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My name is Guillermo Martin and I welcome you to Cooperation Paradigm. We are a platform on a mission to spread the idea that cooperation beats competition. That working together is not just nicer but also more effective and that we can transform our world if we agree to collaborate, to work with each other. Today we are honored to have Dr. Raymond Peat. For those who do not know our guest today, Dr. Peat is a scientist, writer, teacher, and artist whose work continues to influence the
thinking of thousands of readers worldwide. Even though much of Dr. Peat's work centers around how our health is affected by our environment, I personally think his greatest contribution is to teach us all how to be free thinkers, how to question everything and be critical. And he has done this through his example, through his personal work. So before we start the interview I really want to thank Dr. Peat for his career and for his contributions because he really has done so much for us. Today we will talk about a few things
intelligence in nature, artificial scarcity in our world, and how to create a healthier society among other things. I apologize for the sound quality is not the best but definitely very, very worth listening always to Dr. Peat. So here we go. So Dr. Peat, in your opinion, is there a guiding intelligence in the evolution of the species or is it just random mutations that are selected by the environment as neo-darwinists propose? My picture of the big picture or the cosmology grew out of reading several people.
Vladimir Vernadsky, for example, was one of my influences. Frederick Soddy, the physicist who is known for his idea of isotopes. I think that is his main identification. But he was a theorist about the nature of cosmic rays and cosmic energy. Looking at all of my influences, especially Frederick Soddy, I think it is justifiable and reasonable to think that the cosmos itself, the universe, is in the process of growth. The Russian astronomer, N.A. Kozyrev, discovered eruptions on the dark side of the moon, volcanic eruptions,
which were ridiculed at the time. But he developed a theory of stellar energy, which would account for the internal heat of all of the cosmic bodies, including the earth and the moon. He correctly predicted that the outer planets would be producing more heat than they received from the sun. Putting these ideas together with Fred Soddy's, it looks like the universe is increasing in energy and in substance. Planets are growing warmer, more energetic, and substance is increasing, mass is increasing. A geologist proposed the expanding earth hypothesis,
which is just an extension of Kozyrev's and the other physicists' ideas of an actively, energetically expanding, growing universe. So that's the big picture, that things are constantly in flux at every level, the microscopic as well as the macroscopic. Looking at the small-scale biology and physics, with that perspective, you see everything in flux, and you realize that the doctrines that are dominating pretty much the world for the last 200 years are based on some Christian, mostly Christian, theological ideas. Kozyrev explained how the doctrine of thermodynamic directionality was an arbitrary choice, more theology than observation or science.
This approach, the theological, theologically based physics, had to conceive of atoms as being unchangeable, not subject to time except in the idea that there is a statistical lifespan of every particle. But other than that, no atom has a history. It's like a platonic ideal out of time. And this is where Vernadsky had a revolutionary influence, seeing every atom as having a history. In high school textbooks, when I was in high school, a standard experiment referred to nascent oxygen, newly born oxygen, has for several seconds
chemical reactivity that's very different from quiescent old oxygen. But more than that, every atom has its history in the sense of a flow through the organism. He described an organism as a whirlwind of atoms. That's my basic approach. You have to look at the practical meaning of intelligence and guidance is in the system, the energy flowing from the sun into the earth, for example, drives this whirlwind of atoms. And in the response to this flow of energy, you have the organized interaction of atoms guided by the flowing energy.
Right. And that was kind of like my next question because you said that cooperation is a property of matter itself. It creates order everywhere that energy flows. So obviously to have order, we need energy, but order implies some kind of guidance or intelligence. Otherwise, you don't have order, you have chaos, I assume. In the framework of this growing energetic universe and the flow of energy from hot spots to less hot spots, every place in the universe, there is energy flowing. And every place that flows, you have the
tendency in response to the flow to align, the individual aligns with the flow of energy. One of my experiments years ago was to pass an electrical current through an egg, putting an electrode in each side of an egg and measuring the resistance. As the voltage rises, the flow increases, and as the voltage falls, the flow keeps going because the resistance was decreased. The material of the egg white aligned itself to make the current pass more freely. And that's the sort of process that Vernadsky saw as generating more and more complex organisms.
He saw animals, for example, are growing bigger and bigger brains and bodies to assimilate and preserve more and more of that flow of energy. So the intelligence of the organism, as he saw it, was being responsive to this flow of energy. So the more energy that flows and can be assimilated, the more intelligence there is. If you said that planets and objects in the universe are increasing in substance and the universe is increasing in matter, so that energy, we can assume that as time goes by, there will be higher levels of
organization and intelligence in a way. Towards the end of his life, Vernadsky was at the end of the World War II. He said despite all of the chaos that we're seeing, he was confident that the energy of the planet would gradually help us grow out of the chaotic political world situation. Some scientists and philosophers speak of a universe that is able to experience, to have consciousness. If this idea became accepted, how do you think our relationship with the world would change knowing that this world, this universe, somehow has awareness,
consciousness? If you see the flow of energy through matter as being what creates experience, if you aren't warm and respiring, having a flow of energy through your brain, you aren't conscious and experiencing. So if the flow of energy through your brain slows down, your consciousness decreases. The dominant philosophy among my professors all the time from high school through graduate school, my professors were generally committed to the idea that animals are unconscious. Even at the extreme, they were saying that children aren't conscious
until they're a year and a half or two years old and begin to talk. I think in simple societies, people have an animist approach. They see everything as having a soul or a mind. Some cultures have kept more of this attitude, others less. The Anglo-American culture of the last hundred years has been very exaggerated in denying that the world is alive and that things are aware. In the medical description of autism, the brain or metabolic condition that produces the regression and the condition called autism, the outstanding feature
is that they are unaware of the mind and consciousness of other people or of animals. They don't understand the emotions or intentions of others. It's called mind-blindness. Most of my science professors in the 1960s and 70s, I would say were mind-blind or autistic in their view of the universe. We know that the truth is coming out and more scientists are pointing to this. Even little amoeba and microorganisms have this incredible awareness of their surroundings. Speaking of their surroundings, I would like to talk about society,
in the context of our environment as humans. Do you believe that we currently have the means to provide for everyone on this planet to thrive? People over the years are calculated that the productive capacity of the land, the amount of sunlight needed to produce a certain amount of food. The Earth is very easily able to sustain about 10 billion people in good nutrition and good living conditions if things are properly organized. There has been a very deliberate organized effort to create artificial scarcity in the depression in the United States.
There were huge surpluses of food that no one could afford to buy and so people were starving while these hordes of food existed. Even in the 1940s, approaching 1950, there were great famines through India in particular while the U.S. was having a great problem economically with gigantic over surplus of grains. On a world level, the same condition existed that had existed within the United States during the Depression. One of the Nobel Prizes in that period was to Irving Langmuir. He was
notable for having discovered how to make light bulbs burn out in a few weeks or months so that they could sell more light bulbs. That was a big part of American science research, how to make products useless; how to make them wear out faster. You said something really interesting that if things were organized, the planet could provide for 10 billion people. Organizing in a certain way, in a collaborative way. What we see is that society is organized purposely but not to work with each other,
not to collaborate to almost the opposite, to divide. That's built into the economic system that people who challenge it are excluded. Teachers who advocate too much change in the system don't get to continue teaching. You talk sometimes about the ruling class. It's the ruling class that sets the tone and the expectations and anybody that is trying to change the paradigm and challenge the status quo. You're saying that they are going to be excluded and they want to divide and conquer. They control schools as well as the publication media. The internet is now being censored heavily
by the ruling class interests. The ruling class is part of the same ecosystem. They are part of our society. How can we make them see that it's also in their best benefit in the long term. In the short term, sure, they have this greed and power. I'm sure that feels good. In the long term, it's better for everyone, including them, to collaborate, to not divide and conquer, but to actually distribute things in a rational way. How can we approach these people and try to convince them that that's the best way for everyone, including them?
About 40 or 50 years ago, I was discussing that issue. I was starting to see the offspring of the ruling class. Some of them were starting to have exactly that realization that everyone is in it together. That has been a very slow process. You can see some of the errors to big fortunes becoming interested in preserving the ecosystems, but it has to start happening a lot faster. If you could pass a law tomorrow, a law that is going to be binding, that people need to
enforce the authorities, what would that be? What would you do if you had that power for one day? One of the first things that occurs to a person is to equalize the money supply, but that has always been made impossible. I think maybe a better place, if you could just start at one aspect of the society, I think canceling all licenses. People are licensed to create scarcity. Very much medical care would be economically available, and all of the prescription drugs would lose their exorbitant prices if all of the licensing functions were simply canceled.
I want to know if the person that is going to treat me knows something, I guess. What you're saying is that it shouldn't be illegal for somebody to treat the other person as long as the other person knows that that person doesn't have a certain certification, but it's okay with that. The problem is that people believe that the medical license means that they have the knowledge and capacity to cure, but the majority of medical practice as it exists now is probably counterproductive. I think it's making people sicker on balance. Longevity
in the United States has been decreasing the last several years, and the number of people killed by medical accidents, even accidents recognized by the medical profession, it's several times worse than the deaths in traffic accidents. It's approaching the death rate from cancer and heart disease, simply errors that are made in hospitals. Yes, I always tend to see things in a way that is cooperation versus competition. I guess that's why we're having this conversation, but I believe that the people behind these corporations and even medical institutions have their mindset of collaborating and helping the
ecosystem, helping humanity. They will free a lot of their resources, they will drop the prices and the margins that they make on certain medications, which are really extremely high and necessary to do. I see what you're saying, and I agree. The universities are set up to exclude people. I was an English teacher for a while, and the department head told us that we had to fail about half of our students, half of the freshmen students. That would indicate that their standards were high, but it really meant a failure to teach them adequately.
Speaking of education, you've written a lot about helping individuals to become healthier and having more energy, but it seems that we are always fighting against a stressful environment, competitive environment, and obviously this makes things difficult for us to thrive. How can we create a healthier society, like a healthier lake, so that the fish are healthier, stronger in terms of our context? How can we do that? The whole economy is set up in ways that are poisoning our health. People have to commute
to work and spend hours at work. Usually a big part of that is in meaningless activity just being present. I don't think it's possible to maintain the present work environment. Many of the problems that I hear is about the meaninglessness of the work that they're doing, seeing the world as having meaning. Your own life doesn't really have meaning if you see the world as a meaningless competition for status. It always comes back to this. For me and every person that I talk to, the quickest way to make
our society healthier is to change the way the economy runs. It's just making people sick, really. When I hear about robots replacing people, to me that's always good news, because I think that's wonderful. That's why we invent the tractors, so that we don't have to do the job. But most people in the news, they say, "No, it's a bad thing. Unemployment!" I think it's wonderful. 75 years ago and more, I was hearing people talking about automation and how it would
make it possible for people to have to work only two days a week. In the 1940s, that was the calculation that robots would ease everyone's workload. But what it did was make fewer people have jobs and increase the unemployed and increase the poverty. They are energy productive materials. You talk about a lot of these, like pregnenolone and progesterone, things like that, hormones. How about those energy protective thoughts that we can entertain in our minds? What effect do they have in our health and which ones are important in
education to foster? I think from first grade through graduate school, there should be a curriculum assuming that the whole world has meaning and that the individual being educated should be helped to relate to this world of meaning. As it exists, all of these levels are being funneled into serving the industry as it exists, making them better competitors rather than better cooperators. That starts early in grade school and you can see it competition to get into medical school, for example. The whole college undergraduate experience for people who want to get into medical
school is invalidated by this competitive focus on getting a good future job. Yeah. I heard that they don't share notes. They don't share notes and things like that. The whole culture and language are being deformed by this competitive attitude towards education. I taught linguistics for a while, the theory and structure of language. My emphasis was on how is communication possible through these structures of language. When you have to make up a sentence which has never been spoken before,
how is a person able to discover your meaning? I think it reduces to the fact that your intention to invent and express a new meaning has to elicit an inventive response to invent an understanding of your novel, innovative expression. I think you can see communication through language as an extension of the actual communication that exists in all animal species. Ants and bees, for example, have been studied somewhat for the way they intelligently understand novel environments and how they communicate that to other members of the group.
People at present, in the educational system geared towards competition, people aren't behaving as intelligently as ants and bees because they don't realize that expression is always inventive and innovative, and delivering something intrinsically useful. So a language reflects our behavior and I'm assuming it works in both ways. If we change our language, that could also affect our behavior in my opinion. That's why I'm always trying to change the mindset of people when they say, oh, we need to be more competitive.
I say, no, we need to be more competent if you want, but we don't need to be more competitive. We need to be more collaborative. If we make a trendy topic, a trendy word, and we change the language, do you agree that these will also change behavior and work in both ways? Yeah, the idea of competition in education extends to attitudes towards novel ideas. If you invent something useful, the pressure is to copyright it or pass it. Instead of communicating it and getting it into
work, the artificial scarcity pressures people. Even in university departments, they have classified research that they can't talk about -- business... But when you put out ideas, you're actually going to have a return with an advantage you get back more than you've put out. You shared this quote with me and I really love it, by Bertrand Russell. "The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation." How do you see this redemption happening in the near future? I doubt that it is happening in the near future, but it's something that is always possibly
only a moment away. It's something that could be instantly started, but there are forces that are turning it off faster than it can be started. I think individuals have to see themselves as autonomous creators who are going to be enriched by sharing with other autonomous creative individuals. I think that's the only kind of process that can't be stopped if people try to establish an organized structure in opposition to the ruling class's interests. The ruling class always has the means to disrupt that organization. So if people see themselves as creative individuals, cooperating organizations will
be spontaneously come into existence as appropriate. I think that's how intelligence works in the animal and plant world. When there's a problem, the organism spontaneously has the intelligence to solve the problem appropriately. I think that's how the survival of society is going to have to come about. If we understand the laws of physics and the way energy flows and everything, it's only a matter of time that we will create enough organization and we will have enough intelligence to overcome these issues and overcome the power over control of the ruling class. We
will succeed as having a thriving civilization. That's the idea that the planet is actually increasing in its potential and energy flow. The increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for Vernadsky in 1945, that was a very promising thing. He said the metabolic rate of the world is increasing. So planetary warming is a constructive thing, increasing the intelligence of all of the components of the ecosystems and hopefully of society. Yes, and I agree with that. I tell people sometimes that actually warmer planet is better because where do we see more life
in the tropics. It's not in the North Pole that we see life. Now, I agree that we should get there in a natural way, not using any fossil fuels and things like that. We should let a natural world take care of things. Any closing thoughts, Dr. Peat, today? No, just that things are not as hopeless as they look from the official perspectives. When you see the organism, the planet and the cosmos as an organism advancing, I think there's reason to have confidence that appropriate intelligence will arise as needed.
Dr. Peat, we all would like to support your work. I know you keep researching and writing. I believe there is a newsletter that you share with people. How can we connect with that and support your work through this newsletter? The newsletter address and email is [email protected]. Do we send you a way to sign up for the newsletter? Yes, by PayPal. It's $28 for 12 bi-monthly issues. That's two years. I will leave the information in the description of this video. Again, Dr. Peat, thank you so much
for your time today. I really appreciate it. Okay, thank you. I hope you liked that interview. We all need to listen to a few times. Dr. Peat definitely points out to critical things in our world to move forward, to improve, and please support him. We are lucky that he is still doing research and sharing with all of us, so let's just support Dr. Raymond Peat and also support this channel and click subscribe, share with your friends, spread the word cooperation. It's the way
forward cooperation beats competition. Thank you so much and I'll see you on the next.