MAHA: What’s Real, What's Fake, What's Unclear? ft. Cremieux

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Charlie Kirk Show - "MAHA: What’s Real, What's Fake, What's Unclear? ft. Cray Moo" (July 1, 2025)

Host: Charlie Kirk
Guest: Cray Moo, Bioinformatician

In this thought-provoking episode of "The Charlie Kirk Show," host Charlie Kirk engages in a candid and detailed discussion with bioinformatician Cray Moo. Together, they delve into a myriad of topics ranging from the efficacy of dietary supplements and the obesity epidemic to the complexities of autism diagnoses and the state of higher education admissions. Their conversation is marked by a critical examination of prevailing narratives and an unapologetically conservative stance on various societal issues.

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1. Supplements: Debunking Common Myths

Vitamin D:
Cray Moo challenges the widespread belief in the benefits of vitamin D supplementation, asserting that it is "almost certainly overrated" for the general population unless one suffers from specific conditions like osteomalacia.

Cray Moo (04:09): "Almost certainly overrated. Unless you have osteomalacia. Unless you have brittle bones. Oh, no, probably nothing is going to happen."

He further critiques the association between vitamin D and mood enhancement, highlighting the lack of causal evidence despite numerous correlations.

Cray Moo (05:17): "When you do a real trial... there's just no relationship between the levels and changes. There's no effect of the treatment."

Zinc and Other Supplements:
While zinc is acknowledged as beneficial, especially during illness, Moo maintains that most supplements, including resveratrol and oregano oil, offer negligible benefits.

Cray Moo (07:30): "Zinc is great. You need zinc. But if you supplement a bunch, I don't think you're going to get very much unless you're sick."

He dismisses the purported benefits of supplements like resveratrol and olive oil, emphasizing their lack of significant clinical impact.

Cray Moo (09:07): "It's all down to selective things... what's the difference... pick your side."

2. Dietary Choices: The Vegan Conundrum

Cray Moo emphasizes the nutritional deficiencies inherent in vegan and vegetarian diets, advocating for the inclusion of animal products to achieve nutritional completeness.

Cray Moo (37:02): "A good diet that is nutritionally complete will probably today include meat. Unfortunately, vegans and vegetarians are just gonna have to deal with some insufficiencies."

He promotes lab-grown meat as a viable alternative to traditional animal products, aiming to mitigate the nutritional gaps in plant-based diets.

Cray Moo (08:03): "I want every vegan to start eating lab grown meat the moment it's available because they have so many nutritional deficiencies like omega 3s."

3. Heart Health and Cholesterol Management

LDL Cholesterol and Statins:
Moo staunchly defends the role of LDL cholesterol in heart disease and the efficacy of statins in reducing mortality rates.

Cray Moo (11:07): "All the data giving... their LDL goes down, their all cause mortality improves, they become more likely to survive."

He addresses misconceptions about the safety of statins, citing genetic studies that support their long-term use without adverse mental effects.

Cray Moo (13:18): "People have proposed... genetic epidemiology stuff gives us very long term evidence that there's really no harms."

Public Policy and Underprescription:
Moo criticizes the underprescription of effective heart medications like statins and PCSK9 inhibitors due to insurance limitations rather than medical reasons.

Cray Moo (29:18): "I think we are under prescribing drugs in general. I think we are under prescribing statins, for example."

4. Obesity: America's Silent Epidemic

Causes and Consequences:
Cray Moo attributes the rising obesity rates to increased caloric intake and decreased physical activity, rather than to genetic modifications or reduced food quality.

Cray Moo (33:20): "We eat a little bit more than we used to... you've gotten a lot fatter."

He underscores the economic burden of obesity, estimating its direct and indirect costs to exceed $1 trillion annually.

Cray Moo (40:25): "The benefits of the American economy would be a little over $1 trillion a year."

Solutions:
Advocating for pharmacological interventions, Moo supports the use of GLP-1 receptor agonists to combat obesity, citing their efficacy in reducing weight and improving related health conditions.

Cray Moo (43:07): "It's very, very difficult to get people to actually stick to dietary changes... adherence is negligibly low."

5. Autism: Overdiagnosis and Societal Implications

Rising Diagnosis Rates:
Moo contends that the surge in autism diagnoses is largely due to broadened diagnostic criteria and socio-cultural incentives, rather than an actual increase in prevalence.

Cray Moo (60:14): "They have to have symptoms that are on the opposite ends of the IQ spectrum... almost nobody got diagnosed before DSM 3."

Impact of Policy and Incentives:
He highlights how legislation like the IDEA Act has incentivized schools to increase autism diagnoses, leading to potential overdiagnosis for access to social services.

Cray Moo (66:37): "We're giving it out too often... imposture and overdiagnosis are rampant."

Misconceptions and Data Integrity:
Moo debunks myths linking autism to vaccines, emphasizing the absence of any causal relationship in large-scale studies.

Cray Moo (90:26): "We see no difference in autism rates. And a lot of parents will stop vaccinating because of this misconception."

6. Vaccines: Safety and Efficacy

COVID-19 Vaccines:
Addressing concerns about COVID-19 vaccines, Moo acknowledges their role in reducing severe illness and mortality but rejects claims of them providing sterilizing immunity.

Cray Moo (86:15): "We did see myocarditis... it's a lot less [risk] compared to the risk of getting myocarditis from COVID itself."

General Vaccine Safety:
He defends the safety of vaccines, refuting claims that they cause autism and critiquing misinformation spread by discredited studies.

Cray Moo (90:26): "No, not really... we see no difference in autism rates."

7. Fertility Crisis: Social Shifts and Their Effects

Declining Fertility Rates:
Moo attributes the declining fertility rates in America to social and cultural factors, including delayed marriages and reduced religiosity, rather than biological changes.

Cray Moo (95:45): "A lot of it is social... declining in religiosity... starting to have fewer marriages."

Role of Technology and IVF:
He discusses the increasing reliance on fertility treatments like IVF as a response to delayed childbearing, noting the economic and social implications.

Cray Moo (98:03): "IVF treatments are more available now, they are cheaper than they used to be... cultural emphasis on availability."

8. Affirmative Action in College Admissions

Disparities in Admissions:
Cray Moo critiques affirmative action policies, pointing out disparities in admission standards between white and black students.

Cray Moo (102:22): "If you were a white student with legacy... equivalent to a black student in general."

Policy Recommendations:
He advocates for enhanced data transparency in college admissions to identify and rectify discriminatory practices, suggesting executive orders to mandate comprehensive reporting.

Cray Moo (114:22): "The president needs to sign the IPEDS executive order... force all code and data into public repositories."

9. Biotech and Pharmaceutical Industry Critique

Research Funding and Regulation:
Moo highlights inefficiencies in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, particularly criticizing the FDA's regulatory approach and the overemphasis on profitability over innovative research.

Cray Moo (123:00): "The ROI on that research is still very well... most of the pharma winners come from over regulation."

Global Competition and Intellectual Property:
He discusses how foreign companies, such as Denmark's Novo Nordisk, capitalize on innovations initially funded by American research, leading to significant market shifts.

Cray Moo (131:06): "We made a Danish company a trillion-dollar entity... we should march in and take the patent."

10. Artificial Intelligence: Future Prospects and Concerns

Impact on Employment:
Cray Moo forecasts substantial job displacement due to advancements in AI, estimating a 10-20% disemployment rate within the next two decades.

Cray Moo (135:08): "In 20 years we're probably going to see 10 to 20% disemployment... people getting kicked off the job market."

Geopolitical Risks:
He expresses concern that if China achieves artificial superintelligence before the United States, it could lead to adverse geopolitical outcomes.

Cray Moo (135:37): "If China achieves super intelligence before us... if the Marxists are in charge, then we are doomed."

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Conclusion and Final Thoughts

As the episode wraps up, Cray Moo encourages listeners to subscribe to his Substack for more in-depth analysis and insights. He emphasizes the importance of time management and efficient content creation to maintain productivity and deliver valuable information.

Cray Moo (131:38): "I don't like to waste a lot of time when I have a job and I have to work and do a lot of other stuff... constraints help me stay on topic."

Charlie Kirk thanks Cray Moo for his participation, underscoring the critical and often controversial perspectives presented throughout the discussion.

Charlie Kirk (137:14): "Thank you so much, Cray Moo, for your time. This has been phenomenal."

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This episode offers a comprehensive and critical examination of several pressing health and social issues, blending data-driven analysis with conservative viewpoints. Cray Moo's expertise as a bioinformatician provides a unique lens through which to assess and challenge mainstream narratives, encouraging listeners to question commonly accepted truths and consider alternative perspectives.

Transcript

[Charlie Kirk]

Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here live from the Bitcoin.com studio Cray Moo. On the show, you're gonna love this conversation or you're gonna hate this conversation. He says stuff that you might not like, you might not agree with, but it was a fun, spirited conversation. He's not a fan of a lot of the Maha stuff worth you listening to, taking notes. If you don't like it, email me freedom charliekirk.com if you want to listen to a podcast where you agree with the guest all the time, this might not be the interview for you, but I think you guys want intellectual stimulation. You guys want to be challenged. So I think you'll love it. Email us as always, freedomarliekirk.com and subscribe to our podcast. Become a member today. Members.charliekirk.com that is members.charliekirk dot com and get involved at [e-mail] that is tpusa.com okay everybody. It is the event of the summer coming up in Tampa, Florida. It's an event unlike any other. It is our Student Action Summit. All ages are welcome. It's sas2025.com we have Pete Hegseth coming, Kristi Noem, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Donald Trump Jr. Steve Bannon, Greg Gutfeld, Laura Ingram, Ross Ulbricht, Byron Donalds, Tom Homan, Ben Carson, Brett Cooper, Michael Knowles, Brandon Tatum, Benny Johnson, Jack Posobic, riley gaines, james o' keefe and more. That is sas2025.com youm can find your future wife, your future husband, your future soulmate at first, future job and a career go to sas2025.com that is sas2025.com for this game changing, life changing event. So take a look at it right now at sas2025.com sas2025.com Buckle up everybody. Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

[Cray Moo]

Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

[Charlie Kirk]

I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

[Cray Moo]

Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible his spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point usa.

[Charlie Kirk]

We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives. And we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here. Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of the Charlie Kirk Show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals. Learn how you could protect your wealth with noble gold [e-mail] that is noblegoldinvestments.com it's where I buy all of my gold. Go to noblegoldinvestments.com okay, everybody, you're going to love this conversation. Joining us is Cremeux, who is a bioinformatician.

[Cray Moo]

That's right.

[Charlie Kirk]

What is that?

[Cray Moo]

So I basically just make software for geneticists exists. It's pretty boring. It's like being a glorified software engineer.

[Charlie Kirk]

How did you get into that?

[Cray Moo]

That's interesting. So several years ago at a conference, I was pretty critical of some of the presentations there, and a VC came up to me and he said, do you think you can do better? And I go, oh, of course I can. So I switched my field entirely over to working on that.

[Charlie Kirk]

And so you have a lot of hot takes. So you're known as Cray Moo online. Who is Cremu?

[Cray Moo]

So some people call him the Abraham Lincoln of France. He was responsible for a lot of sort of classical liberal initiatives. Very much what you would see among like a lot of the more progressive founding fathers, where he, for example, banned slavery in the French colonies. He did a really interesting thing where he gave the North African Jews the ability to get French citizenship and then come over to France. He emancipated a lot of people and did a lot of interesting things. Very pro market sort of guy. Very pro freedom in general, and just a wonderful historical character from the 19th century.

[Charlie Kirk]

So you have. We have a lot to discuss here. And by the way, I love reading your stuff online. It's very interesting.

[Cray Moo]

Thank you.

[Charlie Kirk]

It's provocative. It's contrarian. And so you are picking apart our supplement stuff here. So you are a bioinformatician. And so, for example, let's say someone's taking vitamin D. You think that it's probably either overrated or not necessary. Is that right?

[Cray Moo]

Almost certainly overrated. Unless you have osteomalacia. Unless you have brittle bones. Oh, no, probably nothing is going to happen.

[Charlie Kirk]

So.

[Cray Moo]

But.

[Charlie Kirk]

But people say it's good for mood or depression. Is there. There's no. There's no correlation to that.

[Cray Moo]

There are correlations. And that's the thing. There are tons of correlations.

[Charlie Kirk]

Why is it not determined causal?

[Cray Moo]

That's the wonderful mystery. So we know that people who are healthy tend to have lots of vitamin D. They have high levels and people who are unhealthy have low levels. But when you do a real trial where you give people more or you watch people over time and really carefully and you monitor their levels. There's just no relationship between the levels and changes. There's no effect of the treatment. There's just really nothing there. And when you go really deep into it using like genetic epidemiology methods, like for example, this thing called Mendelian randomization, this is a way that you can get causal information about how drugs work for. From genetic data, you see nothing. There's just nothing there. For the overwhelming majority of people, there's no effect. It's good that we fortify our food because like we can prevent osteomalacia, the weak bones, brittle bones and stuff. But otherwise you're just not gonna get much benefit.

[Charlie Kirk]

Do you think it has, does it help with serotonin production?

[Cray Moo]

Maybe in the limit. That's the thing. If you go down to people who are very, very deficient, which is a very small minority, then yes.

[Charlie Kirk]

So if you're like an old person in a home that hasn't seen the sun or has a restricted diet.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. You'll have to find people who are really weird in terms of, you know, just relative to the general population. But for most people, you won't get any benefit.

[Charlie Kirk]

Interesting. And so. And you say that because the studies don't bear out the conclusion. Not necessarily. There's a study that shows that there's. There just hasn't been. Has there been long term studies done on vitamin D?

[Cray Moo]

There have been tons of studies. There are hundreds of trials on vitamin D and they seem to do it seems to consistently show practically nothing. There's a lot of hype because there are tons of studies showing these correlations going, oh, look, people with more vitamin D, they are healthier.

[Charlie Kirk]

Do you think it's because they have healthier lifestyles and therefore it's the core?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, I think so.

[Charlie Kirk]

So they're outside more. Is exercise something that you would say is good?

[Cray Moo]

Absolutely.

[Charlie Kirk]

Okay, so at least we agree on that.

[Cray Moo]

Absolutely.

[Charlie Kirk]

How about sun exposure?

[Cray Moo]

Probably good. I mean, you need it. There's great data showing actually know a lot of people in the bay who. They get lamps in their homes to emulate the sunlight.

[Charlie Kirk]

So is there studies about sun exposure?

[Cray Moo]

There are, yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

Okay, so but by getting sun exposure you might get vitamin D, which might just be an effect of something else that is.

[Cray Moo]

That's right.

[Charlie Kirk]

Positive.

[Cray Moo]

Yep. It could be something else that you're getting. Like people who live healthy lifestyles tend to have good vitamin D levels, but supplementing the vitamin D doesn't seem to do much of anything. So.

[Charlie Kirk]

Fascinating.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

It's kind of not even for testosterone production.

[Cray Moo]

Not really, no. If you.

[Charlie Kirk]

You heard that before, I'm sure though, right?

[Cray Moo]

Oh, I've heard it tons. Yeah. It's funny, there are all these claims and there's a lot of hype, a huge amount of hype. During COVID for example, people were saying, oh, vitamin D is going to save you from COVID And no, nothing.

[Charlie Kirk]

Say it interrupts the cytokosine storm or something.

[Cray Moo]

I'm going to get all the cytokine storms.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, sorry, I'm going to get all.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, but yeah, so like your immune system going into overdrive. They say it disrupts that. No, that's not.

[Charlie Kirk]

How about zinc?

[Cray Moo]

Zinc is great. You need zinc. But if you supplement a bunch, I don't think you're going to get very much unless you're sick, in which case take it. Right. As soon as you start feeling sick. And it might help a little bit. There is limited stuff on this, but there's still something. There's some indication and it's not really going to hurt. So why not supplement it? It's also very cheap, so.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah. And you can get zinc and meat. But I mean, absolutely. Right.

[Cray Moo]

You can get pretty much everything you need. Meat.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yes. So you're not necessarily a vegan proponent?

[Cray Moo]

No, not really. I am a big proponent of lab grown meat. I advise a lab grown meat company.

[Charlie Kirk]

Really?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. And I like lab grown meat and all that and it's going to emulate meat and it'll be. I think it'll be great in a few years, but it's just not quite there yet. Like it's very expensive. And the thing is, I want every vegan to start eating lab grown meat the moment it's available because they have so many nutritional deficiencies like omega 3s.

[Charlie Kirk]

And CoQ10 and vitamin B.

[Cray Moo]

Absolutely.

[Charlie Kirk]

Are those the three major ones? Amongst many others.

[Cray Moo]

Right. Yeah. Iron.

[Charlie Kirk]

Iron is big.

[Cray Moo]

They lack creatinine, creatine, they lack taurine and like they just lack seemingly everything.

[Charlie Kirk]

So. Yeah, I was going to ask. I'm sorry to interrupt, but you are a believer in the amino acid benefits, Right? So taurine, lysine, do those have potential benefits or would you get them in your standard estrogen?

[Cray Moo]

You'll generally get them from your diet. Yeah. And the thing is, if you have a good diet, you're very unlikely to be getting a lot from different supplements. There are limited exceptions, like, I mean some. So I think actually a good heuristic is do Bodybuilders use it. And if the answer is yeah, the biggest bodybuilders use it, then it probably is a good supplement like testosterone will help you build a lot of muscle.

[Charlie Kirk]

Sure.

[Cray Moo]

Creatine will genuinely help you put on muscle.

[Charlie Kirk]

Creatine has, has cognitive benefits as well.

[Cray Moo]

But especially for people who are vegans, vegetarians who have restricted diets because they lack that stuff and it seems to help them a lot. For people who have normal diets, normal omnivorous diets, they tend not to get very much benefit from creatine.

[Charlie Kirk]

How about resveratrol?

[Cray Moo]

No.

[Charlie Kirk]

Why?

[Cray Moo]

Oh man, those studies just did not hold off. There was a fad for a long time in the anti aging community. Goodness, there was even some fraud there. And tell me more. I don't really know too much about it because really before my time. Still hyped. It is still hyped, which is baffling to me. But it's considered like one of those cautionary tales about hype nowadays.

[Charlie Kirk]

Is there any downside?

[Cray Moo]

Not really. So just, it's one of the, like a lot of supplements, they don't have real big downsides, they just have no upsides. So the downside is you pay for something that doesn't do anything.

[Charlie Kirk]

So, but, but the argument for resveratrol, again, I'm just a layman here, is that you, that that's, you know, they hype red wine and grapes. Isn't it just an accelerated antioxidant which is good for you?

[Cray Moo]

Antioxidants can be very good for you. And that's actually one of the funny things about seed oils. They contain antioxidants, which helps with the supposed oxidation effects, which.

[Charlie Kirk]

So are you pro seed oil for heart health?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, I am. The trials do tend to say that ascvd, atherosclerotic coronary vascular like heart disease is helped by switching from animal fats to plant fats. Don't want to do that myself, but it does help people. So if you're at very, very high risk, I would suggest going to seed oils instead of animal fats.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah. Do you think, if you think the general population would benefit more from tallow than from some seed oil, they would.

[Cray Moo]

Probably be hurt by tallow on average.

[Charlie Kirk]

Tell us why.

[Cray Moo]

Well, the reason is saturated fats are quite bad. They're very bad. In fact, the hypothesis that LDL causes heart disease has held up incredibly well.

[Charlie Kirk]

Oh, so you're a cholesterol truther.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, I mean all the data giving.

[Charlie Kirk]

You a hard time.

[Cray Moo]

It's actually interesting. So A lot of the drugs we know about today, statins, PCSK9 inhibitors, ezetimibe, various different drugs that we use for handling cholesterol. We have great studies that are based on how we found them. Like the PCSK9 inhibitors, specifically, they were found in these French families. They had a mutation that knocked out production of it and they had, well, it did the opposite. They had very, very high cholesterol or. Sorry, no, I'm thinking of the French families, they had low cholesterol. And it was discovered some large, like almost 11% proportion of African Americans had a variant that dropped their cholesterol levels very low. And then a smaller proportion of whites had another variant that did like a smaller effect. And it all these interesting variants related to PCSK9 had meaningful effects. And so interesting thing is we can just put the product of that gene in a drug, give it to people, their LDL goes down, their all cause mortality improves, they become more likely to survive. And if you give it to people who have hypercholesterolemia, like naturally extremely high cholesterol, the number of Deaths by age 40 is way, way lower. So you can compare families over time. You can say, oh, you, the parent generation didn't have statins or PCSK9 inhibitors or ezetimibe or anything to lower your LDL. And like a sixth of them were dying by age 40 from heart conditions. And then you look at their kids who had statins from a young age and it's like, oh my God, they're all surviving to age 40. They're not dying from preventable heart conditions. And it's just very clear evidence like that. Like it's nice little natural experiments. We also have wonderful trials and we have more genetic epidemiology stuff too. One of the wonderful ways we know statins are safe is because there are some people who basically naturally have statins. Like the effect of statins. The statin, it works through the HMG CoA reductase gene, produces an enzyme that breaks down to the HMG CoA and then mevalonitate. I'm probably mispronouncing. And that's how you, if you block that pathway, if you reduce the function there, you get lower ldl. And naturally some people have way less function there. So they effectively have like a low dose and sometimes a very high dose statin for their whole life. And we have long term cohorts where you can go and look, oh, this guy's totally healthy. Trump, Trump, he's taking statins.

[Charlie Kirk]

I know, I'm saying, yeah, no But I mean, you wrote about this, didn't.

[Cray Moo]

You, with him taking statins? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean he should be taking statins. I feel like most old.

[Charlie Kirk]

But his cholesterol is amazing because of the statin. Well, I'm saying I'm affirming your hypothesis though.

[Cray Moo]

Absolutely.

[Charlie Kirk]

I don't think it's because of his diet.

[Cray Moo]

No, it probably isn't. He has a diet that I've heard is very high in saturated.

[Charlie Kirk]

We only know he's taking statins because he disclosed his medical records to the world, which is awesome.

[Cray Moo]

I love that.

[Charlie Kirk]

Are there any downsides to statins?

[Cray Moo]

Not really. People have proposed a lot of downsides, but the genetic epidemiology stuff gives us very long term evidence that there's really no harms. People proposed. Oh, there'll be these downsides from observational cohorts where they have mental issues. And then you look in the trials and it's like, okay, that doesn't pop up ever. So we're going to. So that probably isn't real. And then you look at the people who have naturally very, very low ldl. They're also fine. They have no mental issues. They don't have any lower IQs, they don't have anything wrong with them compared to people who are otherwise similar.

[Charlie Kirk]

So with ldl, correct me if I'm wrong, isn't cholesterol in the sequence of creating testosterone?

[Cray Moo]

It is, yeah. Steroid hormones are made from cholesterol. You do need some of some.

[Charlie Kirk]

So. But then would would chronically low cholesterol brought to you by seed oils or whatever result in lower testosterone?

[Cray Moo]

So that's the thing. Ldl. No, you could probably get your LDL as low as you want. You'll be fine.

[Charlie Kirk]

Hdl.

[Cray Moo]

Hdl, you want that fairly high.

[Charlie Kirk]

And so, so ldl. Have you read the book the Cholesterol Myth?

[Cray Moo]

I haven't.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah. I don't. I'm not an expert here, but there is a growing community that thinks the cholesterol fixation is over. I'm sure you've heard this.

[Cray Moo]

I have heard this a bunch. Yeah. There's a lot of people who believe it.

[Charlie Kirk]

Again, I'm not, I'm not an expert here, I'm just.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, no worries.

[Charlie Kirk]

I'm throwing it up against you.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. So the consilience of evidence just says, no, it's fine. For years I had gone along with a lot of these sort of contrarian takes of like, oh, if you have a keto diet, you'll actually get a do a lot Better. You'll be a lot better off in all these different ways. And there's all these mechanisms. But in the past few years, I've given a lot less shrift to mechanisms because they mechanisms are not a substitute for the statistical evidence. I need to see in a trial saying, like, you take. Give the person this drug, we do this thing, your mechanism plays out and the person has the effect you expect. But in the trials, if it always shows the opposite of what they predict, then I just think they're wrong.

[Charlie Kirk]

What do you have to say to people that say we don't trust the trials because there has been some corruption in the medical world this past decade? What would you say to that?

[Cray Moo]

Run more trials, fund more trials, have.

[Charlie Kirk]

Them done by more, or look into them. Correct. To see if they were what's right. What red flags do you look for when you look through trials?

[Cray Moo]

Well, I mean, one of the most obvious ones, the small sample sizes. When you have very small trial and you have big conclusions from it, that is a very big red flag. When you have massive effect sizes like that are very unrealistic. For example, Cohen's D of 5, that's a very, very large effect size. Like a. Cohen's D of 5 is like the difference in taste preferences for samples given ice cream flavored like poo and flavored like vanilla. It's a very large difference. And there are studies that purport to show effects that large. And I feel like that's just not real. And in virtually every case, it isn't real. There are very few things with effects.

[Charlie Kirk]

That massive, that dramatic.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. And when you see that in a trial, that just. Big red flag, an effect like that is like. There was actually a funny one a few years ago about country music causing suicides, and I was like, can't be real. The effect size is like 3.5, which is, again, enormous. And if it were true, every Dolly Parton concert, and I'm borrowing something from here, my friend, would be like a mass suicide. People would just be killing themselves. So when they say stuff like that, I don't believe it. I tend to throw it out.

[Charlie Kirk]

Well, I can't stand country music, so send me that study.

[Cray Moo]

So, methylfolate, folic acid fortification of food. Very good. Methylfolate supplementation for adults.

[Charlie Kirk]

Any neurological benefit you probably won't get very much.

[Cray Moo]

If there's something, it's going to be quite small. But the wonderful thing is folic acid fortification of food has been very good for reducing the rates of birth defects. Fewer neurotubule birth defects, babies coming out, disabled at birth. That's wonderful. And all we had to do was change the diet a little bit.

[Charlie Kirk]

Sami. S A M E, which is S adenosine. Something which is used for depression.

[Cray Moo]

S A M E. I'm afraid I don't know it, but it sounds like something adenosine makes.

[Charlie Kirk]

It's a vitamin. How about oregano or saffron?

[Cray Moo]

Oh, nothing.

[Charlie Kirk]

Nothing.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

Oil of oregano doesn't kill any bacteria.

[Cray Moo]

No, it's not really gonna help you. I mean it might help in like a lab setting, but if you start taking it as a supplement, it's. You're not going to get anything from it.

[Charlie Kirk]

How about a daily olive oil shot?

[Cray Moo]

This became pretty popular after Starbucks started promoting it. I saw a bunch of this and it just tasted awful.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yes.

[Cray Moo]

I had it a few times because I was like, I'll try the different drinks they have. Couldn't stand it. But I was happy to see it doesn't actually do anything either.

[Charlie Kirk]

So you would say that olive oil supplementation, no benefit.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, for most people it's going to be nothing. The thing is, most of the conclusions you get in trials are going to be like these population representative samples or samples you get from a hospital of a condition or something like that. They're selected in some or they try to be unselected and then they go nothing for everybody. But there might be some subpopulations that could benefit from pretty much any supplement.

[Charlie Kirk]

How do we say. So I have two questions. How do you long term study preventative supplementation? Meaning? I'm just curious, number two, have you factored out genetic specificity? How some people. For example, there's something called the MFER gene, MFTR gene mutation that, you know, methylfolate is supposed to be fat metabolism and stuff. Yeah. Is there any? True. So take it one by one. How do you long term do trials for preventative supplementation? And then we'll go to the second question for that.

[Cray Moo]

You just have to run a long trial. If you have a hypothesis, so you have a scientifically led discovery of something you think will be preventative for this or that, then you run a long term trial, that's really all you can do. Or you look at a longitudinal cohort that has variation in use over time, or you pay people to start using in a cohort you're monitoring over time, that's about all you can do. So the study designs are all pretty limited. They're all just long term things. The other thing with genetic specificity, so for general population trials, you randomize them, you run an rct. That means you have one group getting a placebo or an alternative treatment and one group like standard care. So for like diabetes related drugs, we give people, we don't give them a placebo, we give them insulin instead of the other thing.

[Charlie Kirk]

Sure.

[Cray Moo]

So you give them placebo, whatever, and you give them the active drug and you compare these general population samples and they're randomized so that there's no genetic variation. You would hope at a large enough sample size, that matters across these two groups. But if you want to stratify that way, you have to go ahead and test them beforehand. Or you can do a post hoc test where you test afterwards and you get data on like what variations of this gene do they have? And then you see did they have larger or smaller effects. Often when you do it post hoc, you'll have too small of a sample to actually find very much. You'll have low statistical power. So you'll end up with conclusions that are iffy because they're just weak. But if you actually go into a trial ahead of time and you stratify them by some known genetic variants you think will modify the effect, you can pretty easily do that. And you can just go ahead and see if it actually leads to like a larger or smaller effect.

[Charlie Kirk]

Is there any truth to the fact that certain gene mutations might make you more likely to benefit from certain supplements?

[Cray Moo]

Absolutely. Massive. Massive. Actually, it's interesting. Statins, about 30% of people, it's a very large portion get myopathy from statins. They feel weak. And this is so common that tons of people have gone through heart disease because they prefer not to feel weak. And for some people, it's actually debilitatingly weak. They can become incredibly weak due to the action of just a few genes or just a few mutations. For example, in the HMGCR gene, that is where we know the mechanism of statins works from. And we have treatments now. Well, they're being developed, they're not actually out yet. Where you can interrupt on that pathway from HMG CoA reductase to mevalonitate, where you can supplement the end product. And it doesn't increase their LDL or anything, but it does give them back their muscular function. So there's massive genetic variation that augments the effects of drugs. You see this for antidepressants, you see this for statins, like I just said, you see this for PCSK9 inhibitors, you see this for many, many classes of drugs, even for lots of anti Cancer agents, response to chemotherapy, tons of things. Usually the genetic moderation is modest, it's very small. In rare cases it's serious side effects. It's for example, about a small portion of people are allergic to a form of natural dye, cochineal based dye from like a little beetle and they'll just die. So yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

Are we doing gene testing before prescribing pharmaceuticals?

[Cray Moo]

Generally not. Because for most things we prescribe there's no reason to or there's not a big reason to. And what you'll find is that people, for example, if they're a low responder to a certain antidepressant, they'll just switch off it after a month or two. They'll be on it for a little while, they'll get their treatment and then they'll go, oh, this isn't working for me, doc, I need to go on something else. And then you switch them. That's how it's been handled. But if we can predict ahead of time, which we can do now, we can actually start doing that. We just need to get more people genotyped and, and then have their doctors be able to learn how to use that information.

[Charlie Kirk]

Private student loan debt in America totals over $300 billion. About 45 billion of that is labeled as distressed. Why refi refinances distressed or defaulted private student loans that others will not touch.

[Cray Moo]

Why?

[Charlie Kirk]

Refi can reduce your monthly payment and guarantees interest rates under 6% ensuring affordability and financial relief. Go to yrefi.com that is yrefy.com do you have a co borrower? Yrefi can get them released from the loan and you can give mom or dad a break. Just call 888-yrefi34. That is 88 yrefi34 and may not be available in all 50 states. Can you imagine being debt free and not living under this burden anymore? We'll go to yrefi.com that is yre f y.com that is yrefi.com bad credit is accepted. And do you have a co borrower? Well, why? Refi can get them released from the loan. That is why refi.com so you mentioned antidepressants. Let's just ask this. What is causing the Are people actually more anxious and depressed or is it a sampling error?

[Cray Moo]

It's an interesting form of error. So a lot of it is social contagion in the sense that nowadays people say they're more depressed than they are. There's some evidence in the US for a real increase in depression and this has to do with suicide rates.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, you can't fake that.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, you can't fake that. That's not a fakeable thing. But in other countries you don't see the same increase. So it's curious. Like we see the same introduction of cell phones which has been proposed as like a reason why teen girls are getting depressed, but we don't see the rise in suicide rates. So it's interesting now when you actually go out and measure depression using like a standardized questionnaire, you'll see that people respond more aggressively nowadays than they used to. So they'll say, oh, I'm very depressed. Whereas in the past the person with the same amount of depression would have said, oh, I'm okay or I'm sad a little bit. But they've changed how they respond. And there's been a lot of impetus, a lot of social like reasoning that goes into, oh, it's cool to be for example, autistic now. So you say, oh, I have, I have autism, I've self diagnosed, neurodivergent. I'm neurodivergent. Yes, people say this stuff all the time now, but it's just not based on a lot. And a lot of times it's interesting, you can go and profile these people who are purely self diagnosed and they are very different from the people who are clinically diagnosed. So for example, for autism, those people don't really have social deficits. The people who are merely self diagnosed without a clinical diagnosis, they differ radically from the people who actually like had.

[Charlie Kirk]

A doctor go or banging their head against the wall or something.

[Cray Moo]

Exactly.

[Charlie Kirk]

So would you say that depression is a growing problem in the west or is it overblown?

[Cray Moo]

Considerably overblown, I would say. The suicides still give me pause and they make me think it is a growing problem, at least in the US where we don't see the same thing. In Sweden, I say, okay, curious. That kind of helps us narrow down on why it happens. Like it's not going to be the cell phones because they have the same thing. There could be something about their social environment that is different in terms of do benzodiazepines work? Yeah, you do?

[Charlie Kirk]

I think so.

[Cray Moo]

Well, yeah. Well, I mean tons of different drugs work, like SSRIs work. The thing is that they have side effects. They don't work for everybody. In fact, for the heterogeneity and how much, how well those work across the population is incredibly significant.

[Charlie Kirk]

If they're working, why are people still depressed?

[Cray Moo]

There are other reasons to be depressed.

[Charlie Kirk]

Okay.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, I mean, so you don't expect it to cure the whole thing. Like the effect size of a commonest stride might be 0.3 D, which is a modest but real sizable effect. That'll help a lot of people. It'll help some people to not kill themselves, but for the average person, it might just not do very much. And the thing is, the effect size is very small in general for like, people who don't have depression.

[Charlie Kirk]

So what is it? A selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. So why can't you just get 5 HTP and tryptophan from your diet? What would the difference between the two be?

[Cray Moo]

It probably doesn't actually act along the same mechanism of action.

[Charlie Kirk]

So tell me why.

[Cray Moo]

Well, a lot of these supplements, you take them and you excrete them in your urine. They're not processed right.

[Charlie Kirk]

But if you take turkey, like say you eat a bunch of turkey, right. Which is a tryptophanic agent, which helps create serotonin. Right.

[Cray Moo]

Different type of tryptophan.

[Charlie Kirk]

Is that right?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. In that case, it'll be processed very, very differently. It will not lead to the same.

[Charlie Kirk]

Sorts of effects to the production of serotonin.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. So it's actually a funny thing. A lot of people think, interesting, I didn't know that. Yeah. A lot of people think, oh, I'm taking this supplement and thus I'll get the effect that this drug that has the same name nominally has. This is really common with vegans and omega 3s. They'll go, oh, I'm taking omega 3s. And it's like, wait, no, you're not taking eicosapenaoic acid or dexaconoic acid or arachidonic acid. You are taking like, you're taking some like linoleic alpha linoleic acid. You're taking stuff that doesn't convert to what you actually need in humans. It might in fish, but you're not a fish. And it's very hard to get it from like seaweed and stuff. The bio conversion.

[Charlie Kirk]

Algae.

[Cray Moo]

Algae, yes. Very poor bioavailability. More bioavailability in pregnant women. But that's just like.

[Charlie Kirk]

So then let's say depression. What other non pharmacological pharmaceutical interventions help with depression? Would you say? Community, friends, exercise, sun exposure.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, socializing. Being around people is good. It can help. It can especially help you with the most risky behaviors. The suicides and everything are the really, really big thing that helps with having a community is very important, like joining clubs, doing drives on campuses where they say like oh come join this club and have some community and all that. That can be quite helpful for people who otherwise don't because if you're allowed to wallow, you might do dangerous things. We have some interesting experiments from an Israel. Suicides were way less common. If they started confiscating soldiers guns on the weekends they would say oh, don't go home alone and all this. And people who are like in traditional communities, not the Hellenim, they more often had those connections or whatnot and the effect is smaller for them. So you see if you let people wallow, they'll do bad things.

[Charlie Kirk]

And so the Zoloft, Xanax, would you also say they work?

[Cray Moo]

The thing is they're not panaceas, they're not miracle cures for anything. All these drugs work in a like limited sense where they don't work for everybody, they don't work perfectly, but they are gonna save lives if we prescribe them to some level.

[Charlie Kirk]

Do you think there's anything troubling that like one out of four teenage girls are on one form of these drugs?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, I do. I think it's over prescribed.

[Charlie Kirk]

So yeah tell so but so tell us why.

[Cray Moo]

Well for one we know that genetic heterogeneity where we can sort of predict if something will affect you. Some people just shouldn't be on certain drugs and they're going to be taking them long term because they're getting a placebo effect and it's like oh, that's just causing the downsides for you. You are not a responder to this and we should have been able to predict that but we aren't there yet with sequencing everybody and getting them this information. If we did more of that, that'd be great. We would be able to tell them that ahead of time, get them on the right drugs, help them to tailor their drug dosing, the regimens, everything like that. But we just don't. It's a really new thing. So it's, it's no surprise it's not been really massively adopted yet.

[Charlie Kirk]

Do you think we're over prescribing drugs in general?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, I think we do for a lot of things.

[Charlie Kirk]

Which ones in particular?

[Cray Moo]

Oh my goodness. Well the antidepressants were a good example. The thing is I also think there are under prescriptions so I think we are under prescribing statins for example. Some drugs are not. Why like available enough? Because it of a generic form. So trilogy is an inhaler that would help a lot of people.

[Charlie Kirk]

Is it Ibudenicide or what is it?

[Cray Moo]

It's a number of things. It's. I think it's four different active ingredients, but it works really well for like suppressing their. It actually works for a lot of different respiratory things, but it works for a lot of different respiratory conditions.

[Charlie Kirk]

So it's an oral steroid?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, it is, yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

It's like. Like budenocyte.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, exactly. I think that's in it. But I'm thinking there are.

[Charlie Kirk]

That's the most popular oral inhalant, but.

[Cray Moo]

We also inhalers with small amounts of steroids in them, like not just albuterol. Those work a lot better and we're not getting those out enough. We should be switching people over to newer medications, but it's difficult because of costs and everything. Like stuff. In America we tend to pay a lot for drugs because we introduce them really early and aggressively. Like a six month wait for drug is invented and drug goes to market. Might be six years in the UK and during that time people are going to suffer through using crappy drugs they shouldn't really be on or that they might be able to replace or they might be able to get a treatment for something.

[Charlie Kirk]

Fascinating.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. Some people might be able to get treated for conditions and then never have to use the drugs again. And they should be able to get off, but they can't afford the treatments too.

[Charlie Kirk]

What else are we under prescribing?

[Cray Moo]

Well, I think we're under prescribing GLP1s. That's a big one. That's a big contemporary ozempic. Yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

Is there any downsides to ozempic?

[Cray Moo]

There are downsides in the form of nausea. That's a transient side effect for most.

[Charlie Kirk]

Does the food waste in your stomach?

[Cray Moo]

No. No, it doesn't. That's a weird myth. I don't know how they came about, but when you have gastroparesis you still have to, you know, excrete it at some point it has to, you have to defecate. It's not going to just get stuck there.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, they say it like rots in your bowels or something.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, that's wild.

[Charlie Kirk]

How is GLP1 different than a semaglutide injection or is it the same thing?

[Cray Moo]

Same thing.

[Charlie Kirk]

Okay, got it.

[Cray Moo]

Semaglutide is a GLP1RA infection. Yeah. The way they work is neural brainstem agonism of the GLP1 receptors. And now with the newer drugs they also do GIP which binds to a similar area in the brain stem and it actually, they have a lot less GLP1, but they're still more effective because of this GIP stuff, which is an insulinotropic drug. And the mechanisms of action are so interesting to me because it feels like they treat practically everything that is modern American chronic disease. Like, oh, you have weird insulin spiking. You have a lot of bizarre problems like pre diabetes. You have metabolic syndrome. And it seems to act on practically all of that. Like, for most pre diabetics, they get normal glycemia by the end of the trial, and that's like. It's like 96%. The most recent trial I looked at for tirzepatide, I think it's 95% or so. For semaglutide, it's just incredible. Like, it's devastating for chronic disease, it basically rolls it back. And the side effects are mostly transient. Like, the gastroparesis is not one that tends to stick with you for a long time.

[Charlie Kirk]

And Zofran can help.

[Cray Moo]

I'm not sure about that.

[Charlie Kirk]

You're not a Zofran fan?

[Cray Moo]

I haven't looked into that.

[Charlie Kirk]

Well, Zofran is a great anti. Nausea.

[Cray Moo]

It is great. Great for nausea, but I don't know if it specifically helps with that.

[Charlie Kirk]

All I know is I take Zofran if I ever get to the stomach.

[Cray Moo]

Flu, and it works. Well, the thing with gastroparesis is that.

[Charlie Kirk]

It'S also an inhibitor. It blocks the serotonin receptors in your brain.

[Cray Moo]

Interesting.

[Charlie Kirk]

Which, I mean, for whatever reason, that blocks the nausea, the. The vomiting response.

[Cray Moo]

Ah, I could see that helping with vomiting, but I'm curious about. I don't know if it helps with the gastric emptying stuff.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, I have no idea.

[Cray Moo]

Because the reason is the gastric emptying does slow down your uptake of drugs. The classic test they use, the proxy test, is they give you some aspirin and they see how long it takes you to, like, excrete it.

[Charlie Kirk]

So there's so many questions, and you're super smart. You know this better than I do. Would you agree? I want to go down that path further, but let me take a step back. Would you agree that we're sicker than ever?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, I would.

[Charlie Kirk]

Okay. So. So that. So you agree with Bobby Kennedy's beginning hypothesis?

[Cray Moo]

Absolutely. I agree with Bobby on a lot of things about this, but I. Yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

Why do you think we're sicker than ever?

[Cray Moo]

Obesity is mostly it. It is almost entirely the fact that.

[Charlie Kirk]

I totally agree.

[Cray Moo]

So fat.

[Charlie Kirk]

Why are we fat?

[Cray Moo]

We eat a little bit more than we used to. The amount that you need to people to eat more compared to 1980. So in 1980 to now you've gotten a lot fatter. The amount that everybody would have to eat every day to explain the entire rise is about one McDonald's double cheeseburger a day.

[Charlie Kirk]

So the argument that Maha people would make, and I'm not, I am not suited to defend this beyond the statement is that the food is become more, less satiating through genetic modification. Have you heard this argument?

[Cray Moo]

I have heard it, but it's not true. There's absolutely nothing to it.

[Charlie Kirk]

Then why did we not eat as much in the 80s?

[Cray Moo]

We didn't have as much variety in food. That's a really great thing. You ever heard somebody go, oh, I'm full, but I think I have another stomach for a piece of cheesecake or something.

[Charlie Kirk]

I hear it all the time.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, whenever you have variety, you can eat a little bit more. Wonderful nutritionist Stephan Guynet has did a great book, the Hungry Brain. He is a wonderful epidemiologist in general for all this obesity related stuff and he talks about this a bunch. He goes, you know, the mechanisms of society, they don't really work when you have a huge amount of variety and everything. They. It's very easy to keep eating when you have all sorts of crap to eat. And everything is so hyper palatable. It's way more palatable than it used to be. Everything.

[Charlie Kirk]

What do you mean by that?

[Cray Moo]

Everything's better. Yeah, it does. Yeah. And we process food in a way that makes for delicious tasting food. Even if it doesn't have direct consequences, it's still, you'll be eating more and you'll be getting fatter.

[Charlie Kirk]

So the. So you think it's a quantity problem, not a quality problem?

[Cray Moo]

Absolutely, absolutely.

[Charlie Kirk]

Do you buy into the standard American mythology that when I go to Europe I'm able to eat more and feel better?

[Cray Moo]

No, I don't. Not at all. I think people are just walking around more and eating less generally.

[Charlie Kirk]

So Joe Rogan said on a podcast recently that when he eats pasta in America, it feels like sludge. When he eats pasta in Italy, it feels like he could run three miles. Is that just him being on vacation?

[Cray Moo]

Probably a placebo effect. Yeah. Enjoying the vacation, enjoying the nice Italian air.

[Charlie Kirk]

But if millions of Americans feel that.

[Cray Moo]

Way, they're just, I think they're just fooling themselves. And the part of it is they.

[Charlie Kirk]

See them tell us why make the case?

[Cray Moo]

I think part of it is a social contagion of it. There's no real reason for this to happen. So why is it happening? I think it's because somebody said it and other people are like, oh, my God, I feel the same way. It's kind of like with many conditions, like the autism self diagnosis that go, oh, you like trains? I really love trains, too. I think I might have that. I think I feel the exact same way. And then they just psych themselves out. But if you were to give them, like, I have a great Italian chef come in with his ingredients, let him choose everything, give it to a sample of people, and then have an American chef come in and make the same thing with typical ingredients you might use. I think you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. And I would love to see this trial.

[Charlie Kirk]

No, I don't. Has it ever been measured?

[Cray Moo]

No, but they should. I think it'd be funny. There's just been no interest in it.

[Charlie Kirk]

For some reason, because the argument is what. And I do want to talk about glycophinate, but the argument is what? That they don't spray their food the same way we do. Is that the.

[Cray Moo]

They use glyphosate, but there's.

[Charlie Kirk]

There's some. There's some pesticides they don't use or something. I don't know.

[Cray Moo]

They could be.

[Charlie Kirk]

What is the case? They make people.

[Cray Moo]

Well, it depends on who you're talking to. It's. There's a lot of variation because some people know, for example, that like, some point they might believe has been, like, debunked. So they go on to some other thing and they. They want to maintain the belief that.

[Charlie Kirk]

Italian pasta sits better.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. So they come up with different reasons and you push them back on that argument. And then this argument and that argument. You keep going through all the different arguments and they just are still insistent. Oh, no, it's better.

[Charlie Kirk]

Is there any merit to the argument that our food is poisoning us?

[Cray Moo]

In the sense that it's very palatable and you eat a bunch of it, yes. But in the sense that there are all these toxins in it? Very likely not.

[Charlie Kirk]

So you say that if you eat a good diet, what is a good diet?

[Cray Moo]

So a good diet that is nutritionally complete will probably today include meat. Unfortunately, vegans and vegetarians are just gonna have to deal with some insufficiencies. It's practically inevitable. There are some things you just cannot get.

[Charlie Kirk]

I totally agree. And you mean chicken, fish and steak.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, chicken, fish, steak. Especially fish. I really love fish.

[Charlie Kirk]

I'm a big believer in fish. So we totally agree.

[Cray Moo]

Absolutely.

[Charlie Kirk]

I think fish is like the secret super weapon of the West.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. And I, I love steak, but it's not as healthful as fish. Fish is a little bit better.

[Charlie Kirk]

I eat fish every day.

[Cray Moo]

Good.

[Charlie Kirk]

Now, do you have concern about mercury poisoning?

[Cray Moo]

Somewhat. I don't like to eat swordfish multiple times a month.

[Charlie Kirk]

Or tuna.

[Cray Moo]

Tuna a little bit less. If you have that done with aquaculture nowadays, it's totally fine.

[Charlie Kirk]

Really?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. That's actually a great way to increase production and reduce costs.

[Charlie Kirk]

What, you mean farm?

[Cray Moo]

Farm raised, yeah, exactly.

[Charlie Kirk]

Is there a difference between wild caught and farm raised salmon?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, less of the natural pollutants you'll find out there in nature there are tons of things.

[Charlie Kirk]

Really. So you actually like the farm better?

[Cray Moo]

I do. Because you can control the environment, you can control what they eat, you can make sure that they're not gross, you can make sure they're not bottom feeders.

[Charlie Kirk]

So when you have a chinook from Alaska, it actually might be less.

[Cray Moo]

It might be less healthy. That's one of the funny things. A lot of unnatural things are quite a bit healthier than the natural alternatives. Like with red dye. The synthetic one we know is very safe, but the one that we get from cochineal will kill a small proportion of people. It's just not as good. But a lot of people, they fall into this weird mental trap where if it's natural, it's healthy, but tons of natural things are not healthy. It's not healthy to go and smoke a bunch of weed. It's not healthy to go and do cocaine. You'll get a heart attack. Like people. Oh, well, it's natural. It should be great. Right? But no.

[Charlie Kirk]

So we are fatter. Would you say obesity is the driving force of our sickness?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, obesity and everything around it, very much so.

[Charlie Kirk]

Is there a correlation between obesity and depression?

[Cray Moo]

There is, yeah. Absolutely. And obesity likely causes depression, has a causal impact.

[Charlie Kirk]

I completely agree.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. And if you fix it, you're very likely to reduce depression rates.

[Charlie Kirk]

That's right.

[Cray Moo]

One of the wonderful things we can see with these randomized controlled trials and these drugs is God, people are a lot happier when they've gotten a lot less fat.

[Charlie Kirk]

So the, so you're, you're, you're a GLP1 advocate. But however, would you say there's a concern to give like a 13 year old?

[Cray Moo]

I would, yeah. I don't like the idea of giving.

[Charlie Kirk]

It to kids and they're trying to push that.

[Cray Moo]

I know, I'm just kind of instinctually against it, but me too. The thing is, it probably is good health advice. Unfortunately, we know that early treatment for a lot of things does help kids. Like with the statin example, those families where they have hypercholesterolemia and the kids inherit it because it's a genetic condition. When you give them statins from, like age 5, it is really good for them. Like, they are way less likely to die young. And that's important.

[Charlie Kirk]

Right, but that's a genetic problem. Right. So I'm talking about a kid that like, and maybe, I don't know, he's eating like crap. He's eating donuts, he's eating McDonald's. He has, let's just say, a lot of insulin resistance, which I want to ask you about.

[Cray Moo]

Oh, yeah, Very good to combat that.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, I would love to get your thoughts on that. Wouldn't it be better to say, hey, let's fix your diet before we start getting you dependent on the injection?

[Cray Moo]

It'd be nice, but the problem is, to control the kid's diet, you have to intervene on the parents. And intervening the parents is difficult, as we've seen from the inability to intervene on them in general.

[Charlie Kirk]

So if we were to get obesity rates down macro, what would that mean for all the other health outcomes?

[Cray Moo]

Outcomes. Beautiful improvements. Just wonderful things. So the CDC's cost estimate for the direct medical cost of BCD in a year is $173 billion. That came out in, I think, 2022 or thereabouts. So up a bit for inflation. Other estimates are usually a little bit higher. Industry estimates are extremely higher. And estimates that have the indirect costs in there, like presenteeism where you're not working at work, absenteeism where you're not going to work just being lazier, having all sorts of productivity reductions, less employment from being fat. If you handle all of that, the benefits of the American economy would be a little over $1 trillion a year. And that's a pretty standard cost estimate. The most extreme ones I've seen were upwards of about three and a half billion.

[Charlie Kirk]

So you would say that solving obesity is one of our. Are we moving less than we did in the 1980s?

[Cray Moo]

Absolutely. Tons. People are way more sedentary.

[Charlie Kirk]

Okay.

[Cray Moo]

A lot of that has to do with the jobs. They're just not as, like, physically demanding and they don't need to be. We should have people going and exercising outside of work if they're not able to do it in work anymore.

[Charlie Kirk]

Food pyramid. Okay, so we agree on that.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

I really don't like it should be reconstituted.

[Cray Moo]

It really should be. I think it was made on pretty bad advice. I Like the large amount of grains is just not that pleasant. I would like to see more vegetables relative to grains. Like all the grains is what vegetables.

[Charlie Kirk]

Are best, the carniferous ones.

[Cray Moo]

Not carnivore. Not carniferous.

[Charlie Kirk]

Whatever.

[Cray Moo]

Cruciferous greens.

[Charlie Kirk]

Whatever.

[Cray Moo]

No, no, no. Yeah, those are great. I love spinach.

[Charlie Kirk]

Broccoli.

[Cray Moo]

I love broccoli.

[Charlie Kirk]

Cauliflower.

[Cray Moo]

I love cauliflower. I love pearl cauliflower. Delicious. Golly. My wife makes just all sorts of delicious stuff with that. It's so good.

[Charlie Kirk]

So. So that. That brings. So. So grains are carbohydrates, which brings us to insulin resistance.

[Cray Moo]

Yes.

[Charlie Kirk]

Is that a problem?

[Cray Moo]

Massive. And it's basically stemming from the same thing. People are eating too much and they are causing desensitization of the pancreas is up. They are becoming pre diabetic. They are effectively managing insulin very, very poorly and acting on that does help with their obesity and helps with everything else because so much is downstream from that. It's all. There's this whole thing about metabolic syndrome where it's just a very vague condition. There's actually no real good definition of it, but it's all in the orbit of that if you fix any part of it, you seem to have effects on all the rest. So like before GLP1s, the big miracle drug was metformin. It goes, oh, it helps with everything, it helps with that. It helps with everything downstream from. And all those downstream benefits are just amazing. Like even. You're even going to cure like a lot of adult acne and stuff. It's just going to be amazing.

[Charlie Kirk]

So would you. So, yeah, but it's all related, I guess the question is, your take is drugs that work is probably a better solution. This is your take than diet, mass dietary changes, I think.

[Cray Moo]

So the main reason is it's very, very difficult to get people to actually stick to dietary changes when you tell them, oh, change your diet in this way or that way. Only people who are like in the upper strata, the upper crust, tend to actually follow the advice and stick to it reliably. And even then they tend to not do so very well. Like adherence to New Year's, New Year's resolutions. The average diet people start on, they're off it by six weeks, they're just. They're off. They don't want to do it, they don't stick with it, they don't stick to their gym memberships. In fact, that's true. The vast majority just never get used. And how do you motivate people? It just Seems it's practically impossible because we've been telling them for decades. Like we even tell them in the latest advice from the hhs, just hey, don't eat ultra processed foods and stuff. We've been saying this for ages and they still do it.

[Charlie Kirk]

And you agree we should reduce ultra processed foods?

[Cray Moo]

It's curious we don't have a good definition of it. There's the nova categorizations and those have been like the go to.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, how about like the big three which is like white bread, cereal and donuts. Like the.

[Cray Moo]

I think we should eat less that stuff just because it gets tempting. Yeah, people eat too much when they have it and it's just tastes good, so why stop yourself? But I think people should stop themselves more and I think cutting back on those options would help. But the thing is if you cut back on options, you kind of just. I don't like taking away choice. I would like people to have a way to choose more but also choose the right thing.

[Charlie Kirk]

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[Cray Moo]

Fake.

[Charlie Kirk]

Tell me.

[Cray Moo]

Entirely fake. This is a great thing.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, so. So like the. What is it? Loma Linda or whatever in California and Greece. All fake.

[Cray Moo]

So Loma Linda is not exceptional. It's about the 74th percentile.

[Charlie Kirk]

Was that coffee, that's for me. You want one?

[Cray Moo]

I would love a coffee.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah.

[Cray Moo]

Thank you. Thank you.

[Charlie Kirk]

Do you want creatine in it?

[Cray Moo]

Do you put creatine in your coffee? No, no, no. That would be fun.

[Charlie Kirk]

I do take creatine, though.

[Cray Moo]

I take it black.

[Charlie Kirk]

Creatine is great for you.

[Cray Moo]

Absolutely. Keeps on a little waterway, but great for the muscle.

[Charlie Kirk]

It would what?

[Cray Moo]

Great for muscle building.

[Charlie Kirk]

It does. It does. You have to drink a lot of water when you're on creatine.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. And it causes you to retain a lot of water, too.

[Charlie Kirk]

That's right. It increases water retention.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

So I do it for the neurological effects, but keep going.

[Cray Moo]

If you have a good diet, though, I don't think you get the neurological effects from that. It's almost all seen in vegetarians.

[Charlie Kirk]

Vegans. Yeah. I want you to finish that point. I found the greatest leap of neurological improvement of mental acuity, memory and stamina when I started doing more fish, more olive oil and more healthy fats.

[Cray Moo]

Nice.

[Charlie Kirk]

That for me is when I saw. Because I was really low on fish, my whole diet. And that's where for me it was a huge level up.

[Cray Moo]

It's so good. I'm a big.

[Charlie Kirk]

Especially salmon. I do salmon almost every night.

[Cray Moo]

Love salmon. Love salmon, love swordfish, love tuna. I love everything that you can like. I love a good tuna steak.

[Charlie Kirk]

I love good food if it's good for you.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. Anyway, you're talking so Loma Linda, not actually that exceptional.

[Charlie Kirk]

The Seventh Day Adventists.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, exactly. And they. Oh, man, they really love.

[Charlie Kirk]

I wrote. I have this in my upcoming book, so you have to debunk it for me.

[Cray Moo]

They.

[Charlie Kirk]

I have a whole book on the Sabbath, so.

[Cray Moo]

Oh, really?

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah.

[Cray Moo]

Do you like the Seven Day Adventists?

[Charlie Kirk]

I use them as a test case that being a Sabbatarian can help your health. That stop pausing for a day can actually improve your health outcomes.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. So I love fasting as well. I used to fast a bunch, but.

[Charlie Kirk]

I'm a big fast. So you're a believer in fasting?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, I just like it for the feeling. I feel like it's an easy way to lose weight.

[Charlie Kirk]

Does the data show fasting is good?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, it's a great way to lose weight.

[Charlie Kirk]

We're in agreement.

[Cray Moo]

And the more rapidly you lose the.

[Charlie Kirk]

Weight, though, but it's good because it creates. Your whole body goes into almost a replenishing mode. Right.

[Cray Moo]

It might lead to autophagy at a meaningful scale, but that's after like four plus days of fasting.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah. Which I don't do more than.

[Cray Moo]

But you were.

[Charlie Kirk]

You're going to make a point on blue zones.

[Cray Moo]

Yes, sorry, let's get back to that. So Loma Linda, not that exceptional. Focused on a bunch. It's at about the 74th percentile thereabouts for US counties or whatever it is in terms of life expectancy, which is not amazing. Like, why should we focus on the 74th percentile? We can just probably go even further out. But then the thing is those percentiles are unstable year to year. They do change quite a bit. So the 99th is probably not going to be the 99th. The like in 10 years because it'll. People will die, it'll change. Nicosia, the one down in Costa Rica or whatever. Yep. It is pretty much vague.

[Charlie Kirk]

Let's define a blue zone. What is a blue zone?

[Cray Moo]

Oh, yeah, sorry. No, it's ok. Blue zones. So blue zones are these areas that have been proposed to basically have the secret to a long life. People there are supposed to have been living very long lives for a very long time. They live well, they enjoy their communities and they eat. They don't have to eat in like crazy ways. Sometimes they smoke even and stuff. They just do all sorts of things there that are somehow all conducive to hell. They live really long lives, but most of it turns out to be pension fraud. Pension fraud. Yeah, that's the thing.

[Charlie Kirk]

I know where Blake gets all this stuff from now, Blake, I figured it out. I found the source.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. I popularized this a little while back. And the guy who documented a lot of this stuff put in all the legwork, he recently got the IG Nobel Prize, which is a yearly kind of joke Nobel, they give out for funny findings. Like there's a woman, Herculana Hozel, who a few years back got one for grinding up monkey brains to count the number of neurons in them. It's just a very funny little thing, but it's real science. And this guy, he went through and he documented, oh my God, this blue zones are like super fake. So Okinawa, they go, oh, you can live to like 110 there easily. It's like, well, I don't believe that that's one of the poorest areas of Japan and their life expectancy officially is much lower than the rest of Japan. It's like, I just don't believe that they smoke a lot there. They weird. So the government went out and they were like, oh, we're going to go interview some of these, you know, super, super old, way older than 100 years old people. Because we Want to learn about their life experiences. It'll be cool. Have, like, a little documentary. And they funded this documentary, and then it turned out, oh, we're finding a lot of corpses. We're finding a lot of people who have been rotting in a room.

[Charlie Kirk]

Here's your coffee with creatine.

[Cray Moo]

Thank you so much. Excellent. All right. They found all these people were just being used to collect checks by their living relatives. And sometimes it didn't exist. And so this prompted. Okay, documentary is over. Government goes out, reviews a lot of this, and now they send out letters every year to ask people, hey, are you still alive? Can you verify you're alive? They give. They sometimes give them little medals every, like, so many years to make sure if you're really old, you're not just scamming the system and actually dead.

[Charlie Kirk]

And so the. Is there nothing to like the Mediterranean diet walking around all the time?

[Cray Moo]

Not really. The thing to the Mediterranean diet is that it's popular. And as things become popular, healthy people adopt them because they're like, oh, my God, I better do the cool new healthy thing.

[Charlie Kirk]

And it generally has principles that aren't terrible. Right?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, yeah. It's a. If the thing about restricting your diet is you limit all that availability of different weird foods and everything.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, totally.

[Cray Moo]

It's easier to satiate yourself. So if you don't have a million options because you. That's how.

[Charlie Kirk]

That's how I eat, basically. I'm a Mediterranean diet guy.

[Cray Moo]

There you go. Well, if you have that limited diet and it goes, oh, I can only eat these things, then you're very unlikely to overeat.

[Charlie Kirk]

Correct.

[Cray Moo]

If you put people in a chamber with nutrient paste, they'll eat enough to live, and then they won't eat very much. They'll probably lose weight because it's dull. It's not an exciting diet. So they're not going to eat a bunch of it. And it's great. That works.

[Charlie Kirk]

And so the big problem that is facing us is an overindulgence. Obesity. Absolutely. And it creates all these downstream health problems.

[Cray Moo]

That's right.

[Charlie Kirk]

And. Yeah, please.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, no, that's basically the gist of it. It is just we are eating so much, and some people are eating a whole lot more than they really should.

[Charlie Kirk]

And we've measured this.

[Cray Moo]

We have. Yeah, we have great measurements. The Nutritional Health Examinations, the nhanes. It's a great study that's done every couple of years. They ask people, please, just log your calories and stuff. And the calories people eat have gone up and the Activity they do has gone down. So on both ends, you're getting fewer calories out and more calories in, and then your stomach is growing and growing and growing. Alcohol bad for you?

[Charlie Kirk]

I don't drink. So make the case.

[Cray Moo]

Well, all the studies.

[Charlie Kirk]

Poison.

[Cray Moo]

Absolutely. It is poison. Ethanol is poison. Yes, absolutely. That is 100%. It is poison.

[Charlie Kirk]

Alcohol is ethanol.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

I didn't know that.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, it's poison.

[Charlie Kirk]

I thought ethanol was derived from corn. Corn alcohol is all alcohol. Corn based.

[Cray Moo]

No, I was gonna say you make alcohol a lot of ways.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, I was gonna say. Okay.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

But I guess you get ethanol from other.

[Cray Moo]

Yep.

[Charlie Kirk]

Okay. I just.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, yeah, it's alcohol. So alcohol in the engines and all that, if you put it in there without the treatment or whatever for your engine, it's gonna, you know.

[Charlie Kirk]

Combustible.

[Cray Moo]

Combustible. Blow it up.

[Charlie Kirk]

So. But do we. Are we drinking too much alcohol?

[Cray Moo]

Absolutely. There's a lot of binge drinking these days. It's pretty bad. So, brief background on why people thought it was good for you. Pretty much the same reason they thought vitamin D is great for you, but.

[Charlie Kirk]

There'S less downsides of vitamin D. Yeah.

[Cray Moo]

Like, if you can dose it, it's not going to do anything.

[Charlie Kirk]

You're just going to dose alcohol. You got big problems.

[Cray Moo]

Yes. Any alcohol you drink is going to be bad for you. All of it is bad for you. There's no lower limit at which it's good for you. I still drink alcohol because it's fun and it's enjoyable and, like, you want to drink because, like, everybody's drinking and it. Some stuff tastes good. Not beer or anything like that, but some liquor tastes good and all that. So it's like, great, I'll drink. But it is bad. It is all bad for you. The people thought, based on selective studies, they were like, oh, people who drink a little bit, they're healthier.

[Charlie Kirk]

I hear this all the time. Oh, a glass of wine a night. It's good for the antioxidants.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. Oh, my God. They say this. It's actually funny. We have comparisons of the effects of drinking wine versus drinking beer during pregnancy. And it turns out, oh, women who drink wine during pregnancy, they didn't have higher IQ kids. Don't extrapolate from this because it's clearly a selection of this.

[Charlie Kirk]

They should not drink anything.

[Cray Moo]

You shouldn't drink anything. It's all downsides. But the reason is selection. Because wealthier women drink wine and poorer women drink beer.

[Charlie Kirk]

So it's like, exactly right. Yeah.

[Cray Moo]

So it's why would a.

[Charlie Kirk]

Why would a. If a mom is drinking her in pregnancy, that's.

[Cray Moo]

It's bad either way.

[Charlie Kirk]

Child abuse. I mean, it's like.

[Cray Moo]

I think it should be considered that.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, I totally agree.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. Some jurisdictions consider it that way. Some jurisdictions recently have been lifting their restrictions on that.

[Charlie Kirk]

Are you. Are you serious? I should lean in on that? Blake. We should get in on that.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

Because, I mean, that's active potentiality for fetal poisoning.

[Cray Moo]

Exactly. It's very bad. It just has no upsides. It's all downside. It's a terrible, terrible thing to do. But some places have started making it. So bars are now allowed to serve pregnant women. It's their choice to do it. They can say no, and they should say no, but they're allowed to serve, which is.

[Charlie Kirk]

Are we drinking more alcohol than we were 30 or 40 years ago?

[Cray Moo]

We are. And we're binge drinking a lot more too. Like, a lot. There are more teetotalers, which is nice. These people are gonna be fine. There are more people who are just drinking insane amounts too, and people in general are drinking a little bit more. And so we had prohibition once. And prohibition.

[Charlie Kirk]

Actually, I'm a big prohibition fan.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

I'm a prohibition truther.

[Cray Moo]

Good.

[Charlie Kirk]

I've read the books.

[Cray Moo]

Good. So you're familiar. It did reduce rates of cirrhosis, and they never actually went back up to where they are.

[Charlie Kirk]

Well, here's my whole. Here's my thought. Crime on prohibition.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yes. It increased gang violence. What caused them to do it in the first place?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

So why would a population go and do a constitutional amendment? There must have been a really big problem.

[Cray Moo]

Root and tune saloons.

[Charlie Kirk]

What was the problem that caused. What was it, the 23rd Amendment? 22nd.

[Cray Moo]

A lot of it had to do with men mistreating their wives.

[Charlie Kirk]

A lot of it was women driven.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. Women were the power behind prohibition.

[Charlie Kirk]

21St amendment.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. They would actually go and bust up saloons that the men would be at after work or sometimes when they should have been working, and they would break the bar, break the stills and everything and try and tell men, get out of here. Don't go home from the saloon drunk and beat your wife. Wife come home and be a good father and all this stuff. And saloon culture was just very bad. When they did break that up, homicide rates went down because men were just going there into these pretty much men and prostitute only establishments and just being violent, being drunk, being adulterous. Very much so. And it was just bad. It was a bad culture. We had we changed it overnight with.

[Charlie Kirk]

What is worse would you say for society? A society that smokes or society that drinks?

[Cray Moo]

Society that smokes.

[Charlie Kirk]

Okay, so you're not a tobacco truther.

[Cray Moo]

No, I. Tobacco is just. Okay, well, okay.

[Charlie Kirk]

Do you think we. No, I'm talking about no cigarettes. I want to get into weed, but do you think there's any truth that we were skinnier when we had. When we were smoking more cigarettes? Yeah, because it is an appetite suppressor.

[Cray Moo]

Absolutely. It contributes a very, very small but real portion of the increase in obesity over time. The reduction in smoking did that. It's interesting. I mean, like it did make people skinnier, but it's not worth it. It causes cancer.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah. One in four chance to get lung cancer. Why is weed bad?

[Cray Moo]

I just think it's a loser drug. I used to think, oh, we'll legalize it, it'll be fine. But the gateway drug thing that I heard growing up that everybody said, oh, it was fake for many years, it seems to have been real. It seems to have been a true thing. People really do get on harder drugs. And you make them available. If you just legalize weed, okay, fine. But you're still going to find that a lot of people waste their lives on this stuff.

[Charlie Kirk]

Totally agree.

[Cray Moo]

It's. Most of the downsides of weed are due to selection. Losers smoke weed. When you make it available to them, they will go smoke it. Most of it is not the weed making their lives worse. It is that losers want to go and do this stuff. But even still, it's still pretty bad. Like kids, when they have it as teens, they pay attention less in high school. They're less likely to go on and get a college degree. They're less likely to do well on various tests and everything. They're less likely to graduate on time. Just downside. And that's illegal use too. So when you make it legal, it increases illegal use. Honestly, it's very funny effect because more it becomes more socially acceptable to do it. So people who are like under the age limit or people who are otherwise ineligible, they will go and get it illegally now or they'll be able to buy it from someone who resold it to them or anything like that. And it's just been a big mess. And anywhere that it's come with the also legalization of or decriminalization, I should say is more common of hard drugs, it's been terrible, it's been atrocious. It's led to like just. I don't know if you've been to SF when it had really, really bad problems with that.

[Charlie Kirk]

The Walking Dead.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, I was in Berkeley, like, golly, around this time last year, and I was just walking around. I was going to go get Boba with some friends, and we passed by McDonald's and there's a guy outside who has needles near him and he has the little. What do you call it, the band around his arm because he had just injected and he was jittering up everywhere and he was just drinking a coffee too. And it's like you clearly just did meth or something. Or not meth, but heroin. And there are people conked out on the sidewalks. There are people you have to step over. It was atrocious. And every city that decriminalizes has a same thing. Portugal, they say, oh, it's a success story, but they do it differently. If you are using in public, they'll arrest you and they'll put you in like rehabilitation program or they'll throw you in the drunk tank. Basically. They don't take it. They took it more seriously than we do here when we try to decriminalize. And I think that's part of the failure is that we adopt an incredibly progressive, liberal attitude towards it. Where we. When we decriminalize, we go, oh, we just wanted to decriminalize. That's all we wanted to do. Where Portugal does it, they go, oh, we wanted to not enforce this stuff. We're going to beat up vagrants still who are using drugs. We don't have the gumption to do that too. And if we did, I think it'd be a better situation. But either way, it's turned out pretty bad.

[Charlie Kirk]

So I want to keep running through supplements, but let's take a detour to a fun one that's on my mind. Are more people getting autism?

[Cray Moo]

No, very likely not. So I'm going to give you a quick spiel on autism. So 1943, Leo Kanner, or Kanner, he. A lot of people, Germans, they Americanize their name and all that, they change pronunciation. He names autism for the first time. And his criteria for it is super restrictive to get a diagnosis of autism. Back when the like Connor criteria came out, you had to have symptoms of having an extremely low iq. Social aloofness, for example, is typically only found in people who are mentally retarded with an IQ of less than 3:35. So super mentally. And that's like where you're totally unaware of any social cues or anything. You're like unresponsive, catatonic almost. Yeah, pretty much but you also have to have a symptom of a relatively normal or high range iq, which is these strict repetitive habits like organizing everything in your room near bedtime. And it's like, how do you have this co location of two symptoms that are on the opposite ends of the IQ spectrum? That's why almost nobody got diagnosed before we had the DSM 3, the Diagnostic.

[Charlie Kirk]

Statistical Manual, third edition.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, they introduced the first autism diagnosis to the mass market. Before that they had like things that were sort of similar, like schizophrenia diagnoses, but they were too dissimilar to modern stuff to really be comparable. Then they started diagnosing more and the criteria were a lot more lax. You had to just be a little bit, as we know, modern autistic. It was more strict than it is nowadays. And. But when they got to round to the DSM 4, they introduced stuff like Asperger's, which is like mild autism. Someone who's a little high IQ and a little quirky. They're autistic now. They weren't under the old criteria, but under the new stuff. Oh yeah, give them a diagnosis and start giving the parents all the social services that entails. And the other big thing is when the IDEA act passed, when we this act where you have to go out and your schools had to actively identify students with mental disabilities, that led to a massive, massive increase in diagnoses. It led to huge numbers of increases in single years sometimes. So like Massachusetts, for example, they had a year where they had a nearly like, I think it was a 300 or 400% increase in the number of diagnoses they reported up to Congress, consistent with the acts they have to report every year because they just changed how the baseline was calculated. So you have all these things that are methodological factors that contribute to the increase. And the increase is just in diagnoses. When you go out of your way to use a consistent criteria like the criteria of the DSM IV and you go out into the community and you go, okay, hi, random person on the street, I'd like to diagnose you with autism or I'd like to see if you qualify for diagnosis and you pay them a little bit to be in the study or whatever. And you do the same thing for adults and for kids. You get incredibly similar rates. You don't for the most severe forms of autism. But that's because those people tend to unfortunately die very young. The guys who are banging their heads against the wall, as you said earlier, they do tend to die young. We have seen an increase in those diagnoses, though, and you might say, oh, is that the real increase in autism? It's like, no, that's because we incentivize that. A lot of that is people who are getting substituted into an autism diagnosis because we give parents. For example, in California, you get a lot more benefits for an autism diagnosis than you do for a mental retardation diagnosis. So if your kid has mental retardation, you can convince a provider to diagnose your kid with autism, and suddenly, ba bam. You get access to a lot more social services. Your kid gets treated better in school. They end up with a lot.

[Charlie Kirk]

You get cash. If you are the caretaker, you get nearly 10,000 bucks a month.

[Cray Moo]

Yep. And we see a lot of exploitation of this. For example, in Minnesota, the Somali community has been greatly exploiting this recently. In 2018.

[Charlie Kirk]

They would never do that.

[Cray Moo]

They would never do that. They were. They've figured out in their community how to get a diagnosis for their kids because it gives them a lot of benefits. The provider spending in I think the Two Cities area was about $6 million in 2018, or it might have been the whole state. I'd have to look back at the report. But it went up to, like, nearly 200 million in just a few years, like, by 2024 or 2023. Actually, that's what it was. And there have been fraud cases about this. There have been people getting arrested for it. There's all sorts. People are getting found out that they're doing this.

[Charlie Kirk]

So you would say there's nothing to the argument that we used to have like 1 in 30,000. Now it's 1 in 30. There's been no increase in brain inflammation?

[Cray Moo]

No, not really. There's been a systematic effort to start diagnosing people. That started only very recently. And because you tend to under diagnose adults, because, like, we just don't care about adults. Like, there's no reason to go out and diagnose all the adults. But there is a mandate to diagnose all the kids. You have to diagnose it by law.

[Charlie Kirk]

So. But is it ever so their counter argument, if I had, like, doctor Means here, you know, who wants to be the next Surgeon General?

[Cray Moo]

Casey.

[Charlie Kirk]

She would say, have you. Have you met her? I don't know if you met her or not.

[Cray Moo]

No, I bet Callie. But I haven't met Casey in person yet.

[Charlie Kirk]

They would say that the criteria the last 10 years hasn't changed.

[Cray Moo]

Incorrect. Well, the thing is. So they're correct in that the diagnostic statistical manual 5 has been the addition we've been on. But the incentives to diagnose have still increased and they're increasing and the awareness increases. Like it's not just about the manuals themselves. It's about campaigns like Autism Speaks where you try and get the population to know about autism. People had no idea what it was before 1980. Now everybody knows what autism is. It's a meme. You can go on TikTok and like find people self diagnosing, giving instructions on how to self diagnose or you can even find that. It's really kind of crazy. You can find instructions on TikTok how to go to a psychiatrist and get diagnosed. You can find people psyching themselves into it. And these cultural trends clearly lead to way, way more diagnosis. Parents being incentivized. When schools, when states pass these reward for diagnosis like laws that reward diagnosis in schools, schools tend to increase in diagnosis by 25% in a single year on average, which is enormous. That's so huge. And it's just because each head that is autistic is a boon for the school. That's just how it is. We keep incentivizing it and the rates keep growing.

[Charlie Kirk]

So for parents that say that there are just noticeable more speech delays between kids now than there were 20, 30 years ago, that's just not really true. That doesn't bear out.

[Cray Moo]

Doesn't bear out. If you look at actual symptomality, which we do have data on, you don't see really any difference over time. And in fact it's wonderful. I love the Swedes for this and the Danish and the Norwegians and the Finns. They trust their government a lot to collect a lot of their data. Like their personal data is very well collected and it's all linked to their health records and everything. And we have data on parental like the question, same questionnaires we give to parents here for autism that prioritize them to go to get a diagnosis. They give those to whole population registers like thousands and thousands of people and we see oh, the reported level of the autistic traits over time or even the clinician like measured level in some cases is the same over time. It just doesn't drift. So the population is as autistic as ever. But the number of diagnoses in those same cohorts just ticks up and up and up and up in a way. And I think that plus the fact that when you do a systematic effort to diagnose under a given criteria, you find the same rates for adults and for children, I think that really just seals the deal. It's hard to argue against that in any credible way.

[Charlie Kirk]

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[Cray Moo]

So that's the thing. We don't know if the increase in autism diagnoses is under or over diagnosis. There's a genuine case to be made that some kids were underserved prior to diagnosis becoming a big thing, because there are some things you can do to help autistic kids. I'm not a psychiatrist, but I know that they have plenty of things that actually do help. I've looked at some of the effect sizes for the treatments and whatnot, and they help them with their behavioral problems. They help them to graduate school and stuff. They help them with a lot of things. So were those kids at one point under diagnosed? I think the answer is probably yes. For those kids nowadays where we're getting autism becoming less and less severe because we're diagnosing more and more marginal cases, I feel that there is a lot of over diagnosis going on and especially when it leads to unnecessary medication. Like, I'm not a big fan of the over diagnosis with adhd, especially because there are.

[Charlie Kirk]

I think it's a scam.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, I'm. I mean, we. Well, we know partially it is a scam definitely because people who are in the DSM are financially compromised. They have been. A lot of them have had pharma contracts. I don't I'm not against big pharma. I love pharmaceutical companies that do great stuff for us. But it is true that they are clever. They might do a lot of smart, good things, but they also lie a lot. They do a lot of things that hurt people. For example, there was the opioid stuff a while back. The epidemic on that is going down now. We are handling that which is lovely, means fewer overdoses. Good. The company that started that which has now been sued out of existence. Well, sued into being just a fund to pay out people they hurt. They went around and lied to doctors and told them, oh, it's not addictive. There's no evidence it's addictive. And then what do you see? About 5% of people who were prescribed these drugs after a surgery got addicted for a short amount of time usually, but sometimes a long amount of time and a lot of time they transition to other drugs. So they do lie, they do mess up stuff and they do over diagnose these kids in the sense that there are some number of them that we know transition from these drugs to harder drugs. There are a good number of people who go from like ADHD drugs, which many will need. Lots of kids will need them. They can't focus otherwise.

[Charlie Kirk]

Like Ritalin.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, Ritalin and Adderall. And like a lot of other drugs, they just work. They actually do work great for a lot of kids who do need them. But the kids who don't need them, they're getting not much upside. A lot of people do use the drugs for focus reasons, like they're on the job and they want to focus better and fine, let them do that if they really want. But the moment it becomes forcing something on a kid and the parents being told they must do it and all that, I'm not a big fan. There are good cases where you should because the kid will fail otherwise. But I do think we give it out too often.

[Charlie Kirk]

And so you would say then the autism emphasis is just a major diagnosis. Scam.

[Cray Moo]

A lot of it is. A lot of it is scamming. I mean, especially when you see like the welfare fraud related to it like that. The Somali case in Minnesota is one of the most well documented now and it's very, very bad. There is really no good reason for them to be going out and getting practically all their kids diagnosed with autism. It's clear that they're doing it because it gives them money.

[Charlie Kirk]

And is there any truth that there is like less autism in the Amish community?

[Cray Moo]

No, not really. They have, they do have autism People say they have zero, and it's like, no, we have diagnosed cases. They just don't get modern medical care. They don't seek it out. So, like, of course not gonna be diagnosed. They're not in our schools, they're not in our hospitals and everything, unless on rare occasions they are. But they're just not getting all the, well, visits kids get and everything. They're not. No. There's really nothing to it. It's a difference in the medical care they receive. So if you were to go and do a community study on them and to, like, go out of your way to diagnose everyone, I think you'd see pretty high rates.

[Charlie Kirk]

So, I mean, your contention is that the 1 in 30 number. I mean, this is one of the greatest medical malpractice issues of a civilization. I mean, it could be.

[Cray Moo]

The thing is, again, there are some kids who do benefit from the services received after the diagnosis. So it's hard to say what percentage. That's why it's hard to say. We don't know. We need to do studies on how often that stuff actually helps. We know, like, the heterogeneity and how SSRIs help with depression. We know that, like, the bottom 30% get, like, nothing, and the. The top ones get big effects and the middle gets just like, meh. But we don't know what it is for autism. We don't know how well the services they can provide in schools affect them. So we don't actually know. Like, we don't have an empirical margin that we've estimated on which to diagnose, but if we did, that'd be great. That would allow us to diagnose appropriately, like, appropriate for a given symptom level, so we could tailor the care better.

[Charlie Kirk]

So in some ways, your message is actually very empowering, that a parent might be being told their kid has autism and they.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

Is that correct?

[Cray Moo]

Oh, absolutely. That is definitely the correct.

[Charlie Kirk]

So talk about that.

[Cray Moo]

That has happened.

[Charlie Kirk]

There might be parents right now in the audience where a doctor is like, well, your kid has autism, and it might actually be a lie.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, absolutely. The thing is, with the criteria being so low being so it's easy to get diagnosed, like, just based on a few symptoms that are just often kids being normal, like, total normal. Child behavior has been pathologized in a lot of ways. There are tons of kids who are certainly misdiagnosed because they're. They're obsessed with trains, and they love their.

[Charlie Kirk]

But what is the train thing? Why does that mean you're autistic. I don't understand people.

[Cray Moo]

It's just kind of a meme. It's not really about trains, about particular obsessions. And I think people, parents overstate obsessions. A lot of times they're worried about their kids and they go, oh, my kid is obsessed with video games or screens or trains or anything like that. But they're just interested at a pretty normal level. And we're treating that pathologically because we're too concerned these days, parents are hovering too much and they're too concerned about every little thing in their kid's environment, every little thing their kid does and they over focus on it and they don't give their kids the space to be normal and develop normally, or they should.

[Charlie Kirk]

So then, if you had your way, how would you then approach this autism issue?

[Cray Moo]

I would let the public know, golly, the diagnostic threshold is incredibly low and we don't need to diagnose so many people and we need to start doing the studies to figure out what, what we should diagnose because we don't really do that. We just do stuff on how to diagnose or oh, I saw this thing and we all in the psychiatric practice agree it's real and we would like to start diagnosing this.

[Charlie Kirk]

We should do that. In order for the, the people that think that autism is increasing, for it to be true, it would have to be standardized across ages, is that correct? Because you said if you pick adults, they do not have the same.

[Cray Moo]

No, no. So the adults do have symptoms. It's just that in this very, very severe cases, you're less likely to get adults who have them because they would have likely younger. But for most symptoms they do have them show up. For adults, the exceptions are things that are age gated like must start presenting symptoms before age 30. You can go back and sometimes look at an adult's case files if they had them that far back and see, oh, they do have something consistent with autism and that does happen, but it's somewhat rare. Also, sometimes adults do intend to go out and get an autism diagnosis because it does lead to higher disabilities payments. We saw this during the great financial recession back in 2008, 2009, lots of people who were on Medicare, Medicaid started, not Medicare, sorry, Medicaid started seeking out autism diagnoses, more benefits.

[Charlie Kirk]

So it's fascinating. Let's go through the supplement stuff and we close health and that we have a lot more to talk about. Yeah, turmeric, ginger, probably not going to do very much.

[Cray Moo]

Might Be a good way to increase your metabolism very, very slightly, burn a few more calories, but not going to do very much in general.

[Charlie Kirk]

What about coffee?

[Cray Moo]

See, I love coffee and I love caffeine, but it's not really going to benefit you a lot.

[Charlie Kirk]

Doesn't it speed up your metabolism though?

[Cray Moo]

Caffeine does a little bit, but it's not terribly large. It's not going to cut off the coffee.

[Charlie Kirk]

Any benefit to the antioxidants in coffee?

[Cray Moo]

Not really, no. It's just not going to do very much.

[Charlie Kirk]

How about drinking a bunch of water?

[Cray Moo]

Not going to do a lot after a certain point. The thing is you're just not gonna get these benefits. They have diminishing returns severely for practically everything. I don't, I can't actually think of anything with non diminishing returns because. But that's kind of hard. That's a silly thing to say in general because the dose makes the poison Oftentimes one of the things you see in a lot of circles like in terms of worry about stuff is oh my God. For example, aspartame. They go, oh, aspartame breaks down partly into formaldehyde. Well, you. Formaldehyde is not bad in the quantities you get from drinking a Diet Coke.

[Charlie Kirk]

There's aspartame in that, in lmnt.

[Cray Moo]

Totally fine. Aspartame is totally fine. It doesn't have any biological way it could be bad for you.

[Charlie Kirk]

And the amounts of aspartame is poisonous.

[Cray Moo]

Some people say that, but the thing is they think formaldehyde is just generally bad for you. And it is bad if you drink like the bottle they would have in an embalming office. But it's not bad for you if you get it in the quantity you get from like eating an apple, which you do get. You get it from a lot of your food, but it's not bad because you. The dose makes the poison. It's such a biologically meaningless amount that it's not going to do anything to you in a million years.

[Charlie Kirk]

How about saunas?

[Cray Moo]

I love saunas, but the benefits there are really sort of minuscule.

[Charlie Kirk]

Have you heard about the Norwegian sauna study?

[Cray Moo]

Which one?

[Charlie Kirk]

The long term one where they measured guys over 30 people over 30 years.

[Cray Moo]

I haven't seen this. I did look at a meta analysis of like the very, very few number of trials in this and they're all really small and it looked like there was basically just nothing there. But I still love saunas and endorse them. They're great for losing water weight how.

[Charlie Kirk]

About training like working out, bench press.

[Cray Moo]

Oh, excellent for you. Yeah, yeah. Strength is good and in fact a.

[Charlie Kirk]

Lot of people for your brain too.

[Cray Moo]

Strength is good for everything. I don't know about the brain benefits. I actually doubt them for depression because a lot of studies have recently been coming out and they've been saying, oh, the depression benefits are really overstated. And that's whatever. Interesting. I used to think it was a big thing, but meh. Running gets my mind off things. But it doesn't actually seem to help much in the trials. Strength training is just good to have in general to prevent a lot of aging related decline. Like lower back problems really are very, very common.

[Charlie Kirk]

I have a lower back issue.

[Cray Moo]

You should have been deadlifting more.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, I know.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, I tell everybody, deadlift, please.

[Charlie Kirk]

I can't deadlift now because of my back.

[Cray Moo]

Oh no, I'm sorry. That's. That sucks. A lot of people if, especially if you're young right now you should be going out and doing lower back exercises. Don't strain.

[Charlie Kirk]

I agree, I agree.

[Cray Moo]

You should train your back because if you don't train your back, you will end up an adult who is miserable. Like when you're older.

[Charlie Kirk]

My back is a disaster.

[Cray Moo]

Oh, I'm sorry.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, that's L4 L5 up against the sciatic.

[Cray Moo]

Oh no, it's terrible. Yeah, that's one of my big strength training pieces of advice. Are you everyone?

[Charlie Kirk]

So is there any. Let's finish on supplements. Anything that you recommend. Take no vitamin C. We get enough.

[Cray Moo]

Of it in our diet for most people you're going to get pretty much everything. Fine.

[Charlie Kirk]

Even if you're sick with that.

[Cray Moo]

One actually doesn't offer many, many benefits if you're sick.

[Charlie Kirk]

So ascorbic acid? Nothing.

[Cray Moo]

No. Zinc is actually the biggest thing for if you're sick, which is weird. You don't see that emphasized if you're sick.

[Charlie Kirk]

How about lysine?

[Cray Moo]

Probably not going to do very much.

[Charlie Kirk]

Even though it's a. No, the thing is a viral replicated inhibitor.

[Cray Moo]

No, not going to do very much. It's not going to become bioavailable in the way you want it to. A lot of things. It's funny, a lot of supplements, like multivitamins especially, they don't tend to do very much for anything. You look at the trials on heart disease and it's like bupkis. Nothing, no effect at all. Why?

[Charlie Kirk]

Well, how about if you take these vitamins intravenously?

[Cray Moo]

That is an interesting question. I don't see many people doing that.

[Charlie Kirk]

So I Don't know because the absorption is much different.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, it is very different. I'm curious about that, but I don't have an answer for you.

[Charlie Kirk]

How about nad?

[Cray Moo]

I love taking NAD shots whenever they're available because everybody's just like, oh, we'll give them to you. And I'm like, great. Because I go to a lot of conferences where they have the rejuvenation clinic things. They're like, oh, you want to get on the saline bag and you want to do all this fun stuff and like, oh, go to the oxygen bar and doesn't do anything for me. And I don't think it does very much in general, but not going to say no. Hyperbaric oxygen potential benefits.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, I see great data behind that.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, there do seem.

[Charlie Kirk]

I had a concussion eight years ago and I did 120 sessions of hyperbaric. Helped a lot materially. You could see it rebuilt the back of my brain.

[Cray Moo]

Interesting.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of non hocus pocus data behind hyperbaric.

[Cray Moo]

I think the hocus pocus though is for when people say it'll help with autism. I had a friend growing up and he had Asperger's and his parents.

[Charlie Kirk]

I can't speak to that.

[Cray Moo]

His parents had hoped that this would cure his autism. They kept him on a like carb free diet because they read some paper and they bought a hypobaric like oxygen chambers, like a little pod thing in their basement and they put him in it multiple times a week and just didn't do anything for that. Nothing for other outcomes, like recovery stuff.

[Charlie Kirk]

But doesn't keto help you if you have seizures?

[Cray Moo]

It can. That's one of the interesting things. It can help you with that because.

[Charlie Kirk]

There is data to support that, that a ketogenic diet can help you if you have epilepsy. Right?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. And that's very odd. I don't know why it does that.

[Charlie Kirk]

It must be carbohydrates. It has to be sugar.

[Cray Moo]

I mean, you're cutting them out. So it must be what is causing.

[Charlie Kirk]

The rise in cancer in young people.

[Cray Moo]

Diagnosis we are actually getting much, much better at.

[Charlie Kirk]

So there's not a material rise.

[Cray Moo]

There's not really, no. This is one of the big things I keep emphasizing to people, the cancer death rates, which is the thing you should focus on for young people. They're going down.

[Charlie Kirk]

But I mean, let me, let me. So like, I don't know enough about it to materially challenge you, but wouldn't I mean 25 year olds are getting cancer more.

[Cray Moo]

We diagnose more, we screen more, we do more indirect things that act as screenings. Like we get more X rays and whatnot. We could do more various scans of all sorts and we see this stuff more often.

[Charlie Kirk]

But wouldn't we have caught it within 10 years?

[Cray Moo]

Well, if 10 years pass, it could be too late.

[Charlie Kirk]

No, I know, but the cancer death rates are not going up.

[Cray Moo]

No, they're going down considerably.

[Charlie Kirk]

But isn't that just because our treatments are better?

[Cray Moo]

No, it has a lot to do with screening. In fact most so actually it's a great example. Cervical cancer. Between the 1950s and 1990s our treatments barely got better at all for that but 70% improvement in survival. Why? Because we're doing pap smears more often. I say smear. It's weird. I should call it. It's like putting on a vagal Pap smears. We were just catching it more often. And the big thing nowadays that we vaccinate for it and that has done incredible things. That vaccine is amazing.

[Charlie Kirk]

Which one?

[Cray Moo]

Gardasil.

[Charlie Kirk]

Okay.

[Cray Moo]

We are going to eliminate cervical cancer in our lifetimes. Some countries will see zero cervical cancer cases. Among the is Gardasil.

[Charlie Kirk]

Hepatitis B or no.

[Cray Moo]

Hpv.

[Charlie Kirk]

Human. Okay.

[Cray Moo]

Papillomavirus.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yes.

[Cray Moo]

We're beating it. It causes a 100% reduction in a lot of preclinical.

[Charlie Kirk]

What is your take on the COVID shot?

[Cray Moo]

It was amazing engineering feat. I love operation warp speed as a way to accelerate stuff. I think we should have way, way, way more acceleration of getting treatments out there. In fact, there's a guy I met last year. Unfortunately he's passed away now. He. I met him shortly after he had a glossectomy. They removed his tongue entirely for some terrible cancer he had. Jake Seliger. He did a lot of blog posts while he was going through this and he tried very, very hard to get access to novel treatments that could have let him live a few months longer. Right now in Montana, they're trying to pass the Seliger act act named after him. His wife is getting it done, his widow and I hope it succeeds. It's a right to try act. It would allow people to access more cures more quickly even when they're not like through their trials yet. If they have the. That these things might help treat and who knows, if that had been around nationally, he might be alive today. I don't know. He passed away a few months ago. It's very sad, but there are lots of people like that who can't access treatments because they're not doing it quick enough. The FDA is generally too conservative with approvals. They wait too long and people die. They wait too long, and generics aren't approved. They wait too long, partly because, for example, on generic drugs, you know who wrote the rules on generic drugs is the large pharmaceutical consortiums run by the people who make the prescription drugs. I believe that it's very, very bad. We have this thing, the pdufa, the Prescription Drug User Fee Act Amendment. And it's how we fund most of the FDA funding comes from paying the regulator to do an efficient job, going through the approval process and getting the drug on the market. And this is a good way to align the incentives of drug manufacturers and people who like the regulator who allows you to bring the drug to market. And this is where this is great. It leads to the FDA being efficient. They take about less than 180 days to approve drugs that have shown they work, get them out there, start saving lives. But for the generic drug user fee amendment, gdufa, the designers of it were the large pharmaceutical companies that are most likely to use pdufa. And if a generic comes to market, it erodes your profits. It makes it so you are competing against somebody who produces something for pennies on the dollar compared to what you make. So if you're charging a huge amount for a therapy and somebody becomes long makes a generic, then they screw you. So Jadufah is designed such that you start paying the FDA immediately instead of after you've gotten the drug approved. Pdufa, you pay after you get it approved, they do the review, and then you pay them for as long as there's not a generic, but the generic for, like, the generic part, really bad. The GPHA did a lot of the designing, and the GPHA's members are largely huge pharmaceutical companies that have an interest in making sure there are no generic drugs that breach the market.

[Charlie Kirk]

Were there any downsides to the COVID shot?

[Cray Moo]

Hmm. Myocarditis in young men. We did see myocarditis.

[Charlie Kirk]

That's legit. That's not just the diagnosis.

[Cray Moo]

That's legit. Yeah, we had to have very, very large population cohorts to see that. But it's. We eventually did see it. It was pretty clear, and especially with the Moderna shot and the JJ1. But the Novavax is fine. The Pfizer shot was more fine. But the thing is, the myocarditis risk for young men was pretty low in absolute terms. Like, very, very low in absolute terms. And if you compare that to the risk of getting myocarditis from COVID itself, it was a lot less.

[Charlie Kirk]

So you don't. You don't believe in any of the turbo cancer stuff?

[Cray Moo]

Oh, no, none of that. That's all fake. None of that. In fact, the cancer rate started going back down when we started getting the drugs introduced and everything. So we're good on that front. What I love. Sorry. I want to get back on track to. I forgot to mention Operation warp speed could be used to accelerate the introduction of vaccines for cancers. The MRNA platform could be an amazing way to develop. For example, we have in trials right now, there's going to be a vaccine for skin cancer. So if you've had skin cancer and you've gone to the remission, you take the vaccine and it prevents you from getting it again with almost 100% efficacy. Like, you'll just never get it again, which is amazing.

[Charlie Kirk]

How many boosters did you get?

[Cray Moo]

I think I got one.

[Charlie Kirk]

Why not all nine, all night.

[Cray Moo]

I feel like I just got lazy. I haven't got my flu shot this year either.

[Charlie Kirk]

Does the flu shot work?

[Cray Moo]

It does, yeah. It's interesting, though. During COVID we actually eliminated the common strain of the flu just because people were punkering down in their homes.

[Charlie Kirk]

But isn't that a little weird?

[Cray Moo]

It is weird, yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

Maybe there was a. Something else going on.

[Cray Moo]

Well, no one was getting infected with it, so it's like.

[Charlie Kirk]

But why are people getting infected with.

[Cray Moo]

COVID Because they were still going out and about somewhat.

[Charlie Kirk]

Why didn't they get the flu?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, good question. I don't know. Luck of the draw.

[Charlie Kirk]

You're the man with the answers, though, right?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. Oh, no, I don't think so. I think of myself that way, but that the strain.

[Charlie Kirk]

Do we give kids too many vaccines?

[Cray Moo]

No, I think we should probably give better vaccines and more like, I think we should be using vaccines to prevent cancer. I'm a big believer in one of the projects Barda wants to fund. Government agency that does great, like frontier biological research. They want, I think it's about $23 billion to fund a platform to manufacture vaccines for any virus that shows up in the known viral families the moment it comes out. So if we get another big viral pandemic, they want to be able to mass produce a vaccine that we already know is safe because we've done the trialing on it ahead of time and everything that we can get out in like a week rather than having to wait again. So they want to be able to prevent anything Bad from happening. And I feel like we should do more stuff like that as a public health measure. We should be able to stop everything in its tracks. We should be able to destroy cancer entirely by preventing it. We should be able. Like, Gardasil is amazing. I think it's a really, really good thing for preventing hpv. We should have one for herpes. We should have one for the Epstein barr virus because these viruses lead to a lot of downstream effects that are very, very bad. And the transmission for a lot of those happens right near birth. It's when you're young. So Epstein barr you typically get. Almost everybody has it. And you get it typically from, like, your mother's kisses, which is sad. Your parents shouldn't have to think about, oh, my God, what if I give my kid cancer in 50 years? Because you see a lot of Epstein barr in cancers. We should be able to say, no, we're done. We're cutting off that forever. No more transmission of future generations of herpes viruses. No more transmission of anything like that. We should kill it. I think we should be more aggressive with vaccination in terms of destroying diseases that have plagued us for a long time, because we can now. And we're just. We don't have the balls to do it, but we should.

[Charlie Kirk]

Charlie Kirk here. We know that rates are still high and that they can make refinancing or purchasing feel out of reach. But markets can shift fast, and when they do, I want you to be in the strike zone. So what is the strike zone? That's a sweet spot when rates dip just enough to meet your target goal. But it doesn't last long. Make sure you're ready to strike first and save big. At Sierra Pacific Mortgage, Andrew and Todd and their team will get you set up and keep you informed so you can strike at the right time. These are the guys I trust with 40 years of experience. They are really the experts and they make it easy because they keep everything in house. Get pre qualified today. Visit andrewandtod.com do it now to get a priority spot at the front of the line before the rest of the herd jumps in. And when the market enters the strike zone, you'll strike first and save big. Call 888-888-1172. That's 888-1172 or online at andrewandtod.com that is andrewandtod.com they help me and they'll help you. Andrewandtod.com any downsides to vaccines?

[Cray Moo]

Current ones? No, not really. One of the common Complaints is like the MMR vaccine causes autism that does not hold water at all. That was initially came out in 1998 as a Lancet paper by this guy, Andrew Wakefield. He had a financial interest in getting people to stop using the mmr so they would use one of his vaccines plus another one instead. And very compromised and very much a lot of fake data in there. Turned out there was nothing to it. We now have very, very large population register based sibling studies where one sibling is vaccinated and the other one is not. And we see no difference in autism rates. And a lot of parents will stop vaccinating their kids for autism when one of them is diagnosed and they have subsequent kids, they'll be like, oh my God, I'm never going to do it again because it must have been the vaccine. And then, no, the autism rate is the same in their subsequent kids.

[Charlie Kirk]

What do you have to say to critics with the COVID shot that the guarantee was that it would prevent transmission?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, I don't know where that came from. Well, I do know that a lot of it was lying on their part. Like, Fauci did lie a bunch.

[Charlie Kirk]

Wolensky said it would stop transmission.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, a lot of people lied. I don't know why they lied. Like, I don't know why they thought that was a good idea. I don't believe in lying to the public. I feel like whenever you're a public health communicator and you do that, you should basically just never communicate anything again. The moment you start telling lies is when your credibility is gone and when you should not be in the public sphere at all. The fact that Fauci thought it was a noble lie, we've seen the emails now and everything. We know he thought it was a noble lie to say that it would stop transmission in his tracks. And he might have had reasons to believe this, but we know he later on did not. That's when you should stop being a public health influencer of any sort.

[Charlie Kirk]

Does the COVID shot suppress your immune system?

[Cray Moo]

No, not really. No more than any other vaccine does. You have a lot of post viral, like after you get a vaccine injected, you tend to have like a down day. And this happens for all sorts of vaccines. But anyway, sorry, I meant to mention other vaccines, like the polio vaccine wasn't perfect anyway. It didn't provide like permanent sterilizing immunity. People think of it that way for some reason because we mostly eliminated it. But if we had more polio cases going around, people would quickly learn. Oh, it never did that it just allowed us to manage transmission and symptoms better. And people who caught it young historically were able to like fend off some of the worst symptoms that they got it later. And the vaccine basically mimicked that. So if they got it later, they would have low symptomality, which is what the COVID vaccine did. It reduces symptomality. Like you become less likely to have a severe case, you're more likely to stay off the ventilator and not die. But it doesn't, you're actually. It was interesting. You could see over a few months the sterilizing immunity it did provide initially faded really quickly. I think it was within like 90 days. It was down to being practically nothing. But the protection against severe side effects lasted a long time.

[Charlie Kirk]

What, and then we'll move on to the other non healthcare stuff.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

What do you think is the biggest health problem besides obesity facing our country?

[Cray Moo]

Good question. I think it's heart disease. And I think we're actually about to win that fight. I'm actually very confident we're about to win that fight. So heart disease is the top cause of death and it is imminently defeatable. We know the causes of it, we have the ability to treat part of it right now, but all of it we don't have the ability to treat. Some people can't take statins because of the myopathy I mentioned. And there's no generic PCSK. There are no PCSK9 inhibitors that are generic, they're too expensive. And a lot of plans, unfortunately insurance plans sometimes will say, oh no, even though you have the side effect, we're not going to give you a prescription for P6K9 inhibitors because they're too expensive. We're going to keep you on statins or nothing. And people are like, well, I guess it's nothing then. I don't have the money for it. So they just end up with worse hearts. The other thing is some people have high lpa, lipoprotein A, which does also cause heart disease. And there's been no treatments for that until very recently. And we now have five treatments in the pipeline that are highly effective. One of them is a small molecule, that means it's a oral drug. You pill, you take it once a day. The other one is an aso, which is a shot. You take it, I think once a month. And the other ones, the other three are amazing. They are SIRNA therapies. And what they do is they're a shot that basically what it does in effect is it gives you the Appearance of having the genotype, the genes of somebody who's a lot more fortunate than you. If you have high lpa, because you have LPA is genetically high, you can't really do anything lifestyle wise to affect it. It's just like a death sentence. Eventually you'll have heart attacks down the line, but now we have drugs that can reduce the amount by 98% or so with a once every six month shot. We also have SIRNAs, not generic yet, but in a few years for LDL, they do effectively the same thing. They give you the genotype of somebody who is a lot more fortunate for genetic reasons for six months or so. And that is amazing. We are about to defeat heart disease. We are on the cusp of eliminating like most heart attacks, most stroke, most like clotting and everything. It's just about to be gone. I think that's amazing.

[Charlie Kirk]

That will extend life expectancy dramatically.

[Cray Moo]

It's going to be so good.

[Charlie Kirk]

Okay, I want to get into affirmative action, but there's actually one other thing Blake reminded me is the. You said the fertility crisis is a major problem.

[Cray Moo]

Absolutely.

[Charlie Kirk]

Why are we less fertile than ever before?

[Cray Moo]

A lot of it is social. There's really been no decline in like biological Carlos. Of fertility, like, you know, your sperm rate or your ability to conceive. People are just delaying having kids. They are doing things that lead to fewer marriages. They don't sanctify marriage as much. Like there's been a decline in religiosity. A lot of factors are implicated in this and they're all social, they're cultural. The fact that religion alone, that the decline of that has been significant. Used to be you go to a church, meet a nice girl and get married. And then when you're married, you're quite a bit more likely to have kids. If only because.

[Charlie Kirk]

Thank you so much, I'll have one too.

[Cray Moo]

If only because accidents happen more often because you're not using protection in marriage. Often.

[Charlie Kirk]

But correct me if I'm wrong, are testosterone rates lower today than they were? I mean.

[Cray Moo]

No, they're not.

[Charlie Kirk]

All those studies are wrong.

[Cray Moo]

No. So there generally, there really aren't a lot of studies on this. We have some cohorts where we track testosterone rates over time. And the thing is, people are like, oh, look, there's been a massive change because we change how we measure it and we change our sample size, but.

[Charlie Kirk]

Our sperm motility rates not going down.

[Cray Moo]

Not meaningfully beyond what you'd expect from the increase in obesity.

[Charlie Kirk]

Because the articles or the studies they allegedly show A major catastrophic decrease in sperm motility.

[Cray Moo]

A lot of this is down to methodological things like measuring things differently or in the case of sperm, there is some reason to think that obesity is involved because obesity does lower your.

[Charlie Kirk]

Correct. That's legitimate.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. And just being like reducing people's obesity rate or. The obesity rate is going to be enormous for this.

[Charlie Kirk]

Don't be fat.

[Cray Moo]

Exactly.

[Charlie Kirk]

So what would you say?

[Cray Moo]

We have some trials on this, by the way.

[Charlie Kirk]

On what?

[Cray Moo]

On the, like, GLP1s for fertility stuff in men. It does improve sperm parameters or just.

[Charlie Kirk]

Don'T eat as much food.

[Cray Moo]

Exactly. Same thing. Really?

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah. So. So I guess the. What would then be the solution to the fertility crisis? And you're saying more people are getting IVF because they're just getting married later? Because fertility clinics are experiencing a boom.

[Cray Moo]

They are.

[Charlie Kirk]

That is a fact.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, yeah. Past age 35, there's the unfortunately named term geriatric pregnancy. After that age, it is quite hard to conceive and people are waiting a lot longer because they're getting, for example, more professional certifications. One of the silly things we've done is extend education rather than accelerate it. Some places, for example, in Switzerland and Germany, there are some locations where they have reduce the number of required years of high school. This results in no academic downsides. Like the kids are still just as prepared as ever. You just cram more stuff in less time. But they regain two of their years of adulthood. Instead of graduating at 18, you graduate at 16, you push back everything and you are more likely then to get married, have kids at an acceptable age, to have kids. And that leads just more fertility down the line, which is a lovely little consequence of making your life better, I think, because you spend less time in school.

[Charlie Kirk]

So you would say the reason why more people are doing IVF or fertility treatments is just that they're trying to have kids when they're 33 versus 23.

[Cray Moo]

Most of it'll be that. Yeah. Some of it'll be genuine, like issues. People are treating infertility more often instead of just trying to brute force it through that. IVF treatments are more available now, they are cheaper than they used to be. The prices have come down a lot, so it's going to see more use. And it's more popular too. Like there's a lot of cultural emphasis on the fact that it's available and people are just going to choose that because they can.

[Charlie Kirk]

Is having children equally as important of a societal value as it was 30 years ago to most people?

[Cray Moo]

Unfortunately not. The number of ideal children people report is down a lot. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that they have fewer kids and they experience being around fewer kids. When you see people who have, like, say you're a younger sibling or an older sibling, sorry. And you've had to, you know, do part of the child rearing with the little baby, and you hold the baby a bunch of. You're more likely to have your own kids down the line. You have more family values. Related to this, we have some ways of doing causal inference on this with family size fixed effect models that are really interesting. But basically the gist of it is if you have the exposure to more babies, then you're more likely to want to have more babies. And if you accidentally have twins instead of something else, your ideal number of kids that you report goes up. Or, for example, if people around you start having a lot fewer kids, the number of kids you will have is likely going to decrease. We know this in part because of a lot of unfortunate quasi experiments in China where the fact that they tried to limit their fertility so aggressively resulted in reductions in fertility. They initially, the first phases of doing this, they only restricted the Han majority, the ethnic majority's fertility. But in areas with a lot of Han, the minority ethnic groups, they also had reductions in their fertility. But when they weren't in the. When they were themselves in the majority, they didn't see these reductions, which is to say the effect of not being around as many babies, in this case from the Han majority, was to want fewer babies and to have fewer babies. It's a massive social thing and it's very sad that people have decided they want fewer kids.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, I completely agree. So let's go now to affirmative action.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

What? Yeah. And Harvard in general. How. What is the discrepancy between what a white student had to do to get into Harvard versus a black student?

[Cray Moo]

Quite a lot.

[Charlie Kirk]

A standard deviation, right?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. It's possibly more than that of the extremes in, like selecting in the reason being, well, at Harvard, so if you were a white student with a legacy, legacy gives you a huge boost. That was about equivalent to a black student in general. And if you're a black student with legacy status, you are almost guaranteed to get in. If you have anywhere near acceptable academics, you basically got a free pass. If you had reasonable qualifications to get in for a person in your cohort, which is pretty wild, what would be.

[Charlie Kirk]

The average test score that a white person would have to do versus a black person?

[Cray Moo]

The white students who were getting in were getting nearly perfect scores. They were getting upwards of 1550, usually in these recent cohorts. And the black students were getting considerably less, nearer to the 1400s, which is still impressive nationally, but it is far, far less than the white students. And so many rejected white students had higher scores and higher qualifications among a lot of dimensions like they had. They tended to have higher GPAs, tended to do more extracurriculars. They tend to be evaluated by alumni a little better. Harvard had three interviews, and two of them were alumni, and one of them didn't exist. It was the personality evaluation by the office, you know, the admissions office. And it basically was an arbitrary way for them to say that Asians had bad personalities so they could justify rejecting them. But the alumni said Asians had better personalities on average than white or black applicants, and so they should have been invited more. But. Yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

So then what would you recommend as the way to proceed with Harvard?

[Cray Moo]

I don't believe what we're doing right now is the correct move to start off. Like, we really should not just be taking away all their funding. The simple thing that we need to start with is the NIH and other funding authorities need to start separating the funding that goes to administrations and the funding that goes to research. Because the fact that we're pulling research funding is devastating. They. Harvard has their hands in a lot of very, very important research.

[Charlie Kirk]

Like what make the case Making tons.

[Cray Moo]

Of drugs for one. That's a big one. But, like, a lot of the stuff we know about.

[Charlie Kirk]

Wait, so explain to our audience, what do you mean that colleges are making drugs?

[Cray Moo]

Oh, so they do a lot of the rudimentary discovery. So, for example, to bring back to GLP1s, they were discovered based on some guy's weird interest in Gila monster spit. Like, Gila monsters, the big lizards that you can that, like, will paralyze you. He just wanted to break down what was in there. And he found this wonderful compound that has now been turned into a drug that a lot millions of people are using. And they do that basic research, the basic fundamentals of a lot of things that lead to stuff down the line.

[Charlie Kirk]

Why can't the pharmaceutical companies fund that themselves?

[Cray Moo]

Because it's a high cost. They really don't have enough money for it, the pharma. The returns on pharmaceutical R and D are abysmal. They are very, very low. They're actually below the cost of capital right now. So they're not a good investment. We've had recently had a little bit of a reversion in the long term trend towards declining returns due to the GLP stuff because they've been, they've had a huge boom. We had a bit of a reversion due to the initial glut of funding that came when Covid started. But otherwise it's just been a degring a lot. It's been a decline that's continuous for many, many years. And it's because it's very difficult. It's hard. I'm actually making discoveries is really tough. And if we don't fund the basic research, we're just not going to find a lot of stuff like a lot of our anti cancer drugs. Just because the government was like, oh cool. We're going to fund your lab to do brute force breaking down of every cell sea animal you have available and seeing if any of it helps with cancer. And that has worked. That strategy of just funding crazy ideas does work. We know a lot of things work just because somebody had a weird idea, they got a grant for it, the government paid, they were like whatever and it turned into something down the line. The researcher generally doesn't profit directly from it, but other people who learn from them and learn from their mistakes sometimes will.

[Charlie Kirk]

What percentage of Harvard research would you say is valuable?

[Cray Moo]

Practically everything. In the hard sciences I say just slash all the sociology.

[Charlie Kirk]

How much of the money goes to sociology?

[Cray Moo]

Not a lot, actually, it's a small portion. Most of the money does go to harder stuff a lot, to biology and chemistry and physics.

[Charlie Kirk]

Hasn't the woke stuff infiltrated the hard sciences as well?

[Cray Moo]

It has.

[Charlie Kirk]

So then why should we keep funding it?

[Cray Moo]

We should fund the good stuff in there. I think we should definitely get rid of funding the work stuff.

[Charlie Kirk]

What's the difference?

[Cray Moo]

Well, the difference is real discoveries that lead to like theoretical progress, like the studies that were under, that underlied the Manhattan Project were great to do ahead of time. We funded those labs for many years.

[Charlie Kirk]

I know, but that was a bunch of white guys doing it at Harvard. We trust them. Why?

[Cray Moo]

We don't trust them right now and we shouldn't trust their administration.

[Charlie Kirk]

Well, that's what I'm saying is that they're not hiring based on merit. Their researchers are not what they used to be potentially.

[Cray Moo]

But in the hard sciences they're still pretty good. It's pretty off. Like it's evident when people are pretty bad. Like there are people who do, they do astronomy, they say, and all of their work has been like talking about getting women into astronomy. And that is not worthwhile.

[Charlie Kirk]

Right.

[Cray Moo]

You should be studying astronomy itself. Not studying how to involve women more.

[Charlie Kirk]

So Harvard's sitting on a 50 billion, $55 billion endowment. Not all. It's liquid, but they could still sell assets.

[Cray Moo]

Oh yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

What is the case then? That we have to keep on sending.

[Cray Moo]

Money because that actually isn't that much money in the long run. They will run it out if they keep doing a lot of research.

[Charlie Kirk]

So what? Why 55 billion? Why is it our problem?

[Cray Moo]

The ROI on that research is still very well.

[Charlie Kirk]

The ROI for pharmaceutical companies is. Yeah, for sure.

[Cray Moo]

No, no. Most of the ROI from new drugs goes to people. It's because those drugs do allow them to extend their lives or live better lives or live more productive lives.

[Charlie Kirk]

But we don't get the profits of that. Right. So we're, We're. We're socializing.

[Cray Moo]

We're socializing returns is what it is for a lot of these things.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yes. So help me understand that. So. So biotech investors do well.

[Cray Moo]

They. Oh, they do pretty poorly on average. Typically. They.

[Charlie Kirk]

They still put money in it.

[Cray Moo]

They do. They do.

[Charlie Kirk]

They wouldn't keep putting money in. Yeah, I get pitched on biotech all the time.

[Cray Moo]

Most don't invest in most of it. It's mostly correct.

[Charlie Kirk]

I know. But they wouldn't keep on investing it if there was no return.

[Cray Moo]

I think a lot of them cope into it. They think something is going to work. They aim for moonshots and big things. But the typical returns are very, very bad. They are below the cost of capital. I made a graph of this recently on one of my recent blog posts, actually my most recent one, about how 23andMe, the acquisition by Regeneron is a great idea because it will help them to make their R and D a lot more efficient if they use it well. But I don't know if they're going to. I'm hoping that they do. Time will tell. But in general the rate of return is below the cost of capital, which means that it is not profitable. They're losing money on average. It's really rough situation right now and we can do a lot to change that.

[Charlie Kirk]

We're getting out of a biotech winter, but shouldn't have. But hold on. We should never have entered a biotech winter because we've been funding the hard seller sciences so much. Right.

[Cray Moo]

No, most of the biotech winner I think comes from over regulation. We for example, the cost of gene therapies. I have recently been helping a lot of companies with this. They want to reform GMP good manufacturing practices because those regulations add a lot of cost more Than half the cost is just due to compliance with that, apparently. And great. We can reform to a model like Australia's, which apparently is a lot lighter. And this seems to be easy to implement, I guess, but it's still high quality. It ensures that drugs are good without imposing massive costs on people who are developing gene therapies and when they want to run a trial. We can also make it easier to recruit people. For some reason, we've decided to restrict recruitment. I think a lot of the ideas in healthcare that add a lot of cost come from weird sort of quasi socialist ideas in the past. Like there was a health economist in the past who said a hospital bed built is a hospital bed filled. And the idea there was, if you make some new medical resource, people just use it. So we shouldn't make as much. So he proposed certificate of need laws which require you, if you want to be a doctor who goes into a new area and you want to open a practice, you have to ask your competition, hey, is there unmet demand here that you're like, you need to practice for? And of course they're going to say no. So too many areas have too few medical practices. And these sorts of laws are. They impact everything. They impact trials. Not the certificate of need to law directly, but laws like them, they impact trials, they make it really, really hard to do stuff. And repealing them will, I think, lead to a massive improvement in that area and make it less critical for us to fund all this stuff.

[Charlie Kirk]

So Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna, Johnson, I know J and J, those are all American companies, I think.

[Cray Moo]

AstraZeneca, Swedish, I think.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, okay, But Pfizer is definitely American.

[Cray Moo]

Yep.

[Charlie Kirk]

So is JJ.

[Cray Moo]

Yep.

[Charlie Kirk]

Those two together, probably what, $500 billion market cap, huge. Why can't they fund their own research?

[Cray Moo]

Because it is just too expensive to look at everything.

[Charlie Kirk]

Take out a loan. Seriously. I mean, so you're $500 billion of market cap, collateralize your stock, take out a $5 billion line of credit.

[Cray Moo]

Problem is, the likelihood of actually getting those returns is just too low.

[Charlie Kirk]

That's the market though, right?

[Cray Moo]

A lot of what we do nowadays in order to overcome this cost issue is we in license things from China. So, for example, Novo Nordisk, Danish company.

[Charlie Kirk]

My question, if we invent a glp, why is it that the Danish company is worth a trillion dollars?

[Cray Moo]

They're the ones who got the patent and they are. I think we should do that. A lot of it was the government, American government. A lot of it was Harvard, actually.

[Charlie Kirk]

I know but well, hold on.

[Cray Moo]

So you're arguing American government.

[Charlie Kirk]

So we just made a Danish country a trillion dollars. That doesn't.

[Cray Moo]

We did.

[Charlie Kirk]

Doesn't help your case.

[Cray Moo]

No, it doesn't. We should get that back. I think we should march in and take the patent with Bay Dull. Which is another topic entirely. I think we should actually.

[Charlie Kirk]

I just want to make. I'm sorry, interrupt. So we funded the rise of a trillion dollar foreign company.

[Cray Moo]

We did.

[Charlie Kirk]

So we should stop doing that.

[Cray Moo]

No, I think we should actually do it more because the social returns are still larger. If you can make people not fat, the returns to that are huge for us.

[Charlie Kirk]

I mean. But you see what I'm saying. Like we're not here to fund foreign companies. Right.

[Cray Moo]

The thing is Americans want it. So it's funding the creation of a product that Americans want. Going to want on this particular thing. I think we should be beating up Novo Nordisk right now. They've done a lot of good. They've developed, they've put in a lot of work, they invested a lot of their own capital developing this thing. And they've had a lot of failures too. I was going to mention CAG SIMA is one of their proposed improvements on Semaglutide Ozempic and it is. It failed. They in license it for billions of dollars from a Chinese company. They did the trials and they turned out to not be any better than Semaglutide. So they lost a lot of money on that and their stock has been tanking ever since. It tanked like 6% in a day when the results came out. And like that is a good. If a small company had done that, they would have gone bankrupt. And going bankrupt is the norm for these small medical researchers. Like their Alzheimer's last year, Cassava I think was the name of it or something like that. They went bankrupt overnight because their trial results came back bupkis. Billions lost, evaporated.

[Charlie Kirk]

It's part of it. Welcome to the market.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, it's very bad.

[Charlie Kirk]

I don't know if it's bad. It's healthy though, right?

[Cray Moo]

The thing is though, it leads to this conformity. There's a conformist strain in. Actually this is a great. I'm glad you brought that up. There's a conformist strain in pharmaceutical research. It's worse than anywhere else, any other area of research because it is so strict. You are likely to fail to an extreme, extreme degree and there's like likely to not be any benefits to your company. It'll be to somebody else's company, maybe down the line. That does happen all the time. Time some company fails and like someone else harvests it later. Roivant, that's Vivek Ramaswamy's company. Their whole model is look at the secondary outcomes that were affected in trials for failed drugs and then go, ah, we're going to get it approved for that indication, helping with that secondary outcome. And that has worked really well for him. He's made a lot of money from it. But the conformist attitude I'm talking about is that these companies are so hesitant to do anything that is not like heavily exposed. Expected that they just don't invest in obvious things. So obesity is a great example. Nova Nordisk CEO and I quoted this to Blake the other day, I can find the quote. It's really bad. He does say we're not going to search for drugs that help with obesity. He says it's a social and cultural problem and so to treat it we need a radical restructuring of society. Novo Nord he said, radical restructuring of society. That is an exact quote. It's in there. Not a pharmacotherapeutic cure. And it's like, wait, that's your whole thing now you're just, you're selling weight loss stuff. But years ago that was the attitude. It was until some researcher pushed them really, really hard and continuously. They weren't gonna do it.

[Charlie Kirk]

You know, one of the biggest lies being sold to American people right now is that you're in control of your money, especially when it comes to crypto. But the truth is most of these so called crypto platforms are just banks in disguise, fully capable of freezing your assets the moment some bureaucrat makes a phone call. That is not what Bitcoin was built for. That's why I use Bitcoin.com I just did a major transaction on it. They offer a self custodial wallet, which means you hold the keys, you control your assets. No one can touch your crypto. Not the IRS or not a rogue bank, not some three letter agency that thinks it knows better than you do. This is how it was intended by the original creators of Bitcoin. Peer to peer money. Free from centralized control, free from surveillance and free from arbitrary seizure. So if you're serious about financial sovereignty, go to bitcoin.com, set up your wallet, take back control. Because if you don't hold the keys, you don't own your money. Bitcoin.com freedom starts here. So to circle back to the universities, what is an efficient way to make the colleges stop discriminating, beat them down.

[Cray Moo]

By this is a very easy thing. So this policy proposal has made it to Trump's desk and he needs. Just sign it. This will fix it right away.

[Charlie Kirk]

Tell me, I was with him yesterday.

[Cray Moo]

IPEDS reform. We have an.

[Charlie Kirk]

I'm sorry, what?

[Cray Moo]

Ipeds Integrated Post Secondary Educational Data System. We have a data collection thing and I can show you what he needs to sign if you want to push that on him. It just needs to get done. We have a data collection mechanism that already exists and does allow you to gather the requisite data to find and everybody red handed. You can catch every university in flagrante delicto if you force them to report all the necessary outcomes to indicate if they're discriminating. And we can already do this through an existing system. It would take no extra effort on our part and we just put a little cost on the universities that's minimal. All they have to do is report the data. Force them to report the data. We have that authority. We can tell them no public funds until you start reporting this, that and the other data and this. The exact data has already been detailed by.

[Charlie Kirk]

So it's an information collecting. So for example, we have some idea. So Harvard, after the students prefer admission case in 2019, they had about 31% of their student population be black.

[Cray Moo]

Yep.

[Charlie Kirk]

A white. White. Yeah, white. And it basically stayed the same. MIT, their black population collapsed to like 4%. Am I correct in this?

[Cray Moo]

And it should go down more because we, we know that it's.

[Charlie Kirk]

But they're directionally going so that that little sample size was evident that someone was following the Supreme Court decision and someone was not. Am I correct?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. And lots of different universities, we have their admissions data now and a lot of them have followed it. They've followed the advice, they've done what they're supposed to do, but so many aren't. And that's bad. And none of them is doing as well as they should. They are all still discriminating to some extent and we have to stop that.

[Charlie Kirk]

And iPads will help.

[Cray Moo]

IPads will help. It's very, very easy. We have everything that we need to collect written up. It's already hit Trump's desk. He just needs to sign it. Someone needs to tell him, hey, reminder, sign this order right away and we can catch them all. People will go out of their. So this is actually a funny thing. Republicans don't seem to know this, but data collection is the way to win a lot of political battles. If liberals have known this for many years, Democrats, they mandate data Collection in a lot of areas, from health care on down to education, because they can use it to catch people and start a legal case. They mandated the collection of certain test score data back in the day for schools because they wanted to be able to sue for disparate impact. They want to be able to sue for all sorts of things. They mandate you, me and everybody else reporting weird data that they can use in like citizen action, A citizen, a law firm, somebody can go and file that case, make that money. They can make a social change through torts, through the legal system. A lot of the regulation we see these days is because of some, frankly, often dumb legal decisions that were funded basically by the government because they produce the underlying data. They mandated the collection.

[Charlie Kirk]

What data should we start collecting, especially on crime?

[Cray Moo]

On crime, we should have more up to date data. The fact that we don't is very weird. It makes it very difficult to actually get a lot done in crime. Like you can't tell when something is. Something works. And if you want to tell when something works, you need to be able to like have the updated data or else you got to wait years to figure it out. If you want to have adaptive policy where we can rapidly change our direction on things.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, we only get the murder numbers for the past year, about a year later.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. And that's not efficient at all. Some people have tried to create live indices that give you like a week delay, but it's just not very effective. And yet they have to update all the time. We do this. We actually. I think the biggest area where slow data collection kills is the CDC's Data Death Index, which is supposed to be a live updated index of dead people when people die, but they don't update it very quickly. So you might wait. If you're running a trial and you want to like track. Do my patients in the trial live or have they dropped? Why have they dropped out of my study? You want to know? Is it because they died? And you might have to wait a year and during that time you could have had. You could have gone to the FDA and been like, hey, actually our drug works so well that we can stop the trial early and start giving it to people, but you can't because the death index is so slow.

[Charlie Kirk]

What is the. We've got to go rapid fire because we have another. What is the number one proven way to stop crime?

[Cray Moo]

Oh, man. Arrest people, put them in jail.

[Charlie Kirk]

I thought we have too many prisoners.

[Cray Moo]

We don't have enough prisoners.

[Charlie Kirk]

So now he's speaking my language.

[Cray Moo]

Too many Prisoners is always a relative.

[Charlie Kirk]

To what stupid left wing talking point.

[Cray Moo]

It's a very bad.

[Charlie Kirk]

So they'll say this, and they say this in Oxford, that we're, we have like, we have a certain amount of the world's prisoners. You've heard this whole.

[Cray Moo]

Yes, they say it's way too much. They draw these graphs where like America's off the charts and it's like. Yeah, because we're a lot more violent than everywhere else.

[Charlie Kirk]

We are very, very violent.

[Cray Moo]

We have more guns and we shoot more guns.

[Charlie Kirk]

So do we have an under imprisonment problem?

[Cray Moo]

We do very severely. And it's funny. So the big reason for the reduction in the crime wave that happened near the beginning of the the 20th century is because we started incarcerating more. We started putting crazies in asylums, we started putting wackadoo violent people in jail. Very simple. And we had a reduction that led in part to the crime wave in the 1980s. And then we had an increase that led to the reduction afterwards. If you incarcerate a lot of people, you will have a reduction in crime because you'll put away these big offenders. And even if you just. So in the Netherlands they've done this really great thing. If you have like a certain number of offenses, they'll just lock you away for a very long time. It's right.

[Charlie Kirk]

It's like gotta love the Dutch.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, it's like three strikes but better. They've. They managed to reduce a lot of their like violent crime by about 25% I think by just arresting super offenders. And that's trivial. That adds almost nothing to the jail population. But it puts back, it gives you back communities, it gives you back inner cities, it gives you back huge swaths of the American like everywhere that is violent. You can even do gang crackdowns like they did in New York and you can immediately see like 20% reductions in all violent crimes in the city.

[Charlie Kirk]

So we need more prisoners, more people arrested.

[Cray Moo]

Absolutely. We are under imprisoned right now and we are under policed. That's even bigger. So America has more of an under policing problem because we're afraid to pay for a lot more officers.

[Charlie Kirk]

I totally agree.

[Cray Moo]

It's the weird thing is Europe, they police a lot more relative to what like their crime levels than we do, which is weird. Why did they have so many more police which allows them to incarcerate less? Because having police driving around, that's a deterrent. If you have a police doing a patrol in a gang riddled neighborhood, they are less likely.

[Charlie Kirk]

So obvious. I Mean, these people are so dumb. When I talk on campus, they're like, oh, police cause crime. I say, okay, let me ask you a question. Let's pretend that you're a gang banger and you're about to shoot up another rival gang.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

And you turn the corner and there are two cop cars. Are you more or less likely to do the gang shooting?

[Cray Moo]

That's right.

[Charlie Kirk]

This is not hard. And they say, oh, they'll come back later.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

Okay, then less likely.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, exactly.

[Charlie Kirk]

This is not hard stuff.

[Cray Moo]

And most violence is fruit of the moment stuff. It's not planned at all.

[Charlie Kirk]

It's exact. Well, the gang stuff. Yes and no.

[Cray Moo]

Even still a lot of the gang stuff.

[Charlie Kirk]

So tell me, what do you mean by that?

[Cray Moo]

So very little violence is premeditated. People don't generally go out of their way to plan out a murder. They tend to do it in the heat of the moment. It happens from a fight, an insult. Somebody getting drunk and doing something. Sure. Somebody on drugs.

[Charlie Kirk]

But isn't the gang stuff, they're like, tonight we're gonna go shoot something up. So there is some premeditation.

[Cray Moo]

There is some premeditation. But gang crime is not actually anywhere near the majority of our crime problem. It's mostly like random one offs and those you prevent them by like locking up the crazies away for their earlier offenses.

[Charlie Kirk]

Carrying weapons.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

To defend yourself.

[Cray Moo]

Well, actually the great thing is you could just police carrying weapons a lot better because a lot of them carry weapons when they shouldn't be able to. They're not allowed to because they're a felon. They have prior offenses. If you lock them up for those prior offenses, you will stop them from doing the more, the more hideous crimes like actually killing someone.

[Charlie Kirk]

So we're very lucky on this program. We spend a lot of time with President Donald Trump. What executive orders do you think he should do? IPads is one to start nailing them off.

[Cray Moo]

I'll pull up my list.

[Charlie Kirk]

You have a list? Good.

[Cray Moo]

I do, yeah. Let me just pull this up real quick.

[Charlie Kirk]

So another thing, I knew you'd be an Android guy.

[Cray Moo]

There you go. So he needs to do the iPads executive order. That's a great one. That will cripple a lot of the bad things that like the discrimination right away. That's simple. Another one is he needs to address the academic publishing cartels.

[Charlie Kirk]

You mean like Springer Nature and stuff?

[Cray Moo]

Oh, yes. He needs to crush them. And he can crush them. He has the right to.

[Charlie Kirk]

So we did a whole segment on Springer. What do you Mean by crush? Tell me.

[Cray Moo]

Ah, so they have extreme profits for no good reason. They should not be profiting like they are. We have an executive order typed up that needs to hit his desk immediately. Needs to sign it. Basically.

[Charlie Kirk]

You need to tell me who wrote that.

[Cray Moo]

I'll show you afterwards, actually.

[Charlie Kirk]

Okay, sorry.

[Cray Moo]

There are, there are several here that I will show you.

[Charlie Kirk]

So crush the cartel like Springer Nature.

[Cray Moo]

Yes. You can actually mandate that a lot of research start becoming publicly available. They shouldn't be able to charge.

[Charlie Kirk]

Don't just get close to the MIC yet.

[Cray Moo]

They shouldn't be able to charge fees to access a lot of the research. Because if it's publicly funded, it is actually publicly owned in a meaningful way. Like the government has legally the ability to say, hey, that paper cannot be behind a paywall. I want it now. And they can reclaim it and they can do this. For most research that's published, they should.

[Charlie Kirk]

Do this immediately and then democratize it.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah. And then they should say. Exactly. And they should say you cannot spend public funds like your research funds on article publication fees. If you want to publish an article, you should not be, you shouldn't use your research funding on this frivolous thing that doesn't need to exist. The add on from these journals is almost nothing. They don't do much editing and the peer review they, they get is free. It's voluntary stuff from other researchers, so it wastes their time too. It makes our research dollars much less efficient.

[Charlie Kirk]

So what, what, what would you recommend the president does? What with the academic. Because I have had friends that I really trust say this is a huge issue.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, I will show you the exact details on this afterwards. But we have a lot of things that written in here. Basically force all code and data into public repositories, prohibit using funds on academic publishing and reclaim all of the research that has been hit with public funds that should have been done a while ago. There's some stuff at the NIH that should be going on at this. They are going to remove for example, their one year embargo on their research. There needs to be effort done on making data transparent. So papers published with funds from the government, they need to immediately be made to require all their code and the providing of data. They need to open up a lot of data that is out there that is arbitrary. So this is actually great. A lot of research is arbitrarily stopped by bureaucrats. There are reasons they don't have to provide them. They don't have to say why they're denying you a Given researcher access to some data set maintained by the government.

[Charlie Kirk]

Could be they don't like you because you're white.

[Cray Moo]

That's exactly it. And that actually has happened to a few people.

[Charlie Kirk]

Of course it has.

[Cray Moo]

There was going to be a lawsuit two years ago about this and then they were like, ah, whatever, we'll just not do it. We'll wait for stuff to happen. Some other researchers wanted to investigate the relationship between BMI and education and they wanted some genetically informative models. So they wanted that.

[Charlie Kirk]

You mean body mass index?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, they wanted to research this and the NIH said no. And they were like, what's the reason? They're like, we don't have to tell you. So whatever, you're not allowed to do it. They can. These bureaucrats can just say no for whatever reason.

[Charlie Kirk]

Are there, are there any correlations between somebody's race and their bmi?

[Cray Moo]

Oh yeah, considerable. It's interesting. Black men didn't have about the same BMIs as white men. But black women tend to be much, much more obese than like, is it.

[Charlie Kirk]

Just because of dietary or is there a genetic reason?

[Cray Moo]

You think it's ultimately dietary, but we don't know why. So the thing is, if something's dietary, it could be heritable too. Meaning like the disposition towards liking sweet foods. There's a genetic component to that. So people who like more sweet foods might be disposed towards wanting to eat more of them.

[Charlie Kirk]

Is there anything to the IQ differences between race considerable?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, the evidence is really dispositive these days and people get really worked up about it. It makes a lot of people very, very offended. But every time you test it, you get the same result.

[Charlie Kirk]

What is the result?

[Cray Moo]

The result is about a 1 standard deviation gap in IQ between blacks and whites in the US about 0.5 standard deviations between Asians and whites. Asians do a little bit better and about 0.66 between Hispanics and whites who are Hispanics do a little bit worse. And that's just how it's been for the. I mean, as long as we've measured it. In fact, even using proxies from literacy tests back in like nearly the 1870s, like they were given as part of the census, you can see the same sorts of gaps. There are similar magnitudes. It's been around forever. It's how it is. If you want to address it, we have to stop clamoring about it and getting worked up about it.

[Charlie Kirk]

Because how do you raise iq?

[Cray Moo]

We don't know yet. Genetic engineering is the most likely means. Embryo Selection, choosing to have the smarter kid among a set of embryos. If you're doing ivf, a lot of things like that will actually make material differences. They're the only things we really know.

[Charlie Kirk]

Remind our audience what a standard deviation is.

[Cray Moo]

A standard deviation is going from the median to about like the 67th percentile or so. So it's moving up quite a bit.

[Charlie Kirk]

Does the, do the IQ differences between races, does that happen across the planet or is that just to America?

[Cray Moo]

It happens across the planet and there is differences in selectivity. So like for example, the UK gets relatively elite Africans in like as immigrants and they get relative.

[Charlie Kirk]

A lot of Nigerians.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, they get. Oh yes, a lot. Because it's the biggest source country in Africa. So it's the most popular populous and it's part of the Commonwealth, so they will get a lot of those. America gets the most brilliant Indians. We actually have their test scores. We have their test scores on the joint entrance exams to the IITs, the Indian institutes of Tech. And the higher their score on those exams, the higher their rank in the whole country, the more likely they are to immigrate and in particular the more likely they are to immigrate to America. So we get the smartest Indians, but their national IQ is just very like low. We don't see those people though.

[Charlie Kirk]

What do you think caused the genetic differences in iq?

[Cray Moo]

A lot of it's probably drift. A lot of it has to do with selection over time due to socioeconomic stuff. So for example, in the not so recent, not so distant past, people who were a lot better off had a lot more surviving kids. They didn't have any difference in fertility or anything. But infant mortality used to be extremely socioeconomically stratified. Where if you were, for example, in Poland, the Jews there, they tended to live quite well. That's where my family is from, that's where our last name is from. It's in Poland. They tended to live quite well and their infant mortality rates were low. And the higher up within that community, the lower the rates were. So you have more surviving kids and the upper classes over many generations would replace the lower classes. This is Gregory Clark's thesis for why people became why we had Industrial Revolution. We reached a point where we had hit some threshold and the good traits for being economically successful had proliferated enough throughout the population because the poor people in every era didn't survive very much and the richer people did.

[Charlie Kirk]

Why do you think people get so worked up on IQ differences?

[Cray Moo]

They overvalue it, they value, oh My God, that person's more intelligent than me. That can't be. They refuse to believe in intelligence differences unless somebody's like a clear genius, like John von Neumann. They hate the idea of being lesser or anything like that, or being perceived in certain ways. They just get. They attach so much emotional valence to it when it should just be a simple thing. We can do a lot of policies that reduce the importance of IQ differences. Like in Sweden, when they scheduled people to get vaccinations during COVID that led to a reduction in the IQ stratification of vaccination rates and that led to a reduction in the IQ stratification of mortality rates. So those lower IQ people were dying in a lot of counties, but in Uppsala, where they pre schedule everyone, the lower IQ people were more likely to go out and get the vaccination and they were more likely to stay off the ventilators and survive. Fewer serious side effects in that county. And there are a lot of policy options like this that allow us to make those differences less significant. The longer we treat them as taboo, the more likely we are to just continue contributing to the plight of people who have low IQs for no fault of their own.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah. And so, I mean, again, I don't even have much more to add to that. I just, I mean, Douglas Murray wrote about this. Yeah, extensively. Is there any irrefutable, is there any contrarian data we might be missing here in regards to IQ differences? Because it gets people so worked up they say it's not true, it's a hoax, it's a scam.

[Cray Moo]

I think we're actually missing out on a lot of the policy experiments we could be using here. So you can very simply go out to like a hospital and gate the WI fi with a short little optional test or whatever, and you can learn about a population of like Medicaid users or Medicare people, anything. Like you can learn about cognitive decline in simple ways if you just like normalize testing. But this stuff is so taboo that it's hard to implement these simple data collection programs or anything that could result from those programs. It's like we've cut off a tech tree because we're afraid.

[Charlie Kirk]

I meant Charles Murray, not Douglas Murray.

[Cray Moo]

Oh, yeah, sorry, I was confused. I was like, what did Douglas Murray.

[Charlie Kirk]

Big difference.

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, notable.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yes. So let's now go to closing. I think that will sufficiently piss people off.

[Cray Moo]

I think. Yeah, you saved the worst for last.

[Charlie Kirk]

You challenge yourself to write a blog post in a single hour. Tell our audience about that and just tell more about Kind of what you do and how you do. I mean, obviously you have a remarkable grasp of these topics and it's impressive. So just tell us more about yourself.

[Cray Moo]

Thank you.

[Charlie Kirk]

To the extent you can.

[Cray Moo]

So I don't want to give away too much.

[Charlie Kirk]

I know you have to be careful. I'm completely on your team there. Because the bad guys are bad.

[Cray Moo]

They are very bad. Golly. Just yesterday I got mailed something that was very rough. I'll tell you about that later. So the thing is, I don't like to waste a lot of time when I have a job and I have to work and do a lot of other stuff. There's a million projects I'm involved in. I advise a lot of companies on various things. Things. And I want. I have to manage my time pretty carefully. If I waste too much, then that blows away my day and it blows my productivity. Makes me feel pretty bad. I feel down if I waste too much time. So I try and constrain myself to about an hour or if I know it's going to be a longer post, I'll do two hours for a lot of my posts. And I have a little timer app that I made, just a simple Python script. I write it all up in WordPad and it automatically closes it and deletes everything if I don't do it in the allotted amount of time. And I think that's a pretty, pretty good way to manage my time. It forces me to stay on topic, stay, think about it ahead of time, manage all the thoughts in my head, really line up. How I'm gonna do the post long before I've actually done it. And I don't make any notes because I think that's cheating. But I will, like. Sometimes I'll make graphics a few days ahead of time, like showing off something from a paper, and I'll include that in the post and I'll be able to go and reference it and bring it in. But I don't ever. I don't usually make things for a post during it because I'll be on a time crunch and I'll have made it ahead of time and thought about it and all that.

[Charlie Kirk]

And you're mostly a substacker, is that fair to say?

[Cray Moo]

I mostly do substack for my writing. Yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

What would you say? This is my last question and we do have to dash. I think we've almost two hours. Almost. What is the. What is. What topic do you think is most intellectually not explored on the right.

[Cray Moo]

Ooh, wow. That's a really, really Good one. So I'm going to give a really. It's going to sound odd, but I think deregulation is under explored. I think that the right talks about it a bunch and they mention it, but they don't know the specifics and they don't think about it. They don't think about the function of bureaucrats or how they work or how to reform our systems or anything. And this is actually a thing where we really see a lot of lag among Republicans and libertarians relative to Democrats because Democrats understand the system and how it works and, and they understand like what a direct final rule is or they understand the process to go through to change some regulation or pull a guidance document or anything like that. And Republicans just have no idea. And this leads to a major, major human capital problem.

[Charlie Kirk]

Do you think it's a bigger problem that we just need to learn how government works?

[Cray Moo]

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

[Charlie Kirk]

You're very bright. How to what extent is AI going to change our lives the next 10 years?

[Cray Moo]

Probably a lot. Very, very considerably. It is going to make massive, massive differences. Is my probability of doom is very low the that P doom, as they call it.

[Charlie Kirk]

Yeah, I'm with you.

[Cray Moo]

They. I don't think it's going to kill us all. I think there's actually a medium for them for AI to do that. But I do think there are a lot of ways that it can implement like it can aid discovery of like new glass, like quantum computing.

[Charlie Kirk]

Especially if they marry the two together.

[Cray Moo]

New ways to do all sorts of things. We can do so so much if we have.

[Charlie Kirk]

How severe will the job displacement be?

[Cray Moo]

Probably very large. Not in the next 10 years, but after that. Yes. I think in 20 or so years we're probably going to see 10 to 20% disemployment. Like people getting kicked off the job market and not being so useful.

[Charlie Kirk]

So you say about 20 years from now. Wow. Some people are more bullish. They think it's going to happen in the next five to 10 years, but I mean, who knows? It's all guessing, right?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah, it is. We'll see.

[Charlie Kirk]

Do you think it will lead towards an inevitable apex of totalitarianism?

[Cray Moo]

No, I'm hopeful that it doesn't. That's my worry, though, is that if China achieves super intelligence before we do.

[Charlie Kirk]

What'S gc, gci, CGI or whatever.

[Cray Moo]

AGI or asi? AGI, Artificial General Intelligence. Asi, Artificial super intelligence. If they reach that first. And a friend of mine, Jeremy. No, he has written about this quite a bit. His big fear is not that AI will go out of control like a skynet and kill us. It is that China will get it and they will use it to beat us thoroughly. And if the Marxists are in charge, then we are doomed.

[Charlie Kirk]

Do you think it will eventually eliminate private property?

[Cray Moo]

No, I don't believe in any of that. That's very. I think that's like a communist sort of pipe dream, that it'll make all of that superfluous and we'll live in Star Trek utopia and. No, I think private property is actually essential to social organization.

[Charlie Kirk]

I agree, but do you think it will? I mean, Andreessen flirts with this, that it will be the most effective war on scarcity we've seen in the modern world.

[Cray Moo]

Oh, I think it will. It will definitely be a war on scarcity. It'll make it so we live in an era of abundance that is unprecedented. But I just don't believe that it'll fundamentally alter a lot of our social institutions and it might even bring us back to something that's a little more palatable.

[Charlie Kirk]

That's a very optimistic take.

[Cray Moo]

I'm optimistic and I hope you're right.

[Charlie Kirk]

Is there anything we didn't talk about? How could people support you? Talk about your substack. This was phenomenal.

[Cray Moo]

Go subscribe. If you like what I like or if you like what I write, then go subscribe. Follow me on Substack. I don't have a Patreon or anything.

[Charlie Kirk]

Do you have an email that you can give or. Because you're going to get a lot of tremendous spicy feedback on some of the COVID stuff.

[Cray Moo]

If you subscribe to me on Substack, you can message me there. My DMs are open to paid subscribers.

[Charlie Kirk]

Great. Very good. And I'm sure you'll read any thoughtful critiques, right?

[Cray Moo]

Yeah.

[Charlie Kirk]

Well, thank you so much, Cremu, for your time. This has been phenomenal. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us as always, freedomarliekirk.com thanks so much for listening and God bless for.

[Cray Moo]

More on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk. Com.