DarkHorse Podcast
The DarkHorse Podcast is hosted by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. Bret and Heather both have PhDs in biology, and they seek truth and explore a wide variety of topics with their evolutionary toolkit as society loses its footing. Tune in to infamous spreaders of "Covid Disinformation" Bret and Heather for a podcast—maybe you'll like what you see!
DarkHorse Podcast
Can the internet make you sick? The 297th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Today we discuss the experience of returning home after timeway—culture shock, social media, and seeing your home with fresh eyes. Then a difficult set of topics: anorexia, physician assisted suicide, “terminal” diagnoses, social contagions, and what people have a right to do with their own lives. Finally: AI has been used to predict potentially useful drug combinations to fight cancer. What does this mean for the future of medicine, and AI?
988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: https://988lifeline.org
Free and confidential helpline for individuals and families facing mental disorders: https://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/helplines/national-helpline
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Our sponsors:
Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club: Scrumptious & freshly harvested. Go to http://www.GetFreshDarkHorse.com to get a bottle of the best olive oil you’ve ever had for $1 shipping.
Helix
Helix: Excellent, sleep-enhancing, American-made mattresses. Go to http://www.HelixSleep.com/DarkHorse to get 20% off all mattress orders.
Manukora: the most flavorful, delicious, and nutritious honey you’ll ever have. Get $25 off your starter kit at http://www.Manukora.com/DarkHorse
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Join us on Locals! Get access to our Discord server, exclusive live streams, live chats for all streams, and early access to many podcasts: https://darkhorse.locals.com
Heather’s newsletter, Natural Selections (subscribe to get free weekly essays in your inbox): https://naturalselections.substack.com
Our book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, is available everywhere books are sold, including from Amazon: https://amzn.to/3AGANGg (commission earned)
Check out our store! Epic tabby, digital book burning, saddle up the dire wolves, and more: https://darkhorsestore.org
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Mentioned in this episode:
Denver Post op-ed on Jane Allen: https://www.denverpost.com/2025/10/02/assisted-suicide-was-offered-to-my-friend-jane-allen-she-had-an-eating-disorder-opinion/
Gaudiani et al 2022. Terminal anorexia nervosa: three cases and proposed clinical characteristics. Journal of Eating Disorders, 10(1): 23: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s40337-022-00548-3.pdf
Guarda et al 2022. Terminal anorexia nervosa is a dangerous term: it cannot, and should not, be defined. Journal of eating disorders, 10(1): 79: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s40337-022-00599-6.pd
Mia Hughes’ tweet thread on social contagions: https://x.com/_CryMiaRiver/status/1491065839495544837
Laura Delano on DarkHorse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18XtCdasn2Q&list=PLjQ2gC-5yHEuZwhHfjXu3KH8MomS2N3zq&index=13
Laura Delano’s book, Unshrunk, excerpted at Natural Selections: https://naturalselections.substack.com/p/informed-consent-in-the-land-of-psychiatric
How a Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway: https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-gemma-ai-cancer-therapy-discovery
Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse Podcast, live stream number 297.(...) 297?(...) 297? Run? Yes. No. No. Alright, well, I'm over it. 300 minus 3, that's how you know it's not prime, right there. So you just got like a... Oh, I see. So, you know, 399, 9 and 27. No, 9 and 33, 11 and 27. Yeah. Nice. Alright, well, we'll see. Okay, so it's not prime. Yeah. Go. Right. That actually takes the pressure off. It does, I think. Yeah. This is our second live stream in a few days. I will say, on the last live stream, I was headed in a bad direction getting sick, and I am now still sick, but headed in a better direction getting better, and you are now getting sick. So anyway. Oh man, I'm going to be sick. I'm going to be sick. Yeah. So apologies. Apologies for that. We are, we both, I guess you picked something up on the plane, one of the planes on the ride home as often happens. But here we are. Check out the watch party on locals, and you had a Patreon conversation this morning, we'll have that one tomorrow morning. It was off the hook, by the way. Was it? That was off the hook. What does that mean? Well, it means that we made some interesting progress. It feels like it means you lost the fish. Oh gosh, no, it's a phone reference, which is... Still? Well, to make progress with the phone, it has to be off the hook, or at least it did back when phones were on hooks. That's weak. Do you remember the eight? I mean, it's true, but it's weak. So I feel like off the hook has this really strong sense of like, man, that was awesome. But a precondition for success, most of which won't result in success, does not strike me as the same as that was off the hook. I agree. That phone call was totally off the hook, like duh. Yeah, okay, it was off the hook. Was it any good? Interesting things inside. We don't know anything on the basis of that. So I feel like it's neither a fish reference nor phone reference. I think it's a third thing that we don't know. That's possible. Do you remember the band X and the song, Your Phone's Off the Hook, but You're Not? No, I don't. It was a favorite of my kind. That was a good song. At least a good line. Yeah, it was a very good line. Alright, let's pay the rent up top with our sponsors, three awesome sponsors, as always, right at the top of the hour. Our first sponsor this week is Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club. Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club.(...) We love these guys and our olive oils so much. Extra virgin olive oil is delicious and nutritious. It's actually good for your heart. Helps prevent Alzheimer's. High enough accidents. The list of health benefits from olive oil goes on and on. It's a cornerstone of Mediterranean diets, but if you've never had excellent fresh olive oil, and maybe you haven't, even if you cook with olive oil all the time, put it in your salad dressing and such, you may wonder what all the fuss is about. Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club is the brainchild of TJ Robinson, also known as the Olive Oil Hunter. He brings the freshest, most flameful, nutrient-rich olive oils from harvest to your door. TJ's Prime Fresh Oils are incredible. We've received several different varietals now, all with noticeably different flavors, and have used them in all sorts of culinary contexts. In marinades for meat and fish, tossed with carrots or asparagus or potatoes before roasting or grilling, rubbed directly on the steaks before grilling, used fresh in salads or drizzled as a finish on a cold soup, or grilled halloumi cheese. We made olive oil cake and several raw sauces that benefit from amazing fresh olive oil, a mostly classic Italian pesto and a Venezuelan green sauce that is rich in cilantro. This week, when we got our newest shipment, we sipped them to taste them in our... Let's start that paragraph again. This week, when we got our newest shipment of olive oil from the Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club, we sipped them to taste them in their purest form. One was spicy, green, and aromatic, a distinct considerable rubella. Another was bolder and richer. They are all unbelievably good. Olive oil is a succulent, delicious food, like pretty much all fads, as best when it's fresh.(...) But most supermarket olive oils sit on the shelf for months or even years, growing stale, dull, flavorless, even rancid. The solution is to have fresh-pressed artisanal olive oil shipped directly to you after each new harvest, and the oils' flavor and nutrients are at their peak. As an introduction to T.J. Robinson's Fresh Pressed Olive Oil Club, he will send you a full-size, $39 bottle of one of the world's finest artisanal olive oils, fresh from the new harvest, for just $1 in album cover shipping. And there's no commitment to buy anything now or ever. Get your free $39 bottle for just $1 shipping to taste the difference freshness mix. Go to getfreshdarkhorse.com. That's getfreshdarkhorse.com for a free bottle of amazing artisanal olive oil and pages of $1 in shipping. It's such good stuff. And he also, which isn't in the script, sends out descriptions of not just what he and his tasters taste in the various olive oils,(...) but where they are grown, who they are grown by, how they are processed, what the history of the land is and the farm and the olives. And it's just such a great way to add to your sense of what you're eating and the terroir, where it's coming from. You can tell it's a labor of love. Indeed. Our second sponsor this week is Helix, which makes truly fantastic mattresses. We've had our Helix mattress for just about four years now, and it continues to provide amazing sleep just as much as it did when we first got it. It's fern, which we like, but if you want a soft mattress, then make those, too. It's cooling, it's quiet, and just lovely in every regard.(...) Everyone has had bad sleep. Sometimes it's attributable to modernity, the light shining in your window, the noises of humanity that you can't shut out, the churning of your brain, your physiology that's been mangled by fake food and pharmaceuticals. All of that contributes to bad sleep, but so does a bad mattress.(...) Helix makes excellent mattresses, every one of which combines individually wrapped steel coils in the base with premium foam layers on top providing excellent support for your spine. Take the Helix Sleep Quiz... It's a quiz, but... It's a small quiz. Take the hint it's kind of a small quiz. Maybe I'll call it a quiz because no one knows the word. It gives you anxiety so that you can't quite breathe. Oh, a quiz-wease. A quiz-induced-wease. That's right.(...) Take the Helix Sleep Quiz online, and in less than two minutes you'll be directed to which of their many mattresses is best for you. Do you sleep on your back, your stomach, or your side? Do you toss and turn or sleep like a log? Do you prefer a firmer or softer mattress? Once you've found your perfect mattress, you have a hundred nights to try it out without any penalty in the unlikely event that you don't love it. Helix mattresses are made in America at their own manufacturing facility, and unlike many mattresses now on the market, all of Helix's mattresses are 100% fiberglass free. Helix mattresses are built for human bodies and built to last. Helix also supports military, first responders, teachers, and students by giving them a special discount. Everyone we know who has slept on a Helix mattress raves about it. Seriously, some family members just slept on our Helix mattress for a few nights, and they went home and immediately ordered one for themselves. And Zach's about to get one on his apartment at college as well. Actually, update, he has it now, and it's amazing, he reports. Just as we expected. We have heard about people having or directly experienced ourselves better sleep, less sleep apnea, less back pain, fewer temperature problems. So, go to helixsleep.com slash DarkHorse for 20% off site-wide.(...) That's helixsleep.com slash DarkHorse for 20% off site-wide. Site-wide? Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you. Once again, that's helixsleep.com slash DarkHorse for a seriously comfortable mattress. Heather, our final sponsor this week is Delicious and Nutritious. It's Mauna Cora Honey. Oh, man. I know. Really good stuff. It is really good stuff, especially when you're sick and you need it. Mauna Cora Honey is rich and creamy and the most delicious honey you've ever had. Ethically produced by Master B's beekeepers in the remote forests of New Zealand, Mauna Cora Honey contains powerful nutrients to support immunity and gut health. All honey is excellent for you. The scientific research has indicated that honey has antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and anti-mutogenic properties as well as expediting wound healing.(...) Spread a thin layer on your face after showering and leave it there for 20 minutes or longer and find that your skin becomes softer, its tone evens out, and actually diminishes. All of that is true for regular honey, but Mauna Cora Honey is even better. All of the health benefits attributed to regular honey appear to be even stronger with Manuka Honey. I've been conflating the two terms and I apologize. From the fungal infections to diabetes to gastrointestinal tract infections, Manuka Honey can be useful in treating the problem. Bees that collect nectar from the leptospermum scoparium, aka the Manuka Tea Tree in New Zealand, create honey that has three times the antioxidants and prebiotics than average honey. In addition, a unique antibacterial compound, MGO, comes from the nectar of the Manuka Tea Tree, delicious and nutritious with great quality control. That's Manuka. A lot of honey on grocery market shelves isn't even real honey. You'll never have that problem with Manuka.(...) Manuka Honey is rich and creamy with a complexity and its flavor profile that is unmatched by other honeys that we've had. If you are already making the switch away from processed sugars towards things like maple syrup and honey go farther, try Manuka Honey and you'll be blown away. With Manuka Honey, a bit of sweetness that you can crave can be satisfied without putting your health at risk. Manuka Honey is a game changer and all that you need is one teaspoon to get the most out of the amazing bioactives in Manuka. Now it's easier than ever to try Manuka Honey. Head to monocora.com slash dark horse to get $25 off the starter kit which comes with an MGO 850 plus Manuka Honey jar, five honey travel sticks, a wooden spoon and a guidebook. That's monocora.com slash DarkHorse for $25 off your starter kit. I'm going to talk about something truly crazy and then you're going to wrap it up with something laterally crazy. Laterally crazy, exactly. Yes, I wanted to pick up in our last podcast, we talked about three important lessons from the Camino. You do not have to watch that podcast for this to make sense to you. Well, I accept that maybe that's the Camino.(...) The Camino is this famous hike in Spain. There are actually many versions of it. Heather and I did the Primitivo which is the original hike. Anyway, we learned many things and are still learning many things upon our return. The three lessons from last time were that it finds every defect if you push yourself to your limits. Every physical defect. Every repair that you've had, all those things come to the surface.(...) You discover capacity that you didn't know you had buried within you largely as a result of being able to get used to and tolerate suffering that you couldn't have tolerated before. And equilibrium is the key concept to pulling off something like this. You need to earn back whatever debt you've created during the day, during your hike, over the period of rest. And if you don't do that, then you begin to lose ground and it gets worse and worse. So equilibrium is the key. The fourth lesson, which we didn't talk about. The equilibrium is key lesson could also be restated as don't burn the candle at both ends. If once you're off the trail, you continue to spend in whatever way you might want to spend, you are unlikely to be back to your baseline the next morning. Yep. And it's not like failing to hit baseline one day is going to do you half, but you can't be losing ground every day or you'll never regain it. You'll drop out of the... How many ways that we speak use metaphors that involve walking. You can't lose, you don't want to lose ground every day. Well, like you literally hiked and then once you're stopped, you don't want to lose ground. That's metaphor, but meaningful here. We are swimming in a sea of metaphors. All right. So the fourth... I know you're giving me that low count. It's just not relevant.(...) We weren't swimming, we were walking. But it felt like swimming. It is true that metaphor is in just about every single sentence that we utter. The fact that there are other metaphors that don't have to do with walking is not surprising. We are drenched in metaphor. All right. I'm going to stop doing that. Actually, I can't stop doing that because our language is so full of metaphors. All right. The fourth lesson though, and actually, would you put up the picture I sent you? So this is a picture I couldn't find the last time. This is a picture. I mentioned that on the Camino, because everybody's hiking in the same direction, you tend to meet the same people again and again. Here we have Matt and Chris, who were part of our party, and Lisa and Amber, a mother-daughter duo who were hiking in the same direction that we were hiking. We encountered them many times. They became friends along the way. In any case, when we met them, Matt and I met them hobbling, literally hobbling to the supermarket one night to pick up some dried fruit and some oranges. Shortly after the hospitality sort of ride. Shortly after one of the most remote and steepest live days. This is when I was not with you guys. So we, you know, it was three blocks from where we were staying and we were like, kind of limping to the supermarket. On the way, limping at home, we ran into these two and they stopped us to ask a question about something that we had all seen on the trail, these sleek roofs and all. But anyway, struck up a friendship, discovered that they had actually been hiking. They had taken a much longer route and they've been on the road for a month. So anyway, and they told us interesting things like the scuttlebutt on the trail is you hit your stride after two weeks. That's the point at which you can reach the equilibrium every day. But in any case, the long duration, either that month that they were out or the two weeks that we were out, 16 days, 16 days is enough,(...) especially given that you don't have lots of bandwidth to spend checking in. There is internet access in many places, but you just don't have the mental capacity to engage. And so it breaks you of your connection to the online world. And what that does is it actually reminds me of what used to happen when you and I did extended field seasons away. Extended field season away back when you and I were doing it where you really weren't checking in at home, you couldn't. The technology wasn't sophisticated enough to make that easy. You would return home and you could briefly see your own culture with a kind of objectivity and clarity that is just not available to you when you're drenched in it. You come to you begin to come to terms with what has felt neutral and baseline and fundamental to you all the time. And now, having been away from it either looks like exactly what you wanted, exactly what you need or something that that feels for it. And so it actually creates a greater both appreciation for everything that we do right and a greater awareness of those things that we're not doing right in our home. Yeah, I must say that I experienced this every time it happened as a kind of whiplash. Yeah, and you sort of want to preserve the ability to see your culture with that objectivity and you of course lose it because everything is so normalized. I remember being particularly shocked. This is 30 years ago, but particularly shocked by advertisements. Because the way in which you are being manipulated and it's so commonplace that you stop noticing it and then to see it, be able to briefly understand what these forces are and how they're affecting you is powerful stuff. I remember being particularly shocked by something that will seem silly. And I went off the coast of Madagascar for five months.(...) And my mother and I were walking during rush hour on some busy street in London. And I came up short next to a window for a store that I didn't know existed, which was Baby Gap. And for some reason I thought, we are just so ridiculously pampered and specialized. The Gap makes jeans, but we need a store for the babies. And at this point, this would have been in 96, I guess, or seven. Seven maybe. It seems like an absurd thing to be jolted by. But at the time, that was my example of, oh my God, how far from our roots have we come that this is the sort of store that exists and is thriving. And it's akin to being thrown by advertising, I think. Well, I mean, in fact, I think it strangely presages our kind of distortion.(...) Because, as you've pointed out many times,(...) kids are sort of overly reified in the present because they go online and they have an avatar. They can cultivate and curate and they can make a splash. You can get Greta Thunberg into importance at a very young age. And the idea that the baby needs not just nice clothing, but like a particular bent on fashion,(...) a particular kind of nonchalance. They actually do nonchalance pretty well without the gap. But, you know, some of them-- They got you right there for them. Yep, that's right. It's got their back and the other sides of them. And their back. Yes, a lot of that.(...) But, okay, so very jarring to see your own culture as it is. But the point here is that in this case,(...) the communal experience was particularly isolating in a strange way because it took up so many resources all at once. And then returning it. Returning to,(...) you know, life involves checking back in with the world that's spent weeks in motion while you were away. Now, what I'm dancing around here is returning to, you know, my own internet life. It looks crazy. This world-- You know why? Because it is crazy. Yeah. It's not like I wouldn't have known that six weeks ago. I knew that formally. But the degree to which the battles look insane and look almost tailor-made to make us un-understandable to each other is shocking. So I'm curious.(...) I didn't have this experience unless online to begin with. And I think there are a number of reasons that I did not have this experience that you're having here. But we both have had the experience in the past when mostly before it was possible to be completely online back in the real world. Although I ran a study abroad trip where, you know, we go deep into the Amazon where there's just nothing possible.(...) Even just a week of no contact is a remarkable way to break some yelps and bad habits. And it can get a little good habits as well.(...) But I'm curious. You said upon returning to at least some of the online life that you had before the communal, the arguments appear to be particularly crazy. I think that's what you said. I'm wondering if you can pinpoint that at all. What specifically are you seeing or does the whole thing just look like us? Well, one thing I'm seeing is that the focus on Israel is disruptive of the sort of fragile progress that we in the public have made on many fronts trying to make sense of the world. And it's not the first time I've seen this. October 7th did this. You noted this explicitly at the time. That there were groups of people who would come together with understanding who are now being rifted. The medical freedom movement. Rifted. Yes. They were experiencing unbridgeable gaps. And it felt, after October 7th, like it was a direct hit on the medical freedom movement. Now maybe I'm seeing things that don't deserve to be connected, but it felt like you had a powerful political force emerging that it endured, that it effectively had been in a kind of war. And that had galvanized them into a community that had its own language and had its own assumptions. And that just shattered in an instant. And, you know, presumably that was largely maybe entirely incidental. But what I'm now seeing is that the way that all things Israel have taken over every conversation, it's like it is an unavoidable lens that obviously has nothing to do with most of the substance of life. And yet because people have divided into teams on this topic, maybe understandably, but they've divided into teams on this topic, that those teams are causing every other discussion to fragment and disintegrate and descend into mutual suspicions of disloyalty. And I think that's a very important point. Rather than burn to the ground and have new things built in their place. I see credibility in both arguments. But usually you take the other position, right, that none of the existing institutions can be saved. But what they have done in the past is indeed provide us a shared narrative. On the other hand, technologically, we may just simply be past an age in which synchronicity is possible. You're going to have a crossword puzzle and she's knitting, or whatever might be a story from an era not that long ago which doesn't seem toxic. That's certainly a possibility with two people on two different devices. But if both people are scrolling through what seems to be what happened today, if that has replaced the shared screen with the news, which may or may not be lying to you, there is actually very little together in being together. You're not living a shared reality, even if you can reach across and touch the other person. If you're receiving information into your eyes and therefore your brain, they're wildly different from the person sitting next to you, in what way are they sitting next to you? She was a woman who had been in a progressive step toward an enlightened autonomy but assisted suicide is anything but compassion for vulnerable people like the tragic story of my friend with anorexia, Jane Allen, which shows how assisted suicide laws threatened the lives of the young and terrible. Jane Allen was a circulating called terminal anorexia, which is an arrow to the heart of young people with eating disorders who are already experiencing distorted ideas of their worthiness to live. Now, we're assisted suicide is legal. They have the state and part of the medical profession telling them they were better off dead. After struggling with anorexia for most of her life in 2018 chain was living in Colorado Springs and getting help for her mental health disabilities, including her eating disorder. She ended up in the care of an exclusive boutique eating disorder practice. She was in and out of hospitals and residential treatment. Jane's condition resisted treatment and she ended up receiving a terminal anorexia diagnosis. Jane wrote that her eating disorder doctor would make an exception for me and allow me to die if that was my choice. It didn't feel like my choice I felt coerced and spent an incredibly agonizing months in an assisted living facility. Jane was a prescription directly from her eating disorder doctor. Instead, she was referred to another doctor who probably checked the boxes required under Colorado safeguards and saw to it that Jane got the lethal drugs. Jane's life was saved at the last minute when her father received a guardianship order from a Colorado judge was able to have the lethal drugs destroyed.(...) After that, Jane said, quote, I ate just enough to not die right away. And then I ate more. I weaned off the morphine and all the other hospice drugs that kept me in such a fog. I was told that I was too much of a liability and dropped from the boutique clinic. I moved from Colorado to Oregon. I have a job that I love a new puppy and a great group of friends. I'm able to fuel my body to hike into the things I love. I am repairing my relationship with my family and I have a great therapist who is helping me process all of this. Things obviously aren't perfect and I still have hard days, but I also have balance and flexibility and a life that is so much more than I was told would ever be possible for me. A week before she planned to go public with her story, however, she died suddenly of complications to her health caused by over two decades of starving herself.(...) To this day, I wonder, whether the months of treatment lost during Jane's detour into terminal anorexia care worsened her condition, whether she could still be with us today doing all the good. We'll never know. What we do know is that these laws are not so rosy as the propaganda would have you believe. They are as messy as life itself and there has been and will be more collateral damage in people like Jane or Colorado Mary Gossman, who was told by a nationally renowned Denver eating disorder treatment facility,"There's nothing we can do for you," which qualified her for lethal drugs under the law. Specifically says there is no book, so I'm not looking for where this diagnosis comes from. It turns out it's not so long ago. Here's a paper, a peer-reviewed scientific journal article in the Journal of Eating Disorders from 2022 called Terminal anorexia nervosa, three cases and proposed clinical characteristics. I'm just going to read the abstract and a couple of pieces from it. Abstract. Most individuals with eating disorders will either recover, settle into an unrecovered but self-defined acceptable quality of life, or continue to cycle from crisis to relative stability over time. However, a minority of those with severe and enduring eating disorders recognize after years of trying that recovery remains elusive and further treatments seems both futile and harmful.(...) No level of harm reduction feels achievable or adequately ameliorates their suffering. In this subgroup, many of those with anorexia nervosa will experience the medical consequences of malnutrition as their future cause of death. Whereas anyone who wishes to keep striving for recovery despite exhaustion and depletion should wholeheartedly be supporting in doing so, some patients simply cannot continue to fight. They recognize that death from anorexia nervosa, while perhaps not welcome, will be inevitable.(...) Unfortunately, these patients and their carers often receive minimal support from eating disorders health professionals who are conflicted about terminal care and who are hampered and limited by the paucity of literature on end-of-life care for those who have had aorexia nervosa. In this paper, they say three case studies elucidate this condition. One patient was so passionate about this topic that she has to be a posthumous co-author of this paper. So you can see here on the screen, we've got three authors.(...) The lead author, Gadiani, was involved in facilitating the end-of-life for two of the three cases in this paper. And the second author is one of those cases. It doesn't seem to have collected my highlights. So there was a rejoinder to this paper published soon thereafter in the same journal. Terminal anorexia nervosa is a dangerous term. It cannot and should not be defined. This is by, strangely, the first author's name looks similar, but it's a totally different group of authors. Again, the Journal of Eating Disorders in 2022,(...) in which they say in the abstract, recall in the paper I was just reading from, a recent article proposed defining terminal anorexia to improve access to cognitive and hospice care, and to medical aid in dying for a minority of patients with severe and enduring anorexia nervosa. The danger of a label. Again, this is in the rejoinder to the paper that proposes introducing terminal anorexia nervosa as a formal diagnosis for some people who have already been diagnosed with anorexia. Defining criteria for terminal anorexia has potential risks. We urge extreme caution discussing these ideas as vulnerable patients and their caregivers are but a Google search away. Increased public demand for PAS for psychiatric illnesses in Europe following legalization of medical assisted... The medical A in dying is a warning, the assisted suicide, that's what the MAID acronym stands for. Introducing the diagnosis of terminal anorexia risks countering hope for recovery and increasing demand for... I don't remember what all of these acronyms stand for, but for physician assisted suicide by patients with severe and enduring anorexia.(...) Social contagion and suicide demoralize patients who read about terminal anorexia may self identify with a label and seek out concierge physicians who offer physician assisted suicide as an elective treatment. I'm not going to a doctor or a physical therapist or something. And being told, ah, you have X. And feeling the relief. It's a thing. What I'm experiencing is not something new to science. It's not one off. It's a thing. As long as it's a thing that's known, probably there's a cure that's known. Of course, that confidence is often misplaced.(...) And the fact that something has a name doesn't mean that it's a good name. Categories are often bad. There are a lot of categories where we've just collected a bunch of things and sort of looked together, looked the same, stuffed them into one category and they're not actually the same at all. It's good to have friends, but specifically having a name for something makes it and makes it more likely that people will end up self-diagnosing with that thing. And so I was reminded just one more piece of reading before we start talking about this. I was reminded of a Twitter thread put out by the excellent Mia Hughes back in 2022. So she was the person who put together the WPATH files and is now working leading up GenSpec to Canada. She's excellent. And so she, of course, has not only been thinking about social contagions generally, but specifically they mean about social contagions with regard to the trans phenomenon. That's just again. Yeah. Guys, sorry. I think this is just try this again. All right. So again, February 8, 2022, Mia Hughes puts out a long thread of social contagions. I'm just going to read the first view. the 1990s was spread this way. Bulimia entered the lexicon via women's magazines, such as Mademoiselle and Better Homes and Gardens, which runs stories about this new and worrying disorder affecting women and girls. Multiple studies demonstrate the media's culpability in the spread of social contagions. In the first decade of the 21st century, the seeds were sown for another global contagion. A rights movement that started out with the aim of improving the lives of transgender people has given rise to a new type of gender dysphoria with all the hallmarks of the social contagion.(...) I'm just finished with this. I'll let the rest of the thread is excellent as well. Just like bulimia, gender dysphoria was virtually unheard of in the teenage girl population prior to 2010. And then all of a sudden, countries all over the industrialized world saw an explosion of adolescent girls identifying as transgender. So I don't know. I did not dig into the history of anorexia. Mia here is reporting on the history of bulimia as a first identified and then written about, and then it gets into the DSM and boom, it spreads across the world like wildfire. Case of bulimia, I suspect that anorexia has something similar. We have talked before about having decided individually and never having talked about one of the very few things that we would never discuss with our children before they came to be a certain age.(...) And I think that's probably a problem in mid teens or so, which was suicide. Why would you introduce to a child an idea(...) that they have not come up with themselves, which is horrifying and awful every time it happens? You should not.(...) Why would you introduce to a child or a young person the idea that a destructive, debilitating thing that a few people have discovered how to do is actually a moral part of human experience, anorexia, bulimia, or that fantasy is truth and that myth is reality, that you can change sexes, which you cannot transform. So on top of that, on top of the horror that is social contagion and the particular susceptibility that both children and young people specifically, women have to social contagion, how dare anyone in a position of authority to potentially influence what goes with the DSM add to an already questionable diagnosis, the word terminal, when there are no diagnostic criteria either existing or possible for such a thing. Why would you ever take away hope from people? This is the opposite of what we are told that we should be doing for people in the throes of mental crisis, which is what people who think they're trans or too fat when they're too skinny or need to throw up all their food or any of these social contagions are. They're in the throes of mental illness. You do not take away hope from them at that point. I have many things, of course, that I wanna say. I wanna start just with one baseline consideration. And I don't like saying this in the context of a story like this, but it has to be said. I do think a human being has a fundamental right(...) not to be if necessary. And that almost everybody who exercises that right is making a mistake, but that does not mean essentially that you can be forced to endure suffering for legal reasons. This is actually, this is the point I wanted to end on, so we'll come back to this. Okay, we'll come back to it. So anyway, I'm not making an argument in favor of this at all. I think this is obscene,(...) but somehow we have to navigate the, what are your rights as a human being relative to existence and suffering and all of that. But there are a couple of errors here that are so clear, and long time viewers and listeners will find these things familiar.(...) We've talked about them before. One of them,(...) I argue that there is a problem with psychology. Just one.(...) There's a fundamental one. Which is that psychology is two different things. One is a therapeutic art, which is not inherently about science or medicine or anything like that. Clinical psychology. Yeah. And the other is a science in which we aspire to understand how the mind works. Okay. The idea that we know enough about how the mind works to proceed therapeutically from that understanding, bullshit. We do not understand the mind at any level. And so the idea that these two things are one and the same and that we are sophisticated about understanding the mind. And therefore, hey, we know when your anorexia is not gonna clear up. Really. What you haven't done here, this is the second thing. So psychology, the clinical art should have a different name. It should not pretend to be a science. I'm not saying you can't use science on those occasions where there is a question to be answered, but it is really about hearing a patient and delivering feedback that is useful to them. The second thing though is this pretends that anorexia is a disease in which we understand the cause, which is preposterous in light of the fact that the cause just showed up. This is a new disease. So it's the result of some kind of exposure,(...) informational, chemical, both, who knows. But the point is it's a brand new disease. You're pretending that you know enough about it to say when somebody can't be cured, even though you don't know what the thing is that causes it that if you took it away, it might be better. So the point is we have a category. It's called syndrome. A syndrome is you've got a bunch of symptoms. We've seen these symptoms show up before. That's a syndrome. That's not the same thing as saying we know why you're sick. It's that we recognize this pattern of things happens together, right? It's a lot lower level of understanding. It's not like you have measles and we know the pathogen that causes it, right? It is basically a black box for cause that says something happens and then a bunch of symptoms show up, right? Could be multiple things cause that set of symptoms because you interrupted a cascade 10 different ways and everything downstream in that cascade falls apart in the same way once you do. We don't know. But the point is if you're dealing with the syndrome, you are not remotely close to the place where you would be able to say, yeah, this is a case. It's not gonna go away. You don't know anything yet. So get over your goddamn selves.(...) You're not entitled to do this, especially as you point out when it results and you've got a patient in front of you, they're not well. And you're telling them out. It says right here in the DSM, if you've got these seven things, your case is, sorry to tell you, it's terminal.(...) What? Has anybody tried moving the ill person to another culture where they don't speak the language and are therefore forced to reboot aspects of their brain? You don't know that this is terminal. Well, and one of the things that I noted in the op-ed about Jane Allen, who was extracted without the father from the drugs that went in her life, canalization that she had been set up for, but then died from complications of decades with anorexia. And the op-ed writer wonders if that time when she was in the terminal anorexia through orbit didn't contribute badly to her health. And what he says,(...) the op-ed writer, is that she weaned herself off of the internal anorexia the drugs that she had been on in hospice care that were given her brain fog. This reminds me very much of Laura Delano's experience in "I'm Shrunk," which is when I just excerpted on "Natural Selection." It's excellent, but highly recommend it. And she's an extraordinary woman as well. That in both of these cases, we see evidence that actually some of what you're experiencing is the atrogenic. Maybe all of it. Presumably in Laura's case, we know, she was experiencing the stern and drawn of adolescence in the high pressure social world. And we don't know anything about what was going on with this woman before she started starving herself. But even if the medical intervention doesn't come before the first signs of anxiety or mental distress, anxiety and mental distress aren't inherently unhealthy. They aren't inherently a sign of illness or of a misapprehension of what is true about the universe. Because very often when people are actually anxious or angry or fearful, they are responding to something real in the universe that is giving them reason to be anxious or angry or fearful and by flattening that out, we are making people more anxious and angry and fearful in part because they know that they can no longer determine what is true and what's not. Yeah, you're actually shifting the blame onto the patient when here's the feature of the story that is not gonna get said, which is, these are new disorders. That tells you something. And it tells you because these are new disorders that afflict many people, it's not a bad gene that somehow got fostered. It's something that is a novel exposure to something. So here's the question, what kind of a sick society discovers that it is a novelty exposing people to something that causes them to ruin their own lives and it doesn't go looking for the something? I mean, here's the thing, we know in this case that the something is transmitted by mass media. It's transmitted over televisions, it's transmitted over the internet, it's transmitted over phones and social media. Here's the thing though, it's also transmitted by the expert class in the form of the DSM. Right, of course, we should interface this with these things. So you know a lot about the cause.(...) We used to know, medically speaking, that prevention was the right approach to making people talk, that treating them and giving up on them by declaring their terminal would be, that's like surrender. So how is it that all of the effort that's put into this is put into pretending that we know more about the diseases than we do, deciding what category of people is beyond our health, which is really an indictment of the field, it's not an indicator of the condition.(...) What it says is, hey,(...) you goons aren't good enough at your job to figure out what to do with somebody who has a severe case of this. So you decided to declare it terminal as if that's a God given category. It's insane, right? We should be looking for the cause each and every time. And here's one of the lessons that I think you and I both got as a result of, well, what was triggered by COVID. All the investigation we've done into all the things that we had taken at face value medically,(...) is that a whole suite of diseases that you think are ancient aren't, right? Then it's like allergies, then it's like Alzheimer's disease. These things showed up out of nowhere, which tells you what you should be doing about them. Yes, it's all well and good to try to help the people who got them, but you have an opportunity to prevent people from getting it a new way. You're doing nothing about it. You're just gonna pretend to scratch your head over the fact that, oh, something showed up, there's a new cause, let's not worry about that. Let's just invest in treatment or useless diagnoses or whatever. The whole system is turned on set. Anytime you have a new disorder,(...) the focus should be figuring out, okay, well, what factor is causing this that wasn't here before? Is the class of things that we call chronic disease(...) itself now? I think broadly it is.(...) I wonder if chronic disease itself is a largely downstream of the industrial revolution. I think it's largely. It can't be entirely,(...) but largely. Yes, the vast bulk of the cases are you being exposed to something either developmentally or in ongoing cases and it's disrupted something that would otherwise regulate itself. I think so. So you mentioned in first responding to what I was sharing here, you feel that it is a human right to take your own life. And then almost everybody who does it is making a mistake. Yes. So I wanted to say something relevant to that. So the author of that Denver Post piece ends with this line. How many collateral deaths are acceptable to you? For whatever purported good they do, these laws just aren't safe. I read that and I thought the surprise was a little bit chill. That's the same argument against the death penalty, which have not occurred to me before.(...) I've always, as you know, I've been opposed to the death penalty, not because I think violent criminals' lives need to be saved, but because one error is too many. The state will make mistakes and the state should never be in a position to put an innocent man to death. Full stop, not okay. Well, the argument against assisted suicide, against physician assisted aid in dying(...) seems to me to be a similar argument, actually. And we've talked before about positions. We are asked sometimes, what positions have changed since you went through the Ringer at Evergreen in 2017? And the thing that I've said most frequently is my position on affirmative action has changed. I used to think it was a good idea and now I see, I think accurately,(...) that it is bad for everyone, including and perhaps, especially the very people who it is purported to help. And I'm gonna add to my list of positions about which I have changed my mind. I think, I'm not sure of this yet, but I think assisted suicide. I think that the risks are just too high. In part, in part because of what we've just been talking about, and then in part because of what is talked about more frequently, which is the perverse incentives of a system that wants your organs, or is concerned about population levels, or healthcare costs, right? If a system can benefit from having you dead,(...) making it easier to have you be dead is not good for you. You don't want the state or the healthcare system or if it's the same thing or not, to be in a position where it benefits from you dying,(...) ever. And yet it is true that I do think, my friend Alex, who died at his own hand, actually I talked about him very briefly. So it happened once we were already doing DarkHorse. I think it was in, it was in 2020 or 2021, I don't remember at the moment.(...) But he used to say to me, because he did have that darkness in him and he knew that there was a possibility that he would do this. So I asked him over and over again, not to, and to tell me if he felt that he was going there. But he used to say to me all the time that it is a person's right to do so. And I agree with him. I agree that it is a person's right to do so. And I wish for him that he had not, it was the wrong choice, but he didn't. But having the state be in a position to sanction such an action, facilitate it, that's not okay. I don't think that is ever going to be okay. Yeah, I mean, I think there are cases in which it's okay, but the problem is once you open the door to it, there are going to be plenty of cases in which it isn't. Just as the state has executed truly violent and heinous people who were benefiting no one by being alive, the errors,(...) the potential for errors and the fact of errors make it too dangerous. And not even errors. In the case of assisted suicide,(...) the danger of abuse is absolutely profound. Abuse by family members who want to get rid of you or a medical establishment that wants your organs or whatever it is. There's lots of reason that will be hidden from the patient or irresistible because the patient is not in a position to comprehend it and those dangers are too great. So I don't know what you do about this on the photo of the picture because if you do have a right and I think it's a fundamental right. I think too there's a reason that the most famous speech in Shakespeare is about this very topic. People are almost always making a mistake when they do this, as people have famously said, permanent solution to temporary problems. And people box the job. They die horribly. And so the temptation to,(...) if people have this right, to at least make it painless and seamless and all of that, I get it. But the potential for abuse is so spectacular. I think this can't be enough. I think you're right. Even though we have presumably all heard stories of people who are able to live their final months with a progressive disease that would take away their facility to make their own decisions, knowing that they had the capacity to be under their own control. Yeah, it is unfortunately not a simple issue for all of those reasons. I will also just say, I wish it didn't have to be said. You and I have no instinct towards suicide. I won't do it, I would say. In my personal case, I wouldn't do it unless I had a terrible disease and there was nothing but suffering and a burden to my family ahead. I just wouldn't do it in any other circumstance. That's right. Never, not an option for all the reasons. Yep, for all the reasons. All right,(...) is there more on that topic?(...) A lot more, but that's good for now. All right, okay, final topic is a little bit of an odd one. It sort of fits with the first thing we discussed, something the world that we returned to contained, of course,(...) progress on fronts that were rapidly moving, including AI. And one thing particularly caught my attention is that people will see immediately why it would be something of particular interest to me given my well-known obsessions. Well,(...) this is gonna be good. Well, the well-known obsession in this case is correcting people who misuse the word theory and telling them that what they in fact have-- That's a later obsession. Oh, it's a major-- At best. No, I think actually-- You have very interesting major obsessions. I do, but this one, my feeling is we just simply, in our own, I realize it's cumbersome that hypothesis people feel like they're putting on errors. And you counted it the syllables, Bret. You're wasting people's time, four syllables versus two. Come on, man. As you know, I would agree with you here. Yeah, but I just think the world would be so much better if we were clear on when we're talking about hypothesis and when we're in the much rarer case talking about something that has actually progressed to being a theory. Right. That's the obsession.(...) So the story, do you have the tweet that I sent you, Jen? Okay, so you wanna scroll back a little bit and show whose tweet this is? Okay, this is Vittorio, an interesting account who says massive white pill with two alarms. He said, AI just generated new scientific knowledge. Muhling et al. used a 27 billion Gemma model and it discovered a new cancer mechanism. It predicted a drug, I struggle with the pronunciation of this,(...) simitacer-tib. Simitacer-tib. Simitacer-tib. Would only make tumors visible in the immune system if low interferon was present and lab tests confirmed it. AI made new biological hypothesis and it was right how this not AGI, ADI meaning artificial general intelligence which is something, you know. So, yeah. Yeah, go ahead. No, I just said the sentence up above would have benefited from the comma so they go back up just a little bit more. There we go. The AI predicted that a particular drug would only make tumors visible to the immune system if low interferon was present, period.(...) Lab tests on actual cells then confirmed it. I only spent five minutes looking at this right before but it's not,(...) anyway, the prediction wasn't the lab test confirmed it, that's the, that's the verification, apparent verification of the prediction. Yeah, that's the test. So I found this fascinating, I dug into it a little bit and I'll tell you, you know, I think the details don't matter terribly much but here's some interesting stuff. What they did was they took cellular data, I think the cellular data in question was the mRNA, messenger RNA transcripts inside of cells. So you've got the DNA which houses all of the genes of the cell and the organism and then you've got the mRNA transcripts which are moving from the cellular genome to the ribosomes to make protein and the reason that these mRNA transcripts tell you something, you know, all of what's in the mRNA is also encoded in the DNA in a slightly different form. But what's interesting, what the mRNA does for you is it tells you what the cells actually do it, right? The cell knows how to do lots of things that it never does because it's not that kind of cell. The mRNA tells you what the cell is up to either because that's the nature of this particular cell or because that's the nature of what the cell is doing at the moment. If the cell is defending off an infection it will have certain transcripts, you know, if it's responding to damage.(...) So anyway, those mRNA transcripts have meaning and what they did, super clever, is they figured out how to create sentence-like structures from the mRNA for the purpose of feeding it into the LLAs. So as an occasional phylogenic systematist who has thought a lot about how it is that we decide what data to include and what the heuristics are by which we choose which patterns to spend time looking at and which patterns to not spend time looking at, I have to wonder what's in the big black box that is and we turn the mRNA transcripts into sentences. Totally. Now here's what I would say, absent this result, and I don't know if this result's true or not, I have no reason to doubt it, but there's lots of fraud out there, this could be fraud and I can imagine the reasons. The AI models are in competition for lots of things, for achievements, but also for investment and so pretending your AI model is better than it is, there's a reason to do that. So I'm not ruling out the possibility that this is fraud though as I read it, everything here is plausible. We turned mRNA into sentence-like structures(...) and then trained an LLM on it, strikes me as, well, were your sentences any good and what was your rubric? And there's all sorts of questions to be asked. The result is-- That's it. The result is that there was a prediction made and the early tests anyway suggest the prediction is born out. Right, and in fact-- And the prediction, I don't know, knowing nothing here, but presumably the prediction was somewhat risky. The prediction wasn't something obvious. Well, the prediction is not obvious(...) and I will get to what the prediction was in a second, but the hypothesis here is weekly novel, I would say. So it's not the slam dunk that I would have looked for, but the point is-- Just to be clear, when I said the prediction is risky,(...) it's a better test of a hypothesis when the prediction is so unusual that there's no other possible hypothesis that would result in that prediction being born out. And so we're hoping for the riskiest prediction that is then failed, that we failed to falsify it. I'm like, "Oh, wow, that looks like really good support for that hypothesis." So you're saying this hypothesis was, or this prediction was not all that out there. No, given what you've just said about riskiness, it's risky enough so that the result is impressive. What it is not is a big leap away from what was known. It's a small leap away from what was known. Okay, so it's two different things, two different things. I guess, is the hypothesis standing stronger in the wake of this test of this prediction and was the hypothesis regardless of what the result would be going to be an important breakthrough if it turned out to be true. And the second question appears to me, not really, but the first one is really the foundation of science, which is, do you have a hypothesis that is testable and have you tested it and have you failed to falsify it and voila, here we go, happily. And although I think we can conclusively dismiss that this is AGI, I think that's an over interpretation of what this is. What it does say is unless this was a total fluke, which is a possibility, but unless it was a total fluke,(...) we are on the foothill of AI creating hypotheses. So the point is give it five minutes and you'll get some radical stuff out of it that you wouldn't have spotted on your own and then we're in a whole new universe. So if this paper is what it appears,(...) we are somewhere new and although not AGI, we are on the foothill of something that probably leaves there. So overall, does this work as far as you can tell what it is,(...) give you hope or give you pause? Oh, it scares the crap out of me, it's fascinating. But yeah, I don't know, I mean, personally, I don't know what I do for a living at the point that AI can train on my work and all sorts of stuff I've never read and out think me. That's not a good world for me, I don't like that idea at all. And so anyway,(...) that's frightening. But so let me just run through what the hypothesis was and then what the test means. So there is a distinction between cold and hot tumors. Cold and hot is like visible to the immune system. So a cold tumor is a tumor that's growing, it's dangerous, but it is not chemically triggering the immune system to recognize it as foreign and dangerous as the immune system is not attacking it. So a cold tumor is bad. A hot tumor is putting out signals that cause the immune system to fight it. And the immune system we are learning ever more is responsible for doing away with a lot of would-be cancerous stuff. The immune system is very effective at dealing with this. And when we get a dangerous tumor or cancer, it's because it has invaded the immune system.(...) So-- How much do we think about the difference(...) in origin or developmental trajectory of cold versus hot tumors? Well, it's not a clean story, but there is a piece of it that is prominent. That there is selection in the context of the tumor for immunization. So hot tumors are not-- So hot tumors can become cold tumors? That's a good question. That sounds like what you just said. Sounds like a prediction of the model. So I'm going to say yes, whether that is a common trajectory or not. There's a question. Also, it sounds like a possible prediction of that model is no tumor is either or. All tumors begin as hot tumors and the immune system takes care of them before they become invisible to the immune system, great for the body.(...) And if they become cold tumors before the immune system takes care of them, then the body has a problem. Right. So what these folks did is they asked the AI to find a combination of drugs that would cause a cold tumor to become hot. And what they effectively found was Interferon, a common cellular product used as a drug in combination with this other drug, but not in the absence of Interferon, would cause the tumor to turn hot, would cause it to become invisible. Now, the test that they ran was not in tumorigenic tissue as far as I could tell. It was in normal tissue. It was not in a living creature. It was on a bench, but it was in living tissue.(...) And they demonstrated that in fact, you could trigger antigen presentation that would cause the immune system to react(...) in the context of Interferon, but not in its absence. So that's what the AI did here. And they claim, and I have no reason to disbelieve them, they've done a search that says, this is not anticipated by anything in the literature. This is not the AI reproducing something we already knew. This is the AI telling us something we didn't know that has potential therapeutic value. Now, the fact that it's being done in cells that aren't tumor-less and aren't in the body, it means that this is-- We're many steps away from knowing if it will. If it will have therapeutic value, but it has potential therapeutic value, and the claim is that humans didn't know this before. Right. If you, as a graduate student, came to your advisor and you said, "Hey, check this out."I can get this tissue to trigger the immune system "in the context of Interferon. "That has potential utility against tumors." It'd be a kind of, "Hey, that's super cool, keep going. "See if this pans out moment." So anyway, I think what we've got here is, if the work is what it presents itself as, is to be taken as face value,(...) it's highly unlikely to be a pure fluke, though that's possible. It is born out by experiment. That's very cool. And it suggests that AI, it's not AGI, because it's not general.(...) It's a highly specific use. Yeah. But nonetheless, where is AGI gonna come from? It's gonna come from cultivating these specific uses, and then, voila, it's gonna land on your doorstep before you know it. So being on that foothill-- We're gonna need better locks.(Laughs) And better cables. Oh yeah, sure. But yeah, I think, so I do think this is, again, if it's all to be taken face value, this is an important moment because it's the moment which the fish starts breathing air. It's like that, it's the foothill of something potentially huge. Well, that's a way of thinking about AGI that I had not thought about before. As you know, I'm somewhat of a devotee of the very many transitions that were required for vertebrates to come on to land and become tetrapods. So the fish breathing air thing puts a different spin on what is happening over an AI world for me. I think it's the right one. Everything needs to be retooled at some level, if the tetrapod analogy is right. Like it's not that you have to bear your weight, you have to be refractive in the seas of air versus water, you have to not lose all your water at your gills, just everything needs to be retooled. And yet happened, here we are. I think the thing that's important about it is that once you get to the foothill of something like tetrapod land, every improvement you make opens up opportunities. They seem like tiny non-opportunities to us haven't already gotten there, but they were worlds. Right, but it's self-fueling. And so that positive feedback means that from the foothill, this moves very quickly. You think by next Wednesday we'll still be here? Because that's our plan. You and I will seem to still be here from the point of the audience, having gotten up, left this room, done other things, and then come back, but from their perspective, they will have no-- This is where we live. Certainly, there's a lot of life in there. At least we have our done beetle. At least we have our done beetle and our labrador, our storm labrador in the corner, so it could be a lot worse. All right, is that it? That's it. Weird conglomeration of topics, but there it is. Yeah, we'll be back on Wednesday, so not too long from now. Check out our sponsors this week, which were Fresh-Pressed Olive Oil, Helix, and Manogora,(...) all amazing sponsors as always. Find us on Locals, and Bread Stew and Conversations on Patreon, I've got natural selections going on at Substack.(...) And until you come and find us again next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside. Be well, everyone. All right, now we can cough, sneeze. Oh man, I managed not to sneeze. I took the morning tea. So we should-- Zach called me in the middle of the show, which is why it went through.
