Hello. In this video, we will share our experience with serverless techniques and describe our next-generation digital library platform built on the AWS Cloud. My name is Bill Ingram. I'm Assistant Dean and Director of IT for University Libraries at Virginia Tech. I will be joined in this presentation by Yinlin Chin, Digital Library Architect. After a brief introduction, Yinlin will discuss the technical details of the new digital library platform. We will begin by describing the challenges and technical barriers of building digital library applications. Next, we will present an overview of the Virginia Tech digital library platform and the 12-factor methodology for building software as a service applications. We will describe the process of transitioning from a monolithic digital library architecture into a set of serverless microservices, and we will conclude with lessons learned in next steps. Online access to digital research and educational materials have become increasingly important, and the ongoing impact of COVID-19 has reinforced and accelerated the library's investments and digital resources. Before transitioning to the serverless architecture, the library maintained multiple repository and digital library applications. But the cost of maintaining multiple full-stack applications was becoming overwhelming. Each system has its particular quirks, and it's been difficult to find developers and systems administrators with deep knowledge of these niche systems. Our new system architecture alleviates many of these challenges. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Yen-Lin to describe the new digital library platform in detail. Thanks, Bill. So digital library performance contains a lot of services, and for each service, it's composed of microservice and management service. So in here, each service focus on one job and do one job well. And our website built on top of each service and to support different needs. So this is a very, very complicated code performance. So how do we build this? We use the 12-factor methodologies. 12-factor provides 12 best parties to enable us to build scalable, maintainable, call-based service. And this methodology being adopted by many companies, such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft. So we apply these best parties to implement our service. So it will require a huge amount of time. But actually, we don't need to build everything by ourselves because we use the code. So many things in here already provide by the code providers. So we use these services. We build on top of these services in order to make our service more scalable in the code. So in the library settings, we alter about five people. So we build our service on top of the AWS service, which is incremented by thousands of engineers. They create these ecosystems. And they do it very well. And they handle many of these we don't want to do. Like they set out all hardware, they handle all the securities, they handle all the networking infrastructures. We just use that. We don't need to build everything by ourselves. We build our service on top of these services. So we can provide a stronger call service as before if we build it local. Also, we follow this principle to build our server-based applications. So we automate every microservice and it's triggered by eBat automatically. Also, every single service have their single purpose and do it very well. And we only use the resources we need. Also, because we build on top of many services provided by the code providers. So we have a more powerful front-end, direct internet with backend service. So we can provide rich and powerful front-end and increase our user experience on top of this. Also, we use dog tools, monitor tools provided by the code providers, which can monitor our applications behavior to help us more understand our applications and then we can trigger all the issues and make our application more better. In the past, we use the three layers of the textures. So everything is in one state. You make a change, you need to deploy the whole entire applications. For the small site, it could be okay. But when our business becomes more complicated, this three-layer architecture is not enough for us to build our library service. So we transfer from the three-layer architecture into the server-based architecture. So after we transfer to the server-based architecture, we are not only provided one user interface, we provide multiple front-end, multiple user interface and also API interface. And under the user interface, there are a lot of microservices that communicate with back-end management service. And the user service do one job and do that job very well. So we can create a different combination of the service pipeline to serve a different kind of the business logic and to support multiple combinations of business needs. And then not only the service we use in the business logic, we can choose purpose-built database. So each database is good at one thing. For example, traditional relational database, we use this to do the transitional data. And we can use the key-value database or we can use document database. And we can also use electric search. So based on a different business need, we can pick and choose and combine different services, communicate with different microservices and provide the service we want to the user. So and then before a site might be just using one stack of software on the built-in. So now we only need to focus on to make our digital library profile stronger, can serve continue adding new features, new functionality into these profiles. And the total one body can support multiple sites and each site can have their own user base, own purpose and provide their service to the user. We still use our multiple development environment. So each site will have a dev site, a test site, and a production site. We still implement our code features and come into the code source control servers such as GitHub. And the difference is that after we commit our code, we let AWS to deploy our code for us. We no longer need to deploy the server, deploy the code by ourselves. We use AWS, we set up a pipeline so they can deploy this for us. Which servers are advertised? Also, in the past, a site at least needs three servers, three environment. So three sites, you need at least nine, 10 sites, you need 30 at least. And also sometimes one test server is not enough. You maybe need multiple test sites. Also, you maybe need multiple dev sites. We have this issue in the past. To handle like, if we want five test sites, five test sites, this is already 10. And handle three different websites. So these are all 20 different servers. So matriarchal servers, it's a lot of work because each site is just a server or either containers. You still have to handle networking, hardware, storage. They require a lot of time to handle that. It's complicated. After we switch to AWS, all the deployment is by AWS. We just tell, okay, we have new features. Give us a server to show our new features. And that's it. We no longer need to figure how to deploy them. How to figure out the details and how the name was saved. We just buy one click, automatically deploy. And then we can have unlimited test site, unlimited test site. And the entire process is fully automatic. So once our code comes into a source code servers like GitHub, you trigger by AWS and AWS create a server, build our code, test our code, deploy it, and verify. Finally, we simply create a link they provide and we can see our new features. Our test, we can test it and to decide if we want to merge into our productions. As of the time we need, take this for example, one build takes like 18 minutes. In the past, 18 minutes, not enough to create a server. So because we can have unlimited test sites, unlimited test sites. So right now we can do like this. So we can have one change, one single pull request can have one site. So this functionality we cannot do in the past using the single local server. So take this for example, we can have four pull requests and four test sites at the same time using AWS. So it's totally different compared to before. And the which increase our productivity of the software development very quickly. So in the past, we allocated a resource. So no matter how the traffic is heavy or is light, we always require a resource. And you can see the blue color in here just wait because we already got a fixed resource. But after we switch to the Microsoft, my subreddit editors, we can more control the resource we use. So we still, this is still a learning process because all the Microsoft it can be tuned and we need to do some tests, but we can more control and more confidence to control this resource we use in the cloud. And when we use more, more efficient under the source, we pay less. This is how local service, you pay less, you only pay your use. So as long as we can use the related resource we need, we pay less for our usage. Also, after we deploy our website into the AWS, the performance is increased because we utilize the H computing of AWS. So our sites not only like support in Virginia, everywhere around the global can have a similar response time of our website. Also, besides compare the performance of website, there are many things we cannot do in the past, but we can do it now on AWS. This is an example. In the past, we need to acquire local server or we'll create multiple server in the AWS in order to process a large amount of the image. After we deploy our code into a serverless intelligence, so in here we use the same code base, use the same programs. The difference is that we package our program into a microservice and trigger the backend AWS service. So AWS will create multiple batch jobs. Inside each batch job is a darker container to run one set of image. Once we set it up, we no longer need to consider how much server we need, we just let that to decide by AWS. We define how much does it need for each jobs and let AWS to handle all the service creation over the container or the state. We let AWS to do that for us. So in the past, we need to spend months to handle the image that I said we have. After we transfer into a serverless intelligence, we just finish in two days and then we can finish more collections and also in two days. Also in the past, once we have a server, we need to install the software, we need to install the libraries in order to deploy our code. But when we use AWS, this managed service is already there for us to use. What we need to do is to kill AWS, how to deploy our service in AWS. So just like we programming our microservice into a Lambda function, for example, we also program programming our entire infrastructure as a code. After we finish this template, deploy a huge set of code service just by one create of the buttons and we can have multiple environment like these contain many different kinds of AWS service and very quickly. Also, each service provided by AWS, they provide a monitor to us. So it helps us to understand our applications behavior, performance, issues, almost real-time. So we can continue to improve our applications and make our application even better and more easily. We don't need to build these one-to-two by ourselves, we just receive it. So this saves us a lot of time, so we can focus more on the create a new service, find more optimal way to make our application more better. Also, the cost model is totally different. In the past, we need to find budget and to estimate the server we need to use, but usually we just acquire more than we need. And also, after server is purchased, we need to human to install or config the server, handle the network, acquire the port, IP address, a lot of things. But now our consideration is, what service can we choose in order to support our business needs? How to create a server is not our concern. And our concern is how can we use these services more efficiently so we can pay less. And also, in the past, the service needs to be always raw, right? So even a service is idle, you still, the server is on, it's continue running as always. But compared to Culp, if the server is idle, then we don't need that server and then we don't want to pay anything and we don't need to pay anything because the server is idle. When there's new requests come in, the server just bring it up and handle the request. And all the parsing is automatically. So probably, so today, we have demonstrated many serverless architectures. We also published all these, all our works in the GitHub is open sourced. So feel free to check it out and see our digital library performance. So in here, I would like to turn it to Bios, so he will talk about conclusion and our future work. Thank you. Thanks, Yilan. To summarize, you could think of serverless services like Lego bricks. We snapped the bricks together to build digital library services. The developers are able to write less code and development time is much quicker. The applications they build are more resilient, secure and scalable and cost efficient than the traditional server-based environment. Another benefit of this technology is the AWS community, which is large and vibrant. There is an abundance of documentation and educational resources. We're looking ahead to building new features and enhancement to our digital library platform. We're exploring AI, machine learning and deep learning services, as well as text and data mining. Finally, we're looking for collaboration opportunities with teams from other institutions who are developing applications in the AWS ecosystem. We're happy to share code and ideas, so please do get in touch. Well, thank you for your time. Here's a link to our GitHub repositories where you can find all of our code. And thanks again.


On this episode of Skepticoke, a show about being right. Am I wrong? Are we going to split hairs here? Am I wrong? Am I wrong? No. Am I wrong? That's right. A show about being right. Explain to me since you're in that camp. How do they explain away the gain of function research? No idea. I hope that the audience listening to this has gained some value from what I have said, but I would be going into areas I just don't have a clue about if I even went there. Rationally, logically, how does that make any sense to you? I don't know. I just can't. Because two years ago, the whole no-virus thing at all didn't make sense to me, so I just don't know. That first clip was, of course, from The Big Lebowski, and the second was from this spirited dialogue I had with Richard Cox from the Deep State Consciousness podcast, all about the no-virus thing. Stick around. This is Classic Skeptico. No two ways about that. Welcome to Skeptico. Where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Acarrison. I guess I ought to own it. I like being right. So I'm just rolling, but I'm not sure quite how we should do this, so I'm kind of open to any suggestions you have. And I mean, I can... Yeah, whatever you think. I can start it. You can start it. Well, I suspect you are looking to understand how I've jumped the shark, so to speak, how I've come to a place which seems very irrational to you, right? And what would be good to come out of this, I suppose, is not, I think, you know, to decide whether viruses exist or not. It might be a little ambitious for the two of us sitting here, but to decide what a sensible way to ask these questions are and how we can come to see that differently and why this division arises. And other things like the role of then Psi Ops and that kind of thing and what do we do about that? That might be an interesting way to go then. Yeah, you know, I was actually talking to Rob from the Skeptico forum a few days ago when I was saying, you know, this turns out to be kind of to me, and it has been, like, it's made me rethink everything about Skeptico. It's made me rethink about all the interviews I've done over the years and all those factors of Psi Ops, because, you know, you have jumped the shark here.  We both interviewed this guy, Michael Wallach, who made this film, The Viral Delusion. To me, when I interviewed the guy, I was like, this no virus stuff is absurd. And my goal in the interview was just to show how absurd it is by using an extreme example of, like, okay, so then you guys think, like, rabies doesn't exist and dogs don't really start foaming at the mouth because they have this viral infection that's been known for hundreds of years. So I was going to the absurd, right, to kind of show how crazy this thing is. And as you know from that show, when I sent him the email, I was like stunned because he emails me back and goes, yeah, you know, I made up this fictional story about my dog who had rabies when I was a kid. And he goes, yeah, man, your dog didn't have rabies. Your dog must have worms because there's no such thing as rabies. Rabies isn't a disease. It isn't a viral disease. It doesn't. And I was just like, so I did the show just to kind of show how these guys have worked themselves into this crazy space. And then the really, the next level stuff is, is that potentially a PSYOP to kind of cover what's going on with COVID? But then lo and behold, you do the interview with Moala. Can you start saying the same thing? Maybe rabies doesn't exist. I mean, do you share, do you like say that to people in the real world outside of this echo chamber that we're in? Do you ever say that that, hey, I'm coming to think that maybe rabies isn't really. Oh, yes, I did a public showing of one of Michael's episodes of episode two of the viral delusion just a couple of nights ago. But see, I think it gets hidden in there, right? So you're willing to share with people that you think maybe rabies doesn't exist. Yes. And you're willing to share, like you're open about the fact that you're not sure that COVID is a viral disease. Yes.  No, not for this.  Well, out the window is strong. What I'm saying is it should be on the table. Like, I think the no virus camp. I've transitioned in my mind from hearing about it the first time and thinking, oh, OK, this is the lunatic fringe of the COVID era, like the, the no planes at the Pentagon or the no planes at the Twin Towers. They were holograms. That was the lunatic fringe of the 9-11 era and no virus. It's like no terrorist, no al-Qaeda. It's the extreme end of the conspiracy. So we will push that off to one side, ignore that and carry on with something more sensible. And I've transitioned from that point to thinking, oh, I've made a mistake here that they're not the lunatic fringe. They're actually re-looking at the whole paradigm of biology and asking the most logical, critical and penitent questions of anyone. So I think they should be firmly on the table. I'm not saying they're ultimately correct about everything. And I don't think even they say, or a lot of them wouldn't say, we can absolutely prove there is never a virus ever because that, I mean, that's an extremely high bar. And not being in biomedical sciences myself, I can imagine that I will get to my death and departure from this world without ever being able to firmly come down on the side of the line and saying, I know this for certain about this. But as regards an interesting proposition, the introduction of a valuable paradigm and something that may indeed well be true, yes, I think it's firmly on the table. They've crossed that line for me. Why take it very seriously. Okay. So, like, did you get COVID? Yeah. Okay. So what were the symptoms as described by everybody else? Textbook, Omicron symptoms.  Like textbook Omicron symptoms.  But my daughter got it, you know, when she was in college and she came home and then my wife got it and then a few days later I got it. And then my brother-in-law got it. We both had kind of classic symptoms exactly, you know, and the respiratory thing and, you know, that. And it went just right along with the schedule. Last a long time, worst flu I can remember having for a long, long time, maybe in my whole life. So, you know, now the people that you're in bed with now and you interviewed some of them on your show, they say, no, you didn't have the flu. Because there's... Non-virus, yes. What is now your understanding of what happened to you and what happened to me since it wasn't viral? Well, I don't know. And I think this is one of the maybe weaker points of the no-virus thesis, if you like. Yeah.  So there seems to be transmission going on. And I don't discount that what I had could have been a virus. It could have been the COVID virus. Okay? But I'm open to the possibility. No, no, you do. In a way I previously wasn't. No, I don't. You do discount it. You do discount it. Because you can't. See, this is like one of the things that I was hoping we could kind of talk about, because these are the logical fallacies. And that's why I say it relates back to the whole skeptical thing from the beginning and, you know, years ago. And we've known each other for a long time. And like the one thing I want to say at the beginning of this, anyone go back, I have a ton of respect for you and for your work and for your mastery of these topics. That's why I've had you on Skeptico. And that's why I've always spoken so highly of you because I just do. So that's what makes this particularly interesting to me. Because if you can jump the shark, if you can be influenced by the sci-fi nonsense, then it just puts it in a different category for me. And it just causes me to think about it differently. But the point I was going to make, and I kind of rambled on there, so maybe I slipped in some things you want to kind of address. But it's like this idea that I can be neutral, I can be agnostic, it doesn't hold scientifically. For you to maintain that maybe you did have the virus or maybe you didn't have the virus, is to deny all this tons of science that tells you exactly what happened to you and millions of other people and explains it in a way that is scientific. You're challenging that. You're just being kind of like, I'm just being open. But no, you're challenging all that. No, I'm not just like fence sitting in the sense of like, oh, could be this, could be that. I don't know. I really don't have any opinion. Maybe the earth is round. Maybe the earth is flat. Who knows? My transition has been from, if you'd asked me that question a year ago and I'd have got COVID the year before, let's just say, I would have firmly said, oh, yeah, I had a virus, of course. And I would have described my childhood experiences of measles being virus. And I just wouldn't have entered my head to question that. What shifted for me, it's not completely, I don't completely deny that possibility, but this whole or the paradigm has arisen. Well, maybe there's a completely different way of looking at what's going on there. And I think there's a solid underpinning to that as well. I think there's a lot of reasons you can put forward that point to serious substantial holes in the viral hypothesis. There are serious substantial holes in virology. But back to what you're saying, you're obligated to explain what happened to you, what happened to me, what happened to all these folks, common symptoms, write down the list. You need an alternative theory for how that could possibly be because it's your direct experience and my direct experience. Yeah, but I don't, I mean, look, you might get someone on here who, from the no virus camp, who can put forward a more solid argument. My case is, I don't think the power of the hypothesis on what's going on with things like COVID is massively overwhelmingly strong. It wouldn't have convinced me. Okay. So you could say, well, maybe it's a detoxification. Okay. I got it in January. I do tend to drink more in December. So maybe my body is detoxifying. I don't know. It doesn't sound any more compelling to me than it was a virus as a theory. Okay. Or just to point to another week's point spot, chicken pox parties. Okay. So parents have this anecdotal experience that if you take your kids around to a house or a chicken pox, they will also catch chicken pox. Now you need to explain that. And I asked my recent guest, Daniel Thompson Mills, who had really researched Tom Cowan's work. And Tom Cowan's notion on this is, well, maybe it's resonance, right? That if a child is going through a detoxification process, or the children come into resonance, the way women come into resonance with their menstrual cycles. And maybe that's true. To me, that sounds as speculative, if not more than it's a virus that's doing it. So I just don't think there's a good accounting for that in the, in the no virus paradigm as to how these things, how people seem to pick these things up in groups.  And it seems like it's a virus. So sometimes you can account for how people seem to have viruses when they don't, when there's this group contagion effect. But in other, in other cases, I don't think it's always strong. I don't think the no virus paradigm is a complete explanation of why disease and dysfunction arise in the human body. But equally, I think the viral paradigm has substantially bigger holes in places, different places. And that's what I mean about jumping the shark, right? So seven years ago, I think it's seven years ago at this point. I did the show on Skeptico, you remember this. The title is, UN says African-American women 20 times more likely for HIV AIDS.  And it was an interview with this guy, Dr. Henry Bauer from Virginia Tech. And he was onto exactly what you're talking about is that our understanding of viruses is very, very incomplete. And it's led us into some rather wacky, politically driven, sci-op-y driven conclusions, one of which was this connection between HIV and AIDS. So what this guy did is phenomenal. And actually he's just, in this book, he was reporting on the work of other people who had pointed this out. But they were using information collected by the United States military because when you join the military, they test, do you have HIV, do you have AIDS? And they found this anomaly that completely crushes the idea of this direct connection between HIV and AIDS. And that is that African-American women were 20 times more likely So he was pointing to what you're pointing to is that we have a very incomplete understanding of how viruses, how germs, if you will, work and this work that our body does to keep all this stuff stable and healthy and all that stuff. But the jump, the shark moment is the Michael Wallach moment. It's the, no, there's no viruses.  And like he says stuff like they've never isolated the virus. And I said, well, here's seven scientists who say they've isolated the virus. Here's a guy in Saskatchewan, Canada, a doctor who used to work with camels in Saudi Arabia for viruses that cross from animals to people. And he goes, well, I don't believe it. And he needs to tell the CDC, oh, just all this nonsense. It's the classic kind of flat earthy science where the standard then becomes you have to convince me. If you don't convince me to my satisfaction, then it isn't true. When just common sense would tell you that Richard, you had COVID, I had COVID, my wife had COVID, my daughter had COVID, my brother-in-law, my father-in-law died of COVID. Now, I don't usually throw that out there because I don't know if he really died of COVID, but he was in a nursing home in Alabama and he got sick and tested him and it came up COVID and he died. I don't make too big of a deal out of that as a kind of a lead with, oh my God, somebody close to me died because they said he was going to die a year or two ago and it took a good strong flu to kind of put him over. I'm not trying to be insensitive, but that's the facts of it. You understand that to anyone who's listening to this just kind of rationally, they'd say, gee, Richard, you got to offer some way for how that could explain. It's not detoxification. That doesn't fit with, you know, your body was detoxing and my body was detoxing and all these people, you know, that we could trace the number and the spread of it and the whole thing and everyone's detoxing or some other kind of environmental stuff. You understand that that just completely doesn't make any sense. I don't think it's pivotal. Okay, and I can understand why you might disagree with that, but what I think the no virus idea is is a competing paradigm and I don't think paradigms necessarily explain all the facts. I think if you look at it in a CUNY and Thomas CUNY sense, I've moved in my mind from the place of virology being the dominant paradigm to now the arising of a competing paradigm, both of which have explanations for some facts. So if I can monologue for a minute, maybe, on how I got here with the HIV thing. So I obviously, going years back to when you did it on skeptical and before, was aware that there was this idea that HIV didn't cause AIDS or wasn't directly connected or there was something a bit funny there and that seemed as the years went by to have more and more validity in. You don't see the mass die-offs that were predicted in the 80s, but I didn't pay too much attention to this until the COVID era were all forced to look at viruses. And I went back and forth reading the work of Peter Dusberg, the microbiologist who is probably the most prominent figure along with Carrie Mullis, the inventor of the PCR test on denying that connection between HIV and AIDS. So it seems to me to be the case, it seems to me that people in the 80s were destroying their immune systems by a heavy drug lifestyle and then the drug AZT came along and it seems undeniable at the doses it was being handed out at. This is Anthony Fauci's drug. It was killing people who had positive HIV tests and there was deaths of being logged as AIDS. So that would be something of a problem for virologists. But okay, maybe it's a one-off. Maybe that was one mistake and they were right above the others. But then when I looked at polio, you have this inert virus that lives in human beings for thousands of years doing nothing and then at exactly the moment people start spraying lead arsenate everywhere, polio mutates and becomes a virus that paralyzes people. And that continues in the first world, but not the third world when they're not spraying these things until lead arsenate and DDT are banned at which point polio falls off a cliff and then a vaccine comes in, which takes the credit for that. But at the same time, DDT is being sprayed in the third world now and polio shoots through the roof and you see it being renamed and re-labeled. And then the third point for me would be the vaccination program. I don't think you can divorce this from questions of whether virus or questions of the credibility as a science that if you were to ask any virologist, how did the vaccination program contribute to the decline of these diseases? I'm going to say the vast, vast majority of them will think it's massive, will think they were the primary factors into the decline. Whereas what we actually see is a death rate from whooping carp and measles and so on was down 98, 99% before the introduction of vaccinations. So increasingly then, virology looks like a shaky science and all these points and at some point you think, well, if something has got that many holes in it, maybe it's not just the odd mistake here and there. Maybe there's something fundamentally wrong with the paradigm that at least in the case of AIDS and polio myelitis, we're not looking at a virus. There's something else. And a virologist can be wrong about that. Why not measles? Why not smallpox? And why not COVID? And that brings me to then the idea that a lot of the COVID deaths, which I was convinced was viral induced, were iatrogenic, were medically induced during the early part of 2020 and onwards and there. And that was the big shock of me because I'm not sure that I can't put a number to it. It's very hard to get a number to it. It wasn't 100%. It was less than that. But it seems like through things like the inappropriate use of ventilators, end-of-life pathways, which Britain is famous for running to excess in drugs like Madazzlan, it seems like a lot of people were killed by their doctors during the second quarter of 2020 and when those death spikes are occurring. So when you add all this up, virology has so many holes in that maybe it's a sinking ship. Maybe there's something wrong with the very fundamentals and that what we're looking at, what scientists are looking at when they're staring down the electron microscopes and identifying particles and the virus people and the no virus people both agree on what is being seen. They're pointing to the same things, but they have a fundamentally different interpretation of what those things are, that they're either an infectious viral agent or they're the effects of toxification what you're seeing is dying tissue there. And I just simply don't know which one of those ideas is correct at the moment, but I know the no virus people can point to a lot of areas where they have scored big time against the virologists. Yeah, but this is again the jump the shark thing.  The other one that I was going to, you know, bring to your attention because we've talked about it as well is Dr. Mary's Monkey, just a fantastic book, Edward Haslam. And you said when I brought this up to you that you've read this book. Well, I don't know how you could read this book and not see the subtlety involved in what we're talking about here. And then is that just to recap the story on Dr. Mary's Monkey is they're trying to develop a polio vaccine because despite everything that you're saying and I'm not saying that some of that isn't true. Polio was the most feared disease in the 1940s, 1950s, right? It was mothers would keep their kids in from school not send them out so they don't get polio and they don't wind up with these braces, these metal braces all over their legs and it was the most feared disease. And when Saul comes along and says I have the vaccine for polio it was like a life changing event. If you read the stories about the history there are actually the reporters were weeping in the press conference because this was such a breakthrough from science that we could do this, all this stuff, right? So notwithstanding a lot of the stuff you're saying the history I always talk about, I've talked with you about this on the show.  Eventually this woman in charge of testing the vaccines which is going to make Oschner just tons and tons and tons of money she stands up and says, you know, hey to mention this but in my lab some of the monkeys we've been testing the vaccine on are dying or getting really sick. And he goes, no couldn't be, couldn't be, couldn't be happening. This is like COVID vaccine repeated which has turned out to be incredibly, incredibly dangerous if you see now the health effects that are happening which again completely contradict your model cannot sustain this no virus thing and at the same time explain how the vaccine which is based on the virus could be causing all these health effects but back to the story with Oschner. Oschner is looking at losing millions and millions of dollars if his vaccine, because there's competing vaccine companies that are developing this, if his vaccine is shown to be dangerous so he puts this big public demonstration and again this is history, you can see pictures of this guy and pictures of his kids and stuff like that. He does this public demonstration where he says I will inject the vaccine into two of my grandkids right here on stage. He does. One of them dies within 24 hours. The other is permanently injured in a severe way by polio. So this little story which is like a true account people are there, people report on it demonstrates how stupid the no virus thing is but at the end of the day to suggest that there is no virus to get into camp with these people what really bothers me and the whole reason for this thing is it just opens the door for what they really want to do which is to be in complete control of the scientific narrative around in this case COVID because if they can do the divide and rule thing if they can get people in this there is no virus camp they've taken them off the table they're off the table from public debate from rational discussion because no one takes that shit seriously. Well just to the polio vaccine point I was watching that exact thing in episode 2 of Mike Wallach's Documentaries a couple of nights ago did a public showing of it and if I was to talk to someone from the no virus camp who's really studied this next that would be exactly my question Alex it's okay if it's not a virus why did people receiving the polio vaccine have the same symptoms as polio myelitis like you'd think that if it was just some random tissue they're injecting you'd think they'd have something different happen to them like people getting the COVID vaccine it's a problem that the myocarditis is meant to be the thing so I don't know that that's a good question it was a question that I thought of but it doesn't change the fact that polio myelitis correlates so tightly with environmental poisons and in terms of where it arises both in time and in geography so that seems like a much more likely paradigm to explain this condition of paralysis that was happening in children than an inert virus that's lived in human beings for thousands of years randomly mutating into a deadly virus or a paralyzing virus at exactly the moment we start spraying all the food with chemicals we know paralyze people and then going away at exactly the moment we stop paralyzing spraying the food with chemicals we know paralyze people so this seems like too much of a coincidence so so if I can put a question to you answer it now in a minute or whether if there are these problems of phyrology both in terms of the vaccination program being greatly exaggerated like massively exaggerated in its efficacy and that being something that biologists would support the vaccinations and if it is true that HIV does not cause AIDS if it is true that polio myelitis is not caused by a virus and if it's true that a good proportion perhaps all the COVID deaths were iatrogenic, doctor induced how many sins would you allow the virologists to commit how many times would you allow them to be wrong before you would say well okay maybe they're wrong about something else like maybe it's measles maybe it's rabies but it's not like they're just wrong about the things you can prove right now if they're wrong about all this they're gonna have one of the others wrong surely and if they can have one of the others wrong then it could be two or three and at what point do you have to say you know I think there is something potentially wrong with the underpinning virology paradigm what would be your point of falsification for virology where you would at least question it this is my job is to take each one of those cases and break them down and find out where the truth is and follow the data so are there serious problems with stretching how far and how effective vaccines are absolutely what about the anti-vaxxer you know five years ago the big issue was the danger of vaccines which I think has it like I stumble over this that is like a super important topic to me the danger of vaccines but I want you to realize what this no-virus si-op does to that it completely sidelines it you can't have both a few years ago the hot topic was is MMR associated with autism is there a connection and I think like statistically I think that's been established so before I go on and on do you get what I'm saying how from a si-op standpoint what an effective move you got these these guys slam in this no-virus thing and it completely sidelines the dangers and the risks of vaccines well that isn't where they go with it certainly they would be as critical vaccinations as anyone now I'm not quite sure but for different reasons look the underlying science that I'm putting forward that again you have to take a stand on this one way or another is that the danger of like the MMR vaccine is in the vaccine so what would the germ people how would the no-virus people honestly that's exactly the question I have I don't know it occurred to me just the other day why did people taking the polio vaccine get polio-like symptoms it's a good question but at the same time and I'm repeating myself here I can't ignore the tight correlation between polio-myelitis and environmental poisons it just seems overwhelming to me when those poisons are known to cause paralysis like even with the flat earth Alex I made myself come up with a falsification point not because I think the earth might actually be flat but my concern was if I'm just dismissive and I get people commenting on my channel and occasionally arising to me saying hey you should really cover the flat earth and I look at their writing and what they link to me and so far it's all been ridiculous it's been people going down to the beach and going look flat to me so I've never gone further with that I refuse to cover flat earth as a science because I just don't accept that but I made myself think of falsification points what would convince me what would make me reject the round earth paradigm or at least put the flat earth paradigm on the table if I went outside and looked at the sun again and I saw it actually disappearing into the distance rather than setting that would be a thing and if I looked at the ship and I saw that it didn't actually disappear the bottom first or if someone could demonstrate to me that there was actually a 500 year satanic conspiracy in the catholic church going at some point to suppress the truth of this and there were some hidden CIA documents about putting bases all around the Arctic I want to have these points not because I think any of this is true but because I think if I just make assumptions there, I'll start making assumptions elsewhere and I'll dismiss all the things one day I'll get it wrong so I made myself have a falsification point for round earth and in the same way I just think you have to have some kind of falsification point for virology you have to say how many things are allowed to get wrong but what you say maybe what they think they're seeing down those electron microscopes isn't what they're actually seeing yeah, no tell us about your interview with Dr. Merrill Nass I pulled it up on the screen we've talked about it I thought it was phenomenal it was super important it was deeply scientific I think for people to really follow it and understand the subtleties of what she's saying so tell us who she is and then tell us about the interview because again this is something else that completely contradicts your no virus thing Dr. Merrill Nass has a background working with the anthrax virus in security theater and relevant to the covid story she was one of the first people to realize and blow the whistle so to speak on the doses of hydroxychoroquine that were being used in trials around the world and saying hey these doses are far higher than what should be used break that down a little bit, that whole thing forget there's so many aspects to the covid pandemic conspiracy that they get lost at some point and also remind us that this Dr. Merrill Nass she is like super highly credentialed, respected not only as a physician in New York but in all these multitude of research papers, panels fellowships, super and she comes out against the covid thing and man they go after her even get her a license I can't remember the exact details of her biography or how her battles are going with the medical authorities in the state she lives in and if it's gone to court or what's going on but that's all been a thing she was I think struck off, I think that's what happened due to her promotion of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for covid 19 she was a big supporter of that but hydroxychloroquine is obviously the drug that Trump politicized it became well made famous it became this politicized drug where Republicans loved it and Democrats hated it it was based on whether you liked Donald Trump or not, it was kind of crazy but not a lot of people are aware that there were really substantial trials went on in hydroxychloroquine prior to Donald Trump ever mentioning it in April, May, June of 2020 and Merrill Nass is one of the doctors who highlighted the doses being used in these trials was toxic, now the other one the interview you brought up on screen there wasn't my interview, Merrill Nass that was a post-interview clip I made where I contrasted her thoughts with the thoughts of Dr. Klaus Kohlheim who was a European doctor who noticed the same thing and it's been fed back to him that he may have prevented hydroxychloroquine trials in Germany by going on the German media and talking about the toxic doses so I did a fair bit to establish that yes that is indeed true the doses were, I think depending how you look at it, it's either if you look at it a certain way, you can say it's like 900% more hydroxychloroquine was used than is typically used in a trial and the trials were stopped and it ended in Brazil it ended in a legal case but the question I wanted to pose to Dr. Nass particularly on this, the controversy is that the book Virus Mania heavily implied that those trials contributed to the excess mortality seen in European countries so in Great Britain for example 10,000 excess deaths a week and there's a heavy implication in Virus Mania that the trials were part of that and Dr. Meronass said and I think she's completely correct about this that's wrong because the trials are being wrong of a few hundred people so as compared to the total mortality rate it's a blip so I did that particularly to get a critique of the no virus position now I don't think it's dead in the water because it could be and the book Virus Mania also indicates this that hydroxychloroquine was being used at a dose comparable to the trials in hospitals across European countries and that's one of the reasons, several reasons why you get like Spain has the biggest death spike in Europe Portugal right next door has nothing, it's a complete flatline Germany has minimal, minimal excess deaths whereas France is very high, Belgium is very high and apparently, I checked this directly but Switzerland apparently breaks down according to the cantons so the Virus Mania paradigm is that the deaths you're seeing are doctor induced that's a close call on the paradigm so really I was getting a critique of that because if that's true, then we need to get precise on what's causing that and we can't say it's trials if it's not and if it's not true, then we need to say okay well there was this dangerous virus going around and Portugal avoided it by locking down on time but there's obviously problems with that because Sweden didn't lock down and they got a mild hump in the care homes so I was trying to shed light I think that's like really to me is the most important question in the world because if there's not a big scary death spike, there's no justification for masking lockdowns, compulsory vaccinations any of it, so I want to get precise on that even if the answers that come back contradict the position that I'm investigating, that they were eatrogenic and Meryl Nassar's answer did, she took deaths out of that category Okay, so you're kind of burying the lead none of her research it wasn't her research her research was kind of an investigation into a multitude of studies that were done by these antiviral medications and whether or not they were efficacious in people who were I think most of them were in ICU from COVID, I mean none of the shit you're saying makes any sense if there's no virus none of Meryl Nassar's work and again it's not her work none of these studies would make any sense if there's no virus do you understand the contradiction in what you're saying forget for a second the other thing you're dealing with and the spike in deaths and all that the fundamental underlying research wouldn't make any sense giving someone hydrochloroquine, giving someone ivermectin and then measuring whether or not the mortality rate after they had been admitted for COVID it presupposes the existence of a virus so it stands totally in contrast with this wacky no virus, no rabies shit it presupposes that hydrochloroquine and ivermectin treat what is demonstrably going wrong with the person it doesn't presuppose that it's vile ivermectin is anti-parasitic so it's not and it's hard to go from the lab results of what it's doing to why that would then work in a person so i know this is something that Dr. D. Rancor the Canadian emphasised that he thought the reason you get a spike in COVID deaths in the southern United States particularly is because they're bacterial infections and what you see he presented statistics in his paper showing that the prescriptions antibiotics dropped immensely during 2020-21 and this accounts for why you have the rising COVID deaths because the bacterial infections are being misdiagnosed as a virus and not being treated so he suggests that ivermectin would also work on that. Two points the first is I think you're kind of sliding off the issue of if you take it really kind of block dumb simple you have all these people who are being admitted to the hospital and tested for the existence of the COVID antibodies in their blood which again you'd have to just kind of throw that out the window but there are these people again i just it's so illogical that it doesn't make any sense but there's this group of people and then you're going to not treat some of them and then you're going to treat other ones and you're going to measure the result that's all we can ever do with these medical experiments it does become a statistical kind of thing so in the same way that when you asked Meryl Nass about this crazy Andrew Kaufman you know kind of there is no virus she was like of course that's ridiculous and she came out and she said this guy's ridiculous he's a fraud he isn't even a scientist he's a psychiatrist and but then she won't even talk on that anymore because she got so much pushback in just again calling out how stupid the no virus thing is yeah she refuses to address it so she's written articles on it but then refuses to address it further because she already addressed it in the papers and she said the guy's a total quack so what is that you know switching to the stuff I'm interested in that supports the idea that this no virus thing is the Psyop is one of the Psyops because there's a million of them but yeah when she gets slapped down for saying the obvious that this guy is a quack you know that I don't know if she was slapped down she was doing the slapping at some part she critiqued a paper that Torsten Engelbrecht wrote and he's a journalist who was part of the virus mini book along with Klaus Kohlein and there was another doctor with a European name I can't recall and so yeah I sent the interview to Torsten Engelbrecht journalist and he wasn't impressed either he felt no Meryl Nass hadn't answered any of his positions but it's nigh on impossible to get any of these people in the same room together like people don't talk across paradigms like ever so this is the closest you'll get and there's two people there's no paradigm involved and I mean I still don't see that you're I mean maybe we're disagreeing but like none of what Meryl Nass is saying would even fundamentally make sense to even investigate or talk about there wasn't a COVID virus and you kind of slipped into the kind of crazy land where like maybe all these people in the hospital are not, I don't know if you're saying that they're not sick or that they're sick but they don't have COVID or that they all pass the COVID test because they're all in the hospital and they were tested for COVID and they tested positive for COVID and that's your sample size but then I don't know what you're saying after that is that then we can't measure or not whether or not in this case hydrochloroquine can be effective I don't understand what you're saying it's completely illogical well I'm saying if you witness a massive decrease in the number of antibiotic prescriptions then you've got to wonder like what happened to all the people getting bacterial infections but that's a separate issue that's a separate issue right Richard and we'll get to that that's the second point that I was going to bring up about germ theory but back to Meryl Nass when she's saying because like we're going to get way deep here but that's okay because you did in your show and that's why I like the show so much the subtlety that Meryl Nass brought to that is she said look there's all these people getting admitted to the hospital and when they come in they're tested for whether or not they have COVID they get a positive COVID test and then they want to see if hydrochloroquine could be effective so they gave them doses of hydrochloroquine and then they measured whether or not they got better so none of that works unless COVID is what we think COVID is you don't get different results you don't get this pattern but what she said the whole meat and potatoes of what she was trying to say that again just gets kind of totally pushed aside by the crazy no virus folks is that she goes look what these mother fuckers did is so subtle is that we've known for a long time that this hydrochloroquine is a tricky drug and that you know if you overdose just a little bit you start getting some pretty bad side effects so what they did in these studies is they just push the dosage up just a little bit my reading of it maybe a little bit different than yours it wasn't like 900% it was just enough to get what they wanted which is a no result the no result was hey if you give them hydrochloroquine or if you don't give them hydrochloroquine it doesn't matter because they're still dying at this rate so that was the goal of it was to show that hydrochloroquine yielded a no result in these studies what she then showed and what you reported on is that if you do it correct with the proper dosage of hydrochloroquine like they did in the Brazil study that you referenced it turns out to be very efficacious again which makes no sense if you're a no virus person no sense at all but make sense if you understand the antiviral qualities of hydrochloroquine now do you see what I'm saying about how there's a contradiction there how you can't kind of have both ways you can't have there is no virus and then at the same time be doing these rather sophisticated medical experiments that she documents on treating the virus just to say I might want to back off that 900 figure I can't quite remember I did say it was the most extreme figure you could calculate because it depends how you look at it and the dosing of hydrochloroquine studies just went on for a lot, lot longer over a continuous period of days so most extreme figure I get is like if you take the end day of like the 14 days whatever and compare it to the two or three days people are usually on for parasitic infections or whatever it is then you get this massive increase but within 24 hours it was something like a 50% increase in 24 and 100% increase in 28 and what people say is there's a very low therapeutic to toxic threshold with hydrochloroquine so you don't have to give that much more before it's it's damaging yeah that was certainly I went as far as looking at the scientific papers where they established what would be safe and what wouldn't and pictures of the doctors' faces appear on this they were doing this and it's a very strange experience to look at them and think were you deliberately setting the dose too high or were you just like idiotic in what you were doing or is there a very strange question but certainly it has that effect right of rubbishing the effects of the drugs and making it appear dangerous maybe if it was rolled out on mass and I just don't know that it was at the same time the studies were going on then it would also have had the effect of lifting the death rate but to speak to does it prove if hydrochloroquine hydrochloroquine hydrochloroquine and ibamectin are effective does that prove the its viral origins of Covid obviously people aren't going to the hospital because they're feeling great there's obviously something wrong with them and those drugs are treating that thing if it's demonstrated to be effective it necessarily proves that that thing is viral especially when ibamectin is anti-parasitic to begin with right but they're being tested for whether or not they have the Covid antibodies so then people can spin off on all of that but when you put it all together it doesn't make any sense like this is like basic experimental science like what is your group how do you control the group well the control in this group was do they test positive for Covid do they not just show the symptoms but do they test positive based on this test we have and that is how we separate that's like the entry ticket into controlling this experiment so no it doesn't you can't go into this kind of la la land like you know maybe they had viral maybe they didn't no we tested them for that with the test that is a fairly substantial part of the no virus case and I have to say it goes over my head but the idea is that the PCR test is not effective well no what they're really saying if you really look at it and again some of the best work from this comes from the people who are against the pandemic and yet that's why I think you got to look at the Psyop here when the people like Del Big Tree you know Del Big Tree is right he came out early and was very much saying this is scandemic this is scandemic this is not great and he did the best thing on the PCR test is what they're doing is they're upcycling the right so they're increasing multiple times and they're generating a lot of false positives right so it's not that the test is completely ineffective it's just if you have a test with enough false positives it would never be anything that someone uses but now if you buy like off the shelf like my wife did when she was sick if you buy the off the shelf PCR test down at your local drug store what they say is look this is a pretty shitty test it's pretty ineffective but if you take it two times 48 hours a point and they both come up positive you can be pretty sure that you have it and then you can go into your doctor and they can actually do the blood test and when you get all those confirmed the chances are that you have COVID you do there's no way so there's no way around that again the misinformation about there is no none of that stuff would be possible if there were no viruses and you couldn't have like the basic idea of like that's what I'm saying fundamentally behind the Meryl Nass thing and I think what I sense when you talk to her or when anyone talks to her is when someone goes down this moonshot crazy there is no viruses stuff they just kind of check out because it's like they're not going to talk to somebody who is in this flat earth camp but what she's saying I think is that look that doesn't make any sense in that you couldn't test all these people and have all them have the symptoms and positive test if there wasn't a virus and that's just the starting point to what we really wanted to test as to whether or not Hydrochloroquine was effective so it's do you get the kind of built in frustration that I have a little bit but not that much because I'm totally in the game of conspiracy a lot more than other people are but do you get that sense when you talk to people who really kind of know the science and they just kind of check out with all this wacky no virus stuff well certainly Meryl Nass did and I have to just acknowledge I'm up against my limit now in terms of what I can speak I can't speak to the testing all of them parroting what I hear people say and say well this is what they the testing is ineffective and there's no isolation of either COVID no meaningful isolation so just common sense how would that make sense then Richard how would it make sense that you test these people and they're sick they have the symptoms and they're positive on the test and you have other healthy people and they test and they're negative and you do that over and over again how would that make any sense well it could be testing for something that's to do with obviously with them being sick okay like a breakdown like so to go back to the electron microscope when the virus and no virus can't look down it they're seeing the same thing but when the virus can't look down they're saying okay that's a virus down there we're seeing that little squiggly thing with the crown like proteins on or whatever and the no virus people are saying no that's tissue breaking down it's going to do toxification due to some kind of illness so if the test is testing for the presence of that thing then it's saying that thing is there but it's either a virus or the breakdown of tissue and again I'm not saying that's a good explanation so for the audience please don't take that to the background but that's just one logical way that that could be the case it seems to be inherent in the whole fact that there is a disagreement that the test could be showing different things okay hold on here folks this is what you've been waiting for we're about to have a breakthrough here a logical breakthrough so Richard you are a little biotech startup and you're going to manufacture this test for COVID and you're not part of the pandemic in particular you're just a guy trying to make a buck you know you've already do all these other tests and now you're going to do this test okay what do you do to show in order for your test to be accepted to be used I mean can you just do can you just totally fake it can you just put out a totally fake test that doesn't really do anything it just randomly comes up positive negative is that going to work is that going to pass muster with consumers no I suppose I mean good look I'm getting very speculative here but I suppose you would have to have a test that lights up when the presence of whatever it is that we're calling COVID-19 is there to some degree of accuracy but it doesn't necessarily mean that that thing that is being picked up by the test is a virus like that's the point of contention how do you suppose you would do that because the way they did it was they're testing for the virus antibodies so how would you do it given in this world that you're in where there are no viruses how would you make your test work so you can make money so you can sell it to there are biological entities that are being identified as viruses right but again they're going to have to match up with symptoms so people are sick they're going to go to the store and they're going to buy and then you're also in your testing in your testing before you put this out on the market because we already agreed you can't just do a total sham test a total sham thing so you're going to have to do some internal testing you're going to have to take people who are sick and then you're going to have to take people who are healthy and you're going to have to give them your little instant test so how are you going to run how are you going to run that test to see whether or not your test is efficacious because the tissue is picking up again I have to say that I'm being very hypothetically and the tissue the tissue being picked up gone it could be that's a tissue that appears in the presence of sickness whether that sickness is a virus or a detoxification process that's the thing that's up for debate if you aim the test at that it's going to pick up on it and you can say oh that's a virus or it's how tissue breaks down under toxification and that seems to be the central split in how that's interpreted so it is plausible to have a test that would pick up on sickness and a certain type of sickness you just realize kind of your problem there when you add a particular type of sickness because now we're talking about a very particular set of symptoms around this thing called COVID-19 so you're just getting into kind of territory that just doesn't it doesn't make any sense and again so back to your little laboratory you would also have to have because this is an instant test you want to crank these things out so that people can just do them really quickly with the saliva in their mouth kind of thing and then it's going to be backed up with the blood test that they're going to do where they're going to do a more comprehensive test so that's going to be your standard inside your little biotech company by which you compare whether your test is effective like is my little saliva test working in the same way as the blood test does and I'm hoping that at this point you see that in order for you to do any of this work effectively you will have to have a working understanding of this virus a working understanding of it you are not at the level of just saying well let's see this tissue you couldn't do it you couldn't manufacture these things you couldn't test to see whether they're effective it just wouldn't work to be honest I'm out of my death with the testing because nothing about the testing convinced me that the virus would be to put the no virus position on the table so I think I've just got to acknowledge this because your audience is going to be getting increasingly bad arguments from me from here on in because it's just you would need to bring someone who's really studied the testing on my basis for putting the no virus position on the table is what I've already said regarding that there are these really strong other corporates for polio and HIV and other COVID deaths and the efficacy of the vaccination program etc I'm sort of trying my best with the testing but I'm concerned I'm not representing a position that all the people could represent very well yeah this is what people always say when they kind of reach a point where they can't do it look the virus the testing and the vaccine are all related and when people break them out and say well I don't know about the testing the testing is the virus there's no you can't separate it out as its own category the vaccine is the virus when we talked about the MMR autism connection it's about the virus so again all that stuff is out the window for the no virus people but we've pounded on that enough the other thing I would say that always just drive me crazy about the germ people it's all this focus on virus but oh bacteria that's something that's a whole different category you know anthrax or cholera or any rest of that if you see it in a microscope that isn't in our purve of this kind of wacky germ theory versus terrain theory thing why doesn't bacteria fall into the same category as viruses I don't know perhaps because of what you said it's a larger entities that are visible and do float around causing disease I imagine there might be some I don't know I think it's kind of funny because we've always talked about the catch postulates you know this guy back at 1870 and isolation and stuff like that he isolated bacteria that was the first thing that he did and the whole idea of germ theory is that before that no one would believe that there were these things that couldn't be seen that were causing disease and that was the breakthrough that these guys did and like you've reported on in your show and everyone has you know Lister was famous for the antiseptic surgical techniques where he insisted you know that doctors wash their hands after giving birth so that they didn't and you know all of a sudden infectious diseases went way down because these doctors hey my hands are clean there can't be anything there so again this wacky no virus stuff go read what these people say that has nothing to do with bacterial infections it totally does the guy you last had on your show right Daniel Thompson Mills yeah he's all about terrain theory versus germ theory so germ theory includes bacteria it isn't limited to viruses so when he's pushing back against germ theory he's not distinguishing he's not saying oh yeah well you know bacteria are a totally separate category of these invisible small little things that can be linked to disease it's just no one talks about it it's a sigh out man yeah so I'm not saying that about bacteria Daniel said some things which I thought were speculative some things which were very sensible and some things which I thought were wrong and I did push back on certain things that he taken from Tom Cowan's work like apparently Tom Cowan has an idea that when pus forms around a splinter that's the body pushing the splinter out oh great I hadn't heard that one before but that's a classic when I pushed on that and well he says for that and he was just quoting Tom Cowan he didn't have one so there's some certainly certain things I'm very cynical of okay and I'm not personally going down the bacterial infections don't exist at all I think it's just really demonstrable they do so I'm just not what's the distinction you're making there between bacterial infections and viral infections I couldn't describe it in the terms of biology bacterial living things aren't they in viruses aren't are they much smaller I couldn't describe the biology of it well the viruses are clearly living things right I mean I didn't I don't think so I thought they're not technically alive I could be wrong about that I thought that was quick Google might yeah I mean they're alive or they wouldn't be they wouldn't be multiplying our viruses living that's a question look at this so most biologists say no viruses are not made out of cells they can't feed themselves in a stable state so I think that's one factor that makes people skeptical of the normal living thing can do all these things attributed to them it's not my complaint my complaint is well with bacterial infections you could identify the bacteria and it seems to be causal there's not some or the thing you can put in there to suggest hey this is causing all the diseases where it's with some viruses that's present as I explained with with polio accepting right so I guess as I keep going through viruses are considered both living and non-living this is due to the fact that viruses possess the characteristics of both living and non-living for instance viruses can reproduce inside a host just like any other living organism but this ability to reproduce is lost when viruses outside of the host cell I still think you're going to have a hard time but I understand your distinction I don't want to dismiss it I understand that there's a distinction between viruses and bacteria that could feed into what they're saying okay how should we move towards wrapping this up do you want to have some kind of closing well maybe another aspect of this which might be interesting to talk about just because I think we we're going to start going around in circles with the virology thing and we've said what we've said is your perception that it's either a Psyok or at any rate it's something that's very very bad to have in because it introduces all this craziness into what we need to have which is focused resistance against COVID okay in the COVID agenda and whatever COVID 2.0 is which is going to come down it's already heading towards us and this is for me I see a repetition of what happened with 9-11 where you have everyone has a different kind of crazy line with 9-11 so you get people who think that it was all a geopolitical games being played by the CIA and they were trying to manage the ultimate hijackers but they lost control of them and then you get people who say no that's not far enough they were managing the hijackers so they could do the operation and the first group think the second group is crazy but the second group think the people who say bombs in the buildings are crazy the people who say there were bombs in the buildings they think the holographic playing people are crazy and what you have is a massive amount of infighting because everyone thinks it's very important that no one to the left or the right of them should be included in the movement and I just see that pattern repeating it's been a very depressing thing for me to see how no one will talk across ideological lines with the COVID virology questions everyone just goes into their silo and that's it and this is from us to entirely non-experts on this read what you've read on it but do not spend our lives staring at what exists to a dialogue on this topic almost you know which is quite depressing really so it's that perception I suppose where I'm differing there Alex is I don't necessarily and I can't see intellectual expansiveness as being a bad thing so if people are just on a pure science level I think that science progresses through conflicts of opposites this protagonist sentiment that you make the weaker argument the stronger and thereby advance the motion of the whole I think that by interjecting an alternative paradigm and that could be creationism in the evolutionary story then you look at or it could be the no virus camp even if it's not ultimately true then by looking at things that way they are going to see things that all the people won't like who is it that's going to see that the bones we're saying are the missing links aren't really the missing links will it be people that don't believe in evolution and who is it that's going to see the polio maybe wasn't caused by a virus after all it was environmental factors well quite likely people who are very very very cynical about the existence of viruses at all so to me pluralism is a healthy thing for the advancement of knowledge and an uncertainty on issues that we don't know about embodying that uncertainty is a healthy thing too I'm not just talking about like outright fence sitting but a movement off the fence in both directions into one side and then the other and coming back to the fence and all of this seems very healthy to me and then I notice I don't think you see it that way I think you see it as something that's detracting from what should be more focused so how do we square that circle well this is something that you've mentioned to me in the past and particularly with 9 11 and the example you gave was somebody starts out with flat earth you know and they eventually over time go wow that was pretty crazy don't remind me but it opens them up to looking at 9 11 so they were moving in these circles where those two issues within the circle of people they came in contact with were equally crazy like you're saying you believe in flat earth you believe in 9 11 they're the same and now the person goes through this process like you're saying and they go yeah flat earth is kind of goofy but 9 11 turns out to be you have a lot of substance to it and I've had we've had this conversation before where you kind of hold that up and that's undeniable I mean shoot we've all been there we've all been there personally the reason I like science even though I still think science is wrong about almost everything because it doesn't incorporate any consciousness is that I do think it is important to have especially in these times where information is being manipulated is being controlled there are all these psyops there are all these agendas undeniable you know when you go into these other fields that we we we hold to some basic principles and standards both in terms of science and in terms of logic and reason and I don't think it's a good idea to jump off just for a little while so that I can come back on with a fresh perspective I accept that maybe that works for some people but I don't think in general that's a good path and I think it's just a rot with all sorts of potential manipulation to me just follow the data wherever it leads in the case of viruses you know to make that case in advance that case you would have to contemplate a conspiracy going back hundreds of years involving thousands and thousands of scientists who've published peer-reviewed papers that you can look up and then analyze and other people have analyzed them and you'd have to say all that was some kind of organized effort to bring us to this point in this discussion between Richard and Alex to confuse the issue because what's really going on is there's no viruses to me that is just only an inch or two above the flat earth stuff so I completely disagree about it necessitating a conspiracy and what I think is that in some ways we still live in the Middle Ages and this is maybe maybe this is a fundamental point of contention in some ways we don't when I look at my window and I see a giant flying robot moving from the sky that's the end point of a process of where we have become in some way better at interrogating the natural world and coming up with science and building technology off that science so we are in some ways fundamentally different in the way we think than we were in the past evidence by the world around us but in another way I don't think we are and I think that other way is that we're still very very bad at questioning our core assumptions and this is Thomas Coons point about the way people come into science is it's more like learning a trade so when my electrician comes around and does the wiring in the house he may be very competent at that but I don't necessarily expect to be able to have a conversation with him about the nature of electricity or whether Nicola Tesla was right about transmitting it wirelessly through the air I mean you know I'm sure you get very philosophical electricians but I'm not that's not in the training to question the nature of things and I think science is essentially the same with that where people are initiated into a profession by having to compress a learning into a tight space of time and regurgitate different exams inside an existing paradigm and then they can go their entire career under pressure to always produce and always move on without ever questioning the foundation they're standing on and I think that's why you can have sciences that are people pour their expertise into spend their lifetime studying and they can still be wrong about the fundamentals and that occurs in lots of different ways I've just produced a podcast on the history of the First World War questioning whether historians have been locked into a perspective that excuses the British complicity in starting the war I'm looking at a podcast on the science of memory and I'm realizing that a lot of older pinnings of certain branches of psychotherapy really went down a wrong path with very destructive results because people don't question the foundation so in all areas of human knowledge I think this can exist and that's why you don't need a conspiracy to account for massive errors existing over time and space Yeah I think you have to be really careful when you draw these analogies and the part that I think totally runs against what you're saying is the engineering of medical devices, medical cures medical science so kind of like I'm saying I think the strongest argument you can go back and kind of contemplate a little bit is like if you were going to come up with a test for COVID that tested your saliva and you know indicated whether or not you had COVID and you had one to cross-correlate it with the effectiveness of the blood test you know and there are two different means of getting at the same thing you can't engineer shit and make it work if you don't have a command of the science it's kind of like you can't build a computer, you can't build a modem you can't build an iPhone if you don't have a command of how an integrated circuit works you can't just kind of wish it to be so or speculate on it in the engineering which a lot of times leaves behind what you're talking about in terms of the philosophical underpinnings of some of this stuff the engineering of it is where it really kind of is all revealed and I'd say the same is true with vaccines the vaccines are the engineering of the virus and that their existence completely is counter to the idea that there are no viruses it's like you know it's like the other thing about the covid is it's not only a virus it's a bioweapon they built it in a fucking lab in a lab where they were building other dangerous viruses and weaponizing other dangerous diseases again like in a rant for a little bit longer because we didn't talk about this topic notice how that is effectively moved to the side with this sigh up hey there is no viruses so let's not worry about our bioweapon labs and the chinese bioweapon labs because there are no viruses gain of function that's off the table there are no viruses they can't be working to improve the gain of function of the virus because there are no viruses do you understand the absurdity of that? I entirely agree everyone who thinks that the virus is a bioweapon thinks the no virus thing is a scam to detract from that and everyone who is into the no virus thing thinks that the gain of function and the chinese borosheet is a scam to detract from the fact there's no viruses how could that explain to me since you're in that camp how do they explain away the gain of function research I mean explain to me how they explain that away no idea I hope that the audience listen to this has gained some value from what I have said rationally logically how does that make any sense to you? I don't know I just can't because two years ago the whole no virus thing at all didn't make sense to me so I just don't know I know they talk about it I just don't know about it Richard think about it for a minute think just anything again you said there were just two people who don't know that much again this is back to my point of logic basic logic basic reason how can you have published studies on gain of function of the weaponization of these viruses if viruses don't even exist how could you have people studying that how could you have these bioweapons? I have heard Mark Bailey make the exact opposite point and say well the reason this research never comes to anything and the reason you have chemical warfare but no biological warfare rolled out is because it's completely ineffective because it's built on a false paradigm so it is addressed but I would the poverty of my reply would be such I just I'm out I don't know I can't do that one okay so as a result of this you're going to get to the bottom of it because you agree that is completely logically inconsistent that whole body of research which is gain of function it's not only would it not be like even the part you said about that guy who said it never works it's like no I mean they publish all these papers and say that this is what they did and here's the results that they got and all the rest of that you would have to create a world where that is how would you even explain that that they're just kind of making that up or that it's passing peer review or that they're not really doing the experiments I mean I don't even know logically how that would even how you would put that argument together I don't know but it doesn't if you consider like the body of work that must exist on HIV okay and if it doesn't cause AIDS you can take and put straight into the bin but there must be thousands of thousands of scientists who have worked on that problem and thousands of thousands of scientists who have worked on the polio problem and either the guy you had on your show was wrong or all that research goes in the bin and I don't think it's because they're all in a conspiracy no it's because they're looking at something no see that's not how it is and that's not the case with the HIV AIDS thing and this is again the PSYAP is like the HIV AIDS thing when Henry Bauer was on there and the people he talked to is it not that these viruses don't exist not that AIDS isn't connected to a virus it's just that it's not as simplistic as they're trying to make it it's analogous to the climate change thing you know climate change thing is complicated man there's a lot of things that go into climate a lot of things go into climate itself so teasing it apart is like you can always get a different angle so people can really do work on HIV and AIDS and they can very subtly delude themselves into thinking that they're seeing an effect or they're exaggerating the effect or they're statistically calculating because there really are viruses and there really is such a thing as HIV it's just make subtler little kind of scientific mistakes that we can understand and come to these weird exaggerated conclusions like you're pointing to but you can't do that if there's no viruses right you can't that doesn't fit back into the equation right well I mean to be fair Peter Dusberg who's I think the most prominent and renowned critic of the HIV was AIDS hypothesis I think he considers there is an HIV virus it's just not causing AIDS he also talks about that being a kind of halfway house he thinks that's the direction it will go is when people want to move away from this idea that HIV causes AIDS they'll say well there are co-factors that you have to have for HIV to develop into AIDS but he doesn't accept that he says no that HIV is irrelevant to AIDS so again if he's correct then I don't think the HIV research is really willful that much then I would say it probably doesn't need to go under bin I mean look the people that we really respect who really know what's going on they don't even give any credence at all to the there is no virus nonsense okay but these are also people that didn't notice the vaccination program was ineffective and didn't notice that AZT was clearly causing AIDS and people are not HIV through the 80s and 90s so if they can be wrong about that also the people that didn't notice the DDT polio connection so I'm telling you if they can be wrong about that is it possible they could be wrong about at least one more virus? they could be wrong well I don't even know you haven't even defined what wrong is but like yeah it's yeah maybe we have hammered it hammered it enough I think it's going to the forum Alex I think this is the uh probably going in circles probably okay yeah I think we have kind of wrapped it up and you kind of told us what's coming up on uh deep state consciousness yeah so I'm sure you'll you'll kind of find your way through it or I'll find my way through it and I'll come out and say there's no such thing as viruses maybe who knows maybe I'll I'll be writing a lesson for apology I'm posting on the skeptical forum otherwise yeah I'll hold up something to the screen well thanks for doing this I do think it's uh it's a good dialogue to have thank you for having me on I have found it insightful in ways that conversing in text I've wounded your position and it's kind of I think clearer to me now the kind of underpinnings of our thinking that are different and why this arises so it's been very insightful for me thank you thank you thanks again to Richard Cox for joining me today on skeptical be sure to check out deep state consciousness podcast really are a lot of excellent excellent interviews that he's done there so we hammered this to death where did we wind up the question I would tee up is do you see why some people think the no virus thing is a Psyop I mean it isn't even worth discussing whether it's potentially true whether it's right it's obviously crazy just an inch or two above flat earth but do you think it's a Psyop let me know your thoughts track me down wherever you can skeptical form is great if you want to get there otherwise just find me and let me know your thoughts love to hear from you until next time take care and bye for now


and like a bad coin here I am again your blue professor of psychology my name is some back mean and I'm the author of malignant self-love narcissism revisited and countless other books which no one myself included is ever read so today we're going to discuss psychopaths and narcissists under the radar masquerading in camouflage as something else but in order to understand how this works we first need to discuss defenses alloplastic defenses versus autoplastic defenses you can't say that I'm not exposing you to $20 words recently autoplastic defenses simply means blaming oneself for the consequences and outcomes of one's own choices and decisions as well as blaming oneself for the outcomes of the choices that other people make and even for circumstances beyond one's control in other words blaming myself or blaming yourself for every everything and for everyone whatever other people do it's your fault whatever mishaps and misfortunes occur must have been you even when circumstances change I don't know natural disasters you should have taken greater care and you should have been more careful to avoid the unfavorable consequences autoplastic defenses are a common type of defense in neurosis and they are constructed they're contrasted with alloplastic defenses alloplastic defenses is the opposite blaming other people blaming other people for the predictable consequences and outcomes of your own choices and decisions you make bad choices bad decisions you're never guilty you're never to blame you're never ashamed you never accept responsibility it's never your fault you're never wrong you never apologize other people are to blame they made it happen they conspired they were lazy or indolent they were stupid they underestimated or overestimated or did not estimate or something always blaming other people institutions the weather god universe destiny and of course the Chinese comedy spotting alloplastic defenses are a feature of cluster B personality disorders especially narcissistic borderline and psychopathic antisocial personality disorder examples of alloplastic defenses it is their fault they made me do it they should have been more careful they should have been less gullible frequently you talk to a psychopathic corner artist and he says they had it coming they had it coming they should have been more cautious they should have been more wary they should have done their due diligence they should have done some research it's of my fault that they are naive bumbling fools indeed but there are situations where autoplastic defenses mix with alloplastic defenses this is especially true where cognitive distortions are involved cognitive distortions such as grandiosity example there are many people who are for example people pleases there are many people who are emotionally disregulated or delusional or paranoid narcissistic or passive aggressive or depressive or anxious or or you get a negative attitude there are many people with problems in functioning problems flaws in character and pathologies of the self but all these psychopathologies sometimes serve as excuses as covers for psychopathic immoral anti-social and narcissistic acts and misconduct and this is a unique combination of both alloplastic and autoplastic defenses similarly mental ill people would say I am the victim of my own proclivities my own weaknesses my own lack of mental health my own character defects I'm a victim all these things are me of course I'm the one who is having the flawed character I'm the one with the personality disorder I'm the one whose anxiety drives him to act impulsively and recklessly I'm the one whose emotional dysregulation causes him to be aggressive and hurtful to other people I'm the one but these things overpower me they overwhelm me I can't help I can't help it it's stronger than me so in a way it's me autoplastic defense but it's not my fault alloplastic defense in this case internal structures internal constructs internal introjects internal processes serve as some kind of outside influence it's as if you as if you were to say in the Middle Ages I'm possessed I have demons inside me these demons are responsible yes they're inside me I my body is there about my mind is the shrine of these demons that's where they reside but these demons are not me in some way they're not who I am so they are responsible for my misbehavior and misconduct mental illness is the new demonology psychiatry is the new form of demonology so instead of demons we say personality disorders so it's blaming your illness for your misbehavior blaming your character for your misbehavior your parents you upbringing so it's a combination of autoplastic and alloplastic defense people are leveraging the the the excuse is that people are leveraging taking advantage of my frailties I never do wrong I never to blame I'm never responsible for my actions there are higher internal forces at work I'm as much a victim as the people I victimize they need to believe there's a need to believe on both parties in both sides of the abyss both sides of the equation the abuser needs to believe that he is essentially a good person a good person who is imperfect owing to his or her mental illness and personality constitution so the message is or the the underlying signal is it's a form of virtue signaling the underlying signal is I'm a good person but I hurt people and I hurt people because I cannot help it I'm the victim of these forces which are stronger than me please forgive me please help me to help myself please restrain me somehow so this is on the abuser side on the victim side there's also a need to believe it's the need to believe in the essential goodness of people it's a need to believe that the world is essentially just and structured it's a naive kind of belief of course but it's essential for daily functioning we need to believe that people will not act maliciously for no reason at all or even when there is a reason we need to believe that the world has some kind of underlying order which is intimately connected with a sense of justice we need to believe all this and another need is to not feel like a victim we don't want to feel stupid no one wants to believe that his judgment is wrong no one wants to suspect that he misapprehends people no one wants to think that she can can and do fall in the hands of predators or con artists people don't want to believe that they had been victimized and these needs the need to believe in some kind of some quiddity of goodness in people they need to believe that the world is structured and just they need the need to not feel like a victim these needs coalesce they come together and they result in a cognitive dissonance when people we have trusted and role models misbehave when they betray us there's a great break in the order of the world the unease is extreme the anxiety is profound there's a sense of all pervasive discomfort and in a conflict that ruptures us asunder tears us apart and we need to get get to grips with this lest we lose it lest we split we we slip over the edge and crash way down below so to allay this to mitigate to ameliorate this we receive ourselves in order to overcome this internal upheaval this inner upset when we are confronted with the truth we lie to ourselves we reframe so for example we say well maybe she hurt me maybe she did me wrong but she's flawed she's weak she's human she means well she's just unfortunately mentally ill and she's so in need of love or we say she is a people pleaser she's emotionally dysregulated she's merely being depressed or anxious she's delusional she's labile in short she didn't hurt me she is not the one who hurt me she's not the one who devastated me it's her disorder it's her mental illness it's her character flow it's her personality in this array whoops the dissonance is gone now you don't blame yourself for having this judge another person you don't blame the other person even there's this mysterious third essence mysterious entity ectoplasm of a ghost the ghost of mental illness in the air she didn't do anything to me her borderline personality did he didn't abuse me he's people pleasing tendency did so no one is to blame and there's no dissonance but in reality of course she did victimize him he did damage you they did pray on you she to say that she did not mean it it is not her fault it was stronger than her you see this is to deceive yourself because everyone has a choice ultimately and everyone can tell right from wrong unless they are severely psychotic the thing is that this need to deny that you had become a victim that you had been victimized this need is coupled with grandiose autoplasmic defendant defenses the tendency to blame yourself for anything that had gone wrong because you need to feel in control your grandiosity tells you you should be supreme you should be above you should be in charge you should be the puppet master and so if you are in control you made it happen if she acted immorally and hurt you to the quick and ruined you and devastated you with her actions it was all your fault you made her do it you caused it to happen you're not the victim you're the victimizer you're the abuser so everything is fine you're the one who took advantage of the character flaws and the mental illness of other people and so if you made it happen if you orchestrated the whole thing if you took charge and if you were in control then you're still safe to restore this sense of safety you need to reframe everything in terms of control and this is again an autoplasmic defense so as you can see autoplasmic defenses and alloplasmic defenses intermingle are very often entwined they very often interact with each other and in quite a few cases they coexist they are co-extant it is wrong to say that people have only autoplasmic defenses or only alloplasmic defenses I gave you an example that if you're grandiose you're likely to deploy autoplasmic defenses in order to restore your sense of control and if you are mentally ill or believe yourself to be mentally ill you're likely to deploy alloplasmic defenses directed at yourself you're likely to say my mental illness made me do it not me as if your mental illness was not you as if your mental illness is not a part of you and this is of course fiction but very useful fiction allowing you to split autoplasmic defenses from alloplasmic defenses and also to split yourself in the middle there is you and you're all good and there is your mental illness and your mental illness is all bad and it is this bad part of you your mental illness that is responsible for your abusive misconduct and egregious misbehavior this part of you this dark side this shadow whatever you want to call it he's it is to blame not you it's kind of self-directed self-splitting which allows you to entertain suppose simultaneously alloplastic and autoplasmic defenses so the field is a lot a lot more murky than Freud had believed and others later it seems that we all deploy multiple arrays and cascades of alloplasmic and autoplasmic defenses intended to preserve cognitive distortions and to reframe reality in a way that will not cause us undue trauma and will not push us to decompensate and act out