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

Episode Date: July 1, 2025

Substack statistics blogger Cremieux has built a big following online for his takes on medicine, college admissions, and more — all while operating under a pseudonym. Now, Cremieux is going public on the Charlie Kirk Show with a sweeping interview on almost every controversial topic imaginable, from IQ tests to what health supplements work and which ones are nonsense. Cremieux gives his statistically-informed takes on anti-depressants, Ozempic, Vitamin D, and far, far more. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here live from the Bitcoin.com studio. Craymu on the show. You're going to love this conversation or you're going to hate this conversation. He says stuff that you might not like, you might not agree with, but it was a fun spirited conversation. He's not a fan of a lot of the maja stuff. Worth you listening to, taking notes. If you don't like it, email me freedom at Charlie Kirk.com.

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, but I think you guys want intellectual stimulation, you guys want to be challenged. So I think you'll love it. Email us as always freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to our podcast. Become a member today, members.charliekirk.com that is members.charliekirk.com and get involved at turning point USA at tpusa.com that is tpusa.com.

Okay, everybody. It is the event of the summer. Coming up in Tampa, Florida, it's an event unlike any other. It is our Student Action Summit. All ages are welcome. It's SAS2025.com. We have Pete Hegseth coming, Christine Elm, Tucker Carlson,

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Gold Investments at noblegoldinvestments.com. That is noblegoldinvestments.com. It's where I buy all of my gold. Go to noblegoldinvestments.com. Okay, everybody. We're going to love this conversation. Joining us is Cray Moo, who is a bioinformatician. That's right. What is that? So I basically just make software for geneticists. It's pretty boring. It's like being a glorified software engineer. How did you get into that? That's interesting.

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 you can do better? And I go, oh, of course I can. So I switched my field entirely over to working on that. And so you have a lot of hot takes. So you're known as Cremu online. Who is Cremu? So some people call him the Abraham Lincoln of France. 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. 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. 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. So you have, we have a lot to discuss here, and by the way, I love reading your stuff online. It's very interesting. Thank you. It's provocative, it's contrarian, and so you are picking apart our supplement stuff here. So you are a bioinformatician,

and so for example, let's say someone's taking vitamin D. You think that it's probably either overrated or not necessary, is that right? Almost certainly overrated. Unless you have osteomalacia, unless you have brittle bones, Oh no. Probably nothing is gonna happen. So, but people say it's good for mood.

They do. Or depression, there's no correlation to that? There are correlations and that's the thing. There are tons of correlations. Why does it not determine if that causal? That's the wonderful mystery. So we know that people who are healthy tend to have lots of vitamin D They have high levels and people were unhealthy have low levels 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. There's no effect of the treatment. There's just really nothing there. 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. You see nothing. There's just nothing there. For the overwhelming majority of people, there's no effect. It's good that we fortify our food

because we can prevent osteomalacia, the weak bones, brittle bones and stuff, but otherwise you're just not gonna get much benefit. Do you think it has, does it help with serotonin production? Maybe in the limit, that's the thing. If you go down to people who are very, very deficient, which is a very small minority, then yes. So if you're like an old person in a home that hasn that's the thing. If you go down to people who are very, very deficient, which is a very small minority, then yes. So if you're like an old person in a home that hasn't seen the sun or has a restricted diet.

Yeah, you'll have to find people who are really weird in terms of, you know, relative to the general population. But for most people, you won't get any benefit. Interesting. 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? Oh yeah, there have been tons of studies. There are hundreds of trials on vitamin D, and they seem to do, it seems to consistently show practically nothing, 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. Do you think it's because

they have healthier lifestyles and therefore it's the core? Yeah I think so. So they're outside more and exercise something that you would say is good? Absolutely. Okay so at least we agree on that. Absolutely. How about sun exposure? Probably good. I mean you need it. There's great data showing actually know a lot of people in the Bay who they get lamps in their homes to emulate the the sunlight so is there studies about sun exposure there are you okay so but by getting sun exposure you might get vitamin D which might just be good yeah an effect of something else that is that's right positive yep it could be something else that you're getting 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 so it's fascinating yeah it's kind of not even for testosterone production Not really. No, if you want you heard that before I'm sure though, right? Oh, I've heard it tons. Yeah, it's funny There are all these claims and there's a lot of hype a huge amount of hype during COVID for example people were saying Oh vitamin D is going to save you from COVID and No, no, you say it interrupts the cytokosine storm or something. I'm gonna get all the words wrong. Cytokine storm.

Yeah, sorry, I'm gonna get all the stuff wrong. Yeah, so like your immune system going into overdrive, they say it disrupts that, no, that's not a preserve. How about zinc? Zinc is great, you need zinc. But if you supplement a bunch, I don't think you're gonna get very much, unless you're sick, in which case,

take it right as soon as you start feeling sick, and it might help a little bit. There is limited stuff on this, but there's still something, there's some indication. And it's not really going to hurt, so why not supplement it? It's also very cheap.

So yeah, and you can get zinc and meat, but I mean, at stake, right? You can get pretty much everything you need in meat. Yeah, so you're not necessarily a vegan proponent. No, not really. I am a big proponent of lab-grown meat. I advise a lab-grown meat company. Really?

Yeah, I like lab-grown meat and all that 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, like it's very expensive. 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. Like Omega-3s and CoQ10 and Vitamin B. Absolutely. Are those the three major ones? Amongst many others. Yeah iron iron is they lack creatinine creatine they lack Taurine and like they just lack seemingly everything. Yeah, I was gonna ask I'm sorry to interrupt but you are a believer in the amino acid benefits, right? So taurine lysine are, do those have potential benefits?

Or would you get them in your standardized diet? You'll generally get them from your diet, yeah. And the thing is, if you have a good diet, you're very unlikely to be getting a lot from different supplements. There are limited exceptions. So, I think actually a good heuristic is, do bodybuilders use it? And if the answer is, yeah, the biggest bodybuilders use it, then it probably is a good supplement like testosterone will help you build a lot of muscle. Sure. Creatine will genuinely help you put on muscle. Creatine has

cognitive benefits as well. But especially for people who are vegans, vegetarians, who have restrictive diets because they lack that stuff and it seems to help them a lot. For people who have normal diets, normal omnivorous diets, they tend not to get very much benefit from creatine. How about resveratrol? No. Why? Oh man, those studies just did not hold up. There was a fad for a long time in the anti-aging community. Goodness, there was even some fraud there.

Tell me more. I don't really know too much about it because it was really before my time. It's still hyped though. It is still hyped, which is baffling to me, but it's considered like one of those cautionary tales about hype nowadays Is there any downside? Not really so just it's one of the like a lot of supplements. They don't have real big downsides They just have no upsides so the downside is you pay for something that doesn't do anything So but but the argument for resveratrol again. I'm just a layman here

Is that you that that's you know they hype red and grapes. Isn't it just an accelerated antioxidant, which is good for you? Antioxidants can be very good for you. And that's actually one of the funny things about seed oils, they contain antioxidants, which helps with the supposed oxidation effects, which- So are you pro-seed oil? For heart health, yeah, I am.

The trials do tend to say that ASCVD, atherosclerotic, coronary vascular, like heart disease, is helped by switching from animal fats to plant fats. Don't want to do that myself, but it does help people. So if you're at very, very high risk, I would suggest going to seed oils instead of animal fats. Yeah. Do you think the general population would benefit more from tallow than from some seed oil? They would probably be hurt by tallow on average. Tell us why.

Well, the reason is saturated fats are quite bad. They're very bad. In fact, the hypothesis that LDL causes heart disease is held up incredibly well. Oh, so you're a cholesterol truther. Yeah, I mean, all that is in support time. It's actually interesting. So a lot of the drugs we know about today.

Statins. Statins, PCSK9 inhibitors, azetimibe, various different drugs that we use for handling cholesterol, we have great studies of like, that are based on how we found them. Like the PCSK9 inhibitors specifically, they were found in these French families. They had a mutation that like knocked out production of it and they have, well, it did the opposite. They had very, very high cholesterol. Or sorry, no, well, they did the opposite. They had very, very high cholesterol.

Or sorry, no, I'm thinking of the French families. They had low cholesterol. And it was discovered some large, like almost 11% proportion of African Americans had a variant that dropped their cholesterol levels very low. And then a smaller proportion of whites had another variant that did like a smaller effect. And all these interesting variants related to PCSK9

had meaningful effects. And the interesting thing is we can just put the product of that gene in a drug, give it to people, their LDL goes down, their all-cause mortality improves, they become more likely to survive, 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. So you can compare families over time. You can say, oh, you, the parent generation, didn't have statins or PCSK9 inhibitors or azetamide or anything to lower your LDL, and like a sixth of them were dying by age 40

from heart conditions. 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. They're not dying from preventable heart conditions. And it's just very clear evidence like that. Like it's nice little natural experiments. We also have wonderful trials and we have more genetic epidemiology stuff too. 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. The statin, it works through the HMG CoA reductase gene, produces an enzyme that breaks down to the HMG CoA

and then mevalonotate, I'm probably mispronouncing, and that's how you, if you block that pathway, if you reduce the function there, you get lower LDL. And naturally, some people have way less function there, so they effectively have like a low dose, and sometimes a very high dose, statin for their whole life life and we have long-term cohorts where you can go and look oh this guy's totally healthy Trump Trump he's taking statins I know I'm saying yeah no but I mean you you wrote about this didn't you with him

taking statins yeah it's interesting I mean he should be taking statins I feel like most old nobody's cholesterol is amazing because of a statin well I'm saying I'm affirming your hypothesis, though. Absolutely. I don't think it's because of his diet. No, it probably isn't. He has a diet that I've heard is very high in saturated fat. I only know he's taking statins because he disclosed his medical records to the world,

which is awesome. I love the... Are there any downsides to the statins? Not really. People have proposed a lot of downsides, but the genetic epidemiology stuff gives us very long-term evidence that there's really no harms. When people proposed, oh, there will be these downsides from observational cohorts where they have mental issues and then you look in the trials and it's like, okay, that doesn't

pop up ever so we're going to, so that probably isn't real. And then you look at the people who have naturally very, very low LDL, they're also fine. They have no mental issues. They don't have any lower IQs. They don't have any, anything wrong. They don't have anything wrong with them compared to people who are otherwise similar. So with LDL, correct me if I'm wrong, isn't cholesterol in the sequence of creating testosterone?

It is, yeah. Steroid hormones are made from cholesterol. You do need some of it. So but then would chronically low cholesterol brought to you by seed oils or whatever result in lower testosterone? So, that's the thing. LDL? No. You could probably get your LDL as low as you want. You'll be fine. HDL? HDL you want that to be fairly high. And so LDL, have you read the book The Cholesterol Myth? I haven't. Yeah, I'm not an expert here, but there is a growing community that thinks the cholesterol fixation is over. I'm sure you've heard this.

I have heard this a bunch, yeah. There's a lot of people who believe it. Again, I'm not an expert here. I'm just... Yeah, no worries. I'm throwing it up against you. Yeah. So the conciliance of evidence just says, no, it's fine.

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 get a lot better. You'll be a lot better off in all these different ways. And there's all these mechanisms. But in the past few years, I've given a lot less shrift to mechanisms because they mechanisms are not a substitute for the statistical evidence. I need to see in a trial saying like, you take, give the person's drug, we do this thing, your mechanism plays out and the person has the effect you expect. But in the trials, if it all shows the opposite of what they predict, then I just think they're wrong. 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 there has been decade. What would you say to that? Run more trials, fund more trials, have them done by more or look into them Correct to see if they were can what's right? What red flags do you look for when you look through trials? Well, I mean the most one of the obvious ones a small sample sizes when you have very small trial And you have big conclusions from it That is a very big red flag when you have massive effect sizes like that are very unrealistic for example Cohen's D of five that's a very very large effect size like a Cohen's D of 5. That's a very, very large effect size. Like,

a Cohen's D of 5 is like the difference in taste preferences for samples given ice cream flavored like poo and flavored like vanilla. It's a very large difference. And there are studies that purport to show effects that large, and I feel like that's just not real. And in virtually every case, it isn't real. There are very few things with effects that massive. That traumatic. Yeah. And when you see that in a trial, that just big red flag.

An effect like that is like, there was actually a funny one a few years ago about country music causing suicides. And I was like, can't be real. The effect size is like 3.5, which is again, enormous. And if it were true, every Dolly Parton concert, I'm borrowing something from here, from a friend, would be like a mass suicide. People would just be killing themselves.

So when they say stuff like that, I don't believe it. I tend to throw it out. Well, I can't stand country music, so send me that study. So, methylfolate. Folic acid fortification of food, very good. Methylfolate supplementation for adults. Any neurological benefit? You probably won't get very much.

If there's something, it's going to be quite small. But the wonderful thing is folic acid fortification of food has been very good for reducing the rates of birth defects. Fewer neurotubule birth defects, babies coming out disabled at birth, that's wonderful. And all we have to do is change that eye a little bit. Sammy, S-A-M-E, which is S-A-D-N-N-S-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E-N-S-H-E How about oregano or saffron? Oh, nothing. Nothing? Yeah.

So oil and oregano doesn't kill any bacteria? No, it's not really going to help you. 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. How about a daily olive oil shot? This became pretty popular after Starbucks started promoting it. I saw a bunch of this and it just tasted awful. Yes.

I had it a few times because I was like, I'll try the different drinks they have. Couldn't stand it, but was happy to see, doesn't actually do anything either. So you would say that olive oil supplementation, no benefit. Yeah, for most people it's gonna be nothing. The thing is, most of the conclusions you get in trials are gonna be like these population representative samples

or samples you get from a hospital of a condition or something like that. Like they're selected in some way or they try to be unselected and then they go, nothing for everybody. But there might be some subpopulations that could benefit from pretty much any supplement. How do you, how do we say, so I have two questions.

How do you long-term study preventative supplementation? Meaning, I'm just curious. Number two, have you factored out genetic specificity? For example, there's something called the MFer gene, the MFTR gene mutation, that methylfolate is supposed to help. Yeah, is there any, so take it one by one. How do you long-term do trials

for preventative supplementation? And then we'll go to the second question. For that you just have to run a long trial. 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. That's really all you can do. 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, that's about all you can do.

So the study designs are all pretty limited. They're all just long-term things. The other thing with genetic specificity, so for general population trials, you randomize them. You run an RCT, that means you have one group getting a placebo or an alternative treatment, and one group, like standard care. 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. Sure. So you give them placebo, whatever, and you give them the active drug. 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. But if you want to stratify that way, you have to go ahead and test them beforehand. 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? And then you see, did they have larger or smaller effects? Often when you do it post-hoc, you'll have too small of a sample to actually find very much. You'll have low statistical power. So you'll end up with conclusions that are iffy because they're just weak.

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. Is there any truth to the fact that certain gene mutations

might make you more likely to benefit from certain supplements? Absolutely, massive, massive. Actually, it's interesting, statins, that certain gene mutations might make you more likely to benefit from certain supplements? Absolutely. Massive, massive. Actually, it's interesting, statins, about 30% of people, it's a very large portion, get myopathy from statins. They feel weak.

And this is so common that tons of people have gone through heart disease because they prefer not to feel weak. And for some people, it's actually debilitatingly weak. They can become incredibly weak due to the action of just a few genes or just a few mutations. For example, in the HMGCR gene, that is where we know the mechanism of statins works from,

and we have treatments now, well, they're being developed, they're not actually out yet, where you can interrupt on that pathway from HMG-CoA reductase to mobile onotate, 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. So there's massive genetic variation

that augments the effects of drugs. 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. Usually the genetic moderation is modest.

It's very small. In rare cases, it's serious side effects. 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. So yeah. Are we doing, are we doing gene testing before it's prescribing pharmaceuticals?

Generally not, because for most things we prescribe, there's no reason to, or there's not a big reason to, 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. They'll be on it for a while, they'll get their treatment, and then they'll go, oh, this isn't working for me, doc. I need to go on something else. And then you switch them. That's how it's been handled. But if we can predict ahead of time, which we can do now, we can actually start doing that. We just need to get more

people genotyped and then have their doctors be able to learn how to use that information. Private student loan debt in America totals over $300 billion. About $45 billion of that is labeled as distressed. Why ReFi refinances distressed or defaulted private student loans that others will not touch. Why ReFi can reduce your monthly payment and guarantees interest rates under 6% ensuring affordability and financial relief. Go to whyrefi.com. That is y-r-e-f-y.com. Do you have a co-borrower? Why ReFi can get them released from the loan and you can give mom or dad a break. Just call 888-WYREFI34, that is 888-WYREFI34. And may not be available in all 50 states.

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What is causing the... Are people actually more anxious and depressed or is it a sampling error? It's an interesting form of error. So a lot of it is social contagion in the sense that nowadays people say they're more depressed than they are. There's some evidence in the US for a real increase in depression and this has to do with suicide rates. Yeah, you can't fake that.

Yeah, you can't fake that. That's not a fakeable thing. But in other countries you don't see the same increase. So it's curious. Like we see the same introduction of cell phones which has been proposed like a reason why teen girls are getting depressed but we don't see the rise in suicide rates so it's interesting now when you actually go out and measure depression using like a standardized questionnaire you'll see that people

respond more aggressively nowadays than they used to so they'll say oh I'm very depressed 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. But they've changed how they respond. 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. So you say, oh, I have autism, I've self-diagnosed.

I'm neurodivergent. I'm neurodivergent, yes. People say this stuff all the time now, but it's just not based on a lot. And a lot of times, it's interesting, you can go and profile these people who are purely self-diagnosed and they are very different from the people who are clinically diagnosed. So for example, for autism, those people don't really have social deficits. The people who are merely self-diagnosed without a clinical diagnosis. They differ radically from the people who actually, like, had a doctor go-

Or bang in their head against a wall or something. Exactly. So would you say that depression is a growing problem in the West or is it overblown? Considerably overblown. 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. That kind of helps us narrow down on why it happens.

It's not going to be the cell phones because they have the same thing there. Could be something about their social environment that is different in terms of- Do benzodiazepines work? Yeah. You do? I think so. Yeah. Well, I mean, tons of different drugs work.

SSRIs work. The thing is that they have side effects. They don't work for everybody. In fact, for the heterogeneity and how much how well those work across the population is incredibly significant. If they're working, why are people still depressed? There are other reasons to be depressed. Okay. Yeah. I mean, so you don't expect it to cure the whole thing. Like the effect size of a common SSRI might be 0.3 D, which is a modest but real sizable effect that will help a lot of people.

It will help some people to not kill themselves. But for the average person, it might just not do very much. And the thing is, the effect size is very small in general for people who don't have depression. So, what is that, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor? So why can't you just get 5-HTP and tryptophan from your diet? What would the difference between the two be? It probably doesn't actually act

along the same mechanism of action. So tell me why. Well, a lot of these supplements, you take them and you excrete them in your urine. They're not processed. Right, but if you take turkey, like, say you eat a bunch of turkey, right, which is a tryptophanic agent

which helps create serotonin, right? Different type of tryptophan. Is that right? Yeah, in that case, it'll be processed very, very differently. It will not lead to the same sorts of effects. To the production of serotonin. Yeah.

So it's actually a funny thing. 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. Sure. This is really common with vegans and omega-3s. They'll go, oh, I'm taking omega-3s. And it's like, wait, no, you're not taking icospeninoic acid or dexacanoic acid or arachidonic acid.

You are taking some linoleic, alpha-linoleic acid. You're taking stuff that doesn't convert to what you actually need in humans. It might be in fish, but you're not a fish. And it's very hard to get it from seaweed and stuff. The bio conversion to- Algae. Algae, yes, very poor bioavailability.

More bioavailability in pregnant women, but that's just like, not that great. So then let's say depression. What other non-pharmacological pharmaceutical interventions help with depression? Would you say community, friends, exercise, sun exposure? Yeah, socializing. Being around people is good.

It can help. It can especially help you with the most risky behaviors, the suicides and everything, are the really, really big thing that helps with. Having a community is very important. Like joining clubs, doing drives on campuses where they say, like, oh, come join this club and have some community and all that,

that can be quite helpful for people who otherwise don't. Because if you're allowed to wallow, you might do dangerous things. We have some interesting experiments from in Israel. Suicides were way less common. If they started confiscating soldiers' guns on the weekends, they would say, oh, don't go home alone and all this. And people who are like in traditional communities, not the Hilaim, they more often had those connections or whatnot, and the effect is smaller for them. So you see, if you let people wallow, they'll do bad things.

And so the Zoloft, Xanax, would you also say? They work. The thing is, they're not panaceas. They're not miracle cures for anything. All these drugs work in a limited sense where they don't work for everybody. They don't work perfectly. But they are going to save lives if we prescribe them to some level. Do you think there's anything troubling that one out of four teenage girls are on one of these drugs? Yeah, I do. I think it's overprescribed. So tell us why.

Well, for one, we know that genetic editorgeniety where we can sort of predict if something will affect you. Some people just shouldn't be on certain drugs, and they're gonna be taking them long term because they're getting a placebo effect, and it's like, oh, that's just causing the downsides for you. You are not a responder to this, and we should have been able to predict that, but we aren't there yet with sequencing everybody

and getting them this information. If we did more of that, that'd be great. We would be able to tell them that ahead of time, get them on the right drugs, help them to tailor their drug dosing, the regimens, everything like that, but we just don't. It's a really new thing, so it's no surprise it's not been really massively adopted yet. Do you think we're over-prescribing drugs in general? Yeah, I think we do for a lot of things.

Which ones in particular? Oh my goodness. I think antidepressants were a good example. The thing is, I also think they're under-prescriptions. So I think we are under-prespressants were a good example. The thing is, I also think there are underprescriptions. So I think we are underprescribing statins, for example. Some drugs are not available enough because they don't have a generic form. So Trilogy is an inhaler that would help a lot of people. There are-

What is it, Boudinicide or what is it? It's a number of things. 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 different respiratory conditions. So it's an oral steroid? Yeah, it is.

Yeah, it's like Budenacite. Yeah, exactly. I think that's in it, but I'm thinking there are other things. That's the most popular oral inhaler. 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, we should be switching people over to newer medications, but it's difficult because of costs and everything, like stuff, in America, we tend to pay a lot

for drugs, because we introduced them really early and aggressively, like a six month wait for drugs invented and drug goes to market might be six years in the UK. 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. Fascinating.

Yeah. 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, too. What else are we under-prescribing? Well, I think we're under-prescribing GLP-1s. That's a big one. That's a big contemporary thing.

Ozempic? Yeah. Is there any downsides to Ozempic? There are downsides in the form of nausea. That's a transient one. That's a big contemporary. Ozempic? Yeah. Are there any, is there any downsides to Ozempic? There are downsides in the form of nausea. That's a very, that's a transient side effect for most. Does the food waste in your stomach? No, no, it doesn't.

That's a weird myth. I don't know how that came about. But when you have gastroparesis, you still have to, you know, excrete it at some point. It has to, you have to defecate. It's not going to just get stuck there. Yeah, they say like rots in your bowels or something. Yeah, that's wild. How is GLP-1 different than a semaglutide injection or is it the same thing?

Same thing. Okay, got it. Semaglutide is a GLP-1 RA injection. Yeah. The way they work is neural brainstem agonism of the GLP-1 receptors and now with the newer drugs, they also do GIP, which binds to a similar area in the brainstem 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. And the mechanisms of action are so interesting to me

because it feels like they treat practically everything that is modern American chronic disease. Like, oh, you have weird insulin spiking, you have a lot of bizarre problems like pre-diabetes, you have metabolic syndrome, and it seems to act on practically all of that. Like for most pre-diabetics, they get normal glycemia by the end of the trial, and that's like it's like 96% most recent trial I looked at for terzepatide. I think it's 95% or so for semaglutide. It's just incredible. Like it's devastating for chronic disease.

It basically rolls it back and the side effects are mostly transient like the gastroparesis is not one that tends to stick with you for a long time. And Zofran can help. I'm not sure about that. You're not a Zofran fan? I haven't looked into that. Well Zofran is a great anti-nagia. It is great for Nagia but I don't know if it specifically helps with that.

All I know is I take Zofran if I ever gets the stomach flu that works Well thing with gastroparesis is that it's also an inhibitor it blocks the serotonin receptors in your brain interesting which I mean for whatever reason that blocks the nausea the the vomiting response ah I could see that helping with vomiting, but I'm curious about I don't know if it helps with the gastric emptying stuff I had no idea because the reason is the gastric emptying does slow down your uptake of drugs. The classic test they use, the proxy test, is they give you some aspirin and they see how long it takes you to like excrete it. So there's so many questions and you're super smart and know this better than I do. Would you

agree, I want to go down that path further, but let me take a step back. Would you agree that we're sicker than ever? Yeah I would. Okay so that so you agree I want to go down that path further, but let me take a step back Would you agree that we're sicker than ever? Yeah, I would okay, so so that so you agree with Bobby Kennedy's beginning hypothesis Absolutely, I agree with Bobby on a lot of things about this, but yeah Why do you think we're sicker than ever obesity is mostly it it is almost entirely the fact I totally agree so fat. Why are we fat? We eat a little bit more than we used to the amount that you need to People to eat more compared to 1980. So in 1980 to now we've gotten a lot fatter. The amount that everybody would have to eat every day to explain the entire rise is about one McDonald's double cheeseburger a day. So the

argument that Maha people would make, and I'm not I am NOT suited to defend this beyond the statement, is that the food is become more less satiating Through genetic modification. Have you heard this argument? I have heard it, but it's not true. There's absolutely nothing to it Then why did we not eat as much in the 80s? We didn't have as much variety in food That's a really great thing. You ever heard somebody go Oh, I'm full but I think I have another stomach for a piece of cheesecake or something. I hear it all the time. Yeah. Whenever you have variety, you can eat a little bit more. Wonderful nutritionist,

Stefan Gaianet, has did a great book, The Hungry Brain. He is a wonderful epidemiologist in general for all this obesity-related stuff. And he talks about this a bunch. He goes, you know, the mechanisms of society, they don't really work when you have a huge amount of variety in everything. They, it's very easy to really work when you have a huge amount of variety and everything they It's very easy to keep eating when you have all sorts of crap to eat and everything is so hyper palatable It's way more palatable than it used to be everything. What do you mean by that? Everything is better. Yeah, it does. Yeah, and we process food in a way that makes for delicious tasting food Even if it doesn't have direct

Consequences, it's still you'll be eating more and you'll be getting fatter. So the, so you think it's a quantity problem, not a quality problem. Absolutely. Absolutely. Do you buy into the standard American mythology that when I go to Europe, I'm able to eat more and feel better? No, I don't. Not at all. I think people are just walking around more and eating less generally. So Joe Rogan said on a podcast recently that when he eats pasta in America it feels like sludge when he eats pasta in Italy it feels like he could run three mouths.

Is that just him being on vacation? Probably a placebo effect yeah enjoying the vacation enjoying the nice Italian air. But if millions of Americans feel that way they're just... I think they're just fooling themselves and the part of it is they see the mean. Tell us why make the case. I think part of it is a social contagion of it. There's no real reason for this to happen. So why is it happening? I think it's because somebody said it and other people are like,

oh my God, I feel the same way. It's kind of like with many conditions, like the autism self diagnosis that go, oh, you like trains? I really love trains too. I think I might have that. I think I feel the exact same way. And then they just psych themselves out.

But if you were to give them Like I have a great Italian chef come in with his ingredients I let him 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. I don't know this trial. No, I don't has it ever been measured No, but they should I think it'd be funny This has been no interest in it because the argument is what what? And I do want to talk about glyphosate, but the argument is what? That they don't spray their food the same way we do? Is that the... They use glyphosate.

But there's some pesticides they don't use or something. I don't know. They could be a lot of things. What is the case they make? Well, it depends on who you're talking to. There's a lot of variation because some people know, for example, that like some point they might believe has been debunked, so they go on to some other thing. And they want to maintain the belief. That Italian pasta sits better? Yeah, so they come up with different reasons.

And you push them back on that argument, and then this argument, and that argument. You keep going through all the different arguments. And they just are still insistent, oh, no, it's better. Is there any merit to the argument that our food is poisoning us? In the sense that it's very palatable and you eat a bunch of it, yes.

But in the sense that there are all these toxins in it, very likely not. So you say that if you eat a good diet, what is a good diet? So a good diet that is nutritionally complete will probably today include meat. Unfortunately, vegans, vegetarians are just going to have to deal with some insufficiencies. It's practically inevitable. There are some things you just cannot get.

I totally agree. And you mean chicken, fish, and steak? Yeah, chicken, fish, steak, especially fish. I really love fish. I'm a big believer in fish. So we totally agree. Absolutely. I think fish is like the secret super weapon of the West. Yeah. And I love steak, but it's not as healthful as fish fish is a little bit better I eat fish every day good now is do you believe you do you have concern about mercury poisoning? Somewhat I don't like to eat swordfish multiple times a month or Tuna a little bit less if you have that done with aquaculture nowadays, it's totally fine. Really? Yeah That's that's actually a great way to increase production And reduce costs. What you mean farm farm raise? Yeah, exactly. Is there a difference between wild caught and farm raised salmon?

Yeah, less of the natural pollutants. You'll find out there in nature. There are tons of things. Oh really? So you actually like the farm better? I do because you can control the environment. You can control what they eat You can make sure that they're not gross. You can make sure they're not bottom feeders So when you have a Chinook from Alaska, it actually might be less healthy. That's one of the funny things, a lot of unnatural things are quite a bit healthier than the natural alternatives, like with red dye, the synthetic one we know is very safe, but the one that we get from Cochinil will kill a small proportion of people. It's just not as good, but a lot of people, they fall into this weird mental trap where if it's natural, it's healthy.

But tons of natural things are not healthy. It's not healthy to go and smoke a bunch of weed. It's not healthy to go and do cocaine. You'll get a heart attack. Like people go, oh well it's natural. It should be great, right? But no. So we are fatter. Would you say obesity is the driving force of our sickness? Yeah, obesity and everything around it. Very much so. Is there a correlation between obesity and depression? There is.

Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree. And obesity likely causes depression, has a causal impact on it. I completely agree. Yeah. And if you fix it, you're very likely to reduce depression rates. That's right. One of the wonderful things we can see with these randomized control trials and these

drugs is, God, people are a lot happier when they've gotten a lot less fat. So you're a GLP-1 advocate. But however, would you say there's a concern to give like a 13-year-old? I would. Yeah. Why? I don't like the idea of giving it to kids. And they're trying to push that?

I know. I'm just kind of instinctually against it But I need to I the thing is it probably is good health advice Unfortunately, we know that early treatment for a lot of things does help kids like with the statin example those families where they have hypercholesterolemia And the kids inherit it because it's genetic condition when you give them statins from like age 5 It is really good for them. Like they are way less likely to die young and that's important. Right, but that's a genetic problem, right? So I'm talking about a kid that like, and maybe, I don't know, he's eating like crap.

Yeah. 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. Oh yeah, very good comment that. Yeah, I would love to ask you about. Oh yeah, very good comment that. Yeah, I would love to get your thoughts on that. Wouldn't it be better to say, hey, let's fix your diet before we start getting you dependent on an injection? It'd be nice, but the problem is to control the kids diet, you have to intervene on the parents.

And intervening on the parents is difficult, as we've seen from the inability to intervene on them in general. So if we were to get obesity rates down macro, what would that mean for all the other health outcomes? Beautiful improvements, just wonderful things. So the CDC's cost estimate for the direct medical cost of obesity in a year is $173 billion. That came out in I think 2022 or thereabouts, so up it a bit for inflation. Other estimates are usually a little bit higher.

Industry estimates are extremely higher. 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. If you handle all of that, the benefits of the American economy would be a little over $1 trillion a year. And that's a pretty standard cost estimate. The most extreme ones I've seen were upwards of about 3.5

billion. So you would say that solving obesity is one of our... Are we moving less than we did in the 1980s? Absolutely, tons. People are way more sedentary. Okay. A lot of that has to do with the jobs. They're just not as like physically demanding.

And they don't need to be. We should have people going and exercising outside of work if they're not able to do it in work anymore. Food pyramid. Not great. Okay, so we agree on that. Yeah, I really don't like to be reconstituted. It really should be I think was made on pretty bad advice. I like the large amount of grains is just not that pleasant. I would like to see more vegetables relative

to grains like all the grains is what vegetables are best carniferous ones not carnage not carnivorous Cruciferous grains. Yeah, whatever. No, no Yeah, those are great. I love spinach. I love broccoli cauliflower. I love cauliflower. I love perled cauliflower delicious Collie my wife makes just all sorts of stuff with that. It's so good. So that brings, so grains are carbohydrates, which brings us to insulin resistance. Yes. Is that a problem?

Massive. And it's basically stemming from the same thing. People are eating too much and they are causing desensitization of their pancreas, they are becoming pre-diabetic. They are effectively managing insulin very, very poorly. And acting on that does help with their obesity. It helps with everything else because so much is downstream from that. It's all, there's this whole thing about metabolic syndrome

where it's just a very vague condition. There's actually no real good definition of it, but it's all in the orbit of that. If you fix any part of it, you seem to have effects on all the rest. So like before GLP-1s, the big miracle drug was metformin. It goes, oh, it helps with everything. It helps with that, it helps with everything downstream It helps with that. It helps with everything downstream for me.

And all those downstream benefits are just amazing. Like, you're even gonna cure a lot of adult acne and stuff. It's just gonna be amazing. So would you, so yeah. But it's all related. I guess the question is, your take is, drugs that work is probably a better solution, this is your take, than mass dietary changes.

I think so. The main reason is it's very, very difficult to get people to actually stick to dietary changes. 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.

And even then, they tend to not do so very well. Like adherence to New Year's, New Year's resolutions. The average diet people start on, they're off it by six weeks. They're just, they're off. They don't want to do it. They don't stick with it. They don't stick to their gym memberships. In fact, the vast majority just never get used. And how do you motivate people? It just seems it's practically impossible because we've been telling them for decades Like we even tell them in the latest advice from the HHS just hey don't eat ultra processed foods And so we've been saying this for ages and they still do it and you agree we should reduce ultra processed foods It's curious that we don't have a good definition of it

There's the Nova categorizations and those have been like the go to debt. Yeah. How about like the big three, which is like white bread, cereal and donuts. Like I think we should eat less of that stuff just because it gets tempting. Yeah. If you will eat too much when they have it. Um, it's just tastes good. So why stop yourself? But I think people should stop themselves more. And I think, uh, cutting back on those options would help. But the thing is, if you cut back on options, you kind of just, I don't like taking away choice.

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Take action now. Go to selectivesearch.com slash California and start building the future you deserve. What do you think about blue zones? Fake. Tell me. Entirely fake. This is a great thing. Yeah.

So like the, what is it? Loma Linda or whatever in California and Greece, all fake? So Loma Linda is not exceptional. It's about the 74th percentile. Oh is that coffee? That's for me. You want one? I would love a coffee. Thank you, thank you. Do you want creatine in it?

Do you put creatine in your coffee? No. No. That would be fun. I do take creatine though. I take it black. Thank you. Creatine is great for you. Absolutely. Keeps on a little water way but great for the muscle.

What? Great for muscle. It does. You have to drink a lot of water when you're on creatine. Yeah. And it causes youway, but great for the muscle. What? Great for muscle building. It does, you have to drink a lot of water when you're on creatine. Yeah, and it causes you to retain a lot of water too. That's right, it increases water retention. Yeah, so as you say. I do it for the neurological effects, but keep going.

See, if you have a good diet though, I don't think you get the neurological effects from that. It's almost all seen in vegetarian vegans. So yeah, I want you to finish that point. 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. Nice. Those were that for me is when I saw because I was really low on fish

my whole diet. And that's where for me, it was a huge level up. It's so good. I I'm a big especially salmon. I do salmon almost every night. Love salmon. Love salmon. Love swordfish. Love tuna. I love everything that you can like I love a good tuna steak. I love good food. It's good for you Yeah, anyway, you're talking so Loma Linda not actually that exceptional the Seventh-day Adventists. Yeah, exactly and they love man They really love I wrote I have this in my upcoming books. Do you have to debunk it for me? They have a whole book on the Sabbath. So really? Do you like the 7 day Adventists? I use them as a test case that being a Sabbatarian can help your health. That pausing for a day

can actually improve your health outcomes. Yeah, so I love fasting as well. I used to fast a bunch. No, I'm a big fast. So you're a believer in fasting? Yeah, I just like it for the feeling. I feel like it's an easy way to lose weight quickly. Does the data show fasting is good? Yeah, it's a great way to lose weight quickly. So we're in agreement. And the more rapidly you lose the weight. Well the data show fasting is good? Yeah It's a great way to lose weight. We're in agreement and the more rapidly you lose the weight though But it's good because it creates your whole body goes into almost a replenishing mode, right? It might lead to Autophagy at a meaningful scale, but that's after like four plus days of fasting Yeah, which I don't do more than but you were gonna make a point on blue zones. Yes. Sorry Let's get back to that. So Loma Linda, not that exceptional, focused on a bunch.

It's at about the 74th percentile thereabouts for US counties or whatever it is, in terms of life expectancy, which is not amazing. Like why should we focus on the 74th percentile? We could just probably go even further out. But then the thing is, those percentiles are unstable year to year, They do change quite a bit. So the 99th is probably not going to be the 99th in 10 years because people will die, it'll change.

Nicosia, the one down in Costa Rica or whatever. It is pretty much vague. Let's define a blue zone. What is a blue zone? Oh, yes, sorry. No, it's okay. So blue zones are these areas that have been proposed to basically have the secret to a long life People they're supposed to have been living very long lives for a very long time. They live well They enjoy their communities and they eat they don't have to eat in like crazy ways Sometimes they smoke even and stuff. They do all sorts of things there that are Somehow all conducive to hell they live really long lives but most of it turns out to be pension fraud pension fraud yeah that's the thing I know where Blake gets all

the stuff from them Blake I figured it out I found the source yeah I popularized this little while back and the guy who documented a lot of the stuff put in all the legwork he recently got the IG Prize, which is a yearly kind of joke Nobel they give out for funny findings. Like, there's a woman, Herculano Hosell, who a few years back got one for grinding up monkey brains to count the number of neurons in them. It's just a very funny little thing, but it's real science. And this guy, he went through and he documented, oh my God, these blue zones are like super fake. So Okinawa, they go, oh my god, these blue zones are like super fake.

So Okinawa, they go, oh, you can live to like 110 there easily. It's like, well, I don't believe that. That's one of the poorest areas of Japan. And their life expectancy officially is much lower than the rest of Japan. It's like, I just don't believe that. They smoke a lot there. They, weird. 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 It'll be cool. I have like a little documentary and they funded this documentary and then it turned out. Oh, we're finding a lot of corpses We're finding a lot of people who have been rotting in a room. Here's your coffee. Thank you so much Excellent. All right, they found all these people were just being used to collect checks by their living relatives. And sometimes it didn't exist. And so this prompted, okay, documentaries over. Government goes out, reviews a lot of this.

And now they send out letters every year to ask people, hey, are you still alive? Can you verify you're alive? They sometimes they give them little medals every like so many years to make sure if you're really old, you're not just scamming the system and actually dead. And so is there nothing to like the Mediterranean diet walking around all the time?

Not really. The thing to the Mediterranean diet is that it's popular. And as things become popular, healthy people adopt them because they're like, oh my God, I better do the cool new healthy thing. And it generally has principles that aren't terrible, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's a, if the thing about restricting your diet is you limit all that availability of different weird foods and everything. Yeah, totally. It's easier to satiate yourself. So if you don't have a million options because you said, that's how I eat. Yeah, I'm a Mediterranean diet guy. There you go. Well, if you have that limited diet and it goes,

oh, I can only eat these things, then you're very unlikely to overeat. If you put people in a chamber with nutrient paste, they'll eat enough to live and then they won't eat very much and they'll probably lose weight because it's dull. It's not an exciting diet, so they're not going to eat a bunch of it. And it's great. That works. And so the big problem that is facing us is an overindulgence obesity

Absolutely, and it creates all these downstream. Yep health problems. That's right. And yeah, please. Yeah No, that's basically the gist of it It is just we are eating so much and some people are eating a whole lot more than they really should And we've measured this we have yeah, we have great measurements the nutritional health examinations the in Hanes It's a great study. That's not every couple of years They ask people please just log your calories and stuff and the calories people eat have gone up and the activity they do has gone Down so on both ends you're getting fewer calories out and more calories in and then your stomach is growing and growing and growing Alcohol bad for you. I don't drink so make make the case. Well, all the studies... Is it fair to call it poison? It is poison. Ethanol is poison, yes, absolutely. That is a hundred percent it is poison.

Wait, alcohol is ethanol? Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah, it's poison. I thought ethanol was derived from corn. Corn alcohol. Is all alcohol corn based? No. I was gonna say it's green based. You can make alcohol in a lot of ways. I was gonna say it, okay. But I guess you get ethanol from other green based. You can make alcohol in a lot of ways. I was going to say. OK. Yeah. But I guess you get ethanol from other? Yep. OK.

I just. Yeah, yeah. It's alcohol. So alcohol in the engines and all that. If you put it in there without the treatment or whatever for your engine, it's kind of, you know. It's combustible. Combustible.

Blow it up. Ha ha ha. Not blow it up. So but are we drinking too much alcohol? Absolutely. There's a lot of binge drinking these days. It's pretty bad. So brief background on why people thought it was good for you.

Pretty much the same reason they thought vitamin D is great for you. But there's less downsides of vitamin D. Yeah. Like, if you can dose it, it's not going to do anything. You're just going to beat out. But if you dose alcohol, you got big problems. Yes. Any alcohol you drink is going to be bad for you.

All of it is bad for you. There's no lower limit at which it's good for you. Like, I still drink alcohol because it's fun and it's enjoyable and like, you wanna drink because like everybody's drinking and some stuff tastes good, not beer or anything like that, but some liquor tastes good and all that. So it's like, great, I'll drink.

But it is bad. It is all bad for you. The people thought, based on selective studies, they were like, oh, people who drink a little bit They're healthier. I hear this all the time. Oh a glass of wine a night. It's good for the antioxidants Yeah, oh my god. They say this. It's actually funny we have comparisons of the effects of drinking wine versus drinking beer during pregnancy and It turns out oh women who drink wine during pregnancy

They didn't have higher IQ kids. Don't extrapolate from this, because it's clearly a selection of facts. They should not drink anything. You shouldn't drink anything. It's all downsides, but the reason is selection, because wealthier women drink wine, and poorer women drink beer. That is exactly right. But why would a mom, if a mom is drinking or in pregnancy, that's... It's bad either way child abuse

I mean, it's like I think it should be considered that I totally agree Yeah, some jurisdictions consider it that way some jurisdictions recently have been lifting their restrictions on that Are you are you sure I should lean in on that Blake we should get in on that. Yeah I mean that's active potentiality for fetal poisoning exactly. It's very bad. It just has no upsides. It's all downside It's a terrible, terrible thing to do, but some places have started making it so bars are now allowed to serve pregnant women. It's their choice to do it. They can say no, and they should say no, but they're allowed to serve, which is... Are we drinking more alcohol than we were 30 or 40 years ago? We are, and we're binge drinking a lot more too. Like, a lot... There are more alcohol than we were 30 or 40 years ago.

We are. And we're binge drinking a lot more too. Like a lot, there are more teetotalers, which is nice. These people are going to be fine. There are more people who are just drinking insane amounts too. And people in general are drinking a little bit more. And so we had Prohibition once. And Prohibition actually... I'm a big Prohibition fan.

I'm a Prohibition truther. Good. I've read the books good so you're familiar it did reduce rates of cirrhosis and they never actually went back up to where they are well here's my whole cut here's my thought crime on prohibition yeah yes it increased gang violence what caused them to do it in the first place yeah so why would a population go and a constitutional amendment? There must have been a really big problem. Root and toot in saloons. What was the problem that caused that caused what was it the 23rd amendment 22nd?

A lot of it had to do with men mistreating their wives. A lot of it was it was it was women driven. Yeah, women were the power behind prohibition 21st amendment. Yeah, they would actually go and bust up saloons that the men would be at after work or When they should have been working and they would like break the bar break the stills and everything and try and tell men get out Of here. Don't go home from the saloon drunk and beat your wife come home and be a good father and all this stuff and saloon drunk and beat your wife, come home and be a good father and all this stuff. Um, and saloon culture was just very bad. 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, uh, and it was just bad. It was a bad culture we had. We changed it overnight with temper what is worse would you say for a society a society that smokes or society that drinks society that smokes okay I'm so you're not a tobacco truther no I tobacco is just okay well okay I was thinking you know I'm talking about no cigarettes I know I want to get into weed

yeah but do you think there's any truth that we were skinnier when we had when we were smoking more cigarettes Yeah, because it is an appetite suppress absolutely it contributes a very very small but real Portion of the increase in obesity over time the reduction in smoking did that it's interesting I mean like it did make people skinnier, but it's not worth it Yeah, cause cancer one for chance to get lung cancer. Why is weed bad? I just think it's a loser drug. I used to think, oh, we'll legalize it and it'll be fine,

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. It seems to have been a true thing. People really do get on harder drugs and make them available. If you just legalize weed, okay, fine, but you're still gonna find that a lot of people

waste their lives on this stuff. Totally agree. It's most of the downsides of weed are due to selection. Losers smoke weed. When you make it available to them, they will go smoke it. Most of it is not the weed making their lives worse. It is that losers want to go and do this stuff. But even still, it's still pretty bad. Like kids, when they have it as teens, they pay attention less in high school. They're less likely to go on and get a college degree. They're less likely to do well on various tests

and everything. They're less likely to graduate on time. Just downside. And that's illegal use too. So when you make it legal, it increases illegal use, honestly, it's very funny effect because it becomes more socially acceptable to do it So people who are like under the age limit or people who are otherwise ineligible

They will go and get it illegally now or they will to buy it from someone who resold it to them or anything like that And it's just been a big mess 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 It's been atrocious. 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 but walking dead, yeah, I was in Berkeley like golly around this time last year and I was Just walking around I was going to go get Boba, his friends, and we passed by 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 arms 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. And there were people conked out on the sidewalks,

there were people you have to step over, it was atrocious. And every city that decriminalizes has the same thing. Portugal, they say, oh, it's a success story, but they do it differently. If you are using in public, they'll arrest you and they'll put you in like rehabilitation program or they'll throw you in the drunk tank, basically. They don't take it, they took it more seriously than we do here when we try to decriminalize. And I think that's part of the failure is that we adopt an incredibly progressive liberal attitude towards it, here when we try to decriminalize. 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. That's all we wanted to do.

Where Portugal does it, they go, oh, we wanted to not enforce this stuff. We're going to beat up vagrants still who are using drugs. We don't have the gumption to do that too. And if we did, I think it'd be a better situation. But either way, it's turned out pretty bad. So I want to keep running through supplements, but let's take a detour to a fun one that's on my mind. Are more people getting autism? No, very likely not. So I'm going to give you a quick spiel on autism. So 1943, Leo Connor, or Caner, he, a lot of people, Germans, they Americanize their

name and all that, they change pronunciation. He names autism for the first time, and his criteria for it is super restrictive. To get a diagnosis of autism, back when the, like, Connor criteria came out, you had to have symptoms of having an extremely low IQ. Social aloofness, for example, is typically only found in people who are mentally retarded with an IQ of less than 35. So super mentally retarded. And that's like where you're totally unaware

of any social cues or anything. You're like unresponsive. Catatonic almost. Yeah, pretty much. 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 a room near bedtime and

it's like how do you have this co-location of two symptoms that are on the opposite ends of the IQ spectrum that's why almost nobody got diagnosed before we had the DSM-3 when we have diagnostic statistical manual right third edition yeah they introduced the first autism diagnosis to the mass market before that they had like things that were sort of similar like schizophrenia diagnoses but they were to dissimilar to modern stuff to really be comparable then they started diagnosing more

and the criteria were a lot more lax yet to just be a little bit as we know modern autistic it was more strict than it is nowadays But when they got around to the DSM for they introduced stuff like Asperger's which is like mild autism Someone who's a little high IQ and a little quirky They're autistic now. They weren't under the old criteria, but other the new stuff Oh, yeah, give them a diagnosis and start giving the parents all the social services that entails and the other big thing is when the IDEA Act passed,

when we, this act where you have to go out and your schools have to actively identify students with mental disabilities, that led to a massive, massive increase in diagnoses. It led to huge numbers of increases in single years sometimes. 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 act, they had to report every year, because they just changed how the baseline was calculated. So you have all these things that are methodological factors that contribute to the increase. And the increase is just in diagnoses. When you go out of your way to use a consistent criteria, like the criteria of the DSM-IV,

and you go out into the community and you go, okay, hi random person on the street, I'd like to diagnose you with autism or I'd like to see if you qualify for diagnosis, and you pay them a little bit to be in the study or whatever, and you do the same thing for adults and for kids, you get incredibly similar rates. You don't for the most severe forms of autism, but that's because those people tend to, unfortunately, die very young. The guys who are banging their heads against the wall,

as you said earlier, like that, they tend to die young. We have seen an increase in those diagnoses, though, and you might say, oh, is that the real increase in autism? It's like, no, that's because we incentivize that. A lot of that is people who are getting substituted into an autism diagnosis, because we give parents that. A lot of that is people who are getting substituted into an autism diagnosis.

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. So if your kid has mental retardation, you can convince a provider to diagnose your kid with autism, and suddenly, ba-bam, you get access to a lot more social services. Your kid gets treated better in school. They end up with a lot more care. You get cash if you're the caretaker. You get nearly $10,000 a month.

And we see a lot of exploitation of this. For example, in Minnesota, the Somali community has been greatly exploiting this recently. In 2018, they were spending... They would never do that. They would never do that. They've figured out in their community how to get a diagnosis for their kids because it gives them a lot of benefits.

The provider spending in, I think, the two cities area was about $6 million in 2018, or it might have been the whole state. I'd have to look back at the report. But it went up to nearly 200 million in just a few years, like by 2024, or 2023 actually, I thought it was. And there've been fraud cases about this, there've been people getting arrested for it. There's all sorts of people are getting found out that they're doing this. 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. There's been no increase in brain inflammation.

No, not really. There's been a systematic effort to start diagnosing people that started only very recently. 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. You have to diagnose it by law. So but is it ever so the their counter argument if I had like Dr. Means here, to you know, who wants to be the next surgeongeon General. I know Casey. She would say, have you met her? I don't know if you met her or not. No, I bet Callie, but I haven't met Casey in person yet.

They would say that the criteria the last 10 years hasn't changed. Incorrect. Well, the thing is, so they're correct in that the Diagnostic Statistical Manual 5 has been the addition we've been on, but the incentives to diagnose have still increased and they're increasing and the awareness increases.

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. People had no idea what it was before 1980. Now everybody knows what autism is. It's a meme, you can go on TikTok and like find people self-diagnosing, giving instructions on how to self-diagn diagnose, or you can even find that it's

really kind of crazy. You can find instructions on TikTok on how to go to a psychiatrist and get diagnosed. You can find people psyching themselves into it. And these cultural trends clearly lead to way, way more diagnosis. Parents being incentivized. When schools, when states pass these reward for diagnoses, like laws that reward diagnosis in schools, schools tend to increase in their diagnosis by 25% in a single year on average, which is enormous. That's so huge. And it's just because each head that is autistic is a boon for the school. That's just how it is. We keep just how it is.

We keep incentivizing and the rates keep growing. 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... Not really true. That doesn't bear out. Doesn't bear out. If you look at actual symptomality, which we do have data on, you don't see really any difference over time.

And in fact, it's wonderful. I love the Swedes for this and the Danish and the Norwegians and the Finns. They trust their government a lot to collect a lot of their data. Like their personal data is very well collected and it's all linked to their health records and everything. 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, they give those to whole population registers, like thousands and thousands of people. 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. It just doesn't drift. 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. 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 seals the deal. Like it's hard to argue against that in any credible way. Ask 10 people to define the word capitalism. How many different responses do you think you'll get? This is a word that comes up all the time, but does anyone know what it really means? Do you?

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it. Right now go to CharlieForHillsdale.com to enroll. There's no cost and it's easy to get started. That's CharlieForHillsdale.com the register, C-H-A-R-L-I-E for Hillsdale.com. What is a issue that we are under diagnosing or under emphasizing? So that's the thing. We don't know if the increase in autism diagnoses is under or over diagnosis. There's a genuine case we 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.

I'm not a psychiatrist, but I know that they have plenty of things that actually do help. I've looked at some of the effect sizes for the treatments and whatnot, and they help them with their behavioral problems. They help them to graduate school and stuff. They help them with a lot of things. So were those kids at one point underdiagnosed? I think the answer is probably yes for those kids. 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. And especially when it leads to unnecessary medication. Like, I'm not a big fan of the overdiagnosis with ADHD, especially because there are... I think it's a scam. Yeah. I mean, we... Well, we know partially it is a scam, definitely, because people who are in the DSM are financially compromised.

They have been... A lot of them have had pharma contracts. I'm not against big pharma. I love pharmaceutical companies that do great stuff for us, but it is true that they are clever. They might do a lot of smart good things, but they also lie a lot. They do a lot of things that hurt people. For example, there was the opioid stuff a while back. The epidemic on that is going down now. We are handling that, which is lovely. It means fewer overdoses. Good. The company that started that, which has now been sued out of that, which is lovely. It means fewer overdoses, good. The company that started that, which is 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. There's no evidence it's addictive. And then what do you see? About 5% of people who prescribe these drugs after a surgery got addicted

for a short amount of time usually, but sometimes a long amount of time, and then a lot of time they transition to other drugs. So they do lie, they do mess up stuff, 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. There are a good number of people who go from ADHD drugs,

which many will need, lots of kids will need them. They can't focus otherwise. Like Ritalin? Yeah, Ritalin and Adderall and a lot of other drugs, which they, many will need. Lots of kids will need them. They can't focus otherwise. Like Ritalin? Yeah, Ritalin and Adderall and like a lot of other drugs, they just work, they actually do work great for a lot of kids who do need them. But the kids who don't need them, they're getting not much upside.

A lot of people do use the drugs for focus reasons, like they're on the job and they wanna focus better. And fine, let them do that if they really want. 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. There are good cases where you should because the kid will fail otherwise, but

I do think we give it out too often. And so you would say then the autism emphasis is just a major diagnosis scam? A lot of it is. A lot of it is scamming. I mean, especially when you see like the welfare fraud related to it, like that the Somali case in Minnesota is one of the most well documented now and it's very, very bad. There is really no good reason for them to be going out and getting practically all their kids diagnosed with autism. It's clear that they're doing it because it gives them money.

Is there any truth that there is like less autism in the Amish community? No, not really. They do have autism. People say they have zero. It's like, no, we have diagnosed cases. They just don't get modern medical care. They don't seek it out. So like, of course, they're not going to be diagnosed. They're not in our schools. They're not in our hospitals and everything, unless on rare occasions they are, but they're just not getting all the well visits kids get and everything. They're not, no, there's really nothing to it. It's a difference in the medical care they receive. So if you were to go and do a community study on them and to like go out of your way to

diagnose everyone, I think you'd see pretty high rates. 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. I mean... It could be. The thing is, again, there are some kids who do benefit from the services received after the diagnosis, so it's hard to say. What percentage?

That's why it's hard to say. We don't know. We need to do studies on how often that stuff actually helps. We know, like, the heterogeneity and how SSRIs help with depression. We know that, like, the bottom 30 percent get, like, nothing and the top ones get big effects and the middle gets just, like, meh. But we don't know what it is for autism. We don't know how well the services they can provide in schools affect them. So we don't actually know, like we don't have an empirical margin that we've estimated

on which to diagnose. But if we did, that'd be great. That would allow us to diagnose appropriately, like appropriate for a given symptom level so we could tailor the care better. 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. Yeah. Is that correct? Oh absolutely that is definitely true. So talk about that. So there might be parents right now in the audience where a doctor's like well your kid has autism and it might actually be a lie. Yeah absolutely. 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 like

Total normal child behavior has been pathologized in a lot of ways. There are tons of kids who are certainly misdiagnosed because They're they're obsessed with trains and they love their what is the train thing? Why does that mean you're autistic? I don't understand people. It's just kind of a meme. Yeah, it's not really about trains about particular obsessions And I think parents overstate obsessions a lot of times. 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. But they're just interested at a pretty normal level.

And we're treating that pathologically because we're too concerned these days. Parents are hovering too much and they're too concerned about, you know, every little thing in their kid's environment, every little thing their kid does, and they over focus on it. And they don't give their kids the space to be normal and develop normally. Or they should.

So then, if you had your way, how would you then approach this autism issue? I would let the public know. Golly, the diagnostic threshold is incredibly low, and we don't need to diagnose so many people, and we need to start doing the studies to figure out what we should diagnose, because we don't really do that. 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. We shouldn't do that.

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. Is that correct? Because you said if you pick adults, they do not have the same... No, no. So the adults do have symptoms. 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. But for most symptoms, they do have them show up for adults. The exceptions are things that are age-gated, like must start presenting symptoms before age 30.

You can go back and sometimes look in an adult's case files if they had them that far back and see, oh, they do have something consistent with autism. And that does happen, but it's somewhat rare. Also sometimes adults do intend to go out and get an autism diagnosis because it does lead to higher disability payments. We saw this during the great financial recession back in 2008, 2009. Lots of people who were on Medicare, Medicaid started seeking out autism diagnoses. More benefits.

So it's fascinating. Let's go through the supplement stuff. Close health and we have a lot more to talk about. Yeah. Turmeric, ginger? Probably not gonna do very much. Might be a good way to increase your metabolism very very slightly. Burn a few more calories but not gonna do very much in general. What about coffee? See I love coffee and I love caffeine but it's not really gonna benefit you a lot. Doesn't it speed up your metabolism though? Caffeine does a little bit but it's not terribly large it's not gonna like cut off any benefits of the

antioxidants in coffee. Not really no it's just not gonna do very much. How about drinking a bunch of water? Not gonna do a lot. If after a certain point the thing is you're just not gonna get these benefits they have diminishing returns severely from practically everything. I don't I can't actually think of anything with non-diminishing returns. But that's kind of hard, that's a silly thing to say in general, because the dose makes the poison. 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. They go, oh, aspartame breaks down

partly into formaldehyde. Well, formaldehyde is not bad in the quantities you get from drinking a diet coke. There's aspartame in that, in LM&T. Totally fine. Aspartame is totally fine. It doesn't have any biological way it could be bad for you, and the amounts are so small. I'm told aspartame is poisonous. Some people say that, but the thing is, they think formaldehyde is just generally bad for you,

and it is bad if you drink, like, the bottle they would have in an embalming office. 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. You get it from a lot of your food, but it's not bad, because the dose makes the poison. It's such a biologically meaningless amount that it's not gonna do anything to you in a million years. How about saunas? I love saunas, but the benefits there are really sort of minuscule. Have you heard about the

Norwegian sauna study? Which one? The long-term one where they measured guys over 30, people over 30 years. I haven't seen this. I did look at a meta analysis of the very, very few number of trials on this, and they're all really small. And it looked like there was basically just nothing there. But I still love saunas and endorse them. They're great for losing water weight.

How about training? Like working out, bench press? Oh, excellent for you. Yeah, yeah, strength is good. And in fact, a lot of people- Strength is good for your brain, too. Strength is good for everything. I don't know about the brain benefits. I actually doubt them for depression because a lot of studies recently have been coming out and they've been saying,

oh, the depression benefits are really overstated. And that's whatever. Interesting. I used to think it was a big thing, but running gets my mind off things, but it doesn't actually seem to help much in the trials. Strength training is just good to have in general to prevent a lot of aging-related decline. Like, lower back problems really are very, very common. I have a lower back issue. You should have been deadlifting more. Yeah, I know.

Yeah, I tell everybody, deadlift, please. I can't deadlift now because of my back. Oh, no. I'm sorry. That sucks. A lot of people, especially if you're young right now, you should be going out and doing lower back exercises. Don't strain yourself. I agree.

You should train your back because if you don't train your back you will end up an adult who is miserable. Like when you're older... My back is a disaster. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, that sucks. L4, L5 up against the sciatic. Oh no. It's terrible.

Yeah, that's one of my big strength training pieces of advice. Are you... It's everyone. So is there any... let's finish on on supplements anything that you recommend take no vitamin C We got enough of it in our diet for most people you're gonna get pretty much everything fine, even if you're sick With that one actually doesn't offer many many benefits if you're sick, so sorbic acid nothing No, zinc is actually the biggest thing for if you're sick, which is weird. You don't see that emphasize your sick How about lysine?

Probably not gonna be very much even though it's a no the thing is it's a viral replicated inhibitor no not gonna do very much it's not gonna get bioavailable in the way you want it to a lot of things it's funny a lot of supplements like multivitamins especially they don't tend to do very much for like anything you look at the trials and heart disease and it's like bupkis nothing no effect at all. Why? Well, probably sufficient. How about if you take these vitamins intravenously? That is an interesting question.

I don't see many people doing that, so I don't know. Because the absorption is much different. Yeah, it is very different. I'm curious about that, but I don't have an answer for you. How about NAB? I love taking NAB shots whenever they're available, because everybody's just like, oh, we'll give them to you. And I'm like, great, because I go to a lot of conferences

where they have the rejuvenation clinic things. They're like, oh, you want to get on the saline bag and you want to do all this fun stuff. And I'm like, oh, go to the oxygen bar and it doesn't do anything for me. And I don't think it does very much in general, but not going to say no. Hyperbaric oxygen.

Potential benefits, yeah. I see great data behind that. Yeah, there do see to be some benefits. So I had a concussion eight years ago. Yeah. And I did 120 sessions of Hyperbaric, helped a lot. Materially you could see it rebuilt the back of my brain. Interesting.

Yeah, there's a lot of non-hocus pocus data behind Hyperbaric. I think the hocus pocus though is for when people say it'll help with autism. I had a friend growing up and he had Asperger's and his parents. I can't speak to that. His parents had hoped that this would cure his autism. They kept him on a like carb free diet because they read some paper and they bought a hypobaric like oxygen chamber like a little pod thing in their basement and they put him in it multiple times a week and like just didn't do anything. For that nothing for other outcomes, like recovery stuff. But doesn't keto help you if you have seizures?

It can. That's one of the interesting things. It can help you with that. I... Because there is data to support that. Yeah. That a ketogenic diet can help you if you have epilepsy, right? Yeah.

And that's very odd. I don't know why it does that. It must be carbohydrates. It has to be. Sugar. I mean, you're cutting does that. It must be carbohydrates. It has to be. Sugar. I mean, you're cutting them out, so it must be. What is causing the rise in cancer in young people? Diagnosis. We are actually getting much, much better at...

So there's not a material rise. There's not really, no. This is one of the big things I keep emphasizing to people. The cancer death rates, which is the thing you should focus on for young people, they're going down. 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? We diagnose more. We screen more, we do more indirect things that active screenings like we get more x rays and whatnot, we

could do more various scans of all sorts. And we see this stuff more often. But when we caught it within 10 years. Well, if 10 years pass, it could be too late. No, I know, but so the cancer death rates are not going up? No, they're going down considerably. But isn't that just because our treatments are better? No, it has a lot to do with screening.

In fact, most of, so actually it's a great example, cervical cancer, between the 1950s and 1990s, our treatments barely got better at all for that, but 70% improvement in survival. Why? Because we're doing pap smears more often. I say schmear, it's weird, I should call it it. It's like putting a lot of a- pap smears. We were just catching it more often. And the big thing nowadays that we vaccinate for it, and that has done incredible things. That vaccine is amazing. Which one? Gardasil. Okay.

We are going to eliminate cervical cancer in our lifetimes. Some countries will see zero cervical cancer cases among the... Is Gardasil Hepatitis B or no? HPV. Oh, the human papilloma virus. Yes. We're beating it. It causes a 100% reduction in a lot of pre-clinical... What is your take on the COVID shot? It was amazing engineering feat. I love Operation Warp Speed as a way to accelerate stuff. I think we should have way, way, way more acceleration of getting treatments out there. In fact, there's a guy I met last year, unfortunately he's passed away now. I met him shortly after he had a glossectomy. They removed his tongue entirely for some terrible cancer he had. Jake Seliger, he did a lot of blog posts while he was going through this.

And he tried very, very hard to get access to novel treatments that could have let him live a few months longer. Right now in Montana, they're trying to pass the Seliger Act, named after him. His wife is getting it done, his widow. And I hope it succeeds. It's a right to try act. It would allow people to access more cures more quickly even when they're not like through their trials yet if they have the conditions

that these things might help treat and who knows if that had been around nationally he might be alive today. I don't know. He passed away a few months ago. It's very sad but there are lots of people like that who can't access treatments because they're not doing it quick enough. The FDA is generally too conservative with approvals. They wait too long and people die. They wait too long and generics aren't approved. They wait too long partly because, for example, on generic drugs, you know who wrote the rules on generic drugs?

It's the large pharmaceutical consortiums run by the people who make the prescription drugs. I believe that. It's very, very bad. We have this thing, the PDUFA, the Prescription Drug User Fee Act amendment. And it's how we fund, 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. 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. And this is where, this is great. It leads to the FDA being efficient.

They take about less than 180 days to approve drugs that have shown they work, get them out there, start saving lives. But for the generic drug user fee amendment, Gadoofa, the designers of it were the large pharmaceutical companies that are most likely to use Padoofa. And if a generic comes to market, it erodes your profits. It makes it so you are competing against somebody who produces something for pennies on the dollar compared to what you make. So

if you're charging a huge amount for a therapy and somebody becomes all and makes a generic, then they screw you. So Jadufa is designed such that you start paying the FDA immediately instead of after you've gotten the drug approved. Padufa you pay after you get it approved. They do the review and then you pay them for as long as there's not a generic. But the generic part, really bad. 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 breach the market. Were there any downsides to the COVID shot?

Myocarditis in young men. We did see myocarditis. That's legit. That's not just the diagnosis. That's legit. Yeah. We had to have very, very large population cohorts to see that, but it, we eventually did see it. It was pretty clear. And especially with the Moderna shot and the J&J one, but the Novavax is fine.

The Pfizer shot was more fine. But the thing is the myocarditis risk for young men was pretty low in absolute terms, very, very low in absolute terms. And if you compare that to the risk of getting myocarditis from COVID itself, it was a lot less. So you don't believe in any of the turbo cancer stuff? Oh, no, none of that. That's all fake. None of that. In fact, the cancer rates started going back down when we started getting the drugs introduced and everything. So we're good on that front. 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. 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. 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, like you'll just never get it again, which is amazing. How many boosters did you get? I think I got one.

Why not all nine? All nine. I feel like I just got lazy. I haven't gotten my flu shot this year either. Does the flu shot work? It does, yeah. It's interesting though, during COVID, we actually eliminated the common strain of the flu

just because people were hunkering down in their homes. But isn't that a little weird? It is weird, yeah. Maybe there was something else going on. Well, no one was getting infected with it, so it's like. of the flu just because people were hunkering down in their homes. But isn't that a little weird? It is weird. Yeah. Maybe there was something else going on. Well, no one was getting infected with it. So it's like... But why were people getting infected with COVID?

Because they were still going out and about somewhat. But why didn't they get the flu? Yeah, good question. I don't know. Luck of the draw. You're the man with the answers though, right? Yeah. Well, no, I don't think so.

I think of myself that way. But that... Do we give kids too many vaccines? No, I think we should probably give better vaccines and more. Like, because like, I think we should be using vaccines to prevent cancer. I'm a big believer in one of the projects Bardo wants to fund government agency that does great by like frontier biological research. 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. 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 ahead of time and everything that we can get out in like a week rather than having to wait again. So they want to be able to prevent anything bad from happening. And I feel like we should do more stuff like that as a public health measure. We should be able to stop everything in its tracks. We should be able to destroy cancer entirely by preventing it. We should be able to, like, Gardasil is amazing. I think it's a really, really good thing for preventing HPV.

We should have one for herpes. We should have one for the Epstein-Barr virus, because these viruses lead to a lot of downstream effects that are very, very bad. And the transmission for a lot of those happens right near birth. It's when you're young. So Epstein-Barr, you typically get, almost everybody has it, and you get it typically from like your mother's kisses, which is sad. Your parents shouldn't have to think about, oh my God, what if I give my kid a cancer in 50 years, because you see a lot of Epstein-Barr in cancers. We should be able to say, no, we're done. We're cutting off that forever. No more transmission of future generations of herpes viruses. No more

transmission of anything like that. We should kill it. 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. And we're just, we don't have the balls to do it. But we should. Charlie Kirk here. We know that rates are still high and that they can make refinancing or purchasing feel out of reach, but markets can shift fast. And when they do, I want you to be in the strike zone. So what is the strike zone? That's a sweet spot when rates dip just enough to meet your target goal, but it doesn't last long. Make sure you're ready to strike first and save big at Sierra Pacific mortgage. Andrew and Todd and their team will get you set up and keep

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Or online at andrewandtodd.com. That is andrewandtodd.com. They help me and they'll help you. andrewandtodd.com. Any downsides to vaccines? Current ones, no, not really. One of the common complaints is like the MMR vaccine causes autism. That does not hold water at all.

That was initially came out in 1998 as a Lancet paper by this guy, Andrew Wakefield. 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. And very compromised and very much a lot of fake data in there. Turned out there was nothing to it. We now have very, very large population register based sibling studies where one sibling is uh vaccinated and the other one is not and we see no difference in autism rates. And a lot of parents will stop vaccinating their kids for autism

when one of them is diagnosed and they have subsequent kids they'll be like oh my god i'm never going to do it again because it must have been the vaccine and then no the autism rate is the same in their subsequent kids. What do you have to say to to critics that with the COVID shot that the guarantee was that it would prevent transmission? Yeah I don't know where that came from. Well, I do know that- The CDC. A lot of it was lying on their part. Like Fauci did lie a bunch. And Walensky said it would stop transmission.

Yeah, a lot of people lied. I don't know why they lied. Like, I don't know why they thought that was a good idea. I don't believe in lying to the public. I feel like whenever you're a public health communicator and you do that, you should basically just never communicate anything again. The moment you start telling lies

is when your credibility is gone and when you should not be in the public sphere at all. The fact that Fauci thought it was a noble lie, we've seen the emails now and everything, we know he thought it was a noble lie to say that it would stop transmission in his tracks and he might have had reasons to believe this

but we know he later on did not. That's when you should stop being a public health influencer of any sort. Does the COVID shot suppress your immune system? No, not really. No more than any other vaccine does. 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. But anyway, sorry, I'm going to mention other vaccines like the polio vaccine wasn't perfect. Anyway, it didn't provide like permanent sterilizing immunity. People think of it that way for some reason, because we mostly eliminated it. But if we

had more polio cases going around, people would quickly learn, oh, it never did that. It just allowed us to manage transmission and symptoms better. And people who caught it young, historically, were able to like fend off some of the worst symptoms that they got it later. And the vaccine basically mimicked that. So if they got it later, they would have low symptomality, which is what the COVID vaccine did. It reduces symptomality.

Like you become less likely to have a severe case. You're more likely to stay off the ventilator and not die. But it doesn't, you're actually, it was interesting. You could see over a few months the sterilizing community did provide initially faded really quickly. I think it was within like 90 days. It was down to being practically nothing. But the protection against severe side effects lasted a long time. What and then we'll move on to the the other non health care stuff. Yeah. What do you think is the biggest health problem

besides obesity facing our country? Good question, I think it's heart disease. And I think we're actually about to win that fight. I'm actually very confident we're about to win that fight. So heart disease is the top cause of death and it is imminently defeatable. We know the causes of it. We have the ability to treat part of it right now

But all of it we don't have the ability to treat some people can't take statins because of the myopathy I mentioned And there's no generic PCS can there are no PCS can I inhibitors that are generic though too expensive 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 PCS can I need to be there's because they're too expensive We're gonna keep you on statins or nothing. And people are like, well, I guess it's nothing then. I don't have the money for it. So they just end up with worse hearts. The other thing is some people have high LPA, leprosyne A, which does also cause heart disease. And there's been no treatments for that until very recently. And we now have five treatments in the pipeline that are highly effective. One of them is a small molecule that means it's an oral drug,

you take it once a day. The other one is an ASO, which is a shot you take, I think, once a month. And the other ones, the other three, are amazing. They are s-I-R-N-A therapies. 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 if you have high LPA. Because you have, LPA is genetically high. You can't really do anything lifestyle-wise to affect it. It's just like a death sentence eventually.

You'll have heart attacks down the line. But now we have drugs that can produce the amount by 98% or so with a once every six month shot. We also have siRNAs, not generic yet, but in a few years for LDL that do effectively the same thing. They give you the genotype of somebody who is a lot more fortunate for genetic reasons for six months or so. And that is amazing.

We are about to defeat heart disease. We are on the cusp of eliminating, like, most heart attacks, most stroke, most, uh, like, clotting and everything. It's just about to be gone. I think that's amazing. That will extend life expectancy dramatically. It's gonna be so good. Okay. I want to get into affirmative action, but there's actually one other thing Blake reminded me. Um, is the, you said the fertility crisis is a major problem.

Absolutely. What, what is, why are we less fertile than ever before a Lot of it is social there's really been no decline in like biological Correlates of fertility like you know your sperm rate or your ability to conceive people are just delaying having kids. They are Doing things that lead to fewer marriages They don't sanctify marriage as much like there's been a decline in religiosity. A lot of factors are implicated in this, and they're all social, they're cultural. The fact that religion alone, the decline of that, has been significant. It used to be, go to a church, meet a nice girl, and get married.

And then when you're married, you're quite a bit more likely to have kids. If only because, thank you so much. I'll have one too. If only because accidents happen more often, because you're not using protection in marriage often. What, but are testosterone rates lower today than they were? I mean, no, not all those studies are wrong. No, so they're generally there aren't really aren't a lot of studies on this.

We have some cohorts where we track testosterone rates over time. 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. But are sperm motility rates not going down? Not meaningfully beyond what you'd expect from the increase in obesity. Because the articles or the studies, they allegedly show a major catastrophic decrease

in sperm motility. A lot of this is down to methodological things like measuring things differently. Or in the case of sperm, there is some reason to think that obesity is involved because obesity does lower your... Correct that's that's legitimate. Yeah and just being like reducing people's uh obesity rate like or the obesity rate is going to be enormous for this. Don't be fat. Exactly. So what would you say... We have some trials on this by the way. On what? On the uh like glp1s for fertility stuff in men, it does improve sperm parameters.

Or just don't eat as much food. Exactly. Same thing, really. Yeah. So I guess what would then be the solution to the fertility crisis? And you're saying more people are getting IVF because they're just getting married later? Because fertility clinics are experiencing a boom. They are.

That is a fact. Yeah, yeah. Past age 35, there's the unfortunately named term geriatric pregnancy. After that age, it is quite hard to conceive and people are waiting a lot longer because they're getting, for example, more professional certifications. One of the silly things we've done is extend education rather than accelerate it. Some places, for example, in Switzerland and Germany, there are some locations where they have reduced the number of required years of high school.

This results in no academic downsides. Like the kids are still just as prepared as ever. You just cram more stuff in less time, but they regain two other years of adulthood. Instead of graduating at 18, you graduate at 16. You push back everything, and you are more likely than to get married, have kids at an acceptable age to have kids.

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. 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. Most of it will be that, yeah. Some of it will be genuine like issues. People are treating infertility more often instead of just trying to brute force it through that. IVF treatments are more available now. They are cheaper than they used to be. The prices

have come down a lot so it's going to see more use. And it's more popular too. 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. Is having children equally as important of a societal value as it was 30 years ago? To most people, unfortunately not. The number of ideal children people report is down a lot. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that they have fewer kids and they experience being around fewer kids. When you see people who have, 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. You have more family values related to this. We have some ways of doing causal inference on this with family size fixed effect models that are really interesting. 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.

And if you accidentally have twins instead of something else, your ideal number of kids that you report goes up. 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. 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. Initially the first phases of doing this they only restricted the Han majority, the ethnic majority's

fertility, but in areas with a lot of Han the minority ethnic groups they also had reductions in their fertility but when they were themselves the majority they didn't see these reductions. 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. It's a massive social thing, and it's very sad that people have decided they want fewer kids. Yeah, I completely agree. So let's go now to affirmative action. Yeah. Why atop it? So let's go now to affirmative action. Yeah, what topic yeah and Harvard in general

How what is the discrepancy between? What a white student had to do to get into Harvard versus a black student quite a lot a standard deviation, right? It's yeah, it's possibly more than that of the extremes in the like selecting in the reason being well at Harvard So if you were a white student with a legacy legacy gives you a huge boost that was about equivalent to a black student in general and if you're a black student with legacy status you are almost guaranteed to get in if you have anywhere near acceptable academics you basically got a free pass if you had reasonable like qualifications to get in for a person in your cohort, which is pretty well.

What would be the average test score that a white person would have to do versus a black person? The white students who were getting in were getting nearly perfect scores. They were getting upwards like upwards of 1550 usually in these recent cohorts 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. And so many rejected white students had higher scores and higher qualifications among a lot of dimensions. Like they had, they tended to have higher GPAs, tended to do more extracurriculars,

they tend to be evaluated by alumni a little better. Harvard had three interviews and two of them were with alumni and one of them didn't exist. It was the personality evaluation by the office, you know, the admissions office. And it basically was an arbitrary way for them to say that Asians had bad personalities so they could justify rejecting them. But the alumni said Asians had better personalities

on average than white or black applicants. And so they should have been invited more, but yeah. So then what would you recommend as the way to proceed with Harvard? I don't believe what we're doing right now is the correct move to start off. Like we really should not just be taking away all their funding. 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. Because the fact that we're pulling research funding is devastating.

Harvard has their hands in a lot of very very important research. Like what? Make the case. Making tons of drugs for one. That's a big one. But like a lot of the stuff we know about... Wait, so explain to our audience, what do you mean that colleges are making drugs? Oh, so they do a lot of the rudimentary discovery. So for example, to bring back to GLP-1s, they were discovered based on some guy's weird interest

in Gila monster spit. Like Gila monster's the big lizards that will paralyze you. 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 millions of people are using. And they do that basic research,

the basic fundamentals of a lot of things that lead to stuff down the line. Why can't the pharmaceutical companies fund that themselves? Because it's a high cost. They really don't have enough money for it. The returns on pharmaceutical R&D are abysmal. They are very, very low. They are actually below the cost of capital right now, so they're not a good investment.

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 been they've had a huge boom. We had a bit of a reversion due to the initial glut of funding that came when COVID started but otherwise it's just been a degringalod, it's been a decline that's continuous for many many years and it's because it's very difficult, it's hard. I'm actually making discoveries, it's really tough, and if we don't fund the basic research, we're just not going to find a lot of stuff. Like a lot of our anti-cancer drugs,

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. And that has worked. That strategy of just funding crazy ideas does work. We know a lot of things work just because somebody had a weird idea, they got a grant for it, that strategy of just funding crazy ideas does work. We know a lot of things work just because somebody had a weird idea, they got a grant for it, the government paid, they were like, whatever,

and it turned into something down the line. The researcher generally doesn't profit directly from it, but other people who learn from them and learn from their mistakes sometimes will. What percentage of Harvard research would you say is valuable practically everything in the hard sciences I say just slash all the sociology how much of the money goes to sociology not a lot actually it's a small portion most of the money does go to harder stuff a lot to biology and chemistry and physics hasn't the woke stuff infiltrated the hard sciences as well it has so then why should we keep funding it? We should fund the good stuff in there.

I think we should definitely get rid of funding the woke stuff. What's the difference? Well, the difference is real discoveries that lead to like theoretical progress. Like the studies that underlie the Manhattan Project were great to do ahead of time. We funded those labs for many, many years. I know, but that was a bunch of white guys doing it. At Harvard, we trust them. Why? great to do ahead of time. We funded those labs for many, many years. I know, but that was a bunch of white guys doing it. At Harvard, we trust them.

Why? We don't trust them right now. And we shouldn't trust their administrations. That's what I'm saying, is that they're not hiring based on merit. Their researchers are not what they used to be. Potentially. But in the hard sciences, they're still pretty good.

It's pretty obvious. It's evident when people are pretty bad. There are people who do astronomy, they say. And all of their work has been like talking about getting women into astronomy. And that is not worthwhile work. Right. You should be studying astronomy itself,

not studying how to involve women more. So Harvard's sitting on a $55 billion endowment. Not all that's liquid, but they can still sell assets. Oh, yeah. What is the case then that we have to keep on sending money because that actually isn't that much money? In the long run they will run it out if they're doing a lot of research So what why why 55 billion? Why is it our problem the ROI on that research is still very well if the ROI for? Pharmaceutical companies yes, yeah for sure no no the most of the ROI from new drugs goes to people It's because those drugs do allow them to extend their lives or live better lives or live more productive lives

But we don't get the profits of that right so we're worth we're socializing We're socializing returns is what it is for a lot of these things. Yes, so help me understand that so so biotech investors do well They know they do pretty poorly on average typically they they they still put money in it They do they do they wouldn't keep putting money in yeah, I get pitched on biotech all the time most don't invest in most of it It's most I know but they wouldn't keep on investing it if there was no return. I I think a lot of them cope into it. They think something is gonna work They aim for moonshots and big things, but the invest the typical returns are very very bad They are below the cost of capital.

I made a graph of this recently on one of my recent blog posts, actually my most recent one, about how 23ME, 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. But I don't know if they're going to. I'm hoping that they do. Time will tell. But in general, the rate of return is below the cost of capital, which means that it is not profitable. They're losing money, on average. It's a really rough situation

right now, and we can do a lot to change that. We're getting out of a biotech winter. I agree, but shouldn't have, but hold on, we should never have entered a biotech winter because we've been funding the hard sciences so much, right? No. Most of the biotech winter, I think, comes from over-regulation. We, for example, the cost of gene therapies. I have recently been helping a lot of companies with this. They want to reform GMP, good manufacturing practices, because those regulations add a lot of cost. More than half the cost is just due to compliance with that, apparently. And great. 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. But it's still high quality. It ensures that drugs are good without imposing massive costs on people who are developing gene therapies and when they want to run a trial. We can also make it easier to recruit people. For some reason, we've decided to restrict recruitment. 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. Like, there was a health economist in the past who said a hospital bed built is a hospital bed filled.

And the idea there was if you make some new medical resource, people will just use it. So we shouldn't make as much. So he proposed certificate of need laws, which require you, if you want some new medical resource, people just use it, so we shouldn't make as much. 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? And of course they're gonna say no. So too many areas, too few medical practices. And these sorts of laws, they impact everything. They impact trials, not the certificate I need to law directly, laws like them they impact trials They make it really really hard to do stuff and repealing them Well, I think lead to a massive improvement in that area and make it less critical for us to fund all this stuff. So

Pfizer AstraZeneca Moderna Johnson. I know change. Those are all American companies. I think Astra Zeneca Swedish. Yeah, okay, but Pfizer is definitely American. Yep. So is Jane J. Yep. Those two together probably what five hundred billion dollar market cap huge Why can't they fund their own research because it is just too expensive to look at everything take out a loan Take out a seriously. I mean see your five hundred billion dollars a market cap collateralize your stock take out a five billion dollar line of credit Problem is the likelihood of actually getting those returns is just too low Well, it's the market though, right a lot of what we do nowadays in order to overcome this cost issue Is we in license things from China? So for example Nova Nordis Danish company without my question if we invented GLP

Why is it that the Danish companies worth a trillion dollars? They're the ones who got the patent and they are I, I think we should be saying about that. But who funded the research? A lot of it was the government. American government? A lot of it was Harvard, actually. I know, but hold on. So you're arguing. The American government.

So we just made a Danish country a trillion dollars. That doesn't help your case. No, it doesn't. We should get that back. I think we should march in and take the patent with Beidou, which has done their topic entirely. I think we should actually. I just wanna make, I'm sorry to interrupt.

So we funded the rise of a trillion dollar foreign company. We did. So we should stop doing that. No, I think we should actually do it more because the social returns are still larger. If you can make people not fat, the returns to that are huge for us. I mean, but you see what I'm saying.

We're not here to fund foreign companies, right? The thing is Americans want it. So it's funding the creation of a product that Americans could want. On this particular thing, I think we should be beating up Novo Nordisk right now. They've done a lot of good. They've developed, they've put in a lot of work. They invested a lot of their own capital developing this thing and they've had a lot of failures too.

I was going to mention Kagri Sima is one of their proposed improvements on Simaglutide ozimpic and it is, it failed. They in-licensed it for billions of dollars from a Chinese company, they did all the trials, and they turned out to not be any better than semaglutide. So they lost a lot of money on that, and their stock has been tanking ever since. It tanked like 6% in a day when the results came out,

and like that is a good, if a small company had done that, they would have gone bankrupt, and going bankrupt is the norm for a small company had done that they would have gone bankrupt and going bankrupt is the norm For these small medical researchers like their Alzheimer's last year Kassava, I think was the name of it or so sorry something that they went bankrupt overnight because their child was let's get back bupkis billions lost Evaporated it's part of the welcome to the market. Yeah, it's very bad. I don't know if it's bad. It's healthy though, right? The thing is though it leads to this conformity.

There's a conformist strain in, actually this is a great, I'm glad you brought that up. There's conformist strain in pharmaceutical research. It's worse than anywhere else, any other area of research because it is so strict, you are likely to fail to an extreme, extreme degree. And there's likely to not be any benefits to your company, it'll be to somebody else's company, maybe down the line.

That does happen all the time. Some company fails and someone else harvests it later. Roivant, 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. And that has worked really well for him. He's made a lot of money from it. 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. So obesity is a great example. Nova Nordic CEO, and I quoted this to Blake the other day, he, I can find the quote, it's really bad, he does say we're not going to like search for drugs that help with obesity, he says it's a social and cultural problem and so to treat it we need a radical restructuring of society, novo nordi, he said radical restructuring of society, that is an exact quote, it's in there, not a pharmacotherapeutic cure and it's like wait, that's your whole thing now.

You're just, you're selling weight loss stuff. But years ago, that was the attitude. It was until some researcher pushed them really, really hard and continuously, they weren't going to do it. 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. 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.

That is not what Bitcoin was built for. That's why I use Bitcoin.com. I just did a major transaction in it. They offer a self-custodial wallet, which means you hold the keys. You control your assets. 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. This is how it was intended by the original creators of Bitcoin, peer-to-peer

money, free from centralized control, free from surveillance and free from arbitrary seizure. 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. Bitcoin.com freedom starts here. So to circle back to the universities, what is an efficient way to make the colleges stop

discriminating? Beat them down by, this is a very easy thing. So this policy proposal has made it to Trump's desk and he's just sign it this will fix it right away tell me I was with him yesterday iPads reform we have anything what iPads integrated post-secondary educational data system we have a data collection thing and I can show you what he needs to sign if you want to push that on him it just needs to get done.

We have a data collection mechanism that already exists and does allow you to gather the requisite data to find everybody red-handed. You can catch every university in flagrante delicto if you force them to report all the necessary outcomes to indicate that they're discriminating. And we can already do this through an existing system. It would take no extra effort on our part, and we just put a little cost on the universities. It's minimal. All they have to do is report the data. Force them to report the data. We have that authority. We can tell them no public funds until you start reporting this, that, and the other data and this, the exact data has already been detailed by... So it's an information collecting. So for example, we have some idea. So Harvard, after the students prefer admission case in 2019, they had about 31% of their student

population be black. Yep. A white. White. Yeah. And it basically stayed the same. MIT, their black population collapsed to like 4%. Am I correct in this? And it should go down more because we know that it's... But they're directionally going... So that little sample size was evident that someone was following the Supreme Court decision Oh, yeah, someone was not am I correct? Yeah and lots of different universities We have their emissions data now and a lot of them have followed it. They followed the advice They've done what they're supposed to do, but so many

aren't and that's bad and None of them is doing it as well as they should they are all still discriminating to some extent And we have to stop that and iPads will. iPads will help. It's very, very easy. We have everything that we need to collect written up. It's already hit Trump's desk. You just need to sign it. Someone needs to tell them, hey, reminder, sign this order right away and we can catch them all. People will go out of their... So this is actually a funny thing. Republicans don't seem to know this, but data collection is the way to win a lot of political battles.

If liberals have known this for many years, 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. 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 impacts. They wanted to be able to sue for disparate impact stuff.

They wanted to be able to sue for all sorts of things. They mandate you, me, and everybody else are reporting weird data that they can use in like citizen action. A citizen, a law firm, somebody can go and file that case, make that money. They can make a social change through torts, through the legal system. 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.

They mandated the collection of it. What data should we start collecting, especially on crime? On crime, we should have more up-to-date data. The fact that we don't is very weird. It makes it very difficult to actually get a lot done in crime. Like you can't tell when something is something works and if you want to tell when something works you need to be able to like have the updated data or else

you gotta wait years to figure it out. If you want to have adaptive policy where we can rapidly change our direction on things. Yeah we only get the murder numbers for the past year about a year later. Yeah and that's not efficient at all. Some people have tried to create live indices that give you like a week delay, but it's just not very effective and yet they have to update all the time. 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 so you might wait if you're running a trial and you want to like track do my patients in the trial live or have they dropped why have they dropped out of my study you want to know is it because they died and you might have to wait a year 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. But you can't because the death index is so slow. What is the number one proven way to stop crime?

Oh man, arrest people, put them in jail. I thought we have too many prisoners. We don't have enough prisoners. Now he's speaking my language. Too many prisoners is always a Relative to what stupid left-wing talking point? It's it's a very bad So they'll say this and they say this in oxford that we're ex We have like x we have a certain amount of the world's prisoners. You've heard this whole

Yes, they say it's way too much and they draw these graphs We're like americas off the charts and it's like yeah, because we're a lot more violent than everywhere else We are very very violent. We have more guns than we shoot. So do we have an under imprisonment problem? We do very severely and it's funny 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. We started putting crazies in asylums. We started putting wackadoo violent people in jail. Very simple and we had a reduction that led in part to the crime wave in the 1980s, and then we had an increase

that led to the reduction afterwards. If you incarcerate a lot of people, you will have reduction in crime because you'll put away these big offenders. And even if you just – so in the Netherlands, they've done this really great thing. If you have like a certain number of offenses, they'll just lock you away for a very long time. It's alright. It's like three strikes, but better. They've they managed to reduce a lot of their like violent crime by about 25% I think by just arresting super offenders and that's trivial. That adds almost nothing to the jail population, but it puts back, it gives you back communities, it gives you back inner cities, it gives you back huge swaths of the American like everywhere that is violent you can even

do gang crackdowns like I did in New York and you can immediately see like 20% reductions in all violent crimes in the city so we need more prisoners more people arrested absolutely we are under imprisoned right now and we are under police that's even bigger. So America Has more of an under policing problem because we're afraid to pay for a lot more officers It's the weird thing is Europe. They police a lot more relative to what like their crime levels than we do which is weird Why did they have so many more police which allows them to incarcerate less because having police driving around? Yeah, it's a deterrent if you have a police doing a patrol in a gang riddled neighborhood

they are less likely to shoot out. I mean these people are so dumb when I talk to them on campus they're like oh police cause crime I say okay let me ask you a question let's pretend that you're a gang banger and you're about to shoot up another rival gang yeah and you turn the corner and there are two cop cars you know are you more or less likely oh likely to do the gang shooting? That's right. This is not hard.

And they say, oh, they'll come back later. Yeah. Okay, then less likely. Yeah, exactly. This is not hard stuff. And most violence is fruit of the moment stuff. It's not planned at all. It's exactly.

Well, the gang stuff, yes and no. Even still, a lot of the gang stuff. So tell me, what do you mean by that? So very little violence is premeditated. People don't generally go out of their way to plan out a murder. They tend to do it in the heat of the moment. It happens from a fight, an insult, somebody getting drunk and doing something, somebody on drugs. But isn't the gang stuff like tonight we're going to go shoot something up?

So there is some premeditation. There is some premeditation, but gang crime is not actually anywhere near the majority of our crime problem. It's mostly like random one-offs. And those, you prevent them by like locking up the crazies away for their earlier offenses. Carrying weapons. Yeah. To defend yourself. 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. They're not allowed to because they're a felon. They have prior offenses. If you lock them up for those prior offenses, you will stop them from doing the more the more hideous crimes like actually killing someone. So we're very lucky on this program. We spend a lot of time with President Donald Trump. What executive orders do you think he should do? iPads is one. Just start nailing them off. I'll pull up my list. You have a list? Good. I do. Yeah. Let me just pull this up real quick. So another thing- I knew you'd be an Android guy. There you go.

So he needs to do the iPads executive order. That's a great one. That will cripple a lot of the bad things that- like the discrimination right away. That's simple. Another one is he needs to address the academic publishing cartels. The- You mean like Springer Nature and stuff? Oh,, he needs to crush them. And he can crush them, he has the right to. So we did a whole segment on Springer. What do you mean by crush? Tell me. Ah, so they have extreme profits for no good reason. They should not be profiting like they are. We have an executive order typed up that needs to hit his desk, immediately needs to sign it.

Basically... You need to tell me who wrote that. I'll show you afterwards actually. Yeah, okay. There are several here that I will show you. So crush the cartel like Springer Nature. Yes you can actually mandate that a lot of research start becoming publicly available. They shouldn't be able to charge. Don't just get close to the mic. Yes. 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. Like the government has legally the ability to say, hey, that paper cannot be buying a paywall, I want it now, and they can reclaim it.

And they can do this for most research that's published. They should do this immediately. And then democratize it. Yeah. And then they should say... Open source it, basically. Exactly. And they should say, you cannot spend public funds, like your research funds, on article publication fees. 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. The add-on from these journals is almost nothing.

They don't do much editing, and the peer review they get is free. It's voluntary stuff from other researchers. So it wastes their time, too. It makes our research dollars much less efficient. So what would you recommend the president does with the academic? Because I have had friends that I really trust say, this is a huge issue.

Yeah. I will show you the exact details on this afterwards. But we have a lot of things written in here. 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. That should have been done a while ago. There's some stuff at the NIH that should be going on with this. They are going to remove, for example, their one-year

embargo on their research. There needs to be effort done on making data transparent. So papers published with funds from the government, they need to immediately be made to require all their code and the providing of data. They need to open up a lot of data that is out there that is arbitrary, so this is actually great. A lot of research is arbitrarily stopped by bureaucrats. Their reasons, they don't have to provide them. They don't have to say why they're denying you,

a given researcher, access to some data set maintained by the government. Could be they don't like you because you're white. That's exactly it. And that actually has happened to a few people. Of course it has. There was going to be a lawsuit two years ago about this, and then they were like, ah, whatever, we'll just not do it. We'll wait for stuff to happen. Some other researchers wanted to investigate the relationship between BMI and education, and they wanted some genetically informative models, so they wanted to get access. You mean body mass index? Yeah, they wanted to research this, and

the NIH said no, and they were like, what's the reason? They're like, we don't have to tell you, so whatever. You're not allowed to do it. They can, these bureaucrats can just say no for whatever reason. Are there any correlations between somebody's race and their BMI? Oh yeah, considerable. It's interesting, black men didn't have about the same BMIs as white men, but black women tend to be much, much more obese than like white women. Is that just because of dietary or is there a genetic reason, you think?

It's ultimately dietary, but we don't know why. So the thing is, if something's dietary, it could be heritable too, meaning like the disposition towards liking sweet foods. There's a genetic component to that. So people who like more sweet foods might be disposed towards wanting to eat more of them. Is there anything to the IQ differences between race?

Considerable, yeah. The evidence is really dispositive these days and people get really worked up about it. It makes a lot of people very, very offended, but every time you test it you get the same result. What is the result? The result is about a one standard deviation gap in IQ between blacks and whites in the US, about 0.5 standard deviations between Asians and whites. Asians do a little bit better and about 0.66 between Hispanics and whites where Hispanics do a little bit worse and that's just how it's been for the, I

mean as long as we've measured it. In fact even using proxies from literacy tests back in like nearly the 1870s like like they were given as part of the census, you can see the same sorts of gaps. They're a similar in magnitude. It's been around forever. It's how it is. If you want to address it, we have to stop clamoring about it

and getting worked out about it. Cause how do you raise IQ? We don't know yet. Genetic engineering is the most likely means. Embryo selection, choosing to have the smarter kid among a set of embryos for doing IVF. A lot of things like that will actually make material differences. They're the only things

we really know. Remind our audience what a standard deviation is. A standard deviation is going from the median to about like the 67 percentile or so. So it's moving up quite a bit. Does the IQ differences between races, does that happen across the planet or is that just to America? It happens across the planet. And there is differences in selectivity. So like, for example, the UK gets relatively elite Africans as immigrants and they get relatively-

A lot of Nigerians. Yeah. Oh yes, a lot. Because it's the biggest source country in Africa. It's the most populated country. And it's part of the Commonwealth. So they will get a lot of those. America gets the most brilliant Indians.

We actually have their test scores. We have their test scores on the joint entrance exams to the IITs, the Indian Institutes of Tech, and the higher their score on those exams, the higher their rank in the whole country, the more likely they are to immigrate, and in particular, the more likely they are to immigrate to America. So we get the smartest Indians. But their national IQ is just very low. We don't see those people though. What do you think caused the genetic differences in IQ?

A lot of it's probably drift. A lot of it has to do with selection over time due to socioeconomic stuff. So for example, in the not so distant past, people who were a lot better off had a lot more surviving kids. 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. That's where my family is from, that's where our last name is from, it's in Poland. They tended to live quite well, and their infant mortality rates were low. And the higher up within the community, the lower the rates were.

So you have more surviving kids. And the upper classes over many generations would replace the lower classes. This is Gregory Clark's thesis for why people became, why we had industrial revolution. 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 poorer people in every era didn't survive very much, and the richer 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. Why do you think people get so worked up on IQ differences? They overvalue it. They value, oh my god, that person's more intelligent than me, that can't be. They refuse to believe in intelligence differences unless somebody's like a clear genius like John von Neumann. They hate the idea of being lesser or anything like that or being perceived in certain ways. They just get they attach so much

emotional valence to it when it should just be a simple thing. We can do a lot of policies that reduce the importance of IQ differences. 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. 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. Fewer serious side effects in that county. And there are a lot of policy options like this that allow us to make those differences less significant. 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.

Yeah, and so, I mean, I don't even have much more to add to that. I just, I mean, Douglas Murray wrote about this extensively. 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? They say it's not true, it's a hoax, it's a scam. I think we're actually missing out on a lot of the policy experiments we could be using here. So you can very simply go out to like a hospital and gate the Wi-Fi with a short little optional test or whatever. And you can learn about a population of like Medicaid users or Medicare people, anything like that.

You can learn about cognitive decline in simple ways if you just like normalize testing. 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. It's like we've cut off a tech tree because we're afraid. I meant Charles Murray, not Douglas Murray. Oh yeah, sorry. I was confused. I was like, what did Douglas Murray write?

Big difference. Yeah, notable. Yes. So, let's now go to closing. I think that will sufficiently piss people off. I think, yeah, you saved the worst for last. You challenge yourself to write a blog post in a single hour Tell our audience about that and just tell more about kind of what you do and how you do. I mean, obviously you have a remarkable grasp of

These topics and it's impressive. So just tell us more about yourself Thank you to the extent you can so I don't give away too much. I know you have to be careful I'm completely on your team there, because the bad guys are bad. They are very bad. Golly, just yesterday I got mailed something that was very rough. I'll tell you about that later.

So the thing is, I don't like to waste a lot of time. 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, I advise a lot of companies on various things, and I have to work and do a lot of other stuff. There's a million projects I'm involved in. I advise a lot of companies on various things. And I have to manage my time pretty carefully. If I waste too much, then that blows away my day and it blows away my productivity. It makes me feel pretty bad.

I feel down if I waste too much time. So I try and constrain myself to about an hour or if I know it's gonna be a longer post, I'll do two hours for a lot of my posts. And I have a little timer app that I made, just a simple Python script. I write it all up in WordPad and it automatically closes it and deletes everything if I don't do it in a lot of the amount of time. I think that's a pretty good way to

manage my time. 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. I don't make any notes because I think that's cheating. 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. But I don't ever, I don't usually make things for a post during it because I'll be on the time crunch and I'll have made it ahead of time and thought about it and all that.

And you're mostly a substacker. Is that fair to say? I mostly do substack for my writing, yeah. What would you say, this is my last question and we do have to dash, I think we've got almost two hours, almost. What is the, what is, what topic do you think is most intellectually not explored on the right? Ooh, wow. That's a really, really good one. So I'm going to give a really, it's going to sound odd, but I think deregulation is under explored. 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. They

don't think about the function of bureaucrats or how they work or how to reform our systems or anything. And this is actually a thing where they, 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 like 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 and Republicans just have no idea. And this leads to a major major human capital problem. Do you think it's a bigger problem that we just need to learn how government works?

Absolutely. Yeah, I think Republicans especially have no idea how anything works that is crucial for them to change. And it's led to Republicans not being the ones to staff their own governments. So when a Republican comes into power, they tend to still have a bunch of Democrats working under them and they frustrate them. They try and do things that prevent them from actually exercising their will and changing policies in the way that they need to. And it makes them look less effective and it makes it harder for them to get reelected and all that.

You're very bright. How to what extent is AI going to change our lives the next 10 years? Probably a lot. Very, very considerably. It is going to make massive, massive differences. My probability of doom is very low. The P-Doom is what they call it. Yeah, I'm with you.

I don't think it's gonna kill us all. I don't think there's actually a medium for AI to do that, but I do think there are a lot of ways that it can aid discovery of new glass. Quantum computing especially, if they marry the two together. New ways to do all sorts of things. We can do so, so much if we have how severe

Will the job displacement be? Probably very large not in the next ten years, but after that yes, I think in 20 or so years We're probably gonna see 10 to 20 percent Disemployment like people getting kicked off the job market and not being so useful so you see about 20 years from now wow Some people are more bullish they think it's gonna happen the next five to ten years But I mean who knows it's all guessing right? Yeah, it is. We'll see. I mean do you think it will lead towards an inevitable apex of totalitarianism? No, I'm hopeful that it doesn't that's my worry though. Is that if China achieves? Superintelligence before we see what's GC GC. I see GI or whatever a GI or a SI a GI artificial intelligence

a si artificial superintelligence if they reach that first, and a friend of mine, Jeremy Noh, he has written about this quite a bit, his big fear is not that AI will go out of control like a Skynet and kill us, it is that China will get it and they will use it to beat us thoroughly. And if the Marxists are in charge, then we are doomed. Do you think it will eventually eliminate private property?

No. I don't believe in any of that. That's very, 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 and no, I think private property is actually essential to social organization. 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.

Oh, I think it will. It will definitely be a war on scarcity. It'll make it so we live in an era of abundance that is unprecedented. 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. That's a very optimistic take. I'm optimistic about this. And I hope you're right.

Is there anything we didn't talk about? How can people support you talk about your substack? This was phenomenal. Go subscribe. If you like what I like, or if you like what I write, then go subscribe. Follow me on substack. I don't have a Patreon or anything. Do you have an email that you can give or a way because you're going to get a lot of

tremendous spicy feedback on some of the COVID stuff. If you subscribe to me on Substack, you can message me there. I might DMs are open to paid subscribers. Great, very good. And I'm sure you'll read any thoughtful critiques, right? Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Craymu, for your time.

This has been phenomenal. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us as always, freedom at CharlieKirk.com. Thanks so much for listening and God bless us as always, freedom at CharlieKirk.com. Thanks so much for listening and God bless. For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.