Ask Dr. Drew - Navy SEAL: How To Make Your House A “Bug-In” Fortress Before Disaster Strikes w/ Joel Lambert + Matt Waltz & Fred Santor – Ask Dr. Drew – Ep 439
Episode Date: January 3, 2025“Except for a few unlikely cases like a raging wildfire or tornado barreling straight for your house, bugging out is a very bad idea,” warns former Navy SEAL Joel Lambert, who says the safest plac...e to secure yourself and your loved ones during a national crisis is the fortress you already know: your own home. “Why would you ever want to leave your amazing home where you probably have a half full fridge, maybe some cans, a warm bed, a roof over your head, as well as neighbors you know, and terrain you’re familiar with, … only to run OUT THERE to some place you know nothing about and try to forage your daily meals?” explains Lambert, who authored “A Navy SEAL’s Bug-In Guide: How to Turn Your House into the Safest Place on Earth” to help others prepare for the unexpected. Joel Lambert is a former Navy SEAL, author, and television personality. He starred in Discovery Channel’s ‘Manhunt’ (known as ‘Lone Target’ in the US) and ‘Predators Up Close.’ Lambert authored ‘A Navy SEAL’s Bug In Guide’ (available at https://amzn.to/3PyXa4t) drawing from his military expertise in security, crisis management, and survival tactics. He currently works as a consultant and speaker on security preparedness and resilience. His television work has aired internationally on Discovery Channel and Animal Planet. Follow him at https://x.com/joel5326 Matt Waltz is a founder of New Freedom, a pioneering behavioral health and re-entry facility in Arizona. Matt is also an Arizona State University graduate and founder of Waltz Construction. New Freedom is a comprehensive facility offering integrated services for formerly incarcerated individuals, including therapy, job training, case management, and on-site parole services. Find more at https://newfreedomaz.com Fred Santor is a Shop Manager at PHP, a leading Arizona painting contractor, following a remarkable career transformation through New Freedom’s program. After facing multiple incarcerations and four decades of addiction, Fred completed New Freedom’s 90-day vocational program in 2022. In just 27 months, he advanced from Painter to his current leadership role. Read more at https://newfreedom.org/success-stories 「 SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS 」 Find out more about the brands that make this show possible and get special discounts on Dr. Drew's favorite products at https://drdrew.com/sponsors • FATTY15 – The future of essential fatty acids is here! Strengthen your cells against age-related breakdown with Fatty15. Get 15% off a 90-day Starter Kit Subscription at https://drdrew.com/fatty15 • PALEOVALLEY - "Paleovalley has a wide variety of extraordinary products that are both healthful and delicious,” says Dr. Drew. "I am a huge fan of this brand and know you'll love it too!” Get 15% off your first order at https://drdrew.com/paleovalley • THE WELLNESS COMPANY - Counteract harmful spike proteins with TWC's Signature Series Spike Support Formula containing nattokinase and selenium. Learn more about TWC's supplements at https://twc.health/drew 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 Portions of this program may examine countervailing views on important medical issues. Always consult your physician before making any decisions about your health. 「 ABOUT THE SHOW 」 Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Happy holidays, everyone.
Great to be here.
Merry Christmas.
This is our end of year show.
We're looking forward to 2025.
We appreciate you joining us as always.
And as always, we appreciate the people that have supported us.
Today, we're going to end the year talking a little survival and preparedness and also treatment for PTSD and veterans.
So it's going to be a very interesting survey.
We first have a former Navy SEAL author and television personality.
He's from Manhunt, and he's going to talk a little bit with us about preparedness.
And Susan is very interested in that these days.
So see if she has any thoughts as well or any questions.
And then Matt Waltz is going to join us with one of his alumni.
He is the founder of New Freedom, pioneer behavioral health and reentry facility in Arizona.
He is also a founder of the Waltz Construction.
New Freedom is a comprehensive facility operating integrated services for formerly incarcerated individuals.
So it's about bringing people back to themselves, back to the world.
We'll be back with you right after this our laws
as it pertain to substances are draconian and bizarre psychopaths start
this right he was an alcoholic cuz of social media and pornography PTSD love
addiction fentanyl and heroin ridiculous I'm just saying you go to treatment
before you kill people.
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 help stopping, I can help.
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checkout for that 15 off or just go to our website dr drew.com slash fatty 15 first up today is joel
lambert you can follow joel on x and instagram at joel5326 or check out buginguide.com As I said, Joel Lambert authored
Navy Seals,
a Navy Seals
Bug-In Guide, that's thebugin.com
He drives from his
military experience in security, crisis
management, survival tactics.
He currently works as a consultant and speaker
on security preparedness and resilience.
His television work on
Manhunt was on Discovery,
where I have a long history with as well.
He has worked internationally on Discovery Channel and Animal Planet.
You can also, as I said, follow him on Exit Joel, J-O-E-L-5-3-2-6.
Joel, thank you for being here. Welcome to the program.
Dr. Drew, thanks for having me. Good to see you.
Good to see you too. So let's start with wherever you think is the appropriate place to start with
bug in. Now, one of the things that Caleb told me before the mics heated up was that
a lot of people get very focused on go bags and getting out of here and get scram.
You have a different philosophy.
Exactly. And that is what I wrote my book in
response to. When I was doing Manhunt, especially, I'm doing escape and evasion. I'm inserting in
foreign countries. I'm dropping in places I'm not supposed to be. I'm coming up on beaches. I'm
crossing borders under trucks. And then their special tracking force or fugitive recovery team
would come after me with everything they had to try to capture me before I'd make my extract point, which would be three to four days away.
And I'd be doing tracking, counter-tracking, booby traps, primitive skills, all this stuff to try to get away.
And being followed by, did you do your own filming or was there a camera crew in tow?
There was one cameraman with me.
They never let me go alone.
So the cameraman, sometimes he was pretty good, sometimes he was not.
He got me caught on a couple occasions.
But about that time, the people, you know, they just kind of, the people and civilians kind of got enamored with the concept of bugging out.
Which was, you know, you have a bug out bag in your car.
You have a bug out bag by your door.
Something bad happens.
You grab the bag and you get out, you bug out until danger is over and you have enough stuff in your bag to survive
and get along. And, you know, being that I'm doing this internationally on a global television
series, people would always ask me, you know, what's in your bug out bag? What's in your go bag?
What do you have? What would you recommend? And I'd say, that's a terrible idea, except in very
specific cases like
a tornado is barreling straight for your house or or something is coming specifically to you
we we have we have in this in this part of the world we have fires and so you actually have to
have you have to have fire safes you have to have a fire you know sort of uh you know important
documents and stuff ready to go. Everyone knows to do this.
It's not like it's a special thing.
You just got to get out of the way.
Exactly.
And in that case, obviously getting out, you have to.
There's no choice.
In fact, LA may tell you you have to go.
But in most cases, your house is where you should stay.
Your house is shelter.
You have food here. You have water. You have your tools. You have your weapons. You you should stay. Your house is shelter, you have food here,
you have water, you have your tools,
you have your weapons, you have your family.
It's a rally point, that is everyone knows where it's at.
You know your neighbors, you know the terrain,
you have a community there that's built in.
It makes no sense to run away and leave that
to try to establish that someplace else
under extreme circumstances. So why not build
your house and supply your house and prepare your mind and your family for settling in and staying
in for an undetermined period of time where you're not going to be, you're not, maybe you don't have
access to pharmaceuticals. You don't have access to the grocery store. You don't have access to an
ATM. I mean, whatever the circumstances might be, civil war unrest world war three who knows what any you
know natural disasters any of that your house is the best place to be set up and of course
if a wildfire comes or a tornado comes or something like that you can always grab the go bag and get
out but why leave all the things you need to go someplace else to try to establish them so i wrote a book no you uh you triggered me to this i work with a company that sets up these uh emergency
pharmaceutical kits you know for this they have an emergency kit i have one they have a they have
oh good you have the wellness company they have a killer a killer box this thing has everything in
it yeah this thing will withstand the coin airstrike uh what is this one called
it's called the field emergency kit there it is um and uh that one's just i mean you you're good
with that it was like an er in a box and um so you know it's weird to me that in a weird way
because much as i bristled against staying at home during COVID,
the fact that COVID made us think about staying at home
and preparing ourselves for whatever the government might be doing to us.
I mean, that's where Wellness Company came from.
It's like, just to try to prepare ourselves,
because they started restricting everything,
and I want to be ready for them.
Exactly. And being a bit of a prepper my whole life, you know, I would get,
you know, flack from, from friends who thought it was weird and strange and, you know, but now nobody, nobody questions me after COVID and after, you know, the summer of love and all the things
we've experienced over the last five years, nobody questions preparedness.
Now everyone's stocked up on toilet paper and everyone gets it that something wrong
might go at any point in time.
So what do you recommend we be prepared for?
Is there sort of a priority list?
Yes.
I'm glad you asked that.
As far as events, it could be anything.
It could be natural disasters.
It could be a government situation.
It could be some sort of conflict.
It could be an EMP.
It could be a banking crisis, anything like that.
But that doesn't matter.
What we need to think about is I like to divide survival and escape and evasion and preparedness into five essential components. And if you address these
five in order of precedence, you'll be covered whether it's out in the field or whether it's
in your house or whether it's in an apartment or whatever the circumstances might be.
And those five are- I'm writing them down as you say them.
Order of importance. Don't go ahead. I'm writing them down.
They're shelter, water, food, communication, and navigation. and shelter being anything obviously we have a house
that's shelter but shelter is also closed shelter is anything that protects your physical body
from the elements or from from any kind of anything that can threaten your physical safety
so your physical body preparing your physical body water is very important as in we can only
last three days without water in um the the we're going to put ourselves in. So water is, and everyone, you know,
we're used to turning on the tap, but what happens if even a power outage, that big pumping station
in your city center now can no longer provide the pressure to get to your house? People don't think
about these things and storing water. Water can go bad. You need to know how to store. How much water? Well, it depends on how long you want to prepare
for. And so I have, I always set up for a primary tertiary or primary secondary tertiary and
emergency and tertiary and emergency can be the same, but I always like three levels of preparedness
in the SEAL teams and in many other military groups, we'd always talk about two is one and
one is none.
And basically, that means if we're going to make a plan, a mission or an operation, we
can only plan for having, say, a GPS unit to navigate with if we have at least two of
them.
We have to have a redundancy before you can factor it into your planning.
And so I always like to have at least three levels where I can, and some of these are,
you know, physical tools that I might have in order to start a fire,
or there might be the knowledge that I have where I can start a fire using a
bow drill or some sort of other primitive means.
And so I always like to have redundancies and you know,
you got to think through when you approach these things,
you divide everything into those five sections, like I said,
and you're going to get a primary, secondary, and tertiary
for each of those things that you need. And we start thinking through, and this is what I've done in the book, you start thinking through all the possible contingencies. In an EMP situation,
what's going to happen? Well, I'm going to have no electricity. What's going to happen to,
you know, how am I going to navigate? How am I going to drive my car? How am I going to get my
kid from school? You know, you got to think through all these things and prepare um contingency plans and they don't have to be they don't have to be thorough they
just have to be i've thought about this and i've realized that i can't go i can't take the freeway
because such and such and so then you have these these these thoughts in your mind and it's going
to guide you and you're going to improvise at a much higher level than you would if you hadn't
already thought through these these aspects you said water goes bad i don't think about water going bad what what
happens there well you know things grow things grow in the water you need to put things you
need to rotate we rotate our water and we also store it in a manner that the algae and stuff
that can go that can grow in the water
and all the creepy crawlies that will take over
are not going to be able.
So there's things you can put in the water.
Obviously, we purify with chlorine and iodine,
also silver, copper, things like that
actually prevent algae growth and mold and things like that.
So there are lots of ways that we can store in conditions that we store them
in the containers that we store them and the things that we can add and rotate.
Rotation is very important that we can rotate through.
And then also what happens if all of a sudden the pumping station goes down?
Where are you going to get your water?
So you got to source the water.
You have to purify the water and you have to store the water.
Those are the important things you need to do.
Excuse me.
And I just had a thought about it.
Would you recommend that you mentioned weapons and things like that.
Do you recommend some sort of place within your home,
provided you have space to retreat to, like a plan for,
I'm trying to imagine what that would be like.
No, you're thinking of a safe room or something. Yes, or fortifications.
Yeah, something of that sort.
Fortifications are a double-edged sword because one, you're fortified and it makes you safer,
but it also pins you down. You're now dependent on that location. So you can no longer
move as effectively as you could. So I'm not a big fan of fortifications. I'm a big fan of
setting things up ahead of time. For instance, for my family in the house, you know, bullets go
through walls very easily. And so one of the things I recommend in the book and that I'll have
is frangible ammunition. And this is something we trained with quite a bit in the SEAL teams when we're doing house runs.
A frangible projectile is a bullet that is basically made of compressed copper or some
other metal that's pressed together. So it's lethal, but as soon as it strikes a hard object,
it just fragments into a cloud of fairly non-offensive dust.
And so there are things that we need to think of
in the house, and obviously we don't want to get to the
point where someone's in our house.
That's, we've messed up if we're at that point,
but we still need to plan that contingency.
So how am I going to deal with this?
Where are my family going to go to?
How am I going to get my, yeah, there we go.
Yeah, where am I going to get my kids, my wife,
my parents, my pets to, so we go. Yeah. Where am I going to get my, my kids, my, my wife, my, my parents,
my pets too, so that I can clear this house and I can deal with the threat without having to worry
about where they're at and if they're in my line of fire. So there's all kinds of things we've got
to think about. You want to ask any questions? Susan, you were here. She was thinking about
building a safe something. Those are great ideas i think this house
i think this house is like a fortress like we have a long house with windows and we're going
to invite emily bars over with all our guns if anything happens just to get here if they
have a plan for that here one of the biggest you don't want to do i was
go ahead one of the biggest things i always tell people for basic house fortification before you
do anything else is go go down to home depot or lowe's and buy some three inch wood screws the
big long heavy suckers and then go through all of your your doors and replace the the strike
plates for the the panels and the hinges take out those little one and a quarter inch screws
or three quarter inch screws whatever they put them there, that one good kick will put those right through the wall and put three
inch screws into that big, that big support lintel all the way around. And that is going to,
I went to breacher school. And when we're learning to break in places, you know,
the difference between the little tiny screw and a three inch screw will give you at least 10 minutes of 10 minutes of, depending on how prepared they are, it will give you time to realize someone's coming in to retreat to make sure that that reactionary gap between something happening and us being able to respond to it is as long as possible.
So we're able to mitigate whatever circumstances are happening, get our loved ones safe, and then engage in whatever manner we need to to deal with the threat.
Yeah, Susan, we're going to have to get rid of those hollow core doors too.
Because the three and
screws are not going to save you from those so um so what are we expecting is world war
three coming in your mind oh nice um well we're certainly barreling towards the kinetic ass i
think we're in world war three right now which is a war of narratives it's fifth generational
warfare however um you know the kinetic aspect of, we are barreling towards with total abandon.
And so I don't know what to, and really one of the things I hit in my book all the time is I don't
want to sell fear. This isn't about World War III or, you know, civil war or even, you know,
a nuclear explosion or EMP. What this is about is about getting back to the things that we can be
empowered with in our own life.
Take care of your house.
Take care of your food.
Take care of your water.
Take care of your community.
Build community.
Connect with people that provide things that you don't provide and build that so that then we're living in a way that these things that we're worried about, if they come to pass, we're already set up for it.
I believe in creating a life that we live
and these things are just natural outgrowths
of the way we live.
Yeah, this has been said to me more than a couple of times.
And you mentioned communication as one of the top five.
Presumably cells would be out.
So what form of communication should we have on hand?
Well, when you talk to all the experienced preppers, everyone talks about ham radio, HF radio, which is absolutely the gold standard.
However, it's very difficult to learn.
It's not something you have to get licensed for it.
I mean, in a shithead hitting the fan situation, nobody's going to be worried about licenses, but you you have to get licensed for it. I mean, in a, in a shit hitting the fan situation, you know, nobody's gonna be worried about
licenses, but you still have to operate that.
And it's, it's not something that you can just, you know, go out and switch it on all
of a sudden be talking, you know, worldwide.
And so, um, for my, my family, I have family still in LA.
And so I'm out in middle Tennessee now.
And so communicating with them is the most important thing for me in a situation.
And so there are several things you can do. The thing i did is i got on starlink so um you know
if if things go down starlink is going to i believe stay up much longer and be able to communicate
through starlink um when you know you need power for starlink too do you have to have power in
order to receive from starlink so we get then you need a backup generator, right? Exactly. And gasoline, solar power?
Whatever.
There are all kinds of ways to do it.
All the go.
We out here, we're on a generator system.
And then I have smaller generators if my big goes down.
But we have Starlink as our primary.
And then one of the other things we communicate with is we have a satellite, Iridium satellite network.
And Garmin bought recently a company called Delorme.
And Delorme had these location-based units that they put them in my backpack in Manhattan after the first episode when I got lost in Africa.
Or they lost me in Africa.
I knew where I was at.
They didn't.
But you can text using the Iridium Satellite Network,
and there's an SOS button that you can, anywhere in the world,
anywhere in the world on the network, they will send out a rescue for you.
So that's my secondary.
And then tertiary, we have some other radio mesh communications
is another really good way, depending on one of the things that people
always ask me, what is the best way for this, this, this, there is no one best day.
The best way is whatever the situation dictates, you know, the situation will always be different
and each person is always different.
And so you need to stack your preparedness plans based on you and the place you live
and the circumstances that you're in.
And so everyone's going to be different. I'm just telling you what I have set up. So I have,
you know, I have Starlink and then I have, you know, the Iridium satellite network. And then I,
I of course know how to use HF and, and, and ham radio stuff. So I have a setup for that.
And the ham radio network, the other cool thing about the ham radio network is these people live
for natural disasters.
That's what they do is they communicate.
And that is the greatest thing that could happen to a ham radio operator in his world is the world ending.
Because then they're going to be communicating with everyone, passing everyone's messages.
They love this shit.
They really do.
And so if you can connect with ham radio operators, they will help you out.
If you understand the basics and can connect with them,
they will help.
They will break their hands.
Don't you need a big tower for that?
There are big towers.
Those are repeaters.
And so what you need to do is you need to be able to connect to one of those.
That's all that you need to do.
I see.
Yeah.
I see.
We're probably in the wrong demographic.
We're also sort of in a valley here.
We're sort of surrounded by stuff. We're also sort of in a valley here. We're sort of surrounded by stuff.
We can't even get cell service up here.
But Caleb, do you know about that second backup, the Iridium?
Is that what you called it?
Iridium, yes.
Yeah, I think, if I remember correctly,
it has something to do with like Russia has those satellites
or it's like a backup network that's not based on our GPS.
No, it's GMRS. Okay, I'm based on our gps or a nice gmrs okay
i'm thinking of the different ones yeah you're thinking of the different gps location that is
the the russian thing um glonass or i think it's called glonass anyway that's all open up and our
gps uh uh units now operate on glonass and on the us-based system but what i'm talking about is the
iridium satellite network satellite phones almost all'm talking about is the Iridium satellite network, satellite phones.
Almost all of them operate on the Iridium satellite network. And governments use this,
you know, for, I mean, we would have satellite phones in Afghanistan when we were deployed,
all that. So the Iridium network is pretty robust. And I don't expect that it would be taken down
because the people that would be taking it down are dependent upon it. So I'm gambling
that our secondary will be able to communicate on Iridium satellite.
And, you know, nothing is 100%.
You can try to cover the greatest percentages you can in the best overlapping you can
so that when, you know, if something were to happen that you're not covered for,
it's a very, very small percentage of possibility.
And I have to ask, just because I think it's on people's minds, given the New Jersey situation and all the chatter about drones and whatnot.
Is there a procedural sort of protocol to go through for radiation?
For radiation?
Well, we had...
That's a good question because I did, I actually did two specials on Fukushima for Discovery Channel that were amazing. And I got to go to Fukushima,
Daiichi and Daini and see where everything went down. And the amount of radiation that I got,
I was wearing a rad meter the whole time and I could only get a certain amount of radiation
before we had to shut down the filming. But what's interesting is I got more radiation on both of my flights to and from Japan than I did actually in Fukushima. So the radiation
is something that we get a lot of radiation as you're well aware, Dr. Drew. I mean,
there's a lot of radiation that's not just going to come. I mean, there are supplements that we can
take to keep the radioactive isotopes from binding to, you know, binding to those receptors.
Cement and potassium iodide.
Exactly.
But for most people, we already have, we have enough in our system.
So I'm not too worried about the long-term radiation.
What I am worried about are, you know, what's going to happen, the other things that are
happening if a radiological event were to occur, you know,
that's, that's going to be nuclear air bursts or, you know, something that I'm going to have
priorities. But yes, that's a great question. Yeah. It's, it's, it, my understanding is a little
different than people think. I mean, they, you know, first priority is getting it off of you,
like washing off, leaving everything outside.
And then it's staying covered, right?
And then after about three or four days, you can kind of venture out a little bit, right?
Isn't that sort of how it works
if it's not the major center of things?
I'm no expert,
but as I understand it,
yes, you're correct.
And like in Fukushima,
we did all the CBR,
chemical, biological, radiological did all the CBR chemical
biological radiological drills all the time in the SEAL teams and that was the big thing
is you got to clean we had a whole we had a man portable cleaning station that was set up where
we clean our feet all right we go through a whole procedure stripping everything off and cleaning
all the rads off of you and then and then going on and getting someplace where there's a shelter. But in Fukushima, yeah,
that's what happened. But then the radiation that was in the topsoil, you know, that's the
long-term stuff that they have to deal with. It was in the topsoil. And I actually went and
interviewed this Zen monk who ran a Zen church. He was amazing. And he was trying, he saw all the
children walking to school where all the radiation was, he was really concerned about it so he did some research and he learned that sunflowers process the cesium whatever the isotope of cesium
was pull it right out of the soil and so he went and with his own money bought all these sunflowers
and planted sunflowers all across his village and all along the side of the roads to absorb all the
cesium and make it safe for the kids to walk to school. Very charming story. Very interesting. I mean, it's stuff like that that I'm interested
in, these little nuggets that can make a big difference in these situations that seem
overwhelming to those of us that aren't familiar with all the details of how to respond.
Well, listen, I appreciate you being here. I appreciate your service, of course. I
appreciate you trying to help everybody else out with preparedness. As we head into the new year,
is there something top of mind for you that we should keep top of mind for ourselves?
Personally, I think everything is going to get incredibly beautiful for the human race
going into this next year. I think
we're beginning a beautiful phase of our existence. I think it's going to be bumpy for a little while
before that starts. So I would say, you know, building some community and getting prepared for
just even a couple of weeks. In my book, I cover apartment dwelling. You know, obviously it's great
if you're on a big spread of land, but, you know, stack yourself up for a little bit. So if you can't go to the ATM and you can't go make a run to the grocery store and you're stuck inside for two, three, four weeks, you're going to be absolutely fine.
That's my advice to everyone.
And get a Navy SEALs bug-in guide so you can go through specifics of how to prepare yourself, which I think we should do it.
I'm up for it.
I'm already hoarding food and water.
I don't know what you're so worried about.
That's all we're doing.
We always make fun of it.
You know, everybody has recommended
we get a generator.
We've just not done it.
Yeah, we need it.
And we're in earthquake territory.
We're in fire territory.
I got Starlink,
but we're still trying to find somebody
who can set it up.
So we're in the contemplative phase.
You know, there's just like every change, right?
You go through thinking about it, contemplating it, preparing for it, executing it, and then maintaining it.
I want to have the generator so that we can keep the studio on and we can have the Starlink and we can still.
This is Susan's ham radio.
This is her version of ham radio.
Which is what we did during COVID, frankly, how this started.
Yeah, you're great.
Get a whole house unit and then get a couple small units that you can run freezers and things in if the house unit goes down or whatever.
So that's what I have.
A couple small ones and I have a big whole house.
Emily's going to take me shooting and then I'll know how to shoot a gun.
I'm a good shot apparently.
So I've been told.
And those three-inch screws.
Joel, is there a place other than X and Instagram
you'd like people to go to find you?
Oh, you can find me on Facebook, too.
I think it's joel.lambert something.
You can find me on there.
I've got a business account.
But buggingguide.com and bugginginguide.com.
And I look forward to
interacting with everybody. Thank you all. You know, I think things are going to get beautiful.
Are the Discovery shows still on Hulu or something?
They are. They're on Apple TV and Max, because that's part of Discovery. That's on there. It's
on Amazon. I think you can find all of them. You can find Manhunt. It's called Lone Target in the US
and in France,
but it was Manhunt everywhere else.
But yeah, you can find all the shows.
It was a great show
and I'm pretty proud of it.
So check it out.
Oh my gosh, it sounds magnificent.
Discovery is hardcore.
They do good work.
They really do.
The executives are really very thoughtful
about what they put on the air.
All right alright my friend
good to talk to you
have a nice new year
and 2025 onward
sounds good
well Lambert everybody
thank you everybody
cheers
thank you again
we can always eat the bunnies
and the squirrels
in the yard too
now you're thinking
but you gotta
capture them first
then you have to have
a fire to cook them on
a knife to clean them with.
If you're a doctor, you can do that.
This is the point about preparedness.
We got knives.
We got plenty of knives.
Yeah, yeah.
I am.
You know, in the seer training,
they teach you to catch rabbit and skin them and eat them.
Yeah, good times.
Caleb, we're going to-
We have a lot of extra dog food out there we can cook up first.
We're going to eat our dog's food.
That's fantastic.
All right, next up is Matt Walsh.
He's the founder of New Freedom,
pioneering behavioral health,
reentry facility in Arizona.
It is a comprehensive facility
offering integrative services
for formerly incarcerated individuals,
therapy training, case management,
onsite parole services.
It's a comprehensive program.
You can find out more about it at NewFreedomAZ.
They're in Arizona, NewFreedomAZ.com.
You're going to follow Matt on Instagram
at NewFreedomAZ as well.
And he'll have a alumni with us here as well
to talk about the program.
Be right back after this.
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Yeah, I was going to say in the bone broth, it's a great source of protein.
Just put in some warm water and you're good.
I have a bunch.
We would never go hungry.
Yeah, we don't.
That's true.
We don't think about it as disaster preparedness, but it definitely is. Protein is such an important thing.
You know, like you can have like a lot of pastas in the pantry and stuff like that,
but having that protein is really important.
You don't have to kill the rabbits in the backyard like Susan wants to do.
Yeah, that's right.
Barbecue squirrel.
Let's get to our next guest.
It is Matt Waltz.
It is newfreedomaz.com.
Matt, welcome to the program, and thank you for your work as well.
So great to be with you, Dr. Drew.
So tell us about the program, how you got going, what the history is.
Is it something that can be reproduced?
You know, Arizona compared to California is a very, I would say, encouraging environment
compared to California where you can't do anything.
But what's the history?
So the history of New Freedom,
a banking contact of mine about six years ago said,
hey, I've got three guys you should meet with.
They've got a really unique idea.
So these three guys came to my office, sat down.
These three are my partners in New Freedom today. So one of them was serving a life sentence in prison.
And he got sick of seeing these young guys just come back over and over, leave for two months,
come back, leave for four months, come back. He became aware there were some federal funds
available for recidivism programs. He applied for those funds, got them, and started
teaching a class inside the prison, basically how to not come back to prison. There were two guys
in the addiction recovery world who heard about this. They started writing letters,
supporting the guys in the program, started to have tremendous success. At the same time,
a partner who was serving a life sentence was working on his appeal.
Much to his surprise, he won his appeal and got released.
So these three guys then said, hey, let's take this program and let's scale it up.
Let's find a way to do a lot more good, help a lot more people.
So they wrote a fantastic business plan, went to some banks.
The banks said, great idea, great business plan.
No fucking way am I giving an ex-conv next convict and 2x addicts any money and about the fifth banker said no but i know a guy you should meet so they came
to my office they presented this plan it was a fantastic business plan they figured the funding
out and i just couldn't understand why it hadn't been done already so we decided to push forward
with this idea at the same time try to answer the
question why didn't this exist already and I think what we found talking to ESG funds and family
offices is people don't love the idea of helping ex-convicts and so when I learned that meeting
with these fund managers and family offices I became even more encouraged because I think that was the answer to why new freedom didn't already exist.
Yeah.
And also finding a place where you could put things like that.
And again, in California, just the legal barriers to doing something like this are profound.
They've just done everything possible not to make it something that can be done in this state.
Did you have any encouragement or resistance
from the state of Arizona?
No.
You ever heard of this thing called the coronavirus?
Yeah, yeah.
So when we would look for a space,
the coronavirus lockdown happened the day before.
So we walked into a 250-room conference hotel that was empty.
The owners basically begged us to buy it.
They sold it to us for an incredible price.
In order to get licensed, the city had a special use permit hearing.
No one attended because it was in the dark of COVID.
So we got approved.
It came together faster than anything I've ever been involved with before.
It was incredible.
Wow.
And how do you staff it?
In other words, I'm sure there's quite a range of mental health issues, substance issues, as you said.
How do you figure out how to do that?
So the way New Freedom works, it's a combination
of clinical staff, licensed clinical professionals, also peer support. So we have over 220 employees
today. 85% of them are formerly incarcerated, formerly addicted. What this population believes
that if you haven't been through
what I've been through, I don't want to hear it. I want some college students to learn this in a
book. I want to talk to people that know what I've been through. So in our facility, we have guys,
men and women who used to be shock collars in the prison gangs. I mean, truly terrifying human
beings who are now generous, successful, charismatic, capable people.
And so when someone comes walking through our doors
and they see this man who used to be an absolute terror
and he gives them a hug and says,
hey man, you can have a different life,
it sparks this hope that's just incredible to see.
But I want to get back to this well a little bit
I mean I definitely knew it would be alumni
driven and also
you know recovering
people both recovering from incarceration
recovering from drug addiction this is critically
important in running a program like this
but I'm thinking there's going to be also
a range of psychiatric problems
and trauma for sure
how does that all get managed yeah so the
big picture of how new freedom works is we're trying to reprogram a formerly incarcerated
person's day so it matches a successful professional so that they starts off with
exercise first thing then breakfast then about six to seven hours of clinical programming,
group therapy, individual therapy, you know, dealing with the traumatic events that probably
cause someone to have this incredibly self-destructive behavior, right? After that,
dinner, then the night shift. And the night shift consists of secondary education, the same way a
young professional would be improving themselves after hours. We have vocational job training programs, GED, commercial driver's licenses.
So we're really training people to use what they already have. A lot of people have these skills
already. Let's address what the root of the problem is that causes self-destructive behavior,
give you tools to deal with that, and then give you a real future,
training you for not just a job, but a career.
Do you have to have been incarcerated,
or have you thought about maybe mixing it
with just straight drug addict cases?
You know, we've thought about that.
We've talked about it.
It's a really unique population set
that's just, that that's formerly recently incarcerated.
You know, it could be possible that people that haven't been incarcerated, they just they wouldn't have the same needs.
They wouldn't have the same challenges.
And I mean, good news or bad news for us in Arizona, there's 40,000 people who are incarcerated, over 18,000 coming out of prison every year.
And we're helping about 15 percent,000 coming out of prison every year, and we're helping about 15%
of people coming out of Arizona prisons.
So there's still so much more work to do.
Yeah, again, I've asked that question
because I'm thinking about California
where drug addicts do not go to jail,
and so they die on the street.
And so, yeah, they may have gone through prison at one time,
but there's not anymore and uh and they're
just dying like crazy um and you're not allowed to do anything for them or with them before we
rolled into this episode today we uh caleb put up a little tape of an interview i did with rfk
jr i don't know if you had a chance to see that matt but in there he was talking about his vision
for these sort of recovery spaces it's very similar to what you're
talking about if if i can get his ear is there something i could tell him that could help you
provide this other places or scale this up in some way because i it it feels like i've seen
stuff like this in various states around the country like indiana has great
stuff like this but it's all inside the prisons and how do we how do we get someone's ear who's
enthusiastic to provide these kinds of services on a larger platform throughout the country
i'm so glad you asked that question yeah both robert f kennedy jr or dr oz who's going to be
in charge of medicaid in the incoming administration the majority of our funding in Arizona comes from Medicaid.
And there's so much talk in today's world about government waste and inefficiencies and all these
things. And what I'd like them to do is, this is one of the successful programs that uses government
funding. So they should know there are amazing things happening at New
Freedom. In fact, we have some outside consultants coming in to analyze our funding. For every
$1 of government funding New Freedom gets, we return $10 to the citizens of Arizona in
value, almost $200 million a year back to the citizens of Arizona. So for RFK Jr. and
Dr. Ross, just know we exist we're creating miracles we're
helping people become good citizens good neighbors good fathers good sons and
helping the community with adding to the GDP reducing crime there's so many
benefits and are you familiar with the so-called IMD exclusion on Medicaid and Medicare?
And how do you guys get around that?
I'm not.
That term does not ring a bell for me.
So I'm guessing this must come through the state of Arizona, right?
They must get a block grant.
Yeah. I almost don't want to tell them what you're
doing because there's something called the IMD exclusion. When President Johnson set up Medicare,
Medi-Cal, he specifically excluded institutions for mental disorders of any type called the IMD exclusion. And it's been a point, an issue forever.
And one of the things I want to talk to Oz about is getting rid of that.
So there may be more funding.
Now stuff comes into the individual states and sort of a block grant.
They kind of get around it a little bit,
but I almost don't want to tell them what you're doing because it might be
in violation.
You might cause more trouble than not. them what you're doing because it might be in violation. You might cause more trouble than not.
So what we're doing, we're providing discrete services, peer support, group therapy.
So it's just the clinical services that are being reimbursed.
I got it.
But that's, again, that's not for medical disorders.
It's for mental disorders.
And that's how you get into trouble with these guys.
So interesting.
I'll go feel that all out
because this is obviously an area
that RFK Jr. clearly is passionate about.
I don't know if Oz,
he's a very bright guy,
so I won't be any trouble communicating this to him
and you'll see it immediately,
the importance of all this.
And I understand you have an
alumni with you to talk about the program,
what the experience was like.
Correct.
Shall we bring in Fred?
There's Fred.
Fred, welcome. I appreciate you being here.
We are great. Tell us about
your experience with the program
and what your life was like before that.
A living hell.
I've been locked up 17 years.
I've been down three different times.
Every time you get out,
there was nothing out there for us to go back to,
but our old life, you know, doing drugs, robbing people,
whatever we were doing, that's what we did.
This last time I was locked up, I got a little three years old.
I was 58 at that time.
Then there were some flyers from New Freedom being passed out on the yards. And I started to write them. I wrote them for a year
and a half. They put you on a mentorship program. So you get a letter.
They send you a newsletter. They're feeling you out as much as you on a mentorship program. So you get a letter, they send you a newsletter.
They're feeling you out as much as you're feeling them out. Okay. They accepted me.
They came to the prison and picked me up. They brought me to new freedom. And the funny thing is I grew up less than a quarter mile from that place. My parents still live at that house, or my brother does.
I go there.
The first night I'm there, it's a little overwhelming because everybody is so giving and caring.
Oh, welcome home, welcome home.
Well, you know, I'm thinking to myself, this isn't my home.
So I get overwhelmed.
I go to my room.
I go to dinner.
I see some of the fellows from the yard.
I talk to them. They say, hey, just open your eyes a little bit and see what they got to say.
I go to my first class the next morning. And there are the counselors asking for anybody to get their life story.
So I jump up and give my story. And from then on, it was all, it's a family.
They treat you like family.
I went through the vocational program.
My employer was running the program.
There was a PHP, John Morris and Greg Quinlan.
They came in two nights a week.
They taught us how to be better people, better employees, better citizens to begin with. I was hired
two weeks into it
and I stayed there 90 days
and I went right to work
with PHP. I've been working there
for two years.
I believe without New Freedom
I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing right now.
I'd probably be back in prison.
You're helping
other people you're helping
other people stay out of prison what what is the number one barrier you face in getting because i
i know when i work i work with drug addicts all the time i have no problem working with drug
addicts but when drug addicts become sort of criminalized they become sort of committed to
their criminal thinking i i noticed that they've become very, very difficult to reach,
probably just because I'm who I am.
I've not been through what they've been through.
But they will not trust.
I cannot get them to trust what I'm saying.
So for me, that's the biggest thing I face when dealing with somebody out of prison.
Is that the same for you, or is there something else that you have to overcome?
It's the stigma of being in prison.
Like he said, when I got out, I went to that program,
and the first people I see are people I used to do crime with.
I know those guys.
I know them from the streets.
I know them from the prison system.
You can trust them.
And that is a fact that we have
a hard time trusting people because so many people
have said shit to us to get us to do things,
but they don't care about us.
All they care about is
what we're going to do for them.
New Freedom's not like that.
When those guys said something from the janitor
to the head guy,
they care.
And it's the same with the vocational people.
Excuse me.
My boss, he cares.
We have a family-run business.
Six of the upper echelon people are from New Freedom.
Project managers, supervisors, our head estimator,
all graduated from New Freedom.
Fred, I want to bring you. So, I mean, it's just-
Fred, I want to bring you, I'm sorry, Matt.
I want to bring Matt back in for a second.
Matt, you know, Fred really emphasized
something you emphasized was the importance
of the peer program, which again, doesn't surprise me.
But it must have taken some time
to get to a critical mass with that.
Or did you have enough, you know what I mean?
You needed to kind of get to the, that must have been really challenging.
Well, I'm a serial entrepreneur.
I've started and exited, you know, about five businesses in my career.
I've never seen anything come together the way New Freedom came together.
You know, the employees love working there.
The second we started hiring, we're lined up out the door to get in there.
Great people who have turned their lives around.
It's been nothing short of amazing. I would love to give you
a tour in person, Dr. Drew, because you hear about this
program and it sounds amazing. Every time I've given a tour, people tell me, I can't believe what's happening here. You're
walking, you feel the energy. The employees are fired up. The program are fired up. You feel
this energy of success and hope and change that's hard to describe.
Fred, do you think we can reproduce this other places?
Yes.
Yes.
If Matt Watson's involved with it, then it can get reproduced anywhere.
And they need to because...
He's going to give you more work, Matt, just so you know.
It's just ridiculous.
Go ahead, Fred. I'm sorry.
Well, it's just ridiculous with the recidivism rate of people going back to prison for nothing because they don't have nothing when they get out.
They give you the structure.
They give you what you need to succeed.
And if you just follow the recipe, you're going to succeed.
I mean, I'm living proof.
I'm 60 years old. And Matt, one of the complaints I hear from people that have been convicted of various significant crimes is the employment issue, trying to get back into the workforce.
How do you get people over that hump other than the vocational training you provide?
It's like nothing I've seen before.
So we didn't realize when we first started, we didn't even plan on doing vocational training.
It's something that evolved.
People are saying, hey, we want jobs.
Can you help us get jobs?
So we developed this vocational training program.
I've been in construction development for close to 30 years.
So I brought some of my trade contractor partners in.
They started teaching classes and then hiring these people.
Today, there are over 90 employers who hire out of new freedom
some of them exclusively hire from new freedom because they they're the best employees i've
ever had i mean the average that's a major piece of this that that is the one thing that
on the drug addiction side in particular we fail uh because it is a very specialized thing to be able to provide,
which is A, vocational rehab,
and then B, jobs.
That is a major, major milestone
that you were able to do that.
I wonder, do you do other things
besides construction
or the other sort of vocational opportunities
you provide?
There are about 15 different vocational tracks, commercial driver's license.
We offer peer support certification so they can go out and work in other behavioral health
facilities.
We have a commercial kitchen, so we're training people how to work in restaurants and do food
service.
But the overwhelming majority are in the trades.
I mean, it's a natural fit.
Talk to any general contractor or subcontractor.
Finding people who want to work in construction is incredibly challenging.
And the men and women coming out of prison love that work.
They're not afraid to work hard.
They roll up their sleeves.
Again, you hear all the time, they're some of the best employees that our employer partners
are hiring.
You mentioned women. time. They're some of the best employees that our employer partners are hiring.
You mentioned women. Is this both sexes in your program?
That's correct. We started with our first facility was men and women. And about three months ago, we opened our women's only facility. So we have two facilities in
Phoenix. We're serving just over 400 people total. So we're really proud of our success.
Yeah, I'm just thinking about some of the programs I've seen around the country.
And Texas, you would find, would be very welcoming to this kind of thing.
Also, the other thing that happens, I imagine this happens at Phoenix as well, is the community wants to support it.
So there's a funding source there sort of to just be a part of it.
The community
wants to contribute. Well, you're right. And I told you when we first started, you know,
the coronavirus affected, we went through our special use permit process without a person
showing up. Well, a few months later, the neighborhood group found out about us and
they came with the proverbial, you know, pitchforks and torches. But once they came inside and saw what we were doing, the neighborhood group is now our biggest supporter.
They love us.
They support us in every way.
So it's just been magical to watch what happens.
When you help people get better, the American people at large, they want that.
I mean, when you hear these stories of friends.
These are the kinds of things that we have to,
we can wish for just to solve some of our problems.
We just, you know, again,
we support a program in our community
that's a therapeutic living environment
for essentially kids that are pulled out of the home
because of abuse and trauma and all this stuff.
And I just always think to myself,
God, if we could have a hundred more of these
just around the country.
And you're providing the same challenge here.
Let's figure out how to do this elsewhere.
Now, one of the things that Fred mentioned
was this sort of enrollment process.
How do you select people for enrollment?
So we've got a team of people that does nothing but write letters to incarcerated people in Arizona prisons.
In fact, we write over 7,000 letters a month.
And so what happens is we build a relationship with people inside prisons.
And when they say, hey, I'm done with this life, but maybe I don't know how to be done with this life, our mentors say, great.
That's exactly what we're here to do is
help you do that. So the first thing we do is we send them six
courses, there's a six course curriculum, that is basically
homework. They do the homework in prison, they send it back to
us. And for the last six to 12 months of their incarceration, we
require that they don't get into trouble. So no gang activity, no drugs, no fighting.
And those two things are the cost of admission to new freedom.
And if those two things can get completed, then they can fill out an application to be accepted at new freedom.
Okay, that's interesting because that explains why you haven't had the need for some of these more higher-level clinical services
because you've selected people that can participate,
that can stop taking drugs, can do these things.
Yeah, that's good.
I mean, that's...
This program is not for everyone, right?
You need to fit a specific criteria.
You can't be currently addicted.
You know, you can't,
we don't take this MI.
There's a few parameters.
And again, we're helping about 15%
of the people that are coming out
of Arizona prisons today.
And Fred, what is your hope
for the program?
Oh, by the way, before I say that too,
but for both of you,
I know how rewarding it is
to help people with these kinds of disorders and this sorts of condition.
Matt, it's probably not like anything you've ever done before, but I see how you're completely turned on by it.
And you'll always have this.
You'll always be able to make a difference because of this project.
And Fred, you too.
I imagine this is sort of a surprise for you at this stage of your life.
Yes, it is.
It's a big surprise because I never figured I would be on the streets this long.
You know, it's a nice deal that there's someone out there that cares about us enough to do what he did.
And hopefully someone watching this will start something like this in another state and get it on the ball.
Because it's a game changer.
If people want to change and they're given the opportunity to, I think most of us will
change.
My family's back in my corner.
I've been with the same woman for 28 years and she said the most beautiful words to me
she's ever, ever said was, you're a man of your word.
Because I wasn't a man of my word for a lot of years.
So I take care of it.
It's very important.
Honesty, trust,
gratitude.
Fred, is there a spiritual component to this?
Sometimes people find great
satisfaction or importance of some sort of
spiritual something.
You know, I'm really not
going to bullshit. I'm not a big believer in
any of that crap.
You're going to change if you want to change.
You don't need it.
That's informative to me.
Yeah, it's fine.
Matt, do you find that people need it?
I don't do any.
I don't do AA.
I decided I wanted to change, and this is what I did.
I go to work every day.
I go home.
I go to the gym.
I'm building a motorcycle.
And I do whatever my girl needs me to do.
That's, I guess that'd be my spiritual deal,
if that's what you want to call it.
Well, that is, Fred, that actually is.
Service, service, accountability,
all these things has a spiritual component to it.
But Matt, what do you say?
Yeah, so there are a lot of options at New Freedom.
It's not compulsory.
There are some faith-based options. You know, there's a lot of options at New Freedom. It's not compulsory. There are some faith-based options.
You know, there's a lot of different paths.
Fred's a great example.
Not everyone chooses the path of faith.
A lot of people do.
But really, and Fred's right.
You know, the people that come to New Freedom, they want to change.
You know, one interesting thing I want to tell you, Dr. Drew, is the thing that I've come to realize, especially as a business owner, the skill set that it takes to be a successful criminal in the criminal world is almost identical to what it takes to be successful in the business world.
The main difference is the stakes are so much higher.
Someone like Fred, who was a leader in the criminal world, if he doesn't do his job right, his life might be at risk.
In the business world, if you don't do your job right, you lose a client, maybe some people quit.
So what we're doing is we're taking those skills all these men and women already have and repurposing them for good and success in the business world.
Gentlemen, I appreciate you being here. Fred, congratulations on your work.
Thank you.
Matt, congratulations on this organization.
I hope to shake your hand in person and see the facility.
Thank you so much.
All right, gentlemen, thank you so much. And for everyone else, Caleb,
let's throw up the schedule going forward. It's a little, it's, it's,
I'm not sure it's filled
in yet, but we got a lot of stuff coming
our way, just sort of getting everything put together.
I've got some travel coming up too.
Jeff Dye finally is going to get here, Salty
Cracker. We're going to have Peter McCullough back in.
Tom Wren's coming in, first of the year.
He's got some updated
materials for us. Just a
dumb old guy from,
you know, what does he call himself?
A simple
country lawyer.
Just a simple lawyer fighting the government
in a billion dollar lawsuit.
Like every simple lawyer does.
A billion dollar lawsuit.
Tom, you can't fool
me with that crap anymore, my friend.
But in any event, always interested
to hear what he's digging up, what he's
coming up with. And as I think we
all know, I was just listening to Mark Andreessen
from an interview he did about three weeks ago
about just stuff is just coming up
now. There's more and more. All the things
we have had the great privilege of sort of
touching on this program over the last
couple of years in terms of talking to people who were
canceled, who had seen things, who had ideas, who had brought
stuff up. Lo and behold,
they're all coming to
bear fruit. It's all
turning out to be, for the most
part, accurate.
We have the justice in the
sense that now RFK Jr. is
in Washington, which is what I was hoping for
all along. HHS,
Jay Bhattacharya at the NIH, which is
this great gift. I almost
couldn't imagine this happening, but
here we are. Now let's see what these guys
can do with it in 2025. I'm going
to reach my hand out to Oz
and Kennedy and
Jay and just see
if there's anything I can do to help. We appreciate
you all being here this year in
2024. Let me quickly
look at, yes, the real man, the salty crackers coming back.
So look forward to that.
It's towards the end of the month.
On the restream, yep, people are happy with the McCullough following up and seeing us again.
And there's a lot more coming, trust me.
Emily has some great, interesting guests that are, some of them are top secret.
I want to tell you about you, but you will enjoy no doubt.
And of course we'll be revisited by some of our friends like Jimmy door and
Dave Rubin and people that have supported us throughout the year.
Susan,
anything in the upcoming new year for,
from your standpoint,
what you want to say to people?
Happy new year.
Happy new year.
Appreciate you being here, Caleb. Thank you for all you do. Emily, New Year. Happy New Year. Appreciate you being here.
Caleb, thank you for all you do.
Emily, thank you for all you do.
Susan, for you and for all you've done
and for being who you are.
I appreciate it very, very much.
And Caleb, thank you for thinking of this thing.
I'm doing gratitude lists every day.
And you and Susan came up with the idea of doing this show
and it's been a great experience all the way along.
So let's keep it going and build to the next level with this.
Everybody's happy when Drew's happy.
Well,
it's,
it really turned out to be a really interesting,
it's just a surprise that,
you know,
I was sending some gratitude to the,
your mom's house people yesterday.
I think it was,
I've seen,
it really was a surprise and a gift
that we ended up working with you guys
and then it ended and so fine,
but it was still this great gift.
And I feel very much the same way about this,
which has taken over.
And I would argue,
I don't want to use pejorative language
about what I did at Your Mom's House,
but I feel like this is a more important project
we're doing here. And we're going to keep to treating it asative language about what I did at your mom's house, but I feel like this is a more important project we're doing here.
And we're going to keep to treating it as such.
One time I was telling Tom, you know, well, we're doing this kind of, you know, boring stuff, you know, over here.
And he goes, it's important.
Oh, he's seen it.
That's good.
I appreciate that.
You got to do it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it is important.
And it has proven itself to be important.
Like I said,
this idea, we became free speech advocates, particularly
this year. The word
platforming was leveled at me
for the last three years. That is
a disgusting term. Let's just call it
speaking in public together
as we should always do.
And you all, you arrive at your own conclusions. I give it to you to should always do. And you all,
you arrive at your own conclusions.
I give it to you to arrive at stuff.
And by the way,
please do give us feedback.
Let us know where we fail.
Let us know who you'd like to see going forward.
If there's other guests that you might like to see in here.
We're going to be going back around
and seeing some of our old favorites too.
Let me just quickly look at you guys
on the restream uh hold on let's see sorry you guys i just want to just look at this
anything um a lot of interesting
stuff in here in the restream today. Susan, did you catch anything on the rant?
I'd just like
to remind everyone that QR
codes are again not the mark of
the beast. It's just a fancy
barcode that your phone can read. They've been around
for a long time. That is not the mark
of the beast. You don't need to worry about it.
Please.
So let me
leave you with this thought for the
new year. We'll be back with Tom Renz
on the second, right after the new
year, which is
don't
do, don't
become, don't do what they did to us.
The
excesses of COVID should be
an absolute reminder at all times of what excess and ideology and hubris and sort of totalitarian impulses and centralization does to us. that maybe aren't supported by the facts,
which I welcome that, that's fine,
but don't impose them on other people
any more than we should have been imposed
vaccine mandates and lockdowns
and all the things that were imposed upon us.
So try to develop some irrational uncertainty
in all things.
Certitude is irrational.
We've been through this massive wave
of irrational certitude.
It's collapsing, thank God.
Rational uncertainty should prevail.
We should all have a certain amount of hubris,
excuse me, of lack of hubris and humility instead
that gives us, and you by all means
share ideas with other people,
but don't insist upon them.
Caleb, am I getting somewhere with that?
Does that make sense to you?
I was thinking about the QR thing in that context.
Yes.
Yeah, and we don't want to be like the rest.
Things were foisted on us that we got to the point
where we were having to defend free speech.
Think about that.
This is an unbelievable moment,
a wind that blew in the history of this country
that must be fought against at all times.
And we must not be the way that those
that did that unto us were.
We must develop much more humility.
And Joe Fink says, there must be brutal justice.
Well, that's a different topic.
I understand you may want some justice
and we can mill through that process
given the excesses of what happened and how people
were hurt. I get it. People were hurt
and they'd like some justice on that. But that still
is different than imposing
our will.
And I don't know.
Let's just keep our equanimitas in place.
Thank you, everybody, again.
Happy New Year.
And we will see you on the second.
Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky.
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