In this episode of The CharlieKirk Show, host Charlie Kirk sits down with bioinformatician Cray Mu to discuss his views on Bitcoin and M.O.A.R.K. Cray talks about his journey from being a software engineer to writing a book, and why he thinks Bitcoin should be considered a reserve asset.
00:00:54.000We have Pete Hegseth coming, Christine Ohm, Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly, Donald Trump Jr., Steve Bannon, Greg Gutfeld, Laura Ingram, Ross Ulbricht, Byron Donalds, Tom Holman, Ben Carson, Brett Cooper, Michael Knowles, Brandon Tatum, Benny Johnson, Jack Pesobic, Riley Gaines, James O'Keefe, and more.
00:01:51.000His 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.
00:02:00.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:02:53.000So 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?
00:03:14.000So some people call him the Abraham Lincoln of France.
00:03:18.000He 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.
00:03:30.000He did a really interesting thing where he gave the North African Jews the ability to get French citizenship and then come over to France.
00:03:37.000He 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.
00:03:47.000So you have, we have a lot to discuss here.
00:03:49.000And by the way, I love reading your stuff online.
00:04:28.000So 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.
00:04:36.000But 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.
00:04:51.000And 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.
00:05:41.000And 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?
00:05:54.000There are hundreds of trials on vitamin D, and they seem to do, it seems to consistently show practically nothing.
00:05:59.000But 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.
00:06:05.000Do you think it's because they have healthier lifestyles and therefore it's the core, yeah?
00:06:29.000So, but by getting sun exposure, you might get vitamin D, which might just be an effect of something else that is positive.
00:06:35.000Yep, it could be something else that you're getting.
00:06:37.000Like, 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.
00:07:55.000And 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.
00:08:02.000Like omega-3s and CoQ10 and vitamin B. Absolutely.
00:08:49.000Creatine will genuinely help you put on muscle.
00:08:51.000Creatine has cognitive benefits as well.
00:08:54.000But especially for people who are vegans, vegetarians, who have restricted diets, because they lack that stuff and it seems to help them a lot.
00:09:00.000For people who have normal diets, normal omnivorous diets, they tend not to get very much benefit from creatine.
00:09:57.000The trials do tend to say that ASCVD, atherosclerotic, coronary vascular, like heart disease is helped by switching from animal fats to plant fats.
00:10:10.000I don't want to do that myself, but it does help people.
00:10:13.000So if you're at very, very high risk, I would suggest going to seed oils instead of animal fats.
00:10:18.000Do you think the general population would benefit more from tallow than from some seed oil?
00:10:23.000They would probably be hurt by tallow on average.
00:10:40.000So 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.
00:10:54.000Like the PCSK9 inhibitors specifically, they were found in these French families.
00:10:58.000They had a mutation that like knocked out production of it.
00:11:02.000And they had, well, it did the opposite.
00:11:09.000And it was discovered some large, like almost 11% proportion of African Americans had a variant that dropped their cholesterol levels very low.
00:11:16.000And then a smaller proportion of whites had another variant that did like a smaller effect.
00:11:20.000And all these interesting variants related to PCSK9 had meaningful effects.
00:11:25.000And so interesting thing is, we can just put the product of that gene in a drug, give it to people, their LDL goes down.
00:11:36.000And 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.
00:11:45.000So you can compare families over time.
00:11:46.000You can say, oh, you, the parent generation, didn't have statins or PCSK9 inhibitors or azetamide or anything to lower your LDL.
00:11:54.000And like a sixth of them were dying by age 40 from heart conditions.
00:11:58.000And 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.
00:12:03.000They're not dying from preventable heart conditions.
00:12:06.000And it's just very clear evidence like that.
00:12:08.000Like it's nice little natural experiments.
00:12:10.000We also have wonderful trials and we have more genetic epidemiology stuff too.
00:12:14.000One 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.
00:12:22.000The statin, it works through the HMG-CoA reductase gene, produces an enzyme that breaks down into the HMG-CoA and then mevalonitate.
00:14:37.000So the conciliance of evidence just says, no, it's fine.
00:14:41.000For 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.
00:14:49.000You'll be a lot better off in all these different ways.
00:14:52.000But in the past few years, I've given a lot less shrift to mechanisms because mechanisms are not a substitute for the statistical evidence.
00:15:00.000I 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.
00:15:08.000But in the trials, if it always shows the opposite of what they predict, then I just think they're wrong.
00:15:13.000What 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?
00:15:28.000What red flags do you look for when you look through trials?
00:15:31.000Well, I mean, one of the most obvious ones is small sample sizes.
00:15:33.000When you have a very small trial and you have big conclusions from it, that is a very big red flag.
00:15:37.000When you have massive effect sizes that are very unrealistic, for example, Cohen's D of five, that's a very, very large effect size.
00:15:46.000Like 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.
00:17:43.000I had it a few times because I was like, I'll try the different drinks they have.
00:17:48.000Couldn't stand it, but I was happy to see.
00:17:50.000It doesn't actually do anything either.
00:17:52.000So you would say that olive oil supplementation, no benefit.
00:17:56.000Yeah, for most people, it's going to be nothing.
00:17:57.000The 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.
00:18:04.000Like they're selected in some way or they try to be unselected and then they go, nothing for everybody.
00:18:10.000But there might be some subpopulations that could benefit from pretty much any supplement.
00:18:16.000How do we say, so I have two questions.
00:18:19.000How do you long-term study preventative supplementation?
00:18:25.000Number 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.
00:18:40.000How do you long-term do trials for preventative supplementation?
00:18:46.000And then we'll go to the second question.
00:18:47.000For that, you just have to run a long trial.
00:18:50.000If 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.
00:18:59.000Or 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.
00:19:30.000So you give them placebo, whatever, and you give them the active drug.
00:19:34.000And 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.
00:19:42.000But if you want to stratify that way, you have to go ahead and test them beforehand.
00:19:46.000Or 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.
00:19:53.000And then you see, did they have larger or smaller effects?
00:19:56.000Often when you do it post-hoc, you'll have too small of a sample to actually find very much.
00:20:03.000So you'll end up with conclusions that are iffy because they're just weak.
00:20:08.000But 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.
00:20:18.000Is there any truth to the fact that certain gene mutations might make you more likely to benefit from certain supplements?
00:20:34.000And this is so common that tons of people have gone through heart disease because they prefer not to feel weak.
00:20:41.000And for some people, it's actually debilitatingly weak.
00:20:45.000They can become incredibly weak due to the action of just a few genes or just a few mutations.
00:20:49.000For example, in the HMGCR gene that is where we know the mechanism of like statins works from.
00:20:55.000And 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.
00:21:11.000So there's massive genetic variation that augments the effects of drugs.
00:21:15.000You 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.
00:21:28.000Usually the genetic moderation is modest.
00:21:31.000In rare cases, it's serious side effects.
00:21:34.000It'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.
00:21:46.000Are we doing gene testing before prescribing pharmaceuticals?
00:21:49.000Generally not, because for most things we prescribe, there's no reason to, or there's not a big reason to.
00:21:55.000And 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.
00:22:01.000They'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.
00:23:52.000Now, 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.
00:23:59.000So they'll say, oh, I'm very depressed.
00:24:02.000Whereas 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.
00:24:30.000You can go and profile these people who are purely self-diagnosed, and they are very different from the people who are clinically diagnosed.
00:24:36.000So, for example, for autism, those people don't really have social deficits, the people who are merely self-diagnosed without a clinical diagnosis.
00:24:43.000They differ radically from the people who actually had a doctor go.
00:24:47.000Or banging their head against the wall or something.
00:24:56.000I 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.
00:25:05.000That kind of helps us narrow down on why it happens.
00:25:08.000like it's not going to be the cell phones because they have the same thing there.
00:25:11.000Could be something about their social environment that is different in terms of...
00:27:36.000Like joining clubs, doing drives on campuses where they say, like, oh, come join this club and have some community and all that.
00:27:42.000That can be quite helpful for people who otherwise don't.
00:27:45.000Because if you're allowed to wallow, you might do dangerous things.
00:27:48.000We have some interesting experiments from in Israel.
00:27:51.000Suicides were way less common if they started confiscating soldiers' guns on the weekends.
00:27:56.000They would say, oh, don't go home alone and all this.
00:27:58.000And 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.
00:28:05.000So you see, if you let people wallow, they'll do bad things.
00:28:09.000And so the Zoloft, Xanax, would you also say?
00:28:52.000And we should have been able to predict that, but we aren't there yet with sequencing everybody and getting them this information.
00:28:57.000If we did more of that, that'd be great.
00:28:59.000We 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.
00:29:39.000I 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.
00:29:57.000But 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.
00:30:04.000We should be switching people over to newer medications, but it's difficult because of costs and everything.
00:30:09.000Like stuff, in America, we tend to pay a lot for drugs because we introduce them really early and aggressively.
00:30:14.000Like a six-month wait for drug is invented and drug goes to market might be six years in the UK.
00:30:20.000And 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.
00:30:29.000Some 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.
00:31:14.000The way they work is neural brainstem agonism of the GLP-1 receptors.
00:31:18.000And now with the newer drugs, they also do GIP, which binds to a similar area in the brainstem.
00:31:23.000And 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.
00:31:31.000And the mechanisms of action are so interesting to me because it feels like they treat practically everything that is modern American chronic disease.
00:31:39.000Like, oh, you have weird insulin spiking.
00:31:42.000You have a lot of bizarre problems, like pre-diabetes, you have metabolic syndrome.
00:31:48.000And it seems to act on practically all of that.
00:31:50.000Like for most pre-diabetics, they get normal glycemia by the end of the trial.
00:33:21.000We eat a little bit more than we used to.
00:33:23.000The amount that you need people to eat more compared to 1980.
00:33:27.000So in 1980 to now, we've gotten a lot fatter.
00:33:30.000The amount that everybody would have to eat every day to explain the entire rise is about one McDonald's double cheeseburger a day.
00:33:37.000So 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.
00:35:43.000And then they just psych themselves out.
00:35:44.000But 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.
00:36:19.000Well, it depends on who you're talking to.
00:36:21.000There'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.
00:39:03.000One 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.
00:39:27.000The thing is, it probably is good health advice.
00:39:30.000Unfortunately, we know that early treatment for a lot of things does help kids.
00:39:35.000Like with the statin example, those families where they have hypercholesterolemia and the kids inherit it because it's a genetic condition.
00:39:41.000When you give them statins from like age five, it is really good for them.
00:39:44.000Like they are way less likely to die young, and that's important.
00:39:48.000Right, but that's a genetic problem, right?
00:39:50.000So I'm talking about a kid that like, and maybe I don't know, he's eating like crap.
00:39:54.000He'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.
00:40:04.000Yeah, I would love to get your thoughts on that.
00:40:06.000Wouldn't it be better to say, hey, let's fix your diet before we start getting you dependent on the injection?
00:40:12.000It'd be nice, but the problem is to control the kids' diet, you have to intervene on the parents.
00:40:15.000And intervening on the parents is difficult, as we've seen from the inability to intervene on them in general.
00:40:20.000So if we were to get obesity rates down macro, what would that mean for all the other health outcomes?
00:40:26.000Beautiful improvements, just wonderful things.
00:40:29.000So the CDC's cost estimate for the direct medical cost of obesity in a year is $173 billion.
00:40:35.000That came out in, I think, 2022 or thereabouts, so up it a bit for inflation.
00:40:40.000Other estimates are usually a little bit higher.
00:40:42.000Industry estimates are extremely higher.
00:40:44.000And 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.
00:40:59.000If you handle all of that, the benefits to the American economy would be a little over $1 trillion a year.
00:41:05.000And that's a pretty standard cost estimate.
00:41:07.000The most extreme ones I've seen were upwards of about three and a half billion.
00:41:09.000So you would say that solving obesity is one of our...
00:43:07.000The main reason is it's very, very difficult to get people to actually stick to dietary changes.
00:43:13.000When 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.
00:43:24.000And even then, they tend to not do so very well.
00:43:26.000Like adherence to New Year's, New Year's resolutions.
00:43:30.000The average diet people start on, they're off it by six weeks.
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00:46:35.000If you have a good diet, though, I don't think you get the neurological effects from that.
00:46:38.000It's almost all seen in vegetarians and vegans.
00:46:41.000Yeah, I want you to finish that point.
00:46:43.000I 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.
00:49:16.000Yeah, 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.
00:49:29.000Like 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.
00:49:36.000It's just a very funny little thing, but it's real science.
00:49:39.000And this guy, he went through and he documented, oh my God, this blue zones are like super fake.
00:49:44.000So Okinawa, they go, oh, you can live to like 110 there easily.
00:49:48.000It's like, well, I don't believe that.
00:49:50.000That's one of the poorest areas of Japan.
00:49:52.000And their life expectancy officially is much lower than the rest of Japan.
00:50:00.000So 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.
00:50:42.000They 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.
00:50:49.000And so is there nothing to like the Mediterranean diet walking around all the time?
00:51:27.000If 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.
00:51:35.000It's not an exciting diet, so they're not going to eat a bunch of it.
00:53:22.000There's no lower limit at which it's good for you.
00:53:24.000Like 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.
00:53:33.000Not beer or anything like that, but some liquor tastes good and all that.
00:56:27.000When 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.
00:58:19.000So when you make it legal, it increases illegal use, honestly.
00:58:22.000It's a very funny effect because it becomes more socially acceptable to do it.
00:58:26.000So 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.
00:58:36.000And 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.
00:58:55.000I was in Berkeley, like, golly, around this time last year, and I was just walking around.
00:59:02.000I 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.
00:59:21.000And there were people conked out on the sidewalks.
00:59:23.000There were people you have to step over.
00:59:40.000They took it more seriously than we do here when we try to decriminalize.
00:59:42.000And 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.
01:00:59.000But 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.
01:01:10.000And it's like, how do you have this co-location of two symptoms that are on the opposite ends of the IQ spectrum?
01:01:16.000That's why almost nobody got diagnosed before we had the DSM-3.
01:01:20.000The diagnostic statistical manual, third edition.
01:01:23.000Yeah, they introduced the first autism diagnosis to the mass market.
01:01:26.000Before 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.
01:01:35.000Then they started diagnosing more, and the criteria were a lot more lax.
01:01:39.000You had to just be a little bit, as we know, modern autistic.
01:01:43.000It 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.
01:01:50.000Someone who's a little high IQ and a little quirky, they're autistic now.
01:01:55.000They 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.
01:02:03.000And 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.
01:02:17.000It led to huge numbers of increases in single years sometimes.
01:02:22.000So 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.
01:02:35.000So you have all these things that are methodological factors that contribute to the increase.
01:02:40.000And the increase is just in diagnoses.
01:02:42.000When 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.
01:02:51.000I'd like to diagnose you with autism or I'd like to see if you qualify for diagnosis.
01:02:56.000And you pay them a little bit to be in the study or whatever.
01:02:59.000And you do the same thing for adults and for kids, you get incredibly similar rates.
01:03:03.000You don't for the most severe forms of autism, but that's because those people tend to, unfortunately, die very young.
01:03:09.000The guys who are banging their heads against the walls, you said earlier, like that, they do tend to die young.
01:03:13.000We have seen an increase in those diagnoses, though, and you might say, oh, well, is that the real increase in autism?
01:03:22.000A lot of that is people who are getting substituted into an autism diagnosis.
01:03:26.000Because 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.
01:03:33.000So if your kid has mental retardation, you can convince a provider to diagnose your kid with autism.
01:03:38.000And suddenly, ba-bam, you get access to a lot more social services.
01:03:41.000your kid gets treated better in school.
01:04:39.000There's been a systematic effort to start diagnosing people that started only very recently.
01:04:44.000And 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.
01:04:57.000So 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?
01:05:16.000Well, 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.
01:05:27.000Like, 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.
01:05:35.000People had no idea what it was before 1980.
01:06:03.000When 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.
01:06:25.000We keep incentivizing it and the rates keep growing.
01:06:27.000So 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.
01:06:44.000I love the Swedes for this, and the Danish and the Norwegians and the Finns.
01:06:48.000They trust their government a lot to collect a lot of their data.
01:06:50.000Like their personal data is very well collected.
01:06:54.000And it's all linked to their health records and everything.
01:06:56.000And 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.
01:07:06.000They give those to whole population registers, like thousands and thousands of people.
01:07:10.000And 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.
01:07:20.000So 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.
01:07:27.000And 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.
01:07:36.000Like it's hard to argue against that in any credible way.
01:07:42.000Ask 10 people to define the word capitalism.
01:07:45.000How many different responses do you think you'll get?
01:07:47.000This is a word that comes up all the time, but does anyone know what it really means?
01:07:56.000Free online courses on subjects like the book of Genesis, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the history of the ancient Christian church.
01:08:04.000It's hard for me to even say which is my personal favorite.
01:08:06.000You guys have got to take these online courses.
01:08:08.000They've recently launched a new course, Understanding Capitalism, that I've been watching.
01:08:13.000In seven lectures, you'll learn about the role of profit and loss, how human nature plays a part in our economic system, why capitalism depends on private property rights, the rule of law, and above all, freedom.
01:08:24.000And why capitalism is ultimately a system that encourages morality rather than undermines it.
01:08:29.000Right now, go to charlieforhillsdale.com to enroll.
01:08:32.000There's no cost, and it's easy to get started.
01:08:34.000That's charlieforhillsdale.com, the register.
01:08:48.000We don't know if the increase in autism diagnoses is under or overdiagnosis.
01:08:52.000There'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.
01:08:59.000I'm not a psychiatrist, but I know that they have plenty of things that actually do help.
01:09:02.000And I've looked at some of the effect sizes for the treatments and whatnot.
01:09:05.000And they help them with their behavioral problems.
01:09:08.000They help them to graduate school and stuff.
01:09:12.000So were those kids at one point underdiagnosed?
01:09:15.000I think the answer is probably yes for those kids.
01:09:17.000Nowadays, 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.
01:09:27.000and especially when it leads to unnecessary medication.
01:09:29.000Like, I'm not a big fan of the over-diagnosis with ADHD, especially because there are...
01:10:04.000The 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.
01:10:17.000About 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.
01:10:25.000And then a lot of time they transition to other drugs.
01:10:29.000And 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.
01:10:38.000There are a good number of people who go from like ADHD drugs, which many will need.
01:11:28.000I 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.
01:11:35.000There is really no good reason for them to be going out and getting practically all their kids diagnosed with autism.
01:11:42.000It's clear that they're doing it because it gives them money.
01:11:45.000And is there any truth that there is less autism in the Amish community?
01:12:01.000They're not in our hospitals and everything, unless on rare occasions they are.
01:12:06.000But they're just not getting all the well visits kids get and everything.
01:12:08.000They're not, no, there's really nothing to it.
01:12:11.000It's a difference in the medical care they receive.
01:12:16.000So 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.
01:12:22.000So, 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.
01:13:27.000So 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.
01:13:34.000The 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.
01:13:45.000Total normal child behavior has been pathologized in a lot of ways.
01:13:48.000There are tons of kids who are certainly misdiagnosed because they're obsessed with trains and they love their...
01:14:04.000And I think people, parents overstate obsessions a lot of times.
01:14:08.000They're worried about their kids and they go, oh, my kid is obsessed with video games or screens or trains or anything like that.
01:14:14.000But they're just interested at a pretty normal level.
01:14:16.000And we're treating that pathologically because we're too concerned these days.
01:14:19.000Parents 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.
01:14:29.000And they don't give their kids the space to be normal and develop normally, or they should.
01:14:34.000So then, if you had your way, how would you then approach this autism issue?
01:14:41.000Golly, the diagnostic threshold is incredibly low, and we don't need to diagnose so many people.
01:14:46.000And we need to start doing the studies to figure out what we should diagnose because we don't really do that.
01:14:51.000We 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.
01:15:01.000So in order for the people that think that autism is increasing for it to be true, it would have to be standardized across ages.
01:15:16.000It'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.
01:15:22.000But for most symptoms, they do have them show up for adults.
01:15:25.000The exceptions are things that are age-gated, like must start presenting symptoms before age 30.
01:15:30.000You 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.
01:15:36.000And that does happen, but it's somewhat rare.
01:15:39.000Also, sometimes adults do intend to go out and get an autism diagnosis because it does lead to higher disability payments.
01:15:45.000We saw this during the Great Financial Recession back in 2008, 2009.
01:15:48.000Lots of people who were on Medicare, Medicaid started seeking, not Medicare, sorry, Medicaid, started seeking out autism diagnoses, more benefits.
01:18:01.000And in fact, a lot of these Strength is good for everything.
01:18:05.000I 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.
01:21:35.000This is one of the big things I keep emphasizing to people.
01:21:37.000The cancer death rates, which is the thing you should focus on for young people, they're going down.
01:21:42.000But 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.
01:23:44.000It 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.
01:23:53.000And who knows, if that had been around nationally, he might be alive today.
01:24:32.000Most 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.
01:24:38.000And 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.
01:24:52.000They take about less than 180 days to approve drugs that have shown they work, get them out there, start saving lives.
01:24:58.000But for the generic drug user fee amendment, GADUFA, the designers of it were the large pharmaceutical companies that are most likely to use PADUFA.
01:25:08.000And if a generic comes to market, it erodes your profits.
01:25:11.000It makes it so you are competing against somebody who produces something for pennies on the dollar compared to what you make.
01:25:17.000So if you're charging a huge amount for a therapy and somebody who comes along and makes a generic, then they screw you.
01:25:23.000So JADUFA is designed such that you start paying the FDA immediately instead of after you've gotten the drug approved.
01:25:30.000PADUFA, you pay after you get it approved.
01:25:32.000They do the review and then you pay them for as long as there's not a generic.
01:25:36.000But the generic, like the generic part, really bad.
01:25:39.000The 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.
01:25:49.000Were there any downsides to the COVID shot?
01:26:36.000And 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.
01:26:47.000The 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.
01:26:54.000So 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.
01:27:02.000Like you'll just never get it again, which is amazing.
01:27:47.000I think we should probably give better vaccines and more.
01:27:51.000Because I think we should be using vaccines to prevent cancer.
01:27:53.000I'm a big believer in one of the projects BARDA wants to fund, government agency that does great frontier biological research.
01:28:01.000They 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.
01:28:11.000So 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.
01:28:23.000So they want to be able to prevent anything bad from happening.
01:28:25.000And I feel like we should do more stuff like that as a public health measure.
01:28:29.000We should be able to stop everything in its tracks.
01:28:32.000We should be able to destroy cancer entirely by preventing it.
01:28:35.000We should be able, like Gardasil is amazing.
01:28:38.000I think it's a really, really good thing for preventing HPV.
01:29:17.000I 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.
01:29:24.000And we're just, we don't have the balls to do it.
01:32:17.000You 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.
01:32:24.000But anyway, sorry, I meant to mention other vaccines like the polio vaccine wasn't perfect anyway.
01:32:29.000It didn't provide like permanent sterilizing immunity.
01:32:31.000People think of it that way for some reason because we mostly eliminated it.
01:32:34.000But if we had more polio cases going around, people would quickly learn, oh, it never did that.
01:32:40.000It just allowed us to manage transmission and symptoms better.
01:32:43.000And people who caught it young, historically, were able to fend off some of the worst symptoms if they got it later.
01:32:48.000And the vaccine basically mimicked that.
01:32:49.000So if they got it later, they would have low symptomality, which is what the COVID vaccine did.
01:33:55.000And 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.
01:34:04.000We're going to keep you on statins or nothing.
01:34:06.000And people are like, well, I guess it's nothing then.
01:34:40.000And 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.
01:36:36.000No, so there generally, there really aren't a lot of studies on this.
01:36:39.000We have some cohorts where we track testosterone rates over time.
01:36:42.000And 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.
01:36:47.000But are sperm motility rates not going down?
01:36:50.000Not meaningfully beyond what you'd expect from the increase in obesity.
01:36:52.000Because the articles or the studies, they allegedly show a major catastrophic decrease in sperm motility.
01:36:58.000A lot of this is down to methodological things, like measuring things differently.
01:37:00.000Or in the case of sperm, there is some reason to think that obesity is involved.
01:37:45.000Past age 35, there's the unfortunately named term geriatric pregnancy.
01:37:50.000After that age, it is quite hard to conceive.
01:37:53.000And people are waiting a lot longer because they're getting, for example, more professional certifications.
01:37:57.000One of the silly things we've done is extend education rather than accelerate it.
01:38:02.000Some places, for example, in Switzerland and Germany, there are some locations where they have reduced the number of required years of high school.
01:38:08.000This results in no academic downsides.
01:38:11.000Like the kids are still just as prepared as ever.
01:38:13.000You just cram more stuff in less time, but they regain two of their years of adulthood.
01:38:17.000Instead of graduating at 18, you graduate at 16.
01:38:20.000You push back everything, and you are more likely then to get married, have kids at an acceptable age to have kids.
01:38:27.000And 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.
01:38:33.000So 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.
01:39:10.000The number of ideal children people report is down a lot.
01:39:13.000And a lot of that has to do with the fact that they have fewer kids and they experience being around fewer kids.
01:39:18.000When 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.
01:39:31.000You have more family values related to this.
01:39:33.000We have some ways of doing causal inference on this with family size fixed effect models that are really interesting.
01:39:38.000But 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.
01:39:43.000And if you accidentally have twins instead of something else, your ideal number of kids that you report goes up.
01:39:50.000Or, for example, if people around you start having a lot fewer kids, the number of kids you will have is likely going to decrease.
01:39:57.000We 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.
01:40:08.000Initially, the first phases of doing this, they only restricted the Han majority, the ethnic majority's fertility.
01:40:15.000But in areas with a lot of Han, the minority ethnic groups, they also had reductions in their fertility.
01:40:21.000But when they were themselves in the majority, they did not see these reductions.
01:40:25.000Which 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.
01:40:34.000It's a massive social thing, and it's very sad that people have decided they want fewer kids.
01:40:58.000Yeah, it's possibly more than that of the extremes in selecting in.
01:41:01.000The reason being, well, at Harvard, so if you were a white student with a legacy, legacy gives you a huge boost.
01:41:08.000That was about equivalent to a black student in general.
01:41:11.000And if you're a black student with legacy status, you are almost guaranteed to get in if you have anywhere near acceptable academics.
01:41:17.000You basically got a free pass if you had reasonable qualifications to get in for a person in your cohort, which is pretty wild.
01:41:26.000What would be the average test score that a white person would have to do versus a black person?
01:41:30.000The white students who were getting in were getting nearly perfect scores.
01:41:33.000They were getting upwards, like upwards of 1550 usually in these recent cohorts.
01:41:37.000And 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.
01:41:46.000And so many rejected white students had higher scores and higher qualifications among allotted dimensions.
01:41:52.000Like they tended to have higher GPAs, tended to do more extracurriculars, they tended to be evaluated by alumni a little better.
01:41:57.000Harvard had three interviews, and two of them were with alumni, and one of them didn't exist.
01:42:02.000It was the personality evaluation by the office, you know, the admissions office.
01:42:08.000And it basically was an arbitrary way for them to say that Asians had bad personalities so they could justify rejecting them.
01:42:14.000But the alumni said Asians had better personalities on average than white or black applicants, and so they should have been invited more.
01:42:22.000So then, what would you recommend as the way to proceed with Harvard?
01:42:27.000I don't believe what we're doing right now is the correct move to start off.
01:42:31.000Like, we really should not just be taking away all their funding.
01:42:34.000The 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.
01:42:44.000Because the fact that we're pulling research funding is devastating.
01:42:48.000Harvard has their hands in a lot of very, very important research.
01:42:56.000But like a lot of the stuff we know about bulk.
01:42:58.000Right, so explain to our audience, what do you mean that colleges are making drugs?
01:43:02.000Oh, so they do a lot of the rudimentary discovery.
01:43:04.000So for example, to bring back to GLP1s, they were discovered based on some guy's weird interest in Gila monster spit.
01:43:10.000Like Gila monsters, the big lizards that you can, that like will paralyze you.
01:43:13.000He 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.
01:43:21.000And they do that basic research, the basic fundamentals of a lot of things that lead to stuff down the line.
01:43:27.000Why can't the pharmaceutical companies fund that themselves?
01:43:38.000They're actually below the cost of capital right now, so they're not a good investment.
01:43:41.000We'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.
01:43:49.000We had a bit of a reversion due to the initial glut of funding that came when COVID started.
01:43:54.000But otherwise, it's just been a dagring a lot.
01:43:57.000It's been a decline that's continuous for many, many years.
01:44:03.000actually making discoveries is really tough.
01:44:05.000And if we don't fund the basic research, we're just not going to find a lot of stuff.
01:44:08.000Like 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.
01:44:31.000And it turned into something down the line.
01:44:34.000The researcher generally doesn't profit directly from it, but other people who learn from them and learn from their mistakes sometimes will.
01:44:42.000What percentage of Harvard research would you say is valuable?
01:44:46.000Practically everything in the hard sciences.
01:47:05.000I 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.
01:48:12.000It ensures the drugs are good without imposing massive costs on people who are developing gene therapies and when they want to run a trial.
01:48:19.000We can also make it easier to recruit people.
01:48:22.000For some reason, we've decided to restrict recruitment.
01:48:25.000I 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.
01:48:32.000Like there was a health economist in the past who said a hospital bed built is a hospital bed filled.
01:48:39.000And the idea there was if you make some new medical resource, people just use it.
01:48:44.000So 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?
01:48:56.000And of course they're going to say no.
01:48:57.000So too many areas of too few medical practices.
01:49:00.000And these sorts of laws are, they impact everything.
01:52:07.000Some company fails and someone else harvests it later.
01:52:11.000Royvant, 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.
01:52:23.000And that has worked really well for him.
01:52:26.000But 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.
01:53:10.000It was until some researcher pushed them really, really hard and continuously, they weren't going to do it.
01:53:18.000You 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.
01:53:24.000But 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.
01:53:33.000That is not what Bitcoin was built for.
01:53:45.000No 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.
01:53:52.000This is how it was intended by the original creators of Bitcoin.
01:53:55.000Peer-to-peer money, free from centralized control, free from surveillance, and free from arbitrary seizure.
01:54:01.000So 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.
01:54:45.000We have a data collection mechanism that already exists and does allow you to gather the requisite data to find everybody red-handed.
01:54:51.000You can catch every university inflagrante delicto if you force them to report all the necessary outcomes to indicate if they're discriminating.
01:55:00.000And we can already do this through an existing system.
01:55:03.000It would take no extra effort on our part, and it would just put a little cost on the universities.
01:56:15.000Someone needs to tell him, hey, reminder, sign this order right away.
01:56:19.000and we can catch them all, people will go out of their...
01:56:23.000Republicans don't seem to know this, but data collection is the way to win a lot of political battles.
01:56:29.000Liberals have known this for many years.
01:56:30.000Democrats, 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.
01:56:40.000They 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.
01:56:46.000They wanted to be able to sue for all sorts of things.
01:56:48.000They mandate you, me, and everybody else reporting weird data that they can use in like citizen action.
01:56:55.000A citizen, a law firm, somebody can go and file that case, make that money.
01:56:59.000They can make social change through torts, through the legal system.
01:57:04.000A 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.
01:57:23.000It makes it very difficult to actually get a lot done in crime.
01:57:27.000Like, you can't tell when something works.
01:57:30.000And 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.
01:57:35.000If you want to have adaptive policy where we can rapidly change our direction on things.
01:57:39.000Yeah, we only get the murder numbers for the past year about a year later.
01:57:43.000Yeah, and that's not efficient at all.
01:57:44.000Some people have tried to create live indices that give you a week delay, but it's just not very effective.
01:57:53.000We 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.
01:58:06.000So 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?
01:58:13.000You want to know, is it because they died?
01:58:16.000And 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.
01:58:25.000But you can't because the death index is so slow.
01:58:28.000What is the, we've got to go rapid fire because we have another.
01:58:31.000What is the number one proven way to stop crime?
01:59:12.000So 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.
01:59:19.000We started putting crazies in asylums.
01:59:20.000We started putting wackadoo violent people in jail.
02:01:53.000Well, 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.
02:01:59.000They're not allowed to because they're a felon.
02:03:17.000They 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.
02:03:24.000Like the government has legally the ability to say, hey, that paper cannot be behind a paywall.
02:03:39.000And they should say, you cannot spend public funds, like your research funds, on article publication fees.
02:03:45.000If 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.
02:03:52.000The add-on from these journals is almost nothing.
02:04:12.000I will show you the exact details on this afterwards, but we have a lot of things that are written in here.
02:04:16.000Basically, 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.
02:04:27.000That should have been done a while ago.
02:04:28.000There's some stuff at the NIH that should be going on at this.
02:04:31.000They are going to remove, for example, their one-year embargo on their research.
02:04:36.000There needs to be effort done on making data transparent.
02:04:40.000So papers published with funds from the government, they need to immediately be made to require all their code and the providing of data.
02:04:50.000They need to open up a lot of data that is out there that is arbitrary.
02:05:18.000Some 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.
02:06:20.000The 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.
02:06:28.000Asians do a little bit better, and about 0.66 between Hispanics and whites or Hispanics do a little bit worse.
02:06:34.000And that's just how it's been for the, I mean, as long as we've measured it.
02:06:38.000In 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.
02:06:57.000Genetic engineering is the most likely means.
02:07:00.000Embryo 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.
02:07:07.000They're the only things we really know about.
02:07:08.000Remind our audience what a standard deviation is.
02:07:10.000A standard deviation is going from the median to about like the 67 percentile or so.
02:08:13.000A lot of it has to do with selection over time due to socioeconomic stuff.
02:08:18.000So for example, in the not so distant past, people who were a lot better off had a lot more surviving kids.
02:08:25.000They 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.
02:08:50.000And the upper classes over many generations would replace the lower classes.
02:08:53.000This is Gregory Clark's thesis for why people became, why we had Industrial Revolution.
02:08:58.000We 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.
02:09:08.000Why do you think people get so worked up on IQ differences?
02:09:18.000They refuse to believe in intelligence differences unless somebody's like a clear genius like John von Neumann.
02:09:23.000They hate the idea of being lesser or anything like that or being perceived in certain ways.
02:09:29.000They attach so much emotional valence to it when it should just be a simple thing.
02:09:33.000We can do a lot of policies that reduce the importance of IQ differences.
02:09:38.000Like 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.
02:09:49.000So 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.
02:10:00.000Fewer serious side effects in that county.
02:10:02.000And there are a lot of policy options like this that allow us to make those differences less significant.
02:10:07.000The 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.
02:10:17.000Yeah, and so, I mean, again, I don't even have much more to add to that.
02:10:20.000I just, I mean, Douglas Murray wrote about this extensively.
02:10:24.000Is 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?
02:10:31.000They say it's not true, it's a hoax, it's a scam.
02:10:33.000I think we're actually missing out on a lot of the policy experiments we could be using here.
02:10:37.000So you can very simply go out to a hospital and gate the Wi-Fi with a short little optional test or whatever.
02:10:45.000And you can learn about a population of Medicaid users or Medicare people.
02:10:49.000You can learn about cognitive decline in simple ways if you just normalize testing.
02:10:53.000But this stuff is so taboo that it's hard to implement these simple data collection programs or anything that could result from those programs.
02:11:00.000It's like we've cut off a tech tree because we're afraid.
02:11:04.000I meant Charles Murray, not Douglas Murray.
02:12:15.000So 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.
02:12:20.000And I have a little timer after I've made just simple Python scripts.
02:12:23.000I 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.
02:12:30.000And I think that's a pretty good way to manage my time.
02:12:33.000It 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.
02:12:43.000And I don't make any notes because I think that's cheating.
02:12:45.000But 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.
02:12:55.000But 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.
02:13:24.000So I'm going to give a really, it's going to sound odd, but I think deregulation is underexplored.
02:13:32.000I 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.
02:13:36.000They don't think about the function of bureaucrats or how they work or how to reform our systems or anything.
02:13:41.000And 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.
02:15:08.000Probably very large, not in the next 10 years, but after that, yes.
02:15:10.000I 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.
02:16:16.000I think private property is actually essential to social organization.
02:16:19.000I 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.
02:16:28.000It will definitely be a war on Scarcity.
02:16:30.000It'll make it so we live in an era of abundance that is unprecedented.
02:16:34.000But 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.