The Joe Rogan Experience - #968 - Kelly Brogan

Episode Date: May 31, 2017

Kelly Brogan, M.D. is a holistic women’s health psychiatrist and author of the NY Times Bestselling book, A Mind of Your Own.

Boom we're live that's it just like that so thank you for doing this welcome what's going on total pleasure nothing happy to be in LA are you I am always New York's good right now though right it's good it's like June-ish it's like an addictive relationship but most of us would rather be in california new york is yeah yeah yeah it's um you're a psychiatrist i am um i would think that there is ample work in new york just the environment that new york provides people stacked on top of each other like that beep beep hong kong fuck you all that like i would assume all that stress leads to a lot of people with a absolutely it's like if you're a fisherman you want to live near a river right right and it's fetishized in New York too to have a psychiatrist it's sort of almost expected that you do so not

only is there like ample supply and demand but then it's you know it's a thing to talk about yeah yeah what what's that about can you explain that I think it's like you know, it's a thing to talk about. Yeah. Yeah. What, what's that about? Can you explain that? I think it's like, you know, Woody Allen level, right? Like sort of embracing your shadow. And there's something refreshing about it because we don't pretend to be okay. I mean, we're deeply not okay in New York chronically. Well, is someone okay? Like in general anywhere? Is there a spot like, Oh yeah, Seattle, they've got it nailed. I mean, there's this term actually in the medical literature, believe it or not, called paleodeficit disorder. And it just refers to, like, how far have you strayed from the path in your lifestyle? Like, basic stuff, green space, movement, you know, sleep.

And I would imagine that if you have more of those components intact, you're probably a bit more okay than if you're living, you know, in, you know, midtown Manhattan. Like Seattle in the summer to me is a really good place because it's so green and it's so pretty and the ocean's right there. Totally. So you're getting some good air and then you're getting sun because it's the summer. So you don't have that seasonal depression thing that goes on. I mean, I imagine they're doing better. They're doing better in the summer. You never? Well, I've heard it's like summer, so you don't have that seasonal depression thing that goes on. I mean, I imagine they're doing better. They're doing better this summer.

I've never been there. You never? Well, I've heard it's like crazy beautiful, yeah. It's awesome. It's awesome. But those winters, they get to you. After the 30th day of rain, you're like, come on, this is stupid. Like, how much water do you need?

I'm like a big, big winter complainer, and I have been my whole life. So I complain 10 months of the year of what it's like to live in the Northeast. But recently I've been playing around with the idea that there's actually something cool about like, you know, sort of cyclical living. just like everything's dead and miserable for a period of time and then it blooms and then you get to experience like this rebirth and then it you know flourishes and then it dies again that there's another perspective on that actually being I don't know like if you work with it it's sort of like a woman who's on birth control has no idea that there's any point to you know a cycle of energy over the course of the month right and she sort of thinks is that there's any point to, you know, a cycle of energy over the course of the month. Right. And she sort of thinks that that's annoying. But there's a way you can wrap your mind around it where you work.

What do you mean? OK. So like if you're on birth control, you have no menstrual cycle. Right. Right. So you're just like you're like a man. You're like a flat line the whole month. But there's actually something really empowering if you understand how to work with your energy shifts because naturally like a woman's natural man i know this is really what you want to be talking about i do i don't i mean it's alien to me so i do want to hear so like i figured this out

i'm 39 i was on birth control for 12 years so i never knew what it was what it meant to have like a menstrual cycle until very recently because then I had two kids, breastfeeding. So a couple of decades into my life, I'm just figuring this out. But you have like totally different kinds of energy over the course of the month. And you have to know how to work with that. So there's a kind of energy that, you know, you want to go out and socialize or you want to stay in and work or you want to sleep more or less. And if you don't know how to ride that, then you could be sort of taken off guard by it. But if you know how to work with it, it's so much more powerful than just having this like

artificial hijacking of your endocrine system. That's interesting. So there's like some sort of analogy to be drawn between the cycles of nature and the cycles of your body month to month. Huh. I would have never considered that. I never even thought about it, but I have thought about birth control before about how crazy it is that you give a woman a hormone that convinces her body that she's perpetually pregnant and that a giant percentage of women are on it for convenience or even for other medical issues like skin issues. Right? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, when I, I've always been a feminist. Right. So even when I was younger and very much asleep, I identified as a feminist. And I was one of those people who thought that birth control was like a female entitlement. Like, how dare you not make this free and widely available? and more about how it's in many ways like the ultimate, you know, not to sound too inflammatory,

but the ultimate tool for oppression of, you know, the modern woman. Now I find it incredible that we, you know, that we're still taking it because it seems like a good idea, right? Who wants to deal with your annoying menstrual cycle? Who wants to get pregnant? Who wants to have endometriosis or polycystic ovary? You know, who wants to have acne or like hair growing in weird places? But it's the magic pill illusion. There's no free lunch. There's never going to be something that just fixes it for you and you just wheromones you secrete, you know, and there there was just a million woman study in Scandinavia that showed about the vast increase in antidepressant prescribing for teenagers who are prescribed birth control. So it's the beginning of sort of it's like a gateway drug sometimes for psych meds too. I heard, I had a friend who one of his good friends,

his daughter died from some complications with taking birth control pills and smoking cigarettes. Yes, pulmonary embolism probably. Smoking cigarettes apparently, along with the birth control pills are extremely dangerous, but so many do it. Of course. And you don't even have to have that additional risk factor, you know, because birth control, whether it's the pill or something called the NuvaRing, by itself has that. You know, I'm contacted often by parents of girls who have died from pulmonary embolism who've now become like

activists in this realm. It's because of birth control pills. Yeah, yeah. No, it's like a known mechanism. And it's a known risk factor. Like I think that's not being suppressed or hidden. It's just that we are sort of entrained to dismiss the risks as we attach to the promise. So we sort of like collude in ignoring that potential, you know. That's so interesting because most people, when they think about the birth control pill,

they think about it as something that liberated women. Exactly women because they can control whether or not they got pregnant and they were allowed for the first time to have careers and do whatever they wanted to because they didn't have to worry about being trapped. That's right. Right. So story. But that's the biological free lunch thing, right? but that's the biological free lunch thing, right? Exactly. Isn't there also a lot of issues? Chris Ryan was on here, Dr. Chris Ryan, the author of Sex at Dawn. He was on here, and he was talking about how women can, like if you smell the clothes of other men,

you can literally tell the men that you are attracted to, you would be biologically compatible with those men, and that when they did these same studies on women who were on the birth control pill, they couldn't smell the difference. That's right. It's called the t-shirt study. Yeah. How does that work? Could you explain that? Well, essentially, the premise of pharmaceutical medicine is that you can just pull like one little thread of the spider web and leave the rest of it intact. Everything else is gonna be fine. We're only working on this one area. So with birth control, for example, the idea is we're just, you know, taking over the management of your sex hormones, but the rest of your body is going to be totally

unaffected. And of course, as we learn more about how all of these systems are totally and inextricably interconnected, we have a better understanding of how, you know, when you interfere with sex hormones, you also potentially have other effects, including raising things called binding globulins, including inflammatory response, you're depleting a number of nutrients. And we're having, you know, it's possible that we haven't even begun to look through the keyhole of the effects on brain and neuropeptides in these arenas where we don't have any idea what hormonal secretion is about. We just have to defer to the probability that our bodies are more complex than we've begun to understand. So your biology is meant to guide you. It's meant to empower you. And it's meant to, you know, create a sense of vitality if you can inhabit your body and be in a truce with it. That's part of the problem with the mindset of birth control is I'm just going to,

you know, take this over. I'm going to manage this. And so who knows, maybe even it's a top down like mindset thing that begins to sort of divorce you from your sensibilities. We don't really know is the point that's going to be a common answer. I think I have to give you is that we don't really know, but it does make sense that you're, you know, the subtle nature of your biology that involves, you know, sort of guiding your human interactions and particularly sex-related interactions is going to be derailed. I mean, low libido is one of, ironically, the most common disclosed side effects of birth control. So you're taking it so that you can have unprotected sex, but you don't feel like having sex ultimately anyway. So it's not even really that well thought out, I think, by most of us.

It's very bizarre. But what other alternatives are there? I mean, if you're a woman and you want to have control of whether or not you get pregnant, there's not a whole lot of options other than weird ones like IUDs, which seem real weird. Yeah. I mean, there's some of my patients use what's called a copper IUD. You know, it's funny because I had one put in and two and a half, it costs like $700. And two and a half weeks later, I had it taken out because I just felt weird about having like a pharmaceutical metal in my body. It felt like a tracking device. Could you feel it in there?

No, no, no. You just were freaking out. It's just like psychologically felt weird. But I use something called a daisy, which is like this highly calibrated thermometer. And you track your, you know, because you have six fertile days a month. This isn't, you know, like some major sacrifice you have to make in order to learn how your cycle works. And then you get the benefits of being in your hormonal milieu. You know, like it's not that complicated. But there's a learning curve, you know, like it's not, it's not that complicated, but there's a learning curve,

you know, requires like learning how to be a woman and also sharing the onus because, you know, with all of these side effects we've been talking about, you know, there was like a male birth control study that was just terminated because of how many side effects like the men didn't want to deal with, you know, so there's such a sociocultural double standard around this. But if we're talking about six days a month, like, how about we collaborate and try and figure something out? You know, that doesn't involve a risk of death, perhaps. So this daisy thing just monitors your temperature and tells you exactly what's going on?

Yeah. I mean, it's a little more sophisticated than that. It actually has the efficacy, like above 99% efficacy. If you listen to it, that's part of the you know room for human error but it basically just tells you like have sex now if you want to conceive or if you don't then don't so it's a little like a little light it's green red or yellow how many women are on birth control if you had a guess nationwide you know i would that's a good question. I don't know the stat offhand.

Upwards of like 10 million, I would say. That's a staggering number of people taking some sort of a substance that alters the very nature of who they are. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, my interest in it really came from looking at the psychiatric side effects because I'm very interested in medications that have potential, you know, gateway effects around psychiatric meds that we aren't informing women of before, you know, they start the prescription. So, you know, whether it's like acid blocking medications, you know, or antibiotics, you know, birth control vaccines, these things have known psycho-biological effects. If you don't know that, then you'll never connect the dots.

And then you end up in the polypharmacy realm where you're taking multiple meds without ever knowing where the dominoes like started to fall. Yeah. I remember there was a commercial that they used to have. I don't know if they still air it, it was for uh um psychiatric medication that you take it was an antidepressant when you were depressed from antidepressants do you know what i'm talking about i think you're probably talking about a billify yes yeah it was actually the number one prescription in america recently terrifying it's an antipsychotic yeah you read the side effects it's's like, whoa, slow down.

Like, what is this? Like, psychotic thoughts and death and bleeding. Right. And if what you were taking that had similar side effects isn't working, then you can just layer this on. It's very common practice. It's very rare, I would say, actually, for people to be on just one psychiatric med. Really? just one psychiatric med. It's almost become industry standard to be taking upwards of, I would say, you know, two, three, sometimes even five. Many of the patients I work with

come to me on a cocktail of like five medications. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Well, you're chasing something for like years, right? Because you're never really going to feel yourself the way you want to. And that's what I found is really what we want. You know, like we just want to feel yourself the way you want to. And that's what I found is really what we want. You know, like we just want to feel comfortable in our own skin. We just want to feel

ourselves. Like, in fact, we don't want to, you know, be her or him or be rich or beautiful. We just want to feel cool being who we are. And you're never going to, I don't want to say never, it's very unlikely you'd feel that way while on a medication that has consciousness altering effects and a slew of side effects. And so you're going to be chasing that with other, with the promise of other meds, you know, a stimulant because your Paxil is making you tired and then you need a benzodiazepine because you can't sleep. And, you know, then you're sort of depressed again. And so you have another antidepressant layered on. And then there's a fad, you know, sort of, you know, bipolar two medication that you could try out like Lamictal or Abilify. And so this is sort of the culturally sanctioned approach to mental health today.

So how does a doctor know? Like, say if they put you on some Zoloft or something like that and not to pick on Zoloft, but then they say, well, it's just not really totally doing it for you. We're thinking about stacking Abilify in with the Zoloft. And I think that just might be the ticket to your happiness. Right, right, right. Yeah. Well, it's it's important to remember, right? Like, particularly in psychiatry, there's no objective testing, measurement. It's not like you have a broken arm. Like, hey, I see you have a broken arm. We're going to put your arm in a cast. But with a broken arm, you can get an x-ray.

Right. Right, and prove that you have a broken arm. Right. In psychiatry, there's no blood test. There's no EEG. There's no, you know, scan of any kind. It's a conversation, sometimes as short as 10 minutes. Like, say if I came into your office and I'm like...

My office is a little different. Okay. But just say if you're a regular psychiatrist and I'm like, man, I don't know, Kelly, I'm a fucking mess. I can't keep it together. What do I do? What do I take? Could you just start someone off on like a low dose of something and see if it helps? And they come back in a couple of weeks. Like, how does it work? it's like it it's like an art form i mean you have your personal favorite medications that you feel comfortable prescribing so you're more likely to prescribe them but then also and this is also you know in the literature itself if a patient comes in asking for a particular medication then you 49 i think it was like of prescriptions that are written, are written because of specific patient requests.

Oh, Jesus. Where are people getting? Exactly. They're getting these ideas from the fact that we are one of three countries in the world that allows for direct-to-consumer advertising. What are the other ones? North Korea and Russia? No, it's surprising.

It's surprising. Brazil and New Zealand. Oh, wow. That is surprising. It's weird, right? It confuses the hell out of me. When I watch those commercials and there's beautiful piano music playing and there's cartoon flowers that are smiling at everybody, I'm like, what are they selling me?

Yeah, but it works. And they know it works. Ask your doctor. Ask your doctor. Multi-billions are put into those commercials. Yeah, for good reason. Multi-billions are put into those commercials. Yeah, for good reason. So there's no real, like, there's not like a blood test or something they give you where they say, I think this is going to be the ticket for you.

Nope. Yeah, no, it's very impressionistic. And that's sort of the issue. I mean, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the DSM, is sort of the dictionary, so to speak, in psychiatry. And like in the 50s, it was like 150 pages, and now it's 886 pages. And it's grown in volume, largely because of the consensus decisions of a bunch of older white men sitting around a table. Goddamn white men. Most of them, you see, I'm so tired of them.

Bane. You know, almost all of them have industry ties. And this is out there. This isn't like a conspiracy theory. Yeah, no, my wife's mom was a nurse. And she was always telling me that they would get taken out on these really nice dinners by these pharmaceutical companies. They'd take you to a real nice restaurant,

buy a steak and baked potato and everybody could have a drink. And, you know, they would be so willing to be like very complimentary of this medication. Oh, I know a girl who took this and it really helped her a lot. And you think it's not going to affect you. Like I was in that, you know, generation two where I got taken out to five star restaurants in Manhattan all the time. Yeah, they just buy you stuff.

It feels really good because you're making like 20 grand a year working your ass off. And so when someone takes you to a fancy restaurant with your friends, but you could convince yourself that it's not actually going to, you know, that you're an intellectual and you're going to make your own decisions. But all of the data suggests otherwise, that you are unduly influenced by that kind of courtship behavior. And it's true. So we have this like, you know, sort of collusion on the part of the doctor and the patients to support industry interests over any sort of, I don't know, shred of a scientific or evidence-based process for really diagnosing someone. Well, especially when we're talking about something that is so subjective where it's not like a broken arm, right? We're like, uh, Joe, you've

got a broken arm. Like I know what to do. We're going to set your arm and give you a cast. It's like, so you're feeling down. Hey man. Right. You know, like do they even ask you like, does this, does, does a normal psych, like, I guess like someone who's really good would, but is your diet and your sleep patterns, is that a consideration before they prescribe medication? No. No. In fact, most sort of turncoat doctors like me will tell you that we have one hour of nutrition education in all of our medical school and residency training. One cumulative hour. Are you a turncoat? Are you like considered like a training. One. Are you a turncoat?

Are you like considered like a rat? Are you a bad person in the industry? I am not welcome in the halls anymore. No, I lost all my faculty positions and yeah. Why? Just for being honest about this stuff? Um,

because I guess the kind of science that I bring to the table, which is not my own, I don't have any original ideas, but I am really good, because, you know, I don't prescribe medication anymore under any circumstances ever. But I do have an entire practice, you know, devoted to taking people off of medication. So I have sort of my thing, and it's a lot based on lifestyle change, as you mentioned, right? If you don't have your methodology as an alternative to prescribing, and you're going to acknowledge what a lot of the science says that condemns the pharmaceutical approach, what are you going to do instead? You just invested $200,000 of debt, blood, sweat, and tears, indentured servitude for like a decade of your training. You're just going to give that up, you know? So it's a lot to expect the average psychiatrist to acknowledge, you know, anything beyond what's called like consensus medicine.

It's called that because it doesn't even have a connection to the evidence. It's not evidence-based. It's just they all agree on it and they're just going to keep doing it, you know. So this consensus medicine, like in psychiatry, there's kind of like this understanding that you don't criticize the system that everybody's operating under. You just work within that system. Yeah. Why would you bother? You know, because it's going to get you in trouble. It's going to be uncomfortable for you. It's going to get you in trouble. Wow, that's so crazy. There's no incentive, you know, like I read more science than probably all my conventional

colleagues put together because I have a lot of incentive to do so because I'm practicing outside of the, you know, the gold standard, so to speak. So when you're in the fold, why would you bother reading science? Who cares? You just do what you were taught to do. Don't question it, you know? So it's, you know, the reason that lifestyle is not presented as a relevant factor in conventional medicine is because it flies in the face of the whole model, right? Like the model is still a gene-based model. It's still, you were born with it. You know, it's like coddling the victim. There's nothing you can do about it. So, you know, you better just be a good boy and take your medication. It's the only thing you can do because diet doesn't matter. You know, whether you're, you know, huffing fumes through your window doesn't matter.

Whether you're eating six cans of tuna a day and mercury poisoning yourself doesn't. None of that matters really. Maybe it's like of minor interest, but the real problem is your inborn genetic chemical imbalance. Right. is your inborn genetic chemical imbalance, right? So if that is the premise, and it's not just in psychiatrists, it's in all of medicine, is gene-based determinism frees pharma to offer the only solution. And it actually validates people on some level as the victim, right?

So like a lot of people want to feel, weirdly, you know, like their own victimization it feels comfortable even though there's science that supports that having a healthy nutrient-dense diet allows your body to produce the all the healthy hormones and chemicals and neurotransmitters and all the and then along with exercise which also increases it simple stuff yeah Haven't there been studies also that show that exercise, regular aerobic exercise in particular, it does as much to treat depression as SSRIs? More. More. Yeah, actually.

Because the efficacy of most antidepressants is pretty embarrassing, to be frank. Because if you really dig into the literature, it's not what you think it is in terms of really being a viable treatment option. So many of these natural alternatives, like far outpace, I mean, things even like herbs like turmeric or acupuncture, yoga, you know, exercise. And that's just a single intervention. So there's nothing miraculous about my approach. It's basically just putting all those things together at once for like a synergistic effect. So you can send your body and mind like a signal of safety, right? And it works, right? So if you're just doing one of those things in isolation, and even one of those things is more effective, then,

you know, it's really, it really comes down to the mindset, because if you want it in a pill, it's going to be challenging for you to get results through effort or something behavioral. So the mindset piece has become a real focus for me as being maybe the most important determinant of what's going to be an effective intervention. The mindset piece, meaning? what's going to be an effective intervention. The mindset piece, meaning? Meaning what you believe, like about health. And if you want to, you know, believe that you're broken

and that, you know, chemicals are necessary to manage your scary body and mind. I've talked to a lot of smart people that believe that. I have a friend, she's a scientist. She's very smart and she's on antidepressants. And if you talk to her, she will argue to the death that these are critical for her life and that she needs them. And she has some sort of a brain imbalance and it's no different than having, you know, some other organ in your body that doesn't function properly and you need medication for that. We've been told that. I was told that and I

believe that for sure. You know, the analogy is often, well, it's like insulin to a diabetic. It's the same thing. And the more you challenge that, you're stigmatizing mental illness. And how dare you? I've been accused. That's exactly the approach. Yeah. I've been accused of shaming women, which is, of course, the last. All I care about is empowering women around their health.

Literally, I wake up every single day and devote my life to that purpose. The last thing I have any intention of doing is shaming anyone who's made this decision. Well, it's just whenever something makes someone uncomfortable with their choices, they immediately want to turn someone else into an aggressor or someone who's victimizing them. But this woman that I'm friends with, it's unfortunate because I feel like if she exercised, at least she would know. She doesn't exercise. So if you don't exercise, you don't really know if that would help. Right.

You know, but I hate to be that guy because I already am. You know, like that proselytizing, you got to work out, God. That's fucking annoying. That's like the CrossFit person or the proselytizing vegan or whatever. Exactly. A new cult member. Right. You know, you just want to talk forever about it. And it doesn't work because you're never going to convince someone.

You annoy people. They hate you. It's true. And it's like you bring a horse to water thing. Yes. You can't make it happen. Of course. But there is more readiness now than I think ever before.

People are ready, and once they have the information, it's sort of like, and then they just transform. Well, these conversations are happening now more and more with people where they're starting to look at like what is it in my life that's causing me stress? What is it in my life that is depleting my sleep patterns or my health? Have I ever gotten my blood test done and find out where my nutrient levels are? Simple stuff, yeah. health have I ever gotten my blood test done and find out where my nutrient levels are stuff yes and you know and everybody's nutrient needs are very different biologically people like people are gonna respond differently to drugs people are gonna respond differently to food it's just we come

from different parts of the world and some people need different stuff and this is being called like n of one medicine and meaning like meaning the number of people in a study so like the phrase is N of one medicine and meaning like, meaning the number of people in a study. So like the phrase is N of one medicine, because we're beginning to understand exactly what you're saying, which is that it's you, this is your thing. This is your journey. This is very specific to you, right? So like, you know, your depression, let's say could be because you have a B12 deficiency. It could be because you have low thyroid function. It could be because you have a B12 deficiency. It could be because you have low thyroid function. It could be because you're taking birth control. It could be because, you know, your dog died. It could be

because you have a shitty job that you hate. It could be because your marriage has to go. And it could be because you're ready for some psycho-spiritual emergence, you know. And you are the only one who really knows and who really can figure it out. But we, on the conventional side of things, seek to depersonalize it. So it's not you. It has nothing to do with you. It's just a chemical process that's unfolding, and you need this one-size-fits-all intervention. It's very disingenuous, but it's also super common. Isn't that weird?

I mean, the access to the data is there for everybody. It's there for psychiatrists as well. Like they would know the efficiency or the effectiveness rather of exercise, right? But that's what I'm saying. It's really coming down to like almost religious level belief systems. Like either you believe, right, which I used to, P.S., either you believe that we're sort of machines, right? Like as Alan Watts would say, we're like flesh robots on a dead rock floating in the middle of nowhere. So everything is purposeless and random.

And it's just bad luck and bad genes. And, you know, it's like the other shoe could fall at any moment. And life is just a hustle. And you're just trying to survive. And you've got to avail yourself of real medicine, which is pharmaceutical medicine. It's the only legit option. And you've just trying to survive. And you got to avail yourself of real medicine, which is pharmaceutical medicine is the only legit option. And you just got to do it. And you know what, you want some credit for even having the courage to actually take the steps to take your meds, right? So that's one mindset. And then the other, which is, I believe, growing, is that we

have no idea what we're doing scientifically, and we're just looking through the keyhole. And science is a process. It's not like a destination where the science is settled, my favorite phrase. So, you know, the body itself has this, you know, chiropractors call it vitalism, like has this innate wisdom, and it doesn't make mistakes. Like it doesn't mess up. Every single thing your body is doing is in wise response to a perceived, you know, stimulus, right? Except diseases,

of course, right? Like cancer. No. Leukemia. No, it would include without exception. Really? Without, and I could explain what I mean by that. But, but right. So, so if I have an ache or a pain or I my hair is falling out or I have a tumor growing out of the side of my body. My first response, it's possible, could be curiosity, like it could be what is this about? You know, where am I off? Right. Because in like indigenous cultures, for example, illness is not like something that your body is doing. It's the, you know, sort of manifestation of things out of balance with you and your soul, you know, with you and the relationships in your life, with you and nature and maybe the collective itself. So it's this expression, it's this physical manifestation of something much deeper that has roots. And until you understand what those roots are for you, you won't resolve it. Right.

But like serious errors like birth defects and things along those lines, that's not like a wise response to anything. Right. It's an error. It's a good question. You know, the sort of like congenital question, like if you're just like born without a leg. genital question, like if you're just like born without a leg, I mean, you could take it to the extent where you say, okay, so what drove the birth defect, whether it was some sort of, you know, okay, so let's back up a second because epigenetics, right, is the word du jour for beyond or above actually technically genes, right? So there's, the genes are interesting, but perhaps as insignificant as like 1% of what makes us sick, right? Or well, we never study what makes us well,

it's like a total black box. But epigenetics is like, how does the environment impact our genes, right? So you could argue that a lot of congenital, you know, sort of malformations and things like that, because this was an area of study for me when I was prescribing to pregnant women which believe it or not was my specialty prescribing psychiatric meds to to pregnant women that it is a risk in response to that exposure and it's the body's method of adapting to an exposure is it an adaptation or is it just an error like if someone's born without a leg what kind of of adaptation is that? It seems like some sort of a genetic error, no? It depends how you want to look at it. I mean, to me, there are no errors because the body is responding to a perceived stimulus. Now, if you throw a lot of toxicity, you know,

in the way of your body, there may be a limit to which it can or will accommodate, right? Because something confusing for me was at one point, I was reflecting on the fact that, you know, there may be a limit to which it can or will accommodate, right? Because like something confusing for me was at one point, I was reflecting on the fact that, you know, we've had all of these environmental exposures for like about 100, 150 years, like since the industrial revolution, right? So we like live totally different lives now with all these toxic exposures that we sit all day and we don't sleep and we have Monsanto and all the rest pretty much for like the past 100 years or so we can adapt like my body is adapting within the hours that we're you know hanging out so why would it not have adapted over the past 100 years and

like a paleo argument is like like we've evolved the same way for 95 of our evolution and now we just haven't taken enough time to evolve to catch up with today's modern influences right but i actually think we're not meant to accommodate this and we will self-extinguish like if we don't course correct which i have faith we will do but we're not meant to adapt to this kind of lifestyle. You mean like cubicle life, traffic? Yeah, exactly. So that you really think this will be the end of people if we don't course correct? I think we will.

Cubicles will eat your soul. biologically adapt, I think we won't, because there is like a cosmic intelligence that is holding us accountable to a certain level of respect for this human organism, a certain level of respect for the privilege of being alive, you know, and the way we're living today, just like trashing ourselves and trashing this planet is in is a violation so i don't know it's just like a subtle point but i think the point is we're not going to adapt so don't wait for it you know and we're just going to get sicker and sicker and sicker and die and and perhaps that is the most intelligent damn someone's the voice of doom and gloom no i said it's going to get better remember right yeah it seems like the sacrifice for productivity the daily sacrifice for productivity that comes at the expense industry start their practice or start practicing being a

doctor, a professional doctor with quarter million dollar debt. Right. Which is crazy. It's so much money. It's, it's so crazy. It's so, what a terrible idea. Like what's almost mandatory for any civilization. Well, you need healthcare for sure. You need to be able to take care of people. I got an idea. Let's take those people that you need to make these critical decisions to save your life, and let's fuck them over. Let's saddle those people up with crazy debt and leave them trapped in a world of stress. I got an even better idea. When they're going through their residency, let's not let them sleep.

Right, exactly. Let's keep them up. Keep them caffeinated, sugared. Keep fucking working. Give them pills. Give them amphetamines. Give them Adderall. You them caffeinated, sugared. Keep fucking working. Give them pills. Give them amphetamines. You know, give them Adderall. You need a prescription, Sally.

Are you tired, Sally? I got a little pick-me-up. It's called Adderall. Sweetie, it's not your fault. You've got A-D-H-D-D-S-T-U-V. Exactly. Q-R-S. But that's how, it's like a hazing.

It's a hazing process. It's nuts. Not unlike the military. Right. They break you. You know, so that you remain loyal. I mean, that's obviously one perspective on it. But that's what I'm saying, right? Like, I was $200,000 in debt. It took a lot for me to just, like, jump ship and say, okay, whatever I, you know, invested that in, I'm just going to walk away from it. Most people, you know, are not in a position to do that. And perhaps that's part of the design. I don't know.

Well, even if it's not a design, it's a very efficient survival mechanism for the industry. It just seems like one of the worst ways for someone to start a career in taking care of people is to be all fucked up themselves. But they need to be broken down in that way

to stay in line. It's just basic sort of hierarchical systems work this way. Is it a conspiracy or is it people just taking advantage of this need and being greedy and just charging exorbitant amounts of money and having the whole thing subsidized by the government so that it could be expensive and then the whole thing is crazy? And also, here's the big one that a lot of people, maybe if you're a kid, you're not aware of this. Your student loans haunt you till you're dead.

You cannot get out of those fuckers. Like you can get out, you could buy a Ferrari. You could be stupid and buy a Ferrari and go, God damn it, I can't afford this car. You go bankrupt and they will allow you to go bankrupt. That can happen. You can have a business, make terrible decisions, lose all your money, go bankrupt, and they will allow you to go bankrupt. That can happen. You can have a business, make terrible decisions, lose all your money, go bankrupt, and literally be absolved of your debt. Except your student loans. That shit is in your DNA, kids.

They keep you. You have to pay that. You have to. It's crazy. It's so nuts how much money it is. When you find out what the student loan industry is in this country and how much money children go. You're a fucking child when you're 18 years old, right? Totally.

So you make some ridiculous decision to go to some school and you get some grant or you get some sort of scholarship. And then the rest of it, you're going to get loans or whatever the hell your situation is. And then you get out of four years and then you go and do your master's you go and do some graduate work oh you're fucked you're fucked you're so broke and then if you get out what are the odds you even get a job in your field you know you have to scramble to try to make some money and then you have this this never ending pool of debt that you have to suck a little bit out of every month. It's like living for the oasis on the horizon. But that's what we do in this country. You know, we just are constantly waiting for it to feel okay,

constantly waiting till we get there. We're not getting there. I think that free education, I mean, if it would be possible, if it is possible to do it without ruining the educational system, if it's not already ruined, if it is possible to do that, it would be like one of the best things we could ever do for young people. Just keep them from being saddled down with some bullshit that you have to keep with you for the rest of your life. So you like are handicapped out the gate. Yeah, it's crazy. And it also, it inhibits any risk taking that you're going to have. Exactly. Any chance like to jump ship and try something new. Like maybe you're doing something, but all the while you have this idea, God, I think this

is really what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm always thinking about it. I got to take a chance, but I have this fucking debt. And the only way to really pay this debt off is if I enter into this same. That's it. That's a really important point because if you sort of look across dimensions culturally, they're all geared towards supporting a certain kind of mindset and mentality, which is productivity oriented, which is, you know, capitalism and consumer supportive in terms of that, you know, sort of financial apparatus. And so the things and elements, you know, like Graham Hancock has talked about this, you know, the elements that are convenient to that paradigm, including psychiatric meds and even alcohol on some level, like these more sort of suppressive, consciousness suppressive tools are sanctioned, right? But the things that would encourage risk taking, encourage creative

expression, encourage, you know, sort of consciousness expansion are, you know, demonized or, you know, rendered illegal because they're inconvenient to the paradigm. I guess, but honestly, I think it's a victim of circumstance more than anything. I don't, I'm not necessarily, I believe that when the psychedelic act of 1970 was put into play, it was clearly put into play because they were trying to arrest people that were in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. That's been proven. It's been proven that there was a collusion and that what they were trying to do was make

it so that they could go after these people in the civil rights movement, go after these people that were in the anti-war movement, and they would catch them for drugs and arrest them, and they would cripple these movements. And this is all documented real clear by the Nixon administration. The reason why they passed that sweeping psychedelics act of 1970, which covered a lot of stuff that's not even psychoactive. They didn't even know what they were doing. And they missed some of the big ones.

They missed like 5-methoxy-DMT, which is one of the most potent psychedelic drugs known to man. Just a few years ago, you used to be able to buy that shit online from chemical companies. They would give you like a jug of it. They could get a whole city high for a month. And you could go buy it with a credit card. Not that I know of anybody who did it. And I certainly didn't.

And I definitely still don't have any of it. But if I did, it's not even illegal. That's what's crazy it's like they they made stuff that was like a normal part of human use for thousands and thousands of years that made it highly illegal and they did it at a time where they were trying to break down these people that were trying to change society right so that was 1970 but along the way I think what's really happened is it became a matter of financial risk, like marijuana is a big one, like financial risk of the pharmaceutical drug companies if they found out that there's so many different things that marijuana could help,

whether it is people's appetite or certain arthritic conditions. You can go down the list. Kids with epilepsy, it's a huge factor. Children with autism, especially edible marijuana, all these different things that it treats. If that was made legal and people started turning to that and exercise in a holistic approach, it would cost the pharmaceutical companies literally billions of dollars a year.

So I think that's the big conspiracy. I think it's not really a paradigm, consciousness sort of a thing as much as it's a financial thing. I don't think the people that don't- They're totally related. I agree, but I don't think the people that are suppressing it are even aware of the effects.

I agree. No, I would agree. Which is part of the problem. There's no master puppet string puller. It's like this organism that's just moved only in one direction. Yes, money. Yeah. The same reason why also involved in trying to keep these drugs illegal, you have prison guard unions because they want to keep their money coming in.

You have police unions. I mean, there's a lot of that where you find lobbying by these unlikely groups and you're like, I don't understand why. And then you go, oh, they just want to make more money. Like they're more than willing to lock people up. They're more than willing to demonize helpful things that grow naturally and have virtually no negative effects in terms of like your health, things like marijuana. Totally. I mean, that's, that's why I, you know, when I speak about this, cause I used to be really in like warrior mode on this, um, topic. Huh? How so? Like, what do you mean by warrior?

Because I just thought, okay, like I've, you know, once I woke up, whatever it was almost 10 years ago. Do you ever use hashtag woke? Do you ever write that? No. No. Okay. Should I? No, no, it's just, it's a joke with the kids today. Hashtag woke or hashtag woke do you ever write that no no okay should i no no it's just it's a joke with the kids today hashtag woke or hashtag woke af i'm old i'm old too woke af that's good woke as fuck yeah thanks i got that um i'm a quick study so when you when you became aware of when i became aware i was pissed what was was it a gradual process no no no i um i would i got like sick i guess uh wasn't very dramatic but my big sob story is that i was diagnosed with my first health condition which is an autoimmune disorder after my first pregnancy hashimoto's oh i have that oh really yes oh that's interesting my dad and my brother do my mom has it

also which is like not as common in men, but probably because nobody's looking for it. Yeah. So I was diagnosed with that and I just had this like intuitive sense that I wasn't going to go to a conventional doctor, even though I had never, ever, you know, done anything but dismiss alternative medicine. Like I was hardcore into the pharmaceutical model, very into science from that perspective. And so I, um, but I knew that all they had to offer was Synthroid and I, I had enough patients that never felt well on it. And so it's weird stuff. I took that stuff for a while and then I switched to armor thyroid. And, uh, that's one reason why I got pissed at Dr. Drew when Dr. Drew was giving that, um,, when he was talking about Hillary Clinton and all of her health issues,

and he was going over her prescription, he was mocking the fact that she was on Armour Thyroid. He was saying that that's old. That's an old way of treating. I'm like, he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. Yeah, unfortunately. He's absolutely wrong. Because I went through a bunch of different stuff. And then when I took Armour Thyroid, all of the symptoms went away.

Gone. And that's what the data shows, that people feel subjectively better on T3 containing. Yeah. Well, explain what that is. It comes from pig thyroid. Yeah. Yeah, which is fascinating. It's a glandular.

And he's not wrong because it is an old-fashioned medicine. He's wrong that it's ineffective, though. He was talking about how outdated it is. And that's subjectively people feel better on it. Yes. So I took that for something similar called Nature Throid for a while. But I went to a naturopath because, which is so funny that I did that, you know, at that time. It sounds like a hippie.

Did you go to a dirty place with like macrame and stuff? Oh, no. It smelled really good. Ferns? Do they have any ferns? She was very friendly. Oh, she's friendly? Yeah.

Did she smell like patchouli or incense? Yes. Oh absolutely hmm that was good that's that's it felt right even though it seems very wrong at the moment no i did and um she i put it into remission in the space of like a year and my antibodies were like in the high 2000s my tsh was like 20 and what did you do to put in remission so the same things i do with my patients so i initially just changed my diet so initially i just very simply at her recommendation and i'm italian i grew up italian my mom's from italy and i ate cheese and bread of some variety like five times a day literally literally, for my whole life. Right.

So the two things, of course, she asked me to take out were gluten and dairy. Damn it. So it was a very amazing transition. But my early win was that I started, like, pooping every day and hadn't ever done that in my whole life. Thank you. Thank you. These things matter.

And so I was like, wow, she must be on to something. And then later I layered in other stuff. Were you eating a lot of vegetables at the time? No. I think it was more about what I took out at that point than what I put in. But when I saw the change on paper, I was like, this is not even supposed to be possible. This is literally not even, we're not even taught that this is possible, let alone that it has anything, you know,

that putting autoimmune conditions into remission has anything to do with diet. Right. And so I was really indignant. And I've always been a science nut. I've always spent Saturday, you know, like a good four hours every Saturday on PubMed. Of course, I'm looking at different stuff over time. But I went to PubMed and I was like, what else didn't I learn? And I was like on an obsessive rampage for like a good couple years. And that's when I just turned over every stone, like everything, every sacred cow, whether

all these meds we were talking about, like, you know, statins or acid blockers or antibiotics. Then I got onto psych meds and then I started to look at the science supporting a very different kind of perspective on, you know, this interconnected model and the gut microbiome and, you know, sort of the impact of belief on our, you know, biology that we can sort of like reprogram our hardware, you know, with our software, which is like, we're the only species that can really do that, that we can literally change. Through meditation. Yeah, exactly. And, but also the way your brain interacts with your body. And then it changes the health of the body. You literally change your body. So what did you do to do that? Like what methods? So I was very reluctant to meditate. I was an atheist my whole, like a belligerent, you know, sort of like Dawkins level atheist my whole life because I was a science worshiper. And I was like, well, you know, spirituality and religion is for like weak people who like need to believe in some fairy tale to make them feel better about.

Typical New Yorker. New York liberal coming at you. New York liberal scientist. Exactly. Well, it's scientism, right? It literally is the church of, of science. And so, you know, when I had this crisis of faith, so to speak, like I, I was lost for a long time because science had sort of, you know, or what I believed had sort of failed me in some ways. And then I didn't have, I don't know what, the readiness to start meditating or find out what, you know, people were talking about when it came to spirituality. Although I followed the literature. So like I read the literature on meditation and epigenetic expression for years and years and years. And I used to tell my patients to do it. But you didn't do it.

But I didn't do it. Huh. What held you back? Because I liked to tell my patients to do it. But you didn't do it. But I didn't do it. Huh. What held you back? Because I liked feeling stressed out. Ha! Yeah. That's so honest. When you don't do something, you're not doing it because you like actually being sick.

You like how you're feeling. You're invested in it. Is it that you like or that you're addicted to the weirdness with it? It's comfortable. Yeah. And the unknown. For some of my patients, the meditation piece is the last part because they know it's going to be the game changer. And they're not ready for everything to just be totally reconfigured.

They're not ready for that level of transformation. Isn't that what they say, too, about sometimes people that are addicted to cigarettes? That you're almost addicted to the idea that you're doing something bad to yourself. You're addicted to that rush of being naughty. Oh, so good. Totally. Oh, so good totally oh so good it confirms something yeah some like self-loathing the hook too because you're like fucking i'm alive who gives a shit this is all bullshit i'm not the future fuck the future nihilist yeah total nihilist

right like so many fucking smart people smoke cigarettes and it's so confusing it's like you're making a deal to slowly pay to poison yourself. You're like throwing a little bit of money in the pot every month, guarantee you, guaranteeing that 20 years down the line, 30 years down the line, however long it takes, you're going to have some, some bolt is going to come off the machinery. And Hey, uh, Mike, you got a tumor in your lungs. It's not good. We're going to have to cut one of these things out of your chest. You can get by on one lung, buddy. This is what we got to do, though.

You got to start eating papayas. Like, what? Papayas. Start thinking, why am I even alive? But we all do stuff like that. I mean, it's not always as obvious. But we recognize, right? Yeah, we do.

Because we're invested in reflecting a felt wrongness, you know, I would call it. A felt wrongness. Like we feel deep inside something is wrong, wrong with us, wrong with society. Right. Something's missing. And then we don't want to pretend that everything is okay. So we self-medicate, you know, whether with, you know, drugs or cigarettes or, you know, workaholism or, you know, sex addiction, or we're all sort of in this place, not wanting to acknowledge that there's a reason, you know, like

one of my favorite quotes is this like Krishnamurti quote that it's no measure of health to be well adapted to a profoundly sick society. Right. So, right. If you're like really low, I love New York. It's the best. I love the traffic. I love the, you're like, Oh, you're a really, I love New York. It's the best. Right, exactly. I love the traffic. Exactly. You're like, oh, you're a sick person, man. Something is wrong with you. Totally. I love it.

Honk, honk. Yes, I'm home. Yeah, that's a weird, one of my very, very best friends is just addicted to New York. Yeah, and it's like that. He loves it. He's been there forever. He loves it. It's like an abusive relationship.

He loves the city. Totally. But he loves the energy. He likes been there forever. He loves it. It's like an abusive relationship. Loves the city. Totally. But he loves the energy. He likes all the cars and traffic. I don't know what it is. But he's healthy, like fairly. Physically, he's got a few issues. But mentally, he's very healthy.

Well, that's unusual to have just one thing sorted out. He's a smart guy. The other thing is problematic. He just loves the, I don't know what it is. Honk, honk. That's other thing is problematic. He just loves the, I don't know what it is. Honk, honk. You know? That's the thing, though. Like, if you think about what the messaging is from the top down we were talking about, right?

Like, the messaging is keep it together. Punch the clock on Monday. Like, you know, sort it out. Right. And you're supposed to be, like, fine, be fine. Yeah. Right. But many of us don't feel fine. No. Like range, a huge range of not fineness. That's what I'm saying when I say like a felt wrongness. And that's actually healthy, you know, to sense that. And a lot of artists, I would say, are the canaries in the coal mine, so to speak. Like

they're the ones who feel, you know, the collective wound, you know, if you want to call it that, more than we do. They're sensitive in ways. Well, I don't want to put you in my category. You're more of an artist than I am. I'm not an artist. So I sort of can look down. Do you think of yourself as an artist? No, no, definitely not.

No, it's interesting, actually, because most of my patients are. Really? Or they become after I get them off meds. Whoa. Wait a minute. So they weren't artists. You get them off meds, and all of a sudden they start composing music or something or making paintings. Exactly.

They find some repressed expression, something like that. But if you also look at, like i just wrote an article recently that tied in chris cornell um and his yeah that one hurts i know oh i know that one bothered me i know and it's it's not an isolated i mean listen i don't know the details i don't know what happened but i i saw his wife believes yeah let's just say what his wife believes. She believes he took too many of his antidepressants or anti-anxiety medications. But wasn't there like some rumor about him having a relapse? Was there a rumor? Rumor that there was like track marks, fresh track marks.

See if you find anything on that. How the hell would anybody know that? That seems like some shit that people just start making up. And listen, and I could be accused of doing the same thing even commenting but his wife who is married to him was the one that said that she believed like when she talked to him on the phone that he had taken too much of his anti-anxiety medication and it'd be one thing to just be like oh she's like a grieving widow if there wasn't like a very indicting body of evidence that unequivocally like literally two new studies just came out this evidence that unequivocally, like literally two new studies just came out this week, that unequivocally implicate benzodiazepines in homicide and

suicide, right? So you are a very important Finnish study, you know, demonstrated that benzodiazepines led to like a 223% increase risk of committing homicide. Jesus Christ. And they, along with antidepressants and actually other psychotropics, including stimulants, you know, all of these medications have been linked to an increase in suicide as well. So when I hear about a school shooting or I hear about the Germanwings, you know, plane crash. What's the Germanwings?

That guy, Lubig, like who took down the plane, the Germanwings plane. He just like suicided with a whole plane of people and crashed the plane. Like when I hear about these mass murder, like menace to society kind of situations, my first thought is what psych meds were they on? And, you know, my training basically conditioned me to say, oh, well, they're mentally ill. So obviously they're taking psych meds. That's like saying umbrellas cause the rain, right? Right. That's not how it works.

Causation, correlation. Exactly. Yeah. But actually there's a massive suppressed body of literature that implicates these medications, all of them. And we know why, we think, right? So we think that it has to do with the way you metabolize, some people metabolize these medications. So you might be born with a genetic variant in your liver

that makes it so that you, by design, metabolize medications differently than someone else, right? So you can enter into a state of what's called auto-intoxication more easily than someone else right so you can enter into a state of what's called auto intoxication more easily than someone else even sometimes in a couple of doses and you develop what's called akathisia induced impulsivity impulsivity which is like akathisia is like this feeling like you just want to crawl out of your skin but you seem really chill it's really creepy like horror movie level. So no one around you knows that you're about to fucking boil over

and explode. I had, I spoke in July in London. I did this like workshop and this guy contacted me named David Carmichael and he's like, I'd love to meet you. I followed your work and I want to sort of tell you about my story.

I had known about this paper of which he was one of 10 or 11 subjects by these authors, Lucier and Crotty. It was from 2011, an older paper, where they took all these people who had committed, like, heinous acts, right? Like, you know, murdered their therapist or killed their child or themselves jumped in front of a train or whatever. And they were prescribed antidepressants for totally run of the mill stress. Right. So like work stress or a dog dying, not because they had like severe mental illness and were suicidal. Right. These people were not suicidal. They were not homicidal.

They were normal citizens and they went on to do this crazy thing. And what they found was when they analyzed each of these, you know, victims, perpetrators, however you want to look at it, they found they all had these liver variants that I'm talking about so that they were basically poisoned by medication. But before they were poisoned, they were put into this altered state where they did impulsively violent things. So this guy basically gets on the stage where I was speaking and he talks about how he was prescribed Paxil because he worked, I think, as an accountant and he was prescribed it for work-related stress. Like it was just like taking on too much stress at work, right? And he remembers feeling like his mind like slip away. Like he began, you entered this realm of like psychosis essentially. And he started to develop all of these paranoid beliefs, but he looked and people told him like, oh, you're getting better. I'm so glad you're feeling better. and people told him, like, oh, you're getting better.

I'm so glad you're feeling better. Long story short, he strangled his 11-year-old son. Oh. Dead. This is before or after you met him? After. This was actually years ago. And he was not jailed. So you met him and he was telling you about all this

and then after that he killed his kid? No. He killed his son before we met, years ago. Oh, okay. But he wanted to share with the audience of doctors I was speaking to. Like, listen. So they exonerated him based on this medication? They did, which is rare, actually, believe it or not, because a lot of times these people are jailed.

So it's like, you know, punishing the punishing the victim, so to speak. But that's sort of the issue that it's an important issue, right? Because you're a friend, right? Okay, so let's say some people, this is in line with their consciousness to not have any curiosity about why they're having symptoms, not want to see what they can do in terms of optimizing their lifestyle. It's just like not their deal, right? So they want to take a medication and they want to suppress their symptoms and just like hope it works out. That's fine. I don't care what people do. This should be a free country. Right. You do what you want to do. Practice the medicine that makes sense to you.

But the sort of like chink in the armor is perhaps this issue, which is that we don't really have a good way of identifying. You know, it's Russian roulette. We don't have a good way of identifying if you're going to be David Carmichael right so and it's you know it's one thing to kill yourself impulsively but like you know the school shootings for example have without an exception been

committed by people who are kids who are recently medicated so it's either they're on psych meds or coming off psych meds people who are kids who are recently medicated. So is this a public health issue? So either they're on psych meds or coming off psych meds, right? Exactly. It's almost 100%. Yes, if not 100%.

It is really crazy that that's denied. And when you bring that up, by the way, people call you a gun rights apologist. Well, you're distorting the issue. You're turning it to a psych meds issue when it's a gun issue. If these people don't have guns They can't commit these crimes like that to me is a very bizarre way of looking at like one Science which is why would they but it's it's what you were talking about before where psychiatrists aren't talking about this This is this is such a taboo subject that by the time it gets to the average

educated and informed person who for the most part part, is probably liberal and, you know, because we're talking about people that want to get rid of guns. What they're seeing is only the gun. They're not seeing the mindset behind the ability to do something like that. The context. The very relevant context. Yeah. This liver issue that you're talking about, is this testable? It is, actually. So. And nobody tests that you're talking about, is this testable? It is actually.

So and nobody tests for it. Like literally, apart from functional medicine doctors, perhaps, but for the most part, they're not going to be the ones starting patients on psychiatric meds. Most psych meds are started by primary care doctors after a 10 minute appointment. And there's a scientific consensus that this issue exists that this with this liver issue that if you take these medications, it can turn you into this or take you to the psychotic state? Yes. Yes. And you would be surprised how much scientific acknowledgement there is of some really... What's it called again? I'm sorry. It's called akathisia-induced impulsivity. Akathisia is the experience, the symptom,

neurologic symptom that's induced by the impaired, it's thought to be impaired metabolism on the liver level of these medications. So this is not like a theory. It's not a theory. It's right. Yeah. But there's a lot of stuff like that. Like there's, you know, in the literature, there's something called antidepressant tachyphylaxis, which is the acknowledgement in the scientific literature that like a good 30% of the time, they just stop having an effect, like stop working. Yeah. That's the thing that people that I know that have taken them have said that the doctor will tell you, Hey, this is going to work for a little while. And then it's not going to work anymore. I just hope you don't like my friend. Well, my friend who got on them, and actually I have two friends that got a great benefit from getting on SSRIs.

They had a great benefit and they both eventually got off of them. Cool. They got on them and then their life improved. They improved just the overall existence that they experienced. Like they improved their job. They improved just their status in life.

Relationship stuff. All these different things improved. And then they slowly weaned themselves off. And now they don't need them anymore. But both of my friends that were on them say that it was a great benefit of them. To get on them. So that's a rare story. I would say.

It's a pretty rare story. Now you could argue that I have a skewed exposure to the population. Because I only see the people who have been on 10, 20 years and want to desperately get off and can't, you know. But I am, again, this public health issue aside, which is that, you know, these medications could be inducing impulsive violence at random. And like, perhaps we should at least be talking about this as a society. Right. Right. Perhaps we should at least be talking about this as a society. Right. Right.

That issue aside, I'm, you know, a crusader for informed consent. I believe that you just should know all the options and all of the available science and then you make your own damn decision. Right. With your free will, you do what's right for you. What matches your level of consciousness. Right. which is your level of consciousness, right? Because the problem is that most people are not taken off of meds and they are maintained for long term, even though all of the long term science suggests that people do worse

long term on all categories of psychiatric meds than if they were never medicated. And this includes antipsychotics for schizophrenia. All of them. All of them. And the person who exposed this and really, you know, sort of blew the whistle on this issue, his book changed my life and made me put down my prescription pad is Robert Whitaker, who's an investigative journalist. And he wrote a book called Anatomy of an Epidemic. And I read it, you know, when it came out and I was ready to read it because and receive it because

I just had this health experience of my own. Right. So I read it and basically what he says is, okay, so we have escalating rates of treatment, right? Like more and more people, you know, 16% of the American population is on these meds, right? Including a lot of your friends, my friends. And with more treatment, shouldn't we have less disability, right? Like, shouldn't people be more functional and less sick? And what we find is that the reverse is true, you know, that we have more disability with more medicating. So his book goes through all of these studies. I never heard about one of them in my Ivy League training. All of these studies that are not industry funded, right? Because we know that the pharmaceutical industry is four times more likely

to publish something when it's positive than when it's not. And they can publish whatever they want and not publish whatever they don't want, right? So they are in charge of their own policing, which is the fox guarding the hen house kind of a situation. So these were all non-industry funded studies. And the story they tell is quite different than what you might imagine. And it's like almost shocking, right, that you have schizophrenia, right? Obviously, you need to take meds, right? Right. Well, but what if like doing something is not as good as doing nothing, according to

the published literature, right? So doing nothing is better, according to the published literature, than doing something. Than doing medication. So taking medication for some sort of a psychotic disorder, what are the odds that it's going to work? So when we're looking at the data that suggests that it's effective to take an antipsychotic, they're, without exception, short-term studies, so six to eight weeks. Oh. But people are taking these medications for months to years. And they lose their efficiency over time or their effectiveness over time?

They have sedating effects usually up front. But it's not the same as SSRIs in terms of the efficiency? No. in terms of the efficient? No, the story is similar because if we look at outcomes in the long term, like do you have a job? Do you have a friend network? Are you a functional member of society? If we look at those parameters in the long term, people do worse.

And his argument is that that's why we have more and more of the population literally getting checks from the government because they cannot function in society, even though they're medicated to the hilt. You know, like they're fully treated, so to speak. And he makes this argument for benzodiazepines, for stimulants. And if you look into the literature, you understand that all that's happening is you're forcing an adaptation on the part of the body. This is a chemical. It is not fixing anything.

And just like alcohol, okay, like some people love alcohol. For some people, it's very relaxing, right? Some people hate it and it's terrible and it makes them sick. So just like any other chemical substance with unpredictably psychoactive effects, it may be adaptive for a given period of time. But we know through the alcohol analogy that there's no free lunch, right? So even if it's adaptive in the short term, your body adapts, habituates, you become potentially dependent, although that's a more complex conversation. You know, what drives

that dependency? But the long term is known to us, like the long term picture of like, chronic use of alcohol for let's say, social anxiety doesn't look pretty if you want to just stop drinking 15 years down the line after you've been drinking every day. Right? So but we've been told to think of psych meds differently. And what I'm trying to say is we shouldn't be right, because they are just chemicals having chemical effects that your body is adapting to. So obviously that chemical effect is not going to endure, right? Like it's not going to last. And then there's going to be a cost. So one of the major pieces of informed consent I would like to see foregrounded for people is it may be nearly physically impossible for you to come off of this medication after several years of use.

Are you cool with that? Right? Like, are you okay with that? Nearly physically impossible. And all you have to do is Google, like, antidepressant withdrawal or benzodiazepine withdrawal, right? Because we're keeping people on these meds long term because, of course, we're not fixing the root cause of the problem, right? It's like if you have glass in your foot, we're not taking the glass out. We're just like putting a bandaid on it, giving you a Tylenol and being like, okay, get out of here. You know, so we're not fixing the problem, so to speak. So we're masking it. And there's going to be, you know, sort of it's going to, it's like a whack-a-mole. Like, is this going to keep manifesting in other ways? So people are kept on these meds long-term and then coming off them is,

I've come to the conclusion that they're more habit forming than any chemicals on the planet. Crack, Oxycontin, nothing. They do not hold a candle to how hard it can be to come off of psych meds. All you need to do is ask someone. So your friends are very rare examples because there are millions of people on the internet right now trying to help each other, like, survive the process of coming. Physically survive, let alone, you know, psychospiritually. Survive the process of coming off of meds. So that's what I focus on, you know, in my day-to-day practice now.

Now, are there certain meds that are more difficult to come off than others? I would say yes, although I've seen exceptions to that, too. You know, I would say that there are certain antidepressants that are notoriously challenging, you know, meds like Paxil or Effexor. But then Prozac, which is supposed to be like have this long half-life and be easy to come off of. I have patients who develop what looks like AIDS. Like they get so sick in such complicated ways that no one believes them.

And then they think that they're, you know, well, you must have MS or you must have, you know, mono or you must have, you know, some new diagnosis. And the literature since 2014 has told us, no, this is a withdrawal. This is a complicated, protracted withdrawal that is worse than any other meds out there. And so if you knew that, you might be like, all right, well, what are my other options? Do I have other options? And, you know, since I put down my prescription, I have many years now of experience of treating all manner of bipolar disorder, suicidality, psychosis, without medication. And let me tell you, like the outcomes that I get today, I couldn't have fantasized about when I was prescribing. I didn't even know that this was possible. So if you know that these outcomes are possible, then maybe you would consider a lifestyle approach.

But you have to know it's possible. So that's informed consent. What was the best case scenario when you were prescribing? And did it ever feel like, I mean, did it ever get to the point where you were wondering, like, none of these people are really getting better. They're improving in certain ways, but they're not getting better? You don't have the goal of getting them totally better. What was your goal? Management. That's it.

Management of symptoms. So the idea is you have an issue. This issue is never going away. Let's just throw a wet blanket on this sucker and see if we could hold down the fire. Exactly. And you know what? I have a lot of compassion. Many of my friends are conventional psychiatrists, so I have compassion for people who are in

the trenches practicing conventional approaches because I thought I was doing good. You know, when I was prescribing, I thought I was doing good things for these people. These friends, how do they feel about what you're doing now? They sort of like tolerate me. I don't know. That's it? Well, it's funny because I have this, I don't know what you want to call it, like scientific advantage, It's funny because because I have this I don't know what you want to call like scientific advantage, meaning like I know more of the literature. I've read more of it. I've obsessively devoted my life to this subject. They know sort of not to fuck with me on some level. Like so I have respect, but they also it's like my thing that I do over here. Right. Look, Kelly, we have a business.

My business is giving pills to crazy people like fuck out of my office leave me alone yeah exactly i share an office one of my best friends you know do you really he rents from my office you know and he's with all the buddhas everywhere and i mean he's he's more conscious about it than that actually he works in forensics which means that he works to sort of identify where people in the legal system are being medicated necessarily or unnecessarily. Oh, God. Yeah, there's all sorts of weird specializations within the Guild of Psychiatry. It's like a many tentacled animal. So when you say management, like, did you ever take someone from being like

a real mess and bring them off the ledge and then their life improved? Yes, that's the good summary of what I do today. So I see the sickest people that no one can help because they've gotten to the end of the road. So they've done electroconvulsive therapy. They're on six medications. They've been hospitalized even in state facilities. They're, you know, at the end of their rope because they're not well. And even conventional psychiatry has nothing left to offer them. So I, you know, people think like, oh, I treat the worried well, like some Upper East Side, you know, woman who's having an affair and she's stressed out or whatever. They call it the worried well, the worried well. Yeah. But it's not, you

know, it's not true. Like my patients are very sick. And you know, I have an online version of what I do in the office. And the outcomes there are even wilder than the ones in my office. So you can even do this totally on your own. It's not like some voodoo I'm working on Madison Avenue in New York. But like, for example, okay, so one of my so I've started to video interview these people as social proof and like, it's all on my website. And you can see what they have to say about it. Because why would you believe me? Because it sounds crazy what I'm saying.

So what do you do then? Say I come to you and I say, hey, I've got real problems. I'm depressed all the time. I've got some big problems. Super bummed out. Can't keep it together. 99 problems. So I'll tell you about a woman, Allie.

Okay. So she. Don't give her a real name. No, she's on my website. Bam. In a video. Yeah. She is an intrepid woman.

She's incredible. She's beloved. I've never said that about a person. They're intrepid. She is. I believe you. That's the point I'm ultimately going to make is that this process of moving through the fire of your mental illness, which I don't believe in mental illness, but moving through the fire. I don't. What do you believe? you know that we feel things intensely and some people have experiences you know like in other cultural settings some of the early experiences as what we would label schizophrenic you know

there is an elder that is assigned to you to shepherd you through your psycho-spiritual emergence you know we just don't have a cultural context for anything other than full and total complacency full and total adaptation to this sick society, right? But regardless of environmental influences and whatever genetic problems you might have, people can have something really wrong with their mind, right? I don't ever think it's really wrong. When it gets really wrong is under the influence of psych meds. Always?

There are very few exceptions. If someone's experiencing psychotic breaks and they don't get put on psych medication, does it go away? Well, that's the long-term data I was describing for you. It does. It does. So we have turned what might have been a single episode experience that, when properly supported, totally, completely resolves and you get back to life, which is what

used to happen even in the early 1900s. You know, when we documented the natural history, so to speak, of these illnesses, we would see that they would go away on their own within a year. You know, 80% of the time. So when they would come up out of nowhere, they would go away out of nowhere as well. Right.

And we've turned them into chronic processes. How many people are you talking about? Sorry to interrupt you, but how big is this study? Like how many people are being... There are many, many... And this is where Whitaker is like, you know, my knight in shining armor.

Robert Whitaker, because he's cataloged all of this data. There's a robust amount of data. And importantly, it wasn't paid for by the industry. So that's an important bias

to control for, right? So if someone comes to you and they're psychotic... So, so that's, I'm going to tell you about Allie, right? And her video is on my website. This is all, you know, fully with her consent that I share it. And she came to me end of her rope. She came with her husband from Kansas to my office and she was actively, you know, in an episode. What are her episodes? Okay, her episodes are three days before her period for years, she would develop psychotic symptoms, become totally paranoid and delusional, to the extent that at one point, she was digging a hole in her face trying to get at like a thread she thought was in there. She committed attempted to

commit suicide multiple times. She attempted to commit suicide multiple times. She had been on at least seven different psychiatric medications, in and out of hospitals, like a laundry list of diagnoses like this, literally, including bipolar disorder with psychotic features, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, you know, all manner of dating back from like eating disorders in her earlier history. She'd been through the ringer. Okay. So she was like a professional psych patient. And I was the last stop before an inpatient facility, basically like institutionalization. Okay. I told her, this is how it's going to go. So I have like a very heavy hand up front and I can be a hard ass for sure.

But it's in service of passing the baton to these women because I don't have long term patients like there's an intense window and then they they're done with me. Right. Once they're through the birth canal, so to speak. Right. So what I asked her to do is follow a very strict diet. No cheating. None. Like zero bullshit. OK. So what's the diet?

Okay. So the template for the diet that I recommend is based not only on like my personal experience, but also on my work with my mentor, Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez, who was the most badass figure in modern medicine. He passed suddenly in 2015. But he for 27 years treated terminal cancer, you know, metastatic, like no hope cancer, literally, neurodegenerative illnesses, Lyme disease, you know, diabetes, all with 100% holistic approach that was based on three pillars, a personalized diet, so like one of 10 diets um coffee enemas oh do you know what that is i've heard of it you heard of it all right because it's like in the zeitgeist like people are hearing about why coffee enemas why are you sticking coffee

up your butt yeah i know it's it's only necessary because we live in like a pretty toxic world at this point but what happens is the Okay, so you're sticking this little tube like 12 inches actually, I know. And it seems totally crazy and weird, but you do it all yourself. You don't go somewhere to do it. It's not like that. And you're hitting this like, it's called a flexure. You're hitting this point right here where your intestines come across and then down. Okay. And right there is a nerve bundle that reflexes to your—it's called a parasympathetic nerve bundle. It reflexes to your liver, and it basically helps your liver to dump toxicants. Like, it's like a supercharging of your liver's ability to detox you.

By putting coffee in there? Because the caffeine stimulates that nerve bundle. It's basically like jacking up your liver because we don't know how to detox better than our own body does. Your liver is charged with that responsibility. So if you can help your liver do it, it's going to be best. And this is most relevant in cancer, like radical cancer treatments, because when the tumors are breaking down, you need to flush that waste or you'll die. Like literally, it's called tumor lysis syndrome. So, you know, some early pioneers discover that coffee enemas are critical, like literally life

or death critical for helping you flush those wastes. So I learned about them from the master. And since using them in my practice, it's completely changed my practice. So like a med taper that would take two to three years now takes me like six months with a given patient. And Ali, so Ali started doing coffee enemas twice a day. But the dietary template is a little bit, I wouldn't say it's like totally, people think healthy, right? And they think like vegan or they think vegetarian or they think tons of green juice or whatever.

And I noticed early on that as long as my patients ate a fair amount of red meat, they got better. And I used to be like an ethical vegetarian when I was eating like cheese doodles and Pepsi, basically. And so it was very confusing to me that, you know, red meat could be a healthy part of anyone's lifestyle, or, you know, anything I could ever wrap my mind around recommending. But over the past 10 years, and now with the understanding of Nick's metric, you know, where there are some people who do

require red meat to balance their nervous system, essentially. Now, is this an actual requirement? Or is this is can this be mitigated through, like a very smart and conscious vegetarian diet? Like if you're really careful about your nutrients and making sure that you get the essential fatty acids, making sure you get the essential amino acids and a really balanced profile of vegetable protein? It's a great question. Ultimately, my goal in this month is to clear the slate of all the stuff that's like yanking on your brain

and your immune system and driving inflammation so that you can begin to sense what you need. Have you ever had anybody that attempted to do it with say like hemp protein or pea protein or vegetable based protein? So at this point, I'm going for gold, right? So I'm interested in like, massive transformation for people not just like, I guess I feel a little better. So I won't even see a new patient if they're not willing to at least try for the month to eat red meat. Really? But is this all anecdotal? So it's all just like what you've experienced for working with patients.

Yes, this is just my clinical practice. But have you ever experienced a single patient that tried to do it correctly through vegetable protein? No, but I wouldn't. Did you ever have anyone try it? I wouldn't, because you know what I'm saying? But I do have this online program where there are people who get well on,

and they stick to a vegetarian diet so it's apparently possible well vegetarian at least you can get eggs you know right in his model there were no vegan diets and it's based on the work of weston price you know who he is weston price i've heard the name yeah he's like a dentist in the 1900s who like went around the world with his wife and studied all of these different people who like indigenous people all over like Eskimos, like Himalayan, you know, folks, Mexican folks and South American and studied the healthy indigenous populations that were not eating industrialized food. Right. And what he found was they all ate different stuff. So there isn't like a diet right right so how

do you know what is your version right so like an eskimo doesn't eat coconuts and like a messiah warrior doesn't eat whale blubber so like how do you know what's your version the truth is only you know but like our signals are so distorted and suppressed that we can't figure it out. Right. But you'll begin to like clear the, like lower the white noise enough if you have this month long experience of detox. So I asked, I asked for daily meditation, three minutes. Um, I told you I'm a Kundalini zealot. So I asked for people to do, you told me that before the podcast. Yeah. They didn't hear me, but it's okay. so so i i came to kundalini yoga basically out of sheer desperation at a very difficult time in my life after my

largely after my mentor died and um it totally changed my like rewired my nervous system literally literally where now nothing stresses me out but if you have someone i mean i'm obviously not a vegan um but if you have someone that comes to you that does not want to eat meat, but wants to try this out and wants to try this out with, I mean, it's really just the science of nutrition. I mean, you can eat a vegan diet and be healthy as long as you do it right. Can't you? Well, so his model is that there are different kinds of people and different kinds of people. And I can explain a little more, require for their health certain dietary complements. And what are called the parasympathetic dominance, right, which is more like the Eskimos, require red meat to be healthy. You will not only never be fully healthy,

but then you're at risk for developing the illnesses that parasympathetic dominance develop, like leukemia, lymphoma, hypothyroidism, chemical sensitivity, chronic fatigue, depression, right? So many, many, many, many, many former vegetarians converted from vegetarianism because they felt depressed. Right. So while that's true, on the other side of the spectrum are the sympathetic dominance who don't need to eat red meat and who do really well on like a full force, like plants, grains, you know, even a high carb diet and they feel well. And it's when they eat too much red meat, particularly industrial red meat, that they develop solid

tumors like, you know, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, colon cancer. This is a very common, you know. So essentially when you're dealing with particularly indigenous populations and people that have a very strong gene pool that comes from one very strong area in the world, like Eskimos or like people that live in the Pacific Northwest or something like that. Not Pacific Northwest, but you know what I mean, like Alaskan people. Like there's people that live on like Nunavak and all these different islands that have eaten seal for hundreds and hundreds of years and have very little access to vegetables. Right. And meanwhile, they have super low instances of cancer. So it's just because their bodies have adapted and evolved for those requirements. With the environment.

Exactly. That's exactly it. But your body, like say if you came from Vietnam, you would have a very different nutritional requirement than that person would. Right. And you will never be fully vital or healthy on the wrong version of the diet. Is this all science or is this anecdotal guesswork? When it comes to nutrition based science, there ain't none. There's just none. Because the idea of nutrition research is like taking one nutrient out of the context of the person, out of the context of their life, out of the context of their life, out of the context of their cultural, you know, surroundings. That's how we treat, we treat it like a pharmaceutical. We look at single nutrient out of, you know, a whole complement of information.

So we just don't, I tried learning about nutrition that way. And I drove myself crazy because I was like, what the hell do I tell my patients to eat? I can't find any science to support this. Because I was like, what the hell do I tell my patients to eat? I can't find any science to support this. And that's why I looked for outcomes. So Nick Gonzalez's outcomes are unprecedented in medical history. Literally. Like 34-year terminal pancreatic cancer survivor.

Do you know how long you have to live when you're diagnosed with pancreatic cancer? Yeah, not that long. Like three to six months. And he had many of those. I know a guy who's been alive for a few years on it. But he's actually taken meds and still eats sugar. Yeah, I know. It's amazing. He still eats sugar, this fucker.

It's crazy. He's doing his thing. He's eating fucking gummy bears and shit. Do you know Rob Wolf? Do you know Rob Wolf? Yeah, not personally. I know his work. Rob's a really interesting guy.

And one of the things that he does that's kind of fascinating is on his Instagram, he and his wife will do these tests. They'll do carbohydrate absorption tests and ketosis tests. And they'll both eat the same things, but he'll test her and then test him. And the results vary widely. Yes. Like his reaction is like he just jokes around about how poor his genetics are and about how robust his wife's genetics are. Apparently, nothing can knock her out of ketosis.

She can eat like crazy amounts of food. And then like a couple hours later, she's like back on baseline. That's, yeah. Whereas his body is all like, ah. Like his body just goes off the tracks. Yeah, he's weaker. Totally the weaker sex. Yeah.

So his studies, though, and his little tests, although, you know, they're very small. It's just him and his wife, they're really fascinating to see how two people who are in the exact same household, same environment, you know, one's male, one's female, but also just different genetic and backgrounds, and how wildly they vary. It's really... So what do you do with that, right? Right. Like, that's... Right, how do you know who you are? That's the N of one medicine, right?

Right. So the truth is that you have an intuitive compass right especially with food you are going to want to eat the diet that is going to make you well oh candy and ice cream that's what it is it's intuitive dude that's what people think but the truth is if you actually like take this break and detox so to speak from all those addictive foods and you have this shift in your body, you're not going to want it. It's going to be a different deal. Because tiramisu, after you have like a nice dinner and you see that on the menu, you're

like, come on, roll it out. Let's do this. Get that cream with the cocoa on the top of it. Totally gross. So good. It's gross. I've never liked it. Oh, how dare you?

I quit coffee like nine years ago and now I can't touch it. What about chocolate ice cream? Is that okay? No. Nothing? Doesn't do anything for you? Well, you're like some sort of an android then. No.

Something's wrong with you. I'm eight years into this stuff, so it starts to decondition. And then if you really, really feel like something like that then you're like what's up like what am i like you know what i mean trying to eat some ice cream that's what the fuck is up shit is good you ever had like an ice cream sundae with whipped cream i grew up in new jersey okay i was born there. I went to Friendly's on the regular, and I got the Happy Ending. Can you believe it was called that? I know.

We're taking this. Can't do that anymore. I know. And the fries and the grilled cheese. I used to eat- Sounds good. Even through my training when I was at, I trained at Bellevue in New York. And at the gift store, they used to know me, so they'd have Twizzlers and dark chocolate

Milky Way waiting for me every day. Oh. Every day. So I was- With dealers. With dealers. like an addict, you know, by any definition. And you can resolve that, you know. And then you figure out like what actually you're meant to eat. Because Nick always said you will eat the food that you're meant to eat. You'll want it.

But you have to sort of get your brain out of the way. So if you have, you know, all of these nutrition gurus in your head telling you like red meat's going to kill you and give you a heart attack, then you're going to not want it. But if you can, that's why I demand the openness as a criteria, you know, to, to, to participate with me anyway, in a clinical setting, because then like, I can't tell you how many of my patients were former vegans and now they're totally thriving. Okay. So let me finish telling you about Allie, which I didn't finish telling you. Okay. So that's basically what she did, right? She was off all meds except for as, as needed Klonopin, uh, when she met me. So she had already done. What does Klonopin do? It's like Ativan, like the one we were talking

about with Chris Cornell. It's an anti-anxiety medicine, like Xanax or Valium, if you've heard of those. It's one of the most challenging to get off of in the long term. And why wouldn't it be long term? Like, that's the confusing part. Like, why would you just voluntarily stop taking something that makes you feel chilled out when you're feeling anxious, right? But what if your anxiety is because you have unstable blood sugar and you're having this fight or flight explosion every hour and a half? If you're not resolving that, then it's like putting a Band-Aid on a piece of glass in your foot. It's like, okay, but why don't you just fix it?

And then you won't need it. So you make them eat a certain amount of red meat. Do you limit their portions? No, there's no calorie counting. There's no portion anything because you are initiating yourself into the process of determining what's best for you. So the whole point of this month, this like military month that I impose on people is that it's like an initiation to your own self. So the stuff you're doing, whether it's the meditation enemas,

detoxing your products and stuff like that, basic, you know, functional medicine stuff, or the diet, it's all in your control, which is why you can do this without me, which has been the best,

like, evidence I've ever, you know, I never even dreamed that was totally possible and now I'm super pumped about it because the last thing I want it to be is like about you know the kelly brogan effect or something like that's not at all what i'm interested in um so

yeah so you do all this yourself what do you make the meat though besides red meat okay so basically food okay so you're eating food just eat food you'll be fine crazy person literally no but listen it's because tell me this isn't food okay so it's animal food including you know any kinds of meat fish eggs whole eggs not just the whites um any kind of vegetables except for white potatoes i'll explain why um any kinds of fruit nuts and seed seeds natural salt as much as you want tons of filtered water that's important and And then natural fats. So like ghee, which is like a clarified butter, coconut oil, olive oil, that kind of thing. That's food, by the way, what you're taking out is a little more challenging for some people.

So you're taking out all this is just for the month, it gets so much easier in the future. But you're taking out all grains, beans all dairy and then so the ice cream is going and then all refined sugar so like honey and maple syrup are fine and then coffee and alcohol but listen if you were really desperate yes you might think about this oh yeah for sure and it can be challenging for the first like week. And then you start to see the dividends and you want to just have one month in your adult life where you just see what's up when you control for these variables. It's worth it because then you know what the sort of relationships are between you, your personal, you know, biology and these, you know, elements of your nutrition. So what's the general reaction when you get someone to get rid of processed sugars,

cut out the grains, cut out the nonsense, dairy, and just eat regular healthy food? What's the normal reaction? That sometimes you feel worse. Really? Depending on how much of the stuff you were eating, you can literally go through like a mini withdrawal. Like headache, fluish symptoms, fatigue, irritability. They call that like the keto flu when people get off of carbs.

Carb flu, yeah, or paleo flu. Exactly. So that can be real. Coffee too, obviously, anyone who's ever tried to quit can know. But it's like a couple of days and then you move through it. And then what normally starts to happen is you start to like sort of feel the clearing, right? So your energy is better, your sleep is better. One of the most interesting things

is how many people tell me that they sleep better when they eat more red meat. Like you would never make that connection, right? Sounds crazy. I didn't mention this. I hope it goes without saying that there's like massive, like militant focus on organic and sourcing.

Like I would tell people never to touch an animal food if they don't know, you know, that it was consciously raised. Okay, so that's a caveat, important caveat. So sleep gets better. A lot of the, like, ravenous hunger. Like, I have patients who can't even go as long as we've been talking without, like, having a snack or they get hangry, right? Like, they get, like, irritable, lightheaded, you know, sort of racing

heart. Carb addicts. Yeah, pretty much. But like, who isn't, you know, when you're just eating convenience food, like that's a natural response. And then sometimes it's much more radical. So like in Allie's case, within two cycles, she was completely symptom free. So she went from grossly psychotic and suicidal to not only totally symptom free, but now she's like, moved through is moving through, I would say, a process of awakening. Like it's a spiritual shift, right? Because it's like, you know, Gibran says, like the wound is where the light enters. And we don't have that consciousness as a society because we think that suffering. What does that mean? The wound is where the light enters.

It means that grief, pain, suffering is where you grow. Like it's where the real experience of being human and where the real contact with who you are. Right. So this is true even for something like ayahuasca. Like, why would anyone ever do something like that? Right. But the point is, through that experience of humbling surrender, you meet yourself. Right. But we don't have a consciousness for that in America. In fact, crying, like literally tears, is a symptom in the DSM. So it's literally a pathological symptom to cry. That is the most basic evidence of our humanity is that we cry. And if we are living in a culture that says you're sick when you're crying, stop doing that. Take this so that you

can stop feeling. We have a bigger problem on our hands, right? So I know I can't just sit in my Madison Avenue office taking people off of meds and think like, oh, you know, I'm changing the world. This is a systemic cultural issue that we make no room for things to fall apart. We make no room. Do you know that with the DSM-5, so like the latest DSM, they took out something called the bereavement clause from the depression diagnostic category. And that means that if you meet criteria for depression, which is what you would imagine, you know, well, changes in sleep, changes in appetite, low mood, poor concentration, hopelessness. If you meet that criteria for two weeks, it doesn't matter if your kid just died or your

wife or like your dad. So that's bereavement. Right. It doesn't matter. You're still a candidate for treatment. Or if you got fired or if you experienced a natural disaster. It doesn't matter. Or if you lost your house in a fire right doesn't

matter right so some people saw that as like wow really a last straw of pathologizing normal human experience so is that one of the issues with these disassociative sort of uh chemicals that people get put on because that's like one of the ways to describe a lot of people's reaction to that people get put on because that's like one of the ways to describe a lot of people's reaction to SSRIs and antidepressants is a disassociative. Yes. Like they have a very, they can, anything can happen and they're okay with it. It's fine. No worries. No big deal. So they don't get these highs and lows. And so because they don't get the lows, they don't get to rebound and get the highs and then also find themselves, understand themselves so they can manage how low the lows get. Exactly.

Through the mind and through your just living in the moment and understanding. Yes, exactly. Understanding that this is just a natural process of life and you've been through it before. So instead of taking a pill, just suck it up. 100%. I mean, we don't, right? Like in tribal cultures, like men are initiated, right? Oh, I've got a video I'll show you if you want to see.

Right, like you've got a tooth yanked out or you've got to like survive in the wild. No, I've got an African circumcision video if you really want to get crazy. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, one of the ones. Well, you know, so we think of ourselves as being lucky, like that we don't have to go through that. For sure. I'm not taking responsibility for what's in this video. Yeah.

As being in any way related to what I'm talking about. No, I'm kidding. Definitely not. I'm sure. You wouldn't approve. But it's true. Like we, we're, we're just like, we just baby our way through life because no one is teaching us how to, to confront our deepest fears.

teaching us how to confront our deepest fears, like explore the shadow realms and integrate it into our own power, right? We have no understanding of it. We make fun of that. We think it's like woo weirdness that like other cultures can, you know, do in their little tropical islands. But what I have found is that taking people off of psych meds somehow is seeming to serve as like an initiation process for like thousands today.

So interesting, right? Like that you took it because you thought it was a good idea and it's so challenging to come off it and forces you to confront a lot of elements of your consciousness, live differently. It forces you to work with your body differently. It forces you to begin to look at why you went on them in the first place. And then there's a whole nother layer of just it's being really physically disabling in some cases to come off these meds. And it really brings you to your knees sometimes. And so a lot of what I think of myself as doing is just like holding space for that process to happen. And then once it happens, they move through into this like awakened state. I mean,

the vast majority of my patients and you know, online course completers go on to become healers. Why else would that happen if they weren't making people crazy? That's why they're turning to healers. But you surely must experience a massive blowback from just conventional psychiatric medicine practitioners who are looking at what you're saying and saying, so you're telling someone all they have to do is just stop eating sugar and they won't be psychotic anymore. That's fucking crazy.

I'm not saying that. I never said that. I know you're not saying that, but I'm boiling it down to that. You're saying that you took this woman and you took her off of processed foods, you made her eat healthy vegetables and meat and eggs and healthy fats and coconut oil

and avocado oil and detox and medication and all the inflammation went away. The problem of the insulin spikes and all the blood sugar spikes, that goes away and then the body somehow or another comes blood sugar spikes. That's right. That goes away. Yes. And then the body somehow or another comes back to some sort of a baseline.

That's right. And, you know, in the New England Journal of Medicine recently, there was a case report, right? A 37-year-old woman who was so psychotic that her family took out a restraining order on her. Okay. Paranoid, delusional, totally psychotic. She was treated with Risperdal and Zoloft, an antipsychotic and an antidepressant, which did nothing. A year of this nonsense later, she was finally diagnosed with gluten sensitivity.

Okay. So wheat sensitivity, right? They put her on a three, this is in the hospital. This is not like in some quacks office, you know, in, in Boulder. How dare you go after Boulder like that? It's one spot, though. That is a spot. And Sedona.

That's another one. And Sedona. I'm going there, actually. Those motherfuckers. I can't wait to check it out. Totally. So in three months on this strict gluten-free diet, she was totally normal again. Wow.

So this is not like a wellness fad. There are real root drivers, but we don't know what it is for you, right? Like I said, it could be physiologic where it's like, you know, there's a similar story about a lifelong vegetarian woman. This is in the published literature, who became psychotically depressed, was admitted for catatonia. Catatonia is like the worst diagnosis in psychiatry, right? She's basically unresponsive. She was so mentally ill. Okay. They treated her with electroshock therapy because the antipsychotics and antidepressants they used didn't work. Finally, she gets transferred to an outside

hospital because they were like, well, we don't know what to do with this woman. They check her B12 level and it's like, you know, tanked. They give her a couple of B12 injections. And not only is she better, but she's better than she's been in like 14 years from a couple of B12. So my point is that for her, it was B12. For her, it was wheat. For someone else, it could be blood sugar instability. For someone else, thyroid, autoimmune thyroid can make you crazy, can make you suicidal. According to the literature, it's not a theory. Have you ever had anybody that you put on this diet and they didn't respond and they stayed psychotic or whatever the issue was? Here's why not a long time, because I screen for readiness, right? So I screen for mindset.

And that's what we're talking about earlier. Because if you're ready and you believe that you're like a whole radical next chapter of your life is like forthcoming, then I'm just part of the ritual, you know? And it's like using the placebo effect even. I don't know. I mean, I'm very interested in science. Well, it's not really a placebo, right? But it is a belief. If you don't believe that this is going to do anything for you and you're a skeptic, it won't. Right. It won't.

It won't. It won't show you all the science in the world and it won't work for you. But the physiological changes of adjusting your diet, those are real, right? So, like, why won't it help you? But your beliefs can even override that. Whoa. I think that's true. How is that possible?

Okay, so I'll tell you about another study. Okay. So these are people like your friends and millions of others who think they were treated to remission. Think medication really helped them, right? Right. With Prozac. Okay, so they're, like, well on Prozac. Okay, so they're put in this study, 12-week study, and they get to either stay with their same dose of Prozac that helped them or they get crossed over to the placebo arm, the sugar pill arm.

And they don't know which is going to happen. Right? So what happened, interestingly, in that study is that the time they were crossed over or not, they both, both groups became statistically significantly depressed, right? So like Mary takes her 40 milligrams on Tuesday, enters the study, is still taking her 40 milligrams like next Thursday, but now all of a sudden she's acutely depressed just because of the possibility that she might've gotten the sugar pill. That's called the nocebo effect. So the nocebo effect is the impact of fear or negative beliefs that limit your ability to respond to a given intervention.

It's real. It's more important than anything we're actually doing is what you believe is happening. So if somebody convinces you that Krispy Kreme donuts could fix you, there literally might be some truth to that. There could be. And I would equate on some level like psych meds with Krispy Kreme donuts. So there are some people who are going to say like, wow, that really helped me.

So this guy, Irving Kirsch, right? He's a psychologist who's like a placebo effect expert, arguably. What he identified was that when you control for what's called the active placebo effect, which is what happens when you feel the side effects you've been warned about of a given medication, and then you feel the medication is working, and then it actually works. Right. So when you control for the active placebo effect by giving people in a trial antidepressant, but then also a medication like atropine, for example, that has very similar side effects, dry mouth, you know, headache, constipation, this kind of thing. There's no difference. So what he showed is that there is no statistically significant effect of antidepressants above and beyond placebo. And that the reason that people believe that they're working, and they are, right, so they believe it and then they do, is because they feel a shift. They feel a change. And they've been educated by commercials and their doctor maybe about these side effects.

And then they start to say, oh, my chemical imbalance is being, you know. Adjusted. Adjusted, right? So it's subtle, but this is not just in psychiatry. It's really relevant to psychiatry. But it's true in surgery. You know, they do sham operations in orthopedics. And it's true in even, you know, pain management, you know, that the placebo effect is so real. And it's not like

you're being fooled. Like, you know, like in my training, I was taught to dismiss the placebo effect, like some nuisance we have to control for. But it's, if we could, Bruce Lipton said this, like, if we could harness this, we would have a side effect free medicine for everyone, you know, but we don't study it. don't understand it and we just assume it's like people being tricked or something aren't the placebo effects fairly limited like nothing really truly miraculous it's true it's about 30 but that's exactly the efficacy of antidepressants so there was a study once um that was done on some a kid who had some horrible wart disease where it was incurable and it was like spreading all over their body and all over their arm do you know the study i don't and they gave this kid some sort of a placebo and it completely

cleared it up. That's amazing. I should know that. Yeah. I'm going to check that out. And then when they found out that it was a placebo, then it became a problem and I think it came back. Ethically, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that there's something going on with the mind and the body, right?

And that's what the placebo effect is demonstrating. Right. But this is unharnessed and this is untrained. And this is very different than what's going on with the mind with meditation, which is harnessed and trained and focused. So your thought is that this mind factor is not just an inconvenience. It's not just a variable, but maybe one of the most crucial aspects to overall health. If not the most crucial. Yeah. And again, conventional medicine is interested in this

to some extent now, noticing that what people believe, like that you'll lose less blood in surgery if you visualize losing less blood in surgery, that that actually happens. How can you control the physiologic activity of your body? But you can. That's what I'm saying. Like we have software. They can prove that? It's a study on putt-putt.

Wow. So how do they convince them that they're going to lose less blood? They visualize it. They meditate on it and visualize losing less blood. So they have one group that says, you're going to do a visualization where you just like visualize your body letting go of less blood after the surgery or during the surgery and then the other group just does their thing what if you have one group

you say dude you're gonna spray like a fountain you're like a broken fire hydrant you're gonna just be gushing all over the table you're gonna be a sprinkler you're right you should conduct this study that would be fascinating to see if the nocebo effect would have it probably would it probably would yeah It probably would. Yeah, I would imagine there's probably a way you could mindfuck someone into some terrible state, right? So you know where we see this is in cancer diagnosis. It's called medical hexing, that when you are diagnosed with cancer, the completion of suicide, but also other accidents and your health basically declines simply because of the

diagnosis. And that's why it's considered to be, it's like bone pointing or something. So it's voodoo. It's what we've always known that like someone could put a hex on you. And if you know that a hex is on you, you're like, God damn, there's a goddamn hex on me. And you start believing it and then it could really cause a huge issue. That's what has become clear to me is real. And we don't want to think about it that way because we think medicine is science and it's, you know, this, you know, sort of impenetrable, you know, the hallowed halls of truth. But it's a religion just like anything else. In fact, Nick Gonzalez, my mentor, said it's the last really unrecognized religion

on the planet is medicine. And, you know, we have special language and we wear costumes and there's initiatory rights. We're talking about the hazing process. But it's real in a lot of aspects, like the medicine involved in treating a bacterial infection, antibiotics, the medicine involved in healing a broken arm. You know, there's real stuff there. So antibiotics is a whole nother conversation, for sure. Emergency medicine, listen if you know I get hit

by a bus don't like bring me to my don't bring me to the healer. You know my naturopath in her office downtown. She's going to like light a candle. Right exactly. It's going to be fine. Don't start staging my body. For emergencies that's what conventional medicine is really designed for. We only ran into trouble when we started

extrapolating from acute setting medicine into the outpatient world. Well, also the denial of the aspects of nutrition, like the denial of the influence of nutrition, like this idea of only concentrating on the medicine and not concentrating on what we know to be viable alternatives and things that can make your body healthier. Like not taking that into account seems, it seems almost insane. It seems like you're going to fix a car. Like I hear a banging, I'm just going to inflate these fucking tires. And you know, like, well, what about the engine? There's a banging in the engine. Should I fix the engine?

Like, no, no, no, no, no. Just turn off the alarm light. Let's just turn the AC on. Like, it's almost like there's, there's certain aspects they're looking at, the aspects of medication, and because of all the aforementioned variables like student loans, the consensus of your peers, everybody's in this sort of group together. There's all this unspoken word that you're not going to criticize the establishment. And you can't really do that because if you do, you're out of a job and all your money that you spend on.

God. Yeah. the establishment and you can't really do that because if you do you're out of a job and all your money that you spent on god yeah i mean it's it's important to remember that the pharmaceutical industry is a business right when you when you forget that and you think that they're in it to protect your well-being help us i see commercials if you forget that which is easy to do right you know especially because they work with doctors and we think of doctors as priests. So if you forget that, then you can get with some circumspection upon their claims and their approach, you know, but our education as doctors is totally through the lens of pharmaceutical model, you know, regulatory agencies famously like the FDA, CDC and industry, it's a revolving door, literally, you know, and this is totally available information on the FDA, CDC, and industry, it's a revolving door, literally, you know, and this is totally available information on the to have a problem, especially if we're presenting this as the only legitimate course of action for a sick patient, you know, where you can actually,

as a parent, have your children taken away from you if you don't participate in the model. Have there ever been any serious suggestions that we remove this whole ask your doctor commercial aspect of medicine? Not to my knowledge. It seems so crazy that we know how influential commercials are. Right. I mean, they're so influential. And these are not just fact-based commercials. They've got cheery music going on.

There's sunshine and butterflies and shit. And it just makes you feel, like, super happy. Like, I want to be like these people. They're smiling all the time. Totally. It's conditioning. It's so crazy that they can do that for drugs. But you could argue, right, that you're just empowering patients with knowledge to help themselves.

Right? Like that's why we're allowing the commercials. Ask your doctor if Abilify is going to keep you from jumping off a bridge. Or make you do it. Ask your doctor. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. So you said Abilify was at one point in time the most prescribed?

Yeah, recently it was the number one prescription. I think it was two years ago. Synthroid's always up there. But, yeah, it was. And it's because there's these trends, I guess, these stylistic trends in prescribing that, of course, have no evidence base. and prescribing that, of course, have no evidence base. But in psychiatry, we're really vulnerable to that because there isn't a clear A to B in terms of presenting symptoms and medication recommendation. It's sort of a free-for-all.

You can pile on as many or as few as you want. And there are algorithms, but they're very loose. What you're trying to say is Scientology is right. Who said that? It's kind of what you're trying to say, right? I mean, aren't they like super anti-Scientology? Remember when Tom Cruise was on with, what's his face? What's that dude's name?

The dude's name, the Good Morning America guy. Wasn't he on Oprah too? Matt Lauer. Matt Lauer, yeah. Matt, you're glib. Matt Lauer, that's right. You're glib, Matt. Yeah, he's been on Oprah.

But on Oprah, it was when he was in love. He jumped up on the couch and he was in love like no straight man who's ever lived on the face of the planet. Let him do his thing. Yeah, he's in love. I'm in love. Now I'm divorced. But back then, I was into it. But no, when he was saying that on the Good Morning america show with matt lauer he was essentially

just saying what scientology has always said like if you go down sunset or hollywood where's the psychiatry kills center oh right you know i think it's on sunset there's some part of hollywood where they have protests outside they have people with like electroshock helmets on like ah and like it's like psychiatry kills. Like, what is this? It's a fucking Scientology center. If you go in there, they're like, you don't need Scientology. You need to hold onto these cans that are attached to the E meter. We got to find out what's ticking, you know?

And then they start manipulating your beliefs and that in turn helps you feel better. So there is some sort of a correlation between the mind, you know, getting, I mean, you know, in a way, like they're almost like not totally misguided in their efforts, right? Yes. And I would say an important difference in my perspective, perhaps, and theirs is that I believe in like individual empowerment. Also, you're not asking for 10% of all their income and you don't require two and a half hours of study every night. Yeah, no, there's hopefully more differences in that. But, but no, I mean, it's, you know, come and you don't require two and a half hours of study every night. Yeah. No, there's hopefully more differences in that.

But, but no, I mean, it's, you know, if you're subsuming someone into a, I don't want to say like. Cult. Culture. How about a culture? Oh, that's cool. Just pause before I say the chur. Cult.

Chur. Then you're just transferring dependence, you know know from one model to the next and you know sort of my bag is to really give people back their their power through a methodology that's you know their own alone i think that highlights why that stuff works for people and why a lot of different things work for people a lot of different kinds of religions and unfortunately a lot of different cults and a lot of different ideologies and a lot of different mindsets do work for people even fucking crossfit there was a great article that i read about equating crossfit to um the fact that people do not have these religious groups they don't have these social bonding groups like a community because they're not going to

church anymore so now they're going to this gym and they'll like a lot of them literally call the gym church totally yeah have you heard of the um rat park studies rat park yeah rat like the rodent what what is which studies on what so the there are these canadian studies that basically looked at the addictive model of cocaine right so like you put we know right that if you put a rat in a cage by itself and you give it the choice of water or cocaine it's going to drink the cocaine until it dies. Yeah, I'm aware of these studies. But then these. Yeah. So then these researchers were basically like, well, hold on a minute.

That's like totally unnatural environment for a rat to be in. So if we what if we like put it in rat heaven where it can like have sex with the rats and hang out and have like a community and there's things to play with and little wheels and whatever. Then what happens? And if you give them cocaine or water, they don't touch the cocaine. and hang out and have like a community and there's things to play with and little wheels and whatever, then what happens? And if you give them cocaine or water, they don't touch the cocaine. And you can even addict them in isolation and they will voluntarily detox in rat heaven. Isn't that fascinating? Yeah.

So what does that mean, right? It means that we fundamentally need community. Like we need each other, like it or not. And we don't have that as a part of the fabric. We live in boxes. We don't know our neighbors. Like we don't have communities anymore. And so anytime we have the opportunity, whether through AA or CrossFit to, to plug into a community, we, we fix something inside ourselves. So we have less of a vulnerability to abuse the effects of a substance like cocaine or alcohol. The Rat Park study is so important because so many people will cite that as evidence that cocaine is so incredibly addictive. Well, then when they find out about this, because this is like a different variation on that study, and they go, oh, okay. I'm in a rat park.

The context. Yeah. The context matters. I mean, you're kind of in a rat park every day if you're in a cubicle environment. Exactly. You're in your car in traffic or you're on the bus and no one's talking to anybody. You're in your little cubicle by yourself, you know. And then there's shared suffering that's coming from things like CrossFit where you have these

moments where you're bonding together. Almost like you guys are, you know, you're in the trenches, right? Yeah. Yeah. Suffering together. There's something to yoga class like that. People get all sat nam, namaste on you. I mean, there's a lot of that.

Kundalini's like that. There's a lot of struggle. It's hard. It's hard. It's super hard. Yeah. Yoga is really hard. And that's part of what's good about it is that we need, I think we need hard things.

I think your body, if you're just constantly nerfed and everything's soft and everything's a free ride and there's no ups or downs and everything's middle, like what is that? That's not a human. It's not life. It's not what you're designed for. So like when you're having a difficult window in your life, you know, and maybe you know why, like you had a loss, or maybe you don't know why. And things are just off. Yeah, right. Like, either you have a consciousness that says, there's something here, you know, there's something to this, there's some meaning to this, I got to look deeper, I got to pay attention to things, I got to rebalance and different, I got to up my game, you know, self-care. Or you're like, this sucks. I don't want to feel this way. And there are thousands of prescribers

like happy to open their door to you. Yeah. And that is really the problem, right? The real problem is that there's so many different options other than what's going to make you healthy. And there's so many different ways to just numb this whole experience, just numb it all down. Like, let's put some ice on it, baby. You're going to be fine. Let's numb this whole experience, just numb it all down. Like, let's put some ice on it, baby. You're going to be fine. Let's numb this whole thing down. I have been of the opinion, especially over the last few years, I've really focused on this heavily and I've talked about it maybe too much, but I think people need to struggle in order to appreciate how nice things are and also to mitigate the effects of actual

bad things that happen to you. If you can do difficult, hard things on a daily basis, on a regular basis, you know, whatever your schedule allows for, but whether it's martial arts or whether it's yoga or whether difficult struggle, physical struggles where you have to test yourself, we have to pull through. You have to have discipline and resolve. And it's hard to do. When you get through that, you develop that muscle and that understanding of struggle. And believe it or not, this is where it's going to seem really weird. The struggle that you get in a yoga class is so much harder than the struggle that you'll ever experience outside of that.

Right. Which doesn't make any sense. Like, no, you're going to work out. Like, this is just like, no, this is not spin class, man. This is something like very intense. Not that spin class is not difficult. Hey, I was going to say I'm a SoulCycle fan. Watch it.

Yeah. I'm all about SoulCycle. Spin class is hard too. I mean, it's a bad example. What I should say is it's not like going to the gym and doing like a simple round of like calisthenics or exercise. It's pushing you into your discomfort. Real serious discomfort where you want to quit.

You want to stop and you have to push through. And that intense focus on difficult things, it makes life more bearable. Totally. It makes it more enjoyable. My awakening, so to speak, began when I gave birth for the first time. Whoa. Right? Yeah.

And I had a natural birth. Oh, did you do it in a bathtub? Did you get crazy? So the second time, I did it in a birthing center the first time. The second time, I had a home birth. Why did you do that, though? What if there was anything wrong and you needed to get to the hospital? It's interesting because my first birth, I was still in the Matrix, right?

So I was still eating McDonald's and, you know, prescribing. So you like that kid less than the second kid? You're the Matrix baby. You're totally the Matrix. Meanwhile, she's like a sage. She had to compensate for all my dark energy. So I actually had a natural birth because of the science. Because I was like in this real like know-it-all place in my life um or believe it or

not I've tried to move past that but I had this OB at the time and I was like she doesn't know what she's talking about and I researched like what is the evidence show OB is actually like psychiatry only about 30 percent of obstetrical practices are evidence-based and the rest is consensus like the rest is consensus. The rest is just they're just doing it because they're doing it. What if the cord's wrapped around the baby? What if nothing? What if nothing?

We've been doing this since the beginning of time. Right, but babies have died since the beginning of time because of these things. So we actually have home birth versus hospital birth data, which should be totally unnecessary. Right. Right? But we actually have it at this point to demonstrate that that's like patently, it's fear mongering. It's like patently false. But people do get choked by umbibical cords, right?

Yes. So what do you do? Anything is possible, of course. So when that's going down. But the truth is that when you research the interventions, you will find. So I had a natural birth because the research that I did on the interventions, you will find. So I had a natural birth because the research that I did on the interventions, things like fetal monitoring, episiotomy, even ultrasound, let alone C-section, you know, antibiotics during delivery, et cetera. What I found was that there

wasn't science to support them. And actually the science suggests that they should be abandoned. So what I was left with was- What does the science suggest should be abandoned? These interventions? C-sections? Yeah. Oh, I mean, the consensus, even the WHO, which is part of the machine, but even the WHO says they should be less than 10%. I mean, they're over in New York, they're upwards of almost 40% of births are C-section births. Why are women doing that? Are they doing that to save their vaginas? They're doing it because they don't want to feel bad feelings and they don't want to feel pain it's exactly what we're talking about i've heard women like specifically say they don't want to

get stretched out i don't think that's a big yes certainly but i don't think that's a huge motivator i think people are women have been made to feel afraid of their own bodies it's the birth control thing we were talking about earlier if you think of your body as a total pain, you know, that's dangerous, it's going to fuck up at any given time. And you're going to, you know, wish you had listened to your, you know, doctor who's a man and has never had a baby. Then you could obviously be led down this path that says, let me manage your body. I know better. Science knows better how to do this. Your body messes up all the time, right? So that's the mentality. And in that mentality, my opinion is that you're robbed of this opportunity, like psychedelic level opportunity

to have a transformation of your consciousness, because it is hard and it is scary and it breaks your mind my mind broke on that day broke and it's how so never been recovered because it was literally so intense that my mind was telling me you're gonna die you're gonna die you're gonna die you're gonna pain it's like pain but it's more more that. It's not pain that you would have recognized. Because it's purposeful pain. It's not just a signal of something wrong. Right? So it's a sensation that is a part of the process of moving a human being through and out of your body.

So we call it pain, but midwives don't call it pain, for example. It's not pleasure either. It's just another thing. It's another thing. So, but- Why are they screaming? It sounds like it's pain. Because when you're in that intense portal, you moan.

There are these primal sounds we make, you know, when we're making love or when we're experiencing, you know, fear, when we're really in it, you know know we make those kinds of sounds and and and there is a lot of fear but ultimately if you don't succumb to it you it breaks and you see oh that was trying to tell me i couldn't do this and look i just did it do you ever think that if you could meet your old self that your old self be like, listen to this crazy bitch. 100%. I wouldn't even have hung out with me. I wouldn't even have talked to me at a bar. Oh, Kundalini and placebos, huh?

What do you want me to do, eat eggs? Get the fuck out of here. This girl's crazy. Get her on pills. You need pills. No, you need pills. You're delusional. Totally.

You're talking about healers and holistic medicine. It would have been the eye roll of all time. Totally. That's hilarious. How do you reconcile that? Yeah. Because I feel myself. I feel 100% myself.

So is there a self-conscious aspect of it where you do recognize that there are certain science-based practitioners that will be like rolling their eyes at you? Oh, I don't care. You don't care? No, no, I don't care about that. And it was interesting, right? So I published this book last year in March. And what's it called again? A Mind of Your Own.

And I published it and it was a really weird experience because I, you know, I was a total newbie. I'd never written a book before or whatever. And out the gate, I got like this very generous advance from a mainstream publisher, which shocked me. And then it comes time to publish it. And they can't get me on a single, you know, the Today Show, Dr. Oz, 60 Minutes. And they're used to waltzing their authors who they give these large advances to, like right on to these platforms, right? Mainstream media platforms. I told them it is not going to work with me. Like you haven't worked

with someone like me before. Trust me, it's not going to work out. These are all pharma funded outlets, even NPR, PBS, they all are. So, you know, we're going to have to come up with something else. And ultimately they didn't listen. And they started to spaz when I, a month before launch, didn't have a single interview. They'd never had that happen before. And so it was cool because alt media, you know, like this, I just called on a bunch of my friends and colleagues. And we, it was like top 20 on Amazon within the first week. And that's like the power. Like mainstream media is totally dead.

I don't have to tell you that. But it was so quiet for like the whole year afterward if you google my book there is not a negative review of this like very controversial text on the internet very weird because we have trolls on our site every single day on facebook for example or you know twitter even instagram it's like part of the deal of being an activist is that you deal with astroturfing and you deal with that whole, you know, sort of astroturfing. Oh, yeah. Oh, you should. There is an amazing TED talk that you need to watch by Cheryl Atkinson, who's like a turncoat journalist, right? Like she used to be an anchor, I don't know where. And so she has this TED talk on astroturfing and she basically breaks it down. Astroturfing is like what. So the word. Right. It's it's like a fake grassroots movement on social media. Right. So it's paid industry paid bots basically who generate the impression that there is an opinion.

who generate the impression that there is an opinion anti anyone who threatens the establishment, right? And then there are people who, like, organically glom onto that. So they create this, okay, so they'll come on my site by the thousands, right? And immediately after a comment is written, like, you quack, like, where did you get that fake medical degree? Like you're killing people. You should be ashamed of yourself. You're reckless. Yeah, exactly. And they almost always call me a twat or a cunt. That's like almost always part of it. That's how you know. And there will be like 500 likes within 10 minutes.

That's like one of the indications that it's a troll. You know what I mean? So like there'd be a Facebook comment. How do you know that that's a troll and not just people resonating with this idea that they hate quacks? Because I don't have that many people on my Facebook page that that would ever be a metric. I see. I see. It's not even like probably algorithmically possible that it would be an organic phenomenon. Did you see that thing recently?

Jamie brought it up yesterday about Donald Trump. It turns out that he just had millions of bots follow him on Twitter. That doesn't surprise me at all. Just out of nowhere. Just like something like four million bots

just joined on and everyone's like, okay, what's going on here? What happened here? What is this? These are fake accounts. Yeah, it's like a thing. That's,

it's not surprising that this would have been No, it's not surprising that this would have been part of it. No, it's not surprising that people figured out that they can manipulate this. Half of President Trump's Twitter followers are bots. Holy shit, this is so crazy. So you generate the impression that there's a grassroots energy,

and that it's actually not real. He picked up 3 million Twitter followers in recent days, most of which appear to be recently created Twitter bots. Screenwriter John Niven pointed out Tuesday morning that Trump's account Right, so this is AstroTurbo. So that is something that they're doing. They're making an active campaign to sort of bolst up his public appeal. Right, and in that case, I don't know specifically, but in that case it would be to generate the impression that it's grassroots.

Right. When it's not. That's why it's called AstroTurfing. Got it. Because it's fake grassroots. Got it, got it. But yeah, so I have all that energy in my daily life, but I didn't have a single negative review of this book in like a year.

What are you laughing at? It's totally weird. It says it's false. No. Why do they say it's mostly false? It says President Trump, like other Twitter users with large following, has a large number of followers that appear to be bots or inauthentic automated user profiles. What's false? Trump did not receive

an influx of 5 million new Twitter followers in three days. Oh, so snopes. So how many did? I thought they said 3 million. As of May 1st it had 28.5 so it couldn't have gone up that fast over the month

because it's only 1.5 million gain. I don't know. That's not even abnormal for someone with that many millions. He has 28 million. I don't know. The story just got weirder. According to the archived images on Twitter page, rumors of a surge in followers

were greatly exaggerated. Well, that's fake news. I mean, bots could have jumped on the fake story, Dad. Yeah, but I'm sure there's a ton of bots following him. I know there's a ton of bots following me. I get them all the time. These women that are fake women that want to talk about sex.

Like, come chat with me about sex. Come sex me up. And they're like, it's all like the worst broken English. Like, it's done. Because you've tried to have a conversation with them. It's not worked out. Who explained it to us?

Yeah, I try to DM them. They don't ignore me. Who tried to explain that to us? That they use intentionally, was it Malice? Was it Michael Malice? Maybe. That they use intentionally shitty language so that if you follow them, like their poor grammar sort of like alerts them to suspicious people so that suspicious people don't interact

with them, but dumb people. So they're a honeypot that creates this environment that stupid people are attracted to because they can't see the grammatical errors because they're dumb. And so it makes it more effective. So these Nigerian scammers apparently purposely use bad grammar. Like they're more than capable of using good English, but they use this shitty grammar so that the people that they do get are just really dumb. They're not trying to snag like the Ivy Leaguers. Yeah. Well, anybody who's got a discerning idea of what this may or may not be. They're not trying to get that.

They're trying to get the gullible, and there's plenty of them. Like, why go fishing for sharks when you can catch guppies and get nets full of guppies? They can't even chew their way through the net. This is easy pickings. Don't go try to catch a whale, dude. That's too much work. It's really interesting, though. I mean, if that is how sophisticated they truly are, it's kind of fascinating.

But once you know this stuff, then you can interpret. It just helps to be aware of it. It would be a big, big deal if we found out that pharmaceutical companies were actively engaging in the use of these bots to attack people like you. companies were actively engaging in the use of these bots to attack people like you. Like if you had someone like WikiLeaks on your side that dug into this shit and got some whistleblower from the pharmaceutical industry that cares and released that stuff, that would be pretty giant. I have some colleagues working on that. Really?

Yeah, yeah. Don't tell people. Now they're going to try to cover their tracks. They'll never know. No. I mean, the truth is that I don't think it's going to require that because I think people are waking up just like by sheer zeitgeist energy. Like people are waking up. They are calling bullshit on a lot of the heavy handed claims of the pharmaceutical industry. They know their doctors aren't helping them. You know, they know that the conventional model has a very limited

ability to help them and or they've tried it and it's not worked so people are waking up and that's why in more recent time i've focused my energy not on like fighting this is like some david and goliath you know situation but i i'm just focusing on making sure people know like what's possible it's like you know this bucky fuller quote like you you don. It's like, you know, this Bucky Fuller quote, like you, you don't fight the existing system. You know, you, you create one that makes the existing system obsolete. Basically.

I don't know who made this quote, but it's a wonderful one in this regard that, uh, before diagnosing yourself with depression, first, make sure you're not surrounded by assholes. Whose quote is that? It's a great quote.

It's a great quote. It is, you know, and also you might have a shitty life. You might be bummed out because you're working all the time in a job that's uninspiring. You might be bummed out because you got an abusive spouse. You might be bummed out because you live in a crime-infested neighborhood. You might be bummed out for, you know, you might have some environmental issues that are causing health problems. There's a lot going on.

You might work in a job that gets you exposed to toxic fumes or chemicals or a lot of variables. We, you know, we're in a medical system that blames your biology. That's it. Yeah. It just blames your biology. Because it's convenient and because it suits the paradigm that's in place. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

It should be, a lot of people ascribe it to Freud. Right. But this quoteinvestigator.com says that it actually should go to this Twitter account. A Twitter account? Yeah. Which Twitter account? Debbie Hope should be credited with constructing the saying it says. Debbie, you wizard, you.

Whoever it was, she nailed it. Did she nail it and attribute it to Freud? That's not kind of a clever move. I don't want the attention. The radio edit version. Yeah, really awesome and attribute it to some dead dude who was a genius. I found this site before. They kind of like do the telephone game with quotes and sort of like this is what people are saying.

And then they go through all the iterations of how it's been translated out. Well, do you remember that one Greg Giraldo joke that got attributed to me online and people had photos of me with Greg Giraldo's quote and something that I never said. It's absolutely not mine.

I didn't know whose it was and then someone had to say it's Greg Giraldo's and then people were like, why are you stealing Greg Giraldo's shit? I'm like, I'm not making memes. I'm not doing that. Somebody else did that. But I put it on Twitter. This is not mine.

I think I might have put it on Instagram, too, a long time ago. But it was weird. It was like I kept getting them. You get them. These memes come in waves. Yes. You know? Yeah, yeah.

I get ones that I did say. I get those in waves, too. I get these pictures of me with like weird quotes that I had said. Memes are very powerful. Yeah. Video is even more powerful, though, because I think people have come to this conclusion that they can't trust anything anymore. Memes are funny. That's one of the things that like a good, solid meme. That's one of the things that was so egregious about that fat Jewish guy. That's one of the things that was so egregious about that fat Jewish guy Yeah He was stealing these brilliant ideas and it made him look brilliant when really he's just sort of this aggregator of other people's awesome ideas without giving them credit and he just got in on this

Plagiarism loophole and everybody's like what and now he's got this weird thing that he does where he says that he puts up the the meme He writes his own quote and then just puts the originator's name at the end of it. He doesn't even say originally created by. He just puts their name, and that's like attributing credit, some sort of a weird way. That's weird. It's super slimy. Like, what's going on now with, like,

and the problem is, like, someone will send you something, and I have a real issue with this. Like, someone sends me something that's hilarious, and I want to put it on Instagram. I'm like, I don't know who made it. Can I just put it up? What do I do? Do I say, hey, I don't know who the fuck made this.

Let me know. And then put it up, and then people go, oh, did you see what Joe Rogan said? This is hilarious. I didn't say it. It matters. I'm big into attribution because it's like I have company around me. I don't want to take credit for all this. It's also people turn into a business.

Yeah. like it's like I have company around me you know like it's also people turn into a business yeah like the meme business is a business and then they have sponsored sponsored uh Instagram posts and sponsored tweets and they make a lot of money like there's a lot of money to be made and people were getting these development deals to do television shows and all sorts of other things based on the content of other people's ideas they They're just aggregating. That's amazing. Yeah. Well, it's just a weird loophole. It's like if you were doing it with music, like say if you just wanted to take riffs that you thought were really awesome and put them on your music page, people will go, well, fuck you.

You can't do that. This is my stuff. I created this. But that signature, unless you're putting watermarks on everything, that signature is not necessarily available with memes. Right. Because they're that powerful. Yeah.

And even if you do put a watermark, you know what they do? They just find the original photo, put their own quote over it, and just don't attribute anything to you. Because they don't want you to have the watermark on their page. It's sneaky. It's like some weird copyright loophole that exists now. No one knows exactly what to do about it we need some ambulance chasing lawyers to catch up yes ambulance chasers so what blowback have you experienced other than this influx of trolls and people that's what i was saying right is that

for a whole year none like i took out a out a large life insurance policy when I published my book expecting like pretty serious. You were worried you were going to die? It's happened. I have colleagues, you know. What colleagues do you have that have died? I'm going to leave that mystery hanger. Do you think people have been killed because they've criticized pharmaceutical companies?

You just have to know that it's the most powerful industry in the public eye anyway. That's intense though, what you just said. You have colleagues that you believe may have been killed. You don't want to talk about it, obviously. He clammed right up.

It's hard to shut me up. I just don't think it serves to focus on this layer. clamped right up it's hard to shut me up it is hard to shut me you really believe that serves like to tell you know what i mean is like focus on this layer but i do i do think it's a possible narrative how about that it's a possible narrative they might silence you and in the in the realm of independent journalism and media where some random schmo like me can actually have influence, especially, you know, that I am credentialed in a way that people might pay attention to. Right. Then why would they not want to, you know, quiet me?

Well, they put labels on cigarettes. No one gives a shit. Yeah. You know, I don't know if what you're saying is worth killing somebody over. Who knows? I mean, I'm still here. So apparently not. Right. But you know what I mean? I mean, I'm still here, so apparently not, right?

You know what I mean? It's like all those whistleblowers when it came to cigarettes and cancer, who gives a shit? They make more money from cigarettes now than ever. Less people smoke, so they just charge more for cigarettes, and they make more than ever. They make more now for cigarettes than they have in the last 15 years. Yeah, no, I believe that.

And it's true, that just because... But I... Right? I'm not just trying to scare people out of taking meds. You're trying to help them. I'm also showing that you can totally shed your chronic illnesses completely forever. Well, I can't show forever, but that you can have long term shedding of your chronic illnesses. That to me is a more threatening element of what I have to say than just like, these pills are dangerous. You shouldn't take them. I'm not saying that. I'm saying you might have been told you're broken, that you have a mental illness for life. But in fact, you know, like I have a woman who completed my online program, had such bad migraine headaches that she had to be on IV treatment. She was treated by the top neurologist at Emory. She was on multiple pharmaceuticals. She was bedbound for two years.

Okay. And she completed my program, which we talked about. This is not rocket science. Okay. And she's totally symptom free. Totally. So that's pretty threatening, right? To show you that, in fact, what you're told is a permanent problem you just have to deal with and live with with pharmaceutical medicine, could be completely dissolved is a very threatening concept.

And I'm not the only one. I mean, many functional medicine doctors and holistic healers are, you know, working to create awareness of this possibility. But regardless, it was pretty weird that, you know, the book made the New York Times list, strangely, and there wasn't a mention of it in mainstream media for a year. Not once. Nobody wanted to have you on their show. This is amazing. Let's talk to her about this. Not a negative review. Not a single mention in mainstream media. So the negative review is the problem with that is that you could refute the negative reviews and

also cause attention on it. And like, let's see what her response is. It's like they decided to ignore me, which I was totally cool with because I had a very chill year but it's um with your life insurance policy yeah exactly just just waiting uh you know to get my couple million to my kids but it's changing like even in the past month or so there's been like a more of a targeted effort and a couple of allure and Cosmo and a couple of mainstream outlets have begun to suggest that I am, you know, a dangerous, reckless person who shames women who take meds. They've said this in articles. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I don't want to give it the shame. Isn't that funny that like, if you give advice that based on actual

studies, actual medicine, give advice about, you know, like, Hey, maybe it's not a good idea that you take these crazy medications where we don't exactly know why you're taking them. We don't know exactly if these are the right medications for you. They're testing them on you literally as you go along that you're shaming. I'm not even saying maybe it's not a good idea. I'm just saying here's what the science says that you might not have been told. And here's what's additionally possible. You should just at least know. Okay. And here's the social proof, you know, interviews, I'm publishing four case reports as we speak in the peer reviewed index medical literature, you know, so this is not like some random blog I wrote. Okay. So just know that that's possible

and then make your decision. And guess what? If you're on meds and this sounds interesting to you, then I'm showing you there's a path to a new, you know, approach. That's, you know, that's it. But actually, you know, and I hate to even give it airwaves because it's just sort of ridiculous. And I do believe a lot of it initiated with astroturfing, but I'm being called an ableist. Oh, that's my favorite. I love that word. I've never heard that word before. It's wonderful. It's one of the new ones that the kids are using.

All these little snowflakes. Good to know. I love it. So I'm shaming people who can't do what I'm able to do, including have a home birth. Ableist. This has been around for a while. You're white, too. I know.

You have white privilege. You're a woman. It sounds bad. White woman privilege is not real have white privilege you're a woman it's not as bad white woman privilege is not real it is real no it's totally real it certainly is it certainly is but you guys have a you know struggle with that a bit more yes perhaps yeah i'm i'm a conqueror i'm a man terrible person done awful things throughout history clearly all men are responsible for all terrible stuff yes yeah ableist is a wonderful term. Do you ever use that, Jamie? No.

Don't call anybody an ableist. No one actually does. Yeah, well, in college they do, and they do online. Who knew? I don't know where I've been that I never heard that term. People are just, it's too easy to get by. It's too easy to eat. It's too easy to survive.

There's not enough difficulty out there. People go looking for insults and looking for things that are off. Yeah. There there's a constant searching for outrage, this quest for recreational outrage, you know, and, and people find things to be appalled at and then attack them and go nuts over it. It's just, it's a very strange time. It's a, I think it's beautiful though. I think it's all, it's all really all really good. Like, we're coming to grips with how preposterous we are. And we're doing so in the middle of these embroiled battles over ideologies, over cultural expression. There's some girls in Portland that are taking a rash of shit because they're selling burritos and they're white.

They made a burrito truck and people are going crazy. They're trying to shut them down, shut them down, because they're not Mexican and they're selling burrito truck and people are going crazy they're trying to shut them down shut them down because they're not Mexican and they're selling burritos like they're not you know

they're not pretending they're not like putting shoe polish on and pretending they're not putting brown face on they're just fucking selling burritos

like it's so crazy now you said that there it is critics closed white women's Portland burrito stand for cultural theft. What the fuck, man? They're burritos, you assholes.

Mexicans don't even eat burritos. Yes, they do. How dare you? When you go to Mexico, how often do you eat burritos? I've eaten burritos in Mexico. Real Mexican food? Yes. I have had a real chicken burrito in Mexico.

It was quite delicious. I love Mexico. I just don't understand why anybody thinks that there's something wrong with learning a style of cooking. It's like I think if you have cultural appropriation, if you have like a person who's pretending they're from Laos and they start talking with a fake accent and, you know, and you go, hey, man, you're from fucking Cleveland. You're not even you're not even of laos descent like you do a 23 and me on you and you find out like your family's from finland like the fuck is wrong with you like but there are people that do that and that is crazy right but that's just deceptive this is not deceptive this is someone who likes making

burritos they're making burritos and then these goofy white kids are fucking closing them down and that's what it is. It's cultural appropriation heroes just shouting out from the rooftop that you're wrong. Right. You're wrong. It's like you said, we're just always looking for who to blame, who to be mad at, who to make sort of the persecutor of our felt wrongness. It's that same issue. It's so crazy.

No, it is a weird it is a weird time. And the trouble is, you know, that the more that we, this infighting is like in some ways a distraction from the greater issues that are like government overreach and these greater issues that are allowed to unfold while we're busy calling each other names. Yeah, you're doing that on Twitter and the government's literally reading your emails while you're doing it. Right. And you're like, no, but we have to worry about this burrito stand. Right, you think you're fighting a good fight. You can't have salsa. You can't have tortillas. You're not from here.

Like, what is wrong with people that never existed before? Like, whatever. Here's the thing. Here's what's fascinating. It only works if the people that you're supposedly culturally stealing from are brown. Like if you try cooking French food and you're not a French descent, nobody gives a shit. You could cook Italian food all day long and no one cares about cultural appropriation. Like you could be a white woman from Switzerland who lives in New Jersey and runs an Italian restaurant and no one cares.

They won't care. Well, arguably, they haven't been like oppressed, I guess, in the same way. They were at one point in time. They just got through it. Now you're getting technical. You know, it's Mexican. But I mean, for real, I mean, that's literally the path of boxing in America was it was Jewish people, Italians, Irish.

It was the suppressed people, black folks. It was always the people that were the most economically suppressed that rose to. And then they were also like my grandparents came from Italy and they experienced horrible racism back then, back in the early 1900s. But by the time they integrated into society, like being Italian isn't even thought of as being not white anymore. That's interesting. Yeah. But when my grandparents were kids, it was just like being Mexican. It was the same kind of thing.

It was like you were treated like someone from somewhere else that they didn't want here. Right. You know? They called them guinea wops and all these crazy slangs, horrible expressions that don't even mean anything anymore. Right. They're so ineffective now.

And our hope is, right, that one day it's going to get like that with Mexicans the same way it's like you can't really mock someone from being from holland no one gives a shit like you can say oh you're from holland like yeah like it's not what about guido though like does that doesn't matter they call themselves guidos like people in my family they call themselves guidos they'll call themselves guineas they'll call themselves all and it's like almost like a term of endearment. No, it loses its power. It's true. It's totally lost its power because it's culturally acceptable to be Italian.

And then one day, I mean, but the idea that these girls are stealing from Mexicans is where it's so crazy. Like, oh, they're just, they're just selling burritos, folks. Just food. It's just a certain way of preparing it. You know, it's not like they're pretending. We invented this. No one else did it. It's a rap. Like of preparing it. You know, it's not like they're pretending. We invented this. No one else did it.

It's a wrap. Like, the people who make wraps, those should be slapped. That's not a wrap, motherfucker. That's a burrito. You're making a shitty burrito and you're calling it a wrap, right? Gluten-free burrito. Those are the real problem. Those are the problem people. They're calling it wraps.

That looks like a tortilla. No, no, no. No. A wrap. What is it? What do they call it? Do they call a wrap a tortilla? Do they say it like a tortilla. No, no, no. A wrap. What do they call it? They say it's a tortilla? What do they call that outside of a wrap? It was a co-opting.

It's like a co-opting. Totally co-opting. That's the real theft is wraps. But it doesn't even taste good. If those girls were just selling wraps, everybody would be like, oh, that's cool. It's just a wrap. They just mislabeled it. As long as they don't have a Mexican flag anywhere or any cartoon of a chili pepper. Sombrero.

It's just, I really feel like this goes, I mean, it's a stretch, granted. But I really feel like this goes back to what we're talking about, is that people need difficulty in their life. They really do. And that way they don't seek out difficulty that's not real. You're going to manufacture it. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's true. And I think that's one of the reasons why you're getting a lot of this from these college kids

where their tuition's being paid for, they don't have jobs, they're not competing in the real world, they're just operating on ideologies, and they're being taught by these knuckleheads that are just trying to keep their tenure and they're trying to spread the same sort of ideology that they had when they were in college and they never really entered into the workforce in a lot of examples. A lot of these people went from academia

to teaching. Right. I mean right in there. Just embedded into the system. Totally. You know. Hey ho. These racist teachers have got to go. Right? It's just people are going crazy today. And I think a lot of it has to do with the same thing. I think it's this newfound ability to communicate, which is fantastic. And it's going to have its hiccups, and there's going to be some issues, and there's going to be some real co-opting of the system,

like what you're experiencing with trolls attacking an idea. But overall, those ideas are spreading in a way that's unprecedented and impossible just a few decades ago. Like your ideas spreading the way they have where I hear about them. And now, you know, you and I sit down and talk about this. Millions of people are going to hear this conversation. And this is unprecedented. Like this has never been available before. So all the bad stuff, stuff you got to take it with all the good stuff there's a light and a dark 100 yeah like what you're expressing what you're

trying to get out to people this is all this is all new stuff like no one was saying this 20 years ago because we were all asleep this matrix talk this is more hippie talk that you would hate 20 years ago you'd be like oh my god I'm so crazy when I'm older. But that's why it is a cool time because it's sort of like the democratization of information where if you want to learn about other perspectives on anything, you look it up. And then you make your own decisions. So it is a time where you have the potential to be an individual in ways that were not honored in a more conformist, you know, controlled media environment. I mean, the trouble is that many people are still, you know, still believe that mainstream media is telling them the truth that that deconditioning is

very challenging. Yeah. But yeah, that's a real problem. I mean, I think even goddamn sexual assault paradise over there I mean these these guys just keep getting kicked out of Fox News over and over again. It's all these Sexual harassment allegations and people are resigning left and right right well because of all that stuff. It makes you go. Oh, oh These guys are creeps like there's a lot of creeps even there like when Brian Williams got busted lying And you're like oh that news guy is just like another asshole. They just make shit up. Just because he's saying the real news sometimes doesn't mean everything he says is true. And there's no way to filter it.

So everybody has to question things now in a way that you never questioned during the Walter Cronkite era. When people were giving the news back when Ted Koppel was on the air, you weren't, like, is Ted Koppel full of shit? Like, no one was saying that, you know? Right? But Brian Williams is clearly full of shit. But that's why it's weirder now to follow mainstream media.

Because if you're not saying that, like, how do you have so much allegiance to the machine that you would never question it? Like, to me, that's surprising. It's also that machine is the only vehicle for these pharmaceutical companies. They have to sandwich those commercials in between, you know, whatever show you're watching. That's right. You know, 360, whatever the fuck it is.

Yeah. This guy's. It's every 10 minutes. Yeah. And they just sandwich them in there. Whereas you're not going to see those commercials like no one's going to read those drug ads on a podcast. You're not going to say, OK, well, hey, been really nice talking to you. And I want to talk to you folks about Abilify.

Are you right now thinking about being suicidal and really want to cement those thoughts and solidify them and make action. It's so not funny. It's not. You're right. I shouldn't say it because I don't even know what I'm talking about. You should be talking about this, not me. But here I am. What is this?

Abilify drug blame for compulsive gambling, eating, shopping, sex. That's just life, bro. How can you blame Abilify? Here's one. No, you can because of this impulsivity thing I'm telling you. Yeah. Whoa. A gambling habit cost her between $1 million and $2 million

in less than five years. You just suck at gambling, lady. Stop blaming drugs. The woman had been living in Las Vegas since 1999, but she had never been tempted to gamble until she started taking the drug. Get the fuck out of here. That lady got a good lawyer. She got a good lawyer and

she's crazy. I got 200 people on this lawsuit that all have claimed that gambling has started after they got on a bill of five. I want to get in on it. I want to take a bill of five so I can get some of that cash. There was a drug called Reequip and there was a man in Ireland that took this drug and said before the drug, he was a healthy heterosexual, and after he took the drug, he became gay and a gambling addict, and he would engage in risky sex, and he would meet men in chat rooms and have unprotected sex with them. And then he got off the drug and was like, what did I do? And he won the equivalent of US somewhere in the

neighborhood of $600,000 from GlaxoKlineSmith. Yeah, here it is. Man says Parkinson's drug made him addicted to gambling and gay sex. What is that? From 2000 what? What does it say up there? Yeah. That was my memory. That's what I remember. I remember things that could turn me

into a gay sex and gambling junkie. That's what I remember. I remember things that could turn me into a gay, sex, and gambling junkie. That's important to know. Hey! Meanwhile, what else works good on Parkinson's? Pot. Yeah. And pot doesn't do that. Well, it could.

It's crazy. This guy sued the shit out of him and won. That's what's crazy. That's amazing that he won. Because I believe it. Well, what's crazy is it's one dude. Hopes for new drugs. I love how they sandwich that in there. Well, what's crazy is it's one dude hopes for new drugs. I love how they sandwiched that in there.

Oh, my God. As many as one million people in the United States have Parkinson's, and there's some new stuff that doesn't turn. There's probably ads on the side of them. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I like how when you scroll down, the video keeps playing anyway. Like, they put a little video. Like, you can't escape the video.

It's always sitting in the corner. Like, go ahead. Press play. Don't be tempted i have been doing this on the bottom like where usually you'll see like uh another story or similar stories a sponsored story oh yeah yeah you can't even tell it's sponsored usually well you can now on cnn they have a ton of those on a lot of websites they have a ton of those yeah it's pretty fascinating and it's like you know you won't believe what they look like now and you're like god what do they look like now and then you have to go through like fucking 20 pages of what other people that look like shit now to get to this one person that you might not even they might even be on that.

You know, just totally. You wasted 10 minutes of your life. You never get back. Yeah. I mean, on Medscape and these like seemingly official medical websites, there are pharma ads that appear to be diagnostic quizzes. So like, do you have depression? And then you go take the quiz and this is known, has been exposed. 100% of people are identified, pretty much no matter what you click, you're identified as being a candidate for antidepressant.

Of course, right? They're not like, dude, you're fine. Go on your life go play frisbee in this objective assessment you're doing great you're doing great yeah oh my god i'm so glad that i don't have to sell you drugs right wow that's so what what do you hope to to really get into people's heads with this book and with all this information and what you've gone on in your journey, if you had to like sum it up. Well, it's sort of like when you know better, you do better. It's like a Maya Angelou quote. It's like one of my favorite quotes. That's a great quote. It is because there's no shaming in that, right? It's as good as the fake Freud quote. When you know better, you do better. It's really good. When Freud said the word asshole in a quote. So with this information, is there

something in you that's like excited about it or that says like, hmm, yeah, there's something to that? Because if there is, then you should know what's possible, right? Because if you know what's possible, then you will naturally move towards possible, right? Because if you know what's possible, then you will naturally move towards that. And the transformations that I have seen and continue to see, I mean, like I cry thinking about it. It's so deeply inspirational because it's a kind of human experience that is so redemptive. It's like a real reclamation that is not possible through the pharmaceutical model, in my opinion. I want to tell you a quick story about antibiotics because you brought this up yes earlier so i went to india recently right and um i brought some antibiotics when you get back no no i would never take i would never i

don't take any pharmaceutical you don't take antibiotics ever what if you got an infection like what if you got staff then i'll tell you exactly what would happen right so i went to india okay i brought my little kit with me, right? Knowing that there's like, and honestly, like, I don't believe in germ theory in the classical sense. So I don't, and neither should anyone. Germ theory is like, if you're exposed to a bad bug, then you get sick. Right. Exposure equals infection.

Right. Right. But, you know, Pasteur himself on his deathbed said that it was the terrain, not the bug. So what's the terrain? The terrain is the context. The terrain is your body in your lifestyle and, you know, in your existence. So that seems to be more relevant. And then the discovery of the microbiome, like this inner ecology has totally, we got to go back to the drawing board completely in medicine because we didn't know that before.

How recent is the discovery of the microbiome? It's about like 20 years. 20 years. In 20 years, the science of probiotics and understanding the importance of consuming fermented foods. Exactly. And super infections through antibiotic overuse and the fact that you can't ever get out from under this idea of just killing the bad bugs. Right. It doesn't work. And so the more you sanitize and you use bleach and alcohol and Purell and all that stuff, you're actually distorting things.

And you're making it more likely for people to develop what are called nosocomial illnesses or infections, which is hospital induced infections, right? This is the hospital is a sick environment in part because we have a wrong idea about how biological ecosystems work. There's no bad guys. Everything works together. It's like a metaphor for life. In fact, there aren't really any bad guys. It's all, you know, sort of part of the polarity of life. We need we need bad to know we're good. It's that ancient philosophy. So anyway, we go to India and I bring bentonite clay, I bring colloidal silver, I bring a bunch of... Colloidal silver?

Do you know what that is? Is that real? That's that stuff that you use like little electrodes, you stick the water, the stick, the silver in the water. Yeah, or you just rely on people to make that for you in a responsible way. Didn't that turn some dude blue? Blue, yeah, yeah.

Did that really work? And it can. It can do that. And you're taking that risk? If you have the wrong, if you're using large particles. Would you be cool if you looked like Avatar? Like an Avatar lady? Would you be cool with that?

I mean, I think it could work. What do you think? You think it would undermine my credibility? I don't know. It'd be freaky. I'm super healthy, but I'm blue as fuck. That poor guy, he died. Blue face, oh my gosh.

Yeah, and that's irreversible, apparently. Yeah, that's not what we're going for. That's why, as a DIY, it may not be the best idea. So what is colloidal silver? What's the benefits of colloidal silver? Okay, so like herbal, like botanical, you know, sort of like antimicrobials, if you want to call them that. They don't kill stuff. I think they have like a rebalancing effect.

But they're, you know, for like SIBO, which is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, it's like a thing people are struggling with that a lot of functional medicine doctors treat. There is a randomized trial looking at antibiotics versus herbal botanicals, showing herbal botanicals are as effective. So why would you ever bother with the risks of antibiotics, which are legion? I mean, they're massive risks. So what herbal botanicals are specifically efficient? Things like oil of oregano, for example.

That's really good for you, right? One of the better studied ones. You know, grapefruit seed extract. There are Pau d'Arco. There's a whole number of them. Golden seal, echinacea, that have these properties. And a lot of supplements just sort of put them all together. Right.

So I'm making this story too long. So I go to India. I bring all this stuff, right? And one of the women, it's like a Kundalini trip, and one of the women gets really sick. Like projectile vomiting and like screaming in pain. Like bad scene. I laughed right before you got like screaming in pain like bad scene i laughed right before you got to screaming in pain i'm sorry i thought she was just puking you know it was it was she was super sick and even the indian dude who was sort of like our chaperone in a way

like a friend of the woman who led the led the trip was like oh we got to bring her to the hospital hospital and you're like no i got to give her colloidal silver and i was like give me 12 hours just i looked him in the eyes i was like give me 12 hours and i know her well enough to know that she would be down for this approach okay so and she was not afraid important detail she's not afraid she was super uncomfortable but she wasn't like freaking out and like oh my god i'm gonna die okay she just thought she was sick which is true right so in 12 hours she was completely well we were in the car for a two-hour trip going to like another part of northern india and how did you cure or treat her she may very well have done it herself and and the ritual of these supplements and bentonite clay and whatever could have just been an accessory. Who knows? The truth is that if she had taken antibiotics, which she never did, if she had taken them reflexively, she probably would have been sick

longer. And she then ultimately, when she got better, would have attributed it to the antibiotics, right? So she never would have had the opportunity to just see what her body's capable of. So she never would have had the opportunity to just see what her body's capable of. So we make these assumptions about pharmaceuticals in the absence of any baseline evidence, information, or even experience to help us understand what our bodies are capable of. But what if someone catches one of these antibiotic-resistant, very aggressive strains like MRSA? very aggressive strains like MRSA. I mean, you know, so my partner has a website called greenmedinfo.com, right? What is it called? Greenmedinfo.com.

Greenmedinfo.com. And he catalogs all of the data from PubMed.gov on these natural substances, evidence that shows that something like garlic, you know, because there's a study he put up on MRSA, and I think it was like garlic and maybe honey or something you would laugh at, right? Dr. Rhonda Patrick went through this, and she talked about it on the podcast. She had a persistent staph infection that would not go away,

and she treated it with garlic in a topical form, and it cured it when nothing else would. And she had gone through this host of antibiotics that really wrecked her gut biome. And she was really fucked up for like a year because of it. And she treated it with a topical application of garlic, which is crazy. And it sounds crazy until you actually learn that there's, you wouldn't know that there's actually science to support that. Yeah.

So there's a ton of science to support natural medicine. I don't know who funds these studies. It's crazy that they're even done because there certainly isn't pharma money behind them. But they are done. And if you know about them, it might help you to make an informed decision. But this reflexive assumption that, well, pharmaceutical medicine is the only legit choice if it gets bad enough, is conditioning. That's all I'm saying. It's a, it's a conditioned assumption. And if you have an experience that defies that, then you'll make different decisions for yourself in the future. But you have to have like that woman will probably make different decisions for herself in the future because now she trusts her body like just a little bit more,

you know, and she's that much less afraid of all of the horror stories. The fear mongering is the greatest marketing device, you know, employed by the industry is scaring you into what if you don't do it? But aren't there a bunch of people that like when they do catch MRSA or something like that and then get devastated, like the right move is to get on an IV antibiotic like is isn't that sometimes the case you just told me a story where that's not true well I told you a story okay so then some people what is one but it's one and she had a topical issue but if it's one and you're the one then that's important information for yourself it certainly certainly is. I mean, antibiotics for that one, but I mean, don't, don't they serve a purpose in some functions sometimes? I mean, you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? I mean, if someone has some rampant, aggressive infection, a bacterial infection. Listen, if we only used antibiotics for true life or death emergencies, we would have a very different situation on our hands than what we have

now, which is a combination of, you know, devastating our ecosystem, you know, making people gravely ill because they have very serious and totally unpredictable side effects, including long-term neurologic side effects. You know, what's even going on with our livestock? Like, we are in a mess with our worship of this idea of, of, do you know what antibiotic means? It means against life. Like literally there's something wrong headed about that mentality. And so it comes back to philosophy. Like if you want to believe in, in war, you know, you want to war against your body. You want to war against and blame all the bad people who do all this bad things and you want to lock them up in prisons and you want to hate the, you know, you know, Arabs and terrorists. And if that's your

talk again, lady, but if that's your general vibe, then it's going to make sense to take medications like that for you. But I, you know, have plenty of colleagues and myself, we have a different philosophy. So that's why it comes down to it's a religion. It really comes down to your belief system. So your philosophy is improve the health of the gut biome, take in natural antibiotics, things like garlic, things like oregano oil. Work with nature, yeah. Right. Get back to the continuum.

the continuum. Like, you know, there's this notion that there's like a path we're meant to walk, you know, where we sort of follow our what our ancestors sort of set us up for. And we've strayed from it big time. And we're in some ways being reminded, you know, that we can't go too much farther without like, struggling pretty seriously. I think one of the big points that you just made, which is really huge, is that if we only used antibiotics when necessary in life or death situations, we wouldn't have the issues that we have right now with livestock, with people's health. And people take Z-packs like it's going out of style. I mean, they take them like they take Tylenol for a headache. I know so many people that take antibiotics. They just throw them down. Oh, I feel so much better. I took a Z-pack take antibiotics. They just throw them down. Oh, I feel so much better. I took a Z-Pak. Like you might feel better because you were going to feel better anyway. And the Z-Pak, you just threw on top of the mix and decided that that was what was

taking you over the top. That's right. Meanwhile, it's like in the water supply now. Is it Z-Paks? But it's like microscopic levels that you can't really, they're not psychoactive, right? Isn't it? There was just this? There was just something I put on social media. It was like studying fish that are exposed to antidepressants through water, and they became more aggressive. Wow. It was something like, you know, fish aren't made happier. But the point is that antidepressants are just in the water supply now, pharmaceutical products. happier by but but the point is that antidepressants are just in the water supply now pharmaceutical products apparently in dosage is relevant to the clinical expression of fish behavior i don't know

but jesus christ yeah i mean there's no free lunch there's no free lunch with pharma i think it's but if you're into fishing that's good because you want fish to be aggressive i mean maybe they don't want to be aggressive i don't give a fuck what they want i'm here to eat loving they want to just chill. I've never seen one. They're trying to chill. Fish are just eating things. Mostly other fish.

They're a bunch of goddamn cannibals. All of them. Deep thoughts. Yeah. Silly, silly thoughts. Thanks for indulging those, by the way. And thanks for coming on here. I really appreciate it.

We just had three hours. It was fun. Wow. That was three hours. That's quite an attention span. So you do not need Adderall. You're doing just great. No, I'm scared of Adderall.

I had two cups of coffee, though. But if I had Adderall, I just don't. I want to try it one day, but I'm terrified of it. A Canadian study just came out that if you take a stimulant, you're 13 times more likely to be prescribed an antipsychotic and four times more likely to be prescribed an antidepressant. But they're Canadian. They're not even like regular people. They're a totally different kind of person.

It's very important. Super important. Confounding variable. They're from the woods. They're forest folks. They talk weird. I know. All right, Kelly.

So one more time, tell people what is the name of your book, where you can get it. I'm sure you're going to get a lot of positive and negative. Stay offline for a couple days. I thought you had my back. I do have your back. I'm just telling you. I don't want you to get hit with the trolls. No, listen.

First of all, it's important. It's my disclaimer that I'm not here to tell anyone what to do. Right. Okay? It's just about informed consent. And if you know all the information, you want to continue making your choice, do your thing.

But I do believe people are entitled to all of the information, and I didn't know about it when I was prescribing. So I carry that charge, you know? So my book is called A Mind of Your Own. And the rest of my nonsense is on my website. It's just kellybroganmd.com. All right.

Beautiful. Thank you. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you. It was fun. Total pleasure. All right, my friends, that's it. We'll be back tomorrow with hilarious Andrew Santino.

So until then, get off those pills, you fucks. Or don't. Or don't. Take more.