Gaslighting the Vaccine Injured: A DarkHorse Story
Nick Gibson is a long-time participant in Bret’s Patreon discussions. In this episode, Nick and Bret discuss his experience through covid and his shift in perspective.*****Our sponsors:PaleoValley: Wide array of amazing products, including SuperFood Golden Milk and beef sticks. Go to https://paleovalley.com/darkhorse for 15% off your first order.Vivo Barefoot: Shoes for healthy feet—comfortable and regenerative, enhances stability and tactile feedback. Go to www.vivobarefoot.com/us/darkhorse1...
I am sitting this morning in person with Nick Gibson, who is a friend of mine.
He started out in my orbit as a participant in the evolution discussion that I hold monthly.
He has then started participating in the Coalition of the Reasonable Discussion.
And anyway, we've become friends.
I thought it would be a good idea for us to talk a little bit about your trajectory over the course of COVID.
And I don't just mean your trajectory physically, but your trajectory also in terms of your understanding of various things.
I think it will become obvious why we're having that discussion when you tell us what your journey has been Like, but in any case, Nick, welcome to Dark Horse.
Thanks for having me.
So, um...
Tell us where you were in early... First of all, I should say, if you are detecting a somewhat thick accent, that is because Nick is actually from Canada, which is technically in North America.
Yeah, yeah.
Barely.
Barely.
It's a very far foreign land.
It is.
It is quite chilly in the winter, but in any case... The grass is not so green on the other side of the border, so it seems.
I didn't even know that you had grass on the other side of the border.
That's the point, yeah.
In any case, tell us roughly how COVID was going for you in the early days, what you thought was going on, and how that changed over time.
Yeah, I think like a lot of people, I didn't take it very seriously at the beginning.
So if we think sort of February 2020, I can distinctly recall going into my office at work and, you know, chumming with some colleagues and just saying like, oh, it's fine, just wash your hands a little bit more and, you know, get more sleep or Whatever, which ironically may have been actually the the right advice in the long term anyways.
But I had no sense of what would happen approximately a month from then.
As we got to the lockdowns in Canada, much like most places in the world, in the United States, I took it all in just like every other kind of normie out there.
I wasn't as scared of the virus personally.
I was more concerned around how it was going to affect people around me per se so even then implicitly I didn't feel that level of fear but I definitely felt the the heaviness of what was going on and all the All the policy implications that came out of it.
So yeah, pretty pretty standard, standard Manila boat bell curve kind of reaction.
And it's sometimes hard for me at least to go back and reconstruct what was understood when.
But it seems to me that even very early in the pandemic, as we were still wrestling with how hard we were going to be hit here in in North America, It became clear pretty early that it wasn't hitting healthy young people especially hard.
And at the time, you know, before COVID and during early COVID, you were highly athletic, healthy, you didn't have chronic health issues.
Okay, so you, like many of us, would have looked at it and thought, that's worrying, it's frightening, but less so for me because I don't have the conditions that would make me especially vulnerable, given what we're seeing.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, there's a little bit of you don't know what you don't know, and the information landscape, to say the least, was pretty messy at the time.
But I'd say my anxiety or nervousness or whatever was more so related to the broader Broadly what was going on relative to, as opposed to the disease itself, the infection itself.
All right.
And so how did things develop?
Yeah, I'd say over time, I slowly but surely started to think things were a little weird, put it that way.
I'd say by May, June, as things started to ease off in the first kind of wave of things, I started feeling comfortable with even just seeing my family because, you know, my parents are They're not old, but they're older, and certainly in a real sense, COVID would affect folks who are above 60, above 70, more so than the rest of the population.
So I was a little more careful that way, but by May I started visiting them with no, you know, out of the ordinary precautions.
And as the summer went on, cases went down, but the fall came, much like most places in the... well, all places get the fall in some way, as we know.
But in the case of COVID, when the fall rolled around, I, as you mentioned, I played different sports.
I was playing in a softball league that fall, and Ontario, where I'm from, decided that they're going to do another lockdown.
They're going to shut down outdoor softball.
And I was just perplexed, and I think that was the first turning point of a few during the course of this era.
Well, at that time we did not know that the virus was not transmitted by rapidly moving spherical objects.
That's right.
Yeah, it's particularly bad on leather things that you put on one hand.
Right, the stitching also, the virus hides in the stitching.
It gets stuck in there, you know.
Yeah well I guess of all of the insanity that we went through the idea of preventing people from being in outdoor spaces doing healthy activities to me strikes me as near the top because any hour that you spent doing that actually was an hour that you were safe from contracting the disease by virtue of the fact that it just simply didn't transmit that way which became clear fairly early on.
Yeah I mean to add to that just In my mind, it was just so absurd on at least two or three levels, right?
I would kind of get, at that point, I don't agree with it now, but at that point I would have been much more sympathetic to the idea of indoor sports being closed down.
Sure.
Even now, at this point, I don't even think that's relatively a case that I would make, but I would have been more sympathetic to it.
But it was just such a sweeping, over-the-top, ridiculous approach, and it only kind of got worse from there.
It got worse.
So maybe the way to think about this is we were on parallel trajectories.
I don't know at which point you started paying attention to what we were thinking about COVID, but for us, Initially we believed that measures that were being taken were sensible, even if we didn't know that they were working.
You know, a short lockdown, I'm embarrassed to say now, but a short lockdown seemed sensible enough.
I think there's no way at the point that we began locking down that there was any controlling of the virus, but at the time it seemed reasonable.
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How did your... So you were somewhat skeptical of some of the provisions, but basically on board with the mainstream understanding for some time.
And then there's a point at which that's no longer true.
What happened to you?
Yeah, actually, I'll add some more context to make that even more color.
I think I've said this to you, but I had the reaction early on.
I don't remember exactly when you started talking about LabLeak, but I had the reaction of, oh no, Brett's going down that route.
And I didn't, you know, I knew you enough even at that point that I didn't completely write you off.
Obviously I'm here, so that didn't fully happen.
But I was a little like, oh no, why is he doing this?
Why is he going down there?
Because I was...
imbuing and consuming the overall kind of shoo-shoo of that narrative, right?
Right.
So just for folks listening, I think that just adds even more color to the transition that ended up happening.
So I'd say going into 2021, folks were excited more generally around the vaccine being available and I I was generally happy, you know, in November when it was announced that, oh, this high efficacy and all the numbers, it's like, oh, OK, that's great.
Such high efficacy.
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah.
You know, I should know this as someone who works with numbers in my day job, that numbers can be played with pretty easily.
Nonetheless, as that went on, I still kind of, at first, there was the first wave of, we don't have enough, we're going to triage who's going to get it, right?
There were a lot of problems with that, but in general, I was like, yeah, I don't need it.
I'm working, first of all, you know, my health, my age, and I was working from home.
I was the last person that needed to get one, you know, right away.
So I'm like, okay, I won't even think about it.
Right.
But then in April, May came around.
And by that time, unambiguously, everyone who wanted to get it could get it.
And that was the time where I'm starting to think like, I don't know about this, especially because the cases were going down.
But I still in my head thought, OK, I'm probably still going to get at some point, but I just I wasn't prioritizing it.
And as I heard more from you and from others, I was getting more concerned that it wasn't as advertised, to put it lightly.
But I was talking to some folks in the last day or so, and I don't exactly know what happened.
To say the least, but I think eventually I got to a point where there was enough social pressure that I felt like I need to, you know, support others, because as I said, I wasn't, especially at that point, wasn't particularly concerned about the virus.
I mean, no one likes getting sick, right?
It sucks for a few days kind of thing, but I did it.
My sister was having a wedding about a month after I ended up getting it in August of 2021.
And so the intention was to get the first one, give it, you know, three to four weeks and I could get the second one and it was well before her wedding.
Which one did you get?
The Moderna.
Moderna.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that was just what was available at the time.
And yeah, that was that ended up being quite a turning point.
Because at first I was so relieved that I'm like, okay, this decision is now behind me, right?
I've done it.
"It's okay, we're good." I expected that that night was going to be a little messy, Most people knew that there was, or at least you're set up to understand that the symptoms that you get in that night are, you know, going to be a little rough.
You might have a bad sleep.
Generally speaking, I didn't have as good a sleep as I normally would, but it was fine.
It was until the days later that things started to change.
How?
Yeah, one of those, as I joked with other people, one of those lucky lottery winners that turns out this is a pretty high odds lottery, but lucky lottery winners that had an injury from the from the vaccine.
You know it was, I'll put it this way, it sucked in many ways and you know we might get more into it as we go through this, but I was quite fortunate relative to other people.
And that's a perspective I try to keep in my mind even though it would be difficult any given day to do so.
But yeah, I had any very eclectic mix of symptoms.
So the first bit was this sort of unbearable fatigue.
So you mentioned I'm pretty active.
So during the course of the day, I will go to the gym kind of, at that time I was going in the afternoon, so I'd go midday if work was well, you know, going well.
I didn't have any other things.
I'd go to the gym and then just pick up work afterwards.
There was one day about three, no, about four days later, I started noticing just like subtle symptoms of fatigue and even just like tightness in upper chest.
But then I started like, oh, maybe this is my workout, right?
So I eased up a little bit.
And then, six or seven days in, I came home from a workout.
I was going to a workout, I already felt a little tired.
During the workout, I was like, oh man, I really can't push today.
This is weird.
Maybe I just need to take it easy.
And on the way back, I was so tired that I needed to message one of my colleagues and say, I'm sorry, I'm done for the rest of the day.
I just need to, I need to nap.
Like, and I've never had that urge before.
It was just so, Overwhelming.
And so I'm like, okay, maybe I'm burning myself out.
It didn't make sense because it was the middle of summer and, you know, stress levels were actually, relatively speaking, the pandemic were pretty manageable at that point, but, um, took some time off from the gym and, uh, was actually planning to go on a trip out to, uh, Western Canada for a conference.
I was going to on the Friday morning and, uh, woke up that morning with what I thought was, well, For all intents and purposes, I thought it might have been a heart attack.
My heart rate was not high, but for those who, you know, watched cartoons as a kid, it was as if my heart was like pushing through my ribcage.
And it wasn't like I woke up from a dream that was, you know, because if that were the case, my heart rate would be high.
Yeah, it wasn't a panic attack.
No, no.
And it wasn't going down.
So I visited the ER.
Didn't really get much other than just a bunch of tests.
Nothing happened and things did ease up after a little bit.
But yeah, that was sort of the immediate phase one and it continued.
It continued.
And so, forgive me.
It took a long time in our regular meetings, which were over Zoom, but it took a long time for you to say enough and for me to notice enough to realize that something was going on with you.
You were not You may have been open about this, but you certainly weren't bringing it to the fore in a way that it became apparent to me.
At the point that we finally had a completely clear discussion about the state of your health, You had become pretty visibly frail compared to what you had been before and what you are now.
What was your life like and what was your day-to-day interaction with the new medical realities that you were facing?
Yeah, so I'd say there were two kind of Two paths or two parallel paths I would articulate.
One is the physical piece to your point and managing those symptoms.
So I didn't know what was wrong with me, but I knew there was something wrong.
And so I tried various things.
You would go to your standard doctors in Canada.
Fortunately, unfortunately, that may be another discussion topic for another day, but we have the ability to access healthcare in a basic sense, at least.
Through the system that we have without without pulling out the credit card, so to speak.
But yeah, test after test after test was coming back either negative or all within normal range, which became the bane of my existence because I know my body pretty well and knew that you knew something was going on and they weren't finding it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so yeah, it's one of those things where It came in different waves, but over time, the heart palpitations was something that would continue.
The wave of fatigue was an issue.
So it got to the point where two and a half weeks after the dose, I took some time off after that ER visit as well.
But yeah, about a week and a half after that, I basically stopped exercising other than walking for what ended up being almost a year.
All right and we can go back and pick up whatever information we've glossed over but at some point you did say something about that you were facing a vaccine injury and that you weren't sure what to do about it and of course at the point that that crossed into my consciousness fully I know exactly who to send you to.
I know the people who specialize in treating vaccine-injured people, and I know that they succeed at it because you're not the first person that I've sent.
Right.
But I said, hey, how about we set you up with Dr. Corey?
And you were up for it.
Of course, you had tried everything and nothing worked.
Right.
I was up for almost anything at that point.
And so, OK, you met up with Dr. Corey virtually, I assume.
What happened next?
Yeah, and that was, you know, I'm always grateful for that introduction to him.
Well, I'm embarrassed that it didn't come earlier.
I should have paid closer attention.
But regardless, I was grateful for it nonetheless.
And it happened, I think, April, May-ish, kind of, of 22.
So at that point I'd gone, to your point, I'd gone through any number of different specialists and different testing and just straight up gaslighting from the medical system.
I have many new opinions of the healthcare system that I didn't have before.
But yeah, once I got to that point, He was incredibly helpful.
I think one of the things I struggled with was not simply just the symptoms, because at that point the symptoms were, I'd gotten into a groove where I could manage them.
Now, I still wasn't exercising at that point, other than, again, just walking and stuff like that, but I had habits around sleep.
I had habits around when I would eat and what I would eat and very, very mindful of all of that.
But to your point, I lost a lot of weight.
I was probably, from where I am right now, I was the lowest.
I'm probably 25 pounds heavier now versus when I was there before.
And I was eating healthy, so it wasn't fat.
I was losing a fair amount of muscle.
Yeah, you looked like a different person.
Yeah, yeah.
So, which also, You get to the point where you start getting conscious about that too in terms of how you present right but I was virtual I mean in our conversation certainly but even in from a work context I was I was virtual so you can kind of hide some of it but I actually recall now bringing that up I had a colleague who hadn't seen in a while because I moved to a different team and we met up and she's just like oh man like you've you've lost a lot of weight in like sort of like a positive-ish sort of way.
Right.
And I kind of, you know, just politely acknowledged it and, you know, we moved on to the conversation.
But that really kind of hit me and I don't remember exactly when it was.
But it was like, oh yeah, I experience it every day in this sort of incremental sense.
But people who haven't seen me in that gap, it's really noticeable.
But to your question, Dr. Corey was very helpful.
Both because I needed two things, mainly.
Number one, I needed somebody who actually knew what they were doing, right?
And he did know what he was doing.
Number two, and almost more importantly, I needed somebody who I trusted was actually going to do their homework.
Because I had cardiologists, to my earlier point, who basically said to me that, okay, we don't see anything on our tests, so this must be psychosomatic.
I'm like, first of all, you didn't ask any even basic triage questions to see whether I had any mental health challenge history.
Number one.
Number two, even if that is what you think it's going to be, or it is, you should at least couch it with your patient as, you know what, I'm not, I haven't really found what's going on here.
You know, sometimes there are scenarios where patients will We'll be so anxious that its physical symptoms will manifest.
I want to rule that out.
So help me, help me with this sort of thing, right?
There's a way to vary with a high level of EQ, so to speak, do that, right?
But I got, no, it must be all in your head.
I'm like no it is most certainly not all in my head and if it were um but not even if it were it just it it was not and and I know that because the contrast was so stark from pre to post and it wasn't like I didn't want to like right The fact that I couldn't play sports or do a lot of the activities that I was doing before, even just non-sports things that just extended my day too long, I'm like, no, I can't.
I can't go too far because I'm going to be so wiped and I didn't want to affect my job because if I affected my job, Then I couldn't pay for the extra health care that I need to pay out of pocket, among many other things, right?
So, yeah, it's one of those things where he became, Dr. Corey became someone who I could trust, that would actually do the homework, and then also as a treatment, because one of the hypotheses I had was that I had myocarditis.
And I'll just say that According to him, it's very unlikely that's the case.
Unfortunately, it's something that you need some pretty advanced test to completely rule out.
But the test that I did do, plus the other things that he kind of took in clinically, he didn't feel like it was that.
So the easiest way to describe it was like a very over-the-top autoimmune response.
Okay, so that's a powerful story.
It's also, I will say, just the fact that it's not like you're describing, you got the shot, you started to feel anonymously terrible, you went to Dr. Corey, you started to feel better.
You're visibly different, right?
So psychosomatic doesn't, you know, it's not impossible that a person could imagine that they were better and change their behavior and all of that, but you were trying and it wasn't working and then Dr. Corey intervened medically and the transition is Not only remarkable in its degree, but also remarkable in its speed.
And you started reporting as I asked you, hey, how is that going?
You know, it wasn't like, hey, I'm better.
He cured me.
It's like, wow, this is going really well.
I'm amazed at how quickly I'm feeling a difference, which, you know, all of this suggests an actual intervention that has physiological implications.
Right.
Okay, so I should also just say, Two things.
One, it is important to me.
I get accused of lots of stuff, as you know.
The people who participate in the discussions that I host, the people who are on the Discord server, the people who circulate around Dark Horse.
I do think it is likely that they are less vaccinated than average.
If we were to just see who got shots and how many, less than average.
But it is nothing like, oh, the people who circulate around Dark Horse didn't get them, right?
Many.
I think most probably got some.
And this is far from the only story I know.
And it's not just people who circulate around Dark Horse.
I have friends, people I knew from long before COVID, who got shots and have very horrifying stories to tell.
So there are a lot of those.
Cases and I also, as I said, have seen people go to Dr. Corey finally out of desperation.
And this is the report that I get is wow, this is the first time a I felt that the thing was being dealt with in a logical way and be the response is undeniable.
So that's all very positive.
I will say just for People who may be having this experience.
Dr. Corey now does telemedicine and if you're in need of his help, I definitely suggest you get a consult.
Okay.
The most important thing here is it's a little bit delicate because obviously, reputationally, I have a lot riding on this.
And that's part of why I've asked you to have this discussion.
But certain things that you've said, unprompted by me, I think are quite telling with respect to where you are now with your understanding of what happened during COVID, what the reality of the shots was.
And maybe most importantly, where you think you would be if you hadn't had this terrible medical misfortune?
Yeah.
Yeah, I described to folks that I would put myself in sort of a libertarian-ish disposition and political ideology prior to COVID and still would be there to a large extent, if I'm having to summarize.
But the The expectation I had of institutions was that, particularly in the COVID scenario, would be that they would inefficiently, clumsily, slowly get there almost to the right answer, right?
And as I said to you, I couldn't have been more wrong on that.
That realization took months, years to really see, but I would say that those smaller pieces, I mean I used the softball example earlier, it sounds very kind of mundane, but it is a little bit of a light bulb moment.
It's a dimmer light bulb than the vaccine issue, but there were some of those types of moments that started adding up But still, obviously at that point, I still decided I'm going to go ahead with with getting that shot.
And yeah, it changed.
And I think it's one of those things where Had I either taken the shot and had no adverse event or other sort of scenario, I could definitely see myself going down the route of many folks that the audience would be very aware of from a podcast world perspective and just others in your lives.
Are the quote-unquote normies who would have said, you know, look at those anti-vaxxers, vaccines are amazing, you know, etc, etc, etc.
You know, I try not to be the person who is overtly, you know, impolite and rude, but certainly from a thinking perspective, I would have been there for sure.
And in fact, I was there and had certain things in addition to just the vaccine thing, which obviously a big one, but had other things not happened, yeah, I can easily see myself as somebody who would be pushing back against the so-called conspiracy theorists and All that sort of stuff.
So where do I sit now?
I'd say that I'm much more skeptical.
I am.
I often will answer questions by saying I can't rule anything out.
At this point, yeah, it's a. It's a tough position.
I have to tell you because.
Once you are aware of what can be true, I mean, in this case we had.
A technology that was a radical departure from the technologies we knew.
And even the technologies we knew, the truth of them had not been properly aired.
But this radically new technology deployed under false pretenses and then pushed towards people who stood to benefit not at all from it.
Like kids.
That tells you that there's some force out there, whatever the nature of it, that is willing to do things that put healthy children in mortal danger for no benefit.
Something no rational society would contemplate.
Right.
Once you know that that can happen in a particular context, you have to ask yourself the question, is that a unique defect of pharma and its interaction with governance and science?
Or is this a more general pattern?
And do I now have to be alert for this possibility in other places?
And of course, You don't want to be somebody who's constantly looking for nefarious explanations for things that have mundane explanations.
On the other hand, you know that you'd be foolish to assume that the mundane explanations had to be right because that was the correct bias in a prior world.
So, you know, in some sense I...
I want to say, A, welcome, and B, I'm sorry.
You know, I'm not personally sorry.
I don't think I did this to you, but I'm sorry that this happened to you, because what it means is, from here on out, now that you're aware, nothing's easy.
It just can't be.
You have to do your homework.
You're going to make errors.
You're going to see stuff that you think indicates
uh some sort of nefarious activity and sometimes it will turn out not to be sometimes you'll miss nefarious activity because you're trying not to be reflexive it's it's just not an easy position to be in no yeah and and part of my struggle i think was was uh as i would phrase it how do i keep both my feet on the ground in all this it's because it is destabilizing yep right and so it's destabilizing but i also then uh correspondingly knew that
Stress or anxiety would worsen my symptoms at the same time.
So it's this weird sort of place that I had to both practically manage that anxiety by, you know, moving on to other things or whatever, but also confront the fact that
My worldview had been at minimum adjusted if not you know quite significantly profoundly changed so you know one of the things you had you just mentioned was this the idea of a force and I think a lot of people get caught up in the idea of of you being conspiratorial by using that sort of phrasing but how I've always or at least how I now interpret what you mean by that is you're describing a A phenomenon in a simple sense, right?
It's a series of different incentives and people and things that come together to create a certain direction in society or in particular places, right?
And I think that, in general, I was too naive to certain incentives.
I was too naive that sociopathic and psychopathic people do exist.
Like, obviously, intellectually, I knew they existed.
But I didn't appreciate that those people do often get into places where they can wield disproportionate power.
And then I honestly, one of the most concerning things that I've learned about people around us in general is there's a lot of compliant people.
And as you were alluding to, I think I would have been one of those people.
Because I would have not in a sort of, you know, you are a bad person sort of way.
I just don't think I'm dispositionally, you know, structured that way.
But certainly in my mind, those people are not doing their part.
You know, those people aren't reading the research or whatever the phrasing would be in my head.
But the, as you've used the word too, the brown shirting of folks Around me in general.
Luckily my closer friends are I'd say more normies, but not the They don't wear brown shirts.
Let's just put it that way fortunately and that was also very helpful in my recovery process too that it took a little bit of stress off but but yeah, even just I didn't even tell my my mom about it until Five plus months later.
later.
Yeah, that's amazing.
Partly, partly because I didn't want her to worry as moms would do, but also because like the burden of her taking that on and sort of like managing that.
I wasn't going to be worried about her response to me and that she was going to cast me away.
It was more so the stress of her reaction and the burden that she would have to take on in conversations with other people.
It didn't make sense.
Fortunately, one of my siblings is a nurse and we've been coming
You know we had all this classic sibling rivalry as we were younger but over time we've gotten pretty close and pretty much she was the only one that knew other than a few other friends early on for both practical and and other reasons and so yeah it affected all those different relationships and and yeah the the worldview gets adjusted quite significantly when you go through those those changes and so it's also given me a lot of empathy for folks who have gone through either
Other types of health challenges that are completely ignored or gaslit or non-health, but otherwise, you know, experiencing things, seeing things or whatever.
I don't have to necessarily agree, believe, accept their premises.
But as far as I'm concerned, at the very least, I'm going to hear them out.
I'm going to give them the time.
Obviously, you can't give the time to every single person that you ever come across, especially someone like you.
But in principle, that's where I am.
And I think I was much more I was much less generous before, and I regret that, but I'm here now.
Well, I think actually you've hit on the most important insight from all of this, which is that your social connections have to be uh robust to differences even profound differences even differences that depending upon who's right have life and death implications the point is if you're honestly trying to figure out what's going on and you're wrong and the way you're wrong puts people in jeopardy
The right thing to do is to attempt to persuade you, and maybe you'll persuade me.
The wrong thing to do is to imagine that if your conclusion is incorrect and potentially harmful, that that is a moral defect that you are displaying, because it isn't.
If your analytical process leads you to a conclusion.
You're open to the possibility of changing it, and you act based on what you have concluded with the best tools at your disposal.
Who can fault you for that?
It's not a moral defect.
It might be an analytical one, but that's it.
And so anyway, I think the idea that, I mean, some of the other people I know who have stories, and frankly, some of them are worse than yours.
As I said, I'm very great.
As bad as this was, Um, I'm very grateful that it wasn't nearly as bad as many others have had.
Many others.
And it's funny, you know, and it's, it's the opposite of funny in my circle.
You know, I don't know how representative my circle is.
I don't know how evenly distributed the injuries were.
I don't know how, um, you know, my circle is odd because it's unusually large.
I've been put in contact with a lot of people by, uh, events since 2017, but, Several of the people I know who have serious injuries are well-known people who have not talked about it publicly.
And the idea that something would put you in the predicament where you had been injured, you try to do the right thing, you try to do something that was pro-social, as the term is, And it went badly for you.
You were injured.
There are lots of people who claim injury who are being portrayed as psychologically defective and you're quiet about it, even though you have personal experience.
You could say, hey, look, I don't know, maybe I'm an anomaly, but I had a terrible experience with this thing.
Let me tell you about it.
In what universe are people who are in general bold about Talking about heterodox ideas, unwilling to share their experience.
That suggests, you know, go back to the point about a force.
I don't know what the force is.
I'm not, you know, I'm agnostic about, yes, there's definitely some conspiracy here, but there's also some emergent property of the way social phenomena unfold.
Agnostic as to where the balance point is, what fraction of this is actually, you know... You know that we got to where we are, and so something has got us here.
Right.
What I can see is, it's just like the discovery of a planet that you haven't spotted yet, where you detect that something is exerting a gravitational impact on some other body.
And so the point is, well, I don't know what that is, but I can tell How powerful it is.
I can tell how much mass it's got.
And this is like that.
The fact that there is a force that gets people to self-censor their own, yes anecdotal, but significant
reaction to one of these vaccines to me suggests a very very powerful social force that causes people who are ordinarily biased in the direction of sharing information to protect a story that actually harmed them, which is an amazing fact.
Yeah, I mean, it gives you a sense of the gaslighting piece because I think it's related to this.
So I've mentioned the cardiologist piece.
I also went to my general practitioner, my family doctor.
I'm not sure what the Yankees call it, but I'm not sure if you're technically a Yankee given where you are in the world.
I went to my doctor with not a whole lot of expectations, just basically hoping that she could do some basic, you know, checkup type stuff and see if something she'll find.
And also the way the Canadian system works, it's very, I know, Other systems are similar, but the Canadian system is very dependent on that GP to be who refers you out to the various other specialists, right?
So I kind of needed to go through her, but went to this Appointment.
And by the end of the appointment, she basically said, everything seems pretty good.
I was expecting that.
I wasn't expecting to get some new insight necessarily, but I said, let's try.
But as I was walking out the door, she says, so when are you going to get your next dose?
And you know, I think you know me enough to know that I'm not a particularly emotive person.
It took a lot of energy for me not to just lose it in that moment.
So there's probably was a good like one to three seconds of just like breathing.
Right.
And then, you know, letting it go.
But I bring that up.
It's so ridiculous that it's almost comical.
But That is the experience of a lot of folks.
I did go quasi-public in January of 2020.
Sorry, 2022.
That timeline wouldn't work.
2022, that timeline wouldn't work, of 2022, which before the, you know, as a Canuck, before the trucker protests, because the conversation in Canada was lurching towards mandatory vaccinations.
And at that point, for obvious reasons, I was not interested in getting a second one, and that would have made me up to date or whatever the phrasing is now.
So I did the video.
I didn't really get a lot of traction but I just viscerally needed to say something I could not say something and I needed to figure out the way to do it in a constructive way and all those other things that are important to me but I could not say something and after that video I had a couple people reach out to me and honestly of course right someone I knew from school that hadn't seen in a while and he had the exact same issues that I had um you know had some people who responded in a more public way who were
We were, let's just say, skeptical of my claims and my skepticism towards mandatory vaccinations or other forms of things.
Like, they'll bring up sort of school vaccinations and make the comparison there, which I think is both wrong but also has some resonance, but I don't think it's completely relevant to the topic area at the time.
But it's quite interesting and so to your point someone like me who generally I wouldn't call myself an open book like if I'm more open than I ever used to be in general but I'm not the first person to be default open.
But if I had a health issue, I would have been in non-COVID, non-super-controversial political topic areas, I would have been open enough to talk to people who would have been able to support me in different ways, right?
In this case, one of the biggest problems is that not only was the healthcare system not responding to me in the ways that I needed, But it was very difficult to reach out to other people who might have had ideas for other people to, for me to reach out to.
Like other family or friends who may have connections in the healthcare system and stuff like that.
So I had to couch everything that I said and because I didn't want people to feel like I was crazy.
Because if that was the case, then they'd write me off, right?
It's like, oh...
Man, the pandemic has really affected Nick, too.
Kind of thing, right?
So, it was always that sort of, I don't want to oversell it, but that cognitive load, if you will, of trying to communicate the right way and then trying to manage your symptoms and then all these different things.
The symptoms were exhausting.
But then the additional mental load was exhausting, and fortunately I don't have to do that now, but that's probably one of the reasons why it took so long for me to get to that result that I am at now.
So, we are so far from any normal, acceptable system that it's hard to even fathom how far that story is from reasonable.
Let's say that the universe is the one that you described, you would have assumed was going to happen where the system would be too bureaucratic, it would bumble its way towards the right answer too slowly, with too much carnage, but whatever, it would get there.
In that world, Okay, they should never have said, it's totally safe, because no drug is.
Right.
The chances this was going to be totally safe were zero.
It's safe enough.
They could have made that error.
If they did make that error, and you were the unlucky guy, the one in a million who had some weird reaction based on some unusual bit of your physiology interacting with the shot or some contaminant in the shot that was very, very rare or something like that.
Who the hell is anybody?
Not to just simply say, that really sucks that this shot hurt you.
I understand that's a very rare phenomenon, but what does that mean to you?
You got hurt.
So from my perspective... For me, it's one for one.
Right?
Right.
The gaslighting of the vaccine injured is So deeply callous and inhuman that it is hard for me to imagine people, the architects of it.
And I know that some of it is emergent.
For example, doctors who fell for this and administered it to their patients or strong-armed them into getting it or whatever they did.
Those doctors, many of them do not have the strength of character to face their own responsibility, and so they are rationalizing what they did, and in rationalizing what they did, they are dismissing people who are injured in front of them as having psychosomatic illness.
I know there's some of that.
But there's also people, you know, the people who took the vaccine injured and shut down their Facebook group.
So these people couldn't even, you know, never mind whether they were going to find some sort of a treatment.
And there are obviously treatments that work, but just even the ability to join other people who were injured and say, Yeah, that's happening to me too.
I also have tinnitus that I can barely stand, right?
The ability just simply to make human contact with other people who are in a similar situation, that is the right of the injured.
And the force that disrupts that right by throwing them off Facebook and demonizing them as if they're making this up in order to, oh, it's just insane, you know, to even just the idea that the word anti-vaxxer comes up here.
You're talking about people who took the vaccine.
They're not anti-vaxxers, or if they are now, they're anti-vaxxers with a justification.
So, I don't know, I find the degree to which people are self-editing and worried about what others will say, the degree to which people are willing to reach out to you and, you know, to your face tell you that you're not on the team because you're talking about some experience that you had, This is madness.
I would also say, I don't know what I would have done in your shoes with this doctor who asked when you were getting your next dose, but I think what I would like to have done, had I been in your shoes, would be something like, say, good one doc, you had me for a second.
Honestly, that probably would have been a good response, but I think I was just so shocked that, you know, I could imagine her thinking it, But for her to be so, like, matter-of-fact, even just what she said wasn't even the problem.
It was just so matter-of-fact.
It was, okay, you know, here's the checklist and we're going through it.
You're a few months late, but, you know, you get your second one.
You can participate in society again, right?
Because at that point...
You know, a lot of place in the world.
At that point, it was probably two and a bit months in of passports, right?
But no, I'm going to push back on you.
Okay, you've got a doctor who has in front of them someone who at least is experiencing some massive disruption of their life that occurred who was healthy, got a shot, is having a massive unexplained disruption of their physiological life.
To ask that person when they are getting their next dose of the same stuff is to reveal that this person Has no logical capacity that medical training was wasted on them.
Because the fact is, it is readily possible that your experience is the result of an anomaly of your physiology.
Either you picked up an allergy to some ingredient in the vaccine, or you have some rare genetic predisposition to etc.
But the idea that somebody who has had that experience This doctor should be recommending, oh, listen, Nick, I think everybody should get these shots, but not you.
In fact, you know, that would at least be consistent with some universe in which logic holds.
Or at the very least, it's not, you know, when are you getting your next dose?
It's, you know, maybe even if she thinks I ought to, it's, are you going to get your next dose?
Right, and let's talk about this.
There's at least something to discuss rather than, okay, well, I've done my due diligence and we're now on the part of the appointment where we close things down and we ask the regular questions.
Well, the absurdity, now that I think about it, the absurdity even further is at that point, this was November 2022, right?
We knew a lot of things at this point.
in terms of the not just the safety profile put that aside the utility of it the any there's a little weasel words here but if it's uh effect efficacy effectiveness but i'll just say utility yeah right and we knew at that point that the transmission argument was dead in the water even though the passports were alive and well at that point
And so why someone who you literally just examined, right, and have records for?
Not many because I wasn't there very often because I didn't need to be, but you had records for.
Why would I need, personally, to get another shot?
Even regardless of whether you think the shot caused my current issues, right?
Right.
So, like, on at least two or three different levels, it was an absurd question, right?
An absurd assertion on her part, right?
You know, I don't bring her name up for a reason, because I don't think it's relevant, but it does show that Smart people have more tools in their toolbox to deceive themselves, right?
And post-hoc rationalize.
And I think some of the doctors you were mentioning, I think probably fall in that same camp, right?
There's a courage element, but there's also the post-hoc rationalization that they tie the bow on, which is when you reveal on the surface, which is simply You know, an undermining of integrity or a lack of courage or whatever it is, right?
Like, there are ways to still be in line with your values, but maybe not necessarily be out in the open, right?
There's different roles people can play in a world like this, right?
Not everyone has to have a podcast.
Not everyone has to have a big platform.
But there are ways to act with integrity that don't include, you know, just going along with every single dictate, right?
Or even just being kind of strategic about it, right?
In her case, she could have maybe said, you know, I don't know.
The idea of an exemption never came up, which also, now that I think about it, is kind of interesting.
There are many ways between fully public you know someone like yourself fully public in you know everyone's criticizing you for for your point of view and then you know fully right on mainstream kind of view there's a lot of ways that you can maneuver within this space that are not just sitting there especially if you are aware implicitly or many explicitly that something is off here right and personally
Notwithstanding this conversation, my approach has been, I'm not going to participate or, you know, at least maybe comply, I suppose, to absurd things, right?
So the mandatory vaccination thing, I was like, okay, I need to get ready for the fact that I'm not going to take this and take the, you know, whatever the backlash is or the consequences of that are, like literally to the point where I'm like, I need to think about options maybe to get to the US.
Now fortunately that conversation died after a good week and a half due to maybe the truckers and other things, but I guess to folks who are listening, you do not have to be Brett who has the platform and the moral courage to talk about these things.
To make a difference right you don't have to you just I think it's really you know I talked to you where I was coming from this week was kind of a leadership conference and one of the conversation points was the core of leadership is the the values the the integrity that kind of Undergirds all of it.
All the different skills and EQ and all these different other things that stack on top of that.
Those are important.
They're useful.
They're skills.
If you don't have that foundation, none of it matters.
And if your values evaporate in the face of pressure, then they're not... They're a fashion statement.
Yeah, they're not values in the deeply meaningful sense of the term.
Right.
And I agree with you.
And I have been, I think, too cautious, actually, in pushing people to stand up.
And this was true before COVID.
This was true with the woke madness.
Two, and the reason I was very explicit about why I was reluctant to push people to stand up.
It's not that I don't want them to stand up.
I do.
But I don't want them to stand up because I suggest that if you do that, and even just the example of me suggests that if you do that, it won't be catastrophic.
They've done terrible things to Heather and me, but we're still doing fine.
So that example could be misleading.
If you're in a position, you know, happens we don't work for anybody.
So they could interrupt our ability to earn, and they did, powerfully, but nobody can fire us.
So we're in a good position to stand up.
Somebody who works for a boss who's going to fire them either
out of a misunderstanding of what's motivating them or out of some fear of their own that if they don't they will be next in line that person may not be in a position to stand up but it doesn't mean that they have to be on board with the madness it doesn't mean they have to be part of it and the thing that is I don't want to say most conspicuous but at the top of that list are a number of things one of them is
The system is not reacting the way a system that had made an honest error would react.
There is not, you know, yes there would be ass covering in that case, but there would also be maybe grudging discussion of how can we make sure this never happened again.
There would be uh scapegoating right there would be all sorts of stuff in you know exactly an analogous process to the system stumbling its way to the right answer right if we were all let's put it this way if they weren't willing to do the harm they did then the fact that they had accidentally done all of this harm would be causing the system to function in a way that it is not it is still gaslighting it is still pushing the same damn shots it is still pushing them towards kids
it's pushing mandates again right it's pushing mandates again um and as you point out among the many absurdities here we know they don't block transmission and We know that the hospitals aren't overwhelmed.
What business is it of theirs if you get a shot?
Even if their point is it will protect you from the worst outcomes, which is not true.
Even on that point, right?
It's absurd on its face.
So put aside the transmission argument because we know that even though people still deploy it, They're half-heartedly just deploying it and anyone with just a pair of eyes can see that it's not, it doesn't work, right?
Like it's just, it just doesn't work.
That said, you know, the the Mott & Bailey sort of approach here is to start with the transmission argument and pull back to, oh, well, it's preventing severe disease or mitigating severe disease and supporting the hospitals on that basis, right?
Which is even a more powerful argument in Canada because of the, you know, the public health care system, right?
But even on that argument, right?
It's like, okay, let's look at that.
Let's look at the data.
Because one of the things in my day job, I do look into data.
I'm not some super wizard with it, but I have basic skills to look through data.
And if you looked probably fall 2021 into 2022, the people who were going to emergency rooms were vaccinated old people.
Right, right.
So it's like, OK, that maybe if I'm generous, maybe there would be more of those older people if they didn't have the vaccine, right?
Right.
But it's only them.
And and then the games played around what it what is a hospitalization?
Right.
What does that actually mean?
Right.
And all those different like the stack of the of the games, like the data manipulations, not even just from like we made up the raw data.
Like, I don't even think they In the case of the public data, you don't have to assume, let's put it this way, you don't have to assume that the data was made up in order to still see the absurdity here.
Yeah.
Right?
It's just the phrasing, it's the discussion there on that basis.
So you don't even have that argument.
But if you go any further, the impact, the relative impact of getting X more people vaccinated, even on the best numbers, Still wouldn't make much of an impact on any particular hospital, especially because it's completely untargeted.
It wouldn't make any impact on any given hospital.
It also would be an extremely powerful argument for age stratification, because the point is a certain number of people are going to the hospital, or worse, dying, who weren't going to end up in the hospital from COVID.
Right.
So those people should be insulated from both things.
They're already predisposed not to suffer from COVID.
We should protect them from the shots.
And the fact that we don't have that conversation is conspicuous.
And then you get into the really deep stuff and it's like, well, all right.
If you are saying that we have a collective responsibility to take these shots because something, something, hospitals overwhelmed, severe effects, something like that.
Then the evidence that those who have gotten many doses have IgG4 triggered, and that seems to be downregulating the immune system.
Can we at least agree that if the shots, getting many of them, turns out to downregulate your immune system in a way that makes you more likely to get COVID and makes you more likely to contract other diseases, that were that true, That you should be recommending against the shots for everybody.
Can we just at least get there?
If it's true, you'll recommend against.
And the answer is no, no, no.
We're going to be recommending for no matter what.
What we're going to do is rearrange the facts so that they explain why we're recommending for the shots.
But the sacred thing here is we will recommend the shots.
And it's like, whoa.
They have a conclusion now.
We're looking for the evidence.
We're looking for, yeah, we're looking for the justification.
And it's like, well, that doesn't sound scientific or medical or anything.
That sounds At best, that sounds like business.
On a slightly different note, it also reminds me of earlier in the conversation we talked about how people are deducing values from certain political stances, right?
And so it's almost the reverse.
We ought to align on values writ large, whether it's what we want to see in the world or just sort of how we act in the world.
And then Blowing from that, there may be disagreements on how and what we do and stuff like that, liberal, conservative, whatever phrasing you want to use.
But the problem is, we are doing it in the reverse way.
What is your position on vaccines?
What is your position on other controversial ABC issues?
And then deducing, that's what your values are.
Now, it's not completely unrelated, obviously.
You know, you can deduce something from those things.
In fact, ironically, you can probably deduce more because of the polarization.
But, I think we undermine the dignity of human beings and the ability to bring people together if we start in that way.
You might get clues on that but try to transcend that and have those conversations because look like You and I, you know, we know each other pretty well, but we don't know each other like super in depth.
But you and I disagree on certain things, and I've come to your position on more things apropos of this conversation.
But as far as I'm concerned, I don't feel...
An obligation to believe everything that you say.
Right.
Right.
I just listen because I think you have insights.
I listen to other people who have insights, whether they are kind of mainstream people or people, you know, on anywhere on the map sort of thing.
And I, I've opened that, that, um, that space a lot more than I had in the past.
But the key thing for me is that, is there an insight there, even if it's buried in a lot of bullshit, right?
Is there something to that, that I can chew on, that I can work with?
Even if you think of it from, you know, folks in the audience who may be interested in the sort of investment space or venture capital and stuff like that, that's how, or angel investing, that's how they think.
They think about where do I find the novel insights that other people aren't paying attention to?
And so apply that mindset to your life outside of investing in terms of how I work on my health, how I look at my professional life, how I work And support people around me in terms of relationships, right?
Like that is that is a useful skill set.
Instead, what we're calling critical thinking is I'm defaulting.
I have a proxy and my proxy is, you know, Journal A, B or C. It's, you know, doctor on CNN or in my case, CBC, right?
Or any number of those things.
And I was playing that proxy game too, but it's OK to proxy.
Proxying is OK, but know that it's a proxy.
It's not where you know where you're doing.
Yeah, exactly.
You got to know where that flow of proxying is happening because we can't do the all the way down to 0.0 of everything, right?
Or first of all, it would drive us insane.
Second of all, we don't have the capacity or the time, right?
Yeah, so I love this point.
I think it's a gorgeous point.
It's a gorgeous point.
The tendency, the ability to spot what others are missing is almost synonymous with intelligence.
That is what, when we say that somebody is intelligent, that's what we mean.
We don't mean that they're better at following the, you know, they're better at reciting facts.
Sure.
What we mean is that they can see what others can't, or they see what others will eventually see sooner, or something like that.
So the idea that we have now valorized the degree to which you adhere to a slate of stated beliefs rather than the degree to which you depart in a way that goes on to be prescient.
That turns out to have been prescient.
That is us turning intelligence on its head.
Yeah, and I think there is something to be said, though, that that description, I think, is true.
However, I would add that I think people who otherwise have this the skill set or the raw, you know, intellect power are being basically, you know, it's almost as if they have two sheets of paper or something to their two sides of their head that they can only see in front of them and they'll just deal with the phenomena that they can see.
Yep.
And so some, to your point, force incentives, The way that our culture works, we've kind of put up these walls and we only see what's in front.
And until you're able to open up that periphery and take on the obligations and the difficulty that comes with that, frankly, especially when it first happens.
We will not be able to, first of all, find interesting insights just in general, but also solve big problems because I don't care what the issue is, whether it's COVID related or otherwise, the biggest meta challenge, as far as I'm concerned, is our inability to solve challenges, period, and have conversation and transcend even the most difficult problem areas, right?
By, to your point, aligning on where do we agree, Where do we don't?
What are those value sets that can bring us together?
What are the things we can do that show the humanity in each of us and then come to the table, so to speak, and work on the problems?
Until we have the ability to do that, it doesn't matter what the issue is.
We're not going to solve it.
In fact, we're going to make it worse because certain people are literally or figuratively profiting from the inability of people to solve those problems.
It occurs to me, in your description, you think about what it means that somebody has been framed, right?
When we say that that person was framed for a crime.
What we mean is, I mean, we're literally, it's an analogy to a picture frame, that a picture has been painted in which this person looks guilty.
And what you're describing The blinders is a matter of something having framed a pandemic that causes certain things to follow logically from it.
If you accept the blinders, then the picture looks completely coherent.
Right.
If you throw away the blinders, you know, it's Potemkin in its own way, right?
That looks like a town.
But if you go around the back, it's a set, right?
That's an important distinction and so part of the problem of communicating this to people is I'm not saying that you don't see what you say you see.
Right.
I'm telling you to stand somewhere else.
Right.
Then you will see what I see.
Right.
And if people are unwilling to do that, and this is the key, the reason that they demonize us morally Why would I stand?
Nazi told me to stand there.
Would I go?
And it's like, okay, but you've just accepted a formulation that makes it impossible for you to go through an exercise, which I swear will cause the scales to fall from your eyes.
And you're telling me it's for moral reasons.
And the point is, morality does not enter into this.
It's analytical.
Yeah.
Well, I mentioned this to you before, too, but I We won't go into the story too much, but simply to say that I had a friend of mine.
This sort of illustrates the cognitive dissonance, right?
All of us have cognitive dissonance.
Everything I've said today, I'm a flawed human being just like anyone else, and maybe more so.
Oh, definitely more so.
That's right, that's right, yeah.
We need a lot more time to list all the things.
I don't think there isn't enough time.
That's right, that's right.
Even YouTube would run out of recording space.
It would be him too.
But I had a friend of mine who was both one of the most supportive people during my health journey, but also one of the most over the top, you know, declares of his adherence to you know, declares of his adherence to the various narratives, right?
In terms of, you know, those anti-vaxxers are screwing it up for all of us and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
But it was an interesting insight for me because he literally was one of the only people who reached out to me on a regular basis, at least a few times a week saying, hey, how are you doing?
How you feeling?
Right?
I played sports with him so one of the things that he would notice is that I'm not on playing those sports with him.
Yeah.
Right?
So there is that capacity in people to both have that sort of You know, I'm going to be supportive and caring to somebody I know, but then also play this other sort of virtue signaling game.
And again, I'm not trying to be condescending because I've played those games in the past too.
Yeah.
Right?
No, no, I probably will in the future in some way.
This is perfect, because for one thing, I don't know who you're talking about.
I'm sure I don't know him.
I have a lot of hope for that person, because what did not happen was they did not shut down his sympathy for a friend.
And so his humanity is intact, even if his analytics have been captured.
So definitely recoverable.
But I also find an interesting analogy.
I mean, you're drawing the analogy yourself, but an analogy To you and your journey here, because, well let me ask you, I'm working from knowledge outside of our conversation here, but you were a Sam Harris fan?
Yes, okay, I think this is important and I actually hope Sam will watch this You were a Sam Harris fan and one of the things that you said that struck me very powerfully after I Think after you had begun to be treated for your injury.
Mm-hmm Was that absent your misfortune that you would probably be.
Ballpark where Sam Harris is.
Ballpark where Sam Harris is.
Yeah.
And.
That struck me profoundly because, of course, you know, Sam is or was a friend.
And he's been terrible to Heather and me over COVID, as you know.
Uh, and I think he imagines all sorts of moral defects, uh, in people who disagree with him and he does not understand where this is coming from.
And anyway, I think, um, Your ability to still to not flinch from looking at where you think you would be if you hadn't had the personal experience that woke you up.
Sam does not know how many of the people who are most angry at him actually are fans of his, who are deeply disappointed and feel betrayed by his straying from central features of his own philosophy.
The moral imperative not to lie, for example.
Story we were given was riddled with lies and he's he's doubled down again and again over them His position that you know, we have two choices One of them is to have difficult conversations and the other is violence and yet he refuses to talk so anyway I hope that maybe he and others who are in the same place can hear, here's somebody who would be with us, potentially.
And I don't necessarily know that you would, but I think the fact that you're willing to entertain that possibility.
But had an experience that is just simply incompatible with landing there.
That's all you need to know, right?
Sam, there but for the grace of God go you, right?
And you know, I hate to put it in religious terms, but Sam, this is part of it, right?
I think it's I think it's a key and the way that I that I phrase it.
I mean, I don't know.
I don't know, Sam.
I only know him through through the podcast and, you know, the YouTube world when I went through my My quasi-atheist phase.
I'm not a religious person but I wouldn't call myself an atheist at this point.
But I was introduced to him that way and then I thought he was particularly good on Read COVID issues in many ways.
Didn't agree with him about everything, but he's a different human being.
So therefore, of course, I don't agree with him on everything.
I know I make that point a lot with friends and stuff like that, but it's just, we know that, but we don't internalize that point.
If you're only 99% in agreement, which is probably still quite rare, you know, that 1% makes us a moral hazard or some moral defect in some way, right?
Yeah, I think it's just incredibly important to have the humility to understand that, you know, this also sounds quasi-religious too, but the humility to know that you are also flawed, that you are affected by the same phenomenon that one might be describing around the world and affecting other people.
You were affected by it too.
You might be affected differently, but you were affected by it too, and Absent other circumstances, you may be falling in different places.
And to your point, I identified, to your point, I don't know.
It's projecting on a other scenario that we don't know exactly where it would go.
But the defaulting, the proxy point I was making earlier, I think one of the flaws that Sam has in this case is that he thinks his evidence, his evidence is proxies.
Yeah, his evidence is proxies which amounts to appeals to authority.
In most people's case, they don't know how the immune system works, they don't know how the The image in the textbook differs from the actual physiology.
They're not in a position to judge this.
And to Sam's credit, Sam says he's not in a position to judge it.
But what he does that doesn't make sense is he projects that onto, for example, Heather and me.
Right.
And he says, you don't know anything about this space just the same way I, Sam, don't know anything about the space.
And that's dead wrong.
And, you know, I don't want to go after Sam's capacity to analyze this stuff, but the fact is there is a discussion to be had about, you know, it's not the degree that makes you qualified, it's whether or not you have the background information to extrapolate in a way that is more insightful than it is misleading.
And Sam doesn't have it, he knows that, but he just assumes that that must be true of anyone who departs from the narrative rather than there's something wrong with the engine that's generating the narrative it is heavily influenced at the very least by powerful forces with perverse incentives yeah i think ultimately when you look at someone like like sam um i see somebody who yeah has it
so those direct appeals to authority and but at the same time you know he does this but i think it's a broader phenomenon too We often will see that folks who kind of accept the more mainstream approach to the issues we've been facing over the past few years, not just COVID, but more broadly, They will appeal to expert A, which has, you know, epidemiologist or cardiologist or whatever.
And it's like, OK, all right.
Well, they certainly, in principle, would have some sort of tool set to evaluate the issues that might be at hand.
But then you pull out those very same titles and backgrounds and stuff like that, who disagree, right, slightly or even profoundly.
And it's like, oh, no, they're cranks.
And it's like, OK, but who is deciding that they are cranks?
Right.
Right.
They might be cranks.
Right.
Could very well be the case.
But who is deciding that?
Much like how people will say, well, don't do your own research.
Right?
And I've, you know, again, humility.
I've definitely said that sort of thing or made jokes to that effect with other people.
But fundamentally, and I'll still probably make jokes to some effect almost in just an ironic way.
But fundamentally, if you are, again, maybe in my health journey as well, but in general, when people go to the doctor and they get an opinion from the doctor on something, and then they go to another doctor and get a second opinion on something, who's and then they go to another doctor and get a second opinion on something, who's going to decide Right.
And, you know, if the two opinions agree, that tells you something.
Sure.
But often they don't.
That's why you would get a second one.
That's why that used to be the wisdom.
Right.
But you get a second opinion, you get maybe a third opinion, whatever.
But ultimately, my point is, you as the non-expert, quote, unquote, are still going to have to make the call.
Right.
Which may be based on who you think is more likely to be right.
It may be based on a calculation that actually is influenced by your values.
In other words, how much do I want to extend my life at all costs, and how much would I rather
You know increase the quality of my life at some risk to shortening it those things could cause you to decide one way or the other you know am I gonna throw caution to the wind and assume that I don't or whatever it is, but But to your point and this again, I don't mean to focus on Sam here, but the doctors The dissident doctors.
That group includes some of the most highly published doctors in their fields.
And their work was not based on a guess.
It was based on proper medicine.
They detected patterns, they chased them down, and those patterns are manifest in experiment.
Where?
If you know where to look.
To demonize them as kooks, to portray them as out of their depth, as grifters, as, you know, Sam went to the point of hypothesizing that they might be schizophrenic, right?
The point is, okay, well, that's, you know, Possible.
Right.
The realm of possibility includes that they are schizophrenic.
It also, Sam, includes the possibility that you are schizophrenic, right?
But the incredibly deep publication record and the history of innovating Treatments that are now standard of care for multiple different disorders.
This is not consistent with a world in which these people are lightweights.
And what you are saying is that people who were at the top of their field are now cranks, have thrown away their careers over nothing, over insanity, or over perverse incentives.
Does that make sense?
Does that make more sense than a world in which Uh, Pharma, which has an obvious perverse incentive, captured doctors and turned most of them into puppets, people who are not highly published in their fields.
Which of these is more likely?
You know, this is the kind of question that Sam used to be very good at.
Yeah, if you take But the thing is we are sort of fed these one-liners around okay he's a grifter or you know this person is a crank or whatever the line is and but there's also sort of an incentive going back to my point around doing your own research To not look at it, right?
It's sort of like this smoke signal, this odor that is thrown over.
And again, mea culpa, like I definitely have fallen victim to avoiding the stench, so to speak, of other folks who might have insights that I otherwise could have used in some ways in the past.
And so now my approach is, I'm very aware that a skunk may have been in this area, so to speak, because other people have thrown the odor down.
But I'm interested, again, I'm interested in the insight.
I might have to really search and really, you know, claw my way to find it, but I'm interested in the insight.
And there are certain things that I'm getting better at in understanding who has those insights, and for what reasons, and what values sort of undergird it, and their approaches, their styles.
And, you know, I'll have my revised version of proxies.
But again, I know who my proxies are, or at least I I am very conscious of identifying where I am proxying.
Well, the other thing, if I can just extrapolate from the story that you've told, if the same scenario went down again with a different virus, different highly novel shots, whatever, You would still not know who knew what they were talking about before, but if you could read the basics, the basics are, I am not heavily threatened by this disease.
In fact, I'm probably not in serious danger at all.
I'm likely to get it, but I'm likely to come through it.
There is no long-term information on the impact of this new technology that I'm being told to get.
I know that I'm being told that it is highly effective at preventing the transmission of disease, but I know that the voices that say that have lied to me before.
They've told me that they knew it blocked transmission, then it turned out years later that they had no basis for saying such a thing, and they probably knew it wasn't true.
But they said they didn't say it.
Right, and then they tried to memory hole their having said.
If you have those facts, and then the point is, yes, but I'm being...
coerced, I have to get this shot because I'm not going to be allowed to participate in society, you would undoubtedly choose to accept a higher cost to avoid the much larger unknown of the consequence of that shot because you know what can lurk behind that door.
And that is, you know, I hate that this lesson had to come to you this way.
I hope that what's happened is you have fully recovered and nothing lurks from your one inoculation.
But if that's what happened, in some ways that's a gift.
It's an incredibly powerful lesson.
You say that and that's kind of the phrasing that I was saying while I was working on the recovery.
I said to the people who did know, I said that I When, if, whatever phrasing I would use at the time, I get through this, this will be among the greatest gifts I've ever been given.
And I do believe that.
It was profoundly the biggest challenge of my life.
You know, I always want to emphasize that.
It was bad, but I had it much less than many other folks had it, right?
And so I'm always conscious of that.
But yeah, I mean, sometimes that's what is required in life.
Some people need a nudge, some people need a little tap on the shoulder, and sometimes you need to be fully shaken before you
See certain things that you wouldn't see otherwise and you know who knows what that trajectory would have been absent of this to your earlier point But I am where I am and and I'm still learning I'm still you know figuring things out as I go and and I would just say in general that I My values have not changed from where I was pre 2020 my view on the world and how it operates has changed and Right, but my values have not changed.
In fact, I almost kind of scraped through a little bit and noticed certain things that were almost kind of suppressed in a value sense because I just wasn't thinking of it or it was so deep in proxies and all these different things.
And I think it's for folks out there who may otherwise not be Don't find my message endearing, don't find my story endearing, or otherwise, you know, dismiss me.
You know, fair enough, that's your prerogative.
But just, I would just hope that you give yourself a moment to think, am I also being a little, am I lacking humility here?
And you don't have to agree with what I'm saying, what Brett's saying, what anyone's saying.
But do I have a little bit of humility to understand that I couldn't possibly know how the world works in a fulsome sense?
And the way that the last few years has worked out, there's no way that your model, even if it predicted relatively well, that your model would ever get to what we saw.
Even for folks like yourself, your model changed over time.
Now you had a pretty good model going into it, but it certainly changed even, I'd say, significantly, right?
Yep.
And so just at least start with a humility, notwithstanding anything else that we've talked about.
And if you start there, That's great.
And also just maybe the first thing with that humility is to rebuild that bridge, if possible, with that person that you have either been estranged from or otherwise.
We're possible.
I know it's not possible in many cases, but I think it's a deep, deep thing that we all crave as human beings for that connection and whenever you can rebuild a bridge that has been burnt down.
It's a tough but a rewarding experience and you know notwithstanding everything that has been talked about today I think that that's at least the foundational step and it sounds like it's so divorced from talk about you know side effects from a from some sort of health care intervention and going through the system and all sort of stuff but Gear Intervention is downstream from the fundamentals, the first principles of how do we communicate with each other?
What are our values?
And are we mindful that as human beings that we're not only flawed, but also can't possibly know everything that's going on in the world.
So you must be able, you must be open at least to some extent to information that you might otherwise be dismissive of.
Yeah.
And let me, Add a little precision to your example here.
We know that people were injured by these shots.
Everybody acknowledges that.
Even Pfizer acknowledges this.
That means that when you're dealing with somebody who's telling you that they had an injury, you might be dealing with a very rare unlucky person, but you're not dealing with a morally defective person.
And the point is, the real question, if you think these shots were a slam dunk, you have to acknowledge that the cost of that slam dunk was some number of people got hurt.
And the question is... Somebody got hit by the ball when it went through the hoop, so to speak.
How many?
How many?
If it's a tiny number, then if it's a tiny number and the shots are effective and the evidence that suggests they're not is somehow an error, then the point is, yeah, okay, these are shots that have a cost of X, that is the number of people who were hurt and how badly they are injured.
And they have a benefit, which is why.
And you can compare these things and do a cost-benefit analysis.
And then you would do something smart like risk stratification based on age.
If you're demonizing people because they say they were hurt, you have a moral problem.
That's an actual moral problem.
You're not allowed to demonize people who tried to do the right thing and got unlucky.
It doesn't matter whether they are very common and they upend the story of safe and effective vaccines or they are very rare and it's just simply the cost of an improvement in our collective health.
You have no right to demonize people who got hurt.
Yeah, I mean obviously I'm biased when I say that but I would agree with that.
But I would go even further and just say you don't have to accept that it was caused by the vaccine in that case.
You don't have to go there.
Yeah.
Just be a good human being and support somebody who's going through a rough time.
Right, even let's agree that A medical treatment that has a certain number of adverse reactions that there will also be people who have the deep misfortune of having gotten the treatment and then having a weird bit of luck where something completely unrelated to that treatment befalls them right in the immediate aftermath and so they think this happened to them and it didn't.
Even that person Has done nothing wrong.
They've extrapolated in a way that we could all put two things together and imagine they're connected and they're not.
That person also deserves your compassion.
You just don't have any right to demonize any of these people.
You could demonize somebody who was lying.
If somebody was lying to get attention, they are actually hurting people who've actually been injured.
That person does deserve ridicule.
I would just say, just quickly on that point, the lying part.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of people And it's ubiquitous.
It's crazy.
I don't think even in my 2020 or pre-2020 mindset, I don't think I would have necessarily jumped to lying.
At least not in most cases.
I would have probably just said, you know, you're mistaken.
It's probably with something else.
It's unfortunate that's happening to you.
It probably wasn't the, you know, super safe, super effective and amazing vaccines that we all know are amazing.
They are amazing, at least in a business sense.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, Nick, this has been a great discussion.
I thought we were going to chat for 15 minutes.
Gone over an hour here.
But anyway, it was a pleasure.
Thank you for coming up to the islands and visiting and thank you for courageously exploring a story that can't be much fun to relive.
Not fun, but it was a good exercise and I do appreciate you making the time.
