Dr. Drew is a board certified physician and legacy celebrity talent with over 35 years of national radio appearances, best selling books, and countless tele-shows bearing his name. In this episode, Dr. Drew and Russell discuss the role of evangelical physicians in the opioid crisis, and how they have contributed to the growing problem of addiction in the United States, and why they are responsible for much of the problem. Russell Brand is a writer, speaker, and host of the radio show and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times bestselling book . He is also the co-host of the podcast on Rumble streaming with his show, Ask Dr Drew and hosts the popular show , where he talks about addiction and recovery from addiction on a wide range of topics including addiction, mental health, and mental illness. He has been married to his wife for over 30 years and they have two grown children, a daughter and a son-in-law, and a stepson, who is also a physician and a great friend of the family. He is the author, and has been a long-time friend of Russell Brand s. This episode was produced in part 1 of a 2 part mini-series that Russell and I did on addiction and mental health in America. Stay Free with Russell Brand: Stay Free With Russell Brand. Stay Free, Stay Free. Remember, there s an episode every single day to educate and elevate our consciousness together! Stay free, stay free, and enjoy the episode. You'll get a detailed breakdown of current topics that the mainstream media should be covering, but if they are not covering them, they're amplifying establishment messages and not telling you the truth. But if they're not covering it, they re amplifying the truth, they are amplifying it, you're not going to be covering it. If they are covering it well enough, you'll get to know the truth you need to be informed and elevate your consciousness together, not telling the truth they should be spreading it everywhere else. And they re going to tell the truth about it, right? - That's what you should be listening to you, right here. - What's up to you? - Stay Free! - Russell Brand Thank you for listening to this episode of Stay Free? (Rumble streaming? ) - RATE 5 stars on iTunes and share it on your social media platforms?
00:00:00.000Hello there you Awakening Wonders on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you download your podcasts.
00:00:05.000We really appreciate you, our listeners, and want to bring you more content.
00:00:08.000We will be delivering a podcast every day, seven days a week, every single day.
00:00:13.000You'll get a detailed breakdown of current topics that the mainstream media should be covering, but if they are covering, they're amplifying establishment messages and not telling you the truth.
00:00:23.000Once a week we bring you in-depth conversations with guests like Jordan Peterson, RFK Jr, Sam Harris, Vandana Shiva, Gabor Mate and many more.
00:00:31.000Now enjoy this episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:34.000Remember, there's an episode every single day to educate and elevate our consciousness together.
00:00:50.000He's a board certified physician and legacy celebrity talent with over 35 years of national radio, New York Times best-selling books and countless tele-shows bearing his name.
00:01:00.000You can check out his work at drdrew.com plus he's on Rumble streaming with his show Ask Dr. Drew.
00:01:13.000As we were just starting to mention before the mics heated up, we were together a few years ago.
00:01:18.000We did a speech together about recovery.
00:01:20.000As I think about our last meeting and then this one, many roads have been traveled.
00:01:28.000Would you have imagined the world would evolve the way it has?
00:01:32.000No, and the only people that did imagine it were kind of peripheral, zealous, fringe evangelists that were at the time regarded as conspiracy theorists.
00:01:45.000I always felt that in our conversations Because we're talking about medicine, we were talking about mental health, we were talking about addiction and wellness.
00:01:52.000I know that in our previous conversations we would have touched on the social implications of a condition like addiction.
00:01:58.000That addiction is somewhat related to social pressures.
00:02:02.000We may even have got as far as saying that the pharmaceutical industry possibly exploits addiction.
00:02:07.000We may not have been in a position to talk about Purdue And Big Pharma and the Sackler family and the way that the opioid crisis has been handled.
00:02:14.000But, you know, I know that's the kind of thing we would have touched on before.
00:02:17.000But as you say, we're in a very different territory now.
00:02:20.000From your perspective, Doc, what lines have been crossed and how is it we've found ourselves here?
00:02:26.000Well, I've become a student of history because of this and much to my shock, but I want to answer that two ways that are a little bit glib and a little bit just so.
00:02:43.000One is, post-structuralism has taken hold in this country, in particular, in a way that has been destructive.
00:02:49.000The idea of truth has been undermined, and the reality is there is a truth, and our goal should be to ascend to some approximation of truth.
00:02:58.000We've forsaken that, and that has bled into science and everything, so that's a problem.
00:03:06.000Number two, that's the sort of historical sort of note, but number two, You mentioned the Sackler family and the excesses of the opioid industry, but the real perpetrators of the opioid crisis were evangelical physicians.
00:03:21.000In this country, and in the UK as well, pain medicine became this cudgel.
00:03:27.000That went around and forced physicians, sound familiar now?
00:03:31.000Forced physicians to make pain the fifth vital sign.
00:03:51.000In this country, we have a Deborah Birx who evangelizes for lockdowns.
00:03:55.000An evangelical physician went state to state, governor to governor, and persuaded, frightened these governors that if they didn't lock down, they'd be killing people.
00:04:06.000Same phenomenon, same playbook, same disaster.
00:04:10.000It's interesting that we're talking about two subjects, both of which I'm fascinated by.
00:04:15.000The impact of post-structuralism and relativism.
00:04:17.000The idea that there perhaps is a degree of ambiguity.
00:04:20.000And look, I'm sympathetic to the idea that there are institutions that have been deemed just and granted authority that could benefit from open-ended analysis.
00:04:34.000These are some of the areas of post-structuralism.
00:04:37.000You know, not necessarily talking about semiotics and the semantic component of that, but certainly looking at power from an open-minded perspective.
00:04:46.000But also, the idea that when you say evangelical physicians, it shows that there's a sort of component to prescribing medicine and issuing medical care that is emotional rather than practical.
00:05:04.000Not only emotional, but also social, because now we are having these movements in medicine where people are, you know, I was a scientist, I was a clinician, and the idea that we have social movements within medicine and focusing on things that are, I mean, it's good that we're paying attention to these things, but that those are sweeping us away from science is really very, very concerning.
00:05:25.000Yeah, it's extraordinary and I don't know how or why that's happened because the post-structuralist idea, does that lead to the over-emotionalization of everything?
00:05:38.000I would have thought that it was quite an academic, quite cold, atheistic, materialistic, rationalistic ideology and yet what we are talking about now is a type of hysteria within the medical profession.
00:05:49.000But the hysteria was, we were all, the world, much to my amazement, seemed to have been prone to this hysteria.
00:05:56.000So, now, you know, again, I was giving you just so things that came to mind when you asked your initial question.
00:06:02.000My other sort of frame is, and I know you'll agree with this, is we've had, particularly again in this country, a narcissistic turn.
00:06:12.000The general trait structure of our personalities have gone towards what's called Cluster B, borderline sociopath, narcissist, and I'd not seen a lot of histrionic, but it was waiting in the background, clearly, with the hysterias right on the heels of it.
00:06:29.000I wrote a book about that 20 years ago.
00:06:32.000You know, it's something I can talk a great deal about.
00:06:34.000I saw it coming, I predicted, and I knew that the liability of narcissism is scapegoating.
00:06:40.000I knew there would be scapegoating, and I knew there would be mobs, and man, I didn't know it would look like this, though.
00:06:47.000Do you think that this narcissism and this emergence of kind of pathological conditions that would have before been regarded as extraordinary and maybe even rare and certainly as problems, and it sounds like you're saying they've become normalized, is this because of individualism?
00:07:07.000And what do you mean by that, that everyone's become borderline sociopaths?
00:07:27.000And in the early, mid-80s, when I first started working at the psychiatric hospital, I would look at all the admitting forms, you know, patients coming in, and I would see there was always a window where we put in the personality diagnoses.
00:07:40.000And the psychiatrist would put in, I saw all kinds of things, dependent personalities.
00:07:45.000And the full spectrum of the A, B, and C disorders that you find in the DSM-5.
00:07:52.000I noticed toward the end of the 80s, all of a sudden I was seeing, in the female, predominantly borderline.
00:08:04.000That's all we admitted were Cluster B patients.
00:08:07.000And I thought at the time, if you remember, I did a, excuse me, a radio show back then, and I was talking to people, you know, by the hundreds every night, and all I was hearing about was childhood trauma, childhood trauma, childhood trauma.
00:08:20.000And the outcome of childhood trauma is commonly a Cluster B personality, at least trait, if not disorder.
00:08:29.000Just to reiterate, so that I understand properly, Cluster B, can you just tell me what the indicators are again?
00:08:36.000That's the borderline narcissist, sociopath, and histrionic.
00:09:05.000And of course, we documented that they had a higher incidence of narcissistic traits than other populations.
00:09:11.000And even our control population, we used our control population as business school students, and they were above previously documented average.
00:09:59.000What is on the A scale, which are adverse childhood experience scale, things like divorce, domestic abuse, somebody in the family in prison, somebody using substances.
00:10:08.000And if you have more than two of those, You're, and of course overt trauma and all those sorts of things we would think of as trauma, but in this world where families are decayed, where people are using substances, where there's a lot of violence and aggression, who isn't exposed to that?
00:10:22.000It's extremely common to be exposed to adverse childhood experience and then add to that screens.
00:10:27.000We have no idea how that's amplifying everything and what they're being exposed to there, whether that's an independent trauma So, here we go.
00:10:37.000And of course, of course, it's happening more than ever.
00:10:41.000The only period of history that I could find similar experiences of that kind of abandonment, neglect, and abuse of kids was pre-revolutionary France.
00:10:49.000And I wanted to write a chapter in my book about that, and I was told by the editor it was too speculative.
00:10:55.000I said, look, there's going to be guillotines, there's going to be mobs.
00:11:12.000So if you have a culture that fetishizes the individual, that is histrionic and narcissistic, sociopathic, the characteristics that you laid out, one of the symptoms when that becomes ubiquitous is the emergence of scapegoating.
00:11:28.000It has to, the sort of culture or the society requires it.
00:11:32.000And you're saying revolutionary France, obviously with the guillotine, practiced that in a Visible, demonstrable and dramatic way.
00:11:40.000But you're saying that our culture is bearing those signs also.
00:11:45.000If something's happening at that scale, it can't be moving up through individuals, can it, Doctor?
00:11:50.000There must be some sort of central social factor.
00:11:55.000Well, I haven't thought about it that way.
00:11:57.000What do you, uh, it's an interesting question.
00:12:00.000You mean like somebody taking advantage of that and sort of, uh, amplifying it or manipulating it in some way?
00:12:06.000It means, for me, my sense is that whether there was a radical increase in addiction, you think, well why would that be?
00:12:14.000Is there the availability of substances?
00:12:20.000What are the social factors that likely lead to epidemic proportions being reached?
00:12:27.000I feel that you indicated at the beginning that the values of the culture have shifted, and I feel that that's true also.
00:12:35.000On some level, and it's a difficult thing to entirely articulate, some people in our chat are saying the breakdown of the family, and I feel like we have lost our connection with God.
00:12:45.000I feel that our values have become Narcissistic that even identity politics and I'm sympathetic to the civil rights movements around each of the categories but what I sense is that the individual has become the sort of apex of value that what you are as a person and what you feel and what you want is the kind of summit of the social values rather than who we are as a member of a community who we are as a member of a movement or even a nation or a religion yeah I think that I feel that that plays a part somehow
00:13:20.000I mean, what are the first couple of steps of recovery from a substance use, which is letting go, not controlling everything, which means, you know, as many of my patients say, they feel like they're a piece of ass around which the whole world revolves.
00:13:49.000I don't know what that is for everybody.
00:13:50.000It's kind of magical to me to some extent, but I know that it's necessary for people to fully let go of their self-centric Whether it's white-centric or Eurocentric or whatever-centric it is, they have to let go.
00:14:05.000They have to let go and be open to what the world has.
00:14:34.000How we fill that emptiness, to me, I don't claim to be the carrier of that information, but I do know we need to solve it.
00:14:45.000Yeah you're right because of course we were talking before about addiction and you were kind enough to help me with my book Recovery I remember and I went on your radio show or podcast I can't remember what medium was flourishing at that time but I do know that when we did the live Yeah, it was a print and we were talking about that.
00:15:07.000You agreed with my interpretation of the 12 steps is about having, as you just described, a spiritual awakening and the support of a community and ultimately being able to overcome the inclination towards a type of self-centeredness that you're describing in your cluster B diagnosis there.
00:15:25.000I want to interrupt you because I left out one thing that I was going to comment on your last construct of how you were describing the lack of connection.
00:15:33.000Lack of connection is really what you're talking about.
00:15:35.000Lack of connection to other, lack of connection to community, lack of connection to God, lack of connection to self, frankly.
00:16:14.000Don't stand on the stage and beat your chest and gnash your teeth.
00:16:17.000That is grandiose caring, that is narcissism.
00:16:21.000I'm glad you care, I want you to care about other people, but that is not going to help the present moment.
00:16:27.000In Christianity, I know that it's significant to do God's work privately and quietly and with humility so that it doesn't become performative.
00:16:35.000And I guess a component of the scapegoat in has become something that's often discussed virtue performed publicly.
00:16:45.000And I was thinking about the culture at the moment.
00:16:47.000I was thinking, how are people getting it up, Dr. Drew, to talk about the Oscars or the Golden Globes, when there is this immersive sense that we are in some kind of crisis?
00:16:59.000I was so fascinated to hear your diagnosis, because it's one that I agree with.
00:17:03.000Because continually, from this odd globalist humanitarian perspective, people will continually cite Confident statistics around, well do you know more people have been pulled out of poverty than ever before and the standard of living this and this is better than ever and I always feel like, I don't know that that's the reality a lot of people are living in.
00:17:21.000It feels like we're in a highly precipitous and dangerous moment in a massive crisis of meaning and this kind of shared psychopathy seems relevant.
00:17:35.000What does it mean to live a good life?
00:17:39.000And it may well be that these measures, these instruments that we measure economic well-being and, you know, people being pulled out of poverty, all that stuff you just referenced, is not relevant to the crisis of the present.
00:18:45.000But eudaimonic happiness, as Aristotle called it, is something that's much more nourishing and is the source of a good life.
00:18:53.000So we have to each of us figure out what that meaning is for us.
00:18:59.000And there's some You know, people have thought about that for thousands of years, and there are people that have suggested certain things.
00:19:04.000We might return to some of that stuff, perhaps.
00:19:07.000Yeah, the inward generation of joy compared to the external application of pleasure is a confusion that seems to have been with us some time.
00:19:17.000I was chatting to someone about Epicureanism, the sort of like Epicurus was kind of got associated with pleasure seeking, but someone explained to me recently, no, he wasn't about pleasure.
00:19:27.000And when we start talking about pleasure over joy and transient happiness, which is Can easily commodified is very distinct from the generation of independent joy joy coming from within joy in your nature.
00:19:39.000You said independent joy i'm of the opinion i may be wrong about this but i always noticed that real joy tends to be a shared experience.
00:19:50.000It's something that people have together, or at least it's amplified in such a way that it becomes more substantial when it is experienced with at least an other, if not many others.
00:20:02.000Yes, I think that's a fair assessment.
00:20:04.000Although sometimes when I think of someone like Yogananda, like he's talking about there being an ever-present bliss
00:20:11.000that we're blocked off from because of layers of samskara and layers of injury, and I try sometimes to contemplate
00:20:17.000what does Christ, what's meant by the kingdom of heaven being within?
00:20:22.000So there's no doubt, I don't wanna double down on the kind of individualism that you and I
00:20:27.000are both decrying, and I reckon that there's a certain joy that can be derived from relationship and service,
00:20:32.000but the idea that, what I'm trying to establish and to explain is that as a recovering addict,
00:20:38.000the idea that pleasure is gonna come from the outside, whether it's through sex or through food
00:20:44.000or through heroin or alcohol, that I can consume somehow pleasure
00:20:48.000rather than through service and good conduct.
00:20:51.000Through right conduct, joy will be generated as a byproduct rather than as the aim.
00:20:58.000Isn't right conduct something that is in short supply also?
00:21:04.000I just, you know, I always think it's kind of amusing.
00:21:06.000I mean, his first principle was, of course, that, you know, behave as though your behavior can be judged as universal principle, which is essentially another way of saying behave in such a way that people can see all your choices, as though there's a camera going at all times.
00:21:28.000Okay, before you answer the next question, Doctor, I have to tell our beloved viewers on YouTube, we need you to join us.
00:21:34.000We need you to be a part of this movement because we're going to discuss stuff that would be contraband on a WHO platform, on a platform that listens to the British government when they say demonetize Russell Brand.
00:21:45.000This is part of our movement. We need you with us right now. We're going
00:21:49.000to be talking about Dr Drew's views on Joe Rogan and the Covid protocol that he espoused and
00:21:54.000why the legacy media responded the way they did with that massive pile on. You know,
00:21:58.000excuse me, isn't it weird when the whole media responds with one voice as if there is one
00:22:04.000agenda to amplify and normalize the power that the agenda of the powerful.
00:22:10.000We're talking about Fauci, we're talking about excess deaths, all sorts of stuff we wouldn't be able to do on YouTube.
00:22:13.000So, click the link in the description and join us there.
00:22:16.000And please, see you in a second, consider becoming a supporter of our content, becoming an Awaken Wonder to get an additional video every single week.
00:22:24.000Brilliant ones on excess deaths, on farmer protests, and more importantly, perhaps, support our work so we can grow together.
00:22:33.000So in particular, Doctor, do you consider that a seismic occurrence took place at the commencement of the pandemic and the regulations that were imposed and the attitudes around vaccine mandates?
00:22:47.000Was that a pivotal moment in modern history?
00:22:55.000It certainly revealed something to me.
00:22:56.000And not just a something, a lot of things.
00:22:59.000And it's so funny when I was thinking about how you frame your Identify your program as stay free.
00:23:09.000I thought to myself, gosh, I used to my entire career.
00:23:13.000I used to tell people to stay well, but my shift because of covid has been stay free also and that is that is astonishing to me that I always thought that was a foregone conclusion and the fact that we have to stand up and a stat and sort of Let's say a fight for that.
00:23:33.000It's just astonishing to me who I talk to.
00:23:38.000I mean, I was thinking about some of the interviews I used to do on HLN and CNN.
00:23:41.000I used to interview white supremacists.
00:24:47.000Like you said, it became hysterical, it became political, they were unable to constrain themselves.
00:24:53.000There was a concerted legacy media effort to shut him down, to silence and smear and disgrace him.
00:24:59.000They dug up things from the past about him, his use of profane language.
00:25:04.000It was extraordinary how that was coordinated and it revealed a degree of authoritarianism that, as you said, Doctor, we assumed was Off the menu.
00:25:17.000Whether you're Democrat or Republican, we care about individual freedom and free speech.
00:25:21.000Well, no, that isn't what's happening anymore.
00:26:05.000So, you know, first through the Jacobins, and then all the Jacobins got their heads cut off, and by the Sainte-Colette, and then Sainte-Colette and Robespierre got their heads cut off by the Royalists, and then the Royalists got put in prison by Napoleon.
00:26:26.000Doc, is this a good time for us to talk about the wellness company that are promoting and are partnering us with our content today that I believe you are affiliated with?
00:26:35.000We've already done a promo for the wellness company for the medical kits, where in the event of an emergency, you would have in your home necessary medicines, including the controversial prize-winning Ivermectin, as well as a variety of other products.
00:26:51.000Can you tell us what that kit is and what, in particular, what your affiliation with it is?
00:26:56.000I'm a member of their chief medical board.
00:26:58.000There is a variety of physicians on that board with differing opinions.
00:27:01.000We're not all in complete unison on everything, but we all agree that the physician-patient relationship has been adulterated.
00:27:08.000We were just talking about Joe Rogan and how people tried to adulterate his relationship with his doctor.
00:27:15.000The physician is powerless in this country right now, so I am interested in empowering patients.
00:27:19.000They should have access to things that they know how to use, that are simple to use, that we can teach them to use.
00:28:01.000I think, look, my wife is lucky because, you know, if it's an after hours situation and her physician's unavailable, I can kind of step in and help out.
00:28:11.000It's not a great idea to treat your family, but there's certain things that are just so easy to use that people should just have.
00:28:16.000And I've thought for When people travel, I give them a batch of medicines.
00:28:32.000Right, so it'll be things like antibiotics, antiparasitics, medicines that are likely to be useful in the event of a variety of kind of common conditions.
00:28:44.000For God's sakes, don't go to an urgent care where you pay for all that real estate, all that equipment, all those employees.
00:28:50.000You pay for that when you walk in there.
00:28:53.000Our system could be infinitely more efficient and this is an attempt to bring it that way.
00:28:57.000Well brilliant, well we'll post a link for that right now and I guess we're doing some kind of discount I would hope given that we are like affiliated in some way but we'll post that right now.
00:29:08.000Can we move elegantly onto the subject of excess deaths?
00:29:14.000It's a difficult thing to talk about because of censorship as well as the fact that you know well take this example there's been an eight percent increase in excess deaths among children in the United Kingdom.
00:29:24.000It's difficult to countenance that that means There's a higher likelihood that your own children are going to die.
00:29:32.000And I saw recently a Channel 4 documentary that, interestingly, were one of the companies that attacked me recently, in conjunction with other legacy media organizations, simultaneously, working together on their investigation.
00:29:43.000When they were talking about excess death, they literally did an item on the news.
00:30:22.000They're being done well and properly and thoughtfully and non-hysterically.
00:30:27.000And we have to be open to any and all explanation.
00:30:31.000My own belief is, my suspicion is, I shouldn't say belief because it is science, my suspicion is we're going to find that the real culprit is the spike protein, however you are exposed to it.
00:30:44.000And so the more exposure to spike, the more we're going to see difficulty.
00:30:48.000It is clearly the pathogenic part of the virus.
00:30:53.000And of course, many of the vaccines, that's what we're creating to create the immune reaction, is more spike.
00:31:00.000And maybe some people produce more spike than others.
00:31:38.000This is the astonishing thing to me, that the whole world shut down, the whole world became hysterical, and the entire world is ignoring this thing.
00:31:49.000Now, maybe they don't feel it's the place of government, maybe it's the medical system that has to come up with that.
00:31:55.000And we take a long time to cull through stuff, to come up with the evidence of what's going on.
00:32:00.000If you leave it just to the medical system, who's going to pay for the studies?
00:32:13.000Just to give you some information on the COVID inquiry in the UK, it's cost £145 million up until now.
00:32:19.000They're delaying the significant questions indefinitely.
00:32:22.000They've not said when they're going to continue the inquiry, but it will certainly be after the elections in the summer.
00:32:26.000So there's the kind of opacity that's defined investigations in your country as well.
00:32:32.000And it Obviously, being a skeptical person, I can't help but think that some powerful interests are being served or protected by the way that this is subsequently being handled.
00:32:41.000And on that subject, Anthony Fauci has gone from being a sort of a hero, very deliberately portrayed in that manner as well, from late night talk shows, holding dance numbers, and we're all invited to adore Anthony Fauci.
00:32:56.000He proclaimed himself as being The science, in inverted commas, and he also said publicly that people, when the right measures are imposed on them, will lose their ideological BS.
00:33:09.000I wonder if you think that irreparable damage has been done in the institutions that surround American medicine, the CDC, the NIH, etc., due to Fauci's conduct and some of the odd financial relationships around that time.
00:33:23.000Well, again, a lot packed into your questions, as always.
00:33:27.000And I don't know about irreparable damage because they were adulterated and we didn't know it.
00:33:39.000The fact that it had gone so far in a certain direction where regulators and pharmaceutical companies are so intertwined.
00:33:46.000And by the way, the publishing infrastructure and major medical journals, this is all... I'm not allowed even to allow a drug rep into my office to give me a pen with a drug name on it.
00:34:01.000And yet these guys go back and forth between and amongst each other and share each other's jobs and livelihoods.
00:34:13.000Number two, you mentioned how Dr. Fauci was a hero.
00:34:15.000Dr. Fauci has been my hero my whole career.
00:34:18.000He was the reason I got involved in radio.
00:34:20.000I was deeply involved in treating AIDS patients, and in the mid-early 80s, when we were just starting to go from calling this thing grids to AIDS, he was saying, you know, you got to get out there.
00:34:30.000He actually was telling us to go out and scare people.
00:34:47.000I thought we stopped that from happening by scaring the crap out of these kids.
00:34:53.000But I apologize now if that had adverse effect.
00:34:56.000I see now the In the advantageous outcome of using fear, we should never use fear and panic in medicine.
00:35:03.000It's unethical, and I apologize if my participation that harmed people, but we really had a, you know, that was a deadly illness with a 100% fatality rate.
00:35:15.000Not a 1% fatality rate, a 100% fatality rate, and it was a bleak, dark period.
00:35:22.000I was telling, as a fourth-year medical student, I was telling young men regularly They had six months to live, so there was a degree of panic.
00:35:32.000Now, when this thing hit, you know, the things that I got criticized for were obviously, you know, when things go viral, you know, I'm sure you've noticed, it's never what you say.
00:35:43.000It's always what somebody says you said.
00:36:01.000And when things are viral on me, the one thing they always cut out of my comments was the thing I actually got wrong.
00:36:09.000Because the thing I actually got wrong was at the end of every comment I would say, please just listen to Dr. Fauci, listen to the CDC, they've been guiding my career, you can rely on these people to get us through it.
00:36:18.000And I believed that until Dr. Fauci was in front of our government and they asked him whether we should, whether, you know, Dr. Fauci, you've closed down church practices out of doors, is it okay to go to a political demonstration?
00:36:32.000And he looked and he went, I don't know what you're talking about.
00:36:34.000And I thought, oh, he's been adulterated.
00:37:02.000It's quite extraordinary and frightening, I would think, to be in a position where, necessarily, if you're a medical profession, you have to operate within institutions, because institutions, when they're good, are the housing of expertise and accumulative knowledge, but institutions, when they are bad, are the vessels for corruption, and it seems like you've almost experienced that metastasis.
00:38:08.000And I thought, there's something wrong with the editorial process, too.
00:38:11.000Actually, I saved one journalist, not here on my desk right now.
00:38:15.000But Annals of Internal Medicine, about two years into COVID, finally started writing some articles that were about budesonide and about fluvoxamine and about alternative treatments for early COVID.
00:38:28.000They're showing the full spectrum of what's out there.
00:38:32.000But remember that Danish study that showed that a small percentage of the initial rollout of the vaccine was responsible for 90% of the adverse reactions?
00:40:11.000It's about trying to get to a clear understanding of what's going on here.
00:40:15.000I don't know if you saw the Austrian study that came out also that Vinay Prasad put out, he put on Twitter, which was, I want to read you that one.
00:40:24.000I actually pulled it up because that will really interest your audience, it seems to me.
00:40:29.000We did not, this is an excellent study, well done, peer-reviewed.
00:40:33.000We did not observe a significant vaccine effect from the fourth vaccine dose, COVID-19 deaths, during a time with already very low absolute risk for outcome, meaning the vaccine had no effect.
00:40:45.000And they observe no individuals younger than 40 years died of COVID-19.
00:40:49.000So why are we getting vaccinated at all?
00:41:52.000For me, it seems like it was an extremely revealing period that I obviously come from a Different world in many regards, though there are crossovers in our experience and some of our perspectives.
00:42:05.000But for me, the confirmation that you cannot trust authority, that various arms of the establishment work in conjunction in order to achieve favoured outcomes, that crises are utilised to impose power, that if there's an opportunity to introduce authoritarianism and Generate profit, it will be taken.
00:42:24.000All of these sort of pre-existing biases, I would have to call them, appear to get like pretty significant ticks next to them over that couple of year period.
00:42:36.000I mean, you and I grew up in similar eras when at least, you know, question authority was our presumed position.
00:42:44.000That's how we, and then We expected our press to speak to the people in power and to question the people in power.
00:42:51.000That is flipped on its head, where people are signing on to authoritarianism and are becoming a part of the elites and reinforcing their excesses.
00:43:03.000Okay, now we need to become a student of history, because that is not something that I would expect in your country or mine, and yet here we are.
00:43:11.000By the way, the French, back to the French Revolution, the French youth have been pushing back on this.
00:43:16.000They have been bristling about it since they were getting a vaccine mandate.
00:43:20.000They were in the streets on Friday and Saturday night demonstrating against that.
00:43:29.000Yeah, in every protest movement, you can rely on the French to take it to extremes.
00:43:33.000It's agricultural, we're dumping stuff in the street.
00:43:37.000Yeah, thank God for the French, you have to say once in a while, even as an English person.
00:43:41.000Yeah, it's become clear that the function of the media is to normalise and amplify the agenda of the establishment.
00:43:48.000That's a sort of a paradigm that, you know, whether that's to introduce a new piece of technology, a new piece of legislation, to shut down a piece of dissent, it's become something that's become prevalent and You can candidly state in this space now.