None, you know, not everything is binary and and I think something that I've learned over the last year, particularly with regards to those quote, UN quote on our side is how they are no different to those on the other side. Yes, absolutely. I mean, there's that old idea of the horseshoe where, you know, the the idea is that you have this spectrum, let's call it, let's accept that the left right structure for a second, just for analytical purposes.
OK, So you've got people on the left and people on the right. And then they become more and more vociferous and more and more polarized. And the idea is that instead of getting further apart, they actually come closer together because they become increasingly doctrinaire and dogmatic, you know, inclined to force their views onto other people. And in doing so, they adopt more and more a shared set of behaviours and insistences or demands. And I think there's a lot of truth in that.
That extremity just converges on a sort of weird, somewhat arbitrary authoritarianism. Which certainly feeds into the conversation that you and I had some time back about the whole left right dichotomy. Yes, I've discussed that one so many times. I'm bored with it. There is no left, right? It's not a useful construct.
I mean, people defend it because there's so much political writing that's based on it. And you know, the the framing has come to mean something because of that writing, but I just really find them somewhat empty. So one of the things that I love about you, Nick, is your ability to speak in front of groups of people. And I watched a a documentary a while ago, maybe 2 weeks ago, and there was a clip of you speaking in Europe. You've done a lot of this kind of thing over the last few
years, haven't you? Hundreds of talks. Yeah. And it, it's, it is a strange thing. I sometimes wonder, you know, at what point did I become completely, you know, I, I don't have any sense. Oh, now I'm talking in front of people. It's the same as if I was talking to myself or just to one person. What, what, what strange thing does that highlight about my psychology that it, it's sort of never a threatening story.
I mean, I invest a lot of time in, in planning and, and, and thinking through what I want to say. But that's, that wouldn't really change if the audience was one or 1000. You know, if, if, if there's an event and somebody's asked you to think about something and come and talk about it, then I'm going to, you know, do my best And yeah. Yeah. But I mean just on that, so we are kind of leading to was how have you found general reactions?
I know that you spoke recently. What is, I mean, what has been has, have you seen a shift over the years? I've, I've noticed a recent shift that has totally surprised me. I did, I did 2 recent live audience events and I love those. It's my favorite is to be able to look at the faces and see how people are reacting as you're talking. And then you notice somebody who's got like an whoa, he's really upset or he's objecting to something you're saying and you can sort of start interacting.
Even if it's not verbally, you know, you at least get a sense of the, the ineffable parts of the communication or the non verbal parts, I should rather say. So the, the, the most recent two of those live events, there was one for the, for, you know, Professor Tim Noakes's World Nutrition Summit. I'm a huge Noakes fan and a big admirer of his scientific integrity and independence.
So I was, so I was hugely honoured to, to, to be presenting there and I did a talk highlighting the, the, the structure of propaganda and propagandized narratives. And I the, the, the, the structure of the talk was to show the parallels between the climate change narrative, the, the saturated fats hypothesis and cholesterolemia hypothesis that led to the whole statins fraud. And then the third one was of course the COVID fraud.
And I, I just very carefully went through and, and show the audience how the propaganda elements and what are, what are the key propaganda elements? You start with a latent agenda. You then spew out propaganda to to in effect promote the latent agenda. The the ideology begins to take hold as a result of the propaganda. And then after that you it's no longer necessary to keep the agenda late latent. You can make it patent because
the ideology has taken hold. And then the second sort of structural reality of propaganda is, is, is, is really when, how do you, you know an identification methods, How do you know when you're dealing with a scam? First of all, you're being told it's a, it's a global problem, admitting only global solutions in the, in the amid suppression of dissent, those three elements.
And I just showed how those elements were all present for all three of the scams of COVID, climate change and the saturated fats hypothesis. And the audience reaction was really interesting. There were, there was a divided story. Amongst the audience were doctors who simply did not want to accept the idea that there was no COVID pandemic. They saw the sick people, their their colleagues had patients dying in hospital.
And but the difference is here I am at a live event and there's a lunch and there's a tea and so on. So I can sit there sort of doing the, the Socratic method on these people, you know, asking them questions. So how do you know, how did your colleague know what the patient was dying from? And they would say, oh, there's a PCR test or whatever and and so on. So it affords the opportunity now to, to do this, conduct this
kind of dialogue. And, and what I noticed is that the, the light bulb people were not running away. When, for example, I presented at the actuarial convention in 2023, people literally ran away. They were, they couldn't face it, they couldn't discuss it. It was just outside of their bandwidth. And it wasn't that they were, they thought it was boring or uninteresting or that they were just so offended by it, you know, no, they were afraid to discuss it. It challenged too many of their
beliefs. Why would they be afraid? Because that's a psychological issue. It's very interesting, I think that at, at a certain level people have awareness of the shallowness of their own thinking, that they've just adopted a set of principles, A mantra, A dogma, without ever having understood it. And so they're, they, they're intuitively fearful of any analysis of the axioms of that, that dogmatic structure.
Then I think also they're fearful of being seen to indulge something that is the antithesis of that dogmatic, that dogmatic structure. Because their reason for adhering to the dogmatic structure is to stay in with an in Group to to maintain social credit with a crowd of people for whom tribal membership is tightly associated with signing
up to the dogmatic structure. And so it and that that elaborates the fear because they they find themselves first of all, not at all convinced of their own ability to defend the dogmatic structure. And secondly, painfully aware that just being seen to indulge the dissident might be a strong enough signal to their community that they're not actually part of the in Group, and so they risk excommunication from a structure that they somehow depend upon.
But that basically echoes what Nassim Taleb has written about extensively in terms of risk analysis and skin in the game. In other words, in In other words, like Tim Noakes has lots of skin in the game and ran huge risks by doing U turns on some of his on some of his scientific views.
Yes. And, and, you know, the the interesting thing about him is he's a man of such character that, you know, he didn't pause the moment he realized that he made a mistake or that he that a better explanation was in view. I don't think, yeah, I don't think he's the type of person who had to agonize late at night over what he was giving up. I think he just moved on and that's why part of the reason why I have such admiration for him.
I also have to give a disclaimer because whenever I talk about Nassim Taleb, as much as I like his work, he got covered. Completely wrong. He got everything wrong on COVID and we haven't heard much from him since, have we? No, I think, I think there's a degree. Well, he blocked me. What's that? He blocked me. I wanted to talk to you. As well. Yeah, for a fairly, fairly innocuous question. But the second presentation was
that was even more interesting. So another person who I greatly admire is is Leon Lowe, who established the the Free Market Foundation in South Africa some 40 or 50 years ago. He also was a courageously independent voice during the the the COVID phenomenon. I was invited to address the 40th annual libertarian seminar Lib SIM in Cape Town alongside some luminaries. I mean, Rand Paul was addressing the audience and Thomas Massie was there, you know, physically
present, also speaking. I had a delightful dinner with him, by the way. But what a wonderful man. And I, I was asked to, you know, to speak about how to, how to sort of catch the lives of mainstream media or what to do about mainstream media nonsense or something. I can't remember the actual title, but I decided to give it
a no holds barred kind of talk. And I went in informing the audience about Operation Gladio. You know, this, this whole business of the, the, the Americans having left 10,000 or something or more. Maybe there's even 20,000. It's the largest. Did you know it's the largest covert operation in history? The largest covert operation in history and and possibly the largest terrorist operation in
history and longest anyway. So they leave these operatives in Europe and proceed to create a series of destabilization and terror events, including assassinations of sitting presidents or a sitting president over the course of some 42 years before the before the organization is sort of altered in courts and the media. And George Bush senior, the former head of the CIA, which supervened over Operation Gladio, It was basically forced onto the stage to at least to
nominally shut it down. By which time of course, the entire thing was operate, was still operating under the guise of these NGOs like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy. So they really had no need for a formal CIA structure, an illegal CIA structure. But I went on from Operation Gladio to then discuss the phenomenon of the colour revolution and, and, and its frequency and how these are propagated around the world.
And I really gave it horns. Now, I, I would have expected three years ago for people in that kind of audience to completely switch off. Yeah, conspiracy theorists, blah, blah, blah, all those stupid kind of comments, you know, but not only did they not turn off, but, but in the audience vote for best speaker, I won hands down. So, so I was, and I was completely taken aback.
I, I, I decided that I didn't care and I was going to actually get up there and just go, go for it and expecting a little bit of complaint and retribution and whatever. But what I got was the opposite. The audience loved it, lapped it up and spoke to me in detail afterwards. Wanted to understand more about kind of revolutions and how they articulated. Do you think we've had one in South Africa? Do we have S Africans who sit on some of these committees, you know, like the Ned in South
Africa and so on? So, and and that was a pleasant surprise for me in the, in the, in the sort of the, the days after the seminar, I ended up having an informal dinner party at my house with some of the other speakers and, and with Leon. No, who who, by the way, has just. Yeah. Thanks for the invite, Nick. Thanks. Yeah, just completed his his his biography working with is it Tom Cohen or Tim Cohen? And, and, and I've just started reading that. It's a good read.
He has had a very interesting life and met very interesting people along the way. Yeah. So I'd recommend that. So let me tell you something about I noticed something very funny for the first time. I mean, I, I sort of consider myself to have made it a a bit of a sort of sideline activity to disabuse people of libertarianism. And I say that somewhat tongue
in cheek. But what I noticed at this seminar is if you tell, tell, tell some a libertarian that you are a libertarian, it'll take them 5 minutes to for them to tell you that you're not a real libertarian. Yes. And, and, and if you tell them that you're not a libertarian, it'll take them 5 minutes before they tell you you actually are one. So it's it's a very amusing thing, But but yes, I mean, libertarians for the most part were a complete no show in in
COVID skepticism. Yeah. Shocked they all got ejected like every libertarian self-described libertarian I know got a vaccine. I know it's completely, completely stupid and, and, and also just missed the idea. This was the ultimate sort of authoritarian surveillance state move, erosion of civil liberties and and independence and the the sovereign individual, you know, it's never come bigger than this on such a scale. And there so many of them just capitulated, went alone.
It's the power of fear, Jim. It's the power of fear. Yes, I had a conversation with Libertarian. I won't mention his name because both you and I know him and he always talks about going against the state and, you know, not trusting the government. But he got injected. And I said I said to him, but that's the ultimate trust in the government because it was the government that told you that there was this there was this deadly pandemic. Yeah. What did he say?
Well, it's it's the typical. Well, it's about choice. So yeah, you see, that's the argument that that I think fails miserably. Yeah, No, you needed to spot the intrusion and fight it on all fronts and not say I'm going to selectively participate. I mean, that's. Absolutely. Because that's, but that's the point. That's that's what you've been talking about is, is propagandizing. So in other words, you think you're making a choice, but you actually aren't. Yeah, yeah.
Also, recently I've I've noticed at long last there seems to be more and more people coming around to the idea not merely that we should have all been skeptical about the the COVID phenomenon, but but coming around to the idea that there was in fact no pandemic of any sort whatsoever. I have for many years now, since October 2020, felt rather alone in in holding that view that there was no pandemic at all.
But and and over the next, I would say four years, the rate at which people adhere to that view join joining the minority who who hold it was was painfully slow. But what I've noticed in the last couple of months is a much greater willingness among let's just say more normally people to to entertain the perspective. And I think that's that signals something. I think it's very important. But it goes so much further than that though. I mean, COVID was a placeholder sustainable development.
That's it, that everything falls under that category. I. I would say sustainable development supervenes of pandemics and climate. The the thing about the Sustainable development goals is is, you know, did on on as discreet goals one at a time. More of the goal is probably something that almost everybody would sign up to because they're they're quite aridine bland
statements. But the, the problem of bestowing upon a highly centralized grouping of people like the United Nations and the people who supervene over them, the ability to decide how you would go about satisfying this panoply of, of feel good ambitions is that and, and, and particularly when you frame those ambitions with absolutely no attempt to provide a, a, a framework of trade off and with no attempt to prove that those are exhaustive ambitions, that
there shouldn't be any other ambitions in life. So you provide a powerful group of people with this list, no basis for trade off and no obligation to consider where there aren't other things that we should value is that they can then basically do whatever the hell they want. And they do. And what they want is not those goals. What they want is control. And, and this ultimate sort of technocratic surveillance state. They've been aiming for it for more than 100 years.
And so, and, and what they will do is couch every policy statement and determination in the wordings or of of one or another of these strategic development goals. And that provides the ethical justification for what they're doing. And so the whole framework becomes essentially evil. But I, I, I hold people in absolute contempt who wear that little SDG lapel badge.
I mean, this is you. You are confessing to, you know, a pathological level of stupidity and a complete void when it comes to ethical nuance when you wear that lapel. Bill Gates a few years ago actually said in an interview the four major invisible enemies of humanity. I mean, he said. He said it like this are climate change, pandemics, AI and nuclear war. OK. Yeah, I want to come.
You raise a good point. I want to come back to it, but it just struck me that I want to highlight as a sort of a structural play that's rolled out in several domains. So, so I pointed to the the SDGS lacking a coherent trade off framework. And you see you have this mult, this complex of goals and, and nowhere to, to say which, which is more important than the next. And, and no way to determine
whether it's exhaustive. If you move over into the corporate world, a construct that I've railed against for many years is that of stakeholder capitalism. And the idea there is that you can't manage a company for its owners. No, there are other
stakeholders. You need to take them into account quietly ignoring the fact that in order to increase the value of a company, you need to look at a look after a multitude of stakeholders, you know, so for example, if you're, if you want to increase the value of the company, one important way of doing so is to increase the company's revenues. Well, you can't increase its revenues and there's there more people out there who want its products.
And that means you're satisfying you, you have a, you know, an objective of satisfying a growing number of customers along the way. And so, so there's this construct called stakeholder capitalism. And it too now poses that that you need to take into consideration multiple stakeholders. But once again, it does so while providing no basis for trading off the interests of 1 stakeholder versus another and no basis for determining whether you've got an exhaustive list of
stakeholders. So you have the same story again and then another one in the corporate world, ESG, which which stands for what's it environmental, social and governance reporting as opposed to just financial reporting. You must now report under these other categories. But once again, it's it's now, you know, increasing the number of objective functions, but not telling you how many brownie points for environment you must trade or for how many financial
points. Another 1D EI. Oh no, we, we need to show that as a corporate citizen, we are attending to DEI on ADEI scorecard. And what's that? Diversity, equity and and inclusivity. OK, but once again, so we got all these objectives, but exactly how many white lesbian HR managers should I trade off for black male mine workers? You know what, what, what is the framework?
What's actually being said here? And, and so it's a manatee of our times that we allow people to insert these measurement frameworks and and and objective functions all over the place whilst providing no coherent framework for trading them off. I believe if you forced them to do that, then the ludicrous nature of these structures would become rapidly apparent and they'd be far less destructive than they are. Invisible enemies is a, is a, is a very old theme.
You know, it it it's of course he states it a little bit strongly because whenever another person is being othered or scapegoated in any kind of way, you're actually creating an invisible enemy because the other in process involves creating a false image of that that person or grouping of people. So you create an enemy that doesn't exist. So, and I think people do that all the time when they're trying to motivate populations to do things that are not in fact in their best interests.
But we saw when in 1972 or 90, sorry, 1972 or 74, I'm not sure, Club of Rome document where they where they say, look, we came across this idea of sort of using invisible threats because creating real threats is too expensive and practically difficult. So what we'll do is we'll focus on invisible threats. And two very good invisible threats are the threat of a deadly pathogen and the effect of a change in the weather. So, so the, the scam has its
roots there. And it's, it's, it's all very transparent. When you go back 50 years and read all this, what the origins of the the supposed climate crisis, where it's impossible not to conclude that all the work that's ever been done on the greenhouse effect or whatever they want to call it is, is complete fraud. But it does make you question then if any of those enemies which are invisible are in fact real.
Exactly. I mean, but, but the process of othering is, is an older one and, and, and that has very tangible effects. And I just see all the time I'm, I've been dragged onto a number of, you know, social media boards, WhatsApp groups and that kind of thing.
And the one group, there's this woman who was quite transparent in terms of her, well, quite perceptive in her ability to see through the COVID thing, but seems to have fallen for every single scam since, you know, she's very quick to post all the terrible things that these Muslims do. You know, they're, they're so, they're so cruel and they, they hate women and they're this, this and the next thing.
And whilst they must be there, there, there is clearly an element of truth in underlying these kind of othering tactics. The image that they foster is one that's completely divorced from the reality. Yeah. And I'm not somebody who is an advocate of multi ethnicity or what, what is it called diversity on as as defined by the work powers that be? I I think it's actually a, a very dangerous thing. It's something you want to try and avoid, but it's not because I have animosity towards other
groups. I just recognize there are differences. I think that from a evolutionary perspective, it's extremely healthy to have different groups of people believing, well, animals. Do it. Animals do it naturally. Yeah. So I want there to be other religions and I want there to be other political perspectives and other cultural modes and other languages and other value systems. I think that's healthy.
It's it, it, it creates anti fragility in the human population overall, but it's just very sad to see how easily manipulated people are because this kind of othering is not organic. There's a there's an effort, you know, at at a certain level in a power structure, there's an effort to create polarization amongst the the laptop classes, for example, in order to distract their attention from the evil plans that are under way at their behest. And it's horrible to see it being effective.
I mentioned colour revolutions earlier on. OK, now I recently I was listening to podcast. I don't know if you've come across EM Burlingham. He was on my show. Oh, was he OK? Well, then I knew that James Denningpole had interviewed him. But, but, but he raised an interesting point.
He, he said that he, he thought and, and I, I'll apologise in advance if I paraphrase him incorrectly, but he thought that the CCC PS objective in asserting centralized control in certain domains was very likely wrapped up in their desire to avoid a color revolution. Because this is what the Anglo American establishment does it it basically undermines every single potential power block on earth by periodically conducting
color revolutions. And the the the Chinese know that that's the case and that they have to set up their country to avoid that at all costs. And in order to do that, they need an element of control of information flow over narratives of people movement. And in order to wage a relentless war against the would be color revolutionaries. And to an extent, Russia has had
to do the same. And, and that raises the question of, well, OK, so the fight against the, the the Anglo American establishment actually forces you into a political structure that has authoritarian elements, which the Anglo American establishment then turns against you by calling you authoritarian, by calling you draconian, by accusing you of wig your genocides, communism, whatever.
I mean, it's actually very difficult to to see communism in China. It's impossible to see it and and people need to also go to Xinjiang, for example, to understand the the political issue. I mean that province, without getting into the discussion about that, but that province borders Afghanistan, Pakistan and a bunch of other areas that are targeted. Silk Road, Yes. Right. Yes, but people don't understand you once you. Go to Urumqi. Yes, a few times.
The grads are all study. Fascinating place. Delicious food, I'll tell you that. I believe so. Very. So, yeah. Very, very, very nice food. Yeah, but but you know, there I I think the the gap between Western perceptions and and and reality on the ground seems to me to be vast. I mean, you used the word earlier framework and I think this is really, really important. I was chatting to Zoe Harcombe, funny enough. Yeah, she's great.
Yeah. We were just having a chit chat the other day and and she was asking me about do I think that they are individuals who are in these positions of power or is it actually something bigger than that? And I, and I said, I think it's something bigger than that. It's frameworks. It like it doesn't matter if Klaus Schwab steps down from the World Economic Forum. It doesn't matter if you've all Harare goes and does something else with his life. The framework still exists.
Yes, bad. They're bad meme clusters is the way I like to think of them. They're sort of, yeah, I mean, they do, they do attain the level of highly sophisticated and complex frameworks. And you can see these written down and and agglomerating over time. And they are consistent families that are involved, but tends not to go beyond, you know, 456 in the extreme generations.
So there's some continuity. I sometimes wonder what they put in the Rothschild drink, drinking water that that such truly terrible ideas and ethical values persist with such fidelity over so many generations. But, and you can say the same for the Rockefellers. But, but in general, I mean by the time you get to the 4th generation, you are dealing with an idiot. You know, the idiot grandson or great grandson comes to the fore and messes everything up. That's that's a pretty reliable
pattern. But but I mean just sorry on this, someone said to me the other day, but why is nobody going after Fauci? But Fauci is just a he's just a pawn on on the chess. Board, it's just. A waste of time. He didn't. He didn't actually. I mean, I'm not defending Fauci. He's he, he was involved in the HIV scam in the 80s, but he didn't actually do anything during COVID. He just told people to wear mosques. And take shots. Yeah. No, I'd agree with that. I mean, he's just a bit player.
Nasty piece of work to be sure. But everybody who thinks that, oh, the important thing here is to prosecute to Fauci, you know, and if you did, because he's the kingpin and he organised all of this, I mean, that's such an immature view because it's not even close to the truth. And what would you be achieving? And Nuremberg trials must do Nuremberg trials. You know it. Yeah. It's a bit comical really. But I've lost the the track here where I know you were talking about it.
It's not so much that there's the same people or continuity of families or an organization over time as, as it is about a framework. And I said maybe even like something less than that, like a meme cluster. Yes, I, I think that's the case. And, and so the, there's almost like you, you could call it another, another way of referencing it would be to call it an ideological battle. You know, the case for the sovereign individual versus the case for feudalism or a kind of collectivism.
And, and I, I think that that that's, that's probably a more useful way of, of, of looking at things. It, it sometimes comes down to psychological features as well. I was engaged in a discussion with an economist the other day. And what it's often just absolutely annoys me and, and deflates me about economists is that the field tends to attract these, these very systematized thinkers, linear thinkers.
And, and so they, they want to believe that, you know, if they were in charge, it would be very easy to get the country to full employment or to increase living standards or something like this, Because all you have to do is just put more resources behind this project and, you know, put more money there and, and build this bigger or, or, or, or employ these people in the government sector. And then they would be able to work in the hospitals and everybody would be able to get
healthcare. And that would create a circular flow and the economy would grow and it would flourish. They talk about these systems as if they're sort of just going to be implemented by Fiat. And in the conversation with him, I, I, I said to him, you know, it, it's, that is not just wrong, it's, it's not even wrong. It's so far from reality. I said, I describe to him what happens when I invest in a business and that business does well and it grows 100%. So it double s in size.
Well, when it double s in size, it delivers to me the most complex set of, of problems that need to be resolved by painstaking and complex structural adjustment. You have to repurpose the organization. And I, I don't really like that term repurpose because you, you have to redesign the organization in such fundamental ways. And the process of implementing that new design is so perilous, economically perilous, and that it takes decades to learn how to do that properly.
And that's just at the level of one fairly small company that you're trying to take from $100 million of revenue to $250 million of revenue or whatever. That process is astonishingly different. And so I, I, I, I said the, I said to the guy, you know, look, you can't just scale institutions. You can't just take a small institution and keep all its structures and hierarchies the same and blow it up, you know, expand it.
That will lead to disaster. So, so organizational structure both in economics and in commerce and indeed in in politics is not scale invariant. You've got to change the nature
of the organization as it grows. Decentralization becomes a more important thing and a harder and harder thing to deal with as organizational scale increases because you want to make sure that decisions are being made on the periphery and as close to the, the relevant information as possible by people who are understanding that aerial, that segment of your target market. And, and so and that challenge is huge.
It's very hard. And, and what invariably happens is, is that despite gallant efforts to, to bring, to bear such decentralization and subsidiarity in organizational design, companies invariably fail along the way. And you end up with this situation where almost no innovation takes place at large corporations.
You know, they're taking the, the my observation to an extreme level or, or, or they're there's, they're suffering from what I'm observing at an extreme level in the sense that they're, they're trying to radically centralized things on a global level and to cast a single framework that's assessed at a central location. All the trade-offs are determined at a central location where all the ethical frameworks are set and globalized and universalized.
As I've always said, very consistently said that that aspiration is destined for failure. It is doomed before they're out of the starting blocks and it's not solved by AI or data availability or speed of processing information or anything like that. It's a doomed project. It's. Irony, though, is that it keeps going.
Yes, because there's always there's a ready supply of linear thinking idiots, systematizers, people who have no appreciation for complexity or from this, this very fundamental problem that optimal organizational design is scale variant. As you change scale, what's optimal changes? And part of that is very, very much based on modeling, isn't it? Are you spoken about this in the past? And this is precisely how how the climate change scan works and virology. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah.
And the models have limited value. You know, when if you're building a bridge, you would be quite nice to have a little bit of a model of load bearing and that kind of thing. You know you'd want to have some of that if you're. Yeah, but you can see the results. So in other words, if your if your model complex. Yeah, but as soon as you get up to more complex phenomena, modelling is completely useless.
And and in fact, it's dangerous because it gives people overly simplistic picture of how things are and and they start making decisions as if they're operating in a simple framework. And the COVID models were a wonderful thing. You know, there's, they're, those are extremely simple models with like 3 parameters, you know, to model this whole complex scenario. And, and I think all we got to do is control the rate of infection, you know, and then we
got to do that by locking down. Well, what an absurdity, you know, so, so too with the climate models. I mean, anybody, I, I, I think you should also like, what if you're going to be a climate scientist, you should all, it should almost automatically be a fireable defense offense. If you, if you build a model, because you just, you have no
understanding for your field. If you think you can model the climate usefully, it, you know, looking for statistical regularities and so on is not the same thing as building a model. Noticing that I don't know some form of solar proximity or solar flares or whatever affects the climate is that's a good statistical regularity to observe and then you try and understand there was one of the variables in the system and is it dominant. I don't know what conditions is it dominant and so on.
And yeah, that that well that's useful. OK, but basically modeling in in the face of complexity is a is a fool's undertaking. The problem is that this actually applies to a much broader category, because modeling is 1. Is is is an instance of explanation, you know, So within the broad, the very broad category explanations of how reality works, one subset is a mathematical model. Yeah. But the problem we're pointing to here is general to
explanations. When faced with complexity, explanations are likely to be hard to come by. And our response to that is not to give up, but to have the humility to recognize that we must address complexity not by way of grand models and grand explanations, but by way of systematically trialling systematic trial and error, by trying things on the modern margin with no grand explanation for whether they'll work or not. Just try something. And does it seem to improve or not?
And of course, that's harder to do than than than it is to say. And and there's still a lot of danger because something might appear to work in the short term but be a disaster in the long term. And how long is the long term? So but but but yeah. Would you say that a lot of medicine or pharmaceutical products are based on modeling? I'm thinking of of of prophylactic type type stuff like vaccination. They, they might have a model
for the benefits. I mean, you get these crazy claims that vaccine, vaccines have saved 140 million lives or whatever. It is absolutely absurd. Again, people should be fired for attempting to calculate that
number. But no, it's not so much based on modelling, it's based on an explanation, which is that if you introduce the body to a pathogen or part of a pathogen or a tenuated pathogen, that it learns how to respond to the pathogen in a Safeway. OK, not an entirely stupid proposition, but one which has never been proven and I I increasingly suspect it's because the immune system doesn't function as described and and pathogens by and large
don't function as described, so that the whole intellectual construct is actually due due for defenestration. So it's definitely based on an explanation, not not a model. But but why were you asking that question? Why is that of interest to you? The COVID era was driven by models. Who was the guy? The. Main Yeah, yeah, we go. Horrible little man. No. Yeah, a stunted intellect as well. I mean, he's stupid. They are stupid. You know, and then you had, and then you had Christian Drosten
with the peace out protocols. Yeah, which which were passed very, very quickly by The Who. Yeah. So that that the yeah, declared them the gold standard and yeah. And yeah, we are now we now we are. We're having impossible conversations. I've been trolling 2 gentlemen on Twitter for the last two weeks. Ian Copeland, PHDI think you might know who he is? Let. Me guess. Neil Stone and Neil Stone.
Two obvious Pharmaceutical industry Schulz, neither of them very bright and and but just so naked in there consistent rolling out of these shibboleths of the pharmaceutical edifice. So you would argue that vaccines are not really based on on modelling, because remember, they don't use double-blind trials. No, no, I mean that that they do definitely, as I said, try to model the benefits of vaccines. But no, I, I think they're based on a very bad idea. You know this this sort of notion.
No, actually, they're genius. They're genius because you can't ever prove your argument. What do you mean you can't? Say you, you can't say I was harmed by a vaccine. You can't ever actually say it because it's, it's a prophylactic. It's it's given to you years in advance. Well, I mean, some people drop dead the moment they receive a vaccine. And it's an interesting question about what about the vaccine is harming them. Yeah, I mean, I'll, I'll OK,
I'll share, share my thoughts. To the extent that we have an immune system and and pathogens are relevant with respect to our health, I think it's important to understand that the idea of injecting the vaccine into the blood is, is a is a bad one. OK. So that that's just that whole category of injected vaccines is, is a stupid idea, even conditioning on there being an immune system and there being
pathogens. But over and above that, I think the understanding of the immune system and and what it what it actually is doing, there's a lot of scrutiny. I think, I think what's often interpreted as kind of a system for dealing with non self elements is is is would be better understood as a system for dealing with toxins, which
which may be self or non self. I mean, the idea of toxicity is is is is an important one to understand you because every single substance that you can consume or inject is toxic at some dose. There's a, there's a notion of a, a thing called the median fatal dose, median lethal dose, MLDI think. And so something like coffee, for example, espresso has a, a median lethal dose of about a litre. So if you have 40 shots of the, of espresso, you've got a 50% chance of dying.
I, I forget how many liters of water is fatal, but you can definitely drink fresh water, fresh water until you die and you'll die quite quickly. You're from a condition called hypernatremia. So everything is toxic at a certain dose and a lot of the systems in the body are designed to maintain an equilibrium of one sort or another. So the body is full of systems that are dealing with excess or,
or, or deficiency. And I think it, it strikes me often that what's described as a system of dealing with non self is, is is maybe more tangled up with the system of dealing with disequilibrium. And there also this notion of pathogens as being something foreign, something outside the body that that comes in and then causes a disequilibrium of some sort. I think that's also ought to be suspended or, or or not taken as strongly or as heavily.
I think a lot of these observed structures, bacteria and and the like, are in our systems all the time. And when the, the system goes into this equilibrium for a 'cause that has nothing to do with this, this structure, then what happens is that the structure proliferates and people falsely attribute to it causality in the, this equilibrium when they actually are consequential to it.
So I, I think both the idea of immunology and the idea of pathology really require a great deal of, of scrutiny and, and we should be taking a, a real white board approach to I, I, I would even advocate for just just for the time being, suspend the term immune system. Yeah, well, I mean, it's effectively just white blood cells. Well, it's, it's, it's a bit of different types of cells, yeah. I remember back. In the apparatus.
Yes. Well, I remember in 2021 when I started thinking about this whole thing. Towards the end of 2020, I remember asking my wife, do you think this, any of this is real? You know, And, and then I, and then I came across a wonderful book written by Ethel Hume called Beisha Pasteur or Beishamp. And it was about the two contemporaries, Louis Pasteur and, and, and Tony Beishamp. And Beishamp was effectively
arguing what you've just said. And that was already in the 1800s, but then the Pharmaceutical industry basically shut him down and went with the whole Pasteur thing, which is where we are now. Yes, no. And if you look at Chinese medicine, you know that it's, it's old. I mean, it's, it's central theme. Is it, it, it emphasizes equilibrium, you know, and, and is trying to and, and also medieval medicine, you know, the balance of the humors.
That was the, the, the temperaments of the humors. You know, what was it? Cholera, spleen, bile, and I'm forgetting one now. Melancholia, I think it was. But yeah, well, the the idea in that medicine, that primitive medicine was that that you needed to keep these in balance, the full temperaments. Yes, but that makes so much sense. And The thing is, is that it makes me realize also that we have an impoverished understanding of health 1000 years ago.
I, I don't think, I mean the, the, the, the popular claim is people didn't live past age 30. I think that's probably largely bunk. That's probably because of wars and other things. But health wise they would have been very healthy because they didn't, they didn't even have sugar. I mean, you would think then chronologically today we should be immensely healthy. Nick. Yes, well, I guess so.
One of the things that happened was in medieval in later Europe, when they've now the, the, the one of the things that happened is the diversity of the diets dropped a lot because they, you know, they were typically have a dominant crop or a handful of dominant crops. So they were eating a lot of grains. Diet was not diverse. I'm a big fan of diversity in diet, right? But, and, and you had these conditions like consumption, tuberculosis. Now that's an example of
something. I, I, I've heard it said by a South African, a well to do South African pathologist that he thought that it was probably the case that every single South African corpse had at least a small tubercular lesion on the lungs. So everybody has, you know, asymptomatic tuberculosis in essence, but that of course, so only a minority of people actually succumb to the disease or, or, or, or develop the disease.
And, and that's a really is, that really is a, a, a kind of combination of the terrain and, and the, the pastor's germ theory, where, where the, the germ is there. But it, it, the germ is a thing, but it, it plays almost no role in the causal structure. You need a person who's malnourished, who doesn't have a, a diverse diet.
I never used the term balanced diet because that's aligned with the whole USDA framework of food pyramid that's based on carbohydrates, which is a very, very bad thing. But, you know, so people who have this UN UN diverse diet end up with systems that are on disequilibrium and then the tubercular lesion grows. My daughter was killed by one of these things, a bacterium called Klebsiella pneumonia, which is often referred to as a hospital super bug.
It's when people die from the infections, from this this thing, they often blame nosocomial infection, or in other words, they're blaming the hospital for poor infection control practices. But Klebsian and pneumonia apparently exists in the digestive tracts of nearly all people. So what's happening is there's there's some instance of leaky gut is the, is the distal equilibrium that led my daughter to be in the hospital in the first place or the surgery that you went through.
Did that cause something that is meant to be on the immunological outside, which means inside your digestive tract. That's that that from an immunological point of view is
outside your body. So if you've got something in your digestive tract going onto the inside that that that's might that's caused by this other discontinuity or this disequilibrium and then that that bacterium proliferates in a way that's hard to control and is ultimately one of the part of the causal structure of the the death. So. So I think these things are bound. The Pharmaceutical industry likes to reduce complexity to a single cause with a single
response and a single solution. Yeah, yeah, that's right. It's, it's a simplistic model. Again, that's attraction for the simple narrative. Yeah. So you picked up a virus, that's why you got flu. Take the shot. Yeah, but but the important thing is, you know, people say, oh, you know, you're going to get tuberculosis if somebody coughs on you.
No, I think you could be the Princess Diana of tuberculosis patients and, you know, hugging every single one of them and walking around day on a daily basis with TB, TB sufferers. And if you've got a normal diet and are healthy, you have absolutely no elevated risk at all. I know they can cough on you all day. I think that's the reality. Whereas the the picture that's presented is no. Well, there's this pathogen and you've got to try and avoid getting it.
Just quickly, you mentioned healthy. So I said the other day to somebody, if your system is healthy then you won't get sick. I mean that that seems to be the correct dichotomy. And then he said almost. By definition, right? But then he said, OK, then why don't we live forever? Yeah, I mean, that's a whole different subject that's almost a mechanical subject or a, or at least a sort of biochemical subject. There's this phenomenon of programmed cell death,
apoptosis. It's quite hard to understand. And it's a, you know, I don't for a minute believe that it's been fully understood. I mean, I've seen explanations for how apoptosis works that include quantum mechanics, which, you know, it's, it's quite hairy. But apoptosis or programmed cell death is, is, is this phenomenon that we do run into. And it happens, by the way, in a cascading fashion. Once, once apoptosis hits a certain threshold in the body, it cascades into the rest of the
body. So you, you, you think people die of like sort of one organ failure. But actually what happens is the body starts collectively dying and other organs start dying and, and the whole system shuts down in this this cascade of program cell death or apoptosis. And that describes death in normal circumstances. So yeah, I mean it and it presents, as far as I understand
it, a hard limit. So all of these loony billionaires who are trying various life extension methods and so on, and who believe that they kind of survive long enough to upload their brains and the computers are living a
completely delusional lie. But but, and, and I think there's a hard limit and it's hitting humans at around the age of 120. And at that point, cells that don't get replaced by the body and probably can't plausibly be replaced turn off and that's it. OK, so we are out of time, but I just want to point out Nick, I am a fan of germ theory. A few bottle of wine you've got and laughter that's really on top that. It's been a wonderful chat job.
Thanks very much and I hope you have a wonderful festive season and Merry Christmas to all the viewers out there. I'm sorry if we rambled a bit, but I enjoyed the conversation. Thanks a lot. We were just spit morning. But before you go, Nick, how can my audience follow you? You can follow me on the most heavily shadow band platform that is X. My handle is Nick Hudson, CT and I've got a sub stack that I'm threatening to crank up over the Christmas holidays. Who knows?
Yeah, that's about it.