Walter Isaacson set out to write about a world-changing genius in Elon Musk and found a man addicted to chaos and conspiracy.

I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertips feel for social, emotional networks.

The book launched a thousand hot takes, so I sat down with Isaacson to try to get past the noise.

I like the fact that people who say I'm not as tough on Musk as I should be, are always using anecdotes from my book to show why we should be tough on Musk.

Join me, Evan Ratliff, for On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Cheryl McClellum, host of the Cold Case podcast, Zone 7. Join us every Wednesday to hear cases like the Long Island serial killer.

You.

Show genuine interest and you can't fake it, but.

These.

Guys can see.

Right through to your soul.

You have to be prepared.

If you don't know your stuff, they're going to just call.

You out. Listen to Zone 7 with Cheryl McClellum on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Get ready because Aaron and Carissa from Calm Down have got something special coming up at State Farm Park in iHeartLand, a reading of Twists in Night Before Christmas. They'll infuse it with stories and memories tying into the holiday spirit. Don't miss this special event. Starting Thursday, December seventh at 7:00 PM Eastern at State Farm Park in iHeartland and Fortnite. Available all weekend long. Afterwards, stick around and check out all the exciting things State Farm has to offer. Say hi to Jake from State Farm on the big screen and try to beat Jake's score at the parkour mini game. Visit iheartradio. Com/iheartland to start playing today.

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Hey, everybody, out there in the Pacific Northwest or with access to an airport or a car rental place that can get you to the Pacific Northwest specifically at the end of January, we'll see you in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco.

That's right. To our new live show for 2024, Seattle, Washington, January 24th at the Paramount Theater, then Portland at our homeway from home at Revolution Hall on the 25th, and then winding it all up at Sketchfest on the 26th at the Sydney-Golstein Theater.

Very nice. If you want tickets, if you want information, if you want tickets, you can go to a couple of places. You can go to our Linktree at linktree/YSK. You can go to our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow. Com, click on the tour button, and it'll take you to all of the beautiful places you can go to buy your tickets. We'll see you guys in January. Welcome to.

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Production of iHeart Radio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. This is Stuff You Should Know, the last edition of the Two to the O to the Deuce tray.

Is this our final of the year? It is.

It's the last one of 2023. Chuck, we recorded all of the episodes that we're ever going to record in the year 2023. Isn't that amazing?

Yeah. Hey, since you brought that up, can I say something? Sure. Spotify, who carries our show, as do all platforms, they have this really cool thing they send out called the WRAP, I guess is in year-end wrap-up thing. And they sent us, as a show, our own statistical analysis, but then they send individual users their own. And we just had a lot of great listeners sending us in their rap statistics like, Hey, I'm in the top one % of stuff you should know, listenership. And it's just really neat to see all that stuff coming in. So thank you.

It really is. It's amazing. And everybody's so proud of it. It's so great to see. So no matter what percentage you're in, if you are proud enough to send an email or post it, kudos to you because we're proud of you right back. I do think, though, Chuck, that we probably should shout out the person who wrote in with far and away the largest number of listening minutes according to Spotify.

Yeah, who's that?

That is Eravin Kantarla, who is in the top 0.05 % of listeners. Based on the 86,772 minutes, I don't see how there could be anybody else in the remaining, what, 0.05 % left?

Yeah, I did a little back-of-the-envelop math, and that's something somewhere between like 25 and 30 hours of stuff you should know a week.

Yeah.

That's a lot. That just doesn't seem possible. I have suspicions that this person might have just played it on a loop so they could, and then just went out shopping or whatever.

I don't know. I think, Irvine strikes me as a pretty straightforward person. So congrats to Irvine. And also, seriously, thank you everybody who listens to us so much that you get statistics at the end of the year that make you proud. I mean, that's amazing, guys. Thank you very much.

Yeah, and thanks to Spotify. That's a cool service that they... Or I don't know, is that a service? Whatever. It's a cool thing they do.

It's a service. It's a public service.

We were downloaded in 163 countries.

I didn't know there were that many countries.

We looked it up. It was actually something like 190. So that's most of the countries.

Yeah, I would say that's the vast majority of them. By the way, everybody, I knew that there were more countries than that. I was joking.

And quickly, I saw that, I don't know if you went through that yet, Josh, but our third biggest country of growth was Mexico. Oh, no way. And I'm gaming. I'm aiming for a show in Mexico City. I'd like to do that. We just don't know if people would come. So if we can get like 1,000 people in a room in Mexico City, I think that might be a fun thing to do.

Yeah, especially if it's a room with seats.

Yeah. So we should get at least 500 emails saying at least two people will come, and then that means we might go. All right. So anyway, should we get on with barbaric practices?

Yeah, let's, because I find this endlessly fascinating. Olivia helped us with this. Basically, what we're doing here is reversing what we already like to do smugly, which is look back 50, 100, 200 years and be like, Look at how backwards and antiquated those people were back then. Even as recently as the '90s, I remember in the mid-90s, I smoked on an airplane on the way to Amsterdam. It was just like the last three rows were smoking. But it's not like it was sectioned off. There wasn't even a curtain. It's just like this is the smoking section. Even though the entire plane is being covered in your cigarette smoke. This was the 90s, man.

Yeah, the first time I flew to Europe, there was smoking. That would have been 96.

Yeah. I mean, imagine that today. You would literally go to federal prison if you tried to light a cigarette on an airplane today. Yeah?

Yeah. I mean, it's about the fire, but sure.

Yeah, a few decades before that, there was Jello Salad, where it was all the rage and the weirdest Jello Salad. If you've never just taken a walk down memory lane and looked up pictures of Jello molds from the '50s to the '70s, treat yourself and go do that. But make sure you have not had lunch yet because you're going to want to gag when you see a lot of them. That's another fun thing to judge people for, being stupid with jello. Because I don't know if we said it yet, we're going to do the opposite of that. We're going to look forward and try to figure out what our descendants are going to ridicule us or look down at us about. What will we seem primitive or barbaric or ridiculous about?

That's right. But what we have before us are seven, I think, a little more serious things than Jello Molds. Spanking Kids is on up there. However, it really depends on who you ask, because about half of Americans still think, and this is a quote from a survey a couple of years ago from the American Family Survey, quote, It is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good, hard spanking.

Half of those respondents said almost under their breath, feel so right.

Yeah. I mean, big change from back in the day. They have another stat from 68, when 94 % of parents said, Yeah, hit your kids.

It's awesome. It's quite a drop. That's a big drop.

But things are really changing because a third of the respondents between 18 and 29 agree with spanking compared to 50 % of the overall survey. So it's something that's going out of fashion for sure.

Yeah, it seems to be following a larger trend of moving away from social acceptance of violence in any form. And it's being supported by studies that find like, yeah, it's actually good if you don't spank your kids because not only has there never been a study that shows it improves children's behavior, study after study keeps suggesting it does the opposite. It actually maladjusts children. I mean, I can't imagine what a well-adjusted person I would be if I hadn't been spanked that handful of times when I was a kid.

Yeah, we're always trying to poke around to find the other opinion on something just to take a look at it. And there are people who don't agree. I saw this one professor from the Oklahoma State, Robert Larzali. I can't even read my own handwriting now. But he said that the studies that are out there are flawed for a couple of reasons. One, he says these studies that say that if you spank kids more, that leads to them actually acting out more. He's saying, no, it's the kids that are acting out more that it's a chicken and the egg thing.

Yes.

I've seen that. Those are the ones getting spanked more.

I've seen that. I think I found in a scientific American article, there was at least one group that managed to control for that. Basically, it's shown like, no, actually, actually does have this effect on kids. The problem that, what did you say, Larizeli?

I think so. If my writing is any indicator.

What Lairazeli is saying is that these studies, they don't start following kids from birth to 25 or 30 and then see where you spanked, where you not spanked. It's all just like they might peek in on a kid who's at the spanking age and look at their behavior then, and you just can't parse it apart. So there's not really good quality studies. But I saw it put like this. Even if there are no studies that conclusionsally show spanking is bad for kids or produces maladjusted behavior in kids. There are plenty of studies that seem to suggest that. There aren't any studies that seem to suggest otherwise that it's actually good. It's effective to spank your kids. The argument that I've seen is like, why do it then?

Yeah, I saw a... First of all, I'm a parent. I can't, in a million years imagine hitting Ruby for any reason.

That's nice.

It makes me want to cry just thinking about that. It's terrible for our family. But I did find a study from 2018 that I found from NPR. They didn't do the study, but did a thing on it.

I'm sure they were hot and heavy on it.

Of course. It was what they claim, and it seems like probably one of the most robust studies, at least that looks at countries that have banned spanking because I think something like 62 countries have banned spanking, starting with Sweden in 1979.

Did you even know there were that many countries?

They followed four or they followed four... They used 400,000 children from kids from 88 countries, so that's pretty good. 58 countries have the bands and 30 don't. I'm not sure which one it is. But what they found when they were tracking was incidences of kids fighting, like getting in fights at school. In the countries that have banned spanking, there was a school fighting reduction by 69% in boys and 42% in girls, which is pretty substantial. I was curious about the United States because we both grew up. My dad was my elementary school principal, and he spanked me and other kids. It's ridiculous to think about.

But.

Apparently in '77, the Supreme Court of the United States gave the power to the states. These days, 90 % of schools don't use corporal punishment, but it is still legal in 17 states. There are restrictions in place in a lot of those. Like maybe your parents have to sign a thing that said, Sure, hit my kid.

That's what I.

Would tell the states. But 17 % of states, you can still do this with Mississippi.

Leading the way in.

The most spankings. And the other thing I found out that we should point out is that black males are twice as likely to be spanked than anyone. And get this, 16.5 % of kids that are corporally punished in schools in America today are disabled. Oh, my God. Usually, it's an intellectual disability. Wow. Is that not disturbing?

Yeah, of course, it's disturbing. That's horrible. That's one of the most horrible statistics you've ever spouted out. I should say also, just want to verify for the listeners in any of those 62 countries where spanking is banned, you're talking about public spanking, like in school, in 17 states, in schools, you're allowed to do that, right?

Yes, a teacher or a principal. And they say it's, and this is one of the other problems that that professor had, is that those studies, he says lump everyone in together, as in the parents who do it as the very last resort after several other attempts at discipline, or parents are just like, Oh, you screwed up. Let's hit you, or whatever. And apparently, almost all the schools, it is a last resort, as in they've tried other things, but it's just, I don't know. I try not to judge people, but don't hit your kids.

Well, I was going to say it's legal in 17 states for schools to spank kids. It's legal in all 50 states for a parent to spank kids. There's not really anything coming down the horizon that makes it seem like that's ever going to be banned. But it does seem generationally like we're moving away from spanking pretty rapidly.

Yeah, my spankings as a kid were very infrequent and very organized, as in it was never done in the heat of anger, like just getting slapped or something. It was like, All right, go to the bathroom and spend 10 minutes upset and scared. And then I got spanked with a bolo paddle. You know the little bolo paddle games?

I know the bolo tie.

No, the bolo paddle was a little light plywood paddle with a ball on a rubber band. That was the spanking device.

In my house. Those things are made of bosa wood.

Yeah, it wasn't too bad. It stung, but, you know.

How about all of your spankings that a grownup?

That usually involves leather.

Okay. So you want to move on to the next one?

Yeah, let's move on to chemotherapy.

Okay, so chemotherapy is one of these things where if you start putting it down today, what you're talking about is our current modern medical miracle that since the 90s has reduced the cancer death rate by 25 %. It's a really big deal that we have chemotherapy now. It's saved a lot of lives.

Yeah, this is not poopoo in chemotherapy.

No, it's not. The reason why we could probably guess that our descendants down the line are going to look at chemotherapy as fairly primitive and barbaric is because it's so indiscriminate in how it harms the body. It harms the whole body in order to kill the cancer cells, right? And we're moving, it seems like, much more toward far, far more specific and tailored medicine. And so all of the side effects and the horribleness that come with chemotherapy, even though it does save lives, will be going away in future decades, it looks like.

Yeah, and it seems like, and we're going to talk about a few ways that things are becoming more specific, but that seems to be the way it's all trying to go is instead of just killing all the cells, let's see if they can just specifically target cancer cells and then eventually get down to the human-specific targeting of things, which would be amazing, obviously, patient-specific. But one of the first ones is antibody drug conjugates. And this is a type of chemotherapy, but it combines chemotherapy, like the drugs used in chemotherapy, with monoclonal antibodies, which are lab, just like antibodies that we have in our body, except they're created in a lab.

Right. And so what happens is we inject these drugs, these antibody drug conjugates into a patient with cancer, and those antibodies are designed to go seek out that tumor, the specific tumor that that patient has, and attached to that tumor, that cancer cell. And it delivers that payload of chemo drugs to it. It says, Here you go. Here's a nice little present. And then turns around and runs, and then in the background, the cell explodes and the antibody ends up on its chest, but lives to fight another day.

Yeah, exactly. That's if we're heading in that direction, that's fantastic. Vaccines is another one. The mRNA vaccines that we detailed back when those came out for COVID, two of the most successful versions of those vaccines were originally brought about, to begin with, as tumor vaccines. And the idea is to use that same technology to just specifically target tumors themselves. So it's not like a vaccine to prevent a disease. It's a shot that will essentially specifically shrink a tumor.

Yeah, just like the mRNA vaccines for COVID trained the body to look for and respond to COVID viruses saying, Hey, if you see anything with this little horn on it, this spike, go after it, they're doing the same thing with tumors, right? So that's boosting the immune response. It's also training the immune response. So technically, it does qualify as a vaccine. And because like we talked about in the COVID vaccine episode, this mRNA technology is just so... It's just ready to wear vaccines, basically. Yeah, very promising. Apparently, they have reached a turning point. And in the next five years, a lot of cancer researchers are saying we're going to see a lot more cancer vaccines coming down the pike.

Amazing. And then what I talked about earlier, targeting cancer cells specifically is a great direction to go. But really getting into personalized cancer care will be the next step beyond that. Like, hey, I'm going to identify exactly what tumor that you have in your body and not just maybe this tumor, customer, and get to patient specific levels of treatment. I know we pooh-poohed AI in certain respects, but this is a place where AI can really probably do a lot of good.

Yeah, I think we should just clarify our position on it if I can speak for both of us. Sure. As long as AI is not taking over the world or damaging humanity in some terrible way, I'm all for all the great ways it can help things. This is a really sterling example of that.

Yeah, they gave us a new Beatles song.

Yeah, I would say that's right in the middle for me. But I think what you were talking about was taking a sample of the specific tumor that a specific person has, analyzing its genetic makeup and then looking at that genetic makeup, thanks to AI spitting out all of the information that we need from analyzing that huge genome saying, Oh, this is an Achilles heel. This is another weakness. This is another way we can attack it, and then tailoring the treatment for that specific tumor, like that tumor. Like you said, not that tumor, that tumor is getting attacked. It's so specific, you could name the tumor. Name the tumor, Melvin, and Melvin is toast when you're using precision or personal cancer treatments.

Yeah, this stuff could even be possible now. It's just really, really expensive to target a specific tumor for a specific human. And so the idea is hopefully with the help of AI, they can just reduce a lot of the cost, basically, for doing that. So it becomes, instead of something that's not even something worth pursuing or able to be pursued because of finances. Something that's like, Oh, yeah, just step right up and we'll spit out your treatment.

Yeah, and as the cost comes down, more people use it, which means more people using it allows for a greater chance of new breakthroughs. So hopefully, we're going to have cancer licked in the future. I saw somebody suggest that it'll end up being a chronic disease akin to diabetes in the future.

Just something you can live fairly healthily with?

Yeah, you can manage in and there'll be plenty of drugs to keep you going.

Amazing.

You want to take a break?

Yeah.

Okay, well, then let's do that.

When Walter Isaacson set out to write his biography of Elon Musk, he believed he was taking on a world-changing figure.

That night, he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea.

What he got was a subject who also sowed chaos and conspiracy.

I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertips feel for social, emotional networks. And when.

I sat down with Isaacson five weeks ago, he told me how he captured it all.

They have cans of spray paint, and they're just putting big X's on machines. And it's almost like kids playing on the playground. Just chews them up left, right, and center. And then like Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, he doesn't even remember it. Getting the bars, done an excuse, being a total. But I want the reader to see it in action.

My name is Evan Ratliff, and this is On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Join us in this four-part series as Isaacson breaks down how he captured a vivid portrait of a polarizing genius. Listen to on Musk on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Cheryl McCleom, host of the Cold Case podcast, Zone 7. Join us every Wednesday to hear cases like the Long Island serial killer. Here, Carrie Lawson, daughter of the notorious serial killer, BTK, weigh in on the accused Long Island serial killers children.

You show genuine.

Interest.

And you can't fake it, but these guys can see.

Right through.

To your soul. You have to be.

Walled off, prepared. And if.

You don't know your.

Stuff.

They're going to just call you out and.

They're going to.

Be like, Nope.

I'm talking to.

Somebody else. I'm not talking to you.

Here, great insight from one of New York City's finest, Detective Joe Jackalone, a cold case expert.

You know, as well as I do, cops weren't even aware of it back then, so they're going to have some difficulty putting those cases together unless, of course.

He confesses. Listen to his own seven with Cheryl McCleom on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

Get ready because Aaron and Carissa from Calmdown have got something special coming up at State Farm Park in iHeartland. A reading of Twists in Night Before Christmas. They'll infuse it with stories and memories tying into the holiday spirit. Don't miss this special event. Starting Thursday, December seventh at 7:00 p. M. Eastern at State Farm Park in iHeartland in Fortnite. Available all weekend long. Afterwards, stick around and check out all the exciting things State Farm has to offer. Say hi to Jake from State Farm on the big screen and try to score at the hardcore mini game. Visit iheartradio. Com/iheartland to start playing today.

Hi, this is Shannon Dordy, host of the new podcast. Let's be clear with Shannon Dordy. You may know me from, let's see, 90210, Charmed, MallRats, Heathers, probably also know me from my stage four cancer diagnosis and sharing that journey with so many of you. There's something so authentic about a podcast. It's me connecting, me talking raw in the moment. That's what my goal is to give you to talk about why I feel that cancer, to a certain extent, is a gift, what my responsibilities are as a person with cancer. Because I think that there's something so much bigger than me. And to be honest, I'm still trying to find out what that is. And maybe together, we'll find it. It's going to be a wild ride. So I hope that you all tune in. Listen to Let's Be Clear with Shannon Dordie on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

All.

Right, next up on the list of things that people may one day look back and say, Why did you do it that way? Dummies of the 21st century is organ transplants. We have a pretty great episode on organ transplants somewhere in our back catalog. It feels like a long time ago.

It was a little while.

But what we're basically talking about, and again, organ transplants, awesome. It's amazing how far they've come since they've been doing them. But rejection rates are still an issue, up to 10-15 % for kidneys, for instance. And then also the fact that transporting organs, getting them to the people in time can still be an issue. 17 Americans die every day waiting on organs. And it's also inequitable in that generally people that are the most funded get the most organs for transplant. But there's a better way forward, right?

Yeah, I just want to say one I found a stat that I found rather shocking. One in five donated kidneys goes unused. It goes to waste. Even though people die waiting for kidneys, that's just how clue-jie the whole setup is right now.

Yeah.

So, yeah, they're trying to fix the process and the system and the organization in charge of that in the United States. But further down the pike on a longer timeline, the goal is organigenesis, which is what it sounds like. It's creating new, entirely new organs from cells, from scratch. It's like, watch this grow. You remember those little dinosaur spunges that you added water to and they just grew, grew, grew? It's like that, but with fully functioning organs.

Yeah. How far are we away from someone trying to grow a human out in a lab?

I'm sure somebody's probably trying it already, but I don't know how long it'll be till they're successful.

I mean, we had Dolly the Sheep. Dolly was a clone, right?

Yes. I don't know if everybody's read our book. If you haven't, I'll just go ahead and share with you a little fact from it. A passage? Yeah, a passage, a dramatic reading. Apparently, Dolly was named Dolly because she was grown from a Mamary cell. So it was a 90s ha-ha joke about.

Dolly Parton. Yeah. I think we might have said that in the Dolly Parton episode, didn't we?

Or did we? If we did. I'll have to go back and listen. If so, we'll edit this part out.

No, no, no. It bears repeating, I think.

Okay, so yes, we're a little ways off because not only, Chuck, are we not capable of growing human from cells? We're not capable of growing kidneys or hearts. But we are somewhere. We've grown and successfully transplanted wind pipes, bladder, fairly simple organs and structures. But simple is like a relative term because we're talking about something that was grown from that person's own cells into the very piece of equipment that they needed and then put in them, and it worked.

Yeah, which is remarkable. I know that they can do this with, at least right now, the epidermis. So if you're a burn victim, you can get your own stem cells, and you can get some new epidermis, I was about to say just skin, but they're working on growing the entire thickness of the skin. They're not there yet. But they can now grow epidermis from your own stem cells in a lab, and they transfer it to something called Fibrin, which is a protein that really helps your blood clot when you get a cut or something. And then they put it on your body and it goes... And then you're done.

Yeah, it makes.

That sound. Obviously, it's a process. I was just kidding around. But right now, they can't grow skin that grows hair or sebaceous glands and stuff like that. But if you're a burn victim and you can get your own epidermis to replace your scarred skin on your body, then that's pretty amazing.

It's akin to laying soda, but with skin. Yeah, sure.

So right now, I think the state of the art with organogenesis, that extra O trips me up. I like the ad syllables, so that's a real tricky one, is growing organs in other animals. And as we'll see, hopefully, we're going to be moving away from that because to take that organ from the animal and transplant it into human, you kill that animal in the process, right? You can't take a pig's heart and be like, Good luck with the rest of your life, because it doesn't have a rest of its life. It's missing its heart. And from a lot of the trends that I've seen, it seems like a fairly safe bet that we are moving in a direction where animal welfare is going to become more and more and more important to where how we treat animals will be maybe the most critical thing that people of the future will look back at us on.

Yeah, which that's coming up in a more robust way in a second. But to finish this up, there's also 3D bio printing, which is pretty amazing. I remember telling the story one time. I've known two people in my life who were born without an external ear. And the process back then was they formed a skeleton of the shape of an ear. And if I'm not sure what it was made of, I think cartilage. But if I'm not mistaken, that then was... There was like a skin bubble around it, and then they would suck the air out of that skin bubble very quickly to onto that cartilage to form what looks close enough to an external ear. And I say external, like the ear parts.

Or- Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

I've known two people in my life that had that done. And back in the day, it was not like it is now. I think the 3D bioprinting of ears is much, much further along and they look much better than they used to. And that's the point. But they're thinking that maybe one day we can 3D bioprint a liver.

Yeah, pretty amazing. And that'll come up well in the next section, too. I say we move on to the next section because it does tie into what we were talking about just now.

That's right. Let's do it.

So getting meat from animals is probably something that will really be looked down upon in the future because we already have techniques that make it so we don't really need live animals to create meat, to eat meat, and yet we're still eating meat. That's despite, and I'm very much guilty of this too, that's despite knowing how horrific and terrible factory farming is for the animals themselves, for the environment. People just really love meat and it's tough to give up. So rather than forcing people to give up, there's other alternatives that people are working on to replace it. We're going to need to do that too, because apparently, Chuck, the growing demand for meat is going to be totally unsustainable in the next couple of decades.

Yeah, I mean, there are statistics like the UN will throw out that say by the year 2050, the meat demand means we're going to have to produce 50-100 % more meat than we do now. But there's also other people saying like, hey, this whole notion of wealthier countries eat meat because they can afford it, and countries that are more developing eat agriculture-ly, largely, or vegetarian because they're forced to isn't really the case, or at least moving forward, it looks like, because what they found is the emerging trend is that people are eating less meat once they get enough wealth to afford it for a bunch of reasons. One of which is what you're talking about is there's just a forever-changing way that humans look at animals and animal welfare for one, and also red meat and the fact that it's terrible for your body is another one.

And terrible for the environment, livestock raising, that includes transportation, tractor emissions, but also methane from the cow shooting ducks all the time, that accounts for 14.5 % of global greenhouse gas emissions. So it has this triple impact, triple negative impact on the animal's welfare, the human body, and the health of the earth. And for those reasons, it does seem like people in wealthier countries are starting to move away from meat. I think the organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, they released an agricultural outlook within the last couple of years. They predicted that around 2025, the whole world will start moving away from meat and that eventually we're just going to stop eating what's called carcass meat very appropriately altogether.

Can I tell you something really quick about an Instagram video I saw today?

Yeah.

It has to do with the cows and the methane. Actually, our colleague, our old friend, Tamika, at work, posted this. And it was a video of a guy that showed how they treat bloat in cows. Have you seen this?

No.

When a cow gets bloated with gas, they stick a needle into the cow's stomach releasing methane, and they light that thing so they can see a flame to judge how much gas is still in there. There was a video of a cow with a blowtorch coming out of its side, essentially.

Wow! What was the cow's expression like?

Well, all I saw was the cow. But the guy who was hosting the video, his expression was horrified because he was like, Can we believe that this is where we are in the world?

Yeah, I totally can believe that. That doesn't surprise me at all to tell you the truth.

They're trying to help the cow, but the reason the cow is there is because of factory farming.

Right. Tamika, by the way, has one of the better non-celebrity Instagram feeds you can find.

Yeah, to me, this is great. It's good stuff. But what you were saying about moving away from, what would you call it? Carcass meat?

Yeah.

There are two main ways that that's happening right now, and that is obviously what they call novel vegan meat replacements, fake meat, impossible stuff, beyond stuff. And then lab-grown meat, which did we do a whole episode on lab-grown meat?

Yeah, we did a while back.

I thought so.

We should update it like we did the recycling episode. So much stuff has changed since then, I'm sure. We'll update it eventually. But lab-grown meat or cultured meat is exactly what it sounds like. You use a bioreactor, sometimes a 3D bio-printer using animal cells to recreate meat. I think there's a consulting group called A. T. Kearney. They predict that by 2040, which is not that long off, everybody, up to 60 % of global meat consumption will be from cultured or non-vegan meat replacements. That's significant. That's a huge change. There may be countries that are developing now that won't even eat carcass meat when they become wealthy because the replacements will have become so great, there'll be no reason to eat meat.

Yeah. If you ask the CEOs of Beyond It and Possible, they're going to say, In 15 years, there will be no more eating of meat. That's a littleambitious. And I think that maybe they're trying to drive up the stock price. So that's probably not going to be the case. But that AT Kearney group prediction, that seems quite possible.

I buy that, especially if there's a couple of challenges that are overcome by then, which is that's 16 years now away, and that's plenty of time to overcome some relative speed bumps. One is replicating. No, I think they have flavor licked, at least as far as cultured meat goes.

Yeah, texture.

Texture is the problem because you don't want to eat a little scoby of beef that tastes just like beef, but looks like a scoby from a kombucha batch. No one wants to eat that. Yet, Japanese researchers recently showed, I think according to FreeThink, this great website I found, in 2021, they recreated a wago steak, which has got some of the most complex marbling of fat mixed in with the meat that you could possibly ever come across. They faithfully recreated one. I'm sure it cost them a million and a half dollars to make that one steak. But there was a proof of concept that it can be done. The other big challenge is right now when you're making that Waguih steak from cellular culture, you actually need to take it from an unborn calf as you slaughter the mom. I don't think the mom has to be slaughtered. I think they just take it while they're slaughtering the mom. And that's what they use to grow meat right now. And a lot of people are like, No, still, I'm not okay with that. It's still the an animal suffers somehow some way. And so there's a company called Meatable, a Dutch company that said, We got this.

We got our way around this.

Yeah, they made a sausage in July 2022 that was lab-grown sausage, lab-grown pork, but it did not use, I don't think we said what it's called fetal bovine serum is that blood drawn from the cow's fetus. And that's what you said is typically used. But they didn't use that at all. There was no animal involved.

Yeah, they used cells from a live animal that was.

Unharmed by it. Well, yeah, that's what I meant. No animal involved, as in their death was not involved.

Right, exactly. Yeah, the animal couldn't have carried less either way, from what I understand. They were being degassed, so they had bigger fish to fry than somebody scraping a few cells off their hindquarters.

It's like I got a blow torch coming out of.

My side. Exactly. Okay, I say we move on. Oh, but first, Chuck, let's take a break because it's that time.

Let's do it. I'm so tired.

When Walter Isaacson set out to write his biography of Elon Musk, he believed he was taking on a.

World-changing figure. That night, he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea.

What he got was a subject who also sowed chaos and conspiracy.

I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertips feel for social, emotional networks.

And when I sat down with Isaacson five weeks ago, he told me how he captured it all.

They have cans of spray paint, and they're just putting big X's on machines. And it's almost like kids playing on the playground. Just choose them up, left, right and center. And then like, Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, he doesn't even remember it. Getting to bars doesn't excuse being a total, but I want the reader to see it in action.

My name is Evan Ratliff, and this is Ayn Musk with Walter Isaacson. Join us in this four-part series as Isaacson breaks down how he captured a vivid portrait of a polarizing genius. Listen to Ayn Musk on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Hi, this is Shannon Dordy, host of the new podcast, Let's Be Clear with Shannon Dordy. You may know me from, let's see, 90210, Charmed, Mall Rats, Heathers, probably also know me from my stage four cancer diagnosis and sharing that journey with so many of you. There's something so authentic about a podcast. It's me connecting, me talking raw in the moment. That's what my goal is to give you. To talk about why I feel that cancer to a certain extent, is a gift, what my responsibilities are as a person with cancer? Because I think that there's something so much bigger than me. And to be honest, I'm still trying to find out what that is. And maybe together we'll find it. It's going to be a wild ride. So I hope that you all tune in. Listen to Let's Be Clear with Shannon Dordie on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Okay, we're back, Charles. We're talking about what people in the future are going to think of us based on the stuff we do today. It may seem primitive, and one of them might not seem, well, it could seem primitive, it'll seem quaint, probably, is driving a car yourself or maybe even owning your own car. Because the predictions for the future are that car hailing apps will become so ubiquitous that you're going to need your own car less and less and less. The is a prediction from Cara Swisher, the New York Times tech call in this, sorry, Cara, that in not too many years, owning your own car is going to become obsolete. And then eventually, the next step, this is me adding to that prediction. Those cars that pick you up when you use a ride-hailing app will not have a driver in them. You will just get in the back and go.

Yeah. I mean, self-driving cars has been in the news a lot over the past, a decade or so. I remember being in San Francisco a couple of years ago and seeing a car with a crazy contraption on top. I was like, What in the world is that? Is that a Google Maps or Google Earth thing?

Taking pictures? That car is wearing braces.

Then I looked inside. I was like, No, no, no. There's no human in that car. And it startled.

Me, but- Did you shout witchcraft?

I did. I threw a Molotov cocktail at it. I could hear that problem. But there was a company, I think there was more than one company that's trying this stuff out, but there's a company called Cruz, which just recently in October of this year, or I guess last year now, of 2023, the California state government said, You can't practice this anymore. No more driverless practicing out of you because, well, for a lot of reasons, building up to what was called the incident. But minor incidents involve things like blocking ambulances, stopping in the middle of an intersection, re-arraining a bus, running red lights, stuff like that. But the big incident was when a pedestrian, finally, was bound to happen, was hit in downtown San Francisco when she was hit by another car, driven by a real human, knocked into the other lane. And then the cruise car apparently braked, but then rolled over her anyway, pulled her forward, and then stopped on top of her.

Just stopped. It was like, Okay, I'm fine. I don't know what to do. I'm just going to freeze right here on top of this pedestrian. So, yeah, Cruz is far and away the only company from having problems with their tech that they're working on. They're just the most recent poster child of the problems with self-driving cars.

Yeah, she didn't die, by.

The way. No, thank you for saying that. The point of this is, though, is that despite setbacks, we exist in the time of setbacks. In a couple of decades, we'll exist in the time where we're beyond those setbacks and we have driverless cars. These setbacks don't mean we're never going to have driverless cars. In fact, even people who are super skeptical of them right now still admit we're probably going to have them at some point in the future. It's just a question of when. And it seems like we're a little further behind than we may have thought a few years ago.

Yeah. And one thing that if it's not, I think the road there may not be as abrupt because we already see in newer cars a lot of things like lane assistance, like your car will correct itself and steer itself back if it sees that it's driving off the road, like if you're drowsy or you're on your phone, which you should never be. So you see lane assistance and stuff like that. If your speed really changes a lot, a lot of times cars these days will send you an alert that says, Are you okay? Maybe you should pull over, stuff like that. So that's like, these are the intermediary steps that will lead to full automation, and they've already come a long way. But apparently, again, with the help of AI, they could go a lot further.

Yeah, eventually, the car is just going to start talking to itself, and you'll feel so left out you just don't even get in the driver's seat anymore. But the whole point of removing humans from cars is to remove humans from the equation of driving. Not for our convenience necessarily, but for our safety, because we're our own worst enemies when it comes to driving. You found a stat that recently, was it like 2020, 2021? Do you know?

It's 2021, but just over the last few years in general, it's been about 30 % to 33 %.

Of fatalities involve at least one of the drivers being drunk. I couldn't find any statistics that also include drugs, but just being drunk alone, 30 % of people who die in the United States die because one of the people involved in that crash was drunk. That is unacceptable. But it's humans. People do that. It's a terrible decision. People think that that's not going to happen to them, and... It does, and it does. It accounts for thousands and thousands and thousands of deaths every year. Driverless cars don't drink. They have other problems right now, but as we work them out, those problems will become a part of the past, and drunk driving accidents will become a part of the past as well, which will be great for everybody.

Yeah, I mean, 94% of any accident in the United States involves some human error. What I'm curious about is what the acceptable percentage of driverless car error, because it seems like human car error is just endlessly forgiveable to the point where every car these days, you shouldn't be able to start unless you can blow into a breathalyzer. That technology is there.

Yeah, we're harder on computers than we are on ourselves is what you're saying, huh?

Well, exactly. What if all of a sudden, driverless cars, they prove like they can reduce total accidents by 90 %? There would still be people saying, In those 10 % of cases where someone died, it was some AI computer or whatever. I don't know, I just find it really interesting that we still allow people to get into a car after they've been drinking and drive, even though the technology exists to stop that from happening.

Well, yeah, I think that it's a cognitive bias of ours. We tend to focus on the more sensational. The more sensational is a car being driven by a computer killing somebody, then a drunk dude killing somebody in his car.

Yeah.

So, yeah, just removing people from the equation should increase safety. It should also probably increase or decrease pollution as a result. There's somebody who came up with the eye-popping statistic that 30 % of the traffic in metropolitan areas is people circling the block looking for a place to park. If you don't own a car and you're not driving your own car, that goes away. So 30 % of traffic goes away instantaneously with that.

Yeah.

I mean, you had me right there. Yeah. So driverless cars, almost certainly coming down the pike, as long as AI doesn't take over the world, of course. I think we should caveat this entire episode with that. All of this is going to happen if AI doesn't take over the world, okay?

That's right. And we're going to finish up with a couple of shorter ones that I think are just pretty awesome and interesting. One is the fact that the current thinking is that we tend to tie progress as a nation, definitely in the United States, but in most places around the world, to how robust an economy is. It's always tied to finances on what progress we're making. And there are people that think, like with the way we're starting to look at animals, One day, that's not going to be the most important factor for humans. And things like the health of the earth and human beings, health and wellbeing, both physically and mentally, you should equate that with the success of a nation. And one day they're going to look back and say, You remember when all that we cared about was the fact that the stock market was flush.

Yeah, because GDP just tells you whether an economy is growing or shrinking, right? That's basically all it tells you. And it leaves out a lot of stuff. Like you said, human wellbeing, things like whether people are dying of deaths of despair or whether they're generally happy, how many resources are being depleted. Is anybody working on an alternative that? All of the stuff that creates that growing economy just is totally ignored. And I think that's what that economist, Kate Rayworth, was saying. It's madness. It's so ridiculous to just completely not count all of this stuff that really, really counts in favor of just this one metric, which is growth or shrinkage. And not only is that probably going to be thought of as ridiculous in the future, people, younger people today who are becoming adults or who have recently become adults, they already tend to think this way as a group. So it's a pretty sure indicator that we're going to leave GDP or growth behind as an indicator of the health of an economy and start thinking more about the other stuff, the more important stuff. And who knows what can result from that? What great cascading knock-on effects that that will have?

Yeah, you found this Princeton University bioethicist named Peter Singer, who talked about the fact that the circle of concern as humankind advances is expanding. And that's just a wonderful thought. And you see it and everything from the fact that we've laughed before, like the Mad Men episode where people used to just willingly throw litter on the ground. We look back at that as barbaric generally, and that's just one small example. So as humans are evolving down the line, that circle of concern is expanding and people are caring about more and more things that they didn't care about before. And that's great.

Yeah. And Peter Singer, by the way, is a very famous ethicist as far as animal rights are concerned and animal welfare. So, yeah, his whole thing is like, we're going to stop focusing on conspicuous consumption, and rather you'll be more considered a great person, not from your wealth, but from your charity and your charitable giving, which would be great. And then that circle of concern leads us to our last one, too, because the most recent inclusion into the circle of concern is the environment, the Earth, the health of the Earth. And this one is just a sure give me. There is no way that we're not going to be looked down upon for this by our descendants. And that is burning fossil fuels.

Yeah. I mean, in 500 years, who knows? Maybe sooner. It seems like people will definitely look back and say, I can't believe that we used to burn fossil fuels like we did, and for a lot of reasons, not just the process of removing fossil fuels and all that goes into that, or even the climate and the ozone, which are all huge concerns, obviously, but just things like pollution and air quality and the fact that that kills people, and that costs so much money and health care. I think there was a study from the University of Wisconsin in Madison that said if we stopped burning fossil fuels altogether, it would eliminate about 50,000 premature deaths per year because of air quality alone and about $600 billion annually in the US alone in healthcare costs.

Yeah, and I think even more than looking at this as dumb-dumbs for ignoring that, we're going to be looked at as reviled because of the future we'll have delivered our descendants because of the climate change we just allowed to happen. I saw a WHO estimate that 250,000 additional deaths per year are expected to come each year between 2030 and 2050 because of climate change from things like heat stress, malnutrition, insect-borne diseases, that an additional quarter of a million people are going to die every year because of climate change starting six years from now. That's nuts. So I can only imagine what the people of 2100 are going to think of us. Hopefully, they'll have everything under control by then, but they're probably going to be pretty ticked off that they had to go to the trouble.

Yeah. You can see this coming because it already happens now, once again, by seeing younger generations already looking at previous generations as barbaric and how we treat.

The Earth. For sure. I saw an RHS financial estimate or prediction that the oil market will collapse this decade, that we're just based on trends, current trends now and the way people think now that probably we won't be using oil nearly as much in the next 10, 20 years. Very interesting. Yeah. The future is interesting, Chuck, and it is the future. As a matter of fact, it's almost 2024. I just want to say Happy New Year to everybody.

That's right. Happy New Year, everyone. We thank you once again for your support. We say it all the time. If there was no you, there would be no us. We are always grateful that we are allowed to do this job because.

You listen. Yeah, thank you. Happy New Year to everyone. Happy birthday to you, me. Happy birthday. Thanks, Chuck. We'll see you guys next year. If you want to get in touch with us in the interim in this very short time left in 2023, you can do it via email almost instantaneously. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, put a sash on it that says 2024, and send it off to Stuff Podcast at iheartradio.

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Walter Isaacson set out to write about a world-changing genius in Elon Musk and found a man addicted to chaos and conspiracy.

I'm thinking that it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertips feel for social, emotional networks.

The book launched a thousand hot takes, so I sat down with Isaacson to try to get past the noise.

I like the fact that people who say I'm not as tough on Musk as I should be are always using anecdotes from my book to show why we should be tough on Musk.

Join me, Evan Ratliff, for On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Cheryl McCleom, host of the Cold Case podcast, Zone 7. Join us every Wednesday to hear cases like the Long Island serial killer.

You show genuine interest and you can't fake it, but these guys can see.

Right through.

To your soul.

You have to be prepared.

If you don't know your stuff.

They're going to just.

Call.

You out. Listen to Zone 7 with Cheryl McCleom on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Get ready because Aaron and Carissa from Calm Down have got something special coming up at State Farm Park in iHeartland. A reading of Twists in Night Before Christmas. They'll infuse it with stories and memories tying into the holiday spirit. Don't miss this special event. Starting Thursday, December seventh at 7:00 PM Eastern at State Farm Park in iHeartland in Fortnite. Available all weekend long. Afterwards, stick around and check out all the exciting things State Farm has to offer. Say hi to Jake from State Farm on the big screen and try to beat Jake's score at the parkour mini game. Visit iheartradio. Com/iheartland to start playing today.

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