Dr. Drew Pinsky joins Dave Rubin to critique public health failures, citing CDC opacity and lockdowns that caused a 400% rise in adverse online events for children. He details his personal reaction to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, preferring older platforms over mRNA due to sensitivity, while condemning mandates as counterproductive. Pinsky warns against ideological rigidity eroding doctor-patient trust and links cancel culture to personality disorders, advocating for a return to pragmatic freedom rooted in America's historical principles of diverse coexistence rather than political persecution. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.