Listen, I find it near impossible to DNF series, so if a series is on this list, you know, I really didn't like it. Welcome back to my channel. Today we're going to be talking about the book series. I won't finish! I won't do it! I won't do it! I think I'm tired from this video, the book series you couldn't pay me to finish, which I know sounds harsh, but a lot of you all know I'm really trying to finish as many series as I can this year. I'm trying to get my currently reading series down to the lowest number and we're already in dire straits. Like, it's already bad? And I really scratched my head and I wonder where's God when you need him. So you couldn't pay me to add these books back onto my currently reading series and to add to that number. That's why it's titled that. Before we get into chatting about those series, I want to say a massive thank you to today's sponsor, which is Book of the Month! My favorites! I love Book of the Month. I think it's such a cool service for readers online. Their mission is to promote new and emerging authors, introducing you to new authors that you will love. They also though do a good job of like having repeat authors. So like for example, if you have all of Lucy Foley's books or all of Allie Hazelwood's books in the Book of the Month editions, they usually have a few authors that they repeat as well, I find. As someone who tries to keep up with all the new releases that are coming out, I know it's really tough and Book of the Month do that for you. You don't need to spend time looking them up, searching, scaring what are going to be the big new releases this month. They find that out for you and they give you a selection of five to seven books every month to pick from, but it is risk-free. If none of those books interest you, you can skip a month. You won't be charged. So I think it's such a great thing to sign up for to discover new books, to discover new authors. At this time, we need to be supporting new authors. And I always think Book of the Month is one of the best things out there at giving new and emerging authors a spotlight. They have the best price and you say it, the best price for hardcover, new release fiction. You can get your first one for only $9.99 using the code MegwithBooks. Go check them out using my link down below and use the code MegwithBooks for only $9.99. A book for only $9.99. It's crazy. It's so good. So the two books I chose this month. Firstly, I chose White Horse by Erica T. Weirth. This is a horror book that sounds really interesting. And of course, I'm trying to get into more horror, trying to get my hands on more horror. Our protagonist's cousin finds an old family bracelet that once belonged to the protagonist's mother. It inadvertently calls up both her mother's ghost and a monstrous entity. I also love the cover and like the vibes of the cover. It feels very like retro 80s almost to me. And then my mum loves the romance selections that Book of the Month give out every month. She loves them. Every, every time I get my Book of the Month package, she's like, have you picked one of the romance ones? And often I don't because there's two other books that excite me more. But she always gets really upset. So this month I did pick a romance choice because I found it interesting as well. I think this is about a couple who have been married and they want to save their marriage. And this is all about them rebuilding their marriage. And I feel like that's not something you see a lot in romance. It's often like people falling in love for the first time. But I think it's equally important to tell stories of people falling back into love. And you know, loving someone is a choice. It's a decision you make. And so I really like the idea of seeing that in more romance. So yeah, definitely go check out Book of the Month down below. Use my code, make a book, get your first book for only $9.99. Okay, so I have about 12 series here that I have DNF'd. I've left in the past. We're going to go in order of oldest to most recent DNF's because the more recent ones you probably remember hearing we talk about. But of course, further back in past, there was less of your hair. So it makes more sense to talk about those ones first. This is all of them apart from like series that I read or started for videos that I knew I was probably never going to continue with the series like Kendall and Kylie Jenner's book or book series that I read when I was a kid and I read the first book again, but knew I wasn't going to continue with the series, that kind of vibe I haven't included in this list. But every other series that I have DNF'd, we're going to chat about. So I also have unhauled most of these books. So we'll have to have pictures. So the first one is the, I don't even want to say Montague, is that how you say it? Siblings by Mackenzie Lee. I read the first one, A Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue. This wasn't for me. It's not for Main Park. I feel terribly ill all of a sudden. I can't see. I've gone to shake it. So what I remember about this is that we're following a guy as he goes on like his rich boy tour of Europe back in the day. I can't remember what the plot is of this, like what the inciting incident is. But I know we're following him and his friend and his sister. I know this series is LGBTQ friendly. I remember finding the writing really annoying. When I read this in 2020, it was still like a pretty popular series. I feel like it's died down a bit now.  And in the field, it was still a book that everyone loved. And I remember listening to the audiobook and I was like, Oh no. Oh girl. Oh no. There was also some kind of controversy, I remember with the author. I mean, listen, it was an awful long time ago, I love. And I don't remember. I don't remember love. I don't remember at all. I really don't. It was an awful long time ago. I don't hold on to every nugget of tea in my brain. But I remember she was like signing her name on other people's books, like other authors books and like just facing them. I feel like there was something more extreme than that as well, like more serious. But everyone just made fun of the book signing. I can't remember. Let me not say stuff that's not true. But that was right after I read it. And I remember just thinking, I'm good. We can leave that one in the past. So I think that was the first series I ever properly DNF. Before that, you know, I am innately a finisher of series. I like don't like not ticking stuff off. I feel like it's also tied into like, I don't like unhauling. I don't like getting rid of stuff. I find that difficult. So like it's all one big happy family. And so usually I make myself finish series. But this was the first one where I was like, I'm okay. Next is the Gumiho series by Katcho. The first is Wicked Fox. Now this one makes me really sad because I really think Katcho seems like the sweetest person ever. I love her author tube channel. Like I love her author tube channel. And she just seems so sweet. And I wanted to love this. This is what is this about. We've got I think a girl who is also a fox spirit. Oh girl, we're trying to remember a lot now. This is in the past. There's like a romance in it as well. There's a sweet little romance. She has a difficult relationship with her mom who might also be, I'm not going to say anything because I'm like, what is a spoiler or what's not?  So yeah, this one makes me sad because I really love Katcho. But here's the situation. I listened to this via audiobook again. I just didn't like the book. I found it really boring. I didn't enjoy it. I gave it two stars, finished the series, whatever. But since then, I have listened to more audiobooks narrated by that narrator. And I haven't liked them. So I think I, I've spoken about this before. I think I have a problem with this narrator. And like, when I listen to them, I don't like, I don't say, oh, I don't like how they're narrating that. Like I do, but everything I listen to them, I rate low. Even one point, I was reading the Poppy Ball Physically majority and I remember I switched to the audiobook and I found it so boring. And then I switched back to the physical and I liked it again. So it's obviously just an issue I have with this audiobook narrator, but I don't care enough to go back and give that sequel to Wicked Fox a go physically. It could just be left in the past, but now I know to not really pick up stuff by this narrator. I mean, they're a really, really popular fancy narrator. Like everyone else loves them. It's a me problem. It's not them. Something about my brain and them just don't vibe. So yeah, Wicked Fox, maybe I would have loved if I read it physically. It's one that got away, you know what I mean? But yeah, another early series I DNF'd. Then we have Skyward by Brandon Sanderson. Like is it called the Skyward series? I don't know. Now this I enjoyed. I think I gave it three stars, but I was just happy to leave it as a standalone. There's not much tea here. This is the only Brandon Sanderson I've ever read. My dad loves Brandon Sanderson. He has all the books next door and I just like have never delved into that situation. I don't really have any bad opinions about this.  There's no tea. I would just like we can just leave this as a standalone. I don't often do that, but like I was just, you know, the books are long and the days are short. Oh, okay. Next was Fable by Adrian Young. I can't even say it. I hated it. I hated this book. I just did not enjoy this. This is like a sea book. I just think it's a little bit of my imagery telling because the girl is ginger on the front. It's to do with the sea, but it's not. It's definitely not. My problem with this is the majority of the book is about romance and it's set on a ship with like maybe five characters total. I did not know any of the characters other than the two in the romance. Like all the other characters in the ship have no personality, no personality. They are cardboard. They are vanilla. Like, oh my god, that's mean, but like it's true. This was like a one star for me and I very rarely give one stars out and this book is offensive. This was just like upsetting to me. I just hated it. It is so bad. I want to give you a zero, but that's not possible. So I give you a one. Adrian Young's adult debut has just come out and everyone's been really hyping it up and excited for it and loving it. And I'm just like, I don't think I should go there. I think just let everyone else enjoy it. And I would, because it's like a murder mystery as well. I was like, oh, like I've got to, maybe I've got to give it a go, but I don't. Sitting here thinking back to how Fable made me feel, I don't. I don't need to do that to myself. Next is a controversial one, but it's an Ember in the Ashes by Sabah Tahir. Another one that really upset me because I loved Sabah Tahir before I read this book. I listened to loads of podcasts with her on. I took, I think, a Skillshare class that she did and I just found her so interesting that she talked about writing and stuff. And then I just, I don't like it. I found it boring. I know this is a really unpopular opinion. Like, I remember everyone when I gave this opinion being like, oh, maybe you should delete your channel. But yeah, I just found this boring. It's like too perspective, which sometimes I don't vibe with because it was kind of dual timeline. It was like similar. We're following these two characters, one who I think is a guy who was kind of in the army and another is a girl whose family I think were like revolutionaries. I can't remember. Anyways. And it's kind of dual timeline because although it's like set in the same time, they're two different storylines we're following. And I just don't think that works for me because I just get bored with both of them because neither of them strong enough to hold a book on their own. If we're going to do a dual timeline, you have to have been able to write a book just from that perspective. In my opinion, a lot of what's on this list really is YA fantasy. And I'm trying to be a lot more careful with the YA fantasy that I do pick up. The next one is the never-torting world by Rin Chepeko. This was another victim of dual timeline, right? We're following twin sisters who I think don't know they're twin sisters. I really like, listen, if I'm doing after series, it's out of my brain. The world is split in half, one in darkness, one in light eternally because the world doesn't tilt, right? So one is always in darkness, one's in light and they've been in those two separate kingdoms and they've each got like a mission that they're going on and so you're looking back and forth between their perspectives. And yeah, just another one that I didn't love. But yeah, this was I think the turning point for me realizing that I really don't like dual timeline. This was like the realization. This was the light bulb. And so since then I've read less, but you can definitely see in books I rated low before this and DNF that there was a lot of dual timeline stuff. Next was a super disappointing one for me and it was Marion Lane and the Midnight Murder by T.A. Wilberg. This is probably one of my like most disappointing murder mysteries. I mean I gave it a two and I've given like one or two murder mysteries a one star before, but this was really disappointing to me because I was so excited for it. It was a locked room murder mystery set in the 1950s with like this underground secret government organization. It set in the 1950s but like there was nothing that set it in the 1950s. Other than like the occasional mention of how she had to get married and how shameful it was that she hadn't gotten married yet. There was like nothing that put me in that era. That was one of the things that annoyed me most because I love historical murder mysteries because I always feel like the historical setting lends itself to creating a vibe for the murder mystery, but this didn't. Like you could have said it present day. The thing that annoyed me was there's so much like technology in this secret government agency that we don't even have today. And so it felt like futuristic in a way, but it was 1950s. The only thing that set in 1950s was like oh girl, you haven't gotten married yet? Oh, you know what I mean? That was it. I didn't like the writing, didn't like the characters. I can't even remember how the murder mystery was solved, like what the result was. I really can't remember. This one was a huge disappointment for me. Right, then I'm like bracing myself. Another one that I, DNF and the series I DNF was These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong. I just didn't vibe with this. I'm not really interested, sorry. Like I'm just not interested. To be fair, I read this when I was starting to become these latter ones or ones that maybe I think earlier on I would have continued this series, but I was becoming more aware of how many series I was actually in the middle of. And this one I was just fine living behind. This is obviously a Romeo and Juliet retelling. I think it's set in 1920 Shanghai. This just wasn't for me. I just didn't enjoy it. I remember being really bored throughout it. And I feel terrible, but listen, Chloe Gong has got her success. You know what I mean? Like she doesn't need me to like the book. I am one fallen soldier. She has many others who love her stuff. When the book ended, I was just like I have no interest in seeing why this goes. I think I gave it like a 2.5 maybe even a 3. Did I give it a no? So yeah, this was just another one I was happy to leave to the fans and just step away from, remove myself from the situation, remove myself from the narrative. Next we've got two that I actually haven't unhauled because this one especially, I think I gave this three stars. This was Legend Born by Tracy Dion. I will not be continuing on with this series. I liked aspects of this, right? I gave it three stars. I liked the writing. I think this is a good book. This is probably one of the best books on this list in my opinion. I can see why other people love it. It's just long and I knew the sequel would be long. Like it's like tiny font. It took ages to read and I'm like I just don't love this enough to continue. I'm again happy to treat this as a standalone. It had interesting magic systems. I liked the main character. I liked the journey that she went on throughout the book. I actually quite liked the love interest. You're like Megan, why did you why did you DNF it if you're saying good things? I was just a bit bored and I wasn't super interested in it. I can recognize its good aspects but I also think I read this around the time I read a lot of five stars and so maybe if I hadn't done that I would have wanted to continue on with the series more but I would give Tracy Dion a go in the future which is not, I can't say that for a lot of authors on this list. Like when she publishes a new series or a new standalone you know her next book that isn't in the series I think I will pick up and give a go. Then we have got a book that I hated probably one of my least favorite books of this year and that is the Gilded Ones by Namina Forna. This is about these girls who are seen as demons by society and they're kind of made into like this army by the nation they live in. This was just one where I really didn't like much about this book which I feel terrible about because I was so excited to read it. I didn't like the writing, I didn't like the plot, I didn't like the characters, I didn't like the ending, I didn't like what else. The villain, I didn't feel like any tension was built throughout, I didn't like it. I also remember feeling like this was young YA writing, like very young YA writing but with very mature YA topics and violence as well. So I just felt like those two were at loggerheads with one another. I don't mind younger YA writing, I don't mind more mature topics in YA but I don't feel like those two should necessarily go together so I just couldn't figure out who this was for either. And then we just have two more that I've DNF'd in really recent videos. The first was in My Cats Pick My TBR vlog and it's Bella Donna by Adeline Grace. This one was actually a really big disappointment for me as well. This is about a girl who can't die and who can see death and she moves in with a new family because she's an orphan, she's kind of passed around relatives and she thinks a murder happened right before she got there and she wants to have deaths help to solve it. It has a love triangle which I think I figured out isn't my thing if like the love triangle isn't equal. You know it's a very gothic but I feel like if you love vibes you'll love this but I just didn't vibe with the writing again. For me I think the big problem with a lot of these is the writing. If I don't vibe with the writing we're not going anywhere you know. And then finally one that I think surprised a lot of people. This was in my last vlog that went out like two days ago so if you want to spoil yourself look away. But I am not continuing with the In The Hall With A Knife Cluedo Clue Mystery series. I didn't dislike this, I gave it three stars but again we're up against it with the series at the moment and I would just find a treat as a standalone. I think it was an enjoyable experience. I liked reading a book with clue characters in it. Yeah you know I enjoyed the the theory of it but it was just a fine mystery and I'm just fine not knowing what happens to the characters beyond this point. You know what I mean? Like I can just leave it here. It was a fun enjoyable experience but I don't need to read two more of pretty much the same thing. So there we have it that is all the book series that I will not finish that I have started. Let me know if you've read any of these. I would you know if you've loved any of these let me know why you love them because I'm one person with one opinion. I would like to hear yours as well. So let me know what you think of any of these series if you've read them, if you GNF them as well or if you continued with them. Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to go check out Book of the Month down below and I will see you very soon with another video. Bye!


Here, we're at the College Frontier Service Now's loser group at the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas. I was able to escape the cube for a few minutes and come down to the hackathon. So I'm here with Alan Bipong who left some other crazier places to come to the Excitement Service Now. That's right. Good move. I'm having a lot of fun here so far. I'm having a lot of fun. So tell us what's happening here in the hackathon. What we have is we have about 20 teams that are here that are building service and applications from scratch right now between now and midnight. So now I'm in advance. They started with a blank, clean slate of our product. They're building a really, really fun, creative apps. And at the end of this time period, we're going to pick some winners. Those winners are going to go present tomorrow and try and burn their votes and sort of like an American idol-style judging. We're going to pick a winner and I'm going to announce it on Thursday during the keynote. Awesome. So these apps, they thought about before they came to the show.  No, no. We told them we were going to hackathon about multiple games. They had times where they let it ruminate and sort of germinate in their mind, but they had no time and they couldn't include it in the hackathon. And that started as a consequence. Okay, great. Let's go check them out. Okay, so here we are. What's your name? Todd. Todd, how are you? What's your buddy's name? That's Jeff with a not-working. Okay, that's right. Jeff not-working. So what are you working on, Todd? I'm creating an implementation of a GTD system within service now. GTD is getting things done. It's an organizational system that they've now put together and published. You are keeping track of everything that comes into your life and getting any new projects and actions and then being able to execute all of them for you. So how do you take care of that GTD now? This application called OmniFocus is what I use, but it's Mac only. So it depends on me having a Mac and me having an iPhone and an iPad and Apple devices. So this is going to be a web-based version. Okay, so how much of it have you kind of sculpted in your head before you got here? I came up with the concept during the keynote this morning and kind of made my boots at that point with the last couple hours. Well, they said earlier that if you can whiteboard it out, you can be able to build it. Are you using the new app creator or are you doing it at old school? No, I'm doing it at old school. Everything's by hand. Okay, so how's it going so far? Pretty good. Just getting the schema in place so that I can start processing incoming emails. Okay, good. So what do you think your biggest challenge is going to be? The time limit or trying to go up functionality? Well, probably trying to get the UI the way I wanted to look within the time limit. Okay. The UI is always okay. Are they bringing you guys food? Yeah, they got pizza coming in. We got pizza coming in with plenty of sugar in the back and we're going to have a bunch of entertainment because we're distracted right now. It's Vegas, so you got to do something fun, right? I pretty tell this for so-girls or something. I have no idea about that, but I will see them. All right, we'll talk good luck. Thank you very much. We'll check in later. Thanks, Doc. All right, so here we have Team 2. So who do we have here? This is Brian Hart of the New York Stock Exchange. But the New York Stock Exchange. So you must be working on something very important. Top secret. Top secret. But what is it? Tell us about it. You're not going to devolve it. So you're too early. A few hours from now. You're not telling us at all. You have to give us something. Okay, well let's think of something else. How much thought had you given to the top secret thing before the session started? I hear only minutes ago. About two hours. Two hours. So it's good? Did you whiteboard it? They said if you whiteboard it, you can build it in service time. We put it in pen and paper. Where's the whiteboard? Where's that? That's top secret. This is top secret. So are you using the new app creator or are you going old school? We're going to test out some features of the app creator. This is a new app creator. You just use the app creator. What did you think? It was nice. It was good? Yeah. Okay. So what's your biggest challenge? The time limit? Or the feature functionality? Trying not to climb too much on the table. Trying to make sure we don't bite too much. Because it's very easy to get excited about the future. So let's go for it. Yes. Go for it. Even in a team of three with a limited amount of time. Especially. Okay good. Well good luck guys. And we'll be able to attack later. Okay so here we are. That's great. I'm a little concerned about the New York Stock Exchange guy. I'm not concerned about them. Are they trading over there? Or what are they doing over there? They're building apps. They're building apps. So again the contest closes at midnight? It closes at midnight tonight. We're going to feed them. We're going to keep the sugar up. Keeping caffeine. Throw a little Vegas entertainment in there. We're going to pick some winners. We're going to pick what we think is the final four tonight at midnight. And then tomorrow morning we're going to have all the companies attending through our SMS and text. We're going to have American Idol style voting. Thursday morning during my keynote. We're going to have massive... So people get to play with the apps. I mean the New York Stock Exchange guys won't even tell us what it is.


In February 2022, the World Journal of Oncology published an article by a team of 13 researchers, claiming that vapors are about as likely to get cancer as people who smoke traditional cigarettes. Citing this article, Stanton Glantz, a tobacco control activist and retired professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, claimed that not only are there some carcinogens in e-cigarette aerosol, but now there is also direct evidence that people who use e-cigarettes are at increased risk of some cancers. And then the World Journal of Oncology's editors retracted the study because concerns have been raised regarding the article's methodology, source data processing, including statistical analysis, and reliability of conclusions. The editors of the journal and their paper's peer reviewers failed to notice the study's many flaws prior to publication, but they ultimately concluded that it was bad enough to retract. Even so, it's worth dwelling on the problems because they're typical of what we see with statistical studies on this topic and other public policy issues. The retracted study claimed a large sample size with data on 154,856 subjects. For assessing the cancer risk of vaping versus traditional smoking, but we should be looking at our vapors who never smoke traditional cigarettes and yet have cancer. There were 180 vapors with cancer in the study, but based on general population percentages, probably fewer than a hundred of them had never smoked traditional cigarettes. That's too small a sample to draw robust conclusions. The median age of vapors in the study was 25 versus 62 for the traditional smokers, and they had very different breakdowns of income, race, sex, and medical conditions. Adjusting for all these factors would require a minimum of a thousand observations. If researchers can query the same data sets and arrive at completely bizarre results that are as strong or even stronger than the ones they're reporting, they're doing something wrong. In this case, the authors claimed active vapors had 2.2 times the risk of cancer as a control group, but their logistic regression showed that people who never used cocaine, heroin, or methamphetamines also had a 2.2 times higher risk of getting cancer. Why didn't the authors run with this finding that cocaine might be a cancer preventative? Because it's absurd and would likely have brought ridicule. According to the researcher's data, being white raises your cancer risk by 2.6 times. Having a middle income of between 25,000 to 65,000 raises your risk 2.3 times. The authors didn't report these spectacular findings either. This paper is among the worst of the anti-vaping articles that managed to get published in respectable peer-reviewed journals and cited by regulators and legislators. But even the best studies haven't surmounted a key statistical issue, and they tended to distort the evidence to make vaping look dangerous. An analysis in internal and emergency medicine noted 11 flawed studies that linked vaping to various diseases. Some of these studies relied on surveys that don't report when respondents began vaping, but the population assessment of tobacco and health study reports age ranges for initiation of smoking and vaping as well as diagnoses. Based on that survey, the authors of the internal and emergency medicine article found that subjects diagnosed with cancer typically started vaping after they were diagnosed with their conditions. In fact, just 4% of e-cigarette users were definitely diagnosed after they started vaping. By contrast, about 98% of smokers were diagnosed after they started smoking. Overall, 99% of cases involved people with a history of smoking and just 2.3% of vapors diagnosed with one of the four health conditions covered by this study had never been cigarette smokers. The tiny population of vapors who never smoked traditional cigarettes and who started using e-cigarettes before being diagnosed with a health condition is hard to identify, unrepresentative of the general population, and likely to small to draw conclusions from. No amount of tricky statistical work can overcome this basic data issue. There's another problem with the way the results of these studies are reported. Even if it does turn out that vaping has negative health consequences, it may still be a net positive for users who otherwise would go back to traditional cigarettes. And banning e-cigarettes altogether would cause some people to turn to the black market to get their vaping fixed. Then they would have no idea what they're sucking into their lungs because there would be no quality control. In 2019, underground manufacturers of marijuana vapes mixed vitamin E acetate into their products, which likely explains why 2,807 people ended up hospitalized and 68 died. Proving that traditional cigarettes caused cancer, which they do, required two types of data, observational studies and experimental studies. First people noticed that cancer patients were more likely to be smokers than non-cancer patients, and then careful experimentation teased out some of the mechanisms by which smoking led to cancer. Observational studies even without data issues can show only in association, not causation. Although most vaping studies claim only in association, journalists, activists, and public officials are quick to assert causation. Experimental studies can show causation but can't measure the practical extent of an issue or possible offsetting factors. One experimental study of vaping that drew press attention was published in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine under the title Molecular Imaging of Pulmonary Inflammation in Electronic and Combustible Cigarette Users, a pilot study. A new study shows e-cigarettes caused more inflammation in the lungs than traditional cigarettes. The researchers at the University of Pennsylvania say vape devices cause unique damage to the lungs. That is not yet fully understood. One problem with this particular paper is that it studied only 15 people, five vapors, five users of traditional cigarettes, and five people who didn't smoke at all. However, carefully you select groups of five subjects that can't represent a broad enough cross-section of users to draw any solid conclusions. That would require hundreds of participants. This experiment also relied on screening volunteers and made no attempt at randomness or sampling the range of population, meaning that each of the three groups of five subjects differed from each other in important ways. The paper did not show that vaping causes increased lung damage. In fact, the research didn't check for that. Instead, it looked for biomarkers or chemicals thought to be associated with lung damage. By that measure, they found no difference between the five vapors and the control group of five people who had never vaped or smoked. The study did find that uptake of a chemical thought to react to a biomarker for lung damage was higher in the five vapors than in the control group. But the five cigarette smokers included in the study had a lower uptake of that chemical than the controls, which makes the conclusion suspect since we know traditional cigarettes cause lung damage. Most likely, the correlation can be attributed to random chance. And this was a pilot study, meaning it was aimed not at generating firm conclusions, but at testing procedures and determining which hypothesis could be tested in a subsequent study. The authors mentioned more than 30 statistical tests at the five percent level of significance, and they may have conducted more. A five percent significance level means there's a five percent chance of getting a positive result by random chance, even if there is no association at all in your data. With 30 tests, you expect 1.5 positive results, even if vaping is unrelated to lung health. The authors got two positive results out of 30, which is hardly strong evidence of anything. And the two results are among the least direct in terms of linking vaping to lung damage. The more direct tests of biomarkers fail to find any differences among the groups. A classic prohibitionist argument is that while a controversial activity may not be harmful in itself, it leads to bad things. In the case of vaping, several studies suggest that young vapors are something like seven times as likely to smoke traditional cigarettes in the future, than similar young people who don't vape. The data is pretty clear so far in the limited studies we have that it looks like it is a gateway for youth smoking. An off-sided paper in this area, e-cigarettes and future cigarette use, is typical of the genre. Out of 298 Southern California 17-year-old high school students who didn't vape, only 11 percent were smoking cigarettes a year later. Among those who were vaping at 17, 40 percent had taken up old fashioned cigarettes at 18. The paper did a lot of additional analysis, but this is the basic statistic driving the conclusion. To the author's credit, they were careful to label this an association between vaping and future smoking, rather than claiming that vaping caused future smoking. Yet when this paper was cited by regulatory authorities, they interpreted it as causal evidence and therefore as a justification to restrict vaping. There are reasons to be skeptical about this kind of research. Not everyone is honest when they fill out a survey, especially young people asked about activities that are frowned upon, and only 14 percent of the students interviewed at age 17 participated in the follow-up survey a year later. The missing students might be systematically different from the ones recorded in the study. It's also plausible that teenagers who vape differ from teenagers who don't, in ways that independently affect their likelihood of smoking. Perhaps the type of kid who vapes at 17 is more likely to smoke at 18. In that case, restricting vaping among 17-year-olds probably won't reduce smoking at age 18. In fact, some 17-year-old vapors will switch to traditional cigarettes or turn to underground purveyors of e-cigarettes, which would pose a much more serious health risk. There is plenty of evidence that many smokers use vaping to reduce or quit smoking. In fact, adolescent smoking has continued to fall as adolescent vaping has increased. Another anti-vaping argument is that it has negative mental or social health consequences. Studies like electronic cigarette use and mental health, the Canadian population-based study, suffer from the same issues as studies linking vaping to future smoking. It's easy to show that vapors have more psychological and social issues than non-vapors, but that's only an association. An obvious alternative explanation is that troubled kids are more likely to vape, either as a form of self-medication, or because they have less regard for adult opinion and rules, or perhaps because they are less supervised or have less to lose by acting in a deviant way. Even if we did have good observational studies suggesting that vaping is reliably associated with future smoking, or that vaping is associated with mental and health problems, we would still need experimental studies to support causal claims. Most real experiments are unethical since participants would have to be randomly assigned to either vape or avoid vaping, which is why researchers look for natural experiments. A good example of a natural experiment is intended and unintended effects of e-cigarette taxes on used tobacco use. The authors used data on youth smoking and vaping rates in 10 states and two large counties that enacted e-cigarette taxes between 2010 and 2019. They found that taxes were associated with a reduction in vaping among young people, but they were also associated with an increase in young people smoking traditional cigarettes. That's good evidence that vaping and smoking are substitutes. If vaping led to smoking, a decrease in vaping would lead to a decrease in smoking. Several other natural experiment studies reinforce the idea that vaping and smoking are substitutes, although the rate of substitution seems to vary in different populations. But we still have a lot to learn in this area. The evidence to date suggests that discouraging vaping will lead to increased smoking and very likely worse public health. This research suggests that the 15-20% e-cigarette tax, which was part of the original Build Back Better Act, though it was eventually taken out, probably would have reduced youth vaping by about 3% and increased youth smoking by about 2%. Given the evidence that vaping is far less hazardous than smoking, more teen smoking instead of vaping doesn't represent an improvement in public health. None of this research shows that vaping is safe, and it doesn't rule out the possibility of negative health effects that haven't been found yet. But in public policy, the most important question is instead of what? In real life, there are no solutions only trade-offs. There's overwhelming evidence that if the alternative of vaping is cigarette smoking, vaping represents a huge improvement for public health. Government officials generally fail to reason in these terms. They tax, ban, and regulate as if their policies exist in a vacuum, setting statistically dubious studies to support their preconceived policies.