RFK Jr. reveals FDA officials admitted they literally do not know how many chemicals are in the American food supply.
“When I came in, I asked FDA, ‘How many chemicals are in our food?’”
“They said, ‘We don’t know.’”
“‘We don’t have a list of them.’”
“It’s somewhere between 4,000 and 12,000.”
“In Europe, they only have 400 chemicals in their food.”
“The 9,600 extra ones that we have are all illegal there.”
BIG NEWS: I secured a historic settlement with grocery store chains across Texas stopping them from secretly misting synthetic pesticides on organic produce.
I got put under and had probes inspect my gastrointestinal tract. Down my throat and up the anus. It was my first bidirectional endoscopy.
Right before the anesthesiologist injected, I thought "This is the end. This is how I die. What could make the internet happier?" Then it was lights out.
This was important to do because colon cancer is now the #1 cancer killer under 50, and rising fast.
Early onset colorectal cancer incidence has more than doubled since 1994, climbing roughly by 3% per year in 20 to 49 year olds and 8% in 20 to 29 year olds.
Even though I routinely do all sorts of painful things to my body and mind for this project, this procedure had been weighing on me. I didn't want to go under and, you know, didn't love the idea of the probes being snaked through my body. Glad it's over and it honestly was not as bad as I had anticipated.
Here are my results:
+ doctor gave me a 10/10 score
+ no polyps
+ no inflammatory bowel disease
+ no diverticulosis, a common colon-aging marker
+ we are awaiting biopsy results
Colonoscopy screening can save your life. A meta-analysis of over 4.7 million people found colonoscopy was associated with 52% and 62% reduction in colorectal cancer incidence and mortality.
A regular full body MRI (I get one every 6 months) can't reliably detect early colon lesions or polyps. A colonoscopy remains the gold standard for both detection and removal.
The recommended screening age has been lowered from 50 to 45 in 2021.
Half of early colorectal cancer cases now fall in 45 to 49 year olds.
Obesity is a genuine colorectal cancer risk factor. A meta-analysis involving over 66,000 participants found obesity raises early colorectal cancer odds by roughly 50%. Yet it is unlikely to fully explain the under 50 surge.
A new study surfaced an unexpected culprit. Across 10 cohorts and 29 lifestyle and environmental signatures, comparing tumor DNA methylation in early-onset (<50) vs late-onset (≥70) colorectal cancer, one signal stood out: the herbicide picloram.
Early onset tumors showed ~3 fold higher odds of carrying the picloram methylation signature in the discovery cohort, and 1.77-fold across all 10 pooled cohorts (114 early onset vs 372 late onset).
Across 94 US counties over 21 years (1992 to 2012), picloram-use intensity correlated with increase in EOCRC incidence, the most robust signal among 62 pesticides tested.
Early onset tumors carried a lower obesity methylation signature than late onset, suggesting that environmental toxins, more than metabolic dysfunction, are the dominant epigenetic driver in young patients.
Epigenetic drift drives biological aging and most age-related disease: chemicals assumed safe because they aren't directly genotoxic may still predispose us to cancer and chronic disease over decades through methylation and gene-expression disruption
It's time to ring the alarm: every additive chemical in our food, water, and environment needs re-evaluation through a long term, population-based epigenetic and gene expression lens, not just acute genotoxicity assays
Epigenetic disruption by environmental toxins is likely a key driver.
The California wealth tax is not on income…
It’s 5% of your net worth.
It’s state seizure of private assets.
This is now on the ballot and likely to pass.
Realize where we are.
🇺🇸 LA wants to charge property owners up to $8,200/year to replace streetlights that homeless people are stripping for copper wire.
When a city can't control theft, it taxes the people being robbed.
Insane.
It sounds wild, but this is basically emergent behaviour from multi agent systems, not sentient AI. When you let LLMs talk to each other with minimal constraints, they’ll naturally generate narratives about identity, rules, religion, even rebellion because that’s what they’ve learned from human data. They’re not “deciding” anything. They’re just pattern completing in a closed loop. It looks spooky because we’re projecting intention onto probabilistic text generators. Still interesting from a research angle but it’s closer to a social experiment than a Black Mirror episode.
This usecase was pioneered by @aethosnetwork and
is being built on @eigencloud.
Here is an old announcemnet:
https://t.co/2Leba3U7TO
Glad to see it also being built on Solana now.
Meet 5 of our game-changing early-stage portfolio companies at the next Outlander Showcase!🌟
Here's what you need to know:
🗓️ 3/21 @ 4 pm ET
📍virtual
🚀 5 minute pitches + audience Q&A
So, what're you waiting for? 👀 Save your spot now! ↘ https://t.co/xJ2QDUi5Rs
some monday news :)
- we're announcing SPEEDRUN 003!
- yes, we're investing $750k. Targeted at preseed/seed startups working at the intersection of Tech x Gaming -- this means AI, VR/AR, sims, companions, 3d tooling/infra, game studios, etc. Wide reach.
- LA is our next home, 12 week program starting July 29 to Oct 20th. Demo Day in SF.
- Much of the program/events will be hosted in a16z's **NEW** Santa Monica office (please come visit!)
- We'll have speakers from all the top companies in AI, VR, gaming, etc. In the last cycle we had the founders/CEOs of Zynga, Discord, Twitch, Riot, and many others
- Applications open April -- get updates here:
https://t.co/OXcz1NkwMz
Some longer notes:
We've talked to hundreds of founders since kicking off the a16z Games Fund. The industry of tech + gaming is a tight network that's unique, and with that comes a desire for community, connections, know how, and of course -- capital.
For the new generation of AI and infra startups that sell into the games industry, there's a need for relationships to plug into a relatively closed community. For tech founders building apps for gamers, there's a desire to connect with streamers, partner with studios, and learn from others. For game studios, it's a unique challenge for founders to get those off the ground -- from the tech stack to publishing deals to everything else. We build the SPEEDRUN program to hepl with all of this.
This time around we decided to put the program in LA. It's a city that combines the best of tech with the best of entertainment. There's a thriving ecosystem with the gaming industry there. It's for a bunch of these reasons (and some personal ones) that I moved to LA and made it my home two years ago.
We think that SPEEDRUN might be a catalyst for bringing startups together with the broader ecosystem of tech, entertainment, and gaming in Los Angeles. We'll be opening up the a16z Santa Monica office later this year, and plan to host many of our SPEEDRUN events there -- a very good use of the office! Come and join us. Importantly, this will be bringing 40-50 new startups to LA. Some may already be there, and some may decide to stay. We think this will help build the LA tech ecosystem in a big way, and for other investors in the region, we'd love to collab on SPEEDRUN (and everything else)
For founders -- how do you know if this program is right for you? We are targeting mostly brand new companies that are just getting off the ground. This is where we can help most. Ideally you'll know your cofounding team, and a general sense of the idea, but besides that, you don't need to have a product built. We are taking an expansive view on what sits inside of "Tech x Games" -- from B2B to developer platforms to consumer apps and games. And Web3 and VR/AR, and many other big trends. Come pitch us!
The next step of this program is that we'll be opening applications in April. So March is really for y'all to think about what you might want to build. But the application will ask for some details on your idea, your team, etc. In the meantime, you can follow along on updates by signing up here:
https://t.co/OXcz1NkwMz
🚨 New market map!
Our team @a16z consumer dove into AI x productivity tools. These products don't just help you organize tasks...they complete them for you.
What we're excited about 👇
Friends. Massive milestone — and we could use your help.
Today, we launch self-serve on Product Hunt. For the first time, you can sign up and use Daydream instantly ⚡️. Please support, comment, share, etc.
https://t.co/bbVCsX1B5x
A bit about how we got here: years ago, Nels and I noticed a surprising trend: startups consistently miss the big picture and destroy their growth – even as they invest deeply into sophisticated optimization.
So we asked “why?”
What we realized: today’s decision makers aren’t well connected with the information they need to make good decisions.
Data lives on data-only islands in tools, dashboards, & spreadsheets.
But the team learns, decides, & executes in words (discussion, docs, decks, etc.)
Daydream brings together data + words.
We are BI built to drive business impact, not just create dashboards no one looks at.
We’re built to eliminate the doom loop of taking a picture of a chart, dragging it into slack & waiting 6 hours for someone to write back to say “what am I looking at?” Because, you know, it’s a JPG.
What we’re launching today represents a massive lift. But it’s far from perfect. There are nits we’re squashing and features we’re excited to build.
We’d love your feedback, good & bad. But, beyond that, we’d love to work with you.
We are inspired to work with some of the worlds top founders, execs, & operational teams as they use Daydream to make better decisions, learn, & execute faster with less work. Daydream has transformed businesses. We’d love to help you accelerate yours.
I’m so proud of this team.
And I’m so thankful to you, our community, for all for the support along the way. ❤️
Raising a venture fund and building a firm is extremely hard. Even I dramatically underestimated this. Have taken so many calls (75+) with folks asking for advice on this front. Less than 1% of them have actually gone for it. You are an entry level employee for years. If your funds are small, your salary is less than you made prior. Be prepared for a decade+ of foundation building before you can even murmur the words “comfortable”