The Megyn Kelly Show - Dr. Drew Pinsky on COVID Hysteria, The Rise of Narcissism, and Marriage and Parenting | Ep. 141

Episode Date: August 6, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Dr. Drew Pinsky, host, author and addiction medicine specialist, to talk about the destructive effects of COVID hysteria, vaccine mandates and passports, Dr. Fauci's poor messaging, Gov. Cuomo's narcissism, Big Tech censorship and disinformation, diagnosing the post-pandemic mood in America, marriage and parenting (and drugs and alcohol), stoicism, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. I'm Megyn Kelly and happy Friday. Today we've got Dr. Drew Pinsky. You know Dr. Drew, he is a doctor of internal medicine, he's an addiction specialist, and he's a superstar. You've seen him all over television and podcasting, the internet and so on. Right now he's hosting the Dr. Drew podcast. He's also co-hosting the Adam and Dr. Drew show. Did you know that Carolla and Drew are still together?

It's an uncensored, nothing off limit, limit show about where they take calls about sex, drugs, rock and roll, you name it, even Love Boat. And then there's Dr. Drew After Dark, a modern day love line, which is where I first saw him and where he became a star back in the day, where they'd answer questions about people's love lives. He and Carolla, it was so fun. Anyway, so he's got all sorts of thoughts. And we're going to talk about so many interesting things. Several of my staff just popped on after this interview and said, I love that. He's got to be regular. And I agree with that. I'd love to have him as a regular because he can talk about anything.

We spent a lot of time on COVID and how isolated people are feeling. And do you have anybody in your life who feels a little crazy right now, thanks to the COVID lockdowns and a year not talking to people? Doug and I have seen this with some of our pals in New York. Like, whoa, whoa, what's going on? We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about therapy. We're going to talk about drugs, marriages, kids, drinking, pornography, you name it. We got into it and I really enjoyed the whole thing. It was sort of an emotional journey and how the country right now has moved from narcissism into histrionics.

That was a good part of the discussion. Anyway, you're going to love it all and love him. And we had a little fight about Dr. Fauci, which you'll enjoy too. Dr. Drew's awesome. We'll get to him in one minute. First this. Dr. Drew, how are you? I'm great.

How are you, Megan? I'm so well. I'm so excited to talk to you about many topics. And let's start with the one of the week. What the hell's wrong with Andrew Cuomo? Well, I mean, all roads lead to narcissism these days, so I don't think he's any exception. What's extraordinary to me about people that take a certain position, the blind spots they have in their own personal behavior, where, and this is something we see a lot these days, where a lot of the consternation out in the world is because of projection, and something called projective identification. And so you see bad parts of yourself out there in the world, and

that's where you attack it. And then you don't see it in yourself. And certainly that's the case. You know, we the again, people talk about him as being what tone deaf. Right. He didn't get it. And he shows that video of himself kissing everybody. I kiss everyone. My mom kissed everyone.

My dad kissed everyone. He forgot the part about my mom and dad shoved their hands up somebody's blouse over their bra without their consent. I didn't see that in the video. I didn't see that either. But but but to be fair, you know, it's so funny. This has come up right now. My daughter and I have just written a book about consent. And she's a 20 something woke person. And she has her perspective on this and kind of expanded my understanding of of consent. And one of the things that she took issue with was how family members, you know, encourage children to be boundaryless with other family members, like go kiss your uncle, go without considering what the child is experiencing, which is part of the consent process. And so to, there's all kinds of things families do that are sort of, I don't want to use too strong a word, but quasi-pathological that have adverse impact on kids.

And that very phenomenon is what we saw on display in full throttle on that video. So it really wasn't his parents' fault. We can blame Mario Cuomo. Look, I mean, to be fair, physical abuse of children was endorsed for many generations. And this is not OK. We know it's not OK. And yet cultures have endorsed it for a long periods of time. But what do you make of it? I mean, I'm genuinely curious what Janice Dean was on the

other day and we were talking about him, about Cuomo. And I've had this conversation about Harvey Weinstein as well. And the general belief about sexual harassment is that it's not about trying to get action. It's about power. It's about, you know, sort of seeing how small you can make the woman across from you or the gender roles could be reversed. And I just wonder, I think in most cases, that's probably at least largely true. I just don't know about him and getting the executive assistant against the wall with the hand under the blouse allegedly and grabbing the bottoms of random women and feeling up the boobs of some woman who waited to see him on a rope line. I genuinely am curious, what would make a man in his position do that? Well, I'm going to speculate. And let me

push back on the power small diathesis that you bring up there. I do believe in the strongest terms, that is what a woman who's the object of this experiences, because her motivational systems that she can't experience in any other way. And it is such a profound violation of her personhood, both her physical personhood and her sort of the self-respect that she deserves. Dignity. Dignity. So no doubt in my mind, that's what a woman feels. I don't think that's a matter of experience.

Look what happened to men as they age. When they get more demented, they get more like this. They're not thinking about power. They start grabbing. And that's just in our system. And if you feel entitled to gratify that BS in motivation, that is, you know, we have men has all kinds of bizarre aggressive impulses. That's what people are talking about when they talk about toxic masculinity. This is what they'd like to men to get under control.

We'd like to encourage men to go ahead and keep that under control because you guess what? We think better of you. You can, but that is in us as a motive, not us, many men as a motivational state. And they're just gratifying it because they can. And to that extent, there's a belief that the woman wants it. Do you think for a guy like, like, oh, she wants it. So this random person wants me to feel up her boots. Megan, it's me. It's me.

Of course she wants it. And that's the power piece. She's attracted to me because I'm this powerful, virile man. Look at me. I mean, he has made, he and his brother have made references to those things about them. And it's gross. And listen, you mentioned Weinstein. Weinstein, I was really listening to some of the things he said very carefully. And it was uncanny the way he used the same defense strategy in Cuomo's pace. It was this is my culture. This is my family in Weinstein's.

I don't remember. He said this in great detail. I grew up in the 70s on Long Island, and this is just what we did is indoctrinate. We thought this was right. And I would even go one step further. This is gross, but this is true. Back in the 70s, I don't know if you can you were you conscious then can you remember i was in a stroller but i was around well let me tell you

something that happened that no one has been talking about and i recall it because i was an adolescent at the time the young males were told listen men and women they are exactly the same sound familiar we're doing the same thing now they are exactly the same. Sound familiar? We're doing the same thing now. They are exactly the same. And we have to unleash women from the oppression of the past. They have the same sexual urge as you do. And your job is to bring that out, to be as aggressive as possible so they don't have to feel responsible for unleashing this repression that they've been put under. This is what the young males were told.

And then you take a toxic environment like he was in, and now it's on. Now it's on. And the problem is, it's disgusting because we then don't tell them to think about the behavior and educate them to, hey, stop. No, none of that was okay. I understand you were 17 and reared on that. None of it's okay. And they just stay with it because they can. Now we're back to the power thing again. Now they can't. And that's where the power figures into it. They don't want to see us legislate away, right? Like any sort of pursuit or pushing past a woman's initial, you know, I'm not sure. And then, you know, I just sort of think that's playful and fun.

And that's but then couples have to figure out where the line is, right? Like, no, no, generally does mean no. but sometimes it means like, well, ask again. You have to, you have to differentiate for men this, this, um, dance versus aggression. One is not non-aggressive. It's a, it's an art form that you're talking about, which is it's okay to show interest and it's okay to show a lot of interest. It is not okay to violate boundaries and be disrespectful, period. And we're talking about outside of the work setting right now. We're not talking about a boss over a subordinate. Correct. And this is another thing. So whenever there's a power, whenever there's a power circumstance, let's say in the workplace and let's just use the workplace.

And this is not exclusive to the workplace, but it is certainly most commonly in the workplace. The people with power are responsible for the people beneath them. Their job is to hold boundaries and take care of those people, not to exploit and, you know, and violate boundaries. It's not different. And why I have a lot of heated feelings about this, than a physician taking advantage of a patient, right? It is a terrible problem. And here's the really disgusting part about it, let's say in a patient-physician relationship. The patient that is going to try to violate those boundaries is precisely the patient who had been abused and is attracted to these sorts of circumstances and explicitly need the boundaries held in order for their mental health to improve.

As soon as you violate those boundaries, you are engaged in a traumatic reenactment and you're just putting that person in an endless cycle of dysregulation. You think there's a fair amount of doctors who do that, who cross that line with a patient? Historically, there's been. I don't think so much now, but historically, for sure. Do you ever have a patient come on to you? Oh, it's a common thing. It's in the psychiatric setting. And in fact, that's why you don't ever go in a room alone.

Because not only does that happen, but it also happens that they can distort what's going on if they've been previously abused and sort of report something that just didn't happen. So you always have to have other eyes in the room. But therapy is always a lot. I don't. So I don't do individual. I would do the kind of therapy you do in a hospital, in a medical unit. And so I would bring a patient into the room with my nurse. And I wasn't doing long-term therapy with anybody. Occasionally. There is that sort of, I think there's that

general thrill of, um, I don't know. I remember when I was in law school, there was this very geeky professor. I mean, he, he probably weighed 120 pounds. He wore a little bow tie. He wore a sweater vest. He had had no hair and i thought he was hot i was attracted to this guy what's going on here really and it was just he was so smart he was in a power position over me and there is sort of this like jones that can come from that that relationship where you're sort of the peon and the other person is in power over you and has control over in this situation your grades um and i don know, it's always exciting when you stimulate a man based on your intellect, right?

Like if you're having fiery intellectual exchanges, that can be an aphrodisiac. And to this day, I think to myself, oh my God, if this guy ever knew that was sitting in his class. But the bigger issue is how old were you? 21. Okay. Technically, I mean, females are a little more, you know, developed at 21 than males, but, but let's call you at least young adult, if not adolescent.

And what adolescents need to complete their development is adults to take care of them and maintain boundaries so they can develop a sense of boundaries around themselves. So impulses like this can become playful and not destructive. See, I mean, it's just so it's again, a teacher taking advantage of the student, worst thing, just as bad as a, as a physician and a patient, it violates your needs in the moment. So we never acted on this. He had no attraction to me, none whatsoever. Sorry, I can tell, although I was looking for it. But so nothing ever happened. But are you saying if he had acted on, if he had, let's say we had some, some night in the sack together, that that would be a me too situation, even though I wanted it? Oh, 100 percent. That would have been anathema to your development through young adulthood, anathema.

And it would not only have been a me too, because whenever there's a power imbalance, you have to be extremely careful. This is one of the problems if somebody is a celebrity and wants to date anybody. There's already a power imbalance and somebody can easily turn back and say, well, I was sort of blinded by this. He took advantage of it. Yeah. Yeah. You have to be super careful. Fascinating.

Well, I mean, these poor celebrities, they can't wind up having one night stand with anyone. No, I don't mean that. I don't know if you know Mark Geragos at all, but Mark and I went to high school together. We've sort of knew each other since we've been friends ever since. And our sons have been friends. Celebrity lawyer. Right. And he was telling me that he has paperwork for every one of his celebrity clients, that if somebody comes in their house, somebody dates them, if somebody is going to go further with them, they sign paperwork before they do. Yeah. Well, you know, I was talking to somebody who I guess I shouldn't name the baseball player, but a very, very famous baseball player. And he knows that baseball players team, like the people around the guy. And the story is that if you hook up with this baseball player as a young woman, upon entering the apartment, there's a guy standing there with a video camera saying, are you OK? Are you drunk? Are you of your own free will? Blah, blah, blah.

And upon exit, the same thing. Now, is it bulletproof? You know, no, but it's very helpful in staving off frivolous lawsuits or claims, et cetera. That's right. Well, what's crazy to me is the boys at South Park, Matt and Trey, are like, they must be time travelers or something. Because they predicted this kind of thing about three, four years ago. PC Principal. And Trump's presidency, didn't they? Also Trump's presidency. Everything. You name it. They previously predicted it.

They are oracles. How they're able to do this i don't know i wonder what's coming next but uh yeah a hundred million a billion dollar deal i think they just signed a billion a 900 million dollar deal so that's what's coming next with with uh comedy central viacom um we have the viacom yeah it's so funny uh i know that uh seth mcfarland had something extraordinary too and i and he was a friend of mine. I haven't seen him in a while. But I just said, look, I don't care what they're paying you. It's not enough. It's like you are.

But can I say something about that? Go ahead. Seth MacFarlane. So I saw the news yesterday. He said something about being with Fox. He's with Big Fox, not Fox News Channel. But, you know, it's obviously still Murdoch. Something like this needs to be this needs to end in divorce.

This marriage is not working. He doesn't like the relation to Fox News Channel. And he he was basically complaining that, you know, this is about the about the ownership structure and the relation. And I have no tolerance for that. The same way I have no tolerance for James Murdoch running around besmirching Fox News. You you can't make your gazillions off of the entity. And then once you have them say they're disgusting, I am horrified. It's like James Murdoch is sending saying nasty things about Fox while he rides on a jet paid for by Fox News in it from his mansion paid for by Fox News

on his way to his yacht paid for by Fox News. So spare me if I don't have my little violin out for him and others, you know, who profited off of the Fox empire. And now just want to say they're disgusted to have made a mint off of it. We call that hypocrisy. It's just hypocritical. You don't, you don't get to, to capitalize on their, what they're providing, uh, and own it and then complain. It's disgusting. You don't want anything to do with it. If you want anything to do with it, spin it off. That's fine. That's all cool. Um, yeah, so it is, it is disgusting. You don't want anything to do with it. If you want anything to do with it, spin it off. That's fine. That's all cool. Yeah.

So it is interesting. I did a nightly newscast on Fox 11 here in Los Angeles. And every time I talked about what I was doing, I'd have to say, not Fox News. I'd have to think Family Guy. It's that Fox. It's weird. Just the mention of Fox News raises tons of feelings to people. Yes, it does. I'm aware.

Yes, I've heard that. Your reference to the 70s brings something up for me. There was this dust up on Twitter this week. It wasn't big, but it did sort of catch my attention. Some reporter sent out a tweet saying, maybe we should have like soft core porn on the internet made available for teenagers because right now all they can access and they are accessing it is hardcore porn. It's very damaging. Well, the internet unleashed hell on this woman.

And then then another organization came out and said, no, but seriously, maybe we should have that. And now they're getting pummeled. And I agree with the pummeling. Right. I totally, I do not support that idea at all. But I went to this education seminar for parents of young boys. And I have two boys, I have two boys and a girl. My oldest is about to be a 12-year-old boy. And they said at that seminar, I'm trying to find my stats here, that the vast majority or the average, the average 12 year, the average boy sees internet porn at age 11 for the first time. It's actually because of, when was that seminar? It was just one year ago, right before the COVID lockdown. It appears that because of all the distribution of those tablets to kids to be educated at

home, that has been pushed back maybe a year, maybe more. My Lord. Yeah. So I'm worried about this as a mother. Yeah. I know. It's like when I was, when you and I were kids, when I was in the seventies, I remember the first time I ever saw like a penthouse and there was this clubhouse that we always

to hang out in. It was fun. I mean, we just go in there and like have fun and talk. And one day there was a dirty magazine in there, quote unquote, dirty magazine. And I remember, you know, my eyes were like silver dollars, like, holy cow, I'd never seen a female body like that. And then of course they had penthouse forum, which I was like, this, this is too much for me. I was little. Um, so it happens. It's not just because of the internet that young kids get exposed to the stuff. But with the internet, it's ubiquitous. It's so easy to stumble upon. And it's so graphic.

So what's your advice to moms like me? We have the controls and all that on there, but that's not going to stop it. All those parents of the 11-year-olds who are averaging into that number probably have parental controls on. And your kid has access to somebody's phone somewhere that doesn't have them. Yeah. It's a problem, right? And we don't even know the full impact yet. I have a personal theory that for males, things they see from about 11 to 14, sort of in that window, visually, things that they see that are intense become preferences. And so I don't know what that's going to do to them in terms of what they think about and want to do with female peers in their adult life. So there's, that's a concern.

Number two, it's overwhelming and traumatizing to kids to see explicit stuff like that. And it adds to emotional dysregulation and problems trusting and confusion about closeness. That's a major, major problem. And then in terms of what can you do, there's a big problem that is a cousin of this, which is sexting, which also begins in young adolescents and is a crime in most states. In most states, if you ask for it, go ahead. I was just going to say that this is one of the points that they were making at the seminar I went to where they were saying even to see it. So if your son or daughter, for that matter, gets sent a sext, just it being on their phone

can be a crime. And so everyone needs to make very clear with their kids that stuff comes in. You don't even look at it. All you do is give mom the phone and let mom or dad handle it. So it's requesting, sending, receiving, looking, sharing with your peers, each one of those is a separate felony crime. And there are certain states that will go after that if the parents are upset about what happened. And even if you didn't want it and sort of inadvertently, lives have been ruined by that. So kids need to understand that that happens in some states. And that maybe that's a way into the conversation about how serious these issues are. I've always felt that, you know, I think this is excessive, but it's this opportunity to talk about these things.

My friends that are psychologists, one woman in particular that I interview on my streaming show, which I do, you can see at drdrew.tv, I just interviewed her and she runs an academy on how to do this and how to want. And with her kids, she allows them one hour a day on their phone. That's it, period. That's it. And she's been able to maintain that. And she's scared of that even. So people that have seen the consequences have no difficulty maintaining strict boundaries around it. It's hard when you're just the general parent. You don't really, you sort of trust your kids and you, they tell

you that they can't function without it and you believe it. It's a, you can't function without your phone. It's, it's a constant struggle. And I think more than anything, we have to figure out how to prepare for the exposure and help them manage it in a healthy way because it's common. On the subject of sex, they say young, young girls get in particular trouble on this because how does a girl sext? The boys want a picture of her breast nine times out of 10, or this is what the girls choose to send. And they hold the camera down. The camera is below them, right? Cause you're getting from the ground up. So their faces in

the shot, whereas boys take a, take a picture from the top down and their faces aren't in the shot. And therefore you're seeing a lot of girls have their reputations ruined and their lives ruined when their faces and their breasts are all over the internet because somebody wasn't trustworthy. What a shock. Um, and so I do think that is worth just discussing with your kids, but I, I don't know. It's like porn on the internet. I confess I haven't discussed this with my kids. I don't really want to highlight it if they haven't seen it. And you know, you plant the seed in there and then the next thing you know, they're only human. They go looking for it. Listen, and if they're not looking for it, I don't know if you've been around a group of young males lately, but they share each other's stuff. They try to freak each

other out. They try to one up each other with their prowess in terms of seeing and understanding. No, not mine. Mine is a little angel. Well, maybe he is, but those around him are not, I assure you. That could be true. And so it's, I mean, it is a really serious struggle. I am a big believer, though, in stringent boundaries. I know it sounds awful. Like I said, my psychologist friends that work in this area have very stringent boundaries. I feel the same way about drugs and alcohol and anything you really don't want kids to be doing. You have to lay down serious consequences because they they'll push on that even if you have serious consequences. Well, what do you mean about that, though? Because I talk to other parents about this all the time. Like, do you? Yeah. So are you the house that lets the people have the kids have the party with alcohol or not? I mean,

my position, of course, if you're not, never. So here's what I told my kids about that. I said, listen, you know what I do? They they'd been to my drug unit, they'd seen the patients in there struggling. And I said, you know what I do for a living? And I said, I see adolescents all the time where the parents do not do what's right. And the adolescents end up in disasters or dead. So because of that experience, I feel, have very, very strong feelings about this. And I feel like I'm obliged to follow what I know to be necessary to keep you safe.

So I said, God forbid you go to a party where another parent is giving you alcohol, because if they do, I will show up with the sheriffs and I'll be standing on the long last. I'll be standing on the long laughing my goddamn ass off as they haul those parents off for exposing you to alcohol, for contributing to delinquency of a minor, for gut. And by the way, every unwanted consequence in adolescence, everyone, whether it's an STD or a fight or an accident or a pregnancy, you always find alcohol. So if you can control the alcohol, you can control most of the negative consequences in adolescence and so i said i'll be standing there laughing my ass off so good

luck you show up one of those parties i'll be standing along with the sheriff it'll be great i can't wait so did your so you have if correct me if i'm wrong you have triplets who are now 28 two girls my boy two boys okay two boys and a girl okay so. Two boys and a girl. Okay. So did they not drink at all? They didn't get invited to those parties is what happened because they let, let the word be known. And they may have tried out, I'm sure they tried alcohol, but, but I'm certain that it wasn't at the hands of an adult. Um, and I said the same thing. I said, if, you know, if you develop an addiction problem, uh, I'm going to pack your car with heroin and make sure the cops find you. It just is. I know I'm going to be saving your life.

And I have to do that. And so we didn't really have addiction. I didn't expect that problem. But I was sure that they would be invited to parties where parents were doing. Why would a parent take that liability? Anything bad that happens in the party, which is always the case with alcohol, the parents are responsible if they're administering and providing the alcohol. It's crazy. It's so crazy. To me, that's a no-brainer. I haven't spent much time thinking about my end of it because I just know I wouldn't do it. I would not be that parent.

But I've heard parents I love, friends say they want to be the house that hosts because then they can control it. Then they can keep an eye on their kid. They can't. That's a horrible idea. Let me tell you, statistically, they're wrong. They're just categorically wrong. It's the exact wrong thing to do. Not only is it wrong from the standpoint of thinking you can control it.

That's just categorically wrong. The bigger problem is you cannot tell an adolescent you can do this here, but not here. Because when you tell them you can do this here, they're doing it. They're going to they'll be circumspect, but they're going to push the boundaries as they always do. You have to draw the boundary back sooner. If you say, you know, you can smoke cigarettes here, but not over there in the men's room. Are you kidding? Are you adolescents? Are you kidding? Of course, they just immediately blow through boundaries. As soon as you say it's okay to do something, they're going to go, why just there? Why? He said, you gave me the alcohol. You're watching me. It's a complete

lack of understanding of how the adolescent brain works. Well, it's interesting because I mean, I've said this before, but in my own house, my parents made very, very clear that no drugs whatsoever would be tolerated of any kind. So I knew it was a hard line and I had no interest in drugs, even marijuana. I just never tried it because in my school, it was considered kind of low life. It was something low life did, you know, like we used to call the people who were into pot, the dirties, and they hung out in what was called the dirty section where they kicked around the hacky sack during lunch. And I was part of a different group called the swelts, which, you know, they would drink, but they wouldn't do drugs. It sounds like a warring party from 15th, 17th century Florence.

Oh my God. Can I tell you it's straight out? No, the swelts, the creamies, the dirties, my high school is straight out of a John Hughes film however my parents didn't send that hard hardcore message on alcohol and I did drink when I was younger and I wish I hadn't you know now of course I look back and I wish I hadn't and I can see the war coming in my own family right where my kids and like friends are going to start drinking and I and like I wanted to sort of try to shore myself up to say like hard line, same thing as my mom did, but I'm worried I might not mean it. Well, so here, one of the, because you didn't have that model, but, but here again, you

know, when you work in the field, it makes you, you know, it makes it much easier because you just know. And one of the great delusions that is promulgated everywhere in the world is we teach our kids how to drink. We give them wine and the table is we teach our kids how to drink. We give them wine and the table. We're Italian. We're French. We give them wine and the table. Italians and French have alcoholic liver disease, uncanny levels of consequences from alcohol. Every piece of data we have shows that the first drink for the alcoholic is usually in the home and usually by age eight. And it is, we have the same data on adolescent rats that if you expose them early, they're more likely to lose

control. This is, this is again, anathema. This is a fallacy. It is wrong. Exposing to alcohol in the home. And again, you have to have the genetic burden of alcoholism, but if you've got that genetic potential, it makes that potential more likely to be expressed, not less likely, more likely. So teaching somebody in the home is another fallacy that we sort of have out there. Yeah, I did hear that at another seminar we went to. We go to a lot of the seminars because we don't read all that many parenting books. So when they offer them, we go.

And they were saying the same thing, like the longer you can delay your child's first drink, the lower his or her odds of becoming an alcoholic. It doesn't, it's not a guarantee, but the more you can postpone it, the better you're setting your kid up. Say that again? The what? Say that. The longer you can postpone your child's first alcoholic drink, the lower his odds of becoming an alcoholic. That's exactly right. Now, there's a necessary and sufficient sort of quality to alcoholism. You've got to have some genetic potential for it. But even so, you can have problems with alcohol, a relationship with alcohol,

that's not alcoholism per se. And that also goes up if you expose them early. Up next, you know anybody who's gone COVID crazy, right? People who are just different as a result of the past year and a half. Are you one of them? Dr. Drew tackles that in one minute. Now, I'm interested in your background because I think people who go into mental health always have interesting backgrounds, right? And I say this as somebody whose mom is a psychiatric nurse. Doug's dad was a psychiatrist. My first husband's dad was a psychiatrist, too. So interesting.

And so you choose, I know you're an internist, but you do therapy. I mean, you talk about, you therapize people all the time. So let me explain what happened to me so you can understand my sort of career, because I have kind of a weird career path. So I was a straight up internist. I was, you know, practicing medicine. I was chief resident. I was going to be thinking about being a cardiologist. I was very good at intensive care stuff. I still can do all those kinds of things. And I started moonlighting in a psychiatric hospital. And I always had an interest in mental health and the human psyche. And this sort of

really peaked that and I started getting more and more involved. I ended up taking over their department of medicine. So I became an expert in the medical care of psychiatric patients, which is a really important skill. I don't know if I can emphasize this enough, but about 20 to 30% of the time, I would either find a medical issue that had precipitated the psychiatric symptomatology, a medical issue that had precipitated the psychiatric symptomatology, a medical issue that was contributing to the psychiatric syndrome, or a medical issue caused by the psychiatric syndrome. So it's very common for psychiatric patients to have really significant medical issues. So that was a thing. A lot of the day in, day out medical problems were down

on the drug unit. So I ended up spending a lot of time down there. I liked the culture. I liked the staff. I hung out there. I got very good at detoxing patients from drugs and alcohol. All the while I would, you know, I'd sit in the nursing station to look through the window into the treatment room and see the 12 steps on the wall and go, what is that silliness? I'm doing the real, I'm getting them off the drugs here. What is that nonsense? I had no idea what was going on, but I watched some people go young, healthy people who were dying of addiction become these amazing human beings. And I was like, whoa, that I want to be a part of that. What, what is that? What is happening here? So I got more and more and more involved in the treatment process was asked to be the assistant director of

a program. And then the six months later, the director quit and I became the director of the program. And that's when I really dug in and I became the director of the program. And that's when I really dug in and got another board certification in that field, made it my sort of, what should you say, my passion to really expand my understanding. And addiction is such a fascinating field because you get to see all the other higher functions of the brain serving a broken system, the motivational system, serving a false God. The system that normally says survive, that's good survival. Yes, love your family, go to work, do your hygiene. Those are rewarded things in your brain at the very base of the brain that becomes tweaked. And one motivation emerges, which is do drugs. And all the other systems, the thinking, the interpersonal experiences, everything serves this broken God. And you can see how the brain works in sort of an interesting way

because it's not working normally. It's so fascinating. Also had to understand the medical neurobiology. You had to understand the psychiatry. I'd understand the interpersonal and family systems. It really was the crossroads of everything. And so that's where I started digging in. So all the while I was had for 25 years, I had two careers. I had general medicine, inpatient and outpatient. And then I had the psychiatric thing, which eventually just became addiction medicine. Do you feel like, I mean, I've seen the stats, but have you anecdotally seen an increase over the past year with the lockdowns and so on in drug addiction and alcohol addiction? A hundred percent.

I mean, even forget alcohol addiction, just substance use. Substance use is up. Make no mistake about it. Abuse and abuse. Because you can abuse without being an addict. Absolutely. And you can have consequences without being an addict. You can hurt yourself without being an addict.

But look, more deaths in San Francisco from opioid overdoses than COVID. Mr. Governor, you want to pay a little attention over here? Mr. Mayor, Mrs. Mayor, pay attention. We have more deaths from drug addiction than from COVID. And you're shutting down society for one and literally endorsing the other to continue allowing people to die in your streets on a regular basis. What is going on here? Yeah, it's worse. Depression is no, the depression is up fourfold, anxiety up fourfold. I mean, isolation, disorders of isolation, not to mention just delaying coming in for medical treatment and all that is done. It is, I knew this was going to happen. I could see it coming. I was, I was on this from the get-go that they were going to cause a major mental health problem. And they did it. Well done. Well done, everybody. What specifically? I mean, I realize losing one's job, being sort of cut off from society,

but what do you think was the most damaging part? I would say two things. And one is sort of something you can kind of dig into inducing panic and hysteria that is an extremely destructive thing to do the the way to lead humans i mean do you think george patton you know induced hysteria in his troops when they were in trouble he would go gentlemen some of you aren't going to make it back we have an obligation to move forward let's go get this thing that's how you solve problems that's how we've always done it as opposed opposed to shelter in place, hide in your home. Where did that come from? There's no infectious disease textbook that advises that anywhere, ever. But you know, the whole idea of lockdown came from a 14-year-old girl in Albuquerque. You know that, right?

No. Oh, you don't know the history of lockdown? Was her name Rochelle Walensky? Was it her? No, no. Was it the young Rochelle? No, his name was Green. Her last name was Green. So throughout human history, you quarantine sick people, not well people. There was never a concept of stay in your home or lockdown.

Though I will tell you there's a natural tendency,. This is born out in the smallpox literature, that when there's an outbreak, humans tend to reduce their social contact naturally. That's what we do when we're trying to protect ourselves. But never, only one time in history was there a stay home order. And that was in Venice. I think it was the 14th century and it was a catastrophe. Never before. Then we have Wuhan, China outbreak, and we have the government there behaving in the strangest way from a medical perspective, chlorine containing drugs, rolling down the street, squirting the streets. What was that? Blocking people in their homes. That's not physicians. I promise did not do that. No doctors were involved in that decision.

That was either something they had rehearsed in case there was an outbreak from their lab or a face-saving measure by the local Soviet, whatever you want to call it, so the higher-ups didn't blame them for whatever happened. This was some government action, not medical, not medical. Then we have every press outlet in this country demanding the same response, demanding it. The New York Times editorial board demanding lockdown. That to me was breathtaking and disgusting. I hope people look back at that and look at that with a jaundiced eye and with care, because that was how we got into this mess. And we had a government then responded to it.

Then there was even more going on at the time. Of course, anything that was Trump, we had to do the opposite. So Trump says no lockdown. So California locks down completely. Now, I actually signed up for the lockdown at the time and said, well, our leaders are in a tough position till we can figure out exactly what we're dealing with. Let's let's listen to our leaders. And that's just sort of my curve. Yeah.

OK, listen to the leaders. That's fine. But then we're still in it now here in California, for Christ's sake. I mean, that's just sort of my thing. Bend the curve. Yeah, bend the curve. Okay, listen to the leaders. That's fine. But then we're still in it now here in California, for Christ's sake. I mean, it's just unbelievable. So back to the lockdown. This young 14-year-old did a science, a summer science project, where she built a model that showed that you could disrupt an influenza outbreak, very different than a respiratory virus, an influenza outbreak by very different than a respiratory virus,

an influenza outbreak by holding kids back from school, essentially. Influenza is hand transmitted and transmitted by kids and kills kids. So it was an interesting model for influenza. Her father, who worked at the, I forget the name of the lab, it wasn't Los Alamos, but it was another think tank in New Mexico. He was a model builder. He was a computer modeler. And he thought, wow, she's really onto something. I bet I can make a model about local lockdowns, local lockdowns for a pandemic. The Bush administration found it after he published his paper with his daughter,

the 14, I guess now 15-year-old, as the second lead author, as the pandemic policy. That's something that they could do. Now, they never used it. We went through H1N1, which was a terrible pandemic. And by the way, I cut my teeth on the HIV epidemic, which had a 100% fatality, not a 1%, not a 5%, a 100% fatality. I was telling people as a third-year medical student, every day they were going to die in six months. I was never wrong. We never induced, we never employed this so-called lockdown policy. It was just a theoretical sort of instrument that they put on their sort of, but it was never meant for a respiratory virus and never meant for the entire country. It was meant as a localized sort of phenomenon. And that became what we lived

through. It's just uncanny. I look around now as people sort of emerge, you know, as they periscope up from in places like New York City and soon I hope for you in California and you see them coming out more, I mean, maybe a little bit less now with the Delta variant going around and all the scaremongering about it. But in New York, when the masks came off and people started to go back to the restaurants, what I noticed, and Doug noticed it too, my husband, is that there are some people who seem to have gone a little batty. There are some people who have gotten themselves so scared. They really spent the past year alone avoiding restaurants, avoiding other people. Normal people, friends of ours who are young and very cool people.

It's not like a bunch of elderly who should be staying at home. No, no. And you can sort of see there's a little craze in their eye. You can just see the beard's gotten really long and they're a little unkempt and they look a little scattershot with the eyes. And I, I've been just anecdotally wondering what happened to them? What are they coming back from that? Well, hopefully, I mean, the problem is, I think adults will come back for that. The problem is we may have injured permanently eight to 15 year olds who manifest similar stuff. Humans, humans need social contact. Why do you think the most severe penalties a human can face is isolation? That is the worst that a human can tolerate.

Our self emerges in the context of our relationships with other, our capacity to feel our emotions and regulate them happens because of the reflection of others. Our ability to make meaning of life and have things like careers and be of service is our relationship to others. When that is restricted, as you say, we go bad. It's the worst thing you can do to a human being. And to do it with a particularly no end in sight, it's just, it's torture. And this is, this was entered into, but there's another layer to this whole thing that we're getting into here that I want to point out, which is what my profession did. I pointed out to you repeatedly that this was not a medical decision. This was not a medical,

there's no infectious disease policy that talks about lockdowns and not even social distancing. You won't find that in an infectious disease textbook. But my profession, because of the politicization, because of the mob on social media, because as I've discovered, most physicians now are employees. This was a shock to me. They were afraid of losing their job. They were afraid of their reputation. They were fearful of the mob. And we froze in place. Physicians became unwilling to do anything. I've never experienced an illness where my peers just said, send, send, go home till you get sick that. They kept improvising and doing things for their family and patients quietly. But trust me, they were doing stuff. I saw it. But the rest of us, the primary care side, froze in place, mostly out of fear of losing the job, I FDA, the CDC, and the NIH. Do you think, Megan, those organizations ever had anything to do with any decision I ever made when I was taking care

of a patient through a 35-year career ever? They would send me information and publications and give suggestions. They were not involved in the decision-making. I did that. My training, my judgment. We ceded that entirely to bureaucrats who have not been clinicians in, if ever, many years, who don't understand how to make or can't make a risk-reward analysis from where they are and can't admit they're wrong and can't change direction. It is the worst of medicine.

No, nothing about mental health. Nothing. What are Dr. Fauci's or Rochelle Walensky's qualifications there? She's the one, speaking of not inducing a panic, she's the one saying, I feel an impending sense of doom. She's crying. I have a bad feeling. It's like, grow up.

Thank you. The other thing is we knew how to do health messaging. We studied it during HIV. We had a real problem in HIV. We had to change behavior. And we discovered during that epidemic, pandemic, was that you create narratives where you see the consequences of people's actions. You use a little music, a little humor, a relatable source, that changes behavior. It's been my model forever in terms of using media. It's why Teen Mom works. It's why Loveline works. Because you have a little case, somebody explicates it, there's some humor, and they hear it, they get it, they receive it, and they adjust their behavior. Somebody in a box and a white coat telling them what to do, or worse yet, in a panic with a bad feeling, that does not change behavior. It hardens behavior. Why do you think we have vaccine resistance? It's all that. You don't

trust what you're seeing. You can't you just want to withdraw. And that's why I think people are looking at the approval of the vaccines as non-experimental. You know, we're expecting the real approval by the FDA, maybe in September. And these folks who are trying to force mandates on us and so on and masks on us and force the vaccine, they see this as some sort of, you know, cure-all. Like, oh, if we could just get the real approval, the anti-vaxxers are, you know, they're going to change their mind. That's not going to do anything. These people don't trust the government. Yeah, they don't. And that's, you you're exactly correct because I've talked to a lot of vaccine resistant and it's always the same thing.

It's always about trust, trust, trust. And I don't know where to go to get trusted information. But I usually, I must tell you, Megan, I have talked to a lot of them and most of them tell me that if there was full approval, that would loosen their resistance a bit. The other thing, there's a vaccine platform called Novavax that's an old-fashioned pertussis platform that should be out any minute that they agreed they would take when you describe it to them. So there may be some stuff there.

As far as the FDA approval, you know, the main thing that holds that approval process up is the drug companies have to fund it. And these guys have already sold their products, so I don't know how motivated they are to fund that full development, full approval, number one. And number two, it's the attorneys. It's getting through the legal morass of approval. That takes forever. The number of, I want to get my numbers in front of me, but the number of people within the black community who have gotten the vaccine is under 33%. Like 24%. It's about 24%.

And so when you create a vaccine passport, you are now creating, that's the most racist policy of the last 50 years. So basically 75% of the black community can't eat in New York City restaurants. Can't go to a restaurant, can't go to a theater. I mean, just because of the color of your skin quite literally. Right. And it's just unbelievable. It's unbelievable what they're doing.

Right. Yeah. Just one gaffe after another. I can't, I can't understand it. Well, I don't, I mean,

I know that there's data saying people who are anti-vax would see a guarantee. They didn't have to wear masks as an incentive to get it right. Like they, they hate masks just as much if not more than vaccines but you know we're going the opposite way on that too it's it's now now everybody who's been vaccinated has to have a mask on according to the cdc they don't know what they're doing and they and as much as they don't understand mental health they really don't

understand pr right pr and and again health messaging that adjusts behavior. They're trying to change behavior. That's the goal. In order to do that, we know a lot about that. I transmitted to the public and that adversely impacts the mental health. That's it. But I want to ask you about about disinformation. OK, in the crackdown, because I know this is something that you've been railing on to and you've been the victim of the YouTube jail and you've been put in YouTube jail. So twice. How do we figure this out? Because as I look at the Internet and I know the Biden administration has identified the disinformation dozen and it's the 12 people most responsible allegedly for putting out COVID lies in the internet. And it may be true. I haven't, I haven't actually gone through and clicked on other websites and tried to figure out what's true and what's not true. I don't have time for that. But I, I, I, gosh, I'm trying to figure it out myself because I'm against government censorship. I don't like disinformation. I tend to believe the answer to bad information is good information, right? Don't censor the one, just offer the other. I agree. But I also have seen people I know get sucked down internet rabbit holes that are just so misleading. And I can see that once they get pulled into that, it's impossible to extricate them. I mean, it's just impossible to pull them back. It seems to be like glue. Once you get, once you get pulled into this,

in my experience, pulling them back out with good information is a lot harder than it would seem. It is harder and they need to have something experiential that pulls them out. So there's two issues. How do you combat it? Which is one. And then how do you get somebody out of a hole? And they need to, somebody around them needs to get sick. That's really what happens. That's, that's when they come out of it. So, you know, if they could be somehow exposed, I don't know, they need something experiential. It's not, not no longer a didactic issue. It's not like you can educate them out of it because they have a thousand other educational, you know, sort of didactic responses that they're going to push and push back at you. You have to change the emotions. It's an emotional thing and that has to change. But I completely agree with you that good information is how you fight bad. And the only way you can,

the obfuscation of information has been the reason you've created such distrust in the resistant population. That's where the distrust comes from. Open the data up. Show where you're ambivalent. This idea that public health messaging has to be one unified monolith, that's a mistake. That's a gigantic mistake. You need to tell them where you're unsure. You need to be honest about what the data is. You need to come forward with everything. And it's got to be good data. And you got to help people understand what's good and what's bad and open it up. That's the only way to combat this. Now, again, we're talking about engaging trust from people who are distrusting. I'm not sure you need that for everybody. Many people just follow the edicts, whatever the people in authority say. But in terms of getting further with those that are resistant, it is about the obscurity of what

they're saying and the fact that there's other data that people come upon that flies in the face of what the official data is, the worst thing you could do for this population. You know, I was thinking about it because you've got there's this one guy who my attention was called to and he's on the list of the disinformation doesn't CNN just went after him the way I remember when Paris Hilton got arrested all his years and all the photographers were outside of it was the Hilton of 2006. They documented how they tried to track him down here. They tried to get him. They did a confrontation on the street, Jesse Waters style, got in his face. And you know, what about this? What about this?

And this guy's apparently like well-loved by this sort of very hard anti-vax community. And I thought, all right, let me figure out a little bit about this guy. And it turns out this guy believes that he can take the temperature on your chest and figure out whether you have breast cancer. Okay.

A bunch of nonsense. But so he's made a lot of crazy statements, this guy. If you spend two minutes looking at his background, people are free to believe what they want to believe. But do I love the fact that he's got such power? He's got such a platform? Not really. So I just, I don't know. But I still get uncomfortable with Facebook saying he's got to go or the government saying you can't listen to him.

Yeah. Listen, there's something called the Streisand effect. You ever heard of that? It's where on the internet, particularly in social media, when you obscure something, it increases the interest in it. Barbara Streisand had some- Why is it the Streisand? She had years ago, early in the internet days, she had some pictures of her real estate, her home. And she went to great lengths to scrub it.

And the internet made it its job to go after it and get it and reissue it and distribute it. And it became this huge thing where now everybody was interested in those pictures. Before just a small number of people noted it. And so, yeah. That just happened recently with one of the Kardashians who inadvertently had an assistant tweet out a natural picture of herself in a bathing suit. And then as soon as it went out, she was like, get it back. I want it back. And the whole internet was like, well, now I have to see it. Right. It's the call to stride sound effect. Yeah. We are in such a weird time. I've been saying from the beginning, listen to the CDC, listen to Dr. Fauci.

I've said that from the very beginning. They have, they have been strange in how they've sort of presented the information. I've got lots of notes, even though I still think, I still have faith in my peers at the CDC. It's just our, it was our mistake. Do you have faith in Dr. Fauci? I do. I'll tell you why. have faith in my peers at the CDC. It was our mistake. Do you have faith in Dr. Fauci? I do. I'll tell you why. Stop it.

No, listen. I'll tell you why. You're too smart. I've been through five pandemics with him. Five. Okay? He was the reason I got involved in radio. During the AIDS epidemic, he was a leading light.

He was a great story. He was a star. That's how he became a star. I get it. But you have new information based was a leading light. He was a great star. That's how he became a star. I get it. But you have new information based on the past year. I understand. So hold on, let me let me make my case. Okay, counselor, is that is that he was really important to me, he was chanting at us about getting in the media and educating and doing these things I'm talking about doing properly now. And I took that very seriously. And that's how I got involved in radio back in 1984. So he was always very important to me. But it started with HIV and

AIDS. Then we had MERS. We had MERS. We had SARS-1. We had H1N1. And you don't even know what he did during those things. You don't know. Nor do I care. He had my respect as sure as coming into this. But new things happened. Yeah, you shouldn shouldn't know but the way the press and the politics played out this time put him into a soup where i'm not happy with his behavior either i i understand what your concerns are that being political from that position or being overtly political and obscuring data and lying not being totally forthcoming lying he's admitted to you don't you have to hedge on it it's not it's not sinkingying. He's admitted to it. You don't have to hedge on it. It's not sinking your friend. He's admitted it, intentionally

misleading us to manipulate us into the behavior he wanted. And then he doesn't understand why we don't trust him anymore. I understand. I agree with you. I don't disagree with you. But there is a piece of lying that we have to talk about on a moral level, which is lying without

justification. Oh, the noble lie. The noble lie. The noble lie. The mask don't work. Bull. No, no, no. That's it. Once the trust is broken, it's broken. I'm with you. And when he said that, I actually was completely supportive of that because then we thought this, traditionally viruses are primarily transmitted by hands and we don't want people wearing masks to bring their hands to their face. He was towing that policy. No, he was lying. He was.

He knew that was a lie. He knew there was more. That's right. And that's where it was a problem. That's right. Not to mention his denials about whether they ever funded gain of function research, whether his group did. And they did. Right.

They did. So he's been misleading on that. I mean, we could go down the list of the number of things he, but that's not even an allegedly noble lie. That's just covering his ass. I think so. And as I said,

the politics destroyed him this time. I'm not happy. I'm unhappy. But I have been through five pandemics and I still feel like his judgment is something we can, he's an important source of good information and judgment.

If he just would stop. All right. Agree to disagree. Agree to disagree on Fauci. Up next, we're going to talk about the general sense of malaise that seems to be coming over the country right now. Optimism for the future is at a precipitous low, and it just seems like people feel less hopeful right now. And I don't think it's just because of the rise in the Delta variant and the return of masks, although that hasn't helped. I think it's bigger than that. And so does Dr. Drew. And we're going to get into that in one minute. But first, I want to bring you a feature we have here called Sound Up.

This is where we bring you some sound that we feel you must hear. Today, we're going over to the Olympics in Tokyo. Yes, we have good news for a change from the Olympics in Tokyo. And bringing you the story of a true winner and a true patriotic champion. I want to talk to you about Tamara Mensah Stock. Tamara is 28 years old. She's from Katy, Texas. She grew up in Chicago, and now she is the first black woman to win an Olympic gold medal in wrestling. What did she have to say after her dominant victory? Enjoy this.

Of course I surprised myself. It's by the grace of God I'm able to even move my feet. Like, I just leave it in his hands. And I pray that all the practice, that the hell that my freaking coaches put me through pays off. And every single time it does. And I get better and better. And it's so weird that there is no cap to the limit that I can do.

And I'm excited to see what I have next. Last question for you. That American flag around your shoulders looks pretty good. How does that feel to represent your country like this? It feels amazing. I love representing the U.S. I freaking love living there.

I love it. And I'm so happy I get to represent U.S.A. Love her. I love it. And I'm so happy I get to represent you. Love her. I love everything about that. If you see her on camera, it's even more contagious, her enthusiasm for her sport, for herself. She's a wrestler, by the way, because she's just like, she's got a thousand watt smile. It goes ear to ear. Her hair looks adorable. She looks adorable. You can just see how happy she is. The joy is what's contagious. You can hear it in the voice too. But what a refreshing change, right? Both pieces of her message. Like there's no limit to what I can do. And I got, you know, I was put through hell, but what it taught me was there's no limit to what I can do. I continue to

impress myself, right? Like what a difference from some of the whining we've heard from from too many others. And then just the the love of country and the unabashed willingness to express it. And by the way, good on that reporter for remarking on the flag she had around her her shoulders in a way that seemed to want to produce a nice answer. You know, it wasn't like you're wearing the flag. A lot of people find that controversial. Why would you do that? Right. That's how some people would ask that question. So I applaud the reporter too, whose name I don't know. This is a year, of course, where we've heard all the Gwen Berries and the Megan Rapinos of the world who have such a negative view of the flag, not to mention our country, and they have crapped out at the Olympics. That's the truth. Gwen Berry, she didn't even get

a medal. So good. And Megan Rapino, well, our soccer team wound up with some pretty embarrassing results. Yes, they got the bronze, but that's embarrassing for the United States. It should have been gold, and it was an embarrassing match. And a lot of people are saying you should have spent more time on your game and less time dealing in woke politics and trying to lecture all of us on how America sucks. That's certainly how I feel. So anyway, we need more like Mensa Stock, who makes me want to stand up and cheer for her, for American wrestling and for the good old U.S. of A. This is a woman, by the way, whose father, an immigrant from Ghana, died in a tragic car accident when she was in high school. Now she's at the top of her game and full of happiness, full of pride in self and country, in accomplishment.

And she is an example to us all. This has been Sound Up. And now back to Dr. Drew. You made a comparison of COVID to the flu. Yeah. And I know you've apologized for that, but I have to say a lot of doctors felt that way. Very well-respected doctors early on thought this was going to be like a event. It would go away when the weather got warm.

You weren't alone. I mean, I don't know why you got so flagellated for that. Yes. Well, it was part of the hysteria of the moment, which if you're saying anything other than hide in place, you're a murderer because there's about to be a nuclear winter. So I had my dad in my head. My dad was an old family practitioner. And I just imagine he, I literally had, I had like almost hallucinations of him saying to me, wait a minute, he's been gone for a while now, but he, I know would have been like, wait a minute. We had yellow fever and polio and tuberculosis and they shut the world down for respiratory. What? What? What? He would have been like, what about that? What about? He would have been, it would have killed

him again, for sure. For sure. And so I made a mistake. It's not, it's really not a good move. It's not logically accurate to compare one pandemic against another. That was a mistake. But I was trying, my intent was, I was disturbed that the press was mandating the policy of the Chinese Communist Party, which was not medical, that they were demanding that the policies of a 14-year-old high school student be the policy of the land. And by the way, something it was not designed for. And I was trying to calm everybody down. That was what I was telling the press to shut up, listen to the CDC and calm down. There are bad things out there.

Pandemics suck. They kill. They're defined by excess death. They suck. And I made the mistake of comparing it. And to be also fair, I didn't quite get the infectivity, the degree to which this thing roars through populations. I didn't get that, but I did get. OK, I mean, you own that.

You apologize for that. But I do think once you cross this group in the press in particular, that's it. There's no making it up like you get you get labeled a quack or whatever it is they say. And that's the end of that. That's the end of you in their eyes, even though, I mean, if we want to go through their mistakes and at the same time, this is the same group of people like big tech and so on that was hiding stories like the Hunter Biden story saying, you can't believe that it's not true in the New York post. Big tech did that. Another journalist

applauded it saying, you can't talk about the COVID lab theory because that's only quacks do that, right? That turns out to be the leading theory now, even according to them. And then they look around at people who follow the disinformation dozen and say, why do they listen to them? When we tell them that they're liars, why don't they believe us, that we want to protect them from this disinformation? And they don't get right why people don't listen right they well they they feel that people are either dumb or it's back to a basket of deplorables right which is that these are just those people those people it's always that right and not not no kind of empathic understanding of what other people are experiencing

and it is it is reasonable if you really look at what that population has withstood in terms of trying to come up with a trusted source. They're naturally distrustful. And then you give them every reason to be distrustful. And it's on at that point. Yeah, it's the postmortem on this. I don't think, listen, everybody study your history. Study 1790 in France, please.

This is no different than that. This is the exact same thing. And the people that put people on the guillotine end up on the guillotine for not being pure enough. And then those people end up on the guillotine out of the resentment of the other people for all the guillotines. We're in it now and they end up eating their own. And we're sort of seeing that. Right. And we opened the conversation

with the governor Cuomo. I mean, this is, you know, this is it. It's, it's nobody's pure enough. Nobody's good enough. Nobody's anything enough. And it's all intolerance in the name of tolerance. We've done, humans have done this before. It doesn't turn out well. And we have to really push back. I never thought, I was going to say a few minutes ago that I have been remiss in not paying more attention to freedom. I didn't appreciate it. I didn't appreciate how much I should cherish it and how fragile it is. That was my mistake.

And this whole experience has really pointed that out. And we all should be paying. I'm not saying you should do anything. You should pay attention. You're not alone in that. I have so many friends. I've said it many times. Virtually all of my friends are Democrats and liberal Democrats in New York City and elsewhere. And I've heard from so many of them who are having the same realization, whether it's because of what happened to their kids in school or being called a white supremacist for doing absolutely nothing,

or just the amount of government and media pushback for something totally non-controversial that they happen to believe, even if it's not them that's being targeted, their belief gets targeted when somebody else expresses it. So I think a lot of people are feeling it. And I also think it's part of the reason why I think the country's going through something right now that's sort of a sense of malaise, a sense of depression. And I wonder what you thought about it because I think it's beyond COVID and lockdowns and cancel culture. It started with technology obsession and our selfie culture and the obsession with the celebrities and pictures and physicality instead of what we think and what we believe and how we

interact with one another. I just think there's so many things going on right now that make you feel like our best days are behind us. You know, the days ahead are only going to get worse. And as somebody who's actually literally written a book about obsession with celebrity culture and how damaging that is, and some of these issues we've been talking about, how do you see it? How would you, if the country's your patient, how do you diagnose its problems right now? Yeah, I completely agree with you. And by the way, when we wrote that book, we did not, we sort of painted the picture of a landscape where this could happen, but we didn't understand

that the technology was going to launch it into hyperspeed. And by the way, before I talk more about this, I want to mention your liberal Democrat friends, which are now, you can't be a liberal Democrat. Doesn't that make you a turncoat? Doesn't that make you a somebody that, yeah, that's not good enough. No, no, no. What is that? You got to be a progressive, woke Democrat in order to be in the club. You're as bad as everybody in the center or on the right, if you're a liberal Democrat. But, but it, all roads lead to narcissism, right? That's what the book was about. And we've had a narcissistic turn, right? I told you about how I was working at the psychiatric hospital back in the 80s. And, you know, every patient had a admission sheet with all their diagnostic criteria on it. And there was a slot back in those days for what's called AXIS-2 or was called, I think we're still calling it that, but the personality disorders. And when I got there, AXIS-2 was different in every patient. It was all

over the place, dependent, obsessive compulsive, anti-social, all over the place. And about 1987, 88, I noticed it all shifted such that every single patient that was admitted had what's called a cluster B diagnosis. Narcissist, borderline, sociopath. Those were the main three. Those are bad. Everybody, all of them. It just begs no issue. That was just with the diagnosis in the box. And I thought, well, that's interesting. And at the same time, I was doing a radio show where I was talking to adolescents every night, and I would say two out of every three callers had had childhood abuse, destroyed families, and was dealing with the consequences because they were calling about their relationships. And of course, the relationships was where all that trauma was acted out or where the ability to form a stable relationship was impossible because of that trauma. And so I was witnessing the large scale childhood trauma,

the pandemic of childhood trauma of the 80s, 90s, and maybe even the early 2000s. And it made sense to me, given how the 70s were. The 70s, you got to understand, that was a decade where people went, hey, man, whatever you're into. And kids, they're just little adults and they're sexual beings too. And if they want to have sex with you, that's, that's the kid, man. That's what they're into. This was the bullshit that was going around back then. And so it, it put a rocket fuel into this. And by the way, when people acted out on children, they didn't do it just once. They did it many times and injured God knows how many. So this was pandemic. And those kinds of childhood traumas end up with narcissistic disorders. That's just what happens. So narcissism and narcissistic traits and borderline, it's antisocial and stuff,

they're very difficult to treat. People with those disorders locate the locus of trouble outside of themselves. They put it out there in the world. The world's the problem. I'm a victim. Sound familiar? And I would even go further to say that we've even moved off narcissism, I'm hoping temporarily, to histrionic, which is another personality disorder that I used to never see very much,

but it was a narcissistic disorder. And clearly, we've moved into histrionic. Histrionic is superficial emotions that sweep back and forth, a tendency to get caught into trends, preoccupation with physical physicality, and a tendency towards delusion. People are literally delusional now. And they're thinking, you talked about the people in their rabbit hole. A lot of that becomes delusional in its process. It's how rigid it becomes. Yes, yes, yes. I'm hoping that piece is situational and we'll just move back to straight narcissism once things settle down. If you're histrionic, if you have a histrionic personality disorder, can you get out of that?

Well, if you have a personality disorder per se, people argue about whether it can be approved or not. I've seen it improved. I'm not worried about the disordered people, which is much smaller population as compared to those with the traits. So we're really talking about large populations with narcissistic traits, disorder traits of hoistronic traits of narcissism, traits of antisocial, which is everywhere now, just everywhere. And so how do you deal with that? Yeah, you feel it. And fundamentally, this is going to sound somewhat glib. I jumped from a sort of a complicated issue of personality construct to sort of a glib recommendation, which is humans need a simple life. People need to keep it simple. And in the process of keeping it simple, they need to prioritize the elements of mental health, which are our relationships and our important relationships

and our families. The fact that families have been sidelines is just another way to do things. That's disgusting and it is profoundly destructive. We need to focus on our families. I'm not saying, I'm not prescribing a particular type of family. I'm talking about normative patriarchy. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not prescribing that. I'm saying to raise kids, you know, this doing it alone, it's impossible. You need, you need help. So two people, two humans together committed to each other over the longterm, creating a stable environment for child rearing and advocating virtues and values and all the things we do in culture and transmitting that and educating

and keeping that stable across time. That's what we need. Now, I would say the second issue is if that can't be maintained, and I'm certainly not taking aim at single moms or single dads there, I couldn't do it. My hat's off to you.

But a single second relationship with an adult outside the home, again, sustained over years, has a dramatic effect on the outcome for kids. So relationships, families, and then service, meaning, doing things in society, doing things in the world that are meaningful. This is it. This is it's that simple that, you know, Freud summarized it as work, love, and play. Most of us have work. Most of us don't have time for play, but I'd suggest we do that. But love, you know, writ large, our relationships is really what needs to be worked on. And it's what's difficult for people with narcissistic disorders. They won't enter the frame of

closeness. That closeness is threatening to them. So they manipulate and end up acting out situations that are commensurate with the past and just reenact these disturbed relationships over and over and over again. Keep it simple. And the internet has not made that easy. It's made that worse, made it more difficult. Relationships have become disposable. People are usable. It's heroin.

It's heroin. Oh, it's heroin oh it's crack absolutely it's a crack pipe 100 and i was somebody's put put future shock the video uh the the future shock uh documentary about the book by alan alvin toffler back in the day and one of the things that i was sort of scanning through it but one of the things that popped out was this idea, very prominent piece of his thesis is that relationships become disposable. And he didn't get into the consequence of that. And now we're living it. Now we're living it. We can't do that. We have to go back to basic. So it's weird to me, though, is that this, you know, I just went over to I was in Greece and Germany. And lo and behold, there's another California, it's called Germany. A lot of the same stuff is going on there in terms of the government and the panic and the

hysteria and stuff. But when you get down to it, they're better because they still have intact family systems. They still have relationships. They still prioritize relationships and we just don't do that. We need to start doing that. I'll tell you, you go online these days and I, every time I click off, I just feel bad. I just feel bad after being online. All you see is a celebration of ridiculous women showing every single body part they can. It's like, even you go watch an award show, it's like it's down to, they might cover their nipples and you know, and their vag and everything show. It's like, it's down to, they might cover their nipples and, you know, and their vag and everything else. It's like, really, must it be so in my face every time I go online of women's sexuality? And I love women's sexuality. I'm, I believe we should celebrate it,

but it's ubiquitous. And truly for this society that's trying to empower little girls, then they should take a look at the, at the internet because every single page you go on, it's Kardashian, Kardashian, Kardashian, JLo, JLo, JLo in their bathing suits. It's like, I'm so sick of it that they are speaking out of both sides of their mouths. And then if you go on to the more serious websites, it's all about how we hate each other, how everybody's the worst person ever. Tribal, tribal, tribal team Jersey, and everybody who's not in your team is hideous. And then cancel culture where you and anybody makes a mistake or even something that's not a mistake, but just deemed a mistake by those in power. You're written off. Your life is done. You're awful. And then they wanted to lecture us

about, oh, mental health. It's like, oh, please, you're destroying everyone's mental health. Don't lecture us. I don't know. It's like, maybe I should just stay off the internet and yet I have a job that doesn't allow it. Most people can't avoid it. Well, the cancel is the modern guillotine. Let's be 100% clear about it. It is public executions. It is, again, speaking of narcissism, it's a primitive way to manage narcissism, which is one of the things about being a narcissist or a borderline is you tend to have unregulated rage. You have narcissistic rage, it's called. And that rage can start to get acted out on one another unless collectively you get together and focus that rage on one. That releases it in a way that is less damaging, less dangerous. And so this is

scapegoating. Scapegoating is a collective behavior of narcissists. And it's on full scale right now with the cancel culture. You mentioned the internet. You've been on TikTok yet? Have you spent any time on that? I've only seen a couple videos here or there. I've never actually- Spend 10 minutes on there. You'll have trouble getting off. You'll realize that is so sticky and so terrible. It's so manipulative. It's like, wow, that's the one that I worry about right now because people get lost. It's so popular. it's where the kids go can i ask you to define narcissism so narcissism is good point sorry i have a morning cough ever

since i had h1n1 by the way your long covid my long covid is over this is still the remnants of h1n1 um uh narcissism is is not what you think it is uh it's not egotism egotism is, is not what you think it is. Uh, it's not egotism. Egotism is a separate phenomenon and egotism is associated with lots of different things. Narcissism is a particular disorder caused by either inadequate nurturance, like too much abandonment in childhood or trauma in childhood, where fundamentally the child doesn't stay in the frame of intimate connection with the caretakers. The intimate connection with caretakers over time is what builds self and builds our ability to regulate emotions. We have primary emotions. We feel them. Our intimate contacts reflect them

back to us and give us soothing effects to help regulate them. So we learn to identify and regulate. If you have been hurt by those people, you exit that frame. It's too tender. It's too painful. And you do not go back. Do not go back. So you never, without a lot of treatment, enter the frame of closeness that gives you a deeper sense of self and ability to contact your primary emotions and feelings and your ability to appreciate what other people are experiencing. And so that person, that child, will then turn inward and start looking in the world to get nourishment for what they need against what they're feeling on the inside, which is small and empty. So narcissists feel empty,

they feel a core that's unstable, and they feel longing. They long for this to end really, but they go into the world and get what they need out of it to feel okay minute to minute. And what they need is to feel big and important and get gratified. And so they developed many times a pseudo self, a second self on top of the primary self that gets from the world what they need. However, they feel, you know, small. They may not consciously feel a lot of time, but they definitely would feel empty and longing and those kinds of things. The problem with narcissists, because they don't have a stable connection with feeling states, their feelings don't matter and your feelings don't matter. And so the big liability of narcissism is that they can be manipulative and use you for their own needs to buttress themselves up, and they can lack empathy. And so empathic failure is the big liability of narcissism. And as such, they can hurt other people to get their needs met because they don't really appreciate that they're hurting anybody. So that's sort of a basic primer of narcissism. That explains basically every comment thread online there's ever been, right?

You just spend two minutes looking at a comment thread. Everyone seems to have that. All roads lead to narcissism now. And the tribalness, the scapegoating, the banding together, the guillotines, it's all narcissism. In fact, in my book about narcissism, I wanted to put in a chapter about pre-revolutionary France and the Aztecs, because I believe those were two pieces of history where there was horrible childhood trauma that went on. And then you could see the

consequence. I mean, Rousseau himself, who was the great you know genius of the french revolution sexually used has a set a a woman that he used as a sexual concubine who just trailed around with him throughout the world and he just used her like a like a sex doll she had five children he made her leave all five of them on the doorsteps of the orphanages those children children, 80% of them died, and the other 20% had severe disorders because of the abandonment and neglect. And so it was not surprised to me that we would see revolutionary France on the heels of that. Same thing with Aztecs. They had this thing called a codex, which was a systematic way of abusing children to create warriors, which, well done, they succeeded. But as a result of that, in order to

control the aggression, the group had to kill somebody every day. So they didn't kill each other. There was. And so now here we are. I just wish I'd written that chapter. So if you look historically how these things end, what would you predict for us over the next five to 10 years? They end in a spasm. And I don't want to predict that. I believe, I believe in a weird way that they were acting it out electronically and through cancel culture, maybe our salvation, because we're not actually going to kill people. And maybe we'll be able to pull back from this in some way. I have faith that we will. I don't know. I can't figure out what the form is going to be. and I can't figure out how long it's going to take. But I just I'm an optimist. I just feel like we're going to pull back. We've not actually the level of resentment and aggression that would occur if

we actually killed people would play out in a really horrible way. We're not, thank God, actually involved in murderous conflict yet. I hope not. And the extent that we're not, I think, gives us an opportunity to pull extent that we're not, I think gives us an opportunity to pull, pull back from this. So on the subject of relationships, not the ones you mentioned as our, as our model, but I do want to ask you a question about it since you, you did love line with our pal, Adam Carolla, who we also love. Um, and, and you've been doing a lot of shows and offering advice on this subject for a long time. A lot of marriages suffered during the past year. And a lot of marriages, a lot of relationships,

even outside of marriages, found that that much time together was not a good thing. Relationships that were already shaky, that were surviving because they spent a lot of time apart, moved over to a new ground. And I wonder, as somebody who believes in marriage and it's fine. I've, I, as a divorced person too, I've said, I believe in divorce as well, if it's from the right person. Um, but I think a lot of people, I believe in the institution of marriage and for

fighting for it, if you can, right. Like if you, if you want to get your relationship back on track and I, but I think there's a lot of resentments out there right now, a lot of anger between couples. What do you think just generally for couples who are struggling right now and wondering if they like one another right now are a few good things to think about in finding one's way back to one's partner? That, listen, it's very difficult to make sweeping recommendations because the specifics of two individuals are so important to what they need to do. So for me to make this sort of sweeping generality, it's very inadvisable. It's going to be only partially sort of applicable. So I have to

sort of think in terms of not so much psychological terms, but values and what's likely to happen based on my clinical experience. So from a value standpoint, we need to keep stable environments for our kids. They need us to be together. They perceive families. They don't even perceive relationships. When families rupture, they feel ruptured. Do not kid yourself that divorce doesn't impact kids. It does.

Not to say that their lives are ruined and they can't make it through. It impacts them. And if you can avoid that, it's always nearly always better unless there's abuse or violence and obviously get out of there and don't even look back. But in most situations, at least keeping them together as they get through high school, please, it works better. Number one. Number two, it's if you commit to marriage, this is the thing about marriage being disposable that has been a problem lately. Most people don't have the experience of working things through. It's kind of amazing how much better things can, not even better, but how much you can work through things that seem insurmountable and seem miserable right now. I mean, if it's chronic and you're not just not happy with that

person and it's been that way since the, and if you're one of these people that had misgivings at the altar, you know, okay, maybe that's time to call it quits. Maybe you made a big mistake from the beginning, but if it's because you're conflicting about something and you're just not happy with each other right now, too much time together is another one of these things that I think is like, what is it about too much time together? What are you seeing about each other? What can we work through here? I would say stick, give it a chance, stick with it. It really is kind of uncanny how much stuff people are able to work through if they give it a chance, stick with it. It really is kind of uncanny how much stuff people are able to work through if they give it a chance. It really is kind of,

I, you know, I've been married 30 years and that's one of the things that having worked with couples and seen in my own marriage that I find sort of astonishing lately is that people can get through a lot of stuff and they usually get to a better place and to dispose of it and just, you know, start over, you kind of end up in the same place typically, not necessarily, not necessarily. I'm not saying, again, to make generalization about this is very, very almost irresponsible because as I said, sometimes just the wrong person or sometimes this person has changed the point or if they're a drug, you know, there's all kinds of reasons you should leave, but trust me, there are. But in general, if it's just because you were spending too much time

together and you're conflicting more, I would hang in and see where you can get to another place. And beware the long-term solution to the short-term problem, right? Like, we're coming out of that phase and things are eventually going to go back to normal. Yeah, I completely agree with you. And God, I long for it. I long for normal, don't you? I mean, the idea that we're never going back to normal, I took great issue with that. I think people hunger for normal. Some people need it. I mean, this is another psychiatric lane, but some people clearly need this fear. They love the panic. They enjoy the mask. They, they, there's some sort of drama queen inside of them that loves it. And the rest of us are like,

get your hands off of my kid's face. Yeah. It's histrionic again. I don't know what I keep. It's bizarre to me. It's one thing to be a sheep and follow along. I kind of, cause I, I always respond to authority. That's my personality. I, I kind of get that to judge other people who want to do something different to me is weird, but what's even weirder to me is to be a leader who likes to do this to people. I can't understand that. I have a relationship with a governor. I'm not going to call him out here, but he was way late with the mask man. I think, and he got rid of it as soon as he possibly could. And he said, this is my job. I'm not, my job isn't to tell people what to do. I'm a governor. I'm not, and I live in a state where our governor seems to just love telling us what to do. Like love it.

And I, I can't understand that. I, I, it's just, I, I can relate to the governor that had resist, was troubled by doing that, telling people how to live their life. That was never, if I got involved in government, it would not be to tell people how to live their life. It would be to, it would be to participate in this great experiment in freedom and to, and to protect those freedoms and to, you know, limit government, not to, not to use it as I wish to gratify feelings, need to control people. It's so weird. Don't leave me now. We got more coming up in 60 seconds. This reminds me of Governor DeSantis of Florida who had a soundbite on this. He was going off.

I can't remember if he was specifically taking on the White House. Let's listen to it. Here we have it. Biden, he rejects science. So his vision is, just like in New York City, restaurants should ban young kids from being able to go in because they're not eligible for vaccination, and law-abiding citizens have to produce proof of their medical records just to go to the gym or attend an event or just to participate in everyday society. He wants that, but yet if you want to vote,

he thinks it's too much of a burden to show a picture ID when you're voting. So no voter ID, but have to show your medical papers just to be able to live an everyday life. Give me a break. But let me tell you this, if you're coming after the rights of parents in Florida, I'm standing in your way. I'm not going to let you get away with it. And as you mentioned earlier, it's particularly targeting people of color who didn't get the vaccine. I mean, how can they stand? No, they cannot. No, they cannot.

They've got to loosen that up. Not to mention, what are these waiters supposed to do at these New York City restaurants? So they're going to have to be an expert in figuring out what vaccination card is real, which one isn't. You know, there's a real question. Some states have already said on these university admissions that are mandating that you prove you got the vaccine. This has already come up because I have been wondering because, you know, the fake vaccination passport thing is going to become a crazy they're forcing it they're forcing that of course i mean right i sent out a tweet the other day all the guys downtown who used to make fake ids for kids who wanted to drink are now switching over to vaccine passports i mean as we see it's absolutely so there's a question that some of the universities who are mandating uh vaccines about whether they

could require proof, like some sort of a federal government proof that you'd gotten it. And there was too much pushback from communities on that. And so therefore, at some of these universities, they settled on, you just must represent.

It's the honor system. You have to represent. So in New York City, it's not the honor system. You have to go in with your little card. And I mean, you tell me what, what it's going to be like a bouncer now. Like we don't have enough guys on power trips at the front of entertainment

establishments. I'm going to say something kind of extreme here, but, but it, it creates it, it, a group rises up or sort of becomes noticeable that we maybe didn't notice before. I was on a flight the other day and I noticed the behavior. Usually the flight attendants are very almost apologetic, wear the mask, please. Then you get a few people that get off and yell. It gets on you about your mask and perfection with your mask. I went, listen, when I got COVID, I was trying to get the vaccine and I was running around the hospital.

And when I came into the hospital, there was a guy at the desk screaming at me, where are your papers? Where are your papers? I'm a senior staff member. I've been at that hospital for 35 years. The guy was like 26 years old. And I was thinking, do you enjoy this? You'd like treating senior staff like this? And I thought, oh, that's what happened. This is what happened in Germany. This is how these people started behaving this way. And pretty soon they

were in control. There are people that like this. And it's not a good look on human beings. It's not okay. It's absolutely nuts when you take a bite of your food on the airplane. On the plane. This has happened to me. And the flight attendant actually comes over to tell you to put your mask on in between your bites. Right, that's right.

Those are the moments where I really want to be like one of the people in Walmart. You know, like I refuse. You want to be Karen. I'm not doing that. I'm still chewing. What do you mean? That's really too much.

Yeah. They're drunk on their own power. Again, I haven't seen as much of that lately because to me, there's not a histrionic tone to that, that the histrionics have settled a bit, but I hope we pull back. I mean, look, there's plenty of reason to get the vaccine, but my son right now is very, very sick with a vaccine reaction, it appears. And he had COVID, but he had to take the vaccine because of a graduate program he was in, and now he's been sick for a week. That's what my doctor said. My doctor said the same thing. He said, if you have natural immunity,

you don't need the vaccine. And not only that, but if you get it, you may get a very adverse reaction. There you go. And he had to do it to prove to the school. Now he's going to have to come up with a medical document that proves why he doesn't take the second vaccine. And here's the deal. It's an unwanted medical, it's an unnecessary medical procedure. What more ethical standard does a doctor have than to not do unnecessary medical procedures? Now we're being required to do unnecessary medical procedures. The other thing, our second very, very important ethical standard is informed consent. We talked earlier about how the data is obfuscated. It's very hard for us to give informed consent unless we have clear data, all the data, so we can discuss that with our patients.

Even we don't have access to the data right now. So unnecessary medical procedures and lack of informed consent, that's my concern around vaccines. But, you know, that's been getting much from the powers that be. On your point about air travel, Juliette Kayyem, she's the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security under Obama. It's funny, you know, I she her brother and I are good friends or had been good friends for a long time. Well, you should take this up with her because she just wrote in The Atlantic that unvaccinated people need to be on a no fly list saying we have

to start taking people's rights away. So they're going to start treating this, you know, she's in charge. I've heard more of this from our officials like DWI, right? The, the reason the drinking age in every state is 21 is not because all the States wanted to do that. It's because the federal government said you can set it wherever you want, but you're not going to get any federal money for your roads unless it's at 21. So they have a way of coercing people into doing it over their own best medical judgment in some cases. And that's where this is going to go sooner or later. I've heard you say you regret getting the vaccine because you had COVID.

That's how they're going to get everybody eventually. They're going to make you stick it in your kid's arm and your baby's arm and your arm, because you're not going to be able to do anything unless you do. It wasn't a necessary medical procedure for me. I've actually been documenting my, my, it's called an additive score. I get that monitors my B cell function and my humoral immunity. But there was a piece of literature that came out recently that showed that recovered COVIDs who get J and J have remarkable immunity against the variants. So I'm glad I took the vaccine after all. So again, these are moving targets, all of them. Even though it was an unnecessary medical procedure that I had a terrible reaction to,

I'm glad I took it. There you go. It's not a good thing. Well, I will say, I've always been, I am vaxxed. I got the Pfizer vaccine and I'm glad I got it. I really am. I don't have to worry about it. I'm 50, so I'm not in a particularly high age group group and the risk of death for somebody like me is absolutely nil.

No, not done. But I'm just glad I got it. I don't want to deal with it. You know, I don't want to deal with it. I don't blame you. You want to be free, right? You want to be free to move about. And believe me, you don't want the illness either. It's brutal. But one of the strangest things people asked me when I was sick was like, were you scared? Were you scared? I was like, no, I had a 1% fatality rate. When a doctor tells you you're 99% going to get cured, you are going to be okay. That is a doctor telling you, you're going to be okay. So I didn't even contemplate the idea that I would die. It wasn't even, it was so weird to me having people talk about being afraid, being afraid.

I had all kinds of nasty stuff, but it was hysterical again. You know, you, you started talking to me about my background and I never answered that. So can I, can I indulge you for a second? You talked about your, was it your, your father was a, your, your husband's father was a psychiatrist. And so my husband's dad was a psychiatrist and my first husband's dad was a psychiatrist. Interesting. So, so my, my dad was a family practitioner. He was, he was a great guy, but he was sort of narcissistic. So I got very good at dealing with narcissists as a result of that. I've heard you say that.

Why do I say that? No, I've heard you say that. I've heard you say your mom was verbally abusive. Oh, terrible. Yeah. So that's interesting to me. You turned out so well. You go one of two ways with those kinds of environments.

And you either go not good, like more antisocial, or you go pro-social. You sort of go one of two ways with those kinds of environments and you either go not good, like more antisocial or you go pro social, you sort of go one of two directions. And so it's a very risky thing to do to kids if you put them in that kind of environment. And yeah, my mother was, and, and indeed I, you know, I was exposed, I, I, you know, I had lots of therapy and I value all of it. I have no sort of resentments or anything. I, I do have a sort of a position on my mom stuff where it's like, you just don't do that to kids.

I don't, I don't, it makes me not respect her as a person. It's like, you don't do that. Verbally abused children. It was, it was bad. And just don't do that. And so I don't have resentments at, oh, woe is me. I feel like, okay, I've used've used it to my worked out fine for me it's it's okay but you just don't but can i just ask a quick follow-up before you finish that point

so without being overly uh intrusive into your own be intrusive go ahead please oh okay i didn't want to make you feel uncomfortable but um what can you describe the verbal abuse just so parents at home who may be doing this under understand or recognize it i have a very simple model for it think mommy dearest if you watch hate fade down away oh boy that's what i got i got lots of that and uh it was not okay and it was interesting my sister feels totally differently she did i don't think she even maybe didn't see it i don't know that's also like mommy dearest right didn't get it and um and you know the abuser often selects one kid and often hides it from everybody else so my mother had a secret life we didn't know about did you get this part of my history oh this is an opera singer no just this

year she she was don draper the thing don draper what uh yeah I was, I was probably 45, 50 years old. And a friend of mine came with me to Loveline one night and he was on the internet while I was on the air. And he said, you know, he goes, we started talking about our parents. I said, yeah, my mom used to act in film noir films. He goes, Oh, I'm such a film noir fan. So he starts looking her up and goes online is the early days of Google. And he goes, Oh, here, look, here's a page dedicated to your mom, Helene, whatever, you know, she had married to such and such silent film star in 1949. I was like, really, that's interesting. This was not your dad. Not my dad. My dad, she married 1958. She was married. She was the this, this will give you a sort of a personality profile. She was the fifth wife of a silent film star at the age of 18 and carted out to L.A. where they live.

She had a stepson whom she one day after 10 years married to this guy just left and never, never whitewashed the whole thing somehow. And I understand back then it was a much more divorce was a shameful thing and all this kind of stuff. That's how you found out about it. And I, my sister freaked out about it a bit and I was, was like, you know, she's 80, whatever, 84. And she wants to take this to her grave. Let her, let her do it. I don't know. You never raised it with her. And we didn't know if my dad ever knew either. We didn't never know that. And I was like, I don't want to, I don't want to mess. I don't want to do that to them. I don't want to agree with that decision. Here's yeah. Here's, here's the, there's some comedy in this too. My wife has a bunch of friends that are psychics. That's her thing. She loves psychics, loves her friends who are psychics. And she twice had my mom in,

she used to do podcasts with her friends and my mom in both times with two different psychics that had do not know each other both times. First thing that happened, she goes, Hey, there's a man here. It says he's your husband. Oh, it's more, no, it's not him. It's some other guy. He says he's your first husband. And she goes, I don't know what you're talking about. You go, your first husband? He says he's your first husband. I don't know the first husband. And just both times, just completely denied it. So Don Draper, remember Don Draper, he had one identity, then he had another, and it just didn't happen. Yeah, that's right. One of the greatest series of all time, by the way.

Oh, my God, yes. So anyway, all that interesting human behavior and psychiatry and psychology and stuff probably primed me to be interested in these things. Well, it also brings me back to, I've quoted this song a few times just personally, but the song by Carly Simon that goes, um, sometimes I wish often I wish that I never, ever, ever knew some of those secrets of yours. It's not always great to sing. I thought you were going to sing. You're so strange. So you mean Bane, right? Right. You're so vain. Right. You're so vain. I'm saying strange. I translated strange in my head, but yes, you're right in this information age. we're all about getting new information. And, you know, you have to be more pointed and thoughtful about it when it comes to family.

No, that's exactly right. I mean, look, again, back to the 70s where openness, everything, discharge, everything. You know, we had this weird thing in the 70s that, you know, affects feelings were things that need to be discharged and then they go away. No, no, no, no. Letting it all hang out is can be unstable. De-stabilize it can be a problem. You have to choose things carefully and wisely and with boundaries in a systematic way with trust and compassion. It's it's it's not that you you were told in college, you went to see, uh, see counseling.

And the guy basically said, why don't you just suck it up and take a walk in the woods and you'll be good. Oh yeah. So I was having panic attacks, disabling panic attacks, and I didn't know what was going on. I could, I first, I thought maybe I'm having a seizure, all the usual things that kids think about when they have a panic attack. And, um, but I knew enough to go to the mental health part of the thing. I thought, no, this is something else. Something's affecting me. They sent me down to the medical thing. And, you know, back then, well, there was no adolescent medicine. The physician that was there was sort of a retired family practitioner, you know,

dedicating a little bit of time in his, you know, in his afternoons there. And he, he was, I was sent down there to get like a Valium medication to try to break the panic. And he looked at me and with disdain and went get like a Valium medication to try to break the panic. And he looked at me and with disdain and went, yeah, you just take long walks in the woods. What's wrong with you? Get it together. And I was like, sure. That works. I, I happily, I, you bet I would do that. That's all it takes. I done, done and done. And like, yeah, it was terrible. And, uh, yeah, I was mismanaged. I was mismanaged a lot for like about 18 months and which is crazy in retrospect. And it, it's mismanaged. I was mismanaged a lot for like about 18 months and,

which is crazy in retrospect. And it's one of the things that actually, it also motivated me to pay attention to mental health stuff and particularly young people, because there was no, there were no services for adolescents and young adults. And that's a very special stage of development. It needs its own specialty. And then now it has that now it has it and it made me very interested in that so i didn't want i'm i'm very pro therapy if it's for you right like now we've gotten into like sort of a therapize nation where we just lean on it as a crutch and everybody does and they sort of use it as a i don't know some sort of a calling card like oh my therapist my analyst as they'd say in the woody allen movies yeah um but i love therapy i've been in therapy for many many years and i love my guy who I've

been going to for a long time. I do. I've said on the show before and including recently that we're like the Simone Biles thing. And in particular, the Naomi Osaka thing, because I did not believe Naomi Osaka. If you look at the evolution of her story, there was no reason to doubt her claims. There was something up. Yeah. Yeah. We're just lionizing anybody who says the term mental health now in a way that feels weird. Yeah, you have to be careful. Yeah, it can't be an excuse. It can be a fact and it can be, you know, if you sort of think of it as a medical issue.

But boy, when it comes when you start violating contracts and things like that, it's like now it becomes an excuse. And that's where it starts to feel weird. Right. And plus, it's like everyone's got some mental health issues. Everyone. That's called being human. So you could, if mental health issues get you out of your, you know, committed contracts,

mild mental health issues at best, then everyone could use them. I mean, that's ridiculous. There's not one perfect human being who has none, right? Tom Brady's got mental health issues. We just don't know what they are. That's right. That's right. 50%

of us at any given time is having a condition that could be diagnosable, is having symptoms that could be diagnosable. The issue though, that makes, you know, sort of, I'm not a huge Freud fan, but I feel there's some stuff to be learned from him. And one of the things he said when he arrived in the United States and the reporters, he got off the, apparently the transatlantic boat and the reporters ran up to him and said, Dr. Freud, what do you hope to do here in the United States? And he said, well, I hope to come to an understanding of the difference between real psychiatric pathology and ordinary misery. And that is something we have lost track of. Ordinary misery is something I dare say, I'm going to put a value judgment on it, is good. Ordinary misery is part of life.

It's how we grow. It's when we can't function because of symptomatology that it becomes a medical psychiatric issue. But misery itself can teach us, can guide us, can motivate us to change. And it's ordinary and part of life. And the fact that we have made that anathema to the American experience is a disaster. We never were like that. We have to. And now people talk finally about grit and things like that.

That's what they're talking about. Ordinary misery. And we should, we should. And, you know, the Stoic said not to bear what is necessary, but to love it. I think we could use, we could use a little bit of Stoicism in our general psychology. Oh man, that is, that is the perfect note to end this on. It's so good talking to you. Thank you so much for your wisdom, your insights. Say hello to your beautiful wife, who seems like a really great life partner and business partner from what I read to you.

She is. It's been inspirational. Thanks, Megan. I appreciate it so much. Don't miss Monday's show. We have got Andrew Sullivan, who is, he's just, he's a fountain of wisdom. You read Andrew Sullivan and you, like, I literally will spend a couple of minutes thanking God that he's alive, that he's with us, that he writes the way he does, that I can access it. It's it's wonderful writing. And the way he thinks about things is so clarifying for someone like me. You know, I've recommended his pieces before, but this is a man whose opinion I really value. We're not totally aligned politically. I couldn't give two fakes. I like listening to him and his worldview and him process information because you feel like a better person when you're

done. It's intellectual growth, not just stimulation. So very much looking forward to that. Please subscribe in between now and then so you don't miss it. Download the show. Give us a five star rating if you feel so inclined and definitely send out a review on the Apple podcast reviews. Cause I, I do read them all. I'm amused by a lot of them. Some are insulting, but not many, not most of them are quite delightful. And, uh, let us know what you thought of the show and let us know if you have any guest suggestions. Cause we do get a lot of good guest suggestions from you guys. Um, somebody was just, just suggesting that we go interview the reporter who broke the Elizabeth Holmes story, you know, the Theranos thing. I mean, now she'd be an amazing interview,

but she's not so keen on talking to the press these days. But I like that suggestion. So anyway, we're taking your thoughts and suggestions right now. Also, you can do it on social media because we follow the Insta, the Twitter and the Facebook posts as well. Anyway, in the meantime, have a great weekend, and we'll see you on Monday. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures. you