Podcast appearances and mentions of paul nathan

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IntroAround New Years, Max Alexander, Laura Duffy, Matt and I tried to raise money for animal welfare (more specifically, the EA Animal Welfare Fund) on Twitter. We put out a list of incentives (see the pink image below), one of which was to record a drunk podcast episode if the greater Very Online Effective Altruism community managed to collectively donate $10,000.To absolutely nobody's surprise, they did ($10k), and then did it again ($20k) and then almost did it a third time ($28,945 as of March 9, 2024). To everyone who gave or helped us spread the word, and on behalf of the untold number of animals these dollars will help, thank you.And although our active promotion on Twitter has come to an end, it is not too late to give! I give a bit more context in a short monologue intro I recorded (sober) after the conversation, so without further ado, Drunk Pigeon Hour:Transcript(Note: very imperfect - sorry!)MonologueHi, this is Aaron. This episode of Pigeon Hour is very special for a couple of reasons.The first is that it was recorded in person, so three of us were physically within a couple feet of each other. Second, it was recorded while we were drunk or maybe just slightly inebriated. Honestly, I didn't get super drunk, so I hope people forgive me for that.But the occasion for drinking was that this, a drunk Pigeon Hour episode, was an incentive for a fundraiser that a couple of friends and I hosted on Twitter, around a little bit before New Year's and basically around Christmas time. We basically said, if we raise $10,000 total, we will do a drunk Pigeon Hour podcast. And we did, in fact, we are almost at $29,000, just shy of it. So technically the fundraiser has ended, but it looks like you can still donate. So, I will figure out a way to link that.And also just a huge thank you to everyone who donated. I know that's really cliche, but this time it really matters because we were raising money for the Effective Altruism Animal Welfare Fund, which is a strong contender for the best use of money in the universe.Without further ado, I present me, Matt, and Laura. Unfortunately, the other co-host Max was stuck in New Jersey and so was unable to participate tragically. Yeah so here it is!ConversationAARONHello, people who are maybe listening to this. I just, like, drank alcohol for, like, the first time in a while. I don't know. Maybe I do like alcohol. Maybe I'll find that out now.MATTUm, All right, yeah, so this is, this is Drunk Pigeon Hour! Remember what I said earlier when I was like, as soon as we are recording, as soon as we press record, it's going to get weird and awkward.LAURAI am actually interested in the types of ads people get on Twitter. Like, just asking around, because I find that I get either, like, DeSantis ads. I get American Petroleum Institute ads, Ashdale College.MATTWeirdly, I've been getting ads for an AI assistant targeted at lobbyists. So it's, it's like step up your lobbying game, like use this like tuned, I assume it's like tuned ChatGPT or something. Um, I don't know, but it's, yeah, it's like AI assistant for lobbyists, and it's like, like, oh, like your competitors are all using this, like you need to buy this product.So, so yeah, Twitter thinks I'm a lobbyist. I haven't gotten any DeSantis ads, actually.AARONI think I might just like have personalization turned off. Like not because I actually like ad personalization. I think I'm just like trying to like, uh, this is, this is like a half-baked protest of them getting rid of circles. I will try to minimize how much revenue they can make from me.MATTSo, so when I, I like went through a Tumblr phase, like very late. In like 2018, I was like, um, like I don't like, uh, like what's happening on a lot of other social media.Like maybe I'll try like Tumblr as a, as an alternative.And I would get a lot of ads for like plus-sized women's flannels.So, so like the Twitter ad targeting does not faze me because I'm like, oh, okay, like, I can, hold on.AARONSorry, keep going. I can see every ad I've ever.MATTCome across, actually, in your giant CSV of Twitter data.AARONJust because I'm a nerd. I like, download. Well, there's actually a couple of things. I just download my Twitter data once in a while. Actually do have a little web app that I might try to improve at some point, which is like, you drop it in and then it turns them. It gives you a csV, like a spreadsheet of your tweets, but that doesn't do anything with any of the other data that they put in there.MATTI feel like it's going to be hard to get meaningful information out of this giant csv in a short amount of time.AARONIt's a giant JSON, actually.MATTAre you just going to drop it all into c long and tell it to parse it for you or tell it to give you insights into your ads.AARONWait, hold on. This is such a.MATTWait. Do people call it “C-Long” or “Clong”?AARONWhy would it be long?MATTWell, because it's like Claude Long.LAURAI've never heard this phrase.MATTThis is like Anthropic's chat bot with a long context with so like you can put. Aaron will be like, oh, can I paste the entire group chat history?AARONOh yeah, I got clong. Apparently that wasn't acceptable so that it.MATTCan summarize it for me and tell me what's happened since I was last year. And everyone is like, Aaron, don't give our data to Anthropic, is already suss.LAURAEnough with the impressions feel about the Internet privacy stuff. Are you instinctively weirded out by them farming out your personal information or just like, it gives me good ads or whatever? I don't care.MATTI lean a little towards feeling weird having my data sold. I don't have a really strong, and this is probably like a personal failing of mine of not having a really strong, well formed opinion here. But I feel a little sketched out when I'm like all my data is being sold to everyone and I don't share. There is this vibe on Twitter that the EU cookies prompts are like destroying the Internet. This is regulation gone wrong. I don't share that instinct. But maybe it's just because I have average tolerance for clicking no cookies or yes cookies on stuff. And I have this vibe that will.AARONSketch down by data. I think I'm broadly fine with companies having my information and selling it to ad targeting. Specifically. I do trust Google a lot to not be weird about it, even if it's technically legal. And by be weird about it, what do mean? Like, I don't even know what I mean exactly. If one of their random employees, I don't know if I got into a fight or something with one of their random employees, it would be hard for this person to track down and just see my individual data. And that's just a random example off the top of my head. But yeah, I could see my view changing if they started, I don't know, or it started leaching into the physical world more. But it seems just like for online ads, I'm pretty cool with everything.LAURAHave you ever gone into the ad personalization and tried see what demographics they peg you?AARONOh yeah. We can pull up mine right now.LAURAIt's so much fun doing that. It's like they get me somewhat like the age, gender, they can predict relationship status, which is really weird.AARONThat's weird.MATTDid you test this when you were in and not in relationships to see if they got it right?LAURANo, I think it's like they accumulate data over time. I don't know. But then it's like we say that you work in a mid sized finance. Fair enough.MATTThat's sort of close.LAURAYeah.AARONSorry. Keep on podcasting.LAURAOkay.MATTDo they include political affiliation in the data you can see?AARONOkay.MATTI would have been very curious, because I think we're all a little bit idiosyncratic. I'm probably the most normie of any of us in terms of. I can be pretty easily sorted into, like, yeah, you're clearly a Democrat, but all of us have that classic slightly. I don't know what you want to call it. Like, neoliberal project vibe or, like, supply side. Yeah. Like, some of that going on in a way that I'm very curious.LAURAThe algorithm is like, advertising deSantis.AARONYeah.MATTI guess it must think that there's some probability that you're going to vote in a republican primary.LAURAI live in DC. Why on earth would I even vote, period.MATTWell, in the primary, your vote is going to count. I actually would think that in the primary, DC is probably pretty competitive, but I guess it votes pretty. I think it's worth.AARONI feel like I've seen, like, a.MATTI think it's probably hopeless to live. Find your demographic information from Twitter. But, like.AARONAge 13 to 54. Yeah, they got it right. Good job. I'm only 50, 99.9% confident. Wait, that's a pretty General.MATTWhat's this list above?AARONOh, yeah. This is such a nerd snipe. For me, it's just like seeing y'all. I don't watch any. I don't regularly watch any sort of tv series. And it's like, best guesses of, like, I assume that's what it is. It thinks you watch dune, and I haven't heard of a lot of these.MATTWait, you watch cocaine there?AARONBig bang theory? No, I definitely have watched the big Bang theory. Like, I don't know, ten years ago. I don't know. Was it just, like, random korean script.MATTOr whatever, when I got Covid real bad. Not real bad, but I was very sick and in bed in 2022. Yeah, the big bang theory was like, what I would say.AARONThese are my interest. It's actually pretty interesting, I think. Wait, hold on. Let me.MATTOh, wait, it's like, true or false for each of these?AARONNo, I think you can manually just disable and say, like, oh, I'm not, actually. And, like, I did that for Olivia Rodrigo because I posted about her once, and then it took over my feed, and so then I had to say, like, no, I'm not interested in Olivia Rodrigo.MATTWait, can you control f true here? Because almost all of these. Wait, sorry. Is that argentine politics?AARONNo, it's just this.MATTOh, wait, so it thinks you have no interest?AARONNo, this is disabled, so I haven't. And for some reason, this isn't the list. Maybe it was, like, keywords instead of topics or something, where it was the.MATTGot it.AARONYes. This is interesting. It thinks I'm interested in apple stock, and, I don't know, a lot of these are just random.MATTWait, so argentine politics was something it thought you were interested in? Yeah. Right.AARONCan.MATTDo you follow Maya on Twitter?AARONWho's Maya?MATTLike, monetarist Maya? Like, neoliberal shell two years ago.AARONI mean, maybe. Wait, hold on. Maybe I'm just like.MATTYeah, hardcore libertarianism.LAURAYeah. No, so far so good with him. I feel like.AARONMaia, is it this person? Oh, I am.MATTYeah.AARONOkay.MATTYeah, she was, like, neoliberal shell two years ago.AARONSorry, this is, like, such an errands. Like snipe. I got my gender right. Maybe. I don't know if I told you that. Yeah. English. Nice.MATTWait, is that dogecoin?AARONI assume there's, like, an explicit thing, which is like, we're going to err way on the side of false positives instead of false negatives, which is like. I mean, I don't know. I'm not that interested in AB club, which.MATTYou'Re well known for throwing staplers at your subordinate.AARONYeah.LAURAWait, who did you guys support in 2020 primary?MATTYou were a Pete stan.LAURAI was a Pete stan. Yes, by that point, definitely hardcore. But I totally get. In 2016, I actually was a Bernie fan, which was like, I don't know how much I was really into this, or just, like, everybody around me was into it. So I was trying to convince myself that he was better than Hillary, but I don't know, that fell apart pretty quickly once he started losing. And, yeah, I didn't really know a whole lot about politics. And then, like, six months later, I became, like, a Reddit libertarian.AARONWe think we've talked about your ideological evolution.MATTHave you ever done the thing of plotting it out on the political? I feel like that's a really interesting.LAURAExercise that doesn't capture the online. I was into Ben Shapiro.MATTReally? Oh, my God. That's such a funny lore fact.AARONI don't think I've ever listened to Ben Shapiro besides, like, random clips on Twitter that I like scroll?MATTI mean, he talks very fast. I will give him that.LAURAAnd he's funny. And I think it's like the fast talking plus being funny is like, you can get away with a lot of stuff and people just end up like, oh, sure, I'm not really listening to this because it's on in the background.AARONYeah.MATTIn defense of the Bernie thing. So I will say I did not support Bernie in 2016, but there was this moment right about when he announced where I was very intrigued. And there's something about his backstory that's very inspiring. This is a guy who has been just extraordinarily consistent in his politics for close to 50 years, was saying lots of really good stuff about gay rights when he was like, Burlington mayor way back in the day, was giving speeches on the floor of the House in the number one sound very similar to the things he's saying today, which reflects, you could say, maybe a very myopic, closed minded thing, but also an ideological consistency. That's admirable. And I think is pointing at problems that are real often. And so I think there is this thing that's, to me, very much understandable about why he was a very inspiring candidate. But when it came down to nitty gritty details and also to his decisions about who to hire subordinates and stuff, very quickly you look at the Bernie campaign alumni and the nuances of his views and stuff, and you're like, okay, wait, this is maybe an inspiring story, but does it actually hold up?AARONProbably not.LAURAYeah, that is interesting. It's like Bernie went woke in 2020, kind of fell apart, in my opinion.AARONI stopped following or not following on social media, just like following him in general, I guess. 2016 also, I was 16. You were not 16. You were.MATTYeah, I was in college at that time, so I was about 20.AARONSo that was, you can't blame it. Anything that I do under the age of 18 is like just a race when I turn 18.LAURAOkay, 2028 draft. Who do we want to be democratic nominee?AARONOh, Jesse from pigeonhole. I honestly think he should run. Hello, Jesse. If you're listening to this, we're going to make you listen to this. Sorry. Besides that, I don't know.MATTI don't have, like, an obvious front runner in mind.AARONWait, 2028? We might be dead by 2028. Sorry, we don't talk about AI.MATTYeah.AARONNo, but honestly, that is beyond the range of planability, I think. I don't actually think all humans are going to be dead by 2028. But that is a long way away. All I want in life is not all I want. This is actually what I want out of a political leader. Not all I want is somebody who is good on AI and also doesn't tells the Justice Department to not sue California or whatever about their gestation. Or maybe it's like New Jersey or something about the gestation crate.MATTOh, yeah. Top twelve.AARONYeah. Those are my two criteria.MATTCorey Booker is going to be right on the latter.AARONYeah.MATTI have no idea about his views on.AARONIf to some extent. Maybe this is actively changing as we speak, basically. But until recently it wasn't a salient political issue and so it was pretty hard to tell. I don't know. I don't think Biden has a strong take on it. He's like, he's like a thousand years old.LAURAWatch what Mitch should have possibly decided. That's real if we don't do mean.AARONBut like, but his executive order was way better than I would have imagined. And I, like, I tweeted about, know, I don't think I could have predicted that necessarily.MATTI agree. I mean, I think the Biden administration has been very reasonable on AI safety issues and that generally is reflective. Yeah, I think that's reflective of the.AARONTongue we know Joe Biden is listening to.MATTOkay.AARONOkay.MATTTopics that are not is like, this is a reward for the fundraiser. Do we want to talk about fundraiser and retrospective on that?AARONSure.MATTBecause I feel like, I don't know. That ended up going at least like one sigma above.AARONHow much? Wait, how much did we actually raise?MATTWe raised like 22,500.LAURAOkay. Really pissed that you don't have to go to Ava.AARONI guess this person, I won't name them, but somebody who works at a prestigious organization basically was seriously considering donating a good amount of his donation budget specifically for the shrimp costume. And, and we chatted about it over Twitter, DM, and I think he ended up not doing it, which I think was like the right call because for tax reasons, it would have been like, oh. He thought like, oh, yeah, actually, even though that's pretty funny, it's not worth losing. I don't know, maybe like 1000 out of $5,000 tax reasons or whatever. Clearly this guy is actually thinking through his donations pretty well. But I don't know, it brought him to the brink of donating several, I think, I don't know, like single digit thousands of dollars. Exactly.LAURAClearly an issue in the tax.AARONDo you have any tax take? Oh, wait, sorry.MATTYeah, I do think we should like, I mean, to the extent you are allowed by your employer too, in public space.AARONAll people at think tanks, they're supposed to go on podcast and tweet. How could you not be allowed to do that kind of thing?MATTSorry, keep going. But yeah, no, I mean, I think it's worth dwelling on it a little bit longer because I feel like, yeah, okay, so we didn't raise a billion dollars as you were interested in doing.AARONYeah. Wait, can I make the case for like. Oh, wait. Yeah. Why? Being slightly unhinged may have been actually object level. Good. Yeah, basically, I think this didn't end up exposed to. We learned this didn't actually end up happening. I think almost all of the impact money, because it's basically one of the same in this context. Sorry. Most of the expected money would come in the form of basically having some pretty large, probably billionaire account, just like deciding like, oh, yeah, I'll just drop a couple of mil on this funny fundraiser or whatever, or maybe less, honestly, listen, $20,000, a lot of money. It's probably more money than I have personally ever donated. On the other hand, there's definitely some pretty EA adjacent or broadly rationalist AI adjacent accounts whose net worth is in at least tens of millions of dollars, for whom $100,000 just would not actually affect their quality of life or whatever. And I think, yeah, there's not nontrivial chance going in that somebody would just decide to give a bunch of money.MATTI don't know. My view is that even the kinds of multimillionaires and billionaires that hang out on Twitter are not going to ever have dropped that much on a random fundraiser. They're more rational.AARONWell, there was proof of concept for rich people being insane. Is Balaji giving like a million dollars to James Medlock.MATTThat's true.AARONThat was pretty idiosyncratic. Sorry. So maybe that's not fair. On the other hand. On the other hand, I don't know, people do things for clout. And so, yeah, I would have, quote, tweeted. If somebody was like, oh yeah, here's $100,000 guys, I would have quote, tweeted the shit out of them. They would have gotten as much possible. I don't know. I would guess if you have a lot of rich people friends, they're also probably on Twitter, especially if it's broadly like tech money or whatever. And so there's that. There's also the fact that, I don't know, it's like object people, at least some subset of rich people have a good think. EA is basically even if they don't identify as an EA themselves, think like, oh yeah, this is broadly legit and correct or whatever. And so it's not just like a random.MATTThat's true. I do think the choice of the animal welfare fund made that harder. Right. I think if it's like bed nets, I think it's more likely that sort of random EA rich person would be like, yes, this is clearly good. And I think we chose something that I think we could all get behind.AARONBecause we have, there was a lot of politicking around.MATTYeah, we all have different estimates of the relative good of different cause areas and this was the one we could very clearly agree on, which I think is very reasonable and good. And I'm glad we raised money for the animal welfare fund, but I do think that reduces the chance of, yeah.LAURAI think it pushes the envelope towards the animal welfare fund being more acceptable as in mainstream ea.org, just like Givewell would be. And so by forcing that issue, maybe we have done more good for the.AARONThat there's like that second order effect. I do just think even though you're like, I think choosing this over AMF or whatever, global health fund or whatever decreased the chance of a random person. Not a random person, but probably decrease the total amount of expected money being given. I think that was just trumped by the fact that I think the animal welfare, the number I pull out of thin air is not necessarily not out of thin air, but very uncertain is like 1000 x or whatever relative to the standards you vote for. Quote, let it be known that there is a rabbit on the premises. Do they interact with other rodents?MATTOkay, so rabbits aren't rodents. We can put this on the pod. So rabbits are lagging wars, which is.AARONFuck is that?MATTIt's a whole separate category of animals.AARONI just found out that elk were part of it. Like a type of deer. This is another world shattering insight.MATTNo, but rabbits are evolutionarily not part of the same. I guess it's a family on the classification tree.AARONNobody, they taught us that in 7th grade.MATTYeah, so they're not part of the same family as rodents. They're their own thing. What freaks me out is that guinea pigs and rabbits seem like pretty similar, they have similar diet.AARONThat's what I was thinking.MATTThey have similar digestive systems, similar kind of like general needs, but they're actually like, guinea pigs are more closely related to rats than they are to rabbits. And it's like a convergent evolution thing that they ended up.AARONAll mammals are the same. Honestly.MATTYeah. So it's like, super weird, but they're not rodents, to answer your question. Rabbits do like these kinds of rabbits. So these are all pet rabbits are descended from european. They're not descended from american rabbits because.LAURAAmerican rabbits like cotton tails. Oh, those are different.MATTYeah. So these guys are the kinds of rabbits that will live in warrens. Warrens. So, like, tunnel systems that they like. Like Elizabeth Warren. Yeah. And so they'll live socially with other rabbits, and they'll dig warrens. And so they're used to living in social groups. They're used to having a space they need to keep clean. And so that's why they can be, like, litter box trained, is that they're used to having a warren where you don't just want to leave poop everywhere. Whereas american rabbits are more solitary. They live above ground, or in my understanding is they sometimes will live in holes, but only occupying a hole that another animal has dug. They won't do their hole themselves. And so then they are just not social. They're not easily litter box trained, that kind of stuff. So all the domestic rabbits are bred from european ones.AARONI was thinking, if you got a guinea pig, would they become friends? Okay.MATTSo apparently they have generally similar dispositions and it can get along, but people don't recommend it because each of them can carry diseases that can hurt the other one. And so you actually don't want to do it. But it does seem very cute to have rabbit.AARONNo, I mean, yeah. My last pet was a guinea pig, circa 20. Died like, a decade ago. I'm still not over it.MATTWould you consider another one?AARONProbably. Like, if I get a pet, it'll be like a dog or a pig. I really do want a pig. Like an actual pig.MATTWait, like, not a guinea pig? Like a full size pig?AARONYeah. I just tweeted about this. I think that they're really cool and we would be friends. I'm being slightly sarcastic, but I do think if I had a very large amount of money, then the two luxury purchases would be, like, a lot of massages and a caretaker and space and whatever else a pig needs. And so I could have a pet.MATTLike, andy organized a not EADC, but EADC adjacent trip to Rosie's farm sanctuary.AARONOh, I remember this. Yeah.MATTAnd we got to pet pigs. And they were very sweet and seems very cute and stuff. They're just like, they feel dense, not like stupid. But when you pet them, you're like, this animal is very large and heavy for its size. That was my biggest surprising takeaway, like, interacting with the hair is not soft either. No, they're pretty coarse, but they seem like sweeties, but they are just like very robust.LAURAHave you guys seen Dave?AARONYes.LAURAThat's like one of the top ten movies of all time.AARONYou guys watch movies? I don't know. Maybe when I was like four. I don't like.LAURAOkay, so the actor who played farmer Hoggett in this movie ended up becoming a vegan activist after he realized, after having to train all of the animals, that they were extremely intelligent. And obviously the movie is about not killing animals, and so that ended up going pretty well.AARONYeah, that's interesting. Good brown.MATTOkay, sorry. Yeah, no, this is all tracked. No, this is great. We are doing a drunk podcast rather than a sober podcast, I think, precisely because we are trying to give the people some sidetracks and stuff. Right. But I jokingly put on my list of topics like, we solved the two envelopes paradox once and for all.AARONNo, but it's two boxing.MATTNo. Two envelopes. No. So this is the fundamental challenge to questions about, I think one of the fundamental challenges to be like, you multiply out the numbers and the number.AARONYeah, I feel like I don't have like a cash take. So just like, tell me the thing.MATTOkay.AARONI'll tell you the correct answer. Yeah.MATTOkay, great. We were leading into this. You were saying, like, animal charity is 1000 x game, right?AARONConditional. Yeah.MATTAnd I think it's hard to easily get to 1000 x, but it is totally possible to get to 50 x if you just sit down and multiply out numbers and you're like, probability of sentience and welfare range.AARONI totally stand by that as my actual point estimate. Maybe like a log mean or something. I'm actually not sure, but. Sorry, keep going.MATTOkay, so one line of argument raised against this is the two envelopes problem, and I'm worried I'm going to do a poor job explaining this. Laura, please feel free to jump in if I say something wrong. So two envelopes is like, it comes from the thing of, like, suppose you're given two envelopes and you're told that one envelope has twice as much money in it as the other.AARONOh, you are going to switch back and forth forever.MATTExactly. Every time. You're like, if I switch the other envelope and it has half as much money as this envelope, then I lose 0.5. But if it has twice as much money as this envelope, then I gain one. And so I can never decide on which envelope because it always looks like it's positive ev to switch the other. So that's where the name comes from.AARONI like a part that you're like, you like goggles?MATTSo let me do the brief summary, which is that basically, depending on which underlying units you pick, whether you work in welfare range, units that are using one human as the baseline or one chicken as the baseline, you can end up with different outputs of the expected value calculation. Because it's like, basically, is it like big number of chickens times some fraction of the human welfare range that dominates? Or is it like some small probability that chickens are basically not sentient times? So then a human has like a huge human's welfare range is huge in chicken units, and which of those dominates is determined by which unit you work in.AARONI also think, yeah, this is not a good conducive to this problem. Is not conducive to alcohol or whatever. Or alcohol is not going to this issue. To this problem or whatever. In the maximally abstract envelope thing. I have an intuition that's something weird kind of probably fake going on. I don't actually see what the issue is here. I don't believe you yet that there's like an actual issue here. It's like, okay, just do the better one. I don't know.MATTOkay, wait, I'll get a piece of paper. Talk amongst yourselves, and I think I'll be able to show this is like.LAURAMe as the stats person, just saying I don't care about the math. At some point where it's like, look, I looked at an animal and I'm like, okay, so we have evolutionarily pretty similar paths. It would be insane to think that it's not feeling like, it's not capable of feeling hedonic pain to pretty much the same extent as me. So I'm just going to ballpark it. And I don't actually care for webs.AARONI feel like I've proven my pro animal bona fide. I think it's bona fide. But here, and I don't share that intuition, I still think that we can go into that megapig discourse. Wait, yeah, sort of. Wait, not exactly megapig discourse. Yeah, I remember. I think I got cyberbullyed by, even though they didn't cyberbully me because I was informed of offline bullying via cyber about somebody's, sorry, this is going to sound absolutely incoherent. So we'll take this part out. Yeah. I was like, oh, I think it's like some metaphysical appeal to neuron counts. You specifically told me like, oh, yeah, Mr. So and so didn't think this checked out. Or whatever. Do you know what I'm talking about?LAURAYeah.AARONOkay. No, but maybe I put it in dawn or Cringey or pretentious terms, but I do think I'm standing by my metaphysical neurons claim here. Not that I'm super confident in anything, but just that we're really radically unsure about the nature of sentience and qualia and consciousness. And probably it has something to do with neurons, at least. They're clearly related in a very boring sciency way. Yeah. It's not insane to me that, like, that, like. Like the unit of. Yeah, like the. The thing. The thing that, like, produces or like is, or like is directly, like one to one associated with, like, particular, like. Like, I guess, amount, for lack of better terms, of conscious experience, is some sort of physical thing. The neurons jumps out as the unit that might make sense. And then there's like, oh, yeah, do we really think all the neurons that control the tongue, like the motor function of the tongue, are those really make you quadrillion more important than a seal or whatever? And then I go back to, okay, even though I haven't done any research on this, maybe it's just like opiate. The neurons directly related neuron counts directly of. Sorry. Neurons directly involved in pretty low level hedonic sensations. The most obvious one would be literal opioid receptors. Maybe those are the ones that matter. This is like, kind of. I feel like we've sort of lost the plot a little.MATTOkay, this is like weird drunk math.AARONBut I think your handwriting is pretty good.MATTI think I have it. So suppose we work in human units. I have a hypothetical intervention that can help ten chickens or one human, and we assume that when I say help, it's like, help them. The same of it. So if I work in human units, I say maybe there is a 50% chance that a chicken is zero one to 1100 of a human and a 50% chance that a chicken and a human are equal. Obviously, this is a thought experiment. I'm not saying that this is my real world probabilities, but suppose that these are my credences. So I do out the EV. The thing that helps ten chickens. I say that, okay, in half of the world, chickens are one 100th of a human, so helping ten of them is worth, like, zero five. Sorry, helping ten of them is zero one. And so 0.5 times zero one times ten is zero five. And then in the other half of the world, I say that a chicken and a human are equal. So then my intervention helps ten chickens, which is like helping ten humans so my total credence, like the benefit in that set of worlds with my 0.5 probability, is five. And so in the end, the chicken intervention wins because it has, on net, an ev of 5.5 versus one for the human intervention. Because the human intervention always helps one human. I switch it around and I say my base unit of welfare range, or, like moral weight, or whatever you want to say, is chicken units. Like, one chicken's worth of moral weight. So in half of the world, a human is worth 100 chickens, and then in the other half of the world, a human is worth one chicken. So I do out the ev for my intervention that helps the one human. Now, in the chicken units, and in chicken units, like, half of the time, that human is worth 100 chickens. And so I get 0.5 times, 100 times one, which is 50. And then in the other half of the world, the chicken and the human are equal. And so then it's 0.5 times one, times one, because I'm helping one human, so that's 0.5. The ev is 50.5. And then I do have my ev for my chicken welfare thing. That's, like, ten chickens, and I always help ten chickens. And so it's ten as my units of good. So when I worked in human units, I said that the chickens won because it was 5.5 human units versus one human unit for helping the human. When I did it in chicken units, it was 50.5 to help the humans versus ten to help the chickens. And so now I'm like, okay, my ev is changing just based on which units I work in. And I think this is, like, the two envelopes problem that's applied to animals. Brian Tomasic has, like, a long post about this, but I think this is, like, this is a statement or an example of the problem.AARONCool.LAURACan I just say something about the moral weight project? It's like, really just. We ended up coming up with numbers, which I think may have been a bit of a mistake in the end, because I think the real value of that was going through the literature and finding out the similarities and the traits between animals and humans, and then there are a surprising number of them that we have in common. And so at the end of the day, it's a judgment call. And I don't know what you do with it, because that is, like, a legit statistical problem with things that arises when you put numbers on stuff.MATTSo I'm pretty sympathetic to what you're saying here of, like, the core insight of the moral weight project is, like, when we look at features that could plausibly determine capacity to experience welfare, we find that a pig and a human have a ton in common. Obviously, pigs cannot write poetry, but they do show evidence of grief behavior when another pig dies. And they show evidence of vocalizing in response to pain and all of these things. I think coming out of the moral waste project being like, wow. Under some form of utilitarianism, it's really hard to justify harms to, or like harms to pigs. Really. Morally matter makes complete sense. I think the challenge here is when you get to something like black soldier flies or shrimp, where when you actually look at the welfare range table, you see that the number of proxies that they likely or definitely have is remarkably low. The shrimp number is hinging on. It's not hinging on a ton. They share a few things. And because there aren't that many categories overall, that ends up being in the median case. Like, they have a moral weight, like one 30th of a human. And so I worry that sort of your articulation of the benefit starts to break down when you get to those animals. And we start to like, I don't know what you do without numbers there. And I think those numbers are really susceptible to this kind of 200.AARONI have a question.MATTYeah, go.AARONWait. This supposed to be like 5.5 versus one?MATTYeah.AARONAnd this is 50.5 versus ten? Yeah. It sound like the same thing to me.MATTNo, but they've inverted this case, the chickens one. So it's like when I'm working in human units, right? Like, half the time, I help.AARONIf you're working in human units, then the chicken intervention looks 5.5 times better. Yes. Wait, can I write this down over here?MATTYeah. And maybe I'm not an expert on this problem. This is just like something that tortures me when I try and sleep at night, not like a thing that I've carefully studied. So maybe I'm stating this wrong, but, yeah. When I work in human units, the 50% probability in this sort of toy example that the chickens and the humans are equal means that the fact that my intervention can help more chickens makes the ev higher. And then when I work in the chicken units, the fact that human might be 100 times more sentient than the chicken or more capable of realizing welfare, to be technical, that means the human intervention just clearly wins.AARONJust to check that I would have this right, the claim is that in human units, the chicken intervention looks 5.5 times better than the human intervention. But when you use chicken units, the human intervention looks 5.5 times better than the chicken intervention. Is that correct?MATTYes, that's right.AARONWait, hold on. Give me another minute.MATTThis is why doing this drunk was a bad idea.AARONIn human.LAURANo, I think that's actually right. And I don't know what to do about the flies and shrimp and stuff like this. This is like where I draw my line of like, okay, so lemonstone quote.MATTTweeted me, oh, my God.LAURAI think he actually had a point of, there's a type of ea that is like, I'm going to set my budget constraint and then maximize within that versus start with a blank slate and allow the reason to take me wherever it goes. And I'm definitely in the former camp of like, my budget constraint is like, I care about humans and a couple of types of animals, and I'm just like drawing the line there. And I don't know what you do with the other types of things.MATTI am very skeptical of arguments that are like, we should end Medicare to spend it all on shrimp.AARONNo one's suggesting that. No, there's like a lot of boring, prosaic reasons.MATTI guess what I'm saying is there's a sense in which, like, totally agreeing with you. But I think the challenge is that object level.AARONYeah, you set us up. The political economy, I like totally by double it.MATTI think that there is. This is great. Aaron, I think you should have to take another shot for.AARONI'm sorry, this isn't fair. How many guys, I don't even drink, so I feel like one drink is like, is it infinity times more than normalize it? So it's a little bit handle.MATTI think there has to be room for moral innovation in my view. I think that your line of thinking, we don't want to do radical things based on sort of out there moral principles in the short term. Right. We totally want to be very pragmatic and careful when our moral ideas sort of put us really far outside of what's socially normal. But I don't think you get to where we are. I don't know what we owe the future was like a book that maybe was not perfect, but I think it eloquently argues with the fact that the first person to be like, hey, slavery in the Americas is wrong. Or I should say really the first person who is not themselves enslaved. Because of course, the people who are actually victims of this system were like, this is wrong from the start. But the first people to be like, random white people in the north being like, hey, this system is wrong. Looks super weird. And the same is true for almost any moral innovation. And so you have to, I think saying, like, my budget constraint is totally fixed seems wrong to me because it leaves no room for being wrong about some of your fundamental morals.LAURAYeah, okay. A couple of things here. I totally get that appeal 100%. At the same time, a lot of people have said this about things that now we look back at as being really bad, like the USSR. I think communism ends up looking pretty bad in retrospect, even though I think there are a lot of very good moral intuitions underpinning it.AARONYeah, I don't know. It's like, mostly an empirical question in that case, about what government policies do to human preference satisfaction, which is like, pretty. Maybe I'm too econ. These seem like very different questions.LAURAIt's like we let our reason go astray, I think.MATTRight, we, as in some humans.AARONNo, I think. Wait, at first glance. At first glance, I think communism and things in that vicinity seem way more intuitively appealing than they actually, or than they deserve to be, basically. And the notion of who is it? Like Adam Smith? Something Smith? Yeah, like free hand of the market or whatever. Invisible hand. Invisible free hand of the bunny ear of the market. I think maybe it's like, field intuitive to me at this point, because I've heard it a lot. But no, I totally disagree that people's natural intuition was that communism can't work. I think it's like, isn't true.MATTI'm not sure you guys are disagreeing with one.AARONYeah.MATTLike, I think, Laura, if I can attempt to restate your point, is that to at least a subset of the people in the USSR at the time of the russian revolution, communism plausibly looked like the same kind of moral innovation as lots of stuff we looked back on as being really good, like the abolition of slavery or like, women's rights or any of those other things. And so you need heuristics that will defend against these false moral innovations.AARONWait, no, you guys are both wrong. Wait, hold on. No, the issue there isn't that we disregard, I guess, humans, I don't know exactly who's responsible for what, but people disregarded some sort of deserving heuristic that would have gardened against communism. The issue was that, like, it was that, like, we had, like, lots of empirical, or, like, it's not even necessarily. I mean, in this case, it is empirical evidence, but, like, like, after a couple years of, like, communism or whatever, we had, like, lots of good evidence to think, oh, no, books like that doesn't actually help people, and then they didn't take action on that. That's the problem. If we were sitting here in 1910 or whatever, and I think it's totally possible, I will be convinced communism is, in fact, the right thing to do. But the thing that would be wrong is if, okay, five years later, you have kids starving or people starving or whatever, and maybe you can find intellectuals who claim and seem reasonably correct that they can explain how this downstream of your policies. Then doubling down is the issue, not the ex ante hypothesis that communism is good. I don't even know if that made any sense, I think.LAURABut we're in the ex ante position right now.AARONYeah, totally. Maybe we'll find out some sort of, whether it's empirical or philosophical or something like maybe in five years or two years or whatever, there'll be some new insight that sheds light on how morally valuable shrimp are. And we should take that into account.LAURAI don't know. Because it's really easy to get good feedback when other fellow humans are starving to death versus. How are you supposed to judge? No, we've made an improvement.AARONYeah, I do think. Okay. Yes. That's like a substantial difference. Consciousness is, like, extremely hard. Nobody knows what the hell is going on. It kind of drives me insane.MATTWhomstemonga has not been driven insane by the hard problem of consciousness.AARONYeah. For real. I don't know. I don't have to say. It's like, you kind of got to make your best guess at some point.MATTOkay, wait, so maybe tacking back to how to solve it, did you successfully do math on this piece of paper?AARONMostly? No, mostly I was word selling.MATTI like the verb form there.AARONYeah. No, I mean, like, I don't have, like, a fully thought out thing. I think in part this might be because of the alcohol. I'm pretty sure that what's going on here is just that, like, in fact, like, there actually is an asymmetry between chicken units and human units, which is that. Which is that we have much better idea. The real uncertainty here is how valuable a chicken is. There's probably somebody in the world who doubts this, but I think the common sense thing and thing that everybody assumes is we basically have it because we're all humans and there's a lot of good reasons to think we have a decent idea of how valuable another human life is. And if we don't, it's going to be a lot worse for other species. And so just, like, taking that as a given, the human units are the correct unit because the thing with the unit is that you take it as given or whatever. The real uncertainty here isn't the relationship between chickens and humans. The real question is how valuable is a chicken? And so the human units are just like the correct one to use.LAURAYeah, there's something there, which is the right theory is kind of driving a lot of the problem in the two envelope stuff. Because if you just chose one theory, then the units wouldn't really matter which one. The equality theory is like, you've resolved all the inter theoretic uncertainty and so wouldn't that get rid of.AARONI don't know if you know, if there's, like. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by theory.LAURALike, are they equal, the equality theory versus are they 1100 theory? And we're assuming that each of them has five probabilities each end. So if we resolved that, it's like we decide upon the 1100 theory, then the problem goes away.AARONYeah, I mean, that's true, but you might not be able to.MATTYeah, I think it doesn't reflect our current state or, like.AARONNo, just like taking as given the numbers, like, invented, which I think is fine for the illustration of the problem. Maybe a better example is what's, like, another thing, chicken versus a rabbit. I don't know. Or like rabbits. I don't know.MATTChicken versus shrimp. I think it's like a real one. Because if you're the animal welfare fund, you are practically making that decision.AARONYeah. I think that becomes harder. But it's not, like, fundamentally different. And it's like the question of, like, okay, which actually makes sense, makes more sense to use as a unit. And maybe you actually can come up with two, if you can just come up with two different species for which, on the merits, they're equally valid as a unit and there's no issue anymore. It really is 50 50 in the end.MATTYeah. I don't know. I see the point you're making. With humans, we know in some sense we have much more information about how capable of realizing welfare a human is. But I guess I treat this as, like, man, I don't know. It's like why all of my confidence intervals are just, like, massive on all these things is I'm just very confused by these problems and how much that.AARONSeems like I'm confused by this one. Sorry, I'm, like, half joking. It is like maybe. I don't know, maybe I'll be less confident. Alcohol or so.MATTYeah, I don't know. I think it's maybe much more concerning to me the idea that working in a different unit changes your conclusion radically.AARONThan it is to you.LAURASometimes. I don't know if this is, like, too much of a stoner cake or something like that.AARONBring it on.LAURAI kind of doubt working with numbers at all.MATTOkay. Fit me well.LAURAIt's just like when he's.AARONStop doing that.LAURAI don't know what to do, because expected value theory. Okay, so one of the things that, when we hired a professional philosopher to talk about uncertainty.MATTPause for a sec. Howie is very sweetly washing his ears, which is very cute in the background. He's like, yeah, I see how he licks his paws and squeezes his ear.AARONIs it unethical for me to videotape?MATTNo, you're more than welcome to videotape it, but I don't know, he might be done.AARONYeah, that was out.MATTLaura, I'm very sorry. No, yeah, you were saying you hired the professional philosopher.LAURAYeah. And one of the first days, she's like, okay, well, is it the same type of uncertainty if we, say, have a one in ten chance of saving the life of a person we know for sure is conscious, versus we have a certain chance of saving the life of an animal that has, like, a one in ten probability of being sentient? These seem like different types.AARONI mean, maybe in some sense they're like different types. Sure. But what are the implications? It's not obviously the same.LAURAIt kind of calls into question as to whether we can use the same mathematical approach for analyzing each of these.AARONI think my main take is, like, you got a better idea? That was like, a generic.LAURANo, I don't.AARONYeah. It's like, okay, yeah, these numbers are, like, probably. It seems like the least bad option if you're going by intuition. I don't know. I think all things considered, sometimes using numbers is good because our brains aren't built to handle getting moral questions correct.MATTYeah, I mean, I think that there is a very strong piece of evidence for what you're saying, Aaron, which is.AARONThe whole paper on this. It's called the unreasonable efficacy of mathematics in the natural sciences.MATTOr this is. This is interesting. I was going to make sort of an easier or simpler argument, which is just like, I think the global health ea pitch of, like, we tend to get charity radically wrong.AARONOften.MATTCharities very plausibly do differ by 100 x or 1000 x in cost effectiveness. And most of the time, most people don't take that into account and end up helping people close to them or help an issue that's salient to them or help whatever they've heard about most and leave opportunities for doing what I think is very difficult to argue as not being radically more effective opportunities on the table as a result. Now, I led into this saying that I have this very profound uncertainty when it comes to human versus animal trade offs. So I'm not saying that, yes, we just should shut up and multiply. But I do think that is sort of like the intuition for why I think the stoner take is very hard for me to endorse is that we know in other cases, actually bringing numbers to the problem leads to saving many more lives of real people who have all of the same hopes and dreams and fears and feelings and experiences as the people who would have been saved in alternate options.LAURAIsn't that just like still underlying this is we're sure that all humans are equal. And that's like our theory that we have endorsed.AARONWait, what?MATTOr like on welfare ranges, the differences among different humans are sufficiently small in terms of capacity to realize welfare. That plausibly they are.AARONYeah, I don't think anyone believes that. Does anyone believe that? Wait, some people that everybody's hedonic range is the same.LAURARandomly select a person who lives in Kenya. You would think that they have the same welfare range, a priority as somebody.MATTWho lives in the description. The fundamental statistics of describing their welfare range are the same.AARONYeah, I think that's probably correct. It's also at an individual level, I think it's probably quite varied between humans.LAURASo I don't think we can say that we can have the same assumption about animals. And that's where it kind of breaks down, is we don't know the right theory to apply it.AARONWell, yeah, it's a hard question. Sorry, I'm being like kind of sarcastic.LAURAI think you have to have the theory right. And you can't easily average over theories with numbers.MATTYeah, no, I mean, I think you're right. I think this is the challenge of the two envelopes. Problem is exactly this kind of thing. I'm like four chapters into moral uncertainty. The book.AARONBy Will.MATTYeah. McCaskill, Ord and Bryke Fist. I'm probably getting that name. But they have a third co author who is not as much of like an.AARONYeah, I don't know. I don't have any super eloquent take except that to justify the use of math right now. Although I actually think I could. Yeah, I think mostly it's like, insofar as there's any disagreement, it's like we're both pointing at the issue, pointing at a question, and saying, look at that problem. It's, like, really hard. And then I'm saying like, yeah, I know. Shit. You should probably just do your best to answer it. Sorry, maybe I'm just not actually adding any insight here or whatever, but I agree with you that a lot of these problems are very difficult, actually. Sorry, maybe this is, like, a little bit of a nonsense. Whatever. Getting back to the hard problem of consciousness, I really do think it feels like a cruel joke that we have to implicitly, we have to make decisions about potentially gigantic numbers of digital lives or, like, digital sentience or, you know, whatever you want to call it, without having any goddamn idea, like, what the fuck is up with consciousness. And, I don't know, it doesn't seem fair. Okay.MATTYeah, wait, okay, so fundraiser. This is great. We've done all of these branching off things. So we talked about how much we raised, which was, like, amount that I was quite happy with, though. Maybe that's, like, selfish because I didn't have to wear a shrink costume. And we talked about. Cause prio. We haven't talked about the whole fake OpenAI thing.AARONFake open AI.MATTWait. Like the entire.AARONOh, well, shout out to I really. God damn it, Qualy. I hope you turn into a human at some point, because let it be known that Qualy made a whole ass Google Doc to plan out the whole thing and was, like, the driving. Yeah, I think it's fair to say Qualy was the driving force.MATTYeah, totally. Like, absolutely had the concept, did the Google Doc. I think everybody played their parts really well, and I think that was very fun.AARONYeah, you did. Good job, everybody.MATTBut, yeah, that was fun. It was very unexpected. Also, I enjoyed that. I was still seeing tweets and replies that were like, wait, this was a bit. I didn't get this after the end of it, which maybe suggests. But if you look at the graph I think I sent in, maybe we.AARONShould pull up my. We can analyze my Twitter data and find out which things got how many views have.MATTLike, you have your text here. I think the graph of donations by date is, like, I sent in the text chat between.AARONMaybe I can pull it like, media.MATTLike you and me and Max and Laura. And it's very clear that that correlated with a. I think it's probably pretty close to the end.AARONMaybe I just missed this. Oh, Laura, thank you for making.MATTYeah, the cards were amazing cards.AARONThey're beautiful.MATTOh, wait, okay, maybe it's not. I thought I said. Anyway, yeah, we got, like, a couple grand at the start, and then definitely at least five grand, maybe like, ten grand, somewhere in the five to ten range.AARONCan we get a good csv going? Do you have access to. You don't have to do this right now.MATTWait, yeah, let me grab that.AARONI want to get, like, aerospace engineering grade cpus going to analyze the causal interactions here based on, I don't know, a few kilobytes of data. It's a baby laptop.MATTYeah, this is what the charts looked like. So it's basically like there was some increase in the first. We raised, like, a couple of grand in the first couple of days. Then, yeah, we raised close to ten grand over the course of the quality thing, and then there was basically flat for a week, and then we raised another ten grand right at the end.AARONThat's cool. Good job, guys.MATTAnd I was very surprised by this.AARONMaybe I didn't really internalize that or something. Maybe I was sort of checked out at that point. Sorry.MATTI guess. No, you were on vacation because when you were coming back from vacation, it's when you did, like, the fake Sama.AARONYeah, that was on the plane.LAURAOkay, yeah, I remember this. My mom got there the next day. I'm like, I'm checking out, not doing anything.AARONYeah, whatever. I'll get rstudio revving later. Actually, I'm gradually turning it into my worst enemy or something like that.MATTWait, how so?AARONI just use Python because it's actually faster and catchy and I don't have to know anything. Also, wait, this is like a rant. This is sort of a totally off topic take, but something I was thinking about. No, actually, I feel like a big question is like, oh, are LLMs going to make it easy for people to do bad things that make it easier for me to do? Maybe not terrible things, but things that are, like, I don't know, I guess of dubious or various things that are mostly in the realm of copyright violation or pirating are not ever enforced, as far as I can tell. But, no, I just couldn't have done a lot of things in the past, but now I can, so that's my anecdote.MATTOkay, I have a whole python.AARONYou can give me a list of YouTube URLs. I guess Google must do, like, a pretty good job of policing how public websites do for YouTube to md three sites, because nothing really just works very well very fast. But you can just do that in python, like, five minutes. But I couldn't do that before, so.MATTI feel like, to me, it's obvious that LLMs make it easier for people to do bad stuff. Exactly as you said because they let make in general make it easier for people to do stuff and they have some protections on this, but those protections are going to be imperfect. I think the much more interesting question in some sense is this like a step change relative to the fact that Google makes it way easier for you to do stuff and including bad stuff and the printing press made it way easier for you to do?AARONI wouldn't even call it a printing press.MATTI like think including bad stuff. So it's like, right, like every invention that generally increases people's capability to do stuff and share information also has these bad effects. And I think the hard question is, are LLMs, wait, did I just x.AARONNo, I don't think, wait, did I just like, hold on. I'm pretty sure it's like still wait, how do I have four things?LAURAWhat is the benefit of LLMs versus.AARONYou can ask it something and it tells you the answer.LAURAI know, but Google does this too.AARONI don't mean, I don't know if I have like a super, I don't think I have any insightful take it just in some sense, maybe these are all not the same, but maybe they're all of similar magnitude, but like object level. Now we live in a world with viruses CRISPR. Honestly, I think to the EA movement's credit, indefinite pause, stop. AI is just not, it's not something that I support. It's not something like most people support, it's not like the official EA position and I think for good reason. But yeah, going back to whatever it was like 1416 or whatever, who knows? If somebody said somebody invented the printing press and somebody else was like, yeah, we should, well I think there's some pretty big dis analysis just because of I guess, biotech in particular, but just like how destructive existing technologies are now. But if somebody had said back then, yeah, let's wait six months and see if we can think of any reason not to release the printing press. I don't think that would have been a terrible thing to do. I don't know, people. I feel like I'm saying something that's going to get coded as pretty extreme. But like x ante hard ex ante. People love thinking, exposed nobody. Like I don't know. I don't actually think that was relevant to anything. Maybe I'm just shit faced right now.MATTOn one shot of vodka.AARON$15 just to have one shot.MATTI'll have a little.AARONYeah. I think is honestly, wait. Yeah, this is actually interesting. Every time I drink I hope that it'll be the time that I discover that I like drinking and it doesn't happen, and I think that this is just because my brain is weird. I don't hate it. I don't feel, like, bad. I don't know. I've used other drugs, which I like. Alcohol just doesn't do it for me. Yeah, screw you, alcohol.MATTYes. And you're now 15.99 cheaper or 50. 99 poorer.AARONYeah, I mean, this will last me a lifetime.MATTYou can use it for, like, cleaning your sink.AARONWait, this has got to be the randomest take of all time. But, yeah, actually, like, isopropyl alcohol, top tier, disinfected. Because you don't have to do anything with it. You leave it there, it evaporates on its own.MATTHonestly. Yeah.AARONI mean, you don't want to be in an enclosed place or whatever. Sorry. To keep. Forget. This is like.MATTNo, I mean, it seems like a good take to me.AARONThat's all.MATTYeah, this is like a very non sequitur.AARONBut what are your guys' favorite cleaning suppliers?MATTOkay, this is kind of bad. Okay, this is not that bad. But I'm, like, a big fan of Clorox wipes.AARONScandalous.MATTI feel like this gets looked down on a little bit because it's like, in theory, I should be using a spray cleaner and sponge more.AARONIf you're like, art porn, what theories do you guys.MATTIf you're very sustainable, very like, you shouldn't just be buying your plastic bucket of Clorox infused wet wipes and you're killing the planet.AARONWhat I thought you were going to say is like, oh, this is like germaphobe coating.MATTNo, I think this is fine. I don't wipe down my groceries with Clorox wipes. This is like, oh, if I need to do my deep clean of the kitchen, what am I going to reach for? I feel like my roommate in college was very much like, oh, I used to be this person. No, I'm saying he was like an anti wet wipe on sustainability reasons person. He was like, oh, you should use a rag and a spray cleaner and wash the rag after, and then you will have not used vast quantities of resources to clean your kitchen.AARONAt one point, I tweeted that I bought regular. Actually, don't do this anymore because it's no longer practical. But I buy regularly about 36 packs of bottled water for like $5 or whatever. And people actually, I think it was like, this is like close to a scissor statement, honestly. Because object level, you know what I am, right. It's not bad. For anything. I'm sorry. It just checks out. But people who are normally pretty technocratic or whatever were kind of like, I don't know, they were like getting heated on.MATTI think this is an amazing scissor statement.AARONYeah.MATTBecause I do.AARONI used to be like, if I were to take my twelve year old self, I would have been incredibly offended, enraged.MATTAnd to be fair, I think in my ideal policy world, there would be a carbon tax that slightly increases the price of that bottled water. Because actually it is kind of wasteful to. There is something, something bad has happened there and you should internalize those.AARONYeah, I think in this particular, I think like thin plastic is just like not. Yeah, I don't think it would raise it like very large amount. I guess.MATTI think this is probably right that even a relatively high carbon tax would not radically change the price.LAURAIt's not just carbon, though. I think because there is land use implicated in this.AARONNo, there's not.LAURAYeah, you're filling up more landfills.AARONYeah, I'm just doing like hearsay right now. Heresy.MATTHearsay. Hearsay is going to be whatever. Well, wait, no, heresy is, if you're arguing against standardly accepted doctrine. Hearsay is like, well, it's both. Then you're just saying shit.AARONI'm doing both right now. Which is that actually landfills are usually like on the outskirts of town. It's like, fine.LAURAThey'Re on the outskirts of town until the town sprawls, and then the elementary school is on a phone.AARONYeah, no, I agree in principle. I don't have a conceptual reason why you're wrong. I just think basically, honestly, the actual heuristic operating here is that I basically outsource what I should pay attention to, to other people. And since I've never seen a less wrong post or gave Warren post about how actually landfills are filling up, it's like, fine, probably.LAURANo, this is me being devil's advocate. I really don't care that about personal waste.MATTYeah, I mean, I think plausibly here, there is, right? So I think object level, the things that matter, when we think about plastic, there is a carbon impact. There is a production impact of like, you need to think about what pollution happened when the oil was drilled and stuff. And then there is like a disposal impact. If you successfully get that bottle into a trash can, for what it's worth.AARONMy bottles are going into their goddamn trash can.MATTIdeally a recycling. No, apparently recycling, I mean, recycling is.AARONWell, I mean, my sense is like apparently recycling. Yeah, I recycle metal. I think I do paper out of convenience.MATTIf you successfully get that bottle handle a waste disposal system that is properly disposing of it, rather than like you're throwing it on a slap, then I think my guess is that the willingness to pay, or if you really crunch the numbers really hard, it would not be once again, a huge cost for the landfill costs. On the flip side, if you throw it in a river, that's very bad. My guess is that it would be right for everyone on Twitter to flame you for buying bottles and throwing them in a river if you did that.AARONWhat is an ed impact on wild animal welfare and equilibrium? No, just kidding. This is something. Yeah, don't worry, guys. No, I was actually the leave no trade coordinator for my Boy scout troop. It's actually kind of ironic because I think probably like a dumb ideology or.LAURAWhatever, it's a public good for the other people around you to not have a bunch of garbage around on that trail.AARONYeah, I do think I went to an overnight training for this. They're very hardcore, but basically conceptually incoherent people. I guess people aren't conceptually incoherent. Their concepts are incoherent who think it

De Maurice Molitor mam Vize-President vun der Handwierkerkammer iwwer d'Suergen an d'Erwaardunge vun der Baubranche.

Tonight, I return to Montauk to honor the life and legacy of one of the few original Camp Hero explorers, Paul Nathan Fagan Paul left our world only one week ago but his legend and magnificent obsession with Camp Hero lives on. My special guest this week is Brian Minnick another original Camp Hero explorer and we celebrate Paul's life as we discuss the enigmatic and sometimes disturbing mystery of the Montauk Air Force Station. Stay tuned, you don't want to miss this. Follow Off To The Witch wherever you find your podcasts including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and many more. New episodes are available every Wednesday night at 8:00pm ET. #christopherpaulgaretano #whitephosphoruspictures #offtothewitch #podcast #montaukchronicles #camphero #paulnathanfagan #montaukproject #paranormal #montauk #strangerthings #strangerthingsorigins #mystery #unsolvedmysteries Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

EPISODE #17 Tonight, I return to Montauk to honor the life and legacy of one of the few original Camp Hero explorers, Paul Nathan Fagan Paul left our world only one week ago but his legend and magnificent obsession with Camp Hero lives on. My special guest this week is Brian Minnick another original Camp Hero explorer and we celebrate Paul's life as we discuss the enigmatic and sometimes disturbing mystery of the Montauk Air Force Station. Stay tuned, you don't want to miss this. Follow Off To The Witch wherever you find your podcasts including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and many more. New episodes are available every Wednesday night at 8:00pm ET. #christopherpaulgaretano #whitephosphoruspictures #offtothewitch #podcast #montaukchronicles #camphero #paulnathanfagan #montaukproject #paranormal #montauk #strangerthings #strangerthingsorigins #mystery #unsolvedmysteries

D'Josiane Jacob, de Paul Nathan an den Tom Oberweis waren e Samschdeg Invitéen an der Emissioun Background.

E "jonke" Bléck op den État de la Nation - mat engem Logementspolitiker, enger Klimaaktivistin an engem Patron.

Episode 50 features Lucid Absinthe Superior, the first legal absinthe sold in the United States after a 95 year ban. The bottle for the tasting is 375mL at 62% ABV, or 124 proof. Enjoy this episode with some Lucid Absinthe, and be sure to dilute with cold water to experience the "louche" or spontaneous emulsification that turns the drink cloudy. Lucid's official website: http://www.drinklucid.com/ (http://www.drinklucid.com/) Brief Historical Timeline: 1780s - Absinthe is created by French ex-pat Dr. Pierre Ordinaire in Couvet, Switzerland 1797 - The recipe is sold to Major Henri Dubied who produces it with his son in law Henri-Louis Pernod 1805 - Henri-Louis Pernod sets up a distillery in Pontarlier, France to make absinthe, creating the first commercially available brand: Pernod Absinthe, and providing the genesis for global spirits conglomerate Pernod Ricard Early 1800s - Absinthe grows in popularity, influencing the original name for French happy hour, l'heure verte, or the green hour 1860s - Phylloxera insects ravage the French wine industry, driving up wine prices and spurring consumption of absinthe 1880s - The French were drinking 36 million liters of absinthe a year Early 1900s - Absinthe has fallen out of favor due to dubious health claims, inferior products, wine industry lobbying, a growing temperance movement, and governments scapegoating it for social ills 1910 - Switzerland bans absinthe 1912 - France bans absinthe 1915 - United States of America bans absinthe Early 1990s - Non-traditional artificially colored and flavored "absinthe" begins to be produced in the Czech republic 2004 - T.A. Breaux, or Ted Breaux, a research scientist an absinthe historian, begins distilling absinthe at the Combier Distillery in France 2007 - Ted Breaux and his business partner convince the US government to lift the ban on absinthe, making Lucid the first to be legally sold in 95 years 2013 - Hood River Distillers purchases Lucid for an undisclosed sum Key Cocktails: Absinthe is featured in more than 100 recipes in the landmark 1930 Savoy Cocktail book, so take your pick of the classics that call for it. Absinthe is perhaps best enjoyed with cold water to experience the louche. A sugar cube is optional. References: https://www.hrdspirits.com/lucid-absinthe (Hood Rivier Distillers) https://abarabove.com/seminars/embracing-lucid-absinthe-replay/ (A Bar Above Seminar on Embracing Absinthe, featuring Ted Breaux) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absinthe (Wikipedia Article on Absinthe) https://www.amazon.com/Little-Green-Book-Absinthe-Contemporary/dp/0399535632 (The Little Green Book of Absinthe by Paul Owens & Paul Nathan) https://www.amazon.com/Spirited-Guide-Vermouth-botanical-cocktails/dp/1472262972/ (A Spirited Guide to Vermouth by Jack Adair Bevan) Contact Information: Official show website is: https://www.liquorandliqueurconnoisseur.com/ (www.liquorandliqueurconnoisseur.com) Join my mailing list: http://eepurl.com/hfyhHf (http://eepurl.com/hfyhHf) Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/liquorandliqueurconnoisseur (https://www.facebook.com/liquorandliqueurconnoisseur) Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/LiquorandLiqueurConnoisseur/ (https://www.instagram.com/LiquorandLiqueurConnoisseur/) Twitter: @LLConnoisseur

Big Hass & Ana are out and about at "Al Majaz Waterfront" broadcasting Yalla Home Live and having guests throughout their show. In this segment, they chat with Paul Nathan of the I Hate Children Children's show. Its an amazing Magic Show! https://www.sharjahfringe.com/en/ Enjoy & share Listen to #Pulse95Radio in the UAE by tuning in on your radio (95.00 FM) or online on our website: www.pulse95radio.com

Children have historically been excluded from medical research studies and clinical trials in order to protect them. While this exclusion is well intentioned, we need pediatric research to answer important clinical questions and improve clinical care for this patient population. On this episode of Raw Talk, we explored the nuances of pediatric health research and clinical practice. Our conversation started with Dr. Elizabeth Stephenson, Staff Cardiologist, researcher, and Chair of the Research Ethics Board at the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), who shares why it’s so important to include vulnerable populations, like children, in research and the ethical considerations that make this possible. Dr. Stephenson also discussed concepts including capacity, consent vs assent, and risk vs benefit in the pediatric setting. We also spoke with Nurse Practitioner Tara McKeown and Clinical Research Nurse Andrea Cote about their exciting and challenging roles in the New Agent and Innovative Therapy (NAIT) program, conducting early phase clinical trials at SickKids. Finally, Dr. Paul Nathan, Director of the AfterCare childhood cancer survivorship program at SickKids, shares how clinical care differs in childhood vs adult cancer survivors, the concept of “shared care” in this field, and both he and Dr. Stephenson discuss the importance of including children and adolescents in conversations about their health. Pediatric Oncology Group of Ontario All Ontario AfterCare Programs - POGO SickKids AfterCare Program New Agent and Innovative Therapy (NAIT) Program Children's Oncology Group (COG) Ronald McDonald House Toronto

Children have historically been excluded from medical research studies and clinical trials in order to protect them. While this exclusion is well intentioned, we need pediatric research to answer important clinical questions and improve clinical care for this patient population. On this episode of Raw Talk, we explored the nuances of pediatric health research and clinical practice. Our conversation started with Dr. Elizabeth Stephenson, Staff Cardiologist, researcher, and Chair of the Research Ethics Board at the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), who shares why it’s so important to include vulnerable populations, like children, in research and the ethical considerations that make this possible. Dr. Stephenson also discussed concepts including capacity, consent vs assent, and risk vs benefit in the pediatric setting. We also spoke with Nurse Practitioner Tara McKeown and Clinical Research Nurse Andrea Cote about their exciting and challenging roles in the New Agent and Innovative Therapy (NAIT) program, conducting early phase clinical trials at SickKids. Finally, Dr. Paul Nathan, Director of the AfterCare childhood cancer survivorship program at SickKids, shares how clinical care differs in childhood vs adult cancer survivors, the concept of “shared care” in this field, and both he and Dr. Stephenson discuss the importance of including children and adolescents in conversations about their health. Pediatric Oncology Group of Ontario All Ontario AfterCare Programs - POGO SickKids AfterCare Program New Agent and Innovative Therapy (NAIT) Program Children's Oncology Group (COG) Ronald McDonald House Toronto

Luke, Paul & Nathan open up about dealing with loss. A very hard hitting episode that is guaranteed to drop a tear.

ASCO: You’re listening to a podcast from Cancer.Net. This cancer information website is produced by the American Society of Clinical Oncology, known as ASCO, the world’s leading professional organization for doctors who care for people with cancer. The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement. Cancer research discussed in this podcast is ongoing, so the data described here may change as research progresses. The 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting, held May 31 to June 4, brought together physicians, researchers, patient advocates, and other health care professionals from around the world to present and discuss the latest research in cancer treatment and patient care. In the annual Research Round Up podcast series, Cancer.Net Associate Editors share their thoughts on the most exciting scientific research to come out of this year’s ASCO Annual Meeting and what it means for patients. First, Dr. Vicki Keedy will discuss 2 different studies in soft-tissue sarcoma, and explain how the results of these studies have lead to important conversations in the field of sarcoma. Dr. Keedy is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology/Oncology and the Clinical Director of the Sarcoma Program at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She is also the Cancer.Net Associate Editor for Sarcoma. Dr. Keedy: Hello. My name is Vicky Keedy, and I am a medical oncologist who specializes in the treatment of sarcomas at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Today, I'm going to talk about 2 important studies discussed at the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting. The first study I would like to discuss is called the ANNOUNCE trial. This study looked at whether adding a targeted therapy called olaratumab to the standard treatment, doxorubicin, was better than doxorubicin alone for patients with adult soft tissue sarcomas. In 2016, this combination was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or the FDA, based on the results of a smaller phase II trial. This was approved in what is called an Accelerated Approval Program, which requires a larger study to confirm the findings. The final results presented unfortunately showed the larger phase III trial did not confirm that the combination of olaratumab and doxorubicin was better than doxorubicin alone, meaning there is no benefit to adding olaratumab to doxorubicin. The reasons for the different outcomes between the 2 studies are not completely known and is likely due to a combination of factors. An important finding, however, was that survival in patients with adult sarcomas continues to improve over time. And for patients receiving doxorubicin alone, overall survival was an average of approximately 20 months, showing that doxorubicin is an effective treatment for patients with adult soft tissue sarcomas. Based on these results, olaratumab will be withdrawn, and no new patients should start on this treatment. For patients already receiving olaratumab for the treatment of their sarcoma, they should have an open discussion with their oncologist about stopping the drug. For patients who their doctors feel they are receiving benefit from olaratumab, there is a program to allow continued access to this drug. What I think is most important about this trial is the focus it has drawn to clinical research and sarcoma. Because sarcoma is made up of a large number of very different and very rare cancers, advancements in treatments has been relatively slow. The results of this study have led to a larger discussion about how we think about and design trials for patients with sarcomas. It also highlights how important it is for patients to be seen at centers that have trials for their specific type of sarcoma. Several trials reported at the meeting exemplify how the sarcoma community can successfully complete trials in rare sarcoma and make potentially substantial advancements. One example is the phase II trial of tazemetostat in patients with epithelioid sarcoma. Epithelioid sarcoma is a rare sarcoma sub-type with disappointing results from standard sarcoma treatments. One of the hallmarks of epithelioid sarcoma is the loss of a tumor-suppressor gene called INI1. When INI1 function is lost in a cell, a tumor-enhancer molecule called EZH2 becomes too active. Tazemetostat blocks the action of EZH2. The trial included patients with several types of cancer that have lost some INI1. This trial reported the results of the cohort of patients with epithelioid sarcoma. The results showed 15% of patients had a partial response, meaning their tumors decreased by about a third, with an additional 56% of patients having a minor response or stable disease. Importantly, in many of the patients whose tumors decreased in size, the response lasted for a relatively long time compared to what we typically see with sarcoma-based chemotherapies. The drug was relatively well-tolerated, with the most common side effects of low-grade tiredness, nausea, loss of appetite, and tumor pain. The company who developed tazemetostat has submitted an application to the FDA for consideration of an accelerated approval for patients with epithelioid sarcoma. If approved, this will be the first drug approved specifically for this type of sarcoma. Again, the study is just 1 example of how we can make substantial improvements for patients with a rare cancer by collaboration amongst the sarcoma community, both nationally and internationally. Although it will not be possible to have a trial for every sarcoma sub-type, when available, it is important for patients with a metastatic sarcoma to go to centers that have trials for their specific disease. With this approach, I believe we will see even more advancements in the future for patients with sarcoma. Thank you very much for your time, and I hope I have more exciting findings to discuss in the future. ASCO: Thank you, Dr. Keedy. Next, Dr. Ryan Sullivan will discuss 2 studies in melanoma, including 1 that looked at treatment for melanoma that has spread to the brain, and 1 that is a long-term follow-up on targeted therapy for melanoma with a BRAF mutation.  Dr. Sullivan is a medical oncologist and Attending Physician in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also the Cancer.Net Associate Editor for Melanoma and Skin Cancer. Dr. Sullivan: Hello. My name is Ryan Sullivan. I'm the Associate Director of the Melanoma Program at the Mass General Hospital Cancer Center in Boston, Massachusetts. Today I'm going to discuss research that was presented at the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting in the Melanoma Program. There are 2 presentations that I'm going to highlight. The first is a presentation by Dr. Hussein Tawbi from MD Anderson in Houston, Texas, who presented a follow-up of the safety and effectiveness of a combination of 2 treatments called nivolumab and ipilimumab given together in patients with melanoma who had brain metastases. This trial is also known as the CheckMate 204 study and initially, was presented in 2017 at the ASCO Annual Meeting and was subsequently published in 2018 in 1 of our prestigious journals called the New England Journal of Medicine. This is an important study because it truly is the largest and most relevant clinical data that we have in how to most effectively treat patients with melanoma who have brain metastases. Brain metastases, unfortunately, are very common scenario for patients with metastatic melanoma. While the majority of patients probably do not develop brain metastases a significant minority do, and brain metastases can certainly complicate the treatment of patients with melanoma. Furthermore, they are also commonly and traditionally very commonly then a cause of death for patients with metastatic melanoma. The CheckMate 204 trial built upon a number of emerging clinical trials that were showing that some of the newer treatments for melanoma, specifically drugs called immune checkpoint inhibitors which are therapies that alter the way that the immune system interacts with the cancer, have been increasingly effective in patients with metastatic melanoma, and furthermore have actually been moved forward into earlier stages, for example, stage 3 melanoma. And a logical question was whether or not these treatments would be effective in patients with brain metastases. A common problem with therapies in patients with brain metastases is they may not get into the brain or the tumor to effectively treat that tumor and that was specifically a concern with these types of therapies. However approximately, it was almost 10 years ago when the trial was run and probably 8 years ago when it was published was the trial of ipilimumab in patients with brain metastases. Which the summary of it was that that drug worked about as well in patients who had disease in the brain particularly if that disease was asymptomatic and didn't require treatment for symptoms—it worked about as well in patients who were in that situation whereas patients who didn't have brain metastases but were treated with that medicine and about 20% of patients had long-term control of disease. Moving forward, the last few years there's been clinical trials that have been published and presented about PD-1 blocking drugs called pembrolizumab and nivolumab which seemed to work a little less well in patients who have disease in the brain, and specifically these drugs probably, in patients who present with metastatic melanoma and are treated and don't have brain metastases, probably about 40 to 45 percent of patients have disease control in response and maybe a third of patients have control that's long-standing. In patients who have disease in the brain, it appears that that number is about 20 or 25 percent with response and durable control of disease, so effective, but not as effective in patients who do not have brain metastases. So one logical question with emerging data about the combination of ipilimumab plus nivolumab, so ipilimumab plus a PD-1 blocking drug, was whether or not there would be a higher effectiveness. In patients without brain metastases, there's a clear improvement in response rate and maybe a delay in progression of disease and maybe even a slightly better overall outcome in terms of living longer for that combination, but that combination has side effects and those side effects can limit the effectiveness of the treatment. So it wasn't clear whether or not combining these drugs would be the best scenario for patients with brain metastases. However, this clinical trial, the CheckMate 204 study, looked to study just that. The initial data that had been presented and published was based on 101 patients who were treated. These patients did not have any symptoms of brain metastases but were identified to have these brain metastases on imaging that was done probably just prior to starting therapy for recurrent and/or newly diagnosed metastatic disease. And amazingly over 50% of patients had responses to this combination on this trial, so of the 101 patients, 55 had a response and 59 had control of disease. And perhaps more amazingly, over time, the control of disease rate, which we call progression-free survival which basically just measures whether or not patients are alive and that their disease hasn't progressed, remained pretty stable at about 60%. So 60% of patients at 6 and 12 months had disease that hadn't progressed in the population of patients that previously had very bad outcomes. And that was really better than anything we've ever seen in these patients. More importantly, the great majority of patients were alive. So almost over 90% of patients at 6 months, over 80% at 12 months, about 75% of patients at 18 months, and it seemed like that was pretty stable thereafter. And so a therapy that had shown effectiveness in patients with melanoma who don't have brain metastases seem to be even more effective in patients who did have brain metastases, at least when you compare that to outcomes that had previously been presented or published with just a single drug of nivolumab or the similar drug called pembrolizumab. So that data that was previously presented and published really set the new standard of care for patients who were diagnosed with metastatic melanoma who were unfortunate enough to have brain metastases, for us as providers who are treating these patients to say, "You need to be on this combination." At the ASCO meeting, in addition to sort of the update that I just provided, they also presented the data from the cohort B. The second part of this study was in patients who actually had symptoms, and in those patients with symptoms they could be on medicines called steroids. Steroids often will reduce swelling in the brain around a metastasis and can make the symptoms better, however, the challenge with that is these medicines tend to be suppressive of the immune system and so they theoretically could counteract immune therapy like ipilimumab and nivolumab. In any event, there were 18 patients that were treated on this part of the study. 4 of those 18 patients had responses, so that was over 20%. And importantly, of those patients who responded, 3 of the 4 were not on steroids. That baseline, again, suggesting that potentially patients who are on steroids may have worse outcomes than patients who aren't on steroids, may do a bit better. There's certainly going to be a bit longer follow-up needed to truly understand how effective this approach is in patients who have symptoms and who may be on some steroids. But the bottom line is it's clear that patients who are having symptoms, this is still the best regimen for patients with metastatic melanoma with disease in the brain and that it's possible to have responses even in the situation where those symptoms require patients to be on steroids. And so this is really important information for the field. And again, though it doesn't change the standard of care—our standard of care changed a year-and-a-half or two years ago with the initial presentation of this data, but it solidifies the standard of care and expands it a bit out to patients who also may have some symptoms and/or who may be on steroids and that this is an approach that's possible. The second study that I wanted to talk about was a presentation. It was the first presentation of very long-term follow-up on BRAF-targeted therapy. So BRAF-targeted therapy for patients with melanoma is only appropriate for about the 40 or 50 percent of patients who have a BRAF mutation that's identified in their tumor. BRAF is a gene that leads to a protein that ends up being a very important part of the signaling pathway that leads to tumor growth and metastasis and evasion of the immune system. And as I stated, about 40 or 50 percent of patients who have melanoma will have an identifiable mutation in BRAF and that BRAF mutation drives tumor growth in those patients. There are now three combinations of inhibitors that block BRAF and its subsequent signaling to a protein called MEK. And so our standard BRAF-targeted therapy is a BRAF inhibitor and a MEK inhibitor. There are three combinations: dabrafenib plus trametinib, vemurafenib plus cobimetinib, encorafenib plus binimetinib. So there are 3 regimens that are FDA approved for patients with BRAF mutant melanoma that's metastatic or unresectable. Now, we know that these drugs are very effective. About 70% of patients have significant regression of tumors, and we know that when we compare these to single BRAF inhibitor treatment that combination is better, that patients live longer, have more responses, are less likely to have their disease progress. We know that BRAF inhibition versus chemotherapy is better on all those same parameters. And so what we don't know, however, is whether BRAF-targeted therapy’s better than immune therapy, and the purpose of the study I'm going to describe doesn't address that. There are a couple of trials that are still being enrolled to across the world that are answering that question, but we don't have that data to make any definitive statements about what's the best first therapy for a patient with BRAF mutated melanoma. However, we haven't had very long-term data with these combinations. So this presentation by Dr. Paul Nathan was a combination of patients that were enrolled to either the COMBI-d study which compared dabrafenib, trametinib versus dabrafenib and the COMBI-v study which is dabrafenib, trametinib versus dabrafenib. And the data that was generated was looking at the 211 patients who got dabrafenib and trametinib in the COMBI-d and the 352 patients that got dabrafenib, trametinib in the COMBI-v study, and they just pooled all of that data together and followed to see how well those patients did. The 3-year data was presented and published a few years back. This was the 5-year data, and I think the most important points are that about 20% of patients are still alive and without progression at 5 years. BRAF-targeted therapy was thought to be something that would be a temporary help and that wouldn't lead to durable benefit, but in fact, it seems like we're seeing durable benefit in these patients and more importantly, over 30% of patients were alive at 5 years. That number being 34%. When the investigators broke that down, we know that a protein that we can measure in the blood called LDH is associated with poor outcomes, and we know that patients who have a normal LDH tend to do better with these types of therapies. And in fact, over 30% of patients who had a normal LDH and limited number of metastatic sites were alive and progression-free at 5 years. And when you looked at that same bit of data with regards to whether people were alive or not, the great majority, 55%, were still alive at 5 years. So this is proof that some patients can have long-term benefit and disease control with BRAF-targeted therapy who are started on BRAF-targeted therapy as their first treatment for metastatic melanoma, and that if you select patients just by very easily and readily available criteria, like this blood LDH measure and how many sites the melanoma has traveled to, that you can identify a population of patients where the majority will be alive at five years. Now, we have more work to do. We still need to learn a little bit more about who those 30% of patients are that may have long term disease control in addition to the LDH measure, in addition to the number of metastatic sites. And we and others are working on trying to develop better tests to identify who those people are so that when we have a patient with metastatic BRAF mutated melanoma in front of us we can best offer them the option of BRAF-targeted therapy or immunotherapy and be smarter about making that decision. But I think that this is really an important piece of information because it does prove the concept that long-term control with disease is possible with a therapy that 10 years ago we didn't think long-term disease control was going to be possible. And so it's really exciting data to finally see it. We obviously have a lot more work to do. It's not acceptable to only have 30% of patients alive five years later. We need to get that number to 100% and along the way get it to 50 and then 60, and 70, and 80 percent, etc. But the fact that this data demonstrates that long-term control is possible with these therapies really does make us feel better about offering this to some patients in the front-line setting, and more importantly, inspires us to do additional research to truly figure out who those patients will be. And with that, I'd like to thank you for your attention today, and it's been a pleasure discussing these 2 presentations at the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting. Thanks. ASCO: Thank you Dr. Sullivan. Learn more about these topics and other research presented at the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting at www.cancer.net. If this podcast was useful, please take a minute to subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts or Google Play. And stay tuned for additional Research Round Up podcasts coming later this summer. Cancer.Net is supported by Conquer Cancer, the ASCO Foundation, which funds breakthrough research for every type of cancer, helping patients everywhere. To help fund Cancer.Net and programs like it, donate at conquer.org/support.

Ahead of their six performances at Glastonbury Festival this week, Kane & Abel are joined by genuine festival punter David Lowe to preview everything the festival has to offer. Find out the top tips for who to watch from the world of music, magic, comedy, cabaret, circus and variety during the five-day festival on Worthy Farm. Hear festival memories from comedian and magician Steve Best, magician Paul Nathan and Alex Oddball from the world's largest juggling company Oddballs. Also, get all the top tips on travel, weather, food and drink and festival survival tips and hear about potential secret sets. Plus what to do if you accidentally walk off the festival site or get caught short in the toilet queue.         

Advisory Board member and study author Paul Nathan, from the Mount Vernon Cancer Centre in Middlesex, UK, discusses the phase III SUMIT trial, which evaluated the addition of the MEK inhibitor selumetinib to dacarbazine in patients with metastatic uveal melanoma. Find more on Medicine Matters oncology This content was originally published on Medicine Matters oncology (https://oncology.medicinematters.com/) on May 4, 2018.

Celebrity magician Paul Nathan joins us on Talking Tricks to discuss his phenomenal career, from starting out performing close-up magic in nightclubs for the rich and the famous in LA including Prince and Grace Jones to his iconic performances at Glastonbury Festival and how he inadvertently created and starred in the smash-hit kids' magic show The I Hate Children Children's Show and won huge awards at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Paul also talks about leaving Hollywood A-Listers behind to become a street performer and how he ended up running his own theatre in San Francisco. As well as telling amazing stories from his life on the road, Paul reveals that he has just bought a new mansion in the States that could become a new Mecca for magical performances. 

DisArmed welcomes bad boy magician and San Francisco bon vivant Unkle Paul Nathan.

19 The Apostle Paul - Nathan Lanceley - 18th January 2015 by HebronWallasey

Super Pet Photographer, Paul Nathan, author of "Groomed" joins us to talk about his new book. Always fun and informative, this dynamic couple from the #1 rated web tv, blog, radio and podcast show for animal lovers, Pets Teach Us So Much, Robbin and Joseph Everett entertain millions of people from all over the world with segments about: -Pet health and nutrition -Pet behavior -Learning from our pets-how to have better relationships with the people in our lives with The Love Genies segment -Animal stories from around the world -Guests include, authors, veterinarians, bloggers, celebrities, product inventors, charity spokespersons and animal behavior experts. For more information about the global leader in pet related new media entertainment, Pets Teach Us So Much Radio, Podcast, Blog, web tv, Robbin and Joseph Everett, or to book an appearance, go to http://www.TPPC.tv.

Paul (David), Wes, and Paul (Nathan) discuss kids on drugs, videogames, and comedy. Notes at www.featurecompletealpha.com. Recorded 6/2/2013!