The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down for a candid discussion with Dr. Mehmet Oz, discussing the toxified food environment within the United States—pointing directly to its causes—and exploring not just possible, but immediate routes for change. These include better governmental oversight, but also the implementation of new technologies such as AI. Dr. Mehmet Oz, newly appointed by President Donald Trump as the 17th Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), is a cardiothoracic surgeon, professor emeritus at Columbia University, and former leader of the heart institute at New York Presbyterian Medical Center, known for innovations like the Mitraclip and over 400 publications in heart surgery, health policy, and complementary medicine. He gained national fame through The Dr. Oz Show, winning nine Daytime Emmys and authoring several New York Times bestsellers, before becoming the 2022 Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania. A Harvard and UPenn MD/MBA graduate, Oz also co-founded the influential health platform Sharecare and the nationwide teen wellness initiative Healthcorps. His public influence has been recognized by Time, Forbes, and Esquire, making him a high-profile figure at the intersection of medicine, media, and policy. This episode was filmed on November 13th, 2024  | Links | For Dr. Mehmet Oz: On X https://x.com/droz?lang=en On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dr_oz/?hl=en Dr. Mehmet Oz shares his vision for CMS https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/press-releases/dr-mehmet-oz-shares-vision-cms   

If you gave America the knowledge that they could use to improve themselves, to feel confident that they had jurisdiction over their own body, to actually play an active role in ensuring that they don't develop those chronic illnesses, that they'll do it. If people don't think they matter, then they don't show up in their own lives. There's no uniting narrative, there's no union. It's a completely pathological claim because we live in a hierarchy of narratives that stretch in principle up to the ultimate pinnacle. There's that, then there's the fact too that now we're all connected so things can spread

much faster. It's certainly possible that oversimplified, easily understandable pathological ideas like viruses spread the most rapidly. It's so painful for me to see so many of my bread and other Americans feeling ill, thinking it's their fault and thinking there's no way out. The nihilism around health is stunning, which is, George, why the messaging that you're delivering

is so critical. Hello everybody. I had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Mehmet Oz. Dr. Oz was an early advocate for me, a fair early advocate for me back as early as 2018, which made him unique in that regard on the legacy media side and since then we've had a number of public discussions and a much broader, a much larger number of private discussions and that's been very good as far as I'm concerned. He's a very remarkable person, full of ideas, exceptional level of energy, and doing his best to aim upward as far as I can tell, and quite effectively so. And so it was a pleasure to have him today in Scottsdale where he is with his wife.

And what did we talk about? Well, we talked about the changing media environment and why that's occurred, the shift from legacy media to online media, and also the corruption of the legacy media enterprise over about a 10-year period, something that he got wind of as early, let's say, as 2012. And we tried to puzzle out why that was occurring. And that brought us into a broader discussion of, well, corruption on the scientific and

academic front, which is a manifestation of the same set of symptoms in a different area. And we talked about the radical changes on the political side with regards particularly to the Make America Healthy Again movement, which is a twist in the Trump approach that certainly meets with Dr. Oz's approval because he's been working for years on the public health side and is pleased, I would say, or more than pleased to see this become a central issue of public concern as it should be given the unbelievable

cost and consequences of the chronic disease epidemic that does immediately confront us. And so we discussed all of that. We also discussed as well his foray into the political realm, the price he paid for that personally, the advantages of that and his plans for the future which involve continuing to develop what is already a sizeable social media, new media presence which is expanding and that he's hitting with all his customary diligence. So stay tuned for that. Well, Dr. Oz, it's good to see you again. As always.

We haven't done anything publicly since 2021. Before I decided to run for office, that was the last time we taped and you were the last big interview I did. Oh, oh, is that right? Oh. It was very helpful, I asked. So that'll teach you to interview me. Exactly.

Career ending move. You got me psyched up to go. Yeah, yeah. You said, tell the truth and go out there and do battle. What was actually, it was actually a weird situation at that time because three years ago there wasn't, there still was very, very few people, let's say on the classic legacy media side who would do an interview with me. And you were certainly one of the, because we had done something earlier than that too. Two years before that maybe? I was earlier, I think 2017 or so, 18, that early time period. I say that because when we first decided to invite you,

I had an intense battle within the show with people threatening to quit. Did they quit? I'll tell you the story very briefly, but it's a wonderful reflection of what I think is the ultimate hypocrisy that happens often, certainly within media. Folks wanted to quit, it was performative in general. They wanted to show that they were gonna be

taking a strong stance against you. And the odd, the reasons were obvious. I know all the accolades they can throw at you. And so I challenged the team. I said, well, show me those evidence because if he's truly those things, I don't want to have him on. I'd never met you before. I had listened to you.

I was intrigued by the battle that you'd waged around compelled speech in Canada. And I thought big thinkers ought to be heard. And my job as a television host, I was trained was to expose the public to ideas that are worth hearing so they can judge for themselves. It's most clear with your health where you really should be taking charge because you're going on the wrong path otherwise. But it's true for almost any other important thing you do is to make sure you have an opinion

on what's best for you. So when I invited you on, I heard different things. And I heard back from no one except one individual, a senior producer, very capable and well respected, said that you're homophobic. He happened to be gay. And so I said, bring me the evidence. He brought me evidence. And it was fascinating because it was you talking on a social site to two gay men, advising them to be thoughtful about their adopted child, because that adopted child might face hardship because it's an untraditional, non-traditional family they're having.

You didn't judge them. I thought you were very caring and loving. This is a psychologist would be in that setting. And I confronted my Pagush with that and he refused to back down, but he didn't quit. And at that point I realized that it really wasn't about whether you truly were those ad hominem attack words, but the fact that it really wasn't about whether you truly were those ad hominem attack words, but the fact that they just didn't like you to be able to say

what you wanted to say because they didn't agree with what they thought you should be saying. And that is the biggest risk, I think, to free speech in America. And I'm reminded of a very close friend who grew up in Hungary. And he left Hungary when he was about 20 years of age. He's older now. He's in his, you know, he just had his 80th birthday. And he said when he grew up,

everyone that he talked to, he knew they were lying to him. But that wasn't the problem, Jordan. The problem is that those people knew that he knew that they were lying. And they knew that he knew that they knew that he was lying. Everyone's in on the game. Exactly, so as is often said, democracies based on common truths and

the authoritarian governments are based on common lies. He just did not want that this older gentleman was such a patriotic American after having immigrated here, fled from Eastern Europe. He didn't want that for this country. And yet he saw it. I'm witnessing it. My parents were immigrants to this country, came here, loving America for everything it represented. the shining city on the hill, is Reagan called it. It was there for all the world to admire and emulate. And we can't afford to slip on that.

I was in Singapore, my show is, you know, aired in 120 countries, so a lot of the world. And I didn't have a lot of competition because in many parts of the world there aren't health shows. So we were the dominant health show for those 13 years we aired. And I would go around and do interviews. And one of the places I went was Singapore. I'll never forget, right before I went on the air, I was on my show aired right before the national news.

So I went on the national news to promote the show. And the anchor turned over to me and said, please help America, please save America. And I said, well, I mean, I love my country. And of course, I'm going to do my best for it. But why are you warning me about that? And he said, in our country, we have several warring groups, people who don't naturally get along, different ethnic groups, religious groups.

And we're not a tiny island. And every time we're about to blow ourselves up and crush that thin veneer civilization that protects us. Someone looks up and says, guys, guys, America pulled this off based on a piece of parchment 250 years old. If they can do it, again, based on something that was written, we can do it too. So America is a role model for the rest of the world. So when we blow it, they copy us.

When we sneeze, they get pneumonia. And that's why the crisis that we have felt over the last several years, exacerbated by COVID, which really just sort of bolded and underlined what was going wrong, is such an opportunity for us, as well as potential risk. An opportunity to put things right again. To wake people up to what has happened.

And I do think it slipped up on us. I don't think most people appreciated how hard it was to say what you believed needed to be said and heard. You were a very early example of this. I mean, just blaringly obvious that you should have been allowed to say what you were saying about compelled speech. And yet you were, again, the ad hominem attacks, they can't attack what you're saying, so they have to attack you. And anytime anybody's listening out, you read a newspaper article or anything that's, you

know, a commentary, and the first thing they do is attack the person rather than the idea, you know that they're on weak ground. Because if I got you on the idea, why would I bother wasting my time attacking you personally? I only attack you personally because you're not worth listening to. I think the arguments around R.K. Jr. are a good example of this. I mean, if you can argue against his ideas, and gosh, there are lots of ways you could do that, then argue them.

But stop wasting your time attacking him. Well, it's also the sign of someone who's juvenile and relatively simple-minded because it's a juvenile approach to go for the person. It's simple-minded to avoid the nuances of the situation, you know, and I can understand to some degree why people do that, I think, with me, but also with RFK Jr. because it's hard to believe that the things that I pointed to, let's say in Canada, were actually a danger and it's hard to believe that the things that he's got his finger on can possibly be true.

You have to do a lot of thinking and a lot of reorganization of your beliefs in order to give RFK Jr. for example credence and you know when I objected to Bill C-16 in Canada in 2016, I had some thoughts about where legislation like that might go if things didn't work out well. And of course, at that point, I still thought they were most likely to because Canada had been such a remarkably stable country. Since then, by the way, we've gone from GDP parity with the US to 60% of GDP per capita in Canada, right? We are on average poorer than people in Mississippi, which is the poorest American state, right? And we have real estate costs that have spiraled out of control and incredible internal divisiveness

in Canada on a scale that is completely historically unprecedented. It doesn't take much of an assault on free speech like Bill C-16. They extended the provisions of protection, let's say, to gender identity and gender expression, which I thought was insane beyond comprehension. The outcome of that has actually been worse than I had originally suggested. I did tell the Senate in 2016 that they would produce an epidemic, a psychological epidemic among young women by confusing them about their gender.

And I got that exactly right. And so I'm fairly happy about that. Of course, they just told me that I was, you know, transphobic or whatever the hell their like epithet of the day was. So tell me, let's talk about free speech and the media in a broader context. Now you've watched this transition, right? At least that's what it looks like to me. And I think it's driven by the fact that YouTube made digital bandwidth essentially free.

I think that's the fundamental issue at stake here. And I can't see, the legacy media doesn't seem to be able to compete with that. They drop production cost to zero. There's more going on than that, but that's the technological aspect of it. I think the rot was happening much earlier. And just to rewind this a little bit, I trained in a fairly traditional way. My father was educated actually in World War II in Istanbul, Turkey, which may have been the best medical school in the world

because all the Jews from Europe had fled to Turkey. And for that reason, he got a superb education. And when he finished first in his class, he was recruited to America because we wanted people like that, top tier students from high quality universities coming to America, one of the brain train. But I was completely indoctrinated by his way of thinking

about a hard science approach to taking care of patients. And at the time, 50s, 60s, 70s, there was remarkable advances being made in the treatment of diseases. You know, the skate saves metaphorically, you know, the people are about to die and you get in there and you fix the heart and you take out the problem and they're better again.

And there was no wrong in traditional medicine. When I started my career at Columbia University where I'm on the faculty, you know, I was for many years, tenured because I published and I worked hard and made sure that I was on the cutting edge of a lot of different fuels. I wrote patents around to repair a replacement of heart valves from the groin. I was involved in mechanical heart, heart transplant programs around the Heart Institute. I mean these are like hard science ideas. So there was nothing wishy washy about my career.

But I began to realize that the patients had not read the same books that I had read, that they were getting it wrong at a very fundamental level and taking care of themselves. So I can throw as much high tech out there as possible, but without some of the lower tech preventive ideas, we weren't going to get the desired responses. And you know, my wife, Lisa, she won't be silenced. She kept saying, you know, they're getting it wrong because you're not giving it to them. If you gave America the knowledge that they could use to improve themselves, to feel confident that they had jurisdiction over their own body, to actually play an active role in ensuring that they don't develop those chronic illnesses,

that they'll do it. That's why I even started doing media. Otherwise, I was perfectly happy in the operating room, in the ivory tower at Columbia University, having the time of my life, you know, studying scientific things and, you know, making sure that those advances were legit. My dad intensely disliked that I stepped out of that traditional approach to medicine to start talking on the airwaves about health.

In the beginning, I didn't think what I was doing was all that controversial. I was literally telling you everything that we knew within medicine. And then things started to change. Okay, what period of time was that? This isn't now, so I started doing the Oprah show around 2003, four, and I started my show in 2009,

and all that was pretty smooth going. Right, right. And then around 2012, I began to notice a big shift. And I remember one event in particular, there was evidence from several articles that there was arsenic in our apple juice. Now, why would anyone put arsenic in apple juice? There's no reason to do that. It's a derivative of using arsenic as a pesticide or herbicide around the apple.

It's a cheap spray. And so America banned the use of arsenic in that setting so that the apples, when you harvest them, when the apple juice is squeezed out of the apples, there's no arsenic in them. Does that make sense? It seems reasonable. OK. What if the Chinese don't do that? What if the Chinese farmers continue to spray with an inexpensive product like arsenic,

and then multinational companies buy those apples, squeeze the juice out of it, put it into cartons and ship it to America. What happens then? You think that's a legitimate question? Could there be arsenic in that apple juice? I think so. People had studied it. They said it was the case. We decided to go to the government and say, hey, we want to see your data. Is there actually arsenic in the imported apple juice? And if so, what can we do to make sure that's not a problem? Because arsenic is not good for kids. Primarily children drink small apple juice cart and if so, what can we do to make sure that's not a problem, because arsenic's not good for kids? Primarily children drink small apple juice cartons.

You and I aren't drinking apple juice cartons, generally. That stuff's coming for young people, and the arsenic levels in America in our water are capped. You're not supposed to have above a certain number of amount of arsenic for a reason, because it's not good for you. Government wouldn't share their data. They wouldn't talk to me.

And then I started realizing that no one was talking about this. And I wanted to make waves because I don't think it was right. We did a show and I just saw a tsunami of negativity. Much of it led by media, who had clearly been played. And I say that because when we finally got the data from the government, which was released the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, which anyone who knows press and PR knows, you release data the day before Thanksgiving to bury it, because you don't want anyone to see it. But friends came, people who had been attacking me came out and shared openly that they had

been incorrect and there was actually a concern about this. And we today in America, we have limits on the amount of arsenic that can be imported with the apple juice. It shouldn't have been that hard, but I began to see the inner workings of how this game is played. I had a similar problem with GMO food labeling, and I wasn't taking a stance on the show against GMOs per se. It's a separate discussion.

I was just saying transparency. Allow consumers to know if the products are GMO. So just write on the label, GMO corn or whatever. And companies didn't want that. And yet every other Western country did that already. It wasn't like I was asking for this ridiculously crazy outlandish concept. It was already the standard in most other countries. We were the exception, clearly the outlier. And then I began to get attacked, not for that exactly, but for other things around

that. And that, you think that was really starting to come to a head around 2012, or that's when you saw that? No, this is now, by the way, this is going over five years of battles. Every year I'm fighting for another reason for something that doesn't seem that it should be that much of an argument. I mean, these are things that fighting for another reason, for something that doesn't seem that it should be that much of an argument. I mean, these are things that I thought were better for market. Don't you want to label your foods with GMOs?

If you disagree with me, come tell me why. They don't tell you why. This is what I'm pointing out. These battles happen behind the scenes. If they were to attack me directly on labeling GMOs, they're going to lose. Everybody wants transparency in that reality. Again, I'm not accusing manufacturers that the GMOs are bad for you. I might have been making a medical commentary.

I'm actually making an argument for transparency in the process. You're not going to win that argument. So you don't attack the person telling the story for the story. You attack them for who they are. And now all of a sudden, and I get clues here and there, they were, this is hilarious, they got 10 doctors, so-called peers of mine, even though the lead writer was the head of the cigarette disinformation program, cigarette smoke disinformation program for big tobacco in Europe.

The second author went to jail for Medicaid fraud. I haven't done any of those things here, by the way, so they're not really my peers. But they read an article to the Dean of Columbia asking for my ouster. I'm tenure faculty, you can't just fire me because you don't like me. So far. So far, that could change, we'll get to that.

You ask the whole point of giving someone tenure so they can speak their mind and have some job security. But the press published it before the dean got the letter. Now you taught me how that happens. And then in letter, they were complaining that I did a lot of bad things, including this GMO crazy idea that I had. And then I began to realize this is actually a very well oiled machine. It's a takedown. I, you know, because I bought ink by the barrel and published it, I'm on network television, I had a production team go out to the headquarters of these guys, which was a shell organization, There was no one there. And you begin to realize that you can get

past these guys. But I had a lot of resources, a massive show with a lot of people, smart people working hard for me. What about the people who don't have that? Which is everyone. Which is everybody else. And I began thinking, my goodness, these folks are, you know, if they're the only one putting their hands up, they're gonna get shot. And then boom, COVID came. When COVID hit, we saw firsthand what happens when in a time of tension, when the answers aren't that obvious and people start offering ideas that you don't wanna hear,

it's a problem. So I began talking to doctors around the world. There was Didier Rolte was the main virologist, paracetologist in Marseille, in France, and he'd had a lot of experience with hydroxychloroquine. So I was curious, could that work? Maybe we should study if that works. Then I find out we're banning the prescription of that medication in New York State. The governor of the state is banning the right of a licensed doctor to prescribe a medication.

It's never before happened in America. And there's not a real good reason for this. In fact, we weren't even willing as a country to study whether this worked. I'm not making the argument that it would have saved anybody. Even to this day, there's still debate over this because it was never actually studied in a way that was acceptable. And we saw a general move away from looking for treatments of COVID infection to only believing that the vaccine was the answer. And it's not that the vaccine is a problem. I was strongly supportive of the vaccine. We'll come back to when they're happening with this creation, but why wouldn't you entertain another thought process that might be perfectly valid? Hey, historically doctors treated the,

you know, prevent the gunshot wound, historically doctors treated the, you know, prevent the gunshot wound, but if it happens, treat the patient. Don't lament the fact that the bullet went through the heart. Fix the problem, put your finger in the hole, deal with the hemorrhage. And that mindset just wasn't acceptable. And I remember very vividly several months into it,

I was really upset because there was so much published data that the schools should not be closed. Right. And so I said it. Now, in retrospect, obviously I was right. But at the time, whether I was right or wrong, we should have had a debate about whether the open schools for America. That's for sure. The kids in Europe went to school, the kids in Asia went to school. Are those kids different biologically than Americans? So why would we only take our orders, we think, from special interests, teacher juniors, around these school openings and closings? Why wouldn't we, at least in our own

country, acknowledge that some states were doing better than others and they were having their schools open? This became a major battle. But I mean, the kind of vitriol that I felt personally, just by raising the issue, solidified, steeled me to the reality of where we had come. Where we no longer could have open discourse. We had Nobel laureates getting canceled. You know, we have people who have domain expertise in the area of COVID offering thoughtful suggestions about how to manage the crisis better.

We ought to be careful in dismissing those ideas. In the operating room as a heart surgeon, if I'm having an issue and someone else comes in who happens to have expertise in the area and offers me an idea about how to put a stitch or what kind of valve to use or a different technique for opening the chest wall to get in there, I'm at least going to hear them. I'm not going to have them escorted from the premises never to return because I didn't want their intrusive thoughts in my mind. There was a fragility around our policy that compelled me to want to eventually run for the

Senate. But it also, in many ways, highlighted many of the things we've been fighting for. In the Maha movement, the Make America Healthy Again movement, the ideas that are being raised are ones that came up on the show over and over again. And not just my show, they were coming up in many other places, but they never could get any air cover. They get smothered, suffocated, before they could sort of get airborne.

What's happened that I think is very promising is that we're at least now seeing some pushback on ideas about whether or not Florida is actually a beneficial thing to have in our drinking water. Should there be mandates around vaccines? You know, can we talk to the revolving door of our federal agencies and the agency capture that is perceived by some?

Why is the NIH not actively studying prevention with any kind of aggressiveness. It's just a trivial part of their budget. They're not doing it because they think other things are, curing this other illness is more important, which I do that too, if you want. But you have to study prevention because no one else will do it because there's no money in it. Companies aren't going to profit by studying how to not use their products.

Well, cure without prevention often indicates relapse as well, right? I mean, if the conditions are there to make the disease possible to begin with and you don't change that, then why is there any reason to presume that it won't recur? I know there are situations where it doesn't recur, but it's, you know, even that dichotomy between prevention and cure seems to be odd from a conceptual perspective. Jordan, I think metaphorically, if it may help, the issue of prevention is about the soil. We have to till the soil, fertilize the soil, protect the soil, use regenerative techniques on your biology to make sure that you're resilient enough to deal with illness and other insults to your well-being.

That's what longevity is fundamentally about. It's not about being made perfectly. It's about being resilient enough that when bad stuff happens, you can cope with it. And we have actively, in America, without intending so, I don't believe, but it nevertheless actively made it difficult for people to do the right thing.

We've chummed the waters with products that make bad behavior simple. Federal policies have over and over again subsidized products that aren't as healthy for us. And we, you and me, and our brethren have let the country down. Because the intellectual elite, the knowledge workers groups haven't been honest, or at least haven't been willing to challenge some of the fundamental assumptions we've made about our well-being. So we now have bad signs or bad conclusions from science being infused in the products

made by industry, which aren't in our best interest, wrap that in bad policy and then dish it to people, serve people with that. And that's also had an effect on the legacy media. Like we've got three things sort of in the air now that we're discussing simultaneously, and it'd be useful to see if we can untangle them to some degree. We have the transformation that you described on the legacy media landscape that started to take place around 2012.

We have the complicitness and the malfeasance and the silence of the scientific and medical community, let's say around COVID, but even more broadly on the scientific front. And then we have this emergent, make America healthy again movement that interestingly enough is being capped and now by the very person who has been pushing it most in the most extreme manner in the public sphere for the last 20 years. So these things are related in some way, right? There's been some massive shift in the last 10 years on all these fronts, and it's driven by something that's, it's driven by factors that are similar across all the areas.

And it's very difficult to put a finger on exactly what that is. I think some of it's, we talked a little bit about the fact that technological transformation, let's say on the YouTube side, has put a tremendous amount of pressure on the legacy media because YouTube basically brought the price of television production and dissemination to a much broader audience than was ever conceived of as possible, plus made it permanent for zero cost.

And so I thought back in 2003, I think I started putting my YouTube videos up, maybe it was somewhere between 2010 and 2013 when YouTube was still mostly for like cute cat videos. But I looked at it and I thought, you know, this is something, this is very weird because we have video on demand, it's free and it's permanent. Like that's, I thought, is that like the Gutenberg printing press?

Like, is this something completely different in a revolutionary way? Not only on the price side, but video is now permanent and indexable. Well that's like, what the hell does that mean? Well we're kind of seeing what it means. It means a radical shift in the way people communicate. There's that, then there's the fact too that basically during that same period, we became hyperconnected right with these. And that's a very interesting thing to think about that psychologically and even neurologically.

Now we're all connected. So things can spread much faster. Okay, so what spreads quickly? Well, do good ideas spread quickly? I think there have been good ideas that have spread rapidly and I think YouTube's probably been the best for that of all the social media networks because it facilitates long-form communication. But it's certainly possible that once you're all connected, pathological ideas, oversimplified, easily understandable

pathological ideas like viruses spread the most rapidly. And so that's driving this as well because we're hyper connected. And then there's the maybe there's the the effective policy. I mean, there was a legal change and I don't remember how many years ago in the United States that made it possible for pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to the consumer, right? And this was something, this is a policy that characterizes the United States relatively uniquely. And from what I understand, that means that 50% of the advertising budget for the legacy

media networks in general is now pharmaceutical company driven, and 75% of the advertising for the legacy news associations. So the legacy news shows. And so that means the pharmaceutical giant, pharmaceutical companies have a hammer lock on public communication apart from the, you know, emergent new media. So that's a lot like that's a lot of technological transformation in 10 years, right? I mean, that's stirring the pot in a major way. The question is, would it have happened anyway?

And I think bad ideas, they can be viral, but I think of them more like bacteria. They'll burrow under your skin, and if you don't expose them to light and oxygen, then they'll become abscesses and fester. The sores are painful, and they can kill you. And what I think technology did to a large extent is expose a lot of mediocre ideas to the reality of what happens when you try them. Because ideological movements sound great conceptually,

but when you actually put them into use, they don't pan out so much. And the motivation for the movement might be positive, but the results are not. I'll give you a concrete example, because I think it plays into what you're saying. Long before we had cell iPhones and YouTube or anything else, Ancel Keys went to Europe and did a seven-country study to look at what happens to people when they eat certain foods and what kinds of problems it causes with their heart. He happened to collect the data during Lent,

which of course skewed the data a bit and the local scientists didn't like it, but he brought it back. And because our nation was desperately looking for solutions for heart attacks, President Eisenhower had just had one, we had the data that a lot of young men were dying, they jumped at the possibility that a low fat diet

might be better for you, because that's what seemed to come out of this early data. Now, again, this is long before we had any technologies. That became the ruling dogma. Keys came back, he had allies, because of his allies politically supporting him and no one being able to challenge him, but successfully, because anyone who tried

to raise their hands and say something got taken out, we now develop a formal national policy to advocate for low fat diets. So low fat usually means high carb too. Somebody's gotta make up the calorie difference. So companies started making high carb solutions. Simple carbohydrates, high fructose corn syrup, unhealthy foods, which directly correlated to weight gain.

Again, this wasn't a conspiracy, it was- And diabetes. And diabetes, and heart disease, and Alzheimer's, and all the things that come out of Menovox syndrome, this array. But as you look back on the history of all this, which is only possible now because you have so many ways of telling the truth, and lying, by the way,

but you have ways of telling the truth, you look at things like the Minnesota Heart Study, which was commissioned to prove that this theory was right, and they never published the data. And years later, 15 years later, they finally are forced to publish it because it showed, proved that low fat diets do all the things we now know they do.

And they do not in any way help with heart attacks. So all that data was very easy to cover up, and you never know it was hurting you, and you think it was bad luck, you think you're gaining weight because you're lazy, or other people are gaining weight because they're sloths. You start making all these excuses about why we have gone in the wrong direction

without addressing the fundamental flaw, which was we're giving people bad ideas. And bad ideas lead to bad outcomes. You talk about SID, right? As the idea of an arrow heading towards a target. And if you hit the target, fantastic. If you don't, that's a SID. Or if you have the wrong target that you're aiming at,

you're definitely not gonna hit the right target. That's what we did. We aimed people in the wrong direction. And then we allowed industry to co-opt that process because it was easier for them to make those foods less expensive. And they were very much, they had a best interest in making sure that ideology stuck. So how do you turn that over?

A lot of physicians sacrificed their careers trying to do so and didn't succeed. What's allowed us to finally take these on in a very aggressive way and they're wonderful scientists now who are getting big enough that they what they say, you know, has gravitas and people hear them, listen to them, and act on them, is because they can get their word out through podcasts like this in ways that were never before possible. If I was trying to challenge someone

about the American Heart Association guidelines for cholesterol intake, the diet intake of fat, I couldn't do that. I mean, literally, I couldn't. Who are we gonna talk to? You walk into the learned organization where all the heart doctors are supposed to say what they think is important, no are we gonna talk to? You walk into the learned organization where all the heart doctors are supposed to say what they think is important,

no one's gonna listen to you. They'll dismiss you and push you to the corner. So the democratization of information has allowed us to challenge dogma that was incorrect. That I believe more than anything else, coupled with obvious errors during COVID, has allowed a lot of Americans now to believe that our country is not sick by accident. And by making America healthy

again, it's both achievable goal, but also one that will deal with our crisis. I'll give you a little bit of math here because when I was in medical school, I went to business school at Wharton because I was interested in healthcare policy, just these issues. Like how do you fix the game so that you actually get some benefits? And one thing you always track is what drives the big budget items. So in America, the big budget item that's stripping a lot of competitors away is the healthcare budget. It's $105 roughly, right?

Four and a half trillion dollars. Trillion with a T. It's a lot of money. 90% of the healthcare budget is driven by chronic disease. 90%. If we deal with chronic disease. And the most common chronic diseases are? Mederbach syndrome is the root cause of all. Describe that. Mederbach syndrome means your pancreas, it makes insulin, but it's unable to make it

in a way that allows your body to deal with the calories coming into your body. So the body reacts by doing things that are maladaptive. It'll deposit the fat in your belly, for example, in your momentum. Sounds like the momentum, but not the M. That fat tissue there was designed for our ancestors to store fat in times of feast, but you use it in times of famine.

Right, at the harvest. The harvest is a good example. So you didn't die in the winter. Good habit to have, which is why our ancestors had the uniquely effective ability to store fat. Right. It's is a good example. So you didn't die in the winter. It's a good habit to have, which is why our ancestors had the uniquely effective ability to store fat. Right. It's not a bad thing. Right.

Except if you're storing, if you have to go hunting, you open the fridge, it doesn't work because you're not consuming calories to hunt your food anymore. And so metabolic syndrome is a series of problems that occur because the fundamental process by which you consume and use energy is off. And people who happen to have a healthy metabolism live a lot longer, they don't develop heart disease and Alzheimer's and cancers and a slew of other problems nearly as commonly. And people have those issues with the metabolism of their blood sugar and inability of insulin to keep up, and as a consequence, lots of inflammation in the body,

including in the liver. All those complications drive most of the healthcare expense, at least half of the healthcare expense of the country. So that's very tightly linked to diet, and not exactly to caloric intake, but rather to type of diet. Yes, and people who are overweight have trouble exercising, they don't sleep well,

that's another building block of your health. And oftentimes, people overweight feel shame. Yes. Well, we've made it a moral issue. My attitude towards that has shifted a lot in the last 10 years. When I see someone overweight now on the street, I would say probably 15 years ago I was slightly more judgmental. I'm not a particularly judgmental person when it comes to people's health because it's

generally very complicated. But it was easy enough to think, well, if they just exercise more and ate right, they do fine. And then I learned that, well, I learned many of the things that you just described, you know, broad broaden my knowledge in that area and started to understand that these high carbohydrate diets were making people obese and that was as simple as that. Well, I read a study at one point that suggested that one soda a day is sufficient to cause

the obesity epidemic. It's true and let me explain that's really important. Yeah. Yeah, well that's nothing, right? That's not even much of a bad habit by all appearances. 160 calories. 160 calories. That's not the problem.

Your body is looking for nutrients. Your brain very wisely is disregarding caloric intake, only focusing on the nutrient density of what it's getting. That's what it uses to build muscle and hormones and brain and everything else. So when you take in a soft drink, your brain doesn't count that as food because it's not getting what it's looking for. And yet the calories still add on and the high fructose corn syrup actually sort of stimulates a bunch of processes that are also maladaptive, but getting full feeling satiated

is not one of them. And so we see this happening over and over again, where small little errors reproduce every single day. Yeah, well, that's the thing. But the converse is also true. Small things, small steps done right every day, all of a sudden life's beautiful. And that's why it's so painful for me to see so many of my brethren, other Americans, feeling ill, thinking it's their fault and thinking there's no way out. The nihilism around health is stunning. And I'm, these are focused on longevity,

wellness issues because there's so much opportunity there. You know, not just because we've got AI now that can customize recommendations for you, just exactly what you need, including when you hear the recommendation, because you're not always receptive equally, but we also have much better technologies that are available that can help you get on the right path. There's medications that in some instances make sense, but these are all crutches that fundamentally to get you to realize that you can do it, to empower you.

The person whose ultimate destiny is so tied to your own will, which is, Jordan, the messaging that you're delivering is so critical because if people don't think they matter, then they don't show up in their own lives. We have a kids foundation, which you've been incredibly helpful on, called Health Corps. It's based on the principle of the Peace Corps. So we go around the country with young college grads who, like the Peace Corps, would train them to do great things.

Instead of sending them off to Botswana to build dams, you put them in schools in America. In fact, here, where we're taping in Arizona, the Department of Education has given health corps a $5 million grant to go into 100 schools and build digital platforms to deal with this issue that I just discussed. Fundamentally, here's the problem. We can't get young people to practice anymore for sports. We can't get them to do their math homework anymore. You know, you can't get them to be respectful in class.

Why? Because they don't think they matter. Think about your life. If you're listening, think about your childhood. Someone told you that showing up would change the world. That if you actually studied math or became a doctor or nurse or construction worker, a union person,

if you did something with your life, that the world would be a better place for it. If you don't think that's true, Jordan, you're not gonna do your homework in school. And you aren't gonna go to practice because why would you bother? Oh, right. And so what we try to do more than anything else

is get young people to first off very narcissistically focus on themselves, their own bodies. You can be healthy, you can be cool, you can be a better mate for someone in the future, a better employee in the future, but no matter what, you are important. You can do great good things, you can do terrible bad things, but what you do matters.

So start focusing on what's in front of you. Show up in life by showing up in your school. So we're brought in to tell young people things through the lens of health that historically was told to them by their teachers and by their parents or just by society at large, by messaging. Because culture eats strategy all day long. You got a strong culture,

then you can make up for flaws in your strategy. But if you don't have a culture, who cares what you're being told to do? You're not gonna do it. Well, they're told the opposite now. I mean, they're really told, they're categorized by group, and that group can be race, gender, sex, whatever.

They're categorized by group. They're told that they're pawns of a tyrannical society, and that they have absolutely no agency. And in the boys' case, they're also told that if they have any agency, that's nothing but a manifestation of a detrimental power drive and that their play preferences are all wrong in school. And so I can't see how we could demoralize children more effectively if we'd set out to actually manage that.

I read a study again not so long ago that showed I think it was 43% of American youth feel that they had no agency in their life. Well, that's a hell of a thing to think when you're 18. Jordan, you go into the schools and you've been kind enough to be supportive of health course, you may have witnessed this as well. You talk to a 17 year old and the light's gone out of their eyes. It's just

blank darkness. They don't know what to think anymore. They have 15 different conflicting ideologies being torn. None of them are going to help them deal with the challenge of their life. Imagine all of us had those issues when we were in high school. Somebody put their hand out and said, Jordan, you can do this, man. It could have been priest in your church. It could have been a coach. But, it could have been a coach, but someone helped a little bit. That's what we try to do with Health Corps.

But there are other ways of getting that message out that aren't being used. And most importantly, we don't have the luxury of sitting back on our butts and wondering what happens next and complaining about this process. You need to pick up an orange, start rowing. And ideally you get someone across the hull from you you so you're rowing in straight line circles. But it's a reality that has, it's like an epidemic taken over like a brain worm our young people. But they don't want it.

They know it's wrong. It doesn't take a lot when you sit in the room to get a young person to believe in themselves. So what's Health Corps doing? Well, as an example, we will teach you about the fundamentals of health. So what I just mentioned is an example about soft drinks. But how do you message that to a kid? If I lecture them, like I just discussed these topics with you, I mean, they're not listening to me. I'm not cool to them.

I don't culturally identify with some of the subtle music taste that they have. I don't get the jokes all the time. So ideally, someone who's close to the age of them goes in there and say, hey listen, the man, the man wants to take advantage of you by selling you junk food that's not good for you. They know it's not good for you, but they're selling it to you because they make a lot of money. So don't be conned by the man. Now you've got a little bit of a thing going on. You know, it's me versus- A counterculture edge. Counterculture.

Now it's sort of cool for me to reject junk food and vaping and cigarettes. Now, you know, I'm actually better than that. Now we actually have studied this in randomized trials. We've actually gotten data to show that it works. Young people know it's not good to drink soft drinks and they don't drink as much soft drink, especially when women.

And then you've got to translate that to they perform better in life, which we're still studying. But someone's got to deliver the message to them. But that's the foundation. I use health as a crowbar to open them up to get into their bodies, the thoughts that I think they need to hear about how valuable they are. Because if you're the most precious thing you're ever given by your family is seen by you as being worthwhile, all of a sudden you're worthwhile. Oh my goodness, I got this incredible body and I got all these opportunities. Now I'm going to start paying attention and maybe get past all these thoughts that I was racing in my head that were taking me in the wrong

direction. And then we can use that as an excuse, a trampoline, to develop mental resilience. Because what I really want to do is workforce development. I want to get these young people to believe that they can enter American culture and help. And if they have the mental resilience to recognize that, that if they can change what's happening in their body, Jordan, they can change the world outside of it. If they can actually get that idea in their heads, you can't stop them. What's been your experience introducing HealthCorps into the schools?

What kind of response are you getting from kids? Jordan, I've raised with my wife Lisa, $90 million for the foundation. We've touched the lives of three million plus kids. We're getting large multi-million dollar grants from states and foundations. Of course, we raised a lot of the money privately as well. It costs about a dollar per year of life lived by the kids.

It's incredibly inexpensive. We can get nursing schools to give us their volunteer hours because nurses have to volunteer time in the community. Social workers do the same thing. People want to help. The thing that I found most uplifting when I was campaigning and I saw on the show as well is the average American thinks they can live their life.

They're worried about their neighbor. They don't think they're doing so well next door. But they're okay right now, generally. They can be better. They got this problem. They're being held back by that and the government, they definitely don't want around because government's really going to be useful to them in a positive way. But they-

It's an interesting approach to ask people about their neighbors. I read of a pollster recently who was doing that when he, when trying to predict the outcome of the election, which he apparently called correctly. People are more likely to, what would you say, maybe they're less guarded when they, when they're asked about how their neighbor thinks or how their neighbor is going to vote or how their neighbor is doing, for example. So, you know, you get some sense of their picture of the generic other, and that might be, yeah,

that might be an extremely effective way of gathering information. All right, let's go back to the legacy media issue and the MAHA nexus, let's say. So, in principle, now RFK is going to be running the show on the health front. I don't know what that's going to look like or how he's going to manage it. One of the fundamental problems I think that he's going to have to address, and this is an incentive problem, I mean if you want to make a system work properly, you have to get

the incentives aligned with the aim, and that's very difficult. It's something that behavioral psychologists specialize in. And one of the problems on the prevention side is that it's very difficult to give people credit for prevention. You know, if you go for a drive and you don't have an accident, nobody pats you on the back, you know, but you've prevented innumerable catastrophes if you drive, you know, 100 miles safely. You're not going to get credit for things that you do intelligently that stave off a

catastrophe that doesn't exist. And so it's very difficult to associate scientists, let's say, or physicians with effective preventative strategies, because the evidence that they've done something good is subtle and it takes a long time to make itself manifest. That's way different than, well, was it Barnard who did the first heart transplant? You know Barnard. He used to play basketball with him. Right, right. He was my father.

Right, right, I remember that. But he learned how to do the transplant at Stanford and Texas Heart, but because of our regulatory issues in the United States, he took the technology, flew back to South Africa and did it there. And did it there, yes, yes. Well, he became world famous, of course, for doing that. And that's not prevention, that's cure. And you can tag him immediately with the prevention. George, I lived this.

I was exactly what you're describing, taking incredible pride in what I could do with a scalpel and a stitch. Yeah, yeah. I could change hearts, I could put mechanical hearts in, I could now begin to change the valves. It's very dramatic and immediate. Unbelievable, we did shows in this, we had New York Med, which is a new show

that was filmed in the hospital that did very, very well, airing on primetime television. On the show, the Dr. Rosh show, we'd go into hospitals and show these dramatic moments. It's fantastic. Right, right, right. There's so many TV shows that have been successful, Marcus Well Beyond, the ER and down in-

House. House, there's a reason for it, because it's exciting. I don't think the issue of prevention is that you don't get credit for it. The issue of prevention is more about how do you create a system where it's easy to do the right thing? Yes. Well, that's the incentive issue, of course. And that's where I believe our government has been of very minimal value. Because if

the NIH was able to put some support behind looking at the actual tactics that might work, getting rid of the ones that are ineffective, reinforcing the ones that do help Americans, then we'll start to develop mechanisms to make our lives a little better. Ironically, there are differences in between different parts of the country and the health of our people. Just learning from that would be effective for us. But no private sector business is going to do that because they're not going to be able to pay their shareholders back for that invested money. That's something we as a people should do for ourselves. And that's an example of one of the topics for the the maha movement.

You know, we should, regulatory bodies should be responsive to us and should at least be able to explain why they're not spending money in a way that might make sense for the betterment of the average American. We also should not be directly misleading them. I mean, you chum the water by telling people to eat a low-fat diet. I mean, you eat only meat. You've lost weight, you're sharper,

you know, the rheumatoid issues are- Better looking. Better looking, your boyish good looks never better. You know, all those things happen, but it's not an accident. And the fact that we're not- It's also impossible to believe. Well, I think that's part of it.

Why is it impossible to believe? Someone long ago, because these ideas are not new, these ideas have been battled for decades, someone long ago should have been honored by at least hearing their ideas, and we suffocated them. Kill these ideas in their infancy. Do you think that, okay, so let's talk about something more radical. When you were talking about the NIH and these granting agencies, I thought about a conversation

I had with Larry Arn, who's the president of Hillsdale College. And Larry is quite the force of nature and Hillsdale is a remarkable institution, right? It's one of the few universities, legacy universities, let's say, which has maintained its appropriate function. They have a 1% first year dropout rate, right? The average is 40%. 1% is stunning. And it's a lovely campus and the students are very much on board and the typical student

there told me that 90% of their professors were excellent. And I asked like 15, 20 students, you know, and privately so they could actually talk to me. In any case, one of the things Hillsdale did was not take government money right from the beginning. And it's very interesting. It's like, I don't exactly know what to make of this

because in the beginning stages of my career as a researcher, which was quite extensive, because I published about 100 papers, and the reason I'm saying that is because I want people to know that I know what I'm talking about when it comes to discussing the research environment. And so I did research at McGill and Harvard and the University of Toronto, and that all went really, really well. The only fly in the ointment that entire time was the emerging power of the research ethics

boards which became, in my opinion, corrupt beyond belief and absolutely 100% counterproductive and woke. They were awful and they started out bad and they got rapidly worse. But something again seemed to happen somewhere around 2014. And the research enterprise, which was in the main, in my field, in psychology, relatively free of careerism and relatively free of corruption, like not everybody who was doing research

was a great scientist, but you can't expect that. And most research wasn't true, but you're going to have a lot of misses, but everyone, virtually everyone I ever met who was seriously involved in the research enterprise was doing it above board and ethically, and they weren't careerists. And also the scientific journals were trustworthy, and the granting agencies were, too. And then something twisted in the last 10 years, and I think none of that's the case now. I mean, Science, the greatest magazine in the world, greatest scientific journal in the world, and Nature have both become ideologically corrupt.

Scientific American is pretty much gone. I mean, that's more on the public side, but it's emblematic of the same thing. The replication crisis, so to speak, never shocked me because I never thought that most things that were published were true. That would be too much to hope for, but some things at least were true. Now I wonder, I don't see a pathway forward, a straightforward pathway forward to rectify the granting agencies. I mean, even 20 years ago, the typical scientist in the United States was spending one third

of their time writing grant applications that failed. One third of their time. That's insane. You basically sidelined 30, 35% of your researchers in producing paper that has no utility whatsoever. And things have got much worse since then because you have to be ideologically pure now to get a grant. You have to have your DEI statement in order, and that's the first order of business. And so do you think is that a rectifiable situation or was the trajectory inevitable if you have government finance research does it become corrupted by

government bureau government corporate collusion I don't know like I'm not really sure what think about that much of what the young people do is Mirroring what their professors and teachers are well, which is what they should be doing. They should be mirroring it That's the whole point. They're rejecting it They're rejecting it. They're rejecting it en masse because it's a failed ideology. And they're also realizing, to quote, paraphrase, George Orwell, who, as you know, was a journalist,

was sent up to the coal mines in Northern England and he quit after a few articles. And he argued that he thought the socialists cared about poor people. It turns out that socialists didn't care about poor people, they hate rich people. And turns out that socialists didn't care about poor people. They hate rich people. And so when the professors don't actually care about-

Worse, they hate successful people. That's even worse. But that's what you start to see. All of a sudden, the faculty who are leading these onslaughts of, you know, to revise the institutions, aren't, they're pretending, performative again, just pretending that they care about the poor patients who are being left behind.

They actually just hate the system. And if you're going to blow the system up, you better know what you're going to do next. Metaphorically to one of your 12 rules, you know, make your bed first. Just get the basics right. Telling a young student that he has to use pronouns to a person who's not going to appreciate that is the opposite of what you're going to go. Which is like 95% of people panicking. Which is like 95% of people, right?

Because that is not the highest concern of 95% of people, especially if they're going to a hospital because they're sick. And to have to, I can't really imagine as a clinical psychologist a worse way of demonstrating my, a better way of demonstrating my cowardice in the face of an ideological onslaught and the capture of my imagination than by stating my pronouns and asking for

them the first thing I do when I meet a client. I would never do that under any conditions whatsoever. It's absolutely preposterous. It's precisely announcing to someone, first of all, my ideological position, which you should not do, certainly as a therapist and I would also say as a physician. You're not to burden your patient, your client with that sort of information. You're not there to make a personal statement to them. You're there to listen to them.

And so you shouldn't be starting out with an announcement of your ideological position. And you're also telling anyone that who can think that you're too weak to stand up to the woke mom, which is not exactly something that's going to strike confidence in the heart of someone who's on their deathbed and hoping that you can help or in some sort of terrible crisis. Yeah, so this is well, so we continue to outline the problem and the solution that you've put forward so far, at least in part, is based on some faith

in the students themselves to see through this and put pressure on the institutions. But man, you know, what I saw as a professor, and the same thing I believe happened in the research enterprise overall, is the faculty retreated as the administration advanced. And I don't think that's my opinion because all you have to do is track spending on administration

against spending on faculty or spending on students. And you can see who won that battle. And it was 100% the administrators. And they pretty much had that in the bag by 2014. And then the woke mob took over the administration. And that seems to me, that's also what happened, what did it happen on the, what the boards, the editorial boards of the scientific journals?

Is that exactly the same thing? But this is cowardice, Jordan. This is the, our Hippocratic oath is for this. That pesky thing. The pesky thing is you read at graduation and that you're supposed to, you know, people have in their offices, right? You take care of your client, your patients, is number one always, you never compromise them.

You police your specialty or field because you have domain expertise, others lay people don't have. So I've got to call you out if you do something that I think is wrong. I have to advance the field by standing on your shoulders. So the people who taught me that I've got to do more than they did to make the field better. But the fourth thing you have to do, the civic responsibility of being a professional is to speak out on issues that are wrong.

And we have been cowards in organized medicine and in the learned arts. It's our job to take the bullet for the team because if all of us put our hands up, they can't take us all out. But they can definitely take you out one at a time though. But that's what we're doing. If it's one, and we did that for my, what I think has changed in, and I don't want to overplay it, but I'm sensing it over the last year. And that's what the Maha movement I think represented.

And now people put their hands up that if you mention the possibility that we're going to revisit some of these mandates, you don't get taken out summarily. People may still hate you, but they don't feel emboldened to shoot you because they're bullies. The government of Alberta made vaccine mandates illegal two weeks ago, right? They revamped the Alberta Human Rights Act. I think it's the Alberta Human Rights Act or the Alberta Charter of Human Rights. I don't exactly have that at my fingertips, but that's no longer going to happen.

And I think too, you know, one of the things that public policy people should have known. Now I have some sympathy for them because when COVID emerged, the politicians completely abandoned their responsibility and made the public health policy people who were willing, the experts on everything, and they ran the show and that just was completely inappropriate. It was a devolution of responsibility from the political. But the public health policy people who also, by the way, were very complicit in the Nazi organizations in the 1930s. So there are parallels to this historical parallels that are not fun. There are parallels to this, historical parallels that are not fun. Public health policy officials should have realized that any medical doctrine that relied on compulsion, force and fear was pathological in its essence.

We have seen, I think, the biggest consequence of the COVID tyranny is going to be the demolition of faith in the public health field. And maybe there's also an indeterminate spillover effect of that on the medical profession in general and then all the other associated professions that are under the broader rubric of helping professions in general. But it's also the case, it's not that surprising that individuals won't speak out. In 2016, when I annoyed the government by making some YouTube videos, I didn't really think they were going to have that much of an effect. It was more of an experiment on my part. I had three sources of income, three independent sources of income.

I lost two of them. I lost my clinical practice. And basically it became impossible for me to be a university professor or to continue with my research. And so, and then I've been fighting an ongoing battle for 10 years with my regulatory agency. And that's cost me more than half a million dollars.

And it's been unbelievably annoying, like way too annoying, very, very stressful. And so that's a lot to ask for people to speak out You know I mean it was hard to take me out because I had more than one Means of supporting myself and that turned out to work out very well But you know there are very few voices on the medical side or the psychological side in particular in Canada On the medical side or the psychological side, in particular in Canada, people contact me behind the scenes and there is the odd person, there's the odd nurse, there's the odd teacher who has said something, but it's also very easy for people just to write them off because

they're such extreme outliers, you know, and to tar them with some right-wing epithet, for example. So I can understand why people don't speak out. And I guess part of what all this has done for me is to highlight even more particularly the absolute miracle that any country anywhere ever managed to establish anything like a right to free speech. There's so many factors that work against it, which is why free speech of course doesn't reign in almost all the countries in the world. So what the hell did we do right so that it actually worked for some period of time in the West? What were the preconditions for that?

Well let's get into that. That is, as a good psychologist you're asking the most important question. As you know I'm Turkish of origin and when you go to Göbekatepe, Hatbele Hill, which is in southeastern Turkey, is the oldest known human civilization. And you see these big tea temples that they built there 12,000 years ago, and they're clearly religious in origin. These people, primitive as they may have been, had some belief in something bigger than them. There was something out there.

They had the audacity, actually, the sense that they were connected. That it wasn't just the material world around them. And I would argue that it's because they had that audacity of belief that they thought, hey, I can domesticate animals. If I trap those gazelles, I can actually do animal husbandry.

If I put these seeds in the ground in an organized fashion, put water on them, I can actually do animal husbandry. If I put these seeds in the ground in an organized fashion, put water on them, I can grow crops. And so it actually gave rise to human civilization. Abraham met Sarah there, by the way. It's not a coincidence. Something special happened there that allowed this to all take place. And as it began for humans, began to take over the world, who knows when that happened. We left Africa 60, 70,000 years ago. But again, something allowed us to go beyond the typical tribe size. The typical tribe is under 50 people.

Something connected us, a belief that we're all in it together so that we could get 500, 5,000, 50,000 people together and homo sapiens took over the planet. We killed off the other six species that for some reason didn't get that deeper. Yeah, it is an orientation to some kind of abstract, higher order, uniting good. There's no doubt about that. And that's, I think, where democracy comes out of.

It's fundamentally based on humanism. So let me quiz you. I may have shared this with you in one of our late night discussions. But this is something I think everyone who's listening could do. Quiz themselves, but also for people around them. You're standing on the side of the river and you see a stranger floating by. And they're heading towards a waterfall.

And they're obviously having trouble. And let's assume they perish if they hit the waterfall. And you've got a ring you can throw out there, rope, and save them. And then out of the corner of your eye, you see your pet, your favorite dog. The cute thing is it is, woof, woof, woof, coasting by this stranger. Who do you save? You only get to save one.

Oh, I'd take the person without a second thought. Most people in the Western world who are older pick the person. Most younger people pick the Western world who are older pick the person. Most younger people pick the pet. This is about humanism. You saved the stranger. Why? You don't even know the person. Young people say we have too many people. There are billions and billions of people. That dog is my dog. I love that dog.

We don't need more people. That dog, if he dies, will hurt me personally. So they save the dog. I'm not even trying to make a value judgment here. I'm just describing the numbers that seem to come back when this question is asked. Please, everyone, do it yourself. Ask that question of young people, old people. Let them struggle with the answer. But if we don't think that stranger is more important, then it's hard to have a democracy. Because without believing in humanism, the sacredness of that individual, that there is something bigger that unites us all, a

non-local consciousness, a God, you can call it whatever you want, that sees us all of having value and therefore worth listening to, then what's the point of having democracy? And that begins to challenge some of the assumptions we've taken for granted because America was, yes, it was created by modernists, but they were all interested in God, if not overtly religious. Well, this is a good time to give you this book that I think- As you know, and you're very kind of, you shared a draft with me early on, probably it was January, February, very early. And I remember going through it.

And I'll tell you right now in an unpatronizing way, this may be your most important work ever. And I was flabbergasted at the depth that you brought into some of these discussions. And I must say, it's nothing else. Most people read the beginning of a book anyway. When you get to the part about Cain and Abel, which I thought I knew that story. Most people think they know that story. And when you begin to explain what it was

that Cain did that was truly murderous, that really was the problem, all of a sudden they began to see parallels in modern society. And that's why the ability, and you've done this so brilliantly, to dive deeply into these archetypal stories. Stories that people used to discard

because, oh, there's old people who wrote up, wrote down dumb concepts. They weren't dumb and they weren't unrelated. They're desperately important for our time. Well, that's what it looks like to me. And I think I'm hoping that book is better by a substantial margin than the draft I sent you in January because I did a lot of work after that. And so I walked through, I think, basically 10 biblical stories trying to describe why

they're sequenced the way they are and what they actually mean. I am hoping that your comment is correct, that it's the most significant work that I've done. I think that might be true because Maps of meaning was very dense and academic and then the following two books were quite popular and more descriptive and helpful rather than conceptual. Practical. Yeah, they were more practical.

This book is also practical, but it's, I hope I got the balance between idea and practicality right, exactly right. It's a harder read than 12 Rules for Life, for example, though easier than Maps of Meaning. But the other advantage that it has is that most people still know these stories at least to some degree, right? So there's some essential familiarity that I can draw on, which is, of course, a culture that doesn't share stories isn't a culture. It's fragmented into subpopulations that share stories. There's no uniting narrative. There's no union, you know, in the postmodernists

claim, the fundamental postmodernist claim, actually, it's actually the defining claim of postmodernism is that there's no uniting narrative. And it's a completely pathological claim because technically we live in a hierarchy of narratives that stretch in principle up to the ultimate pinnacle, let's say. And there are uniting narratives at every single level. You can't just put an arbitrary cap somewhere and say, well, beyond this level, there's no uniting narrative. It's preposterous.

There's no way of doing that. And so I think the fundamental postmodern claim is intractable. And I think part of the reason the postmodernists have turned to the doctrine of power is because when you lose your uniting narrative, and that's something roughly equivalent to the death of God, let's say, then other competing narratives immediately emerge. And the three most likely candidates are sex, and of course that's what Freud concentrated on in such a revolutionary manner in the early 20th century.

Well, if it's not God, then maybe it's sex. Fair enough, like reproduction, like that's a fair proposition. Well, if it's not sex, maybe it's power. Well, then you get the Marxists and you get the postmodernists, most of whom were Marxists, and you get the totalitarians. Nothing unites us except power. And all friendships are power relationships, and marriage is a power relationship, and all economic relationships are power.

It's like, well, you know, you can make a case for that. Or you can say, well, there's no essential union, and we basically live in a nihilistic morass. And those seem to me to be the three competitors to the idea of what's highest and every single one of those competitors is self-devouring and pathological so The question is what's what rules that is the question what rules and nothing is an answer But man you pay a price for that answer. I remember calling you about two years ago and I but I

I've always been impressed at your ability, your resilience. And I was struggling with some stuff, and I asked you if you thought there was a God. And you paused, pregnant pause, longer than usual, and you said, there better be. And it was interesting to me to hear you say that because we're better off living like there's a God. I happen to believe there is a God, but you're better off living like there's a God.

And sometimes in life, if you go along and try to understand why there's such power there, it begins to bloom. So you begin to see it in different ways. I think there's been a shift in America quite dramatically in that people aren't willing to give it a chance. They're not willing to truly allow it to grow in their heart and to see if there's wisdom there.

They almost feel like it's a sign that you're a fool and you believe in a God. The big shift I would argue is, and I've seen some data on this, 30 years ago, a third of people believed strongly in God. A third of people weren't sure, but they definitely respected the people who believed in God and they wanted to be like them. They were struggling to actually be like them and they were having difficulty. And then a third of people were not religious, but they weren't disdainful either, they just weren't religious. That shifted now. And the middle group shifted. You still have a third that go to church all the time,

and a third that don't go to church ever. But the people in the middle no longer want to be like the ones who have found a faith. They actually are disdaining them. That's the shift that's happened in America, and that's a powerful group of people. Those are the people who, through the culture, should feel more comfortable, at least allowing the concepts that have governed human culture, should feel more comfortable at least allowing the concepts that have governed human culture for at least 12,000 years, but probably all 60,000, 70,000 since we left Africa, to rise up.

It's audacious, it's arrogant, and it's dangerous to ignore thousands of years of wisdom compiled by your ancestors. Well, you degenerate into a kind of, one of the dangers is the degeneration into a self-serving populism. And there's utility in populism insofar as democratic leaders consult their constituents to find out what they need and want. But the problem with the populist approach in general is that it's too short-term, it's too focused on only the things that you can understand during the span of your life, however long that has been. You know, there's an insistence in the biblical text that there's

two axes of orientation. One is interpersonal, to treat other people as if they're of divine value and to love other people as if they're yourself, let's say. But the other one is upward, it was to orient yourself to the highest possible good. Now the sum total of all highest goods, that's a reasonable definition of God. But you know, even in the biblical corpus, the reality of God is, what would you say, especially in the Old Testament, the reality of God is indeterminate, not least because God is in a category that transcends the real. And this is something that's very important to understand because the atheist claim is,

well, do you believe in God? But there's a, what would you say, there's a metaphysics in that question, because the atheist materialist definition of belief is an atheist materialist definition. And so what they're trying to do is to take the concept of God and reduce it to the reality of an everyday object, a table, atoms, something material and structured. And the God that's presented in the biblical corpus is ineffable. And that means that the reality of God isn't the same order of reality as the reality of things.

And that's not my inference from struggling through the biblical texts. Texts that's absolutely crystal clear, not only in the text, but in the tradition, that whatever the highest divine principle might be, it transcends the categories of time and space, and it's not bound by what's materially real. And so if your initial starting point is there's nothing but what's material, then there's no sense

having a discussion about value at all. But if you understand that you have to have a discussion of value because you have to value things to act, then you're, and you do. This is one of the points I tried to make in the book. The idea that we see the world through a story is an incontrovertible fact. It is being demonstrated in at least

six different independent disciplines. And it's not only true for our beliefs, let's say, that we live in a story, but it actually structures the very perceptions that hypothetically inform us about the facts. And I think this is a revolutionary realization that a description of the structure through which we see the world is a story. We live in a story. The postmodernists were right about that. And that's partly why we have this culture war. It's because the postmodernists were right about that.

Now their solution to that, their analysis of that problem was lacking, sorely lacking to say the least, and unbelievably self-serving and worshiping at the feet of power and hedonism as well, which is a very bad idea. You might say why? It's like, worship of power is self-defeating. You know, I outline the data from the chimp studies. Chimp tyrants, like human tyrants, tend to meet a very unpleasant end and early in life.

It's like, well, what happens if you play a power game? Well, then you're in the power game. And the problem with being in the power game is as soon as you're not the biggest kid on the block, you're not just dead. You're ripped apart and dead. And so there are things that you can raise to the highest place, power and sex for that matter, hedonism in general. The problem with doing that is that it doesn't iterate, it doesn't work. You can't do that with other people because they object. And

not only that, even if you do that with yourself, you'll defeat yourself in the future. So what I've tried to outline in this book is the idea that there are a radically limited number of self-sustaining and improving principles. And that's something like a natural law. It's something like there's a universe of games. Some of them are playable and some of them aren't. Non-playable games are much more common. Games that will defeat themselves that no one wants to play. Then there's a fraction of games that are playable.

So people will do them voluntarily and they'll iterate. Then there's a smaller fraction that iterate and improve. There's even a smaller fraction that iterate and improve multi-generationally. Well, the biblical stories capture the spirit of the iterated game that improves over centuries. And I think accurately, I think one of the cases I try to make in this book, you might say, well, what's the alternative to power? And that's fairly clear. Voluntary sacrifice is the alternative to power? And that's fairly clear. Voluntary sacrifice is the alternative to power, and that's why the biblical texts concentrate

on sacrifice. So what do you mean, what does sacrifice mean? What do you give up to be married? What do you give up to have a friend? What do you give up to have a community? If it's all about you, you give up nothing, but if it's all about you, you don't have a community. So obviously the community is predicated on sacrifice.

Once you know that, you think, okay, what's the sacrifice? Well that's the question. That's the same question as what's the nature of life? What's the nature of work? What's the principle of community? Like the example you gave with the stranger in the stream and the dog. What do you sacrifice the dog? Right your attachment to the dog your juvenile Sentimentality right maybe even your hatred. What if it's an enemy in the street?

What if it's the bully who made your life miserable or your dog? It's like, what do you do? You rescue the bully? Why that's a hard question? your life miserable or your dog. It's like what do you do? You rescue the bully. Why? That's a hard question. The answer to that is something like if you don't rescue the bully the world turns into hell. It's something like that and you think well that's not obvious. It's like well yeah that's for sure. It's not obvious but your conscience will tell you that. And so yeah, so how did we get into this? While we were trying to figure out what had gone wrong, you know, at a fundamental level,

and then we switched into this discussion of deeper things, yes. Add something to what I'm hearing, is that we all have a filter, because we can't process everything. Yes, that's the thing. I'm watching you, I could, I see the pink shirt that matches mine, but a tie that I'm not wearing. Great choice of shirts.

Thank you. But there's a lot that I'm, even when you speak, I'm hearing some things that you're saying clear to me. Yeah, definitely. Others feel like, you know, Charlie Brown, Lucy. Yeah. And so that's all of us do that. It's not even disrespectful, just some ideas will resonate with us do that. It's not even disrespectful, just some ideas will resonate with us. Yes. The story that I shared that I was told about the pet first, your pet, beloved pet versus some stranger, whether it be a good person, is a story some people will hear and remember for the rest of their life.

Others are getting that I didn't understand it the first time. Yeah. And there's a spectrum in between there. So I think a lot of our political differences are caused by that. We tend, not only we serve to different news feeds, I get all that, that's been said many times. But even if you were here the same news feed, your interpretation of it is very different,

depending on the stories that you believe and the story that you're in. And the stories that are at the foundation of the structure through which you look at the world. So in therapy, as you try to work with people like me and everybody else on the planet, I've been told that you challenge us with this concept of complementarity, which was originally a physics idea, Niels Bohr. The idea that you could have particle theory and wave theory and they could both be true. On the surface, opposites. Matter is a particle, matter is a wave.

But in reality, it's waves and particles, the particles act like waves, and so Niels Bohr could hold both of these concepts in his mind at once without breaking. You know, when Carl Jung was working out his principle of complementarity with regards to unconscious function, he was also having a dialogue with one of the world's most famous physicists. So in fact, one of Jung's books, which I think is, it's either Alchemical Studies or Psychology and Alchemy is actually a library of dreams that this physicist dreamed up at the moment. And he was one of the physicists who worked on the principle of complementarity. And at the moment, unfortunately, his name has escaped me.

Pauli. Pauli. Wolfgang Pauli. Yes. who worked on the principle of complementarity. And at the moment, unfortunately, his name has escaped me. Mm-hmm. Paulie. Paulie, Wolfgang Paulie, yes. This is, let me just share with folks at home. So this is so typical. We're in a conversation, Jordan is tolerating me. He wants to talk to my wife. He was just yelling out the answers to the questions

that he has in his mind that he can't articulate. So usually when we're together, I go to bed around midnight, which is late for me, because I'm a surgeon. You stay up with Lisa until dawn dawn debating Jung and other realities that aren't so obvious to others. Yeah, so the complementarity idea too is part of that does lay out the landscape of the dream because Jung's idea, for example, was that you'll have an ideological framework, let's say,

but it keeps things out. That's relevant to your discussion of this filtering mechanism. But there's part of you that keeps track of what you're not paying attention to, because you pay attention to very little and you don't pay attention to a lot. And if what you're paying attention to is misaligned, you need, what would you say, you need a repository of is misaligned, you need, what would you say, you need a repository of alternative potential conceptualizations and that's fleshed out in the landscape of dream and fantasy. Yeah, brilliant idea.

I'm certain it's right. It's maps very nicely onto the hemispheric theories. Part of the question becomes how do we realign Western society to at least begin to focus on things all of us believe are worthy of our attention Yes, and the stories that we're telling are ones of nihilism. Yeah of power of a power of evenism of a Patriarchy that nature worship we're replacing a humanistic. Yeah, with nature Well, even the dog rescue is an example of that, right? Because that's putting the the animal above the human in the hierarchy of values. You might say, well, I love the dog. It's like, you're missing the point.

You're missing the point. It's not about what you love. That's not the point. That's too focused on you. Why shouldn't it be focused on me? Well, the simple reason is if everything's focused on you, subjective identity. If your identity is radically subjective, no one is going to want to be around you, right? The degree to which any of us is tolerable to other people, let alone welcome, is directly dependent on how much of our own individual whim and power drive, let's say, that we sacrifice to the relationship. Obviously, we know that with children, two-year-olds can't do that. So they don't have friends. They're still too egocentric.

Three-year-olds start to learn to do that, and the three-year-olds that are expert at that by four are desirable play partners, and they're socialized by their peers properly for the rest of their lives. And now we're reverting, you know? We're telling all our young kids, it's like act like a two-year-old. Define yourself subjectively, right? It's about who you think you are. Well, it even begs a question, it's like what part of you do you think is you?

Right? Like, is it, it's your immediate hedonistic whim, that's you, what I want, what I feel, right? Well, no one's going to be able that's you, what I want, what I feel, right? Well no one's going to be able to tolerate you, obviously. They'll just walk around you, they'll find someone else. Why wouldn't they? No, I used to tell my socially anxious clients, suggest to them that when they went to a party, whenever they started worrying about how they were fitting in, that they flipped out to

trying to make other people comfortable. Right, because they couldn't stop, you can't tell someone to stop thinking about themselves, right, because that just makes them think about themselves more. But you can tell people to make other people welcome. And that takes them out of that realm of self-consciousness, and then they could draw on their own social skills. Many of them had social skills, not all of them.

Some people were socially anxious because they just didn't know how to behave, and that was a more complicated problem. But well, that all tangles back into the idea that the community is founded on sacrifice. This realization, it just flattened me, because one of the things I understood, I think, was that we have in the West, in the Christian West most particularly, have been looking at an image of sacrifice for 2,000 years without understanding why. Our European towns were literally founded around a sacrificial center, right? The cross, the altar, the cathedral, the town, the country. Why is the sacrifice at the center of that? Well, the answer is,

well, sacrifice is at the center of the community. It's like, oh, okay. Obviously, it has to be. Communities defined by sacrifice. Like a bear, it just does what it wants. There's no community of bears. It's only a community when you sacrifice. Well, so then that begs the question, what's the highest form of sacrifice? Well, we're going to wrestle our way through that question a lot sooner than anybody thinks, you know? And that's partly what this book is concentrating on.

It's like, what's the nature of the sacrifice that redeems? Even though you don't know it, that's the central question of your life. And there's actually an answer to that. Like, you see that in the story of Abraham, right? Because Abraham sacrifices Isaac, or is asked to. He doesn't. And there's a lesson in that.

And what's the lesson? If you offer your children to what's highest without reservation, you get them back. And that's 100% true because if you're the sort of grasping parent who protects them or who devotes your child to you, they're gonna run away. And rightly so.

But if you encourage them out into the world and ask them to pursue nothing except what's best, then they'll know you're on their side and you'll get them back. And of course, the atheist types, Dawkins is guilty of this, point to God's demand to Abraham that he sacrifice Isaac as proof of the superstitious quality of the Old Testament narratives and the fundamental malevolence of the God of, let's say, Jacob

and Abraham. And that's completely wrong. It's like parents offer their children up to what's highest if they're good parents. And then they get them back and then they establish a dynasty and that's actually what happens to Abraham if you tell the whole story. And so it was quite a shock to understand what that meant. And then to understand that that is what you do with your children if you love them. Who would have guessed that?

But of course that's what you do because raising children is about something. It could be about your child or it could be about what you want. That's not good. The latter one, that's really not good. Is it about your child? No, it's not. It's about encouraging your child to be good. That's what it's about.

Well, what do you mean by good? It's in relationship to something Well what well The highest possible aim and it is the aim that that our respect for free speech is predicated on it Is the aim that all of the freedoms that make the West what it is and a desirable place to immigrate For everyone in the world who votes with their feet. There's a foundation underneath that. And that, you know, we've been wrestling without today when we've been talking it through. When that foundation shakes, what? Everything shakes. Science, this is so interesting, hey? It was one of the things I found fascinating about talking with Dawkins.

Dawkins knows that the scientific enterprise is in trouble. Like he was hoping that if we switched to a kind of materialist atheism that science would flourish. It's like, no, I think when you knock out the religious substrate, one of the first things that goes is science.

It's fragile and unlikely to have a whole cadre of people who do nothing but pursue the truth and that they're protected. That was what tenure was for. That's very unlikely. What's the precondition for that? Belief in truth? Belief that the truth will set you free? Belief that you have to tell the truth. That's right. Even when it's at the risk of your career.

Which is why science came out of religion. Yeah, well that's- It was their faith-based traditions, because they put something above each and every one of us, implored us to tell the truth because we weren't reporting to you. Because smart people are really good at lying to themselves. Yes. In fact, the smarter you are... Yes, definitely.

The more effective you can put the truth. That's why the intellect is Lucifer, absolutely. And so we see that playing its role. I mean, the learned people who destroyed Russia and Cambodia and China, these were smart people. Yeah, yeah. Paul Pot, he got his PhD at the Sorbonne. Where he outlined his plan, much to the delight of the leftist postmodernists that taught him.

And then he went back and killed what, six million people? At least. And the skulls piled up where, he didn't illustrate that part with his thesis, but these are smart people who come up with these fantastical ideologies that are so destructive. But if the purpose of science is to find truth, someone has to hold you accountable. And we've all witnessed this because you get into a debate and people will cherry pick the facts that they like, which is the opposite of telling the truth, because you're entitled to your own opinion. There's more to hand off than said, but not to your own facts.

And we are intellectually dishonest about the data, the facts that we're using, which is rampant now. We're seeing more and more. If you go back and just look at all the manuscripts that are published, half of them are suspect, not minority. Half of them are suspect because people get rewarded not just monetarily, but with tenure, with pride and ego, and all those things that trump the truth.

And we're left with a deeper belief that the truth matters. The whole system begins to implode, right? The gyre begins to spin faster and faster. And as we crash land, the public is watching this and saying, I thought those guys knew what they were doing. And now I'm seeing them actually censor each other in a way that I wouldn't censor the guy who works at local deli.

I let that guy say his piece, so I can say my piece, and these guys aren't doing the same thing. Again, Nobel laureates being censored because you don't like what they're saying, reinforces a pathology that the public begins to appreciate. And I think that was directly correlate with what happened in this election. And that's why they make America healthy again, movement got traction because some of the things that are being said, there is no way that you'd be able to accept this. Even two, three, four years ago, I know because we were saying it.

And I'll give you a story. This just happened to me. So the debates around vaccines have gotten a bit louder. And please do not start off everyone by saying, oh, is anti-vax pro-vax? It's not about that. I had Bobby Kennedy on my show 10 years ago to talk about this issue. And I got, as usual, a ton of grief, but that was my job, I thought, to give people who deserve to have,

I say, their minutes on network television. And the first, I asked, are you anti-vax? Because everyone's telling me you're anti-vax. What does that even mean? And I opened this book, and the first line of the book, the first line was, I'm not against vaccinations. Right, right. And then he said, if you're actually one of the few people

who reads the whole book, go to the last line. I'm not against vaccination. So I thought, my goodness, you know, what I've been told about this guy might not be right. So then I started getting into it a bit more. And one of the issues is hepatitis B vaccine. Now do you know much about the hepatitis B vaccine? No, this is, I love your psychological interpretation of what's going on here.

So this is a vaccine that's effective reducing the incidence of a very bad illness called hepatitis B that destroys your liver, leads to liver cirrhosis and transplantation, kills you. You don't want to get it, you can pass it to others. It's generally passed through sex, prostitutes, high risk activities and intravenous drug abuse.

Those are the main ways that it gets passed. We vaccinate, we mandate vaccination of every newborn as soon as they come out of their mother's womb. I mean, like that day, it's the first thing that happens. So, the doctors look at that and say, well, geez, you know, I just described how you get hepatitis B. I mean, this child's not gonna engage

in any of those activities. It's true the mother might have hepatitis B, but you could test for that. And that'd be a very tiny fraction of people. Small, but it's there and I understand that theory. But there's a lot of women who might say, well, test me. If I don't have hepatitis B and my child's not going to start taking drugs, maybe I don't want to inject them the first day of their life. You can't ask that question. So this weekend, I'm at an event and a woman who's, I'm speaking, so

I deliver a little bit of this message and a woman comes up to me afterwards and she says, I'm a doctor and I'm a little alarmed by what you said. And I said, well, what part of both of you? And she said, well, you know, I just had a baby and I vaccinated the baby. So I, you know, I think it's helpful to have for them to have the hepatitis B vaccine. So I said, I know you vaccinated the child, you allowed the vaccination, but do you still think that it really was helpful to have it the first day of life? Could they have had it when they were 10 or 12 or 15 or 18? Because I vaccinated my kids, but they were about to enter into college. There was actually a possibility they might get exposed to it.

And I saw the wheels turning and the panic in her eyes. And then she said, well, these sit safe, which is a unfortunate comment to make, because I'm not gonna argue that it's safe or not safe, but if there's no value, then I don't want to even ask the second question. She was going through something that I think many Americans are suffering from. Because she realized that she didn't really understand this and had taken the advice of the experts, she couldn't acknowledge the expert advice might have been wrong.

Yeah, of course. Well, there's also another psychological fact that you're running up against there, which is that we rapidly bring our beliefs in line with our actions. People think you believe and then you act. It's like, well, some of the time, much of the time you act, you watch yourself act, you draw the conclusions about your belief that your actions indicate, and you bloody well stick to those beliefs. Well, why? Well, you've already committed yourselves to them behaviorally.

So this physician that you're describing, she had a real conundrum at hand because it wasn't a mere abstract issue for her. She'd already vaccinated her baby. So if she's wrong, then she did a bad thing. To her own baby. Yes, exactly. Right. On its first day.

Right. Well, you know, you could imagine the evidence would have to stack up pretty high before she's going to be willing to swallow that bitter pill. That's why I think when it happens, it'll be a tsunami. Until now. Maybe it's already happened. I think it's starting, which is why I believe it impacted the election so powerfully. And I know in Pennsylvania that it did.

It made a very big difference. We were actively involved there. The Maha movement, per se. The Maha movement, per se. Question. It took a lot of people who started to feel the kind of anger that motivates you to vote when they began hearing these stories. Because you eventually, maybe that position now several days later is having this epiphany,

you at some point have to deal with the fact that you may have hurt your child. And that makes you really unhappy. That biomechanics, the basic biology of- Well, it's worse too, because you may have hurt your child, and you did it because you believed the experts. Right, so now there's lots of rats that crawl out of that nest, isn't there?

It's like, well, why did I listen to them? And are they in fact experts? Right, and so we've certainly hit that period of questioning in our society in a very large way. And when you mandate it in a way shames the new mother who just went through a lot of stuff and is in a vulnerable position. That's for sure. And when she is shamed by the nurse or physician

taking care of the baby about the fact that she must not love her child if she's not willing to follow the state law with mandates vaccination, and isn't able to ask in that confused moment, a couple extra questions, they take that person. That's for sure, and they will not forget it.

And we're starting to see that in lots of other areas. If fluorinating the water is not really, really important to do for the betterment of society, then you start to feel that you may have been passively allowed something to happen that put your family at risk. So there better be a good explanation and good reason. And there might be. I'm not even saying that these issues are settled.

The science is being debated and it should be. But you couldn't ask the questions. And now more and more GMOs, pesticides, herbicides, glyphosate, is it really a problem? What are the toxins that were along in our environment that don't seem to be allowed in other countries? Is it true that we have that much plastic in it? Does it really matter? Are you feeding me a lot of junk food and subsidizing it so it's, you're making, you're

chumming the water basically, so I'm going to go looking for it and now I'm putting weight on it, it turns out it wasn't all my fault. That kind of stuff gets people, because it's very personal, to start to think differently about who's on their team. And I believe the reason this issue is so critical is because you have an opportunity on the Republican side to take a generation of people who didn't have strong sentiments. Remember, half the people don't vote. Half do not vote.

If some of those people all of a sudden begin to think, you know what, I'm believing that this Republican party cares about issues that I care about, they start to become Republicans. And that's an existential threat to the Democratic Party because this should be an issue that Democrats embrace. So if they both embrace it, you actually start to get change. Let's turn our attention to the political scene again on the daily wire side of this. We've got another half an hour. I think that would be a good conversation. I'd like to lay out, I'd like to hear more about your thoughts regarding the Maha movement in general, how you think that could go right and how you think it could go wrong.

Underneath that, there's obviously this broader discussion of this massive shift in the political landscape that has taken place that we don't understand. Because at one level of analysis, it's the Republicans defeating the Democrats, but Trump, Kennedy, Gabbard, Rameswamy and Vance, those are very strange Republicans, right? First of all, most of them were Democrats. So I'd like to delve into that a little bit.

So all of you who are watching and listening, you can follow us on the daily wire side for another half an hour and we'll dig more deeply into The possibilities that are going to be laid out in the coming months and years as this radical shift Propagates itself through the political system. Thank you very much for your for talking to me today And also I should say too. thank you for interviewing me back in 2018. You know, you, I've had very few American in particular mainstream media interviews, like I can certainly count them on the fingers of one finger really. So, you know, that was quite, seriously like it's, you know, it's fine and it's fine, but the reason I'm bringing that up isn't to bemoan the fact

because it hasn't mattered that much, but it does also highlight the degree to which you took a risk and very early on. And so I definitely appreciate that. Well, if I can add one thing to that, right? Part of the reason I'm launching my podcast is because of what happened after the interview. And the interview went two hours and 42 minutes. I'll never forget it because it was so ridiculous that I would have talked to you that long.

I loved it that much. Lisa and I spent weeks preparing for it because you were explaining things that were so fundamentally important for folks to hear all over the world. And so I do the interview and I think, ah, it's too bad it's so long because people aren't gonna listen to it. More than five million people have listened to a two hours, 42 minute interview,

which means in my mind there is an appetite, a voracious appetite if the information truly is life changing. And so it highlighted to me that although there are many benefits of network television, reach, obviously, you know, you can- Uniform it for that matter. You can begin to get people to think, you know,

similarly around important issues, particularly valuable when we have crises like COVID. But if you want to go deep into the kind of topics that change your life, it's nice to take those little sparkly ideas and go deep with them. So I first, thanks for coming on and trusting me to host you, because I know it was a difficult time, but also for awakening me to the possibility that we could talk about stuff with a lot

more depth than ever thought possible. Yes, well, we can also discuss that on the daily wear side too, because I'd also like to discuss the, what would you say, well, expand on exactly the distinction between what's happening in the new media world, let's say, and the legacy media. We can take that apart in some detail. So infinite bandwidth, right, and permanence, those are radical changes, low cost, and they do change the dynamics of the social landscape in ways that we're barely beginning to understand. And thank you very much, sir.

God bless you. You bet, man. Good to have you here.