Bad Science; Good Science

Welcome to Baked To Differ, The Bulwark weekly round table discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right. I’m Mona Charms, syndicated columnist and policy editor at The Bulwark, and I am joined by our regulars, Bill Galston of The Bookings Institution and The Wall Street Journal. Linda Chavez of the miss Gannon Center and Damon Linker who writes the Substack newsletter, eyes on the right. Our special guest this week is Jesse Single, who writes a sub stack newsletter as well called Single Minded, and Jesse is also the co host of the podcast blocked and reported.

So thanks, Jesse, for joining us. Thanks, one and all for being here. We have a lot to get to today. I am particularly excited about the news on nuclear fusion, which we are going to get to. But I am particularly pleased that Jesse is on.

Jesse, I followed your work for a while. And I have to say you have been incredibly conscientious in reporting, but, you know, a fraud topic, namely, what’s the best treatment for trans children? You’ve gotten deep into the science on this, and you’re one of the only people in journalism who’s had the courage to do it and you’ve been rewarded with a lot of accusations of hatred and so on. But I have followed you and I detect nothing but care and concern about getting it right. So congratulations for the work you’ve done.

I’d like you to just give a quick walk through of where we are because a number of European countries are sort of scaling back their approach to the gender affirmation model of treatment because they’re concerned about this potential side effects and our sort of medical and sort of culture is not there yet. We’re afraid to say that the Europeans may be right or something. What’s your sense of this?

Well, Mona, thank you for having me. Thank you for the kind words. I should say that there’s been a lot of drama, obviously, in covering the subject, a lot of toxicity. I I do feel like also been rewarded for it, frankly, with the way my podcast and and newsletter has grown. So I try not to I definitely don’t feel like not

to be a guest on Big to do.

Except most I was I was gonna get to that. The the highest highest accolade of all, short of maybe a Nobel Prize, but look, it’s a really complicated fraud subject. I think a lot of people on both sides have kids best interest at heart. It’s hard to sum up easily. I think the best place to start is this clinic in the Netherlands that really pioneered this approach where if a kid has severe and persistent gender dysphoria, This is the so called Dutch clinic.

You put them on puberty blockers, which as the name implies, will stall their puberty. And then if they continue to feel that way, you put them on cross section hormones, which will cause them to develop some of the secondary sex characteristics of the other sex. So that’s been going on there in sort of a routine way since a little after the turn of the century. They have some of the best data available on the outcomes for a cohort of young people who are now, I think, in their thirties, who started getting treatment around that time. Even that data is not great.

The data does not scream out that these are incredible treatments that they have great evidence behind them. And that data comes from a very important context, which is a Dutch clinic that took physical transition very slowly by the standards of many American clinics today. Like you had months of assessment, you were only allowed to transition if you had a supportive family, if your other mental health issues were under control, and if you were just a good candidate for serious medical treatment. So a big part of the problem is that a lot of activists and unfortunately doctors are taking this little sliver of evidence from the Dutch and they’re applying them to an American setting where I think, especially as a recent Reuters investigation revealed, a lot of doctors are not that careful about prescribing puberty blockers and hormones and in some cases they’ll do it on the very first visit. So in a context like that where a trans kid shows up at clinic and gets prescribed blockers or hormones immediately, it’s not an exaggeration to say that that is a completely experimental treatment protocol.

We have zero data on that. The decent data we have, which is not overwhelmingly positive, comes from settings where kids are assessed very carefully over months basically. Please. So that’s the short version. I’m happy to talk about whatever angle this you want.

And the careful way of approaching this is to do a complete psychological evaluation and make sure that they are not rushing to the diagnosis of gender dysphoria. They need to rule out other things. And so on. I mean, there was a really good piece by two psychologists, Laura Edwards Lipper and Erica Anderson that was published last year in the Washington Post. Laura Edwards, LEAPER started, I think, one of the first trans clinics in the United States, and Erica Anderson is a trans person herself and they wrote a really cautionary piece about how there’s this in American medicine right now, there is a rush to prescribe puberty blockers and other aggressive treatments including so called top surgery where girls’ breasts are removed as they transition to being boys.

And, you know, at fifteen or sixteen years old, I mean, it’s not crazy to say that that’s too young to make such a life altering decision. And in any event, so part of the problem, Jesse, as you’ve been very good about, pointing out, is that people on the right have been awful. Whereas the left sort of labels anybody who disagrees or who raises questions about this protocol as being a hater or wanting to deny the trans people exist or wanting people to die, which you constantly hear. On the right, they’re sort of saying, well, nobody should get these treatments or the heavy hand of the state should come in and outlaw these kinds of treatments that some red states are doing. And so people get sort of locked into their corners and afraid to acknowledge reality.

But one of the problems is that the science, as you say, is not settled. So people like John Oliver, you know, you really took apart John Oliver and John Stewart where you, you know, you talked about how they were so smug and so — Yeah. — dismissive of anything that challenged the received narrative. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah. Unfortunately, these two episodes which were released, I think within, like, a week and a half of each other really exemplified everything going wrong with this discourse in progressive spaces. And like you said, there’s this unfortunate push pull thing going on where right wing actions sort of make the left crazier and vice versa. And I’ve I’ve spoken out against these laws banning these treatments. I don’t think that’s the right approach at all.

I think what’s happening in Texas where they’re trying to take out of their parents homes is egregious and and —

Yeah. —

frankly, tyrannical. But you could acknowledge all that while acknowledging that this smug condescending treatment Oliver and Stewart gave to this issue where they basically treated skepticism of youth gender medicine like, you know, skepticism of penicillin or or anthropogenic climate change, like just an unbelievably ignorant position. And in the context, as you’ll hear, if you listen to our whole episode, I should warn what’s long is they got a lot of basic stuff wrong about the science themselves. And unfortunately, there’s this aspect of not really regulatory capture, I guess, activist capture, where you’ll see a newsroom that is clearly only talking to a small subset of activists. And a lot of the lines Oliver and Stewart repeated, including stuff that at this point is totally unproven.

Like puberty blockers being completely reversible, Unfortunately, if you reach out to certain activists, they will, a, tell you that that’s true and b, tell you that anyone who disagrees with that is a big hit or has questionable motives. And I just think know, John Oliver and John Stewart aren’t journalists per se, but their shows clearly are serving a journalistic purpose. The clinicians I have the most faith in have a certain level of humility where they understand development, adolescent development in particular is a dynamic process. And nobody knows how a sixteen year old will feel at age twenty six. And that should make you at least cautious about setting them down roads of permanent medical treatments?

Well, permanent medical treatments that will absolutely make them

sterile. Okay? I mean, I knew plenty of people who when they were in college said they never wanted to have kids for example — Yep. — who then went on to change their minds and have kids. If they had sterilized themselves in some permanent fashion.

In college, they would have lived to regret that decision. You don’t always know what your future self is gonna want or be. And certainly, the idea that a fifteen or sixteen year old knows is I think wrong. I mean, some will, but they obviously need to be careful evaluated. And then you talked to a documentary filmmaker from one of the European countries.

I think it was Finland, but I can’t remember. Who talked about some of the d transitioners, and there was one particular boy who had serious bone damage because of having been put on puberty. Blockers or I mean, this is anecdotal. Obviously, this is one case, but it was interesting. Howard Bauchner: Yeah.

So

this was Carolina Gensby, who’s a Swedish documentary filmmaker and and she won either one of the or the highest award for, I think, documentary filmmaker in Sweden for a It’s been a three or four part series released over years just on this issue on public TV in Sweden, and and she and her team uncovered.

What

certainly looks like a cover up at the Karolinska Hospital, which is one of the most highly rated hospitals in the world, and sort of the the Center for Gender Medicine in Sweden. They have a few other places you can get it, but that’s really the spot. And they found psychological effects or rather kids going on blockers and then being suicidal. Like you said, kids going on blockers and then having bone density problems, which is a known potential issue. There was really sloppy follow-up of keeping an eye on these kids for health issues.

The suicide thing is particularly alarming because we hear over and over that blockers prevent suicidality, which is a claim we frankly have no good evidence for. So it was really bad. And and what I pointed out is that I think America’s healthcare system is frankly worse than Sweden. It’s definitely more decentralized and disorganized. So I think we should have No reason to think that if these sorts of problems are popping up in Sweden, which they are, or in the UK, that’s a different subject, but we know they are there.

Why should we think that American gender clinics, especially those operating away from the spotlight are doing any better work than in these European countries. So I think we have a lot to worry about here, and I think a call for more transparency and open discussion of the pros and cons in the evidence.

Right. And the fact is shutting down debate, which is what the left attempts to do on this issue by saying if you question this at all that you want kids to die of suicide, is really harmful, not just to free and open debate, but it’s harmful to the best interests of those kids. Because we want the science, we want to know. And one of the things you’ve been so good at pointing out is we don’t have the follow-up data, you know. Sometimes they’ll say, oh, these kids have been followed and you point out, no, they haven’t.

I mean, like, one year after double mastectomy and not anything after that and the kids who never return, they don’t keep track of, and it’s very, very shoddy science. It’s

shoddy science. And I’m I’m also worried that

there’s

this mindset among the more enthusiastic clinicians that if a kid shows up at a gender clinic, and they have suicidality, anxiety, depression, and gender dysphoria, it must be the case that gender dysphoria is causing those other conditions rather than vice versa. According to that logic, you should put a kid on blockers and hormones right away. So what I’m sort of worried is happening and what might explain cases where kids go on blockers and then their suicidicality gets worse is just like misdiagnosis or a lack of what’s called differential diagnosis of figuring out exactly what’s causing symptoms. And if you literally just read the quotes of the most enthusiastic clinicians, they’re pretty explicit that they do not believe in comprehensive assess or careful differential diagnosis. They’ll just say so.

It doesn’t require reading any tea leaves. So there’s a big debate among clinicians who call themselves affirming clinicians who do want to help kids transition if they’ll help them. And that debate until recently wasn’t really being covered in mainstream outlets. Do

you think things are improving? Because the New York Times has had a couple of stories recently, you know, delving into this and the economist, Do you sense that the cement is cracking a little? I

do. Yeah. I think these are getting better. John Shane had an article on New York easing’s website I recommend. And he mentioned me, he pointed out that after my Atlantic article came out in twenty eighteen, there was like such a a real attempt at what I call reputational napalm, like, to really

I don’t

wanna sound dramatic, but to basically make it that I couldn’t work again or or be taken at the very least be taken seriously on this subject again. And I he implies and I I agree with this and I think people saw how intense they got, and we’re a little bit scared to cover this subject. And I don’t really blame them. And I’m not I don’t have proof of that. I do know After that, it took years for, like, more journalists to pop up and cover this appropriately.

And since then, yeah, we’ve got The Economist did some good stuff, a ways back also have New York Times has now done multiple good articles covering this, Reuters, Washington Post. So — Yeah. —

I think

things are getting much better. And as Kate points out, you can’t pretend forever that a controversy, which is what this is, is not a controversy. If you just It’s repeated like a mantra that the science is settled. Everyone agrees that’s just not true. And if you keep claiming that people will see through you.

Yep.

Anybody else on the panel want to ask a question or make a comment before we let Jesse go? Well,

I would if we have time. Yeah, Jesse, great to speak one on one. I spent way too much time on Twitter. I think you probably do too, but It’s horrible. Yeah.

I mean, I’m an admin. But So I I see the pylons and the abuse that you sustain, and I I would wanted to briefly express my admiration for your fortitude and withstanding it. It’s more than I could take. But I do wonder because I see that kind of abuse in your case and many others on Twitter and other social media, I spend more time than I should wondering, you know, about the motivation of those who were piling on the activists. But I guess I can sort of understand even though I think it’s appalling, you know, their behavior, they’re like monomaniacally focused on this one issue.

What they care about. They don’t care about distorting the facts or reality or ethical standards in order to advance their game. Again, I don’t approve that at all, but I guess it’s explicable. The thing that is more difficult for me and I’m the kind of writer who likes to write and think about these kinds of unanswerable questions, but like, what do you think about the doctors? People trained as scientists.

People who really do think of themselves as doing the right thing for their patients. Why are they so susceptible to be strong armed by the activists? Why do they hang up their standards, put them aside and basically treat their patients the way that you and others are showing. Is pretty shoddy and reckless.

You

must have thought about such questions. What do you think? I think

there’s maybe at least a couple different categories here. One are the true believers who have really been involved in gender medicine for a long time. And I think the bias they might be susceptible to is they probably, a, hang out and have colleagues who are trans and who are happy they transition, and there are plenty of such people, including a lot of, like, really well adjusted trans adults for whom transition was very important. So they have a lot of positive examples of the benefits of transition. I also think a lot of the times the doctors just don’t see the cases that don’t go well because those patients don’t go back to their clinicians.

There was also an example of this in a New York Times piece by Azeem Gaurishi, where a woman who advertises her top surgery services in Florida to teenagers told Gaurishi She didn’t know any patients who regretted transitioning through her, and then Gareh, she found one. So I think that might explain the true believers. And there’s the folks who have some other area of specialty or sub specialty and are just getting involved in youth gender medicine because demand for it’s exploding. So let’s say you’re a family practice doctor. You come across your first trans kid.

The first thing you’ll do is you’ll go to activist websites. It’ll go to the American Medical Association’s websites. And there you will find buried little nuance. You will find a lot of distorted reasoning that exaggerates the evidence we have and you know, people are busy. If you’re running a family medical practice and you have your own family and you have other responsibilities, are you really going to print out three hundred pages of the literature and assess it yourself or are you just going to, you know, use heuristic, use what your own medical body say.

So it takes a lot of effort to sort of do the right thing and to evaluate evidence yourself I don’t think people always have the wherewithal to do that.

Howard Bauchner: Which is why these medical societies are particularly palpable. Sorry, but that’s really inexcusable. They’re the ones who are supposed to be the gatekeepers. I agree.

Okay. I have a quick question, Mona, for Jesse. And that is whether or not you could see down the road, some people who’ve had very adverse effects either psychologically or physiologically, from these kinds of transitioning services administered when they were teenagers. Whether or not there’s some question of whether they could sue and whether we might see, you know, worries about malpractice suits against doctors who’ve done this. Cavilirally to teenagers and whether that would have some effect.

Yeah. I

don’t really know the legal side of that. I do know some attorneys are already starting to sort of circle the wagons and there’s some talk of class action stuff going on. Carrie Callahan is a really smart detransitioner who I interviewed for my piece she wrote something for The Economist where she mentioned a case where this is

hard to even

talk about. But a man who’s in the grips of a psychotic break and he thought the world was ending, had an arkyctomy, he had his testicles removed while he was in the grips of that psychotic break. Some surgeon just agreed to do that. And he subsequently sued either the clinic that referred him or the surgeon himself. I don’t remember which.

So I think we’re going to see a lot of these cases and I think they’re going to be very ugly This is just all the more reason that doctors should be careful and should make sure those sorts of stories don’t accumulate because it’s not in anyone’s interest to have that happen. Okay.

Bill, I assume you don’t have anything for us? I think

this has been an excellent conversation on them. Thank you for scheduling it, but I think it’s been a very full conversation. Okay,

great.

Jesse, thank

you so much for the work you’ve done and continue to do and for taking the time to talk with us about it. Appreciate it very much. Thank you

guys for having me. Really

appreciate it. Well, in the political world, there was a good news, bad news story this week. And it concerns Rhonda Santos, the governor of Florida. So the good news is that several polls have shown him doing better than Trump among Republican primary voters and independents who lean Republican. So one poll showed that sixty five percent said they would prefer DeSantis.

And I should say one poll did show that Trump was still the favorite, but there’s plenty of evidence out there that DeSantis is moving up in the rankings among Republicans who would rather see him as their nominee in twenty twenty four. The bad news is that DeSantis has chosen this moment to do something so irresponsible and frankly inexplicable basically court the anti Vaxor vote. So Damon, I think you’ve been following this First of all, what do you make of the polling? And maybe, you know, it’s too soon to make anything of it, but I think it’s significant that Trump seems to be, you know, really losing altitude in many respects right now. And then talk about the DeSantis thing.

Yeah. I mean, Obviously, I’m cheered as someone who more than any other thing would like to see Trump never get anywhere near the president say again.

That sheers

me. You know, I consider DeSantis an extremely flawed vehicle for attaining this goal, but he’s what we have at the moment. So if he can manage to start consistently beating Trump, and then maintain it for the next several months going into twenty twenty three. That will have a big effect on donors. It could have a self fulfilling prophecy effect on future polling where it becomes a kind of fate a Compli or a snowball rolling down a hill, choose your metaphor or image.

So I’m encouraged by all of this. You know, Trump has been doing nothing to help himself, and and it’s also, therefore, also a little encouraging to see that there’s some connection between what my eyes as a political observer and analyst picks up and sees and the way pull respondents on the right are responding to this. Because sometimes I feel like we inhabit completely different universes and what what I think is up is down for them and vice versa. So, hey, you know, I I look at Trump and I think, wow, that guy’s floundering, and it turns out, you know, some Republicans think that too. Yay.

But then, as you know, with DeSantis, I mean, he has decided that he needs to try to outflank Trump on the right on something. And he’s chosen vaccines. Now, I I’ve seen some Republican poster analyst types online for the last couple of months speculating that he’s gonna do something like this because one of his big calling cards is that you know, he stood up to the lockdowns and got rid of them sooner than other states and got a lot of abuse and lo and behold it was wonderful even though in fact the virus numbers for Florida are kind of not great. So, you know, from my point of view, I I’m not really clear that, you know, he deserves any kind of award for this, but that is something that he likes to trumpet as one of his great achievements as governor and he won reelection by twenty points. Clearly, there are a lot of Floridians who seem to be fond of him for that and other things.

But he’s now taken at several steps further to be launching all of these investigations into the supposed medical dangers of the vaccines and related investigations that, you know, in truth, we’ll probably go nowhere. As most of his big kind of culture warring gestures tend

not to.

But, you know, given the fact that this country has a lot of anti vaxers and growing numbers of anti vaxers in the wake of COVID-nineteen pandemic. That you could have potentially the leading nominee for the Republican presidential nomination in twenty twenty four leading his campaign with a kind of enhancing or augmentation of this madness. I mean, you already are seeing measles coming back and cases of children getting sick with measles because there are so many people who are no longer getting their children vaccinated for measles, this is going to become a really big problem for this country. The world, let me tell you, was not better. Before facts scenes.

If the right starts defining its goal to turn the clock back as turned the clock back to before we had these miracle, medicines that keep us from dying from a whole slew of diseases, including especially children. This is not gonna be good for the country or anyone’s quality of life. So I just sort of sit back and throw my heads up in the air It’s like, oh, okay. I guess this is the next chapter in the rights of self inflicted madness, but that’s where we are. It appears.

Bill, it seems to me that DeSantis has made an error here. He’s made a blunder. Had he not done this? He could still have presented himself as the fighter and the, you know, the trumpiest candidate without the baggage. But by choosing to embrace the anti Vax movement.

And he really I mean, his press conference, he highlighted couple of people who had had bad reactions and then said, see, you know, you can’t trust the CDC. And he said, at this point, anything they put out, you just assume that it’s not worth the paper. It’s printed on, and he says he’s gonna create a new agency that will counter the CDC AND HE WANTS STUENT PANEL A GRAND JURY GOL THOUGH HE DOESN’T HAVE THE AUTHORITY TO DO THAT BUT HE’S ENCOURAGING, I GUESS, THE PROSECUTORS WITHIN THE STATE OF FLORIDA to impamble a grand jury, to look into criminal actions on the part of vaccine producers. I mean, this makes him sound nutty. Okay?

This is the very thing that a significant number of voters in the midterms signaled they don’t want. They don’t want the nut cases. They don’t want the election deniers or the anti vaxors on bound to say, I think those would fall into the same category. Don’t you think this is a blunder on this part?

You’ve made it hard for me to say no. But But boy, that or not, I spontaneously and quickly reach the same conclusion. But let’s put this in a larger context. There is a venerable tradition articulated by Richard Nixon among others that if you’re a Republican, you go right as you’re preparing for and then entering the primary season. And then tacked back in a somewhat different direction after you’ve secured the nomination.

So I think that if we step back from our substantive revulsion at the choice that mister DeSantis has made and look at the reasoning that must lie behind it. It tells you something interesting about his political persona. I do think that there is something actually Nick Sonya. About him. If I’m looking for a parallel in recent history, he is not a warm man And he is by all reports, and I think just on the face of it, a very calculating man and he has made a calculation that this is his best shot at nailing down the passionate right wing support that will secure him the nomination I think he must believe that despite the polls, the fervent support, the core fervent support that Donald Trump retains, could be enough to win a plurality and multi candidate race.

And so I think this has to be understood as part of an effort not only now that Trump is down to keep him down and emerge as the most credible candidate on the right and not a compromised candidate. Now

whether

if he edges over the next year or so, the persona of someone who will stop at little or nothing to appeal to that part of the party, whether he can then create a broader appeal during the general election is anybody’s guess. But I think this is a window into the way he thinks and I find it quite interesting once I get past being pulled by

it. Linda let’s indulge for a minute the supposition that I’m wrong, that it’s not a mistake, that he is going to nail down that trampian wing of the party, that thirty or thirty five percent or whatever it is, that they will transfer their loyal completely to him because he’s the nutty guy, and that’s what they’re after. And that then he can pivot because there are a lot of voters out there who will prefer somebody with an r after their name when it comes to the general election and that it won’t matter that he got there by appealing to the very nuttiest element in the party. What what

do you think? Well, I’m not buying it, Mona. First of all, I mean, I don’t think that being an anti Vactor is synonymous with being right wing. Remember that the anti Vactor movement really seemed to start on the left. It was, you know, it did Hippies and commutes and, you know, flower children who didn’t want it.

The crunchy

granola. That’s right.

And so I think he could have made the COVID response his issue, and I think he could have appealed basically on saying that, you know, the administrative state got in there. We shut down schools and kept bars open. I mean, there are lots of arguments when would make, which I wouldn’t necessarily agree with. But this is so fringe and so nutty that I think it will be difficult for him. To get out from under it.

And I think it’s sort of a mistake. I like actually Bill’s comparison with Richard Nixon because certainly in terms of persona. There is something very Nixonian about him. He’s got that sort of dark brooding look, you know, you sort of can see him having the five o’clock shadow and not looking so great in a debate. But I think this was a mistake on his part.

It’d be interesting to see if he starts to sort of walk it back. But on the other

hand,

you know, he could decide that he’s gonna go all in on this and that he’s gonna order the state to get involved in looking at Hunter Biden’s laptop because maybe the answer is there. Maybe we’ll find some brand conspiracy with the drug companies on Hunter’s laptop, and he’ll sort of try it all together. I don’t know. But I think he’s hurt himself in the long run. And I’m not sure that it’s gonna gain him anything even in the short run.

Okay. With that, let us turn to another topic. My favorite topic, I truly believe that the scientific announcement out of the Department of Energy this week was ethical. I can’t exaggerate how important I think this is. And it has been a frustration to me to see that it got kind of a limp reaction at first.

And it’s like, oh yeah, the Department of Energy says they’ve been successful at getting ignition on a fusion reaction in the laboratory. That is they were able to create more energy than they put in. This is huge and yet, people are poo pooing it. It’s almost like a joke. What I need to say is, the way people are reacting.

So you have at the same time the Wall Street Journal editorial board and the Washington Post editorial board both throwing cold water on this tremendous human accomplishment. The Wall Street Journal, true to form, wants to say, well, you know, this is all right, but, you know, they’re not that crazy about it because it happened under the Biden administration, and they’re also not that crazy about it. Because they wanna say, oh, well, time for the private sector to get busy on this now. This was government, and that’s as far as we want the government to go. Thank you very much.

Private sector will take it from here. Everybody needs to calm down. And the Washington Post threw cold water on it because they are concerned that it will detract from the immediate steps that we need to take about climate change and they say this technology will not be ready for decades for commercial application. And so, you know, we don’t want to get complacent and blah blah blah. And who on this panel wants to join me in saying, this is a tremendous breakthrough for humanity.

Anybody? Damon, what about you? Well, potentially

yeah. I mean, I I I am enthusiastic stick about this if I allow myself to daydream and extrapolate and wonder if I will live at my age of fifty three to actually see it come to fruition. I I just don’t know. I’m not a scientist. I’m not even that close to enough scientists to actually ask anyone’s, you know, informed opinion about how excited to be about this.

I mean, again, I it’s a kind of notional excitement. I mean, to put it in perspective, I I know you said and I’ve heard other news reports talk about how this breakthrough is defined as creating more energy than went into the reaction. But in fact, creating the reaction required the use of one hundred and ninety two lasers that consumed three hundred and twenty two megajoules of energy to make the reaction and the reaction produced perhaps three megajoules of energy. So I don’t know how again, I don’t even know enough about the science to understand how that could be translating into creating more energy than it consumes. But, I mean, it is an important scientific breakthrough, but the applications making it stable, making it something that can be reproduced in a way that can be applied to the generation of energy on a mass scale is probably a decade or more away, and that’s just a wild guess.

So at the level of kind of theoretical scientific advance that could be marshaled for incredible things in the future, yes, extremely exciting if it can do what Mona you’re hoping it could do, you’re entirely right that it will revolutionize everything about human civilization. Because it will mean that we’ve developed an incredibly clean way of generating massive amounts of energy and could replace everything. Yeah. That’s that’s incredibly exciting. Yeah.

Yeah. So I incredible potential, but, like, when we’re gonna see it actually create the revolution I I just don’t know. And so I’m definitely not a guy you want around to talk to the venture capitalists, get them to invest, you know, a a couple billion dollars in your startup I’m always gonna be like, yeah. But who have you thought of this? I I’m I’m kind of Damon downer and No.

That’s okay. Alright. Yeah. Well, that’s enough

out of you then. Okay. Yeah. Go ahead. Linda, let me see if I can get you excited.

Alright. So first of all, what Damon mentioned, it’s already happening. There was a Wall Street Journal article about how, you know, there are many private companies that are in this field and that are pursuing this research. Right? And now suddenly, everybody wants to talk to them.

All the funders are opening their wallets. It’s already happening. So why is this such great news? There are many reasons, but start with climate. If this can be made to work, in, say, two, three decades.

We can have bridge technologies between now and then where, you know, we do ordinary nuclear fission reactors and we rely on wind and solar and so on and so forth. But we know that a, you know, inexhaustible supply of cheap reliable energy with no nuclear waste whatsoever, and very low cost is coming. And that means a huge change in our sort of outlook for how to deal with climate change. We can’t even begin to imagine all of the ways in which this will transform human civilization. But just take a couple of examples, vertical farming.

Right? If you had an inexhaustible supply of clean energy, you can grow plants and food in skyscrapers. You don’t need to have big farms. You can have clean drinking water everywhere because desalination of ocean water will be cheap and easy. No more need for fossil fuels from evil countries like Saudi Arabia or Russia, etcetera.

You don’t have to sell me more. Okay. It’s so fun. I I I do think it’s exciting. Although I’d have to admit that I don’t know a megajoule from a megawatt and I have a hard enough time understanding where a megawatt is megajoule is sort of beyond my capacity.

But I think the moral of the story is that human ingenuity is so important and it’s what I’ve always believed in terms of the doomsday scenarios with climate change is that we are not a suicidal race. We are not out to destroy ourselves on this planet.

And that what

it is going to take is a lot of ingenuity, a lot of investment, and a lot of very, very hard

work,

including scientific work, to be able to solve some of the problems that we’ve also created through that ingenuity. Because after all, we created internal combustion engine and other things that have produced wonderful results, but also have had some.

Bad ancillary

effects. So I am excited by this. And while I think, you know, it’s important that this particular venture, which was supported by the government, was done. I think it’s better that we have lots of different bets being made by lots of different private companies.

But how

much should we put all of our eggs in one basket? I think that’s the problem. And when you have private individuals making bets, and you have many different bets out there going on at the same time. I think that’s the most benefit. But I don’t see any downside in and I, you know, the fact that it’s going to take a generation, maybe two generations to get there.

Those of us who have grandchildren, are gonna be very happy for our grandchildren if this bet actually pays off.

Yeah. Bill, I think for the people who are throwing cold water on it, it was useful to reflect that it was only sixty six years between the Wright Brothers first flight and the moon landing. And that was before the age of machine learning, supercomputers, before the age of tremendous wealth around the world. So right now, we have all different countries around the world are also doing this research. Including a big project in Europe.

They’re doing a slightly different form of fusion research. But it’s not at all outlandish to think that this is the start of a huge new leap forward for humankind. Right? You are a

very effective advocate, Mona. And as the son of a scientist, at least in spirit and in principle, I can’t disagree with you. And all sorts of things that were out of the question when my late father was working on them or advising private sector firms about them have come to pass. Some things that look very promising have not come to pass. I mean, we’ve been talking now for two decades about commercially feasible carbon capture and sequence.

Illustration, and we are really not very close to it. This breakthrough in a carefully controlled and very expensive laboratory is potentially transformational.

The joke

about fusion is that it will be commercially applicable in twenty years. And that it has been for the past twenty years. And here we are. Mhmm. So I don’t think that it’s

wrong to

be cautious about the pace by which this scientific breakthrough will be transformed into actual real world applications that make a difference at scale. You can believe that caution is warranted while at the same time not only celebrating the breakthrough, but also being very happy that the private sector is making a number of different bets on different ways forward in this area. I think that is exactly the way it should function. Will any of them pan out? How long will it take?

The only responsible thing to say is who knows? I do agree with you, Mona, that pouring cold water on it is not the right response, history suggests that the measure of caution is warranted, and I can’t figure out what else

to say about this question. Alright. Speaking also as the child of a scientist, my dad taught physics. For many years. And so I do feel this in a personal way because he used to talk with us about the potential for fusion energy.

And he would explain that, you know, with fission, which is what we use now to power nuclear reactions. You have the problem of nuclear waste and so on. But with fusion, there is no nuclear waste. Practically none. And the ignition material can be hydrogen, which is the most abundant element in the universe.

And I remember him saying, he held up a teaspoon full of water. And he said, this teaspoon full of water we can figure out how to do fusion can power the Queen Mary to go back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean. And, you know, he was so excited about it. And believed it would happen eventually. And I am really thrilled to say that the world is different today from the way it was on December fourth.

This happened on December five, I think this will go down in history as a pivotal moment where they got ignition. That’s the thing. They got ignition there’s going to be many, many engineering and other scientific steps that are going to have to take place before this can be applied and before we can see the benefits. But you know, Things can happen a lot more rapidly than we think and that’s why I gave the example of the Wright Brothers. So it’s tremendously exciting and reason for hope and for all those kids out there, and I talked about this on the Secret Podcast that I did this week with my son.

But there are a lot of young people who feel that they shouldn’t have children because the Earth is doomed and climate is going to make the planet uninhabitable in the very near future, and that is not true. But even more, as Linda was saying, human ingenuity should never be discounted, and this is an example of why you should not despair. All I can

say is Mona, that discovering that you are a good and loyal daughter is the least surprising. At least it’s rising discovery I’ve made and it’s pretty much to your credit. Well, thank you very much. Alright. Well, we had a bunch

of other things that we were gonna try to get to this week. Gonna have to leave Musk destroying Twitter, if he is, and other things for next week. So for now, let us turn to our highlight or a low light of the week Damon Linker. Well, I

left this out in our prior discussion of Trump and DeSantis, and I’m glad that no one else touched on it so that I can jump in on it here. Our former president, the forty fifth president of the United States, we all know, is planning to run again in twenty twenty four. He’s announced his intentions very, very early. And then earlier this week, he declared on his Truth Social account that he would have a major announcement on Thursday this week. And, oh, the country did halt in its tracks and wait expectantly to see what it is that our once and potentially future president would it say with this announcement?

And what was it? He announced that he is making available for the low, low price of ninety nine dollars a series of Trump NFTs or non fungible tokens of himself looking like a superman like super hero. These are like baseball cards but digital, which in other words means you get nothing. In other words, no physical product. And of course, it’s very difficult if not impossible to accurately price such things since by definition nothing comparable to them.

That’s what makes them non fungible. And the idea that this guy I mean, I was very much in the camp of people who said, yeah, DeSantis other Republicans think they can dislodge this guy. I don’t know. They love him. The base.

They love him. He’s the leader for the nomination in twenty twenty four unless some unexpected thing happens. Well, It perhaps should have been considered expected, but my goodness. Here we are. If he isn’t deliberately pointing the nose of the plane toward the ground for thirty thousand feet.

At this point, I don’t know what else would do it. I mean, far more than shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. He’s looking like a complete and nipped moron at this point. And I’m sorry, you know how to have to use somewhat harsh language about it. But what is he thinking?

I genuinely don’t believe that even his most die hard fanboys and girls are going to be thrilled by this nonsense. Of him coming out with like a penny anti scheme to make a few bucks for basically nothing. It’s really quite amazing. So my low light of the week, which is also a highlight because I think it means my goodness, we really might be rid of this. Let’s see.

As the

saying goes from your lips to God’s ears. Yeah.

Exactly. God’s rolling his eyes today.

Linda

Chavez. Well, that is a perfect segue into my recommendation this week. Segue spelled differently than it’s going to be used in this article. And that is a piece by Matt Eglazius in his slow boring newsletter. It’s called Crypto is the segue of finance, a different kind of segue.

Yeah. And he glacier has written what is a very discursive essay on the current cryptocurrency. Scandal that is going on now with Samuel Bankman free now

having

been indicted for fraud in FDX. The company, the trading platform that he was using. And he goes into, you know, kind of, as I say, very long rambling almost essay about crypto and gives a little bit of a short history on the Internet, he talks about the holiday movie, home alone, talks about bearer bonds and then moves from that into intermediaries like banks. And why may be putting your money in the hands of such trusted intermediaries is a better thing than putting it into cryptocurrency, or there we say these weird tokens that Donald Trump is out there, digital. Figments really.

They’re kind of just they’re not real any more than cryptocurrencies may turn out to be. So I thought it was a very interesting piece

and I recommend it to our listeners. Okay. Thank you. Bill Galston. Well, I’ll begin with a comment and segue to my highlight, which is a genuine highlight, if Elon Musk

were actually to destroy Twitter.

I think it

would be a magnificent service to humanity, whether he actually attended it or not. Among other things, people like Damon would have, I suspect an extra four hours a day, to think deep thoughts, which I do think would be good for us. Probably good for him too. I believe it was our guest who described Twitter as an addiction. And as someone who’s not on it, that has been my observation of people who are on it very very regularly.

As to my Highlight, I have breaking news, better than CNN’s breaking news, and that is that Kevin McCarthy has done something right. Real estate. Mhmm. He has created a select committee on China in the House of Representatives and he has put one of the most thoughtful Republican defense experts Mike Gallagher in charge

of it. I

think that we are likely to get more useful bipartisan information and policy foundations out of this committee in the next two years than we’ve had in the previous decade. And you know, I’m not gonna be thanking Kevin McCarthy for very much, I suspect, in the next two years, but I do think that we ought to praise him for

this move. Okay. Thank you for that. I would like to draw attention to a piece that actually Jesse Single mentioned a New York Magazine piece by Jonathan Shade. It’s called helping trans kids means admitting what we don’t know.

And in his signature style, Jonathan has taken after the left. Now he goes after the right on a regular basis as his regular readers will know. But every now and then, he turns his laser focus on his own side. And he is highly critical of the tone of a lot of leftist discussion of this trans medical issue. And he says, for example, I’m quoting, this absolutest mindset has had an especially pernicious effect on the issue of youth gender medicine.

This is because the science is genuinely murky and embryonic, making the struggle to identify a humane and effective solution both difficult and necessary. The left has thrown itself behind a crusade to define such a position out of existence. Unquote. That is exactly right. And I highly recommend this piece.

It’s a very, very fair look at how Not cheerleading, but bullying has characterized the less treatment of this very, very delicate issue, highly recommended. Alright. With that, I want to thank Jesse Single again for having been our guest. I want to thank our panel. Our sound engineer today is Joe Armstrong, our producer, as always, is Katie Cooper, And most of all, we thank our listeners, many of whom I have heard from in the last couple of weeks.

I don’t know, it must be something about the holidays that prompts people to write, but love hearing from you. Thank you so much. It always makes my day. And with that, we’ll be back next week, guys, every week.