As Biden Taps Billionaire Dem to Oversee Ukraine's Business, More Insiders Are Enriched From the War. PLUS: Gabor Mate on the Explosion of Anti-Depressants in the West | SYSTEM UPDATE #148
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight...
It's not exactly a secret that while the vast majority of Americans are paying a real price for the endless war in Ukraine, higher energy prices, higher debt and debt servicing, threats to needed domestic programs, there is a tiny sliver of the richest Americans who are profiting greatly and will continue to do so for as long as Congress funds this war with no one in sight.
Among them, the lucky ones are the U.S.
arms industry, companies like Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed, which donate massive amounts of money to both parties and have former top executives running key government agencies, including the Pentagon, as well as the CIA and other parts of the Pentagon and intelligence agencies whose budgets, authorities, and secret powers always skyrocket during U.S.
wars.
And that illustrious list of those enriching themselves from the U.S.-funded war most definitely includes the various oligarchs, corrupt politicians, and other hangers-on who populate the power centers of Kiev and are responsible for the country's long-standing reputation as the most corrupt in Europe.
The money is flying around and those are the people hovering it up.
Along with others, we have done substantial reporting on how, on this show, documenting how Western arms dealers and corrupt elements in Kiev are enriching themselves greatly at the expense of the American taxpayer that's funding this war.
But there is another very powerful group of profiteers waiting in the wings like vultures to swoop down on Ukraine as soon as there is something resembling a peace.
And they may end up being this war's most successful profiteers.
At the start of the year it was revealed that the American hedge funds and investment corporations and investment banks such as BlackRock and JP Morgan were not so patiently waiting in the wings to exploit all of the very lucrative deals awaiting what will be called the reconstruction of Ukraine.
After this war finishes, whenever that is, its job of destroying most Ukrainian infrastructure, those financial institutions working in direct partnership with the notoriously corrupt Ukrainian officials under martial law will swoop down and make hundreds of millions of dollars, probably billions of dollars in fees by arranging all kinds of capital deals and other financing schemes to rebuild Ukraine.
Most, if not all of that, will be accomplished with public monies from the U.S.
and the West, of course, and much of it will be headed directly to the pockets and the bottom lines of these Western investment funds, who pay millions of dollars each year in donations and other lobbyist activities to ensure their access to and subservience from the establishment wings of both parties exactly for moments like these.
Now, all of this is far from just a private sector initiative.
The U.S.
government, which will administer the funds and facilitate these deals using all of its diverse arms of power and influence in Washington and in New York and Kiev, will be overseeing and controlling all of it.
And that, in turn, requires someone who is very comfortable with and welcomed by these oligarchs to grease the wheels of this reconstruction.
Today, the Biden administration announced what seems to be the perfect person for that job, at least judging through the framework of all these corrupt interests to oversee it all.
Earlier today, the Biden administration announced the appointment of the so-called special representative for Ukraine's economic recovery.
Quote, in this role, the government said she will work with the Ukrainian government, the G7, the EU, international financial institutions, international partners, and one of our greatest assets, the American private sector, to help forge Ukraine's future as a prosperous, secure European democracy.
For this special role, Biden has tapped the multi-billionaire heiress Penny Pritzker, who inherited billions of dollars from one of America's richest multi-general families, the Pritzkers, founder of the Hyatt Hotel chain.
She has used her vast wealth to become one of President Obama's earliest and largest funders in the 2008 presidential election, which Nonetheless denied her expectation to become appointed Secretary of Commerce in his first term, that's what she wanted.
But he couldn't name her that due to all sorts of unpleasantries about her company abusing its labor force and another touchy scandal involving a failed savings and loan that was bailed out by the government under her management and her family's.
She finally received her rightful entitlement as Commerce Secretary once Obama was elected for his second term when he no longer needed any votes and then he anointed her to that position.
Penny Pitzker's brother is the current Democratic Governor of Illinois.
Democrats really love their oligarchs.
And she will obviously fit right in.
Now, Democrats once cared about such tawdry motives for war, or at least so they said.
You may remember, for those of you who lived through the Iraq War, that Democrats fixated obsessively On what they believed was a key motive for invading Iraq, namely that Halliburton, a company for which Vice President Dick Cheney had worked years earlier and had still retained a profit motive in, would financially benefit from the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq using Halliburton contracts.
And the destruction and rebuilding of Iraq was indeed a huge boon for Halliburton, as they predicted, to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars in profit.
But these days, such discussions are considered distasteful when it comes to Ukraine, or even, altogether now, Russian propaganda.
But we will nonetheless look at today's announcement of Penny Pritzker, as reconstructions are to oversee all of this new business in Ukraine to understand how it fits within the broader profiteering aspects of the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Then, almost every warning sign for mental health pathologies had already been blinking bright red in the United States and the West for years.
And that was all before the COVID pandemic and its lockdowns and isolation descended upon hundreds of millions of people.
The solution used by the medical and mental health profession seems clear if you look at the data.
They want to just simply dole out more and more antidepressant medications, specifically the class of medications known as SSRIs, serotonin uptake inhibitors, to simply treat these rising mental health problems as little more than chemical imbalances, kind of like what happens when your car doesn't work well, that takes place in the brain and that requires simple medical solutions.
You just give medications that adjust the chemical imbalances and send the patient on their way.
One of the smartest and most interesting critics of this approach is Dr. Gabor Maté, who has worked for over a decade in Vancouver's downtown Eastside with patients challenged by both drug addiction and mental illness.
He is a best-selling author of four books published in over 30 languages and has really become someone who routinely appears on and is favorably received on all sorts of television and radio programs and online platforms that span the political spectrum.
Something not that easy to do these days.
We've become a fan of his for quite some time and are very excited to welcome him tonight to our program.
It may seem that this topic is a little bit off course for what we usually cover.
If that were true, that would be fine.
We want to cover a broad range of topics, but we actually see these pathologies that he talks about and works on as directly linked to many of the broader social, political, and economic problems we cover on this show.
And we think that you will see the important connections as well between the mental health problems suffered by more and more Americans and the rotted political system and the rotted society it produces in which they live.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
We are by far the first, of course, to observe that even though war propaganda is typically focused on all sorts of inspiring concepts like patriotism and fighting to observe that even though war propaganda is typically focused on all sorts of inspiring concepts like patriotism and fighting evil and combating for democracy and against autocracy and
Often at the heart of it lies something much more...
Common, much tawdrier, which is a profit motive.
It's not often discussed because it's so at odds with the propaganda that allows populations to support the war.
But if you look at the history of war, there are always people, typically very valuable people, who exercise a lot of influence in the capitals and the halls of power where decisions about war and peace are made, who are the ones profiting.
And obviously, they have an interest in having those wars fought and use that influence to ensure That they do.
And one of the obvious ways that a very tiny sliver of influential people in society generally in the United States benefit is through being an arms dealer and having to be the one who supplies all sorts of arms and weapons to the countries that are fighting in the war.
And that is exactly what has happened and exactly the way that you would expect.
Here in the United States, the companies that wield the greatest power in Washington, Raytheon, Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, the companies that Dwight Eisenhower warned in 1961 constituted the military-industrial complex were becoming more powerful than the president.
Have prospered in almost indescribable ways by virtue of the fact that the Ukrainians have been constantly behind the Russians when it comes to weapons and the war has basically been an endless frenetic chase to place as many orders as possible, paying as much money as necessary, to get these companies to produce more and more and buy them more and more to get them as quickly as possible to send them to the theater of war where Ukraine is fighting.
It hasn't really worked in the sense of helping Ukraine but it certainly has helped the bottom line in the stock price of these companies and I would submit you have to either be very naive or someone drowning in either hearing propaganda or disseminating it To believe that it's a gigantic coincidence that the companies who wield the most power in Washington happen to be greatly profiting from the number one policy priority of the U.S.
security state, which is the war in Ukraine.
So that is not really the area which I want to focus.
I just want to remind you of this crucial profiteering context to talk about the new event of today.
So let's just remind ourselves by looking at this first article here, if we can bring that up on the screen.
There you see the title, As the War in Ukraine Drags On, America's Arms Industry Reaps the Profits.
The sub-headline is, Weapons Manufacturers Raking a Fortune.
As arms flood into Ukraine from the U.S. and Europe, experts warn sending more will only fuel continued global violence, but of course it will also fuel that profiteering even more.
Quote, billions of dollars worth of military equipment has poured into Ukraine since Russia launched dozens of missile strikes into Ukraine late last year, marking the start of its full-fledged military invasion into the country.
From state-of-the-art tanks and missile systems to helicopters, helmets, and ammunition, rounds and rounds of military hardware continue to fly in.
The vast majority, experts say, is coming from the United States.
Quote, it's certainly more than before and more than we've ever given any country before, even at the height of the Afghanistan war.
Said Hannah Homestead, a policy analyst at the Center for International Policy, who focuses on the impact of the U.S.
arms trade around the world.
Quote, the aid that we've been sending to Ukraine for their military is more than our NASA budget for space.
So far, American defense firms have been the only winners in the conflict.
Quote, the fact is, if you look at it soberly, the country that is most profiting from this war is the U.S.
because they are selling more gas and at higher prices and because they are selling more weapons.
An unnamed EU official told Politico in November last year.
Now remember, one of the very first things that happened at the start of the war was the fulfillment of something that US officials, including Donald Trump, had long wanted.
You may remember at the very same time that our lying, corrupt corporate media was accusing him of being a Russian agent, of being controlled by Vladimir Putin through blackmail Trump was pursuing, probably attacks on the two most vital Russian interests you can imagine.
Number one, he had flooded Ukraine with lethal arms.
And then number two, he was doing everything he could to sabotage Nord Stream 2, which connected Russia to Germany and allowed the Russians to sell their cheap natural gas into Western Europe via Germany.
And Trump wanted to destroy that because he felt, his argument was, we pay all this money for your defense in Europe, you should be buying natural gas from us, not from Russia.
And the Germans laughed at him.
And it wasn't until the United States, most likely, went and blew up that Nord Stream pipeline connecting Germany and Russia, which, by the way, was one of the worst acts of industrial terrorism, as well as one of the worst environmental disasters in years.
You'll notice very few people who claim to be so worried about the climate care much about that.
But immediately, and even before it was blown up, the Germans had already said, we're going to start buying natural gas from the US, as will the rest of Europe.
That was a major accomplishment for the US.
That was a huge financial boom to the United States, to get Europe to start buying our natural gas at higher prices than they could buy them from Russia.
But ever since then, it's been even more and more of an economic boom.
It's all these weapons have poured in from American manufacturers, including Raytheon, That was lucky enough to send right from its Board of Directors Lloyd Austin who now is in charge of the Pentagon and therefore all of its procurement.
The article goes on, quote, regardless of declining public support for military spending in a protracted conflict, Americans' weapons manufacturers have seen their values skyrocket since the war began.
In the weeks after Russia's invasion, the market capitalization of Raytheon Technologies, that's where Lloyd Austin came from, shot up to $155 billion from $128 billion at the start of the year.
Lockheed Martin started 2022 worth $98 billion.
By the end of the year, it had reached $127 billion, its highest since record show.
Northrop Grumman started the year at $61 billion and ended at $84 billion.
So congratulations to all of them!
They had a great year as a result of the war in Ukraine.
Ukrainians didn't.
They're dying in large numbers in their countries, being destroyed.
But these arms industry giants and leaders have had a great year and continue to as long as the war continues.
Quote, it's a huge profit center for the big companies.
Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and Boeing, says William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute, where he focuses on the global arms trade and Pentagon spending.
Quote, at the moment, I think they're riding the wave.
I would say they're riding the wave, and the wave doesn't seem to really have an end in sight.
Now, just to underscore the point, here's one other article of a similar vein.
It is from ABC News in Australia.
In January of this year, the headline, as the war rages on and military spending booms, the U.S.
armed industry Congratulations again is a big winner in Ukraine.
We have a big winner in this war.
Not the Ukrainian people for sure, not the Russians, not the poor people of Europe paying higher gas prices, or even the poor people in the United States paying higher gas prices, but it is the U.S.
armed industry, which very coincidentally happens to spend millions of dollars each year To buy influence with both political parties, the establishment wings of each support this war.
Quote, as the war in Ukraine heads towards the one-year mark, so far there has been only one clear winner, the U.S.
arms industry.
But as the conflict rages on, there have been accusations from some EU officials that the U.S.
is profiting from the war through weapons sales and gas prices.
Meanwhile, analysts have warned of excessive spending in the U.S.
military-industrial complex expanding beyond what is needed in response to Ukraine.
Since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, the U.S.
and its NATO allies have been throwing tens of billions of dollars worth of military aid Ukraine's way.
And there are a small number of companies in this highly consolidated industry that are reaping the rewards.
Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, all from the U.S., are among the top contractors.
They also produce some of the most in-demand and expensive weapons being sent to Ukraine.
The conflict has sent their stock surging, with the stock price of Northrop Grumman increasing 40% by the end of 2022, while Lockheed Martin's was up 37%.
I mean, how can you not be happy for them?
They're just having a dream year in terms of their profits, in terms of their stock prices.
A lot of cynics said that when Raytheon placed Lloyd Austin as the head of the Defense Department, that would benefit them.
But most people said, you don't know what you're talking about.
This is a man of great integrity.
He would never favor Raytheon or the arms industry just because he came from there and was enriched by them and is now in charge of the endless defense budget.
But believe what you want, it could be a gigantic coincidence.
Lloyd Austin could be really sad about it, where he might be really happy.
But in any whatever is true, whatever scenario you want to believe about the psychological motives, it certainly is taking place here.
As a reminder, the New York Times in December of 2020, Biden's choice for Pentagon faces questions on ties to contractors.
Retired General Lloyd Austin III serves on the board of Raytheon, one of the world's largest weapons makers, and is a partner in an investment firm that buys military suppliers.
And Raytheon, whose 195,000 employees make fighter jet engines, weapons, high-tech sensors, and dozens of other military products, Spent the past several years selling billions of dollars worth of weapons and the radar systems to allies in the Middle East, some of which were used to fight a war in Yemen.
Now Raytheon could soon have another point of distinction.
A member of its board, retired General Lloyd Austin III of the Army, has been named by President-elect Joseph R. Biden to be the next Secretary of Defense.
A lot of people, including myself, gave President Biden credit for finally getting out of Afghanistan, even though the way he got out was filled with deceit.
And he wiped out a family of innocent people on the way out and then lied about it for good measure.
And it was President Trump who really negotiated that way out.
And a lot of people tried to block him, in part because they didn't want him to have the political benefits of running in 2020 based on that promise.
But whatever it was, Biden did oversee the withdrawal.
And yet, no worries for these companies.
Six months later, they had a new war that was better than ever in terms of being an endless profit center.
As I said, this is something that the left used to spend a lot of time talking about in the United States.
Here's just one reminder from right around the time when they began writing about politics.
It was from the Huffington Post.
September of 2006, the headline, Halliburton and Dick Cheney, war profiteers in chief, fight to keep their wallets fat.
Halliburton stock has risen 200% since the invasion of Iraq three and a half years ago.
David Laser, its CEO, made over $40 million in 2004 alone.
In case you think it was only left-wing blog blogs talking about that, here is the left-wing public news outlet NPR in December of 2003, so the year that the U.S.
invaded.
Quote, examining Halliburton's sweetheart deal in Iraq, experts say lucrative contracts yield razor-thin profit margins.
Quote, oil services company Halliburton has come under intense scrutiny over its multi-billion dollar contracts with the U.S.
military in Iraq.
Congressional critics want to know if the company is engaging in gold plating contracts, inflating costs, and pocketing the difference.
Other critics charge that Halliburton has seemingly become another branch of the U.S.
military, while the company's former chief executive officer, Dick Cheney, is now the vice president.
Do you find it odd that there's no talk like this about The current arms industry and the war in Ukraine and all the people who used to work for those current arms industries and their positions now in the Biden administration and the possibility that maybe there is a profit motive involved in Washington and why this war is continuing with that end and there are no diplomatic efforts to try and stop it.
In case you think that that was just focused on Dick Cheney and it was politically motivated, this is true of every war.
Here from the Financial Times in 2013, contractors reaped $138 billion from the Iraq War.
Quote, eight days after the invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then Deputy Defense Secretary and a leading proponent of the war, told a congressional committee, quote, we are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.
People in Congress wanted to know, how much is it going to cost us when we destroy Iraq to then go and rebuild it?
And Paul Wolfowitz said, oh, don't worry.
There's no reconstruction cost.
They're going to do it themselves.
They have oil revenue.
A decade later, that assessment could hardly have turned out to be more wrong.
I can't believe a neocon lied about the Iraq War.
It's so unlike them.
Quote, the U.S.
has overwhelmingly borne the brunt of both the military and reconstruction costs, spending at least $138 billion on private security logistics and reconstruction contractors who have supplied everything from domestic security to power plants and toilet paper.
An analysis by the Financial Times reveals the extent to which both the American and foreign companies have profited from the conflict.
With the top 10 contractors securing business worth at least $72 billion between them, none has benefited more than KBR, once known as Kelly Brown and Root.
The controversial former subsidiary of Halliburton, which was once won by Dick Cheney, Vice President to George W. Bush, was awarded at least $39.5 billion in federal contracts related to the Iraq War over the past decade.
Now, one of the things I've noticed is that a lot of people love to condemn the U.S.
foreign policy establishment, the U.S.
security state, for abuses they've committed in the past.
If you look around, there are a lot of, like, left-wing figures, people who still in media like to brand as left-wing critics.
Who spent so much time talking about things like the U.S.
overthrow of the Iranian government in the 1950s, or the CIA coups in Latin America in the 60s and 70s, or the dirty wars in Central America in the 1980s, and think they're so brave for doing it, for talking about the CIA's crimes from 50 years ago.
When in reality, that's like propaganda for the CIA.
It implies that those things only happened in the past, as if the CIA isn't doing anything like that any longer, which is why they never criticize what the CIA is doing now, because it's under Joe Biden that they're doing it.
Same with all of this.
Do you think if and when an Inspector General is finally permitted to examine the flow of money from the U.S.
Treasury to Kiev, They might find similar financial abuses like that, similar extraction and profiteering of an obscene kind from the war in Ukraine before the Reconstruction even begins.
Seems possible.
Which is probably why so many of the people in Washington financing this war don't want that kind of oversight and why they've repeatedly voted against it.
Now besides the arms industry, as I said, there are people waiting for their chance on the sideline.
These are the ones who are going to come in and finance the deals and the profits that go along with it for things like rebuilding Iraq, or rather Ukraine, and rebuilding their government infrastructure and their apartments and their houses and their cities that have been destroyed.
And the two leading firms chomping at the bit to do it, who also basically already have President Zelensky's partnership and promise to do it, are BlackRock and JP Morgan, the two financial giants in the United States.
Here from the Financial Times in June of this year, BlackRock and JP Morgan helped set up Ukrainian Reconstruction Bank.
These firms are not well known for being benevolent humanitarian institutions who help other countries and people for their own benefit, for the benefit of other people.
They do it for their own profit.
Quote, the fund aims to attract billions of dollars in private investment to assist rebuilding projects in war-torn countries.
Quote, BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase are helping the Ukrainian government set up a reconstruction bank to steer public seed capital into rebuilding projects that can attract hundreds of billions of dollars in private investment.
The Ukraine Development Fund remains in the planning stages and is not expected to fully launch until the end of hostilities with Russia.
But investors will have a preview this week at a London conference co-hosted by the British and Ukrainian governments.
Look at all these people salivating.
The World Bank estimated in March that Ukraine would need $411 billion to rebuild after the war.
And obviously it's going to be a lot more than that by the time all is said and done.
Recent Russian attacks have driven that figure higher.
The Kiev government engaged BlackRock's consulting arm in November to determine how best to attract the kind of capital, and then added JP Morgan in February.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky announced last month that the country was working with the two financial groups and consultants at McKinsey.
BlackRock and JP Morgan are donating their services.
Okay.
I'm sure they're donating their services and expect to receive nothing.
Quote, although the work will give them an early look at possible investments in the country.
Oh!
So they may have profiteering opportunities as a result of this magnanimous decision to donate these original steps so they have their foot in the door.
The assignment also deepens JP Morgan's relationship with a long-standing client.
The bank has helped Ukraine raise more than $25 billion in sovereign debt since 2010 and led the country's $20 billion debt restructuring last year.
Here's just some more detail from the consultancy of the EU that's already angry about how the U.S.
is profiteering.
There you see the headline.
It's from August 18th, just a couple weeks ago.
BlackRock, JP Morgan and McKinsey.
You add now McKinsey to the mix.
Working on Ukraine's reconstruction bank.
Having been ravaged by war since the invasion of Russian troops in 2022, estimates suggest it will take Ukraine more than $400 billion to rebuild.
To provide a solution for this huge funding gap, global asset manager BlackRock, banking giant J.P.
Morgan, and management consulting firm McKinsey & Company are working with the country to establish a, quote, fund of reconstruction and attract billions more in private investment.
After the Russian military's invasion of Ukraine commenced in early 2022, the World Bank predicted it could take at least $411 billion to rebuild Ukraine and its economy after the war.
With the recent launch of a Ukrainian counteroffensive, this sum is likely to increase further as the conflict escalates once more.
In anticipation of this, Ukraine has reached out to some of the largest financial and professional services firms of its ally, the U.S.
The government of President Vladimir Zelensky has announced it has called upon the consulting branches of BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase, as well as the strategist of McKinsey, to help set up a fund of reconstruction.
Founded in 1988, initially as an enterprise risk management and fixed income institutional asset manager, BlackRock is the world's largest asset manager with $8.59 trillion in assets under management as of the end of 2022.
JPMorgan, meanwhile, was brought in partly for its debt expertise and has helped Ukraine in this way before, having enabled the country to repay more than $25 billion of sovereign debt since 2010.
The fund is being set up also to give public and private sector investors the opportunity to invest in specific projects and sectors, JP Morgan's head of debt capital said.
These will be different sectoral funds than the funds identified as priorities for Ukraine.
The aim is maximized capital participation.
So when politicians in Washington talk in public About the need for this war, the virtue of this war.
All they talk about is the geostrategic importance of defending Ukrainian democracy, of not allowing Vladimir Putin a win.
When the cameras are off, the people with whom they're spending most of their time are not democracy activists, but BlackRock and JP Morgan and McKinsey.
Those are the people who donate millions and millions of dollars to bold political parties.
And their interest in Ukraine is solely this kind of profiteering.
You're talking about massive sums of money.
And it's going to come from the US government.
That's going to say we have a responsibility to rebuild Ukraine, just like they did in Iraq, and it's going to go from the American people and the middle class and their taxpaying dollars, as yet another massive transfer of wealth up to the wealthiest people in the society.
And it will keep increasing for as long as the war continues, which is why the war is continuing.
This is the interest that Washington has.
Here is just one more article from CNBC, and it's from February of 2023.
Ukraine plots post-war rebuilding effort with JPMorgan Chase as their economic advisor.
And just to kind of underscore the point here, here is the Open secret donation list for BlackRock in the 2022 cycle.
Of course, they donate to both parties.
But the number one donor for BlackRock was Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Majority Leader of the Senate.
Second was the DNC Services Corp.
They threw in a Lisa Murkowski or Raphael Warnick.
a Republican senator here, the National Republican Senate committee down there.
But you see that their two biggest ones are Chuck Schumer and the DNC, which seems smart since they're going to be the people who are going to be running this Ukraine construction fund.
Here is JP Morgan.
And JP Morgan also has as their number one donor a Senate group called the Senate Majority PAC that's designed to ensure the Democratic Party keeps the majority in the Senate.
Right after that is the Republican Senator, Senatorial Committee, so they keep their feet in both camps.
They also donated to Raphael Warnock to ensure Democratic control of the Senate.
And then you see the DNC group, some more Democratic Party campaigns.
So you see exactly what's going on here, which is that they are ensuring that They have influence with the establishment wings of both parties, both of whom are in favor of this war.
If you look at the 2020 cycle, BlackRock and JP Morgan both donated to Joe Biden's re-election campaign, but not to Donald Trump's.
Now, President Zelensky is very well aware, obviously, of these profit opportunities, and as somebody who Had a lot of wealth unveiled by the Pandora's Papers, which revealed how very rich people keep a lot of money offshore, and he was one of them.
He was helped very much by the overwhelming benefit of a Ukrainian oligarch.
He's extremely aware of the aspects of this international finance.
You can imagine how many billions of dollars are going to be flying through Kiev when all this happens.
And whoever's in a position to approve particular permits, or construction projects, are going to be people who BlackRock and JP Morgan and McKenzie have a lot of interest in currying favor with.
So Zelensky is very excited about these partnerships.
And here he is, in January of 2023, announcing to the world that Ukraine is open for business.
We are defending freedom and property thanks to the leadership of the United States of America, which has consolidated the world in defense of freedom.
We see how to win this battle.
Together we'll be able to start The difficult work of rebuilding Ukraine, our cities, our economy, our infrastructure.
It is already clear that this will be the largest economic project of our time in Europe.
It is obvious that American business can become the locomotive that will once again push forward global economic growth.
We have already managed to attract attention and have cooperation with such giants of the international financial and investment world as BlackRock, J.P.
Morgan, and Golden Sox.
Such American brands as Starlink or Westinghouse have already become part of our Ukrainian way.
Alright, so...
He's fighting an existential war, apparently, and yet he has a lot of time to say, just want you to know, all of you huge investment giants with trillions of dollars under your control, here I am, open for business.
Come on in.
We're ready to do deals with all of you.
We have all this rebuilding to do.
You know how much profiteering that's going to be.
There's going to be American public funds flying all over the place.
We're the people to come and see.
You know where to find us.
Goldman Sachs and BlackRock and JPMorgan.
And again, if you want to believe this is just like a coincidental part of the war, that these institutions that wield enormous power in Washington don't care about these opportunities that are going to only get more lucrative the longer the war goes on, and aren't exercising their influence to ensure that those profits are maximized,
I don't really know what else to say, except that the most basic understanding of how these companies function, of the reasons they spend millions of dollars in Washington to buy influence, would strongly contradict that.
Now, again, you need a government official who's trustworthy to those institutions to lead it all, and here she is.
From the New York Times, Joe Biden taps Penny Pritzker to drive Ukraine's economic revival.
The appointment of the former Commerce Secretary and Democratic Party fundraiser, the key credential, reflects a growing focus on Ukraine's post-war economic survival.
President Biden on Thursday appointed a former Commerce Secretary, Penny Pritzker, to be special representative for Ukraine's economic recovery, a new position that signals the Biden administration's concern about the country's long-term economic survival, even as its war with Russia grinds on.
Again, why would this be the priority now when we're told Ukraine is in an existential war that they're not really winning?
Unless the Biden administration wants to show these entities crucial to his re-election campaign that he's taking care of them now.
In a statement, Mr. Biden said that Ms.
Pritzker would, quote, drive the United States' effort to help rebuild the Ukrainian economy by working with Ukraine's government along with U.S.
allies, international finance institutions, and the private sector.
Isn't it amazing?
How comparatively little attention is focused on the rebuilding of the United States versus the rebuilding of Ukraine?
As I said, Penny Pritzker is not a person with a pristine reputation.
Here in 2012, Politico reported on the fact that she was very angry she didn't get to be the Commerce Secretary even though she was one of the biggest, maybe the biggest, single biggest donors to Obama's presidential campaign, especially in 2007 and 2008 when most of the big money in the Democratic Party was lined up behind Hillary.
There you see lost Obama donor surfaces on Air Force One.
Pritzker was a central player in the president's 2008 campaign, but Politico reported last week, citing Democratic donor sources, that Pritzker had complained privately she felt slighted by the White House.
And Obama, despite her huge contribution in 2008, I love that they just come right out and admit, when I give money to a presidential candidate, millions and millions of dollars, I expect, in return, a major appointment to the cabinet.
It's a total print quote.
They don't even hide it.
However, her tenure in those bodies was stormy because the Hyatt Hotel chain her family owns is often at odds with unions representing maids and other hotel workers.
Union leaders served on both boards and there was some heated discussion over the hotel-related issues, a source familiar with the situation told Politico.
Here from the New York Times in 2012, leading role in Obama 08, but backstage in 12.
At first glance, the party that Penny Pritzker hosted last month in Chicago could have passed for an Obama reunion.
Her modernist home and sculpture garden had been the site of Obama fundraising events over the years, and the guests that night included presidential allies like Rahm Emanuel and Warren Buffett.
For Mrs. Pritzker, Ms.
Pritzker, her high-profile backing of Mr. Obama came at an unexpectedly bitter cost.
Their relationship made her a punching bag for the labor movement, which targeted her for what union officials called exploitative practices toward housekeepers by the Hyatt Hotels.
For Mr. Obama, Ms.
Pritzker's wealth and business experience are huge assets.
To his political career.
But also potential liabilities.
He considered nominating her for Commerce Secretary, but did not, because her fortune risks making her radioactive.
She does plan to join him on the campaign trail this month.
And that could prove awkward, given that the president is pounding Mr. Romney for some of the same practices of which Ms.
Pritzker or her family is accused.
Housing significant wealth in offshore trust and treating workers poorly.
Quote, there is a huge unresolved set of issues in the Democratic Party between people of wealth and people who work, said Andy Stern, the former president of the SEIU, a big union.
Penny is a living example of that issue.
Without Penny Pritzker, it is unlikely that Barack Obama would have ever been elected to the United States Senate or the presidency, says the New York Times.
She was that instrumental in Obama's political career, the person now about to run Ukraine's reconstruction.
When she first backed him during the 2004 Senate run, she was number 152 on the Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans.
He was a long-shot candidate and needed her support and imprimatur.
Mr. Obama and Ms.
Pritzker grew close, sometimes spending weekends with their families at her summer home.
Do you see how these politicians immediately integrate into the oligarchical class?
Ms.
Pritzker, 53, is an heiress who hates being called an heiress, friends say.
Yeah, why would anyone call her an heiress just because she received $4 billion of unearned wealth by the genetic lottery of being born to the Pritzker family?
She's a woman who wants to be known for more than her family fortune.
In 2008, she poured that energy and grit into putting Mr. Obama in the White House.
Democrats often have rocky relationships with corporate interests, but Ms.
Pritzker helped forge an unlikely bond between Mr. Obama, a former community organizer, and bankers, entrepreneurs, and executives.
She wanted to become a Commerce Secretary, friends say, but shortly after Election Day, while she was still raising money for Mr. Obama, more than $53 million for his inauguration.
On top of the $745 million for the campaign she raised, she withdrew from consideration.
So she's been around for a long time, a key part of Obama world.
She also obviously, oh, here's the other problem that she had.
This is a little problem that she had in her past too.
Quote, a bank owned in part by her family had been so mired in toxic subprime loans, That the Pritzkers and other owners eventually paid a $460 million settlement to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
And her nearly $2 billion fortune exploits a network of trust, including some held offshore, to minimize tax liabilities.
In September, after Hyatt fired 100 housekeepers at non-union hotels near Boston and replaced them with low-wage subcontractors.
This is the person absolutely fundamental to President Obama's political career.
This woman who was involved in a Fraudulent savings and loans that collapsed, and that the federal government had to bail out, and he was mistreating union workers by firing them and hiring low-wage subcontractors.
She served on White House councils alongside labor leaders, and that cast her as a villainess who hurt rather than help the economy.
All right, so that's Penny Pritzker.
She seems perfect to me for this job, which is to extract as much wealth as possible from the American taxpayer and from Ukraine to enrich the corrupt Kabul in Ukraine that will be running this process and making sure that she and her extremely rich friends that are crucial to Obama's re-election campaign in Black Rock, Goldman Sachs, and McKinsey
Have no limits on their ability to profiteer off this war.
Do you see what this war is about in reality and how rarely we hear about any of it?
It's all just lurking there under the surface?
Everything else we hear about the war is the pretext and the propaganda.
This is the actual driving force of the war.
We are very excited to talk to Dr. Gabor Mate about depression, about depression medications.
I have been wanting to have him on my show for a long time.
We are thrilled to have him.
He is waiting in the wings.
We apologize for keeping him waiting a little bit.
bit.
We're going to be right back with him just after this.
We'll be right back.
And what that means is independence is we need ways to support the program.
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I would only allow endorsements and sponsors of products that I take and that I take because it really does align with the way I live my life.
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I'm not a very patient person.
If you're like me, you don't want to take a product that has benefits 12 months from now, right away you will feel healthier.
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It'll be visible.
People will comment that your skin and hair look healthier.
And it can also help you lose weight if that's one of your goals.
And the thing that impresses me the most in terms of the product's integrity and why I feel comfortable is they give this better health promise, which is you take Field of Greens not for very long.
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Dr. Gabor Mate is, in my view, one of the leading and most interesting experts in the world on questions of mental health, depression, addiction, and how the psychiatric and psychological fields are treating the explosion in these pathologies in the West.
He was born in Hungary in 1944, obviously while World War II was raging, and much of his childhood was shaped by experiences of being part of a Jewish family in Europe and the traumas of escaping the Holocaust.
He and his family ended up in Canada, in Vancouver, Where he became a medical doctor and spent years treating drug addicts, mental health pathologies, and ended up being known for a wide range of then pretty heterodox, even heretical views, which have gained more and more acceptance, including on the need to treat the root causes of depression and addiction, including psychological, emotional, connective and spiritual ones, rather than just seeing them as chemical imbalances to be corrected with medications.
In some narrow circles, including ours, he is sometimes known as the father of Aaron Maté, the outstanding independent journalist who is my friend and a friend of the show.
But in reality, in most normal places, he's become one of the most influential mental health and addiction experts in the world.
Albeit, as is true for most original thinkers, one still controversial in many sectors.
He has a new book out entitled, The Myth of Normal Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture.
We're excited to talk to him about that and many of the related issues on which he's long been working.
Dr. Maté, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today.
We are really thrilled to have you here.
Good evening.
Glenn, it's really nice to meet you in person.
You have a lot of admirers in our family, and I'm one of them, and so is my son Daniel, with whom I wrote this book you just mentioned.
Absolutely, yeah.
So I'm an admirer of the people in your family who work on a lot of different things.
I have so many questions for you, but before I get into those specific ones, let's just start with the book.
This is not the first book that you've written, and so you become well-known in a lot of the fields that I talked about there.
People see it on the screen.
It's called The Myth of Normal Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture.
You've been talking about a lot of things over the years, so what is it that you felt you had new to discuss in this book?
Well, basically in my previous books, I covered issues of mental health or physical health and how they relate to people's life experience.
But in this book, we actually look at it on a whole broad cultural level so that the Western medicine in which I was trained separates the mind from the body and the individual from the environment.
But scientifically speaking, Not to mention from the point of view of traditional wisdom, mind and body are not separable.
Any individual manifests something about the culture in which they live.
So what we consider normal in this society is very often very toxic, very unhealthy.
And to give you a very quick physical example, the more experiences of black, of racism, a black woman experiences, the greater her risk for asthma.
So the inflammation and narrowing of her air tubes is not simply a biological pathology in an isolated organ in the discrete individual.
It manifests as social malaise.
And the pathways have been beautifully worked out by modern science.
Unfortunately, this recognition of the unity of the individual and the environment is just not recognized in mainstream medical circles.
I want to give you a couple of statistics over many years just to kind of indicate for our viewers how long this increase in the use of antidepressant medication by your field has been going on.
So we found a Reuters article from 2009, so that's almost 15 years ago.
The title of which was Antidepressant Use Doubles in the United States, Study Finds.
And it said the use of antidepressant drugs in the United States doubled between 1996 and 2005, probably because of a mix of factors.
Researchers reported on Monday about 6% of people were prescribed an antidepressant in 1996, 13 million people.
This rose to more than 10 million This rose to by 10% or 27 million people by 2005, the researchers found, and then more updated data from the CDC says the same thing.
It just keeps increasing.
2015 to 2018, 13.2% of adults age 18 and over used antidepressant medication in the last 30 days.
age 18 and over used antidepressant medication in the last 30 days.
It's higher among women, 17.7%, and an increase with age overall in both sexes.
It's just every demographic field, every age, not just in the last few years, but for a couple of decades and now, it's just an explosion of these medications.
What is going on with that?
Well, in 2020, it was also reported that the diagnosis of anxiety went up 36% in one year in the United States.
And in 2017, 40 million adults now suffer from anxiety disorder.
And these medications, the so-called antidepressants, they're also prescribed for anxiety.
So the number of people that are being prescribed medication, not to mention all the kids, the millions who are being diagnosed with ADHD and being medicated with stimulants, The statistics for all mental health disorders are going up and up and up.
The number of Americans overdosing last year, you may be aware, more Americans died, almost twice as many Americans died in one year of drug overdoses than died in the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghan wars put together.
These numbers keep rising so there's something happening to the mental health of the population and the Response to the medical profession is to see it as a biological problem purely and to try and change the biology of the brain Now having said that the antidepressants or you might also call them anti-anxiety medications because they also work for anxiety they can help some people to confess I've taken them myself with benefit but They don't work as well as they're meant to work, number one, for a lot of people.
Number two, their rationale for their use is scientifically untenable, unproven.
And thirdly, the biggest problem is that even if they work, which sometimes they do, they're only dealing with the symptom, not with the underlying problem.
And our profession, my profession, is just not educated to deal with underlying dynamics that lead to what we call mental illness.
We just deal with the manifestation.
So we're actually missing the boat when it comes to treating people.
And some of that is due to the narrowness of the medical ideology.
Some of it is due to the very clever manipulation of research by the drug companies.
And in general, in the Western capitalist ideology, that people are individuals and their problems are individuals.
And let's not look at the broader social and traumatic issues that really cause mental illness.
So I know there's a lot going on here, and I want to talk about some of the other issues, but we just did a segment on the profit motive of war.
Obviously, during COVID, there was a lot of discussion about some of the profit motives driving a lot of early and rapid approval of certain medications that didn't end up working nearly as well as they said, things that people didn't have a good grasp on.
So in terms of profit motive, when it comes to dispensing these medications, there's usually two components of it.
One is it's a lot easier from a financial perspective to go to a doctor, and instead of delving into your childhood traumas and all your difficulties, they just write a prescription and send you on your way, and you go back two months later, and they check on your physical symptoms.
But also, there's obviously a big profit motive in the pharmaceutical companies selling these medications in massive numbers.
Is it too cynical to think that those are, even though there's other factors, and I want to talk about them, that those are significant factors in the explosion of the prescription of these medications?
Well, look, when I was a family physician, I drank the Kool-Aid, you know, for a while.
Somebody would come in with what I perceived as symptoms of depression, and I would blithely and very sincerely explain that what you got is a lack of serotonin in your brain.
Let's give you a medication that increases serotonin levels.
Serotonin is an important neurotransmitter, chemical messenger in the brain, and this will fix your problem.
And sometimes it did.
But what I was saying was scientific hogwash.
There's absolutely zero evidence that low serotonin levels cause depression.
And the ideology that it does was very cynically promoted by the pharmaceutical companies despite any lack of evidence.
And there was a very interesting guy called Robert Whitaker, who used to be head of medical publications at Harvard University.
And he wrote a book called Anatomy of an Epidemic.
And he also wrote for the Boston Globe, I think.
And he was a sincere believer in this hypothesis that lack of serotonin causes depression, until he started looking for the research.
And he couldn't find any.
And at first he couldn't believe his eyes.
And then he went to the experts and they said, Oh, yeah, there's no such evidence.
It's just a metaphor.
And so that metaphor really took hold in the medical profession.
And what research do medical professionals see was published in the medical journals, who funds the research, the pharmaceutical companies, who have a clear interest that Their product be sold and propagated and so to say that there's nothing cynical about it.
It's just how it works and wouldn't be the only example.
One of the things I think is so interesting is if even just as kind of a layperson, you go and read about the various most popular SSRIs and antidepressants, which I've done before when friends have gotten suggestions from doctors that they should take them or I've just been interested in it.
If you just read the basic literature, I don't mean the advanced medical literature you need a degree in order to understand, but just the basic literature, it will say Medical professionals have seen that it works because patients say it works, but people, they don't really have a good, clear idea scientifically about why it does, kind of what you were just saying, that there's really no proven explanation about why these reuptake inhibitors will actually cure depression.
Is it also the case that the question of risks, mid-term, long-term risks, are also very unknown?
Well, it's for sure that antidepressants, like any time you take a medication of any kind, to be fair, it's a bit of an experiment, because every person is physiologically discreet and different.
And so, when I prescribe a medication, I don't know what effects it's going to have.
It could have beneficial effects, or it could have side effects, or it could have both.
And the side effects tend to be minimized and the benefits tend to be maximized in the literature that the pharmaceutical companies send out.
And they sometimes select the research that they will publish and then the research that they will not publish, you know.
So, now having said that, I just want to be clear about it.
Sometimes they do work.
I've taken them and believe me, they've helped me.
But Again, the real problem is, first of all, they work not as frequently as we think they do.
Secondly, they do cause side effects more frequently than we like to talk about.
And number three, whether they work or not, they don't address the underlying dynamic and underlying problem.
So let me ask you about that though, because as I'm sure you know, this is a controversial topic because people have written against these medications in the way that you've done and others have done.
And there are people who swear by them.
You know, there are people who say, these saved my life.
These changed my life.
They have not, they didn't just have a temporary effect.
They have made my life livable.
Let's assume just for the moment that one of these medications actually does do that or some new medication coming down the pike will do that.
Namely, it will have these very visible effects that patients testify to, the life changes are visible.
And let's say they're more common than the current ones.
Instead of working 30% of the cases, they work in 70% of the cases.
And let's say they work more or less permanently.
Would you still say that it's still an inadequate solution if it doesn't treat the underlying problem?
Or is the only thing that matters that people have these terrible debilitating symptoms and as long as the medication is helping them, let's applaud it even if it doesn't help the underlying symptoms?
Why does it matter so much to help the underlying symptoms?
Well, first of all, just dealing with a fact doesn't deal with causes.
And as long as we're focusing only on the downstream alleviation of symptoms, we're not going to look at the broad social causes that actually are driving this epidemic of suicides, ADHD, addictions, depression, anxiety, and every other mental health disorder.
So it allows us to ignore what's really necessary to pay attention to, which is about social cultural factors.
Amongst other things we touch upon in our book.
So that's the one problem.
The other problem is nothing works permanently unless you keep taking it.
So that the antidepressants, they don't cure, they don't change the brain in the sense that once you stop them, now your brain is fixed.
No, it isn't.
As a matter of fact, it's sometimes very difficult to get out these medications.
There's significant withdrawal symptoms.
So people tend to stay on them for much longer than they need to just because coming off them can be so painful and so distressing.
And number three, Just the medications themselves, even when they do work, they don't give the person the capacity to free themselves from all the psychological dynamics and emotional hurts that drive their depression in the first place.
I mean, just look at the word depression itself.
Glenn, let me ask you, what does it mean to depress something?
It means to push it down.
What gets pushed down in depression is your emotions.
Why do people push their emotions?
Because when they were children, they had to push their emotions in order to speak.
So they become disconnected from themselves.
So what I'm saying is, we're not dealing with the underlying issue.
So I want to spend the bulk of my time that I have left on those underlying issues that is the focus of your book, which I read a good part of, and I'm very interested in that.
Just one more question, though, before I get to that, which is I want to just use an analogy.
It may seem off base, but I think the relevance will be evident in a second, which is there's a big debate now about trans people.
And there are these statistics showing that there's this huge increase in the number of people who are identifying as being trans.
And a lot of people say, oh, that's because there's a social pathology to it.
There's a contagion that the more you legitimize it, the more people seek out that self-identity to distinguish themselves, to give them social clout.
And usually, the answer to that that advocates of trans people will offer is no.
It's very similar to left-handedness.
For a long time, people were left-handedness was discouraged.
It was punished.
In private schools, people who use their left hand would be slapped and told to use the right hand.
And so the percentage of people who identified as left-handed, quite unsurprisingly, was very low.
Soon as the stigma was lifted and people realized it's not any better or any worse, the numbers of people who are left-handed in the population shot up, simply because the stigma's gone and now people come out and say, I'm left-handed, whereas before they didn't.
Is it possible that the significant increase in people identifying as being depressed or being diagnosed as depressed has to do with the elimination or reduction of the stigma around seeking out therapy, talking about your mental health problems?
Do you think that's at least part of it?
Well, theoretically that's possible, but when you look at the overwhelming numbers, People don't kill themselves because the stigma on suicide has been destroyed.
You know, people kill themselves because they're desperate.
And so I think in the numbers of people committing suicide, young people is going up relentlessly.
Children don't...
Scattered their minds and to quote the title of one of my earliest books on ADHD, children don't scatter their minds because it's legitimate socially to tune out.
They tune out because they're under stress and the tuning out becomes their coping mechanism so they don't suffer so much from the stress.
And same with depression.
People don't depress their emotions because all of a sudden it's permissible to talk about depression.
People push down their emotions Because the early environments forbid them to experience themselves authentically.
So, you know, I don't think that the removal of the stigma is actually responsible for the number of people now acknowledging anxiety and depression in their lives.
I think that has to do with the stress of modern society.
So let's talk about that, then.
That's what I want to focus on.
So just to give people a sense of what you were talking about, here's just the CDC data.
It's not for that long of a period of time.
It's for the last decade, basically.
And you can just see, this is the number of deaths due to suicide in the United States from the CDC.
And you can just see, from 2012 to 2022, the number pretty much goes up in a straight line.
The trend is just, I mean, it had a little bit drop one year, but that's kind of an aberration.
And you just see it going up this steep hill.
What is or what are the primary social, emotional, psychological, spiritual causes of the rise in depression, the rise in addiction, the rise in anxiety, the rise in suicide as you see it?
Well, addiction, properly understood, is not a disease or genetic really.
What it is, nor is it a free choice that somebody makes.
Addiction is a desperate attempt to escape human suffering.
And when you ask people, what do you get from your addiction, whether it's pornography or drugs or gambling or nicotine, caffeine, heroin, what does it give you?
They all get something like stress relief, numbing from emotional pain, separation from distress, a sense of control, sense of agency, sense of belonging, All of these things are essential human attributes and the addicted person just wants to feel like a normal human being.
And so my mantra is don't ask why the addiction, ask why the pain.
And if you want to understand why people are in emotional pain that they have to escape from, you have to look at their lives.
And if you look at their lives, whether you do it anecdotally or large scale studies statistically, it's trauma, it's adversity, it's stress, it's emotional pain.
Now, if you look at depression, again, the word itself means to push something down.
What gets pushed down are people's emotions, their legitimate anger, And for example, this happens when children are abused or they're just not seen, received, understood, attuned with, valued for who they are.
They have to pretend to be somebody else.
They have to suppress their emotions in order to be acceptable by their environment.
And in a society where the parenting environment itself, due to no fault of the parents, but because of the stresses of society, is becoming more and more volatile, more and more stressed, Families are more under conditions of isolation and pressure.
Fewer and fewer parents are able to be there for their kids the way they need to be, which means kids have to be pushing on their feelings, which means you're going to see more depression.
And if you look at the broad social causes, it's everything that you've often talked about on your program.
The rise in inequality, you can trace inequality and the rise in mental health problems in a society.
You can trace globalization, increasing isolation, and the rise in ADHD from Germany to Israel to China, the United States.
You can trace globalization, inequality, and the rise in obesity and diabetes.
And if you look at the social factors that stress people, they are the factors that are generated voluminously in a individualistic, aggressive, capitalistic society, which are loss of control, fear, conflict, uncertainty, and lack of information.
And when you put millions of people under such conditions, you're going to see a rise in all manner of pathologies.
I want to share a little anecdote with you because sometimes I use this as insight into some of the things I think about this.
I'm interested in what you think about it because we're talking about I realize, obviously, as a doctor who's treated individuals, understanding the individual is crucial, right?
So that's a little bit anathema to talking about these broad societal trends.
And yet, at the same time, if you're looking at these charts and you see this huge increase, there must be things in the society that everybody has in common or that's at least a factor, a frequent factor in a lot of these cases.
I lived in New York for 15 years and I was a lawyer.
I was working in Manhattan.
It was an extremely high-pressed, high social, high stress lifestyle.
I remember I lived in the same building in a condominium for eight years.
I never once spoke To any of my neighbors, even though we would often leave the apartment at the same time to go to work, you would just look straight ahead.
If anyone exchanged any sorts of small talk, you would call the police.
You would think the person was weird.
And I remember as well, if I was in an ATM line and somebody entered the wrong password and had to start over, I'd want to murder them because they wasted seven seconds of my time that I now can't use to maximize my economic utility.
And when I moved to Brazil, everything was different.
You get into a line of people in a pharmacy or in a grocery store, and someone gets to the front of the line, and even though there are six people behind them, they just start chatting about their families and about their kids.
And at first, when I started living there, I was gonna have an aneurysm.
I wanted to kill them.
How could someone be so selfish?
And then I started kind of realizing, wait a minute, this is like...
Human connection.
This is communicating with other human beings about your life and about your family the way we've always lived in small villages where we've known people and we didn't live in these big concrete jungles where we were expected to stare straight ahead and never talk to anybody.
And I'm wondering whether you think that some of these changes and just how industrialized society has become, people don't marry as early, they don't start families, they're expected to focus on careers, which are often very soul draining, they don't have religion, that they're just getting more and more isolated without any kind of human or spiritual connection.
Do you think, societally speaking, those are big factors?
Well, first of all, I do think so, but never mind what I think.
That's just what the science and the research actually shows.
So that loneliness and isolation has become a modern epidemic, and the number of people who are lonely goes up.
Doubles like every 10 years it seems according to the statistics and loneliness Statistically is a significant factor for illness.
I'm talking about physical illness as well as Smoking 15 cigarettes a day and those are just statistics now as you suggest By the way, let me tell you in an anecdote.
Okay, so I was visiting Costa Rica some years ago and Everybody smiles at you and says hello.
Hola, senor.
I'm sure you've seen this.
And I'm in this shop, little shop, buying a cold drink.
And this woman, this stranger, says to me, hola, senor.
And I don't respond.
She comes up, puts her face in my face, and said, Hola, senor!
Wake up!
I'm talking to you!
And I said, Hola, senora!
And so that's how it works.
And as you suggested, it's not how it evolved.
For millions of years, our hominin ancestors and for hundreds of thousands of years, our own species lived in small band hunter-gatherer groups until Historically speaking, the blink of an eye ago.
If our species has been around for one hour, I mean, if you can, that 200,000 years that our species has been on Earth can be condensed to an hour.
Until five minutes ago, we lived in small band communities where everybody knew each other else.
And that's our evolutionary nature.
And that's what we expect.
And that's what our nervous system expects.
So to live in a culture that usually isolates and turns people against each other and makes them suspicious of each other and stresses them and destroys families and stresses communities is this is why we call them the subtitle of the book.
trauma illness and hanging in a toxic culture.
It's a toxic culture precisely because it denies the essential human needs that we as a species have evolved over eons.
And this is totally unnatural.
It's considered the norm, but it's so unnatural as to make us sick.
And that's what's happening.
And that needs to be recognized on the political level, on the social level, on the legal level, on the educational level, and for God's sakes, on the medical level.
And it is not, despite all the science and despite all the wisdom that points us in the right direction.
Just a couple more questions.
At the very start of the COVID pandemic when, you know, I think most people didn't really know what we were dealing with.
There was a lot of horror stories coming out of not just China, but Iran and Italy and Spain.
I remember I interviewed two mental health experts.
One, Andrew Solomon, who wrote a very well-celebrated book on depression in 2002, and the other, Johan Hari, who has written about addiction and depression.
And I remember being, I don't think I've ever been so alarmed before by interviews I've done because both of them are saying essentially, look, the mental health pathologies in the West, the warning signs are already blinking as red as they can possibly be blinking.
If we are now about to enter into a period of time where forced isolation and lockdowns are needed, and at the time we were still talking about things like flattening the curve, it seemed kind of temporary, I don't think anyone thought it was going to be a year or two years where people are going to just be very kind of separated from their lives.
Which ended up happening.
I remember being really scared by them and always thinking, even though, of course, COVID policy is very controversial and without taking a specific position, I always felt like the cost from all those, the mental health costs, were never really fully appreciated, in part because whenever you have an immediate danger of something you think is going to kill you, these longer term costs seem more like luxuries that you can kind of put to the side.
Do you think That they were right to be as alarmist as they did.
And how would you characterize the way in which the COVID isolation and lockdowns ended up exacerbating these problems?
Yeah, well, first of all, there's no doubt that the COVID isolation increased family violence, child abuse, addictive behaviors, and so on.
So, I mean, retrospectively, that's just how it happened.
So, insofar as they were worried about that, they were quite right to worry about it.
In the beginning, I was kind of a skeptic and I said, well, only later on when we look back are we going to know what was right and what wasn't right, what was done properly, what was overdone or not done.
Then for a while, I kind of jumped on the social isolation bandwagon, thinking along with my infectious diseases colleagues, I'm not infected by my medical colleagues and infectious diseases, that okay, we have to do everything we can to You know, stop the spread of this virus.
In retrospect, I go back to my original skeptical position and we paid a huge price.
We paid a huge price by the policies that we really thought were necessary at the time, but we did not consider the broad social costs and You know, increasingly the debate is going to attract more research.
When you look at countries like Sweden that didn't have such a strict enforcement and they had a more open policy, They didn't suffer more than others.
So I think that's a conversation that we need to have, not just to do a retrospective on the past, but also to guide us in the future.
But certainly the social, psychological impacts of what we were doing were not, did not form A properly accredited part of the conversation, it should have.
And to the extent that Andrew Solomon and Johan Hari, who Johan is actually a friend, they raised that alarm, they were quite right to do so.
Last question, and it's about a controversial topic, but one that you have a lot of experience working on directly with patients, which is the best approach to drug addiction.
I think there was a kind of trend in the United States and the West to stop thinking about drug addiction and drug use as a crime and treat it more as a health problem, to be opposed to the imprisonment of people, as cities are starting to be more filled with People who are clearly terrible addicts and there's a perception that they're creating a dangerous environment or causing crime.
I think there's unfortunately a reversal on that, where people are now more turning to punitive measures to put people into prison because of it.
Just two quick questions.
One, on an ethical issue, if you begin with the premise, as you did, that drug addiction happens because of a spiritual deprivation or disease, does it make any sense to put those people into prison?
And then secondly, what does the data show about what happens if you treat drug addicts as criminals and stick them into incarceration?
Well, I mean, the historical evidence is irrefutable.
The so-called war on drugs, which has been waged with ferocity now internationally and led and chair-led and sometimes imposed by the United States is leading to more and more people being addicted and more and more people dying of addiction.
I mean, Nancy Reagan had her totally inconceived and illiterate program, I should say, Just Say No.
How successful was that?
How successful it was is that now we have many more people dying of overdoses than they did in those days.
I mean, those punitive and prohibitive and discouraging approaches simply don't work.
Well, they do work.
They work to keep the prison industrial complex going.
They keep police forces well-armed and well-endowed.
They keep the justice system or the so-called justice system It's not called, in my view, as I pointed in this book, it's not called the criminal justice system for no reason.
It is a criminal justice system because it punishes people for being hurt and turning to painkillers to soothe their pains.
So, you know, it's utter nonsense.
Now, I was the physician in North America's first supervised injection site.
Here in Vancouver, where people brought in their illegal drugs, but they weren't arrested.
They could be given clean needles so that they don't infect each other with HIV, Hepatitis C, sterile water, a tourniquet.
And if they overdose, they'd be resuscitated.
And many lives were saved.
And so that's called harm reduction.
And some people say harm reduction coddles the drug addict.
No, it doesn't.
What I would ask opponents of harm reduction is to tell me what's better that people should inject with dirt and needles using puddle water from the back alleys or should they use sterile water and given human contact which would encourage them to seek help and to move on to other treatment approaches.
The problem is, is that the harm reduction approach, which is now being adopted, thank God, in more and more American cities, still exists in a context of hostility and severe judgment or probiomasticization of drug addicts, which has not only its medical aspects, but also its social and racial aspects, as we know.
And furthermore, the average physician, I mean this is shocking to say, that despite all the evidence linking drug use specifically with addictions in general, whether again from shopping to pornography to eating to gambling, whatever it is, linking to trauma, despite all the scientific evidence, statistically, and despite all the scientific evidence showing how the physiology of the brain is actually
Programmed by early childhood experience so painful childhood experiences lead to different brains that are more prone to addiction despite the scientific evidence That's not even vaguely controversial the average physician To this day does not hear a single lecture on childhood trauma so the gap between the science and the evidence on the one hand and practice is Huge and this is true
Not uniformly, but frequently enough, even in the addiction treatment sector.
Well, Dr. Maté, as I said at the beginning, there's a lot of things I find so interesting about your work.
One of them from a media perspective is that you've really been able to find a receptive audience With programs and people across the political spectrum, left, right, and everything in between, which is very rare these days, and I think the reason for that is because you're able to speak with a lot of compassion about the individual from your work and just your approach, but also you offer this societal critique about a lot of the Thank you so much for all your great work and for taking the time to talk to me about it tonight.
a lot of these problems that I think do appeal to a lot of people as well.
And I look at this book, The Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, as kind of the culmination of that part of your work.
It's by you and Daniel Mate, and I really hope people who found this conversation interesting, and I know I'm among them, will pick up this book because it expands on a lot of these scenes.
Thank you so much for all your great work and for taking the time to talk to me about it tonight.
I really appreciate it.
Well, thanks for your work and certainly thank you for having me and giving me this platform to speak my truth.
Absolutely.
Hope to talk to you again.
Have a great evening.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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