You know, hold my beer, all the stupid things that men do, sometimes it works out and sometimes you bite it.

Good afternoon, Michael Malis here. Let that beer welcome for the next hour. We have with us someone

I'm really excited to talk to you, Rezib Khan. He's one of my new buddies that I've made here since I've been to Austin for those don't know his sub stack is received at subsack.com. He is the co host of the am I allowed to even say it?

The what? The Brown pundits podcast. Yeah, why you can say it. I think you can say it.

Yeah, but you have brown hair. You're brown hair. And Rezib, you had a little embryo years ago in your times, which I'm sure we were going to talk about. But most importantly, you aren't your specialty is talking about genetics and how that affects consumer choices have that pecs people in day to day lives. Sure.

And there's a lot to cover here. And I want to give people a little bit of backdrop because one of the things that you discuss in your work is something that I voted substantial amount of time to in my book.

Then you write, which is the concept of eugenics. And this is one of those words that is taboo. And it's the worst thing ever and and all this other stuff. And yet it's something which is practiced literally every day by pretty much everyone who's engaged in having kids when you're testing to make sure your kid is going to be happy and healthy.

You're practicing eugenics when females tend to be attracted towards men who are taller or who make more money. They are practicing eugenics. And one of the things as background, which you're going to enjoy on this is I have a very big book collection.

And what's useful to me is instead of reading now what people were saying about people in the past, it's useful to learn what they were saying at the time.

So I like getting old rare books and reading them and one of the books that I own in my collection is something called the case for sterilization.

Now sterilization is an example of eugenics at its most extreme. It's something that I think most of us would agree is dystopic and you know the idea of the government sitting down and sterilizing people is I think all of us pretty regularly regardless horrific.

But it was part of somewhat mainstream discourse, you know, less than a century ago. Now this book is from 1934 and it's written by Leon Whitney, who is director of the American eugenics society.

So I'm like, OK, let's hear what he had to say before World War II and the atrocities. And literally the first sentence.

Since the year 1934 open, there has been a starting startling increase in the attention given to the subject of sterilization and increase which among American newspaper readers is probably due largely to the news from Germany that Hitler has undertaken to have some 400,000 German sterilized nearly a hundredth part of the population.

Whether or whether or not this order is or is not directly exclusive to use it is so grave decision as to justify fully the recent discussion hold on a second hold on.

So then he goes on to be like while we don't agree with everything Hitler says sterilization still has some good points.

And I got this book. I was like, guys, I was rooting for you. I was hoping that you'd be rejecting this. Can you break down for us what eugenics is and why it is so misunderstood?

Sure. Yeah, I mean, as you as you said, you know, it's kind of one of those words that's attached to a lot of things and as you as as implied by what you just read there.

The fact that that book is published in 1934 by a, you know, I mean, probably a respected person, although the 1930s were kind of transition eugenics was much more mainstream.

A century ago and it basically just refers to, you know, like applying animal breeding practices to humans, you know, in a crafts way, but it comes out of Francis Galton's work.

He was, I think like the double first cousin of Charles Darwin and he, you know, pioneered things related to statistics, fingerprinting and a bunch of other things.

And one of the issues that he was interested in was hereditary genius talent and Galton wanted there to be more genius and talent.

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