Ask Dr. Drew - “I Was Wrong About Lockdowns & Mandates” says Kevin Bass. What Changed His Mind… and When Will Others Do The Same? – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 212

Starting point is 00:00:00 And welcome everybody. Sorry we're a little bit late. We had some technical problems. Kevin and I will tell you about in just a second. Kevin Bass is my guest today and he's a young man whose tweets I caught, I don't know how, I just sort of came upon them and I thought, huh, interesting. I'm interested in what young medical students are thinking. He also is a scientist and carefully trained. I will tell you some of his training in a second. He has a degree in medical anthropology and biology from UT Texas, UT Austin, a master's in immunology, and is working at MD, PhD. I think he's a third-year medical student presently. And he'll tell you all about that. Plus, he's had medical misadventures of his own, and he's had marked turnarounds in his position and opinions about COVID, lockdown, vaccines. And so I'm really interested in sort of understanding what those changes were like for him and where he was to begin with and where he is now and what we can do about it. I just, I think we need to listen to some young voices. And so this

Starting point is 00:00:53 is an opportunity to do so. We'll be right back. Our laws as it pertained to substances are draconian and bizarre. A psychopath started this. He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction. Fentanyl and heroin, ridiculous. five months, I'm a doctor for. Say, where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying, you go to treatment before you kill people.

Starting point is 00:01:16 I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals. Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time. Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. If you have trouble, you can't stop, and you want to help stop it, I can help. I got a lot to say. I got a lot more to say.

Starting point is 00:01:46 A reminder that we'll be back tomorrow with Kelly Victory and Dr. Peter McCullough making a sort of a checkup back with him that is tomorrow uh Nicole Sapphire coming in on Monday Nicole Petrovsky next Tuesday and then we have some travel to do with that but we appreciate your patience today as I said Kevin Bass is uh degreed in anthropology and biology and immunology and graduate level and is now an MD-PhD. And his substack is Kevin Bass, B-A-S-S. His Twitter is Kevin N. Bass and covidcommentary slash substack.com as well. So please welcome Kevin Bass. There you are. Thank you so much for having me, Drew.

Starting point is 00:02:21 It's a pleasure. So I can't figure out how I caught sight of your tweets in the first place. Sometimes I'll just start following people. Something catches my eye about the way they're thinking or the kinds of things they're thinking about. And you were one of those people. So first of all, set the record straight so people can't dive into their BS about you. You're not a doctor yet. You're not a physician yet. Are you a third year medical student? Are you a second year medical student? Where are you in your training? That's right. I just defended my PhD in March, did the dissertation, oral defense, all that stuff.

Starting point is 00:02:55 And then I've just been waiting for the past seven weeks to start the third year of medical school. Great. And what was your PhD in? It's in the cell and molecular biology department. I looked at the physics and the regulation of something called ketogenesis, and it's regulated different than it often had been thought to be in the biochemistry industry. So you broke up completely. You may have to refresh and come back. Yeah, but hang on, let me just make sure I got what you said, which essentially, you're looking at some of the more,

Starting point is 00:03:36 not the more classical pathways of ketogenesis, you're looking at ketogenesis, the full spectrum of how it's physiologically present in the body. Would that be about accurate? Yes, exactly. We've shown through knockout models that ketogenesis is actually partially regulated, not just by the liver as it's traditionally thought, but also by the colon. Maybe about 20% of circulating ketones during fasting come from the colon,

Starting point is 00:04:00 and that's something novel for non-rubinant mammalian species. That's interesting i i wonder if okay we can go down a big rabbit hole here but uh in the setting of of of terrible ketosis like like uh sepsis or alcoholic ketosis or ketoacidosis from diabetics i'm guessing that's more liver no uh that would be my yeah yeah that would be my assumption that the predominant source of that is probably going to be from the liver i would be very surprised if there's a strong colonic contribution to ketoacidosis but it's but it's possible i don't think anybody knows at this point i i just have a feeling that's where that's where that convention came from, I bet you.

Starting point is 00:04:46 That's often the way it is in medicine. We find stuff in a pathological setting. We go, ah, there it is. That's it. That's how it works. And sometimes it doesn't work when people aren't sick the same way. So, all right. So tell me about what you were thinking about COVID and what changed your mind. I could tell by the way you write your tweets, you're a scientist. And you've been very careful to talk about,

Starting point is 00:05:09 to point out that you don't have your clinical training yet, but you're looking forward to it. And we'll talk about your misadventure in medicine and what your sort of goals are in medicine, because I think that's fascinating. But first talk to me about COVID, what your original idea was and how you switched. So like a lot of people, I firmly believed that the authorities and the public medical establishment, I believed what they said.

Starting point is 00:05:37 I believed we should follow what they were saying. I believed we needed to try to save lives as possible. I realized at the beginning of COVID that there were going to be trade-offs, economic trade-offs, as we know from the famous Stat News article by John Ioannidis. But even before the article, it was obvious to any economy that COVID was going to have some downsides.

Starting point is 00:05:57 The lockdowns and the response that COVID was going to have downsides. Nonetheless, I thought it wouldn't matter if the GDP goes down by a billion dollars or a few billion dollars or however much it's going to decrease if we can save lives. So saving lives needs to be the primary focus, the primary thing that we need to be. We need to do everything possible to save lives. And that includes doing things that we don't necessarily know that there's any evidence for, but, uh, it looks like it, it can't have great harm. Uh, live should be paramount. Anybody who believes

Starting point is 00:06:33 that saving lives shouldn't be paramount may have some sort of weird ideology where they think that the vulnerable, the weak, the sick should die. Uh, those kinds of people are weird and infected or not. not they're they're evil right so um so the good guys the good guys are the ones who want to save lives and do as much as possible and intervene as much as possible and the bad guys who enter and let me have some weird alternatives and some strange value systems and this literally was the way that i think i think uh now a lot of people uh who who who, who, who criticize me, uh, probably put me in the group of, of people who have these weird and bad times. It's a very strange

Starting point is 00:07:11 thing. So let me, let me drill in a little bit on, on your good guy, bad guy thinking, um, were you one of the people saying one, one death is too many. One death is too many. Something I heard a million times. Were you, were you. Okay. So how did you reconcile that? I really want to know this. Pandemics are defined by excess death. So how can you say, how were you able to say at that time, one death is too many? That would mean we were no longer in a pandemic. And so that was very confusing to me. It's like in a pandemic, people are going to die and we do the best we can to mitigate that. We do the best we can.

Starting point is 00:07:48 But people were walking around saying one death is too many. And that was physicians were saying that. And that was confusing to me. How did you reconcile that? Well, I thought and I think as a lot of people and I think the policy was based on this, I thought, well, look at China. Look what China's doing. Uh, once their, their outbreaks happened, once they realized there was a problem, they stopped, uh, sort of suppressing that knowledge in their population. They locked down everything. They were going around with, uh, with, uh, like disinfectant everywhere around the cities. They

Starting point is 00:08:18 had sort of a military level lockdown. Um, it was ridiculous, but, but, but, but a lot of people in my camp and a lot of people who still believe this they still believe this uh believed that uh if we did something like that we could have saved at what one one million more than one million american lives that we lost yeah so so yeah let me show you the graph that china put out if you could put out the uh sanger's book on the screen here, this was the graph that the Chinese Communist Party put out as what happened during their lockdown to COVID cases. So it's on the cover of this book. It's the yellow line that's going to show up on this book. I'm

Starting point is 00:08:57 sorry to spring that on you, Caleb. But essentially, it just went up, up, up, and then flat, zero cases when the Communist Party locked down, which, of course, there it is. That yellow line above Xi Jinping's name and under his picture, that was the claim of their epidemiology during the pandemic, during the lockdown, which was insanely, insanely distorted lie. And why anybody accepted that as fact over here was also confusing to me so that happened uh and then so here we are the people are expecting lockdowns to work expecting masks to work even though these are terms that had never been contemplated before these are things never contemplated in human history right i mean what what if i had come to you i'm really fascinated by this what if i had come to you when I'm really fascinated by this. What if I had come to you when you were, and I appreciate your honesty and looking at all these parts for me, because I think we all have to analyze what we've been through here.

Starting point is 00:09:52 What if I had come to you when you were advocating for a Chinese-style lockdown and I were to say, look, the six-feet distancing, made-up concept. Social distancing, made-up concept. There's nothing in epidemiology or infectious disease that has ever substantiated either of those things. Why don't we protect the vulnerable? That's who's dying. Why don't we protect the vulnerable? What would you have said if I'd come at you with that? So the first thing I would say about the part where you said there's no evidence, I would say, well, yeah, there's no evidence, but we have to do something. And it makes sense.

Starting point is 00:10:26 And since we don't have any evidence, we need to just do as much as possible that seems relatively reasonable. Why are you so worried about being inconvenienced by not being able to be within six feet of other people? Do you want people to die? Is that what you want? That would be the first response.

Starting point is 00:10:43 And then to- And let's keep going. Let's keep going with it. So what if I said, no, I think what would be the first response. And let's keep going. Let's keep going with it. So what if I said, no, I think what would be more effective is every time you see a chair, you should walk around it twice. Why don't you just do that? Okay. And it's about as effective. And so I'm going to tell you something now as somebody who taught medical students and residents for many, many years.

Starting point is 00:11:03 Do not ever do anything because just you have to do something. That's how you harm people. That is an absolute categorical rule in clinical medicine. I screamed at students and residents about this for 20 years. If you feel you have to do something just to do something, you will harm people. You do everything because you know exactly why you did it, and you have evidence for having done it, and then you have a backup plan, also evidence-based, when your plan doesn't work.

Starting point is 00:11:28 That's how you deal with medicine. And you do things just to do things, you will hurt people. Now, because I worked in mental health, and you and I are going to talk about that in a second, I knew the mental health consequences of this would be profound, profound. And I knew the fact that they were locking down schools, profound. And then I watched in California, businesses closing and jobs being lost. For me, the businesses around Disneyland were sort of the symbol for me of how far we had gone. Just thousands of jobs just being just trashed and businesses being trashed. And those were lives that were going to be destroyed

Starting point is 00:12:02 for telling people to walk around the chair twice just because we have to do something. Yeah. So it's funny that it's almost like we're having a debate of the old me with you. With your old you. I know. I love it. I know. I love that because it's the old me and current me too.

Starting point is 00:12:22 But I love it because it lets us dissect this thing. That's what I was so interested in talking to you. I want to talk to the old you. I want to understand where this was all coming from. And it's, but more than anything, please, when you go forth in medicine, people did things to you when you were younger and look how they harmed you. You know what I'm saying? They had to do something. Look what they did to you.

Starting point is 00:12:44 That's how that shit happens. But go ahead. I'm sorry I interrupted you. No, I'm a hundred percent on the same page as you about this. In fact, before COVID happened, I was on that kind of frequency. That's part of actually what got me out of this way of thinking, especially with Vinay Prasad's tweets. He really helped to inspire me to sort of break free of that, of that I think can be to sort of break free of that, of that I think can be very harmful way of thinking of just try to do something. You know, there were models that, that, that existed as much as I think the Chinese, they lied about a lot of things. If you talk to people who are in China, especially,

Starting point is 00:13:22 I don't know, the middle of 2020, all the way up through early 2023 or this year, it seemed from talking to them, it seemed that they were having success. Now, I don't know if you can trust the official statistics, but from the scientists that I know that were living in China, they were having some success. And in fact, if you also think about New Zealand and Australia, they had some success as far as preventing infection was concerned. We didn't have very much good data, but we just said, okay, since they seem to be having success, we'll just copy what they're doing. But we didn't ask the question, as you're pointing out, what are the downsides of these things and how effective are they going to be in the American context? So Michael thinks,

Starting point is 00:14:05 uh, we talked about Michael Singer's book earlier. Michael thinks that, uh, that, that lockdowns aren't effective at all. I think that in some contexts with a certain level of severity, if you go like brutal and the whole population is on board and then like you're, you're having police out and stuff like that. I think that lockdowns can, there's still a case to be made that lockdowns in there's still a case to be made that lockdowns in some context can work but in the american context uh i just i think the over the data overwhelmingly have shown that lockdowns are not associated with reductions in covid deaths and that's probably because uh they're just not properly suited for the american context or the

Starting point is 00:14:40 particular context and we live we we value our freedoms too much. And- Or, or, or, or they're not suited to a respiratory virus. In fact, and this is the argument, and it's the same thing with mask wearing, is that you can, if you wear that N95 properly fitted perfectly 100% of the time, yeah, you can have an impact with that. But that's not something any human ever does, except when they're sort of walking in and out of a patient room.

Starting point is 00:15:10 Then you can do it for a few minutes, and then people are good with that. But doing it day in, day out, you know, throughout their life, it just doesn't get done that way. But I want to, there's one other point I wanted to make about, shoot, my aging brain. Oh, this is what I'm willing to concede also, is that for sure, lockdowns can slow viruses, for sure. And you could argue that it might have reduced some of the consequence of alpha and delta. That is an argument that I think is a – you could entertain that argument. But this idea that you're going to stop the pandemic, a respiratory virus pandemic with lockdowns is just fallacious. There's just no evidence that anything like that could work.

Starting point is 00:16:01 And it's never been thought of. The only time it's been thought of is in the 11th century, and it was a catastrophe. It's never been done otherwise. Right. I think before the pandemic hit, if you look at all the pandemic simulations that the government and various different academic institutions did, they never talked about lockdown seriously. There was sort of like a non-canonical notion that something like this was conceivably possible, but nobody ever talked about it seriously. In many of these simulations, they weren't brought up at all. In fact, they would have fierce debates about things like

Starting point is 00:16:33 travel restrictions and trade restrictions. That's where their line was drawn. And suddenly, because China did it, the line got drawn elsewhere. And it's very interesting that if you look at excess mortality above baseline, percent excess mortality above baseline, although it seems to be the case that perhaps in China and New Zealand and Australia, that maybe early on, it might've been the case that they did better than other countries. If you look at that mortality from 2020 all the way to 2023, in fact, one of the countries that had the fewest lockdowns, the fewest mandates, the fewest restrictions, Sweden, where everything was voluntary and people were recommended to do certain things, they have actually the best excess mortality. And in fact, by 2023, the excess mortality of Australia, which had a zero COVID policy actually exceeds from

Starting point is 00:17:20 2020 to 2023 exceeds that of Sweden. So it turns out that as you're pointing out, you can't trap these respiratory viruses. Maybe you can do it in the short term, but what are you going to do after years or after months and months of time when people want these things to be over? And then you add on top of that, then you add on top of the fact that you locked down

Starting point is 00:17:39 and maybe slowed the spread and then you're going to catch up later. You add on top of that the negative effects of lockdowns. For example, people are going to lose their jobs people aren't going to have anything to do um in america there were perhaps as many excess deaths from things like drug overdoses of accidents for people's uh alcohol alcohol abuse uh and there was an increase in homicides firearms so you have in addition to what is in some ways an inevitable fact of respiratory viruses this is ebola where you can lock it down and get rid of it

Starting point is 00:18:11 it's going to stay around um yep you add on top of that the negative effects of the things that you shouldn't have done in the first place to try to prevent uh what was inevitable. Yes. We have now, as of 2021, a JAMA article last week, 57% of teen girls report feeling persistently sad or hopeless. 19%—no, 30% report serious suicidal ideation. That is a medical mental health catastrophe, and we did that to them. It should be a national emergency, and why we're not focused on that, and it's going to, again, excess mortality is still up. It's not because of COVID. Yeah, and by the way, there are animal reservoirs. Do we kill all animals? Is that going to be in

Starting point is 00:18:59 our plan too? Every animal is dead, the lions, the tigers, the dogs, the cats, everybody dead. Is that it? We got to kill all of them because they might expose us to something? Well, they slaughtered all the minks in Denmark. Yes, they did. Yes, they did. So, yeah. Yeah, but the point is that there's many reservoirs. That's the thing about these respiratory viruses.

Starting point is 00:19:22 It's not a rational approach. And I don't know if if you know but the real reason we went for it was italy the the lombardi politicians that locked down lombardi ill-advised based on the chinese uh sort of experience and the politician that pulled the trigger on it wrote a book that was quickly pulled off the shelves. Michael Singer, you mentioned earlier, has a copy of it where he says explicitly he did not believe he was going to be able to affect COVID with the lockdown. He had just such admiration for the Chinese Communist Party and their policies that he wanted to use this opportunity to bring that kind of policy to Italy.

Starting point is 00:20:03 So there you go. He did not expect it to affect COVID, and it to Italy. So there you go. He did not expect it to affect COVID and it didn't. So here we are. So how did you change? What happened? Um, so I, uh, and I think you've alluded to this earlier, but, um, because of the things that happened when I was a kid, I was very, I'd been very interested in misinformation. Uh, you know, I was on Twitter, but then every time I would log on Twitter, I'd realize like half the stuff I'm reading is, is total nonsense. And then I started thinking, well, uh, if it's total nonsense and people are doing these things as a result of the things that they're reading online, which they are, there's big giant, like online cults of people doing

Starting point is 00:20:43 really weird things for their health that that in some cases are counterproductive or harmful if they're doing these things then we need to make sure more it would be best if if they stopped or it would be best if they had better information so that they would do the right things for their health so it if we can correct misinformation then people can make better choices about their health because they know what the real options are as opposed to the fake options, the fake options that are going to cause potential harm. So then I started becoming very, um, almost obsessed with this. So I would, uh, for about like the previous five years before,

Starting point is 00:21:20 before now I've been online debunking a lot of health misinformation from all sorts of different areas. I usually focus on some of the most popular kinds of health misinformation because I know that's the way it'll make the biggest potential impact. But at some point, I think it was in early 2022, I realized that a lot of people don't really want to hear me criticizing other health influencers. What they want to hear is what can they do positive for their health so instead of just debunking other people I started to try to say things that were going to be beneficial or helpful for people to use in their own lives well just so turns out once I changed my orientation in that respect and I started saying things that were like okay here are some

Starting point is 00:22:01 of the things that you can do or here's what the research suggests that you can do for your health then I started getting debunked on my own by the debunking community I was very careful with the literature the way I read it I wasn't reading it in a haphazard way I wasn't using a bunch of speculation sometimes I would cite papers that were published by FDA in fact and then I would, here's what FDA is saying, and I would still be debunked. And basically what was happening is that certain popular ideas or certain notions that were ideologically based, people had those sorts of ideas, and they were using those sorts of ideas as sort of their

Starting point is 00:22:45 foundation for thinking that the things that I was saying are wrong. Because they have consensus in some other respect or according to some other group on the internet, therefore I'm wrong. So a really good example of this is I got into some, to make it concrete, I got into some dispute about sunscreen. So as everybody knows, there's two kinds of sunscreens, mineral and chemical sunscreen. Well, in 19, sorry, in 2019, 2018, 2019, the FDA published two papers where they showed if you put on the sunscreen all over the body of the chemical

Starting point is 00:23:15 sunscreen, you leave it on for a little while, the level, the concentrations at which the chemicals are in the blood exceed a certain limit. That's called the level of concern, according to the FDA, at which they need to do more safety studies. The FDA didn't know this until they published these studies, but once they published these studies showing the blood concentrations of these chemicals got too high above this level of concern, then they started to wanna do these exercise studies,

Starting point is 00:23:41 for example, on childhood development, sorry, development in the womb, teratogenesis, carcinogenesis, other sorts of things that they hadn't done previously. All I did was report this. And then I said, the FDA is currently looking at this issue. This doesn't mean that these sunscreens are necessarily unhealthy. It just exceeds this level of concern at which FDA becomes more concerned. It's going to do more studies. Then it started becoming interpreted that I was saying chemical sunscreens are unsafe, but that wasn't what I was saying. I was just saying that chemical sunscreens, you know, there's this ongoing science, but because I wasn't fitting within the box of like, oh, we want everybody to wear sunscreens. You're dissuading people from wearing

Starting point is 00:24:17 sunscreens. You're anti-chemical, you're anti-science. Even though I wasn't I was being scientific I put in a box by people who are very well respected in this community within the entity of look looking at misinformation about cosmetics etc and I got like unfollowed and I got like I got a dunked on quite a lot over the course of days by people who I previously respected I didn't understand like why they were doing things like this happened over and over again in all sorts of other domains and for example for plant-based diets and veganism etc there's these ideological perspectives if you start to question them by using science by using science people who are not necessarily particularly scientifically inclined but are more inclined to sort of like want the best for people

Starting point is 00:25:06 want people to do the best things for themselves but they don't actually know how to read the science they'll start to criticize you and say you're bad and unfortunately a lot of the evidence based community on uh in medicine online is this way there are a lot of real scientists as well but there is a really strong contingent of people who behave this way, and they really actually dislike science. They just keep people educated for interventions that are considered consensus. So when that happened, I started to realize, hey, wait a second, the people who I thought are sort of on my team, they're on like team debunker, team science, these people are actually ideal. People are not necessarily promoting science. And once they started to see that, once they started to, uh, and I retweeted, uh, one of,

Starting point is 00:25:50 uh, Elon's posts, the, his one where he said, um, uh, my pronouns are prosecute Fauci. I retweeted this cause I thought it was an entertaining tweet. I thought the perspective was that he was, um, saying was, was interesting to pay attention to. It was novel to me. I also, um, was starting to question COVID a little bit more at this time. Then what happened is I got a huge pile on, on me. People said that I was a grifter. I was saying all these terrible things. And I was like, wait a second. I'm just trying to, um, like I'm not, I'm not trying to do anything wrong. I'm trying to think about covid and then at that point uh that that had been the accumulation of several different months of me starting to question covid

Starting point is 00:26:31 and then i wrote this apology uh thread on twitter that's pinned to my uh my uh it's pinned to my profile and you know i wrote my newsweek article. I went and talked to them. I've been a fan of them. It's a weird thing to realize the group of people that you once thought were the good guys are, you know, there is just as much corruption as there is on any other side. So that's what I'll say. Yeah. any other side so that's what i'll say yeah i mean i i mean i hate to you know i don't want you to be cynical and skeptical going into the profession but but i will tell you terms like evidenced base gets gets um used as a cudgel uh ideology i don't understand why humans don't understand why ideology always harms human

Starting point is 00:27:26 beings if it's not founded in good science. And that science changes constantly. And things like standard of care, I have seen hurt countless people. So whenever I hear about policies that are holding physicians to a standard consensus standard of care, you need look no further than psychosurgery in the fifties and the opiate crisis in the nineties. Those were standards of care harmed. Millions of people were still trying to dig out from the opiate crisis. And, and it's, it is, it needs to be constantly dispassionate. That's, I think, what caught my attention with your stuff. You were just dispassionate and analyzing and just trying to figure it out.

Starting point is 00:28:11 And you came to some conclusions. And it can't have a political bent. Unfortunately, it does. But it shouldn't have any sort of politics. It shouldn't have any sort of camps or tribes associated with it. And it can be very heated, too, in science, of course. People can have varying different opinions. But it shouldn't be ever, thus saith the Lord.

Starting point is 00:28:34 And unfortunately, people in authority were taking that position and have harmed God knows how many people. I'm going to take a little break in just a second here, but I appreciate your story. And I had kind of a similar evolution with my relationship with Dr. Fauci because I was such an admirer of him during the AIDS pandemic. I was very active during that, and he was just a guiding light. And I said from the beginning, just listen to the CDC, listen to Fauci, they'll get us through this. Stop listening to the press. Stop listening to the press conferences. Stop it. Just let the people have their opinion. And now when I hear Fauci disavowing any of his recommendations as having had impact, I wonder if he didn't understand how the press used his words and how state governments used them as, again, not to overuse a term, but as cudgels in an absolute mass formation, as a panic. And we have to have safeguards in place to prevent that from happening, or we will do,

Starting point is 00:29:35 once again, unknown amounts of harm. Our call in medicine, Kevin, is do no harm. That is our numero uno priority, number one. And when you do things just to do things, you're guaranteed to do harm, guaranteed. And that's just the way the clinical practice works. So I'm going to be back with Kevin. He's got a long story, well, an interesting story to tell us about his own misadventure in medicine as a patient, which I'm anxious to hear. We'll be right back after this. With Mother's Day quickly approaching, what better way to express your love than by giving the gift of younger looking beautiful skin with the luxurious feel of GenuCell Skin Care. Susan, who is a huge fan of the brand, has raved about their ultra retinol product, which contains

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Starting point is 00:33:51 Visit birchgold.com slash drew today. That is B-I-R-C-H-G-O-L-D, birchgold.com slash drew. And we are back with Kevin Bass. And Kevin, he's just defended his phd he's starting his third year in medical school he has a medical anthropology degree or is it medical anthropology or just anthropology generally it's anthropology but my uh honors thesis was specifically in medical anthropology i'm always you know one of the the reasons I got interested in Jordan Peterson like 10 years ago was he was trying to pull together, it seemed to me, anthropology, psychology, you know, and to some extent psychiatry. And I'm fascinated by trying to pull these disciplines together because there's so much about the human experience that's really not entertained

Starting point is 00:34:45 by the clinical side and the anthropology has a lot of those observations definitely I'm a big fan of Jordan Peterson and actually I would like to talk about something that you mentioned before we went to break and I just couldn't help but think about this while while the break was going on but you mentioned how you know I shouldn't become cynical just because I see or recognize or notice certain things in medicine that aren't perfect and I just want to point out sort of citing Jordan Peterson he often mentions how many people think that they're good he says you know many people think that they're good people. He says, you know, many people think that you're good people, but actually you need to realize

Starting point is 00:35:30 sort of the darkness inside you. You need to realize you actually have a tendency or a potential to do wrong things. And I think that what I've seen or what we've seen in medicine, in society, in various different experiences that we have that are sometimes negative, we see the potential, you know, as in the way that Jordan's talking about, we see the potential of people to do evil. And I think that when we see that potential to do evil, once we become more aware of it, it actually allows us to be better people. Because once we are aware of the ways that we can be corrupted or do the wrong thing, or other people can be corrupted or do the wrong thing, then we can take steps or take

Starting point is 00:36:09 measures to prevent those things from happening. So I actually would hope that what I'm saying is hopefully more of a positive message that once we identify the problems and the ways that we went wrong, then potentially we can try to do things better and make the world a better place. I love that. That will offer you against cynicism, it would seem to me. So now, if you don't mind, tell us your personal story and the misadventure you went through. Yeah. So whenever I was eight years old, I was diagnosed with ADHD. I was one of the, I was probably the smartest child in any of the classes, but I didn't, and I got all, you know, great grades and everything, but I like would just talk while the teacher's talking all the time. So I just, I wouldn't even know that the teacher's talking.

Starting point is 00:36:57 I didn't even have any idea that the teacher was talking. I was completely unaware of what the teacher was doing. And I would just like be talking and doing whatever I wanted to do, um, without, without any sort of respect or awareness that that was probably inappropriate. Um, and they diagnosed with me with ADHD as a result of that. And they put me on ADHD medications. So they started with, with Ritalin and then they moved to Adderall. And at some point I started having really bad mood swings.

Starting point is 00:37:23 So I would be coming off of the medications in the, in the evening. And, uh, I would have almost, uh, like it's not, I didn't, I wasn't physically violent, but, uh, the way that I talked and the way that I was bathing was, it was night and day different compared to what I was before. Uh, you were aggressive, very aggressive. Um, and so then so then they took me to another doctor, and then I was diagnosed with a more severe thing. So they started saying, oh, he has bipolar disorder because he is having these mood swings. So then they started giving me mood stabilizers, and then they started giving me— And let me say, well, hey, I got to know the details of this because I spent many years working at a psych hospital. Did they take you off the psychostimulants no no because they had adhd they have to treat the adhd

Starting point is 00:38:10 yeah i understand but that's what was inducing everything of course and and you know there there has been a tendency in psychiatry to label people as bipolar who are having drug-induced hypomanias and manias. And I'm not, that to me, I don't call anybody bipolar unless they've been, you know, without withdrawal or influence of a substance for at least six months. So there was a lot of that going on in those days. So, okay, excellent. Yeah. So then, so then at that point I was on like a mood stabilizer, an antidepressant because

Starting point is 00:38:44 I started to like feel anxious about things as well. and i was on the the psycho stimulant and i couldn't gain weight and they added something to help me gain weight and they added something more for anxiety so at some point i was on six or seven different yeah i was on six or seven different medications um obviously i didn't tolerate them very well i especially hated the way the the quote-unquote mood stabilizers would make they they made me feel dumb. So I like, we kept changing things. Eventually we changed to lithium. So lithium has a very narrow therapeutic window. As you know, the, the concentrations of lithium at which you get a therapeutic effect on mood are also close to the concentrations at which you get toxicity. So you have to stay within this very narrow window in order to be therapeutic without being toxic. Well, I, I, I was always within that

Starting point is 00:39:30 window, but I think I was particularly sensitive maybe for some genetic reasons. So even though on average, that's the window, it probably should have been a little bit lower for me. Uh, I had a sort of a delirium, not a sort of, I had a delirium or sort of a delirious psychosis in response to it. So basically I like and and you know like you know the yeah it can jack up the antidepressant too right so lithium may have put the and you're on a psychostimulant i mean just the the soup that you were on is i mean of course you're and you're nine years old at this point. I was 12 or 13, 12 or 13 at this point. Yeah. So I'd been going on for several years and, and,

Starting point is 00:40:16 and that's why I went to lithium is because nothing else was, was, uh, was appropriate or I couldn't do without the side effects. So yeah, we finally went. Yeah. So then I, so then, um, basically, uh, at that point, then point then they said well the reason that this happened is because your bipolar flared up it got worse um and then you're having psychosis because you're improperly treated or inadequately treated of course so we need to put you on antipsychotic other things maybe you have schizophrenia so um you know at some point i think when i was about 16 years old i had actually seen like world experts at some of the most elite medical schools to try to figure out what the problem was and figure it out. They were like, just keep treating the symptoms. You know, at some point, I just.

Starting point is 00:40:54 Did anybody say get off some of the BS? Did anybody say let's get off some of this, some of the, some of it, any of it? Yeah. Well, there was this one guy who did, but then my parents and like all the other doctors said he was crazy so so you had to call you had to call him back and thank him right so at some point i mean at some point i was like i can't live like this like i wouldn't even if i'm gonna go crazy because that was the model like if you go off these medications your disease will progress you'll become like your brain will shrink all this other pseudoscience that I was told. Um,

Starting point is 00:41:30 even though I believe that, even though I believe that's a possibility, I was like, I still just can't live this way. I just rather see what happens. So then I started, I literally had to cheek everything because I was like watched and made sure that I took the meds. I cheeked it. And, and, uh, I did that for like two weeks. And then I like revealed to my parents, Hey guys, I've been off for the last two weeks now like oh my gosh like you're doing so well why are you doing so well and you're off your medications and then i was like can we can we please keep trying to do this and then we kept doing it and it was after a few months they're like oh my god i feel so they're like i we feel so terrible we can't believe that this happened

Starting point is 00:42:02 i i have a feeling you're really your core issue that, were you still on Adderall at that point? No, I went off everything. Yeah, yeah. No, no, but I mean before you went off, at the point you went off everything, was Adderall your stimulant? Yes, yes, yes. Psychosomal. That's what I figured. I've seen crazy reactions to Adderall in adolescence.

Starting point is 00:42:22 And do you know the generic name of Adderall? Yeah, it's an amphetamine. Amphetamine salts, right? Yeah. Dextra amphetamine salt. Yeah, dextra amphetamine. Giving that to a 14-year-old. If you'd gone out and used methamphetamine

Starting point is 00:42:38 and got psychotic in a couple of weeks, would anybody have been surprised? It's like, my goodness. So I have grave concerns about overprescribing. You know, when I was working at the psych hospital, my first 10 years there, I was running the medical system. And all I did was run around dealing with the side effects of medicine, of psychotropics. That's all I did all day long. And also the other thing that's kind of interesting I would do was that about 20 of the time there was a medical issue a significant medical issue that was either precipitating worsening uh involved with the

Starting point is 00:43:11 psychiatric syndrome in some meaningful way and so i would often find cancers and heart disease and things like that that was like underlying the depressions or whatever which again always listen to your patients don't't shortcut. Do systematic analysis. But don't assume every answer is in a pill, which back in those days in psychiatry, I think there was an awful lot of that. Yeah. Hopefully, that's getting better. I don't really pay attention right now to what's going on in the field, but hopefully, it's getting better. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:43:43 So after that point, I had been kind of a, a failure in school. I would bet obviously for obvious reasons, I would like play video games all day long to escape reality and all that stuff. But then after I got off on the medications a couple of years after, uh, I started to take things very seriously. Uh, I went to like a community college. I studied really hard. I made like straight A's and then like I applied to then I applied to one school because my friends were going there.

Starting point is 00:44:07 I didn't know anything about the colleges or anything. But then I applied to UT Austin. I got into UT Austin because I did very well on the SATs and had good grades from community college. Yeah, and then I started to think when I was in college, hey, maybe I should be a doctor. These things that happened to me were pretty messed up. Maybe I can do a better job or improve things somehow. So yeah, then I started thinking about medicine.

Starting point is 00:44:34 I became a little bit disaffected by especially what I saw in the psychiatric hospital when I was doing my honors thesis. And I started to read a lot of really really hard left sort of things like a lot of critical theory a lot of Foucault and you're probably uh familiar with Foucault and and I started to sort of think that medicine Foucault has hurt yeah on millions of people he has harmed killed millions of people I mean his basic principle is that uh psychiatric illness doesn't work it doesn't isn't such a thing as a brain disease. Brains get sick just the way eyes get sick, the way lungs get sick, the way hearts get sick.

Starting point is 00:45:08 They just do. And the reason we have homeless is, you can think of Michel Foucault. He and the psychoanalysts in the 40s and 50s decided that mental illness didn't exist. It was all caused by institutions. And that is why you have homelessness that that's what caused that right right so then i started becoming radicalized yeah

Starting point is 00:45:32 go ahead read a book called american psychosis it chronicles that history american psychosis but go ahead you got radicalized yeah i got radicalized because i read foucault and a lot of the other critical theorists. This was in sort of the anthropology realm of academic, you know, academic literature. And then I was like, maybe I shouldn't be a doctor. So I spent like four or five years thinking, you know, medicine was some oppressive institution that was, as you pointed out, like, like maybe causing more problems or mental illness didn't exist. We just didn't have enough empathy for difference, et cetera, et cetera, these kinds of things. But then at some point I, you know, I started to think, you know, even though, uh, maybe these institutions are oppressive or whatever, this is what I was thinking at the time. Uh, you know, maybe I can still make an individual difference. Like I can still make people's lives better

Starting point is 00:46:20 individually, uh, and just do my, do my part. And that can be deeply meaningful. Keep them out of the institutions, keep them out. Give good primary care, whether mental health or primary care, primary care, and keep them out of the hospitals. Keep them out. Good. Beautiful. Sure. Yeah. So then I applied to medical school. I did really well on the MCAT. I got like a 99th percentile score. I studied really hard, got into medical school. And then I started, you know, that sort of starts to put these two links of the rope together. Then I started to really appreciate medicine, actually. I started to see that my colleagues and the scientists in the medical school were very serious and they were all dedicated to helping people. Medicine does

Starting point is 00:47:03 help a lot of people. And so that sort of started to change my perspective, but I did still realize, and I did still understand that misinformation did exist out there. And that's where I started to go onto Twitter and try to debunk misinformation to try to help people. So, and then at that point, now I'm back to non-backs now sort of feel like I've circled back around and and then back at at this place where, um, you know, I'm questioning the medical establishment a lot more, but hopefully I'm doing so from a more centrist position where, um, you know, I realized it's reasonable. Yeah. I realized, yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:47:34 I realized people are trying their best. I don't, it's interesting that you mentioned, uh, you are a Fauci fan, uh, you know, Fauci's trying his best. I think he has certain flaws as a, as a leader, but a lot of those people went into doing those things because they have good intentions and they want to help people. Uh, so, um, and overall, uh, medicine does, I think get better over time. So, uh, despite these problems, hopefully I have a more centrist position and I'm a little bit more of a, of a moderate critic than i used to be so that's great i mean because that's usually where truth lies right you're trying to ascend to the truth and in in science i'm sure you're aware and certainly in clinical practice hubris is the enemy hubris is really an enemy certainty is an enemy you can't you can't you can't have certain you can't have your hubris uh you have to have sort of a humility about everything or or you end up in trouble and uh yeah i agree with that point of view you i think you i think you personally are have tendency to be what we call

Starting point is 00:48:32 an enthusiast so you have to be careful about your enthusiasm that you get enthusiastic about stuff and you go down the rabbit hole which is a strength and if you have humility and not hubristic about it can be quite a strength so yeah um i don't know if you know but uh enthusiasm used to be an insult back in the 19th century they used to they used to they used to reserve it for like religious zealots those were called enthusiasts isn't that funny interesting you know what i mean today yeah we mean something different. So as we go forward, go ahead, finish. No, I think enthusiasm and zealotry was sort of one of the big problems with the COVID response, for sure.

Starting point is 00:49:17 I mean, that is at the heart. Yes, of course. Yes, yes. Yeah, of course it is. And I don't know, that was going to be my next question is what do we do to temper that, to prevent people from doing harm, do no harm by living by our number one credo, which is do no harm? put forces in place or you know is it merely as simple as looking back on this thing and everybody being rational and taking responsibility and getting out of their tribes and you know do some sort of you know morbidity and mortality review some giant review that we all do where everyone is welcome at the table and um i don't know i don't know what the answer is i i'm my own personal feeling is we got to try to understand what happened. That's certainly job one.

Starting point is 00:50:10 Like, really, what are the facts? What happened here? And then if we can, maybe try to understand why that happened, which I think just us doing sort of this sort of improv we were doing with Kevin from his previousvin from his previous incarnation i think that kind of thing is very useful it lets people sort of look at what the conversations we couldn't have back then no one would talk no one would love it's like we still can't have honestly if you're talking to people who like if i'm on twitter i we still can't a lot of times have open conversations people are still in denial i know i think that i know you know it's like a like they're an aggressive,

Starting point is 00:51:05 vicious denial. Like they think I shouldn't be a doctor because I say that has negative effects or that masks work or that masks have potential downsides. They think I shouldn't be a doctor. They're literally people report me to my medical school for that, you know? So it's like, we, we need to, I think even more foundation, in order to even have these conversations that me and you are having because me and you are respectful and civil people and we understand that if we have a difference of opinion, it doesn't reflect somebody's moral worth. We need to sort of to reeducate people about having opinions. let me let me see sorry opinions having medical opinions having clinical opinions having opinions about anything people's worth is not tied up in the opinions that they have just because you have an opinion no matter how bad i think it is even if you're the worst you have the the, you're, you're

Starting point is 00:52:05 a Stalinist or you're a Nazi, or you think, you know, whatever the worst opinion you can possibly have just because you have those terrible opinions. Um, in my opinion, in my belief system, it doesn't make you a bad person. It just means you have bad opinions and bad beliefs. And, um, you know, we're all flawed as people sometimes we make mistakes and being able to talk to people and talk to people humanely and talk to people in a way that they can relate to and they can connect with can actually help them to correct those errors and mistakes and shaming people and suppressing people and censoring people doesn't help them and it certainly doesn't help us because

Starting point is 00:52:42 then we don't are not exposed to that information so i think we need to have a fundamental reappraisal of the way we understand um um morality and the relationship people's beliefs and morality we need to become more tolerant to to views that are different from our own even to the most worst possible thing and once we can do that then we can start having more conversations. But that's, that's already, um, that's a long ways for a lot of people, because I think, uh, the universities have not been teaching that they've been teaching the opposite. They've been teaching that certain views are good and certain views are, are wrong

Starting point is 00:53:19 and evil. And, and if those people have those wrong views, they should be canceled or protest. And I think what the universities are teaching people is destroying our ability to have civil discourse about our differences of opinion and we have to correct that in order to start having these these these um these conversations to go back to uh what what uh and actually just a couple days ago i i sent michael a message michael singer because i talk with Michael a fair bit, like at least once a week and sometimes several days a week, because he understands the history of lockdowns better than anybody.

Starting point is 00:53:53 He's very brilliant about that. And I asked him this very question that you're asking me, how do we do things different in the future? How do we avoid this from happening in the future? It's very interesting because as I was pointing out earlier, uh, all the pandemic games that had been happening before that point, lockdowns never figured in there are considered a little bit, they were, they were considered like far too extreme, even to mention in most of the pandemic games and in the other ones, it was only in passing.

Starting point is 00:54:17 And so how did it happen that suddenly the Overton window moved so much because of what China did and then what Italy did to then say, okay, you can do this in Western countries as well. How did, how did that Overton window move so much and how do we allow fear to cloud our ability to think about the downsides? Because as I mentioned, this is the third or fourth time we had recognized that there were downsides to pandemic policies forever. We had been recognizing

Starting point is 00:54:45 this forever. And then when, when 2020 and COVID hit, suddenly it became almost, um, uh, just disgraceful or shameful to talk about potential downsides. Like you are a bad person and the extreme, the extremes to which we went to, which we thought that the interventions, uh, should be all the way up to lockdown suddenly became much more extreme. And I think that happened because of a little bit of fear, a little bit of that we saw that China did it. And how do we, how do we prepare against that? You know, because I think there's something that kind of irrational that happened. from our previous rational thinking about pandemics and started doing something completely crazy that we would have never thought to do

Starting point is 00:55:27 just a few months earlier, October 2019, we wouldn't have even thought to do. So how did that happen? And I think that to understand and to avoid that happening, again, we need to fully, and this is like my opinion, I don't know if this is realistic, but I think we need to fully understand and acknowledge the extent to which

Starting point is 00:55:46 many of these policies had harms. We need to understand the extent and acknowledge how much censoring alternative points of view, some of which were correct. We censored the truth about lockdowns. We censored the truth about many aspects of pandemic policy. And then the policymakers themselves said things that were untrue, right? We were saying things that were untrue and we were censoring the truth. We need to fully come to terms with how damaging that was and stop basically having this culture of canceling and of misinformation. Kevin, I could not agree with you more strongly. Somebody asked me,

Starting point is 00:56:27 well, somebody asked RFK Jr. What he would do to bring the country together. And I thought his, and I'm not, you know, supporting him either way. I just,

Starting point is 00:56:34 he's has, he's a brilliant guy and he has some interesting ideas. And he said, here's what I do to bring the country together. Government needs to stop lying. Stop lying to us. No lies, truth only at all times. And that would create,

Starting point is 00:56:47 these camps are all built on distortions and lack of truth and people trying to establish the truth and then being canceled for saying the truth. It really is just, it's a terrible process. Have you looked at Matthias Desmet's stuff about mass formation? I'm familiar with the name and i'm familiar with uh what malone talks about and i think mass formation is such an interesting and informative concept i think that's probably you want to look at his stuff you want to look at his stuff because he was he was he was formulating his ideas long before pandemic long before he was really just trying to understand how things take hold amongst a population and how they'd be persuaded to do stupid shit.

Starting point is 00:57:28 And when this came, he went, oh, here it is. It's happening right now in front of my eyes. And then people, of course, canceled him. They canceled him. They called him a quack and a grifter. Yeah, of course. Of course. They would have these fact-check articles, these ridiculous fact-check articles like articles like fact check uh a mass formation

Starting point is 00:57:45 psychosis is just something he came up with and like yeah it's something he came up with like what are you talking about yes it is that's right he could be writing about it for years that's right we might want to look at that so let's let's finish up by talking a little vaccine where i i'm having i you know i'm i vaccinate i've said this you know upsets a lot of my listeners. I've vaccinated and boosted all my elderly patients. I've seen no real adverse events amongst the elderly. I've seen some real benefits in terms of being in some very complicated, multiple diagnosis medical situations where because of liver problems and whatnot,

Starting point is 00:58:22 I can't use Paxlovid or other antivirals. And I was very, very grateful that my patients in those complex settings had been vaccinated. I've seen the illness be more mild in the vaccinated group. I've seen Paxlovid work. I've seen the rebound. The rebound from Paxlovid is a real thing. I've seen that so much now, it's ridiculous. But it's better than the initial infection. And so we have thoughts. And of course, Omicron is much, much, much, much milder. And we don't have randomized controlled trial. Yes, you guys that are going to start screaming at me on Restream. We don't have the RCTs to document that it maybe isn't just milder because of the Omicron. Possible, possible. I'm just saying that

Starting point is 00:58:58 clinically, my judgment is these are complicated situations. And sometimes I'm willing to take a little risk reward, but I'm not willing to do harm to a 30-year-old where I don't understand what the benefits are and I don't fully see the risks yet. And I've seen a lot of stuff happen that really concerns me. And then there are,

Starting point is 00:59:17 now there's camps in this whole world now too, people reporting horrible things from the vaccines and people reporting rosy things, nothing from the vaccines and people reporting rosy things. Nothing from the – and I've seen medical literature not publish things that should have been published. And so I get worried about things I'm not seeing. How do you make – what are your peers saying? What do other medical students say? What are you thinking about all this?

Starting point is 00:59:41 Well, right now, I haven't integrated with sort of the medical student stream things. I do. There are people who are medical students who are and there are infectious disease doctors, some old friends from from undergrad who are I have infectious disease doctor friends who agree with me. There are, of course, people who disagree with me. I don't know what my guess would be among medical students if i just had to wildly guess is that they're they broadly you know you know they we tend to believe everything we tend to believe everything

Starting point is 01:00:11 we're told as medical students we don't have time to question things right we're too busy uh studying for the exams you question anything so that's just sort of the nature of medical training but at least at the undergrad level um yeah, but, you know, it is interesting because the whole Freeman et al article, I'm sure you're familiar with it. I was talking to Joseph Freeman recently, and apparently, not a trial, but a study, it's a study that was that Moderna and the Pfizer studies

Starting point is 01:00:42 using different criteria for adverse events than the ones that they used. It had Sander Greenland, who is a legendary epidemiologist, maybe one of the top five epidemiologists of the time, had several very distinguished people who wrote the paper. They found a rate of severe adverse events for the mRNA vaccine, the COVID mRNA vaccine of about one in 800, which is unheard of almost among vaccines. Vaccines get pulled off for adverse events on the order of one in 10,000, one in 100,000. Potentially the COVID vaccine has a rate of one in 800. And Joseph was telling me that if he had submitted this today, it wouldn't have gotten published in the same journal. They just got lucky because that particular journal for, I think,

Starting point is 01:01:30 I want to say like somebody had a personal, like one of the editors had like a personal bad experience with the vaccine or something like that. So they wanted to publish something like that. So in general, papers that are critical of these things and papers that are objectively analyzing many of the potential downsides, even apart from vaccines, are not being published. And there's a severe career liability for doing so. In fact, I talked to one guy who published about the lockdowns, how they potentially cause more harm than good in the UK. And he literally nearly lost his marriage over it over one paper that he published.

Starting point is 01:02:07 So, so, um, yeah, it's like, uh, yeah, uh, I, I, I personally have gotten, uh, three vaccines, uh, three doses on my third dose. I got, um, uh, pericarditis though, uh, uh, a a month or two afterward. That's due to the vaccine itself. We're, we're not actually sure, but, um, yeah, I got, I got pericarditis. Uh, my kids all got their vaccine doses. Um, and I, and I tell my grandma, uh, and I tell my parents to make sure that my grandma gets her regular boosters because she's 90 years old and the slightest uh and shoved her might knock her over and she may die so i i see the boosters but people who are young especially get we're not really able to have a good conversation about the vaccines anymore we don't have enough in my opinion i don't know like we have enough data on the severe

Starting point is 01:03:01 adverse events especially given the Freeman et al. article. And then there's some really well-documented, really well-studied, relatively well-studied risks with respect to myocarditis and pericarditis in young people. And I think that it's quite unclear what the relative risk-to-reward ratio is among young people in particular. That's right. That's exactly, that's been my problem. That has been, that has been what I've been very concerned about. I, again, back to do no harm. I don't, I just want to get that risk reward right. And they've just not given us the data to be able to say that. And I've seen, I've seen people debilitated with these weird wasting syndromes. I have seen neurological symptoms. I've seen lots of strange rhythm

Starting point is 01:03:46 disturbances where people have to get ablations when they're 40 years old. Lots of that. And by the way, strange. There's superventricular rhythm is anything over 150, you're in the zone. But these are like 300 beats per minute.'s very very strange very rapid rhythms and um i don't know i i i still i i just worry about it that's all and we don't seem to be moving the the the goal we don't see moving towards the end zone in terms of figuring out the risk reward i just don't see us doing it maybe i i don't know i don't know what's holding us back i don't get it it's it's it's i think it's controversial even to talk about what we're talking about right now. It's controversial to be having this conversation right now.

Starting point is 01:04:33 That's crazy. To ask that question. That's considered like anti-vax. We're anti-vaxxers right now, true. So just to ask these questions and try to get the science right. And by the way, trust me, trust me. I hear from the anti-vaxxers too.

Starting point is 01:04:47 So, so, so we get screwed on both. We get crushed on both ends. Right. Right. Yeah. Right.

Starting point is 01:04:52 The anti-vaxxers. Yeah. The anti-vaxxers. Yeah. We're, we're being way too nice about the vaccine for the anti-vaxxers. Um, I,

Starting point is 01:05:00 you know, I think there is hope and I'm, I'm an optimist. Uh, sometimes I'm pessimistic, but like the vast majority of time, I'm very optimistic. I think there's hope here because I think that the narrative about COVID is shifting along all sorts of dimensions, whether it's school closures, masks.

Starting point is 01:05:15 In many ways over the last few weeks, the narrative is shifting. And once that dam breaks open in those places, there's a potential for us to revisit the question with regard to vaccines once people are ready for it. that dam breaks open and open in those places there's a potential for us to revisit the question with regard to vaccines once people are ready for it and i think there's a potential that people will be ready for it soon so i'm by the way i try to respond i try to set all the records straight where we possibly can there's uh somebody alleging that you were giving paid medical consultations before you got your license talk to me about that so i had a on me about about like i think i had a consultation page where um and that's that yeah i've never that consultation page that many people or some people who don't like me post where i like

Starting point is 01:05:58 say i think like a thousand dollars or something i've never gotten a consultation through that. There was one person where, and in general, this service is off. I just don't have to do it. But in general, if people have questions about the science with respect to certain health issues, not necessarily, well, it's usually the ones that they have, but I give people information. Here's what the scientific literature says about that, but they're always working with a doctor it's never like me telling them what the health advice is so for example there's this one guy this is the only time I've ever done this he has elevated LP little a he was working with the foremost expert on LP little little a his name is Smeekus. He's at, um, uh, UCSD. Uh, he was working with him.

Starting point is 01:06:47 He was only able to see him, I think like once a year because, uh, this guy is, you know, he's the world expert and he, and he sees a lot of patients. So he had a very long waiting list. He wanted to talk to me and, and get my input and my thoughts before he went to see Smeekus again. Uh, you know, what are some potential things that he could do to reduce his LP little a? We went through a lot of the literature about niacin and some other stuff. And I said, I just laid out, here's what the evidence says. Here's what you could do, potentially. Here's what the evidence gaps are.

Starting point is 01:07:19 Go talk to Samikis about it. I'm interested in what he says once you hear back from him, but in general, like I have all these ideas about the ways that I want to monetize, but I'm too, uh, and the reason is, is I'm very poor. So I don't have any money. I don't have a working car. My car recently broke down. It was a 1997 Dodge Caravan. Poor, he's trying to find ways to monetize, but because I'm just so passionate about the science, I, I generally don't spend enough time on that. So I don't actually, uh, do so. So now that that consultation page has now been changed to from $1,000. So if somebody wants to have, uh, some consultations for me for a million dollars, uh, they can, this will be only the science and not any medical advice. It's sort of a spoof on,

Starting point is 01:08:05 on, on the way that my critics are, are, uh, are, are, are tacking me about that. But yes, if you want to do it for $1 million, that'd be great. I can buy a house. Um, but yeah, that's where I get through medical school. Um, uh, Caleb, you have a question. I hear you coming in there. No, no. It just, it reminded me of like my old business website where I put Caleb nation will only accept up to two new clients per year when it's like, I'm going to take any client that comes to me on my website. When I was a kid, I had my own like design business I was doing. It was just to, to kind of build up your profile. It doesn't mean, you know, that you're actually giving medical advice and all of that stuff. It's part of your website. So I can see why people would question it, but it's kind of the same. It yeah you know you got to keep you got to push push out there what you're actually

Starting point is 01:08:48 doing so as far as lp little a are you uh in the insulin camp with lp little a and uh reducing carbohydrates and all that stuff oh wow yeah i i remember that there's this whole i think you had dave feldman on right i i I mean, I did have Dave Feldman, but, but I, I, Peter Atiyah has got a new book out that's called Outlive. It's really good. He gives a really good analysis of lipids. And, um, yeah, I think I have a little LP little a problem, although I've never measured it. Oh, so, so, uh, that's interesting. So Peter thinks that reducing carbohydrates is going to reduce your LP little a, he thinks that's a good, you know, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna I I don't want to

Starting point is 01:09:27 misrepresent I'd have to really go back to his book I've just Feldman kind of convinced me that that was a thing and I know Feldman and T have conflict on a lot of stuff but I'm just wondering where you are in this I haven't looked up that particular management strategy with respect to LP little a. I do know that dietary changes, whether they have been low carb, I've seen people who have dramatic reductions in their LP little a from low carb. I've also seen it from people who do whole food plant-based diets. It's unclear, in my opinion, what the mechanisms are that modulate LP little a from a nutritional perspective. That's actually really,

Starting point is 01:10:05 there's actually like almost no good evidence on this. There's some mechanistic papers, but there's no real good interventional studies that have teased apart what the various nutritional factors are that modulate LP little a. I'm convinced that it does happen though, because I've seen several anecdotes of that happening.

Starting point is 01:10:25 So that's all I have to say on that. Interesting. So listen, thank you for joining me. Thank you for coming in here. I would love to talk to you after you've done about a year of rotations to see how it changes your perspective on things. It'll be a really interesting experience for you. Being able to have a scientific mind when you're on your feet in the wards is extremely helpful. Extremely helpful because you're problem solving all day on your feet.

Starting point is 01:10:53 And you've got to build sort of an automatic kind of internal instinctive relationship with the clinical experience. And it has to be founded in good thinking and you know all the things you're going to learn when you're out on the ward so be very interesting to hear your experience anything before i wrap up um uh uh be open i just hope that your listeners are listeners can be open to alternative points of view, including the ones that they hate the most. I think that our personal growth— This is called free speech. In this country, we all just called that free speech until the recent five years or so. I don't know where this—what we got infected with that made us change the notion of free speech. But on a personal note, you were going to say? Well, I think we're back in a phase of our culture where we need to be persuaded again and understand the value of free speech. And so I was just saying, I hope that people understand that it's often in the places that

Starting point is 01:12:03 we reject the most or we disagree about the most, those areas, those thoughts, those ideas, those concepts can often be the place where we grow the most as people once we open ourselves to those things. So that is the ultimate value of opening yourself to alternative points of view. Sometimes that's exactly what you need. So that's all I'll say. All right. We will leave it at that. And I thank you. And people can see you at Kevin and Bass on Twitter and your sub stack again. Kevin Bass, K-E-V-I-N-B-A-S-S, but I don't really publish anything on my sub stack right now. I just focus on COVID stuff and mostly on Twitter.

Starting point is 01:12:46 I'll be watching you and hopefully I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Thanks, Drew. As a reminder, Nicole Sapphire next week, Peter McCullough. So interesting. That's why I liked his Twitter threads. They were just very thoughtful

Starting point is 01:13:02 and interesting. Yeah, but his background, like, sheesh. Oh, what happened to and interesting. And hearing his thinking about. but like his, his background, like, sheesh. Oh, when it, what happened to him when he was a kid?

Starting point is 01:13:09 Yes. I used to listen. I spent, ran around the psychiatric hospital, taking people off meds all day long. That's what I did. And thank God for community college. Yes.

Starting point is 01:13:16 That's a good point. That's a good point. I mean, I had ADD and I never used anything, but I don't know. I got pretty far with it. Yep. Yes, you did. I was a pain in the ass when I was a kid. So what did you find interesting? Well, I just, you know,

Starting point is 01:13:31 I, I feel sorry for him for, you know, having to put up with the, the Twitter mobs and stuff. It's, you know, we're, we're in a position where we're so used to it over the years with, with just press and you, we've been maneuvering our whole life through this kind of thing but just sad to hear people who are trying to make a difference that are just... But he's got a pretty good attitude about it. No, he does. He does. And I'm glad that we can finally talk about it. Yeah, I want to, once he gets further into medical school I'd be very interested to hear what his peers are thinking, what he thinks now that he has some clinical training.

Starting point is 01:14:02 It's, that third year changes you dramatically. Everything, I would say the third year of medical school and then you're really kind of your move from intern to resident. Those first few months of residency are very, very intense. All right, everybody, we have, I said- Seems smart enough. We have Peter McCullough coming by tomorrow,

Starting point is 01:14:20 Nicole Sapphire on Tuesday, a lot of stuff coming up. Check us out. Be sure to sign up at drdrew.tv and follow at Ask Dr. Drew for updates on shows and guests. And we will see you. It's now Tuesday. We'll see you tomorrow at 3 o'clock Pacific. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky. As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis,

Starting point is 01:14:46 or treatment. This show is intended for educational and informational purposes only. I am a licensed physician, but I am not a replacement for your personal doctor, and I am not practicing medicine here. Always remember that our understanding of medicine and science is constantly evolving. Though my opinion is based on the information that is available to me today, some of the contents of this show could be outdated in the future. Be sure to check with trusted resources in case any of the information has been updated since this was published. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, don't call me. Call 911.

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Ask Dr. Drew - “I Was Wrong About Lockdowns & Mandates” says Kevin Bass. What Changed His Mind… and When Will Others Do The Same? – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 212

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