The Megyn Kelly Show - Dr. Drew Pinsky on COVID Hysteria, The Rise of Narcissism, and Marriage and Parenting

00:00:00.000 When I found out my friend got a great deal

00:00:02.160 on a wool coat from Winners,

00:00:03.780 I started wondering,

00:00:05.440 is every fabulous item I see from Winners?

00:00:08.560 Like that woman over there with the designer jeans.

00:00:11.260 Are those from Winners?

00:00:12.780 Ooh, or those beautiful gold earrings?

00:00:14.880 Did she pay full price?

00:00:16.620 Or that leather tote?

00:00:17.620 Or that cashmere sweater?

00:00:18.840 Or those knee-high boots?

00:00:20.280 That dress?

00:00:21.060 That jacket?

00:00:21.740 Those shoes?

00:00:22.780 Is anyone paying full price for anything?

00:00:25.780 Stop wondering.

00:00:26.980 Start winning.

00:00:27.920 Winners.

00:00:28.520 Find fabulous for less.

00:00:30.620 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:32.520 Your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:42.120 Hey, everyone.

00:00:43.200 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:44.520 I'm Megyn Kelly, and happy Friday.

00:00:47.160 Today, we've got Dr. Drew Pinsky.

00:00:49.620 You know Dr. Drew.

00:00:50.820 He is doctor of internal medicine.

00:00:53.320 He's an addiction specialist, and he's a superstar.

00:00:56.200 You've seen him all over television and podcasting,

00:00:59.820 the internet, and so on.

00:01:01.120 Right now, he's hosting the Dr. Drew podcast.

00:01:03.400 He's also co-hosting The Adam and Dr. Drew Show.

00:01:06.120 Did you know that Corolla and Drew are still together?

00:01:08.700 It's an uncensored, nothing-off-limit show about where they take calls,

00:01:12.960 about sex, drugs, rock and roll, you name it, even love boat.

00:01:15.680 And then there's Dr. Drew After Dark, a modern-day love line,

00:01:19.660 which is where I first saw him and where he became a star back in the day,

00:01:24.080 where they'd answer questions about people's love lives.

00:01:26.400 He and Corolla.

00:01:27.300 It was so fun.

00:01:29.080 Anyway, so he's got all sorts of thoughts,

00:01:31.240 and we're going to talk about so many interesting things.

00:01:33.200 Several of my staff just popped on after this interview and said,

00:01:36.100 I love that.

00:01:37.100 He's got to be a regular, and I agree with that.

00:01:38.660 I'd love to have him as a regular, because he can talk about anything.

00:01:41.440 We've spent a lot of time on COVID and how isolated people are feeling.

00:01:44.840 Do you have anybody in your life who feels a little crazy right now,

00:01:47.540 thanks to the COVID lockdowns and a year not talking to people?

00:01:50.840 Well, Doug and I have seen this with some of our pals in New York,

00:01:54.120 like, whoa, whoa, what's going on?

00:01:56.700 We're going to talk about that.

00:01:58.300 We're going to talk about therapy.

00:02:00.120 We're going to talk about drugs, marriages, kids, drinking, pornography,

00:02:05.000 you name it.

00:02:05.780 We got into it, and I really enjoyed the whole thing.

00:02:08.440 It was sort of an emotional journey.

00:02:09.680 And how the country right now has moved from narcissism into histrionics.

00:02:15.380 That was a good part of the discussion.

00:02:16.940 Anyway, you're going to love it all and love him.

00:02:18.740 And we had a little fight about Dr. Fauci, which you'll enjoy, too.

00:02:22.760 Dr. Drew's awesome.

00:02:23.940 We'll get to him in one minute.

00:02:25.300 First, this.

00:02:32.040 Dr. Drew, how are you?

00:02:33.600 I'm great.

00:02:34.120 How are you, Megan?

00:02:35.140 I'm so well.

00:02:36.340 I'm so excited to talk to you about many topics.

00:02:39.420 And let's start with the one of the week.

00:02:42.160 What the hell's wrong with Andrew Cuomo?

00:02:43.580 Well, I mean, all roads lead to narcissism these days, so I don't think he's any exception.

00:02:49.600 What's extraordinary to me about people that take a certain position, the blind spots they

00:02:58.200 have in their own personal behavior, and this is something we see a lot these days, where

00:03:03.120 a lot of the consternation out in the world is because of projection and something called

00:03:08.340 projective identification.

00:03:10.340 And so you see bad parts of yourself out there in the world, and that's where you attack

00:03:14.820 it, and then you don't see it in yourself.

00:03:17.500 And certainly that's the case.

00:03:19.420 You know, again, people talk about him as being, what, tone deaf, right?

00:03:24.480 He didn't get it.

00:03:25.240 And he shows that video of himself kissing everybody.

00:03:27.320 I kiss everyone.

00:03:28.240 My mom kissed everyone.

00:03:29.320 My dad kissed everyone.

00:03:30.600 He forgot the part about my mom and dad shoved their hands up somebody's blouse over their bra

00:03:35.080 without their consent.

00:03:35.820 I didn't see that in the video.

00:03:37.520 Yeah, I didn't see that either, but to be fair, you know, it's so funny this has come

00:03:41.800 up right now.

00:03:42.340 My daughter and I have just written a book about consent, and she's a 20-something woke

00:03:46.740 person, and she has her perspective on this and kind of expanded my understanding of consent.

00:03:53.140 And one of the things that she took issue with was how family members, you know, encourage

00:03:58.580 children to be boundaryless with other family members, like, go kiss your uncle without considering

00:04:04.020 what the child is experiencing, which is part of the consent process.

00:04:07.320 And so there's all kinds of things families do that are sort of, I don't want to use too

00:04:11.480 strong a word, but quasi-pathological, that have adverse impact on kids.

00:04:15.840 And that very phenomenon is what we saw on display in full throttle on that video.

00:04:20.960 We can blame Mario Cuomo.

00:04:23.940 Look, I mean, to be fair, we, you know, physical abuse of children was endorsed for many, you

00:04:28.780 know, generations, and this is not okay.

00:04:31.220 We know it's not okay, and yet cultures have endorsed it for long periods of time.

00:04:36.100 But what do you make of it?

00:04:37.060 I mean, I'm genuinely curious.

00:04:38.860 What Janice Dean was on the other day, and we were talking about him, about Cuomo, and I've

00:04:43.720 had this conversation about Harvey Weinstein as well.

00:04:45.840 You know, and the general belief about sexual harassment is that it's not about trying to

00:04:50.060 get action.

00:04:51.120 It's about power.

00:04:52.660 It's about, you know, sort of seeing how small you can make the woman across from you, or

00:04:56.840 the gender roles could be reversed.

00:04:59.200 And I just wonder, I think in most cases, that's probably at least largely true.

00:05:04.660 I just don't know about him and getting the executive assistant against the wall with the

00:05:11.220 hand under the blouse, allegedly, and grabbing the bottoms of random women and feeling up the

00:05:16.980 boobs of some woman who waited to see him on a rope line.

00:05:20.400 I don't, I genuinely am curious, what would make a man in his position do that?

00:05:26.580 Well, I'm going to speculate.

00:05:28.000 And let me, let me push back.

00:05:31.100 Right.

00:05:31.820 And let me push back on the, the power small diathesis that you bring up there.

00:05:36.840 I do believe in the strongest terms, that is what a woman who's the object of this experiences

00:05:43.260 because her motivational systems that she can't experience in any other way.

00:05:47.220 And it is such a profound violation of her personhood, both her physical personhood and

00:05:53.280 her sort of, um, the self-respect that she deserves.

00:05:57.120 So dignity.

00:05:58.260 So, so no doubt in my mind, that's what a woman feels.

00:06:00.920 I don't think that's what men are experiencing.

00:06:02.700 Look what happened to men as they age.

00:06:04.460 When they get more demented, they get more like this.

00:06:07.220 They're not thinking about power.

00:06:08.340 They start grabbing and that's just in our system.

00:06:11.100 And if you feel entitled to gratify that BS in motivation, that is, you know, sort of,

00:06:17.680 we, we have men has all kinds of bizarre aggressive impulses.

00:06:20.680 That's what people are talking about when they talk about toxic masculinity.

00:06:23.720 This is what they'd like to men to get under control.

00:06:26.240 We'd like to encourage men to go ahead and keep that under control because you guess what?

00:06:30.440 We think better of you.

00:06:31.420 You can, but that is in us as a motive, not us, many men as a motivational state.

00:06:37.060 And they're just, they're just gratifying it just because they can.

00:06:40.040 And to that extent, there's a belief that the woman wants it.

00:06:43.000 Do you think for a guy like, like, she wants it.

00:06:46.260 So this random person wants me to feel up her boots.

00:06:48.860 Megan, it's me.

00:06:50.020 It's me.

00:06:50.540 Of course she wants it.

00:06:51.740 And that's the power piece.

00:06:52.840 She's attracted to me because I'm this powerful, virile man.

00:06:55.820 Look at me.

00:06:56.560 I mean, he has made, he and his brother have made references to those things about them.

00:07:02.460 And it's gross.

00:07:03.780 And listen, you mentioned Weinstein.

00:07:07.640 Weinstein, I was really listening to some of the things he said very carefully.

00:07:11.260 And it was uncanny.

00:07:13.160 The way he used the same defense strategy.

00:07:16.240 In Cuomo's place, it was, this is my culture.

00:07:18.680 This is my family.

00:07:19.840 In Weinstein's, I don't know if you remember, he said this in great detail.

00:07:22.500 I grew up in the 70s on Long Island.

00:07:25.280 And this is just what we did.

00:07:26.680 It was indoctrinated.

00:07:27.440 We thought this was right.

00:07:28.500 And I would even go one step further.

00:07:30.600 Oh, this is gross.

00:07:31.520 But this is true.

00:07:33.080 Back in the 70s, I don't know if you can, were you conscious then?

00:07:38.160 Can you remember any of that?

00:07:39.160 I was in a stroller, but I was around.

00:07:41.000 Well, let me tell you something that happened that no one has been talking about.

00:07:44.060 And I recall it because I was an adolescent at the time.

00:07:47.060 The young males were told, listen, men and women, they are exactly the same.

00:07:52.660 Sound familiar?

00:07:53.240 We're doing the same thing now.

00:07:54.220 They are exactly the same.

00:07:55.660 And we have to unleash women from the oppression of the past.

00:08:00.200 They have the same sexual urge as you do.

00:08:02.320 And your job is to bring that out, to be as aggressive as possible,

00:08:05.960 so they don't have to feel responsible for unleashing this repression that they've been put under.

00:08:12.620 This is what the young males were told.

00:08:13.820 And then you take a toxic environment like he was in, and now it's on.

00:08:18.220 Now it's on.

00:08:19.140 And the problem is, it's disgusting because we then don't tell them to think about the behavior and educate them.

00:08:25.460 Hey, stop.

00:08:26.620 No, none of that was okay.

00:08:28.280 I understand you were 17 and reared on that.

00:08:30.300 None of it's okay.

00:08:31.480 And they just stay with it because they can.

00:08:34.060 Now we're back to the power thing again.

00:08:35.620 Now they can.

00:08:36.620 And that's where the power figures into it.

00:08:38.720 They don't suffer consequences.

00:08:40.300 That is a common phenomenon in power and celebrity, and it works against mental health in all situations.

00:08:49.260 I mean, I will say that I think there can be a fun little cat and mouse situation, you know,

00:08:54.220 pursuer and prey between a man and a woman that I, for one, don't want to see us legislate away, right?

00:09:01.860 Like any sort of pursuit or pushing past a woman's initial, you know, I'm not sure.

00:09:06.820 And then, you know, I just sort of think that's playful and fun.

00:09:10.340 And that's, but then couples have to figure out where the line is, right?

00:09:13.540 Like no, no generally does mean no, but sometimes it means like, well, ask again.

00:09:17.740 You have to differentiate for men this dance versus aggression.

00:09:28.840 One is non-aggressive.

00:09:30.700 It's an art form that you're talking about, which is it's okay to show interest and it's

00:09:35.660 okay to show a lot of interest.

00:09:37.680 It is not okay to violate boundaries and be disrespectful, period.

00:09:41.780 And we're talking about outside of the work setting right now.

00:09:43.760 We're not talking about a boss over a subordinate.

00:09:46.760 Correct.

00:09:48.160 And when, and this is another thing, you know, so whenever there is a power in,

00:09:52.740 whenever there's a power circumstance, let's say in the workplace, and let's just use the workplace.

00:09:56.800 And this is not exclusive to the workplace, but it is certainly most commonly in the workplace.

00:10:01.040 The people with power are responsible for the people beneath them.

00:10:05.080 Their job is to hold boundaries and take care of those people, not to exploit and, you know,

00:10:11.120 and violate boundaries.

00:10:12.460 It's, it's not different.

00:10:13.920 And why I have a lot of heated feelings about this, than a physician taking advantage of

00:10:17.840 a patient, right?

00:10:19.600 It is a, it is a terrible problem.

00:10:22.740 And here's the really disgusting part about it.

00:10:25.560 Let's say in a patient, a physician relationship, the patient that is going to try to validate,

00:10:30.700 validate, violate those boundaries is precisely the patient who had been abused and is attracted

00:10:37.100 to these sorts of circumstances and explicitly need the boundaries held in order for their

00:10:43.120 mental health to improve.

00:10:44.300 As soon as you violate those boundaries, you are engaged in a traumatic reenactment and

00:10:48.400 you're just putting that person in an endless cycle of dysregulation.

00:10:51.360 You think there's a fair amount of doctors who do that, who cross that line with a patient?

00:10:56.080 Historically, there's been, I don't think so much now, but historically for sure.

00:10:59.260 Do you ever have a patient come on to you?

00:11:00.780 Oh, it's a common thing.

00:11:02.940 It's in the psychiatric setting.

00:11:04.120 And in fact, that's why you, that's why you don't ever go in a room alone, because not

00:11:08.580 only does that happen, but it also happens that they can distort what's going on if they've

00:11:13.520 been previously abused and sort of report something that just didn't happen.

00:11:16.520 So you can have to, you always have to have other eyes in the room.

00:11:19.780 But therapy is always alone.

00:11:22.360 I don't, I, so I don't do individual, I, I would do the kind of therapy you do in a hospital,

00:11:28.460 in a medical unit.

00:11:30.160 And so I would bring a patient into the room with my nurse and it's, we, I wasn't doing

00:11:34.780 long-term therapy with anybody.

00:11:36.780 Occasionally.

00:11:37.180 That's fascinating.

00:11:37.740 Occasionally.

00:11:38.140 There is that sort of, I think there's that general thrill of, um, I don't know.

00:11:43.060 I remember when I was in law school, there was this very geeky professor.

00:11:47.100 I mean, he, he probably weighed 120 pounds.

00:11:50.220 He wore a little bow tie.

00:11:51.620 He wore a sweater vest.

00:11:52.740 He had no hair.

00:11:54.280 And I thought he was hot.

00:11:56.400 And I thought I was attracted to this guy.

00:11:58.860 What's wrong with you, Megan?

00:11:59.580 What's going on here?

00:12:00.820 Really?

00:12:01.220 And it was just, he was so smart.

00:12:02.500 He was in a power position over me.

00:12:04.100 And there is sort of this like Jones that can come from that, that relationship where

00:12:08.600 you're sort of the peon and the other person is in power over you and has control over

00:12:12.380 in this situation, your grades.

00:12:14.340 Um, and I don't know, it's always exciting when you stimulate a man based on your intellect,

00:12:19.040 right?

00:12:19.480 Like if you're having fiery intellectual exchanges, that can be an aphrodisiac.

00:12:24.080 And to this day, I think to myself, oh my God, if this guy ever knew that I was sitting

00:12:28.080 in his class.

00:12:29.160 But the bigger issue is how old were you?

00:12:31.740 Uh, 21.

00:12:32.920 Okay.

00:12:33.820 Technically, I mean, females are a little more, you know, developed at 21 than males,

00:12:38.260 but, but let's call you at least young adult, if not adolescent.

00:12:42.040 And what adolescents need to complete their development is adults to take care of them and maintain

00:12:47.160 boundaries so they can develop a sense of boundaries around themselves.

00:12:50.860 So impulses like this can become playful and not destructive.

00:12:54.460 See, I mean, it's just so it's again, a teacher taking advantage of the student worst thing,

00:12:59.620 just as bad as a, as a physician and a patient.

00:13:02.160 It violates your needs in the moment.

00:13:04.100 So we never acted on this.

00:13:05.260 He, I mean, he had no attraction to me, none whatsoever.

00:13:07.760 As far as I can tell, although I was looking for it, um, but you know, you probably, so nothing

00:13:11.860 ever happened.

00:13:12.600 But, but are you saying if he had acted on, if he had, let's say we had some, some night in the

00:13:17.220 sack together, that that would be a me too situation, even though I wanted it?

00:13:21.680 Oh, 100%.

00:13:23.420 That would have been anathema to your development through young adulthood, anathema.

00:13:30.400 And, and it would not only have been a me too, because whenever there's a power imbalance,

00:13:34.640 you have to be extremely careful.

00:13:37.300 This is one of the problems.

00:13:38.240 If somebody is a celebrity and wants to date anybody, there's already a power imbalance

00:13:42.500 and somebody can easily turn back and say, well, I, you know, sort of blinded by this

00:13:46.340 edit that he took advantage of it.

00:13:47.800 Yeah.

00:13:48.400 Yeah.

00:13:48.620 You have to be super careful.

00:13:50.220 Fascinating.

00:13:50.740 Well, I mean that these poor celebrities, they can't wind up having one night stand with

00:13:55.980 anyone.

00:13:56.520 No, I don't mean that.

00:13:57.400 I don't know if you, do you know, Mark Geragos at all, but Mark and I went to high school

00:14:00.580 together.

00:14:01.000 We've, we've sort of knew each other.

00:14:02.000 We've been friends ever since.

00:14:03.160 And our sons have been friends.

00:14:04.300 Celebrity lawyer.

00:14:05.120 Right.

00:14:05.440 And he was telling me that he has paperwork for every one of his celebrity clients, that if somebody

00:14:09.960 comes in their house, somebody dates them, if somebody is going to go further with them,

00:14:14.280 they sign paperwork before they do.

00:14:17.600 Yeah.

00:14:18.180 Well, you know, I was talking to somebody who I guess I shouldn't name the baseball player,

00:14:22.440 but a very, very famous baseball player.

00:14:24.660 And he knows that baseball players team, like the people around the guy.

00:14:29.980 And the story is that if you hook up with his baseball player as a young woman, upon entering

00:14:36.360 the apartment, there's a guy standing there with a video camera saying, are you okay?

00:14:41.240 Are you drunk?

00:14:42.000 Are you of your own free will?

00:14:43.280 Blah, blah, blah.

00:14:43.640 Yeah.

00:14:43.900 And upon exit, the same thing.

00:14:46.140 Now, is it bulletproof?

00:14:47.000 You know, no, but it's very helpful in staving off frivolous lawsuits or claims, et cetera.

00:14:53.100 That's right.

00:14:53.940 Well, what's crazy to me is the boys at South Park, Matt and Trey are like, I, they must

00:15:00.420 be time travelers or something because they predicted this kind of thing about three, four years

00:15:05.200 ago, PC principal.

00:15:07.220 And Trump's presidency, didn't they?

00:15:08.480 Also Trump's presidency.

00:15:09.520 Everything.

00:15:10.080 You name it.

00:15:10.720 They, they, they come, they previously predicted it.

00:15:14.200 They are oracles.

00:15:15.400 How they're able to do this.

00:15:16.580 I don't know.

00:15:16.900 I wonder what's coming next.

00:15:18.360 But yeah.

00:15:19.260 A hundred million, a billion dollar deal.

00:15:21.100 I think they just signed a billion, a $900 million deal.

00:15:23.620 So that's what's coming next.

00:15:24.700 With, with Comedy Central, Viacom?

00:15:27.360 We have Viacom.

00:15:28.480 Yeah.

00:15:29.020 It's so funny.

00:15:29.580 I know that Seth MacFarlane had something extraordinary too.

00:15:33.640 And I, and he was a friend of mine.

00:15:34.800 And I haven't seen him in a while, but I just said, look, I don't care what they're paying

00:15:36.980 you.

00:15:37.100 It's not enough.

00:15:37.860 It's like, you are.

00:15:39.140 But can I say something about that?

00:15:40.440 Go ahead.

00:15:40.940 Seth MacFarlane.

00:15:41.700 So I saw the news yesterday.

00:15:43.440 He said something about being with Fox.

00:15:45.700 He's with big Fox, not Fox news channel, but you know, it's obviously still Murdoch.

00:15:50.140 Something like this needs to be, this needs to end in divorce.

00:15:53.100 This marriage is not working.

00:15:54.580 He doesn't like the relation to Fox news channel.

00:15:57.740 And he, he was basically complaining that, you know, this is about the, about the ownership

00:16:02.700 structure and the relation.

00:16:04.320 And I can, I have no tolerance for that the same way.

00:16:07.300 I have no tolerance for James Murdoch running around besmirching Fox news.

00:16:11.040 You, you can't make your gazillions off of the entity.

00:16:16.540 And then once you have them say they're disgusting, I am horrified.

00:16:21.620 It's like James Murdoch is sending, saying nasty things about Fox while he rides on a jet

00:16:26.220 paid for by Fox news in it from his mansion, paid for by Fox news on his way to his yacht

00:16:30.940 paid for by Fox news.

00:16:32.200 So spare me if I don't have my little violin out for him and others, you know, who profited

00:16:36.980 off of the Fox empire.

00:16:38.220 And now just want to say they're disgusted to have made a mint off of it.

00:16:41.560 We call that hypocrisy.

00:16:43.180 It's just hypocritical.

00:16:44.120 You don't, you don't get to, to capitalize on their, what they're providing, uh, and own

00:16:49.780 it and then complain.

00:16:51.540 It's disgusting.

00:16:52.220 You don't want anything to do with it.

00:16:53.560 If you want anything to do with it, spin it off.

00:16:54.740 That's fine.

00:16:55.160 That's all cool.

00:16:56.220 Um, yeah, so yeah, it is, it is interesting.

00:16:58.780 You know, I was doing a, I did a nightly newscast on Fox 11 here in Los Angeles and I had every

00:17:05.420 time I, every time I talked about what I was doing, I have to say not Fox news and I have

00:17:10.180 to think family guy.

00:17:11.300 It's a, that Fox it's, it's weird.

00:17:13.060 Just the mention of Fox news raises tons of, uh, feelings in the people.

00:17:17.920 Yes, it does.

00:17:18.920 I'm aware.

00:17:19.660 Yes.

00:17:19.980 I've heard that.

00:17:21.180 Um, your reference to the seventies brings something up for me.

00:17:24.920 There was this dust up on Twitter this week.

00:17:27.540 It wasn't big, but I, it did sort of catch my attention.

00:17:30.300 Some reporter sent out a tweet saying, maybe we should have like soft core porn on the internet

00:17:37.780 made available for teenagers because right now all they can access and they are accessing

00:17:43.460 it is hardcore porn.

00:17:44.720 It's very damaging.

00:17:45.660 Well, the internet unleashed hell on this woman.

00:17:47.540 And then, then another organization came out and said, no, but seriously, maybe we should

00:17:52.900 have that.

00:17:53.320 And then now they're getting pummeled.

00:17:54.920 And I agree with the pummeling, right?

00:17:56.880 I totally, I do not support that, that idea at all, but I, I went to this education seminar

00:18:03.580 for parents of young boys and I have two boys, I have two boys and a girl.

00:18:07.680 My oldest is about to be a 12 year old boy.

00:18:10.380 And they said at that, at that seminar, I'm trying to find my stats here that, uh, the vast

00:18:15.680 majority or the average, the average 12 year, the average boy sees internet porn at age

00:18:21.800 11 for the first time.

00:18:23.700 It's actually because, uh, because of when was that seminar?

00:18:29.020 Uh, it was just the one year ago when it, right before the COVID lockdown, it appears

00:18:33.620 that because of all the distribution of those tablets to kids to be educated at home, that

00:18:39.740 has been pushed back maybe a year, maybe more.

00:18:42.240 Oh my Lord.

00:18:43.540 Yeah.

00:18:43.780 So I'm worried about this as a mother.

00:18:46.380 Yeah.

00:18:46.780 I, I know it's like when I was, when you and I were kids, when I was in the seventies,

00:18:50.700 I remember the first time I ever saw like a penthouse and there was this clubhouse that

00:18:54.600 we always to hang out in.

00:18:55.600 It was fun.

00:18:56.000 I mean, we just go in there and like have fun and talk.

00:18:58.000 And one day there was a dirty magazine in there, quote unquote dirty magazine.

00:19:01.240 And I remember, you know, my eyes were like silver dollars, like, Holy cow.

00:19:04.660 I'd never seen a female body like that.

00:19:06.640 And then of course they had penthouse forum, which I was like, this, this is too much for

00:19:09.880 me.

00:19:10.080 I was little.

00:19:12.100 So it happens.

00:19:13.060 It's not just because of the internet that young kids get exposed to the stuff, but with

00:19:16.940 the internet, it's ubiquitous.

00:19:18.220 It's so easy to stumble upon and it's so graphic.

00:19:21.800 So what do you, what's your advice to moms like me?

00:19:24.820 I mean, we have the controls and all that on there, but that's not going to, that's not

00:19:27.820 going to stop it.

00:19:28.460 All those parents of the 11 year olds who are averaging into that number probably have parental

00:19:32.120 controls on and your kid has access to somebody's phone somewhere that doesn't have them.

00:19:36.420 Yeah.

00:19:37.820 It's a problem, right?

00:19:39.060 And we don't even know the full impact yet.

00:19:41.660 I have a personal theory that for males, things they see from about 11 to 14, sort of in that

00:19:49.920 window, visually things that they see that are intense become preferences.

00:19:55.460 And so I don't know what that's going to do to them in terms of what they think about and

00:20:00.600 want to do with female peers in their adult life.

00:20:03.860 So there's, that's a concern.

00:20:05.020 Number two, it's overwhelming and traumatizing to kids to see explicit stuff like that.

00:20:11.400 And it adds to emotional dysregulation and problems, trusting and confusion about closeness.

00:20:17.880 That's a major, major problem.

00:20:19.780 And then in terms of what can you do, there's a, there's a big problem that is a cousin of

00:20:27.900 this, which is sexting, which also begins in young adolescents and is a crime in most

00:20:34.640 states.

00:20:35.420 In most states.

00:20:35.900 Go ahead.

00:20:38.500 I was just going to say that this is one of the points that they were making at the seminar

00:20:41.140 I went to, or they were saying even, even to see it.

00:20:43.680 So if your son or daughter for that matter, gets sent a sext, just it being on their phone

00:20:50.520 can be a crime.

00:20:51.900 And so everyone needs to make very clear with their kids, that stuff comes in.

00:20:55.620 You don't even look at it.

00:20:56.820 All you do is give mom the phone and let mom or dad handle it.

00:20:59.620 So, so it's requesting, sending, receiving, looking, sharing with your peers.

00:21:05.900 Each one of those is a separate felony crime.

00:21:08.680 And, and there are certain states that will go after that if the parents are upset about

00:21:13.380 what happened.

00:21:14.540 And even if you didn't want it and sort of inadvertently, lives have been ruined by that.

00:21:19.660 So kids need to understand that, that, that happens in some states and that maybe that's

00:21:25.860 a way into the conversation about how serious these issues are.

00:21:29.900 I've always felt that, you know, I think this is excessive, but it's this opportunity

00:21:34.320 to talk about these things.

00:21:35.340 My friends that are psychologists, I have one woman in particular that I interview on my

00:21:39.200 streaming show, uh, which I do, you can see it, drdrew.tv, uh, just interviewed her

00:21:44.680 and she runs an academy on how to do this and how to want, and she, with her kids, she

00:21:51.160 allows them one hour a day on their phone.

00:21:52.920 That's it, period.

00:21:53.420 That's it.

00:21:54.680 And she's been able to maintain that.

00:21:56.500 And she's scared of that even.

00:21:58.640 So people that have seen the consequences have no difficulty maintaining, uh, strict

00:22:04.760 boundaries around it.

00:22:05.880 It's hard when you're just the general parent, you don't really, you sort of trust your kids

00:22:09.640 and you, they tell you that they can't function without it.

00:22:12.020 And you believe it.

00:22:12.700 It's a, you can't function without your phone.

00:22:15.040 It's, it's a constant struggle.

00:22:17.760 And I think more than anything, we have to figure out how to prepare for the exposure and

00:22:22.700 help them manage it in a healthy way because it's common.

00:22:26.420 On the subject of sex, they say young, young girls get in particular trouble on this because

00:22:31.700 how does a girl sexed?

00:22:34.000 The boys want a picture of her breasts nine times out of 10, or this is what the girls

00:22:37.820 choose to send.

00:22:38.580 And they hold the camera down.

00:22:40.480 They, the camera is below them, right?

00:22:42.220 Cause you're getting from the ground up.

00:22:43.820 So their face is in the shot, whereas boys take a, take a picture from the top down and

00:22:49.560 their faces aren't in the shot.

00:22:50.840 And therefore you're seeing a lot of girls have their reputations ruined and their lives

00:22:54.160 ruined when their faces and their breasts are all over the internet because somebody

00:22:57.900 wasn't trustworthy.

00:22:58.880 What a shock.

00:22:59.980 Um, and so I do think that is worth just discussing with your kids, but I, I don't know.

00:23:04.060 It's like porn on the internet.

00:23:05.840 I confess, I haven't discussed this with my kids.

00:23:08.080 I don't really want to highlight it if they haven't seen it and you know, you plant the

00:23:12.020 seed in there and then the next thing, you know, there's, they're only human.

00:23:15.040 They go looking for it.

00:23:16.640 Hey, listen.

00:23:17.500 And if they're not looking for it, uh, I don't know if you've been around a group of young

00:23:21.780 males lately, but they share each other stuff.

00:23:24.540 They try to freak each other out.

00:23:25.940 They try to one up each other with their prowess in terms of seeing and understanding.

00:23:30.580 Mine is a little angel.

00:23:33.300 Well, maybe he is, but those around him are not.

00:23:35.860 I assure you.

00:23:37.000 Um, and so it's, I mean, it is a really serious struggle.

00:23:42.800 I, I, I am a big believer though, in stringent boundaries.

00:23:46.080 I know it sounds awful.

00:23:47.620 Um, like I said, my psychologist friends that work in this area have very stringent boundaries.

00:23:51.660 I feel the same way about drugs and alcohol and anything you really don't want kids to

00:23:55.580 be doing.

00:23:56.000 You have to lay down serious consequences because they, they'll push on that even if you have

00:24:00.420 serious consequences.

00:24:01.840 Well, what do you mean about that though?

00:24:03.240 Because I talked to other parents about this all the time.

00:24:05.460 Like, do you, are you the house that lets the people have the kids have the party with

00:24:09.540 alcohol or not?

00:24:10.420 I mean, in my position, of course, if you're not, never.

00:24:12.880 So here's what I told my kids about that.

00:24:15.020 Uh, I said, um, listen, you know what I do for, they'd, they'd been to my drug unit.

00:24:19.160 They'd seen the patients in there struggling.

00:24:20.940 And I said, you know what I do for a living?

00:24:22.700 And I said, I see adolescents all the time where the parents do not do what's right.

00:24:27.360 And the adolescents end up in disasters or dead.

00:24:29.880 So because of that experience, I, I have feel have very, very strong feelings about this.

00:24:35.360 And I feel like I'm obliged to follow what I know to be necessary to keep you safe.

00:24:40.480 So I said, God forbid you go to a party where another parent is giving you alcohol, because

00:24:46.780 if they do, I will show up with the sheriffs and I'll be standing on the long last, I'll

00:24:51.820 be standing on the long laughing my goddamn ass off as they haul those parents off for

00:24:56.560 exposing you to alcohol for contributing delinquency of a minor for gut.

00:25:00.420 And, and by the way, every, every unwanted consequence in adolescence, everyone, whether

00:25:07.280 it's an STD or a fight or an accident or a pregnancy, you always find alcohol.

00:25:12.780 So if you can control the alcohol, you can control most of the negative consequences in

00:25:17.900 adolescence.

00:25:18.500 And so I said, I'll be standing there laughing my ass off.

00:25:20.500 So good luck.

00:25:21.500 Show up one of those parties.

00:25:22.700 I'll be standing along with the sheriff.

00:25:24.260 It'll be great.

00:25:24.900 I can't wait.

00:25:25.680 So did your, so you have, if correct me if I'm wrong, you have triplets who are now 28,

00:25:29.400 two girls, my boy.

00:25:30.760 Two boys and a girl.

00:25:31.580 Okay.

00:25:32.180 Two boys and a girl.

00:25:32.880 Okay.

00:25:33.100 So did they not drink at all?

00:25:35.920 They didn't get invited to those parties is what happened because they let, let the word

00:25:40.780 be known.

00:25:41.720 They didn't get invited.

00:25:42.700 I want Dr. Pinsky.

00:25:43.860 And, and they may have tried out, I'm sure they tried alcohol, but, but I'm certain that

00:25:47.920 it wasn't at the hands of an adult.

00:25:50.100 And I said the same thing.

00:25:51.260 I said, if, you know, if you develop an addiction problem, I'm going to pack your car with heroin

00:25:54.980 and make sure the cops find you.

00:25:57.540 I just, it just is.

00:25:59.200 I know I'm going to be saving your life and I, and I have to do that.

00:26:02.480 And so I, I didn't, we didn't really have addiction and I didn't expect that problem,

00:26:07.280 but I was sure that they would be invited to parties where parents were doing.

00:26:10.760 Why would a parent take that liability?

00:26:12.460 They, they, they, anything bad that happens in the party, which is always the case with

00:26:15.940 alcohol, the parents are responsible if they're administering and providing the alcohol.

00:26:20.540 It's crazy.

00:26:21.600 Well, but I think, so to me, that's a no brainer.

00:26:24.320 And I've certainly, I haven't spent much time thinking about my end of it.

00:26:27.460 Cause I just know I, I wouldn't do it.

00:26:29.060 I would not be that parent, but I've heard parents.

00:26:32.040 I love, you know, friends say they want to be the house that hosts because then they

00:26:36.220 can control it.

00:26:36.740 Then they can keep an eye on their kid.

00:26:37.960 They can't.

00:26:38.320 That's a horrible idea.

00:26:39.340 Let me tell you, statistically, they're wrong.

00:26:42.080 They're just categorically wrong.

00:26:43.420 It's the exact wrong thing to do.

00:26:44.760 Not only is it wrong from the standpoint of thinking you can control it.

00:26:48.280 That's just categorically wrong.

00:26:49.300 The bigger problem is you cannot tell an adolescent, you can do this here, but not here.

00:26:55.840 Because when you tell them you can do this here, they're doing it.

00:26:58.840 They're going to, they'll be circumspect, but they're going to push the boundaries as

00:27:02.680 they always do.

00:27:03.620 You have to draw the boundary back sooner.

00:27:05.840 If you say, you know, you can smoke cigarettes here, but not over there in the men's room.

00:27:10.360 Are you kidding?

00:27:11.120 Are you adolescents?

00:27:11.740 Are you kidding?

00:27:12.780 Of course.

00:27:13.560 They just immediately blow through boundaries.

00:27:15.480 As soon as you say it's okay to do something, they're going to go, why just there?

00:27:18.680 Why?

00:27:18.980 You said, you gave me the alcohol.

00:27:20.840 You're watching me.

00:27:22.600 It's a complete lack of understanding of how the LSM brain works.

00:27:27.540 Well, it's interesting because I mean, I've said this before, but in my own house, my parents

00:27:30.640 made very, very clear that no drugs whatsoever would be tolerated of any kind.

00:27:35.040 So I knew it was a hard line and I had no interest in drugs, even marijuana.

00:27:39.680 I just never tried it because in my school, it was considered kind of low life.

00:27:44.340 It was something low life did.

00:27:45.400 You know, like we used to call the people who are into pot the dirties and they hung out

00:27:49.620 in what was called the dirty section where they kicked around the hacky sack during lunch.

00:27:53.320 And I was part of a different group called the swelts, which, you know, they would drink,

00:27:57.060 but they wouldn't do drugs.

00:27:58.760 It sounds like a it sounds like a warring party from 15th, 17th century Florence.

00:28:05.940 Oh, my God.

00:28:06.540 Can I tell you, it's straight out?

00:28:08.440 No, the swelts, the creamies, the dirties.

00:28:10.620 My high school is straight out of a John Hughes film.

00:28:12.900 Oh, my God.

00:28:13.320 However, my parents didn't send that hard, hardcore message on alcohol.

00:28:17.800 And I did drink when I was younger and I wish I hadn't.

00:28:22.040 You know, now, of course, I look back and I wish I hadn't.

00:28:24.140 And I can see the war coming in my own family, right, where my kids and like friends are going

00:28:27.940 to start drinking.

00:28:28.460 And I and like I want to sort of try to shore myself up to say like hard line, same thing

00:28:34.640 as my mom did.

00:28:35.480 But I'm worried I might not mean it.

00:28:37.280 Well, so here one of the because you didn't have that model, but but here again, you know,

00:28:42.300 when you work in the field, it makes you, you know, it makes it much easier because you

00:28:46.980 just know.

00:28:48.580 And one of the great delusions that is promulgated everywhere in the world is we teach our kids

00:28:55.000 how to drink.

00:28:55.640 We give them wine on the table.

00:28:57.360 We're Italian.

00:28:58.160 We're French.

00:28:58.640 We give them on a table.

00:29:00.080 Italians and French have alcoholic liver disease, uncanny levels of consequences from alcohol.

00:29:06.480 Every piece of data we have shows that the first drink for the alcoholic is usually in

00:29:12.940 the home and usually by age eight.

00:29:16.100 And it is we have the same data on adolescent rats that if you expose them early, they're

00:29:21.380 more likely to lose control.

00:29:23.160 This is this is again, anathema.

00:29:25.220 This is a fallacy.

00:29:26.660 It is wrong.

00:29:28.080 Exposing the alcohol in the home.

00:29:30.160 And again, you have to have the genetic burden of alcoholism.

00:29:33.200 But if you've got that genetic potential, it makes that potential more likely to be

00:29:38.440 expressed, not less likely, more likely.

00:29:41.660 So teaching somebody in the home is another fallacy that we sort of have out there.

00:29:47.400 Yeah, I did hear that at another seminar we went to.

00:29:50.000 We go to a lot of the seminars because we don't read all the many parenting books.

00:29:53.860 So when they offer them, we go.

00:29:55.240 And they were saying the same thing.

00:29:56.060 Like the longer you can delay your child's first drink, the lower his or her odds of

00:29:59.840 becoming an alcoholic.

00:30:00.920 It doesn't it's not a guarantee, but the more you can postpone it, the better you say that

00:30:05.680 again.

00:30:06.000 The what?

00:30:06.560 Say that the longer you can postpone your child's first alcoholic drink.

00:30:10.920 That's the lower his odds of becoming an alcoholic.

00:30:13.920 That's exactly right.

00:30:14.780 Now, it's a there's a necessary and sufficient sort of quality to alcoholism.

00:30:19.200 You've got to have some genetic potential for it.

00:30:21.300 But even so, you can have problems with alcohol, a relationship with alcohol that's not alcoholism

00:30:27.160 per se.

00:30:27.980 And that also goes up if you expose them early.

00:30:32.600 Up next, you know anybody who's gone covid crazy, right?

00:30:36.380 People who are just different as a result of the past year and a half.

00:30:39.160 Are you one of them?

00:30:40.600 Dr. Drew tackles that in one minute.

00:30:42.680 Now, I'm interested in your background because I think people who go into mental health always

00:30:51.780 have interesting backgrounds, right?

00:30:53.020 And I say this as somebody whose mom is a psychiatric nurse.

00:30:56.300 Doug's dad was a psychiatrist.

00:30:58.200 My first husband's dad was a psychiatrist, too.

00:31:00.280 So interesting.

00:31:02.020 And so you choose.

00:31:04.040 I know you're an internist, but you do you do therapy.

00:31:06.360 I mean, you talk about you therapy all the time.

00:31:08.820 So let me explain what happened to me so you can understand my sort of career because I have

00:31:11.800 kind of a weird career path.

00:31:13.460 So I was a straight up internist.

00:31:16.260 I was, you know, practicing medicine.

00:31:18.500 I was chief resident.

00:31:19.660 I was going to be thinking about being a cardiologist.

00:31:22.480 I was very good at intensive care stuff.

00:31:24.660 I still can do all those kinds of things.

00:31:26.900 And I started moonlighting in a psychiatric hospital.

00:31:30.880 And I always had an interest in mental health and the human psyche.

00:31:35.200 And this sort of really peaked that.

00:31:37.440 And I started getting more and more involved.

00:31:39.000 I ended up taking over their department of medicine.

00:31:40.680 So I became an expert in the medical care of psychiatric patients, which is a really important

00:31:45.600 skill.

00:31:45.980 I don't know if I can emphasize this enough, but about 20 to 30 percent of the time, I

00:31:50.680 would either find a medical issue that had precipitated the psychiatric symptomatology,

00:31:56.080 a medical issue that was contributing to the psychiatric syndrome, or a medical issue

00:32:00.300 caused by the psychiatric syndrome.

00:32:02.040 So it's very common for psychiatric patients to have really significant medical issues.

00:32:06.020 So that was a thing.

00:32:07.060 A lot of the day-in, day-out medical problems were down on the drug unit.

00:32:11.900 So I ended up spending a lot of time down there.

00:32:13.760 I liked the culture.

00:32:14.600 I liked the staff.

00:32:15.300 I hung out there.

00:32:16.380 I got very good at detoxing patients from drugs and alcohol.

00:32:19.820 All the while, I would sit in the nursing station to look through the window into the

00:32:23.780 treatment room and see the 12 steps on the wall and go, what is that silliness?

00:32:27.720 I'm doing the real, I'm getting them off the drugs here.

00:32:30.140 What is that nonsense?

00:32:30.920 I had no idea what was going on, but I watched some people go, young, healthy people who were

00:32:36.660 dying of addiction become these amazing human beings.

00:32:40.060 And I was like, whoa, that, I want to be a part of that.

00:32:42.340 What, what is that?

00:32:43.280 What is happening here?

00:32:44.340 So I got more and more and more involved in the treatment process, was asked to be the

00:32:48.280 assistant director of a program.

00:32:50.320 And then the six months later, the director quit and I became the director of the program.

00:32:54.920 And that's when I really dug in and got another board certification in that field, made it

00:33:00.740 my, my sort of, um, what should you say?

00:33:04.180 My passion to really expand my understanding.

00:33:07.140 And addiction is such a fascinating field because you get to see all the other higher functions

00:33:12.520 of the brain serving a broken system, the motivational system, serving a false God.

00:33:17.360 The system that normally says survive, that's good survival.

00:33:20.940 Yes.

00:33:21.140 Love your family, go to work, do your hygiene.

00:33:23.120 Those are, those are rewarded things in your brain at the very base of the brain that becomes

00:33:28.100 tweaked and one motivation emerges, which is do drugs and all the other systems, the

00:33:33.300 thinking, the interpersonal experiences, everything serves this broken God.

00:33:37.780 And you can see how the brain works in sort of an interesting way because it's not working

00:33:42.760 normally.

00:33:43.340 It's so fascinating.

00:33:44.940 Also had to understand the medical neurobiology.

00:33:48.060 You had to understand the psychiatry.

00:33:49.360 You had to understand the interpersonal and family systems.

00:33:51.140 It really was the crossroads of everything.

00:33:54.140 And so that, that's where I started digging in.

00:33:56.640 So all the while I was had for 25 years, I had two careers.

00:34:00.220 I had general medicine, inpatient and outpatient.

00:34:02.760 And then I had the psychiatric thing, which eventually just became addiction medicine.

00:34:08.120 Mm-hmm.

00:34:09.080 Do you feel like, I mean, I've seen the stats, but have you, have you anecdotally seen an increase

00:34:14.040 over the past year with the lockdowns and so on in drug addiction and alcohol addiction?

00:34:19.940 A hundred percent.

00:34:20.700 I mean, even forget alcohol addiction, just substance use.

00:34:23.920 Substance use is up.

00:34:25.240 Make no mistake about it.

00:34:26.320 Use and abuse.

00:34:26.920 Because you can abuse without being an addict.

00:34:29.100 Absolutely.

00:34:29.700 And you can have consequences without being an addict.

00:34:31.560 You can hurt yourself without being an addict.

00:34:32.960 But look, more deaths in San Francisco from opiate overdoses than COVID.

00:34:37.200 Uh, Mr. Governor, you want to pay a little attention over here?

00:34:40.400 Mr. Mayor, Mrs. Mayor, uh, pay attention.

00:34:43.280 We have more deaths from drug addiction than from COVID.

00:34:47.120 And you're shutting down society for one and literally endorsing the other to continue

00:34:52.040 allowing people to die in your streets on a regular basis.

00:34:55.040 What is going on here?

00:34:56.740 Yeah, it's worse.

00:34:57.660 Depression is no, the depression is up fourfold.

00:35:00.400 Anxiety up fourfold.

00:35:01.320 I mean, isolation, disorders of isolation, not to mention just delaying coming in for medical

00:35:06.780 treatment and all that is done.

00:35:08.400 It is it.

00:35:09.380 I knew this was going to happen.

00:35:10.500 I could see it coming.

00:35:11.520 I was, I was on this from the get go that they were going to cause a major mental health

00:35:15.680 problem and they did it.

00:35:16.980 Well done.

00:35:17.540 Well done, everybody.

00:35:18.420 What, what specifically, I mean, I realized losing one's job, you know, being sort of cut

00:35:22.960 off from society, but what do you think was the most damaging part?

00:35:26.720 I would say two things.

00:35:28.440 And one is sort of something you can kind of dig into inducing panic and hysteria.

00:35:35.140 That is an extremely destructive thing to do.

00:35:39.440 The way to lead humans.

00:35:41.360 I mean, do you think George Patton, you know, induced hysteria in his troops when they were

00:35:45.940 in trouble?

00:35:46.600 He would go, gentlemen, some of you aren't going to make it back.

00:35:49.640 We have an obligation to move forward.

00:35:51.000 Let's go get this thing.

00:35:52.460 That's how you solve problems.

00:35:53.900 That's how we've always done it.

00:35:55.200 As opposed to shelter in place, hide in your home.

00:35:58.140 Where did that come from?

00:35:59.920 I was sure.

00:36:00.700 No, there's no infectious disease textbook that advises that anywhere ever.

00:36:05.320 But, you know, the whole idea of lockdown came from a 14-year-old girl in Albuquerque.

00:36:09.180 You know that, right?

00:36:10.680 No.

00:36:11.160 Oh, you don't know the history of lockdown?

00:36:12.520 Was her name Rochelle Walensky?

00:36:14.240 Was it her?

00:36:14.620 No, no.

00:36:15.140 Was it the young Rochelle?

00:36:16.560 No, his name was Green.

00:36:17.800 Her last name was Green.

00:36:18.940 So throughout human history, you quarantine sick people, not well people.

00:36:25.040 There was never a concept of stay in your home or lockdown.

00:36:29.760 Though I will tell you there's a natural tendency, this is borne out in the smallpox literature,

00:36:36.400 that when there's an outbreak, humans tend to reduce their social contact naturally.

00:36:41.220 That's what we do when we're trying to protect ourselves.

00:36:43.580 But never, only one time in history was there a stay home order.

00:36:47.700 And that was in Venice.

00:36:48.640 I think it was the 14th century, and it was a catastrophe.

00:36:51.440 Never before.

00:36:52.940 Then we have Wuhan, China outbreak, and we have the government there behaving in the strangest way from a medical perspective.

00:37:00.860 Chlorine-containing drugs rolling down the street, squirting the street.

00:37:04.860 What was that?

00:37:06.340 Locking people in their homes?

00:37:07.880 That's not—physicians, I promise, did not do that.

00:37:11.260 No doctors were involved in that decision.

00:37:12.960 That was either something they had rehearsed in case there was an outbreak from their lab or a face-saving measure by the local Soviet, whatever you want to call it,

00:37:22.460 so the higher-ups didn't blame them for whatever happened.

00:37:25.340 This was some government action.

00:37:27.680 Not medical.

00:37:28.920 Not medical.

00:37:30.400 Then we have every press outlet in this country demanding the same response, demanding it.

00:37:37.060 The New York Times editorial board demanding lockdown.

00:37:40.080 That, to me, was breathtaking and disgusting.

00:37:43.560 I hope people look back at that and look at that with a jaundiced eye and with care, because that was how we got into this mess.

00:37:52.120 And we had a government then responded to it.

00:37:54.820 Then there was even more going on at the time.

00:37:57.440 Of course, anything that was Trump, we had to do the opposite.

00:37:59.760 So Trump says no lockdown, so California locks down completely.

00:38:03.120 Now, I actually signed up for the lockdown at the time and said, well, our leaders are in a tough position.

00:38:08.200 Until we can figure out exactly what we're dealing with, let's listen to our leaders.

00:38:11.680 I mean, that's just sort of my thing.

00:38:12.500 Bend the curve.

00:38:13.420 Yeah, bend the curve.

00:38:14.180 Okay, listen to the leaders.

00:38:15.160 That's fine.

00:38:15.980 But then we're still in it now here in California, for Christ's sake.

00:38:18.940 I mean, it's just unbelievable.

00:38:19.780 So back to the lockdown, this young 14-year-old did a science, a summer science project, where she built a model that showed that you could disrupt an influenza outbreak, very different than a respiratory virus, an influenza outbreak by holding kids back from school, essentially.

00:38:40.100 Influenza is hand transmitted and transmitted by kids and kills kids.

00:38:45.200 So it was an interesting model for influenza.

00:38:48.120 Her father, who worked at the, I forget the name of the lab, it wasn't Los Alamos, but it was another think tank in New Mexico, he was a model builder.

00:38:57.920 He was a computer modeler.

00:38:59.560 And he thought, wow, she's really onto something.

00:39:01.460 I bet I can make a model about local lockdowns, local lockdowns for a pandemic.

00:39:06.840 The Bush administration found it after he published his paper with his daughter, the 14, I guess now 15-year-old, as the second lead author, as the pandemic policy.

00:39:18.660 That's something that they could do.

00:39:19.980 Now, they never used it.

00:39:21.200 We went through H1N1, which was a terrible pandemic.

00:39:24.040 And by the way, I cut my teeth on the HIV epidemic, which had a 100% fatality, not a 1%, not a 5%, a 100% fatality.

00:39:34.880 I was telling people as a third-year medical student, every day they were going to die in six months.

00:39:39.480 I was never wrong.

00:39:40.960 We never induced, we never employed this so-called lockdown policy.

00:39:46.360 It was just a theoretical sort of instrument that they put on their sort of – but it was never meant for a respiratory virus and never meant for the entire country.

00:39:58.400 It was meant as a localized sort of phenomenon.

00:40:01.160 And that became what we lived through.

00:40:03.300 It's just uncanny.

00:40:04.280 I look around now as people sort of emerge, you know, as they periscope up from – in places like New York City and soon, I hope, for you in California, and you see them coming out more – I mean, maybe a little bit less now with the Delta variant going around and all the scaremongering about it.

00:40:19.140 But in New York, when the masks came off and people started to go back to the restaurants, what I noticed, and Doug noticed it too, my husband, is that there are some people who seem to have gone a little batty.

00:40:30.040 Like, there are some people who have – they've gotten themselves so scared.

00:40:34.180 They've really spent the past year alone avoiding restaurants, avoiding other people, normal people, friends of ours who, you know, are young and very cool people.

00:40:44.940 Like, it's not like a bunch of elderly who should be staying at home more.

00:40:48.320 No, no.

00:40:49.140 And you can sort of see there's a little craze in their eye, you know, that you can just see, like, the beard's gotten really long, and they're a little unkempt, and they look a little scattershot with the eyes.

00:40:58.900 And I've been just anecdotally wondering, what happened to them?

00:41:03.340 Are they coming back from that?

00:41:06.520 Well, hopefully.

00:41:07.820 I mean, the problem is – I think adults will come back for that.

00:41:11.400 The problem is we may have injured permanently 8 to 15-year-olds who manifest similar stuff.

00:41:16.860 Humans need social media.

00:41:18.400 We may need social contact.

00:41:20.040 Why do you think the most severe penalties a human can face is isolation?

00:41:24.700 That is the worst that a human can tolerate.

00:41:27.880 Our self emerges in the context of our relationships with others.

00:41:31.740 Our capacity to feel our emotions and regulate them happens because of the reflection of others.

00:41:37.540 Our ability to make meaning of life and have things like careers and be of service is our relationship to others.

00:41:44.500 When that is restricted, as you say, we go batty.

00:41:48.540 It's the worst thing you can do to a human being.

00:41:51.880 And to do it with a particularly no end in sight, it's just – it's torture.

00:41:57.320 And this is – this was entered into – there's another layer to this whole thing that we're getting into here that I want to point out, which is what my profession did.

00:42:05.780 And I pointed out to you repeatedly that this was not a medical decision.

00:42:09.200 This was not a medical – there's no infectious disease policy that talks about lockdowns and not even social distancing.

00:42:15.000 You won't find that in an infectious disease textbook.

00:42:17.460 But my profession, because of the politicization, because of the mob on social media, because as I've discovered most physicians now are employees, this was a shock to me, they were afraid of losing their job, they were afraid of their reputation, they were fearful of the mob, and we froze in place.

00:42:37.840 Physicians became unwilling to do anything.

00:42:40.340 I've never experienced an illness where my peers just said, go home till you get sicker.

00:42:47.460 That is the opposite of what we do.

00:42:50.400 Now, interestingly, my surgical colleagues did not do that.

00:42:53.500 They kept improvising and doing things for their family and patients quietly.

00:42:57.580 But trust me, they were doing stuff.

00:42:59.420 I saw it.

00:43:00.340 But the rest of us, the primary care side, froze in place, mostly out of fear of losing the job, I think, or getting attacked by the mob.

00:43:07.880 So we shut up, and we ceded our decision-making, our responsibility to the FDA, the CDC, and the NIH.

00:43:16.660 Do you think, Megan, those organizations ever had anything to do with any decision I ever made when I was taking care of a patient through a 35-year career, ever?

00:43:27.520 They would send me information and publications and give suggestions.

00:43:31.340 They were not involved in the decision-making.

00:43:33.080 I did that.

00:43:34.220 My training, my judgment.

00:43:36.300 We ceded that entirely to bureaucrats who have not been clinicians in, if ever, many years, who don't understand how to make or can't make a risk-reward analysis from where they are and can't admit they're wrong and can't change direction.

00:43:50.520 It is the worst of medicine.

00:43:52.720 No, nothing about mental health.

00:43:54.240 Nothing.

00:43:54.540 What are Dr. Fauci's or Rochelle Walensky's qualifications there?

00:43:58.080 She's the one, speaking of not inducing a panic, she's the one saying, I feel an impending sense of doom.

00:44:05.660 She's crying.

00:44:06.880 I have a bad feeling.

00:44:07.840 It's like, grow up.

00:44:09.540 Thank you.

00:44:10.540 The other thing is we knew how to do health messaging.

00:44:13.260 We studied it during HIV.

00:44:15.180 We had a real problem in HIV.

00:44:16.540 We had to change behavior, and we discovered during that epidemic, pandemic, was that you create narratives where you see the consequences of people's actions.

00:44:28.160 You use a little music, a little humor, a relatable source.

00:44:32.060 That changes behavior.

00:44:33.560 It's been my model forever in terms of using media.

00:44:36.900 It's why Teen Mom works.

00:44:38.280 It's why Loveline works.

00:44:39.400 Because you have a little case.

00:44:40.980 Somebody explicates it.

00:44:42.160 There's some humor, and they hear it.

00:44:43.960 They get it.

00:44:44.420 They receive it, and they adjust their behavior.

00:44:46.780 Somebody in a box and a white coat telling them what to do, or worse yet, in a panic with a bad feeling, that does not change behavior.

00:44:55.800 It hardens behavior.

00:44:57.160 Why do you think we have vaccine resistance?

00:44:59.080 It's all that.

00:45:00.480 You don't trust what you're seeing.

00:45:01.880 You just go to withdraw.

00:45:04.480 That's why I think people are looking at the approval of the vaccines as non-experimental.

00:45:10.920 We're expecting the real approval by the FDA, maybe in September.

00:45:14.240 And these folks who are trying to force mandates on us and so on and masks on us and force the vaccine, they see this as some sort of cure-all.

00:45:23.520 Like, oh, if we could just get the real approval, the anti-vaxxers, they're going to change their mind.

00:45:28.080 And that's not going to do anything.

00:45:30.440 These people don't trust the government.

00:45:33.480 Yeah, they don't.

00:45:34.600 And you're exactly correct.

00:45:36.560 Because I've talked to a lot of vaccine-resistant, and it's always the same thing.

00:45:40.360 It's always about trust, trust, trust.

00:45:41.880 And I don't know where to go to get trusted information.

00:45:44.780 But I must tell you, Megan, I have talked to a lot of them.

00:45:48.420 And most of them tell me that if there was full approval, that would loosen their resistance a bit.

00:45:54.440 The other thing, there's a vaccine platform called Novavax that's an old-fashioned pertussis platform that should be out any minute that they agreed they would take when you describe it to them.

00:46:05.480 So there may be some stuff there.

00:46:07.660 As far as the FDA approval, you know, the main thing that holds that approval process up is the drug companies have to fund it.

00:46:14.140 And these guys have already sold their products.

00:46:15.720 So I don't know how motivated they are to fund that full development, full approval, number one.

00:46:19.960 And number two, it's the attorneys.

00:46:21.680 It's getting through the legal morass of approval.

00:46:24.900 That takes forever.

00:46:26.740 The number of, I want to get my numbers in front of me, but the number of people within the black community who have gotten the vaccine is under 33%.

00:46:34.560 It's 24%.

00:46:35.240 It's about 24%.

00:46:36.620 And so when you create a vaccine passport, you are now creating, that's the most racist policy of the last 50 years.

00:46:46.940 So basically 75% of the black community can't eat in New York City restaurants now.

00:46:51.160 Can't go to a restaurant, can't go to a theater.

00:46:52.600 I mean, just because of the color of your skin, quite literally.

00:46:56.100 Where's Ibram X. Kendi?

00:46:57.500 Just unbelievable.

00:46:58.580 It's unbelievable what they're doing.

00:47:00.020 Right.

00:47:00.220 Just one gaffe after another.

00:47:01.900 I can't understand it.

00:47:03.200 Well, I don't, I mean, I know that there's data saying people who are anti-vax would see a guarantee they didn't have to wear masks as an incentive to get it.

00:47:13.880 Right.

00:47:14.180 Like they hate masks just as much, if not more, than vaccines.

00:47:17.980 But, you know, we're going the opposite way on that, too.

00:47:20.160 It's now that now everybody who's been vaccinated has to have a mask on, according to the CDC.

00:47:24.260 They don't know what they're doing.

00:47:25.360 And as much as they don't understand mental health, they really don't understand PR.

00:47:31.000 Right.

00:47:32.200 PR and, again, health messaging that adjusts behavior.

00:47:36.800 They're trying to change behavior.

00:47:39.320 That's the goal.

00:47:40.280 In order to do that, we know a lot about that.

00:47:43.460 I don't know where they were.

00:47:45.500 What are they talking to?

00:47:46.360 They've been doing that.

00:47:47.220 Yeah.

00:47:47.480 I don't understand.

00:47:48.780 I think it's just the panic.

00:47:49.740 They're in a panic.

00:47:50.460 Everyone's in a panic.

00:47:51.140 And that panic gets transmitted to the public.

00:47:52.940 And that adversely impacts the mental health.

00:47:55.440 That's it.

00:47:56.000 But I want to ask you about about disinformation.

00:47:58.140 OK.

00:47:58.540 And the crackdown, because I know this is something that you've been railing on, too.

00:48:00.820 And you've been the victim of the YouTube jail.

00:48:03.480 And you've been put in YouTube jail.

00:48:06.060 So twice.

00:48:06.960 How do we figure this out?

00:48:08.440 Because as I look at the Internet and I know the Biden administration has identified the disinformation

00:48:13.480 dozen and it's the 12 people most responsible, allegedly, for putting out COVID lies in the

00:48:18.340 Internet.

00:48:19.000 And it may be true.

00:48:19.680 I haven't I haven't actually gone through and clicked on other websites and tried to

00:48:22.440 figure out what's true and what's not true.

00:48:24.140 I don't have time for that.

00:48:24.980 But.

00:48:26.240 I, I, I, gosh, I'm trying to figure it out myself because I'm against government censorship.

00:48:31.320 I don't like disinformation.

00:48:32.880 I tend to believe the answer to bad information is good information.

00:48:36.280 Right.

00:48:36.680 Don't censor the one.

00:48:37.600 Just offer the other.

00:48:38.820 I agree.

00:48:39.180 But I, I also have seen people I know get sucked down Internet rabbit holes that are just

00:48:47.000 so misleading.

00:48:48.160 And I can see that once they get pulled into that, it's like, it's impossible to extricate

00:48:53.280 them.

00:48:53.620 I mean, it's just impossible to pull them back.

00:48:56.500 It seems to be like glue.

00:48:58.120 Once you get, once you get pulled into this, in my experience, pulling them back out with

00:49:02.440 good information is a lot harder than it would seem.

00:49:04.600 It is harder and they need to have something experiential that pulls them out.

00:49:10.880 So there's two issues.

00:49:12.360 How do you combat it?

00:49:13.640 Which is one.

00:49:14.160 And then how do you get somebody out of a hole?

00:49:15.960 And, and they need to, somebody around them needs to get sick.

00:49:18.900 That's really what happens.

00:49:19.900 That's, that's when they come out of it.

00:49:21.140 Um, so, you know, if they could be somehow exposed, I don't know, they need something

00:49:27.540 experiential.

00:49:28.260 It's not, not no longer a didactic issue.

00:49:30.620 It's not like you can educate them out of it because they have a thousand other educational,

00:49:34.960 you know, sort of didactic responses that they're going to push and push back at you.

00:49:38.120 You have to change the emotions.

00:49:40.800 It's an emotional thing.

00:49:42.040 And that has to change.

00:49:43.080 But I completely agree with you that good information with is how you fight bad.

00:49:47.760 And the only way you can, the, the obfuscation of information has been the reason you've created

00:49:53.740 such distrust in the resistant population.

00:49:56.040 That's where the distrust comes from.

00:49:57.920 Open the data up, be, show, show where you're ambivalent.

00:50:01.400 Show, don't, don't this idea that, you know, public health messaging has to be one unified

00:50:06.480 monolith.

00:50:06.900 That's a mistake.

00:50:07.640 That's a gigantic mistake.

00:50:09.280 You need to tell them where you're unsure.

00:50:10.980 You need to be honest about what the data is.

00:50:13.300 You need to come forward with everything that, and it's got to be good data and you've got

00:50:17.620 to help people understand what's good and what's bad and get, get, get, open it up.

00:50:22.380 That's the only way to combat this.

00:50:23.740 Now, now, again, we're talking about engaging trust from people who are distrusting.

00:50:28.680 I'm not sure you need that for everybody.

00:50:31.220 Some, many people just follow the edicts, whatever the people in authority say, but in terms of getting

00:50:36.500 further with those that are resistant, it is about the obscurity of what they're saying

00:50:42.440 and the fact that there's other data that people come upon that flies in the face of

00:50:46.860 what the official data is, the worst thing you could do for this population.

00:50:50.320 You know, I was thinking about it because you've got, there's this one guy who my attention

00:50:57.140 was called to, and he's on the list of the disinformation doesn't.

00:51:00.180 CNN just went after him the way, remember when Paris Hilton got arrested all his years

00:51:05.240 and all the photographers were outside of her?

00:51:06.820 It was the most crazy media event.

00:51:09.400 They went after him like he was Paris Hilton of 2006.

00:51:12.100 They, they documented how they tried to track him down here.

00:51:15.660 They tried to get, they did a confrontation on the street.

00:51:17.920 Jesse water style got in his face.

00:51:19.860 And you know, what about this?

00:51:20.620 What about this?

00:51:21.180 And this guy's apparently like well loved by this sort of very hard anti-vax community.

00:51:27.280 And I thought, all right, let me, let me figure out a little bit about this guy.

00:51:29.900 And it turns out this guy believes that he can put, he can take the temperature on your

00:51:33.360 chest and figure out whether you have breast cancer.

00:51:35.460 Okay.

00:51:36.580 All right.

00:51:37.040 A bunch of nonsense.

00:51:38.320 But so he's made a lot of crazy statements.

00:51:40.220 This guy, if you spend two minutes looking at his background, people are free to believe

00:51:43.740 what they want to believe.

00:51:44.620 But do I love the fact that he's got such power?

00:51:46.600 He's got such a platform.

00:51:47.980 Not really.

00:51:49.400 So I just, I don't know, but I still get uncomfortable with Facebook saying he, he's

00:51:54.440 got to go or the government saying you can't listen to him.

00:51:58.000 Yeah.

00:51:58.480 Listen, there's something called the Streisand effect.

00:52:00.520 You ever heard of that?

00:52:01.560 It's where on the internet, particularly in social media, when you obscure something, it

00:52:06.580 increases the interest in it.

00:52:08.260 So, uh, Barbara Streisand had some, she had years ago, early in the internet day, she

00:52:13.960 had some pictures of her, her real estate, her home, uh, and she went to great length

00:52:18.280 to scrub it.

00:52:19.240 And the, the internet made it its job to go after it and get it and reissue it and distribute

00:52:24.420 it.

00:52:24.740 And it became this huge thing where now everybody was interested in those pictures when before

00:52:29.100 just a small number of people noted it.

00:52:30.920 And so, yeah, that just happened recently with, with, with one of the Kardashians who's,

00:52:35.160 who inadvertently had an assistant tweet out a natural picture of herself in a bathing

00:52:39.000 suit.

00:52:39.760 And then as soon as it went out, she was like, get it back.

00:52:41.980 I want it back.

00:52:42.560 And the whole internet was like, well, now I have to see it.

00:52:44.860 Right.

00:52:45.260 It's, it's the call the Streisand effect.

00:52:47.460 Yeah.

00:52:48.160 It's, it's such a, we are in such a weird time.

00:52:50.220 I, I never, I think I, look, I, I am, I've been saying from the beginning, listen to the

00:52:57.440 CDC, listen to Dr. Fauci.

00:52:58.880 I've, I've said that from the very beginning.

00:53:01.480 They have, um, they have been strange and how they've sort of, uh, uh, uh, presented the

00:53:08.520 information.

00:53:08.980 I've got lots of notes, even though I still think I still have faith in my peers at the

00:53:13.620 CDC.

00:53:14.040 It's just our, it was our, I do.

00:53:17.860 I'll tell you why.

00:53:18.740 I'll tell you why.

00:53:19.300 No, listen, I'll tell you why I've been through, I've, I've been through five pandemics with

00:53:24.880 him five.

00:53:26.360 Okay.

00:53:27.060 He was, he was the reason I got involved in radio during the AIDS epidemic.

00:53:32.040 He was a leading light.

00:53:33.460 He was a great star.

00:53:34.920 That's how he became a star.

00:53:36.120 I get it.

00:53:36.580 But you have new information based on the past year.

00:53:39.560 I understand.

00:53:40.040 So hold on.

00:53:40.460 Let me, let me make my case.

00:53:42.080 Okay.

00:53:42.560 Counselor, uh, is that, is that he was really important to me.

00:53:46.460 He was chanting at us about getting in the media and educating and doing these things

00:53:50.340 I'm talking about doing properly now.

00:53:52.120 And I took that very seriously.

00:53:53.380 And that's how I got involved in radio back in 1984.

00:53:55.760 So he was always very important to me.

00:53:58.000 And, but it started with HIV and AIDS.

00:54:00.240 Then we had MERS.

00:54:01.340 We had MERS.

00:54:02.000 We had SARS one.

00:54:02.920 We had H1N1.

00:54:04.100 And you don't even, you don't even know what he did during those things.

00:54:06.720 You don't know.

00:54:07.420 Nor do I care.

00:54:08.120 He had my respect as, as yours coming into this.

00:54:10.760 You shouldn't know.

00:54:11.080 But now, but new things happened.

00:54:12.840 Yeah.

00:54:13.020 You shouldn't know.

00:54:14.440 But the way the press and the politics played out this time, put him into a soup where I'm

00:54:20.280 not happy with his behavior either.

00:54:21.700 I understand what your concerns are, that being political from that position or being

00:54:26.880 overtly political and obscuring data and lying, not being totally forthcoming, lying.

00:54:31.580 He's admitted to, you don't, you don't have to hedge on it.

00:54:33.820 It's not, it's not sinking your friend.

00:54:35.940 He's admitted it, intentionally misleading us to manipulate us into the behavior he wanted.

00:54:41.880 And then he doesn't understand why we don't trust him anymore.

00:54:44.140 I understand what, I agree with you.

00:54:45.840 I don't disagree with you, but, but there is a piece of lying that, that we have to talk

00:54:50.960 about on a moral level, which is lying without justification is a noble lie.

00:54:56.800 The noble lie, the noble lie, the noble lie, don't, the mass don't work.

00:55:00.680 Bull.

00:55:01.100 No, no, no.

00:55:01.780 That's it.

00:55:02.080 Once the trust is broken, it's a, it's broken.

00:55:04.700 I'm with you.

00:55:05.160 And when he said that, I actually was completely supportive of that because then we thought

00:55:10.660 this, traditionally viruses are primarily transmitted by hands and we don't want people

00:55:14.560 wearing masks to bring their hands to their face.

00:55:16.540 He was towing that policy.

00:55:18.320 Now the problem was.

00:55:19.500 No, he was lying.

00:55:20.180 He was, he's admitted that was a lie.

00:55:22.200 He knew there was more.

00:55:23.160 That's right.

00:55:23.620 And that's where it was a problem.

00:55:24.880 That's right.

00:55:25.060 Not to mention his denials about whether they ever funded gain of function research,

00:55:28.460 uh, the, the, the, um, whether his group did and they did, right?

00:55:32.880 They did.

00:55:33.260 So he's been misleading on that.

00:55:34.740 I mean, we could go down the list of the number of things, but that's not even an allegedly

00:55:37.740 noble lie.

00:55:38.700 That's just covering his ass.

00:55:40.080 I think so.

00:55:40.960 And I, and I, as I said, the, the politics destroyed him this time.

00:55:44.160 I'm not happy.

00:55:45.080 I'm unhappy, but I have been through five pandemics and I still feel like his judgment

00:55:49.700 is something we can.

00:55:50.820 Um, he's an, it's an important source of good information and judgment.

00:55:54.320 If he just would stop.

00:55:55.640 All right.

00:55:56.140 Agree to disagree.

00:55:57.480 Agree to disagree on Fauci.

00:56:00.220 Up next, we're going to talk about the general sense of malaise that seems to be coming over

00:56:04.520 the country right now.

00:56:05.960 Optimism for the future is at a precipitous low and it just seems like people feel less

00:56:11.660 hopeful right now.

00:56:12.740 And I don't think it's just because of the rise in the Delta variant and the return of

00:56:16.300 masks, although that hasn't helped.

00:56:18.260 I think it's bigger than that.

00:56:19.300 And, uh, so does Dr. Drew.

00:56:20.700 And we're going to get into that in one minute, but first want to bring you a feature we have

00:56:24.140 here called sound up.

00:56:25.640 This is where we bring you some sound that we feel you must hear today.

00:56:29.540 We're going over to the Olympics in Tokyo.

00:56:31.640 Yes.

00:56:31.820 We have good news for a change from the Olympics in Tokyo and bringing you the story of a true

00:56:36.620 winner and a true patriotic champion.

00:56:39.080 Want to talk to you about Tamra Mensah stock.

00:56:42.900 Tamra is 28 years old.

00:56:44.800 She's from Katy, Texas.

00:56:45.980 She grew up in Chicago and now she is the first black woman to win an Olympic gold medal

00:56:52.220 in wrestling.

00:56:53.540 What did she have to say after her dominant victory?

00:56:56.800 Enjoy this.

00:56:57.920 Of course I surprised myself.

00:56:59.220 It's by the grace of God, I'm able to even move my feet.

00:57:01.920 Like I just leave it in his hands.

00:57:03.320 And I pray that all the practice that the hell that my freaking coaches put me through pays

00:57:08.240 off.

00:57:08.520 And every single time it does, and I get better and better.

00:57:11.440 And it's so weird that there is no cap to the limit that I can do.

00:57:15.180 And I'm, I'm excited to see what, what I have next.

00:57:19.120 Last question for you.

00:57:20.200 That American flag around your shoulders looks pretty good.

00:57:22.780 How does that feel to represent your country like this?

00:57:25.180 It feels amazing.

00:57:27.220 I love representing the U S I freaking love living there.

00:57:30.920 I love it.

00:57:31.760 And I'm so happy I get to represent U S I love her.

00:57:37.620 I love everything about that.

00:57:38.880 If you see her on camera, it's even more contagious, her enthusiasm for her sport, for herself.

00:57:44.760 She's a wrestler, by the way, because she's just like, she's got a thousand watt smile.

00:57:49.160 It goes ear to ear.

00:57:50.880 Her hair looks adorable.

00:57:52.220 She looks adorable.

00:57:53.620 You can just see how happy she is.

00:57:55.200 The joy is what's contagious.

00:57:56.480 You can hear it in the voice too.

00:57:58.600 But what a refreshing change, right?

00:58:00.580 Both pieces of her message.

00:58:02.080 Like there's no limit to what I can do.

00:58:04.120 And I got, you know, I was put through hell, but what it taught me was there's no limit

00:58:07.500 to what I can do.

00:58:08.200 I continue to impress myself, right?

00:58:10.880 Like what a difference from some of the whining we've heard, um, from, from too many others.

00:58:16.180 And then just the, the love of country and the unabashed willingness to express it.

00:58:21.860 And by the way, good on that reporter for remarking on the flag she had around her,

00:58:26.440 her shoulders in a way that seemed to want to produce a nice answer.

00:58:29.540 You know, it wasn't like if you're wearing the flag, a lot of people find that controversial.

00:58:32.980 Why would you do that?

00:58:33.780 Right?

00:58:33.960 That's how some people would ask that question.

00:58:36.340 So I applaud the reporter too, uh, whose name I don't know.

00:58:39.640 This is a year of course, where we've heard all the Gwen Berry's and the Megan Rapinoe's

00:58:43.680 of the world who have such a negative view of the flag, not to mention our country.

00:58:47.300 And they have crapped out at the Olympics.

00:58:49.560 That's the truth.

00:58:50.160 Gwen Berry, she didn't even get a medal.

00:58:51.860 So good.

00:58:52.680 And Megan Rapinoe, well, our soccer team wound up with some pretty embarrassing results.

00:58:56.660 Yes, they got the bronze, but that's embarrassing for the United States, which should have been

00:59:00.180 gold.

00:59:00.560 And it was an embarrassing match.

00:59:02.260 And a lot of people are saying you should have spent more time on your game and less

00:59:04.900 time dealing in woke politics and trying to lecture all of us on how America sucks.

00:59:09.320 That's certainly how I feel.

00:59:10.800 Um, so anyway, we need more, uh, like Mensa Stock, who makes me want to stand up and cheer

00:59:16.140 for her, for American wrestling and for the good old U.S. of A.

00:59:20.120 This is a woman, by the way, whose father, an immigrant from Ghana, died in a tragic car

00:59:25.440 accident when she was in high school.

00:59:27.340 Now she's at the top of her game and full of happiness, full of pride in self and country

00:59:33.660 in accomplishment.

00:59:35.120 And she is an example to us all.

00:59:37.640 This has been Sound Up.

00:59:39.360 And now back to Dr. Drew.

00:59:44.760 You made a comparison of COVID to the flu.

00:59:47.420 Yeah.

00:59:47.540 And I know you've apologized for that, but I have to say a lot of, a lot of doctors felt

00:59:52.060 that way.

00:59:52.520 Very well-respected doctors early on thought this was going to be like a flu-like event.

00:59:56.540 It would go away when the weather got warm.

00:59:58.660 You weren't alone.

00:59:59.660 I mean, I don't think, I don't know why you got so flagellated for that.

01:00:02.580 Yes.

01:00:02.900 Well, it was, it was part of the hysteria of the moment, which if you, if you're saying

01:00:06.820 anything other than, um, hide in place, you're a murderer because there's about to be a nuclear

01:00:12.460 winter.

01:00:13.280 So I, I had my dad in my head.

01:00:15.460 My dad was an old family practitioner and I just imagine he, I literally had, I had

01:00:20.660 like almost hallucinations of him saying to me, wait a minute, he's been gone for a while

01:00:25.380 now, but he, I know would have been like, wait a minute.

01:00:28.800 We had yellow fever and polio and tuberculosis and they shut the world down for respiratory

01:00:35.200 what, what they, what?

01:00:38.200 He would have been like, what about that?

01:00:40.740 What, what about, he would have been, it would have killed him again, for sure.

01:00:43.760 For sure.

01:00:44.800 Uh, and so I made a mistake.

01:00:46.780 It's not, it's really not a good move.

01:00:48.720 It's, it's, it's, it's not logically accurate to compare one pandemic against another.

01:00:54.140 That was a mistake.

01:00:54.660 But I was trying, my intent was, I was disturbed that the press was mandating the policy of the

01:01:02.160 Chinese communist party, which was not medical, that they were demanding that the policies of

01:01:08.020 a 14 year old high school student be the policy of the land.

01:01:12.460 And by the way, something it was not designed for.

01:01:14.540 And I was trying to calm everybody down.

01:01:16.780 That, that was what I was, I was telling the press to shut up, listen to the CDC and calm down.

01:01:21.580 There are, there are bad things out there.

01:01:23.700 Pandemics suck.

01:01:24.840 They kill, they're defined by excess death.

01:01:27.120 They suck.

01:01:27.680 And I made the mistake of comparing it and, and to be also fair, I didn't quite get the

01:01:32.940 infectivity, uh, the, the degree to which this thing roars through, uh, populations.

01:01:37.860 I didn't get that, but I did get, I did get the basic elements.

01:01:40.600 I mean, you own that, you apologize for that, but I do think once you cross this group in

01:01:44.760 the press in particular, that's it, there's no making it up.

01:01:47.960 Like you get, you get labeled a quack or whatever it is they say.

01:01:50.940 And that's the end of that.

01:01:52.200 That's the end of you in their eyes, even though, I mean, if we want to go through their mistakes

01:01:57.080 and, and, and at the same time, this is the same group of people like big tech and so

01:02:01.720 on that was hiding stories like the Hunter Biden story saying, you can't believe that

01:02:05.380 it's not true in the New York post.

01:02:06.820 Big tech did that.

01:02:07.920 Another journalist applauded it, um, saying you can't talk about the COVID lab theory.

01:02:11.700 Cause that's only quacks do that.

01:02:13.740 Right.

01:02:14.100 That turns out to be the leading cause of the leading theory now, even according to them.

01:02:18.620 And then they look around at people who follow the disinformation dozen and say, why do

01:02:24.440 they listen to them?

01:02:25.800 Why, when we tell them that they're liars, why don't they believe us that we want to

01:02:31.460 protect them from this disinformation and they don't get right.

01:02:35.240 Why people don't listen.

01:02:36.800 Right.

01:02:37.320 They, well, they, they feel that people are either dumb or it's back to a basket of deplorables,

01:02:43.120 right?

01:02:43.780 Which is that these are just those people, those people.

01:02:47.060 It's always that not, not no kind of empathic understanding of what other people are experiencing.

01:02:52.000 And it is, it is reasonable.

01:02:55.020 If you really look at what the, that population has withstood in terms of trying to come up

01:03:00.500 with a trusted source, they, they are, they are, they're naturally distrustful.

01:03:05.380 And then you give them every reason to be distrustful and it's on at that point.

01:03:10.200 Yeah.

01:03:10.460 It's, um, the postmortem on this, I don't think, listen, everybody study your history,

01:03:16.800 study 1790 in France, please.

01:03:19.040 It, this is, this is no different than that.

01:03:21.420 This is the exact same thing.

01:03:22.480 And the people that put people on the guillotine end up on the guillotine for not being pure

01:03:26.920 enough.

01:03:27.320 And then those people end up on the guillotine out of the resentment of the other people

01:03:30.500 for all the guillotines.

01:03:31.820 It's, it's, we're in it now and, and you end up, they end up eating their own and we're

01:03:36.380 sort of seeing that.

01:03:37.080 Just ask Chrissy Teigen.

01:03:38.380 Right.

01:03:38.800 And we opened the conversation with the governor Cuomo.

01:03:41.040 I mean, this is, you know, this is it.

01:03:43.220 It, it, it's, it, nobody's pure enough.

01:03:45.880 Nobody's good enough.

01:03:46.820 Nobody's anything enough.

01:03:47.780 And it's all intolerance in the name of tolerance.

01:03:50.380 We've done, humans have done this before.

01:03:52.360 It doesn't turn out well.

01:03:53.480 And we have to really push back.

01:03:55.120 I never thought I was going to say a few minutes ago that, that I have been remiss and not paying

01:04:00.000 more attention to freedom.

01:04:00.880 I didn't appreciate it.

01:04:02.000 I didn't appreciate how, how, how, how much I should cherish it and how fragile it is.

01:04:06.220 That was my mistake.

01:04:07.220 And this whole experience has really pointed that out.

01:04:10.460 And we all should be paying, I'm not saying you should do anything, you should pay attention.

01:04:15.100 You're not alone in that.

01:04:16.140 I have so many friends.

01:04:17.280 I've said it many times, virtually all of my friends are Democrats and liberal Democrats

01:04:21.240 in New York city and elsewhere.

01:04:22.560 And I've heard from so many of them who are having the same realization, whether it's because

01:04:26.880 of what happened to their kids in school or being called a white supremacist for doing

01:04:30.640 absolutely nothing.

01:04:31.520 Um, or, you know, just the, the amount of government and media pushback for something

01:04:36.880 totally non-controversial that they happen to believe, even if it's not them, that's

01:04:40.220 being targeted, their belief gets targeted when somebody else expresses it.

01:04:43.340 So I think a lot of people are feeling it.

01:04:45.240 And I also think it's, it's part of the reason why I think the country's going through something

01:04:50.380 right now.

01:04:50.960 That's sort of a sense of malaise, a sense of depression.

01:04:55.320 And I wonder what you thought about it, because I think it's, it's beyond COVID and lockdowns

01:05:00.040 and cancel culture.

01:05:01.480 It's also, it started with, you know, technology obsession and our selfie culture and the obsession

01:05:07.700 with the celebrities and pictures and physicality instead of, you know, what we think and what

01:05:13.880 we believe and how we interact with one another.

01:05:15.780 I just think there's so many things going on right now that make you feel like our best

01:05:20.460 days are behind us.

01:05:21.920 And, you know, the days ahead are only going to get worse.

01:05:25.360 And as somebody who's actually literally written a book about obsession with celebrity

01:05:29.960 culture and how damaging that is, and some of these issues we've been talking about, how

01:05:33.700 do you see it?

01:05:34.320 How would you, if the country's your, your patient, how do you diagnose its problems right

01:05:38.220 now?

01:05:38.960 Yeah, I completely agree with you.

01:05:41.020 And by the way, when we wrote that book, we did not, we sort of painted the picture of

01:05:46.020 a landscape where this could happen, but we didn't understand that the technology was going

01:05:49.840 to launch it into hyperspeed.

01:05:52.280 And by the way, before I, before I talk more about this, I want to mention your liberal

01:05:55.800 Democrat friends, which are now, uh, you can't be a liberal Democrat.

01:06:00.540 Doesn't that make you a, a, a turncoat?

01:06:02.700 Doesn't that make you a, somebody that, yeah, that's not, that's not good enough.

01:06:06.840 No, no, no.

01:06:07.340 What is that?

01:06:07.800 You gotta be a progressive woke Democrat in order to be in the club.

01:06:10.520 You're not, you're no, you're, you're as bad as everybody in the center or on the right

01:06:13.900 if you're a liberal Democrat.

01:06:14.800 Um, but, but it, it, all roads need to narcissism, right?

01:06:18.780 That's what the book was about.

01:06:20.320 And, and we've had a narcissistic turn, right?

01:06:23.020 I told you about how I was working at the psychiatric hospital, uh, back in the eighties.

01:06:28.480 And, you know, every patient had a admission sheet with all their diagnostic criteria on

01:06:33.500 it.

01:06:34.820 And there's a, it was a slot back in those days for what's called access to, or was called

01:06:39.660 it, I think it's, we're still calling it that, but the personality disorders.

01:06:42.700 And when I got there, access to was different in every patient was all over the place, dependent

01:06:47.620 of obsessive compulsive, anti-so, all over the place.

01:06:51.600 Uh, and about 1987, 88, I noticed it all shifted such that every single patient that

01:06:59.220 was admitted had what's called a cluster B diagnosis, narcissist, borderline sociopath.

01:07:05.220 Those were the main three.

01:07:06.420 Those are bad.

01:07:07.420 Everybody, all of them.

01:07:09.180 It just begs no issue.

01:07:10.320 That was just with the diagnosis in, in the, in the box.

01:07:12.940 And I thought, well, that's interesting.

01:07:14.360 And at the same time, I was doing a radio show where I was talking to, uh, adolescents

01:07:19.220 every night.

01:07:19.740 And I would say two out of every three callers had had childhood abuse, destroyed families,

01:07:25.340 and was dealing with the consequences because they were calling about their relationships.

01:07:28.720 And of course the relationships was where all that trauma was acted out or where the ability

01:07:33.120 to form stable relationship was impossible because of that trauma.

01:07:35.880 And so I was witnessing the, the large scale childhood trauma, the pandemic of childhood

01:07:41.700 trauma of the eighties, nineties, and maybe even the early 2000.

01:07:45.120 And it made sense to me given how the seventies were the seventies.

01:07:49.440 I, you, you got to understand that was a decade where people went, Hey man, whatever you're

01:07:53.900 into and kids, they're just little adults and they're sexual beings too.

01:07:57.160 And if they want to have sex with you, that's, that's the kid, man.

01:07:59.540 That's what they're into.

01:08:00.160 This was the bullshit that was going around back then.

01:08:03.620 And so it, it put a rocket fuel into this.

01:08:06.860 And by the way, when people acted out on children, they didn't do it just once.

01:08:10.660 They did it many times and, and injured God knows how many.

01:08:14.540 So this was, this was pandemic and those kinds of childhood traumas end up with narcissistic

01:08:20.460 disorders.

01:08:21.080 That's just what happens.

01:08:21.940 So narcissism and narcissistic traits and borderline, it's antisocial also, they're very difficult

01:08:28.060 to trade, to treat people with those disorders, locate the, the locus of trouble outside of

01:08:35.380 themselves.

01:08:35.740 They put it out there in the world.

01:08:37.020 The world's the problem.

01:08:38.040 I'm a victim.

01:08:38.700 Sound familiar.

01:08:39.660 And, and, and I would even go further to say that we've even moved off narcissism.

01:08:44.680 I'm hoping temporarily to histrionic, which is another personality disorder that I used to

01:08:49.320 never, never see very much, but it was a, it was a narcissistic disorder.

01:08:52.940 And clearly we've moved into histrionic.

01:08:56.100 Histrionic is superficial emotions that, that sweep back and forth, a tendency to get caught

01:09:00.580 into trends, preoccupation with physical physicality and a tendency towards delusion.

01:09:05.240 People are literally delusional now.

01:09:07.440 And they're thinking, you talked about the people in their rabbit hole.

01:09:09.900 A lot of that becomes delusional in its process.

01:09:12.680 It's how rigid it becomes.

01:09:14.240 And so I'm hoping that piece, yeah, I'm hoping that piece is, um,

01:09:19.320 situational and that we'll just move back to straight narcissism once things settle down.

01:09:23.720 If you're histrionic, if you have a histrionic personality disorder, can you,

01:09:27.620 can you get out of that?

01:09:29.000 Well, if you have a personality disorder per se, uh, people argue about whether it can be

01:09:34.840 approved or not.

01:09:35.500 I, I, I, I've seen it improved.

01:09:37.560 I I'm not worried about the disorder people, which is much smaller population as compared

01:09:41.680 to those with the traits.

01:09:42.660 So we're really talking about large populations with narcissistic traits, disorder traits of

01:09:48.460 hoistrionic traits of narcissism, traits of antisocial, which, which is everywhere now,

01:09:52.860 just everywhere.

01:09:53.700 Yes.

01:09:54.000 And so how do you deal with that?

01:09:55.760 Yeah, you feel it.

01:09:56.700 And, and fundamentally, this is going to sound somewhat glib.

01:09:59.720 I jumped from a sort of a complicated issue of personality construct to sort of a glib

01:10:03.800 recommendation, which is humans need a simple life.

01:10:09.600 People need to keep it simple.

01:10:12.180 And in, in, in the process of keeping it simple, they need to prioritize the, the elements of

01:10:17.920 mental health, which are our relationships and our important relationships and our families.

01:10:23.720 The fact that families have been sidelines is just another way to do things.

01:10:27.940 That's disgusting.

01:10:29.080 And it is profoundly destructive.

01:10:31.060 We need to focus on our families.

01:10:32.940 I'm not saying I'm not, I'm not prescribing a particular type of family.

01:10:37.160 I'm talking about normative, normative patriarchy.

01:10:39.500 I'm not, I'm not, I'm not prescribing that.

01:10:41.940 I'm saying to raise kids, you know, this doing it alone, it's impossible.

01:10:46.360 You need, you need help.

01:10:48.120 So two people, two humans together committed to each other over the longterm, creating a

01:10:52.720 stable environment for child rearing and, you know, and advocating virtues and values and

01:10:57.760 all the things we do in culture and transmitting that and educating and keeping that stable

01:11:02.700 across time.

01:11:03.760 That's what we need.

01:11:04.620 Now, I would say the second issue is if that can't be maintained, and I'm not certainly

01:11:08.500 not taking aim at single moms or single dads there, I couldn't do it.

01:11:11.720 I'm a hats off to you.

01:11:13.100 But a single second relationship with an adult outside the home, again, sustained over years

01:11:18.360 has a dramatic effect on the outcome for kids.

01:11:20.960 So relationships, families, and then service, meaning, doing things in society, doing things

01:11:27.860 in the world that are meaningful.

01:11:29.980 This is it.

01:11:31.020 This is, it's that simple that, you know, Freud summarized it as work, love, and play.

01:11:36.580 Most of us have work.

01:11:37.920 Most of us don't have time for play, but I'd suggest we do that.

01:11:40.820 But love, you know, writ large, our relationships is really what needs to be worked on.

01:11:47.240 And it's what's difficult for people with narcissistic disorders.

01:11:50.080 They won't enter the frame of closeness.

01:11:52.140 That closeness is threatening to them.

01:11:54.240 So they manipulate and end up acting out situations that are commensurate with the past

01:12:00.120 and just reenact these disturbed relationships over and over and over again.

01:12:04.020 Keep it simple.

01:12:04.960 And the internet has not made that easy, has made that worse, made it more difficult.

01:12:10.840 Relationships have become disposable.

01:12:12.580 People are usable.

01:12:13.540 It's heroin.

01:12:14.440 It's heroin.

01:12:15.300 Oh, it's crack.

01:12:16.100 Absolutely.

01:12:16.780 It's a crack pipe, 100%.

01:12:18.240 I was, somebody put Future Shock, the video, the Future Shock documentary about the book

01:12:25.420 by Alvin Toffler back in the day.

01:12:28.500 And one of the things that I was sort of scanning through it, but one of the things that popped

01:12:32.220 out was this idea, very prominent piece of his thesis is that relationships become disposable.

01:12:39.720 And he didn't get into the consequence of that.

01:12:42.340 And now we're living it.

01:12:43.640 Now we're living it.

01:12:44.420 We can't do that.

01:12:46.140 We have to go back to basics.

01:12:47.200 So it's weird to me, though, is that this, you know, I just went over to, I was in Greece

01:12:51.420 and Germany, and lo and behold, there's another California.

01:12:54.960 It's called Germany.

01:12:56.340 A lot of the same stuff is going on there in terms of the government and the panic and the

01:13:01.220 hysteria and stuff.

01:13:02.500 But when you, when you get down to it, they're better because they still have intact family

01:13:06.760 systems.

01:13:07.180 They still have, they still have relationships.

01:13:10.800 They still prioritize relationships.

01:13:13.220 And we just don't do that.

01:13:14.580 We need to start doing that.

01:13:16.740 I'll tell you, you go online these days and I, every time I click off, I just feel bad.

01:13:22.100 I just feel bad after being online.

01:13:24.000 All you see is a celebration of ridiculous women showing every single body part they can.

01:13:29.340 And it's like, even you go watch an award show, it's like, it's down to, they might cover

01:13:34.220 their nipples, you know, and their vag and everything else.

01:13:37.100 It's like, really, must it be so in my face every time I go online of women's sexuality?

01:13:41.600 And I love women's sexuality.

01:13:42.980 I'm, I believe we should celebrate it, but it's ubiquitous.

01:13:46.860 And truly for this society that's trying to empower little girls, then they should take

01:13:51.120 a look at the, at the internet because every single page you go on, it's Kardashian, Kardashian,

01:13:55.360 Kardashian, JLo, JLo, JLo, JLo in their bathing suits.

01:13:58.380 It's like, I'm so sick of it that they, they are speaking out of both sides of their mouths.

01:14:03.220 And then if you go on to the more serious websites, it's all about how we hate each

01:14:06.640 other, how everybody's the worst person ever tribal, tribal, tribal team Jersey.

01:14:10.560 And everybody who's not in your team is hideous.

01:14:13.180 And then cancel culture where you and anybody makes a mistake or even something that's not

01:14:16.740 a mistake, but just deemed a mistake by those in power, you're written off, your life is

01:14:20.280 done.

01:14:20.540 You're all you're awful.

01:14:21.940 And then they wanted to lecture us about, Oh, mental health.

01:14:24.320 It's like, Oh, please.

01:14:25.000 You're destroying everyone's mental health.

01:14:26.620 Don't lecture us.

01:14:27.780 Right.

01:14:27.880 So I don't know.

01:14:30.140 It's like, maybe I should just stay off the internet and yet I have a job that doesn't

01:14:32.320 allow it.

01:14:32.680 Most people can't avoid it.

01:14:34.560 Well, the cancel is the modern guillotine.

01:14:36.900 Let's be a hundred percent clear about it.

01:14:38.440 It is, it is, uh, public executions.

01:14:41.740 Uh, it is again, uh, speaking of narcissism, it's, it's a primitive way to manage narcissism,

01:14:47.880 which is one of the things about being a narcissist or borderline is you tend to have unregulated

01:14:51.560 rage.

01:14:52.020 You have narcissistic rage is called, and that rage can start to get acted out on one another

01:14:56.540 unless collectively you get together and focus that rage on one that, that releases it in

01:15:03.260 a way that is less damaging, less dangerous.

01:15:06.000 And so this is scapegoating scapegoating is a collective behavior of narcissists and it's

01:15:11.640 on full scale right now with, with the cancel culture.

01:15:14.920 Um, you know, you mentioned, uh, the internet, you, you ever, you've been on Tik TOK yet.

01:15:18.520 You spend any time on that?

01:15:20.080 I've only seen a couple of videos here or there.

01:15:22.740 I've never actually spent 10 minutes on there.

01:15:24.540 You'll have trouble getting off.

01:15:25.560 You'll, you'll realize that is so sticky and so terrible.

01:15:27.940 It's so manipulative.

01:15:28.660 It's like, well, wow, that that's the one that I worry about right now.

01:15:32.280 Cause it, it's, it's, it's where the kids go.

01:15:35.320 Can I ask you to define narcissism?

01:15:37.500 So narcissism is a good point.

01:15:39.940 Sorry.

01:15:40.360 I have a morning cough ever since I had H1N1, by the way.

01:15:43.240 You're long COVID.

01:15:44.920 My long COVID is over.

01:15:46.160 This is still the remnants of H1N1.

01:15:47.820 Um, uh, narcissism is, is not what you think it is.

01:15:53.760 Uh, it's not egotism.

01:15:55.700 Egotism is a separate phenomenon and egotism is associated with lots of different things.

01:16:00.320 Narcissism is a particular disorder caused by either inadequate nurturance, like too much

01:16:06.720 abandonment in childhood or trauma in childhood, where fundamentally the child doesn't stay in

01:16:12.600 the frame of intimate connection with the caretakers.

01:16:15.940 The intimate connection with caretakers over time is what builds self and builds our ability

01:16:21.000 to regulate emotions.

01:16:22.280 We have primary emotions.

01:16:23.780 We feel them, our intimate contacts reflect them back to us and give us soothing affects

01:16:28.600 to help, help regulate them.

01:16:30.320 So we learn to identify and regulate.

01:16:32.160 If you have been hurt by those people, you exit that frame.

01:16:35.780 It's too tender.

01:16:36.540 It's too painful.

01:16:37.240 And you do not go back, do not go back.

01:16:40.120 So you never, without a lot of treatment, enter the frame of closeness that gives you a deeper

01:16:45.520 sense of self and ability to contact, contact your primary emotions and feelings and your

01:16:50.240 ability to appreciate what other people are experiencing.

01:16:53.280 And so that person, that child will then turn inward and start looking in the world to get

01:17:01.200 nourishment for what they need against what they're feeling on the inside, which is small

01:17:05.840 and empty.

01:17:06.480 So narcissists feel empty.

01:17:08.880 They feel a core that's unstable and they feel longing.

01:17:13.420 They long for this to end, really.

01:17:15.780 But they go into the world and get what they need out of it to feel okay minute to minute.

01:17:20.300 And what they need is to feel big and important and get gratified.

01:17:24.140 And so they develop many times a pseudo self, a second self on top of the primary self that

01:17:30.140 gets from the world what they need.

01:17:32.180 Uh, however, they feel, you know, small, they may not consciously feel a lot of time, but

01:17:37.740 they definitely will feel empty and longing and those kinds of things.

01:17:40.580 The problem with narcissists, because they don't have a, a stable connection with feeling

01:17:45.820 states, their feelings don't matter and your feelings don't matter.

01:17:50.300 And so the big liability of narcissism is that they're, they can be manipulative and, and

01:17:55.520 use you for their own needs to, to keep buttress themselves up and they can lack empathy.

01:18:01.680 Uh, and so empathic failure is the big liability of narcissism.

01:18:06.580 And as such, they can hurt other people to get their needs met because they don't really

01:18:11.140 appreciate that they're hurting anybody.

01:18:12.740 So that, that's sort of a basic perma of narcissism.

01:18:16.080 That explains basically every comment thread online there's ever been, right?

01:18:20.960 You just spend two minutes looking at a comment thread.

01:18:23.380 Everyone seems to have that.

01:18:25.140 All roads lead to narcissism now.

01:18:26.720 And the tribalness, the scapegoating, the banding together, the guillotine, it's all.

01:18:31.940 In fact, I, in my book about narcissism, I wanted to put in a chapter about pre-revolutionary

01:18:38.940 France and the Aztecs, because I believe those were two pieces of history where there was

01:18:45.620 horrible childhood trauma that went on.

01:18:47.620 And then when you could see the consequence, I mean, Rousseau himself, who was the great,

01:18:53.020 you know, genius of the French Revolution, sexually used, has a, had a, a woman that he

01:18:59.240 used as a sexual concubine who just trailed around with him throughout the world.

01:19:03.360 And he just abused her like a, like a sex doll.

01:19:06.560 She had five children.

01:19:08.180 He made her leave all five of them on the doorsteps of the orphanages.

01:19:11.760 Those children, 80% of them died.

01:19:13.880 And the other 20% had severe disorders because of, uh, the abandonment and neglect.

01:19:19.420 And so it was not surprised to me that we would see revolutionary France on the heels of that.

01:19:25.400 Same thing with Aztecs.

01:19:26.560 They had this thing called a codex, which was a systematic way of abusing children to create

01:19:31.120 warriors, which well done, they succeeded.

01:19:34.300 But as a result of that, in order to control the aggression, the group had to kill somebody

01:19:39.280 every day.

01:19:40.020 So they didn't kill each other.

01:19:42.020 There it was.

01:19:43.100 And so now here we are.

01:19:44.700 I just wish I'd written that chapter.

01:19:45.980 So if you look historically how these things end, what would you predict for us over the

01:19:51.560 next five to 10 years?

01:19:52.840 They end in a spasm.

01:19:54.200 And I don't want to predict that.

01:19:55.920 I believe, I believe in a weird way that they were acting it out electronically and through

01:20:02.480 cancel culture may be our salvation because we're not actually going to kill people.

01:20:06.460 And maybe we'll be able to pull back from this in some way.

01:20:09.560 I have faith that we will.

01:20:11.220 Uh, I, I don't know, I can't figure out what the form is going to be and I can't figure

01:20:15.080 out how long it's going to take, but I, I just, I'm an optimist.

01:20:18.340 I just feel like we're going to pull back.

01:20:19.780 We, we, we've not actually, the, the level of resentment and aggression that would occur

01:20:24.280 if we actually killed people would play out in a really horrible way.

01:20:27.900 We're not, thank God, actually involved in, in murderous conflict yet.

01:20:32.500 I hope not.

01:20:33.500 And to the extent that we're not, I think gives us an opportunity to pull, pull back from

01:20:36.820 this.

01:20:37.100 So on the subject of relationships, not the ones you mentioned as our, as our model,

01:20:42.020 but I do want to ask you a question about it since you, you did love line with our pal,

01:20:46.280 Adam Carolla, who we also love.

01:20:48.080 Um, and, and you've been doing a lot of shows and, and offering advice on this subject for

01:20:53.080 a long time.

01:20:54.180 A lot of marriages suffered during the past year.

01:20:57.120 Uh, and, and a lot of marriages, a lot of relationships, even outside of marriages found

01:21:01.360 that that much time together was not a good thing, right?

01:21:04.720 Like relationships that were already shaky, that were surviving because they spent a lot

01:21:09.820 of time apart.

01:21:10.940 Yeah.

01:21:11.740 Moved over to a new ground.

01:21:13.240 And I wonder as somebody who believes in marriage and it's fine, I've, I, as a divorced person

01:21:17.500 too, I've said, I believe in divorce as well, if it's from the right person.

01:21:20.740 Um, but I think a lot of people, I believe in the institution of marriage and for fighting

01:21:24.900 for it, if you can, right.

01:21:25.880 Like if you, if you want to get your relationship back on track and I, but I think there's a lot

01:21:28.920 of resentments out there right now, a lot of anger between couples.

01:21:31.440 What do you think just generally for couples who are struggling right now and wondering

01:21:35.340 if they like one another right now are, are a few good things to think about and finding

01:21:39.820 one's way back to one's partner.

01:21:43.080 That it, it, it, listen, it's very difficult to make sweeping recommendations because the,

01:21:49.480 the specifics of two individuals are so important to what they need to do.

01:21:54.660 So for me to make this sort of sweeping generality, it's very, um, inadvisable, it's going to be

01:22:00.240 only partially sort of applicable.

01:22:03.620 So I have to sort of think in terms of not so much psychological terms, but, but values

01:22:09.960 and what's likely to happen based on my clinical experience.

01:22:14.380 So from a value standpoint, we need to keep stable environments for our kids.

01:22:19.460 They, they need us to be together.

01:22:20.820 They perceive families.

01:22:21.780 They don't even perceive relationships when families rupture, they feel ruptured.

01:22:25.420 Do not, do not kid yourself.

01:22:27.040 The divorce doesn't impact kids.

01:22:28.320 It does not to say that their lives are ruined and they can't make it through.

01:22:31.700 It impacts them.

01:22:32.900 And if you can avoid that, it's always nearly always better unless there's abuse or violence

01:22:37.200 and obviously get out of there and don't even look back.

01:22:39.040 But in most situations, at least keeping them together to get through high school, please.

01:22:43.620 It, it, it, it works better.

01:22:45.400 Number one, number two, it's, if you commit to marriage, this is the thing.

01:22:51.720 About marriage being disposable.

01:22:53.360 That has been a problem lately.

01:22:55.340 Most people don't have the experience of working things through.

01:22:58.740 It's kind of amazing how much better things can, not even better, but how much you can

01:23:03.840 work through things that seem insurmountable and seem miserable right now.

01:23:06.980 I mean, if it's chronic and you're not just not happy with that person.

01:23:09.740 And it's been that way since the, and if you're one of these people that had misgivings at

01:23:12.900 the altar, you know, okay, maybe that's time to call it quits.

01:23:16.260 Maybe you made a big mistake from the beginning, but if it's because you're conflicting about

01:23:20.020 something and you're just not happy with each other right now, too much time together is

01:23:24.220 another one of these things that I think is like, what is it about too much time together?

01:23:28.580 What are you seeing about each other?

01:23:29.640 What can we work through here?

01:23:31.040 I would say stick, give it a chance, stick with it.

01:23:33.620 It really is kind of uncanny how much stuff people are able to work through if they give

01:23:39.100 it a chance.

01:23:39.540 It really is kind of, I, you know, I've been married 30 years and that's one of the things

01:23:43.560 that having worked with couples and seen in my own marriage that I find sort of astonishing

01:23:48.060 lately is that people can get through a lot of stuff and they usually get to a better place

01:23:54.080 and to dispose of it and just, you know, start over.

01:23:59.360 You kind of end up in the same place typically, not necessarily.

01:24:03.620 Not necessarily, I'm not saying again, to make general generalization about this is

01:24:07.140 very, very, um, almost irresponsible because as I said, sometimes just the wrong person

01:24:12.320 or sometimes this person has changed the point or if they're a drug, you know, there's all

01:24:15.700 kinds of reasons you should leave, but trust me, there are, but in general, if it's just

01:24:19.500 because you were spending too much time together and you're conflicting more, I would hang in

01:24:23.560 and see, see where you can get to another place.

01:24:25.580 And beware the long-term solution to the short-term problem, right?

01:24:28.580 Like we're coming out of that phase and things are eventually going to go back to normal.

01:24:34.740 Yeah.

01:24:34.920 I completely agree with you.

01:24:36.340 And, and, uh, God, I, I'm, I long for it.

01:24:39.840 I long for normal.

01:24:41.220 Don't you?

01:24:41.820 I mean, the idea that we're never, when they started saying we're never going back to normal,

01:24:45.200 I took great issue with that.

01:24:46.360 I think people hunger.

01:24:47.320 Some people need it.

01:24:48.280 I mean, this is another psychiatric lane, but some people clearly need this fear.

01:24:52.680 They love the panic.

01:24:54.340 They enjoy the mask.

01:24:56.320 They, they, there's some sort of drama queen inside of them that loves it.

01:25:01.180 And the rest of us are like, get your hands off of my kid's face.

01:25:05.460 Yeah.

01:25:05.940 It's a histrionic again.

01:25:06.940 I don't know what I keep.

01:25:08.020 It's bizarre to me.

01:25:08.660 It's one thing to be a sheep and follow along.

01:25:11.120 I kind of, cause I, I always respond to authority.

01:25:13.580 That's my personality.

01:25:14.480 I, I kind of get that to judge other people who want to do something different to me is weird,

01:25:20.280 but what's even weirder to me is to be a leader who likes to do this to people.

01:25:25.420 I can't understand that.

01:25:26.880 I have a relationship with a governor.

01:25:28.680 I'm not going to call him out here, but he was way late with the mask man.

01:25:32.300 I think, and he got rid of it as soon as he possibly could.

01:25:34.200 And he said, this is my job.

01:25:35.500 I'm not, my job isn't to tell people what to do.

01:25:38.400 I'm a governor.

01:25:39.120 I'm not, and I live in a state where our governor seems to just love telling us what

01:25:43.380 to do.

01:25:43.740 I love it.

01:25:44.840 And I, I can't understand that.

01:25:46.980 I, I, it's just, I, I can relate to the governor.

01:25:50.100 That had resisted, was troubled by doing that, telling people how to live their life.

01:25:54.100 That was never, if I got involved in government, it would not be to tell people how to live

01:25:58.340 their life.

01:25:59.120 It would be to, it would be to participate in this great experiment in freedom and to,

01:26:03.980 and to protect those freedoms and to, you know, limit government, not to, not to use it

01:26:09.000 as I wish to gratify them.

01:26:10.500 Feelings need to control people.

01:26:11.800 It's so weird.

01:26:13.320 Don't leave me now.

01:26:14.260 We got more coming up in 60 seconds.

01:26:15.900 This reminds me of Governor DeSantis of Florida, who had a, had a soundbite on this.

01:26:24.240 He was going off with, I can't remember if he was specifically taking on the White House.

01:26:27.360 Let's listen to it.

01:26:28.000 Here we have it.

01:26:28.780 Biden, he rejects science.

01:26:31.340 So his vision is, just like in New York City, restaurants should ban young kids from being

01:26:39.240 able to go in because they're not eligible for vaccination.

01:26:42.280 And law-abiding citizens have to produce proof of their medical records just to go to the

01:26:47.620 gym or attend an event or just to participate in everyday society.

01:26:52.960 He wants that, but yet if you want to vote, he thinks it's too much of a burden to show

01:26:58.700 a picture ID when you're voting.

01:27:00.860 So no voter ID, but have to show your medical papers just to be able to live in everyday

01:27:05.860 life.

01:27:06.880 Give me a break.

01:27:08.580 But let me tell you this.

01:27:10.100 If you're coming after the rights of parents in Florida, I'm standing in your way.

01:27:14.540 I'm not going to let you get away with it.

01:27:16.060 And as we mentioned earlier, it's particularly targeting people of color who didn't get the

01:27:23.040 vaccine.

01:27:23.560 I mean, how can they stand up?

01:27:25.380 No, they cannot.

01:27:26.560 No, they cannot.

01:27:27.880 They've got to loosen that up.

01:27:29.380 Not to mention, what are these waiters supposed to do at these New York City restaurants?

01:27:34.560 So they're going to have to be an expert in figuring out what vaccination card is real,

01:27:39.380 which one isn't.

01:27:40.860 You know, there's a real question.

01:27:42.100 Some states have already said on these university admissions that are mandating that you prove

01:27:48.400 you got the vaccine.

01:27:49.580 This has already come up because I have been wondering, because, you know, the fake vaccination

01:27:54.140 passport thing is going to become a crazy industry.

01:27:57.540 They're forcing it.

01:27:58.140 They're forcing that.

01:27:58.840 Of course.

01:27:59.140 I mean, I sent out a tweet the other day.

01:28:01.280 All the guys downtown who used to make fake IDs for kids who wanted a drink are now switching

01:28:05.480 over to vaccine passports.

01:28:06.820 I mean, as we see.

01:28:07.880 It's absolutely true.

01:28:08.460 So there's a question that some of the universities who are mandating vaccines.

01:28:12.360 About whether they could require proof, like some sort of a federal government proof that

01:28:18.860 you'd gotten it.

01:28:19.620 And there was too much pushback from communities on that.

01:28:22.920 And so, therefore, at some of these universities they settled on, you just must represent.

01:28:27.480 It's the honor system you have to represent.

01:28:28.860 So in New York City, it's not the honor system.

01:28:30.620 You have to go in with your little card.

01:28:32.700 And I mean, you tell me what what's going to be like a bouncer now?

01:28:36.120 Like we don't have enough guys on power trips at the front of entertainment establishments.

01:28:39.720 I'm going to say something kind of extreme here, but it creates, a group rises up or

01:28:46.340 sort of becomes noticeable that we maybe didn't notice before.

01:28:49.720 I was on a flight the other day and I noticed the behavior.

01:28:52.820 Usually the flight attendants are very almost apologetic, wear the mask, please.

01:28:56.380 Then you get a few people that get off and yell, it gets on you about your mask and

01:29:00.520 perfection with your mask.

01:29:02.080 I went, listen, when I got COVID, I was trying to get the vaccine and I was running around

01:29:06.120 the hospital and when I came into the hospital, there was a guy at the desk screaming at me,

01:29:10.320 where are your papers?

01:29:11.360 Where are your papers?

01:29:11.900 I'm a senior staff member.

01:29:13.400 I've been at that hospital for 35 years.

01:29:15.000 The guy was like 26 years old and I was thinking, do you enjoy this?

01:29:19.140 You like treating senior staff like this?

01:29:20.880 And I thought, oh, that's what happened.

01:29:22.740 This is what happened in Germany.

01:29:23.940 This is how these people started behaving this way.

01:29:27.060 And pretty soon they were in control.

01:29:28.420 There are people that like this and it's not a good look on human beings.

01:29:33.420 It's not okay.

01:29:34.440 It's absolutely nuts when you take a bite of your food on the airplane.

01:29:37.700 The plane.

01:29:38.380 This has happened to me.

01:29:39.340 And the flight attendant actually comes over to tell you to put your mask on in between

01:29:42.980 your bites.

01:29:43.800 Right.

01:29:44.220 That's right.

01:29:44.540 Those are the moments where I really want to be like one of the people in Walmart.

01:29:47.620 You know, like I refuse.

01:29:49.200 You want to be Karen.

01:29:49.800 I'm not doing that.

01:29:50.740 I'm still chewing.

01:29:51.700 What do you mean?

01:29:52.720 That's really too much.

01:29:54.420 Yeah.

01:29:54.560 They're drunk on their own power.

01:29:56.020 Again, I haven't seen as much of that lately because to me, there's not a histrionic tone to that,

01:30:00.900 that the histrionics have settled a bit.

01:30:03.560 But I hope we pull back.

01:30:05.240 I mean, look, there's plenty of reason to get the vaccine.

01:30:08.340 But my son right now is very, very sick with a vaccine reaction, it appears.

01:30:12.600 And he had COVID, but he had to take the vaccine because of a graduate program he was in.

01:30:17.320 And now he's been sick for a week.

01:30:19.620 That's what my doctor said.

01:30:20.500 My doctor said the same thing.

01:30:21.420 He said, if you have natural immunity, you don't need the vaccine.

01:30:24.380 And not only that, but if you get it, you may get a very adverse reaction.

01:30:27.980 There you go.

01:30:28.720 And he had to do it to prove to the school.

01:30:31.180 Now he's going to have to come up with a medical document that proves why he doesn't take the second vaccine.

01:30:35.600 And here's the deal.

01:30:36.580 It's an unwanted medical.

01:30:38.060 It's an unnecessary medical procedure.

01:30:40.200 What more ethical standard does a doctor have than to not do unnecessary medical procedures?

01:30:46.240 Now we're being required to do unnecessary medical procedures.

01:30:49.940 The other thing, our second very, very important ethical standard is informed consent.

01:30:55.340 We talked earlier about how the data is obfuscated.

01:30:58.160 It's very hard for us to give informed consent unless we have clear data, all the data, so we can discuss that with our patients.

01:31:05.400 Even we don't have access to the data right now.

01:31:07.820 So unnecessary medical procedures and lack of informed consent, that's my concern around vaccines.

01:31:12.860 But, you know, that's not getting much from the powers that be.

01:31:17.540 On your point about air travel, Juliette Kayyem, she's the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security under Obama.

01:31:23.080 It's funny, you know, her brother and I are good friends or had been good friends for a long time.

01:31:27.400 Well, you should take this up with her because she just wrote in The Atlantic that unvaccinated people need to be on a no-fly list saying we have to start taking people's rights away.

01:31:36.020 So they're going to start treating this, you know, she's in charge, you've heard more of this from our officials, like DWI, right?

01:31:41.200 The reason the drinking age in every state is 21 is not because all the states wanted to do that.

01:31:46.980 It's because the federal government said you can set it wherever you want, but you're not going to get any federal money for your roads unless it's at 21.

01:31:52.840 So they have a way of coercing people into doing it over their own best medical judgment in some cases.

01:31:58.160 Um, and that's, that's where this is going to go sooner or later.

01:32:01.680 I've heard you say you regret getting the vaccine because you had COVID.

01:32:04.900 Um, that's how they're going to get, that's how they're going to get, they're going to get everybody.

01:32:08.560 Eventually they're going to make you stick it in your kid's arm and your baby's arm and your arm, because you're not going to be able to do anything unless you do.

01:32:17.060 It wasn't a necessary medical procedure for me.

01:32:19.620 I've actually been documenting my, my, it's called an Atatix score.

01:32:22.980 I get that monitors my B cell function and my humoral immunity.

01:32:26.000 But, uh, there was a, a piece of literature that came out recently that showed that recovered COVIDs who get J and J have remarkable immunity against the variants.

01:32:34.800 So I'm glad I took the vaccine after all.

01:32:37.320 So again, these are, these are moving targets, all of them, even though it was an unnecessary medical procedure that I had a terrible reaction to.

01:32:43.920 I'm glad I took it.

01:32:44.960 There you go.

01:32:45.840 It's, it's, I will say I've always been, I, I am back.

01:32:48.800 I am back.

01:32:49.560 I got the Pfizer vaccine and I'm glad I got it.

01:32:51.400 I really am.

01:32:51.940 I don't have to worry about it.

01:32:52.760 I'm 50.

01:32:53.380 So I'm not in a particularly high age group and the risk of death for somebody like me is absolutely nil.

01:32:58.880 No, I'm just glad I got it.

01:33:00.220 I don't want to deal with it.

01:33:01.280 You know, I don't want to deal with it.

01:33:02.660 I don't blame you on it.

01:33:03.720 You want to be free, right?

01:33:04.600 You want to be free to move about.

01:33:05.480 And believe me, you don't want the illness either.

01:33:06.860 It's brutal.

01:33:07.720 But, uh, one of the strangest things people ask me when I was sick was like, were you scared?

01:33:11.500 Were you scared?

01:33:11.920 I was like, no, I had a 1% fatality rate.

01:33:14.820 When a doctor tells you you're 99% going to get cured or going to be okay, that is a doctor telling you you're going to be okay.

01:33:21.320 So I didn't even contemplate the idea that I would die.

01:33:24.600 It wasn't even, it was so weird to me having people talk about being afraid, being afraid.

01:33:28.460 And like, yeah, I had all kinds of nasty stuff, but it was hysterically again.

01:33:32.520 You know, you, you started talking to me about my background and I never answered that.

01:33:36.640 So can I, can I indulge you for a second?

01:33:39.080 Yeah.

01:33:39.280 You talked about your, was it your, your father was a, your, your husband's father was a psychiatrist.

01:33:44.340 And so my husband's dad was a psychiatrist and, uh, my first husband's dad was a psychiatrist.

01:33:49.140 Interesting.

01:33:49.620 So, so my, my dad was a family practitioner.

01:33:52.660 He was, he was a great guy, but he was sort of narcissistic.

01:33:55.320 So I got very good at dealing with narcissists as a result of that.

01:33:57.860 I've heard you say that.

01:33:59.080 Why do I say that?

01:34:00.440 No, I've heard, I've heard you say that.

01:34:01.840 I've heard you say your mom was verbally abusive and.

01:34:04.620 Oh, terrible.

01:34:05.820 Yeah.

01:34:06.120 So it's kind of, that's interesting to me.

01:34:08.060 You turned out so well.

01:34:09.420 Uh, you, you go one of two ways with those kinds of environments and you either go not

01:34:14.260 good, like more antisocial or you go pro-social, you sort of go one of two directions.

01:34:18.600 Uh, and so it's a very risky thing to do to kids if you put them in that kind of environment.

01:34:22.700 Um, and yeah, my mother was, uh, and, and indeed I, you know, I was exposed, I, I, you know,

01:34:28.900 I had lots of therapy and I value all of it.

01:34:31.640 I, I have no sort of resentments or anything.

01:34:33.840 I, I do have a sort of a position on my mom stuff where it's like, you just don't do that

01:34:39.160 to kids.

01:34:39.500 I don't, I don't, it makes me not respect her as a person.

01:34:43.460 It's like, you don't do that verbally abuse children.

01:34:45.840 It was, it was bad.

01:34:47.520 And you just don't do that.

01:34:49.000 And so I, I don't have resentments that, Oh, woe is me.

01:34:52.440 Uh, I feel like, okay, I've used it to my, it worked out fine for me.

01:34:55.900 It's, it's okay.

01:34:56.480 But you just don't.

01:34:57.220 Can I just ask a quick follow-up before you finish that point?

01:34:59.940 So without being overly, uh, intrusive into your own past, go ahead, please.

01:35:05.280 Oh, okay.

01:35:05.820 I didn't want to make you feel uncomfortable, but, um, what, can you describe the verbal

01:35:10.840 abuse just so parents at home who may be doing this under, understand or recognize it?

01:35:15.060 I have a very simple model for it.

01:35:16.940 Think mommy dearest.

01:35:18.180 If you watch hate fade down away, that's what I got.

01:35:22.140 I got lots of that.

01:35:23.520 And, uh, it was not okay.

01:35:25.680 And it was interesting.

01:35:26.840 I, my sister feels totally differently.

01:35:28.360 She did.

01:35:28.760 I don't think she even maybe didn't see it.

01:35:30.460 I don't know.

01:35:31.400 That's also like mommy dearest.

01:35:33.180 Right.

01:35:33.640 Didn't get it.

01:35:34.440 Uh, and, um, and, uh, you know, the abuser often selects one kid and often hides it from

01:35:40.900 everybody else.

01:35:41.480 So my mother had a secret life we didn't know about.

01:35:44.020 Did you get this part of my history?

01:35:45.560 Oh, this is awesome.

01:35:46.080 I know she was an opera singer.

01:35:47.100 No, this, this, she, she was Don Draper.

01:35:49.820 The thing, Don Draper.

01:35:51.060 What?

01:35:51.580 Uh, yeah, she, I was, I was probably 45, 50 years old.

01:35:56.320 And a friend of mine came with me to Loveland one night and he was on the internet while I was

01:36:00.400 on the air.

01:36:00.960 And he said, you know, he goes, we started talking about our parents.

01:36:03.640 So I said, yeah, my mom used to act and film noir films.

01:36:06.220 He goes, Oh, I'm such a film noir fan.

01:36:07.920 So he starts looking her up and goes online is in early days of Google.

01:36:12.240 And he goes, Oh, here, look, here's a page dedicated to your mom.

01:36:15.540 Helene said, whatever, you know, she had married to such and such silent film star in 1949.

01:36:21.100 I was like, really?

01:36:23.140 That's interesting.

01:36:24.500 This was not your dad.

01:36:26.060 Not my dad.

01:36:27.000 My dad, she married 1958.

01:36:28.360 She was married.

01:36:29.240 She was the, this, this will give you a sort of a personality profile.

01:36:32.780 She was the fifth wife of a silent film star at the age of 18 and carted out to LA where

01:36:40.980 they live.

01:36:41.340 She had a stepson whom she, one day after 10 years married to this guy, just left and

01:36:47.840 never, never whitewashed the whole thing somehow.

01:36:50.600 And I understand back then it was a much more divorce was a shameful thing and all this kind

01:36:54.420 of stuff.

01:36:55.100 But, um, imagine how you found out about it.

01:36:57.860 And I, my sister freaked out about it a bit.

01:37:00.760 And I was, was like, you know, she's 80, whatever, 84.

01:37:03.800 And she wants to take this to her grave.

01:37:04.940 Let her, let her do it.

01:37:06.440 I don't know.

01:37:07.020 So you never raised it with her.

01:37:08.620 And we didn't know if my dad ever knew either.

01:37:10.140 We didn't never know that.

01:37:11.020 And I was like, I don't want to, I don't want to mess.

01:37:12.840 I don't want to do that to them.

01:37:14.100 I don't want to do that.

01:37:14.580 I agree with that decision.

01:37:15.960 Here's, yeah, here's, here's the, there's some comedy in this too.

01:37:19.000 My wife has a bunch of friends that are psychics.

01:37:20.920 That's her thing.

01:37:21.540 She loves psychics, loves her friends are psychics.

01:37:23.220 And she twice had my mom in, she used to do podcasts with her friends.

01:37:27.860 Um, and both times with two different psychics that had, do not know each other.

01:37:31.920 Both times.

01:37:32.560 First thing that happened, she goes, Hey, there's a man here.

01:37:34.660 It says he's your husband.

01:37:35.680 Oh, it's more.

01:37:36.520 No, it's not him.

01:37:37.440 It's some other guy.

01:37:38.160 He says he's your first husband.

01:37:39.780 And she goes, I don't know what you're talking about.

01:37:42.440 They go, your first husband.

01:37:43.460 He says he's your first husband.

01:37:44.380 I don't know the first husband.

01:37:45.560 And just both times just completely denied it.

01:37:48.540 So, so, so Don Draper, remember how Don Draper was, you know, he was, he had one identity

01:37:54.000 and then he had another.

01:37:55.160 And it just didn't happen.

01:37:56.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:37:56.580 One of the greatest series of all times, by the way.

01:37:58.580 Oh my God, yes.

01:37:59.680 So anyway, all that interesting human behavior and psychiatry and psychology and stuff probably

01:38:04.660 primed me to be interested in these things.

01:38:06.520 So, well, it also brings me back to, um, I've, I've quoted this song a few times just

01:38:10.800 personally, but, but the song by Carly Simon that goes, um, sometimes I wish often I wish

01:38:17.440 that I never, ever, ever knew some of those secrets of yours.

01:38:21.560 Because it's not always great to pry.

01:38:23.060 I thought you were going to sing, I thought you were going to sing, you're so strange.

01:38:25.880 So, so.

01:38:27.320 You mean vain.

01:38:28.780 Right, right.

01:38:29.360 You're so vain.

01:38:29.960 Right.

01:38:30.180 You're so vain.

01:38:30.780 I'm saying you're part.

01:38:31.360 No, but I mean.

01:38:32.280 Strange, I translated strange in my head, but yes, you're right.

01:38:35.020 In this information age, we're all about getting new information.

01:38:38.060 And you know, you have to be more pointed and thoughtful about it when it comes to family.

01:38:42.240 No, that's exactly right.

01:38:43.340 I mean, look, uh, we, again, back to the seventies where the openness, everything, discharge

01:38:49.440 everything.

01:38:49.920 That's, you know, we had this weird thing in the seventies that, you know, affects feelings

01:38:53.800 were things that need to be discharged and then they go away.

01:38:56.460 No, no, no, no.

01:38:57.780 A little late, letting it all hang out is, can be unstated, destabilizing, can be a problem.

01:39:04.580 You have to choose things carefully and wisely and with boundaries in a systematic way with

01:39:09.120 trust and compassion.

01:39:09.980 And it's, it's, it's not that simple.

01:39:13.020 Well, I read that you, you were told in college, you went to see, uh, see counseling and the

01:39:16.680 guy basically said, why don't you just suck it up and take a walk in the woods and you'll

01:39:19.400 be good.

01:39:20.200 Oh yeah.

01:39:20.660 So I was having panic attacks, disabling panic attacks.

01:39:23.360 And I didn't know what was going on.

01:39:24.580 I, I could, I, first I thought maybe I'm having a seizure, all the usual things that

01:39:28.440 kids think about when they have a panic attack.

01:39:30.260 And, um, but I knew enough to go to the mental health part of the thing.

01:39:33.380 I thought, no, this is something else.

01:39:34.940 Something's affecting me.

01:39:36.880 They sent me down to the medical thing.

01:39:38.740 Uh, and you know, back then, well, there was no adolescent medicine.

01:39:43.300 The physician that was there was sort of a retired family practitioner, you know, dedicating

01:39:47.000 a little bit of time and his, you know, in his afternoons there.

01:39:50.180 And he, he was, I was sent down there to get like a valium medication to try to break the

01:39:54.900 panic.

01:39:55.440 And he looked at me and with disdain and went, yeah, you just take long walks in the woods.

01:39:59.880 What's wrong with you?

01:40:00.760 Get it together.

01:40:01.340 And I was like, sure.

01:40:02.580 That works.

01:40:03.320 I, I happily, I, you bet I would do that.

01:40:05.380 That's all it takes.

01:40:06.140 I done, done and done.

01:40:07.540 And like, yeah, it was terrible.

01:40:10.740 And, uh, yeah, I was mismanaged.

01:40:12.840 I was mismanaged a lot for like about 18 months and which is crazy in retrospect.

01:40:17.420 And it, it's one of the things that actually, it also motivated me to pay attention to mental

01:40:21.920 health stuff and particularly young people, because there was no, there was no services

01:40:26.320 for adolescents and young adults.

01:40:27.700 And that's a very special stage of development.

01:40:29.800 It needs its own specialty.

01:40:31.900 And then now it has that, now it has it.

01:40:33.360 And I, it made me very interested in that.

01:40:35.020 So I didn't want anybody else to do that.

01:40:37.100 I'm very pro therapy if it's for you, right?

01:40:39.500 Like now we've gotten into like sort of a therapized nation where we just lean on it as a crutch

01:40:43.400 and everybody does.

01:40:44.040 And they sort of use it as a, I don't know, some sort of a calling card, like, Oh, my

01:40:47.920 therapist, my analyst, as they'd say in the Woody Allen movies.

01:40:50.660 Yeah.

01:40:51.000 Um, but I love therapy.

01:40:52.360 I've been in therapy for many, many years and I love my guy who I I've been going to

01:40:56.140 for a long time.

01:40:57.160 I do.

01:40:57.820 I've sat on the show before and including recently that we're, we're like the Simone

01:41:01.300 Biles thing.

01:41:01.960 And in particular, the Naomi Osaka thing, cause I did not believe Naomi Osaka.

01:41:05.380 If you look at the evolution of her story, I, there was a reason to doubt her claims.

01:41:08.560 There was something up.

01:41:09.220 Yeah.

01:41:09.380 So we, yeah, we're just lionizing anybody who says the term mental health now in a way

01:41:13.940 that feels weird.

01:41:15.180 Yeah.

01:41:15.320 You have to be careful.

01:41:16.120 Yeah.

01:41:16.340 It can't be an excuse.

01:41:18.300 Uh, it can be a fact and it can be, you know, if you sort of think of it as a medical issue,

01:41:24.080 but boy, when it comes, when you start violating contracts and things like that, it's like now

01:41:29.060 it becomes an excuse and that's where it starts to feel weird.

01:41:32.160 Right.

01:41:32.520 And it plus it's like, everyone's got some men, mental health issues, everyone that's

01:41:36.400 called being human.

01:41:37.320 So you could, if mental health issues get you out of your, you know, committed contracts,

01:41:41.740 mild mental health issues at best, then everyone could use them.

01:41:45.520 I mean, that's ridiculous.

01:41:46.680 There's not one perfect human being who has none, right?

01:41:49.780 Tom Brady's got mental health issues.

01:41:51.380 We just don't know what they are.

01:41:52.880 That's right.

01:41:53.760 That's right.

01:41:54.520 50% of us at any given time is having a condition that could be diagnosable is having symptoms

01:42:01.060 that could be diagnosable.

01:42:01.900 The issue though, that makes, you know, sort of, I, I can't, I'm not a huge Freud fan,

01:42:08.660 but I feel that there's some stuff to be learned from him.

01:42:10.800 And one of the things he said when he arrived in the United States and the reporters, he got

01:42:14.860 off the, apparently this transatlantic boat and the reporters ran up to him and said, Dr.

01:42:19.040 Freud, what do you hope to do here in the United States?

01:42:20.880 And he said, well, I hope to come to an understanding of the difference between real psychiatric pathology

01:42:27.420 and ordinary misery.

01:42:29.020 And that is something we have lost track of.

01:42:33.640 Ordinary misery is something I dare say, I'm going to put a value judgment on it, is good.

01:42:40.420 Ordinary misery is part of life.

01:42:42.320 It's how we grow.

01:42:43.820 It's when we can't function because of symptomatology that it becomes a medical psychiatric issue.

01:42:49.720 But misery itself can teach us, can guide us, can motivate us to change.

01:42:55.620 And it's ordinary and part of life.

01:42:58.840 And the fact that we have made that anathema to the American experience is a disaster.

01:43:04.080 We never were like that.

01:43:05.700 We have to, and now people talk finally about grit and things like that.

01:43:09.340 That's what they're talking about.

01:43:10.560 Ordinary misery.

01:43:11.460 And we should, we should, and you know, the Stoic said not to bear what is necessary,

01:43:16.460 but to love it.

01:43:17.560 I think we could use, we could use a little bit of Stoicism in our general psychology.

01:43:22.300 Oh man, that is, that is the perfect note to end this on.

01:43:26.120 It's so good talking to you.

01:43:27.620 Thank you so much for your wisdom, your insights.

01:43:29.900 Say hello to your beautiful wife, who seems like a really great life partner.

01:43:32.500 And this is partner from what I read to you.

01:43:34.220 She is.

01:43:34.700 It's, it's been inspirational.

01:43:36.600 Thanks Megan.

01:43:37.200 I appreciate it so much.

01:43:38.080 Don't miss Monday's show.

01:43:43.840 We have got Andrew Sullivan, who is, he's just, he's a fountain of wisdom.

01:43:49.700 You read Andrew Sullivan and you, I like, I literally will spend a couple of minutes

01:43:53.720 thanking God that he's alive, that he's with us, that he writes the way he does,

01:43:57.520 that I can access it.

01:43:58.880 It's, it's wonderful writing.

01:44:00.980 And the way he thinks about things is so clarifying for someone like me.

01:44:05.020 You know, I've recommended his pieces before,

01:44:06.920 but this is a man who, whose opinion I really value.

01:44:10.960 We're not totally aligned politically.

01:44:12.440 I couldn't give two fakes.

01:44:14.040 I like listening to him and his worldview and him process information because you feel

01:44:19.020 like a better person when you're done.

01:44:20.300 It's intellectual growth, not just stimulation.

01:44:23.820 So very much looking forward to that.

01:44:25.400 Please subscribe in between now and then.

01:44:26.820 So you don't miss it.

01:44:27.980 Download the show.

01:44:29.000 Give us a five-star rating.

01:44:30.380 If you feel so inclined and definitely send out a review on the Apple podcast reviews.

01:44:36.140 Cause I, I do read them all.

01:44:37.980 I'm amused by a lot of them.

01:44:39.640 Some are insulting, but not many, not most of them are quite delightful.

01:44:44.240 And, uh, let us know what you thought of the show and let us know if you have any guest

01:44:47.140 suggestions.

01:44:47.580 Cause we do get a lot of good guest suggestions from you guys.

01:44:51.060 Um, somebody was just, just suggesting that we go interview the reporter who broke, uh,

01:44:57.680 the Elizabeth Holmes story, you know, the Theranos thing.

01:45:00.500 I mean, now she'd be an amazing interview, but she's not so keen on talking to the press

01:45:03.560 these days.

01:45:04.220 Um, but I like that suggestion.

01:45:05.700 So anyway, we're taking your thoughts and suggestions right now.

01:45:08.760 Also, you can do it on social media because we follow the Insta, the Twitter and the Facebook

01:45:12.820 posts as well.

01:45:13.740 Anyway, in the meantime, have a great weekend and we'll see you on Monday.

01:45:18.460 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show.

01:45:20.520 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

01:45:25.420 The Megan Kelly show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.

The Megyn Kelly Show - August 06, 2021

Dr. Drew Pinsky on COVID Hysteria, The Rise of Narcissism, and Marriage and Parenting ｜ Ep. 141

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