Today we discuss the experience of returning home after timeway—culture shock, social media, and seeing your home with fresh eyes. Then a difficult set of topics: anorexia, physician assisted suicide, “terminal” diagnoses, social contagions, and what people have a right to do with their own lives. Finally: AI has been used to predict potentially useful drug combinations to fight cancer. What does this mean for the future of medicine, and AI?
988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: https://988lifeline.org
Free and confidential helpline for individuals and families facing mental disorders: https://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/helplines/national-helpline
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Mentioned in this episode:
Denver Post op-ed on Jane Allen: https://www.denverpost.com/2025/10/02/assisted-suicide-was-offered-to-my-friend-jane-allen-she-had-an-eating-disorder-opinion/
Gaudiani et al 2022. Terminal anorexia nervosa: three cases and proposed clinical characteristics. Journal of Eating Disorders, 10(1): 23: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s40337-022-00548-3.pdf
Guarda et al 2022. Terminal anorexia nervosa is a dangerous term: it cannot, and should not, be defined. Journal of eating disorders, 10(1): 79: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s40337-022-00599-6.pd
Mia Hughes’ tweet thread on social contagions: https://x.com/_CryMiaRiver/status/1491065839495544837
Laura Delano on DarkHorse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18XtCdasn2Q&list=PLjQ2gC-5yHEuZwhHfjXu3KH8MomS2N3zq&index=13
Laura Delano’s book, Unshrunk, excerpted at Natural Selections: https://naturalselections.substack.com/p/informed-consent-in-the-land-of-psychiatric
How a Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway: https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-gemma-ai-cancer-therapy-discovery/
Timestamps:
00:00:00 Holding Screen
00:05:04 Will this episode be "off the hook?"
00:16:14 Reviewing The Three Camino Lessons from Episode 296
00:18:49 The 4th Camino Lesson: Culture Shock
00:37:54 Social Contagion: Assisted Suicide & Terminal Anorexia
01:11:55 AI: Discovering NEW Cancer Mechanism
01:27:44 Closing
We have "cartesian blinders being put on us so that we are trying to make sense out of scraps of information and hints." - @bretweinstein
WEINSTEIN: I mean, even if you have your villains who are engaged in the behavior that motivated this war in Iran, even if that's the story, presumably most of the people in the path of these ferocious bombings that he is describing are not deserving of going back to the Stone Age.
In fact, I distinctly remember him telling us that part of what we were up to was liberating the people of Iran from their tyrannical regime.
So if it's the tyrannical regime that justifies the ferocious bombing, then it's a tragedy that other people are going to be sent back to the Stone Ages with them. Right?
HEYING: It's it's not a narrative. It's an incoherent set of talking points.
WEINSTEIN: Yeah, it's a kind of cheerleading that is completely inappropriate from the perspective of the president.
Bret Weinstein discusses the Trump administrations "back to the stone age" recent remarks in the latest episode of The Evolutionary Lens, Episode 320 "Are we back in the stone age?" on DarkHorse.
Bret Weinstein explains, "If you stop businesses from starting here, and if you drive people so that they move elsewhere—even though it's difficult to do—then the point is the tax base dries up, which then forces you to become even more predatory for the people who stayed.
And that's really the thing, right? They're setting themselves up so that they have to go after more and more people, because the people who are starting new businesses are not going to do it here."
