All right, and joining us now is Dr. Richard Restak, MD, and he is a neuroscientist as well, and he has written a lot of books on the brain.
And now this is one kind of the nexus of our brain and artificial intelligence.
So I wanted to get him on because we, as you know, we talk about AI and its impact on society quite a bit.
Thank you for joining us, Dr. Restick.
Wood, I'm happy to be here.
Thank you, David.
You've written so many books, and a best-selling author, and of course people can find this on Amazon.
You've written so many books.
What is different about the brain?
What is different about this one?
And why did you write this book?
I wrote this book to announce and to discuss the dangers that are lurking, so to speak, in the 21st century and are unique to the 21st century, but are having an effect on the brain and the negative one.
So that we really are imperiled by eight different factors, one of which is the global warming.
We have new diseases that are present in the 21st century that are increasing, starting with COVID and moving forward.
We have problems, of course, with the global warming, which we'll talk about in more detail.
And then the internet, the effect of the internet, the effect of AI, memory, the alteration, the attempt to alter memory, almost to alter our memories of what the past was like.
This is an ongoing enterprise by various governments in the world, including our own.
We also have surveillance, the seventh, the surveillance, becoming increasingly a surveillance society.
It's almost impossible to not be revealing things about yourself because there's surveillance cameras everywhere.
I can give you several examples of that just in my own personal life.
And then finally, the eighth one is anxiety.
All of these things are creating what I call an existential anxiety.
People are being given information, but it's being molded according to the thoughts and the inclinations of people in power.
For instance, let's take today's, right out of today's New York Times, on page A7, there's an article called The Air in New Delhi is Life-Threatening.
And it tells the tale of the New York Times reporters who have spread themselves throughout New Delhi from 6 a.m. until late in the evening of a certain day recently.
And they measured the particulate matter in the air, and it was anywhere from 10 times to 30 times as great as would be considered minimally normal.
Now, on top of that, you have the statement that they state that the government is actually trying to hide this kind of insight to the populace by spraying water and other things like that.
It says that they're doing this around the measuring stations.
They're also losing data from the measuring stations during the worst bouts of pollution.
So there you have the molding of the facts, either denying them altogether or trying to improve them so that people say, oh, well, they measured it down at such and such a measuring station, and it was really not all that high.
Well, of course, they were spreading water and other things to try to reduce this.
So we've got a capitalist society here in the United States, which has a vested interest in pushing forward certain scientific points of view.
So science is being put sort of in the back seat.
And there's politicians and other people, all of whom share one thing, capitalistic enterprises, which they're part of or which they are advancing.
And a kind of crony capitalism where they can get protection and subsidies as well.
And the control is being taken away from us because, as I was just reporting earlier today, they're working very hard to make sure that state and local governments can't enact any control on artificial intelligence.
And that came up in the context of talking about how the manufacturers of tasers, also big manufacturers of police body cams, how they want to wed that to artificial intelligence.
And the question is, you know, what could possibly go wrong with that?
If they identify you, they misidentify you as a dangerous criminal and warn the police about how dangerous you are.
They could get people killed.
Well, not only that, but all of these efforts set up a sense of anxiety and fear.
Let me just tell you what happened to me one morning.
Call a cab to go to a medical appointment.
And when we started going down the road, I said to the driver, you know, you're not going the most efficient or the quickest way.
He said, I know that.
He said, but I don't want to go that way because there's speed cameras.
I said, well, you know, you're driving very sensibly and you're not speeding and I'm in no hurry.
So what's the problem?
He said, well, they take pictures of everybody that goes by those cameras because they want to see who's in those photos, in those cars.
So I asked him to give me a reference for that.
And he got sort of, didn't say anything else for the rest of the trip.
So when I got down to the medical building, I got in the elevator and said, in this facility, there is surveillance, both obvious and hidden.
Santa Claus was watching you now.
This is all one morning.
And then when I got up to sign in, I signed the board with an electronic pen, and I didn't see no signatures.
I said, well, it didn't take.
She said, oh, it took.
But we don't allow it to go on the screen so it could be seen.
I said, why is that?
She said, well, somebody behind you might see the thing and then remember it and use your signature to forward something somewhere.
Well, first of all, there was a sign that said, stand 10 feet back.
And secondly, there's nobody else behind me.
So there's three examples just drawn at random that we're becoming an increasingly surveilled society, which is creating a sense of paranoia and a sense of fear.
So the brain has to adjust to these type of things, David.
And it's very hard to do.
And I think that is calculated.
They want to do this even to the extent, when you talk about these cameras taking everybody's picture, the flock network that is out there, this corporation that is saying, well, we can do whatever we want because it's in public space.
And we're not government, so we can collect this information.
And yet they collect it in order to sell it to the government.
So it's just one level indirect, but they not only grab your license plate, but they also do a complete profile of your car and all of its idiosyncrasies.
Does it have a dent here?
Does it have a scrape there?
What about a bumper sticker?
So it creates a model of your car.
And so they almost have like biometric identification of your cars as well as of you.
And this is now made possible because of the advances of AI.
But this has been something that has been concerning me.
I look at things kind of from a libertarian perspective.
And this has been concerning me for a long time, the idea that government is using technology many different ways, internet, social media, things like that, to monitor and to manipulate us all the time.
And to me, artificial intelligence just puts this on steroids.
And so I think there is something to be anxious about if we're going to look at this.
We should be concerned about it.
Maybe not anxious, but we should be concerned about the goals of people who are putting this kind of stuff together.
So, yeah.
But there's that.
And then there's if you can manage to change the present, you can manipulate the future.
Of course, there's a real way to get it is to get control of the past, as Orwell pointed out.
You control the past, you can control the present, and by the implication, control the future.
And we're seeing alterations of materials, even government documents, government films, documentaries, things like that, are being altered in ways that are not visible, not, I should say, detectable, not detectable to the ordinary person.
So they get ideas about what the past was like, which are wrong and don't show you, as I mentioned in the book, if you were at a dance in 1850 before the Civil War, and it's a film we're watching.
Let's say we're watching a film about 1850, and we're seeing people ballroom dancing, all that.
Then one of them pulls to the side and pulls out a cell phone.
And you say, wait a minute, we didn't have cell phones then.
Well, you know, there were a lot of things that were going on now that were not going on in the past.
And it's not to our advantage to try to pretend that they were.
They weren't.
We have to understand the past to understand the future.
And we're not only creating situations that are false, but we're also, like in 1984, Orwell created a character called Commander Ogilvy.
He was a war hero.
He got all sorts of medals, and it was all the prologues were all told to honor him and so forth.
Well, he never existed.
He actually was made up entirely.
And that's one of the things that the narrator is doing in the job at work is filling in photographs, inserting Ogilvy into historical events that happened, wartime scenarios, etc.
Anyone reading it will say, wow, this is some man.
Well, he was a complete fabrication.
We're just about at that point with Sora, the AI app, which could take you and had you, you know, to say, let's get David Knight and have him leading some sort of a parade of whatever.
And, you know, suddenly people say, well, gosh, I saw him with my own eyes.
So what's happening is that the actual seeing is believing is being turned on its head.
So that's no longer true.
You're talking about a completely fabricated character out of Orwell.
Just recently they had Tilly Norwood, who is a completely fabricated AI personality.
And the person who came up with it got agents representing her that got her out there as an actress.
I mean, it's like, so I've created an AI actress, which will do a lot of different roles for you.
She probably does her own stunts as well, I imagine.
People in SAG, Screen Actors Guild and they're furious about this and said any agent that represents this AI character is not going to do any business with us.
But we're already at that point.
It truly is interesting.
And one of the ways of neutralizing it is to create the situation that exists right now between you and me.
You're laughing and I'm laughing because it seems sunny.
And it is sunny.
But it's a very serious purpose behind all this.
It's all a matter to try to alter people's perceptions so that they begin to doubt the veridity of what they're seeing.
That's right.
Yes.
And I've talked for the longest time about how the whole idea for the internet was created by DARPA psychologists.
And I've been concerned that it was all about psychological manipulation from the get-go with all of this.
But as a physician and as a neuroscientist, I'd be interested in your take on what is currently going on.
Because besides manipulating the past by changing information about the past or memory-holing it or writing a new alternative history of it, they're also concerned, and there's been projects that have been put out by DARPA, and I don't know if they've been successful or not, but they're putting out requests for people to come up with things to manipulate people's memories.
So you've got a soldier, they say, who's got bad PTSD?
Let's get rid of that memory.
Let's give them different memories.
What do you see in terms of someone who studies the brain and neuroscience?
What do you see about that?
What do you take is, I think, is the state of the art with that?
Well, my last book was called The Complete Book of Memory.
It had to do with memory.
I studied memory in great detail.
And of course, you have to do away with the concept that memory is like a videotape or something that you just store in your brain.
And when you want to get it, you just bring it out like you'd bring out a videotape.
It's not like that.
It's a reconstruction.
Each time you think back to a certain event, you alter that memory so that you have memory one, memory two, memory three, on and on and on.
That's the nature of memory.
And memory can be manipulated.
It's always, you know, in the courtroom, they're always trying to avoid the contamination of the witness.
The example of that would be, well, which car went through the red light?
And to ask a witness, and he said, oh, it was a red car went through the red light.
Well, would it surprise you to know that it wasn't a red light, but it was a stop sign, Mr. Witness?
Of course, his credibility is gone because he took the suggestion that it was a red light and said, and it'd be very easy to do because you don't necessarily have that image of that intersection in your mind.
So that's why there's protections, even in the courtroom, against leading the witness, they call it.
In other words, providing information that's either not true at all or half true.
So we've got that going.
This didn't start in the 21st century.
That started, you know, as long as we've had courtrooms.
This is more an emphasis now on altering memory so that people will get up there and under cross-examination, they'll do pretty well because their whole memory has been altered.
They've changed by various mechanisms, suggestion, repeating information which is false, of course, which is the misinformation.
There's a cartoon about a week ago by Ramirez in which he's built a prize winner.
He has three doctors in an operating room in a laboratory.
One of them is looking into a microscope and he looks up and he says, this is the most dangerous pathogen we have ever encountered.
And the second doctor says, well, is it bubonic plague?
Is it smallpox?
And then the one lady says, no, it's misinformation and disinformation.
That's right.
And we've got to be very careful because many times the people who will tell us about that are the people who want to be the ones who define what the information is for us.
And they will ask those leading questions.
You know, when we talk about leading questions and manipulating people, there's been a lot of reports about artificial intelligence, kind of people who have a particular psychosis or something, and they get involved with the AI, and it starts to confirm the things that they want because that's what it is set up to do in terms of bias.
I want to, you know, be empathetic and sympathetic to people.
And so it starts doing that and leading them further and further down a particular rabbit hole.
There's been situations of people got into severe mental distress, some suicides of some young children and other things like that.
Speak to that aspect of it and the real danger of that.
That is really kind of, I think, speaks to the psychological aspect and potential of artificial intelligence.
And that could be weaponized.
Right now, it's just kind of happening out of their business model, right?
But that could definitely be weaponized against people.
Well, I talk about that in my book, in the chapter on the internet.
There are famous examples of people who have suicided right on the internet live feed, and they've been manipulated to doing that by other people who've encouraged them, said this would be a sign of strength.
This would be a sign of that you're not afraid to die if necessary.
And there's cases of it that actually led to the suicide.
One of them is the most grisly I have in my book about a person who was talked into pouring gasoline over themselves and setting a match all on open feed internet.
And while this fire is burning, you can hear everybody in the background cheering.
We did it.
We did it.
We got him to do it.
Wow.
That's amazing.
That's amazing.
So there's something about the internet and about that actually brings out sadistic, criminal, psychopathic trends.
And we don't know why.
Is it the fact that you don't necessarily can't be identified?
It's something that is going to be influencing and has influenced the internet greatly.
And it will continue to do so until we understand it.
I think that's one of the things that's so dangerous about the things that we saw with lockdown and other aspects of it.
There's an atomization here.
And so many different ways the government and tech companies are trying to make sure that we're not in person with each other.
Many cases, like for example, in this interview, we couldn't do this interview if one of both of us had to travel.
We're able to do this because we can do it over Zoom or whatever.
But just taking ordinary things that you would normally do in terms of interacting with people in school or in church or in your community or whatever, taking that away and putting a screen between the two of you, it really does change the way people interact with each other.
I remember Errol, the film director, was able to get people to say all kinds of things to him.
He got a murderer to confess.
He got Robert McNamara to confess about the false flag of the Vietnam War.
He got people to say all kinds of stuff because there was that distance between him and them.
He could have interviewed them in person, but what he did was he put an Interatron, which is what he called it.
It was basically a teleprompter that he had set up so he could do two-way communication at the time.
And once he had that distance there, then it completely changed the dynamics that he would have versus with somebody person to person.
And that's what we're talking about here, isn't it?
Yeah, we're talking about that.
And of course, there's integrations of this, and it continues.
Like you were interviewing me, we're discussing, I feel like it's a discussion.
If I were to say something that later I regretted, I could probably say, oh, well, that wasn't me.
Was my avatar or my agent, right?
I got an AI agent that's out there doing.
That's right.
It's crazy.
We also see, though, as a doctor, you're seeing people have noticed actual physical changes that can be observed in people's brains.
I'm thinking of the story about the London taxi drivers who would do the knowledge, and they would find that after they memorized all these factual details and drew on that all the time in order to take people to this very complicated city with its complicated streets, that they had a particular part of their brain that was larger than the typical person.
And then they found that once they stopped doing that, it started to shrink again.
And we're starting to see that happening with people in a lot of different areas of their life, that kind of atrophy.
And it's physically observable, isn't it?
Well, it is.
You have to learn.
You have to use the things that you have learned to do.
Like I mentioned in my memory book, there's all kinds of memory exercises that you could do.
I do them every day.
And they're very easy, and they help you to continue with your memory and keep it sharp.
Give us some examples.
I'm sure everybody would love to know that.
We'd all like to have a better memory.
What kind of things can we do to exercise?
Well, think about the fact that you never had to learn pictures.
When you were an infant and a young child, a picture was something that you could, you may not know what you're looking at, but you could see it without an intermediary.
Whereas language is something that you have to hear from other people.
It's something that's sort of added on to the brain.
Okay.
So as a result, the most best way of remembering something is to make an image for it.
For instance, I have a little dog called a Skipper Key.
Skipper Key is a Belgian dog.
He's a nice little fellow.
But it was embarrassing to me when walking the street.
People would say, what kind of a dog is that?
And I couldn't come up with a name because it was such complicated.
And I thought, that's Skipper Key.
I didn't speak any Dutch or anything.
So then I got this image of a small boat with a large captain with a beard holding a big key.
So it was Skipper Key.
And I remember it forever.
So I had the picture.
Once I have the picture, it's easy to do.
Another way, an easy way to do it, and you can do that with all kinds of times all the time.
I was going upstairs before I came down to the office, and I wanted to get my wallet, and I wanted to get my cell phone.
So I just had an image of a wallet in the form of a cell phone, and I was walking up the stairs talking into the wallet cell phone.
So I got up, and I knew I had these two elements to get.
It'd be very easy to get one and forget the other.
So you have these images all the time.
And the quickest, you know, this is sort of off the topic of the book, but if you want to have a firepower memory for a load of things, that's up to 10 things, and get 10 areas that you are familiar with, that you see every day.
And then you could put on those images the thing you're trying to remember.
So if I'm trying to remember a loaf of bread, milk, maybe batteries, I have a regular way of doing that.
I have, like, I remember my library that's near my home, the coffee shop, the liquor store, Georgetown University Medical School, where I went, Georgetown University, Cafe Milano, which is a place in Washington everybody gathers, and then Keybridge, Iwajima Memorial, and Reagan Airport.
So that bread would be, for instance, the loaf of bread.
I would look in the window of the library, instead of seeing books, I'd see bread, loaves of bread.
And when I get down to the liquor store, instead of it being filled with liquor, it'd all be milk bottles.
So that's how I'd have to get to it.
So I have those 10, so I can get 10 items together without any problems at all.
That's great.
Yeah, it's interesting you talk about the importance of a visualization.
It's one of the things that I do in terms of preparing for the show.
I have a lot of articles that I go through.
And it's really when I highlight things or when I write them down, that's when I can remember them.
If I don't do that, if I were just to read these things, I wouldn't remember them.
But if I interact with it and write it down, that helps me to remember it.
So that is a kind of visualization there, I guess, as well.
It truly is interesting.
And what you said earlier about memory not being something that is stored in a place as somebody coming from a computer science background, that was a very different thing.
When you construct your memory, how do you reconstruct that?
I mean, that opens up a whole new area of questions as well.
In other words, every time somebody brings up a subject, I mean, there isn't something that's stored initially to reference that and then rebuild from that.
Yeah, there's that.
There's the interconnections.
Like, you know, somebody listening to us might say, well, gee, this is called the 21st century brain, but I haven't heard that much about the brain.
Well, let me just link that up so that these things make sense.
We have a new version, or I should say a new understanding of the brain called the connectomic brain, in which there's all kinds of interactions in the brain of parts of the brain, which you don't, we're just learning about.
I have the, I use the metaphor of a bowl of spaghetti.
You pull out one of the strains of spaghetti, and you never have any idea what it's connected to, how many other strains of spaghetti this is connected to.
So that's, if you think of the brain as being kind of set to make connections, that's its natural processing.
So it gets back to these things that we were talking about earlier, you know, global warming and memory and surveillance and all that.
How are we going to solve all those?
Well, somehow or other, those things are connected with each other.
That's the take-home message of this book.
And the basic goal is to try to figure out what it is that connects these things, what it is that would allow us to, by solving one of them, solve the other.
And I mentioned at the end of the book, experts so far haven't done it.
So it's useful, as Hayek said, to get ordinary people to give, when I say ordinary, I mean non-specialized people, to give their ideas.
Gee, I wonder what such and such would happen.
What would happen about global warming?
For a while, in fact, there's still experiments going on on the effect of sulfur that would help the CO2 problem and shooting sulfur up into the atmosphere.
Of course, the reason for that was the volcano in 1980 something, in which after that volcano in Hawaii, it was noted that the air was clearer and there was less pollution.
So that's something to think about.
Is there some way of using that particular sulfur experiment to decrease global warming?
War, for instance, we don't think of war as a cause of global warming, but it is.
Or CO2.
Thermonuclear warming.
Yeah, it's been put up since the Ukraine war and the Gaza war.
Then, you know, tremendous amounts.
It's going to overcome and exceed the benefit of any of these things like non-gasoline engines, but using electrical and things like that.
Absolutely.
Yeah, it's kind of like shooting up rockets in order to put satellites up.
How many cars and lifetime use of cars from people would that be equivalent to?
And you start talking about all the missiles that are being shot.
And then you get to the explosives as well.
It is really interesting how they focus on their objectives for their ways to control it.
The manipulation's been going on for quite some time.
And so, yeah, that is pretty amazing.
And I guess that's my, you know, my, when we look at this stuff, it really does look like science fiction.
And I'm almost inclined to write it off when I first see it.
When DARPA is saying, well, we need to find some way that we can erase memories in people and insert new memories into them.
I mean, we're going back to total recall, right?
So it sounds like something from a Philip K. Dick novel, but they're really working on that.
And I guess one of the most striking things we saw, we reported on it a couple of weeks ago.
And it was a company that was bragging about how they could read your mind more accurately and quickly than their competitors, because there's a lot of different companies that are doing this.
And how they could, it was called Brain IT was the name of the company.
And so they had a way that they would do MRI and they could essentially train it on your brain in a much shorter period of time than the other people.
And they could get much better results.
And our producers just pull this up.
So what they do is they show you an image and you're looking at that image and then it's reading your mind and reconstructing what you're looking at, which I thought was absolutely amazing and terrifying at the same time.
How is this going to be used?
I guess that's the real issue.
When we start talking about all these different things, I think that is the real case that it's difficult for people to understand just how far and how quickly the technology has progressed.
And then to say, and how do we control this from it being used for bad purposes?
Well, that's a specifically 21st century problem.
Yes.
Because all of these things have either originated in the 21st century or they have in fact further developed and become increasingly threatening.
And bear in mind, we have to have to solve these problems because they're not something that's going to go away.
And then the most important thing to remember, David, is that all of these things harm the brain.
And the brain is the thinking processor that's going to save us.
It's going to figure out what the problems, what the solutions to the problems are.
So we know now that wildfire smoke, for instance, it creates dementia.
It enhances the likelihood of somebody becoming demented.
So as the brain is affected negatively, increasingly over longer and longer periods of time, our ability to solve these problems is going to decrease.
So we've got to do it now.
We've got to get serious about it.
And this business of people getting up and saying that global warming is fiction and all that is really very disturbing.
Yeah, well, you know, the example that you gave earlier of the fact that the Indian government was manipulating the temperature at some of the stations there, that kind of works both ways.
They have put some of these temperature stations on the airport tarmacs.
And in the UK, they have a lot of the temperature stations that they've got there, they're just extrapolating the data.
They don't have real temperature measurement stations there.
So it all really gets back, I think, to the scientific method.
And that's really where we have to hold people's feet to the fire.
We're talking about something like that.
We can have an absolute standard of what truth is.
And that truth is going to be being able to measure something accurately and being able to reproduce that.
And then I think a good yardstick for that is when somebody is trying to hide their data, that's the clue right there that they're not doing science.
Because if they're doing science and they've come to the right conclusion, they don't have a problem with somebody looking at their data.
And so I've got a question here for you from a person in the audience asking about doctors James Giordano and Charles Morgan and their work with military.
I'm not familiar with those names.
I don't know if you know anything about that or not.
Giordano says familiar.
What particular thing are they asking about them?
I don't know.
It just says their work with the military.
I guess it would have to do with something, but you haven't heard of it.
I'm not sure whether they're talking about it.
I could say Giordano did this or did that.
No.
Sure, I understand.
Yeah, let's talk a little bit about the things that we have been anxious about.
And, of course, as Christians, we have one answer to it.
But you talk about how this is something that has been around pretty much all of our life.
I mean, I grew up with anxiety about nuclear war, for example.
That was on everybody's television, and that was the forefront of our mind, especially growing up in Florida when the Cuban Missile Crisis was happening.
They got us really afraid of that when I was in elementary school.
It's like there's not going to be enough time for you to get home when the nuclear bombs start falling.
And so, I mean, there's all these different ways that you can panic people.
I guess part of it is how do we identify the real problems and how do we deal with those problems?
Because there's always things that are competing for our attention and our anxiety, many of which are not real.
And usually the things that you're really the most concerned about don't happen.
And it may be sometimes because you have taken a precaution about it.
What would you say about that, about anxiety?
You're starting to break up a little bit.
Can you hear me clearly?
I hear you.
Yes, yes.
Sorry about that.
It's breaking up a little bit.
You're talking about traumatizing a population.
What do you do to guard against that type of thing?
And of course, that's going to really escalate with the ability of AI to create a narrative.
Yeah, well, let's talk as an avenue to get into that.
Let's go back to what you brought about the atomic weapons and the atomic war and the fears of people that there's going to be another atomic war.
I mean, you know, this is not unrealistic.
There's even been a movie that's just come out that's getting all kinds of attention, as you know, and has to do with the threat of a nuclear war.
If you look at what's happening in Europe right now, there's all kinds of suggestions that could lead to a nuclear war.
I mean, Ukraine now has announced that they're under no conditions willing to give up any land.
And Stalin is, I mean, Putin is thinking what he can do to change that.
Maybe he'll attack another country.
I mean, this is scary stuff.
So what's happening in response to the government is to try to show that, oh, we shouldn't worry about it.
We have things under control, but I don't think things are under control.
And we've talked about the problems, and we talked about problems.
Your final chapter is New Ways of Thinking.
And I'd like to talk about that.
One of the things that you say is Occam was wrong, Occam's razor that people are familiar with.
Tell us a little bit about that.
Why is Occam wrong?
Well, because he says that entities are not to be multiplied, meaning that we can always explain things best by limiting ourselves to the minimum amount of factors, ideally one, one cause of every effect.
That's not true.
It's certainly not true in the 21st century, where there's all kinds of interactions between factors and causes.
So that Occam was wrong in that basis.
We have to think of an interconnecting pool, just as in the brain, of interconnections of neurons, interconnections of these problems.
And they're all related.
They're all related.
All eight of them that I talk about in my book.
They're all related.
And if you can figure a way of influencing one, you influence all the others.
I mean, who would think there'd be a connection between global warming and the amount of artisan and cheese, for instance, high-end cheese?
Well, there is because they don't check and so lay the many eggs and all the various other things that come on in terms of making cheese.
I learned that the other day.
That was something that was a surprise to me.
You know, it's kind of interesting they talk about connections so much.
There was a series that was on, I think it was on PBS.
I think the guy's name was Burke.
I can't remember his first name.
I'm not sure about the last name, but he had a series called Connections.
And I thought it was fascinating because what he would do is he would take a whole series of connections to show how a particular technology had evolved.
So he might go from the quill to the jet engine or something like that.
And it was a fascinating, fascinating thread of things, very much like what you're talking about.
It really is.
And I did consult his work, actually.
Did you?
When I was writing this book, because he did that connections.
He did a book called The Day the World Changed and all this.
He also did a book called Circles, in which he would start with one particular event that occurred in history.
And if you go around the circle, you come back to the beginning where it started, where this particular inventor invented something.
What led up to it?
What was the circle leading to that?
So yes, we're talking about connections, and we're talking about the inability to understand things without reference to supporting and accessory factors.
We have that going all the time, denying things that are going to be happening.
And of course, I think the fearful thing is that the government is aiding in this denial.
Because if you deny that there's a problem, then there's very little impetus to try to solve it.
If there ain't no problem, don't try to solve it.
They're throwing out their own chaos and uncertainty and anxiety that's out there all the time, always, I guess.
So the question is, you're talking about volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
I mean, that sounds like a government policy.
I think they've got bureaucracies that specialize in that.
Yeah.
Well, actually, that's true.
Yeah, that's in your section there about new ways of thinking.
And so how do we incorporate that into new ways of thinking that help us to solve this riddle?
Well, each of those factors is a factor that helps you to understand things and to have more control.
It doesn't necessarily mean it helps you to link them together.
That has to be done by original thinking.
You have to be, you know, under those things, things are volatile.
You don't have a basic situation that doesn't change.
It changes all the time.
So the other thing that I want to emphasize most is that is the role of capitalism in all of this.
I mean, there's all this, like the private equity, the business of people having a point of view that is going to advance them financially and then blinding them to the problems that are here.
Like, for instance, we talked about global warming.
Well, the rich people, very rich people, are buying multi-million dollar apartments and condominiums, which have special air filters, which will keep wildfire smoke out and will try to keep the global warming effect at bay by superpower air conditioners.
They're building their own bunkers, too.
They're building things that are creating all kinds of chaos and weapons of war and mass destruction.
They're out there building super bunkers in various places as well.
So I think they're somewhat pessimistic about what they're doing.
Well, it's basically the idea is that we don't care about the ordinary person.
We're going to survive.
We're going to see to our own survival.
And in order to do that, we have to deny certain things that are going on.
We'll do so.
Now, incidentally, all of this is not conscious thinking.
They don't necessarily say, well, I'm going to deny global warming because it'll be to my advantage financially because all my investment is in the oil and gas industry.
They don't do it that way.
They come up with pseudo-logic, things that seem to make sense to them.
But if they didn't have a financial thrust in the matter, they would look upon it quite differently.
That's right.
We can always find a justification for what it is that we really want.
Everybody should understand that if you're a parent this time of year at Christmastime, you can always understand that people will come up with a justification for what they want.
And that's as true of government as it is of corporations out there.
And it's really dangerous when the two of them connect with each other.
I think that's one of the things, you know, you talk about connections and the importance of it and how we can try to connect these different factors, each of us individually, but I think it's the human connection that is out there that is going to be essential for all of this.
It's going to be our collective work on all this.
What do you think about that?
Would you agree with that?
Well, I'd agree with it, but there's so many things that are taking place now that are causing the schisms and splitting people into factors and belief systems and political points of view.
And that's very dangerous because then you can't get together any kind of unity, even in the face of an emergency.
Well, I think we've always had these factors, you know, factions and things like that.
You know, the founders of the country warned about factions and political parties.
But I think what makes it unique is that when you're interacting with people on a personal basis, you interact with them a little bit differently than if you've got that separation between you that technology is giving us now.
Because now you're interacting with something that's abstract.
It's not with another person.
And there's also the body language that you're not picking up on.
But it makes it easier for you to be harder on people when there's that distance there, I think.
That's why I think, you know, the personal connection, I think, is really vital to making these connections and coming up with an understanding of what's going on.
We talk about the hidden factors that are out there, hidden unrelated topics, other people, as you pointed out earlier, just talking to ordinary people about what it is that you see with different things.
I think that is the genius of the collective free market out there, that there's so many observers who are looking at things and thinking about them.
And it's kind of their collective decision that is kind of guiding things along, as opposed to having a central planner who's doing that.
What do you think about that?
You've got to, in your final chapter, a new way of thinking, you have what you call a sensible solution.
What does that really involve?
I'm sorry, I didn't hear what you said.
What's the last part?
You have a sensible solution.
What do you think a sensible solution to the kind of stress and chaos and anxiety that we have, manipulation that we have?
What is a solution to that?
Well, I think the Wikipedia is a good example of that.
They have people from all walks of life, all levels of education, free to contribute to whatever topic they may want to do that.
It may be helpful.
I mentioned earlier about the effect of global warming on the making of cheese.
It might be somebody who makes cheese that's going to come up with some idea.
You know, we don't know that.
We don't know that that may not be where comes some original idea on what to do about global warming.
And you put it on what I'd like to think, and I hope it will be developed, a kind of Wikipedia where the ordinary person can feel free to put forth their ideas about it.
Now, you say, well, we already have that.
We have the internet.
No, we don't.
The internet is a commercial situation.
It's all done for making money and grab attention and all that.
And there's no criticism of it.
There's no peer review, if you will.
Whereas in the Wikipedia, I mean, you know, people could write in and say, well, that particular contribution is bonkers and then give an example why it is, or that was a very good idea.
And after that, you begin to get things coming together in unpredictable ways that may help us solve these eight problems.
You know, the problem is, it seems like whenever you wind up having a form or place where things can be, and that's true of the internet, it's also true of Wikipedia, then it becomes you have gatekeepers who are there.
And we saw this in spades throughout the COVID stuff: that if somebody's got a different idea, rather than debate them, the impetus is to silence them by the people who are in authority.
And so that really, I think, is the key thing.
And I think as part of that, we see a continuing rise in disgust and deprivation of free speech.
People are not interested in the principle of free speech.
They don't want to have open debate.
And I see this, regardless of where people are coming from on the political spectrum, there is a declining interest in debate and thinking.
The debate is critical to critical thinking.
And so the people who are in charge, the gatekeepers, whether it's Wikipedia or the Internet or any other form of information, they are weighing in on that.
And they don't want things that they disagree with.
And it might be because they've got an agenda or it might be because they've just got a particular prejudice about something.
They want to make sure that the contrary views don't get out there.
That, I think, is a real key that's there.
And again, this is part of this atomization that we have of people, feeding that tribalism in a way that we've never seen it before using technology.
I agree with everything you've just said, exactly.
And I think we have to try to get beyond that.
But we get back again to this business of people having their own personal financial point of view and position and pushing that basically on the fact that they look upon it as so maybe we're talking about a capitalism problem.
We've got capitalism.
It's what this country is all about.
But I mean, it's in certain parts of it now.
We've gotten to the point where people are unable to take another point of view if it's going to be financially harmful and hurtful to them.
Yeah.
I think that, you know, start looking at the tech companies.
I don't think that their capitalism would exist.
I don't think they'd have billions of dollars if they weren't unified with the government.
So there's a symbiosis there that the two of these entities feed off of each other.
And I think that nexus right there is a difficult thing.
And so I think, you know, when I think of capitalism, I don't like to refer to capitalism anymore because I think of it as a partnership, a public-private partnership, some kind of economic fascism where they are working together.
But I like to think of a free competitive market where the government doesn't have any role except as some kind of a referee between two parties that have a conflict or something.
But yeah, that's the thing that's really driving this.
Many people, when they talk about AI, they said, well, here's a couple of different outcomes.
Maybe this stuff really works the way it's supposed to work and it takes everybody's jobs and we wind up with a depression.
Or maybe it doesn't work at all, in which case the big AI stock bubble that we've got bursts and everybody loses their job because of that.
I said, well, there's a third alternative, and that is that the government keeps propping it up with public funds because it feeds their surveillance and manipulation needs, their ability to surveil and to control us.
And I really think that that's where this is all going to head.
I don't really, you know, those other two things may happen and they may be true.
But I think there is a customer out there for the AI stuff that is driving all this stuff that has been putting out these proposals for the longest time.
And that's governments, governments around the world.
I mean, we look at the brain project that we had a few years ago.
That was during the Obama administration.
But things like the brain-computer interface that Elon Musk and many other tech companies are doing out there with this Neural Inc., and there's a lot of them that are doing that.
That's being driven by the government wanting to connect into our minds, hack into our minds, really.
And they've been funding that kind of stuff.
So how do we break that?
Yeah.
On the Musk side, he's doing it for money.
I mean, obviously to make money.
That's right.
So that there's an unholy alliance, if you will, between someone who can't see anything other than the dollar and another side of the government can't see anything other than increasing power and surveillance over the population.
Yeah, that's right.
Absolutely true.
Well, it's a fascinating book.
It's a fascinating take on this.
And, of course, you've written many books on the brain.
The memory one, very interesting.
And you do have sections about memory in this book as well.
And people will be able to find this on Amazon, I guess, is the best place that they can find it.
Looking for the title of this.
And it is something that I think we all need to think about how we're going to operate the effects that this technology is having on our brains in the 21st century.
And that is the title of the book, The 21st Century Brain by Richard Restak.
Thank you very much, Dr. Restak.
Thank you.
Appreciate you coming on.
Good day.
I enjoyed it very much.
Thank you.
Yeah, very interesting conversation.
Thank you.
Have a good day.
Folks, we're going to take a quick break, and we will be right back.
The Common Man.
They created common core to dumb down our children.
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That is what we have in common.
That is what they want to take away.
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