0:00:00
Dan, welcome to the podcast.
0:00:05
Thanks, Jake. Thanks for the invite.
0:00:07
No, it’s my pleasure.
0:00:09
Dan, to say the least, you caught my attention recently,
0:00:12
and I got tagged into a thread on NOSTA,
0:00:16
where the discussion between terrain theory and germ theory
0:00:22
is very much happening.
0:00:25
And what I thought we would do today,
0:00:27
as we discussed before recording,
0:00:29
is just spend some time talking about that and what you’re reading about and where that rabbit
0:00:36
hole is taking you. I like to keep the conversations as broad as possible. So we’ll weave in all sorts
0:00:43
of bits and pieces as well. But yeah, so what was the recent research that you were sharing and why
0:00:48
did it catch your attention? Yeah, so I’m an emergency doc and I’m always just sort of perusing
0:00:56
different medical, you know, medical forms. And, and I follow the health literature pretty closely.
0:01:04
And recently, there was a well, so the concept of the germ has, you know, dates back, you know,
0:01:13
long time back to Louis Pasteur and pasteurization. But, you know, during COVID, there was,
0:01:20
you know, I guess, a corner of sort of the freedom health movement that started to question the
0:01:26
presence or absence of virology as like a legitimate science. And they, you know,
0:01:32
they make a lot of great points. They, you know, point to a lack of isolation of viruses, a lack of
0:01:39
real legitimate sequencing from start to finish of almost all viruses that have been documented.
0:01:45
They, you know, they point to a historical lack of, you know, great randomized control trials that
0:01:53
show a evidence for contagion, you know, which we all take for granted. And so, you know, I read
0:02:02
this and, you know, I work in the emergency room. I always, you know, contribute a runny nose to,
0:02:09
you know, a patient that coughed on me. I contribute a sore throat to a young child who
0:02:13
brought something home from school. So our lived experience seems to be, seems to be colored by
0:02:20
the concept that we get sick from others. And it seems, you know, it’s taught to us in medical
0:02:28
school. It’s passed down to us from our parents to our children. And we have run with this concept
0:02:34
of contagion and germ theory for, you know, a long time. And during COVID, when, you know,
0:02:39
reading many of these, you know, rightfully so labeled somewhat fringe topics on the concept of
0:02:46
the lack of a real virus in the world. It was just interesting. It was just fun to read these,
0:02:52
you know, essentially what seemingly seemed like to be heretical topics. Until I discovered this
0:02:58
researcher, and he was running a very wonderful group called the Viral Contagion Control,
0:03:05
or sorry, the Viral Control Studies Group. And I think he’s out of France. His name is Jamie
0:03:11
Andrews, and he’s been publishing essentially all of his research, you could say unpeer-reviewed,
0:03:17
but in a sense it’s the most peer-reviewed because it’s completely open. They videotape
0:03:21
their science experiments, they release every single picture that they take with their electron
0:03:27
microscopes, and what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to replicate virology with controlled
0:03:33
studies. And so basically what that means is that when they run an experiment, you want to have
0:03:38
an arm of the experiment where there’s nothing happening. It is just pure, it’s the pure baseline
0:03:46
of reality. And then you want to have another arm of the control experiment, the experimental arm,
0:03:51
where there is actually something different about reality, whether that’s you’re introducing an
0:03:55
illness, or you’re introducing a medication, or you’re introducing a particular therapy. But you
0:04:02
want to make sure that the arms are only differ by that one variable. And one of the problems that
0:04:07
virology seems to either have ignored or swept under the rug or taken for granted is that when
0:04:16
they do virology studies, they never really provide a control arm. They always assume that a virus is
0:04:24
present because they got the sample from someone who was ill. And so when you take a sample from
0:04:32
someone who is ill and you follow the traditional Cox postulate, which is the theory of germ
0:04:38
transmission is that you take a sample from someone who’s ill, you isolate the presumed
0:04:45
pathogen, you then grow that pathogen, you inject the pathogen into somebody who’s not
0:04:51
ill or an animal that’s not ill, and you see the illness that you’re studying.
0:04:56
And then you finally take a sample from the newly infected person or animal and you isolate the same thing that you infected them with.
0:05:06
And so it’s a very logical deductive path of following an illness from the pathogen through the infected host, re-isolating the pathogen.
0:05:15
and unfortunately in virology there’s never a full there’s never a full
0:05:23
showing of that of that postulate there’s always isolate there’s always claimed isolation from
0:05:30
a sick individual there’s always the claimed culture of that thing and these are often done
0:05:37
in different experiments and then there’s always the assumption that what is taken from the sample
0:05:44
or the medium that’s being grown is the same thing that was injected in it from the
0:05:49
from the from the infected or you know sick host and so virology just has because it’s
0:05:58
you know maybe it’s a bunk science but it’s also very difficult science because you can’t
0:06:02
simply see what you’re studying so everything is done inductively everything is done through
0:06:06
either either inference or sort of secondary evaluation of what we think is happening
0:06:13
Are we making these assumptions about the microbial world by seeing different effects and inferring that a particular process is happening?
0:06:22
So what Jamie’s doing, going back to your original question, is he is taking the cell cultures that people grow, quote unquote, viruses in.
0:06:36
They’re called varrocells. I think they’re monkey kidney cells, these cultures.
0:06:40
And what he’s doing is he’s saying we are going to grow them in a very healthy medium.
0:06:46
They use something called fetal bovine serum. And so it’s a very nutrient rich medium.
0:06:50
They grow the cells.
0:06:52
And then what we’re going to do is, as in all experimental arms of all viral studies,
0:06:57
and specifically, you know, they were looking at the COVID protocols, we’re going to then
0:07:01
also grow them in a reduced fetal bovine serum media.
0:07:05
So we’re going to reduce the nutrients that they grow in.
0:07:08
Virology does this often with the claim that we want a reduced medium of growth so that
0:07:13
these cells are more fragile, so that the viruses will lyse from them, so that they’ll
0:07:17
be easier to conduct an experiment in a reasonable amount of time. And so they grow them in a rich
0:07:23
medium to make sure that this is going to work, that everything’s good. They claim that’s the
0:07:27
control. But then what they do is they do a sleight of hand, either intentionally or unintentionally,
0:07:32
and reduce the concentration of the medium, essentially starving the cells. And then they
0:07:36
observe the release of viral particles from these infected cells. You know, that’s, you know,
0:07:44
that classic little circle with the spikes all over it that’s coming out of a cell that we’ve seen in, you know, in high school and, you know, college biology classes.
0:07:52
They see those on electron microscopy and they assume that that is the viral particles being released after propagation in the cell and replication.
0:08:02
But they’ve done it at a reduced nutrient medium.
0:08:07
So what they’ve done is they’ve starved the cell and we’ve released the particle.
0:08:11
We see the particles being released.
0:08:12
but what would happen if you had nothing in that infected culture and that’s what jamie’s doing and
0:08:18
that’s what’s so interesting is that he takes the cells he takes healthy cells that have you know
0:08:24
quote-unquote certified completely sterile no virus no contamination he grows them at 10 percent
0:08:30
you know and they they grow well then he reduces it to two percent no infection no virus added to
0:08:35
the sample and you see the same out pouchings of these cells they call them the cytopathic effects
0:08:42
sometimes it’s referred to as cpe and you see the virus is being released from the cells but there
0:08:47
is no virus so what’s being released and it bring and so you come full circle and and you have to
0:08:52
wonder if everything that we have thought about the concept of germ theory whether it’s bacterial
0:09:01
germ theory or viral germ theory and contagion is potentially built on a a foundation of sand
0:09:08
because what we’re actually observing is malnutrition manifesting with malformed cells,
0:09:15
which we see in his experiments, these malformed cells of our body releasing malformed DNA or RNA,
0:09:22
which we could potentially think is a virus because we see it commonly in people who are
0:09:30
suffering the same condition, whether they’re suffering a vitamin D deficiency or a protein
0:09:33
deficiency or mineral deficiency and they manifest with similar symptoms because we’re all human so
0:09:39
we have similar makeup so when we’re similarly sick we similarly make malformed cells and we
0:09:45
release that dna and rna from ourselves and we shed it in our mucal membranes like our you know
0:09:50
our nose and our mouth and we do pass things from people to people and sometimes when we pass things
0:09:54
from people to people if contagion is actually true which it debatably may not be those things
0:10:00
that we pass can make people unwell or is it that we are similarly in an environment with other
0:10:07
people who might be suffering the same malnutrition because we’re in the same family or the same house
0:10:11
or we’re living in the same climate in the same time of year and we all manifest because it’s the
0:10:16
same biology with an illness that has nothing to do with contagion nothing to do with an external
0:10:22
particle but all to do with the malnourishment of ourselves as as this experiment is showing
0:10:26
where when you reduce the medium that a cell is grown in to this point of basic starvation and malnutrition,
0:10:34
it looks like it is infected with viruses.
0:10:37
And so that’s sort of the broad overview,
0:10:39
is basically that this malnutrition of these cells shows the exact same morphology and pathology
0:10:45
that we would say is present in a viral culture,
0:10:50
but there’s no virus and it’s just a malnourished cell.
0:10:53
Whoa.
0:10:54
Dan I’m going to give it to you best 10 minute opening fucking bang I’ve had on the podcast ever
0:11:02
in 100 or so episodes it’s it’s so cool to get context and it’s why the long form conversations
0:11:10
are so good because you can’t you just can’t get it in a five minute clip there’s so much to it
0:11:16
um and there’s now a ton of different directions I can go but when I started looking at this
0:11:23
recently it was a comment my wife had made in the car and she had gone down a number of rabbit
0:11:31
holes herself and is very interested in holistic health and questioning kind of the food pyramid
0:11:37
for example it’s one great like why so many grains are people healthy are they not why um and she
0:11:44
said oh you should look at terrain theory versus germ theory and we had this very specific example
0:11:49
recently where first my daughter got some kind of gastro virus and she was puking in the kitchen on
0:11:57
the floor and was sick for a day or so and then my son got it and then I got it but then my other
0:12:03
daughter and my wife they were totally fine frustratingly for my wife she’s very busy kind
0:12:09
of running around cleaning up sick and very much from a germ theory perspective be like got to make
0:12:14
sure that these surfaces are all clean so no one else catches it but it was like hang on a second
0:12:20
why would it be the case that these two other people very likely you know have been literally
0:12:27
in the same living space not get sick and that very simple fact puts under question germ theory
0:12:35
completely it’s like why it’s such simple first principles like well hang on why would they get
0:12:41
sick and they not get sick um and so when i started looking into the history of it and you
0:12:47
mentioned louis pasteur already and kosh with the the kind of the postulates that you’ve got to
0:12:52
to step through and actually there’s like a almost 200 year old debate that’s been going on
0:12:57
in the science space that i actually referenced it to kind of like when i started asking the
0:13:05
question what is money i realized oh my god there’s this field of economics called austrian
0:13:10
economics and sound money and I didn’t even know they existed but I was someone who’s been highly
0:13:15
trained in how to make money going through business school and working in business my whole
0:13:19
life and you’re like hang on a sec I didn’t even realize that this was an option and it’s kind of
0:13:25
the same for me with germ theory and terrain theory so when you mentioned you’re a doctor
0:13:31
yourself Dan and you work in the emergency department like how much time have you ever
0:13:36
spent looking into these two different areas and like is it even part of your education when you go
0:13:42
through the system uh i mean no one spends i mean it is sort of like the old you know i think it’s
0:13:49
richard feyman said like we’re the easiest person to fool is yourself and you can fool yourself by
0:13:54
just assuming everything that you have been told is correct because your teachers seem benevolent
0:14:02
You know, the educational system seems benevolent. Like they want productive members of society. You want emergency physicians. You want any physician to be well educated. Why would you be told something false? But we all know that most things in textbooks 20 years later are all disproven.
0:14:18
and that science is a perpetual circle of disproving old theories and invalidating and falsifying claims.
0:14:31
It never really proves anything. It always tries to falsify existing principles.
0:14:38
And so it’s just something you don’t think about.
0:14:41
And only when you sort of ask why, like six, seven times, over and over again,
0:14:46
to finally get down to a first principle,
0:14:48
and there has to obviously be some impetus
0:14:50
for why you’re even asking why in the first place,
0:14:53
do you begin to sort of uncover the fact
0:14:57
that even germ theory itself is actually terrain theory?
0:15:00
Because no one in a germ theory camp
0:15:03
would say that the medium that a germ is present in
0:15:08
is not important.
0:15:10
We know that when you culture a bacteria,
0:15:12
it has to be cultured on the right medium.
0:15:13
Most things we still don’t know how to culture.
0:15:15
Very, you know, there’s something called the great plate theory where, you know, why can we not figure out how to grow essentially anything in a petri dish?
0:15:22
Because we don’t even really understand the mediums that most bacteria need to grow.
0:15:31
And so even germ theory, where we say an infectious agent is possibly at the cause of illness, requires a medium in which that infectious agent can thrive and cause illness.
0:15:42
So even germ theory is terrain theory. Essentially, terrain theory is just a first principled acknowledgement that the environment in which a living thing is present matters.
0:15:56
and so in your case you know with the gastroenteritis the environment in which whatever
0:16:05
toxin bacteria bad food whatever took hold and caused you know a expulsive reaction to your body
0:16:16
all that required an environment of the body in which it could take hold and so and so even
0:16:25
germ theory is terrain theory. Um, and unless you really start to ask and think, or even have a
0:16:31
reason to ask why about this, almost everyone in medicine, um, you know, just assumes rightfully so,
0:16:36
you know, that they, you know, have been taught correctly. Cause why, why would you,
0:16:39
why would you assume you weren’t taught correctly? And so through your, um, medical education,
0:16:48
like, did you even discuss terrain theory? Oh no, no, it’s not. No, similar to how,
0:16:53
you know you hear a lot of people talk about how you know they went through you know an economics
0:16:57
degree and only learned keynesianism correct there is it is basically viewed um i think more as like
0:17:03
a naturopathic kind of quackery type um uh theory because you know we know germs are true right of
0:17:11
course we know germs are true and that sort of self uh enforces the perception that well germs
0:17:16
are true so why would you consider an alternative theory um but what you ask about germs you realize
0:17:21
that the only reason a potential germ could cause a problem is because it needs an environment in
0:17:26
which it could cause a problem in and that is terrain theory and so even germ theory even if
0:17:31
it is wrong is built on a more true principle that the environment in which a pathogen is present
0:17:38
matters cool and it’s so interesting is that of course there’s a very controlled environment within
0:17:45
in which the virology space is operating for it to then prove that this is the science and therefore
0:17:52
it’s correct it’s like well hang on you’re actually showing that terrain theory itself
0:17:56
is true just by taking that approach yeah really interesting insight okay and so if you
0:18:03
to take a day-to-day example like you start talking to a colleague about this subject like
0:18:09
are people interested or is it like no one would be no absolutely there’s no one will be interested
0:18:15
in this because essentially it puts into question it you know when you when you challenge a first
0:18:23
principle which this is one of the most fundamental first principles of medicine that germs cause
0:18:29
disease rather than a diseased host being a place in which germs can take hold and and potentially
0:18:36
you know eat the dying tissue flipping it around i mean the idea that someone sneezes on you and
0:18:42
go, you know, but actually, it doesn’t matter if you’re in good shape.
0:18:48
It doesn’t matter.
0:18:50
Right.
0:18:50
And what even might be even more strange to think about is that when you have a disease,
0:18:58
that disease itself might be beneficial to you for that time period in which it is trying
0:19:05
to clean up the dying tissue or the malformed cells or the inadequately profused area of your
0:19:14
body, that disease is taking hold there as a beneficial cleanup to you, just like algae will
0:19:23
grow in a dirty pond and help clean the pond and aerate the pond. And that you still need to also
0:19:31
work to get better because that disease could run amok and hurt you. But the disease initially,
0:19:36
when it takes hold, may be a beneficial signal to your body. One physiologically that you need to
0:19:42
now rest, take care of yourself, eat better. But also from a cellular level, potentially beneficial
0:19:48
and that is consuming a malformed or malnourished part of your body intentionally to get rid of
0:19:55
something that is harmful to you. And so it even becomes one level deeper in that diseases
0:20:01
when we have them may be beneficial so that we can know to get better and also from a cellular
0:20:10
level remove things that are damaged. Interesting. And so with that lens, a sickness that you might
0:20:18
get or even like a chronic illness that’s just rampant these days, right? Whether it be heart
0:20:24
disease or any number of other different things that people kind of come across in their life cancer you know there just so many different things that people have wrong with them In some ways they actually a good thing Because your body is
0:20:39
signaling that there’s a problem. Would that be? Maybe. Maybe. I think the chronic diseases are
0:20:46
something of a different story. I think what I’m talking mostly is the acute illness that is
0:20:52
recoverable, that is temporary. Like a gastro. Yeah, it’s like, yes, you got to get it out.
0:20:58
And that’s actually a good thing. Yes.
0:21:00
But the chronic illnesses, I think, are what you see.
0:21:03
The chronic illnesses are what you see when you’ve permanently changed almost irreversibly the metabolism of your body.
0:21:13
And so you have permanently damaged your coronary arteries from a high amount of blood sugar because you’re diabetic.
0:21:20
And that allows the cholesterol plaques to take root.
0:21:24
And so, you know, think about the cholesterol hypothesis since you brought it up.
0:21:27
It is sort of analogous to terrain theory of infectious agents in that the cholesterol needs a damaged blood vessel in the first place to embed itself in.
0:21:41
It itself is not damaging the blood vessel as we’re often taught.
0:21:44
You know, most physicians still believe that it is intrinsically damaging, but it can’t be intrinsically damaging because our body is filled with cholesterol.
0:21:51
and yet most people function on a high level. Our brain is cholesterol, our vasculature is
0:21:57
cholesterol. But when you have a damaged environment, a damaged blood vessel, that
0:22:02
cholesterol can take hold and form a plaque. And so what then causes the damage to your blood
0:22:08
vessel? That is the next question to answer. And that is most likely many of these oxidized
0:22:13
particles that come from the consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids. It can be the
0:22:18
the excessive amounts of blood sugar that cause insulin resistance. It can be the pro-carcinogenic
0:22:24
effects of a high concentrated amount of insulin that is never really fully used at the cell
0:22:30
wall level. But it is an environment that is already ready to be, that is already damaged,
0:22:38
and it’s just waiting for something to happen. You know, the forest does not spontaneously catch
0:22:44
on fire but if it is left in a state in which it can catch on fire then you see a forest fire
0:22:51
and so that is essentially the terrain theory of nutrition as well which is that
0:22:56
if you live a chronically unwell lifestyle you are at risk for a normal physiologic process
0:23:05
to become perverted and disrupted and lead to a chronic disease wow and this is very powerful
0:23:11
subject to have come across actually Dan because sad story for me um my father had a heart attack
0:23:17
and he died now uh 16 17 years ago and um he had something called a pulmonary embolism he was only
0:23:26
48 years old and I’ve always wondered why like why did he die and some part of it is definitely
0:23:34
you know like a classic 90s diet chicken Kiev’s and our family business was a beer and pub company
0:23:40
So he was often on the road and he’d sneak a chocolate bar here and there or he’d have lunch in the pub that he was visiting.
0:23:48
Not a heavy drinker, but definitely was consuming alcohol and overweight for his size.
0:23:54
But I think ultimately it was stress, like the environment that he was in and the role he was working within the business at the time.
0:24:02
There was a bunch of things that happened and basically just his heart couldn’t handle it.
0:24:07
and I wonder
0:24:08
and this is what struck me recently
0:24:11
with the terrain
0:24:12
at one point there he was taking statins
0:24:15
which I’ve since done some research on
0:24:18
and like very questionable
0:24:19
whether or not actually like thinning your blood
0:24:21
is a good thing anyway
0:24:22
but the thing that I’m trying to get at here
0:24:26
is this idea that
0:24:27
the terrain theory
0:24:30
it helps
0:24:32
it helps point out
0:24:34
that really you’re accountable.
0:24:38
Like your body is only susceptible to these things
0:24:41
if it’s in a certain state of disrepair.
0:24:45
And if you focus on optimal health choices,
0:24:49
rest, sleep, eat, move,
0:24:52
the environment that you’re in,
0:24:54
your lifestyle choices, your work,
0:24:57
whatever the case might be,
0:24:59
you can control those things.
0:25:01
And with that being true,
0:25:03
the ability for the terrain that you are as a human um it can get better or worse based on your
0:25:10
choices so one of the reasons that my father’s no longer around is basically his choices
0:25:15
but from a terrain perspective you go well actually dad you could have done a bunch of
0:25:20
different things and that might not have happened and the germ side of things would be like you know
0:25:25
take this prescription drug and blah blah blah and there’s a whole like portfolio of different
0:25:30
options that have been patented and it props up a very different incentive structure like sell a
0:25:38
solution rather than like no no just it’s basically your choices um and even that i’m sure is extremely
0:25:45
triggering for a lot of people to think well actually no no it’s on you mate and it’s much
0:25:50
like you know becoming your own bank with bitcoin it’s like well you can just take control of your
0:25:54
own wealth and not trust anyone else but you are responsible for it and if you get it wrong
0:26:00
it’s a problem um so does any of that resonate dan i mean that is probably why most people are
0:26:08
uncomfortable thinking about the turing theory of biology even though they implicitly acknowledge it
0:26:15
with almost all of their actions um is because when you are forced to take personal responsibility
0:26:22
it does appear somewhat uncompassionate, even though it perhaps is the most compassionate and empathetic thing you can do,
0:26:29
which is to empower somebody to be responsible for their own actions.
0:26:33
But it does appear on the surface to be unempathetic when you can somewhat point in a blame-like way
0:26:42
to why you have done this to yourself and made yourself ill, even though we will try to help.
0:26:49
the damage is done because of a series of very bad and uninformed and potentially misguided
0:26:57
choices that you’ve made for a long time in your life and that is that is tough and it’s tough for
0:27:03
I think most doctors would not want to ever have that conversation with the patient
0:27:06
because either they don’t have enough time they don’t know the patient well enough to have that
0:27:11
conversation and it also is a little bit hopeless because for some situations the choices that
0:27:19
you have made in terms of your health can be unreversible. And so, you know, but it does
0:27:27
underscore that there is not necessarily, you know, saying that there’s terrain theory is really just
0:27:34
saying that there is the first principle acknowledgement that your biology influences
0:27:41
your interaction with the exterior world and your interior environment is in communication with the
0:27:47
exterior world. The exterior world is in communication with your interior environment.
0:27:51
And the choices you make from both a metabolic standpoint are your responsibility. And they can
0:28:01
be reversed sometimes with medications. But mostly you’re treating symptoms. You know,
0:28:07
I’m in the sick care business. I don’t make people healthy. If you show up with a broken arm,
0:28:11
I can make you less sick. But most of medicine is sick care, not necessarily health care, because health care is a very personal responsibility, you know, field which everyone can do on their own.
0:28:28
I actually really like that definition differential there between healthcare and sick care
0:28:35
you kindly shared an episode you did with Caribou a couple years ago and I
0:28:41
very much enjoyed listening to that conversation because it’s so true isn’t it that
0:28:45
especially the emergency department of a hospital it’s like people are coming in with
0:28:50
an emergency it’s like yeah I’ve fallen off the ladder or I’ve been in a car crash or whatever the
0:28:55
case might be um why do you think that it isn’t better defined like that you know why is it all
0:29:04
lumped into being health care do you think like because that seems such an obvious thing to point
0:29:08
out no i mean i think we just live in a world where we’re given terms and we accept them um
0:29:13
it’s the same reason why no one’s thought about this topic that you’re bringing up right now is
0:29:17
that you know we’re just told this is health care this is health insurance this you know we’re just
0:29:21
you know when you’re born into a word you unless you really are somewhat rebellious in your thought
0:29:29
or you know very first principle you don’t question why a term is used you know going back
0:29:35
to the virology concept born into a money right i grew up anything i mean we’re just okay that’s it
0:29:40
right yeah yeah i mean we’re born into an environment uh the environment we live in
0:29:44
is made up of people and rules and language and society and and some of it is just there for no
0:29:51
reason. Some of it is there for bad reasons. Some of it is there for good reasons. But unless you,
0:29:56
you know, people can only question so much in their life and not go, you know, crazy. So they
0:30:04
just accept things and you will just accept the term that healthcare is healthcare. And, you know,
0:30:09
that term, health, sounds great. You know, this is healthcare. Everyone calls it healthcare. It’s
0:30:14
called health insurance. We need to give healthcare to everybody. You know, and so you just associate
0:30:21
health with the, uh, you know, with, with medicine or you associate health with a hospital,
0:30:26
um, or a doctor. Um, and then we have another word for nutrition. We call it nutrition or we call it
0:30:33
physical fitness and it doesn’t have, it does not call it health. So, you know, it’s obviously
0:30:38
good, but it’s not as good as, you know, going to the doctor, you know, or going to the dentist,
0:30:44
you know, those things are what make me healthy because it has the word health in it. And so, um,
0:30:50
You know, I think it’s just that, you know, we were born into a world with language and that language impacts how we think.
0:30:56
We think in language. And unless you question the language and the principles under under sort of underpin that language,
0:31:04
you know, you just sort of keep going in that system until you are presented with the situation that makes you ask why.
0:31:11
And unless you keep asking why, you may not really figure out what’s going on.
0:31:15
And that’s the fun bit. I mean, that’s why we’re on a podcast here together.
0:31:19
you know is that question why like why is this the case and and that’s a good opportunity for me
0:31:25
to kind of get back to this research that you were posting about because what and this is a
0:31:30
non-technical summary of what you described but it seems to me then so when you stress the cell
0:31:37
the cell observably does the same thing whether or not it’s a virology experiment or a non-virology
0:31:43
experiment the uh the virus and the little cell break off or whatever you describe it as doing
0:31:52
the same thing so the observed the observation is well here is actually a genuine control group
0:31:59
and the control group behaves in exactly the same way as what the virology guys are trying to say is
0:32:05
actually what their drug or process is doing so what does that mean and what are some of the
0:32:14
ramifications that spring to mind for you for like okay this is actually pretty pretty pretty
0:32:20
serious stuff what what might change or um if anything nothing maybe everyone’s gonna ignore it
0:32:26
i don’t know well i think most people will ignore it but what it does question is almost every
0:32:34
piece of infectious disease as a field that we have um learned for the last you know 100 some
0:32:44
years so um so like masks fucking pointless like vaccination fucking pointless like all the stuff
0:32:52
it’s like it’s actually not about that yeah so if you take you know so vaccination is an interesting
0:32:59
topic, you know, it, because you, you, in theory, just sort of let’s, you talk through it logically.
0:33:05
I mean, it does sound a little absurd, even though it’s touted as the most, you know,
0:33:12
his light, you know, it’s a societal changing component of modern medicine is the,
0:33:16
is the modern vaccine that has eradicated, you know, diseases. But if you take a vaccine,
0:33:22
so what you do is you have, in theory, a protein that’s related to a virus so that your body will
0:33:27
recognize this viral particle if you’re ever to encounter in the wild and squelch the problem.
0:33:32
So you inject that, but that alone is not enough because what you would think it would be enough
0:33:39
if I’m injecting a viral particle directly into someone’s bloodstream and this viral pathogen is
0:33:44
indeed on the level of life-threatening disease that we claim it is, injecting even a small amount
0:33:50
where it can hijack this cell should be enough. So then we say, well, we’re denaturing the virus.
0:33:55
So that’s why it alone is not enough.
0:33:59
So then you also need adjuvants.
0:34:00
You need various heavy metals so that the body is immediately inflamed,
0:34:06
not because of the particle that you’re inducing,
0:34:09
but because of the adjuvants that go along with the particle.
0:34:13
And then you measure the antibodies later
0:34:18
if you want to see if someone became immune to a disease.
0:34:20
But those antibodies are very nonspecific.
0:34:22
Most antibodies have multiple diseases that they’ll be positive for.
0:34:26
And so you’re not even sure, in theory, if someone is immune to a disease because that
0:34:30
antibody can be positive.
0:34:32
You know, HIV is a good example.
0:34:33
There’s like 50 conditions in which you can have HIV positive antibodies, but not have
0:34:37
HIV.
0:34:37
You can have tuberculosis and have a positive HIV antibody.
0:34:39
You can be pregnant and have a positive HIV antibody.
0:34:42
And so it questions the existence of many viruses as diseases.
0:34:46
There are already people who have questioned the existence of HIV.
0:34:49
And it is a troubling history in medicine to go down and read how it has come to be a defined disease, even though acquired immune deficiency is a real syndrome that people suffer from when their immune system is defunct.
0:35:05
So it questions those diseases that are chronic viruses.
0:35:08
It questions cancer related viruses.
0:35:11
You know, we have associated, you know, HPV with cervical cancer.
0:35:17
and perhaps if a virus is not a product of the external world but is a product of the nutrition
0:35:24
and we find this sequence of HPV in women who have cervical cancer, then we need to ask, well,
0:35:29
why are they producing these fragments if it is due to a nutritional deficiency of their cells
0:35:34
making these fragments? And we’re not pursuing the correct cure because the cure perhaps might be
0:35:40
some other deficiency that we have ignored. And so what it really does is if these findings do
0:35:48
begin to change medicine, is that it allows the attention to not be on the treatment,
0:35:55
but more on the prevention of disease. And so if the terrain is what is important,
0:36:02
and that the nutritional state of individuals is what causes the manifestation of these fragments
0:36:07
that we see associated with diseases, these RNAs and DNAs, we see them and we’ve sequenced them
0:36:13
and we find them whenever someone has a similar disease, but that similar disease is because
0:36:19
other people have similar nutritional deficiencies, then the focus of health basically changes from
0:36:28
treatment to prevention. Because these are not something that’s invading us that needs to be
0:36:33
treated uh these are things that our body is creating because of a deficiency that we then
0:36:41
need to focus on preventing um and perhaps even curing by fixing that you know malady within within
0:36:49
the body so it basically flips the script of almost all western medicine from a interventional
0:36:55
approach to a sort of defensive approach it strikes me it’s kind of like um you
0:37:02
it’s like being downstream isn’t it when you’re looking at all of these symptoms and like okay
0:37:09
we can solve this solve that but actually you flip it around it’s like well what what’s going
0:37:13
on here what’s at the very source and the the illness has arisen due to previous actions
0:37:20
or in some ways proof of work or lack of proof of work of someone’s decision making has created the
0:37:28
situation that they’re in and it’s therefore what did that person do what environment were they in
0:37:33
what were their choices at the time that then this manifested as a result and perhaps that’s why you
0:37:41
know if you go and see a someone who’s trained in chinese medicine for example acupuncturist
0:37:46
claire shout out to claire he’s been over recently a couple times to help my wife and i
0:37:50
and the first thing she wants to do is look at your tongue you know you stick your tongue out
0:37:56
and they’re like oh okay cool and they start playing around you’re like what are you doing
0:37:59
you know and all they’re really doing is obviously checking to see the state of your body right now
0:38:06
with visible signs that help to dictate the state that you’re in and that’s preventative in a great
0:38:14
sense because you’re then like okay well that was a great session where you helped me to and why I
0:38:19
really like the acupuncture is dropping into a really deep parasympathetic state that is actually
0:38:26
frustratingly hard to attain in the modern world whether that’s because you’re driving a car and
0:38:31
there’s traffic lights or whether you’re on a mobile phone that’s flashing at 400 different
0:38:35
times a day and you just can’t get out of fight or flight and therefore sometimes getting
0:38:42
practitioners to assist that osteopath is another great way of doing it you drop into like another
0:38:48
state meditation you can do it that way too and these are all things that and it’s one of the
0:38:54
reasons why terrain theory really speaks to me so strongly because like these are things you can go
0:38:59
and do and if it is true that it’s basically what’s happening upstream that’s important prior to the
0:39:07
disease manifesting then these are that’s great these are all things that we can control to some
0:39:12
degree um but wow it really it really does have large ramifications to like flip the script doesn’t
0:39:20
it um could you could you envision any major change to the system quote unquote that you’re
0:39:28
you know operating within today and i like the idea of you know from an entrepreneurial perspective
0:39:35
you’ve got to play the playing field that exists in front of you and don’t complain about the fact
0:39:42
that you know there’s a tax or uh there’s some regulation because it’s it’s there mate but what’s
0:39:48
the way of operating in and around that. The medical system is a big beast that has profit
0:39:54
incentives that misalign things in strange places. It has legal structures in place that remove any
0:40:02
accountability in some ways. And it’s a whole massive debate. But with the simple insight that
0:40:09
we’ve been discussing today of the benefits of focusing on your terrain and less worry or stress
0:40:15
about germs what might change if anything you think dan uh well one you you know you yourself
0:40:23
will change because you have nothing to worry about like if you are bathed in germs yeah it’s
0:40:29
so yeah you just you know there can be just a full release of yeah anxiety of yeah so true
0:40:36
Yeah. From a therapy standpoint, it questions the utility of many vaccinations.
0:40:47
From a treatment standpoint I think it questions the treatments for many quote viral diseases It does not totally burn down the system completely But I think the second order effects of asking and finding this as a potential truth is that you know I think it probably similar you know for Bitcoiners is that they once they asked one question and feel good about asking questions they sort of can stop questioning most things
0:41:30
And one of the things it could do if it gains widespread acknowledgement that these are true controlled results that question most of existing virology is that you question, you feel comfortable questioning medicine.
0:41:48
You know, people felt comfortable questioning money.
0:41:50
And for a while, you know, during COVID, people felt comfortable questioning their government.
0:41:55
At least some people did.
0:41:56
physicians very rarely question medicine. If it’s published, we think it’s true,
0:42:04
even though most of the publications are fairly polluted with just garbage science.
0:42:10
But once you question medicine, then you can question almost all diseases. You can ask,
0:42:14
and you might find the same answer that is true. So you could question the cholesterol heart
0:42:19
hypothesis. You could question the nutritional science. You can question the various treatments
0:42:25
of chronic diseases. And once you start questioning things, one, it will, you know,
0:42:33
it will make humanity better. But two, you’ll feel comfortable thinking independently. And I
0:42:40
think that would be sort of the biggest change the system that could happen is that if this is,
0:42:46
if virology is ever proven, or you never really prove anything in science, but disproven as a,
0:42:52
as a true science and there’s another there’s another reality it that it better describes what
0:43:00
is happening in our environment just like in physics you know when you come up with a new
0:43:06
theory and we finally discover that this is actually what’s happening or we’re trying our
0:43:10
best to approximate what is actually happening you can make scientific advancements you can actually
0:43:16
perhaps have people really live longer. You could perhaps help actually cure chronic diseases.
0:43:24
There’s many reports of people with Crohn’s disease switching to a carnivore diet and actually
0:43:28
curing themselves rather than being on biologic modulators for the rest of their life and high
0:43:33
dose steroids and never really being cured. So it could have second order effects of actually
0:43:40
allowing physicians to feel comfortable questioning dogma if a major dogma is all of a sudden proven
0:43:47
to be incorrect. You know, for a long time, there’s a classic story of gastric ulcers
0:43:53
being, you know, seen as related to infection with a particular H. pylori agent. And so everyone
0:44:02
started giving PPIs. And, you know, perhaps the reason that H. pylori bacteria is in your stomach
0:44:08
in the first place is because of the creation of an excessively acidic environment from your
0:44:13
dietary consumption habits. And the real treatment for chronic gastritis and gastric ulcers
0:44:21
is as a result of just dietary modification. Those are profoundly
0:44:28
big changes that reduce the amount people have to spend on healthcare. And it’s always
0:44:37
concerning in areas of the country where you hear that, you know, healthcare is the biggest employer,
0:44:43
because those are people not doing something else productive. You know, being emergency
0:44:47
efficient is fairly, you know, productive when you need an emergent stabilization. But being a
0:44:54
doctor that, you know, prescribes medications for people who have chronic illnesses doesn’t really
0:45:00
advance humanity unless those people who are taking those medicines also then can be more
0:45:07
productive. And so healthcare is always a strange field because it’s never really a productive
0:45:13
field. It doesn’t create new things. It can help people live longer and less symptom-free
0:45:20
for some things. But what could happen is if people need to spend less money on quote-unquote
0:45:27
sick care, they now have more money to spend on other things, real healthcare, real entrepreneurial
0:45:34
endeavors. And we spend a lot of money on things that perhaps don’t work. And if you’re willing to
0:45:42
question some of those things that are not working, and it comes from the tearing down of a paradigm
0:45:50
in medicine that we hold sacred, called virology, then that could be a beneficial, you know, a
0:45:56
beneficial move in society where we just we are now spending less money on healthcare, because we
0:46:01
just we don’t need it it’s not helping us and also you make better decisions when you feel better
0:46:08
so whatever the the best approach might be to help those people struggling with disease and illness
0:46:16
should they shake the shackles of the scenario that they’re in with better advice and improve
0:46:23
their terrain and then suddenly see all of these different improvements in their life they will
0:46:27
think better when you think better you make better decisions and so you’re right the compounding
0:46:31
interest will be will be really exciting Dan I’m intrigued to take almost about a bit of a historical
0:46:39
lens um where the the average age or the average life expectancy has drastically changed at least
0:46:51
I believe it has in roughly the last 200 years and a lot of the different reasons for that be like
0:46:56
better sanitation, better water or vaccination. From this perspective of germ versus terrain
0:47:03
theory, what do you think has been the main driver behind life expectancy, improvements?
0:47:11
And when you say people might live longer from where we are today, how might they achieve that
0:47:16
with this lens? Well, the things you have mentioned, I think, are undoubtedly and unequivocally
0:47:25
and unarguably what anyone in medicine would say is the main drivers of our longevity,
0:47:31
which is the improvement and safety of our environment that we live in.
0:47:35
We have electricity.
0:47:36
We have running water.
0:47:38
We have sanitation.
0:47:41
Most people would be hard-pressed to say that therapies within medicine have improved our longevity
0:47:46
because it’s just there’s nothing you could really point to.
0:47:51
There’s been no, you know, you can look at even maybe infantile illness is mostly prevented as a result of our ability to, you know, a premature, just take the most extreme example, a premature infant born, you know, prematurely.
0:48:09
We can keep that infant alive, mainly not because of medication advancements, but because of mechanical advancements.
0:48:15
We have small ventilators that can breathe for them.
0:48:18
We can keep them warm.
0:48:20
We can provide them nutrition and take it to the other extreme, the elderly.
0:48:27
The elderly are allowed to live a long, flourishing life as they age and become less mobile or, you know, just, you know, potentially more fragile as an individual as you age because of the mechanical and engineering and technological advances that we have in society.
0:48:45
not because of medicines. I think no one would be hard-pressed to say that blood pressure
0:48:50
medicines are what’s improving the longevity of our population. And many of the chronic diseases
0:48:57
are actually shortening the lifespan of our population. And we’re not curing these chronic
0:49:02
diseases. We’re just managing them. And so to go back to your original question, I think
0:49:06
we all acknowledge
0:49:10
silently
0:49:13
maybe implicitly
0:49:14
that it is the optimization
0:49:16
of our environment
0:49:18
taking us from the wild
0:49:20
where things are tough
0:49:22
where a bear can only live 20 years
0:49:24
but a human when taken out of the wild
0:49:26
can live 7,500 years
0:49:28
it is the optimization
0:49:30
of our environment to be safer
0:49:32
that is what is
0:49:34
improving the health and longevity
0:49:36
of our of us as humans and it’s why we’re you know the apex species on the planet because we
0:49:43
can modify our environment in a way that other species cannot and we do so sometimes to our
0:49:51
detriment but in large part by making things safer and more mechanized we do so to our benefit
0:50:01
that’s so interesting as a as a as a medical man yourself working in the emergency department
0:50:08
to to point to essentially mechanical engineering and you know building a house and having air
0:50:15
conditioning and running water and a bed that wasn’t what i was expecting your answer to be
0:50:20
but from a first principles perspective that makes so much sense slash we’re also not in
0:50:27
dangerous situations as much or as often as we would have been in the past and i think about just
0:50:34
the simple fact you know if you were part of some kind of hunter-gatherer tribe and you had a bad
0:50:40
broken leg and you couldn’t move well how do they take you with them right as a nomadic you couldn’t
0:50:46
right you’d be basically you’d probably be left behind pretty much whereas now it’d be like you
0:50:53
know, take six months, put a cast on, you can have some sick pay or whatever the case might be.
0:50:59
Yeah. And we see this in international medicine all the time. People will go into, you know,
0:51:04
a small village and, you know, pick, you know, Nicaragua and we’re going to give them dental
0:51:10
care for six months. But what they really need, you know, that’s fine. It looks great and you feel
0:51:15
good and everyone there gets their teeth cleaned or, you know, you do a, you teach them about,
0:51:21
using an ultrasound or something like that. But what really is beneficial is the electrical
0:51:31
infrastructure that is there or the EMS system that actually can function because you have
0:51:37
ambulances on roads that can move people from a rural area to an urban area when they need an
0:51:43
emergent stabilization or the ability to AeroVac people out. But the building of power plants,
0:51:50
Those are the things that improve the health of that region more than the esoteric medical therapy that you might happen to teach a rural community that’s impoverished.
0:52:07
You know, I don’t do anything productive for society unless the people I save in the emergency department do something productive when they leave the emergency department.
0:52:16
I am not a net producer in society unless the people that I help are net producers.
0:52:22
You know, my job is just to treat an emergency so that people can then leave the emergency to be a net producer and a net benefit to the world.
0:52:34
but me myself in the emergency department does nothing productive for society unless the people
0:52:39
i help then do something productive for society yeah that’s a cool insight and so dan to to spend
0:52:46
some time like what what is your day job like you know could you paint a picture for me
0:52:52
yeah when you start when you finish what are the kind of average customer yeah it’s not a customer
0:53:00
where it’s someone who’s got a broken arm.
0:53:01
Do you know what I mean?
0:53:02
But like, what’s it like?
0:53:03
It’s like a restaurant business though.
0:53:04
No, it is.
0:53:05
I mean, we’re a service industry.
0:53:07
You know, I work shifts.
0:53:09
So, you know, days, middle of the day,
0:53:11
some night shifts, you know,
0:53:12
you work holidays, you work weekends,
0:53:14
you do your mixture of everything.
0:53:15
I work for university.
0:53:16
So we also teach, we teach students.
0:53:18
We have residents that are in their training.
0:53:21
And a day in life in the emergency department
0:53:23
is somewhat unpredictable.
0:53:25
But, you know, the clientele is a mixture
0:53:27
of people with extreme trauma,
0:53:29
and illness to the worried well. And it’s a mixture of all of those in between.
0:53:36
And we’re, you know, we’re always triaging to make sure that those that are worried well
0:53:41
are taken care of, but maybe at a lesser speed than those who are critically ill.
0:53:48
And most of it, you know, as emergency physicians, we know, and we, you know, we can’t really
0:53:53
We’re one of the last few bastions of generalists within medicine, where we can’t really forget what we’ve been taught in medical school and just sort of focus on one particular field and then let some of that other core principles drift away.
0:54:09
We sort of always have to be remembering the first 20 to 40 minutes of all specialties within medicine, you know, caring for people sometimes for many hours when they’re in the ER across multiple disciplines.
0:54:23
not, you know, um, you know, almost as, you know, you would think of your classic traveling
0:54:28
physician in the olden days that sort of could take care of everything and knew a little bit
0:54:33
about everything and may not be the world’s expert on one particular thing, but knows enough to be
0:54:37
able to diagnose essentially any disease with relative certainty, um, and be uncomfortable a
0:54:46
little bit with some of the, um, the, um, the unpredictability that they could be wrong,
0:54:51
but manage symptoms and stabilize individuals who need emergent therapy.
0:54:57
And that’s where medicine really shines is medicine is, again,
0:55:00
we talked a little bit about the sick care,
0:55:02
but medicine is a symptom management tool
0:55:05
so that you can get through an emergent situation.
0:55:10
And I think medicine has its most positive effects
0:55:14
in people who have emergencies
0:55:16
because that is where symptoms are often the greatest
0:55:19
and the potentially most difficult to manage and potentially the most life-threatening.
0:55:27
And by managing those symptoms, whether it’s someone who’s about to have a cardiac arrest
0:55:30
or someone who is having a cardiac arrest or someone who just had a traumatic event from a motor vehicle accident
0:55:35
or someone who’s psychologically in a very fragile place,
0:55:39
managing those symptoms quickly and empathetically and also effectively
0:55:44
has the most bang for buck in medicine in the emergency department in comparison to almost all
0:55:51
other specialties probably short of sort of surgery and ob-gyn and so that’s it’s a very
0:55:56
fulfilling job because you do see how modern medicine can fix things from a symptom basis
0:56:02
so that people can recover later so cool and i would imagine that some scenarios are very stressful
0:56:10
how as someone’s come in they’re irate they’re angry they might be drunk who knows but as the
0:56:21
as the doctor on the floor like how do you manage those situations you guys obviously must have
0:56:27
training in terms of like stress management and also like situations that appear but um
0:56:33
yeah how do you deal with those kind of scenarios yeah i mean i think uh in almost any
0:56:39
you just don’t take anything personally.
0:56:42
I mean, I think that’s mostly where people,
0:56:44
you know, in life as well,
0:56:46
you have an angry neighbor,
0:56:47
you have a difficult colleague.
0:56:51
You just, if you don’t take anything personally,
0:56:54
well, then there’s no reason to be emotionally invested
0:56:57
in what seems to be like a very traumatic situation
0:57:00
because you are just doing things
0:57:02
in a need-based way.
0:57:06
You know, this needs to be done.
0:57:07
We’re doing this.
0:57:08
This doesn’t need to be done.
0:57:08
we’re not doing that. And if you’re very just sort of logical and unemotionally invested in the
0:57:13
situation, then, you know, I find that those probably make the best, you know, people who
0:57:18
can deal in emergencies, because there’s no meltdown that can take place because I’m not
0:57:23
invested here. I’m, I’m looking for a good outcome, but I’m not emotionally invested. I’m just
0:57:29
intellectually invested. Yeah, okay. There’s probably all sorts of different
0:57:34
um tactics in that sense where because yeah someone else’s trauma is not your problem
0:57:41
in the sense of my trauma it’s their trauma yes right um and so dan just sorry very quickly we’ve
0:57:48
hit up on the hour do you have some more time to continue yeah yeah if you want to keep going yeah
0:57:53
yeah we’ll shoot for another kind of 20 minutes or so um okay fascinating because it it when you
0:57:59
say that you’re not a net producer it’s i struggle to kind of square that away in a sense because
0:58:06
it’s such a skilled job that you do you know like that’s an incredibly important part of
0:58:13
an economy right it’s like some people economic actors get they become unproductive for whatever
0:58:22
reason so the quicker you can patch them up and get them back out again the better um sure
0:58:27
but to describe yourself no i’m not a rent yeah no i think it’s a you know maybe i’m thinking
0:58:33
about it incorrectly but you know i’m not a rent seeker either i’m not extracting from the system
0:58:37
but i’m i’m there you know as as a physician i’m basically a stabilizer for a functioning system
0:58:44
so the system the society the world the economy has to be functioning for me to have a role in
0:58:53
helping individuals from a very Austrian standpoint.
0:58:58
I work on an individual basis, but that individual then has to do something later.
0:59:02
Me stabilizing broken limbs does not produce anything.
0:59:11
No new innovations, nothing.
0:59:13
I use innovations that other people have produced to help with emergencies.
0:59:18
and I help individuals who are in emergencies get through it
0:59:22
so that they can then innovate, produce, and provide services to others within society.
0:59:28
So in a sense, I’m like a lubricant for an already productive society.
0:59:33
Yeah, that’s a cool idea because it’s almost like the inevitable entropy
0:59:37
that exists within a complex system.
0:59:41
Like stuff’s going to break, like it or not,
0:59:44
but therefore having a way of patching it up is the key and that’s essentially what you do
0:59:49
gosh cool okay and so um what i’d love to spend a bit of time doing now dan is
0:59:54
uh we’ve obviously connected over novster which is something that most people have never even heard
1:00:00
of um but before we kind of get to that it’s it’s bitcoin so how did you come across bitcoin
1:00:06
and how’s it kind of changed your life?
1:00:13
And not to tell your story for you,
1:00:17
but I always really enjoy meeting people
1:00:20
that are highly skilled professionals
1:00:21
that have figured out Bitcoin’s a good thing
1:00:24
and carry on doing what they were doing
1:00:27
and just use Bitcoin on the backend to help them,
1:00:30
which is what I assume you do.
1:00:33
But yeah, I’d love to learn some more
1:00:34
about how you ended up coming to that point.
1:00:36
Yeah, I mean, I was a poor resident. I trained out in Los Angeles area, so I was living in Long Beach. And I just remember reading a Slashdot article. I’ve always been somewhat interested in technology. And I just thought it was fun. You wire some money to Mt. Gox, and you think you’re never going to get anything. And then this little token appears on your online wallet.
1:00:57
and you learn about downloading Electrum,
1:01:00
which was the wallet back then, or Multibit.
1:01:03
And you just sort of say like, oh, this is cute.
1:01:04
This is fun.
1:01:06
I’ve got student loans to pay.
1:01:07
I just sort of forget about it.
1:01:09
And you never really made any connection beyond
1:01:11
it seemed like a neat little thing
1:01:12
that was similar to BitTorrent,
1:01:15
where everyone around the world
1:01:18
could have a part in this ledger,
1:01:20
just similar how everyone around the world
1:01:21
could potentially share movies or music
1:01:23
or Linux distros or whatever,
1:01:25
you know, the legal thing you were sharing.
1:01:28
And it was just, that was sort of the end of it.
1:01:32
You know but being financially strapped also you know because you got student loans and you don make a lot of money as a resident always you know creates some pressure for you to think about ways to get out of debt faster or to
1:01:50
you know, just become more financially stable and less, you know, living paycheck to paycheck to
1:01:55
pay off student loans. And so then as you learn more about it and you’re willing to ask why,
1:02:02
why you know why does this work this way why do i have to invest in the s&p 500 you know why do i
1:02:09
have to always put money in a roth contribution to be tax-free in the future what is it growing at
1:02:13
why am i doing this um you begin to think back to that little token that you got you know from
1:02:21
mount gox and you realize that nobody else can take that token from you and that token is a
1:02:28
fixed percentage of total circulating supply.
1:02:31
And you read the Bitcoin Standard by Safedine
1:02:34
and that probably really opened my eyes
1:02:36
to beyond just the technical coolness
1:02:41
of how Bitcoin works
1:02:42
and how it is essentially uncontrollable.
1:02:46
It just becomes logical.
1:02:49
And to not understand it
1:02:50
after reading a book like the Bitcoin Standard
1:02:54
and actually using it on a computer
1:02:57
and seeing it actually work and restoring a wallet on a different computer and seeing that you own
1:03:02
this thing that is intangible, but actually real, um, to not understand it after doing that,
1:03:09
uh, would be absurd. And so I think most people that probably don’t understand it
1:03:15
have just not given it the time to really understand it. Um, and, and, but again,
1:03:21
it is just money. And again, money is the most, I say, you know, go back to me, I’m an unproductive
1:03:27
member of society, but I am essential for the productive class of society to be productive.
1:03:32
Money is also the most unproductive thing. It does nothing. It sits there. And it is a record of
1:03:42
having done something productive, but it itself is an unproductive asset. And by being so interested
1:03:51
in an unproductive asset, as many people who then sort of want to work in Bitcoin and be in Bitcoin,
1:03:58
you know, I think is a little troublesome sometimes because, you know, if you’re actually
1:04:03
working on the tech in Bitcoin or educating people about Bitcoin, you do need to just do what you’re
1:04:09
actually good at in society because focusing so much on an unproductive asset like money, I think,
1:04:15
is somewhat harmful. And what is most useful is using a money that is unproductive and good and
1:04:23
high quality so that you can then do something good in society. And that’s sort of where I come
1:04:28
at it. So I still work as a doc. I’ll work as a doc as long as I can. It’s an enjoyable position.
1:04:34
And having a good money is just a tool to allow some aspects of my life to be less stressful.
1:04:41
and that’s sort of how sort of I’ve come to think about it.
1:04:46
And to highlight then, because I always love how does it actually make a difference for you?
1:04:52
So you mentioned student loans, perhaps that’s an area,
1:04:55
but when you say it helps make parts of your life less stressful,
1:04:59
obviously no specific details have been mentioned,
1:05:01
but like what are you referring to exactly?
1:05:04
Like if someone out there was listening and saying,
1:05:05
oh, should I get closer to Bitcoin?
1:05:07
What would it actually do for me?
1:05:09
Because real examples are great.
1:05:11
Yeah, so you, I think the easiest example is you no longer, you know, most doctors have a financial advisor that they pay. Most doctors will max out every retirement account and constantly sort of be thinking about either day trading or doing various, you know, real estate investments.
1:05:30
and all those things slowly over time become consumptive of your attention so you have to
1:05:36
meet with the advisor once a year you’ve got to manage a couple rental properties that somebody
1:05:40
told you was a good idea you’ve got to think about the allocation of your stocks bonds and
1:05:46
alternative investments and all these things you have to think about and so i think the
1:05:51
biggest benefit to me is just the cognitive unloading that takes place. I don’t need to
1:06:00
think about all those other things. I’m fine from the finance standpoint. I can hold money.
1:06:05
My money will appreciate if something I think is a better investment than the appreciation of my
1:06:09
money, then I’ll make that investment. And I can then spend time to go down rabbit holes for other
1:06:14
things, such as I can read about virology literature. I can spend time learning about
1:06:20
the mitochondrial association nutrition i can be a better emergency physician i can
1:06:24
learn how to teach my children how to read and write and do math um and so it is a cognitive
1:06:30
unload because it frees time um from some of the other sort of financial you know the time pit
1:06:38
holes that a lot of people get sucked down yeah actually shout out to um tarek samore who came on
1:06:43
the podcast i can’t remember how many episodes ago now but he’s a surgeon based here in australia
1:06:49
and taught me about that fact.
1:06:53
He knows surgeons on big money
1:06:55
and with the big money salary,
1:06:58
you can then leverage that
1:06:59
and you can get into the real estate market
1:07:02
and you buy one place
1:07:03
and you buy another place and whatever.
1:07:05
And in the last like four or five years,
1:07:07
interest rates have become more and more expensive.
1:07:10
And basically there’s a bunch of really stressed,
1:07:13
highly paid surgeons out there
1:07:15
that are going into operating theatres
1:07:17
thinking about the fact that their real estate portfolio is now actually causing them a headache,
1:07:23
not storing their value over time.
1:07:27
And you’re right, like a cognitive, what’s the right word I’m saying?
1:07:31
It’s like, it’s a…
1:07:33
Oh, like cognitive unloading.
1:07:34
Yeah, it’s so true.
1:07:36
And it applies to lots of different areas.
1:07:38
But this specific one’s a good example,
1:07:39
because you really need the person walking into your surgery,
1:07:43
or the person there, Dan, on the door of emergency being like,
1:07:48
come on in, not thinking about their stocks and bond portfolio
1:07:52
that’s gone down the 10 and, you know,
1:07:55
they haven’t been able to effectively save.
1:07:58
Yeah.
1:07:59
You need someone to be there and present and on the fucking game.
1:08:03
Right.
1:08:03
And that’s why, you know, we go back to how do you stay calm
1:08:07
in the emergency department?
1:08:08
You know, you need to have your own emotional house in order
1:08:10
or you will become emotionally unstable in stressful situations.
1:08:16
You know, it’s like the old adage that, you know,
1:08:17
you can’t love anyone else unless you love yourself.
1:08:20
Like you can’t be a good spouse unless you also love, you know, are a good individual.
1:08:26
And if you have your emotional house disordered,
1:08:29
and that could be disordered because of lots of financial stresses,
1:08:33
then it will be tough to be emotionally ordered when the time comes
1:08:37
and it’s, you know, a life or death type situation.
1:08:40
And so tell me, Dan, in the emergency department, how many other people have you managed to persuade Bitcoin is a good idea?
1:08:49
Probably five, most, you know, very few, you know, and who knows how much they really get it as well.
1:08:55
But if someone wants to ask me about it, you know, they know that I’m interested in it.
1:08:58
But mostly it’s probably neither the place or the time to talk about it.
1:09:03
And so it’s only if it comes up in passing where someone mentions their Dogecoin and, you know, I ask them how much Bitcoin they have or, you know.
1:09:10
Do you really know what Solana is?
1:09:14
Yada yada.
1:09:16
And I find these points interesting.
1:09:19
We’re so early.
1:09:21
No one really has adopted Bitcoin in a meaningful way.
1:09:25
When I think about my direct,
1:09:28
like people that I’ve met in my lifetime,
1:09:30
5,000 people or whatever it might be,
1:09:34
50 of them might own Bitcoin.
1:09:38
And that’s in my…
1:09:39
Like no one owns this stuff.
1:09:43
But what I find fascinating is when you talk to people that have gone and done the work by mistake or by choice, it doesn’t really matter.
1:09:53
But you dot together four, five, ten seemingly spurious life experiences to something.
1:10:01
Actually, this is really, really important.
1:10:03
And start saving, whether it’s through a DCA or they decide to reallocate from other investments into Bitcoin.
1:10:11
And then as years go by, their lives improve.
1:10:15
And they are making progress faster, at least from what I see, than everyone else.
1:10:21
But we’re still so early.
1:10:23
So when you get that lens on down, like how excited are you about the future?
1:10:29
You know, if you think about how, I mean, I think I think more clearly than most people.
1:10:34
And I think I’m making better decisions than most people.
1:10:36
And I think I’m happier than most people because of the position I’ve created for myself.
1:10:42
It’s hard to compare, right?
1:10:44
You know, I can’t verify how someone else feels.
1:10:47
But if I’m a small microcosm of what the future might look like,
1:10:51
and then i chat with yourself and i think about what the future emergency department might be like
1:10:55
on a bitcoin standard what does that open up for you you know we are probably yeah we’re probably
1:11:03
in a science dark ages and we don’t realize it i mean the amount of you know you would never waste
1:11:08
money on a on a junk study of various random associations of this and that when you had to
1:11:16
spend real money to do it. You would only fund like the most highest of highest impact research.
1:11:25
Like you would fund physics research. You would fund curative research. You would never fund
1:11:30
chronic management of X, Y, or Z or association of, you know, someone with, you know, X condition
1:11:38
living in some place. You would only fund the highest quality research because you would be
1:11:44
Parting with the fiat science of just junk pollution in the literature.
1:11:50
I mean, there’s so many publications that because the incentive to publish that is so high that all that matters right now is quantity.
1:12:02
And what we will probably move to is something of massive quantity of high quality research that really advances humanity.
1:12:11
humanity that is not just puff pieces to fill a resume. I think that is sort of the most exciting
1:12:17
thing that would happen when there’s a real cost on the line of doing an experiment is that you
1:12:23
will do an experiment that is most likely going to produce incredibly high quality impact because
1:12:29
you’re also departing with something of equally high quality. When you give something away that
1:12:36
is high quality, you would want high quality in return. So if you give away high quality money,
1:12:40
you should expect high quality science in return. It makes me think about from an investing lens,
1:12:49
the, you know, the cost of capital for the last 50 years has basically been the base rate of a
1:12:56
central bank. And, you know, vis-a-vis some kind of government bond. It’s like, right, well, your
1:13:00
risk-free rate of return is 4% over the next 10 years with this UK guilt or whatever it might be.
1:13:07
and I am now fully of the opinion that the risk-free rate of return is actually Bitcoin
1:13:13
and so if you’re not potentially going to get higher than a 50-60% CAGR then why are you
1:13:20
investing in this other asset and that’s assuming that the risk reward is the same in the other
1:13:27
asset there might be counterparty risks there might be liquidity risks there might be all
1:13:33
sorts of different reasons why actually the other asset is even far riskier than bitcoin and it’s
1:13:39
just made me think about how you just described medical research it’s like the hurdle rate for
1:13:45
the choice of money to be spent on a medical research project is going to get much much much
1:13:51
much higher and with that for therapy as well it’s in for therapy as well medicine a treatment
1:13:57
a doctor all of it yeah wow the CAGR gets applied to real you know you you know the the opportunity
1:14:03
cost is applied to real life oh okay so let’s let’s unpack that a little more what do you mean
1:14:09
so the opportunity cost is applied to real life what does that mean so you know right now um when
1:14:16
we pay for a medical therapy often a third payer pays for it they pay for it you know with us dollars
1:14:22
but that’s coming from an insurance company, the insurance company.
1:14:26
So right now, it appears to most people that there’s no opportunity cost for paying for stuff
1:14:34
because somebody else is paying for it.
1:14:36
They’re also paying for it with garbage money, but that doesn’t really matter.
1:14:39
So say you have a healthcare system on a Bitcoin standard.
1:14:42
That means if there is insurance, which there probably will be, insurance has existed forever,
1:14:46
there will be also insurers who are operating on a Bitcoin standard.
1:14:52
So insurers also recognize their opportunity cost.
1:14:56
And so they will want to encourage as little payouts as possible.
1:15:02
But if they don’t pay out when people need it, people will leave the insurance company and they’ll go somewhere else to an insurance company that is reputable.
1:15:09
So insurance companies will be forced to be good.
1:15:12
and when they’re forced to be good and pay out when things are required they’ll also want to
1:15:18
make sure that the person that they’re insuring is getting healthier because as they get healthier
1:15:24
they will need less payouts but they’ll still carry their insurance so the insurance company
1:15:29
will get to make some more money because they will pay less for good you know just like good drivers
1:15:34
make more money for a car insurance company than bad drivers do and so at the same time when they
1:15:41
pay out for their good, healthy customers. They want to make sure they’re paying out to a good
1:15:47
physician. They’ll make sure they want to be paying out to a good, reputable, high-quality therapy.
1:15:53
They’ll want to make sure that that good, high-quality, reputable therapy improves the
1:15:57
longevity and prosperousness of their insuree, so that that insuree still has a job and has
1:16:03
money and savings, so they can keep paying the insurance premiums. And so the whole system
1:16:07
feeds positively on itself because nobody wants to waste money they all want to prosper and their
1:16:17
net worth is essentially a reflection of how prosperous they are and when you lay it out
1:16:25
like that it makes it such a kind of laughable statement that uh you couldn’t have a deflationary
1:16:32
money that society wouldn’t work if that existed but you know i call bullshit like my life’s
1:16:41
improving sitting on a deflationary money thanks very much but it’s this idea that like the most
1:16:46
saleable good to use the austrian lens and that’s why the austrian economics is so key as part of
1:16:51
this learning journey because it’s like oh this is economics that actually kind of makes sense it’s
1:16:57
like why do people make decisions oh that’s what economics actually is okay cool let’s learn some
1:17:03
more about it but as you describe it’s like people aren’t going to exchange the most saleable good
1:17:09
that’s going up in purchasing power over time for crap it’s like no my decision making bar has just
1:17:17
got much much higher so unless you offer me a quality service that’s going to be completed on
1:17:22
time and actually give me what I need, then I’m going to go to someone else because you’re giving
1:17:28
me a shit deal. And that just changes the incentive for everything. Wow, it’s going to be a very,
1:17:35
very different world, isn’t it? Well, let me ask you this. So what kind of timeframe do you think
1:17:40
we’re looking at, Dan, for Bitcoin to seep into the wider economy? Because let’s be honest, at the
1:17:49
moment it’s still pretty fringe even though yes there’s etfs yes there’s bitcoin on the balance
1:17:54
sheet of companies yes there are individuals that have gone out and become bitcoin maximalists and
1:18:00
self-custody their wealth and people can now you know sell nine billion dollars worth of bitcoin
1:18:06
and whatever it’s still very early days in terms of i think that the penetration into the wider
1:18:12
economy. How long might this process take, do you think?
1:18:17
I’m hopeful that my kids will experience that. I don’t think I will.
1:18:21
I think, just like I think language, we’re talking about
1:18:25
you’re born into terms and you’re born into, I think it’s very hard
1:18:28
there’s a saying that science advances one death at a time. I think society
1:18:32
also does that and I think it’s going to take maybe one or two generations
1:18:36
of people to not be influential over society
1:18:40
whether they’ve aged out or they’ve just lost influence.
1:18:47
But I think it’s going to be at least another generation.
1:18:51
I’m hopeful that my children experience that world that we’re talking about
1:18:54
because they will come up in a world that has only ever known
1:19:00
or from their parents if their parents taught them about Bitcoin.
1:19:05
And it might even be longer than that
1:19:07
because it will then require them to then teach their grandchildren about it.
1:19:10
or my grandchildren about it when they teach their kids about it.
1:19:13
And so I think it,
1:19:14
I think these things take a long time because money is,
1:19:17
is like a cultural change when you change your money and to change a culture
1:19:22
is to need to change.
1:19:26
I think many generations.
1:19:28
Yeah.
1:19:28
And as I sit here thinking about it,
1:19:30
it’s like,
1:19:31
okay,
1:19:31
so Bitcoin’s 15 years old.
1:19:33
So if you’re 15 today,
1:19:35
you’ve never not known a world in which Bitcoin existed,
1:19:38
but in another 15 years they’re only going to be 30 i i turned 37 in june this year and whilst it’s
1:19:47
true that i can make decisions within my sphere of control there’s not many 37 year olds that
1:19:53
actually do much in terms of like positions of power so you know the the presidents of countries
1:20:01
and the kings and queens they’re like you know commonly octogenarians like proper boomers and
1:20:06
it’s another 30 years on top of that.
1:20:09
So for,
1:20:10
for large organizations and institutions to actually be managed and run with
1:20:16
decision makers,
1:20:17
that it’s a long time off from now,
1:20:19
isn’t it?
1:20:21
Yeah.
1:20:22
I think until we see the societal effects that we talk about in this like
1:20:25
deflationary,
1:20:27
you know,
1:20:28
that like,
1:20:28
like Jeff Booth’s book,
1:20:30
you know,
1:20:30
that this,
1:20:31
the real advances that a human,
1:20:33
that humanity can see when everything is cheaper.
1:20:36
and we do have this opportunity cost with reality that is truly based in physics and the time that
1:20:44
we have i think that’s going to take a long time i think people will get fabulously rich in between
1:20:49
but the true societal benefits that we hope will happen from this type of technology i think will
1:20:57
take a while yeah cool okay um dan so we’ve been going an hour and 20 minutes or so now
1:21:03
I would love to get just one last question in, which is really to throw it to yourself.
1:21:08
So is there anything that we haven’t covered today that you wanted to comment on or that’s come up that resonated or equally the research that we first kicked off with just to close things out?
1:21:19
No, I think I think we talked through a lot of stuff.
1:21:22
If you if you really want to go deeper on some of this, I mean, if you can if you can get Jamie, Jamie Andrews to come on your podcast.
1:21:29
He’s done a couple appearances and he’s pretty well spoken about it.
1:21:32
And it could be a fun, it could be a fun episode.
1:21:35
Definitely. I’ll have a look at that. Thank you very much.
1:21:37
Well, Dan, if anyone wants to reach out and get in touch,
1:21:40
what’s the best way for them to do that?
1:21:43
Well, I mean, I’m really minimally active on social media,
1:21:46
except for posting some, some science stuff on, on Noster.
1:21:49
So if, if you follow me there, then I’ll, you know,
1:21:51
I’ll post about metabolic health and other things that I read about in,
1:21:55
in biology.
1:21:56
Cool. Well, I’ll post a, a show note with a link to your Noster in there.
1:22:01
So Dan, awesome.
1:22:03
Well, have a wonderful day because it’s early with you and late with me.
1:22:06
So thanks so much for your time.
1:22:07
Thanks, Jake.
1:22:08
My pleasure.