In this episode, we talk to the Director of Research and Communication at Harosite, the world's leading genetic engineering company in the field of selecting for intelligence. We talk about their work on genetic correlates to intelligence, the challenges they face in the space, and why they are so important.
00:00:00.000hello i am excited to be here today because today we can talk about something that we have had to
00:00:04.680keep quiet for years which is if you know the collins family lore it's that we did a large
00:00:12.180batch of embryos because we had to simone was unable to get pregnant naturally and we then
00:00:17.960did genetic sequencing on them to decide the order in which we did the implantation now for a long
00:00:25.320time we just had to say that we did this with a group of scientists and when people were like well
00:00:30.240so people use this company or this company we say well the company that they should probably be using
00:00:34.700isn't out there yet and the reason why this is really important when we're talking about independent
00:00:40.920companies with good genetic data on humans is as time has gone on the genetic data that is held in
00:00:49.580the public sphere by scientists and everything like that is decreasing in quality and specifically
00:00:56.460what i mean by this is there was a famous case where the national biobank in the uk ended up closing
00:01:01.980off their genetic access to a lot of publishers because one scientist accidentally found that
00:01:08.140one group within the united states was having children within the uk within the uk yeah in the
00:01:13.160uk something like 14 000 the rate of any other group and that was a naughty fact and so now they're like
00:01:19.080now we need to screen all research for anything that could be naughty facts the problem is is that
00:01:24.040naughty facts are the facts we really need for humanity to move forwards which includes things
00:01:29.600like genetic correlates to intelligence and the reason why i have been so impressed by this company
00:01:35.600and it's the reason we're going to be doing this and talking about this not just about their work
00:01:39.360around intelligence and their work around the correlates to intelligence was really interesting because
00:01:43.140almost everything is correlated with intelligence so if you're selecting for if you're like i as a
00:01:47.020country will not allow people to select for intelligence i will only allow heart health you
00:01:51.060are also selecting for intelligence because these things are highly correlated with each other so we're
00:01:54.680going to go into that we're going to go into intelligence associations with social behavior
00:01:58.680patterns and everything like that because obviously that's important and we're also going to go into
00:02:02.800oh gosh i was going to say that now anyone can do this so if you're anywhere in the world even if
00:02:08.680it's illegal to do within your country because pgdpa is legal to do in almost any country they've got a
00:02:13.680unique technology that allows you to transfer pgdpa stuff into full genomic stuff so we're going to
00:02:18.940move ahead with johnny anomaly an old friend of ours who is working with these guys yeah so johnny anomaly
00:02:24.520is the director of research and communication of harosite which finally we can say is the company we've
00:02:31.200been working with on all these things that has been taking what we think is the most conscientious
00:02:36.080thoughtful science first detailed autistic in the best possible way approach to this johnny anomaly is
00:02:44.380a background as a bioethicist and he's just an overall awesome guy he's a major proponent of this
00:02:49.320technology and he's kind of the the gateway person to anyone who wants to enter this sphere and learn
00:02:56.240more about it so we're really grateful to you joining us today johnny thank you so much and also we have
00:03:00.960a little bit of time to the end of this i'd really love for you to dive in or maybe we could even start with it
00:03:05.800just because it's like salacious drama some drama that played out this week between sort of not just
00:03:13.240harosite and nucleus genomics another company that gives polygenic risk or data to parents but also
00:03:20.160nucleus genomics and genomic predictions which is another polygenic risk or company so just maybe to
00:03:25.980start would you mind just telling us because it helps us understand sort of how harosite is different
00:03:30.640and what other companies in the space are doing possibly wrong what what played out on x this week
00:03:37.060about nucleus genomics another company in the space yeah well thanks for having me guys and yep we've been
00:03:43.760working together and we have many common friends here in austin and other places where i am but let's
00:03:49.720see here so there was quite a bit of drama and i didn't get into this business for the drama as as you
00:03:54.400know i i wrote a book about this i was an academic i'd been interested in this topic long before i i
00:04:00.420went into the private sector and joined this company a few years ago so i really want things to be done
00:04:06.740well and we stayed in stealth for a really long time you know more than three years and the reason is
00:04:12.420we knew that first of all this is a nascent science so the the science of polygenic prediction
00:04:18.440that is using genomic data to predict traits about let's say embryos or and by the way this is why
00:04:25.560it's not mysterious or using it to we might say retroject traits about past people so for example
00:04:32.500the reich lab at harvard david reich wrote a book called who we are and how we got here and he recreates
00:04:39.440the ancient past and migration patterns and and even and even makes inferences about the traits that
00:04:45.440people have in the past based on polygenic scores that's so this is not mysterious technology we use
00:04:51.420it all the time in history and and going forward in personalized medicine and now for embryos nevertheless
00:04:57.580i understood it was a nascent science it's it's pretty new it's very complex you need some of the
00:05:03.160world's best statistical geneticist and i'm not one you know i studied economics and philosophy that's
00:05:08.980what i thought but we hired some of the best and it takes a while right to lure him from academia they
00:05:13.660knew alex young for example who's our true superstar he's still at ucla but you know he got in a little
00:05:20.400bit of hot water as soon as he announced that he was with us even though it's like what are we doing
00:05:24.960we're reducing disease in the world and maybe marginally increasing intelligence a bit but that's
00:05:30.400considered controversial so anyway that's just the background of why we were in stealth why we wanted
00:05:35.860to hire the world's best first do the best research validate our predictors and we can talk about
00:05:41.840how that's done later and it was only then that we emerged from stealth nevertheless a company that
00:05:48.220had been around for a little while called nucleus decided to launch just before everyone knew we were
00:05:55.080about to come out of the closet and yeah they had done that a few months ago just about a month or two
00:06:02.240before us and announced they were now going into doing embryo scoring and we took a look at some of
00:06:08.500their reports and found them let's just say lacking and so we decided when we launched we were going
00:06:15.940to launch with a white paper and oh i love hearing baby sounds only on your podcast is it one of the
00:06:23.260babies yeah i love it this is beautiful and we'll talk about maybe pronatalism later too but
00:06:29.580anyway we before we launched we really wanted to make sure that we had validated the best predictors
00:06:35.520on the planet made it really clear how we did that etc and as part of our initial validation paper
00:06:42.140we have an appendix showing what nucleus genomics was up to and it was it was not kind but it was
00:06:48.400accurate scott alexander picked up on it and scott also had talked about you know using us and and that
00:06:55.160sort of thing and he didn't want to be too partial i mean it was a partial endorsement of us but really a
00:07:00.460survey of the landscape like what is the state of the art when it comes to this and anyway that kicked
00:07:06.140off the initial controversy but last week last week some anonymous blogger i guess he's a chinese guy
00:07:12.200who lives in in the bay area called sichuan mala like bad sichuan yeah he decided to do a pretty
00:07:20.620thorough takedown of nucleus some of it was citing our earlier work and then apparently nucleus found our
00:07:26.980work so good our white paper that they decided to more or less copy and paste it without citation
00:07:32.140as as their own and so you know it's i'm not gonna say too much about that but i guess that's a great
00:07:39.460honor for us that they decided to do that so so i'll say this you don't need to worry about getting
00:07:44.120yourself in trouble so basically what it came down to if you read this guy's takedown is this other
00:07:48.320company launched with a largely plagiarized version of this other company's white paper but with just
00:07:54.820worse data pasted in yeah like where because you know how when you plagiarize something you gotta
00:07:58.840change a couple things but like the stuff they changed just made it strictly worse i'm i'm just
00:08:04.660in case there's you know any legal risk i'm not going to use you know whatever words that might get
00:08:10.100me in trouble i'll just say you can read the papers and compare them for yourselves but the
00:08:14.140allegation was certainly plagiarism and i think the more easy yeah go ahead malcolm where this matters to
00:08:19.940me is how because i think this is this is relevant to especially our audience which is going to be
00:08:25.060more skeptical how did you guys get such good information you must have been getting access
00:08:33.420to populations or data that other companies didn't have access to how is that sourced yeah and how is
00:08:42.380your data so much better and how can parents know who to trust because also like yep none of us are
00:08:48.200experts you know who are who are doing this you know even like people who are doctors who are using
00:08:52.120herosite like it can be hard for any of us outsiders to know like oh i i nucleus is i don't trust them
00:08:59.860but herosite they have their act together like what what makes you guys different yeah good so let me
00:09:03.940answer that let me put a bow on the last point for 30 seconds and then answer the two of your
00:09:08.600questions together because that is the most important question it's not even just where do you get
00:09:12.640your data although happy to tell you that it's how do you justify and validate your
00:09:17.340predictors what really matters is not how you create things but how do you prove that they work
00:09:22.480and i'll mention that in a second but to put a bow on the previous point yeah apart from the
00:09:28.460allegations that this blogger made about plagiarism and you know and and sort of sloppiness by nucleus
00:09:34.920i mean one of the funniest bits that i saw i've been kind of a third party i've stayed out of it for
00:09:40.300the most part but you know nucleus apparently had these reviews that were either ai generated one of
00:09:46.400them was like from an ll bean catalog and and yeah like the photos of reviewing parents on their
00:09:52.600website were just photos of people of testimonials where it was like stock photos from the internet
00:09:58.720and then sometimes it would be a black guy but then another time it would be like an indian guy
00:10:03.560with the same review but they like face swap them and somebody said yesterday my favorite commentary on
00:10:09.720it was you know why are people mad at a genetics company that has actually changed the race of
00:10:15.160someone that shows how effective they are yeah how powerful good point good point but anyway i so i
00:10:22.160don't want to get into the drama i will say that everyone should listen to alex young again who's
00:10:27.540our superstar at ucla he's going to be on the show that was debated yesterday on twitter i guess it was
00:10:34.240this anonymous poster cremeu against kian from nucleus genomics so kian didn't agree to debate but
00:10:41.420they did do a side by side first they had cremeu on then they had kian on now they're going to have
00:10:47.120alex in studio next week and alex is again one of the world's authorities on this topic and
00:10:53.800statistical genetics now having said that let me just say never just take someone's authority for
00:11:00.440granted alex is an authority and he's you you can read his work but what really matters is not the
00:11:06.480person it's the method how do we justify and validate our score so first of all it's worth
00:11:12.760saying like how do you build a polygenic risk score or what is one it's the tool that we use to make
00:11:18.900predictions about either individuals who are born now like what's your susceptibility simone to
00:11:25.840alzheimer's disease or malcolm how tall are you and you know we you know we can't do this perfectly
00:11:32.220but we can get it more or less close to where you are using polygenic risk scores and the idea is
00:11:38.100all of these traits that you really care about not not tay sachs disease that's caused by one gene
00:11:43.780right not sickle cell anemia also caused by two copies of the same variant but rather height
00:11:49.620intelligence schizophrenia all these things are caused by thousands or even tens of thousands of
00:11:54.520small genetic variants that add up to an overall risk which is why it's called a polygenic risk score
00:11:59.600or just polygenic score so those are the things that we're using to to measure your likelihood of
00:12:05.940developing a trait or a disease as an adult but similarly since embryos are just bundles of genes
00:12:11.880just like you are and the genes don't change over time our audience will be aware of all of this
00:12:16.900yeah okay good what i think our audience is more interested in is how did you get more accurate
00:12:22.300polygenic scores yeah yeah so let me let me get into that i just wanted to define what a polygenic score
00:12:26.100was first so good yeah so the first thing you need to do to construct a good polygenic score
00:12:30.800everyone has to do this is access biobanks right and one of the things that we were a bit surprised
00:12:36.600by because these other companies you know we're a bunch of nerds who were in stealth for a few years
00:12:41.620and yet we had applied to just about every biobank we could possibly apply to in the world
00:12:47.220sometimes you get denied but we often got access because well a you need a phd
00:12:52.300you need to justify why you have access and what you're studying usually it's disease and so on
00:12:57.740and so that's the first thing is we have access to a lot of biobanks a lot of companies don't seem
00:13:04.040to even apply to very many which is a little surprising to us it's partly one of one of our
00:13:09.100theories about why is there is a public catalog of polygenic scores that anyone can use the problem
00:13:16.220is those are usually five years old they're not nearly as good as the state of the art because
00:13:21.160academics don't have an incentive a market incentive to really just like ramp up the value
00:13:27.300of those scores because they're not they're not they have no profit incentive so anyway
00:13:30.380for step one is access as many biobanks as you can step two is hire the talent that it requires
00:13:37.920to actually interpret that data and then step three is when you're validating the data and this is what
00:13:44.040alex young is most famous for is using within family studies and what you're really trying to do when
00:13:49.560you're making embryo predictions you're not predicting traits about random people in a
00:13:54.100population you're predicting traits about potential siblings and then choosing which sibling will be
00:14:00.000born and the idea is if you're doing that the way to validate your scores is run them through adult
00:14:06.780siblings just imagine this you have you know 12 brothers and sisters which hopefully your children
00:14:12.140will have and and we say look if we can take their dna and predict how tall are they or do they have
00:14:19.440schizophrenia or whatever and we can do this across tens of thousands of sibling pairs then there's no
00:14:25.340question the scores work the only question is how well do they work and how well do they work across
00:14:29.840ancestry groups and just to put that put all those little pieces together when you're thinking about
00:14:35.260embryo selection remember that embryos have the same relationship to each other and to their parents as adult
00:14:40.900siblings do to each other and their parents so if you can predict scores really well for adult siblings
00:14:47.320then first you can predict them well for embryos and second you don't need to wait a hundred years
00:14:53.660for an army of of embryos to be implanted and then they grow up and they develop alzheimer's or not
00:14:59.640you simply don't need to do that i mean it's a nice closing touch to absolutely prove mathematically this
00:15:05.840works but it's actually it's actually too much of a demand for rigor to say that well we can't know
00:15:11.760anything about this or whether it works until all these people are born no no no as i said you can
00:15:17.820prove it on adult siblings and david reich at harvard already uses these to reconstruct the ancient past
00:15:23.780nobody bats an eye they're like well that's cool nice finding dude you know and so so really the only
00:15:29.720reason i think that there's a lot of controversy around this is a some companies are not doing
00:15:35.380this properly and b it is morally controversial as you know at least among some people and so some
00:15:41.320scientists are looking for any excuse to just say like this doesn't work yeah which i found very
00:15:47.520interesting i i know a the the the scientists will go out there and just be like oh there's no
00:15:51.420correlation i i had a like a blow up with telemundo i don't know if the interview has gone live
00:15:56.200the mexican tv station so this clip actually did somehow go live yesterday and it went viral on
00:16:04.540twitter and some other platforms it was crazy you've said things like black women are biologically
00:16:11.900different than white women they they yes they have uh different fertility windows they have a higher
00:16:17.360rate of fertility complications 50 there's no scientific evidence to prove that a black woman and a white
00:16:23.680woman are genetically different right this is like what are you talking about no no literally there
00:16:29.700are genes that code for their skin color what there are genes again this is i mean this is like
00:16:33.760government data this this is me right this is the national institute of health this is the american
00:16:37.880medical association like there there is no scientific evidence to prove that and that's a big problem
00:16:42.920right because no no no no no there's no something and that's why i asked like iq differences black people are
00:16:49.180genetically different from other populations i'll say that again there's it there is at least there is
00:16:56.060no scientific evidence to prove that right and as people that no no no i'm sorry i'm stating do you
00:17:01.280want to ask an ai if there's scientific evidence to prove that no i want to ask yeah because what you're
00:17:05.200stating is just factually incorrect humans are genetically diverse it's not a bad thing that you know i'm not
00:17:10.200i'm not saying it's a better or a good thing i'm saying there is no scientific evidence and i'm saying that as a
00:17:17.000factually he's saying that there is scientific there is scientific evidence there is overwhelming scientific
00:17:21.560evidence based on in this basics no no no this is like saying the sky is not blue like it is genes that code their skin
00:17:29.080color right those genes are obviously different in them than they are in us how is that not science that's just like a basic fact the genes that code their skin color their level of melanin production
00:17:39.080level of melanin production are different from my genes and that's precisely why i was asking this question
00:17:44.340because i think for some people that do believe like you that people are genetically different
00:17:49.000that has historically been used to promote racial hierarchies right and that's why i'm asking you because
00:17:54.560yeah yeah so i was talking with them and i was like you know of course i'm not saying
00:18:05.940you know that that any s ethnic like like that there's any sort of genetic correlation between
00:18:11.760ethnic groups tied to intelligence i'm just saying that there are obvious genetic differences between
00:18:16.220ethnic groups and she goes no there isn't and i was like wait what do you mean there's no genetic
00:18:21.080difference between ethnic groups and she's like you know malcolm we can cite our own paper alex young
00:18:26.300was on the definitive paper two months ago along with peter visher who's one of the most famous people in
00:18:31.220the field in oxford and they published a paper using mexican biobank data showing that type one
00:18:37.320diabetes is almost entirely a genetic phenomenon you know and specifically the indigenous in the more
00:18:44.060indigenous components of the mexican population are the ones that are most susceptible we already
00:18:49.400suspected that for years but they proved it beyond beyond any doubt so wow olamundo is just wrong and it's
00:18:54.980it's demonstrably wrong but yeah that was that was a very fun i wish i hadn't known that one off the top of my
00:18:59.840head i just got into like more blaine stuff i was like wait so do you think that like black people
00:19:04.140are taller because they're less privileged like that's not like weird like joseph smith's logic
00:19:11.000there right like totally forget cognitive traits just look around at physical traits
00:19:15.180the melanin is a reaction to systemic racism floor up because of the racism and just
00:19:23.040like weird lamarckian evolution that i'm dealing with here yeah well you've got that especially
00:19:30.640below the neck they're like that but like you say if you just point out traits like height or
00:19:34.540sprinting ability or whatever and and just look at ethiopians versus kenyans i mean as you know
00:19:39.400there's more ethnic or genetic diversity in africa than the rest of the world combined huge genetic
00:19:44.380and so what you find is eastern africans are really good at long distance and west at short
00:19:50.260distance and everyone else sucks you know and that's that's you know what i was was unaware of
00:19:55.620and we have a whole video on this this might be too controversial to even talk about here because we
00:20:00.180talk about in this video but did you know that european populations are genetically closer to
00:20:05.280neanderthals than we are to the cosine well that makes sense there's more neanderthal admixture
00:20:10.880in european population no no i mean like like not that we are sorry i i'm not just the admixture
00:20:16.020you're saying yeah not just the admixture i mean in terms of i forget the word it's like ipi or
00:20:20.700something like total nucleotide arrangement they are a closer ethnic group to us than the cosine are
00:20:28.820to us yeah and i was shocked to learn that i didn't know that they split off before the cosine did
00:20:33.640but the cosine had more genetic drift since the split than the neanderthals had had because i didn't
00:20:40.180know that it makes sense i mean neanderthals are a pretty relatively recent you know branch of of our
00:20:45.460species so yep yeah lots of fun stuff there but let's jump in to intelligence related stuff go
00:20:52.700into the things that cross correlate with intelligence and in terms of like how it affects
00:20:57.800society as you are messing with this stuff good yeah let's let's do it from two different directions
00:21:04.720one is gonna i'm gonna kind of harness the insights from people like stewart ritchie and russell warne and
00:21:10.400really kind of the history of of intelligence research at least in the last few decades
00:21:14.700and on the other end i want to i want to address the plyotropy question which is if you select for
00:21:20.140higher intelligence along with other traits as well do you get some unwanted side effects that are
00:21:25.540either good or bad for the kid i think both are pretty interesting and we found some some some cool
00:21:30.780stuff so yeah something that is not original to us even though we are selecting we're offering the
00:21:37.040ability select for intelligence the kind of consensus of intelligence researchers show that
00:21:41.820you know as you move up the or let's just say to the right hand side of the bell curve for
00:21:47.260intelligence you get a lot of really interesting outcomes and some of those outcomes are things like
00:21:52.380lower rates of addictive disorders whether it's smoking drug abuse alcohol abuse and there's no reason
00:21:58.180to believe that smarter people are any morally better or that they have more genes that predispose them
00:22:04.980to resist addiction per se it's not that addictive genes are differentially distributed it's rather
00:22:11.100that you know intelligence is correlated with a bunch of interesting things like self-control and
00:22:16.100time discounting and so smarter people on average you know when you go across a large number of people
00:22:22.040they tend to think about the future they set goals and they tend to be a bit better at sticking to
00:22:27.040their goals not massively better but better enough that systematically for example
00:22:32.500on average you know steve jobs is an exception you know he he went to some quack doctor when he had
00:22:37.660cancer and died because of that probably but generally a brighter person will not only be able to
00:22:42.700sift through the relevant information better but they'll keep their appointments it's really simple
00:22:47.480to think about that i mean why wouldn't you keep your appointment but the truth is smarter people do
00:22:52.080they tend to keep their appointments pay their bills on time set plans and then and then follow through
00:22:57.620on them and that may seem rudimentary but in in in the course of a life that means better health and
00:23:03.040better outcomes better jobs and so on on the other hand there's also the usual stuff which is like
00:23:08.680slightly higher income more scientific achievement the maybe racier findings and this is something that
00:23:14.640you know i first learned from garrett jones and then we published a paper together maybe you can post
00:23:19.100it it's called cognitive enhancement and network effects why individual traits or rather why individual
00:23:25.820welfare depends on group traits and what garrett jones showed and we argued is when you take a group
00:23:31.200of of bright people they actually tend to be more cooperative and the reason for that again is not that they
00:23:37.740have morally better motivations but they can see the benefits of mutual cooperation in the short run
00:23:43.160for their own long-term gain and from a national level from a company level from from a neighborhood level
00:23:50.360that means weird things like less corruption why because corruption is often like look i can get an
00:23:56.340immediate payoff now and fuck the whole institutions over in the long run because i'm just thinking about
00:24:02.500my short-run payoff or i can actually follow these short-run rules for mutual gain in the long run and
00:24:09.000that makes all of us better off including myself and so what we find is it's really amazing i mean
00:24:15.100there are very few bad things about being brighter i can tell you one thing that might be the case okay
00:24:21.140yeah and that is let me find let me first say something that's been claimed but not replicated
00:24:27.480and that is karpinski in 2018 et al they argued that brighter people are a little bit more prone to
00:24:33.980depression and actually all the other findings have have said that's wrong and all the findings both
00:24:41.240before and after and it looks like that's really a function of a very small sample set of specific
00:24:47.720mensa members in a specific chapter in la oh i imagine that like yeah if you live in la and have
00:24:53.800joined mensa also it just seems like most mensa members are just very they're already sad yeah exactly
00:24:59.080there's a selection but all the other research suggests the opposite the one thing that has not been
00:25:05.820settled is it may be the case and some within our company actually do think this is true and some
00:25:11.340don't it may be the case that when you go really far toward the right hand side of the bell curve you
00:25:16.340select for asperger's some have said there's about a 0.2 correlation with that now that's not bad in and
00:25:22.380of itself if that corresponds with low functioning autism then it would be bad but actually you've actually
00:25:28.940you've looked at maybe how to like look at you've looked at potentially including scores in herocyte
00:25:36.060for autism right like i don't know if you do yet or if you ever will but my understanding was the
00:25:42.220low functioning autism is just autism plus low iq am i wrong with that yeah that's probably wrong and
00:25:49.580actually one of the things that we screen for first of all autism is almost certainly multifactorial
00:25:54.620there's definitely genetic components yeah there's and also autism is a asd is a collection of
00:25:59.900different things exactly yes yeah we were probably better off when it was two separate things like
00:26:05.100yeah but yeah we do have a full timer who's working on this and and we do now have a predictor that we
00:26:11.020just call neurodevelopmental disorders or neuro risk and the idea here there are rare but sufficiently
00:26:17.980common variants and you know let's call it 10 20 percent of the population that genetic variance that is
00:26:23.900that correlate with low functioning autism various other neurological disorders including even dyslexia
00:26:29.900and so on and so yeah we do have a predictor for that we're still not really close to cracking the
00:26:34.860full story of autism but we can select against some forms of low functioning autism having said that
00:26:41.180to go back to the previous point too and i'm glad you mentioned that someone so we did a comprehensive
00:26:46.460study on plyotropy and that's this idea that sometimes one gene or a set of genes will encode for
00:26:51.740multiple phenotypic effects and you know maybe one is good but another one's bad so you're selecting
00:26:57.660for a high iq but maybe there's some horrible thing like i don't know increased risk of breast cancer
00:27:02.460that you're going to get as a side effect yeah as it turns out and this was tobeas who who led this
00:27:08.620study we looked at 31 traits that you might target for embryo selection things like 31 traits that we have
00:27:15.660good scores for like intelligence breast cancer height and then we looked at the genetic associations with
00:27:22.220thousands of other known diseases more than a thousand anyway wow and what we found is plyotropy
00:27:28.220where it exists at all is overwhelmingly positive or neutral meaning that when you select against one
00:27:34.700disease you actually get fewer of other diseases too and when you select in favor of intelligence you get
00:27:40.300better mental health overall there's very few exceptions and i'll go through one you know one
00:27:46.460is an interesting one and that is high iq is a bit associated with anorexia why is you guys have a
00:27:53.820suspicion about why do you like yes i think it's about exerting too much control like it's where it goes far
00:28:04.140because i mean you were also talking about the correlation between higher iq and lower disease risk
00:28:08.940because it like you're so conscientiously like i'm gonna go to my appointments i'm gonna pay my
00:28:13.260bills and in this case it's like i'm gonna control what i eat every step on the treadmill i'm gonna
00:28:18.620count and you know explain the the high iq correlation with other forms of body dysmorphia like gender
00:28:24.140dysphoria yeah possibly it's also if i remember from the research it's been shown to correlate well just
00:28:29.500anecdotally you walk around silicon valley where all like the brilliant programmers are and like
00:28:33.660there's so many there's so many like i don't know you go to manifest and like half the chicks are
00:28:38.700dudes so it's it's kind of hard yeah yeah they're also like asian so they pass and they look great
00:28:43.500so who cares it's all good you know i agree and if you read the book neurotribes that's that's a big
00:28:49.020part of the story is like silicon valley there's a selection effect that attracts programmers who are
00:28:54.060obviously going to be more likely to be you know asperger than than not and so on and then they pair up
00:29:00.140and have children and so obviously through assortative mating you're going to get higher rates of
00:29:04.540of at least asperger's if not low functioning and yeah i mean no doubt that's true you're
00:29:08.940going to find it in fields like math and so on but yeah i mean back to that point simone i think
00:29:13.500you're entirely right i'm not a psychiatrist so i don't want to give a definitive statement it sounds
00:29:17.740plausible but that's a case where you know it's not that the genes that cause intelligence are causing
00:29:23.740you to have bulimia or whatever it's rather that again they're causing these general traits which are
00:29:29.500basically great but do you have some risks in some environments that they'll well that's where
00:29:34.380a hair site can be really helpful to parents because if you know that that's a risk like
00:29:39.820and polygenic risk or selection with embryos is not just about choosing birth order and selecting
00:29:44.940which embryo to start with it's also about understanding the risks that you should be
00:29:49.340screening for and preparing for and because we know that for example things like autism and eating
00:29:53.900disorders are risks for our children we we prepare for them in ways where when you intervene early you can
00:29:58.940make the difference between someone having an eating disorder that manifests poorly versus one that's
00:30:03.900manageable and like it took my parents too long to figure out how to make my anorexia manageable
00:30:10.860where like it's totally not a problem for me like so now there's irreversible osteoporosis and
00:30:16.220fertility problems but because we know now how to manage it and how that need for control can be exerted
00:30:23.740we don't have to worry about that in our own kids and parents who are concerned about that and
00:30:27.420they know their kid has that risk and just prepare to do that i also wanted to point something out
00:30:31.980here for for watchers of our show who are like oh this is you know choosing which embryos end up
00:30:36.860getting implanted and which ones don't get implanted which is you know killing embryos which is it was the
00:30:42.700current science factually we're sort of past that part of history while some people will use it that
00:30:48.220way we have now had successful germline gene editing used to resolve serious genetic conditions that were
00:30:55.260spotted through technology like this specifically there was a case where so far it's healthy a fetus
00:31:02.060that had been born the conceived with an extra chromosome had the extra this this would have
00:31:06.620had down syndrome had the extra chromosome successfully removed now a a human who would have lived their
00:31:13.340entire life with down syndrome will not live their life was down syndrome because of this kind of
00:31:20.780technology which is scanning for this stuff and as we get further with this technology i i'm not i'm
00:31:26.300talking even a few years because a lot of our followers are younger if you are not using this
00:31:32.140kind of technology and one of your kids was fated to die at three of cancer and that could have been
00:31:36.620resolved through a germline intervention which we're also funding right that that you're responsible for
00:31:43.420that that that was sort of your moral vanity spent the life of your child just as much as jehovah's
00:31:52.060witnessed it refused a blood transfusion because it was unnatural or it doesn't work perfectly every time
00:31:58.380or you know if god wanted them to die if you look at that person who refused the blood transfusion for
00:32:03.820their kid and you look at them with moral revulsion be aware that there are people in the future maybe even
00:32:12.380your own children who will look at you that way as this technology continues to develop so while
00:32:18.220we're just at the beginning now and even i agree i see it as morally sketchy to say which which we are
00:32:23.900not saying we're going to use some of our embryos and not others we're just using it for ordering
00:32:27.020but we are entering an era very soon and we've already entered this era officially where that's not
00:32:33.820the only use case or potentially even the core use case of technology like this yeah good let me address
00:32:38.380both of those points first i really like simone's point about you know in the rare cases where we do
00:32:44.140have negative or antagonistic pleiotropy they're very rare but they're going to be there it may turn
00:32:49.820out that there is a really small correlation for example between intelligence and and autism and and
00:32:55.820if that's true just like there is between height and heart conditions when you get really really tall
00:33:01.660you are more likely to have you know various kinds of cardiovascular problems and
00:33:06.060we can obviously understand why right the heart has to support a bigger body
00:33:09.580in cases like that you know the truth is like maybe i would like an extra inch or two of height but
00:33:15.340you know our ceo and founder michael i mean he's six seven
00:33:21.100he wants to select for shorter kids why because you know when you're when you're at the fertility
00:33:26.700clinic and not in the mating market you're thinking about the health of your kids not just like how sexy
00:33:31.580they are or whatever you know are they just taller than average so so the truth is like actually even
00:33:37.500in those rare cases of antagonistic pleiotropy it's actually good for parents to know about it
00:33:42.220so they can then select accordingly and optimize and to your point malcolm yeah exactly i mean look
00:33:48.620one point i like to make is natural sex natural pregnancies about half of them result in spontaneous
00:33:54.060abortion you guys know this you've talked about it most of those aneuploidy cases are not mere downs i
00:33:59.580mean we all recognize if you have down syndrome you know you should not only be respected you should
00:34:04.220be honored you can live a good life with down syndrome but the vast majority are not downs they're
00:34:09.260actually completely incompatible with life and so if you think that the body is flushing those out
00:34:14.620naturally which it is in many many cases there's no difference between separating out those embryos
00:34:21.100in the lab ahead of time and thereby increasing the chance that you'll have a successful pregnancy
00:34:26.300then you know having a bunch of miscarriages and then doing it the so-called natural way so
00:34:31.980you know that's that's my view of that situation i mean apart from the moral status of embryos i'm
00:34:36.460going to debate that on louise perry's show pretty soon here but oh you are well have you have you
00:34:41.180heard my long debate on this because i i talk about it a lot on this show but when i'm talking about
00:34:45.900it on the show i'm often talking about it to a different audience than you're used to me so yeah
00:34:49.980the arguments i often use that i do not see used enough is first that if god if it was the case
00:34:58.060that the installment happened at conception then identical twins wouldn't exist and human chimeras
00:35:03.740wouldn't exist because if that's the case then identical twins have the same soul they are humans
00:35:09.100sharing a soul because embryos twin in other words like let's say a week after you've created the embryo
00:35:14.380the body has created them sometimes by sheer accident when they're when the cells are dividing
00:35:19.340the embryo basically accidentally becomes a twin and it's like at that stage do you now have two
00:35:24.780souls or one or five right and i've never seen a good and and human chimeras are when two embryos
00:35:31.260combine into one embryo and a person might have parts of their brain half a soul right yeah yeah they
00:35:37.260have how does this work right so i think that the that if and it's important to note is animals
00:35:43.980mammals have children that are chimeras or identical twins at different rates some mammals have no
00:35:50.220identical twins or human chimeras in some mammals it's like 40 of them are human are chimeras this
00:35:55.740is in some primate species if god had wanted humans to not have chimeras or identical twins he could have
00:36:01.820made that the case if god had wanted to say i knew you when you were conceived in your mother's womb
00:36:08.780instead of before you were conceived in your mother's womb he could have had that written as
00:36:13.900well and yet the bible very clearly says before which is why many of the early even catholic thinkers
00:36:20.860so augustus of hippo and thomas aquinas i remember one was pretty concretely and solomon happened seven
00:36:25.580days after an embryo begins to develop and the other just didn't have an opinion on this yet and i will
00:36:30.380note here that people say well you know the church has always been against the killing of children
00:36:36.540however a child is defined even loosely and i completely agree with this the or even forms
00:36:42.460of abortion right um which i also agree with since the church has historically looked down on that
00:36:48.060however the problem is that depending on when insolement happens you are killing a child by not
00:36:55.260using this technology potentially because it also finds things like cancer risk and stuff like that
00:37:01.340you can potentially kill a child by not using it if it turns out that insolement happens after
00:37:08.300conception and if you told these early thinkers that a child could die because this is not used
00:37:16.380i think that that's where this becomes a more morally tricky argument even within the context of the early
00:37:21.500church but i when when they begin to develop opinions on this the opinions that the church developed didn't
00:37:28.220really get solidified into both pious the knights i mean this was only about 200 years ago and if you
00:37:33.420go to the early catholic thinkers and you're like yeah so you know we could through using this technology
00:37:39.180prevent a child from dying at like two or have a healthy child instead i don't think any of them would
00:37:43.980be like oh yeah you you should you should sacrifice the life of the the sickly child they simply they
00:37:49.580simply didn't know a lot of this biology too i mean obviously and you know the truth is you know i i i have
00:37:56.140great respect for for catholicism and and christianity and many of my friends are catholic but the truth
00:38:02.300is as you guys know i mean a lot of them will call the current pope like a commie you know like they
00:38:06.940don't listen to him actually right we were just talking about that and they know they know as we all do
00:38:13.020too you know god may be perfect but his representatives on earth are imperfect and they're partly political
00:38:19.900appointments right bishops elect them through a democratic election and you know apply your curtis yarvan
00:38:25.740analysis to that so i mean you know it's not clear like you know what one pope says
00:38:33.020is the pope who solidified the life begins at conception thing and he's the pope who ripped
00:38:38.620the penises off of all the statues but he's the pope who wrote the syllabus of errors that called for a
00:38:44.300catholic caliphate you know he he wasn't exactly you know i i think a a from my perspective he sort
00:38:50.940of represented catholicism's drift towards islamism as as like by the way islam recognizes ivf is
00:38:58.540completely fine so interestingly to the you know we mention this all the time when we're on news shows
00:39:03.900so we do news in italy and france and germany and in all of those countries you basically cannot do ivf
00:39:09.500because you can only do live transfers and i always tell them i go i don't mind that you're going to be
00:39:14.380muslim majority soon because i would be legally allowed to have kids under sharia law and i am
00:39:19.980not legally allowed to have kids in your country as it's structured right now we had one listener
00:39:25.100write us angrily and they go they're you know what was it infertility is not permanent and i'm like no
00:39:31.340some forms of infertility are pretty permanent yeah and another another argument on that front on the
00:39:36.860infertility front you know are you going to blame a generation of men for having lower sperm counts and
00:39:42.540testosterone they didn't deserve that and it's not you know it can't be just genetic change that
00:39:48.220you know our grandparents had how are 40 higher rates clearly it's the environment and clearly
00:39:54.140if that can do it in one generation it's reversible so if you're infertile now you should still be having
00:39:59.500children right unless you're passing along some horrific you know life-ending disease it's probably
00:40:04.940more that you're like mom microwaved all your food in plastic bags yeah yeah microplastics who knows what
00:40:09.820it is so there was a study done on this that showed that by 2060 50 of men in the developed
00:40:15.260world are going to be infertile so cultural groups that refuse to use fertility assisted technology are
00:40:20.940going to really struggle exactly genes and cultures co-evolve and i always like to say like look guys
00:40:26.780first of all we all know that china will be using this technology so will singapore you know right now
00:40:33.020it's still new they haven't heard of it necessarily but they already subsidized ivf to boost their birth
00:40:38.140rates israel does the same thing israel and the emirates also subsidized genetic testing for people
00:40:45.500who are doing ivf or forming a union in the uae and so this is just the next step and the idea that the
00:40:52.620moral landscape just is going to be as it is right now and not evolve you know i mean it just ignores
00:40:59.500history like the catholic church's position will absolutely evolve on this issue it did in our lifetime
00:41:05.340or our grandparents lifetimes remember initially they were against for example adding respirators
00:41:11.820because what were you doing like if you were dying you know that was god's will respirators were playing
00:41:17.340god oh now it's mandatory now you're playing god if you remove a respirator and so like these things
00:41:22.460evolve and i'm not mocking the pope or the catholic church i'm just saying we all recognize these things
00:41:27.900evolve and you know it's not clear that what the stance is right now is just sort of god's word or he
00:41:33.580would have put it in the bible yeah no absolutely anyway i didn't mean this to be a sermon from any
00:41:40.460of us but yeah it would have been easy to put something in the bible other than i knew you
00:41:44.460before you were in your mother's womb right like yeah it would have been incredibly easy that's like
00:41:49.100a huge oversight and by that he means the soul whatever the soul is he doesn't mean a specific
00:41:53.900sperm cell or embryo or something like that memories are being created and destroyed all the time
00:41:58.700naturally so we go deep on this and some of our stuff but yeah no so one i might have to run to
00:42:03.420get the the kids for their to a therapy speaking early interventions so i might i did i'm just warning
00:42:08.940that i might bounce but malcolm's gonna stay on in case i have to leave early but so we want to get
00:42:13.980also to the the global element of this where if you're outside the us and you can't necessarily have
00:42:18.380your embryo sequenced how can you still get polygenic scores for your embryos yeah so our big
00:42:25.580innovation one of the reasons that we stayed in stealth a bit longer than originally planned
00:42:30.700is we have a patent pending on this who knows if it'll be honored but i think it will
00:42:35.900and that is this idea that we can take data from a common genetic test that's offered at every ivf
00:42:41.340clinic in the world you could be in italy you could be in the us you could be in china and we don't serve
00:42:47.660every country in the world we'll get into that but you could technically do it from anywhere in the world
00:42:51.740and the idea is you can get this pre-implantation genetic test for aneuploidy this test for chromosomal
00:42:58.700problems like downs anywhere in the world and what we can do is ask you to request your raw genetic
00:43:05.260data from that test which it's your hipaa right here it's gdpr rights in europe and other countries
00:43:10.780have similar have similar laws where you own your genetic data and the data of your your embryos
00:43:15.500and since that test is offered anywhere but it's very low coverage genetic data what we do is we
00:43:22.620patented this this algorithm thanks to alex young and and others on our team where we we do short and
00:43:29.100long read sequencing on the parents we get a really deep genomic sequence of the parents and then we can
00:43:34.620put that together with the pgta data to get an idea of the whole genome of each discrete embryo which
00:43:40.540of course are different from each other and in and of itself that's just kind of a cool mathematical
00:43:45.340puzzle and the way it works is basically you're inheriting large chunks of dna from mom and dad
00:43:50.540and if if you know something about the start and stop points for those blocks and then a little bit
00:43:55.260in between then you can sequence the parents and fill those in those values it turns out it's a lot
00:44:01.580harder to do mathematically than it is to describe the way i am and you know that's why i'm not on the
00:44:06.620science team i'm you know i'm sort of on the comms team and doing some of the other things in the
00:44:11.100company but but anyway that allows people i'll give you an example somehow someone heard about
00:44:18.620our x thread when we when we launched in mongolia on the radio people were local influencers were
00:44:24.540doing tiktoks or whatever it was and they called us up and they're like hey can you service in mongolia
00:44:29.500and no other company can do that because they need to have a partnership with the clinic and then
00:44:35.340maybe whole genome sequence the embryo or do some other method but we can just be like yeah no no
00:44:40.540problem like as long as as long as the laws there allow you to select an embryo of your choice
00:44:45.580we can serve you now i will say a caveat here as usual europe is way behind and so we don't serve
00:44:51.820europeans directly like if they want to fly that's fine they can come to california they can go to cyprus
00:44:57.180and it's all legal there but even though we technically could serve europeans
00:45:02.060very easily through this process i just mentioned we don't right now because we don't want to get in
00:45:07.580trouble with with european governments we do however urge your followers wherever you are in
00:45:13.020the world to assert your rights and make sure your governments are saying like look there's a choice
00:45:18.860here either we get to select our embryos either we own our genetic data or the government does and
00:45:24.860you guys have heard as much as i do the word eugenics thrown around here who's engaged in coercive
00:45:29.980government-sponsored eugenics is it seriously is it no so what we point out is the data
00:45:37.580let you use the data to make your decision or is it rather the government who's saying no
00:45:42.060we're gonna by force of law prevent you from accessing your own data the coercive eugenicists not not us
00:45:49.820right so i think i think a better way to make this argument is to point out that you know where this
00:45:54.300technology is going is germline gene editing right and it's clearer who the eugenicists is when we are
00:46:00.220talking about the legality of germline gene editing because that is a government saying that people with
00:46:05.420specific genetic patterns do not have a right to exist and they will coercively prevent those human
00:46:12.700beings existence because of what their genes said that is just plainly eugenics and these are people who your
00:46:20.540kids will know and interact with and they'll be like yeah i'm not allowed to exist in france or
00:46:25.500germany or whatever and my favorite point on this is everybody oh oh oh do you really like when i when
00:46:30.780i talked to you know i was like the problem because i was talking to a german reporter about this do you
00:46:34.940think we were mad at the nazis because they wanted to make people healthier we were mad at the nazis
00:46:38.940because they were controlling who could have kids and how and she responded murdering people yeah do you
00:46:44.140you really think yeah do you really think like 1950s americans were were fighting in war war ii
00:46:51.260with the hope of like scientists being able to genetically augment a human to be stronger and i said
00:46:56.540the very face of anti-nazi propaganda was captain america a human whose scientists augmented to be
00:47:03.500better this is this has always been what this side of the fight has been about against the the opposite
00:47:10.540side of the fight it's silly and i you know i i make that point as a rhetorical one yours is partly
00:47:15.180rhetorical too about you but of course you know in my academic career i mean as a philosopher i mean
00:47:20.700i was asked for example to participate in a debate and i wrote a paper called defending eugenics but of
00:47:25.420course what i meant by that and i was absolutely clear by it is of course individual eugenics where you
00:47:31.180can make choices to improve the welfare of your children you know i always use leonard darwin's
00:47:36.700definition of eugenics he he was the president of the eugenics society and son of leonard of
00:47:41.260charles darwin and he said eugenics is the study of heredity as it may be used to improve the mental
00:47:48.380and physical well-being of humanity and it's like well if that's how you define it great and then the
00:47:53.820only question is who gets to decide so you know i don't have like an interest in like oh this this is
00:47:59.740or isn't eugenics who cares that's just a word it's like it's like settling or trying to settle the
00:48:04.620abortion debate by just saying well i'm pro-choice and like are you against choice well that okay now
00:48:10.220you're just using rhetoric like obviously the question is what's the moral status of the fetus
00:48:14.540and is this you know is the mother in the best position to decide or the state same thing here
00:48:19.180so i don't really like you know engaging these debates about eugenics but again if they're gonna
00:48:23.980levy that charge against us and then just drop the mic it's like hold on here dude we're the ones who
00:48:29.900are arguing that individuals and parents have the right right you guys are the ones arguing for
00:48:34.700restriction so don't take the moral high ground on us exactly yeah okay i'm gonna i'm malcolm if
00:48:40.860you can wrap this up with i'll wrap it up you don't have to wrap it up fast i'm just i have to run
00:48:45.340to get the kids simone i i would like to try to do beef orange beef tonight and i will bring back
00:48:51.260the ingredients for the sauce it's just cooked the way we've been doing the beef every other night
00:48:54.780pan frying except the sauce uses an orange and a bit of orange rinds that i'm gonna pick up from
00:49:00.220the grocery store when i get some beer we have clementines can i use that we have orange in the
00:49:05.580show by the way but we have clementines sorry we always oh clementines yeah you can use clementines
00:49:10.780that's fine then you don't need to go to the store anyway i'm i'm jumping and you guys can wrap up here
00:49:14.780and yes order received malcolm i sent the ingredient the list on whatsapp or you can look up a recipe okay
00:49:20.700okay perfect and johnny thank you so much i'm sorry for bouncing early but i'm so glad you're on
00:49:25.740the show and we're really excited to run this so yeah okay carry on great to see you thanks yeah
00:49:32.620great okay so any any final things you wanted to go over
00:49:36.700i don't really have any particular agenda what are you what are you thinking about was the
00:49:39.900leith perry show is this your first time doing it no it was on a couple years ago but yeah i mean
00:49:44.220she wanted she just had diana fleishman and lyman stone two people that i know you know as well
00:49:48.940yeah yeah yeah debate eugenics which is of course partly a semantic debate partly a substantive one
00:49:54.860but then she wanted someone to do specifically pgtp pre-implantation genetic testing for polygenic
00:50:00.140traits i'm obviously the face of that in in a sense even though i'm not you know the the best scientist
00:50:05.580on our team but i've been kind of the spokesman so i'm the obvious choice and we're looking for an
00:50:09.900opponent and you know have a really healthy debate so yeah well do you guys have an opponent our audience
00:50:15.820skin yeah i mean she's looking she's asked someone so we'll see we'll see what they say but yeah i
00:50:20.780mean what i'm excited for like for our company and the space because i'm not necessarily here to show
00:50:25.500us of course we always like customers it's great you know you can go to hair site.com but i'm i'm
00:50:30.700actually much more excited just about the whole space i think the idea of you know reducing disease
00:50:37.020in the world that that's bad is ridiculous like all of us spend so much time worrying about health and
00:50:42.140you know going to the gym and whatever eating right and so like i just think this is a really
00:50:47.420fucking great tool like we're gonna increase health marginally increase intelligence and
00:50:53.340obviously there's a great bridge technology like you said i mean i've written about it in my book like
00:50:58.140i'm super excited about the future i think this is one of the few things we should be excited about
00:51:03.420like there's been so many great inventions you know basic plumbing you know reduce disease risk
00:51:09.020antibiotics etc and to me biotechnology when it's done right and genetics when it's done right
00:51:14.780this is going to be the biggest boon to human welfare and personally you know just to just to
00:51:19.980add another thought on that i'm not personally a transhumanist i'm not someone who wants to upload
00:51:25.020my brain into the cloud i know some people who do and that's fine but at the very least surely
00:51:29.980we can agree that it's better if we can live like longer healthier lives be a bit brighter a bit
00:51:35.100more creative etc and i just think this is step one to doing this and you know you might worry about
00:51:41.340yeah go ahead it's an interesting technology to think about because it's not a technology
00:51:45.500that is going to be used by the next generation and the way it was used by this generation because
00:51:50.380germline gene editing will presumably be mainstream and inexpensive by the time we have the next generation
00:51:57.100in which case this technology will move to a preventative and associative technology to germline gene
00:52:02.860editing actually we'll probably be combining the two of them because i think you're still going to
00:52:07.180have like if you do the equivalent of ivf or rather ivg which i'm sure you've talked about you know you
00:52:12.620take an adult cell turn it into a whatever you know you're still going to have a range of different
00:52:16.780outcomes and a basic sort of you know you might call it a genetic deck and then you stack it by first
00:52:22.540selecting one of the embryos and then secondly touching it up with editing i actually think like
00:52:27.500it may be a little ways longer than many people think i don't have strong views but i talk to
00:52:31.340people at the church lab and and the brode institute and i think massive multiplex editing
00:52:36.460which is what you would really need like hundreds or thousands of genes to really get big effects
00:52:40.860that may be a ways away but you know what's what's also coming very soon after that and maybe even
00:52:45.740before and that is creating entire chromosomes from scratch i mean that may sound science fictiony but
00:52:51.660there are many people working on this now and when you think about it gene editing is a really
00:52:56.460delicate thing you've got billions of base pairs and to like edit one by one and not have off-target
00:53:01.580effects it's harder than you might think it might actually end up being easier in the long run to
00:53:06.780just create entire genomes from scratch as well i think it changes a lot of the probabilities in this
00:53:12.780space where historically i would have agreed with you but now i'm sort of of the perspective
00:53:17.420as ai continues to develop ai's ability it turned out there's been some research on this that ai is just
00:53:23.100very good at predicting genetic effects and modeling genomes and so it turns out that we're
00:53:28.220probably going to get you know five ten years from now the ai will probably be fairly accurate
00:53:32.540at this stuff but we still need a good editing system so the problem with crispr and i'll tell
00:53:36.780all of its descendants is off-target mutations and again if you're even if you had like a three
00:53:42.380percent probability of that okay it would be good to fix a single broken gene right but not not
00:53:47.260hundreds or thousands and so you know there's going to be some stuff that has to be worked out and
00:53:51.420whatever but i'm all hopeful for it i know you are too i i thought i would say one more thing i
00:53:56.300mean if we're if we're closing i mean a lot of people worry about egalitarian objections and you
00:54:01.260know i'm not an egalitarian so i'll just say that and you know i i agree more with nietzsche that mankind
00:54:06.460is judged by its highest specimens you know not not just mere life you know that's not what that's not
00:54:12.060what is what's important but you know even from an egalitarian standpoint i am sympathetic to some
00:54:17.580extent you know when you think about what really impedes people's ability to to really flourish in
00:54:23.260life i mean one of the main things is just having a poorly functioning immune system my my grandmother
00:54:29.180had a bunch of autoimmune diseases and she couldn't leave the house and yet she was the smartest person
00:54:34.060in our family by far so the idea is look to the extent that we have inequalities a lot of them not all
00:54:40.860of them are genetic and who's going to benefit the most from this technology in the long run it's
00:54:46.220actually those people who have the worst genetic luck i mean in a sense they're not going to be
00:54:52.060born instead a sibling that's a lot like them would be born but when we're talking about the distant
00:54:57.100future or future people you don't just have some abstract right to be born i mean there's a trillion
00:55:03.020potential combinations of eggs and sperm right yeah the idea is to create future people that are
00:55:09.100basically on average going to be healthy and thrive and and i mean to me like that's just really great
00:55:15.740and if we have a few more von neumann's in the population we have more inequality but we also have more
00:55:21.980cool shit in the world and in the and in the end we also are going to get in some ways less inequality
00:55:28.940not that that's the only thing i care about simply because a lot of these this low hanging fruit
00:55:34.380you know really low intelligence or really bad diseases are simply going to be cured and so like
00:55:40.380i just see that as a as a win-win it's going to be a better world yeah yeah no i i mean i'm i'm
00:55:45.820excited for for the technology that's coming down the pipeline right now it's really cool um and i and
00:55:49.740i it's funny the people who are mortified by this technology they always assume that everyone else on
00:55:56.300the right is going to be mortified by this technology and i think they're often quite surprised that no most
00:56:01.740people just do not care especially in their private lives people want the best for their
00:56:05.820children whatever they publicly say to my knowledge nick fuentes was born via ibf you know famous pro
00:56:11.180catholic anti-ibf guy right like i don't i don't want to be on nick fuentes team but okay that's true
00:56:16.300by the way can i can i say something you know i don't know if you're going to mention
00:56:20.940pro natalism i know this doesn't have much to do with it but the truth is
00:56:24.700you know i i agree with you i'm really worried about birth rates i think any reasonable person would
00:56:29.180be if you if you love humanity you you want us to survive and and you know we've we've had many
00:56:35.260customers already by the way and and many are religious or on the right as well who are going
00:56:40.860to have a kid that they wouldn't have had if it weren't for polygenic selection and the reason is
00:56:46.220they have a family history of disease or they were infertile especially the the former you know we've
00:56:51.100had real people worry like look i don't want to have a kid if it means that they're going to have
00:56:56.940these horrible diseases but if i can embryo select they're much less likely to so we're going to have
00:57:02.060more kids like this is actually a pro natal pro family technology and i know not everyone's going
00:57:07.740to agree with us on that but like it is it's objective no i mean it creates more humans and
00:57:12.460healthier ones so more more adult humans people can say well do you consider an embryo human but it
00:57:17.180creates more adult humans and i and i would note i do consider most embryos humans just not at the
00:57:22.140exact like i consider potential humans myself but like yeah we can parse words yeah but but in
00:57:28.460terms of like living adults which is the thing that prenatalism is concerned about obviously this is
00:57:33.020we get more of them yeah exactly but yeah it's been great to have you on great to catch up yeah any any
00:57:38.540new projects you're working on yourself well no basically we're trying to spread this to to the
00:57:43.740world and and find ways of doing this but obviously i'm always writing we we just put on our website
00:57:50.140and ethics of embryo screening paper and what we really want to do next is in addition to offering
00:57:55.740more and better traits we're always trying to do that including potentially personality or severe
00:58:00.780depression that you could select against we're especially interested in doing more of these
00:58:05.020plyotropy studies my worry always was as an academic like look this is probably going to be net good but
00:58:12.060maybe there's all this hidden plyotropy where we're going to get all these bad unexpected effects but
00:58:16.380the more we learn about it the more we learn that's not true and and yeah i want to dig into
00:58:21.180this because i think it's really good news and it's really important for people you know doctors
00:58:27.420a lot of people in the industry the fertility industry they just don't keep up with genetics and
00:58:31.660so the more we discover about it and the more we publish in mainstream journals the more attention
00:58:37.020they're going to have to pay and just change their views so i really want to be on my soapbox and
00:58:41.100like make the arguments and kind of be part of the epistemic change in the world that makes us more
00:58:46.780acceptable well great great to have you on thanks for having me great to catch up
00:58:51.260is this indy's first time seeing snow yeah i think so oh are you guys making snow angels
00:59:07.180get up octavian look at the angel you did a really good job actually
00:59:09.820what do you think girl is it kind of cold it's just professor girl hey fessor
00:59:25.260it's still snowing out today yeah hey you want me to get the chickens today so you don't freeze
00:59:30.140see that's the yellow snow that's what i said yeah we should not eat that yeah don't eat the yellow
00:59:52.300snow right guys wow that is so beautiful you're a good girl