Nov. 7, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:02:13
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| You know, I did a local show here on Channel 11, on Fox 11, all through the pandemic. | ||
| We were doing updates every day on what was going on. | ||
| And we had somebody from the school board come in, you know, a week in, when they decided they were going to close the schools. | ||
| And I was like, how did you arrive at this decision? | ||
| Who were the physicians that advised you? | ||
| Who were the experts? | ||
| We just decided to do it. | ||
| It's like, Why? | ||
| How long? | ||
| What are the consequences? | ||
| How are you? | ||
| You should see now the data. | ||
| There's this group called Gaggle that documents the data of adverse events from the use of screens in terms of sexting, access to porn, violent and suicidal sort of musing online. | ||
| It's like up 400 percent. | ||
| And it's up in elementary age as well as middle school. | ||
|
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[MUSIC] | |
| All right, I'm in studio with a live, a real live human being. | ||
| According to the paperwork, Dr. Drew Pinsky. | ||
| It is good to see you, my friend. | ||
| It is good to see you. | ||
| And to be fair, I insisted on this. | ||
| I did. | ||
| You were like, no, we'll do it by Zoom. | ||
| I'm like, no, I don't want to do it by Zoom anymore. | ||
| I'm tired of this. | ||
| I've seen this great studio. | ||
| I want to be in it with you. | ||
| I want to see you. | ||
| It's good to see you. | ||
| We are less than six feet apart, so we're risking everything right now. | ||
| You're risking everything. | ||
| I'm as immune as I can possibly be. | ||
| You've had COVID like 18 times. | ||
| I've had COVID. | ||
| I've had the injection. | ||
| I've had the vaccine. | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| And I do something that no one does. | ||
| I'm following a very sophisticated antibody screen with my neutralizing antibodies and my B cell function. | ||
| So I can tell you categorically, if I get COVID, it'd be reportable. | ||
| Do you feel like your life's work has led to this moment? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| I never expected any of this. | ||
| Nor do I really welcome it, to be fair. | ||
| But I will, you know, I took the Johnson & Johnson vaccine myself and I had a nasty reaction to it. | ||
| Really bad. | ||
| I woke up with a sudden black eye. | ||
| This is called a raccoon's eye, which is the presenting symptom of transverse sinus thrombosis, which is the dreaded complication of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. | ||
| I'm looking in the mirror going, oh, goddammit. | ||
| Am I going to have a transverse sinus thrombosis? | ||
| And nothing, so. | ||
| And nothing. | ||
| So, did you choose the Johnson & Johnson one intentionally? | ||
| I did, I did. | ||
| I sort of picked it early for two reasons. | ||
| One, I react horribly to viruses, horribly to vaccines. | ||
| So I kind of just wanted one vaccine. | ||
| Silly me. | ||
| Now I need another. | ||
| But I was hoping just to get by with one. | ||
| Also, I like the idea of a sort of an old-fashioned platform. | ||
| Nothing against Moderna. | ||
| I might even take the Moderna now, or the mRNA vaccines. | ||
| But I just thought, eh, I react to everything. | ||
| Better I use something old-fashioned. | ||
| So before we get to the book, which I'm holding in my hand, so I'll put it down for a moment. | ||
|
unidentified
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Let's just do the COVID stuff. | |
| You've got antibodies. | ||
| You did Johnson and Johnson. | ||
| You don't have a problem with the mRNA. | ||
| Is there anything that people should know about the mRNA? | ||
| We're hearing so much conflicting stuff. | ||
| And I had Dr. Brian Keating on my show last week talking about that people just don't trust experts anymore. | ||
| And in many cases, it's the expert's fault. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Particularly the CDC's fault. | ||
| Anybody associated with public health or CDC has created vaccine hesitancy. | ||
| They've created it. | ||
| They've done everything wrong. | ||
| They should have been, from the beginning, wide open. | ||
| Here's our thinking. | ||
| Here's our concerns. | ||
| Here's the debate we have behind closed doors. | ||
| All that is how you get people who are resistant to loosen up and come on board. | ||
| You treat them like intelligent people who need to be reasoned with, and you give them all the information. | ||
| You don't say, you can't handle the truth. | ||
| You can't handle the truth. | ||
| I'd become resistant. | ||
| What's bizarre to me is we learned how to do this during the HIV epidemic. | ||
| I don't know if I ever told you this. | ||
| I got involved in radio because in 1983, one Anthony Fauci, who was my hero at the time, was telling us young physicians that we had to get out there and educate and change behavior because we couldn't get people to stop having sex and passing this virus. | ||
| And I thought, oh, I took it very seriously. | ||
| And we learned across that pandemic with a 100% fatality rate. | ||
| It was the darkest, the darkest hours. | ||
| We learned that the way you change behaviors is with narratives and information and showing the consequences of people's choices, a little humor, a little music. | ||
| That's how you change behavior. | ||
| Not me in a box, pointing my finger at somebody. | ||
| It's the opposite. | ||
| Right, so I've heard you talk about your experience with Fauci then, and you've been, I think, very fair to Fauci. | ||
| I would say almost overly fair, like to me. | ||
| I've been overly fair because I've been through five pandemics with him, right? | ||
| He was really my man during HIV, MERS, SARS-1, H1N1. | ||
| H1N1 was a terrible pandemic. | ||
| You don't even know what happened. | ||
| That's what I kept saying during the outbreak of this. | ||
| I was like, that was bad, and you're worrying about this one. | ||
| Why didn't we have a moderate reaction to that one at least? | ||
| Why this reaction? | ||
| Anyway, so I figured he had been adulterated by what everyone gets adulterated with, which is the tribalism of our time, and I thought he would revert to the mean. | ||
| I thought his overall function has always been, like, his judgment has been awesome, and I assume I still, to this day, believe we'll see a reversion to the mean in terms of him looking okay. | ||
| However, he finally did something that upset me. | ||
| Which was, I don't know if you remember, in front of Congress multiple times, whenever they would ask him about the gain of function or funding. | ||
| Yeah, we've covered it. | ||
| He would just be like, I'm confused. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| Two days ago, he goes, well, you know, we did fund change viral function, but we didn't, not this, but we were changing virus. | ||
| Right, that was the word. | ||
| He said change of. | ||
| Why didn't you tell us? | ||
| That's how you create vaccine hesitancy. | ||
| Now it's like, okay, I can't trust you. | ||
| You knew what we were asking. | ||
| Answer the damn question. | ||
| Be open about this. | ||
| Trust the American people to be able to digest what you're telling them and give them a recommendation and then move on. | ||
| So do you think in essence he lied under oath to Rand Paul? | ||
| I don't really have an opinion about that so much as to say... Because change of seems to be the word that he's confusing. | ||
| You can't do that right now. | ||
| You've got to be open and honest. | ||
| You cannot obfuscate. | ||
| This is dissembling. | ||
| You cannot, whether it's, you know, lying or, you know, Worthy of sort of further investigation. | ||
| I have no opinion. | ||
| It's dissembling. | ||
| It's obfuscating. | ||
| You can't be that way now. | ||
| That's how you create vaccine hesitancy. | ||
| I've gotten to the point now where I'm telling people your problem. | ||
| I've talked to lots of vaccine hesitant people. | ||
| Your problem is you don't know who to trust. | ||
| Here's what I want you to do. | ||
| I want you to find, if it's for the kids, find a pediatrician, if it's you, find an internist that you trust and you sit down with that person and you too make that medical decision the way we're supposed to make all fucking medical decisions. | ||
| The fact that anybody has an opinion about what a doctor does with his patients is offensive and disgusting. | ||
| The fact that anybody has an opinion about what Joe Rogan doctor does with him, that's disgusting. | ||
| Now, other physicians can have opinions about it, and we can discuss it professionally, but for people in the world to interfere with that relationship, that is disgusting. | ||
| And why people aren't more upset about the adulteration of the relationship between doctors and patients, I'm... | ||
| Gobsmacked. | ||
| Yeah, no, I can see it. | ||
| Look, I know you pretty well off camera, too. | ||
| I'm pretty sure I've never heard Dr. Drew or my friend Drew say the F-bomb before. | ||
| I'm upset. | ||
| So I get it. | ||
| Not that I don't say it. | ||
| You put a pretty party on here. | ||
| I have my best behavior. | ||
| I do, all right. | ||
| So to that end, I mean, I assume, I've heard you talk about it a little bit. | ||
| Are you 100% against mandates as a general rule? | ||
|
unidentified
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To what you just said. | |
| You want people to make decisions, but they're not. | ||
| One thing I've learned about medicine is you never say always and never. | ||
| You just never do that. | ||
| So, am I against mandates? | ||
| Generally, yes. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I'm against the idea that this... Now, I understand that we need to do things to urge populations to do certain things. | ||
| I don't see where it's that... Look, I was in France. | ||
| You've been to France recently? | ||
| I've only been to France once. | ||
| It was in 1997. | ||
| I suggest you go back there now because it's very interesting what's happening there. | ||
| What's happening there, they have the same mandates we have essentially. | ||
| They apply it very differently. | ||
| When you go to the Louvre, you can show your EU pass or go over there and get a test if you'd like. | ||
| Whatever you want. | ||
| Or you can show us your antibodies from your natural immunity. | ||
| Rational. | ||
| There's a mandate, but a rational application of a mandate. | ||
| And the really interesting thing is the youth are fighting like crazy. | ||
| So 18 to 28 year olds are in the streets by the thousands. | ||
| Yeah, you don't see that on CNN. | ||
| Vive la liberté is their call. | ||
| My French is pretty good and I spoke to a lot of them because I was intrigued. | ||
| I'm like, young people not asking for more mask wearing? | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| They were furious and their position was, look, You've educated us, rightly, that this thing is not a major risk to us. | ||
| Now you're mandating us put something in our bodies? | ||
| We may choose to do it, and you can help us make that decision if you think it's so. | ||
| Mandating it? | ||
| No. | ||
| And it's echoes of 1790. | ||
| I'm telling you, they bring up the same language as 1790. | ||
| They raise their fists. | ||
| And they've got a history of beheading over there. | ||
| Well, I don't think this is that kind of mob action yet, but that's going on here. | ||
| It's called cancel culture. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I remember I was talking to a woman at the ticket counter as I was leaving, and I thought, no, she's about 25, I'm going to bring this up. | ||
| And I brought it up, started talking to her, and this big, she got up from behind the counter, she goes, Viva Liberté! | ||
| It's so important! | ||
| Do you understand what they're doing to us? | ||
| And I thought, wow, 25-year-olds, this is their idea now, as opposed to a study that was done at Stanford. | ||
| where they looked at the irrationality around signaling and masks. | ||
| This researcher went up to Stanford, looked at Stanford students on bicycles. | ||
| What percentage were wearing helmets? | ||
| What percentage were wearing masks? | ||
| 60% mask, 20% helmet. | ||
| Hilarious. | ||
| This virus does not transmit out of doors. | ||
| It does not transmit out of doors. | ||
| Even the Delta really doesn't transmit out of doors. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| That is an insanity. | ||
| Okay, so there's a lot there. | ||
| So first, are you shocked we're here in LA? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's beautiful out every day. | ||
| Yes, unfortunately we are here for now. | ||
| You almost ran for governor, by the way. | ||
| I don't know if you wanted that to be... I was in a contemplative phase, yes. | ||
| I was kind of pushing you, too. | ||
| Yes, you were. | ||
| But it didn't happen. | ||
| Probably when I was here was as close I came to making a serious effort. | ||
| I think I called Governor Schwarzenegger the next day or something to see what his thoughts were. | ||
| And he pushed me even further. | ||
| I was surprised. | ||
| I thought he was talking me out of it. | ||
| What stopped you at the end? | ||
| For the record, because I know everyone's listening, this was also before Larry Elder got involved. | ||
| I started talking to people about going to what they called the money class, which was a shocking thing to hear. | ||
| Already my naive brain was exploding. | ||
| But it turned out I needed some radiation for my prostate cancer. | ||
| So I was looking down a few weeks of radiation. | ||
| It would interrupt everything. | ||
| We were still gonna go to France. | ||
| And I was like, something's telling me this is not the right time. | ||
| And that was that. | ||
| And the radiation is fine. | ||
| It's a relatively perfunctory treatment in the kind of prostate cancer I have. | ||
| And it's, like all cancers, chronic illnesses that you can live with for decades. | ||
| You are a true television professional, because when you have to make a point, you go to the camera instead. | ||
| When it's an important point, trust me, I'm here. | ||
| Okay, so that aside, here in L.A., When I go to the supermarket, they still want you to put the mask on, obviously. | ||
| To me, I'm looking at people. | ||
| It doesn't seem as if anyone is even thinking anymore. | ||
| They're all walking around. | ||
| Everyone has this sort of glossed over look. | ||
| They're wearing it in the parking lot. | ||
| And it's like we don't even talk. | ||
| Why isn't Garcetti giving a speech every now and again? | ||
| We're thinking about maybe taking the mask off. | ||
| Like the ship has sailed. | ||
| It's like it's over. | ||
| I know. | ||
| The way to manage, another way to manage vaccine hesitancy is with rewards. | ||
| Hey, everybody get vaccinated. | ||
| If I can get to 80%, I'm going to get rid of these mandates. | ||
| We're going to open up the schools. | ||
| The kids, I mean, just the kids. | ||
| I did a, I did a, you know, do you understand there's a, there's a several pediatric psychiatric associations and hospital associations have declared a national mental health emergency on kids. | ||
| And somebody was asking me, I was lecturing a teacher's group, and they're like, what can you do, what can you do to help kids? | ||
| I said, look, what they need is contact, they need you in your presence, they need you to be on their level, listening, and reflect, this thing called reflective functioning, where you use your face to reflect the emotions that you see in the children. | ||
| It's extremely It's what we call building affect regulation. | ||
| It gets into the brain in a way that words do not. | ||
| And I was thinking about what I normally recommend for this, and one of the teachers goes, but the masks. | ||
| And I thought, oh my God. | ||
| I'm at a loss for words. | ||
| What do you think we're doing, really, to the kids at that age? | ||
| All we know is the numbers. | ||
| You should look at the numbers. | ||
| Suicide, depression, substance use, it's going crazy. | ||
| I mean, look, if you're 18, you're 8 years old, or 12 years old, or 14 years old, and you start, every time you turn on the TV or get on the internet, you see your parents are in danger, your family's going to be destroyed. | ||
| Of course! | ||
| You know, that late adolescence, early childhood, excuse me, late childhood, early adolescence is a very grandiose phase where you believe everything's going to happen to you. | ||
| That's normal. | ||
| The way to destroy their psyche is with what we've been doing. | ||
| So all right, so backing up a little bit to Fauci for a second. | ||
| So I've been covering this a lot, and I always try to say I'm not trying to impugn his motives, but I am starting to. | ||
| I honestly am. | ||
| To me, he has bungled this to the point of almost ridiculousness, like literally at the height of it, telling us all to wear masks, but then emailing his friends who were going on vacation to say the masks you buy at stores don't work, and actually, then the video came out later, him telling someone else on PBS years ago that masks actually make you touch your face more, but then he's telling people to double mask. | ||
| There's been such a series of crazy things that it leaves someone like me that's fairly well-educated. | ||
| I talk to people like you, and I watch him, and I think, the ship has sailed with this guy. | ||
| Public health definitely, you know, whatever public health official has just boggled, bungled this entirely. | ||
| Again, it was astonishing to me. | ||
| I don't know why they did what they did. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| They defied everything we've learned about changing behaviors in a pandemic, and I don't know why they did. | ||
| I don't get it, but there was something you were saying. | ||
| Oh, so here's the deal with the mask thing, right? | ||
| So, Influenza. | ||
| Well, you know the whole story about where the lockdowns came from, from a high school student. | ||
| Yes, right. | ||
| It was something that was never studied, right? | ||
| It was sort of a joke. | ||
| Although I saw her father online a little while ago doubling down that she saved millions of lives. | ||
| It was the right thing to do. | ||
| So he who published the paper that said local lockdowns for influenza is a good idea. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| National lockdowns for a respiratory virus? | ||
| We have no idea. | ||
| Totally different transmission rates. | ||
| You mean that people in rural Montana maybe should have a different reaction than people living in midtown Manhattan? | ||
|
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What? | |
| I don't understand what you're talking about. | ||
| Is there a difference between those two populations? | ||
| So the mask with influenza, we do recommend you don't wear it because the hand is the primary transmission unit. | ||
| So getting hands away from the face is our primary goal. | ||
| So he was applying the principles of influenza, thinking this was going to be like influenza. | ||
| I would defend him on that. | ||
| What I don't defend is the theater around mask wearing. | ||
| What is the efficacy of masks? | ||
| Do you ever hear anybody talking about that? | ||
| No, we don't anymore. | ||
| Okay, and do you have any studies about this, do you think? | ||
| Okay, there have been two huge studies. | ||
| One was the Danish study and there was tremendous excitement around this study. | ||
| We couldn't wait to see it published and find out how well these masks work. | ||
| Suddenly, everyone starts passing on the publication, JAMA. | ||
| Ah, I can see where this is going. | ||
| It's finally published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, right? | ||
| It's published and it shows about a 15 to 20 percent efficacy of mask wearing. | ||
| Which was not zero, not zero, but not 80 and not 100 percent. | ||
| It's 15 to 20 percent. | ||
| Then there was a huge study that came out of Bangladesh that was highly criticized, but not a bad study. | ||
| Showed, again, 15 to 20 percent in that range, maybe a little less. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| That seems what masks do. | ||
| People behave as though they're 100%. | ||
| And wearing them outdoors makes zero sense. | ||
| None. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| But indoors, it's like, OK, we want to do something. | ||
| But to treat people like they're some sort of wielding a murderous weapon by not wearing the mask, again, we need to educate people about the reality of masks. | ||
| You're better off just distancing. | ||
| That's significantly better. | ||
| Anyway, it's just a signal at this point. | ||
| So when you talk, when you mention what happened at the Louvre, and okay, so you have to have a test, or you can be tested right there, or they check your antibodies, like that all sort of intellectually does make sense to me, but where I'm at at this point is... I think emotionally, it's a lot more pleasant. | ||
| Because they literally are like, what do you want? | ||
| What do you want to do? | ||
| But I would give you something even more emotionally pleasant to me, which would be if you've been vaccinated, go in and if you want to wear a mask, wear a mask. | ||
| That's kind of the way it is in New York. | ||
| No, I know it. | ||
| It's just fine in New York. | ||
| I mean, I was shocked when I was in New York a couple of weeks ago. | ||
| They scan, they put a wristband on you? | ||
| They were barely doing it. | ||
| They were barely doing it when I was there. | ||
| See, when I went there, it was right when it had started and they were doing it. | ||
| And they're like, take your mask off. | ||
| We'll make the staff wear it, but you get out of here. | ||
| But how worried are you about the conditioning of it? | ||
| Whether you send people to go check your antibodies, or let me look at this. | ||
| It's what Adam Carolla calls crate training. | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| We've all been crate trained. | ||
| Yes, that is what I am far more concerned about. | ||
| The mind virus more than the COVID virus. | ||
| I worry about it. | ||
| I've always been a stream, moderate, middle, everything. | ||
| And I think I was a little more liberal, but the liberal kind of left me somehow. | ||
| I know the feeling. | ||
| Yeah, and it makes me seem more right. | ||
| I am not, trust me. | ||
| I mean, I spent decades fighting the right because they were the ones not letting me talk about HPV vaccines and mourning after contraception. | ||
| I mean, I was really in conflict with it. | ||
| Now, it seems like it's coming from the other side, which is astonishing. | ||
| Don't worry, my audience gets it. | ||
| It's very weird, it's very weird. | ||
| But we'll have shit, I lost my train of thought. | ||
| Well, the mind virus basically. | ||
| So Adam was just saying how we've all been crate trained and that it's complete now. | ||
| The crate training is complete and they don't have to worry about it. | ||
| I'm generally mystified. | ||
| I know what I was going to say. | ||
| I'm generally mystified by people that want orders from without and the people that want to issue those orders. | ||
| That's mysterious to me. | ||
| I don't understand why Gavin Newsom would feel okay about this. | ||
| I talked to a governor, a friend of mine in another state, who called me and said they want me to put a mask on. | ||
| That's not my job. | ||
| I don't tell people. | ||
| That's not government. | ||
| That's not what I should be doing. | ||
| He was eventually persuaded to do it because the pressure got so high. | ||
| Now I lost my train of thought again. | ||
| This is what COVID did to me. | ||
| It gave me some weird stuff. | ||
| I have more train of thought trouble than aging alone used to give me. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Well, we're talking about the crate training aspect of it and that basically everyone is just bowing to demands of people who oddly want to demand things of them. | ||
| So this is the other thing I was going to say, which is one thing that I have changed on, even though I've stayed in the middle and I'm still the same ideas I've always had, I never was aware of how much I valued freedom. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| and how much it needed to be protected. | ||
| I'd heard about that, I'd laughed about that when military people talked about it, | ||
| I literally made fun of it. | ||
| And all of a sudden, that has become a vivid reality to me. | ||
| That freedom is something to be cherished and to be defended, and we better pay attention to that. | ||
| And the masking is the opposite of that. | ||
| Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't mask. | ||
| I'm saying you should not be taken by the mind virus You should be doing it because you've decided to make a difference for that 15% effect, and you're doing the best you can, not because somebody told you to do it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| You see the difference? | ||
| Right, so of course. | ||
| So the other part then, I would say the next extension of that, is the thing that I'm worried about, which is that we are now othering I don't think we sitting in this room, but mainstream is now othering people who are making medical choices for themselves to the point where they're basically saying you're diseased, which by the way, if you haven't been vaccinated, it doesn't mean you have COVID, but you're diseased and you're going to potentially come kill me, which is an odd anti-vax statement, by the way, if you believe the vaccines work. | ||
| But can you just talk a little bit about the psychology about that? | ||
| Because, you know, one thing that's popped up now is like, you could sort of see how the Nazis did horrible things now when you other people in a society. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, let me actually write stuff down as I'm talking to you. | ||
| Yeah, we can make that happen. | ||
| What's happening is I'm having so many thoughts at once. | ||
| We can make that happen. | ||
| So there's one form of othering that I spotted earlier that I knew was going to be a problem, and that was what they were doing in New York, when you have to have a vaccine to go to a restaurant, to go to anywhere, essentially. | ||
| In New York City, there was a high degree of vaccine hesitancy in African Americans. | ||
| And I thought, what is this? | ||
| You're creating an outgroup based on historical treatment of a population due to their race. | ||
| There's a very compelling reason black people, black folk, have distrust of the medical system. | ||
| Mishandled throughout much of history. | ||
| God knows on the mental health side it's even been worse. | ||
| And I'm not just talking about the Tuskegee experiment. | ||
| I'm talking generally medicine. | ||
| Just look at how we treated the cocaine pandemic. | ||
| We treated that as a criminal problem. | ||
| Thank God I did not. | ||
| I treated lots of cocaine addicts and I treated them as people with an illness. | ||
| The way we did with the opiate epidemic. | ||
| The point being that you create an out-group based on a historical treatment of a population due to their skin color, and now you're telling them because of that you're out. | ||
| That is as racist as you can possibly be. | ||
| And it's creating an out-group. | ||
| So now we create an out-group there. | ||
| Out-group in the unvaccinated who get sick, they shouldn't get access to treatment. | ||
| Have you seen that? | ||
| No, this is extraordinary now. | ||
| That means that anybody who makes a bad decision that has an impact on their medical condition should be prevented from accessing medical care. | ||
| What happens to my patients? | ||
| The heroin addicts? | ||
| The alcoholics? | ||
| They're all making bad choices all the time. | ||
| Just die? | ||
| No access for you? | ||
| In fact, you'd have to close emergency rooms because the emergency rooms are filled with people who are doing stupid shit. | ||
| That's mostly what's going on. | ||
| People in accidents, people using drugs, people not taking their meds, people... I mean, it's mostly what it is. | ||
| And so all those people no longer get access to medical care. | ||
| Is that what we're saying? | ||
| It's also against the Hippocratic Oath. | ||
| Isn't that the number one thing? | ||
| I'm gonna talk to Arthur Kaplan on Monday on my streaming show, and this is what I wanna get into with him. | ||
| He's a medical ethicist, he's a cornel, and he took the position that it was okay not to treat, I believe that's what he concluded, it was okay for doctors not to treat unvaccinated people, which I'm like, I just can't even. | ||
| The premise being that this is such an extraordinary moment. | ||
| Look, I was presented with treating, there was a horrible, this is way in the late 80s, We had a horrible shootout. | ||
| It was an Asian gang in a part of San Marino, Monterey Park. | ||
| Really an ambush on a group of officers. | ||
| These guys were animals. | ||
| Some of them were shot and came to our ER. | ||
| I ethically had to treat them. | ||
| I didn't want to. | ||
| I thought about not doing it. | ||
| It was my obligation to treat those guys. | ||
| I had all kinds of horrible thoughts about them, but I treated them. | ||
| I did my job. | ||
| And the fact that we turn away from that is bizarre. | ||
| So we have, based on race, based on behavior, which is how you get bad medical outcomes, and then it's hardening them, right? | ||
| It's making them into a tribe, and it's hardening their resistance by telling them they're dumb and ignorant and don't know what they're doing. | ||
| All of them. | ||
| I talked to lots of them. | ||
| And it's always the same story, which is, I don't know who to trust. | ||
| I don't know where to get good information. | ||
| And like I told you, I've been telling them to get together with a doctor now. | ||
| Get together with your doctor, someone you trust, and make that decision together, the way medicine has always been practiced. | ||
| And by the way, I will give you credit here where it's due, which is that you were one of the first people out of the gate, probably a month in before any, when everybody was just going along with group thing. | ||
| Shut everything down! | ||
| Shut everybody down! | ||
| And you were one of the first. | ||
| Do you know how many weeks that was in, basically? | ||
| It was immediate. | ||
| Well, it was actually during the Wuhan outbreak. | ||
| We had barely gotten to Italy yet. | ||
| I was saying, stop using the word staggering. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| It's not staggering. | ||
| There's going to be big numbers. | ||
| What are you going to call that? | ||
| Incomprehensible. | ||
| So this was probably like February of 2020, right? | ||
| I was in Denver on a TV show and I said, just the press needs to shut up. | ||
| Everything they're doing is going to create more problem. | ||
| Panic does not help things. | ||
| Listen to the CDC. | ||
| Then I was saying, listen to the CDC, listen to Dr. Fauci. | ||
| They're the people whose job it is to get us through this stuff. | ||
| And then, like, Trump derangement took off. | ||
| It was like the New York Times editorial board had an opinion about medical management of a pandemic. | ||
| To me that's almost a criminal action to try to interfere with the operation of a medical decision-making process with multiple organizations. | ||
| They scared everybody to death where my profession froze and it was astonishing to see. | ||
| I made a huge mistake in there by the middle too. | ||
| I was comparing it to H1N1. | ||
| It's a mistake to compare one pandemic from another but I was just trying to get everyone just to Kind of put it in context and calm down and let's make some good decisions. | ||
| Think how different this would have been if somebody had said, this is gonna be awful, we're gonna get through this. | ||
| The medical system here in the United States is the best in the world. | ||
| We'll flex up, it'll be a challenge, but we will get enough beds, we'll have enough ICU, we'll get more ventilators, and we will find a way to a vaccine and some treatments. | ||
| It's what we do best, so let's get this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now, for a couple weeks, while we figure things out... It's crazy what Trump said, isn't it? | |
| It was impossible to tell what was coming out of there at that time. | ||
| Well, there was a lot of different stuff coming out. | ||
| But in the meantime, lock it down while we figure out what's going on, see if we're right, and see if this is really something that we can handle this way. | ||
| And then let's keep the kids in school like so many countries are doing. | ||
| I mean, let's minimize the collateral damage from this thing instead of maximizing the collateral damage. | ||
| In retrospect, do you think it's nuts? | ||
| Like if I think I could, if I had a time machine, I had a DeLorean and I'm going back in time. | ||
| It has to be a DeLorean. | ||
| It's not a, it's not a phone booth. | ||
| It's a DeLorean. | ||
| I'm back in time. | ||
| To me, it seems that we should not have locked down anything. | ||
| We should have said to people, wear masks. | ||
| If you want to wear masks, life is going to continue. | ||
| We're going to work on a vaccine and we're just going to do the best we can. | ||
| And to me, no matter what, I think the result, even if the death uptick had been a bit more than it is right now, we would be much better off because now the cascading problems throughout society, you've mentioned, you know, between work and health and mental health and everything else. | ||
| I mean, the amount of weight people have gained, there's all sorts of stuff. | ||
| To be fair, some people have been through this and benefited. | ||
| I talked to a woman, a 90-year-old woman this morning, who said, you know, this thing's been a blessing for me because I could stay home and do these things. | ||
| I thought, okay, I can accept that it's not all bad. | ||
| But, and I have many friends, smart friends, who say, you know, when I say things like you just said, they go, you know, we needed to lock down, we needed to figure out, we really didn't know what's going on. | ||
| I go, okay, for a while. | ||
| But to have done it with no end point, with no goal, I remember, I was, you know, I did a local show here on Channel 11, on Fox 11, all through the pandemic. | ||
| We were doing updates every day, what was going on, And we had somebody from the school board come in, you know, a week in when they decided they were going to close the schools. | ||
| And I was like, how did you arrive at this decision? | ||
| Who were the physicians that advised you? | ||
| Who were the experts? | ||
| We just decided to do it. | ||
| It's like, why? | ||
| How long? | ||
| What are the consequences? | ||
| How are you? | ||
| You should see now the data. | ||
| There's this group called Gaggle that documents the data of adverse events from the use of screens in terms of sexting, access to porn, violent and Suicidal sort of musing online, it's like up 400%. | ||
| And it's up in elementary age as well as middle school and high school. | ||
| Because we literally forced them to have their only interactions on those screens. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And did nothing to protect them from all the consequences of screens that we know. | ||
| The screens, we're going to look at the screens the way we look at tobacco in 20 years. | ||
| There's no doubt in my mind. | ||
| But to think about it, we gave Kids, cartons of cigarettes. | ||
| This will make you feel better. | ||
| Here you go. | ||
| This will help you with your education. | ||
| So instead we said to them, you're not going to school. | ||
| Put a computer in their room. | ||
| They have access to God knows what all day. | ||
| On top of just the general And on top of the isolation, the fear, the, you know, the lack of socialization, the lack of developmental milestones and just, and lack of academic progress and just throw our hands up. | ||
| Well, what are you going to do? | ||
| Is there a psychological term for that feeling that that first two weeks when lockdowns were starting where there was almost this odd excitement, like not, not joy, I would say, but everyone just felt like, oh, there's something going on. | ||
| It's like a little bit out of our, Mundane lives. | ||
| I didn't have that. | ||
| I remember I was on Fox and I brought my dog on because I was home. | ||
| And they loved it. | ||
| My dog is on Fox. | ||
| It's so great. | ||
| I adopted a dog. | ||
| Like, there was this feeling of like, oh, well, it's temporary. | ||
| It's this weird thing. | ||
| And we all kind of, like, jumped in on it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know, Clyde. | |
| He did not sit still for a television show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He did not sit still. | |
| I had a mundane afrino. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| That sounds like Clyde. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Something about that sort of group excitement. | |
| I think there's a certain... I didn't experience that. | ||
| And I think a certain percent of the population always experiences stuff like that. | ||
| When things are dangerous, they actually get high. | ||
| For me, I use the word nuclear winter to describe that. | ||
| That to me felt like nuclear winter. | ||
| It was like a pall filled over everything. | ||
| It was awful. | ||
| I hated it. | ||
| Hated every second of it. | ||
| And I was not alone. | ||
| It was really darkness. | ||
| It was really darkness everywhere. | ||
| And that is not a healthy thing for the human condition. | ||
| That's about as bad as you can get. | ||
| And why did we do it is the question. | ||
| And why aren't we measuring what we did? | ||
| And why aren't we sort of asking questions about what we should do differently next? | ||
| Right, that's what I was going to say. | ||
| Why aren't we asking any of those questions now? | ||
| We're not doing any of that. | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| Do you have any... And by the way, I'm not against lockdown. | ||
| I think a temporary lockdown was probably what we needed to do. | ||
| I mean, think about... But here's the thing. | ||
| But why? | ||
| You didn't do it in Farnham. | ||
| Because we didn't know. | ||
| We didn't know. | ||
| But to be fair, he was right not to. | ||
| Remember how he made his decision? | ||
| He brought in a bunch of Nobel laureates. | ||
| Do you remember that panel he had? | ||
| I don't remember it specifically. | ||
| Oh, I watch it. | ||
| It doesn't surprise me. | ||
| I watch it. | ||
| He brought in three Nobel laureates and two other guys, if I remember right. | ||
| And he just queried them for a couple of hours about what this looks like, what the data is, how this works. | ||
| And at the end he went, I see no compelling reason based on what you're saying that we should lock down. | ||
| And they all went, yeah. | ||
| Wait, so then why are you partly for them? | ||
| Because it was confusing and I'm okay with people sort of... I remember being at the time thinking... I was not against locking down the schools. | ||
| That always seemed insane to me. | ||
| I also was very disturbed that they never were honest with us about who was really at risk for this thing. | ||
| 85 plus is really at risk for this thing. | ||
| Kids, not at risk. | ||
| And that should have been clear from the beginning. | ||
| But the fact that we didn't really know what was going on, and I thought about, at the time I thought to myself, what if I was in this position, and I was charged with keeping everybody safe, I probably would prepare for the worst case scenario, at least for a couple of minutes. | ||
| And I thought, I don't think he's right, but okay, I'll go along with it for a little while. | ||
| Never dreaming it would go on forever. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, that's why if I had that time machine, to me, you'd basically do nothing. | ||
| Oh, if I had the time machine? | ||
| If you had the time machine. | ||
| Oh, if I knew everything I know now? | ||
| So now it's February 2020. | ||
| Oh, I know everything I know now? | ||
| It's coming. | ||
| We know something's coming. | ||
| I would advocate for distancing. | ||
| I would keep kids in school. | ||
| I would, again, we didn't know the speed at which that R0 was going to go. | ||
| Because if we'd done nothing, we would have ended up with something like we had in December and January of 2020. | ||
| 2021, rather. | ||
| And that was pretty nasty. | ||
| That was pretty nasty. | ||
| But we ended up with it anyway, is the point. | ||
| And the virus does what the virus does. | ||
| There does not seem to be a lot that we do that really changes the behavior of the virus. | ||
| What we can change is how it affects us. | ||
| That we can change. | ||
| Make milder illness, get antivirals, vaccinate. | ||
| That we can do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Should we be paying attention to any of these other horse dewormers or things that crazy right-wing maniacs like Joe Rogan are talking about? | ||
| Early treatments? | ||
| Like, can you say the words on your... I gotta put it on YouTube, Jack Price. | ||
| We're on Rumble now. | ||
| We'll be alright. | ||
| We'll be alright. | ||
| So, I don't think... I talk to... There are nodes in this pandemic for me in terms of the ability to be open and honest. | ||
| One node was when Fauci said, yeah, maybe this, we'll look into whether this thing came from a Wuhan lab. | ||
| I felt like, oh, now we can have this conversation. | ||
| I was talking to a pulmonologist yesterday from the Cleveland Clinic, and it was on a stream show, and he said, well, you know, at the beginning, remember at the beginning, we all were prescribing hydroxychloroquine. | ||
| And I thought, oh, we can say that now? | ||
| Doctors everywhere. | ||
| We were getting kicked off YouTube six months later. | ||
| You couldn't say the word. | ||
| This is a medicine that Joy Behar and other people and Don Lemon had just learned how to pronounce. | ||
| They just learned how to pronounce it. | ||
| I've been using it for decades. | ||
| It's one of the safest medicines you can use. | ||
| And we were prescribing it because we had nothing else to offer and this looked like it might be helpful. | ||
| So doctors routinely were prescribing it. | ||
| Now we can say that. | ||
| We can be honest about that's what you're doing. | ||
| Didn't do much, if anything. | ||
| I think ivermectin, maybe a little better, but not much. | ||
| I think once you have real treatments, that's going to all go away. | ||
| And you're going to have real treatments that have real effects. | ||
| It's the difference between essentially drinking cranberry juice for urinary tract infection versus taking Scepter or taking Cipro. | ||
| It's a lot different. | ||
| You mentioned that one of the things that's changed you in this is that you value freedom more, you understand the concept a little bit more. | ||
| The fact that you just said, all right, we couldn't talk about HCQ, and YouTube was booting people off, and Twitter was getting rid of people. | ||
| For doctors talking about just discussing the evidence, not saying you should do this or shouldn't do it, just discussing the evidence. | ||
| Quite literally, quite literally. | ||
| Doctors, we know. 100%. | ||
| Has any of this changed your feelings on any of the big tech stuff? | ||
| I know that's not totally your domain, but as someone that communicates this stuff for a living, I have no doubt that not only online options have probably closed in some ways, but I would guess some of the mainstream stuff, right? | ||
| Like, are you getting less calls because you're willing to talk about this? | ||
| I was getting less calls for a while now. | ||
| It's now that sort of, like I said, there are nodes in this thing where you can start to be honest about this. | ||
| And you don't have to cancel people if they're trying to be honest. | ||
| So I am getting more opportunities to speak right now because people want to take a look at this and see what happened, what people's opinions are, rather than opinions being dangerous and needing to be canceled. | ||
| Which was, think about how crazy that is. | ||
| Have you ever been through a period of history like this? | ||
| Anywhere? | ||
| I've personally been through it. | ||
| Where? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I mean, you know this. | ||
| Well, you mean just generally about cancel culture? | ||
| This sort of thing? | ||
| No, I mean a period of history. | ||
| In America, we've never had anything like this. | ||
| Right, we've never seen anything like this. | ||
| Although, we have had periods of extreme polarization, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, no. | |
| I guess, you know, in the 50s, some degree of, like, communist. | ||
| Well, this is the same thing, right? | ||
| It's very similar to that. | ||
| But usually, in the face of that kind of stuff, we come up with a center. | ||
| We really do. | ||
| Whether it's Teddy Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln. | ||
| People tell me that Abraham Lincoln was a radical. | ||
| He was a centrist. | ||
| He was interested in finding a middle path. | ||
| I feel like we're going to come up with something like that. | ||
| I hope. | ||
| And the reality is, that's going to be the populist movement. | ||
| Trump is not the populist movement. | ||
| There's going to be some middle, much like, Teddy Roosevelt's in my head as the model. | ||
| And something like that's going to kind of rise up, I think. | ||
| Because there's so many people in this country that are just fearful and afraid to speak their mind and are rational people with good ideas and wondering what went wrong with their government. | ||
| Well, to that point, do you think there's something else going on with all of us psychologically that has led to this political thing? | ||
| Putting aside COVID specifically. | ||
| I'm going to have to build this case for you. | ||
| I wrote a book on narcissism, and the book documented very clearly we've had a narcissistic turn. | ||
| We have. | ||
| There's no disputing that anymore. | ||
| In 1850, they debated whether narcissistic disorder even existed. | ||
| There's no debate in 2021. | ||
| In the 80s, I was working in a psychiatric hospital, and we'd have these admitting sheets with the Axis 1, 2, and 3 diagnoses, and Axis 2 were the personality disorders. | ||
| When I arrived there in 1985, Axis 2 had all kinds of different personality disorders, obsessive-compulsive, dependent, all kinds of things, antisocial. | ||
| And then, around 1988-89, I noticed that all of a sudden, all the other personality disorders went away, and only Cluster B's were being admitted, which are the narcissistic disorders. | ||
| borderline sociopath, narcissist, histrionic. | ||
| Those were the, those are the cluster Bs. | ||
| And that's it ever since. | ||
| Everyone has a cluster B disorder. | ||
| Now, where do the cluster Bs come from? | ||
| They come from childhood trauma. | ||
| Now, at the same time, I was doing a love line all, and all it was every night, every call, | ||
| sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect. | ||
| I mean, it was pandemic. | ||
| The 70s unleashed something. | ||
| And it unleashed it on people to do it. | ||
| First, it took the attitude that children were little beings, little adults, little sexual beings. | ||
| They just need to express it. | ||
| And if some adult predator was around, it's like, hey man, he's into it. | ||
| He wanted to, you know, there's a lot of horrible stuff going on for years. | ||
| And that person didn't do that once. | ||
| They did it many, many times. | ||
| And then that child has a probability of being a perpetrator. | ||
| So it was expanding rapidly all over the place. | ||
| I was hearing about it all the time. | ||
| When I wrote the Narcissist book, I wanted to do a chapter on, we're back to the French Revolution again, on pre-revolutionary France. | ||
| And the reason was, I was looking across the historical sweep and I thought, this is not normal. | ||
| It's not as though periods of this degree of childhood sexual abuse is normative in social, even in highly distressed populations, in war, in impoverished areas, not this kind of exploitation of children. | ||
| There are other periods of history where this must have happened, and the only really good one I could find was 1750 France, where children were routinely marginalized, were abused sexually, families were broken apart, there was libertinism everywhere, and it was destructive to children. | ||
| And then you get the French Revolution. | ||
| I was talking to the woman that helped me wrote the book on narcissism, and I said, do you remember me obsessing about 1750 France and wanting to put that in? | ||
| And she was like, oh yeah, you were hell-bent on it, but the publisher wouldn't let me, saying it was too far-fetched. | ||
| And the point I wanted to make was, is that when there's that kind of childhood trauma, you get a lot of narcissism and a lot of unregulated emotions, particularly aggression, and that results in collective mobs and guillotines, scapegoating. | ||
| Scapegoating mechanisms is what keeps people that are aggressive from acting out on each other. | ||
| They get together and they act out on one. | ||
| I didn't know about social media. | ||
| I didn't know about cancellation, but there it is. | ||
| That's the cancel culture. | ||
| So there is the big sweep, but there's a new wrinkle in this that I did not see coming. | ||
| Can I finish this? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, of course. | ||
| And when I, a couple of years ago, I was sitting here and I was hearing discourse | ||
| that to me sounded delusional, and frankly delusional. | ||
| And I thought, oh my God, if somebody came in my office in 2015 and said, you know, there's Nazis, I have to go kill some Nazis, there's Nazis, there's a Nazi and a Nazi and a Nazi. | ||
| She's a Nazi. | ||
| And, oh, well, the government, there's Russian operatives in the White House. | ||
| I said, you are being, you're going to the hospital right now. | ||
| I'm going to admit you for delusional, some psychotic disorder. | ||
| And I thought, oh my God, that is everywhere. | ||
| We are prone to delusionality. | ||
| Well, when are people prone to delusions? | ||
| When they become histrionic. | ||
| So we've shifted from pure narcissism into histrionic disorder. | ||
| And histrionics are prone to getting swept into, you know, sort of collective ideas. | ||
| They have a lot of emotionality. | ||
| They have, you know, extreme acting out behaviors. | ||
| I mean, it's all with us now. | ||
| It's what we're seeing. | ||
| I don't know if the pandemic caused it or it was something that's coming anyway, but histrionic is sort of the disorder, the order of the day. | ||
| All right, so now I think we're into the meat here. | ||
| So when I turn on, I don't have a TV, I don't have cable anymore, but when I see clips, let's say of MSNBC during the day, and they are saying the most outrageous, over the top, white supremacists have taken over, Trump is leading the Nazis for the insurrection, like to stuff that to my ear sounds, you live in an alternate reality. | ||
| And I talk about it on the show a lot. | ||
| These people live in a different reality than me. | ||
| I don't know how we mitigate that. | ||
| I don't know how we do that. | ||
| If someone is watching this and they have someone in their family that is listening to this stuff and really believes Nazis are everywhere and all this stuff, what would you do? | ||
| How do we deprogram these people? | ||
| I have been obsessing about this for a few weeks now as I've sort of crystallized these ideas. | ||
| And the only way I know of to do it is what we call sort of reality testing. | ||
| Getting people back to reality. | ||
| Keep emphasizing Real numbers. | ||
| Real facts. | ||
| Just keep them in reality. | ||
| It's about all you can do. | ||
| And use reality testing. | ||
| That ain't easy these days, because people don't trust numbers anymore. | ||
| It's not easy. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I don't trust them either. | ||
| And so that's why it's hard. | ||
| But you've got to just stay with what's real. | ||
| Do you know any Nazis? | ||
| Have you seen Nazis? | ||
| Like, try to stay in the reality of the moment. | ||
| And the more you get to reality, the more you can break down the delusions. | ||
| It's not easy and it may not even be possible. | ||
| That's what worries me. | ||
| I don't know that it's possible. | ||
| I do know that the media, you know this as well as I do, the people producing the media are really just, they do something and they look at the numbers. | ||
| Did that create numbers or not? | ||
| Hey, when she talked about Nazis, it really got a spike in the numbers. | ||
| Do more of that. | ||
| I don't know if they believe what they're saying or not. | ||
| The problem is they're fueling delusionality. | ||
| And so you have to, again, let's talk about what they're doing on TV here. | ||
| Let's talk about the people. | ||
| Let's look at who's creating the information you're looking at. | ||
| Let's look at some alternative ideas. | ||
| You've got to stay, much like with vaccine hesitancy, you have to treat people with respect and be very sort of magnanimous in your approach. | ||
| You have to be just sort of, hmm. | ||
| You know, I recommend the use of therapeutic wonderment all the time. | ||
| I wonder what the, if the world were flat, I wonder, hmm, I wonder how that would work | ||
| with trigonometry. | ||
| I wonder how they could get a, you know, something to the, just a lot of wondering, | ||
| wondering, wondering, and just keep the reality coming in and eventually you kind of get through. | ||
| Do you think some of this is just sort of like, it's almost like at the end of a successful society. | ||
| No, don't talk that way. | ||
| Well, no, I still have hope. | ||
| Believe me, I have a lot of hope. | ||
| I think we can get to some of the things that you're talking about. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I don't know that it exactly comes out of the center, but putting that aside, that at some stage of a liberal democracy that is flourishing, you will have allowed in so many crazy ideas. | ||
| You will have gotten so fat on freedom and doing what you want and living as you wish, which is mostly good. | ||
| That then you will have drag queen story hour, you will have the Surgeon General saying that a biological man is a female, you will have all of this stuff, like it's just the end game in a way of this, which as a California liberal, I think is how you describe yourself, is a sad position to have to defend. | ||
| This is again back to keeping reality coming in. | ||
| Reality eventually comes to bear. | ||
| Reality has a way of coming in, and you can say all the... Abraham Lincoln has a famous... Some of this must have been going on in the Civil War, too, because Abraham Lincoln has a very... It wasn't a famous quote, it was a quote that caught my attention, as it pertains to our current moment. | ||
| He came into the cabinet meeting one day, and he, you know, Chase and all those guys are there, and he goes, If I say an elephant's trunk is a leg, you hear this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| How many legs does that elephant have? | ||
| And they all go, five, I guess. | ||
| And he goes, no, four. | ||
| Calling it a leg doesn't make it a leg. | ||
| And I thought, that's this moment. | ||
| You can say anything you want. | ||
| It doesn't make it so. | ||
| You're trying to make it so. | ||
| It won't be. | ||
| It just isn't. | ||
| You can't make things so. | ||
| But there is an interesting thing you said here, too, also, which is you talked about the limits of freedom at the same time as we're sort of defending freedom. | ||
| I'd not really thought about that because in a way the way we got here is because of sort of... | ||
| In a weird way, excessive freedom to the point that reality was subjugated. | ||
| Well, it's more freedom to instead of freedom from, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So you want freedom from persecution. | |
| Right, it reminds you of the tolerance and intolerance. | ||
| It's intolerance in the name of tolerance. | ||
| It's a weird, this is a weird spot. | ||
| I do feel, though, that the excesses of freedom have brought us to the place where freedom from, yes, needs to be defended. | ||
| So, I know that we're actually all bouncing around through a lot of the stuff that's in your book. | ||
| It is in the book. | ||
| Let me just say, the book is written by me and my daughter. | ||
| She is very woke, and she actually helped me understand some of her point of view. | ||
| I really got to a better understanding of where she sees these things. | ||
| And it's designed for a 15-year-old and their parents, essentially. | ||
| It's something you should leave out on your coffee table if you have middle-aged, late teenagers, how to navigate relationships. | ||
| It was originally about consent, 'Cause back when we, before COVID, | ||
| consent was something in the Heals the Me Too movement was a very, very important conversation | ||
| and adolescents were very confused about it. | ||
| We realized as we wrote the book, it really is about how to navigate relationships generally. | ||
| So to that point, so you just described your daughter as woke, | ||
| which I think a lot of people watching this would be-- | ||
| In fact, we were on Megyn Kelly and Megyn went, "I think you're the first woke person | ||
| "I've ever had on this show." | ||
| 'Cause she launched into her patriarchy thing. | ||
| Oh yeah, and Megyn was great. | ||
| She was very gracious, and she pushed back, and we had a nice, that's good! | ||
| That's a night that's exactly, and then my daughter's there, I shouldn't be on these kinds of shows. | ||
| If you want to make your point, you want to make it to the Echo Chamber, make it to Megyn Kelly! | ||
| That's where you should be making it if you want to bring people on board with your point of view. | ||
| What kind of tension has that caused you? | ||
| Because every single person watching this is going through some version of that. | ||
| Myself included. | ||
| For she and I? | ||
| You've got someone woke in your family. | ||
| It actually really improved our situation because I think we were forced to really clarify our positions to one another by talking to somebody else. | ||
| And it helped me. | ||
| And by the way, I started admiring how she thought about things. | ||
| You can admire people that have ideas that are different than yours. | ||
| I feel like for her, reality will come in a little more and she'll adjust to something. | ||
| But I admire what she's thinking about and that she's struggling with these things. | ||
| And I get it. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I don't agree with it, but I get it. | ||
| And so that's how I would approach it. | ||
| So without making this about her specifically, although if you want to, feel free. | ||
| We have no issue. | ||
| Generally speaking, if you were to say to a woke person, there are biological differences between men and women, males and females. | ||
| You'd have to say, look, I'm not a biological determinism. | ||
| You'd have to find, just get the common ground quick. | ||
| Just go, look, I agree gender is a construct and it's not about strictly the biology, but, and I actually put this in the book. | ||
| This is where I was pushing back kind of hard in the book. | ||
| I was like, I'm a physician. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, I have to know the sex hormones and what they're doing biologically. | ||
| I have to know that. | ||
| And by the way, if I'm going to deal with a transgender, they are getting very powerful medication from maybe me that are hormones that are not being produced because of the chromosomal situation. | ||
| That's a medical treatment. | ||
| I need to know what I'm doing. | ||
| And that's actually my main thing about treatment of transgender right now is I don't think my profession is doing a good job. | ||
| The job should be the right treatment for the right patient at the right moment. | ||
| And we have not figured that out. | ||
| They're all getting everything the same. | ||
| And that is never as good. | ||
| That's never good enough. | ||
| What do you think happened, I guess, at the psychiatric layer when it comes to this? | ||
| I'm guessing you're familiar with that. | ||
| I'm not talking about psychiatry. | ||
| I'm just talking about push all that aside and just say somebody's going to get treatment. | ||
| When do you do it? | ||
| And who do you give it to? | ||
| And who's the right one to give it to? | ||
| And how do you determine that? | ||
| None of that is just everybody gets the treatment, no questions asked. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's not how you do it. | ||
| Same thing that happened during COVID. | ||
| Same thing that happened is my physician freezes. | ||
| They freeze. | ||
| And they're afraid to do anything. | ||
| They're afraid to say anything. | ||
| Something I didn't know until COVID is that so many of my peers are employees now. | ||
| So they're fearful of doing something out of line for their employer. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| So there's less that just have their own practice now because of the nature of... It doesn't exist. | ||
| So if you say something wrong, the employer will fire you. | ||
| I have talked to doctors that have been fired for saying something online that didn't fit the orthodoxy of the institution, as well as a fear of the cancel culture, and fear of people coming after them, and fear of people encumbering their license. | ||
| I mean, they're scared. | ||
| Doctors are so easily scared. | ||
| That's how we end up with the opioid epidemic. | ||
| Because doctors started getting criminally prosecuted for inadequate treatment of pain. | ||
| They were getting fined. | ||
| That's not malpractice. | ||
| That's criminal and civil liability. | ||
| And we all froze. | ||
| We stopped prescribing for pain patients and sent them all to the pain management people. | ||
| And their position was, Pain is what the patient says it is. | ||
| Pain control is what the patient says it is. | ||
| You don't even need a doctor. | ||
| Just ask the patient what they need and set it up at the counter. | ||
| We'll have a Starbucks. | ||
| Point at what you want. | ||
| They were doing that in Florida at one point. | ||
| And that's how you got the opioid epidemic. | ||
| So relating this to the trans issues, it's one of the issues of the day, and since you were talking to your daughter in the book, I mean, we seem unable to have that basic thing. | ||
| But I get it, you can... You can have it. | ||
| There are soft ways to have it. | ||
| No, yeah, but some ways to get into it. | ||
| Then once you're into it, you're going to disagree on things. | ||
| Sure, but when you see the Surgeon... I don't know if you saw it, the Surgeon General of the United States sending out a tweet that Rachel Levine is our first four-star female blah blah blah... | ||
| She, I'll use her preferred pronouns because I'm a nice guy. | ||
| She's not female. | ||
|
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But you see the Surgeon General saying that. | |
| There's a lot of orthodoxy around the language. | ||
| Did she say female or woman? | ||
| Female. | ||
| That's the part. | ||
| I have trouble with the female part. | ||
| Because I have no problem with calling a transgender woman a woman. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| But when you start trying to adjust the biology, then I'm concerned. | ||
| Then it's like, how do I treat this person? | ||
| How do I know what I'm dealing with? | ||
| As a gynecologist, should I be treating men? | ||
| As a urologist, should I pretend that women have a prostate? | ||
| Screen them for prostate cancer because they want me to? | ||
| I hate to tell you what I think most of their answers would be. | ||
| You've got to be kidding. | ||
| Not really. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Listen, I am very concerned about transphobia. | ||
| I don't want anybody with those people. | ||
| I don't want anybody with any conditions to feel marginalized or not a part of it. | ||
| I want everyone to get along. | ||
| That's my thing. | ||
| And so, you know, people want to use certain language. | ||
| I'll try to figure it out. | ||
| I'll try to go with it. | ||
| But I'm a biologist and there's certain things I just have to have in order to do my work. | ||
|
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That's all. | |
| So are you surprised how woke the hard sciences became? | ||
| That 2 plus 2 doesn't always equal 4? | ||
| I always thought that would not happen. | ||
| That was shocking to me. | ||
| I still think that will quickly come back. | ||
| That can only happen for so long before science doesn't work. | ||
| Well, the question always is then what kind of destruction can they create? | ||
| Well, they will do it, I know. | ||
| But they will be quietly doing what they do. | ||
|
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That's just the way it is. | |
| You can't do it otherwise. | ||
| What else is on your mind these days? | ||
| In this just craziness that we seem to be in. | ||
| It is craziness. | ||
| Because it does seem like a mass psychological disorder that we're all going through. | ||
| And you're a public person in the midst of all of this. | ||
| It feels like your life sort of led to this. | ||
| Oh, it's been very unpleasant. | ||
| It's been terribly unpleasant, but I feel like my job is to really keep walking through it. | ||
| But I got to tell you, the only thing I would say is I'm leaning on philosophy a lot right now. | ||
| I think stoicism has remarkable utility right now. | ||
| Stoicism is like an antiviral sort of system for our cognitive systems. | ||
| We have lots of glitches in our cognitive system. | ||
| Some of what's going on here is that people don't know how to reason, don't know how to think, don't know how to assess things, and stoicism adjusts the cognitive processes | ||
| very nicely. | ||
| The other thing is I'm kind of, I didn't know I would ever become this way, | ||
| but I find myself being a little bit Hegelian in the sense that, which he didn't actually say this, | ||
| but there's a construct around his thinking is that there's a thesis, an antithesis, | ||
| and then a synthesis. | ||
| And I feel like we're in some sort of antithetical movement now that will bring good things. | ||
| I'm trying to say positive. | ||
| There'll be good things that come of it and we'll have some sort of synthetic function that will get us through this. | ||
| You said something to me as we were walking in here today that made me What did I say? | ||
| What did I say? | ||
| You said you were worried right before we started. | ||
| take hold, but that tends to be how-- | ||
| Wait, what did I say? | ||
| What did I say? | ||
| You said you were worried right before we started. | ||
| Well, we were talking about cities in this country and our concerns about them and what a disaster they are. | ||
| And you said, well, that's the plan to prove, yeah. | ||
| Well, but I don't know that that's counter to the idea. | ||
| It's just that I believe that the intentions of these people related to their policies. | ||
| If you defund police and then you increase crime and then murder goes up and you look at the data and you keep doing it, my belief is that their intentions are to destroy some of these cities to prove in their minds that capitalism doesn't work. | ||
| Thus, they can usher in whatever it is that they want to. | ||
| That's different than the sort of pure... | ||
| I get it. That's really antithesis, antithesis. | ||
| That's, you know, and we were talking about anarchists when we walked in here. | ||
| We were talking about Michael Malice and things like that. | ||
| But that... | ||
| Whenever ideology prevails, humans suffer. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| We need a pragmatic party. | ||
| We need a pragmatic system that's based on the human reality, how humans work, what our motivational systems are. | ||
| The one thing is, when you sit in the middle, you can see the excesses on both sides. | ||
| And one of the things I keep seeing on the progressive side is, They seem in total denial of how humans work and what our motivational systems are and how humans are. | ||
| I don't mean just at this historical moment. | ||
| I mean, I've worked for years with humans with all kinds of broken motivational systems. | ||
| I know how our brain works. | ||
| I know how our emotional systems work. | ||
| I know how our interpersonal and intersubjective experiences are supposed to go. | ||
| They're just in abject denial about that. | ||
| And history is replete with examples of when ideology becomes the prevailing I hate that that guy's brought up all the time. | ||
| You could bring up all kinds of other people throughout history that have done the same thing. | ||
| And it's interesting that we're getting a little lesson on how that can happen. | ||
| One of the things that was shocking to me This is one thing that I think Malice was saying when he was talking to Jordan Peterson, or Jordan Peterson was saying it, was that... | ||
| We deputized people during this pandemic to be an authority. | ||
| So anybody, because I remember, I got COVID, in my humble opinion, by trying to get the vaccine at a time. | ||
| So I was treating lots of COVID patients, I was still operating my outpatient practice, and my hospital started offering the vaccine. | ||
| And I went, I gotta get this vaccine. | ||
| So I made an appointment, I went in, and when I went in, A 28-year-old guy started screaming at me, where are your papers? | ||
| I mean, it was like a border crossing scene from a Second World War film. | ||
| And I was sort of stunned and he started yelling at me and I thought, I've been a staff member at this hospital for 35 years. | ||
| You treat senior staff. | ||
| Do you like this? | ||
| It was so confusing to me. | ||
| Does this feel good to do this? | ||
| Yes, it does. | ||
| That's how people do that. | ||
| And so I didn't have the right papers. | ||
| I had to run all over the hospital. | ||
| I was in many poorly ventilated rooms. | ||
| I thought this is how I'm going to get COVID. | ||
| Three days later, sick. | ||
| And they wouldn't get me the vaccine because first they had to... Even though I made the case, I said I'm treating COVID patients. | ||
| I'm volunteering in the ER. | ||
| I want to help with this problem. | ||
| We have employees that are really, we gotta be fair, and we have to give it to our employees first before, so the gardeners and everybody else got it before me and I got sex. | ||
| The gardener got it before you? | ||
| Everybody, everybody before me. | ||
| That was somebody that did not like one of your TV shows, perhaps. | ||
| All right, so in our last couple minutes here, I think we've pieced together a decent sort of psychological picture of what's going on in the United States. | ||
| Have we? | ||
| I'm still mystified and confused. | ||
| Well, maybe a little bit, but I do want to give the devil his due here. | ||
| Obviously, I'm much more critical of the left. | ||
| Obviously, I can talk about the woke stuff all day. | ||
| But when you talk about some of the personality disorders that are maybe happening over there or they don't really understand human nature. | ||
| I didn't say over there, it's all of us. | ||
| Okay, so now that's what I want you to do then. | ||
| So give me some of that on the right. | ||
| It's all of us. | ||
| Is there something maybe that I'm not seeing that's more broadly happening on the right? | ||
| I see the same excesses on both sides. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just that one right now is sort of more in charge and more sort of involved with our everyday life, you know what I mean? | ||
| We're having interactions, people are yelling. | ||
| I walked by somebody, I ran by somebody, when I wasn't wearing a mask, I was out running, and the guy was like, like, that's that kind of thing. | ||
| I don't see that stuff from the right. | ||
| Right, so what am I not seeing there then? | ||
| If it is, I get it, they have more culture now, so it feels louder. | ||
| I wondered that same thing myself, you know, what am I not seeing? | ||
| That I would say, you know, usually on the right, rigidity is more of the problem. | ||
| There's more openness on the left and more rigidity on the right. | ||
| And the rigidity can go towards excess. | ||
| I've seen some of our friends say things where I get my butt muscles tighten up in a similar fashion. | ||
| Like, I don't think you really mean that. | ||
| And I don't say anything. | ||
| I don't say anything to them either about Their early treatments or you know what they're thinking about the virus or vaccines or anything like that. | ||
| It's like you're entitled to your opinion that that's fine. | ||
| If you want me to talk to them, I'm available. | ||
| That kind of thing. | ||
| I guess for me the fundamental difference would be that for whatever rigidity is there and of course it is. | ||
| If you're more conservative by nature, you're less into change. | ||
| But to me it's like in a time when the world is just spinning off the cliff because of this craziness. | ||
| But it makes them more rigid. | ||
| A little rigidity is okay and it makes them more rigid. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| No, I agree a little rigidity. | ||
| I'm up for it. | ||
| But the rigidity can have a problem too. | ||
| And I think that in there creates some of the funny thinking. | ||
| And there's a What is it over there that bothers me that could get out of control? | ||
| I try to find it. | ||
| I'm trying to find it. | ||
| That's why I'm asking you the question. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Everyone's in hiding right now. | ||
| I see glimpses of it. | ||
| It pops out in parties and things where everyone just goes, okay. | ||
| And I'm thinking, where does that go when it gets to be? | ||
| I think my fear is there'll be, you know, there'll be retribution and guillotines on that side too. | ||
| That's my fear. | ||
| So if the right can not do that and stay focused on some pragmatic solutions and staying positive and getting everybody on the ship, it will be much to everyone's advantage. | ||
| The problem is the pendulum seems to go both ways. | ||
| I'm fearful that, and the same processes are going on there that elsewhere. | ||
| It's just different themes, different themes. | ||
| It's very concerning. | ||
| I'm very worried about it, but I remain optimistic, and that's just me. | ||
| I'm always optimistic about people. | ||
| I love people, and I feel like especially Americans. | ||
| My big push would be to try to get us under the Under the umbrella of what got us all here in the first place. | ||
| Why did my ancestors come here? | ||
| Why did my family run away from the Ukrainian genocide? | ||
| Thank God. | ||
| Why did they avoid the Bolsheviks and the Tsarists? | ||
| All three were getting on my family's case. | ||
| And by the way, I'm called anti-immigrant. | ||
| Again, fuck you. | ||
| Because my family escaped a genocide, one of the ones you guys have all forgotten about. | ||
| So, they came here because of an idea. | ||
| And we have to get clear about that idea again, and we have to value that idea again. | ||
| I feel like that's what's under attack, really, when you get right down to it. | ||
| Yes, they were old white men, there were some slave owners, there were some horrible things, Hamilton was a screwball, but there was an extraordinary set of ideas put forth at that time. | ||
| that have been the umbrella for multiple generations of humans from multiple regions, every region of the world, and multiple ethnicities to get along to an uncanny degree and lead good lives. | ||
| If we just get back to that, the basics, and I'm not saying brainwash everybody and stand up and pledge allegiance every day. | ||
| I'm not saying that. | ||
| Just expose everybody to those good ideas and agree that they're good ideas and see if we can live under those principles. | ||
| Drew, I know you're a TV pro because not only do you look at the camera when you make a point. | ||
| I do right at the hour. | ||
| I didn't even have to tell you we can't end depressingly. | ||
| We have to end positively and did it. | ||
| It's good to see you, my friend. | ||
|
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You as well. | |
| Appreciate it. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlists all right over here. |
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