O:H header
Any regular readers of Sott.net, Mercola.com, GreenMedInfo and a number of other alternative health news websites are no-doubt familiar with the fact that alternative health information is being censored, deranked or flatly banned by a number of Big Tech platforms. Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Pinterest, even MailChimp have all been exposed recently for taking a firm stand against their user's freedom to have access to the health information they may wish to see.

Today we're joined again by Scott Ogrin of Scottie's Tech.Info to give us the techie take on the nefarious agenda of Big Tech to control the information flow and steer public perception towards official consensus reality. We cover the latest whistleblower releases of Zach Vorhies, Dr. Robert Epstein and more.

It's a scary world, and one that is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate! Join us on this edition of Objective:Health where we cover the latest machinations of the technocracy!


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Running Time: 01:17:30

Download: MP3 — 70.3 MB


Here's the transcript of the show:

Doug: Hello and welcome to another episode of Objective Health. I am Dougl With me are my co-hosts Elliot and Erica.

Elliot: Hello.

Doug: And in the background on the ones and twos as usual is Damian.

Damian: Hello.

Doug: And unfortunately Tiff can't be with us today but we do have a very special guest. We've interviewed him before and we thought we would bring him on today because we're going to be talking about big tech censorship and specifically big tech censorship of health news and information. Anybody who has been paying attention in the last little while and is a regular reader of anything like Mercola.com or GreenMedInfo or Natural News or any number of other popular alternative health websites has probably seen them talking about the fact that they are being censored rather extensively.

So we thought we would bring on a tech expert to walk us through a little bit of this, so we will welcome again Scottie from ScottiesTech.Info. Welcome Scottie.

Scottie: Howdy. Good to be here again.

Doug: So cool. Just from my intro there, there seems to have been a lot of stuff in the last little while coming out, specifically I think Zack Voorhees coming out, the Google whistleblower, who was giving solid evidence of what Google is actually doing. People have been speculating for a long time about re-ranking health sites and having all these other kinds of ways of manipulating access to information on this show, our health show. We specifically talk about health information but the big news is probably election meddling and doing things to boost certain candidates and de-rank other candidates. I know Tulsi Gabbard has been a victim of that and is suing Google at the moment. But maybe we should just start with what's going on? {laughter} Just to be kind of general about it.

Scottie: Well let's see. Where should we begin? I've done a few videos on my scottiestech.info channel talking about Google and all this kind of stuff. It really actually began way the heck back with I think Larry Page doing his PhD thesis. Google was founded in 1998 and Larry Page did his PhD thesis. It was partially funded by DARPA. So Google always had this motto, "Don't be evil" which was actually kind of funny because since Google's inception, before the company ever went public you have the involvement of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency - that's a complicated acronym - a US government institution. So everyone thinks that Google came about because Larry Page and Sergey Brin are these two geniuses and they created this wonderful search engine.

The truth is actually that - and this is all based on publicly available information, there have been several books by various people written about it - from its very inception Google was designed to hoover up lots of data and collect information on people and it was all part of this whole total information awareness thing where ostensibly it's because they want to collect information to advertise better. They just want to sell you a fancier car or a printer or whatever. It's like Edward Bernays and marketing and all that kind of thing. But it was with the involvement of these different agencies. And of course the NSA actually comes in at various points.

So basically from the get-go, Google was never about a good search engine. It was about how we can grab a bunch of information. Then you fast forward in time and Google became very powerful. The book Surveillance Valley which I think I mentioned last time when I was on your guys' show is a very interesting book by Yasha Levine. He talks about how in silicon valley all of this stuff has worked over the years. Not that it wasn't about innovation; it was about innovation and technologies are cool. The Google search engine itself is pretty awesome and all the things that Google can do like Google maps and all that, it's all very useful.

But behind all that, at every step of the way you had essentially intelligence and government agencies wanting to get their mitts on as much data as possible. Then eventually you get to the whole smartphone craze and this is actually interesting. It's becoming even more interesting. Initially of course you could sign up for a gmail account and part of the agreement is that they will give you one gig of storage and part of the agreement is that you allow all your emails to be scanned and they would grab key words. Anyone who sent you an email, they'd grab that person's email address. They key word search that person's email and they gather all this data.

Eventually we started carrying smartphones around with us and the smartphones of course have all these sensors. Then we started getting things like Siri and Google assistant and now we have the Amazon Echo and it's even gone so far as now you don't have just that little interactive speaker that you can talk to and it answers questions and of course listening pretty much all the time, but now you're supposed to get Amazon security cameras and hook them up to your wifi network so you have footage.

There was a recent news article where everyone was up in arms because it turns out that - I'm not sure if it was Amazon or Apple, can't remember which one - it turns out that there were human reviewing the footage. So all this is supposed to be private and of course everyone's up in arms again.

Anyway, then you have the smartphones and smartphones are great because it's also potentially listening to everything you do and everyone can relate to the whole experience of going out to dinner with some friends and you have your smartphone on and you're not actually using it actively, it's just on in standby mode. The screen is off. It's in your pocket and you're talking about some product or service and after dinner you all get home and suddenly you surf the internet and you start seeing ads for that product. So obviously they are actually monitoring and they're hoovering up a lot of data.

Now of course the next interesting step is some new smartphones with AI processors which is kind of interesting because AI processors can do interesting, cool stuff. They have smarter auto-focus let's say, or they could post-process images or video. There's all kinds of neat stuff you can do with it. But it's kind of curious because it's also something that could be used to run these machine learning algorithms which is the way that companies like Google and Amazon crunch all this data. Many people say, "Wait a minute, there's so much data that there's no way they could process it all" and in fact they can because they're using these machine learning algorithms where you have a box and you program the box (it's software), but you program this box with certain inputs and outputs and you tell it, "Optimize for blah" like "optimize for figuring out what kind of candy people like the best" or whatever and then it gives a certain output and that gets fed back in and it's sort of self-learning, like self-teaching and it tweaks itself.

So that technology which has, until this point, been only in Google's warehouses full of servers, now suddenly it could be off-loaded onto the smartphone itself. So then they don't necessarily have to process so much data themselves because your smartphone will actually be spying on you and processing all the data and sifting through it more efficiently. So they're extending the artificial intelligence out into the smart phones themselves.

And all that is kind of interesting because it ties directly into this whole censoring of alternative health sites. There was all this stuff with the election and Trump and blah, blah, blah. Then they say there's Russian interference in the elections and there's a lot of nonsense going on. At the same time all this spying and stuff is occurring you have a bunch of people saying, "We know what the truth is and here it is." Then you also have companies like Google, because they've become so powerful, they are now actually saying "Well, okay not only are we going to hoover up all the information and control all the information but heck, as long as we control the information, let's just start telling people exactly what to think."

Then you get into "Well no, sorry. GreenMedInfo and Mercola are not okay." It's interesting because Mercola had one of his many recent articles on this whole problem. He said if you go onto Google and you type just arthritis, his articles used to come up because he's an expert on arthritis and alternatives treatments for it and that sort of thing. If you type just arthritis he doesn't come up anymore. If you type Mercola arthritis I think he does come up but the results are for his pet site or something.

So I did a little experiment. I said, how about if I go on Yandex, which is the Russian Google, the Russian search engine? If you use DuckDuckGo, it is just using Google's search results and I'm pretty sure Start Page does as well. I'm not sure about that. But a lot of these alternative search engines are just using Google's search results and filtering out all the privacy-violating stuff supposedly. So I just went to Yandex.com and I typed in arthritis and of course Mercola's not on the first page but I typed Mercola arthritis and poof! there was all his stuff.

So I recently switched entirely from DuckDuckGo to Yandex.com and I'm now using the Russian search engine for the simple reason that it will actually give me the results that I want and it's not going to censor things based on what somebody in Washington, DC or somebody at Google wants me to see. It's going to give me relatively, I'll say accurate results - accurate assuming that their system still works by the general rule that if a billion people do a search and most people click on this link then that's going to be the most likely one that we should show you.

Doug: Right.

Scottie: So far it seems to be working pretty well. Just a little plug there for a Russian search engine. {laughter} I'm sure that will be very popular with YouTube.

Doug: Our video's going to get censored. {laughter}

Damian: It already is.

Scottie: I have a friend who actually works at Yandex and I started thinking about him and I thought, he's a good guy and he's really smart so I'm going to try Yandex. I've been super happy with it since.

Doug: That's interesting. I'm going to have to give that a go actually because I always wondered about that whole duckduckgo thing because it's still technically Google. It's just got a shell on it. Like you were saying, it supposedly doesn't have all that data hoovering stuff going on.

Scottie: Duckduckgo is just kind of a wrapper for Google so if the Google results are skewed, duckduckgo's results will be skewed. Usually if you type a search and then you do space site colon and then the name of the site, for example "arthritis site:mercola.com" then Google will give you only results for that actual website's domain name.

Doug: It doesn't work so well though really. I've tried doing that with SOTT before and it brings up a lot of sites that are not SOTT and SOTT is never the first few choices. Then it'll bring up French SOTT. Clearly I'm not looking for that.

Scottie: SOTT has been subject to a lot of that kind of censorship for a very long time. It's been going on for probably about 10 years at least, or longer and lately it has actually gotten pretty bad where even if you do site:SOTT.net you don't get any results. It's kind of a problem because there are people out there who are deciding that the masses of people are doing searches and they're clicking on stuff and instead of simply showing me what everyone else might look at, they're showing me what they think I should look at.

People make the argument that Google's a private company. That's true, it is so maybe they should be able to show me what they think I should look at except the problem is that we're not talking about simply product A versus product B here. We're talking about actual political and social movements and even who the President of the United States of America is. While all these people are saying, "Evil Russians did this," everyone's pointing the finger at somebody else while simultaneously preventing me from reading articles on Mercola? Well maybe the reason that Mercola and GreenMedInfo are popular is because they actually share information that does actually help people.

Doug: Yeah.

Scottie: Why are you hiding that from me? It's a little bit too Big Brother I'm afraid.

Doug: Mercola did a pretty good job of actually digging into it and the top health sites that are coming up in Google searches for health terms are WebMD, HealthLine and there was another one that I forget right now. Anyway, they're all essentially advertising sites that are directing people to pharmaceutical advertisements and pharmaceutical stuff. It's portrayed as if they're an authoritative voice on health stuff but of course they're completely skewed to that pharmaceutical aspect of stuff and Google has a conflict of interest there because it's actually invested in some of these pharmaceutical things, especially when you start digging into the vaccine issue.

I think Google is coming out with the first universal flu vaccine or something along those lines. It's such a huge conflict of interest. When you've got all these different companies and someone wants to start their own search engine, the fact of the matter is that Google is the gold standard. Facebook, all these other social media companies that have platforms out there, there's no point in being on them really because no one else is on there. So it's like there's nobody there. The whole point of a social network is to share things.

So there is a monopoly situation going on there. When all those companies have these special interests, conflicts of interest and are directing people towards particular things, I don't know how to finish that sentence. It's really bad.

Elliot: I've personally noticed this. Say if I type something into Google specifically related to a health issue or some kind of therapy or some alternative medicine concept, then the first four or five pages {audio problem} are the typical - oh did you lose me?

Doug: Yeah, we lost you for a second there.

Elliot: Oh, sorry. I was going to say that whenever I type anything related to alternative medicine or alternative therapies or anything into Google, the first four or five pages will literally just be conventional nonsense really, just sites which claim to debunk these things. For instance Mercola gave an example of when you put in supplements the Google search engine has actually been rigged so that it doesn't present the different suggestions for the end of the sentence for what most people have searched into the engine. Sorry, my internet connection goes down.

Essentially they've rigged it so supplements are bad. Supplements are nonsense. Supplements don't work. Supplements are dangerous. So it's very much shaping the thought of the average person so if they ever did seek to step outside of the box and look at alternatives, then the first thing that they come across is this information.

Scottie: Yeah. In the recent past there has been a lot of stuff about vaccines as well. Doug mentioned vaccines and that whole thing is just crazy because you can search and what you find is mostly the mainstream view about it. I'm not the kind of person who's going to say, "Well vaccines are always evil, period" because I can look at things that happened and I can go, "Well in that case that vaccine did actually seem to save lots of people's lives." But then at the same time I'm going to go, "Well what's in these vaccines and how well are they tested and why is that when I was a child I got four or five shots and now even babies are being given 27 shots at once. You're asking are all of these illnesses suddenly super prevalent in the United States and other countries? Where did this come from?

I hop on Facebook and see people who say, "Listen up! I'm a registered nurse and anyone who says vaccines are bad are retarded and blah, blah, blah and it's about saving people's lives." I kind of see where they're coming from, especially as a nurse or healthcare professional because they can be good in certain circumstances. But one of the things that the anti-vaxxers are saying is quite simply "Look, why do we need all these shots?" And of course, what about the fancy adjuvants, all the additives.

But if you try to do a search for that all you're going to get is mostly mainstream stuff. Everything from health to politics, with literally everything, you're not being shown the things that are necessarily the most relevant to you. Like Elliot mentioned, supplements. I have a personal friend who had urinary tract infections for 11 years and her doctor put her on this low dose of amoxicillin or some antibiotics. For 11 years she was on it! It was a friend of mine's mother who had this problem and he said, "Well you know, if you take d-mannose, boom, you're cured." She said, "No, that's crazy." So she took the mannose and three days later her urinary tract infection of 11 years was gone! Mannose is a type of sugar. Technically it's a supplement.

So here was this poor woman suffering for 11 years from these things and even her doctor didn't know and many doctors don't know these things because they're only taught mainstream stuff. So naturally people go onto the internet and in every case is it good that people are getting information from the internet? Well no, because it's not always accurate or the bigger problem is that they themselves are not actually sifting through the information and doing their own homework. But just the fact that people have to do this, that they have to do their homework because a lot of these alternative therapies are poo-pooed. I've used a bajillion alternative therapies in my day including energetic things like Reiki and I swear by them simply because they work.

But now they're forbidding you from even attempting to sift through all the information and come to your own conclusions because any time you do a search, they're making it more and more tricky for you to get any information at all which is the antithesis of what the internet is supposed to be, which is bad.

Doug: Yeah. Again, we come back to, "It's bad."

Scottie: It's bad. {laughter}

Doug: It's kind of crazy. I've seen the word technocracy thrown around lately. I guess it's a made up word but that is what we're starting to see here. It's basically a complete control of information. It seems like it's right on the horizon. When the internet first came around everybody said, "Yay, freedom! This is going to be the saviour of humanity. All the information is free and everybody's going to have all this information and get so smart." Now it seems like they started clamping down on it. Well with the creation of the internet it was already, like you were saying, a big data hoovering operation from the get-go, but it seems like it went in a direction that nobody was really expecting, at least us plebs weren't really expecting it. We're going to be telling our kids about the golden age of the internet when you could find any information you wanted to! Not now! You can't find it now.

Even now at least you can sift through search results or there are ways of finding information. There are different portals that you can go through but it seems like on the horizon, we're going to get to a point where there is official information and there is illegal, censored information. Whether or not it's illegal, it just won't be accessible.

Scottie: Yeah. Which is actually very funny because what do we hear in the news all the time about, for instance, China? Well they have their social credit score system and it's so evil and they're controlling information and they have the great firewall of China. Everyone's so busy looking over at China and saying, "Oh, at least it's not that bad over here" that they're not actually looking in the mirror, realizing that they are either advocating for the exact same thing here or they're sitting around as we are going, "What's going on here because that's not how the internet's supposed to work?"

Erica: Or they're inundating you with so much useless nonsense that you have the illusion of choice.

Scottie: Yes.

Erica: Especially the arthritis thing you were talking about Scottie. Okay, you can have this pill or that pill but never anything about diet or lifestyle. It's 10 pages of the illusion of choice and then your brain is inundated and you say, "Okay, I guess I will not continue to search for that."

Scottie: Yeah. I thought it was actually pretty interesting when the whole Jordan Peterson and his daughter Mikhaila and they went through and are still doing the whole carnivore diet and there was this huge blowback, all these articles and experts coming out and saying "Oh the carnivore diet is dangerous. It's horrible." It was just a barrage, a tidal wave of 'that's all nonsense, it's dangerous, you're going to kill yourself'. You ask, what's the actual harm in trying unless you have some pre-existing horrible medical condition?

On the other hand you have all these people who are becoming vegans and there are problems with being a vegan in many cases. But at the same time it's not that simple because you can't just say "Well carnivore is best for everybody" or "veganism is best for everybody" because there are stories of people who get some kind of cancer and then they start juicing and they claim that juicing cured their cancer. Well maybe it did because maybe for them they had some severe lack of vitamins or nutrients or whatever and so maybe it did and that's a great story. But then in the long term are they still going to be healthy? Well I don't know. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't.

So it's even kind of crazy because most of us who are into alternative health tend to look at all this information and sift through it and consider all these different possibilities and try things, in many cases because mainstream treatments simply didn't work, like in the case of my friend's mom's urinary tract infection. Look, 11 years! That's a long time to be taking antibiotics for that kind of thing and then poof! Three days later a supplement cures it and occasionally she has flare-ups so she takes more d-mannose and boom! Done.

It's crazy and most people are actually sifting through information, being careful about it, and yet we're all treated like children. "No, you're not smart enough to do that and so we'll do it for you."

Doug: Yeah.

Scottie: Then they proceed to tell you, "Obviously if you think you have a problem, here take this new pharmaceutical that's anti-anxiety or antidepressant or something." It's crazy. It's bad. {laughter}

Doug: It's an interesting point, treating us like children. It is nanny state on steroids. I saw this a lot particularly a couple of years ago with the whole vaccine debate, the vaxxers versus the anti-vaxxers. There was a lot of rhetoric out there that people who weren't doctors didn't have the right to make any kind of informed choice about vaccination. "You're not a doctor so you can't weigh in on the debate or you can't decide for your family whether or not you want them to get vaccinated."

It's so contrary to - I would use terms like 'the spirit of the internet' but I keep on thinking back to the fact that you've already debunked that Scottie, saying that the internet was just invented to hoover your data.

Scottie: Not exclusively. Email began as a fun little project. The reason email is so horrible is because it began as this messaging thing with no security and no encryption and anyone could send a mail to anyone else. It was kind of a fun thing you could do and it evolved into email. The internet was a government project connecting military computer networks together, blah, blah, blah, and it evolved into what it is today. Along the way, of course, all these cool tools came up and all these capabilities and massive turnover of information.

If your computer breaks or if your car breaks and you have to replace some switch, like your rear view mirror control switch in your car, just go on YouTube and type the make, model and year of your car, "rear view mirror switch replacement" and I would bet you a large amount of money that you will find a video on there, or at least a website that tells you exactly how to do it. That's phenomenally cool.

So it's like "they" in the background always had this horrible inclination to do all the data hoovering and to try and control, but at the same time it exploded into something that they didn't really expect. I don't think any of them really ever envisioned that it would be as awesome as it is in terms of the ability to share so much information and to have all this information accessible at your fingertips, literally if you want to know how to do anything.

Say I'm living in the US and I wanted to build a wooden framed house with this, that and the other thing, I can hop on the internet and learn pretty much everything I need to know to do that. If I want to learn any language, there are various resources where I can learn that language. I don't have to pay anything. Well I have to pay for my internet access. I have to pay for my computer.

So I think a lot of that happened and that was unexpected. As all of that good stuff exploded, so did the ability to spy and the data hoovering. That also exploded. My theory is that it reached a point where also politically and socially things got a little bit too crazy, let's say, where then all of a sudden it was like, "Stop!" It was almost like somebody felt like they lost control and so now they said, "Okay, we've got to lock all this stuff down and start telling people, 'no, parents do not have the ability to decide for their own children. It's only doctors who can decide! It's only this.'" And suddenly we find ourselves moving towards the types of repressive societies that we're always poo-pooing and that we turn on the news and that they're always poo-pooing - that country 'over there' because they're so repressive and their citizens don't have choice and blah, blah, blah.

Doug: Yeah.

Scottie: That's exactly what we're seeing right now in our own countries. So it's not all bad or all good. These two different parts of the internet evolved at the same time and for whatever reason, it's like somebody flipped a switch and the crazies just went, "Okay, this is nuts. Now we have to control everything" which is not going to work. That's my prediction.

It's going to be a bumpy road but I don't think it can possibly work because you can't control everything. You can't control all the information in the universe. Facebook came out and said "Oh, we're going to have a Libra crypto currency." They wanted to create their own money and control it and everybody said, "No you're not! That's stupid! You're not going to do that!" And they were like, "Okay." {laughter} That was the end of Libra. I'm not really optimistic, but I'm also not pessimistic about it. I'm kind of neutral towards the whole thing.

Doug: Well if we use China as an example - I don't really know much about it - have they been really efficient at locking down the information? Are there pirates over there? Are there guys getting secret access to things that is not government sanctioned? Maybe you don't know the answer.

Scottie: It's kind of hard. It depends on who you ask. Unfortunately I don't actually have any friends who live in China so I don't have any sort of insider information like I do with certain other countries that are in the news a lot lately. Various videos and articles I've read of people who claim to live there or to have lived there, say various things. Some of them say it's horribly bad and controlled and some of them say, "Yeah, this website is banned. that website is banned. This one is filtered. That one is filtered." Then of course it's a question of what are they filtering. I don't know.

So I really don't know. I can't say with any degree of authority. But I would say is it any worse than what we're going through here now? If I want to search for some supplements and it's being effectively censored, then what is the difference between that and the government of China saying, "No, you're not allowed to view Scottiestech.info because he's a rebel"?

Doug: Right. I'm just wondering because your outlook is kind of on the balance of optimistic/ pessimistic. You don't think that the shutdown of the information, the clamp down is going to work, and I was thinking to myself it kind of seems to have worked in China but I don't really know that much about it. That was just where my question was coming from.

Scottie: I think for certain things - this is my guess - for certain things like political topics, I'm guessing that's pretty well locked down, but in terms of supplements for example, well probably not because there's Chinese medicine, there's all kinds of other stuff. Again, this is a guess but because of things like Chinese medicine which is considered alternative medicine in the west, maybe that kind of stuff isn't so locked down. I don't know. That's difficult to say really. I probably shouldn't try to say any more about it. {laughter}

I'll go to China and find out and let you know.

Doug: Yeah, okay. Most of our discussion has been about Google so far but other sites as well have been censoring information also. Greenmedinfo was talking at one point about getting dropped from Mail Chimp which is really just a batch email sending service.

Scottie: That was actually very surprising to me because when I watched the video where he mentions that I thought "Wow!" because I run various servers and use different mail sending services. Email, as I said earlier, is a total nightmare and so in order to ensure deliverability, you use something like Mail Chimp because if you have your own server and you try to send your own mails you get blacklisted instantly because of spammers and similar IP blocks and blah, blah, blah.

So everyone who sends mass mail, like newsletters or daily updates or something, you should use something like Mail Chimp because if you don't, it's not going to get delivered. Up until this point, I'd never heard of anyone being poo-pooed by them, certainly not just kicked off because they were talking about alternative medicine stuff. I think there were a couple of stories about someone supposedly sending terrorism-related newsletters and the company put the kibosh on them. It wasn't Mail Chimp, it was another one. That actually surprised me. I wondered who put pressure on Mail Chimp? Then again, maybe nobody put pressure on them. Maybe Mail Chimp is simply run by an individual or individuals who feel very strongly that alternative medicine is bunk and we should all get our vaccinations and take our antidepressants and that's it. That's also a possibility.

So part of the problem is big tech but the other part of the problem is the general sort of hysteria that's going on where you can't actually have a conversation with many people about certain topics because they just get so upset about it. Obviously Trump, democrats and republicans - the more political side, that's certainly one. But vaccines is another where if you say, "You know what? I don't think I'm going to vaccinate my kids" and people start throwing bottles at your head and stuff.

That whole thing I think is another symptom of current problems with society but also aggravated by the techie side.

Erica: Well it's interesting with the Mail Chimp issue that it was just the vaccine topic. It wasn't, like you were saying, supplements or alternative medicine, chiropractors, it was actually just the question of the vaccine schedule and like you said earlier, Scottie, the difference between getting five vaccines as opposed to 65. We've mentioned this before on the show. In the US, the compliance rate with vaccinations is well over 90% so it seems like targeting greenmedinfo for sending out to 300,000 people on their mailing list over just that one topic seems really excessive censorship.

Doug: It coincided with a few other ones. On Pinterest they started censoring anything - I hate to use the word 'anti-vaxxer' because as Sayer Ji at GreenMedInfo was saying, "We're not actually anti-vaccine." Anti-vaccine is taking the stance of wanting all vaccines to be erased from the planet. They're pro-choice about vaccines, the idea that you should have the freedom to choose your medical interventions. But anything that wasn't blatantly pro-vaccine was erased from Pinterest. Facebook I'm pretty sure did the same thing.

Elliot: Yeah, that's the problem. It's not like there's even that many people it seems in that kind of community who are blanket anti-vaccine. It's just pro-choice and it's pro-education.

Scottie: Yeah.

Elliot: It's in favour of the right to decide your own health choices, right? It's educating and honesty, medical honesty. That's what these people are protesting for essentially. But the problem is that with this whole thing that's going on now with Google, it's essentially as though anyone who does not agree 100% with the narrative is somehow a heretic.

Doug: Yeah. They should be burned at the stake!

Erica: For questioning. It seems like in reading for this topic, the decision to try and control all the information for people who just have questions. Back to the example that you used Scottie of having a urinary tract infection, what was one of the articles we read? Seven hundred thousand searches a minute for health-related topics, for example, 'if I break out in a rash what could it be?' They're controlling all the information that you may get away from alternatives or whatever they call them, quacks or whatever. I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around why that would be such an important thing to control, why the opportunity to use western medicine as opposed to alternative medicine is such a need to control the information! One of the articles we were reading compared it to the book Fahrenheit 451, book burning and censoring. Probably because I've been in the alternative health world for so long, it just seems like common knowledge that you would want two very different sides of a perspective to get an idea of how to navigate forward. Sorry if that didn't make sense.

Doug: No, it made sense.

Erica: It just seems absurd to me that...

Doug: I agree.

Elliot: But when there's billions involved, you need to block out the other side of the market essentially. You can't be having those kinds of influences making people ask questions, especially when there's money to be made!

Scottie: It always seems the same as with everything. There's all this money to be made and then you have lobbying groups in the background and sometimes maybe with "Let's distract people from this political crisis by having this vaccine crisis over here." It just seems like you have a relatively small group of people who feel like they're losing control. On the side maybe big tech is being approached by their pharmaceutical company cronies and they're saying, "Yeah, you should do something about that Bob". {laughter} And then Bob goes and does blah, blah, blah and suddenly they're censoring things.

Also at Google especially, apparently they have this whole wing for social justice warrior branch where they all have pinky-green hair and they're all going to make sure that everything is fair and balanced. And you're going, "Well then they probably shouldn't all have pinky-green hair because most people don't and that's not very balanced," you know? {laughter} So you have groups like that who are apparently steering things in various directions so if one of them gets really upset by vaccines or something, suddenly you have this whole big explosion.

It is actually a little bit strange to me. It is absurd and it does actually blow my mind because I'm continually surprised. I said I'm optimistic and pessimistic but at the same time I am still kind of shocked that there hasn't really been enough blow-back against all this stuff. Okay, so we had some congressional hearings where they're grilling Mark Zuckerberg and Google execs, but that has happened many times over the decades and usually there is a whole big stink made about it and then companies or intel agencies promise to not do these things anymore and then they outsource to Britain and Britain outsources theirs to ours and we go, "Yeah, we just carry on as before."

I don't know if it's just because of hysteria but it's like something in the air where suddenly all these things are coming up at once. I don't think that's purely related to technology. Because we have this technology and because there's this thing in the air where people are just losing their minds, that's sort of the means by which they try to control what everyone else is thinking. It is pretty absurd actually. How far will it go? I don't know. I was actually pretty shocked to learn about Greenmedinfo and Mercola. I mean, come on! How many people have they helped for crying out loud?! This huge mailing list and all this stuff.

Plus like Doug said, they weren't saying "No vaccines ever". They were saying, "No, we want the choice". And then there's this misunderstanding where the pro-vacciners are saying "You're anti-vaccine" and the anti-vacciners are saying, "No, I'm not anti. I just to have choice, whether I or especially my child, gets this." They start punching each other. The amount of hysteria is crazy and I think that's just spilling over into the tech world and unfortunately many of the people at these big tech companies have decided, "Alright. We'll just control everything and do it better."

Erica: For your safety. For your safety.

Scottie: Yeah, of course. There's a huge backlash. If I publish a video on "Hey, use this dumb phone. It doesn't run Google's Android it runs KaiOS but it does have little Google apps like YouTube and Google Assistant but it's not evil apps like on a smartphone it's different", people just post like crazy. "No Google! I hate Google!! No, nothing Google!" And I'm like, "Good job!" {laughter} There is kind of a backlash but then big tech goes, "You're mad that we're censoring Mercola and Greenmedinfo? Well we don't care. We're going to double down and do it even more."

Then people will do what I did and say, "Okay, I'll just use Yandex." They're like, "No, that's the evil Russian search engine!" "Yeah, if they give me the search results that I'm looking for, then who else am I going to use?" It's crazy.

The other interesting thing, they were talking about - in whichever video I watched, I can't remember, with Sayer Ji and Greenmedinfo - they were talking about Wikipedia. Pretty much everyone has known that Wikipedia is not exactly totally above board for a very long time now, so that just highlighted once again how corrupt it has become. But then at the same time, if I go on Wikipedia and I look up something about electrical engineering, power systems or circuit analysis, something that's very engineering pure sciency kind of things, there is very good information on there. It's not a politically or socially hot topic. It's not like vaccines or a medically hot topic. It's just there.

So there is no one in there saying, "No! Power is not equal to voltage times current!" Even though it is. "My philosophy says no!" So there is still a lot of good information on there, but that means you have to be very careful and sift even more if you decide to use Wikipedia. It's crazy. That's the theme of this show - It's Crazy!

Doug: It's crazy. It's bad and it's crazy.

Scottie: I don't actually know why I'm optimistic. {laughter} For a very long time I was pessimistic. I would probably argue that I actually understand more about this stuff than most people and I see it getting worse and worse every day so I'm not actually sure why I'm optimistic. I guess it just seems to me like, how on earth would you censor people like Sayer Ji and Dr. Mercola and all these people who have done so much good for others and who have shared so much and then you're just going to censor them and there's not going to be any push-back to that? Plus it's happening in so many different areas that it just seems like eventually something is going to snap.

When Facebook comes out and says, "Yeah, we're going to start controlling money because everyone's going to use Libra" and everyone looks at them like, "No you're not! You're stupid!" Then they go, "Oh, you're right, we're not." That gives me a little bit of hope. Maybe it'll get worse. Maybe five years from now we'll be sitting here and I'll be saying, "Yes, I'm pessimistic now. We're all going to die." {laughter}

I think the core of it just that all this stuff is happening and, like I said earlier, you cannot control all information. Every time this has been tried throughout history it can get bad. It can get very, very bad in some cases and in some places. But eventually the tide turns back the other way because if it doesn't we all destroy ourselves. I know there are a lot of people who say, "No, I don't want my stupid smartphone anymore. I don't want Google anymore. I'm sick of Facebook. I'm sick of being on Twitter and being shouted down by a bunch of crazy people." I even observed on Facebook the other, I posted a Greta Thunberg thing, a picture of her eyes and said, kind of as a joke, "Big sister is watching". One friend of mine from grade school posted and he said something about, "Yeah, because she'll just find another boat or something and four guys will take her on the boat with zero emissions and then they'll get on airplanes and fly back home."

So another friend of mine from grade school replied to that and posted one of these animated gifs with the pug and the text "triggered" at the bottom. Then we have this back and forth - and this had never happened before - they had this kind of back and forth where the first one who posted said to the triggered guy, "You're a big man behind the keyboard" or "People shouldn't be tough guys behind the keyboard on social media". Then the other one responded and said, "I don't think you're a tough guy behind the keyboard" and the other one responded, "No, no, I wasn't talking about me!" That actually opened the way for a conversation where the nicer one, let's say, the non-triggered one, said "Hey, we should meet up for coffee some time." {laughter}

They agreed to meet for coffee in the end. That's not how that's supposed to go! Everyone's supposed to be triggered and then start hurling insults and memes at each other and then smash their computers with a baseball bat or something and instead they're going to meet up for coffee now and have a chat. More in ncommon than they thought. That's a good idea! That's nice!

So I see little glimmers of hope here, both in terms of technology and in terms of society. You never know how things are going to go. I wish there was something that we could do. I suppose we could go to Mercola and Greenmedinfo and other sites like that and just read them more often, bookmark them...

Doug: Share them.

Scottie: And share them on social media and just keep going because that would be a shame if they were wiped off.

Doug: Yeah, because the latest change in the Google algorithm, Mercola was saying he's lost something like 99% of his traffic or something like that. It just shows you how powerful Google is, all these platforms, how incredibly powerful they are. I would hope to see more and more people starting to shift away from those two alternatives. That's opening a whole other can of worms. We could probably do a whole show about that, but I think the big problem is that these ones have their power because they came up at the right time so it's consensus that that's the one that everybody uses.

So for another viable alternative there would have to be mass migration from these platforms. I would like to see that.

Scottie: There are other alternatives. YouTube is obviously a big one. You can't say certain things on YouTube, I discovered. If you give any sort of fair and balanced review of China and what's going on there, if you say anything to the effect that they're not totally evil, then suddenly that video can be demonetized and you're poo-pooed and it gets no views. You can't even use the word "drugs" because if you do, they say, "Sorry, this is demonetized. Doesn't follow our guidelines." You do a manual review and then they say, "Okay, you're back". There are different levels. There's being demonetized permanently, individual videos, then there's being de-platformed where they just kick you off entirely.

But there are alternatives to YouTube and none of them will give creators the exposure that YouTube does.

Doug: Exactly.

Scottie: That's why everyone using it. Right now YouTube knows that but there are other alternatives in the works and who knows what the next thing will be. I was just thinking the other day, it's kind of funny because right now video is "the thing". Well video isn't going to be "the thing" forever. I don't know what the next thing is going to be but when you have YouTube and something like 43 years of video uploaded every single day, you reach a point where if everyone on earth is making YouTube videos and uploading them, something has to give and something else will come along and be the next thing, whatever that is and that may or may not be controlled by Google and Facebook and Apple and Amazon and whatever and if it's not, they'll probably buy it.

Doug: Right.

Scottie: That is kind of problematic because it gives you all this exposure but at the same time there's more and more of this control. The other thing I wanted to say is, you mentioned that Mercola has said that his traffic is down 99% or something. That's actually also very interesting because on SOTT.net we have lower traffic by quite a bit since five years ago. Part of the reason for that it seems, is because we have analytics of various types and one of the things they say is, "Oh, Facebook, you're getting 33% of your traffic from Facebook". But if you go and actually look at the numbers, they keep telling you that you're still getting 33% of your traffic from social media, in this case Facebook, but the actual total amount of people that are coming from Facebook is lower.

So you're still getting the same percentage of traffic. In other words, Facebook is driving the same percentage of your total traffic to your site as before but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are not actually penalizing you in any way.

Doug: Right.

Scottie: And it's kind of a problem because if Facebook decides when people share stuff from whatever website, we're going to poo-poo that and we're not going to let as many people see it, suddenly you get fewer referrals and you get fewer people clicking over to your site. Then of course your traffic drops and they say, "But we're still giving you 33% of your traffic. We're still sending the same percentage as before" but actually in terms of sheer numbers, no they're not. So you have to look at these things very carefully. There's not really much you can do about it but you can find other ways to spread the word.

If Facebook is censoring you then try Twitter and if Twitter is censoring you, then keep doing stuff on YouTube and if YouTube starts to censor you, well branch out and use one of the alternative platforms. If you've got a 300,000 person mailing list, tell them "We're using these guys now. Hop on over." That could be the thing that actually pushes that alternative platform over the edge or at least helps to push it over the edge and suddenly it becomes popular and boom! It explodes as the next best thing and then it becomes the best thing.

Doug: Yeah. I've seen a number of YouTube content creators who directly in their video are saying, "By the way, go to this other platform and follow me there", promoting it in that way. I saw one guy who was actually saying, "Look, on this other platform I've got exclusive content that I'm not posting on YouTube so go over there and find me there." If you get a critical mass of people doing that you would see at least trickles of people starting to migrate to these other platforms. We post ours on Brighteon which is Mike Adams' Natural News alternative to YouTube. The views are not as big over there as they are on YouTube obviously, just because there's not as large on audience.

Damian: We've got to tell people to head on over there!

Doug: Yeah! Head over to Brighteon. {laughter} We don't have the exclusive content over there but maybe we will someday.

Damian: Yeah, that's a good idea. Take a page from his book.

Doug: Yeah.

Scottie: In this day and age what are you going to do? Post paper flyers everywhere? Okay, that will work to an extent.

Erica: A phone tree? {laughter}

Scottie: Yeah. And then you think if you have a YouTube channel and you're trying to grow a business or something and you are getting hits from people and there is interest, to what extent is that actually reduced, compared to what it would be because they're still actually penalizing you? There's so much of this stuff that goes on. Social networks let you share stuff but then they censor it in the background. The best kind of censorship is not where they tell you to your face, "You're a dork and we're canceling your channel." The best kind is where you're posting content and they are simply not allowing it to propagate or share in putting it in front of other people and you sit there and think, "Nobody loves me. I'm a big fat loser" and then you give up.

Whereas the truth is that they're doing it in the background because they don't like your content. So that's why you should never give up. {laughter}

Erica: I'm wondering if that's why this is particularly happening in the health world with Google. If they just don't allow the alternatives to be available then people will just take what they can get, whether it's the drugs or the medical doctor? Maybe that's the intention, to control it to the point where people don't have the time and energy to go through five or ten pages of Google searches to find what they're looking for, a form of discouraging. It's also like the average American's attention span too, is not very large. So if we just put endless nonsense they'll just get tired of it and just take the pharma drug, they'll ask their doctor, so having that tenacity to be committed.

I think that's why the vaccine thing is really one of those top five concerns because they know parents - and I've said this before - don't have hours and hours to read medical journals and really get to the bottom. So if they just keep lambasting people who choose to even question safety, that the answer's already been made, the decision's already been made, then they think, "Oh, I don't have to do my research. This doctor says it's safe. This organization, the CDC, Doctor Offit or whatever," you've got your five people and that's as far as they go.

The vaccine thing just seems so bizarre that it would still be going on. I feel like six months ago we did the vaccine thing and it's still going on. It's still under censorship.

Doug: Yeah, it's still going on.

Erica: No, it's not letting up.

Doug: Maybe everybody will go back to books if you can't find the information you need online on the web, so people will just start reading books again.

Erica: But that can happen in a library too where you want a book and it's missing, they can't find it. I just think that the internet is, like you were saying Scottie, so extensive. There's just so much. I wanted to share that I'm with you. I'm optimistic as well. I know I shared this a couple of months ago, about Monsanto getting sued and maybe this will eventually happen in the future with vaccine companies and my co-hosts did not share my optimism. {laughter} But I'm staying optimistic.

Scottie: Alright! Good job! What you're saying is true because you see it across the board, whether it comes to politics and countries waging war on other countries and vaccines and all this stuff. You can say the average American doesn't have a long enough attention span. It's also the simple fact that most people are so buried in their lives, it's enough to get up and take care of the kids, get them to school and then go to work, get the kid after school, dah, dah, dah, and they barely have time to breathe.

So at the end of the day they're just going to turn on mainstream news or this or that. Those of us who for whatever reason actually have not just the drive but the time to talk about this stuff, I think it's that much more important that we do because on my techie channel, I've made some videos about dumb phones and I've talked about 5G and the health risks of wireless stuff, radio frequency emissions and stuff, when I do that kind of stuff I feel like "Well, I'm probably not going to make any kind of difference. It's probably not going to stop the rollout of 5G. But I'm just going to do it anyway because I look and I see literally thousands of studies about the stuff and think 'this is ridiculous, we've got to stop!'"

And I say point blank, "I don't think we should get rid of all of it. I think we should work together and do a real long term study and figure out how to make it safe. So we don't have to get rid of it. We just have to make it safe. I think it's possible to do that." Again, I feel like on the one hand, I have to do this and on the other hand, well why am I bothering because nobody's going to care? It's not going to change anything. And in the end, suddenly, a few months, even years later, suddenly there are entire cities who have stopped the rollout of 5G. They're saying, "No we're not going to allow 5G!"

There was another story where the first video I did on 5G, the following month for PC Magazine I think, who wrote an article. It wasn't in response to my video or anything like that - I'm not that important {laughter} - but it was interesting because my video was one of several videos and news stories at that time and a month later here comes this guy from PC Magazine who wrote an article. He wasn't even pro 5G. He kind of wussed out actually. He didn't really take a stance on it either way. He was reporting, "You have these people who say it's good and you have those people say it's bad. Bye." {laughter} That was it. And he lost his job for it!

Doug: You're kidding?!

Erica: Wow!

Scottie: And they replaced him with another guy who wrote this glowing review of how wonderful 5G is and it's going to save all of our lives. And the guy didn't even say anything. I remember reading the article and thinking, "Dude, you should have at least..."

Erica: Stuck your neck out enough to make it worth it.

Scottie: Yeah, if you're going to take the time to write something, do a little research and at least spell out your own opinion. Make it worth something. He couldn't even do that. Now I find out a little while ago that he was actually fired because it wasn't a glowing enough review and was replaced by an article by another guy who just said 5G is so wonderful.

So there are also cities that are banning stuff. There are petitions that are going on. There are entire Facebook groups that spring up. And that's just for one topic, the topic of 5G and it's the same for vaccines and all this stuff. I think that's actually very important because no, we may not actually change the world and it may not turn out exactly the way we want but there needs to be somebody actually speaking out about this stuff, if only so that other people out there can hear you saying, "No, that's ridiculous. Why are they doing that? That's not right." Or "This should be done." Or whatever. I think somehow, some way it does have an effect greater than we might think because like I say, I don't think I'm important enough to have swayed the whole community on 5G and the dangers of wireless stuff, but I did actually notice that me adding my voice to the chorus, then waiting a few months and suddenly I'm seeing little blips here and there and I think, "Oh, that's surprising. That city banned it until further review?! That's crazy!"

So I think it's important to stay on top of these things and speak out about it and not be afraid, whatever the topic is if you know that there's a site like Mercola or Greenmedinfo that's having a hard time. I don't know Dr. Mercola. I do know Sayer Ji and he's a good guy and that actually irritated me. "Why are you censoring him?! That's crazy!"

Elliot: Mercola's a dude as well. {laughter} He's a great guy like Sayer Ji. He's just one of those guys who has helped millions of people probably, over the decades that they've been doing this. It's unfathomable the amount of people that they must have helped without any kind of recognition or anything. People have just stumbled upon their articles and experienced life-changing effects just by adding in small little changes.

Scottie: Yeah. I've been trying to think of what I can do to help Greenmedinfo. I haven't come up with anything brilliant yet. Just go read articles and share more.

Erica: Well sharing our support here on this video for them. I know I've read most of their work since the inception when it started. I always follow both those websites just to see what new and exciting information they're coming out with and it's not just one particular thing. It's general overall health and the importance of informed consent. That is your sovereign right, to be able to choose what you do with your own body.

Doug: Well, I think we're coming up on our time here. Was there anything else that you wanted to talk about Scottie?

Scottie: No, I don't think so. I get bummed about whatever topic when I see this kind of thing happening or when I post a video and think, "God! This thing is awesome and people are going to love it! It's going to blow them away man!" And then no one watches it. {laughter} You just have to keep going because if things do get worse then you just keep going because what else are you going to do? Throw yourself out the window or something? I don't know why. I think maybe just because I'm stubborn. "No! You're not going to take down my favourite medical sites! You're not going to do this!" {laughter} I'll just share them more than ever. That's what I'm going to do! I'm going to start a Twitter account. I don't have a Twitter account. I'm going to launch a Twitter account and share nothing but Mercola and Greenmedinfo on it. {laughter}

Doug: Ten million followers.

Erica: All of a sudden Scottie's banned on Twitter. Good thing you tell them what you're doing.

Scottie: I think if you have any sites like that that you like, always be thinking of new and better ways to share stuff. If you do x, y and z normally, then add a, b and c. If you don't normally email people links to articles without a blurb, start doing that because you always think "This little action won't matter" and very often that's the little flapping butterfly wings thing and crazy things happen. We just have to keep paying attention to what's going on and keep sharing stuff and fight the power!

Doug: Yeah, fight the power. {laughter} Kill them with kindness.

Scottie: You know what we need to do? We need to invite Google and Facebook and YouTube people for coffee! {laughter}

Doug: Oh yeah.

Scottie: Invite them on your show and then we'll each have a big honking American cup of coffee and say, "We have more things in common than we do differences. Let's sort it all out." By the time the show's over, we'll have fixed everything and there you go.

Doug: Yeah. I'll be hugging Zuckerberg. {laughter}

Scottie: I will not be hugging Zuckerberg! {laughter} I'll shake his hand.

Doug: Okay. Baby steps. Alright, that's our show for this week guys. Thanks so much for joining us. Be sure to tune in next week for another exciting health topic on the Objective: Health Show. Be sure to like and subscribe down below and thanks so much to Scottie for joining us today. Very good conversation.

Scottie: Thanks for having me.

Doug: We'll see you next week.

All: Good-byes.