The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” ｜ Dr. Mehmet Oz

00:00:00.000 If you gave America the knowledge that they could use to improve themselves, to feel confident that

00:00:05.240 they had jurisdiction over their own body, to actually play an active role in ensuring that

00:00:09.760 they don't develop those chronic illnesses, that they'll do it. If people don't think they matter,

00:00:14.540 then they don't show up in their own lives. There's no uniting narrative. There's no union.

00:00:18.980 It's a completely pathological claim because we live in a hierarchy of narratives that stretch

00:00:24.260 in principle up to the ultimate pinnacle. There's that. Then there's the fact too that now we're all

00:00:30.500 connected. So things can spread much faster. It's certainly possible that oversimplified,

00:00:37.200 easily understandable pathological ideas like viruses spread the most rapidly.

00:00:42.420 It's so painful for me to see so many of my brethren, other Americans feeling ill,

00:00:48.700 thinking it's their fault and thinking there's no way out. The nihilism around health is stunning.

00:00:54.260 which is, Jordan, why the messaging that you're delivering is so critical.

00:01:16.540 Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Mehmet Oz.

00:01:21.940 Dr. Oz was an early advocate for me, a fair early advocate for me back as early as 2018,

00:01:30.900 which made him unique in that regard on the legacy media side. And since then, we've had

00:01:37.040 a number of public discussions and a much broader, a much larger number of private discussions.

00:01:43.920 And that's been very good as far as I'm concerned. He's a very remarkable person,

00:01:47.960 full of ideas, exceptional level of energy, and doing his best to aim upward as far as I can tell,

00:01:55.400 and quite effectively so. And so it was a pleasure to have him today in Scottsdale,

00:02:00.520 where he is with his wife. And what did we talk about? Well, we talked about the changing

00:02:08.340 media environment and why that's occurred. The shift from legacy media to online media and also

00:02:16.420 the corruption of the legacy media enterprise over about a 10-year period, something that he

00:02:22.220 got wind of as early, let's say, as 2012. And we tried to puzzle out why that was occurring. And

00:02:28.560 that brought us into a broader discussion of, well, corruption on the scientific and academic front,

00:02:33.940 which is a manifestation of the same set of symptoms in a different area. And we talked about

00:02:40.180 the radical changes on the political side with regards particularly to the Make America Healthy

00:02:45.180 Again movement, which is a twist in the Trump approach that certainly meets with Dr. Oz's approval

00:02:52.800 because he's been working for years on the public health side and is pleased, I would say, or more

00:02:59.360 than pleased to see this become a central issue of public concern as it should be given the

00:03:05.140 unbelievable cost and consequences of the chronic disease epidemic that does immediately confront us.

00:03:14.400 And so we discussed all of that. We also discussed as well his foray into the political realm, the

00:03:20.600 price he paid for that personally, the advantages of that, and his plans for the future, which involve

00:03:26.560 continuing to develop what is already a sizable social media, new media presence, which is expanding

00:03:34.720 and that he's hitting with all his customary diligence. So stay tuned for that.

00:03:42.000 Well, Dr. Oz, it's good to see you again.

00:03:44.140 As always.

00:03:45.180 We haven't done anything publicly since 2021?

00:03:50.500 Before I decided to run for office. That was the last time we taped and you were the last big interview I did.

00:03:54.960 Oh, oh, is that right? Oh, it was very helpful. I asked.

00:03:58.400 That'll teach you to interview me.

00:03:59.980 Exactly.

00:04:00.640 Career ending move.

00:04:02.180 You got me psyched up to go.

00:04:03.680 Yeah, yeah.

00:04:04.620 You said, tell the truth and go out there and do battle.

00:04:07.480 Well, it was actually a weird situation at that time because three years ago, there still was very,

00:04:14.540 very few people, let's say, on the classic legacy media side who would do an interview with me.

00:04:21.080 And you were certainly one of the, because we had done something earlier than that, too.

00:04:24.840 Two years before that, maybe?

00:04:26.520 It was earlier, I think 2017 or so.

00:04:29.520 It was 18, that early time period.

00:04:32.060 I say that because when we first decided to invite you, I had an intense battle within the show with people threatening to quit.

00:04:43.000 Did they quit?

00:04:43.560 I'll tell you the story very briefly, but it's a wonderful reflection of what I think is the ultimate hypocrisy that happens often, certainly within media.

00:04:53.520 Folks wanted to quit.

00:04:54.360 It was performative in general.

00:04:55.740 They wanted to show that they were going to be taking a strong stance against you.

00:04:58.900 And the reasons were obvious.

00:05:00.340 Yeah.

00:05:01.140 I know all the accolades they could throw at you.

00:05:04.560 And so I challenged the team.

00:05:06.740 I said, well, show me those evidence because if he's truly those things, I don't want to have him on.

00:05:09.820 I'd never met you before.

00:05:10.880 I had listened to you, I was intrigued by the battle that you'd waged around compelled speech in Canada, and I thought big thinkers ought to be heard.

00:05:19.260 And my job as a television host, I was trained, was to, you know, expose the public to ideas that are worth hearing so they can judge for themselves.

00:05:26.880 It's, you know, most clear with your health where you really should be taking charge because you're going on the wrong path otherwise.

00:05:33.160 But it's true for almost any other important thing you do is to make sure you have an opinion on what's best for you.

00:05:38.780 So when I invited you on, I heard different things.

00:05:41.680 And I heard back from no one except one individual, a senior producer, very capable, well-respected, said that you're homophobic. 0.97

00:05:48.660 He happened to be gay. 0.87

00:05:50.240 And so I said, bring me the evidence. 0.83

00:05:51.660 He brought me evidence.

00:05:52.480 And it was fascinating because it was you talking on a social site to two gay men, advising them to be thoughtful about their adopted child, because that adopted child might face hardship because it's an untraditional, nontraditional family they're having.

00:06:09.000 You didn't judge them.

00:06:09.820 I thought you were very caring and loving.

00:06:11.260 This is a psychologist would be in that setting.

00:06:13.600 And I confronted my producer with that, and he refused to back down, but he didn't quit.

00:06:20.260 And at that point, I realized that it really wasn't about whether you truly were those ad hominem attack words, but the fact that they just didn't like you to be able to say what you wanted to say because they didn't agree with what they thought you should be saying.

00:06:33.100 And that is the biggest risk, I think, to free speech in America.

00:06:37.480 And I'm reminded of a very close friend who grew up in Hungary, and he left Hungary when he was about 20 years of age.

00:06:44.360 He's older now.

00:06:45.240 He just had his 80th birthday.

00:06:47.200 And he said when he grew up, everyone that he talked to, he knew they were lying to him.

00:06:54.220 But that wasn't the problem, Jordan.

00:06:56.200 The problem is that those people knew that he knew that they were lying, and they knew that he knew that they knew that he was lying.

00:07:02.400 And everyone's in on the game.

00:07:03.940 Exactly.

00:07:04.420 So, you know, as is often said, democracy is based on common truths, and totalitarian governments are based on common lies.

00:07:10.440 And he just did not want that, this older gentleman who's such a patriotic American after having immigrated here, fled from Eastern Europe.

00:07:16.640 He didn't want that for this country.

00:07:18.020 And yet, he saw it.

00:07:19.860 I'm witnessing it.

00:07:20.720 My parents were immigrants to this country.

00:07:22.040 He came here loving America for everything it represented, the shining city on the hill, as Reagan called it.

00:07:27.780 It was there for all the world to admire and emulate.

00:07:30.480 And we can't afford to slip on that.

00:07:33.460 I was in Singapore.

00:07:34.440 My show, as you know, aired in 120 countries.

00:07:38.880 It's a lot of the world.

00:07:40.300 And I didn't have a lot of competition because in many parts of the world, there aren't health shows.

00:07:43.920 So we were the dominant health show for those 13 years we aired.

00:07:47.740 And I would go around and do interviews.

00:07:49.760 And one of the places I went was Singapore.

00:07:51.360 I'll never forget, right before I went on the air, I was on my show aired right before the national news.

00:07:55.840 So I went on the national news to promote the show.

00:07:57.980 And the anchor, you know, turned over to me and said, please help America.

00:08:01.720 Please save America.

00:08:03.300 And I said, well, I mean, I love my country.

00:08:05.560 And, of course, I'm going to do my best for it.

00:08:07.260 But why are you warning me about that?

00:08:09.900 And he said, in our country, we have several warring groups, people who don't naturally get along, different ethnic groups, religious groups.

00:08:16.660 And we're on a tiny island.

00:08:18.560 And every time we're about to blow ourselves up and crush that thin veneer of civilization that protects us, someone looks up and says, guys, guys, America pulled this off based on a piece of parchment 250 years old.

00:08:32.960 If they can do it, again, based on something that was written, we can do it too.

00:08:38.840 So America is a role model for the rest of the world.

00:08:42.080 So when we blow it, they copy us.

00:08:44.740 When we sneeze, they get pneumonia.

00:08:46.780 And that's why the crisis that we have felt over the last several years, exacerbated by COVID, which really just sort of boldened and underlined what was going wrong, is such an opportunity for us as well as potential risk.

00:09:01.040 An opportunity to put things right again.

00:09:03.520 To wake people up to what has happened.

00:09:05.540 And I do think it slipped up on us.

00:09:06.880 I don't think most people appreciated how hard it was to say what you believe needed to be said and heard.

00:09:12.460 You were a very early example of this.

00:09:14.620 I mean, just blaringly obvious that you should have been allowed to say what you were saying about compelled speech.

00:09:20.700 And yet you were, again, the ad hominem attacks, they can't attack what you're saying.

00:09:25.140 So they have to attack you.

00:09:26.300 And any time you, anybody who's listening now, if you read a newspaper article or anything that's, you know, a commentary, and the first thing they do is attack the person rather than the idea, you know that they're on weak ground.

00:09:38.060 Because if I got you on the idea, why would I bother wasting my time attacking you personally?

00:09:43.220 I only attack you personally because you're not worth listening to.

00:09:46.300 I think the arguments around RFK Jr. are a good example of this.

00:09:50.180 I mean, if you can argue against his ideas, and gosh, there are lots of ways you could do that, then argue them.

00:09:55.640 But stop wasting your time attacking him.

00:09:57.860 Well, it's also the sign of someone who's juvenile and relatively simple-minded because it's a juvenile approach to go for the person.

00:10:06.980 It's simple-minded to avoid the nuances of the situation, you know.

00:10:11.320 And I can understand to some degree why people do that, I think, with me, but also with RFK Jr.

00:10:16.140 because it's hard to believe that the things that I pointed to, let's say in Canada, were actually a danger.

00:10:24.420 And it's hard to believe that the things that he's got his finger on can possibly be true.

00:10:30.480 You have to do a lot of thinking and a lot of reorganization of your beliefs in order to give RFK Jr., for example, credence.

00:10:38.900 And, you know, when I objected to Bill C-16 in Canada in 2016, I had some thoughts about where legislation like that might go if things didn't work out well.

00:10:52.640 And, of course, at that point, I still thought they were most likely to because Canada had been such a remarkably stable country.

00:10:59.800 Since then, by the way, we've gone from GDP parity with the U.S. to 60% of GDP per capita in Canada, right?

00:11:10.120 We are on average poorer than people in Mississippi, which is the poorest American state, right?

00:11:16.340 And we have real estate costs that have spiraled out of control and incredible internal divisiveness in Canada on a scale that is completely historically unprecedented.

00:11:26.120 It doesn't take much of an assault on free speech like Bill C-16.

00:11:30.620 They extended the provisions of protection, let's say, to gender identity and gender expression, which I thought was insane beyond comprehension.

00:11:41.760 The outcome of that has actually been worse than I had originally suggested.

00:11:46.260 I did tell the Senate in 2016 that they would produce an epidemic, a psychological epidemic, among young women by confusing them about their gender. 0.98

00:11:56.540 And I got that exactly right.

00:11:58.000 And so I'm fairly happy about that.

00:11:59.420 Of course, they just told me that I was, you know, transphobic or whatever the hell their, like, epithet of the day was.

00:12:05.920 So tell me, let's talk about free speech and the media in a broader context.

00:12:12.340 Now, you've watched this transition, right?

00:12:15.760 At least that's what it looks like to me.

00:12:18.700 And I think it's driven by the fact that YouTube made digital bandwidth essentially free.

00:12:24.720 I think that's the fundamental issue at stake here.

00:12:26.860 And I can't see the legacy media doesn't seem to be able to compete with that.

00:12:30.940 They dropped production costs to zero.

00:12:33.160 There's more going on than that, but that's the technological aspect of it.

00:12:36.620 I think the rot was happening much earlier.

00:12:39.600 And just to rewind this a little bit, I mean, I trained in a fairly traditional way.

00:12:44.380 My father was educated, actually, in World War II in Istanbul, Turkey, which may have been the best medical school in the world because all the Jews from Europe had fled to Turkey.

00:12:55.220 And for that reason, he got a superb education.

00:12:57.200 And when he finished first in his class, he was recruited to America because he wanted people like that.

00:13:02.960 I mean, I'll come to your students from high-quality universities coming to America.

00:13:07.880 He went at the brain drain.

00:13:09.000 But I was completely indoctrinated by his way of thinking about a hard science approach to taking care of patients.

00:13:15.720 And at the time, 50s, 60s, 70s, there was remarkable advances being made in the treatment of diseases.

00:13:22.240 You know, the skate saves, metaphorically.

00:13:24.680 You know, the people are about to die, and you get in there, and you fix the heart, and you take out the problem, and they're better again.

00:13:31.140 And there was no wrong in traditional medicine.

00:13:34.540 When I started my career at Columbia University, where I'm on the faculty, you know, I was for many years, tenured, because I published and I worked hard and made sure that I was on the cutting edge of a lot of different fields.

00:13:48.840 I wrote patents around the repair and replacement of heart fowls from the groin.

00:13:55.820 I was involved in mechanical heart, heart transplant programs.

00:13:59.160 I ran the Heart Institute.

00:14:00.620 I mean, these are like hard science ideas.

00:14:03.100 So there was nothing wishy-washy about my career.

00:14:06.140 But I began to realize that the patients had not read the same books that I had read, that they were getting it wrong at a very fundamental level and taking care of themselves.

00:14:15.880 So I can throw as much high-tech out there as possible, but without some of the lower-tech preventive ideas, we weren't going to get the desired responses.

00:14:23.500 And, you know, my wife, Lisa, she won't be silenced.

00:14:26.280 She kept saying, you know, they're getting it wrong because you're not giving it to them.

00:14:29.540 If you gave America the knowledge that they could use to improve themselves, to feel confident that they had jurisdiction over their own body, to actually play an active role in ensuring that they don't develop those chronic illnesses, that they'll do it.

00:14:42.980 That's why I even started doing media.

00:14:44.320 Otherwise, I was perfectly happy.

00:14:46.120 In the operating room, in the ivory tower at Columbia University, having the time of my life, you know, stunning scientific things and, you know, making sure that those advances religion.

00:14:54.580 My dad intensely disliked that I stepped out of that traditional approach to medicine to start talking on the airwaves about health.

00:15:02.360 In the beginning, I didn't think what I was doing was all that controversial.

00:15:05.640 I was literally telling you everything that we knew within medicine.

00:15:09.260 And then things started to change.

00:15:11.820 Okay, what period of time was that?

00:15:13.480 So I started doing the Oprah show around 2003, 2004, and I started my show in 2009, and all that was pretty smooth going.

00:15:21.060 Right.

00:15:21.300 Around 2012, I began to notice a big shift.

00:15:25.100 And I remember one event in particular, there was evidence from several articles that there was arsenic in our apple juice.

00:15:32.580 Now, why would anyone put arsenic in apple juice?

00:15:35.480 There's no reason to do that.

00:15:36.900 It's a derivative of using arsenic as a pesticide or herbicide around the apple.

00:15:42.560 It's a cheap spray.

00:15:43.560 And so America banned the use of arsenic in that setting so that the apples, when you harvest them, when the apple juice is squeezed out of the apples, there's no arsenic in them.

00:15:51.580 Does that make sense?

00:15:52.580 It seems reasonable.

00:15:54.040 Okay.

00:15:54.320 What if the Chinese don't do that? 0.99

00:15:57.540 What if the Chinese farmers continue to spray with an inexpensive product like arsenic, and then multinational companies buy those apples, squeeze the juice out of it, put it in cartons, and ship it to America?

00:16:08.740 What happens then?

00:16:10.160 Do you think that's a legitimate question?

00:16:11.680 Could there be arsenic in that apple juice?

00:16:13.120 I think so.

00:16:14.060 People had studied it.

00:16:14.940 They said it was the case.

00:16:16.080 We decided to go to the government and say, hey, we want to see your data.

00:16:19.320 Is there actually arsenic in the imported apple juice?

00:16:21.500 And if so, you know, what can we do to make sure that's not a problem?

00:16:23.980 Because arsenic's not good for kids. 1.00

00:16:25.540 Primarily, children drink small apple juice cartons.

00:16:27.720 You know, it's not, you know, you and I aren't drinking apple juice cartons generally.

00:16:31.620 That stuff's coming for young people. 1.00

00:16:33.800 And the arsenic levels in America and our water are capped.

00:16:36.540 You're not supposed to have above a certain number of amount of arsenic for a reason, because it's not good for you.

00:16:40.700 The government wouldn't share their data.

00:16:43.280 They wouldn't talk to me.

00:16:44.560 And then I started realizing that no one was talking about this.

00:16:47.060 And I wanted to make waves because I didn't think it was right.

00:16:51.000 We did a show, and I just saw a tsunami of negativity.

00:16:54.920 Much of it led by media, who had clearly been played.

00:16:58.620 And I say that because when we finally got the data from the government, which was released the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, which anyone who knows press and PR knows, you release data the day before Thanksgiving to bury it.

00:17:10.680 Because you don't want anyone to see it.

00:17:13.060 But, you know, friends came, you know, people who had been attacking me came out and shared openly that they had been incorrect.

00:17:20.680 And there was actually a concern about this.

00:17:22.560 And today in America, we have limits on the amount of arsenic that can be imported with the apple juice.

00:17:28.000 It shouldn't have been that hard.

00:17:29.440 But I began to see the inner workings of how this game is played.

00:17:32.980 I had a similar problem with GMO food labeling.

00:17:37.100 And I wasn't taking a stance on the show against GMOs per se.

00:17:40.500 It's a separate discussion.

00:17:41.740 I was just saying transparency.

00:17:43.960 You know, allow consumers to know if the products are GMO.

00:17:47.240 So just write on the label, you know, GMO corn or whatever.

00:17:51.140 And companies didn't want that.

00:17:53.420 And yet every other Western country did that already.

00:17:55.700 It wasn't like I was asking for this ridiculously crazy outlandish concept.

00:17:59.100 It was already the standard in most other countries.

00:18:02.040 We were the exception, clearly the outlier.

00:18:04.080 And then I began to get attacked, not for that exactly, but for other things around that.

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00:19:02.060 Go to shopify.com slash jbp.

00:19:04.180 Again, that's shopify.com slash jbp.

00:19:10.260 And you think that was really starting to come to a head around 2012, or that's when you saw that?

00:19:15.340 No, this is now, by the way, this is going over five years of battles.

00:19:19.240 I mean, every year I'm fighting for another reason, for something that doesn't seem that it should be that much of an argument.

00:19:25.580 I mean, these are things that I thought were better for market.

00:19:27.300 Don't you want to label your foods with GMOs?

00:19:29.160 If you disagree with me, come tell me why.

00:19:31.340 They don't tell you why.

00:19:32.380 This is what I'm pointing out.

00:19:33.360 Now, these battles happen behind the scenes.

00:19:37.100 If they were to attack me directly on labeling GMOs, they're going to lose.

00:19:41.100 Everybody wants transparency in that reality.

00:19:43.740 Again, I'm not accusing manufacturers that the GMOs are bad for you.

00:19:48.180 I might have been making a medical commentary.

00:19:49.880 I'm actually making an argument for transparency in the process.

00:19:53.060 You're not going to win that argument.

00:19:54.020 So you don't attack the person telling the story for the story.

00:20:00.480 You attack them for who they are.

00:20:01.980 And now all of a sudden, and I get clues here and there.

00:20:06.040 This is hilarious.

00:20:07.280 They got 10 doctors, so-called peers of mine, even though their lead writer was the head of the cigarette disinformation program, cigarette smoke disinformation program for big tobacco in Europe.

00:20:18.180 The second author went to jail for Medicaid fraud.

00:20:21.740 I haven't done any of those things, by the way.

00:20:23.300 So they're not really my peers.

00:20:24.800 But they read an article to the dean of Columbia asking for my ouster.

00:20:28.100 I'm tenure faculty.

00:20:29.000 You can't just fire me because you don't like me.

00:20:31.080 So far.

00:20:31.820 So far.

00:20:32.280 That could change.

00:20:32.820 We'll get to that.

00:20:34.480 That's the whole point of getting someone tenure, so they can speak their mind and have some job security.

00:20:39.400 But the press published it before the dean got the letter.

00:20:43.260 Now, you tell me how that happens.

00:20:44.340 And then in the letter, they were complaining that I did a lot of bad things, including this GMO crazy idea that I had.

00:20:50.060 And then I began to realize this is actually a very well-oiled machine.

00:20:54.340 It's a takedown.

00:20:55.700 Because I bought Ink by the Barrel and published it, I'm on network television.

00:20:59.320 I had a production team go out to the headquarters of these guys, which was a shell organization.

00:21:03.920 There was no one there.

00:21:05.320 And you begin to realize that you can get past these guys.

00:21:08.180 But I had a lot of resources.

00:21:10.140 A massive show with a lot of people, smart people working hard for me.

00:21:13.160 What about the people who don't have that?

00:21:15.300 Which is everyone.

00:21:16.540 Which is everybody else.

00:21:17.760 And I began thinking, my goodness, these folks are, you know, if they're the only one putting their hands up, they're going to get shot.

00:21:23.160 And then, boom, COVID came.

00:21:25.780 When COVID hit, we saw firsthand what happens when in a time of tension, when the answers aren't that obvious,

00:21:33.120 and people start offering ideas that you don't want to hear, it's a problem.

00:21:37.520 So I began talking to doctors around the world.

00:21:41.740 There was, Didier Rolt was the main virologist, parasitologist in Marseille, in France.

00:21:48.920 And he'd had a lot of experience with hydroxychloroquine.

00:21:51.680 So I was curious, could that work?

00:21:53.200 Maybe we should study if that works.

00:21:55.120 Then I find out we're banning the prescription of that medication in New York State.

00:21:58.780 The governor of the state is banning the right of a licensed doctor to prescribe a medication.

00:22:03.680 It's never before happened in America.

00:22:06.240 And there's not a real good reason for this.

00:22:08.160 In fact, we weren't even willing as a country to study whether this worked.

00:22:13.140 I'm not making the argument that it would have saved anybody.

00:22:16.140 Even to this day, there's still debate over this because it was never actually studied in a way that was acceptable.

00:22:21.760 And we saw a general move away from looking for treatments of COVID infection to only believing that the vaccine was the answer.

00:22:30.100 Yes.

00:22:30.320 And it's not that the vaccine is a problem.

00:22:31.900 I was strongly supportive of the vaccine.

00:22:33.500 We'll come back to, you know, what ended up happening with this creation.

00:22:36.580 But why wouldn't you entertain another thought process that might be perfectly valid?

00:22:41.220 Hey, historically, doctors treated the, you know, prevent the gunshot wound.

00:22:45.560 But if it happens, treat the patient.

00:22:47.240 Don't lament the fact that the bullet went through the heart.

00:22:49.300 Fix the problem.

00:22:50.020 Put your finger in the hole, deal with the hemorrhage.

00:22:52.060 And that mindset just wasn't acceptable.

00:22:54.660 And I remember very vividly, several months into it,

00:22:57.960 I was really upset because there was so much published data that the schools should not be closed.

00:23:03.180 Right.

00:23:03.800 And so I said it.

00:23:05.340 Now, in retrospect, obviously, I was right.

00:23:08.160 But at the time, whether I was right or wrong, we should have had a debate about whether the open schools were in America.

00:23:13.640 That's for sure.

00:23:14.220 The kids in Europe went to school.

00:23:16.060 The kids in Asia went to school.

00:23:17.560 Are those kids different biologically than Americans?

00:23:20.020 So why would we only take our orders, we think, from special interests, teachers unions, around these school openings and closings?

00:23:28.100 Why wouldn't we, at least in our own country, acknowledge that some states were doing better than others and they were having their schools open?

00:23:33.720 This became a major battle, but, I mean, the kind of vitriol that I felt personally, just by raising the issue, solidified, steeled me to the reality of where we had come, where we no longer could have open discourse.

00:23:48.400 We had Nobel laureates getting canceled.

00:23:50.660 You know, we had people who had domain expertise in the area of COVID offering thoughtful suggestions about how to manage the crisis better.

00:23:59.300 We ought to be careful in dismissing those ideas.

00:24:02.660 In the operating room, as a heart surgeon, if I'm having an issue and someone else comes in who happens to have expertise in the area and offers me an idea about how to put a stitch or what kind of valve to use or a different technique for opening the chest wall to get in there, I'm at least going to hear them.

00:24:17.780 I'm not going to have them escorted from the premises never to return because I didn't want their intrusive thoughts in my mind.

00:24:23.680 There was a fragility around our policy that compelled me to want to eventually run for the Senate.

00:24:32.660 But it also, in many ways, highlighted many of the things we've been fighting for.

00:24:37.800 In the Maha movement, the Make America Healthy Again movement, the ideas that are being raised are ones that came up on the show over and over again.

00:24:45.140 And not just my show, they were coming up in many other places, but they never could get any air cover.

00:24:52.320 They get smothered, suffocated, before they could sort of get airborne.

00:24:56.620 What's happened that I think is very promising is that we're at least now seeing some pushback on ideas about whether or not fluoride is actually a beneficial thing to have in our drinking water.

00:25:07.360 Should there be mandates around vaccines?

00:25:09.320 Can we talk through the revolving door of our federal agencies and the agency capture that is perceived by some?

00:25:18.480 Why is the NIH not actively studying prevention with any kind of aggressiveness?

00:25:26.020 I mean, it's just a trivial part of their budget.

00:25:27.740 They're not doing it because they think other things are, you know, curing these other illnesses is more important, which I do that too, if you want.

00:25:35.340 But you have to study prevention because no one else will do it because there's no money in it.

00:25:39.460 Companies aren't going to profit by studying how to not use their products.

00:25:43.080 Well, cure without prevention often indicates relapse as well, right?

00:25:47.440 I mean, if the conditions are there to make the disease possible to begin with and you don't change that, then why is there any reason to presume that it won't recur?

00:25:56.280 I know there are situations where it doesn't recur, but, you know, even that dichotomy between prevention and cure seems to be odd from a conceptual perspective.

00:26:04.640 George, I think metaphorically, if it may help, the issue of prevention is about the soil.

00:26:10.920 We have to till the soil, fertilize the soil, protect the soil, use regenerative techniques on your biology to make sure that you're resilient enough to deal with illness and other insults to your well-being.

00:26:22.800 That's what longevity is fundamentally about.

00:26:24.720 It's not about being made perfectly.

00:26:26.640 It's about being resilient enough that when bad stuff happens, you can cope with it.

00:26:30.040 And we have actively in America, without intending so, I don't believe, but it nevertheless actively made it difficult for people to do the right thing.

00:26:39.460 We've chummed the waters with products that make bad behavior simple.

00:26:43.800 Federal policies have over and over again subsidized products that aren't as healthy for us.

00:26:49.120 And we, you and me, and our brethren, have let the country down because the intellectual elite, you know, knowledge worker groups haven't been honest, or at least haven't been willing to challenge some of the fundamental assumptions we've made about our well-being.

00:27:10.160 So we now have bad science or bad conclusions from science being infused into products made by industry, which aren't in our best interest, wrap that in bad policy, and then dish it to people, serve people with that.

00:27:26.840 And that's also had an effect on the legacy media.

00:27:30.240 Like we've got three things sort of in the air now that we're discussing simultaneously, and it'd be useful to see if we can untangle them to some degree.

00:27:37.940 We have the transformation that you described on the legacy media landscape that started to take place around 2012.

00:27:45.680 We have the complicitness and the malfeasance and the silence of the scientific and medical community, let's say around COVID, but even more broadly on the scientific front, right?

00:27:57.600 And then we have this emergent, emergent Make America Healthy Again movement that, interestingly enough, is being captained now by the very person who has been pushing it in the most extreme manner in the public sphere for the last 20 years.

00:28:14.180 So these things are related in some way, right?

00:28:17.360 There's been some massive shift in the last 10 years on all these fronts, and it's driven by something that's, it's driven by factors that are similar across all the areas.

00:28:28.980 And it's very difficult to put finger on exactly what that is.

00:28:32.360 I think some of it's, we talked a little bit about the fact that technological transformation, let's say on the YouTube side, has put a tremendous amount of pressure on the legacy media.

00:28:41.720 Because YouTube basically brought the price of production, television production, and dissemination to a much broader audience than was ever conceived of as possible.

00:28:51.780 Plus made it permanent for zero cost.

00:28:55.700 And so that's, I thought back in 2003, I think I started putting my YouTube videos up, maybe it was somewhere between 2010 and 2013, when YouTube was still mostly for like cute cat videos.

00:29:09.140 But I looked at it and I thought, you know, this is, there's something, this is very weird, because we have video on demand, it's free, and it's permanent.

00:29:18.740 Like that's, I thought, is that like the Gutenberg printing press?

00:29:22.940 Like, is this something completely different in a revolutionary way?

00:29:28.300 Not only on the price side, but video is now permanent and indexable.

00:29:32.720 Well, that's like, what the hell does that mean?

00:29:35.080 Well, we're kind of seeing what it means.

00:29:36.800 It means a radical shift in the way people communicate.

00:29:40.260 There's that.

00:29:40.960 Then there's the fact, too, that basically during that same period, we became hyper-connected, right, with these.

00:29:47.000 And that's a very interesting thing to think about that psychologically and even neurologically.

00:29:52.960 Now we're all connected.

00:29:54.780 So things can spread much faster.

00:29:57.580 Okay, so what spreads quickly?

00:29:59.800 Well, do good ideas spread quickly?

00:30:02.660 I think there have been good ideas that have spread rapidly.

00:30:06.940 And I think YouTube's probably been the best for that of all the social media networks, because it facilitates long-form communication.

00:30:13.360 But it's certainly possible that once you're all connected, pathological ideas, oversimplified, easily understandable pathological ideas like viruses spread the most rapidly.

00:30:26.300 And so that's driving this as well, because we're hyper-connected.

00:30:29.860 And then maybe there's the effective policy.

00:30:35.240 I mean, there was a legal change, and I don't remember how many years ago, in the United States that made it possible for pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to the consumer, right?

00:30:45.280 And this was something, this is a policy that characterizes the United States relatively uniquely.

00:30:51.020 And from what I understand, that means that 50% of the advertising budget for the legacy media networks in general is now pharmaceutical company-driven, and 75% of the advertising for the legacy news associations.

00:31:07.460 So the legacy news shows.

00:31:09.940 And so that means the pharmaceutical, giant pharmaceutical companies have a hammerlock on public communication, apart from the, you know, emergent new media.

00:31:19.100 So that's a lot, like, that's a lot of technological transformation in 10 years, right?

00:31:24.100 I mean, that's stirring the pot in a major way.

00:31:26.200 The question is that, would it have happened anyway?

00:31:28.940 And I think bad ideas, they can be viral, but I think of them more like bacteria.

00:31:34.760 They'll burrow under your skin, and if you don't expose them to light and oxygen, then they'll become abscesses and fester.

00:31:43.040 The sores are painful, and they can kill you.

00:31:45.240 And what I think technology did, to a large extent, is expose a lot of mediocre ideas to the reality of what happens when you try them.

00:31:55.660 Because, you know, ideological movements sound great conceptually, but when you actually put them into use, they don't pan out so much.

00:32:03.840 And the motivation for the movement might be positive, but the results are not.

00:32:08.800 I'll give you a concrete example, because I think it plays into what you're saying.

00:32:11.620 Long before we had iPhones and YouTube or anything else, Ansel Keys went to Europe and did a seven-country study to look at what happens to people when they eat certain foods and what kinds of problems does it cause with their heart.

00:32:23.600 He happened to collect the data during Lent, which, of course, skewed the data a bit, and the local scientists didn't like it.

00:32:28.780 But he brought it back, and because our nation was desperately looking for solutions for heart attacks, President Eisenhower had just had one.

00:32:36.220 We had data that a lot of young men were dying.

00:32:38.520 They jumped at the possibility that a low-fat diet might be better for you, because that's what seemed to come out of this early data.

00:32:44.980 Now, again, this is long before we had any technologies.

00:32:47.480 That became the ruling dogma.

00:32:50.020 Keys came back.

00:32:50.720 He had allies.

00:32:51.380 Because of his allies politically supporting him and no one being able to challenge him, but successfully, because anyone who tried to raise their hands and say something got taken out, we now develop a formal national policy to advocate for low-fat diets.

00:33:07.260 So low-fat usually means high-carb, too.

00:33:10.580 Somebody's got to make up the calorie difference.

00:33:12.160 So companies started making high-carb solutions.

00:33:15.360 Simple carbohydrates, high-pructose corn syrup, unhealthy foods, which directly correlated to weight gain.

00:33:20.780 Again, this wasn't a conspiracy.

00:33:23.080 And diabetes.

00:33:24.180 And diabetes, and heart disease, and Alzheimer's, and all the things that come out of Metabox syndrome, disarray.

00:33:29.380 But as you look back on the history of all this, which is only possible now because you have so many ways of telling the truth, and lying, by the way, but you have ways of telling the truth, you look at things like the Minnesota Heart Study, which was commissioned to prove that this theory was right, and they never published the data.

00:33:43.880 And years later, 15 years later, they finally are forced to publish it because it showed, proved, that low-fat diets do all the things we now know they do, and they do not in any way help with heart attacks.

00:33:58.280 So all that data was very easy to cover up, and you never know it was hurting you, and you think it was bad luck, you think you're gaining weight because you're lazy, or other people are gaining weight because they're sloths.

00:34:08.360 You start making all these excuses about why we have gone in the wrong direction without addressing the fundamental flaw, which was we're giving people bad ideas.

00:34:20.360 And bad ideas lead to bad outcomes.

00:34:23.020 You talk about SID, right, as the idea of an arrow heading towards a target, and, you know, if you hit the target, fantastic.

00:34:29.100 If you don't, that's a sin.

00:34:30.300 Or if you have the wrong target that you're aiming at, you're definitely not going to hit the right target.

00:34:33.640 That's what we did.

00:34:34.380 We aimed people in the wrong direction, and then we allowed industry to co-opt that process because it was easier for them to make those foods, less expensive, and they were very much, had a best interest in making sure that ideology stuck.

00:34:47.240 So how do you turn that over?

00:34:48.300 A lot of physicians sacrificed their careers trying to do so and didn't succeed.

00:34:53.240 What's allowed us to finally take these on in a very aggressive way, and they're wonderful scientists now who are getting big enough that what they say, you know, has gravitas, and people hear them, listen to them, and act on them, is because they can get their word out through podcasts like this in ways that were never before possible.

00:35:08.760 If I was trying to challenge someone about the American Heart Association guidelines for, you know, for cholesterol intake, you know, the diet intake of fat, I couldn't do that.

00:35:18.860 I mean, literally, I couldn't.

00:35:19.680 Who am I going to talk to?

00:35:20.960 You walk into the learned organization where all the heart doctors are, you know, supposed to say what they think is important, no one's going to listen to you.

00:35:28.080 They'll dismiss you and put you to the corner.

00:35:29.580 So the democratization of information has allowed us to challenge dogma that was incorrect.

00:35:37.460 That, I believe, more than anything else, coupled with obvious errors during COVID, has allowed a lot of Americans now to believe that our country is not sick by accident.

00:35:48.140 And by making America healthy again, it's both an achievable goal, but also one that will deal with our crisis.

00:35:54.820 I'll give you a little bit of math here because, you know, when I was in medical school, I went to business school at Wharton because I was interested in healthcare policy, just these issues.

00:36:01.740 Like, how do you fix the game so that you actually get some benefits?

00:36:05.520 And one thing you always track is what drives the big budget items.

00:36:09.740 So in America, the big budget item that's really stripping a lot of competitiveness away is the healthcare budget.

00:36:15.120 It's $1.5 roughly, right, $4.5 trillion, trillion with a T. It's a lot of money.

00:36:20.520 90% of the healthcare budget is driven by chronic disease, 90%.

00:36:25.320 If we deal with chronic disease—

00:36:27.080 And the most common chronic diseases are—

00:36:29.200 Metabolic syndrome is the root cause of all—

00:36:31.020 Describe that.

00:36:31.860 Metabolic syndrome means your pancreas, it makes insulin, but it's unable to make it in a way that allows your body to deal with the calories coming into your body.

00:36:41.320 So the body reacts by doing things that are maladaptive.

00:36:45.600 It'll deposit the fat in your belly, for example, in your momentum.

00:36:49.220 Sounds like the momentum, but not the M.

00:36:51.480 That tissue there was designed for our ancestors to store fat in times of feast, but you use it in times of feast.

00:36:59.020 At the harvest.

00:36:59.540 The harvest is a good example.

00:37:00.620 So you didn't die in the winter.

00:37:02.200 Good habit to have, which is why our ancestors had uniquely effective ability to store fat.

00:37:06.740 Right.

00:37:06.980 It's not a bad thing, except if you're storing—if you have to go hunting, you open the fridge, it doesn't work because you're not consuming calories to hunt your food anymore.

00:37:14.900 And so metabolic syndrome is a series of problems that occur because the fundamental process by which you consume and use energy is off.

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00:38:30.700 And people who happen to have a healthy metabolism live a lot longer.

00:38:36.160 They don't develop heart disease and Alzheimer's and cancers and a slew of other problems nearly as commonly.

00:38:41.280 And people have those issues with the metabolism of their blood sugar and inability of insulin to keep up.

00:38:48.000 And as a consequence, lots of inflammation in the body, including in the liver.

00:38:51.560 All of those complications drive most of the health care expense, at least half of the health care expense of the country.

00:38:56.940 So that's very tightly linked to diet.

00:39:00.260 And not exactly to caloric intake, but rather to type of diet.

00:39:03.340 Yes.

00:39:03.680 And people who are overweight have trouble exercising.

00:39:06.620 They don't sleep well.

00:39:08.100 That's another building block of your health.

00:39:11.260 And oftentimes, people who are overweight feel shame.

00:39:15.260 Yes.

00:39:15.700 Well, we've made it a moral issue.

00:39:17.700 You know, and my attitude towards that has shifted a lot in the last 10 years.

00:39:23.240 When I see someone overweight now on the street, I would say probably 15 years ago, I was slightly more judgmental.

00:39:30.900 I'm not a particularly judgmental person when it comes to people's health, because it's generally very complicated.

00:39:36.980 But it was easy enough to think, well, if they just exercised more and ate right, they'd do fine.

00:39:41.800 And then I learned that, well, I learned many of the things that you just described, you know, broadened my knowledge in that area and started to understand that these high-carbohydrate diets were making people obese.

00:39:54.460 And that was as simple as that.

00:39:56.220 Well, I read a study at one point that suggested that one soda a day is sufficient to cause the obesity epidemic.

00:40:04.000 It's true.

00:40:04.640 And let me explain.

00:40:05.300 That's really important.

00:40:06.020 You write that up.

00:40:06.640 Yeah.

00:40:06.860 Well, that's nothing, right?

00:40:08.220 That's not even much of a bad habit by all appearances.

00:40:10.960 160 calories, 160 calories.

00:40:12.600 Right.

00:40:12.880 That's not the problem.

00:40:14.040 Your body is looking for nutrients.

00:40:16.320 Your brain very wisely is disregarding caloric intake, only focusing on the nutrient density of what it's getting.

00:40:23.260 That's what it uses to build muscle and hormones and brain and everything else. 0.99

00:40:28.520 So when you take in a soft drink, your brain doesn't count that as food because it's not getting what it's looking for.

00:40:35.260 And yet the calories still add on.

00:40:37.220 And the high-fructose corn syrup actually sort of stimulates a bunch of processes that are also maladaptive.

00:40:42.620 But getting full, feeling satiated is not one of them.

00:40:45.240 Right, right.

00:40:45.940 And so we see this happening over and over again where small little air is reproduced every single day.

00:40:50.520 Yeah, well, that's the thing.

00:40:51.300 But the converse is also true.

00:40:52.740 Small things, small steps done right every day, all of a sudden life's beautiful.

00:40:58.060 And that's why it's so painful for me to see so many of my brethren, other Americans, feeling ill, thinking it's their fault and thinking there's no way out.

00:41:08.940 The nihilism around health is stunning.

00:41:11.620 And these are focused on longevity, wellness issues because there's so much opportunity there.

00:41:19.920 You know, not just because we've got AI now that can customize recommendations for you just exactly what you need, including when you hear the recommendation because you're not always receptive equally.

00:41:28.620 But we also have much better technologies that are available that can help you get on the right path.

00:41:34.200 There's medications that in some instances make sense.

00:41:37.640 But these are all crutches that fundamentally to get you to realize that you can do it, to empower you, the person whose ultimate destiny is so tied to your own will.

00:41:47.880 Which is, Jordan, why the messaging that you're delivering is so critical.

00:41:51.320 Because if people don't think they matter, then they don't show up in their own lives.

00:41:56.400 We have a kids' foundation, which you've been incredibly helpful on, called Health Corps.

00:42:01.000 It's based on the principle of the Peace Corps.

00:42:03.200 So we go around the country with young college grads who, like the Peace Corps, would train them to do great things.

00:42:08.760 Instead of sending them off to Botswana to build dams, you put them in schools in America. 0.61

00:42:12.780 In fact, here where we're taping in Arizona, the Department of Education has given Health Corps a $5 million grant to go into 100 schools and build digital platforms to deal with this issue that I just discussed.

00:42:24.760 Fundamentally, here's the problem.

00:42:25.840 We can't get young people to practice anymore for sports. 0.98

00:42:30.400 We can't get them to do their math homework anymore.

00:42:33.020 You can't get them to be respectful in class.

00:42:34.980 Why?

00:42:36.020 Because they don't think they matter.

00:42:37.900 Think about your life.

00:42:39.140 If you're listening, think about your childhood.

00:42:40.900 If someone told you that showing up would change the world, that if you actually studied math or became a doctor, a nurse, a construction worker, a union person, if you did something with your life, that the world would be a better place for it.

00:42:56.620 If you don't think that's true, Jordan, you're not going to do your homework in school.

00:42:59.340 And you aren't going to go to practice because why would you bother?

00:43:01.980 Right.

00:43:02.220 And so what we try to do more than anything else is get young people to, first off, very narcissistically focus on themselves, their own bodies.

00:43:09.580 You can be healthy.

00:43:10.560 You can be cool.

00:43:11.280 You can be a better mate for someone in the future, a better employee in the future.

00:43:17.600 But no matter what, you are important.

00:43:20.860 You can do great good things.

00:43:21.960 You can do terrible bad things.

00:43:23.300 But what you do matters.

00:43:24.440 So start focusing on what's in front of you.

00:43:26.960 Show up in life by showing up in your school.

00:43:29.740 So we're brought in to tell young people things through the lens of health that historically was told to them by their teachers and by their parents or just by society at large, by messaging.

00:43:40.340 Because culture eats strategy all day long.

00:43:42.320 You've got a strong culture.

00:43:43.760 Then you can make up for flaws in your strategy.

00:43:46.240 But if you don't have a culture, who cares what you're being told to do?

00:43:50.000 Well, they're told the opposite now.

00:43:52.000 I mean, they're really told.

00:43:53.420 They're categorized by group.

00:43:55.220 And that group can be race, gender, sex, whatever.

00:43:59.080 They're categorized by group.

00:44:00.540 They're told that they're pawns of a tyrannical society and that they have absolutely no agency.

00:44:06.780 And in the boys' case, they're also told that if they have any agency, that's nothing but a manifestation of a detrimental power drive.

00:44:14.360 And that their play preferences are all wrong in school.

00:44:17.760 And so I can't see how we could demoralize children more effectively if we'd set out to actually manage that.

00:44:24.540 I read a study, again, not so long ago that showed, I think, it was 43% of American youth feel that they had no agency in their life.

00:44:32.960 Yeah.

00:44:33.060 Well, that's a hell of a thing to think when you're 18.

00:44:39.020 Jordan, you go into the schools and you've been kind enough to be supportive of HealthCourse.

00:44:42.660 You may have witnessed this as well.

00:44:44.420 You talk to a 17-year-old and the light's gone out of their eyes.

00:44:48.620 It's just blank darkness.

00:44:50.460 They don't know what to think anymore.

00:44:52.200 They have 15 different conflicting ideologies being thrown at them.

00:44:55.280 None of them are going to help them deal with the challenge of their life.

00:44:58.160 Imagine all of us had those issues when we were in high school.

00:45:01.420 Somebody put their hand out and said, Jordan, you can do this, man.

00:45:04.620 It could have been priests in your church.

00:45:06.840 It could have been a coach.

00:45:08.360 But someone helped a little bit.

00:45:10.420 That's what we try to do with HealthCourse. 0.91

00:45:12.200 But there are other ways of getting that message out that aren't being used.

00:45:16.880 And most importantly, we don't have the luxury of sitting back on our butts and wondering what happens next and complaining about this process.

00:45:24.920 You need to pick up an oar and start rowing.

00:45:26.340 And ideally, you get someone across the hole from you, so you're rowing in straight, not in circles.

00:45:31.500 But it's a reality that has an epidemic taken over like a brain worm our young people.

00:45:39.500 But they don't want it.

00:45:41.000 They know it's wrong.

00:45:42.420 It doesn't take a lot when you sit in a room to get a young person to believe in themselves.

00:45:46.940 So what's HealthCore doing?

00:45:49.020 Well, as an example, we will teach you about the fundamentals of health.

00:45:53.160 So what I just mentioned is an example about soft drinks.

00:45:55.340 But how do you message that to a kid?

00:45:57.360 If I lecture them like I just discussed these topics with you, I mean, they're not going to listen to me.

00:46:01.660 I'm not cool to them.

00:46:02.700 I don't culturally identify with some of the subtle music tastes that they have.

00:46:06.660 I don't get the jokes all the time.

00:46:09.140 So ideally, someone who's close in age to them goes in there and says, hey, listen, the man wants to take advantage of you by selling you junk food.

00:46:18.720 Food that's not good for you.

00:46:19.660 They know it's not good for you.

00:46:20.780 But they're selling it to you because they make a lot of money.

00:46:23.300 So don't be conned by the man.

00:46:25.660 Now you've got a little bit of a thing going on.

00:46:27.980 You know, it's me versus them.

00:46:29.260 A counterculture.

00:46:30.220 Counterculture.

00:46:30.780 Now it's sort of cool for me to reject junk food and vaping and cigarettes.

00:46:34.980 Now, you know, I'm actually better than that.

00:46:37.280 Now, we actually have studied this in randomized trials.

00:46:39.820 We've actually gotten data to show that it works.

00:46:41.480 Young people know it's not good to drink soft drinks and they don't drink as much soft drinks, especially when women. 0.74

00:46:49.580 And then you've got to translate that to they perform better in life, which we're still studying.

00:46:53.100 But someone's got to deliver the message to them.

00:46:55.320 But that's the foundation.

00:46:57.080 I use health as a crowbar to open them up to get into their bodies the thoughts that I think they need to hear about how valuable they are.

00:47:03.400 Because if the most precious thing you're ever given by your family is seen by you as being worthwhile, all of a sudden you're worthwhile.

00:47:13.240 Oh, my goodness, I've got this incredible body and I've got all these opportunities.

00:47:16.860 Now I'm going to start paying attention and maybe get past all these thoughts that were racing in my head that were taking me in the wrong direction.

00:47:23.380 And then we can use that as an excuse, a trampoline to develop mental resilience.

00:47:28.580 Because what I really want to do is workforce development.

00:47:30.860 I want to get these young people to believe they can enter American culture and help.

00:47:36.120 And if they have the mental resilience to recognize that, that if they can change what's happening in their body, Jordan, they can change the world outside of it.

00:47:43.260 If they can actually get that idea in their heads, you can't stop them.

00:47:48.300 What's been your experience introducing HealthCore into the schools?

00:47:51.360 What kind of response are you getting from kids?

00:47:53.560 Jordan, I've raised with my wife Lisa $90 million for the foundation.

00:47:57.280 We've touched the lives of 3 million plus kids.

00:47:59.260 We're getting large, multi-million dollar grants from states and foundations.

00:48:04.340 Of course, we raised a lot of the money privately as well.

00:48:06.540 It costs about a dollar per year of life lived by the kids.

00:48:10.200 It's incredibly inexpensive.

00:48:12.380 We can get nursing schools to give us their volunteer hours because nurses have to volunteer time in the community. 0.99

00:48:17.160 Social workers do the same thing.

00:48:18.860 People want to help.

00:48:19.860 The thing that I found most uplifting when I was campaigning, and I saw it on the show as well, is the average American thinks they can live their life.

00:48:30.040 They're worried about their neighbor.

00:48:31.780 They don't think they're doing so well next door.

00:48:34.100 But they're okay right now, generally.

00:48:36.000 They could be better.

00:48:36.920 They've got this problem.

00:48:38.000 They're being held back by that.

00:48:39.340 And the government, they definitely don't want to round because the government's rarely going to be useful to them in a positive way.

00:48:44.720 So, you know, but they, you know, they want to-

00:48:48.060 It's an interesting approach to ask people about their neighbors.

00:48:50.740 I read of a pollster recently who was doing that when trying to predict the outcome of the election, which he apparently called correctly.

00:48:57.460 People are more likely to, what would you say, maybe they're less guarded when they're asked about how their neighbor thinks or how their neighbor is going to vote or how their neighbor is doing, for example.

00:49:09.520 So, you know, you get some sense of their picture of the generic other, and that might be an extremely effective way of gathering information.

00:49:18.320 All right, let's go back to the legacy media issue and the Maha nexus, let's say.

00:49:26.020 So, in principle, now RFK is going to be running the show on the health front.

00:49:31.640 I don't know what that's going to look like or how he's going to manage it.

00:49:35.840 One of the fundamental problems I think that he's going to have to address, and this is an incentive problem.

00:49:42.560 I mean, if you want to make a system work properly, you have to get the incentives aligned with the aim, and that's very difficult.

00:49:49.300 It's something that behavioral psychologists specialize in.

00:49:51.940 And then one of the problems on the prevention side is that it's very difficult to give people credit for prevention.

00:49:58.080 You know, if you go for a drive and you don't have an accident, nobody pats you on the back.

00:50:02.700 You know, but you've prevented innumerable catastrophes if you drive, you know, 100 miles safely.

00:50:09.120 You're not going to get credit for things that you do intelligently that stave off a catastrophe that doesn't exist.

00:50:16.640 And so, it's very difficult to associate scientists, let's say, or physicians with effective preventative strategies because the evidence that they've done something good is subtle and it takes a long time to make itself manifest.

00:50:30.900 That's way different than, well, was it Barnard who did the first heart transplant?

00:50:35.280 No, Barnard.

00:50:36.060 Right.

00:50:36.400 I used to play basketball with him.

00:50:37.620 Right, right.

00:50:38.100 He was my father.

00:50:39.060 Right, right.

00:50:39.900 He learned how to do the transplant at Stanford and Texas Heart, but because of our regulatory issues in the United States, he took the technology, flew back to South Africa and did it there.

00:50:50.620 And did it there.

00:50:51.160 Yes, yes.

00:50:51.800 Well, he became world famous, of course, for doing that.

00:50:54.340 And that's not prevention.

00:50:55.980 That's cure.

00:50:56.740 And you can tag him, you know, immediately with the prevention.

00:51:00.040 I lived this.

00:51:01.000 I was exactly what you're describing, taking incredible pride in what I could do with a scalpel and a stitch.

00:51:09.040 Yeah, yeah.

00:51:09.800 I could change hearts.

00:51:10.840 I could put mechanical hearts in.

00:51:11.980 I could now begin to change the valves.

00:51:13.740 It's very dramatic and immediate.

00:51:15.900 But we take shows in the, you know, we had New York Med, which is a news show that was filmed in the hospital that did very, very well, airing on primetime television, right?

00:51:24.660 On the show, the Dr. Oz show, we'd go into hospitals and show these dramatic moments.

00:51:29.640 It's fantastic.

00:51:30.160 Right, right, right, right.

00:51:30.940 And there's so many TV shows that have been successful from markets well beyond that, you know, the ER and down in-

00:51:38.780 House.

00:51:39.320 House.

00:51:39.900 You know, there's a reason for it because it's exciting.

00:51:42.860 I don't think the issue of prevention is that you don't get credit for it.

00:51:46.100 The issue of prevention is more about how do you create a system where it's easy to do the right thing.

00:51:52.320 Yes.

00:51:52.620 Well, that's the incentive issue, of course.

00:51:54.360 And that's where I believe our government has been of very minimum value, because if the NIH was able to put some support behind looking at the actual tactics that might work, getting rid of the ones that are ineffective, reinforcing the ones that do help Americans, then we'll start to develop mechanisms to make our lives a little better.

00:52:15.280 Ironically, there are differences between different parts of the country and the health of our people.

00:52:19.100 Just learning from that would be effective for us.

00:52:21.460 But no private sector business is going to do that because they're not going to be able to pay their shareholders back for that invested money.

00:52:28.180 That's something we as a people should do for ourselves.

00:52:31.060 And that's an example of one of the topics for the Maha movement.

00:52:35.640 You know, regulatory bodies should be responsive to us and should at least be able to explain why they're not spending money in a way that might make sense for the betterment of the average American.

00:52:45.800 We also should not be directly misleading them.

00:52:48.480 I mean, you chum the water by telling people to eat a low-fat diet.

00:52:52.920 I mean, you eat only meat.

00:52:54.700 You've lost weight.

00:52:55.760 You're sharper.

00:52:56.940 You know, McCullough's rheumatoid issues are-

00:52:59.460 Better looking.

00:53:00.140 Better looking.

00:53:00.880 Your boyish good looks, never better.

00:53:02.480 You know, all those things happen, but it's not an accident.

00:53:07.820 And the fact that we're not-

00:53:08.680 It's also impossible to believe.

00:53:10.140 Well, I think that's part of it.

00:53:12.600 Why is it impossible to believe?

00:53:14.120 Someone long ago, because these ideas are not new, these ideas have been battled for decades, someone long ago should have been honored by at least hearing their ideas.

00:53:24.240 And we suffocated them.

00:53:26.900 Killed these ideas in their infancy.

00:53:29.180 And so now-

00:53:29.920 Do you think that-

00:53:31.040 Okay, so let's talk about something more radical.

00:53:34.760 When you were talking about the NIH and these granting agencies, I thought about a conversation I had with Larry Arnn, who's the president of Hillsdale College.

00:53:44.220 And Larry is quite the force of nature, and Hillsdale is a remarkable institution, right?

00:53:48.420 It's one of the few universities, legacy universities, let's say, which has maintained its appropriate function.

00:53:55.060 They have a 1% first-year dropout rate, right?

00:53:58.380 The average is 40%.

00:53:59.860 1% is stunning.

00:54:01.720 And it's a lovely campus, and the students are very much on board.

00:54:05.660 And the typical student there told me that 90% of their professors were excellent.

00:54:12.080 And I asked like 15, 20 students, you know, and privately so they could actually talk to me.

00:54:16.860 In any case, one of the things Hillsdale did was not take government money, right from the beginning.

00:54:23.200 And it's very interesting.

00:54:24.740 Like, I don't exactly know what to make of this, because in the beginning stages of my career as a researcher, which was quite extensive, because I published about 100 papers.

00:54:35.700 And the reason I'm saying that is because I want people to know that I know what I'm talking about when it comes to discussing the research environment.

00:54:41.640 And so I did research at McGill and Harvard and the University of Toronto, and that all went really, really well.

00:54:49.880 The only fly in the ointment that entire time was the emerging power of the research ethics boards, which became, in my opinion, corrupt beyond belief and absolutely 100% counterproductive and woke.

00:55:02.180 They were awful.

00:55:03.420 And they started out bad, and they got rapidly worse.

00:55:06.820 But something, again, seemed to happen somewhere around 2014.

00:55:12.740 And the research enterprise, which was in the main, in my field, in psychology, free of, relatively free of careerism and relatively free of corruption.

00:55:24.220 Like, not everybody who was doing research was a great scientist, but you can't expect that.

00:55:29.460 And most research wasn't true, but you're not going to have a lot of misses.

00:55:33.520 But everyone, virtually everyone I ever met who was seriously involved in the research enterprise was doing it above board and ethically, and they weren't careerists.

00:55:42.860 And also, the scientific journals were trustworthy.

00:55:46.260 And the granting agencies were, too.

00:55:48.900 And then something twisted in the last 10 years, and I think none of that's the case now.

00:55:53.520 I mean, science, the greatest magazine in the world, greatest scientific journal in the world, and nature have both become ideologically corrupt.

00:56:00.540 Scientific American is pretty much gone.

00:56:02.480 I mean, that's more on the public side, but it's emblematic of the same thing.

00:56:06.420 I mean, the replication crisis, so to speak, never shocked me, because I never thought that most things that were published were true.

00:56:14.380 That would be too much to hope for.

00:56:15.800 But some things, at least, were true.

00:56:18.000 Now I wonder, like, I don't see a pathway forward, an easy, a straightforward pathway forward to rectify the granting agencies.

00:56:28.420 I mean, even 20 years ago, the typical scientist in the United States was spending one-third of their time writing grant applications that failed.

00:56:36.600 One-third of their time.

00:56:38.100 That's insane.

00:56:39.020 You basically sidelined 30%, 35% of your researchers in producing paper that has no utility whatsoever.

00:56:48.980 And things have got much worse since then, because you have to be ideologically pure now to get a grant.

00:56:54.920 You have to have your DEI statement in order, and that's the first order of business.

00:56:58.880 And so, do you think, is that a rectifiable situation, or was the trajectory inevitable?

00:57:06.580 If you have government finance research, does it become corrupted by government corporate collusion?

00:57:14.640 I don't know.

00:57:15.380 Like, I'm not really sure what to think about that.

00:57:17.900 Much of what the young people do is mirroring what their professors and teachers are doing.

00:57:21.900 Well, which is what they should be doing.

00:57:23.380 They should be mirroring it.

00:57:24.540 That's the whole point of the education system.

00:57:26.800 They're rejecting it en masse.

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00:58:32.700 Because it's a failed ideology.

00:58:37.300 And they're also realizing, to quote, paraphrase George Orwell, who, as you know, was a journalist,

00:58:43.040 was sent up to the coal mines in Northern England, and he quit after a few, you know, a few articles.

00:58:48.340 And he argued that he thought the socialists cared about poor people.

00:58:52.640 It turns out that socialists didn't care about poor people.

00:58:55.540 They hate rich people.

00:58:56.440 Right, right, right.

00:58:56.980 And so when the professors don't actually care about-

00:58:59.920 Worse, they hate successful people.

00:59:01.660 That's even worse.

00:59:02.580 But that's what you start to see.

00:59:03.660 All of a sudden, the faculty who are leading these onslaughts of, you know, to revise the

00:59:08.680 institutions, aren't, they're pretending, performative again, pretending that they care about the poor

00:59:15.760 patients who are being left behind.

00:59:17.100 They actually just hate the system.

00:59:19.820 And if you're going to blow the system up, you better know what you're going to do next.

00:59:23.340 Metaphorically to one of your 12 rules, you know, make your bed first.

00:59:26.980 Just get the basics right.

00:59:28.800 Telling a young student that he has to use pronouns to a person who's not going to appreciate

00:59:32.840 that is the opposite of the hypochranic health.

00:59:34.520 Which is like 95% of people, right?

00:59:37.620 Because that is not the highest concern of 95% of people, especially if they're going to

00:59:43.040 a hospital because they're sick.

00:59:45.000 And to have to, I can't really imagine as a clinical psychologist a worse way of demonstrating

00:59:51.520 my, a better way of demonstrating my cowardice in the face of an ideological onslaught and

00:59:58.120 the capture of my imagination than by stating my pronouns and asking for them the first thing

01:00:05.500 I do when I'm at a client.

01:00:06.540 I would never do that under any conditions whatsoever.

01:00:09.380 It's absolutely preposterous.

01:00:11.460 It's precisely announcing to someone, first of all, my, my ideological position, which

01:00:17.280 you should not do, certainly as a therapist.

01:00:19.900 And I would also say as a physician, it's, you're not to burden your patient, your client

01:00:26.520 with that sort of information.

01:00:27.960 You're not there to make a personal statement to them.

01:00:31.480 You're there to listen to them.

01:00:32.820 And so you shouldn't be starting out with an announcement of your ideological position.

01:00:37.220 And you're also telling anyone that who can think that you're too weak to stand up to the

01:00:42.000 woke mom, which is not exactly something that's going to strike confidence in the heart of

01:00:46.700 someone who's on their deathbed and hoping that you can help or in some sort of terrible

01:00:52.240 crisis.

01:00:53.320 Yeah.

01:00:53.520 So this is, well, so we continue to outline the problem and the solution that you've put

01:00:58.980 forward so far, at least in part, is based on some faith in the students themselves to

01:01:04.680 see through this and put pressure on the institutions.

01:01:07.020 But man, you know, what I saw as a professor, and the same thing I believe happened in the

01:01:11.980 research enterprise overall, is the faculty retreated as the administration advanced.

01:01:18.300 And I don't think that's my opinion, because all you have to do is track spending on

01:01:22.160 administration against spending on faculty or spending on students.

01:01:26.260 And you can see who won that battle.

01:01:28.120 And it was 100% the administrators.

01:01:30.520 And they pretty much had that in the bag by 2014.

01:01:33.720 And then the woke mob took over the administration.

01:01:36.780 And that seems to me, that's also what happened.

01:01:40.240 What did it happen on the, what, the boards, the editorial boards of the scientific journals?

01:01:45.960 Is that exactly the same thing?

01:01:48.300 But this is cowardice, Jordan.

01:01:49.540 This is the, our Hippocratic oath is for this.

01:01:53.480 That pesky thing. 1.00

01:01:54.380 The pesky thing is you read at graduation and that you're supposed to, you know, people

01:01:57.720 have in their offices, right?

01:01:59.220 You take care of your client, your patients, is number one, always, you never compromise

01:02:03.060 them.

01:02:03.940 You police your specialty or field, because you have domain expertise, other lay people

01:02:08.440 don't have.

01:02:08.960 So I've got to call you out if you do something that I think is wrong.

01:02:12.120 I have to advance the field by standing on your shoulders of the people who taught me

01:02:15.680 that I've got to do more than they did to make the field better.

01:02:18.080 But the fourth thing you have to do, the civic responsibility of being a professional, is

01:02:24.240 to speak out on issues that are wrong.

01:02:25.880 Yeah.

01:02:26.440 And we have been cowards in organized medicine and the learned arts.

01:02:31.660 It's our job to take the bullet for the team, because if all of us put our hands up, they

01:02:36.600 can't take us all out.

01:02:38.160 But they can definitely take you out one at a time, though.

01:02:40.820 But that's what we're doing.

01:02:42.020 And we did that for what I think has changed, and I don't want to overplay it, but I'm sensing

01:02:48.540 it, over the last year, and that's what the Maha movement, I think, represented, enough

01:02:52.600 people put their hands up that if you mention the possibility that we're going to revisit

01:02:56.920 some of these mandates, you don't get taken out summarily.

01:02:59.480 People may still hate you, but they don't feel emboldened to shoot you, because they're

01:03:03.220 bullies.

01:03:04.000 The government of Alberta made vaccine mandates illegal two weeks ago, right?

01:03:08.480 They revamped the Alberta Human Rights Act.

01:03:11.800 I think it's the Alberta Human Rights Act, or the Alberta Charter of Human Rights.

01:03:14.920 I don't exactly have that at my fingertips, but that's no longer going to happen.

01:03:18.640 And I think, too, you know, one of the things that public policy people should have known,

01:03:23.720 now, I have some sympathy for them, because when COVID emerged, the politicians completely

01:03:28.360 abandoned their responsibility and made the public health policy people who were willing

01:03:32.640 the experts on everything, and they ran the show.

01:03:35.460 And that just was completely inappropriate.

01:03:37.000 It was a devolution of responsibility from the political.

01:03:40.520 But the public health policy people, who also, by the way, were very complicit in the Nazi

01:03:47.320 organizations in the 1930s.

01:03:49.160 So there are parallels to this, historical parallels that are not fun.

01:03:54.880 Public health policy officials should have realized that any medical doctrine that relied

01:04:00.700 on compulsion, force, and fear was pathological in its essence.

01:04:03.980 We have seen, I think, the biggest consequence of the COVID tyranny is going to be the demolition 0.96

01:04:10.600 of faith in the public health field.

01:04:13.940 And maybe there's also an indeterminate spillover effect of that on the medical profession in

01:04:22.120 general, and then all the other associated professions that are under the broader rubric of

01:04:27.520 helping professions in general.

01:04:28.820 But it's also the case, it's not that surprising that individuals won't speak out.

01:04:34.060 In 2016, when I annoyed the government by making some YouTube videos, I didn't really think they

01:04:42.220 were going to have that much of an effect.

01:04:44.000 You know, it was more of an experiment on my part.

01:04:46.460 Um, I had three sources of income, three independent sources of income.

01:04:51.940 I lost two of them.

01:04:53.280 I lost my clinical practice.

01:04:55.400 And basically, it became impossible for me to be a university professor or to continue

01:04:59.680 with my research.

01:05:01.100 And so, and then I've been fighting an ongoing battle for 10 years with my regulatory agency,

01:05:06.420 and that's cost me more than half a million dollars.

01:05:08.580 And it's been unbelievably annoying, like way too annoying, very, very stressful.

01:05:14.100 And so, that's a lot to ask for people to speak out.

01:05:18.380 You know, I mean, it was hard to take me out because I had more than one means of supporting

01:05:23.660 myself.

01:05:24.320 And that turned out to work out very well.

01:05:26.680 But, you know, there are very few voices on the medical side or the psychological side,

01:05:33.260 in particular, in Canada.

01:05:35.080 People contact me behind the scenes, and there is the odd person, there's the odd nurse, there's

01:05:40.020 the odd teacher who has said something, but it's also very easy for people just to write

01:05:45.000 them off because they're such extreme outliers, you know, and to tar them with some right-wing

01:05:49.620 epithet, for example.

01:05:51.000 So, I can understand why people don't speak out.

01:05:53.340 And I guess part of what all this has done for me is to highlight even more, particularly,

01:05:59.620 the absolute miracle that any country, anywhere, ever managed to establish anything like a right

01:06:05.240 to free speech, right?

01:06:07.800 There's so many factors that work against it, which is why free speech, of course, doesn't

01:06:11.840 reign in almost all the countries in the world.

01:06:14.160 So, what the hell did we do right so that it actually worked for some period of time in

01:06:17.900 the West?

01:06:18.740 What were the preconditions for that?

01:06:20.200 Well, let's get into that.

01:06:21.380 That is, as a good psychologist, you're asking the most important question.

01:06:26.560 As you know, I'm Turkish of origin.

01:06:28.200 And when you go to Göbekli Tepe, Potbelly Hill, which is in southeastern Turkey, it's

01:06:34.960 the oldest known human civilization.

01:06:37.360 And you see these big tea temples that they built there 12,000 years ago.

01:06:41.960 And they're clearly religious in origin.

01:06:45.700 These people, primitive as they may have been, had some belief in something bigger than them.

01:06:53.360 There was something out there.

01:06:55.260 They had the audacity, actually, to sense that they were connected, that it wasn't

01:07:01.200 just the material world around them.

01:07:03.740 And I would argue that it's because they had that audacity of belief that they thought,

01:07:08.680 hey, I can domesticate animals.

01:07:09.980 If I trap those gazelles, I can actually do animal husbandry.

01:07:13.640 I can, if I put these seeds in the ground in an organized fashion, put water on them,

01:07:17.360 I can grow crops.

01:07:18.540 And so, it actually gave rise to human civilization.

01:07:21.820 Abraham met Sarah there, by the way.

01:07:23.440 It's not a coincidence.

01:07:24.360 There's something special happened there that allowed this to all take place.

01:07:28.960 And as it began, for humans, began to take over the world. 0.95

01:07:32.340 Who knows when that happened?

01:07:33.480 We left Africa 60,000, 70,000 years ago.

01:07:35.660 But again, something allowed us to go beyond the typical tribe size.

01:07:40.340 A typical tribe is under 50 people.

01:07:42.420 Something connected us.

01:07:44.140 A belief that we're all in it together so that we could get 500, 5,000, 50,000 people together.

01:07:49.580 And Homo sapiens took over the planet.

01:07:50.900 We killed off the other six species that, for some reason, didn't get that deep work.

01:07:57.120 Yeah, it is an orientation to some kind of abstract, higher-order, uniting good.

01:08:01.880 There's no doubt about that.

01:08:02.920 And that's, I think, where democracy comes out of.

01:08:05.700 It's fundamentally based on humanism.

01:08:07.780 So, let me quiz you.

01:08:09.160 I may have shared this with you in one of our late-night discussions.

01:08:12.220 But this is something I think everyone who's listening could do.

01:08:15.480 For themselves, but also for people around them.

01:08:17.360 You're standing on the side of the river.

01:08:19.980 And you see a stranger floating by.

01:08:23.900 And they're heading towards a waterfall.

01:08:25.760 And they're obviously having trouble.

01:08:27.740 And let's assume they perish if they hit the waterfall.

01:08:30.300 And you've got a ring you can throw out there, a rope, and save them.

01:08:34.020 And then, out of the corner of your eye, you see your pet, your favorite dog.

01:08:39.680 Cute thing as it is.

01:08:40.520 Woof, woof, woof. 1.00

01:08:41.560 It's coasting by this stranger.

01:08:44.180 Who do you save?

01:08:45.540 You only get to save one.

01:08:47.420 Oh, I'd take the person without a second thought.

01:08:49.640 Most people in the Western world who are older pick the person.

01:08:54.120 Most younger people pick the pet.

01:08:58.080 This is about humanism.

01:09:00.540 When you saved the stranger, why?

01:09:02.800 You don't even know the person.

01:09:04.880 Young people say, we have too many people. 0.98

01:09:06.980 There are billions and billions of people.

01:09:08.860 That dog is my dog.

01:09:10.180 I love that dog.

01:09:11.480 We don't need more people.

01:09:12.820 That dog, if he dies, will hurt me personally.

01:09:15.260 So they saved the dog.

01:09:17.040 I'm not even trying to make a value judgment here.

01:09:18.860 I'm just describing the numbers that seem to come back when this question is asked.

01:09:22.240 Please, everyone, do it yourself.

01:09:23.740 Ask that question.

01:09:24.480 Young people, old people, let them struggle with the answer. 1.00

01:09:27.240 But if we don't think that stranger is more important,

01:09:31.280 then it's hard to have a democracy.

01:09:33.660 Because without believing in humanism, the sacredness of that individual,

01:09:37.740 that there is something bigger that unites us all,

01:09:40.580 a non-local consciousness, a god, you call it whatever you want,

01:09:44.300 that sees us all of having value and therefore worth listening to,

01:09:49.340 then what's the point of having democracy?

01:09:51.040 And that begins to challenge some of the assumptions we've taken for granted.

01:09:54.980 Because America was, yes, it was created by modernists, but they were all interested in God,

01:10:01.440 if not overtly religious.

01:10:03.340 Well, this is a good time to give you this book that I think...

01:10:06.300 As you know, and you were very kind of, you shared a draft with me early on.

01:10:09.420 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:10:09.540 Probably it was January, February, very early.

01:10:12.280 And I remember going through it.

01:10:14.700 And I'll tell you right now, in a non-patronizing way,

01:10:17.720 this may be your most important work ever.

01:10:20.480 And I was flabbergasted at the depth that you brought into some of these discussions.

01:10:25.480 And I must say, it's nothing else.

01:10:26.960 Most people read the beginning of a book anyway.

01:10:29.380 When you get to the part about Cain and Abel, which I thought I knew that story.

01:10:33.600 Most people think they know that story.

01:10:35.580 And when you begin to explain what it was that Cain did that was truly murderous,

01:10:41.820 that really was the problem, all of a sudden they began to see parallels in modern society.

01:10:47.880 And that's why the ability, and you've done this so brilliantly,

01:10:50.260 to dive deeply into these archetypal stories.

01:10:52.860 Stories that people used to discard because, oh, there's old people, 1.00

01:10:55.760 wrote up, wrote down dumb concepts. 0.92

01:10:57.800 There's, you know, they weren't dumb and they weren't unrelated. 0.99

01:11:01.840 They're desperately important for our time. 0.80

01:11:04.460 Well, that's what it looks like to me.

01:11:06.140 And I think I'm hoping that book is better by a substantial margin

01:11:10.480 than the draft I sent you in January, because I did a lot of work after that.

01:11:14.080 And so I walked through, I think, basically 10 biblical stories

01:11:18.400 trying to describe why they're sequenced the way they are and what they actually mean.

01:11:23.240 I am hoping that your comment is correct, that it's the most significant work that I've done.

01:11:29.780 I think that might be true because MAPSA meeting was very dense and academic.

01:11:37.240 And then the following two books were quite popular and more descriptive and helpful

01:11:43.900 rather than conceptual.

01:11:46.420 Practical.

01:11:46.480 Yeah, they were more practical.

01:11:48.060 This book is also practical, but it's, I hope I got the balance between idea and practicality

01:11:54.060 right, exactly right.

01:11:56.160 It's a harder read than 12 Rules for Life, for example, though easier than Maps of Meaning.

01:12:00.740 But the other advantage that it has is that most people still know these stories at least

01:12:09.400 to some degree, right?

01:12:11.200 So there's some essential familiarity that I can draw on, which is, of course,

01:12:15.860 a culture that doesn't share stories isn't a culture.

01:12:19.940 It's fragmented into subpopulations that share stories.

01:12:24.860 There's no uniting narrative.

01:12:26.500 There's no union.

01:12:28.340 You know, and the postmodernists claim, the fundamental postmodernist claim, actually,

01:12:32.560 it's actually the defining claim of postmodernism, is that there's no uniting narrative.

01:12:36.980 And it's a completely pathological claim because, technically, we live in a hierarchy of narratives

01:12:46.140 that stretch, in principle, up to the ultimate pinnacle, let's say.

01:12:51.900 And there are uniting narratives at every single level.

01:12:55.500 You can't just put an arbitrary cap somewhere and say, well, beyond this level, there's no

01:13:00.840 uniting narrative.

01:13:02.160 It's preposterous.

01:13:03.680 There's no way of doing that.

01:13:04.920 And so I think the fundamental postmodern claim is intractable.

01:13:09.920 And I think part of the reason the postmodernists have turned to the doctrine of power is because

01:13:16.240 when you lose your uniting narrative, and that's something roughly equivalent to the death of

01:13:21.920 God, let's say, then other competing narratives immediately emerge.

01:13:26.460 And the three most likely candidates are sex.

01:13:30.180 And, of course, that's what Freud concentrated on in such a revolutionary manner in the early

01:13:35.480 20th century.

01:13:36.740 Well, if it's not God, then maybe it's sex.

01:13:40.120 Fair enough.

01:13:41.100 Like, reproduction, like, that's a fair proposition.

01:13:44.180 Well, if it's not sex, maybe it's power.

01:13:46.640 Well, then you get the Marxists and you get the postmodernists, most of whom were Marxists,

01:13:50.600 and you get the totalitarians, nothing unites us except power, and all friendships are power

01:13:56.900 relationships, and marriage is a power relationship, and all economic relationships are power.

01:14:01.800 It's like, well, you know, you can make a case for that.

01:14:04.240 Or you can say, well, there's no essential union, and we basically live in a nihilistic

01:14:09.740 morass.

01:14:10.340 And those seem to me to be the three competitors to the idea of what's highest. 0.98

01:14:15.580 And every single one of those competitors is self-devouring and pathological.

01:14:20.260 So the question is, what rules?

01:14:24.380 That is the question.

01:14:25.500 What rules?

01:14:26.220 And nothing is an answer.

01:14:27.740 But, man, you pay a price for that answer.

01:14:30.180 I remember calling you about two years ago.

01:14:33.660 And I've always been impressed at your ability, your resilience.

01:14:38.220 And I was struggling with some stuff.

01:14:41.060 And I asked you if you thought there was a God.

01:14:45.260 And you paused, pregnant pause, longer than usual.

01:14:49.940 And you said, there better be.

01:14:53.180 And it was interesting to me to hear you say that, because we're better off living like

01:14:58.500 there's a God.

01:14:59.260 I happen to believe there is a God.

01:15:00.540 But you're better off living like there's a God.

01:15:02.260 And sometimes in life, if you go along and try to understand why there's such power there,

01:15:09.140 it begins to bloom.

01:15:11.000 So you begin to see it in different ways.

01:15:13.400 I think there's been a shift in America quite dramatically in that people aren't willing to

01:15:18.500 give it a chance.

01:15:19.540 They're not willing to truly allow it to grow in their heart and to see if there's wisdom

01:15:23.240 there. 0.98

01:15:23.540 They almost feel like it's a sign that you're a fool if you believe in a God. 0.96

01:15:29.320 The big shift, I would argue, is, and I've seen some data on this, you know, 30 years 0.82

01:15:34.300 ago, a third of people believed strongly in God.

01:15:37.560 A third of people weren't sure, but they definitely respected the people who believed in God.

01:15:42.260 And they wanted to be like them.

01:15:43.660 They were struggling to actually be like them.

01:15:46.240 And they were having difficulty.

01:15:47.900 And then a third of people were not religious.

01:15:50.040 But they weren't disdainful either.

01:15:51.460 They just weren't religious.

01:15:52.120 That's shifted now.

01:15:54.000 And the middle group shifted.

01:15:55.460 You still have a third that go to church all the time and a third that don't go to church

01:15:58.300 ever.

01:15:58.840 But the people in the middle no longer want to be like the ones who have found a faith.

01:16:03.640 They actually are disdaining them.

01:16:05.840 That's the shift that's happened in America.

01:16:08.320 And that's a powerful group of people.

01:16:10.460 Those are the people who, through the culture, should feel more comfortable at least allowing

01:16:15.880 the concepts that have governed human culture for at least 12,000 years, but probably

01:16:20.360 all 60,000, 70,000 since we left Africa to rise up.

01:16:25.280 It's audacious, it's arrogant, and it's dangerous to ignore thousands of years of wisdom compiled

01:16:32.540 by your ancestors.

01:16:33.920 Well, you degenerate into a kind of, one of the dangers is the degeneration into a self-serving

01:16:39.880 populism.

01:16:41.500 And there's utility in populism insofar as democratic leaders consult their constituents to find out

01:16:50.380 what they need and want.

01:16:52.100 But the problem with the populist approach in general is that it's too short-term.

01:16:56.740 It's too focused on only the things that you can understand during the span of your life,

01:17:02.520 however long that has been.

01:17:04.740 Now, there's an insistence in the biblical text that there's two axes of orientation.

01:17:10.200 One is interpersonal, to treat other people as if they're of divine value and to love other

01:17:16.520 people as if they're yourself, let's say, but the other one is upward.

01:17:20.200 It was to orient yourself to the highest possible good.

01:17:23.380 Now, the sum total of all highest goods, that's a reasonable definition of God.

01:17:30.280 But, you know, even in the biblical corpus, the reality of God is, what would you say, especially

01:17:37.920 in the Old Testament, the reality of God is indeterminate.

01:17:41.500 Not least because God is in a category that transcends the real.

01:17:47.240 And this is something that's very important to understand because the atheist claim is,

01:17:51.900 well, do you believe in God?

01:17:53.880 But there's a, what would you say?

01:17:56.300 There's a metaphysics in that question because the atheist materialist definition of belief

01:18:02.020 is an atheist materialist definition.

01:18:04.960 And so what they're trying to do is to take the concept of God

01:18:07.700 and reduce it to the reality of an everyday object, a table, atoms, something material and

01:18:16.880 structured.

01:18:17.400 And the God that's presented in the biblical corpus is ineffable.

01:18:22.140 And that means that the reality of God isn't the same order of reality as the reality of things.

01:18:28.200 And that's not my inference from struggling through the biblical texts.

01:18:33.440 Texts, that's absolutely crystal clear, not only in the texts, but in the tradition, that

01:18:38.540 whatever the divine, the highest divine principle might be, it transcends the categories of time

01:18:45.780 and space, and it's not bound by what's materially real.

01:18:49.960 And so if your initial starting point is there's nothing but what's material, then there's no sense

01:18:56.280 having a discussion about value at all.

01:18:58.260 But if you understand that you have to have a discussion of value because you have to value

01:19:03.240 things to act, and you do, this is one of the points I tried to make in the book.

01:19:08.700 The idea that we see the world through a story is an incontrovertible fact.

01:19:14.700 It is being demonstrated in at least six different independent disciplines.

01:19:19.060 And it's not only true for our beliefs, let's say, that we live in a story, but it actually

01:19:26.860 structures the very perceptions that hypothetically inform us about the facts.

01:19:31.880 And I think this is a revolutionary realization that a description of the structure through

01:19:38.640 which we see the world is a story.

01:19:40.840 We live in a story.

01:19:41.880 The postmodernists were right about that.

01:19:43.700 And that's partly why we have this culture war.

01:19:46.080 It's because the postmodernists were right about that.

01:19:48.100 Now, their solution to that, their analysis of that problem was lacking, sorely lacking,

01:19:53.800 to say the least, and unbelievably self-serving and worshipping at the feet of power and hedonism

01:19:59.260 as well, which is a very bad idea.

01:20:01.800 You might say, why?

01:20:03.040 It's like, worship of power is self-defeating.

01:20:06.720 You know, I outlined the data from the chimp studies. 0.75

01:20:09.580 Chimp tyrants, like human tyrants, tend to meet a very unpleasant end and early in life. 1.00

01:20:17.800 It's like, well, what happens if you play a power game?

01:20:20.580 Well, then you're in the power game.

01:20:22.600 And the problem with being in the power game, as soon as you're not the biggest kid on the

01:20:26.600 block, you're not just dead.

01:20:28.820 You're ripped apart and dead. 0.90

01:20:31.500 And so there are things that you can raise to the highest place, power and sex, for that 0.76

01:20:38.940 matter, hedonism in general.

01:20:40.680 The problem with doing that is that it doesn't iterate.

01:20:43.140 It doesn't work.

01:20:44.080 You can't do that with other people because they object.

01:20:47.040 And not only that, even if you do that with yourself, you'll defeat yourself in the future.

01:20:51.440 So what I've tried to outline in this book is the idea that there are a radically limited

01:21:00.160 number of self-sustaining and improving principles.

01:21:07.980 And that's something like a natural law.

01:21:10.740 It's something like there's a universe of games.

01:21:15.300 Some of them are playable and some of them aren't.

01:21:17.640 Non-playable games are much more common.

01:21:20.020 Games that will defeat themselves that no one wants to play.

01:21:24.440 Then there's a fraction of games that are playable.

01:21:26.700 So people will do them voluntarily and they'll iterate.

01:21:29.480 Then there's a smaller fraction that iterate and improve.

01:21:32.480 There's even a smaller fraction that iterate and improve multi-generationally.

01:21:37.280 Well, the biblical stories capture the spirit of the iterated game that improves over centuries.

01:21:45.740 And I think accurately.

01:21:46.860 I think one of the cases I try to make in this book, you might say, well, what's the alternative

01:21:51.720 to power?

01:21:52.860 And that's fairly clear.

01:21:55.220 Voluntary sacrifice is the alternative to power.

01:21:57.620 And that's why the biblical texts concentrate on sacrifice.

01:22:00.880 So what do you mean?

01:22:01.700 What does sacrifice mean?

01:22:03.760 What do you give up to be married?

01:22:06.180 What do you give up to have a friend?

01:22:08.200 What do you give up to have a community?

01:22:09.760 If it's all about you, you give up nothing.

01:22:11.600 But if it's all about you, you don't have a community.

01:22:14.040 So obviously the community is predicated on sacrifice.

01:22:17.660 Once you know that, you think, okay, what's the sacrifice?

01:22:22.600 Well, that's the question.

01:22:24.060 That's the same question as what's the nature of life?

01:22:26.700 What's the nature of work?

01:22:27.840 What's the principle of community?

01:22:29.780 Like the example you gave with the stranger in the stream and the dog.

01:22:35.700 What do you sacrifice?

01:22:36.900 The dog.

01:22:38.200 Right.

01:22:39.060 Your attachment to the dog.

01:22:40.840 Your juvenile sentimentality.

01:22:44.880 Right.

01:22:45.240 Maybe even your hatred.

01:22:46.560 What if it's an enemy in the stream? 0.52

01:22:48.860 What if it's the bully who made your life miserable or your dog?

01:22:52.580 It's like, what do you do?

01:22:53.460 You rescue the bully.

01:22:55.080 Why?

01:22:55.960 That's a hard question.

01:22:57.820 The answer to that is something like, if you don't rescue the bully, the world turns

01:23:01.240 into hell.

01:23:02.220 It's something like that.

01:23:03.460 And you think, well, that's not obvious.

01:23:04.960 It's like, well, yeah, that's for sure.

01:23:07.080 It's not obvious, but your conscience will tell you that.

01:23:11.040 And so, yeah.

01:23:14.020 So how did we get into this?

01:23:15.900 Well, we were trying to figure out what had gone wrong, you know, in a fundamental level.

01:23:19.760 And then we switched into this discussion of deeper things.

01:23:22.380 To add something to what I'm hearing is that we all have a filter because we can't process

01:23:30.060 everything.

01:23:30.540 Yes, that's the thing.

01:23:31.460 I'm watching you.

01:23:32.380 I could, I see the pink shirt that matches mine, but a tie that I'm not wearing.

01:23:36.380 A great choice of shirts.

01:23:37.600 Thank you.

01:23:38.200 But, but there's a lot that I'm, you know, when you speak, I'm hearing some things that

01:23:43.800 you're saying clear to me that others feel like, you know, Charlie Brown, Lucy, you know,

01:23:49.160 and so that's all of us do that.

01:23:51.820 It's not even disrespectful.

01:23:52.880 It's just some ideas will resonate with us.

01:23:55.120 The story that, that I shared that I was told about the pet versus your pet, beloved

01:24:00.320 pet versus some stranger, it might not even be a good person, is a story.

01:24:04.180 Some people were here and remember for the rest of their life, others are going to not

01:24:07.760 even understand it the first time.

01:24:08.940 Yeah.

01:24:09.160 And there's a spectrum in between there.

01:24:10.680 So I think a lot of our political differences are caused by that.

01:24:14.320 We tend, not only are we served with different news feeds, I get all that.

01:24:17.540 That's been said many times, but even if you were here, the same news feed, your interpretation

01:24:22.400 of it is very different depending on the stories that you believe and the story that you think

01:24:27.780 you're in.

01:24:28.140 Yeah.

01:24:28.420 And the stories that are at the foundation of the structure through which you look at the world.

01:24:33.200 So in therapy, as you try to work with people like me and everybody else on the planet,

01:24:38.380 I've been told that you challenge us with this concept of complementarity, which was

01:24:44.700 originally a physics idea, Niels Bohr.

01:24:47.400 The idea that you could have particle theory and wave theory, and they could both be true.

01:24:52.020 They're on the surface opposites.

01:24:54.360 Matter is a particle, matter is a wave.

01:24:56.220 But in reality, it's waves and particles.

01:24:58.760 The particles act like waves.

01:24:59.840 And so Niels Bohr could hold both of these concepts in his mind at once without breaking.

01:25:04.500 You know, when Carl Jung was working out his principle of complementarity with regards

01:25:08.940 to unconscious function, he was also having a dialogue with one of the world's most famous

01:25:13.100 physicists.

01:25:13.580 So, in fact, one of Jung's books, which I think is, it's either alchemical studies or psychology

01:25:22.000 and alchemy, is actually a library of dreams that this physicist dreamed up at the moment.

01:25:28.840 And he was one of the physicists who worked on the principle of complementarity.

01:25:31.960 And at the moment, unfortunately, his name has escaped me.

01:25:35.000 Pauling.

01:25:36.140 Pauling.

01:25:36.980 Wolfgang Pauling.

01:25:38.040 Yes.

01:25:38.520 Let me just share with folks at home.

01:25:40.000 So, this is so typical.

01:25:41.340 We're in a conversation.

01:25:42.360 Jordan is tolerating me.

01:25:43.380 He wants to talk to my wife.

01:25:44.760 He was just yelling out the answers to the questions that he has in his mind that he can't

01:25:48.580 articulate.

01:25:49.640 Yes.

01:25:50.060 So, usually when we're together, I go to bed around midnight, which is late for me because

01:25:53.000 I'm a surgeon.

01:25:53.560 You stay up with Lisa until dawn debating Jung and other realities that aren't so obvious

01:25:58.840 to others.

01:25:59.300 So, yeah, so, so, so, so this, this, the, the complementarity idea too is, is part of

01:26:08.020 that does lay out the landscape of the dream because Jung's idea, for example, was that

01:26:12.900 you'll have an ideological framework, let's say, but it keeps things out.

01:26:17.580 That's relevant to your discussion of this filtering mechanism, but there's part of you

01:26:21.780 that keeps track of what you're not paying attention to because you pay attention to very

01:26:26.940 little and you don't pay attention to a lot.

01:26:29.380 And if what you're paying attention to is misaligned, you need, what would you say?

01:26:34.500 You need a repository of alternative potential conceptualizations, and that's fleshed out

01:26:39.300 in the landscape of dream and fantasy.

01:26:41.840 Yeah.

01:26:42.220 It's a brilliant idea.

01:26:43.120 I'm certain it's right.

01:26:44.340 It maps very nicely onto the hemispheric theories.

01:26:46.780 Part of the question becomes, how do we realign Western society to at least begin to focus

01:26:52.020 on things all of us believe are worthy of our attention?

01:26:55.120 Yes.

01:26:55.440 And the stories that we're telling are ones of nihilism, of a power, of a patriarchy

01:27:03.680 that has failed us, replacing a humanistic God with nature.

01:27:08.380 Well, even the dog rescue is an example of that, right?

01:27:11.560 Because that's putting the animal above the human in the hierarchy of values.

01:27:15.320 You might say, well, I love the dog.

01:27:16.680 It's like, you're missing the point.

01:27:18.520 You're missing the point.

01:27:19.660 It's not about what you love.

01:27:21.760 That's not the point.

01:27:22.660 That's too focused on you.

01:27:25.920 Why shouldn't it be focused on me?

01:27:27.760 Well, the simple reason is if everything's focused on you, subjective identity.

01:27:32.720 If your identity is radically subjective, no one is going to want to be around you, right?

01:27:39.060 The degree to which any of us is tolerable to other people, let alone welcome, is directly dependent on how much of our own individual whim and power drive, let's say, that we sacrifice to the relationship.

01:27:51.740 Obviously, we know that with children, two-year-olds can't do that, so they don't have friends.

01:27:59.980 They're still too egocentric.

01:28:01.240 Three-year-olds start to learn to do that, and the three-year-olds that are expert at that, by four, are desirable play partners, and they're socialized by their peers properly for the rest of their lives.

01:28:12.520 And now we're reverting, you know, we're telling all our young kids, it's like, act like a two-year-old.

01:28:17.740 Define yourself subjectively, right?

01:28:19.960 It's about who you think you are.

01:28:22.420 Well, it even begs a question.

01:28:24.700 It's like, what part of you do you think is you, right?

01:28:28.240 Like, it's your immediate hedonistic whim.

01:28:31.200 That's you.

01:28:32.040 What I want, what I feel, right?

01:28:35.060 Well, no one's going to be able to tolerate you, obviously.

01:28:39.320 They'll just walk around you. 0.88

01:28:40.960 They'll find someone else.

01:28:42.280 Why wouldn't they?

01:28:43.720 You know, I used to tell my socially anxious clients, suggest to them that when they went to a party, whenever they started worrying about how they were fitting in, that they flipped that to trying to make other people comfortable.

01:28:57.420 Right, because they couldn't stop.

01:28:59.160 You can't tell someone to stop thinking about themselves, right?

01:29:02.280 Because that just makes them think about themselves more.

01:29:04.720 But you can tell people to make other people welcome.

01:29:07.480 And that takes them out of that realm of self-consciousness.

01:29:11.080 And then they could draw on their own social skills.

01:29:13.720 Many of them had social skills.

01:29:14.980 Not all of them.

01:29:15.700 Some people were socially anxious because they just didn't know how to behave.

01:29:18.720 And that was a more complicated problem.

01:29:21.340 But, well, that all tangles back into the idea that the community is founded on sacrifice.

01:29:26.980 This realization, it just flattened me.

01:29:30.560 Like, because one of the things I understood, I think, was that we have, in the West, in the Christian West most particularly, have been looking at an image of sacrifice for 2,000 years without understanding why.

01:29:47.520 Like, our towns, European towns were literally founded around a sacrificial center, right?

01:29:55.240 The cross, the altar, the cathedral, the town, the country.

01:30:00.820 Why is the sacrifice at the center of that?

01:30:03.660 Well, the answer is, well, sacrifice is at the center of the community.

01:30:07.220 It's like, oh, okay, obviously, it has to be.

01:30:13.860 Community is defined by sacrifice.

01:30:16.220 Like a bear, it just does what it wants.

01:30:18.660 There's no community of bears.

01:30:20.620 It's only a community when you sacrifice.

01:30:23.600 Well, so then that begs the question, what's the highest form of sacrifice?

01:30:27.960 Well, we're going to wrestle our way through that question a lot sooner than anybody thinks.

01:30:35.080 You know, and that's partly what this book is concentrating on.

01:30:38.120 It's like, what's the nature of the sacrifice that redeems?

01:30:41.720 Even though you don't know it, that's the central question of your life.

01:30:45.820 And there's actually an answer to that.

01:30:47.280 Like, you see that in the story of Abraham, right?

01:30:49.380 Because Abraham sacrifices Isaac or is asked to. 0.74

01:30:52.820 He doesn't.

01:30:54.560 And there's a lesson in that.

01:30:55.940 And what's the lesson?

01:30:57.560 If you offer your children to what's highest without reservation, you get them back.

01:31:02.140 And that's 100% true.

01:31:04.660 Because if you're the sort of grasping parent who protects them or who devotes your child to you, they're going to run away.

01:31:14.640 And rightly so.

01:31:16.520 But if you encourage them out into the world and ask them to pursue nothing except what's best,

01:31:26.620 then they'll know you're on their side and you'll get them back.

01:31:30.500 And of course, you know, the atheist types, Dawkins is guilty of this, point to God's demand to Abraham that he sacrifice Isaac as proof of the superstitious quality of the Old Testament narratives

01:31:42.700 and the fundamental malevolence of the God of, let's say, Jacob and Abraham.

01:31:48.560 And that's completely wrong.

01:31:50.440 It's like parents offer their children up to what's highest if they're good parents.

01:31:55.000 And then they get them back.

01:31:56.800 And then they establish a dynasty.

01:31:58.340 And that's actually what happens to Abraham if you tell the whole story.

01:32:02.620 And so it was quite a shock to understand what that meant.

01:32:05.900 And then to understand that that is what you do with your children if you love them.

01:32:09.520 Who would have guessed that?

01:32:12.080 But of course that's what you do.

01:32:13.560 Because raising children is about something.

01:32:17.060 And it could be about your child.

01:32:20.520 Or it could be about what you want.

01:32:22.700 That's not good.

01:32:23.720 The latter one, that's really not good.

01:32:26.020 Is it about your child?

01:32:28.040 No, it's not.

01:32:28.960 It's about encouraging your child to be good.

01:32:32.140 That's what it's about.

01:32:33.680 Well, what do you mean by good?

01:32:35.000 It's in relationship to something.

01:32:37.440 Well, what?

01:32:38.400 Well, the highest possible aim.

01:32:40.800 And it is the aim that our respect for free speech is predicated on.

01:32:45.100 It is the aim that all of the freedoms that make the West what it is and a desirable place to immigrate for everyone in the world who votes with their feet.

01:32:54.920 There's a foundation underneath that.

01:32:57.780 And, you know, we've been wrestling with that today when we've been talking it through.

01:33:01.440 When that foundation shakes, what?

01:33:03.220 Everything shakes.

01:33:04.740 Science, this is so interesting.

01:33:06.580 It was one of the things I found fascinating about talking with Dawkins.

01:33:12.460 Dawkins knows that the scientific enterprise is in trouble.

01:33:16.440 Like, he was hoping that if we switch to a kind of materialist atheism that science would flourish.

01:33:21.140 It's like, no, I think when you knock out the religious substrate, one of the first things that goes is science.

01:33:26.700 It's fragile and unlikely to, you know, to have a whole cadre of people who do nothing but pursue the truth and that they're protected.

01:33:34.480 That was what tenure was for.

01:33:36.580 That's very unlikely.

01:33:38.160 What's the precondition for that?

01:33:40.020 Belief in truth?

01:33:41.020 Belief that the truth will set you free?

01:33:43.260 Belief that you have to tell the truth.

01:33:44.620 That's right.

01:33:45.900 Even when it's at the risk of your career.

01:33:48.420 Which is why science came out of religion.

01:33:50.560 Yeah, well, that's...

01:33:51.380 It was their faith-based traditions, because they put something above each and every one of us, implored us to tell the truth because we weren't reporting to you.

01:34:00.040 Because smart people are really good at lying to themselves.

01:34:04.380 Yes.

01:34:04.580 In fact, the smarter you are...

01:34:06.160 Yes, definitely.

01:34:06.760 The more effective you could...

01:34:07.700 That's why the intellect is Lucifer.

01:34:09.860 Absolutely.

01:34:10.900 And so we see that playing its role.

01:34:12.440 I mean, you know, the learned people who, you know, destroyed Russia and Cambodia and China. 0.60

01:34:18.960 I mean, these were smart people.

01:34:21.100 Yeah, yeah.

01:34:21.380 Paul Pott, he got his PhD at the Sorbonne.

01:34:24.260 Exactly.

01:34:24.700 And where he outlined his plan, much to the delight of the leftist postmodernists that taught him.

01:34:31.060 And then he went back and killed, what, six million people.

01:34:33.960 At least.

01:34:34.500 And, you know, the skulls piled up.

01:34:36.220 You know, he didn't illustrate that part with his thesis.

01:34:38.660 But, you know, these are smart people who come up with these fantastical ideologies that are so destructive.

01:34:43.660 But if the purpose of science is to find truth, someone has to hold you accountable.

01:34:48.340 And we've all witnessed this because you get into a debate and people will cherry pick the facts that they like, which is the opposite of telling the truth.

01:34:55.660 Because you're entitled to your own opinion, as Moynihan often said, but not to your own facts.

01:35:00.140 And we are dishonest, intellectually dishonest about the data, the facts that we're using, which is rampant now.

01:35:05.980 We're seeing more and more.

01:35:07.240 If you go back and just look at all the manuscripts that are published, but half of them are suspect.

01:35:11.360 Yeah.

01:35:11.620 Not minority.

01:35:13.220 And half of them are suspect because people get rewarded not just monetarily, but with tenure, with pride, and ego, and all those things that trump the truth.

01:35:26.060 And we're left without a deeper belief that the truth matters.

01:35:30.140 The whole system begins to implode, right?

01:35:31.820 The gyre begins to spin faster and faster.

01:35:34.460 Yes, yes.

01:35:34.960 And as we crash land, the public is watching this and saying, I thought those guys knew what they were doing.

01:35:40.920 And now I'm seeing them actually censor each other in a way that I wouldn't censor the guy who works at a local deli.

01:35:46.560 I let that guy say his piece, so I can say my piece.

01:35:48.940 And these guys aren't doing the same thing.

01:35:50.900 Again, Nobel laureates being censored because you don't like what they're saying reinforces a pathology that the public begins to appreciate.

01:35:58.520 And I think that was directly correlate with what happened in this election.

01:36:02.960 And that's why the Make America Healthy Again movement got traction.

01:36:06.140 Because some of the things that are being said, there is no way that you'd be able to accept this, even two, three, four years ago.

01:36:13.420 I know because we were saying it.

01:36:14.980 And I'll give you a story.

01:36:15.760 This just happened to me.

01:36:17.360 So the debate around vaccines have gotten a bit louder.

01:36:20.460 And please do not start off, everyone, by saying, oh, he's an anti-vax pro-vax.

01:36:23.460 It's not about that.

01:36:24.400 I had Bobby Kennedy on my show 10 years ago to talk about this issue.

01:36:30.060 And I got, as usual, a ton of grief.

01:36:31.920 But that was my job, I thought, to give people who deserve to have, you know, I say, their minutes on network television.

01:36:39.460 And the first, I asked, are you anti-vax?

01:36:41.640 Because everyone's telling me you're anti-vax.

01:36:43.420 What does that even mean?

01:36:44.480 And I opened this book.

01:36:45.520 And, you know, the first line of the book, the first line was, I'm not against vaccinations.

01:36:50.300 Right, right.

01:36:50.860 And then he said, if you're actually one of the few people who reads the whole book, go to the last line.

01:36:55.620 I'm not against vaccinations.

01:36:57.040 So I thought, my goodness, you know, what I've been told about this guy might not be right.

01:37:00.200 So then I started getting into it a bit more.

01:37:02.220 And one of the issues is hepatitis B vaccine.

01:37:06.260 Now, do you know much about the hepatitis B vaccine?

01:37:08.100 No.

01:37:08.300 This is, you'll, I love your psychological interpretation of what's going on here.

01:37:12.380 So this is a vaccine that's effective, reducing the incidence of a very bad illness called hepatitis B that destroys your liver, leads to liver cirrhosis and transplantation.

01:37:20.520 It kills you.

01:37:21.200 You don't want to get it.

01:37:21.900 You can pass it to others.

01:37:23.500 It's generally passed through sex, prostitutes, high-risk activities, and intravenous drug abuse.

01:37:30.000 Those are the main ways that it gets passed.

01:37:32.040 We vaccinate, we mandate vaccination of every newborn as soon as they come out of their mother's womb. 1.00

01:37:39.360 I mean, like that day.

01:37:40.380 It's the first thing that happens.

01:37:41.360 So doctors look at that and say, well, geez, you know, I just described how you get hepatitis B.

01:37:47.900 I mean, this child's not going to engage in any of those activities.

01:37:51.100 It's true the mother might have hepatitis B, but you could test for that.

01:37:55.120 And that'd be a very tiny fraction of people.

01:37:57.460 Small, but it's there.

01:37:58.440 And I understand that theory.

01:37:59.520 But there's a lot of women who might say, well, test me. 1.00

01:38:01.920 If I don't have hepatitis B and my child's not going to start taking drugs, maybe I don't want to inject them the first day of their life.

01:38:08.100 Right, right, right.

01:38:09.020 You can't ask that question.

01:38:11.200 So this weekend, I'm at an event, and a woman who's, I'm speaking, so I deliver a little bit of this message.

01:38:19.180 And a woman comes up to me afterwards, and she says, I'm a doctor, and I'm a little alarmed by what you said.

01:38:25.300 And I said, well, what part of you bothered you?

01:38:27.120 And she said, well, you know, I just had a baby, and I vaccinated the baby.

01:38:31.620 So, you know, I think it's helpful for them to have the hepatitis B vaccine.

01:38:35.280 So I said, I know you vaccinated the child, or you allow the vaccination, but do you still think that it really was helpful to have it the first day of life?

01:38:45.180 Could they have had it, you know, when they were 10 or 12 or 15 or 18?

01:38:49.040 Because I vaccinated my kids, but they were about to enter into college.

01:38:52.780 There was actually a possibility they might get exposed to it.

01:38:56.860 And I saw the wheels turning and the panic in her eyes.

01:39:02.100 And then she said, well, at least it's safe, which is an unfortunate comment to make, because I'm not going to argue that it's safe or not safe.

01:39:12.560 But if there's no value, then I don't want to even ask the second question.

01:39:17.320 She was going through something that I think many Americans are suffering from.

01:39:21.580 Because she realized that she didn't really understand this and had taken the advice of the experts, she couldn't acknowledge the expert advice might have been wrong.

01:39:30.680 Yeah, of course.

01:39:31.880 Well, there's also another psychological fact that you're running up against there, which is that we rapidly bring our beliefs in line with our actions.

01:39:41.700 Like people think you believe and then you act.

01:39:45.040 It's like, well, some of the time, much of the time you act, you watch yourself act, you draw the conclusions about your belief that your actions indicate, and you bloody well stick to those beliefs.

01:39:57.320 Well, why? Well, you've already committed yourselves to them behaviorally.

01:40:01.340 So this physician that you're describing, she had a real conundrum at hand because it wasn't a mere abstract issue for her.

01:40:08.440 She'd already vaccinated her baby.

01:40:11.160 So if she's wrong, then she did a bad thing.

01:40:15.460 To her own baby.

01:40:16.240 Yes, exactly. Right. On its first day.

01:40:18.600 Right. Well, you know, you could imagine the evidence would have to stack up pretty high before she's going to be willing to swallow that bitter pill. 1.00

01:40:25.380 That's why I think when it happens, it'll be a tsunami.

01:40:29.120 Until now.

01:40:29.740 Maybe it's already happened.

01:40:30.860 I think it's starting, which is why I believe it impacted the election so powerfully.

01:40:34.480 And I know in Pennsylvania that it did.

01:40:36.120 It made a very big difference because we were actively involved there.

01:40:39.040 The Maha movement per se.

01:40:40.740 It took a lot of people who started to feel the kind of anger that motivates you to vote when they began hearing these stories.

01:40:50.020 Because you eventually, maybe that position now, several days later, is having this epiphany.

01:40:55.240 You at some point have to deal with the fact that you may have hurt your child.

01:40:58.400 Yeah.

01:40:58.680 And that makes you really unhappy.

01:41:00.820 Yes.

01:41:00.920 That's the basic biology of...

01:41:02.740 Well, it's worse, too, because you may have hurt your child and you did it because you believed the experts.

01:41:10.680 Right.

01:41:11.200 So now there's lots of rats that crawl out of that nest, isn't there?

01:41:14.600 It's like, well, why did I listen to them?

01:41:17.900 And are they, in fact, experts?

01:41:21.440 Right.

01:41:21.760 And so we've certainly hit that period of questioning in our society in a very large way.

01:41:26.360 And when you mandate it, in a way, shames the new mother who just went through a lot of stuff and is in a vulnerable position.

01:41:35.480 That's for sure.

01:41:36.140 And when she is shamed by the nurse or physician taking care of the baby about the fact that she must not love her child if she's not willing to follow the state law which mandates vaccination and isn't able to ask in that confused moment a couple extra questions, they take that person...

01:41:53.820 That's for sure.

01:41:54.580 And they will not forget it.

01:41:55.900 And we're starting to see that in lots of other areas.

01:41:58.860 If fluorinating the water is not really, really important to do for the betterment of society, then you start to feel that you may have tacitly allowed something to happen that puts your family at risk.

01:42:10.460 So there better be a good explanation, a good reason.

01:42:12.640 And there might be.

01:42:13.320 I'm not even saying that these issues are settled.

01:42:16.060 The science is being debated and it should be.

01:42:18.220 But you couldn't ask the questions.

01:42:20.040 And now more and more, GMOs, pesticides, herbicides, glyphosate, is it really a problem?

01:42:25.620 You know, what are the toxins that we're allowing in our environment that don't seem to be allowed in other countries?

01:42:30.540 Is it true that we have that much plastic in it?

01:42:32.340 Does it really matter?

01:42:33.420 You know, are you feeding me a lot of junk food and subsidizing it so it's, you know, you're making, you're chumming the water basically.

01:42:38.760 So I'm going to go, you know, looking for it.

01:42:40.640 And now I'm putting weight on it.

01:42:42.040 It turns out it wasn't all my fault.

01:42:43.740 That kind of stuff gets people, because it's very personal, to start to think differently about who's on their team.

01:42:49.580 And I believe the reason this issue is so critical is because you have an opportunity on the Republican side to take a generation of people who didn't have strong sentiments.

01:43:00.060 Remember, half the people don't vote.

01:43:01.740 Yeah.

01:43:02.040 Half do not vote.

01:43:03.460 Yeah.

01:43:03.740 If some of those people all of a sudden begin to think, you know what, I'm believing that this Republican Party cares about issues that I care about, they start to become Republicans.

01:43:13.700 Yeah.

01:43:13.900 And that's an existential threat to the Democratic Party, because this should be an issue the Democrats embrace.

01:43:19.160 So if they both embrace it, you actually start to get change.

01:43:23.100 Let's turn our attention to the political scene again on the Daily Wire side of this.

01:43:28.480 We've got another half an hour.

01:43:30.020 I think that would be a good conversation.

01:43:31.820 I'd like to lay out, I'd like to hear more about your thoughts regarding the Maha movement in general, how you think that could go right and how you could, how you think it could go wrong.

01:43:42.500 Underneath that, there's obviously this broader discussion of this massive shift in the political landscape that has taken place that we don't understand.

01:43:52.340 Because at one level of analysis, it's the Republicans defeating the Democrats.

01:43:56.860 But Trump, Kennedy, Gabbard, Ramaswamy, and Vance, those are very strange Republicans, right?

01:44:07.860 First of all, most of them were Democrats.

01:44:10.540 So I'd like to delve into that a little bit.

01:44:12.480 So all of you who are watching and listening, you can follow us on the Daily Wire side for another half an hour.

01:44:17.880 And we'll dig more deeply into the possibilities that are going to be laid out in the coming months and years as this radical shift propagates itself through the political system.

01:44:28.060 Thank you very much for talking to me today.

01:44:31.060 And also, I should say, too, thank you for interviewing me back in 2018.

01:44:36.820 You know, you, I've had very few American, in particular, mainstream media interviews.

01:44:42.160 Like, I can certainly count them on the fingers of one finger, really.

01:44:46.380 So, you know, that was quite seriously, like it's, you know, it's fine and it's fine.

01:44:53.640 But the reason I'm bringing that up isn't to bemoan the fact because it hasn't mattered that much.

01:45:00.760 But it does also highlight the degree to which you took a risk and very early on.

01:45:06.160 And so I definitely appreciate that.

01:45:08.760 Well, if I can add one thing to that.

01:45:10.100 Part of the reason I'm launching my podcast is because of what happened after the interview.

01:45:17.560 And the interview went two hours and 42 minutes.

01:45:20.560 I'll never forget it because it was so ridiculous that I would have talked to you that long.

01:45:24.540 I loved it that much.

01:45:26.320 Lisa and I spent weeks preparing for it because you were explaining things that were so fundamentally important for folks to hear all over the world.

01:45:34.540 And so I do the interview and I think, oh, it's too bad it's so long because people aren't going to listen to it.

01:45:40.100 More than 5 million people have listened to a two-hour, 42-minute interview, which means, in my mind, there is an appetite, a voracious appetite if the information truly is life-changing.

01:45:51.580 And so it highlighted to me that although there are many benefits of network television, reach, obviously, you know, you can-

01:45:58.120 Uniformity, for that matter.

01:45:59.660 You can begin to get people to think, you know, similarly around important issues, particularly valuable when we have crises like COVID.

01:46:05.520 But if you want to go deep into the kind of topics that change your life, it's nice to take those little sparkly ideas and go deep with them.

01:46:14.060 So first, thanks for coming out and trusting me to host you because I know it was a difficult time.

01:46:18.120 But also for awakening me to the possibility that we could talk about stuff with a lot more depth than ever thought possible.

01:46:24.620 Yes, well, we can also discuss that on the Daily Wire side, too, because I'd also, I'd like to discuss the, what would you say?

01:46:32.220 Well, expand on exactly the distinction between what's happening in the new media world, let's say, and the legacy media.

01:46:40.360 We can take that apart in some detail.

01:46:42.100 Well, so infinite bandwidth, right, and permanence, those are radical changes, low cost.

01:46:48.220 And they do change the dynamics of the social landscape in ways that we're barely beginning to understand.

01:46:53.840 And thank you very much, sir.

01:46:55.360 God bless you.

01:46:55.920 You bet, man.

01:46:56.640 Good to have you here.

01:46:57.700 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - May 01, 2025

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

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