WEBVTT

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 So, we'd like to start with your explanation of the idea of the interdependence of structure

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 and energy, something that isn't talked about much and how that runs counter to the accepted

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 culture of how... the independence of energy and structure.

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 The physics as it developed in the 17th, 18th, 19th century became more and more abstract

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 in their understanding of energy and matter.

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 And the whole idea of matter tended to define units as sort of lifeless, utterly lacking

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 intelligence.

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 And the kinetic energy concept that Leibniz proposed was living force.

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 And so, if you abstract kinetic energy and equate it with heat and chemical energy and

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 potential energy and such, then you get this abstract idea of energy as something separate.

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 And when you take away the living force, what you have is a dead matter.

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 And the same abstracting process reduced matter to the idea of elements.

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 And an element is made up of timeless, supposedly timeless, indivisible units, each of which

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 is identical to everyone else in the universe.

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 And in old chemistry classes, they used to talk about how to do a particular experiment.

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 You would use nascent oxygen, meaning freshly born oxygen, which had the reactive properties

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 that old oxygen doesn't have.

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 And that's an example of one of the properties that you tend to neglect, that if every atom

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 is the same, no matter where it is in its history.

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 The astronomer Halton Arp sort of revived the idea that time is important in matter.

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 When he saw physical connections between galaxies that had different redshifts, so they should

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 have been in utterly different parts of the universe with different ages and so on.

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 And so he proposed the idea that newly born matter has different properties altogether,

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 mass, energy of ionization and so on.

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 And that the person who, I think he claimed the term isotope, Fred Soddy, he's now in

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 the main line of physics history, but he proposed that cosmic rays are the result of newly born

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 atoms, that he saw time as a real thing affecting the nature of an atom.

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 So these people got away from the abstracted notion of dead matter, all the same everywhere,

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 regardless of context and so on.

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 And part of the motivation for having that abstracted idea of both energy and matter

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 was because they wanted to build machines, understand the causal interactions, how, what

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 happens when you put energy, fuel or fire into your steam engine, produce steam and

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 motion and so on.

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 And that understanding of a machine with the energy abstracted from the parts that you

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 manufactured, that was used as a model for an organism and it led at the beginning of

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 the 20th century to the idea of aging as wear and tear.

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 Just like a machine, you run energy through it and it degrades over time, gets worse and

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 worse.

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 And the Vernadsky-Le Chatelier trend is that as you run energy through matter, it complexifies

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 and that's especially relevant to a living system, which is generated and complexified

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 exactly by the flow of energy through it, which should be running the machine down by

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 wear and tear.

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 And still, practically all of my professors were absolutely dedicated to the idea that

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 aging is in one way or another wear and tear, somatic mutations and so on.

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 So once you see the context, the historical reason for doing this abstraction of energy

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 from matter, it gives you a different picture that you can't separate the existence, the

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 very substance of a thing from its place in the energy system all the way up to the star

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 energy that's driving the life on earth, for example.

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 And applying this to the organism, you get a different view of what stress is from the

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 old view.

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 Stress involves tearing down the system in various ways.

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 And the idea of a functional system is that whatever the organism decides it has to do,

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 you can call it a stressor or an opportunity.

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 Ideally, problems are opportunities that allow you to develop a part of your system to meet

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 the possibilities or challenge in the environment.

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 And the exercise of that part of your system to fit into the environment in that particular

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 unique time-sensitive way, wherever you are in your development, means that you're going

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 to use a different part of your system to respond.

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 So if you get a job chopping wood, for example, you will use part of your system and develop

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 the capacity to do that very well.

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 But if you don't talk to people while you're chopping wood, the energy from your talking

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 system goes to strengthen your working system.

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 And whatever the organism is doing as part of its survival and daily living is reinforcing

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 the system that's functioning and backing up the development of what you're using to

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 adapt.

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 The stress hormones like cortisol will take down, like if you're using one set of muscles

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 and not the other.

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 The cortisol that is helping you adapt is going to dissolve unused muscles, turn them

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 into amino acids, which then feed the muscles that are working.

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 And different kinds of exercise, eccentric exercise means that you're trying to use

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 your muscles in a productive way, but something's resisting it.

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 And instead of doing what you want to, it's stretching it against your intention.

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 Eccentric means that you're achieving doing the work and then relaxing doing the work

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 again.

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 Concentric builds and the eccentric tears down.

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 And the positive building side of your functional system uses things like testosterone to block

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 the action of the destructive catabolic cortisol-type hormones.

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 Someone used radioactive labeled testosterone and gave it to a weightlifter and then made

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 an image of where the radiation was coming from and they thought it would all be concentrated

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 in their skeletal muscles, but their heart was the brightest concentration of testosterone.

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 And if you're under stress doing hard labor, it's good to take down the muscles you aren't

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 using, build up the working muscles, but you don't want to take down your heart to feed

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 the working muscles.

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 Your heart, lungs, and brain are where the concentration of testosterone is to protect

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 against the takedown as food.

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 The thymus is very weakly protected and it's the first thing to go away when you're short

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 of protein and under stress.

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 So you can build a muscle quickly and feed it high protein solution just by taking your

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 thymus down.

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 And looking at cadavers, people who had been killed in accidents or died after a sickness,

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 they found that the adults didn't have any thymus gland to speak of, so that created

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 the idea that it's a gland that normally atrophies.

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 But using isotopes and such, they found that a healthy adult does have a thymus and that

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 good health, progesterone for example, and thyroid, accelerate the regeneration of the

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 thymus gland.

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 And so the old idea of adulthood and aging and stress were really artifacts and a better

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 examination of what's happening shows that in good health at least, the stress effects

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 are temporary and repairable.

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 Becker, I believe, talked about children when they get a digit of their finger severed,

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 if left alone it'll grow back.

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 If anything's done to it, it won't, and that it's not really accepted, this idea that the

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 digits will grow back.

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 Very few doctors even know that now.

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 Yeah, it's been known for more than 50 years.

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 I've seen it happen three times.

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 Around 50, over 50 years ago was the first time I saw it.

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 Next time was a little kid, four or five years old, caught the tip of his finger in the wheel

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 of his tricycle and cut it off right at the base of his nail.

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 And I told his mother about what I had seen in the late 1950s, and she got the case of

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 a ballpoint pen that just fit over his finger without touching the tip and just kept it

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 unexposed to air.

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 And I forget, maybe two weeks or something like that, it had completely regenerated,

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 perfect fingertip.

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 And then a friend of mine who was an electrician accidentally sawed off the tip of one of his

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 fingers a few years after that, and he had big, big fat fingers.

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 And so he used an aluminum cigar tube that just slipped over his finger.

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 And again, I guess he was 40 years old at the time, it regenerated perfectly.

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 So part of my understanding of that is that the carbon dioxide equilibrates and protects

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 it against excess oxidation, and oxidation, I think besides drying it out, it prematurely

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 differentiates a layer of skin, scar tissue and skin, and the carbon dioxide keeps the

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 energy up and lets the tissue sense the cues that it should be sensing to finish its proper

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 development.

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 And the same, I think, applies to injuries internally that could lead to cancer or fibrosis

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 if you're well soaked in carbon dioxide and the nutrients, the carbon dioxide keeps

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 the energy up and the inflammation down.

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 So instead of making a prematurely differentiated scar tissue, you can go on differentiating

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 replacement proper stem cells.

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 What seems unique to your writings and thought process is that you take the ideas of Hillman

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 and Ling and Pollack and Mae-Wan Ho and others, as well as this idea of the interdependence

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 of energy and structure and apply it to or impact how you understand disease, aging and

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 nutrition.

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 How did you connect these dots?

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 Because it seems so rare for someone to look at these abstract ideas.

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 Oh, I think the questions that I had in the 50s that led to experiments such as measuring

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 the conductivity of young and old people, seeing that the body seemed to be developing

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 internal obstacles to communication of some sort, the electricity simply doesn't flow

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 through an old body as well as a fresh young body.

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 That was sort of the background of coming in this direction.

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 And so seeing that the idea of the membrane in the 60s, there was a real mania in the

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 60s.

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 Scientific American started it early in the 60s and then several new journals, I don't

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 know how many membrane journals around the world started.

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 Nature devoted a whole new magazine, Nature Membrane, I think it was called.

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 So at the time I entered graduate school, the idea of a membrane as a limit to each

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 cell was dominating.

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 And it conflicted with my idea that the organism is a whole thing that generates its field

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 and has its conductivity.

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 And so running into Lange, he seemed on the path to developing knowledge that doesn't

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 play like a machine with little isolated parts.

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 And right at that same time that I ran into Lange's work, I started, well, I had read

00:19:01.520 --> 00:19:07.920
 Michael Polanyi's book, Personal Knowledge, in the 60s.

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 And in that he said just a very little bit about his own work.

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 Somehow in the encyclopedias earlier I had run across adsorption, the article on adsorption

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 at that time had a little passage describing Michael Polanyi's adsorption isotherm.

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 And it was one of the few mathematical images that really seemed appropriate to apply to

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 the real world and organisms that the adsorption increases with the concentration or pressure.

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 And that means that you'll get multi-layer adsorption simply as the pressure goes up.

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 And 1915 when he presented that, Einstein and other big shots in physics said, well,

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 in Hungary that might seem convincing, but in the modern world we know that one atom

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 with its electrical charge totally neutralizes the field of the underlying one.

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 You can't have multi-layer adsorption.

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 And so he went off and did different things.

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 But he went into studying crystals and the elasticity and surface properties, friction,

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 all of the things that people study in crystals, and found that every place he looked, long-range

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 energy was showing him the same kinds of long-range multi-layer effects.

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 That when a crystal, if you work a metal until it cracks, the energy to separate the parts

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 of the crack is drawn from a great surrounding area that this antenna-like effect conducts

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 the energy even for something like breaking a crystal.

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 And if you wet the surface of a crystal, what you do on the surface affects the elasticity

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 properties of the crystal.

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 So it goes from the inside out and from the outside in.

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 There's no such thing as an abstract surface.

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 There are long-range effects.

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 All this was done in the early 1920s.

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 And again, when he would present his ideas, they weren't acceptable.

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 It was 1931, I think, when he in London finally did a revision that could account for long

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 multi-layer adsorption.

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 But anyway, I started reading Polanyi at the same time as Gilbert Ling and seeing that

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 these long-range forces were part of creating the coherent image of the cell and the organism.

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 That the membrane thing was really an attempt to preserve the abstractable reductionist

00:23:00.420 --> 00:23:02.280
 parts.

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 The whole is nothing but a sum of the little parts, nothing long-range beyond the membrane,

00:23:10.980 --> 00:23:12.980
 either outside or inside.

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 The inside is all one phase, the outside is all another, and they're kept different by

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 the properties of this membrane.

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 I wrote to Ling at one point asking him if he had considered using the Polanyi adsorption

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 isotherm because of this intrinsic field idea that was built into it.

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 And he said no, the one he was using, Langmuir, I guess it was, works fine.

00:24:02.420 --> 00:24:10.860
 And then how did this alternate model that you were shaping in your mind change how you

00:24:10.860 --> 00:24:29.620
 thought about nutrition and disease?

00:24:29.620 --> 00:24:45.900
 I think it was much later that I, against a background of deciding that my mental activities

00:24:45.900 --> 00:25:01.540
 should be directed toward use rather than interaction with culture systems, periodically

00:25:01.540 --> 00:25:07.500
 from the '60s on I kept saying, now how can this be useful?

00:25:07.500 --> 00:25:18.620
 And to the extent that something is useful, how does that affect the theory about it?

00:25:18.620 --> 00:25:32.900
 And so I was constantly trying to remind myself to keep the theory and generalization in the

00:25:32.900 --> 00:25:39.060
 same world as the practical stuff.

00:25:39.060 --> 00:25:52.220
 Right at that time, someone who saw me having a migraine later said she had known someone

00:25:52.220 --> 00:25:57.380
 that said that eating a carrot a day would prevent migraines.

00:25:57.380 --> 00:26:00.420
 And so I started trying it.

00:26:00.420 --> 00:26:08.700
 And for, I guess it was about six years, I ate a carrot every day and didn't have a migraine.

00:26:08.700 --> 00:26:22.860
 And that started me being receptive to information, which I had again read earlier.

00:26:22.860 --> 00:26:33.860
 The newspaper, Dr. Walter Alvarez in the '40s had written some sort of autobiographical

00:26:33.860 --> 00:26:43.460
 books describing his experiences working with the intestine of his medical students, for

00:26:43.460 --> 00:26:44.980
 example.

00:26:44.980 --> 00:26:54.980
 And so putting together the old medical stuff about the importance of the intestine and

00:26:54.980 --> 00:27:04.380
 the ration experiments in which they would put a balloon in the intestine and inflate

00:27:04.380 --> 00:27:07.820
 the balloon, nothing would happen.

00:27:07.820 --> 00:27:15.940
 But if they gave the animal some insulin to lower its blood sugar, again, nothing would

00:27:15.940 --> 00:27:21.820
 happen until they blew up the balloon and stretched the intestine.

00:27:21.820 --> 00:27:36.820
 And then it would have constriction of the trachea or seizures or some analog of some

00:27:36.820 --> 00:27:41.100
 symptoms, some disease that's common.

00:27:41.100 --> 00:27:52.580
 And that, when I started writing the Mind and Tissue, doing the course on Russian brain

00:27:52.580 --> 00:28:04.860
 research, I was integrating that with the effects of estrogen, thyroid, progesterone,

00:28:04.860 --> 00:28:06.660
 and so on, and so on.

00:28:06.660 --> 00:28:17.140
 And the information going way back medically, that into the 19th century, people were aware

00:28:17.140 --> 00:28:28.740
 that dying people very frequently, most of the time, showed intestinal inflammation as

00:28:28.740 --> 00:28:36.300
 though it's a universal factor in sickness and dying.

00:28:36.300 --> 00:28:46.380
 So those components were needing explanation in terms of this coherent picture of the organism.

00:28:46.380 --> 00:29:01.620
 So things reinforced each other until it gradually produced this picture of the organism adapting

00:29:01.620 --> 00:29:09.180
 to its environment, both internal, nutritional chemicals, toxic chemicals running through

00:29:09.180 --> 00:29:18.740
 the system, stresses consuming energy, lowering blood sugar, causing you to shift your fuel

00:29:18.740 --> 00:29:24.460
 type, the way you use your oxygen, and so on.

00:29:24.460 --> 00:29:39.100
 So besides the daily carrot, what other changes to your diet or lifestyle did you make?

00:29:39.100 --> 00:29:49.860
 When I lived in Mexico, for myself as well as seeing the people in the city and country

00:29:49.860 --> 00:30:00.700
 who were very short on food, I was teaching English classes and paying expenses by cutting

00:30:00.700 --> 00:30:12.260
 my food intake, and that was how I ran across a store that sold wholesale wheat germ.

00:30:12.260 --> 00:30:18.980
 And I found that I could get the required amount of protein and vitamins very cheaply

00:30:18.980 --> 00:30:20.820
 using wheat germ.

00:30:20.820 --> 00:30:30.500
 But then my teeth started decaying and becoming very painful, and I looked up what the properties

00:30:30.500 --> 00:30:37.100
 of wheat germ are, and it's extremely high in phosphate and it takes calcium out of your

00:30:37.100 --> 00:30:38.500
 system.

00:30:38.500 --> 00:30:48.980
 And so I saw that you have to economize in safe ways.

00:30:48.980 --> 00:31:02.940
 But keeping the idea of economy was a central factor way into the '70s when I was trying

00:31:02.940 --> 00:31:12.540
 to finance my continuing studies by cutting my living expenses to practically nothing.

00:31:12.540 --> 00:31:21.940
 So as part of that, I ran onto the idea that potatoes are very close to a perfect nutrient

00:31:21.940 --> 00:31:30.900
 balance, adequate protein because of the high quality of the protein and amino acid equivalent,

00:31:30.900 --> 00:31:36.500
 and have basically everything except vitamin A and B12.

00:31:36.500 --> 00:31:51.100
 And then in Mexico, everyone cooks their tacos and such in vegetable oil, and so I was pretty

00:31:51.100 --> 00:31:58.100
 well soaked in safflower oil for all the years that I was in Mexico.

00:31:58.100 --> 00:32:08.260
 And working on my dissertation, looking at the things that cause aging and the wastage

00:32:08.260 --> 00:32:19.660
 of oxygen the way estrogen and radiation do, I saw that in the early 1940s, there are lab

00:32:19.660 --> 00:32:31.420
 animals had, in several labs, had suffered epidemics of brain softening and atrophy of

00:32:31.420 --> 00:32:33.820
 the testes.

00:32:33.820 --> 00:32:46.420
 And Dr. Shute in the '30s and then his son Evan and Wilfred into the '40s and '50s were

00:32:46.420 --> 00:32:56.780
 working on the idea at first that vitamin E was a fertility nutrient because of being

00:32:56.780 --> 00:32:58.820
 anti-estrogenic.

00:32:58.820 --> 00:33:06.020
 And being anti-estrogenic, it prevented blood clots, among other things.

00:33:06.020 --> 00:33:14.740
 And the preventing blood clots led them into treating it as something to prevent heart

00:33:14.740 --> 00:33:16.240
 disease.

00:33:16.240 --> 00:33:29.220
 But in the middle of that process, the fact that these lab animals getting a grain-based

00:33:29.220 --> 00:33:39.220
 or bean-based diet very high in polyunsaturated fats, the brain and testicle atrophy was prevented

00:33:39.220 --> 00:33:52.400
 by adding vitamin E. And because of the various industrial forces at that time, 1942, the

00:33:52.400 --> 00:34:01.240
 pharmaceutical industry, I think a dozen different companies, came together to lobby the FDA

00:34:01.240 --> 00:34:10.800
 and medical schools to the idea that estrogen was the female hormone and should be approved

00:34:10.800 --> 00:34:16.040
 as a drug to treat infertile and aging women.

00:34:16.040 --> 00:34:24.720
 And because this coincided in time with the discovery that what had been the anti-estrogenic

00:34:24.720 --> 00:34:34.180
 vitamin E, that it cured male infertility and dementia in the animals, that would be

00:34:34.180 --> 00:34:42.680
 bad if it was acting as an anti-estrogen to prevent degenerative disease.

00:34:42.680 --> 00:34:50.660
 So they promoted the idea that it's working as an antioxidant, that the vegetables are

00:34:50.660 --> 00:34:57.840
 unstable, and the vitamin E prevents that toxic free radical thing.

00:34:57.840 --> 00:35:08.240
 And so out of that misinterpretation, essentially, of what vitamin E is, developed this whole

00:35:08.240 --> 00:35:14.840
 idea that aging is caused by free radicals excess.

00:35:14.840 --> 00:35:23.340
 And in my dissertation, trying to understand what estrogen was doing, similar to aging

00:35:23.340 --> 00:35:34.520
 and radiation, I saw that previously the toxic effects of the polyunsaturated fatty acids

00:35:34.520 --> 00:35:45.800
 were producing lipofuscin, or age pigment, and that the degenerating brain and testicles

00:35:45.800 --> 00:35:57.740
 involved the same oxygen-wasting pigment-producing process that had been seen in old infertile

00:35:57.740 --> 00:36:00.320
 uteruses.

00:36:00.320 --> 00:36:10.080
 And so I started extracting the pigment from the aged, sort of gnarled-up uteruses of the

00:36:10.080 --> 00:36:20.580
 hamsters and studied the age pigment in itself and found that it has an enzyme-like oxygen-consuming

00:36:20.580 --> 00:36:28.120
 effect that generates free radicals and wastes oxygen.

00:36:28.120 --> 00:36:38.480
 So that sensitized me to the immediate toxic dangers of unsaturated fatty acids.

00:36:38.480 --> 00:36:47.840
 And then in the '70s, I saw an experiment described in which they had given several

00:36:47.840 --> 00:36:57.640
 groups of animals, I think it was 15 different compositions of the diet, high-fat diet, low-fat

00:36:57.640 --> 00:37:07.040
 diet, high PUFA, low PUFA in different combinations.

00:37:07.040 --> 00:37:19.800
 And at the end of their life, the fat animals were the high PUFA animals independent of

00:37:19.800 --> 00:37:23.400
 the quantity of fat in their diet.

00:37:23.400 --> 00:37:33.040
 So a low-fat, pure PUFA diet was just as fattening, basically, as a high-fat, high PUFA diet.

00:37:33.040 --> 00:37:40.880
 But a high-fat, all-saturated fatty acid diet wasn't fattening.

00:37:40.880 --> 00:37:52.160
 So that was when I decided to look for a source of coconut oil.

00:37:52.160 --> 00:37:59.920
 So I read the literature and saw that there were just dozens of studies showing that as

00:37:59.920 --> 00:38:09.840
 the proportion of polyunsaturation in the diet increases, not only obesity, but the

00:38:09.840 --> 00:38:18.400
 rate of cancer goes up directly with the unsaturation of the fat in your diet.

00:38:18.400 --> 00:38:30.600
 And one... coconut oil was such a standard animal food at that time, many people showed that

00:38:30.600 --> 00:38:37.240
 it was very low in its allowance of cancer to develop.

00:38:37.240 --> 00:38:40.680
 And hydrogenated coconut oil...

00:38:40.680 --> 00:38:50.640
 Maybe we should just wait for this siren.

00:38:50.640 --> 00:38:58.400
 Hydrogenated coconut oil was tested in relation to cancer and carcinogens, and it was even

00:38:58.400 --> 00:39:03.520
 more protective than a normal natural coconut oil.

00:39:03.520 --> 00:39:07.280
 So it was purely the unsaturation.

00:39:07.280 --> 00:39:17.200
 And new studies are showing that red blood cells, for example, are high in stearic acid

00:39:17.200 --> 00:39:23.200
 in people who don't have cancer, and low in stearic acid, the saturated fat, in people

00:39:23.200 --> 00:39:24.960
 who do have cancer.

00:39:24.960 --> 00:39:36.680
 And as far back as the 1920s, there were observations that a fat-free diet made the animals cancer-free.

00:39:36.680 --> 00:39:46.680
 And where did endotoxin fit into this picture for you?

00:39:46.680 --> 00:40:05.000
 For me, it was a way of understanding how bowel inflammation could have so many ramifications

00:40:05.000 --> 00:40:18.200
 of, for example, in traumatic shock, if the intestine is full of undigested food, the

00:40:18.200 --> 00:40:22.560
 consequence of the shock is much worse.

00:40:22.560 --> 00:40:30.960
 And so just as a reservoir of something, the intestine interacts with stress and shock.

00:40:30.960 --> 00:40:38.440
 When your adrenaline goes up, for example, the movement of the intestine decreases.

00:40:38.440 --> 00:40:43.080
 You don't have bowel sounds when you're tense.

00:40:43.080 --> 00:40:47.640
 And the circulation decreases.

00:40:47.640 --> 00:40:50.920
 That's part of the functional system.

00:40:50.920 --> 00:41:00.120
 The blood flow and energy go to your working muscles, and you don't use your viscera.

00:41:00.120 --> 00:41:07.240
 So the same thing that shrinks your thymus is shutting off the blood supply to your intestine.

00:41:07.240 --> 00:41:16.280
 And if that goes on very long, your intestine loses the barrier function, and whatever is

00:41:16.280 --> 00:41:19.600
 in the intestine tends to get in the bloodstream.

00:41:19.600 --> 00:41:32.400
 And endotoxin is, it's always present to some extent if you have bacteria, and it's

00:41:32.400 --> 00:41:34.200
 always a mild stress.

00:41:34.200 --> 00:41:47.000
 But when the organism is being intensely challenged, then endotoxin can have systemic, very intense

00:41:47.000 --> 00:41:48.240
 effects.

00:41:48.240 --> 00:42:00.000
 And so endotoxin is just one of the dimensions of the challenges that the organism is defending

00:42:00.000 --> 00:42:04.800
 itself against.

00:42:04.800 --> 00:42:15.920
 There have been experiments on long-range germ-free effects, and the animals have a

00:42:15.920 --> 00:42:29.200
 very low mortality in youth and middle age than on the diets that they give these germ-free

00:42:29.200 --> 00:42:30.200
 animals.

00:42:30.200 --> 00:42:35.440
 Then they almost catch up in mortality in very old age.

00:42:35.440 --> 00:42:43.440
 But mortality is definitely low, showing that they're more resistant to stress in many

00:42:43.440 --> 00:42:50.520
 ways simply by not having germs growing in their intestine.

00:42:50.520 --> 00:43:01.960
 But they are still eating a standard diet with, among other things, starches and unsaturated

00:43:01.960 --> 00:43:03.920
 fatty acids.

00:43:03.920 --> 00:43:14.040
 And even though one of the factors that gets in your system when you're under stress is

00:43:14.040 --> 00:43:22.720
 endotoxin, a fairly small molecule, even the bigger molecules, such as starch grains, can

00:43:22.720 --> 00:43:36.520
 get through the wall of the intestine and circulate and, in effect, accelerate aging.

00:43:36.520 --> 00:43:45.880
 The mice have been fed raw starch for a long time and then sliced up and found that there

00:43:45.880 --> 00:43:53.960
 were nests of dead tissue all through their bodies, including their brains, around starch

00:43:53.960 --> 00:44:02.640
 grains that had plugged up small arterioles and cut off the circulation.

00:44:02.640 --> 00:44:10.320
 So the endotoxin is a chronic constant, and starch grains are another factor.

00:44:10.320 --> 00:44:21.000
 And the polyunsaturated fats are, unless you make an extreme effort to avoid them, they're

00:44:21.000 --> 00:44:28.200
 always going to be absorbed and incorporated into your tissues.

00:44:28.200 --> 00:44:38.400
 And it happens that the unsaturation makes them a little more water-soluble, and so they,

00:44:38.400 --> 00:44:46.600
 to some extent, escape oxidation through the fat-loving cells and are more likely to be

00:44:46.600 --> 00:44:54.420
 stored simply because they stay in circulation and avoid being eaten immediately.

00:44:54.420 --> 00:45:06.400
 But when they're in storage in fat droplets in your fat tissues, the fat cell is needing

00:45:06.400 --> 00:45:13.200
 energy to survive, and it preferentially oxidizes saturated fats.

00:45:13.200 --> 00:45:20.460
 And so once you start getting fat, your fat cells are eating the good stuff for themselves

00:45:20.460 --> 00:45:25.680
 and letting the stored fat get more and more polyunsaturated.

00:45:25.680 --> 00:45:34.400
 And when you're under stress, these are the water-soluble things which are released preferentially.

00:45:34.400 --> 00:45:40.440
 So the older and fatter you get, the worse any stress is for you.

00:45:40.440 --> 00:45:55.960
 And the polyunsaturated fats not only have their direct effects, hormone-like, and a

00:45:55.960 --> 00:46:06.960
 toxic effect on the mitochondria, the unstable susceptibility to oxidation, and so on, but

00:46:06.960 --> 00:46:19.440
 we have the enzyme system that creates a loop in the molecule creating the prostaglandins.

00:46:19.440 --> 00:46:26.680
 And at first, the drug companies said, "They're hormones that we make.

00:46:26.680 --> 00:46:27.680
 You find them in semen.

00:46:27.680 --> 00:46:31.960
 That's why they call them prostaglandins."

00:46:31.960 --> 00:46:40.560
 And since they're hormones, they're prospective products for drugs or supplements.

00:46:40.560 --> 00:46:46.280
 And I got some to experiment with around 1970 or '71.

00:46:46.280 --> 00:46:56.280
 I was doing electrical measurements still at that time, and I put some spots on my skin.

00:46:56.280 --> 00:47:08.080
 And for comparison, I made a sleeve covered with tinfoil and had some holes in the tinfoil

00:47:08.080 --> 00:47:11.920
 so I could sunburn spots selectively.

00:47:11.920 --> 00:47:23.400
 And I think it was the F-type of prostaglandin imitated the sunburn electrically.

00:47:23.400 --> 00:47:29.200
 It created a reducing area on my skin.

00:47:29.200 --> 00:47:37.920
 And around that time, a few people started saying, "Well, they're natural hormones,

00:47:37.920 --> 00:47:44.320
 but some of them have really bad effects, such as knocking out progesterone production

00:47:44.320 --> 00:47:45.320
 in the ovaries."

00:47:45.320 --> 00:47:52.880
 And so there was the yin and yang theory of prostaglandins, the good ones and the bad

00:47:52.880 --> 00:47:53.960
 ones.

00:47:53.960 --> 00:48:01.500
 But when you look at the good ones, as the evidence accumulates, they all have some really

00:48:01.500 --> 00:48:09.480
 bad effects, causing pain or atrophy or inflammation or such.

00:48:09.480 --> 00:48:16.040
 So not having any of these ordinary prostaglandins would be good.

00:48:16.040 --> 00:48:31.040
 And when you're really deficient, absolutely lacking the vegetable N-6 or N-3 fatty acids,

00:48:31.040 --> 00:48:38.660
 the body produces its own polyunsaturated fats, but they're stable because they have

00:48:38.660 --> 00:48:45.480
 this tail of a hydrocarbon chain of nine carbons.

00:48:45.480 --> 00:48:47.760
 They're the N-9.

00:48:47.760 --> 00:48:53.200
 And these are anti-inflammatory rather than pro-inflammatory.

00:48:53.200 --> 00:49:01.640
 And so our body tends to make those when it isn't being blocked by the vegetable or

00:49:01.640 --> 00:49:03.600
 fish oils.

00:49:03.600 --> 00:49:14.600
 And so our natural defensive anti-inflammatory system seems to be a casualty of the accumulation

00:49:14.600 --> 00:49:18.800
 of these environmental fats.

00:49:18.800 --> 00:49:32.800
 Can you talk about how endotoxin can increase some of the other disease-causing agents like

00:49:32.800 --> 00:49:41.120
 estrogen and serotonin?

00:49:41.120 --> 00:49:49.640
 The intestine being the main source of endotoxin, you can breathe it if you work on a farm,

00:49:49.640 --> 00:49:51.240
 for example.

00:49:51.240 --> 00:49:56.160
 It gets in the air and can cause respiratory problems.

00:49:56.160 --> 00:49:59.520
 But usually it's the intestine that's the main source.

00:49:59.520 --> 00:50:16.480
 And the intestine is well-supplied with hormone-producing cells and serotonin.

00:50:16.480 --> 00:50:24.720
 There are a lot of conductors and regulators in the intestine, various types of nerves

00:50:24.720 --> 00:50:32.360
 and things like nerve transmitters that regulate the tone and function of the intestine.

00:50:32.360 --> 00:50:40.240
 And the intestine is very richly supplied with these serotonin-producing cells.

00:50:40.240 --> 00:50:54.160
 And partly the direct effect of the endotoxin activates these cells.

00:50:54.160 --> 00:51:00.920
 And at the same time, it's making the intestine leaky by knocking down the energy production.

00:51:00.920 --> 00:51:07.240
 It's also acting as a signal to activate serotonin production.

00:51:07.240 --> 00:51:15.260
 And the combination of the leakiness, the lowered energy, and the serotonin increase

00:51:15.260 --> 00:51:18.840
 nitric oxide production.

00:51:18.840 --> 00:51:26.240
 And the serotonin and nitric oxide circulate systemically.

00:51:26.240 --> 00:51:33.760
 Ordinarily the serotonin that's absorbed into the blood from the intestine is carried

00:51:33.760 --> 00:51:37.720
 on the platelets to the lungs.

00:51:37.720 --> 00:51:43.200
 And the lungs are a major detoxifying organ.

00:51:43.200 --> 00:51:56.280
 And nitric oxide interferes with the production of the detoxifying capacity of the lungs.

00:51:56.280 --> 00:52:03.480
 And so the combination of nitric oxide and serotonin, and especially if endotoxin is

00:52:03.480 --> 00:52:12.440
 also reaching the lungs, will swamp the ability to detoxify serotonin.

00:52:12.440 --> 00:52:18.440
 And then the serotonin gets through to the brain.

00:52:18.440 --> 00:52:25.200
 The brain normally produces only a few percent of the body's total serotonin.

00:52:25.200 --> 00:52:33.240
 But it's a very important regulator in the brain, controlling emotion and formation of

00:52:33.240 --> 00:52:37.040
 new cells, for example.

00:52:37.040 --> 00:52:44.440
 And if your intestinal serotonin is getting through to your brain, it's received as

00:52:44.440 --> 00:52:48.720
 a stress signal, creating depression.

00:52:48.720 --> 00:53:00.160
 It turns on the little peptide signal, which turns on your pituitary signal to produce

00:53:00.160 --> 00:53:03.680
 ACTH to turn on your adrenal glands.

00:53:03.680 --> 00:53:10.600
 So the serotonin caused by stress getting through your lungs into your brain turns on

00:53:10.600 --> 00:53:18.720
 the stress system, activates production of cortisol, which, unless it's compensated

00:53:18.720 --> 00:53:27.200
 with a lot of testosterone and progesterone, is going to start melting down your tissues

00:53:27.200 --> 00:53:32.080
 under the influence of stress.

00:53:32.080 --> 00:53:44.400
 So these three factors, in particular serotonin, nitric oxide, and endotoxin, are a very central

00:53:44.400 --> 00:53:50.080
 part, at least in our present diet, atmosphere, and so on.

00:53:50.080 --> 00:53:57.720
 They're a very central part of keeping us on the edge of melting down all the time.

00:53:57.720 --> 00:54:05.640
 So having identified some of the stress-causing or disease-promoting substances, what do you

00:54:05.640 --> 00:54:13.360
 consider as life-supporting or energy-protecting?

00:54:13.360 --> 00:54:20.800
 This morning I saw an article from two or three years ago about one of the oldest men

00:54:20.800 --> 00:54:32.360
 in the U.S. I think he lived in New Jersey and was the oldest man in the state when he

00:54:32.360 --> 00:54:36.120
 died at 111.

00:54:36.120 --> 00:54:44.120
 His son said that all through his life he would eat bowl after bowl of strawberry ice

00:54:44.120 --> 00:54:55.680
 cream as his favorite food, and the staples of his diet were sugar, fat, and when he ate

00:54:55.680 --> 00:55:02.840
 vegetables they were cooked to softness.

00:55:02.840 --> 00:55:10.280
 So choosing the right kind of vegetables and good ice cream, that's really a perfectly

00:55:10.280 --> 00:55:13.760
 supportive long-life diet.

00:55:13.760 --> 00:55:21.000
 In Vilcabamba, where there were people who according to the church records, they

00:55:21.000 --> 00:55:32.960
 were up in their 140s and the churches generally have been very reliable recorders of births

00:55:32.960 --> 00:55:35.440
 and deaths.

00:55:35.440 --> 00:55:45.360
 And living in the high regions, they ate lots of greens because they're easy to grow in

00:55:45.360 --> 00:56:00.800
 a stressful environment, and sheep, sheep milk or sheep cheese because sheep are a common

00:56:00.800 --> 00:56:06.800
 animal for farmers in the high mountains.

00:56:06.800 --> 00:56:17.000
 So that made me interested in the role of high magnesium and mineral intake.

00:56:17.000 --> 00:56:27.800
 And there's talk that in these high areas the water, a lot of it is glacier water, rich

00:56:27.800 --> 00:56:38.040
 in pulverized minerals, but I think the diet of a very rich in minerals such as magnesium

00:56:38.040 --> 00:56:45.640
 and calcium is an important anti-stress, anti-aging effect.

00:56:45.640 --> 00:56:57.480
 And thinking about the effects of high altitude besides the low oxygen pressure that prevents

00:56:57.480 --> 00:57:05.400
 an overproduction of lactic acid when you're under stress and working, because in your

00:57:05.400 --> 00:57:10.900
 lungs there's an exchange between oxygen and carbon dioxide.

00:57:10.900 --> 00:57:19.280
 If you reduce the oxygen pressure, you increase the amount of carbon dioxide left in the tissues,

00:57:19.280 --> 00:57:29.520
 and the carbon dioxide pushes towards the continuing oxidation of glucose and inhibits

00:57:29.520 --> 00:57:31.880
 the production of lactic acid.

00:57:31.880 --> 00:57:38.320
 Lactic acid produces inflammation, fibrosis, and so on.

00:57:38.320 --> 00:57:46.160
 So the high altitude in itself, just because of the oxygen relative deficiency, is very

00:57:46.160 --> 00:57:48.200
 protective.

00:57:48.200 --> 00:58:02.880
 But another thing about high altitude is that as water evaporates from the ocean, you get

00:58:02.880 --> 00:58:08.360
 all of the isotopes pretty much coming off the surface of the ocean.

00:58:08.360 --> 00:58:16.120
 Heavy hydrogen, deuterium, as well as normal hydrogen.

00:58:16.120 --> 00:58:27.880
 But as the water condenses, first in the coastal regions, rising and cooling as it goes, it

00:58:27.880 --> 00:58:33.280
 rains out selectively the heavy isotopes.

00:58:33.280 --> 00:58:39.000
 And so the higher you go, the lighter your water is.

00:58:39.000 --> 00:58:50.160
 And the first experiments were written up in Science News around 1950, in which they

00:58:50.160 --> 00:58:54.840
 were making heavy water for their nuclear industry.

00:58:54.840 --> 00:59:04.040
 And they fed mice some of the heavy water and found that they had accelerated aging,

00:59:04.040 --> 00:59:09.200
 turned gray in middle age, and died young.

00:59:09.200 --> 00:59:20.960
 And so very little was done from 1950 until pretty much this century.

00:59:20.960 --> 00:59:32.880
 But there is definite evidence that the heavy isotopes slow down biochemical processes,

00:59:32.880 --> 00:59:37.560
 simply lower the energy production of the system.

00:59:37.560 --> 00:59:53.000
 And you can make some improvement in your isotope balance just by, for example, choosing

00:59:53.000 --> 01:00:02.400
 sugar beet derived sugar from the high country in the Midwest, Colorado, for example, if

01:00:02.400 --> 01:00:11.120
 you could get all your sugar from beets grown in Colorado, you would have a distinct advantage

01:00:11.120 --> 01:00:20.680
 in isotopes over Hawaiian sugar, which is very rich in the heavy isotopes.

01:00:20.680 --> 01:00:30.640
 And so a couple of companies, I think a Hungarian company and a Chinese company, are selling

01:00:30.640 --> 01:00:40.200
 ways to produce light water cheaply and even selling bottled.

01:00:40.200 --> 01:00:47.680
 I saw on the internet $10 a cup for the light water.

01:00:47.680 --> 01:00:54.080
 And would you also consider, you mentioned progesterone and thyroid, would you consider

01:00:54.080 --> 01:00:56.920
 them life-supporting or energy-protective?

01:00:56.920 --> 01:01:06.360
 Yeah, our body is naturally renewing itself and stabilizing itself by supporting the oxidative

01:01:06.360 --> 01:01:13.240
 processes and differentiative processes.

01:01:13.240 --> 01:01:25.080
 In a challenge, we'll have a flash of reduction, electron rich conditions, but that produces

01:01:25.080 --> 01:01:34.080
 cell growth, accelerates repair, and then to turn off that process, you need energy.

01:01:34.080 --> 01:01:47.680
 And our central stabilizing hormones are thyroid to run the oxidative machinery.

01:01:47.680 --> 01:02:00.200
 And cholesterol is a basic stabilizing substance, but the cholesterol can be turned into pregnenolone

01:02:00.200 --> 01:02:09.800
 and progesterone if you have enough raw material cholesterol and enough thyroid.

01:02:09.800 --> 01:02:21.360
 The thyroid oxidative energy is needed to take off a chain of the cholesterol molecule

01:02:21.360 --> 01:02:25.960
 and it uses vitamin A to do that.

01:02:25.960 --> 01:02:39.080
 And in the brain, this is at the basis of all of the degenerative brain diseases, psychoses,

01:02:39.080 --> 01:02:43.320
 euphoria, depression, and so on.

01:02:43.320 --> 01:02:53.240
 The failure to convert cholesterol into pregnenolone, progesterone, and the neurosteroids.

01:02:53.240 --> 01:03:02.560
 So without adequate thyroid and adequate cholesterol, your brain can't do what it should be doing.

01:03:02.560 --> 01:03:10.380
 And instead, under stress, it produces the esters of cholesterol.

01:03:10.380 --> 01:03:18.960
 So the young, healthy brain, it's very rich in plain cholesterol, which is a stabilizer.

01:03:18.960 --> 01:03:26.480
 And the demented, Alzheimer's brain is low in real cholesterol, but instead has the

01:03:26.480 --> 01:03:35.600
 ester form, a relatively soap-like water, relatively water-soluble, and tending to destabilize

01:03:35.600 --> 01:03:38.320
 the brain.

01:03:38.320 --> 01:03:49.080
 And in fairly recent publications, they've described giving, I think it was 9 or 10 grams

01:03:49.080 --> 01:03:57.920
 of purified cholesterol every day to autistic kids and improving their brain function because

01:03:57.920 --> 01:04:04.040
 they had seen that their brains were being deprived of the neurosteroids.

01:04:04.040 --> 01:04:12.560
 And I think sugar, which lets your liver and intestine and other cells produce more cholesterol,

01:04:12.560 --> 01:04:22.120
 sugar and thyroid will support your body's ability to make neurosteroids, testosterone,

01:04:22.120 --> 01:04:25.360
 progesterone, and so on.

01:04:25.360 --> 01:04:32.540
 Have all these findings and connections you've made led you to believe there is a root cause

01:04:32.540 --> 01:04:39.720
 of disease, or how can disease be understood differently within this larger context?

01:04:39.720 --> 01:04:45.960
 How can disease be understood as a general process?

01:04:45.960 --> 01:04:48.760
 Exactly, yeah.

01:04:48.760 --> 01:04:56.720
 Deprivation, I think, essentially, energy deprivation, environmental degradation in

01:04:56.720 --> 01:05:02.880
 every sense.

01:05:02.880 --> 01:05:11.160
 A lot of the fossil and mummy records and such, Egyptian mummies had practically no

01:05:11.160 --> 01:05:23.480
 cancer, and so the record shows that there have been whole periods of history or prehistory

01:05:23.480 --> 01:05:32.520
 when people either had very different diseases or practically no disease, showing how important

01:05:32.520 --> 01:05:34.200
 the environment is.

01:05:34.200 --> 01:05:41.040
 And insurance companies over the last, well, they've been in business for hundreds of years,

01:05:41.040 --> 01:05:49.280
 and they've accumulated information about where people are better bets for insuring,

01:05:49.280 --> 01:05:58.280
 and mortality decreases according to their figures, decreases as you go higher in altitude,

01:05:58.280 --> 01:06:08.080
 and cancer decreases, even fairly small differences.

01:06:08.080 --> 01:06:11.560
 And people have said, "But what about the radiation?"

01:06:11.560 --> 01:06:21.000
 And let's look at melanomas, theoretically caused by ultraviolet burning of the skin.

01:06:21.000 --> 01:06:29.680
 Someone, a cancer geographer in Texas, and the altitude differences between the northwest

01:06:29.680 --> 01:06:39.120
 Texas and the flatter, lower areas isn't very great, but looking at this most radiation-sensitive,

01:06:39.120 --> 01:06:46.120
 supposedly cancer melanoma, they found that there is an inverse gradient, even within

01:06:46.120 --> 01:06:54.080
 Texas and in the higher ranges.

01:06:54.080 --> 01:07:00.560
 The insurance companies have seen that the mortality for heart disease and cancer both

01:07:00.560 --> 01:07:05.800
 are much lower at high altitude.

01:07:05.800 --> 01:07:18.320
 So the nature of the whole ecosystem in itself is a factor, and things like living where

01:07:18.320 --> 01:07:29.640
 there's abundant mineral-rich food, good digestible fruits, for example, will help us to make

01:07:29.640 --> 01:07:39.720
 our own carbon dioxide, but at a given diet and other conditions, the higher you are,

01:07:39.720 --> 01:07:50.720
 the more protected you are from these intrinsic processes of polyunsaturated fats, endotoxin,

01:07:50.720 --> 01:07:56.640
 starch absorption, and so on.

01:07:56.640 --> 01:08:03.360
 How did you come to believe, or why do you think that fruit seems to be such an ideal

01:08:03.360 --> 01:08:08.280
 or healthful food?

01:08:08.280 --> 01:08:15.640
 I think I was thinking about an article of J.D. Bernal's in 1960.

01:08:15.640 --> 01:08:27.480
 He was talking about the evolution of heavy atoms in stars and the sun, and that started

01:08:27.480 --> 01:08:40.600
 me thinking about the nature of energy and matter in general, and just in the most generalized

01:08:40.600 --> 01:08:52.440
 way that I could conceive in 1960, I was thinking of what the ideal flow from the sun to our

01:08:52.440 --> 01:09:04.960
 brain would be, what things would simplify and generalize that flow to reduce the costs

01:09:04.960 --> 01:09:14.120
 and side effects, problems, disease, and so on, and looking at the flow of energy.

01:09:14.120 --> 01:09:24.640
 Trees that could stay in place for many years, dropping their leaves to fertilize the ground,

01:09:24.640 --> 01:09:33.400
 humans putting their sewage back into the soil, and eating the fruit as their main energy,

01:09:33.400 --> 01:09:36.720
 the plants evolved.

01:09:36.720 --> 01:09:44.960
 Most of the things we consider edible fruits were specifically evolved to tempt and support

01:09:44.960 --> 01:09:49.080
 animal life to disseminate their seeds.

01:09:49.080 --> 01:09:58.760
 So the plants would put really serious toxins in their bark and leaves and roots, but they

01:09:58.760 --> 01:10:05.800
 would create things that would promote animal life in the fruit so that the animals would

01:10:05.800 --> 01:10:10.040
 live long enough to spread their seeds.

01:10:10.040 --> 01:10:19.560
 So the environment is deliberately supporting animal life in the form of fruit.

01:10:19.560 --> 01:10:31.080
 And ruminants have developed a system for detoxifying the environment that other animals

01:10:31.080 --> 01:10:34.040
 have neglected.

01:10:34.040 --> 01:10:45.280
 So if you put fatty acid into, polyunsaturated fatty acid, into a typical person or non-ruminant,

01:10:45.280 --> 01:10:53.920
 about 98% of it survives into the system if it's quickly absorbed.

01:10:53.920 --> 01:10:58.520
 2% of the bacteria can saturate.

01:10:58.520 --> 01:11:08.160
 But the ruminants simply extended parts of their intestine to allow that kind of bacteria

01:11:08.160 --> 01:11:17.600
 that can hydrogenate polyunsaturated fats to develop and cook their food before it gets

01:11:17.600 --> 01:11:19.480
 into their system.

01:11:19.480 --> 01:11:29.960
 So they have about 98% of their fats become saturated, where 98% of ours are remaining

01:11:29.960 --> 01:11:31.760
 unsaturated.

01:11:31.760 --> 01:11:43.160
 So the way a tree can continue producing fruit constantly, a cow can constantly continue

01:11:43.160 --> 01:11:53.060
 converting vegetation into almost a perfect food.

01:11:53.060 --> 01:12:03.880
 So it turns out that the two most compatible foods with our system and with the cosmic

01:12:03.880 --> 01:12:10.760
 energy scheme, fruit is the basic energy efficient one.

01:12:10.760 --> 01:12:21.080
 Milk is the practical conserver of energy and provider of a concentrated nutrient.

01:12:21.080 --> 01:12:27.840
 Can you talk a little bit more about milk and what made you start to integrate it more

01:12:27.840 --> 01:12:31.320
 into your own diet?

01:12:31.320 --> 01:12:42.280
 When I was living in Mexico City, much of the milk, probably 70 or 80% of the milk was

01:12:42.280 --> 01:12:52.480
 adulterated and tasted terrible and was known to be other stuff than milk.

01:12:52.480 --> 01:13:00.080
 So I pretty much stopped drinking it when I was doing the college.

01:13:00.080 --> 01:13:14.880
 And over several years, every spring, I would develop pneumonia and really started having

01:13:14.880 --> 01:13:16.980
 health deterioration.

01:13:16.980 --> 01:13:23.560
 When I would go back to the border, the first thing I would do would be to have a giant

01:13:23.560 --> 01:13:25.140
 milkshake.

01:13:25.140 --> 01:13:31.120
 Back when they didn't put glue in the milkshakes.

01:13:31.120 --> 01:13:38.720
 So my health would improve just for having this milkshake diet while I was in the U.S.

01:13:38.720 --> 01:13:44.160
 Then I would come back.

01:13:44.160 --> 01:13:50.720
 When I was 16 and working in the woods, I weighed 160 pounds.

01:13:50.720 --> 01:14:00.520
 And after several years of not having all of the milk and fancy diet that I got in the

01:14:00.520 --> 01:14:04.800
 woods, my weight went down to 145.

01:14:04.800 --> 01:14:13.720
 And a friend of mine, a professor there, said, "You should go back to the U.S. before you

01:14:13.720 --> 01:14:18.560
 die," because I was getting so skinny.

01:14:18.560 --> 01:14:26.520
 And besides the larger connections you made about fruit and health and milk and health,

01:14:26.520 --> 01:14:38.920
 what about the carbohydrates in them are more health-supporting than starch?

01:14:38.920 --> 01:14:53.360
 The nutritionists in the 1970s started talking about the glycemic index in connection with

01:14:53.360 --> 01:14:58.560
 the idea that sugar is the cause of diabetes and so on.

01:14:58.560 --> 01:15:07.560
 And in looking, they were saying that it's good to eat foods that don't have such a high

01:15:07.560 --> 01:15:16.320
 glycemic index on the idea that glycemia is what is harmful, causing diabetes.

01:15:16.320 --> 01:15:27.680
 But the actual figures show that a pure starch is much more glycemic than a pure sucrose.

01:15:27.680 --> 01:15:36.280
 Pure glucose and pure starch have the absolute perfection of raising your blood sugar.

01:15:36.280 --> 01:15:44.200
 Sucrose is much lower, and when you test the components, the glucose half of the molecule

01:15:44.200 --> 01:15:46.360
 is just like starch.

01:15:46.360 --> 01:15:53.720
 And the fructose part of the molecule can actually lower the insulin because it goes

01:15:53.720 --> 01:15:58.160
 into your cells so easily and is converted.

01:15:58.160 --> 01:16:06.560
 It promotes the production of glycogen when it's taken in ordinary physiological amounts.

01:16:06.560 --> 01:16:13.160
 It raises your glycogen, helps to steady your blood sugar over time because the glycogen

01:16:13.160 --> 01:16:19.000
 is available as soon as your blood sugar falls to oxidize.

01:16:19.000 --> 01:16:36.760
 So the fructose part of the sucrose molecule that you find in most fruits is anti-stress,

01:16:36.760 --> 01:16:45.320
 anti insulin-stimulating, anti-obesity because it prefers to increase your glycogen stores

01:16:45.320 --> 01:16:53.560
 and steadier blood sugar rather than stimulating insulin, insulin-stimulating fat synthesis

01:16:53.560 --> 01:16:56.000
 as well as glycogen synthesis.

01:16:56.000 --> 01:17:06.800
 So it's a little steadier to have a sugar diet rather than a starch diet.

01:17:06.800 --> 01:17:17.200
 And besides the fruits come with a high concentration of certain minerals, pretty much the balance

01:17:17.200 --> 01:17:28.360
 of minerals that we have in our cells, a high potassium concentration, for example.

01:17:28.360 --> 01:17:35.640
 You hear about bananas and orange juice as rich sources of potassium, but that's typical

01:17:35.640 --> 01:17:39.200
 of any fruit or any cellular material.

01:17:39.200 --> 01:17:44.440
 And so it's compatible supplying the nutrients that we need.

01:17:44.440 --> 01:17:56.760
 And the potassium itself has an insulin-like action, helps the cells to take up and use

01:17:56.760 --> 01:18:02.520
 carbohydrates, bypassing the need to secrete insulin.

01:18:02.520 --> 01:18:04.800
 So it's easy on the pancreas.

01:18:04.800 --> 01:18:09.840
 Your pancreas doesn't have to do anything if you're eating fruit.

01:18:09.840 --> 01:18:17.920
 So there's very little insulin stimulation.

01:18:17.920 --> 01:18:25.200
 So some of these conclusions specifically that simple sugars are beneficial and that

01:18:25.200 --> 01:18:31.320
 polyunsaturated fats are harmful seem to run counter to what's considered healthy today,

01:18:31.320 --> 01:18:34.920
 both by medical professionals and by nutritionists.

01:18:34.920 --> 01:18:44.560
 How did the establishments and so-called experts get everything so wrong?

01:18:44.560 --> 01:18:53.280
 I mentioned how the pharmaceutical industries collaborated and conspired against the public

01:18:53.280 --> 01:19:01.880
 and the government to sell the idea that estrogen is the female hormone that prevents infertility

01:19:01.880 --> 01:19:04.000
 and aging and so on.

01:19:04.000 --> 01:19:12.760
 And that helped to shape the interpretation of what vitamin E is doing.

01:19:12.760 --> 01:19:22.760
 And instead of recognizing the toxic estrogen-like effect of the polyunsaturated fatty acids,

01:19:22.760 --> 01:19:31.520
 it happened that during the 1940s, the war cut off the supply of coconut oil.

01:19:31.520 --> 01:19:39.440
 Things like Oreo cookies had been made since the 19th century using coconut oil.

01:19:39.440 --> 01:19:47.960
 And so a lot of our standard commercial foods had been using coconut oil because it was

01:19:47.960 --> 01:19:54.320
 cheap coming from backward countries, free labor.

01:19:54.320 --> 01:20:03.200
 And the war cut off access to those sources of coconut oil.

01:20:03.200 --> 01:20:17.080
 And so other alternative food materials, as well as especially animal food, were becoming

01:20:17.080 --> 01:20:18.640
 available.

01:20:18.640 --> 01:20:25.760
 Henry Ford had been responsible for starting the U.S. soybean industry.

01:20:25.760 --> 01:20:35.040
 He made a soybean car in the 1930s, replacing the steel body parts with plastic made from

01:20:35.040 --> 01:20:36.920
 soybeans.

01:20:36.920 --> 01:20:41.240
 And for various reasons, that didn't go over.

01:20:41.240 --> 01:20:48.680
 But still, the cars, the steering wheel, door knobs, and dashboard parts and such were made

01:20:48.680 --> 01:20:51.840
 of soybean plastic for a while.

01:20:51.840 --> 01:21:07.200
 But the plastics industry and the paint industry found the soybean a good source of raw material.

01:21:07.200 --> 01:21:14.080
 But then chemists found how to make plastics and paints out of petroleum.

01:21:14.080 --> 01:21:21.960
 So there was this soybean industry that had been started largely for paint and plastics

01:21:21.960 --> 01:21:24.840
 that had no market.

01:21:24.840 --> 01:21:40.040
 And the reinterpretation of why the oils were toxic to animals, this had to be rethought.

01:21:40.040 --> 01:21:51.040
 And when they compared the soybean fat, for example, in a pig's diet to coconut oil, the

01:21:51.040 --> 01:22:02.960
 pigs were healthy and hungry and slim on the coconut oil diet and became fat and marketable

01:22:02.960 --> 01:22:07.200
 eating less food on the soybean diet.

01:22:07.200 --> 01:22:11.840
 So they realized that it was great pig fattening food.

01:22:11.840 --> 01:22:22.280
 And still they had leftover soy oil that couldn't be used in the paint and plastic industry

01:22:22.280 --> 01:22:26.880
 because petroleum was so much cheaper.

01:22:26.880 --> 01:22:39.040
 And as the paint industry shifted to petroleum, the marketing of these toxic oils to humans

01:22:39.040 --> 01:22:49.440
 looked for evidence in biology and biochemistry to support why they should be human food.

01:22:49.440 --> 01:22:58.120
 And the Burrs, who in the 1930s had argued that they were essential fatty acids, despite

01:22:58.120 --> 01:23:04.640
 the contemporary published evidence showing that they were carcinogenic and fattening,

01:23:04.640 --> 01:23:13.680
 Burr himself showed that giving the so-called essential fatty acids to rats suppressed their

01:23:13.680 --> 01:23:19.680
 metabolism by a huge amount of 30 percent or something.

01:23:19.680 --> 01:23:33.000
 And he theorized that maybe their skin was leaking fluid and making them need extra heat

01:23:33.000 --> 01:23:34.800
 to evaporate all that water.

01:23:34.800 --> 01:23:42.360
 But the pig industry saw that it was really slowing their metabolic rate and making them

01:23:42.360 --> 01:23:45.200
 need less food to put on weight.

01:23:45.200 --> 01:23:54.400
 But Burr, because he was the one outstanding figure who insisted that he had found that

01:23:54.400 --> 01:24:03.760
 they were really nutritionally important, that the ex-paint industry found him as their

01:24:03.760 --> 01:24:09.120
 historical support for saying, "Look, it's essential.

01:24:09.120 --> 01:24:12.840
 If it's essential, it must be good for you.

01:24:12.840 --> 01:24:16.800
 And so how can it be good for you?"

01:24:16.800 --> 01:24:24.520
 And that was when they discovered or reinvented the idea that cholesterol is toxic rather

01:24:24.520 --> 01:24:26.800
 than protective.

01:24:26.800 --> 01:24:37.480
 And if you define cholesterol in the blood as rather than a defense against stress, as

01:24:37.480 --> 01:24:45.120
 the cholesterol in the blood rises, your ability to turn it into protective pregnenolone, progesterone,

01:24:45.120 --> 01:24:48.560
 and brain steroids rises.

01:24:48.560 --> 01:24:53.320
 So when you're injured, you defensively increase your cholesterol production.

01:24:53.320 --> 01:25:00.880
 But if you reinterpret that and say, "Look, stressed people have high cholesterol, must

01:25:00.880 --> 01:25:03.280
 be causing the stress.

01:25:03.280 --> 01:25:10.240
 Therefore, if we can lower that, we will have a health food product."

01:25:10.240 --> 01:25:17.120
 And the polyunsaturated fat does lower cholesterol a little bit.

01:25:17.120 --> 01:25:28.000
 And so that was the whole basis of the saturated fat cholesterol thing causing heart disease.

01:25:28.000 --> 01:25:36.320
 Medical studies in the 1960s, like a veteran's study, put people on this high polyunsaturated

01:25:36.320 --> 01:25:42.960
 diet, and they started dying at a higher rate of cancer.

01:25:42.960 --> 01:25:45.360
 And so they stopped that.

01:25:45.360 --> 01:25:57.040
 But still, the industry push was to present the N-6 seed oil polyunsaturates as essential

01:25:57.040 --> 01:25:59.040
 and beneficial.

01:25:59.040 --> 01:26:09.640
 So the idea of going from essential in a minimal trace amount to beneficial in any amount,

01:26:09.640 --> 01:26:16.360
 that finally, through things like the heart study that turned out to be the carcinogenic

01:26:16.360 --> 01:26:26.440
 diet study, that gradually started coming into the public consciousness that there really

01:26:26.440 --> 01:26:30.080
 can be seriously toxic.

01:26:30.080 --> 01:26:38.280
 So as the seed oil toxicity was coming up, with people like Clarence Ip showing that

01:26:38.280 --> 01:26:45.560
 as you increase the percentage of linoleic acid in the diet, the cancer mortality of

01:26:45.560 --> 01:26:49.720
 the rats increases linearly.

01:26:49.720 --> 01:26:57.440
 That sort of thing was such clear evidence of linoleic acid as probably the main motor

01:26:57.440 --> 01:27:01.880
 of cancer and aging.

01:27:01.880 --> 01:27:09.040
 This coming into the public consciousness required some marketing changes.

01:27:09.040 --> 01:27:17.520
 And so the idea of essential fatty acids said, well, maybe it's not the N-6, maybe it's

01:27:17.520 --> 01:27:22.080
 the N-3, because we have all of this excess fish oil.

01:27:22.080 --> 01:27:29.960
 The Environmental Protection Agency, I think, was who gave a boost to that.

01:27:29.960 --> 01:27:39.040
 The canneries along the coast were dumping their fish skins and heads into the lagoons

01:27:39.040 --> 01:27:44.680
 and in landfills and such, and creating horrible pollution.

01:27:44.680 --> 01:27:51.320
 So the EPA told them they had to clean up their factories.

01:27:51.320 --> 01:28:02.960
 And they economized by refining the fish heads and skins into protein powder and fats.

01:28:02.960 --> 01:28:13.520
 And I guess the fish oil lamp market was extinct, so they had to find something to do with the

01:28:13.520 --> 01:28:21.760
 fish oil, and a very limited market for fish oil varnish and lamp fuel and such.

01:28:21.760 --> 01:28:30.960
 So the marketing of it as a health food has developed over the last 20 years.

01:28:30.960 --> 01:28:39.680
 And since it took about 50 years for the toxicity of seed oils to come to consciousness, I think

01:28:39.680 --> 01:28:46.080
 we've got another 20 years, anyway, of fish oil promotion.

01:28:46.080 --> 01:28:52.000
 The marketing seems to have been so successful in that it's a billion-dollar-a-year industry

01:28:52.000 --> 01:29:01.040
 now as well as it seems to be the one supplement that everyone is taking, especially people

01:29:01.040 --> 01:29:04.240
 that aren't so conscious of...

01:29:04.240 --> 01:29:14.280
 One of the marketing ideas is that the brain has a lot of N-3 fatty acids in it.

01:29:14.280 --> 01:29:22.400
 And so they say it's an essential fat, and especially essential for the brain.

01:29:22.400 --> 01:29:28.720
 And so you'll have a better brain, and you can use it to cure schizophrenia, depression,

01:29:28.720 --> 01:29:34.680
 Alzheimer's disease, and everything, especially in the brain, because the brain is so full

01:29:34.680 --> 01:29:35.760
 of it.

01:29:35.760 --> 01:29:45.560
 But people have noticed that ruminants in particular, a newborn ruminant, is really

01:29:45.560 --> 01:29:48.000
 highly saturated.

01:29:48.000 --> 01:29:58.400
 And newborn humans, the brain is pretty free of the N-3 fatty acids, and so people have

01:29:58.400 --> 01:30:05.720
 said, "What kind of a catastrophe is this that almost all babies are being born deficient

01:30:05.720 --> 01:30:08.640
 in essential brain fatty acids?"

01:30:08.640 --> 01:30:15.160
 And so they started saying, "You need to give it to the babies in their artificial

01:30:15.160 --> 01:30:20.240
 milk to let their brains and retinas develop properly."

01:30:20.240 --> 01:30:30.640
 And some French researchers devised an experiment for electrically monitoring the brain, the

01:30:30.640 --> 01:30:37.560
 babies, the fetuses' responses to sounds.

01:30:37.560 --> 01:30:43.800
 So they would play a sound into the mother's abdomen and record how the baby's brain

01:30:43.800 --> 01:30:51.720
 accommodated to it, and so they were studying prenatal learning or adaptability.

01:30:51.720 --> 01:30:57.920
 And they predicted that by feeding the mother a lot of fish oil, that they would be improving

01:30:57.920 --> 01:31:03.560
 the brain, preventing the essential fatty acid deficiency.

01:31:03.560 --> 01:31:07.280
 And it turned out that it had the opposite effect.

01:31:07.280 --> 01:31:17.200
 It impaired their brain adaptability and reduced the birth weight and brain size of the babies,

01:31:17.200 --> 01:31:27.600
 which this outcome using seed oil, this had been done in the 1960s and '70s, showing

01:31:27.600 --> 01:31:38.740
 that feeding a pregnant rat or dog a very saturated fat diet, the babies had bigger

01:31:38.740 --> 01:31:43.720
 brains and were much more trainable.

01:31:43.720 --> 01:31:48.560
 Feeding them a highly polyunsaturated diet, the babies had smaller brains and were less

01:31:48.560 --> 01:31:50.920
 trainable.

01:31:50.920 --> 01:31:59.280
 So the French study has simply applied to humans what had been learned 30-some years

01:31:59.280 --> 01:32:00.280
 earlier.

01:32:00.280 --> 01:32:05.920
 And so what do you think could be the root of the problem?

01:32:05.920 --> 01:32:11.400
 Is it simply just the influence of money, dogmatism, rationalism?

01:32:11.400 --> 01:32:17.400
 Do you think it's one thing in particular?

01:32:17.400 --> 01:32:33.480
 I think Wilhelm Reich spent his life thinking about what the source of authoritarian, irrational,

01:32:33.480 --> 01:32:36.320
 cruel behavior is.

01:32:36.320 --> 01:32:47.480
 And he increasingly saw it as incurable in adults and that it required an early start

01:32:47.480 --> 01:32:48.960
 in life.

01:32:48.960 --> 01:32:57.320
 And I think to a great extent there is curability in adults.

01:32:57.320 --> 01:33:05.160
 People can, given the right setting, radically change their way of thinking and living.

01:33:05.160 --> 01:33:16.860
 But given a change in institutions, the whole society can, in one generation, I'm sure,

01:33:16.860 --> 01:33:26.840
 make the switch, give up the destructive ways of upbringing and so on.

01:33:26.840 --> 01:33:37.000
 But making the switch and deciding what's wrong, I think, is what's being prevented.

01:33:37.000 --> 01:33:47.960
 And there are the corporate institutions and their subservient government regulatory agencies

01:33:47.960 --> 01:33:58.600
 that are enforcing, creating laws to keep in place the wrong ways of doing things because

01:33:58.600 --> 01:34:02.240
 there's investment in it that has to be protected.

01:34:02.240 --> 01:34:12.920
 The property rights of mistaken science are being built into the legal system.

01:34:12.920 --> 01:34:20.040
 And you had sent us that talk by Gerald Pollack about why there's fewer and fewer breakthroughs

01:34:20.040 --> 01:34:21.040
 in science.

01:34:21.040 --> 01:34:27.840
 It seems like there was a definite shift when science and medicine took a turn for the worst

01:34:27.840 --> 01:34:34.280
 and that a lot of pre-1950s or '40s or whenever this happened seemed to be so much more good

01:34:34.280 --> 01:34:41.680
 science and science open to or more receptive to outlying ideas.

01:34:41.680 --> 01:34:50.800
 I ran across some articles in the 1920s in which the drug companies and chemical companies

01:34:50.800 --> 01:35:01.640
 were talking among themselves about how Germany's chemical pharmaceutical industry had been

01:35:01.640 --> 01:35:08.360
 so important to them in the First World War and that America had better start imitating

01:35:08.360 --> 01:35:24.000
 German science and culture and that and various other influences working with government.

01:35:24.000 --> 01:35:37.000
 The atomic bomb project, the government sort of in an unpublic way was seeing these needs

01:35:37.000 --> 01:35:45.280
 of industry and of the country to compete against Germany and Japan in the 1920s and

01:35:45.280 --> 01:35:46.280
 '30s.

01:35:46.280 --> 01:35:55.600
 Japan and Germany had the chemical industries, for example, and the poison gas industries

01:35:55.600 --> 01:35:56.600
 and so on.

01:35:56.600 --> 01:36:05.040
 And so the U.S. wanted to get in on germ warfare, radiological warfare, chemical warfare and

01:36:05.040 --> 01:36:06.120
 so on.

01:36:06.120 --> 01:36:13.880
 And so a lot of this was very secret in the U.S., but it was developing in the '30s.

01:36:13.880 --> 01:36:24.840
 So the government was intimately involved at the beginning with the corporations in

01:36:24.840 --> 01:36:27.040
 developing a new kind of science.

01:36:27.040 --> 01:36:35.280
 The Manhattan Project was where the money flowed in huge quantities to beat Germany

01:36:35.280 --> 01:36:38.880
 and Japan to the atomic bomb.

01:36:38.880 --> 01:36:48.680
 And as soon as the bomb was produced, the industry, which had been very secretive for

01:36:48.680 --> 01:36:56.560
 German chemical warfare, started receiving the money that wasn't needed to be concentrated

01:36:56.560 --> 01:36:58.920
 purely in the bomb research.

01:36:58.920 --> 01:37:11.000
 So to get the money funneled efficiently, they converted this secret chemical and germ

01:37:11.000 --> 01:37:15.600
 warfare industry into molecular biology.

01:37:15.600 --> 01:37:28.120
 And E.B. Jensen was the person who invented the estrogen receptor.

01:37:28.120 --> 01:37:36.440
 He had been a chemical warfare specialist until the government financed him to be part

01:37:36.440 --> 01:37:44.240
 of the endocrine molecular revolution in biology.

01:37:44.240 --> 01:37:53.640
 And he was given isotopes from the nuclear industry.

01:37:53.640 --> 01:38:02.520
 So he had a government connection that allowed him to do experiments that supported his argument

01:38:02.520 --> 01:38:12.760
 that estrogen, as an analog of chemicals and hormones in general, estrogen acted only by

01:38:12.760 --> 01:38:19.120
 turning on genes by attaching to this so-called receptor.

01:38:19.120 --> 01:38:24.280
 And he demonstrated using the government isotopes, which no one else had.

01:38:24.280 --> 01:38:32.820
 And the real science developing at the same time had shown that estrogen is acting like

01:38:32.820 --> 01:38:43.200
 a cofactor in many ways, affecting the activity of enzymes.

01:38:43.200 --> 01:38:50.580
 In the cancer metabolism, for example, it's acting as a shuttle, oxidation reduction on

01:38:50.580 --> 01:38:54.680
 one side and oxidation reduction on the other side.

01:38:54.680 --> 01:39:04.340
 It helps to shift energy to facilitate the shift from glucose oxidation to fatty acid

01:39:04.340 --> 01:39:09.300
 oxidation, essential for cancer metabolism.

01:39:09.300 --> 01:39:18.420
 The enzymologists working on endocrinology in the '40s were moving in this direction,

01:39:18.420 --> 01:39:26.420
 which happened to be showing the ramifications of the dangers of estrogen excess.

01:39:26.420 --> 01:39:36.940
 But besides the industry pressure, selling estrogen as a vital anti-aging pro-fertility

01:39:36.940 --> 01:39:48.580
 drug, there was the government industry with its germ warfare people creating the idea

01:39:48.580 --> 01:39:57.660
 that estrogen can do nothing but turn on enzymes, turn on genes.

01:39:57.660 --> 01:40:01.360
 And what it's going to turn on are the female genes.

01:40:01.360 --> 01:40:08.360
 So it's harmless to men because women have the genetic tendency to be women.

01:40:08.360 --> 01:40:15.100
 And if estrogen is acting only to activate genes, then it's only going to affect breasts

01:40:15.100 --> 01:40:21.660
 and hips and maybe the pituitary.

01:40:21.660 --> 01:40:35.160
 But it was an ideological setup that turned out everything he argued to show why estrogen

01:40:35.160 --> 01:40:38.440
 receptors were what he claimed them to be.

01:40:38.440 --> 01:40:45.440
 All of those claims proved to be absolutely false, like he had just invented a story and

01:40:45.440 --> 01:40:49.260
 then said, "I have the tools to prove I'm right.

01:40:49.260 --> 01:40:50.600
 You don't have them."

01:40:50.600 --> 01:40:57.520
 But as they became more generally available, his claims turned out to be wrong, that estrogen

01:40:57.520 --> 01:41:07.600
 is activating enzymes and doing massive changes instantly when it reaches the cell, where

01:41:07.600 --> 01:41:14.080
 the process of activating a receptor, turning on genes and making proteins, there's quite

01:41:14.080 --> 01:41:18.280
 a delay between putting it in the cell and getting your change.

01:41:18.280 --> 01:41:20.880
 But actually, estrogen acts.

01:41:20.880 --> 01:41:27.320
 You can demonstrate chemical changes in the first five minutes, taking up water, changing

01:41:27.320 --> 01:41:29.960
 enzyme activity and so on.

01:41:29.960 --> 01:41:41.200
 So the shift to molecular biology, the whole thing has to be suspected and reinterpreted.

01:41:41.200 --> 01:41:50.040
 It wasn't just scientists said, "Oh, now I'm going to stop making bombs and I've become

01:41:50.040 --> 01:41:51.760
 a moral person.

01:41:51.760 --> 01:42:00.440
 I'll think about how to cure cancer by studying molecular biology and genes and how the brain

01:42:00.440 --> 01:42:01.960
 works and so on."

01:42:01.960 --> 01:42:08.200
 But it was being pushed by huge amounts of government financing.

01:42:08.200 --> 01:42:16.680
 Additionally, it seems another problem is that most scientists see with blinders on,

01:42:16.680 --> 01:42:20.720
 only focused on their very specific field of inquiry.

01:42:20.720 --> 01:42:26.000
 What do you think that says about both them individually, as well as the system that seems

01:42:26.000 --> 01:42:30.660
 to support that?

01:42:30.660 --> 01:42:39.700
 A typical person working in science starts right away in high school and undergraduate

01:42:39.700 --> 01:42:48.660
 college studies thinking they're going to be a career scientist or doctor.

01:42:48.660 --> 01:43:00.640
 So they're shaping the way they think and accepting the authority of textbooks and professors.

01:43:00.640 --> 01:43:13.420
 And the liberal arts education used to be centered on learning some kind of universal

01:43:13.420 --> 01:43:21.240
 context and learning how to take a critical approach to knowledge.

01:43:21.240 --> 01:43:34.380
 But with the turning of science into a career, the idea of becoming a scientist affected

01:43:34.380 --> 01:43:37.900
 how doctors were trained.

01:43:37.900 --> 01:43:47.860
 Medicine was turned into a science and a technology rather than in the 19th century, it was thought

01:43:47.860 --> 01:43:57.900
 of as primarily an art in which everything had to be evaluated and judged.

01:43:57.900 --> 01:44:09.420
 So the training of scientists and doctors has become textbook-ized.

01:44:09.420 --> 01:44:19.980
 And textbooks even used to be the reflection a famous physicist or doctor or whatever would

01:44:19.980 --> 01:44:23.140
 sum up his knowledge in a textbook.

01:44:23.140 --> 01:44:30.840
 And they used to be very, a lot of them were very readable, better than novels, for seeing

01:44:30.840 --> 01:44:38.020
 how a person was holding reality together and making sense of things.

01:44:38.020 --> 01:44:55.100
 But as science education became institutionalized and turned into a career, textbook publishing

01:44:55.100 --> 01:45:05.340
 became very practical and they looked for who was going to be buying their books.

01:45:05.340 --> 01:45:15.020
 And so the well-financed professors in the biggest universities who were getting introductory

01:45:15.020 --> 01:45:25.740
 courses of 400 or 500 students, one of those professors could, if they charged $100 per

01:45:25.740 --> 01:45:33.180
 book, they had their expenses paid just by sales to one professor.

01:45:33.180 --> 01:45:40.540
 And so a chemistry textbook, for example, would look for who had the biggest classes

01:45:40.540 --> 01:45:45.460
 around the country and then what they had published.

01:45:45.460 --> 01:45:54.140
 And the text would be laid out according to the achievement of who was available to buy

01:45:54.140 --> 01:45:56.320
 their books.

01:45:56.320 --> 01:46:11.160
 So you would learn the chemistry according to who had the biggest classes in the country.

01:46:11.160 --> 01:46:21.040
 Going back to some of your own self-experimentation with your diet or certain vitamins, environment

01:46:21.040 --> 01:46:29.280
 and lifestyle, can you talk about how the relationship is set up between doctor and

01:46:29.280 --> 01:46:41.440
 patient in this society and how that sort of self-experimentation is often discouraged?

01:46:41.440 --> 01:46:52.900
 I was always trying to apply what I read, like in Adelle Davis or Linus Pauling, to my

01:46:52.900 --> 01:46:56.440
 own practical situation.

01:46:56.440 --> 01:47:04.440
 And sometimes it had really bad consequences, like when I was overly impressed with Linus

01:47:04.440 --> 01:47:10.560
 Pauling's advocacy of vitamin C.

01:47:10.560 --> 01:47:19.360
 Before Linus Pauling got onto vitamin C, it was sold in the late 40s and early 50s in

01:47:19.360 --> 01:47:25.120
 little tiny 25 or 50 milligram tablets.

01:47:25.120 --> 01:47:28.840
 And it was usually called cevitamic acid.

01:47:28.840 --> 01:47:36.080
 And when I worked in the woods my first few weeks, I was getting terrible poison oak.

01:47:36.080 --> 01:47:42.360
 And someone said he had heard that vitamin C made you immune to it.

01:47:42.360 --> 01:47:50.760
 So on the weekend, very itchy and inflamed, I went to the drug stores and were selling

01:47:50.760 --> 01:47:51.760
 little bottles of it.

01:47:51.760 --> 01:48:00.180
 And I took a couple of pills on the weekend and the itchy inflammation blisters disappeared.

01:48:00.180 --> 01:48:04.280
 And since then I've never had poison oak sensitivity.

01:48:04.280 --> 01:48:06.720
 So I was very impressed with vitamin C.

01:48:06.720 --> 01:48:17.560
 And then a few years later, 1956, it started coming out manufactured in a new way where

01:48:17.560 --> 01:48:22.600
 it was very cheap to make 500 milligram tablets.

01:48:22.600 --> 01:48:24.480
 And I took one of those.

01:48:24.480 --> 01:48:27.840
 And the next morning, woke up with a sore throat.

01:48:27.840 --> 01:48:32.160
 And repeatedly I would try it and get a sore throat.

01:48:32.160 --> 01:48:40.640
 And then in the mid 60s, I read Linus Pauling and was really convinced.

01:48:40.640 --> 01:48:46.840
 Read some backup studies that it should have anti-stress, anti-itching effect.

01:48:46.840 --> 01:48:54.400
 And so I started taking some and got chronic bronchitis and had a horrible cough.

01:48:54.400 --> 01:49:05.500
 And then on some trip, I was in a hotel and the maid threw out my bottle of vitamin C

01:49:05.500 --> 01:49:08.120
 and my cough cleared up.

01:49:08.120 --> 01:49:15.720
 And so I started getting interested in what might be in the ascorbic acid that didn't

01:49:15.720 --> 01:49:17.280
 have good effects.

01:49:17.280 --> 01:49:26.200
 And with further study over the years, I learned that there were manufacturing trace metal

01:49:26.200 --> 01:49:36.720
 impurities in the most purified synthetic ascorbic acid that made it create oxidation

01:49:36.720 --> 01:49:43.760
 byproducts equivalent to very intense X or gamma rays.

01:49:43.760 --> 01:49:48.840
 So it's always a stress to take the manufactured stuff.

01:49:48.840 --> 01:49:57.360
 I found that just a milligram or two of the synthetic stuff, even without knowing that

01:49:57.360 --> 01:50:04.400
 I was taking it, a bread profile, bread and breakfast cereals and things contained a little

01:50:04.400 --> 01:50:08.800
 bit of ascorbic acid added to the formula.

01:50:08.800 --> 01:50:16.400
 And just a piece of one of those foods containing a tiny amount of ascorbic acid synthetic would

01:50:16.400 --> 01:50:18.320
 make me sick.

01:50:18.320 --> 01:50:25.340
 But then I could drink a gallon of orange juice, other fruit juice, and get thousands

01:50:25.340 --> 01:50:29.640
 of milligrams with no symptom at all.

01:50:29.640 --> 01:50:38.840
 But anyway, I became a lot more careful with my experiments on myself.

01:50:38.840 --> 01:50:50.160
 And I was doing volunteer work with a free clinic in Eugene, the White Bird.

01:50:50.160 --> 01:50:59.320
 And I advised a couple of people to stop using their vitamin supplements that contained ascorbic

01:50:59.320 --> 01:51:02.840
 acid and several other irritants.

01:51:02.840 --> 01:51:12.200
 And they had total recovery from their allergy symptoms, which was at that time, field burning

01:51:12.200 --> 01:51:13.920
 was done every summer.

01:51:13.920 --> 01:51:19.040
 And so everyone in Eugene got some poisoning smoke symptoms.

01:51:19.040 --> 01:51:29.240
 And from those people at White Bird who recovered from their chronic allergies by stopping their

01:51:29.240 --> 01:51:35.080
 vitamin pills, that started people coming to see me.

01:51:35.080 --> 01:51:42.680
 And that has continued until I stopped traveling and lecturing.

01:51:42.680 --> 01:51:48.280
 People were constantly coming to the house to have me encourage them to stop taking supplements.

01:51:48.280 --> 01:51:53.160
 I think we'll go more into that later.

01:51:53.160 --> 01:52:06.480
 But what I was imagining is, or from my own experience, there's nothing a doctor seems

01:52:06.480 --> 01:52:12.680
 to hate more than when his patient comes in saying, "Oh, I started to do my own research."

01:52:12.680 --> 01:52:18.560
 And I read this on the internet, seemingly questioning their authority and that you're

01:52:18.560 --> 01:52:20.720
 thinking for yourself.

01:52:20.720 --> 01:52:28.280
 Yeah, I haven't gone to a doctor except for like a physical to get a driver's license

01:52:28.280 --> 01:52:30.720
 in Mexico or something.

01:52:30.720 --> 01:52:36.560
 I think I was 12 the last time I had a doctor for being sick.

01:52:36.560 --> 01:52:42.720
 So I didn't really have any personal experience with how doctors act.

01:52:42.720 --> 01:52:49.640
 But a couple of times I went to the hospital with friends who were sick or dying.

01:52:49.640 --> 01:52:59.920
 And I would ask the doctor, "Why are you prescribing that rather than this older drug

01:52:59.920 --> 01:53:06.000
 that has a lot of information about it and the brand new drug?

01:53:06.000 --> 01:53:09.000
 What's the reason for that prescription?"

01:53:09.000 --> 01:53:14.800
 And their reaction was just like a professor that I had embarrassed or something.

01:53:14.800 --> 01:53:20.480
 Just great hostility and refusal to comment.

01:53:20.480 --> 01:53:30.120
 And I can imagine a patient going to a doctor with information, "Why shouldn't I take

01:53:30.120 --> 01:53:36.160
 vitamin K to prevent clotting as well as bleeding?"

01:53:36.160 --> 01:53:40.680
 A handful of articles.

01:53:40.680 --> 01:53:47.800
 The doctor insists vitamin K is for clot.

01:53:47.800 --> 01:53:51.440
 It'll cause clotting and not prevent it.

01:53:51.440 --> 01:53:53.960
 So simply wouldn't read the papers.

01:53:53.960 --> 01:54:02.520
 And it's generally just useless to try to present information to a doctor.

01:54:02.520 --> 01:54:09.760
 And apparently sometimes it'll make the doctor so hostile that they'll refuse to

01:54:09.760 --> 01:54:13.160
 continue treating the person.

01:54:13.160 --> 01:54:19.520
 Why do you think this great sort of hostility or skepticism towards self-experimentation

01:54:19.520 --> 01:54:21.640
 or self-...

01:54:21.640 --> 01:54:32.240
 The calling the customer a patient is they're supposed to be patient and passive.

01:54:32.240 --> 01:54:35.720
 A client, not a customer.

01:54:35.720 --> 01:54:46.400
 And the idea is that they aren't selling you something for money in a normal business deal.

01:54:46.400 --> 01:54:57.000
 You aren't hiring them to do something, but you're submitting to them, to their authority.

01:54:57.000 --> 01:55:07.440
 And the doctor now submits not only to the authority of the professors who give the instruction

01:55:07.440 --> 01:55:14.240
 and doctrine, but to the authority of the state in terms of the licensing board.

01:55:14.240 --> 01:55:27.280
 And many of the licensing boards have de-licensed doctors because they prescribed thyroid, natural

01:55:27.280 --> 01:55:33.000
 Armour thyroid, on the basis of symptoms rather than a blood test.

01:55:33.000 --> 01:55:39.160
 Having shown that the blood test is wrong, they lost their license and couldn't practice

01:55:39.160 --> 01:55:40.160
 medicine.

01:55:40.160 --> 01:55:50.360
 So the context is that doctors know that they'll get in trouble with the powers if they act

01:55:50.360 --> 01:55:52.560
 too rationally.

01:55:52.560 --> 01:55:59.680
 And if the customer is presenting information that should be taken into account, that's

01:55:59.680 --> 01:56:03.960
 part of potentially being too rational.

01:56:03.960 --> 01:56:10.400
 And it means challenging the system all the way up to the government.

01:56:10.400 --> 01:56:20.320
 And so the doctors are authoritarian subordinates, and they need their authoritarian passive

01:56:20.320 --> 01:56:23.560
 subordinates to work.

01:56:23.560 --> 01:56:33.040
 So the system is intended to channel products from the corporations to the mouths of the

01:56:33.040 --> 01:56:34.040
 recipients.

01:56:34.040 --> 01:56:43.360
 So we'd like to talk a little bit about evolution.

01:56:43.360 --> 01:56:48.360
 If you could talk about your views on neo-Darwinianism.

01:56:48.360 --> 01:56:49.360
 About?

01:56:49.360 --> 01:56:50.360
 Neo-Darwinism?

01:56:50.360 --> 01:57:08.040
 Well, in the family encyclopedia, when I was probably nine years old or so, I ran into

01:57:08.040 --> 01:57:15.240
 the section on Lamarck and Darwin.

01:57:15.240 --> 01:57:24.200
 My parents had a 19th century edition of Darwin's Descent of Man.

01:57:24.200 --> 01:57:32.880
 And in the introduction to that, he said, "People are misrepresenting me."

01:57:32.880 --> 01:57:42.320
 And talking about natural selection as the only thing he named several different points

01:57:42.320 --> 01:57:47.320
 that were very close to Lamarck.

01:57:47.320 --> 01:58:00.920
 And later, I read Samuel Butler's book on something like the biology of memory.

01:58:00.920 --> 01:58:10.640
 It was his theory of a Lamarckian mechanism of inheritance as memory of the tissues.

01:58:10.640 --> 01:58:18.640
 And he discussed Darwin's grandfather's theory of evolution.

01:58:18.640 --> 01:58:27.720
 Erasmus Darwin was contemporary with Lamarck and with William Blake.

01:58:27.720 --> 01:58:41.320
 And in London, at that time, knowing that evolution wasn't popular with the government

01:58:41.320 --> 01:58:46.880
 and the church, he wrote it in the form of poetry.

01:58:46.880 --> 01:58:55.760
 And at one point, he had his carriage painted with the slogan on the side, "Everything,"

01:58:55.760 --> 01:59:03.440
 in Latin, everything comes from sea critters, seashells or such.

01:59:03.440 --> 01:59:10.320
 And that's part of the culture that Blake lived in.

01:59:10.320 --> 01:59:20.480
 Swedenborg and his advanced brain research and so on in the 1700s.

01:59:20.480 --> 01:59:36.320
 And because of the pressure of commerce, church and government, Darwin, the grandson, didn't

01:59:36.320 --> 01:59:44.320
 put much emphasis on the Lamarckian aspects of inheritance.

01:59:44.320 --> 01:59:54.040
 And that's why Samuel Butler denounced him as a coward and a fraud, stealing his grandfather's

01:59:54.040 --> 01:59:56.720
 and Lamarck's ideas.

01:59:56.720 --> 02:00:05.400
 But at least in his later edition of Descent of Man, Darwin said, "Don't get me wrong.

02:00:05.400 --> 02:00:10.160
 I'm not really a Darwinist, a neo-Darwinist."

02:00:10.160 --> 02:00:21.480
 But then the people who revived Gregor Mendel's P-work were really very anti-Darwinian.

02:00:21.480 --> 02:00:31.160
 They totally eradicated and rewrote anything that sounded Lamarckian.

02:00:31.160 --> 02:00:45.480
 And Mendel was basically a careerist who wanted to be a higher-up in the religious business.

02:00:45.480 --> 02:00:56.360
 And so he knew it was going to please the higher-ups if he disproved Darwin's evolution

02:00:56.360 --> 02:01:11.720
 as Darwin had the idea that these little particles taken out of the various tissues were sent

02:01:11.720 --> 02:01:23.360
 to the gonads to reflect the experience of the organism and become part of the germ cells.

02:01:23.360 --> 02:01:36.520
 And that meant that your traits were being modified by the environment and passed on

02:01:36.520 --> 02:01:39.560
 reflecting time and experience.

02:01:39.560 --> 02:01:49.600
 And the church and Mendel knew that they had to preserve something of the timeless, abstract,

02:01:49.600 --> 02:01:53.320
 unchanging thing that God created.

02:01:53.320 --> 02:02:01.560
 And so they said, "Well, maybe God didn't create the exact type of animal and plant,

02:02:01.560 --> 02:02:06.800
 but God did create the traits.

02:02:06.800 --> 02:02:13.680
 What's timeless is the trait, not the way the traits are mixed up in the organism."

02:02:13.680 --> 02:02:23.720
 So by breeding peas, he claimed to have disproved Darwin and Lamarck and that, in fact, things

02:02:23.720 --> 02:02:26.200
 are timeless and unchanging.

02:02:26.200 --> 02:02:31.620
 It's just that breeding mixes them up in different proportions, but really nothing

02:02:31.620 --> 02:02:40.360
 changes because all of the inner parts are timeless, perfectly formed units.

02:02:40.360 --> 02:02:49.880
 And then the neo-Darwinists in reviving Mendel were basically doing the same thing, saying,

02:02:49.880 --> 02:03:00.360
 "Here we can incorporate the knowledge of the physicists, of the statisticians, and

02:03:00.360 --> 02:03:08.400
 basically the whole platonic tradition that the particles can be absolutely understood

02:03:08.400 --> 02:03:14.640
 because they're standardized and unchanging."

02:03:14.640 --> 02:03:26.320
 And the very recent, just the last few years of research, well, actually starting in 1960

02:03:26.320 --> 02:03:40.520
 in Korea, this Korean reported the way he had stained pieces of tissue showing what

02:03:40.520 --> 02:03:44.040
 he called a third circulatory system.

02:03:44.040 --> 02:03:52.600
 Besides blood vessels and lymph vessels, he showed another system separate from the lymphatic

02:03:52.600 --> 02:04:01.080
 system carrying very tiny particles rich in RNA.

02:04:01.080 --> 02:04:09.880
 And since RNA was recognized as part of our genetic system, it looked like this was, in

02:04:09.880 --> 02:04:17.160
 a way, maybe analogous to Darwin's gemmules as something circulating information in our

02:04:17.160 --> 02:04:18.440
 body.

02:04:18.440 --> 02:04:32.680
 And the Koreans' work preceded the 1968-1969 discovery of reverse transcriptase, which

02:04:32.680 --> 02:04:42.880
 explained how viruses can be RNA-based rather than DNA-based because they had their own

02:04:42.880 --> 02:04:51.840
 enzymes that could copy themselves into DNA and then be reproduced.

02:04:51.840 --> 02:05:01.640
 But because that hadn't been invented yet in the United States, the Koreans' work

02:05:01.640 --> 02:05:11.720
 was simply dismissed as so totally outside the scheme to have a third circulatory system.

02:05:11.720 --> 02:05:23.720
 But all along, people looking at a sample of blood through a very good light microscope,

02:05:23.720 --> 02:05:29.160
 it looks like there's a lot of dust in the background, white cells and red cells and

02:05:29.160 --> 02:05:35.640
 platelets and then a kind of dusty granular stuff in the background.

02:05:35.640 --> 02:05:43.520
 And people finally have got around to studying the dust and its particles.

02:05:43.520 --> 02:05:53.440
 I think the range is something like most of them are 5 to 50 nanometers or millimicrons

02:05:53.440 --> 02:06:05.440
 in diameter, up to the size of a bacterium, one micron, but pretty smeared out between

02:06:05.440 --> 02:06:09.800
 five millimicrons to a thousand millimicrons.

02:06:09.800 --> 02:06:17.160
 And it's still so small that they look like dust through an ordinary microscope.

02:06:17.160 --> 02:06:25.040
 And these are now starting to be examined in different states of health, aging, disease,

02:06:25.040 --> 02:06:26.400
 and so on.

02:06:26.400 --> 02:06:36.440
 And it turns out that every kind of cell under stress is shedding particles of its substance.

02:06:36.440 --> 02:06:46.240
 They call them membrane vesicles or exosomes, but they seem to fulfill the requirements

02:06:46.240 --> 02:06:53.920
 of some of these things all the way back to Darwin's gemmules and the Koreans' third

02:06:53.920 --> 02:07:08.200
 circulatory system and possibly the alternative ways of looking at gene changes under stress

02:07:08.200 --> 02:07:19.160
 like Barbara McClintock's movable genes that stress can increase the mobility.

02:07:19.160 --> 02:07:27.600
 And it turns out that, in fact, we are constantly circulating even in the blood, but also in

02:07:27.600 --> 02:07:28.920
 the lymph.

02:07:28.920 --> 02:07:38.800
 And now some other Koreans are coming back and validating the 1960 guys' research showing

02:07:38.800 --> 02:07:49.920
 that maybe there is a third specialized circulatory system for little particles of RNA.

02:07:49.920 --> 02:08:01.560
 So what I first ran across was the traditional encyclopedists.

02:08:01.560 --> 02:08:09.960
 The Encyclopedia Britannica had a good article on the Lamarckians, and that was because before

02:08:09.960 --> 02:08:18.480
 the Second World War, the science hadn't been completely taken over by the dogmatists,

02:08:18.480 --> 02:08:23.280
 and so people were still talking about the evidence.

02:08:23.280 --> 02:08:34.720
 And some people that I knew before I went to

02:08:34.720 --> 02:08:46.640
 graduate school were talking about the training worms, flatwormers.

02:08:46.640 --> 02:08:52.920
 Flatworms and the Worm Runners Digest, for example, came out of the training of flatworms.

02:08:52.920 --> 02:08:59.240
 You would train them, then grind them up and feed them to other worms, and the new worms

02:08:59.240 --> 02:09:03.480
 would have the learned behavior.

02:09:03.480 --> 02:09:15.520
 And following the worm experiments, a Scandinavian, I think he was probably Danish from his name,

02:09:15.520 --> 02:09:25.760
 Hiedenhain, was doing similar experiments with catfish and goldfish and rats and various

02:09:25.760 --> 02:09:32.000
 other animals, showing that he would train them and then grind up the brain and inject

02:09:32.000 --> 02:09:42.080
 it into an untrained animal and basic types of light avoidance or dark avoidance.

02:09:42.080 --> 02:09:49.000
 He could train the various animals and transmit it by the juices of the brain.

02:09:49.000 --> 02:09:57.800
 And in one type of experiment, he would monitor the RNA and protein in the different sides

02:09:57.800 --> 02:10:06.640
 of the brain of a catfish while putting an odorant molecule into one nostril or the other

02:10:06.640 --> 02:10:17.120
 and show that there were RNA changes corresponding to the sense record and experience.

02:10:17.120 --> 02:10:24.800
 And then he would take the juice of the brain and show that it was involved in the training

02:10:24.800 --> 02:10:27.440
 and learning.

02:10:27.440 --> 02:10:38.640
 And my first year in graduate school, I was spending a lot of time in the library, and

02:10:38.640 --> 02:10:43.480
 I found a book called Cold War in Biology by C.C.

02:10:43.480 --> 02:10:45.240
 Lindgren.

02:10:45.240 --> 02:10:53.880
 And it was published by the man who started the Worm Runners Digest, because no other

02:10:53.880 --> 02:10:55.960
 publisher would take it.

02:10:55.960 --> 02:10:59.680
 But it was a history of genetics.

02:10:59.680 --> 02:11:05.240
 Lindgren was one of C.L.

02:11:05.240 --> 02:11:15.320
 Morgan's, no, the famous genetics pioneer.

02:11:15.320 --> 02:11:19.440
 I've confused him with a psychologist of emergence.

02:11:19.440 --> 02:11:35.040
 But anyway, he was the student of the Columbia and the center of the genetic, defining genes

02:11:35.040 --> 02:11:40.080
 by crossing over the classical genetics.

02:11:40.080 --> 02:11:52.760
 And so he was, his graduate study and early career was in contact with the classical geneticists.

02:11:52.760 --> 02:12:03.640
 And it happened that another of, one of his classmates was the person who developed the

02:12:03.640 --> 02:12:17.320
 cancer-prone strain of mice, and his career made him famous for developing genetic strains

02:12:17.320 --> 02:12:24.360
 that would develop a certain kind of cancer, 100 percent or almost never.

02:12:24.360 --> 02:12:36.840
 And both of these people, the mouse men and Lindgren, went away from classical genetics

02:12:36.840 --> 02:12:47.560
 of the 19-teens and 20s to a perfectly Lamarckian view of things based on their experience.

02:12:47.560 --> 02:12:58.880
 Lindgren worked for the beer industry as a yeast geneticist, and he described his own

02:12:58.880 --> 02:13:12.440
 experiments in which he would stress the particular organisms while watching them under the microscope

02:13:12.440 --> 02:13:23.120
 and show that it wasn't random mutation like the standard university student experiment

02:13:23.120 --> 02:13:31.000
 and the textbook description that you make an imprint of a colony of bacteria and press

02:13:31.000 --> 02:13:32.960
 that onto other plates.

02:13:32.960 --> 02:13:40.840
 You can show that the evolution starts from one random individual, supposedly, so that

02:13:40.840 --> 02:13:48.600
 that's randomizing the whole idea of genetics to fit the neo-Darwin idea that it's all random

02:13:48.600 --> 02:13:51.800
 variation and natural selection.

02:13:51.800 --> 02:14:01.200
 But Lindgren looked, using yeast that he could follow the individual cell under the microscope

02:14:01.200 --> 02:14:11.040
 while he was starving it for a given nutrient, with a stain that showed their metabolic state.

02:14:11.040 --> 02:14:16.280
 He could show the color change indicating that they were being stressed almost to the

02:14:16.280 --> 02:14:18.200
 point of death.

02:14:18.200 --> 02:14:25.500
 And then he could show that individuals were changing their genes to become able to metabolize

02:14:25.500 --> 02:14:32.840
 something else that was available, so it was visibly non-random.

02:14:32.840 --> 02:14:45.400
 But this had to be published by the Worm Runners Press because none of the standard biology

02:14:45.400 --> 02:14:48.600
 journals would take it.

02:14:48.600 --> 02:14:56.100
 But in this book, The Cold War of Biology, he went over the whole 20th century genetic

02:14:56.100 --> 02:15:06.140
 situation showing how right around 1947 there were still the Lamarckians teaching in colleges

02:15:06.140 --> 02:15:07.820
 and high school.

02:15:07.820 --> 02:15:19.440
 But under this wave of new science, I think of it as germ warfare molecular biology genetics,

02:15:19.440 --> 02:15:27.200
 there was a removal of all of the Lamarckians from the educational system right across the

02:15:27.200 --> 02:15:28.200
 spectrum.

02:15:28.200 --> 02:15:32.560
 No one was left after 1947.

02:15:32.560 --> 02:15:44.600
 One guy at Harvard, John Cairns, started seeing the same kind of effect in bacteria that Carl

02:15:44.600 --> 02:15:47.520
 Lindgren had written about.

02:15:47.520 --> 02:15:56.560
 And so he became sort of a token Lamarckian that people say, "How do you explain that

02:15:56.560 --> 02:16:07.240
 away?" and they're still pretty much trying to explain the way Cairns directed evolution

02:16:07.240 --> 02:16:15.360
 in bacteria, meeting the need by changing their own structure.

02:16:15.360 --> 02:16:25.840
 And more recently, a couple of other people are seeing even bacteria as able to do genetic

02:16:25.840 --> 02:16:30.080
 engineering on themselves to meet the need.

02:16:30.080 --> 02:16:37.320
 And the only way you can achieve that is if you have a meaningful, coherent structure

02:16:37.320 --> 02:16:47.660
 in the cytoplasm that is perceiving the need and knowing how to evaluate which gene needs

02:16:47.660 --> 02:16:49.360
 to be changed and so on.

02:16:49.360 --> 02:16:57.600
 So it's intelligence directed towards the inside and the outside that you can't explain

02:16:57.600 --> 02:17:08.960
 the events without recognizing that, but it's very hard to get that idea into science.

02:17:08.960 --> 02:17:14.040
 There's a website called Cell Intelligence on the internet.

02:17:14.040 --> 02:17:23.240
 For several years, a man who shows, he argues that cells are communicating at the infrared

02:17:23.240 --> 02:17:25.120
 wavelength.

02:17:25.120 --> 02:17:36.980
 And so he shows a laser-directed spot of infrared energy and how cells can be moved around under

02:17:36.980 --> 02:17:45.520
 the microscope following a spot of infrared light.

02:17:45.520 --> 02:17:48.600
 Albrecht Buehler is that man's name.

02:17:48.600 --> 02:17:49.600
 From the website?

02:17:49.600 --> 02:17:55.920
 Gunter Albrecht Buehler.

02:17:55.920 --> 02:18:00.640
 It seems so intuitive.

02:18:00.640 --> 02:18:11.640
 What do you think the getting stuck on the whole, you know, randomness as a, like the

02:18:11.640 --> 02:18:19.960
 driving force for evolution seems like some kind of, like it gives you the opportunity

02:18:19.960 --> 02:18:24.360
 to not take responsibility for something that might be happening?

02:18:24.360 --> 02:18:34.600
 I've tried to trace the doctrine of randomness or the assumption of randomness.

02:18:34.600 --> 02:18:45.720
 And the mathematicians were trying to describe how to predict where a cannonball is going

02:18:45.720 --> 02:18:46.720
 to fall.

02:18:46.720 --> 02:18:54.360
 And the insurance companies were looking at how to handle randomness to predict investments

02:18:54.360 --> 02:18:57.760
 and risk judgment and so on.

02:18:57.760 --> 02:19:08.400
 So the mathematicians were working on it in the 18th and 19th century for practical purposes.

02:19:08.400 --> 02:19:20.800
 But in the context of mechanizing, abstracting energy from matter and universalizing the

02:19:20.800 --> 02:19:32.680
 atomization or quantization into these out of time and out of interaction, the absolute

02:19:32.680 --> 02:19:49.040
 unit, you didn't want any intelligence or susceptibility or memory left in matter itself.

02:19:49.040 --> 02:19:56.520
 And so you had to find ways of explaining it in terms of statistical chance.

02:19:56.520 --> 02:20:05.600
 And that was the context that S.J. Bose was working against when he showed that matter

02:20:05.600 --> 02:20:15.040
 and organisms all have these properties of sensitivity, reaction, memory, and fatigue

02:20:15.040 --> 02:20:24.160
 and recovery right across from inorganic to organic and living matter.

02:20:24.160 --> 02:20:34.080
 But that was very deliberately a definition of matter was created to eliminate anything

02:20:34.080 --> 02:20:38.800
 but random mindless causality.

02:20:38.800 --> 02:20:50.320
 And so the conflict currently between the neo-Darwinists and the creationists, it's

02:20:50.320 --> 02:21:00.240
 going back to around 1800 when the universities and the government said you must believe that

02:21:00.240 --> 02:21:08.480
 God created it and if he isn't intervening, he's at least responsible for setting it up.

02:21:08.480 --> 02:21:17.640
 And the random people who said, no, it's all stupid and mindless, it all happened by chance.

02:21:17.640 --> 02:21:25.640
 So they're both basically committed to the same system and ideology.

02:21:25.640 --> 02:21:35.040
 The neo-Darwinists are just as extreme as the antique religionists in how they view

02:21:35.040 --> 02:21:38.440
 change and matter.

02:21:38.440 --> 02:21:47.680
 And the whole thing comes down to what is substance and what is an element and so on.

02:21:47.680 --> 02:21:57.760
 Aristotle didn't commit himself to any of these ultimately deadly ideas.

02:21:57.760 --> 02:22:04.320
 And so he's very hard to understand coming from a contemporary.

02:22:04.320 --> 02:22:13.760
 You learn what the Greek word meant in his time, try to figure out how you would translate

02:22:13.760 --> 02:22:20.400
 it and it really becomes impossible to translate into this system.

02:22:20.400 --> 02:22:28.480
 You've got to change your mind about what substance and change and being, everything

02:22:28.480 --> 02:22:37.560
 has to radically change before you can translate someone like Aristotle or even read him properly.

02:22:37.560 --> 02:22:47.080
 And for example, for him apparently a substance was anything.

02:22:47.080 --> 02:22:55.160
 It wasn't necessarily an abstract thing, but Socrates was a particular substance and a

02:22:55.160 --> 02:22:58.680
 goat is another kind of substance.

02:22:58.680 --> 02:23:10.000
 There's no defining absolute distinction between iron and the emperor.

02:23:10.000 --> 02:23:19.320
 Each thing has its properties and a law, a natural law is what a thing does.

02:23:19.320 --> 02:23:26.480
 And so the laws are governed by the thing rather than the thing being governed by the

02:23:26.480 --> 02:23:27.760
 law.

02:23:27.760 --> 02:23:39.280
 And so if the thing is becoming and changing through time, if it decides to change because

02:23:39.280 --> 02:23:45.360
 of its something intrinsic to it, if it changes in a certain direction, then you can say that

02:23:45.360 --> 02:23:50.400
 it's following a law, but it wrote the law.

02:23:50.400 --> 02:24:01.120
 And so if substances keep developing through time, so do the laws that they, at one time

02:24:01.120 --> 02:24:07.600
 there were maybe volcanoes and clouds and so on.

02:24:07.600 --> 02:24:18.240
 And there were certain natural laws, but as organisms appeared, new natural laws appeared.

02:24:18.240 --> 02:24:25.080
 And the organization is the substance.

02:24:25.080 --> 02:24:33.760
 A new organization appears in response to physical conditions and that new organization

02:24:33.760 --> 02:24:37.580
 is a new substance.

02:24:37.580 --> 02:24:49.720
 So there's a substantial difference between a sponge and a person, but each one has its

02:24:49.720 --> 02:25:00.520
 organization, and so it has its ways of, its laws of behavior and reacting and so on.

02:25:00.520 --> 02:25:14.580
 And Blake was one of the first people to think through this issue and to apply it to social

02:25:14.580 --> 02:25:26.500
 thinking and said one law for the horse and the tiger, I guess, is tyranny, that each

02:25:26.500 --> 02:25:37.700
 thing has its own natural laws.

02:25:37.700 --> 02:25:43.660
 It's mind-blowing to me to think about things from that perspective, because like you said,

02:25:43.660 --> 02:25:53.060
 both of the other ideas are based completely on external control of some kind, as opposed

02:25:53.060 --> 02:26:01.620
 to things having internal motivation and that that is like a driving force in the universe.

02:26:01.620 --> 02:26:13.200
 No one seems to ever take that possibility into as a real motivation for anything.

02:26:13.200 --> 02:26:28.800
 You can see how Plato generated a good ideology for emperors and kings, because things that

02:26:28.800 --> 02:26:33.720
 weren't timeless weren't quite real.

02:26:33.720 --> 02:26:42.000
 Real things were the general ideas or the things that don't change.

02:26:42.000 --> 02:26:57.840
 And so all of this stuff, I think it was somewhere in Plato that he said there's no real entity

02:26:57.840 --> 02:27:01.440
 for things like fur and mud.

02:27:01.440 --> 02:27:06.920
 Things really are not quite defined.

02:27:06.920 --> 02:27:14.240
 And so that idea that things are timeless and perfect and clean, and all of this is

02:27:14.240 --> 02:27:18.040
 erroneous and not fully real.

02:27:18.040 --> 02:27:23.680
 So it says that don't try to change things.

02:27:23.680 --> 02:27:32.640
 The way it's set up, by those of us who know how it is, that's the only way there is.

02:27:32.640 --> 02:27:45.800
 And Hegel, recognizing certain ways that history has changed things, kept the idea that it's

02:27:45.800 --> 02:27:53.600
 still a mental process, and so it's all closed and has a predetermined outcome.

02:27:53.600 --> 02:28:01.320
 The same way Plato said the outcome is known beforehand because there's no real time,

02:28:01.320 --> 02:28:08.920
 Hegel said, well, maybe there's time that it has this definite outcome with the king

02:28:08.920 --> 02:28:12.560
 at the top.

02:28:12.560 --> 02:28:23.240
 Can you talk a little bit about the dangers of genetic determinism, how that's destructive?

02:28:23.240 --> 02:28:40.320
 I've known actual living eugenicists, people functioning in society who not only supported

02:28:40.320 --> 02:28:50.720
 molecular biology and genetic engineering, but who advocated it for the purpose of improving,

02:28:50.720 --> 02:28:58.160
 eliminating the wrong types of humans.

02:28:58.160 --> 02:29:07.300
 One of the, when Philip Abelson was the editor of Science Magazine, they were regularly publishing

02:29:07.300 --> 02:29:18.840
 things by Herrnstein and some of these Harvard racists, fascists, who were applying genetic

02:29:18.840 --> 02:29:22.400
 determinism to intelligence.

02:29:22.400 --> 02:29:32.560
 And Abelson or his editorial staff kept publishing these basically fascist, racist things.

02:29:32.560 --> 02:29:38.760
 And one of them, I think it was an 11-page article in their fine print, a really long

02:29:38.760 --> 02:29:50.040
 article for Science, talking about, I think it was essentially working class inferiority.

02:29:50.040 --> 02:30:04.520
 And after all of these pages of arguments, their last paragraph drew conclusions about

02:30:04.520 --> 02:30:12.360
 how this determines class ability and stratification and such.

02:30:12.360 --> 02:30:19.400
 But it had no clear evidence, no clear relation to the evidence they'd been talking about.

02:30:19.400 --> 02:30:30.200
 And so I said, well, since, in a little tiny letter to the editor, I said, since they haven't

02:30:30.200 --> 02:30:40.000
 considered intrauterine conditions according to the environment experienced by the mother,

02:30:40.000 --> 02:30:46.280
 this last paragraph doesn't have anything to do with the preceding 11 pages.

02:30:46.280 --> 02:30:52.640
 And I got back a rejection letter.

02:30:52.640 --> 02:31:02.040
 My little two-sentence comment on that article had gone to two different referees, and each

02:31:02.040 --> 02:31:11.040
 referee wrote a little article explaining why my comment shouldn't be published.

02:31:11.040 --> 02:31:19.040
 One of them said my position was almost as extreme as the author's.

02:31:19.040 --> 02:31:30.600
 And the other one said in these publications, his comments are shown to be erroneous.

02:31:30.600 --> 02:31:44.480
 The reference he gave was work done in 1942 and '43 at Hitler's Racial Hygiene Institute.

02:31:44.480 --> 02:31:50.680
 Could you talk a bit about the importance of novelty and stimulation for the organism?

02:31:50.680 --> 02:31:57.160
 Or I think you've called it, or at least relates to what you've mentioned as the orienting

02:31:57.160 --> 02:32:03.400
 reflex?

02:32:03.400 --> 02:32:14.440
 If you start with something like Heraclitus's consciousness, and there is nothing but novelty,

02:32:14.440 --> 02:32:26.080
 but with a certain kind of upbringing, we get indoctrinated and start thinking abstractly.

02:32:26.080 --> 02:32:35.000
 And that creates a suppression of the experience of novelty, and we start seeing things in

02:32:35.000 --> 02:32:37.360
 stereotyped ways.

02:32:37.360 --> 02:32:46.640
 And that creates a kind of depression that reduces our motivation to contact novelty,

02:32:46.640 --> 02:32:55.480
 makes us not only less adventuresome, but to start fearing change and adventure.

02:32:55.480 --> 02:33:09.320
 But the natural Heraclitian state is to, when an environment is stable, so that it's really

02:33:09.320 --> 02:33:24.520
 presenting some things that are repetitive, you're experiencing change, but there are

02:33:24.520 --> 02:33:31.560
 no demands for changing yourself if your environment is very stable.

02:33:31.560 --> 02:33:38.560
 But when the environment changes a little, then you have an opportunity for adapting

02:33:38.560 --> 02:33:42.720
 and finding out why it's different.

02:33:42.720 --> 02:33:48.700
 And if you move, your environment is different.

02:33:48.700 --> 02:33:58.920
 And so every time you move, you're creating opportunities to see new stuff in the environment.

02:33:58.920 --> 02:34:06.720
 And so the natural state of being alive is to move and create a changing environment,

02:34:06.720 --> 02:34:10.240
 to have this exploration tendency.

02:34:10.240 --> 02:34:20.880
 Every time you move, you are receiving different stimuli and getting a new opportunity or a

02:34:20.880 --> 02:34:24.520
 demand for action.

02:34:24.520 --> 02:34:32.380
 So the environment can become chronically more and more stimulating.

02:34:32.380 --> 02:34:46.380
 And as you understand each of these changes, each one calls up a need to reinterpret.

02:34:46.380 --> 02:34:57.940
 And every time you reinterpret, you have the opportunity to generalize and see how one

02:34:57.940 --> 02:35:01.780
 thing helps to explain another thing.

02:35:01.780 --> 02:35:14.420
 And the model we have of what we understand in the world and our place in the world, the

02:35:14.420 --> 02:35:21.100
 Russians called it the acceptor of action.

02:35:21.100 --> 02:35:32.220
 When we do something, our model is noticing what we do and what effect it has.

02:35:32.220 --> 02:35:38.600
 And so that action is requiring change in our model.

02:35:38.600 --> 02:35:49.820
 And so the acceptor of action is an actual structural process in the brain that as you

02:35:49.820 --> 02:35:57.940
 have new understanding, you see new possibilities for doing things in the world.

02:35:57.940 --> 02:36:11.300
 And this opens up the need and the opportunity to use your energies in different ways.

02:36:11.300 --> 02:36:21.740
 And when you have a bigger system understood, you find that you can achieve more by doing

02:36:21.740 --> 02:36:23.540
 less.

02:36:23.540 --> 02:36:29.820
 And so it takes less mental energy the more you understand.

02:36:29.820 --> 02:36:36.880
 But you discover things at a higher rate when you have a broader range of experience.

02:36:36.880 --> 02:36:42.740
 And so it becomes more stimulating but also easier to do.

02:36:42.740 --> 02:36:49.940
 It's the idea of relaxing into complexity.

02:36:49.940 --> 02:36:59.980
 You get an energy reward by the efficiency of understanding things more efficiently.

02:36:59.980 --> 02:37:10.240
 And actually new circuits are set up in your brain combining things that had been separate.

02:37:10.240 --> 02:37:23.120
 And now the activation or flow of energy between your various brain parts is more abundant,

02:37:23.120 --> 02:37:28.400
 more complex, but also easier.

02:37:28.400 --> 02:37:37.320
 And so generalization of understanding is also a changing of the way the inner processes

02:37:37.320 --> 02:37:39.040
 are working.

02:37:39.040 --> 02:37:48.580
 And it increases the rate of metabolism, rate of energy production, but also the efficiency

02:37:48.580 --> 02:37:51.360
 with which it's used.

02:37:51.360 --> 02:38:03.560
 And that should be a stimulating way of living and accumulating structure in your body as

02:38:03.560 --> 02:38:11.800
 well as modifying the way you exist in the world.

02:38:11.800 --> 02:38:24.840
 And that involves interaction with your economy, your ecology, society in general.

02:38:24.840 --> 02:38:32.840
 So I guess we want to get into self-ordering systems a little bit and the way nature creates

02:38:32.840 --> 02:38:35.020
 higher order.

02:38:35.020 --> 02:38:41.080
 Is it spontaneous and is there a place for randomness in the ideas?

02:38:41.080 --> 02:38:49.000
 Oh, yeah, randomness is always a threat.

02:38:49.000 --> 02:39:11.920
 Things like Michael Polanyi's adsorption, I say long-range layering, given a concentration

02:39:11.920 --> 02:39:25.520
 or a pressure, you're likely to have a field extending through space, influencing multiple

02:39:25.520 --> 02:39:29.360
 atoms or molecules and those in turn influence others.

02:39:29.360 --> 02:39:36.360
 And everything has these fields and more or less stickiness.

02:39:36.360 --> 02:39:50.800
 And so the things like resonance and hysteresis are spontaneously everywhere reducing randomness.

02:39:50.800 --> 02:40:04.020
 You move your finger through water or through dust or anything where fields interact, friction.

02:40:04.020 --> 02:40:12.800
 This is all leaving a change and an order for, like you walk through grass in one direction,

02:40:12.800 --> 02:40:19.400
 you bend the grass down and coming back the grass is pointing at you.

02:40:19.400 --> 02:40:23.200
 So the way back is not the same as the way out.

02:40:23.200 --> 02:40:39.420
 And constantly your intended behavior is affecting the environment in ways that tend to support

02:40:39.420 --> 02:40:41.980
 your intention.

02:40:41.980 --> 02:40:49.460
 But if you get counter-intentions, then that has a randomizing, it breaks down the order

02:40:49.460 --> 02:40:53.780
 that you're creating.

02:40:53.780 --> 02:41:07.220
 The occasionally, like you have very vigorous parasites, their intentions might, if they

02:41:07.220 --> 02:41:15.380
 encounter you in a state where your blood sugar is low, for example, the parasites might

02:41:15.380 --> 02:41:22.660
 find an opportunity and start disorganizing your system.

02:41:22.660 --> 02:41:33.220
 So there are competing systems and a lower system getting too much of a foothold in a

02:41:33.220 --> 02:41:37.500
 higher system counts as randomness.

02:41:37.500 --> 02:41:49.940
 But the assumption of randomness is usually, without stating it, is that everything is

02:41:49.940 --> 02:42:00.420
 always random and that what has been ordered is achieved at high cost.

02:42:00.420 --> 02:42:10.900
 And so the arrow of time for these people is that you had to expend energy to create

02:42:10.900 --> 02:42:14.580
 the order and get things piled up in a certain way.

02:42:14.580 --> 02:42:20.580
 And you can only do that at the expense of consuming energy somewhere else.

02:42:20.580 --> 02:42:27.500
 And so that develops in the idea of a universe that's running down.

02:42:27.500 --> 02:42:38.540
 You're burning up a lot of energy to create a little bit of order, but that's suppressing

02:42:38.540 --> 02:42:49.060
 all of the alternative ideas that the generation of order is really in many ways a free process,

02:42:49.060 --> 02:42:55.500
 a spontaneous process that just jumps out of things.

02:42:55.500 --> 02:43:07.060
 Like the way polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons generate their own structure spontaneously

02:43:07.060 --> 02:43:11.860
 from a random gas.

02:43:11.860 --> 02:43:21.300
 Gases are counted as random and most things in solution are counted as random.

02:43:21.300 --> 02:43:29.420
 But that's because we are ignoring the fields that are running through the gas and so on.

02:43:29.420 --> 02:43:39.740
 And it's an idea that the atom is not really responding in any complex way to the fields

02:43:39.740 --> 02:43:42.100
 running through it.

02:43:42.100 --> 02:43:50.260
 But when you look closely enough in the right system, then you see that atoms have their

02:43:50.260 --> 02:43:57.740
 different way of spinning, which matters in many circumstances that you can have memory

02:43:57.740 --> 02:44:08.020
 even in the gas as it has its own state of electronic excitement and so on.

02:44:08.020 --> 02:44:17.460
 And proton spins and electron spins, these things, and probably subtler and more complicated

02:44:17.460 --> 02:44:21.660
 things on the subatomic level are probably happening.

02:44:21.660 --> 02:44:33.580
 And the idea that nuclear fission is a random process, that's one of the biggest applications

02:44:33.580 --> 02:44:39.500
 of randomness.

02:44:39.500 --> 02:44:47.780
 When I was in the university, one of the professors who pinned things on the bulletin board in

02:44:47.780 --> 02:45:03.340
 the hall put up a clipping of a nuclear physicist who was experimenting with radioactive carbon

02:45:03.340 --> 02:45:05.580
 isotopes.

02:45:05.580 --> 02:45:15.260
 And he made the carbon into fatty acids or lipid chains of some sort.

02:45:15.260 --> 02:45:23.980
 And in the bottle, they had a perfectly random rate of decay.

02:45:23.980 --> 02:45:33.260
 But he coated these oils, radioactive oils, in a monolayer on a foil, I think aluminum

02:45:33.260 --> 02:45:43.780
 foil, and then measured the nuclear fission, the so-called random decay, and showed that

02:45:43.780 --> 02:45:49.820
 one decay triggered a cascade of other decays.

02:45:49.820 --> 02:45:51.140
 And there would be a burst.

02:45:51.140 --> 02:45:54.380
 Once there was one, there would be a burst.

02:45:54.380 --> 02:46:04.300
 And so he showed clear evidence that even the nuclear fission was interacting.

02:46:04.300 --> 02:46:15.220
 Something in the surface caused them to coordinate their moment of decaying so that you got bursts

02:46:15.220 --> 02:46:20.060
 intermittently rather than a smooth decay that happened in the bottle.

02:46:20.060 --> 02:46:30.620
 And H.C. Dudley was an ex-Navy physicist who had his pension when he worked as a radiation

02:46:30.620 --> 02:46:35.180
 biologist, I think at the University of Illinois.

02:46:35.180 --> 02:46:42.900
 And he said that because he had his pension, he could do the kind of work he wanted and

02:46:42.900 --> 02:46:46.060
 not worry about getting fired.

02:46:46.060 --> 02:46:55.940
 So he was working out some of the implications that Fred Soddy, early in the century, had

02:46:55.940 --> 02:47:09.420
 proposed that the Soddy proposal was maybe nuclear radioactivity could be reflecting

02:47:09.420 --> 02:47:13.140
 an ether interaction.

02:47:13.140 --> 02:47:28.740
 And later he proposed the idea that the timing, the birth of new material in the cosmos produced

02:47:28.740 --> 02:47:37.780
 cosmic rays, and that the constant generation of cosmic rays was generating a radio wave

02:47:37.780 --> 02:47:40.260
 background.

02:47:40.260 --> 02:47:49.180
 I think he was the first person to predict that there would be a radio wave background

02:47:49.180 --> 02:47:50.940
 in the cosmos.

02:47:50.940 --> 02:47:58.260
 And when that was finally discovered, I think they forgot that Soddy had predicted it on

02:47:58.260 --> 02:48:01.580
 the basis of new matter being formed.

02:48:01.580 --> 02:48:07.180
 And instead they said this is fossil evidence of the creation of the universe in the Big

02:48:07.180 --> 02:48:08.180
 Bang.

02:48:08.180 --> 02:48:12.740
 But it was exactly 180 degrees opposite from that theory.

02:48:12.740 --> 02:48:17.900
 It was the constant creation of matter.

02:48:17.900 --> 02:48:29.340
 And Horace Dudley revived the things that at one point Fred Soddy had proposed to explain

02:48:29.340 --> 02:48:39.700
 nuclear decay and suggested that the ether could consist of a sea of neutrinos.

02:48:39.700 --> 02:48:49.780
 And at that time the doctrine insisted that the neutrino had no rest mass.

02:48:49.780 --> 02:49:04.820
 And Dudley was suggesting that there is a very small rest mass in neutrinos and that

02:49:04.820 --> 02:49:16.660
 if the neutrino, if the background is filled with a flow of neutrinos, that they could

02:49:16.660 --> 02:49:22.540
 be the medium of resonance between atoms.

02:49:22.540 --> 02:49:32.540
 And by coincidence, Dudley's article proposing that there could be a medium of interaction

02:49:32.540 --> 02:49:41.740
 causing the appearance of random nuclear decay, that was published in an Italian mainline

02:49:41.740 --> 02:49:51.700
 physics journal within a week of the other guy's demonstration of non-random carbon

02:49:51.700 --> 02:49:55.820
 isotope decay on the surface.

02:49:55.820 --> 02:50:02.140
 Exactly the thing Dudley was warning about, saying that if things like the crystal structure

02:50:02.140 --> 02:50:12.340
 of nuclear fuel is really the mechanism of nuclear decay, we aren't able to predict

02:50:12.340 --> 02:50:21.980
 safely what's going to happen with stored nuclear waste and so on.

02:50:21.980 --> 02:50:36.100
 And this idea of a surface affecting even the inner behavior of an atom, it implies

02:50:36.100 --> 02:50:51.020
 that maybe the ordering of a metal is involving other things than electrical charge.

02:50:51.020 --> 02:50:57.460
 Michael Polanyi, in his study of crystals, surface effects, friction, elasticity and

02:50:57.460 --> 02:51:07.060
 so on, was showing that the forces that you see on a surface are really also depth processes

02:51:07.060 --> 02:51:10.740
 in the metal.

02:51:10.740 --> 02:51:17.900
 And when you have a metal surface apparently causing non-random nuclear decay, that means

02:51:17.900 --> 02:51:29.740
 that you're projecting something, organizing something through the surface of the metal.

02:51:29.740 --> 02:51:41.420
 Alexander Rosson, working at the Rockefeller Institute, was mostly known for being able

02:51:41.420 --> 02:51:52.060
 to measure extremely thin films of substance, measure the thickness by the angle at which

02:51:52.060 --> 02:51:55.500
 a beam of polarized light is absorbed.

02:51:55.500 --> 02:52:02.020
 And so it would allow extremely fine measurements of a layer.

02:52:02.020 --> 02:52:08.540
 And that was acceptable and useful.

02:52:08.540 --> 02:52:22.060
 But in the '50s and '60s, he started refining, looking at places where the technique showed

02:52:22.060 --> 02:52:32.620
 some anomalous results, and started doing some of his experiments overnight, repeating

02:52:32.620 --> 02:52:42.140
 - he would coat a glass slide with a film of metal and then put a protein or antigen

02:52:42.140 --> 02:52:52.500
 on it, and then maybe a film of fat or plastic over that, and see what could be detected

02:52:52.500 --> 02:52:59.620
 through the layer intervening between the protein and the antibody, for example.

02:52:59.620 --> 02:53:10.380
 And he found that when laid in a thin film on a metal that had been deposited on the

02:53:10.380 --> 02:53:20.340
 glass, the antigen properties, even if the protein had been semi-denatured by being smeared

02:53:20.340 --> 02:53:29.060
 out on the surface, you could lay a film of plastic over it and antibodies would still

02:53:29.060 --> 02:53:32.620
 be detectable on the surface.

02:53:32.620 --> 02:53:44.740
 And he proposed that you could manufacture slides with an antigen laid out so that you

02:53:44.740 --> 02:53:52.220
 could dip it in someone's serum and through a piece of plastic you could detect by the

02:53:52.220 --> 02:53:59.100
 pattern that it pulled out of the serum what antibodies they had, according to what antigens

02:53:59.100 --> 02:54:03.020
 you had prepared the slide with.

02:54:03.020 --> 02:54:13.140
 And in studying this process, he found that aging the slides overnight would change the

02:54:13.140 --> 02:54:25.940
 activity, and so he saw some process that would go up and down as the daylight changed,

02:54:25.940 --> 02:54:39.500
 and so it was in some way timed to the electromagnetic or other Earth or solar system environment.

02:54:39.500 --> 02:54:49.700
 But it was showing the long-range effects of not only antigens and antibodies, but he

02:54:49.700 --> 02:55:01.700
 could demonstrate that an enzyme blocked by a layer of plastic polymer could break down

02:55:01.700 --> 02:55:09.460
 a substrate on the other side of the plastic film, both of them knocking out the idea that

02:55:09.460 --> 02:55:20.620
 of lock and key necessary contact, one-to-one neutralization showing the Polanyi long-distance

02:55:20.620 --> 02:55:32.940
 effect opening up the physics for all kinds of long-range coherent processes in the organism.

02:55:32.940 --> 02:55:47.180
 I think that leads into electromagnetic fields and fields in general.

02:55:47.180 --> 02:55:57.540
 If you could talk about how electromagnetic fields influence biology positively, negatively,

02:55:57.540 --> 02:56:04.820
 what sort of how things are affected by fields?

02:56:04.820 --> 02:56:19.020
 The Becker's book, The Body Electric, described his experiments showing that you could impose

02:56:19.020 --> 02:56:28.820
 a weak electrical field and stimulate accelerated healing of a tissue by increasing the electrical

02:56:28.820 --> 02:56:33.420
 field.

02:56:33.420 --> 02:56:43.140
 The body normally is generating these fields, and when there's a wound, there's an intensified

02:56:43.140 --> 02:56:48.900
 field.

02:56:48.900 --> 02:56:57.940
 Becker's way of measuring these things was pretty free of artifacts.

02:56:57.940 --> 02:57:02.220
 It took the outside way of measuring things.

02:57:02.220 --> 02:57:11.260
 When you have the injury, you can measure with any kind of electrode, even relatively

02:57:11.260 --> 02:57:20.380
 remotely because there's a field, and that kind of bioelectric measurement is something

02:57:20.380 --> 02:57:26.300
 that gets around the artifacts of sticking a needle in and injuring the cell because

02:57:26.300 --> 02:57:31.460
 you when you poke the cell, you're creating an injury potential.

02:57:31.460 --> 02:57:39.060
 But in the healthy organism, you can externally measure the difference between a healthy field

02:57:39.060 --> 02:57:43.700
 and an injured regenerative field.

02:57:43.700 --> 02:57:56.620
 And if the environment is so intensely full of electrical fields, that's interfering

02:57:56.620 --> 02:58:06.740
 with our body's own generation of electrical fields.

02:58:06.740 --> 02:58:13.980
 Early experiments at NASA found that you could turn off a person's consciousness just by

02:58:13.980 --> 02:58:21.380
 putting a very intense magnetic field across their neck.

02:58:21.380 --> 02:58:33.020
 Now there are therapies being proposed in which you can magnetically stimulate the brain.

02:58:33.020 --> 02:58:50.260
 The Holodomor in Russia made a big point of saying that he's talking about the sensitivity

02:58:50.260 --> 02:59:00.300
 of the organism to its outside fields, but he wasn't investigating the fields generated

02:59:00.300 --> 02:59:05.420
 by the organism.

02:59:05.420 --> 02:59:14.820
 One of the references he gave me was by Madeline Barnothy and her husband on the sensitivity

02:59:14.820 --> 02:59:25.180
 to fields, following up on some of the things that Soko Trump had done.

02:59:25.180 --> 02:59:35.100
 The Barnothys showed that everyone is really potentially tuned in to very weak fields in

02:59:35.100 --> 02:59:36.420
 the environment.

02:59:36.420 --> 02:59:44.500
 And the fact that very few people are studying these doesn't mean that they aren't important.

02:59:44.500 --> 02:59:55.020
 But Robert Becker was very definite in saying that we should be a lot more cautious with

02:59:55.020 --> 03:00:01.900
 our exposure to fields because they are so intrinsically involved in maintaining and

03:00:01.900 --> 03:00:05.740
 repairing healthy tissue.

03:00:05.740 --> 03:00:13.740
 That was something Michael Persinger talked about a fair amount when we chatted with him.

03:00:13.740 --> 03:00:21.940
 The difference that there's such powerful fields in the environment, but that you can

03:00:21.940 --> 03:00:29.140
 have profound changes in consciousness with just a very weak field that he used to apply,

03:00:29.140 --> 03:00:36.540
 causing religious experiences for people with something that has no more power than a hair

03:00:36.540 --> 03:00:39.540
 dryer or something like that.

03:00:39.540 --> 03:00:51.660
 In the '60s, I was experimenting with putting a weak direct current across the brain.

03:00:51.660 --> 03:01:03.980
 And I ran into some people in San Diego working in the military industrial complex who, when

03:01:03.980 --> 03:01:10.620
 they learned that I was interested in experimenting along this line, they told me about stuff

03:01:10.620 --> 03:01:15.340
 that was being done in their field.

03:01:15.340 --> 03:01:23.660
 And they said that already at that time, people could be monitored from a distance of several

03:01:23.660 --> 03:01:29.860
 feet away, give them a whole physical exam and lie detector test and such without touching

03:01:29.860 --> 03:01:31.780
 them.

03:01:31.780 --> 03:01:46.060
 And there were experimenters changing, imposing a different rhythm on the brain, the brain's

03:01:46.060 --> 03:01:50.680
 natural rhythm, for example, 10 or 11 cycles per second.

03:01:50.680 --> 03:01:59.740
 They would synchronize with that and then gradually slow it down and find that as they

03:01:59.740 --> 03:02:07.820
 drove the brain frequency down below about a third or 40 percent lower than normal, the

03:02:07.820 --> 03:02:10.260
 person would get sick.

03:02:10.260 --> 03:02:21.580
 And they were talking about the brain's natural oscillation with the Earth's 11-cycle rhythm

03:02:21.580 --> 03:02:32.540
 and probably the brain's alpha rhythm, I guess it is, the 10 or 11 per second, is probably

03:02:32.540 --> 03:02:39.500
 our oscillation with the ionosphere resonance.

03:02:39.500 --> 03:02:48.340
 And anyway, I was interested in the DC fields because I was experimenting and seeing that

03:02:48.340 --> 03:02:54.500
 as conductivity increased, so did the polarity across the head.

03:02:54.500 --> 03:03:02.700
 And after I had been experimenting, seeing if it made sick people feel better and such,

03:03:02.700 --> 03:03:11.340
 I found an experiment in which they had polarized cats.

03:03:11.340 --> 03:03:17.740
 Remember at first they would train them until they could do a trick.

03:03:17.740 --> 03:03:26.260
 They would plot the performance of the cat's behavior and they would get it to 100 percent

03:03:26.260 --> 03:03:27.260
 of performance.

03:03:27.260 --> 03:03:33.860
 And then they would reverse the DC polarity across the head and they would forget everything

03:03:33.860 --> 03:03:42.500
 they knew, or if they were training a cat and seeing a course of improvement and learning,

03:03:42.500 --> 03:03:49.260
 then they would reinforce that polarity with a positive on the back and a negative on the

03:03:49.260 --> 03:03:56.780
 front and suddenly they would jump up to 100 percent and get it all right, right away.

03:03:56.780 --> 03:04:07.460
 So it seemed like a potential therapy to simply give a very weak direct current support or

03:04:07.460 --> 03:04:14.620
 doing things that allowed the body to retain, not be interfered with.

03:04:14.620 --> 03:04:22.460
 Like a resonance effect, it seems like?

03:04:22.460 --> 03:04:33.180
 There was someone who isolated people in a chamber, a Faraday cage, and kept out the

03:04:33.180 --> 03:04:39.660
 Earth's resonant frequency and found that people slowed their brain rhythms just by

03:04:39.660 --> 03:04:43.220
 isolation.

03:04:43.220 --> 03:04:53.500
 And you would think that there would be someone trying to optimize the way we resonate, but

03:04:53.500 --> 03:05:02.140
 I don't know if Persinger is proposing wiring your house to resonate with a better frequency?

03:05:02.140 --> 03:05:11.220
 No, but the effects of grounding, electrically grounding.

03:05:11.220 --> 03:05:21.380
 So like bare feet on the Earth having a specific effect in lowering cortisol and other biomarkers

03:05:21.380 --> 03:05:27.900
 and then there are companies now that they make grounding pads for when you're inside

03:05:27.900 --> 03:05:31.740
 that you plug into the wall and into the ground and put your bare feet on.

03:05:31.740 --> 03:05:39.500
 People have measured the voltage from the surface of the Earth up and it looks like

03:05:39.500 --> 03:05:47.380
 the Earth is a source of electrons and so putting your feet on the Earth, since the

03:05:47.380 --> 03:05:52.900
 head is positive, then walking around with your bare feet on a source of electrons is

03:05:52.900 --> 03:05:56.860
 a way of reinforcing that polarity.

03:05:56.860 --> 03:06:01.360
 Same idea as putting a battery across your head.

03:06:01.360 --> 03:06:10.660
 He also did experiments with generating a field that he said was I guess the same as

03:06:10.660 --> 03:06:19.300
 the field of the Earth around 7 hertz, I think he said, in a time of magnetic calm and putting

03:06:19.300 --> 03:06:27.260
 the exact same field around two people that he, they would separate people into two rooms

03:06:27.260 --> 03:06:32.900
 that were dark and flash a light in one person's eyes and if they applied the same field to

03:06:32.900 --> 03:06:43.100
 both people's head, the flash would register in the other person's brain as well.

03:06:43.100 --> 03:06:49.060
 Andrea Puharich, have you run across him?

03:06:49.060 --> 03:06:57.060
 He heard about Wilhelm Reich's, actually Reich ripped off Nikola Tesla's self-charging

03:06:57.060 --> 03:07:09.460
 chamber but Reich developed it as a therapeutic orgone accumulator and Andrea Puharich built

03:07:09.460 --> 03:07:19.420
 a chamber like that and some of his experiments, he said it was financed by the government

03:07:19.420 --> 03:07:29.020
 but either they would eat mushrooms or they would sit in the chamber and people with a

03:07:29.020 --> 03:07:39.940
 known tendency to clairvoyance sitting in the chamber had a great amplification and

03:07:39.940 --> 03:07:49.220
 I was interested in that because of my own various types of dream experiences that seemed

03:07:49.220 --> 03:07:59.820
 to extend with people having experiences remotely.

03:07:59.820 --> 03:08:04.180
 I think that's what got Persinger started with those experiments was he was working

03:08:04.180 --> 03:08:13.220
 with someone who was somewhat of a clairvoyant and two different people, one who traditionally

03:08:13.220 --> 03:08:22.460
 did remote viewing and then another who was more of a traditional psychic who would be

03:08:22.460 --> 03:08:31.300
 able to read people as they came into the room and by enhancing the field, he found

03:08:31.300 --> 03:08:36.940
 first that when someone came into the room that his brainwaves would sync up with whoever

03:08:36.940 --> 03:08:43.380
 came in and that seemed to be related to his ability to read them.

03:08:43.380 --> 03:08:47.860
 So I think that's what got him started with trying to apply the same fields to two different

03:08:47.860 --> 03:08:55.900
 people and see the action at a distance of linking their brains.

03:08:55.900 --> 03:09:04.020
 Puharich had the idea that it was a field generated by shifting, I think, to the exaggerated

03:09:04.020 --> 03:09:16.660
 parasympathetic dominance in the brain but that was just a theory to try to explain what

03:09:16.660 --> 03:09:29.100
 he was seeing evidentially.

03:09:29.100 --> 03:09:38.660
 Connecting Sheldrake and his creative formative field to this interconnecting clairvoyant

03:09:38.660 --> 03:09:52.460
 reading field, I've had experiences that seem to involve something like an extending

03:09:52.460 --> 03:09:58.540
 field that's sensing the future.

03:09:58.540 --> 03:10:09.060
 Sometimes watching people in a conversation, I could encompass how they were going to be

03:10:09.060 --> 03:10:17.340
 directing their argument minutes into the future.

03:10:17.340 --> 03:10:27.820
 There was a period of a few weeks in 1956 when every morning, just in my last dreams

03:10:27.820 --> 03:10:38.340
 before I would wake up, I would see some sort of an event or image and I would wonder what

03:10:38.340 --> 03:10:43.140
 that meant would be sort of an out of context dream.

03:10:43.140 --> 03:10:50.140
 Then an hour or two or three hours later, something unexpected would happen and I would

03:10:50.140 --> 03:10:53.220
 say, "Oh, there's that dream."

03:10:53.220 --> 03:11:03.580
 That happened repeatedly over this period of a few weeks in 1956 and I think it was

03:11:03.580 --> 03:11:14.060
 a couple of years ago, exactly the same thing started happening again about 56 years later.

03:11:14.060 --> 03:11:25.660
 I would have a dream, like a very concrete thing an hour or two later.

03:11:25.660 --> 03:11:35.260
 In a couple of cases, I even mentioned it and wanted to have a witness.

03:11:35.260 --> 03:11:48.140
 In fact, a very unique one-time event happened after having a strange dream of that same

03:11:48.140 --> 03:11:52.700
 sort of one-time event.

03:11:52.700 --> 03:12:03.700
 So it made me think that the people involved seemed to be having an intention to go in

03:12:03.700 --> 03:12:09.220
 that direction that was being projected.

03:12:09.220 --> 03:12:16.180
 So there was a definite span of time that seemed to be covered in these states, usually

03:12:16.180 --> 03:12:21.420
 just from one to three hours.

03:12:21.420 --> 03:12:26.980
 I think some of the work that Michael Persinger did early on was correlating experiences like

03:12:26.980 --> 03:12:35.740
 that, looking at time periods where people had an increase in those sorts of experiences

03:12:35.740 --> 03:12:42.180
 and then looking at the records of the geomagnetic activity of the earth and seeing that they

03:12:42.180 --> 03:12:48.860
 seemed to line up where people seemed to have more clairvoyant experiences at times of geomagnetic

03:12:48.860 --> 03:12:54.940
 calm and that that ability seemed more disturbed at times of high activity.

03:12:54.940 --> 03:13:04.660
 But anyways, what do you think of the work of Michael Persinger?

03:13:04.660 --> 03:13:14.700
 His work on the brain and consciousness and such in itself is very interesting, just as

03:13:14.700 --> 03:13:28.980
 a neurologist, but his fields, stimulation and detection of synchrony and such, I think

03:13:28.980 --> 03:13:33.940
 a lot more people should be working on that.

03:13:33.940 --> 03:13:40.500
 As far as my experience goes, it was these government people in the '60s who, I don't

03:13:40.500 --> 03:13:48.300
 know if they were leaking stuff that shouldn't have been leaked, but it was very closely

03:13:48.300 --> 03:13:55.460
 related to that kind of Andrea Puharich research.

03:13:55.460 --> 03:14:00.160
 At what point did your knowledge of biology and health lead you to begin helping other

03:14:00.160 --> 03:14:05.860
 people with their issues?

03:14:05.860 --> 03:14:26.300
 I think reading Adelle Davis and seeing the practicality of using diet changes and such

03:14:26.300 --> 03:14:36.300
 when I was in Mexico, seeing the common protein deficiency and how big a change you could

03:14:36.300 --> 03:14:49.260
 make with a small diet change, that encouraged me to offer my suggestions to people even

03:14:49.260 --> 03:14:56.100
 when they didn't ask for it.

03:14:56.100 --> 03:15:05.420
 What you had said, it was you started to sort of become known as the person that told people

03:15:05.420 --> 03:15:07.020
 to stop taking their vitamins.

03:15:07.020 --> 03:15:12.660
 Yeah, that started probably around 1970.

03:15:12.660 --> 03:15:21.940
 I don't remember when Whitebird Clinic started, but we had a peace movement anti-war group

03:15:21.940 --> 03:15:29.940
 going in the '60s, and it was probably late '60s when Whitebird Clinic was started.

03:15:29.940 --> 03:15:42.300
 A guy named Lemons, I think, was the founder, and all of the peace movement type were volunteering

03:15:42.300 --> 03:15:47.980
 there.

03:15:47.980 --> 03:15:58.940
 My main idea was, based on my experience with allergies of vitamins, that that started people

03:15:58.940 --> 03:16:05.700
 telling each other and sending them to talk to me.

03:16:05.700 --> 03:16:10.140
 What sort of things, what kind of issues did people start to come to you with?

03:16:10.140 --> 03:16:19.740
 First, mostly allergy problems, constant runny nose and kids that were constantly having

03:16:19.740 --> 03:16:20.740
 colds.

03:16:20.740 --> 03:16:38.580
 And then fertility problems, lots of young women with their maltreatment by the local

03:16:38.580 --> 03:16:40.700
 medical establishment.

03:16:40.700 --> 03:16:55.180
 Just incredible stories about rudeness, insults, assault, the wrong kind of surgery, having

03:16:55.180 --> 03:17:03.940
 ovaries removed when they were supposed to be having surgery to fix a cyst.

03:17:03.940 --> 03:17:11.780
 They would wake up and their ovaries would be gone.

03:17:11.780 --> 03:17:22.980
 The counterculture was very conscious to the need to have a different medical establishment,

03:17:22.980 --> 03:17:30.540
 so the pre-clinic wasn't just for the poor student population.

03:17:30.540 --> 03:17:39.900
 It was an outlet, an escape from the dangerous gynecologists.

03:17:39.900 --> 03:17:49.540
 I got acquainted through that connection with a local gynecologist who had, years before,

03:17:49.540 --> 03:17:55.100
 testified for a patient who had been maimed by a local doctor.

03:17:55.100 --> 03:18:01.740
 He was the only doctor in the whole region who would testify for the patient.

03:18:01.740 --> 03:18:10.180
 And so he was ostracized by the profession, but continued his private practice.

03:18:10.180 --> 03:18:14.380
 And his own health was ruined.

03:18:14.380 --> 03:18:32.100
 He had Addison's, a mixture of stress syndromes, tissue damage from chronic stress.

03:18:32.100 --> 03:18:40.620
 That environment of seeing how dangerous the medical establishment was, and the fact that

03:18:40.620 --> 03:18:49.860
 I had been working on the danger of estrogen and a bad diet, and how that was counteracted

03:18:49.860 --> 03:18:55.180
 by progesterone and thyroid.

03:18:55.180 --> 03:19:11.620
 One of the most serious people to come along was someone with a history of multiple sclerosis

03:19:11.620 --> 03:19:24.220
 symptoms and variations, brain degenerative symptoms, blindness, paralysis, and so on.

03:19:24.220 --> 03:19:31.380
 And she had found Katharine Dalton's book on progesterone therapy.

03:19:31.380 --> 03:19:43.540
 And I think just before that, a woman with a history of epilepsy had gone to a local

03:19:43.540 --> 03:19:51.300
 neurologist when she was 35 and had been a schoolteacher, and she was having migraines.

03:19:51.300 --> 03:19:59.140
 And the neurologist said, "Migraines are like epilepsy, so I'll give you an anti-epilepsy

03:19:59.140 --> 03:20:00.140
 drug."

03:20:00.140 --> 03:20:06.820
 And she took it during the summer and realized that she couldn't be intelligent enough to

03:20:06.820 --> 03:20:12.020
 teach her classes, so she stopped taking it in the fall.

03:20:12.020 --> 03:20:16.660
 And stopping it suddenly, she had a seizure.

03:20:16.660 --> 03:20:23.740
 She hadn't been warned that withdrawal from an anti-seizure drug had to be gradual.

03:20:23.740 --> 03:20:29.500
 And so she went back to the doctor and he said, "See, I said migraines are like epilepsy."

03:20:29.500 --> 03:20:37.060
 So then she became an epileptic patient from the age of 35 to 52.

03:20:37.060 --> 03:20:43.220
 And every year she would visit the doctor and he would give her an IQ test and show

03:20:43.220 --> 03:20:49.260
 her how she had become demented by her late 40s.

03:20:49.260 --> 03:20:56.560
 And when I saw her, she was, I think, 52 and couldn't leave the house by herself because

03:20:56.560 --> 03:20:58.960
 she couldn't find the way back.

03:20:58.960 --> 03:21:07.660
 So her son brought her over and I told them about progesterone and thyroid and how it

03:21:07.660 --> 03:21:16.940
 worked in animals and mentioned inflammation as one of the signs of estrogen poisoning.

03:21:16.940 --> 03:21:24.740
 And she had two purplish kind of fat fingers that she couldn't bend.

03:21:24.740 --> 03:21:31.300
 And I explained how she could dissolve the progesterone in oil and rub it under her skin.

03:21:31.300 --> 03:21:34.580
 She said, "Well, I'll start with these."

03:21:34.580 --> 03:21:39.500
 And she took some home with her.

03:21:39.500 --> 03:21:50.220
 And a week later, even though she had said she was not allowed to leave the house by

03:21:50.220 --> 03:21:59.300
 herself, she came back down the sidewalk holding a piece of paper I had given her to mark her

03:21:59.300 --> 03:22:01.620
 changes or improvement.

03:22:01.620 --> 03:22:08.660
 And she was grinning and coming down the sidewalk, bending her fingers, showing that five days

03:22:08.660 --> 03:22:12.260
 later her fingers were mobile.

03:22:12.260 --> 03:22:19.700
 And she showed me the paper that she had dotted each day, a radical improvement, until she

03:22:19.700 --> 03:22:25.100
 was now rating herself as the best possible.

03:22:25.100 --> 03:22:30.580
 And that was in the middle of summer sometime.

03:22:30.580 --> 03:22:38.780
 And she went back to graduate school in the fall and signed up for a master's program

03:22:38.780 --> 03:22:46.580
 in gerontology, got straight A's, got her master's degree after nine months, after 17

03:22:46.580 --> 03:22:49.100
 years of dementia.

03:22:49.100 --> 03:22:55.340
 So that really encouraged me to make progesterone available.

03:22:55.340 --> 03:23:03.340
 And then this other woman who had MS and blindness and paralysis and such, I had started teaching

03:23:03.340 --> 03:23:06.380
 at a naturopath school in Portland.

03:23:06.380 --> 03:23:11.780
 And she volunteered to come and talk to my class.

03:23:11.780 --> 03:23:16.540
 It was on the second or third floor of an old building in Portland.

03:23:16.540 --> 03:23:27.340
 And she drove herself to the school, came up the stairs walking perfectly, and lectured

03:23:27.340 --> 03:23:32.260
 for about an hour about progesterone and her experience.

03:23:32.260 --> 03:23:43.620
 And so then I was really encouraged to make progesterone and thyroid available freely.

03:23:43.620 --> 03:23:52.860
 And I bought a drum of Armour, pure thyroid powder, 10 kilograms, I think it was.

03:23:52.860 --> 03:24:08.100
 And because I had sent some of the young women back to their gynecologists with telling them

03:24:08.100 --> 03:24:13.500
 that they were aware of what was wrong with their diagnosis, that in fact one had been

03:24:13.500 --> 03:24:21.500
 told that she was having moral or psychological problems.

03:24:21.500 --> 03:24:25.540
 She couldn't be pregnant, but she felt pregnant.

03:24:25.540 --> 03:24:34.860
 And she found out that he had done an incompetent abortion and left part of the material in

03:24:34.860 --> 03:24:35.860
 her uterus.

03:24:35.860 --> 03:24:37.340
 And she knew right where it was.

03:24:37.340 --> 03:24:39.540
 It said where in the uterus it was.

03:24:39.540 --> 03:24:47.940
 And after many rejections and insults, she found out that it was exactly where she felt

03:24:47.940 --> 03:24:50.380
 it and had it removed and was okay.

03:24:50.380 --> 03:25:00.020
 And a series of people like that gradually, over a period of just a few months, let the

03:25:00.020 --> 03:25:06.900
 local gynecologists know that their patients were onto them.

03:25:06.900 --> 03:25:12.500
 And they changed and started prescribing progesterone.

03:25:12.500 --> 03:25:26.780
 So for 10 years or so until those guys retired, Eugene had some good gynecologists.

03:25:26.780 --> 03:25:33.540
 How would you describe how you interacted with your patients?

03:25:33.540 --> 03:25:34.980
 I don't know if that's what you'd call them.

03:25:34.980 --> 03:25:41.060
 But compared to how they interacted with their doctor, how did you...

03:25:41.060 --> 03:25:44.300
 What was different about the way you problem-solved?

03:25:44.300 --> 03:25:53.020
 Since I was a teacher, I thought of each visit as being a little hour class on a subject

03:25:53.020 --> 03:25:54.780
 of their choosing.

03:25:54.780 --> 03:26:00.540
 They would introduce it and explain what they wanted to know about.

03:26:00.540 --> 03:26:12.500
 And so I would give an instant class designed to meet their need for knowledge on what their

03:26:12.500 --> 03:26:14.660
 problem was.

03:26:14.660 --> 03:26:28.740
 And during that period, a middle-class sort of couple, very unfamiliar type of people

03:26:28.740 --> 03:26:39.020
 from what I had been seeing, these middle-classers came and presented some health problems and

03:26:39.020 --> 03:26:47.060
 said, "What is my diagnosis and what would you prescribe?"

03:26:47.060 --> 03:26:53.180
 I kept telling them that I was there to inform them and that if they wanted a diagnosis or

03:26:53.180 --> 03:26:56.300
 prescription they should go to a doctor.

03:26:56.300 --> 03:26:59.340
 And they were behaving so oddly.

03:26:59.340 --> 03:27:09.260
 I made inquiries around a friend who was a psychologist, had friends in a local medical

03:27:09.260 --> 03:27:18.180
 society, and these were agents sent by the Eugene Medical Society to get me to prescribe

03:27:18.180 --> 03:27:22.340
 or diagnose.

03:27:22.340 --> 03:27:26.380
 And they were such obnoxious people.

03:27:26.380 --> 03:27:34.940
 I was just as obnoxious back to them saying, "Well, you need a doctor."

03:27:34.940 --> 03:27:42.020
 But because of that environment, I wanted to give the powdered Armour thyroid to the

03:27:42.020 --> 03:27:43.220
 people.

03:27:43.220 --> 03:27:52.340
 And so I would explain what thyroid does and how it related to what they needed and how

03:27:52.340 --> 03:28:00.300
 populations around the world used to include like the fish head, chicken neck, and so on.

03:28:00.300 --> 03:28:06.920
 The thyroid gland was always left in the food supply until the government decided it should

03:28:06.920 --> 03:28:12.340
 be sold to the pharmaceutical companies and sold separately.

03:28:12.340 --> 03:28:16.940
 So I explained the quantities that used to be in the food supply and how they could use

03:28:16.940 --> 03:28:19.700
 it as a food supplement.

03:28:19.700 --> 03:28:31.860
 But I had powdered kelp, which has a very strong smell, and I would shake up the necessary

03:28:31.860 --> 03:28:38.740
 amount of thyroid powder with a given amount of powdered kelp.

03:28:38.740 --> 03:28:44.700
 And the thyroid is in here, and you take a certain amount, and it'll provide some iodine

03:28:44.700 --> 03:28:45.700
 and so on.

03:28:45.700 --> 03:28:53.740
 So if there were any more spies, they would show it to their doctor, and he would say,

03:28:53.740 --> 03:28:57.740
 "Oh, powdered kelp, he's just fooling you."

03:28:57.740 --> 03:29:01.980
 That's a good trick.

03:29:01.980 --> 03:29:05.340
 You mentioned making progesterone available.

03:29:05.340 --> 03:29:17.980
 Yeah, I think the next person in the sequence was a suicidal 22-year-old girl that had,

03:29:17.980 --> 03:29:22.740
 in California, she had been taking thyroid from her teens.

03:29:22.740 --> 03:29:28.640
 When she came to Oregon, she couldn't get a doctor to continue her prescription.

03:29:28.640 --> 03:29:38.020
 But she got married at the time she moved, and she thought her depression and suicidal

03:29:38.020 --> 03:29:44.220
 urge had to do with being dissatisfied with her marriage or something.

03:29:44.220 --> 03:29:55.900
 And every month for 10 or 11 days, she was absolutely constantly sobbing and suicidal.

03:29:55.900 --> 03:30:05.940
 And after that had stopped, she and her husband came to visit and explained the situation.

03:30:05.940 --> 03:30:15.020
 And I recognized it as an estrogen excess symptom, a perfectly monthly rhythm.

03:30:15.020 --> 03:30:22.300
 And she was about four or five days before or after the episode.

03:30:22.300 --> 03:30:31.340
 And I cooked up a jar of olive oil, warmed progesterone into it.

03:30:31.340 --> 03:30:39.420
 She was sobbing uncontrollably when she arrived and couldn't stop.

03:30:39.420 --> 03:30:55.380
 And she was 22 and mostly Chinese-type skin, an ordinarily smooth, slightly tan skin.

03:30:55.380 --> 03:31:02.740
 But she had these hard green veins standing up on the backs of her hands.

03:31:02.740 --> 03:31:14.660
 And I told her to go in the bathroom and coat her top and face and neck and arms with this

03:31:14.660 --> 03:31:16.020
 oil.

03:31:16.020 --> 03:31:22.820
 And she came back and was sitting at the kitchen table, sobbing with her hands on the table,

03:31:22.820 --> 03:31:31.820
 and just commenting on why she wanted to die and couldn't think of any other possibility.

03:31:31.820 --> 03:31:38.740
 And five minutes after putting that on, her veins had disappeared.

03:31:38.740 --> 03:31:42.460
 And she was getting a little quieter.

03:31:42.460 --> 03:31:55.060
 And watching the clock, I noticed that over the next 30 minutes, her sobbing had subsided.

03:31:55.060 --> 03:32:06.140
 And then she started actually seeing a possibility of living and started looking almost cheery.

03:32:06.140 --> 03:32:10.500
 I think it was exactly 40 minutes after she put it on.

03:32:10.500 --> 03:32:15.020
 She was smiling and saying, "It's like night turning into day."

03:32:15.020 --> 03:32:24.580
 And so I gave her the bottle and told her next time to apply it.

03:32:24.580 --> 03:32:29.300
 And so the next monthly cycle came along.

03:32:29.300 --> 03:32:35.980
 And she phoned up and said, "If I drank this oil, would it kill me?"

03:32:35.980 --> 03:32:42.140
 And she said, "I oiled myself up and it didn't work anymore.

03:32:42.140 --> 03:32:48.940
 So I'm looking for a way to die painlessly."

03:32:48.940 --> 03:32:52.340
 And so I went over to their apartment.

03:32:52.340 --> 03:32:54.500
 She was sitting there all oily.

03:32:54.500 --> 03:32:56.140
 And sobbing.

03:32:56.140 --> 03:32:59.540
 And she showed me the bottle that she had oiled herself with.

03:32:59.540 --> 03:33:03.700
 And the progesterone had crystallized out on the bottom.

03:33:03.700 --> 03:33:09.500
 So I went over to the stove, heated it up, stirred it into solution, had her put on another

03:33:09.500 --> 03:33:14.060
 coat and watched the clock again.

03:33:14.060 --> 03:33:18.780
 Exactly the same thing, just like an unwinding.

03:33:18.780 --> 03:33:26.260
 The veins went down in five minutes and at the end of 40 minutes there was this constant

03:33:26.260 --> 03:33:28.140
 improvement in mood.

03:33:28.140 --> 03:33:37.900
 And she was grinning and saying, "I wish I could always feel this good."

03:33:37.900 --> 03:33:42.260
 Was that before progest-e was around?

03:33:42.260 --> 03:33:43.900
 Before progeste?

03:33:43.900 --> 03:33:51.380
 Yeah, I realized that it wasn't going to be something doctors would want to follow

03:33:51.380 --> 03:33:55.580
 their patients around with re-dissolving it.

03:33:55.580 --> 03:34:03.140
 And so I looked at all kinds of things to hold it in solution.

03:34:03.140 --> 03:34:13.700
 Acetone, for example, has the similar group that makes it a good solvent.

03:34:13.700 --> 03:34:25.140
 But it isn't pleasant smelling and probably wouldn't have a good effect to use repeatedly

03:34:25.140 --> 03:34:26.380
 on your skin.

03:34:26.380 --> 03:34:34.780
 And experimenting a lot, I found that vitamin E seemed to be the only thing that was biologically

03:34:34.780 --> 03:34:39.380
 very compatible and a very good solvent.

03:34:39.380 --> 03:34:45.820
 I could get a 50/50 with the highest purity vitamin E available.

03:34:45.820 --> 03:34:51.220
 I could get a one-to-one solution that was stable.

03:34:51.220 --> 03:34:57.260
 And because if you ate too much of it, it would knock you out.

03:34:57.260 --> 03:35:03.940
 I had totally a very powerful anesthetic at a high dose.

03:35:03.940 --> 03:35:10.700
 So for a while, I made a 20% solution and still if someone drank a bottle of that, they

03:35:10.700 --> 03:35:15.660
 might stop breathing from this deep anesthesia.

03:35:15.660 --> 03:35:23.100
 So I decided that 10% was very unlikely that a person could take too much of it.

03:35:23.100 --> 03:35:30.860
 Well, did you want to say anything else about progest-e?

03:35:30.860 --> 03:35:36.820
 I'm just curious how that came about.

03:35:36.820 --> 03:35:49.780
 When I discovered that vitamin E was the practical solvent, I remembered experiments I'd done

03:35:49.780 --> 03:35:58.220
 in the hamster lab when I was working on my thesis.

03:35:58.220 --> 03:36:10.620
 The mouse, Lamarckian, found that he could grind up liver either from the mice or from

03:36:10.620 --> 03:36:13.100
 beef or shark or whatever.

03:36:13.100 --> 03:36:23.340
 And with a pure ethanol extract, evaporate that and find something injecting into the

03:36:23.340 --> 03:36:30.420
 100% genetic strain of mice.

03:36:30.420 --> 03:36:36.460
 And they wouldn't develop cancer in that generation or for two or three generations

03:36:36.460 --> 03:36:38.660
 after.

03:36:38.660 --> 03:36:47.860
 So something in the liver was changing their hormonal environment, which was affecting

03:36:47.860 --> 03:36:51.740
 the hormonal environment for generations afterwards.

03:36:51.740 --> 03:36:56.660
 And I got some of his mice.

03:36:56.660 --> 03:37:04.060
 Before I started working on my dissertation, I got some of his mice and were testing my

03:37:04.060 --> 03:37:11.260
 theories to explain what it might be in the liver.

03:37:11.260 --> 03:37:27.380
 And thinking about Szent-Györgyi's argument that the pigments are electron donors and

03:37:27.380 --> 03:37:40.500
 acceptors which catalyze protective oxidation, I was, among other things, testing these extracts

03:37:40.500 --> 03:37:54.100
 of liver for anything that would resemble the activated carbonyl or quinone structure.

03:37:54.100 --> 03:38:02.700
 And so one of my oily extracts, I would do paper chromatography and I knew there would

03:38:02.700 --> 03:38:11.060
 be vitamin E and vitamin A and such, and so I compared spots of known substances with

03:38:11.060 --> 03:38:15.940
 a potentially amber to yellow color.

03:38:15.940 --> 03:38:29.420
 And comparing, I bought some ubiquinone coenzyme Q10 from Sigma Chemical as a comparison.

03:38:29.420 --> 03:38:37.900
 And one of the orange extracts ran at the same speed as the CoQ10.

03:38:37.900 --> 03:38:50.700
 And when I had a very pure vitamin E product, when I mixed that with either the CoQ10 or

03:38:50.700 --> 03:39:12.540
 the extract from the liver or simply a chemical, the simplest chemical analog of benzopinone,

03:39:12.540 --> 03:39:21.940
 each of these mixing with vitamin E produced a black or greenish-black pigment just as

03:39:21.940 --> 03:39:24.820
 soon as they were stirred together.

03:39:24.820 --> 03:39:34.260
 And when I did the paper chromatography, the solvent running past these, not only the coenzyme

03:39:34.260 --> 03:39:39.620
 Q10 and the liver extract moved at the same rate, but the vitamin E moving at a different

03:39:39.620 --> 03:39:47.180
 rate, the solvent separated the vitamin E from the coenzyme Q10.

03:39:47.180 --> 03:39:56.020
 And just the pressure of the solvent reverted them to their colorless or orange original

03:39:56.020 --> 03:40:04.980
 color showing that the black or greenish-black color was a very tenuous kind of bond that

03:40:04.980 --> 03:40:12.180
 just the solvent moving it across the paper was enough to separate the bond and destroy

03:40:12.180 --> 03:40:13.380
 the color.

03:40:13.380 --> 03:40:20.380
 And so the fact that when I ground up the liver in the ethanol, the fact that it turned

03:40:20.380 --> 03:40:28.780
 white, I was apparently just separating some components from the coenzyme Q10.

03:40:28.780 --> 03:40:38.180
 And thinking about the livers containing vitamin E as well as coenzyme Q, it occurred to me

03:40:38.180 --> 03:40:46.420
 that part of the color of the liver is probably this darkening effect of putting the donor

03:40:46.420 --> 03:40:49.020
 and acceptor together.

03:40:49.020 --> 03:40:59.060
 And thinking about the metabolic interactions of vitamin E and progesterone, vitamin E as

03:40:59.060 --> 03:41:10.580
 the 1940s anti-estrogen, and some people in Italy called vitamin E the progesterone-sparing

03:41:10.580 --> 03:41:13.380
 material.

03:41:13.380 --> 03:41:21.180
 So it seemed very logical to combine them, not only because it's a perfect solvent,

03:41:21.180 --> 03:41:25.540
 but because biologically they function together.

03:41:25.540 --> 03:41:33.180
 Both of them stabilize and protect respiration and have the anti-estrogenic, anti-inflammatory

03:41:33.180 --> 03:41:35.260
 effects.

03:41:35.260 --> 03:41:47.460
 And vitamin E has some very aspirin-like effects in stopping prostaglandin synthesis

03:41:47.460 --> 03:41:55.220
 and so on.

03:41:55.220 --> 03:42:10.040
 Going back to the helping people, how has that evolved over the years?

03:42:10.040 --> 03:42:21.020
 Several years ago, the lawyers in California, I think were put up to it by the estrogen

03:42:21.020 --> 03:42:22.020
 industry.

03:42:22.020 --> 03:42:34.220
 There was a mysterious $300,000 grant to a women's law group to go after people producing

03:42:34.220 --> 03:42:36.260
 progesterone products.

03:42:36.260 --> 03:42:46.460
 This was 2005, right after the Women's Health Initiative in 2002 had shown that estrogen

03:42:46.460 --> 03:42:54.080
 causes heart disease, dementia, and cancer, and the prescriptions and profits from estrogen

03:42:54.080 --> 03:42:56.940
 dropped off drastically.

03:42:56.940 --> 03:43:06.380
 By 2005, the industry was thinking of progesterone as a dangerous competitor, and this California

03:43:06.380 --> 03:43:14.860
 women's law group got this big grant to go after sellers of progesterone.

03:43:14.860 --> 03:43:25.420
 And following that, I essentially stopped talking to people about progesterone because

03:43:25.420 --> 03:43:38.100
 the lawyers were suing people who had absolutely no claims made and no violation of any law,

03:43:38.100 --> 03:43:45.220
 but they saw that they could force people to settle, knowing that lawyers were going

03:43:45.220 --> 03:43:49.940
 to cost them $50,000 to $100,000 just to defend themselves.

03:43:49.940 --> 03:43:56.820
 They could essentially count on getting $50,000 at least as a settlement, even if the person

03:43:56.820 --> 03:44:00.860
 hadn't violated any rules.

03:44:00.860 --> 03:44:14.780
 So seeing the situation in which lawyers can't be sued for malicious prosecution of a civil

03:44:14.780 --> 03:44:23.660
 case, they're totally exempt and defended by the lawyer establishment.

03:44:23.660 --> 03:44:26.620
 They're allowed to lie and so on.

03:44:26.620 --> 03:44:37.940
 So I saw it as a situation that simply made it impossible.

03:44:37.940 --> 03:44:51.060
 Besides someone earlier had sent my books to someone at the, one of Ralph Nader's organizations,

03:44:51.060 --> 03:45:00.060
 someone has sent my books to a person at this Nader group, said, "Can't you people do something

03:45:00.060 --> 03:45:08.620
 to get the establishment to shift its position on progesterone?"

03:45:08.620 --> 03:45:19.540
 And that person was like an estrogen-soaked devotee of the pharmaceutical industry who

03:45:19.540 --> 03:45:26.980
 turned all of my books over to the FDA and said, "These are all in violation of federal

03:45:26.980 --> 03:45:33.020
 law by saying good things about progesterone."

03:45:33.020 --> 03:45:41.260
 So I talked to people at the FDA and they said, "There's a fine line between violating

03:45:41.260 --> 03:45:49.380
 federal law and having freedom of speech, and we can't tell you where the line is."

03:45:49.380 --> 03:45:58.220
 So I've been very careful about what I say about progesterone now for the last ten years

03:45:58.220 --> 03:45:59.220
 or so.

03:45:59.220 --> 03:46:10.540
 And just progesterone, or are you careful in general about how you word things or recommend?

03:46:10.540 --> 03:46:26.140
 I'm always conscious of doing it in an information way and not as a recommendation or a sales

03:46:26.140 --> 03:46:27.140
 pitch.

03:46:27.140 --> 03:46:32.380
 And so how do you then interact with people now?

03:46:32.380 --> 03:46:40.460
 Like currently, what's the medium that you...

03:46:40.460 --> 03:46:54.700
 Periodically, someone emails me that clearly seems to have ulterior motives, but my procedure

03:46:54.700 --> 03:47:09.580
 seems to so far have not appealed to lawyers, and possibly because I don't demonstrate a

03:47:09.580 --> 03:47:19.860
 thriving business or income that would make it worth their while.

03:47:19.860 --> 03:47:25.620
 Are you still currently receiving lots of emails from people asking for help?

03:47:25.620 --> 03:47:28.740
 You mentioned when we talked to you on the phone originally that you were getting maybe

03:47:28.740 --> 03:47:31.620
 hundreds a day.

03:47:31.620 --> 03:47:34.460
 I think that was an extreme.

03:47:34.460 --> 03:47:42.660
 It goes up and down on work days, it's always higher on weekends, it drops off.

03:47:42.660 --> 03:47:48.300
 And so I guess people are writing from their work computers.

03:47:48.300 --> 03:47:59.180
 And I usually try to answer a few dozen every day, picking out.

03:47:59.180 --> 03:48:07.860
 Like one guy a few days ago said, "Here are a few dozen questions from my pathophysiology

03:48:07.860 --> 03:48:13.380
 lab, could you help me with them?"

03:48:13.380 --> 03:48:16.900
 Things like that I ignore.

03:48:16.900 --> 03:48:22.460
 Have you noticed a spike or noticed trends in, besides the weekdays and weekends, but

03:48:22.460 --> 03:48:26.940
 over the years a growing number of people?

03:48:26.940 --> 03:48:34.140
 I think it has tapered off over the last several months.

03:48:34.140 --> 03:48:40.700
 About a year ago that was when I was seeing 80 to 100 pretty regularly.

03:48:40.700 --> 03:48:48.860
 But now, I haven't counted them, but it looks like more often it's 30 or 40.

03:48:48.860 --> 03:48:55.620
 What motivates you to spend the time to answer everyone's questions?

03:48:55.620 --> 03:49:04.380
 Same as talking to people who had come to visit, I almost always learn something new.

03:49:04.380 --> 03:49:18.440
 And at least I catch onto the latest medical fad.

03:49:18.440 --> 03:49:26.900
 People catch some concern and a dozen or 20 people will come down simultaneously with

03:49:26.900 --> 03:49:30.340
 the same problem that was written about.

03:49:30.340 --> 03:49:44.060
 And I try to stereotype my answers to them to redirect their attention as far as possible.

03:49:44.060 --> 03:49:50.460
 What do you think about the growing recent interest in your work?

03:49:50.460 --> 03:49:57.380
 I don't know really what the condition is.

03:49:57.380 --> 03:50:06.020
 Two or three years ago I looked at one of those site traffic things and it seemed like

03:50:06.020 --> 03:50:11.220
 a few people were looking at it every day, but I haven't checked to see what the traffic

03:50:11.220 --> 03:50:13.900
 has been lately.

03:50:13.900 --> 03:50:19.380
 It's increased a lot over the past year?

03:50:19.380 --> 03:50:30.260
 Yeah, starting about three, four years ago a gentle slope, but then in the last couple

03:50:30.260 --> 03:50:32.380
 years it seems like it's...

03:50:32.380 --> 03:50:41.480
 I think just over a year ago that I was having too many book orders and so I took off the

03:50:41.480 --> 03:50:48.940
 ordering page and it took six months or so for the orders to drop off.

03:50:48.940 --> 03:50:56.640
 But I was not only running out of books, but I was taking up a big part of my time to package

03:50:56.640 --> 03:51:02.280
 and mail books.

03:51:02.280 --> 03:51:08.280
 Are you aware of people who are translating your work and also trying to help and counsel

03:51:08.280 --> 03:51:09.280
 people?

03:51:09.280 --> 03:51:17.240
 Yeah, there are three or four people that are doing a pretty good job.

03:51:17.240 --> 03:51:22.160
 How do you feel about that happening, people translating your work?

03:51:22.160 --> 03:51:31.480
 If they find useful stuff, that's what it's for.

03:51:31.480 --> 03:51:38.440
 I think the largest growing population is on Facebook.

03:51:38.440 --> 03:51:46.560
 There's a couple groups, they call them, that pretty much mainly discuss your work and how

03:51:46.560 --> 03:51:52.920
 it connects to all sorts of different spheres of life.

03:51:52.920 --> 03:51:56.280
 Very wide ranging, as wide ranging as all of your...

03:51:56.280 --> 03:52:04.000
 Someone sent me 20 questions from some group and so far I've answered 10 of the questions.

03:52:04.000 --> 03:52:09.280
 Besides from Facebook, there's forums as well.

03:52:09.280 --> 03:52:15.520
 There's a Ray Peat forum, there's Peatarian, and there's people that think that there's

03:52:15.520 --> 03:52:18.160
 a Ray Peat diet.

03:52:18.160 --> 03:52:24.680
 There's one site that I looked at that seemed to be basing a lot on my ideas.

03:52:24.680 --> 03:52:30.680
 He was really a witty person, very entertaining site, but I don't remember...

03:52:30.680 --> 03:52:34.160
 He had sort of a Hindu sounding...

03:52:34.160 --> 03:52:35.160
 Probably.

03:52:35.160 --> 03:52:39.440
 Yeah, he's a guy in...

03:52:39.440 --> 03:52:41.920
 He's actually just a Caucasian guy in England.

03:52:41.920 --> 03:52:43.200
 Oh, he's British.

03:52:43.200 --> 03:52:48.640
 But he's just really into yoga and sort of connecting some of your ideas and the ideas

03:52:48.640 --> 03:52:50.640
 of CO2 retention.

03:52:50.640 --> 03:52:54.960
 Yeah, the things I read seemed very funny and clever.

03:52:54.960 --> 03:52:58.240
 Yeah, he's a brilliant guy.

03:52:58.240 --> 03:53:08.080
 Yeah, he's applied what he's read from you on CO2 into his spiritual yoga practices and

03:53:08.080 --> 03:53:14.400
 reinterpreting the breathing exercises he's learned from yoga and what's written in the

03:53:14.400 --> 03:53:18.680
 Vedas about breathing and life and consciousness.

03:53:18.680 --> 03:53:23.400
 Understanding that from the perspective of CO2, I think, changed things for him a lot.

03:53:23.400 --> 03:53:30.600
 I knew an Afghan yogi in Mexico who...

03:53:30.600 --> 03:53:39.920
 He was a model for our painting classes and he didn't need rests.

03:53:39.920 --> 03:53:46.920
 All the other models were given rests every 20 minutes, but the professor would give the

03:53:46.920 --> 03:53:51.880
 class a rest break after an hour and a half or something.

03:53:51.880 --> 03:54:03.280
 And I would stay there to talk to him during the break and got sort of an insight into

03:54:03.280 --> 03:54:07.320
 at least the Afghan yogi's consciousness.

03:54:07.320 --> 03:54:15.080
 He offered some techniques that I thought were interesting, not especially breathing,

03:54:15.080 --> 03:54:18.760
 but using the nerves and such.

03:54:18.760 --> 03:54:29.720
 Yeah, I just always wondered what you thought about just the idea that people are basing

03:54:29.720 --> 03:54:35.160
 like a diet that they call the "Ray Peat Diet," even though you've never specifically outlined

03:54:35.160 --> 03:54:37.360
 what something like that would be.

03:54:37.360 --> 03:54:47.400
 Yeah, I don't know what such a diet would consist of because when I had an income of

03:54:47.400 --> 03:54:51.600
 $10 a month, it was one thing.

03:54:51.600 --> 03:54:58.520
 Powdered milk and potatoes were at the center.

03:54:58.520 --> 03:55:13.360
 But according to the setting and your resources, if you can import cherimoyas and tropical

03:55:13.360 --> 03:55:20.040
 fruits and Italian cheese or Greek cheese, then it's one thing.

03:55:20.040 --> 03:55:29.880
 But trying to make out with the average supermarket, you have other types of limitations.

03:55:29.880 --> 03:55:38.560
 I think it sort of goes back to people feeling the need to have someone tell them what to

03:55:38.560 --> 03:55:45.680
 do or have them prescribe a protocol.

03:55:45.680 --> 03:55:48.760
 What do you think that need stems from?

03:55:48.760 --> 03:56:01.960
 When I was teaching school in Urbana, my first college teaching experience, I would explain

03:56:01.960 --> 03:56:11.200
 what the course's purpose was, what my wishes would be, and how I saw my purpose as being

03:56:11.200 --> 03:56:14.600
 there to support their exploration.

03:56:14.600 --> 03:56:25.120
 And about 10 or 15% of any class always was really put off by that attitude.

03:56:25.120 --> 03:56:32.280
 They demanded a prescribed something to learn.

03:56:32.280 --> 03:56:35.800
 They wanted me to tell them what they should know.

03:56:35.800 --> 03:56:42.400
 And every time I've had a big class, there are always these people who are annoyed by

03:56:42.400 --> 03:56:49.300
 the thought that they can decide what they need to know.

03:56:49.300 --> 03:56:56.280
 You mentioned you have to be careful with that as there's the potential to disable someone's

03:56:56.280 --> 03:57:00.200
 own internal guidance.

03:57:00.200 --> 03:57:11.400
 The purpose of education is largely to disempower the students so that they depend on the system

03:57:11.400 --> 03:57:14.600
 and become reliable.

03:57:14.600 --> 03:57:25.720
 In 1965, a professor at Oregon State, I think a psychology or education professor, did a

03:57:25.720 --> 03:57:37.160
 study of the academic success of, I guess it was psychology majors, and graphed it according

03:57:37.160 --> 03:57:40.680
 to their scores on the Miller Analogies Test.

03:57:40.680 --> 03:57:42.840
 Did you ever see that?

03:57:42.840 --> 03:57:58.280
 It's 100 questions, each one, I think, four possible answers with purely analogical reasoning.

03:57:58.280 --> 03:58:04.840
 This is to that, as that is to what, and then you get to choose.

03:58:04.840 --> 03:58:13.800
 And so it measures your vocabulary, but also your ability to reason analogically.

03:58:13.800 --> 03:58:22.320
 And every so many questions, they change the type of analogy.

03:58:22.320 --> 03:58:27.200
 So it might be the size or shape of the word or something for a while.

03:58:27.200 --> 03:58:31.080
 And so it requires also flexibility.

03:58:31.080 --> 03:58:43.040
 And it turns out to be a very quick and good test of general ability, intelligence, even

03:58:43.040 --> 03:58:47.400
 heart rate and body temperature and such.

03:58:47.400 --> 03:58:57.480
 But this professor graphed it according to their academic ranking, the C- students up

03:58:57.480 --> 03:59:06.280
 to the A-students and so on, and showed that up to the school's median score on the Miller

03:59:06.280 --> 03:59:16.160
 Analogies, which in some, like state universities, I think the median score is usually around

03:59:16.160 --> 03:59:19.800
 45 out of 100 answers.

03:59:19.800 --> 03:59:24.240
 Really poor vocabulary or reasoning or something.

03:59:24.240 --> 03:59:39.400
 But in rating it with grades academically, there was a direct correspondence from the

03:59:39.400 --> 03:59:47.480
 lower range up to the A-students, which was right around the median score on the test.

03:59:47.480 --> 03:59:56.840
 And then as the score on the test went above the median, the academic ranking dropped back

03:59:56.840 --> 04:00:00.800
 to equivalent to the lowest scorers.

04:00:00.800 --> 04:00:07.440
 So being too bright was as bad as being too stupid as far as academic success goes.

04:00:07.440 --> 04:00:15.980
 And that really confirmed the suspicion of many people that education is all about training

04:00:15.980 --> 04:00:25.000
 in conformity and obedience, and that you're not going to be successful if you don't know

04:00:25.000 --> 04:00:28.240
 how to cover up what you know.

04:00:28.240 --> 04:00:38.120
 Well, the one other thing I guess I'd like to bring up is if you have anything else,

04:00:38.120 --> 04:00:45.180
 anything else brief to say about taking, you know, your own health, taking your health

04:00:45.180 --> 04:00:52.240
 into your own hands, I think is, it seems to me that's something that people who either

04:00:52.240 --> 04:01:01.920
 haven't had success in medicine or are motivated to experiment and grow in that way seem attracted

04:01:01.920 --> 04:01:10.960
 to your work.

04:01:10.960 --> 04:01:22.320
 Getting away from anything that doesn't seem to be immediately rewarding, I think,

04:01:22.320 --> 04:01:27.400
 is a good starting point.

04:01:27.400 --> 04:01:34.160
 There's the medical doctrine that cures are going to be difficult.

04:01:34.160 --> 04:01:37.920
 Chemotherapy might kill you, but it'll save you.

04:01:37.920 --> 04:01:43.480
 And the idea that you're always going to get worse before you get better, medicine

04:01:43.480 --> 04:01:45.280
 is bitter and so on.

04:01:45.280 --> 04:01:55.080
 But I think people should be open to the idea that maybe the medicine is pleasant and that

04:01:55.080 --> 04:02:01.480
 the reward is going to be instantaneous, practically.

04:02:01.480 --> 04:02:08.840
 The first time I tried progesterone for a migraine, I was in the middle of a horrible

04:02:08.840 --> 04:02:14.760
 migraine because I had either stopped taking thyroid or I'd been in a place that had

04:02:14.760 --> 04:02:19.840
 fluoridated water, which inactivated the T3 I was taking.

04:02:19.840 --> 04:02:28.880
 And anyway, in the middle of a horrible migraine, twice, I decided not to worry about the anti-testosterone

04:02:28.880 --> 04:02:36.040
 effects and so I took a big glob of it, about probably 100 milligrams of progesterone, put

04:02:36.040 --> 04:02:41.320
 it on my tongue and went back to bed expecting to continue mourning.

04:02:41.320 --> 04:02:50.840
 By the time I got lying down in bed, with my eyes closed, I saw the flashing turmoil

04:02:50.840 --> 04:02:56.840
 suddenly getting quiet and velvety black, just about at that speed, spreading out over

04:02:56.840 --> 04:03:03.480
 my visual field and the sickness and headache faded.

04:03:03.480 --> 04:03:11.000
 As the smoothness got to the edge of my visual field, the sickness and pain were about half

04:03:11.000 --> 04:03:18.280
 gone and then I could feel something continuing to move at the same rate as if it was completing

04:03:18.280 --> 04:03:23.960
 the circuit of removing whatever the turmoil in my brain was.

04:03:23.960 --> 04:03:31.480
 A period of just about a minute from putting it in my mouth to being just absolutely peaceful

04:03:31.480 --> 04:03:34.960
 and then going to sleep.

04:03:34.960 --> 04:03:43.720
 But sometimes just a big dose of sugar or aspirin can be almost as quick as that.

04:03:43.720 --> 04:03:54.960
 And with T3, when I was experimenting with a full dose, 25 micrograms of T3 in the morning,

04:03:54.960 --> 04:03:58.040
 it felt okay for a couple of weeks.

04:03:58.040 --> 04:04:04.680
 But then at sunset, I started noticing just as the sun was going down, I would start having

04:04:04.680 --> 04:04:12.760
 my heart stop for about three seconds at a time, several, about every 10 or 15 seconds.

04:04:12.760 --> 04:04:18.120
 And if there was a slight stress, that would make it stop even longer.

04:04:18.120 --> 04:04:27.120
 And in one of those times when I was having very predictable, every 10 seconds, a stoppage,

04:04:27.120 --> 04:04:38.400
 I chewed up 10 micrograms of T3 and I estimated it was about 15 seconds from chewing it up,

04:04:38.400 --> 04:04:44.600
 my rhythm was perfectly straight, no skipping at all.

04:04:44.600 --> 04:04:49.520
 And I tried that out on a couple of friends.

04:04:49.520 --> 04:04:59.320
 One guy in his 80s, whose feet were rotting black holes into the bones of his toes, and

04:04:59.320 --> 04:05:02.440
 the doctor said they would have to be amputated.

04:05:02.440 --> 04:05:10.720
 And he was soaking them in an antiseptic water bath, and his pulse was doing the same thing.

04:05:10.720 --> 04:05:16.960
 Mine was five or 10 seconds of beating and then stopping for a while and coming back.

04:05:16.960 --> 04:05:24.840
 And I gave him some Armour thyroid, and not as quick as the T3, but it quickly brought

04:05:24.840 --> 04:05:29.840
 his pulse rate up to a steady, no skipping.

04:05:29.840 --> 04:05:38.040
 And two or three weeks later, I visited him and he had his shoes on and was dressing up

04:05:38.040 --> 04:05:44.760
 to go out to his lodge and asked him how his rotten feet were.

04:05:44.760 --> 04:05:46.760
 And he said, "What feet?

04:05:46.760 --> 04:05:47.760
 No symptoms."

04:05:47.760 --> 04:05:52.840
 But then he kept going back to his doctor and the doctor would tell him he had to stop

04:05:52.840 --> 04:05:54.320
 that stuff.

04:05:54.320 --> 04:06:02.720
 And we went through two or three episodes of rotten black feet, and each time I would

04:06:02.720 --> 04:06:10.160
 impose on him to take his Armour thyroid and the feet would recover just absolutely and

04:06:10.160 --> 04:06:13.440
 perfectly.

04:06:13.440 --> 04:06:23.620
 One old guy who had been an acrobat and was very self-confident, he was essentially blind

04:06:23.620 --> 04:06:29.520
 and insisted on driving, but he would do things like going down the wrong side of the street

04:06:29.520 --> 04:06:32.840
 in Santa Monica on the way home.

04:06:32.840 --> 04:06:40.520
 And he reached the point where people convinced him not to drive, but he couldn't see the

04:06:40.520 --> 04:06:42.480
 way around his apartment.

04:06:42.480 --> 04:06:53.080
 And so I gave him a handful of thyroid tablets in a dish by his chair, and he couldn't feel

04:06:53.080 --> 04:06:55.800
 his feet at that time.

04:06:55.800 --> 04:07:05.200
 Just a week later I came back and he was walking, could feel his feet, and could see enough

04:07:05.200 --> 04:07:14.000
 to get around and scare his friends by driving again.

04:07:14.000 --> 04:07:25.280
 So the matter of experimentation shouldn't get you involved in, like people tell me about

04:07:25.280 --> 04:07:33.280
 trying the low carbohydrate diet for a year or the low fat or high fat or whatever diet

04:07:33.280 --> 04:07:36.600
 for a year or two and ruining their health.

04:07:36.600 --> 04:07:43.700
 A week is more than enough, I think, for any experimental diet.

04:07:43.700 --> 04:07:58.200
 If you aren't cured in a week, there's something wrong.