The Chris Cuomo Project - Dr. Drew Explains How Politics Hijacked Science
Episode Date: September 18, 2025Dr. Drew Pinsky (Chief Patient Officer, The Wellness Company, and Podcast Host, "Ask Dr. Drew") joins Chris Cuomo for a wide-ranging conversation about what went wrong during the pandemic and how scie...nce was hijacked by politics. Drew explains why mandates lacked bioethical standing, why “irrational certitude” is so dangerous, and why “rational uncertainty” must be at the heart of science. They also discuss long Covid and vaccine injuries, the collapse of trust in institutions, and how arrogance replaced humility in public health. Dr. Drew warns about the dangers of narcissism, scapegoating, and mob thinking, and shares why the pessimism of young people scares him the most. At the same time, he talks about what gives him hope — resilience, families, and the possibility of finding meaning in difficult times. NOTE: This conversation was recorded before the killing of Charlie Kirk. Support our sponsors: Go to cozyearth.com/CHRIS for up to 40% off the best pants, joggers, shirts, everything! Reverse hair loss with @iRestorelaser! Subscribe & Save for 25% off or more + free shipping on the iRestore REVIVE+ Max Growth Kit, and unlock HUGE savings on the iRestore Elite with the code CHRIS at https://www.irestore.com/CHRIS!" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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What do you think of Dr. Drew Pinsky?
Do you think he's a MAGA guy?
Do you think that he's a rational guy, a balanced guy?
Do you think he's changed?
How about instead of thinking about him, you hear from him?
I wanted to have a conversation here on the Chris Cuomo Project,
so thank you for being with me, for subscribing and following.
And instead of talking about and comments and hot takes,
why don't we speak to somebody?
Talk to Dr. Drew Pinsky about what he thinks about vaccines and why,
in the pandemic, and maha, and what we need and what we don't need.
But then shift gears and get his perspective on where he thinks we are
in terms of diagnosing our society,
what is making us sick here in our heads and in our hearts,
not just with body disease.
And does he think it's going to get better?
And if so, how?
Really interesting answers from someone I love to talk to.
Dr. Drew.
Doc, always good to see you.
Thank you for being with me.
Let's talk about me and about you and about perception versus reality.
Do you believe that you have changed?
You know why I'm asking you, right?
You know that people say often, oh, he's different now.
He's a Trump guy.
He's switched.
He's different.
How do you feel about yourself?
No, I have not switched.
I'm still moderate.
I spent most of my career, what's so fascinating to me is I spent most of my career fighting
the right, right?
I was a strong advocate for morning after contraception and the HPV vaccine, and they came
after me for years and years, years, and also discussing, you know, difficult material
on the airwaves.
They came after me.
Suddenly, suddenly they stopped.
And then the left came after me for not.
The best I can tell is for not carrying water for
canonic ideas, whatever they might be.
And I dared to say, hey, everybody calm down around COVID.
Let's figure this out.
You know, it's funny.
The thing I got wrong with COVID, you know,
I had H1N1 too, right, back during that pandemic.
And I'm not sure I would have survived it
at the time in which you and I had COVID
at those ages.
It was a little bit worse than COVID as bad as our alpha and Delta episodes were.
It was a little bit more brutal.
And to me, there was a pandemic that killed 300,000 people worldwide, at least 20, 30,000 people in this country.
I had it.
I knew it was brutal.
And the vast, vast majority of people did not know it happened.
The Obama administration elected not to make an issue, but they managed it just perfectly, I thought.
and they relied on input from the CDC, direction of local public health, just the way you're supposed to deal with a pandemic.
And so I just was like, what are we doing with this one?
Why do we go from, you don't know what happened to we have to close the world down?
And I kept saying, I kept saying, this is the interesting thing when you see videos of me saying, hey, calm down.
At the end of everyone, I said, just listen to Dr. Fauci, listen to the CDC.
I've known these guys for a long time.
They'll get us through this.
And, of course, that's the part I got a little wrong.
And they cut that off of all the videos.
But I've always been a moderate.
I always try to find the truth.
I'm not really taking a team.
I've been a Democrat.
I've been a Republican.
I've been an independent.
I'm an independent now.
What do you think about the attacks on Fauci?
What do you think is a fair criticism?
I, you know, I've talked to Rand Paul a few times.
He is a little extreme in his position.
A little.
I think Dr. Fauci was in a very difficult position.
He seemed, during some of his testimony, he seemed like he was obfuscating.
Like he knew some things he was not coming clean about, like whether or not there's such a thing as natural immunity or why we can't go to a church, you know, a ceremony, but we can go, you know, to demonstrate somewhere.
I mean, just be clear about it.
Why are you taking that?
If it's ideological, fine, just tell us.
But he was like, I don't understand the question.
I was like, oh, he understands the question.
So there's something going on there.
I don't know, Doc. I'll tell you. I've known Tony Fauci most of my life, right?
And, you know, the irony for me is nobody's more pissed off about what happened during the pandemic than I am.
You know, I was so reduced by the illness. And then I got caught up in all this bullshit propaganda.
And then when a lot of it started to wind down, I wasn't on TV. So I wasn't there to weigh in or defend myself or anything.
And I'm no clinician. I don't even know what the fuck I'm talking about.
I'm just, you know, we're taking information from where it comes, vetting where we can.
But I spent a lot of time talking to Tony Fauci, and I was very concerned early on when they were making a white coat, a political messenger.
I don't think Tony obfuscates.
I think Tony is old, and I think Tony is a scientist.
And he is new to politics, even though he's been in public health for a long time.
And he does not answer questions the way the guy from Florida does, for instance.
You know, this guy, Lodipo, which is with this savvy of, oh, I get what you're trying to ask.
Let me finesse it.
That's not the way Tony is.
And, you know, they say he made all this money.
There is no proof of that stuff.
And what bothers me is we haven't learned anything from it, Doc.
We've never gone back and looked at what worked and what didn't during the pandemic.
And now you got MAGA turned against itself with Operation Warp Speed.
They love Trump.
They think he should get a Nobel for Warp Speed, but they think that they think that.
the vaccine is fucking poison.
So let's, let's, it's so weird to me.
You're pointing at something that is just so odd to me that people don't seem to be able
to hold two ideas in mind at the same time.
So Operation War of Speed and the vaccine during Alpha and Delta, which is what you and I had,
it was, saved some of my patients' lives.
There's no doubt in my mind.
It was extremely effective, very helpful.
Then we moved on to an Omicron, which was much milder illness and continues to be so.
Mandates kicked in.
And I was like, whoa, now we're mandating.
And the thing that's oddest about the mandates for me is that we know that the pathogenic component of the virus is the spike protein.
And so if we're going to mandate a vaccine, why mandate the one that only produces spike protein that we know hurts people?
Let's develop a nucleocapsid protein with MRNA.
Fine, let's do it.
Let's do it now.
Let's get another warp speed going.
And that should be great.
But no, this one, you have to take this one.
That to me was bizarre, bizarre.
I mean, look, I think it was wrong.
Now, intentionally wrong, lying, or wrong?
To me, I've never had any proof that they really knew.
What they did do and what I do have proof of, and I know happened,
is they responded like any institution, whether it's a church or a corporation or a government institution
or an educational institution, which is they protected themselves.
So we went from mask to no mask, and they didn't really explain it, even though the scientific explanation was pretty apparent.
And it didn't work the same way with the different variants, and they didn't discuss it the same way.
Same thing with the schools.
And it's because it became political.
And the freedom that you guys have in science is not allowed in politics.
If you change your position on the vaccine, you're an idiot.
And if you say, no, no, no, no, I'm not an idiot.
The data changed.
There's new information about it, so I'm changing my opinion.
In politics, you're a dead man.
You can't do that.
Nobody changes positions.
And in science, that's all you do.
But let's go back up to take back up again and look at the fact that the CDC was never supposed to be a political organization or a organization organization that mandated anything.
That's not their job.
Their job is advisory and to do some research on bioweapons and things like that.
but it's advisory, and to the extent that they are about communicable diseases,
I mean, it was designed to prevent, to control malaria in the United States.
That's where it came from.
And it's still supposed to do the same thing.
It's supposed to just advise public health officials, supervise them.
We get information as physicians the way H1N1 went.
H1N1 was perfect.
And then we make decisions on behalf of our patients, and now we do our thing.
And then maybe the community gets together and makes little decisions on their own.
But this idea that the federal government is mandating what doctors do and public health does, it was never meant to be anything like that.
Never, ever, ever.
But what happened was, as you know, first under the Trump administration and then under the Biden one, they made the mandates based off the CDC recommendation.
They just put the onus, the burden on the CDC because they didn't want to own it.
I mean, that's why Tony was the one talking to us and Burks was the one talking to us.
and Burks was the one talking to us in the first place.
If Trump had wanted to own it, you would have never met any of those guys.
But he didn't want to own it.
And Biden, you know, his people extended the same thing, which is there's only downside on this.
So let's let them handle it.
And the sad thing about it to me is we never learned anything.
And now it's all weaponized for advantage.
You keep saying that.
And I could not agree with you more.
I want a, listen, whenever we have a case, we do a post-mortem.
We'd study what we do, what we get right, what we get wrong.
Let's have a collective morbidity mortality report on what we did.
And there's just, all people have to do is say, I got it wrong.
I got some stuff wrong.
I've got lots of stuff wrong.
And it's just, wow, is it, I've never seen anything like this in my lifetime as it pertains to practice of medicine.
It is very disappointing.
It's all about us and them and finding, uh,
And the way I, how I see this, here's the proof of that proposition.
There is, and we see this again with the Florida Surgeon General, who I thought was polite and he makes an interesting case.
I think it is so clinically weak.
So no mandates of any vaccines, but not because he has information that any of the vaccines don't work.
It's just that he doesn't like the choice structure, which is bizarre to me,
because how can a parent, how can I know what you know?
I don't know what you know.
So if you guys have decided, well, if we don't have these vaccines,
the classroom is going to be a different kind of petri dish
than it has been for the last 50 years,
who might have said, yeah, I don't buy it.
Yeah, I don't buy it.
I don't know anything, but I don't buy it.
I'm not going to have my kid take any of them.
I mean, it seems bizarre to me,
but there is more energy behind that kind of position
or saying that the vaccine kills more than it helps,
then people give a shit about long COVID,
and long COVID is absolutely real,
and vaccine injuries can be real,
but we don't know nearly as much about them
as we do long COVID, and no one gives a shit about it.
I mean, nobody hasn't had the vaccine,
so everyone that has long COVID also had the vaccine,
so how do you sort that out?
But I want to back up a little bit on the vaccine mandate thing.
Are you aware that 88 countries have no mandate for school, for school attendance?
A lot of Scandinavia, most of the EU, China, Japan, even China does not require vaccine to attend school.
And some of these schools have very good vaccine uptake, right?
And some of these countries.
And the way they do it is through education and through the physician recommendations.
So each physician sits down with their patient and says, hey, I'm recommending this.
here's what's going to have if you don't do it.
And there's a good uptake.
That is how medicine is supposed to be practiced, not a mandate.
And to have them, think about the bioethics of a mandate.
What do you need to have a bioethical standard that allows you to make a mandate, right?
Do you have you thought about that?
Yep.
Okay.
So first, the doctor's job, do no harm.
So if you're going to harm the patient with the vaccine, even if it helps the community,
you already don't have the bioethical standing to do it.
Number two, you have to have informed consent, so you have to know exactly why you're recommending it and not the circumstance will be if you don't do it.
And then the child or the adult, and again, I give adult vaccines all the time, and it's a very different proposition.
Bodily autonomy. People are entitled to their bodily autonomy.
And all three of those things are necessary for a mandate to be in place.
And it's got none of that.
And so that's what makes me worry.
We just don't have the bioethical standing, maybe for a 65-year-old, or maybe for measles in a, you know, certain vaccines.
Yes, we maybe have it for measles of Mount Prebella and certain age groups.
But to have it for all vaccines makes it, we just don't have that.
We just don't have it.
Why do the public health officials overwhelmingly believe that the vaccine schedule that our kids have has contributed to America being a healthier society?
Because they have no data to decide one way or the other.
And unfortunately, people have developed religious belief around anti or pro-vax, both sides, equally culpable.
We need to get the data.
We need to figure it out.
We need to look at where it's good and where it's bad.
Like, here's where it's the road for me, for instance.
I was in and around the hepatitis B vaccine research, right, back in the early 80s.
And we were doing this to deal with vertical transmission of hepatitis B, mother-to-child transmission, in China, where they had a big problem with this.
not we never imagined we'd be giving it to children here we wanted it for health care workers we wanted it for china
it makes zero sense here and why do it on day one it's the oddest thing i and apparently was mandated by
the world health organization i don't know why i don't know what the thinking was i can't find it
and i can't as someone who worked with that vaccine there's zero indication they can always take it at
at age 10, take 12, whatever.
It wears off, too.
They have to take boosters later.
I mean, what are we doing?
If a mother has hepatitis B in this country, we know it.
And if we do not know it, that's malpractice.
I mean, and those kids get the B vaccine, for sure.
But that's a couple hundred cases a year.
The one good, I understand all that, and that's helpful.
Thank you for laying it out for the audience.
The concern that I hear as a counter is that
if you do not mandate these vaccines, you can almost guarantee there will be less uptake than
we have currently in society because there's an empowerment principle. It's been politicized.
And are you concerned about that? Or do you believe that we've never needed them?
Oh, no, I'm 100% concerned. I'm in between. I'm concerned about both directions, right?
And look, we just had an outbreak in Texas. Now, you want to look at that. You have to look at it kind of
carefully because there were three deaths, right? And one was in an adult. It wasn't even a child.
And, you know, and the two that were apparently healthy children. That should be an educational
instrument for people who are trying to make this decision. Go, look, here's measles. It's a bad
illness. Right. Here's what can happen. And so, yeah, I'm very concerned about it. I, you know,
do we need HPV at a certain age? Do we need hepatized B to certain age? To me, those are debatable
questions and they should be based on risk reward always risk reward risk reward for that person
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Dynamic, this is now my space, but when I watch the President of the United States at odds with his own base over what they see as their signature issue, and he sees as his signature issue, because when you look at MAGA, there's very little, other than immigration, that galvanized that base the way being an anti-vaxxer did, right?
And then you have all the offshoot issues that if we'd all just take an Ivermectin, you would have never had to worry about COVID and all this other exaggerated stuff.
But that's their issue.
It's also Trump's.
He wants an award for Operation Morp Speed.
He believes it saved us from the fate of other countries.
And he's not allowed to talk about it because his own people hate every time he mentions that he was vaccinated.
Isn't that interesting?
What does that tell you?
This is that thing about being unable to hold two ideas in mind at the same time.
He just a couple days ago said warp speed was a great, you know,
it's such an advancement, such a wonderful thing we did.
And then this morning, he put out a little video, vaccines are all poison.
So I don't know.
Let's leave it to the medical science.
The problem, you know, we're getting in this weird space now where people are getting
confused about public health, which is one thing, and health care, which is a completely other
thing. So those two things are getting conflated and confused by people. And wellness versus
medical science. These are entirely, I started thinking, I woke up a couple days ago and I thought,
people don't understand that everybody gets sick eventually. Everybody. You're all going to get a
medical illness. You're all going to need a surgery or something. You're going to need medical
science involved in your life at some point. Everybody. It's just now that you're healthy,
we want to keep you that way as long as possible, and we don't like all these metabolic diseases.
I get all that. But medical science has been sort of pushed aside. I'm very, very concerned about
that. Well, look, here's what, if I were you as a non-clinician, but somebody who forms and
tests arguments for a living, when everybody was eating organic and the water was clean and the air
was clean. The life expectancy in America was like half of what it is now. And the only thing that
changed is medicine, is science. That's right. It's the only thing that changed. We ate organic, right?
We didn't have any of the stuff that we're worried about now. You know, there were less people.
It was all, we checked every box and we died. And there's only one reason we died at that rate and at that
age. And it was because we didn't have science. So it is interesting that it was a choice to weapon
it, but I think it was circumstantial.
Science is not a great opportunity for bullshit
because it's got a built-in empiricism to it.
But it does work well in spaces of the unknown.
People have gotten confused about it, right?
What is science?
I mean, I realize even my peers are confused about that.
But let me just ask one thing.
Do you ever see the TV show The Nick?
Yes.
Oh, in that first episode, he's doing a eulogy.
It's one of the greatest shows.
I was so, you know, when they could try things and do all kinds of stuff
and use their mind to try to push science forward.
People died anyway.
So it was really what was happening.
And he's giving a eulogy for a friend of his,
and he goes, today at the turn of the 20th century,
a baby born today can expect to live to the age of 47.
And I thought, oh, my God.
Wow, it's so true.
But to be fair, nutrition, sanitation,
you know, trauma therapies, all kinds of stuff.
We moved that forward.
But science is the percentage.
of an approximation of the physical universe, the truth, right?
And it is done with an instrument.
I talked to Brett Weinstein about this, and he was like, this is the problem right now.
It's an instrument that is very delicate.
It has to be applied a certain way.
Francis Bacon gave it to us 400 years ago, and it is called the scientific method.
It involves the following.
Come up with a hypothesis, develop an experiment to test that hypothesis,
do a statistical analysis, hopefully a null hypothesis, and the null hypothesis is either informatory,
excuse me, informing or non-informing. That's it. That's the whole, and if you do, and if the null
hypothesis informs repeatedly, then your hypothesis can go towards theory. But that's it. You can ask
very narrow questions, very clearly, and we've gotten into a world of observational science and
big data and stuff. And it's adulterated the basic principles of the scientific method.
And that concerns me a lot, actually.
Well, we are in an age at the same time, people want to sell certainty out of things that are
uncertain. And it works great for podcasts. It works great for politics because people are
desperate for reason to believe.
And we're only too willing to give it to them.
It's just very often bullshit.
Joseph Freiman framed it this way for me.
He said, we have irrational certitude on the loose.
Yeah, that's exactly.
That's a great way to say it.
Yeah.
And our job as a scientist is to have rational uncertainty at all times.
Right.
At all times.
And in terms of my own mistakes, I got a little hubristic early in COVID.
I will never do that again.
I will always try to keep my mind.
open and never, never assume I have certainty about anything.
I also think that people have weaponized the motivations, you know, because you had Trump
and then you had Biden, and the choice structure was almost exactly the same.
Now, you could say, well, it's because the deep state was in place the whole time.
But I'm just telling you, and I'm sure you had plenty of contacts that most don't also,
speaking to those people in real time, even the people who came up with the antibodies,
okay, the regeneron, you know, first wave and all that.
Yeah.
I didn't get this sense anybody was playing me the whole time, the way I do on a regular basis right now.
Like, when I talk to guys about tariffs, I know they're playing me.
When I talk to guys about immigration, they're playing me in a different way.
When we're talking about crime in the military now, there's a game afoot.
But I never got that feeling for them.
I thought they were afraid of being wrong, and that's dangerous in science, because they're not used to, they weren't used to getting punished for their opinions.
Right.
And I think that changed it, but I think that was a political mistake, not a medical one, but, you know, even when I watch Bobby's ascendance, Robert Kennedy Jr., people send me his clips all the time, Doc, correcting his assertions. And it makes me wonder, I don't believe Bobby's just dead wrong about everything, but it does make me wonder whether or not he is influenced by political persuasion within his policy arguments.
Well, I'm imagining they all have to be, right?
I mean, I have talked to him many times, and he really is trying to stay with the truth.
He's really trying to get at it.
The extent to which he's able to or has to pay attention to what I would call administrative policy issues to get where he needs to go,
God only knows how many different influences get in there.
I just keep saying, I've talked to him, I believe he wants the truth, I believe he keeps an open mind,
mind or read science relative. He has a point of view, but he reads scientists relatively dispassionately.
And we got to give them time to do that. Look, Jay Banachari, if you talked to Jay or
Matt Oz. Yeah, I just had him on. Jay is amazing, right? That's, he's the head of the NIH.
He's a great guy. That is somebody I think you can lean on and rely on.
Mehmet, I've known forever. I feel the same about him. So there's at least two people in there
that I feel confident when they're telling me something I can rely on it.
But what they get beat up about is the politics of it.
You know, like you were on the other night on News Nation on my show with PhD Nurek, right, Dr. Nurek.
And she has made a cottage industry out of just fact-checking, as you guys do all the time in the clinical arena, what comes out of Maga's mouth.
And a lot of the time it's Bobby.
And I spent the time of going back to check her sources to make sure she wasn't just cherry-picking.
And it's always pretty obvious that people get, like you said,
irrational certitude is like the order of the day.
Now, we've diagnosed the easy part.
Now the hard part.
What do we do about it?
By the way, there's one other thing that bugs you.
When you get things wrong, the other sort of weird thing that's happening,
people accuse you of lying.
You lied about this.
It's like, I've got it wrong.
It's possible to get something wrong and not lie about something.
You know, here's where I have landed, and I don't know what else to do except to keep my eye, keep everyone, okay, I guess I have three or four things.
A, be very aware of cognitive dissonance and cognitive distortions. Understand how those things work.
You should interview Mark Chang Kese. He's a physicist, cognitive psychologist, and he really lays out, you know, the kinds of ways our brain.
brain work. We're all prone to it. We all have cognitive biases and things that can get in the way.
Pay attention to cognitive bias. Two, remain rationally uncertain at all times, at all times.
And then three, I've arrived at this spot, which is we have to be, we have to allow free speech all the time.
We have to mix it up. We have to talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. And, you know, and go at things where
they're wrong, talk about things when they're right, have conversations about it. And this
how science is always done, we get to an approximation of the truth by sharing with our peers.
I feel that right now we're accelerating in the misinformation direction. On the fringes, though,
remember that, you know, they dominate, Doc. They dominate. You know, we don't have the
rest of us. Where there's a cottage show that has, you know, even though, you know, you guys were
like a cult show early on them, I was there in the beginning, you know what I mean? I've been
following Dr. Drew, literally from Trump, where, oh, this is a little show that has such
wisdom and is having a kind of conversation about American society that we all need to have.
Now, I believe the fringe has reversed that, and it's like crazy town.
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On the fringes, and the rest kind of step away from it.
Yeah, all I know is that the way these things tend to work,
and by these things I meant, the crazy town part,
is...
About 10% to 20% become evangelical.
They like are in.
And I don't know what to do with that group because people need to look at them and understand who they are on both sides.
Understand it.
Now, they may have something to offer, by the way, too.
Sometimes, you know, the broken watch gets the time right twice a day.
So pay attention and be uncertain.
But about 10% typically goes, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, it's what you're saying.
This is bullshit.
Hang on a second.
And everybody else, the 70%
just wanted to kind of get on with life
and kind of, you know,
and that's the group we got to worry about.
That's the group we got to, like,
make sure that they're kind of paying attention
and they don't get swept into bullshit
and they don't panic
and they don't become hysterical.
And they kind of like, you know,
let's do focus on our family
and our community and the things that are important.
All right, let's talk about it.
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If you could throw on the Dr. Drew Lovelines hat, when you look at where we are as a society, what's winning, what's losing, what do you see?
Well, here's my basic take when I put on that hat.
I didn't intend any of this.
This is not at all what I expected.
This was not what I was doing.
Please, no.
Please, there was an excess.
It went too far.
I was trying to help people with their medical issues in adolescence and young adulthood
when they did not have anywhere else to go for information.
Now they have too much, too much, and now we've gone somewhere else.
So first and foremost, I didn't intend where we are.
The question is precisely, again, what do I see?
Yeah, what do you see and what does it tell you is winning and losing?
I see it all as a work in progress.
I feel like it's moving, we're moving, we're moving, we're not getting stuck.
And I have found myself studying crowds and 1789 France.
Because that's where our crowds really went wacko.
I know the French don't see it that way, but that is what happened.
And that's why the books on mob came out of that.
Le Bonn wrote the book about mobs and crowds, and there have been several since.
And I know they've been criticized, and I'm familiar with the literature, but crowds are
masses are a special thing
and they get swept into frenzies
and we should all be on our guard
about that. Every bad thing
socially has
been because of a mob
doing good.
Social ill is always not done in the name
of good and often because
of a hysteria that swept in.
I read a book about, from the
perspective of the American
ambassador in Germany in 1939.
And I was surprised
to see the Germans talking
about and hysteria.
I didn't understand that they, too, saw this whole thing as a hysteria that had captured
and then got hold, and that was that.
But it just, it just, I, and we have to be careful, too, because there's been a narcissistic
turn, okay?
We are, we are all have traits of narcissism now.
That's a kind of a new thing, and as such, we can be prone to envy, and we can have
empathic failure in certain situations, and mobs love that ship, because mobs will take that
narcissistic liability and scapegoat. So scapegoating becomes the means for the mob to
gratify itself. We need to understand that and pay attention, because that's what, that's what
you're talking about on social media. There are a lot of people who believe that we are
heading for
profound
conflict that
the fringes have taken
over and
you have MAGA on
one side and the reaction formation
to it on the left now
that seems to be
forming
quickly and furiously
and to your
point of we're in process is that
process evolution or devolution?
Oh boy.
we will see right
you're sort of arguing more devolution
in terms of cognitive biases
I have an optimistic bias
and it's bad
it's like it's it's I can't
shake I do as a survival mechanism
I have developed it
so I was I'm raised by
a long line
of
you know pessimists
of you know very cautious
success is failure averted
don't celebrate just worry about
fucking up the next one or not.
Oh, me too. And I think
reaction formation to that for me
was, and especially just being in this business
as long as I've been in it
and how I have decided
to be in it. You, I
have to believe, I have to see
the work as an act of faith
in the future. Because
otherwise, there's just not
enough tequila in the world. There's not enough
THC in the world. There's not enough Klonazepam
in the world. No, I'm with you. I'm with you.
It's just too heavy, too much, too sad.
but not everyone comes from that bias, you know, that we cover.
I was, you know, my family escaped essentially just Ukraine just before the pogroms.
And there was, you know, horrible things they were dealing with.
And they got here just in time for the Depression.
And so their thing is, you don't know what can happen tomorrow.
It can all fall apart.
You better just take care.
And there's a lot of take care of yourself and be prepared.
And I don't know, we can all use a little bit of that, to be fair.
I mean, and Anthony, both you and I have ended up in spite of that with an optimistic bias.
It's not so bad.
I do, although I must say, as a proud member of the Mishbuka, I did not think that I would be defending people like you from anybody.
I believe that my generation of Jews, especially light-skinned ones, had graduated the whiteness the same way I have.
from my father's generation. My father wasn't a white guy. He was considered an ethnic. And he was Italian and the gap-tooth grin and the swarthy and the this and the that. It was all code, right? For him being Italian, he had to share his valedictory. He couldn't get jobs on Wall Street, you know, all that shit. And now I'm a white guy. I'm as much of a white guy as there is. I thought the same of the Jews. I now don't believe that anymore. I think you may look like me. You may sound like me. You may have the same pedigree.
as I do. But if you're a Jew, you're not a white guy. You're a Jew. Well, I have a couple
reactions. One is, yeah, my dad, too, couldn't be a member of the hospital where I'd served for
years. He couldn't be a member of the social club across the street from where he lived. This is
the 16 and 70s. This is not ancient history. He was just not welcome. And he didn't make a lot
of it. He just went down to form a new hospital with some friends, you know, in the other community.
He was like, we're just not welcome. It's just the way to go.
house. And I don't like clubs of any sort. I just don't like excluding people. I don't like special
languages. I love the culture and stuff, but I don't like exclusionary anything. That's just my
bias again. So to the extent that we're not white or I don't like that kind of language, it's just
like, yeah, but you don't hear that. You don't hear that among Jews in your personal life, that they
are worried that they're telling their kids not to wear the start of David. And then you have other
ones that are celebrating Shabbas and having their Shabbat dinners and leading into it more.
I mean, is it not palpable in your own life?
I see both, yes, for sure, for sure. And have you ever seen it before?
Yeah, yeah, not like this, not in this country. I've seen, you know, that's what I'm talking about.
It's not supposed to happen here. This is why Jews fled here.
What's happened here?
It's so odd to me that Jews become the object always in a tumultuous time.
It's like this is back to my thing about scapegoating, right?
They have just had this long history of being scapegoated.
And it's just, it's scapegoating generally is kind of uncanny to me.
I just, I can't do it.
I don't get it.
But maybe I had to study it some more.
I'll understand it better.
I've been trying to figure out how it is that the left has become the home
of anti-semitism.
I never saw that coming.
And it actually gives a little bit of credibility,
just a little bit.
I'm holding my fingers as close together as I can.
Of Democrats started the bigoted political movements.
I think that's unfair.
We're talking about southern white Democrats
who then became Blue Dog Democrats
and then Republicans who started the KKK
and all those organizations.
Those are not Democrats like my dad,
which is when the party became a repository
for the rejects, right?
You know, the ethnics and the underclass and all that.
That's my father's kind of Democratic Party.
Now, though, these cats on campus, or what I pick up, when they're really bad on Israel,
the chance that their MAGA is small.
You want to talk Ukraine.
You'll get a lot more MAGA guys in there about what they've been fed,
about who's the bad guy or whatever.
But on, you know, on globalize the intifada, that's all.
left. How? Yeah. I'm with you. How about how about my body, my choice? That's the left. And yet,
no, you have to take these vaccines. I don't know anything in medicine where you have to do it and you
don't regard the risks at all ever under any circumstances. Well, right. But flip it also, Doc,
because now with Latipo, I didn't go there because I really try not to do gotcha. I have
incredible facility with arguments. But that's not always
illuminating, you know, me saying, oh, Doc, you know, you said this about the 70s, but you forgot
this and this. Oh, yeah, yeah, I did. Right. That factors. It doesn't improve the overall
point, so I leave it alone. But it was no small irony to hear a conservative arguing, you can't tell
me, as the state of all people, what I can and can't do with my body and just ignoring what just
happened with reproductive rights.
No, exactly.
And what's interesting to me is the right lost people during the 80s and beyond by being
self-righteous and hyper-religious and hyper-moral and telling people how to live their lives.
Now that's coming from the left.
It is the oddest thing in the world to me.
And I guess people don't know about that transformation.
They don't see it or something.
It is, like I told you at the beginning, I was fighting the left of the right, rather, for many years.
Anita Bryant and all this.
stuff. You remember all that stuff? It's like, I was a pariah of talking to kids. Oh, how dare you? And now the other side comes after me. It's, it's the, I guess this is how politics goes, right? Just like you said, I mean, you know, the reconstruction of the South was perpetrated by the Democrats. And by the way, everybody, read your history about that period. It was so, so awful. It was literally,
Frederick Douglass himself said that it was worse.
He said, we gave up the lash for the shotgun and the noose.
And this is, it was the craziest period.
I would argue so bad, I think we've tried to put it out of our collective consciousness.
Yeah.
He was really, to me, that is one of the darkest periods.
And, you know, got left over with Jim Crow and all that stuff.
But, oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
And people aren't aware of it.
Jim Crow is a term people know, even if they don't understand the etymology or derivation of it.
that's okay. But what they have to remember is that Jim Crow was allowed to stay in place for so
long when everyone knew it was violative of our Constitution and our collective conscience
because it was easier than just dealing with the war that was going to come over it.
But back to your point, we've had weird periods apart. That's weird. That's insane. And we're in
another kind of weird insane period now, I guess. I guess. I think that so here is the
answer, okay, to one of the things. The reason that you have seen these swings of familiar
antipathy, but coming from different origination, is because that is the natural course for a
binary system. It has to be this way, Doc, that when something starts to move the pendulum and
it starts to swing, okay? What do we know for sure? It's going to over-correct.
And it's going to have to zero out with inertia.
And then it's going to come flying fucking back the other way, building momentum again.
And what we see in our politics is you watch, you win, then you lose, and then you become what beat you.
And that's what we're seeing right now, which is the left tried to resist MAGA.
Now, the good part of resisting MAGA was you didn't want to surrender to that kind of negativity.
and animus and grievance
that was driving your policy
as familiar as that is in politics.
Grievance is almost always at the top of the list
of political motivations.
So that was virtuous, in my opinion.
The wrong part of it was
you were telling people they were wrong
to feel how they were,
and you were owning a status quo
that was really flawed.
And so you lose.
And now, what do we see coming the other way?
Now they have the grievance movement.
Now it's about affordability and being down with Brown, basically, of, you know, adopting or appropriating people suffering as you see it in Gaza, although you don't give a shit about Syria or Africa or what's happening with the Uyghurs in China.
But you do care about Gaza.
I believe because it's the Jews and they're seen as a white oppressor.
But that's just my opinion.
Well, of course.
But we're now seeing it come.
And like, you know, like my brother lost in that primary, we saw it weeks in advance.
that there was a movement of foot that, in my opinion, was motivated by a gap in leadership in New York City
and a federal register of affordability as a crisis. And people were, they don't like hearing how great
everything is when it sucks for them. And Trump breeds animus. And it's easy to dislike him for certain
people. And that has become fuel. And now here they come. And I think the reason that the president is actually
Just talking about our collective psyche, I think he cares about New York City, not because it has anything to do with my brother.
He's no fan of my brother.
But he sees what's happening more so in Minnesota, where a sitting Democrat mayor lost in a primary to a very extreme left Muslim.
And he thinks that's going to beat him in the midterms.
Interesting.
That that's the part of the process, reaction formation.
And now it'll be MAGA of the left.
They just need to name it.
So what is the...
I love the assessment.
I think it fits with reality.
So where does it go?
This is back to my thing
about the working through process.
Yes.
So here's where it comes,
which is why I'm going to need your help
as a clinician,
because you're going to have to treat me
because I'm going to get sicker and sicker.
Here is the only way to deal with it.
You have to stop fighting over the few
and fight for the many.
Stop fighting over the prepositional difference
over the few, the fringe, and who can motivate more madness, and fight for the many.
Here's the problem.
The many don't really give a shit about the conversation you and I are having right now.
Yeah, because they've got other things.
You're framing it in the context of what I said a little while ago about the 10% saying bullshit, 20% being evangelical,
and that 70% wants to live their life.
That's right.
And they'd like it if it was better, if the government can help, but they don't want the government,
they want to be left alone more than anything.
That's right. They care about their communities. They're the people who, you know, in the majority, who are we? You pull over when you see somebody on the side of the road. Now, if somebody scares you and they tell you that people are getting killed for stopping on the side of the road and the person you see doesn't look like you, maybe that will affect you. If you are lucky enough to have been raised the way I was in a place that was so diverse that you didn't know how to stick to type because there were too many different kinds of people around.
Yeah, nobody looks like you.
That's right.
So, I mean, like, I mean, everybody looks different.
Everybody's different.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, I had my Italians and we had language and we had tradition, but you were all kind of second class.
I mean, that was a very palpable feeling in my neighborhood growing up was that
wasps were the real Americans.
And we were just, we were just trying to get a foothold.
You know, that's a Middle Atlantic, you know, New England-y kind of thing.
It was not so much out here.
It was not like that.
But I get it.
I went to college out there, and I saw a taste of it.
And a lot of ethnic pockets.
But what I do is, and I'll tell you, it is not marketable, it is not as commercial.
It's not as easy to monetize.
But the reason I hooked up with the News Nation guys is they offered to give me an opportunity to do what doesn't work best on cable, which is not play to a side.
And look, in my defense, this, what do you call it, faint praise?
When they say, I didn't like you on CNN, but I like you now.
I'm the same fucking guy.
I'm just in different circumstances.
Nobody ever told me what to say.
Nobody has ever controlled me ever.
I'm always difficult to manage.
It comes up everywhere I've ever been.
But I just have different circumstances now.
It's easy for me to police Trump.
I could blow him up every night if I wanted to.
It doesn't move the needle of making us better.
And I don't want to be a lion of the left.
I don't even know what they're about.
My father wouldn't even recognize that party today.
Yeah. So I fight for the many. I fight for the many. Where is the many on this? Who's getting affected by tariffs? What does it mean? What do the immigration people really need? Which, you know, this system, which illegal immigrants are positives and why and how do we have to recognize that and what do we have to do about it? These are all very complicated, unsatisfying dynamics because it's way easier to say tariffs good, tariffs suck. Immigration, scary, brown menace.
you know, or let them all in.
You know, those extremes sell.
And that's what you see.
Right now on the left, who's making money?
People who say, look, think what you want.
Trump is Hitler.
And it is happening again.
It's just like the 30s and all of the police and the military and they're not liking the
elections and he can do it better.
Maybe he won't leave.
He doesn't mind playing into any of it, which I'm not sure about why.
other than his just sense of fucking with the competition.
But that's what sells on the left, period.
Don't work with them.
Don't work with the right.
They're devils.
They're terrible.
These people have to go.
He is a con man and a shister.
And on the other side, it's these people have lost the plot.
They don't know what gender is.
They don't know you come out of the shoot one of two ways.
They don't know what normal is anymore.
And now they want to be socialists.
And that's what sells.
And if you're not saying one of those two things, you're not making money.
In cable, but isn't it, I mean, here you are.
Or pods.
I don't know.
I think people will be very interested in what you're doing right here right now.
I've been doing it for two years.
Doc, if I had you on today and I was comfortable surrendering our relationship for personal satisfaction,
and I just ripped you in half with a bunch of shit about whatever we were talking about,
it would go crazy on the left, Cuomo's back, takes crazy Magapinski down, and, you know, whatever other noise came with it, and my podcast would get a million and a half views.
I just don't, I just can't live with that.
I can't live with it.
I think you get a million and a half views on the social media part of it, the clips, but I don't think, I think people come to pods to hear thoughtful, long form, you know, just passion.
But look at all the Pod brothers on the right.
You know, look at Rogan's comic buddies who now sell themselves as political scientists, you know,
except when they have to defend their inaccuracy.
And then they're just comics.
But, you know, that's who is making waves on the right.
But they're entertaining, though, right?
And there are people go there for the entertainment.
And they're just, in my experience, they're just asking questions, trying to make sense of things and make fun of stuff.
I don't know that they would call, I mean, none of the guys, I mean, whether it's Theo or Tim or whatever, those guys are just fucking around, you know what I mean?
Yeah, but they're reacting and they're curious.
They don't tell their audience they're fucking around.
So when they say, oh, Trump has done this and done that and this is it and here, and they misstate things, yeah, they always have the fallback position that I don't of, oh, I'm just a comic.
I'm just a comic.
I'm just fucking around.
Yeah, that's convenient, but I think that there's a responsibility, I mean, especially for the top of the food chain.
I mean, you know, Rogan now, now he's getting beat up by his own people, right?
Because they're saying that he's gone bad on MAGA because he's questioning some of the things that are going on.
And that's not fair to either.
That's what I like. That's what's good.
These people just, they're just questioning.
They're just curious.
I mean, curiosity and thoughtfulness is really what I think.
this new sort of long-form trend is all about.
I do.
I think conversation is the cure.
I agree with you about that.
I just think it's also the poison.
You know, it depends on how somebody is using it.
And while I believe in curiosity and depend on it and inhabit it,
skepticism is the lowest form of intelligence.
So Dr. Drew says, here's what I've learned in my 50 years of practice.
And I say, yeah, I don't know that I agree.
Oh, yeah.
And it's like, yeah, you don't agree.
Based on what, do you not agree?
Well, you know, I saw a clip from a podcast the other day
where this doctor told me that you're really better off just eating carbs all day
or whatever article of convenience I've found.
And that's where we are, which is where Dr. Drew can be on with cantalope Cuomo
who doesn't know anything about what he's talking about, but he disagrees.
Well, this is, to me, this is symptomatic of something called Dunning Kruger.
Have you heard the Dunning Kruger phenomenon?
Yes.
Is that because people have so much access to information,
they think they have a certain amount of wisdom and knowledge
when, in fact, they're way down the curve of the Dunning Kruger,
which is where confidence, and for people that don't know,
it's essentially you don't know what you don't know,
and people that really know a lot tend to veer towards imposter.
Like, I don't shit.
When you really know a subject, you're like, okay, this is so complicated.
I can only make conclusions about a certain thing.
But as you're going up in your knowledge base about any given topic, you feel like,
oh, because it's sort of enlightening, there's sort of a dopamine reaction associated with,
like, oh, this is interesting.
Oh, I can see that.
But you don't really know anything yet, which is so fascinating about the human.
We used to say when we grew up, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.
And the problem with Dunning Kruger is you can't use it as a positive instruction on anybody that you're applying.
it to because it assumes that they are lacking in fundamental competence.
They are low ability.
And you can't say that to somebody and have them want to sign on.
But I can say, you're right.
You can't, you can use yourself as an example.
I always go, look, I thought I knew something too.
And then I got some real expertise.
And I realized that's pretty complicated.
And so be careful with irrational certitude, once again, you know, thinking like you know a lot
when you're just getting started.
So you believe...
Humility is a really important virtue these days.
But it doesn't go with narcissism.
It doesn't go with narcissism.
No, it doesn't.
That's why it's so virtuous.
I mean, people need to cultivate it.
They need to pay attention because, look, not everyone is narcissistic per se.
We have this narcissistic liability underway now.
It's sort of a trend.
And we all got some of it.
And as I said, it's the liability of it that we have to watch out for.
last thing to diagnose for me doc and thank you so much for the time and helping me out wherever
i've ever been i appreciate you for it um when when you look at where we are and what works in
society as the optimist what gives you most hope what gives you most concern
Obviously, I have lots of feelings about what we're doing with homeless people, which is nothing short of, we have a whole separate conversation about that of negligent manslaughter, but that's that.
I have been very concerned about how young people.
Maybe the state let people die who can't take care of themselves.
They're actively contributing to their demise. It's beyond, it's disgusting.
And again, not a difficult problem to solve. I know exactly how to do it. We could solve it.
but they refused to listen to anybody.
The mayor from Amsterdam came over here.
He had the same problem, solved it, came over to Sacramento.
So let me show you how we did it.
Get the fuck out of here.
Who are you to say?
And believe me, there's a way to do this.
It's not that hard.
And by the way, Maha keeps saying they're going to get at it.
So I'm standing by to kind of try to help with that infrastructure that I think would be necessary.
But I worry about young people being pessimistic.
That makes me nuts.
And I have noticed, because, I mean, what are we doing here except to, you know, pass on and give the next generation, you know, at least, maybe not necessarily better, but good and enthusiastic and engage in life in a meaningful way.
You know, it's, you know, what Aristotle called, you had a word for flourishing.
And we, I want people to flourish everybody.
I want everybody to flourish.
I'll think of the word in a few minutes.
And to see young people feeling beaten down and pessimistic and unable to form relationships,
that is probably the thing that scares me the most.
You're talking about eudamonia, by the way.
Eudemonia, that's what I'm talking about.
Thank you.
But the lack of ability to find meaning and to find satisfying relationships and to build families,
This is profoundly concerning to me.
Now, I will tell you, as I travel around the country, the places I like the best
is where I see young people out engaging.
Like, I see, there are places in the country.
You see that you can see the difference as opposed to here in Southern California.
By the way, Orange County, it's kind of happening there.
And the evidence of it now has started to blossom a little bit where I am seeing,
and this is what gives me the positive part, you're going to find,
birth rates going up. I'm seeing babies all over the place. I'm seeing marriage is happening.
They're like getting on it. It's happening in in regionally, but it's starting to really happen.
So that's what gives me hope that that there will be this ability to find meaning and to,
and to make it, you know, engage the way we want them to. I don't, I don't, you know, I know that now
I'm, I'm 55, so I'm just on the cusp of get off my lawn and starting to hate the new generation.
But I got to tell you, I look at my nieces, man, they had it hard, man.
This 9-11 generation, you know, these people grew up with us getting blown up, going a war that nobody understood in the wrong country, hating people in the place that's supposed to be the melting pot, all kinds of financial, you know, fiscal and political cataclysm.
Nothing has been good for any sustained period.
Then they have the internet on their watch and social media, which is just blown up all our best and worst tendencies and what always wins in any kind of even footing between best and worst is worst.
It's hard for virtue to win.
The reason all of our superheroes and all our narratives about virtue are so powerful is because it's hard, right?
It's so hard to beat it.
And now you have these kids.
Our oldest just graduated.
Ivy League graduate.
Kids redonculously talented.
and she's home.
The jobs aren't there.
The economy is not there for starting the way it used to be.
Everything's too expensive.
She is fortunate that she has parents who want to support her.
And by the way, I got a sneaky thing.
You want to talk about a throwback idea, Doc?
I don't know where you are with your kids.
But I want them home.
I think we fucked up motivating people to be like me,
which is I got to get out of the house.
I got to find my own way.
I got to buy my own place.
I think we had it right
with multi-generational families.
I think it's easier for families
to build wealth.
I think you keep consistency
and you have a better foothold
on the number one problem
from a 55-year-old's perspective,
which is how we deal with the aged.
And my parents,
my father's gone, of course,
but I see it in my in-laws,
I see it all around me.
We suck at elder care
because we're not together anymore.
Oh, my God.
We're not together anymore.
I don't know if you saw RFK's testimony, but the senator from Rhode Island got on this issue,
and particularly end-of-life care, and I was like, that guy knows what he's talking about.
That's where we are pathetic with all that.
I agree with you.
Well, there's a lot packed into what you said.
You know, and the good news is you and I, at 17, after 17, the idea of going back home to live with my family
of origin makes my skin crawl.
And that is that what we used to call the generation.
gap, right? These people had nothing to offer us. It was different. Let's, let's be thankful that our kids seem to want to come home and stay with us, right? Now, there's a, there's a line we have to draw, which is we don't want to make them dependent on us. Right, right? And so this is a hard navigation, and we are not used to it, right? We're like, whoa, whoa, why are you here? I'm confused. Why are you going to be around me? You can navigate it. I went through the exact same thing, Ivy League kids, and by the way, the indoctrination of those schools did not help me.
They came out very pessimistic, and engaging in the world helped a lot.
So getting out, doing stuff, finding a way, finding your passion, all these things.
It's taking a lot longer now than it did in our time.
I thank God I found what I wanted to do early.
Still a little bit late, but relatively early compared to what's happening now.
But look, they're going to live to 85.
They got time.
There are fertility options now that people should be really participating.
in all the time. We can do this. And I'm watching, again, this is what gives me optimism.
I'm watching it happening. I'm watching it going. And it really, do you talk to me two years ago,
or even three years ago? I've been like, I'm really worried. I got concerns. And again, the genius of our
state system. I saw some economists saying, you know, the thing you want to buy your kids,
more, invest in for your kids, if I have anything else, luggage. There's opportunities, but you have to
move around to find it. And that's the genius of our.
state system. So I don't know. I am very worried as are you. I get it, but I'm feeling better,
at least. I work on worry. I have been dominated by it my whole life and anxiety. That's the
much book apart. That's true. I've dealt with, you know, I do therapy. I do medication. I do
everything I can. But what I see around me also, though, is reaction formation in different ways. So,
And a lot of it is binary.
Like my wife is big time professional, magazine person, but she has become obsessed with self-care and wellness and meditation and integrative nutrition and not, you know, eat nothing but soybeans and you'll be fine.
Nothing extreme, but embracing it as a lifestyle.
I see that also.
I see more people surfing and more people getting into camping again.
And, you know, I see that we're responding to all of this negativity.
These midterms are going to be fucking angry, Doc.
It's going to be an angry time.
And we'll figure out how to get through it.
And I'll need your help to do it, Dr. Drew Penske.
So thank you for being with me as always.
Really a privilege.
I had so much fun.
This is a good conversation.
Let's keep it going.
Let's be an example.
I'm happy to have you on whenever you want, and I'm always a call away.
Thank you very much, Doc.
You got it, my friend.
Be honest, different conversation than you expected, right?
Because the explanations and the nuance and the context always change your understanding of conversation.
And you have to forgive yourself because everything's chopped up and twisted and, you know, made for advantage now, right?
We used to fear soundbites.
Now we dream of soundbites because there's so much more context than a meme or one.
little thing that's twisted and then put to music or that is just weaponized for advantage of
these ever-never-ending battles of the fringe. Conversation is the cure. So thank you for being a part
of it with me. I'm Chris Cuomo. Thank you for joining me at the Chris Cuomo Project, subscribing and
following me, checking me out on News Nation, AP and 11P, Eastern every weekday night. My brothers and
sisters, I know it's hard. I know it's frustrating. I know there's so much noise there. But you know
what, there is reason to believe in something better. So let's get after it.
