Transcript
Michael Knowles (0:00)
This episode is brought to you by Good Ranchers, which I ate last night. And I have a lot to tell you about it. A lot of great stories. However, for right now, just know that you can support the American farmers and ranchers who fed this country for 250amazing years. Go to goodranchers.com, use code knowles, get free meat for life and 25 bucks off your first order. Entrepreneurial scientists just taught human brain cells derived from newborn foreskin to play the video game Doom. Do I. I'm just. I'm gonna repeat that sentence. Can we. Entrepreneurial scientists just taught human brain cells that were derived from newborn foreskin to play the video game Doom. That is not a mad lib. That is an actual news story. And while our minds are focused on horrors almost beyond comprehension, Democrat senate candidate James Tallarico wants you to know how much he loves trans children. Like, he really, really loves trans children. Weird. Also, new details reveal that Jeffrey Epstein's prison guards lied about the night he died. Stop the presses. Go figure. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles. Panicans destroyed once again. Plan trusters yet again vindicated. It's almost exhausting at this point. As ships move through the Strait of Hormuz and as oil, which had hit $115per barrel just a couple days ago, is now back safely below 100, I think it's below 90 right now. We'll get to how the whole war is shaking out. We're getting some conflicting signals out of the White House. The president saying that the war is almost over. The Secretary of War saying we're just getting started. Little unclear. We'll get to what it means. First, though, I want to tell you about my magnificent dinner last night from Good Ranchers. Go to goodranchers.com, use code KNOWLES K A W L E S. Before I even get home last night, sweet little Elisa tells me, she goes, Mac, these new good rancher steaks. They're really. Oh, my goodness. There's something else. I said, oh, what do you mean, good good new ranch. They're always. Or, sorry, new good rancher steaks. Cause they're coming out with new stuff. I told you. They came out with these nice thick filet mignon the other but said, I've been eating their New York strip for years and years, and it's excellent. But what do you mean, new? We got the bone in last night. We got the bone in New York strip. That were nice thickies. Okay. I don't want to be. I don't Want to be too graphic or evocative, but they were thick, juicy, delicious. Oh, man. You know, I do the bone out New York strip a lot. This was so much better even than that. It just. They're just the best, man. You support American ranches. You don't get all the weird stuff injected into your meat. You don't deal with foreign stuff and fake branding. It's just. It's just the best. The deal is unbelievable. I don't know how they stay in business right now. When you subscribe to any good Ranchers, box@goodranchers.com, use code KNOWLES, K W L E S at checkout code knowles. You will get free meat for life and 25 bucks off your first order. Goodranchers.com, american meat delivered. Do we have the story? You know what? There's a little video of it. I don't even need to read the news story. You can just see how human neurons in a petri dish plugged into a computer are now playing the famous early video game Doom. There it is. And I remember Doom. I remember playing this when I was a kid. Old joystick on my computer. Pretty cool, pretty fun game. Oh, and that's what's playing it. It's a tiny little water filled petri dish full of human brain cells. Now, the first question that most people would ask when they read a news story about how human brain cells have now been plugged into a computer to learn how to play doom is, whose brain cells are they? Hey, scientists, where'd you get the brain cells? And the answer is, they're no one's brain cells. They are cells. They're neurons that came from stem cells. Stem cells which can develop into other kinds of cells. Stem cells that were taken from the foreskin of newborn babies. In a way, you'd say, well, that's a relief. I know it sounds pretty gross, but it could be much, much worse if, for instance, the stem cells had been taken from aborted babies, as a lot of our pharmaceuticals come from. No, no, in this case, it was just the discarded foreskin of circumcised babies from which we got the stem cells that got the brain cells, the brain cells which are no. 1's brain cells to learn how to play a beloved video game. This is the plot of Frankenstein. This is the actual plot. I don't know if you've ever read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It's a great gothic romantic novel. The plot is that a scientist who wants to transgress the limits of morality transgress the limits placed on us by our nature, by God, goes out, digs up a bunch of dead bodies, goes to morgues and takes body parts, and then cobbles together a monster from rotting human flesh and through a scientific form of wizardry, animates this thing and creates a being that is not human, made from undead flesh. This is actually somehow more grotesque than that because Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, while it describes all sorts of putrid, rotting flesh dug up from cemeteries, doesn't go quite so far as the discarded foreskin of circumcised babies to create brain cells for this ridiculous purpose, which is to play a video game. At least Frankenstein, you know, he really is. He is playing God. He is creating this human being. You know, this is a tale of a new Prometheus here. They just say, wouldn't it be funny if the thing could play Doom? Now, another confusion. This is something I really like about this story. I mean, you can make jokes about it all day and you can also be horrified by it and think that this is evidence of the approach of the apocalypse. But the thing that I really like about this story, you know, I'm a glass half full kind of guy, is it forces us to reflect on our human nature. We have a lot of errors these days about what a human being is. We don't even know what men and women are. Now, famously, infamously, we think a man can be a woman because we don't really know how human nature works. And so something I like about this story is that the reasonable fear that people have, which is, is this a person? Are we creating souls? What are the ethics of this? And the answer is that these cells, even brain cells, they're not a person. This is not a person that we've created. Much like Dr. Frankenstein didn't really create a human being. These cells are not a person. They're not even really like a person. They don't have a soul. They don't have a soul because the soul is not just some magical word to fill in what we haven't yet uncovered through science. The soul is an objective fact that we can all know, which is that the soul is the substantial form of the body. My body is made up of all sorts of molecules and atoms and elements. I've got a lot of carbon in there. I got some hydrogen, I got some oxygen. But the thing that makes me me and that differentiates my carbon from, say, the carbon in this cigar box is my soul. The thing that pertains to me as an integral whole, the soul is the substantial form of the body. The reason that the leftist tears tumbler is different from other pieces of steel and, who knows, gold and platinum and whatever's in this tumbler, the thing that differentiates that from all, every other thing that includes those elements is its tumbler ness, its tumblrity, you could say its soul. The thing that pertains to it, that gives it its form, that makes it what it is. This is not that. So I'm not really concerned that we've created some poor wretched human person in the form of developed neonatal foreskin to play this video game that hasn't even been cooled in 30 years. But it does seem like we should learn a lesson from Frankenstein here. Why are we doing this? The reason that this company, Cortical Labs, creates this thing called dish brain is to just compute faster. The argument is that when you plug in human cells and you create these neurons, it'll compute faster and it will learn things faster than a computer chip. So in that way, it's very much like Frankenstein. In many ways, it's very much like Frankenstein, but in this way that we are transgressing human limits, we are now treating human flesh as if it is nothing but a commodity. And this too is manifest in our culture. We now go to the baby store to buy babies. We order babies, we custom order babies. We pick the mother or the father out of a catalog. We make a bunch of babies, and then the ones we don't want, we return or we discard. We feed, freeze indefinitely. I'm describing, of course, IVF and surrogacy. We then hire other unethical scientists, much like these people, to go and create the babies in a petri dish and then to implant them in different mothers who we pay through this is reminding us, just as the question about human nature reminds us that we once knew more about human nature than we do today. We have actually forgotten something. We thought, think, because of this weirdo technological progress. We think that we are advancing in all areas of life because we're advancing in technology, but we're not. Weirdly, we're advancing in technology and we're actually regressing. When it comes to ethics, we're regressing. When it comes to anthropology, we're regressing. When it comes to philosophy and theology, we are taking one step forward, but 150 steps back at the same time. And so we have to. The glass half full version of this is it forces us to contemplate our human nature. If baby foreskin in a petri dish can learn how to play doom. That is a shocking fact. And it forces me to think about what is a human being. And by thinking about what is a human being, I reconsider all these other aspects of politics. Things like IVF rebortion, things like gender, things like things like the ethical limits of science. If you don't want to live in a future where baby foreskin is playing doom, then we need to rethink what we're doing. Okay. Speaking of human experimentation, our favorite Democrat Senate candidate in Texas, James Tallarico, wants you to know that he really, really, really loves trans kids. We'll get to that momentarily. First, I want to tell you about Relay. Go to JoinRelay app Knowles K WLAS if you're a man watching this episode, there's a good chance you've encountered pornography. And not just because of my intro dance on the desk. I'm talking about like the real hardcore stuff on the Internet, probably more than once. That's just what the statistics show. Data show that around 70 to 75% of American men view pornography regularly. It's 90% plus, I think maybe even mid to high 90s have seen porn at some point on the Internet. 70 to 75% regularly view pornography. This is not a fringe issue, something most men in our culture are dealing with one way or the other. If you are one of those men, before you dismiss the numbers, just do something. Think about all the reasons that you've told yourself not to deal with that addiction. And then think about how terrible you feel when you do look at pornography because it's degrading to yourself. It's bad for your relationships. It's a waste of time. It's gross. It just. Then remember why you want to stop doing it. Because you want to be a good guy and an admirable guy and not like a creep. And you don't want to be a pervert. So anyway, I could go on for a while, but you get the point. Porn doesn't stay private. It'll cost you your marriage. It could cost you your family. You don't have to fight it alone. Relay is a non woke pro family resource built specifically for men who want to quit porn. Here is what I want you to do right now. Pause the episode. Scroll down. Click the link in the description. Copy and paste the code knowleskinewlas to join Relay. Two options. Lose the things that you love or get the help you need. Click the link, Join Relay right now. James Talarico the gift that keeps on giving. I violate my own rule every day. I said it a few days ago. I said, save some clips of this guy until closer to the election. But I can't. I'm just as tempted as all of you are. I can't resist. Here's a clip that's just come back around from a Superbloom podcast on YouTube and in which James Tallarico is asked what he most loves, and his answer is very, very creepy.