Latest / The Lila Rose Show / E192: Are We on the Brink of a Dystopian Future? w/ Dr. Aaron Kheriaty | Lila Rose Show

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E192: Are We on the Brink of a Dystopian Future? w/ Dr. Aaron Kheriaty | Lila Rose Show · The Lila Rose Show

0:00
I planned to stay at the university until I retired.
0:02
Even before the court decided the case, the university
0:05
retaliated and fired me. I want to ask you about this new
0:08
study from Yale Medical School. Some people are calling it a
0:11
bombshell, finding that some people suffering long COVID are
0:15
actually suffering from mRNA vaccine injury.
0:18
Mark Zuckerberg recently came out and basically publicly
0:21
admitted exactly what we are alleging.
0:24
I want to talk about transhumanism with you because
0:27
it's really fascinating, some of your research on this you.
0:30
Could create a child whose biological parents,
0:33
grandparents, great grandparents were all embryos that were
0:36
created and destroyed in a laboratory and that.
0:42
Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Lila Rose Show.
0:44
All right, today we're having on Doctor Aaron Kariati.
0:47
He's actually an OG podcast guest.
0:49
He was on, I think now it's been 18 months ago, but today's
0:52
episode is going to be fascinating.
0:53
Doctor Aaron Kariati is a psychiatrist and he's going to
0:56
be sharing, he's really an expert on a lot of things, but
0:59
he's going to be sharing specifically about some of the
1:01
new research emerging from Yale about the mRNA vaccine and its
1:06
potential to cause long COVID or getting into that.
1:09
Aaron has a lot of thoughts. We're also going to be talking
1:11
about Aaron's work and research on transhumanism.
1:14
Did you know that transhumanism is a whole area of research
1:17
right now? And there's a lot of crazy, very
1:19
dark potential there, and it deserves exploration.
1:23
Aaron has a lot to talk about there too.
1:25
You're going to enjoy this episode.
1:26
And I also think it's just very important information, so please
1:29
don't forget to be subscribed to the show and pass the show on to
1:32
friends and family so that they can learn the latest about these
1:35
topics, too. Doctor Aaron Cariotti, welcome
1:38
to the podcast. Thanks Lila.
1:39
It's always good to be with. You, it's great to have you back
1:41
on. It's been too long.
1:43
Thanks for coming back. Anytime.
1:45
All right, for those who don't know you yet, can you share a
1:47
little bit about the Doctor Aaron Cariotti background?
1:50
Sure. So I'm a psychiatrist, part time
1:53
private practice, and then most of my time is spent as the
1:57
director of the Bioethics and American Democracy Program at
2:00
the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
2:02
And that work involves looking at issues related to medical
2:05
ethics, issues related to technology and its intersection
2:10
with medical advancements. And so a lot of the stuff that
2:15
we're going to talk about today are issues that I've been
2:17
digging into in my research and my writing, my speaking.
2:22
One of the things that really, I think I saw anyways moved you
2:26
out of doing the full time psychiatry and, and, and, and
2:31
you were teaching too, but moved you into more of this role, I
2:34
think and really consulting at a federal level, medical research,
2:40
technology, these advancements, but how to do it ethically.
2:42
And it's such an absolutely essential lane that we need you
2:46
in. Were some events that happened
2:48
during COVID. Can you just share briefly for
2:50
that? Because I think a lot of people
2:51
don't know. And it's an incredible story.
2:52
And I think it speaks to your courage, quite frankly, your
2:54
moral courage. And I think people should know
2:56
about that. Thanks a lot of that.
2:58
Yeah. Up until December of 2021, I was
3:01
at the University of California, Irvine.
3:03
I was a professor in the School of Medicine and then also the
3:06
director of the medical ethics program at the university.
3:09
And I helped the university to develop all of its COVID
3:13
policies up until the vaccine mandate policy that came down
3:17
from on high. I thought, you know, the
3:20
committee that I was on that was vetting the policies for the
3:22
entire UC system should have been consulted on this policy
3:26
because of all the things that we were doing during the
3:28
pandemic, this was going to be the most publicly and ethically
3:31
controversial. It just didn't make any sense
3:34
that we weren't vetting it through the normal process.
3:37
So I wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal with Jerry
3:39
Bradley, law professor at Notre Dame, arguing that university
3:44
vaccine mandates were unethical. I focused on universities
3:47
because they were the first institutions to mandate the
3:49
COVID vaccine. And I argued that this violated
3:52
the basic ethical principle of informed consent, which I had
3:56
taught the medical students every year and their required
3:58
ethics course and which was very foundational for modern
4:02
bioethics. That failed to get a
4:05
conversation going at a debate going at the university.
4:09
And they finalized their vaccine mandate.
4:11
And I decided that given my position, I needed to not just
4:15
take a public stance against the mandate and argue against it,
4:20
you know, in the newspapers or in the medical journals, but
4:22
that I had to do something to actually try to change the
4:25
policy. That, in my view, was violating
4:27
the rights of faculty and nurses and students and people who had
4:31
worked on the front lines with me every day during the pandemic
4:34
and whose jobs were threatened because they were making a
4:36
decision about their own body and about their own medical
4:39
care. That went went against what the
4:42
university was trying to force on them.
4:44
So I ended up challenging the vaccine mandate in federal
4:47
court. I did not win that case,
4:50
although if I were to file that case today, I probably would
4:53
when under a new 9th Circuit precedent that has been
4:56
established since then. But at the time, there was no
4:58
judges willing to, you know, ask any difficult questions or
5:01
consider any challenges. Everyone was lockstep with the
5:05
COVID. Like let's just follow the COVID
5:07
regime rules on on on. Forced facts, basically.
5:10
So I was caught up in that machinery and the university,
5:13
even before the court decided the case, the university
5:16
retaliated very quickly and and fired me, placed me on
5:19
administrative leave. And then as quickly as they
5:21
could, they got rid of me. So yeah, I had planned to stay
5:25
at the university until I retired.
5:27
That was, you know, I was locked in as an academic physician in
5:31
my own mind. And then, you know, based on
5:34
making that decision and putting a stake in the ground on that
5:37
issue, I ended up, you know, moving away from academia,
5:41
establishing a private practice and working for independent
5:44
think tanks like, like EPPC, where I'm at now.
5:48
So my life changed very dramatically at the end of 2021.
5:52
And as a consequence of that, I got to know a lot of people and
5:56
in what some people call the medical freedom movement, a lot
5:59
of other people who had challenged the government's
6:02
preferred pandemic policies, whether it was lockdowns or
6:05
prolonged school closures or vaccine mandates or mask
6:09
mandates. And in the course of that work,
6:12
I also became involved in advocating for free speech and
6:17
the 1st Amendment right of free speech because one of the things
6:21
that started happening to people like me, people like my
6:24
colleague Jay Bhattacharyya, who's been tapped to be the new
6:28
NIH director at the time he was at Stanford.
6:31
Our other colleague, Martin Cold War, formerly at Harvard, was
6:34
that prominent doctors and scientists who were challenging
6:38
lockdown, school closures, vaccine mandates were being
6:41
censored on social media. And initially we thought this is
6:45
just Twitter or Facebook or the social media private platforms
6:48
that are making these censorship decisions.
6:51
And, you know, we can debate the legality of that and whether
6:54
that should be permitted or not. But what we found out later was
6:58
actually this is not just private companies doing it at
7:00
their own, according to their own decisions and judgments.
7:05
They were actually being pressured by the federal
7:07
government to censor voices that were challenging the
7:10
government's preferred COVID policies.
7:13
And that clearly violates the Constitution.
7:16
That's a clear violation of First Amendment free speech
7:18
rights. Nobody doubts that the
7:19
government cannot censor you online, even if private
7:22
companies, you know, might be able to make those kinds of
7:25
censorship decisions. So Jay Martin and I and two
7:30
other private plaintiffs, along with the state of Missouri and
7:32
Louisiana, filed a lawsuit called Missouri V.
7:35
Biden, which is still in federal court.
7:37
We were at the Supreme Court a year ago on a particular aspect
7:40
of that, of that case, preliminary injunction in that
7:43
case. But that case is still in
7:45
federal court. And we're basically alleging
7:47
that the federal government, including over a dozen federal
7:50
agencies, was coercing, pressuring, cajoling,
7:54
browbeating social media companies like Facebook and
7:57
Twitter to do their bidding and to censor information that the
8:00
government did not want out there.
8:03
And that case, I think has succeeded in, first of all,
8:06
shining a bright light and shedding light on the issue.
8:10
Mark Zuckerberg recently came out and basically publicly
8:13
admitted in a letter to Jim Jordan and to Congress and on
8:19
the Joe Rogan podcast, which some of the some of our viewers
8:22
might have seen him. They're basically admitting
8:24
exactly what we are alleging in the case.
8:27
You, you have it straight from the CEO of Facebook that yes,
8:31
the government, he admitted the government was pressuring us to
8:35
make these decisions. Facebook and others tried to
8:37
resist. That's another thing that we
8:39
discovered in the case. They actually tried to put up a
8:41
fight and basically were beaten down and threatened to the point
8:45
where they finally caved in. And Zuckerberg himself has
8:48
admitted we should not have done that.
8:50
And I regret, I regret doing. That it's remarkable.
8:54
And then he also has admitted that we censored a lot of
8:56
information that was true, right?
8:58
So they they censored the lab leak.
9:01
You know, at the time it was being characterized as a quote,
9:03
UN quote conspiracy theory. Now we have several government
9:06
agencies saying this is the most plausible explanation for where
9:10
COVID came from is that it was leaked from this lab in Wuhan.
9:13
So we were right about we were right about COVID origins.
9:17
I think very few people today will advocate for prolonged
9:21
lockdowns and school closures given the collateral harms to
9:25
education, to mental health, to child development, to all kinds
9:30
of other health outcomes that we saw as a result of those
9:33
misguided policies, which failed also to stop the spread of the
9:36
virus. And there's there's been AI
9:39
think a movement also in the direction of saying, you know,
9:43
mandating these vaccines, forcing them on people was
9:46
probably also not a good idea. And at new information coming
9:50
out from Yale and other reputable sources of medical
9:55
research showing that maybe these products were not as safe
9:59
and efficacious as we were initially led to believe.
10:03
So. So I've been, you know, I've
10:05
been for the last several years focused not only on the other
10:10
ethical issues that we're going to talk about later in the in
10:12
the program today, but also looking at kind of what went
10:16
wrong with our pandemic policies.
10:19
Why were certain voices silenced, and how did that
10:24
happen, and how do we prevent that from happening in the
10:26
future? Because good science and
10:28
medicine are totally incompatible with censorship.
10:33
What you end up with is a false consensus or the appearance or
10:37
the illusion of consensus because one side of the debate
10:42
is artificially suppressed. There were debates about all
10:45
these policies that I just mentioned.
10:47
They were just most Americans didn't have access or exposure
10:51
to the reputable people who were saying no.
10:55
Actually, on balance, we think this is a bad idea and this is
10:58
going to do more harm than good. So we can't let that happen in
11:02
the future. Free speech, free inquiry, open
11:07
public debate and discourse is absolutely necessary for good
11:12
science. Science progresses.
11:13
If you anyone who knows anything about the history of science,
11:15
you know that we make progress, We make breakthroughs precisely
11:19
when intrepid scientists daringly challenge the
11:23
consensus. Right what everyone thinks they
11:24
know. Oh, of course the sun goes
11:26
around the earth. We can just look up in the sky
11:28
and watch it happening. It doesn't feel like the ground
11:30
underneath this is moving. So this is obvious, so obviously
11:33
true. And then some people come along,
11:35
Copernicus and others, and say, well, no, actually, we looked
11:39
at, you know, we looked at the evidence and maybe there's
11:41
another way to think about this. And that's always the case in
11:45
advances in medicine and sciences.
11:48
We challenge conventional thinking and, you know, we
11:52
debate that. And sometimes the the people on
11:54
the Vanguard are proposing a new theory are wrong, but you have
11:57
to let it play out. You have to let that debate play
11:59
out because occasionally they're right.
12:02
And you're not going to get that breakthrough.
12:03
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12:06
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13:17
I mean, Aaron, your leadership on this has been absolutely
13:19
amazing. And you took the hit like you
13:22
were one of the first people to take the hit in a really big and
13:24
public and messy way. You know, you see Irvine firing
13:27
you. And you know, this the entire
13:30
way it played out for you was kind of the, you know, signs of
13:34
the worst of the times, right? That was happening during Covad,
13:37
A lot of the misinformation out there, the censorship that was
13:40
happening. And you just took it on the chin
13:43
and then you got back up and now you're, you know, you're doing
13:46
some really, I would say, heroic work because, you know, you're
13:49
talking about, you know, the new administration.
13:51
And I know you're, you know, behind the scenes advising folks
13:54
and working with them. And I do think, you know,
13:57
medical freedom is incredibly important, but then also having
14:01
clear moral bright lines when it comes to all of the advancements
14:06
in biotech, as an example. That's so key.
14:09
And so I'm grateful that you are out there being you.
14:12
Thank you. Before getting to the biotech
14:15
stuff, I want to ask you about this new study.
14:18
Some people are calling it a bombshell from Yale Medical
14:21
School, finding that some people suffering long COVID are
14:26
actually suffering from mRNA vaccine injury.
14:29
So there's actually no such thing as long COVID.
14:31
It's actually vaccine injury. And then there's some
14:34
speculation, I think that this could be a form of vaccine
14:38
induced AIDS is what there's I think calling it or some are
14:42
calling it meaning there's an autoimmune disease now that
14:45
people might have not long COVID from COVID, but from the mRNA
14:49
vaccine. Have you read the study?
14:51
What are your What's your take on this?
14:52
Yeah, so I have. I think the study is concerning.
14:55
I don't want to be too alarmist to any of the viewers who may
14:59
have gotten the mRNA shots. There's a lot more work that
15:02
needs to be done on this question.
15:04
But anyone who's been paying close attention to the mRNA
15:09
shots and the evidence on them won't have been surprised by the
15:13
study. I was not at all surprised to
15:15
see the study. It's perhaps one of the first
15:17
studies to breakthrough the sort of firewall against challenging
15:22
mRNA vaccines in mainstream media or in the public
15:26
discourse, and that's why a lot of people are perhaps only
15:29
hearing this information for the first time.
15:31
But there have been other studies suggesting that the mRNA
15:34
shots may basically cause the immune system to go into an sort
15:40
of imbalanced state that would compromise our immune system in
15:45
the future from fighting other infections.
15:47
Or maybe 'cause autoimmunity, where the immune system gets too
15:51
revved up and attacks some of our own tissues.
15:54
So without getting too much down into the technical weeds of the
15:58
study, maybe I could just give you a quick overview.
16:01
Of. What the issue might be here?
16:04
And again, caveat, we need more research, we need replication,
16:07
we need more work to sort all of this out.
16:09
And I also don't think it's necessarily a question of is, is
16:12
there long COVID or vaccine related injuries that mimic long
16:17
COVID? It could be a both and issue.
16:20
And the reason it could be a both and issue is the underlying
16:23
mechanism that causes long COVID is probably overproduction of
16:28
the spike protein, which is most likely that the humanly
16:31
engineered component of this particular coronavirus is a
16:36
protein on the surface of the virus called the spike protein
16:39
that looks like it was genetically engineered to make
16:43
it more virulent. But in a Wuhan lab.
16:46
It probably in the Wuhan lab as far as we can tell, and this is
16:50
toxic to us. Basically.
16:52
Long story short. So the virus itself includes the
16:57
spike protein, which can cause the immune system to get off
17:01
kilter, make it harder to eradicate that virus.
17:05
But the mRNA technology basically does the same thing
17:10
because the mRNA technology is designed to make our own cells
17:15
produce the spike protein, produce the antigen, the part of
17:19
the virus that our immune system then can attack to try to get
17:25
rid of it. The concept behind the vaccine
17:26
is if, if we can amount a small immune response to the spike
17:31
protein, then when we see the real virus, the immune system
17:34
will know it, will have learned it, so to speak already, and
17:38
then we'll attack the virus more quickly so that we get less
17:41
sick. That's the theory behind the
17:43
mRNA vaccines. But what's what appears to be
17:47
the problem based on this and some other studies is that the
17:51
spike protein for at least some individuals, the body just keeps
17:56
producing it, right, and overproduces it.
17:59
And then that Revs up the immune system too much.
18:02
It has an effect on potentially on T cells, which are one of the
18:07
types of white blood cells in our body that fights infection.
18:11
It's the T cells are the type of white blood cells that are
18:14
impacted by AIDS. And that's where you see this
18:17
analogy being drawn to. Maybe this is an MRNMRNA induced
18:23
AIDS type syndrome where basically we are compromising
18:27
our immune system, which is what happens in AIDS.
18:31
In AIDS people's immune system gets compromised to the point
18:35
where they start getting infections that ordinarily we
18:39
might be exposed to all the time.
18:40
But if you have the acquired immune deficiency syndrome, if
18:44
you have AIDS, your body can't fight that infection the way a
18:48
healthy person would. And so you end up getting sick
18:51
from bugs that are out there and commonly encountered that
18:55
normally people don't have any difficulty eradicating those
18:58
bugs from their body. But the person with AIDS may not
19:01
be able to do that because they're immunocompromised.
19:04
So you can the overproduction of the spike protein for some
19:09
people may push them in the direction of an immune system
19:13
that's too revved up to the point where it attacks our own
19:16
tissues. Or on the other hand, it could
19:20
basically cause the immune system to get off balance in a
19:23
way that our T cells become compromised and weaker over
19:27
time, and then we're not able to fight off ordinary infections
19:32
that we would encounter and have no difficulty with.
19:35
So some people, again, this is speculative, more research needs
19:38
to be done. But some people have noticed,
19:40
for example, that this influenza season has been especially bad.
19:43
We're getting higher morbidity and mortality from the flu, from
19:47
influenza this year than we have in years past.
19:51
And some people are wondering, well, with so many people
19:54
getting the mRNA shots, have we compromised the immune system in
19:58
a subset of the population in a way that makes it more difficult
20:01
for them to fight the annual influenza?
20:05
Wow, season. That's a a crazy thing to
20:08
consider. Did the Yale study weigh at all
20:12
the percentage of people that might be affected by the mRNA
20:15
vaccine in terms of having their immune systems, like
20:18
permanently, it sounds like, compromised?
20:20
I don't think we don't have good numbers on that yet and it's
20:23
going to that's going to require multiple studies.
20:26
This study was trying to look at the underlying mechanism.
20:29
It wasn't necessarily doing the kind of population based
20:32
research and population based sampling that we would need to
20:36
get numbers on incidents and prevalence.
20:39
And you know, there's probably a range of severity of this too.
20:43
It's not an all or nothing phenomenon.
20:45
So you may have some people who are affected in a sort of mild
20:49
way that, you know, may not severely compromise their
20:52
health, but maybe maybe weaken their immune system a little
20:54
bit. And then perhaps hopefully a
20:57
smaller number of people on the more severe end of the spectrum
21:01
where they get a much more serious condition.
21:04
That's that's closer to aid. So, you know, I pray that this
21:09
doesn't pan out that way or that it or that it turns out to be a
21:13
time limited phenomenon. Maybe we have a couple of bad
21:16
years with a higher percentage of the population
21:19
immunocompromised, But if this turns out at least in some
21:23
people, to be a more permanent problem, then we've done
21:26
enormous damage with the reckless rollout of this novel
21:30
technology, which was, which was a concern of mine, to be honest,
21:33
from the very beginning when I heard about the mechanism of
21:36
action of the mRNA vaccines, the very first thing that I thought
21:40
I thought of was autoimmunity, because we're going to be
21:43
expressing the spike protein on the surface of our own tissues,
21:48
right? And originally, the vaccine was
21:50
designed to stay in the arm, to stay in the deltoid muscle where
21:54
it is injected. They were supposed to be this
21:56
anchoring mechanism so that if you got a small autoimmune
22:00
response to the vaccine, it would be limited to just a
22:03
little bit of tissue right around the injection site.
22:05
Well, we knew from animal studies that were suppressed
22:09
that Pfizer did animal studies in Japan that the spike protein
22:14
and the the lipid nanoparticle that carries it in the vaccine
22:18
traveled to all the different tissues of the body.
22:20
That was known very early on. And as soon as I saw that study,
22:24
I said we should be talking about this because the spike
22:28
protein is concentrating not just in the deltoid, but very
22:32
concerningly in that study, the tissue that had the highest
22:35
concentration of lipid nanoparticle and therefore
22:37
probably of spike protein was the female ovary.
22:41
And we've we heard a lot about even early on reports that
22:46
again, the scientific establishment was trying to
22:48
suppress. I mean, yeah, women were told
22:50
you're you didn't miss your period.
22:51
Your eyes don't believe you're lying eyes.
22:53
You don't know your own body. There's no way the vaccine
22:56
injured your fertility in any way.
22:59
I mean, it was astounding, the gaslighting of American women.
23:02
In Western ascending, you know, who knows her own body better
23:06
than a woman who's been keeping an eye on her cycle for years or
23:10
decades. And reports of, of second, third
23:15
trimester miscarriages, which are, you know, first trimester
23:18
miscarriages are very common, Second, third trimester, quite
23:22
rare. But people reporting higher
23:24
incidence of, of miscarriage shortly after getting, getting
23:29
these shots. So menstrual related issues,
23:32
potentially pregnancy related issues.
23:34
There were a lot of women trying to just voice their concerns
23:39
about this. And they were, they were
23:42
ignored, they were gaslit. They were told you don't know
23:44
what you're talking about. And now a couple of years later,
23:49
I think people are sort of waking up from their hypnotic
23:52
state of fear and willing to ask more questions.
23:56
We're, we're starting to see research like this being
23:59
published and, you know, research institutions like Yale
24:02
being willing to look at safety issues around the mRNA shots.
24:06
And, you know, this is serious. We have to deal with this
24:08
because this is not the last time that this technology is
24:12
likely to be used. There are a lot of people
24:15
wanting to deploy the mRNA technology for all kinds of
24:18
other uses because you can ramp it up quickly.
24:20
It takes years, sometimes even decades to develop a vaccine the
24:25
old fashioned way. The idea of kind of
24:28
reprogramming the mRNA to keep up with new superbugs excites a
24:34
lot of people. I have concerns about this
24:37
technology given what happened the first time we rolled it out.
24:41
We haven't even talked about advocacy issues.
24:43
But you know, we now know that it's, it did not stop infection.
24:48
It did not stop transition a transmission of the virus and
24:52
whatever efficacy it had for reducing the severity, severity
24:56
of disease. That was the fall back position
24:58
of of COVID shot advocates. It was OK.
25:01
Well, maybe we have to admit now it doesn't stop infection and
25:05
transmission, but at least it's going to reduce your chances of
25:07
hospitalization and death. Well, it turns out if you
25:10
scrutinize the data carefully, that was probably a very time
25:13
limited effect that lasted only for a few months.
25:17
And after that, not only did that efficacy go away, but there
25:21
is some evidence that it might have actually worsened your
25:24
chances of getting COVID a second or third time.
25:27
So there's serious questions about efficacy of these
25:30
problems. As well as the what was the
25:31
efficacy of the financial benefit?
25:34
Of five at 5 at Pfizer for this. Well, there were like 10 new
25:39
billionaires minted in the first few months of the vaccine
25:42
rollout in places like Pfizer and Modernist.
25:44
So a lot of people made a lot of money doing this.
25:47
Certainly, you know, I don't want to impugn the motives of
25:50
everyone who developed this technology or help to roll it
25:53
out because I, I mean, I think a lot of people were trying to act
25:56
in good faith and wanted to do something to address this, this
26:00
novel virus. But I think the way in which we
26:02
went about it was reckless. At the very least, we should not
26:05
have forced it on people. Allow people to take the risks,
26:09
the benefits and the unknowns, right?
26:12
When you have a new technology, you have to inform people.
26:15
This is what we know, but also this is what we don't know.
26:17
And this is, you know, we don't have 5-10 years of safety
26:21
testing, right? So we don't know what the longer
26:23
term effects of this are going to be.
26:24
And you should be aware of that so you can make an informed
26:28
decision that the principle on which I sacrificed my career in
26:31
academic medicine was the principle of informed consent.
26:34
Tell people what we know, tell people what we don't know, and
26:36
then allow them to make their own decisions for themselves and
26:40
for their children who are too young to consent.
26:43
That was the principle. They got steamrolled and now we
26:47
have people that may have been injured by a vaccine that they
26:50
were forced to take on pain of losing their job.
26:56
It's really egregious. Totally egregious and again, all
26:59
the more shows your really heroic stance that you took and
27:03
again, you know you got the blowback for it, but now you're
27:05
vindicated. I mean, you're looks like
27:07
everyone of these new studies that come out, I'm sure just say
27:09
like vindication. I mean, it's probably painful
27:12
vindication. It's.
27:13
Bittersweet because obviously, you know, if these products do
27:16
turn out to be as harmful as they, they are starting to
27:19
appear, that's gonna be a tragedy.
27:21
I mean, I, you know, I, I take no pleasure in saying I told you
27:25
so. It's really awful.
27:26
Now we need more research on how to clear the spike protein and
27:29
how to help folks dealing either with long COVID or vaccine
27:33
related injury. I have colleagues at the
27:36
Independent Medical Alliance and elsewhere who are, you know,
27:39
doing work on this and trying to develop some, some spike protein
27:43
detox detox protocols for people that are afflicted in this way.
27:48
But you know, I think I worry that some of these effects may
27:53
be long lasting. And so we need to redirect some
27:56
of our energies now to first of all, acknowledging that there's
27:59
a problem, that vaccine injury is is real, not just for the
28:02
COVID vaccines, but for other vaccines as well.
28:06
And I think that Make America Healthy Again movement and the
28:10
appointment of Robert F Kennedy Junior at HHS, you know, might
28:14
open the door a little bit to more careful scrutiny of vaccine
28:19
safety issues across the board. But but certainly with these new
28:22
products that have not been around for decades, we need a
28:26
very careful assessment. And you know, a lot of people
28:30
unfortunately have career investment, financial investment
28:35
in having these things work. And so there's there's also
28:39
forces pushing back against acknowledging what may have
28:43
happened that we need to contend with.
28:46
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Use the code Lila. I remember being pregnant during
29:49
the pandemic with my second, with our 2nd and the doctor and,
29:53
you know, really urging the COVID vaccine, you know,
29:56
thankfully I said no, but she was saying, yeah.
29:59
And it you know, it, there's no all the research shows there's
30:02
no harm. There's no harm, there's no
30:03
harm. And there could really be an
30:05
advantage because, you know, you, you could get COVID and
30:08
theoretically it could be harmful.
30:09
I mean, like I'm a young, healthy woman.
30:11
And I was saying, what do you mean?
30:13
There's no evidence that there's could be harmful.
30:15
All the studies that have been done show that there is, you
30:17
know, it's very, very, very safe.
30:19
And I said, well, how long, you know, how long is this is a new
30:22
vaccine, right? How long has this been studied?
30:24
And she's like, well, this is, you know, they've been doing
30:26
their due diligence. I mean, she didn't even know
30:28
what she was saying, I think, but she was effectively lying to
30:32
me that this was safe, that I shouldn't worry.
30:35
And, you know, my little experience with that is the
30:38
experience of millions and millions and millions of people.
30:40
Now, thankfully, I didn't risk losing my job by not taking the
30:43
vaccine, but so many Americans did and yourself included.
30:45
And it's just a, you know, it really is an incredible time
30:49
that we lived through and. And what she failed to tell you,
30:52
and maybe she didn't realize this, but you know,
30:55
unfortunately many doctors just repeated more or less the press,
30:59
the press report, the PR report from Pfizer and Moderna without
31:04
critically scrutinizing it. But the the studies, the safety
31:08
and efficacy studies that were submitted to the FDA for
31:11
emergency use authorization approval of these products
31:14
specifically excluded pregnant women from the studies.
31:17
So they were, you know, there were a few people that got
31:20
pregnant during the studies that unintentionally and didn't
31:25
didn't realize it till later. And when we looked at those,
31:28
that small handful of women in the studies that did end up
31:31
pregnant, they, they had a higher rate of miscarriage than
31:34
the general population, not statistically significant
31:37
because there weren't very many of them.
31:38
So, so we didn't have evidence and a little bit of evidence
31:41
that we did have didn't look very good.
31:44
And most doctors either didn't bother to look or weren't aware
31:48
of this or you know, God forbid knew it but tried to reassure
31:51
their patients anyways. So that was just not true.
31:56
We didn't have evidence that because we specifically excluded
32:00
pregnant women from the studies, we didn't have evidence that it
32:03
was safe in pregnancy. And then following the rollout,
32:06
we started have a lot of anecdotal reports that were
32:10
sidelined and that we people didn't want to listen to and
32:13
didn't want to investigate. So that that was the state of
32:16
play. And this did a very grave
32:19
disservice to many women who just listened to their doctor's
32:23
advice. Of course, you want to do the
32:24
best thing for you and for your unborn child and your doctor's
32:28
recommending this. You know, most people are not
32:31
not going to question that. And shame on the medical
32:34
profession for being a part of what essentially amounted to a
32:38
propaganda campaign. I have another question about
32:40
this because you were saying earlier about the Yale study,
32:44
you know, that that's speculative.
32:45
They're still kind of figuring out what the heck's going on.
32:47
But I, you know, you mentioned the flu season and I think
32:50
probably people listening, you're like, yeah, it's been 1
32:53
crazy flu season. I know, like in my household,
32:56
there was two months basically where someone was sick and there
33:00
was just, you know, it was very inexplicable.
33:03
Why is this happening in this intense way?
33:05
And there have been these really brutal flus going around that
33:08
seem to be recurring, like you get it and you get it again or
33:10
it doesn't fully go away. I am curious if there is a
33:14
theory that we know whether the people affected, not all of them
33:18
took the vaccine. You know, I got the flu, I
33:19
didn't take the vaccine, right? So this idea that it's connected
33:22
to the vaccine, obviously it's not always the case, But is
33:25
there something else that might be going on in terms of just
33:27
general immunities where people, even those who haven't taken the
33:31
COVID vaccine, are being affected by more virulent flus
33:36
and also more repeat illnesses because of the general shape of
33:40
the population due to our COVID response?
33:43
Is there a connection there? That's a great question, and
33:46
this is very speculative, but I'll mention a few theories that
33:50
need to be tested. One theory is that our our
33:53
immune system may have been compromised by lockdowns because
33:57
basically isolating ourselves from other people and from germs
34:01
and scrubbing down surfaces, you know, manically to try to avoid
34:05
contamination. But unlimited hand sanitizer?
34:08
For an entire year or more, right?
34:11
Bleaching the the whole world with hand sanitizer.
34:14
That is not actually good for our immune systems.
34:16
Our immune systems grow and evolve and develop in response
34:20
to being challenged with bugs, right?
34:24
And so trying to protect yourself completely from that
34:27
can actually weaken your immune system.
34:29
So there is a theory that actually maybe our immune system
34:33
was compromised by prolonged lockdowns and school closures
34:37
and not getting regular exposure to bugs.
34:39
And then we're out and about now for the last couple of years,
34:42
we're re exposing our immune system and it's not in shape.
34:47
It's like we haven't. It's like not going to the gym
34:50
for two years, you haven't worked out and now you're trying
34:52
to exercise again. You know you're going to be
34:55
sore, you're going to be out of shape, you're going to get
34:56
winded more easily. So that's one possibility.
34:59
There has been a little bit of evidence and some hypothesis and
35:05
speculation about the possibility of spike protein
35:08
shedding, right? This idea that when you're
35:11
infected with a virus, you can shed parts of the virus,
35:14
including possibly the spike protein that other people can
35:17
pick up and that's how you get infected.
35:19
Well, if our body is producing or over producing spike protein,
35:23
can people that were living in close quarters with or working
35:26
with who have been vaccinated, can we pick up basically some of
35:31
the spike protein from them? Again, that's speculative.
35:35
I'm not going to endorse that theory, but those are two
35:38
theories as to why maybe maybe even people who didn't get the
35:42
vaccine. When you have an entire
35:44
population behaving in a particular way, it can have
35:47
spillover effects on some. Of the others, if your spouse
35:51
got the vaccine and you're with your spouse all day or all
35:53
night, obviously then you could still have the ill effect of the
35:57
spike protein through shedding on the the spouse.
35:59
Potentially it's a crazy, it's a theory and there's a little bit
36:02
of evidence suggesting that you do get some spike protein
36:06
shedding, you know, whether that's been tied to higher
36:08
incidence of, of illness or, you know, immunocompromised States
36:13
and and non vaccinated people. We're not there yet with the
36:17
research, but those are two plausible theories that deserve
36:21
more investigation, I'll say. Are we going to get more
36:23
investigation on these things? Aaron, what do you think?
36:27
Well, I'm edified by the Yale study.
36:29
I think that was a breakthrough. And I think there are enough
36:34
people now feeling sort of betrayed by the medical
36:36
establishment that want answers that it's possible we might we
36:41
might get more investigations. There's an old joke that science
36:45
advances one funeral at a time. And, and, you know, we would
36:48
like to think of scientists as being entirely objective.
36:51
But the fact is a lot of times new theories don't get embraced
36:57
by the scientific establishment until the old guard retires or
37:00
dies because of ego, because of investment in, you know, being
37:06
right. And right now we have a
37:08
scientific establishment that still is holding a lot of the
37:11
controls in the gatekeeping mechanisms of being the journal
37:15
peer reviewed journal editors, of being the primary
37:18
investigators at universities. You know, things might change
37:21
now at the NIH, which funds biomedical research with the new
37:25
administration. But a lot of people in, you
37:28
know, in power in terms of what research gets funded, what
37:31
research gets published that have a strong stake in the
37:35
status quo. And so it may require a younger
37:39
generation coming up through the medical and scientific
37:42
establishment to fully take stock.
37:45
People keep asking me, are we going to have a COVID
37:47
Commission? My view is actually only when
37:50
the people that were in high school or early college during
37:54
COVID, only in 10/15/20 years, when they are now coming into
38:01
their own in terms of positions of influence and power in the
38:05
scientific and medical establishment.
38:06
That's when we're going to get a real reckoning on COVID because
38:10
the the people that did this to them are never going to want to
38:12
admit that they were wrong. But the people whose lives were
38:16
impacted very severely, I'm going to guess in 1520 years,
38:22
they're going to want to, they're going to want answers.
38:24
Like what were you guys thinking?
38:26
Why did you do this? What happened to this?
38:28
Why did you steal three years of my high school or college
38:30
experience from me? You know, I did everything you
38:34
said. I still got COVID.
38:35
I got vaccine injured or I got, you know, we got long COVID,
38:38
whatever, you know, none of it actually worked.
38:43
But yeah, I, I would like to think that there's a lot of
38:48
people out there in the scientific establishment that
38:50
are, are willing to admit that they were wrong.
38:51
But human nature being what it is, again, sometimes science
38:54
only advances one funeral at a time.
38:56
So I I think it'll take a long time to sort these questions
39:00
out. Well, thank you for your
39:02
leadership in galvanizing the sorting out process, which is
39:07
I'll be a very messy and very complex.
39:11
You gave this really fascinating, really phenomenal
39:14
presentation recently or you, you, you give this presentation,
39:17
you gave it recently on biotechnology in the human
39:19
future. So as much as I love talking
39:22
about COVID, I want to talk about transhumanism with you
39:26
because it's really fascinating some of your research on this.
39:30
And yeah, so let's start with what is transhumanism, and then
39:35
we'll go through, you know, some of the the work you're doing on
39:38
it. So transhumanism is, I would
39:40
argue, is an ideology very influential in Silicon Valley
39:45
and among many of our tech leads.
39:48
And the idea behind transhumanism is to use
39:52
biomedical science and technology, not just to heal the
39:55
sick, not just to treat disease or to help people with
39:59
disabilities or impairments to to increase their functionality
40:03
to a more normal level. But, you know, we can take
40:06
science and technology, including drugs and surgeries
40:10
and implantable devices and prosthetics, and not just.
40:14
To try to heal the sick, but to try to make healthy people,
40:17
quote UN quote, better than well, right.
40:19
So this is let's take a normal healthy human being and make her
40:23
bigger, faster, stronger, smarter through implanting a
40:28
chip in her brain or through gene editing technology.
40:32
Or let's create embryos in a lab and at the early stage of
40:36
embryonic development, we can use gene editing and genetic
40:40
testing to create the optimal human being who's got an IQ of
40:46
160 and who's got blonde hair and blue eyes or whatever we
40:50
perceive to be the quote UN quote more desirable trades.
40:55
And the ultimate goal of transhumanism, if you drill down
40:59
deeply enough on this ideology, is radical life extension.
41:04
So making the human body function forever.
41:07
And in some of the more, I would say fringe elements of
41:11
transhumanism, there are these notions, these ideas that maybe
41:16
using digital technologies, we can upload the contents of our
41:19
consciousness into the cloud and the sky or the mainframe
41:22
computer like, and somehow like, as though the human being and
41:28
our mental life is like a piece of software that can run on any
41:31
piece of hardware. And we could just transfer the
41:32
software to another piece of machinery that will never break
41:36
down and die like the human body does.
41:38
So if you drill down deeply enough, the, the idea of radical
41:41
life extension or uploading the contents of our consciousness
41:44
into the cloud is a desire to live forever, right, which is a
41:49
religious aspiration. So my own assessment of
41:52
transhumanism is ultimately it's a it's a kind of secular
41:56
religion that taps into deep human longings that in a
42:02
secularized culture go unfulfilled, right?
42:05
So if what Saint Augustine said about us is true, and I believe
42:09
that it is that you, God created us for yourself and our hearts
42:13
are restless until they rest in you.
42:16
Well, living in a secularized materialist culture that has no
42:20
hope of eternal life after death in heaven with God in the
42:25
beatific vision, no way to transcend the the human and
42:29
material earthly temporal realm. Well, those, those longings of
42:35
our heart are not suddenly going to disappear simply because we
42:37
live in a culture that does not speak to them or that does not
42:42
fulfill them. And so I think transhumanism
42:44
becomes a kind of secular religion and that the central
42:49
idea being salvation or eternal life through science and
42:54
technology, right? We can build it ourselves.
42:57
And again, there, there are, there are people that really buy
43:00
into this to the point where they say, well, we don't have
43:03
the technology to do this yet, you know, to, to live to the age
43:07
of 300 or 500. But someday we will be.
43:10
They're very confident that, you know, science is going to
43:13
advance in this direction. And there are actually private
43:15
companies that will cryopreserve your body or if you can't, if
43:19
you can't afford, you know, basically freezing your whole
43:22
body after you die, They'll do just your head and just just,
43:25
you know, your brain. Presumably it could be attached
43:28
to a robot or a Cyborg or some other, you know, technology in
43:32
the future. So that once we have the
43:34
technology where you can live forever, we're going to we're
43:36
going to thaw you out and wake you, wake you up and somehow
43:39
technologically revive you so that you can live forever, Which
43:43
I mean, to me is a very sad thing to do.
43:46
I just came directly here from a funeral of, of a friend who was
43:50
laid to rest after a long and fruitful and, you know, faithful
43:54
life. And we were there praying for
43:56
her and for her family. And, you know, I look around and
44:01
I see people that don't have that kind of hope in God's mercy
44:06
or hope for a transcendent afterlife, who don't want to
44:12
just disappear into nothingness and don't want to accept a kind
44:15
of nihilistic view that when I die, that's it.
44:17
And, you know, there's nothing after that.
44:20
And through transhumanism, I see them reaching for a solution to
44:25
that. The problem with that is, number
44:28
one, it's not going to work. Number two, it's going to
44:31
produce a kind of nightmare dystopia for all kinds of
44:35
reasons. I think the effort to become
44:38
superhuman will end up making us more subhuman, which is the the
44:43
basic premise of, you know, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World
44:46
is, is a, you know, great example of what that might look
44:50
like. If we start manufacturing human
44:53
beings according, to, you know, our own specifications in, in a
44:57
laboratory and creating them for, you know, this particular
45:01
purpose and, you know, trying to fulfill all their religious and
45:05
transcendent longings through science and technology alone.
45:08
We're going to end up in a society that is the kind of
45:10
place that no sane person would really want to live in.
45:14
That is such a powerful comment that you're making that I think
45:20
you can get so excited about the technology and, you know, folks
45:22
working on it. I'm sure they have their
45:24
different motivations. But in this effort to be
45:27
superhuman, are we really becoming subhuman?
45:31
And it's begging the question of, like, what does it mean to
45:32
be human, right? And you're talking about, well,
45:35
if you don't have a faith, if you don't believe in an
45:36
afterlife, but you're also, like, weirded out by the idea of
45:39
just becoming dust and, like, disappearing after you die, then
45:42
yeah, you're kind of want to like, I need to live forever
45:44
somehow, or at least live longer somehow.
45:47
What do you think are the, how does one explain?
45:52
Maybe this is the way to ask this.
45:53
How does one explain the kind of core moral parameters, the
45:57
ethical framework for thinking about these technologies to
46:01
somebody who doesn't share faith with us, who doesn't have the
46:05
same rubric? Maybe they believe there's a
46:07
higher power and they generally want to be a moral person.
46:10
But how do you translate ethics for that person to explain?
46:14
Hey, doing this like, you know, bioengineering of the perfect
46:19
human and you know, killing off the crop that aren't as good as
46:22
not a good way to go or gene editing the grown person to be
46:25
the superhuman is not a good way to go.
46:27
How, how do you how do you translate the ethical framework
46:30
for somebody who doesn't have faith?
46:33
So I would start first of all, by just trying to establish the
46:36
premise that there are good and bad uses of technology, because
46:40
in our technological society, many people believe if there's a
46:44
new advance or a new use, that something could be put to that
46:47
we we sort of have to do it. There's this idea, I call it
46:50
inevitable ISM. You know, this technology is
46:52
coming, it's going to be rolled out in this way.
46:54
It's going to be put to these purposes and there's nothing we
46:56
can do about it. It's just like this thing
46:58
advances on its own. So introducing the idea that no,
47:02
as human beings, we should have agency and control and decision
47:06
making power about how we use science and technology.
47:09
You take something like nuclear fission, This can be used to
47:13
make a bomb that kills hundreds of thousands, if not millions of
47:18
people, right? Which would be a very hopefully
47:21
morally concerning use of that technology to someone who's a
47:24
person of faith or a person of no faith or, you know, perhaps
47:28
there's ways to use nuclear fission to create, you know,
47:31
energy and, you know, we can debate about nuclear power and
47:35
so forth. But but the basic crime is that
47:38
clearly there are, there are good uses of technology and bad
47:40
uses of that same technology. And we want to guide these
47:45
things in the direction of human health and flourishing.
47:48
And then from there, I would I would try to, you know,
47:52
introduce the distinction between therapy and enhancement.
47:55
So therapy is using science and technology to treat disease and,
48:00
you know, traditional medical ethics of informed consent.
48:03
Can, you know, analyzing the safety and efficacy of these
48:07
things can help guide us there. If we, you know, if neural link,
48:12
this implantable device that that can go into the central
48:16
nervous system, into the brain that Elon Musk has developed.
48:20
If that can help someone who has a severed spinal cord, a spinal
48:24
cord injury, who's quadriplegic or paraplegic that can help
48:27
their brain communicate with their legs so that they can walk
48:29
again, I'm all for it. That's great, right?
48:33
It's therapeutic. It's therapeutic.
48:34
Exactly. Using that to, you know, feed
48:38
information into the mind from the AI controlled cloud out
48:43
there seems to me to be much more dangerous use of that kind
48:47
of technology, trying to use it to enhance intelligence or to
48:50
create a kind of Cyborg that's tied into digital technologies
48:55
in a way that will fundamentally alter human intelligence, human
48:59
decision making. Those kinds of applications
49:02
worry me. And I would I would try to I
49:04
mean, you could draw on examples to explain how this might go
49:08
sideways. So AI, for example, I'll just
49:12
use a simple example. We have these new so-called
49:15
large language model AI that a lot of listeners are now
49:17
familiar with the ChatGPT, the grok these things that we can
49:21
query to get information. I've had patients go to ChatGPT
49:25
and ask what are the common side effects or benefits of this
49:30
particular antidepressant medication that I'm thinking of
49:33
taking? And assuming that the algorithm
49:35
is well designed and it's drawing on reputable sources,
49:38
that might be a way for this person to use that tool to
49:41
synthesize complicated information and distill it down
49:45
into something that's understandable to the layperson.
49:47
I don't necessarily have a problem with patients using the
49:50
technology in that way as long as they're discussing that, you
49:54
know, with me as their physician.
49:56
But I've also had patients go to ChatGPT and say, given my
50:01
medical history, should I take this antidepressant medication,
50:06
right? Treating this AI as though it's
50:09
a source of wisdom or personal decision making or as a kind of
50:15
Oracle that will give them answers as to how to how to live
50:18
their life in a conversation that they probably should be
50:21
having with their physician rather than with a bot or, you
50:25
know, basically what amounts to a computer program.
50:31
I think even for people without faith, the Old Testament concept
50:35
of an idol can be helpful to think about this.
50:38
What what is an idol? According to the Bible, an idol
50:43
is something that we create. It's an artifact or the work of
50:47
our own hands. It might be an interesting
50:50
artistic artifact, or it might be an interesting tool that we
50:54
could use to to do things better.
50:57
But what happens is we take this thing that is the work of our
51:00
hands and we elevate it above us.
51:04
And, and we look to the golden calf for answers or for wisdom
51:08
or for decision making or as a kind of replacement for human
51:13
discernment and free will or political decision making or
51:16
whatever. And this thing then comes back
51:18
to bite us because we're essentially treating it as a
51:21
God, right? So I don't want to throw out the
51:25
baby with the bathwater. AI is powerful.
51:29
I don't like the term AI because it's not actually intelligent.
51:32
It's not actually thinking. It's just synthesizing
51:35
information, doing it well or doing it poorly, synthesizing
51:38
information that's already out there that has been discovered
51:41
and created by human beings. So I don't think we should treat
51:43
it as though it's an intelligent sentient being.
51:48
But there is this kind of danger that I see that of turning this
51:52
thing into an idol. Can can you explain that a
51:56
little more? This difference between sort of
51:58
compiling and processing information versus intelligence.
52:03
Sure, so so I've used large language model AI to take things
52:10
that I have already written and synthesize them down into a
52:14
shorter summary. Right Op-ed.
52:17
Well. For the Wall Street Just
52:18
kidding. I'm just kidding.
52:19
Nothing that I've published. Everything that I've published,
52:22
I've written. Myself it's fine, but.
52:24
But I, you know, there, there, there have been times where I
52:27
just, you know, I needed a shorter version of this thing,
52:32
you know, for, for some other purpose.
52:33
And it's very useful for that. But asking, you know, asking AI
52:38
to write my own paper, to write my own book chapter, to write my
52:41
own article, first of all gives me the illusion that I know
52:45
something that I don't actually know, right?
52:47
Because at that point, it's not drawing on my own work, It's
52:50
drawing on the work that other people have done in order to
52:53
give me some finished work product.
52:56
And so I think we have to be careful believing that because I
52:59
can query this thing to do some task for me that somehow I've
53:03
accomplished something or something, somehow I know
53:05
something or I've worked through a problem that I don't actually
53:09
know and haven't actually worked through in the way that I would
53:12
if I were trying to write that article myself.
53:15
So the, you know, these things are subtle and there's obviously
53:18
a Gray area and there's plenty of room for debate about what
53:21
what are the good uses of this and what are the bad uses of
53:23
this. The uses that worry me the most
53:27
are basically when we hand over complex decision making to these
53:33
things. I do not want to be governed by
53:35
bots. I want to be governed by elected
53:38
representatives. As much as I may dislike many
53:41
politicians as fallible and conflicted and, you know, quite
53:46
frankly, dumb as they sometimes are, I would rather be governed
53:49
by those people that I, you know, that I can vote out of
53:52
office and that are human beings with human experiences.
53:55
Then by some so-called artificial intelligence that
54:00
supposedly is going to, you know, take a more objective
54:03
approach to this complex political or social question.
54:08
But there's serious people out there who seem to think that,
54:11
yeah, maybe some hybrid form of government that involves both
54:15
human beings and AI making decisions on our behalf is the
54:20
direction that we need to move in.
54:22
And I do not think it's a good idea for us to hand over
54:28
decision making authority, you know, wisdom, counsel, judgment,
54:35
free will is not something that we want machines supplanting us
54:40
and doing instead of human beings as as bad as we sometimes
54:44
are at all of those things. I trust my fellow human beings
54:49
more than I trust a machine, which essentially means trusting
54:53
the programmers, right? So when CS Lewis points us out
54:56
in the Abolition of man in, in his novel That Hideous Strength,
55:00
that, you know, when we start redesigning human nature in this
55:04
way, really what we're doing is giving some human beings power
55:08
over other human beings. And I think that's a very useful
55:11
lens through which to analyze this.
55:14
When we're talking about gene editing and creating
55:16
superhumans, we're talking about scientists in a laboratory
55:19
manipulating human life, its embryonic stage, and exercising
55:23
a kind of quality control, manufacturing disposition over
55:28
new human beings. And what kind of expectations
55:32
does that put on those new human beings, Right?
55:35
You're a clone of LeBron James. What do you mean you don't like
55:38
playing basketball? That's not what we designed you
55:41
to do, right? So we need to recognize with all
55:47
of these technologies that the people who are ultimately in
55:49
control of these technologies, we're essentially handing over
55:54
political power, social control, data and, you know, which leads
56:00
potentially to surveillance. And from looking at it through a
56:06
political lens, that means giving certain human beings,
56:10
many of whom were unelected, no one chose for this role,
56:15
significant power over other human beings.
56:18
And, and trying to design and create and enhance human life in
56:23
the laboratory involves those kinds of power dynamics.
56:27
It just, you know, it's not just about making someone who's
56:30
bigger, faster, stronger. It's about allowing certain
56:33
people to say, OK, these embryos, we like what they're
56:36
showing on their genetic testing gear.
56:38
We're going to implant those and bring those to birth.
56:40
These other embryos that have quote, UN quote, less desirable
56:43
qualities we're going to discard.
56:45
It's, it's such a important point that you're making about,
56:49
you know, the trusting of AI is not, you're trusting the people
56:52
that gave the inputs on the machine.
56:54
So at the end of the day, you are trusting a human.
56:57
It's like, what, who are you going to trust?
56:59
Like you said, when politics, is that your elected official that
57:02
you, you chose freely to vote for or not?
57:04
Or is it someone that's unelected that is inputting and
57:07
programming this machine to do God knows what?
57:09
Who's hidden and who therefore cannot be?
57:11
Held responsible for the consequence.
57:13
Exactly. OK, I want to ask you about in
57:16
vitro gametogenesis, which is a new technology that's emerging
57:21
and I think people should be aware of it and it's extremely
57:25
problematic. So let us know breakdown for us
57:28
what IVG is. So I most people have heard of
57:30
IVF, right? The creation of a new human
57:34
embryo in a Petri dish in the laboratory, using donated eggs
57:38
and sperm to do IVF. The hardest part of the process
57:45
is retrieving eggs from a woman's body because typically,
57:48
as most women know, your body produces 1 egg that's matured
57:52
and that releases every month as part of your menstrual cycle.
57:56
In IVF, they usually want to create more than one embryo
58:00
because they want to have multiple that they can implant.
58:04
Oftentimes those embryos don't survive, so they will do a
58:07
process where they stimulate the woman's ovaries to create maybe
58:11
half a dozen eggs that they create 5678 maybe new human
58:17
beings in the laboratory. And there's there's ethical and
58:20
moral problems associated with that.
58:22
Many of these embryos are not implanted.
58:24
They're kept in cryopreservation.
58:26
Many of them are are discarded or used in scientific research
58:29
and then destroyed. So lots of ethical issues with
58:32
IVF, but one of the things that limits the number of embryos
58:37
that we can create is this egg harvesting process where you can
58:41
only get maybe 5-6 embryos per cycle in the cycle is invasive.
58:46
It requires the woman take hormones to hyper stimulate her
58:49
ovaries to produce more mature ovum.
58:52
So it's it's complicated. What IVG promises to do is to be
58:56
able to create gametes. And by gametes I mean male sperm
59:00
or female eggs, ovum, using basically skin cells.
59:06
So you take skin cells, you take adult cells from other tissues
59:10
in the body and you can program them using gene editing and
59:14
other techniques to basically develop into gametes, into sperm
59:18
and eggs. That would allow women of any
59:23
age to create eggs. So no more menopause.
59:26
The 80 year old woman could basically could develop eggs.
59:30
It would the promise of this in the way it's being pitched is,
59:34
well, what about the woman who had her ovaries removed because
59:36
of cancer? You know, now she can't have a
59:39
baby. This will allow that woman to
59:41
have a baby. And you know, the compassionate
59:42
part of us says, Oh yeah, wouldn't it be nice if a woman
59:45
who had her ovaries removed because of cancer would still be
59:48
able to have a child who's genetically related to her?
59:51
So, you know, IVG is always pitched on those, on those cases
59:54
that that drawn our compassion and our desire to to help
59:58
someone who has an ovarian disease, but recognize also it
1:00:03
would allow for things like creation of eggs from males or
1:00:08
creation of sperm from females. So of course.
1:00:11
Of any age. Of potentially any age.
1:00:14
So many in the LGBT community who you know two men who want to
1:00:18
have a biologically related child could potentially use IVG
1:00:22
for that purpose. The other thing that has been
1:00:26
proposed which as with a same sex couple reproducing a child
1:00:32
who's genetic related to both parents of the same sex.
1:00:35
Some people have talked about so-called Multiplex parenting.
1:00:40
Let's suppose you had four people of whatever sex who
1:00:44
wanted to have a genetically related child.
1:00:48
You could use IVG to create sperm and eggs from two of them,
1:00:53
and sperm and eggs from the other two.
1:00:55
Create 2 embryos in the lab using those gametes, extract
1:01:01
embryonic stem cells from both of those embryos.
1:01:04
Use the IVG technique again to create sperm and eggs from those
1:01:08
embryonic stem cells, and then create yet 1/3 embryo,
1:01:12
discarding the first two embryos.
1:01:14
Now you have essentially what is genetically a grandchild of
1:01:19
those four people that they would consider their
1:01:21
genetically. And they murdered the two other.
1:01:24
Embryos, exactly. And so you get this compression
1:01:26
and space and time of the intervening generations.
1:01:30
And you could do this as many iterations as you wanted such
1:01:33
that you could create a child whose biological parents,
1:01:37
grandparents, great grandparents were all embryos that were
1:01:41
created and destroyed in a laboratory and that genetic
1:01:45
lineage simply vanished. And they're only related living
1:01:52
parents, quote UN quote, are actually, you know, great or
1:01:54
great, great or great, great, great or whatever grandparents.
1:01:58
And there's a lot of people that are really excited about this
1:02:01
Multiplex parenting. But but obviously the sort of
1:02:05
radical revision of, of lineage of human lineage of genetic
1:02:09
identity of family structure, right?
1:02:13
You know, even children who are raised by same sex couples today
1:02:16
still know that I have a biological father and a
1:02:19
biological mother that that contributed in some way to, you
1:02:24
know, my existence. And those people could be
1:02:28
tracked down in some cases and their their genetic history
1:02:32
could be something that maybe their medical history is
1:02:34
something that maybe I could have access to.
1:02:38
So this is very radical technology.
1:02:41
It has not been perfected in humans.
1:02:43
It has been done in mice. We have created mice ovum that
1:02:47
are viable and can be used to create new mouse embryos.
1:02:51
So other mammals, this has already been developed.
1:02:53
There's a lot of researchers, including some in Japan and
1:02:56
elsewhere, who are really working hard on this issue.
1:03:00
And credible researchers in this space, who I think are not being
1:03:05
overly optimistic, say that this may be available in humans
1:03:09
sometime in the next 10 years. So where is the technology
1:03:14
today? The technology today.
1:03:17
Where is IVG today? Yeah.
1:03:18
So the technology today is we could do this with other
1:03:22
animals. We do this with mice.
1:03:25
We can we can eliminate a generation so we could create
1:03:29
sperm from a female mouse and we can create eggs from a male
1:03:34
mouse and then we can create mouse embryos multiples.
1:03:38
And then we can take the, you know, create gametes out of them
1:03:42
to create a grandchild of parents that never really even,
1:03:46
you know, were destroyed before they grow.
1:03:47
Like we can do that with mice. The creation of sperm has proven
1:03:51
more difficult in in mice than the creation of eggs, but that's
1:03:55
very likely got going to be perfected soon.
1:03:58
So we're, we're close to being able to do this with animals.
1:04:02
And we, I mean, I fail to mention there are other weird
1:04:08
scenarios that could result from this too.
1:04:10
When you think about, you know, the difficulty in acquiring
1:04:13
sperm and eggs makes it such that, you know, those things are
1:04:17
hard to steal. But let's suppose you had you
1:04:21
had Brad Pitt staying at at a hotel somewhere and the hotel
1:04:25
maid decide she wants to have Brad Pitt's children.
1:04:28
She could scrape some skin cells off of the pillow where he just
1:04:33
slept, bring them to some rogue lab somewhere that's doing IVG,
1:04:39
you know, donate her own ovum to the process and have a child
1:04:42
who's genetic related to someone who didn't even know that their
1:04:46
biological material had been used in the creation of it's
1:04:49
terrifying beings. So yeah, lots of weird
1:04:52
possibilities, you know, beyond the ones I've already mentioned
1:04:56
with this technology. So this is, you know, where the
1:04:59
Wild West of, of biotechnology in the United States when it
1:05:03
comes to IVF, very, very unregulated industry, which has
1:05:07
created all kinds of, you know, thorny issues and ethical
1:05:11
problems that very few people today seem to want to talk
1:05:14
about. But IVG could really explode
1:05:18
that as well. The, the other thing that really
1:05:21
scares me about IVG Lila is the, the eugenics potential, which
1:05:27
I've sort of hinted at earlier when I talked about prenatal
1:05:30
genetic testing. So with, with IVF, let's say you
1:05:33
create half a dozen embryos in the lab.
1:05:36
Now, there are a lot of companies that are offering
1:05:38
prenatal genetic testing so that you can, you can test for the
1:05:43
sex is this is being used for sex selection.
1:05:46
And among Asian and Indian cultures, people of Asian Indian
1:05:52
descent, very often they're discriminating against girls
1:05:54
only wanting to have boys. There was an article that came
1:05:58
out a year or two ago, I think it was in Slade profiling women
1:06:03
who only wanted to have daughters, right?
1:06:05
And so there's you can have populations that are skewed and
1:06:09
discriminating against either boys or girls in the in the
1:06:13
creation of new human life. So sex related discrimination is
1:06:17
now on the table again because of prenatal genetic testing.
1:06:21
You can also test for genetic diseases, right, and discard
1:06:25
those who are going to be afflicted by sickle cell anemia
1:06:27
or other genetic diseases. But some companies are now
1:06:31
offering genetic testing to try to predict things like
1:06:34
intelligence or eye color or hair color.
1:06:38
So the old 20th century eugenics attitudes of, of, you know,
1:06:42
creating the quote UN quote right type of human being that
1:06:45
has whatever the right skin color, the right eye color is
1:06:48
going to be intelligent. It's going to be, you know, not
1:06:50
afflicted by disease introduces a lot of the same discriminatory
1:06:54
attitudes that we dealt with in the 20th century with the
1:06:57
eugenics movement, which started in the UK and in the United
1:07:01
States before it was exported to Germany and sort of got a bad
1:07:05
name after World War 2 because of what the Nazis did with that
1:07:09
particular ideology. But all that is now back on the
1:07:12
table with prenatal genetic testing.
1:07:16
IVF limits the number of embryos that we can create and test to a
1:07:21
small handful, mercifully, although you know, even the
1:07:24
creation destruction of one human life in that context is
1:07:29
obviously is a serious moral problem.
1:07:31
But with IVG you could potentially create hundreds of
1:07:35
embryos very easily because you're not limited by that egg
1:07:38
harvesting procedure. We're just taking your skin
1:07:41
cells and creating eggs and sperm from those.
1:07:44
So that the possibility of so-called embryo farming where
1:07:48
we're testing hundreds, creating and testing hundreds of embryos
1:07:53
to pick, to pick that one that we deem according to our own
1:07:57
quality control criteria, which always ends up discriminating
1:08:01
against someone who's afflicted by a disease or have a
1:08:05
particular sex or whatever. You know, creating that one
1:08:09
optimized human being and then literally destroying or
1:08:13
discarding hundreds of, of embryos to me is a kind of
1:08:17
nightmare dystopian scenario. And there, there are influential
1:08:23
bioethicists out there who think this is a great idea.
1:08:26
Hank Greeley at Stanford University wrote a book a few
1:08:29
years ago called The End of Sex and the Future of Human
1:08:31
Reproduction, where you said basically anyone who can afford
1:08:33
it, you know, in the next couple of decades is going to be
1:08:37
creating new human life in this way.
1:08:39
Even if they're not infertile, they're going to be using IVF or
1:08:42
IVG pre implantation genetic testing to optimize their
1:08:48
children. And this will be a good thing
1:08:49
and it's going to create a better society.
1:08:52
To me, this will not create a a better society.
1:08:55
It will create a society in which human beings are are not
1:09:00
begotten, but made, but man manufactured according to our
1:09:04
specifications. And that will create a society
1:09:07
that looks down upon those who, you know, were born the old
1:09:11
fashioned way according to the genetic lottery.
1:09:14
And we stopped seeing human beings as as a gift to be
1:09:17
welcomed, regardless of their degree of disability or whether
1:09:21
they're afflicted by an illness or whether they're they're short
1:09:24
or tall or black or brown or white, doesn't matter, right?
1:09:28
Shouldn't matter to the point where we we've created a society
1:09:31
where we know what is best. We know how to create the
1:09:34
so-called optimal human being, which can only lead to negative
1:09:38
attitudes and discriminatory eugenics attitudes to those
1:09:42
human beings that that don't meet those standards, so-called
1:09:47
standards. This really worries me about
1:09:51
IVG. Not just that it will radically
1:09:54
upend family structure, but also that it could introduce a
1:10:00
situation in which we could radically accelerate the
1:10:04
eugenics potential that's already at work now with current
1:10:09
technologies of IVF and pre prenatal genetic testing.
1:10:13
You said, Aaron, that we're doing Ivgs, it sounds like
1:10:16
successfully on mice, right? But we have not done it
1:10:21
successfully yet on human beings.
1:10:24
Do you think it's a foregone conclusion that that's going to
1:10:26
happen at sometime soon? I know the Chinese researchers
1:10:29
were saying in a decade it. Seems very likely given the fact
1:10:34
that we can do this pretty well. Not perfectly, but we can do
1:10:38
this pretty well with other mammals with with mice it see
1:10:42
it, it seems likely we will be able to do this with human
1:10:45
beings. Some prop.
1:10:48
I don't want to give a timeline, but it's it's not overly
1:10:51
optimistic to think it could be possible sometime in the next 10
1:10:55
years. What about human animal
1:10:59
chimeras? Yes.
1:11:01
What about the status of that technology?
1:11:04
What is that? Chimeras?
1:11:06
This is a take. You take a pig.
1:11:13
You take a pig embryo. You, using gene editing,
1:11:18
knockout the genes responsible for that pig developing pig
1:11:23
kidneys. You insert some stem cells from
1:11:27
a human being into that pig embryo and then you try to grow
1:11:31
a pig that has a human kidney inside of it.
1:11:36
That's the idea between human animal chimera.
1:11:39
Chimera is a word that comes from Greek mythology where you
1:11:41
have you have an you have a creature that's part human and
1:11:46
part animal. That's where the word comes
1:11:48
from. So we're not breeding a human
1:11:52
with an animal to get something in the middle.
1:11:53
We're actually creating an entity that has somebody parts
1:11:58
that are pig or sheep or whatever, and other body parts
1:12:02
that are human. Why would we want to do this?
1:12:05
Well, if you create a pig embryo with human kidneys, you can kill
1:12:10
that pig and harvest those kidneys and use them for kidney
1:12:12
transplant. And if the stem cells that you
1:12:15
use to create the human kidney inside of that pig come from the
1:12:18
recipient, then you have a perfectly matched kidney.
1:12:21
And so you can see why this would be.
1:12:22
Attractive. Would that be ethical in your
1:12:24
view? Maybe.
1:12:26
Maybe. Possibly I I have a lot of
1:12:30
concerns about it. Let me just put it that way.
1:12:33
I might be able to be convinced under certain circumstances that
1:12:36
it would be ethically. Permissible within certain
1:12:38
parameters. Very parameters.
1:12:40
But I think I think it's also very dangerous.
1:12:42
So, so one of the reasons it's very dangerous is we're
1:12:45
tinkering with an enormously complex system when we talk
1:12:49
about the relationship between genes and developing certain
1:12:54
organs or, or phenotypic traits. So we knockout the genes
1:12:59
responsible for the kidneys you put in these stem cells and it's
1:13:02
kind of this kind of cowboy procedure.
1:13:04
And we hope that those human stem cells only contribute to
1:13:07
the development of the kidneys, the thing that the the organ
1:13:10
that we want right, for organ harvesting and transplant.
1:13:13
Well, this whole process is normal.
1:13:16
Enormously complex embryonic development is something that we
1:13:19
barely understand anything about.
1:13:22
What if those human stem cells also contribute significantly to
1:13:26
the development of the pig's central nervous system in the
1:13:28
pig's brain and we get a pig with higher human humanizing
1:13:32
type cognitive abilities? Like what are we to make of this
1:13:36
creature? And does this creature have
1:13:39
certain dignity and regard that needs to be afforded?
1:13:43
You have questions about about the human soul.
1:13:46
All these, you know, very difficult metaphysical questions
1:13:49
start being raised when we are attempting to to to humanize,
1:13:57
let's say humanize animals in this way.
1:14:00
Biologically speaking, I think we're tinkering with systems
1:14:03
that we barely understand. And I think the possibility of
1:14:07
creating more human like animals is a real one that cannot be
1:14:12
dismissed. And then, you know, how do we
1:14:14
deal with and what do we, what do we do with those entities?
1:14:16
And also I I'm not a, I'm not a person that believes that
1:14:19
animals have rights in the same way that human beings have
1:14:22
rights. But they have some rights.
1:14:24
But they, they. Yeah, they, they, they.
1:14:26
There's certain ethical treatment.
1:14:27
Exactly, there there are. We can't just do anything and
1:14:30
everything that we want to animals.
1:14:32
We can't. I think we cannot completely
1:14:34
instrumentalize them for scientific purposes without
1:14:37
affording them the kind of regard and respect that's due to
1:14:40
their to their nature. So yes, I'm not a vegetarian.
1:14:43
I do eat pigs, you know, but that I I don't believe it's just
1:14:47
OK to do anything and everything I want to a pig before it I
1:14:51
slaughter it to make some bacon. So I mean the the ethical
1:14:54
Treatment of Animals is also an important consideration.
1:14:56
We talk about human animal chimeras.
1:14:59
What if theoretically you, you know, you talked about the stem
1:15:02
cell that it, you know, develops into a kidney, put it in the pig
1:15:05
from the human. Well, you could probably do this
1:15:08
arguably for the brain. You take a, you know, stem cells
1:15:10
that can develop into it in your brain, put that in the pig.
1:15:13
Theoretically. I mean, I don't know if you're
1:15:16
familiar with the book The Canticle for A Canticle for
1:15:18
Leibowitz, really crazy and Balter Miller's, you know,
1:15:23
dystopian novel about, you know, basically biotechnology gone
1:15:28
wrong and now we're plunging civilization into this chaos.
1:15:32
And in that book, there are these, you know, people walking
1:15:34
around where it's unclear, are they animal or human and how do
1:15:38
we treat them because we've created them Frankenstein like
1:15:41
experiments and how do we treat them now?
1:15:43
Do you think that's actually possible?
1:15:44
Do you think we're within the realm of being able to even
1:15:46
physically do that, technologically speaking?
1:15:49
It seems likely that we, we will be able to do something like
1:15:53
that. I mean, we have grown human
1:15:56
animal chimeras already. This is being done, especially
1:15:59
here in California. This research is not being
1:16:02
funded by the NIH, but it is being funded by the California
1:16:05
Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
1:16:08
This this stem cell, the state of California the state of
1:16:10
California is. Funding so despicable what
1:16:12
California does. So most of this work is actually
1:16:15
being done. By Gavin Newsom.
1:16:18
Right here in our home state and, and we have, we have grown
1:16:23
animals that are pretty close to having potentially viable human
1:16:28
organs. So yet theoretically could we,
1:16:32
could we develop an animal that had a much more human like
1:16:37
brain? It seems plausible, right?
1:16:40
If we can use this to grow other types of tissues, it seems
1:16:44
plausible. Hasn't been done yet as far as I
1:16:47
know. But also a lot of this research
1:16:50
is not necessarily being published because it's ethically
1:16:54
controversial and a lot of the people that are working on it
1:16:56
don't necessarily want public blowback.
1:16:59
Right? Because you start talking about
1:17:00
human animal chimeras, you explain to people what it is.
1:17:03
Most people, their immediate response is well, this is kind
1:17:06
of weird and this is sci-fi Island of Doctor.
1:17:09
And just to be clear, in order to do this kind of research,
1:17:11
they're using human embryos that they're destroying, right?
1:17:14
They're using stem cells from human.
1:17:15
Embryos, they're using human embryonic stem cells.
1:17:17
Sometimes they're using induced pluripotent stem cells from
1:17:20
adults, which would be an ethical way to source stem cells
1:17:25
from adults. So the, the problem with this
1:17:27
research is not necessarily the creation destruction of human
1:17:32
embryos because it can be done with adult stem cells.
1:17:36
And what I've read about human animal chimeras is usually they
1:17:40
are using adult stem cells because they're easier to
1:17:42
control. And also this idea of, of
1:17:45
creating an organ that's a perfect match for a recipient,
1:17:48
you're going to want to take those stem cells from the
1:17:50
potential recipient. So, so there's that reason that
1:17:54
pushes it away from embryonic stem cells, which is a good
1:17:57
thing. And which is why I say, well,
1:18:00
perhaps there would be a form of this research that I could
1:18:03
someday endorse, although I'm very skeptical and very wary.
1:18:07
It would have to be a form of research that does not require
1:18:11
the destruction of human embryos.
1:18:13
Aaron, what do you think are the top two or three regulations,
1:18:17
you know, the legal parameters that should govern this space of
1:18:21
biotechnology, specifically with regard to transhumanism?
1:18:25
I'm going to pitch the one that's the no brainer.
1:18:27
You do not get to create and then kill embryos like you just
1:18:30
don't get to do it. And that's why I think in vitro
1:18:32
fertilization, by the way, it shouldn't just be regulated.
1:18:34
It should be banned. You shouldn't get to create
1:18:36
embryos and test tubes. It's just not it's outside of
1:18:38
the natural order. It's very harmful to the embryo.
1:18:41
It's very dangerous. It's very harmful to, you know,
1:18:44
many other consequences that can arise from it.
1:18:46
So I would argue that's a no brainer.
1:18:48
The pro-life don't create the embryo in the test tube and
1:18:50
certainly don't kill the embryo or take its pieces to use for
1:18:54
your research. What would you say though, are
1:18:56
the other key parameters that we need legally to ensure that
1:19:00
we're not doing Frankenstein like experiments and entering
1:19:03
into A Canticle and Leibowitz, you know, hellscape?
1:19:06
Well, I would like to see a ban on IVGI.
1:19:10
Don't know if that's politically feasible, you know?
1:19:13
Let's work on it, Aaron. Same thing.
1:19:14
About IVF, but I think we I think we need to educate people
1:19:19
on IVG and you know, even if there were, you know,
1:19:23
politically, you had a compromise and get some carve
1:19:25
outs for the woman of childbearing age who had ovarian
1:19:30
cancer. I mean, maybe they're, you know,
1:19:32
the, the way the political process works, you never get
1:19:34
everything that you want. But but any, something as close
1:19:38
to a total ban on IVG as we could get seems necessary to
1:19:43
preserve human dignity and to avoid the, the dystopian embryo
1:19:49
farming scenarios, to avoid the radical disruption of, of
1:19:54
lineage and family structure that that we haven't even
1:19:59
developed the capacity to think deeply about that technology and
1:20:04
what it would mean. So there's this kind of reckless
1:20:07
abandoned that enthusiasts of IVG approach the whole issue
1:20:11
with, which is kind of like, it's almost like an organized
1:20:15
thoughtlessness like. We're not even going to, we're
1:20:17
not even going to think deeply about what does it mean to have
1:20:21
a mother and a father? What does it mean to have two
1:20:24
parents rather than four? I mean, even then, nobody's
1:20:28
going to really have 4 parents. They're going to be genetic
1:20:30
grandparents. But what does it mean to to
1:20:32
create and destroy entire generations of human beings?
1:20:37
What does it mean to create a new human being whose genetic
1:20:42
lineage was an embryo or multiple embryos that were
1:20:45
created and destroyed in the laboratory?
1:20:47
We don't even have the capacity to think through these questions
1:20:51
carefully. We don't have the language to
1:20:54
describe actually what we're tinkering with and what we're
1:20:58
ushering in. And that that scares me.
1:21:02
So to me, a total moratorium on IVG would be, you know,
1:21:09
necessary. If we can't get that, as near to
1:21:12
a total moratorium on IVG as we can get, I think is something
1:21:17
that I would like to see happen in the next few years before
1:21:21
this technology becomes available in human beings.
1:21:24
And you have advocacy organizations or scientists that
1:21:26
are wanting to do this because whatever it's going to be
1:21:29
profitable or we're, you know, we're going to allow people to
1:21:31
reproduce that otherwise would not have been able to do so.
1:21:35
But I think the way in which this would upend human society
1:21:40
and our notions of family and our notions of of lineage and
1:21:43
dissent is so radical that it's not going to produce good
1:21:49
results. Are you hopeful, Aaron, based on
1:21:54
even some of the appointments with the Trump administration?
1:21:57
And by the way, folks know about this, you know, with some of the
1:22:01
advantages of someone like an RFK, there's also the huge
1:22:04
challenge that he's not pro-life.
1:22:05
You know, he's professedly not pro-life.
1:22:07
And like, how can you be the head of HHS and not pro-life?
1:22:10
It's a big problem, you know, and I know a lot of people of
1:22:13
faith are sympathetic because of his medical freedom stance, and
1:22:16
I am too. But at the same time, like,
1:22:18
what's most important here? What is most important?
1:22:21
Human dignity, basic right to life.
1:22:23
It's foundational for everything we're working on so, but despite
1:22:27
the challenges, do you have a sense of hope?
1:22:30
Do you have a sense of dread? How do you see the next four
1:22:33
years, the next 10? Years.
1:22:34
Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I share the same
1:22:36
concerns. I'm, you know, strongly pro-life
1:22:40
and, you know, Bobby Kennedy, who I consider a friend.
1:22:45
I have a lot of respect for him. His needle has moved somewhat in
1:22:49
the pro-life direction in the last few months.
1:22:51
I think being around people in the new administration has
1:22:54
opened his eyes a little bit to some of the issues related to
1:22:57
abortion that maybe he had taken it just just standard
1:23:01
libertarian personally opposed. But you know, the law shouldn't
1:23:04
get involved was his was his standard approach in the past.
1:23:08
I'm starting to see that shift a little bit in in the right
1:23:11
direction. And I think that's good.
1:23:12
But he, you know, clearly still has a long ways to go before he
1:23:16
and I would have fundamental agreements on the issue of of
1:23:19
abortion or the creation of human embryos and destruction of
1:23:22
human embryos for research or for IVF purposes or whatever.
1:23:26
So I am, I am cautiously optimistic that he will do more
1:23:32
to address the chronic disease epidemic, that he will take a a
1:23:34
hard look at things like vaccine safety and liability for
1:23:41
manufacturers and so forth are the issues that I care about.
1:23:46
And hopefully there will be other people in the
1:23:47
administration and within HHS that have strong pro-life
1:23:51
convictions that can move the needle in that direction.
1:23:54
I think that, you know, we need a lot more sensible regulation
1:23:58
about chemical abortions and the abortion pills being shipped
1:24:02
across state lines, the safety and advocacy of these products,
1:24:08
which, you know, we're not necessarily originally developed
1:24:12
for this purpose but now are being used for abortion.
1:24:15
There's a new product that there was a study published on
1:24:19
recently basically showing that this oral contraceptive pill and
1:24:22
high doses might be able to be used for chemical abortion.
1:24:25
So I've I've a lot of concerns about that.
1:24:28
I think there's a lot that can be done at HHS to get better
1:24:32
regulation, better data, better safety monitoring on that.
1:24:36
Those drugs, it's just they shouldn't even be on the market.
1:24:38
Well, drugs to kill babies are on the market.
1:24:40
It just. Yes, and and then.
1:24:43
When you when you take a step back out of all the, you know,
1:24:46
rhetoric and politics of it and you take a step back and you're
1:24:48
like, we literally sell drugs in America that are designed to
1:24:51
kill babies. Well, it's, it's not, it's not
1:24:53
medicinal. It does the opposite of what
1:24:55
medicine is supposed to do. It's just medicine is a healing
1:24:57
and enterprise. And so, yeah, to use drugs to
1:25:00
kill either at the beginning or the end of life is something
1:25:03
that, you know, I've always been opposed to what can be done at
1:25:06
the federal level, The federal level, they could empower the
1:25:08
states to actually make their own laws.
1:25:11
Because if a state, say, restricts or or prohibits
1:25:15
chemical abortions, but somebody can get on their their app and,
1:25:21
you know, basically order the drugs from the state next door
1:25:24
and get them shipped across state lines, you've basically
1:25:27
disempowered that state from regulating abortion in their own
1:25:32
state, which is supposedly what the overturning of Roe V Wade
1:25:35
was supposed to have done. And so that decision is going to
1:25:39
turn out to be toothless if the states can't actually make their
1:25:43
own laws and if pro lifers can't work state by state to make laws
1:25:46
that better protect human life. So, you know, some people are
1:25:50
are wanting to say this is no longer a federal issue, it's a
1:25:53
states issue. And I think that's a bit of a
1:25:55
dodge of, first of all, there's a lot that could be done at the
1:25:58
federal level to better protect human life in all stages of
1:26:02
development from conception to natural death.
1:26:04
But also the the federal government and HHS needs to do a
1:26:08
few basic things to at least allow the states to govern
1:26:12
themselves in this regard. And so, yeah, so I have, I have
1:26:18
both hopes for the new administration.
1:26:21
What can be done with our public health agencies?
1:26:23
The CDCFDANIH. My friend Jay Bhattacharya has
1:26:27
been tapped to lead the CDC. He was a Co plaintiff.
1:26:30
And that Missouri V Biden case that I mentioned earlier in the
1:26:33
podcast, He's, he's wonderful. Is he pro-life?
1:26:38
He is, as far as I know, yeah. He's Jay's a Christian and you
1:26:44
know, he's, I think he's going to be in a position there at the
1:26:47
NIH where he's going to have significant influence over
1:26:50
biomedical research in the United States.
1:26:52
And, and quite frankly, the NIH was funding some really gruesome
1:26:57
research. You've probably seen this in the
1:27:00
work that you do with live action and, and pro lifers
1:27:03
across the country, that fetal tissue research that should make
1:27:09
even the most pro-choice person cringe because it was so, it was
1:27:13
so gruesome, you know, human, human fetal tissue being grafted
1:27:17
onto other animals and, and just just really disgusting research
1:27:22
that should never be done. And certainly American taxpayers
1:27:25
should not be paying for. So I think there's a lot that
1:27:28
can be done at the NIH. There's a lot that the FDA can
1:27:32
do. The new FDA commissioner, Marty
1:27:34
Makary is a good guy. He's a Christian man.
1:27:37
He's not beholden to many of the big pharma special interests
1:27:41
that have captured that agency. So I think there's good, there's
1:27:45
good people now. And I think, I think Bobby
1:27:49
Kennedy could be nudged in a pro-life direction or at least
1:27:54
maybe empower other people in the administration to to deal
1:27:57
with those issues because, you know, I think he's the things
1:28:00
that he's focused on. I vote for Aaron Cariotti.
1:28:06
We'll, we'll see who he taps maybe to, to, to delegate those
1:28:09
issues too. But, you know, I think there's,
1:28:11
there's a, there's a lot of people in the Republican Party.
1:28:13
There's a lot of, there's a lot of pro-life conservatives who
1:28:16
are concerned. And, you know, I understand and
1:28:20
sympathize with with those concerns.
1:28:22
But at the same time, I think there's, you know, there's still
1:28:26
ways to put pressure on this administration to live up to
1:28:30
even the pro-life promises they they made during the the the
1:28:34
campaign. So the IVF order was certainly
1:28:36
disappointing that we saw last week, but we've had some other
1:28:39
executive orders that have been positive when it comes to
1:28:42
protecting human life. You know, and I think we need
1:28:44
to, you know, we need to keep up the the advocacy and the
1:28:48
political work and the pressure and and pro-life.
1:28:51
Americans need to continue making their voices her to make
1:28:54
it clear to the current administration that you know,
1:28:58
you you can't abandoned us You and you cannot you cannot
1:29:01
abandoned this constituency because, you know, we're an
1:29:05
important part of what got you into office.
1:29:08
And you know, there's there's going to be a temptation.
1:29:10
They're saying, well, the the other part is even worse than
1:29:13
these issues. You guys have nowhere else to
1:29:15
go. So you're you're stuck with us.
1:29:16
We don't have to give you anything.
1:29:18
And, you know, political pressure requires that, you
1:29:21
know, people feel the consequences if, you know, it's
1:29:24
got to hurt a little bit if they're not sufficiently
1:29:28
responsive to a major part of their their voting base.
1:29:32
And so I, you know, I think pro lifers should take heart that
1:29:36
there are some good opportunities here.
1:29:37
But we should also, you know, lace up our boots and, you know,
1:29:41
get ready to get ready to engage in the the rough and tumble of
1:29:46
the political process to, to get as much as we can, you know,
1:29:51
given the current realities. Aaron, thank you so much for
1:29:54
coming on the show. It's fascinating, fascinating
1:29:57
stuff. You are a great follow on X and
1:29:59
you also have an amazing sub stack and you also write and do
1:30:02
so many other things. Where can people find your
1:30:03
stuff? So you mentioned I'm on X Aaron
1:30:06
Curiati MDI have a sub stack called Human Flourishing where I
1:30:10
talk about a lot of this stuff. I have a new book coming out in
1:30:14
September called it's called Making the Cut, The Education of
1:30:19
a Physician and the Crisis of Medicine.
1:30:21
So that's a book about both about medical education and also
1:30:24
about the current healthcare system.
1:30:26
It's a it's a critique of the current system with some ideas
1:30:29
of how it could be made better so folks can keep an eye out for
1:30:33
that book. Maybe I could come back later.
1:30:36
We'll talk about it once it's out.
1:30:38
Amazing. Thank you, Aaron.
1:30:39
Keep up the amazing work. Thank you for all you do.
1:30:42
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