543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz

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Speaker 6 If you gave America the knowledge that they could use to improve themselves, to feel confident that they had jurisdiction over their own body, to actually play an active role in ensuring that they don't develop those chronic illnesses, that they'll do it.

Speaker 6 If people don't think they matter, then they don't show up in their own lives.

Speaker 2 There's no uniting narrative. There's no union.
It's a completely pathological claim because we live in a hierarchy of narratives that stretch in principle up to the ultimate pinnacle.

Speaker 2 There's that, then there's the fact too that now we're all connected. So things can spread much faster.

Speaker 2 It's certainly possible that oversimplified, easily understandable pathological ideas like viruses spread the most rapidly.

Speaker 6 It's so painful for me to see so many of my brethren, other Americans, feeling ill, thinking it's their fault and thinking there's no way out.

Speaker 6 The nihilism around health is stunning, which is Jordan Wag, the messaging that you're delivering is so critical.

Speaker 2 Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity to sit down with Dr.
Mehmet Oz.

Speaker 2 Dr. Oz was an early advocate for me, a fair early advocate for me back as early as 2018, which made him unique in that regard on the legacy media side.

Speaker 2 And since then, we've had a number of public discussions and a much broader, a much larger number of private discussions. And that's been very good as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 2 He's a very remarkable person, full of ideas.

Speaker 2 exceptional level of energy and doing his best to aim upward as far as I can tell and quite effectively so. And so it was a pleasure to have him today in Scottsdale, where he is with his wife.
And

Speaker 2 what did we talk about? Well,

Speaker 2 we talked about the changing media environment and why that's occurred, the shift from legacy media to online media, and also the corruption of the legacy media enterprise over about a 10-year period, something that he got wind of as early, let's say, as 2012.

Speaker 2 And we tried to puzzle out why that was occurring.

Speaker 2 And that brought us into a broader discussion of, well, corruption on the scientific and academic front, which is a manifestation of the same set of symptoms in a different area.

Speaker 2 And we talked about the radical changes on the political side with regards, particularly to the Make America Healthy Again movement, which is a twist in the Trump approach that certainly meets with Dr.

Speaker 2 Oz's approval because he's been working for years on the public health side and is pleased, I would say, or more than pleased, to see this become a central issue of public concern, as it should be, given the unbelievable cost and consequences of the chronic disease epidemic that does immediately confront us.

Speaker 2 And so We discussed all of that.

Speaker 2 We also discussed as well his foray into the political realm, the price he paid for that personally, the advantages of that, and his plans for the future, which involve continuing to develop what is already a sizable um social media

Speaker 2 new media presence which is expanding and that he's hitting with all his customary diligence so stay tuned for that well dr oz it's good to see you again as always we haven't done anything publicly since nine 2021

Speaker 6 Before I decided to run for office, that was the last time we taped and you were the last big interview I did.

Speaker 2 Oh, oh, is that right? Oh, it was very helpful.

Speaker 6 I asked.

Speaker 2 That'll teach you to interview me. That's exactly a career-ending mood.
You got me psyched up to go.

Speaker 6 You said, tell the truth and go out there and do battle.

Speaker 2 Well, it was actually, it was actually a weird situation at that time because three years ago, there wasn't, there still was very, very few people, let's say, on the classic legacy media side who would do an interview with me.

Speaker 2 And you were certainly one of the, because we had done something earlier than that, too.

Speaker 6 Two years before that, maybe it was earlier i think uh 2017 or so 18 that early time period i say that because when uh we we you know first decide to invite you i had an intense battle within the show with people threatening to quit uh because did they quit

Speaker 6 I'll tell you the story very briefly but it's a it's a wonderful reflection of what I think is the ultimate hypocrisy that happens often, certainly within media. Folks wanted to quit.

Speaker 6 It was performative in general. They wanted to show that they were going to be taking a strong stance against you.
And the reasons were obvious.

Speaker 6 I know all the accolades they could throw at you.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 so I challenged the team. I said, well, show me those evidence because if he's truly those things, I don't want to have him on.
I'd never met you before. I had listened to you.

Speaker 6 I was intrigued by the battle that you had waged around compelled speech in Canada. And I thought big thinkers ought to be heard.
And my job as a television host, I was trained, was to

Speaker 6 expose the public to ideas that are worth hearing so they can judge for themselves.

Speaker 6 It's the most clear with your health where you really should be taking charge because you'll go on a wrong path otherwise.

Speaker 6 But it's true for almost any other important thing you do is to make sure you have an opinion on what's best for you.

Speaker 6 So, when I invited you on, I heard different things and I heard back from no one except one individual, a senior producer, very capable and well-respected,

Speaker 6 said you're homophobic. He happened to be gay.
And so, I said, bring me the evidence. He brought me evidence.

Speaker 6 And it was fascinating because it was you talking on a social site to two gay men advising them to be thoughtful about their adopted child because that adopted child might face hardship because it's an untraditional non-traditional family they're having you didn't judge them i thought you were very caring and loving as a psychologist would be in that setting and i confronted my producer with that and he refused to back down but he didn't quit And at that point, I realized that it really wasn't about whether you truly were those ad hominem attack words, but the fact that they just didn't like you to be able to say what you wanted to say because it didn't agree with what they thought you should be saying.

Speaker 6 And that is the biggest risk, I think, to free speech in America. And I reminded of a very close friend who grew up in Hungary and he left Hungary when he was about 20 years of age.
He's older now.

Speaker 6 He's in his, you know, he just had his 80th birthday. And he said, when he grew up,

Speaker 6 everyone that he talked to, he knew they were lying to him.

Speaker 6 But that wasn't the problem, Jordan.

Speaker 6 the problem is that those people knew that he knew that they were lying and they knew that he knew that they knew that he was lying so everyone's in on the game exactly so you know as is often said democracy is based on common truths and totalitarian governments are based on common lies and he just did not want that this older gentleman who's such a patriotic american after having immigrated here fled from eastern europe uh he didn't want that for this country and yet he sought I'm witnessing it.

Speaker 6 My parents were immigrants to this country, came here loving America for everything it represented, the shining city on the hill as reagan called it it was there for all the world to admire and emulate

Speaker 6 and we can't afford to slip on that i was in singapore my show as you know aired um in 120 countries

Speaker 6 a lot of the world and i didn't have a lot of competition because in many parts of the world there aren't health shows so we were the dominant health show for those 13 years we aired and i would go around do interviews and one of the places i went was singapore i'll never forget right before i went on the air national i was on my show aired right before the national news so I went on the national news to promote the show.

Speaker 6 And the anchor, you know, turned over to me and said, please help America, please save America. And I said, well, I mean, I love my country, and of course, I'm going to do my best for it.

Speaker 6 But why, why are you warning me about that?

Speaker 6 And he said, in our country, we have several warring groups, people who don't naturally get along, different ethnic groups, religious groups, and we're on a tiny island.

Speaker 6 And every time we're about to blow ourselves up and crush that thin veneer of civilization that protects us, someone looks up and says, guys, guys, America pulled this off based on a piece of parchment 250 years old.

Speaker 6 If they can do it, again, based on something that was written, we can do it too.

Speaker 6 So America is a role model for the rest of the world. So when we blow it,

Speaker 6 they copy us. When we sneeze, they get pneumonia.

Speaker 6 And that's why

Speaker 6 the crisis that we have felt over the last several years, exacerbated by COVID, which really just sort of bolded and underlined what was going wrong, is such an opportunity for us, as well as potential risk.

Speaker 2 An opportunity to put things right again.

Speaker 6 To wake people up to what has happened. And I do think it slipped up on us.
I don't think most people appreciated how hard it was to say what you believe needed to be said and heard.

Speaker 6 You were a very early example of this. I mean, just blaringly obvious that you should have been allowed to say what you were saying about Capell's speech.

Speaker 6 And yet you were, again, the ad hominem attacks. They can't attack what you're saying, so they have to attack attack you.

Speaker 6 And anytime you, anybody's listening now, if you read a newspaper article or anything that's in a commentary, and the first thing they do is attack the person rather than the idea, you know that they're on weak ground.

Speaker 6 Because if I got you on the idea, why would I bother wasting my time attacking you personally? I only attack you personally because you're not worth listening to. I think the arguments around R.K.
Jr.

Speaker 6 are a good example of this. I mean, if you can argue against his ideas, and gosh, there are lots of ways you could do that, then argue them, but stop wasting your time attacking him.

Speaker 2 Well, it's also the sign of someone who's juvenile and relatively simple-minded because it's a juvenile approach to go for the person.

Speaker 2 It's simple-minded to avoid the nuances of the situation, you know. And I can understand to some degree why people do that, I think, with me, but also with RFK Jr., because

Speaker 2 it's hard to believe that the things that I pointed to, let's say in Canada, were actually a danger. And it's hard to believe that the things that he's got his finger on can possibly be true.

Speaker 2 You have to do a lot of thinking and a lot of reorganization of your beliefs in order to give RFK Jr., for example, credence. And

Speaker 2 when I objected to Bill C-16 in Canada in 2016,

Speaker 2 I had some thoughts about where

Speaker 2 legislation like that might go if things didn't work out well. And of course, at that point, I still thought they were most likely to, because Canada

Speaker 2 had been such a remarkably stable country.

Speaker 2 Since then, by the way, we've gone from GDP parity with the US to 60% of GDP per capita in Canada.

Speaker 2 We are on average poorer than people in Mississippi, which is the poorest American state.

Speaker 2 And we have real estate costs that have spiraled under control, out of control, and incredible internal divisiveness in Canada on a scale that is completely historically unprecedented.

Speaker 2 It doesn't take much of an assault on free speech like Bill C-16. They extended the provisions of protection, let's say, to gender identity and gender

Speaker 2 expression, which I thought was insane beyond comprehension. The outcome of that has actually been worse than I had originally suggested.

Speaker 2 I did tell the Senate in 2016 that they would produce an epidemic, a psychological epidemic, among young women by confusing them about their gender. And I got that exactly right.

Speaker 2 And so I'm fairly happy about that. Of course, they just told me that I was, you know, transphobic or whatever the hell their epithet of the day was.
So

Speaker 2 tell me, let's talk about free speech and the media in a broader context. Now, you watched this transition, right?

Speaker 2 At least that's what it looks like to me.

Speaker 2 And I think it's driven by the fact that YouTube made digital bandwidth essentially free. I think that's the fundamental issue at stake here.

Speaker 2 And I can't see the legacy media doesn't seem to be able to compete with that.

Speaker 2 They dropped production costs to zero. There's more going on than that, but that's the technological aspect of it.

Speaker 6 I think the rot was happening much earlier. And just to rewind this a little bit, I mean, I trained in a fairly traditional way.

Speaker 6 My father was educated actually in World War II in Istanbul, Turkey, which may have been the best medical school in the world because all the Jews from Europe had fled to Turkey.

Speaker 6 And for that reason, he got a superb education. And when he finished first in his class, he was recruited to America because we wanted people like that,

Speaker 6 top tier students from high quality universities coming to America. He wanted to brain drain.

Speaker 6 But I was completely indoctrinated by his way of thinking about a heart science approach to taking care of patients.

Speaker 6 And at the time, 50s, 60s, 70s, there was remarkable advances being made in the treatment of diseases.

Speaker 6 You know, the skate saves metaphorically, you know, the people are about to die and you get in there and you fix the heart and

Speaker 6 you take out

Speaker 6 the problem and they're better again. And there was no wrong in traditional medicine.
When I started my career at Columbia University, where I'm on the faculty,

Speaker 6 I was for many years, tenured, because I published and I worked hard and

Speaker 6 made sure that I was on the cutting edge of a lot of different fuels.

Speaker 6 I wrote patents around

Speaker 6 the repair and replacement of heart fouls from the groin. I was involved in the mechanical heart, heart transplant programs.
I ran the Heart Institute. I mean, these are like hard science ideas.

Speaker 6 So there was nothing bushy-washy about my career.

Speaker 6 But I began to realize that the patients had not read the same books that I had read, that they were getting it wrong at a very fundamental level and taking care of themselves.

Speaker 6 So I can throw as much high tech out there as possible. But without some of the lower tech, preventive ideas, we weren't going to get the desired responses.

Speaker 6 And, you know, my wife, Lisa, she won't be silenced. She kept saying, you know, they're getting it wrong because you're not giving it to them.

Speaker 6 If you gave America the knowledge that they could use to improve themselves, to feel confident that they had jurisdiction over their own body, to actually play an active role in ensuring that they don't develop those chronic illnesses, that they'll do it.

Speaker 6 That's why I even started doing media. Otherwise, I was perfectly happy.

Speaker 6 in the operating room, in the ivory tower of Columbia University, having the time of my life, you know, studying scientific things and, you know, making sure that those advances were religion.

Speaker 6 My dad intensely disliked that I stepped out of that traditional approach to medicine to start talking on the airwaves about health.

Speaker 6 In the beginning, I didn't think what I was doing was all that controversial. I was literally telling you everything that we knew within medicine.

Speaker 6 And then things started to change.

Speaker 2 Okay, what period of time was that?

Speaker 6 This isn't now. So I started doing the Oprah show around 2003, four, and I started my show in 2009, and all that was pretty smooth going.
And around 2012, I began to notice a big shift.

Speaker 6 And I remember one event in particular, there was evidence from several articles that there was arsenic in our apple juice. Now, why would anyone put arsenic in apple juice?

Speaker 6 There's no reason to do that. It's a derivative of using arsenic as a pesticide or herbicide around the apple.
It's a cheap spray. And so America banned the use of arsenic.

Speaker 6 in that setting so that the apples when you harvest them when the apple juice is squeezed out of the apples there's no arsenic in them does that make sense seems it seems reasonable okay what if the chinese don't do that?

Speaker 6 What if the Chinese farmers continue to spray with an inexpensive product like arsenic, and then multinational companies buy those apples, squeeze the juice out of it, put it in cartons, and ship it to America?

Speaker 2 What happens then?

Speaker 6 Do you think that's a legitimate question? Could there be arsenic in that apple juice? I think so. People had studied it.
They said it was the case.

Speaker 6 We decided to go to the government and say, hey, we want to see your data. Is there actually arsenic in the imported apple juice? And if so, you know, what can we do to make sure that's not a problem?

Speaker 6 Because arsenic is not good for kids. Primarily, children drink small apple juice cartons.
You know, it's not, you know, you and I aren't drinking apple juice cartons generally.

Speaker 6 That stuff's coming for young people. And the arsenic levels in America and our water are capped.

Speaker 6 You're not supposed to have above a certain number of amounts of arsenic for a reason, because it's not good for you.

Speaker 6 The government wouldn't share their data. They wouldn't talk to me.
And then I started realizing that no one was talking about this. And I wanted to make waves.

Speaker 6 because I didn't think it was right. We did a show and I just saw a tsunami of negativity, much of it led by media, who had clearly been played.

Speaker 6 And I say that because when we finally got the data from the government, which was released the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, which anyone who knows press and PR knows, you release data the day before Thanksgiving to bury it because you don't want anyone to see it.

Speaker 6 But, you know, friends came, you know, people who had been attacking me came out and

Speaker 6 shared openly that they had been incorrect and there was actually concern about this.

Speaker 6 And today in America, we have limits on the amount of arsenic that can be imported with the apple juice it shouldn't have been that hard but i began to see the inner workings of how this game is played i had a similar problem with uh gmo food labeling and i wasn't taking a stance on the show against gmos per se it's a separate discussion i was just saying transparency uh you know allow consumers to know if the products are gmo so just write on the label you know gmo corn or whatever and uh companies didn't want that and yet every other western country did that already it wasn't like I was asking for this ridiculously crazy, outlandish concept.

Speaker 6 It was already the standard in most other countries. We were the exception, clearly, the outlier.
And then I began to get attacked, not for that exactly, but for other things around that.

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Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 you think that was really starting to come to a head around 2012, or that's when you saw that?

Speaker 6 No, this is now.

Speaker 6 By the way, this is going over five years of battles. I mean, every year I'm fighting.
for another reason for something that doesn't seem that it should be that much of an argument.

Speaker 6 I mean, these are things that I thought were better for marketing. Don't you want to label your foods with GMOs? If you disagree with me, come tell me why.
They don't tell you why.

Speaker 6 This is what I'm pointing out.

Speaker 6 These battles happen behind the scenes. If they were to attack me directly on labeling GMOs, they're going to lose.

Speaker 6 Everybody wants transparency in that reality. Again, I'm not accusing manufacturers that the GMOs are bad for you.
I might have been making a medical commentary.

Speaker 6 I'm actually making an argument for transparency in the process. You're not going to win that argument.
So you don't attack the person telling the story

Speaker 6 for the story. You attack them for who they are.
And now all of a sudden, and I get clues here and there.

Speaker 6 This is hilarious.

Speaker 6 They got 10 doctors, so-called peers of mine, even though the lead writer was the head of the cigarette disinformation program, the cigarette smoke disinformation program for big tobacco in Europe.

Speaker 6 The second author went to jail for Medicaid fraud. I haven't done any of those things yet, by the way.
So they're not really my peers.

Speaker 6 But they read an article to the Dean of Columbia asking for my ouster. I'm tenured faculty, you can't just fire me because you don't like me.

Speaker 2 So far, so far.

Speaker 6 That could change. We'll get to that.
Uh, I'm, I'm, you, that's the whole point of giving someone tenure so they can speak their mind and have some job security.

Speaker 6 But the press published it before the dean got the letter. Now, you tell me how that happens.

Speaker 6 So, I, and then they, in the letter, they were complaining that I did a lot of bad things, including this GMO crazy idea that I had.

Speaker 6 And then I began to realize this is actually a very well-oiled machine. It's a takedown.
I, and you know, because I bought ink by the barrel and published it, I'm on network television.

Speaker 6 I had a production team go out to the headquarters of these guys, which was a shell organization. There was no one there.

Speaker 6 And you begin to realize that you can get past these guys, but I had a lot of resources. A massive show with a lot of people, smart people working hard for me.

Speaker 2 What about the people who don't have that? I was wondering. Which is everyone.

Speaker 6 Which is everybody else. And I began thinking, my goodness, these folks are.
you know, if they're the only one putting their hands up, they're going to get shot. And then, boom, COVID came.

Speaker 6 When COVID hit, we saw firsthand what happens when, in a time of tension, when the answers aren't that obvious and people start offering ideas that you don't want to hear, it's a problem.

Speaker 6 So I began talking to doctors around the world. There was Didier Olt was the main

Speaker 6 virologist, parasitologist at Marseille in France, and he'd had a lot of experience with hydroxychloroquine. So I was curious, did that work? Maybe we should study if that works.

Speaker 6 Then I find out we're banning the prescription of that medication in new york state the governor of the state is banning the right of a licensed doctor to prescribe a medication it's never before happened in america

Speaker 6 and there's not a real good reason for this in fact we weren't even willing as a country to study whether this worked i'm not i'm not making the argument that it would have saved anybody that to even to this day

Speaker 6 There's still debate over this because it was never actually studied in a way that was acceptable.

Speaker 6 And we saw a general move away from looking for treatments of COVID infection to only believing that the vaccine was the answer.

Speaker 6 And it's not that the vaccine is a problem. I was strongly supportive of the vaccine.

Speaker 6 We'll come back to what ended up happening with this creation, but why wouldn't you entertain another thought process that might be perfectly valid?

Speaker 6 Hey, historically, doctors treated the, you know, prevent the gunshot wound, but if it happens, treat the patient. Don't lament the fact that the bullet went through the heart.
Fix the problem.

Speaker 6 With your finger in the hole, deal with the hemorrhage. And that mindset just wasn't acceptable.

Speaker 6 And I remember very vividly, several months into it, I was really upset because there was so much published data that the schools should not be closed.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 6 And so I said it. Now, in retrospect, obviously I was right.
But at the time, whether I was right or wrong, we should have had a debate about whether the open school in America.

Speaker 6 The kids in Europe went to school. The kids in Asia went to school.
Are those kids different biologically than Americans?

Speaker 6 So why would we only take our orders, we think, from special interests, teachers' unions, around these school openings and closings.

Speaker 6 Why wouldn't we, at least in our own country, acknowledge that some states were doing better than others and they were having their schools open? This became a major battle.

Speaker 6 But I mean, the kind of vitriol that I felt personally just by raising the

Speaker 6 issue solidified, steeled me to the reality of where we had come, where we no longer could have open discourse. We had Nobel laureates getting canceled.

Speaker 6 You know, we have people who have domain expertise in the area of COVID offering thoughtful suggestions about how to manage the crisis better. We ought to be careful in dismissing those ideas.

Speaker 6 In the operating room as a heart surgeon, if I'm having an issue and someone else comes in who happens to have expertise in the area and offers me an idea about how to put a stitch or what kind of valve to use or a different technique for opening the chest wall to get in there, I'm at least going to hear them.

Speaker 6 I'm not going to have them escorted from the premises never to return because I didn't want their intrusive thoughts in my mind. There was a fragility around our policy that

Speaker 6 compelled me to want to eventually run for the Senate. But it also, in many ways, highlighted many of the things we've been fighting for.

Speaker 6 In the Maha movement, the Make America Healthy Again movement, the ideas that are being raised are ones that came up on the show over and over again. And

Speaker 6 not just my show, they were coming up in many other places, but they never could get any

Speaker 6 air cover. They get smothered, suffocated before they can sort of get airborne.

Speaker 6 What's happened that I think is very promising is that we're at least now seeing some pushback on ideas about whether or not fluoride is actually a beneficial thing to have in our drinking water.

Speaker 6 Should there be mandates about around vaccines? You know, can we talk through the revolving door of our federal agencies and

Speaker 6 the agency capture that is perceived by some? Why is the NIH not actively studying prevention

Speaker 6 with any kind of

Speaker 6 aggressiveness? I mean, it's just a trivial part of their budget, budget. They're not doing it because they think other things are, you know,

Speaker 6 curing this other illness is more important, which I do that too, if you want, but you have to study prevention because no one else will do it because there's no money in it.

Speaker 6 Companies aren't going to profit by studying how to not use their products.

Speaker 2 Well, cure without prevention often indicates relapse as well, right? I mean, if the conditions are there to make the disease possible to begin with and you don't change that, then

Speaker 2 why is there any reason to presume that it won't recur?

Speaker 2 I know there are situations where it doesn't recur, but it's, you know, even that dichotomy between prevention and care seems to be odd from a conceptual perspective.

Speaker 6 Georg, I think metaphorically, if it may help,

Speaker 6 the issue of prevention is about the soil.

Speaker 6 We have to till the soil, fertilize the soil, protect the soil, use regenerative techniques on your biology to make sure that you're resilient enough to deal with

Speaker 6 illness and other insults to your well-being. That's what longevity is fundamentally about.
It's not about being made perfectly.

Speaker 6 It's about being resilient enough that when bad stuff happens, you can cope with it.

Speaker 6 And we have actively in America, without intending so, I don't believe, but nevertheless, actively made it difficult for people to do the right thing.

Speaker 6 We've chummed the waters with products that make bad behavior simple. Federal policies have

Speaker 6 over and over again subsidized products that aren't as healthy for us. And we, you and me, and our brethren have let the country down because the intellectual elite

Speaker 6 you know, knowledge

Speaker 6 worker groups haven't been honest, or at least haven't been willing to challenge some of the fundamental assumptions we've made about our well-being.

Speaker 6 So we now have bad science or bad conclusions from science being infused with

Speaker 6 into products made by industry, which aren't in our best interest, wrap that in bad policy, and then dish it to people, serve people with that.

Speaker 2 And that's also had an effect on the legacy media.

Speaker 2 Like we've got three things sort of in the air now that we're discussing simultaneously, and it would be useful to see if we can untangle them to some degree.

Speaker 2 We have the transformation that you described on the legacy media landscape that started to take place around 2012. We have the complicitness and the malfeasance.

Speaker 2 and the silence of the scientific and medical community, let's say around COVID, but even more broadly on the scientific front, right? And then we have this

Speaker 2 emergent make America healthy again movement that

Speaker 2 interestingly enough is being captained now by the very person who has been pushing it most

Speaker 2 in

Speaker 2 the most extreme manner in the public sphere for the last 20 years. So these things are related in some way, right? There's been some massive shift in the last 10 years.

Speaker 2 on all these fronts, and it's driven by something that's,

Speaker 2 it's driven by factors that are similar across all the areas. And it's very difficult to put finger on exactly what that is.

Speaker 2 I think some of it's, we talked a little bit about the fact that technological transformation, let's say on the YouTube side, has put a tremendous amount of pressure on the legacy media because YouTube basically brought the price of production, television production, and dissemination to a much broader audience than was ever conceived of as possible, plus made it permanent for zero cost.

Speaker 2 And so that's a,

Speaker 2 I thought back in 2013. I think I started putting my YouTube videos up maybe

Speaker 2 it was somewhere between 2010 and 2013 when YouTube was still mostly for like cute cat videos.

Speaker 2 But I looked at it and I thought, you know, this is, there's something, this is very weird because we have video on demand.

Speaker 2 It's free and it's permanent.

Speaker 2 Like that's, I thought, is that like the Gutenberg printing press? Like, is this something completely and

Speaker 2 completely different in a revolutionary way? Not only on the price side, but video is now permanent and indexable. Well, that's like, what the hell does that mean?

Speaker 2 Well, we're kind of seeing what it means. It means a radical shift in the way people communicate.
There's that.

Speaker 2 Then there's the fact too that basically during that same period, we became hyper-connected, right, with these.

Speaker 2 And that's a very interesting thing to think about that psychologically and even neurologically. Now we're all connected.
So things can spread much faster. Okay, so what spreads quickly?

Speaker 2 Well, do good ideas spread quickly? I think

Speaker 2 there have been good ideas that have spread rapidly. And I think YouTube's probably been the best for that of all the social media networks because it facilitates long-form communication.

Speaker 2 But it's certainly possible that once you're all connected, pathological ideas, oversimplified, easily understandable pathological ideas like viruses spread the most rapidly.

Speaker 2 And so maybe that's driving this as well because we're hyper-connected. And then there's the, maybe there's the

Speaker 2 effective policy.

Speaker 2 I mean, there was a legal change, and I don't remember how many years ago in the United States that made it possible for pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to the consumer, right?

Speaker 2 And this was something, this is a policy that characterizes the United States relatively uniquely.

Speaker 2 And from what I understand, that means that 50% of the advertising budget for the legacy media networks in general is now pharmaceutical company driven and 75% of the advertising for the legacy news associations.

Speaker 2 So the legacy news shows. And so that means the pharmaceutical, giant pharmaceutical companies have a hammer lock on public communication, apart from the emergent new media.

Speaker 2 So that's a lot, like that's a lot of technological transformation in 10 years, right? I mean, that's stirring the pot in a major way.

Speaker 6 The question is, would it have happened anyway? And I think bad ideas, they can be viral, but I think of them more like bacteria. They'll burrow under your skin.

Speaker 6 And if you don't expose them to light and oxygen, then they'll become abscesses and fester. The sores are painful and they can kill you.

Speaker 6 And what I think technology did to a large extent is expose a lot of mediocre ideas to the reality of what happens when you try them. Because

Speaker 6 ideological movements sound great conceptually, but when you actually put them into use, they don't pan out so much. And the motivation for the movement might be positive, but the results are not.

Speaker 6 I'll give you a concrete example because I think it plays into what you're saying. Long before we had iPhones and YouTube and anything else,

Speaker 6 Ansel Keys went to Europe and did a seven country study to look at what happens to people when they eat certain foods and what kinds of problems it caused with their heart.

Speaker 6 He happened to collect the data during Lent, which, of course, skewed the data a a bit and the local scientists didn't like it, but he brought it back.

Speaker 6 And because our nation was desperately looking for solutions for heart attacks, President Eisenhower had just had one. We had the data that a lot of young men were dying.

Speaker 6 They jumped at this possibility that a low-fat diet might be better for you because that's what seemed to come out of this early data. Now, again, this is long before we had any technologies.

Speaker 6 That became the ruling dogma. Keyes came back.
He had allies.

Speaker 6 Because of his allies politically supporting him and no one being able to challenge him, but successfully, because anyone who tried to raise their hands and say something got taken out, we now develop a formal national policy to advocate for low fat diets.

Speaker 6 So low fat usually means high carb too. Somebody's got to make up the calorie difference.

Speaker 6 So companies started making high carb solutions, simple carbohydrates, high fructose corn syrup, unhealthy foods, which directly correlated to weight gain. Again, this wasn't a conspiracy.

Speaker 6 It was the diabetes. And diabetes and heart disease and Alzheimer's and all the things that come out out of metabolic syndrome, disarray.

Speaker 6 But as you look back on the history of all this, which is only possible now because you have so many ways of telling the truth and lying, by the way, but you have ways of telling the truth.

Speaker 6 You look at things like the Minnesota Heart Study, which was commissioned to prove that this theory was right, and they never published the data.

Speaker 6 And years later, 15 years later, they finally are forced to publish it because it showed, proved that no fat diets do all the things we now know they do.

Speaker 6 And they do not in any way help with heart attacks.

Speaker 6 So all that data was very easy to cover up and you'd never know it was hurting you and you think it was bad luck.

Speaker 6 You think you're gaining weight because you're lazy or other people gaining weight because they're sloths. You start making all these

Speaker 6 excuses about why we have gone the wrong direction without addressing the fundamental flaw, which was we're giving people bad ideas.

Speaker 6 And bad ideas lead to bad outcomes. You talk about SID, right? As the idea of an arrow heading towards a target.
And, you know, if you hit the target, fantastic. If you don't, that's a sin.

Speaker 6 Or if you have the wrong target that you're aiming at, you're definitely not going to hit the right target. That's what we did.
We aimed people in the wrong direction.

Speaker 6 And then we allowed industry to co-opt that process because it was easier for them to make those foods, less expensive.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 6 they were very much had a best interest in making sure that ideology stuck. So how do you turn that over? A lot of physicians sacrificed their careers trying to do so and didn't succeed.

Speaker 6 What's allowed us to finally take these on in a very aggressive way?

Speaker 6 and they're wonderful scientists now who are getting big enough that what they say has gravitas and people hear them, listen to them, and act on them, is because they can get their word out through podcasts like this in ways that were never before possible.

Speaker 6 If I was trying to challenge someone about the American Heart Association guidelines for

Speaker 6 cholesterol intake, the diet intake of fat,

Speaker 2 I couldn't do that. I mean, literally, I couldn't.
Who am I going to talk to?

Speaker 6 You walk into the learned organization where all the heart doctors are supposed to say what they think is important. No no one's going to listen to you.
They'll dismiss you and push you to the corner.

Speaker 6 So the democratization of information has allowed us to challenge dogma that was incorrect.

Speaker 6 That, I believe, more than anything else, coupled with obvious errors during COVID, has allowed a lot of Americans now to believe that our country is not sick by accident.

Speaker 6 And by making America healthy again, it's both an achievable goal, but also one that will deal with our crisis.

Speaker 6 I'll give you a little bit of math here because, you know, when I I was in medical school, I went to business school at Wharton because I was interested in healthcare policy, just these issues.

Speaker 6 Like, how do you fix the game so that you actually get some benefits? And one thing you always track is what drives the big budget items.

Speaker 6 So, in America, the big budget item that's really stripping a lot of competitiveness away is the healthcare budget. It's $105, roughly, right? Four and a half trillion dollars, trillion with a T.

Speaker 6 It's a lot of money. 90% of the healthcare budget is driven by chronic disease.
90%.

Speaker 2 If we deal with chronic diseases, and the most common chronic diseases are...

Speaker 6 Metabox syndrome is the root cause of all described that. Metabox syndrome means

Speaker 6 your pancreas, it makes insulin, but it's unable to make it in a way that allows your body to deal with the calories coming into your body. So the body reacts by doing things that are maladaptive.

Speaker 6 It'll deposit the fat in your belly, for example, and your momentum. Sounds like the momentum, but not the M.

Speaker 6 That fat tissue there was designed for our ancestors to store fat in times of feast, but have you use it in times of harvest the harvest is a good example so you didn't die in the winter good habit to have which is why our ancestors had uniquely effective ability to store fat right it's not a bad thing except if you're storing if you you know to go hunting you open the fridge it doesn't work because you're not consuming calories to hunt your food anymore and so metabox syndrome is a series of of of problems that occur because the fundamental process by which you consume and use energy is is is off and

Speaker 6 people who happen to have a healthy metabolism live a lot longer. They don't develop heart disease, Alzheimer's, and cancers, and a slew of other problems nearly as commonly.

Speaker 6 And people have those issues with the metabolism of their blood sugar and inability of insulin to keep up. And as a consequence, lots of inflammation in the body, including in the liver.

Speaker 6 All those complications drive most of the healthcare expense, at least half of the healthcare expense of the country.

Speaker 2 So that's very tightly linked to diet and not exactly to caloric intake, but rather to type of diet. Yes.

Speaker 6 And people who are overweight have trouble exercising.

Speaker 6 They don't sleep well. That's another building block of your health.
And oftentimes people overweight feel shame.

Speaker 2 Yes. Well, we've made it a moral issue.
You know, and even my attitude towards that has shifted a lot in the last 10 years.

Speaker 2 When I see someone overweight now on the street, I would say probably 15 years ago, I was slightly more judgmental.

Speaker 2 I'm not a particularly judgmental person when it comes to people's health because it's generally very complicated.

Speaker 2 But it was easy enough to think, well, if they just exercised more and ate right, they'd do fine. And then I learned that, well, I learned many of the things that you just described, you know,

Speaker 2 broadened my knowledge in that area and started to understand that these high carbohydrate diets were making people obese. And that was as simple as that.

Speaker 2 Well, I read a study at one point that suggested that one

Speaker 2 soda a day is sufficient to cause the obesity epidemic.

Speaker 6 It's true. And let me explain that's really important.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, that's, that's nothing, right? One, that's not even much of a bad habit.

Speaker 2 160 calories. 160 calories.

Speaker 6 Right. That's not the problem.
Your body is looking for nutrients. Your brain, very wisely, is disregarding caloric intake, only focusing on the nutrient density of what it's getting.

Speaker 6 That's what it uses to build muscle and hormones and brain and everything else. So when you take in a soft drink, your brain doesn't count that as food because it's not getting what it's looking for.

Speaker 6 And yet the calories still add on. And the high fructose corn syrup actually sort of stimulates a bunch of processes that are also maladaptive, but getting full, feeling satiated is not one of them.

Speaker 6 Right, right. And so we see this happening over and over again, where small little errors reproduce every single day.
Yeah, well, that's the thing. But the converse is also true.
Small things.

Speaker 6 small steps done right every day, all of a sudden, life's beautiful.

Speaker 6 And that's why it's so painful for me to to see so many of my brethren, other Americans, feeling ill, thinking it's their fault, and thinking there's no way out.

Speaker 6 The nihilism around health is stunning. And

Speaker 6 these were focused on longevity, wellness issues, because there's so much opportunity there. You know, not just because we've got AI now that can customize.

Speaker 6 recommendations for you just exactly what you need, including when you hear the recommendation, because you're not always receptive equally, but we also have much better technologies that are available that can help you get on the right path.

Speaker 6 There's medications that in some instances make sense, but these are all crutches to fundamentally to get you to realize that you can do it to empower you,

Speaker 6 the person whose ultimate destiny is so tied to your own will, which is Jordan why the messaging that you're delivering is so critical. Because if people don't think they matter,

Speaker 6 then they don't show up in their own lives. We have a kids foundation, which you've been incredibly helpful on called Health Corps.
It's based on the principle of Peace Corps.

Speaker 6 So we go around the country with young college grads who like the Peace Corps, would train them to do great things.

Speaker 6 Instead of sending them off to botswana to build dams, you put them in schools in America.

Speaker 6 In fact, here where we're taping in Arizona, the Department of Education has given Health Corps a $5 million grant to go into 100 schools and build digital platforms to deal with this issue that I just discussed.

Speaker 6 Fundamentally, here's the problem. We can't get young people to practice anymore for sports.
We can't get them to do their math homework anymore.

Speaker 6 You can't get them to be respectable in class. Why? Because they don't think they matter.

Speaker 6 Think about your life. If you're listening, think about your childhood.
Someone told you that showing up would change the world.

Speaker 6 That if you actually studied math or became a doctor, a nurse, a construction worker, a union person, if you did something. with your life, that the world would be a better place for it.

Speaker 6 If you don't think that's true, Jordan, you're not going to do your homework in school. And you aren't going to go to practice because why would you bother?

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 6 And so what we try to do more than anything else is get young people to first off very narcissistically focus on themselves, their own bodies. You can be healthy.
You can be cool.

Speaker 6 You can be, you know,

Speaker 6 a better mate for someone in the future, a better employee in the future. But no matter what, you are important.

Speaker 6 You can do great good things. You can do terrible bad things.
But what you do matters. So start focusing on what's in front of you.
Show up in life by showing up in your school.

Speaker 6 So we're brought in to tell young people things through the lens of health that historically was told to them by their teachers and by their parents or just by society at large by messaging, because culture eats strategy all day long.

Speaker 6 You got a strong culture, then you can make up for flaws in your strategy.

Speaker 2 But if you don't have a culture, who tells, who cares what you're being told to do?

Speaker 6 You're not going to be able to do that.

Speaker 2 Well, they're told the opposite now. I mean, they're really told, they're categorized by group.
and that group can be, you know, race, gender, sex, whatever. They're categorized by group.

Speaker 2 They're told that they're pawns of a tyrannical society and that they have absolutely no agency.

Speaker 2 And in the boys' case, they're also told that if they have any agency, that's nothing but a manifestation of a detrimental power drive and that their play preferences are all wrong in school.

Speaker 2 And so you... I can't see how we could demoralize children more effectively if we'd set out to actually manage that.

Speaker 2 I read a study again not so long ago that showed I think it was 43% of American youth feel that they had no agency in their life.

Speaker 2 Well, that being, that's a hell of a thing to think when you're 18.

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Speaker 6 Jordan, you go into the schools, and you've been kind enough to be supportive of Health Course. You may have witnessed this as well.
You talk to a 17-year-old and the light's gone out of their eyes.

Speaker 6 It's just blank darkness. They don't know what to think anymore.
They have 15 different conflicting ideologies being torn at them.

Speaker 6 None of them are going to help them deal with the challenge of their life imagine all but you know all of us had those issues when we were in high school somebody put their hand out and said jordan you can do this man it could have been priest in your church

Speaker 6 it could have been a coach but someone helped a little bit that's what we try to do with health corps but there are other ways of getting that message out that aren't being used and most importantly we don't have the luxury of sitting back on our butts and wondering what happens next and complaining about this process.

Speaker 6 You need to pick up an oar and start rowing. And ideally, you get someone someone across the hull from you.
So you're rowing in straight, not in circles. But

Speaker 6 it's a reality that has, it's like an epidemic taken over like a brainworm our young people, but they don't want it. They know it's wrong.

Speaker 6 It doesn't take a lot when you sit in a room to get a young person to believe in themselves.

Speaker 2 So what's Health Corps doing?

Speaker 6 Well, as an example, you know, we will teach you about the fundamentals of health. So what I just mentioned is an example about soft drinks.
But how do you message that to a kid?

Speaker 6 If I lecture them, like I just discussed these topics with you, I mean, they're not going to listen to me. I'm not cool to them.

Speaker 6 I don't culturally identify with, you know, some of the subtle music tastes that they have. I don't get the jokes all the time.

Speaker 6 So ideally, someone who's close in age to them goes in there and says, hey, listen, the man,

Speaker 6 the man wants to take advantage of you by selling you junk food. food that's not good for you.
They know it's not good for you, but they're selling it to you because they make a lot of money.

Speaker 6 So don't be conned by the man.

Speaker 6 Now you got a little bit of a thing going on. You know, know, me versus

Speaker 6 counterculture. Now it's sort of cool for me to reject junk food and vaping and cigarettes.
You know, I'm actually better than that. Now, we actually have studied this in randomized trials.

Speaker 6 We've actually gotten data to show that it works. Young people know it's not good to drink soft drinks and they don't drink as much soft drinks, especially when women.

Speaker 6 And then you've got to translate that to they perform better in life, which we're still studying. But someone's got to deliver the message to them.
But that's the foundation.

Speaker 6 I use health as a crowbar to open them up, to get into their bodies, the thoughts that I think they need to hear about how valuable they are.

Speaker 6 Because if you're the most precious thing you're ever given by your family is

Speaker 6 seen by you as being worthwhile, all of a sudden you're worthwhile. Oh my godness, I got this incredible body and I got all these opportunities.

Speaker 6 Now I'm going to start paying attention and maybe get past all these thoughts that I was racing in my head that were taking me in the wrong direction.

Speaker 6 And then we can use that as a excuse, a trampoline to develop mental resilience. Because what I really want to do is workforce development.

Speaker 6 I want to get these young people to believe that they can enter American culture and help.

Speaker 6 And if they have the mental resilience to recognize that, that if they can change what's happening in their body, Jordan, they can change the world outside of it.

Speaker 6 If they can actually get that idea in their heads, you can't stop them.

Speaker 2 They've got to...

Speaker 2 What's been your experience introducing health core into the schools? What kind of response are you getting from kids?

Speaker 6 Jordan, I've raised with my wife, Lisa, $90 million for the foundation. We've touched the lives of 3 million plus kids.
We're getting large multi-million dollar grants from states and foundations.

Speaker 6 Of course, we raised a lot of the money privately as well. It costs about a dollar per year of life lived by the kids.
It's incredibly inexpensive.

Speaker 6 We can get nursing schools to give us their volunteer hours because nurses have to volunteer time in the community. Social workers do the same thing.
People want to help.

Speaker 6 The thing that I found most uplifting when I was campaigning, and I saw it on the show as well, is the average American thinks they can live their life. They're worried about their neighbor.

Speaker 6 They don't think they're doing so well next door, but they're okay right now, generally. They could be better.
They got this problem, they're being held back by that.

Speaker 6 And the government, they definitely don't want around because government's rarely going to be useful to them in a positive way.

Speaker 2 So, you know, they, but they, you know, they're an interesting approach to ask people about their neighbors.

Speaker 2 I read of a pollster recently who was doing that when he, when trying to predict the outcome of the election, which he apparently called correctly, people are more likely to, what would you say,

Speaker 2 maybe they're less guarded when they're asked about how their neighbor thinks or how their neighbor is going to vote or how their neighbor is doing, for example.

Speaker 2 So, you know, you get some sense of their picture of the generic other, and that might be, yeah, that might be an extremely effective way of gathering information.

Speaker 2 All right, let's go back to the to the legacy media issue and the Maha

Speaker 2 nexus, let's say. So in principle, now RFK is going to be running the show on the health front.
I don't know what that's going to look like or how he's going to manage it.

Speaker 2 One of the fundamental problems I think that he's going to have to address, and this is an incentive problem.

Speaker 2 I mean, if you want to make a system work properly, you have to get the incentives aligned with the aim. And

Speaker 2 that's very difficult. It's something that behavioral psychologists specialize in.
And one of the problems on the prevention side is that it's very difficult to give people credit for prevention.

Speaker 2 You You know,

Speaker 2 if you go for a drive and you don't have an accident, nobody pats you on the back, you know, but you've prevented innumerable catastrophes if you drive, you know, 100 miles safely.

Speaker 2 You're not going to get credit for things that you do intelligently that stave off a catastrophe that doesn't exist.

Speaker 2 And so it's very difficult to associate scientists, let's say, or physicians with effective preventative strategies because the evidence that they've done something good is subtle and it takes a long time to make itself manifest.

Speaker 2 That's way different than, well, was it Barnard who did the first heart transplant? No, Barnard. Right.

Speaker 6 I used to play basketball with him. Right.

Speaker 6 Because of my father.

Speaker 2 Right. Yes.
Right. I remember.

Speaker 6 He learned how to do the transplant at Stanford and Texas Heart, but because of our regulatory issues in the United States, he took the technology, flew back to South Africa, and did it there.

Speaker 6 And did it there?

Speaker 2 Yes, yes. Well, he became world famous, of course, for doing that.
And that's not prevention, that's cure. And you can tag him you know, immediately with the prevention.

Speaker 6 Stuart, I lived this.

Speaker 6 I was exactly what you're describing, taking incredible pride in what I could do with the scaffold of stitch. Yeah.
Yeah. I could change hearts.
I could put mechanical hearts in.

Speaker 6 I could now begin to change the valves.

Speaker 2 It's very dramatic. Unbelievable.

Speaker 6 We take shows in this, you know, we had New York May, which is a new show that was filmed in the hospital that did very, very well, airing on prime time television. On the show, we'd keep my Dr.

Speaker 6 Our show, we'd go into hospitals and show these dramatic moments.

Speaker 2 It's fantastic.

Speaker 6 There's so many TV shows that have been successful from Marcus Well Beyond

Speaker 6 the ER and down in House.

Speaker 6 There's a reason for it because it's exciting. I don't think the issue with prevention is that you don't get credit for it.

Speaker 6 The issue with prevention is more about how do you create a system where it's easy to do the right thing.

Speaker 2 Yes, well, that's the incentive issue, of course.

Speaker 6 And that's where I believe our government has been of very minimum value because if the nih was able to put some support behind looking at the actual tactics that might work getting rid of the ones that are ineffective reinforcing the ones that that that do help americans then we'll start to develop mechanisms to make our lives a little better ironically there are differences even between different parts of the country and the health of our people just learning from that would be effective for us But no private sector business is going to do that because they're not going to be able to pay their shareholders back for that invested money.

Speaker 6 That's something we, as a people, should do for ourselves. And that's an example of one of the topics for the Maha movement.

Speaker 6 You know, we should, regulatory bodies should be responsive to us and should at least be able to explain why they're not spending money in a way that might make sense for the betterment of the average American.

Speaker 6 We also should not be directly misleading them. I mean, you chum the water by telling people to eat a low-fat diet.

Speaker 6 I mean, you eat only meat, you've lost weight, you're sharper, your Michaela's rheumatoid issues are better looking. Better looking.
Your boyish good looks, never better.

Speaker 2 You know, all those things happen,

Speaker 6 but it's not an accident.

Speaker 5 And the fact that we're not.

Speaker 2 It's also impossible to believe.

Speaker 6 Well, I think that's part of it. Why is it impossible to believe? Someone long ago, because these ideas are not new.
These ideas have been battled for decades. Someone long ago should have been.

Speaker 6 honored by at least hearing their ideas.

Speaker 6 And we suffocated them.

Speaker 2 Killed these ideas in their infancy and so now do you think that okay so let's let's talk about something more radical when you were talking about the nih and these granting agencies

Speaker 2 i thought about a conversation i had with larry arne who's the president of hillsdale college and larry is quite the force of nature and hillsdale is a remarkable institution right it's one of the few universities legacy universities let's say which has maintained its appropriate function.

Speaker 2 They have a 1% first-year dropout rate, right? The average is 40%. 1% is stunning.
And it's a lovely campus and the students are very much on board. And

Speaker 2 the typical student there told me that 90% of their professors were excellent. And I asked like 15, 20 students, you know, and privately so they could actually talk to me.

Speaker 2 In any case, one of the things Hillsdale did was not take government money. right from the beginning.
And it's very interesting. Like, I don't exactly know what to make of this because

Speaker 2 in the beginning stages of my career as a researcher, which was quite extensive,

Speaker 2 because I published about 100 papers. And the reason I'm saying that is because I want people to know that I know what I'm talking about when it comes to discussing the research environment.
And so

Speaker 2 I did research at McGill and Harvard and the University of Toronto. And that all went really, really well.

Speaker 2 The only fly in the ointment that entire time was the emerging power of the research ethics sports, which became, in my opinion, corrupt beyond belief and absolutely 100% counterproductive and woke.

Speaker 2 They were awful and

Speaker 2 they started out bad and they got rapidly worse. But something again seemed to happen somewhere around 2014 and the research enterprise, which was in the main, in my field, in psychology, free of

Speaker 2 relatively free of careerism and relatively free of corruption. Like not everybody who was doing research was a great scientist, but you can't expect that.

Speaker 2 And most research wasn't true, but you're not going to have a lot of misses.

Speaker 2 But everyone, virtually everyone I ever met who was seriously involved in the research enterprise was doing it above board and ethically, and they weren't careerists.

Speaker 2 And the also the scientific journals were trustworthy and the granting agencies were too. And then something twisted in the last 10 years.
And I think none of that's the case now.

Speaker 2 I mean, Science, the greatest magazine in the world, greatest scientific journal in the world, and Nature have both become ideologically corrupt. Scientific American is pretty much gone.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's more on the public side, but it's an emblematic of the same thing. I mean,

Speaker 2 the replication crisis, so to speak, never shocked me because I never thought that most things that were published were true. That would be too much to hope for, but some things at least were true.

Speaker 2 Now I wonder, like,

Speaker 2 I'm not, I don't see a pathway forward, an easy, a straightforward pathway forward to rectify the granting agencies.

Speaker 2 i mean even 20 years ago the typical scientist in the united states was spending one-third of their time writing grant applications that failed one-third of their time that's insane you you you've basically sidelined 30 35 percent of your researchers in producing paper that has no utility whatsoever and and and things have got much worse since then because you have to be ideologically pure now to get a grant you have to have your dei statement in order and that's the first order of business.

Speaker 2 And so do you think,

Speaker 2 is that a rectifiable situation? Or was the trajectory inevitable? If you have government finance research, does it become corrupted by

Speaker 2 government corporate collusion? I don't know. Like, I'm not really sure what to think about that.

Speaker 6 Much of what the young people do is mirroring what their professors and teachers are doing.

Speaker 2 Well, which is what they should be doing. They should be mirroring it.
That's the whole point of this. They're rejecting the system.

Speaker 6 They're rejecting it en en masse because it's a failed ideology.

Speaker 6 And they're also realizing, to quote, paraphrase George Orwell, who, as you know, was a journalist, was sent up to the coal mines in northern England.

Speaker 6 And he quit after a few, you know, few articles and argued, he argued that he thought the socialists cared about poor people. It turns out that socialists didn't care about poor people.

Speaker 2 They hate rich people.

Speaker 6 And so when the professors don't actually care about it.

Speaker 2 They hate successful people.

Speaker 6 So it's even worse. But that's what you start to see.
All of a sudden, the faculty faculty who are leading these onslaughts of, you know, to revise the institutions aren't,

Speaker 6 they're pretending, performative again, to pretending that they care about the poor patients who are being left behind. They actually just hate the system.

Speaker 6 And if you're going to blow the system up, you better know what you're going to do next. Metaphorically, to one of your 12 rules, you know, make your bed first.
Just get that, get the basics right.

Speaker 6 Telling a young student that he has to use pronouns to a person who's not going to appreciate that is the opposite of the business.

Speaker 2 Which Which is like 95% of people, right? Because that is not the highest concern of 95% of people, especially if they're going to hospital because they're sick.

Speaker 2 And to have to, I can't really imagine as a clinical psychologist a worse way of demonstrating my

Speaker 2 better way of demonstrating my cowardice in the face of an ideological onslaught and the capture of my imagination than by

Speaker 2 stating my pronouns and asking for them the first thing I do when I met a client. I would never do that under any conditions whatsoever.
It's absolutely preposterous.

Speaker 2 It's precisely announcing to someone, first of all, my ideological position, which you should not do, certainly as a therapist, and I would also say as a physician, it's you're not to burden your patient, your client with that sort of information.

Speaker 2 You're not there to make a personal statement to them. You're there to listen to them.
And so you shouldn't be starting out with an announcement of your ideological position.

Speaker 2 And you're also telling anyone that who can think that you're too weak to stand up to the woke mob, which is not exactly something that's going to strike confidence in the heart of someone who's on their deathbed and hoping that you can help or in some sort of terrible crisis.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so this is, well, so we continue to outline the problem.

Speaker 2 And the solution that you've put forward so far, at least in part, is based on some faith in the students themselves to see through this and put pressure on the institutions.

Speaker 2 But man, you know, what I saw as a professor, and the same thing I believe happened in the research enterprise overall, is the faculty retreated as the administration advanced.

Speaker 2 And I don't think that's my opinion because all you have to do is track spending on administration against spending on faculty or spending on students. And you can see who won that battle.

Speaker 2 And it was 100% the administrators. And they pretty much had that in the bag by 2014.
And then the woke mob took over the administration. And that seems to me that's also what happened.

Speaker 2 What did it happen on the what the boards, the editorial boards of the scientific journals? Is that exact that exactly the same thing?

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Speaker 2 Rules and restrictions apply.

Speaker 6 This is cowardice, Jordan.

Speaker 2 This is the our Hippocratic oath.

Speaker 6 is fourth.

Speaker 2 Pesky thing.

Speaker 6 The pesky thing is you read a graduation and that you're supposed to, you know, people have in their offices, right? You take care of your client, your patients is number one, always.

Speaker 6 You never compromise them. You police your specialty or field because you have domain expertise, other lay people don't have.
So, I've got to call you out if you do something that I think is wrong.

Speaker 6 I have to advance the field by standing on your shoulders. So, the people who taught me that I've got to do more than they did to make the field better.

Speaker 6 But the fourth thing you have to do, the civic responsibility of being a professional, is to speak out on issues that are wrong.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 6 And we have been cowards in organized medicine and the learned arts. It's our job to take the bullet for the team because if all of us put our hands up, they can't take us all out.

Speaker 2 But they can definitely take you out one at a time, though.

Speaker 2 But that's what we're doing.

Speaker 6 And we've done that for my.

Speaker 2 What I think has changed,

Speaker 6 and I don't want to overplay it, but I'm sensing it over the last year, and that's what the Maha movement I think represented.

Speaker 6 Enough people put their hands up that if you mention the possibility that we're going to revisit some of these mandates, you don't get taken out summarily.

Speaker 6 People may still hate you, but they don't feel emboldened to shoot you because they're bullies.

Speaker 2 The government of Alberta made vaccine mandates illegal week two weeks ago right they revamped the alberta human rights act i think it's the alberta human rights act or the alberta charter of human rights i don't exactly have that at my fingertips but that's no longer going to happen and i think too you know one of the things that public policy people should have known now i have some sympathy for them because when covet emerged the politicians completely abandoned their responsibility and made the public health policy people who were willing the experts on everything and they ran the show.

Speaker 2 And that just was completely inappropriate. It was a devolution of responsibility from the political.

Speaker 2 But the public health, public health policy people, who also, by the way, were very complicit in the Nazi organizations in the 1930s. So

Speaker 2 there are parallels to this, historical parallels that are not fun.

Speaker 2 Public health policy officials should have realized that any medical doctrine that relied on compulsion, force, and fear was pathological in its essence.

Speaker 2 And we have seen, I think, the biggest consequence of the COVID tyranny is going to be the demolition of faith in the public health field. And maybe there's also

Speaker 2 an indeterminate spillover effect of that on the medical profession in general, and then all the other associated professions that are...

Speaker 2 what under the broader rubric of helping professions in general.

Speaker 2 But it's also the case, it's not that surprising that individuals won't speak out. In 2016, when I

Speaker 2 annoyed the government by making some YouTube videos, I didn't really think they were going to have that much of an effect. You know, it was more of an experiment on my part.

Speaker 2 I had three sources of income, three independent sources of income. I lost two of them.

Speaker 2 I lost my clinical practice, and basically it became impossible for me to be a university professor. or to continue with my research.

Speaker 2 And so, and then I've been fighting an ongoing battle for 10 years with my regulatory agency, and that's cost me more than half a million dollars.

Speaker 2 And it's been unbelievably annoying, like way too annoying, very, very stressful. And so, that's a lot to ask for people to speak out.

Speaker 2 You know, I mean, it was hard to take me out because I had more than one means of supporting myself. And that turned out to work out very well.

Speaker 2 But, you know, There are very few voices on the medical side or the psychological side in particular in Canada.

Speaker 2 People contact me behind the scenes and there is the odd person, there's the odd nurse, there's the odd teacher who has said something, but it's also very easy for people just to write them off because they're such extreme outliers, you know, and to tar them with some right-wing epithet, for example.

Speaker 2 So I can understand why people don't speak out.

Speaker 2 And I guess part of what all this has done for me is to highlight even more particularly the absolute miracle that any country anywhere ever managed to establish anything like a right to free of speech free speech right there's so many factors that work against it which is why free speech of course doesn't reign in almost all the countries in the world so what the hell did we do right so that it actually worked for some period of time in the west what were the preconditions

Speaker 6 let's get into that that is as as a good psychologist you're asking the most important question is you know i'm turkish of origin And when you go to Gebeketepe, Potbelly Hill,

Speaker 6 which is in southeastern Turkey, it's the oldest oldest known human civilization.

Speaker 6 And you see these big tea temples that they built there 12,000 years ago. And they're clearly religious in origin.
These people, primitive as they may have been, had

Speaker 6 some belief in something bigger than them.

Speaker 2 There was something out there.

Speaker 6 They had the audacity, actually, to sense. that they were connected, that it wasn't just the material world around them.

Speaker 6 And I would argue that it's because they had that audacity of belief that they thought, hey, I can domesticate animals. If I trap those gazelles, I can actually do animal husbandry.

Speaker 6 If I put these seeds in the ground in an organized fashion and put water on them, I can grow crops. And so it actually gave rise to human civilization.
Abraham met Sarah there, by the way.

Speaker 6 It's not a coincidence.

Speaker 6 Something special happened there that allowed this to all take place. And as it began, for humans, began to take over the world.
Who knows when that happened?

Speaker 6 We left Africa 60,000, 70,000 years ago but again something allowed us to go beyond the typical tribe size a typical tribe is under 50 people something connected us a belief that we're all in it together so that we could get 500 5 000 50 000 people together and homo sapiens took over the planet we killed off the other six species that that for some reason didn't get that that that that deep that is an orientation to some kind of abstract higher order uniting good there's no doubt about that and that's i think where democracy comes out of it.

Speaker 6 It's fundamentally based on humanism. So let me quiz you.
I may have shared this with you in one of our late night discussions.

Speaker 6 But this is something I think everyone who's listening could do. Quiz themselves, but also for people around them.
You're standing on the side of the river

Speaker 6 and you see a stranger floating by and they're heading towards a waterfall. And they're obviously having trouble.
And let's assume they perish if they hit the waterfall.

Speaker 6 And you've got a ring you can throw out there, a rope and save them. Right.
And then out of the corner of your eye, you see your pet, your favorite dog, cute thing as it is, woof, woof, woof,

Speaker 6 coasting by this stranger. Who do you save? You only get to save one.

Speaker 2 Or I take the person without a second thought.

Speaker 6 Most people in the Western world who are older pick the person.

Speaker 6 Most younger people pick the pet.

Speaker 6 This is about humanism.

Speaker 6 You saved the stranger. Why? You don't even know the person.
Young people say we have too many people. There are billions and billions of people.
That dog is my dog.

Speaker 2 I love that dog.

Speaker 6 We don't need more people. That dog, if he dies, will hurt me personally.
So they saved the dog. I'm not even trying to make a value judgment here.

Speaker 6 I'm just describing the numbers that seem to come back when this question is asked. Please, everyone, do it yourself.
Ask that question of young people, old people. Let them struggle with the answer.

Speaker 6 But if we don't think that stranger is more important,

Speaker 6 then it's hard to have a democracy.

Speaker 6 Because without believing in humanism, the sacredness of that individual, that there is something bigger that unites us all, a non-local consciousness, a God, you can call it whatever you want, that sees us all of having value and therefore worth listening to, then what's the point of having democracy?

Speaker 6 And that begins to challenge some of the assumptions we've taken for granted because America was, yes, it was created by modernists, but they were all interested in God, if not overtly religious.

Speaker 2 Well, this is a good time to give you this book then, I think.

Speaker 6 As you know, and you're very kindly, you shared a draft with me early on. Probably it was January, February, very early.
And I remember going through it.

Speaker 6 And I'll tell you right now, in a non-patronizing way, this may be your most important work ever.

Speaker 6 And I was flabbergasted at the depth that you brought into some of these discussions. And I must say, there's nothing else.
Most people read the beginning of a book anyway.

Speaker 6 When you get to the, you know, to the part about Cain and Abel, which I thought I knew that story. Most people think they know that story.

Speaker 6 and when you begin to explain what it was that cain did that was truly murderous that really was the problem all of a sudden they began to see parallels in modern society and that's why the ability and you've done this so brilliantly to dive deeply into these archetypal stories stories that people used to discard because oh there's old people wrote up wrote down dumb concepts there's you know they weren't dumb and they weren't you know unrelated they're desperately important for our time well that's what it looks like to me.

Speaker 2 And I think I'm hoping that book is better by a substantial margin than the draft I sent you in January because I did a lot of work after that.

Speaker 2 And so I walked through, I think, basically 10 biblical stories, trying to describe why they're sequenced the way they are and what they actually mean.

Speaker 2 And I do, I am hoping that your comment is correct, that it's the most significant work that I've done. I think that might be true

Speaker 2 because

Speaker 2 Maps of Meaning was very dense and academic, and then the following two books were quite popular and more descriptive and

Speaker 2 helpful rather than conceptual.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they were more practical. This book is also practical, but it's, I hope I got the balance between idea and practicality right.
Exactly right.

Speaker 2 It's a harder read than 12 Rules for Life, for example, though easier than Maps of Meaning. But

Speaker 2 the other advantage that it has is that

Speaker 2 most people still

Speaker 2 know these stories at least to some degree right so there's some essential familiarity that i can draw on which is of course a culture that doesn't share stories isn't a culture it's fragmented into

Speaker 2 subpopulations that share stories there's no uniting narrative there's no union, you know, and the postmodernists claim, the fundamental postmodernist claim actually, it's actually the defining claim of postmodernism, is that there's no uniting narrative.

Speaker 2 And it's a completely pathological claim because

Speaker 2 technically

Speaker 2 we live in a hierarchy of narratives that stretch in principle up to the ultimate pinnacle, let's say. And there are uniting narratives at every single level.
You can't just put an arbitrary

Speaker 2 cap somewhere and say, well, beyond this level, there's no uniting narrative. That's it's preposterous.
There's no way of doing that. And so I think the fundamental postmodern claim is intractable.

Speaker 2 And I think part of the reason the postmodernists have turned to the doctrine of power is because when you lose your uniting narrative, and that's something roughly equivalent to the death of God, let's say, then other competing narratives immediately emerge.

Speaker 2 And the three most likely candidates are sex. And of course, that's what Freud concentrated on in such a revolutionary manner in the early 20th century.
Well, if it's not God, then maybe it's sex.

Speaker 2 Fair enough, like reproduction, like that's a fair proposition. Well, if it's not sex, maybe it's power.

Speaker 2 Well, then you get the Marxists and you get the postmodernists, most of whom were Marxists, and you get the totalitarians.

Speaker 2 Nothing unites us except power.

Speaker 2 All friendships are power relationships and marriage is a power relationship and all economic relationships are power. It's like, well, you know, you can make a case for that.

Speaker 2 Or you can say, well, there's no essential union and we basically live in a nihilistic morass.

Speaker 2 And those seem to me to be the three competitors to the idea of what's highest. And every single one of those competitors is self-devouring and pathological.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 the question is, what's what rules? That is the question. What rules? And nothing is an answer, but man, you pay a price for that answer.

Speaker 6 I remember calling you

Speaker 6 about two years ago, and

Speaker 6 I've I've always been impressed at your ability, your resilience. And I was struggling with some stuff, and I asked you if you thought there was a God.

Speaker 6 And you paused, pregnant pause, longer than usual, and you said,

Speaker 6 there better be.

Speaker 6 And it was interesting to me to hear you say that, because we're better off living. like there's a God.
I happen to believe there is a God, but you're better off living like there's a God.

Speaker 6 And sometimes in life,

Speaker 6 if you go along and try to understand why there's such power there, it begins to bloom. So you begin to see it in different ways.
I think

Speaker 6 there's been a shift in America quite dramatically in that people aren't willing to give it a chance. They're not willing to truly allow it to grow in their heart and to see if there's wisdom there.

Speaker 6 They almost feel like

Speaker 6 it's a sign that you're a fool. if you believe in a god.

Speaker 6 The big shift I would argue is, and I've seen some data on this, you know, 30 years ago, a third of people believed strongly in god a third of people weren't sure but they definitely respected the people who believed in god and they wanted to be like them they were struggling to to actually be like them and they were having difficulty and then a third of people were not religious but they weren't disdainful either they just weren't religious that shifted now and the middle group shifted You still have a third that go to church all the time and a third that don't go to church ever.

Speaker 6 But the people in the middle no longer want to be like the ones who have found a faith. They actually are disdaining them.
That's the shift that's happened in America.

Speaker 6 And that's a powerful group of people.

Speaker 6 Those are the people who, through the culture, should feel more comfortable, at least allowing the concepts that have governed human culture for at least 12,000 years, but probably all 60,000, 70,000 since we left Africa,

Speaker 6 to rise up. It's audacious, it's arrogant, and it's dangerous to ignore thousands of years of wisdom compiled by your ancestors.

Speaker 2 Well, you degenerate into a kind of the one of the dangers is the degeneration into a self-serving populism. And like

Speaker 2 there's utility in populism insofar as democratic leaders consult their constituents to find out what they need and want.

Speaker 2 But the problem with the populist approach in general is that it's too short term. It's too focused on

Speaker 2 only the things that you can understand during the span of your life, however long that has been.

Speaker 2 You know, there's an insistence in the biblical text that there's two axes of orientation, and one is interpersonal, to treat other people as if they're of divine value and to love other people as if they're yourself, let's say.

Speaker 2 But the other one is upward, it was to orient yourself to the highest possible good. Now,

Speaker 2 the sum total of all highest goods, that's a reasonable definition of God. But, you know, even in the biblical corpus, the reality of God is,

Speaker 2 what would you say? Especially in the Old Testament, the reality of God is indeterminate, not least because God is in a category that transcends the real.

Speaker 2 And this is something that's very important to understand because the atheist claim is, well, do you believe in God? But there's a... What would you say?

Speaker 2 There's a metaphysics in that question because the atheist materialist definition of belief is an atheist materialist definition.

Speaker 2 And so what they're trying to do is to take the concept of God and reduce it to the reality of an everyday object, a table,

Speaker 2 atoms, something material and structured. And the God that's presented in the biblical corpus is ineffable.

Speaker 2 And that means that the reality of God isn't the same order of reality as the reality of things. And that's not my inference from struggling through the biblical text.

Speaker 2 That's absolutely crystal clear, not only in the texts, but in the tradition, that whatever the divine, the highest divine principle might be, it transcends the categories of time and space and it's not bound by what's materially real.

Speaker 2 And so if your initial starting point is there's nothing but what's material, then there's no sense having a discussion about value at all.

Speaker 2 But if you understand that you have to have a discussion of value because you have to value things to act, then you're, and you do. This is one of the points I tried to make in the book.

Speaker 2 The idea that we see the world through a story is an incontrovertible fact. It is being demonstrated in at least six different independent disciplines.
And it's not only true for

Speaker 2 our beliefs, let's say, that we live in a story, but it's actually...

Speaker 2 It actually structures the very perceptions that hypothetically inform us about the facts.

Speaker 2 And I think this is a revolutionary realization that a description of the structure through which we see the world is a story. We live in a story.
The postmodernists were right about that.

Speaker 2 And that's partly why we have this culture war. It's because the postmodernists were right about that.
Now, their solution to that, their analysis of that problem,

Speaker 2 was lacking, sorely lacking, to say the least, and unbelievably self-serving and worshiping at the feet of power and hedonism as well, which is a very bad idea. You might say, why? It's like

Speaker 2 worship of power is self-defeating. You know, I outlined the data from the chimp studies.

Speaker 2 Chimp tyrants, like human tyrants, tend to meet a very unpleasant end and early in life. It's like, well, what happens if you play a power game? Well, then you're in the power game.

Speaker 2 And the problem with being in the power game is as soon as you're not the biggest kid on the block, you're not just dead.

Speaker 2 you're ripped apart and dead. And so

Speaker 2 there are things that you can raise to the highest place, power, and sex for that matter, hedonism in general. The problem with doing that is that it doesn't iterate, it doesn't work.

Speaker 2 You can't do that with other people because they object. And not only that, even if you do that with yourself, you'll defeat yourself in the future.
So,

Speaker 2 what I've tried to outline in this book is the idea that

Speaker 2 there are a radically limited number of self-sustaining and

Speaker 2 improving

Speaker 2 principles. And that's something like a natural law.
It's something like

Speaker 2 there's a universe of games. Some of them are playable and some of them aren't.
Non-playable games are much more common. Games that will defeat themselves that no one wants to play.

Speaker 2 Then there's a fraction of games that are playable. So people will do them voluntarily and they'll iterate.
Then there's a smaller fraction that iterate and improve.

Speaker 2 There's even a smaller fraction that iterate and improve improve multi-generationally. Well, the

Speaker 2 biblical stories capture the spirit of the iterated game that improves over centuries.

Speaker 2 And I think accurately, I think one of the cases I try to make in this book, you might say, well, what's the alternative to power? And the answer to that is fairly clear.

Speaker 2 Voluntary sacrifice is the alternative to power. And that's why the biblical texts concentrate on sacrifice.
So what do you mean? What does sacrifice mean? What do you give up to be married?

Speaker 2 What do you give up to have a friend? What do you give up to have a community? If it's all about you, you give up nothing. But if it's all about you, you don't have a community.

Speaker 2 So, obviously, the community is predicated on sacrifice. Once you know that, you think, okay,

Speaker 2 what's the sacrifice? Well, that's the question. That's the same question as what's the nature of life? What's the nature of work? What's the principle of community?

Speaker 2 Like the example you gave with the stranger in the stream and the dog, what do you sacrifice? The dog. Right.
Your attachment to the dog. Your juvenile

Speaker 2 sentimentality. Right.
Maybe even your hatred. What if it's an enemy in the stream? What if it's the bully who made your life miserable or your dog? It's like, what do you do? You rescue the bully.

Speaker 2 Why? That's a hard question.

Speaker 2 The answer to that is something like, if you don't rescue the bully, the world turns into hell. It's something like that.
And you think, well, that's not obvious.

Speaker 2 It's like well yeah that's for sure it's not obvious but your conscience will tell you that

Speaker 2 and so

Speaker 2 yeah

Speaker 2 so how did we get into this well we were trying to figure out what had gone wrong you know at a fundamental level and then we switched into this discussion into deeper things yes add add something to

Speaker 6 to to what i'm hearing is that we all have a filter because we can't process everything yes that's like i'm watching you i could i see the pink shirt that matches mine but a tie that I'm not wearing.

Speaker 2 I could have a choice of shirts.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 6 But, um, but there's a lot that I'm, and when you speak, I'm hearing some things that you're saying clear to me. Definitely.
And others feel like, you know, Charlie Brown, Lucy.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And so that's all of us do that.

Speaker 6 It's not even disrespectful. Just some ideas will resonate with us.
Yes. The story that.

Speaker 6 I shared that I was told about the pet versus your pet, beloved pet versus some stranger who went out and be a good person is a story some people will hear and remember for the rest of their life.

Speaker 6 Others are going to not even understand it the first time. And there's a spectrum in between there.
So I think a lot of our political differences are caused by that.

Speaker 6 We tend, not only are we served with different news feeds, I get all that.

Speaker 6 That's been said many times, but even if you were here the same news feed, your interpretation of it is very different depending on the stories that you believe and the story that you're in.

Speaker 2 And the stories that are at the foundation of the structure through which you look at the world.

Speaker 6 So in therapy, as you try to work with people like me and everybody else on the planet,

Speaker 6 I've been told that

Speaker 6 you challenge us with this concept of complementarity, which was originally a physics idea, Niels Bohr.

Speaker 6 The idea that you could have particle theory and wave theory, and they could both be true. They're on the surface opposites.
Matter is a particle, matter is a wave.

Speaker 6 But in reality, it's waves and particles. The particles act like waves.
And so Niels Bohr could hold both of these concepts in his mind at once without breaking.

Speaker 2 You know, when Carl Jung was working out his principle of complementarity with regards to unconscious function, he was also having a dialogue with one of the world's most famous physicists.

Speaker 2 So in fact, one of Jung's books, which I think is

Speaker 2 either Alchemical Studies or Psychology and Alchemy, is actually a

Speaker 2 library of dreams that this physicist dreamed up. at the moment and he was one of the physicists who worked on the principle of complementarity and at the moment unfortunately his name has escaped me

Speaker 2 Paulie. Paulie.
Wolfgang Paulie. Yes.

Speaker 6 This is, I'm just sharing with folks at home. So, this is so typical.
We're in a conversation. Jordan is tolerating me.

Speaker 6 He wants to talk to my wife, who's just yelling out the answers to the questions that he has in his mind that he can't articulate.

Speaker 6 So, usually, when we're together, I go to bed around midnight, which is late for me because I'm a surgeon.

Speaker 6 You stay up at least until dawn debating young and other realities that aren't so obvious to others.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so

Speaker 2 this

Speaker 2 the complementarity idea, too, is

Speaker 2 part of that does lay out the landscape of the dream because Jung's idea, for example, was that you'll have an ideological framework, let's say, but it keeps things out.

Speaker 2 That's relevant to your discussion of this filtering mechanism. But there's part of you that keeps track of what you're not paying attention to.

Speaker 2 You pay attention to very little and you don't pay attention to a lot.

Speaker 2 And if what you're paying attention to is misaligned, you need, what would you say, you need a repository of alternative potential conceptualizations, and that's fleshed out in the landscape of dream and fantasy.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a brilliant idea. I'm certain it's right.
It maps very nicely onto the hemispheric theories.

Speaker 6 Part of the question becomes: how do we realign Western society to at least begin to focus on things all of us believe are worthy of our attention? Yes.

Speaker 6 And the stories that we're telling are ones of nihilism,

Speaker 6 of

Speaker 6 a power,

Speaker 6 of a patriarchy that is

Speaker 6 we're replacing a humanistic god with nature worship.

Speaker 2 Well, even the dog rescue is an example of that, right? Because that's putting the animal above the human in the hierarchy of values. You might say, well, I love the dog.

Speaker 2 It's like, you're missing the point. You're missing the point.
It's not about what you love. That's not the point.
That's too focused on you. Why shouldn't it be focused on me?

Speaker 2 Well, the simple reason is if everything's focused on you, subjective identity. If your identity is radically subjective, no one is going to want to be around you, right?

Speaker 2 The degree to which any of us is tolerable to other people, let alone welcome, is directly dependent on how much of our own individual whim and power drive, let's say, that we sacrifice to the relationship.

Speaker 2 Obviously,

Speaker 2 we know that with children, two-year-olds can't do that. So they don't have friends.
They're still too egocentric. Three-year-olds start to learn to do that.

Speaker 2 And the three-year-olds that are expert at that by four

Speaker 2 are

Speaker 2 desirable play partners and they're socialized by their peers properly for the rest of their lives.

Speaker 2 And now we're reverting, you know, we're telling all our young kids, it's like, act like a two-year-old, define yourself subjectively, right? It's about who you think you are. Well,

Speaker 2 it even begs a question. It's like, what part of you do you think is you?

Speaker 2 Right? Like, is it, it's your immediate hedonistic whim? That's you. What I want, what I feel,

Speaker 2 right? Well, no one's going to be able to tolerate you, obviously.

Speaker 2 They'll just walk around you. They'll find someone else.
Why wouldn't they?

Speaker 2 You know, I used to tell my socially anxious clients, suggest to them that when they went to a party, whenever they started worrying about how they were fitting in, that they flipped that to trying to make other people comfortable.

Speaker 2 Right, because they couldn't stop that. You can't tell someone to stop thinking about themselves, right? Because that just makes them think about themselves more.

Speaker 2 But you can tell people to make other people welcome. And that takes them out of that realm of self-consciousness.
And then they could draw on their own social skills.

Speaker 2 Many of them had social skills, not all of them. Some people were socially anxious because they just didn't know how to behave.
And that was a more complicated problem.

Speaker 6 But,

Speaker 2 well, that all tangles back into the idea that the community is founded on sacrifice. This is this.
This realization just flattened me. Like, because one of the things I understood, I think, was that

Speaker 2 we have in the West

Speaker 2 in the Christian West most particularly have been looking at an image of sacrifice for 2,000 years without understanding why like our our towns European towns were literally founded around a sacrificial center right the cross the altar the cathedral the town the country why is the sacrifice at the center of that well the answer is well sacrifice is at the center of the community.

Speaker 2 It's like, oh,

Speaker 2 okay.

Speaker 2 Obviously. It has to be.
Community is defined by sacrifice. Like a bear, it just does what it wants.
There's no community of bears. It's only a community when you sacrifice.

Speaker 2 Well, so then that begs the question, what's the highest form of sacrifice? Well, we're going to.

Speaker 2 wrestle our way through that question a lot sooner than anybody thinks, you know, and that's partly what this book is concentrating on. It's like, what's the nature of the sacrifice that redeems?

Speaker 2 Even though you don't know it, that's the central question of your life. And there's actually an answer to that.
Like, you see that in the story of Abraham, right?

Speaker 2 Because Abraham sacrifices Isaiah or is asked to.

Speaker 2 He doesn't. And there's a lesson in that.
And what's the lesson? If you offer your children to what's highest without reservation, you get them back. And that's 100% true.

Speaker 2 Because if you're the sort of grasping parent who protects them or who devotes your child to you, they're going to run away. And rightly so.
But if you

Speaker 2 encourage them out into the world and

Speaker 2 ask them to pursue nothing except what's best, then

Speaker 2 they'll know you're on their side and you'll get them back.

Speaker 2 And of course, you know, the atheist types, Dawkins is guilty of this, point to God's demand to Abraham that he sacrifice Isaiah as proof of the superstitious quality of the Old Testament narratives and the fundamental malevolence of the God of, let's say, Jacob and Abraham.

Speaker 2 And that's completely wrong. It's like parents offer their children up to what's highest if they're good parents.
And then they get them back. And then they establish a dynasty.

Speaker 2 And that's actually what happens to Abraham if you tell the whole story. And so it was quite a shock to understand what that meant.

Speaker 2 And then to understand that that is what you do with your children if you love them.

Speaker 2 Who would have guessed that? But of course that's what you do because

Speaker 2 raising children is about something.

Speaker 2 And it could be about your child

Speaker 2 or it could be about what you want. That's not good.
The latter one, that's really not good. Is it about your child? No, it's not.
It's about... encouraging your child to be good.

Speaker 2 That's what it's about. Well, what do you mean by good? It's It's in relationship to something.

Speaker 2 Well, what? Well, the highest possible aim. And it is the aim that our respect for free speech is predicated on.

Speaker 2 It is the aim that all of the freedoms that make the West what it is and a desirable place to immigrate for everyone in the world who votes with their feet,

Speaker 2 there's a foundation underneath that. And that, you know, we've been wrestling with that today when we've been talking it through.
When that foundation shakes, what? Everything shakes.

Speaker 2 Science, this is so interesting. Hey,

Speaker 2 it was one of the things I found fascinating about

Speaker 2 talking with Dawkins. Dawkins knows that the scientific enterprise is in trouble.
Like he was hoping that if we switched to a kind of materialist atheism, that science would flourish.

Speaker 2 It's like, no, I think when you knock out the religious substrate, one of the first things that goes is science. It's fragile and unlikely.

Speaker 2 Do you know to have a whole cadre of people who do nothing but pursue the truth and that they're protected? That was what 10-year was for? That's very unlikely. What's the precondition for that?

Speaker 2 Belief in truth? Belief that the truth will set you free?

Speaker 6 Belief that you have to tell the truth.

Speaker 2 Believe that's right, even when it's at the risk of your career.

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Speaker 6 Which is why science came out of religion. Yeah, well, that's it was their

Speaker 6 faith-based traditions because they put something above each and every one of us, implored us to tell the truth because we weren't reporting to you.

Speaker 6 Because smart people are really good at lying to themselves. Yes.
In fact, the smart. The more you are.

Speaker 2 Yes, definitely. The more

Speaker 2 you can do that. That's why the intellect is Lucifer, absolutely.

Speaker 6 And so we see that playing its role. I mean,

Speaker 2 the learned people who

Speaker 6 destroyed Russia and Cambodia and China, I mean, these were just smart people.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. Paul Pott, he got his PhD at the Sorbonne.
Exactly. And where he outlined his plan, much to the delight of the leftist post-modernists that taught him.

Speaker 2 And then he went back and killed, what, six million people.

Speaker 6 At least. And the skulls piled up

Speaker 6 He didn't illustrate that part with his thesis. But these are smart people who come up with these fantastical ideologies.
They're so destructive.

Speaker 6 But if the purpose of science is to find truth, someone has to hold you accountable.

Speaker 6 And we've all witnessed this because you get into a debate and people will cherry-pick the facts that they like, which is the opposite of telling the truth, because you're entitled to your own opinion.

Speaker 6 as Moynihan often said, but not to your own facts. Well, we are dishonest, intellectually dishonest about the data, the facts that we're using, which is rampant now.

Speaker 6 We're seeing more and more, if you go back and just look at all the manuscripts that are published, one half of them are suspect.

Speaker 6 Not minority of them, half of them are suspect because people get rewarded not just monetarily, but with tenure, with pride and

Speaker 6 ego, and all those things that

Speaker 6 trump the truth. And we're left without a deeper belief that the truth matters.
The whole system begins to implode, right? The gyre begins to spin

Speaker 2 faster. Yes, yes.

Speaker 6 And as we crash crash land the public is watching this and saying i thought those guys knew what they were doing and now i'm seeing them actually censor each other in a way that i wouldn't censor the guy who works at local deli i let that guy say his piece so i can say my piece and these guys aren't doing the same thing again nobel laureates being censored because you don't like what they're saying

Speaker 6 reinforces a pathology that the public begins to appreciate and i think that was directly correlate with what happened in this election.

Speaker 6 And that's why the Make America Healthy again movement got traction.

Speaker 6 because some of the things that are being said there is no way that you'd be able to accept this even you know two three four years ago i know because we were saying it and i'll give you a story this just just happened to me so the debates around vaccines have gotten a bit louder and please do not start off everyone by saying oh he's an anti-vax provider it's not about that i had bobby kennedy on my show 10 years ago to talk about this issue and i got as usual a ton of grief but that was my job i thought to give people who had deserved to have uh you know a say,

Speaker 6 their minutes on network television. And the first, I asked, are you anti-vax? Because everyone's telling me you're anti-vax.
What does that even mean?

Speaker 6 And I opened this book and, you know, the first line of the book, the first line was, I'm not against vaccinations. Right.

Speaker 6 And then he said, if you're actually one of the few people who reads the whole book, go to the last line. I'm not against vaccinations.

Speaker 6 So I thought, my goodness, you know, what I've been told about this guy might not be right. So then I started getting into it a bit more.
And

Speaker 6 one of the issues is hepatitis B vaccine. Now, do you know much about the hepatitis B vaccine? No, this is, you'll, I love your psychological interpretation of what's going on here.

Speaker 6 So this is a vaccine that's effective reducing the incidence of a very bad illness called hepatitis B that destroys your liver, leads to liver cirrhosis and transplantation, kills you.

Speaker 6 You don't want to get it.

Speaker 2 You can pass it to others.

Speaker 6 It's generally passed through sex, prostitutes, high-risk activities, and intravenous drug abuse. Those are the main ways that it gets passed.

Speaker 6 We vaccinate, we mandate vaccination of every newborn as soon as they come out of their mother's womb. I mean, like that day.
It's the first thing that happens.

Speaker 6 So doctors look at that and say, well, geez, you know, I just described how you get hepatitis B. I mean, this child's not going to engage in any of those activities.

Speaker 6 It's true, the mother might have hepatitis B, but you could test for that.

Speaker 2 And that'd be a very tiny fraction of people. Small, but it's fair.

Speaker 6 And I understand that theory. But there's a lot of women who might say, well, test me.

Speaker 6 If I don't have hepatitis B and my child's not going to start taking drugs, maybe I don't want to inject them the first day of their life. Right, right, right.
You can't ask that question.

Speaker 6 So, this weekend, I'm at an event, and

Speaker 6 a woman who's a

Speaker 6 speaking, so I deliver a little bit of this message. And a woman comes up to me afterwards and she says, I'm a doctor, I'm a physician, and I'm a little alarmed by what you said.

Speaker 6 And I said, Well, what part of Bob did you? So, she said, Well, you know, I just had a baby

Speaker 2 and I vaccinated the baby.

Speaker 6 So, I, you know, I think it's helpful to have for them to have the hepatitis B vaccine.

Speaker 6 So I said,

Speaker 6 I know you vaccinated the child to allow it to the vaccination, but do you still think that it really was helpful to have it the first day of life?

Speaker 6 Could they have had it, you know, when they were 10 or 12 or 15 or 18?

Speaker 6 Because I vaccinated my kids, but they were about to enter into college. There was actually a likelihood or a possibility they might get exposed to it.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 6 I saw the wheels turning. and the panic in her eyes.

Speaker 6 And then she said, well, at least it's safe,

Speaker 6 which is a unfortunate comment to make, because I'm not going to argue that it's safe or not safe. But if there's no value, then I don't want to even ask the second question.

Speaker 6 She was going through something that I think many Americans are suffering from.

Speaker 6 Because she realized that she didn't really understand this and had taken the advice of the experts, she couldn't acknowledge the expert advice might have been wrong.

Speaker 2 Yeah, of course. Well,

Speaker 2 there's also another psychological fact that you're running up against there, which is that we rapidly bring our beliefs in line with our actions. Like people think you believe and then you act.

Speaker 2 It's like, well, some of the time, much of the time you act, you watch yourself act, you draw the conclusions about your belief that your actions indicate, and you bloody well stick to those beliefs.

Speaker 2 Well, why? Well, you've already committed yourselves to them behaviorally. So this physician that you're describing, she had a real conundrum at hand because it wasn't a mere abstract issue for her.

Speaker 2 She'd already vaccinated her baby. So if she's wrong, then she did a bad thing.
To her own baby. Yes, exactly.
Right. On its first day.
Right.

Speaker 2 Well, you know, you could imagine the evidence would have to stack up pretty high before she's going to be willing to swallow that bitter pill.

Speaker 6 That's why I think when it happens, it'll be a tsunami.

Speaker 2 Until

Speaker 2 it's already happened.

Speaker 6 I think it's starting, which is why I believe it impacted the election so powerfully. And I know in Pennsylvania that it did.
it made a very big difference because we were actively involved there.

Speaker 6 The Maha movie per second question, yeah, took a lot of people who started to feel the kind of anger that motivates you to vote when they began hearing these stories.

Speaker 6 Because you eventually, and maybe that physician now, several days later, is having this epiphany. You at some point have to deal with the fact that you may have hurt your child.

Speaker 6 Yeah, and that makes you really unhappy. That's a basic biology of mother.

Speaker 2 Well, it's worse too, because you may have hurt your child

Speaker 2 and you did it because you believed the experts. Right.
So now there's lots of rats that crawl out of that nest, isn't there? It's like, well, why did I listen to them? And

Speaker 2 are they in fact experts? Right. And so we've certainly hit that period of questioning in our society in a very large way.

Speaker 6 When you mandate it in a way,

Speaker 2 shames.

Speaker 6 the new mother who just went through a lot of stuff and is not and is in a vulnerable position.

Speaker 2 That's for sure.

Speaker 6 and when she is shamed by the nurse or physician taking care of the baby about the fact that she must not love her child if she's not willing to follow the state law which mandates vaccination uh and isn't able to ask in that confused moment a couple extra questions uh they they they hold they take that person that's for sure and they will not forget it and we're starting to see that in lots of other areas if fluorinating the water is not really really important to do for the betterment of society then you start to feel that you may have been, you know, tacitly allowed something to happen that puts your family at risk.

Speaker 6 So there better be a good explanation and good reason. And there might be.
I'm not even saying that these issues are settled.

Speaker 6 The science is being debated and it should be, but you couldn't ask the questions. And now more and more GMOs, pesticides, herbicides, glyphosate, is it really a problem?

Speaker 6 You know, what are the toxins that we're allowing in our environment that don't seem to be allowed in other countries? Is it true that we have that much plastic in it? Does it really matter?

Speaker 6 You know, are you feeding me a lot of junk food and subsidizing it? So it's, you know, you're making, you're chumming the water basically. So I'm going to go, you know, looking for it.

Speaker 6 And now I'm putting weight on it. It turns out it wasn't all my fault.

Speaker 6 That kind of stuff gets people, because it's very personal, to start to think differently about who's on their team.

Speaker 6 And I believe the reason this issue is so critical is because you have an opportunity on the Republican side to take a generation of people. who didn't have strong sentiments.

Speaker 6 Remember, half the people don't vote.

Speaker 6 Half do not vote.

Speaker 6 If some of those people all of a sudden begin to to think, you know what, I'm believing that this Republican Party cares about issues that I care about, they start to become Republicans.

Speaker 6 And that's an existential threat to the Democratic Party because this should be an issue the Democrats embrace.

Speaker 2 So they both embrace it.

Speaker 6 You actually start to get change.

Speaker 2 Let's.

Speaker 2 turn our attention to the political scene again on the Daily Wire side of this. We've got another half an hour.
I think that would be a good conversation.

Speaker 2 I'd like to lay out, I'd like to hear more about your thoughts regarding the Maha movement in general, how you think that could go right and

Speaker 2 how you think it could go wrong. Underneath that, there's obviously this broader discussion of this massive shift in the political landscape that has taken place that we don't understand.

Speaker 2 Because at one level of analysis, it's the Republicans defeating the Democrats, but

Speaker 2 Trump, Kennedy, Gabbard,

Speaker 2 Ramaswamy, and

Speaker 2 Vance, those are very strange Republicans, right? First of all, most of them were Democrats. So I'd like to delve into that a little bit.

Speaker 2 So all of you who are watching and listening, you can follow us on the Daily Wire side for another half an hour and we'll dig more deeply into the possibilities that are going to be laid out in the coming months and years as this radical shift propagates itself through the political system.

Speaker 2 Thank you very much for your talking to me today. And also, I should say, too, thank you for interviewing me back in 2018.

Speaker 2 You know, you I've had very few American, in particular, mainstream media interviews. Like, I can certainly count them on the fingers of one finger, really.

Speaker 2 So, you know, that was quite seriously. Like, it's, there's, you know, it's fine and it's fine.

Speaker 2 But the reason I'm bringing that up isn't to bemoan the fact because it. it hasn't mattered that much, but it does also highlight the degree to which you took a risk and very early on.

Speaker 2 And so I definitely

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Speaker 2 We appreciate that.

Speaker 6 Well, if I can add one thing to that, when I, part of the reason I'm launching my podcast

Speaker 6 is because of what happened after that interview. And

Speaker 6 the interview went two hours and 42 minutes. I'll never forget it because it was so ridiculous that I would have talked to you that long.
I loved it that much.

Speaker 6 Lisa and I spent weeks preparing for it because you were explaining things that were so fundamentally fundamentally important for folks to hear all over the world.

Speaker 6 And so I do the interview and I think, that's too bad. It's so long because people aren't going to listen to it.

Speaker 6 More than 5 million people that listen to a

Speaker 6 two hours, 42 minute interview, which means in my mind, there is an appetite, a voracious appetite, if the information truly is life-changing.

Speaker 6 And so it highlighted to me that although there are many benefits of network television, reach, obviously, you know, you can uniformity.

Speaker 6 You can begin to get people to think, you know, similarly around important issues, particularly valuable when we have crises like COVID.

Speaker 6 But if you want to go deep into the kind of topics that change your life, it's nice to take those little sparkly ideas and go deep with them.

Speaker 6 So, first, thanks for coming on and trusting me to host you because I know it's a difficult time, but also for awakening me to the possibility that we could talk about stuff with a lot more depth than ever thought possible.

Speaker 2 Yes, well, we can also discuss that on the dataware side, too, because I'd also like to discuss the what would you say?

Speaker 2 Well, expand on exactly the distinction between what's happening in the new media world, let's say, and the legacy media. We can take that apart in some detail.

Speaker 2 So, infinite bandwidth, right, and permanence, those are radical changes, low cost, and they do change the dynamics of the social landscape in ways that we're barely beginning to understand.

Speaker 2 And thank you very much, sir.

Speaker 6 God bless you. You bet, man.

Speaker 2 Good to have you here.