The Charlie Kirk Show - MAHA: What’s Real, What's Fake, What's Unclear? ft. Cremieux

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here live from the Bitcoin.com studio.

00:00:04.000 Cremu on the show.

00:00:05.000 You're gonna love this conversation or you're gonna hate this conversation.

00:00:09.000 He says stuff that you might not like, you might not agree with, but it was a fun, spirited conversation.

00:00:13.000 He's not a fan of a lot of the Maha stuff.

00:00:15.000 Worth you listening to, taking notes.

00:00:17.000 If you don't like it, email me freedom at CharlieKirk.com.

00:00:20.000 If you want to listen to a podcast where you agree with the guest all the time, this might not be the interview for you.

00:00:24.000 But I think you guys want intellectual stimulation.

00:00:26.000 You guys want to be challenged, so I think you'll love it.

00:00:28.000 Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to our podcast.

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00:00:42.000 Okay, everybody, it is the event of the summer.

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00:01:37.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:01:38.000 Here we go.

00:01:39.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:01:40.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:01:42.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:01:46.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:01:49.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:01:50.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:01:51.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.

00:02:00.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:02:08.000 That's why we are here.

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00:02:37.000 Okay, everybody, we're going to love this conversation.

00:02:39.000 Joining us is Cray Mu, who is a bioinformatician. 0.66

00:02:42.000 That's right.

00:02:43.000 What is that?

00:02:44.000 So I basically just make software for geneticists.

00:02:47.000 It's pretty boring.

00:02:48.000 It's like being a glorified software engineer.

00:02:50.000 How did you get into that?

00:02:52.000 That's interesting.

00:02:53.000 So several years ago at a conference, I was pretty critical of some of the presentations there, and a VC came up to me and he said, do you think he can do better?

00:03:02.000 And I go, oh, of course I can.

00:03:05.000 So I switched my field entirely over to working on that.

00:03:09.000 And so you have a lot of hot takes.

00:03:11.000 So you're known as Cré-Mu online.

00:03:13.000 Who is Cré-Mus? 0.96

00:03:14.000 So some people call him the Abraham Lincoln of France.

00:03:18.000 He was responsible for a lot of sort of classical liberal initiatives, very much what you would see among like a lot of the more progressive founding fathers, where he, for example, banned slavery in the French colonies.

00:03:30.000 He did a really interesting thing where he gave the North African Jews the ability to get French citizenship and then come over to France.

00:03:37.000 He emancipated a lot of people and did a lot of interesting things, very pro-market sort of guy, very pro-freedom in general, and just a wonderful historical character from the 19th century.

00:03:47.000 So you have, we have a lot to discuss here.

00:03:49.000 And by the way, I love reading your stuff online.

00:03:50.000 It's very interesting.

00:03:51.000 Thank you.

00:03:52.000 It's provocative.

00:03:53.000 It's contrarian.

00:03:54.000 And so you are picking apart our supplement stuff here.

00:03:57.000 So you are a bioinformatician.

00:03:59.000 And so, for example, let's say someone's taking vitamin D. You think that it's probably either overrated or not necessary.

00:04:08.000 Is that right?

00:04:09.000 Almost certainly overrated.

00:04:10.000 Unless you have osteomalaciation, unless you have brittle bones.

00:04:13.000 Oh, no.

00:04:14.000 Probably nothing is going to happen.

00:04:16.000 But people say it's good for mood or depression.

00:04:20.000 There's no correlation to that?

00:04:21.000 There are correlations, and that's the thing.

00:04:22.000 There are tons of correlations.

00:04:24.000 Why does it not determine causal?

00:04:26.000 That's the wonderful mystery.

00:04:28.000 So we know that people who are healthy tend to have lots of vitamin D. They have high levels, and people who are unhealthy have low levels.

00:04:36.000 But when you do a real trial where you give people more or you watch people over time and really carefully and you monitor their levels, there's just no relationship between the levels and changes.

00:04:47.000 There's no effect of the treatment.

00:04:49.000 There's just really nothing there.

00:04:51.000 And when you go really deep into it using like genetic epidemiology methods, like for example, this thing called Mendelian randomization, this is a way that you can get causal information about how drugs work from genetic data.

00:05:03.000 You see nothing.

00:05:04.000 There's just nothing there.

00:05:06.000 For the overwhelming majority of people, there's no effect.

00:05:08.000 It's good that we fortify our food because we can prevent osteomalasia, the weak bones, brittle bones and stuff.

00:05:14.000 But otherwise, you're just not going to get much benefit.

00:05:17.000 Do you think it has, does it help with serotonin production?

00:05:21.000 Maybe in the limit.

00:05:22.000 That's the thing.

00:05:22.000 If you go down to people who are very, very deficient, which is a very small minority, then yes.

00:05:26.000 So if you're like an old person in a home that hasn't seen the sun or has a restricted diet. 0.99

00:05:31.000 Yeah, you'll have to find people who are really weird in terms of, you know, just relative to the general population.

00:05:38.000 But for most people, you won't get any benefit.

00:05:40.000 Interesting.

00:05:41.000 And so, and you say that because the studies don't bear out the conclusion, not necessarily there's a study that shows that there just hasn't been, has there been long-term studies done on vitamin D?

00:05:53.000 There have been tons of studies.

00:05:54.000 There are hundreds of trials on vitamin D, and they seem to do, it seems to consistently show practically nothing.

00:05:59.000 But there's a lot of hype because there are tons of studies showing these correlations going, oh, look, people with more vitamin D, they are healthier.

00:06:05.000 Do you think it's because they have healthier lifestyles and therefore it's the core, yeah?

00:06:09.000 I think so.

00:06:09.000 So they're outside more.

00:06:11.000 Is exercise something that you would say is good?

00:06:13.000 Absolutely.

00:06:13.000 Okay, so at least we agree on that.

00:06:15.000 Absolutely.

00:06:15.000 How about sun exposure?

00:06:17.000 Probably good.

00:06:17.000 I mean, you need it.

00:06:19.000 There's great data showing, I actually know a lot of people in the Bay who they get lamps in their homes to emulate the sunlight.

00:06:26.000 So is there studies about sun exposure?

00:06:28.000 There are, yeah.

00:06:28.000 Okay.

00:06:29.000 So, but by getting sun exposure, you might get vitamin D, which might just be an effect of something else that is positive.

00:06:35.000 Yep, it could be something else that you're getting.

00:06:37.000 Like, people who live healthy lifestyles tend to have good vitamin D levels, but supplementing the vitamin D doesn't seem to do much of anything.

00:06:43.000 That's fascinating.

00:06:44.000 Yeah, it's kind of like not even for testosterone production.

00:06:46.000 Not really, no.

00:06:48.000 You heard that before, I'm sure, though, right?

00:06:49.000 Oh, I've heard it tons.

00:06:50.000 Yeah.

00:06:51.000 It's funny.

00:06:52.000 There are all these claims, and there's a lot of hype, a huge amount of hype.

00:06:56.000 During COVID, for example, people were saying, oh, vitamin D is going to save you from COVID.

00:07:00.000 And no, no, no.

00:07:01.000 They say it interrupts the cytokosine storm or something.

00:07:04.000 I'm going to get all the words.

00:07:05.000 Cytokine storm.

00:07:05.000 Yeah, I'm going to get all of that, but yeah.

00:07:07.000 So like your immune system going into overdrive, they say it disrupts that.

00:07:10.000 No, that's not preserved.

00:07:12.000 How about zinc?

00:07:13.000 Zinc is great.

00:07:13.000 You need zinc.

00:07:15.000 But if you supplement a bunch, I don't think you're going to get very much unless you're sick.

00:07:18.000 In which case, take it right as soon as you start feeling sick, and it might help a little bit.

00:07:22.000 There is limited stuff on this, but there's still something.

00:07:26.000 There's some indication.

00:07:27.000 And it's not really going to hurt, so why not supplement it?

00:07:29.000 It's also very cheap.

00:07:30.000 Yeah, and you can get zinc and meat.

00:07:32.000 I mean, you can get pretty much everything you need in meat.

00:07:35.000 Yeah, so you're not necessarily a vegan proponent?

00:07:38.000 No, not really.

00:07:39.000 I am a big proponent of lab-grown meat.

00:07:42.000 I advise a lab-grown meat company.

00:07:44.000 Really?

00:07:45.000 Yeah, and I like lab-grown meat and all that.

00:07:46.000 And it's going to emulate meat, and it'll be, I think it'll be great in a few years, but it's just not quite there yet.

00:07:53.000 Like, it's very expensive.

00:07:55.000 And the thing is, I want every vegan to start eating lab-grown meat the moment it's available because they have so many nutritional deficiencies.

00:08:02.000 Like omega-3s and CoQ10 and vitamin B. Absolutely.

00:08:06.000 Are those the three major ones?

00:08:08.000 I forgot.

00:08:08.000 Amongst many others, right?

00:08:09.000 Yeah, iron.

00:08:11.000 Iron is basically.

00:08:12.000 They lack creatinine and creatine.

00:08:13.000 They lack taurine.

00:08:16.000 They just lack seemingly everything.

00:08:18.000 So yeah, I was going to ask, I'm sorry to interrupt, but you are a believer in the amino acid benefits, right?

00:08:22.000 So taurine, lysine, do those have potential benefits?

00:08:26.000 So you get them in your standard diet.

00:08:28.000 You'll generally get them from your diet, yeah.

00:08:29.000 And the thing is, if you have a good diet, you're very unlikely to be getting a lot from different supplements.

00:08:35.000 There are limited exceptions.

00:08:37.000 Like, I mean, so I think actually a good heuristic is, do bodybuilders use it?

00:08:42.000 And if the answer is, yeah, the biggest bodybuilders use it, then it probably is a good supplement.

00:08:46.000 Like testosterone will help you build a lot of muscle.

00:08:49.000 Sure.

00:08:49.000 Creatine will genuinely help you put on muscle.

00:08:51.000 Creatine has cognitive benefits as well.

00:08:54.000 But especially for people who are vegans, vegetarians, who have restricted diets, because they lack that stuff and it seems to help them a lot.

00:09:00.000 For people who have normal diets, normal omnivorous diets, they tend not to get very much benefit from creatine.

00:09:05.000 How about resveratrol?

00:09:06.000 No.

00:09:07.000 Why?

00:09:08.000 Oh, man.

00:09:08.000 Those studies just did not hold off.

00:09:10.000 There was a fad for a long time in the anti-aging community.

00:09:14.000 Goodness, there was even some fraud there.

00:09:16.000 Tell me more.

00:09:17.000 I don't really know too much about it.

00:09:18.000 It's really before my time.

00:09:19.000 It's still hyped, though.

00:09:20.000 It is still hyped, which is baffling to me, but it's considered like one of those cautionary tales about hype nowadays.

00:09:26.000 Is there any downside?

00:09:28.000 Not really.

00:09:28.000 So just it's one of the, like a lot of supplements, they don't have real big downsides.

00:09:32.000 They just have no upsides.

00:09:34.000 So the downside is you pay for something that doesn't do anything.

00:09:36.000 So but the argument for resveratrol, again, I'm just a layman here, is that that's, you know, they hype red wine and grapes.

00:09:43.000 Isn't it just an accelerated antioxidant, which is good for you?

00:09:46.000 Antioxidants can be very good for you.

00:09:48.000 And that's actually one of the funny things about seed oils.

00:09:50.000 They contain antioxidants, which helps with the supposed oxidation effects.

00:09:54.000 So are you pro-seed oil?

00:09:56.000 For heart health, yeah, I am.

00:09:57.000 The trials do tend to say that ASCVD, atherosclerotic, coronary vascular, like heart disease is helped by switching from animal fats to plant fats.

00:10:10.000 I don't want to do that myself, but it does help people.

00:10:13.000 So if you're at very, very high risk, I would suggest going to seed oils instead of animal fats.

00:10:18.000 Do you think the general population would benefit more from tallow than from some seed oil?

00:10:23.000 They would probably be hurt by tallow on average.

00:10:25.000 Tell us why.

00:10:26.000 Well, the reason is saturated fats are quite bad.

00:10:28.000 They're very bad.

00:10:29.000 In fact, the hypothesis that LDL causes heart disease has held up incredibly well.

00:10:33.000 Oh, so you're a cholesterol truther.

00:10:36.000 Yeah.

00:10:37.000 I mean, all the data.

00:10:38.000 It gives you a hard time.

00:10:39.000 It's actually interesting.

00:10:40.000 So a lot of the drugs we know about today, statins, PCSK9 inhibitors, azetamibe, various different drugs that we use for handling cholesterol, we have great studies that are based on how we found them.

00:10:54.000 Like the PCSK9 inhibitors specifically, they were found in these French families.

00:10:58.000 They had a mutation that like knocked out production of it.

00:11:02.000 And they had, well, it did the opposite.

00:11:04.000 They had very, very high cholesterol.

00:11:06.000 Or sorry, no, I'm thinking of the French families.

00:11:08.000 They had low cholesterol.

00:11:09.000 And it was discovered some large, like almost 11% proportion of African Americans had a variant that dropped their cholesterol levels very low.

00:11:16.000 And then a smaller proportion of whites had another variant that did like a smaller effect.

00:11:20.000 And all these interesting variants related to PCSK9 had meaningful effects.

00:11:25.000 And so interesting thing is, we can just put the product of that gene in a drug, give it to people, their LDL goes down.

00:11:32.000 Their all-cause mortality improves.

00:11:34.000 They become more likely to survive.

00:11:36.000 And if you give it to people who have hypercholesterolemia, like naturally extremely high cholesterol, the number of deaths by age 40 is way, way lower.

00:11:45.000 So you can compare families over time.

00:11:46.000 You can say, oh, you, the parent generation, didn't have statins or PCSK9 inhibitors or azetamide or anything to lower your LDL.

00:11:54.000 And like a sixth of them were dying by age 40 from heart conditions.

00:11:58.000 And then you look at their kids who had statins from a young age, and it's like, oh my God, they're all surviving to age 40.

00:12:03.000 They're not dying from preventable heart conditions.

00:12:06.000 And it's just very clear evidence like that.

00:12:08.000 Like it's nice little natural experiments.

00:12:10.000 We also have wonderful trials and we have more genetic epidemiology stuff too.

00:12:14.000 One of the wonderful ways we know statins are safe is because there are some people who basically naturally have statins, like the effect of statins.

00:12:22.000 The statin, it works through the HMG-CoA reductase gene, produces an enzyme that breaks down into the HMG-CoA and then mevalonitate.

00:12:30.000 I'm probably mispronouncing.

00:12:31.000 And that's how you, if you block that pathway, if you reduce the function there, you get lower LDL.

00:12:36.000 And naturally, some people have way less function there.

00:12:40.000 So they effectively have like a low dose and sometimes a very high dose statin for their whole life.

00:12:45.000 And we have long-term cohorts where you can go and look.

00:12:48.000 Oh, this guy's totally healthy.

00:12:50.000 Trump.

00:12:51.000 Trump?

00:12:51.000 He's taking statins.

00:12:52.000 I know.

00:12:53.000 I'm saying.

00:12:53.000 Yeah.

00:12:54.000 But I mean, you wrote about this, didn't you?

00:12:56.000 With him taking statins?

00:12:57.000 Yeah, it's interesting.

00:12:58.000 I mean, he should be taking statins.

00:12:59.000 I feel like most old people. 1.00

00:13:00.000 No, but his cholesterol is amazing.

00:13:02.000 Because of the statin.

00:13:03.000 Well, I'm saying, I'm affirming your hypothesis, though.

00:13:06.000 Absolutely.

00:13:06.000 I don't think it's because of his diet.

00:13:08.000 No, it probably isn't.

00:13:10.000 He has a diet that I've heard is very high-in-saturated.

00:13:12.000 We only know he's taking statins because he disclosed his medical record to the world, which is awesome.

00:13:16.000 I love the.

00:13:16.000 Are there any downsides to statins?

00:13:18.000 Not really.

00:13:18.000 People have proposed a lot of downsides, but the genetic epidemiology stuff gives us very long-term evidence that there's really no harms.

00:13:25.000 Like people have proposed, oh, there will be these downsides from observational cohorts where they have mental issues.

00:13:31.000 And then you look in the trials and it's like, okay, that doesn't pop up ever.

00:13:34.000 So we're going to, so that probably isn't real.

00:13:36.000 And then you look at the people who have naturally very, very low LDL.

00:13:39.000 They're also fine.

00:13:40.000 They have no mental issues.

00:13:42.000 They don't have any lower IQs.

00:13:43.000 They don't have anything wrong with them compared to people who are otherwise similar.

00:13:48.000 So with LDL, correct me if I'm wrong, isn't cholesterol in the sequence of creating testosterone?

00:13:57.000 It is.

00:13:58.000 Yeah.

00:13:59.000 Steroid hormones are made from cholesterol.

00:14:01.000 You do need some of it.

00:14:02.000 So but then would chronically low cholesterol brought to you by seed oils or whatever result in lower testosterone?

00:14:10.000 So that's the thing.

00:14:11.000 LDL, no. 0.90

00:14:12.000 You could probably get your LDL as low as you want.

00:14:14.000 You'll be fine.

00:14:14.000 HDL?

00:14:15.000 HDL, you want that to be fairly high.

00:14:17.000 And so LDL, have you read the book The Cholesterol Myth?

00:14:20.000 I haven't.

00:14:21.000 Yeah, I'm not an expert here.

00:14:23.000 But there is a growing community that thinks the cholesterol fixation is over.

00:14:30.000 I'm sure you've heard this.

00:14:31.000 I have heard this a bunch.

00:14:32.000 Yeah.

00:14:32.000 There's a lot of people who believe it.

00:14:33.000 Again, I'm not an expert here.

00:14:36.000 I'm throwing it up against you.

00:14:37.000 Yeah.

00:14:37.000 So the conciliance of evidence just says, no, it's fine.

00:14:41.000 For years, I had gone along with a lot of these sort of contrarian takes of like, oh, if you have a keto diet, you'll actually do a lot better.

00:14:49.000 You'll be a lot better off in all these different ways.

00:14:50.000 And there's all these mechanisms.

00:14:52.000 But in the past few years, I've given a lot less shrift to mechanisms because mechanisms are not a substitute for the statistical evidence.

00:15:00.000 I need to see in a trial saying like, you take, give the person this drug, we do this thing, your mechanism plays out and the person has the effect you expect.

00:15:08.000 But in the trials, if it always shows the opposite of what they predict, then I just think they're wrong.

00:15:13.000 What do you have to say to people that say we don't trust the trials because there has been some corruption in the medical world for a decade?

00:15:20.000 What would you say to that?

00:15:22.000 Run more trials.

00:15:23.000 Fund more trials.

00:15:24.000 Have them done by more important people.

00:15:25.000 Or look into them, correct?

00:15:26.000 To see if they were confused.

00:15:28.000 What red flags do you look for when you look through trials?

00:15:31.000 Well, I mean, one of the most obvious ones is small sample sizes.

00:15:33.000 When you have a very small trial and you have big conclusions from it, that is a very big red flag.

00:15:37.000 When you have massive effect sizes that are very unrealistic, for example, Cohen's D of five, that's a very, very large effect size.

00:15:46.000 Like a Cohen's D of five is like the difference in taste preferences for samples given ice cream flavored like poo and flavored like vanilla.

00:15:56.000 It's a very large difference.

00:15:58.000 And there are studies that purport to show effects that large, and I feel like that's just not real.

00:16:03.000 And in virtually every case, it isn't real.

00:16:05.000 There are very few things with effects that massive.

00:16:08.000 That traumatic.

00:16:09.000 Yeah.

00:16:09.000 And when you see that in a trial, that just big red flag.

00:16:12.000 An effect like that is like, there was actually a funny one a few years ago about country music causing suicides.

00:16:18.000 And I was like, can't be real.

00:16:20.000 The effect size is like 3.5, which is, again, enormous.

00:16:23.000 And if it were true, every Dolly Parton concert, and I'm borrowing something from here, from my friend, would be like a mass suicide.

00:16:30.000 People would just be killing themselves.

00:16:32.000 So when they say stuff like that, I don't believe it.

00:16:34.000 I tend to throw it out.

00:16:35.000 Well, I can't stand country music.

00:16:37.000 Send me that study.

00:16:39.000 So methylfolate?

00:16:41.000 Folic acid fortification of food, very good.

00:16:44.000 Methylfolate supplementation for adults.

00:16:46.000 Any neurological benefit?

00:16:48.000 You probably won't get very much.

00:16:50.000 If there's something, it's going to be quite small.

00:16:52.000 But the wonderful thing is folic acid fortification of food has been very good for reducing the rates of birth defects.

00:16:59.000 Fewer neurotubule birth defects, babies coming out disabled at birth.

00:17:02.000 That's wonderful.

00:17:03.000 And all we have to do was change the diet a little bit.

00:17:06.000 SAMI, S-A-M-E, which is S-adenosin something, which is used for depression.

00:17:15.000 S-A-M-E. 0.99

00:17:16.000 I'm afraid I don't know it, but it sounds like something adenosine, it's a vitamin.

00:17:21.000 How about oregano or saffron?

00:17:24.000 Oh, nothing.

00:17:25.000 Nothing.

00:17:26.000 Oil of oregano doesn't kill any bacteria?

00:17:28.000 No, it's not really going to help you.

00:17:29.000 I mean, it might help in like a lab setting, but if you start taking it as a supplement, you're not going to get anything from it.

00:17:34.000 How about a daily olive oil shot?

00:17:38.000 This became pretty popular after Starbucks started promoting it.

00:17:40.000 I saw a bunch of this and it just tasted awful.

00:17:42.000 Yes.

00:17:43.000 I had it a few times because I was like, I'll try the different drinks they have.

00:17:48.000 Couldn't stand it, but I was happy to see.

00:17:50.000 It doesn't actually do anything either.

00:17:52.000 So you would say that olive oil supplementation, no benefit.

00:17:56.000 Yeah, for most people, it's going to be nothing.

00:17:57.000 The thing is, most of the conclusions you get in trials are going to be like these population representative samples or samples you get from a hospital of a condition or something like that.

00:18:04.000 Like they're selected in some way or they try to be unselected and then they go, nothing for everybody.

00:18:10.000 But there might be some subpopulations that could benefit from pretty much any supplement.

00:18:16.000 How do we say, so I have two questions.

00:18:19.000 How do you long-term study preventative supplementation?

00:18:23.000 Meaning, I'm just curious.

00:18:25.000 Number two, have you factored out genetic specificity to how some people, for example, there's something called the MFR gene, MFTR gene mutation, that methylfolate is supposed to have.

00:18:38.000 Yeah.

00:18:38.000 Is there any truth?

00:18:39.000 So take it one by one.

00:18:40.000 How do you long-term do trials for preventative supplementation?

00:18:46.000 And then we'll go to the second question.

00:18:47.000 For that, you just have to run a long trial.

00:18:50.000 If you have a hypothesis, so you have a scientifically led discovery of something you think will be preventative for this or that, then you run a long-term trial.

00:18:58.000 That's really all you can do.

00:18:59.000 Or you look at a longitudinal cohort that has variation in use over time, or you pay people to start using in a cohort you're monitoring over time.

00:19:06.000 That's about all you can do.

00:19:07.000 So the study designs are all pretty limited.

00:19:09.000 They're all just long-term things.

00:19:11.000 The other thing with genetic specificity, so for general population trials, you randomize them.

00:19:17.000 You run an RCT.

00:19:18.000 That means you have one group getting a placebo or an alternative treatment, and one group like standard care.

00:19:22.000 So for like diabetes-related drugs, we give people, we don't give them a placebo, we give them insulin instead of the other thing.

00:19:29.000 Sure.

00:19:30.000 So you give them placebo, whatever, and you give them the active drug.

00:19:34.000 And you compare these general population samples, and they're randomized so that there's no genetic variation, you would hope, at a large enough sample size that matters across these two groups.

00:19:42.000 But if you want to stratify that way, you have to go ahead and test them beforehand.

00:19:46.000 Or you can do a post-hoc test where you test afterwards and you get data on like what variations of this gene do they have.

00:19:53.000 And then you see, did they have larger or smaller effects?

00:19:56.000 Often when you do it post-hoc, you'll have too small of a sample to actually find very much.

00:20:01.000 You'll have low statistical power.

00:20:03.000 So you'll end up with conclusions that are iffy because they're just weak.

00:20:08.000 But if you actually go into a trial ahead of time and you stratify them by their like some known genetic variants you think will modify the effect, you can pretty easily do that and you can just go ahead and see if it actually leads to like a larger or smaller effect.

00:20:18.000 Is there any truth to the fact that certain gene mutations might make you more likely to benefit from certain supplements?

00:20:24.000 Absolutely.

00:20:25.000 Massive, massive.

00:20:26.000 Actually, it's interesting, statins.

00:20:28.000 About 30% of people, it's a very large portion, get myopathy from statins.

00:20:32.000 They feel weak.

00:20:34.000 And this is so common that tons of people have gone through heart disease because they prefer not to feel weak.

00:20:41.000 And for some people, it's actually debilitatingly weak.

00:20:45.000 They can become incredibly weak due to the action of just a few genes or just a few mutations.

00:20:49.000 For example, in the HMGCR gene that is where we know the mechanism of like statins works from.

00:20:55.000 And we have treatments now, well, they're being developed, they're not actually out yet, where you can interrupt on like that pathway from HMG-CoA reductase to movalonitate, where you can supplement the end product and it doesn't increase their LDL or anything, but it does give them back their muscular function.

00:21:11.000 So there's massive genetic variation that augments the effects of drugs.

00:21:15.000 You see this for antidepressants, you see this for statins, like I just said, you see this for PCSK9 inhibitors, you see this for many, many classes of drugs, even for lots of anti-cancer agents, response to chemotherapy, tons of things.

00:21:28.000 Usually the genetic moderation is modest.

00:21:30.000 It's very small.

00:21:31.000 In rare cases, it's serious side effects.

00:21:34.000 It's, for example, about a small portion of people are allergic to a form of natural dye, cochineal-based dye from like a little beetle, and they'll just die.

00:21:45.000 So, yeah.

00:21:46.000 Are we doing gene testing before prescribing pharmaceuticals?

00:21:49.000 Generally not, because for most things we prescribe, there's no reason to, or there's not a big reason to.

00:21:55.000 And what you'll find is that people, for example, if they're a low responder to a certain antidepressant, they'll just switch off it after a month or two.

00:22:01.000 They'll be on it for a little while, they'll get their treatment, and then they'll go, oh, this isn't working for me, Doc.

00:22:05.000 I need to go on something else.

00:22:06.000 And then you switch them.

00:22:08.000 That's how it's been handled.

00:22:09.000 But if we can predict ahead of time, which we can do now, we can actually start doing that.

00:22:13.000 We just need to get more people genotyped and then have their doctors be able to learn how to use that information.

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00:23:15.000 So you mentioned antidepressants.

00:23:18.000 Let's just ask this question.

00:23:19.000 What is causing the, are people actually more anxious and depressed, or is it a sampling error?

00:23:23.000 It's an interesting form of error.

00:23:25.000 So a lot of it is social contagion in the sense that nowadays people say they're more depressed than they are.

00:23:32.000 There's some evidence in the U.S. for a real increase in depression, and this has to do with suicide rates.

00:23:37.000 Yeah, you can't fake that.

00:23:38.000 Yeah, you can't fake that.

00:23:39.000 That's not a fakeable thing.

00:23:40.000 But in other countries, you don't see the same increase.

00:23:42.000 So it's curious.

00:23:43.000 Like, we see the same introduction of cell phones, which has been proposed as a reason why teen girls are getting depressed.

00:23:49.000 But we don't see the rise in suicide rates.

00:23:51.000 So it's interesting.

00:23:52.000 Now, when you actually go out and measure depression using a standardized questionnaire, you'll see that people respond more aggressively nowadays than they used to.

00:23:59.000 So they'll say, oh, I'm very depressed.

00:24:02.000 Whereas in the past, the person with the same amount of depression would have said, oh, I'm okay, or I'm sad a little bit.

00:24:08.000 But they've changed how they respond.

00:24:10.000 And there's been a lot of impetus, a lot of social reasoning that goes into, oh, it's cool to be, for example, autistic now.

00:24:19.000 So you say, oh, I have autism.

00:24:21.000 I've self-diagnosed.

00:24:22.000 Neurodivergent.

00:24:23.000 I'm neurodivergent, yes.

00:24:25.000 People say this stuff all the time now, but it's just not based on a lot.

00:24:28.000 And a lot of times, it's interesting.

00:24:30.000 You can go and profile these people who are purely self-diagnosed, and they are very different from the people who are clinically diagnosed.

00:24:36.000 So, for example, for autism, those people don't really have social deficits, the people who are merely self-diagnosed without a clinical diagnosis.

00:24:43.000 They differ radically from the people who actually had a doctor go.

00:24:47.000 Or banging their head against the wall or something.

00:24:49.000 Exactly.

00:24:50.000 So would you say that depression is a growing problem in the West, or is it overblown?

00:24:54.000 Considerably overblown.

00:24:56.000 I would say the suicides still give me pause and they make me think it is a growing problem, at least in the U.S. Where we don't see the same thing in Sweden, I say, okay, curious.

00:25:05.000 That kind of helps us narrow down on why it happens.

00:25:08.000 like it's not going to be the cell phones because they have the same thing there.

00:25:11.000 Could be something about their social environment that is different in terms of...

00:25:17.000 Yeah.

00:25:17.000 You do, I think so.

00:25:18.000 Well, yeah.

00:25:19.000 Well, I mean, tons of different drugs work.

00:25:20.000 Like SSRIs work. 1.00

00:25:21.000 The thing is that they have side effects.

00:25:24.000 They don't work for everybody.

00:25:25.000 In fact, for the heterogeneity and how well those work across the population is incredibly significant.

00:25:30.000 If they're working, why are people still depressed?

00:25:33.000 There are other reasons to be depressed.

00:25:35.000 Okay.

00:25:35.000 Yeah.

00:25:36.000 I mean, so you don't expect it to cure the whole thing.

00:25:38.000 Like, the effect size of a common SSRI might be 0.3D, which is a modest but real, sizable effect.

00:25:44.000 It'll help a lot of people.

00:25:45.000 It'll help some people to not kill themselves.

00:25:48.000 But for the average person, it might just not do very much.

00:25:50.000 And the thing is, the effect size is very small in general for people who don't have diversional blood.

00:25:56.000 So what is it, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor?

00:25:59.000 That's right.

00:25:59.000 So why can't you just get 5-HTP and tryptophan from your diet?

00:26:04.000 What would the difference between the two be?

00:26:06.000 It probably doesn't actually act along the same mechanism of action.

00:26:09.000 So tell me why.

00:26:10.000 Well, a lot of these supplements, you take them and you excrete them in your urine.

00:26:13.000 They're not processed.

00:26:13.000 Right, but you take turkey.

00:26:14.000 so you eat a bunch of turkey, right, which is a tryptophanic agent which helps create serotonin, right?

00:26:20.000 Different type of tryptophan.

00:26:21.000 Is that right?

00:26:21.000 Yeah, in that case, it'll be processed very, very differently.

00:26:23.000 It will not lead to the same sorts of effects.

00:26:26.000 To the production of serotonin.

00:26:27.000 Yeah.

00:26:28.000 So it's actually a funny thing.

00:26:29.000 A lot of people think that.

00:26:30.000 Interesting.

00:26:30.000 I didn't know that.

00:26:31.000 Yeah.

00:26:32.000 A lot of people think, oh, I'm taking this supplement, and thus I'll get the effect that this drug that has the same name nominally has.

00:26:39.000 And this is really common with vegans and omega-3s.

00:26:42.000 They'll go, oh, I'm taking omega-3s.

00:26:44.000 And it's like, wait, no, you're not taking icospotinoic acid or dexacinoic acid or arachidonic acid.

00:26:49.000 You are taking, like, you're taking some like linoleic, alpha-linoleic acid.

00:26:54.000 You're taking stuff that doesn't convert to what you actually need in humans.

00:26:58.000 It might in fish, but you're not a fish.

00:27:01.000 And it's very hard to get it from like seaweed and stuff.

00:27:04.000 The bioconversion.

00:27:05.000 Algae.

00:27:06.000 Algae, yes.

00:27:06.000 Very poor bioavailability.

00:27:09.000 More bioavailability in pregnant women, but that's just like not that great. 0.99

00:27:13.000 So then, let's say depression.

00:27:16.000 What other non-pharmacological pharmaceutical interventions help with depression?

00:27:19.000 Would you say?

00:27:20.000 Community, friends, exercise, sun exposure.

00:27:23.000 Yeah.

00:27:24.000 Socializing.

00:27:25.000 Being around people is good.

00:27:28.000 It can help.

00:27:28.000 It can especially help you with the most risky behaviors, the suicides and everything.

00:27:32.000 The really, really big thing that helps with.

00:27:34.000 Having a community is very important.

00:27:36.000 Like joining clubs, doing drives on campuses where they say, like, oh, come join this club and have some community and all that.

00:27:42.000 That can be quite helpful for people who otherwise don't.

00:27:45.000 Because if you're allowed to wallow, you might do dangerous things.

00:27:48.000 We have some interesting experiments from in Israel.

00:27:51.000 Suicides were way less common if they started confiscating soldiers' guns on the weekends.

00:27:56.000 They would say, oh, don't go home alone and all this.

00:27:58.000 And people who are like in traditional communities, not the Hulanim, they more often had those connections or whatnot, and the effect is smaller for them.

00:28:05.000 So you see, if you let people wallow, they'll do bad things.

00:28:09.000 And so the Zoloft, Xanax, would you also say?

00:28:14.000 They work.

00:28:15.000 The thing is, they're not panaceas.

00:28:18.000 They're not miracle cures for anything.

00:28:20.000 All these drugs work in a limited sense where they don't work for everybody.

00:28:23.000 They don't work perfectly.

00:28:25.000 But they are going to save lives if we prescribe them to some level.

00:28:29.000 Do you think there's anything troubling that one out of four teenage girls are on one form of these drugs?

00:28:35.000 Yeah, I do.

00:28:35.000 I think it's over-prescribed.

00:28:36.000 So yeah, so tell us why.

00:28:38.000 Well, for one, we know that genetic heterogeneity where we can sort of predict if something will affect you.

00:28:43.000 Some people just shouldn't be on certain drugs, and they're going to be taking them long term because they're getting a placebo effect.

00:28:48.000 And it's like, oh, that's just causing the downsides for you.

00:28:51.000 You are not a responder to this.

00:28:52.000 And we should have been able to predict that, but we aren't there yet with sequencing everybody and getting them this information.

00:28:57.000 If we did more of that, that'd be great.

00:28:59.000 We would be able to tell them that ahead of time, get them on the right drugs, help them to tailor their drug dosing, their regimens, everything like that.

00:29:07.000 But we just don't.

00:29:09.000 It's a really new thing.

00:29:10.000 So it's no surprise it's not been really massively adopted yet.

00:29:13.000 Do you think we're over-prescribing drugs in general?

00:29:16.000 Yeah, I think we do for a lot of things.

00:29:18.000 Which ones in particular?

00:29:19.000 Oh, my goodness.

00:29:20.000 Well, the antidepressants were a good example.

00:29:23.000 The thing is, I also think there are under-prescriptions.

00:29:25.000 So I think we are under-prescribing statins, for example.

00:29:28.000 Some drugs are not available enough because they don't have a generic form.

00:29:33.000 So Trilogy is an inhaler that would help a lot of people.

00:29:36.000 Budenicide or what is it?

00:29:38.000 It's a number of things.

00:29:39.000 I think it's four different active ingredients, but it works really well for suppressing their, it actually works for a lot of different respiratory things, but it works for a lot of the respiratory.

00:29:48.000 So it's an oral steroid?

00:29:49.000 Yeah, it is.

00:29:49.000 Yeah, it's like budenicide.

00:29:51.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:29:52.000 I think that's in it, but I'm thinking there are a lot of things.

00:29:55.000 That's the most popular oral inhaler.

00:29:57.000 But we also, inhalers with small amounts of steroids in them, like not just albuterol, those work a lot better, and we're not getting those out enough.

00:30:04.000 We should be switching people over to newer medications, but it's difficult because of costs and everything.

00:30:09.000 Like stuff, in America, we tend to pay a lot for drugs because we introduce them really early and aggressively.

00:30:14.000 Like a six-month wait for drug is invented and drug goes to market might be six years in the UK.

00:30:20.000 And during that time, people are going to suffer through using crappy drugs they shouldn't really be on or that they might be able to replace or they might be able to get a treatment for something.

00:30:28.000 Fascinating.

00:30:28.000 Yeah.

00:30:29.000 Some people might be able to get treated for conditions and then never have to use the drugs again and they should be able to get off, but they can't afford the treatments.

00:30:35.000 What else are we under-prescribing?

00:30:38.000 Well, I think we're under prescribing GLP-1s.

00:30:39.000 That's a big one.

00:30:40.000 That's big contemporary.

00:30:41.000 Ozempic? 0.79

00:30:42.000 Yeah.

00:30:43.000 Is there any downsides to Ozempic?

00:30:44.000 There are downsides in the form of nausea.

00:30:48.000 That's a transient side effect for most.

00:30:50.000 Does the food waste in your stomach?

00:30:52.000 No, no, it doesn't.

00:30:53.000 That's a weird myth.

00:30:54.000 I don't know how that came about.

00:30:55.000 But when you have gastroparesis, you still have to excrete it at some point.

00:30:59.000 You have to defecate.

00:31:01.000 It's not going to just get stuck there.

00:31:02.000 Yeah, they say it like rots in your bowels or something.

00:31:05.000 Yeah, that's wild.

00:31:06.000 How is GLP-1 different than a semaglutide injection?

00:31:09.000 Or is it the same?

00:31:10.000 Same thing.

00:31:10.000 Okay, got it.

00:31:11.000 Semaglutide is a GLP-1 RA injection.

00:31:13.000 Yeah.

00:31:14.000 The way they work is neural brainstem agonism of the GLP-1 receptors.

00:31:18.000 And now with the newer drugs, they also do GIP, which binds to a similar area in the brainstem.

00:31:23.000 And it actually, they have a lot less GLP-1, but they're still more effective because of this GIP stuff, which is an insulinotropic drug.

00:31:31.000 And the mechanisms of action are so interesting to me because it feels like they treat practically everything that is modern American chronic disease.

00:31:39.000 Like, oh, you have weird insulin spiking.

00:31:42.000 You have a lot of bizarre problems, like pre-diabetes, you have metabolic syndrome.

00:31:48.000 And it seems to act on practically all of that.

00:31:50.000 Like for most pre-diabetics, they get normal glycemia by the end of the trial. 0.76

00:31:54.000 And that's like, it's like 96%.

00:31:56.000 The most recent trial I look at for terzepatide, I think it's 95% or so for semaglutide.

00:32:01.000 It's just incredible.

00:32:03.000 Like it's devastating for chronic disease.

00:32:06.000 It basically rolls it back.

00:32:08.000 And the side effects are mostly transient.

00:32:09.000 Like the gastroparesis is not one that tends to stick with you for a long time.

00:32:12.000 And Zofran can help.

00:32:14.000 I'm not sure about that.

00:32:15.000 You're not a Zofran fan?

00:32:17.000 I haven't looked into that specifically.

00:32:18.000 Well, Zofran is a great anti-nause.

00:32:19.000 It is great for nausea, but I don't know if it specifically helps with that.

00:32:24.000 All I know is I take Zofran if I ever get to the stomach fluid.

00:32:26.000 It works.

00:32:27.000 Well, the thing with gastroparesis is that.

00:32:28.000 It's also an inhibitor.

00:32:29.000 It blocks The serotonin receptors in your brain.

00:32:32.000 Interesting.

00:32:32.000 Which, I mean, for whatever reason, that blocks the vomiting response.

00:32:38.000 Ah, I could see that helping with vomiting.

00:32:40.000 But I'm curious about, I don't know if it helps with the gastric emptying stuff.

00:32:43.000 Yeah, I have no idea.

00:32:44.000 Because the reason is, the gastric emptying does slow down your uptake of drugs.

00:32:48.000 The classic test they use, the proxy test, is they give you some aspirin and they see how long it takes you to excrete it.

00:32:55.000 So there's so many questions, and you're super smart.

00:32:58.000 You know this better than I do.

00:33:00.000 Would you agree?

00:33:01.000 I want to go down that path further, but let me take a step back.

00:33:04.000 Would you agree that we're sicker than ever?

00:33:06.000 Yeah, I would.

00:33:07.000 Okay, so you agree with Bobby Kennedy's beginning hypothesis?

00:33:11.000 Absolutely.

00:33:12.000 And I agree with Bobby on a lot of things about this.

00:33:13.000 Yeah, why do you think we're sicker than ever?

00:33:15.000 Obesity is mostly it.

00:33:17.000 It is almost entirely the fact that American people are so fat. 0.99

00:33:20.000 Why are we fat?

00:33:21.000 We eat a little bit more than we used to.

00:33:23.000 The amount that you need people to eat more compared to 1980.

00:33:27.000 So in 1980 to now, we've gotten a lot fatter.

00:33:30.000 The amount that everybody would have to eat every day to explain the entire rise is about one McDonald's double cheeseburger a day.

00:33:37.000 So the argument that Maha people would make, and I am not suited to defend this beyond the statement, is that the food has become less satiating through genetic modification.

00:33:50.000 Have you heard this argument?

00:33:51.000 I have heard it, but it's not true.

00:33:52.000 There's absolutely nothing to it.

00:33:54.000 Then why did we not eat as much in the 80s?

00:33:56.000 We didn't have as much variety in food.

00:33:59.000 That's a really great thing.

00:34:00.000 You ever heard somebody go, oh, I'm full, but I think I have another stomach for a piece of cheesecake or something?

00:34:05.000 I hear it all the time.

00:34:06.000 Yeah.

00:34:06.000 Whenever you have variety, you can eat a little bit more.

00:34:09.000 Wonderful nutritionist Stefan Guyanette has did a great book, The Hungry Brain.

00:34:13.000 He is a wonderful epidemiologist in general for all this obesity-related stuff.

00:34:17.000 And he talks about this a bunch.

00:34:19.000 He goes, you know, the mechanisms of society, they don't really work when you have a huge amount of variety and everything.

00:34:25.000 It's very easy to keep eating when you have all sorts of crap to eat.

00:34:29.000 And everything is so hyper-palatable.

00:34:31.000 It's way more palatable than it used to be.

00:34:33.000 What do you mean by that?

00:34:36.000 Yeah, it does.

00:34:36.000 Yeah.

00:34:37.000 And we process food in a way that makes for delicious tasting food.

00:34:40.000 Even if it doesn't have direct consequences, it's still, you'll be eating more and you'll be getting fatter.

00:34:46.000 So you think it's a quantity problem, not a quality problem?

00:34:50.000 Absolutely.

00:34:51.000 Do you buy into the standard American mythology that when I go to Europe, I'm able to eat more and feel better?

00:34:57.000 No, I don't.

00:34:58.000 Not at all.

00:34:58.000 I think people are just walking around more and eating less, generally.

00:35:02.000 So Joe Rogan said on a podcast recently that when he eats pasta in America, it feels like sludge.

00:35:08.000 When he eats pasta in Italy, it feels like he could run three miles.

00:35:11.000 Is that just him being on vacation?

00:35:13.000 Probably a placebo effect, yeah.

00:35:14.000 Enjoying the vacation, enjoying the nice Italian air.

00:35:16.000 But if millions of Americans feel that way, they're just...

00:35:19.000 I think they're just fooling themselves.

00:35:22.000 Why do you see them?

00:35:23.000 Tell us why.

00:35:23.000 Make the case.

00:35:24.000 I think part of it is the social contagion of it.

00:35:26.000 There's no real reason for this to happen.

00:35:28.000 So why is it happening?

00:35:29.000 I think it's because somebody said it, and other people are like, oh my God, I feel the same way.

00:35:33.000 It's kind of like with many conditions, like the autism self-diagnosis, they go, oh, you like trains?

00:35:39.000 I really love trains too.

00:35:40.000 I think I might have that.

00:35:42.000 I think I feel the exact same way.

00:35:43.000 And then they just psych themselves out.

00:35:44.000 But if you were to give them, like have a great Italian chef come in with his ingredients, have them choose everything, give it to a sample of people, and then have an American chef come in and make the same thing with typical ingredients you might use, I think you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

00:35:57.000 And I would love to see this trial.

00:35:59.000 No, has it ever been measured?

00:36:00.000 No.

00:36:01.000 But they should.

00:36:02.000 I think it'd be funny.

00:36:03.000 There's just been no interest in it for somebody.

00:36:04.000 Because the argument is what?

00:36:06.000 And I do want to talk about glyphonate.

00:36:08.000 But the argument is what, that they don't spray their food the same way we do?

00:36:11.000 They use glyphosate.

00:36:12.000 But there's some pesticides they don't use or something.

00:36:16.000 I don't know.

00:36:17.000 They could be a little bit.

00:36:17.000 What is the case they make?

00:36:19.000 Well, it depends on who you're talking to.

00:36:21.000 There's a lot of variation because some people know, for example, that some point they might believe has been debunked, so they go on to some other thing.

00:36:27.000 And they want to maintain the belief.

00:36:30.000 That Italian pasta sets better?

00:36:31.000 Yeah.

00:36:32.000 So they come in with different reasons.

00:36:33.000 And you push them back on that argument and then this argument and that argument.

00:36:36.000 You keep going through all the different arguments and they just are still insistent.

00:36:41.000 Oh, no, it's better.

00:36:43.000 Is there any merit to the argument that our food is poisoning us?

00:36:49.000 In the sense that it's very palatable and you eat a bunch of it, yes.

00:36:52.000 But in the sense that there are all these toxins in it, very likely not.

00:36:56.000 So you say that if you eat a good diet, what is a good diet?

00:37:02.000 So a good diet that is nutritionally complete will probably today include meat.

00:37:07.000 Unfortunately, vegans and vegetarians are just going to have to deal with some insufficiencies.

00:37:10.000 It's practically inevitable.

00:37:12.000 There are some things you just cannot get.

00:37:14.000 I totally agree.

00:37:15.000 And you mean chicken, fish, and steak?

00:37:16.000 Yeah, chicken, fish, steak, especially fish.

00:37:18.000 I really love fish.

00:37:19.000 I'm a big believer in fish.

00:37:20.000 So we totally agree.

00:37:21.000 Absolutely.

00:37:22.000 I think fish is like the secret super weapon of the West.

00:37:24.000 Yeah.

00:37:24.000 And I love steak, but it's not as healthful as fish.

00:37:28.000 Fish is a little bit better.

00:37:29.000 I eat fish every day.

00:37:30.000 Good.

00:37:30.000 Now, do you have concern about mercury poisoning?

00:37:34.000 Somewhat.

00:37:35.000 I don't like to eat swordfish multiple times a month.

00:37:37.000 Or tuna?

00:37:38.000 Tuna, a little bit less.

00:37:40.000 If you have that done with aquaculture nowadays, it's totally fine.

00:37:43.000 Really?

00:37:43.000 Yeah.

00:37:44.000 That's actually a great way to increase production and reduce costs.

00:37:48.000 What, you mean farm-raised?

00:37:49.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:37:50.000 Is there a difference between wild-caught and farm-raised salmon?

00:37:53.000 Yeah, less of the natural pollutants you'll find out there in nature.

00:37:55.000 There are tons of things.

00:37:56.000 Really?

00:37:56.000 So you actually like the farm better?

00:37:58.000 I do.

00:37:58.000 Because you can control the environment.

00:38:00.000 You can control what they eat.

00:38:00.000 You can make sure that they're not gross.

00:38:02.000 You can make sure they're not bottom feeders.

00:38:04.000 So when you have a Chinook from Alaska, it actually might be less.

00:38:07.000 It might be.

00:38:08.000 Less healthy.

00:38:09.000 That's one of the funny things.

00:38:10.000 A lot of unnatural things are quite a bit healthier than the natural alternatives.

00:38:13.000 Like with red dye, the synthetic one we know is very safe.

00:38:16.000 But the one that we get from Coach and Eel will kill a small proportion of people.

00:38:20.000 It's just not as good.

00:38:22.000 But a lot of people, they fall into this weird mental trap where if it's natural, it's healthy.

00:38:27.000 But tons of natural things are not healthy.

00:38:29.000 Like it's not healthy to go and smoke a bunch of weed.

00:38:31.000 It's not healthy to go and do cocaine.

00:38:34.000 You'll get a heart attack.

00:38:36.000 But like people go, oh, well, it's natural.

00:38:38.000 It should be great, right?

00:38:40.000 But no.

00:38:41.000 So we are fatter.

00:38:42.000 Would you say obesity is the driving force of our sickness?

00:38:46.000 Yeah.

00:38:46.000 Obesity and everything around it.

00:38:49.000 Very much so.

00:38:50.000 Is there a correlation between obesity and depression?

00:38:52.000 There is.

00:38:53.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:38:54.000 Totally agree.

00:38:54.000 And obesity likely causes depression, has a causal impact on us.

00:38:58.000 I completely agree.

00:38:59.000 Yeah.

00:38:59.000 And if you fix it, you're very likely to reduce depression rates.

00:39:02.000 That's right.

00:39:03.000 One of the wonderful things we can see with these randomized controlled trials and these drugs is, God, people are a lot happier when they've gotten a lot less fat.

00:39:12.000 So you're a GLP1 advocate.

00:39:15.000 however, would you say there's a concern to give like a 13-year-old a zombie?

00:39:19.000 I would.

00:39:20.000 Yeah, I don't like the idea of giving it to kids.

00:39:22.000 And they're trying to push that.

00:39:24.000 I know.

00:39:24.000 I'm just kind of instinctually against it.

00:39:26.000 Me too.

00:39:27.000 The thing is, it probably is good health advice.

00:39:30.000 Unfortunately, we know that early treatment for a lot of things does help kids.

00:39:35.000 Like with the statin example, those families where they have hypercholesterolemia and the kids inherit it because it's a genetic condition.

00:39:41.000 When you give them statins from like age five, it is really good for them.

00:39:44.000 Like they are way less likely to die young, and that's important.

00:39:48.000 Right, but that's a genetic problem, right?

00:39:50.000 So I'm talking about a kid that like, and maybe I don't know, he's eating like crap.

00:39:54.000 He's eating donuts, he's eating McDonald's, he has, let's just say, a lot of insulin resistance, which I want to ask you about.

00:40:03.000 Oh, yeah.

00:40:03.000 Very good combat that.

00:40:04.000 Yeah, I would love to get your thoughts on that.

00:40:06.000 Wouldn't it be better to say, hey, let's fix your diet before we start getting you dependent on the injection? 0.86

00:40:12.000 It'd be nice, but the problem is to control the kids' diet, you have to intervene on the parents.

00:40:15.000 And intervening on the parents is difficult, as we've seen from the inability to intervene on them in general.

00:40:20.000 So if we were to get obesity rates down macro, what would that mean for all the other health outcomes?

00:40:26.000 Beautiful improvements, just wonderful things.

00:40:29.000 So the CDC's cost estimate for the direct medical cost of obesity in a year is $173 billion.

00:40:35.000 That came out in, I think, 2022 or thereabouts, so up it a bit for inflation.

00:40:40.000 Other estimates are usually a little bit higher.

00:40:42.000 Industry estimates are extremely higher.

00:40:44.000 And estimates that have the indirect costs in there, like presenteeism where you're not working at work, absenteeism where you're not going to work, just being lazier, having all sorts of productivity reductions, less employment from being fat.

00:40:59.000 If you handle all of that, the benefits to the American economy would be a little over $1 trillion a year.

00:41:05.000 And that's a pretty standard cost estimate.

00:41:07.000 The most extreme ones I've seen were upwards of about three and a half billion.

00:41:09.000 So you would say that solving obesity is one of our...

00:41:15.000 Absolutely.

00:41:15.000 Tons.

00:41:16.000 People are way more sedentary.

00:41:18.000 A lot of that has to do with the jobs.

00:41:19.000 They're just not as physically demanding.

00:41:22.000 And they don't need to be.

00:41:23.000 We should have people going and exercising outside of work if they're not able to do it in work anymore.

00:41:28.000 Food pyramid.

00:41:29.000 Is that great?

00:41:30.000 Okay, so we agree on that.

00:41:31.000 Yeah, I really don't want to.

00:41:32.000 It should be reconstituted.

00:41:33.000 It really should be.

00:41:34.000 I think it was made on pretty bad advice.

00:41:36.000 The large amount of grains is just not that pleasant.

00:41:40.000 I would like to see more vegetables relative to grains.

00:41:42.000 Like all the grains is, Carniferous ones.

00:41:48.000 Not carniferous.

00:41:50.000 Cruciferous grains.

00:41:51.000 Whatever.

00:41:52.000 No, no, no.

00:41:53.000 Yeah, those are great.

00:41:54.000 I love spinach.

00:41:55.000 Broccoli.

00:41:56.000 I love broccoli.

00:41:56.000 Cauliflower.

00:41:57.000 I love cauliflower.

00:41:58.000 I love pearled cauliflower.

00:42:00.000 Delicious.

00:42:01.000 Golly, my wife makes just all sorts of delicious stuff with that. 1.00

00:42:04.000 It's so good.

00:42:06.000 So grains are carbohydrates, which brings us to insulin resistance.

00:42:10.000 Yes.

00:42:10.000 Is that a problem?

00:42:11.000 Massive.

00:42:11.000 And it's basically stemming from the same thing.

00:42:13.000 People are eating too much and they are causing desensitization of their pancreas and stuff.

00:42:17.000 They are becoming pre-diabetic.

00:42:18.000 They are effectively managing insulin very, very poorly.

00:42:21.000 And acting on that does help with their obesity.

00:42:23.000 It helps with everything else because so much is downstream from that.

00:42:26.000 It's all, there's this whole thing about metabolic syndrome where it's just a very vague condition.

00:42:30.000 There's actually no real good definition of it, but it's all in the orbit of that.

00:42:34.000 And if you fix any part of it, you seem to have effects on all the rest.

00:42:37.000 So like before GLP-1s, the big miracle drug was metformin.

00:42:40.000 It goes, oh, it helps with everything.

00:42:42.000 It helps with that.

00:42:43.000 It helps with everything downstream from it.

00:42:45.000 And all those downstream benefits are just amazing.

00:42:47.000 Like you're even going to cure like a lot of adult acne and stuff.

00:42:51.000 It's just going to be amazing.

00:42:54.000 So would you, so yeah.

00:42:56.000 But it's all related.

00:42:57.000 I guess the question is, your take is drugs that work is probably a better solution, this is your take, than mass dietary changes.

00:43:07.000 I think so.

00:43:07.000 The main reason is it's very, very difficult to get people to actually stick to dietary changes.

00:43:13.000 When you tell them, oh, change your diet in this way or that way, only people who are like in the upper strata, the upper crust, tend to actually follow the advice and stick to it reliably.

00:43:24.000 And even then, they tend to not do so very well.

00:43:26.000 Like adherence to New Year's, New Year's resolutions.

00:43:30.000 The average diet people start on, they're off it by six weeks.

00:43:34.000 They're just, they're off.

00:43:36.000 They don't want to do it.

00:43:36.000 They don't stick with it.

00:43:37.000 They don't stick to their gym memberships.

00:43:39.000 In fact, the vast majority just never get used.

00:43:43.000 And how do you motivate people?

00:43:44.000 It just seems practically impossible because we've been telling them for decades.

00:43:49.000 Like we even tell them in the latest advice from the HHS, just, hey, don't eat ultra-processed foods and stuff.

00:43:55.000 We've been saying this for ages, and they still do it.

00:43:57.000 And you agree we should reduce ultra-processed foods.

00:44:01.000 It's curious.

00:44:02.000 We don't have a good definition of it.

00:44:03.000 There's the NOVA categorizations, and those have been like the go-to for a lot of people.

00:44:06.000 Yeah, how about like the big three, which is like white bread, cereal, and donuts?

00:44:11.000 I think we should eat less of that stuff just because it gets tempting.

00:44:14.000 People eat too much when they have it.

00:44:16.000 And it just tastes good.

00:44:19.000 So why stop yourself?

00:44:21.000 But I think people should stop themselves more.

00:44:23.000 And I think cutting back on those options would help.

00:44:25.000 But the thing is, if you cut back on options, you kind of just, I don't like taking away choice.

00:44:29.000 I would like people to have a way to choose more, but also choose the right thing.

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00:45:53.000 What do you think about blue zones?

00:45:55.000 Fake.

00:45:56.000 Tell me.

00:45:56.000 Entirely fake.

00:45:57.000 This is everything.

00:45:58.000 Yeah, so like the, what is it, Loma Linda or whatever in California and Greece, all fake?

00:46:03.000 So Loma Linda is not exceptional.

00:46:05.000 It's about the 74th percentile.

00:46:07.000 Ooh, is that coffee?

00:46:08.000 That's for me.

00:46:08.000 You want one?

00:46:09.000 I would love a coffee.

00:46:09.000 Yeah.

00:46:10.000 Thank you, thank you.

00:46:11.000 Do you want creatine in it?

00:46:13.000 Do you put creatine in your coffee?

00:46:14.000 No.

00:46:15.000 No.

00:46:15.000 That would be fun.

00:46:16.000 I do take creatine, though.

00:46:17.000 I take it black.

00:46:18.000 Thank you.

00:46:18.000 Creatine is great for you.

00:46:20.000 Absolutely.

00:46:21.000 Keeps on a little waterway, but great for the muscle.

00:46:23.000 What?

00:46:23.000 Great for muscle building.

00:46:25.000 You have to drink a lot of water when you're on creatine.

00:46:27.000 Yeah.

00:46:28.000 And it causes you to retain a lot of water, too.

00:46:29.000 That's right.

00:46:30.000 It increases water retention.

00:46:32.000 I do it for the neurological effects.

00:46:35.000 But keep it going.

00:46:35.000 If you have a good diet, though, I don't think you get the neurological effects from that.

00:46:38.000 It's almost all seen in vegetarians and vegans.

00:46:41.000 Yeah, I want you to finish that point.

00:46:43.000 I found the greatest leap of neurological improvement of mental acuity, memory, and stamina when I started doing more fish, more olive oil, and more healthy fats.

00:46:51.000 Nice.

00:46:52.000 That for me is when I saw, because I was really low on fish for my whole diet, and that's where for me it was a huge level up.

00:46:58.000 It's so good.

00:46:59.000 I'm a big fan.

00:47:00.000 Especially salmon.

00:47:00.000 I do salmon almost every night.

00:47:02.000 Love salmon.

00:47:02.000 Love salmon, love swordfish, love tuna.

00:47:04.000 I love everything that you can, like I love a good tuna steak.

00:47:07.000 I love good food if it's good for you.

00:47:09.000 Anyway, you're talking.

00:47:10.000 So, Loma Linda, not actually that exceptional.

00:47:13.000 The Seventh-day Adventists.

00:47:14.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:47:15.000 And they love, oh, man, they really love.

00:47:18.000 I have this in my upcoming book, so you have to debunk it for me.

00:47:21.000 I have a whole book on the Sabbath.

00:47:22.000 Oh, really?

00:47:23.000 Yeah.

00:47:23.000 Do you like the Seventh-day Adventists?

00:47:25.000 I use them as a test case that being a sabbatarian can help your health.

00:47:29.000 That pausing for a day can actually improve your health outcomes.

00:47:32.000 Yeah.

00:47:32.000 So I love fasting as well.

00:47:35.000 I used to fast a bunch.

00:47:36.000 I'm a big fast.

00:47:37.000 So you're a believer in fasting?

00:47:38.000 Yeah, I just like it for the feeling.

00:47:39.000 I feel like it's an easy way to lose weight.

00:47:41.000 Does the data show fasting is good?

00:47:43.000 Yeah.

00:47:43.000 It's a great way to lose weight.

00:47:44.000 We're in agreement.

00:47:45.000 And the more rapidly you lose weight.

00:47:46.000 It's not waste the weight, though, but it's good because it creates, your whole body goes into almost a replenishing mode, right?

00:47:51.000 It might lead to autophagy at a meaningful scale.

00:47:56.000 But that's after like four plus days of fasting.

00:47:59.000 Yeah, which I don't do more than.

00:48:01.000 But you're going to make a point on blue zones.

00:48:03.000 Yes.

00:48:03.000 Sorry.

00:48:03.000 Let's get back to that.

00:48:04.000 So Loma Linda, not that exceptional, focused on a bunch.

00:48:08.000 It's at about the 74th percentile thereabouts for U.S. counties or whatever it is in terms of life expectancy, which is not amazing.

00:48:17.000 Like, why should we focus on the 74th percentile?

00:48:19.000 We could just probably go even further out.

00:48:21.000 But then the thing is, those percentiles are unstable year to year.

00:48:24.000 They do change quite a bit.

00:48:26.000 So the 99th is probably not going to be the 99th in 10 years because people will die.

00:48:31.000 It'll change.

00:48:33.000 Nicosia, the one down in Costa Rica or whatever, it is pretty much vague.

00:48:37.000 Let's define a blue zone.

00:48:38.000 What is a blue zone?

00:48:39.000 Oh yeah, sorry.

00:48:39.000 So I can't believe it.

00:48:40.000 No, it's okay.

00:48:40.000 Blue zones.

00:48:41.000 So blue zones are these areas that have been proposed to basically have the secret to a long life.

00:48:47.000 People there are supposed to have been living very long lives for a very long time.

00:48:52.000 They live well.

00:48:53.000 They enjoy their communities and they eat.

00:48:57.000 They don't have to eat in like crazy ways.

00:48:59.000 Sometimes they smoke even and stuff.

00:49:00.000 They just do all sorts of things there that are somehow all conducive to hell.

00:49:05.000 they live really long lives.

00:49:06.000 But most of it turns out to be Yeah, that's the thing.

00:49:12.000 I know where Blake gets all this stuff from now.

00:49:13.000 Blake, I figured it out.

00:49:15.000 I found the source.

00:49:16.000 Yeah, I popularized this a little while back, and the guy who documented a lot of this stuff, put in all the legwork, he recently got the Ig Nobel Prize, which is a yearly kind of joke Nobel they give out for funny findings.

00:49:29.000 Like there's a woman, Herculana Hosel, who a few years back got one for grinding up monkey brains to count the number of neurons in them. 1.00

00:49:36.000 It's just a very funny little thing, but it's real science.

00:49:39.000 And this guy, he went through and he documented, oh my God, this blue zones are like super fake.

00:49:44.000 So Okinawa, they go, oh, you can live to like 110 there easily.

00:49:48.000 It's like, well, I don't believe that.

00:49:50.000 That's one of the poorest areas of Japan.

00:49:52.000 And their life expectancy officially is much lower than the rest of Japan.

00:49:56.000 It's like, I just don't believe that.

00:49:57.000 They smoke a lot there.

00:49:58.000 They weird.

00:50:00.000 So the government went out and they were like, oh, we're going to go interview some of these, you know, super, super old, way older than 100 years old people because we want to learn about their life experiences.

00:50:09.000 It'll be cool.

00:50:10.000 Have like a little documentary.

00:50:11.000 And they funded this documentary.

00:50:13.000 And then it turned out, oh, we're finding a lot of corpses.

00:50:17.000 We're finding a lot of people who have been rotting in a room.

00:50:20.000 Here's your coffee.

00:50:20.000 Thank you so much.

00:50:22.000 Excellent.

00:50:23.000 All right.

00:50:24.000 They found all these people were just being used to collect checks by their living relatives.

00:50:30.000 And sometimes they didn't exist.

00:50:32.000 And so this prompted, okay, documentary is over.

00:50:34.000 Government goes out, reviews a lot of this.

00:50:36.000 And now they send out letters every year to ask people, hey, are you still alive?

00:50:40.000 Can you verify you're alive?

00:50:42.000 They sometimes give them little medals every so many years to make sure if you're really old, you're not just scamming the system and actually dead.

00:50:49.000 And so is there nothing to like the Mediterranean diet walking around all the time?

00:50:55.000 Really?

00:50:55.000 The thing to the Mediterranean diet is that it's popular.

00:50:58.000 And as things become popular, healthy people adopt them because they're like, oh my God, I better do the cool new healthy thing.

00:51:05.000 And it generally has principles that aren't terrible, right?

00:51:08.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:51:09.000 The thing about restricting your diet is you limit all that availability of different weird foods and everything.

00:51:14.000 Yeah, totally.

00:51:15.000 It's easier to satiate yourself.

00:51:16.000 So if you don't have a million options because you're not afraid of the e-that's how I eat, basically I'm a Mediterranean diet guy.

00:51:21.000 There you go.

00:51:22.000 Well, if you have that limited diet and it goes, oh, I can only eat these things, then you're very unlikely to overeat.

00:51:27.000 Correct.

00:51:27.000 If you put people in a chamber with nutrient paste, they'll eat enough of it to live and then they won't eat very much and they'll probably lose weight because it's dull.

00:51:35.000 It's not an exciting diet, so they're not going to eat a bunch of it.

00:51:38.000 And it's great.

00:51:39.000 That works.

00:51:40.000 And so the big problem that is facing us is an overindulgence, obesity.

00:51:45.000 Absolutely.

00:51:46.000 And it creates all these downstream health problems.

00:51:49.000 That's right.

00:51:50.000 And yeah, please.

00:51:51.000 Yeah.

00:51:51.000 No, that's basically the gist of it.

00:51:53.000 It is just we are eating so much.

00:51:56.000 And some people are eating a whole lot more than they really should.

00:52:00.000 And we've measured this.

00:52:02.000 We have, yeah.

00:52:03.000 We have great measurements.

00:52:04.000 The nutritional health examinations, the NHANES, it's a great study that's done every couple of years.

00:52:09.000 They ask people, please just log your calories and stuff.

00:52:11.000 And the calories people eat have gone up.

00:52:13.000 And the activity they do has gone down.

00:52:14.000 So on both ends, you're getting fewer calories out and more calories in, and then your stomach is growing and growing and growing.

00:52:20.000 Alcohol.

00:52:21.000 Bad for you.

00:52:22.000 I don't drink, so make the case.

00:52:24.000 Well, all the stuff.

00:52:25.000 Is it fair to call it poison?

00:52:27.000 Absolutely.

00:52:27.000 It is poison.

00:52:28.000 Ethanol is poison.

00:52:29.000 Yes, absolutely.

00:52:30.000 That is 100% it is poison.

00:52:32.000 Alcohol is ethanol?

00:52:33.000 Yeah.

00:52:34.000 I didn't know that.

00:52:34.000 Yeah, it's poison.

00:52:36.000 I thought ethanol was derived from corn.

00:52:38.000 Corn alcohol.

00:52:40.000 Is all alcohol corn-based?

00:52:41.000 No.

00:52:41.000 I was going to say it's alright.

00:52:42.000 You can make alcohol in a lot of ways.

00:52:43.000 I was going to say, okay.

00:52:44.000 But I guess you get ethanol from other...

00:52:47.000 Okay.

00:52:47.000 I just.

00:52:48.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:52:48.000 It's alcohol.

00:52:49.000 So alcohol in the engines and all that.

00:52:51.000 If you put it in there without the treatment or whatever for your engine, it's going to blow it up.

00:52:56.000 Not blow it up at all.

00:52:57.000 So are we drinking too much alcohol?

00:52:59.000 Absolutely.

00:53:00.000 There's a lot of binge drinking these days.

00:53:03.000 It's pretty bad.

00:53:05.000 So brief background on why people thought it was good for you.

00:53:09.000 Pretty much the same reason they thought vitamin D is great for you.

00:53:12.000 But there's less downsides of vitamin D. Yeah.

00:53:15.000 Like if you can dose it, it's not going to do anything.

00:53:17.000 You're just going to put it.

00:53:17.000 If you dose alcohol, you got big problems.

00:53:19.000 Yes.

00:53:20.000 Any alcohol you drink is going to be bad for you.

00:53:21.000 All of it is bad for you.

00:53:22.000 There's no lower limit at which it's good for you.

00:53:24.000 Like I still drink alcohol because it's fun and it's enjoyable and like you want to drink because like everybody's drinking and some stuff tastes good.

00:53:33.000 Not beer or anything like that, but some liquor tastes good and all that.

00:53:36.000 So it's like, great, I'll drink.

00:53:38.000 But it is bad.

00:53:40.000 It is all bad for you.

00:53:42.000 People thought based on selective studies, they were like, oh, people who drink a little bit, they're healthier.

00:53:47.000 I hear this all the time.

00:53:49.000 Oh, a glass of wine a night.

00:53:50.000 It's good for the antioxidants.

00:53:51.000 Yeah.

00:53:52.000 Oh my God, they say this.

00:53:53.000 It's actually funny.

00:53:54.000 We have comparisons of the effects of drinking wine versus drinking beer during pregnancy.

00:54:00.000 And it turns out, oh, women who drink wine during pregnancy, they didn't have higher IQ kids. 0.99

00:54:06.000 Don't extrapolate from this because it's clearly a selection effect.

00:54:09.000 You should not drink anything.

00:54:10.000 You shouldn't drink anything.

00:54:11.000 It's all downsides.

00:54:13.000 But the reason is selection, because wealthier women drink wine and poorer women drink beer. 1.00

00:54:20.000 Yeah.

00:54:20.000 So it's why would a why would a if a mom is drinking during pregnancy, that's it's bad either way.

00:54:25.000 Child abuse?

00:54:25.000 I mean, it's like.

00:54:26.000 I think it should be considered that, yeah.

00:54:28.000 I totally agree.

00:54:28.000 Yeah.

00:54:29.000 Some jurisdictions consider it that way.

00:54:30.000 Some jurisdictions recently have been lifting their restrictions on that.

00:54:34.000 Are you serious?

00:54:34.000 I should lean in on that.

00:54:35.000 Blake, we should get in on that.

00:54:36.000 Yeah.

00:54:37.000 Because that's active potentiality for fetal poisoning.

00:54:41.000 Exactly.

00:54:41.000 It's very bad.

00:54:42.000 It just has no upsides.

00:54:43.000 It's all downside.

00:54:45.000 It's a terrible, terrible thing to do.

00:54:47.000 But some places have started making it so bars are now allowed to serve pregnant women. 1.00

00:54:51.000 It's their choice to do it.

00:54:52.000 They can say no, and they should say no, but they're allowed to serve, which is nutty.

00:55:05.000 We are.

00:55:05.000 And we're binge drinking a lot more too.

00:55:09.000 There are more teetotalers, which is nice.

00:55:11.000 These people are going to be fine.

00:55:13.000 There are more people who are just drinking insane amounts too.

00:55:16.000 And people in general are drinking a little bit more.

00:55:18.000 And so we had Prohibition once, and Prohibition actually...

00:55:23.000 Yeah, I'm a Prohibition truther.

00:55:25.000 Good.

00:55:26.000 I've read the books.

00:55:27.000 Good.

00:55:28.000 So you're familiar.

00:55:29.000 It did reduce rates of cirrhosis, and they never actually went back up to where they are.

00:55:32.000 Well, really well.

00:55:33.000 Here's my thought crime on prohibition.

00:55:35.000 Yeah.

00:55:36.000 Yes, it increased gang violence.

00:55:38.000 What caused them to do it in the first place?

00:55:40.000 So why would a population go and do a constitutional amendment?

00:55:45.000 There must have been a really big problem.

00:55:48.000 Rooting tooting saloons.

00:55:49.000 What was the problem that caused, what was it, the 23rd Amendment, 22nd?

00:55:55.000 A lot of it had to do with men mistreating their wives.

00:56:00.000 It was women-driven. 1.00

00:56:01.000 Yeah.

00:56:01.000 Women were the power behind prohibition.

00:56:04.000 21st Amendment.

00:56:05.000 Yeah, they would actually go and bust up saloons that the men would be at after work or sometimes when they should have been working.

00:56:13.000 And they would break the bar and break the stills and everything and try and tell men, get out of here.

00:56:18.000 Don't go home from the saloon drunk and beat your wife.

00:56:21.000 Come home and be a good father and all this stuff.

00:56:26.000 And saloon culture was just very bad. 0.99

00:56:27.000 When they did break that up, homicide rates went down because men were just going there into these pretty much men and prostitute only establishments and just being violent, being drunk, being adulterous, very much so.

00:56:42.000 And it was just bad.

00:56:42.000 It was a bad culture we had.

00:56:44.000 We changed it overnight with temperance.

00:56:46.000 What is worse, would you say, for society?

00:56:48.000 A society that smokes or a society that drinks?

00:56:51.000 Society that smokes.

00:56:52.000 Okay.

00:56:53.000 So you're not a tobacco truther?

00:56:54.000 No, tobacco is just...

00:56:58.000 Do you think we were skinnier?

00:56:59.000 No, I'm talking about no cigarettes.

00:57:01.000 And I want to get into weed, but do you think there's any truth that we were skinnier when we were smoking more cigarettes?

00:57:06.000 Yeah, because it is an appetite suppressor.

00:57:08.000 Absolutely.

00:57:08.000 It contributes a very, very small, but real portion of the increase in obesity over time.

00:57:15.000 The reduction in smoking did that.

00:57:17.000 It's interesting.

00:57:18.000 I mean, like, it did make people skinnier, but it's not worth it.

00:57:23.000 It causes cancer.

00:57:23.000 You have a one in four chance to get lung cancer.

00:57:25.000 Why is weed bad?

00:57:27.000 I just think it's a loser drug.

00:57:29.000 I used to think, oh, we'll legalize it.

00:57:31.000 It'll be fine.

00:57:31.000 But the gateway drug thing that I heard growing up that everybody said, oh, it was fake for many years, it seems to have been real.

00:57:36.000 It seems to have been a true thing. 0.66

00:57:38.000 People really do get unheard of drugs and you make them available.

00:57:40.000 If you just legalize weed, okay, fine, but you're still going to find that a lot of people waste their lives on this stuff.

00:57:46.000 Totally agree.

00:57:47.000 Most of the downsides of weed are due to selection.

00:57:50.000 Losers smoke weed.

00:57:52.000 When you make it available to them, they will go smoke it.

00:57:54.000 Most of it is not the weed making their lives worse.

00:57:57.000 It is that losers want to go and do this stuff.

00:58:00.000 But even still, it's still pretty bad.

00:58:03.000 Like kids, when they have it as teens, they pay attention less in high school.

00:58:08.000 They're less likely to go on and get a college degree.

00:58:10.000 They're less likely to do well on various tests and everything.

00:58:13.000 They're less likely to graduate on time.

00:58:15.000 Just downside.

00:58:17.000 And that's illegal use, too.

00:58:19.000 So when you make it legal, it increases illegal use, honestly.

00:58:22.000 It's a very funny effect because it becomes more socially acceptable to do it.

00:58:26.000 So people who are like under the age limit or people who are otherwise ineligible, They will go and get it illegally, you know, or they'll be able to buy it from someone who resold it to them or anything like that.

00:58:35.000 And it's just been a big mess.

00:58:36.000 And anywhere that it's come with the also legalization of, or decriminalization, I should say, is more common, of hard drugs, it's been terrible.

00:58:47.000 It's been atrocious.

00:58:48.000 It's led to like just, I don't know if you've been to SF when it had really, really bad problems with that.

00:58:53.000 It's a walking dead, yeah.

00:58:55.000 I was in Berkeley, like, golly, around this time last year, and I was just walking around.

00:59:02.000 I was going to go get Boba with some friends, and we passed by a McDonald's, and there's a guy outside who has needles near him, and he has the little, what do you call it, the band around his arm because he had just injected, and he was jittering up everywhere, and he was just drinking a coffee, too, and it's like, you clearly just did meth or something, or not meth, but heroin.

00:59:21.000 And there were people conked out on the sidewalks.

00:59:23.000 There were people you have to step over.

00:59:24.000 It was atrocious.

00:59:26.000 And every city that decriminalizes has the same thing.

00:59:28.000 Portugal, they say, oh, it's a success story.

00:59:30.000 But they do it differently.

00:59:31.000 If you are using it in public, they'll arrest you.

00:59:34.000 And they'll put you in like rehabilitation program or they'll throw you in the drunk tank, basically.

00:59:39.000 They don't take it.

00:59:40.000 They took it more seriously than we do here when we try to decriminalize.

00:59:42.000 And I think that's part of the failure is that we adopt an incredibly progressive liberal attitude towards it where we, when we decriminalize, we go, oh, we just wanted to decriminalize.

00:59:52.000 That's all we wanted to do.

00:59:53.000 Where Portugal does it, they go, oh, we wanted to not enforce this stuff. 0.99

00:59:57.000 We're going to beat up vagrants still who are using drugs.

01:00:00.000 We don't have the gumption to do that too.

01:00:02.000 And if we did, I think it'd be a better situation.

01:00:04.000 But either way, it's turned out pretty bad.

01:00:07.000 So I want to keep running through supplements, but let's take a detour to a fun one that's on my mind.

01:00:11.000 Are more people getting autism?

01:00:14.000 No.

01:00:15.000 Very likely not.

01:00:17.000 So I'm going to give you a quick spiel on autism.

01:00:20.000 So 1943, Leo Conner or Canner, a lot of people, Germans, they Americanize their name and all that.

01:00:26.000 They changed pronunciation.

01:00:28.000 He names autism for the first time, and his criteria for it is super restrictive.

01:00:34.000 To get a diagnosis of autism back when the Connor criteria came out, you had to have symptoms of having an extremely low IQ.

01:00:44.000 Social aloofness, for example, is typically only found in people who are mentally retarded with an IQ of less than 35. 0.99

01:00:50.000 So super mentally retarded. 1.00

01:00:52.000 And that's where you're totally unaware of any social cues or anything.

01:00:55.000 You're like unresponsive.

01:00:57.000 That's a physician almost.

01:00:58.000 Yeah, pretty much.

01:00:59.000 But you also have to have a symptom of a relatively normal or high-range IQ, which is these strict repetitive habits, like organizing everything in your room near bedtime.

01:01:10.000 And it's like, how do you have this co-location of two symptoms that are on the opposite ends of the IQ spectrum?

01:01:16.000 That's why almost nobody got diagnosed before we had the DSM-3.

01:01:20.000 The diagnostic statistical manual, third edition.

01:01:23.000 Yeah, they introduced the first autism diagnosis to the mass market.

01:01:26.000 Before that, they had like things that were sort of similar, like schizophrenia diagnoses, but they were too dissimilar to modern stuff to really be comparable.

01:01:35.000 Then they started diagnosing more, and the criteria were a lot more lax.

01:01:39.000 You had to just be a little bit, as we know, modern autistic. 0.99

01:01:43.000 It was more strict than it is nowadays, but when they got around to the DSM-4, they introduced stuff like Asperger's, which is like mild autism.

01:01:50.000 Someone who's a little high IQ and a little quirky, they're autistic now. 1.00

01:01:55.000 They weren't under the old criteria, but under the new stuff, oh, yeah, give them a diagnosis and start giving the parents all the social services that entails.

01:02:03.000 And the other big thing is when the IDEA Act passed, when we, this act where you have to go out and your schools had to actively identify students with mental disabilities, that led to a massive, massive increase in diagnoses.

01:02:17.000 It led to huge numbers of increases in single years sometimes.

01:02:22.000 So like Massachusetts, for example, they had a year where they had a nearly like, I think it was a 300 or 400% increase in the number of diagnoses they reported up to Congress, consistent with the acts they reported a year, because they just changed how the baseline was calculated.

01:02:35.000 So you have all these things that are methodological factors that contribute to the increase.

01:02:40.000 And the increase is just in diagnoses.

01:02:42.000 When you go out of your way to use a consistent criteria, like the criteria of the DSM-4, and you go out into the community and you go, okay, hi, random person on the street.

01:02:51.000 I'd like to diagnose you with autism or I'd like to see if you qualify for diagnosis.

01:02:56.000 And you pay them a little bit to be in the study or whatever.

01:02:59.000 And you do the same thing for adults and for kids, you get incredibly similar rates.

01:03:03.000 You don't for the most severe forms of autism, but that's because those people tend to, unfortunately, die very young.

01:03:09.000 The guys who are banging their heads against the walls, you said earlier, like that, they do tend to die young.

01:03:13.000 We have seen an increase in those diagnoses, though, and you might say, oh, well, is that the real increase in autism?

01:03:18.000 It's like, no.

01:03:19.000 That's because we incentivize that.

01:03:22.000 A lot of that is people who are getting substituted into an autism diagnosis.

01:03:26.000 Because we give parents, for example, in California, you get a lot more benefits for an autism diagnosis than you do for a mental retardation diagnosis. 0.98

01:03:33.000 So if your kid has mental retardation, you can convince a provider to diagnose your kid with autism. 0.99

01:03:38.000 And suddenly, ba-bam, you get access to a lot more social services.

01:03:41.000 your kid gets treated better in school.

01:03:43.000 They end up with a lot.

01:03:47.000 If you are a caretaker, you get nearly $10,000 a month.

01:03:50.000 Yep.

01:03:50.000 And we see a lot of exploitation of this.

01:03:53.000 For example, in Minnesota, the Somali community has been greatly exploiting this recently.

01:03:59.000 In 2018, they would never do that.

01:04:01.000 They would never do that.

01:04:03.000 They've figured out in their community how to get a diagnosis for their kids because it gives them a lot of benefits.

01:04:10.000 The provider spending in, I think, the two cities area was about $6 million in 2018, or it might have been the whole state.

01:04:16.000 I'd have to look back at the report.

01:04:17.000 But it went up to like nearly 200 million in just a few years, like by 2024, or 2023, actually, that's what it was.

01:04:23.000 And there have been fraud cases about this.

01:04:25.000 There have been people getting arrested for it.

01:04:27.000 There's all sorts of people are getting found out that they're doing this.

01:04:30.000 So you would say there's nothing to the argument that we used to have like one in 30,000, now it's one in 30.

01:04:35.000 There's been no increase in brain inflammation.

01:04:38.000 No, not really.

01:04:39.000 There's been a systematic effort to start diagnosing people that started only very recently.

01:04:44.000 And because you tend to under-diagnose adults, because like we just don't care about adults, like there's no reason to go out and diagnose all the adults, but there is a mandate to diagnose all the kids.

01:04:55.000 You have to diagnose it by law.

01:04:57.000 So but is it ever so their counter-argument, if I had like Dr. Means here, you know, who wants to be the next surgeon general, she would say, have you met her?

01:05:06.000 I don't know if you met her or not.

01:05:07.000 No, I bet Callie, but I haven't met Casey in person yet.

01:05:10.000 They would say that the criteria of the last 10 years hasn't changed.

01:05:15.000 Incorrect.

01:05:16.000 Well, the thing is, so they're correct in that the diagnostic statistical manual five has been the addition we've been on, but the incentives to diagnose have still increased, and they're increasing, and the awareness increases.

01:05:27.000 Like, it's not just about the manuals themselves, it's about campaigns like Autism Speaks, where you try and get the population to know about autism.

01:05:35.000 People had no idea what it was before 1980.

01:05:38.000 Now, everybody knows what autism is.

01:05:39.000 It's a meme.

01:05:40.000 You can go on TikTok and find people self-diagnosing, giving instructions on how to self-diagnose.

01:05:45.000 Or you can even find that it's really kind of crazy.

01:05:48.000 You can find instructions on TikTok on how to go to a psychiatrist and get diagnosed.

01:05:54.000 You can find people psyching themselves into it.

01:05:57.000 And these cultural trends clearly lead to way, way more diagnosis.

01:06:01.000 Parents being incentivized.

01:06:03.000 When schools, when states pass these reward for diagnosis, like laws that reward diagnosis in schools, schools tend to increase the number of diagnosis by 25% in a single year on average, which is enormous.

01:06:16.000 That's so huge.

01:06:18.000 And it's just because each head that is autistic is a boon for the school. 1.00

01:06:24.000 That's just how it is.

01:06:25.000 We keep incentivizing it and the rates keep growing.

01:06:27.000 So for parents that say that there are just noticeable more speech delays between kids now than there were 20, 30 years ago, that's just not really true.

01:06:36.000 That doesn't bear out.

01:06:37.000 It doesn't bear out.

01:06:38.000 If you look at actual symptomality, which we do have data on, you don't see really any difference over time.

01:06:43.000 In fact, it's wonderful.

01:06:44.000 I love the Swedes for this, and the Danish and the Norwegians and the Finns.

01:06:48.000 They trust their government a lot to collect a lot of their data.

01:06:50.000 Like their personal data is very well collected.

01:06:54.000 And it's all linked to their health records and everything.

01:06:56.000 And we have data on parental, like the same questionnaires we give to parents here for autism that prioritize them to go to get a diagnosis.

01:07:06.000 They give those to whole population registers, like thousands and thousands of people.

01:07:10.000 And we see, oh, the reported level of the autistic traits over time, or even the clinician, like measured level in some cases, is the same over time.

01:07:19.000 It just doesn't drift.

01:07:20.000 So the population is as autistic as ever, but the number of diagnoses in those same cohorts just ticks up and up and up and up in a way.

01:07:27.000 And I think that, plus the fact that when you do a systematic effort to diagnose under a given criteria, you find the same rates for adults and for children, I think that really just heals the deal.

01:07:36.000 Like it's hard to argue against that in any credible way.

01:07:42.000 Ask 10 people to define the word capitalism.

01:07:45.000 How many different responses do you think you'll get?

01:07:47.000 This is a word that comes up all the time, but does anyone know what it really means?

01:07:51.000 Do you?

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01:08:41.000 What is an issue that we are underdiagnosing or underemphasizing?

01:08:47.000 So that's the thing.

01:08:48.000 We don't know if the increase in autism diagnoses is under or overdiagnosis.

01:08:52.000 There's a genuine case to be made that some kids were underserved prior to diagnosis becoming a big thing because there are some things you can do to help autistic kids.

01:08:59.000 I'm not a psychiatrist, but I know that they have plenty of things that actually do help.

01:09:02.000 And I've looked at some of the effect sizes for the treatments and whatnot.

01:09:05.000 And they help them with their behavioral problems.

01:09:08.000 They help them to graduate school and stuff.

01:09:10.000 They help them with a lot of things.

01:09:12.000 So were those kids at one point underdiagnosed?

01:09:15.000 I think the answer is probably yes for those kids.

01:09:17.000 Nowadays, where we're getting autism becoming less and less severe because we're diagnosing more and more marginal cases, I feel that there is a lot of overdiagnosis going on.

01:09:27.000 and especially when it leads to unnecessary medication.

01:09:29.000 Like, I'm not a big fan of the over-diagnosis with ADHD, especially because there are...

01:09:33.000 I think it's a scam.

01:09:41.000 They have been, a lot of them have had pharma contracts.

01:09:45.000 I'm not against big pharma.

01:09:46.000 I love pharmaceutical companies that do great stuff for us, but it is true that they are clever.

01:09:51.000 They might do a lot of smart, good things, but they also lie a lot.

01:09:54.000 They do a lot of things that hurt people.

01:09:56.000 For example, there was the opioid stuff a while back.

01:09:59.000 The epidemic on that is going down now.

01:10:00.000 We are handling that, which is lovely.

01:10:03.000 It means fewer overdoses.

01:10:04.000 Good.

01:10:04.000 The company that started that, which has now been sued out of existence, and well, sued into being just a fund to pay out people they hurt, they went around and lied to doctors and told them, oh, it's not addictive.

01:10:15.000 There's no evidence it's addictive.

01:10:16.000 And then what do you see?

01:10:17.000 About 5% of people who were prescribed these drugs after a surgery got addicted for a short amount of time, usually, but sometimes a long amount of time.

01:10:25.000 And then a lot of time they transition to other drugs.

01:10:27.000 So they do lie.

01:10:28.000 They do mess up stuff.

01:10:29.000 And they do overdiagnose these kids in the sense that there are some number of them that we know transition from these drugs to harder drugs.

01:10:38.000 There are a good number of people who go from like ADHD drugs, which many will need.

01:10:42.000 Lots of kids will need them.

01:10:44.000 They can't focus otherwise.

01:10:45.000 Like Ritalin?

01:10:46.000 Yeah.

01:10:46.000 Ritalin and Adderall and like a lot of other drugs, they just work.

01:10:49.000 They actually do work great for a lot of kids who do need them.

01:10:52.000 But the kids who don't need them, they're getting not much upside.

01:10:57.000 A lot of people do use the drugs for focus reasons, like they're on the job and they want to focus better.

01:11:02.000 And fine, let them do that if they really want.

01:11:05.000 But the moment it becomes forcing something on a kid and the parents being told they must do it and all that, I'm not a big fan.

01:11:12.000 There are good cases where you should because the kid will fail otherwise, but I do think we give it out too often.

01:11:19.000 And so you would say then the autism emphasis is just a major diagnosis scam?

01:11:26.000 A lot of it is.

01:11:27.000 A lot of it is scamming.

01:11:28.000 I mean, especially when you see like the welfare fraud related to it, like the Somali case in Minnesota is one of the most well-documented now, and it's very, very bad.

01:11:35.000 There is really no good reason for them to be going out and getting practically all their kids diagnosed with autism.

01:11:42.000 It's clear that they're doing it because it gives them money.

01:11:45.000 And is there any truth that there is less autism in the Amish community?

01:11:50.000 No, not really.

01:11:52.000 They do have autism.

01:11:52.000 People say they have zero, and it's like, no, we have diagnosed cases.

01:11:56.000 They just don't get modern medical care.

01:11:57.000 They don't seek it out.

01:11:58.000 So, of course, they're not going to be diagnosed.

01:12:00.000 They're not in our schools.

01:12:01.000 They're not in our hospitals and everything, unless on rare occasions they are.

01:12:06.000 But they're just not getting all the well visits kids get and everything.

01:12:08.000 They're not, no, there's really nothing to it.

01:12:11.000 It's a difference in the medical care they receive.

01:12:16.000 So if you were to go and do a community study on them and to go out of your way to diagnose everyone, I think you'd see pretty high rates.

01:12:22.000 So, I mean, your contention is that the one in 30 number, I mean, this is one of the greatest medical malpractice issues of a civilization.

01:12:34.000 Yeah.

01:12:35.000 It could be.

01:12:36.000 The thing is, again, there are some kids who do benefit from the services received after the diagnosis, so it's hard to say.

01:12:42.000 What percentage?

01:12:43.000 That's why it's hard to say.

01:12:44.000 We don't know.

01:12:46.000 We need to do studies on how often that stuff actually helps.

01:12:50.000 We know the heterogeneity and how SSRIs help with depression.

01:12:53.000 We know that the bottom 30% get like nothing, and then the top ones get big effects, and the middle gets just like meh.

01:12:59.000 But we don't know what it is for autism.

01:13:01.000 We don't know how well the services they can provide in schools affect them.

01:13:05.000 So we don't actually know, like we don't have an empirical margin that we've estimated on which to diagnose.

01:13:11.000 But if we did, that'd be great.

01:13:12.000 That would allow us to diagnose appropriately, like appropriate for a given symptom level.

01:13:17.000 So we could tailor the care better.

01:13:18.000 So in some ways, your message is actually very empowering, that a parent might be being told their kid has autism and they don't.

01:13:24.000 Yeah.

01:13:24.000 Is that correct?

01:13:25.000 Oh, absolutely.

01:13:26.000 That is definitely.

01:13:26.000 So let's talk about that.

01:13:27.000 So that has happened to my parents right now in the audience where a doctor is like, well, your kid has autism, and it might actually be a lie.

01:13:33.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:13:34.000 The thing is, with the criteria being so low, being so easy to get diagnosed, like just based on a few symptoms that are just often kids being normal.

01:13:45.000 Total normal child behavior has been pathologized in a lot of ways.

01:13:48.000 There are tons of kids who are certainly misdiagnosed because they're obsessed with trains and they love their...

01:13:57.000 Why does that mean you're autistic?

01:13:59.000 I don't understand.

01:14:00.000 It's just kind of a meme.

01:14:01.000 It's not really about trains.

01:14:02.000 It's about particular obsessions.

01:14:04.000 And I think people, parents overstate obsessions a lot of times.

01:14:08.000 They're worried about their kids and they go, oh, my kid is obsessed with video games or screens or trains or anything like that.

01:14:14.000 But they're just interested at a pretty normal level.

01:14:16.000 And we're treating that pathologically because we're too concerned these days.

01:14:19.000 Parents are hovering too much and they're too concerned about every little thing in their kid's environment, every little thing their kid does, and they over focus on it.

01:14:29.000 And they don't give their kids the space to be normal and develop normally, or they should.

01:14:34.000 So then, if you had your way, how would you then approach this autism issue?

01:14:38.000 I would let the public know.

01:14:41.000 Golly, the diagnostic threshold is incredibly low, and we don't need to diagnose so many people.

01:14:46.000 And we need to start doing the studies to figure out what we should diagnose because we don't really do that.

01:14:51.000 We just do stuff on how to diagnose or, oh, I saw this thing, and we all in the psychiatric practice agree it's real, and we would like to start diagnosing this.

01:15:01.000 So in order for the people that think that autism is increasing for it to be true, it would have to be standardized across ages.

01:15:08.000 Is that correct?

01:15:10.000 Because you said if you pick adults, they do not have the same.

01:15:14.000 No, no.

01:15:14.000 So the adults do have symptoms.

01:15:16.000 It's just that in this very, very severe cases, you're less likely to get adults who have them because they would have likely died younger.

01:15:22.000 But for most symptoms, they do have them show up for adults.

01:15:25.000 The exceptions are things that are age-gated, like must start presenting symptoms before age 30.

01:15:30.000 You can go back and sometimes look in an adult's case file as if they had them that far back and see, oh, they do have something consistent with autism.

01:15:36.000 And that does happen, but it's somewhat rare.

01:15:39.000 Also, sometimes adults do intend to go out and get an autism diagnosis because it does lead to higher disability payments.

01:15:45.000 We saw this during the Great Financial Recession back in 2008, 2009.

01:15:48.000 Lots of people who were on Medicare, Medicaid started seeking, not Medicare, sorry, Medicaid, started seeking out autism diagnoses, more benefits.

01:15:58.000 So it's fascinating.

01:15:59.000 Let's go through the supplement stuff and we'll close Holly for that. 0.99

01:16:03.000 We have a lot more to talk about.

01:16:04.000 Yeah.

01:16:05.000 Turmeric, ginger?

01:16:07.000 Probably not going to do very much.

01:16:08.000 Might be a good way to increase your metabolism very, very slightly.

01:16:11.000 Burn a few more calories, but not going to do very much in general.

01:16:13.000 What about coffee?

01:16:15.000 See, I love coffee, and I love caffeine, but it's not really going to benefit you a lot.

01:16:21.000 Doesn't it speed up your metabolism, though?

01:16:22.000 Caffeine does a little bit, but it's not terribly large.

01:16:25.000 It's not going to cut off the bottom.

01:16:26.000 Any benefit to the antioxidants in coffee?

01:16:28.000 Not really, no.

01:16:29.000 It's just not going to do very much.

01:16:31.000 How about drinking a bunch of water?

01:16:33.000 Not going to do a lot.

01:16:35.000 After a certain point, the thing is, you're just not going to get these benefits.

01:16:38.000 They have diminishing returns severely for practically everything.

01:16:42.000 I can't actually think of anything with non-diminishing returns.

01:16:45.000 But that's kind of hard.

01:16:46.000 That's a silly thing to say in general because the dose makes the poison.

01:16:49.000 Oftentimes, one of the things you see in a lot of circles, like in terms of worry about stuff, is, oh my God, for example, aspartame.

01:16:56.000 They go, oh, aspartame breaks down partly into formaldehyde.

01:16:59.000 Well, formaldehyde is not bad in the quantities you get from drinking a Diet Coke.

01:17:02.000 There's aspartain in that in LMT.

01:17:05.000 Totally fine.

01:17:06.000 Aspartame is totally fine.

01:17:06.000 It doesn't have any biological way it could be bad for you.

01:17:09.000 It's all aspartane as poisonous.

01:17:11.000 Some people say that, but the thing is they think formaldehyde is just generally bad for you.

01:17:14.000 And it is bad if you drink like the bottle they would have in an embalming office.

01:17:18.000 But it's not bad for you if you get it in the quantity you get from like eating an apple, which you do get.

01:17:23.000 You get it from a lot of your food, but it's not bad because the dose makes the poison.

01:17:27.000 It's such a biologically meaningless amount that it's not going to do anything to you in a million years.

01:17:32.000 How about saunas?

01:17:34.000 I love saunas, but the benefits there are really sort of minuscule.

01:17:39.000 You've heard about the Norwegian sauna study?

01:17:41.000 Which one?

01:17:42.000 The long-term one where they measured guys people over 30 years?

01:17:45.000 I haven't seen this.

01:17:46.000 I did look at a meta-analysis of the very, very few number of trials on this, and they're all really small.

01:17:50.000 And it looked like there was basically just nothing there.

01:17:53.000 But I still love saunas and endorse them.

01:17:55.000 They're great for losing water weight.

01:17:56.000 How about training?

01:17:57.000 Like working out, bench press.

01:17:59.000 Oh, excellent for you.

01:18:00.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:18:01.000 strength is good.

01:18:01.000 And in fact, a lot of these Strength is good for everything.

01:18:05.000 I don't know about the brain benefits, I actually doubt them for depression because a lot of studies have recently been coming out and they've been saying, oh, the depression benefits are really overstated.

01:18:13.000 And that's whatever.

01:18:14.000 Interesting.

01:18:14.000 I used to think it was a big thing, but meh, running gets my mind off things, but it doesn't actually seem to help much in the trials.

01:18:21.000 Strength training is just good to have in general to prevent a lot of aging-related decline.

01:18:25.000 Like lower back problems really are very, very common.

01:18:28.000 I have a lower back issue.

01:18:29.000 You should have been deadlifting more.

01:18:31.000 Yeah, I know.

01:18:32.000 Yeah, I tell everybody, deadlift.

01:18:34.000 I can't deadlift now because of my back.

01:18:36.000 Oh, no.

01:18:36.000 I'm sorry.

01:18:37.000 That sucks.

01:18:39.000 A lot of people, especially if you're young right now, you should be going out and doing lower back exercises.

01:18:44.000 Don't strain your disease.

01:18:45.000 I agree.

01:18:46.000 I agree.

01:18:47.000 You should train your back because if you don't train your back, you will end up an adult who is miserable.

01:18:52.000 Like when you're older, my back is a disaster.

01:18:55.000 Oh, sorry.

01:18:56.000 That sucks.

01:18:56.000 L4L5 up against the sciatic.

01:18:58.000 Oh, no.

01:18:59.000 It's terrible.

01:19:00.000 Yeah.

01:19:00.000 That's one of my big strength training pieces of advice.

01:19:02.000 Are you?

01:19:03.000 Everyone.

01:19:04.000 So is there any, let's finish on supplements.

01:19:06.000 Anything that you recommend take?

01:19:07.000 No vitamin C?

01:19:08.000 We get enough of it in our diet?

01:19:10.000 For most people, you're going to get pretty much everything fine.

01:19:12.000 Even if you're sick.

01:19:14.000 With that one, actually, it doesn't offer many, many, but if it's if you're sick.

01:19:16.000 So asorbic acid, nothing?

01:19:18.000 No, zinc is actually the biggest thing for if you're sick, which is weird.

01:19:21.000 You don't see that emphasized.

01:19:22.000 If you're sick, how about lysine?

01:19:24.000 Probably not going to do very much.

01:19:25.000 Even though it's a spiral replicated inhibitor, no?

01:19:29.000 Not going to do very much.

01:19:30.000 It's not going to become bioavailable in the way you want it to.

01:19:32.000 A lot of things, it's funny, a lot of supplements, like multivitamins especially, they don't tend to do very much for anything.

01:19:38.000 You look at the trials on heart disease and it's like bupkis, nothing, no effect at all. 0.99

01:19:43.000 Why?

01:19:44.000 Well, what if you take these vitamins intravenously?

01:19:48.000 That is an interesting question.

01:19:49.000 I don't see many people doing that, so I don't know.

01:19:51.000 Because the absorption is much different.

01:19:53.000 Yeah, it is very different.

01:19:54.000 I'm curious about that, but I don't have an answer for you.

01:19:57.000 How about NAB?

01:19:59.000 I love taking NAB shots whenever they're available because everybody's just like, oh, we'll give them to you.

01:20:02.000 And I'm like, great.

01:20:03.000 Because I go to a lot of conferences where they have the rejuvenation clinic things.

01:20:06.000 They're like, oh, you want to get on a saline bag and you want to do all this fun stuff.

01:20:09.000 And I'm like, oh, go to the oxygen bar.

01:20:11.000 And it doesn't do anything for me.

01:20:14.000 And I don't think it does very much in general.

01:20:16.000 But not going to say no.

01:20:19.000 Hyperbaric oxygen.

01:20:21.000 Potential benefits, yeah.

01:20:22.000 I see great data behind that.

01:20:24.000 Yeah, there do some things.

01:20:25.000 I had a concussion eight years ago.

01:20:27.000 Yeah.

01:20:27.000 And I did 120 sessions of hyperbaric.

01:20:30.000 Helped a lot.

01:20:31.000 Materially, you could see it rebuilt the back of my brain.

01:20:34.000 Interesting.

01:20:34.000 Yeah.

01:20:35.000 There's a lot of non-hocus pocus data behind hyperbaric.

01:20:39.000 I think the hocus pocus, though, is for when people say it'll help with autism.

01:20:42.000 I had a friend growing up, and he had Asperger's, and his parents had hoped that this would cure his autism.

01:20:48.000 They kept him on a carb-free diet because they read some paper and they bought a hypobaric oxygen chamber.

01:20:57.000 It was like a little pod thing in their basement.

01:20:59.000 And they put him in it multiple times a week and just didn't do anything.

01:21:03.000 For that, nothing for other outcomes, like recovery stuff.

01:21:06.000 But doesn't keto help you if you have seizures?

01:21:10.000 It can.

01:21:11.000 That's one of the interesting things.

01:21:13.000 It can help you with that.

01:21:14.000 Because there is data to support that.

01:21:16.000 That a ketogenic diet can help you if you have epilepsy, right?

01:21:20.000 Yeah, and that's very odd.

01:21:21.000 I don't know why it does that.

01:21:23.000 It must be carbohydrates.

01:21:24.000 It has to be.

01:21:24.000 Sugar.

01:21:25.000 I mean, you're cutting them out, so it must be.

01:21:27.000 What is causing the rise in cancer in young people?

01:21:30.000 Diagnosis.

01:21:30.000 We are actually getting much, much better at.

01:21:32.000 So there's not a material rise.

01:21:34.000 There's not really, no.

01:21:35.000 This is one of the big things I keep emphasizing to people.

01:21:37.000 The cancer death rates, which is the thing you should focus on for young people, they're going down.

01:21:42.000 But I mean, let me, so like, I don't know enough about it to materially challenge you, but wouldn't, I mean, 25-year-olds are getting cancer more.

01:21:50.000 We diagnose more.

01:21:52.000 We screen more.

01:21:53.000 We do more indirect things at active screenings, like we get more x-rays and whatnot.

01:21:57.000 We can do more various scans of all sorts, and we see this stuff more often.

01:22:01.000 But wouldn't we have caught it within 10 years?

01:22:04.000 Well, if 10 years pass, it could be too late.

01:22:06.000 No, I know, but so the cancer death rates are not going up?

01:22:10.000 No, they're going down considerably.

01:22:11.000 But isn't that just because our treatments are better?

01:22:13.000 No, it has a lot to do with screening.

01:22:15.000 In fact, most of, so actually, it's a great example, cervical cancer.

01:22:19.000 Between the 1950s and 1990s, our treatments barely got better at all for that.

01:22:22.000 But 70% improvement in survival.

01:22:24.000 Why?

01:22:25.000 Because we're doing PAP smears more often.

01:22:27.000 I say smear, it's weird.

01:22:29.000 I should call it a, it's like putting a lot of vague pap smears.

01:22:33.000 We were just catching it more often.

01:22:34.000 And the big thing nowadays is that we vaccinate for it, and that has done incredible things.

01:22:39.000 That vaccine is amazing.

01:22:41.000 Which one?

01:22:41.000 Gardasil.

01:22:42.000 Okay.

01:22:43.000 We are going to eliminate cervical cancer in our lifetimes.

01:22:47.000 Some countries will see zero cervical cancer cases among those.

01:22:50.000 Is Gardasil hepatitis B or no?

01:22:52.000 HPV.

01:22:54.000 Human papillom, okay.

01:22:54.000 Yeah.

01:22:55.000 Papillomavirus.

01:22:56.000 Yes.

01:22:56.000 We're beating it.

01:22:57.000 It causes a 100% reduction in a lot of preclinical.

01:23:01.000 What is your take on the COVID shot?

01:23:03.000 It was an amazing engineering feat.

01:23:06.000 I love the Operation Warp Speed as a way to accelerate stuff.

01:23:09.000 I think we should have way, way, way more acceleration of getting treatments out there.

01:23:14.000 In fact, there's a guy I met last year.

01:23:16.000 Unfortunately, he's passed away now.

01:23:18.000 I met him shortly after he had a glossectomy.

01:23:21.000 They removed his tongue entirely for some terrible cancer he had.

01:23:24.000 Jake Seliger.

01:23:25.000 He did a lot of blog posts while he was going through this.

01:23:28.000 And he tried very, very hard to get access to novel treatments that could have let him live a few months longer.

01:23:34.000 Right now in Montana, they're trying to pass the Seliger Act, named after him.

01:23:38.000 His wife is getting it done, his widow.

01:23:41.000 And I hope it succeeds.

01:23:43.000 It's a right-to-try act.

01:23:44.000 It would allow people to access more cures more quickly, even when they're not through their trials yet, if they have the conditions that these things might help treat.

01:23:53.000 And who knows, if that had been around nationally, he might be alive today.

01:23:56.000 I don't know.

01:23:57.000 He passed away a few months ago.

01:23:58.000 It's very sad.

01:23:59.000 But there are lots of people like that who can't access treatments because they're not doing it quick enough.

01:24:02.000 The FDA is generally too conservative with approvals.

01:24:05.000 They wait too long and people die.

01:24:08.000 They wait too long and generics aren't approved.

01:24:10.000 They wait too long, partly because, for example, on generic drugs, you know who wrote the rules on generic drugs?

01:24:17.000 Is the large pharmaceutical consortiums run by the people who make the prescription drugs?

01:24:21.000 I believe that.

01:24:22.000 It's very, very bad.

01:24:25.000 We have this thing, the PADUFA, the Prescription Drug User Fee Act amendment.

01:24:29.000 And it's how we fund most of the FDA.

01:24:32.000 Most of the FDA funding comes from paying the regulator to do an efficient job going through the approval process and getting the drug on the market.

01:24:38.000 And this is a good way to align the incentives of drug manufacturers and people who, like the regulator who allows you to bring the drug to market.

01:24:47.000 And this is where, this is great.

01:24:50.000 It leads to the FDA being efficient.

01:24:52.000 They take about less than 180 days to approve drugs that have shown they work, get them out there, start saving lives.

01:24:58.000 But for the generic drug user fee amendment, GADUFA, the designers of it were the large pharmaceutical companies that are most likely to use PADUFA.

01:25:08.000 And if a generic comes to market, it erodes your profits.

01:25:11.000 It makes it so you are competing against somebody who produces something for pennies on the dollar compared to what you make.

01:25:17.000 So if you're charging a huge amount for a therapy and somebody who comes along and makes a generic, then they screw you.

01:25:23.000 So JADUFA is designed such that you start paying the FDA immediately instead of after you've gotten the drug approved.

01:25:30.000 PADUFA, you pay after you get it approved.

01:25:32.000 They do the review and then you pay them for as long as there's not a generic.

01:25:36.000 But the generic, like the generic part, really bad.

01:25:39.000 The GPHA did a lot of the designing and the GPHA's members are largely huge pharmaceutical companies that have an interest in making sure there are no generic drugs that reach the market.

01:25:49.000 Were there any downsides to the COVID shot?

01:25:52.000 Hmm.

01:25:53.000 Myocarditis in young men.

01:25:55.000 We did see myocarditis That's not just the diagnosis.

01:25:58.000 That's legit, yeah.

01:25:59.000 We had to have very, very large population cohorts to see that, but we eventually did see it.

01:26:05.000 It was pretty clear.

01:26:06.000 And especially with the Moderna shot and the J and J one.

01:26:09.000 But the Novavax is fine.

01:26:11.000 The Pfizer shot was more fine.

01:26:13.000 But the thing is, the myocarditis risk for young men was pretty low in absolute terms, like very, very low in absolute terms.

01:26:19.000 And if you compare that to the risk of getting myocarditis from COVID itself, it was a lot less.

01:26:25.000 So you don't believe in any of the turbo cancer stuff?

01:26:28.000 Oh, no, none of that.

01:26:29.000 That's all fake.

01:26:30.000 None of that.

01:26:30.000 In fact, the cancer rate started going back down when we started getting the drugs introduced and everything.

01:26:35.000 So we're good on that front.

01:26:36.000 And what I love, sorry, I want to get back on track to, I forgot to mention, Operation Warp Speed could be used to accelerate the introduction of vaccines for cancers.

01:26:47.000 The mRNA platform could be an amazing way to develop, for example, we have in trials right now, there's going to be a vaccine for skin cancer.

01:26:54.000 So if you've had skin cancer and you've gone into remission, you take the vaccine and it prevents you from getting it again with almost 100% efficacy.

01:27:02.000 Like you'll just never get it again, which is amazing.

01:27:04.000 How many boosters did you get?

01:27:06.000 I think I got one.

01:27:08.000 Why not all nine?

01:27:09.000 All nine.

01:27:10.000 I feel like I just got lazy.

01:27:12.000 I haven't gotten my flu shot this year either.

01:27:14.000 Does the flu shot work?

01:27:15.000 It does.

01:27:15.000 Yeah.

01:27:16.000 It's interesting, though.

01:27:17.000 During COVID, we actually eliminated the common strain of the flu just because people were punkering down in their homes.

01:27:22.000 But isn't that a little weird?

01:27:23.000 It is weird.

01:27:24.000 Yeah.

01:27:24.000 Maybe there was something else going on.

01:27:26.000 Well, no one was getting infected with it, so it's like...

01:27:31.000 Because they were still going down about somewhat.

01:27:32.000 But why don't they get the flu?

01:27:34.000 Yeah, good question.

01:27:35.000 I don't know.

01:27:36.000 Luck of the draw.

01:27:37.000 You're the man with the answers, though, right?

01:27:38.000 Yeah.

01:27:39.000 Well, no, I don't think so.

01:27:40.000 I think of myself that way.

01:27:41.000 But the strategy.

01:27:43.000 Do we give kids too many vaccines? 0.93

01:27:46.000 No.

01:27:47.000 I think we should probably give better vaccines and more.

01:27:51.000 Because I think we should be using vaccines to prevent cancer.

01:27:53.000 I'm a big believer in one of the projects BARDA wants to fund, government agency that does great frontier biological research.

01:28:01.000 They want, I think it's about $23 billion, to fund a platform to manufacture vaccines for any virus that shows up in the known viral families the moment it comes out.

01:28:11.000 So if we get another big viral pandemic, they want to be able to mass-produce a vaccine that we already know is safe because we've done the trialing on it ahead of time and everything, that we can get out in like a week rather than having to wait again.

01:28:23.000 So they want to be able to prevent anything bad from happening.

01:28:25.000 And I feel like we should do more stuff like that as a public health measure.

01:28:29.000 We should be able to stop everything in its tracks.

01:28:32.000 We should be able to destroy cancer entirely by preventing it.

01:28:35.000 We should be able, like Gardasil is amazing.

01:28:38.000 I think it's a really, really good thing for preventing HPV.

01:28:40.000 We should have one for herpes.

01:28:42.000 We should have one for the Epstein-Barr virus because these viruses lead to a lot of downstream effects that are very, very bad.

01:28:49.000 And the transmission for a lot of those happens right near birth.

01:28:52.000 It's when you're young.

01:28:53.000 So Epstein-Barr you typically get, almost everybody has it.

01:28:57.000 And you get it typically from like your mother's kisses, which is sad.

01:29:00.000 Your parents shouldn't have to think about, oh my God, what if I give my kid cancer in 50 years?

01:29:04.000 Because you see a lot of Epstein-Barr in cancers.

01:29:08.000 We should be able to say, no, we're done.

01:29:10.000 We're cutting off that forever.

01:29:11.000 No more transmission of future generations of herpes viruses.

01:29:14.000 No more transmission of anything like that.

01:29:15.000 We should kill it.

01:29:17.000 I think we should be more aggressive with vaccination in terms of destroying diseases that have plagued us for a long time because we can now.

01:29:24.000 And we're just, we don't have the balls to do it.

01:29:27.000 But we should.

01:29:30.000 Charlie Kirk here.

01:29:31.000 We know that rates are still high and that they can make refinancing or purchasing feel out of reach.

01:29:35.000 But markets can shift fast.

01:29:37.000 And when they do, I want you to be in the strike zone.

01:29:39.000 So what is the strike zone?

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01:29:44.000 But it doesn't last long.

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01:30:24.000 Any downsides to vaccines?

01:30:26.000 Current ones?

01:30:27.000 No, not really.

01:30:28.000 One of the common complaints is like the MMR vaccine causes autism.

01:30:31.000 That does not hold water at all.

01:30:33.000 That was initially came out in 1998 as a Lancet paper by this guy, Andrew Wakefield.

01:30:37.000 He had a financial interest in getting people to stop using the MMR so they would use one of his vaccines plus another one instead.

01:30:44.000 And very compromised and very much a lot of fake data in there.

01:30:48.000 Turned out there was nothing to it.

01:30:49.000 We now have very, very large population register-based sibling studies where one sibling is vaccinated and the other one is not.

01:30:56.000 And we see no difference in autism rates.

01:30:59.000 And a lot of parents Will stop vaccinating their kids for autism when one of them is diagnosed and they have subsequent kids.

01:31:04.000 They'll be like, oh my god, I'm never going to do it again because it must have been the vaccine.

01:31:07.000 And then, no, the autism rate is the same in their subsequent kids.

01:31:14.000 What do you have to say to critics that with the COVID shot, that the guarantee was that it would prevent transmission?

01:31:23.000 Yeah, I don't know where that came from.

01:31:24.000 Well, I do know that.

01:31:26.000 A lot of it was lying on their part.

01:31:27.000 Like, Fauci did lie a bunch.

01:31:29.000 And Walensky said it would stop transmission.

01:31:31.000 Yeah, a lot of people lied.

01:31:33.000 I don't know why they lied.

01:31:34.000 Like, I don't know why they thought that was a good idea.

01:31:36.000 I don't believe in lying to the public.

01:31:37.000 I feel like whenever you're a public health communicator and you do that, you should basically just never communicate anything again.

01:31:43.000 The moment you start telling lies is when your credibility is gone and when you should not be in the public sphere at all.

01:31:51.000 The fact that Fauci thought it was a noble lie, we've seen the emails now and everything.

01:31:54.000 We know he thought it was a noble lie to say that it would stop transmission in his tracks.

01:32:00.000 And he might have had reasons to believe this, but we know he later on did not.

01:32:05.000 That's when you should stop being a public health influencer of any sort.

01:32:12.000 Does the COVID shot suppress your immune system?

01:32:15.000 No, not really.

01:32:16.000 No more than any other vaccine does.

01:32:17.000 You have a lot of post-viral, like after you get a vaccine injected, you tend to have like a down day, and this happens for all sorts of vaccines.

01:32:24.000 But anyway, sorry, I meant to mention other vaccines like the polio vaccine wasn't perfect anyway.

01:32:29.000 It didn't provide like permanent sterilizing immunity.

01:32:31.000 People think of it that way for some reason because we mostly eliminated it.

01:32:34.000 But if we had more polio cases going around, people would quickly learn, oh, it never did that.

01:32:40.000 It just allowed us to manage transmission and symptoms better.

01:32:43.000 And people who caught it young, historically, were able to fend off some of the worst symptoms if they got it later.

01:32:48.000 And the vaccine basically mimicked that.

01:32:49.000 So if they got it later, they would have low symptomality, which is what the COVID vaccine did.

01:32:53.000 It reduces symptomality.

01:32:55.000 Like you become less likely to have a severe case.

01:32:58.000 You're more likely to stay off the ventilator and not die.

01:33:01.000 But it doesn't, actually, it was interesting.

01:33:04.000 You could see over a few months, the sterilizing immunity it did provide initially faded really quickly.

01:33:09.000 I think it was within like 90 days.

01:33:11.000 It was down to being practically nothing.

01:33:13.000 But the protection against severe side effects lasted a long time.

01:33:17.000 What, and then we'll move on to the other non-healthcare stuff.

01:33:23.000 What do you think is the biggest health problem besides obesity facing our country?

01:33:28.000 Good question.

01:33:29.000 I think it's heart disease.

01:33:30.000 And I think we're actually about to win that fight.

01:33:32.000 I'm actually very confident we're about to win that fight.

01:33:34.000 So heart disease is the top cause of death, and it is imminently defeatable.

01:33:40.000 We know the causes of it.

01:33:42.000 We have the ability to treat part of it right now, but all of it we don't have the ability to treat.

01:33:47.000 Some people can't take statins because of the myopy I mentioned, and there's no generic PCSK99.

01:33:52.000 There are no PCSK9 inhibitors that are generic.

01:33:54.000 They're too expensive.

01:33:55.000 And a lot of plans, unfortunately, insurance plans, sometimes will say, oh no, even though you have the side effect, we're not going to give you a prescription for PCSK9 inhibitors because they're too expensive.

01:34:04.000 We're going to keep you on statins or nothing.

01:34:06.000 And people are like, well, I guess it's nothing then.

01:34:08.000 I don't have the money for it.

01:34:09.000 So they just end up with worse hearts.

01:34:13.000 The other thing is some people have high LPA, lipoprotein A, which does also cause heart disease.

01:34:19.000 And there's been no treatments for that until very recently.

01:34:22.000 And we now have five treatments in the pipeline that are highly effective.

01:34:26.000 One of them is a small molecule.

01:34:27.000 That means it's an oral drug.

01:34:29.000 Pillowly you take it once a day.

01:34:30.000 The other one is an ASO, which is a shot.

01:34:33.000 You take it, I think, once a month.

01:34:34.000 And the other ones, the other three, are amazing.

01:34:37.000 They are siRNA therapies.

01:34:40.000 And what they do is they're a shot that basically, what it does in effect is it gives you the appearance of having the genotype, the genes of somebody who's a lot more fortunate than you.

01:34:50.000 And if you have high LPA.

01:34:51.000 Because LPA is genetically high.

01:34:54.000 You can't really do anything lifestyle-wise to affect it.

01:34:56.000 It's just like a death sentence eventually.

01:34:58.000 You'll have heart attacks down the line.

01:35:00.000 But now we have drugs that could reduce the amount by 98% or so with a once every six month shot.

01:35:07.000 We also have siRNAs, not generic yet, but in a few years, for LDL, they do effectively the same thing.

01:35:12.000 They give you the genotype of somebody who is a lot more fortunate for genetic reasons for six months or so.

01:35:18.000 And that is amazing.

01:35:20.000 We are about to defeat heart disease.

01:35:22.000 We are on the cusp of eliminating most heart attacks, most stroke, most clotting and everything.

01:35:29.000 It's just about to be gone.

01:35:30.000 I think that's amazing.

01:35:32.000 That will extend life expectancy dramatically.

01:35:35.000 It's going to be so good.

01:35:36.000 Okay, I want to get into affirmative action, but there's actually one other thing Blake reminded me.

01:35:41.000 You said the fertility crisis is a major problem.

01:35:44.000 Absolutely.

01:35:45.000 Why are we less fertile than ever before?

01:35:47.000 A lot of it is social.

01:35:49.000 There's really been no decline in biological correlates of fertility, like your sperm rate or your ability to conceive.

01:35:55.000 People are just delaying having kids.

01:35:57.000 They are doing things that lead to fewer marriages.

01:36:01.000 They don't sanctify marriage as much.

01:36:03.000 There's been a decline in religiosity.

01:36:04.000 A lot of factors are implicated in this, and they're all social.

01:36:08.000 They're cultural.

01:36:10.000 The fact that religion alone, the decline of that has been significant.

01:36:14.000 Used to be go to a church, meet a nice girl, and get married.

01:36:17.000 And then when you're married, you're quite a bit more likely to have kids.

01:36:20.000 If only because, thank you so much.

01:36:22.000 All of one, too.

01:36:24.000 If only because accidents happen more often, because you're not using protection in marriage often.

01:36:29.000 But correct me wrong, are testosterone rates lower today than they were?

01:36:32.000 I mean, no, they're not.

01:36:34.000 So all those studies are wrong?

01:36:36.000 No, so there generally, there really aren't a lot of studies on this.

01:36:39.000 We have some cohorts where we track testosterone rates over time.

01:36:42.000 And the thing is, people are like, oh, look, there's been a massive change because we changed how we measure it and we changed our sample size.

01:36:47.000 But are sperm motility rates not going down?

01:36:50.000 Not meaningfully beyond what you'd expect from the increase in obesity.

01:36:52.000 Because the articles or the studies, they allegedly show a major catastrophic decrease in sperm motility.

01:36:58.000 A lot of this is down to methodological things, like measuring things differently.

01:37:00.000 Or in the case of sperm, there is some reason to think that obesity is involved.

01:37:05.000 Because obesity does lower your...

01:37:07.000 That's legitimate.

01:37:08.000 Yeah.

01:37:08.000 And just being, like reducing people's obesity rate, or the obesity rate is going to be enormous for this.

01:37:15.000 Don't be fat.

01:37:16.000 Exactly.

01:37:16.000 So what would you say?

01:37:18.000 We have some trials on this, by the way.

01:37:19.000 On what?

01:37:20.000 On the GLP1s for fertility stuff.

01:37:23.000 In men, it does improve sperm parameters.

01:37:26.000 Or just don't eat as much food.

01:37:28.000 Exactly.

01:37:28.000 Same thing, really.

01:37:30.000 So I guess what would then be the solution to the fertility crisis?

01:37:35.000 And you're saying more people are getting IVF because they're just getting married later?

01:37:39.000 Because fertility clinics are experiencing a boom.

01:37:43.000 They are.

01:37:43.000 That is a fact.

01:37:44.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:37:45.000 Past age 35, there's the unfortunately named term geriatric pregnancy.

01:37:50.000 After that age, it is quite hard to conceive.

01:37:53.000 And people are waiting a lot longer because they're getting, for example, more professional certifications.

01:37:57.000 One of the silly things we've done is extend education rather than accelerate it.

01:38:02.000 Some places, for example, in Switzerland and Germany, there are some locations where they have reduced the number of required years of high school.

01:38:08.000 This results in no academic downsides.

01:38:11.000 Like the kids are still just as prepared as ever.

01:38:13.000 You just cram more stuff in less time, but they regain two of their years of adulthood.

01:38:17.000 Instead of graduating at 18, you graduate at 16.

01:38:20.000 You push back everything, and you are more likely then to get married, have kids at an acceptable age to have kids.

01:38:27.000 And that leads to just more fertility down the line, which is a lovely little consequence of making your life better, I think, because you spend less time in school.

01:38:33.000 So you would say the reason why more people are doing IVF or fertility treatments is just that they're trying to have kids when they're 33 versus 23.

01:38:40.000 Most of it will be that, yeah.

01:38:42.000 Some of it'll be genuine issues.

01:38:46.000 People are treating infertility more often instead of just trying to brute force it through that.

01:38:50.000 IVF treatments are more available now.

01:38:52.000 They are cheaper than they used to be.

01:38:53.000 The prices have come down a lot, so it's going to see more use.

01:38:56.000 And it's more popular, too.

01:38:57.000 Like there's a lot of cultural emphasis on the fact that it's available, and people are just going to choose that because they can.

01:39:04.000 Is having children equally as important of a societal value as it was 30 years ago?

01:39:09.000 To most people, unfortunately not.

01:39:10.000 The number of ideal children people report is down a lot.

01:39:13.000 And a lot of that has to do with the fact that they have fewer kids and they experience being around fewer kids.

01:39:18.000 When you see people who have, like, say you're a younger sibling, or an older sibling, sorry, and you've had to do part of the child rearing with the little baby and you hold the baby a bunch, you're more likely to have your own kids down the line.

01:39:31.000 You have more family values related to this.

01:39:33.000 We have some ways of doing causal inference on this with family size fixed effect models that are really interesting.

01:39:38.000 But basically the gist of it is if you have the exposure to more babies, then you're more likely to want to have more babies.

01:39:43.000 And if you accidentally have twins instead of something else, your ideal number of kids that you report goes up.

01:39:50.000 Or, for example, if people around you start having a lot fewer kids, the number of kids you will have is likely going to decrease.

01:39:57.000 We know this in part because of a lot of unfortunate quasi-experiments in China, where the fact that they tried to limit their fertility so aggressively resulted in reductions in fertility.

01:40:08.000 Initially, the first phases of doing this, they only restricted the Han majority, the ethnic majority's fertility.

01:40:15.000 But in areas with a lot of Han, the minority ethnic groups, they also had reductions in their fertility. 0.80

01:40:21.000 But when they were themselves in the majority, they did not see these reductions.

01:40:25.000 Which is to say, the effect of not being around as many babies, in this case from the Han majority, was to want fewer babies and to have fewer babies. 0.99

01:40:34.000 It's a massive social thing, and it's very sad that people have decided they want fewer kids.

01:40:38.000 Yeah, I completely agree.

01:40:40.000 So let's go now to affirmative action.

01:40:42.000 Yeah.

01:40:43.000 What?

01:40:44.000 Yeah, and Harvard in general.

01:40:47.000 What is the discrepancy between what a white student had to do to get into Harvard versus a black student?

01:40:55.000 Quite a lot.

01:40:56.000 A standard deviation, right?

01:40:58.000 Yeah, it's possibly more than that of the extremes in selecting in.

01:41:01.000 The reason being, well, at Harvard, so if you were a white student with a legacy, legacy gives you a huge boost.

01:41:08.000 That was about equivalent to a black student in general.

01:41:11.000 And if you're a black student with legacy status, you are almost guaranteed to get in if you have anywhere near acceptable academics. 0.99

01:41:17.000 You basically got a free pass if you had reasonable qualifications to get in for a person in your cohort, which is pretty wild.

01:41:26.000 What would be the average test score that a white person would have to do versus a black person?

01:41:30.000 The white students who were getting in were getting nearly perfect scores.

01:41:33.000 They were getting upwards, like upwards of 1550 usually in these recent cohorts.

01:41:37.000 And the black students were getting considerably less, nearer to the 1400s, which is still impressive nationally, but it is far, far less than the white students. 0.82

01:41:46.000 And so many rejected white students had higher scores and higher qualifications among allotted dimensions.

01:41:52.000 Like they tended to have higher GPAs, tended to do more extracurriculars, they tended to be evaluated by alumni a little better.

01:41:57.000 Harvard had three interviews, and two of them were with alumni, and one of them didn't exist.

01:42:02.000 It was the personality evaluation by the office, you know, the admissions office.

01:42:08.000 And it basically was an arbitrary way for them to say that Asians had bad personalities so they could justify rejecting them.

01:42:14.000 But the alumni said Asians had better personalities on average than white or black applicants, and so they should have been invited more.

01:42:22.000 So then, what would you recommend as the way to proceed with Harvard?

01:42:27.000 I don't believe what we're doing right now is the correct move to start off.

01:42:31.000 Like, we really should not just be taking away all their funding.

01:42:34.000 The simple thing that we need to start with is the NIH and other funding authorities need to start separating the funding that goes to administrations and the funding that goes to research.

01:42:44.000 Because the fact that we're pulling research funding is devastating.

01:42:48.000 Harvard has their hands in a lot of very, very important research.

01:42:52.000 Like what?

01:42:52.000 Make the case.

01:42:53.000 Making tons of drugs for one.

01:42:55.000 That's a big one.

01:42:56.000 But like a lot of the stuff we know about bulk.

01:42:58.000 Right, so explain to our audience, what do you mean that colleges are making drugs?

01:43:02.000 Oh, so they do a lot of the rudimentary discovery.

01:43:04.000 So for example, to bring back to GLP1s, they were discovered based on some guy's weird interest in Gila monster spit.

01:43:10.000 Like Gila monsters, the big lizards that you can, that like will paralyze you.

01:43:13.000 He just wanted to break down what was in there, and he found this wonderful compound that has now been turned into a drug that a lot, millions of people are using.

01:43:21.000 And they do that basic research, the basic fundamentals of a lot of things that lead to stuff down the line.

01:43:27.000 Why can't the pharmaceutical companies fund that themselves?

01:43:30.000 Because it's a high cost.

01:43:31.000 They really don't have enough money for it.

01:43:33.000 The returns on pharmaceutical R ⁇ D are abysmal.

01:43:37.000 They are very, very low.

01:43:38.000 They're actually below the cost of capital right now, so they're not a good investment.

01:43:41.000 We've recently had a little bit of a reversion in the long-term trend towards declining returns due to the GLP stuff because they've had a huge boom.

01:43:49.000 We had a bit of a reversion due to the initial glut of funding that came when COVID started.

01:43:54.000 But otherwise, it's just been a dagring a lot.

01:43:57.000 It's been a decline that's continuous for many, many years.

01:44:00.000 And it's because it's very difficult.

01:44:02.000 It's hard.

01:44:03.000 actually making discoveries is really tough.

01:44:05.000 And if we don't fund the basic research, we're just not going to find a lot of stuff.

01:44:08.000 Like a lot of our anti-cancer drugs are just because the government was like, oh, cool, we're going to fund your lab to do brute force breaking down of every sea animal you have available and seeing if any of it helps with cancer.

01:44:19.000 And that has worked.

01:44:20.000 That strategy of just funding crazy ideas does work.

01:44:24.000 We know a lot of things work just because somebody had a weird idea.

01:44:28.000 They got a grant for it.

01:44:29.000 The government paid.

01:44:30.000 They were like, whatever.

01:44:31.000 And it turned into something down the line.

01:44:34.000 The researcher generally doesn't profit directly from it, but other people who learn from them and learn from their mistakes sometimes will.

01:44:42.000 What percentage of Harvard research would you say is valuable?

01:44:46.000 Practically everything in the hard sciences.

01:44:48.000 I say just slash all the sociology.

01:44:51.000 How much of the money goes to sociology?

01:44:54.000 Not a lot, actually.

01:44:54.000 It's a small portion.

01:44:56.000 Most of the money does go to harder stuff.

01:44:58.000 A lot to biology and chemistry and physics.

01:45:00.000 Hasn't the woke stuff infiltrated the hard sciences as well?

01:45:04.000 It has.

01:45:04.000 So then why should we keep funding it?

01:45:06.000 We should fund the good stuff in there.

01:45:08.000 I think we should definitely get rid of funding the woke stuff. 1.00

01:45:10.000 What's the difference?

01:45:11.000 Well, the difference is real discoveries that lead to theoretical progress.

01:45:15.000 Like the studies that underlie the Manhattan Project were great to do ahead of time.

01:45:21.000 We funded those labs for many millions of years.

01:45:22.000 Oh, I know, but that was a bunch of white guys doing it. 0.83

01:45:24.000 At Harvard, we trust them.

01:45:27.000 Why?

01:45:28.000 We don't trust them right now.

01:45:29.000 And we shouldn't trust their administration.

01:45:30.000 Well, that's what I'm saying, is that they're not hiring based on merit.

01:45:33.000 Their researchers are not what they used to be.

01:45:35.000 Potentially, but in the hard sciences, they're still pretty good.

01:45:39.000 It's evident when people are pretty bad.

01:45:41.000 Like, there are people who do, they do astronomy, they say.

01:45:47.000 And all of their work has been talking about getting women into astronomy.

01:45:51.000 And that is not worthwhile working.

01:45:54.000 You should be studying astronomy itself, not studying how to involve women more. 1.00

01:45:58.000 So Harvard's sitting on a $55 billion endowment.

01:46:01.000 Not all of it's liquid, but they could still sell assets.

01:46:04.000 Oh, yeah.

01:46:05.000 What is the case then that we have to keep on sending money?

01:46:08.000 Because that actually isn't that much money.

01:46:10.000 In the long run, they will run it out if they keep doing a lot of research.

01:46:13.000 So $55 billion, why is it our problem?

01:46:16.000 The ROI on that research is still very heavy.

01:46:18.000 Well, the ROI for pharmaceutical companies is, yeah, for sure.

01:46:21.000 No, no.

01:46:22.000 Most of the ROI from new drugs goes to people.

01:46:24.000 It's because those drugs do allow them to extend their lives or live better lives or live more productive lives.

01:46:29.000 But we don't get the profits of that, right?

01:46:31.000 So we're socializing.

01:46:33.000 We're socializing returns is what it is for a lot of these things.

01:46:36.000 Yeah, so help me understand that.

01:46:37.000 So biotech investors do well.

01:46:40.000 Oh, they do pretty poorly on average, typically.

01:46:43.000 I mean, they still put money in it.

01:46:45.000 They do, they do.

01:46:46.000 They wouldn't keep putting money in.

01:46:47.000 I get pitched on biotech all the time.

01:46:50.000 Most don't invest in most of it.

01:46:51.000 It's mostly.

01:46:52.000 They wouldn't keep on investing in it if there was no return.

01:46:56.000 I think a lot of them cope into it.

01:46:57.000 They think something is going to work.

01:46:59.000 They aim for moonshots and big things, but the typical returns are very, very bad.

01:47:04.000 They are below the cost of capital.

01:47:05.000 I made a graph of this recently on one of my recent blog posts, actually my most recent one, about how 23andMe, the acquisition by Regeneron is a great idea because it will help them to make their R ⁇ D a lot more efficient if they use it well.

01:47:17.000 But I don't know if they're going to.

01:47:18.000 I'm hoping that they do.

01:47:21.000 Time will tell.

01:47:22.000 But in general, the rate of return is below the cost of capital, which means that it is not profitable.

01:47:28.000 They're losing money on average.

01:47:30.000 It's a really rough situation right now.

01:47:32.000 And we can do a lot to change that.

01:47:34.000 We're getting out of a biotech winter.

01:47:37.000 I agree.

01:47:37.000 But shouldn't have, but hold on.

01:47:39.000 We should never have entered a biotech winter because we've been funding the hard sciences so much, right?

01:47:44.000 No, most of the biotech winter, I think, comes from over-regulation.

01:47:49.000 For example, the cost of gene therapies.

01:47:51.000 I have recently been helping a lot of companies with this.

01:47:54.000 They want to reform GMP, good manufacturing practices, because those regulations add a lot of cost.

01:48:01.000 More than half the cost is just due to compliance with that, apparently.

01:48:04.000 And great.

01:48:05.000 We can reform to a model like Australia's, which apparently is a lot lighter, and this seems to be easy to implement, I guess.

01:48:11.000 But it's still high quality.

01:48:12.000 It ensures the drugs are good without imposing massive costs on people who are developing gene therapies and when they want to run a trial.

01:48:19.000 We can also make it easier to recruit people.

01:48:22.000 For some reason, we've decided to restrict recruitment.

01:48:25.000 I think a lot of the ideas in healthcare that add a lot of cost come from weird sort of quasi-socialist ideas in the past.

01:48:32.000 Like there was a health economist in the past who said a hospital bed built is a hospital bed filled.

01:48:39.000 And the idea there was if you make some new medical resource, people just use it.

01:48:43.000 So we shouldn't make as much.

01:48:44.000 So he proposed certificate of need laws, which require you, if you want to be a doctor who goes into a new area and you want to open a practice, you have to ask your competition, hey, is there unmet demand here that you need to practice for?

01:48:56.000 And of course they're going to say no.

01:48:57.000 So too many areas of too few medical practices.

01:49:00.000 And these sorts of laws are, they impact everything.

01:49:02.000 They impact trials.

01:49:04.000 Not the certificate of need to law directly, but laws like them.

01:49:06.000 They impact trials.

01:49:07.000 They make it really, really hard to do stuff.

01:49:10.000 And repealing them will, I think, lead to a massive improvement in that area and make it less critical for us to fund all this stuff.

01:49:16.000 So Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna, Johnson, I know J ⁇ J, those are all American companies, I think.

01:49:23.000 AstraZeneca is Swedish, I think.

01:49:24.000 Yeah, okay.

01:49:25.000 But Pfizer is definitely American.

01:49:27.000 Yep.

01:49:28.000 So is J ⁇ J. Yep. 0.95

01:49:29.000 Those two together, probably, what, $500 billion market cap?

01:49:32.000 Huge.

01:49:33.000 Why can't they fund their own research?

01:49:35.000 Because it is just too expensive to look at everything.

01:49:37.000 Take out a loan.

01:49:39.000 Take out a loan.

01:49:40.000 Seriously, I mean, so you're $500 billion of market cap, collateralize your stock, take out a $5 billion line of credit.

01:49:44.000 Problem is, the likelihood of actually getting those returns is just too low.

01:49:48.000 That's the market, though, right?

01:49:49.000 A lot of what we do nowadays, in order to overcome this cost issue, is we in-license things from China.

01:49:54.000 So, for example, Nova Nordis, Danish company, would be a good idea.

01:49:57.000 That comes from my question.

01:49:58.000 If we invent a GLP, why is it that the Danish company is worth a trillion dollars?

01:50:02.000 They're the ones who got the patent.

01:50:03.000 And they are, I think we funded the research.

01:50:06.000 A lot of it was the government.

01:50:07.000 American government?

01:50:08.000 A lot of it was Harvard, actually.

01:50:09.000 I know, but hold on.

01:50:10.000 So you're arguing.

01:50:11.000 The American government.

01:50:12.000 So we just made a Danish country a trillion dollars.

01:50:14.000 That doesn't.

01:50:15.000 It doesn't help your case.

01:50:16.000 No, it doesn't.

01:50:17.000 We should get that back.

01:50:18.000 think we should march in and take the patent with Baydol, which is another topic entirely.

01:50:22.000 I think we should actually...

01:50:26.000 So we funded the rise of a trillion-dollar foreign company.

01:50:30.000 We Did so we should stop doing that?

01:50:32.000 No, I think we should actually do it more because the social returns are still larger.

01:50:35.000 If you can make people not fat, the returns to that are huge.

01:50:38.000 Yeah, I mean, but you see what I'm saying?

01:50:40.000 Like, we're not here to fund foreign companies, right?

01:50:43.000 The thing is, Americans want it.

01:50:44.000 So it's funding the creation of a product that Americans could want.

01:50:47.000 On this particular thing, I think we should be beating up Nova Nordisk right now.

01:50:51.000 They've done a lot of good.

01:50:53.000 They've put in a lot of work.

01:50:54.000 They invested a lot of their own capital developing this thing, and they've had a lot of failures, too.

01:50:57.000 I was going to mention CAGRI Simma is one of their proposed improvements on Simagglutide, Ozimpic, and it failed.

01:51:07.000 They in-licensed it for billions of dollars from a Chinese company.

01:51:10.000 They did all the trials, and they turned out to not be any better than Simaglutide. 0.97

01:51:13.000 So they lost a lot of money on that.

01:51:15.000 And their stock has been tanking ever since.

01:51:17.000 It tanked like 6% in a day when the results came out.

01:51:20.000 And like, that is a good, if a small company had done that, they would have gone bankrupt.

01:51:23.000 And going bankrupt is the norm for these small medical researchers.

01:51:27.000 Like their Alzheimer's last year, Cassava, I think was the name of it, or Sassaba or something like that.

01:51:32.000 They went bankrupt overnight because their trial results came back.

01:51:34.000 Bupkus. 1.00

01:51:35.000 Billions lost.

01:51:37.000 Evaporated.

01:51:38.000 It's part of the welcome to the market.

01:51:39.000 Yeah, it's very bad.

01:51:41.000 I don't know if it's bad.

01:51:42.000 It's healthy, though, right?

01:51:43.000 The thing is, though, it leads to this conformity.

01:51:47.000 There's a conformist strain in, actually this is a great, I'm glad you brought that up.

01:51:52.000 There's a conformist strain in pharmaceutical research.

01:51:55.000 It's worse than anywhere else, any other area of research, because it is so strict.

01:51:59.000 You are likely to fail to an extreme, extreme degree.

01:52:02.000 And there's likely to not be any benefits to your company.

01:52:04.000 It'll be to somebody else's company, maybe down the line.

01:52:06.000 That does happen all the time.

01:52:07.000 Some company fails and someone else harvests it later.

01:52:11.000 Royvant, that's Vivek Ramaswamy's company, their whole model is look at the secondary outcomes that were affected in trials for failed drugs and then go, ah, we're going to get it approved for that indication, helping with that secondary outcome.

01:52:23.000 And that has worked really well for him.

01:52:24.000 He's made a lot of money from it.

01:52:26.000 But the conformist attitude I'm talking about is that these companies are so hesitant to do anything that is not like heavily expected that they just don't invest in obvious things.

01:52:35.000 So obesity is a great example.

01:52:37.000 Nova Nordist's CEO, and I quoted this to Blake the other day.

01:52:42.000 He, and I can find the quote, it's really bad.

01:52:44.000 He does say we're not going to like search for drugs that help with obesity.

01:52:50.000 He says it's a social and cultural problem.

01:52:53.000 And so to treat it, we need a radical restructuring of society.

01:52:56.000 Novo Nord, he said radical restructuring of society.

01:52:59.000 That is an exact quote.

01:53:00.000 It's in there.

01:53:01.000 Not a pharmacotherapeutic cure.

01:53:04.000 And it's like, wait, that's your whole thing now.

01:53:06.000 You're just, you're selling weight loss stuff.

01:53:09.000 But years ago, that was the attitude.

01:53:10.000 It was until some researcher pushed them really, really hard and continuously, they weren't going to do it.

01:53:18.000 You know, one of the biggest lies being sold to American people right now is that you're in control of your money, especially when it comes to crypto.

01:53:24.000 But the truth, most of these so-called crypto platforms are just banks in disguise, fully capable of freezing your assets the moment some bureaucrat makes a phone call.

01:53:33.000 That is not what Bitcoin was built for.

01:53:35.000 That's why I use Bitcoin.com.

01:53:37.000 I just did a major transaction on it.

01:53:39.000 They offer a self-custodial wallet, which means you hold the keys.

01:53:43.000 You control your assets.

01:53:45.000 No one can touch your crypto, not the IRS or not a rogue bank, not some three-letter agency that thinks it knows better than you do.

01:53:52.000 This is how it was intended by the original creators of Bitcoin.

01:53:55.000 Peer-to-peer money, free from centralized control, free from surveillance, and free from arbitrary seizure.

01:54:01.000 So if you're serious about financial sovereignty, go to Bitcoin.com, set up your wallet, take back control, because if you don't hold the keys, you don't own your money.

01:54:09.000 Bitcoin.com, freedom starts here.

01:54:14.000 So to circle back to the universities, what is an efficient way to make the colleges stop discriminating?

01:54:20.000 Beat them down by...

01:54:24.000 So this policy proposal has made it to Trump's desk, and he needs to just sign it.

01:54:29.000 This will fix it right away.

01:54:30.000 Tell me, I was with him yesterday.

01:54:31.000 iPads reform.

01:54:33.000 We have an iPads.

01:54:34.000 Integrated Post-Secondary Educational Data System.

01:54:37.000 We have a data collection thing, and I can show you what he needs to sign if you want to push that on him.

01:54:43.000 It just needs to get done.

01:54:45.000 We have a data collection mechanism that already exists and does allow you to gather the requisite data to find everybody red-handed.

01:54:51.000 You can catch every university inflagrante delicto if you force them to report all the necessary outcomes to indicate if they're discriminating.

01:55:00.000 And we can already do this through an existing system.

01:55:03.000 It would take no extra effort on our part, and it would just put a little cost on the universities.

01:55:06.000 It's minimal.

01:55:07.000 All they have to do is report the data, force them to report the data.

01:55:10.000 We have that authority.

01:55:11.000 We can tell them no public funds until you start reporting this, that, and the other data.

01:55:16.000 And the exact data has already been detailed by...

01:55:21.000 So for example, we have some idea.

01:55:22.000 So Harvard, after the Students for Fair Admission case in 2019, they had about 31% of their student population be black.

01:55:28.000 Yep.

01:55:29.000 A white, white.

01:55:30.000 Yeah.

01:55:30.000 White.

01:55:31.000 And it basically stayed the same.

01:55:33.000 MIT, their black population collapsed to like 4%.

01:55:36.000 Am I correct in this?

01:55:37.000 And it should go down more because we know that it's not.

01:55:40.000 But they're directionally going that way.

01:55:41.000 So that little sample size was evident that someone was following the Supreme Court decision.

01:55:46.000 Oh, yeah.

01:55:47.000 Someone was not.

01:55:47.000 Am I correct?

01:55:48.000 Yeah.

01:55:48.000 And lots of different universities, we have their emissions data now, and a lot of them have followed it.

01:55:52.000 They've followed the advice.

01:55:53.000 They've done what they're supposed to do.

01:55:54.000 But so many aren't, and that's bad.

01:55:58.000 And none of them is doing it as well as they should.

01:56:02.000 They are all still discriminating to some extent.

01:56:04.000 And we have to stop that.

01:56:06.000 And iPads will help.

01:56:07.000 iPads will help.

01:56:08.000 It's very, very easy.

01:56:10.000 We have everything that we need to collect written up.

01:56:12.000 It's already hit Trump's desk.

01:56:13.000 He just needs to sign it.

01:56:15.000 Someone needs to tell him, hey, reminder, sign this order right away.

01:56:19.000 and we can catch them all, people will go out of their...

01:56:23.000 Republicans don't seem to know this, but data collection is the way to win a lot of political battles.

01:56:29.000 Liberals have known this for many years.

01:56:30.000 Democrats, they mandate data collection in a lot of areas from healthcare on down to education because they can use it to catch people and start a legal case.

01:56:40.000 They mandated the collection of certain test score data back in the day for schools because they wanted to be able to sue for disparate internet stuff.

01:56:46.000 They wanted to be able to sue for all sorts of things.

01:56:48.000 They mandate you, me, and everybody else reporting weird data that they can use in like citizen action.

01:56:55.000 A citizen, a law firm, somebody can go and file that case, make that money.

01:56:59.000 They can make social change through torts, through the legal system.

01:57:04.000 A lot of the regulation we see these days is because of some, frankly, often dumb legal decisions that were funded basically by the government because they produced the underlying data.

01:57:15.000 They mandated the collection.

01:57:16.000 What data should we start collecting, especially on crime?

01:57:19.000 On crime, we should have more up-to-date data.

01:57:21.000 The fact that we don't is very weird.

01:57:23.000 It makes it very difficult to actually get a lot done in crime.

01:57:27.000 Like, you can't tell when something works.

01:57:30.000 And if you want to tell when something works, you need to be able to have the updated data, or else you've got to wait years to figure it out.

01:57:35.000 If you want to have adaptive policy where we can rapidly change our direction on things.

01:57:39.000 Yeah, we only get the murder numbers for the past year about a year later.

01:57:43.000 Yeah, and that's not efficient at all.

01:57:44.000 Some people have tried to create live indices that give you a week delay, but it's just not very effective.

01:57:50.000 And they have to update all the time.

01:57:53.000 We actually, I think the biggest area where slow data collection kills is the CDC's death index, which is supposed to be a live updated index of dead people when people die, but they don't update it very quickly.

01:58:06.000 So you might wait, if you're running a trial and you want to track, do my patients in the trial live or have they dropped, why have they dropped out of my study?

01:58:13.000 You want to know, is it because they died?

01:58:14.000 And you might have to wait a year.

01:58:16.000 And during that time, you could have had, you could have gone to the FDA and been like, hey, actually, our drug works so well that we can stop the trial early and start giving it to people.

01:58:25.000 But you can't because the death index is so slow.

01:58:28.000 What is the, we've got to go rapid fire because we have another.

01:58:31.000 What is the number one proven way to stop crime?

01:58:35.000 Oh, man.

01:58:36.000 Arrest people.

01:58:37.000 Put them in jail.

01:58:38.000 I thought we have too many prisoners.

01:58:40.000 We don't have enough prisoners.

01:58:42.000 Now he's speaking my language.

01:58:43.000 Too many prisoners is always a relative to what?

01:58:46.000 Stupid left-wing talking point. 0.94

01:58:48.000 It's a very bad question.

01:58:49.000 So they'll say this, and they say this in Oxford, that we have a certain amount of the world's prisoners.

01:58:56.000 You've heard this whole expression.

01:58:58.000 They draw these graphs where like America's off the charts, and it's like, yeah, because we're a lot more violent than everywhere else.

01:59:03.000 We are very, very violent.

01:59:04.000 We have more guns than we shoot more.

01:59:06.000 So do we have an under-imprisonment problem?

01:59:09.000 We do, very severely.

01:59:11.000 It's funny.

01:59:12.000 So the big reason for the reduction in the crime wave that happened near the beginning of the 20th century is because we started incarcerating more.

01:59:19.000 We started putting crazies in asylums. 0.99

01:59:20.000 We started putting wackadoo violent people in jail.

01:59:24.000 Very simple.

01:59:25.000 And we had a reduction that led in part to the crime wave in the 1980s.

01:59:30.000 And then we had an increase that led to the reduction afterwards.

01:59:33.000 If you incarcerate a lot of people, you will have a reduction in crime because you'll put away these big offenders.

01:59:40.000 If you have like a certain number of offenses, they'll just lock you away for a very long time.

01:59:45.000 It's all right.

01:59:47.000 You gotta love the Dutch.

01:59:48.000 Yeah, it's like three strikes, but better.

01:59:50.000 They managed to reduce a lot of their violent crime by about 25%, I think, by just arresting super offenders.

01:59:57.000 And that's trivial.

01:59:57.000 That adds almost nothing to the jail population, but it puts back, it gives you back communities.

02:00:02.000 It gives you back inner cities.

02:00:03.000 It gives you back huge swaths of the American everywhere that is violent. 0.73

02:00:09.000 You can even do gang crackdowns like they did in New York, and you can immediately see 20% reductions in all violent crimes in the city.

02:00:17.000 So we need more prisoners, more people arrested.

02:00:20.000 Absolutely.

02:00:20.000 We are under-imprisoned right now, and we are under-policed.

02:00:24.000 That's even bigger.

02:00:25.000 So America has more of an under-policing problem because we're afraid to pay for a lot more officers.

02:00:29.000 I totally agree.

02:00:30.000 The weird thing is Europe, they police a lot more relative to their crime levels than we do, which is weird.

02:00:37.000 Why did they have so many more police, which allows them to incarcerate less?

02:00:41.000 Because having police driving around, that's a deterrent.

02:00:44.000 If you have a police doing a patrol in a gang-riddled neighborhood, they are less likely to shoot.

02:00:48.000 It's so obvious.

02:00:49.000 I mean, these people are so dumb when I talk to them on campus.

02:00:52.000 They're like, oh, police cause crime.

02:00:53.000 I say, okay, let me ask you a question.

02:00:55.000 Let's pretend that you're a gangbanger and you're about to shoot up another rival gang.

02:00:59.000 And you turn the corner and there are two cop cars.

02:01:02.000 Are you more or less likely to do the gang shooting?

02:01:05.000 That's right.

02:01:06.000 This is not hard.

02:01:08.000 And they say, oh, they'll come back later.

02:01:10.000 Okay, then less likely.

02:01:12.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:01:13.000 This is not hard stuff.

02:01:14.000 And most violence is fruit of the moment stuff.

02:01:16.000 It's not planned at all.

02:01:16.000 It's exactly.

02:01:17.000 Well, the gang stuff, yes and no.

02:01:19.000 Even still, a lot of the gang stuff.

02:01:20.000 So tell me, what do you mean by that?

02:01:22.000 So very little violence is premeditated.

02:01:24.000 People don't generally go out of their way to plan out a murder.

02:01:28.000 They tend to do it in the heat of the moment.

02:01:30.000 It happens from a fight, an insult, somebody getting drunk and doing something.

02:01:33.000 Sure.

02:01:34.000 Somebody on drugs.

02:01:35.000 But isn't the gang stuff like tonight we're going to go shoot something up?

02:01:37.000 So there is some premeditation.

02:01:39.000 There is some premeditation, but gang crime is not actually anywhere near the majority of our crime problem.

02:01:43.000 It's mostly like random one-offs.

02:01:45.000 And those, you prevent them by like locking up the crazies away for their earlier offenses.

02:01:51.000 Carrying weapons.

02:01:52.000 Yeah.

02:01:52.000 Defend yourself.

02:01:53.000 Well, actually, the great thing is you could just police carrying weapons a lot better because a lot of them carry weapons when they shouldn't be able to.

02:01:59.000 They're not allowed to because they're a felon.

02:02:01.000 They have prior offenses.

02:02:03.000 If you lock them up for those prior offenses, you will stop them from doing the more hideous crimes like actually killing someone.

02:02:09.000 So we're very lucky on this program.

02:02:11.000 We spend a lot of time with President Donald Trump.

02:02:15.000 What executive orders do you think he should do?

02:02:17.000 iPads is one.

02:02:18.000 Just start nailing them off.

02:02:20.000 I'll pull up my list.

02:02:21.000 You have a list?

02:02:22.000 Good.

02:02:22.000 I do.

02:02:23.000 Yeah.

02:02:23.000 Let me just pull this up real quick.

02:02:25.000 So another.

02:02:25.000 I think you'd be an Android guy.

02:02:27.000 There you go.

02:02:30.000 So he needs to do the iPads executive order.

02:02:32.000 That's a great one.

02:02:32.000 That will cripple a lot of the bad things that, like the discrimination right away.

02:02:37.000 That's simple.

02:02:38.000 Another one is he needs to address the academic publishing cartels.

02:02:42.000 You mean like Springer nature and stuff?

02:02:44.000 Oh, yes.

02:02:44.000 He needs to crush them.

02:02:45.000 And he can crush them.

02:02:46.000 He has the right to.

02:02:47.000 So we did a whole segment on Springer.

02:02:49.000 What do you mean by crush?

02:02:50.000 Tell me.

02:02:51.000 Ah.

02:02:51.000 So they have extreme profits for no good reason.

02:02:54.000 They should not be profiting like they are.

02:02:55.000 We have an executive order typed up that needs to hit his desk, immediately needs to sign it.

02:02:59.000 You need to tell me who wrote that.

02:03:01.000 I'll show you afterwards, actually.

02:03:02.000 Yeah.

02:03:02.000 Okay.

02:03:02.000 Sorry.

02:03:03.000 There are several here that I will show you.

02:03:06.000 So crush the cartel like Springer nature.

02:03:09.000 Yes.

02:03:09.000 You can actually mandate that a lot of research start becoming publicly available.

02:03:14.000 They shouldn't be able to charge.

02:03:16.000 Then just get closer to the mic.

02:03:17.000 They shouldn't be able to charge fees to access a lot of the research because if it's publicly funded, it is actually publicly owned in a meaningful way.

02:03:24.000 Like the government has legally the ability to say, hey, that paper cannot be behind a paywall.

02:03:29.000 I want it now.

02:03:30.000 And they can reclaim it.

02:03:31.000 And they can do this for most research.

02:03:33.000 It's published.

02:03:33.000 They should do this immediately.

02:03:34.000 And then democratize it.

02:03:36.000 Yeah.

02:03:36.000 And then they should say.

02:03:38.000 Exactly.

02:03:39.000 And they should say, you cannot spend public funds, like your research funds, on article publication fees.

02:03:45.000 If you want to publish an article, you should not be, you shouldn't use your research funding on this frivolous thing that doesn't need to exist.

02:03:52.000 The add-on from these journals is almost nothing.

02:03:55.000 They don't do much editing.

02:03:56.000 And the peer review they get is free.

02:03:59.000 It's voluntary stuff from other researchers.

02:04:01.000 So it wastes their time, too.

02:04:03.000 It makes our research dollars much less efficient.

02:04:05.000 So what would you recommend the president does with the academic?

02:04:08.000 Because I have had friends that I really trust say this is a huge issue.

02:04:11.000 Yeah.

02:04:12.000 I will show you the exact details on this afterwards, but we have a lot of things that are written in here.

02:04:16.000 Basically, force all code and data into public repositories, prohibit using funds on academic publishing, and reclaim all of the research that has been hit with public funds.

02:04:27.000 That should have been done a while ago.

02:04:28.000 There's some stuff at the NIH that should be going on at this.

02:04:31.000 They are going to remove, for example, their one-year embargo on their research.

02:04:36.000 There needs to be effort done on making data transparent.

02:04:40.000 So papers published with funds from the government, they need to immediately be made to require all their code and the providing of data.

02:04:50.000 They need to open up a lot of data that is out there that is arbitrary.

02:04:55.000 So this is actually great.

02:04:56.000 A lot of research is arbitrarily stopped by bureaucrats.

02:04:59.000 Their reasons?

02:05:00.000 They don't have to provide them.

02:05:01.000 They don't have to say why they're denying you, a given researcher, access to some data set maintained by the government.

02:05:06.000 Could be they don't like you because you're white.

02:05:08.000 That's exactly it.

02:05:08.000 And that actually has happened to a few people.

02:05:10.000 Of course it has.

02:05:11.000 There was going to be a lawsuit two years ago about this, and then they were like, ah, whatever.

02:05:14.000 We'll just not do it.

02:05:15.000 We'll wait for stuff to happen.

02:05:18.000 Some of the researchers wanted to investigate the relationship between BMI and education, and they wanted some genetically informative models, so they wanted to get access.

02:05:25.000 You mean body mass index?

02:05:26.000 Yeah.

02:05:27.000 They wanted to research this.

02:05:28.000 And the NIH said no, and they were like, what's the reason?

02:05:31.000 They're like, we don't have to tell you.

02:05:32.000 So whatever.

02:05:33.000 You're not allowed to do it.

02:05:35.000 These bureaucrats can just say no for whatever reason. 1.00

02:05:38.000 Are there any correlations between somebody's race and their BMI?

02:05:42.000 Oh, yeah, considerable.

02:05:43.000 It's interesting.

02:05:44.000 Black men tend to have about the same BMIs as white men, but black women tend to be much, much more obese than white white men. 0.95

02:05:50.000 Is it just because of dietary or is there a genetic reason, you think?

02:05:53.000 It's ultimately dietary, but we don't know why.

02:05:55.000 So the thing is, if something's dietary, it could be heritable too, meaning like the disposition towards liking sweet foods.

02:06:01.000 There's a genetic component to that.

02:06:03.000 So people who like more sweet foods might be disposed towards wanting to eat more of them.

02:06:07.000 Is there anything to the IQ differences between race?

02:06:10.000 Considerable, yeah.

02:06:11.000 The evidence is really dispositive these days, and people get really worked up about it.

02:06:16.000 It makes a lot of people very, very offended, but every time you test it, you get the same result.

02:06:19.000 What is the result?

02:06:20.000 The result is about a one standard deviation gap in IQ between blacks and whites in the U.S., about 0.5 standard deviations between Asians and whites. 0.82

02:06:28.000 Asians do a little bit better, and about 0.66 between Hispanics and whites or Hispanics do a little bit worse.

02:06:34.000 And that's just how it's been for the, I mean, as long as we've measured it.

02:06:38.000 In fact, even using proxies from literacy tests back in like nearly the 1870s, like they were given as part of the census, you can see the same sorts of gaps.

02:06:46.000 They're similar in magnitude.

02:06:48.000 It's been around forever.

02:06:49.000 It's how it is.

02:06:50.000 If you want to address it, we have to stop clamoring about it and getting worked out about it.

02:06:55.000 How do you raise IQ?

02:06:56.000 We don't know yet.

02:06:57.000 Genetic engineering is the most likely means.

02:07:00.000 Embryo selection, choosing to have the smarter kid among a set of embryos if you're doing IVF, a lot of things like that will actually make material differences.

02:07:07.000 They're the only things we really know about.

02:07:08.000 Remind our audience what a standard deviation is.

02:07:10.000 A standard deviation is going from the median to about like the 67 percentile or so.

02:07:17.000 So it's moving up quite a bit.

02:07:20.000 Do the IQ differences between races, does that happen across the planet or is that just to America?

02:07:26.000 It happens across the planet.

02:07:28.000 And there is differences in selectivity.

02:07:29.000 So like, for example, the UK gets relatively elite Africans as immigrants, and they get relatively elite. 0.87

02:07:35.000 A lot of Nigerians.

02:07:35.000 Yeah, they get, oh yes, a lot, because it's the biggest source country in Africa.

02:07:39.000 It's the most populous.

02:07:40.000 And it's part of the Commonwealth.

02:07:41.000 So they will get a lot of those.

02:07:43.000 America gets the most brilliant Indians.

02:07:46.000 We actually have their test scores.

02:07:48.000 We have their test scores on the joint entrance exams to the IITs, the Indian Institute of Tech.

02:07:54.000 And the higher their score on those exams, the higher their rank in the whole country, the more likely they are to immigrate.

02:08:00.000 And in particular, the more likely they are to immigrate to America.

02:08:03.000 So we get the smartest Indians.

02:08:05.000 But their national IQ is just very low.

02:08:07.000 We don't see those people, though.

02:08:09.000 What do you think caused the genetic differences in IQ?

02:08:12.000 A lot of it's probably drift.

02:08:13.000 A lot of it has to do with selection over time due to socioeconomic stuff.

02:08:18.000 So for example, in the not so distant past, people who were a lot better off had a lot more surviving kids.

02:08:25.000 They didn't have any difference in fertility or anything, but infant mortality used to be extremely socioeconomically stratified, where if you were, for example, in Poland, the Jews there, they tended to live quite well.

02:08:37.000 That's where my family is from.

02:08:38.000 That's where our last name is from.

02:08:40.000 It's in Poland.

02:08:41.000 They tended to live quite well, and their infant mortality rates were low.

02:08:45.000 And the higher up within that community, the lower the rates were.

02:08:48.000 So you had more surviving kids.

02:08:50.000 And the upper classes over many generations would replace the lower classes.

02:08:53.000 This is Gregory Clark's thesis for why people became, why we had Industrial Revolution.

02:08:58.000 We reached a point where we had hit some threshold and the good traits for being economically successful had proliferated enough throughout the population because the poor people in every era didn't survive very much and the richer people did.

02:09:08.000 Why do you think people get so worked up on IQ differences?

02:09:12.000 They overvalue it.

02:09:13.000 They value, oh my God, that person's more intelligent than me.

02:09:17.000 That can't be.

02:09:18.000 They refuse to believe in intelligence differences unless somebody's like a clear genius like John von Neumann.

02:09:23.000 They hate the idea of being lesser or anything like that or being perceived in certain ways.

02:09:29.000 They attach so much emotional valence to it when it should just be a simple thing.

02:09:33.000 We can do a lot of policies that reduce the importance of IQ differences.

02:09:38.000 Like in Sweden, when they scheduled people to get vaccinations during COVID, that led to a reduction in the IQ stratification of vaccination rates, and that led to a reduction in the IQ stratification of mortality rates.

02:09:49.000 So those lower IQ people were dying in a lot of counties, but in Uppsala, where they pre-schedule everyone, the lower IQ people were more likely to go out and get the vaccination, and they were more likely to stay off the ventilators and survive.

02:10:00.000 Fewer serious side effects in that county.

02:10:02.000 And there are a lot of policy options like this that allow us to make those differences less significant.

02:10:07.000 The longer we treat them as taboo, the more likely we are to just continue contributing to the plight of people who have low IQs for no fault of their own.

02:10:17.000 Yeah, and so, I mean, again, I don't even have much more to add to that.

02:10:20.000 I just, I mean, Douglas Murray wrote about this extensively.

02:10:24.000 Is there any irrefutable, is there any contrarian data we might be missing here in regards to IQ differences because it gets people so worked up?

02:10:31.000 They say it's not true, it's a hoax, it's a scam.

02:10:33.000 I think we're actually missing out on a lot of the policy experiments we could be using here.

02:10:37.000 So you can very simply go out to a hospital and gate the Wi-Fi with a short little optional test or whatever.

02:10:45.000 And you can learn about a population of Medicaid users or Medicare people.

02:10:49.000 Anything like that.

02:10:49.000 You can learn about cognitive decline in simple ways if you just normalize testing.

02:10:53.000 But this stuff is so taboo that it's hard to implement these simple data collection programs or anything that could result from those programs.

02:11:00.000 It's like we've cut off a tech tree because we're afraid.

02:11:04.000 I meant Charles Murray, not Douglas Murray.

02:11:06.000 Oh, yeah, sorry.

02:11:06.000 I was confused.

02:11:07.000 I was like, what did Douglas Murray?

02:11:08.000 Big difference.

02:11:09.000 Yeah, notable.

02:11:10.000 Yes.

02:11:12.000 So let's now go to closing.

02:11:17.000 I think that will sufficiently piss people off.

02:11:20.000 I think, yeah, you saved the worst for last.

02:11:23.000 You challenge yourself to write a blog post in a single hour.

02:11:26.000 Tell our audience about that.

02:11:27.000 And just tell more about kind of what you do and how you do it.

02:11:30.000 I mean, obviously, you have a remarkable grasp of these topics, and it's impressive.

02:11:36.000 So just tell us more about yourself.

02:11:38.000 Thank you.

02:11:38.000 To the extent you can.

02:11:40.000 So I don't want to give away too much.

02:11:42.000 I know you have to be careful.

02:11:43.000 I'm completely on your team there because the bad guys are bad.

02:11:46.000 They are very bad.

02:11:48.000 Golly, just yesterday I got mailed something that was very rough.

02:11:50.000 I'll tell you about that later.

02:11:53.000 So the thing is, I don't like to waste a lot of time.

02:11:59.000 When I have a job and I have to work and do a lot of other stuff, there's a million projects I'm involved in.

02:12:03.000 I advise a lot of companies on various things, and I have to manage my time pretty carefully.

02:12:08.000 If I waste too much, then that blows away my day and it blows away my productivity.

02:12:12.000 It makes me feel pretty bad.

02:12:13.000 I feel down if I waste too much time.

02:12:15.000 So I try and constrain myself to about an hour, or if I know it's going to be a longer post, I'll do two hours for a lot of my posts.

02:12:20.000 And I have a little timer after I've made just simple Python scripts.

02:12:23.000 I write it all up in WordPad, and it automatically closes it and deletes everything if I don't do it in the allotted amount of time.

02:12:30.000 And I think that's a pretty good way to manage my time.

02:12:33.000 It forces me to stay on topic, think about it ahead of time, manage all the thoughts in my head, really line up how I'm going to do the post long before I've actually done it.

02:12:43.000 And I don't make any notes because I think that's cheating.

02:12:45.000 But I will, like, sometimes I'll make graphics a few days ahead of time, like showing off something from a paper, and I'll include that in the post, and I'll be able to go and reference it and bring it in.

02:12:55.000 But I don't usually make things for a post during it because I'll be on a time crunch and I'll have made it ahead of time and thought about it and all that.

02:13:02.000 And you're mostly a sub stacker.

02:13:04.000 Is that fair to say?

02:13:05.000 I mostly do substack for my writing, yeah.

02:13:08.000 What would you say?

02:13:08.000 This is my last question, and we do have to dash.

02:13:10.000 I think we've been almost two hours, almost.

02:13:14.000 What topic do you think is most intellectually not explored on the right?

02:13:19.000 Ooh, wow.

02:13:22.000 That's a really, really good one.

02:13:24.000 So I'm going to give a really, it's going to sound odd, but I think deregulation is underexplored.

02:13:32.000 I think that the right talks about it a bunch and they mention it, but they don't know the specifics and they don't think about it.

02:13:36.000 They don't think about the function of bureaucrats or how they work or how to reform our systems or anything.

02:13:41.000 And this is actually a thing where we really see a lot of lag among Republicans and libertarians relative to Democrats because Democrats understand the system and how it works and they understand what a direct final rule is or they understand the process to go through to change some regulation or pull a guidance document or anything like that.

02:13:58.000 And Republicans just have no idea.

02:14:00.000 And this leads to a major, major human capital problem.

02:14:03.000 Do you think it's a bigger problem that we just need to learn how government works?

02:14:06.000 Absolutely.

02:14:07.000 Yeah, I think Republicans especially have no idea how anything works that is crucial for them to change.

02:14:14.000 And it's led to Republicans not being the ones to staff their own governments.

02:14:18.000 So when a Republican comes into power, they tend to still have a bunch of Democrats working under them and they frustrate them.

02:14:23.000 They try and do things that prevent them from actually exercising their will and changing policies in the way that they need to.

02:14:29.000 And it makes them look less effective and it makes it harder for them to get re-elected and all that.

02:14:34.000 You're very bright.

02:14:36.000 To what extent is AI going to change our lives the next 10 years?

02:14:39.000 Probably a lot.

02:14:40.000 Very, very considerably.

02:14:42.000 It is going to make massive, massive differences.

02:14:44.000 My probability of doom is very low.

02:14:47.000 That P-Doom is what they call it in the UK. 1.00

02:14:48.000 I'm with you.

02:14:49.000 I don't think it's going to kill us all.

02:14:50.000 I don't think there's actually a medium for AI to do that.

02:14:53.000 But I do think there are a lot of ways that it can implement, like it can aid discovery of new glass.

02:14:58.000 Quantum computing, especially.

02:15:00.000 If they marry the two together.

02:15:01.000 new ways to do all sorts of things.

02:15:03.000 We can do so, so much if we have...

02:15:08.000 Probably very large, not in the next 10 years, but after that, yes.

02:15:10.000 I think in 20 or so years, we're probably going to see 10 to 20% disemployment, like people getting kicked off the job market and not being so useful.

02:15:17.000 So you said about 20 years from now.

02:15:18.000 Wow.

02:15:19.000 Some people are more bullish.

02:15:20.000 They think it's going to happen in the next five to 10 years.

02:15:21.000 But I mean, who knows?

02:15:22.000 It's all guessing, right?

02:15:23.000 Yeah, it is.

02:15:24.000 But we'll see.

02:15:25.000 Do you think it will lead towards an inevitable apex of totalitarianism?

02:15:30.000 No.

02:15:31.000 I'm hopeful that it doesn't.

02:15:32.000 That's my worry, though, is that if China achieves super intelligence before we see it.

02:15:38.000 GCI, CGI, or whatever.

02:15:40.000 AGI or ASI.

02:15:41.000 AGI, artificial general intelligence, ASI, artificial superintelligence.

02:15:45.000 If they reach that first, and a friend of mine, Jeremy No, he has written about this quite a bit.

02:15:52.000 His big fear is not that AI will go out of control like a sky net and kill us.

02:15:56.000 It is that China will get it and they will use it to beat us thoroughly. 1.00

02:15:59.000 And if the Marxists are in charge, then we are doomed.

02:16:02.000 Do you think it will eventually eliminate private property?

02:16:05.000 No.

02:16:06.000 I don't believe in any of that.

02:16:08.000 I think that's like a communist sort of pipe dream, that it'll make all of that superfluous and we'll live in Star Trek utopia.

02:16:15.000 No.

02:16:16.000 I think private property is actually essential to social organization.

02:16:19.000 I agree, but do you think it will, I mean, Andreessen flirts with this, that it will be the most effective war on scarcity we've seen in the modern world.

02:16:28.000 Oh, I think it will.

02:16:28.000 It will definitely be a war on Scarcity.

02:16:30.000 It'll make it so we live in an era of abundance that is unprecedented.

02:16:34.000 But I just don't believe that it'll fundamentally alter a lot of our social institutions, and it might even bring us back to something that's a little more palatable.

02:16:42.000 That's a very optimistic take.

02:16:43.000 I'm optimistic.

02:16:44.000 And I hope you're right.

02:16:44.000 Is there anything we didn't talk about?

02:16:46.000 How can people support you?

02:16:47.000 Talk about your Substack.

02:16:48.000 This was phenomenal.

02:16:49.000 Go subscribe.

02:16:50.000 If you like what I like, or if you like what I write, then go subscribe.

02:16:54.000 Follow me on Substack.

02:16:55.000 I don't have a Patreon or anything.

02:16:56.000 Do you have an email that you can give?

02:16:59.000 Because you're going to get a lot of spicy feedback on some of the COVID stuff.

02:17:06.000 If you subscribe to me on Substack, you can message me there.

02:17:09.000 My DMs are open to paid subscribers.

02:17:11.000 Great.

02:17:11.000 Very good.

02:17:12.000 And I'm sure you'll read any thoughtful critiques, right?

02:17:15.000 Yeah.

02:17:15.000 Well, thank you so much, Craymu, for your time.

02:17:18.000 This has been phenomenal.

02:17:20.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

02:17:21.000 Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

02:17:24.000 Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.

The Charlie Kirk Show - July 01, 2025

MAHA: What’s Real, What's Fake, What's Unclear? ft. Cremieux

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