The Chris Cuomo Project - Gavin de Becker

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

Gavin de Becker (author, “The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence”) joins Chris Cuomo for an extensive conversation about the role intuition plays in personal safety, relationships, and creativity, how fear designed as a signal in the presence of danger is a gift, why governments have historically used fear to control populations, how modern politics has become more about fear than fact, the dangers of mixing politics and science, his latest work, "Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 & 2022,” and more. Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is fear a gift? Do you know when to be afraid and what it means and how it affects not just your physical safety, but your intellectual integrity about what you should be aware of, what you should question and when and why and how? back in the 90s called The Gift of Fear, but now has a book called Cause Unknown about what we learned and didn't learn during the pandemic. Gavin DeBecker is a big name and I'm here for it. I'm Chris Cuomo. Nice to have you for another episode of the Chris Cuomo Project. Thank you for subscribing and following,

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The code is Cuomo 50 at factormeals.com slash Cuomo50. You'll get 50% off your first box and two free wellness shots per box while the subscription is active. Gavin DeBecker, I want to thank you first for taking this opportunity and for giving me one of the manuals that I have been meditating on, and I mean that word seriously, for over 25 years. 1997, The Gift of Fear, your seminal work, which to me has so much more to do with emotion than physical, how to defend yourself, although you're great with all that. And that's why people come to you for your help.

But I believe that you put out a book that people should read now to help deal with probably the most paralyzing aspect of life, which is our understanding of fear and our ability to deal or not deal with it. So thank you. Thank you very much for the kind words. That's great.

I'm glad I wrote that. Long time ago now. Seems like a different person and a different planet, but I'm glad that I did it. Took 10 years, and I'm glad that it's still valuable to people. Is there anything that you believe in addition to or differently from what you put in The Gift of Fear?

Well, one evolution I've had is a little bit more patience on gun rights issues, because I was quite a smart ass then with regard to comparing. I mean, the reality was on my side, which is that if you had a gun in the house, you were far more likely to shoot the wrong person or have the wrong person shot or have a suicide.

So the statistics were with me. But I think where I've evolved some is that I've listened to arguments on the other side. So you have gun rights advocates, you have gun safety advocates like me, and then you have people looking to ban guns or reduce the number of guns, as has been done in the UK with success, in Australia with success. Well, I used to sort of discount everybody on the gun rights side. And I learned a lot more about it. And I really have to see that there are sane, reasonable people on both sides of this argument.

It's like a lot of the controversies that divide the country. You almost can't get into a discussion with somebody without it turning to an argument. And I've gotten past that. And I see that a lot of the ways that I approached the topic were not really fair to people on the gun rights side, which, you know, here's my main conclusion on this. And by the way, I wrote a new afterward for the book or a new appendix for the book on gun rights and guns in general, because obviously my book is about tissue damage. It's about injury and safety. So gun has to be a huge part of that discussion. I learned is that there's a lot of argument over whether or not guns are covered in the

Constitution, private ownership of guns, does the right to bear arms derive from the Constitution? And I came to throw that argument out and recognize it doesn't matter where it comes from. Most Americans in most states and most cities have a legal right to have guns. So we can kind of stop arguing over the issue of what was intended in the constitution because the law today is that in almost every state in fact in something like 40 states i think you can carry a concealed weapon and so uh that was a big change for me to stop arguing about the constitution and say okay we now have a country with more guns than adults clearly that's not a actually now more guns than citizens altogether.

That's not the greatest circumstance, but not everybody who owns a gun is a gun nut who shouldn't and that it should be taken away. And above all, I just don't believe it anymore in the federal government having a role in that topic. I really believe in the states making that decision. So that's one thing that comes to mind that's changed a bit.

And now you have a masterclass on this. And when you think of fear, let's just go through the steps. Why is fear a gift? Well, every animal in nature wants to get a signal in the presence of danger. So I wanted to quickly define the two kinds of fear that we live with. One is the category of worry and anxiety and dread. Those are a different animal. Those are a different thing. What I'm talking about is fear defined as a signal in the presence of danger, that kind of fear. Clearly, no animal would like to say, I don't want to hear about it. And no animal in nature ever hears an alarming noise in the middle of the night and says, oh, it's probably nothing.

But human beings do that. And so, you know, we can have a person working late in an office building at night, a woman on her own, and she's on the 10th floor and she calls for the elevator and the door opens up and there's somebody inside the elevator who causes her fear. What do so many people do? They say, oh, I don't want to be that kind of person. I don't want to be racist if he's Hispanic or he's African-American. So what do they do?

They get into a steel soundproof chamber with someone they're afraid of. And there's not an animal in nature that would even consider it. So fear is a gift if you take the signal and you act on it and respect it and don't try to prosecute it, which is what most people do. They quickly say, give themselves all the excuses for why it isn't real. So I think it is a gift. That was your first question. Go with your gut. I am a disciple of a man named Tony Blower, who has a program called No Fear, K-N-O-W. And his self-defense system, which I am very studiously becoming a practitioner of for a while now, starts with the startle flinch reflex that you just displayed expertly and how we are hardwired to react to things. And it's okay to be afraid.

One of the big mental wrestling matches I've ever had was I heard a movie line once, danger is real, fear is a choice. And I was repeating that shit for like a year and a half to my kids and everybody. And then all of a sudden Tony was like, hey, I heard you say the other day, danger, fear is a choice. Fear is not a choice.

Fear is going to be automatic. What you do with fear is a choice. Stop saying that stupid shit, you knucklehead. And I was like, oh. And then I started really thinking about it. And fear is also real, but what you do with it means everything. So what is the proposition for you

in terms of what people need to do to use fear the right way? Well, again, defining it the way we just did, which is a signal in the presence of danger, it certainly isn't a choice. A courage is a choice, which is to act in the presence of fear, but it isn't a choice. What we ideally do is go to our natural responses as basically an animal, which is we didn't get the biggest claws, we didn't get the biggest teeth, but we did get the biggest brain. and we can use so many strategies. You hear a lot about fight or flight, but we have many more than that. We have negotiate, we have comply, we have comply until there's an opportunity to resist, we have resist, we have flee.

And we have all of these options that this extraordinary brain that's the result of millions of years of evolution has given to us. And so the best thing that I recommend to people is when you feel fear, be willing to listen to it and don't spend all your mental energy trying to knock it down. I'll tell you a quick story. A woman named Chyna Leonard, she's in the gift of fear and she took her son to get a minor ear operation. And at the hospital, the guy came in, the anesthesiologist, and the son just didn't

like the guy immediately. And she didn't like him. And she said to herself, go home, go home, go home. She felt fear about the procedure that was coming in the hands of this particular anesthesiologist. She then spent her time saying, well, it's probably nothing. This is the Sisters of Mercy Hospital, for God's sake. They would know. And she allowed the surgery to go forward. Very unfortunately, her 10 or 11-year-old son died on the table because the anesthesiologist who had a long history of this, Dr. Vrubruji, fell asleep.

And around the table, and the interesting teaching for me, was the doctor and a few nurses and other people. And all of them saw that the boy's respiration was in trouble, but all of them assumed somebody else would call it out. And so, uh, the, that story is, uh, you know, one of many indicators, uh, of like, listen to the thing, listen to the thing. Worst case scenario is you don't do the procedure that day. But if you can't get comfortable with something, a person, a guy you're dating, a person who, you know, the manager who stays late after work, if you're not comfortable, the lesson of my work is to listen to intuition, to know that intuition, which by the way, the root of the word I learned when I did that book in tear, it means to guard and protect.

root of the word I learned when I did that book in tear, it means to guard and protect. So that's what intuition is there for. And so we listen to it and recognize that it is always right in at least two ways. One, it always has your best interest at heart. And two, it's always based on something. Then it's our job, as Tony Blauer is saying, to figure out, okay, what's it based on? Did I see that car in the underground parking lot earlier? Is that the same person who was looking at my teenage daughter that way last week? Whatever the intuitive signals are, but to listen to them is the key point. The overwhelming percentage of people who wind up being attacked felt something was off before it happens. Yeah. But in my career, I've interviewed people who invariably tell me their story and it includes, I knew when I went in that underground parking lot or I had a feeling about

that person when I hired him. Now there is an exception. There are really two kinds of attackers. There is the persuasion predator that persuades you to participate and lets me persuade you to get into the car or carry your groceries or whatever it may be. And then the other is the power predator, which is really just like a bear who charges you out of nowhere. But the power predator in human beings is quite rare because the power predator has skin in the game. The persuasion predator doesn't have skin in the game. The persuasion predator gets you to go with him somewhere to that secondary crime scene or gets you to participate in your own victimization. And it's true what you said, that the overwhelming majority of people who

are victimized by violence had some early warning or some indicator, pre-incident indicator beforehand and didn't listen to it. That is true because human beings, we don't, you know, I tell this story of two wolves and they're in the forest and they're on some path and they come face to face. And one of them puts his ears back and the lips dry out and the tongue retracts and it focuses and the hair on its back goes up and then it attacks the other wolf. Well, you can be sure that the wolf who was attacked doesn't say, oh, my God, that came out of nowhere. All these signals have been exchanged. And the same thing with you and me. That came out of nowhere.

All these signals had been exchanged. And the same thing with you and me. If we're going to have a fight, the chin comes out, the breath is brought in and held, the fists form. All variety of things happen that are pre-incident indicators that tell me, wait a minute, this thing's getting out of control or I need to apply some strategy for my own safety. Human beings don't attack each other out of nowhere. Very rare that they attack each other out of nowhere without some indicator. You know, as just kind of a nod to why we need to learn this, even though it's natural, how, you know, how easy it is to get away from these things. I've noticed as a self-defense practitioner, when I watch MMA, UFC, which I love, I can't believe how many of the fighters stare at the eyes of their opponent when all of their training has taught them to look at the

elbows and knees and the hands, you know? And it's because it's really hard for us to get away from what's in our lizard brain. And we tend to lock eyes with people. So even these people, this is what they do, is train to do exactly this. They know that my eyes aren't going to do anything to them. And in UFC, even my head's not going to do anything to them because I can't headbutt. But they do it anyway. And what does that tell us about what we need to overcome to keep ourselves safe? Well, I'm not sure it tells us anything about something to overcome. I take a different view on this. When I was doing the book,

I interviewed a guy who was the world champion marathon runner. He would do races that were a thousand miles and they were a thousand miles around a mile track, a thousand times, boom, miles and they were a thousand miles around a mile track, a thousand times, boom, boom, boom, boom. And he taught me that, you know, he's sort of like somebody who went to the moon and when he got back, he wanted to say, Hey, what was that like? So I said, what was that like? You know, why was it a thousand miles? Why are they choosing a thousand miles? Is that arbitrary? He said, Oh yeah, I could do 1100 miles, do 1200 miles. That would be fine. Really? Tell me more about that. And so he'd talk about it. But what he told me is that he would get next to the guy who was competing with him. He won world championship in 89, 90, 91, 92. But this French guy beat him in 93. And then they went

back and forth. And he said they'd be running next to each other. And he could tell. I even get chills thinking about it now. Just being next to him, he knew he had the race. Or the other guy knew he had the race. So signals were exchanged. And I would propose that the eyes may be giving more indication than the hands and the elbows and the knees. By the time they're moving, yeah, you got to deal with it for sure. But you may be getting information from the eyes and it may very well be as little as looking down quickly and looking back up, which I just did now. But man, we are good at reading this whole being, everything about respiration and perspiration and eye movements. And so I suspect

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based on product and subscription plan. How does the understanding expand beyond threat to body and into creativity and relationships and all of the different types of things that we can see as threats in our lives that aren't physically threatening? Well, it's a rare question for me to get, but I've given it a lot of thought. And it actually links to my main topic, which is violence, in that we all make choices in our lives about who to include in our lives and who to exclude from our lives. So we meet a new person, this will become my spouse, this person will become my employer, my employee. These decisions are enormously important because they write the script for the rest of our lives. And so what I encourage people to do is to make very, very quick decisions about whom you exclude from your life and very slow decisions about whom you include in your life.

Now, having said that, you now open yourself to intuition because you treat it well. You listen to your intuition. And indeed, that will link to creativity enormously. When I was doing Gift of Fear, for example, I would go to somebody's house, and I'm always thinking about the book because I'm writing, and go in and see on their table a book of sayings by Buddha, and it's open to a saying, look at that, the title of chapter two. Go somewhere else and find somebody says something, what, say that again? The beginning of chapter seven, the solution to chapter 11, meaning we're a stenographer for the universe, and I'm just

walking around collecting all this information. And it raises the question of whether the act of creativity and writing is one example. Is it the act of construction? Is it putting together content? Or is it the act of discovery? Is it discovering content? And I submit that it's discovering content. And I give you an example in your life and in your work. You know, you are an interviewer who often goes in deep. You do what I call going 10 questions deep.

You don't ask the question. This is an easy question. They give you the answer. Okay, I'll move on. No, no, you'll keep going. And your intuition is what tells you there's something more here. You don't lay it out. You don't take a minute and say, well, let me put all the pieces together. You just know there's something more there. When I used to give speeches around the country, I would just take a chance and say to somebody

in the front row, you're from Boston, correct? And a lot of times, I didn't hear them speak, nothing. Yes. And it's the most amazing thing. And audiences applauded. But if I got it wrong, audiences just forgot it. They just move on, right? And so it's listening to your intuition of going with the first thing that comes into your mind and trusting that it has some value. So I think it does relate to every part of our lives. Everybody's going to know this if they're paying attention to the podcast, but Gavin has spent a lot of his life helping people

protect the circumstances of their own life, especially when they're high profile. Do you believe that the need for that has increased over time with all of our recognition of violence now that we're seeing all the time. People are killing each other in more creative ways and for worse reason or more trivial reason all the time. Do you believe that that reflects a higher threat profile in our society? It does. And while we've had groupings of assassination, the 60s being a good example, and then we had John Lennon in 1980 and a young actress, Rebecca Schaefer, around that same time, and Reagan in 1981. While we've had groupings like that, and we aren't seeing a grouping right now, we are definitely seeing a circumstance where we used to have, you know, three or four multiple victim shootings in the news in a year. And now that's every week,

shootings in the news in a year. And now that's every week, three or four a week. We are definitely in a circumstance where violence and explosive violence and attention-getting violence and incautious violence, meaning just going for it and coming in with a gun, is a huge part of our lives now much more. This means that where I used to focus on public figures, let's say at the top of our society, I now recognize that a lot of those strategies that I developed for protecting members of Congress or senior government officials or public figures are now needed much more by the general public, which is the strategy of knowing this moment doesn't feel safe. I'm going to change this moment. I'm going to respond to this moment. I'm going to change this moment. I'm going to respond to this moment. I'm going to change this encounter. There's a thing I call PC, not as in political correctness, which I despise, but rather PC is to mean privacy and control. And when somebody has both privacy and control, I'm working late. The manager of the restaurant is the only guy here. He gives me the creeps a

little bit. The door is closed and locked. He has privacy and he has control because I'll cede him control because he's my boss. It doesn't mean he's a bad man. It doesn't mean he's going to hurt the teenage girl who works there. But it does mean she's in a situation where she needs to pay attention to her vulnerability. So anytime you have that, you cede, C-E-D-E, you cede privacy and control to someone else, particularly women who are more vulnerable to attack than men. But anytime you do that, it's good to be aware of it, to just be aware that I don't have advantages right now. I don't have the advantage of being able to call somebody and expect to be heard because we have privacy. And I don't have the

inclination to be strong and resistant because this is the guy I got to go to work with on Monday morning again. And so I think these are key things. But I want to make a point about fear that goes to your last question, because you asked at the very beginning what's good about it and why we should listen to it, why it's a gift. So fear is a gift when it is a signal in the presence of danger, for sure. When I'm watching the news and I see a fire in a high rise, I don't need to get my heart rate up if they say that fire is in Caracas, Venezuela, or I see a police chase, but it's in Brisbane, Australia. That's not, while the news media will, of course, be breathless and be reporting it because it's a big drama and a big event for them. It doesn't mean it's a big event for me. And what I want to say about this is that, Chris, throughout human history, governments and people in power have used fear to control populations. It is the primary mechanism

for controlling populations. And so if we look at human history as a pie, only a tiny sliver of it is representative democracy, the United States and Western Europe. All the rest of it is tyranny. That is the normal way that control over people works, is tyranny. And when governments use fear to control populations, that invariably leads to tyranny. That's what happens because once you have everybody's attention, now you say, well, what shall I do with them? Oh, I know what I'll do. Let's use COVID as an example. And by the way, I can say what I'm about to say, Chris, because you're not on a show that is entirely financed by Pfizer and other pharma companies, as you certainly were at CNN. 85% of the financing coming from pharma companies. So you look at a situation where we are told to be afraid, for example, about the virus.

Nobody wants it. Some people die from it, sure. But what we learned early, in the very beginning, was me. I'm over 60. If you're over 60, you catch this and you're going to die. That was the first story that we were told. But then the report came out of Italy and it showed who actually died. Average age, 81, meaning they had already lived beyond the national norm for lifespan by five years. And what was the survival rate for you as an example, your age?

I'll put aside your fitness, but what was the survival rate? 99.9%. For me, a little bit, your age, I'll put aside your fitness, but what was the survival rate? 99.9%. For me, a little bit older, 99.7%. I make decisions every day on worse odds than that. I get in the car on worse odds than that. And so my point in this is that when we are told to fear something, might be a virus, might be with great purpose, their hearts are in the right place, who knows? But when we're told to fear something, it is our responsibility as citizens always to ask, what is it? And how well do we

understand it? Because governments will always be telling you, a small village will be telling you, fear the people in the next village. A country will be telling you, fear the people in the next country. That is always the case. That is part of human nature. It has nothing to do with America. And I kind of asked myself this question, which is that didn't Americans used to distrust big pharma companies? And when did it come that we afforded pharma the kind of trust that we previously reserved for companies that didn't commit lethal criminal fraud and have the biggest fines in American history, as Pfizer did, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, et cetera, Vioxx, many other products over the years.

The biggest fines in America have been paid by these pharma companies. So something shifted where we didn't respond with skepticism, where we didn't say, oh, you've got a new product, Vioxx. By the way, Vioxx, you know all about it, right? Tens of thousands of lawsuits, paid $4 billion in fines, $253 million judgments, 100,000 people killed. Guess what? $950 million to the federal government. Guess what? Coming back on the market. Even thalidomide, you're a little younger than me, but even thalidomide, it's still on the market. It's still on the market. It's still on the market today.

It's just not given to pregnant women anymore. You know, I brought it up the other day, and boy, I have been getting smacked around about this. So this latest diet craze, these shots people are giving each other, are giving themselves with the diabetes drug, Ozempic, Wagovi. They're losing weight, but I am a staunch adherent to the too good to be true thing. And you're sticking yourself. And now they're saying it cures all cravings, you know, smoking and this and that, but at what cost? And, you know, what you're saying about the pandemic and how it relates to fear, there was another aspect of fear. They had fear on their side

because we didn't want to get it and we were spooked and this was novel. So we were listening. There was also fear on their side of not wanting to correct themselves, even though that is the scientific method. That is not how politics works. Politics works on sticking with your position, no matter what the point of resistance. And even if something as obvious as, I don't know, a gay marriage is a

no brainer equal protection argument. We'll see what this court does with it, but you may like it, me and I like it. That's fine. That's different. That's preference. It's not about protection under the 14th amendment. And yet Obama had to twist himself in the knots to rationalize going with a no brain or equal protection argument because he was afraid of the backlash. And what we had during the pandemic, and I lived it, was, wait a minute, you said that this thing is on things that you touch and we got to clean our vegetables and a mask would actually be stupid

because you'd probably put germs on it or the virus on it. But now you don't believe that anymore. Now you believe it's aerosolized, but you didn't kind of tell me that the way you told me to clean the vegetables. Why? Because politicians got involved and said, hold on a second, let's keep this sort of because they won't trust us if we say we were wrong.

And the irony to me was one of the big people who capitalized on that was the former president. And yet he was the one who made the vaccine happen. He made the vaccine happen faster than it ever would have happened before. Yes, the technology was something they knew a lot about, but they hadn't done this before. And then he went bad on it, you know, because it wound up being politically expedient. And the lesson for me was fear doesn't work in science. It does work in politics. And you can't mix the two. And we needed to have a politician.

If you had heard the former president or the current president say, hey, listen, they were telling us it's about the vegetable clean and everything. We don't have to clean all the offices for 15 hours anymore. This is aerosolized. We're learning as we go. It's like a war. Enemy's doing something different. We got to change our approach.

You can go back to school. I think that if they had gone with that, we would have had a lot of the changes back to normalcy a lot faster than them having to cling to a position because there was such a price for movement. You know, if I go from being like, you know, you said something you'd never hear in politics, which is, oh, I decided to listen to the other boys. But if I decided, hey, you know, I'm a gun owner, but this is crazy.

I don't think anybody should have a weapon except the military and the police. And I'm a dead man in politics. I'm a dead man because my own will reject me and the other side will never take me. So I could never do that. But that's exactly what you do everywhere else in life. So that was the lesson for me. what you do everywhere else in life. So that was the lesson for me, but it is also a play on fear and how we allow it to shape us in pretty much every manifestation. I mean, how many people do you know who stay in situations or relationships that may be physically threatening, but even if they're not, fear of change will keep them in a situation that they know is bad for them professionally, personally. And what does that tell us?

Well, everything you just said now I want to endorse, but also commend you for. Because you came from a circumstance for years where you were at fear central uh the you know CNN or any it's not about them but any cable channel they're in the business of spraying a lot of fear I used to joke that the CBS ought to begin the broadcast by saying uh welcome to the CBS news we're surprised you made it through another day and here's what happened to the people who didn't, and then would be the death litany. And so it's a very compelling presentation you just gave on exactly what was wrong, which is that you have to separate. In fact, I'll give you an interesting example,

the phrase safe and effective. FDA says safe and effective. CDC says safe and effective. I'd like to separate those two processes. Effectiveness is like saying it would be like having the National Highway Transportation Safety Board say, hey, the new Lincoln is safe. The airbags are good. It's also really smooth riding. It's a nice leather seat. Effectiveness is a commercial for pharma. Don't do effectiveness in the same office that you do safety. Safety is just, this thing is bad for your kids. This thing is bad for you, whatever it may be. Boosters, for example. Nobody should get boosters at this point. Big mistake, my opinion. Having, by the way, written a whole book on the topic called Cause Unknown that I'm now promoting shamelessly. But this book is really interesting because this book's about the thing

you're talking about. It has section after section called News You Might Have Missed. And it's predominantly, kind of interesting, by the way, this is a very easy book to read because it's predominantly graphics, right? And it has section after section of news you might have missed. And people don't know what you just said. They don't know that these vaccines don't stop transmission. You know it now, but most people still don't. They don't know that these vaccines don't stop transmission. You know it now, but most people still don't. They don't know that these vaccines don't stop infection. They don't know they don't stop death. They don't know that Pfizer asked for 75 years before they would release the safety trials.

Holy shit, that's our safety trials. We paid for that. You want to wait 75 years? We won that in court, by the way, and it's being released and it's not good for Pfizer. They don't know that the products reduce sperm count, and federal public health officials have acknowledged that, but they've said, oh, it only reduces sperm count for three months. Well, yeah, that's exactly the amount of time

you're telling me to put between vaccines. Like, what are you talking about? They don't know that it increases menstrual bleeding. These are all facts. These are all true things that came. And you gave me a great example when we would order the pizza and we could clean the outside of the pizza box. Don't touch the, but you can eat the pizza. It was just madness. And they should have told us that contact transmission was not an issue. And then the hotels wouldn't have every remote control with a plastic bag for your protection. So I'm really with you that when you, I divided safe and effective in the same way that you propose dividing the white coats, scientists, doctors, et cetera, from the decision makers, because ultimately even my own doctor does not, he doesn't say,

turn around, I'm just going to give you some injection. It's just not your business. He tells me what it is. We talk about it. And I make the decision about whether I sit down for that, you know, to have my chest cracked open for some surgery. And we lost that here because of fear, because when you are afraid, people will take any train that's leaving the station, even if it's not going where they want to go. So when you said wear masks, okay, that makes sense. It seems to make sense. Now wear two masks, I swear to God. Now get a monkeypox vaccine, which is just the, by the way, it is the smallpox vaccine, which is a very tough vaccine. You want to take it if you're facing smallpox. You don't want to take it otherwise. And then the CDC says, take two monkeypox vaccines. So a million people have taken it.

Guess what just found out? In all the cases they've had, out of 90 cases, 70 had the vaccine. And by the way, plus it's self-resolving. You know, you still, they show us pictures of little African kids' hands with monkeypox on it. It doesn't look pretty. They still haven't shown a Caucasian hand with it because you don't know anybody with monkeypox. You can't find anybody with monkeypox where it was a problem for them. What was in the other vaccines? What was in the other ones, if not the vaccine? You're talking about what was in the smallpox vaccine?

No, you said 70 out of the 90 had the vaccine. Oh, they were vaccinated. My point is that it didn't work. So the smallpox didn't work for monkeypox and no surprise. And I just want to tell you a real quick thing, because I just had the research paper out today. This is interesting. So CDC website, right now this morning, you can go there and you'll see everything is safe and effective. They're in the safe and effective business. It's FDA that's supposed to be in the business of, hey, that's no good. But anyway, these are the serious side effects right now listed this morning for the smallpox vaccine.

Heart problems, swelling of the brain and the spinal cord. Oh, I hate that one. Severe skin disease, spreading the virus to other parts of the body. Huh? What? The virus? Severe allergic reactions.

Okay, that's fine. Then they tell you those reactions apply to a certain population of people in America who are, it says, the risks for serious smallpox vaccine side effects are greater for, and then they give you a list. This is the population that have greater risk for the smallpox vaccine. People with any of the following three risk factors, diabetes, oh, 90 million people, great. High cholesterol, oh, 60 million people, great. People with heart or blood vessel problems. You know anybody who didn't have that in their family? And this was a great one. Women who are pregnant or breastfeeding and then people with skin problems. And my absolute favorite was people with a history, family history of heart disease. You mean every person we ever met in

our lives? That's exactly right. That person? The point being that they tell you it's safe and effective and then they tell you except for 190 million Americans, it's not safe and effective. Well, the first list is compiled by scientists. The second list is compiled by lawyers. And that is a big complication of this. I also think it's about, and hopefully this is a lesson, because I'll tell you what will happen in my estimation is the next time one of these happens, I don't know that you're arguably around, but you could have the power balance be exactly the opposite, which is where all the people who are now saying they wanted to inject me with

nanotechnology and say it was a vaccine will be saying, hey, you got to take this vaccine because we're in power and we don't want a lot of people to die on our watch. And, you know, what I was always comfortable with that got me in trouble and, you know, that's okay. I was like, look, if you don't want to take the vaccine, all right, Trump's administration made it happen. They say they know the technology. They say that it will reduce the symptoms,

you know, which will then maybe make it less likely you transmit it, whatever. If you don't want to take it, don't take it, but don't expect the same access while we're trying to figure this shit out. Not forever. And I was okay with that trade-off. And I mean, even my wife runs a wellness business and she has a lot of concerns about things. But I said, look, it's fine, but they're not going to let the kids go to school. So, you know, you got to factor that in. And I know that that pissed a lot of people off,

but I always just saw it as, wait a minute, but I'm always making this accommodation. I don't know anything about any of the vaccines I've given my kids. They're all healthy. I was told by the doctor, these are the shots I need to give them so that they can go to school. I gave them the shots. It was the same shots that I think I got.

It wasn't the same that you got, but go ahead. They have a new protocol. It's like twice as many now as when I went and when I got them in 1974. When I was a kid, it was three. And now it's more than 100 injections by the time you're 14, including Pregardasil, for God's sake, which they're giving to boys

who don't have female sex organs, but it's for cervical cancer. They're giving it to nine-year-old boys. You know, I get it. It's just that, you know, to your point about fear. So why can't we make better choices? Why can't we get better recommendations?

Fear. And people play to it. The lawyers want the most exhaustive list they can find of anybody who could possibly be adversely affected, whether or not the scientists have the same confidence in the expansiveness of the list or not, because they're afraid of litigation. Politicians weaponize error. they're afraid of litigation. Politicians weaponize error. So you got the Democrats, let's say, or whoever, whoever is in charge of the vaccine or the government at that time is not going to like people poking holes in it the way the out party will like. And we saw this.

Trump's administration brought us the vaccine in record time. He celebrated it. Then his party that celebrated him bringing the vaccine demonized the vaccine when it worked for them politically to use fear to motivate people's allegiance. And that's my big problem with our politics. I blame the party system. I blame a two-party system that is fundamentally zero-sum. If I'm running

against Gavin DeBecker and we're going to debate drug protocols, I will tell you right now, my strategy is very simple. Gavin DeBecker punched a woman and got away with it. I am not going to talk to you about drug protocol. You know too much. I am going to try to hurt you with the people in our audience and work on their sense of self-protection against somebody that they should not believe. That's what our politics has become, which is way more about fear than fact. And it's a real concern to me because it's rendered all of us just about ineffectual. Paralyzed, yeah. Because even if I could be talking about,

well, but you worked at CNN. Yeah, but you're in the media. Yeah, but you're in this. You're always identified with something that people can motivate through fear to discount. Well, I'll give you a good example of that. You know, you're in your car and a drug addicted, drunk, homeless man

by the side of the car says, hey, your back tire's flat or there's flame coming out of your exhaust. You don't say, well, I'm not gonna listen to some drug addict on the street. It doesn't matter who the source is. It doesn't matter if the source is Robert Kennedy. He might be right. It doesn't matter if the source is a guy who worked on CNN. He might be right. It doesn't matter if the source is CNN. They might be right. And what we've lost

is the ability, our skeptical, you know, our ability to be skeptics that Carl Sagan, God bless him. He's died now, but he had this beautiful saying. He said, if we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along. It wasn't enough. This is Jefferson. Jefferson said it wasn't enough to enshrine some rights in a constitution or a bill of rights. The people had to be educated and they had to practice their skepticism. Otherwise, we don't run the government. The government runs us. So going to your point,

whoever's in power, and then it's discounting the credibility of the other person. They're a bad person. And you have a name. Trump was great at this. Come up with a nickname rather than engage with the actual arguments.

And I think this is the key. The whole book, by the way, Gift of Fear, it's about personal responsibility. It's about the cops are not going to do it for you. The government's not going to do it for you. They're not going to be there with you. The corporation's not going to do it.

It's you and our kids, how we train them to listen to these resources that they have. And everything in your presentation just now about the division and the fact that we, you know, politicians on both sides use fear, is our responsibility to improve, to be more skeptical. You worked in a place where it was hard to be skeptical of certain things. This isn't about CNN, but any big cable news channel, they had their leaning. And if you'd suddenly come out and said,

oh, the vaccines are dangerous to kids and myocarditis is a real thing and hundreds of kids are showing up with myocarditis, whoa, boy, would you not be on the next day? No way around it. And it just wasn't allowed to do. But you, you specifically, because I've seen your work, you're a skeptical person. You're like, wait a minute, that doesn't sound right. So you want to go a little deeper. That's been lost in the news media. That's been lost in large measure. And when the media loses it, I think people lose it as well. I think that it would be nice to have the excuse that,

yeah, CNN or MSNBC or NBC or whatever alphabet soup you're at, they wouldn't let me. I think it's more often a pursuit of popularity that in the business, you're so sensitive to criticism and that it's easier not to say things. And while everybody always says they want to be a fearless journalist, once you feel the bite of people

who don't like what you ask, it's one thing to see it in a movie. It's another thing to deal with it in your own life. And I get why people, it can mollify quiet. And, you know, George Carlin was so brilliant when he would say, you know, they don't want a critical thinker. Nobody wants people to be critical thinkers.

And that's all I want people to be is critical thinkers. And that's why I was so happy to have the opportunity to talk to you, brother Gavin DeBecker, and hold up your book because most people are going to watch this. And I want people to see the new book, which is an extension of the original work, Gift of Fear,

because you got to know what to be afraid of and not. And Cause Unknown is a great thing. Look, I'm not telling you to just look at one source, but Cause Unknown is a great thing. Look, I'm not telling you to just look at one source, but cause unknown is a great perusal of what was said and what was missed and what questions should still be being asked. For instance, the title, cause unknown. When I started talking about

where the coronavirus came from and Wuhan and whether it was from the lab or the wet market, it was like, everybody told me, well, shut up. It doesn't matter right now. Okay. Fair point. Then we wanted to ask it again and people still don't want an answer. Like it doesn't really matter. Well then if it doesn't really matter, then why won't they just tell us? And why won't they just figure it out? It's not an unknowable thing. And that goes to agendas and who's afraid of what. And Gavin DeBecker has great processes and points of view to help us process all of it.

So thank you very much for having the conversation with me. I appreciate you for it. Thanks. You too, Chris. You too, Chris. Gavin DeBecker, you may not have all the right answers, but he is asking the right questions. And that's because he is not being cowed by fear. Are you?

Got to take charge of your own life. You can't be passive. You got to be active. You got to be asking questions. Doesn't make you a bad person to do so. Doesn't make you a bad person to protect yourself or to protect the integrity of your ideas. Thank you so much for joining me here, for subscribing, following,

watching me on News Nation at 8 and 11 P every weekday night. Appreciate you. Thank you for getting after it with me. Take care of yourself and take care of those you care about.