The Future of Ethnicity with Razib Khan
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Summary
Razib Khan is the CSO of Generate, a startup that helps people access genetic technology and information that they haven t been able to access yet. He s also the founder of Unsupervised Learning, a company that helps you learn and improve your English. In this episode, we talk about fertility, race, and the future of humanity.
Transcript
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it's hard for me to wrap my head around it because I spent the first, like all my childhood
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assuming that everyone was just going to sort of become the same like golden-ish color as everyone
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just interbred with everyone else. And what I'm seeing instead is like everyone moving in the
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direction of glomming off in these more isolated communities, becoming more different from each
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other instead of all kind of the same. It's just so weird. And then of course speciation is going
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to happen when people get off. We ran a big study on this. And one of the things that's most
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correlated with fertility rate, at least in the U.S., is xenophobia, which means that we actually
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will likely preserve independent ethnic groups. It's just the opposite of what I expected. Like
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for the majority of my life, it's so weird. Yeah. I mean, the issue here is like also
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if you look at a country like Brazil or Cape Verde, what happens is actually like even in like a
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genetically homogenous admixed population, there's still variation. And so people still look different.
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And so if they're sorting based on physical type, there will be like kind of like precipitation
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back out, if that makes sense. Would you like to know more?
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Hello. We have a very special guest on Basecamp, Razib Khan. He is the CSO of Generate, which is a
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really, really cool startup, basically enabling people to use a lot of genetic technology and
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information that they haven't been able to use yet. Plus he is the proprietor of unsupervised learning,
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which you can check out on Substack. Talk about deep dives on really cool genetic histories and
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all sorts of stuff. You had really better check it out if you don't know about it yet. You're in for
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a treat. You can also just check out a lot of things that he's working on at razibkhan.com.
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And he's probably one of the most famous in the world communicators on human genetic stuff when it
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Whenever people say that, I'm just like, why aren't there more communicators? I mean, it's like,
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well, I'll tell you why there are more communicators. I'd say there are a number
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of other communicators, but I think a lot of the other communicators in this space go
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a little too hard on the race stuff. Like they seem to have a vested horse in the game,
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which pollutes their ability to give the message. Whereas you come at it much more neutrally,
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which I think is why you're such an effective communicator. And to that end, one thing I wanted
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to ask is where do you think the future of humanity is going genetically speaking? Like,
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are we going to see a die off of ethnic groups? Are we going to see new ethnic groups? Are we going
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to see, you know, who does well in this coming world? What's going on?
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Yeah, it's complicated because, you know, these sorts of linear projections, not necessarily linear,
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but just like, I mean, obviously they're exponential too, but you know, like in 1900, if you had asked me
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this, you know, the, the theory was like all the colored races were going to disappear because the
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fertility of white Europeans was so high and they were conquering all the continents and settling
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everything. Obviously that's not what ended up happening. So it just goes to show you that these
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like very, very long-term projections. So for example, like people like, oh, there's going to be
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like 5 billion people in Africa in 2100. I mean, that's, I'm exaggerating. I think it's close to like
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3 billion or 4 billion. Okay. I just don't think that there will be. I think that those are overestimates
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probably. And you know, the transition will be faster. You know, since like about the 1980s,
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the UN has actually consistently over-predicted population growth because as you guys know,
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a demographic transition has been happening everywhere and fertility is crashing everywhere.
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And so it just depends on where. So in any case, I think like Peter Zehan says, oh,
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the Chinese people are going to disappear. I'm like, look, they got a low fertility,
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but like there's 1.4 billion of them. I mean, you know, they're not going to like,
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they're not going to disappear. Okay. There's like 20 million Jews. And like, we're not like,
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oh, the Jews are going to disappear. You know, the reason the Jews are not going to disappear is
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ultra-Orthodox Jews have a high fertility, right? So they're still going to be around. If you read
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Frank Herbert's Dune, they're still around, you know? So you just need some of them that really
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want to reproduce. Wait, who are the Jews in Frank Herbert's Dune? They work with the
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Bene Gesserit. Yeah. Really? That's fascinating. Yeah. They're still around. They're still around.
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Well, do you know Kwisatz Haderach is Hebrew? No, no. Oh, that's wild. I had no idea.
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Yeah. Mind blown. Mind blown. Are we, are we going the Tylaxi route with our family?
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You know what? So I have a, I have a friend. Do you know what an axolotl tank is?
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Yeah, of course. It's what became the Tylaxi females. They basically turned them into birthing
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ticks. I have a friend who got her eggs and she has like, she produced a lot of eggs.
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And so I was like, you would be a really great axolotl tank.
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Okay. How long till we get axolotl tanks? Like, do you see some groups basically getting
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rid of women when we get artificial wounds? Yeah. Yeah. So I do think in terms of what's
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going to happen, I do think with diversification, it's probably going to be a thing within a hundred
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years. You will have like sex of humans that are naturals, others that are probably going
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to do like legit transhumanism. I mean, assuming our technological civilization continues, you
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know? Right. Right. And then I do think there will be, you know, I mean, look, there's going
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to be like groups of gay men, actually just groups of people in general, like women as
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well, because they don't want to give birth. You know, they don't want to go through the
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body, all that transformation. They're going to use axolotl tanks. The main issue is, I don't
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think they're going to be necessarily many, you know, they're not going to be like, you know,
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dead or like brain dead, you know, Plylaxis, Plylaxis women. But, but the point is like,
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the point is the issue, the issue is always like, all right, actually, you know, this is
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going to be fixed. They're going to test it on, on like animals, but the first ones are
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going to be bad. Right. Yeah. It's just like, you know, C-sections cause some issues, et cetera,
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et cetera. Actually, I'm going to push back here. I heard a theory on this that was actually
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pretty compelling to me that it may turn out when we first start doing artificial wombs that
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the children coming out of them are actually dramatically healthier than children born from
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natural wombs because they don't have any restrictions on resources. And so even though
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they're not able to give people everything at just the right time, keep in mind, this is an
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environment where the mother is basically never sick because they're not interacting with the
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world. There's no restriction on the resources they're giving the kids. So it may be the difference
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we saw with the Flynn effect where like all of a sudden during a person's developmental period,
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they were given way more resources than they ever would have been historically. And we're getting
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like 14 pound babies. And what about babies that pop out and they can like talk? No,
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we got to, we got to aim for that actually. So, so one of the things that I've thought about,
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and you can tell me this is crazy that I was like, okay, well, one of the things I suspect to happen
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as smart people become a rarer asset in the future. And one that companies really need is that there will
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be a huge economic incentive for companies to create their own humans. And, you know, one of
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the things we're really actually trying to do as the Collins Institute is make child rearing at scale
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of like gifted children, like, like scalable and inexpensive. So like a company could implement
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this program without much human intervention. So long as they were producing people and caring for
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them in the first like three or four years of their lives.
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Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, that just sounds like a small nation, right?
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Well, I mean, sorry. I mean, yeah, I guess like, I mean, you, you could do it as a company. You
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could do it as an, I'm sure nations will do it as well.
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I mean, it's like, it's made of the kibbutz system, right?
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Like they didn't perfect it. They didn't get it to work right. But that's, yeah,
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they're like collective raising of these children.
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And they're all for the ends of the corporate, I mean, the idea is like, they stay on the kibbutz,
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Usually, yeah, that's the problem. Yeah. But I mean, when, once you like can actually
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sort of genetically manipulate children, you can even like make them require some kind
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of proprietary enzyme that only you provide. They can't leave the problem.
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Okay. This is, this is, this is, this is actually, I think been written about, and there
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are films about these sorts of things, right? Where it's like, basically it's like, yeah,
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you, they have a, you know, it's, it's like, you know, like Blade Runner, right?
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They have a time bomb and that's how you control them and stuff like that. I mean, is it possible?
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Yeah. Yeah. Is it feasible? Yeah. We might have, we, yeah, we might have to have a butlerian
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jihad. We'll see, you know, whatever it takes, just, you know, what he's talking about. That
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Against thinking machines. Yeah. But they also, they also, it's a jihad, a jihad also against
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like a genetic, like a genetic engineering and other things.
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Oh, they won't beat the genetically engineered. That's that's what they, what they, what they,
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they show the Bedi-Jazera don't use like official genetic entering. What they do is like, is
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breeding, like, you know, use like selective breeding. That's what they do.
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Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, so the, we were talking about ethnic groups, like not going extinct. You're
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like, well, the Chinese aren't going to go extinct, but there are groups that I am genuinely afraid
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for. Like the two that I always mention are actually both in India, which is the Jayans and
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the Parsi. I was wondering, are you worried for them? Are there other ethno groups that you're
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like particularly worried about, or do you just not care that certain groups are going to go extinct?
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I mean, the Parsis probably, but I mean, they have some issues in terms of, uh, yeah, they have. So,
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I mean, so Parsis, as most of your listeners might know, are Zoroastrians in India. Genetically,
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they're about three fourths Iranian, one fourth Gujarati, and they've been Indianized in a lot of
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their cultural habits. So they speak Gujarati. They don't speak any Persian language, obviously.
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They eat Gujarati food, and they have like names that are often, I mean, they have names like
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Khusro, but they often have like, you know, like Patel or whatever, you know, or Gandhi.
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So like Indira Gandhi's husband was a Parsi. His last name was Gandhi. That's a Gujarati name. Okay.
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So, you know, they're kind of cool, but like there are other Zoroastrians elsewhere.
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And one thing that, one thing that the Parsis did is they integrated kind of like Indian caste system
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mentality. And so they really frowned upon intermarriage and outmarried children are kind of
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expelled from the group. That's one of the reasons they're shrinking. So to be like an
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official Parsi, you have to have two Parsi parents. And this is actually like nothing to do with
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their Zoroastrian religion. It has to do with their becoming Indian. And so it's just like,
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yeah, I mean, but I mean, that's just how, that's how they're set up. And it's just like,
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kind of like, you know, with modernity and their, their advances and their, you know, high,
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like, yeah, you remind me of like a zoologist talking about pandas, but we just can't get
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them to fuck in captivity. Like we're trying, we're trying, but they're fucking pandas.
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Well, it's interesting because that it suggests like that there's this certain like just right
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spot Goldilocks zone of xenophobia where like you, you, you can't be like too xenophobic.
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Like if you like, you know, get too weird about marrying out, like it's hard to get enough
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people, like critical mass and like, keep going. But if you're not xenophobic enough,
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like then you're just going to glom into like the main population. So you have to be just like,
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just a little bit xenophobic and then you're okay.
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Yeah. So, you know, the Jews in China disappeared because they intermarried out.
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The Jews in Kaifeng, if you look at them, they just, they got assimilated into the Chinese system.
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Hold on. You have to go deeper here. When did the Jews immigrate to China?
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Yeah. I mean, people can just Google the Jews of Kaifeng. They're probably like Radonite
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traders. So they're Persian Jews probably showed up around the Mongol period. If not earlier,
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the Chinese consistently had problems distinguishing them from Muslims, you know,
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cause they worship one God, they didn't eat pork. All the other stuff is kind of like what,
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whatever, you know? So like they, they would call them things like black hat Muslims or something
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like that. But like they really Jews that like, they don't really know, you know, they're all
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like what weird, but yeah, so they show up in Kaifeng and they're well-known. The Jesuits
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show up in the six, in the late 1500s and they encountered them and they were super curious
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about them because these are Jews that didn't really interact much with Christians at all.
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And so they're like, Oh, like you guys are going to like have like the secret knowledge
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of how like Christianity is actually right. And you guys are hiding the fact that like Jesus
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was actually the Messiah. Anyway, there's a weird thing like that. So they were, they were
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around for like many, many centuries. And what happened is by the 18th century, the Jesuits
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that were the Europeans that encountered them had noticing that they really had been assimilated
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since like the 1500s. Like they looked much more Chinese. Like the original ones were like,
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had West Asian features. A lot of them by the 18th century, they were much more Chinese looking.
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And you know, the local rabbi of the community, he was super embarrassed because his Chinese wife
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was, was, you know, she had pigs in the front yard and he knew that like the Chinese don't care.
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They're like, whatever. But he knew that the Christian would be like, wait.
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So it was just, yeah. But like, you know, and his sons were, had, were in like the, were Chinese
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civil servants and stuff like that. So what happened in the 19th century, there was a flood,
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the community scattered and they either like became Han. So they assimilated into the Han
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majority or they became Muslim. And there are still some way Muslim families in like that area
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of China and also Han families who know that they have the Jewish ancestry. Some of them have gone
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back to Judaism now. Wow. But yeah, some of them have like, it's fascinating. Okay. So to that end,
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cause this is one thing you touched on and I'm wondering what you're thinking about it. So we're
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talking about genetic isolation and populations. Do you see intentional genetic isolation becoming more
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of a thing in the future? IE more, I don't want to call human speciation, but human like ethnic
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speciation becoming more of a thing as IQ is dropping in the general population.
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So, you know what? I think the speciation will happen. I think this is like pretty straightforward
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when we get off planet. Oh, immediately. Yeah. I think basically like, cause people are just
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like, they don't want to like go to, I don't want to go to fucking Mars. I don't care how tall
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and, you know, stretched out she, you know what I'm saying? Like, of course there's going to be
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like, you know, Bumble is going to be like interplanetary option. Like if you really like
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tall chicks, you want to go for a Martian, but the problem is you better have some money to get
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all the way over there. And is she going to be into you? Cause you're like only six foot two.
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No, what I love is in this world, humans were the dwarfs, the ones who are on earth or the short
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stout, like stern boned ones. And the ones who go to Mars are the, the elf like people.
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No, but people, I think underestimate if it continues to be expensive to do interplanetary
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travel, which I think will be a thing for hundreds of years that we will definitely have full speciation.
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Yeah. It's just so, it's so interesting. It's hard for me to wrap my head around it because I spent the
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first, like all my childhood assuming, cause it was kind of like, I don't know, just assumed
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everywhere that I grew up that everyone was just going to sort of become the same like golden-ish
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color as everyone just enter bread with everyone else. And, and what I'm seeing instead is like
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everyone moving in the direction of glomming off in these more isolated communities, becoming more
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different from each other instead of all kind of the same. It's just so weird. And then of course
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speciation is going to happen when people get off. We ran a big study on this. And one of the things
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that's most correlated with fertility rate, at least in the U S is xenophobia, which means that we
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actually will likely preserve independent ethnic groups. It's just the opposite of what I expected.
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Like for the majority of my life, it's so weird.
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Yeah. I mean, the, the issue here is like also, even in a country like Brazil or Cape Verde,
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what happens is actually like, even in like a genetically homogenous admixed population,
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there's still variation. And so people will still look different. And so if they're sorting
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based on physical type, there will be like, kind of like precipitation back out. If that makes
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sense. Does that make sense? And so it's not like actually like-
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Oh, explain. Precipitation back out. So they're selecting a lifestyle, then that ends up
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Yeah. Or like in Brazil, it's known because in Brazil, a lot of families are of a mixed
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background and it's not like weird to say that that's my white brother. That's my black brother
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And there is, there is some evidence that people actually start, they sort based on what they look
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like, even though they have the same. So it's like, there could be someone who, there could be
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someone who is like, you know, looks kind of white in a mixed race family and they end up pairing with
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someone who looks kind of white in another mixed race family. So their ancestry is no different than
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the darker people, but their physical type, because they're selecting on that subset. So it's positive
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assortative mating. That's what I'm talking about. I mean, cause you guys have that IQ, but you know,
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physical things are also like pretty salient to people. And in a place like Brazil, there's like
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skin color prejudice. And so people that are lighter skinned, you know, they have an incentive
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Well, I think people just tend to like people that look like them often. I mean, not always,
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but it seems to happen where people are similar to each other.
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You're just thinking too much of me and Malcolm. Whenever I am at a party with Malcolm these days,
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I'm like, when I'm trying to like point to him, I'm like, oh, the guy who looks like my brother,
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that's my husband. This is how we know you're autistic. Cause like, yes, people think that,
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but very few people say that. Autism confirmed. It works though. It works way better than,
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you know, my husband who's over there now. So do you think that when we begin to have
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genetically selected humans, do you think that we will have the possibility of a caste system?
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Or do you think, because I know you've talked about the caste system before,
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and I'm wondering like, like once we can select for specific traits that are of utility to specific
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professions, like, you know, charisma versus stemminess, do you think that like the only
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stable long-term iteration of humanity is a caste system? Or do you think that there's a way you
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could have this sort of selection without caste systems forming?
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Yeah. So I think like the Indian types caste system requires like a religious justification.
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The gene flow is so fucking low. So I think a normal, like more like colloquial caste system
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does emerge. But I mean, if you read Greg Clark's work about social stability of like,
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you know, status and all that stuff, and that's a legit thing there in the work,
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but there's still permeability. There's still people moving up and moving down and those sorts
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of things. So I think that's going to be more likely just because I, you know, most human
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societies have not sacralized social status that way. Like India is the exception, not the rule.
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But if you sacralize social status, like only those with like that blood can do that thing,
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then yes, it could emerge. So it depends on the religious aspect. We create a religion out of it.
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So I don't know if you saw this, there was a study on this that I thought was really fascinating.
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It was done in the UK. And you know, in the US, we were often like, well, we're not descended,
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you know, if you're from a white US background, they're like, oh, we didn't have a caste system.
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And I'm like, bro, your last name is Smith and his last name is Weaver. And there was an
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interesting study that looked at people with the last name Weaver and found that they had higher
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dexterity, manual dexterity, even today. And people with the last name Smith had higher grip
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strength even today. I don't know if you've seen that one. I thought it was interesting in terms of
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Yeah, I think I saw that. And then also like, like people with these sorts of like, you know,
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you know, working class or blue collar artisanal artisanal names are still much more average to
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like below average and social status. I mean, so what Greg Clark shows is, you know, what is it like
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the persistence of social status, like point eight per generation, which is pretty high. But so what
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happens is there's a lot of noise from one from generation, not to generation one. And so people
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extrapolate from that. But what actually happens is there's often regression back to something that's
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more ancestral. And so I think the statistic is like, so in, in the year 1100, every single officer
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in the British army was basically Norman, because they just replaced all the Anglo-Saxons. Like in the
0.96
00:19:38.740
20th century, 10% are Norman, even though like less than 1% of the names in the British
00:19:44.540
population. Fascinating. You can calculate, you know?
00:19:49.600
Yeah. Another study I heard on this that really was profound to me was looking at China and, you
00:19:55.700
know, looking at the number of people in the Chinese government today, like high level Chinese
00:20:00.320
government who were descended from aristocratic families in China. And this is insane because if
00:20:05.400
you know anything about the Chinese revolution, these families were ground to dust. They lost
00:20:10.300
everything and were treated worse than every other person in society. And yet somehow they
00:20:15.760
all bubbled back. It was something like 80% of the people in high level positions of power
00:20:19.800
came from an aristocratic family from the, the, the last dynastic period, which was just wild
00:20:25.720
to me that even when they were, had everything taken away from them, society reassorted that
00:20:32.480
And we've seen this with like post-Soviet countries too, I think, right?
00:20:35.900
Right. There's, there's lots of, or you, or you, or you see like the descendants of the
00:20:39.880
banking families in Florence from the 1400s or the Swedish like nobility in the 17th and
00:20:47.360
18th century, these sorts of things. Now this doesn't mean that like we have like a fixed
00:20:51.460
caste status. There are people that go up and people that go down. Traditionally in a Malthusian
0.97
00:20:56.400
environment, actually a lot of people just went down and the lower classes didn't reproduce
0.77
00:20:59.280
themselves. So that like, for example, Oliver Cromwell was like gentry, but you know, he
0.99
00:21:05.020
was like, he's one of my ancestors, by the way.
00:21:07.180
Okay. Well, he was, his grandfather was super rich, you know? And so like he, like in his
00:21:12.980
generation had gone way, way down. And that was common in terms of like downward mobility.
00:21:19.340
And then like the lower classes just didn't reproduce themselves. Obviously it's not like
00:21:22.540
how it is today, but still the point is people still go up, people still go down, but there's
00:21:27.260
also like a rough, like, you know, I don't know. I mean, yeah, it's just, if you like look
00:21:33.500
at people's family backgrounds, you can see that a lot of people have actually not moved
00:21:39.780
Like a regression to a certain level of wealth.
00:21:41.840
Yeah. And of course these are things that can be changed now with genetic selection technology,
00:21:46.280
which removes one of the biggest barriers in society to true equality.
00:21:51.760
Sort of. Yeah, I agree. The only thing is like, if everyone has access to it, then it'll
00:21:57.600
Well, I don't think it will. So everyone has access to it, but the groups that will use it,
00:22:01.480
I think are incredibly rare. I think if you look at the people who are actually having
00:22:05.260
kids in our society, maybe two to 3% would really use this technology in mass. And I asked
00:22:11.120
you, you know, before this interview, I was like, oh, the calculation for determining how
00:22:14.940
quickly, you know, if we're creating about the number of embryos we're creating and we're
00:22:18.540
selecting about the number of kids that we're selecting. And you did this for five generations.
00:22:22.740
And then I looked at like the current technology and we should be looking at about a three
00:22:26.960
standard deviation increased in IQ. If you were selecting for IQ only, which is pretty crazy
00:22:33.720
We have the, we have, we have the technology. We have the technology.
00:22:39.320
Which is, which is wild. And it, it, it's, it's one of the things I think about where a
00:22:44.240
lot of people who promote like, oh, you know, we should be really accepting of people who
00:22:48.880
are different. And then I'm like, oh, I'm trying to create people who are different. And
00:22:52.280
they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's too different. They would have a lot, a lot
00:22:57.180
of that is like, but a lot of that stuff is like, you know, performative. Yeah.
00:23:01.660
Normie conformity. Like when really weird people actually show up, they're like, whoa, whoa.
00:23:07.960
Whoa. Yeah. It's funny. Actually. We had the episode that went live right before we were
00:23:12.040
filming. This one was the episode where I was going over Nassib Taleb's argument that IQ
00:23:17.320
doesn't matter at all. Um, well that it's, uh, like, what did he say? Made by Charlotte.
0.97
00:23:22.860
It was just so performative. Like, I was like, come on, man. Like, you know, this matters anyway.
00:23:28.720
Well, I mean, you know, it doesn't matter. Cause he calls people fucking retards all the
0.99
00:23:39.720
One thing I do wonder about is like what the selective pressures will be in the future
00:23:43.360
in terms of gender, like on one end, I see all these fundamentalist groups that are like
00:23:47.060
getting super aggressive and also like probably encouraging a lot of differentiation between
00:23:51.400
the sexes. But then like, when you look at the more technophilic sectors of society or
00:23:56.080
like cultures within society, they're like more blank slatist. Like, no, there shouldn't
0.91
00:24:00.280
be any differences between genders and whether or not there actually are genetically, they're
00:24:04.120
trying to pretend there aren't, maybe they'll try to select against it. Like where, where
00:24:08.480
will the future of, of gender go? Or where is it even now?
00:24:11.740
Yeah. So, I mean, with the trans stuff, one thing I will say, like, I don't talk too much
00:24:15.880
about it, but part of it is it is like modern trans gender therapy, especially for children
00:24:25.520
And so that's how you, that's how you eliminate the gender differences. You biologically go in
1.00
00:24:31.100
and tinker, you know? And so that's how you would do it. And you can create homo androgynous
1.00
00:24:36.740
if you want to. The main, the main issue that we're having right now is I think with the
00:24:41.540
trans stuff is the mixing of normie brain with transhumanist technology. So I've said
1.00
00:24:49.600
this elsewhere, but you know, I knew people who are transhumanists like 15 years ago and
00:24:53.000
they're mostly autistic, but now, now these people, they don't call themselves transhumanists.
00:24:57.800
Like, you know, they're like gender fluid or whatever the hell, but like, but they're
1.00
00:25:01.240
normie brained in terms of like, now they're attaching identitarian politics to it. That's
00:25:05.660
Yeah. I mean, if you're talking about the genetic differences that would be caused by
00:25:10.000
transness, you're actually going to see an increase in gender dimorphism between the two
1.00
00:25:14.360
genders because of the men who are born thinking more like women and the women who are born thinking
0.60
00:25:19.380
more like men are systemically removed from the genetic pool within the progressive population.
00:25:23.960
That means the progressive Jews who are still breeding or eventually selecting against androgynous and
1.00
00:25:31.080
Yeah. Huh. Okay. So even among like progressive cultures where people like really welcome transness,
00:25:39.140
Yeah. And as you guys know that this has been like research that goes back a generation.
00:25:42.900
This was obviously cultures that have like give a lot of freedom to gender expression
00:25:47.180
often shake out to be more dimorphic in a lot of ways. Yeah. A lot of that, a lot of the
00:25:52.920
non-performative visible ways. So men and women in Sweden may dress more similarly than men and
00:25:58.580
women in Turkey, but women tend to major in much fewer STEMI things than in Turkey.
00:26:07.240
This is a selective pressure. IE in societies where, uh, it is more accepted that male and
00:26:16.020
female roles aren't different from each other, that the women who have a biological predilection
1.00
00:26:22.620
to take on more masculine roles, end up having fewer kids. Same with the men who take on more
00:26:27.440
feminine roles. And that then doesn't select them out of the gene pool, leading to a higher amount
1.00
00:26:32.680
of inborn gender dimorphism. Yeah. I mean, it could be, I mean, you'd have someone have to
00:26:38.180
like run the simulation. That's the way you would do it. Yeah. Cause like, you know, we've had it
00:26:41.760
since Sweden, we've had it since World War II, right. The sort of kind of like super egalitarian
00:26:46.280
viewpoint. And, you know, ironically, you know, a lot of things are not as different in Sweden.
00:26:52.160
Like there's a lot of sexual, just like dichotomous behavior because men and women are different
00:26:58.040
on average. It's just a fact. Yeah. Well, and they're given the freedom to make those choices.
00:27:01.800
And so they do. Well, I mean, so also like, you know, one of the things that you see in like a
00:27:06.140
lot of the conservative countries is STEM is a way for women to actually break out of the box
1.00
00:27:11.760
because if they're, if they're a successful engineer at the end of the day, people still
00:27:16.200
need successful engineers. And so, you know, women's women in a lot of these conservative
1.00
00:27:20.800
countries, you see that they, they select STEM in particular, not because like, oh, I have a passion
00:27:26.480
for engineering, but they know that that is a path to social liberation that they otherwise would not
00:27:30.760
have. Whereas in Sweden, you don't need to be an engineer to be like respected, like a man.
00:27:37.260
You know, you have equal rights, you know, at least nominally, at least like legally, you know?
00:27:41.420
And so like in Italy, Italy during Mussolini's period, they privileged philosophy and the
00:27:46.720
humanities over science. And so men tended to go into philosophy and the humanities and
00:27:53.960
So that's really, I didn't know that. Why did they do that?
00:27:58.820
I think they wanted to create like, you know, the fascist ideology. And so the philosophers,
00:28:04.180
the philosopher kings were privileged, you know? Huh?
00:28:07.200
Weird. So like scientists, so scientists are technicians, you know, that's what they thought.
00:28:16.200
I think their performance in the war show is how, how far that gets you.
00:28:20.320
Um, this has been a fantastic conversation. Honestly, one of my favorite interviews so far,
00:28:27.120
I am so excited that we got a chance to chat with you. Please, please, please go check out his
00:28:32.420
sub stack. If you want detailed genetic information on humans, the spiciest stuff that you're not going
1.00
00:28:38.480
to get at this level anywhere else, you know, and if you are interested in, if you run any sort of
00:28:47.340
genetics company, because actually our audience is like a lot of entrepreneurs and stuff like that,
00:28:51.960
and you're interested in, in cutting edge technology, you know, receives a guy to reach
00:28:55.500
out to. And thank you so much for joining us. And, and also thank you so much for, for all of the
00:29:01.400
people you help in this space. Cause I was mentioning on the last episode, you help so
00:29:05.500
many young people in this space and it really makes a difference to them.
00:29:08.020
Yeah. I mean, yeah, I guess so. I don't remember that, but I'm sure.
00:29:12.980
Yeah. Yeah. You don't see it that way. So he mentioned in the last episode, he's like,
00:29:16.580
I really like babies. And I'm like, this is again, not a thing that's known about him. He really likes
00:29:21.980
babies. He is the most, if there was some pronatalist apologetic score here, I need to capture it from
00:29:28.640
his genome. I'm going to need to like have my descendants review it to try to find whatever makes
00:29:34.920
him so into. Yeah. Like best dad, best dad, like unbelievable. So yeah, no, huge fans. Obviously
00:29:42.180
we love you so much, Razeev. Thank you so much for coming on. It was my pleasure. I haven't.