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.