Drugs, Prometheus, and Ideological Justifications for Control

okay so like Mark was just talking about like how like you know there's that that ritual of like sitting down in a bar after a long ass day's work you know ordering a drink lighting up a smoke and you know the place just R of course right but like you know there was this like whole social ritual around that kind of thing which is like lost now you know um because you know it's bad for you you shouldn't do it so try to that from our society we've identified a source of physical risk and have taken an epidemiological approach to eliminating that because the only important thing is the is the the physical risk right um and then like there's a and and and excluding excluding of course purchasing overpriced uh cocktails which is not a risk which we should talk about as well like the idea that like say we're stripping away at a ritual that we believe that is in some way or we you know that that's somewhere he made another interesting point too right which was like you know you walk by uh playgrounds these days and there's way less playground equipment if there even is a playground anymore and you know that's you know we know why that's like the insurance industry uh being like Oh like someone could chip their tooth if they fall from that slide or something right as well as like you know helicopter parent types who are like you know very highly overprotective but to me this seems like to come from like a similar kind of place right where there's this kind of like bi ological physical risk which has been identified as unacceptable and as a result like um a a whole classification of human activity is simply uh simply removed no matter of you know how deeply rooted it is culturally or and and without any reference to the disruptive effects it will have on human psychology on Society on on on you know it's like okay so there are some biological risks here but wait are there are there benefits that Society leaks from that that custom or practice or activity um that you that you overlook by with this sort of exclusive focus on um on biological risk so and like Grant he were talking like alcohol it's not really like any safe amount of alcohol like you know uh and like yeah I tend to agree with that actually I mean I find even one drink like I I I can't write you know if I have like one drink like that's it like I can't okay I did drunk I I did write drunk once but like for the most part I find it shuts things down and you at the same time you're like the anti you're like the anti- Hemingway know yeah exactly exactly uh but at the same time like the the the the social benefits to drinking I think make it worth make it worthwhile to tolerate a certain amount of a biolog iCal toxicity that comes with it that's what that's what melchris writes about in one of his appendices in matter with things right like uh Grant you might Grant do you have that book or have you ever checked it out do you have like an ebook copy or anything I've just read what you guys have written about I think I I think I might have uh I might be able to send you that appendix I think I took pictures of it because it's all on alcohol he he just kind of goes on this tangent about how he he was interested in these uh in all this stuff all the health studies on alcohol and this is kind of like epidemiological stuff and like high level like looking at heart disease and and um you know kind of stuff of the liver and liver cancer and yeah and so so he's so he he's one of those guys um one of those kind of obsessive academic types when when he's interested in something he'll read everything on it and so he's like I looked at all the literature and I can't find anything like anything consistent that shows that any of this stuff is legit and he goes into what John was just saying about the social benefit too he's like well and we're more that uh there's there's a ritual involved where you like in his in his culture because he's uh he's Scottish and and is lived in like the the UK whole life well I don't know if it's if his whole life but the whole thing about going to the pub with your friends you it's not necessarily to go get drunk but it's a social thing and that um it's been a while since I've read it but I think he's kind of making a point that by By ignoring that social aspect that's actually um has arguably health benefits that those May in fact offset the risks of of that are commonly commonly talked about by public health authorities and um and they they like they like reduce humans to like what aonan called like bare life right like you're just this biological uh assemblage of cells in a box and the only relevant inputs are you know food air water um and the the the social aspect doesn't really come into it the psychological the spiritual like none of it right so to take that the Pug like you can't it's impossible they're all technocrats at a certain level actually it's the of planning the terrifying thing actually I think is that you probably can measure it in some ways right like I could totally see the technocrats eventually being like Oh like you know if uh our if our yeast humans spend 1.62 hours uh every 3 days in the pub conversing with their fellow yeast humans it improves their productivity by 62% overall therefore it's like again it's the the the single Factor factoral like graphing of basically everything and it's and minus and minus the ritual and I think the ritual is really the the the the the key angle of attack here right because like if we talk about the ritual I I we started it and I said like well yeah a long day of work I walk into a bar it's it's a bar where you know I'm Norm everybody knows my name I know everybody else's name for the most part it's the watering hole you go in you lay it up a smoke you order a drink and then you look around and then you see what who else is there and like and and you're interacting with them in multiple ways um there's a girl she has a cigarette you light her cigarette you know what I mean uh there there there are a multitude of like smaller rituals contained inside of these larger rituals that lead to that intersect with mating rituals that intersect with um basically The Business of Being Human for the most part like then the busyness of being human is essentially like that we connect con we we Forge and find new connections and we we we fuse the familiar to the new and like in in places like that and experiences like that which are heightened experiences because we're talking about you know substances that alter our perception in a number of ways even if it's just booze and cigarettes there are there there are ways in which we we we we transcend like what is kind of the mundanity of the world the the the the Ho Hum business of Labor of of just sort of just grinding through a day in order to secure whatever small you know possessions we have and it's just kind of like so that that the attacks like in that sense like do seem like spiritual attacks you know it's like yes it's it's all grounded in liability and insurance but at the same time it's like grinding off of all of those rougher edges of surprise and uniqueness like in a way gradually correct bows us into like what John was describing this this base existence like where it's just like okay how can I preserve all of the the current atoms in my body like in in basically the same state for I don't know X number of years or X number of decades and like that's not a human life I I'd say that's not even really a goldfish life I think that you know you said something about rough edges and for me that's that's kind of like the the key Point here like this this kind of rawness and and roughness that I think is associated with things like smoking um especially you know it has something like Primal so uh a sort of shared thing and it's you know and back in the days even nonsmokers used to have ashtrays at home right when because when they had guests you know it was just the polite thing to do to give them an an ashtray so even they had this kind of like shared experience right I mean people can't imagine that anymore um but and it's like the same story we see everywhere basically like I was thinking about that you know when this whole like gas stove discussion was on right I you would think like I mean like a gas stop I mean who would have something against a gas stop right I mean I think it's it goes beyond this the safety Obsession or although there's part of it it's just you know like they to those people it's like the worst they can't allow it to that somebody actually has fire in their house you know like it's just just which is such in itself yeah no totally sort of rawness right this this and for to me like the you know the smoking stuff it's just very much associated with with that you see bands on like wood fires as well fireplaces wood stoves um you know the necessity to get a permit if you want to have like a bonfire for for example and like that is kind of antihuman in a strong way Spirit right of the times I mean just to have the idea to have a fire in your H in your home this is just like a middle finger to like this entire like technocratic thing right it's just the it's it's really interesting yeah it's the it's the it's the evil gods that bound Prometheus to some degree right like like if you want to get Mythic about it like it's just sort of like the idea F fire you have fire you say you're burning fires in your house house like how dare you and it says you mean the thing that that that made us Thrive that got us through the ice age like that thing the thing that and there's this old Association too between like fire and like ancestor Cults um you know where you would like honor the ancestors by having this like little Eternal Flame going in the corner of your house for instance and that was an old old Indo-European custom uh and very old associations between the Fire and Fire and the sacred uh higher existence and so on um [ __ ] even birthday candles I mean like it's it's not in the US not yet I can see the birth of LED candles where like you know they have sensors equipped with them and the child blows on them and the sensors pick up the breath and we used to have like real candles on the Christmas tree and I mean we we still do it um but uh it's like it's become a rarity now Heather H had a article she did about you know the the light spectrum and uh I guess what's produced by fire and incandescent bulbs and you know some portion of of the nonvisible light spectrum that penetrates you know basically into our brains um that it seems like our body needs and I lack the scientific vocabulary to explain it better but it's uh from Guess natural selection it's dark inside your head as the name of the article but she talks about that and like how the LED and fluorescents don't produce that same light right you know and so it's like it has an effect on our mental States you know well yeah and it feels very weird and artificial and things even look strange like under fluorescent lights you know it's like you people just look kind of sickly you know um it's just yeah uh it's I the thing that seems to unify all of this together to me is like this is just sort of how I look at it this like you sort of have people out there who you know they'll get something into their heads some idea uh about like X is bad for you because X is dangerous right and they'll start out by saying hey everyone like here's this bad thing of an X that we found out because we have studies um and then you know some people will look at that and they'll be like oh I hadn't realized that I don't want bad thing to happen to me so I will stop doing X but then a lot of other people are kind of like they're kind of like oh interesting good to know don't care because there's reasons I like doing X you know you know whether X is like drinking too much on a Friday night or going Basse jumping or you know whatever it happens to be um and then that first group gets really cross how dare you not listen to us we told you X's bad thing and you keep doing X so then that's when the government gets involved and the pressure campaign starts and so on because like it's it's the imperative is that like you know you think though that they used that like that are those people really in the driver's seat like are they it's kind of like you have this maternal desire to eliminate risk and you you're said John about uh safety Last is it says it all perfectly like the the obvious viously they're a big force behind it but it's like are are they kind of being used or weaponized by someone else it's like hey their this maternal instinct is useful and so let's promote their fears in this area because you compare this with other things that you know I mean the Cavalier attitude toward World War II for example policy or the violent crime in the cities you know with these I mean the leftist sort of policies towards that or the open borders these like that where there's obvious risks that people see and you you know and probably majority of people would not want something to be done about and yet it's like just ignored whereas these other things like oh the risk of gas fire in your gas fire on your like we can't have there's actually there's actually a really interesting Dynamic there isn't there I mean like so you have like all of these like tiny little like you know like pretty inconsequential risks like you know the risk of a child falling out falling off a a slide and chipping his tooth for example um uh or you know whatever and like there's just the risk from a virus you know um and the 0 one% chance of dying if you're you know healthy um but and so then you have like this this sort of like this huge pressure to like you know eliminate that risk entirely no matter the costs but then on the other hand you have these existential risk phenomena that like you know the possibility of nuclear war breaking up between the great Powers uh or um you know tens of millions of illegal immigrants flooding into the US uh to to God knows what in the long run probably nothing good um and yeah the same people who are like all tied up with these like tiny risks are exactly the same ones who uh kind of shrug at the big ones and then the reverse is also very true in my experience which is that the people who are like looking at those big existential risks and going hold on maybe nuclear war isn't a good idea uh are also the same ones who kind of like shrug at the small stuff like the chance of catching a virus um I think you I think some of that could be go ahead L uh yeah know I was thinking you know the what what might be like an explanation behind it is uh just the drive to control right because um if you if you imagine you're kind of like a maavan evil psychopath leader kind of type right and so what what are you going to do and um you want to avoid that people basically Bond right and get together and uh uh you know like having a good time basically bonding to create like a a complete counter balance to that you know like uh Psychopathic leadership um that it can penetrate penetrate right these kinds of bonds these human bonds are like just stronger and and then like ideologies or whatever and so so you want to avoid that you know but at the same time you know like a threat of nuclear war I mean it gets everybody riled up and in panic I mean that's actually a positive you know like if you want to control the population so they might be more willing to play play with that sort of thing um but you know take I wonder about that though like with like sub you look at this I quick you look at the substances that are encouraged and discouraged in our society I would say like okay you know tobacco it's actually a pretty social substance and it's heavily heavily discouraged uh alcohol very social substance and kind of tolerated but very much like looks down upon like you know you shouldn't drink too much like you know lunch Martini is not a thing anymore um and you know binge drink in the weekends and get blind drunk but that's actually not very social either uh you're not going to have good conversations when you're can't remember your own name uh and then the drugs that are encouraged are weeds opioids you know all these things that kind of shut you down and like you make you stop talking uh so yeah social control yeah and I think the other piece to that I'm glad that like Luke said it started it that way because I think he's correct that like part of this he's he's described half of the picture accurately so there are there are these sort of like there obviously are beneficiaries of like this sort of control gradual um dulling of the edges of the sharp edges of Life uh and at the same time like separating people from each other making sure that they don't engage in the kind of rituals that would strengthen their bonds um and in some sense like rehumanize them but then there's the other aspect of that the other part of that I think is like I don't know that people are really panicking over abstracts I remember abstractions like nuclear war like that when I was a kid growing up that was still a very real possibility we were still very much in the Cold War it was still very much something that people you know spread the panic about um but at the same time I remember a distinct feeling of not being panicked it was an abstraction it was something it was this potentiality that didn't seem to have any actuality like there was no there was no was but there was a sense back then and this is just I I wasn't really a lie for most of the Cold War but uh just like it seems to me that there was this kind of sense of like you know eat drink and be married for tomorrow we may die right that's how I kind of saw it yeah and I think that like a lot of people yeah but just to get to my second point is that I wonder if it's not panic that people are experiencing but the opposite of that control Matrix that control mindset like what if there there's another one another mindset that's very widespread that's supine a subjective mindset a mindset that wants to be you know sort of like the bottom in like any kind of social relationship that would prefer to be commanded that would prefer to be told what to do like in other words like something along the lines of um a a a a parental proxy and like that that is more widespread than most of us think that there might be like more people that in even if they can't express it in language that would prefer to be told what they can and can't do and like so even though they would naturally gravitate towards those rituals that we're talking about because those are good rituals um they would naturally rapit towards them but then they have a threshold Beyond which they're just sort of like well if I'm told that I can't do this I shouldn't do it and I won't do it and I will castigate others that do it like like maybe that's that's a character of of being that we're you know out that's status that governs that so like that's that's how people like the type of people that are compliant like that they're concerned about elevating their status and that's why they'll shout down people that are doing things that uh everybody body knows is stupid and and unhealthy like smoking but I I don't I think that the big everybody's kind of been dancing around this because maybe we don't want to sound like postmodernists and like Fuko but I mean it's all about power like you start we started talking about fire you know and we're talking about drugs and the ability like drugs are they're powerful you know and the mon Monopoly that is given to certain credential class of people to be able to prescribe a huge array of drugs you know look at for cognitive enhancement we have things like Aderall which is just amphetamine we got methylphenidate which is derived from cocaine you know so you can't use COC leaves like the peruvians do to tolerate high altitude and long work days um nicotine has similar effects um alcohol has it like but when it comes to drugs like everything else there's tradeoff and that's why the whole public health Paradigm doesn't work is because they're like the only person who knows whether or not it's a favorable tradeoff to use a drug in any capacity recreationally for for health Wellness um whatever the only person who's qualified to make that decision is an individual because they're the only ones the only one who knows their values and preferences and if you are have the mindset of wanting to help people and wanting to help people be healthier which is you know the the narrative that public health folks operate under you you can't use force and coercion or nudging like cast sunen style to try and modify these people's behavior and expect that it's going to turn out for the best because you're going to be run running rough shot over these preferences and missing these subtle nuances that we've covered over like the social aspect for example no matter how sophisticated your model gets there's going to be stuff that you missed and so if you want to help people then say like hey why is smoking bad like what are the health adverse consequences how did that impact you same thing with alcohol you know what are your values and hey if I think that this is bad from my perspective let me try and persuade you of that and that way you can actually find out what are the trade-off like let's be honest what are the Ben are their benefits of nicotine that you know or smoking you know that we want to pretend like there are none maybe we should investigate and have an open mind and and what are the tradeoffs because we know there's downsides to it but what are what are the upsides everything is a trade-off and I think recognizing that helps navigate these Waters um where Public Health folks like as a rule ignore that Harrison well there's another uh there's another mentality um at work here so I think that um like couple things have been brought up like the the the the E the the motive of control you mentioned power Grant um but earlier you know John had s some said something I can't remember if it was before we recorded or after about like the techn technocratic government where you can imagine a technocracy where they where they where they decide and and figure out that oh this amount of social time drinking is the best for productivity and and worker um you know morale and so they schedu 1.6 hours of social time and it becomes this like rigid kind of um you know part of the routine like in Brave New World or something but just to to kind of get behind that attitude well you can take something from basic basic human psychology and then scale it up so me for instance like whenever I see a toilet paper roll with the with the paper coming out from the from the back I'm like what the hell is going on so who is the idiot that put this toilet paper rule on like this right and there's this I've got this obsessive compulsive need to like turn it around and get angry at the person who did this you know without without thought so I I know I've got some obsessive compulsive traits to me and when you when you scale that like to to like the there's a correct direction for the toilet paper roll there is well you see that's 100% agree with you on that straight off straight off my kids do it the other way and I hate it you wouldn't want this might be the most controversial thing we've ever discussed actually I but I but but wait but the toilet paper rule just goes on the Shelf I don't know how they do things in Canada right actually this is a great segue this is a great segue because I wanted to say very quickly about what Grant said regarding like the idea of studying tradeoffs and seeing what the benefits are here's one of the things I've noticed is that we have abandoned the idea almost entirely like in theems and the institutions of the dynamism of being and the individuality of bodies in other words that not all things might not be good for all bodies and that and that the tradeoffs might be different from body to body like obviously we have a lot of biological cohesion there's a lot of homog homogenity between human bodies but like it's not exact and actually there there probably is quite a degree of difference between the way even the way that various substances that we integrate into our bodies actually affect each individual body and so I wonder if at the same time this attack doesn't have a kind of a spiritual angle where it's it's denying that individuality denying that different things affect different people differently things that are deadly poison to one person and should never be never and I I don't just mean in terms of like chemical substances I I I also mean like in terms of like experiences or practices or C right wa right right like for one person can be deadly poisonous for another person can be absolutely essential so like an example of that would be like um disciplining children how you should discipline children right like you know you have some kids that if you raise your voice at them like they will have like a nervous breakdown and like it will scar them for life and you should probably be very very gentle with them right they don't need strong correction other kids unless you hit them in the back at the head like won't even notice like they need that degree of like sort of like physicality and like order and structure and like frankly like social dominance hierarchy in order to you know be able to learn and grow and if they're deprived of that they go off the rails completely right and it's kind of to a certain that's a boy girl difference right but there's a lot of individual distinction there as well but when you apply that kind of one siiz fix all mindset you're talking about yeah I mean you have people who like see that you see that with the with the whole College thing I mean that's like where that all came like the the only way to have this dignified fulfilling life is you got to go to College you got to work in a white colar environment you know be a knowledge worker it's like there's this contempt that in our in American culture at least like for decades it was against Blue Collar manual labor like you know just this idea like I because a certain class of people you know would look at a factory or you know whatever a work workshop and think oh this is this would be I would be bored doing this work therefore this work is just bad for everybody everybody needs to go to college and you know do the type of work that would be that I feel like would be you know fulfilling for me personally you know so you up college and every it's it's the same irony with the safety question right the big safety questions like securing the Border like all these people say like no throw it open it'll be fine right and and then but then the micromanagement of all these other things that are very personal decisions about the body individual decisions right like those are the contradiction there I think applies here as well where it's kind of like there there is no it's all binary for them it's all on off right and it's all it's all or nothing like it's either the rule either applies generally to everyone or it must be in some sort of a a an off state for everyone except for the actual rule of law that's something that doesn't apply it's like if you're on the right team or the left team I guess then hey you can you can pull you know tear down signs and fire alarm pull fire alarms to stop you know Congressional you're on the right team so go for it sort of like the Border question in like you know nuclear arms uh nuclear war danger and and and frankly also this kind of like you know de civilizational assault being launched by the left on like the the basic underpinnings of Civil Society um and it's precisely you know people on outside who are also the most concerned with like micromanaging the tiny risks of individual lives I wonder if there isn't a a sort of deep connection there almost kind of like related to like a Thanatos and death Instinct where like you know in this like managerial system where it reacts to risk by with withdrawing agency from uh from people like the experts will tell you what is good to do and you must do what the and if you don't do what the experts say you get punished by the insurance company maybe punished by the law right um and you find yourself after a while in a situation where you have almost no personal power right like you were saying Grant like the I think power comes like it's really important here right because there is this feeling I mean I at least I have it I think a lot of others do as well of being like hemmed in all the time where like you have like all of these fenes and regulations and thou shalts and thou shalt Nots kind of like govern uh Your Existence to an insanely sort of um granular degree uh and it's rather intolerable right and if you're not consciously aware of this being an issue like if at the surface you're kind of like oh it is good that uh we have all of these rules and regulations to control our Behavior Uh and experts tell us what to do um but like deep down you still feel deeply dissatisfied with this life because it's not really a life worth living right it's it's very difficult to really have a genuinely time to relax to feel the the the full extent of your talents and abilities to to exercise any sort of agency um and then you start secretly wanting to tear it all down to make it all go away so then you're like oh like we need communism we need to have a revolution or you know you look at something like nuclear war and you you sort of think like well you know would be so bad really it couldn't be worse than this but you know like the the the nuclear war thing I think is actually a good um it's a good example because we're talking before about like you know like these big fears uh like nuclear war for example like these big problems that dwarf like all the uh like how how high should rail on a balcony be so that no children fall off kind of [ __ ] right and the thing is um in in in Germany and in Europe in general I mean during the Cold War this was like a major scare right I mean this was like really freaking people out and was like pushed really hard uh so for instance um we had to read in school like every every child had had to read like this these horrible novels about like children getting like nuclear toast toasted you know like disfigured and like I mean it was just I mean as a child you read that stuff I mean you have nightmares you know and and this this sticks with you and uh and it's actually um the one thing leads to the other in a certain sense right because during the all the nuclear scare in the Cold War times uh there were like these drills where you like uh had to like crawl under the table you know as if that say you know like from the nuclear bomber and and all that kind of stuff so you get used to this kind of micromanagement as well right so and the kind of safetyism so it's basically like the the the big fear is kind of in a certain sense leads to this this mindset right that you need a micromanagement in order to be safe so I think there you're right I mean you're right you're right it could absolutely go in the other direction we're like because you can't do anything about those big risks uh you then take soulless in tightly controlling the things that you can control it's definitely py but but it doesn't really explain their enthusiasm for throwing the Border wide open for example and like you know having millions and millions and millions of of undocumenteds come in whether we're talking about Europe or or in the US uh probably the fruit Death Wish right that's not a migrants that's a hat of what's already there that's like it's it's 100% motivated it's like like you have like a big the big existential risk from the cold war of like of like you know nuclear Annihilation and then that leads to this um this Clinging On to an increasingly regulated Life as a way to control what you can control but then that in turn leads to life being absolutely intolerable it's no longer a life worth living and then you want to try and destroy it and then you're like you know what throw the borders open Let The Barbarians in like um yeah yeah maybe maybe it's not so much a Death Wish as a change wish so like like the idea that like we want some Monumental change because we have become so hemmed in because like it's become so stultifying because have been stultifying everything or the ones wanting the big change so it's kind of like they're it is weird but it's it's possible in the sense like at a at a at a level Bel beneath language like Luke was talking about sort of like all the propaganda that we were treated to when we were kids I was treated to a two in the 80s and like but yet what was popular what was popular in the culture postapocalyptic movies mil was popular he made a career out of it and so like what they like I think at the same time that there was maybe this what some people might experience as a death Drive other people were saying like let's get it over with let's get it over with so we can start to rebuild this puzzle in a different according to a different diet or something me and then like the post-apocalypse like genre I think a large part of the attraction of that is precisely like the that that you're you're now free in a way that you weren't before there's no one to tell you that you can't do things right wrote an article about that about like the zombie apocalypse and how it's never going to happen how it's kind of like a a cope fantasy oh it it absolutely is um it's it's hey easy gentlemen the year is young but you know like I I'm reading quite a bit about like the viar Republic times in in Germany um for obvious reasons you know I mean there's many par many people have drawn like parallels you know to our time and you kind of it's kind of interesting because you had similar things going on back then too right so basically PE it was really bad you know like um it was just bad all around and people just wanted change you know and and especially like what what was on their minds was the whole um technocratic thing right which had begun in Earnest um at the time and and and slightly before like with the industrialization and the technicalization of everything and I mean it's nothing compared to today but people were like really shocked and and fed up with all that and so the question was you know like um what do you do you know I mean you can go back um and there was a lot of like revolutionary just talk and and this this unconscious almost drive you know to um to just shake things up you know and and whether you were on the left or on the right at the time basically it was like okay we this this needs to stop you know and it probably will because that's just how things go you know it would just blow up on its own but we kind of should uh you know I should kind of we we we want that to happen right because we can't stand it anymore and I think there's a lot to to this idea actually that um whether there everybody's conscious of this or not you know that there's this certain sense that um it just can't go on like that and it won't you know I mean it's not even like that we have to do anything you know it's just and people back then saw saw it in the same way they were convinced that you know that's it you know it will run its course and but it there's also this expectation right and I think that's in a lot of people's mind I think the there's a I don't know this was this was said earlier and I don't know I'm just I'm trying to I'm trying to tie it back to to drugs right um and and I do think that it it ties back to it with drugs and power but I read something that Walter ker wrote recently I think on a on an X poost and it was that we have these complex philosophical explanations for what's going on but he talks to like an Insider on the uh like Pol like that knows a large political doners and said we don't really need political philosophy we just need names like what what's going on is just very straightforward grifting and so like all these ideologies like talking about the left and why they engage in prohibition right for our safety right but the right is where drug prohibition initially came from and moralizing T tolers Etc but throughout all of it it was an Unholy marriage with interest like special interest you know so when you're when you're making tobacco um this this drug that's you know non-r then what you're doing is you're increasing the market for pharmaceutical stimulants you know when you when you make uh uh alcohol illegal you're increasing the market for something else and it it doesn't matter what it is whether it's the Border or War uh kind of ever since I looked at like the neocons in starting the Iraq War like a lot of those people believed in it they were like yeah we're going to go democratize the Middle East and yet other people stood to make trillions and profit and so it's like well who's responsible it's an Unholy alliance between the two so you know who was responsible for drug prohibition and um even you know uh sex like sodomy being illegal that was because of the right you know and I think that's where the the definitions get very very confusing and why I don't think that left and right are as useful as they may have been and maybe they were never very useful at all they're different moralizing justifications to use coercion to control people's not right right right somebody else somebody else that doesn't give a [ __ ] about the ideology is there every step step of the way helping it happen and profiting right and that's what I'm thinking so like that's maybe a better app description like if we're for draw redrawing the map we should say there are people who take advantage of moral panics in every age and they manipulate opinion in order to Advantage themselves by spreading moral panics that's a group that we could say that's a definition we can't say it's left or right it's something that seems to appear in every age in every poity like where we'll have that group of people uh that will exploit um anxieties uh whether to do with social status whether they're to do with uh legal uh uh status like U uh with money like that's a group of people and then there are other there are also groups of people that say okay uh no we we thank you very much but we would we would rather not participate in in in in whatever kind of structure you're trying to impose on us and I think that that extends to drugs as well like it's sort of like you know I I you know in the words of Jimmy Hendricks I am experienced you know I I absolutely I don't think I I tried to write it down one time but I'm not sure if there's any major drug whether it's street level certainly i't I've I I've hav't engaged on a pharmacological um uh Expedition I have not been prescribed anything but as far as it goes to the street there's nothing I haven't tried and like it's sort of like the the thing that the thing that always Frankle me is that the legal drug dealers the ones that will prescribe the Aderall they will essentially prescribe all of the on patent versions of anything that you can find on the street or almost anything and so like what wrinkles me about that is that again like this seems to be a case of when when you take something that's prescribed by a doctor um there are two things going on one thing is is very psychological and the psychological play here is this the psychological fundament of that is you are broken in some way and this will make you whole and so like in incorporating transpose that or or compare that to something like heroin compare that to Something Like Cocaine compare it to mushrooms compare it to whatever you like but like the people that I knew growing up that that were engaged in in you know in sort of like were taking street drugs like they never really thought of it as a way to complete their being I think that might make the difference between an addict and a non- addict um and so essentially the entire pharmacological framework that's set up right now is saying that is describing you as someone who is fundamentally broken in some way and so this thing this product completes you I I think it's the it's the creation of of absolute addicts um in the same way that that uh Brave New World uh described them like in other words it is it is this process of saying you are incomplete without our product and that's and I think the psychological wound of that is greater than any concoction of drugs you could find on the street yeah I don't anything that you can find I don't like the way that it externalizes Locust of control so right you know drug drugs are very powerful substances so is food um you know so is lifestyle like in terms like how much you're sleeping exercising what you're doing for exercising all these things are important and to put the decisions about what to do with those things I mean specifically drugs is just totally outside of your locus of control when you have doctors that sanctify certain drugs and it's like a prescription from a doctor now defies it it is now there are now not it's now not a tradeoff where you're making a decision to to use a drug that is going to have POS pros and cons because everything does um now it's it's your treatment regimen and then like you said it's something that can make you whole and I think there is something dangerous to that because it's not the truth you know there there's no fundamental difference other than the matter amount of expertise in in terms of a medication being prescribed versus it not being prescribed you know it's just expert advice essentially but there is this legitimization and sanctification of it that uh results in poly Pharmacy which is incredibly dangerous when you have geriatric patients especially on 8 to 10 medications uh the interaction between 8 to 10 medications like you no one knows you know two or three gets very complex as soon as you have a dozen medications on board you know you start putting people into this zombie like State and really the only way that they ever come out of it is by coming off all the medication and maybe one or two of those medications are are useful but the the cost benefit and just the way that Physicians are manipulated in medical school and then afterwards and DED by by the pharmaceutical industry and even the EXP explanations though I think are even more dangerous they convince people I've I've spoken to some of these people that are on five six seven medications and the way that they speak about themselves and the way that they speak about the world tells me that they have been wounded simply by the explanations in other words the explanations of what's going on inside of them of what they are is has in in so many ways vandalized like the Baseline ort of assumptions about what self is it's it's it's really scary and then yeah I I had the same you know um experience when talking to you know some of these elderly people especially who who are on these medication it's like and they get like scared you know I mean that's how they do it they they basically send the message oh if you're not you C I mean you can refuse it you know it's just that you probably will like die earlier like go get sick or whatever and so it's basically that's the psychological hook right and once you you accept that you you kind of give up give up your your autonomy your your spiritual being as you said Mark right it's like it's it runs pretty deep right because you you just um let yourself be scared and and then you know it's like um I don't know I thought you know like psychosomatic um you know effects are like well studied well well accepted you know concept for a long time U but apparently not right I mean it's like I mean you scare people and you expect them to get better you know I mean or it's like um the all the health benefits that um a good mindset you know like a a fulfilled life and uh you know what we were talking about before those rituals the bonding you know and all of that I mean it's just I mean it is well studied but it's also just plain obvious you know that this is like actually super important for health you know for just physical health um so I'm not saying that's all there is to it obviously right I mean there's like both sides you know you have like the the materialist kind of medicine that that plays a role right and but you also have that mental aspect and and that just gets totally lost right and how can you not take that into account it's it's it's a Myster it's a mystery well that what you're talking about essentially is when they're scaring patients is no sio you know so like there's well understood term happens all the time and my feel that happens a lot with uh Imaging so you know somebody gets uh an MRI and like really common in the lower back you can have uh you get lower back injuries and they tend to uh they tend to the remain on Imaging so it's like if you get a disc kation it's probably painful when it happened it's probably really painful when it happened or even a disc bulge probably you're like a little I I can speak to this from personal experience it's terrible yeah well I mean it it varies depending on the extent of the injury but down the road like that's going to heal and then down the road that that's still going to show up on Mr and so somebody could have back pain that could not be related to that and um there's there's people that are completely painfree that have gnarly uh Imaging and but the way that most Physicians since they don't have a lot of experience in muscular skeletal Care at least not like ones that aren't Specialists like say in primary care you know they they'll read an MRI and say oh yeah you have degenerative this disease and people be like diseased like oh I have this disease like I'm just gonna have back pain forever because my discs are degenerating it's like no I mean like 50% of people in their 30s have some degree of that um of those Chang and if you understand how to communicate that to a patient and like what it actually means then you can avoid noing them and essentially making them worse or making just because of the just because of the structure of our spines like it is practically impossible to be a m milon biped past a certain relatively low age I think it's like in your 20s without encouraging incurring some degree of uh skeletal damage that will show up on uh on a medical imaging scan um yeah calling it damage like there's like osteoarthritis like the way that I think about it is your body lays down bone to control motion so like when you have too much motion your body lays down bone and that stabilizes the joint and that happens in your spine it's called degenerative joint disease or degenerative disc disease you know so if you lose a little bit of kite now all those ligaments that are spanning that joint are functionally loose so you got too much motion you got instability your body lays down bone to control that motion so it's not necessarily even damage it's just change it's your body adapting and uh there's tons of people that have very Advanced degenerative disc disease that their backs feel completely great and you know people can get there but people hold on like it's what Mark was saying about like part of your identity people hold on to these diagnosis and it becomes a part of their idty like hey this is like I have a herniated disc in my back no so when I when I when I when I threw it my back deadlifting uh a few years ago um you know I was like reading up on all this stuff and uh some of the bodybuilding forums especially were talking about exactly this Dynamic rant we're like um you know you would you hurt your back you go into the doctor they're like oh you we need to do an MRI or something and then they do it and then they find like all of this quote unquote damage and then they terrify you with like well we found this and that and you know you should definitely you know don't lift anything heavy like you know you don't strain yourself like take take it easy um May yeah I think that's FAS because that kind of makes you wonder doesn't it um like with the smoking stuff for example I mean um how much you know like like of the health um risks um are coming from like basically the the hypnotic suggestion you know that uh that if you smoke you get lung cancer if you smoke you are like unhealthy in general you know you're like the scum of the earth you are questionably a component so like I mean I'm not saying it's an attack I agree it's an attack it's I think it's I think it is an aligned attack like there there's there's no question that there is like that any kind of propaganda is essentially a war against your mind and that that includes advertising that includes any number of you know whether they're for products or politicians or whatever like every single time that somebody is reaching out to you from across the ether to tell you about something terrible something terrible that may happen to you it I think our default response should be this is an attack you know you know what I mean it's just sort like particularly when you think about the idea of the limitedness of our being the idea that we're all going to die uh some of us will die horribly some of us will die in our sleep some the one the one the one common factors we're all going to die the idea of reaching out across space and time in order to inject fear into someone for any reason for any and I really mean for any reason I understand that they're probably edge cases like where it's just sort of like okay we want to reach out and warn some someone about something that's that's extremely dangerous that they're doing um but like if that danger doesn't expand outside of the realm of that individual person then that's an attack you know and it's and it's and and and and I think that you can gauge like like the the sort of the the the the negative quality of that attack the the the the the aggression the hostility attack by the things that flower up around it like if we talked about syntaxes for example the idea that like New York City for example for the past 20 years has been like you know just sort of layering on a series of taxes syntaxes against cigarettes is a big one there was also um what I used to like to call the alcohol I assume yes alcohol not as much though interestingly enough not as much and not and nothing on sugar forget it Sugar's fine yes sugar apparently like and I'm talking about like not natural blomberg talking Bloomberg wanted to did the didn't he like he was he was talking about he wanted to but not but but he had but he had special pleading for new customers that were coming in I never saw a 7-Eleven in New York City in my life and like when Bloomberg under Bloomberg's Reign like 7-Elevens blossomed you know it was like kind of like the cherry blossoms of China suddenly they were everywhere and so you had like this this essentially this this corporate entity that came in and and and they and in knocking on the door Bloomberg like allowed for special um circumstances for them in other words he wanted to put a syntax on all of on on on buttered popcorn on on all drinks and all um soft drinks that were above 32 ounces I think was what it was except for 7-Eleven and except for Starbucks you know because again like these are the tools of of of control and of power and so like and so you make these special exceptions because like you want the money you want the receipts these people and so it's sort of like so so in every it buried in all of these things uh and I remember like quite uh there was the the most amazing part to me was like when they were doing what I used to call it the um save the world Lane so like essentially like another one of these schemes was that like they were going to put in a um in other words like a uh a lane a special Lane like where if you had a certain number of passengers in it like then they would say like that's a carpol lane and so therefore we'll give you a break on your commute right and so the problem the problem with this yeah the problem turned out to be guess what the problem turned out to be the problem turned out to be that people adapted and so what happened was like you'd have commuters in Jersey that were standing across the other side of this bridge they would wait there and people would pick them up strangers in other words these was like in other words they were unofficial cabs essentially people would be commuting to work they pick up strangers at the foot of the bridge right or at various points along the way to there and they would go through the carpool lane the save the world Lane and and and and everything was fine right but it wasn't fine because they weren't getting the revenues that they wanted because in other words it worked too well and it's the same way with syntaxes it's sort of like they they if if syntax if if if syntaxes were truly meant to to turn off people from smoking or to turn them off from drinking or whatever ever it is if they work too well guess what it would be a problem they started arresting people they started ticketing people that were picking up strangers in order to use the carpooling they don't want it to work they want the money it's all it is definitely that's that's definit that's always been I think like a a huge part of of of that Dynamic right is like if you it's just virtue fig Leaf like it's it's [ __ ] nonsense a scare around it and like you know now you have the excuse to tax the ever living [ __ ] out of it uh that you would not have had before like it just would have been it would have SP was you're not you're not trying to make money for you see you're you're just trying to dissuade people from doing it you're doing it for the best of resour in your it's see your own interests you know um yeah that Dynamic of uh you know scaring people with medical providers I I think it's more tragic than that because they I feel like I think a lot of times they think they're helping you know they think that mod using fear to modify behavior is going to be in the patient's best interest and uh I think yeah that's that's what's so disturbing about it crazy there's sort of like Confluence of interests right I mean like you have your kind of political interests that just want to raise revenue and then have um your sort of Public Health types who like are like True Believers like they genuinely think like oh like you know if we uh if we lie about something it's a little white lie because it'll actually you know it'll be a noble lie because it will prevent people from doing a bad thing yeah but first of all like like what has been noted nobo so everything has not like Placebo and nobo the way that we can talk about both of them them simultaneously is we can say that they're non-specific effects so anything that you do is going to have specific effects and non-specific effects non-specific effects is largely talking about the psychological aspect that can have dramatic influences on your health so using fear in order to get after positive Health outcomes is like probably you're always going to be unsuccessful because you have to overcome those negative non-specific effects that you're that you're delivering and in order to do that um like the intervention has to be so powerful that you would probably be able to sell them on it without using fear in the first place and the other the other thing that screws it up is that fear as everyone knows turns off your cognition like you can't think as clearly and rationally when you're afraid um or or under any condition I conditions of powerful emotion and so like what what's the best way ahead to make people's Health better if we wanted to actually like if we had Public Health people that really wanted to do good they would never use fear like that would be off limits because de facto they're causing harm off the bat that then they have to dig out of that hole and you almost never have a controlled enough experiment ahead of time to know that your intervention is going to be effective and how what the effect size is going to be so you got that and then on top of it it's like what do we really want if we want people to be healthy like really we want to be able to train people to evaluate and make better decisions themselves right so that they can make better health decisions across time and space forever for every particular issue and public health essentially does the opposite of that and and they have a track record of continuous failure I think because of this because they don't recognize that really what public health ought to be about is educating people and empowering people to have an internal locus of control and that they can use their own position awareness of their own preferences and values in enhancing their own cognitive function because there's you know positive psychology does that in order be healthier you know and it's like they they want to just use the Easy Button they want to take the ring they want to take the one ring of power and be like we can do good with this ring it's like no yeah Premier you can't even but even on on a more uh like you know I mean that's kind like would be like the ideal right uh like empowering people you know to to be to have their own control and their own um like take on things right and and in in when it comes to health but even a level below that you know like I mean just stop uh frightening people I mean that would be a good start you know even if you just give better uh counsel you know I mean for example like um well how about you know my oh sorry no finish your point I've got a solution yeah all right perfect um so just to give an example you know like um my the my my mother's doctor you know when when she was pregnant with me actually counseled her to to continue smoking you know because I mean I won't go into like the details of there there was a history right um health history and stuff and uh and basically um he said like okay I mean maybe you can reduce a little bit but you know like the the stress you're going to experience Now by stopping to smoke during pregnancy will offset you know like the um the benefits you might get get from that so um I mean that's you know I was just saying like I mean or imagine like a public health official saying something like oh yeah I mean don't you you guys don't need like any um uh bicycle lane you know you you you you're probably going to be fine you know like don't be afraid you know I'm just I mean that kind of stuff I mean if we just had like a more sensible um advice from from the medical establishment that would be like already such a huge step you know and then you know empowering reminds me that reminds me of Luc shenko at the beginning of uh beginning of Co when he was just like ah go play some hockey drink some VOD you def fine okay so so here's the solution so um while Grant while you were talking well I'm I'm joking you know half joking but uh while you were talking it reminded me of so there's this this polish psychologist debrowski um that uh that I'm familiar with and one of his principles of psychotherapy was that when he saw a patient he he would prefer if he only saw them once you know maybe twice maybe a few times the purpose of psychotherapy was to get them to be able to do it on their own so that they didn't have to come back over and over and over and over again he thought that Psychiatry like like like Freudian psychoanal psycho analys what do we call it analyst analysis psych analysis where you go you know at least once a week or multiple times a week for the rest of your life you thought that was ridiculous absurd and unhealthy now so I was thinking maybe the same thing should be applied to to medicine and to specifically like pharmacology because a doctor should probably like this is for the most part in general terms their interventions should be specific and temporary so if you have a broken bone you get it set if you need surgery you get surgery but when it comes and if you need medicine they give it to you like for the specific purpose that it's needed for now of course there going to be exceptions but that it should probably be limited to that for the most part so you don't have that you won't have doctors saying okay well we're going to put you on this drug for the rest of your life because there's this thing wrong with you and U and and Etc like keep keep the keep the doctors to being these these like um techn technicians of the Body for temporary fixes and uh and and things that might need some time well I don't know Grant what do you think about that should should like should drugs be limited to specific interventions and uh I think there's a lot of providers that do that but I'll tell I'll give you a specific example that's pretty horrifying of why that doesn't happen like look at insulin dependent diabetes so type two diabetes mtis um you're not allowed to say as an endocrinologist that you can cure that even though um I know an then chronologist who's gotten people off of insulin you know and it's like you're not allowed to call it caring it though you have to like say it's in remission or some [ __ ] because the American Diabetes Association like who are their biggest donors like Hogs and like these companies that you know sell a bunch of carbs and like frankly like I'm not I'm not one of these people that's like oh like carbs are the enemy but if if you have type two di like if you have insulin dependent diabetes or you're developing insulin resistance then you know H having a hypocaloric diet there might be some marginal benefit to reducing the carbohydrate intake because you get bigger boluses of insulin release that's going to create more insulin resistance Etc so like there's there's conditions that physicians in in specialties are trained to think of as chronic conditions that aren't necessarily chronic conditions and patient to do so like lifestyle is almost always the most powerful intervention so like sleep exercise nutrition like getting all that stuff lined up and what'll happen a lot of times is Physicians will be like well I told the patient to do those things and they didn't and so now I prescribe medication and it's like well maybe you're not trying hard like maybe you need to do a better job of figuring out how to be successful with lifestyle intervention well I mean the patients themselves often feed into this there's a sort of La beneficial you w think me the pill like I don't want to think that a a surgery is gonna fix it or a pill is going to fix it like something where you don't have to do anything put in the time and effort Magic it's it's magic because and again it's sort of like and there is an addiction to Magic but it's here's the weird thing though is like and this is anecdotal but what you and Harrison were both talking about Grant like it's sort of like I've heard this I know medical professionals intimately a number of them and I've heard them essentially like you know they they they talk the talk like they're they're they're definitely saying a lot of the same things that both of you are saying like like in the in the in the realm of like okay we really should prioritize we should Western medicine should move away from the model that we're currently in we Mo move towards more of a model of temporary care Follow You Know supplemented by good advice and in terms of like geared towards like changing certain habits in order to create a greater probability of of of positive results in the future they pay lip service to that but the fact of the matter is is a lot of these people are also under the gun like there is just as just as they and and sort of like their benefactors in the pharmacological sphere just as they are sort of casting these spells of fears in a certain direction there is also a lot of anxiety in that in those fields as well where they're afraid that they'll lose their license where they're afraid of this they're afraid of that again it goes back to liability it goes back to the insurance industry yeah the insurance all this I think is lawyers are at the at the pit of abdon or aalon depending on whether you're Greek or Jewish at the bottom of that pit is a lawyer I swear and this lawyer this or an insurance agent and like or both like a two-headed monster and like really like if you drill deep enough that is the the fear emanation comes from these beings it comes out of these institutions it it's it's projected in waves that they don't even really notice because I think a lot of these people logically know they agree with Grant they agree with Harrison like they they agree at a fundamental level and yet like there is this spell of fear that is cast upon them too it was never stronger in my lifetime than during Co 19 but you've seen elements of it before where they've gotten a certain position they have acquired a certain and and by the way again I know some of these people intimately and I respect the fact that they work hard for the sorts of opportunities and advantages that are earned through these positions this is a scarse resource right people not just the intell from an intelligence level a lot of these people are quite intelligent but also the perseverance the idea to operate in that sphere to operate in the sphere of of Health in general uh uh is a there's a lot of pressure um there's a lot of um uh sort of horror as well to some degree like in operating particularly if you're operating in the emergency medicine field but like in all in all Fields there is a lot of there there are various pressures and like they are buttressed by all of these anxieties about like well why am I doing this thing that is so difficult um uh if I can lose it at any moment I better play it safe and so while they could speak freely in certain environments as Grant was saying you know it's sort of like there are certain words that they're not allowed to say there are certain um uh there are certain boundaries that are both like sort of some of them are very very hard and fast and other ones are kind of blurry and so I think it gets them into this state where even though they want to provide that good advice even though they want to lead they are terrified to do it they are absolutely terrified and it makes them say weird things it makes them act in contradictory ways you know and then and then you also have like the the the unfortunate in my opinion like there is I don't know if it's something that is sort of part of someone's intrinsic makeup or something that maybe is exemplified if you're in that field long enough but there is a kind of a a God complex that develops with a lot of these professionals it it's just there I'm not this is not me like casting moral aspersions upon people who display it but it's certainly apparent and it's one of those things that magnifies if it's left unattended and and again to me that means spiritual attention like you need to like be able to become aware of yourself and start asking yourself all the big hard questions regardless of what your answers to them are like if you avoid asking them period I think that that could kind of you know you you can have a situation where like somebody has like a minor God complex that you know uh metastasizes into something that's that's that's that's almost inhuman and so and so with all of those pressures operating at the same time even though like they know that everything that you are saying is correct they cannot self-correct and like that's that that that means that I think that the ultimate system that needs to be smashed is that lawyer is that Sy is a legal and liability system that like that that is the root of all evil not not money weirdly enough but risk you know yeah sorry yeah I just wanted to uh go back to um what har was talking about uh with duosi and sort of concrete example from the world of Psychiatry is depression so uh of course you know these days what is it like one in 10 Americans are taking some kind of uh oh we lost Luke okay um are are are uh taking some kind of anti-depressant drug like an SSRI or noi or whatever uh you know daily and they've been on it for years years and years and we'll basically always be on it and it causes all kinds of weird side effects so then you know their psychiatrist has to adjust their dose or you know change the medication or whatever it is um and it doesn't actually cure the depression the you know the evidence for this is I think overwhelming at this point it has basically no effect but it is highly addictive can't just stop use it so back in the N early 1980s um there was psychiatric research using mdna where they found that something like two or three interventions um uh stretch out over like uh a year or two where they would give the patient uh a dose of mdna and then uh have a trained psychotherapist sit down with them for you know a few hours and the drug would have the effect of opening them up and making them very empathetic both towards themselves and towards others other s um which then together with the psychotherapist they could get real insight into their condition uh and the clinical results were that you know three interventions three three three treatments over the course of a couple of years and the Cure rate was pretty much 100% like people's depression went away because they were able to identify why why they were they were depressed like whatever you know it was in their life it was making them depressed or whatever it was in their own psychological makeup that was leading them to be depressed and they stopped being depressed like they changed those things in their lives uh but mdna was first synthesized in the early 20th century it's been off- patent for an incredibly long time but by the 80s it may well have already been a controlled substance because it was a part of drug uh but even if it wasn't like I I don't know the specific history on that aspect um the drug companies weren't going to be able to make any money from it at all because it costs like pennies per pill to synthesize and it's off patent so like what are you going to do and furthermore like what three treatments for pennies each like how are we supposed to make money on that versus something that costs you know like several hundred dollars a month in prescription fees and the patient has to take every day for effectively the rest through life of course they're going to go for the second one even though it doesn't work um so yeah just you know a a very concrete example illustrating exactly what D Broski would was talking about I think um I saw a couple of messages come up here uh so yeah whoever was jump Al apathy has a a tremendous amount of power within it and I think there's this dialectic about alternative like complimentary and alternative medicine where they Advance stuff that I I I don't I think it's stupid frankly like could could you maybe like um Homeopathy I I think it's stupid like there's no molecules left like supposedly you know the substance aligned the the molecular structure of the water such that it still contains the properties I don't I don't buy it that's like an extraordinary claim and the evidence is pretty weak for for Homeopathy and so you have people that practice alpath you know positions and the really aggressive ones like the dunk on complimentary and alternative me medicine because there's aspects of it that are I mean it's just really easy to dunk on them from a materialist perspective um that's not to say that there can't be strong non-specific effects and I'm not even discounting the possibility that there's specific effects that are just very nuanced and difficult to describe but the most powerful and obvious effects in medicine do come from alpath when it where it's appropriate like if you need insulin and you don't have it like you die without it if you need antibiotics because you have a particular bacterial infection that you're going to die without those antibiotics you need it uh certain surgical procedures that if you get them you are going to die or you're going to be freaking miserable um and there's really no other alternative and so that's a lot of power and since alpath has that power why would anybody be surprised that all the vultures come circling like all these people that that see opportunity in power and want to leverage it to their own ends obviously they focused on Al Al apathy for a very long time it's not because alpath is evil or those techniques aren't effective and useful in many contexts um it's been corrupted and perverted just because it's so powerful and that's why we see the structure that Mark was talking about where um it's just this kind of pervasive interdependent thing Insurance thirdparty payers so like individuals aren't making decisions uh based on quality or affordability like all of these things developed not as an accident they developed because alpath is very powerful and in particular because the ability to caliz prescribing powerful medications um that that's a that's a huge source of power and uh you know creates a cartel that there's massive incentives to to gain and maintain control over so I just I just wanted to point that out as a thing that explains some of what Mark was talking about and I think it explains what John was talking about too because those same monetary uh moneyed interest like they're G to look at MDMA they're gonna look at psychedelics and they're gonna try and cast this Aura of irresectability around them um you know that you're not really serious or legitimate if you're looking at anything outside the common scope of practice and so like best practices and uh standard of care like all these kinds of things they're really just weapons from moneyed interest to try and control the rain like the Overton window in medicine because aspect yeah right like yeah drugs like with what's available now everything that we know and science repurpose drugs in in a creative mind there are solutions out there to a lot of the health care problems that people have that like for example I I'll give you an example of something that is is pretty Niche um you know our our friend Alex over at his spouse has a uh and he talked about this on on his Blog has a rare uh constellation of mitochondrial issues and so like people talk about chronic fatigue syndrome like this is a thing that there's probably ways to develop repurpose drugs um maybe develop new drugs but you can't do it because the phase three trials for new medications are hunt it's like $100 million and so it's completely controlled and you know the FDA controls that and then the pharmaceutical companies aren't going to go down that road so like the bottom line is if there was just freedom of maneuver and people had the ability to make decisions for themselves that would open up New Frontiers of advances in medicine um that just can't happen now because yeah the doctors I talk to you see this thing they the same thing they to sacrifice their their standard of living in order exactly exactly trade-off that they're not willing to make because like the these are intelligent people and I talked to them and and they they they they again there is a lot of there is a lot of crossover here between what you're saying what they say the problem again is is that particularly with the allopathic um sort of like um uh like one of the ways that it's described to me is sort of like okay I can only clean up after the car crash and like by that time there's very little I can do by the time the patient gets into my into my purview like all of the damage has been done and so therefore I just feel like a grease monkey that's like trying to tune up lemons or trying to make them drivable for maybe another you know 100 miles or so and like so there's a frustration there there's a frustration level in terms of like well it's it's the system is so hopelessly broken I'm just going to do whatever good I can in in the middle of this broken system without like any real um uh courage that it would take to say to stand up to that system and say I want to practice medicine like this is this is something that's been expressed to me before by a doctor that I know well he says like I don't feel free to practice medicine think about that there's a doctor in a major Hospital Network that says I don't and and and and and a doctor that has you know is has senority and he says I don't feel free to practice medicine and they want to right and like they' I've even spoken to doctors that have talked about like well I just want to go into private practice like I'm essentially going to be a um you know a a almost in the older model of the of the boutique sort of roving doctor like where I'm just going to go around and I'm gonna offer my services privately to a small group of individuals maybe that's the way it needs to go maybe this is the answer the answer the answer is as long as you can escape that that sort of that bound that those those bounds of of liability and and insurance and like this is the thing it's like it doesn't take that much all it would take is a waiver really like so much so much of law can be circumvented through waivers you know I I remember I would talk to to to to uh people in the 90s about like where they were they would they would talk they would talk for hours and hours about how unfair it is that there isn't any gay marriage and I remember like there was one of the during one of these Jeremiah I just kind of broke out and I said why don't just go to a lawyer they'll draw up the documents for you you go ahead and become somebody's like legal uh you know you could you could you could draw up any contract you want that would like emulate marriage in every uh shape and form and then you get into that weird realm though where people want it's like it's not really they don't want the legal rights they don't a lot of things can be Circ circumvented by waivers they don't want they want to be part of some greater status game like that loss of status is is is what's really going to like yeah they want to be they want to be a big authoritarian in they want to be a big Authority in the medical establishment like they losing that has a certain value that you know differs from person to person but it seems to be it seems to be valuable to a lot of people you know well I mean the point of medicine should be to you know heal people right but in practice uh it's to make money from the point of view of the large medical corporations and the hospitals and uh to have social status and make money from the point of view of a very large number of doctors and from my point of view is a free market dude like if you can make people better there it it shouldn't be too hard to figure out how to make money doing that without transgressing against the the purpose of the profession well this is this is I think one of the things that you know underlying the kind of modern discontent with market capitalism um is this kind of it's never I don't think it's ever spoken about much but if you look back at like you know earlier simpler times right uh you know the medieval period or what have you I mean very rarely was making money the central point of what anyone was doing it you you you made money it still happened right like you know if you were a doctor like you were still able to make money or some other kind of professional like you still were probably pretty comfortable um but the purpose of your profession wasn't just making money it was the practice of the profession it was like that was what took presence and I think losing that CRA you know losing that's very unhealthy I if your primary purpose is making money like I just I just don't it's Healy it's like it's because at that point like there's nothing sacred about what you're doing right when right like when you're what you're engaged in is a sacred thing you're not going to cut Corners just to make an extra Buck you're not going to deceive people about your capabilities or uh the the virtues of your product um just to make it next to a buck like you're you're you're going to be like no like what I'm doing is important to me for its own for its own reasons and compensation comes in many forms too it's not just money I mean like like I just mean like in terms of just like assets like that you gain like advantages that you gain in life isn't just money money money is part of it um friends though Network um people that you can rely on in a bad situation like right that's a kind of that's a kind of currency like everything is currency in terms of like uh you know building something right as you said respect among peers like not necessarily Social Power because like the idea of like well I want to uh accumulate more Social Power it's like well how do you spend that you know it's sort of like okay like is that is that a defensive currency is that something where like okay that means I I'm afforded more opportunities to [ __ ] up or does it mean this is a this is a uh some kind of a bribery tool or blackmail to extortion tool something that I could pay agents in order to cause problems for people um uh that I don't like or that in some way I don't think most people were even thinking about it in those terms you know like I I think that kind of like cold calculating like how do I monetize my social networks um like this was not a way that most people thought in the past you know no no not most people but like most people were peasants in the past and very few were Aristocrats and Aristocrats thought that way I think I I'm more talking about your sort of professional classes um you know in the in like the medieval period who generally by and large weren't Aristocrats uh like the the doctors and the lawyers and the the Craftsmen and so on like these were they weren't peasants either you know they sort of the middle class right but like they okay yeah sure yeah I agree that like kind of a boura layer yeah I mean you'd have like I mean the bouris were your property owners technically that was kind of a later thing that came about sort of in the 19th century to challenge the old aristocracy um but like I'm again just like talking about like your professionals you know like specifically I guess plag doctors you mean like like or people with there have always been like Physicians you know and like you know various kinds of Craftsmen and Artisans and and what have you people like specialized like in a certain like know blacksmiths right who like specialize like in a certain kind of thing that they do and of course like they need to support you need to support yourself doing it right the baker isn't just G to give his bread away right but right you know he's also not just doing it for the money like if there was no money in it he wouldn't do it obviously because she'd starve to death uh but you know the point of it really is to make good bread you know like he's he's and and if that's kind of the central point of it he's not going to poison the bread because he can make a little bit of extra money that way right um the blacksmith is going to make deliberately shoddy Goods because you know that using using lower quality Iron means he gets more return business or something because his stuff I want to talk to you about China I want to talk to you about the manufacturing base right now I talk to you about built-in obsolescence you know I mean like come on now yeah I I've actually got a whole essay I'm working on on this planned obsolesence because it's always just enraged me um you're right you're right there's a change and why does that change I agree with you now like why is that change so what was the Arc of that change that led us to this place of of this of built I think I think uh it was managerialism so like I know everyone likes to dump on managerialism these days it's like it's like you know trendy to do so so that's maybe why I'm doing it but like um once you have a class of people who can sort of seamlessly frictionlessly move from one kind of industry or service to the next uh for whom any of these activities are simply ways to make money no intrinsic one no like no no intrinsic difference between running uh you know an auto parts manufacturing plant or uh uh chain of coffee shops it's all ultimately just a corporate structure designed to generate revenue and uh it's account it's the changes in accountability that accompany that because you can't if you get an economic Hitman manager that comes into an organization and liquidates capital to improve Market the the share price in the near term setting up a catastrophic fall at after they've moved on then nobody's nobody can hold that individual accountable and it's just the same reason why the blacksmith you know in Times Gone by was motivated to produce quality because his customers would easily be able to hold him accountable his he exactly the person who's doing the work and who runs the business and owns the business and whose name is on it is all the same person so if he produces shoddy work that's his name on the line right exactly he can't like just go and you know become the baker because he has no idea how to bake whereas like the when when you have a chain of blacksmiths that are being run by some managers that manager if that business collapses he can just like hop onto the you know bakery chain and he'll run that instead and it yes that's a exactly that accountability aspect that that that sort of like uh respon the disconnects between responsibility and power um but also just like what were those people doing back then like like the people that were are our managers now the people in that managerial structure like I assume that they had counterparts like during the age that we're describing uh the age of blacksmith the age of bulletproofing your armor whatever talk about not no not not not really I I mean like you had they had no counterparts like there was what what were those people up to I mean like you had you had a bureaucracy but like it was much smaller um and like you but I meant like like a character like I'm talking more from a character level in other words I'm saying that probably the character of human beings have not changed all that much over the past I I I feel like they were peasants back then like just maybe they were interesting maybe they were were they it's possible they were it's possible they were prostitutes all came from no I'm serious it's possible that they were prostitutes like it like there there it really is like a conundrum because you say like well what is what is the person that that that that exhibits those qualities like qualities that you just described where it's just sort of like well I don't really have any particular you know like mercenaries of some sort let's put it that way um um hirelings like people that would just do anything for for a price yeah but the prostitutes or assassins yeah the problem isn't necessarily managers right the problem is managers with no loyalty so this idea that came from like Robert era that like the organizational man which John alluded to where it's like it's the same running a car company as it is managing a like a a a large segment of Starbucks you know it it's false it's not true like there's so much implicit knowledge required to be a manager of a complex organization like that that if you don't have it and you go in you focus on met you're just going to tear everything apart in order to do you know and then also your skill set in reality is not as transportable and mobile as you might think you know like as as this as this lie tries to convince people like you can't be a a chief manager in in autom manufacturing and move into uh hospitals and do a good job you're you're not going to do a good job you're you're gonna suck well and most of them are not doing good jobs because of thise that's problem isn't having managers exactly it's the professionalization of it right so like I I suspect one size all dilemma if you were if you were to go back a century um the majority of people in managerial roles at large Enterprises uh um are probably worked their way up through that business you they started on the factory floor and they showed some Talent ability and they just kind of got promoted up and like you know 20 years later they're managing it on behalf of the the owner um and like you know they're going to have this intimate understanding of it they're going to know the people there and you know they're going to help everything run more or less seamlessly and there's a huge difference between that and you just hire on some freshly minted MBA with a nice haircut uh and you know slot him into this position um and he just kind of like applies like his spreadsheet knowledge and then ruins everything because he doesn't actually understand how the business Works um yeah then ruin ruins it and then is able to go find a job and some other industry where their reputation isn't ruined and so like that's that's the myth is that they're transportable and if that myth could be destroyed then they would be able to be held accountable like that I think that's the problem the problem isn't managers the problem is it's just accountability like you can't have power without accountability if you do you end up with all the problems that we have it's distributed failure it's distributed account accountability which is the problem the problem is is that anytime something goes wrong in a large enough organization everybody's going to point a finger in another Direction and so therefore the the the accountability for any dis even if it's a disaster like it's going to be spread so thin it's kind of like the insurance market right yeah spreading risk you're spreading responsibility so then no one's responsible the withdrawal from Afghanistan right we're like who's responsible no heads rolled you know no heads roll no's respons Financial collapse in 2008 or like the whole Co tobacco you know um later Harrison uh or like yeah uh I mean I've got a whole essay actually that I've been working on on on this topic as well um because it it is deeply frustrating who's in charge right it's like no one's in charge but yet there's a sense of like overwhelming power bearing down upon you uh the source of which you can't point to which I think also breeds a lot of paranoia I think a lot of conspiracy theory a lot of the motivation for that actually comes out of this um this absolute lack of clarity about where power actually resides inside the system all right that sounds like a good place to wrap things up I mean like for now I mean I and maybe that is a topic for another atire a topic all its own because I do believe that distribution of accountability is really like one of those things where it's it's kind of hiding behind every disaster you you know just like lawyers just like insurers like it's hiding behind every every sort of depravity you have this this this this this kind of this function in which in which once it triggers nobody's responsible that's uh that's amazing that we got there from drugs and cigarettes and booze yeah so that's what we can do for next time power account see it worked out I was like let's just you work out I think I ain't about the uh the destination it's about the journey gentlemen indeed indeed all right well thank you all for joining us for another episode of tonic discussions until next time until next time later

Channel: Tonic Seven

Views: 240

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Id: j2wyVPymq8E

Length: 102min 35sec (6155 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 30 2023