 the Genetic Literacy Project. John, you published your first book when about 1999, is that correct? Yeah, January of 2000. Okay, and your first book was on a taboo topic, but it really grew out of an NBC news documentary that you did with Tom Brokaw. Maybe you can just tell us a little bit about your first book and that initial documentary project that you did with Tom Brokaw. Yeah, I was a television network news producer for ABC and ABC News for many years, including a long stint as Tom Brokaw's producer. And one day he and I were in a friendly argument about why so many American sports seemed to be dominated, increasingly so by African-American athletes. And the world track and field scene had, in terms of running, had almost been taken over by black Africans and blacks of African descent. And I was claiming it was genetics and he was saying, no, it's the classic. They're escaping the ghetto and trying to overcome cultural financial issues. And obviously I thought there was an element of that, but I had become convinced, maybe as a failed college football place-kicker, that there was a genetic component to it. And after much discussion, he got management to overcome their reluctance and approve a documentary called Black Athletes Fact and Fiction, examining the genetic and the sociological arguments for it. And it was a huge success, touched off quite an international debate, hundreds of articles got us in some hot water because we dared to suggest that there were genetic hardwire differences between populations. But I think overall was constructive and out of that came a book contract that led to my book Taboo, Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It. It really reflected my dominant stream in all of my work, which is I like to take on subject matter that's deeply rich and controversial, where I think that political ideology, political correctness has been putting a cap on what we're allowed to say when these are really important issues. In this case, the genetics of human differences is so important because so many diseases affect one population more than another. So what might seem like a somewhat trivial debate over sports differences, even though sports obviously is a huge international phenomenon, it actually has deep medical and also human relations consequences. So that's the history of that and generally why I've taken up the mantle of taking on controversial subjects. Now, there's a widespread opinion that anyone who works in television is like at best a mid-level IQ because the TV medium, of course, you're aiming at a 100 IQ crowd on average, I would assume, but the people who are making TV are not morons. Perhaps you can talk a little bit about that misconception. When now you've dammed an industry with faint praise actually, but I actually don't think that that's true. I think that obviously there's a lot of junk on TV, but there's a lot of high quality stuff as well. A lot of thoughtful documentaries, some news people are among the smartest people I've ever come across. It's not just showmanship to be a really good television news journalist. At the highest level, you have to go through a winnowing process where the lower IQs, if you call it, really get phased out. I was excited to take on a controversial subject. I think the fact that it was turned into a best-selling book and has led to multiple books on genetics and human behavior, controversial books, but thoughtful, very well reviewed, and ultimately led to the founding of my non-profit, which focuses on biotechnology and its impacts on everything from vaccines to gene therapy to GMOs and gene-edited crops. It's called the Genetic Literacy Project, geneticliteracyproject.org. It's an outreach and education group, but it also challenges misinformation by bad journalists, most of whom happen to be in print, I have to tell you. What are the skills that it takes to work in network news? Well, it depends on what level you're operating at and where your focus is. I was a news producer, which unlike in the entertainment field, it means something different. Entertainment producers, other money bags, the people behind the scenes who kind of wire the original structure of a project. The news producers are essentially the journalists who work the beat, who do the gumshoe investigations or background, and I was involved in longer form pieces, working for 2020, primetime live, did long features for the NBC Nightly News for Tom Brokaw for many years. We do a lot of background work, a lot of the interviewing and writing of it. I found that very fulfilling. A lot of people think of Fox News talking heads or CNN commentators in the evening or MSNBC as a synonym for television news, but that's not. That's the blow hard section. It doesn't mean that throwing small smart people doing some of those things. It doesn't mean that you might not learn something from them, but that's a different discipline than the hard news division that I grew out of. What about the effect of groupthink? Every occupation comes with groupthink and one notices with journalism that with pretty much every major story, suddenly all the news outlets are approaching it with about the same emotional temperature. They've already kind of decided who are the good guys, who are the bad guys, and how we're going to cover this. It doesn't matter if it's NBC News, LA Times, they all come with the same sort of emotional approach to a story. That's got to be a product of groupthink. How every profession has groupthink, what are some of the dangers of groupthink in the profession that you are in and how did you escape from it? Well, I do think you're right. There is a lot of conformity, even when the journalists believe that they're being asking out-of-the-box questions. They're usually asking those questions within rather narrow parameters. I think I'm very liberal-minded. I'm not a science denier. I believe climate change is the most pressing problem of our times. I might quibble over what's the best way to address it, but basically I consider myself a liberal-minded person. I certainly reject Trumpism, which is really frightening and autocratic and totalitarian, but I would say that there is a political correctness that dominates television news, but also journalism, mainstream journalism in general. I think it's a liberal bias. I think there's a very important reason why, for instance, mainstream journalists didn't anticipate Trump possibly even winning the election in 2016. I think they were out of touch with the vast majority of America, which tends to be a little bit less well-educated than perhaps journalists are, didn't go to elite schools, don't only socialize with people who take a fairly dogmatic liberal viewpoint. So there's not enough room for heterodoxy. I think I'm a heterodox by nature. I used to have a column for Forbes magazine called The Contrarian, but I'm not a contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian. I'm a believer of a Greek way of thinking called EpoK, E-P-O-C-H-E, which is really, it's called framing. And you try to look at every new idea or fact and frame it and almost try to see it devoid of as many prejudicial inputs as you can. And when you start doing that, you come up with new views of what issues really are. And sometimes your views even make, disconcert yourself. I mean, I get disconcerted sometimes when I allow myself to follow the facts because sometimes I'm uncomfortable with what the facts tell me. But I really have come to believe that I'm willing to live in that world of hard knocks where you say what you believe is the truth, say it in a way that's not dogmatic, say it in a way that encourages conversation. But I have to say that, as you rightly pointed out, I think there is a bit of a group think tends to be kind of liberal, except now there's a whole right-wing echo chamber, insular system from Fox News to other networks, to an incredible online presence, that in its own way is a juggernaut equally as suppressive and sophomoric as the knee-jerk left. So for an example of this group think, almost all the mainstream media journalistic coverage of how the Trump administration reacted to COVID was that it was incredibly incompetent when statistically there's really no difference between how the Trump administration and other industrialized nations reacted to COVID. But from the Washington post to PBS and frontline to the Los Angeles Times, they all reacted the same way. There was virtually no sense of an international perspective like, oh, let's compare how the United States is dealing with this compared to other industrialized nations, except in kind of narrowly drawn ways to make the Trump administration look bad. And the countries that supposedly did really well among the industrialized nations with COVID, they weren't doing anything different than the United States tried. It's not like New Zealand and Australia or Japan or Taiwan had these incredibly innovative techniques that the United States was just too bumbling and incompetent to try. So one, do you grant my premise from what you read and saw of mainstream media coverage of how the Trump administration reacted to COVID? And two, if there's something to what I'm saying, how do you account for groupthink in the mainstream news media? Well, I agree with some of what you said, and I would take issue with a couple of things. I do think our overall death numbers per capita suggest that we didn't handle it particularly well, though that is really dramatically skewed by New York City and the New York area region, which of course took the most restrictive measures. So I can't really hang New York's reaction and its bad situation on the Trump administration per se. But overall, many other countries did better than us. But I think the problem with the Trump administration is its rhetoric and its arrogance. And Donald Trump himself, who I've said this to other people, there's some of his policies that I actually support in certain areas, like in the areas of biotechnology regulation, for instance. I thought Sonny Perdue was a very good Secretary of Agriculture and kind of let Perdue do what he needed to do, partly because it wasn't an area of political interest to Donald Trump. But his rhetoric was inflammatory. He divided people. You can't escape the fact that he's an arrogant SOB and in my mind unfit to have been president. That said, many of the policies that we instituted early on, including some of the things that he pushed, were as reactive in a positive way as anyplace else in the world. And as you said, there's a certain logic to a horrible logic to a disease that was uncontrollable to a large extent. And the missteps were as much done by Trump as it was by the international community, which didn't understand how diseases spread, didn't understand the role that masks could play, didn't understand that lockdowns should never have occurred on children and younger people. Our understanding of risk even today is skewed. And that continues because of this group thing. It's been horrible. Where I think there's a lot of legitimate criticism of Trump, there isn't in a sense of accountability in scaring people. And COVID is horrible. My daughter got it. I have experienced a friend of mine's 32-year-old daughter with no symptoms died of COVID. So it's a serious issue. But on the other hand, we could have managed it a lot more smartly in some of the things that the Trump administration was suggesting in their own bubbling inept and in my case, in my believe offensive way were actually probably would have been better choices. Opening up earlier and focusing only on higher risk populations probably would have served our country a lot better than the way that the liberal intelligentsia to use a better word. I'm uncomfortable a little bit about using that, but really had an agenda of their own, what they thought was the best way. So I basically agree with you with caveats. This is a connected question, even though it sounds disconnected. How many people did you meet in the mainstream media who were pro-life? In other words, they regarded abortion as murder? I'm not sure I could say anyone for sure. I think I can. Zero. I mean, I've talked to all sorts of journalists who worked in the mainstream media. None of them can name one person who believes in a point of view that's held by approximately 40% of the population. And I'm not advertising for that point of view. It's just how different from regular Americans journalists are, particularly at the elite level. I agree with you, but I'll try to add a little bit of nuance to it. I don't have a problem with someone who is not pro-life or someone who is pro-life. I have reservations about abortion, but I'm generally speaking quite supportive of it. But I absolutely side with you on my disgust with people who believe that anyone who is pro-life is automatically a cretin and a narrow-minded bigot. Because the people that I know, I mean, I'm sure there are people who fit that. But the people that I know who struggle with, including one of my best girlfriends and boyfriends from growing up, who I introduced as 12th graders, and she ended up getting pregnant the next year and came to me as a 19-year-old for my advice on whether she should seek an abortion. And I encouraged her to really reach in hard in her soul about what would be important to her. And she and her husband, to be, decided not to have an abortion and has two wonderful kids. She was a kind of a poor working-class girl who ended up becoming a nurse and got bored with it and then became a very wealthy anesthesiologist. And he was a Catholic kid, the oldest of 10, who had to move to California to go to college to support himself, ended up getting his PhD in electrical engineering. These are smart people and they're very liberal-minded. I could say that they're no fun, no fan of Trump, but they are pro-life. And the fact that we can't have a public discussion and acknowledge that this is a richly personal and spiritual issue is a sign of the... I react curdle at the word cancel culture because I think the right uses it as much as the left. But this is an example of left-wing group thing, cancel culture, no question. Yeah, but my point is how unrepresentative elite journalists are. I have never spoken to an elite journalist who's been able to name one peer in elite journalism who's pro-life. So you think that my experience is not representative and if it is even remotely representative, then journalists obviously are absolutely nothing like the American people as a whole, which is fine. But it seems like an obvious point that should be acknowledged. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, you can't... This isn't the... This isn't the GDR. This isn't East Germany. We can't say each year we want 19,718 people to become journalists and we're going to pick them from various demographic groups. It's like whoever wants to go in that profession is going to go in that profession. There might be some selectivity out of people who have so much conservative viewpoints. I have no doubt management in various operations are prejudiced against people with a conservative point of view. No doubt, but that's true. And ultimately, it can cost you your career because I know out-of-the-box thinkers who are frankly not even conservative, but have dared to espouse views that are in conflict with a liberal mainstream viewpoint of things, are excommunicated from the field. It is a fact that journalists tend to be hegemonically liberal and to some degree, many of them, especially the not smart ones, rejectionists and contemptuous of people who don't share their worldview. So let's just say for the point of discussion that per capita COVID death rates in the United States were approximately in the middle of what other European industrialized nations achieved. If I'm in the ballpark there, then the mainstream media coverage of America's response to COVID is just incredibly disjointed or out of touch with reality. I mean, I'm basically just building on analysis by David Wallace Wells in New York Magazine. But essentially, he wrote a great piece, How the West Lost COVID? How did so many rich countries get it so wrong? How did others get it so right? And essentially, he makes the point that per capita death levels in the United States are approximately the same as other European industrialized nations. But there was virtually never that sense of context in almost any of the news media coverage that I saw in the United States. It was all on how awful the United States is doing when that just does not seem to to be true to reality. Any thoughts? Yeah, I think as you say, raised earlier, there's the dislike at a deeply visceral level of Donald Trump was so overwhelming that they were going to laminate defeat and and humiliation onto him at any cost. And so I think that that tone is just infuses the news media and does affect their coverage. And again, Donald Trump is in my mind was contentious and was a divisive figure that I think has done permanent damage to the American population. But what we learned, I think the COVID thing should humble anyone. It was something that no one could control. And actually, certain measures that the US took, for instance, I think pushing in some states, mostly Republican states to open up, especially in schools and other places actually were the smarter decision to make. I'm not sure they were made for the right reasons. In some cases, I think that they were. In other cases, I think it was purely a reaction to what they saw as the liberal take on things. But the fact is, is that this disease confounded everyone. And the narrative that's been painted and has emerged and remained so today is heavily skewed against Trump equals the United States view of the world. No question. How did you realize that part of the reason that certain athletes dominate certain sports is to do with genetics? How did you realize that in your discussion with Tom Brokaw? Well, I mean, I intuitively thought that might be the case when I was 19, 20 years old, I think I was maybe right around then, sports illustrated came out with a seminal front page article on what why are Blacks coming to dominate sports. We're talking the early 1970s when at that point, the NBA in 10 years had gone from 20% African American Black to 80%. The NFL had gone from 10% Black to 60, 65%. Baseball, if you include Black Latinos, Blacks represent 12% of the US population. 33% of baseball players has actually gone down since then, partly because baseball has now thought of more as a white sport and it historically been the Black sport from the time of the Negro leagues on onward. So I intuitively thought that that could play a role. I thought about it. And I am a curious type. I've always been a heterodox in whatever job I've been in. I think always a thoughtful one. I was prized at NBC because I was considered an out of the box thinker and and had the trust of Tom Brokaw and upper management. And they thought that I was going to give an original take on things. And sometimes they were surprised because it contradicted what they thought I was going to do, say. And in this case, ultimately, Tom and I came together on this. And as we explored the evidence, it was somewhat rudimentary at that point. But one thing that was very clear, for instance, was that this is not really a Black white issue per se. It's really about body types and our ancestry. So you look at running, to me, that's the ultimate laboratory for seeing differences among populations. And you look at speed running from, let's say, the 100 meters all the way through the 400 meters. Every single world record and the top two to 300 top athletes are all of West African ancestry. In the case of 100 meters, the top 2,400 100 meter running times are held by a person of West African ancestry. Yet there's not one West African, not one in the world who's a who's an elite 800 meter runner and and longer. There are dominated by people of East African ancestry, Kenyans, Tanzanians. And there's not one. I think that the best rated Kenyan 100 meter runner is like 4,600 ranked in the world. I mean, in other words, insignificant. You can't tell me that the Kenyan runners who love the pageantry and the lucrative payoff of becoming a elite level, Olympic level long distance runner wouldn't wouldn't go after 100 meter events, which take a far less training and toll on your bodies if they were, they could, but they can't because they don't have the body type for it. So I just found that the facts began to tumble out. They were so overwhelming. And then the story morphed from, here's the story about the facts to now we're back to the situation with COVID and explaining it. Why are we afraid to talk about it? So I did original a documentary on the phenomenon and a little bit about the censoring of discussion about human differences, the controversy that discussing that racial racially based human differences or population based to use a less charged term to writing a book 11 years later, 10 years later called taboo, why black athletes dominate sports and why we're afraid to talk about it, which really was mostly about why we're afraid to talk about it. And we're afraid to talk about it because we can't have honest discussions without some form of political correctness and cancel culture stepping in. And that's okay. We don't require that sports commentators tell every bit of context, but I'll tell you what really matters is if you're a black and you need a and you need a bone marrow transplant and you go to a hospital and they tell you we can't give you bone marrow because the only bone marrow we have are from whites. And if we give it to you, it's going to be rejected by your body because people of African ancestry don't have the same histocompatibility standards as whites do. And so these issues that go far beyond sports, sports become an emblem of discussing human differences. And that's what fascinated me, that we're actually willing to deny the nose in front of our face. Most people in the middle class don't like to talk about racial differences. And then there's a tiny group of people who don't like to talk about anything but racial differences, but they usually do it in a provocative and nasty way. How on earth did you pull off this simultaneous trek of being heterodox and working well with other people at elite levels? It's interesting. The liberal magazine Slate wrote a very positive review of my book and its general theme was how was John Entine able to write a book like this, not lose his career, not get threatened with death, and they compared it to an incident in the United States, you may or may not recall. Jimmy the Greek. Jimmy the Greek Snyder who was fired just for discussing in a fairly inelegant way, but still in an honest way, he was not racist, he never raised his bone in his body, I don't think, but he raised the idea that black and white differences were rooted in the slave trade, which we don't believe at all is true. It's the evolutionary differences are hardwired over quite some time, 5,000 to 25,000 years of evolutionary differences. But I was lucky, I don't know, because I think I was an honest broker. I mean, you can read, I have sections that talk about intelligence differences and I don't shy away from what the data says. So I remember giving a talk in Seattle once, we're basically talking about Liberal Central and I was at, they have a very famous bookstore there, maybe it was Portland, I think, Portland or Seattle, anyway, same thing from a liberal perspective. And as I was talking about my book, a white guy gets up and says, you're really racist. This is the idea that you're even suggesting that there could be hardwired black-white differences. You're just opening up the Pandora's box of racism. And I think you're really demeaning blacks. And so like, two blacks got up together because they had been talking to each other and says, hold it, what is this white guy telling me as a black person what I should think about this issue? I've read his book. His book is one of the most honest, enlightened things that really provokes some deep thinking on me and reflecting about a lot of these issues. And you're the racist by trying to squelch this kind of thinking and discussion because he laid his cards on the table and he invited a discourse on this. And that's what we lack today. We really have a situation where there's almost like a programmatic left. It's very Stalin-esque. It's very GDR-like. And it comes as much from the political left as it comes from the political right. The difference is the political left believes that they are purer than Snow White on these things. And they're not. They're censorious and they're narcissistic and self-serving in some cases. Didn't Barack Obama read your book, Taboo? There was one reference saying that he read the book, yes. And it was somewhat said it was an interesting book, I think, as far as he would go. I was on television. I was on CNN. I was on national public radio four or five times. I did over 500 TV and radio interviews. And there were more than 400 print reviews of the book. It was the most heavily reviewed book over a two-year period when it came out. So there was a chance to discuss these things, but it's so interesting because we've now regressed on the issue of talking about human differences back to the point that I don't think I could get that book published today, even though it was widely endorsed by everything from Scientific American to Human Biology magazine to the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. These are really high-end science journals that gave it glowing reviews, let alone the African-American columnists for the Washington Post, for the Hartford Current, Ebony Magazine. I mean, it's got great reviews. Better than Steven J. Gould, who's a very controversial figure and considered one of the bright lights of genetic science. I mean, a lot of his books, I think, have some interesting points, but some say really ridiculous, politically correct things that are just unmoored from the facts. So I think I was able to navigate that ship fairly well, but I think I chose to be willing to face the world of hard knocks. I was willing to take fire. And I think once you're willing to take fire and are going to lay it out and you're not cutting the corners to ensure your politically correct ass, then I think people appreciated that. And I ended up coming out of it okay. And then you came out with a book in 2005 about Jews and genetics. What led you to that book? And what were the challenges with that book? Yeah, it was actually a very funny discussion with my agent saying, look, you have a really great book here. This is in the first book, Tabu. I really think you should maybe consider doing another follow-up on genetics because you really know how to write about this about inflammatory subjects in a way that keeps the flame burning for interest sake, but doesn't let it consume you and the subject matter. And I said, what should I do it on? I don't really know. Right at that time, my sister had been diagnosed with breast cancer and she ended up being tested and found out that she has a genetic version of the breast cancer, which is called a BRCA mutation, that traces back to her Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. And soon after, my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother all died within one year of each other when I was in high school. And so as I was thinking about that, he said to me, you should do a story on Jews. I said, well, why Jews? He says, well, Jews buy books and they also get genetic diseases. It's the perfect match for you to do a story on it. So I decided that I want to do the same issue. Believe it or not, Jews were defined as a race and they actually defined themselves as a race up until World War II. It was just common descriptions. Jews would say that they were a race. Just the whole experience with the Holocaust and genocide linked to racial identity really, I think for the first time ever historically separated the connection between Jews and race, though many people still think of the Jews as a population as a people. And I thought this was fascinating. I want to explore this. And here there's a direct link to the potential benefits of understanding this because so many of our disorders, medical conditions are linked to our race, are linked to our population ancestry. You don't have to use the term race, which is a very problematic term as taboo spent 350 pages talking about why the race term is problematic. But we do have human differences. And the fact is, if you're Jewish, you have a higher chance of getting a genetic disorder. My sister who got breast cancer ultimately died of genetic form of pancreatic cancer linked to her Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. So I was fascinated by that and I was also fascinated by how what distinguished Christianity and Islam from Judaism is that they unmoored religion from ancestry. You talk about blood in the New Testament, blood for Jesus and his disciples means faith. Blood in the New Testament and the Old Testament means blood. It's real and real thing. And I thought that's fascinating to see how all religions were tribal religions until Jesus. And except for, yeah, and the only surviving tribal religions today of note are Judaism and Zoroastrianism. All the rest are faith based religions. And many Jews don't even realize that they're part of something that is much about culture and history as it is about genetics itself. So I thought all these things made it fascinating to me. I'm an atheist, but I was raised Jewish. I majored in religion at Trinity College in Artford, Connecticut. I really respect Islam and respect Christianity and thought that the whole genetics entree into talking about religion was a uniquely interesting way to talk about the same issues that I raised in taboo. There's a lot of overlap and similarity between the two, though if you read them, they're totally different books. But that's some of the themes are the same. How do we talk about human differences in a respectful way? I'm thinking part of the reason for your success in talking about human differences in a way that hasn't gotten you canceled is that you innately have grown up with and have mastered the rhetoric of the elites. I don't know anyone who's not a lead who uses the word problematic. You've naturally mastered the the language of the elite and so therefore they feel more comfortable hearing you discuss things. Do you think that's fair? I guess I'm not self-conscious of some of that. I think I am and I'm aware of that. But frankly, nothing pleases me more than sticking my finger in the eyes of liberal elitists. I work in the area of genetically modified foods, genetic engineering, gene edited crops. I've spent a lot of my time over the past 10 years focusing on human related issues and COVID vaccine development and other things. But really on how you educate the people about a technology that is very progressive in the best sense of the word, we are really empowering the developing world to deal with the effects of climate change and to deal with the effects of less arable land and giving them control over their food destiny, which really means giving them control over their destiny. And who's opposed to it? Crazy liberals who have swallowed the myth of naturalism poll. And so although it pains me that those are my antagonists on a lot of these issues, nothing is more fun than going after a hard-headed, self-righteous, canceled culture promoting woke liberal. What is your IQ? I don't know. What was your GPA in college? I was a philosophy major. In philosophy, I was a 4.0, but in things that I didn't like, I had no problem with getting a B or B minus and things I didn't like. But that's not important. I don't think that I'm necessarily the highest IQ. I think I'm in the low 130s to be honest from what I can tell based on my SATs and things like that. I think some of this is really, do you think out of the box? And that's somewhat of an IQ thing, but it's really a sensibility thing. I really do believe my whole life, even as a little kid, I was always the one who thought a little bit differently. I grew up in a fairly affluent upper middle class community, very liberal. And I remember I was in first grade, I don't know, what, nine years old, something like that? And our teachers, it was an election between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. And the teacher said, let's hold a class election. Like, eight years old. I didn't know policy from Salaman. I didn't know anything about this. So who are you going to vote for? And there were 26 kids in the class, 25 voted for John Kennedy, I voted for Richard Nixon. I ended up loathing Richard Nixon 10 years later, and I was a true blue Democrat in large ways. But at the time, I just wanted, I couldn't believe if all these people won one person, then there's a flaw here, because that's the way autocracy, and now I would use these words, that's the way autocracy works. I can't believe in group think like that. So I'm voting for the underdog. And I think I've had that sensibility all the time. And at times it gets me in trouble. But I think overall, getting back to that framing technique called FOK, I try to look at each situation and be fearless about where the facts take me. And I try to do it on everything. And I have usual bedfellows as a result of that. I've been a member of one of the more, I would say, moderate conservative think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute, but also one of the most liberal think tanks, the World Food Institute out of the University of California, Berkeley. And I'm good friends with Charles Murray, controversial writer of the Bell Curve, who and I share a lot of his very informed views on a lot of issues. But I work with the Aspen Institute and on as almost a classically far left or moderate left organization in promoting alternative viewpoints. What they all share with Charles Murray and the Aspen Institute both share, they're willing to think out of the box. And they're not just hegemonic knee jerk liberals or conservatives. What were your SATs? My SATs were, I don't know, 15, 20, something like that combined. And were you higher in verbal or math? I was higher in math, much higher in math. I didn't have any intentions of being a writer and I didn't have much confidence in my writing abilities. And then I went through a transformation. I wanted to be a political science major. I dropped out of college to give you an idea of my liberalness. I dropped out of college to work for George McGovern and run a county for him in New Hampshire in the 1972 election. But I went through a transformative spiritual awakening that didn't ultimately draw me to religion, but it drew me to spirituality and it drew me to question how I view the world. I had a fairly non-nuanced view I think of religion. I don't think I was nearly as open-minded as for people who had views that were different from mine other than my human impulses from an intellectual point of view. I was fairly crusted over if I had become that person, I wouldn't be friends with that person now. And I just became attracted to philosophy and the philosophy of religion because it basically is about asking questions. It's not always about the answers and you're rewarded as a philosophy major, a religion major in how refined and thoughtful your questions are, not what your answers are. And I became, to me, that was a transformative that changed my brain. It literally changed the structure of my brain. So I remember reading things that I'd read two years before and it took on an entirely different meaning and things that I thought were ambiguous were really about how cool they changed perspectives. So I became a lover of Socrates and Plato because that was really a lot about questioning and was somewhat disdainful Aristotle. Now, actually, in my older age, I'm much more Aristotelian in my viewpoint because I want to actually get things done, not just debate them, but it was just interesting how I think that that inquisitorialness, that's what's missing in journalism today, it seems like, and you pointed this out, I think rightly so, they start out with a conclusion and then find the facts to reinforce that conclusion, rather than keep an open mind and letting the facts dictate where they go. At what age did you have this transformative spiritual experience at what location and what was the experience? I dropped out of college during my sophomore year. As things were percolating in my head, I had done a little acid dropping of that generation. I probably only took acid five or six times, smoked a little bit of marijuana, did not use any pills because I thought pills were anti-mind stimulating. They were all about body experiences, not even now that I'm much less judgmental about that, but at the time I was really interested in mind stuff. I probably read every book that Freud ever wrote. I even ultimately got into psychiatry graduate school, never having taken a psychology class in my entire time at college because I thought psychology, as it was taught, was one of the, I call it one of the gutter subjects. Sociology was the bottom of the heap. Psychology was not much better than that in terms of the seriousness. It was more like writing sophisticated novels in my mind, but it did open my mind to think in different ways. One week I was more Freudian in my mind. Another week I applied Hegelian philosophy to psychological issues, all kinds of things. It was really, I think, a period from my sophomore year into my junior year that began a change in the structure of my mind and the way I asked questions and the way I looked at the world that has became, has served me well. I think I've actually matured in that over the years. I find there's a whole community of heterodoxical thinkers. There's a website you may have heard of called Quillette, with some people calling it, oh, this is a conservative website. It's the opposite of a conservative website. It is the most liberal website when you use the term liberal correctly. It's a liberal-minded website that where no question is out of bounds for them. As long as the writer is willing to challenge it in a thoughtful way, and that's my community right there. I love that place, and I think that that's what we need more of. People who are willing to go where the evidence takes them, even if it ends up overturning their own prejudices that they've built over years and years of a belief system. They have to be willing to change. Okay. Let me push you again to answer my question. What was the date of your transformative spiritual experience? What was the month, what was the year, and what was the place? It happened mostly, I think, in New Hampshire. Like I said, I dropped out of college to work for George McGovern. When the campaign was over, I briefly went home, got a construction job, and then decided I really love New Hampshire. I wanted to spend the summer there. I got a job in, it's 1973. I got a job, 1972 rather, at an inn working as a helper. I got the top floor where I had about 60 books. I ran every one of them. I was reading a book or three a week. I think that summer is when I came to a realization that I think differently about the world. Changed my college experience. I was a mediocre student, bumbling by, and suddenly whatever I wanted to get an A at, I got an A at because my mind was different. It actually absorbed information, like a sponge. And before, I was like in a hand-to-hand combat with information, and it was getting. You were 20 years of age. Yeah. And so you'd been in college for two years at this point? Two years, yes. And what were the drugs that you take that played a role in this transformation? Well, I hadn't taken drugs in a year by that point. The drugs I took were really my freshman year. And so drugs didn't play any real role in that other than it started me on the process of, I think, questioning a bit more. So I think the last drugs I took were probably the summer before, and I had done no marijuana, no acid, nothing. But the the overturning of my worldview began, was seeded the year before with drugs beginning to fracture some of my, I don't think I had a worldview so much. I was just an unreflected person. I only realized how much I didn't have a worldview is what the realization was. And I didn't need a worldview where everything fits together. I need a worldview that by its very nature was about dialogue, dialogue in your brain, dialogue with ideas, challenging things in a respectful way, and always being open to learning and learning from people who you thought you didn't agree with. I remember what's one thing that started this was the year before when I was coming down from an acid. It might have been the last time I took acid. And I was in a park in Denver, I had hitchhiked out to Denver with a friend of mine, we're going to a conference in Aspen. We had organized these things called walks against hunger in our community and raised $100,000 in my freshman year in college for these benefits. And I, as I was coming down to my acid trip, if you know anything about how acid works, it's kind of a weird disassociated period where you're kind of connected to reality and not. And I got kind of challenged by someone who was a Jesus freak. And I was, you know, as a Jewish kid who rejected religion, and the idea of adopting Christianity as my religion was, would have been an anathema to me. And I said, John, you are in the beginnings of a journey. You have to open your mind up to any way of thinking. If it's credible, and it really resonates, that's what you want. That's the kind of person you wanted to be. So I was already on that path. And I said, I'm now going to explore, this is what turned me into being a religion major. I'm going to explore Christianity in a respectful way, rather than, oh, who can possibly believe that Jesus was resurrected? It doesn't make sense. I'm just missing this religion out of hand. And so it set me on a path of questioning probably my deepest prejudices that I thought of Christianity as an unbelievable concept. It didn't ultimately matter whether Jesus had to have been resurrected and the truth of Jesus' life. If we all know anything about Christian history, and I talk a lot about it in my book, Abraham's Children, Christianity easily could have evolved in a different way where Jesus was a prophet. That's what the Alexandria wing of the early Christian movement wanted. They didn't see Jesus as the Son of God. They saw him as a prophet. Then there was the other wing, which is driven by the conservative factions. And ultimately, the conservative factions won. And the idea of Jesus as prophet was relegated to the dustbin of history. So anyway, I was challenged emotionally, spiritually, everything. That was the beginning so. What was the name of the inn that you walked out in New Hampshire? The Lime Inn, L-Y-M-E. It's 10 miles north of Hanover. And how long were you dropped out of college for? You took a semester or a year? And one of the reasons I went to the Lime Inn is because it was right near Dartmouth. And I ended up taking summer classes at Dartmouth and essentially caught up with my class. So I ended up graduating on time. You took a semester off, is that? I took a semester off and then did a summer school to catch up. Did the experience of sex have a transformative effect? Of sex? Yes. I assume I had sex in college and that often changes people. No, I was fairly conservative. I don't think I had an air course until my until my second year, probably much well behind others. So hopefully I made up for lost time, but I don't think that was an issue in my transformation about how I view anything, no. But it happened right before your transformation? No, it happened in the middle of it, I would say. I don't think there's any relationship correctly. Okay, interesting. Who was the first person to notice your transformation? I was pretty profound. You could see my whole demeanor had changed. Everybody around me, when I came back to college after having been out for a semester, in other words I left in whatever December of 1971 and came back in September of 1972, everyone saw that I had changed a lot. I felt more confident and suddenly I also had a ton more friends as a result of this, but I didn't feel I have to prove anything anymore. I felt really confident in my own skin. I think for the first time in my life, I think a lot of us go through identity crises and a sense of self-discovery in college, thankfully I had the opportunity to do that. I didn't have to work during college. I did. I had a full-time job my freshman year, working 20 hours a week in television, writing and editing and producing the 11 p.m. news for the local NBC station. So I was very involved in television journalism for a long, long time. But yeah, it was very transformative. But you don't remember the first person who noticed that you transformed? You have this profound inner experience. Then the first person who notices, I would think that you might remember that because now you're realizing that what you're experiencing is really shining out. Well, I could tell you that within a month of coming back, I developed an amazing relationship with a woman who became my college girlfriend and was the first adult, post-high school adult-like romance of my life. So yeah, that was pretty profound. She knew me beforehand. She didn't like me, but she suddenly saw all these qualities in me. But part of that is just getting to know someone. So I think that was probably the most profound. Was there anyone in your teens or 20s who had a pretty good inkling of the direction of your life, perhaps sharper than you did at the time? Yeah, I think so. I had a really good friend who was 10 years older than me. He was an out-of-the-box thinker. A guy named David Gelber came quite famous for a lot of his documentary work. Worked for 60 minutes. When I met him, he was just beginning to work in TV as a producer, but he was in his 30s. I was in my 20s. He had done a lot of political action stuff. He had been involved as part of the hippie activist social justice movement of the 1960s. I found him a really interesting guy and an out-of-the-box thinker as well. I think we bonded. Like I said, he was 10 years older. I didn't think it was a mental relationship. I think it was two close friends. He respected me and I respected him, but he was very influential, I think, in my formative years. So he saw a direction? I mean, what did he see? What did he say? Where did he say you were going? Well, he just saw me as someone who really cared about journalism in the fullest sense of the word. That's really what it is. I'm a little uncomfortable in some of the directions we're going in because I'm not that special. There's a lot of people who think independently. I'm lucky enough that the things that I am writing about are ones that are in popular consciousness right now, popular debate. So I'm going to do my best to create a genuinely constructive discussion around issues that have historically been taboo. I don't mean the black-white differences so much. I mean, even, you know, I have no problem calling out Trumpites in the genetic litosuit project, but I have no problem calling out the political correctness that affects the left either. So one day I see tweets saying, oh my god, the GLP, did they lose its soul? And the next day I said, wow, that was an amazing takedown of those awful whatever. And I think that's what we want to be. We want to, wherever the facts take us, take no prisoners and ultimately hope people will respect you for your honesty and integrity, even if they don't agree with you. Often mentioned how liberal you are. I assume that you mentioned this as a reflex because pretty much everyone in your, most people in your social circle or social class regard being liberal equals good person. And so I just noticed this reflex in your rhetoric. Am I touching on anything important? Well, I think I have a great respect for conservatism. I just don't have a respect for Trumpism. I think Trumpism is a disease. And it's a real rejection of things that I believe in. I'm a free thinker. I'm a classic free thinker. Classic free thinkers embrace conservative ideas as well as liberal ideas. I have no problem to say that Ronald Reagan, although I didn't agree with everything that he did, was a great president because he pushed back in a thoughtful way against excesses. And that's my kind of thinker. And I don't have to agree with everything that he said. So I deal in a lot of circles where there's a lot of conservatives. And I know the difference between a faux conservative, one who's just a liberal rejectionist versus one who's actually, like Charles Murray, for instance, who are people of reason magazine, which is, I would say, a moderate conservative or libertarian, modest, right viewpoint, where they're great friends of mine. And I embrace a lot of their viewpoints on things. And a lot of the positions I take, I'm very pro fracking because I'm concerned about climate change. I'm very nuclear energy because I'm concerned about climate change. And I think these are two incredibly important tools in the toolbox. And although I support innovation in solar and wind and alternative energy projects, I'm not foolish enough to believe that we can abandon fossil fuels, not only for environmental reasons and economic reasons, but for geopolitical reasons. And so, all my friends are conservatives, not liberals. But what I think what I hate about the Trump administration and Trumpers, a lot of them, is that they're illiberal in the same way that a lot of liberals are illiberal. So I'm not afraid to call it out. But I am, generally speaking, I'd say I'm a Trump rejectionist, but I'm not a, I wouldn't call myself a liberal, but for better or for worse, I use the term filled with all these caveats that go along with it. How did you assemble your book on Jews and genetics? I mean, you must have been delving into a lot of academic material and you don't have a PhD in genetics. So who do you know who to trust when say you've got competing geneticists saying opposite things? Well, I think actually, I mean, if you go on Amazon reviews, for instance, I don't know, there's been 105 reviews, I think 90 of them are five star reviews. It's not, wasn't nearly as controversial in its own way. It was deeply deeply out of the box, but it's disguised in a historical wrapper. A lot of what I tried to do was tell the history of the three Abrahamic religions through the prism of genetics, and then had a lot of side subjects as a result of that. So a lot of it was just understanding history was reading the Quran and reading the Christian Bible and aspects of the Jewish Bible and the Torah for the first time and reading it through and trying to understand it. And then I, you know, it's like I did with taboo. I literally talked to hundreds and hundreds of of experts in the field, some of whom were academics and some of whom were not. And really I have a great confidence, I don't think it's arrogance, in being able to weigh and distill ideas. I definitely have a narrative in those, but I don't find people challenge the narrative, but I'm very transparent in the narrative. You can feel what I'm saying and how I back it up. And when I'm taking a position on something, I lay it out there. I don't try to pretend that I'm not taking a position. So it was easy with that with my attitude. I had no problem finding heterodoxical thinkers among the religious world, among ethicists and in other areas. It was fun. I rarely do you learn so much in writing something. I learned a lot. I mean, I had read the frigging major religious tomes of Western civilization. It's an abomination. I really think the world would be better if everybody was required to do the great books series for their first year or two in college. Everybody should read stuff going back from, you know, the Greek and Roman periods all the way through today and probably sprinkle it in with some more politically correct things of today. But that would shape people's minds and open them up to different viewpoints. Because I think this cancel culture, political correctness that has taken over academia and infected the national news media is so anti-liberal, really, when you come down to it. It's fake liberalism to actually autocratic. And there is a line between here and Orwell if we're not careful. So you mentioned that you're able to find heterodox thinkers. Well, what happened in your research when you found heterodox thinkers on one side and anti-heterodox thinkers on the other? How were you able to judge that? Because if you had a chance to read the books, a lot of what I ask are, here are the different dimensions of it. And here's why I'm choosing this line of thinking. In other words, it wasn't a polemic, it was a discussion. And that's a really different way of writing a book. So you will understand the multiple sides of an issue in reading the book, no matter where I go. It's not like I selectively, it's not an ideological treatise. It's not like reading the crap that's generated by the far left in journalism today or even discussing things like GMOs or vaccines or whatever. It's discussing all the points of view. I'm not afraid to guide people towards a viewpoint that I support, but it's done transparently so they understand. People can read what I've written, I think, and disagree with me, but we respectful the fact that I actually helped lead them to a different perspective on it because I provided enough of the texture and context to make that happen. And what led you to start the Genetic Literacy Project? I've been writing about genetic issues. I've been holding a lot of conferences on it. I started a sustainability consultancy called ESG, Media Metrics, Environmental Social and Governance. I was very influential, I think, in getting involved in early ways to look at what sustainability really means. I actually coined the term greenwashing as it's currently used. There was a version of it before I started using it, and I coined it going after the far left supporting what was called the Corporate Social Investing Movement, which really rejected big business and glorified small businesses like the Ben & Jerry's and the body shops of the world. I thought that was incredibly simplistic. I thought their hearts were in the right place, but their minds were not. And that's why I coined the term greenwashing because it's now used as a term to describe large corporations would do it, but I use the term and it's the first time in circulation. I've been credited by a number of places as well for applying it to small up-and-coming organizations that in their minds were doing the right thing, but if you actually examine their practices, some of them were haywire and wrong. So I had been writing about that for years. In 2001, I became a columnist for a magazine called Ethical Corporation, which I was allowed. I was the chief columnist and their most red person. In fact, I did a conference this morning with the founder of that magazine on how to bring sustainability to the wine industry. And I was the one who basically said we have to scrap ideological terms like organic and regenerative agriculture and agroecology. Those are just marketing buzzwords with no content and therefore no science credibility. If we are genuinely concerned about sustainability, which has its own definitional problems, to be honest, we have to get outside the ideological box. So I was writing about agriculture, I was writing about sustainable world, and I was still in the afterglow of my book on Jewish genetics and Jewish diseases, and also the afterglow of my book Taboo, which is still in print and still sells a couple thousand copies a year. So everything came together. I started writing some articles and I was actually approached by two foundations who knew of me because I had no idea how to even start a nonprofit. And one was the Templeton Foundation, which really is fascinated by the intersection of religion in a non-dogmatic way, religion meaning religious feelings, spirituality, not necessarily Christianity, Judaism, Islam. So they saw me as a very interesting person who combined those two worlds. And also the Searle Foundation, which like the Ford Foundation doesn't just support things involving the auto industry, it's a foundation founded by the Searle family but supported a wide range of causes. And they both encouraged me to start and I think I got $175,000 grant the first year to pay for my salary and to hire a staff. And I started writing and then really kicked it up a notch around 2015 or so. And I've really been found very rewarding to push against windmills perhaps, but to challenge popular thinking on things like genetics and disease and things like genetics and agriculture. Would one way of understanding your work over the past two, three decades, is that you're a translator for abstract researchers and you're taking their work and making it understandable for regular people? I think that's perfect. That's definitely that and the out of the box thinking in a contrarian way about what a lot of other people think are are settled viewpoints. I think those you've captured between those two things you would have captured what I'm all about, what I care about. And I mean just take an example, I think to most people organic means good. And I think to most academics in a related field, they say the word has no meaning. Is that fair? It both has no meaning and has a rigid ideological meaning. I mean I say to people, you know, do you think communicating by telegraph should be required? Because that is the best way to communicate with dots and dashes and telegraph machines. And they look at me like, you know, we're far beyond that. We went to the telephone and then we went to the internet and now we have all these amazing ways to communicate. I said, hmm, isn't it interesting in communications we have evolved over the past 100 years, yet we embrace that superior technology in agriculture that's 100 years old? Wouldn't it be true that although some some of the ideas and organics might be of interest and might inform us in a certain ideological way like soil health is an important thing that one of the main tenets of organic agriculture, its practices are kind of harebrained from a 20, 2021 viewpoint. And when you start looking at it that way, you realize it's an ideology. It's not a set of principles. It's a way of thinking. It's really, it's kind of very Orwellian, you know, out there group thing. The main thing that came out of the conference I did today, and there were two wine growers there, one in from France and one from Germany. And both of them were like, this guy knows what he's talking about. We, as far as they're concerned, they have to be out in the real world. And they think, although they try to get organic status certification on some of the things they do, they do that because that's the ideological world they live in in Europe. But they hate it. They think it's gone off the rails. And they think that we should be focusing on what are the best solutions. It doesn't matter if it comes from the organic world or if it comes from conventional agriculture and the application of biotechnology. We're all about solutions and organics and agroecology and another new buzzword. And frankly, even the word sustainability, if you're not careful, are really about imposing a set of standards which were formulated 100 years ago. And that's the definition of insane, really. I have a lot of friends who think that which is natural is good. And I don't even know how to begin to deal with what seems to me a generally absurd position. How do you deal with this mindset that that which is natural is good, and that which is artificial like COVID vaccines is therefore bad? Yeah, I mean, I'm just going to use the coronavirus. Therefore, coronaviruses are good. And all the vaccines which are all biotechnology based are bad. Basically, if they're that locked into that kind of thinking, there's no way around it, they're just lost souls. But I always say, oh, good, I'm going to make you a Listeria burger and you tell me how good natural is, I'm going to make you a little E. coli salad. And you tell me how good that is. Every year, according to Wikipedia, not necessarily the most reliable source, over 200 people die from food poisoning from natural and organic products in the United States. How many people died in the history of the world from biotechnology in agriculture? It's a big, big round zero. And we're talking and when I say the 200th, that's in the United States alone. So, you know, the myth of naturalism, it's a religion. Naturalism is the pagan religion of our times, promoted by liberals is what it is. And it's sad. It's also embraced by many conservatives as well, to be honest. Organics is so overwhelming a subject that you have organic fanatics among the among the right as well as you have among the left, even though it's more among the left. No question. I have an impossible time feeling sympathy for those who advocate that mainstream vaccines, say for adults, should not be taken. I can't sympathize with that perspective. I think the the anti-vax perspective is absolutely insane. How do you look at anti-vaxes? It's fascinating what's what's going on. The anti-vax movement was primarily a liberal movement about three or four years ago. They I think it was Pew did a survey on which are the counties in the United States that were most anti-vaccine in terms of based on their on some voting patterns on various things. And out of the top five, four were around San Francisco collar counties, all extremely liberal, like 80 percent Democrats. And one was the Jewish Orthodox community in Queens, which is not liberal, but but is just as rigid minded. I mean, it shows that the what links the Jewish Orthodox community and the liberal community in the collar of San Francisco is that they're both rigid, rigid thinking people. So it became a philosophy. Your admission into the liberal party was to what was to say that you think everything should be natural and vaccines were obviously not natural. And so therefore it's something of suspicion that obviously became a favorite of the Hollywood crowd. It became a favorite of really one of the most sad stories of the past 50 years in terms of how low and far and unmoored a person can go. But Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is a vaccine denial par excellence, but he also has rich as hell. So he finances anti-vaccine movements. But what's so interesting is the moment that Trump became the symbol of vaccine rejectionism. You don't hear a peep from the liberal anti-vaccine community, except for some you do some of the some of the very few, but so much more muted because vaccine rejectionism is now called is now associated with Trumpism. And if you're pro vaccine, you're really pro biotech bioengineering. I mean, what makes those every single one is a different type of bioengineering, whether it's the Moderna mRNA or Pfizer mRNA or the more traditionally biotech version of it. And it's like insulin, which is biotech created. It's an application in the medical field of biotechnology, but the same way you create a biotech crop is the exact same way you create a biotech vaccine in its earliest stages. So now anti-vaccination has become associated with Trumpism. And it is to a large degree. But frankly, it has its roots in the need jerk delusionary world of the liberal elite. Now, I also have friends who think if you live in the city, you're useless and that all good people live in the country. I guess this is another aspect of that which is natural is great. And that which is unnatural is bad. I don't know if you encounter this kind of thinking. I don't know even where to begin. I don't think people are inherently good or bad based on whether they live in the city, the suburbs or the country. No, I think there's a difference in terms of education levels. The city tends to be a magnet for more educated people. But education can only take you so far. And there are also plenty of educated people that live outside the city and plenty of people with a less education that are living in urban areas. So we are, we're talking about tendencies there. And look, no one has a patent on stupidity if it happens in all ideologies. I just wish we didn't have this political fascism coming from the political left. And we didn't have Trumpism, which to me is dangerous anti-intellectual anarchy. And they're two peas in a pod. It's a shame. Now, your comment section policy, are people allowed to make the case against vaccines in the comment section of the genetic literacy project? We allow anything where they're citing real sources, but if they're linking to junkscience.com, we'll delete it. In other words, if they're linking to, they link to Joe Merkola, who's an anti-vaxxer, we're not going to allow that on our site. No. But we will, someone who has a coherent argument, and if they have the rare opportunity to link it to something that is coherent, we put it on. I was criticized two days ago because I read an article that appeared in Scientific American, but it really embraced the far left rejection of conventional agriculture. And I didn't agree with the article at all, but I did read the study. And although I didn't agree with the interpretation of the study, I thought it was well done and transparently presented. And so I decided, although I didn't agree with this conclusion, it really graded against me, I thought it's our obligation to our readers to present heterodoxical viewpoints, again, even ones that I don't support, if they're well articulated. And I got a lot of blowback, some former ally of mine, and may still be, I don't know, but who's even hijacked by? Is he now getting seed money from the organic industry? You obviously know I never care about the organic industry, but it's just amazing. People are so much in their silos that they're afraid of other ideas. You don't have to agree with something to try it on for size, because sometimes it begins to change if only on the fringes your viewpoints. So that's what I subscribe to. And I think I've infused my staff with that commitment. What are the standards for what appears on your genetic literacy project? Good journalism. I mean, I think it's what, you know, if I want to get an article in Slate, I've had maybe four or five articles in Slate told by the Washington Post. What are the standards? If an editor likes my article and approves it, it gets in. If an editor doesn't like it, it doesn't get in. I have a staff, and if we like the articles, based on the principles I've articulated, and we try to be honest brokers, we don't always agree, but then we try to reach a consensus ultimately, it gets in. I mean, you can't predict ahead of time. You have to see how someone executes a story. Has modern agricultural practices increased or decreased the nutritional value of food? Both. I think the commoditization of food and processed food has definitely degraded nutritional values. We don't eat as much fresh or fresh frozen. Fresh frozen is actually better than fresh in many cases because you freeze in nutrients at a certain point and they don't deteriorate. For instance, although frozen food, frozen vegetables are considered processed food, they're actually more nutritious than most fresh vegetables because by the time the fresh vegetables, you buy them, bring them home, and then cook them, they've lost more nutritional value, which was actually frozen, locked in when you freeze it. So again, that's heterodoxical to say that, but if your interest is the highest value nutrition, sometimes that kind of processed food is a better choice. So yeah, overall, we eat more junk food. We drink things like diet coke, and it's not so good for you. So yeah. Wait a second. Diet sodas. I mean, I don't think there's anything that's been as exhaustively studied as diet soda, and it just does not seem to be any strong evidence that this is bad for you. No, I think the only thing that might be bad for you is that it does a little trickery on your insulin levels and also on your brain's ability to feel satisfied. So there's some fragmentary evidence, which I think I'm pretty persuaded by actually, that if you drink a lot of a lot of diet, it actually, you don't necessarily, you make it up by eating more fattening foods. It doesn't, the calories get shifted because of your brain's desire and needs. That said, it also has caffeine, which can't be great for you. But then again, look at, we have this booming industry of caffeine shots that people take all the time. I'm a classic, like I said, I used to be a Platonist in my worldview. I'm much more Aristotelian now. There was a politician, which ran John Hightower. Jim Hightower, I think it was in California, no, in Texas for Attorney General many years ago, 25 years ago. And some people criticized him because they said he was not moderate enough. He was too left. And he says the only thing that's good in the middle of the road are right wing politicians or unsuccessful politicians and dead armadillos. And I'm not about to be a dead armadillo. That said, I think I play the dead armadillo lane these days. And I'm looking for solutions. I don't care if they come from the left or the right. How did Plato and Aristotle differ on diet soda? That's a good question. I guess I'll have to go to the world resource for that and Google it. But wait, you'd said you used to be a Platonist with regard to diet soda. Then you became an Aristotelian with regard to diet soda. And I don't understand. My point is, is that I think everything in moderation. Aristotle said everything in moderation. That's his basic viewpoint. He really believed that a more moderate way of looking at things tends to be a more successful way. It was something in my more radical youth, I believed that. I didn't believe that so much. And even now, I believe every once in a while, social change is only going to happen when you push the margins. But generally speaking, I'm just a great believer in diversity and dialogue. And that comes from being willing to see the world through your enemies, who you think are your ideological enemies viewpoint, and undermine them, if you don't agree with them, by actually acknowledging what parts of their argument carry some real weight. Don't be a rejectionist. Don't throw everything out the window just because you're someone you don't respect, espouses a perspective. How did the genetic literacy project deal with COVID? Our focus is on disinformation, not just on information. So we're not reporting on the GWIS latest development, although we did talk a lot about it, but we really got into the anti vaccination movement, denialism about how to deal with containment issues, anything where there was a bubbling controversy among scientists or in the press, that was our sweet spot. And it's been enormously beneficial in increasing the visibility of our site. It's been actually a fun ride. And the whole anti vaccine movement. I remember I was in a number of meetings last May or June, right when they were talking about, oh, vaccines could actually happen. We're funding these are some early research showing it's good. And I was telling my friends and people in policy circles, you wait, there's going to be a huge percentage of the American population upwards of 20%, maybe as high as 40% who aren't going to get vaccinated. They say, that's ridiculous. There's not it's not that hard. I said, I know the anti vaccination movement. And right now it's liberal. And I even said it that now, but it's going to become associated with political divisions and it's going to become conservative. And it's going to be out there and they're going to people who are going to reject it. And they poo pooed me. And even some of those people have come back and said, you were totally right. I didn't anticipate how rejectionists, a large segment of the American population was going to be. So I think overall, we've never had so little trust in our leading institutions. I think that's what surveys show that there's been a steady decline in trust in institutions such as big pharma, big agriculture, the politicians, the academy, the news media. So do you agree that that in your lifetime, we've never had so little trust by the general public in our elite institutions? And if so, is this a problem? And do you have any solutions? I totally agree with you. It is a problem. And I fear that it will get worse rather than better. I would like to think that this is a phase that we're going through. But I think, unfortunately, social media and the balkanization of ideas that's created that even the smallest opinion could have a fairly influential following means that this will continue. I don't see this as a phase we're going through and that we're going to snap back into this era of comedy, COMITY, and negotiation. I think it'll become increasingly balkanized. And I fear that we're going to become Europe. I do like a two-party system. I think it forces people to the middle and to accommodate. But I think because both of the parties have moved to their respective edges, that it will ultimately breed a three- and four-party system. I know that sounds impossible because we have 200 years of history where that's only happened a few times and it's always disappeared. I cannot imagine we're going to get through the 30s, get through the 2020s without a serious, fairly permanent third or maybe fourth party develop. Well, I think during COVID, we've lessened trust. I think Americans due to the COVID experience can have less trust in government, less trust in the CDC, less trust in the FDA, less trust in the media, less trust in our politicians. And here's my tiny little solution for a way back that if you're in an elite position and you come forward with a public statement, you try to place it in proper context of how much you know. So instead of saying, we're going to govern according to science, I mean, science is so huge and amorphous. You say, okay, based on the following studies, I recommend that people wear a face mask. Though, to be honest, we don't know this much. And there are these contrary points of view. And I think that there needs to be more full disclosure on the part of the elites and to come forward more openly and honestly, with the basis for why they're making these proclamations. And then when they change their mind, come forward and be open and honest, say, okay, three months ago, I made a proclamation that you should not wear a face mask. Now, I am saying something different. Here's the reasons that I'm saying something different. So do you have any thoughts on healing the distrust between regular Americans and the elites? Yeah, I wish it was as easy as I don't think I'm not criticizing you, but it's not as easy as that you sort of sketch it out to me. Because there's a vested interest, just to use the example that you said, where Fauci got it wrong in the beginning clearly. He did reverse himself a couple months later. But but now that's become political father for the far right, or the Trumpian right, I would call it's not far right necessarily, the Trumpian right, because it is in their interest to demonize Fauci because he's so closely now associated with the Biden administration. So it'll it'll yield to dividends for Trumpian Republicans and Republicans in general, who also are doing it even mainstream Republicans who wouldn't necessarily call them Trumpian. So the incentives are out of whack. And I don't I don't see any way those incentives will get back in whack. I think that we are hopelessly balkanized and I don't see a road back. I don't mean to sound too pessimistic, but I just don't see it. What if the President of the United States in an analogous situation in the future said, we don't know very much about this current situation, our history with what seems to be this type of pandemic is that these measures may very well work. We have experts who are telling us different things. What do you think about that sort of approach to make some kind of what do you think of that approach versus the approach that we got during COVID where you get these pronouncements as though it was God speaking to us. This is the science. Yeah, it happened on both sides. It happened on the on the on the on the so-called COVID scientists from whether it was from the CDC or the critics of the CDC and the administration. It also of course came from Trump. I think that that's that that's would be a wise nuanced president. And I actually think it would gain a lot of credibility if they had the personality to pull that off. I think Biden would want wants to do that. I don't think he's the sharpest knife in the drawer. He never was I thought he was very mediocre senator all those years. And I think he is a very well meaning person. I think he has those emotional instincts, but he's not an articulate guy. And I don't think he's going to be capable. And it's and he's been too politicized already by a combination of his diehard opponents and a handful of missteps. So yeah, that would be a dream leader. Can that kind of person even get elected today? I don't know. Would the Democrats nominate someone who's to talk like that with the with the with the Trumpian Republican Party nominate someone who who doesn't salute Trumpian ideology? I don't think the answer to both of those is no. So I that's why I don't at this point, I don't see much any transcendent figures. It would have to be a very, very interesting personality who could who could think out of the box and and really capture people. But the danger of that is that usually you find that in demagogues. Some people who are just rhetorically brilliant and and but have have have the elite conveyed the illusion of of mindfulness. So I don't know. I I sound discouraged because I am discouraged. What what is science as as it is used in in the news media as we hear it on CNN or Fox like follow the science? What the heck? What is science? Yeah, science is not a science is not a set of answers. Science is a set of questions. Science is the way you approach things. People don't understand. They think they say science that people associate use the use the term to mean facts. And what it really should be is a term to describe the process of evaluating things. It's evidence base and new evidence comes and new evidence comes along. And if it challenges it, you suddenly put put the f okay box around a set of conclusions. And as the evidence increases, you either bend in that idea and adopt another one, or you get more fully invested in a certain conclusion. Science is a methodology of inquiry. It's not a set of facts. And until people understand that when you say you believe in science, what you believe is an evidence based thinking. And that's a whole lot different from what other people mean when they say science, they believe you believe in my facts. And that's not what it is. In what in what social context does the phrase we need to follow the science have meaning? None. I mean, in other words, I think it's used as you have to follow what I'm telling you. That's what that's the way it's used. Follow the science means you have to be open to new evidence. And and that's not that's not the way it's mostly used either by the media, or frankly, by a lot of officials that talk about it. I mean, from the beginning, if some people had talked the way you described what a wise politician would say, I think that that whoever that person was would have enormous public sway in dampening down concerns and tiptoeing us towards, you know, embraceable solutions. Do you think big tech should should try to squelch, say anti vaccine opinions? Yeah, it's a tough one. I mean, I, we've seen some of our news minded posts censored on Facebook, for instance, when they're really benign. And frankly, if someone, if someone other than a a bot trained by the algorithms generated by a large corporation, you know, it was it's censorship. So I'm a mixed minds about this. I definitely believe that that there are things that are that are dangerous. I think the internet is a purveyor of disinformation. But it's also an impossible place to not only to to police, but by its very nature, it's horribly selective. And will reflect the values and the ideology of the people doing the policing. So I would err on the side of the same reason, you know, I support the ACLU or on the side of having speech that I don't like as a way to preserve speech that I think is really empowering to people. So yes, I think it's gone too far. Do we have to draw? Could we be willing to draw lines somewhere? Yeah. And I sympathize, empathize actually with with, you know, corporations that control Facebook or Twitter, in that they're feeling like they want to be responsible. Where you draw that line is, I'm thankful I don't have to make that decision. Or you do for your operation. I mean, you draw lines all the time, I assume. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I said I put on our site what I want, what we as a staff want to put on the site. So I won't put on things that I determine that we determine because I'm not the only one making the decision that we determine is drivel or dangerous. Did we put on a lot of things questioning the origins of the COVID vaccine? We have to have we put on things that question the left-wing criticism of the Trump administration. We did. Did we put in things critical of some of the outrageous things that Trump perpetrated on a regular basis? We did. And so I guess our way of dealing with it, it's kind of maybe a Clinton, Bill Clinton triangulation strategy, is if you put what you think is the most thoughtful things from perspective, different perspectives, some of which you don't fully agree with, then you're creating the conversation that you hope for and you hope for the best. Let me think for a second. I had this brilliant question. Oh, yes. What are you intellectually excited about these days? Sorry, it's probably my daughter calling. I don't know who it is. Probably a scam call. What are you excited about these days, intellectually excited? What's compelling your attention? What are you eager to know more about? What's driving you? What gets you powering through the day on an intellectual basis? As discouraged as I am by the divisiveness and vulcanization of public discourse in the United States, I am ultimately a bridge builder and I am excited about educating to the best of my ability people to open their minds to out-of-the-box solutions to a wide range of things because I'm less interested in whether you're applying it to GMO foods or vaccines, but I consider my what most excites me is teaching people how to think differently and to try on unconventional ideas in a respectful and open way. Like it's why I said I was excited to stumble on Quillette about a year ago, a year and a half ago. I've been around for about three or four years but I didn't know about it and suddenly I feel, oh my god, I feel like I'm back in college again and I'm challenging my intellectual status quo and I'm just convinced that the more you can open up people's eyes to think out of their rigid, narrow lanes, the more hope you have in challenging some of the intractable problems that we have. So in essence, despite the fact that I was espousing pessimism, I'm excited about the world of ideas and the ability of ideas to inspire and change. What's the last book that got you excited? The last what? The last book that you read that got you excited. I'm reading a book right now about telling the story of a parallel story of families split by the wall going up in East Germany between the East Germans and the West Germans and families that evolved on the East side and the West side. And it's an amazing story of the dangers of in that case far left thinking because that's what East Germany was. It was the left gone wild and it was both apropos for what we're experiencing today in terms of the division between leftist thinking and right-wing thinking. But it also was hopeful because what came through was this incredible humanity that existed from people from incredibly diverse ideologies. And it is very hopeful reading that book that human connection can help us overcome the divisiveness spread by ideological autocracy. Are there any academics who you're excited about these days? You just stumbled on their paper or you just happened to have a conversation with one? I like Michael Shermer always. He's the founder, editor, and publisher of Skeptic Magazine. I always love their out-of-the-box thinking so that's a person I respect. And I just open to people willing to challenge hegemonic thinking. I like ideas. He gets me excited and it makes me believe that the world can change. Have you tried smart drugs? Medaphanel, Ritalin or whatever? Nope, nothing. That doesn't intrigue you? I mean I'm sure you've tried caffeine. I have. I have not tried. I've got a 22-year-old daughter so I can't not be exposed to the cannabis generation and still dabble in that very sporadically but certainly not against it. But no, I have a very good friend of mine who's a psychiatrist. He's in my book club and he's become intrigued with psilocybin and mind-expanding drugs even though he's never taken any serious drugs in his life. And so he's been doing reading in preparation for going on some journeys like that. I mean I'm all for it. I'll be happy to hear what comes of it but I guess I'm not inclined to do something like that myself. Do you drink coffee? Not much. Not really. I usually drink decaf coffee when I have it. I like to drink English breakfast tea in the morning or sometimes I drink hot apple cider. Those are my morning treats. So some people talk about a cup of caffeinated coffee as a cup of optimism. What effect does a cup of fully caffeinated coffee have on you if any? Well I think the reason I like Diet Coke besides the fact I'm addicted to its metallic taste is I do get a caffeine boost from it. I don't mind that. It does sometimes hit a lull like a lot of us do in the biarrhythms of the late afternoon. When I want to generate a couple of hours of more productive work I'll drink a little Diet Coke. But you've never thought of trying something like Medaphanel? No. Or Adderall that just doesn't interest you? I'm gonna say it's just not something I thought much about. You know now that you're raising it I'll probably do a little research to spark my curiosity but I haven't really thought much about it. Both thought at all about it actually. Yeah because when I'm at Medaphanel I went from you know eight good cognitive hours a day to 15 good cognitive hours a day. So for me it was life changing. But that's just my thing. What should I ask you that I have not asked you? I think you've covered it at all. I hope you'll cut this down to the 12 minutes it deserves because we've gone on for quite a long time. I don't think I'm not going to tell you how to do your business for sure but that people would I'm not that interesting. I mean I think I have some I think I reflect certain trends in journalism and critical thinking that a lot of people are carrying that torch these days and I would like to be seen as part of that movement rather than some you know. You're not a guru? Are you telling us you're not a guru? My daughter would definitely say I'm not a guru. I could tell you that. She gets the final vote on all these things. Okay thank you so much for your time John Entine. Thank you very much.