Dr. Daniel Amen exposes Big Pharma’s and cannabis industry’s $3B marketing schemes, linking heavy marijuana use to 7x higher psychosis risk in vulnerable teens—57% report persistent sadness, 32% suicidal ideation—while comparing its brain-damaging effects (dopamine disruption, cerebellum atrophy) to opioids. His study of 1,000 users reveals reduced blood flow and mitochondrial decline, yet authorities ignore risks due to profit incentives, despite marijuana masking chronic pain without addressing root causes. Amen’s "brain health revolution" prioritizes omega-3s, vitamin D, and lifestyle fixes over SSRIs (which he ties to dementia) and critiques psychiatry’s reliance on punishment over imaging-based rehabilitation, arguing neuroplasticity demands proactive care—like his nephew’s recovery after removing a brain cyst linked to violence. The episode frames substance use as a high-stakes gamble with societal complicity. [Automatically generated summary]
So the mitochondria, the little energy powerhouses in your cell, they activate and keep the cell energized and alive.
And 49% of the tracer that we do this study with is actually taken up by the mitochondria in the brain.
So when we see low activity, it's really low activity along with decreased blood flow.
And then there's a new study by a completely separate group than ours on a thousand young marijuana users, and the areas of the brain involved in learning and memory were low in blood flow and activity.
So it's not just me because I have a problem with marijuana.
It's other scientists as well saying marijuana is not great for the brain.
And people who have a certain genetic makeup are more vulnerable to becoming psychotic.
One gene in particular, if you have a combination of an abnormality in that gene, you have a sevenfold, so that's a 700% increased risk of becoming psychotic if you are a heavy user of marijuana.
So not for everybody, but for everybody, the risk is somewhere between two to four times, Especially if you start young.
And now it's the young that are suffering from the idea that marijuana is innocuous because it's not innocuous, but because they think it's innocuous, I think psilocybin is going to go the same way.
When the perception of the dangerousness of a drug goes down, its use goes up.
And that's what we've seen.
And teenagers who use have a higher incidence of anxiety, depression, suicide, and psychosis in their 20s.
And so you're taking a developing brain and altering how that brain develops.
And what we're seeing is the highest incidence of brain and mental health problems in young people we have ever seen.
Study from the CDC: 57% of teenage girls report being persistently sad.
The American Cancer Society came out four years ago against any alcohol because any alcohol is associated with an increased risk of eight different cancers.
And then, you know, we did a prize fight between marijuana and alcohol, and it went 12 rounds.
Alcohol causes a lot of devastation, perhaps more than marijuana.
But the idea in society is alcohol is a health food.
And so I'll show the kid their scan and then go through this exercise with them and they'll start to cry and they go, you won't tell my mom.
And I'm like, no, I'm pretty sure we should.
Because otherwise, how are you going to get the help you need?
And they're like, well, stop, I promise.
And the scans are so helpful for me, a little bit like a lie detector, because it's really hard to say, oh, no, I'm not using when your brain looks toxic and there's not another good reason that it looks toxic.
And that's, and that's why marijuana is innocuous.
I'm like, well, you've not been in my chair for the last 43 years.
The beauty of Thanksgiving is that it celebrates real food.
I mean, at the core of the holiday is actual food, not synthetic garbage, the kind that is almost irresistible.
So wouldn't it be nice if the country embraced, if all of us embraced actual food during the rest of the year, ditching your standard and truly disgusting American chip brands for chips that aren't terrible for you, that have only three ingredients, that would be Vandy crisps.
That'd be a great place to start.
Vandy is about reviving real food, the kind your grandparents ate.
And they look pretty svelte, despite the camels they smoked.
Why?
Because they ate food that wasn't filled with garbage.
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I just didn't know until we had breakfast a minute ago that that kind of damage was so, or any kind of damage to the brain, which was more subtle damage, not, you know, head injury damage, but damage from drugs, for example, was detectable on a brain scan.
Well, it's so important because it's connected to the rest of the brain.
And it used to be thought that the cerebellum was involved in coordination, physical coordination.
Well, now we know it's also involved in thought coordination, how quickly you can integrate new information.
And marijuana slows the function of the cerebellum so your thoughts become slower and you're less coordinated, which is why you shouldn't drive if you're high.
I mean, that was all kind of known when I started smoking marijuana right around 1982 or 81.
And it was like the classic profile of the stoner.
Hey, man.
You know, slow, you know, molasses pace, cadence to the language, droopy eyes, eating lots of snack food, kind of not doing anything.
Like people sort of knew even then when weed was way less potent than it is now, that it slowed you way down, but that's because it slows your brain down.
And in vulnerable people, it actually disrupts dopamine.
So it doesn't work consistently, effectively.
And if it disrupts it, if it goes too high, then for vulnerable people, you can become psychotic.
You can begin to lose touch with what's real and what's not real.
So if you think of psychosis, that's the definition of psychosis, is you begin to have trouble differentiating what's real and what's not.
You might have delusions, hallucinations, and it triggers psychosis that in some people will turn into schizophrenia, which is arguably the worst psychiatric illness.
See, I heard President Trump talk at the Department of Justice.
He had a conversation with the Mexican president about why Mexico exports drugs, but they're not a big drug using country, which I thought was really interesting.
And she said, well, family's really important to us.
And he's like, well, family's important to us.
And she said, and we have a wicked drug education campaign.
And he's like, oh, we should do that.
And so I wrote my friend at the White House.
I'm like, you have to teach people to love their brain first before you tell them something's bad for them.
Because as soon as you tell them something's bad for them, they want to do it, right?
In the book of Genesis, God says, don't eat from the tree.
The next scene, they're eating from the tree.
So I was God, and I never try to play God.
But if I was God and I was counseling God, I'd like, tell them if they eat from the tree, she's going to have to wear clothes and that they're gonna get kicked out.
It's like tell them, ask them what they want, and then well, what's the consequences?
And so the first thing is teach them to love their brains.
And if you love it because it controls everything you do well, why would you hurt it unless you were not that smart?
But it's got.
You got to have that foundational step.
I call it brain envy.
I always say Freud was wrong.
Penis envy is not the cause of anybody's problem.
Gotta love your brain.
It's the only organ in your body where size really does matter.
Before you get caught up in all the shopping and the presents and the travel, it's worth reminding yourself of why we're doing this in the first place.
Because of Jesus, his birth.
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Being overweight decreases the size of your brain.
Um out of the University OF Pittsburgh, my friend Cyrus Raji published it.
He looked at Mri scans of people who are healthy weight.
So bmi between 18.5 and 25 overweight, 25 to 30 bmi or over 30 obese.
The people who are overweight had four percent less volume in their brain, so less brain tissue, and their brains looked eight years older than they were.
How do people who were obese had eight percent less volume think about that and their brains look 16 years older.
I looked at my healthy group that um we have him on clinics and because When we were looking at healthy, we weren't looking at weight.
And after that study came out, we saw exactly the same thing.
And then I did a big NFL study, and I looked at my healthy weight NFL players and my overweight NFL players, and the overweight NFL players had significantly lower activity in their frontal lobes.
So the frontal lobes, it's the most human thoughtful part of your brain.
It's 30% of the human brain, 11% of the chimpanzee brain, 7% of your dog's brain, 3% of your cat's brain, which is why cats need nine lives.
Anyways, significantly lower blood flow and activity in their frontal lobes.
What weight does, excess weight increases something called inflammatory cytokines.
So the fat on your belly is not your friend.
It decreases blood flow.
It increases inflammation.
It prematurely ages your brain.
It takes healthy testosterone and flips it into unhealthy cancer-promoting forms of estrogen, which is why being overweight increases your risk of 30 different cancers.
And there's, and you know, we have this younger generation who have low testosterone levels.
They've been getting lower and lower.
And we have to ask them, so why is that?
And part of it is, this is going to sound really crazy, but I believe it.
The dermatologists won.
They made us afraid of the sun.
And now we have these record levels of low vitamin D levels, but we also have record levels of toxins being put on our bodies.
So mom thinks she's really being a great mom if she lathers her son or her daughter with sunscreen.
And now you've seen in the last couple of years, some screens have come under a lot of scrutiny because of the toxins they have in them that if you put it on someone's skin, it goes into their body.
And he said, well, that's the reason for the rise in autism.
And I wrote, that's sort of like the fox guarding the hen house.
It's, you know, autism clearly has exploded.
And it's not just due to different diagnostic older fathers.
It's due to a gene environmental bomb.
Something has happened in our society where in California now, it's insane.
One in 12 boys, well, we'll meet the diagnostic criteria for autism.
That should just scare us to our core.
And so what is different?
Is it Tylenol?
Is it phthalates?
Is it parabens?
Is it aspartame?
It's this crazy study on aspartame, which is in diet sodas and many diet products.
Aspartame is in 5,000 diet products.
They did this study on rats and they gave rats aspartame and it made them insanely anxious.
And then they gave them valium and it calmed them down.
It's like, okay, that was pretty crazy.
But the part about the study that bothered me the most was their babies who had never been exposed to aspartame were anxious and their grandbabies were anxious.
Well, there's probably 30 other ways to feel better.
We just don't teach any of them in school.
Like, how crazy is that?
Like, one of the things I teach my patients, how to kill the ants, and stands for automatic negative thoughts, thoughts that come into your mind automatically and ruin your day.
And I was 28 years old in my psychiatric residency when a professor said, you have to teach your patients not to believe every stupid thing they think.
And I'm like, but I believe every stupid thing.
Most of us do.
It's like, you mean, I don't have to believe the noise or the nonsense that my brain creates.
They should have taught me that when I was a second grader, how to manage my mind.
I'm friends with Paul Simon.
And Paul's song, Kodochrome, is one of my favorites.
It starts with, when I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all.
It sounds amazing like it couldn't be real, but it actually is real.
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Well, I mean, you said that the president of Mexico said that Mexico doesn't have, you know, pervasive drug use, drug use problems because even though their economy is based on selling drugs, Mexicans don't use drugs at the rate Americans do because they have a very aggressive drug education program.
We also have a drug education program run by the drug peddlers that is super effective.
I mean, I think if you ask people about marijuana, the first instinct is, why are you judging me?
Settle down.
You're too uptight.
And the second is it's way better than alcohol.
And like, you got to get lit on something.
And so you might as well choose weed over booze.
And the third is, unlike alcohol, cannabis is actually like a real medicine, effective medicine.
And pain is now felt in your back, but it's in your brain.
And if you're really going to go after that chronic pain, you have to get your brain healthy.
And so if you're using marijuana for the chronic pain, it's suppressing those pain centers, but it's not getting your brain healthy.
And so when you stop the marijuana, the pain is just going to come back.
And it's very important in the book, I talk about the doom loop, where you have pain for any reason, which then triggers the suffering circuits in the brain that actually are the same ones for anxiety and depression, anxiety, depression, pain, the same circuits in the brain, which then triggers this flood of ants, automatic negative thoughts.
I need surgery.
I'll never be well.
I'll always be in pain, which then triggers muscle tension, which increases the pain and leads to bad habits.
That's familiar to anyone who's had back problems.
You just described it, I think, very well.
But so marijuana is, in your opinion, as a physician, helpful for a few specific illnesses, glaucoma and low appetite.
Why wouldn't the answer be to isolate whatever the compound is in marijuana that helps with appetite and glaucoma and literally medicalize it, put it in a pill or some pharmaceutical form, and then sell it like you would any other pharmaceutical?
So I'm not going to make fun of him for thinking that because people addicted to all kinds of substances become totally convinced that they operate at a higher level when they use those substances.
Well, it wasn't that long ago that many Americans thought they were inherently safe from the kinds of disasters you hear about all the time in third world countries, a total power loss, for example, or people freezing to death in their own homes.
That could never happen here.
Obviously, it's America.
People are recalculating, unfortunately, because they have no choice.
The last few years have taught us that.
Remember when the power grid in Texas failed in the dead of winter?
Yeah, it happened and it could happen again.
So the government is not actually as reliable as you'd hope they would be.
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Can we stop on the second one that it decreases the chatter in your head?
I've had a couple very smart, just high IQ friends who use marijuana for that reason and say they become more fluent, clearer thinking, more able to focus.
No, it could be real, especially in the short run.
Probably not in the long run.
And I always want people to do things that help them feel good now and later versus now, but not later.
Yes.
And so are there other ways to optimize your brain?
And that's what I get so excited with players like Julius and some of the other people I've worked with is how can I help you be the very best you can be?
So it's not about taking broken people and putting them back together.
It's about taking awesome people and helping them be more awesome.
And looking at the brain, for me, it literally changed everything in my life from the time I go to bed at night to what I eat to what I do to make myself happy.
I always wanted to optimize my brain rather than steal from me.
You know, I have six kids and I love them all dearly, but I never want to have to live with them.
And so, you know, I covet my independence.
And as I get older, I'm like, I need to be more serious because did you know 50% of people 85 and older, 5-0% of people 85 and older will be diagnosed with dementia of one form or another?
And it means if you're blessed to live to 85, you have a one in two chance of having lost your mind.
What are, what are the, without getting too technical, you know, steps that a layman can understand to reducing your risk of Alzheimer's would be what?
So it alters the microbiome or all the bugs in your mouth, which then have a negative impact on your whole body.
Gee is genetics.
Know what's in your family?
Like I have obesity and heart disease in my family, but I'm not overweight and I don't have heart disease.
Why?
I'm on an obesity heart disease prevention program every day of my life because I don't want those things.
We adopted our nieces because their parents were addicts.
And I tell them, I said, you have addiction in your family.
You need to be on an addiction prevention program every day of your life.
And when I found the older one vaping, I grounded her for six months.
I mean, we are like very serious about if you want to go that way, that's up to you, but I'm not going to do anything in my power to help you.
The second one, and this is so important, or the next one is H head trauma, a major cause of psychiatric problems.
It's also a major cause of substance abuse, because if you damage your frontal lobes, which happens in 90% of people who have head trauma, 90% of them, their frontal lobes are involved, it decreases impulse control.
So you might know this isn't good for me, but if you want it, you do it rather than if you want it, you distract yourself.
You make a better decision for yourself.
T is toxins, drugs, alcohol, mold in your home can damage your brain and make you decrease your decision making.
But head to head against conservative care, surgery is no more effective and it has a 21-fold increased risk of side effects.
And then this is the statistic.
People my age, 70, 70% of us have abnormal backs who have no pain at all.
People who are 50 who have abnormal MRIs, 50% of them have abnormal back MRIs and no pain at all.
That means just because you have an abnormal MRI on your back or your neck or your shoulder doesn't mean surgery should be the first thing you do, but because there's an industry around surgery that's often the first thing that's recommended.
And I argue, well, let's do the conservative things with a brain boost first.
And then if you need it, you need it, right?
I'm not opposed to it.
I'm just opposed to that's the first and only thing you do.
Or at least in my state, they're not because it's a revenue source, because there's a political lobby.
And it's shameful.
I don't know how else to say it.
When you really understand the research and now even more emerging research on anxiety, depression, suicide and psychosis, I think we should be much more concerned from a public health standpoint.
When was the last time you heard a public health authority in the state of California say, you know, legalizing marijuana has been a disaster and here are the numbers on it?
And it's probably from the almost 300,000 scans I've done, the biggest lesson is I'm not stuck with the brain I have, that I can make it better and I can prove it.
Now, I can also make it worse and I can prove that too, right?
Every day I am making my brain better or I'm making it worse based on the choices that I make.
And that's so exciting.
Everybody gets really excited about neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is you can remodel your brain.
But neuroplasticity goes both ways.
Whatever you repeat, you model in your brain.
Whatever you repeat becomes tracks that force you into that road, if you will.
And so when I go to a restaurant and the first thing they ask you is, do you want a glass of alcohol?
When you go no over and over and over again, well, no becomes strong in your brain.
And so the temptation is low.
If you say yes over and over and over again, that then becomes an automatic response.
And so we're wiring our brains for health or illness by the choices we make.
If there's going to be a different administration, it will be hard.
But I think the more we start caring about our brains.
So the most important thing I'm doing right now is I'm working on creating a national brain health revolution.
My goal is for everyone to ask themselves this one question.
Whatever I'm doing now, is it good for my brain or bad for it?
And if I can accomplish this, then I think people will really start to ask themselves that question.
Is it good for my brain or bad for it?
And the thing most pressing, marijuana, psilocybin, cell phones, social media, AI.
There's a brand new study out from MIT that evaluated smart kids who use AI to write their papers rather than just doing it themselves or just using Google had significantly less brain function while they were doing that task.
What that means is if I go to the gym, I'm used to lifting 25 pounds so I could have strong arms.
It's now I go to the gym and I only lift two pounds.
Just to put it into a larger governance context, like let's say you had a population that had been promised it was control, it, you know, had control of its own government, owned its own country.
And then for, I don't know, like 50 years, you did nothing to serve their actual interests and you started to worry that they would rebel against you in some sort of violent revolution.
You didn't want that.
Wouldn't you do everything you could to make them dumber and more passive, lower their testosterone levels, lower their brain activity, have some kratom, have some SSRIs.
Here's a benzo, get fat.
Like, why wouldn't you want that if you wanted people to be docile?
And in it, I imagined if I was an evil ruler and I wanted to create mental illness, what would I do?
What would you do?
All of those things you just mentioned.
I would have little girls selling Girl Scout cookies.
In fact, in the most brilliant evil ruler strategy, there was a Girl Scout who set up her cookie stand outside a pot dispensary in San Diego and within a span of like three hours, completely sold out and had to get more product.
And I'm like, that is brilliant evil ruler strategy stuff.
It's got little girls that are really cute to sell you sugar with trans fats in them to people who are smoking pot.
I'm like, and the marijuana with the highest level or one of the highest levels of THC is called Girl Scout cookies.
And step two is, is your behavior getting you what you want?
Obviously, it's not.
Step three, let's go get your brain healthy.
Brain health is three things.
Brain envy, God care about it.
Avoid things that hurt it, know the list.
Do things that help it know the list.
That's got to be the next step because with a healthy brain, you're less likely to relapse.
Or if you relapse, you don't see it as a failure because every day, and this is what Julius and I did, every day you win or you learn is you take a curiosity mindset into the problem rather than a shame mindset into the problem.
I failed.
It's like, well, let's look at it.
And if you can understand, do you know when people relapse?
When they have low blood sugar, when they've gone too long without eating, they're more likely to relapse.
And I think coordination exercises and strength training are both really important for blood flow.
Retirement and aging is learn new things.
And everybody should get blood work every year, I think.
And one of the tests you should always get is ferritin.
So ferritin is a measure of iron storage.
And if your iron is high, it promotes aging.
And you should donate blood twice a year.
So donating blood twice a year for people who have high varitin levels, good for their brain, good for the- So there was something behind the whole leech idea.
Wow, so funny.
Tana and I were in Istanbul.
We went to the spice market and had leeches for sale in the spice market.
And I'll look at my wife and I'm like, why do they have leeches for sale here?
And she's a neurosurgical ICU nurse and she said, because they suck blood and it can help wounds heal and it also takes off excess iron.
Now, if your iron levels are low, it's a very bad thing.
And so I now shave with something called Kiss My Face, used it this morning, and it's a two, right?
It doesn't have toxic toxins in the personal product.
So think deodorant, shampoo, body wash, lotions, things along that line.
Read the labels, right?
Most people are smart enough now that they're reading food labels.
They need to read product labels.
The M, we didn't talk about the M, but that's mental health.
If you're depressed as a woman, it doubles your risk of Alzheimer's disease.
If you're depressed as a man, it quadruples your risk of Alzheimer's disease.
And now we know new studies, SSRIs increase the risk of dementia.
Like, holy smokes.
And so significantly.
Significantly.
Head to head against SSRIs or head to head against antidepressants, walking like you're late for 40 minutes, 45 minutes, four times a week, equally effective.
Taking fish oil, equally effective to antidepressants in a study from New Zealand was actually more effective.
Learning not to believe every stupid thing you think.
And we need our vitamin D level to be at a healthy range.
Now, don't go crazy with it because then you'll end up with kidney stones.
But you want to know it, right?
You can't change what you don't measure.
You want to know it and then work to optimize it, either by getting more sun or supplementing it.
It's so important.
And eating garlic, mushrooms, and onions helps support immunity.
So the second eye in Bright Minds is immunity and infections.
And I believe infectious disease psychiatry, it's going to be a major branch of psychiatry in 50 years.
And like COVID, for example, flamed the brain.
It was so interesting because when COVID first started, I mean, I have all these patients and they would get COVID and they'd get anxious or they get depressed or they get psychotic.
You could see it on their scans where their emotional brains became dramatically overactive.
And if you have long COVID, it's damaging your brain.
So if you get COVID, in the next six months, you have a 25% increased risk of having a new onset psychiatric illness.
And what our scans taught us, it caused inflammation that targeted your emotional brain.
And so the way to help that is omega-3 fatty acids decrease inflammation.
Curcumins decrease inflammation.
Quercetin, another supplement, decreases inflammation.
And then make sure you're on an anti-inflammatory diet where you're not eating processed foods, much sugar, or much simple carbohydrates.
This fascinating study from the Mayo Clinic where they looked at people who had a fat-based diet.
So think avocados, nuts and seeds, green leafy vegetables, salmon, healthy oils, 40% less risk of getting Alzheimer's disease.
People had a simple carbohydrate-based diet, bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, fruit juice, sugar, a 400% increased risk of Alzheimer's disease.
The D in Bright Minds is diabetes.
You do not want that.
It's a combination of being overweight and having high blood sugar.
It's a disaster for the brain.
So when I get my overweight pre-diabetic patients, I'm like, if you want to love your life for the rest of your life, we got to get this under control.
The N is neurohormones.
Talked about testosterone a little bit.
And the S is sleep.
So all of those things are the bad things and the good things to do for your brain, but it all boils down to, is this good for my brain or bad for it?
Do you think that the rise in Alzheimer's, which is also, I think, real, we can say it's not just a matter of, you know, extended lifespan or improved diagnosis, but there's actually more Alzheimer's, right?
I think it's directly related to all 11 of those risk factors.
So, for example, if you have sleep apnea, where you snore loudly, you stop breathing at night, you're tired during the day, that triples your risk of Alzheimer's.
I think it's all of these things going together.
And we bought this huge lie that Alzheimer's is caused by an increase in beta amyloid plaque formation in the brain.
But when they develop medicines and vaccines against beta amyloid, they didn't work.
And we have a couple that are now FDA approved, but they don't work very well.
And they're very expensive.
It's you have to go after all the risk factors as early as you can.
I think all of us should be on an Alzheimer's prevention program, which is the same program to prevent depression.
There's a book I love called It Didn't Start With You.
And on our podcast, Change Your Brain Every Day, we interviewed Mark Woolen.
And he talks about how trauma gets passed down through generations, that trauma causes epigenetic changes, these little switches on your genes, and it makes you more vulnerable to anxiety, depression, and the thoughts that are associated with those things.
So like aspartame can affect generations, so can trauma.
And there was a lot of study done on this of children and grandchildren of people in the Holocaust and how it changed the chemistry in their bodies, making them more vulnerable to having depression, anxiety, and PTSD.
It's also been found to be true for the children of the soldiers who enter Iraq and Afghanistan that they have a higher incidence of medical systems.
And they would never do anything to harm the child unless their brain is damaged or their brain is disrupted.
So I've scanned over a thousand convicted felons, over a hundred murderers.
We got this scan of Kip Kinkle, who murdered his mom and dad and then went to his high school and shot 25 people.
His brain was so damaged.
Well, he murdered his mom and dad, so he never really knew.
Likely he had anoxia or lack of oxygen at birth.
And my hero story.
So when I first started doing scans, I loved it.
I was so excited about it.
And then I had, I'm a distinguished fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.
But then so many people there started to hate me.
They said, you shouldn't be scanning people.
It's not part of our tradition.
That's not what we do.
And I'm like, when I was growing up, I had a father whose two favorite words, first one was bullshit.
The second one was no.
And I heard that over and over again.
And so when they told me I shouldn't be doing what I loved, I'm like, bullshit.
No, I'm going to do it.
But I became very anxious because I didn't like powerful people telling me I shouldn't do something.
And it was really painful emotionally.
And then in 1995, I got a call late one night from my sister-in-law who told me my nine-year-old nephew, Andrew, who's my godson, who I loved, attacked a little girl on the baseball field that day for no reason.
And I'm on the other end of the phone.
I'm like, that's awful.
What else is going on?
She said, Danny, he's different.
He's mean.
He doesn't smile anymore.
I went into his room today and I found two pictures he had drawn.
One of them, he's hanging from a tree in a suicide attempt, nine years old.
I want to see him tomorrow because I'd been scanning people for four years and I'd already correlated violence, at least in some people, to the left temporal lobe.
If your left temporal lobe is damaged, you're more likely to have dark, evil, awful thoughts.
And so they brought him up to see me the next day.
They lived eight hours away.
And I'm like, buddy, what's going on?
He said, Uncle Danny, I don't know.
I'm mad all the time.
I'm like, is anybody teasing you?
He said, no.
He says, anybody hurting you?
No.
Anybody touching you in places they shouldn't be touching you?
He said, no.
999 child psychiatrists out of a thousand would have put him on medicine and put him in therapy.
And I'm like, I have to look at his brain because how do I know unless I look?
Right?
That's like one of the taglines of my life.
How do I know unless I look?
Why are psychiatrists the only medical doctors who virtually never look at the organ they treat?
And I went, great question.
I went to the scan center and I held Andrew's hand while he held his teddy bear and got scanned.
And afterwards, my mentor, Jack Pauldy, the image comes up on the computer screen.
He's missing his left temporal lobe.
And I looked at Jack as the first time I've seen it.
And so Dostoevsky said, you can tell about the soul of a society, not by how it treats its outstanding citizens, but by how it treats its criminals.
Yes.
And it just, I want to rehabilitate people who do bad things or at least try, right?
We should look at their brains and see, can we get them better?
Can we get them to love their brains so they don't go out and use drugs?
And I was involved in a program in Washington State where they actually screened for ADHD and learning disabilities, made them go through a 14-week course to learn about what they had.
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show.
On one level, that's not surprising.
That's what they do.
But on another level, it's shocking with everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics with the wars, when the cusp of fighting right now, Google has decided you should have less information rather than more.
And that is totally wrong.
It's immoral.
What can you do about it?
Well, we could whine about it.
That's a waste of time.
We're not in charge of Google.
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