The Sevan Podcast - #39 - David Eberhard

Episode Date: May 28, 2021

The Sevan Podcast EP 39 @SEVANMATOSSIAN @BRIANFRIENDCROSSFIT @EBERHARDDAVID The Sevan Podcast is sponsored by http://www.barbelljobs.com Follow us on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/therealsevanpodcast/ Sevan's Stuff: https://www.instagram.com/sevanmatossian/?hl=en https://app.sugarwod.com/marketplace/3-playing-brothers Support the show Partners: https://cahormones.com/ - CODE "SEVAN" FOR FREE CONSULTATION https://www.paperstcoffee.com/ - THE COFFEE I DRINK! https://asrx.com/collections/the-real... - OUR TSHIRTS ... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Well, here we go. You hear me? How exciting, right? Ah, yes. Ah, yes, we hear you. Yeah. It works better without earphones. I don't know why.

Okay. Well, we have a great – I can hear you great. Can you hear us pretty good? Pretty good. I hear you absolutely great. Yeah. Well, thank you for coming on. Yeah, thank you for inviting me.

What time is it where you're at? 8 p.m. Oh, thank you for coming on. Yeah, thank you for inviting me. What time is it where you're at? 8 p.m. Oh, thank you for doing this. I watched a recent interview with you, and you have nine children. So I know 8 p.m. can be what we call the witching hour at a house with kids. How did you find a quiet spot? I took one of my kids' room, and he'll be sleeping in his brother's room. Well, thank you.

Tell him, give him a big hug and a kiss for us, and tell him thank you in the morning. Dr. Eberhard is a psychiatrist in Stockholm. He's the head of staff. Can you tell us the name of the hospital? It's Prima Maria, Maria Addiction Clinic, Addiction Care Clinic. Okay, what he said. And I came across his TED Talk through Ivor Cummings. He did a seven-minute sort of a cut down of it. I ripped it off of YouTube and I put it on my Instagram. It resonated with me deeply, extremely deeply. Then I listened to the 17-minute version and I regret posting the seven-minute version because the 17-minute version also did not waste a word.

It is extremely concise. I think that there's a lot to unpack there and a lot of words that maybe didn't translate perfectly well. Sweden, their native language is Swedish. It is also the second of all the countries. I don't remember what number one is, but it has the most English speakers besides English-speaking countries. It's number two in the world. I'm assuming English is your second language, doctor? Yeah, yeah, of course.

Swedish is my first language. So I apologize if it wasn't perfect English. Oh, it's perfect. Just, you know, there were some nuances there in some of the words that I'd love to unpack. David, that's Brian Friend, and I'm Se Sevan before we start, or we have already started. I'd like to tell you that we have an enormous bias. We are both, um, I was an executive at CrossFit Inc and, um, which is a fitness lifestyle

methodology around nutrition and basically creating humans who have, um, will a program that will allow humans DNA to express themselves in the most robust, healthiest manner in the world. It was created by Greg Glassman. It's diet and movement. And when I started CrossFit 15 years ago, I was a pretty hardcore liberal. And through the 15 years of being at CrossFit and realizing that people who take personal responsibility and full accountability of their lives are happier and they blossom more and they live a more fulfilled life. And so I've gone through quite the transformation myself in the last 15 years. I've also traveled to 100 countries, the poorest parts in the world, Africa, India, South America, all over through a previous life as a filmmaker. And when there was something that really, as I was researching, I already knew

I wanted to have you on, but in the interview you did, a podcast you did, you mentioned postmodernism and that really like, then I was like, okay, me and this guy are really on the same page. And the interviewer just passed right over it. But then I was like, okay, this guy gets it. I'll open up with this furthermore to show my bias. When the SARS-CoV-2 was first found and they were talking about deaths coming out of China, I was looking at the stats. And my addition, multiplication, and subtraction, my 10-year-old math levels are phenomenal. I'm probably the greatest mathematician at the 10-year-old level in the world. I would compete against any 10-year-old. And I knew right away when they said that the vast, vast majority of people dying in China were men who were over the age of 65,

who had been smoking for more than 30 years. And then the second category of deaths was women who were living with these men. I knew that this, I knew there was something up with this, with this virus and that it wasn't what they were, what people were saying it was, and that there was already becoming some irrational fear around it. And when they started saying that age was a cause of death, I knew that that was a mistake too, because it's really just people who are 30 years complicit in their demise, meaning people who have been drinking Coca-Cola, smoking cigarettes, and eating fast food for 30 years. And then to say it's old people who are dying, no, it's actually – it's no more relevant than saying if my son fell down the stairs, he wouldn't be injured. If I fell down the stairs, I would have a lifetime injury. But if my mom fell down the stairs, would have a lifetime injury but if my mom fell

down the stairs she died this is just life this is just has nothing to do with sars this is just age and like you said um mortality is a 100 percent um i'm not going to say it as good as you but a 100 diagnosis for life right you we all die. And I've posted on my Instagram. I'm sorry, one more time. Correct. Yes. And I have posted on my Instagram several times and I spend conservatively to say one hour a day looking for just one healthy person who has died from SARS-CoV-2. And to this day, there is maybe one, a 17-year-old boy in New York

who did not look obese. The article is very short on him, but possibly he died healthy of the 3 million people. And that is basically the premise. That's what I took away from your TED talk is that, hey, where is the risk assessment? Like, are we going to ban cars next? Are we going to remove stairs from all homes because 12,000 people die a year in the United States from stairs? For example, when I wrote my book in the land of the security junkies back in 2006, they banned, I don't know the English term for it,

the walking chairs that toddlers use, The walking chairs that toddlers use, or small, not even toddlers, like one-year-olds are using, you know, those were banned in Canada because one kid got injured in a stair. So I had that as an example. And the EU had some prohibition against it as well. And I don't think now, I have a two-year-old now, you don't see those anymore in Sweden. So this is actually what I'm saying. This is not only COVID, SARS-CoV-2. You see it everywhere.

And it's an effect of an over-secure society where we have forgotten the fact that we are mortal. Can you go into a little bit of the history of that? You mentioned that in your talk about how the last 50 years have been the safest years in the history of mankind for men. And there's a sort of a formula you lay out there that the more secure we get yeah it's what i call this that's the definition of actually i have in my book since i work with psychiatry i i i have diagnosis like symptom diagnosis one diagnosis is the National Panic Syndrome, which is just a way I use the same DSM manual that you use when you normally diagnose panic syndrome. But I do it on a national level. And also I did the Security Junkie Syndrome that I did the same way. junkie syndrome that I did the same way. I took the symptoms of an addiction and I just changed the word heroin to security. So it was really easy to show that this is exactly what

has happened over the last, I would say, 40, 50 years. we are so into security that it is like an addiction. Is it part of our evolutionary process? So, you know, 500 years ago, we looked for a cave that wasn't accessible to lions and tigers and bears. And does it stem from that yeah i would say that the the people on this uh what's it called in english savannah the the in in africa like we came from africa and and and in that environment any person who was not at a bit risk averse would not pass on their genes. So that's why we see this, like I said, with the security. To sum it up, I would say the security junkie syndrome is that the safer we get,

the more security we seek because the reason for that is because you level level up you always find new risks when it gets safer you get more close nearly risks that that you sort of upgrade to become real risks and this is evolutionary i would say because any person in a cave or in the savannah in Africa that would sort of go up to a lion and say, look at this. This is a huge cat. I can pet it. Would not pass on these genes. It's as simple as that. And here is where we meet. Let me try to punch a hole in your theory here. Why are there so many obese people and so many people not taking care of themselves health-wise when there's such a huge risk? It's almost – I would even say guaranteed risk of a premature death. Because it doesn't happen instantly.

Okay. That's the example I took with the plane crash. We overestimate risks of things that happen instantly and that we can't control. And if you're eating too much, then you have another evolutionary bias, I would say, when it comes to eating a lot, because that's also, if you go back a thousand years in time, it probably was a better strategy to find food as much as you could. But apart from that, also, you don't see the risk in eating. You see it happens 10, 15, 20 years ahead of you. It's the same with smoking. It's like you tell a teenager, oh, you shouldn't smoke, but they don't care because they think they are immortal when they are around 16, 17 years old,

and it can't happen to me. It's a better strategy if you want somebody to quit smoking and say, hey, you smell awful. The girls don't want to kiss you. Yes, I agree. The math is so clear. The math is so clear. You have, you have – I don't know what it is. It's under 300 children have died all with pre-existing conditions in the United States and basically all the numbers for people under 50 years old if you do the division. see that the odds of falling ill or dying from SARS is so limited. Are people not doing the math? Are they not able to contextualize the numbers that they're hearing?

I think it is like I said in my TED Talk. we react we are reacting to events and people are reacting to events and what we have seen all over the Western world probably all over the world globally we've seen people counting deaths so then it's very difficult for I really in when I when I was working on with my TED talk, I had a slide with people say, or at least I intended to say that humans are really bad at high figures. You say you're a 10th grade math. 10 years old, 10 years old. Don't give me too much credit. 10 years old.

Okay. Sorry. Sorry. I meant 10 years old. 10 years old. Don't give me too much credit. 10 years old. Okay, sorry, sorry. I meant 10 years old. 10 years old math. But still, even if you have a 10th grade of math, we don't understand really high figures. It's like with the vaccine, you know, AstraZeneca vaccine. You had 17 deaths among, I don't know, 25 million people. And people think, oh, this is a huge risk.

But obviously, it's less than one in a million. But people don't know what a million is. And it's the same when you start counting all these deaths. People, they sort of try to make it, they try to understand it, but it's not understandable for the human mind. As opposed to the images they're showing of dead people or refrigerator trucks full of dead bodies, those resonate with… They don't understand. That you understand. So you see, oh, there's a lot of people dying here. So I don't know how many percentage of the

population who really understands percentage so so it were especially very low percentages like this is I think you can say it's around like I said in the TED talk is about 0.2 series 0.2% mortality rate when it comes to this infection. It's really low. On a side note, and this isn't a subject I personally delve into and I try to stay away from it. When people ask me why do you think this is happening, do I think that there's like a sentient being behind this? Like that there's some sort of effort from some group of people or some government or to get control or whatnot that people are coming up with theories of why we're going this way? My feeling is that it's not being managed, that it's basically just a crossing of conditions, the condition that you're saying,

the condition that the pharmaceutical company wants to make money, the condition that people are afraid, the condition of the fact that we have social media. Do you have any take on that? Why this is spreading this global, what did you call it? this global what did you call it um yeah or or this global self self self-harming behavior do you have any thoughts on why it's happening happening yeah i think i think i i'm not very much into conspiracy theories i don't think this is a conspiracy i think it uh but people are doing their jobs and they are sub-specialized, all of them. So it's their job. And that I also wrote about in my book when it came to other things than this pandemic.

subspecialized and you have this institutions of different sorts and you have hospitals, you have doctors who are subspecialized in like, I took the example with the compulsory helmet law, bicycle helmet law in Sweden

that sort of oh, you have neurologists and they obviously see people that are really hurt if they have no bicycle helmet. So they are lobbying very much for the bicycle helmet law. And we see the same when it comes to different things. And this is what you see with the pandemic. You see it with legislation regarding food administration, regarding whatever, chemicals, everything. And obviously, you always have people making money. Maybe not only the pharmaceutical companies, because it's also in the state, in the municipality.

You have officials, institutions, governments, they sort of, this is what they do. This is what they do for their living. So it's not a conspiracy, I think. It's just that it's the whole society is risk averse and you get paid to be risk averse. Yeah, it's sort of the story, if you're a hammer, all you see is nails. And it's just the crosshairs of all of these things crossing at the perfect time. Yeah.

You give a stat that's, and I know I'm beating a dead horse, but I have to do it. You give a stat where the mean age of death in Sweden is 82. 84. No, no, no. He said the average – the life expectancy in Sweden was 82. The mean age of death from COVID is 84. And then you say something that I really, really like. I don't know how it's in the U.S., but I saw figures, stats from Italy.

It's the same. It's very similar in the U.S. I want to say it's like 78 and like 78.6 or something like that. We have a lot of obese people in the United States. Don't be rude. Don't be rude, Dr. Eberhard. Don't be rude. Don't be rude. Dr. Everhart. Don't be rude. Don't be rude.

Just half of us. Just half of us. Yeah. What? This is such a strong. And then I want to come back to that. And then you say, and at that point, you have to ask the question, did you die from SARS-CoV-2 or did you die with COVID? And I mean, I would hope that if I, that would be enough if someone said that to me to just snap out of it.

But is that enough to snap people out of it and just the message isn't getting out there? And this is another problem one more thing this is another problem why i have a problem with conspiracy theories like you also because they're not hiding any of the numbers anyone can go to our cdc website and practice their arithmetic yeah yeah no yeah well i i think it's uh it's difficult psychologically. If you are into something very much, you are not very willing to change your mind. It doesn't matter. I don't know if you're familiar with it. I think it was at Stanford they did this experiment with college students.

experiment with college students and they one part they they told they told people they were very against uh major punishment it's called with death penalty and they they they fabricated evidence saying that this is a it's very bad with the death penalty and then they had another group that were against death penalty and they fabricated evidence saying that death penalty is really really good and nobody changed their mind of course you could say they understood that it was fabricated evidence but but I don't think that was the point the point is if you are really into something, it's very difficult to get people to change their minds. But I hope that I can – the majority of people, they don't really know. And those are the ones that I try to listen. There's this – I don't know if it's a Buddhist saying or whatnot, but it goes something along the lines, a man will lose his keys and become furious and turn his house upside down. A man

will lose himself and not even know it. And it's interesting you say that. People want to defend something that they've sort of attached to their identity with such vigor because it would be and it is almost a small death to have to let go of an idea that you're so attached to that you believe is you i'm sevan matosi and i believe covid is the most dangerous thing that ever happened on the planet i mean that will be hard to to relinquish, right? You would have been investing a lot of time in that. It's internally in your personality then. Tell me, when you gave that TED Talk, were there repercussions? Did you think about repercussions that could fall upon yourself for giving such an honest,

truthful talk? I don't know. I have a reputation in Sweden, you know, on the forehand. I normally say what I think. And obviously, yeah, I can get repercussions of that. But my employer is quite nice to me. They don't care. So, but obviously, yes, I really, I have been saying more worse things than this, I think.

At least when it comes to fanatics that find me very annoying and try to ban me and cancel me in different ways. I wrote a book 2018 which I called The Great Gender Experiment which was far more that people

were more pissed off when I wrote that one. Are any of your books in English? When I looked, I could not find them. Unfortunately, I have one book that was translated into, I think, 20 languages. It's called How the Children Took Power. And that one was an international bestseller. It was a bestseller in Korea and Germany. And I had

some connection with some publishers in the US and the UK, but in the end, they wanted their own experts. That's really interesting. In Sweden, we always want international experts, but in the U.S. and the U.K., you want your own. So they turned it down, unfortunately. But we came quite far, but in the end, they turned it down.

I can't speak for all Americans. It's such a diverse country. But I think I would guess that there's a huge respect from most Americans regarding Sweden. I don't think in my 49 years on the planet, I've ever heard anyone say anything bad about your country. I think you've said the most disparaging things. Oh, okay. Sorry. I understand that you have, and I think most people have. And when it comes to security issues, it has always been a huge respect for Sweden, which I don't find. That's why I find it. This originates very much from Sweden, which I was talking about in the TED Talk too when I came to this security junkie thing. And I think a lot of countries have a huge respect for Sweden when it comes to security issues, when it comes to social welfare, etc., democracy, etc. So I understand that. But all good things also have bad side effects.

I thought you wouldn't understand my humor and instead it was the other way around. I didn't understand your humor. I apologize. Yeah. Tell me about how the TED Talks contact

you and ask you to do it and how you prepare for the talk. And the most common comment I got from people after I posted your talk was, I can't believe TED allowed this. And I see that comment on YouTube either. Why hasn't YouTube banned this? And obviously people know it's the truth. You're just talking numbers. You're just talking numbers. You're just talking stats. You're just, you know, expressing an idea of how some of the mechanisms of the brain works.

But can you kind of walk us through your TED experience? This is a TEDx, so it's an independent. It was the Stockholm School of Economics that contacted me. School of Economics that contacted me. And obviously, not all TEDx talks are uploaded to TED's homepage, but this one was, and I haven't been in contact with TED. They just accepted it. But the people I was talking to, they were telling me it's not, it's not a hundred percent that you will get it on Ted, Ted's homepage,

but obviously they have seen it and they didn't ban it. So we don't need to be so paranoid. Fair, fair. And did you prepare this talk just for the TEDx? Were they like, hey, we're going to give you 20 minutes and you put this together? Yeah. I have had this talk a lot of times, similar talks in Sweden, but in Swedish. And normally I have this talk.

It takes me one and a half hours to talk about it. Ted, you are not allowed to talk more than 18 minutes. And I think mine was 17 minutes. Yeah, well, good job. Very nice. Did you rehearse that? No. Yeah, a little bit.

A little bit at nighttime before I send it in. There's a line in there that you say that people – and this is one of the translations that I think is a little bit lost. You say that people have lost touch with nature. And I'd like to hear your definition of what the word nature means because I think it means something different in our culture here in the United States than the way you used it. I think you used it in this really broad way. Yeah, really, really broad way. Yeah, I don't know. What would you say then in the U.S.? Well, you talk about nature and you say…

What I meant was we come from the forest, we come from the saloon. We originate from an environment that is really brutal. And we don't understand that because we are so artificial in the way we live why does get getting more security breed the desire for getting more security because if you get rid if you get rid of a danger dangerous thing you will never be satisfied because it's brought into our system, in our genes, evolutionary, that we need to check our surroundings. You can see this with OCD, which is when this has gone totally out of control, the psychiatric disorder OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. You see this with individuals that have this extreme in its extreme

but we all have it in a way because of because we have it in our genes and obviously we are not only genetically determined we obviously do change according to culture and other environmental factors. But still, this is such a huge percentage of what we are. So it's very hard to just ignore it. And that's why we sort of invent new... If we get rid of one, we invent another danger. And obviously, you have individual differences here that are huge, but still. It's weird to share this with you since you're such an accomplished psychiatrist, but I have a firm believer that when we have, for lack of a better

explanation, that we are a composite, a gathering, an aggregate of I statements. I am hungry. I'm thirsty. I'm tall. I am short. I'm smart. I'm dumb. I'm fast. I am right. I'm a person who loves other people. And I do believe that when, and some of these components that make us up are concepts or ideas or theories. They're not just strictly I statements. But you touch on something very – that works perfect in my sort of understanding of how I work. If I have this thought in my head, then it needs to be addressed in the outside world, right? So I'm hungry, and so I have to go get food. But you nailed it. If you are someone who has identifies with being afraid of things, and there are no dangers in your

world, you will create one. And I've seen the same thing happen. I believe that the same thing has happened in the United States. And we're in the middle of it right now with racism. People are so sure that there's racism out in the world, but they don't see it, that they're pointing to the most absurd things and calling them racism because they need validation of some of those I statements inside of themselves that they've identified with need that validation. Am I understanding sort of what you're saying correctly about like, hey- Yeah, and I totally agree with you when it comes to this new. I wrote another book, 2009, which I called.

I don't know. It's it's hard to translate to English. It's called Nobody Takes Shit. That's nobody in the land of the easily offended. It also was a Swedish bestseller, which was

addressing exactly these issues. And that was 2009. So we have it in Sweden as well. But it's exploded since then. It was a a prophetic book i would say now 10 years later it's totally it's like people are getting so so offended of everything and they look for like sweden is if you look at it the stats sweden is

probably one of the most least racist countries in the world. And we have the same thing here. People are talking about structural racism and things that are sort of – this is sort of a conspiracy theory in itself. It's a delusion I would say, it's like this is the mind of a delusional patient where you have conspiracy, you have we don't really see people are getting the same

chances in Sweden regardless of color gender whatsoever you have the same chances all of us, but still we find this structure that people are looking for these structures and you have structural racism. What's that? Nobody can explain what it is because this word doesn't mean anything anymore.

I agree with you. I think it is a delusion. I don't know what the scholarly definition or academic definition of delusion is, but what I've noticed amongst my peers is a conflation, a blending of thoughts versus the outside world. And a very simple example is we know red means stop, but we also know that's not true. That's an agreed upon delusion or rule we all live by in order so cars don't crash into each other. But for some reason, other thoughts or ideas, people have conflated with the outside world. They think that if they think it, it must exist. And I've told some stories about the Bigfoot. It doesn't matter how much you believe in the Bigfoot. Do you know what the Bigfoot is? Do you have that in Sweden? We don't have that. But I know what it is, yeah. We don't actually have it here in the United States either.

No, I'm not 100% sure. But it doesn't matter. Even if I open up a store that says, hey, we cut Bigfoot's hair and we cut Bigfoot nails, it doesn't make Bigfoot real. Do you have any fear? Fear is not the right word. Did you ever think you would see a mass delusion like this on this scale? All of these sort of postmodern – all of this, that we're seeing people confuse their thoughts for reality, that they're unable to critically think, that they're living in a delusion.

Did you ever think you would see it on this scale? No, not really. Even so, I did write this book 10 years ago, and I will try to – oh, I have a – we are going to publish it, republish it again. And then I'm – like I republished In the Land of the Security Junkies, and I have examples with COVID in the new version of it. And I will do the same with this book from 2009, because I did see this happening 10 years ago, but I could not see the extent of it. It's totally mass psychotic, really. psychotic, really. Like I said, with the land of the security junkies, from national panic syndrome to global self-harm and behavior, you could say, from the land of the easily offended to total delusionary, delusion, mass psychosis, global mass psychosis, or at least in the Western world. You see it mostly in the UK, us and the scandinavian countries i i think i'm guessing i have no proof of this but i'm guessing that the disease is spreading via

electronics that the reason why maybe you didn't foresee it or no one foresaw it is because there were the type of electronics we have now we didn't have in 2009 and so you didn't know that there was going to be such a potent mechanism for the carrier of this disease right right yeah yeah of course so so we've always had people that are slightly delusional but but now they get along very easily they find each other and i don't have a problem with delusion. It's the lack of awareness of your delusion. It's okay to be delusional, but be honest. But you have a responsibility to yourself and to humanity to be honest about it.

I think people are honest about it. I'm not really sure this is quite right, because I think people are really honest,. I'm not really sure this is quite right because I think people are really honest because they do really believe this. Sorry. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yes, I was going to use God as an example. Maybe I shouldn't do that since that will trigger too many people and they might not grasp it. But it's okay to delude yourself. It's okay to believe that you believe that your wife loves you, but then be honest with yourself and be like, hey, I'm not 100% sure. I guess that's what I mean.

Okay, then I understand. That's what I mean. No, no, I agree with you. I think these people are terrified that they're going to die from SARS-CoV-2 even though they're more likely to walk out in the street and get hit by a car. Yeah, I mean how else would people be vaccinating their children? Most people in Sweden, I think, that are not buying into this, they're getting vaccinated just to get these vaccination passports so they can travel again, so we can come back to the normal world again.

That's why people are getting vaccinations. There's a book my wife had me read a chapter in when she was pregnant with our first child, and it was talking about consequences, making consequences for your children. And I don't know if I can explain this clearly, but the consequences needed to be attached to their behavior. So, for example, my son throws and breaks his toy. The consequence would be like, oh, you're going to have to do some – and he says, I want a new toy. I said, okay, well, you broke that one.

Why don't you go do some yard work and I'll pay you and you can buy a new one just to connect these natural consequences. these natural consequences. And what do you think about the consequences, if I can use that word in this circumstance, that they are giving people to get the vaccine? It's not even like consequences, it's coercion. In the United States, we have lap dances, we have alcohol, we have donuts, we have free Uber rides. We have the kids at a school in a chattanooga tennessee were told that if they get the vaccine they don't have to take one of their final exams i'm not seeing i know i know i know i know that's totally amazing wait seven you forgot the other good one at the school is if you if you uh wasn't if you the vaccine, you can get 20 minutes without the mask. Yes, yes.

You could get 20 minutes with, yes, 20. 20-minute mask break. There was like the first person who got it got 30 minutes. The second person who got it was 20 minutes, and the third person was 10 minutes. It was some sort of just. Some sort of competition in order to get them to get it as quickly as possible but what was the rationale behind that

I have no idea what the rationale for any of this is that's why you're on the show doctor that's why you're on the show I have to explain this that's why I want the show what about is this is this just blatant coercion is is this there's someone at the top who's so scared and thinks they're doing back to the delusion thing they think

they're doing such an important job for humanity that everyone must get vaccinated at all costs to save civilization? I think when it comes to the whole events that we have been seeing for not only when it comes to this vaccination stuff, where I think it has to do a lot with people have reached a point where this is the only way out. But I think if you go back one and a half year in time, what we see is that we have politicians that try to be active. They sort of, they need to show that, okay, you elected me. I need to take this seriously and look at me. I'm a great leader.

That was interesting with Sweden because they did nothing for half a year. Actually, it looked from outside that it was a quite rational way to say they said, OK, we ask our public health institute and say that you need the experts, the epidemiologists, you figure out what we do. a while they understood that the the public were comparing sweden and finland and finland had less causes of death so the politicians started to react like it and now they're not even not worse but it's it's the same everywhere so so they start competing between each other and showing off that we can do this we We can do lockdown. We do this. And we have totally, in Sweden, we have totally illogical decisions. It's like if you watch a soccer game, you have this arena with 50,000.

You can have 50,000 people there and you're allowed to take in eight. But if you sit in the restaurant and you can look at the game from the restaurant, then you're allowed to have 300 people or whatever. In a very small area, you have 300

people and then you have eight people for 50,000 seats. This is just one example of, and I think my understanding of this is that this has to do with showing activity, showing that we are real leaders. And what the only thing they are showing is that there are no leaders because leading is about taking difficult decisions when you have to, like in this case, we have,

you totally ignore the fact that, like I said in my TED talk, we have children who haven't been outside for one and a half year. That you totally ignore just to save the lives of an 85-year-old. That you totally ignore just to save the lives of an 85-year-old. And that's also because you say that this sounds really cynical, but it isn't cynical. That's what we pay them to do. There is this – boy, you said a lot there. First of all, I'm going to go back to the stadium thing. We have this really weird thing going in the United States because we have these three or four giant states that opened up a month

ago. And just a couple of weeks ago, they had the largest indoor boxing event with 73,000 people unmasked. And then two days later, our president's telling us that he's thinking about lifting masking rules. And it's like, wait a second, we just saw on TV in Dallas, Texas, 73,000 people smashed into a room together. And of course, Texas's numbers as a state are plummeting, right? There is this, you're saying one of the mechanisms that we're seeing that's prolonging the issue is that they're, I think you use the term, they're trying to find a way out. Basically, you're saying they've committed to the solution that's at the end of the hallway, which requires, let's say, 70% vaccination or what the rules are down at the end there. And now they, instead of saying, hey, we were wrong or, hey, this isn't working or, hey the the cure is doing more damage than the actual disease we're going to abandon that you're saying that they're singularly focused on making sure they stay by their word even if it hurts society to make it to that goal but this is psychologically interesting because because you cannot if you start uh without way out, like the vaccine is sort of a door that, oh, I thought I was at the end of this hallway, but oh, there's a door I can walk out.

But if you don't have that way, then how are you going to do? How are you going to back out of it? are you going to do how are you going to back out of it because every time you see that oh there are a little bit more people infected then you need to have the lockdown again and again and again so so because they have decided to do it the way they do that every time you see like it has nothing now it doesn't in sweden it doesn't have anything to do with cases of death anymore now it's cases of infected people whether they die from it or whether they even get sick from it it doesn't matter anymore so so then it then this uh our state former state epidemiologist he foresaw this one year ago i had him i also have a podcast which is called Health for the Unhealthy,

which is quite similar to what you talk about normally, I think. And I had him as a guest, and he saw this one year ago, saying, how are you going to get out of it? Because you cannot get out of a lockdown if the lockdown always gets back as soon as you get a little more cases of infected people, which is what we are seeing. It's like now we've had quite low numbers for quite some time, and nothing happens. It's still four people that are gathered.

We are allowed four people outside in a restaurant, et cetera. And it's totally logical because it differs where you go. It's happening in other countries too. There's a big CrossFit competition happening this weekend in Australia. And just yesterday, I think, there was a breaking announcement down there that said, four people from northern suburbs of Melbourne tested positive for COVID. So now, if you're entering Queensland and you have been to any Victorian exposure sites, you need to quarantine for 14 days in government-arranged accommodations.

And it goes on to list a bunch of other things that you must do. With four people? And that's just, there's four positive tests. It's like Dr. Eberhard has said. It's not that they were sick. It's not that they died. There were just four cases. And so now imposing 14-day self-quarantines and a whole list of mandated procedures for anyone

who's done certain things in that region. If this is the way you treat this infection, then the only way out is you need to, okay, we get the vaccine to everybody. And I'm certain because the vaccine is not 100% and you're going to get the infection in half a year's time or one year's time anyway because the antibodies, they disappear after a while. It's like normal cold. You don't get antibodies for life like you're having a lot of infections. But in this case, you won't get that. But then it's sort of a mind fuck it's like you need to okay this is the way how we want to come back to the reality that was before the pandemic

and how we're going to do it yeah vaccinate all the all the world and then we get on and if people get infected we know that we are vaccinated. So there is no endgame, basically, with this way. If they're committed to eradicating SARS-CoV-2, there is no endgame, because it will always be back. And they've proven that

we can't keep living like this, we'll all die. I guess, on the one extreme, if all the humans died on the planet, the problem would go away. I mean, basically, that's the only other option. And of course, I just have to throw this in there. From the little bit of research I've done, and I'm no doctor, the vaccine, the antibodies are not the primary way the body will handle SARS. We have NK cells, T cells in a healthy person that can easily, easily handle SARS-CoV-2 and whoop its ass. For a lot of people, most people, probably yes.

I'm not a specialist in infectious diseases, but I have colleagues that I've discussed it with, and yes, probably that's the case. Have you had SARS-CoV-2, Dr. Eberhardt? Dr. Eberhardt? One year ago, I had it. Last Easter, I had it. Oh, happy Easter. And how... But that was time for a week. And I did...

Hours every day for a week. Oh, it sounds like a vacation, not a cold. Cold. Yeah, but I was really tired though. It was a strange feeling. Did your wife get it? No. Not what we know.

And she hasn't been tested, which is really strange. So she probably has T-cells. Otherwise, she would have gotten it. And how many of your kids are at home still? I know you have a couple of basketball teams. Yeah, I have nine kids. You have a couple of basketball teams. Yeah, I have nine kids.

But now I have most of the time five kids and half the time seven kids. And I have two adult kids. And did any of them get it? I don't know. I don't think so. Oh, maybe. I am positive they had it, but they did not get very sick. They just rolled right through it, like the other 99.99999% of kids.

What do you do to stay in shape? What's your regimen? Oh, I go pumping iron, you call it that. I go weightlifting. Go to the gym. I go to the gym you call it that. I go weightlifting. Go to gym. I go to gym five times every week. Wow. And how much time do you spend there in each time?

30 minutes or an hour? Depends, an hour. Between 45 minutes and an hour. And what do you eat? What's your diet like? had this you know i did something called 16 weeks of hell uh they need to change the name they need to change the name it's huge in sweden 16 weeks of hell you know you you go uh weightlifting and go to the gym like six times a week. And then you go for a power walk one hour every day.

And then you eat some special food with low carb food. But the problem was that I lost and I wasn't I wasn't underweight and I lost like six kilos that's 12 pounds in two weeks time something three or four you know I evolutionary I would have starved on on a prehistoric time I would have been starving because I need so much food so they changed I started eating 1200 calories and I lost too much weight and then after when I when I finished this 16 weeks of hell I ate 5000 calories every day just to keep just to keep my weight so I was the one that did this that had been eating most. So I need a lot of food.

So I don't really mind what I eat. I just need to keep my weight. Yeah. Well, you look like you stay in phenomenal shape. I mean, you look great in your TED Talk. You look good in a suit. So whatever you're doing, you're, you're a great, you're a great role model for your, for your people. A friend of mine, um, the, the founder of CrossFit, Greg Glassman

told me yesterday that, um, as humans, and I, and I'm paraphrasing, I'm not going to say what he said perfectly. and he's an extremely brilliant man he was basically saying that people are looking for comfort i think i think he heard um i think there's a movie here in the united states it's called no safe spaces have you heard of it it's a documentary right yeah i don't know it isn't though it it two comedians? It was one comedian, and then the other guy is not a comedian, Dennis Prager. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard about it, yeah. Yeah, you should absolutely see it.

I think you would find it extremely valuable and enjoyable. But there's a piece in there where he says, and I think this is where Greg got it from, that human beings are always searching for comfort. And what they really should be searching for is freedoms. And so you should be overriding that mechanism for comfort to make sure that you maintain your freedom. Does that resonate with you? Is is there anything you can shed light on, the mechanism of how that works? The mechanism is, I don't know. Sorry, I'm kind of ambushing you here. Sorry. It's okay. I'm trying to answer your questions. Well, I do agree.

But the mechanism is obviously more difficult if you talk about it psychologically or you talk about it philosophically or that goes into each other obviously but the problem the problem with comfort or security like this is very much in line with what I write, that if we sort of coddle the whole generation, the whole population, you don't have any freedom and then you don't really live. It gets pointless. Why should you be safe if you have no freedom? What you said there, the point to live is very interesting. I recently quit drinking coffee about four weeks ago. And the first morning I quit drinking coffee, and I used to love getting up in the morning.

I still love getting up in the morning. But that first morning I quit drinking coffee when my eyes opened up. It was the first time I closed them and went back to sleep because I was like, well, there's no coffee waiting for me. So I had lost my reason to live momentarily, right? And now clearly that I have three boys, I know every morning when I wake up, that is my reason for living. I can't wait to see them. I can't wait to interact with them. I can't wait to go out with them. And so basically you're saying – It used to be the coffee, but now it's sports. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. And I see the picture. You're basically painting – you're saying, yeah, we can put you in a 20-by-20-foot room and give you everything you want. We can bring you food.

We can bring you an exercise machine. We can bring you girls. But then bring you an exercise machine. We can bring you girls. But then what? What's the reason for living just to have those experiences over and over and over and over and over and over? And then so that's, is that why we have so many depressed people now? They're losing their reason for living. They're losing their passion. That's one of my topics that I write a lot about because in all of my books, I used to. I did say wrong in my TED talk. I was a bit nervous, I think.

I haven't been working at the Stockholm County Emergency Ward for the last 13 years, but I did work there 13 years. And the five last years, but I did work there 13 years. And the five last years there as head of staff. And that's why I started writing about this, because I saw the development that was that people were starting to seek help for very mild conditions. Like if their girlfriend broke up with them, they came to the emergency ward, the psychiatric emergency ward, and were suicidal. And I think a lot of it has to do with,

especially if you look at the younger generation. I don't know if you're familiar with Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff's book, The Coddling of the American Mind. I am. I haven't read it but i'm familiar yeah so they they draw the same conclusions as i i did in the in the book in the land of security junkies that that that what we see is a generation of people that have very high expectations on life. That's my conclusion. We have a high expectation on life.

But when you get, in Sweden, we have the happiest, the second happiest 11-year-olds in the world, in the OECD countries at least. But then we have very sad young adults because they have high expectations on life. Nothing bad happens to them. They're over-secure. They have this secure box.

They live in this secure box. And when they get out in the real world, they need to call for safe spaces and trigger warnings and the expectations that everything is going to... I am going to be the CEO after working in a company for half a year when you're 21. So they have expectations on life that make them depressed. And they also don't have what previous generations, at least in Sweden, had was that they had

this search for afterlife or there's a meaning, there's a God, there's something bigger issue that the reason why i'm here so so i see this in my work people are why am i here and it's all and then you only talk about this secure place and and everybody's competing about who who is going to get more and more secure and who is going to get most more and more and who is going to get more and more from society. But it has nothing to do with themselves and the responsibility you have yourself. And this is not their fault. We taught them to be like this.

You just painted a great image for me. Anytime you're triggered, that's like going to the gym for your brain so when you have a society that's taking out all the triggers or anything that might offend you basically what they're doing is they're making your brain fat, weak, slow, stupid ignorant and they're stealing from you an opportunity

to process something yourself it's like when your kid falls down and you go over and pick them up, you think you're helping, but what you really did is you stole the muscle contraction that they earned by falling to stand back up. And wow, that was really... Sounds like you read my book. What? What? It sounds like you read my book.

Well, I studied Sweden for two weeks before you came on and then I crammed your book down. I wish I could read your book. I scoured, I scoured, I scoured. I think I'm going to try to get it published in the United States now, if this TED Talk. But, you know, it raised a lot. A lot of people saw the TED Talk, but it's getting slower and slower. So I hope for a new wave that people can see. I know Brian's eager to say some stuff to you, too, before I take you off on it.

We only have 30 minutes left, and I want to talk to you about kids. But if we don't talk about it this time, we can have you back on again, because I fancy myself as a kid expert, and I think we would have fun talking. But go ahead, Brian. I would be thrilled to come back okay brian don't ask him any personal questions about your own psychological issues we stay on topic here stay on top well actually one of the um one of the the main topics that i did want to talk to him about is is related to children not necessarily the raising of your own children but in your in your talk you you know you you mentioned that overestimating the dangers of

infection with a small mortality rate and ignoring massive consequences in the future or side effects in the future, you list out a couple of things. And you talk about keeping the children out of school for an extended period of time, economic crises that could have and will continue to happen, bankruptcies, economic failure, stuff like this. But you also talk about the mental side effects that it will have on the population, which I think is potentially an area that you have a lot of expertise in and maybe needed to remove from that talk to get it underneath the 18 minutes. So I'm curious because we've seen in the United States, some news reporters go on the air and say, I need to condition myself to see a person without a mask again. And to me, that's kind of a silly thing for an adult to say, because you've had decades

of years of seeing people smile and look at you and read their facial expressions without a mask. That should hopefully be what you're conditioned to see, not the opposite. But for kids, and particularly kids that are really young, I've been concerned and worried about how this is going to affect them 10 and 20 years down the line. Because between the ages of zero and five, you're very impressionable. And if all you've seen recently, or maybe your whole life in some instances, is people with masks everywhere you go. What do you think are some of the ways that that could affect that generation of young people as they get old? I would say the straightforward answer is, unfortunately, nobody knows, because we have never carried out this kind of experiment on a generation before.

But again, talking about Jonathan Haidt, and he talks a lot about kids need a window when you can learn things as a kid. The brain works like that. It's like you need, like me, I'm not from an English-speaking country, so I did not have this window when I learned perfectly fluent English. And it's the same. You have this window between some years when if you don't hear a language during that period,

you won't get it fluently. And it's the same with socialization. So that's what Jonathan High talks about. If you have this gap where we, and this is a problem with child-rearing, upbringing, that we try to put everything in order for the kids. They don't, it's not allowed for them to fight because then there's always an adult saying, oh, now you have to apologize. So they don't settle things themselves.

And this is, that's why I started thinking about it because this is the same thing. started thinking about it because this is the same thing obviously it's going to get harder for kids to socialize uh with this mask or this uh especially i don't think the mask is the major problem the major problem is that they have been inside there and and another really huge problem is that they haven't been exercising for one and a half years. It's like, I don't know how it is in the United States, but people are, the kids are not allowed to have the normal, like in Sweden, they were not even allowed to go skiing or skating outside for a couple of months this winter. And this is obviously that we know that habits, you need to have habits. It's like in my podcast, we talk all the time about what are we going to do to get people's health better. Yeah, you need to start when they're kids so you get good habits. And what we are telling our kids is that we are skipping the good habits and and locking them inside and they're they are not even they

won't even get infected but then we then we talk then we give them bad conscience because it's not about them it's because you're killing your grandma if you get this that's that is insanity telling your kids that, by the way. Even if that were true, you should have never told your kids that. That's your narrative. Anyone who said that. I want to just throw one thing in there, Brian. You know what's crazy about our country?

They did have those rules, those lockdown rules, but really the blame is on the parents. Because 99% of the places were not enforcing them. And I never once kept my kids inside and a ton of other parents did either. We still went to the park. We just worked around the yellow tape. We still went to the beach. You just had to have parents who could think and realize who could do 10 year old math and realize, okay, I'm going to stop eating sugar. I'm going to stop eating refined carbohydrates. I'm going to be healthy. I'm going to work on myself and this will be fine. But're we had those rules here but they weren't enforced and so you could have got away with still you could still find classes that would teach your

kids with other kids you could still find ways out but you had to deal with the social pressure and you had to overcome your your fear but but like in sweden we did the kids from, I don't know what grade it was, about what's called the 10th grade or what's it called, high school. They were not allowed to go to school. They had for one year, they are having their uh classes like this on zoom or teams and they they are not allowed to go out obviously if you're a teenager you go out anyway but yes yes of course but the small kids it's like it's it's amazing and and and even though you we had kindergarten open as as soon as someone sneezes they send your kid home same here we have uh in the united states they've if i feel like in the

last five to ten years they've been phasing out or reducing the number of gym classes, physical education classes, and just in public schools in general. And then this year with the lockdowns and kids not being able to go to school, like you talked about, that was missing altogether. So I work at a gym and we started offering some classes for kids of various ages to come. We call them gym classes at the gym. And it was mostly just parents who trained at our gym bringing their kids there. We didn't draw a huge demographic. But it's been a concern of mine even prior to COVID is just the emphasis on, like you said,

hobbies and having something to do and physical activity and engaging with the kids, other kids your age in those settings. I don't know why that has been taken away from the public education system, but it is concerning to me. And we have the same experience over the last 25 years that you have less and less gym classes in school. And that's also a thing that we talk about in our podcast all the time that we need to have these compulsory gym classes every day in school I used to

I used to teach in the public sorry no I used to you go you go you go three strikes you're out it's getting more and more complicated. You go, you go, you go. You go, you go, you go. Three strikes, you're out. Yeah, it's getting more and more complicated to just move around and doing sports without competing in a club or doing it organized.

Like when I was a kid, we were playing soccer out in the yard all the time people were out this is getting more and more complicated and then it's more more and more important that you focus on that in school where so more and more kids can do this as a normal thing way of life sorry yeah go ahead a few years ago I was I was a teacher in high school in Texas. And I was, honestly, I was pretty concerned with what I was seeing there because most of the students I was teaching, they were afraid to think for themselves, afraid to be wrong, afraid to take risks. You know, when I would ask people, what do you guys think is the reason for this? Crickets in the room.

Coach, you're supposed to tell us. Like, that's why you're the teacher. And this mentality was concerning to me. And so I've had and I've spoken with some people and expressed this concern about the public schools. But the other option is to potentially homeschool your kids. But if you homeschool your kids, then you miss out on the thing that I think is equally important. And the reason kids should go to school is interacting with other people and being in those social settings. Social settings. Yeah. So it doesn't matter how you do it.

You do it wrong anyway. It gets wrong anyway, whatever you do. So, but, yeah. Yeah. David, going back to what Brian asked you, I believe that wearing the masks is a psychological – I believe that we're telling – anytime you see someone with a mask, what they're telling you implicitly, maybe even explicitly, is that there's something to be afraid of. And I feel like a lot of people deny that. They don't realize. They go, oh, no, it's no big deal to wear a mask. Oh, kids are resilient. Oh, it's not having that effect at

all. Quit being a baby. Hey, I'm not being a baby. It's not affecting me like that. But one, because I just walk around mostly with my mask off unless I have to go in somewhere really quickly for a law. But I see now a huge chunk of our society is now afraid to take their mask off even though our scientists have told them it's okay. And I don't think they realize the psychological implications of seeing what I call the fear flag for 14, 15 months. Yeah, and of course if it affects adult people like that, obviously it's going to affect kids more. And that's an example of the delusion.

You believe that it's not affecting you, but you're not being honest with yourself. Even if you don't feel it or think it, you can see it in your actions, right? You can be like, hey, this is a little weird taking the mask off. off ah that should be a sign to you that something has happened to you right there's been some sort of shift you probably all noticed how we changed in the way we say hello to each other this is the same thing should i shake your hand should i not should I hug you? How close should I stand? Yeah, it all got so weird. But if you go by subway or the metro and you get too close to people, they can be aggressive. Three weeks ago in my children's jiu-jitsu class, I stopped wearing my mask. And since then, there's been, I don't know, like six or seven or eight or nine classes. And yesterday when I went into the class,

slowly over time, I saw fewer and fewer parents were wearing masks. And I believe it's because I stopped wearing my mask. So the first day I didn't wear my mask, only one parent sat next to me. And I always sit in the corner. Then the next day, two parents came over to me and they took their masks off and they talked to me. And then yesterday, everyone had their masks off and they were joking around. Oh, this is the no mask corner. And we were all kind of crammed into that corner. But then it didn't even matter. But the sad part is the teachers are still wearing masks and the kids aren't wearing masks. I didn't let my kids wear masks at all.

Never once. My kids are only – I have twins that are four and a six-year-old do you have do you have any thoughts on that i'm open to you telling me that i should have given them the experience or i'm open to a hand slapping i'm open to you telling me i'm being too neurotic about it but i i refuse no no i i, you should not let your kids have masks. It's totally irrelevant to have those masks. And I'm not an expert on masks, but I do have some opinion on whether it helps or not. And the evidence for them helping is very, very, what do I say? It's not very fundamental.

No, I don't know if the right word. It has not so strong evidence for it helping. So why should you impose it on everybody? It's really strange. They would ask me, we would go somewhere and there would be like, you know, hundreds of people every day and they would all have masks on, you know, the skate park or wherever we would go

or the tennis lessons and all the kids are masked and my kids aren't. And they would say, hey, can we wear masks? And I would go, no. And they go, how come? And they go, I go, it's only for people who are unhealthy or eat too much sugar. And they were say, hey, can we wear masks? And I would go, no. And they go, how come? And I go, it's only for people who are unhealthy or eat too much sugar. And they were like, oh, okay, cool. And then that was it.

They never asked again. They're like, oh, we're healthy. We don't eat too much sugar. We don't eat any sugar. Yeah. Okay, Brian. I know I said – go ahead. There's a – for me, sometimes it's entertaining to talk about a lot of the problems and to observe some of the maybe crazy behaviors.

But I also think that it's not worthwhile to do that unless you follow up with some, you know, potential actions or solutions that people can have. And there were two times in your talk that it provoked a question that I have for you. So early on in the talk, you said you're talking about the precautionary principle, and in particular, the stagnation that can be generated or created in a person's life as a result of that. So the first... Right. So if you're a person in society who's who becomes aware of this maybe by listening to something that you had to say or something that's out there and you want to take an action step to be less stagnant in your life in a society that's becoming increasingly more stagnant

is there what are some things that as an individual level you can do to create and to get out of that trap. I would say this is the solution to how to get out of if you are too risk-averse, which the Petrosian principle is being too risk-averse. It's what we teach in CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, it's sort of, okay, I'm afraid of this, and I know that I'm not going to dare to do this, but then you sort of should take small steps towards doing it. But then, obviously, it has to do with what you are afraid of, and if you're risk-averse, if you have general anxiety syndrome disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, well, you are afraid of everything. And then you need to work on everything, but in small steps.

So there's no like solution that is sort of, oh, I just do like this. You need to work on it very, very small steps and need to try to get out of your comfort zone. But you can't do it like New Year's Eve. I'm going to change my life totally. It seldom works. So I realize in listening to your answer that the second example in your talk is really very similar to the first. You talk about people and you say we need to stop acting so risk averse and instead find rational ways to challenge our fears. And so what I hear you saying is that if you're a person who wants to start to do that,

same way as someone who wants to start a new exercise program or to start a new diet, you need to find manageable first steps that you can do. Something that's attainable and sustainable in the short run. Yeah, and a good advice is finding if you have a lot of things that you are afraid of, you take the one that you are least afraid of first and you try to manage that fear and then you work your way from there yeah i really love that that's what i do when i work with people in nutrition as well which i ask them what's the what's the thing that you eat the most of that you wish you didn't eat and then it's on them they've identified it and they can take some ownership in that and then we can make an action plan to hopefully eradicate that one food and it's like a snowball effect from there so maybe it's the same in this case in this case it is the same it's it's the same principle and and the problem is that we

have a generation a lot of generations actually that has been uh taken care of by the government or by the society from the cradle to the grave. And they have no individual responsibility. But you need to focus on that you have your individual responsibility. It's up to you whether you live a healthy, good life and be happy. It has to do with yourself. So the other thing that really, Savan, did you have something on that topic? No, go ahead, go ahead.

Yeah, there was one other thing in your talk that really resonated with me. It was when you were referring to the Drunning Kruger effect, which is just the, it's like the law of human stupidity is what it's paraphrased as. And basically you say, ignorant people overestimate their own.

Yeah, it's two different things. Dunning-Kruger effect is actually people that have no insight. They overestimate their own knowledge. And people who have a lot of insights insights they overestimate other people's knowledge but the the basic laws of human stupidities is then you can have a lot of knowledge but you're stupid anyway and that so that's what was of particular interest to me and you you mentioned that um people with very high levels of education or even very high IQs can fall into this trap, correct? Yeah, of course. I think Carlo Schipola, he had this graph where he had the Y-axis and the

X-axis and they have four fields and up in the right corner, up right corner, he called people ending up there, they were I, as in intelligent. The Y-axis is if you do something, it ends up well for other people. And the X-axis

is if it goes to the right on the X-axis, it ends up good for yourself. So if you're on the x-axis, it ends up good for yourself. So if you're in the upper right corner, your action will lead to good things for yourself and for other people. You're intelligent. And in the upper left corner, it had H because it's good for other people but bad for yourself. So then you're helpless. And then in the down right corner, he had a B for bandit.

It's good for yourself, but bad for other people. And in the left corner, down in the left corner, it was S. That's stupid. Bad for other people, bad for yourself. And it doesn't matter what IQ you have. You can still, your actions can still be like that. Okay, it's bad for me, it's bad for everyone else as well. Then you're stupid.

Yeah, that's a great graph to help to visualize that. I've had a few friends of mine who I consider to be highly educated and who for a majority of my life, I've really had very few interactions with them in which I've questioned them from an intellectual level that have, you know, Savan mentioned early in the podcast that we have a big, he and I have a bias in this regard. You know, I don't feel like I need to take a vaccine or really follow any of the lockdown or mask mandates because I live a fairly healthy lifestyle and I feel confident in my immune system to interact with, you know, the threat that might be out there. And some of my friends have told me, well, that's-

Based on the numbers that are out there also, on the other side of the scale. On one side of the scale, you have Brian who's healthy and spends every day working on himself, and on the other side, you have this pandemic. Anyways, I just wanted to say the other side, Brian. Sorry. I'm sorry. Then you could have bad luck. Shit happens. Right.

But based on the arithmetics, yes, you're totally correct. I wonder how many people died going to get their vaccine, like got in a car accident going to get their vaccine of course um sorry brian sorry no no it's good and it's a good point to bring up and bad luck is also a one of the things that greg glassman talks about in the five buckets of death like that's a real thing and we're all mortal and can die and i think that's one of the reasons that I have kind of the comfort with the decision-making I made is because 12 years ago, as a result of my own life circumstances, I was able to rationalize at a young age with the fact that I'm going to die at some point. And I've worked on myself in that regard, you know, at a younger age than a lot of people do. But I've had many people tell me that my decisions to not wear a mask, to not get the vaccine,

had many people tell me that my decisions to not wear a mask, to not get the vaccine, you know, are very selfish and that they have chosen to do those things because their rationale is if I can save one life, that I have to do it. Have to do it. Yeah, this is what I do find the most offensive with this whole situation is this uh uh moralistic like jacob jacobine style where where you have these people reacting uh sort of like we are the the good guys we are the we are sort of divine people say oh you're you're, you don't think about other people. This is so... Oh, I really

detest that way of thinking. And that's not saying... I'm still saying, of course, you should think about other people. But this is sort of a... They put this golden star on themselves statement you recognize what i'm talking about this is this is really to me yeah i mean a hundred percent it's very common here social media you i'm sure you see

it there too boom here's my vaccine card smile here's my donut to go with it smile and and then they have this uh you know, whatever it is, this confidence to talk about how good this action is that they've done. And it's tough for me because like I said, these are some of my closest friends that I've, you know, respected and had great relationships with and have been there for me through really hard times. But we are able to have good conversations about it, even though we have different points of views. And that's the last thing that I think is really missing at the global or more like, you know, that the larger scale level is that most people, if they have different points of views, there's not even the opportunity to have

healthy discussions around them. No, then you're a COVID denier. It's interesting. It's interesting that those people, obviously, what's interesting is that what I've known 100% of the time, and I'm open to being wrong, is that they are completely against talking about what the cost of the cure is. So on one hand, they'll say this thing, I'll do anything to save one person's life. Well, me, on the other hand, I'll do anything to save one child's life. other hand, I'll do anything to save one child's life. So for me, not for you too, but for me, if the vaccine were, let's say, to kill one child, for me, that wouldn't be worth saving 10 million people who are over the age of 85 with a 13.7 month life expectancy, who are 30 years complicit in their demise, whose family dumped them off in a nursing home. I'm not interested in saving any of those people to save one child's life. And, but those people don't want to have that conversation. They just, because I want to know what the trade-off is. How many kids are you willing allowed to be molested? How many kids are

you willing allowed to turn into serial killers because they didn't get socialized by the time they were four years old? Like let's just, and if you're right, I'll acquiesce, but you're not even willing to have the discussion because you're too worried about saving grandma. And it's a tragedy. The truth is that they're being selfish. It's a protective mechanism in their head to avoid looking at the big picture. And it's even worse because what they do then is they don't even see their grandma because she's in a nursing home and they don't dare to go there because they might give her COVID. My mom is 77 or 78 years old, extremely sharp, great shape.

She's a CrossFitter also. She's been CrossFitting since she's 69. And she got her vaccine and she was in step with the mask. But I see her every day. And she knows my stance. I pound her with it. And the other day she basically said, hey, I'm paraphrasing, but I think you were right. What a stupid way to live. All the old people out there, this was a huge mistake. This is not the way I wanted to live. Nobody comes on their funeral. This is not how I wanted to live the last year or two years of my life.

Like, and my mom is going to live longer than that, but she's just saying for old people in general, Hey, they like the real people suffering from this are old people. They got scared and they didn't get to enjoy their last years of their life. David Eberhard.

Dr. David Eberhard. So many fun things to talk to you about. I just want to say that the way that you concluded your TED Talk, when you said that, remember, life is not about living the longest, but living the best. And if you live in fear and isolation, there's no point in living. That, I just have to tell you, man, that resonated with me so strongly because when all these things were happening last year,

and I saw the way that people were reacting to this and removing themselves and their children from society and social settings, and I just, I mean, a lot of us who had the forethought to see it knew that it wasn't going to last a week. It wasn't going to last two weeks. I didn't know how long it was going to last, but it's a huge missed opportunity. I never stopped living my life. I still continue to see my friends and family and work out and go to the places I could go comfortably. And I would never, you know, I would never change that.

So I really appreciated you saying that, and I thought it was a really powerful way to conclude the message that you're trying to get out there. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, David. Yeah. It's now 930 in Stockholm. Yeah, it is. And it's getting a bit dark, I see, because I don't have a good light here. But I hope you might.

He started off as a white man. Now he's a black man and all in one show. That's perfect.