My plan for 2025

Plans for the year et cetera

I apologize for my lack of updates. I have been hard at work at my new job. I am working for a organization developing and using AI technology to characterize media and government misinformation. I didn’t come from a technical background. And I now have a very technical job. I have been working 14+-hour days seven days a week for months to catch up. And often working through the night. I have lost a lot of weight. Likely, it will take at least another 6-12 months before I can pull back. And I may not even then.

I’m not complaining. I’m transitioning to another skillset. And I’m able to make use of my scientific training and background in understanding the interface between what can only be called “the new media” (social media) and science.

Plus, I get to learn about the whole new wide open world of AI. It’s not hype. Every month brings an avalanche of new advances. The tools I’m using now are radically different than those that were available just a few months ago. Even if no advances were made in that field, the next ten to twenty years are going to be insane. What we have will need to be developed and implemented across a wide variety of domains, across all of society. And here’s the thing: the developments are still occurring, and they are occurring rapidly.

Now, what will happen more slowly and gradually than many of the biggest AI promoters have been saying. But the magnitude of the change, gradual or not, will transform our world—to a greater degree than did even the Internet.

As for me, I have so many new ideas along those lines. I have almost more new ideas than I know what to do with. This is one of the most creative and interesting periods of my life.

So I’m not complaining. But I wanted to explain why I haven’t been around.

I have also had a lot of time to think, and I wanted to say a few things right now as I take a short break.

I’m not angry about my medical school dismissal. I wouldn’t say that everything has passed through me completely, so to speak, but I’m not in throes of pain, and I don’t think about what happened to me very often.

For many months, I was tormented by memories of betrayals. The things people said to me, then said during my dismissal hearing. The fake reports. The bizarre, elaborate fake stories that people would tell about me. My friends betraying me to online harassers, feeding people who regularly engage in criminal behavior fake stories concocted about me. Me fitting together the pieces in my mind, making sense of why people could have done to me the things they did. And what I could have done differently, and what I would have done differently.

Whatever things people will say about me, I know that I was a great student. I listened and worked as hard as the hardest workers. I trusted others and believed in them. I gave my heart and my soul to my patients. I gave respect to doctors.

And they did the worst things to me that anyone has ever done to me in my life. I had a challenging childhood—I wasn’t understood then, just as I’m often not understood now—but nothing could have prepared me for what happened to me in 2023 and 2024.

I will never look at other humans in the same way again. You read about these things in books. About the terrible things done to innocent people. I spent a lot of time reading about the European and Salem witch trials.

I read about how the Athenians weren’t as enlightened as we have been told—that its demos, its mob, too, caught up in a religious frenzy, destroyed, murdered, or exiled its greatest thinkers, artists, generals, speakers. About the persecutions wrought against the Christians. The tortures. The barbaric deaths. Men flayed alive and fed to animals. And the way the Christians wrought their own reign of systematic violence against heretics a thousand years later. Some would be tortured. Some would escape with their lives. I read about so much.

I read about the Holocaust or the Gulags. About Stalin’s show trials and the sobbing confessions of hardcore loyalists who had given everything to the Communist Party and were broken before they were executed. About Zerzetsung in East Germany. About the way people who had been turned into scapegoats were treated. Targeted, their lives systematically dismantled. Not by accident. But through conscious effort applied by the other people with whom they live and work. A whole state apparatus designed to target and destroy people.

When Orwell or Koestler or Rand wrote, they were not just discussing the future—they were discussing the present. They were discussing the dark dimension of the human condition—especially in groups and organizations.

Those kinds of things—they happen throughout history. They have always happened. And they always will.

But the thing is, they happen to other people. Right? They happen to other people. They can happen here, yes, but that’s only theoretical. We must never let that happen here, and it can’t. Right?

So when it happens to you, it hits differently. It’s not the same thing. Reading about it and experiencing it are two different things.

It’s not what happened to me that bothers me. That is not what has made an impression on me. What’s done that is seeing other people—wives, mothers, husbands, fathers—people who you know who are human beings in the same way that you are a human being, who love and are loved, who are respected members of the community. It’s seeing those other people do it to you, and wondering how one human being, like me, could do that to another human being.

What made an impression on me is less what happened to me and more that human beings like me could do that to another human being at all. Human beings who know all the same things as I do, who have had the same education.

What made an impression on me is understanding that in all of those books I ever read—those people to whom those things were being done were thinking and feeling the same thing. And the people who I know in my daily life might be capable of those same things.

I might be capable, in another life.

I’m lucky. I wasn’t thrown in prison. I wasn’t tortured or killed. But I remember as I being expelled being unable to sleep. Any creaking in the apartment would terrify me. I would panic and call my parents.

If they could do the kinds of things they were doing to me, what else might they do to me?

I’m lucky.

We live in a time where such things are very rare. But as my sense of reality melted in the face of that kind of behavior, I didn’t know. I had to sleep in someone else’s apartment. And I had to move. I bought surveillance and I learned to defend myself.

I’m lucky.

We all are. Outside of very rare cases—and they do happen when whistleblowers mysteriously die and other times we don’t even hear of—our civilization hasn’t progressed to that point. It’s very rare. But it could become less rare.

What made an impression on me is seeing those same kinds of dark forces at play against me. Experiencing that veneer breaking and showing what was underneath. This is a very different thing, experiencing it, having your sense of reality shattered by that experience, than reading about it.

Still.

After all of this, I have no regrets. I did my best with the knowledge I had. I stood up for myself, even if that meant that the Leviathan crushed me.

I don’t regret it because—imagine if I decided to back down knowing what I know now. Imagine I had said, “Look, you are willing to do very terrible things to me because I’m telling the truth about the pandemic response—and getting a lot of exposure and bringing ‘shame’ on this institution for that. OK, fine, I will be quiet.”

I would have lost my soul as surely as they have lost theirs.

I say again: Truly, the thoughts of the past are gone now. Although I still often reflect on the ways I have changed since, I don’t often think about what happened; I think about where I am and what I am going to do.

I revisit the past here to communicate my point. To paint a picture. For you. To help you understand my plan.

I realize more than ever that medicine was right for me in a profound way. It’s what I invested decades of energy into—to attain mastery of scientific thinking, of medicine, of writing, and communicating. It’s the only thing I cared and still care about. It’s what fits with every aspect of the way my being is wired.

One path would be to put my head down. Get into a medical school in the Caribbean or in Europe. Maybe in the United States through some of the connections I have built. It’s possible.

But I won’t.

The truth matters. My ability to discern it matters. My communication—it matters.

Without the truth, medicine cannot be medicine. And a medical establishment that actively tries to destroy truth and the people who speak it is in danger of not being medicine anymore—of not serving patients, of making medicine into what its biggest wild-eyed detractors accusing it about being: about money.

I believed and believe in medicine with all my heart. It was everything I was, and am. To “go along to get along”, to silence myself just to make a livelihood, would mean to give up on medicine. To give up on my meaning. I didn’t bow—and I won’t bow—because I didn’t sign up for a comfortable life. I signed up to give myself in service to others.

What do I do then? What could my path possibly be? Pursuing my own self-interest, as surely as letting things slide would allow me to do?

I’m not angry anymore. I’m shocked to obtain knowledge of the world that I once only had abstractly. And maybe I’m more than a little distrustful now. I hope that can be healed inside of me. I don’t know how, and I’m not angry with the knowledge I have.

But if I make this about me, then what is my purpose? I have three children. I am married. I know some of the most influential people in the world. They know and respect me. If I wanted to pivot to tech to create some awesome software or a startup, I could do that. If I really wanted a position in the Trump administration, I could have it.

But what is my purpose?

What goes beyond me—is bigger than me?

If I cannot become a part of the profession to which I dedicated my life because I told the truth about one mistake that it made—a big mistake, mind you—and because I am afraid that I will be destroyed if I ever do that again, then I must do my duty.

I have to fight. It is my responsibility.

They failed. They were afraid of what others might think about them when that phantasm that had been created about me was associated with them.

The mob with pitchforks and torches came to their house. I was hiding inside. They gave me to the mob and helped set up the noose to show that they were good people. To show that they were good people, according to bad people. They persuaded themselves that they were right. They failed everything that they had signed up for when they became doctors.

But I don’t have to.

I have to fight. Every darkness that they showed to me, I have to find within myself, and I have to fight.

They will try to smear me again. They will bring out witness after witness. They will try to systematically discredit me. They may even try to destroy my life in countless others ways.

They might succeed temporarily. My friends are concerned about what they might do. They know how deeply I feel things. They know the pain I felt at my dismissal.

But I must. There are many people like me, to whom the same things have been done. Most of them were not subjected to as much as I was. Some were. A handful were subjected to worse.

Medicine was never about me. It was about something higher. It still is.

And it will be in 2025.

And stay on the lookout: our paper about bird flu is coming out soon. I will post about it. It will come out in a few weeks.

And an editorial as well, maybe in a month or so, in a big outlet. As for that, I’ll be fighting another dragon. Or, more accurately, sticking my head into its lair and scolding it a bit. To a few nodding heads right outside. Possibly a crowd. If that happens, I might be in trouble. I do hope the dragon forgives me—I will write what I write to tell the truth about something important—but I don’t plan on it.

And I also hope to have several new dragons in rotation in 2025. Or a big mountain city that I could build and show it to others. It might be useful. And help turn a thing or two on its head. In a good way.

We all should strive for that.

I do think that’s the point in life.