Well, I mean, silence is actually one of the most effective uh forms of
criticism. Uh it so it's beneath anyone's notice. What I wrote was
beneath anyone's notice. And that also occurred with my book about addiction actually, heroin addiction and opiate
addiction. The pseudonym was chosen because it's a very old-fashioned name. Dal Rumple is a
kind of Scottish aristocratic name and I wanted to sound old-fashioned and
badtempered and I think it was a successful choice. Also, it had to be a
name uh that didn't appear on the medical register. There was no doctor
Theodore Dal Rimple. So, no Dr. Theodore Dal Rimple could come out of the woodwork and complain. Part of it of
course is that uh actually there's a pleasure in contemplating catastrophe and disaster. Um because actually we we
live by comparison with all previously existing humans we live uh extremely
safe uh healthy lives. I mean when my father was born for example the life
expectancy of a male in England was 47 years which
is sort of African type level
[music]
[music]
I'm honored today to have again uh Dr. Anthony Daniels aka Theodore Dal Ripple.
That's his pen name. Um we're honored uh to be on somewhat of a firstname basis. Now he's been a little bit of my loadar
and directive albeit at you know his ignorance um and my bliss I suppose um
because I followed his work for so many years through so many of outlets I he's written for all the major English
outlets in including if I'm not wrong the spectator and uh telegraph and and maybe the times and whatnot [snorts] and
uh we can find him at city journal oftentimes um from the Manhattan Institute. uh he's a great social
commentator. He's a medical doctor uh psychiatrist as well and um he's been out of practice I think for 20 years uh
but not out of the practice of producing really sharp finely um honed uh
perspectives and writings. He's um you know it's kind of like looking a diamond
you know there's there's light that flashes off we get many different facets and Dr. Daniels, doc, theater down
provides that to so many different perspectives, social and medical. Um his book is uh life at the bottom I think is
being reprinted by the Manhattan Institute. Uh I recommend that he's got so many other excellent works um in
praise of prejudice which is you know sounds enimical to our day but you know we're always not only prejudging things
but judging things or else we would be bumping into walls um and spending a lot of time and we seem to do that kind of
on a societal basis and uh to it Dr. uh Daniels has written uh so many fabulous
books. The one that kind of helped guide my uh practice uh maybe you know running out of ground in a way um but it was
very informative when I began doing addiction work mid you know kind of late into midway into my medical practice. I
was a primary care doctor. Um is called here romancing opiates and has the more
pathy title in the UK of junk medicine referring to junk or junky heroin and whatnot. And um I think our views align
a little bit but I have to say you know mine probably adhered to uh the um magnetic force that you presented um and
and Dr. Daniels um has again a lot of these great social works um as well as
short stories and so forth. Um but a couple of the books that I maybe we can cover today. Um this is uh mass
lististeria. Uh great pun. You would expect no nothing less. Kind of the mass
hysteria of um things like not lististeria per se but of diseases and grandism. This is let's see if we can
get in focus. Admirable uh evasions. Um how psychology undermines morality. And
one of my favorite books which I recommend I've given this book out a fair number of times. Uh, see, it doesn't seem to want to focus. My
camera's too smart for anything. Uh, so you're not going to be able to see it. Too bad. Uh, let's see. That's weird.
Um, it's got its own thing here. So, I I'll have to tell you what it is. False positive, a year of error, omission, and
political correctness, weirdly enough, in the New England Journal of Medicine by Theodore Down. And so, that goes week
by week by week to show how weak by how weak week by week uh the New England
Journal tends to be. So, uh, that's just as a way of preface. Um, so Dr. Daniels,
um, uh, uh, how how do you do what you do? You know, that's an easy question.
No, it's not. Well, I spend a lot of time doing it. I, uh, I'm a kind of obsessional reader and
then writer and there's very very little else that I do. I mean, my wife complains about it a bit actually. Um so
um that I just um spend a lot of time
doing it. I suppose I don't as I said I don't do much else. So um
and it doesn't seem that remarkable to me to have to do so much by comparison
with uh for example professional journalists who seem to me to uh shall
we say not be very productive or um
of course in the early days uh I used occasionally to go to their lunches and since they lasted six hours there was no
mystery as to why they produced do so little. But uh
uh those days are over. Of course, those good old days are over. It's much harder for journalists now.
So the the reception of false positive, you know, I I' I've kind of done a meta
uh view of your book and just to see what the for me it was really uh you
know, a great read. I I um I didn't read it all at once. Um,
I had it kind of lying around. I pick it up here and there, but it was always entertaining. You have nice twists on
your articles and uh, so I I like, oh, I was see what people thought of it. You know, was there response from the New
England Journal of Medicine so forth? There's very little there about your false positive book. I mean, mind you,
the camera doesn't want to have any part of it either for some reason. It's a conspiracy. It's not interesting in your book. I
don't know what the deal is. Maybe if I open up the page or something like that, but there's like one review of it and it and it um
Oh, there we go. We can get doesn't like the cover for some reason, but the front piece falls. Anyway, uh there's very
little out there except to kind of like go a bad down. Um you know, do do you
get receptions? I mean, is it screaming into the void as one of my friends said about one of my recent articles? I have
an article called uh the Taliban as Teletubbies. I don't if you know what Teletubbies are. their little childhood
figures, a TV show and what and we way we kind of minimize Islamic violence and
it's it's a it's a it's a serious piece despite the title and somebody read it recently and said, "Yeah, fine. You did
a great job with that article, but screaming into the void, you know, there's so many other forces out there. Why bother?"
Yeah. Well, I mean, silence is actually one of the most effective uh forms of
criticism. Uh it so it's beneath anyone's notice. Uh what I wrote was
beneath anyone's notice. And that also occurred with my book about addiction actually, heroin addiction and opiate
addiction. Uh there was uh practically
no review. There was one in the Lancet um where uh in which um the reviewer uh
said something the claim that I said something that I clearly did not say and
that was it. And he also didn't like the style of of the book. He he found me too
sarcastic I suppose. But um uh silence is a is a very powerful form of
criticism because of course you if you're silent you don't have to answer the criticisms if you just disregard it.
And uh however one must be care I have every author complains and therefore I I
have to be careful that I'm not I'm not um overestimating my own importance.
After all, there are I don't know 200,000 books a year published. So I
can't expect um um uh you know in immense numbers of um reviews and and of
course I write I suppose about things uh which most people are not interested in.
I I don't know. Well, you know, I forget about which
it's spoken, but you may not be interested in I don't know if it's about maybe politics. You know, you may not be
interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. And you probably transmit that phrase a lot of different
ways. So the the topics upon which you write, people may not ipso factor at the
moment be interested in, but a lot of times it what goes around comes around and it be they have to eventually become
interested in it. You know, your life at the bottom was written what 20 years ago,
but it seems obviously more no longer 25 years. 25 26 years ago it
was published and some of the articles were because it was a collection of articles that had been published in the
um city journal. Some of them were are now 32 years old. So, uh, uh, uh, yes, I
I I think that they're still highly pertinent to things that are going on
now. And I hesitate to say that they are prophetic, but at any rate, they were
they saw things which were developing and have um, I don't know whether
they're worse, but they're certainly no better. uh now.
Yeah. Well, no, I think they're out there and you know I I have a Substack
and and you know talking about you know stream screaming into the wind. I do a fair amount of that or tilted windmills.
I don't know which one I do. There aren't that many windmills around. Maybe more and more these days along with the solar panels. Um but you know sometimes
things come around and it's not just the number of readers you get. Sometimes it's it's who reads it. Um, I I've met
with certain people who are in reasonably high roles. Um, and you know,
they've told me they read my stuff. So, that's nice. You know, I've gotten compliments from people. So, it's it's
sometimes, you know, you might be on a cruise ship and uh, you know, you do X, Y, and Z
during the day or you throw a letter, toss it off the end of the boat, nobody's going to read it. But if you
happen to sit at the captain's table and you give them a tip and the cap, you know, he's running the cruise ship, you
know, it might have a little bit more of a kind of a dispositive effect on the way things ripple out. So, you know,
it's not so much that, you know, millions of people may not uh, you know, probably more people know about Stephen
King then know about you. Um, on the other hand, uh, you know, I think that's certain.
If you want to that's certain. Yes,
it is certain. If you want to understand what's going on with the UK, you know, whatever whatever type of
horror show the UK has turned into, and maybe Stephen King might be pertinent some regards there, people are going to
learn a little bit probably more about it reading Theodore Down.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's what I hope. I hope it's uh almost my articles
are like a Chinese water torture and and eventually uh
to change the metaphor the penny will drop but so far [laughter]
but so far um uh well I it's very difficult to measure any um any effect
one has but I just there isn't anything else I can do I
know how to do I'm not a politician. I'm not a public speaker. Um, all I can do
is write my articles and books and hope that it eventually they will have some
effect, at least make people think.
Well, clearly they have. You know, I I have followed your um podcasts, you
know, elsewhere. Uh, you were on with Charlie Kirk a few years ago and uh with Jordan Peterson. Um, so you know, your
words do get out there and I think these things are influential and they're not necessarily part of the main stream. Uh,
but they are some alternative stream and people can find them and follow you. I
think there's might be some confusion because you're going through this kind of dual name thing. Um, uh, h how does
that work out for you? Well, when I started uh writing about um
what I was seeing in the prison and um and also in the hospital next door and
writing about um and about patients of course I needed a level of disguise and
so I had to have a pseudonym uh and then I as often happens one
almost becomes one's pseudonym. I mean, George Orwell became George Orwell. No
one thinks of him as Eric Blair. Um, so in so far as I'm known at all, I'm
known as under my pseudonym.
Yeah, I you probably it was chosen the pseudonym was chosen
because it's a very old-fashioned name. Dal Rumple is a
kind of Scottish aristocratic name and I wanted to sound old-fashioned and
badtempered and um and um and I think it was a successful choice. Also, it had to
be a name uh that didn't appear on the medical register. There was no doctor
Theodore Dal Rimple. So, no Dr. Theodore Dal Rimple could come out of the woodwork and complain.
That's interesting. Um, so, you know, as far as putting things out there to be
written, and maybe we can segue into the some of the medical things. You know, I I wrote um a book called Overturning
Zika. Um, came out in 2022. And I'm actually I want to make a second edition because
time keeps happening and there keeps there keeps uh there continues not to be
any microphily as a result of Zika anywhere on earth. Um so you know it's a
very simple thing you know they teach you kind of like in science or philosophy you know the scientific
method is hypothesis um testing reevaluation um but so much in medicine just happens
to be say something that's what it is now you know whether um it's gender
dysphoria or um autism or whatever there's a lot of things that just you know they they kind of move the
goalposts uh they say what it is and that's that there's very little kind of iterative testing and reassimilation. So
when we saw it during COVID, I'm not gonna, you know, re relitigate all of that. Um,
but uh, you know, that was something I put out there. I figured, you know, not maybe people are not going to read it that much right off the bat, but it is
kind of a a flag on the moon, you know, that I was there and I said this at that
time and that uh, you know, time will prove me right. There's kind of a competition. Donald
McNeel who was the chief science reporter for the New York Times for decades. Um he eventually had to resign
for completely other political kind of post George Floyd era uh reasons like a
lot of people committed sepuku kitty under under political duress um and he's
on the left mind you but a lot of people did that um but he wrote a book Zika the
emerging um epidemic and uh my book was to be a counter to that overturning Zika
essentially the emerging epidemic um and uh you know he doesn't have a
second edition coming and I've tried to engage him on it but it just seems like there's very little interest in any of
the halls of academia or the functionary um reverberations the you know the
newspapers the New England Journal the Lance and whatnot to to look back at things it seems much much more that
they're promulgating ideas and theories uh of their own you know circulating around um kind of these politically
correct uh aspects whether It's, you know, well, you could you could speak to
those things, but um so the the I suppose if I want to formulate a question is um you know, what what's
medicine up to? What do they wind up doing? Why do we see things like your title book mass lististeria? Why do we
keep kind of falling for these things like I don't know if you know Charlie Brown with the football the cartoon, but
we keep taking swings and misses and come right back. Yes.
Well, um, part of it, of course, is that, uh, actually there's a pleasure in
contemplating catastrophe and disaster. Um, because actually we we live by
comparison with all previously existing humans, we live uh extremely safe uh and
um healthy lives. I mean when my father was born for example life expectancy
of a male in England was 47 years which is sort of African type level. The
infant mortality rate in the burough London burough in uh which he was born
was 124. Um admittedly,
you know, he was he's he was 84 when he died and he was born in 199. But that is
I mean it's not eons ago. It's not thousands of years ago. It it's within
almost living memory. And even when I was born, the infant mortality rate was
36 per thousand, which would now be regarded as appalling. and would be bad
for a South American country. Uh but we forget all that and uh we
forget how how comparatively safe we are. And I think people enjoy the pro I
think you could define human beings as the only species that enjoy that enjoys
contemplating its own extinction. it [laughter]
there's a certain lubrious pleasure in it and um so that that's one
thing on the other hand of course where illness is so
is relatively unusual I mean you still I don't know whether it was your experience but my experience of people
often was why should I get this illness they might they might be 75 or or older
and the idea that they get a fatal illness seems to them almost
um something that that is unthinkable, certainly unthought of. And um so
individual cases of ill illness now seem anomalous to us because we are um we are
so um we are so safe. Um and
so that the fact that we are so safe does not um uh does not limit our fears
as one would have thought it did. On the contrary, it seems in some paradoxical way to increase our fears. I don't know
whether is was that your experience as a generalist that people would ask, you know, why me? Why did I get this? I've
done everything possible to avoid being ill and here I am being ill.
It's almost as if uh there is some cosmic injustice in being ill.
I don't know whether did that ever occur? I didn't hear I didn't hear that specifically from my crowd. I'll have to
think on that one. Um but I think you're on to something. I mean getting back to Stephen King, you
know, he's made his uh you know, his metier um is is horror. And why do we
have that? You know, it's it's kind of a I think there's pornography in a bunch of different realms that's kind of like
horror pornography. You know, we you know, there's pornography when you you know are wanting for or can't achieve
intimacy with, you know, in a say productive literally or figurative way.
And so there's pornography. Um horror I'm not going to put in that same category, but you know, it's clearly
stimulating something that you're not doing for real. Yeah. There there is another I mean I'
I've been thinking a bit about the political response to to health scares
and um I've tried to imagine what I would do if I were in political power if
if some expert came to me and said there's this risk of um of an epidemic
and the fact is that the politician is almost on a hiding to nothing. He's
certainly on a hiding to nothing if he says, well, he tries to put it into some
kind of perspective and says, well, yes, but it's not that serious. Uh because
the moment someone dies which someone else claimed could a death
that death could have been prevented, it's a serious problem for the politician. Whereas if he shuts down the
whole society um no one no one thinks about uh the the the
damage done. uh it's it's not you don't see what you
don't see immediately the damage done but as soon as someone dies of something which someone claims to have been
preventable then the politician is held responsible and regarded as
something of an unfeilling monster. So his default position I think is to
overreact. And uh we should always remember that
any polic any policy has um
[clears throat] uh has bad effects as well as good ones. So anyway, I I I
think the temptation for politicians is always to overreact.
Yeah. No, I I see that. And if you go back through the years, I mean, what
what's the kind of confluence or the rationale of the need politically to I mean, you you I think you speak to some
of that. Um, but you know, it does seem like there's
almost this uh illicit, and I hate to use the word again, put pornographic aspect, lured I guess would be a better
word, to contemplating these um illnesses. And then there's probably a way that they are misused to dovetail
into um analogous threats um that that
can control the populace. I mean, if you want to be cynical, um why not? Let's be cynical for a few
minutes. Um, you know, all the the getting back to the Zika thing. Um,
Donald McNeel's thesis in part for Zika, the emerging epidemic, is not just the
Zika thing, but it's the fact that this is the the harbinger of more of these
creepy crawly uh, you know, here to four unknown things from the tropics. You
know, we are in the temperate zones. We have tempered in personality. We're temperate in our economies. We're
temperate. you know, we're welltempered and you know, honed over the years in this western civilization thing kind of
the northern part of the world and you're going to get Chaga's disease. You're going to get um you know all the
things the parasites from medical school uh you know one one thing after another. all going to come up here whether it's ecoin is the sephilitis west Nile um 80s
Egypty mosquitoes you know the Egypt part the west Nile you know all these places they're going to they're
basically going to invert it's going to be uh the the scourge of these things
that you know you managed to escape in your comfortable place but don't get so comfortable because it's coming after
you because of this you know the big bad sun monster um you know which we have in tained by by you know giving uh adequate
dispensation ations to the you know Al Gore followers of the world you know this so he weaves into the whole climate
thing and moreover tells women employers and women and this is during the the the
plague year of 2016 for Zika as it were I mean I think it was overblown but under that you know inflamed narrative
of the time um he told women to stop having babies and he wrote in the New York Times uh that women throughout the
tropics should stop having babies until they get the Zika vaccine which will come around the corner any day now. I'm
checking number of days is 3,650 whatever it's like 10 years worth of no Zika vaccine. So there'd be like zero
kids anywhere in Latin America um at this point if they'd followed his advice and he was tapped in with Dr. Fouchy at
the time um and and you know it's he he writes about this in the New York Times and so forth. Um and Tom Frerieden was
from New York. He was head of the CDC during the Zeke era. Anyway, but they're all kind of like in at this party and
just to kind of tap this off, um there's an old expression that um politics is Hollywood for ugly people. Um and you
know, you get your certain moment of fame um and people are focusing on let's
say you happen to be an expert on Usbekistsan and all of a sudden the Soviet Union falls in, you know, the
late 80s, early 90s, whatever, and people are talking about this new country. you've been sitting writing
stuff forever in your little ivory tower and people want to know. I saw this literally happen. Some guy got, you
know, pulled out and he's in front of everything and he's talking about usbekistan. I feel like that is the same thing for infectious disease people.
They're working on, you know, Chaga's disease or whatever and all of a sudden people want to know about it. Like tell us more about West Niles like and you're
right there and it's like why wouldn't you do that? And that's that plus that's your money stream to get research funds.
Yeah. I mean one of the things that's uh remarkable and I think people well
people have remarked on it is the change of our attitude to overpopulation. I
don't you remember Dr. Er, uh, who said it's already too late to avoid
population. Yeah. Hundreds of millions of deaths by
um by um famine and here we are worrying about obesity even even in poor
countries. So [clears throat] um the whirly gig of
time brings in his revenge but uh and now we're worried about underpopulation.
We're worried about the aging population. Um so uh but we have to
worry about something. Uh because I I mean extreme fear does at least give you
a purpose in existence. It does give you a feeling of of significance.
Um At this point, if I if I going to write on a pseudonym, I might take Dr. Mouthus' name and do it backward. It' be
like Slam or something like that because Mouthus seems to be totally inverted these days, isn't he? I mean,
well, well, it is. Yes. I mean, I I read actually, oddly enough, I read Mouthus
not long ago, and I mean, he was a a very interesting writer and he was a
actually he was a good man. Um uh and people there are still people who
said oh well it hasn't been true so far but it will come true
one day. And of course uh for a prediction to be of any use there has to
be some kind of time limit on it. You have to be able to say when this is going to happen. So when Dr. Erik put
his neck out and said it's too late to avert famine by I think 1980. I can't
remember. The book was published I think 73 or something 72 or something like that. Um he was at least
um making himself reputable because what he said didn't come to
pass. And um uh I I don't I didn't
actually follow him afterwards. I don't know whether he ever recognized his error. Uh
I don't think so. I mean there's you know about the the you know the famous the bet with Julian Simon.
Oh yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But of course one I mean people will still
say well uh you know it will happen one day
not just yet. I mean it's a it's a bit like St. Augustine uh asking you know to
be uh to be made um um good and um
continent but not just yet. [laughter]
[clears throat] Yeah, there a similar thing. It's like, you know, a lot of women are looking for Mr. Right, but then there's Mr. Right
now. Yes. Yeah, that's right. And anyway, um
it it's an interesting phenomenon and um uh and one which I think will will
continue. And another I mean one of the things that I I I I found in the New England
Journal for example what I did was I took I think it was I think it was 2017 that I took and I took the New England
Journal every week and took an article or two from it and and and examined it
and I was actually frankly rather surprised at um at the poor quality of
of what was uh being written because I mean when I
When I was young, I took um many uh
scientific journals almost as wholly writt. It never occurred to me that they they could be um uh they could be so so
mistaken. And though I am no statistician and no scientist that
someone like me could actually uncover uh grotesque errors such as for example
that uh every time uh there is some kind of correlation it
is taken as causitive um however weak the correlation I mean to give you a kind and I think it's
actually quite important because it has a cultural effect. I'm I'm I'm making this up, but supposing someone comes
along and has examined uh the um the carrot eating uh uh uh
propensities of 400,000 people according to some kind of um some kind of
questionnaire. And they find after 20 years that there's a 17% increase in the
chance of them getting myastthenia gravis if they've eaten more than three carrots a week. Then suddenly
I'm making this up but it but it is the kind of thing that is published then
carrots eating carrots causes mythemia gravis and no one it's once you have to
work out for yourself the absolute numbers you know that what you're
reading is junk because of course a 17% chance of um uh
increased chance of getting myia gravis cannot be very great uh in absolute
terms because numbers of people with mythenia gravis is not very great. So
and that's even if the hypothesis that eating carrots causes the increased
risk. So, but the journals are full of this now. I don't know whether you find
that, but they're full of these kind of very very rashes and in a certain kind
of way highly sophisticated statistically highly sophisticated
um research. And this eventually filters down or not eventually actually quite
often quite quickly filters down into the general culture. some newspaper or
some site picks it up and and and it enters it enters the general uh culture
and general knowledge. I remember the first time I I noticed this phenomenon
was when the eating of uh green potatoes
that had gone slightly green uh had started to photosynthesize
uh was associated with um spinobipida
and [snorts] [laughter] and there was some kind of
reason for this. I think it that kind of research was the early 1970s
and still to this day I cannot look at a green potato. Not that I look at green
potatoes very often but if I see a green potato my first thought is are spobifida
and uh so these things are easy to insinuate in the mind but they're
difficult to remove from the mind. I remember another one was um selenium and
the levels of selenium and um and uh and
coronary artery disease and since walnuts are high in selenium
there was very rapidly uh after the publicity given to this research walnuts
disappeared from supermarkets. You couldn't you couldn't buy a walnut for
love or money. And um that's crazy.
uh and I think this is it's a a kind of
social phenomenon of our time and I think it's probably caused by this kind
of or at least stimulated by this kind of research
of which there is an enormous amount. Yeah.
um among amongst my productive or semi-productive issues, I
I have a cancer book, right? Uh during the plague year of 2020, um
[clears throat] I spent a lot of time uh I was between jobs, so I wasn't doing medical stuff,
per se, but I was doing a lot of writing. So, I was working on the addiction book that's coming out. It got
a publisher and the original title I think we're changing it. The original title was Anthony Daniels Theor Del
inspired. We we spoke on the phone in 2013 or so and [clears throat] you gave
me the title for the book withdraw to freedom and that's been the working title all along.
Um the editor uh publisher uh is possibly changing it to four months to
freedom because that's constructive. It's like four months to freedom. It's kind of like a certain diet, you know,
four months to freedom, escaping opioid addiction and maintenance. Anyway, so
that's the working title, but it was it was um uh there. But the the other book that I was working on during 2020, I
spent a lot of time out on the porch here um um writing stuff, whatever, is about
about cancer. And I don't really have a full title for it yet. Um my the guy I
was interviewing is a friend of mine, he's since passed away. He had a series in his life of like four different cancers. Um, and he was grappling with
those and we had a lot of back and forth. I would interview him um and get information. It formed the kind of the
framework of the book things he was concerned about because I wanted to get it from a patient's perspective. But one of the title work one of the
working titles which I I'm not sure is going to sell is um cancer a disease of success.
Um because you know the place where you get the least cancer, you can probably guess this aside from Antarctica. If you
had to pick the continent with the least cancer on Earth, leaving Antarctica on a
on a prorated basis, what would that be? Do you you have any idea? Well, I should think Africa.
Very good. And that's because Africa has natural foods and no it's because
they don't live long enough. Say what? They don't live long enough to get cancer.
Right. So, so, so we worry about things um because we've we've become so far
removed from the regular run-of-the-mill, you know, I I know how many horsemen of the apocalypse were
there. You know, there's this pestilence and um famine, war, there four of them.
Yes. Yeah. Is gender dysphoria one of those? I forget. I I don't remember. Um,
it's it's the well, it's the fifth horse person of the apocalypse, [laughter]
I got to tell you. So, so I went to I went to, um, this is total side note. I went to a private school, uh, kind of an
elite private school in New York City. I was a walking student. It was, it was, you know, like a day school called Horus
Man. It's named, ironically enough, it was named Horus Man who was from around here where I'm in Boston. uh he he kind
of was the promoter of the the public school, not the British version, but our version, which is the the general school
for the populace you don't pay for. And he wanted as as a great annealing factor for the for the people, so we'd all have
a common basis of knowledge, the public school. And again, in Britain, the public school means a private school. I have no idea why. Anyway, um, so my kid,
lo and behold, because Horus man is a local figure, he winds up going to Horus Man, the public school, elementary
school here, and they're looking for a new logo for the school, and he comes up with a centaur.
And they're like, "Oh, that's interesting. Um, Sam, like, what's up with that?" He's like, "Horse man,
horse man." I had been to Horse Man for six years and I'd been with hundreds of
kids, probably thousands over the course, you know, one where and none of us had ever thought that Horseman was
was a homophone for a horse man. Um, you know, we had the [clears throat] horse man lions. Um, but it didn't get picked
up. But anyway, I I don't know why I'm bringing that up, but um, aside from horses, I guess we were talking about.
So, you know, cancer being a disease of success, I don't think is a is a is a a
reasonable cell. Like when you get it, you know, like, oh, I'm not successful. But but, you know, we're all going to
pass this moral moral coil one way or another. And if you don't get the famine thing, you know, thank you. You know, if
you don't get impaled on a on a, you know, hoist upon your own petard or whatever it is, um, or somebody else's,
even worse, um, then then what's left? You know, we've run out of things to from which to die.
Yeah. Well, yeah. uh [sighs] we just wind down. [laughter]
And now I mean people do put you know in uh in the obituaries in medical journals
of which there are far fewer than there used to be. uh people are said to have died of old age which um
um I don't know whether that's I suppose that's progress in the sense that it it does
suggest that there is a uh an inevitability of getting old and dying.
So, but um anyway, I I I um in the book
uh false positive, I I I I think I pointed to some of the
harmful effects or or at least suggested some of the harmful effects of this
constant epidemiological research, finding factors that are supposedly
linked to diseases, some of which are are very rare and so on. And and people
are not very good at um uh understanding the the the difference [clears throat]
between relative risk and absolute risk and and many of the many of the journal
articles are not very good at um distinguishing between those two things which are very very important. It's a
very important distinction.
Absolutely. Uh so so what's what's the remedy for that? I mean
you know you you you speak about how schooling in general has uh cratered. Uh
is that across the board or is that just in the public in what I'm calling the public schools. What do you I don't know if what you call public schools uh in
the UK. What what are the the general schools for the populace? The state the free schools. What are those?
Yeah. State. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the the I suppose you call
it the the state school system.
So, is it is the populace dumbing down? Uh is is or you know, are these
institutions dumbing up? I mean, is the dumbness kind of gone upwards or there's just kind of lower standards? I mean,
what what happened? I I had this, you know, I grew up in the era of, you know, this kind of Sputnik era, um, where we
were in the US, you know, afraid of nuclear war, this cold war with the Soviets, and there was a promotion and
we literally when we had this thing, special education, we were called, it's called special ed when I was in public
school, the state school in PS81 in New York City. um there was special education for the kids to get they
wanted to pick out the kids who were good in science and give them special extracurricular you know so they would get even better at science now the thing
I mean it's kind of like a almost like a totem uh you know it's interesting thing
that that now the words I don't know about in the UK but here special education means exactly the opposite that you've taken
yes it does yeah and and uh the idea of uh I suppose It's
at the uh at the heart of it is a kind of um um
mistaken egalitarianism. Um that uh people, you know, when when we
say that people are born equal, people mean it in a most literal sense
as if we were all born clones. Now, it's obvious that people are are very
different and they're always going to be very different unless they actually are cloned and have
and are brought up in chicken battery farms and so on. Um uh and when we say
that people are equal, we mean something in a metaphysical sense
that that people should be um treated
as I as ends and not as means.
And that is true even of a person of low intelligence or
lacking any great ability. But we've transferred that kind of
egalitarianism which is I think very necessary and and very good. We've
transferred it to saying that um uh uh
to say that people are actually intrinsically all the same. I remember I mean I've talked about this several
times. I was driving through Nicaragua uh and I picked up an American um
hitchhiker. I I I spent almost a year in Central America during the period that they were
having civil wars and um [clears throat] and somehow or other I don't know he was
a Marxist and uh somehow or other the
subject of uh individual genius came up. I can't remember how. And he was against
that idea. Marxists were against that idea of of there being individual
geniuses. And um I said and he said that all
people were equal. And I said, "Well, nevertheless, there was only one Mozart."
And [clears throat] uh he said, "Ah yes, but if if you've got to remember that he
his his background and and so on were responsible for his for his genius. It
was there was nothing there was nothing in Mozart himself. It was all the circumstances."
And so people come to believe that the circumstances make make people Excuse
me. I'm my telephone is going off. I won't answer it. I don't know whether you can hear it.
Go ahead. We'll fix it. Go ahead. No, no, no. It's I'll I'll I'll look at I'll look at it
afterwards, but um yes. So um
yeah. So uh so [snorts] there's that feeling that uh all differences must
must result from circumstances and environment.
which is clearly not not so. Yeah. [clears throat] No, I I used to have this thing in my practice called
the Michael Jackson rule. [clears throat] I I assume you're familiar with Michael Jackson, but before he was Michael Jackson, well,
he's always Michael Jackson, but before he became the solo actor Michael Jackson, he was part of the Jackson 5. Yeah.
And not only were the Jackson 5, which was the boys, but there were a number of girls as well. So, I think their parents
were Seventh Day Adventists and they had, you know, more than five kids.
maybe eight or whatever number of kids there were. Um, but Michael Jackson, you know, he got, you know, I think he's
either was a a pedophile um or a pedophile in waiting. Either way, I'm
not sure the degree he acted on those things, but he had little boys in his bed overnight, you know, all this kind
of stuff. Um but at certain point he or others blamed it on his upbringing that
he didn't have you know the normal standard upbringing because he was in this entertainment family. He had to go to work. He had to perform and all kind
of stuff. So he wasn't like the other kids. He didn't get to play stickball or you know get you know just be in a
regular school all this kind of stuff. Yeah. But I was thinking thinking well okay he was one of the Jackson five.
There's four other Jacksons boys that we don't hear about. We don't hear about Tito um you know hanging out you know
putting you know young you know eight-year-old boys in his bed. We don't hear about his sisters Latoya or
whatever. um Janet Jackson we you know there were a lot of fair number of Jacksons as part of this Jackson cohort
to do the Jackson experiment you know to to to kind of divvy out the correlation versus causation thing and it's you know
and but the second part of the Michael Jackson rule for my patients was you know this is during my de-addiction
treatment phase uh the mid 2000s uh till the 201s
people would come in and they say you know they they were my my program was a sobriety program and uh invariably
they'd say, "Well, you know, I had an urge to do this X, Y, and Z." You know
what? Why did you show up with heroin or cocaine? It's like, well, I had an urge, you know. So, well, the Michael Jackson
rule is this. You know, whatever urges Michael Jackson had, this is while he was still alive. So, um you know, my
answer to Michael Jackson would be like there's a Bob Newhart skit where he gets an OCD um customer patient in. and he's
playing a psychologist and he's like his his advice very simple. It's going to be under three minutes. She's only going to
pay him five bucks. He's like, "I can't believe this." Like, I thought psychiatrist like $100. Like, no, it's going to be pretty quick. And she's
getting out of pen and paper. You're not going to need a pen and paper. Just sit down and listen. She's like, "Well, every time I do this, I I think I'm
going to die." Whatever. You every time I get in a car, I think it's going to crash. I said, she says, "Well, does it crash?" No. He says, "Well," he says,
"Okay, this is my advice. Don't do it. Stop it." I think I think his advice is
stop it. like she's have like but I keep thinking she's Yeah. No, I get that. Stop it. Anyway, there's just so so much
that could be kind of instead of leaning into as we like to think, you know, leaning into our, you know, whatever
things we come upon us, our minds, whatever, is just maybe just stop it and kind of like reformulate and and and and
go a different way. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I suppose we have to
be um we have to be slightly neon nuanced because you know there are um
there are condition for example gambling in um in Parkinson's disease does seem
to be an almost neurological consequence of Parkinson's disease but we treat the
whole of human behavior in the same way and once you do that uh then uh you
cease to be an autonomous person. One of the my arguments one of the thing the
damaging things I argue that psychology has done has put is to be to put a lens
of theory between people's um experience of themselves
and how they are so that they actually come to think of themselves not as
themselves but as objects and they start treating themselves as if
they were their own patient. Um so um the psychization of life in my
opinion has been disastrous even if in some cases psychology can help people
but overall it's disastrous and I was looking into [sighs and gasps]
the figures for the number of psychologists in training in the United States it's 200,000
And uh uh this is continuing so soon there will be millions of psychologists
if if studying psychology leads to a career in psych psychology. In Britain
it's even worse actually pratta it's 80 we have 100,000 I think psychology
students France has 80,000 and of course they
even if a substantial proportion of them don't become psychologists could go and
do something else a substantial proportion of them will become psychologists and they need people
to think of themselves elves as as psychological cases rather than as
people with agency and so on. And of course, thinking of yourself as a case
rather than as an agent has certain advantages, psychological advantages,
oddly enough. I mean, it it absolves you of responsibility for your own condition
and behavior. Uh and so people will say, "Well, I I
would change if I had the right help and the assumption is that there is the right help there for you that will that
will change you and then they can continue because there isn't that help.
I think you're you're on to something there. Um we're kind of rounding out the hour and I' I'd like to get your thoughts on two things that don't sound
related per se. Um, I I listened to you speak on the 1961 decriminalization of
suicide uh in the UK. It was a while ago. Um, and people I mentioned this to
somebody in the locker room uh at tennis today and he said, "Well, how how could you possibly criminalize suicide? If you
die, you die. You know, that's a punishment in of itself or whatever." It's like, well, I I think first of all, there's two kinds of suicide. I mean, I
I I divide into male and female suicidality. I think they're v vastly different things almost to be given
different words because I think women are kind of in the dramatic realm of um
crying for help and attempting this thing that's called suicide whereas men su you know kill themselves you know
when when they're in that situation so forth um but the the odd segue would be
to the Lindsey Clansancy um case and I I don't know if you know the name but you
know obviously it's captivated the United States the woman who killed her three kids A couple years ago, uh she
jumped out of the the what we what you would call a first floor window, we call the second story window of her home and
um has partial paralysis. Uh didn't affect in killing herself. Uh so I'm
wondering, you know, on a one level, you know, was she a genuine suicide? Was this kind of an acting out? Did she
think whatever? Um but, you know, it kind of segus into your subtitle for admirable evasions. How psychology
undermines morality. And you know, we have a a situation where the women on
the jury and women kind of extant, you know, surrounding this seems um you
know, don't see that she had any um kind of agency. She wasn't obeying the
Michael Jackson rule of my Michael Jackson rule of not doing that thing that came into her mind. You know,
they're like, well, she was sad, she was depressed, you know, what else could she do? You know, she killed her kids. You
know, she was not of right mind and so forth. and and is this kind of a a classic case of psychology inverting
morality and and in the aftermath of the 1961 act which seems unrelated um did
that affect the same because we wind up getting the behavior that previously was part of a moral framework of don't do
that. Yeah. Well, I wouldn't like to u I wouldn't like to comment on the Clansancy case because I don't I don't I
haven't I think that it's always necessary to know the details of a case like that and my experience of of people
who kill their children um is in most cases they're mad actually and uh so um
uh and therefore I think they do have redu certainly reduced responsibility
as to the uh the uh the uh change in the law in Britain,
it was followed by an enormous increase in suicidal you wouldn't say um suicide
attempts, you would say suicidal gestures. So, for example, there were
eight about 8,000 a year uh before and now there are about
150,000 a year. And uh there was a there's a um a play by uh Terrence
Ratigan that pro name probably doesn't mean anything to you but he was a very good
yeah he was a very very good playwright and in one of his plays and this was I
think it was about 1954 it starts off where in a scene where a
woman has attempted to gas herself and the other characters in the play discuss
the question of whether they have to call the police. She she survives and
whether she has to they have to call the police because a crime has been committed by her, namely attempting to
kill herself. Obviously, you can't pursue someone beyond the grave.
And uh people thought naturally enough that to
add a prosecution to the problem that had caused the the person to to make a
gesture like that um uh was very cruel. But it turns out
that by uh by making it not a crime, you actually promoted that behavior at great
expense and so on. So it's a it is a difficult
question. I mean, I'm not sure I would have liked to have called the police to say, you know, I wake someone up from uh
from uh [laughter] from having taken an overdose of tranquilizer. So, and I am now going to
call the police. I'm not sure. Well, I know. But it's a funny thing. You know, it's it you know, you call you
have the title of the book, Admirable Evasions. you know, these there's I saw this nifty little graph.
It's it's a stylized graph. It's not real. Um, of society getting better
through hard truths, hard truth, hard truth. Society improves and then it's
like gentle lies, gentle lies. And it's like your society, you know,
goes into the into the toilet. You know, it's it's, you know, again, we're going to leave Lindsy Clansancy aside. Uh, I
think, you know, I think it was premeditated. Um, and even either way, whether you want to call her mad or not
mad. Um, she doesn't deserve to be out amongst polite society. Um, and you know, it's kind of
again getting back to my Michael Jackson rule, you know, if you say, "Oh, Michael Jackson had a you know, a sad childhood. you know, his parents, you know, put him
out to make money or whatever, you know. Um, okay. Well, um, it doesn't mean he
doesn't, you know, presuming he did these things um, with the kids and whatnot, that is its own separate issue.
You know, he's writing the ledger for some other set of problems. I mean, the kids who slept with him are going to have their own problems. you know, you
wind up having these, you know, the more you cover these things over and you make an admirable evasion, you wind up
getting more of it. That that which is incentivized increases.
Yeah, of course. And and uh in Britain anyway, uh we incentivize it even more.
uh for example ADHD. Um there are now pe more people receiving social security
uh for ad being unable to work than we have soldiers
and um and this is happening more and more. Um so uh I I I agree with you but
part of the problem part of the problem is that um
uh there are various conditions such as ADHD
I mean I think if you've seen a child of uh three or five destroy a room
uh rushing around and being like um a tornado or a hurricane or even a an
atomic bomb in a room, you think that there's something different about this child. This is not uh there is something
almost there's something medical about it. Uh but the trouble is that there is
no biological marker to distinguish that from
uh just bad behavior. And so the there is a kind of slippage
so that anybody who shows any any degree of uh inability to
concentrate or unwillingness to concentrate gets labeled as ill and then
before long you find yourself uh saying that that it's that that hundreds of
thousands or millions of people have this condition. And the same is true of
depression. I mean I I think there really was a a
medical condition which was thought of as melancholia actually where people did
turn their face to the wall and die and they often had very peculiar or
sometimes had very peculiar delusions and and you couldn't help thinking there was something wrong with them and when
you treated them they actually got better. But there was no biological marker to distinguish them from someone
who was just um um disappointed
with in love or some other aspect of life. So everyone got put in the same
kind of category and this so there was a complete absence of common sense on the
part of doctors in my opinion psychiatrists in particular there's a lack of common sense
um and and of course they didn't want to exercise judgment
and [clears throat] disappoint patients by saying there's nothing wrong with you. Um and that's a
great disappointment to many patients and uh so um um uh so they fail to
exercise judgment and the problem with judgment of this kind is that you can be wrong in both directions.
So you can judge that there's something wrong with someone who doesn't have something wrong and you can judge
someone who does have something wrong as um as not having something wrong. And so
to avoid making that judgment, you just put everybody in the same category.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I I'm going to let you have the last word basically, but
you know the thing I found is that um I know their system in the UK is different, socialized and whatnot, but
um there's a there's an old Saturday Night Light night live skit, a baseball player, Latino, and he says baseball has
been very very good to me. Like he made a lot of money playing baseball because I mean that not notwithstanding that
he'd probably, you know, be doing landscaping or something. Um but a lot of these diagnoses have been very very
good to the world of psychology psychiatry. Um I I wrote an article on mental health
parity act which was a term of art here where you know insurance companies you
talk about coverage at one point you know they have to cover these things which are not forensically
pathologically discoverable you know sadness and ADHD and whatnot. And the more they got paid, the more they got
the coverage to be paid for this, guess what? The more the diagnosis flower and everybody's airing on the side of their
own um you know, college fund for their kids. You know, it's like a it's become
a very Well, I mean, you used to the the Soviets in the Soviet Union,
there was the old joke that uh uh we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. Well, we've now got to the situation
where we pretend to be ill and you pretend to diagnose us. [laughter]
Yeah. And so and um
but the same the same thing has happened in in Britain but in slightly different
circumstances. And I remember speaking fairly recently to a professor of
classics at an Ivy uh co Ivy um league
uh college and he said now that 20% of the students claim special dispensation
uh uh be uh for some kind of psychiatric or psychological problem.
Yeah. Well, they may have we have a joke here.
Yeah. Yeah. We have an in-house joke. My my wife and I. There's an old joke. It's not a It's a kind of a dirty joke, but you know,
why does a dog lick his uh himself? Say um you know, because he can, you know, he
he does it because he can do it. He can do it and it feels good and he does it, you know. So, we have that we that I
ask, you know, why did they close you down? Why did Dr. Fouchy close us down during COVID? because he could, you
know, he felt good, you know. So, we we kind of like assume that everyone's working on the same kind
of moral economic access as ourselves, want people to flourish and some sometimes people just want their own,
you know, benefits and so forth. So I think that that's way uh I'm not a conspiracy guy but I do think there's a
conspiracy of interests that once something happens forces a line to feed themselves and that that the way the
government is organized it feeds on it's feeding frenzy is frenzy you know if there's a frenzy they feed
and yeah and it's selfreinforcing and um
yeah all right lovely so so I'm going to give you the last word you can promote your
your uh republication of your book or anything else you want to mention how people can find you. Um,
sorry, I've just got to plug this into the battery because it's uh running out.
Yeah, right. No worries. Yeah. Yeah. I I plug plug my uh my book. Yes.
Which is the uh Yeah. First you got to plug in your iPad, then you can plug your book. I'm
Yeah, I've I've done it. Um well what what I was going to say is um I'm often
uh have quite often been criticized because I haven't proposed any uh solutions to to the problems that we've
been talking about. Uh but my solution, my preferred solution is that everyone
should read my book and uh and uh [laughter] that uh
and that uh uh and and undergo a kind of religious conversion. It's almost
[clears throat] a a religious conversion. Yeah. No. Well, I I'm I'm kind of
without religion. Yeah. I I've been a drimpist drimplist for a while and I'm certainly honored to
have met his uh his smarter um brother there, Anthony Daniels.
Well, thank you very much. Thank you for having invited me. All right, perfect.
Well, I mean, silence is actually one of the most effective uh forms of
criticism. Uh it so it's beneath anyone's notice. What I wrote was
beneath anyone's notice. And that also occurred with my book about addiction actually, heroin addiction and opiate
addiction. The pseudonym was chosen because it's a very old-fashioned name. Dal Rumple is a
kind of Scottish aristocratic name and I wanted to sound old-fashioned and
badtempered and I think it was a successful choice. Also, it had to be a
name uh that didn't appear on the medical register. There was no doctor
Theodore Dal Rimple. So, no Dr. Theodore Dal Rimple could come out of the woodwork and complain. Part of it of
course is that uh actually there's a pleasure in contemplating catastrophe and disaster. Um because actually we we
live by comparison with all previously existing humans we live uh extremely
safe uh healthy lives. I mean when my father was born for example the life
expectancy of a male in England was 47 years which
is sort of African type level
[music]
[music]
I'm honored today to have again uh Dr. Anthony Daniels aka Theodore Dal Ripple.
That's his pen name. Um we're honored uh to be on somewhat of a firstname basis. Now he's been a little bit of my loadar
and directive albeit at you know his ignorance um and my bliss I suppose um
because I followed his work for so many years through so many of outlets I he's written for all the major English
outlets in including if I'm not wrong the spectator and uh telegraph and and maybe the times and whatnot [snorts] and
uh we can find him at city journal oftentimes um from the Manhattan Institute. uh he's a great social
commentator. He's a medical doctor uh psychiatrist as well and um he's been out of practice I think for 20 years uh
but not out of the practice of producing really sharp finely um honed uh
perspectives and writings. He's um you know it's kind of like looking a diamond
you know there's there's light that flashes off we get many different facets and Dr. Daniels, doc, theater down
provides that to so many different perspectives, social and medical. Um his book is uh life at the bottom I think is
being reprinted by the Manhattan Institute. Uh I recommend that he's got so many other excellent works um in
praise of prejudice which is you know sounds enimical to our day but you know we're always not only prejudging things
but judging things or else we would be bumping into walls um and spending a lot of time and we seem to do that kind of
on a societal basis and uh to it Dr. uh Daniels has written uh so many fabulous
books. The one that kind of helped guide my uh practice uh maybe you know running out of ground in a way um but it was
very informative when I began doing addiction work mid you know kind of late into midway into my medical practice. I
was a primary care doctor. Um is called here romancing opiates and has the more
pathy title in the UK of junk medicine referring to junk or junky heroin and whatnot. And um I think our views align
a little bit but I have to say you know mine probably adhered to uh the um magnetic force that you presented um and
and Dr. Daniels um has again a lot of these great social works um as well as
short stories and so forth. Um but a couple of the books that I maybe we can cover today. Um this is uh mass
lististeria. Uh great pun. You would expect no nothing less. Kind of the mass
hysteria of um things like not lististeria per se but of diseases and grandism. This is let's see if we can
get in focus. Admirable uh evasions. Um how psychology undermines morality. And
one of my favorite books which I recommend I've given this book out a fair number of times. Uh, see, it doesn't seem to want to focus. My
camera's too smart for anything. Uh, so you're not going to be able to see it. Too bad. Uh, let's see. That's weird.
Um, it's got its own thing here. So, I I'll have to tell you what it is. False positive, a year of error, omission, and
political correctness, weirdly enough, in the New England Journal of Medicine by Theodore Down. And so, that goes week
by week by week to show how weak by how weak week by week uh the New England
Journal tends to be. So, uh, that's just as a way of preface. Um, so Dr. Daniels,
um, uh, uh, how how do you do what you do? You know, that's an easy question.
No, it's not. Well, I spend a lot of time doing it. I, uh, I'm a kind of obsessional reader and
then writer and there's very very little else that I do. I mean, my wife complains about it a bit actually. Um so
um that I just um spend a lot of time
doing it. I suppose I don't as I said I don't do much else. So um
and it doesn't seem that remarkable to me to have to do so much by comparison
with uh for example professional journalists who seem to me to uh shall
we say not be very productive or um
of course in the early days uh I used occasionally to go to their lunches and since they lasted six hours there was no
mystery as to why they produced do so little. But uh
uh those days are over. Of course, those good old days are over. It's much harder for journalists now.
So the the reception of false positive, you know, I I' I've kind of done a meta
uh view of your book and just to see what the for me it was really uh you
know, a great read. I I um I didn't read it all at once. Um,
I had it kind of lying around. I pick it up here and there, but it was always entertaining. You have nice twists on
your articles and uh, so I I like, oh, I was see what people thought of it. You know, was there response from the New
England Journal of Medicine so forth? There's very little there about your false positive book. I mean, mind you,
the camera doesn't want to have any part of it either for some reason. It's a conspiracy. It's not interesting in your book. I
don't know what the deal is. Maybe if I open up the page or something like that, but there's like one review of it and it and it um
Oh, there we go. We can get doesn't like the cover for some reason, but the front piece falls. Anyway, uh there's very
little out there except to kind of like go a bad down. Um you know, do do you
get receptions? I mean, is it screaming into the void as one of my friends said about one of my recent articles? I have
an article called uh the Taliban as Teletubbies. I don't if you know what Teletubbies are. their little childhood
figures, a TV show and what and we way we kind of minimize Islamic violence and
it's it's a it's a it's a serious piece despite the title and somebody read it recently and said, "Yeah, fine. You did
a great job with that article, but screaming into the void, you know, there's so many other forces out there. Why bother?"
Yeah. Well, I mean, silence is actually one of the most effective uh forms of
criticism. Uh it so it's beneath anyone's notice. Uh what I wrote was
beneath anyone's notice. And that also occurred with my book about addiction actually, heroin addiction and opiate
addiction. Uh there was uh practically
no review. There was one in the Lancet um where uh in which um the reviewer uh
said something the claim that I said something that I clearly did not say and
that was it. And he also didn't like the style of of the book. He he found me too
sarcastic I suppose. But um uh silence is a is a very powerful form of
criticism because of course you if you're silent you don't have to answer the criticisms if you just disregard it.
And uh however one must be care I have every author complains and therefore I I
have to be careful that I'm not I'm not um overestimating my own importance.
After all, there are I don't know 200,000 books a year published. So I
can't expect um um uh you know in immense numbers of um reviews and and of
course I write I suppose about things uh which most people are not interested in.
I I don't know. Well, you know, I forget about which
it's spoken, but you may not be interested in I don't know if it's about maybe politics. You know, you may not be
interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. And you probably transmit that phrase a lot of different
ways. So the the topics upon which you write, people may not ipso factor at the
moment be interested in, but a lot of times it what goes around comes around and it be they have to eventually become
interested in it. You know, your life at the bottom was written what 20 years ago,
but it seems obviously more no longer 25 years. 25 26 years ago it
was published and some of the articles were because it was a collection of articles that had been published in the
um city journal. Some of them were are now 32 years old. So, uh, uh, uh, yes, I
I I think that they're still highly pertinent to things that are going on
now. And I hesitate to say that they are prophetic, but at any rate, they were
they saw things which were developing and have um, I don't know whether
they're worse, but they're certainly no better. uh now.
Yeah. Well, no, I think they're out there and you know I I have a Substack
and and you know talking about you know stream screaming into the wind. I do a fair amount of that or tilted windmills.
I don't know which one I do. There aren't that many windmills around. Maybe more and more these days along with the solar panels. Um but you know sometimes
things come around and it's not just the number of readers you get. Sometimes it's it's who reads it. Um, I I've met
with certain people who are in reasonably high roles. Um, and you know,
they've told me they read my stuff. So, that's nice. You know, I've gotten compliments from people. So, it's it's
sometimes, you know, you might be on a cruise ship and uh, you know, you do X, Y, and Z
during the day or you throw a letter, toss it off the end of the boat, nobody's going to read it. But if you
happen to sit at the captain's table and you give them a tip and the cap, you know, he's running the cruise ship, you
know, it might have a little bit more of a kind of a dispositive effect on the way things ripple out. So, you know,
it's not so much that, you know, millions of people may not uh, you know, probably more people know about Stephen
King then know about you. Um, on the other hand, uh, you know, I think that's certain.
If you want to that's certain. Yes,
it is certain. If you want to understand what's going on with the UK, you know, whatever whatever type of
horror show the UK has turned into, and maybe Stephen King might be pertinent some regards there, people are going to
learn a little bit probably more about it reading Theodore Down.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's what I hope. I hope it's uh almost my articles
are like a Chinese water torture and and eventually uh
to change the metaphor the penny will drop but so far [laughter]
but so far um uh well I it's very difficult to measure any um any effect
one has but I just there isn't anything else I can do I
know how to do I'm not a politician. I'm not a public speaker. Um, all I can do
is write my articles and books and hope that it eventually they will have some
effect, at least make people think.
Well, clearly they have. You know, I I have followed your um podcasts, you
know, elsewhere. Uh, you were on with Charlie Kirk a few years ago and uh with Jordan Peterson. Um, so you know, your
words do get out there and I think these things are influential and they're not necessarily part of the main stream. Uh,
but they are some alternative stream and people can find them and follow you. I
think there's might be some confusion because you're going through this kind of dual name thing. Um, uh, h how does
that work out for you? Well, when I started uh writing about um
what I was seeing in the prison and um and also in the hospital next door and
writing about um and about patients of course I needed a level of disguise and
so I had to have a pseudonym uh and then I as often happens one
almost becomes one's pseudonym. I mean, George Orwell became George Orwell. No
one thinks of him as Eric Blair. Um, so in so far as I'm known at all, I'm
known as under my pseudonym.
Yeah, I you probably it was chosen the pseudonym was chosen
because it's a very old-fashioned name. Dal Rumple is a
kind of Scottish aristocratic name and I wanted to sound old-fashioned and
badtempered and um and um and I think it was a successful choice. Also, it had to
be a name uh that didn't appear on the medical register. There was no doctor
Theodore Dal Rimple. So, no Dr. Theodore Dal Rimple could come out of the woodwork and complain.
That's interesting. Um, so, you know, as far as putting things out there to be
written, and maybe we can segue into the some of the medical things. You know, I I wrote um a book called Overturning
Zika. Um, came out in 2022. And I'm actually I want to make a second edition because
time keeps happening and there keeps there keeps uh there continues not to be
any microphily as a result of Zika anywhere on earth. Um so you know it's a
very simple thing you know they teach you kind of like in science or philosophy you know the scientific
method is hypothesis um testing reevaluation um but so much in medicine just happens
to be say something that's what it is now you know whether um it's gender
dysphoria or um autism or whatever there's a lot of things that just you know they they kind of move the
goalposts uh they say what it is and that's that there's very little kind of iterative testing and reassimilation. So
when we saw it during COVID, I'm not gonna, you know, re relitigate all of that. Um,
but uh, you know, that was something I put out there. I figured, you know, not maybe people are not going to read it that much right off the bat, but it is
kind of a a flag on the moon, you know, that I was there and I said this at that
time and that uh, you know, time will prove me right. There's kind of a competition. Donald
McNeel who was the chief science reporter for the New York Times for decades. Um he eventually had to resign
for completely other political kind of post George Floyd era uh reasons like a
lot of people committed sepuku kitty under under political duress um and he's
on the left mind you but a lot of people did that um but he wrote a book Zika the
emerging um epidemic and uh my book was to be a counter to that overturning Zika
essentially the emerging epidemic um and uh you know he doesn't have a
second edition coming and I've tried to engage him on it but it just seems like there's very little interest in any of
the halls of academia or the functionary um reverberations the you know the
newspapers the New England Journal the Lance and whatnot to to look back at things it seems much much more that
they're promulgating ideas and theories uh of their own you know circulating around um kind of these politically
correct uh aspects whether It's, you know, well, you could you could speak to
those things, but um so the the I suppose if I want to formulate a question is um you know, what what's
medicine up to? What do they wind up doing? Why do we see things like your title book mass lististeria? Why do we
keep kind of falling for these things like I don't know if you know Charlie Brown with the football the cartoon, but
we keep taking swings and misses and come right back. Yes.
Well, um, part of it, of course, is that, uh, actually there's a pleasure in
contemplating catastrophe and disaster. Um, because actually we we live by
comparison with all previously existing humans, we live uh extremely safe uh and
um healthy lives. I mean when my father was born for example life expectancy
of a male in England was 47 years which is sort of African type level. The
infant mortality rate in the burough London burough in uh which he was born
was 124. Um admittedly,
you know, he was he's he was 84 when he died and he was born in 199. But that is
I mean it's not eons ago. It's not thousands of years ago. It it's within
almost living memory. And even when I was born, the infant mortality rate was
36 per thousand, which would now be regarded as appalling. and would be bad
for a South American country. Uh but we forget all that and uh we
forget how how comparatively safe we are. And I think people enjoy the pro I
think you could define human beings as the only species that enjoy that enjoys
contemplating its own extinction. it [laughter]
there's a certain lubrious pleasure in it and um so that that's one
thing on the other hand of course where illness is so
is relatively unusual I mean you still I don't know whether it was your experience but my experience of people
often was why should I get this illness they might they might be 75 or or older
and the idea that they get a fatal illness seems to them almost
um something that that is unthinkable, certainly unthought of. And um so
individual cases of ill illness now seem anomalous to us because we are um we are
so um we are so safe. Um and
so that the fact that we are so safe does not um uh does not limit our fears
as one would have thought it did. On the contrary, it seems in some paradoxical way to increase our fears. I don't know
whether is was that your experience as a generalist that people would ask, you know, why me? Why did I get this? I've
done everything possible to avoid being ill and here I am being ill.
It's almost as if uh there is some cosmic injustice in being ill.
I don't know whether did that ever occur? I didn't hear I didn't hear that specifically from my crowd. I'll have to
think on that one. Um but I think you're on to something. I mean getting back to Stephen King, you
know, he's made his uh you know, his metier um is is horror. And why do we
have that? You know, it's it's kind of a I think there's pornography in a bunch of different realms that's kind of like
horror pornography. You know, we you know, there's pornography when you you know are wanting for or can't achieve
intimacy with, you know, in a say productive literally or figurative way.
And so there's pornography. Um horror I'm not going to put in that same category, but you know, it's clearly
stimulating something that you're not doing for real. Yeah. There there is another I mean I'
I've been thinking a bit about the political response to to health scares
and um I've tried to imagine what I would do if I were in political power if
if some expert came to me and said there's this risk of um of an epidemic
and the fact is that the politician is almost on a hiding to nothing. He's
certainly on a hiding to nothing if he says, well, he tries to put it into some
kind of perspective and says, well, yes, but it's not that serious. Uh because
the moment someone dies which someone else claimed could a death
that death could have been prevented, it's a serious problem for the politician. Whereas if he shuts down the
whole society um no one no one thinks about uh the the the
damage done. uh it's it's not you don't see what you
don't see immediately the damage done but as soon as someone dies of something which someone claims to have been
preventable then the politician is held responsible and regarded as
something of an unfeilling monster. So his default position I think is to
overreact. And uh we should always remember that
any polic any policy has um
[clears throat] uh has bad effects as well as good ones. So anyway, I I I
think the temptation for politicians is always to overreact.
Yeah. No, I I see that. And if you go back through the years, I mean, what
what's the kind of confluence or the rationale of the need politically to I mean, you you I think you speak to some
of that. Um, but you know, it does seem like there's
almost this uh illicit, and I hate to use the word again, put pornographic aspect, lured I guess would be a better
word, to contemplating these um illnesses. And then there's probably a way that they are misused to dovetail
into um analogous threats um that that
can control the populace. I mean, if you want to be cynical, um why not? Let's be cynical for a few
minutes. Um, you know, all the the getting back to the Zika thing. Um,
Donald McNeel's thesis in part for Zika, the emerging epidemic, is not just the
Zika thing, but it's the fact that this is the the harbinger of more of these
creepy crawly uh, you know, here to four unknown things from the tropics. You
know, we are in the temperate zones. We have tempered in personality. We're temperate in our economies. We're
temperate. you know, we're welltempered and you know, honed over the years in this western civilization thing kind of
the northern part of the world and you're going to get Chaga's disease. You're going to get um you know all the
things the parasites from medical school uh you know one one thing after another. all going to come up here whether it's ecoin is the sephilitis west Nile um 80s
Egypty mosquitoes you know the Egypt part the west Nile you know all these places they're going to they're
basically going to invert it's going to be uh the the scourge of these things
that you know you managed to escape in your comfortable place but don't get so comfortable because it's coming after
you because of this you know the big bad sun monster um you know which we have in tained by by you know giving uh adequate
dispensation ations to the you know Al Gore followers of the world you know this so he weaves into the whole climate
thing and moreover tells women employers and women and this is during the the the
plague year of 2016 for Zika as it were I mean I think it was overblown but under that you know inflamed narrative
of the time um he told women to stop having babies and he wrote in the New York Times uh that women throughout the
tropics should stop having babies until they get the Zika vaccine which will come around the corner any day now. I'm
checking number of days is 3,650 whatever it's like 10 years worth of no Zika vaccine. So there'd be like zero
kids anywhere in Latin America um at this point if they'd followed his advice and he was tapped in with Dr. Fouchy at
the time um and and you know it's he he writes about this in the New York Times and so forth. Um and Tom Frerieden was
from New York. He was head of the CDC during the Zeke era. Anyway, but they're all kind of like in at this party and
just to kind of tap this off, um there's an old expression that um politics is Hollywood for ugly people. Um and you
know, you get your certain moment of fame um and people are focusing on let's
say you happen to be an expert on Usbekistsan and all of a sudden the Soviet Union falls in, you know, the
late 80s, early 90s, whatever, and people are talking about this new country. you've been sitting writing
stuff forever in your little ivory tower and people want to know. I saw this literally happen. Some guy got, you
know, pulled out and he's in front of everything and he's talking about usbekistan. I feel like that is the same thing for infectious disease people.
They're working on, you know, Chaga's disease or whatever and all of a sudden people want to know about it. Like tell us more about West Niles like and you're
right there and it's like why wouldn't you do that? And that's that plus that's your money stream to get research funds.
Yeah. I mean one of the things that's uh remarkable and I think people well
people have remarked on it is the change of our attitude to overpopulation. I
don't you remember Dr. Er, uh, who said it's already too late to avoid
population. Yeah. Hundreds of millions of deaths by
um by um famine and here we are worrying about obesity even even in poor
countries. So [clears throat] um the whirly gig of
time brings in his revenge but uh and now we're worried about underpopulation.
We're worried about the aging population. Um so uh but we have to
worry about something. Uh because I I mean extreme fear does at least give you
a purpose in existence. It does give you a feeling of of significance.
Um At this point, if I if I going to write on a pseudonym, I might take Dr. Mouthus' name and do it backward. It' be
like Slam or something like that because Mouthus seems to be totally inverted these days, isn't he? I mean,
well, well, it is. Yes. I mean, I I read actually, oddly enough, I read Mouthus
not long ago, and I mean, he was a a very interesting writer and he was a
actually he was a good man. Um uh and people there are still people who
said oh well it hasn't been true so far but it will come true
one day. And of course uh for a prediction to be of any use there has to
be some kind of time limit on it. You have to be able to say when this is going to happen. So when Dr. Erik put
his neck out and said it's too late to avert famine by I think 1980. I can't
remember. The book was published I think 73 or something 72 or something like that. Um he was at least
um making himself reputable because what he said didn't come to
pass. And um uh I I don't I didn't
actually follow him afterwards. I don't know whether he ever recognized his error. Uh
I don't think so. I mean there's you know about the the you know the famous the bet with Julian Simon.
Oh yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But of course one I mean people will still
say well uh you know it will happen one day
not just yet. I mean it's a it's a bit like St. Augustine uh asking you know to
be uh to be made um um good and um
continent but not just yet. [laughter]
[clears throat] Yeah, there a similar thing. It's like, you know, a lot of women are looking for Mr. Right, but then there's Mr. Right
now. Yes. Yeah, that's right. And anyway, um
it it's an interesting phenomenon and um uh and one which I think will will
continue. And another I mean one of the things that I I I I found in the New England
Journal for example what I did was I took I think it was I think it was 2017 that I took and I took the New England
Journal every week and took an article or two from it and and and examined it
and I was actually frankly rather surprised at um at the poor quality of
of what was uh being written because I mean when I
When I was young, I took um many uh
scientific journals almost as wholly writt. It never occurred to me that they they could be um uh they could be so so
mistaken. And though I am no statistician and no scientist that
someone like me could actually uncover uh grotesque errors such as for example
that uh every time uh there is some kind of correlation it
is taken as causitive um however weak the correlation I mean to give you a kind and I think it's
actually quite important because it has a cultural effect. I'm I'm I'm making this up, but supposing someone comes
along and has examined uh the um the carrot eating uh uh uh
propensities of 400,000 people according to some kind of um some kind of
questionnaire. And they find after 20 years that there's a 17% increase in the
chance of them getting myastthenia gravis if they've eaten more than three carrots a week. Then suddenly
I'm making this up but it but it is the kind of thing that is published then
carrots eating carrots causes mythemia gravis and no one it's once you have to
work out for yourself the absolute numbers you know that what you're
reading is junk because of course a 17% chance of um uh
increased chance of getting myia gravis cannot be very great uh in absolute
terms because numbers of people with mythenia gravis is not very great. So
and that's even if the hypothesis that eating carrots causes the increased
risk. So, but the journals are full of this now. I don't know whether you find
that, but they're full of these kind of very very rashes and in a certain kind
of way highly sophisticated statistically highly sophisticated
um research. And this eventually filters down or not eventually actually quite
often quite quickly filters down into the general culture. some newspaper or
some site picks it up and and and it enters it enters the general uh culture
and general knowledge. I remember the first time I I noticed this phenomenon
was when the eating of uh green potatoes
that had gone slightly green uh had started to photosynthesize
uh was associated with um spinobipida
and [snorts] [laughter] and there was some kind of
reason for this. I think it that kind of research was the early 1970s
and still to this day I cannot look at a green potato. Not that I look at green
potatoes very often but if I see a green potato my first thought is are spobifida
and uh so these things are easy to insinuate in the mind but they're
difficult to remove from the mind. I remember another one was um selenium and
the levels of selenium and um and uh and
coronary artery disease and since walnuts are high in selenium
there was very rapidly uh after the publicity given to this research walnuts
disappeared from supermarkets. You couldn't you couldn't buy a walnut for
love or money. And um that's crazy.
uh and I think this is it's a a kind of
social phenomenon of our time and I think it's probably caused by this kind
of or at least stimulated by this kind of research
of which there is an enormous amount. Yeah.
um among amongst my productive or semi-productive issues, I
I have a cancer book, right? Uh during the plague year of 2020, um
[clears throat] I spent a lot of time uh I was between jobs, so I wasn't doing medical stuff,
per se, but I was doing a lot of writing. So, I was working on the addiction book that's coming out. It got
a publisher and the original title I think we're changing it. The original title was Anthony Daniels Theor Del
inspired. We we spoke on the phone in 2013 or so and [clears throat] you gave
me the title for the book withdraw to freedom and that's been the working title all along.
Um the editor uh publisher uh is possibly changing it to four months to
freedom because that's constructive. It's like four months to freedom. It's kind of like a certain diet, you know,
four months to freedom, escaping opioid addiction and maintenance. Anyway, so
that's the working title, but it was it was um uh there. But the the other book that I was working on during 2020, I
spent a lot of time out on the porch here um um writing stuff, whatever, is about
about cancer. And I don't really have a full title for it yet. Um my the guy I
was interviewing is a friend of mine, he's since passed away. He had a series in his life of like four different cancers. Um, and he was grappling with
those and we had a lot of back and forth. I would interview him um and get information. It formed the kind of the
framework of the book things he was concerned about because I wanted to get it from a patient's perspective. But one of the title work one of the
working titles which I I'm not sure is going to sell is um cancer a disease of success.
Um because you know the place where you get the least cancer, you can probably guess this aside from Antarctica. If you
had to pick the continent with the least cancer on Earth, leaving Antarctica on a
on a prorated basis, what would that be? Do you you have any idea? Well, I should think Africa.
Very good. And that's because Africa has natural foods and no it's because
they don't live long enough. Say what? They don't live long enough to get cancer.
Right. So, so, so we worry about things um because we've we've become so far
removed from the regular run-of-the-mill, you know, I I know how many horsemen of the apocalypse were
there. You know, there's this pestilence and um famine, war, there four of them.
Yes. Yeah. Is gender dysphoria one of those? I forget. I I don't remember. Um,
it's it's the well, it's the fifth horse person of the apocalypse, [laughter]
I got to tell you. So, so I went to I went to, um, this is total side note. I went to a private school, uh, kind of an
elite private school in New York City. I was a walking student. It was, it was, you know, like a day school called Horus
Man. It's named, ironically enough, it was named Horus Man who was from around here where I'm in Boston. uh he he kind
of was the promoter of the the public school, not the British version, but our version, which is the the general school
for the populace you don't pay for. And he wanted as as a great annealing factor for the for the people, so we'd all have
a common basis of knowledge, the public school. And again, in Britain, the public school means a private school. I have no idea why. Anyway, um, so my kid,
lo and behold, because Horus man is a local figure, he winds up going to Horus Man, the public school, elementary
school here, and they're looking for a new logo for the school, and he comes up with a centaur.
And they're like, "Oh, that's interesting. Um, Sam, like, what's up with that?" He's like, "Horse man,
horse man." I had been to Horse Man for six years and I'd been with hundreds of
kids, probably thousands over the course, you know, one where and none of us had ever thought that Horseman was
was a homophone for a horse man. Um, you know, we had the [clears throat] horse man lions. Um, but it didn't get picked
up. But anyway, I I don't know why I'm bringing that up, but um, aside from horses, I guess we were talking about.
So, you know, cancer being a disease of success, I don't think is a is a is a a
reasonable cell. Like when you get it, you know, like, oh, I'm not successful. But but, you know, we're all going to
pass this moral moral coil one way or another. And if you don't get the famine thing, you know, thank you. You know, if
you don't get impaled on a on a, you know, hoist upon your own petard or whatever it is, um, or somebody else's,
even worse, um, then then what's left? You know, we've run out of things to from which to die.
Yeah. Well, yeah. uh [sighs] we just wind down. [laughter]
And now I mean people do put you know in uh in the obituaries in medical journals
of which there are far fewer than there used to be. uh people are said to have died of old age which um
um I don't know whether that's I suppose that's progress in the sense that it it does
suggest that there is a uh an inevitability of getting old and dying.
So, but um anyway, I I I um in the book
uh false positive, I I I I think I pointed to some of the
harmful effects or or at least suggested some of the harmful effects of this
constant epidemiological research, finding factors that are supposedly
linked to diseases, some of which are are very rare and so on. And and people
are not very good at um uh understanding the the the difference [clears throat]
between relative risk and absolute risk and and many of the many of the journal
articles are not very good at um distinguishing between those two things which are very very important. It's a
very important distinction.
Absolutely. Uh so so what's what's the remedy for that? I mean
you know you you you speak about how schooling in general has uh cratered. Uh
is that across the board or is that just in the public in what I'm calling the public schools. What do you I don't know if what you call public schools uh in
the UK. What what are the the general schools for the populace? The state the free schools. What are those?
Yeah. State. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the the I suppose you call
it the the state school system.
So, is it is the populace dumbing down? Uh is is or you know, are these
institutions dumbing up? I mean, is the dumbness kind of gone upwards or there's just kind of lower standards? I mean,
what what happened? I I had this, you know, I grew up in the era of, you know, this kind of Sputnik era, um, where we
were in the US, you know, afraid of nuclear war, this cold war with the Soviets, and there was a promotion and
we literally when we had this thing, special education, we were called, it's called special ed when I was in public
school, the state school in PS81 in New York City. um there was special education for the kids to get they
wanted to pick out the kids who were good in science and give them special extracurricular you know so they would get even better at science now the thing
I mean it's kind of like a almost like a totem uh you know it's interesting thing
that that now the words I don't know about in the UK but here special education means exactly the opposite that you've taken
yes it does yeah and and uh the idea of uh I suppose It's
at the uh at the heart of it is a kind of um um
mistaken egalitarianism. Um that uh people, you know, when when we
say that people are born equal, people mean it in a most literal sense
as if we were all born clones. Now, it's obvious that people are are very
different and they're always going to be very different unless they actually are cloned and have
and are brought up in chicken battery farms and so on. Um uh and when we say
that people are equal, we mean something in a metaphysical sense
that that people should be um treated
as I as ends and not as means.
And that is true even of a person of low intelligence or
lacking any great ability. But we've transferred that kind of
egalitarianism which is I think very necessary and and very good. We've
transferred it to saying that um uh uh
to say that people are actually intrinsically all the same. I remember I mean I've talked about this several
times. I was driving through Nicaragua uh and I picked up an American um
hitchhiker. I I I spent almost a year in Central America during the period that they were
having civil wars and um [clears throat] and somehow or other I don't know he was
a Marxist and uh somehow or other the
subject of uh individual genius came up. I can't remember how. And he was against
that idea. Marxists were against that idea of of there being individual
geniuses. And um I said and he said that all
people were equal. And I said, "Well, nevertheless, there was only one Mozart."
And [clears throat] uh he said, "Ah yes, but if if you've got to remember that he
his his background and and so on were responsible for his for his genius. It
was there was nothing there was nothing in Mozart himself. It was all the circumstances."
And so people come to believe that the circumstances make make people Excuse
me. I'm my telephone is going off. I won't answer it. I don't know whether you can hear it.
Go ahead. We'll fix it. Go ahead. No, no, no. It's I'll I'll I'll look at I'll look at it
afterwards, but um yes. So um
yeah. So uh so [snorts] there's that feeling that uh all differences must
must result from circumstances and environment.
which is clearly not not so. Yeah. [clears throat] No, I I used to have this thing in my practice called
the Michael Jackson rule. [clears throat] I I assume you're familiar with Michael Jackson, but before he was Michael Jackson, well,
he's always Michael Jackson, but before he became the solo actor Michael Jackson, he was part of the Jackson 5. Yeah.
And not only were the Jackson 5, which was the boys, but there were a number of girls as well. So, I think their parents
were Seventh Day Adventists and they had, you know, more than five kids.
maybe eight or whatever number of kids there were. Um, but Michael Jackson, you know, he got, you know, I think he's
either was a a pedophile um or a pedophile in waiting. Either way, I'm
not sure the degree he acted on those things, but he had little boys in his bed overnight, you know, all this kind
of stuff. Um but at certain point he or others blamed it on his upbringing that
he didn't have you know the normal standard upbringing because he was in this entertainment family. He had to go to work. He had to perform and all kind
of stuff. So he wasn't like the other kids. He didn't get to play stickball or you know get you know just be in a
regular school all this kind of stuff. Yeah. But I was thinking thinking well okay he was one of the Jackson five.
There's four other Jacksons boys that we don't hear about. We don't hear about Tito um you know hanging out you know
putting you know young you know eight-year-old boys in his bed. We don't hear about his sisters Latoya or
whatever. um Janet Jackson we you know there were a lot of fair number of Jacksons as part of this Jackson cohort
to do the Jackson experiment you know to to to kind of divvy out the correlation versus causation thing and it's you know
and but the second part of the Michael Jackson rule for my patients was you know this is during my de-addiction
treatment phase uh the mid 2000s uh till the 201s
people would come in and they say you know they they were my my program was a sobriety program and uh invariably
they'd say, "Well, you know, I had an urge to do this X, Y, and Z." You know
what? Why did you show up with heroin or cocaine? It's like, well, I had an urge, you know. So, well, the Michael Jackson
rule is this. You know, whatever urges Michael Jackson had, this is while he was still alive. So, um you know, my
answer to Michael Jackson would be like there's a Bob Newhart skit where he gets an OCD um customer patient in. and he's
playing a psychologist and he's like his his advice very simple. It's going to be under three minutes. She's only going to
pay him five bucks. He's like, "I can't believe this." Like, I thought psychiatrist like $100. Like, no, it's going to be pretty quick. And she's
getting out of pen and paper. You're not going to need a pen and paper. Just sit down and listen. She's like, "Well, every time I do this, I I think I'm
going to die." Whatever. You every time I get in a car, I think it's going to crash. I said, she says, "Well, does it crash?" No. He says, "Well," he says,
"Okay, this is my advice. Don't do it. Stop it." I think I think his advice is
stop it. like she's have like but I keep thinking she's Yeah. No, I get that. Stop it. Anyway, there's just so so much
that could be kind of instead of leaning into as we like to think, you know, leaning into our, you know, whatever
things we come upon us, our minds, whatever, is just maybe just stop it and kind of like reformulate and and and and
go a different way. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I suppose we have to
be um we have to be slightly neon nuanced because you know there are um
there are condition for example gambling in um in Parkinson's disease does seem
to be an almost neurological consequence of Parkinson's disease but we treat the
whole of human behavior in the same way and once you do that uh then uh you
cease to be an autonomous person. One of the my arguments one of the thing the
damaging things I argue that psychology has done has put is to be to put a lens
of theory between people's um experience of themselves
and how they are so that they actually come to think of themselves not as
themselves but as objects and they start treating themselves as if
they were their own patient. Um so um the psychization of life in my
opinion has been disastrous even if in some cases psychology can help people
but overall it's disastrous and I was looking into [sighs and gasps]
the figures for the number of psychologists in training in the United States it's 200,000
And uh uh this is continuing so soon there will be millions of psychologists
if if studying psychology leads to a career in psych psychology. In Britain
it's even worse actually pratta it's 80 we have 100,000 I think psychology
students France has 80,000 and of course they
even if a substantial proportion of them don't become psychologists could go and
do something else a substantial proportion of them will become psychologists and they need people
to think of themselves elves as as psychological cases rather than as
people with agency and so on. And of course, thinking of yourself as a case
rather than as an agent has certain advantages, psychological advantages,
oddly enough. I mean, it it absolves you of responsibility for your own condition
and behavior. Uh and so people will say, "Well, I I
would change if I had the right help and the assumption is that there is the right help there for you that will that
will change you and then they can continue because there isn't that help.
I think you're you're on to something there. Um we're kind of rounding out the hour and I' I'd like to get your thoughts on two things that don't sound
related per se. Um, I I listened to you speak on the 1961 decriminalization of
suicide uh in the UK. It was a while ago. Um, and people I mentioned this to
somebody in the locker room uh at tennis today and he said, "Well, how how could you possibly criminalize suicide? If you
die, you die. You know, that's a punishment in of itself or whatever." It's like, well, I I think first of all, there's two kinds of suicide. I mean, I
I I divide into male and female suicidality. I think they're v vastly different things almost to be given
different words because I think women are kind of in the dramatic realm of um
crying for help and attempting this thing that's called suicide whereas men su you know kill themselves you know
when when they're in that situation so forth um but the the odd segue would be
to the Lindsey Clansancy um case and I I don't know if you know the name but you
know obviously it's captivated the United States the woman who killed her three kids A couple years ago, uh she
jumped out of the the what we what you would call a first floor window, we call the second story window of her home and
um has partial paralysis. Uh didn't affect in killing herself. Uh so I'm
wondering, you know, on a one level, you know, was she a genuine suicide? Was this kind of an acting out? Did she
think whatever? Um but, you know, it kind of segus into your subtitle for admirable evasions. How psychology
undermines morality. And you know, we have a a situation where the women on
the jury and women kind of extant, you know, surrounding this seems um you
know, don't see that she had any um kind of agency. She wasn't obeying the
Michael Jackson rule of my Michael Jackson rule of not doing that thing that came into her mind. You know,
they're like, well, she was sad, she was depressed, you know, what else could she do? You know, she killed her kids. You
know, she was not of right mind and so forth. and and is this kind of a a classic case of psychology inverting
morality and and in the aftermath of the 1961 act which seems unrelated um did
that affect the same because we wind up getting the behavior that previously was part of a moral framework of don't do
that. Yeah. Well, I wouldn't like to u I wouldn't like to comment on the Clansancy case because I don't I don't I
haven't I think that it's always necessary to know the details of a case like that and my experience of of people
who kill their children um is in most cases they're mad actually and uh so um
uh and therefore I think they do have redu certainly reduced responsibility
as to the uh the uh the uh change in the law in Britain,
it was followed by an enormous increase in suicidal you wouldn't say um suicide
attempts, you would say suicidal gestures. So, for example, there were
eight about 8,000 a year uh before and now there are about
150,000 a year. And uh there was a there's a um a play by uh Terrence
Ratigan that pro name probably doesn't mean anything to you but he was a very good
yeah he was a very very good playwright and in one of his plays and this was I
think it was about 1954 it starts off where in a scene where a
woman has attempted to gas herself and the other characters in the play discuss
the question of whether they have to call the police. She she survives and
whether she has to they have to call the police because a crime has been committed by her, namely attempting to
kill herself. Obviously, you can't pursue someone beyond the grave.
And uh people thought naturally enough that to
add a prosecution to the problem that had caused the the person to to make a
gesture like that um uh was very cruel. But it turns out
that by uh by making it not a crime, you actually promoted that behavior at great
expense and so on. So it's a it is a difficult
question. I mean, I'm not sure I would have liked to have called the police to say, you know, I wake someone up from uh
from uh [laughter] from having taken an overdose of tranquilizer. So, and I am now going to
call the police. I'm not sure. Well, I know. But it's a funny thing. You know, it's it you know, you call you
have the title of the book, Admirable Evasions. you know, these there's I saw this nifty little graph.
It's it's a stylized graph. It's not real. Um, of society getting better
through hard truths, hard truth, hard truth. Society improves and then it's
like gentle lies, gentle lies. And it's like your society, you know,
goes into the into the toilet. You know, it's it's, you know, again, we're going to leave Lindsy Clansancy aside. Uh, I
think, you know, I think it was premeditated. Um, and even either way, whether you want to call her mad or not
mad. Um, she doesn't deserve to be out amongst polite society. Um, and you know, it's kind of
again getting back to my Michael Jackson rule, you know, if you say, "Oh, Michael Jackson had a you know, a sad childhood. you know, his parents, you know, put him
out to make money or whatever, you know. Um, okay. Well, um, it doesn't mean he
doesn't, you know, presuming he did these things um, with the kids and whatnot, that is its own separate issue.
You know, he's writing the ledger for some other set of problems. I mean, the kids who slept with him are going to have their own problems. you know, you
wind up having these, you know, the more you cover these things over and you make an admirable evasion, you wind up
getting more of it. That that which is incentivized increases.
Yeah, of course. And and uh in Britain anyway, uh we incentivize it even more.
uh for example ADHD. Um there are now pe more people receiving social security
uh for ad being unable to work than we have soldiers
and um and this is happening more and more. Um so uh I I I agree with you but
part of the problem part of the problem is that um
uh there are various conditions such as ADHD
I mean I think if you've seen a child of uh three or five destroy a room
uh rushing around and being like um a tornado or a hurricane or even a an
atomic bomb in a room, you think that there's something different about this child. This is not uh there is something
almost there's something medical about it. Uh but the trouble is that there is
no biological marker to distinguish that from
uh just bad behavior. And so the there is a kind of slippage
so that anybody who shows any any degree of uh inability to
concentrate or unwillingness to concentrate gets labeled as ill and then
before long you find yourself uh saying that that it's that that hundreds of
thousands or millions of people have this condition. And the same is true of
depression. I mean I I think there really was a a
medical condition which was thought of as melancholia actually where people did
turn their face to the wall and die and they often had very peculiar or
sometimes had very peculiar delusions and and you couldn't help thinking there was something wrong with them and when
you treated them they actually got better. But there was no biological marker to distinguish them from someone
who was just um um disappointed
with in love or some other aspect of life. So everyone got put in the same
kind of category and this so there was a complete absence of common sense on the
part of doctors in my opinion psychiatrists in particular there's a lack of common sense
um and and of course they didn't want to exercise judgment
and [clears throat] disappoint patients by saying there's nothing wrong with you. Um and that's a
great disappointment to many patients and uh so um um uh so they fail to
exercise judgment and the problem with judgment of this kind is that you can be wrong in both directions.
So you can judge that there's something wrong with someone who doesn't have something wrong and you can judge
someone who does have something wrong as um as not having something wrong. And so
to avoid making that judgment, you just put everybody in the same category.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I I'm going to let you have the last word basically, but
you know the thing I found is that um I know their system in the UK is different, socialized and whatnot, but
um there's a there's an old Saturday Night Light night live skit, a baseball player, Latino, and he says baseball has
been very very good to me. Like he made a lot of money playing baseball because I mean that not notwithstanding that
he'd probably, you know, be doing landscaping or something. Um but a lot of these diagnoses have been very very
good to the world of psychology psychiatry. Um I I wrote an article on mental health
parity act which was a term of art here where you know insurance companies you
talk about coverage at one point you know they have to cover these things which are not forensically
pathologically discoverable you know sadness and ADHD and whatnot. And the more they got paid, the more they got
the coverage to be paid for this, guess what? The more the diagnosis flower and everybody's airing on the side of their
own um you know, college fund for their kids. You know, it's like a it's become
a very Well, I mean, you used to the the Soviets in the Soviet Union,
there was the old joke that uh uh we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. Well, we've now got to the situation
where we pretend to be ill and you pretend to diagnose us. [laughter]
Yeah. And so and um
but the same the same thing has happened in in Britain but in slightly different
circumstances. And I remember speaking fairly recently to a professor of
classics at an Ivy uh co Ivy um league
uh college and he said now that 20% of the students claim special dispensation
uh uh be uh for some kind of psychiatric or psychological problem.
Yeah. Well, they may have we have a joke here.
Yeah. Yeah. We have an in-house joke. My my wife and I. There's an old joke. It's not a It's a kind of a dirty joke, but you know,
why does a dog lick his uh himself? Say um you know, because he can, you know, he
he does it because he can do it. He can do it and it feels good and he does it, you know. So, we have that we that I
ask, you know, why did they close you down? Why did Dr. Fouchy close us down during COVID? because he could, you
know, he felt good, you know. So, we we kind of like assume that everyone's working on the same kind
of moral economic access as ourselves, want people to flourish and some sometimes people just want their own,
you know, benefits and so forth. So I think that that's way uh I'm not a conspiracy guy but I do think there's a
conspiracy of interests that once something happens forces a line to feed themselves and that that the way the
government is organized it feeds on it's feeding frenzy is frenzy you know if there's a frenzy they feed
and yeah and it's selfreinforcing and um
yeah all right lovely so so I'm going to give you the last word you can promote your
your uh republication of your book or anything else you want to mention how people can find you. Um,
sorry, I've just got to plug this into the battery because it's uh running out.
Yeah, right. No worries. Yeah. Yeah. I I plug plug my uh my book. Yes.
Which is the uh Yeah. First you got to plug in your iPad, then you can plug your book. I'm
Yeah, I've I've done it. Um well what what I was going to say is um I'm often
uh have quite often been criticized because I haven't proposed any uh solutions to to the problems that we've
been talking about. Uh but my solution, my preferred solution is that everyone
should read my book and uh and uh [laughter] that uh
and that uh uh and and undergo a kind of religious conversion. It's almost
[clears throat] a a religious conversion. Yeah. No. Well, I I'm I'm kind of
without religion. Yeah. I I've been a drimpist drimplist for a while and I'm certainly honored to
have met his uh his smarter um brother there, Anthony Daniels.
Well, thank you very much. Thank you for having invited me. All right, perfect.