Yo, MSF, I'm fresh out the US, came direct flight, Las Vegas, super jet lag, here's the thing, given the political situation with a certain candidate that rhymes with Rump, I'm going to use this opportunity to officially announce I am seeking asylum in the UK. Is Jeremy Hunt still your secretary of health? Maryland this time of year, is that? Look, Hannah Montana, all right? I don't know if you all know her, she's American, superstar, Disney. When we go into our careers in healthcare and you guys are in the humanitarian space, you were all Hannah Montana. You want to change the world, you want to use your unique gifts to help people in the field. This is health 1.0, okay? But somewhere, some IT guy decided to build you some tech to make things better. And one day you look in the mirror and that reflection has changed. And all the time you realize you were just a twerk in progress, waiting to happen. I'm here all week, MSF, tip your nurse. Health 2.0, okay? This brave new world of medicine as machine with technology to save us has not succeeded outside of the humanitarian space. Luckily you guys are still struggling to get to 2.0. And so this talk is going to be about how do you bypass the worst of 2.0 and get to 3.0, which is going to be dope. That's what we're going to talk about. And this is not health 3.0. This is my dad. Why am I still wearing these glasses? I don't need him to read or do I. So this is my dad and you guys are probably like, what? There's no way. That's what I thought. Because look at, there's no phenotypic resemblance between these two characters at all. I did genetic testing. This is my dad, all right? Beyond the shadow of a douth with a p-value that's very significant. Indian immigrant internist came to the US with $10 in his hand. And obviously when you have an Indian dad who's a physician, those of us with immigrant parents know you're going to be a doctor. There's no getting around it. It's not like I had a choice, right? In fact, those of us know with immigrant parents from the developing world, there is no test they will not criticize. Even a blood test. Easy. The standards are high, people. I'm just saying. So this being my dad, when I was growing up, I loved to make people laugh. I loved to teach. I loved music. And so of course, weird Al Yankovic was my idol. I wanted to be him when I grew up. Creepy and weird, especially when you have the posters on your wall. You never get a date. But I told my dad this is what I want to do. And he looked at me and he said, being a professional clown won't put none on the table, OK? Why don't you come to the clinic and see what I do? See what a real man does to real people to help, OK? And so I had no choice. I did. And what I saw was health 1.0. Here was a guy you trained in India. Didn't have all the expensive tests in the labs and all that. Had touch and intuition and the desire to help people and connect. Here was a guy who was connected to his community, who was paternalistic as heck, right? Because that's health 1.0. It wasn't fettered by data and evidence and technology. It was about a deep relationship, but it was a very hierarchical relationship. And so I saw this and I actually, I fell in love with it. I mean, this was a guy who would lick a person to see if they had cystic fibrosis. You know, and you don't want to know. You don't want to know how he diagnosed diabetes. But, you know, he was deeply suspicious, is deeply suspicious of technology.  I had no wonder the Americans are spending 2.8 trillion on the health care with a T and getting versed outcomes in the developed world. They are thinking the money is growing on wines only. And I said, well, but you know, but he said, always trying to think outside of the rectangle, OK? Don't do it. What do you need to do? You remember that time I tried to do technology and your uncle Sorab in Pune. And I built that app to date for doctors, the dating app, because a doctor should only date another doctor. And it allowed you to connect with doctors around the world, across the borders. Nobody bought it. And then we got sued. And I said, dad, that's because you call the app doctors without borders. That's a thing already. And with that, I decided to go into medical school. And it felt like this. I don't know if it's like this where you guys trained. But where I trained, the medical system is stuck. It's bypassed the Enlightenment.  And the second two years, it's about kissing the ring of the authority figure. It's an apprenticeship so that one day you'll be the ring that's kissed. What a wonderful recipe for innovation and creativity. It's really glorious. And so everything was beaten out of memory. I had an attending physician at UCSF where I trained. We'll call him Flanders for the sake of this talk because that was his real name. And I no longer care. And you can't reach me, Flanders. I'm across 5,000 miles of Atlantic, okay?   I would like you to reverse that. Or better yet, just think. That's how we're treated for innovative questions and ideas. I mean, all for asking. If essential hypertension is so freaking essential, why do we treat it? And so I gradually somehow survived medical school, got into Stanford and then was met with an interesting transition. Health 1.0 was starting to go to health 2.0. Now, health 2.0, especially in the Silicon Valley, was driven by very confident, some might say arrogant tech entrepreneurs who felt that Moore's law, the idea that things get cheaper and faster, technologically speaking, over time exponentially, would apply to healthcare. So maybe we should change the model from medicine as an apprenticeship, as a cottage industry, to medicine as a machine. And so what does that look like in healthcare? I call it Les's law. So what happens when we get fancier MRI machines and CT scans? It gets more expensive. What happens when we get fancier brand name drugs? It gets more expensive. What happens when we put an EHR in the field in South Sudan? I'm gonna argue it does this, unless you do it right and we have not done it right. And so what happens here in the brave new world of health 2.0 is we are all reduced to a commodity. The paternalistic relationship is flattened, but now the doctor is just an arbiter of information. And as my dad said, now these patients, okay, I'm spending all the time looking at the computer. I can't develop the relationship. And what is happening?  Now I don't know who he is, but I have read his notes and he's a quack. And so we're all commodities, including patients.  So for people who aren't familiar with this character, this is Winnie the Pooh, adorable children's, you know, story figure. I'll tell you what I see. I see most of my patients at Stanford in the inpatient hospital environment. I see an anxious concerned affect concerning for depression, not otherwise specified with anxiety features. I see a black necrotic nose concerning for likely cocaine ingestion bilateral. I see central obesity concerning for early metabolic syndrome with insulin resistance confirmed and supported by the complete absence of fingers and toes. Every single extremity concerning for diabetic polyneuropathy with auto amputation. And despite his name, he hasn't. Concerning for diabetic gastropathy with constipation. And with this litany of glucose related complaints, Mr. Pooh, who may well as enough be a Syrian refugee in the middle class that you're seeing in a camp now, presents with his auto amputated right paw deep in a jar of honey. Now in our current system with my current EMR, I say, oh, Mr. Pooh, you're fat diabetic, you should walk. By the way, here's five different medications. Here's six different specialists you're going to see. Here's seven different days we're going to admit you to the hospital to amputate that last little bit of toe and eight different specialists we're going to free to. And by the way, here's a glucometer. Check your sugar four times a day.  See me in a month. Bye. And then I turn around and spend the rest of the hour charting in an electronic health record that's two clicks away from becoming sentient and destroying all of us. Okay. To please a bean counter somewhere has nothing to do with Mr. Pooh. And what happens when Mr. Pooh comes back in a month if he comes back? He's on five medications. Actually, no scratch that he's on one medication. He's taking five times. He's using his glucometer to text his homies with with some success. And he weighs five pounds more and his auto amputated right paw is still deep in the jar of honey. And what are the team? What are the intern and the resident say?  That's how we treat Mr. Pooh in our especially in America. That we cannot take care of them. Why? Because we're not trained. We're not giving the resources to look at the entire 100 acre woods. Like when you guys go into the field, what's going on in the community? Killian gave an amazing talk about getting to the bottom of this. Do we have the time in the incentive to do that? No. Do we have an EHR that enables that understanding and cohesion? No. We have a cash register in the United States. And that's the mistake that you guys are going to avoid when you when you build yours. All right. And so what happens with Pooh? No one's able to ask, hey, where's Christopher Robbins? He's your homie. He's your support. He's totally AWOL. What hole in your life is the honey filling? Is it a cultural thing? Is it the fact that you live on $2 a day? Is it the fact that you're illiterate? We can't ask those questions. We don't have the tools to manage that. No one's asking Piglet. Is there caregiver abuse? Right? No one's asking Mr. Pooh. Have you been dipping into Tigger's crystal meth stash? He has no teeth, people. And so as a result, okay, and don't even get me started on EOR. I don't even know how you get a scar like that. Okay. All I'm saying is the 100 acre woods needs an MSF intervention stat. And so as a result, I would look at Stanford when I was practicing for 10 years, and I realized 50% of the patients in that hospital didn't need to be there. It could have been entirely prevented if we had the technology, the resources, the training, and the motivation to do what we trained to do, which is teach patients to stay healthy and connect with them as human beings. So as a result, I got very burned out and felt like my career was back here again. And here's an interesting statistic from the U.S., greater than 50% of doctors blame the EHR for the fact that 60% of doctors will not recommend the career to their children. How broken is that? I mean, I'm in a room with some of the most passionate people around that are going into danger-risking life in limb to help other people. And that sacred calling can't be recommended. Why? Because we've broken our system, and the technology is part of the problem. There are other problems that are specific to the U.S., but don't make the same mistakes with the technology. So what ends up happening is I ended up looking at this about year 8. I was super burned out. And I ended up deciding, you know what? Something interesting has happened. Social media has started happening. Technology has changed. Maybe there's an opportunity to reclaim this idea that the word docere, which is the root of doctor, means to teach. Maybe we could use social media to engage patients where they are. And I think increasingly in humanitarian circles, you're seeing that people are on Facebook, on cell phones, et cetera. And that's how they're communicating with each other. What if we did that? We could A-B test different strategies to actually focus and prevent disease, to hear what's going on in the community, like Hilary was talking about, go to the women at the well, right? And so maybe we could do that. And then I realized it's going to fail, because I almost lost my job at Stanford with the minimum use of technology, checking my hotmail account on a work computer. Let's just say the speech recognition software also has a long way to go, all right? You've got mail. Yes, several. They're never going to ask me to speak again. It's just, it's done. It's done. Doctors without Z-Dog, that's what it's going to be called. So this is what ended up happening. I started though looking more and more, and young millennials were coming onto my service at Stanford, and they were using YouTube and Twitter and this thing called MySpace that apparently existed at one point. And I said, whoa, whoa, here's the thing. I love to make people laugh. I love to teach. I love to do music. What if I got a handicap and I started recording videos that educated and entertained patients and providers and satirized the system in a way that we could actually affect change and then used a social media apparatus, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera, to actually engage patients where they are, do A-B testing and have a discourse that humanizes us and connects us to that community. And so I got a thing and I got a PC and I started recording and it was a total disaster. Like every time I tried to upload it to YouTube, the whole PC would crash. Then I got a Mac and 160 videos and like millions of views later, this guy is Z-Dog MD with two Gs because one is apparently insufficiently gangsta, was in the house. And by the way, in the UK, they call me Z-Dog, which is clinically proven to be 30% more cool, in my opinion. And so I created this character really against medical advice because the chair of my department was like, you do this, you're going to lose your job. So I did it as this character, and of course it was me, but they never figured it out till I got on the news. And we did tons of videos.  It was so successful, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta use it as an ad on YouTube to target pediatric providers to get them to prescribe the vaccine because they don't do it.  Okay, talk about a first world problem. I heard earlier 64% measles vaccination, that's great. In Marin, it's like 40%. They're just too rich. And so with these videos, what we found is year over year, 35% increased uptake in flu vaccination in the corporate environment where we tested it. And the reason again is that you motivate people's elephants, their hopes, dreams, fears with music and with a message that's catchy in a way that's accessible where they are, which is social media. As opposed to vaccines are safe and effective, you should do, yeah. It's never gonna work. So this thing started to take off and we actually did an Ebola piece earlier and making fun of the US response that it kind of got a life of its own. And the next thing I know, I'm getting an email from the CEO of a company called Zappos. And they sell shoes. They're part of Amazon. But he grew it. This is Tony Shea, the CEO. He grew it from nothing to $1.2 billion U.S. sale based on the idea that if you get human relationship culture right, you can sell shoes online and people will buy them because you can sit on the phone with them and develop relationships. And that's what he did. It was all about culture. People are treated like a family within the organization. He reached out and said, I saw your videos, you need a restraining order. Also, here's the thing, we're investing a bunch of the money I made selling to Amazon to move Zappos to the heart of downtown Las Vegas, which is a demilitarized zone. It's not the strip that you see on the news. This is like an old beaten down drug addicts, homeless people. He said, we're gonna invest $350 million there, move Zappos into the heart of it and try to see if we can accelerate the dividend that happens when people move into tight urban spaces and innovation happens when they bounce off each other and collide. And I said, why are you telling me this? He says, well, because there's 18% of the gross domestic product in the US called healthcare that we don't understand.  Quit your job at Stanford. Quit your wife's job as an academic chess radiologist. Move to the desert. I'll give you a little bit of startup money and you have to fix healthcare and improve the culture and make it exportable to the rest of the world. And so I Googled healthcare innovation Las Vegas. This was the first hit. And unfortunately, the next three hits were, some of the worst outcomes in the United States for preventable, like literally developing world level outcomes for preventable illnesses. It was horrible healthcare. No academic medical center. It would have taken billions of dollars to fix this. You guys could literally do an operation here and actually improve the health by an order of magnitude. That's how horrible it is. And so when I told my family we were gonna quit our jobs and move to the desert to try to fix healthcare, they were incredibly supportive. Really supportive. And I told my daughter, look, we're moving from this big house on the hill in the Bay Area of California, beautiful weather to 120 degrees. You're gonna lose most of your toys because we're now gonna live in an apartment in a demilitarized zone. She was incredibly supportive as well. And but we actually did it. Now you guys are some of the bravest people I've ever met.  I will not fly on a reject airflot plane with bolts flying off to help people in Africa because I'm a scaredy cat. But this was the bravest thing I ever did in my life. And so it's my small contribution. It's nothing like what you do, but it was my small contribution and it looked like this. Here is turntable health, the plans for our clinic. We dropped into this demilitarized zone of downtown Las Vegas, patient population, substance abuse, poverty, et cetera, no sense of community. And we built a facility who's half of it of the 7,000 square feet was based on getting the community together. We had these big screen TVs with Xbox with the sensors that make you move. So people would have to dance instead of sitting there with a controller. We had a teaching kitchen over here, a yoga studio over here, and then the clinical stuff back here. And it looks like this. This is our yoga teaching studio. This is Nina. She's our licensed clinical social worker. She also... So she deals with mental health in the U.S. She also teaches yoga meditation. So she tells patients, listen, I know you're suffering, you're on these medications. Come to my Thursday class where you'll learn from people in your community who are suffering the same way you are. And the connections that are formed between the community members leads to this healing. They exchange ideas. They hold each other accountable. It's a vastly different approach than anything we use in the U.S. And it actually takes the community into account. Now, to do this, you need a team of people. Like you guys have known in MSF forever. It takes an entire team to make this happen. But the thing is, in medicine, we're trained to be autonomous cowboys, right? We're in charge, the patient listens, everyone else listens. Not in what we're trying to do here. So this is what we do. We create a team with doctors, nurses, social worker, and these guys. So the guy's about to break his hip. That's a health coach. That's Andrew. Now, we were just talking earlier. Kylian was talking about how we can be very paternalistic in the humanitarian space. We come in and we say, this is how you should do it. And the community's telling you something different. We want this and this and this. Now, imagine if you get Andrew, we screen 500 people from the community that Andrew is gonna serve to find two, based on emotional intelligence, empathy, et cetera. Then we look at the CV, and then we train them. And so Andrew is, happened to be a paramedic, also was a bartender at the Wind Resort in Las Vegas. He knows the population. You don't have to multiply the drinking history by five to get the accurate result. In fact, you have to remove beers to get the accurate. So Andrew does the heavy lifting and speaks the language of the community. And to support him, then there are four of Andrews to every doctor. So Andrew does the heavy lifting, texts the patient, emails the patient, goes on Facebook with the patient, skypes the patient, holds them accountable, goes running with the patient, goes shopping with the patient. And then the doctor goes room to room, tying it together and practicing that high level intuitive medicine they were trained to do. And so everybody supports each other as a team. And as a result, the tech piece, which is the crucial part we want to talk about in the three minutes we have left, is the whole point of the talk. We looked at all the EHRs, they were all glorified cash registers. And so we said, okay, let's just build our own. So with our partners Iora Health, we got an IT team that served the clinicians on the ground in the community they were serving. And so they built a workflow around us. This EHR is issue based, so chronic congestive heart failure, diabetes, hypertension, substance abuse, in these sort of clouds. Doctors, health coaches, nurses, everybody can write in that cloud at the same time. This isn't episodic care where you click boxes to fulfill an episode of care. It's holistic issue based care that the patient in every room can read and write in their own chart. They can text weight and steps on their little wearable into our chart, and it goes into the chart. And then the health coach follows up and holds them accountable. On the back end is a population health management tool that assigns every patient something called a worry score, zero to 10. How likely is that patient to get admitted to the hospital in the next month? And it's partially algorithmic based on our engine, partially clinician-derived. Then every Wednesday we huddle and we go through all the aids and reach out to keep Mrs. Witherspoon from putting salt into Mr. Witherspoon's food because he's ending up in the ER with edema, which you guys hear spell oedema, which I still don't understand. And it actually, it's actually transformative. And so as a result we use the technology to actually bind the relationship and this is what it could look like for MSF if you get it right. This is what I call Health 3.0. It takes the best of one and two, transcends them and what emerges is even bigger. So it takes the relationship from one and that's sacred autonomy and it puts a team behind it. It equalizes their eye to eye. It's not paternalistic, but also it's not just informative where she has to go to Dr. Google. He has time to learn her hopes, dreams and fears and she has the accountability to hold him accountable as the shepherd for her care and he demands that she release the victimhood of illness and be a team in this. It's very hard, but they need time to do that and look where the chart is. It's a triangle. They use this technology to bring them together to accentuate the human relationship and as a result gray areas thrive. As a result, he's evidence informed but not evidence enslaved. You can have guidelines, but they are that guidelines. You know her hopes, dreams and fears. You know her culture. The health coach tells you about what's going on in the community and the rest of the 100 acre woods and as a result with MSF, if you were to build a system like this and I know because I've seen some of the talks, it's gonna come. You could have 100 acre woods that looks like this. All right. And now Tigger still doesn't have teeth because no one's gonna pay for that. But it is transformative. And so to wrap up, the reason we called it turntable health is because those of us old enough to remember records and those of us young enough to rediscover them, right. Know that it's a piece of beautiful art that you hold in your hand. There's 10 tracks that tell a story. You sit with your friends and you drop a tone arm. It's a ritual, right? It's almost a community ritual.  What a human experience. What an analog human experience. That is the heart of medicine. Everybody here knows that intuitively. Even if you work on logistics and IT, you know that intuitively that's the case. So do not let the IT people or anyone build you an MP3 player. All right. Zeros and ones ripped one track off the internet, jammed into your earbuds on a subway isolated from the rest of humanity because that is what health 2.0 is doing in the U.S. And we can't tolerate it. We can take the analog heart of medicine and amplify it digitally with technology that serves this and that will transform everything. So thank you so much for listening. I'm exactly out of time.  Thank you so much.


Course Reports As a teacher, we have access to some very powerful reports telling us what our learners have been doing in the course and when. To access these reports or logs, we go down to the administration block and click the link Reports. When you use advanced features such as competencies or activity completion, you'll see those reports here as well. But as we are new to Moodle, let's begin by looking at the basic logs. If we click Logs, we can leave it as default which will show us everything everyone has done or we can specify a particular participant, particular day, activity and type of action. So let's select a specific date and create and teaching. So we're looking to see if our teacher created any activities on that day. And when we click Get these logs, we can see that on our chosen day, our teacher Sam set up a forum. Another report that we can see if we go over to the administration block and click Reports again is a course participation report. This is useful for seeing easily who has and has not been taking part in particular course activities. One of the activities we set up if we click the drop-down menu was an Introduce Yourself forum and we needed each learner to tell us a little bit about themselves. So if we look back one day and choose learner and post, we will be able to see who's been active in this forum during the last day. And we see that Francis has posted but Mark has only viewed and not made a post. So we could tick the box to select Mark and send him a message as a polite reminder to participate more in the course. Or we can also select a number of learners and message them together.


My name is Leonardo Flores. I'm a Latin America campaign coordinator with Cote Pink. Leo, can you just maybe give us a brief rundown of what happened yesterday, what you saw, and the outcome of the election? Sure, so there was a group of seven of us here doing electoral observation. We were deployed to, I think, in total maybe about 15 voter precincts, and really we didn't see any major irregularities. I would say the vote was carried out freely and fairly in terms of the voting itself and the vote count. And what we saw at the end of the day was a five-point victory for Guillermo Lasso, a right-wing neoliberal banker over Andrés Araus, a progressive candidate. And we also saw roughly 1.7 million people decide to either vote blank or to spoil their ballot. So I think that was an important factor in this election given that Lasso only won by about 400,000 votes. So what do you think were the biggest factors leading up to the election of Lasso and the defeat of Araus? Well, to me it's very clear that there was an uneven playing field here in Ecuador. I'll go into that in a bit. But also there were, you know, the CNE didn't play fair, especially before the first round of the elections. This was the second round of the elections. And what I mean when I say that the CNE didn't play fair is that, you know, you had Araus' political party was actually banned from running. It was the Allianz de País. And they tried to form a new political party and they refused that option. So eventually they found a small party that basically let them borrow the party as a vehicle for Andrés Araus to be able to run. On top of that you had a candidate banned. You had Rafael Correa, the former president. He was banned from running as vice president. And his image was banned from being used by the Araus' campaign. So, but not only that, they didn't actually ban his image from being used in a negative way by other campaigns. So it was very kind of one-sided. On top of that Andrés Araus was only able to register as a candidate in December. So you had other campaigns, had a four or five months' head start. And then you had the role of the media, which is very clearly, you know, corporate media dominates here in Ecuador. And they were very clearly in the Lasso camp.  Initially one of the big things in terms of fake news was they claimed that Andrés Araus was going to de-dollarize the economy. Ecuador's economy has been dollarized for almost 20 years now, maybe a little over 20 years. And there's kind of widespread consensus that, you know, there are pros and cons to dollarization, and it's clear that dollarization has stabilized Ecuador's economy. And Andrés Araus knows this. He studies this, and he's an expert on this, and he never, ever suggests that he would de-dollarize. We also saw a campaign, electoral interference really from Colombia, when they, you know, they disseminated this video of supposed guerrillas from the ELN, the National Liberation Army, a guerrilla group that insurgent left this group and that's been operating in Colombia for decades now, in which they claim that the ELN had been financing the Araus campaign. This video was debunked immediately by an ornithologist of all people who noted that, you know, the video couldn't have been recorded in Colombia because it was a bird that was only on kind of the Ecuador, the southern border of Ecuador. So this was kind of false news, and yet, even yesterday, on election day, we had an important magazine in Colombia reviving these kind of absurd allegations. And so I think that played an important factor. People really started, I think common voters didn't really know what to think about Araus. They thought maybe he was corrupt in some way, but there's no absolutely no allegation of that. So I think a lot of that played into the fact that Tuomas is the feat. What kind of impact does the feat of Araus in the election of reviving neoliberal candidate like Lasso mean not only for Ecuador but also for the region? Sure. I'll start with the region. I mean, I think a victory by Araus would have really strengthened the region's attempts at regional integration during the so-called Pink Tide, which was this period in the early 2000s. You had when progressive government after progressive government took power in South America and Latin America as a whole and the Caribbean as well. You had these new institutions that were created, such as UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations, and CELAC, the Community of Latin America and Korean States. These were meant to be sort of as a counterbalance to the OAS, the Organization of American States, which can really be understood as being a tool of the State Department to promote U.S. foreign policy throughout the region. UNASUR itself was actually a much broader project to end regional integration, kind of like the EU, and we were taking the first steps towards that. The Moreno government, the current president here in Ecuador, he withdrew Ecuador from both of these organizations, and that really dealt a big blow to the region as a whole. I actually heard a couple of days ago from a former ambassador who said that if UNASUR was as strong now as it had been five years ago, the pandemic would have hit South America not nearly as hard as it has because they would have been able to cooperate in terms of buying vaccines together, in terms of coordinating public policies and other things of that nature. Internally here in Ecuador, I think we're very worried for the people of Ecuador because the Moreno government, so Lenny Moreno was the candidate for the left in 2017. He was seen as the successor of Rafael Correa. Correa was in power for 10 years. He brought economic and political stability to a country that before he came in power had 10 presidents in seven years, excuse me, seven presidents in 10 years. And now what we're seeing is that Moreno basically betrayed the movement and he endorsed the policies that had been put forward by Lasso when he was the candidate in 2017. So really we can say confidence that Lasso, at least his political party, his vision has been in power already in Ecuador for four years and it's been a total disaster, especially in terms of the pandemic. Ecuador is one of the worst performing countries in protecting people from the pandemic. And economically there's a huge crisis. The Moreno government signed this really terrible deal with the IMF that really brings us back to the days of the Washington consensus in the 90s. It's all about posterity and deregulation and reducing the labor rights of workers. So I think there's a lot of concern as to what's going to happen here in Ecuador. The people of Ecuador themselves, there was an uprising in October 2019 against the elimination of a fuel subsidy that would have raised prices on everything, like everything from transportation to eating food. And there was a massive uprising by social movements put down violently by the Moreno government. Lasso endorsed that repression. And then I think that we're going to see more of the same over the next four years. So you talk a little bit about the lawfare tactics that were used against us and the citizens' revolutions campaign as a particular election. Sure, and that really goes back to the fact that Moreno betrayed the party in 2017. So early in 2017, right near the beginning of this mandate, it becomes clear to the Alianza Bayez party that Moreno was going in a totally different direction. One of the first people to blow the whistle on this was Jorge Glass, the vice president. Right after he blows the whistle, there's a huge campaign of political persecution of Jorge Glass. He's investigated for corruption. He's put in jail. He's still in jail, suffering greatly from what we've heard. And that was just really the beginning, the tip of the iceberg in terms of political persecution of Alianza Bayez, the Correa party, and their leaders. So we also had Rafael Correa basically have to go into exile in Belgium because here he would have been thrown into prison. And the campaign, you know, the case against him was ridiculously flimsy. At one point he was accused of having psychic influence over people, and that led to corruption. It's so ridiculously absurd. I mean, we shouldn't even have to address it, but unfortunately we do because the reality here on the ground is that anything is being used to hurt the leaders of Alianza Bayez, of what's known as the Citizens' Revolution. And that really ties into the election as well because you had all of these party leaders who were either in jail, under house arrest, in exile. And so you have this void of party leadership, meaning that your campaign is obviously going to be weaker than it could have been had everyone been here in the first place. And it's not just, you know, the fact that there's been lawfare in Ecuador. We also saw lawfare in Brazil, for example, take down two presidents, basically, Lula and Dilma. But here in Ecuador it took on a particularly nasty turn. So we actually spoke with Rafael Correa's lawyer Faustin, sorry, I'm blanking on his last name, but we spoke to his lawyer and he was telling us that despite the fact that he himself had COVID, he was forced to appear in the court system having COVID because the judges didn't want to give him an extension. So they actually brought his doctor up in front of the courts and they asked his doctor if he was able to speak. And that was the determining factor of whether or not this court case would go through. And people actually got sick as a result of him being there. And, you know, that's just one example. There are many others in court hearings being held at two in the morning. There was such political persecution that it has kind of really destroyed the party. And Andrés Arauza's campaign suffered as a result. And he just says what we might expect to manage in this administration in terms of the time spent. Yeah. And so, you know, there's a previous question that I asked, but I think it's kind of indicative of the law fair question. There is an expectation that there might be further persecutions on social movement leaders, possibly even people who were leaders in the 2019 uprising, but then also continued attacks on Correa's legacy and movement. Yeah. So the person's name is Faustin Harim. And he's not just Rafael Correa's lawyer, but he's actually now a member of the National Assembly. And it was curious. We had a very odd event happen to us as electoral observers on Friday. I guess that would have been April 9th. We had a meeting with, you know, a representative from the UNESCO Party. And after this meeting, we left the building and we happened to bump into Faustin Harim on the street and we were talking to him briefly just saying hello. And suddenly you had four cops on two motorcycles swarm us and very kind of aggressively opened our faces and asked for our IDs, asked for our papers and basically asked us to open our backpacks. You know, in the long run, it was nothing.  And it's very clear to me that that sort of persecution, the incoming Lasso administration is going to try to do the same thing. It's not clear if there will be able to get away with it because the left actually continues to have a majority in the National Assembly. Andres Arauz's party has a plurality. The second biggest party is Pachakutik, which also has left tendencies. So I think there's going to be room for the left to fight back against this political persecution. But there is a lot of fear that people related to the Arauz campaign are going to come under heavy, you know, pressure. And especially and not just obviously the politicians but the social leaders as well. So we have Jaime Vargas, who's the president of Conai, the National Confederation of Indigenous Ecuadorians. And he, you know, he was a huge leader in the October 2019 uprising. And he actually came out in favor of Andres Arauz maybe about a week and a half before the election. And now there's a serious concern that Lasso is going to punish him and go after him. And, you know, one of the things that concerns me is living in the United States is, you know, we have the Senate Foreign Relations Committee issue this resolution in late March, basically touting the relationship between Ecuador and the United States. And not only that, but saying that Lenin Moreno had somehow restored democracy in the country when really Moreno did the exact opposite. He destroyed the country's institutions. He's the one responsible for the beginning of this political persecution. And the fact that Moreno and Lasso are so tied, what it says to me is that Lasso is going to have basically a green light to do whatever he wants here in Ecuador. And he's not going to face any sort of repercussions from the United States. You know, now, since we don't have multilateral organizations like UNASURD and Salaca Strong, we're going to have to depend on institutions within the OAS system, like the Inter-American Court for Human Rights, to defend the people who are going to be persecuted by the Lasso administration. And I'm not particularly confident that that's going to happen.


So I get to present after Rob Wolf or Chris Masterjohn, so CMJ and it's gonna be a tough show to follow So my plan my this plan talk I've been doing some research on botanicals for about three years I started at naturopathic medical school. I went to a little little tiny conference in Texas called paleo effects and Rob Wolf and Mark Sisson when on station said it's your turn guys So I'm gonna challenge you guys that if you guys are interested in furthering this ancestral movement It's your turn So let's try to get this information to as many people as we can and hopefully one day We can just change the world, but about a year ago I was approached by Tony Federico and Jay Brett Smith and that Tara and sorry Amber and Nick. We were part of a little podcast and the podcast was called our Plants paleo should we even be eating plants now? It sounds a little provocative, but I'm going to Try to dispel some myths Because there's a lot of memes out there and we often feel that plants are here for us You know like the children of the forest and game of thrones, you know They're just here to provide us with this nutrients and this phytochemical in order to make us healthier and I want to challenge you to maybe think of plants Not here for us, but here for themselves and trying to evolve just like we're trying to evolving and trying to Connect to their environment and avoiding the mismatch that they plants are presented So in this presentation, we're going to cover the mechanisms of evolution of plants Then we're gonna talk about how these mechanisms of evolution make plants more adapted to their environments And then how can we take and investigate these mechanisms of evolution and do something really cool and create new medicine? If you are in the ancestral movement, if you are in the paleo movement, you're not using botanical medicine You need to start using botanical medicine because it's so exciting. It's so Useful and it's going to in the future in the very near future. It might be one of the The ways that we're gonna save this world and then finally not only using this botanical medicine, but also respecting botanical medicine And understanding that not just because it's natural it's Safe for us. I want to start this presentation with a little story so as you might know Venezuela suffering an economic collapse and within this economic collapse, there's hyperinflation and With this hyperinflation people are basically not able to buy They have stacks and stacks of paper or worthless paper money that they cannot exchange for sustenance so people have a couple have resorted to foraging and When they go out in Forage they might encounter that root vegetable right there. That's actually bitter yucca and it's a close relative to the starchy staple yucca the difference is that bitter yucca has enormous amounts of cyanide and When people find this they're hungry they take it home They can't it's really difficult to differentiate between the yucca and the bitter yucca and they end up consuming it And then they die and the reason Now bitter yucca can be used in eight different types of breads, but it has to be properly prepared and there are bakeries and specialty shops that specialize in processing this bitter yucca But if you do to the untrained eye and someone doesn't understand the difference They can't poison themselves. Why bitter yucca being so mean to us. Well This plant is creating this compound or or or harnessing this compound in and concentrating it to defend itself it put it into the environment and it prevents it deters or Animals from eating this root and imagine, you know all your genetic information is in the plant Have you guys ever seen a plant get up in the leaf? You know away from the predator you can't so you have to create you have to adapt So this plants with this toxic compounds are in fact adapted for survival Let me show you another plant that uses this strategy to This right here's the tobacco plant and it produces this really cool alkaloid called nicotine Nicotine, you know, it's actually insecticide, you know, it kills insects So it's really good at creating this, you know, it defends itself from from predators by producing this insect insecticide But it also deters pollinators So you you are so good at creating this little that even the people, you know, the little bugs that help you reproduce are deterred they walk away and And not pollinating you're not being pollinated So it has developed two different strategies It actually in the past, you know, maybe thousands of years it evolved the ability to self-pollinate Because there weren't enough pollinators to help Pollinate plant so it actually became a self pollinator and then this alkaloid may be in higher-order organisms Is able to use this alkaloid not as an insecticide, but with Pretty cool effects, you know positive effects. It's a parasympathematic Meaning there's you know, there's not a lot of chemicals out there that induce a parasympathetic response and nicotine is one of them It's very addictive, you know, and there's stories about Different higher-order animals are coming in and using this plant because it's just you know They didn't know this nicotine. I've heard stories about deer Tobacco plants, but I couldn't find anything on the literature about deer You know kind of taking care of this plant in order to help it grow But I'm sure you're familiar with this higher And animal being able to pamper this plant in order to help it reproduce So who is controlling who is this plant? Actually creating this alkaloid for itself or for us Now it might sound a little bit crazy, but I'm going to show you another example of another alkaloid that we value Who's familiar familiar with? So that's another alkaloid That is that has this positive effects, you know, if you're not familiar with caffeine, maybe you should you are the wrong conference But this caffeine thing, you know, it gives you jittery, you know And it gives you a little bit of energy and it feels good tastes super good a little bit bitter It acts as an insecticide it deters predators it would be When the berry falls into the ground it kind of like scorches the ground and nothing else can grow in it So it's actually protecting itself by creating this alkaloid Now I'm going to show you another plant that creates the same alkaloid This is the cocoa plant Now what's interesting is that this is another plant that has convinced us to pamper it And it creates the same Chemical structure by a completely different mechanism. There's about 12 different ways that a plant can create caffeine and Camellia sinensis, which is tea The cocoa plant and the coffee plant all three of them create the same molecule in different ways So it's trying to create this insecticide repellent Attractant for other species in order to help its healthy both To do but that to its environment Now I can talk about alkaloids all day long But but something that interests me more than nicotine and caffeine is actually carnivorous plants And Charles Darwin, you know said that they are the most wonderful plants in the world This this is a whole subgenera of the plantate kingdom That was vegan and decided to become carnivorous so This the Sarsenia perpuriate grows in the northeastern part of the United States in Land that is very low in nitrogen And it has evolved the ability to digest bugs in Order to incorporate that nitrogen into its genome How cool is that? You know, this is a plant that on the face of adversity Developed the machinery to be able to digest proteins And my my lab actually became I work for a lab that focuses on the box virus at the University at the Arizona State University And we had this is before my time before I started working there They had no idea about botanical medicine or hippie medicine, you know They just wanted to know how to control the box virus And we came across this paper from the 1800s on the land set and it focused on the mcmack Indians and there was an outbreak of pox of a pox infection and On this article from the 1800s this This was able to control the outbreak of pox virus using a decoction of this plant Sarsenia perpuriate So now this is the the fork where traditional medicine Meets with you know our scientific methods So my lab decided to test if this is possible What we have here is some Healthy cells and you can see they're nice and rounded and they're close to each other and they're growing nice This is an in vitro assay and we decided you know This is that the assay that we use over and over when we're testing botanicals or when we're testing new interventions So what happens if you add some pox virus to this assay you can see how they're bubbling up This is a film of cells And as they die they Go away from the the the petri dish and they bubble up and then they up a toast and they die Okay, but what happens if we add the botanical when you add the botanicals Sarsenia perpuriate the cells survive Whoa, okay, so it worked and it led to the writing of this publication the use of a traditional method of medicine to Eradicate or prevent pox infections So after this paper was written this This whole lab has created a whole section of botanical medicine studies in conjunction with this Southwest College of naturopathic medicine and that's when I became involved in this in this research but Why does this happen? Why is Sarsenia perpuriate so good at killing viruses?  This plant is not giving us free medicine. This plant is protecting itself for survival And We wanted to test this hypothesis So remember when we're talking about forks, you know This so what we decided to do was look at the family of carnivorous plants and They have evolved over different periods of time and look for the intersection When the plant was vegan and decided to become carnivorous And that happens around here You can see Sarsenia perpuriate right there and then the different family that didn't become carnivorous is over here And we decided to test this plant against viral activity and this is what we found out So that's action. We tested the non carnivorous and we did this that you know, this is way We did hundreds of experiments. I'm just showing you like a snapshot We did it over and over and over and over and what we found out is that in every case if the plant did not become Carnivorous it does not have the ability to kill So only the carnivorous plants have this endogenous substances and that's super cool Because if we can if we can use this evolutionary thinking We can trace back the How this plants have evolved and then we can look at ways of using this plants to our advantage But we didn't stop there We wanted to see how why we could use this plant and we decided to test it against a bunch of viruses and Of course it didn't work Because this is not a panacea of health and we found out that this viruses have the Sarsenia has no activity against this type of viruses But it did have very good activity against some DNA viruses and we wanted to see What is the common denominator between these viruses that it's allowing Sarsenia purporate to prevent their replication? What we found out is that these smallpox virus all require CDK cyclic So if this We can use thinking this hypothesis to try to figure out what other viruses Can Sarsenia purporate be helpful? Prospective thinking rather than retrospective so another virus that has CDK activity is the HIV virus So we decided to test it and this is what we found So if you use Sarsenia purporate against HIV so we use a tincture A tincture is a decoction of the plant material using ethanol if we use just the driver This is the blue lines nothing happens at any concentration, but if you use incremental Doses of Sarsenia purporate decoction you can see a decrease in the viral load So we were able to predict that Sarsenia purporate was going to be effective against HIV Because we knew the evolutionary between those viruses So what's happening what happens is the HIV virus comes in and over with the production of that virus over and over and over and over and over What Sarsenia purporate is doing is it blocks the CDK And it allows Doses and it actually stops the viral replication This is super because it creates a new way of combating a way that doesn't require you to suppress the system so Super exciting news, you know, we know that Sarsenia works on CDK and we can kind of estimate mechanisms of action on different plants And we can use What can we do with this information? Well, we know that Sarsenia purporate is really good and inhibiting affected cells just papilloma cells And the same in vitro experiment you unaffected cells, you know papilloma makes you replicate faster reports and if you In fact with papilloma the cells apoptose if you use papilloma and Sarsenia The papilloma and Sarsenia the Sarsenia blocks the papilloma virus and the cells survive this is a type of oncovirus and Something funny about oncoviruses is that they come into the cell they use up the machinery They mutate the cell the virus leaves and that mutated so the machinery is left behind the cell And that's how this this can cause different tumors, you know or growth We wanted to see if Sarsenia purporate Gains virally Transformed cells so the virus is gone. It's Sarsenia purporate able to come in and help these cells Basically go into apoptosis and this is what we found out This is a little bit more confusing. This is the p3 dish when we start on day one Because by day six this are transformed cells and they're Basically the process of cancer and they don't fighting and they just keep growing and growing and growing incremental amounts of Sarsenia purporate and Against the the vehicle you can see we see a reduction and read the reproduction cycle of the cells Which is good Sarsenia purporate works on transformed cells So I have a couple of Close-up shots shots you can see this are the cells, you know, they they look nice and elongated if you put a little bit of Sarsenia, you can see I'm getting a little bit of toxicity if you put a lot of Sarsenia diapoptosis and die and At this is this is a very cool way of addressing this disease process Because Sarsenia purporate is going to affect Preferentially those cells that are transformed because they're reproducing faster. So it's a very surgical approach You can see how the cells They fall and they just die Now We get a lot of Crap, you know About in vitro experiments. Oh, this is in vitro. Can you transfer it to humans? well turns out that in vitro experiments are a really good primer for topical applications and it's so it just so happens that the papillomac causes cervical cancer and the cervix is It's a good way of testing this hypothesis. So we actually Decay studies where we used an application of Sarsenia purporate over the cervix So this these are people that were diagnosed with CIN1 or another you know type of abnormal growth of cells on the skin and The way that that it works is if you if you get an abnormal pap smear You know where they find up normal cells they they do the pap smear and then they make you wait at the time before you either get a Croposcopy or you you repeat the the the pap smear So in that way period we decided to try to use this Sarsenia purporate to see if we could reverse those cells and We did we were able to use those cases. So in the case of topical applications There is we can reproduce the results and Sarsenia purporate could be a very good way of fighting this type of disease Now we can we can talk about other types of Deceased processes for example Epstein DD case Cancer all of them So but more like Processes and we don't have the pharmacokinetics in There's papers About the number one concern for the world in 2050 In the hell is not going to be autism.  It's going to be Because we are using up our antibiotics we we have abused them and we etch my Release that the journal of evolution is bacterial Botanicals we were able to create bacterial resistance using botanicals and it's scary that with meant in the promotion of of plant Antibiotics or antimicrobials that we might not be using them judiciously so to make sure to not make the same mistakes and so we have to respect Just to This at all of the But money and and really at try to advance botanical medicine because answer is out there Just think about how many plants we know and how many plants we don't know and how we could harness There are mechanisms to fight infections If you are interested in botanical medicine a good Into starting a botanical medicine at your house with the help of Tiffany Turner and Billy Mitchell. We created an ebook called the top It's it encasers a an oops moment you can use this natural supplementation to get away from maybe using too many pharmaceuticals, but it's a Using some botanical medicine and and if you haven't please download my podcast that there is very health show And that concludes my presentation. Do you guys have any questions? Yeah Microphone if you have a question, could you could you go to the microphone and yes Okay, so if anybody wants the microphones live now if you want to come ask questions here. Yeah, Mo. Thank you. That was pretty wonderful Especially for someone who I'm only used to using Metronautism and drugs so Was curious you bring up this concept, and I don't know mechanistically. Thank you my back loves that I'm like sitting here in the back thinking do these plants have immune systems. Oh so my Langley actually did part you know, I I was looking to step out and and she did a Plant physiology and she was kind of like upset that she had ended up in this course and After the course was done. She just loves plants because they are so Imagine you know we think that we look at plants and they just sit there and and we think you know just a plant but A good analogy that I heard from Diana Rogers is that imagine if like there were aliens that are moving like closer to these To the speed of light and they're looking at us and we're like barely moving to them. So we're like really boring organisms It's the same way. You know plants have communicate Have immune systems and have all this you know adaptive responses just like we do All right, I think that's gonna be your presentation next year Just saying thank you. Dr. Abbott Thank you. That was fascinating at one point you mentioned. I think how you made an evolutionary connection between a certain plant and a certain virus and I completely missed that how you did that. I was wondering if you could say that again. Okay, so That's the intersection of like your traditional methods of medicine Silly the law the laws of similars, you know, like oh Thankfully with science we can test that and it turns out that maybe by chance, you know, someone did think that you know I'm not taking from along and then you know thousands of years of trial and error Then we But the way we we made that connection was because of that 1800s paper that were the mcmack Indians were using this plant Traditionally for this that's type of skin eruption. So we just decided to test it. Yeah, I see. Okay. Thank you. Thank you I'm Marty Hey Guillermo loved your talk. You had put together like 30 different medicinal plants that are helpful and which reminded me It is a Terrible thing that you're talking about so many of us are talking about about the problems with antibiotics and Bacterial problems that are on the horizon. What are like the three things we can do? With kind of a paleo or ancestral template that we can do to strengthen our bodies So that we don't fall prey to a lot of the problems that are coming up And I suspect some of those 30 items are you're like top three things we could do well you know Using an evolutionary approach to eating to take away, you know Things that we do other than breathing, you know, that's the most probably the most oxidative thing with it eating would be like number two and eating a less inflammatory diet to try to you know move your immune system doesn't have to concentrate on you know bad stuff and You know, let you know laying low and then concentrating like things and more important things like cancer It would be useful to eat a better diet just for immune system concerns, you know and then stationary tail, you know it just respecting the plants I Really shy People not going to a practitioner when they have an infection they just go into their local health food store and just buying Whatever combination of antimicrobial and then using it you wouldn't do that And it turns out that a lot of this antimicrobials have structures really similar to pharmaceutical antibiotics and That's a story that's developing and I have a couple of papers We're gonna publish in the very near future making a very clear Case for that. So just like we are scared of penicillin, you know, we should be scared of Antimicrobials and then thirdly, you know, a really cool thing that we found out, you know, that if you have a cough We found this double blind placebo controlled trial in humans Where instant coffee with honey was more effective at treating a cough than dexamethasone than steroids So how cool that you can use some coffee instead of using steroids for your cough, you know And something that's tasty and it you know, so it you know, just Investigating and and not being scared of of using I'm being very careful in having respect for them That reminded me and one of my big things have come up for me is recognizing the problems that flora-clinolones have Yes, and it's we're just more people are beginning to realize.  Well, would it be beneficial?  Whenever you purify it and you make it into a pharmacologic You call us and then we'll fund you. No one has any interest in working with plants and you can have you know There's many reasons, you know, a Little tagline that I like to say is that it's hard to patent the plant so I Has okay, so we do use botanicals. We do put evidence behind them But now we're going towards trying to isolate the active constituent And creating Pharmaceutical side of them because there is no money and unless we pass the hat around in crowds like this This stuff is not going to get funded It has its advantages because for example when you when you standardize it and you purify it It's going to be way more effective. This are organic materials that change from season to season So somehow so being able to do those things are important for consistency in treatment But at the same time once you purify something and you in you Get it to the least common denominator. Now. There is a chance of creating Of creating assistance because virus can create resistance like bacteria the advantage of using Botanicals is that if you use this strategy of using Evolutionary theory to try to figure out mechanisms of action now you can create synergistic blends with different botanicals that act on viral activity from different points and now you have less of a chance of creating Resistance for example, you can have a plant that is Directly antiviral and then you can have a plant like echinacea that it elevates your mechanisms of action that are acting in completely different ways But are truly synergistic if we investigate this mechanism of action and we find two plants that are act on the same mechanism of action Then we try to avoid combining them too because you're just repeating the same process and the chances of becoming resistance elevate so an easiest strategy without having to go into a lab and creating your own tinctures and in vitro experiments Just think about that fork where plants grew apart if you if you were making an antiviral tincture with something like Sarsenia don't put another Put someone from the asteraceae family someone from the Lamiae family because chances are that their adaptive mechanism is completely different than that of the first plant But yeah, it is it is great talk. So your focus was on Believely or whatever Induce up regulation of our phase one and phase two antioxidant enzymes and can promote better You know immune health and detoxification processes Have you some thoughts on that and just your lab look at that kind of interaction, you know, we are in nature Traditional methods so we do look at okay. What is good against killing staff? We ask a hundred or Test them and we figure out So we're not doing anything. But yeah, I do like for example milk Help with liver detoxification. It's So yeah, this phytochemicals have this almost like little toxic effect and if it can it can add add and add and if you break that camel's back You're gonna get into big trouble So if you if you have if you accidentally took too much Tylenol and you have liver toxicity Do not take milk thistle because it might just you completely So we yeah, but it is a positive stress Okay, well follow up with the last question. It's a comparative question. I'm a comparative scientist So it's gonna sound very odd to many people here probably but Can a carnivorous plant be wired to eat bouncing off of Rob Wolf's talk in the sense that do they have decision-making Processes about diet the insect component of their diet, you know, I had I've heard of things were like Oak trees, I think they create different Chemicals to you know scare away beetles and stuff like that So I can't imagine that these different plants have a preferred diet and they probably do create new Indulgenous substances to attract different different so it it's not completely unplausible It'd be interesting to create a plant that became obese or metabolically broken by giving it a hyper palatable diet And they can't say no to foods and then As an evolution as a model Principles that we're talking about here, and then I would tell that plant you need to stop eating gluten plant. Yes Everything a moderation. Yeah All right, thank you. Let's put our hands together for Guillermo You


Hi, my name is Monty Johnson. I teach philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, and this is the fifth of six lectures on Lucretius, this one about Epicurean cosmology and anthropology in De Rerum Natura Book 5, and I'm using the translation of Cyril Bailey, which is available in the public domain through the Internet Archive. Now, Book 5 comes after we've already established that there are an infinite number of atoms moving in an infinite void space, that these atoms combine to form larger structures, eventually structures large enough for us to perceive that some of these structures are living and have souls that those, some of those souls are capable of sensation, desire, and thought. In this book, we then get an account of the formation of, as it were, structures of human beings coming together and forming organizations like the family unit and cities and kingdoms, and we also get an account of large the largest scale structures in the cosmos, the sun, moon, stars, and so on. And so we are fully dealing with the macroscopic level of natural history, anthropology and cosmology, having passed from basic physics and the basic propositions of atomism, and then onto the psychological issues of the human soul and the senses, now on to anthropology and cosmology, which we build on the basis of the basic propositions and physical assumptions of the microscopic principles of nature that were inferred from macroscopic phenomena, but now we're explaining the macroscopic phenomena themselves and drawing out their ethical implications for our views about death, for our views about desire, for our views about relating to other people. And we get an account in the course of a life history of kind of decline where one step before the death with which the entire poem ends. And in this book Lucretius gives us reminders that he believes the entire world to be destructible and that it's in a process of erosion and decline. Now, more on the structure of this book specifically starts out with a poem or introduction that again is a praise and in fact deification of Epicurus. And then the rather extensive arguments, almost 1400 lines of arguments about the mortality and destruction of the world, the causes of astronomical and cosmological phenomenon, an account of the origin of life on Earth and the development of human civilization essentially down to the present time. And the finale describes the rapid progress in technology and in historical time and Lucretius expresses a somewhat ambivalent attitude about the value of that technological progress. Now, the problem, like earlier books begins with praising Epicurus and in fact calling him Godlike, essentially deifying him, describing the greatness of his accomplishment compared with all other human inventions, including agriculture and vina-culture. Survival is possible without these things. We don't have to grow food, we can hunt and gather it, we don't have to drink wine and so forth, but a good life is not possible without these things, nor is it possible without a tranquil mind and that is what Epicurus offers. And his deeds are compared with the mythic deeds of Heracles or Hercules, how much greater the accomplishments of Epicurus are, because he frees our mind and ridds us of horrible vices like greed and petulance, lust, luxury and laziness. He vanquishes these enemies, not with swords, but with his words. Now, an overview of the arguments begins with a review of what's already been established. Lucretius reviews how things have come to be and pass away, always in accordance with the basic principles of atomism described in the first two books, how the mind and soul is born along with and as part of the body, as shown in book three and all of its functions in book four, and how we are misled into thinking that the dead live on. He announces then what is still to come, that the world itself has at least metaphorically been born and so it's mortal and will die or be destroyed, the regions of land, sea and sky, how they became differentiated and will eventually collapse and become intermixed again, the size and courses of the sun, moon and stars, an account of the origin of life on earth, the development of human society, including speech, religious belief and technology. He declares throughout that no intelligent mind has created or directed any of this, doesn't direct the motions of the sun, moon and stars, nor creates the plants and animals on earth according to any divine plan. This realization removes a false conception of the gods and allows us to see them truly as the Epicureans do, as perfectly tranquil beings that are set apart from all of nature. And this allows us to see the true nature of things, not as designed or created by some super powerful intelligence, but in what way each thing has its power limited in its deep set boundary stone by nature. And he admits that it is strange to say that the whole world will be destroyed, including the sea, earth and the sky, but he can prove this by appeal both to plain facts of perception and to the arguments of pure reason gathered from the earlier books. All of these will show that all things can fall in with a hideous, rending crash. Now, he's also concerned to show that the world is not a living divine thing. So he argues against the view that earth and sun and sky, sea and stars and moon are of some kind of divine body and thus must abide forever. And such arguments seem to be aimed at the kind of view expressed in Plato's timeus where he argues that the cosmos is one gigantic living creature. This is a view that in a modified form was also adopted by the Stoics. Lucretius doesn't say who his arguments are aimed at, and they seem primarily aimed at the older anthropocentric anthropomorphic conception of the cosmos that we find in Plato. Now, it's already been shown that souls and minds can only grow and abide in very specific kinds of body, in fact, only in very specific parts of specific kinds of body. And when a body has been too badly damaged, no soul can possibly subsist in it. This is the cause of death. So it's absurd to think that the soul could exist in, quote, crumbling sods of earth or in the fire of the sun or in water or the high coasts of heaven. Since these things cannot possibly admit souls, they cannot be alive and so we cannot think that the world as a whole is alive. In general, the earth is not a suitable habitat for the gods. There's too much instability, corrosion and destruction in this region, which would upset their tranquil minds. Thus they must exist in the inter-mundial spaces, the voids that exist between worlds and offer no resistance or risk of penetration. Furthermore, the world is not a creation for the sake of human beings. It's not a living animal in its own right and it's not a set of tools designed for the sake of humans. And he gives many reasons for this to think that it's absurd that the gods created the world for our own sake or that they will go on and eternally keep maintaining it for our sake. After all, a god could drive no benefit, even amusement from creating a world for the sake of human beings, nor would it save humans from any evil had they not been created. One who's never been born has no way of being harmed or helped. So there is no apparent motive for this creation of the whole world. Also, there's no pattern for a god to model as a craftsman does in creating the world. Rather, the state of the world appears to be the result of infinite material bodies moving in the infinite void for an infinite amount of time, combining in every possible way so that, quote, it is no wonder if they have fallen also into such arrangements and have passed into such movements as those whereby the present sum of things is carried on ever and again replenished. Furthermore, the imperfections of the world show that it cannot have been created by a god for our sake.  Wild beasts and disease are far too common. Human children are born helpless compared to animals that are hostile to humans. And Lucretius asks, why do the seasons of the year bring maladies? Why does death stalk abroad before her time, referring to pestilences and plagues with which the whole poem ends? Furthermore, the world is not an eternally living thing or a device or design created for human use. Rather, it's just a composite structure like any other visible thing. And so, like any other visible thing and like any other composite structure, it is subject to destruction. Anything which has parts is destructible and must have been generated or constructed through a combination of those parts. And this world has parts. It has lands, continents, oceans, atmosphere made up of air, fire, etc. Therefore, it must be subject to destruction. The earth we see is clearly subject to erosion by the effects of wind and water on soil and river banks, for example. And the water we see all flows dissipates and evaporates. The fire that reaches us through raised the sun supplies light, but this light is dissipated and interrupted every night. Just as the light of torches can be extinguished, so the light from these stars and even our own sun must flow from a similar source that will eventually all be used up and extinguished. The image of mountains crumbling and stones being worn over time by wind or water and the collapse of stone buildings or monuments show the gradual erosion and destruction of the world. Even monuments created to commemorate everlasting human glories and events or images of divine gods erode and corrode. The air that surrounds the crumbling earth, he says, is likewise subject to change and thus to pollution and destruction. In fact, he says human existence is a fairly recent phenomena. The legends that we have of historical floods and conflagrations, if you believe them, also show that the world is destructible.  Furthermore, an independent argument, whatever is indestructible, must be solid and impenetrable, like the atoms, or be intangible, like the void, or have nothing outside of it into which it could be dispersed, like the whole universe. But the world isn't an atom, nor is it void, nor is it the whole universe. Thus, it must not be indestructible. Now, this should be compared with an argument in Book 3 in which a similar argument was applied to show the mortality of the soul. The soul is not an individual atom. The soul is not void, and the soul is not the universe. Thus, the soul must be mortal and subject to destruction. So the world is subject to destruction. He often says that the world is mortal, but that's a metaphorical way of speaking, since, as we just saw, he doesn't believe that the world is alive or a living creature. How then did the world come into being? If it wasn't born like a living creature, or designed by some intelligent craftsmen or God, or if the atoms didn't intelligently arrange themselves, how did this world we see come into being? Lucretius says it's by random collisions of an infinite number of atoms in an infinite void space over an infinite amount of time. All combinations must occur, and so the one that we see and that we live in and that we are must have occurred, and so it has. Initially, there was a great state of chaos. There was no solar system, no constellations, no separation of land, water, and sky, no plants, no animals. But, quote, only a fresh formed storm, a mass gathered together of first beginnings of every kind whose discord was waging war and confounding interspaces, paths, interlacing, weights, blows, meetings, and motions, because owing to their unlike forms and diverse shapes, all things were unable to remain in union, as they do now, and to give and receive harmonious motions. So an utterly chaotic beginning, followed by parts and particles being separated out and joining together, like to like, so that things get set apart from one another. Earth goes to earth, so you form lands and water to water, forming seas and air to air and fire to fire, forming the skies, and so on. Highly entangled and heavy bodies sink down and sink through lighter bodies, so earth sinks through water, and water sinks through air, and air sinks through the ether, and this is why we ultimately see a kind of layered effect and separation of these gross bodies like earth, water, air, and fire. The sun and moon are up there in a sort of intermediary state between the earth and the outermost stars, so the sun and moon must be heavier than those more ethereal bodies, but lighter than the earth itself and its atmosphere, hence they've sunken closer but remain outside. The heavier elements will always sink further down until they arrive at some kind of rest, while the lighter elements will rise up until they start gliding. Now some basic points about cosmology. First, how do the bodies in the sky move, and Lucretius gives multiple explanations. It's either because there is a zone between outer space and the earth. Now a few more basic points about cosmology. First, how do the bodies in the sky or in space move? Lucretius gives multiple possible explanations. It's either because there's a zone between outer space and the area around the earth in which air or fire is flowing, so as to push or pull these around, like a river does the scoops on a water wheel, or they're moved by some force like ether that is beyond them from our perspective, that's outside of them, or they simply move themselves of their own accord. So Lucretius following Epicurus's scientific method admits that he can't be certain about which of these causes is operative. Is it something farther than we can see, or is it something closer in that we can't see, or are they moving themselves? But he provides all of the possible options. That is, he focuses on what causes are possible and reasons that every possible cause will be realized somewhere in the universe in the fullness of time. Now notice that he only needs to show the possibility of a materialist explanation of these phenomena according to any of the causes in order to satisfy his purpose, liberating us from fear of the gods and death.  The earth may be assumed to be essentially at rest in the middle of the cosmos. He says in the sense that it's in a kind of organic equilibrium with our cosmic surroundings, meaning our atmosphere and outer space. But our cosmos, keep in mind, is but one of an infinite plurality of worlds. And there's no reason to assume that we're located in the middle of the universe, or even that we occupy any special place in it at all. Now, another thing that Lucretius tries to explain is the size of the sun, moon, and stars. They appear to be a certain size, but presumably they're a different size than they appear to be. So he says of the sun, nor can the sun's blazing wheel be much greater or less than it is seen to be by our senses. A very ambiguous statement. Does it seem to our senses to be smaller? Does it seem to our senses to be large? Well, he says it's exactly what it does seem to our senses. The closeness of the sun, he points out, is evident from the fact that we can feel its heat. And fires whose heat we can feel are about as large as they appear to our senses to be. And he says that the same is true of the moon, whether its illumination is caused by itself or by another luminous body. Its closeness is evident from the clarity of its outline and the details that we can see in it, even with the naked eye. And the same, he says, must be true of the fixed stars. We can estimate their size by analogy to how terrestrial lights affect our senses. So there is not, he claims, a big difference between the apparent size of these bodies and their actual size. Keep in mind that it's important for Epicureans to maintain that our senses do not deceive us since they are the basis for all other knowledge. So our senses can't be conveying to us that the sun or moon is a much different size than they actually are, or else we could be misled by that. Now, other astronomical phenomena are explained fairly briefly. Again, Lucretius admits that he can't offer a single explanation that's certain to be the exact explanation of all of these phenomena. The circuits of the sun and moon are given an explanation that's attributed to Democritus, that the outer parts of the circle move more swiftly than the inner parts. And so the sun, which is closer to the circle of the earth, moves more slowly than the other stars. And the moon, which is even closer, moves more slowly than the sun. Another possible explanation is briefly mentioned that there are steady currents of error that move these things like clouds, and they do so at differential rates. Night, he says, could be explained either by the extinction of the sun each night, or the same sun traveling under the earth, and dawn could be caused by the sun sending rays towards us, or that fires collect and restart a sun on fire with each new day. He doesn't take a position on which of those is true. Either of them will relieve us from the idea that a god is directing the course of the sun. Multiple explanations are also given for the varying periods of day and night throughout the year, the phases of the moon, and eclipses. The next topic is the natural history of life on earth. And this is a truly extraordinary part of the poem. He discusses the earth and its sort of infancy in the various stages of its growth into the current state of decline. He suggests that plants and trees first grew on earth and animals and human beings only later. Many of the living things were spontaneously generated from the earth and nourished by it, hence the popular idea of mother earth that's mentioned in earlier books.  Initially, deformed and defective creatures of every kind were generated. He mentions hermaphrodites, creatures without feet or hands or mouths, but nature forbade their increase. Nor could they reach the coveted bloom of age, nor find food, nor join in the work of Venus, by which he means they could not reproduce. Thus the many necessities for their survival and propagation as a species could not be secured, and so many of these ancient species went extinct. The only ones that survived are those that could either propagate and survive themselves or secure human protection because of their usefulness. The species that did survive had selective advantages, for example lions, courage, stag, swiftness, foxes, cunning and so forth, or they were useful to humans as oxenar as beasts of burden. Those to whom nature gave no advantages, he says, nature brought their kind to destruction. And so here we see a kind of principle of natural selection. Not a full theory of evolution because Lucretius never talks about one kind of animal mutating or changing or evolving into another kind, but the principle of survival of the fittest natural selection and extinction of unfit species is clearly present here and directly or indirectly had an influence on Darwin's theory. Now Lucretius also refutes the existence of other mythical animals like centaurs or giants. These things, he says, exceed the bounds of the laws of nature and so they never really existed. He can either account for the belief in such creatures by supposing that they had existed but then went extinct or just debunk their existence altogether. Now after the general account of life on earth, Lucretius then describes the development of human life, beginning with an account of primitive human beings. Now this Epicurean anthropology or anthropogony that is theory of the origin of human beings is set within the context of his wider zoogony or theory of the origin of animal life. And so the origin of human beings and animals is continuous and of course human beings are just another kind of animal, another natural being just like the animals. Lucretius describes there being other older kinds of humans, primitive humans who were hardier, who did not practice agriculture but hunted and gathered the abundant fruits that at that point the earth produced. They drank water from fresh sources, they had no fire or clothing or any customs or laws between them, they just slept on the open ground not fearing the darkness. They did have a greater fear of wild beasts but they did not in general suffer more or enjoy pleasure any less than do modern humans. So not knowing medicine they couldn't heal their wounds but they also didn't inflict wounds in mass casualty wars or shipwrecks like we do now. And yes they died more often of starvation but they didn't die of obesity like we do now. So despite our progress we haven't fundamentally improved our level of pleasure or happiness. Now eventually human society in more complex modes of interaction developed. The invention of huts, skins and fire was accompanied by the pairing off of women and men to form a home unit for the sake of mating. And with their offspring in this household the gradual softening of the human race begins. So it begins with exposure to fire which weakens and reduces their tolerance for cold. Now the use of fire he says could have just been discovered accidentally by the effects of forest fire causing caused by lightning or by the friction of falling trees scraping together and cooking was inspired by observing the softening effects of the sun's rays on fruits and so forth. So humans just kind of imitate these natural effects and take advantage of these natural effects that happen. It's not because they were given fire by a god like Prometheus they just accidentally or through their own resources took advantage of it. At this point neighbors started joining in friendship with other neighbors for the sake of avoiding violence or in order to gain protection for women and children in the household quote with cries and gestures they taught by broken words that it's right that all men have pity on the weak. Now they could not thereby obtain a kind of concord but they could maintain what he calls a kind of covenant or what we would now call a social contract. Otherwise there would be no way that the human race could have survived down to the present day. And humans were driven to develop language as a convention just as children are driven by their own speechlessness to gesture at things that they need or want. So it was because of necessity that we started developing these gestures and expressions in order to convey our needs. Language was not invented by a single intelligent person or a god who spread it to others. Rather the human invention of sounds expresses natural and primitive desires and fears and this is paralleled by other animals who also use sounds to express their fear or pain or pleasure as do dogs horses birds etc. Now the origin of monarchical or kingly power Lucretius says quote and day by day those who excelled in understanding and were strong in mind showed them more and more how to change their former life and livelihood for new habits and for fire. So kings or really powerful people founded cities and built citadels for their own protection and then divided cattle and lands to others on their on the basis of their beauty, strength and genius. So he gives an account of sort of the origin of distributive justice strong and exceptional individuals, founding cities, building citadels and thus acquiring more property which they distribute to other people on the basis of their virtues like beauty, strength and intelligence. But the invention of wealth which followed these kingly distributions and was accompanied by the introduction of gold led to a devaluation of virtues like strength and beauty in favor of riches. Riches always beat out strength or beauty. So at this point Lucretius digresses to offer a moral exhortation to a way of life that recognizes that it is quote great riches to a man to live thriftily with a calm mind for he can never lack a little. So he rails against greed, desire for more money, more wealth, more riches and ambition for power as being vain and empty pursuits that pointlessly cause misery. Now the origin of law, order and punishment in this primitive condition. The pursuit of power which Lucretius has just exhorted Memius against is blamed for the slaying of these kings and the overthrowing of these of this monarchical power and the slaying of the first kings resulted in a kind of anarchy because men are eager to trod under foot that which they have most feared quote and so things would pass to the utmost dregs of disorder when every man sought for himself the power and the headship. So you have a kind of return to a state of nature. Kings are not able to maintain order. It's anarchical chaos. Every person fighting with every other person to secure the means of safety and survival. Well, people then become exhausted of living in this violence and so become ready to submit of their own accord to laws which prevent it and thus there are established laws and magistrates in order to curb the wrath and vengeance in this state of nature and the establishment of regimes of punishment produced the fear of punishment to discourage and deter this violence and chaos and encourage instead a calm peaceful and just lifestyle and the fear of punishment is effective even to this day at securing this peace and calm and even at deterring hidden crimes. So even if you don't think you will be punished the regimes of punishment that hang over us plague our conscience with guilt and we never feel sure that we won't be uncovered that our crimes won't be uncovered and thus the fear of punishment keeps us in check. Now Lucretius gives an account of the history of religion that is also set within the context of this naturalistic account of the development of human civilization. So he effectively gives us a natural history of religion. He says that dreams of humanoids moving and speaking and performing marvelous feats of strength and power and being invulnerable to harm appeared to early humans and caused them to suppose that these super powerful and even immortal things actually exist and thus they imagined that these gods exist that resemble humans and lacking explanations for the origin and apparent order of the world including great things like the sun moon and stars and puzzling things like meteorological phenomena lightning and thunder early humans attributed these to those superpowered beings that appeared in their dreams. The problem is that such an explanation of meteorological and cosmological events then produces a new anxious care concern and fear about these super powerful beings and what they can do. The idea that thunder bolts storms and earthquakes might be inflicted by these superpowered beings as a kind of punishment is terrifying to humans and so they live in fear of the gods. Lucretius next gives an account of the development of metals and military technology. Metals again weren't given to us by a certain god like Hephaestius but were discovered accidentally after finding shiny objects molded into the forms of hollows in the ground after forest fires and it dawned on primitive people that they might melt the same metals into any other shape that they could mold them into so they created metal tools and they tried various combinations until the invention of different alloys like bronze and eventually bronze became even more valuable than gold because of its usefulness. Iron he says developed later than bronze. Bronze tools were used for agriculture and war and had tended to make the person who was equipped with bronze weapons and armor invulnerable but the spread of iron technology led to an equalization of this military power. He also has an interesting and somewhat puzzling discussion of the use of animals in warfare. Horses were used in war before the introduction of chariots he says. The Carthaginians introduced elephants into warfare but experiments with bulls, boars and lions using them in war were also introduced but they proved useless since they were just as likely to turn on the army that deployed them as they were to attack the enemies. Thus these kinds of things tended to destroy the people deploying them and so were abandoned and are no longer used in warfare. Now Lucretius expresses skepticism about these possibly legendary stories which he describes in incredibly graphic and gory detail very poetic but he insists that they must have happened somewhere in the universe if not here than in other inhabited worlds. Next Lucretius describes the development of some domestic technologies like clothing and farming and also the origin of music. So plated garments, preceded woven ones. Lucretius says that originally men who are naturally more skillful than women worked wool but then they handed over the working of wool to women once farming was discovered. Sewing and grafting were learned by observing effects of berries and acorns falling to the ground. This gave them the idea to implant shoots into the ground and little by little they experimented with making various kinds of plants grow and thus learned to cultivate the soil. Again they weren't instructed in how to do this by some god or goddess like Demeter instead they observed what was happening around them or accidentally happened on the powers of doing these things. Singing again wasn't learned from a god but by imitating birds. Wind instruments were invented by observing the wind whistling through hollow reeds. The sweet melodies that are produced by singing voices and musical instruments were enjoyed and encouraged people to dance and Lucretius argues that primitive music afforded just as much pleasure to primitive peoples as our sophisticated music does to the accomplished players of today. Showing again that despite improvements and increases in technology the fundamental conditions of life and our happiness and pleasure have not changed. Now in the finale Lucretius describes the steady progress of this technology but mixes it with an exhortation to the limitation of desires very much in line with Epicurean ethics. People he points out are generally content with what they have until something new comes along and then they tend to struggle with in order to get that new thing. So originally people were delighted with having acorns for food and having straw beds but now they despise these things and want harder to get things like very soft mattresses and cooked food. So for example when the use of wild beast pelts for clothing was discovered it was considered such a great discovery that men must have fought to the death for possession of these pelts but then wearing pelts fell into contempt and cloth garments were preferred and then cloths dyed purple or embroidered with gold were wanted and fought over all while a poor man's cloak or even wearing pelts would provide equivalent protection. So we're driven to great labors and pains in order to secure things and possess them consume them which are unnecessary for our pleasure and our livelihood and we're even drawn into wars and driven to seafaring for the sake of acquiring totally unnecessary possessions. And finally he describes how by observing the sun and moon and stars primitive peoples learned the order of the seasons and began to keep track of the passage of time and then to record events like the foundation of cities, the cultivation of fields, the sailing of ships, they wrote these into poetic histories. Written accounts however came shortly after these original oral poetic compositions but all of this culture is very recent. The arts of shipbuilding, agriculture, city building, laws, roads, clothing, etc all continues to progress but it remains an open question whether this progress is beneficial or harmful to the humans. And so Lucretius ends the book on a very ambivalent point.


Michael when you look at this game, I know jock mentioned just the second half Where did things start to turn and how are the jazz able to capitalize? Just playing hard in this Rebound and getting out You know smoking up on defense But yeah, they play hard on this rebounding has been a main point of emphasis on this road trip And what ways have you seen your senior guys not be able to kind of crash the boards and take advantage of it? Yeah, I think it helps even on defensively like We're not playing defense and clack stepping up. We're not helping him. So me personally I Didn't do anything today, especially rebounding. So We just got to help them out and help each other out and we got to rebound together That's been such a strength at least in the earlier stages of the season. I mean you have any idea I guess Why that's changed of late over the last whatever four or five six Just effort just effort Special minds just gotta go just go in there and get it matter how tired you are just gotta go get it teams defended you specifically differently than They had been earlier in the season or is it look at a maker miss lead to go in sometimes and don't go in? Yeah, no No, I feel like it was mr. Shots Just did everything bad today Mr.. Shots free throws not defending not rebounding It's a bad one, you know pretty much just out there and Just let my teammates down coaches down playing five on four out there basically why I'm out there So I just gotta be better and yeah, I won't let that happen again And in the third quarter think cam saying that they just Defensively started mixing up a little more. What did you see on that end? I made it for you tough for you guys to get shots while they were hitting threes Yeah, it's just changing cover just We're getting good looks you just got to make them, but yeah kind of Just keep saying personally, but definitely was affecting mr. Shots effect on what's doing on other Obviously you guys don't want to make excuses Jack was saying that you guys gave everything you had on this road trip So I guess now how do you guys try to regroup quickly with I think five games down the next eight days? Just got learn from me get ready get ready for next game. So, you know Yeah, get let this one go and learn from it, you know The more you soak on it horses gonna get so you just gotta let it go and learn what you got to learn from it You're ready for next one Yeah, I mean it played really good team defense Yeah, it's just they did good job. We just just gotta make them