Today May 40 here So it was under the weather last week and a little slow Coming back. I don't know about you, but when I get sick it's it's really a humbling experience and I was reading recently about how depression has its evolutionary benefit. So depression or just feeling introspective or sad It enables you to take time from acting and start thinking about the consequences of your deeds So there's certainly a time to act, but there's also a time to stop acting and so When you're sick, you can just pause pause your life and you can think about the efforts that you're making and And are they worth it? Right Well, I've been sick. I've been watching some videos on the history of internet blood sports and There's just so much Cringe on there, right? There's just so much nonsense in the history of internet Blood sports. I mean, I can't think of anyone who comes across really well I think mr. Madoka comes across pretty well I don't think mr. Madoka was at all damaged by internet blood sports, but everyone else I think was substantially damaged now Jf garapie was probably the least damage of the remainders, but I don't think most people would want jf garapie's life in remote Canada, you know on the on the margins of polite society and Then I don't think Richard Spence was ever humiliated in internet blood sports But ironically his success in internet blood sports fueled his megalomania and so it's really easy when you're doing something like this you get a little applause or a lot of applause and You immediately start having an exaggerated sense of your own wisdom your own capabilities your own talent and And your desire for attention obviously goes up so I've been waiting for several days To do a stream because I just frankly I didn't want any attention. I just wanted to lay low and so You need you need some desire for attention some some brashness some Some you know desire for for you know other people to admire you to do a live stream or you can tap into a desire to share some thoughts and to possibly be a benefit to some people But yeah, I've had a few days just thinking things through contemplating assessing and realizing how I've misjudged You know this or that just Abstaining from action and there's there's a verse in the Bible. I think it comes from the Psalms I think it's Psalms 46. It says be quiet and know that I am God and I've been on a kick last few years of Looking for secular equivalents to religious statements Because I don't know about you but I can become In your two religion like I can hear so much talk about God and salvation and love and And Torah that sometimes I hit need different language for it to become fresh and real to me So I started substituting And I got this from her okay the word reality for God and so instead of like stopping and knowing knowing that I am God as the psalm says how about stopping and accepting reality I Like that that that speaks to me. I need That that fresh approach. I just stop and accept reality and the reality is what I'm doing right now is like incredibly You know incredibly dangerous My well-being because it is so easy to have an exaggerated sense of your own wisdom and talents and abilities I have an exaggerated sense of the importance that That it the people should hear what you have to say there are so many pools to Reveal things in the ice-cream that you wouldn't reveal to people and face-to-face when you when you're getting visual cues There's so many Attractions to be far more impulsive and reckless and shocking and self-centred and self-absorbed When when you're doing up online Quiet and move to Australia Now I'm sure for many people the the idea of you know be quiet and know that I'm God. That's awesome, right? that just rocks their world and Then for other people they've had so much God talk that they're renewed to it So maybe be quiet and accept reality and then for other people Be quiet and just move to Australia or be quiet and get a new job or be quiet and get back to school or Be quiet and clean up your side of the street and make amends to people you've damaged So I've been reading a lot of books past year by Alan v Horwitz actress use and that dominates the mental health field So he makes the great point in his 2007 book the loss of sadness how psychiatry transformed normal sorrow into depressive disorder But there are plenty of times when the normal natural and healthy human reaction is to feel sad the negative events in your life Let's say you lose a job Let's say you're expecting income that did not come in Let's say you lose a relationship you someone close to you dies Your wife has an affair the normal natural healthy response to these kind of setbacks is to feel sad and to fulfill all the Diagnostic and statistical measures for major depressive disorder Right. He writes the psychiatric Diagnosis of major depression is based on the assumption that symptoms alone can indicate that there is a disorder This assumption allows normal responses to stress is to be mischaracterized as symptoms of disorder Right. So a lot of things that are diagnosed as psychiatric illnesses are actually Healthy and appropriate responses to setbacks in life Now you're probably wondering 40 you've been talking for about five minutes And you haven't played anything from decoding the gurus addition of Decoding the gurus for people who don't know this is where we take The gurus that we have recently decoded and we supplemented with a highly scientific Enterprise of putting them into our trademarked Gourmeters system scoring them according to Alchemical and scientific procedures and quantify their guru essence extracted into a single Number a numerical score of Gourosity if you will so if this is the first time that you've joined us for this exciting adventure get ready for Entirely subjective numbers to be thrown around for a whole bunch of categories that we consider Quint essential to our gurus Good evening Matt. Good evening Chris. It's late here, but I'm ready. I'm ready to cry Yeah, so this is my new favorite podcast by a couple of center left academics one guys from Northern Ireland and here's accent, but Anthropologists who lives in Japan and then the other guy is a professor of psychology at the University of Central Queensland and Part of my desire to get in touch with reality is Coming from looking at that the history of internet blood sports and just Just seeing how deleterious it was for virtually everyone but mr. Medica. I can't point to many Downsized but mr. Medica. I think he was chagrined by being doxxed. I Don't think he was very happy about that, but I was really impressed with how Medica in very fiery intense debate such as with Ethan Ralph last week still managed to keep his cool and Not say anything stupid The more you turn up the temperature like the more intensity in an interaction even if it's just an online Argument the more likely you are to say things that you will regret Just really impressed by how Medica doesn't doesn't say things that But he has reason to to regret But I noticed a lot of conversation in my corner of the internet about you know how I'm done with COVID I'm over COVID. I'm sick of COVID You're feelings about COVID All right, they don't have they don't change the nature of reality and so What's most important is not am I done with COVID but is COVID done with us now? It's possible that COVID And the coronavirus from here only mutates and evolves to be less deadly That's certainly possible, but whatever direction COVID takes our feelings about it. I'm going to shift it and So Michael Hiltzik is a left-wing columnist in the LA Times, but I often agree with him And he has a column here this week. These pundits and politicians say they're done with COVID But COVID's not done with us like you may be done with gravity gravity is not done with you You may be done with monogamy But when you stray outside of monogamy, there are certain consequences. You may be done with your job But unless you get another source of income, you'd be reckless to just quit it.  You may be fed up with your wife But staying in a relationship with your wife and continuing to work for a boss may well be the wisest Most realistic option for you no matter how how fed up you feel So we've got all these elite commentators and politicians declaring that the COVID is over But for millions of Americans, it is not nearly over sixty seven thousand Americans died of COVID last month and according to the To the academic research that I've seen the general academic consensus seems to be that for every reported case of a COVID death There are three point five as many unreported cases of COVID death so in all reality Probably at three million die unofficially and then we've got the hundreds of thousands who are possibly suffering from whatever is long COVID their health appears to be compromised myocarditis seems to be a common symptom and So many people their lives are going to be damaged for the rest of their life perhaps or for a while by by COVID So it's just jarring to hear all these commentators say it's over put the masks away Same time you have tens of thousands of people dying as a thousand people being out of work because they're sick or their kids are Sick and they're wondering how to pay the rent Right last month sixty seven thousand dead Americans. That's more than all the American deaths in the Vietnam War Right the daily average of new deaths this month alone 3,164 is more than the total number of deaths recorded in the 9-11 attacks I kept the grower duck get those numbers in there Give it a big spin and we're we're going to quantify two gurus Simultaneously, it's never been done. My it's never Afraid to tread new ground on this podcast. Yeah, we can handle it. It's it's a robust device It is it's Peter McCulloch and Robert Malone the recent guests of Joe Rogan who we Looked at and find to be pretty much anti-vaccine Misinformation specialists, but whatever your views on them may be there is one thing that we didn't emphasize on the original Episode that we we just wanted to cover Before we start the grometer because I think it bears highlighting and there was so much nonsense We were kind of Overloaded that I think it would be useful just to play one clip and and the highlight What they are actually Claiming occurred if you want to see that Johns Hopkins planning seminar called the spars pandemic in 2017 where they had a symposium people showed up. They wrote up their symposium findings. They published this it says it's gonna be a Coronavirus it's gonna be related to MERS and SARS.  It's laid out in the Johns Hopkins spars pandemic Training seminar. The only thing that got wrong was the year. They said it was gonna be 2025 instead. It landed a few years early But that wasn't the worst clip I heard from a colleague. That was a bad one but the point that I think that clip highlights it a bit better that like what they are alleging this I Actually, it's Peter McCulloch not rather alone these particular clips But they're highlighting that the whole thing was planned and in particular They want to highlight this training exercise that Johns Hopkins had kind of pandemic Planning preparation exercise and because they talked about a potential Coronavirus and kind of game plan how to respond to it that that shows that this is not a natural virus, right? This is a thing which the globalists are releasing Yeah, I think they're probably, you know a lot of great critiques of the conventional wisdom and the WHO and the CDC But they're not coming from doctors Malone and McCullough, right? These guys have been ridiculous in order to induce their vaccination campaign and Just to highlight that that's that's Alex Jones level Conspiracies, right? This is not people who are just saying oh, we need more safety data on Vaccines it's people claiming that the pandemic was planned that the vaccines are a social control mechanism And that they have these documents to show it and that's exactly what Alex Jones says and So when by by many measures, I was you know feeling in my life Over over the past two decades.  I'm feeling in my life. I haven't had kids. I'm feeling in my life I don't have any money. I'm feeling in my life. I'm not you know, building a lucrative and rewarding and Respectable career.  I'm not adequately preparing for Retirement thing I wanted to think about oh, there are these you know, various people that I've damaged and I haven't made amends So that no I didn't want to think about that instead I wanted to kind of twist that my view of life so that I could think about myself as you know a brave brave truth teller and I I had You know, I despise that the careerists I Despised the normies. I was smarter than the normies I could just you know, I could pierce through the confusion and the nonsense that constituted conventional wisdom and I was sharper and better than the normies and now at age 55. I'm becoming increasingly Respectful of the normies You know at age 55 I became more keenly aware of how much my ambition exceeds my talent Now I can't remember the last time that I wrote something that I was proud of and to do a live stream requires such Confidence and to do it well requires, you know, really strongly believing that what you're saying is important and true It requires a brashness and it's so much easier when you have this feeling of you know, how wonderful you are How smart you are and how you're gonna provide people with a better insights than the CBS evening news or the New York Times But you got to get into some feeling of you know, look at me admire me and Some I'll be exaggerated sense of your own qualities and attainments But then once you get into that exaggerated sense, you look like an idiot like many of the people who participated in Internet blood sports I just thinking about Meetings that I've had over the past two weeks where I just completely misread what happened Like how on earth did I get so out of touch? You know with reality like how did virtually everyone who participated in internet blood sports in a big way? How did they all get out of touch with reality? How did they end up all getting severely damaged by it? You know looking like fools Yeah, and and how much was I another internet blood sports bozo? Right, I'm increasingly seeing that that life from the normie perspective that There's a lot more wisdom there, but I didn't want to think About how I was failing through through normal assessments. I just wanted to think about I'm the hero, right? We all we all want to feel like we're the heroes of our own story. I'm re-listing to this excellent Course effective communication skills by Dalton key hoe lecture 10 Protecting the self in face-to-face talk Hi, and welcome to lecture 10 The potential to undermine our self and our self-worth exists Side by side with others positive acceptance of us in every moment. We talk in fact people have not given each other what they want The acceptance of each other's thoughts and acceptance as individuals so many times over the millennia of human existence That is a part of the cultural learning of every child there is passed on by observation and imitation a series of conscious defenses that they can use Right when you're failing when you're screwing up when you're blowing it when you're unnecessarily hurting other people When you're alienating people do you want to think about that? No, you want to reframe what's going on so that you're the hero Let's have a look at the chat Be quiet and fix your microphones says Elliot Blatt Glib medley says the last two years covered peak at the end of January I assume he means this year no matter what level of intrusion on Liberty's government's imposed. Well covered covered in government intrusions on Liberty so interesting most of my My conservative friends think that freedom is the ultimate value and to me freedom is just one value among many Sometimes freedom is number one value plenty of times freedom only number seven values What's more important is order? I've been reading the Oxford companion of Carl Schmitt and It calls him the the professor of order Right a scholar of order Carl Schmitt most people on the right.  I Thought okay, these people aren't nearly as as smart and and wise as they they initially sounded to me 40 was always a company man. The alt-right was but a mere fetish live medley. You are the king of the commentators You are sharp sharp sharp Yeah, I like excitement and you know when the the distant right was exciting I love to talk about the distant right when it became depressing I didn't want to talk about it anymore when the point industry was exciting I love to talk about it when the point industry became depressing I didn't want to talk about it anymore when something adventism is exciting I wanted to talk about something adventism, but when it became depressing and boring I didn't want to talk about it anymore. I Think I lack the zits flash the Yiddish word for just sticking down sitting down and working hard in in one direction I tend to get bored easily if I'm not getting the attention that I crave. I just move on to some other topic. I Am an intellectual jiggler, you know falling in love with every beautiful Idea that comes along but ultimately staying loyal to none Elliot Blatt says why can't we have a collegial conversation about COVID numbers? Why must the sanity emotives be questioned for everyone who holds a desperate opinion? I don't think that the sanity and motives are questioned for everyone who holds a desperate opinion But to have a collegial conversation about these numbers that needs to begin with Research right not just a bunch of tweets right people Lot of people base their their views of the world and their views on COVID and lockdown policies based on tweets or videos Right To have a collegial conversation. It needs to be based on something much more substantive such as the most important scientific papers That the most influential the most discussed Papers about the topic. I think that's that's where a conversation should begin Oh Am I means mass deaths? An inoculation likely of the healthy. Oh my is an arm injection through the air cowpox Cowpox to the healthy and end the unvaxed unhealthy 90% functional virus versus 50% normally As the science rushed on the cove it yes science is constantly adjusting sciences is in States of emergency such as covered is is often rushed Luckily, it's usually self-correcting Mr. Whitemail says Luke. You'll always be my hero Ralph booted from cozy TV by Nick Fuentes Wow Yeah Ralph has has seemed to have gone into Ethan Ralph seemed to have gone into a tailspin Freedom of your own bloodstream should be in the Constitution Maybe but your bloodstream affects other people as the capacity to affect other people So if you can transmit daily disease to other people to me That puts limits on your freedom. So there are limits on all freedoms. There are limits On what you can do with guns and what you can do with cars There always have to be limits because freedom is just one moral value amidst a constellation of value That's worth what Nick Fuentes says that order is above liberty Well, sometimes order is above liberty and sometimes liberty is more important than order generally speaking. Yeah, I believe that Order is more important than liberty Maybe So situational to protect their self-esteem when reality stinks So in this lecture, we will review the common types of defenses And how we use them to respond to a reality that may threaten our sense of self We're also going to review the clever ways we speak emotionally to get what we need indirectly While trying to avoid putting our self-esteem at risk Basically, we're gonna talk about how we converse about everyday topics While avoiding situations where our conversational face is not supported our self-esteem is diminished and We risk feeling the psychic pains of embarrassment shame or guilt Yeah, what do you do to get away from?   That's what I do my mind Automatically starts working in ways that I can see myself as superior to other people Like that's how I shore up my sense of self or if I can't figure out how I'm superior to other people my mind starts working to think about how How I'm superior to where I was, you know last month or last year or five years ago or ten years ago So if I can't think of ways that I'm better than other people my mind automatically starts thinking about oh Yeah, well at least I'm better than I used to be Now to do that we have to take a little step back at the turn of the century again You remember while me was inventing his cognitive model of the conscious self the eye and the me at the turn of the century It turns out Freud had already invented a tripartite model of the personality He called its constituent elements the id ego and super ego As locked in an iron cage at times. I mean we're all goaded by reality. We're all limited by by gravity So I think that we're all stuck in an iron cage together as a particularly useful metaphor for international relations But there I think my favorite dream like the dream that that consistently makes me happy But I think it's been years since I've had this dream is that I'm floating away on a hot-air balloon I think the last one I floated away all the way to New Zealand and So you know that dream of ultimate freedom, you know floating away in a hot-air balloon I'm sure that's that's a useful metaphor. So sometimes. Yeah, we're all locked in an iron cage together And there's no way out. I think that's often the most useful metaphor, but It's a really happy metaphor to think about.  Isn't it? I mean, it's been it was depressing for years and now it's just settled into be boring What's the column heading on the right? I can't see with your video over it? Okay, so Let's go caller Elliot black Blessings bro blessings. I just how about mega dittos. I wish I'd a long-time listener a first-time caller. I Know it's becoming it's becoming Sadly I missed the days when there was a variety of callers Yeah, I feel like I'm I'm just a placeholder for the old team, you know. Oh, yeah That's a good time those days. There's a good day Yeah, I mean and it's so sad because we're none of us are nearly as good on our own as we were Collectively like that's right like Godwood is fine But he's much better when he's got someone to bounce off of or to challenge him. Yeah, we're like we're like we're like Of uranium that needs to bet we need to bounce off each other and create a thermonuclear reaction like the old days We're like porcupines huddling together for warmth I can't I can't attract the old crowd like Dennis Dale doesn't accept my invites Godwood Casey doesn't accept my invites Kevin Michael Grace.  So how are you gonna feel when I stop accepting you in place, but I'm gonna soldier on luckily my primary sense of worth does not depend on The number of viewers that I get I mean it does feel great to get, you know, big viewership make money but No, I saw I think viewers begin viewers, right? Then you know the more you have then the more reactions the livelier the chat and then the attraction You know, there's the the chat becomes the attractions and those old days the track the chat itself was worth the price of admission, which is of course Yeah, no, it's a place to come and talk to interesting fun people Yeah But yeah, but you're you're commentary.  This is a little hangover from the old cocoa or My cocoa I mean COVID No, no, I think it deals with reality. Like how could I you know not not have some regrets or I went You feel bad when things aren't going your way and then when you things are going your way and you feel bad It's often a good idea to stop like Reduce the number of actions that you're taking You know step away from any franticness and and reflect and think okay I took XYZ actions and I got the following results. I don't like those results. Let me let me refocus my attention So can I give you my diagnosis? Yes. Hi. I thought I thought I Think you can't decide whether or not you want to be an entertainer or you want to be a serious journalist you want to walk you want You want a foot in both in sort of both both pies or both paths and one each one sort of countersiggles the other so If people can't roll with this sort of serious 40 playful 40 thing Each of those camps kind of falls away. It's only very few that can sort of roll with your Black and winter word schizophrenia. Yeah, that's good because I do like to get down in the muck No, and see the see the mud flying. Yeah, I do enjoy the blood spots on the other hand they they also repel me and disturb me and discuss me and fright me and Make me feel cringy well So here's I this is what I've sort of always sort of said this I've Chatted this I put it today's chat, but I think the blood sports attracted people that were either actively doing cocaine or formerly heavy cocaine users or at least cocaine users and Because it was a stand-in for that type of rush. There's a certain rush involved in these sort of Concentrations that don't really carry with them any risk of physical retribution That's good. Yeah, that makes sense so, I Don't know You've heard the term dry drunk. Yes. Yeah, so I think this The live-streaming community has a lot of dry drunks in it So, so who do you think came out of internet blood sports undamaged or even or even ahead of the game if anyone? Well, like you say, I mean medicore is really he is excellent I mean and he has very serious health problems himself and she learned and It's just amazing how his his voice though sounds so strong. Yes and clear and I wouldn't I'd never guessed that he had serious health problems, right? So, I Just got a message work. Sorry. So I was very sad to learn that So there was times when I thought medicare was a little bit too vicious and unfair and some of his criticism but his I did listen to that stream with him it was Ethan Ralph and medicare and how well composed he was and He was actually very kind to Ralph in a certain way. He was basically Playing a fatherly role For Ethan or is it Ralph for Ethan? He goes by both Okay, all right people calling both. So anyway, I thought he was incredibly mature and Actually, I think did Ralph a bit of good. I think Ralph May come away from that a little bit more introspective, which is what he desperately needs to do Yeah, I think medicare and And red bar. They're both They're both pretty well situated in reality Yeah red bar too. I want to you know, Coincidentally also has very serious health. Yes. I can't you can't but help But think if that's what it takes to get people to Become a lot more mature in their outlook Yeah, I think it's probably not a coincidence that people who struggle with with serious health problems It probably does have an effect of situating them more in reality. It makes it more difficult to live in delusion Yeah, so that is probably the saddest commentary, you know youth is wasted on the young when they say Now go ahead No, I lost the thought go ahead. Oh, so I was just thinking I can't think of any times or many times when Richard Spencer got humiliated on internet blood sports, but the humiliation came from the consequences of internet blood sports or the The the real when he tried to take internet blood sports into real life Yeah, he's I as a guy I could never figure out, you know, he has a certain chameleon quality um Because he is, you know, as you've noticed he's very intelligent. He's very well educated and he has a certain Playfulness that I think is I think is is an attractive quality, you know and He does sort of keep your attention, but he will sort of seemingly Turn your back on you At the second that you're not Don't support his current direction you know and uh nick fuentes In some senses it was became the most successful from internet blood sports He got over 50,000 live viewers for his election night stream Like he he built a larger audience than anyone else But I don't think many people would like the the real life consequences that he suffered No, that's for and incidentally, I don't know if you know this but Way back when this could be three years or more Ralph and fuentes Got in a ferocious fight on I think jf stream. I think jf was in the in between at all This was just right around the period where Jf left or ski So more or less on that day or the subsequent day right in that time period And they they were just trade barbs of the most vicious kind at one another and It was kind of ugly to sort of even listen in on And then I think they sort of made they sort of patch things up strategically just because of the optics of it all Um but it's just interesting uh that they both find themselves in this, uh, these These compromised positions But it also just serves you like You know had I been around, you know, had the internet had had lysing it around when I was in my 20s Who knows what mistakes I would have made, you know, I'm just lucky that it all came around when I was a lot older Yeah, and uh Halsey English he I don't know if he got damaged I'm not aware of any serious damage that he sustained from internet blood sports No, no, but he's you know, he's in our age brackets right Probably helps to be to be older and to be married and have kids And to have you know a job outside of IBS Yeah, yeah But you know that fact makes our streaming a lot less You know engaging and attractive to to younger people That's they're living when those emotions are very raw and they really want to express them and they get wrapped up in them So what do you say to yourself when you suffer the humiliation of failure? Like I start trying to reframe it so that you know, I think you've tried to think of ways that I'm superior to Other people or if that fails, I think of how I'm doing better now than in the past But what do you do when you suffer a failure in the humiliation? How do you? How do you deal? Oh So usually what I do is I clench my fists Really hard And then I start pacing and muttering and shouting expletives Yeah, and aside from that. I mean Do you are you like me? Do you go to well here? I try to think of angles by which I'm superior Yes, so I go down the list. It's sort of like the the kubo Ross the stage of grief Yeah, but I go through them in about, you know, 10 minutes Rather than multiple days, you know I first Looked for someone else to blame, you know, yeah Is there any way I could business on somebody else? And then then I finally realized that I can't be done Then I say, is there any way that I could mitigate my own stupidity? Can I make an excuse for my stupidity? Right? You know, I got through the line and then, you know, and then it just and then, you know It goes down the line and finally it's just complete contrition And then self-loathing So that's how I deal with it. There's no and then And this is why this is this is, you know Failures repeated failures the failures that kind of stack up over the years This is what ages people this is why people always have this this care war and looked about them because they've been Uh, they've been ruminating on all their failures for so many years.  You've taken responsibility.  Because yes, there's a certain Mindfulness a certain attentiveness that you have to situations that people pick up on And then they immediately feel safe around Versus someone like an Ethan Ralph who Won't take responsibility for his actions, right? They give off this sort of restless Um Unpredictable vibration that people nearly don't trust Yeah, so there is something you know, there is something to be gained from from actually owning up to your mistakes. It will Pay dividends in the long run, but it's Nobody wants to you know myself included. Nobody wants to drink the bitter medicine Yeah, we're not we're not trained to take. Well, we used to be but the the media, you know, the culture people were in Is so hedonistic, right? That's people I find this very true about like the blood sports community that It's the assumptions are all interwoven with hedonism, right? They're they're measures of success Aren't different from anybody else's they're all about You know money and and uh drugs and sex. They're all about these high intensity hedonistic experiences and there isn't this sort of uh Dimension and maturity in there at all. There's no No one has very few seem to have a you know a critical distance on that. They're sort of they're just living it And experiencing the uh repercussions in real time Yeah, it is not very impressive.  It seems like a lot of bridges still have been burned and they're not easily reconstructed Yeah, so what do you think about the idea that that depression or malaise or heavy introspection have Have an often an important advantageous and evolutionary adaptive role to play in that you You stop frantically acting and you think about the consequences of what you've done and what you're thinking of doing and you You play out in your mind the consequences of what you're thinking of doing And so it certainly seems to me that there's often a time to just pause and reflect and to stop acting and to To explore the benefits of being sad I agree a hundred percent.  So, um, but I think you know regret and depression they It sometimes it seems like the same thing, but I think they're two distinct phenomena and they can feed one another but um Well, there's there's a thing called major depressive disorder And so it has symptoms, but all the symptoms are healthy appropriate responses to loss Right, right, right um And then, you know, so then you have depression antidepressant medication and This kind of sort of hacks your body to override or not hear the signal associated with loss um It seems like that could like stifle somebody's maturation Oh, of course there's got to be a downside to everything. So, you know recognizing that there's some people get Get sick from I got to be careful here, but you know what I'm talking about you can take medicine That uh, let's say is beneficial 99.9 of the time that you might have a negative reaction or Some people are still alive because they didn't wear a seat belt So overall seat belt saved lives, but some people wearing a seat belt would have killed them and So that's the that's the random aspect of reality right, uh, but Okay, so depression of the lingering sort meaning, you know multiple months Yeah, probably not adaptive That I think That I think is sort of comes from the physical paralysis that being emotionally depressed Uh Leaves you with in the beginning So it's sort of like there's a lot of toxins in your body And all the chemicals around sadness just get soaked into your tissues and they just sort of recirculate and it becomes I think I think people are okay, you know, it's obvious this is my own completely untested Unpure-viewed opinion here But I think there's definitely a very strong physical dimension to depression and that You physically need to move uh to break up the stagnation that's sort of left in your body after a period of depression To really sort of break through and come through with the other side like Completely have it be gone with it Yeah, I'm sure there's something to that on the other hand What do you think would be an appropriate and healthy reaction to let's say you work up and discovered you'd lost a million dollars Your complete lifetime savings Gone you'd been you know ripped off in in some fashion, you know Or your money was gone. What would be an appropriate and healthy response? I think you would you would feel sad Let's say there's nothing you could do about it. So that's an excellent example because um I have a similar I mean obviously not dramatic but um Years ago. I made a big mistake on my taxes And it turned out that I underpaid my taxes by seven thousand dollars and I got this letter From the irs saying that I owed them seven thousand dollars And I really felt like a bullet had Entered my body you know and I I was like shaking and uh, I couldn't sleep And because this blew my this completely You know just wrecked my world and I thought oh my god Uh, you know my my entire apple card has been upset by in a real way and yeah It was physically traumatic. It was physically traumatic Yeah, so and that's that's a normal healthy reaction.  That's right. It was a big hit. It was a big hit. So um But if you were still moping about it nine months later, you know, that that is not an adaptive reaction No, that's right. But the It took me about a week to get over it until it would slight stop being like a My first thought in the morning. Yeah. Yeah, which seems normal. I think Most people in in your situation would have experienced something very similar Yeah, and it would be adaptive because you need that pain to You contemplate what you did So that you can learn the lesson. So going forward you minimize the chances of something like that happening again So I'll tell you another story. So, uh a few years back. I uh accidentally Left my car in a spot that was a temporary tow away zone And I came out And I discovered my car was gone.  I'm wondering when I finally read the signs of picture Figured out what had happened, right?  I started sweating Uh, because I'm like, you know, oh my god, I got another ticket.  I finally get to it and it's like somebody had put this like we was king's propaganda in my windshield it was just some you know local crusty juggler doing some You know leafleting But just the the visceral response is just seeing a piece of paper can create after You've had your car to uh I don't know. I guess you have to be there. No, no, I completely identify I had my car towed on on a friday afternoon. So it it slowed up You know getting home for for the Sabbath. It you know, I was out about three or four hundred dollars. It was a Giant waste of time. It was a trauma and I've experienced the same thing seeing you know a notice on my car like My first year in LA.  I I've experienced that you have a car and it dies There's going to be a feeling of loss if that's unexpected Oh, yeah, okay a car dying it well Well, immediately you think well, maybe it can be remedy So it's not quite as intense of it as like just disappearing from your site completely like not being where you expect it to be But yes having a car. Yeah, a major financial loss is is Certainly a source of pain no question about it or let's say you are about to propose to your girlfriend You've been in a happy healthy seemingly a relationship with her for a year and You just find out that she's been having sex with your best friend What would be a normal healthy reaction to that? I think that would be devastating and it would take you weeks to get over it Yeah, especially if his name was Luke forward. Yeah Yeah If 40 has been fingering your girl He's digitally interfered with your love life How did we get on this dismal topic? Well, the title of the stream is be quiet and accept reality and it's just variations on the theme of sometimes depressive symptoms are healthy and appropriate response to setbacks in life Right. Okay, but that is a good point right there without these depressing events You can't have real humor You can't have true Gallo's humor, you know um Because that's the best humor you know like um Good humor is born out of real pain, you know And if you don't feel that pain you can't really if you've numbed that pain with antidepressants You can't really have a belly laugh. You can't really understand a good joke What about uh bill bill cosby? What do you think is his legacy? I mean great comic Was he in the news again or No, I'm just thinking about the accusations against him. They seem pretty substantial. He he's apparently, you know drugged and raped hundreds of women On the downside, but on the upside he was like a a path breaker for african americans He was, you know a civil rights pioneer. He was um, he did some pretty good comedy But on the other hand he raped hundreds of women. So like how would you how would you assess? Well, they seem to have documented cases of 70 plus So, you know, you would assume there'd be three times as many Not coming forward. So, you know, how would you weigh it up? He did some good comedy and he raped hundreds of women And he was a civil rights pioneer and ground breaker The comedy would really have to be very good, in my opinion. Yeah, you'd have to have really good comedy to outweigh all that raping Yeah, just he wasn't really that If you offered you a jello shot, would you take it? That show though, I have to say I never really liked it But a lot of people really liked that show and it was on the What was it the 80s? Yeah, is he still america's dad? Or do you think he's lost that? Think so, but then again, I've heard stuff like these These allegations were False yeah, they were they were meet No, they seem so overwhelmingly strong and you hear it when you go back to his comedy He's like joking about spanish fly From the 1960s and going on tv joking about spanish fly and And in the in the cosby show He could have been any doctor, but he's an o b g y n who works in his basement Oh my god, I didn't remember that detail. That's amazing That's really close to that's that's insanity There's a terrific four-part showtime series we need to talk about bill cosby It's really good. It puts the whole career into perspective Yeah, he was um Remember the scooby-doo show The cartoon Yes, yes, yes, yes fat albert like how how do you assess like on the one hand fat albert on the other hand? He raped hundreds of women Ah, it's a tough one.   He promoted jazz music And he he promoted a new you know sexual ethic, you know on the other hand he was having sex with dogs Well, she had all that time to do something else because he was caring for the dog. I mean look at it You gotta weigh these things carefully. Oh and all the all the all the play All the playmates who got raped the bunny girls at his clubs.  I mean the the horrific Tall of of the the sexual, you know liberation movement that that he unleashed But in particular playboy enterprises is is incredible and the relationship between him and his daughter who for a long time Ran playboy enterprises. Let's just say it seems weird Uh, you know that was very funny because I don't know maybe 10 years ago, uh, terry gross interviewed Did you happen to catch that? No So npr terry gross, you know the The normies yes, she's a terrible interviewer. Yeah, yeah, but anyway, um so To use modern parlance. Why would he be platformed? On an outlet like that given that type of history this this wasn't known 10 years ago No, he's had an incredibly sanitized Media because in part because all the rooms of the playboy mansion You know, all of it's got videotaped and so he's got all these leading figures In the media industry in hollywood who he's got compromising You know video off interesting so this whole Epstein island blackmail scenario is very real at the high levels Like this is a yeah, so to really get in the top shelf you need to You need to protect yourself in this way Yeah, probably not a good idea to you know bang Bang inappropriate People at the playboy mansion Have you ever been to the playboy mansion? Oh, not in 20 years It's been at least 20 years No, never never I once you know, I like the the swimming pool You're in you've literally been there.  No, no Oh playboy was gonna hire me at one point but but then You know, they talked to some people in the in the porn industry. You gave a very negative perspective on my on my work That must have been a blow Nick Fuentes civil rights pioneer but hangs out with catboys, you know how to assess and how to assess that legacy Yeah, what do you think about the whole catboy thing do you think? Shall we say You think nicks into the old rough trade or what do you think? Well, I mean, I think it's fairly clear that nick is not bedeviled by his lust for women That he has successfully overcome Whatever lust for women he may have had Yeah, so do you think he's just so spiritual and pious that um No, I don't get any vibes of genuine religiosity or spirituality from nick I think like for for godward, too The christianity is a political pose that they get to you know, they get to advocate for a christian state As a as a euphemism for something that's the small racial Yeah I mean, do you ever get any genuine religious or spiritual vibe from nick fuentes? It seems to be like a rhetorical rhetorical pose I can see him as In the early days, I saw him as a actually I could see him as a devout catholic. I've seen I've known catholics with a similar sort of Uh presentation that nick has a certain Idealism So it wasn't another question to me. I can't uh I can't say that his No, I think his To me it was credible Okay, I mean the catboy stuff the catboy stuff is very eye-raising with the eyebrow raising Let's say but I could see him as being uh, you know a legitimate spiritual seeker and But yes politics does dominate his worldview for sure Right. I just don't notice any Personal sacrifice that he makes on behalf of his religion like a lot of things that he can't do what can't say Uh because of his religion because it doesn't appear that he you know experiences lust for women Well, you yourself interview point is Yes, let's we forget. I think you're uh, um, your primary takeaway from the experience. This was like The I think was the night after the night of the uh, jim goad, uh, extravagant night. Yeah Did that go all night? How many hours did that stream go? That went like seven hours Okay, did it go into like the wee hours? Yes. Yes. Like I started at about you know, seven or eight p.m And it went till about two or three a.m Yeah, but I think your your takeaway from the experience of interviewing nick was He's just a bright happy disposition or something like that. He may feel happy. Yes, and Isn't that one of the gifts of the spirit? Isn't that the gift?  So for example, my father was never taken by a scam my father was You know had a strong skeptical suspicious tenor and and I never saw him get get taken and He was he was a very religious man.   I want to be fair to him. He didn't ask me to give him one He offered me one. Well, that was kind of Yeah, I mean, I think that's a much higher higher madriga. That's a much higher level spiritual level to To offer a blowjob rather than to request one. It's just exactly. It's better to give into So, uh, would you be able to get on the phone your father and tell him what happened? I don't think I did. I think I was kind of embarrassed Oh another thing like I used to run marathons when I was age 12 and so The marathons would usually be two three four hours drive away And so I ride, you know with with some dudes, you know, I'd get in the car and my father would not let me stay at one guy's house overnight a guy who was a bachelor So So I remember that now I never heard anything negative about the guy. He eventually got married and you know later Upstanding life. So he never, you know, did anything wrong.  So your father had a very keen keen understanding. He was not. Yes. He was nobody's fool Like he was much more in reality than than I have been He was much less gullible than I have been So where did you where I felt where in the church? I mean, he was pretty high up in the church Is he not he was like a rock star. So in the something Adventist church the preachers of the rock stars And he was one of the premier preachers and he was also a theologian. He had two phd's So he had both scholarly and popular credentials Now, how is it organized? So is it's hierarchical So there's a general conference at the top and a general conference president and they make the decisions that are then Go to the worldwide church So, um, sorry like every country has a representative So if you enter something or well, yeah, there are there are divisions like there's the australian division, which is south asia australia new zealand North american division south american division But there's no clergy like the scholars. There's no formal hierarchy. There's a yeah, there is a formal hierarchy There's a general conference with a president akin to a pope at the top and that but these are elected positions, right? Within no, they're not well It's some election, but it's not a democracy the members of the church on aren't voting for you Okay and yeah, but So how are these people uh designated them? I don't know what's for a guy on this. I'm just curious. We don't have to talk Yeah, the the best book on this is seeking a sanctuary. So the terrific terrific book by two ex-adventors Or okay, so but so your father was sort of uh, like a billy gram type figure, uh within the 70s That'd be fair. Yes. Yes Yeah, okay, but uh, he alienated a lot of people Because he would say very provocative things So what was the key if if it's a painful zone don't you have to talk about but what was the key theological point where he Uh departed from which caused this schism schism. Yeah, so You know how cults make predictions about the end of the world And so the the millerite movement in the 1840s they predicted the end of the world in I think 1844 on on Yom Kippur 1844 and so That day came and went and the world didn't end. So this court had to reinterpret So there was this young woman who claimed that She got a vision and her vision just happened to coincide what the leaders of this cult movement had decided it really happened and so The cult movement then developed a whole theology saying that in 1844 Jesus did something in the heavenly sanctuary you move from the holy to the most holy place in the heavenly sanctuary to inaugurate the final work of judging the saints And so something Adventist church believed that something, you know Of divine cosmic significance happened on 1844 And that was the whole unique basis for the church and my father denied like that central doctrine of choseness Okay, so he descended from that view As a coat he said, whoa, this is a coat and for this he was ostracized or at least Yeah, yeah, he tried to he got two phd's and when people get that secular education, you know, they start trying to rationalize so religions become steadily more rational and as As the world loses mystery because when you rationalize everything the world loses mystery If fewer things are a mystery now than 50 years ago and a hundred years ago and 300 years ago and a thousand years ago So the world steadily lost mystery over the past thousand years And as the world steadily loses mystery it steadily loses religiosity And so my father was you know, rationalizing a religion But he was he was also taking away the mystery of it That makes sense now this woman that had the vision was this ellen white. Yes Okay, I told you my ellen white story, right? I'm not sure I used to work in the building. She she was from portland, Maine. She lived in portland, Maine And I lived in portland, Maine briefly and I worked at a health food store in portland, Maine inside the building that was once the school in which ellen white had her religious epiphany about You know, I don't know what the epiphany was but she really became a strong figure in the church after that She be so but I was in that I used to work in that very building Wow Did you feel a vibe? Well, the building was actually very beautiful in its own sort of austere way It was just a big brick square building, but it had this elegance about it.  I don't know. When was her vision? It was like 18 Oh, she had the whenever the church needed them So the church would reach a consensus on something and then she'd have a vision That would ratify, you know, the god in heaven as approved of this church decision Okay, and it's it's very funny that they needed a woman to have the vision So it just didn't seem like a bureaucratic decision that had to be divinely inspired She was the vessel through which yeah, she was the vessel. There aren't there aren't many, you know Western religions founded essentially by women. So it's one of the rare ones Yeah And it's very convenient that she'd have these visions, you know, just after the church orders decided something. Sorry go ahead Well, I grew you know, I grew up my early days were in new england and new england still had a lot of Uh, little small sex like shakers, you know, the shakers are yes Okay, so a lot of small products with sex and there would be uh, I think uh, there were other ones too, Seventh Day Adventist and then the, um Jehovah's Witnesses, you know, I never could keep all of these straight. There was Quaker. There were Quakers So all the different denominations were very hard for a kid to parse through Well, that's that's one of the the problems with religion is that religion looks absurd at best and and you know Downright satanic and evil at worst unless you are essentially raised in it Like from from an outside perspective religion at best seems silly Right, right Um But uh shakers, you know, they made uh this furniture They old school hand tools they would make furniture by hand and it's some of the most prized antiques you can find in America in original shaker Theology may have been suspect, but their furniture was not That's right. It was sound Because you know, they were doing all that shaking and had to withstand all of the shaking and gyrating that the parishioners Uh enjoyed during their sermon sessions Anyway, sorry for this digression So, uh, what do you think about this? I saw thread, uh, just came across Oh, okay. Someone we know I won't name him. Uh He is putting forth the idea that Colin Liddell is a massage operative Do you think this is true? Um, I'm skeptical I was skeptical as well, but given who it came from I was very surprised Uh, someone put out an idea like that. I just said, wow, this is some weird stuff. And this is somebody that, um Has a phd show it so I'm very surprised when People with advanced degrees like that could say things that are so dumb Anyway Okay, man speaking. Okay. Good to talk. All right. Good talk talk to there. All right. Blessings And blessings blessings And superego In his model the self is powered by the ins unconscious impulses and emotions The drive for immediate satisfaction and gratification got to get it done now Babies actually can't help themselves And society's efforts to suppress these impulses as the child is socialized the superego In the process of being socialized Society's values are internalized by the child A conscience and an ego ideal develop out of parental instruction Okay, this is Dalton keyho from the great courses effective communication skills Bruce says in the chat our appreciation for god has receded In conjunction with our inability to watch the sky at night And the chat suggests that nick wenters is simply saving himself for the right woman And spiritual says father Ford seems rather rigid rigidly principled and very erudite Yes, my father was a smarter man than me And yes quite erudite very skilled as well as a sense of the guilt and shame when parents punish behavior that doesn't live up to the values They are trying to instill This ideal self and the superego represents the larger Right a question from the chat Do the coa name the the Jewish priests know secret names of God which then can be used to control people and perform miracles? Well, according to wanting to legend. Yes, but I'm not sure that we have peer-reviewed, you know academic studies Validating this Urge your social order inside the child's mind As well as the proper behavior required by society to limit the impulses of the it Now how do these pressures get managed through the ego? Which operates on the reality principle the child thinks listen, I really want what I want right now But I found in the past that when I demanded it I got smacked So I'm going to be real here I'm not going to ask or I'll find a different way to ask And the social order of course is reinforced Now this sounds like mead's notion of role-taking and self-management and it is Remember his model also focused on the conscious part of the self However, unlike mead's kind of debating society approach between the I and the me Freud's self is portrayed as a kind of emotional pressure cooker Okay, uh Bell said something very nice in the chat. He says looks shows a special They are more rare KMG is the daily worker grinding away Bombing the outrage hand selecting the zany world madness. Maybe not even one zero hedge article discussed by ford. Yeah, I don't really promote a lot of rage porn And don't get a lot of my information from zero hedge Imagine chairman Enoch oiling up Striker and then disappearing into the barn for a few hours Look guys can oil each other up and disappear into a barn for a few hours and doesn't mean that anything gay is happening Like they might be just going in there to read the comp right Why can't uh Why can't the distant right youtubers Get together and do shows like what is it about us that makes it difficult Verging on the impossible for us to consistently work with others Like why did we all splinter up go our separate ways when me on my own god would on his own kevin on his own denis dale on his own Uh otto pole on his own All all us dissidents. We're not nearly as compelling entertaining provocative We're not we're not nearly as useful not nearly as funny Uh as when we were working Together when we're working up against each other when we're working On the same shows Kind of sad with lots of psychic energy at play in the struggle between the id and the superego Now we do get by in the world without always doing things the way the world wants us to We make unthinking decisions that get us what we want right away And sometimes we get caught When I was finishing up my doctorate You were late into the hours all the time And I was working late in my office at york university at that point york university was still Surrounded by open fields and lots of rural roads. I wanted to get home quickly It was four o'clock in the morning couldn't be a problem I come to a four-way stop in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night Now nobody's around So what do I do here? Do I just stop and do the formal? You know pause and then go ahead Nah, I'll just roll right through it And all of a sudden the whole world lights up turns out there's a cop sitting there in the dark I don't know doing his paperwork something like that and he suddenly becomes the superego of the society Catching me up when in fact, I thought I was getting away with something And looking at the chat bruce says when we witness a natural wonder reminds us of our finitude Or humans used to have the most grand of natural wonders stars anywhere and everywhere at night Don't get to see many stars in uh, los angeles because of the visual pollution And uh, spiritual momma says that uh ove Ove uh, flamed out what happened to ove what he imploded Uh, he's still around but shunned by a lot of people. Is he doing is he still doing shows with the base takes? remember that I've been playing a little bit of my father there Maybe I have some of my father's uh featurely impulses So the sociology of stress This is alan hall which shows how non-disordered people meaning normal people often become distressed in context such as chronic subordination So losing loss of status resources and attachments or the inability to receive valued goals So if you're losing at life, if you're losing status losing resources losing attachments not achieving your goals You're going to feel down. That's normal natural and healthy. It's not You know a major sickness evolutionary psychology indicates the distress rising in these context stems Of psychological mechanisms that are responding appropriately to stressful circumstances A diagnosis of a mental disorder By contrast says these mechanisms are not functioning as they are designed to function but the American psychiatric associations dsm diagnostic and statistical manual treats both the natural results of failing at life Or suffering loss in life and individual pathology as they're both equally mental disorders And so we've got all these social groups that benefit from the promotion and conflation of normal emotions with dysfunction You've heard about the military industrial complex where we've got a mental health industrial complex So we vastly overestimate the number of people who are mentally ill And we're not focusing social policy on those who actually need treatment Instead we continually enlarge the social space of pathology into the general culture is a little bit from Encoding the gurus I don't know my if I if I played this clip But this one was another really extreme one that I thought it would be good for people to hear So here you go. And we've had a giant loss of life a giant number millions and millions of unnecessary hospitalizations And it seemed to me and I said I've told Tucker Carlson and many others It seems to me early on there was an intentional Very comprehensive suppression of early treatment in order to promote fear suffering isolation hospitalization and death and it seemed to be Completely organized and intentional in order to create acceptance for and then promote mass vaccination So you believe this is a premeditated Thing that they were doing so they realized that in order to To get people enthusiastic About taking this vaccine The best way to do that was to not have a protocol for treatment It's not just my idea now It's completely laid out by the book by dr. Pam Popper the book recently published by peter braggen COVID-19 in the global predators. We are the prey. We are the prey Yes, and you did play that one and it came in at about two hours in Two hours and two minutes if people are keen to focus on it Yeah, so at the time when we were recording that we'd just listened to so much of this Nonsense frankly that So depression is a little bit like a mini lockdown Right when things go bad in your life or you suffer some setbacks or you lose an attachment you lose resources You don't achieve your goals The no more natural and healthy response is to lock yourself down a bit to abstain from going out and taking action in the world and instead pause reflect on whether your Actions are actually serving you because they haven't been serving you very well. So you need to stop acting. You need to stop Going out you need to stop, you know getting so short you need to stop trying to change the world and reflect on What could be a more useful approach so Sometimes depression sadness introspection staying home reflection is adaptive and normal and healthy and so to for communities when you've got a raging contagion maybe staying home Is like a healthy response? So looking at this Michael Hiltzik column in the Los Angeles Times It's jarring to hear elite commentators say it's over put the mask away The same time you have thousands of people dying being out of work because they're sick or their kids are sick wondering how they're going to pay the rent emergency room doctors Everyone who's checking out our groceries serving our food. They ought to be offended. They're not done with covid so this phrase Done with covid the smug unfeeling phrase writes Michael Hiltzik comes from Barry Weiss right wing pundit railed against covid restrictions on the bill mar show Some of it just slipped by us. In fact, you know, some of the leads like that. There was just so crazy So we didn't talk enough about it. But yeah, if you want to go back, it's about two hours in That's where the crazy really gets going. So just to be clear He's he's saying that the the pandemic was planned So Oswald Spengels says is the pharmaceutical industrial complex a separate entity from the mental health industrial complex? there are many ways in which it's part they're part of the same complex and they're There are ways in which it's separate because the pharmaceutical industry does not just specialize in depression, but Yeah, there's pharmaceutical industry. I'm sure it does some good and the mental health industry does some good But they also both do do a great deal of harm and they pathologize. What is normal natural and healthy? sadness Right when life doesn't go your way when you suffer loss is a normal and healthy response when you've got a raging influenza epidemic Social distancing and staying home is probably a healthy response that it was orchestrated one to that they deliberately suppressed life-saving Early treatments by which he means hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin which which would have saved people lives so Deliberately killing people and did all this to put the population of America, I suppose into a state of fear So that they would be forced to take these vaccines, which he thinks are dangerous and don't work Hello, and this this is my why This is a post script of the episode before we get to the grometer But just to point out that there's a guy online called the night preside Who's a doctor who produces content online about coveted and that kind of thing and he wrote a thread responding to the claims made recently on Joe Rogan, right and he he very much took a line of I disagree with them about the dangers of vaccines But they re is very important to issues and if you read it you come away With the impression that despite getting some things wrong These are important voices that we need to have and it's yeah I'm impressed by the very low quality and the discourse in support of Joe Rogan like michael shomer is like praising, you know, Joe Rogan's apology and Got all these pundits in the media saying that, you know, Joe Rogan is this important voice I'm sure Joe Rogan does some good work, but he's overall The quality of his show is moreronic the quality of his thinking is more on it He doesn't even realize that there was a moon landing in 1969. He thinks. Oh, maybe it was faked He has no ability to judge reality It's It's frequently a stupid show and and you will leave listening to it, you know, dumber than when you started listening to it Yeah, there are some good good shows on it overall The quality of the discourse is more on it on the Joe Rogan show It's good that Joe was Introducing this discussion to the public and what he didn't touch on was any of this right like that that this kind of thing or the promotion of HIV AIDS denialists or RFK junior anti-vaxxers like the creams made are sanitized into A version where it's reasonable disagreement and I want to Point out that this is a step which often happens and then people will respond and kind of say So you're against free dialogue and you're you're against, you know, you want to close down all debates and What I'm so saying that Joe Rogan frequently does moronic shows and that Joe Rogan That lacks even a normal ability to See what is real from what is fake is not advocating that he be censored or that episodes be Removed from from Spotify.  It's just a moronic show With some occasionally, you know at a fine moments, but overall not worth investing much time in so Barry Weiss she has really ridden the The zeitgeist. I mean she's become huge since quitting the New York Times and He knows how to put her finger on No attention-seeking commentary and on the Bill Marsh. Oh, she said I'm done with COVID. I'm done I went so hard on COVID. I sprayed the Pringles cans that I bought at the grocery store So this is typical people go from one crazy extreme. Like I didn't spray any cans or groceries All right, that's an extreme and ineffective way to deal with COVID like COVID is not Transmitted in large part by touch. It's aerosol. It's in the air You know spraying the Pringles can that you buy at the grocery store I stripped my clothes off because I thought COVID would be on my clothes. This is just crazy thinking I did it all Then we were told you get the vaccine and you get back to normal and we haven't got back to when When will we told that if if you take the vaccine that it's all over that there could never be any more complications? like You didn't get that from by and large from public health officials. They said get the vaccine that will Reduce the likelihood that you'll get hospitalized and it'll reduce the likelihood that you'll die from COVID and will probably reduce the transmission of COVID but Public health officials people who knew about the vaccines and knew about COVID But we're not telling us. Oh, everything is going to go back to normal once you take the vaccine the vaccines are one important part of dealing with the COVID epidemic at other times and places wearing a mask may be an important part of dealing with the epidemic even though everyone's vaccinated and Social distancing may still have a an important role to play at certain times and certain places So this this view that you know, I'm done with COVID. It's just like an emotional outburst that has no relationship to reality And then Barry Weiss on Bill Marsha, you know dry drags out this, you know Debunked statistics suggesting that suicides among teen girls spiked during the pandemic Layed to school closures. You hear a lot of this from the anti lockdown crowd that all these people are committing suicide. Well We have plenty of studies that indicate the suicides have fallen during school closures and lockdowns And then you hear a lot of stuff about how states that instituted strong mitigation measures hadn't done appreciably better than those that remained wide open well mitigation measures And not the only factor, right? There's a lot we don't know so you can have a state with strong mitigation methods and another state with Weak mitigation methods and they may have a similar rate of COVID death But that doesn't tell you what the rate of death would be in that state that had strong mitigation methods What it could have been without them But there's a lot we don't know yet If we look at excess death rates, then we would be looking at well over two million deaths from COVID so Without thinking that we should you know, just put a green light on the exit ramp from any pandemic restrictions is just ignoring reality We have to keep an eye on hospitalization rates and intensive care unit capacity new case rates positive test results Just because you don't like reality doesn't mean that you can just say oh, I'm done with reality Highlighting and what we highlighted on the episode is what these guys are alleging It's not within the realm of Reasonable debate and stuff. It's outright conspiracism. It's alex jones level stuff And if you want to treat it like that and discuss it fine If you're appropriately critical if you're actually arguing back But joe rogan is incapable of doing that So what he's doing is introducing to a huge audience people that are advocating very extreme positions but they're presented as Reliable cautious Figures who have very important information which is being so I don't believe the conventional wisdom or the the dominant wisdom Is always correct for example We've got a whole grief counseling industry and there's absolutely no evidence that grief counseling And forcing people to acknowledge their grief are effective In fact, the evidence shows that this tends to be if anything harmful So an alarmingly high number of grieving people get worse after receiving treatment And alan hallwitz notes this in his 2007 book the loss of sadness our psychiatry transformed normal sorrow Into depressive disorder So grief Shows, you know all the all the symptoms of major depressive disorder, but sometimes grief is normal natural and healthy Like why would you not be intensely sad if you lose all your money or you lose your loved ones or you lose your girlfriend? Or you don't get a promotion that you thought you're going to get if a love affair ends that Your spouse has been unfaithful that your marriage is ending that you haven't achieved your cherished goals, right? These are all reasons to be sad and to basically fulfill the DSM's own general definition of major mental depressive disorder Right the emotionally pained response to loss events such as marital romantic health or financial reversals Is normal natural and healthy Right marital dissolution is probably the most common trigger of intense normal sadness That can be severe enough to meet the DSM symptomatic criteria for depressive disorder All right the intense sadness that follows the loss of romantic attachments is a central literary theme The current research sports the intuition that severe losses of intimate attachments naturally lead to sadness That just marriage losing friends losing community losing status losing resources Or normal natural reasons to get surprised as for van apre said he either hasn't listened to the whole thing Or he did Or he's being just greatly irresponsible. Perhaps because he's angling for an appearance on Joe Rogan or something Who knows whatever. I put my flag in the ground that He or somebody like him, but I suspect him because Joe cited him recently positively as well He will be brought on and he will respond to some of the points that McCulloch and Malone Reused and he will be generally in favor of vaccines, but he will also say You know, but a lot of the points that they raised are important and need to be discussed And he'll he'll both sides it you do not need to both sides of shit, do you? No, it's just that it's going to be presented as you see Joe is Opening a debate and he's he's willing to have people that disagree but like van apre in his friends is just praising Joe So what Joe will do and again, let's see if I'm right or not is that He will have someone on who is willing to say that what you know, what he's saying is good. Yeah, so A lot of the people on the right had this moronic Let me stop calling people names. So On the right, there's a much greater belief in Self-efficacy that that people can freely make choices to reduce their odds of getting sick And obviously people can make choices to reduce their odds of getting sick the left tends to Take much more of a social perspective on health And accepts much more of the randomness of life that you can be born with with bad genetics And all the green vegetables and exercise aren't going to cure the the problem. So That placed myself in the middle. So yes We can make choices that can expand the quality and possibly The length of our lives, but how much Can we You know improve the quality and the length of our lives? It's it's not at all clear, you know We really don't know what definitively causes heart disease and cancer So it used to be prior to the past hundred years. Most people died from infections And now that we've got that under control People live longer and now they die from cancer and heart disease and we're never going to you know Win the war on cancer or heart disease people live longer that their body is going to fail So there's a terrific book by the same sociologist of medicine diagnosis therapy and evidence conundrums in modern american medicine so Pharmacy human history infectious diseases took their heaviest toll among infants and children But beginning in the late 19th century infectious diseases began to decline as the major causes of mortality So more young people reached adulthood and lived longer when you live longer Right, you get long duration illnesses and not many people are living longer You don't get that many people with long duration illnesses. Notably heart disease and cancer So people live longer. Obviously long duration illnesses heart disease and cancer are going to become more prominent In killing people more prominent elements in morbidity and mortality patterns So cancer and heart disease Diseases associated with advancing age the longer people live the greater risk you have are becoming ill or dying from heart disease or cancer So We have increasing prominence of long duration and chronic diseases It reflects that more and more of us are enjoying greater longevity in large part Thanks to what the global elites are doing, right? They have transformed our health system and our sewage systems And so we've been after double lifespans in the industrial world over the past 120 years now health used to mean simply the absence of illness But a dramatic perceptual transformation took place after world war two. So the world health organization promulgated in 1946 That health is a state of complete physical mental and social well-being not merely the absence of disease or infirmity And why would The medical profession seek this vastly Expanded definition of health, right because you get to expand your power and your money-making abilities Right. So the medical profession deals deals with the care and treatment of the sick but now The medical profession has taken on the added responsibility of making people healthy happy and socially well adjusted And yeah, it's not doing a particularly Good job with that because it's probably beyond as per view. He's an important figure And that is a pushback that he can you know cope with this.  All right. I love this book Alan Horwitz Diagnosis therapy and evidence conundrums in modern American medicine chapter four how science tries to explain deadly diseases Meaning heart disease and cancer. So chapter one is rhetoric and reality in modern American medicine And I gave you that earlier that health used to mean the absence being sick Now health means being happy and socially well adjusted and thriving So that way the medical profession has an expanded mandate and gets to make more money and have more power and prestige All professions do this all professions Right a limit who can get into the profession and expand the profession's ability to make money and to have influence and power Chapter two is medical rivalry and etiological speculation the case of the peptic ulcer So why don't people get ulcers anymore? So etiology is how does something come about Chapter three how theory makes bad practice the case of tonsillectomy So we knew by the 1930s that tonsillectomy is generally speaking weren't doing any good But we kept performing tens of thousands of them into the 1960s Because doctors got to make money from them just like all the uvorectomies taking out women's ovaries Hysterectomies that shortens women's lifespans leads to all sorts of negative results Tens of thousands of these are still performed even though in general they're a bad idea But they're a great moneymaker Chapter five is transforming stress into discreet disorders So when you're stressed feeling anxious is a normal natural response when you're running out of money feeling anxious Is a normal healthy response when You're losing your attachments losing your wife losing your friends losing your status losing your community losing your resources A normal natural healthy response is to respond with a feeling of anxiety and stress Chapter six depression creating consensus from diagnostic confusion All right, why did we get three times as many people since the 1980s with depression? Compared to prior to the 1980s Right, it's because we changed the definition of what's depression and it used to be that anxiety was the number one mental health disorder Why did it become depression has to do with the pharmaceutical industry? They they couldn't license drugs to treat anxiety But they could license these drugs to treat depression and then positions would rename depression anxiety Rename anxiety depression so they could feed people drugs And sometimes these drugs do good and sometimes they're a wash and sometimes they do harm I'm not, you know Instinctively need your opposed to pharmaceuticals injurious disinformation like this stuff just needs to be mocked and laughed at which is Which is what we do, but more people need to do it I am Then I decide and and always like him that are more definitely more reasonable than Malone definitely more reasonable than McCulloch But there's this kind of set that are the kind of the darlings of barry And elliott bladd asks what are the signs of well-functioning epistemics? So epistemics refers to how do you know what you know and the signs of a well-functioning epistemics? Is you're not getting humiliated, right? When your epistemics are in touch with reality You're much less likely to get humiliated joe rogan is being humiliated And he can laugh it off and he's just gonna stand up comedy routine and laugh it off But he's getting humiliated and he is getting ostracized because his epistemics are in bad shape He can't even tell that there was a moon landing in 1969 so How do you know when you're getting out of touch with reality? Yeah, how do you know when your epistemics are in bad shape? When you get humiliated on an ongoing basis Vice and others you'll find them often and you will also see them penning papers saying that a year ago that The pandemic is going to end in four months time or something like that And i'm not saying that nobody else has made predictions which have turned out wrong But what happens is like the mainstream and the institutional things get slammed by the heterodox figures for their Takes which turned out to be wrong right or their their kind of advice which should have changed quicker with the evidence or that but Okay, let's go to uh chapter four of this terrific book how science tries to explain deadly diseases like heart disease and cancer So in contemporary america cancer and heart disease are the two leading causes of mortality They arouse fear and anxiety and i notice many people talking about oh Why do we have so many people dying of cancer and heart diseases because of the food industry or this industry or? The truth is being hidden from people well When people live longer they die from these long lasting diseases All right there are all these perennial calls for wars to conquer heart disease and cancer which is never going to happen You've got all these groups you got physician scientists epidemiologists providing bewildering ever changing explanations or the causes of these two diseases Now i'm 55 right i know in my lifetime the explanations for the causes of these diseases Is just constantly changing by those with power in the medical and public health field Right and these ever changing explanations continually shape surgical and medical therapies as well as preventative interventions So hardly a day goes by without new behavioral and dietary advice that will presumably lower your risk of developing cancer and chronic heart disease But these claims about the etiology the basis of these diseases are not based on high empirical data or sound epidemiological analysis epidemiology is a study of you know where we get sick Instead these claims are based on broad social and intellectual currents that perceive disease as a result of changing social environmental conditions or inappropriate lifestyles So that cancer and heart disease are now the major causes of mortality is a recent development right wasn't this Wasn't this way in the 19th century So what accounts for the increasing importance of heart disease and cancer is the major causes of mortality in the last hundred years Well because the other things that used to kill people when they were much younger and no longer such a big problem These heterodox doctors who make extreme claims that turn out to be completely wrong They're brought on to take victory laps about how badly the institutions are getting things wrong and stuff and like It's kind of difficult because in a lot of respects they're more reasonable but I I was thinking about it in terms of like Weaves that i've seen in this pandemic and you have the first wave, which is you know the anti-vaxxers who are always anti-vaxxers the anti-weight foods the rfk jr Then you have this kind of second wave like the people that we are looking at maculloch and robert malone and bret Weinstein and and so on who are directly connected to the Anti-vaxxers right like they are recommending rfk jr. And they're they're going on marches together with them No, I but they they had that kind of appearance of separation Initially right there. They're not anti-vaxxers. They're just have some concerns And I think there's a kind of third wave which is which is not There are important distinctions because generally they are not saying that people don't get vaccinated But they're very much on the side of both sides to the point of arguing that people like malone and maculloch not pointing out that they're disinformation Uh, they're people spreading disinformation But rather that you know, they they just have different Opinions and like they they've got some things wrong that I disagree with but you know But the institutions have got things wrong too And it's a lot of their concerns are very legitimate that people have and it's a kind of enlightened centrism Which tries to argue that everything is a golden mean that there there's excesses amongst The heterodox brett Weinstein and so on they they may have took things too far But but didn't the cdc and the who so like both are equally at fault and like no it isn't equal One has been saying vaccines are good and helpful and that you know, the COVID is a Serious disease and the other has been implying that it's a conspiracy Okay so The checkered epidemiology of coronary heart disease mean that the people in medical and public health power have constantly given constantly changing explanations For what's causing coronary heart disease and you know what we need to do to change so at the beginning of the 20th century Chronic heart disease was uncommon But by the 1920s there was this you know big upward trend in coronary heart disease and it just continued unabated for 30 years beginning about 1950 age specific death rates for all major cardiovascular renal diseases began to fall why Between 1916 2005 age adjusted mortality rates for all heart diseases fell from 559 to 211 per 100,000 so more than half Decline virtually every age group shared in the decline the aging of the population was not a factor In the increase in mortality from heart disease The larger proportion of people within in age group within each age group perished from heart disease in 1950 than in 1900 So mortality began to decline in the 1960s between 1970 1993 mortality among men ages 45 to 64 dropped by more than 60 Women experienced a similar decline Right the decline in cardiovascular mortality had a significant effect upon life expectancy between 1962 and 1982 the death rate for more cardiovascular diseases dropped 36 By 1982 this translated into 500,000 fewer deaths and would have occurred based on 1963 rates So this improvement in cardiovascular mortality played this huge role in the increase in life expectancy But what explains the irregular trend of mortality from chronic heart disease in the 20th century? We don't know We don't know you get all these people who make a living pronouncing on heart disease All right who go on crusades about heart disease Now this is what causes heart disease. We don't know why chronic heart disease steadily Went up in the first half of the 20th century then steadily went down from 1962 to 1982 All right researchers used to believe that heart disease was just a degenerative disease related to aging And it could not be influenced by specific preventative measures But now you've got you know tens of thousands of people making a living From promoting various preventative measures with regard to heart disease, but there's no strong evidence that they work Right the commission on chronic illness created in 1950 to study chronic disease noted the causes of heart disease are known only in part And prevention of this disease is largely confined to the prevention of complications And that heart disease is not preventable at the present time Right, but by the 1960s the focus has shifted to the role of risk factors as crucial elements in the etiology the basis of cardiovascular disorders So It's uh, it's dietary fat. It's raising your serum cholesterol right So age blood pressure serum cholesterol. These are the key critical variables in the genesis of chronic heart disease, all right And uh, the study showed that weight smoking and physical activity played no role in heart disease Then you know more more doctors came along and there are more studies so In the 1959 major problem among the population was high cholesterol levels This is the problem and and these are supposed to be the result of a diet high in meat and dairy fat Margarine and hydrogenated shortening which produce supposedly clogged arteries So in the past carbs played a much More important role in the american diet So in most parts of the world 60 to 75 percent of food calories come from carbohydrates But in the american military barely 40 percent comes from their source And so the whole american population In the first 60 years of 20th century largely Replace carbohydrates with fat.  Obviously now that has been questioned So then we get studies saying that it's high blood pressure, obesity, cigarette smoking Family history of heart disease is the is crucial So all these various american public health associations, they're constantly coming out with contradictory claims about what causes chronic heart disease right, so The idea of identifying individuals at risk for chronic heart disease was becoming firmly established by the 1970s 70s but There's no unanimity on which risk factors should be used But they the medical profession thought oh, you know, this will be resolved But during the 1970s and 80s there's this rising crescendo of claims That high fat diets and obesity are causing heart disease and cancer so These new studies rejected the the older degenerative hypothesis And and they claim that chronic heart disease was the result of series of behaviors peculiar to the industrialized world so This gave meaning to us public health officials and doctors Because these people could now identify those who are presumably at greater risk of heart disease and and show them ways of decreasing that risk So the mystery and the randomness that are previously characterized explanations of chronic heart disease Now superseded by the claim that individuals are at increased risk for chronic heart disease if they ate High fat foods if they smoked if they were overweight if they were physically inactive Right when you when you can tell people what to do and say their lives. There's a lot of power and money and status You can gain So this new emphasis on behavioral risk factors mirrored a belief that each individual was responsible for his own health Right that you know, we can freely make choices so that we can live long and well As well as a faith that medical science Could illuminate, you know, what's causing all these awful diseases So you have all these medical professionals saying That it's the availability of rich and abundant foods alcohol smoking less physical activity and other good things associated with the modern industrialized world That's what's killing people with heart disease that The problems of disease arise mainly from the circumstances of living So here's a quote from a medical study rural communities with poor sanitation located in areas heavily infested by parasites mosquitoes and other disease agents and vectors Reflected with one pattern of health disease mortality Urban community is starting on the path of industrialization That affected by crowding inadequate food and poor sanitation have another pattern Modern metropolitan communities with advanced industrialization and good sanitation But low physical demand coupled with access to plenty of fatty foods have another kind of health disease mortality pattern So you have all these studies Emphasizing improvements in treatments and reductions in risk factors. You get clinical trials to identify risk factors You need all these observational studies You provide evidence supporting the causal association between risk factors and chronic heart disease The stronger the association The more convincing that that relationship between risk factors and heart disease was causal And second, you know exposure to these risk factors that that always precedes the onset of the disease And the association has to be dose dependent Fourth, the relationship has to be consistently demonstrated under diverse circumstances such as various populations And it had to be biologically plausible And the association had to be specific in that the risk was associated with a particular disease So that's what the task force of the american college of cardiology 1996 try to establish Then you get another task force that specifies interventions for specific risk factor categories such as cigarette smoking, LDL cholesterol, hypertension And then there are other categories that we're going to reduce your odds of getting heart disease such as reducing diabetes, increasing physical activity Then there are factors that might reduce chronic heart disease such as psychosocial factors, triglycerides alcohol consumption So the emphasis on risk factors as major elements Of chronic heart disease is not persuasive. So, you know, why do you chronic heart disease mortality rates Rise among young men in the 30s and 40s from the 1920s to the 1950s if the causative factor Right is responsible for for this chronic heart disease Then a latency period of perhaps 20 years must be subtracted from the time when the mortality curve began to rise But this was not the case The risk factors did not begin to be an important element until the late 20th century Whereas chronic heart disease mortality Has been dropping since 1960 Dietary changes came in after world war two. So we switched to more fat less cholesterol after world war two Then in the 1970s and 80s we switched to more carbs less fat Death rates for chronic heart disease in general have not followed our dietary changes It's really hard to know what diet makes what effect on health because you'd have to Follow people for years and years and years on the very particular circumstances to see what they actually eat But cigarette smoking that's supposed to be a major cause of chronic heart disease evidence is Quite low Americans have become more sedentary the latter part of the 20th century But heart disease Is we don't have strong evidence that it's no primarily caused by a lack of physical activity And not much evidence that it's cigarette smoking either Comparative data from other countries also fails to sustain the claim that risk factors such as high fat diets explain chronic heart disease So in southern europe heart disease rates are steadily declined While animal fat consumption rose during the 20th century because of increasing affluence So more animal fat consumption lower heart disease rates Then you've got scientists saying oh, it's the availability and consumption of fresh produce year-round that keeps people healthy Right you got to eat your greens Right scotland and finland right? They have high rates of chronic heart disease that citizens eat high fat diets But consume a few fresh vegetables and fruits But Mediterranean populations consume large amounts of fresh produce year-round Right, so we've got this big anti-fat movement, which has gained so much prominence in recent decades Or based on the notion that something bad Heart disease had to have had an evil cause and you got a heart attack because you did something wrong Which was eating too much of a bad thing rather than not having enough of a good thing Let's learn more about effective communication skills by don't key her like the little kid that I am Happens all the time, but this is a more obvious and dramatic example of what happens in smaller ways in conversation We do what we do We ignore or distort input and go with the flow As long as we don't get caught that is don't get put on the spot by somebody else. We think we're just fine In fact many philosophers analyzing the human condition argue that our ego can't actually handle too much reality We have to somehow defend ourselves against it Yeah, that's a very good insight So a lot of us have you know highly irrational beliefs and in great overestimation of very uniqueness and talent to you know Sustain our ego So epidemiology the study of disease has become a major academic discipline during the second half of the 20th century But many of its methods and explanations have serious problems Right many epidemiological studies rely on cohort analysis and observational studies So they investigate and monitor heart disease rates and lifestyle factors such as diet physical activity And then infer conclusions from the relationship between them So they identify risk factors such as high fat diets which presumably cause heart disease The problem is that risk factors are at best associations They do not necessarily explain changes in epidemiological patterns in time and space cohort analysis generates hypotheses But says nothing about causation Right unless you're taking genetics into account These studies are not so useful So associating Disease and behavior has become the whole basis of public health recommendations about what individuals should do to prevent disease But many of these observational studies are erroneous The claim that hormone replacement therapy or beta carotene consumption Protected against heart disease the fiber intake protected against colon cancer have all been discredited So there's this arrogance of preventative medicine Without any evidence from positive randomized trials without systematic reviews of randomized trials We cannot justify soliciting the well to accept any personal health interventions There are simply too many examples of the disastrous inadequacy of lesser evidence as a basis for individual interventions among the well This is from chapter four of this terrific book diagnosis therapy and evidence conundrums in modern american medicine so One sorts of epidemiological studies are severely limited by methodological inadequacies They fail to shed light on pathological mechanisms So 56 different cause-effect relationships in these studies had conflicting evidence Which the results of at least one epidemiological study were contradicted by the results of another About 40 more conflicting relationships would have been added if the review had included That is a disputed associations between individual sex hormones and individual birth defects So americans are besieged by behavioral advice that changes daily First they are told that margarine is better than butter and they learn that butter is better than margarine They are told that exercise is good for the heart But then they are told it increases the risk of sudden death They are told that vitamin e and beta carotene prevent cancer only to learn That uh, the both were no better and possibly worse than a placebo so All these changes in disease incidence and prevalence Frequently have little relationship to risk factors Now the emphasis on risk factors has been a major impact on medical practice so By the 1970s the asymptomatic treatment of high blood pressure high potential One of the risk factors identified with chronic heart disease has become standard medical practice But high cholesterol could not be treated So it was not regarded as a significant factor in chronic heart disease So the introduction of pharmaceuticals notably the statins in the 1980s to control cholesterol level right that led to dramatic changes in medical thinking and practice So cholesterol reduction fueled by the introduction of statins became an important goal of medicine Right you get statins the pharmaceutical industry gives us statins And then we get the creation of a new disease category elevated cholesterol. That's the threat But elevated cholesterol is a disorder of pure number and the number is largely a function of the Negatiating process between pharmaceutical companies and consensus medical committees that set numbers in an arbitrary manner frequently So whether elevated cholesterol Is is a disease in the conventional sense of the term or simply a number that has been reified meaning, you know made wholly by Pharmaceutical industry and you know medical committees is questionable Right the evidence that cholesterol reduction medications prevent heart disease is not at all clear Yet we have you know over 30 billion dollars a year in statin sales, but no evidence that they do good so We have a medical industry in a pharmaceutical industry that has a financial incentive to continually define pathology In terms of a numerical scale from normal to abnormal And we've got this faith in risk factor explanations. It's not validated by evidence The risk factor explanations have had a major impact on dietary and behavioral advice given Americans know over the last 70 years All right, it's supposed to be high saturated fat that caused heart disease So you had the american heart association the american medical association urging americans to reduce their intake of saturated fat Are eating less meat eggs butter and cheese But these all elevate cholesterol and they clog the arteries and they add weight Americans have been urged to see smoking There americans have uh heeded this advice So fat intake cigarette smoking hypertension cholesterol levels of all declined last quarter of the 20th century But there's no evidence and the incidence of heart disease has declined Defend ourselves against being overwhelmed by it actually Now I think this idea is captured in a very famous exchange At the dramatic high point of a courtroom drama called a few good men When a young altruistic defense attorney challenges a tough aging marine commander Allege to have given an order that led to one of his men's death Like our ideal self he shouts, I want the truth And like our ego defense system the older man shouts back you can't handle the truth And often we can't Not if it's going to evoke feelings of guilt or shame The emotional process is involved in protecting our ego will parallel our discussion of the inference ladder model of reality We reviewed in lecture six Remember it clarified how our thinking processes work when we're confronted When we talk back to our confronter we think we're responding from the here and now When actually our thinking is separated from the here and now by at least four steps of automatic cognitive processing So my my agenda here is not, you know, the medical profession is all crooked. I don't think it's any more crooked than any other profession The medical profession does some good And they also do some harm.  So we've got this astronomical rise in obesity and in diabetes So the emphasis on low fat diets has led to increased carbohydrate consumption increased obesity and increased diabetes So the percentage of calories from carbohydrates Between 1971 and 2000 has increased from 42 to 49 percent among men and from 45 to 52 percent among women Sandage of calories from total fat decreased from 37 to 33 percent among men among women 36 to 33 So We have increased consumption of food away from home as well as large consumption of salty snacks soft drinks pizza and increased portion sizes Now the relationship between high carbohydrate diets and heart disease and disease in general is complex The more carbohydrates are consumed The greater the need for insulin to send the glucose from carbohydrates to the cells If blood sugar is higher than normal resistance to insulin glucose develops Which is characteristic of persons with either insulin dependent Or non insulin dependent diabetes The other side of the equation is that excess insulin leads the liver to secrete trigrycelurides for storage in the fat tissue With all those risks the ensuing state of hyper amounts of diabetes Hyper insulin prevents the development of diabetes, but increases the risk of developing hyperelepidemia and hypertension Which then mostly heightens the risk of developing chronic heart disease So a low fat high carbohydrate diet Does not modify the basic defect in insulin resistant persons who are about one third of americans And accentuates all of the undesirable metabolic metaphestations Including chronic heart disease Now Recent years insulin resistance, hypertension, high triglycerides, low identity lipoprotein cholesterol levels have become known as metabolic syndrome You hear Conversation about this on Dennis Prager's show a lot Now there's considerable debate whether there is such a thing as metabolic syndrome whether it is a distinct entity Now Central obesity particularly in the upper body as contrasted with lower body obesity Is an important cause of insulin resistance Other factors include diet and sedentary lifestyle So insulin resistance appears to be a far more important variable than weight But the national institutes of health Promote the claim that high LDL cholesterol the result of high saturated fat a diets and cholesterol was the major cause of heart disease This is a position That is seconded by most prestigious medical organization, but there's no evidence for this Now such claims are not confirmed By studies So we've still got this widespread hold of risk factor hypothesis with regard to heart disease But we don't have a convincing fit of trends for any risk factor with heart disease We can't directly associate specific improvements in cardiovascular disease prevention and treatment with mortality decline So the influences of altered behaviors medical treatment and prevention are incomplete indirect and equivocal That we don't really know why people get and die from chronic heart disease Risk factor theory despite its popularity despite its widespread acceptance in the medical community Has very little basis So many of the dietary standards promulgated by the government and medical associations are not valid and frequently are harmful now There are other explanations for the rise of chronic heart disease after 1900 But why is it a common cause of death among men who have low risk characteristics? So maybe It is caused by fetal under nutrition That's one theory The search for the causes of western diseases such as chronic heart disease and cancer focus on the adult environment And they tend to ignore the childhood environment. Most environmental models have their origin In those epidemiological studies that deal with the effects of cigarette smoking So may well be the chronic heart disease will turn out to be the effect of Interuterine or early postnatal environment cognitive processing So we managed to get through many situations without being here and real even though we're telling ourselves We are here and we are being real Now to pull off this self deception We need to employ communication and thought patterns that protect our mind self ego From psychic pain These are the ego defenses Now what's interesting is that although Freud's version of the unconscious and its pressures on the ego Is really not very widely accepted today His concept of ego defenses and his list of defensive patterns are still used by many therapists and researchers When we are in trouble with reality reality always wins So we have to defend ourselves using one or more of these techniques on our everyday conversations In our everyday lives Let's start with denial We simply refuse to admit that a threat is relevant to us or assume somehow that it can be postponed How about avoidance Here we refuse to face a threat. We simply step out of the way of any situation that might force us to look at it So there are provocative theories that the large cause of chronic heart disease Is uh infection in childhood. So until the 1980 peptic ulcers were attributed to gastric acidity stress smoking alcohol and genetic predispositions Even though it's been they've been successfully treated since 1946 by anti biotics so The prevailing paradigm was that peptic ulcers were a non infectious disease But we have a successful empirical treatment From 1946 Treating it with antibiotics So perhaps research on chronic heart disease will follow a similar path So at present is possible to diagnose and manage chronic heart disease by bypass surgery angioplasty stents and drugs So their effectiveness remains controversial So these medical technologies seem to improve the quality of life Even they do not seem to extend life But the whole basis for what causes chronic heart disease Beans shrouded in mystery So we've had this dramatic decline since 1960 in heart disease mortality, but nobody seems to know why this happened Nobody knows. What are the underlying mechanisms responsible for coronary disease? Everyone is free to provide their own theory and opinion You can claim that it's because of fat or jogging or lack of exercise You can think it comes from having a competitive personality You might assert that more of this should become calmer and less combative But uh, we don't really know what causes heart disease and what reduces incidents of coronary mortality and like chronic heart disease cancer presents similar Enigmas, so 1900 cancer accounted for perhaps four percent of all deaths ranked six as a cause of mortality Then the proportion of deaths from cancer began a gradual rise By 1940 cancer was ranked second accounted for 11 percent of mortality Since uh 1993 there's been a modest decline in cancer mortality Then the disease the decrease accelerated between 2002 and 2004 So like heart disease mortality from cancer relates to age Increase in number of cancer deaths was in large part of reflection that people were living longer So we don't really know much about what causes cancer cancer Arouses profound fears and anxieties, but it's still a mystery You've got all sorts of competing theories about what causes cancer some people claim It's a contagious disease caused by germs some insist. It's inherited Some think it's related to the relies of industrial civilization other people say is caused by emotions and stress And so the seeming inability of doctors to treat most forms of cancer has led to a proliferation of therapies We don't have much evidence of their effectiveness So by the late 1960s a powerful lobby declared war on cancer Leading to the passage of the war on cancer act of 1971 Cancer has received more publicity than almost every other disease Long been a barometer of social difference and index of social roles and relations Vital indicator of inequalities Marker of fundamental differences among people and a vehicle for expressing anxieties about change and social status So cancer is being blamed on heredity microbes viruses irritation Occupation behavior diet environment psychological factors such as stress But we don't really know what causes cancer So it's easier to describe its pathology than its etiology So pathology is the progress of the disease etiology is trying to understand why you have the disease To look at it and force us to face weakness in ourselves We avoid anything that might cause us dis-ease In talk we avoid certain topics or we talk around them using indirection or euphemism How about rationalization one of the most common defense mechanisms? Making excuses explaining away threats to our sense of self We didn't live up to it. It wasn't me. It was them who made me do this When a manager is confronted by a colleague about hitting the wall outside her boss's office in anger Another defense will talk about momentarily She turns and says if you look at this part of the wall, it has lots of marks in front unit From bad conversations with that idiot very clever rationalization And phantom says Luke, how do you explain that in 1939 upper class new york males ate around 4100 calories a day and obesity rates were very low Back to the book Contrary to popular belief the genesis of cancer is a slow process decades past before the disease becomes symptomatic Progression of lung cancer is slow general a person has to smoke for three decades before a single cell becomes malignant Colon cancer the natural progression is also slow takes between 20 and 40 years Now unlike chronic heart disease cancer rates have not fluctured radically But overall cancer mortality rate is not necessarily an accurate barometer rates for specific cancers have changed dramatically over time And there's considerable variations in mortality based on sex ethnicity race class age and geography So such variations make it extraordinarily difficult to make definitive statements about the etiology The basis what causes cancer what All these cancers may turn out to be very different kinds of diseases Even though they are all subsumed under a single general category of cancer There between 1930 and 1965 age adjusted mortality rates from all cancer increased And then they started going down from the early 1990s The wide accounts for overall cancer mortality as well as changes in the rates for particular cancers. We don't know So there's general agreement that certain cancers have external causes. Lung cancer is related to smoking But the etiology the basis for most cancers Is a mystery So it used to have high rates of gastric cancer for world war two gastric cancer was the leading cause of cancer mortality in males By 1930 decline in mortality appeared that has persisted for the rest of the century 1960 had fallen to sixth place 1992 at ranked ninth Other industrialized nations experienced a comparable decline that what explains this dramatic decline? There's no evidence that new treatments played a role There's no change in survival rates after diagnosis So environmental factors such as diet get the most attention All right more fresh fruit and vegetables So despite the claim that diet is the primary reason for high rates of cancer Researchers have been able to quantify Effective diet with any degree of accuracy So this whole persistence of wide variations and changes in Cancer mortality rates and diets between countries render many etiological explanations a problem the decline in mortality preceded a dietary change So like the decline in mortality from chronic heart disease the decline in mortality From gastric cancer remains a puzzle Striking relationship between smoking and lung cancer Has fostered the emergence of an explanatory model that emphasizes environmental and behavioral Bases for most cancers yet the evidence to just demonstrate such linkages is hardly persuasive Especially all of the epidemiological studies that emphasize such factors as diet and lifestyle and cancer Suffer from the same defects or similar studies of the etiology of chronic heart disease The wall has got the problems and the boss has got the problems The next common form of defense is intellectualization Ideology this is rationalization for the better educated More education provides us the opportunity of creating more complex explanations There etiology etiology the cause the set of causes or manner of cause of a disease or condition etiology Complex explanations of our reality that will distance us from our own bad behavior So we say it's the nature of the world Of today's kids or it's the nature of men or of women or the economy Anything to cover up our inability to simply ask for or get what we want The better your education the more power to reason away the world's responses to you This reminds me of Woody Allen's ego defense in the movie Annie Hall when he says The other important joke for me Is one that usually is attributed to groucho marks, but I think appears only in Freud's wit and its relation to the unconscious and it goes like this I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member And you know, that's the key joke of my adult life in terms of my relationships with women Okay, so you get an academic named Richard Dahl He played a big role in publicizing and illuminating the risks of smoking And he extended the environmental interpretation of cancer causes in dramatic fashion So cancer he wrote in 1981 is largely a preventable disease More than two-thirds or perhaps more of all cancers would do to smoking and diet Well occupational hazards alcohol food additives sexual behavior pollution Industrial products and medical technology played minor roles So along with Richard Pito, he gathered comparative comparative data That revealed differential incidence rates for specific cancers in various countries And only diet and lifestyle they insisted could explain such differences Their studies were widely publicized Eventually made it into book form and were cited in countless journal articles and so We have this widespread belief that cancer is a largely preventable illness In 1996 the Harvard report on cancer prevention included a table listing the estimated percentage of total cancer deaths Attributable to established causes of cancer such as tobacco The tobacco counter for 30% along with diet and obesity for 30% of cancer mortality sedentary lifestyle occupation family history biological agents prenatal factors each countered for 5% The remainder were divided among reproductive factors alcohol socioeconomic status environmental pollution radiation prescription drugs medical procedures salt and other food additives Cancer was a preventable illness right So we need to reduce smoking and consumption of alcohol dietary modifications more vegetables fruit bread pasta cereals reduced consumption of red meat animal fat salt refined carbohydrates greater use of plant oils And there's considerable evidence that greater use of plant oils is not so good for you avoidance of obesity and adult life increased physical activity avoidance of exposure to radiation and environmental hazards And the world cancer research fund came to similar conclusions and argued for this preventative approach Now An epidemiologist at memorial Sloan catering in new york city express reservations He noted that the report echoed countless cohort case controlled and ecological studies that purport to show that cancer was caused by environmental factors But this dr. Colin Begg Epidemiologists emphasize that the emission of any consideration of genetic susceptibility Which could operate independently of environmental risk factors So this effort to link cancer to diet to carcinogens to behavior Which has been central to the public health campaign to prevent control disease It's been rooted largely in belief and hope rather than fact So that prevention of cancer in the latter half the 20th century remains an elusive goal has not diminished the popularity of the kill cancer industry Prevention supports values that place a premium on individual responsibility for one's own health and well-being This is what conservatives love Like individual responsibility. That's the that's the cure for cancer and heart disease The alternative to the etiology of cancer Is not clear and is not necessarily amenable to individual choice Is not an attractive explanation It's entirely plausible that cancer is closely related to aging genetic susceptibility and genetic mutations Which together impair the ability of the immune system to identify an attack malignant cells and thus permit them to multiply If there is at present no way to arrest the aging process, then cancer mortality is inevitable And many of the genetic mutations that eventually lead to cancer occur randomly and thus cannot be prevented But this conception of prevention of cancer remains popular But we don't have evidence for effective therapies One doctor wrote that after 35 years of intensive effort to focus on improving cancer treatment This must be judged a failure The best of modern medicine has much to offer to virtually every patient with cancer for palliation, but not necessarily for cure The problem is the lack of substantial improvement over what treatment could already accomplish decades ago We're not making progress in the war on cancer A national commitment to the prevention of cancer largely Replacing reliance on hopes for universal cures is now the way to go So in the past decade there have been some advances in treating many cancers that extend life That do not result in cures Now aside from behavioral modification to reduce cancer morbidity and mortality There's an increasing effort to urge individuals to take advantage of screening tests. We've got to screen early guys colon screening tests breast cancer screening tests So we've largely accepted medical claims that finding cancer in its early stages Saves lives listen to Katie Couric guys So virtually all women over the age of 40 have had a pap test to Detect cervical cancer 90% have had a mammogram 71% of males age of 50 or over have had a prostate test to detect prostate cancer So the goal of screening is to detect disease in its earliest stages when it is most treatable and presumably curable But for screening to be successful three requirements must be met First the disease must have a recognizable early stage Second there must be an accurate way to diagnose the disease and finally there must be a therapy that is effective when applied early rather than late But the evidence that overall cancer mortality has been reduced by screening is not persuasive relationships with women Now there is intellectualization in full flight notice how elegantly he doesn't say He's a loser when it comes to the opposite sex Another very common ego defense is displacement When reactions are redirected from a more threatening activity to a less threatening person or object You're really angry. You can't do anything to the person or the situation that made you angry So you displace the anger into some other object or situation You drive too fast. You whack your kid seems to help us release all of that tension At least we think it does How about projection Rather than accept negative emotions in ourselves. We attribute our anger and threatened feelings to other people So there's no clear evidence that current cancer treatments including radiation and hormone therapy extend life Prostate cancer screening has resulted in a substantial degree of over diagnosis of cancers that never would have been presented clinically And would not have affected morbidity or morbidity or mortality So many cancer treatments have serious side effects including impotence Incontinence and higher risk of death following surgery So since many prostate cancers grow so slowly that they are harmless the treatments themselves may pose far greater dangers than watchful waiting There is apparently way too much prostate screening resulting in too much treatment The medical industry is feeding off the cancer phobia I'm reading from a terrific book diagnosis therapy and evidence conundrums in modern american medicine So for men younger than age 75 the benefits of screening for prostate cancer are uncertain The balance of benefits and harms cannot be determined The study also recommends against screening prostate cancer in men age 75 or older since the harms outweigh the benefits So we've got a steroid drug in the early 1990s to treat enlargement of the cancer And a big trial was launched to determine if it prevented the disease Nope And then what about early screening for breast cancer? Doesn't really save lives either The evidence that mammography alone plays a significant role in preventing death is weak and indirect And what about the long-term effect of associated radiation hazards? So the promotion of mammography as a general public health measure is premature But mammography remains a controversial screening tool The claims for its efficacy seem to have been overstated So over diagnosis the company's increased screening and it Over diagnosis poses its own risks And mammography exposes individuals to radiation Which has many health problems So it's not at all clear that the benefits of all this early cancer screening the benefits of mammography outweigh the risk So cherished explanations for the etiology etiology and changing patterns of cancer and heart disease morbidity and mortality lack evidence Many etiological assertions tend to be based on opinion and hope rather than on clear evidence There's a striking difference between medicine's ability to manage diseases and its etiological claims etiological claims whose validity is yet to be determined can have a negative impact Because they lead to the articulation of proposals for behavioral changes in diet and lifestyles that may not be good So our knowledge about cancer heart disease and basic physiological processes However impressive is dwarfed by what remains unknown Back to decoding the gurus that the vaccines are harmful and that ivermectin is a miracle cure. It's not equal The well the thing that unites a lot of these characters is the Motivation to stake out some territory in that independent commentator space All of these people have an interest in being a public communicator Have having an online platform And it occurs to me that the incentives for someone in that position is very much to Pander I think to some degree to popular sentiments and to stake out a position that is recognizably different From the mainstream orthodoxy because if it's not then they don't really have any added value to add to the ecosystem So I can see the incentives and the siren called that inexorable pool towards Hot takery You know and it's not like you said the distinctions are important These people are not equivalent to malone and maculak But you know it is it's a slippery slope and the incentives just to pull people in in the wrong direction There's there's just no online cache to be made for moderation tepid takes the cdc who positions which despite them getting it wrong occasionally are the most correct positions So the issue that people take with that is they'll say well look cdc is political, you know, it says Five days Okay, let's go to chapter one in this terrific book rhetoric and reality in modern american medicine Most americans believe that their healthcare system is the best in the world number one That they do not recognize the extent to which many claims about the causes of disease therapeutic practices and even Diagnoses the shape by beliefs that are unscientific unproven and wrong This is not to condemn american medicine Which has its strengths but to point to rhetorical claims and practices that rest on shaky foundations The most of human history Death was associated with infectious diseases. They took their heaviest toll among infants and children But beginning in the late 19th century for reasons we don't fully understand Excess diseases began to decline as the major causes of mortality So the reduction in mortality among the young permitted more people to reach adulthood and to live longer So therefore long duration diseases such as heart disease and cancer Have become more and more prominent so The decline in mortality from infectious diseases largely preceded antibiotic drug therapy So if and infectious diseases could be say conquered by Antibiotic drugs as we were told by the health establishment Why could not long duration diseases be eliminated by new medical therapies? So americans have come to believe that the medical care system can play a crucial role in conquering disease and extending longevity, but it The importance of medical care for our health is Generally speaking for most people not significant So americans taken as an article of faith That a science based health system is the capacity to reduce morbidity and mortality and improve the quality of their lives They point with pride to a health esta