American Thought Leaders - How Modern Medicine Abandoned Healing: Mihai Nadin

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

Sponsor special: Up to $2,500 of FREE silver AND a FREE safe on qualifying orders - Call 855-862-3377 or text “AMERICAN” to 6-5-5-3-2The failures of our COVID response and the “gender-affirming��� care model have made a lot of people question science and medicine in the West.Mihai Nadin argues that science and medicine went awry a long time ago—in foundational ways.He’s a scholar and researcher with broad insights spanning electrical engineering, computer science, aesthetics, human-computer interaction, and post-industrial society, and he’s the author of “Disrupt Science: The Future Matters.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

We made the machines, and then we fall on our knees in front of the machines. We are treating the machines as the new gods. The failures of our COVID response and, quote, gender-affirming care have made a lot of people question science and medicine in the West. Dr. Mihai Nadine argues that science went awry a long time ago in foundational ways. We don't have healing. We have repair. argues that science went awry a long time ago in foundational ways. We don't have healing, we have repair. It maintains life actually in a state of dependence.

He's a scholar and researcher with broad insights spanning electrical engineering, computer science, aesthetics, human-computer interaction, and post-industrial society. And he's the author of Disrupt Science, The Future Matters. We reached a moment in which this repair starts being a form of engineering. The whole obsession with transgenders is part of the engineering. Are you aware of the fact that for the rest of your life, you are going to be on a leash

and you are going to have to swallow medicine after medicine after medicine? This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Keller. Before we start, I'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsor of our podcast, American Hartford Gold. As you all know, inflation is getting worse. The Fed raised rates for the fifth time this year, and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is telling Americans to brace themselves for potentially more pain ahead. But there is one way to hedge against inflation. American Hartford Gold makes it simple and easy to diversify your savings and retirement accounts with physical gold and silver. With one

short phone call, they can have physical gold and silver delivered right to your door or inside your IRA or 401k. American Hartford Gold is one of the highest rated firms in the country with an A-plus rating with a Better Business Bureau and thousands of satisfied clients. If you call them right now, they'll give you up to $2,500 of free silver and a free safe on qualifying orders. Call 855-862-3377. That's 855-862-3377 or text American to 65532. Again, that's 855-862-3377 or text American to 65532. Dr. Mihai Nadine, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you for having the courage to I've been reading your book Disrupt Science and I find it absolutely fascinating and kind of a very original view on the current state of the world. So how could I not have you on?

Yes. I use the word courage because I do not know of too many outlets at this moment in the United States who would go as far as to accept that there is a need to disrupt science. Many of us are, it's very clear to us that there's something profoundly wrong with the system as it functions, including the system, let's call it, of knowledge generation, be it scientific or otherwise. I want to touch on something that many of the viewers of the show will be familiar with, which is always looking at things in terms of a cost-benefit analysis. You believe that in terms of, for example, medical interventions, right, around the time of the HIV crisis, you say that the cost started to surpass the benefit of

essentially, I think you're saying the way the whole system functioned. And surpass the benefit of essentially, I think you're saying the way the whole system functioned. And that's, of course, a big claim. But explain this to me, please. Yes, the living survives on the account of using as much energy and resources as necessary in order to make it to the present or the future. So the return is the maintenance of life. In that sense, the HIV crisis maintains life, but maintains life at the cost that is not socially and not individually justified. It maintains life actually in a state of dependence that no longer reintegrates those affected

by the condition, but rather gives them a chance to continue to exist but in a state of dependence. The replacement of a knee, the replacement of a shoulder, the replacement of a hip, which are extreme surgical interventions, are many, many times justified. but most of the times they are not justified because in the long run they are creating the increasing number of those who are going to be in wheelchairs and will need help for the rest of their lives the disruption would mean in this case let's give up this false understanding of the human being as a machine, which was promoted for a very, very, very, very, very long time, and understand that the human being, like any other being in this universe,

is subject to processes called self-healing, called self-repair. We don't have the patience for it because if you go for a replacement it's going to take a day in the hospital and maybe another couple of hours before they release you. But if you would go the biological way, the biological path, it might take months or even years to get healed. But that healing is going to be organic and not mechanical. And that's what I mean by that. It's comfortable to say I'm not going to miss my job for three months. I'm not going to miss the possibility to go to the football game or play my tennis as

mediocre as that tennis is after you have something replaced. I want it to happen now. I go to the doctor, I have a headache, give me a pill. I want to go out of your office and don't have this headache. Well, in some cases, the headache might be a condition, a holistic, affecting the entire human being of such a nature that you might need two, three years, exactly the number of years you took to destroy whatever led to the headache in order to get rid of the headache.

Are we prepared to give up the instantaneous reward of the wrong science applied to us? And are we prepared to understand that we are going in the long run to pay a huge price for accepting it? Moreover, more critical, are we prepared to take the path of returning to the natural cycles instead of the artificial cycles of machines? When you're talking about this instantaneous gratification that's expected, you know, let me use an example here. OK, for example, I need, you know, I once had to get my ACL repaired. So, you know, central ligament in my knee because I popped it skiing.

And so, you know, I had surgery and then, you know, spent about a year in physiotherapy. And then I was out the other end. But over time, that actually, that ligament kind of degrades and sort of decades down the line, most people need to get it fixed again. But that year, that didn't feel like instantaneous gratification to me. You're a little unfair, and you're a little unfair in which respect. The amount of money that we invested, we mean society, means the medical establishment, etc., etc. in fixing things of all kinds is such that the solutions favored by the public are called replacement, are called take my natural piece of this and replace it with an artificial piece of that. The example that you brought, it only documents what I'm arguing. We do not put an honest effort into developing the biological processes that will help us fix a situation such as

you described, not only for a short time, but in the long term. What you were subjected to is to a beginning of the right path, but that path has to be improved. We don't put money into that. We continue to put money in the alternative, which is the mechanical alternative instead of the biological alternative. This is absolutely fascinating. I'm thinking about this, what you describe as machine theology. I'm going to get you to tell me about that in a moment. Before we go there, I would like our audience to understand your background, how you got to writing this remarkable book. There's many steps along the way, one of them of course being that you came from communist Romania originally. Tell me that story.

I'm deeply, how should I say, grounded in that story because it shaped a lot of what I would say my perspective of life as I have it today. I grew up under what people call a totalitarian regime. For instance, it meant that in addition to the mathematics, which was excellent, in addition to the physics, which was still excellent, we had to go through what you call here in the western part of the world social studies. Those were not social studies, it was called dialectical materialism, in which we were told, based on what Marx and Engels and Lenin and some other great nonsense creators described as being the laws of nature. They picked up the very convenient path of determinism.

Why? Because the entire society was of a deterministic nature. They controlled the causes in order to control society. And they forced the people to accept it. If you would fail your exam in math, or if you would fail your exam in physics, you had the chance to redo it. If you would fail in materialism, dialectical materialism, you were out of the university. Why? Because this nonsensical view of reality was the one that they wanted you to accept. You have to be aligned. Okay? And as my life, you know, had very interesting turns of all kind, I realized that there is no freedom at the moment in which somebody is telling you, this is your perspective. Because you simply don't see the whole reality.

You see only what is given to you as the perspective here it is this This is what it is and if you go outside it Guess what sir? they knew what cancelling meant and most of my Teachers were at some moment in their lives cancelled. I will never forget the great meeting, political meeting, in which one of the most important professors in physics in Romania was cancelled from one day to the other.

Why? Because he was not aligned with the ideology. I'm now here in the country of maximum freedom. And what do we have? We're rediscovering wokeness and we're rediscovering cancelling. Not only that, in Canada, the country from which I understood you come, they would take a person whose views I might or might not accept, it's absolutely irrelevant, and send him to re-education. Do you remember what the Chinese were doing? They were re-educating China. Is this what we call the freedom? No.

And accordingly, I do not claim I was a dissident in Romania. I'm not going to claim I'm a dissident in the United States. But I'm going to claim that I try to live as a free person in Romania, as I try to live as a free person in the United States, despite the fact that given the scientific position that I'm taking and I'm promoting and I'm researching. I never made it into the big competition to get the big money from, you know, the government. I have to confess also to you I made it a point in my life to not even try. I don't like tainted money no matter whether it's tainted red, blue or any other color. So that's incredibly interesting because many, many examples today of the cost of essentially

most funding sources that are available to scientists right now being tainted, in your words, in various ways. Yes. Yes, and my problem is not with the fact that in order to be active in science you need the appropriate means. You need money among other things, but not only. You need also talent and etc. The tainting goes so far as to make impossible alternative solutions to problems that are exceptionally important. There is an official tenor and academia became an echo chamber

to those who were in the position to control academia. And so from the level of the university to the level of the endowments to the level of the major funding agencies, either you are aligned or you are basically not part, you cannot succeed. Scientific journals have gatekeepers that will not even get your paper for peer review. We are no longer producing science, we are producing justification of the official viewpoint. Come on. That is a major investment. We're publishing millions of papers of zero value.

Publish or perish is a game that has nothing to do with ideas, has nothing to do with ideas, has nothing to do with science, has to do with the stupidity of a system that became bureaucratic that was turned into a machine. And that machine wants as an input give me papers, give me number of students who studied with you, give me number of PhDs, give me numbers of the money you brought in. Please think about the science produced in the past by an Einstein or by Newton,

and try to put him in the position to apply to NSF for a grant. I can tell you the outcome. So what I find particularly fascinating about your hypothesis or thesis is that you're basically saying that this situation we have right now in science,, this woke-ification of science is something that you would expect to happen within how science has existed for the last many centuries. And that's not necessarily obvious to everyone, because most people would just say that the existing science is a perversion of what went before, and it's a kind of a Lysenkoism perhaps, instead of science, right? You are describing two different levels. One is the level of the discourse about science and one is the level of the science. So one is object level and one is meta level. Regarding the meta level, there was always something disturbing in the fact that scientists were suspected of doing things that were contrary to what those in powers were

pursuing. That's nothing new. And authentic science will always have this quality. It will not align with those in power. It will rather be a form of resistance, a form of challenging, a form of engaging those in power and others in addressing what is important. But after I look at the meta level I realize that where things are really significant is the object level. We carry with us this wonderful heritage of the Cartesian revolution, in which René Descartes able to come with rational explanations to phenomena that at that time were on the mind of many people. And he ascertains, maybe not as exclusively as we think today, he ascertains that there are universal laws and those laws, he doesn't say that, but indirectly are the laws of physics, the laws of what makes matter.

He rejects the distinction between the living and the non-living. For him they are subject to causality and if you have a cause and effect that's all what you need. Moreover, you need a method and the method that he develops is the reductionist method in which you take something that you don't understand, cut into pieces, try to understand each piece and as a result you get for free the understanding of the whole. And that's the major shortcoming of the view because that was never proven to be the case. So on this inheritance we are today in the most advanced possible technological stage in the history of humankind, without any doubt. And as a result we reached levels of prosperity that nobody in his right mind will ever question.

Absolutely not. We are able in our days to do things that were subject of science fiction only 50 or 100 years ago. It's absolutely sensational that we can explore the outer space. It is totally fascinating that we are creating at this moment machines of all kind that can do a variety of things. But at which cost? And that question is never asked within the view of cause and effect. Cause and effect means if my arm would like to move something, the arm is not strong enough, okay, I extend the arm, I build a hammer, now I have a hammer, with the help of the hammer I can do way more than I do only with my arm. I use this arm also to throw stones at somebody. So the hammer can start being

imagined as the beginning of the gun. But along the line of the cause and effect involved in what I just described to you, there is no place for the question of morality. There is no place of what does it mean that I'm going to shoot somebody? What does it mean that I'm going to launch a rocket in space? Those are also moral questions of all kind. What does it mean that beginning with the Industrial Revolution and culminating in turning agriculture into an industrial activity, the waistline of humankind changed. What does it mean that in 1930 people did not have the problem of overweight and in 2024 not only people have a problem with overweight half of the nation is on a continuous diet because on the one hand we take advantage of what we can produce

industrially processed food refriger, everything that comes into place, but we created a disease for us. Is this the goal that we have? That's not a very good goal, because if you look at what it means in terms of moral and emotional cost to society, This is a huge cost. Can we live with that cost? The numbers show us that there is a relation between this kind of exclusive causality to the detriment of understanding

the consequences of our actions. Consequences of our actions means anticipation, means the possible future has to inform the choices we make today, has to inform the actions that we perform today. And in essence, you're saying we just don't really think about that. If it would be only think about it, it would be easy. Wake up, start thinking about it. Mao had what, a billion people listening to him wake up and start. No, it's not thinking it's guiding our

understanding of reality is informing us that we should give up the simplistic notion that we can understand change in the living by understanding change in the non-living. We should stop expecting from the science of the living, that happens to be called biology, results as we expect them from physics. In physics we can build experiments which should be replicated and if they are valid they will be replicated in biology you cannot perform experiments because biological processes are open-ended an experiment is a closed situation in an experiment I can prove what gravity is, but in an experiment I cannot prove what in terms of biology means that there are no two cells in the human beings that are identical.

That's a major awareness. If we don't have it, then we produce a vaccine, like we produce a synthetic vaccine, which we decide we're going to inject under the assumption that all cells are the same. No, the cells are not the same. All cells are different in the human being. Accordingly, in some human beings, we had some effects that we can describe in other human beings we still don't know what long COVID is because we don't have the biology for it and the physics and chemistry that we used to make the vaccine are not sufficient in order to explain it so it's not only be aware of it, it's start before you do something. Think about what are the consequences, and those consequences are, as opposed to physics and chemistry,

of long duration, of longer frames of time. Well, so this brings us back, I think, to this machine theology, I think, as you describe it, because what you're talking about is a whole, it's a kind of foundational societal assumption amongst most people, or many people. And you're suggesting that we need to kind of transcend that, I think, is that right? Not so much to transcend, but to realize what we're doing. And let me explain it as simple as possible, yeah? We made the machines, and then we fall on our knees

in front of the machines, and we fall on our knees in front of the machines and we start claiming now is some people claim that we our reality are the outcome of computation we made a machine called the computer and now we claim in a in a game that is close to irrational that we are the outcome of the machine. So if I made a machine but I'm also the outcome of the machine something in this thinking does not really add up. Well these are not the only machines that we are becoming servant of. We are treating the machines as the new gods, you know, and these new gods can do everything for us. They can do animation, they can do chat GPT in which they will tell you who

you are going to get married to and how long you are going to live. Every machine from the simplest to the most complicated is the representation of cause and effect. Turing in his genius trying to answer a scientific question that came from a fascinating mathematician called Hilbert, Hilbert and Kaufman actually, tried to solve the so-called Entscheidungsproblem, which is the problem of how do I know whether mathematical proof is right or wrong? Is there a machine that can do that? And Turing proved that there is no such a machine, but there is a machine that if you give me a recipe, will be able to do with that recipe everything that you expect. In other words, it can get you not only tomato soup,

but potato soup and whatever. If you have the recipe recipe I can make it. But that doesn't mean that the machine understands anything. There is no understanding. There is only a syntactic sequence, a formal, a repetition, an imitation. Intelligence means to, and this understanding applies from the simplest form of living, which is the blade of grass, to the human being. Actions that are not based on understanding are not viable. Unfortunately, humankind at this moment in time is not by any means demonstrating

that it has a better understanding of what reality is and what we need to do for the future than it used to have in previous times when it was more dependent on its own efforts. So what do you see as the implications of that? The implications are relatively simple. There are a number of activities that would need to be rethought. Medicine is one, but education is one. An education that is not anticipatory is an education that ends up like the education that

was performed under Mao, in which you were simply trained to repeat slogans, etc. That's not called education. In my opinion, politics is anticipatory. And before I wrote the book that we're discussing now, Disrupt Science, The Future Matters, I wrote a book, Are You Stupid? A Second Revolution Might Save America From Herself, in which I made the claim that the constitution of this country was an anticipatory document at its time.

At this moment, this document is a dead document. The country needs to define an anticipatory path for its future. And the best proof of what I'm saying is if you look at the level of the political discourse at this moment in the country, never mind if you look at how painfully democracy is failing in this country, One should understand that without reclaiming the anticipatory dimension the country does not have a future. My claim at that moment was the Soviet Union imploded

because it lost the anticipatory path and became a deterministic machine and became a deterministic machine. And as a deterministic machine, it was doomed to fail. We are on the path of repeating the story of the Soviet Union. Again, I want to sort of jump back to this general idea. You're basically saying that with this Cartesian view of the world, this mechanistic view of the world, we end up building a theology around that view of the world and we exclude the anticipatory element that life brings in. I want you to actually explain that as well. So how is it exactly that a living system is something beyond what can be described in the sort of Cartesian mechanistic worldview?

The deterministic, the reductionist deterministic view of reality ascertains that everything that there is in the world is made of matter. I will not question that. I will only say there is a distinction between matter that is living matter and matter that is not living matter. Living matter has a different dynamics. Living matter is matter that is subject to all the requirements of survival. Living matter is such that it cannot survive by using more energy than the energy it needs in order to survive. If it would be so, we would have a great deal of nature already disappearing. Living matter is such that in order to understand it, we have to give up the reduction to physics and chemistry because the properties of life

are not reducible to the properties of the molecules from which our bones are made or our skin is made or etc. It's not reducible even to that chemistry and not only it's not reducible but each time we do the reduction, we cause trouble. Such as, we take chemistry to treat pathologies, to treat pathogenies, to treat disease. What does this chemistry do? It's creating new diseases. In other words, the side effects with which almost every piece of medicine you buy today is coming is the cause of a new set of diseases that will have to be addressed by a new medicine. This is an infinite cycle. Why? Because we are not looking at the dynamics of

the living matter. We are trying to reduce it to the dynamics of the dead matter. Not only that, we take the living, and in order to analyze it, we kill it. You don't analyze the characteristics of something alive by killing it. All the genetic sequencing is nothing else but take the living cell and kill it. And then you look at what it is made out of. No, that's not how life functions. So in terms of your very precise question, and it is a very precise and it is a fundamental question in the living we almost never deal with simple causality we deal with multi causality in the living we almost never deal with what Descartes ascertains which is the deterministic view one

cause one effect guess what in living, one cause many possible effects. The processes are non-deterministic. They are not reducible to calculations and they are not reducible to models. Instead of trying to understand the living by looking at how the living is expressing we take the living and now we model it in silico and then we come with new rules telling us from the computational model how we should treat a certain disease. Guess what? 80 percent of the papers published about cancer in various publications cannot be replicated.

And that's no surprise, because the reduction of the living to the non-living is simply false. You know, one thing you're really making me think of here, in the process of the last few years, as the COVID pandemic happened, I've become familiar with numerous doctors groups and numerous doctors themselves who did things a bit differently and in many cases suffered a lot for doing that. What these doctors typically did were observing symptoms in patients, observing the situation, seeing that certain protocols that they were kind of demanded in a one-size-fits-all way were actually harmful to their patients and came up with new ways, looking at repurposed drugs and so forth. And kind of what you're describing to me seems kind of analogous to this process of these doctors that actually became quite successful at treating this disease when the sort of

the, I guess, orthodox approach to doing so failed at many levels. We had the Lysenko experiment in the United States under COVID. In the sense that the government told us this is what you do, we know it better, and these are the means you should use. It turns out that even the Nobel Prize given in respect to the COVID is the wrong Nobel Prize. I don't dispute the performance of Kathleen Corico and Dr. Wiseman, superb and dedicated scientists. But they got a prize in medicine or physiology. In reality it's a prize in chemistry. All what they did is they discovered the substance that has to be changed with the RNA so that the

body will not throw it out, will not reject it. That's chemistry. But it did not ever prevent one COVID infection and the vaccine is supposed to prevent. Period. We can go around this definition forever it never prevented any moreover it turns out and I again bring up something that I discussed with some of my colleagues the mRNA became the generator of the variants of the virus as though it was not enough that we had one virus, now we are going to multiply them by applying a vaccine that is not a vaccine. That is a strange situation. That is a Lysenko situation, if you want it.

Even under communism, you could not do better than what those in power were doing. And I don't care whether they are Republicans or Democrats or in Europe, in France, you know, the party, the power, or in Germany, they played the game, you know, is that CDU compared to the SPD, etc., etc. They all aligned to this misunderstanding. If you look at the numbers of the people vaccinated and if you look at the number of the people who are vaccinated and died, you are going to ask the

question, is that a justified campaign? Scientific it was not and it should never have happened at this level. But because political expediency took over, heavy amounts of money were given. And immunity was given to companies. That's unheard of. Immunity for what? Something that you mentioned that I found very fascinating is that you also, as far as I can tell, you argue that it's a natural consequence of this machine theology,

as we'll call it, right? This sort of envisioning of everything in this reductionist way, the effect of that or the logical consequence of that as today is a loss of individual autonomy, of individual sovereignty. And essentially every system, including the governance that we experience, will turn into a sort of machine which treats every person as a cog in that machine. I thought that was absolutely fascinating. It is, if you want, one of the direct consequences in terms of social impact of what I'm arguing for. For the last probably 50 years, America experienced not only the euphoria of science but also the very sad reality of progressive loss of individual sovereignty. The individual today compared to the individual 50 years ago has less degrees of freedom than ever and the tendency is

to lose even the little that is still left. It is not only that you know privacy is gone for good. There is no way that anyone will ever recuperate this dimension called privacy. That is gone for good. So on the one hand, we know that we lost the privacy. And on the other hand, we are not willing to go to the consequence, to the price of what does it mean. Okay, you robbed me of something. What is the return for me? The return cannot be only the fact that whatever I type in when I'm looking for aspirin or whatever, 15 companies will immediately, within 30 seconds,

tell me what I find and they will even send to my door the next person to deliver the aspirin. The answer has to be the change in the social structure. And the change in the social structure has to be we can no longer live by this illusion of a democracy in which my vote in California or somebody's vote in Texas is zero, totally zero, has absolutely no impact. Is this what you call democracy? No. Socially, we are entitled to be part of a process where at this moment left out of the process how do we get to be again part of the process here are the things that people should start being aware and that will start by changing the notion notion of education. We have to give up education as a machine operation. If we do that, and if we go into celebrating the fact that we're different, infinitely different, there are no two human

beings that are the same in this world. If we celebrate that, the consequence is this whole obsession with DEI and the whole obsession with false wokeism will go away. Will go away because there is no room for it, so to say. So yes, the implications of a different perspective of reality are not only relevant to science and technology, they are relevant to our daily life and to the way in which we can unfold our talents and remain creative. The challenge is, and I think that you argue that every totalitarian system is actually fundamentally reductionistic. We touched on this a bit earlier in the discussion in its very nature. Many people on this program have argued that we are in the midst of a totalitarian moment. And you argue, I think, that that's a result of this fixation on this reductionist Cartesian viewpoint taken to its extreme, taken to its logical conclusion. What you're

saying resonates with me, but the question is, okay, so how to enact that in a situation, for example, where the education system, you know, the math and other subjects are used purely as kind of a foil to instill particular ideological viewpoints in people, right? So how do we, you know, kind of move past that? Because it seems like things are heading towards this logical conclusion that you've been describing. I'm not a catastrophist. I do not predict doom. I do not predict we're at the end. On the contrary, it seems to me that we are still living the most interesting times

ever in the history of humankind. No doubt about that. It is a time of opportunities and it is a time of dangers. At this time what we see, at this moment what we see are mainly the dangers. And they are mainly the dangers because they are kind of a number of situations that are totally new to us. The opportunities are a little more difficult to see. The opportunity means you need the challenge in order to discover the opportunity. So I'm really in favor of a science that instead of producing answers to the public,

is challenging the public, is engaging the public in the interaction that leads to scientific discovery. The public was not only left out, was pushed away. We will tell you what's right, We will tell you what's wrong. No, the public has to be at this moment, and it is so far. We have everything that it takes to integrate the public in the process. The integration of the public in the process, if you want, is pretty similar to the community meeting.

In New England, you have the towns in which the town meets and discusses its priorities. Is it a school? Is it a light? Is it a whatever? We need to get away from the globalist obsession to a more, how should I say, scaled down interaction among people who feel responsible for a certain part of their existence. And science, again, in order to make the progress, I'm sure every scientist would like to make progress. I don't think that there is any scientist who would like to destroy science.

If you want to make progress, you have to, number one, get rid of the preconceived ideas in which we were formed and start what they call so nicely in English thinking out of the box but not out of the box in the sense I am out of the box I am part of a group that I'm going to interact with that is my community with which I'm going to share ideas questions and and and and and so forth. We have to finish this obsession which is of a non-scientific nature of tenure as a form of guaranteeing the freedom of the scientist. Freedom is not a matter of tenure. Freedom is a matter of your own thinking. You don't need tenure in order to think freely.

The society is prosperous enough to maintain at this moment huge amounts of people involved in science, in a science that actually produces no good. Time to go back and say, OK, the science has to be the science of a certain community that has some goals, some targets. How do we work on them together? The scientists being only one part of it. So what I'm arguing is not the return to anything. When I say globality is not the answer, it does not mean throw away

globality and we're going now to be all local and we're going to go to the local markets and we'll eat only fresh food. It's not rational. What's rational is communities of people are formed based on the challenges that those communities are facing. These are cells of self-organization that cannot be dictated hierarchically. They result from needs. The example of anticipation, the example of the butterflies landing here in Pacific Grove, some of them, cannot go without the example of the exhausted sardines that once upon a time were feeding the community here. The idea is to engage the human being so that they can unfold their talents. Am I an utopian? If you say it to my face, I will never feel offended.

If you allow me to say, probably I will not go for utopian, but I will go for, am I idealistic? Yes, I believe in the human capacity to reinvent itself. Don't forget, not only are we made of cells that are totally different in our body, but the majority of them are in a continuous process of being remade. We are in a creative cycle. The cells are renewed. Some of them faster, some of them slower. This renewal that corresponds to the characteristic of the living matter is for me the model of a sustainable social activity

and of a sustainable society. That is if you want the answer. Do I know of concrete ways to do it? No. Is it too late for me to say tomorrow I'm going to start? No it's not. I will do my part. If you do your part and if other people do their part, I'm convinced something will happen. So you mentioned these butterflies in Pacific Grove and I guess the lack of sardines in the bay where you are. Can you just kind of explain those two scenarios to me please? One is the scenario of successful anticipation in which the butterflies in order to succeed they will not stay over the winter in New England they start a very

very long journey from New England to a place where the conditions for their survival are better those butterflies that start in New England, someplace along the way will die and will be replaced by their offspring and even those will die again who will be replaced by offspring until the third generation will make it here and that's anticipation. The butterflies remain alive, they start the journey back. Those who start in Pacific Grove will not make it to New England, but their offspring will.

That's anticipation at work, in the most direct way. Many years ago, the area of Monterey Bay was an area very, very rich in various other sources, but sardines among other things, and they produced sardines here day and night. People lived on, you know, catching them, cooking them, putting them in cans, etc. Up to the moment when that resource was exhausted. This is the place where our machine industrial model killed the anticipation from nature. As an alternative, we built there a spectacular aquarium. And for me, that aquarium is the metaphor of one of the dangers through which we go.

Which is the danger of thinking that we are going to understand nature if we put it in a bottle. Because an aquarium is a bigger bottle, nothing else. And at certain moments in the day the people paid for it, go into the bottle and feed the fish from the shark to whatever. But that's not nature. That's not nature. Like the zoo is not nature. There is an image that broke my heart for a very simple reason. It's an image that I saw recently on social media, on X.

A bear was freed from a zoo in Romania. And the bear is now filmed in the new habitat in which it was placed. Do you know what the bear is doing day in, day out for years now? Going in a circle, like it used to go in the circle when it was in the zoo. That's what we are at this moment as a society. We are really in a condition in which we are on a leash, so to say. And it's time to break that leash. Now, going back exactly to your question, the sardines and the butterflies. Successful anticipation, anticipation

that was undermined and we're doing it to ourselves unfortunately more and more. It's wonderful to have sardines from Morocco, they taste wonderful but you realize that if we continue on the same path, we are not going to succeed much better than we did or did, failed in the Monterey Bay. So, you know, we have an epilogue, doctors should lead, not the medical establishment, which speaks very much to, you know,

everything I've been discovering over the last however many years. But go back 100, maybe even 50 years, it was very much more doctors leading, doctors looking at individual patients according to the Hippocratic Oath, figuring out how to best help them through observing and through learning from their community of doctors and the general learning that was available at the time. Whereas today we're in the situation where many doctors just so-called follow the guidelines. And so according to your thesis, why did that happen? Very tough question.

We institutionalized medicine. Once we turned medicine into an institution, subject to laws and regulations, we created a framework within which the art of healing is practically eliminated eliminated in favor, a huge tradition of interest in healing, a huge, huge tradition which unfortunately we're not fully aware of. We keep talking about it but we are not fully aware of. Even great religious leaders such as Maimonides, the Rambam, was a splendid physician. He was not the only one. And there are others. But they integrated the observations based on the science of the day with the art of healing.

Their purpose was the art of healing. Their purpose was never the repair. Today, given the machine model, we are repairing. And we created a context in which the rules for repairing are given. And in some countries the rules are not very pleasant. This is the amount of medicine we are going to give to older people or this is the amount of medicine we are going to give to whatever group, etc. But we reach the moment in which the repair starts being a form of engineering. The whole obsession with transgenders and things like that is part of the engineering. There is no transgender person who is told as a kid, I want to be a boy, I want to be a

girl. Okay, let's consider what we're doing. Are you aware of the fact that for the rest of your life you are going to be on a leash and you are going to have to swallow medicine after medicine after medicine? If you are aware of the consequences. In other words, even if you are young, I don't want to talk about 10, 12, that's irresponsible. We don't want to give those decisions just like that. But even at the level of 15, 16, 17, 18 are you aware of the long-term consequences? I don't think that there are many people who are going to subject themselves to this form of

engineering that will create a handicap, a handicap for the rest of their lives. So to your question, why are these things changing? There's yet another factor which I will not ignore. Do you remember the times when churches were beautiful, architectural monuments? Do you remember what was the next wave when instead of

churches we had what being beautiful monuments? Banks. Yeah? Neither churches nor banks are anymore in the condition, in the position to afford having the luxury buildings. Money is now made on hospitals. This is where medicine becomes no longer a dedication to human health, but a business. The highest profit is made on hospitals. The number of people in the administration of medicine increased by 3,000%. While doctors, basically the numbers are pretty much the same. Administration of what? How do I get a patient in a hospital means 1,200 a night, 2,000 a night. Or they are waiting for you at the end of your life. They are really waiting there. Waiting like, you know, lawyers waiting for you at the end of your life. They are really waiting there.

Waiting like lawyers waiting for accidents on the roads. One month, if you are in the last part of your life, not like Carter who is able to do it for a longer time, one month at the end of your life, $30,000 a month. Somebody's making that money. And that is the major explanation for why the corruption of medicine took place. It was transformed into a business. Fascinating.

You could say the same thing about education. There's certainly higher education. Correct. My previous university, I'm totally impressed by how it developed over time. I'm part of it and my slogan at the university was always, none of us is better than the university we are serving. I believe in that, so if I say something negative, I say something negative about myself. Building and building and building and building. That's not the future. The future is to create an education of human interaction,

not of buildings and overbuildings. But there is money to be made, and money is made. Yeah, I mean, really you're talking about the industrialization and commodification of every endeavor of our lives. I mean, that's kind of what's coming through for me in our discussion. Correct. You just gave a very good summary of what my viewpoint is about it. So I find it extremely interesting that you work both on the side of engineering and also on aesthetics. And one of my observations, we've been talking about sort of the decline of this model

or reaching the kind of logical conclusion of this Cartesian deterministic model. My observation is that at least for the last hundred or several, maybe several hundred years, the very notion of beauty in art, in my view at least, and I suppose it's subjective, has been under assault. And a lot of what I'm told I'm supposed to think is beautiful I find atrocious. And you know at one point art was essentially a celebration of the divine, as I understand it.

And a lot of what came out was truly, genuinely beautiful. But then that got changed. according to our thesis here, the commodification and industrialization of everything now, including art that resulted in a lot of what we have today. I'm curious what your thoughts on this are. This is a bigger topic, perhaps for another interview, but I'd just maybe like to start it here. It always was. We are witnessing a process of aesthetic decadence. When I say decadence does not mean it's more glorious than ever. On the contrary, the decadence is the abandonment of the condition of art. For me, art is an interrogation, always was.

Science interrogates about the laws of nature. Art interrogates about the meaning of life. Science has never anything to do with meaning, art has always to do with meaning. There's less and less of it. Why? Because we transformed art also into a commodity and as a commodity who cares what's hanging in your doctor's office? And it is an expense that the doctor will incur because it's a good tax deduction, not because he cares about or she cares about that work of art. The lower and lower aesthetic threshold results in the fact that we produce not only more mediocre works of what is called art but more mediocre artists. People who never had

even the faintest desire to question anything. They are very good, like a machine, in reproducing what some other people did. What does it actually mean? I received at the moment when chat GPT came out, I received probably on a daily basis questions from all kinds of people who said, look at what I did, look at what I did look at what I did isn't it wonderful art in the moment I said it's junk forget it you know the conversation was over machines do not make art artists make art you can use a machine for making art you can use a machine for anything, for sharpening your pencil or you name it, you can use it.

But art is essentially an expression of creativity. Art is something that results in something that didn't exist before. The uniqueness of art is not something that we decided over time. It's part of its condition. There is no machine in the world, as we speak now, that can formulate one question. There is no machine that can formulate one question. Art formulates questions and engages the public, those who are willing and interested in that art,

in giving their answers, whatever they are, sometimes silly, sometimes not. But that's the life of a piece of art. We go to a Shakespeare performance in our days not because we have anything to do with what Shakespeare described. The questions implicit in what Shakespeare put in that play are questions that are also of interest to us today in a different way than in his time. My questions today are definitely not going to be the questions that people formulated at his time,

when they were sitting in the theater and were drinking beer and applauding at several theatrical lines. Some of these qualities are lost and the result is we created a very high level that is not accessible to the large public at all and we created junk that we feed the people on a continuous basis. Not only does it destroy further their aesthetic perception, but it makes the aesthetic being less significant for society. And this is the part where I am a bit emotional. Because art, by its nature, is anticipatory.

If we lose that, art becomes an object like any other. Is there anything else you want to make sure that we cover today? I would like to make sure one thing, that the fundamental issue in changing the perspective of science is the understanding that living matter and matter are not the same. Matter can be described and to use the logical system of Gödel, matter is decidable. We can produce complete and consistent descriptions. This is what allows us to say with precision when will be the next eclipse in this and that part of the world. We can say it not to seconds, to milli, to microseconds,

with a precision that is absolutely amazing. We can do the same thing when we send an object in space. We're very good at decidable processes. The living is an undecidable entity. Living matter is undecidable, cannot be ever completely and consistently described. This difference between the two was not acceptable to the science until very very recently. Very very recently. Okay. One of the most intriguing scientists, Elsasser, his name comes from Al Sass, one of those who had to emigrate to the United States. Al Sasser was rejected, was taken off the list of possible Nobel Prize winners because he was considered a vitalist.

In other words, those people who believe that the living is different from the non-living. So you understand that this process that we're talking in our days, in which people are not allowed to do the science that they believe in or they consider justified, is not a new process, but it becomes more and more radical. Elsasser was cancelled, if you want. That's an example of being cancelled. The Nobel Prize Committee is cancelling everyone who is not in the deterministic mode. Not understanding that the living is not reducible to physics and chemistry will prevent us from understanding it finally. And at stake is the survival of

the living. Guess what? When this universe, based on the models that we have today started, there was no living around. Am I correct? Based on the models. This was a universe in which we know it was matter. What is today the dominant presence in our universe? The living. Do you see the difference between the living and the non-living? There is more living than non-living. The living created itself, survived, and keeps creating itself. That's a very important observation to understand. What do you mean exactly by there's more living than non-living? Because it seems like there's a lot of non-living. Add up every form of non-living matter in the world, which means mountains, which means

rivers, which means… You're talking about variety. Every other form of non-living. And add up all the forms of living that you are aware of from the blade of grass to the animals not only variety more quantity of living matter while at the beginning there was no living matter it was zero living matter yeah there were only the elements as we know them from the Mendeleev inventory. Yeah?

There was no living matter. Today, living matter is predominant in our world. Even Neumann asked the question, Boy, strange. I'm looking at how do I create machines that replicate themselves. It seems that nature knows how to replicate itself better than any machine that I can do to let's call it think outside of the box so to speak to use the term you used earlier what would

that be to facilitate that in the long term I articulate in the books what I importantly would call the Nadine law, according to which reaction to breakdowns is by many order of magnitude more expensive than prevention and not sustainable. We should focus on prevention. If we gain this understanding that focusing on prevention is our own contribution to a more sustainable world, boy, I would consider myself a very happy person. You know, I'm thinking about this sort of, I mean, I actually see it as a huge societal problem of, you know, I would call it

safetyism. Okay. And that seems to me to be this sort of inordinate focus on, I don't know, avoiding risk at any cost. Okay. And with all sorts of societal consequences. And how does that comport with the idea of focusing on prevention? Prevention does not mean avoid risk. Prevention means the awareness of the risk attached to every of our choices. If the return on the choice we make, in other words, if the return on the risk we take, justifies it, then that is the model that I'm going for. Not zero risk. On the contrary. Awareness of risks as it is associated with choices.

Awareness of choices. This is the second part which is the most important part. In order to be anticipatory it has to be an awareness of choices. And the judgment according to which the choice I make is the one that returns the value that I expect at the lowest possible risk. Or at the risk that I can bear. Sometimes the lowest cannot be achieved. But something that we can adapt to which is good enough. Right and I guess the perfect model for that would be in medicine where you know the sort of preventative medicine is seemingly gone by the wayside as we've been discussing. One would be definitely in medicine but the other one which I

will insist a hundred times because we are going through pretty dramatic events. None of the wars that are taking place in our days should have taken place. They were both at least preventable. We decided not to prevent. We decided for a reactive course. And we pay a huge price that affects not only those that we want to help, but affect everyone. We could have prevented definitely the disaster of the Ukrainian-Russian war. And even the disaster in the Middle East could have been prevented if indeed anticipation would have been at work.

It's a failure of anticipation, both wars. Dramatic, absolutely tragic failure. Every human being killed is for me one too many, if we can avoid the killing of human beings. Well, Dr. Mihai Nadine, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. I hope you mean it. Okay. I do. Thank you all for joining Dr. Mihaly Nadine and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.

I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.