The Ben Shapiro Show - Dr. Drew Pinsky | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 3

00:00:00.000 If you're empty and you can't find meaning in other people, in being service to other people, in contributing to society, I don't know what we're doing here.

00:00:16.000 Well, welcome.

00:00:17.000 I am very excited to have with me today, Dr. Drew, and we'll be talking with him in just one second.

00:00:20.000 But first, look, everybody looks better in a suit.

00:00:22.000 Dr. Drew is the best dressed man on the planet, but even Dr. Drew would look great in Indochino because Indochino is the world's largest made-to-measure menswear company.

00:00:29.000 They've been featured in major publications, including GQ, Forbes, and Fast Company.

00:00:33.000 They make suits and shirts made to your exact measurements for a great fit.

00:00:36.000 Dudes love the wide selection of high quality fabrics, the option to personalize all the details, including your lapel, your lining, your monogram.

00:00:42.000 So here's how it works.

00:00:43.000 You can go to a showroom.

00:00:44.000 They have one in Beverly Hills or

00:00:45.000 They have them all around the country, or you can shop online at Indochino.com.

00:00:48.000 You can pick your fabric, choose your customization, submit your measurements.

00:00:51.000 I've done it myself.

00:00:52.000 It is super cool.

00:00:53.000 And then you wait for your custom suit to arrive in just a few weeks, and it fits you like a glove.

00:00:56.000 This week, my listeners can get any premium Indochino suit for just $379 at Indochino.com when you enter Shapiro at checkout.

00:01:04.000 Again, use that promo code Shapiro.

00:01:05.000 You get 50% off the regular price for a made-to-measure premium suit, and shipping is free.

00:01:10.000 So Indochino.com, promo code Shapiro, any premium suit, 379 bucks and free shipping.

00:01:15.000 You look like James Bond, but you don't have to pay James Bond prices.

00:01:17.000 It's an incredible deal for a suit that will fit you better than anything off the rack could.

00:01:20.000 Indochino.com, use that promo code Shapiro.

00:01:23.000 Okay, so now, Dr. Drew, thank you for stopping by.

00:01:26.000 Dr. Drew, for those who don't know, and you've been hiding under a rock for the last 20, 30 years, Dr. Drew,

00:01:31.000 Is the original host of Loveline, which is where I first got to know his work, just like everybody else.

00:01:36.000 But he is currently a host over at KBC in Los Angeles on middays.

00:01:40.000 He also does five separate podcasts.

00:01:42.000 I've got Adam and Drew, got Drew.

00:01:44.000 We got the Soul Patrol, which is a health and fitness podcast, and another one with Bob Forrest, the guy with the hat and the glasses that I did celebrity rehab with, called This Life.

00:01:53.000 It's about mental health and addiction, that kind of stuff.

00:01:55.000 So Dr. Drew has a very, very full plate.

00:01:57.000 Busy, busy.

00:01:57.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:01:58.000 So I'm glad that you had time to come over here and talk with us.

00:02:00.000 I was thinking about it as you were talking about the suits I'm going to buy, by the way.

00:02:05.000 Too good a deal to let go.

00:02:06.000 But I want you to change my mind today.

00:02:10.000 Unfortunately, we live in a world where people don't like to change their mind.

00:02:13.000 I cannot understand that.

00:02:16.000 My mind changing is how I grow.

00:02:18.000 I want you to change my mind.

00:02:20.000 Well, this is why I think you're so popular.

00:02:24.000 One of the reasons that a lot of the people we have on, I think, are so popular is because if you view life as a journey through knowledge, I think that you have a much better time doing it, and also you're less likely to become ticked off.

00:02:35.000 So one of the things that's great about what you do is that you talk with a lot of people from a lot of variant points of view, but you're pretty even keel.

00:02:41.000 I mean, you're not in the business of getting angry.

00:02:43.000 The hubris is the furthest thing from what I think I should be.

00:02:47.000 And when people become hubristic, that's where I get pissed.

00:02:50.000 Because the human experience is so complex and so rich, for anybody to stand off and tell you this is how it's got to be, I get a little pissed off.

00:02:58.000 So before we get into any of the deep stuff, I first want to get something off the table, because obviously there's an elephant in the room for those who know our history together.

00:03:05.000 So the first time that we ever met in person is when I was on your show back on CNN Headline News.

00:03:10.000 And it became sort of a cause celebre because there was an incident with Zoe Terzou.

00:03:13.000 Zoe Terzou is a transgender woman, a man who is, in my opinion, believes he is a woman.

00:03:18.000 And Dr. Drew is hosting the show.

00:03:20.000 And in the middle, there was a bit of a conflagration when he started calling me names, suggesting I was a little boy.

00:03:26.000 And I said, what are your genetics, sir?

00:03:27.000 Not you, Zoe.

00:03:28.000 I remember that part.

00:03:30.000 I remember you calling her sir, and that's what got her.

00:03:33.000 So it started off with me talking about genetics, and then Zoe saying, you don't know anything about genetics, little boy.

00:03:39.000 I see.

00:03:40.000 And then me responding, well, what are your genetics, sir?

00:03:42.000 And that led, obviously, to this big kind of blow up and a national story and all the rest, and the rest is history.

00:03:48.000 And I didn't produce it, and I apologize to you and to Zoe for putting you in that position.

00:03:53.000 I had no idea that was the direction it was going to go.

00:03:56.000 But I do remember, you know, I've done a lot of... I've run a lot of groups in my time.

00:04:01.000 And I know when groups are getting out of control and when there's potential violence.

00:04:04.000 I know how to jump in.

00:04:05.000 I know where to jump in.

00:04:06.000 And I also know where to let things kind of play out.

00:04:09.000 And I always felt like, okay, well, that's kind of... I'm not quite out of my chair yet on this one.

00:04:13.000 Yeah.

00:04:14.000 If you felt like I should have been, I apologize.

00:04:16.000 Oh, no, no, no.

00:04:17.000 It wasn't on you, and I didn't blame you for any of that.

00:04:19.000 It was just a very weird and odd circumstance.

00:04:20.000 I just wanted to get that one off the table.

00:04:22.000 Dr. Drew and I are not angry at each other.

00:04:24.000 It doesn't bother all of us.

00:04:25.000 No.

00:04:25.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:04:26.000 Everything's cool.

00:04:26.000 So, okay, so now I want to talk a little bit.

00:04:28.000 Let's just jump into, first some health issues, and then I want to get into sort of your personal philosophy.

00:04:32.000 So, as a medical doctor,

00:04:35.000 And somebody who, as you were telling me before the show, now gets to spend your days talking about things rather than working 5a to 10p.

00:04:41.000 I want to ask you about a couple of things that seem to be plaguing the country.

00:04:43.000 So the opioid epidemic is obviously a major issue on a lot of people's minds.

00:04:48.000 And there are a lot of debates over the cause of this upswing in opioid use.

00:04:51.000 How much do you think that the opioid epidemic is a result of overprescription from doctors?

00:04:56.000 And how much is a result of the influx of heroin into the cities or moral collapse?

00:05:03.000 Have you read the book, Dreamland?

00:05:04.000 Yes.

00:05:04.000 Okay, that is how it happened.

00:05:07.000 Sam Quirino's book.

00:05:08.000 I talked to Sam, and what I call him, all I said is, how did you get it so right?

00:05:12.000 Because I lived through that, and that book describes it accurately.

00:05:18.000 Mostly perpetrated by my profession.

00:05:20.000 If you look at the history of opiates, we've had two major opioid crises in this country.

00:05:23.000 One was about 1880 after the Civil War.

00:05:26.000 It's when we had the hypodermic needle.

00:05:27.000 We created the hypodermic, we invented the hypodermic needle and invented morphine sulfate.

00:05:32.000 These are wonderful drugs.

00:05:33.000 For the first time we could affect human suffering.

00:05:35.000 We got carried away.

00:05:36.000 We created a bunch of addicts.

00:05:38.000 We didn't know what to do.

00:05:39.000 We treated it with

00:05:40.000 Methamphetamine, and cocaine, and all kinds of other crazy things.

00:05:45.000 We've always made the same mistake, which is we become over-enthusiastic, we don't understand what addiction is, we create addiction, and then we try to treat it with other drugs.

00:05:53.000 We've made that mistake many, many times.

00:05:54.000 We're doing it again now.

00:05:55.000 This time was extraordinary.

00:05:57.000 There are a multiplicity of forces that came together to create it.

00:06:00.000 There was, you know, the insurance situation.

00:06:03.000 Insurance companies sort of took over the practice of medicine.

00:06:05.000 Everything had to be very quick, and there's no quicker way to end it.

00:06:08.000 And an appointment then opening a prescription pad.

00:06:11.000 That and the fact that a group of physicians decided that they would stake their reputation on the fact that opioids are not addictive and you could treat pain liberally.

00:06:21.000 Pain became the fifth vital sign.

00:06:23.000 The attorneys got involved with that and started not just suing doctors for malpractice but criminally suing them, civilly suing them for inadequate treatment of pain.

00:06:30.000 The state medical boards got involved.

00:06:32.000 The Joint Commission on Hospital Accreditation.

00:06:34.000 All these forces came together and said pain is as important as your pulse.

00:06:38.000 And pain controls what the patient says it is.

00:06:41.000 Pain experiences what the patient says it is.

00:06:43.000 We have these great medicines. 1.00

00:06:44.000 Use them and you are a coward. 0.99

00:06:46.000 You're actually a dangerous person if you don't. 0.99

00:06:49.000 And so I was living through all that trying to get everybody off them.

00:06:52.000 My peers were putting them on them.

00:06:54.000 And I just will tell you it was a catastrophe.

00:06:56.000 And you would know 90% of the opiates on earth end up being prescribed in this country.

00:07:00.000 And now we're beginning to find our way out of it.

00:07:02.000 What happened was the heroin problem, as it was documented in Dreamland, there was a group of people who learned how to distribute it very effectively at a time when my peers were cutting off patients.

00:07:12.000 They were beginning to learn that, oh my God, we were creating drug addicts.

00:07:14.000 So as opposed to bringing the patient into the office and going, look, we didn't intend this.

00:07:18.000 I didn't mean to make an addict.

00:07:19.000 We have now a second problem.

00:07:21.000 We have to get this treated.

00:07:22.000 What do you think the solution to all this is?

00:07:23.000 Because there's a lot of talk about, you know, putting a lot of government funding behind things, and it doesn't look like there's a very clean solution, and the government's always throwing money in.

00:07:44.000 And I want to say too that the soil in which this thing took place was about us, right?

00:07:51.000 I don't know how else to describe it except to say, and this is a deeper conversation, that we are in the midst of a deep spiritual

00:08:01.000 We're good to go.

00:08:21.000 It's very controversial.

00:08:23.000 I spoke to the head of the addiction program at Harvard just yesterday for a podcast coming out soon.

00:08:28.000 And he and I both believe that they've got to get behind mutual aid societies, which are available in every corner and are free.

00:08:35.000 And he's publishing a Cochran study that's going to show that these treatments, mutual aid societies like 12-step and smart recovery and these sorts of things, are as effective or more so than any other treatment.

00:08:47.000 I think so.

00:09:06.000 I think so.

00:09:21.000 We're taking half measures with a lot of patients, and that may be required.

00:09:24.000 There may not be a realistic possibility of surviving this disease and attaining abstinence.

00:09:29.000 It's complex.

00:09:30.000 Yes, I'd like to go back, actually, to the first thing that you said, because I think that there is a deeper and more interesting conversation there.

00:09:36.000 The rest of it's medical.

00:09:37.000 It's not too interesting.

00:09:38.000 Exactly.

00:09:39.000 It's interesting, but it's treatable.

00:09:41.000 For me, spirituality exists between humans.

00:09:48.000 We're good to go.

00:10:08.000 And that landscape of connectedness and intimacy and parenting and family has been forsaken for about 60 years.

00:10:18.000 If not forsaken, demeaned.

00:10:20.000 And the result has been a group of adults that are empty.

00:10:25.000 And if you're empty and you can't find meaning in other people, in relationships and being service to other people and contributing to society,

00:10:34.000 I don't know.

00:10:55.000 My suspicion, it depends on what you mean by why.

00:10:59.000 You know what I mean?

00:11:01.000 If it's why, my suspicion is it was some sort of reaction to the world wars of the first half of the 20th century.

00:11:08.000 That those were so traumatic, and the children of those wars, somehow that trauma was rained down upon them.

00:11:16.000 At the same time, we decided families are not important, or relationships aren't important, or families don't matter, or it takes a village, or whatever it is.

00:11:25.000 I mean, families are the cornerstone of everything, and have always been throughout human history and every culture throughout time.

00:11:33.000 And whenever that has fallen apart,

00:11:36.000 It has been to the detriment of the society.

00:11:38.000 I can only think of, you know, only extraordinarily totalitarian systems like Sparta pulled that off and they didn't pull it off for long.

00:11:47.000 Otherwise, it is about the family and we developed some sort of spiritual, some sort of philosophical, political

00:11:55.000 I can't really think of where it started or why it happened, but it certainly was there in the 60s and 70s.

00:12:00.000 Yes, I'll tell you my theory.

00:12:00.000 So my theory is that there, I agree with you that in the aftermath of both World Wars, there was an existential angst that sort of washed across the land.

00:12:07.000 But I think that a lot of that existential angst had to do not only with decline of religion, which you can see statistically taking a nosedive after World War II, but also having to do with this unfulfilled longing for community that had once been filled by either religion or a bunch of bad ideologies.

00:12:22.000 So, the feeling of communal purpose was lost, and without that communal purpose, we saw ourselves as atomistic individuals.

00:12:27.000 When you read existentialist philosophy, it's always me versus the world, right?

00:12:30.000 You read Sartre, and everything is about, here I am in this chaotic universe as this atomized human being, and it's my will that's going to shape the world around me.

00:12:39.000 Well, that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for a connection with other human beings.

00:12:42.000 It does leave a whole lot of room for you to be by yourself.

00:12:44.000 Right.

00:12:45.000 And yet, though, something unique happened in this country, because

00:12:49.000 Go to Italy or maybe not Italy is a good example, but there are plenty of other certainly Western and even Eastern European countries.

00:12:56.000 Where there was marked decline of religion, but the families remained.

00:13:00.000 Families remained.

00:13:01.000 And they did not have the same kind of BS that we've had.

00:13:04.000 They've not had it.

00:13:04.000 I mean, when you go... We have then started filling ourselves with so many things like money and cars and extreme activities that don't fill.

00:13:14.000 It's a never-ending pit that we do here in this country.

00:13:16.000 While there, they still have their families.

00:13:18.000 They still have their family units.

00:13:20.000 The existentialism you're talking about, I mean...

00:13:25.000 I don't know how we go down this path, because I hate Sartre.

00:13:28.000 I hate him.

00:13:30.000 But I like Heidegger. 0.87

00:13:33.000 I don't like him. 0.98

00:13:34.000 He was a scoundrel.

00:13:36.000 But his philosophy is kind of interesting and maybe really Husserl is where I belong.

00:13:41.000 And the idea that there can be a phenomenological explanation of how we put experience and being together.

00:13:47.000 That's appealing.

00:13:49.000 It's interesting.

00:13:49.000 So let's dumb that down for people who don't know any of those authors.

00:13:52.000 So what do you mean by that?

00:13:53.000 Husserl wanted to make a study of experience and being.

00:13:58.000 Heidegger took that to another level.

00:14:00.000 He sort of extrapolated from Husserl and started talking about a being that makes an issue of its being, meaning the human being.

00:14:07.000 And we're the only being on earth that really makes an issue of being in our existence.

00:14:10.000 Right, it's not, I think, therefore I am.

00:14:11.000 It's, I am, therefore I am.

00:14:13.000 Yeah, I am.

00:14:14.000 I am in the world.

00:14:15.000 I am being in the world.

00:14:16.000 Right.

00:14:16.000 And in a temporal frame.

00:14:18.000 And all these things come together.

00:14:20.000 And he goes way into outer space with it.

00:14:21.000 It's a wonderful intellectual exercise.

00:14:23.000 But it's how we think about neurobiology now, in a way.

00:14:26.000 And what I want to say about that neurobiology is that we've moved away from a single skull system.

00:14:31.000 You know, in the 90s we talked about the decade of the brain.

00:14:34.000 A single skull, we're going to understand how the brain works.

00:14:37.000 Turns out the brain does not work without other brains.

00:14:39.000 And it really is, everything's in an interpersonal context.

00:14:42.000 Where does your self emerge but out of a relationship with mom and dad?

00:14:46.000 And it emerges out of this relationship.

00:14:49.000 There's another phenomenon that is just poorly discussed, which is what people like me call affect regulation.

00:14:55.000 The ability to be okay in our own skin, to be able to regulate emotions so they're not too prolonged, too intense, too negative.

00:15:02.000 And it turns out that the normal interaction, normal frame for that to develop, it starts with mom.

00:15:08.000 It starts being attuned to and being an object of scrutiny and learning that brains have content and learning that when I have a feeling, the mom reflects that back to me on her face and may offer me some soothing affects alongside that.

00:15:20.000 That frame of closeness, of intimacy is what that is, is really where all meaning sort of resides in terms of feeling good about life and feeling good about yourself and experiencing yourself.

00:15:30.000 And then we can move away from that and regulate autonomously.

00:15:34.000 Well, when we've been traumatized, or when trauma is reigning through intergenerationally, that close frame becomes dangerous.

00:15:40.000 A lot of unpleasant material gets reigned through, if not shattering material.

00:15:45.000 Physical abuse, sexual abuse, abandonment, whatever it might be.

00:15:48.000 And so, the frame of closeness, in which we can find so much meaning and satisfaction, becomes a dangerous place that we don't go to.

00:15:55.000 Okay, so I want to have you expand on that a little bit in one second.

00:15:58.000 First, I have to say thanks to our sponsors over at Helix Sleep.

00:16:00.000 So, there's nobody on the planet like you, thank God.

00:16:02.000 I mean, could anyone stand two of you?

00:16:04.000 But, you need your own mattress, okay?

00:16:06.000 You need a mattress that is built for you.

00:16:08.000 Working with the world's leading sleep experts, Helix Sleep developed a mattress that is customized to your specific height, weight, and sleep preferences, so you can have the best sleep of your life at an unbeatable price.

00:16:15.000 We're good to go.

00:16:33.000 At the Shapiro household, we actually took a Helix Sleep mattress, and you get it in the mail, you unfold it, and it just inflates right in front of you.

00:16:39.000 We took a more expensive mattress, moved it out of our room, because our Helix Sleep mattress is so good.

00:16:43.000 All you have to do is go to helixsleep.com slash benguest right now, and you'll get up to $125 toward your mattress order.

00:16:49.000 That's helixsleep.com slash benguest, because I have a guest, for up to $125 off your mattress order.

00:16:53.000 Again, that's helixsleep.com slash benguest.

00:16:56.000 You'll definitely enjoy the Helix Sleep mattress.

00:16:57.000 It's really terrific.

00:16:58.000 Okay.

00:16:59.000 So it's why I, I know you just interviewed Jordan Peterson, it's why I love him so much, because he would not disagree with anything I've said so far, but he takes all of this into a sort of a deeper frame, and he has a religious overlay to it, an anthropological overlay, and looks for the patterns of human behavior that are sort of reflective of what our neurobiology is.

00:17:17.000 And what I was thinking about is how we've sort of, I don't know why I'm jumping all the way to this, but I'm gonna go.

00:17:27.000 We've missed, in terms of understanding the human experience, we've become too relativistic in the sense that we just look at the superficial blush and not really ask the question, why do humans do that?

00:17:37.000 Why are they like that?

00:17:38.000 Why do the Aztecs tear somebody's heart out and throw it down the stairs every morning?

00:17:42.000 Oh, it's because they believe the sun will come.

00:17:44.000 Oh, okay.

00:17:45.000 Okay, we can stop there then. 0.98

00:17:48.000 As opposed to, oh my God, this was a population that had something called a codex, which was a systematic way to create a warrior by abusing the crap out of children. 0.98

00:17:58.000 I mean, vicious abuse. 0.74

00:18:00.000 And when you take a bunch of people that are severely abused and you put them together, they have a hard time not acting their aggression out on one another.

00:18:08.000 But if you focus that aggression out there in somebody,

00:18:12.000 That you sacrifice every day, then there's this sort of a catharsis that goes on within the mob, now we're okay today, we did it to that one.

00:18:20.000 And I mentioned to you before we started, before the cameras heated up, that I wanted to mention human sacrifice.

00:18:26.000 And to me it's an informative phenomenon about the human being that no one ever looks at and it's in plain sight here at all times.

00:18:35.000 And that is that if you look at every print of religion, you find human sacrifice, right?

00:18:39.000 And it's always there, it's always around.

00:18:40.000 And then it sort of started, in Judaism, it started percolating over to, well, we'll have an animal substitute for the human. 0.59

00:18:46.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:18:47.000 But, I mean, if you look at what Abraham, if people talk about the Abrahamic religion, what was Abraham doing when God sent the angel down to grab his hand?

00:18:55.000 He was going to sacrifice his son.

00:18:57.000 He went to kill his son.

00:18:59.000 It was part of the ancient sacrifices that people did, and then some hallucination or whatever came through to him, and it changed everything in that moment.

00:19:09.000 No more human sacrifice.

00:19:10.000 Until, evidently, we started getting into it again with our aggressions, and then we decided, well, there's this one guy.

00:19:17.000 This one guy died for us.

00:19:19.000 And so now we don't have to do any more of that, because we can focus on the one guy.

00:19:22.000 We drink his blood, eat his flesh and stuff, and do these cannibalistic things to help us feel better.

00:19:26.000 Whatever it is.

00:19:27.000 Deep in that is this primitive primate stuff that we never really look at.

00:19:33.000 So the real question becomes, okay, so how did we get from there to here?

00:19:38.000 Here being a civilization where we oppose human sacrifice, for example.

00:19:41.000 We've learned to focus it and channel it in ways that have gotten us through periods of history where it could have been a problem.

00:19:47.000 Right, but the real question is why in our particular civilization, for example.

00:19:51.000 So, for example, I don't think that all civilizations have developed an aversion to human sacrifice quite to the same extent, obviously.

00:19:57.000 An aversion to it?

00:19:58.000 Yes.

00:19:58.000 I don't know.

00:20:14.000 And this is sort of the point that I'm trying to make, which is that the Judeo-Christian tradition, in attempting to eradicate human sacrifice, right? 0.89

00:20:20.000 The Bible is very harsh about human sacrifice.

00:20:23.000 It's one of the big things, and it's one of the big puzzles about Abraham.

00:20:25.000 So the traditional Jewish read on that is that this was Abraham's struggle, is he's being told to do something he knows is immoral, because God has already told him it's immoral to do this.

00:20:33.000 Thank God he doesn't do it.

00:20:34.000 Right, and then he doesn't go ahead and do it, presumably because, you know, he's not supposed to do it, and God doesn't.

00:20:39.000 So I have my own sort of

00:20:41.000 We're good to go.

00:20:57.000 We're good to go.

00:21:17.000 Well, look at my theory.

00:21:19.000 My theory would be that the reason that we're able to focus and not be that way is because of families.

00:21:24.000 Because our experience in development and our experience of self and other and the ability to develop affect

00:21:30.000 It includes the experience of love, and ultimately, if we do enough connection with other people, we develop something called empathy.

00:21:36.000 And with empathy, no way we're going to do stuff like that, right?

00:21:39.000 So that's the highest order of human development, is deep empathy of other people, to be able to really appreciate other people's contents of their minds.

00:21:48.000 If you're being traumatized and beaten or in war, or you're living in horrible circumstances,

00:21:54.000 You're going to be prone to aggression.

00:21:55.000 So how do we balance these two needs?

00:21:57.000 This need for family and this need for community and this need for interaction with the fact that we live in an individual rights society that suggests that you as an individual are the highest point of our system.

00:22:06.000 How do we build a system that balances these two things?

00:22:09.000 I think we distinguish, you know, what's healthy and what's politically proper, right?

00:22:16.000 It's healthy to be part of a community.

00:22:18.000 It's healthy to sacrifice on behalf of the community.

00:22:21.000 My rights and privileges should be as an individual.

00:22:24.000 But I think we've even gone way too far with that.

00:22:26.000 I mean, the fact that you walk outside the street and you find a homeless encampment, those people are not, we're allowing those people to suffer.

00:22:32.000 Right, those people are not capable of, there are a lot of mental, the percentage of mentally ill among the homeless is extraordinarily high.

00:22:37.000 Chronically severely mentally ill, and we're allowing them, and I've been through the experience a number of times where you get them and treat them and they look back and go, who the hell let me sit like that? 0.82

00:22:44.000 They're angry.

00:22:45.000 So their civil liberties are being protected?

00:22:47.000 I mean, that's way too far.

00:22:49.000 And by the way,

00:22:50.000 There's going to be an infectious disease outbreak here in Los Angeles this summer off of these encampments.

00:22:55.000 I promise you.

00:22:56.000 It's not going to be pretty.

00:22:57.000 And so we have sanitation failure, we have human suffering in the streets, we have inability to intervene on their behalf to make them help them, and we're endangering the entire population of Los Angeles because of sanitation failure.

00:23:12.000 What is that?

00:23:13.000 What have we done?

00:23:14.000 It seems like the society has bifurcated into radical individualism versus radical communitarianism, and the in-between has sort of disappeared.

00:23:22.000 I don't think the radical communitarianism really knows what they even mean by that yet.

00:23:26.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:23:28.000 Even that feels sort of like a narcissistic acting out, like, well, it's radical communitarianism, but I'll be in charge.

00:23:33.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:23:35.000 That's exactly right.

00:23:35.000 People who are pushing radical communitarianism will completely deny any of the possibilities of those things going bad, because obviously, how could it possibly go bad?

00:23:42.000 I'm going to be running it.

00:23:43.000 It'll be great.

00:23:43.000 And again, it's different this time because I'm running it, number one.

00:23:48.000 And the I'm that's running it has not read history.

00:23:50.000 Right.

00:23:51.000 I guarantee you, because I can't think of a time in history where it didn't go bad.

00:23:54.000 Right.

00:23:54.000 And that's one of the things that I find so fascinating about the American founding in particular, because the American ideology from root was that it was your job to, it was government's job to stand up your way, but it was your job to be virtuous.

00:24:04.000 This was the balance.

00:24:05.000 Virtuous and educated, so you lived up to the responsibility of self-government.

00:24:09.000 Right.

00:24:10.000 And George Washington talks about this, and all the founders talked about this.

00:24:14.000 It was so great.

00:24:14.000 And we're forsaking it.

00:24:18.000 People aren't even aware of it.

00:24:19.000 And both sides we're forsaking it.

00:24:20.000 On the one side we say, you don't need virtue.

00:24:22.000 All you need is to find your bliss.

00:24:24.000 Do what you want to do.

00:24:25.000 Other people are objects.

00:24:27.000 That's fine.

00:24:27.000 We deny that that's what we're doing, but in reality there's a lot of that going on.

00:24:30.000 I'm sure you see it much more.

00:24:32.000 In terms of broken interpersonal relationships.

00:24:35.000 It's out of control.

00:24:37.000 I get so many letters from people who listen to my show, and I don't talk about this stuff particularly often on my show, but because I'm younger and because I talk about my relationship with my wife and all this, I get a lot of letters from people who say I've really screwed up relationship with this other person, and typically that's happening because they're not even talking to one another.

00:24:53.000 They're talking past one another.

00:24:54.000 They're not seeing each other as independent human beings with a set of values, and then they're not basing their relationships off that shared value at all.

00:25:01.000 Yes.

00:25:03.000 Yes and yes.

00:25:04.000 But a lot of what you're describing is shared intellectual experiences, which is again about listening to each other and appreciate each other's values and points of view.

00:25:12.000 But there's a deeper piece where they're not even experiencing each other as wholly there.

00:25:17.000 There's the other person's mind having real agency and content.

00:25:21.000 It's just sort of somebody that I use to feel better.

00:25:25.000 So I'll ask you a practical dating question that I've gotten a lot, because this is fun.

00:25:28.000 I mean, as long as I got you here.

00:25:30.000 So the practical dating question that I get a lot is, should people who have different value systems or different religions, for example, date each other?

00:25:36.000 So my typical answer on this is no.

00:25:38.000 Is that if you want to have a long lasting relationship with somebody, you're both going to get old and wrinkly, and you're both going to not be as handsome and pretty as you once were, and you're not going to be as sexually attracted to that person as you once were.

00:25:49.000 But what you see from the studies is that levels of commitment, committed love, go up over time.

00:25:53.000 We're good to go.

00:26:11.000 But if you have to bet, are you going to bet on the people who share values?

00:26:15.000 I'm going to defer to my host, which is that if you look at common scripts, things tend to go better.

00:26:22.000 Life scripts, family scripts, family of origin scripts, things where everything is already self-evident to one another.

00:26:28.000 That tends to help relationships go along.

00:26:31.000 But having said that, of course, the exceptions are always the radical differences where people form these new phenomenological experiences together, and that's very rich, and it's dangerous.

00:26:42.000 You're right.

00:26:42.000 There might be a risk-reward ratio.

00:26:45.000 There is a risk-reward ratio, but I wouldn't discourage somebody from that just based on that, for any more reason than I would discourage you and I from having a good dialogue, you know?

00:26:53.000 Yeah, but I don't think we should get married, just breaking it to you now.

00:26:55.000 I'm so sorry. 0.98

00:26:58.000 Damn it! 0.98

00:26:59.000 There goes the rest of the show, the big reveal at the end. 1.00

00:27:02.000 I mean, I can't believe I blew it.

00:27:03.000 So let's talk a little bit about your experiences.

00:27:07.000 I want to get back to the deep philosophy stuff, because this is the fun stuff.

00:27:10.000 But let's talk a little bit about your experiences in the media, because you politically are, I would say, kind of libertarian-ish.

00:27:17.000 Is that fair?

00:27:17.000 Well, it's so funny.

00:27:18.000 I always thought I was, recently,

00:27:21.000 I've been Republican, I've been Democrat, and then I thought, I'm independent.

00:27:23.000 So I registered independent.

00:27:24.000 What do you think happens when you register independent?

00:27:27.000 It's an actual party here?

00:27:28.000 Unless you're careful, you get assigned to the American Independent Party.

00:27:30.000 So I think that's actually one of them.

00:27:34.000 Because I was going to go libertarian.

00:27:35.000 I thought, now that would change who I could vote for and stuff.

00:27:37.000 And I'm not really a libertarian, but I kind of am.

00:27:40.000 And my daughter, who's pretty way left, said, you're libertarian, you're just right-wing.

00:27:44.000 I'm like, I'm not.

00:27:46.000 And then I started talking on the radio about solving the homelessness problem, and I'm concerned about the lack of government functioning, basic functioning.

00:27:55.000 And people started going to me, Leo Terrell, you know Leo Terrell?

00:27:57.000 Yeah, of course.

00:27:58.000 Leo goes to me, he goes, who do you want to solve that problem?

00:28:00.000 Government?

00:28:01.000 And I go, yeah, yeah.

00:28:01.000 He goes, government?

00:28:03.000 Mr. Libertarian, you want the government to solve that problem?

00:28:04.000 And I'm like, really?

00:28:06.000 Although, the libertarian philosophy, I mean, I consider myself fairly conservative slash libertarian, and I think that most libertarians, there's different branches, and you and I agree on this.

00:28:15.000 I like the Fed, I think the Fed should, I mean, you may not like the Fed, but I like

00:28:20.000 Freedom.

00:28:20.000 And I think we've lost the freedom and liberty.

00:28:23.000 That's what this country was about.

00:28:25.000 And we just lost the value in that, as though that's a self-evident given for everybody.

00:28:31.000 And I think people are looking to take away other people's freedom in the name of

00:28:36.000 I'm not sure what.

00:28:38.000 Self-realization?

00:28:39.000 Self-esteem?

00:28:41.000 Inflexing their own ideologies?

00:28:43.000 And if you ever look at wherever ideologies prevail in human history, humans suffer.

00:28:47.000 Wherever ideology is the prevailing

00:28:51.000 Wind that blows, it does not go well for people.

00:28:54.000 And all I'm concerned about is that people should thrive.

00:28:57.000 That's all I'm concerned about.

00:28:58.000 And I believe mostly that's what most people want.

00:29:01.000 The vast majority, I would say.

00:29:03.000 It's just how we get there is what we disagree on.

00:29:05.000 And that we can't talk about that is really distressing because I just want humans to do well.

00:29:10.000 I want them to thrive.

00:29:10.000 I want them all to thrive.

00:29:11.000 And I deal with a lot that really have trouble thriving.

00:29:13.000 Drug addicts, narcissists, it's very difficult for them.

00:29:17.000 Yet, we get them. 0.89

00:29:18.000 We get them.

00:29:19.000 It's an interesting experience.

00:29:21.000 Here's a question for you.

00:29:22.000 Do we know enough about psychology to use psychology as a guide when it comes to policymaking?

00:29:27.000 Because if you look back at the history of the use of psychology, there's a whole wing of people right now who say, if we just thought scientifically about things, if we just brought all the data to bear, then policy would inevitably arise.

00:29:37.000 And you look back at the self-esteem movement, the self-realization movement, which was based on a fair bit of bad science.

00:29:43.000 Disaster.

00:29:43.000 And it just manufactured an entire generation of people

00:29:46.000 who were incapable of functioning outside the realm of, I have to be in my own little bubble.

00:29:51.000 I'm gonna let you answer the question.

00:29:52.000 But first, I wanna say thank you to our sponsors over at Policy Genius.

00:29:55.000 So, the truth is, a healthy 35-year-old can get half a million bucks in coverage for less than $30 a month.

00:30:00.000 So what are you waiting for?

00:30:01.000 I understand you think you're never gonna die.

00:30:03.000 You're wrong.

00:30:03.000 You are, okay?

00:30:04.000 And when you do, then your corpse will not be cold on the floor yet before your family starts paying for you, and it will make them poor.

00:30:11.000 So, what you actually need to do is go get some life insurance right now.

00:30:13.000 And getting life insurance does not have to be complicated because of PolicyGenius.

00:30:17.000 PolicyGenius is the easy way to compare life insurance online.

00:30:20.000 In just five minutes, you can compare quotes from the top insurers to find the best policy for you.

00:30:24.000 PolicyGenius has helped over 4 million people shop for insurance, placed over $20 billion in coverage,

00:30:28.000 They don't just make life insurance easy, they also compare disability insurance and renter's insurance and health insurance.

00:30:33.000 If you care about it, they can cover it.

00:30:34.000 So if you've been thinking about getting life insurance, go to PolicyGenius.com.

00:30:37.000 It's the easy way to compare the top insurers and find the best policy for you.

00:30:40.000 Again, save time and money and hassle, and it's free over at PolicyGenius.

00:30:44.000 Again, comparing life insurance doesn't need to be a pain in the neck.

00:30:46.000 Check it out, PolicyGenius.

00:30:47.000 All right.

00:30:48.000 So I'm fascinated by social sciences, right?

00:30:51.000 I really love reading about it.

00:30:52.000 I love the people that are in that space and trying to make sense of things.

00:30:56.000 But technically, they're not really sciences, right?

00:30:59.000 You can't do placebo-controlled studies.

00:31:03.000 You can't do

00:31:05.000 Create a hypothesis and create an experiment on giant human populations and then have a null hypothesis and you can't do science in the real sense of doing science.

00:31:15.000 And it's in itself sort of infinitely complex, right?

00:31:19.000 And so here it is something we can't do science.

00:31:21.000 It's infinitely complex.

00:31:23.000 We can be informed in our decision making by psychology and we can sort of see if we can help but guide good decision making.

00:31:31.000 But to have it be the sort of

00:31:35.000 1984 style, you know, way politics or history is created.

00:31:43.000 No, no, no, no, no.

00:31:44.000 Absolutely not.

00:31:45.000 And I had a personal experience with this just recently.

00:31:49.000 When Trump was coming on the scene, I was trying to understand.

00:31:51.000 I couldn't get it.

00:31:52.000 I was like, why?

00:31:53.000 What's this guy for you?

00:31:54.000 And people were, there was a lot of enthusiasm.

00:31:57.000 And then he's elected.

00:31:59.000 And then people are asking me to evaluate his mental health and he's manic and he's this and the other thing.

00:32:03.000 She is! 0.62

00:32:05.000 And I started sort of looking at his personality and his, you know, mood stuff and I thought, wow.

00:32:10.000 Is this good or bad?

00:32:11.000 I don't know.

00:32:11.000 It's too complex.

00:32:13.000 And then I thought, oh my goodness.

00:32:14.000 Hmm.

00:32:15.000 My very favorite president had all these same characteristics.

00:32:18.000 Teddy Roosevelt was essentially the same guy.

00:32:20.000 Same guy, same dude.

00:32:21.000 You couldn't sit and have a conversation.

00:32:23.000 You'd have to walk through Central Park with him or Washington, D.C.

00:32:26.000 or whatever because he was so manic, he couldn't sit still.

00:32:29.000 He had some, later in life, some real problems because of that bipolar stuff.

00:32:35.000 But as president, it was spectacular.

00:32:37.000 It was crazy.

00:32:38.000 It was a lot of crazy-making, but it ended up

00:32:41.000 Because of his judgment, and because of who he is as a human being, and because of his instincts, and the way he adjusted to some of the decisions he made, and the philosophy, and the intent, and the thinking going forward, Teddy Roosevelt, ended up where it needed to go.

00:32:54.000 And the same is true, like, not that this is kind of a weird sidebar, but, you know, in medicine, we make decisions.

00:33:00.000 You make your decisions based on your instinct, and you're informed by your experience.

00:33:04.000 You don't expect to be right, necessarily.

00:33:07.000 You have a backup plan, and you watch, and you adjust, and you think, and you're careful, and you set the table around the decision you made so you make sure that things don't run amok.

00:33:17.000 That's what presidents are supposed to do, I think.

00:33:19.000 And that takes a lot of energy, and it's a lot of...

00:33:24.000 We're good to go.

00:33:44.000 What's that?

00:34:03.000 Well, it's inappropriate.

00:34:05.000 It's okay for a physician or psychologist to talk about, in generalities, in cases like that.

00:34:12.000 But to say you're thinking X because of Y, even for a well-trained person?

00:34:17.000 No, not unless you spent years on the couch with that person.

00:34:20.000 And for a non-trained person to do it is sort of lunacy.

00:34:24.000 Yeah, and the reason I ask is because I think that a lot of this reliance on sort of junk science has become very easy in the media.

00:34:31.000 It's a good way to dismiss your opponent on the basis of sort of faux science.

00:34:34.000 Can you give an example?

00:34:35.000 I'm not sure I hear it so much.

00:34:36.000 Sure, so in this last election cycle, there was constantly what you would hear from people.

00:34:41.000 We're good to go.

00:35:00.000 Personality disorder actually has pretty deep roots going all the way back to the post-World War II kind of Eric Fromm school of diagnosis, where there's the authoritarian personality, and if you support Trump it's because you have an authoritarian personality type.

00:35:11.000 Do you think any of that sort of stuff is appropriate, or is it just overrated?

00:35:13.000 It's not appropriate, it's false.

00:35:15.000 But it really, you know, it really has echoes of, you know, something much more sinister, which is labeling people as your ex, your whatever, your other.

00:35:25.000 We're good to go.

00:35:42.000 Why?

00:35:43.000 How did we get here?

00:35:58.000 I, uh, you and I had a little conflict once on Adam's show.

00:36:01.000 Yes.

00:36:02.000 When me and Adam were at your show and you were telling me that the news was so biased and I was like, man, no one's ever told me what to say or not to say or anything, which was true.

00:36:08.000 Right.

00:36:08.000 At HLN we were sort of doing true crime and sort of C and BD stories in the news and no one ever, ever came to me about the way I should present my opinion or the news.

00:36:18.000 Seems like a different era.

00:36:19.000 Seems like a different time.

00:36:21.000 And you assured me that I was naive, and I started thinking about it.

00:36:24.000 I thought, well, yeah, I guess those guys kind of have their own point of view, and it just kind of does come across.

00:36:28.000 But it's not affecting me, and I don't feel like it's a system-wide sort of institutionalized sort of mandate of any type.

00:36:36.000 These were just these personalities, the guys they hired, and I guess that's what they like.

00:36:41.000 Well, then they decided to stop my show.

00:36:44.000 Okay?

00:36:45.000 Then I was on the radio.

00:36:47.000 No, no.

00:36:47.000 Then I was on, I was on... On Don Lemon?

00:36:51.000 I was on Don Lemon's show and he said, let's do analysis of Donald Trump's personality.

00:36:55.000 And I went, all right.

00:36:56.000 And I started, and I had thought of this Teddy Roosevelt thing at the time.

00:36:59.000 I said, you know, business people can be very hypomanic.

00:37:01.000 He's got all those hypomanic qualities, but, and there's no doubt some narcissism, like all politicians and, and, but I don't see malignant narcissism because his relationship with his kids is too good.

00:37:10.000 And the kids would not be putting up with that if it was really a malignant narcissism.

00:37:14.000 And then I went on Teddy Roosevelt, who really was a belittled narcissist, and I said, you know, you don't know just because somebody's one thing doesn't mean they're a bad leader or a bad president.

00:37:22.000 And I was sort of making that point.

00:37:23.000 I talked for probably 10 minutes on their air.

00:37:26.000 The next morning, my radio at KBC, my radio guy who you know, Drew Hayes, just goes, hey, that was pretty good.

00:37:31.000 Do 30 seconds for us on our website.

00:37:33.000 I went, okay.

00:37:33.000 So I did it in 30 seconds.

00:37:35.000 And as I was getting up and he goes, you know, you should really balance that out.

00:37:37.000 Do you have 30 seconds on Hillary? 1.00

00:37:39.000 And I go,

00:37:40.000 Yeah, they just released her medical records today and it really bothered me what the doctors were doing.

00:37:44.000 So I did 30 seconds on, not her health, on the seriousness of her health and the kinds of decisions the doctors are making, which were bizarre.

00:37:54.000 Whenever I see

00:37:56.000 Weird decision-making by a physician.

00:37:57.000 And it's a celebrity.

00:37:59.000 I know it's the doctors, you know, being addled by taking care of celebrities and sort of letting celebrity dictate.

00:38:04.000 I mean, I just look at Michael Jackson, look at Prince.

00:38:07.000 I mean, it's just everywhere.

00:38:08.000 It happens all the time.

00:38:10.000 And so I was just being critical of the care she was getting.

00:38:14.000 Well, Drudge picked that up.

00:38:16.000 And they portrayed it as, finally a doctor's brave enough to say, Hillary's sick.

00:38:21.000 Which is not what I said.

00:38:23.000 It's not what I said.

00:38:25.000 But then CNN picked up, and they came down on me like a ton of bricks.

00:38:28.000 I mean, it was intense.

00:38:29.000 So it's funny when you're diagnosing Trump, at the moment that you said anything about Hillary Clinton.

00:38:33.000 And I thought, wow, that's pretty telling.

00:38:36.000 I was shocked and surprised by that.

00:38:39.000 And it was already a decision that had been made to stop the show.

00:38:43.000 So it was not like, we're going to fire her.

00:38:45.000 It was just like, listen, this is a very difficult time.

00:38:47.000 And upset people were calling me.

00:38:50.000 And I was like, I don't want to be in the middle of this.

00:38:52.000 So I'm out.

00:38:53.000 So I just didn't say a thing.

00:38:56.000 They announced two weeks later that I'd stopped the show.

00:38:59.000 Well, the world, social media, went, aha, see?

00:39:01.000 So they went from crucifying me because I'd say anything at all negative about Hillary, so her world was mobilized.

00:39:08.000 And then I became the sacrificial, I became the scapegoat for everybody by having lost my job and everyone sort of felt good and sided with me, even though none of it had actually happened.

00:39:18.000 None of it was true.

00:39:19.000 And I told, I called HLN, Bryce, I said, let me straighten this out.

00:39:24.000 I don't have any hard feelings.

00:39:25.000 This isn't what happened.

00:39:25.000 Let me straighten it out.

00:39:26.000 He said, shut up. 0.98

00:39:28.000 Interesting. 0.94

00:39:28.000 Well, I think that one of the things that, you know, to bring some of this full circle, one of the things that has clearly happened is that the level of polarization in politics is leading to an enormous amount of anger, and that's leading to an enormous amount of reactivity. 0.94

00:39:39.000 And I think that... It's so uncomfortable.

00:39:41.000 It's so unpleasant.

00:39:41.000 It is.

00:39:42.000 It's unnecessary, too.

00:39:43.000 And the level of just, I mean, I don't know, you have a huge following on Twitter, but you don't spend an awful lot of time on Twitter, it doesn't look like.

00:39:49.000 It's so dangerous, it's so scary for me to say anything, because you just get crushed.

00:39:53.000 That's exactly right.

00:39:54.000 It feels like there's a swarm that just eats you immediately.

00:39:57.000 You know, I wrote that book on narcissism, The Mirror Effect, and I wanted to put an entire chapter, I actually wrote most of it, about other periods of history where narcissism had emerged so prominently.

00:40:08.000 And every time, I was looking at pre-revolutionary France, I was looking at times like that, and when you see a lot of narcissism, a lot of childhood trauma, then a lot of narcissism, and again, that's because of our destroyed family.

00:40:19.000 We have lots of traumatized kids.

00:40:23.000 You see mob.

00:40:24.000 Mobs develop. 0.98

00:40:25.000 So are you concerned that that's what's going to happen next?

00:40:27.000 It is.

00:40:28.000 Social media is mob behavior.

00:40:29.000 It's happening.

00:40:30.000 Do you think that breaks out anywhere further, or does that restrict itself to social media?

00:40:36.000 We've had a few little outbursts.

00:40:38.000 I don't think it's going to be big mobs.

00:40:42.000 I feel like we're on the backside of some of it a little bit.

00:40:46.000 It doesn't feel like it's calming down.

00:40:47.000 I think that one of the things that's happened is that the mob mentality has become so obviously tribal.

00:40:52.000 People are now rebelling against the tribalism.

00:40:54.000 It's become so extreme that there's this push against it.

00:40:58.000 So I see that mostly in the reaction to identity politics.

00:41:01.000 I see that there are a lot of people right now where if you state a fact, people will immediately accuse you of being a sexist, racist, bigot, homophobe.

00:41:08.000 If you say, for example, that the statistics that are usually cited about the wage gap are just plain wrong.

00:41:12.000 Or if you suggest that there are biological differences between men and women, because there are biological differences between men and women.

00:41:17.000 Obviously, every doctor ever has to diagnose somebody.

00:41:22.000 There's no difference.

00:41:22.000 It's so absurd.

00:41:23.000 I mean, I was hearing from a doctor friend of mine that there was a transgender person who came in and the hospital had been instructed that instead of that person writing down their biological sex on their form, they should instead write down their gender.

00:41:33.000 They should write their perceived biological sex, their perceived gender. 0.95

00:41:36.000 And so the person came in and if they had not done, they were complaining of lower stomach pain.

00:41:41.000 Well, I mean, you're going to get a wildly different diagnosis based on whether that is a man or a woman if it's lower stomach pain.

00:41:47.000 And yet if you say so much as that, there are a bunch of people who are willing to come down on you and just

00:41:51.000 Yeah, I don't understand why we can't say that there are populations that have been ill-served because of science or because of lack of sensitivity to certain things, and now let's talk about the science.

00:42:02.000 And let's hope, let's state up front that we don't want that science to be used to marginalize or condemn or be used improperly to hurt other people.

00:42:12.000 But let's just discuss the science.

00:42:14.000 How else do we create equality unless we understand the differences?

00:42:19.000 I mean, Lincoln said it.

00:42:22.000 He goes, we're not equal in all respects.

00:42:23.000 He said it in the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

00:42:26.000 But it's about creating a level playing field, an environment where everybody has equal opportunity, equal probability of success.

00:42:34.000 Maybe probability is not the right word.

00:42:35.000 At least a right to success.

00:42:36.000 Everybody has an equal, there are no bars in the way, in other words.

00:42:40.000 I would say even if we can, you know, if we know the differences and some people need a little help or something, we can talk about helping it.

00:42:46.000 If there's a biological difference that we can discuss or a scientific phenomenon that is relevant to helping one group out versus another, or keeping another group, whatever it is, let's just discuss the science.

00:42:57.000 Because if we can't discuss the science, we're not in reality anymore.

00:43:00.000 And this is what I'm saying with people.

00:43:01.000 This is why I say I think there's a unifying moment that's happening because people on the political left, you know, Sam Harris, who is a Hillary Clinton acolyte and is a voter.

00:43:09.000 And he was basically thrown out of good company by people like Ezra Klein because he had the temerity to say that the IQ studies that exist about group differences are valid.

00:43:20.000 He was not saying that they're not environmentally caused.

00:43:22.000 He was just saying that they're just the raw data show that there are differences in IQ between groups.

00:43:27.000 And science has been used historically to keep down unfairly that population that fell out of those studies.

00:43:32.000 Of course.

00:43:33.000 Has been.

00:43:34.000 But that has nothing to do with what Sam was saying.

00:43:36.000 And if the science is too

00:43:40.000 It's too provocative or too dangerous to be discussed.

00:43:44.000 I don't know what we do with it, but we still need a mechanism to discuss it.

00:43:50.000 What country am I living in where science can't just be discussed without it resulting in an ad hominem attack?

00:43:56.000 It's almost like there was a chain of thought that happened where people said, okay, science is going to make policy.

00:44:00.000 And immediately, whatever science comes out, that will be the new guide for policy.

00:44:03.000 And then all this new science came out and people said, well, we don't like the policy that we think would come out of that science, so we'll just get rid of the science.

00:44:10.000 We won't do the science anyway.

00:44:11.000 When the reality is, as you were saying earlier, there should be a gap between science and policy, and that gap is called ethics and morality and values, and that has to fill that in.

00:44:20.000 That's a pretty deep well, that well to figure out, of what we do in between science and policy.

00:44:29.000 And that's another area that we as Americans don't spend a lot of attention and time thinking about, which is, I mean, I think virtue ethics people do think a bit about these days, but guiding philosophies and what's good for humanity, I don't think people spend enough time on.

00:44:44.000 So let's talk about that in just a second.

00:44:45.000 But first, I'm going to tell you to brush your teeth, because I mean, come on, people, brush your teeth.

00:44:48.000 The truth is everybody is brushing your teeth wrong.

00:44:50.000 Usually you're not brushing it for long enough.

00:44:52.000 You forget to change your brush on time.

00:44:54.000 We're good to go.

00:45:12.000 Okay, the reality is that Quip's built-in timer helps you clean for the dentist-recommended two minutes with guiding pulses to ensure that you are reminded when to switch sides.

00:45:20.000 Next, Quip's subscription plans are for your health, not just convenience.

00:45:23.000 They deliver new brush heads on a dentist-recommended schedule every three months for just five bucks, including free shipping worldwide.

00:45:28.000 And Quip comes with a mount that suctions right to your mirror and unsticks. 0.88

00:45:30.000 You can use it as a cover for hygienic travel wherever you take your teeth.

00:45:34.000 And finally, everybody loves Quip.

00:45:35.000 Everybody likes them.

00:45:36.000 Oprah likes them.

00:45:37.000 Time likes them.

00:45:37.000 Dr. Drew likes them.

00:45:38.000 Come on! 0.61

00:45:39.000 The American Dental Association likes them.

00:45:41.000 Plus, they're backed by a network of over 20,000 dentists and hygienists and hundreds of thousands of happy brushers use Quip every day.

00:45:46.000 So, Quip starts at just 25 bucks.

00:45:48.000 If you go to getquip.com slash bengest right now, you'll get your first refill pack for free with a Quip electric toothbrush.

00:45:53.000 Get your first refill pack free again at getquip.com slash bengest.

00:45:58.000 That's spelled G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash bengest and get that first refill pack for free.

00:46:03.000 Okay, so now we get into the very, very deep stuff, the narrow.

00:46:07.000 So, what sort of guiding philosophy do you think people ought to use for life?

00:46:10.000 I feel like I need to either pace or lean back, or get on the couch for this.

00:46:14.000 I have found a great starting point, and for some people, the finishing place, too, is Aristotle.

00:46:24.000 I think he kind of figured things out.

00:46:27.000 And I like the way he approached science.

00:46:29.000 He was an empiricist.

00:46:31.000 I think that, speaking of empiricism, I think that the pragmatists have a role, too.

00:46:37.000 I think pragmatism needs to come back again, where the pragmatic outcome of what's good for humanity and human beings needs to take a seat at the table.

00:46:45.000 I can see why you and Jordan Peterson get along.

00:46:47.000 Yeah.

00:46:47.000 He's a pragmatist as well.

00:46:49.000 But I do believe that a great way to think about

00:46:53.000 A lot of things was figured out by Aristotle.

00:46:57.000 He, I mean, you know, the whole concept of eudaimonia, right, which is we now think in terms of eudaimonic happiness versus hedonic happiness, right?

00:47:06.000 The happiness literature is all very wacky because I'm not even sure in this country we know what we mean by happiness.

00:47:11.000 Because we think, I kept telling, first, when I first started seeing happiness literature, I was like, Jesus, my heroin addicts are happy 8 a.m.

00:47:19.000 when they get that hit.

00:47:19.000 That's happy, man.

00:47:21.000 That's not what you're talking about.

00:47:22.000 It's leading a certain kind of life, really.

00:47:25.000 And leading a certain kind of life may not always be comfortable and it may not always be hedonic.

00:47:29.000 Yeah, I have a positive hedonic tone.

00:47:31.000 But it certainly should always be eudaimonic, in the sense that there's something more nourishing, there's something more fulfilling.

00:47:38.000 And one of the interesting things about Aristotle's sense of eudaimonia, which was he had teleology and everything.

00:47:45.000 Why do humans exist?

00:47:46.000 They exist for eudaimonia.

00:47:47.000 I think we mistranslated it as happiness for many years.

00:47:50.000 I think it's actually sort of a thriving or nourishing or living well or something.

00:47:56.000 Virtually in accordance with right reason.

00:47:58.000 Well, he did say that, yeah.

00:48:01.000 That sort of was a sidebar on this.

00:48:02.000 Where I want to go with this is a little bit different, which is that he felt in order to be armed properly to be able to achieve eudaimonia, you needed to have a certain amount of phronesis, wisdom, a certain amount of techne, skill.

00:48:17.000 He had a couple other criteria that don't stay with me right now as much, but phronesis and skill I thought were very important.

00:48:25.000 And this is the part that people miss.

00:48:27.000 They think that if I'm leading a certain kind of life, most people will come to the point that participating with other humans is what really gives something nourishing, whether it's raising a family, or being community, or whatever it is.

00:48:41.000 It's not necessarily layering soup in the homeless kitchen.

00:48:45.000 It's good.

00:48:46.000 It's also not being...

00:48:49.000 What was Brad Pitt's wife's name?

00:48:51.000 Angelina Jolie.

00:48:51.000 Angelina Jolie is saving the world!

00:48:53.000 That's not, that does not feel, that's not that fulfilling.

00:48:55.000 It's good, I'm glad she does it, but it's not that fulfilling in the way that having a set of skills and wisdom to help another human being with something that they're struggling with.

00:49:05.000 That's why I'm so grateful to be a physician.

00:49:07.000 I have all that skill and wisdom of experience where I really am always loaded up and ready to do something like that.

00:49:12.000 I'm very aware that that creates, if you use it and use it

00:49:18.000 For good.

00:49:18.000 Use it to help others.

00:49:19.000 And be aware that you're gifting somebody something with it.

00:49:23.000 It's tremendously filling.

00:49:24.000 It's always filling.

00:49:25.000 You always feel a certain kind of eudaimonia.

00:49:29.000 I hope people understand what I mean.

00:49:32.000 Balance, nourishment, being okay.

00:49:34.000 And I had to have a few years of therapy in there too.

00:49:37.000 I did.

00:49:38.000 But I've always been... One of the things I'm most grateful for is I got this piece.

00:49:42.000 I got this thing to offer.

00:49:43.000 And I think we all got to remember and think about that.

00:49:45.000 So the question is, and the reason I mentioned the teleology is, can you have eudaimonia in the absence of teleology?

00:49:51.000 Can you have the eudaimonia without that piece where you say it's virtue in accordance with right reason and the whole system of Aristotle's, the idea of the unmoved mover, the idea that you were created to do certain things and those things can be discoverable in the universe by virtue of what those things are.

00:50:05.000 So you as a human being, you were created to reason because this is what distinguishes you from the animals.

00:50:09.000 And if you are not actually acting in accordance with that right reason and using that right reason in order to

00:50:16.000 There's a great book called After Virtue by McIntyre and his entire argument is that what's happened in the West is that Aristotle's version of virtue has fallen away and it's been replaced by this other weird version of virtue which is basically we define for ourselves what virtue is.

00:50:35.000 So we got rid of the Greek teleology and we replaced it instead with this idea that you were just supposed to be a nice guy.

00:50:40.000 And that's not actually what Aristotle is saying.

00:50:41.000 What Aristotle is saying is that you have to act in accordance with your reason as applied to the highest seekings of human beings.

00:50:48.000 So human desires often take a backseat.

00:50:50.000 But human desires do take a backseat and we have been hedonic for at least 30 or 40 years.

00:50:56.000 But we've also abdicated our personal responsibility to figure out our own virtue ethics to the government and the law.

00:51:03.000 Yeah, I certainly agree with that.

00:51:05.000 Period.

00:51:06.000 And I think that's why, so we don't have a practice of that anymore.

00:51:08.000 We're just like, the nanny takes care of us.

00:51:11.000 And I think that the reason that I feel, you know, what I'm often saying is that Athens and Jerusalem is the Straussian model of what built Western civilization is.

00:51:19.000 The ethic of Judeo-Christian values combined with this Greek teleology, this search for reason, which unite in philosophers like Aquinas, where he's clearly trying to apply Aristotle to the Bible.

00:51:30.000 This is what has created Western civilization, which is where I was trying to go earlier in the discussion about the movement from human sacrifice, is that you have to combine a certain set of values and that people are actually not very good at discovering their own sets of values.

00:51:41.000 That when people are trying to discover their sets of values, very often what they come up with

00:51:45.000 You have evidence for that?

00:52:00.000 That when we try to arrive at our own virtues, we become maniacs, essentially.

00:52:05.000 And not that we become maniacs, but that we tend to prioritize our priorities over other people's priorities.

00:52:12.000 It's hard to get to a place where you are prioritizing the larger concern of somebody else's humanity as an individual human being over even your utopian wishes.

00:52:22.000 Ideology arises from your attempt to reach utopia.

00:52:24.000 Yes.

00:52:25.000 It's difficult.

00:52:26.000 We have a motivational system, and it's difficult for us to escape it.

00:52:30.000 And if it's charged up or if it's unregulated, watch out.

00:52:51.000 And we're all there.

00:52:52.000 And she turns to the entire audience and says, listen, you guys don't have to worry.

00:52:56.000 The competition's over.

00:52:56.000 This isn't the paper chase.

00:52:58.000 Everything is good.

00:52:58.000 You're all going to get jobs.

00:52:59.000 And then she said, the part that really disturbed me is she said, and now you are going to be the masters of the universe.

00:53:05.000 We have this number of justices on the Supreme Court.

00:53:07.000 We have this number of people who are in the Senate.

00:53:08.000 We have this number of people who are in the House of Representatives.

00:53:11.000 You guys are the smartest.

00:53:12.000 You're the best.

00:53:12.000 You know the most.

00:53:13.000 And you're going to be the ones who are making all the rules.

00:53:15.000 Oh boy.

00:53:16.000 And I just thought to myself, well, this is how every bad thing in the history of humanity has happened right here.

00:53:20.000 I mentioned hubris 45 minutes ago.

00:53:21.000 That's hubristic.

00:53:23.000 That's hubris.

00:53:24.000 Whenever you think you know more than everybody, and by the way, there's a very natural sort of ebb from what she said to, well, I'll do whatever I want because I'm that guy.

00:53:38.000 I'm the guy on the top.

00:53:39.000 The mutant Superman.

00:53:39.000 It's me, yeah.

00:53:39.000 But I'm going to tell you how to do it because I'm the best.

00:53:42.000 That is a horrible, horrible,

00:53:44.000 Humility.

00:53:45.000 Gratitude.

00:53:45.000 Humility.

00:53:46.000 Gratitude.

00:54:05.000 Who's we?

00:54:06.000 Anyone.

00:54:07.000 Anyone who's suffering from a feeling of purposelessness, a feeling of anger over things that don't matter too much.

00:54:14.000 Oh, man.

00:54:14.000 You know, the literature shows it's very strange, but I'm going to piece together a bunch of different little things.

00:54:21.000 First thing you should do is make your bed.

00:54:23.000 The happiness literature is very clear that if you start your day by making your bed, you're more likely to be happy and it tends to set a tone for the day. 0.99

00:54:30.000 Like as you start doing something, get off your ass, start doing something. 0.97

00:54:35.000 Secondly, one thing you can do is to, I advocate this rather strongly, is to watch the relationships around you and watch who you avoid and who you sort of gravitate towards. 0.99

00:54:48.000 And start kind of hanging out with somebody you might not otherwise, doesn't have to be somebody you're aversive to, but somebody different than you normally hang with.

00:54:56.000 And tell them about yourself and find out about them.

00:54:59.000 You'll be stunned how often people have some moments of clarity about themselves as a result of something as simple as that.

00:55:06.000 I call it seeing yourself with a new pair of glasses.

00:55:10.000 We have lots of delusions and denial and stuff about ourselves and if we're not happy and we're in a bad spot, we're contributing to it somehow and we can contribute to getting out of it.

00:55:20.000 But if we don't really see ourselves as we are, it's very difficult to do that.

00:55:25.000 And I would attend to nutrition and exercise, all those simple things, and I would find some way to create meaning.

00:55:32.000 How can I do something meaningful?

00:55:34.000 Not, how can I get happier?

00:55:36.000 How can I make money?

00:55:39.000 What's meaningful for me?

00:55:58.000 You can build a life and it's really ultimately, it's about others and it's about who you build your life with and spending time with people.

00:56:06.000 And I'm not saying, it's not going out really in arousing circumstances.

00:56:10.000 I think that's where colleges have really done young people a disservice.

00:56:14.000 It's all about these extremely intense parties and drinking and all that, hooking up.

00:56:18.000 Opposite, quiet, shared moments, thinking, talking, discussing things, being present with other people, but be fully present.

00:56:27.000 Rigorous honesty is another thing that I've found to be extremely important.

00:56:31.000 Practice it.

00:56:32.000 Practice it.

00:56:32.000 You won't do it.

00:56:34.000 I think David Brooks has some interesting things to say about developing character and virtue ethics.

00:56:44.000 Listen to these podcasts and see where you can apply

00:56:48.000 Doing better.

00:56:49.000 I don't understand why that's not thrilling for people.

00:56:52.000 It should be extremely exciting.

00:56:54.000 And then, if you really get inspired, read about your country.

00:56:57.000 I mean, there's so much genius in this country we have.

00:57:02.000 I am so inspired by the Founding Fathers.

00:57:05.000 And yes, all of their weaknesses and their craze.

00:57:07.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:57:09.000 They put together, out of thin air, in the first time in history, a country based on ideas.

00:57:15.000 Never happened before and it has sustained us for 200 plus years.

00:57:19.000 Get behind that notion and learn what it is and see if you can't contribute to it at whatever that means for you rather than... I'm not even sure our politicians even understand the country that they're serving right now.

00:57:33.000 Particularly in the state level.

00:57:35.000 And to understand what it is and to

00:57:39.000 Where it was weak, make it stronger.

00:57:41.000 But where it was a genius system.

00:57:44.000 And again, it was based on philosophy.

00:57:46.000 That's where they looked at what had worked and what hasn't.

00:57:50.000 And as another sidebar, I'm gravely concerned about California.

00:57:55.000 I'm gravely concerned about it.

00:57:56.000 And here's my biggest concern.

00:57:58.000 All right.

00:58:13.000 Destiny or failure.

00:58:15.000 And I think when the history books are written, they're going to look at that as the reason that California implodes and becomes three states.

00:58:21.000 I think we might be three states sometime soon.

00:58:23.000 Wow.

00:58:24.000 I really do.

00:58:26.000 I would have been mortified by that thought about it.

00:58:28.000 We're going to have to move to Orange County because LA is going to be great.

00:58:30.000 Yeah, well, but you'll be able to at least determine your future a little bit.

00:58:34.000 But I would have been mortified by that thought six months, for sure, 12 months ago.

00:58:38.000 Now I'm starting to think there may be no other way out.

00:58:40.000 Well, Dr. Drew, thank you so much for stopping by.

00:58:42.000 I really appreciate it.

00:58:44.000 You're not going to get a more eclectic conversation than you will with Dr. Drew.

00:58:47.000 I'm so sorry.

00:58:48.000 Oh no, it's wonderful.

00:58:49.000 It's how I'm feeling today.

00:58:50.000 It's really fun.

00:58:50.000 I love picking it from every aspect of the tree and it's wonderful to have you here.

00:58:53.000 If you haven't listened to Dr. Drew's podcast, you definitely should.

00:58:55.000 Go to DrDrew.com.

00:58:56.000 DrDrew.com is where everything is.

00:58:58.000 Fantastic.

00:58:58.000 So go check out DrDrew.com.

00:59:00.000 Dr. Drew, thanks so much for stopping by.

00:59:01.000 You too.

00:59:09.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay.

00:59:12.000 Executive Producer Jeremy Boren.

00:59:13.000 Associate Producers Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens.

00:59:16.000 Edited by Alex Zingara.

00:59:17.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.

00:59:19.000 Hair and makeup is by Jeswa Alvera.

00:59:21.000 And title credits by Cynthia Angulo.

00:59:22.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.

00:59:26.000 Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.

The Ben Shapiro Show - May 27, 2018

Dr. Drew Pinsky | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 3

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript