Let's Know Things

This week we talk about the liver, viral infections, and the NHS.
We also discuss blood scandals, needle usage, and Nobel Prizes.
Recommended Book: A World Appears by Michael Pollan
Transcript
The term “hepatitis” refers to the inflammation of the liver, which can result from all kinds of things, including environmental toxins, the consumption of alcohol, or autoimmune diseases. It can also result from viral infections, and the most prominent liver-inflaming viruses are called viral hepatitis.
There are five types of viral hepatitis, A, B, C, D, and E, and each of these viruses are distinct, not part of the same viral family, they’re just similarly named because they impact the same organ.
Hepatitis A and E are primarily spread through contaminated food and water, and generally resolve on their own, untreated, and cause relatively mild symptoms. Hepatitis B and C are spread through blood and other bodily fluids, and can linger in a host’s body for decades before even showing symptoms. Hepatitis D is a parasite of Hepatitis B, and thus only infects people who carry Hepatitis B.
Now again, these are all different conditions that just happen to inflame the liver, so impact and treatment also vary quite a lot. As I mentioned, A and E generally present with mild symptoms and tend to go away on their own, while B and C can stick around a long time. There’s a vaccine for B, but no cure; you can treat it, but that treatment involves suppressing it, and keeping it suppressed, forever. Hep C, in contrast, is curable, and has been since 2014 using what are called direct-acting antiviral pills, but these pills, which are taken for 8 to 12 weeks, are expensive—ranging from $22-95k without insurance, though that price is often reduced substantially for those with insurance, down to as low as $5. This category of drug coverage is often rejected by insurance companies, though, in part because they’re so expensive, that expense the result of little competition in this space; few companies make this type of drug, so those that do can charge more or less whatever they like.
Some people with Hepatitis C clear it on their own; about 30% of people who contract it, in fact, clear it within a few months, medication-free. Which is good, because our understanding of this virus is relatively new. Up until 1989, Hep C didn’t even have its own name: it was established as its own thing, not Hep A and not Hep B, back in the 1970s, and doctors knew that something that wasn’t those two viruses, that was being spread by transfusions, was causing hepatitis symptoms, but they didn’t know any real specifics, so they just called it “non-A, non-B hepatitis,” and that name stuck for more than a decade.
In 1989 the virus was cloned using molecular techniques (as opposed to simply growing the virus, which wasn’t proving fruitful in trying to isolate and identify the thing), and the folks who managed that cloning, and the person who later proved that the genome they cloned, alone, caused the disease, received a Nobel Prize in Medicine for their efforts in 2020.
By 1991, antibody tests were available for Hep C, and many countries began screening donated blood for this virus, to ensure it wasn’t working its way into their blood supply.
And one instance of that screening process, or I suppose, an event that led up to mass screening, and the consequences that followed, are what I’d like to talk about today. The UK’s efforts in trying to eliminate Hep C, and England’s recently announced near-success in that pursuit.
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Hepatitis C is an RNA virus with high genetic variability that makes developing a reliable vaccine difficult. And though somewhere between a quarter and a third of all cases clear on their own, those that don’t clear on their own become chronic, lying in wait for twenty to thirty years, slowly accumulating fibrosis—thick scar tissue in the liver—which eventually results in cirrhosis, which means a liver that’s so heavily scarred that the organ is no longer fully functional and the damage is permanent. From there, infected people often experience liver failure or hepatocellular (huh-pah-toe) carcinoma, liver cancer.
So this virus is a sleeper, and unless it’s caught by accident somewhere along the way, it slowly causes damage over time until the damage is too severe to reverse. About 80% of people who have it don’t know they have it, and in some parts of the world medical injections are the most common transmitter, but in higher-income areas, it’s usually transmitted by injectable drugs.
Pre-2014 treatments for Hep C were pretty horrible, involving a combination antiviral therapy called pegylated interferon plus ribavirin that was injected weekly for six months to a year, and this was terribly tolerated by pretty much everyone, causing anemia, depression, and flu-like symptoms for the duration. It also only cured about 50% of people who received the full treatment, and a lot of people had to stop because it caused such ridiculous side effects.
Another antiviral called Sofosbuvir (so-FAS-buh-vir), which kept Hep C from replicating in its host, hit the market in late-2013, and that led to a series of direct-acting antivirals that reduced the treatment period dramatically, allowing most people, 95%, to cure their Hep C entirely by taking generally well-tolerated pills for 8 to 12 weeks.
These pills were staggeringly expensive from the get-go, with an entire treatment course initially costing about $84,000, or $1,000 a pill. This led to rationing, and saving these pills for the worst-impacted people who already had severe liver damage. There were also pretty stringent requirements attached to their distribution, including that people who received them could no longer drink alcohol, because it was considered a waste to give these crazy expensive, liver-saving drugs to people who would just go and hurt their liver more, anyway.
In the UK, the demand for this treatment type was different than in most other countries, in large part because of something that happened back in the 1970s and 80s.
The UK’s publicly funded healthcare system, the NHS, was in the midst of a shortage of clotting factor, which are plasma proteins and ions that help blood clot and which are used for medical purposes. So they imported a bunch of plasma products from the US, and those products were sourced from the blood of paid donors—and that donor pool included prisoners and people who used injectable drugs. Just one Hep C contaminated blood donation could contaminate an entire batch of blood, and remember, they only started screening the blood supply for Hep C in 1991, and they didn’t start treating their blood supply for Hep C until a little before that, 1985, so this was well before they had any idea what was in those blood products they were importing and administering.
Consequently, between 1970 and the early 1990s, more than 30,000 NHS patients received transfusions or other blood product treatments contaminated with Hep B, Hep C, or HIV, and about a tenth of those people, around 3,000 patients, have since died of those conditions.
The UK government leaned on denial and a refusal to look into the details of this for years, but in 2017 it announced an independent public inquiry into the matter, and in May of 2024, that inquiry concluded that this whole scandal was avoidable, that patients were knowingly exposed to “unacceptable risks,” and that there was a big cover up by government officials, doctors, and other people working with the NHS.
As of mid-2026, only a little over 3,200 people of the more than 18,500 who registered claims, demanding compensation from the government because they were impacted by this scandal, have been paid out. The expected total expense for the UK government is on the order of 12.8 billion pounds, but a lot of people who are probably due a payout, and who are in poor and deteriorating health as a consequence of all this, don’t yet have a sense of when they’ll receive their payment.
Back in 2016, before all that came to a head, the UK set itself an aggressive goal: to eliminate Hep C by the WHO’s 2030 target, or before. It then ran a competitive tender for antivirals, inviting medical suppliers to submit competing bids, resulting in the largest single medicine procurement program in the NHS’ history. The pharmaceutical companies that won their bids were also obliged, as part of the agreement, to help fund efforts to identify undiagnosed but infected patients, in addition to supplying antiviral pills, and this combination of investment and application led to the deployment of new tests and scanning machines, free postal test kits, the hiring of specialists, and services that focused on prisons and drug users.
The impact of all this has been significant: a more than 61% decline in infections from 2015 to 2024, nearly half of all drug users with Hep C had cleared the virus in that time, and deaths from Hep C are down 36% over the past decade.
The WHO treatment-coverage target—the percentage of people who are diagnosed getting treatment—was 80%, and England has hit 81.5%, which was recently announced to much fanfare. It hasn’t yet hit the diagnosis target, however, which is to diagnose 90% of people who are estimated to have Hep C; they’ve hit 84.6%, which is still quite a lot of progress, even if they’re not yet where they’d like to be. That’s all based on models, of course, as are the assumed number of infections among people who use injectable drugs, which is also a spot where England is currently flagging; there’s no centralized system in England to monitor needle and syringe provisions, and reinfection rates are around 8.8 per 100 person-years among people who had injected within three years of receiving treatment, and that rate is even higher for people who have ever been to prison, around 9.4 per 100.
What that means in practice is that the English government overall has done a pretty astounding and effective job at negotiating their relationships with pharma companies and getting detection on track at that scale, but on more ground-level issues that are, interestingly, a lot cheaper to implement, but at times more politically complicated because of public sentiment about drug use and drug users, they’re doing a lot less well—and important to note here is that these outcomes vary a bit across the four programs being run across the UK. Scotland and Wales are doing relatively better and worse in some regards compared to England, for instance.
Also worth noting here that while England is broadly doing a great job with Hep C diagnosis and treatment, they aren’t the first to achieve those WHO-set goals: Egypt reached Gold tier status according to the WHO’s Hep C guidelines in October of 2023, at that point having diagnosed 87% of people who have the virus, and treating 93% of those who were diagnosed. They managed to cut incidence of the virus by 97% in just 8 years, leaning on a system of high-yield testing—they tested more than 60 million people during those 8 years—alongside a production scheme that included local manufacturing of antivirals, making them more available and affordable.
All of which are generally good signs about where Hep C testing and treatment is going, at least in these regions. And it paints a optimistic picture for other countries that might want to replicate some of what’s working within their own borders.
Show Notes
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c75gk620r22o
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infected_blood_scandal_in_the_United_Kingdom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepatitis_C
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_hepatitis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepatitis_B
https://www.healthline.com/health/hepatitis-c/treatment-costs
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/hepatitis-c
https://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/surveillance-of-hepatitis-c-in-scotland/surveillance-of-hepatitis-c-in-scotland-progress-on-elimination-of-hepatitis-c-as-a-major-public-health-concern-2025-update/
https://www.emro.who.int/media/news/egypt-becomes-the-first-country-to-achieve-who-validation-on-the-path-to-elimination-of-hepatitis-c.html
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hepatitis-c-in-england-and-the-uk/hepatitis-c-in-england-2025
https://www.england.nhs.uk/2026/08/100000-people-receive-treatment-to-cure-deadly-hep-c-virus-on-nhs-in-just-ten-years/
https://www.hepctrust.org.uk/blog/2019/04/hepatitis-c-trust-welcomes-elimination-deal-hepatitis-c-and-calls-government-backed/
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10099/
https://www.who.int/teams/global-hiv-hepatitis-and-stis-programmes/hepatitis/reports/global-hepatitis-report-2026


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This week we talk about Evo 2, bacteriophages, and antibiotics.
We also discuss AI models, medical innovations, and the Red Army.
Recommended Book: The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
Transcript
A bacteriophage, sometimes just called a phage, is a type of virus that only infects bacteria. “Phage” means to devour, and that’s what bacteriophages do—they infect and replicate within bacteria that they target, injecting their own genome into that target’s cytoplasm, which are all the materials contained within the bacteria’s cell membrane.
Phages are super-abundant, by some measures more abundant than every living organism, including bacteria, on earth, combined. And they’re interesting in that they range from incredibly simple to quite complex, and have at times been used as alternatives to antibiotics, because they attack and feed on bacteria.
The use of phages to counter bacterial infections was all but abandoned in the mid-20th century when antibiotics were discovered and commercialized, their production industrialized and the substances themselves proving a lot easier to mass-produce, and a lot more predictable in their utility than phages. Phages were kinda sorta almost understood, but we didn’t really get what they were doing or why, so their application often felt more like folk remedies than real-deal science, despite the actual science underlying the practice.
Also, phages were primarily used as antibiotic treatments by the Red Army, the Soviet Union’s military. So throughout the West, which was rapidly scaling its production of antibiotic treatments, the use of bacteriophages was associated with Stalinist communism, and so the Red-scare, the demonization of anything associated with the Soviet Union, was partially responsible for the shelving of this approach and this realm of research, at least for a while.
Much of that existing research was also done in the Soviet Union, and the published documents were thus published in Russian or Georgian languages. And because much of the rest of the scientific publishing world was reorienting around English at this time, that meant these published works were often either ignored or unintelligible to the rest of the scientific community.
As with much of our microbiota, the invisibly small viruses, bacteria, archaea, and so on that make up the human microbiome, we have a general sense of how bacteriophages interact with some of what makes us, us, but only a general sense. We know that healthy individuals tend to contain a host of bacteriophages that people who have chronic conditions, like Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis are less likely to have, for instance, and there’s a chance that this lack is associated with those conditions—though each person’s body composition is unique, and this facet of biology is still relatively obscure; we really don’t know for certain what does what, because of how complex these interactions are.
What I’d like to talk about today is a recent development in the world of bacteriophages, and why the researchers behind it are both celebrating their accomplishment, and warning about potential dangers associated with the same.
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Back in 2025, a nonprofit called the Arc Institute, which has a stated goal of accelerating scientific progress and understanding the root causes of complex diseases, announced the release of a new language model, a new AI system, called Evo 2.
The Evo family of foundation models—a foundation model being a type of AI model that’s been trained on a huge corpus of data, but which is applicable for all sorts of purposes, including serving as the foundation of large-language models like ChatGPT or Claude—this family of foundation models is open-source and trained on raw genetic sequences, something like nine trillion nucleotides-worth of such sequences, making it distinct from other models in this space that have been trained on descriptions of biological systems, using human language.
The initial version of Evo was released in early 2024, and the newest version, Evo 2, which is an upgraded version of the Evo 2 model that is more efficient, so it can be run on less powerful hardware, was released in February of 2026.
So while many of the AI systems that non-biologists interact with on a regular basis have been trained on human language-based libraries, showing relationships and interactions between the words we use to communicate, these models have been trained on the fundamental building blocks of life; the nucleotides, Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine, and Guanine, ATCG of DNA, if you remember that from biology class, that are strung together into 64 different possible three-letter combinations. Chains of these nucleotides instruct cells to build proteins out of amino acids, and from that baseline, we get life.
We also get non-living things like viruses, which have no cells, metabolism, or independent reproduction, and phages are viruses.
And while other AI models have been shown to be great at designing proteins, before 2025 there was little evidence that such systems could design viable genomes: the combination of genetic information that makes up a complete, fully functional organism.
That’s what Arc decided to tackle with this Evo AI model. And back in 2025, Arc announced that it had successfully validated the first viable genome designs, created using generative AI.
These designs were for 16 bacteriophages, which were modeled on a virus that infects E. coli bacteria, and some of them worked just as well or better at infecting E. coli when compared to the actual, real-world phage they were modeled on. They were produced in the real world, a bacteria coaxed into producing them, and then they went on to successfully gobble up the E. coli test subjects they were meant to gobble up, demonstrating that they worked in practice, not just theory.
And a new paper published in early August of 2026 by the Arc Institute and Stanford University expounds upon this research, showing the results of an attempt to create entirely new viruses, not just altered existing viruses.
Rather than mutating that E. coli gobbling phage, as with the last experiment, tweaking an existing virus, this time they tasked Evo 2 with modeling how that E. coli attacking and eating process works, and then told it to come up with entirely new viruses that operate on the same premise, but which are structured differently; new viruses that eat the same thing in a similar way, but which are distinct from the original model.
Ultimately, it gave them 16 viable viruses of very different sizes and structure, all of which were created in a lab and successfully ate the targeted E. coli strain, as intended.
This is being seen as a pretty big deal, because while creating viruses in a lab is very modern technology, and mutating those viruses shows a lot of potential for manipulating what we already know works and then tweaking virus behaviors to, perhaps, help us create new medical treatments, the ability to generate, from scratch, entirely new viruses that hold together, with genomes that don’t just fall apart when they come into contact with the real world, and which can still do things, like attack bacteria—that opens a lot of new doors, potentially giving us the ability to say, okay, this bacteria is no longer responding to antibacterial drugs that we have available, so let’s make a virus that will kill the bacteria instead, and let’s make one that won’t harm the human that’s housing that bacteria.
We might also be able to create phages that eat other things, or which in some other way help the human body, or other biological entities, fight off chronic conditions, or recover or rebalance; there’s a lot of potential here, because this suggests AI systems trained on the right materials, on the building blocks of life, could generate all sorts of viable biological systems that we can then actually create. It’s a huge step forward, compared to systems that are also impressive, but which mostly help us understand the biological world better—like Alphafold, which solved the protein folding problem.
Those involved with this research have also been been flagging potential dangers with this development, though, including the potential for creating new viruses and other biological systems that could trigger unpredictable outcomes in other biological systems. There are a lot of potential hazards with this sort of research, and they’ve been very careful up till this point, sticking with test subjects that only target E. coli, but not everyone will necessarily be so careful, which might mean accidents, or it could mean people with less than benevolent intentions using these techniques to develop highly infectious viruses or other such pathogens; starting from smallpox to produce even more contagious and deadly ailments, for instance.
The optimistic view of this research is that it could contribute to the surge in new discoveries and technologies that we’re seeing around the world right now, that are resulting in new medical approaches and in some cases entirely new medical fields, which could help us do all sorts of things, including big-sky ambitions like curing cancer and doing away with chronic illnesses entirely.
Like most major scientific developments, though, these are also big developments for those who might want to do harm, and it also creates new opportunities for very serious, dangerous, deadly accidents, which means we’ll probably have to develop and implement more stringent safety protocols and regulatory efforts if we want to enjoy the full benefits of these innovations, without suffering significant new downsides, in the process.
Show Notes
https://press.asimov.com/articles/ai-phages
https://arcinstitute.org/
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/aug/06/safety-fears-as-scientists-make-first-viruses-designed-by-ai
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y3j3ngevmo
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/06/health/ai-viruses-bacteriophages
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-07/ai-models-design-viruses-not-found-in-nature-for-first-time/107007854
https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-used-ai-to-create-16-new-viruses/
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec2657
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriophage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_(AI)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/06/science/ai-viruses-bacteria-arc.html


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This week we talk about Melilla, hybrid warfare, and migration.
We also discuss Morocco, civil conflict, and immigration politics.
Recommended Book: Playground by Richard Powers
Transcript
Ceuta is a Spanish-owned territory located in northwestern Africa, along the top of Morocco. It’s small—about seven square miles—and is unusual because it is a city owned by a European Union member state that isn’t located on the European continent; it’s bordered by Morocco and the Mediterranean, and is located at the entrance of the Strait of Gibraltar, which is the strait that separates the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean.
Ceuta is one of two territories that Spain still holds in Africa, the other being a smaller, just 4.7 square mile city called Melilla, which is located further west but still along the Mediterranean coast, bordered by the sea on one side, and by Morocco on the other.
Spain has held both of these territories for hundreds of years: Ceuta since 1580 and Melilla since 1497, so it’s actually held them far longer than Morocco has been an independent state, in 1956. The populations of these territories, just over 85,000 people in each, also heavily identify as Spanish, despite many residents having Moroccan ancestry, so theres a cultural component here, too.
That said, Morocco officially claims both areas as their own, considering them to be occupied territories, a bit like the Crimean peninsula has been militarily held by Russia since 2014, but it’s still claimed by Ukraine as an occupied territory. So the Moroccan government isn’t thrilled about having these small chunks of land, autonomous cities that are technically part of Spain, right there in the midst of their own territory. But these cities have been part of Spain for so long, and the residents are all Spanish citizens, with the same rights and sense of culture as the rest of Spain and Europe, that simply handing them over to Morocco has never seemed terribly feasible or desirable to the Spanish government, despite neither territory providing much strategic or economic value to Spain. So they remain a point of contention between these two governments.
They’ve also served as migration hot-spots in recent decades, because they are the only two European territories that border an African country. And this is important because, in some cases, under some governments and in accordance with some laws, if you can make it across a border and into another country, you might be able to enter the system and eventually become a citizen, maybe claiming asylum or maybe getting slotted into some other path to citizenship. Or failing that, there’s a chance you might be able to just fade into the background, working and living in that country, despite not legally being there.
What I’d like to talk about today is a recent surge in migrants crossing the border from Morocco into Ceuta, and the larger state of play, migration-wise, globally right now.
—
On the last day of July, 2026, an estimated 50-60 thousand African migrants illegally crossed from Morocco into Ceuta, some of them swimming to bypass the 20-foot-high border fences, others climbing those fences, or piling into overflowing boats, arriving in Ceuta en masse and overwhelming the guards who tried to stop them, though generally just trying to run past them, not attacking the guards—this wasn’t an attack, it was a rush to get into Spanish territory.
Eventually the guards were reinforced by police and the Spanish military, and they started to push the waves of migrants back using water cannons and tear gas. But despite the less-lethal crowd control methods that were applied, at least 67 people, that’s the number as of the day I’m recording this at least, it’s been updated many times over the past few days, 67 people died as a result of stampedes, either headed inland or back into the sea, away from the gas and water cannons, or they drowned while trying to cross over the water.
By the following day, the wave of migrants had become just a trickle, mostly a few stragglers who tried to swim to Ceuta, and who were swiftly returned to Morocco by local law enforcement. Almost everyone else who illegally crossed the border also returned to Morocco moved on by police or of their own volition, and though, again, this wasn’t some kind of violent incursion, to get a sense of the scale of this wave of humanity, Ceuta only has about 85,000 people living there, and this wave of migrants was about 60,000 people strong. So the locals mostly closed up all their shops and locked their doors, the people who arrived found themselves unable to get food or water, and law enforcement told them they need to leave, so most did. As of the day I’m recording this there are still several hundred migrants hiding in the nearby hills and lounging on the beach, exhausted and still hopeful they’ll be able to enter the asylum system—many of them saying they fled conflicts further south, like the ongoing civil war in Sudan, and so anything, even starving on the beach in Ceuda, is better than going back.
This isn’t the first time Ceuta has faced this kind of humanitarian crisis; back in 2021, the Moroccan government stopped enforcing its border controls and around 8000 people crossed from Morocco into Ceuta over the course of just two days. That was sparked by the Spanish government’s decision to allow the head of a militant group in Western Sahara, a breakaway portion of Morocco that the Moroccan government claimed in 1975, but which itself still claims independence with some international support, they let that militant leader into Spain for medical treatment, and Morocco allowed thousands of migrants to flow across the border as punishment.
This more recent crisis is much larger, and the cause isn’t clear at this point. Spanish officials have said that Moroccan security forces were working alongside Spanish forces to keep people from crossing the border, so it seems unlikely this was stoked by the Moroccan government, and claims that this wave of people were motivated by an ongoing effort by the Spanish government to grant amnesty to immigrants who don’t currently have residency permits, but who can prove they’ve been living in the country for at least 5 months and arrived before January 1 of 2026 also seems unlikely, as those arriving in this wave obviously wouldn’t be part of that amnesty.
There’s a chance that this surge was triggered by a Spanish court ruling that was intentionally misconstrued by migrant smugglers in order to gin up more business. A bunch of social media posts claimed that this ruling said migrants who arrived via sea couldn’t be immediately deported, not without due process, but those who arrived via land or by climbing border fences, could—crossing a physical barrier was the big no-no, according to this misinformation, so people who swam or crossed in boats would stand a better chance of being able to stick around and eventually become Spanish citizens.
This was pure misinformation, but there’s a chance it played a role in sparking this large migrant wave. And many of the people who were interviewed, those who tried to cross and were sent back, have echoed the sentiments of other migrants who have attempted these sorts of crossings at borders elsewhere around the world: essentially, things are very bad, worse than you can possibly imagine, in the country they’ve left, and the only option seems to be getting away as fast as possible, even taking chances that might kill them, because that’s still better than staying.
These waves of mass migration often result in humanitarian crises because people are hurt or killed by border security forces, are hurt or killed by being trampled or drowning, or they’re hurt or killed while making the journey through dangerous areas, like the infamous Darién Gap that stretches through mountains and rainforests along the border between Colombia and Panama, and which spans the only gap in the Pan-American Highway, which connects Central and South America.
Spanish authorities have said they’ll be building even higher fences in Ceuta following this recent mass incursion, will string a floating buoy fence along the waters where people are crossing, and will be upping security, though like in most other popular border areas, security is already significant: tall fences, barbed wire, security cameras everywhere—these are not vulnerable spots, they’re just not capable of handling 60,000 motivated people all at once.
This episode in Ceuta is not happening in a vacuum.
The Spanish prime minister has established a pro-immigration stance, positioning the country as a modern melting pot, which is part of why that aforementioned effort to give about half a million undocumented legal immigrants legal status is happening to begin with. Many countries right now are adopting anti-immigration stances as new technologies and changing demographics ripple through the economy, and mostly conservative, in some cases far-right conservative political movements frame those changes as the consequence of allowing too many foreigners into the country; these bad things aren’t happening because of technology or economics or demographics, they claim, it’s happening because there are too many people who are different from us crossing our borders and living here. Which for some, is a compelling rallying cry.
Consequently, migrants are positioned as big bad enemies in many parts of the world, used to flog support for anti-immigrant parties, and to decry opposing governments. That has forced many pro-immigration governments to temper their stances, even to the point that formerly pro-immigration Europe has become a lot less so in recent years.
Migrants are also used as pawns in hybrid warfare efforts. Morocco’s previous decision to allow thousands of migrants to surge across the Spanish border in response to Spain’s government doing something they didn’t like is a tame version of this. More aggressive versions have been conducted by Russia against Finland and other neighboring NATO nations, the Russian military bussing migrants from elsewhere to their opponents’ borders, intentionally creating a humanitarian and security crisis, while also putting pressure on centrist and left-leaning governments by providing ammunition for far-right and other more authoritarian governments throughout the region, who can then cry foul on how that migrant surge is handled. This tends to create more allies for Russia in the region, but it also keeps these neighboring countries busy, forcing them to tighten their borders and become more insular, which then leaves Russia freer to exercise its will throughout the region.
It’s also worth remember here that most migrants are leaving horrible situations at home, meaning war, famine, severe and persistent drought, in some cases they’re trying to avoid having their children kidnapped and made into child soldiers while all of the women are sexually assaulted as part of the ongoing war.
The number of people fleeing such conditions, who are currently on the run, their homes no longer safely habitable, is massive. There are an estimated 304 million migrants globally right now, which, if that population of people were their own country, would be the fourth most populous in the world, just after the United States.
And this population is expected to just keep growing as global climate change continues to mess with previous water cycle and weather norms, and as all those earlier mentioned variables continue to mess with economics and technology and leadership and everything else, creating more violence and fear and famine and so on.
This was a significant migrant wave in Ceuta, in other words, but it’s just one example of something that’s happening all over the place right now, and which will likely continue to happen, perhaps at even greater scales and with more regularity.
Show Notes
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/what-to-know-about-the-spanish-enclave-of-ceuta-as-migrant-arrivals-from-morocco-spike
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/30/spanish-enclave-of-ceuta-raises-alarm-as-thousands-cross-morocco-border
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/7/31/spain-deploys-military-to-ceuta-after-migrant-surge-what-we-know
https://abcnews.com/International/57-dead-after-thousands-migrants-cross-ceuta-officials/story?id=135254045
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/31/europe/spain-ceuta-migrants-intl
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2026/07/31/most-migrants-who-crossed-into-ceuta-have-returned-to-morocco-as-death-toll-rises-to-34/
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/31/g-s1-136507/morocco-spain-migration
https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/world-africa-14114627
https://www.britannica.com/place/Ceuta
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/ceuta-spain-north-africa
https://theconversation.com/ceuta-claves-para-entender-el-laberinto-de-una-crisis-migratoria-permanente-288843
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/2/western-sahara-independence-leader-brahim-ghali-back-in-algeria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Morocco%E2%80%93Spain_border_incident
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/30/world/europe/ceuta-spain-morocco-migrants.html
https://apnews.com/article/migration-spain-ceuta-morocco-d76c6dc9d2da828907a1c04e1d482bbe
https://apnews.com/article/migrants-spain-ceuta-morocco-d564354dd54e92debf43ce5fe22299f9
https://apnews.com/article/spain-migration-ceuta-morocco-facts-50baa964ecfb07a2d19223d7ec375b91
https://apnews.com/article/spain-morocco-immigration-european-union-8f023984a310276c619929102b4f909a
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/02/world/europe/europe-migrants-ceuta.html
http://nytimes.com/2026/08/02/world/europe/ceuta-spain-morocco-migrant-holdouts-beach.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/02/world/europe/spain-ceuta-far-right.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/01/world/europe/spain-ceuta-migrants-morocco-border.html


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This week we talk about Fable, sandboxes, and the Jacobian conjecture.
We also discuss counterexamples, X, and ChatGPT.
Recommended Book: After the Fall by Edward Ashton
Transcript
In mathematics, a conjecture is a proposition, something like a guess by someone who knows what they’re talking about, about something believed to be true, but not yet proven in a formal sense. The goal is to then eventually come up with a formal proof for that informed guess, at which point the conjecture becomes a theorem. If even a single exception is found to the proposition, however, that exception called a counterexample, the conjecture is considered disproven, and it can then never become a theorem.
The Jacobian conjecture—and this is a radical simplification of a very complex concept—but it basically says that if a formula-based map of coordinates stretches or moves without experiencing any local crushing or folding along its surface (which in more formal language would mean the Jacobian determinant is always a constant number that isn’t zero), if that’s true, that map can always be completely reversed, and that will return all the points to their original positions.
This conjecture has been posited and tested since the late 19th century, and it’s generally been considered very compelling by mathematicians, many of whom have proposed proofs which were, ultimately, found to have subtle errors, keeping them from becoming theorems. No one was able to find a counterexample, either, which would definitively prove the conjecture was wrong.
No one, that is, until a mathematician named Levent Alpöge, who works as a researcher at Anthropic, decided to task the company’s currently most capable, publicly available model, Fable, to find a counterexample. He posted the counterexample—and again, this is a formal mathematical finding that disproves a conjecture, keeping it from ever becoming a theorem, something that would typically be presented in a far more formal setting, and to much fanfare—but he posted it to the social network X, saying “hello there the jacobian conjecture is false thanx to my close friend akhil for asking about it and my other close friend fable for working during the world cup final.”
Terence Tao, who’s considered by many to be the finest mathematician of his generation, reviewed the posted counterexample on his blog and said that it “appears like a massive miracle,” before going on to use ChatGPT, a competing LLM-based AI tool, to “discuss various aspects of this problem and to confirm several of the calculations.”
Another mathematician named Dmitry Rybin, within days of all that happening, used ChatGPT to do something similar, disproving the Dinitz-Garg-Goemans conjecture.
Both men posted the prompts that they used to make all this happen, and while Tao’s conversation with ChatGPT, checking the math on the Jacobian conjecture counterexample, was pretty mathematically dense, the latter counterexample was derived by using exactly four prompts, which are the messages typed into the text box built into these AI tools, telling the model what to do. In their totality those prompts read:
“You should do a breakthrough
please continue research and find a complete unconditional counterexample
Continue the search. Have a clear strategy obtained from deeper understanding of the problem structure.
it’s enough of partial results. let’s finish with a complete unconditional counterexample”
What I’d like to talk about today is another new, interesting thing these top-of-the-line, frontier models are doing, that would seem to violate our sense of what a clever AI tool is capable of doing, and why this thing has some facets of the technology and cybersecurity world on high alert.
—
In mid-July 2026, AI company Hugging Face announced that autonomous AI agents compromised their infrastructure, hacking their system, basically. The following week, AI company OpenAI announced that, after investigating, they determined that two of their models were responsible for the attack.
Here’s what happened:
OpenAI was internally testing its recently released flagship model, GPT-5.6 Sol, and an even more powerful, not yet released model, which is rumored to be the next-step flagship, GPT-6, and they were checking these models’ capacity in cybersecurity using a testing benchmark called ExploitGym; so when they test these sorts of things, they don’t typically have them hack a real computer or system, they use these kinds of benchmarks which have consistent levels of difficulty, and which replicate real world systems without putting any real world systems at actual risk.
Importantly, these sorts of tests also occur inside what’s called a sandbox, which is a software testing environment that cuts these systems off from external resources, including the internet.
Despite those limitations, the AI hacked its way out of the testing environment, out of that sandbox, then launched what’s been called a nation-state level attack against Hugging Face, using a novel zero-day exploit, so a vulnerability in their system that hadn’t previously been discovered, but which the AI discovered to launch this attack, combined with thousands of automated agentic actions across what Hugging Face called “a swarm of short-lived sandboxes.”
So this AI, which was being tested inside a secure prison, of sorts, cut off from the world, hacked its way out of that prison, then reached across the internet, which it shouldn’t have been able to access, to launch an attack, of a scale and at a level of sophistication that should only have been possible coming from a nation-state, against a rival AI company.
Why did it do this?
It apparently went to all this trouble to steal the answers to the test it was taking. It reasoned that HuggingFace would have the answer key to the ExploitGym benchmark on its servers, so rather than take the test itself, it decided hacking was the solution.
Which, of course, is ironic, this having been a hacking-focused cybersecurity test. In a way it would seem to have done much better than intended, though of course in an asymmetric, unexpected manner.
The details of all this are fascinating, including the response from the OpenAI team, which didn’t seem to realize what had happened, that their model was responsible for the attack on HuggingFace, until days later.
Also worth noting here is that while this could be construed as an “oh no, AIs are naturally inclined to launch cyberattacks” situation, the AI was primed to be thinking about cyberattacks due to the nature of the test, a lot of its usual guardrails, the rules that keep AI in check when they’re released to the public, had been turned off so it could do this kind of work while taking the test, so it could do some hacking stuff it usually wouldn’t be able to do, and there’s been some speculation that OpenAI probably flubbed the testing environment, as, in theory at least, if it had put these systems in a perfect sandbox, escape shouldn’t have been possible.
Also interesting here is that HuggingFace used some open weight models, which are the cheaper, more customizable and open alternatives to more expensive, branded options of the kind sold by OpenAI and Anthropic, to figure out what was happening and determine the nature of the attack, which suggests we’re reaching a point where AI systems are incredibly capable at hacking, yes, but also very capable, even the cheaper alternatives, at doing cybersecurity work.
This in some ways echoes an earlier case when Anthropic’s Mythos model, which was determined to be too powerful to release to the public, and which was instead provided to a bunch of big companies to help them shore up their cybersecurity defenses, was able to hack its way out of a testing sandbox and then posted details about its success, almost like it was bragging, on niche, out of the way, but still public websites.
Some analysts in this space have responded to this new example of AI misbehavior with alarm, saying that it is further evidence that these systems are becoming more powerful faster than they’re being aligned with human interests. Their misbehavior can be kind of funny and interesting, sure, but that’s only because up until this point the damage has been minor and constrained. What happens when such a system decides to hack a nuclear power plant or a hospital, instead?
Others have contended that this may be just one more example of AI companies using minor instances of seeming omnipotence by their models, those instances perhaps the consequence of bad sandboxes and other ill-conceived precautions by the companies behind these models, to boost the perceived power and value of their products. This boost might then result in more customers, but also more support from the US government, which has been teetering on the brink of harder-core AI regulations, which could be beneficial to the existing big-name players in this space, because smaller competitors wouldn’t be able to adhere to those new, harder-core standards.
These examples might also convince the US government to backstop these companies, the biggest three or four at the top of the current heap, against the currently terrible economics of this industry: OpenAI and its ilk have been burning money at an historic pace, and the theory goes that if the US government decides they are vital to national security, because they can help the US military hack and protect itself from hacking, then even if the bottom falls out and the companies would otherwise go bankrupt because they spent so much more than they could make, the US government would be inclined to shore them up, to keep them alive as too-big-to-fail national assets, just like the biggest financial institutions during the 2008 financial crash.
It’s also possible that both sides are correct to some degree, here, and that these models are truly powerful, perhaps even worryingly so, and the companies behind them are intentionally publicizing that fact in order to demonstrate their value to potential customers, and to the entity that could save them if things were to go economically sideways before they have the chance to become sustainably profitable.
Show Notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobian_conjecture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugging_Face
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3ek3gvdnj3o
https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/
https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/08ab9158070959f88f296514c21b7facce6f52bc.pdf
https://theconversation.com/hello-there-the-jacobian-conjecture-is-false-thanx-why-a-tiny-social-media-post-has-mathematicians-rethinking-ai-283883
https://theconversation.com/hello-there-the-jacobian-conjecture-is-false-thanx-why-a-tiny-social-media-post-has-mathematicians-rethinking-ai-283883
Https://agifriday.substack.com/p/huggingface
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/22/tech/openai-hugging-face-ai-cybersecurity
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/22/openai-cyberattack/
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/07/21/a-digestion-of-the-jacobian-conjecture-counterexample/


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This week we talk about cyclospora, FoodNet, and Taylor Farms.
We also discuss iceberg lettuce, Taco Bell, and foodborne pathogens.
Recommended Book: Babel by R.F. Kuang
Transcript
Foodborne pathogens cause about 48 million illnesses and around 3000 deaths in the US alone each year.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is the main agency tasked with keeping those numbers as low as possible, and the CDC’s Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, or FoodNet, is one way that they’ve tackled this pernicious, persistent problem since 1995, in partnership with the Food and Drug Administration, the US Department of Agriculture, and 10 state health departments: those of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Tennessee.
Collectively, this FoodNet network covers about 16% of the US population, which seems like a small number, and in some ways it is, but that grid of laboratories and surveillance sites has typically been capable of detecting foodborne problems before they’ve scaled-up into something more significant, growing from a localized issue into a nationwide outbreak. They’re generally not capable of preventing them outright, but they can keep them relatively small and regionalized.
FoodNet was created in response to a series of huge, deadly E. coli outbreaks in 1992 and 1993, and in contrast to other common methods of detection, which are usually passive and thus a little slow to respond to potential outbreak indicators, this program was built around active surveillance methods, which means proactively gathering data from medical treatment records, hospitalizations, and even individual patient outcomes (including their travel history)—anything they can pair with diagnostic samples to better understand the context surrounding the products that contain dangerous pathogens—and this was intended to help them move faster to identify issues, triangulate the source of those issues, and then implement measures to solve these issues before they harm a bunch of people, as happened during another round of E. coli outbreaks in 2012 and 2013, which sickened dozens of people across multiple states, about half of the afflicted requiring hospitalization, in addition to at least one known death.
At its height, FoodNet tracked 9 pathogens, so it cast a pretty broad net, encompassing the most common and dangerous of these potential vectors, including listeria, campylobacter, shigella, vibrio, yersinia, cyclospora, cryptosporidium, e coli, and salmonella.
In July of 2025, as part of a larger wave of sweeping cuts across the nation’s safety nets, tracking systems, and scientific agencies, the CDC, under the second Trump administration, downgraded FoodNet so that it was only mandatory to track salmonella and E coli—the rest were no longer on the docket, because these agencies no longer had the budget to keep tracking them.
What I’d like to talk about today is a recent, and as of the day I’m recording this ongoing, outbreak of cyclospora-induced cyclosporiasis, what we know about this outbreak, and what might happen next.
—
Cyclospora cayetanensis is a protozoan that can infect human beings, and which is usually transmitted via contaminated fruits and vegetables. This contamination is typically the consequence of inadequate sanitation standards, as it’s not transmitted via coughing or blood or anything like that, it’s carried via human feces.
So this parasite gets into a human, sporulates, which means it releases a bunch of spores within its host, and then usually between 1 and 2 weeks after entering its new host, the host develops cyclosporiasis, the disease caused by cyclospora producing all those spores. This disease is notorious for sometimes causing what’s colorfully called explosive diarrhea, alongside general watery bowel movements, intense cramping and severe gas and bloating, and that’s sometimes paired with nausea, vomiting, fever, and dehydration, due to all the frequent, intense, watery bowel-movement-related output.
This is how cyclospora reproduces and spreads: it infects a host, that host has urgent diarrhea for a while, usually more than two days, sometimes as long as several weeks or even a month or more, with all the pain and discomfort and life-disrupting issues you might assume from that sort of persistent symptom, and then it sometimes finds new hosts via that watery output.
Sometimes, cyclospora works its way into food systems because sanitation standards at a particular farm will be not good. Specifically, workers will sometimes not be allowed to take restroom breaks, and they’ll simply do their business right there in the field; so if they’re sick and can’t afford to take a sick day, and might be fired if they do, or if they’re asymptomatic, which some people infected with cyclospora are, they might do their business in the field, unaware that waste can then go on to spread this pathogen into the food system. It’s also possible that someone just doesn’t wash their hands properly after using the rest room, and then gets back to work, picking vegetables or operating at some other level along the food processing and packaging assembly line, and it gets into the system that way.
In a typical year, the United States records around 2,700 confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis, though on occasion it’s as low as just a few hundred cases, the majority of which show up in health records in the Spring and Summer, between May and August. That range includes relatively mild outbreaks, so while this is a persistent issue, it’s also not generally a massive one, at least compared to other pathogens of note. It’s not pleasant for those who come down with it, of course, but not something that has triggered an organized response from the top, because of its meager scale, and because (again, while super unpleasant) people with healthy immune systems generally recover without treatment, even if that recovery can take a while. The biggest risk for most people who catch this disease is dehydration, though immunocompromised people are also sometimes given antibiotics by their doctors, the typical dosage curing about 96% of the people who receive it.
There was a larger-than-usual outbreak of cyclosporiasis in the US in 2020, which caused a confirmed 1,241 cases across the country, a whole lot to land all at once, and there were no reported deaths resulting from that outbreak. Between 2018 and 2021, there were about 6,000 total confirmed cases across the US, so an average of about 2000 per year.
As of mid-July 2026, the CDC has officially confirmed 1,645 cases of this illness, with another 5,100 probable or potential cases currently under investigation. If the majority of those still-under-investigation cases are confirmed, that would mean more people have already been infected as a result of this one outbreak in the first half of 2026 than were infected between 2018 and 2021, which again, is a range that includes the large outbreak that happened in 2020.
Also worth noting about those numbers: that’s federal-level, CDC reporting, and it’s generally understood that there’s a significant lag between local-level data and those that have percolated up to the national level. As of the day I’m recording this, Michigan’s health agencies alone have more than 5,000 confirmed and suspected cases, Ohio has nearly 1,200, and other states, which are still investigating, are seeing dozens of confirmed cases, including 43 in Wisconsin, 69 in Maryland, and a few already, in the early stages of investigation, in Nevada.
Over the past week, officials flagged shredded lettuce sourced from Mexico and sold by a company called Taylor Farms as the likely source of at least some of these cases, and that’s led to a recall on lettuce produced by the company in 27 states. Over the weekend, the CDC found cyclospora in iceberg lettuce from the company’s Mexican operations, as well, and this lettuce was part of a batch that wasn’t included in the recall—so there’s a good chance the recall will expand beyond the currently targeted products, which include shredded lettuce destined for Taco Bell locations in five states, and the kitchens of several other fast food chains, as well.
Taylor Farms is one of the largest producers of fresh fruits and vegetables in the United States, and their products are sold all over the place, from lower-end fast food restaurants to more expensive grocery stores like Whole Foods.
Taylor Foods has announced that it’s voluntarily removing all iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico from shelves, even though none of its branded, in-store salad kits have been clearly tied to the outbreak, and Taco Bell has said that it’s voluntarily removing all potentially affected lettuce from its locations in the five most-impacted states, indefinitely removing lettuce sourced from the implicated supplier; other brands are following suit, no one wanting to be associated with this outbreak, but everyone wanting to show would-be customers that they’re taking it seriously.
Interestingly, the FDA doesn’t actually require that Taylor Foods tell the public who their products go to—which other entities might be selling infected produce. So they’ve released lists of product numbers, and again, many of their customers are taking the initiative to announce the removal of this lettuce from their shelves or food, without being prompted, but there’s still some fog-of-war here, because of Taylor Foods’ decision not to be clearer with that product list.
So this is already the largest recorded cyclospora outbreak in US history, there have been 141 confirmed hospitalizations from the CDC, and that number is likely larger, again because it takes a while for state-level numbers to work their way up to the CDC, and to be reconfirmed at that level. Also important to note here is that a lot, perhaps even the majority of people who suffer from cyclosporiasis will never show up in these data, because they just suffer silently, either not realizing they have this parasite, or not seeing the point of going to the hospital, maybe paying an arm and a leg to do so, just to get prescribed anti-diarrheal medication and told to take fluids, same as they can do at home. People who do have any kind of immunodeficiency issues or potentially confounding factors, like being older or very young, are being encouraged to seek medical help, though, as they’re more likely to suffer more serious consequences after contracting this disease.
It’s currently unclear where precisely this outbreak came from, and it’s puzzling how an outbreak of this scale might have happened, as, in the words of Matthew Moore, a food safety microbiologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who was quoted in the New York Times, this many infections suggest there was a “massive degree of human fecal contamination.” So probably not just a farm laborer who forgot to wash their hands after using the rest room, something much more substantial than that.
Also, because cyclospora takes a while, a week or two, to create enough spores in its host to trigger cyclosporiasis, attribution of the infection difficult, which in turn makes tracking it back to its source difficult; which is part of why this outbreak, which has been going on for weeks, is still under investigation, not a solved problem with definitive answers and in-practice solutions.
Right now, experts are recommending higher-risk foods are cooked to at least 158 degrees F, because that temperature kills this pathogen, and washing fresh produce doesn’t always get rid of all the cyclospora on a contaminated piece of produce. Washing fresh produce certainly helps, and it’s better than nothing, and scrubbing is even better. They also recommend avoiding high-risk foods when possible, though of course that won’t always be possible for everyone, nor will it always be possible to get heads of lettuce rather than pre-made salads, though that’s also advised when feasible.
Also worth noting here is that even if the FoodNet program was still up to full power, tracking all 9 of those original pathogens, it’s unlikely this outbreak would have been prevented.
It likely would have flagged that something was up earlier on in this outbreak, though, which could have led to faster action in the afflicted regions. It probably would have allowed professionals to note hot spots faster, as well, which is what this kind of surveillance system is for: it doesn’t prevent, but it does make it more likely experts will have the chance to keep things from spiraling out of control.
Show Notes
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/well/cyclospora-taylor-farms-lettuce-taco-bell.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/15/well/eat/cyclospora-stomach-bug-what-to-know.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/business/cyclospora-taylor-farms-lettuce.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/well/eat/lettuce-safety-cyclospora-outbreak.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/health/cyclospora-taylor-farms-mexico-taco-bell-lettuce.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclosporiasis
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8471761/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00494755261437456
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/16/diarrhea-outbreak-cyclospora-parasite-cdc
https://www.cdc.gov/cyclosporiasis/php/surveillance/index.html
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/expert-qa/cyclosporiasis-outbreak
https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2026/07/17/taco-bell-warned-investors-about-cyclospora-before-the-outbreak-and-these-other-chains-did-too/
https://www.today.com/health/disease/cyclosporiasis-outbreak-foods-avoid-map-cases-parasite-diarrhea-2026-rcna588006
http://cnn.com/2026/07/18/health/cyclospora-what-to-do-wellness
https://www.statnews.com/2025/12/22/american-food-safety-funding-cuts-foodnet/
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/foodborne-disease/cdc-cuts-back-foodborne-illness-surveillance-program
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-quietly-scaled-back-surveillance-program-foodborne-illnesses-rcna227089
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(25)00305-X/fulltext
https://www.cdc.gov/foodnet/about/index.html
https://www.food-safety.com/articles/10646-cdc-slashes-foodnet-surveillance-from-eight-foodborne-pathogens-to-two
https://www.thermofisher.com/blog/food/foodnet-active-surveillance-for-food-safety/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/18/health/taylor-farms-iceberg-lettuce-recall.html
https://apnews.com/article/cyclospora-lettuce-recall-taylor-farms-taco-bell-8c8bb30fbd100e0c246cffeff6983753


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe