All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 17, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
50:42
Episode 264 Scott Adams: Dr. Shiva - U.S. Senate Candidate
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody, come on in here.
We've got a very special coffee with Scott Adams.
As soon as you get in here we'll queue it up.
You're looking over my shoulder and you are probably seeing my special guest.
I'm going to introduce the moment we have our sip.
Just before it. All right, we've got enough people.
So today we're talking to Dr.
Shiva Ayyadurai, who's an independent candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, running against, here's the fun part, running against Elizabeth Warren.
What better guest and what better day?
Couldn't get any better than this.
We're going to talk about that and a few other topics like Saudi Arabia and DNA and polls and stuff like that.
But before we do that, I would like to ask Dr.
Shiva to join me in the simultaneous sip with the rest of you.
Grab your chalice, your mugs, your glasses, your containers.
Put something in there like coffee and join me for the simultaneous sip.
Oh, that's a good way to stop it, honey.
Alright, Dr.
Shiva, tell us what you think about Elizabeth Warren's DNA test.
And I should mention to the people who are not familiar with you that you have several advanced degrees that are relevant to this question.
You've got a medical degree, let's see, I have a little list here of your many degrees.
You've got an MIT, BS, MS, M Engineer, PhD.
You've got credentials in Systems Biology, Computer Science, Scientific Visualization, Traditional Medicine, and that should get us covered for this DNA and other discussions.
Tell me what you thought of the whole DNA thing with Elizabeth Warren.
What was your take on this?
Well, you know, the Boston Globe called me, you know, who's completely in bed with Elizabeth Warren trying to resuscitate her image.
And they asked me for a quote.
I said, well, the results showed that she's a bigger fake Indian than we ever thought.
She's 99.99% white.
That's what the results show.
And if you look at any percentage, Scott, that she has any Native American genes, you know, of, let's But would it be fair to say that she might have a trace amount?
Is that fair to say?
Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely.
Yeah, from a statistics standpoint, she may have a few base pairs.
You know, it's like if you think about the genome as a huge document with billions of characters, there may be a few characters in there which have Native American origin.
Now, I have to ask you a weird question, Mark.
I saw it on the news and I forget what the context was.
But isn't there something to the fact that women carry around some component of DNA from their sex partners from the past?
Is that a thing? Or is it not the DNA that they're carrying around?
It's some component of that.
Have you ever heard of that? Yeah, something they pick up permanently from their partner.
At least permanently it becomes detectable in that.
Is that a thing? Yeah, so here's the interesting thing.
So in 2003, Scott, when the Genome Project ended, we found out some very fascinating things about DNA. It was initially thought it was a unidirectional process, right?
You have your DNA and You can get it from it coming from sex partners.
You can actually get it from viruses.
In fact, the environment can turn on and turn off genes.
So insertions into the genome can take place, but you can also have certain genes be accessible and not accessible.
But would there ever be a case where somebody did a DNA test and what was detected was something from a partner?
Another case you're talking about where there's pieces of double-stranded DNA which hop from a partner in, that's one.
That could happen. It could also happen from a virus coming in, right?
Because the virus is also a delivery mechanism.
But yes, it's possible.
Alright, I just wondered about that.
So, does this seem like, to you, like the worst political mistake that you can remember for her to do this video about her DNA? And I thought what went wrong is that, you know, although you could argue that, you know, both...
Well, she's called an academic, usually, right?
That's one of the things people talk about.
Now, people could say that about you, except you seem to be a completely different personality, more practical.
But I think she branded herself as sort of an ineffective academic through this exercise.
Is that what you got out of it? Yeah, I think you bring up an important point.
Look, Scott, if you look at my degrees and my background, it's been in engineering, right?
Electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, design, and biological engineering.
Now the difference between an engineer or a quote-unquote scientist is this fundamental difference, or a lawyer or lobbyist.
The problem with pure science and pure lawyers, they are paid to manipulate data.
Think about it, right? A lawyer can completely, his job is to convince a jury that no matter if the data is against his client, somehow that everything is okay.
So they're about taking 0.001% and trying to convince people that you're a Native American.
In science, you can gather a bunch of data, plot it, and then you're fitting a line to a curve.
And that can be manipulated.
In engineering, the fundamental difference is we can't manipulate because if you build a piece of software or you build an airplane and it falls out of the sky, it's pretty clear whether your stuff works or not.
Right? Now, in the case of Elizabeth Warren, I can tell you why all of this occurred, which has really not come out of the media, and with all due respect, we're not getting our fair credit for what our campaign did, because on the ground, Scott, I was trying to bring up a couple of photographs here.
Our people have literally been on the ground, Scott, day and night, putting up tons and tons of these signs, which you may see everywhere.
Our volunteers, I don't know if you can see that, has this picture.
Fake Indian. Four by eight signs all over Massachusetts.
This is on a highway here.
You can see it there, Scott.
This is on people's homes, and this incredible work by our volunteers, which has been happening for about a year, is what forced the Boston Globe to write this treatise saying Elizabeth Warren did not get into Harvard because of her Native American heritage.
It's complete nonsense.
Again, the Globe is the one who did this because they're in a very close relationship with Warren.
And when that failed, Warren was forced to take this DNA test.
And I believe she probably took this DNA test, Scott, the one we sent her.
It likely failed.
And so then she went hunting for this guy, Carlos Bustamante, who then threw in Colombian, Peruvian, other genes, essentially gene sniffs.
It's like you're doing a Google search.
Instead of using cat, you try to use dog.
And you try to find something that's a four-legged creature in there.
And that's essentially what just took place.
So Elizabeth Warren, even doing this, a mistake she made, Scott, which was a significant mistake, was out of the desperation of the fact that the real Indian, fake Indian meme has gone out into the broad mass of people in Massachusetts.
That's what compelled her to make, and the globe, to make these mistakes.
Well, it's kind of hilarious, but I understand you're also being prevented from debating because of the way they calculate who can debate and who can't.
Can you make that in its simplest form?
What math did they do that kept you off the debate stage, and how did they do it right or wrong?
Yeah, so the first math, Scott, before the polls, even the simpler math is this.
There are only three candidates who got on the ballot, and only two are allowed on the debate stage.
In 2014, five candidates in a governor's race were allowed on the debate stage, three independents and a Democrat and a Republican.
All of them only had to get 10,000 signatures.
We fulfilled that. In fact, we got 20,000 signatures.
So just on that math alone, on fairness, I think the debate stage can handle two people or three people.
Right. Debate people can do...
By the way, these are federal and state laws which have been put into place that people like you and I can run and follow the rules.
Well, we followed all the rules.
But then they start introducing this thing called polls.
And in the polls, Scott, they can introduce criteria that you must achieve in a poll this level of head-to-head comparison to be on the debate stage.
So, after we filed the lawsuit...
4 a.m. of the day the judge decided to hear us, they said Shiva must get 10% or more in the head-to-head comparison.
And the UMass poll, which is University of Massachusetts who are suing, they said I'm at 9%.
Alright, so that's what it is at.
Now let's talk about how they calculated.
Okay, so when they got the 9%, they polled everybody, not just likely voters, right?
No, so the UMass poll included two groups.
They did one poll among likely voters and one poll among all registered voters.
So we were at 9% among the registered voters, all registered voters, and 8% among likely voters.
Okay? Okay, so to just put it simply, let me tell you what we discovered, you know, it took an MIT PhD and an MIT professor to figure this out, is that for, I think forever, they've been making a fundamental error, purposely, in polls, which favors really incumbents and the existing two-party system.
And let me explain it this way.
Remember the hot dog example I gave you, Scott?
Maybe that helps. Okay?
Okay. So let's say I've got a pool of 100 people that I'm going to poll.
And let's say, and I put this, by the way, on my Twitter, and I ask people for the answer.
Let's say you've got 100 people that you're going to poll to find out who likes a samosa, which is an Indian treat, or a hot dog.
Alright? And head-to-head.
But among those 100 people, only 50 people have ever tasted a samosa, but all 100 people have tasted the hamburger.
Okay? Hamburger and samosa.
Now you do the head-to-head, and you ask people, do you like a samosa or do you like a hamburger?
50 people say they love the samosa, and 50 people say they love the hamburger.
What is the head-to-head favorability?
That's a question.
Well, the pollsters have always been dividing by 100.
That means they say 50 over 100 is, you know, 50% of the people like the samosa and 50% of the people like the hamburger, right?
Okay.
Well, here's the problem.
Among those 100 people, 50 people have never tasted the samosa, ever.
So is the intention of the law to measure desirability among voters or to measure awareness among voters?
Have they even heard of your name?
What are they trying to measure?
They call it the ballot test.
It's to measure if you went into the booth, who would you vote for?
Okay? So, they have been reporting the 50% on the samosa and the 50% on the hamburger when it should be really If 50 people among those 100 are the only ones who've ever tasted, that means 100% of the people with 50% visibility like the samosa and 50% of the people like the hamburger.
So the bottom line is if you take an incumbent candidate and one of the two party candidates, the denominator in that is going to match the actual visibility, right?
But when you have a new candidate coming who doesn't have as much visibility, It essentially has to spend a lot more.
That denominator is going to be far bigger because there's an indeterminate set of people who have never, in fact, experienced that candidate.
So what do you do in a taste test?
What do you do with food?
Well, you have a taste test.
And that's what a debate is, Scott.
A debate is akin to a taste test.
So what they want to deny the American people is the taste test.
Where you get to see the candidate and then you get to do the poll.
So they do these polls and they rig it so you can never allow people on the debate stage.
So it's almost saying you have to score this much and then I'm going to let you do the taste test.
I would imagine that your visibility would increase tremendously if you were on the debate stage.
Oh, yeah, that's why they don't want me on the debate stage, Scott.
Not only would it increase visibility, but people would see this distinct difference between a different standard of person who works for a living, solves problems, has a history of solving problems, actually has to solve real problems, you know, building airplanes and building software, actually has to solve real problems, you know, building airplanes and building software, versus someone
That's what Elizabeth Warren, we're seeing this dynamic of lawyer lobbyists who can take .01% and try to still convince with the media that she's still a Native American.
It's absurd.
It's no different than saying that the sun revolves around the earth, or the earth is flat.
That's what lawyers and lobbyists do.
They don't have to pay attention to fact or career politicians.
at least if Elizabeth Warren's on the stage, they have one person of color.
One person of what?
One person of color.
Just kidding. Yeah, one person of color.
In this case, we put out this meme, and we should discuss racism here because we put whites only, Shiva not allowed.
And when I say that, Scott, it's a deeper discussion about race for far too long in this country.
The left, or the Democrats, have bounded race into, don't use the N-word, don't put up the Confederate flag, change the name of these buildings, ceremonial things, and the right and the republic can say, don't talk about racism.
But there is racism in this country, and it's racism today, in 2018, about excluding diversity of ideas.
I call it dark matter.
In Massachusetts, 60% of the voters here nearing 60% They are that dark matter, independence.
They're not affiliated with Democrats or Republicans.
That's only 40%. So they don't want the dark matter of ideas.
Someone like me who will talk about how the Postal Service can be a framework for free speech.
Why Monsanto has no safety assessment standards.
They don't want that diversity of ideas.
So that's the new form of racism.
It goes beyond skin color.
Well, diversity in general, diversity of thought, diversity of ideas.
So let's change topics here.
I have to ask you about Saudi Arabia.
Yeah. So the latest news is, and I'm not really good at pronouncing the victim's name here, Khashoggi.
Khashoggi. You all know who I'm talking about.
So the latest news is that the team of people who went in there are closely connected with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.
We didn't know how connected they were, but now it's apparently members of his actual security team allegedly were in the murder group.
What do you think we should do with this?
What do you think the United States...
What do you think our response should be?
Well, you know, you may have been seeing, I've been retweeting what Rand Paul has been posting on this.
You know, being in the Senate, I would essentially build a coalition with Rand Paul on this issue.
I think he's right on target. There's no reason we should, I think we should, he's put a bill in Congress to cut the arms.
deals to Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia, when you look at the entire cultural basis of Saudi Arabia, they support radical, you know, Islamic fundamentalism.
They were essentially the, you know, by many reports, the core area where a lot of the terrorists from 9-11 came.
In many ways, they have nothing in common with the values that this country stands for.
But let me ask you this.
For years, we know that Saudi Arabia beheads people for violating their local laws, and we've never changed our relationship with them because of an ongoing beheading in public, which we would consider pretty awful.
Doesn't it matter who gets killed and what the consequences are?
Because this particular person was important to us because he was a Washington Post writer.
But otherwise, isn't it sort of a family squabble in some way?
I mean, do we have a national interest?
Well, I think what's going on, Scott, is I think the disappearance of a journalist, right?
I don't know if you want to bring up this contradiction here, right?
For years, we've allowed Saudi Arabia to get away with its mistreatment of its own people, or its quote-unquote treatment of its people per their norms.
In this case, we have a person who I believe could speak English, right?
He was a journalist who was exposing some of the issues within Saudi Arabia, and it became so egregious that I think now the contradictions are too much for us, so then it becomes an issue against quote-unquote Western values.
So I think if it was just a Saudi Arabian who gets beheaded for, I don't know, stealing and they cut off their arms or whatever, we're fine with that.
But when it becomes someone who has, in this case, I think the egregious nature of this is, as I understood, this journalist was actually reporting on the Crown Piss, he was working for the Post, and he was actually a Westerner in some ways.
That's when I think...
But doesn't it matter to us, as a top representative of the Muslim Brotherhood, that if Shashoggi got his way, there would be Sharia law in the United States and everywhere else?
Is this something we need to care about?
Because it's not exactly like he was on our side.
His preferred world is that, I assume, women and LGBTQ would be suppressed, if not discriminated against, if not a form of slavery, by Western standards.
If you like Sharia law, then everything's fine, I suppose.
But should we see him as our ally?
That's the question. The reason that we don't care, I shouldn't say don't care, but we don't respond when Saudi Arabia does something to their own citizens as they broke one of their local laws is it's sort of none of our business.
You know, it's not like they're killing somebody who's our ally, it's not our citizen, etc.
And Jashoggi is not exactly on our team.
Should we respond the same and damage our own national interests?
Yes, I think, Scott, if you look at Khashoggi from that perspective, I think what you're asking is, there's this issue of him being a journalist, right?
There's this one body of ethical position.
You can take, well, he's a journalist, he's reporting, forget what he stands for, but he's reporting on as a journalist, right?
That's one position. I think you're asking, do we...
I believe he's an opinion writer, so it's more of a propaganda...
Kind of a thing than it is exactly reporting, if that matters.
I see. I didn't know that.
I didn't know that he was an opinion writer.
The way the media, everything I've been reading, has presented him as a journalist.
Yeah, they use that word, and to me that feels misleading.
Now, I'm not the expert on him, but I've read...
Yeah, so the reports I've heard that he was a journalist, you know, he was exposing the Saudi Arabian government of its particular ills, and I do know some of the issues you brought up.
So one model is to look at him as a free speech activist who is doing journalism.
That's the way the press has presented it, at least what I've seen.
And I think your argument is that it's not that.
It's basically he's someone who wants to essentially sustain some of the fundamentalist issues.
And why are we participating in that?
Let Saudi Arabia figure that out.
Is that what you're saying, Scott?
Yeah, it's just...
In these situations, we love to be morally correct and set a standard.
We like to...
It's not even about... Telling the world how they need to be, it's as much about protecting our own brand.
You know, the way we treat the rest of the world is about our own brand.
And do we want to be the kind of country that would ignore this alleged barbarism?
And of course we don't.
But we also don't want to damage our interests in the Middle East.
We don't want to, you know, economically damage people.
And I just wonder, where do you draw the line?
Because the Middle East is abusing people every minute of every day.
You know, including our allies.
I mean, there's lots of people getting abused over there.
A lot of people getting killed.
It just seems like we should be smart about where we draw the line.
Yeah, it's interesting.
You know, I had an uncle. My uncle was a surgeon, lived in Saudi Arabia for many years.
And, you know, it took him after, you know, he went there for about 20 years to basically make money, you know, from India.
It was a great place.
He got paid a lot of money, and he became one of the leading surgeons there.
But, you know, the bottom line was he said he were living in essentially a form of police state.
But he was willing to put up with that to make money for his own needs, whatever.
But I think what you're pointing out is that entire system, that's sort of the norm.
And now to raise something and sort of rattle the bee's nest, how does that help U.S. interests?
I think that's how you're framing the question.
Yeah, I don't really see people ask the question as starkly as I'm presenting it, so I feel like the public is not being served, because it just needs to be laid on the plate.
Yes, we'd like to... Yeah, I think you're bringing up this broader foreign policy question, which I think is...
There are these countries doing extreme acts of abusive behavior or something that's counter to our quote-unquote value system.
And why is it on certain conditions we go in and jump in or decide to make an issue and other times we don't?
That's really the more broader question.
Yeah, and so here's the suggestion.
Let me just throw this out. Tell me if it's crazy.
Suppose our response was to get all of our allies to simply close all of the Saudi Arabia embassies in their own countries for a month.
And just say, we're just going to inquire for a month.
Because it would send a really strong signal...
And it would be a little more appropriate to the crime because it was something that happened in an embassy, so maybe there's some appropriateness there.
But not selling them the products that we want to sell feels like just shooting ourselves in the foot.
Why are we punishing ourselves because we don't like what somebody else did?
It would just seem more appropriate to make a really big statement and just close all the embassies for a month and say, we're not even going to take your credit.
I think what you're saying, Scott, is that your court model is interesting, right?
So if for decades and decades and decades we've been supporting this regime, and then when an incident like this occurs, why are we going to another extreme response?
So basically the punishment should fit the crime.
That's what I hear you saying. And if we truly care about Saudi Arabia's abuse, then there should be a much larger discussion that should be a formal U.S. policy discussion that should be taking place.
Do we We want to support these countries, what is our value system, etc.
And that discussion has never taken place.
As I know in American politics, it's one of those big issues, right?
You're dealing with a country which frankly lives in the 10th century.
And we make a lot of issues about other countries not being democratic, but we've never applied that same rule to Saudi Arabia.
And here when an incident occurs, then we go all out trying to make an issue out of it.
Yeah, it's a good point.
Let me ask you another question.
Fentanyl, I understand that, if you haven't heard this yet, the reboot of Roseanne's show called The Conners, the way they explained Roseanne's not being on the show is that she died of an opioid overdose, which I appreciate that the show did that because, as you know, I lost my stepson three weeks ago, I guess, to an opioid overdose.
And I'm looking at all the things that can be done about that.
Is there one choke point for you, the one thing we should work on the hardest?
Should we be working on China to execute their illegal fentanyl labs because most of it comes from China?
Or should we just give it away for free in a controlled environment so every addict can give free drugs?
What would you do? Let me jump ahead and say what I would do is I would do a small test in different cities of different ways to handle this and see which one works.
In six months we'll have a good idea.
Yeah, so I think, first of all, your solution of trying different tests, because the whole fentanyl thing, the whole area of opioids, is fundamentally a very complex systems problem.
You have the fact of, why did we even develop them?
Because it was missing, you had Advil and those things for certain levels of pain, you had morphine, and a certain group of doctors built this for a new category of pain, which was open territory.
So there's the science that went into developing these kinds of drugs, right?
But now the cat's out of the bag, so now they exist.
What do we do? Right.
So we have a volunteer.
I can speak to this from a little bit of knowledge that I've started to gather, separate from my background in biology and addiction, etc., you know, understanding the mechanics of it.
We had a doctor who is a volunteer.
Here's a guy. His name is Dr.
Kishore. He actually had a solution for this entire problem, and his issue was that it is a complex problem.
One is you can just take it away, but the reality is you have people who are addicted on these drugs.
So what he did, Scott, was he found out that simply putting them on another drug, simply sending them to rehab, had a very high recidivism rate.
So the solution he had was a program Where he actually went into the homes and it was sort of a four-part process where, first of all, he got people off of it using a series of other drugs.
So it... Essentially, diminish the withdrawal symptoms.
And then he put lifestyle modification, but he got the family involved, Scott.
He realized that most of these problems is behavioral things that you have to involve the community and the family.
And he brought down the recidivism rate to 50%.
What ended up happening to him was a district attorney of Massachusetts threw him in jail, took away his medical license, and destroyed him.
There's a movie coming out of him called Hero in America.
So what I'm saying is, one solution is, it's not just doing these sort of singular reductionist approaches to help people who are addicted.
There is a solution which involves bringing the community and the family.
So that's one piece.
There are known solutions which have a better rate than just putting people on other types of opioids.
The other solution, I think, is what you're talking about.
Why not do this test where you restrict the illegal production in China or their ability to bring it in?
There's also the whole aspects of...
I don't know if people give this Narcan stuff for opioids.
Are you familiar with that? Yes, yes.
Yeah. There's, you know, the Narcan, I think it's about $2,500 a shot.
So you have this whole process that that itself has become a money-making environment, and that's another aspect we should start looking at also.
You know, is that contributing to this, or is it actually alleviating the problem?
But I like your idea of using a multiple approach, but I do know in Massachusetts, among 250,000 people where this was tested, not only Massachusetts across the country, There's a lot of very powerful results or good results showing that you had significant reduction in recidivism.
Can you break down, what was the main thing that working with the family of the addict, what was the main dynamic that they changed?
Yeah, so the main dynamic was this.
When an addict gets up in the morning, When a normal person gets up in the Right when they got back on the plane, they were back literally on the airplane taking their drugs.
Then the secondary model was, I think called the Philadelphia model, which was give them methadone.
Okay? Well, now you put them from one drug to another drug.
I mean, the biology, the biological problems with that, it's a whole discussion, but it doesn't really help the person biologically.
So here the approach is, in the home there are enough behavioral cues that if you use the rehab model and you put the person in the home, they still have the same behavioral cues, Scott.
So you need to break those patterns in the home.
So that was a fundamental thing, because if you can think about our body as a system, it's got a lot of different muscle memory, neural memory, that the cues are already there, so you have to cut those cues.
How long? I had proposed at least to think about the idea of creating small rehab cities.
So instead of a rehab that's just a building, you have a community where you might have to live for two years to reprogram your habits.
You would just be in a whole new place where they can't get any drugs in.
You've got dogs everywhere.
Would that work?
Just take somebody out of the gate for two years?
I think you've got to be careful with that, right?
That would work to the extent...
That the person was able to go back into the real world.
That's why I think Kishore's model was an interesting model because he was doing sort of what you're talking about in a much more micro way in the home and the family, the neighbors, right?
So in that model, if you did it for two years, the behavior...
Wait a minute. Are you suggesting, I'm just going to throw this out, that if there were two addicts, they were each in their own home, that you could almost cure them by making them switch homes?
I'm not saying that's practical, but if you could just switch teenagers and say, okay, you're in a whole new home and we're going to create all new habits in this new home, I wonder if that would work.
Well, that may be getting more closer, but remember, it's a familiar relationship, Scott, that people have.
So I don't know if the new home...
Well, the new home may work if they can build those bonds and those new associations.
But when people go back to their existing home, the neural network is set in their brain, right?
In a lot of ways, mind and body, of these relationships.
As in systems theory, we say it's the interconnections that matter.
So if those interconnections, the relationship you have with your mom, the relationship you have with your physical home, the food choices you make, this is an emergent property that comes from all those different connections you have.
And simply putting people in rehab but not addressing those connections and getting your parents and the family, the girlfriend, the daughter, whatever, right, to be supportive doesn't really address the issue because you're still putting them back in the same petri dish.
It's like taking You know, a particular organism out of its existing petri dish, putting it in a beautiful, clean petri dish, and then sticking it back.
It's the same genetics, the epigenetics are going to turn on.
So the issue is you have to do the hard work of addressing it in the home.
He called it home detox.
But if the person never went back to their original home, and all of their...
That's an interesting idea. It's an interesting idea because what you're saying is you're basically reprogramming them in a new home environment.
Yeah, I'm talking about a permanent change.
That would probably, you know, if you follow this logic through, it would probably change.
And there's a lot of epigenetic data to show that, by the way.
If you know the story about the two mice.
And again, that's something you could so easily test.
You just have to find two volunteers and find out if they're both better at the end.
Right, right. It turns off, you know, we started talking about DNA and genes, Scott.
It turns off, remember I told you the DNA is more malleable.
They call it epigenetics.
It's not just genetics. So what you're talking about is we have within us a genetic framework that can be turned on and off.
And that role in addiction is only starting to be researched.
But there's a lot of data that's come out where you literally have people living in a certain environment of a certain, even genetics, and you remove them into a different environment, different genes get turned on.
Several years ago, they took a lineage of mice which were angry mice and a lineage of mice which were very peaceful mice.
They took a pup From one of the angry mice, and they had it start getting fed by the peaceful mice.
And the question was, how would that mice behave?
What do you think? I would imagine he got reprogrammed.
He got reprogrammed and he got peaceful, but here's more interesting.
How were the children of those pups?
Oh, well, so I guess the anger will go to the children, right?
That's what you would think, because you would think it has the genes for angry gene.
I put it with the peaceful mice, it got reprogrammed.
It turns out that the children of that mice also became peaceful.
Why? It turns out angry mice never lick the ears of their baby mouse pups because they're always freaked out in a stressful environment.
The peaceful mice always lick the ears of their pups, which turns on a set of molecular mechanisms that basically turn on essentially a gene which allows that mice to control its cortisol levels.
Controlling cortisol is extremely important for whether you're angry or peaceful, etc.
So it turns out once that gene is turned on, that gene, the turned on gene, goes through the germ cells and is passed on to the mice.
This is why this is so fascinating, that what you're talking about is, you can, you know, in some ways, I hate to say Marx was right, right?
But the notion of some of his ideas was the material conditions affect the person.
So here the ecosystem, the complex ecosystem, it's not like the genes are just fixed in time.
You can turn them on and off and they can be passed on.
So that's what's so fascinating about what you just said, that if you remove that attic and you put them in a new home, And they probably will probably turn off a lot of those addictive genes.
I mean, I don't have the research, but there's enough data on epigenetics emerging that shows that the genome is very, very malleable.
Now, I've heard, and maybe you can confirm this, that people who got addicted, let's say in the Vietnam War, so there were heroin addicts when they were in the service and they were actually in Vietnam, But that when they came home, because their environment so completely changed, you know, the difference between being, you know, in the jungle in Vietnam versus going home, that they almost easily got off of drugs because every single cue had changed.
Have you heard that? Is that a thing?
I've heard that with relative opium and heroin, right?
I've heard, in fact, there's a whole area.
We just published recently a paper in Nature Neuroscience talking about the blood-brain barrier.
But as we were doing that research, there's a whole body of research which talks about The fact that there's a phenomenon called plasticity in neuroscience.
They thought that the brain sort of ends its behavior around 21 years old, but it turns out that the brain is quite plastic, even as you get So you have the ability to learn a lot of new things.
And that plasticity concept goes to what you just talked about.
Under certain conditions, you know, certain behaviors come up and you remove those from other conditions, the plasticity of the brain knows how to morph its even addictive model that you're talking about.
So it does sound like that the secret for addicts is to get them out of their queues.
And me and my experience with my stepson is, you know, we tried the rehab, etc.
But every time he came back, he would need a social life.
Yeah, so that's the thing.
He needs a new life. By the way, my deep condolences to you and your family, Scott.
It's almost like you need to change the OS. It's like you can have whatever app is running on the application layer, but if the OS, you're plugging back that app into the same...
Operating system, it's going to have the same bugs, right?
You have to almost put it into a different operating system.
Now, you were talking about cortisol and that made me think of the chemical that we produce when we bond, when we were in love, the oxytocin, right?
Yeah. It feels to me like addicts may not be getting enough oxytocin and they're trying to compensate with whatever they can.
Because if you don't have any oxytocin, you just don't feel good and you don't know why.
Yeah, I mean, look, I had a...
When I used to teach this class at MIT, we had a student from the Ed School who did this whole research on inner cities and the dropout rates.
And, you know, one thing she found that was fascinating was that there was a very low dropout rate, no matter how horrible the environment was, among those people who had a mentor or at least one family member who gave them security and love.
That it didn't require the state to come in and put DSS and all these operations.
You just needed this one person who loved and cared enough for that person.
And that love and care gave that person that comfort, you know, to make them out of it.
And sort of, Scott, you and I were talking about, remember when we were doing that diagram with security, etc.?
Right. In many ways, if you look at the human womb, two things the womb provides.
It provides, obviously, the mother is loving and caring to make sure she's protecting it, but it provides nourishment and the safety and security.
In many ways, that's sort of what love is.
Providing that. And I think when that gets provided, anything is insurmountable.
I mean, you talk to my parents who came from nothing in India or people who came from horrible slum-like conditions, but they have this family connection that no matter, you know, whatever, there's rats running around or whatever horrible conditions, that deep sense of connection gives them this inner strength to make it through all sorts of things.
Yeah, and I put it in chemical terms, which is that whole deep sense of connection creates a very specific chemical state, and if you don't have that, you're going to look for something to make you happy, because you can't get happier than it.
I mean, the mouse example sort of brings that.
I have a book that I call System Self, and in that I talk about the complexity of ecosystems.
In the mouse case, you have the mother mice, you have the pup, but you also have the ecosystem in which that mouse lives.
One could argue in an environment where there's scarcity, where there's violence, where there's problems, the mother mouse probably gets stressed out and forgets to give love and, in this case, lick the mice.
In the other case, where there's peace and there's some sense of stability, the mice has time to care for the young.
And that's why, literally, genes get turned on and off.
So, I think this is an interconnected problem.
In the human model, again, I have limited experience, but when teens are getting addicted, it feels like teens are losing their connection with their mom and dad because they're too old and too cool and they can't hang around with mom and dad, so whatever oxytocin they were going to get from just being loved and hugged by parents sort of goes away around 14.
Because the teen rejects you.
And then they have to find another way to get it.
And if the way that they can get it is with people who are using, which is around here, it's everybody, your search for oxytocin will drive you to drugs, all other things being equal.
Because you're not going to live without...
I have what I call the...
The pleasure unit theory.
That people need a certain level of physical pleasure in their life, or they'll just check out.
They'll just kill themselves. They'll do something dangerous until they die.
And that the people who are not getting this basic level of oxytocin and connection and pleasure in their life are going to do any freaking thing they can to fill that gap, even if it might kill them.
Well, Scott, I think I may have shared with you, we have this technology that came out of my MIT work called Cytosol, where we can literally model at the molecular level these complexities of these chemical reactions known as molecular pathways for any type of biological phenomena, as long as we can extract it from the literature.
It would be fascinating to literally look at this chemical process.
And you can set two conditions where you have different levels of oxytocin, right?
And how that turns on and turns off particular genes, which results in, let's say, control of certain characteristics that we're talking about.
I'm not saying it's easy, but it's something we could actually at least get a handle on and model, and I think that would really give some perspective on what you're talking about.
Yeah, because in theory, once you've got a handle on which chemical states are the most protective or the least protective, you could measure everything you do and see if it contributes to or takes away from that chemical state.
Yeah, definitely. But you need data.
Well, you are fascinating as always.
We're coming toward the end of our Is there a topic or anything you want to wrap up in summary?
Yeah, I think the topic that we want to wrap up is, you know, if you look at nature and you look at human development or any development, I think the reason I think your show is so fascinating, Scott, is because you allow a diversity of ideas.
You don't take a left or right.
And I think nature has always, we view nature as an engineer.
Nature really supports diversity, right?
Meaning not diversity in name only, but the best things in nature are composite things.
You look at very strong things in nature as a composite and the integration of multiplicity of things.
And what are we doing to our country, and this comes to the debate stage issue, where you only let one choice, which is a two-party system.
What are we doing to the complexity of choices that would actually have an emergent property of more ideas, really great solutions?
You know, we put out the slogan called Let Shiva Debate.
And if anyone wants to help, we have a debate on October 19th, which we're being excluded.
October 21st, we're being excluded.
October 30th, we have a hearing coming up with the judge.
We may be allowed in there.
But if anyone wants to support us on October 19th, we're holding a huge rally in Boston.
It's up on our Twitter.
Please come to it.
And this is not about me, but it's really about you.
Demanding that in America that we get the best and we have meritocracy and this true diversity of ideas.
And that's the racism we need to fight, Scott.
So it's almost in many ways for our survival or your survival or our strength as a people that we get true diversity of ideas.
And I would put that in systems form, which is, you know, the goal would be to have, you know, the best laws and the best government, but the system to get there is very much like the system for investing.
You can't really always pick the right stock, but you can buy an index fund, you can diversify, and hope that your diversification is the smart approach.
Right now, our Congress is not diversified in talent.
They're very lawyer-oriented, and you get a lot of lawyerly results.
When I look at Rand Paul, whenever he talks about anything, I'm always struck by the same thing.
He comes at every topic from a more, let's say, scientific, rational, less dogmatic perspective.
And I think, why can't we have more people like that?
Well, I think what's happened is, Scott, the mainstream media, by the way, they're not run by journalists anymore.
You don't have the quality of people that the American people deserve.
So they have essentially created a little oligarchy of ideas, very homogenous ideas.
And yet this group preaches diversity.
And I think we deserve this whole spectrum of ideas.
And that's what the opportunity is in our race in Massachusetts.
You have one guy, We call them a fake Trump or a dirty deal.
The other woman who is a lawyer lobbyist who's trying to convince everyone she's still a Native American.
And here's us out there.
And with spending very little money, we've made her life hell.
We brought up issues that people do not bring about in a very thoughtful way.
And that's what scares them.
But it's a huge opportunity for us as Americans to see someone like myself in the Senate.
And I think people deserve that.
Yeah, my take on that is that Elizabeth Warren in the Senate gives you another one of what you already have 30 of, which is another academic lawyer kind of a voice.
But putting somebody like you in the Senate takes a talent stack that would probably be greater than anybody in the Senate right now.
The number of different skills, the real life experience, the starting of companies.
I mean, your experience is about five times.
As broad and valid and on point for what the Congress needs to do.
So you're sort of like getting five good skills compared to Warren, who's sort of just like the stuff they already have.
So if you were to look at it as an investment per se, it would be a no-brainer.
Because you bring diversification even within yourself with five different, ten different talents, whatever you got there.
And the Congress just needs more people like you.
So I'm going to leave it on that.
And if you'd like to say bye to the people...
Yeah, so bye everyone. If you want to learn more, go to Shiva for Senate.
And look forward to being in the U.S. Senate and really making America great.
Thank you. Alright, thanks.
Thank you. Bye for now.
Be well. Alright, back to me.
Most interesting person?
Whoever ran for office.
Love him or hate him.
He's got more education, more real-life experience, more ideas.
You saw how much energy he has.
Tons of energy. So he's quite an interesting candidate.
So if you're in Massachusetts, give him a thought.
All right. Did anybody have any comments about that?
I see some people liked it.
Yeah, think how interesting that was.
I especially liked the idea of removing addicts from all of their life cues and putting them in a whole new world.
And as soon as you hear an idea like that, your mind starts trying to solve for it.
And I was thinking, what would virtual reality do?
Suppose you put somebody in a virtual reality world a few times a day and just took them out of their head.
Would that help? What if you traded houses with two addicts?
Would that help? So, it certainly makes me think.
▲
Export Selection