Dr. Drew Pinsky and Ben Shapiro dissect the decay of America's medical establishment, revealing that 70% of physicians fear job loss for speaking out while administrators dictate care. Pinsky details his CNN cancellation for questioning Hillary Clinton's stroke records versus silence on Biden's Parkinsonian features, linking the opioid crisis to legal threats against doctors. They critique mRNA vaccine data gaps, attribute rising autism and obesity rates to an adulterated food supply, and condemn open-air hospitals enabling addiction. Ultimately, the conversation calls for defending free speech and restoring objective truth against a collapsing post-truth era. [Automatically generated summary]
Dr. Drew Pinsky is a board-certified internist and addiction medicine specialist with over 35 years of experience in national TV and radio, as well as a New York Times bestselling author and host of the Dr. Drew podcast.
All within the past couple of years, crises like COVID-19, the fentanyl epidemic, and skyrocketing rates of chronic illness have pulled discussions about America's national health to the forefront.
Dr. Drew's nuanced focus on public health has become a valuable resource to millions of Americans, particularly as our trust in our expert class has deteriorated to a historic low.
In today's episode, Dr. Drew shares his personal experience being censored by the legacy media and his biggest frustrations around the pandemic and its aftermath.
He also surveys the decay of the American medical establishment and highlights the backward incentives in our governmental agencies.
While we navigate an extremely polarized political moment, the restoration of Americans' physical and mental well-being should be of paramount importance to all of us.
Don't miss this important conversation with Dr. Drew Pinsky on this episode of the Sunday Special.
I swear to God, Dave Rubin says every time I speak to that guy, it's the same thing.
I got two of you on me.
And I owe you another apology.
You'd forgotten this, but Adam Kroll and I do a podcast still to this day.
And you called in one time and I said, Ben, I apologize because I told you I don't forget where I told you this, but I made the case that media wasn't biased.
I was on HLN and CNN for years.
They never ever got involved with what I said until I ran afoul of them.
And then it was on.
They were very censoring.
And so, apologies again.
I look for opportunities to apologize, and this is one of them.
So, I used to do Don Lemon's show almost every night, particularly during the run-up to the 2016 elections.
And Don was trying to figure out who was Donald Trump, like, what is up with this guy?
And I was like, well, you know, I don't really know him, but, you know, there's some narcissistic qualities, but, you know, it's not a malignant narcissist because his family, you know, you can't maintain a relationship with your family when you're a malignant narcissist.
And he never sleeps, so maybe there's a little bipolarity.
And then I would say, But be careful.
We have had presidents, great presidents, with bipolar disorder, with alcoholism, with depression, and some of our best presidents have been people with certain proclivities.
I mean, that's an extraordinary office, extraordinary people should go into it, and that comes with certain liabilities.
Not all liabilities are, strictly speaking, a problem.
It's only when they affect functioning.
Like Abraham Lincoln, his depressions were profound.
There's a story of him dragging, I think it was Willie behind him, or Ted, Robert, in a wagon, and the wagon spilled over while he walked to the Capitol building.
He left his kid like a mile back, and he was so lost in his depression, he didn't even notice it.
Any event, so the next morning I come into my radio station.
I had a daytime radio show at the time, and the general manager goes,
hey, that was really interesting.
Could you do that for 30 seconds for our website?
And I said, I think I can get it down to 30 seconds, and I did.
And then I was getting up, and he goes, you know, it's an election season.
We have to have balance.
Can you do 30 seconds on Hillary?
I said, funny thing, her doctor has just released her medical records this morning.
She had a transverse sinus thrombosis and a stroke.
They had her on armor thyroid for unclear reasons.
They were treating the hypercoagulability without a workup.
I had lots of questions about what her doctors were doing.
So I did 30 seconds on why I thought there was concerns about her medical care.
Not that she was unfit for office, not that there was anything wrong with her physically or mentally, just that these medical records made me very concerned.
Drudge report next morning, headline, finally a doctor says she's not fit for office.
And I was like, uh-oh.
Well, that, I heard from the highest echelons of CNN, shut up.
Just shut up, no more from you, no more talking.
And I was like, I'll help you set the record straight, shut up.
We had decided a month before that we were gonna cancel my show.
The following week, the cancellation date was coming, or maybe two weeks hence, we cancelled the show.
It looked like it was cancelled.
I said, let me go on the air and straighten this all out.
Shut up.
So, and then I was not allowed to speak ever again on that network.
I mean, it is amazing the rules around what you're allowed to say about various presidential candidates.
So, I'm old enough to remember when John McCain was running for president in 2008, and there were all sorts of questions about his health and his fitness because he was 72, which now looks like a spring chicken in American politics.
I mean, he's 12 years older than Tim Walz is right now, 13 years older than Kamala Harris, and fully nine years younger than the current president of the United States, and he was running at 72.
And whatever questions you had about his health, his fitness, all of those were perfectly appropriate.
Then you hit 2016, and you couldn't ask what the hell was going on with Hillary when she was collapsing into a van in the middle of the race.
I mean, there are things in medicine that are just, that when we treat medical students, we show them videos and pictures, so when they see it in the clinic, they'll know it.
One of those conditions is Parkinson's.
Parkinsonism, not Parkinson's disease.
That's a diagnosis.
But if you want to see Parkinsonian features, Mask-like faces, not very expressive, that's Parkinsonism.
We would show a video to a medical student of someone like Joe Biden and say, that's Parkinsonism.
But if you said that publicly, how dare you make a diagnosis?
No diagnosis, just describing what we're seeing.
We're seeing Parkinsonism.
Just like if we saw a rash, we could describe the rash.
We might not be able to say what causes it, but we can describe it.
They're showing you features and they're saying, if a symptom looks like this, then give a differential diagnosis to all the things this could possibly be with this set of features.
So, I'm going to shine a light on that, because what we do as physicians, we see those features that we saw in the pictures and videos in medical school, and we learn the list of possibilities and how to differentiate amongst those potential causes, and then what kind of workup we need to differentiate it.
From really running against him in the Democratic primaries.
They assured that he received pretty much every vote possible in the Democratic primaries.
And then the minute that he did that debate and showed everybody what we'd all been seeing, then all of a sudden it was like, wait, this guy, he's actually suffering from senility.
Well, remember everybody, I want to educate your audience for a second.
May I speak directly to them?
Here's what happens.
20% of the people are hypnotizable immediately.
They are the ones that respond to propaganda and there's nothing you can do about it.
They're the ones that were calling in Tim Walz's helpline to report their neighbors because they weren't wearing a mask.
That's 20%.
10% throws the BS flag right away and is thinking it is autonomous because this doesn't feel right to me, let's figure this out.
70% is everybody else.
And that 70% is the group we need to gaffe into reality and keep them fighting for things like freedom of speech and things that they need to fight for because they just want to live their lives and be left alone.
But that 20% is the one you need to worry about.
And those are the ones that get swept into these propagandistic shifts so quickly and they feel like That's what's happening.
It's the 70% that needs to become more objective about this and look at it.
And it has massive downstream effect because the reality is that institutions
in order to function always require a core level of trust.
Any institution that functions has to have trust.
The police have to have trust, your doctor you have to have trust with, and when you have another institution, the
media in this case, that just says that there are certain things you can talk
about, certain things you can't talk about, promotes actual false narratives about health, for example,
then what it ends up doing is infecting these Yep.
these other institutions.
And those institutions respond to incentive structures.
They don't want to be smacked by the media.
So they start changing how they do business in order to avoid getting clubbed by the media,
which takes us to COVID-19 and medicine, a lot of the stuff that you've been talking about,
which is sort of the perversion of the medical industry.
So let's talk about that.
I want to talk about that in the context of sort of your own experiences, COVID-19, big pharma, and also with regard to RFK Jr., which I mentioned earlier, you and he have become pretty close.
So let's talk about, you know, what has happened to the medical industry, the lack of trust that people have.
It's sort of like how people feel about Congress.
It's like 8% love Congress, 80% like their congressperson.
If you remember at that point, the HMO phenomenon was occurring.
So people were being considered risk pools.
They were part of a risk pool and you could reduce the medical cost by putting people into these giant
populations where the organizations, the insurance resources, made
money by restricting your access to care.
That's literally what they were doing.
There was also just private practice at that time.
My dad was a family practitioner, my uncle was a psychiatrist.
Thank God I got some of their judgment, and I saw what they went through.
They lived in sort of a golden age.
All they concerned themselves with was the well-being of the patient.
In front of them, they had deep relationships.
With all of them, that was being systematically dismantled in the 80s.
So this has been going on a long time.
And there's one story I experienced that really was the cornerstone of insight into what was happening back then.
I started running a drug treatment program.
So my story is I'm an internist by training.
I was doing general medicine when you could do intensive care medicine.
I was doing hospital medicine, doing outpatient medicine, but I also had this second job in a psychiatric hospital where I was running medical services and I ended up running their addiction services.
So I was just getting going running the addiction services in the program at this freestanding psychiatric hospital.
And I got a call from a friend of mine who was a really excellent physician who had become essentially an insurance administrator running an HMO.
He started developing those models.
And he called me and he goes, hey, you know, I need a three-day detox from your program.
I go, look man, three-day detox.
We've been doing the three-day detoxes for your patients.
They come back in two weeks.
Of course they come back.
It does nothing.
What are we doing here?
I said, I'll tell you what, you name your price.
I will treat them across my resources.
We'll manage them as an outpatient and we'll keep following them.
My staff can't tolerate these three-day detoxes.
These people come back, come back and then die.
And he goes, no, I want a three-day detox.
I go, I think they're not going to bounce back.
He goes, oh, no, they'll bounce back.
But if they do that three times, they'll lose their job.
Then they're no longer my concern.
I was speechless.
I was like, you're a physician.
How can you?
And he literally, I was like, he could tell I was just like dumbfounded.
And he said, he goes, I'm an insurance resource now.
I'm not a social agency.
So I can't tell you whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Okay, that was HMOs.
So that's where we started falling off the cliff.
The next great misadventure in medicine was the opiate crisis, which I was fighting mightily against.
In fact, I'm going to correlate it with COVID as I tell you the story.
In the end of the 19th century, the hypodermic needle was developed, as well as morphine sulfate and methadone.
And at the end of the Civil War and during Reconstruction, we physicians brought the first opioid crisis to America.
We literally were the distributor, we were the source of everything, we were the drug dealers.
And it was a massive opioid crisis.
The Harrison Narcotic Act was a response to that, that put physicians in prison for prescribing of opiates.
That stopped it immediately.
It created an absolute phobia of prescribing opiates to patients.
When I was in training, we would use them only very occasionally in surgical setting.
You would not give them to cancer patients.
Well, in the 70s, a group of nurses and doctors realized that was dumb.
and we should be developing a way of managing pain with opiates for cancer patients.
Of course we should.
So they had a great idea, but then they kept going.
They said, oh no, no, you know what?
The answer's always been here all along.
It's the poppy flower, it's the opium.
We should get rid of pain in America.
There should be never anybody experiencing pain everywhere, anywhere.
They were starting to catch on, they were getting some momentum,
the pain management world developed, and then some wise attorneys realized
that they could step outside of the malpractice system and civilly prosecute physicians and criminally
for inadequate treatment of pain.
Now that the standard of pain management had developed in North Carolina, in Florida, in California, doctors were having these million-dollar suits and going to prison for inadequate, not giving enough pain medication.
Well, that stopped this again.
Everybody stopped in place and we sent all of our pain patients to the pain management doctors who took the position that they were a white hat profession.
I have quotes from them saying, literally, we were the salvation.
We were evangelists.
We were going to save America from pain.
Pain became the fifth vital signs.
And there were several certain personalities that went around and got the VA.
Pain is the fifth vital sign.
Got the medical societies.
Pain is the fifth vital sign.
Then the standard of care in all the sub-specialty professional societies.
Pain is more important than your pulse.
And you couldn't leave an ER without a pain scale and 60 Vicodin in your pocket if you've ever had a knee twinge.
This became the standard of care.
And so I was fighting mightily against it.
I was getting sanctioned by the Department of Health, by the California Medical Association, by my own hospital administration.
Why?
Because I wasn't treating my heroin addicts in withdrawal who were uncomfortable with an opiate.
Think about how insane that was.
So this was going on until... I don't know if people know how it stopped.
I was actually at a White House symposium and Jeff Sessions came in.
This was...
He stopped it.
People don't know that he did this.
He came in, he goes, yeah, I see what's happening here.
He goes, there's something with his little Southern drawl.
And he goes, I'm going to stop this in about three to six months.
You watch, I'm going to do it.
He put a bunch of doctors in prison for over-prescribing.
The whole thing stopped right away.
And then people started looking around like they woke up from some sort of trance going, well, what have we been doing here?
And of course, no apologies to me.
I had 15 years of fighting it.
Sound familiar?
In COVID, you have an evangelist.
Dr. Birx running around saying lockdown is the only way to do things, masking is the only way to do things, society is picking it up, regulators picking it up, and all of a sudden an evangelical physician Who gets a hold of the regulatory system and now it's on.
Not only that, but there was never a single study that showed that opioids were useful in chronic pain.
In fact, I remember, because of the regulatory setup, you had to go to symposiums to maintain your license on pain management.
And I remember I went to one, and the doctor stood up and went, one of the pain specialists, he goes, yeah, you know, we've never really had any data that suggests opioids are useful, so let's figure out how to use them safely.
It's like, Why are you using them at all?
It's like, what are we doing here?
It's like, incredible.
The California Medical Society actually put out an encyclical saying that, like, no studies so far, but we're going to tell you how you should be using these things.
Never, ever any studies in chronic pain.
In fact, there still is no studies in chronic pain.
Occasionally, it's a little useful.
Suboxone is very useful in chronic pain, and we're having difficulty getting people to adopt that for some reason.
Wild.
But it's people.
It's human beings.
At its core, they're humans running all these organizations.
And it's shocking to me when that happens.
In COVID's case, it was flabbergasting.
It was gobsmacked.
That there was capture, stem to stern, to where the publishers, the great storied medical journals that I rely on and love, suddenly weren't publishing alternative points of view.
I mean, the way science evolves, it never all goes one way.
It just doesn't work like that.
There's just sort of a consensus that builds as you build more studies, create more studies, built on differing assumptions, different analytics, different experimental structures, and you start to learn, oh, this is probably the, probably, not necessarily, probably the truth, and we reach a consensus.
If you don't see other points of view, I only saw things in one direction, masking good, vaccine good.
I knew something was wrong.
And RFK Jr. was the guy that alerted me to the fact that there had been a capture.
And once he started pointing it out to me, I was like, oh my God, he's right.
First, it was the cozy relationship with the FDA and the pharmaceutical companies.
And then it was how media buys.
I never could understand why pharmaceutical companies were advertising this obscure medication that very few people would use.
I understand they'd be very expensive and maybe there's a big profit margin or something, but why would you be Why those medications that are just not that commonly prescribed?
And he meant, I think it was him that pointed out to me that, no, no, they're not trying to raise awareness about that product so much.
They want brand awareness, of course, but they want to capture the media.
They want the media companies to be their customer and to listen to them and to be unable to criticize them or to run afoul of their version of the reality.
I thought, oh boy.
And then he pointed out that he thought that the three majors the publications, and you could see it in the British
Medical Journal out loud, that some of the majors have been captured in some way. And he said he
was going to bring them in and say, you solve this. His theory was that they were captured by
the pharmaceutical companies. I'm not sure. But that you solve this or you're going to be
prosecuted as a RICO. And I thought, oh, I just woke up. I went, oh, yes, somebody's got to stop
this. So we get objectivity back into the medical literature. And one journal I could see
through was trying, was Annals of Internal Medicine. They published a study early in COVID on
a combination of Luvox and an inhaled And I thought, ah!
And it was a positive study.
It showed a positive effect on COVID.
Only study of any positive treatment other than vaccine therapies for COVID.
I thought, well, at least they're publishing something.
We'll get to more with Dr. Drew in just one moment.
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God bless and thank you.
I mean, one of the things that was very hard during that period is if you were a person who was data-driven and sort of broke down into three groups, as you mentioned.
There were people who were immediately skeptical.
There were people who were immediately buying in.
And then there was, you know, a group of people in the middle.
For the physicians in that group, if they spoke up or raised their hands, and this is something I did not know until the COVID outbreak, 70% of physicians are employees.
I didn't know that.
They raise their hand, they lose their job.
And they were afraid.
There was fear, fear, fear.
Fear was rampant in my profession.
And so people just shut the hell up.
And you had hospital administrators dictating how doctors treated patients.
And I think even today, it's hard to tell what interventions were supposedly good, what interventions were— I mean, there are certain things we hear at this company.
We actually sued OSHA to prevent a national vax mandate that the Biden administration was attempting to push.
It went all the way to the Supreme Court.
We stopped that.
From happening, we internally at the company, we never had a mask mandate, we never had a vaccine mandate, we opposed all of that.
On a personal level, you know, I will say that I think early on in the pandemic, I bought what was being sold with regard to the vaccines, particularly.
And listen, I've been looking forward to the mRNA platforms for cancer.
And again, different risk profiles.
Somebody's going to die of a cancer and you want to take a lot of risk, for sure, take tons of risk in terms of what you're doing to help fight that cancer.
But a 25-year-old healthy person, you're going to take a platform that maybe has some problems for that age group?
There are two other vaccines available.
You know, there's the Novavax and Covaxin.
You want to push vaccines, why don't you push those two?
On the other side of the aisle, what happens when institutions get discredited or when they start to fall apart, the normal human response is to kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater.
So the idea is that Big Pharma in general, everything they produce is bad, which of course
is not true.
Big Pharma produces every drug that your grandmother is taking at the hospital.
This idea that you can just cut off the money source for big pharma by cramming down pricing based on the federal government's demands, that's a great way to destroy all R&D.
has the idea, which is you have to untangle the incentives and the cozy relationship with the regulators, and you have to really do the right research, and do it properly, and do it well.
and that observational studies are inadequate.
It's just, it's not okay to say, well, you use it a lot, it's generally okay.
Have you ever heard of Cali Means or his sister, his EMT doctor, Dr. Means?
One of the leading surgeons at ENT left her practice to go fight this fight, because she started looking at all that was coming in and said, there's a root cause here, and it's food.
And her brother was a lobbyist for the food organizations.
He left and became an evangelist, be careful, anybody's evangelizing about anything, be careful, for this project.
And he educated me that, you have to remember, the tobacco companies, when they pivoted, they pivoted to food.
And they brought with them their scientists, and their lobbyists, and their marketers, and have deployed the exact same strategies that they use with tobacco.
Make it addictive, protect it with the lobbyist, and market it aggressively and brainwash people.
That's our food supply.
And look at what it's doing to us.
You have to really be careful about what you put in your mouth.
I remember hearing this from nutritionists and dieticians way on, that real foods, things that come out of the ground, things that grow on trees, It's fine to eat chicken and fish and beet.
Please eat it.
Beans, nuts.
But things in a package, generally be careful about.
Be a label reader.
And when you see seed oils, vegetable oils, I mean, that whole story is another story that's crazy.
The fact that we pivoted off butter and tallow into things that are carcinogenic when you heat them up and get stuck in our fat and are metabolically destructive to us.
You look at all these issues, and you're trying to just kind of make your way in the world, and it's very difficult to figure out exactly who to trust, how to rebuild those levels of trust, and it seems like... Trust Ben.
Yeah, I mean... Trust Ben Shapiro.
No, I think my answer is don't.
I mean, trust but verify would probably be the answer.
The persuasion and brainwashing game is at an all-time high in this country.
I have something that stayed with me from the 70s.
I don't know why it stayed with me, but it came back to me during COVID, which was I was watching a TV news interview, like a 60-minute type interview, and it was on Pravda.
And somebody like one of the old 60-minute guys was in Russia talking to the lead anchor on Pravda television.
What was amazing about the COVID crisis, or faux crisis, is that the unwillingness to even recognize basic medical facts, like people are not equally vulnerable to disease.
Like, this is like the number one thing that we all refuse to recognize.
It was like, if you're a 10-year-old child, you're just as vulnerable to this as an 85-year-old woman.
And Jay Bhattacharya was the lead author on that, is the poster child for the excesses of COVID.
This is a wonderful man, a brilliant epidemiologist, and you destroy him?
Fauci went after him?
By the way, when I was cancelled, somebody put together some videotape of me trying to get everybody to calm down in the early days and made it look as though I was saying, throughout the pandemic, you had no risk.
And they cut out the one thing I really got wrong at the beginning.
Which was, you know, we just went through this H1N1 pandemic.
I got that illness.
That was terrible.
It killed 300,000 people.
And the Obama administration did a good job with that.
And you don't even know what happened.
And now we're going to, this one may kill a million people.
It could, but we're going to destroy the world because of it.
Isn't there an intermediate step we could take?
And I would say the same thing at every comment I made.
I said, look, the CDC and Dr. Fauci have been guiding light through my whole career.
Just listen to what they say and they'll get us through this.
That's what I got wrong.
I didn't realize how adulterous, and of course they cut that out of every comment I made.
So, obviously, you spent a lot of time talking about physical health, but also about mental health.
Yes.
There's been a lot of talk about the mental health crisis in this country.
One of the things about psychology is that, again, many of the diagnoses in the DSM-5, it's very, very hard to diagnose things properly in psychology because, again, the symptoms are much vaguer.
If there's a rash, the rash is on your skin and you can look at it with a microscope.
I'm going to stop you and say we are both over-diagnosing And under-diagnosing at the same time.
I don't know how we get both ends wrong.
But to your point, the one thing that you must look at is, is it affecting functioning?
If it is not affecting functioning, it is not a diagnosable condition.
It is a trait.
It may become a disorder, but at this point it is a trait if it doesn't affect functioning in work or school, your financial health, your legal status, your relationships, your physical health.
If it's not affecting one of those areas, it's a trait.
And yes, you can get treatment for it.
We don't want it to become a problem.
Maybe a very enlightened, careful practitioner could say, you know, this could be a problem.
Most people aren't motivated to do the work, though, until it becomes a problem.
So it's very hard to treat people until they really have the motivation.
As opposed to, you know, what it used to be, as opposed to what it is now, which is, well, I mean, as long as they can go to work and, you know, have relationships, even if he thinks he's Napoleon, is that really like a huge deal?
And let me just say this one thing before I go on to this topic.
The physician-patient relationship has been under assault my whole career.
I've spent my whole career fighting it.
You know, by the insurance resources and the regulators and the hospital administration.
We lost.
We lost.
We saw it during COVID.
We lost.
We have to start empowering patients, which is, I know you read things for, advertisements for TWC, the wellness company.
That's why I got involved with them, because they are taking stuff right to the patient, and Dr. Kelly Victory is on my medical board with me, said, you know, five years ago I would have thought, maybe this is a little crazy, but now I think you're crazy if you don't do this.
You've got to be ready, you've got to be on your own, you've got to do it yourself.
So that's why I'm deeply involved with those guys, so, for the record.
I'm Napoleon side and homelessness, I want to get to a little bit next, this idea that practitioners can't judge, so to speak.
We have open-air hospitals in our cities.
These are psychiatric hospitals without walls, okay?
It's populated by serious mental illness and drug addiction.
That's what's there.
Think about it.
If you have serious enough brain disturbance that you cannot find a couch to sleep on or a family member to put you up for a minute, you have to lie down on the sidewalk?
That's a specific thing.
And you can't take advantage of the billion dollars of resources that are available, particularly in Los Angeles.
Lots of resources available.
So you have open-air hospitals being run by social workers.
Social workers are not trained to, they're not doctors, they're not nurses, they're not trained to even diagnose, let alone manage these conditions.
And they are trained to meet the patient where they are.
That is the most insane thing I've ever heard.
If I met my drug addict patients where they were, well then I'd probably be handing them heroin too.
You have to fight the illness, you have to be able to identify it, see through the denial.
Assess it and know what's needed to fight it.
It's hard.
You meet patient where they are, you just enable the illness.
That's what enabling is.
You have to have a team and you have to fight it to save that life.
A kid I've gotten to know now, he wrote a book called Crooked Smile, who told me the other day, he'd been off the street a few years now and he's thriving.
And he said, you know, when I was on the street, I would meet these caretakers and they would all pat me on the back and go, You're a victim of capitalism.
If we get socialism and communism in, this will all stop.
But in the meantime, here's your heroin.
Can you imagine that?
That's disgusting.
That is murder.
That is a form of negligent murder.
Or enabling.
It's giving a suicidal person a gun.
It's murder.
It's some sort of manslaughter.
And it's active.
And our politicians are participating in that negligent manslaughter.
If they didn't have qualified immunity, somebody would have to go after them.
And I think that the chief institution, and this is going to sound like out of right field, but it is, the chief institution that fell apart actually were churches and communities.
When churches and communities fell apart, everything fell apart.
Your doctor used to go to church with you.
That's who he was.
We're synagogue with you.
So did your banker.
Everybody had a functional community in which you knew each other and you had the same general orientations for what was true and what was false.
And when that fell apart and when truth became absolutely relative, truth cannot be relative in one area and remain stagnant and absolutely clear and set in another.
And so as a country that has moved into a post-truth era, we tried to divide off kind of the sciences from everything else.
We said scientific truth, It's a different kind of truth.
You can have falsification.
It's Karl Popper.
It either works or it doesn't.
But it turns out that's just as vulnerable to the same kinds of post-truth mentality that destroyed everything else.
We have a post-value, post-truth society.
And then we just applied that to medicine.
And we said, okay, well, you know, we'll redefine functionality, for example.
So the community, and the family, and the relationships, these are things that we have to rebuild.
I mean, you're absolutely right.
And the truth has value, the truth has meaning, and we need to use our best practices to try to ascend to it.
I don't know what else to say but that, the fact that that is not, I get defeated thinking about this, because it's so discouraging to me that the system that I valued so much, higher education, is perpetrating all this.
And so you're doing nothing if you're not making the mind, changing the brains, changing the minds so that they continue to learn and continue to grow and continue to ascend to something like the truth.
If you're turning them into parrots, into things that just parrot what you say is the truth or what is relatively the truth.
I don't know where we go. I don't know where that goes. It just seems like an empty circle.
Nobody acknowledges it, though. That's the problem. It's not acknowledged as such.
I have found one beachhead in all of this.
And that is speech.
We should all at least be defending that.
If we can all defend speech and really stand up where it is most difficult.
Again, my peers as physicians who didn't do that because they're afraid of their bosses.
You must speak what you think is the truth and speak up and speak loudly and take risk and do whatever is necessary to maintain and protect that speech.
Then I feel like we'll find our way through this.
But if we allow speech to be undermined, it's just so easy to point at that as the one thing that could get us through this.
I mean, imagine we can't even have this conversation.
And who knows?
I'll probably get cancelled for having this conversation.
Right?
And you know what?
Fine.
It's the way it goes.
These days I'm like, okay, well that's not my... No, because that's not my job.
My job is to stand up and talk.
And if you don't like it, great, let's engage with it.
I'm delighted with that.
I saw where Jay Bhattacharya invited Peter Hotez to a Stanford event.
That'd be great.
I want to see those two guys talk.
But if we be quiet or get... Have you ever heard this notion of you're platforming bad people?
How dare you platform somebody like that?
What is that word even?
Platforming.
When I was on CNN, your beloved CNN and HLN, I used to interview Nazis and white supremacists to try to figure out what was going on with them.
That wasn't platforming them.
They gave their position.
They exposed themselves.
You judge for yourself what's going on with those guys.
Platforming.
That's the weirdest word in the world.
Anytime you hear somebody saying the word platforming, block them.
Not because of you, because it's reflective of so much we're contending with these days in this country.
And let me just say, I just think This country was founded on brilliant ideas.
And I was, I don't know, I was rereading some of Lincoln's speeches, you know, the better angels of our nature and the mystic cords that bind us and the grays of every patriot and malice towards none.
I mean, these are words that we should lean on right now and get ourselves back together and just realign with the principles that were laid out in these brilliant documents at the beginning.