Speaker 1: Good Day team.
Speaker 2: It's the two champions, it's the two standout superstars of
Speaker 2: the U Project. And that doesn't include Tiff, even though
Speaker 2: IF's editing this, so I feel like I could get
Speaker 2: in trouble. Shout out to you anyway, Tiff, David, James Gillespie, Craig,
Speaker 2: Anthony Harper. Here at your service, folks. So what I firstly,
Speaker 2: hi mate? How are you good?
Speaker 3: How are you?
Speaker 1: How are you?
Speaker 2: It's good. I'm going to sound like a little winger
Speaker 2: for a moment, but it's not the worst wind. It's
Speaker 2: forty four degrees in Melbourne, so we are pretty hot
Speaker 2: as fires all over Victoria at the moment. What's the
Speaker 2: temperature up there in the Sunshine State.
Speaker 4: I think it's about thirty, but it was pretty hot yesterday.
Speaker 4: It's like thirty eight or something yesterday. But yeah, when
Speaker 4: I used to live in Victoria, I do remember not
Speaker 4: liking that particular aspect of it is that most of
Speaker 4: the time it's pretty nice, but when it gets hot,
Speaker 4: it really gets off.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's yeah.
Speaker 2: Well the one days the predicted top well, it's still
Speaker 2: going to get hotter. They reckon, it's going to get
Speaker 2: forty six at about six o'clock, but the prediction was, well,
Speaker 2: the forecast was forty seven.
Speaker 1: I'm like, who does forty seven? Anyway, we're here.
Speaker 2: As long as everyone's safe, and everyone's and all the
Speaker 2: animals and forests are not getting burnt and devastated, that's
Speaker 2: all we care about. So I sent your message before
Speaker 2: and you went, I said, well, what are we talking about?
Speaker 1: What have you written?
Speaker 2: And you went, nothing, put on your thinking cap And
Speaker 2: I went, you know what I'm doing. I'm getting AI
Speaker 2: to put on its thinking cap. Oh no, so I
Speaker 2: said to Chatters. So if this is terrible, everyone don't
Speaker 2: blame me. It couldn't possibly be me. It's either David
Speaker 2: or chat GPT. So you're welcome, I said to Chatters,
Speaker 2: if you not me, because it always if I ask
Speaker 2: it stuff, it'll put its itself in my place.
Speaker 1: If you not me.
Speaker 2: Were interviewing author, researcher and lawyer David Gillespie, what would
Speaker 2: you ask him?
Speaker 1: And then I don't know why.
Speaker 2: It brought up sweet poison, like you've only ever done
Speaker 2: one thing, like there's a few other there's some deviations,
Speaker 2: but if I need to modified, I will.
Speaker 3: Craig.
Speaker 1: This is what he said to me.
Speaker 2: He or she if I were interviewing David Gilespiotim for
Speaker 2: questions that go beyond what he thinks and dig into
Speaker 2: how he thinks, why he changed his mind, and where
Speaker 2: people most misunderstand him. Here's how I'd structure it, origin,
Speaker 2: story and epistemology. I'm like, thanks, chatters, subtitle how a
Speaker 2: lawyer ends up waging war on sugar and big narratives.
Speaker 1: If these are ship will be in.
Speaker 3: But we'll see how we go.
Speaker 1: You were trained as a lawyer, not.
Speaker 2: A nutritionist or a neuroscientist. How did that shape the
Speaker 2: way you evaluate evidence compared to experts trained in those fields.
Speaker 1: It's not a bad.
Speaker 3: Well done chatters, Yeah, it's not bad. It's not bad.
Speaker 1: Good chatters.
Speaker 4: Well, I guess the important thing to know is that
Speaker 4: I don't have a dog in the fight, and lawyers
Speaker 4: rarely do.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: There's that old saying, you know, if you represents yourself,
Speaker 4: you've got an idiot as a client. And that's kind
Speaker 4: of one of I think the most valuable things I
Speaker 4: bring to anything I look at. And it's also why
Speaker 4: I never really write about law. So I can't be
Speaker 4: fired for anything I write because I'm not employed as
Speaker 4: a dietitian or a psychologist or anything like that. I
Speaker 4: don't have a dog in the fight. I'm coming to
Speaker 4: the question and I'm saying, what does the evidence show us?
Speaker 4: And I look at the evidence on both sides of
Speaker 4: the argument and see what it says. And I think
Speaker 4: that's the skill that I'm bringing to the table here,
Speaker 4: which is that a so called expert in the area,
Speaker 4: say in biothet x or nutrition or something, has a
Speaker 4: dog in the fight. They have a job that and
Speaker 4: them keeping their job usually means that they have to
Speaker 4: stick with the consensus, the company line on this stuff.
Speaker 4: So if the consensus is fat makes you fat, then
Speaker 4: those are the glasses they will have on when they
Speaker 4: look at any of the evidence, Whereas I don't care.
Speaker 4: I just want to know what the evidence says. And
Speaker 4: if the evidence said fat makes you fat, then that's
Speaker 4: what I would have said. And nobody would have probably
Speaker 4: published a book written by me, because I would have
Speaker 4: been saying the same thing as everybody else.
Speaker 3: But I don't care about that either.
Speaker 4: In the sense that, as you well know as a
Speaker 4: fellow author, nobody gets rich writing books, and certainly nobody
Speaker 4: gets rich writing books in Australia. Yes, So all I'm
Speaker 4: doing is writing down in terms that people who are
Speaker 4: not experts in the area like me, can understand what
Speaker 4: the evidence actually says. And this is something probably the
Speaker 4: only useful thing that lawyers are trained to do, which
Speaker 4: is they are asked to understand the evidence in all
Speaker 4: manner of disciplines. They have to understand the evidence in
Speaker 4: a car accident, or the evidence in a bridge failure,
Speaker 4: or the evidence in a construction litigation, or the evidence
Speaker 4: you know, in whatever you name it. It's all different,
Speaker 4: and they're trained in one of us. They do have
Speaker 4: to understand the evidence and they have to be able
Speaker 4: to clearly state what the evidence says. And even more
Speaker 4: than that, and this is a side that most people
Speaker 4: don't see in lawyers, is they have an obligation to
Speaker 4: the court to present evidence to the court which contradicts
Speaker 4: their case, obligation not to mislead the court. So if
Speaker 4: there is evidence that they are aware of that contradicts
Speaker 4: something they are saying to the court, they must point
Speaker 4: it out. So I guess in that sense, I'm the
Speaker 4: best possible person to look at the questions that I'm
Speaker 4: writing about exactly because I'm not an expert in the area,
Speaker 4: and I am trained in assessing evidence.
Speaker 2: That is such a good answer, Tode. I hate paying
Speaker 2: you a compliment, but it's very good. Like I think
Speaker 2: also this because people firstly, you're possibly our most if
Speaker 2: not popular, definitely in the top three, right. I mean
Speaker 2: they are probably a couple of people who don't like you.
Speaker 2: There are thousand who don't like me. Who cares, right,
Speaker 2: But the thing about you is that you're not emotional
Speaker 2: and you don't have you said, you don't have a
Speaker 2: dog in the fight for me. You don't have any
Speaker 2: financial incentive to lean one way or the like. Whatever
Speaker 2: the data says, whatever, wherever the evidence goes. What a
Speaker 2: but buck up fill in the blank. It just is
Speaker 2: what it is. The next thing I want you to clarify,
Speaker 2: which I know and you know the answer to clearly.
Speaker 1: But when you say the evidence for this stuff, just clarify.
Speaker 2: For our listeners who are not scientists or researchers or
Speaker 2: gatherers of evidence in this sense, where do you get
Speaker 2: your evidence? I'm guessing not YouTube or Instagram, No.
Speaker 4: But mostly because those are media that people are using
Speaker 4: to summarize evidence. Hopefully they're not really presenting the original
Speaker 4: evidence because it would bore people rigid and no one
Speaker 4: would watch their YouTube channel. Yes, So what I mean
Speaker 4: by the evidence is I go to the source to
Speaker 4: the best quality of evidence that is available. So if
Speaker 4: I often, i'll see an artist call online and maybe
Speaker 4: it is even on Instagram post. I'm not sure, you know,
Speaker 4: but I'll see something that said that makes a claim.
Speaker 4: Like I'll give you an example. I saw one today.
Speaker 4: So there was an article I think was on Instagram.
Speaker 4: It's been doing the rounds. It says AI makes you dumber,
Speaker 4: all right, and has The one I saw on Instagram
Speaker 4: had a sort of a picture of a brain scan
Speaker 4: of someone who had apparently been using AI next to
Speaker 4: a picture of a brain scan of someone who hadn't
Speaker 4: been using AI, and it was much more colorful, so
Speaker 4: their brain was working better, apparently, and the other persons
Speaker 4: were just a dull gray now, you know. And so
Speaker 4: I thought, well, that sounds interesting. Is where is that
Speaker 4: coming from and what is the evidence underneath it? And
Speaker 4: so I went look. I went looking for what is
Speaker 4: this based on? And it is based on a study
Speaker 4: done by an American university I can't remember which one,
Speaker 4: but quite a reputable one. The study was only about
Speaker 4: forty p and it was that they found that in
Speaker 4: some circumstances they were able to test in a variety
Speaker 4: of ways and find that, for example, people had less
Speaker 4: recall when they used an AI to write something than
Speaker 4: if they wrote it themselves.
Speaker 3: And I'm kind of.
Speaker 4: Thinking, well, the yes, that seems to be logical. If
Speaker 4: you didn't write it, you're probably not going to remember
Speaker 4: what you didn't write, of.
Speaker 2: Course, whereas it's such a fucking dumb like claim out
Speaker 2: of that or that particular research design.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and so sure I did look at something. It
Speaker 4: got my attention initially in a popular media. But what
Speaker 4: I just did there is what I tend to do
Speaker 4: when I'm looking for research, which just keep drilling down
Speaker 4: until you find the source and then make judgments about
Speaker 4: the quality of that source.
Speaker 3: So first of all, all.
Speaker 4: You know handily journals are rated, so you can you
Speaker 4: don't have to guess is this a reputable source of information?
Speaker 4: They have ratings and you can decide, okay, well this
Speaker 4: is not a particularly highly rated journal. So I'm already
Speaker 4: a little bit cautious about whether this has been peer
Speaker 4: reviewed or not. So the particular study I was talking
Speaker 4: about there with AI not peer reviewed. So so straight
Speaker 4: away you're thinking, but that doesn't mean throw it in
Speaker 4: the bin. It just means start being really, really cautious
Speaker 4: and questioning about anything that's being said and put your
Speaker 4: critical thinking head on.
Speaker 3: Okay, and.
Speaker 4: So you apply that sort of logic to it, and
Speaker 4: then you start looking at, well, who's paying for this study?
Speaker 4: Do they have a vested interest in the outcome? All
Speaker 4: those kinds of questions as you're looking at it, and
Speaker 4: then if it withstands all of that, you start going
Speaker 4: to look for other research, and well, what other This
Speaker 4: can't possibly be the only person who's looked at this question.
Speaker 3: It never is.
Speaker 4: Thousands of studies are published every day. What do other
Speaker 4: people say about this particular area, What is their contradictory evidence?
Speaker 4: What does it say? And then I look at all
Speaker 4: of that and I start to form a view as
Speaker 4: to how reliable or otherwise what's being said is. And
Speaker 4: then I might form a hypothesis about whether it's you know,
Speaker 4: whether A plus B equals C, and then I'll start
Speaker 4: trying to prove it wrong. So I'll start I'll start
Speaker 4: looking for research that might prove that what I just
Speaker 4: said A plus B equal C is wrong. And if
Speaker 4: I can't find any despite my best efforts, then I
Speaker 4: start to think, okay, well this is starting to stack
Speaker 4: up logically. I can't find anything that says it's wrong.
Speaker 4: Can I find things that suggest that elements of this
Speaker 4: is right? Because you rarely ever find one that says
Speaker 4: all of it together. You say, well, if A is
Speaker 4: true and B is true, then C must be true.
Speaker 4: And so what I'll just describe to you there is
Speaker 4: kind of the process I go through over and over
Speaker 4: and over again with everything I look at, and it's
Speaker 4: an almost automatic thing that I do. And then every
Speaker 4: now and then, one in one hundred times I might
Speaker 4: find something that I think, you know, well, actually this
Speaker 4: is just surprising. This is the opposite of what I
Speaker 4: had believed and the opposite of what I think what
Speaker 4: most people believe. And then I'm all right about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it such a good process.
Speaker 2: I didn't even know until I started my PhD that
Speaker 2: there were generally there's like Q one through to Q
Speaker 2: four or Tier one to tier four papers which you
Speaker 2: know about. And just to give our listeners an idea,
Speaker 2: like to get accepted and published in a Tier one
Speaker 2: academic journal.
Speaker 1: It depends on the journal.
Speaker 2: They vary, but some of them take less than two
Speaker 2: percent of the papers that get submitted, and these are
Speaker 2: all obviously peer reviewed, and then down to Q four
Speaker 2: so the lowest level, which is where they're often not
Speaker 2: peer reviewed, and the way that they get published is
Speaker 2: by the authors paying for it to be published.
Speaker 3: Yes, you know play Yeah, so it's like oh.
Speaker 2: And then when you so it's and people don't know that,
Speaker 2: not that that's an insult.
Speaker 1: People aren't expected to know that.
Speaker 2: So when you go, oh, this was published in a
Speaker 2: scientific journal that could be analogous to the fucking Woman's
Speaker 2: Day or new Idea like it to be. Yeah, that's
Speaker 2: that's cool, but let's wish what was what was the journal?
Speaker 1: And some on. But even with your forty people.
Speaker 2: Research, you go, so, there's eight billion people in the
Speaker 2: world and we've done some research with forty it's that's
Speaker 2: not necessarily going to extrapolate or you know, and the other.
Speaker 4: Thing there's a problem with that than just this. I mean,
Speaker 4: small research can give you interesting insights that you might
Speaker 4: not other have seen, particularly when it's done in humans.
Speaker 4: So but then you start to look at, well, what
Speaker 4: exactly did they do? And if it becomes you look
Speaker 4: at it and you think, well, yeah, well that's kind
Speaker 4: of obvious, you know, And what are they proving by
Speaker 4: by showing that people who didn't write things don't know
Speaker 4: what they didn't write, you know, I guess they are.
Speaker 3: Proving that those people didn't think much.
Speaker 5: But so what yes, yeah, well I think also there
Speaker 5: are so many things that I never thought about until
Speaker 5: I started this journey, but like the quality of the participants,
Speaker 5: or the demographic.
Speaker 1: Or the age, or the buppa bappa bar fill in
Speaker 1: the blank. Right.
Speaker 2: So with I ran a few projects and in one
Speaker 2: of my projects, I had two hundred and ninety nine
Speaker 2: people and pretty much it was a bit skewed, but
Speaker 2: not a lot. It was like one hundred and forty students,
Speaker 2: so undergrad psychologist students, and the other group was general public.
Speaker 2: So you don't think about the limitations, and you don't
Speaker 2: think about, like when I explain to people, like good
Speaker 2: data and bad data. So this is true because most
Speaker 2: or many many research papers use students as their participants
Speaker 2: because they're so accessible and easy to motivate to do
Speaker 2: the research. But so the problem in inverted commas with
Speaker 2: some of my research is that I had one hundred
Speaker 2: and sixty odd general public who wanted to be there.
Speaker 2: They chose to be there. They're interested in the research,
Speaker 2: interested in the topic. They potentially follow me on social media.
Speaker 2: They were motivated by the fact that I was doing
Speaker 2: a public workshop at the end, which they paid zi
Speaker 2: zo four. How many came because of that, I'm not sure,
Speaker 2: but anyway, the average time, give or take, and this
Speaker 2: is this is written in in the paper, like you
Speaker 2: have to write what the limitations and what problems and
Speaker 2: you know, like in terms of the design, what did
Speaker 2: you fuck up?
Speaker 1: What would you do different?
Speaker 2: So the paper to answer all these questionnaires like paper
Speaker 2: questionnaires with a pen and paper took if you did
Speaker 2: it properly, about fifty minutes. And so the general public,
Speaker 2: it took all of them somewhere in the forty to
Speaker 2: sixty minute range.
Speaker 1: And then I won't.
Speaker 2: Even say how many, but a lot of the students
Speaker 2: were getting through in under fifteen minutes. And the reason,
Speaker 2: the main reason is because they were motivated to be
Speaker 2: there because they were getting academic credits, you know, and
Speaker 2: so you go, oh, so you have a ranging quality
Speaker 2: of data. And then then you've got to try and
Speaker 2: figure out which you literally remove some of the data
Speaker 2: because some of them didn't even finish the thing properly,
Speaker 2: so you just take that out. But yeah, there's a
Speaker 2: huge range of variables. Another thing that is a red
Speaker 2: flag for me is when you see some kind of
Speaker 2: pseudoscience that says, oh, fifty percent of people respond this
Speaker 2: way if they do that, or they see an improvement
Speaker 2: in that if they take this, and you're like, fifty percent,
Speaker 2: what are the chances that's thirty percent of the population,
Speaker 2: Like it's always an exact number, but in real research,
Speaker 2: it's almost never an exact number.
Speaker 1: Like never I didn't have any.
Speaker 2: Completely you know, like fifty or sixty or it's always
Speaker 2: like thirty seven point four or whatever it was. So yeah,
Speaker 2: and that's that's what you don't realize until you kind
Speaker 2: of open that door and try to understand how it
Speaker 2: works well.
Speaker 4: Data transparency is one of the are big problems in
Speaker 4: research is that good papers make their data available so
Speaker 4: that any other research can go in and use their
Speaker 4: data to see if they get the same results.
Speaker 3: And that's one of the big problems.
Speaker 4: And we talked about this briefly before when I think
Speaker 4: we talked about STATN research is STATIN research is almost
Speaker 4: exclusively controlled by consortium funded by the drug companies that
Speaker 4: make statins, and all of that research is published without
Speaker 4: access to the original data. In fact, it's explicitly and
Speaker 4: on purpose kept secret from any other researcher. So you
Speaker 4: will never ever see papers that contradict the results of
Speaker 4: STATIN papers because no one else can see the data,
Speaker 4: which means you can't tell who did they eliminate and why,
Speaker 4: what exactly did they do to the data set to
Speaker 4: get this result, what did they manipulate about it? And
Speaker 4: we know some of the things that they do, so
Speaker 4: there's a peculiar way that they count whether or not
Speaker 4: someone persisted with the drug or not, which is quite
Speaker 4: unusual in that kind of research. And that's just one
Speaker 4: example where data matters. And here's another one which is
Speaker 4: really important. There was a massive study in the United
Speaker 4: States called the Minnesota County Experiment in I think it
Speaker 4: was done in the nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies,
Speaker 4: and in that what they were trying to prove was
Speaker 4: that if you took people off the traditional American diet
Speaker 4: at that time, which was heavy and saturated fat and
Speaker 4: replace the saturated fat with margarines and seed oils, you
Speaker 4: would reduce the incidents of heart attacks. Now, the study
Speaker 4: cost an absolute fortune because unlike the study we're talking
Speaker 4: about before with about forty people in it, this one
Speaker 4: had I think almost one hundred thousand people involved and
Speaker 4: it ran for the better part of a decade. So
Speaker 4: this thing was massive and hugely expensive and funded by
Speaker 4: the American government. And it proved nothing in the sense
Speaker 4: that it didn't prove the hypothesis, which is that there'd
Speaker 4: be less heart attacks and the people eating margarine, and
Speaker 4: so they published nothing. So they ran that study and
Speaker 4: produced a paper at the end of it, which was meaningless.
Speaker 4: They didn't produce a paper because I presume they had to,
Speaker 4: but it was meaningless. And recently, I say recently in
Speaker 4: the last decade, the National Institutes of Health in the
Speaker 4: US had access to the original data. So they went
Speaker 4: back looked at the data and said, well, it didn't
Speaker 4: prove the hypothesis, but did it prove anything else? Because
Speaker 4: it's a really important and useful data sets. You should
Speaker 4: make such a huge number of humans and have this effect,
Speaker 4: Did it prove anything?
Speaker 3: And what they found is.
Speaker 4: That it didn't. Actually, the people who were on the
Speaker 4: traditional diet had better heart disease outcomes than the people
Speaker 4: whose diet was changed, and the worse than that. The
Speaker 4: all cause mortality was much higher in the changed group.
Speaker 4: So reducing people's cholesterol, which was the aim, actually got
Speaker 4: worse outcomes, not just from heart disease but from everything.
Speaker 4: Now everything is usually code for cancer, so there were
Speaker 4: more people dying of cancer, more people are dying of
Speaker 4: heart disease. When they re looked at the data, and
Speaker 4: that was the research that got published by the National
Speaker 4: Institutes of Health about a decade ago.
Speaker 3: Now that's pretty big news, I would have thought.
Speaker 1: I mean, you think about.
Speaker 2: In reality, what they've done to those people by making
Speaker 2: the meat this alted diet, which was allegedly better and
Speaker 2: healthy and produce better health outcomes, was they overall increased
Speaker 2: morbidity and mortality.
Speaker 3: So it was bad.
Speaker 2: It was literally bad for people, but they buried that.
Speaker 2: I mean, look about talk about fucking unethical, if not evil.
Speaker 2: Imagine knowing that this is actually bad for people, but then,
Speaker 2: because of your ego or your commitment to some kind
Speaker 2: of authority or financial backing or whatever, you hide that
Speaker 2: actual evidence.
Speaker 1: Of what you know to be true for whatever range
Speaker 1: of reasons, like so immoral.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's sorry. I don't want to mislead people.
Speaker 4: So just while you were rabbiting on there probably saying
Speaker 4: really important, I actually looked up the study and I
Speaker 4: want to be really accurate with some of the things
Speaker 4: that I just said to you there. So it wasn't
Speaker 4: one hundred thousand. The cohort was nine douns four hundred
Speaker 4: and twenty three women and men age twenty to ninety seven,
Speaker 4: so it was just short of ten thousand. And what
Speaker 4: they were measuring was the cholesterol and the exposure. So
Speaker 4: they had serum, they had cholesterol lowering diet that replaced
Speaker 4: saturated fat with corn oil and corn oil's polyunsaturated margarine,
Speaker 4: and the control diet was the normal American die at
Speaker 4: the time, which was high in animal fats and butter
Speaker 4: and so on. So they then looked at, okay, well
Speaker 4: what happened when you reanalyze that data, and they found
Speaker 4: there was a twenty two percent higher risk of death
Speaker 4: for every thirty milligrams per deesci let, or the more
Speaker 4: common measure for Australia's point seven million miles for later
Speaker 4: reduction in cholesterol. So you had a twenty two percent
Speaker 4: in increase in death for every zero point seven to
Speaker 4: eight reduction in cholesterol.
Speaker 3: So that's pretty nasty.
Speaker 4: So the people who were being fed the experimental diet,
Speaker 4: the margarine, were much more likely to die.
Speaker 2: That's exactly what I said when you alleged that I
Speaker 2: was rabbiting on.
Speaker 4: And then there was the all cause increase as well.
Speaker 4: So the the thing about that is there, at least
Speaker 4: we could get even if every even if the health
Speaker 4: authorities have completely ignored that, which they have, at least
Speaker 4: it was possible to do that analysis. And by going
Speaker 4: back to that sort start. By the way, anyone who
Speaker 4: wants to read this, it's in the British Medical Journal
Speaker 4: in twenty and sixteen and it's by a research at
Speaker 4: the National Institute of Health. Lead researcher is Chris Ramsden,
Speaker 4: so that also everyone.
Speaker 2: Just in case you're wondering, there's a bunch of academic
Speaker 2: search engines, but probably the easiest one.
Speaker 1: Is just Google scholar. So if you just go into
Speaker 1: Google and literally type in Google.
Speaker 2: Scholar, it'll bring that up and it's free and got
Speaker 2: It's not quite as good as some of the youbut ones,
Speaker 2: but it's pretty good, so start there.
Speaker 4: Well, and this one you can have the full text
Speaker 4: of because it's in the BMJ and it's open access.
Speaker 4: So for anyone in your audience who's saying, oh, that
Speaker 4: can't be true, you can't possibly it can't possibly be
Speaker 4: true that a cholesterol lowering diet actually increases your risk
Speaker 4: of heart disease, well there you go.
Speaker 3: It is. It's well documented. The data has.
Speaker 4: Been there for decades, ignored for decades because it contradicted
Speaker 4: the mainstream message. Ramsden looked at it again and said, well, actually,
Speaker 4: this data says the opposite. It says you're in you're
Speaker 4: in big trouble if you do what the health experts
Speaker 4: tell you to do. And still the health advice was
Speaker 4: totally resistant to that information. And that's what we're fighting
Speaker 4: against is you have a consensus and the average doctor
Speaker 4: today in Australia would still say to you, oh, oh
Speaker 4: you should be you know, you should be eating margarines
Speaker 4: and lowering your cholesterol. And yet the evidence, very very
Speaker 4: high quality evidence, says that's nonsense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm just writing down the topic of tonight's you
Speaker 2: just gave it to me. Thanks, health advice, Who to trust? Hey,
Speaker 2: you know it's hilarious. Is there's I don't know seven
Speaker 2: a questions or something that chatters? Yeah, we're currently on
Speaker 2: number one, but I'm going to tell you something funny.
Speaker 1: At the end. I've got one more question for you,
Speaker 1: which is a great question. Probably won't be as good
Speaker 1: as chatters, of course. At the end, Chatter says.
Speaker 2: If you want, I can one sharpen these into more
Speaker 2: provocative and confrontational versions like really, two rewrite them in
Speaker 2: full you project conversational tone, or three add neuro behavior,
Speaker 2: change angles to align with your metaperception work. And then
Speaker 2: it goes just tell me the vibe.
Speaker 1: So funny. All right, So let's wind up.
Speaker 2: But I want to wind up with this could take
Speaker 2: you thirty seconds or five minutes or ten, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: So some people are listening to this going that's interesting,
Speaker 2: that's fascinating. I'm fucking terrified. But how do I know
Speaker 2: who to trust?
Speaker 1: Like? That's what? Like? Who do I listen to? Who
Speaker 1: do I not listen to?
Speaker 2: And I know that's not an arbitrary answer, but how
Speaker 2: do I know who or what to trust with this stuff?
Speaker 2: That's literally going to impact everything from my healthpan to
Speaker 2: my lifespan.
Speaker 4: Do you know it's a lot of easier these days
Speaker 4: now that we have access to AI in this sense,
Speaker 4: my answer to that has always been only trust people
Speaker 4: who can point, you know, who can put a footnote
Speaker 4: after every fact they state. Lawyers and law students are
Speaker 4: trained with this. We're trained that our opinion is valueless,
Speaker 4: our opinion is nonsense. Our opinion doesn't matter to a court.
Speaker 4: All that matters to a court is the evidence. And
Speaker 4: so we are trained that whenever we state anything the
Speaker 4: sun is shining, then we should put a little number
Speaker 4: after that, and you know, put a reference that tells
Speaker 4: where we got that information from. So and the reason
Speaker 4: the courts require us to do that is so that
Speaker 4: if they don't believe us for whatever reason, or have
Speaker 4: cause to investigate further, they can dig themselves. They can
Speaker 4: go and see look at the footnote and see if
Speaker 4: they agree with the evidence that the sun is shining.
Speaker 4: And anyone who does that, who is trained to do that,
Speaker 4: is always saying to the reader, don't trust me. You
Speaker 4: don't have to trust me. I'm not requiring you to
Speaker 4: trust me if you don't think I'm what I'm saying
Speaker 4: is true, then read the evidence that I'm basing this
Speaker 4: statement on, which is why every single book I've ever
Speaker 4: written comes with a complete index of the studies I
Speaker 4: am relying on, and they are all footnoted.
Speaker 3: So you don't have to trust me.
Speaker 4: If you think what I'm saying is bs, go to
Speaker 4: the source that I say I'm getting it from, Shove
Speaker 4: that into an AI and say does this say that?
Speaker 1: Yes? Yes?
Speaker 2: And also the thing about you is that you are
Speaker 2: the last person to try to shove an opinion down
Speaker 2: someone's throat or an ideas well.
Speaker 3: I'm not entitled.
Speaker 4: I'm not entitled to an opinion because I'm not an expert.
Speaker 4: The problem with experts, though, is that they give opinions
Speaker 4: that are not necessarily evidence based, but are leaps based
Speaker 4: on they know A and D, so B and C
Speaker 4: is probably true because they've never had to investigate it.
Speaker 4: They've never had to satisfy themselves that it is in
Speaker 4: fact true. And I don't get to do that because
Speaker 4: I'm not an expert. I don't get to make statements
Speaker 4: about diet without verifying that the statement has evidence behind it,
Speaker 4: whereas an expert will happily do that based on Oh,
Speaker 4: I've heard people say this, yeah.
Speaker 2: And it's so like, there's probably you're not all over
Speaker 2: this because you don't follow probably a lot of the
Speaker 2: people I follow, but or who come.
Speaker 3: Across my I don't follow you, Craig, but you.
Speaker 1: Know you don't need to. There's nothing new.
Speaker 4: I must have followed you somewhere, because I do every
Speaker 4: now and then see your inspiration quotes come up somewhere
Speaker 4: or other.
Speaker 1: Oh well, at least you call them that. Thank you.
Speaker 1: I'm surprised you didn't say self help dogshit.
Speaker 3: No, Chatters is doing a great job for you.
Speaker 1: What was I going to say?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a whole bunch of influencers and quite literally
Speaker 2: legitimately qualified and shudo qualified people who making all of
Speaker 2: these claims about all of these things, and invariably, when
Speaker 2: you get through it, they're actually selling a supplement or
Speaker 2: a product or a program or are something that this
Speaker 2: whole kind of spiel up front is meant to be. Oh,
Speaker 2: here's just some information that might help you. And then
Speaker 2: you get through and it's like, by the way, I've
Speaker 2: got this range of supplements and it's all this, and
Speaker 2: that's all that, and it doesn't.
Speaker 4: That doesn't automatically mean that what they're saying is not true.
Speaker 4: It just means be careful because this person has other motivations.
Speaker 4: But it might be the case that the person has
Speaker 4: in fact done the research, has looked to be evidence
Speaker 4: and has come to the conclusion that the only possible
Speaker 4: way that you can achieve this outcome is by buying
Speaker 4: this supplement, and they believe in it so much that
Speaker 4: they've invested their life's fortune, you know, life savings into
Speaker 4: you know, sending it out there.
Speaker 3: That might be the case. It probably isn't, but it
Speaker 3: might be.
Speaker 4: And and you shouldn't automatically discount something just because someone
Speaker 4: stands to make money out of what they're saying. It
Speaker 4: just means you have to be much more careful. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I agree, you're making a fortune out of our conversation.
Speaker 2: So you know, I'm just sitting on a pile of
Speaker 2: cash as we speak, actually chafing my ass.
Speaker 1: I should put some pants on.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And so you have to be careful about what
Speaker 4: Craig tells us because you know, you know, you'll know
Speaker 4: that money he could be covering what he says, he
Speaker 4: could he could be only presenting me because he's actually
Speaker 4: you know, he's he's part of I don't know, big
Speaker 4: meat or something and try to encourage you to to
Speaker 4: eat eat more.
Speaker 1: Beef, fat beef. Tellow that's exactly it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't even trust me, and I am me,
Speaker 2: so definitely trust me. Do you want to plug anything
Speaker 2: or point anyone in a direction today? You never normally
Speaker 2: do that.
Speaker 3: But don't.
Speaker 4: Well, I haven't even got an article to point for
Speaker 4: people to just as always. You know, if you keep
Speaker 4: an eye on my sub stack, which you can get
Speaker 4: to from my website, which is David Gillespie dot org,
Speaker 4: then you know I'll probably try and put out an
Speaker 4: article tomorrow.
Speaker 3: Don't ask me what it's about.
Speaker 4: I haven't thought about it yet, although I was interested
Speaker 4: in something that caught my eye this morning about them
Speaker 4: someone suggesting that, you know, it should be compulsory for
Speaker 4: children to be slathered in sunscreen at school, and since
Speaker 4: I think most sunscreen is a toxic I might write
Speaker 4: about that.
Speaker 1: You definitely should do that.
Speaker 2: You could you could write another article one day about
Speaker 2: no that's going to say who to trust and why?
Speaker 1: But I feel like that could that could not work out.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 4: The short answer to that is trust anyone who can
Speaker 4: show you where they're getting their information from so that
Speaker 4: you can go check it out yourself. You want someone
Speaker 4: who says, I don't want you to believe me, because
Speaker 4: you don't have to. You can just go and look
Speaker 4: at it yourself.
Speaker 1: Somebody who's not doing any arm twisting. Mate.
Speaker 2: I will say goodbye off here, but as always, appreciate
Speaker 2: you thanks for being on the show.
Speaker 3: Talk to you, Seah.