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Nov. 28, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:26
MUSK DERANGEMENT SYNDROME Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep464
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Coming up, I'm going to reveal the effects of Musk derangement syndrome driven by insane hostility to Elon Musk and his desire to make Twitter a free speech forum.
Massive protests going on in China, the biggest since Tiananmen Square.
I'll try to spell out the implications.
I'll examine the legal options for Carrie Lake and Abe Hameday in Arizona and producer Nancy Armstrong joins me.
We're going to talk about her new film about ADHD. It's called The Disruptors.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
We've all heard about Trump derangement syndrome, PDS. But I want to talk in this segment about Musk derangement syndrome.
Yes, I'm talking about Elon Musk.
And the syndrome can be called, well, can be called MDS. Now, before I dive into it, a couple, well, just an announcement.
I hope you had a good Thanksgiving weekend.
We certainly did.
But today is kind of my only podcast for the week.
Debbie and I are leaving tomorrow morning for Israel.
We're going on a Salem media trip.
We'll be gone about eight days.
And so for the rest of this week, Danielle D'Souza Gill, my daughter, will be filling in for me.
So the podcast goes on, but Danielle will be at the helm.
And she'll also do the first part of next week.
We get back the middle of next week.
So I'll pick up the podcast in the second half of next week.
Actually, Debbie says next Friday.
So, so Daniel will be doing eight podcasts in my space, in my stead, and then I'll pick it up after that.
Now, let's turn to Mr. Elon Musk, because he is causing the left to have a freak out.
And it's a little bit interesting to think about why.
Is it because, well, one thought occurred to me yesterday, and that is that Elon Musk has been really focused.
He's freeing speech on the one side, but he goes, I'm really gonna crack down on Twitter on pedophiles, on pedophiles.
And this, too, has freaked out the left.
It's kind of interesting to see.
I mean, is it because there's a substantial fraction of pedophiles in the cultural left?
Is Elon Musk kind of nuking a wing of the left that doesn't, you know, they can't openly say, well, we're pedophiles.
So what they do is they pretend, I'm going to be leaving Twitter on principle.
It could be a secret reason for the leftists freak out.
Here's Alyssa Milano, who, by the way, used to be a huge Elon Musk fan.
I found it fascinating. Here are a couple of Milano tweets.
I'm in awe of Elon Musk.
And then she goes on to, Thanks Elon Musk and Tesla.
Elon Musk, you're amazing.
She says if she could have dinner with four people, she'd pick Jesus, Roberto Clemente, John Lennon, and Elon Musk.
And then more recently, here's Alyssa Milano.
I gave back my Tesla.
I bought the Volkswagen.
I love it.
Now, what's so weird about this is, first of all, she's turned on Musk.
Why? Because evidently he's for free speech.
That alone is enough to set her off.
Number two... She buys, let's call it the Nazi car.
Why? Because if you want to talk about history, Volkswagen was started under the Nazi regime.
In fact, the word Volk is a very fascist term.
Volk means, of course, people.
And the Nazis, who were socialists, talked about the people's car, Volkswagen, the wagon of the people.
So here's Alyssa Milano.
Well, she doesn't really know better.
But nevertheless, she has MDS, Musk Derangement Syndrome.
Today, Elon Musk says he's going to begin offering a general amnesty to suspended accounts.
Just as long as they haven't broken the law, engaged in egregious sort of spam, they're going to be back.
And again, Musk's approach was he had a poll.
He had a poll, just like he had a poll about whether to bring Trump back.
Trump won that poll, kind of narrowly, something like 52-48.
Well, the poll that Elon Musk had on giving a general amnesty won big, 70, I think 72% to 28.
And so basically Elon Musk goes, hey listen, the people have spoken.
And by the people, of course, he doesn't mean the people of the United States.
He means the actual users and customers of Twitter.
They've spoken, they've participated in the poll, they were free to vote, there was no voter suppression, and they voted for this amnesty.
Twitter, I think, is becoming really a great, fun place to be.
And no surprise, even though the left is like, Twitter is going down, Twitter is going to be down the tubes, what a waste of $44 billion.
In fact, Twitter is gaining approximately 2 million new followers a day.
A day. And Elon Musk estimates that if this trend continues, which I think we will, and we should do our best to make sure it does...
Twitter will cross 1 billion followers or 1 billion users.
Now, that's incredible.
I mean, we have about 8 to 9 billion people on the planet.
And so that means that Twitter has something like, well, over 10%.
Of the world's population.
I think this is going to be, this will be a huge victory for free speech.
In fact, it's going to put tremendous pressure on, let's call them the fascist platforms, which is to say YouTube and Facebook.
There's a fascist mentality driving the censorship there.
But it only works if there's complete coordination with the Nazis called Gleichschaltung, Gleichschaltung, across the various platforms.
Here, if you have one major platform, and in a sense the most influential, the place that really drives the debate, and if you have one billion people saying no to censorship and yes to free speech, the other platforms are going to feel the heat.
They're going to start eroding, they're going to start crumbling, and you're just going to get a good old jackboot surrender.
They're just going to give up, throw in the towel, say, listen, they'll pretend like they've suddenly learned the wisdom of free speech.
Now, Antifa says they're going to threaten Elon Musk.
We're going to do some vandalism at Tesla headquarters and Tesla dealerships.
Elon Musk is aware of this.
I hope he beefs up security to deal with Antifa if they show up.
But he's forging ahead.
And I think it's just a wonderful sight to see we finally have In this, the world's richest man and the world's perhaps greatest entrepreneur, a vigorous champion of free speech.
And Twitter finally has become a, well, a liberated platform.
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Guys, I've got a new guest on the podcast.
It's Alex Epstein, who is an author.
He's an energy expert.
And several months ago, I read his book called The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.
Just a marvelous and beautifully argued book.
And he has a new one.
It's called Fossil Future.
Why global human flourishing requires more coal, more oil, more natural gas, not less.
The website, by the way, energytalkingpoints.com.
Check it out. You can follow him at Twitter, at Alex Epstein.
A-L-E-X-E-P-S-T-E-I-N. Alex, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you. Thanks for having me.
I really appreciate it.
You start off this book, and in fact, you argue this point also in your earlier book, that look, let's just begin with reality.
We have a world that is making progress.
Tons of people are being lifted out of poverty.
There are growing energy needs around the world, and that There's only one type of energy that is meeting this demand, and that is fossil fuels.
So talk about the dominance of fossil fuels in the world today, and the role of fossil fuels in making our world a better place.
I believe it is really important to start with the reality and particularly what are the benefits we get from fossil fuels?
Because there are these proposals on the table to rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use.
And if you're rapidly eliminating anything, like if somebody says, hey, let's rapidly eliminate antibiotics, they have side effects.
Well, you'd want to know what are the benefits?
What are the things that you might lose?
And as you indicated, so fossil fuels are the Dominant source of energy.
They provide 80% of the world's energy.
They are still growing.
They're growing particularly in the parts of the world that care most about having low-cost, reliable energy, such as China.
So this indicates they have some unique cost effectiveness that is continuing into the future.
They're not actually being replaced in an energy transition.
At most, they're being supplemented in an energy addition.
And then if you understand how dominant they are, how much they continue to grow, And then you think about how valuable is energy because that's the thing that powers all the machines that make our lives productive and prosperous.
Once you see that, you should be really scared of these proposals to get rid of fossil fuels.
You talk about, in the book, and I like this very much, really in the opening part of the book, you talk about the need to have a rational cost-benefit analysis where each side of the debate sort of recognizes what the other side is saying.
And you make the point that if the sort of climate advocates were being straightforward, they would go, hey, listen, we acknowledge that Most of the world uses fossil fuels.
China and India and Russia have clearly stated they intend to continue to do that.
But we still think that we need to get rid of all these fossil fuels.
We acknowledge it's going to cause all kinds of chaos.
But you say they never say that.
They actually almost act in a dream world in which the cost-benefit analysis or the acknowledgement of the price of taking these steps, they don't actually do that.
Yeah, so if we look at the facts that I shared before about 80% of the world's energy still growing, the value of energy, those things are just basically not discussed.
And they were particularly not discussed before my book came out.
Now we have a global energy crisis.
What people are noticing is, say, in the realm of agriculture, we depend on fossil fuels for diesel-powered agricultural machinery that makes one person 1,000 times as productive as they would be using manual labor.
We rely on natural gas for modern fertilizer.
We see that when you suppress the supply of fossil fuels and the price goes up, then agriculture becomes expensive and you literally have threats of starvation.
And yet the opponents of fossil fuels did not talk about this, even though it was entirely obvious, and I talk about it repeatedly in Fossil Future, that if you don't recognize that fossil fuels are the basis of, say, agriculture, and you suppress their supply, and you don't think seriously about the fact that the world needs more energy, it's going to devastate people.
And that's what's happening.
I call this fossil fuel benefit denial.
And unfortunately, it's rampant in our culture.
You also talk about what you call, this I think is a very nice phrase, the knowledge industry or the industry of knowledge formation.
We're repeatedly told, and this is, by the way, not exclusive to fossil fuels or even climate change.
We hear this in about 10 different areas.
The experts say, or even more comically, science says.
And you say, wait a minute, we have to make a distinction here between experts on the one hand or even science on the one hand And what we are told the experts say.
In other words, very few of us actually go right to the experts.
We don't talk to immunologists.
We don't talk to ballistics experts who are dealing with, let's say, nuclear weapons.
We don't talk to people who are experts on the climate.
We listen to the New York Times or we listen to...
So there's an intermediary that is telling you this is our reading of the experts.
Talk about the distinction between experts and the relaying of knowledge about the experts.
I'm glad you raised this.
I think it's one of the most important things about the book, and I think it is something that's applicable to every field.
It's pretty involved.
I think you can get chapter one for free online so people can check it out there.
But I call it the knowledge system.
And the basic idea is that we need expert knowledge and guidance to make good decisions.
But there's a challenge because there's a big distance between the expert researchers who themselves are fallible.
That is its own issue.
But even if they were infallible, there's still a big distance between them and then deciding what to do about expert knowledge.
And so I break it down into four phases.
There are researchers who do the basic research, synthesizers who take that enormous amount of research and put it all together and decide, hey, what's really most important and what's true.
And there can be huge errors there.
Then there are disseminators like the New York Times and the Washington Post that take whatever is synthesized and then they further distill that and break it down for us.
And then they're what I call evaluators, which are those who are the people who take knowledge from a specific field, say climate science, and then they translate that into what do we do about it?
One of the things I identify, consistent with what we've talked about so far, is that there's clear benefit denial among the evaluators.
Even if they were totally right about the disseminated science in terms of negative climate impacts, they are not paying attention to the benefits of fossil fuels.
You can see there is an error in the knowledge system.
The first three chapters of my book are basically showing, hey, there's an error in terms of ignoring benefits, There's an error in terms of what I call catastrophizing negative side effects.
And then in Chapter 3, I talk about what's the root of this?
Why is our knowledge system so dysfunctional?
And only once we understand that can we take steps to get better knowledge about this issue.
Let's take a quick pause, Alex.
When we come back, I want to talk specifically about the benefits of fossil fuels.
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Let's make it our biblical responsibility as Christians to support Israel now and I'm back with author and energy expert Alex Epstein.
We're talking about his new book, Fossil Future.
Alex, you have a section in the book where you say, listen, you know, it's not random or accidental that fossil fuels became so widely used, so dominant.
The Chinese, the Indians, the Russians aren't being dumb and saying, hey, we need fossil fuels going forward.
Fossil fuels supply something or do something that other forms of energy don't do or not quite as easy to do.
Talk about the unique benefits of these fossil fuels.
We've heard a lot about why they're bad.
Let's hear about why they're good.
And particularly why they outcompete the alternative.
Exactly. And what they do is they provide what I call ultra cost effective energy, which has four attributes. It's affordable.
So a typical person can use a lot of it.
It's reliable. It can be used on demand when needed in the quantity needed.
It's versatile. This is particularly crucial.
It can power every type of machine, including high heat for industrial purposes and heavy duty transportation.
And it's scalable, can provide energy for billions of people in thousands of places.
And the fossil fuel industry is the only industry that has been able to do this on a scale of even over 1 billion people, let alone billions of people.
And three attributes I bring up in terms of fossil fuels that are relevant are they are naturally concentrated, so they store a large amount of energy in a small space, which is good for economics in general, but particularly good for mobility applications.
That's why oil is so hard to replace.
They're naturally stored.
This is very underrated.
They're like a natural battery.
Nature basically made us a battery that we release.
Whereas with solar and wind, you have to concentrate and farm it yourself, which turns out to be very, very expensive to store energy yourself.
And then they are abundant.
So there's more than 10 times the amount of them in the ground than we've used in the entire history of civilization.
So those amazing attributes plus generations of ingenuity by the fossil fuel industry to actually make the energy cost effective for billions of people, that is this huge advantage that nothing has been able to compete with.
The closest is nuclear because it has those core attributes, but it doesn't have those generations of industrial ingenuity.
So I'm very in favor of liberating nuclear.
We have to recognize nothing is remotely close to fossil fuels, which means that if you deprive us of fossil fuels, you deprive us of energy, which means you deprive us of life.
I mean, one of the very ingenious points you make, which I really like, is There are people who defend fossil fuels and they do it by minimizing or just poo-pooing the notion of climate change.
What you say in the book is, look, I'm not denying climate change, but I am making the point that fossil fuels can help us to deal with climate change.
In other words... You know, it's not necessarily the idea of like, let's try to blot out the sun or prevent the sun's rays from getting to the earth.
There's actually a more sensible way to deal with climate change.
Talk about how fossil fuels paradoxically can help address climate change.
I'm glad you brought that up.
It's even stronger than that.
Because if we start with reality, which is how you began this whole interview, the reality is that human beings are far safer from climate than we've ever been.
And this seems insane if you look at the news, but it seems obvious if you look in practice.
Would you rather live in the winter 100 years ago or now?
Would you rather live in the summer 100 years ago or now?
Would you rather live through a storm 100 years ago or now?
What you get is that, wait, there's our climate conditions.
That's one thing. Then there's our ability to master those conditions.
What matters the most is our ability to master it.
We can quantify this.
We have climate related disaster death statistics that tell us how many people are dying of extreme heat, extreme cold, storms, floods, wildfires, et cetera.
And those deaths, this is shocking to people, and it was shocking to me when I learned it, but those deaths are down 98% in the last 100 years, which means the average person around the world is 1 50th as likely to die of a climate related disaster than they used to be.
And then if you think why, it's pretty obvious fossil fuels have a huge role because they power all the machines that neutralize climate danger.
So heating and air conditioning might be obvious, but something like irrigation and crop transport for drought relief is just as big.
Or the machines that build sturdy buildings that keep us safe from storms, or the machines involved in weather warning systems.
Like we are unnaturally safe from climate.
So what we've done is we've mastered an enormous amount of natural climate danger.
So insofar as we are adding or changing climate danger, we have those same mastery abilities.
And those abilities will continue to grow as we have more freedom, more discovery, et cetera.
So anyone who talks about the threat of climate impact, but they don't mention that we have so far been masters of it and that fossil fuels have made us safer, I call them climate mastery deniers.
And that is rampant, unfortunately, among scientists.
It's not that they're so wrong about climate science, but that they ignore and deny climate mastery, which would be like, you know, you just, you ignore the fact that with polio, like you just look at polio, but you don't look at the fact that we have a polio vaccine.
Like that you cannot think of it rationally without paying attention to mastery.
This is awesome stuff, Alex.
I think you make very powerful arguments here, and your clarity in this interview is just a hint of what people can get in the book.
Really, both of Alex's books are well worth reading.
The first one, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, and then the new one, Fossil Future.
Alex Epstein, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you, Dinesh.
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I'd like to do an update on what's happening with the midterm election results in Arizona.
Now, Maricopa County is getting ready to certify their election results.
They might even do it today or tomorrow.
They shouldn't do it, but it looks like they're going to do it.
Now, if you remember, I spoke last week about how the attorney general, Mark Brnovich, had stepped in and sent a kind of urgent demand of Maricopa County laying out all the problems with the election, the breakdown of the tabulating machines, the sending of voters either home or to other locations,
the collection of ballots that were not properly preserved, mixed in with other ballots, even though they should have been separated.
And all of this going on on Election Day.
And by the way, not trivial.
This is not a case where it affected a small number of voters.
It affected a large number of machines, a large number of voters, and could very well have made the difference in the election.
In fact, probably, most likely did.
Now, how this could even have occurred is a question because these machines were working just fine for early voting when, by the way, the majority of Democrats cast their votes.
And then they suddenly break down mysteriously just on Election Day and for a large part of the day.
So how is this even possible?
And the Attorney General is like, I demand answers.
And Maricopa County, by the way, is obviously trying to thumb their nose at Mark Barnovich.
Why? Because they sent one of these pompous letters basically saying things like, well, we don't really see any violation of the rules here.
Machines do break down.
It is not specifically outlawed in the law to send voters to a different location.
It's not specifically outlawed to tell voters, hey, listen, cast your ballot here, we'll put it in a bag.
It's not even against the rules to somehow merge these ballots.
These are all maybe failures of administration, but they don't really amount to any kind of unlawful conduct that would justify not certifying the election results or somehow having a redo of the election.
So clearly a fight is brewing here.
The first question is whether the Attorney General, who by the way, he has prosecuted some election fraud, but he's also been kind of lukewarm.
He certainly was terrible with regard to 2000 mules.
Not only did he do nothing about the research supplied to him by True the Vote, but then he put out a letter implying that he had not gotten that research that he clearly had received.
And so this was a very shaky, or as they say, suspect behavior, sketchy behavior by Mark Brnovich.
So Debbie and I are skeptical that this guy is really on the case.
He might just be trying to put on a rhetorical show of force, like, yes, I'm very serious about this, I demand answers, whereas it's really wink-wink to Maricopa County.
The other possibility is that Maricopa County is just digging in.
Now this is this is itself a little paradoxical.
By the way, these are for the most part never Trump Republicans.
Some of them are McCain Republicans.
Some of them are just never Trump Republicans.
And they seem happier throwing the election to Democrats than having people, a kind of MAGA crew, like Abe Hamadei or Mark Fincham or Carrie Lake win the elections.
They would rather be governed by a Democrat.
This is sort of the Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol view of things.
And it appears to be shared by at least some of the key people in Maricopa County.
Abe Hamadei has filed a lawsuit.
Carrie Lake has an army of attorneys.
She, too, has filed.
So this is going to be fought out.
But it looks like, in a sense, the Maricopa people are going to try to settle the issue, at least for now, and declare Katie Hobbs the winner of the Arizona election so she can take office.
So even though the lawsuits go forward, They can sort of argue, well, it's a fait accompli.
She's already in the position.
And so whatever remedies are given will not apply, should not apply.
They will argue Maricopa County should not apply to this election, but maybe only apply going forward.
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We are seeing massive protests break out in China, not just in one place, but in many places, and there's every indication that these protests are spreading.
The images on social media are incredible.
Because not only do you see large crowds, but you see the bravery of Chinese.
Think about it. They were living under a totalitarian regime, and yet they are refusing to take orders, in some cases pushing back against the police.
And China has not, at least to date, unleashed massive force against the protesters.
They're using a police presence to sort of try to control them.
But we haven't seen anything like this since Tiananmen Square, which was, by the way, 1989, I believe.
So wow, China has been able to keep the lid on for, well, 30 years.
And now it looks like things are boiling over again.
This protest is driven by anti-lockdown.
And the Chinese are, you know, think of it.
You've got well over a billion people.
A lockdown is going to be something completely different in China than it's going to be in other places in the world.
And I think people have just had it.
China has, by the way, a so-called no COVID policy.
So their idea is that we lock down to get rid of COVID completely.
The Chinese are not willing to put up with even certain levels of COVID and say, all right, well, we can live with this.
No, their point is we want to have this completely eliminated from China.
And so they take very draconian measures for this to happen.
The Chinese are out there.
They're like, down with Xi.
They want to take down the CCP. There's actually calls for the dismantling of the regime.
Now, we heard those in Tiananmen Square.
Sadly, they didn't amount to anything because the Chinese were able to shut it down.
I wouldn't hastily equate this with Tiananmen Square just yet.
Remember, Tiananmen Square was a protest that lasted for almost two months.
And that is not the case here yet.
We'll see how this all plays out.
But... But it is still a remarkable sight to see.
And it's interesting because now there are huge protests going on.
There are protests in Iran right now against the regime, protests in China, by the way, protests in Brazil.
And all of this is getting kind of muted coverage in the media.
This is what's so telling.
In America and in Europe, the elites are trying to look away from all this.
I just looked at the United Nations.
They have a post, not about China, which you'd think would be the biggest story, I think, going on right now.
They're talking about the need for climate action to create, quote, a more peaceful and equitable world.
And so kind of missing the lead, missing the headline, missing the real story, focused on their own obsessions.
And even media coverage of the Chinese protests so far, you can find this stuff on social media, and this is really why a liberated Twitter is so powerful.
I'm going to talk, I just talked about Elon Musk and Twitter.
But in the mainstream media, there's muted coverage of all this.
They... Biden hasn't said a word, and I guess we know why that is.
The Biden family is sort of compromised by China, bought and paid for, some people say.
Yeah, there's no question they've made a whole bunch of money in China.
And so, as a result of that, their mansions and beachfront residences...
I've come with the Chinese money, at least in part.
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So I can see why Biden is going to be very late to say anything about all this.
And even where these things are covered, CNN actually did a remarkable story on the...
On the protests. And this was Selena Wang, the correspondent, who did a good job.
But even there, you think to yourself, wait a minute, this is kind of interesting.
They seem to be like throwing in with these anti-lockdown protests in China.
But wait a minute, haven't there been anti-lockdown protests going on throughout the West since March of 2020 when the lockdowns began?
Those receive very muted coverage.
So somehow the shutdowns in America and the West were okay.
But now that it's happening in China, we are in solidarity with the Chinese people.
So there is a deep hypocrisy here.
I think part of what we're noticing now is that these elite institutions from the UN to the Biden regime to the media are not institutions that can be relied upon.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Nancy Armstrong.
She's an Emmy-nominated producer, and she has a new film that Debbie and I just watched.
It's called The Disruptors.
It's about the phenomenon called ADHD. Most of us are familiar with someone that has ADD or ADHD. And this is a film that, by the way, is up on my Locals channel.
You can check it out at disruptors.locals.com.
And Nancy, welcome to the...
to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me.
You know, we have a family member, actually, my stepson, who has ADHD. But I have to say, it's not something I knew that much about. We think of it as a kind of a deficiency, I guess, of some sort. This was a really eye opening film for me, because I sort of understood ADHD as you could almost call it an alternative neurological wiring that gives people that may be an
impediment in some ways, but can be also a great strength in So let's begin by asking, how did you get interested in this topic and decide to make a film about it?
Yeah, well, I raised three children with ADHD, and it was much more challenging than I ever thought parenting was going to be.
And it was so frustrating to me that there was no film on ADHD. There's films on everything under the sun, but there was no definitive comprehensive film on ADHD. And I thought it would have been so helpful to have that, not only for our own understanding, but also for the community in which our children were growing up in.
Teachers, coaches, you know, bus drivers, for them all to understand that these kids Are wired a little bit differently and that they just need a little more support in their world.
I mean, it's so eye-opening because Debbie will chuckle at this, but I have an uncle in India that I'm now convinced has ADHD. And for years, we just thought of him as unbelievably eccentric because he would come over to parties.
He would refer to very obscure items that he had spotted in the newspaper that he had developed a kind of laser-like focus on.
He wouldn't stop talking about it.
And so, you know, my brothers and my sister and I, we were just like...
Man, you know, this guy is like nuts.
We didn't understand that he just saw the world differently.
So watching a film like this just opens your eyes to the fact that these people aren't really dysfunctional.
They, in fact, can learn to be extremely functional.
And talk about some of the people who are in the film who argue that well-managed ADHD can be a strength.
Well, it's really been around forever since the beginning of man.
You know, we've been talking about ADHD in the history books since the 1700s.
It's just evolved in our understanding and what we've called it.
But like you said about your uncle, that we didn't do a very good job diagnosing, you know, years ago.
My mother sounded very similar to your uncle.
She had all of those struggles, and we didn't understand quite what was going on with her, but it turns out she had Pretty heavy dose of ADHD. And what we've come to understand in the last 20 or 30 years is that this is very common.
It's the most common diagnosis in children, and it's about 9.4% of the children population in this country, and it's global.
So we've come to understand it and we've also seen that through history, some of our greatest innovators, creators, inventors, they all had the symptoms of ADHD.
And so we tried to highlight that both sides of this, you know, for so long, we only focused on the deficit.
And we didn't focus on, you know, the asset of ADHD.
If you can manage the challenges, you can turn this into a great skill.
I mean, you've got all these fascinating people from the great quarterback Terry Bradshaw.
You've got entrepreneurs.
I thought it was fascinating when Glenn Beck, who's in the documentary, talks about when he comes on set, he says, you know, there's 50 things going on.
Normally, it's impossible for someone to digest the overall scene and recognize, this needs to be fixed, move that light over there.
But his ADHD comes into play, and it rapid fires inside his brain, and he's able to do something that I guess is remarkable for someone who's managing this kind of media operation.
So I thought it was eye-opening how ADHD can be converted into a source of Well, it's the flip side of what is the impediment.
So as Ned Halliwell, one of the foremost experts in the world on ADHD, who's also in the film, is Each of the three core symptoms, the triad of symptoms, impulsivity, distractibility, and hyperactivity, those can be an impediment if you don't manage them, but the flip side are very positive.
And in Glenn's case, he is all of those things.
He's impulsive, he's hyperactive, he's got all that energy, and he's got what every person with ADHD has, which is Lower dopamine.
So when Glenn gets into a really stimulating environment like that studio where there's a million things going on at once, his dopamine starts to fly at a really comfortable level.
So that's why he's so good in that environment.
You know, ER doctors, engineers, things that are high stimulation or high creativity.
Those are great fields for people with ADHD because their brain turns on in those situations.
I posted the film over the weekend on my Locals channel, and I'm just kind of scrolling through the comments, and people seem to really love the film.
And there's a whole bunch of people who have ADHD, or they have a son or daughter with it, and they testify to the exquisite balance of the film, the fact that it doesn't attempt to sugarcoat anything.
You know, sometimes in our day, people will take deficiencies and pretend like they're great virtues.
you know, I'm 400 pounds, but it's a wonderful thing for my health. But this film doesn't do that. There was one thread of criticism, though, I wanted to mention to you, and there are some people who are taking the film, I didn't take it this way, and neither did Debbie, as sort of an apologetic for Big Pharma. They're like, well, you know, this film advocates Big Pharma. I didn't see it that way at all. But would you address that point?
Yeah, I mean, I think the film is pretty agnostic about medication in general.
There's been a lot of misinformation about medication and the fact that some people who don't have ADHD abuse Adderall.
That's, you know, there's a big Adderall shortage right now in the country.
And I think part of the problem is that, well, there's the supply chain issue, but there's also that people are just throwing these prescriptions around pediatricians who are not, you know, really trained to deal with those medications.
And we saw even in the film You know, that very point of when the pediatrician had Brianna cut her medication in half, a time-release medication.
You can't cut time-release medication in half.
I mean, so that was kind of unbelievable.
But really, the film tries to say that it's a very personal decision to take medication, but it's one decision.
It's a tool in a toolbox that you have to really employ many different strategies to help kids with ADHD because it is a struggle growing up.
There's no way around that. It's hard.
It's been hard for our family and that's why I wanted people to be able to see their children in this film.
I wanted parents to see themselves in the film because there's a lot of parental guilt around the fact that we don't do it right, we're getting it wrong.
And this is not a film about big pharma.
There is research around the medication, and it's important to know what the research is.
And the research is that it can be very effective in 80% of the cases where you want to get target symptom relief with no side effects.
But medication is not for everyone.
Guys, it's a really good film.
I mean, it just begins in the perfect way with the parent-child interaction and the kind of breakdown of communication that occurs where ADHD is creating a kind of mental wall between the child and the parent.
This is something that the film treats with, I think, with great compassion and insight.
It's a fun film to watch.
It's called The Disruptors.
And if you want to watch it, go to Disruptors.
That's D-I-S-R-U-P-T-O-R-S. You'll have a choice, by the way.
You can just buy it, stream it, and watch it, or you can subscribe to my local channel and the film will be just included with your annual subscription.
Nancy Armstrong, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Feel the difference. Before we get into the Christian answer to atheism, we want to explore atheism itself.
We want to see what atheism is, what radical secularism is, what the claims are on behalf of these sort of philosophies.
Now, I want to introduce the concept of deep atheism, deep atheism as contrasted with, let's call it, normal atheism.
So the normal atheist claim is that, hey, listen, I don't really see any evidence for God, and therefore I'm not going to believe in God.
Now right away that's a little bit strange because there are all kinds of things that we don't have evidence for that we nevertheless do believe in.
Things that we can't prove but nevertheless we operate ordinary life on the assumption that they are true.
We take it, you may say, on authority or they're the necessary prerequisite for what we believe.
I recently saw on social media a clip from the atheist Sam Harris saying something like, well, we've got information from the most distant stars and we just don't see any evidence for God.
Now, that is, to me, not a very good argument.
Christians have maintained, not just now in response to science, but maintained for many, many centuries that God is not, in that sense, in the universe.
The ancient Greeks believed that their gods lived on Mount Olympus that was someplace on Earth.
But the Christian view is that eternity is outside of time and space.
So God, you can't expect to find God like beyond Pluto or beyond Neptune.
And it's not a very sophisticated argument to repeat what a Soviet cosmonaut said many decades ago.
I've been in outer space.
I've been looking around and I haven't seen really God.
So therefore... We can safely conclude that God doesn't exist.
Nevertheless, this claim that there's not enough evidence for God and therefore we don't believe, that's normal atheism.
Deep atheism is somewhat different, and to me, it's epitomized in a character that Milton created.
This is Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost.
Now, if you follow Satan in Paradise Lost, you can sort of be introduced to him in the very first books and maybe sometime on the podcast, I'll do an in-depth study of Paradise Lost and of Milton.
But nevertheless, you right away realize that Milton is, Milton Satan is not a denier of God.
How can he be?
In fact, he's engaged in a kind of dispute and a war, a rebellion against God.
So the issue for Satan is not God's existence or non-existence, it's something different.
Satan doesn't want to be under God's authority.
And so we get this remarkable critique that God is a tyrant.
In a sense, the atheist position here is, listen, I don't care if God exists or not.
Even if God exists, I don't really want God.
Why? Because God is telling me what to do.
God has a plan for my life, but I have my own plan.
I want to follow my plan and not God's plan.
In other words, I want to be the architect, the author of Of my own, not just choices, but my moral choices.
So I want freedom, but not just normal freedom.
I don't want economic freedom or political freedom or freedom of speech per se.
What I want is moral freedom.
I want to be liberated from the Ten Commandments.
I don't want to be in what Nietzsche once called the shadows of God.
What are the shadows of God?
For Nietzsche, this is the moral landscape that is sort of thrown out by religion.
Because we believe in God, we don't do this and we don't do that and we pattern our lives in this way and we're honest and truthful and kind and compassionate.
And for Nietzsche, you don't have to be those things because if you don't have God, you don't have the shadows of God.
And so morality becomes something that is not given We're good to go.
I'm the master of hell, so in hell I am sovereign.
I am God. And so the argument here, and I think this is really the secret desire of the radical secularists, is not just, you know, separate church and state, let's not have religion in the public square.
Ultimately, it is that we get to make our own commandments.
We get to erase traditional distinctions, like the distinction between male and female.
We get to abolish the nuclear family.
There's nothing sort of natural or divinely given about the family.
It's simply a human artifact.
If you want to build it somewhat differently or completely differently, you can totally do that.
Here is Satan, after he's been flung, as Milton says, headlong flaming from the ethereal sky.
Satan is down now, kind of gathering his forces.
And he goes, So the satanic slogan in Paradise Lost...
Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven.
This is sort of the radical secularist manifesto.
This is the deep atheism that Milton is talking about, and this is the atheism ultimately that we need to answer, not just to make the case for the plausibility of God or even to prove God's existence, but to make the plausibility for the alternative way of thinking about the world, a world under God's sovereignty and not freed from it.
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