Ed Dowd Reveals Astonishing Death Rates in the UK https://t.co/bA7gjOkIyy
— Dr Naomi Wolf (@naomirwolf) September 19, 2023
I don’t often lose my composure when I am conducting an interview. I was given very thorough media training at the start of my career — indeed, when I was just 26 — by a woman who was a legend in the world of media training – the late Barbara Browning.
In a book-lined apartment overlooking Central Park, and adorned only in calming creams and whites, long before that was a fashion, this elegant lady, who trained many of the serious nonfiction authors at that time, taught me a technique I have used ever since.
It is called “hit, bridge, sparkle”; it is a kind of verbal judo in which you use the force of an attack to stay centered. The technique — in which you “hit” the question or the attack by acknowledging it, “bridge” to what you really want to say, and “sparkle” in your preferred field of discourse, sharing the facts you wish to present to the audience — allows you to face up to and absorb any difficult question, confront any bully, or bear up serenely under any confrontation, without losing your balance or calm demeanor.
People often ask me how I manage to deal with all of the attacks I face, and that is one technique. I am forever grateful to Ms Browning, as I have faced many bullies, as well as many confrontations and difficult subjects, on camera. (Another source of my composure under attack is my certainty that I’ll be dead someday and will then have to account for my life choices, as will my attackers for theirs, but that is a subject for another essay).
I mention all this because my interview last night with Edward Dowd, formerly a hedge fund manager at BlackRock, now founder of Phinance Technologies and author of Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022, presented me with a couple of moments in which what he was telling me was so horrific and so unimaginable that I stumbled a few times, and visibly lost my usual composure. The interview is linked above, at the top of this essay. Here is the report.
You can tell from watching the interview that in absorbing — or trying to absorb — the news he was giving me, I was a state of vertigo caused by processing his words, to the point that I struggled to articulate the next question. That should indicate to you the scale of the news he was presenting. Your mind will probably also reel as you try to absorb what he is announcing here.
