I expected quite a bit of pushback in my recent video. I have encountered marijuana proponents before, but they still managed to surprise me. There was a lot of anger, a lot of defensiveness, a fair share of personal attacks on me and my character or motivations, and one death threat that was disturbingly specific. That was not the norm, though. For the most part, I was pleasantly surprised by the rationality of the responses. People disagreed, some suggested I might be unconsciously biased on the topic, and others asked some really great questions. There were also a few people who shared with me stories and personal anecdotes, either for or against points raised in the video. Some said they would forward the vid to friends or relatives. A few even said that I gave them some motivation to quit. I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to everyone who watched, considered the content and participated in the discussion. I want to start off with one apology. I think it's been correctly pointed out that I misrepresented the LD50 data comparison to nicotine. One was for oral and one was for inhaled dose in the comparison. That's a bit sloppy, and that whole section was not well received. Let me just amend that part to say that an LD50 for THC has been established. By my best estimates, the median lethal dose of marijuana is somewhere on the order of 50 joints, or 6 grams of THC. So far as I know, no one has ever had their heart stop because they smoke too much marijuana. There are documented overdoses from synthetic cannabinoids. I really only intended to address the old saying that it's impossible to overdose from THC because it's so safe. It's certainly impractical, but what protects the user is not the safety or non-toxicity of THC, but the low density of the drug and how it affects the body. There are also two really important issues raised as deficits in the video. One, I didn't address the threshold of usage, how much pot is abused and how much is okay. Two, are the other forms of use, things like vaporizing and ingesting safer. The short answer to both is, I don't know. There's not much data on very low consumption, and the definition changes from paper to paper. Any amount of the drug is going to have effects on the brain, but not all DNA damage necessarily leads to cancer. Human clinical studies are not very good at detecting very small differences in risk and behavior because there are so many variables in the way people live their lives. I can only say that smoking is probably never a good idea, that we don't know how much is too much, and you'd be better off with a healthy habit instead of a bad one. I'm going to address the accusations of cherry picking at the end of this video, because I found that to be the most common and frankly the most offensive accusation. It's important that a scientist always be ready to concede bias, but I want to let you, the viewer, decide if I unfairly cherry pick studies, or if I'm fairly representing the most recent research on harmful effects of smoked marijuana. Before I get to that, there were a couple of common misconceptions that I want to address. There were a lot of people who were quite insistent that marijuana is less harmful than tobacco or alcohol, and that somehow invalidated the research presented. Let every drug be considered on its own merits. Just because heroin is worse than cigarettes doesn't make cigarettes a safe alternative to heroin. Just because you suspect that marijuana is better than cigarettes does not make marijuana a safe alternative to tobacco. One of the best questions asked in comments was how marijuana and cigarettes compared, especially in cancer risk. It seemed like I was saying that they were equal per unit mass, like one cigarette equals one joint, but that's not the case. One joint contains twice the cancer causing compounds of cigarettes, but the method of smoking is much worse. The New Zealand study in 2008 did a case control study of about 400 people. After they made corrections for tobacco smoking, the risk of lung cancer was increased by 8% for every joint per day they smoked. This was the same risk increase as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. The people in the study who smoked the most pod were also the most likely to develop lung cancer. I want to be very clear that older studies have failed to find the same correlation in other populations. The ratio of the studies I looked at was about 2 to 1 in favor of pot smoking increasing risk. The biggest differences in the studies are the age of the subjects.  The hardest part of studying this is untangling the cigarette and marijuana use of people who use both.  There are statistical methods specifically for accounting for multiple variables, and researchers think through their models very carefully. Two, a lot of people inform me that I was wrong about marijuana being addictive. They base this on their intuitive knowledge or their personal experience. I can only say that repeated studies have demonstrated that a percentage of people experience withdrawal, and many people are actually unable to quit. Why do the scientists think they know better than YouTube commenters? Because they send out surveys, they interview users, and study behaviors of patients in recovery. Now you are welcome to dismiss this research because it conflicts with your personal experience. You can accuse the researchers of being dumb, being biased, or making the results up. You can even dismiss all research as being invalid. However, if you give yourself that kind of easy excuse, you can dismiss anything you disagree with out of hand. It's a rationalization, and it causes you to lose your objectivity. Better to face evidence with honest openness, even when you disagree, where the results are hard to hear. The other common objection to cannabis addiction is that everything is addictive, including sugar and love, or that marijuana addiction is just people missing their emotional crutch. You're welcome to use this argument as well, but be sure to apply it consistently. The symptoms of withdrawal in marijuana are very similar to the symptoms of withdrawal in cigarettes. They are physiological changes in the organ systems of the body. Would you say that cigarettes are only psychologically addictive? Three, the schizophrenia link was contested by a lot of people as well. The most common argument was that marijuana couldn't cause psychoses, but it can make the symptoms of a preexisting disorder worse. It's actually an interesting paradox. Some diagnosed schizophrenics actually benefit from marijuana when compared to their non-drug state. A common cause of self-medication is to cope with hallucinations. However, the mechanism of how marijuana acts as a component cause is well documented. Let me define that term. Component cause is a cause that is not sufficient alone to cause the disease, but in context with other risk factors is actually causative. More on this at the end. Four, there were a lot of anecdotes shared with me about how marijuana made a friend smarter or cured his emphysema or removed her warts. I think that's great, but A, it's not relevant for the harmful effects, and B, anecdotes are interesting but not always useful in objective analysis. If you're a student of human psychology, you know that people tend to be very poor at determining causation. We remember the hits and forget the misses. Your experience may not be typical, which is why scientists use large populations randomly selected and aggregate their results. Now we get to your chance to judge my bias. What I'm going to show you here are the first 10 papers for cannabis and schizophrenia found on PubMed Central. Let me be very clear. I typed in the terms cannabis and schizophrenia in the search bar. And these are the first 10 hits in the database of full text research papers from around the world. I'm not asking if you agree with the findings of these papers. I'm asking if an honest person could read through these 10 papers and still agree with the conclusion that cannabis is addictive and plays a role in the development of schizophrenia. I invite you to follow the link in the bar below and verify that I'm not manipulating anything here. Now am I cherry picking or accurately representing the body of knowledge? One, the environment and susceptibility to schizophrenia. A considerable amount of data supports cannabis use in adolescents, migration on favorable neighborhood environments, and possibly infections at different points in the lifespan as risk factors for schizophrenia. Two, cannabis dependence in the San Francisco family study, age of onset of use, DSM, four symptoms, withdrawal, and heritability. These findings suggest that within this population that cannabis use and dependence, as well as individual cannabis dependence symptoms, have a significant heritable component, that cannabis dependence is more likely to occur when use begins during adolescence, and that cannabis dependence syndrome includes a number of heritable untoward psychiatric side effects, including withdrawal. Also, chronic use of cannabis is associated with both physical and mental health problems. Persistent use poses health problems similar to those of tobacco. Three, do patients think cannabis causes schizophrenia? A qualitative study on the causal beliefs of cannabis using patients with schizophrenia. There still is a debate among the research community whether cannabis use may cause schizophrenia, and whether cannabis use of patients with schizophrenia might lead to a more untoward outcome, like earlier and more frequent relapses. Four, cannabis and psychosis schizophrenia, human studies. The association between cannabis use and psychosis has long been recognized. Recent advances in knowledge about cannabinoid receptor functions have renewed interest in this association. Converging lines of evidence suggest that cannabinoids can produce a full range of transient schizophrenia-like positive, negative, and cognitive symptoms in some healthy individuals. Also clear is that in individuals with an established psychotic disorder, cannabinoids can exacerbate symptoms, trigger relapse, and have negative consequences on the course of the illness. It is likely that cannabis exposure is a component cause that interacts with other factors to cause schizophrenia or a psychotic disorder, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient to do so alone. Five, cannabis use and cognition in schizophrenia. The relationship between cannabis and schizophrenia seems fairly specific to schizophrenia as compared to other mental disorders and cannot be explained by potentially confounding factors like pre-morbid disorders, drug use, intoxication, personality traits, sociodemographic markers, and intellectual ability. An alternative explanation is what can be called reversed causality, namely that schizophrenia patients use cannabis as a form of self-medication, although existing data does not seem to support this hypothesis. Thus, taken together, the available data seemed to point to cannabis use as increasing psychotic symptoms and increasing the vulnerability for a psychotic outbreak. Six, using the matrix to guide development of a preclinical cognitive test battery for research in schizophrenia. The use of cannabis, of which the psychoactive ingredient, delta-9-THC, acts as an agonist on cannabinoid receptors, is a known risk factor for schizophrenia and cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia patients. Seven, cannabis and cognitive dysfunction parallels with endophenotypes of schizophrenia. Cannabis intoxication impairs cognitive processes. There is an increasing body of outage demonstrating that cannabis users show persistent deficits in specific cognitive functions beyond the period of acute intoxication. The extent of persistence of these deficits is still a matter of contention. In this paper, we integrate this evidence within the framework of endophenotypes of schizophrenia and propose that the similarity between the cognitive dysfunctions associated with cannabis use in schizophrenia is more than purely coincidental. Eight, cannabis withdrawal is common among treatment-seeking adolescents with cannabis dependence and major depression, and is associated with rapid relapse to dependence. Cannabis withdrawal has the most commonly reported cannabis dependence criterion among the 104 subjects in our sample, with cannabis dependence being noted in 92% of subjects using a two symptom cutoff for determination of cannabis withdrawal. The most common withdrawal symptoms among those with cannabis dependence were craving, irritability, restlessness, anxiety, and depression. Cannabis withdrawal symptoms were reported to have been associated with rapid reinstatement of cannabis dependence symptoms. Nine, a perspective study of cannabis use as a risk factor for non-adherence and treatment dropout in first episode schizophrenia. Results indicate that cannabis use is a risk factor for non-adherence to medication and dropout from treatment. Treatment for first episode schizophrenia may be more effective if providers address the issue of cannabis use with patients throughout the early years of treatment, especially for those with existing cannabis abuse slash dependence. Ten, increased cortical inhibition deficits in first episode schizophrenia with comorbid cannabis use. Comorbid cannabis abuse may potentiate the reduced intracortical inhibition and enhanced ICF observed in first episode schizophrenia patients in some previous studies. This finding suggests an increased alteration of GABA and MDA receptor activity in cannabis abusing first episode patients as opposed to schizophrenia patients with no history of substance abuse. This may constitute a distinct vulnerability factor in this special population. Those are the top 10 hits on PubMed Central. I could repeat this exercise for cannabis and lung cancer, cannabis and addiction, cannabis and heart disease, etc. For now, I'm done with marijuana. It's been a pretty painful experience facing down dozens of angry denialists. I've been asked to do a video on alcohol and its harmful effects and then possibly for cigarettes. I doubt that I will have to face so much rationalization so I'm actually looking forward to it. In the short term, I have an essay by Einstein, a discussion of MSG and food and I'm also looking into Aspartame. You can also look for a discussion of evolution and a little bit about my work with NASA. Again, I want to thank those of you who have reached out to me in a positive way. I make the videos on topics you request, even if it kills me. Thanks for watching.


I mean, there's some interesting things, I'll just give you one thing. One interesting thing that Bernie says here, before this clip, you know, Bernie wants the TV stations to give free airtime to political candidates to make their case, like the BBC I think does in England, he says the BBC does in England, but he does say he's not sure, he thinks that's the case. In Israel I know in the old days at least, the television station was owned by the government and the television station would give each political power based on how big they were a certain number of minutes for them to make their case. So, Bernie is saying that TV stations should do that and Joe Logan asks him, yeah, but do you really think that the U.S. television stations would agree to that? And Bernie says, straight face completely, of course. Well, of course not. We'd have to pass a law. In other words, he says, well, of course not. We'd have to force them. We'd have to use coercion against them. We'd have to put a gun to their head and make them do it. So that was a little gem that you're going to miss, because he says it a few minutes before this, it's pretty, you know, pretty funny. Okay, here we go. And the truth is, Joe, that if you look at the issues that I campaign on, but I believe they are really not terribly radical. Now, this is something you repeat on and on, and this is what I find socialists and leftists do constantly. Everybody agrees with us with a majority. And the sad fact is in America that on issue by issue by issue, on the issues, on the specific issue, in polls, this so-called social democratic ideas win. So Medicare for all or some kind of socialized medicine, some kind of public option wins in polls. The specific issues, even among Republicans, enough Republicans agree with them that a majority often agrees. And Bernie will make the case that not only the American people believe in him, but what he'll say over and over and over again, again, to soften up the culture, to make it clear, again, to play to the second-handedness of the culture, of the people listening. Look, all the European countries do it, and most Americans believe this is a good thing, so I'm not radical, I'm just, this is just mainstream American, this is just mainstream European, this is every civilized country in the world has national health care. In many countries all over the world, for example, just we can start on health care. Is the idea that health care is a human right, not a privilege? Now, that's great, right? This is great. Is it a human right or a privilege? Not that something, that's the real alternative. Is it right or is it a service to be paid for? And this is, of course, the moral point that he just takes for granted. Well, of course, it's a human right. And watch Joe Rogan's response. I don't think it is. Yeah, Joe Rogan says, well, I don't think that's controversial. Of course, it's a human right. This is so-called the Batarian, Joe Rogan, conservative Joe Rogan, I don't know, whatever Joe Rogan. So health care is a right. Now, you know, I could do an hour talk on the issue of is health care a right? But think about the implication of health care being a right. Health care being a right means that you should have access to it at no cost to you. At no cost to you. Which means it should be provided as a duty by anybody who can't provide the service. It makes doctors and nurses in the health care industry completely at your behest. They are your servants. They are responsible for your life. They have to treat you, whether you can pay them or not. And health care, not just not that this is a right either, but not just life-saving, you know, emergency stuff, but health care. You and I titled to health care. The doctor has a duty now to provide it, whether you pay or not. What do you call that when somebody has to provide you with the service, whether they get paid for it or not? Well, that's, he becomes your servant. He becomes your slave. You, he is now forced to provide you with the service. His view about whether he wants to provide you with the service, whether he's gonna, whether he's being paid the right amount to provide you with the service, doesn't matter. His ideas, his perspective, his motivations, his incentives, his pursuit of happiness, doesn't matter. He wanted to be a doctor. By being a doctor, this is what he signed up for. Now know what a right is. A right is the recognition that each one of us has the freedom to act in pursuit of our own rational values. So if you have a right to health care, then you're rejecting the idea that the doctor has a right to his own life. You rights here are conflicting. They're at each other. Now, there is a sense in which you have a right to health care. You have a right to take the actions, to find a physician who will treat you in exchange for a value that you provide and that you're willing to provide and he's willing to accept. So the government shouldn't be able to limit your access to doctors, nurses, hospitals, insurance plans, or any other related activity related to health care. The right to health care means the right for you to actively pursue health care that you think is appropriate for you at whatever price you're willing to pay for. And of course, that does not conflict with the right of the doctor to provide you with care or not to provide you with care depending on whether you can come to an agreement or not. That's how you apply rights to health care. But the way Bernie Sanders, the left in general and much of the right today, use the idea of the right to health care turns one's rights, rights and quotes, against the others. It is the denial of the rights of producers and we'll see that as a theme for Bernie, the denial of the rights of producers for the sake of those in need. This is altruism to the extreme. It places the needs of those who need health care above the life, the rights, the freedom of those who produce health care. And remember, health care, like any other value needs to be produced other than the air we breathe. Pretty much everything else that we need in order to survive as human beings needs to be produced. Somebody needs to produce it. One of the things you see with thinkers both left and right, unfortunately, is their assumption and this is true of many economists as well, their assumption that the stuff is just there. Now it's just a question of whether we have access to it or not. And that's the assumption throughout Bernie's discussion of health care and we'll see that when he talks about drug companies that the ability to provide health care is just there. It doesn't need to be produced. Drugs are just there. Somebody has to produce them and those people have rights as well. But they don't matter because need trumps all else. That's how altruism manifests itself in politics. And it's why nobody stands up to them.  Altruism trumps every other issue out there. And the truth is, we are the only major country on earth. Many people don't know this. We're the only major country on earth, not to guarantee health care to all people as a human right. And yet we end up spending almost twice as much per capita on health care. Now we get into these numbers. This is a good example of what I meant before by they just saw this stuff out. It's true. We spend twice as much than Canada, which is what he's gonna example. Not twice as much as Switzerland, which is much closer to us in terms of per capita spending. But why do we spend so much? And you can argue with me if you want, but the function of the current health care system is not to provide quality care. It is to make tens of billions of dollars in profit for the drug companies and insurance companies. Now, you would think, you would think given how much time they spend talking about profits of drug companies, you would think that drug companies in the United States were fabulously, I mean fabulously profitable that they return to capital was amazing, was huge, was humongous. They were the most profitable industry in the United States. But it turns out none of that is true. Generally health care as an industry, the return of capital is quite low. The highest return of capital within the health care industry happens to be among the middlemen. The pharmacies, the drug wholesalers, the PBMs. PBMs, something, something, something. I'm not sure what PBMs are, but they are middlemen between the pharmacies and the drug companies. And there's a reason why they have all those of the highest profit margins because the industry's so convoluted, so distorted. I'm not just talking about drug development, but every distribution of drugs is so distorted by regulations, by controls that those who have managed to play the regulatory game and capture those areas have made large profits. Drug companies have relatively low profits. Medium relative to other industries, for example, half of what computer science companies make in terms of profits. The internal rate of return on drug companies is 3.2%.  I wouldn't invest in anything at a 3.2% interest rate. They return to capital, they return to investment, average, average. But you wouldn't know that from hearing Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders is all about, oh, they make so much money, huge profits. And yet, that's not the case. And indeed, the return on capital has been in decline for the last, what is it, six years, seven years. And that is true in general in medicine, in the private sector, massive declines. What Bernie also doesn't tell you is yes, the United States spends double. But where is that money spent? So this is the thing, to really combat this, you have to go look at graphs. You have to go look at data. Who wants to do that? And who has time to do that? But if you really want to understand what these guys are talking about, you have no choice. It turns out that the United States spends as a percentage of GDP in the public sector about the same as most other countries. But that's weird. Most other countries treat almost their entire population with the public sector. In the United States, we treat a much smaller percentage of the population, not granted the older, but a much smaller percentage of the population with the public sector, and we spend the same. So it means that we've got a public sector that is far less efficient, and this is true of all welfare programs. Welfare, generally in the United States, is delivered far less efficiently than it is in many of these welfare states, and there are a variety of reasons why that is, and the fact is that Medicare and Medicaid are fabulously inefficient, and that's why it's very, very expensive. Now, over 50% of every cent spent in the United States is spent by the government. Bernie wants it to be 100%. The 50% is unbelievably inefficiently spent, and now you wanna make it 100%. That's not gonna reduce the amount of money spent on healthcare in the United States, because what's driving that is to a large extent the public sector, the government sector. Now, you could go on and on and on about these kind of things. You know, do you know what the percentage, what the percentage of the U.S. budget dedicated to healthcare is? Anybody know that? What's the percentage of the U.S. budget dedicated to healthcare? How much of the government's money, of our money, taxpayer money, of the budget of the federal government is spent on defense? Anybody know? I'm looking at the chats. I don't see a number. Oh wait, 40% on defense? No, it's about 10% of defense. 39.5% on healthcare. So maybe, maybe Leonard was saying 40% on healthcare. You're right. Just below, no, it's 40% on healthcare. 40% and Bernie wants to do medical for all. Just think of the numbers, but everybody does it. Every country in the world does it. Now, it is true also that the United States healthcare system, the private sector healthcare system is very inefficient. It's very unproductive. It costs a way too high. Well put it differently. We don't even know what to cost really up. And that is because of regulations and controls and there's no market. It's because of government intervention. It's not that we're comparing capitalist free market healthcare system United States to Canada. I don't know what we would spend in a truly free market in the U.S. I suspect significantly less than we do today if we are 100% private, but we don't know because we're not and because the private sector is so distorted by controls and regulations and restrictions left and right on everything, everything. Including which stem cells you can take from your own body to inject back into your own body. So to say that the American healthcare system is twice as expensive as the Canadian healthcare system is just complete distortion and completely meaningless. Yes, technically that is true. What does it mean? Plus the other question obviously is what is the optimal amount of money to spend on healthcare? What is the optimal percentage of GDP to spend on healthcare? Who gets to decide that? Should we have a central planning committee that sits down and says, I think this year we should spend 10% of GDP on healthcare. Next year should be 20% of GDP on healthcare. Who gets to decide that?  Like, I'll give you a real example. I'll give you a real example. So I once had something called third, was it third eye palsy.  And I had this, but I didn't know what was going on. My doctor didn't know what was going on. Nobody knew what was going on. It's very rare, it's very unusual. So what do we do? He sent me immediately to emergency room and I got an MRI, an MRI because he was why I was having a brain aneurysm. And the MRI was negative. Everything looked fine in the MRI.  And it didn't show anything. So that's a waste. Then he said, oh, we should look deeper. So we got the next morning. I mean, just the speed of this is unbelievable. You can't get this kind of speed in any healthcare system in the world. So the next morning, I got a CAT scan with color of my brain and it was negative. Everything was normal.  Yeah, my healthcare.  And it turned out to be negative. But on the numbers, if you look at evidence-based medicine or you look at all the different standards that supposedly they have, it looked like I just wasted a bunch of money because there was no, I didn't suffer from any of those things they were looking for. Now that was good news for me, but bad news for GDP spending, for healthcare spending as a percent of GDP, very bad. So yeah, maybe the United States spends an optimal number of dollars on healthcare, not so much to extend light, but also to give us peace of mind. Maybe we're so rich, by the way, we're about 35% richer than Canadians on a per capita GDP basis, whatever that's worth, 35%. Maybe we've reached such a state of wealth in this country that we're willing to spend a gazillion dollars in order to reassure ourselves we don't have certain diseases and that costs money and that inflates our healthcare spending numbers. Who knows? But the very fact that we're spending double means we're, something's really bad about American healthcare system, about America spending, right? Again, and I'm spending a lot of time on this because these kind of issues come up over and over and over again whenever you hear people talking about healthcare, these are the kind of issues that come up and they don't know what they're talking about. They're not giving you the context, they're not giving you the reality, they're giving you canned statements that don't really mean anything. And you have to dig deep to figure out what's actually going on. Oops, what's going on on my screen? All right, we've only done like 40 seconds of burning so I better speed it up because we've already eaten up most of the show. Here's more burning. That's the function. If you go to Canada, and I live 15 miles away from the Canadian border, you'll have major heart surgery. You're in the hospital for a month. Yes, how much is cost? Zero. You got it. Joe Rogan playing into that zero. It really cost you zero, really? I mean, this is the free lunch fallacy of Milton Friedman. Somebody paid for it. You didn't pay for it directly out of pocket but somebody should really pay for it. Nothing is free. Nothing is free. So you paid for it through your taxes. Taxes in Canada are higher. Maybe one of the reasons they're less rich than we are. And those taxes go to pay for your healthcare. So you pay for it in taxes.  There's a massive redistribution of wealth from healthy rich people to sick poor people. That's what's going on in every socialized medicine country. But again, you'll never get that. And yet they guarantee healthcare to all of their people and they spend one half of what we spend. That's kind of what I want to do. And I don't think that that's terribly radical. We have a program now, which everybody knows, it's called Medicare. It was started by Lyndon Johnson back in 1965. It is a popular program. All that I want to do over a four-year period is to expand the today eligibility age of 65. I want to take about 55, 45, 35, everybody over a four-year period. That's about it. And I want to expand benefits to include dental care, hearing aids, and high glasses. And notice how he's presenting this. Well, this is obvious. This is what we should be doing. Everybody does this.  So by implication, if we do it, we'll actually spend less on healthcare because we'll take out all those profits. And I mean, this is what everybody does. This is just common sense. Everybody agrees to this. And Joe Morgan is going, yeah, yeah, absolutely. This is great. This is exactly what we should be doing. As well. That's better, not too radical. That doesn't sound radical at all. Now when you say that Canada spends less, obviously they have less people. You mean less per capita? Yes, half per capita, exactly per capita. And the quality of care is as good or better. Do they have problems? Is as good or better. And now that's, again, a blatant lie. Again, you have to dig into the numbers. You have to find the specifics. But again, the example I just gave about my third eye palsy, which turned out to be an infection, I would have never got those two scans. And if I had had a brain aneurysm, I'd be dead. The problem is those people who die waiting in line for the MRIs, they don't count. People, and this happens in the NHS in England and happens in Canada, nobody cares about them. They just die. And the people who it happens to, the family of the people it happens to, just accept that this is life. I mean, you have to wait three weeks for an MRI. You have to wait. No, you don't. If you only need to spend more money, which I am, but the government is not, I am individually, I get to choose how much money to spend on my healthcare. That's the moral issue. Who should decide? That's the question. Who should decide? How much money you should spend on healthcare? I say it's me, I should decide. I should make the choices. There are trade-offs in life.  Save money for my healthcare expenses.  Save money for healthcare expenses. No, you shouldn't have that choice. Choice is bad. We want a central planet to decide exactly what percentage of your income should be taken from you by force and what healthcare you should have access to, what healthcare you shouldn't have access to, when you should have an MRI, when you shouldn't have a MRI and all of that. You shouldn't get to choose. The bureaucrat should choose for you. The state should choose for you. The majority should choose for you. So this whole basis here is anti-individual choice because it's anti-rights. It's anti-human rights. It's anti-individual rights. The only human right that there is. The rights of the individual to be free, free of coercion. All right. They have problems. Everybody has problems. But overall, the healthcare experts will tell you the quality of care there is as good or better than it is in our country. Just not true. So what's the hurdle? Okay, I'll tell you exactly what's hurtless. The hurdle is exactly the same thing as in every other aspect of our lives. It's the power of money. That's it, right? And here again, this is not controversial. This is not controversial. So the money is the root of all evil. And if it's not money, then greed certainly is the root of all evil. And what is Bernie doing? He's playing right into that. And it's so easy to accept. And again, I don't know that you're gonna find many Americans who disagree with us. He says, yeah, the problem is the moneyed interests. The problem is money. Not that we haven't convinced enough people. Not, I don't know what excuse he can come up with. It's those evil corporations. It's the wealthy. It's money that's evil. Money, right? Money created by the producers. Wealth created by the producers. By the same corporations he's gonna vilify. Money is just a representation of that wealth. At least in a free society with free banking. Money. Money. All right, listen to this. Over the line. Somebody says it's not money, it's corruption. Well, but he implies that by allowing people to have their money, it's necessarily gonna corrupt. And the only way to stop the corruption is to stop the money flow. So what he wants to do is reduce the profits of the drug industry, for example, which don't have very high profits, don't have particularly high profits, relative to other industries. Reduce their profits. So they have less money to corrupt politics. I wanna do away with corruption. How do you do away with corruption? Get politicians out of healthcare. Get politicians out of business. Get politicians out of the economy. And then there's nothing to bribe them for because they have no favors to give. His solution is to take all the money that rich people have, to tax it away, to regulate it away, to control it away so that they have no political power.  The drug companies alone have spent four and a half billion dollars in 20 years on lobbying in campaign country. It doesn't seem like a lot, four and a half billion dollars in 20 years. That's what, 200 and something million a year, an industry that is constantly under attack that is massively regulated. Remember, over the last 20 years, they've probably spent a huge amount trying to fight for or against Obamacare. Many of them fought for Obamacare. For over the last 20 years, they've had multiple attempts, for example, George Bush, I think that's in the last 20 years, maybe not, George Bush, yeah, Bush would be in the last 20 years. Trying to increase Medicare, maybe they lobbied for it against it, I don't know. But this is an industry that is constantly in the crosshair politicians. I'm surprised they only spent 250 million a year on lobbying. One would think they would spend much more. Now, obviously they don't do a very good job at it because the general perception of them is that they're the bad guys. Now remember who drug companies are. Drug companies, these evil bastards, right? Remember who they are. I mean, second probably only to the oil industry. They're the givers of life. They're the givers of life. I mean, think of how many lives are saved every year because of the drugs drug companies have invented, produced, marketed, distributed, made available to all of us. Millions and millions of lives from chemotherapies that today are curing more and more cancers to, I don't know, I don't know if you believe in statins that reduce people's cholesterol, but we've seen a massive reduction in heart disease over the last few years to all kinds of rare diseases, to simple stuff like antibiotics and new antibiotics, to Advil, Aspen, and tons, tons, tons of other types of drugs. They are life givers. But note how he despises them. And it's not just that. Bernie Sanders despises producers. He despises the productive. He despises the people who actually work and change the world, who actually produce the life-giving stuff that makes our life better constantly. Whether it's tech companies, energy companies, drug companies, he despises them. And so do all these leftists and statists of every political bent. Hateful. We've got somebody already calling him a Jewish socialist.  Now we have to call him Jewish socialist. Yeah, that gives it. This is on the chat. All right, let's keep listening. That's what we're up against. The knowledge, and I mock my words, within a short period of time, you will see TV ads in California, all over this country, demonizing Bernie Sanders. He wants to do this terrible thing to you. He wants to do that. Yeah, good. They're trying to defend themselves. They have unbelievable amounts of money and politicians are frightened of that power. Really, really, politicians are frightened of the drug companies. I mean, it's exactly the other way around. Exactly the other way around. By the way, for the anti-Semites watching this, I'm a capitalist Jew. If he's a socialist Jew, I'm a capitalist Jew.  Back in 2016, I got involved here in a little way with an effort on the part of the nurses to control the cost of prescription drugs in California. You may recall that effort. Yeah, so we want price controls. The nurses in California were behind an effort in California to control prices, price controls. Those have worked wonderfully throughout history. Price controls are one of the best, oh, brilliant, brilliant strategies. There was a ballot item in one state here in California. Do you know how much the drug companies alone spent at the feet of that effort? They spent $131 million. Good, good, yay for the drug companies. We didn't get price controls. Something that I believe should be unconstitutional is horrific in terms of its consequences and outcomes. The drug companies saved California from a horrible, horrible mistake. A ballot item in one state. All right, last year, the top 10 drug companies made $69 billion. Is that a lot? I don't know, $69 billion. It sounds like a lot, but is that a lot? I don't know. Again, average profitability. Drug companies are not more profitable than any other business in the United States. On average, they're very average in that sense. A week ago, I went to Canada with a number of Americans who were dealing with diabetes. We bought insulin in Windsor, Ontario for one 10th of the price, 10% of the price, same exact product, being charged in America. So here's another example of just a blatant lie. I mean, it's a sophisticated lie. That's what makes it hard. Really, he bought it for one 10th of the price. Now, it's true, drugs are cheap in Canada. Canada uses coercion against drug companies in order to get low prices. Drug companies don't make money in Canada. Drug companies don't make money anywhere in the world, except the United States. It's why, relatively speaking, drug prices are high in the United States and low everywhere else because all the funding of R&D has to be produced from consumers in the United States and maybe placed like Switzerland and a few other free countries because other countries basically use coercion in order to drive the price close, not completely to a profit margin of zero, but very close to a profit margin of zero. So if you're gonna make money so that you can invest in R&D, you have to make it in the US. Have to make it in the US. So yes, drug prices in the United States are higher than drug prices in Canada, but at 10th, does that make any sense? Is that real? Well, no. First, he's quoting a list price in the United States, a list price that nobody actually pays. And this is one of the convoluted parts of the American healthcare system. The American healthcare system is completely messed up.  One of the convoluted parts of it is the fact that we have no visibility into actual pricing because primarily because of Medicare but also because of the way insurance companies are regulated because of the way drug companies are regulated because of the way pharmacies are regulated and all the middlemen are regulated. We don't actually know what a drug costs. We can't actually negotiate with our pharmacists for a price. We can't negotiate without, it's hard enough to negotiate with our doctors and suddenly almost impossible with the hospital. That is, so that is a consequence of state involvement in the healthcare sector. So you don't know exactly what the insulin costs and what is the insulin cost to the average consumer versus what his list price is. And then there are all kinds of insulin. All kinds of insulin. So I did, I don't know, 20 minutes of research because I wanted to understand why insulin is 10% is 90% cheap in Canada than in the US. So this is just what I've discovered in less than 20 minutes of research, not deep research, granted. Turns out that different types of insulin, some is very cheap, some is much more expensive. I don't know what he's comparing. Is he comparing apples to apples? No. He's comparing apples to, you know, oranges or different types of apples. Some apples being very expensive apples. And these are the kind of numbers they throw at you and what are you supposed to say? What are you supposed to say?   He knows, this is a charade.  People think of him as an outsider. People think of him as this radical. No, he's just a politician who's been out for a very long time. So he's good at it. He's good at throwing these things out. By the way, 57% of all R&D spending on drugs in the world globally is spent in the United States. 57%, we're not 57% of the world. Even our economy is not 57% of the world economy. We pay a lot for drugs because nobody else will and the drug companies have to make whatever profit they make here because they don't make any profit in Canada. They don't make any profit anywhere else. And there are no drug companies in Canada. They're all here in Switzerland who happen to be the two freest countries when it comes to healthcare. That's why they have the drug companies. And those two countries overwhelmingly support the R&D of everybody else. And indeed, I've always said, I think it's something like 75% of all healthcare innovation happens in the U.S. Now don't hold me to that number because I don't know exactly where it comes from. A medical researcher once told me that and I can't find complete verification of it but it makes sense to me. 75%. Imagine if you socialized healthcare in the United States, if you made it Medicare. So drug companies couldn't make any profits in the U.S. Doctors would have to follow government guidelines on the kind of research they did, the kind of products they produced, the kind of treatments they gave. Everything would be dictated by the government. What do you think would happen to innovation in healthcare? I mean, there's no question. We know exactly what would happen. It's happened in France, it's happened in Germany, it's happened in Europe. It plummets, it basically disappears. And who would suffer the whole world? So what is happening today is that the entire world including by the way the Cuban healthcare system which many socialists rave about, the Cuban healthcare system, free ride, free ride. They get a free ride off of American innovation that happens in America, funded mostly by private money. Now, yes, the basic research is funded by government because they've crowded out all private money. But the actual application is all private money. If you destroy that private market, if you destroy the ability of doctors to innovate, to experiment, to try new things, not only will Americans suffer, everybody in the world will suffer. Everybody in the world from poor kids in Africa, to wealthy Europeans, to wealthy, to poor Chinese, to everybody in the world benefits from innovations produced by the relative, relative free market in healthcare that exists in the United States. Take that away. Everybody is worse off, not just Americans.  What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims, or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of the stare, cynicism, and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist broads.


Think Tech Away, Civil Engagement Lives Here. Likeable science with Ethan Allen, and I'm the guest host, and he's the host guest. You can switch those around, whichever way you want. And we're talking about a subject this Friday that we've talked about before, a couple of occasions, which is CRISPR. And CRISPR was in the paper a couple of days ago, a few days ago, with a Chinese scientist who went public on a discovery that, well, a biological action that he could recreate a human being using CRISPR. And then immediately the hailstorm started, because there's big ethical questions in that. So tell us what happened, actually. Well, again, all this is just sort of reports that we hear. Not too much of it has been absolutely confirmed yet, but apparently this Chinese scientist, last name of Hay, helped this woman taking, took her embryos and edited two of the, one of the genes for HIV resistance, because apparently the father of these embryos was HIV positive. And so he edited this gene to make the embryos more resistant to getting HIV. Well, that all sounds pretty positive. Yeah, all right. You can sort of see his motivation for doing that in that sense. However, basically CRISPR, which stands for Clustered Regular Interspersed Short Palindromic Repeats. No, that's going to be on the final exam. I hope you caught that. It's still a very experimental technique, right? I mean, CRISPR is basically it's a little molecular machinery they found in bacteria and archaea that they basically used to defend themselves. They would snatch little bits of the DNA from viruses that were hacking them and then use it to fight the virus. Oh, interesting, like a vaccination almost, at the DNA level. Right, they sort of pick it up, copy it, and then they combine it with something called a CAS9, which is a protein which can go and CAS-9, which is just CRISPR associated protein 9. And it basically can snip that stuff out. And that was the basis of sort of this whole technique because this allows you to essentially snip DNA and then you can simply insert other bits where you snipped. Can I drill down right there? Sure.  How do you snip out from the virus and put it somewhere else? How do you change things that small? Well, more or less, I mean, it's molecular scissors, if you will. There are molecules have the right receptors to latch on to things at the right point and literally have them bond to that molecule instead of this molecule and then pull it away. And it's now snipped out. So it's not a chemical thing, it's a physical thing. I'm able to go into- At that level, chemistry and physics are pretty much the same thing. Oh, thank you for that. Yeah, I see what you mean, yeah. And the other thing is, no, OK, now you've done that. And you've created like one cell maybe or a handful of cells, I suppose. But primarily one cell, which has different characteristics. And it happens to be a human cell and it happens to be better equipped to deal with HIV. How do you make that into a person? How do you take the one cell and do anything with it? Well, that is, they did this with very early stage embryos, which are only a few cells anyhow. And so they changed the genes within those few cells. And that has changed up permanently. If these girls grow up, become women, have kids of their own, their kids will have this modified HIV receptor. Permanent change in the DNA in a gene line. Not just in the one cell, but in all the cells that come off that cell. Exactly. And we have never had anything where a sort of human-edited change in a gene has been put into a situation where it can be passed along from generation to generation. Although we've been doing DNA changes on people, we've been doing stem cell treatments actually in doctors' offices. Isn't this the same thing? It is similar, but different. It's the same in, yes, they use CRISPR in treating cancer or whatever. But treating it, putting it into embryos, permanently altering their DNA that they will then pass along to their offspring is a very different thing than just treating somebody going in after their cancer cells and getting screwing around with all their cancer cells. Yeah. God reminds me of the boys from Brazil with Gregory Peck. Yeah, exactly. This is, thousands of Hitler's is what they created, yeah. And this is what people are upset about. This technology really is not really ready for prime time. OK, so what is the problem? Is it imperfect? It doesn't work, right? Or is it the ethical consideration? Well, there's both. One, yes, it's still being worked on in CRISPR. There's actually a lot of forms of CRISPRing and associated CAS proteins. Multiple ones that work slightly differently, have slightly different characteristics. People are still playing with these, figuring them out. You know, again, you don't know exactly necessarily that it's only going to cut exactly the piece you want. You believe that, but. So you're saying that on the scientific side, forget the ethical for a moment, that we're still learning how to do this. Exactly. But what's the downside? I mean, is this going to be the creature from the Black Lagoon or what? What are we worried about here on the, in order to do science, you have to have trial and error, don't you? To some extent, yes. And the general opinion in this is there should be a lot more trials done on non-human animals before running this one on people, because it does have this potential to change the germ lines of people, to really alter them in ways that we do not really fully understand. But that could happen with an animal, too. I mean, how can you control it? You could have a creature from the Black Lagoon that's an animal, too. Right.  Make them go away. Yeah, right, and they're probably gone. Not so easy with a human being. Yeah, exactly. They start developing a second head or whatever. You still, like, you can't really just say, let's get rid of them.  And we'd all suffer knowing that happened. Right, and so this is why the Chinese government has condemned this guy. The scientific societies have condemned him. People feel it's going to... For one, this technology has tremendous potential to be used and to be used very well to take care of cure a lot of diseases that are currently attractable, and they worry that this sort of bad press that's resulting in this is going to set the whole thing back. Either it's going to be draconian regulation against it, or it's going to get a very bad name and will be associated with sort of sloppy science. So now you're getting into the ethics. Right. What is the ethical conversation about this sort of thing? And this isn't the first time we've had this kind of conversation, either. But what's the conversation about CRISPR changing human DNA? Well, it has sort of unparalleled capacity to change the germline, to change the reproductive cells, basically, and therefore to make permanent alterations in the human genome, as it were. And that's sort of a scary thing. You don't want to go into that really like, let's just do this and see what happens, right? It could be a worse case analysis. What could happen? A side effect could be, for instance, that the offspring all develop nasty, untreatable cancers when they're three or four years old. And in that case, maybe it doesn't get carried very far. Maybe they develop a Huntington's-type disease, so it doesn't show up until they're 40 years old. And then they develop nasty cancers. And meanwhile, they've now passed it on to their kids who are then going to develop these nasty cancers when they're 40 years old. So, take the one cell, and then you have one person. And then you have that person have offspring with other people. And then this could be a dominant trait in the way it works. And then all of a sudden, lots of people are logarithmically expanding. And maybe it could cover all of humanity over time if you... Yeah, now you're getting into the worst case. I'm giving you the worst case. Gene drivers, yeah, which is a sort of related bit, a sort of different kind of thing. So just as easy as making a person resistant to HIV, you could make them into a guaranteed psychopath. And well, like the boys from Brazil, right? Not quite. I mean, this was a somewhat controlled thing. And the genes that control our psychological of being are not well understood and not that cleanly identified yet. So it's because we don't know what will happen that gives us the ethical concern about this. That's in large part right. There's still a lot of unknowns about it. OK, so just for a moment, can we look back at ethics and science? You were telling me before the show about a conference that happened some decades ago relating to that that actually had a positive effect on controlling science that could get out of control. Right. So if you remember back in the early 1970s, the recombinant DNA became a big thing. And they were just learning how to start pulling genes out of one organism and sticking them into another organism in a pretty crude way. And that was really frightening because some of you thought, yeah, what happens if I start sticking human genes into tomatoes or vice versa? You have these weird hybrid organisms. And they called a conference in Asilomar, California. And it was actually a different conference because it didn't just involve the scientists. It involved legal scholars, theologians, ethicists, all kinds of different people from very different walks of life as well as the scientists who were doing the work. And they basically incorporated everyone's feedback, listened to all their concerns, and came up with a set of guidelines on how to deal with this. And again, they recognized then as we should recognize. Now, the technology, you know, once you've led a technology out of the bottle, like the genie out of the bottle, you can't stuff it back in. There's just no way it's going to go back in. It's out there, particularly something like CRISPR now. CRISPR is very easy to do. It's a cookbook technology now, basically. So you don't really even have to be much of a scientist to use it if you get the right stuff. You have to practice your technique. But anyhow, so what Asilomar showed us was that, yes, you can bring, if you bring the right groups together, and that's more than just a scientist. Scientists have good insights, but sometimes don't see the whole picture. Yeah, they don't see the big picture. They're limited into science. That's the nature of what they do. Right. And so what hopes that sometimes this maybe a wake-up call will do the same kind of thing again and bring, convene a group or multiple groups around the world to think about and try to set up guidelines or how we deal with CRISPR. But what were the guidelines back when? They were basically, they agreed not to do certain kinds of things. They wouldn't do this recombinant technology on people. And you simply would not do it on people. You wouldn't try to make people with recombinant. What is recombinant technique? That was, again, it was crudely pulling out genes from one organism and sticking them in another organism.  And they even actually put strong limits on that. And they sort of said, you've got to report what you do very clearly. It should all come to some central repository. People should have a chance to weigh in on it before you proceed too far along with it. We should have an open discussion if you're doing something, say, messing around with corn plants or wheat plants or rice plants. That has potential to spread around the world. We're talking about more than just ordinary human being people. Right, yeah. We're talking about agriculture in the world. Right. And so they agree back then, these kind of issues had to be dealt with up front. And you can't just sort of let people run a muck and do this. So how do you stop that? Well, yeah. That was, the results were basically a sort of self-regulation by the industry, by the enterprise. Recombinant DNA technology was pretty complicated at that point. And you couldn't just do it willy-nilly. You had to be a pretty sophisticated scientist to do it. So the community who could do it was relatively constrained. So that self-regulation sort of worked. They did, really. They made it all sort of sad, yeah. This is very sensible stuff. OK, but here we are how many years later, decades later. And a couple of things have happened. One is I'm sure it's easier to do that technology. And two is it's easier to propagate that technology to everywhere in the world. Because they're a PhD in biochemistry and what have you that live in every country that are trained, many of them in the US. And it's so easy to be acquainted with and implement that technology now and read about it and learn about it wherever you are. Oh, CRISPR has commercialized. I mean, they sell kits. Many multiple companies sell CRISPR Cas9 kits.  And so, yeah. Talking about it out of the bottle, boy. Yeah, talking about it out of the bottle, right. And so it may require, and some groups are suggesting, yeah, so we should certainly have at least a national conversation, if not a global conversation or a series of national conversations, international conversations about this. And think very hard about what we want the technology to do, what we really don't want it to do, and how we can sort of maximize its chance of being used for good and minimize its chance for being used for ill. And whether that involves a legal system, in Britain they did that. They looked at some of this technology when people began being able to move mitochondria from one cell to another. And they made strict laws that actually allowed in Britain the classic, the three-parent baby now, right, who has sperm from a donor, the egg from the mom, and mitochondria from another woman, because mom's mitochondria were sort of screwed up. And we don't actually allow that in the US. That was actually set up by a legal process in Britain that came up. When we come back after this break, Ethan, I'm going to talk about sanctions. That is, you know, the hard end of those laws and what they mean and how well they would work, are working, and how they might affect this going forward. Pretty scary. OK, take a minute off, everybody. Deep breath. Deal with your fears. Come back in one minute, and we'll go further with this discussion on CRISPR and people. Aloha. I'm Marcia Joyner, inviting you to come visit with us on Cannabis Chronicles, a 10,000-year artisty where we explore and examine the plant that the muse has given us. And stay with us as we explore all of the facets of this planet on Wednesdays at noon. Please join us. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea is on Think Tech Hawaii every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join me, where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music and Hawai'iana all across the sea from Hawaii and back again. Aloha. I'm Jay Fidel of Think Tech here on Likeable Science with its principal host, Ethan Allen, who is a scientist. He's our chief scientist here at Think Tech. And we're talking about CRISPR and how it has affected and could affect the development of human people. This is really kind of scary. I hope you're over the primary fear in the first part of our show, because now we're going to discuss other things. So one thing is, gee, how do you deal with this in the scientific community? So you have statutes, they're different in different countries. They may be different in different states. Who knows? This is really not settled. And furthermore, you have sanctions. It makes it a crime, I guess, and outlaws it somehow. And then what is the sanction? You go to jail, what happens? You pay a fine, what happens? The stakes are so high on this. The risks are so high that it's not clear that a given sanction will actually work. And furthermore, it's really hard to find what somebody is doing in the back end of his laboratory. So how does it work now? How is it going to work in the future?  Nobody sat down 10 or 15 years ago when Christopher first was being developed and said, oh my god, let's set up a set of policies on how to deal with this. No, that never happened. So there aren't any real regulations. The Chinese Minister for Science and Technology wrote a rather scathing statement about Hay's work. And basically, I'm guessing the Chinese government will impose some sanctions on him as they see fit. We have to talk about the Chinese scientists involved in the Chinese government's reaction. But I'm just very curious as to how this would work in a sort of industrial sense. So I come to you. And I say, my family, we have a predilection to a weakness, vulnerability to HIV or any number of other diseases, Ethan. We'd like you to go in the back room of your laboratory and create a new fidel that is resistant to these bad things because we don't want our children to be dying at an early age or have a bad life. So we want you to make a super fidel. And we're going to give you for this because we have the bucks. We're going to give you $100 million, Ethan. You're going to be worried about the statute and the sanctions. You'd be worried about being turned out ethically. Well, I mean, scientists do care about the approval or disapproval of their colleagues, certainly. But it's funny, you mentioned that. At Harvard right now, they are proceeding with experiments using CRISPR on sperm. It turns out, for instance, that Alzheimer's, which is a devastating, ugly disease to get right, particularly when it strikes early. And there is a particular genetic variant, a gene called apoE, which if you have a particular form of this gene, you have massively increased odds on developing Alzheimer's early. So Harvard scientists are now working on designing sperm and going into sperm and altering this apoE gene. And really, all it takes is it's intranets. It's literally one little base molecule out and subsets another base molecule in. And it turns it from a variant that promotes Alzheimer's to a variant that almost certainly prevents it. And so it's, and they're working on this. So to make a better line of people, basically. And nobody's really coming down on Harvard about doing this because they're only doing it on sperm. And it's really no difference. Sperm, per se, are never going to do anything, right? It's the same thing, isn't it? But yes, you can see within vitro technology, of course, all the sperm could. But again, I suspect the Harvard researchers are not going to go and sell those sperms to a sperm bank and let them be used. That would probably cause a good deal of controversy and besmirch Harvard's by name, right? Yeah, but it's not limited to Harvard. For one thing, I want to say that you think about sperm, in vitro virtualization, IVF, was invented right here, right here in Hawaii, in the University of Hawaii, Manoa, by a guy named Ryozu Yanagimachi. We covered that years ago. And he was active in many genetic change kinds of experiments. And he had a lot of interesting outcomes. He was world famous. And one of the things he did for which he was never compensated, for which the university was never compensated, for which Hawaii was never compensated, is he developed IVF, which is used all over the world, all over the world. So my question to you, and recently, what is it? The Vika virus has been resolved. I think it's here. Yeah, we're going to have a show about that not too far away. Hawaii Biotech has been working on it. So I think there's the possibility. And we have brilliant researchers at the medical school, cancer research centers, crossover, over this molecular biology. Is it possible that Hawaii could participate in CRISPR? Are we participating in CRISPR? I'm sure there are researchers here in Hawaii doing that. I don't know the details on that. I've not followed who's doing what now. But the technology is around and available. I'd be absolutely blown away if no one was doing it here. That should certainly be part of it. I mean, it is. It's a technology of tremendous potential. Because it's a little easier, in some sense, to say we're going to edit your genes, then we're going to actually pull genes from a different organism and stick them into you. That seems heavier shift, right, rather than just saying, hey, we're going to go in and fix this gene and make it slightly different. Because your genes have all these variants by themselves anyhow. So all we're doing is mimicking nature, in that sense. But it is a process you don't want to play with lightly. Well, I'd like to just throw the two possibilities out at you. Number one is this isn't living into Harvard. There are a lot of schools in this country, medical schools and research facilities of one kind or another, that have access to the same technology, the CRISPR technology. And likewise, there are schools all over the world, say China, that have access to this and scientists that are interested in making a name for themselves, but also helping the human race. So the likelihood is that the gene is not going to stay at Harvard, or the school the guy was working out in China. It's going to be Hither and Yang. OK, the other thing is that this technology is not static. It's going to change. And a third thing is that the ethics are not static either. Because when the technology goes forward, the ethics will have to follow, don't you think? To some extent, yes. And everyone agrees it's OK to use it to fight diseases, to help cure people of incurable conditions and all that. The question becomes, suppose, A, I want to have a kid with blue eyes instead of brown eyes. Is that an OK use of it? I want my kid to be six feet two instead of five, 11. Is that OK? Are you allowed to sort of engineer for desired traits? Yeah, if I can afford it, if I can afford it, and then the price is an issue going forward, assuming this passes the ethical test at some point, then I can create, I hate to use this term, but a master race. I can create, if I have the money, I can create a master race of people who have advantages over everyone else. Super smart, super strong, super resistant to disease. You name it. That's, and this is exactly why this is today or yesterday or 10 years ago is the time that we should be talking about this and figuring out how to best regulate this technology, how to keep everything open and transparent and be sure that as it moves along and advances, that we're all aware of what's being done, that people have a chance to question it before it gets too widespread or some gene variant spreads across the world. We don't want to do that. Yeah, it's not climate change in a sense, because you have to have a global collaboration to deal with this. And you have to have a global body that has some authority. And you have to have rules and statutes embodying ethical concepts that are going to be accepted around the world and sanctions that will work around the world. And that's very tricky, because different cultures have very different views about, for instance, sort of abnormal people. And some cultures have a great deal of sympathy for these people and embrace them. Other cultures basically shun them, think of them as less than fully human. And how are those cultures going to get together and come up with a common set of guidelines? It's going to be a very tricky thing to do. Yeah, so this guy, I'm going to read his name. This one who did this, Hei Jiangui, Chinese scientist. He did this, and he thought it was a good thing. And he went public with it. And then China's vice minister for science and technology, Xu Nanping, made a statement only a few days ago to criticize him. You want to give that as the quote of the day, this is a quote of the day on what that scientist had done. So the Chinese minister said, the genetically edited infant incident reported by the media blatantly violated China's relevant laws and regulations. It's also violated the ethical bottom line that the academic community adheres to. It is shocking and unacceptable. I wouldn't want to be that scientist right now, because this is telegraphing terrible things that are going to happen to him in terms of prosecution by the Chinese government. I think I'm going to tolerate this for world opinion purpose. He was in Hong Kong for his, when he delivered this news, and if I were him, I would be on a fast boat out of Hong Kong. Stay in Hong Kong. Get out of there. Well, so the question is whether there'll be other scientists who are drawn or magnet-style to this kind of technology. This was a comment in one of the articles I was reading. Hei may have been the first scientist to create CRISPR babies, but he certainly won't be the last. And you can bet your bottom dollar on that. The technology is just so readily available now, and there's so many people who could use it. And the potential for making a name for yourself, for making money, for doing something dramatically good is so tremendous that other people are bound to do it. Ethics are going to have to change. I suspect this is just the first of what are going to be a whole series of incidents that are going to pop up here and there until some sort of firestorm emerges where we really start building the regulations that we need. What I hear you saying, though, is that it's not just this one guy right now. There are others right now. As we sit, as we speak, we're doing the same thing. And they're faced with the issue of getting criticized or prosecuted the way Hei Jing-Pu, Jan Kui, is going to be punished when they get him. But in different countries, different results. And so there are probably a lot of people who actually, who are working on it, and I know this sounds strange, but reading about this, learning about this, they may be attracted to work on it now. Sure. Absolutely. And there may be people who now realize, like, I'd like to work on it. I'd better go quiet, go underground, find some rich sponsor who wants me to improve his germline, her germline, basically. So they can be the founders of a master race or whatever, and they'll support me while I work out the bugs out of the technique. And you just do it quietly and figure these people will, the payoff will come down the road. You'll be famous 20 years from now. So yeah, I think it's almost inevitable at this point that people are going to be doing what he did in various places. But that's one of the concerns, is that his actions, in some sense, will drive some of this work underground and make it harder to see. And part of the issue and part of the beauty of Islam are was it produced transparency, and everyone became very open about what they were doing. That was part of the deal was, hey, we all want to share this. We all want to know what's going on. Stakes are higher now, though, somehow, way higher. And I'm going to offer one other really interesting thought and possibility here at the end of our show. And that is, I can make my line stronger, taller, smarter, more resistant to disease. And ready, are you ready? With the ability to live longer. It's the fountain of youth. Oh, potentially, yeah. And for money, I can buy crisper technology to make my line live longer. That's indeed, yeah. No reason, no reason. There are people working on it today. I would bet my bottom dollar that are people working on just that problem. Wow. Well, as usual, Ethan, we've opened up a can of worms. And they're not going to go back in that can. Thank you so much for this discussion. I enjoyed it, Jay. Always fun. Aloha.