Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Dr Drew - America's Favourite Doctor

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Dr Drew - America's Favourite Doctor · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  G'day, humans. Well, Australia has a new government and a new government that is both a resounding
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  victory for the Labor Party and the new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in the sense that
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  it's a resounding defeat before the governing coalition run by the Liberal Party and Scott
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  Morrison. But also a non-resounding victory in the sense that the Labor Party only picked
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  up about a 32% share of the total primary vote in terms of the people who actually nominated
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  the Labor Party as their first choice. With much of the rest of the anti-government vote
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  going to independence and to the Green Party, there was a campaign of independence in this
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  election that's kind of unprecedented in Australian history. Multi-billionaire, named Simon
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  Holmes Accord had recruited female candidates who were passionate about climate change, but
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  otherwise fairly economically conservative and inoffensive to conservative voters to run in
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  marginal government-held seats and try to topple the most vulnerable government-held
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  electorates, most vulnerable members of parliament. And they largely succeeded. These were all women,
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  they were running on three issues. The first was climate change. The second was the introduction
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  of a federal anti-corruption commission in Australia. State governments generally have anti-corruption
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  commissions who can investigate the government and make sure that they're basically watchdogs
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  that make sure that some property developer isn't giving kickbacks or flying MPs around on
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  first class visits internationally as a way to butter them out up and to prove the development,
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  something like that. But at a federal level we don't have such a body and the Prime Minister had
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  always held the position that this wasn't something that voters cared about and that it would just
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  be more bureaucracy and red tape and make it more difficult for the people's elected representatives
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  to do their jobs if they had to keep worrying about personality bureaucrats looking over their
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  shoulder. Well that didn't fly. The third issue that the independence were running on was gender
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  representation, the way that the country addresses sexual assault and sexual harassment and gender
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  representation in organisations and in parliament. And those three issues were enough to get the
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  large majority of these independence. They're called teal independence because they're
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  their core flutes which is what we call sort of lawn signs painted in teal, a kind of mix of red
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  and blue, meaning that they're a mixture of both parties, they're neither the red party nor the
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  blue party, they're teal. And those independence are not technically a party of their own,
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  they're not going to caucus together, they're not going to hold weekly meetings or anything but they
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  are all part of the same push. And a consequence of their success is not just that the government's
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  been toppled but that the ruling party, the previously ruling party which is now in opposition,
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  the Liberals, has been castrated of all its moderates. So the perverse effect has been that
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  you've made the party much more conservative. And the most shocking thing that happened on
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  election night was that the treasurer lost his own seat. Josh Friedenberg, who was widely tipped
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  as being the next leader of the opposition, the next leader of his party which would consequently
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  mean that he would probably be the next prime minister of Australia, now has no political future.
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  It's hard to fathom if you're not from a parliamentary democracy, if you're living in America for
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  example, how big a deal that is because you don't have a leader who comes from your Congress,
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  you have a president who's separate, but I suppose the closest analogy might be something like
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  imagine if Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi lost not just their majority or minority position
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  in the chamber that they serve in. If their party didn't just lose power, but they actually lost
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  their district or their state, not by being primary, not by losing a primary election or
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  something that they're actually running, and imagine Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell literally
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  losing and the opposition party taking power in their district, that's how revolutionary, how
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  ground-shaking it is for Josh Friedenberg to lose in his seat to one of these
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  till independence, largely because of his inaction on climate change, and this is an individual who
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  has previously tried to do the most for the climate within his own party. He was the energy
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  minister previously and he had fought tooth and nail to get the Liberal Party to come on board
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  the climate train and he had been essentially overruled by the right-wing faction in his own
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  centre-right party, and as the treasurer was not part of his portfolio, it was not part of his
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  purview, there was much he could do about climate, but he nonetheless found himself joined at the hip
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  to this deeply unpopular prime minister who in his final days seemed tinnyed out of touch,
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  vaguely corrupt, vaguely dismissive, a little bit of a bully, and unwilling to respond to the
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  electorates increasing fury about Australia's inaction on climate change. And I think
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  if anything is heartwarming about the election, it's that if you persistently refuse to act
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  on a topic on which the electorate and the voters consistently say they really care about,
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  you can only whistle Dixie for so long, you can only keep charming them with your marketing
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  else for so long, eventually the voters will rise up and they'll kick you out. Australians have been
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  saying that the climate is the most important issue for them for some time now, basically since the
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  bushfires, the horrendous bushfires of 2019 to 2020, and then we've had these devastating floods
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  over this recent southern summer, and people are putting two and two together. Australia is the
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  most vulnerable rich country to climate change by far. It's the driest inhabited continent
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  and the most vulnerable to droughts and cyclones and floods, and we're seeing an unfold,
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  and whether you believe that any specific weather event is or is not caused by the increasingly
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  chaotic climate, there's no doubting that an increasingly chaotic climate throws up increasingly
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  chaotic and extreme weather events. Climate change is the number one issue for voters. It has
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  displanted all of the others, for voters who say that they will vote for the Labor Party,
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  the Central Left Party, and for independent voters. It's the top three issue even for liberal voters,
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  and the Prime Minister had basically felt, basically set up a straw man and said that the only way
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  to respond to climate is by destroying and trashing the Australian economy and banning all the
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  coal mining and all the industry that the Australian economy relies on. Of course,
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  that's nonsense. There are all kinds of things that you can do by gradually transitioning the
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  subsidies that you give to dirty fossil fuel industries into green industries. You can support
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  research and development, and the government can actually make money in the longer run by
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  supporting that. You can encourage solar energy. There are all kinds of kickbacks and subsidies
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  that the government currently gives to miners and to fossil fuel industries that could be reallocated.
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  At the end of the day, if you've got a long-term view, if you think about what the 21st century
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  is going to be like, and the 22nd century is going to be like, if you want to be a forward-looking
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  innovative nimble economy, then you're going to have to be a green economy at some point.
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  So the change has to be made. It's just, do we make it now when we're in control of it?
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  Do we get ahead of the game? Or do we find ourselves on the back foot after we suddenly have to make
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  a 180-degree turn and a chaotic pivot because things get untenable, or the international
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  community acts before we do, or China or America do something and all of a sudden we realize that
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  the countries to which we're selling all of this coal have put a huge carbon tax on it.
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  So people felt that the inaction, people didn't want action on climate. I've seen some people
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  on Twitter. Ben Dreyfus was quite funny. He was saying it's so funny to see a country like
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  Australia get so exercised about climate change when in the grand scheme of things. They have
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  no impact. Wake me when a country that actually matters to start to care about climate change.
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  And on one level that's right, but on another level it misses the point.
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  People were frustrated that Australia isn't taking advantage of a green revolution,
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  and frustrated that we aren't using our diplomatic heft, which is a lot larger than our economic
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  heft, to try to coerce and cajole the rest of the world into doing something about this
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  phenomenon that is going to impact Australia more heavily than any other rich nation,
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  which of course I should add the caveat that it'll impact a lot of our neighbours much,
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  much worse, Pacific island nations that could be completely wiped out, but we're not
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  including those in the club of rich Western democracies to which Australia belongs.
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  In some ways I didn't want to make this point on Twitter because it couldn't be articulated
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  without people jumping over throat in a small number of characters, but in some ways I see parallels
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  between this election and the 2016 election in the United States, where you had one candidate
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  who was essentially the incumbent candidate Hillary Clinton running on a continuation of more
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  of the same, who had an air of vague corruption about her and perhaps entitlement in the same way
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  that Scott Morrison had started to in voters eyes, and you had an upstart newcomer in the form
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  of Donald Trump who was seizing one issue that had been dysfunctional for so long in American
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  politics, immigration, which both parties had refused to do anything about for too long,
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  and voters were fed up. Now in the case of Donald Trump, he was a person offering no
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  particularly well thought out or long term solutions to this, and certainly not the kinds of
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  compromises that would be needed to actually resolve the immigration crisis in America,
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  but at least people felt that he was talking about a thing that they had been worried about
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  that wasn't being dealt with for a long time. And so was it in Australia with climate change.
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  Here was finally an opportunity to vote out someone who seemed out of touch with an issue
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  that had been bubbling along and getting bigger and bigger and bigger as people endured month after
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  month after month of smoke clogged skies in 2019 and 2020, and endless horrendous delusers of
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  rain in 2021 to 2022 and was simply fed up with it and wanted someone who at least made the
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  appearance of action. Now the perfect avatar of climate action is not Anthony Albanese and the
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  Labor Party, but a lot of people didn't vote for Anthony Albanese and the Labor Party. A lot of
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  them voted for these independence whose number one issue was climate change or for the grains.
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  So the positive lesson is people do matter. The electorate does still work, especially in a
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  country where you have compulsory voting like Australia and where you don't have primaries,
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  so you don't have these forces pushing people further to the right and further to the left,
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  pushing candidates that way, you have people actually fighting over the centre and the centre votes
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  either way. God bless compulsory voting in that respect. Just means that you can't pander to your
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  fringe. You have to win over the middle. But as I alluded to earlier, the perverse result of this
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  is that the moderate wing of the centre-right party has been eviscerated. Not only will the next
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  leader of the party not be a moderate Josh Friedenburg, it's highly likely to be Peter Dutton,
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  who's part of the right wing faction, who isn't almost comically evil looking gentleman,
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  no offense Peter. But I mean, even one of the tabloid newspapers had to put a photo of
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  him trying to look friendly. He's sort of bald and he looks a bit like golem from all of the rings.
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  They put a picture of him with his wife smiling and the headline said quote, I'm quote,
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  he's not a monster. Which presumably is a quote from his wife. I didn't read the piece,
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  but I thought it was amusing when someone tweeted that and said they've already got their
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  campaign slogan. He's not a monster. Put that on a bumper sticker. So you've got him as the
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  presumed next leader of the party and a party that whose centre of gravity is much more right wing
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  than it would have been. There was a lot of gloating about this on the evening of the election
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  and the day after with left-wing people and labour supporters saying ha ha ha, serves them right.
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  All of these liberal party members like Josh Friedenberg, like Trent Zimmerman in North Sydney,
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  like Jason Falinsky. These are all the moderates who got kicked out because they hitched their
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  wagon to this sexist and environmentally vandalist government blah blah blah.
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  And I tweeted a tweet that said something a lot of the lines of be careful what you wish for
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  because in a democracy, especially a parliamentary democracy, a healthy opposition is actually
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  necessary. The liberal party will come back to power one day and it's in everybody's interests
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  for that party to be sane and moderate and centrist. It's not in the interests of left wingers,
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  though they might like to gloat about it right now for the opposition party to be a deranged
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  faction of anti-vax freedom marching climate denying lunatics. It'll be interesting to see how the
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  liberal party deals with this, how it licks its wounds, the lessons that it takes away from this,
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  but I for one whilst I am pleased that the people have been able to speak out and have a change of
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  government enacted and have their wishes expressed through the ballot box. I don't think that anyone
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  should be too sanguine about the fact that some of the smartest and most moderate people in the
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  liberal party are now out of a jaw ball together and have lost their ability to sway the party
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  to the sane and reasonable middle. So those are my general thoughts. Congratulations on everyone
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  who won, especially the Teal Independence who have really shaken up Australian politics and shown
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  what can happen in a parliamentary democracy. If you step outside the two party system, we'll see
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  what happens from here and I would just exhort you as I always do to maintain several conversations,
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  to try to understand where people who disagree with you are coming from, to enjoy the win,
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  but don't gloat, don't rub your enemies' faces in it. In fact, they're not your enemies,
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  they're your opponents, and your fellow countrymen. So I have those conversations that are difficult,
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  but that are optimistic, that are challenging, and that yes, you know what I'm going to say,
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  that is sometimes uncomfortable.
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  Today on the show, one of the world's great medical conversationalists and medical communicators.
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  Dr. Drew, otherwise known as Dr. Drew Pinsky, he's a physician. He had the nationally syndicated
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  radio talk show Love Line from 1984 all the way until 2016, taking people's calls and giving
• 15:59
  them advice. That went on to TV, on HLN, he got Dr. Drew on call, he got a show called Life Changes,
• 16:08
  he got a show called Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew, Celebrity Rehab
• 16:14
  presents Sober House with Dr. Drew, you get the picture. He's an all-around media personality
• 16:21
  extraordinaire and still a physician in Southern California, which is where he's from. He has a
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  podcast, The Adam and Drew Show, with his former Love Line co-host Adam Karola, he might remember
• 16:32
  from The Man Show, with Jimmy Kimmel, and he's got a new book. You may be pleased to know,
• 16:40
  we barely talk about it at all. I mean, this is one of those things where, oh hey, you've got a new
• 16:43
  book. Now let's go off and wander in the weeds and talk about a whole bunch of different
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  incredible things from the French Revolution to our handling of COVID. The new book is technically
• 16:51
  called It doesn't have to be awkward dealing with relationships, consent, and other hard to talk
• 16:56
  about stuff. He wrote it with his daughter and it's sort of a me too book about consent, but he's
• 17:01
  an interesting guy because he started out as you'll hear very much on the left. Now he doesn't
• 17:09
  think he's changed, but he gets a lot of flak from the left because he's been critical of over
• 17:14
  reactions to COVID, which we touch on a bit, but we don't go too hard down the COVID train.
• 17:19
  He's written a bunch of books and all of the shows I could bore you talking about ask Dr.
• 17:25
  Drew, dose of Dr. Drew, Dr. Drew after dark, this life with this life you live with Dr. Drew, Dr.
• 17:31
  Drew podcast, the Adam and Dr. Drew show. You don't need to know all that, you just need to know
• 17:35
  that it's a very clever and charismatic and thoughtful guy. I hope you enjoy this at times
• 17:40
  uncomfortable conversations with Dr. Drew.
• 17:42
  I'm interested in what you wanted to do when you were a kid and then adolescence. Did you
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  want to be a physician or a immediate personality or something else? No, I'm a physician for sure.
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  That was sort of always the assumption. My dad was a fan of our tissue and my uncle was a
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  psychiatrist and you will be a doctor and I never really questioned it until I got to college
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  and had my ass handed to me academically and I sort of bailed out at that point and said,
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  this is not for me, I'm not smart enough, I can't do it and just farts around for 18 months after
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  that and did music and theater and this and that then was extremely unhappy. Actually, I've got
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  depressed, started having panic attacks and the whole wild I was like, well, this is not me,
• 18:41
  that's other people's expectations of me so I can't even contemplate doing that, that Dr.
• 18:47
  business again. But one day I just thought, you know, you're pretty good at sciences and maybe
• 18:54
  maybe that wouldn't be so bad and it immediately felt a sense of relief and so started moving that
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  direction again and when I got to it, I had to really get to it academically and interestingly,
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  I found that not only was I more motivated and so obviously at purpose and it was not such a drag
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  to be killing myself 24, 7 academically but I could do it and I literally looking back think that
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  my brain needed a mature like I was 18 when I got to college and I just don't think I was ready
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  and a year and a half, two years later, I was a lot different and I found the experience of
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  rigorous academic application a lot different and so it helped.
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  It's crazy isn't it? We do expect so much of people who are still kids. I mean, when I left high
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  school, I took a year off and deferred before going to uni and then strapped on the backpack
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  and went around the world by myself and came back and I remember in first year University,
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  a professor said, have you been traveling? And I said, yeah, who told you? And he said, you can
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  just always tell. You can just tell the kids who have gone and had some life experience from
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  going to a straight out of high school. How can you expect people to know what they, you know,
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  not only do they have the stamina to deal with college but also to have the foresight to know what
• 20:17
  they want to do with their lives until they've got some life experience. Oh for sure and not only
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  that but I was young college, you know, I graduated high school at 17 and I went across the country
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  to New England and something I'd never contemplated. I just always assumed I'd live in California
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  and that was a shock. So it was a lot of a lot of adjusting. Where were you going in New England?
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  Amherst College. Right. My partners from New England. So I know I know the area very well. I got
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  family in New Hampshire and yeah, father-in-laws from Boston and went and so they had at that
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  migraine into into ending up being a media personality. What happened? Oh total complete accident.
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  The, that means there are long stories but I was a fourth year medical student and I lived
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  near a radio station which was, we allowed to swear on this on the side. Yes, yes. It was in a
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  just a shithole about a block up for my apartment and it was not even a blip on the radar ski.
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  Green of Los Angeles radio and I'd lived most of my life in Los Angeles and all of a sudden
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  overnight it became the number one radio station in the, in the, the biggest radio market in the
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  country. But at a time when radio was incredibly impactful, a young people today can't really
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  appreciate that you really find yourself by what radio station to listen to. I know it's hard
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  to imagine. People carried boom boxes with them. They had the radio going on. The car was a
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  major social sort of feature of Southern California particularly and so you know this is a big deal
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  that quote, new wave had hit and it was 1982 or 83 and I started listening to this radio station
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  and I was, I was aware it was just right up the street and friends of mine started socializing
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  with people that worked there and I got this call one day in like 1983. His friend of mine goes,
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  you know the radio station? Yeah, yeah. He goes, well, I've been talking to those guys, you know,
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  they're great and they have a show in the middle of the night and they need, it needs to be a community
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  service show and they, I brought your name up, I year in medical school, you could maybe do something
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  useful but what we want you to do is do a segment called Ask a Surgeon. You'll use big words.
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  It'll be really funny. I was like, what? What do you want? I what?
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  But I was intrigued and I went to meet the disjockeys that were doing this thing which was
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  essentially just opening the mics at midnight, it was midnight, it was midnight to 3 AM,
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  Sunday night, Monday morning and just talking to listeners and I was convinced to go up there
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  and I went up there with my infectious disease and gynecology textbooks, you know, in Hainto and
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  was completely freaked out what I was doing and was blown away by the fact that young people
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  were coming to this environment for their, some of their most important health questions
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  and oh by the way, at that time I was taking care of AIDS patients, hand over fist, it became
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  most of what I was doing medically for the next five years and we had just stopped calling it
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  grids, gay-related intestinal disease syndrome and we're calling it AIDS for about the last year,
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  did not yet have a cause. Well, I think we had HTLV3, we called it, it was not called HIV yet,
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  the term safe sex hadn't been coined yet, it was just a mess and the shock to me was that the
• 23:51
  young people I was talking to had never heard of this and I thought in retrospect I thought,
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  of course, the sexual revolution in the 70s was perpetrated by adults, they never contemplated
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  that adolescents would be having sex and I was 24 years old and I knew what adolescents were up
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  to, I knew what I'd been doing and I thought, oh my god, we have to, we have to talk and at that same
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  time somebody I admired very much a guy named Anthony Fauci was really my, one of my guiding
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  sources during the HIV epidemic and he was saying that these, you have to get out there,
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  you have to, you have to educate, we've got to get out there and change behavior and I took that
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  very seriously and began talking about this concept of safe sex before the term had even been
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  coined yet. Did you know at the time what the transmission route for HIV was? Yeah, it was pretty
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  well, there were still some Lucy, you know, weird, you know, could you spin in somebody's eye and
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  get it? Well, yeah, I mean, that's what I'm wondering if you've got all these patients coming
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  through, there were a lot of uninformed doctors as well who are, you know, wearing PPE and going,
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  I don't know, we're actually, we actually went the other way, we sort of considered it our
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  pride in not protecting ourselves at all because it couldn't be transmitted that way so we'd be
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  maybe wearing gloves and we kind of overdid it, I say. Right, but I mean, you must have seen
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  some horrendous things then, did that strike you in your early 20s? Oh, these strong, fit young
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  men wasting away into nothing. It was, I feel like I was witness to a human tragedy that was of
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  such magnitude and there's no one to discuss it with, there's no, no one's here to talk about it,
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  they're not, they, none of them survived, they can't tell their tale and I was witness to
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  maybe thousands of just gruesome deaths, it was a, before we had treatments, it was just, I
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  mean, I literally saw men cut in half by Burkett's lymphomas, it was just, it was just a dark
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  chapter and the people forget, remember, that was a pandemic with a 100% fatality rate, not one
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  percent, not five percent, 100% fatality rate. It is amazing that it's so
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  survivable and so manageable now. What did you make at the time of the, I guess the cultural
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  reaction to it, you're straight, I'm married to a guy, but that'll happen before I was obviously
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  around and I mean, as I understand it, there was a lot of pushback about like, well, if you live
• 26:37
  a deviant lifestyle, then think then she's gonna happen. There was sort of, there was a weird,
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  yes, there was a weird, it's so funny to me because one of the, one of the really kind of
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  uncanny aspects of my life is I spent many years fighting the right and now I'm fighting the left,
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  it's just crazy, it's super crazy. But at that time, yes, there was this sort of weird,
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  under their breath, like, well, in the math houses and what did you expect? It was kind of bullshit.
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  And it's, it died down pretty quick. It did because because the tragedy started getting through
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  to people. And by, you know, by the way, this country, particularly, I don't really know about
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  the UK story because I was deep in it here in the United States, did an amazing job of defining
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  an illness, defining its epidemiology, defining how it's transmitted, finding a causative agent,
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  coming up with treatments, using developing public health messaging that worked by the way,
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  abandoned all that during COVID strangely, but the public health messaging worked and I felt
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  like I was part of that, which is let cases speak for themselves and we'll just sort of
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  explicate them. How well did the public health messaging work? Because I mean, I was in Australia
• 27:54
  growing up in the eighties and we had one of the most aggressive public health aids campaigns
• 27:59
  in the world, which was really terrifying. I mean, it's still branded into my memory. You had,
• 28:02
  you had a grim reaper figure in a 10-pin bowling alley. I don't know, have you ever seen these
• 28:07
  Australian ads? And, and this droning voiceover saying aids is coming for everything. And the
• 28:14
  10-pin, that the pins that will get dropped at the end of the 10-pin bowling alley were women
• 28:18
  and children and regular people. And the grim reaper throws the bowling ball in these human bodies
• 28:22
  go smashing everywhere and had ends with always user condom, always. At first only gays and ivy drug
• 28:32
  users were being killed by aids, but now we know every one of us could be devastated by it.
• 28:42
  The fact is, over 50,000 men, women and children now carry the aids virus,
• 28:48
  that in three years nearly 2,000 of us will be dead.
• 28:57
  That if not stopped, it could kill more Australians than World War Two.
• 29:05
  But aids can be stopped and you can help stop it. If you have sex, have just one safe partner
• 29:11
  but always use condoms, always.
• 29:21
  That doesn't work very well. Well, you know what? I mean, Australia did better than
• 29:27
  other Western countries. And I can safely say that I scared the shit out of me. I have never
• 29:33
  ever had sex without a condom except in a monogamous relationship and all of my American friends
• 29:38
  living in New York have and did and continue to do. That's just anecdotal. But you know,
• 29:44
  it's a problem. How do you grate America on its response to that?
• 29:48
  Well, in terms of getting the behavioral change, here's what we went through. So we learned,
• 29:54
  we studied and learned that the way to change, difficult to change, highly motivated behavior
• 29:59
  was not, you know, doctrine of white code in a box, you know, or the grim reaper, reaper,
• 30:05
  dropping, dropping horrible messaging on you. It is narrative, relatable, relatable characters,
• 30:13
  people like you, people you can understand. Narrative about those people show the consequences of
• 30:18
  their choices and include humor and music. That's it. That's all you got to do. And it changes
• 30:25
  behavior. And so, you know, the young people, and so that's what love line was. It was cases,
• 30:32
  a comedian, musical guests, and me sort of explicating these cases. And that works. It changes
• 30:39
  behavior. Yeah, I mean, I suppose if you're trying to actually draw people into pay attention,
• 30:43
  then you need to let stuff. But if you're just going to ambush them in a 30 second ad campaign
• 30:47
  while they're watching the voice or whatever the equivalent wasn't in the 1980s, you know,
• 30:50
  Roseanne. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. We just, we just know it doesn't. And so,
• 30:55
  but how do we know it doesn't? I'm not sure it was all studied. It was carefully studied over
• 30:58
  10 years. And they were having tremendous. They had no problem getting the information across.
• 31:04
  They couldn't change the behavior until they realized that this sort of case approach is the
• 31:09
  way to go. And then what happened was, because we did the same thing Australia did, we said,
• 31:15
  it's, you know, it's everybody. And everybody's at risk. People started realizing that, well,
• 31:21
  maybe my risk was overblown. Then they got pissed. And then they then they stopped listening.
• 31:26
  So you can't lie or exaggerate when you're giving public health messaging. That's the other thing
• 31:30
  because they will turn away. Well, let's, let's, what lesson do we have from that from COVID then?
• 31:36
  Right. Same thing, right? Very similar. Right. It's all from on high. It was fiat. It was authoritarian.
• 31:44
  And it was often wrong. And people just started abandoning ship and pushing back all over the place.
• 31:51
  Was there, did you see similarities between the amount of uncertainty in the early days of this
• 31:55
  pandemic and the other pandemic? Or did we get clearer faster in one versus the other?
• 32:01
  This was so different because there was a, you know, a universal panic, a worldwide panic.
• 32:10
  And that was different. During HIV and AIDS, it was, it was slowly coming into consciousness that
• 32:16
  there was even a problem. Is that because of the contagiousness and the transmissibility or
• 32:20
  something cultural or what? I don't know. Well, I think we have to write history books about it.
• 32:26
  There were some major, major errors made. And it seemed to me that there's a guy that, well,
• 32:31
  I don't, I just don't know. The fact that that, I mean, look at what's going on in Shanghai right now.
• 32:38
  That's the exact same thing that went on in Wuhan. Italy copied Wuhan. And then California copied
• 32:44
  Wuhan. And it was never, there was no physicians involved in that. There was no infectious disease.
• 32:51
  Anybody, anywhere involved in that decision making, especially in this country, including school
• 32:56
  closures, they just did it. And it was pure panic. And it was the whole way to me, just very,
• 33:04
  very strange. I remember I was at a local television program. I was doing for a year during the early,
• 33:09
  the first year of the pandemic. We just reported on updated on things every night.
• 33:14
  And I was sitting talking to a school board member when the first
• 33:19
  countywide closure was going to be undertaken. There's the first school to do it. And I was like,
• 33:24
  who told you to do this? The CDC is not telling you to do this. Why are you doing this? We just have
• 33:29
  to. It's the right thing to do. So it was all done with no evidence. And we're still doing stuff
• 33:35
  with little evidence. I feel so sorry for so many of my friends and colleagues in the states,
• 33:40
  where anytime I try to, you know, every country has its own trauma from this thing and from the
• 33:45
  policies that were imposed in response to it. And Australia got its share of bad flag and bad press
• 33:51
  last year at a time when there was no COVID in Australia, because the borders had been closed.
• 33:56
  And in the context of there not being any cases in a jurisdiction, then periods of isolation,
• 34:03
  periods of lockdowns were effective in stopping it from spreading if you only had 10 cases out
• 34:09
  of 7 million people. But then, I mean, you can argue about the human rights trade off of
• 34:15
  requiring everybody to stay away from it. But the current thinking is, you can chain the time
• 34:22
  chorus, but we're all going to end up in the same place anyway. Yeah, that's right. Well,
• 34:26
  it was a race to get vaccinated was what it was. I mean, that's to me, that's a viable thing.
• 34:31
  Yeah. And then in the November once, yeah, once once Australia and the state government here
• 34:37
  in New South Wales, which is the state where Sydney is said that once we hit 80% eligible
• 34:42
  population vaccinated, then we're out of lockdown when we hit 90% then everything goes back to normal.
• 34:47
  They did that. They're on the crime hit. The waves swept through over the northern winter,
• 34:52
  the southern summer. Everyone basically got it. And now we're, you know, now everything's
• 34:57
  back to normal. What's happened by contrast in the states, it strikes me is that you've had this,
• 35:02
  this, but through all of that, schools basically remained open with the exception of the hardest
• 35:07
  lockdown. So I'm sort of excluding Melbourne here because the Victorian government went super,
• 35:11
  super, gung ho crazy kind of authoritarian for a while. But schools in most parts of Australia
• 35:16
  remained open. There was none of what I saw out of from my friends in LA, for example, we had
• 35:22
  had bulldozers pushing sand over skate parks for honest beach and stuff like that. So what,
• 35:28
  teenagers can't be outside skating because that's more dangerous than whatever else they would be
• 35:31
  doing, like being blasted off to the moon or something like what do they think they were sitting
• 35:35
  inside? They put steel over basketball hoops, they closed beaches down. I mean, the level of
• 35:43
  incompetence was unbelievable. I mean, you want to look at incompetence. Then when they open the
• 35:48
  beaches, they said, well, you can stand on the beach, but if you lie a towel down, you'll be
• 35:51
  arrested. Yeah, we did have that. We had that for a while. Yeah. That's incompetence. That's
• 35:55
  more test and competence. And it's fiat and it's, and it's, it tells you how pathetic the decision
• 36:01
  making was. Yeah. I mean, especially when there's, there's the, there are these hall, there's
• 36:05
  a lot of the side of the ledger that doesn't get taken into consideration, which is the well-being of
• 36:09
  kids, the socialization of kids, the eight to 15 year old group just is destroyed. We have really
• 36:19
  harmed a large swath of a generation. And everyone else is suffering. The mental health
• 36:26
  consequences have been profound. And they're predictable. Of course, it would be like that. Of course,
• 36:31
  these people were not making risk reward decisions. They just weren't. Oh my god, it was just,
• 36:36
  it's so beautiful to see that. I mean, not to mention the fact that their own objectives,
• 36:41
  which is to slow the spread of the virus or to save people's lives or whatever,
• 36:45
  they themselves get undermined by the backlash that consequently arises from their stupid policies.
• 36:50
  Like I think there was less of a backlash in places where it made a little bit more sense.
• 36:54
  Yes. You know, in Australia where you could still send your kids to school and masking really didn't
• 36:58
  become a thing until Delta happened. But for the first, I mean, in February of 2021,
• 37:06
  I went to see Hamilton with 2,000 other people in Sydney. Now think of what February of 2021 was
• 37:14
  everywhere else. I mean, that was the DACA's days, right? Pre-vaccinated. It was nasty. The
• 37:20
  darkest was the six months before the initial. Yeah, the initial. Houston, California, which was
• 37:24
  absurd, just absurd. Oh my god. And why why we can't look back and learn and just sort of
• 37:30
  we got to learn and look at it objectively. And let's be honest about the mistakes we made.
• 37:34
  Yeah, it was an untruth clear situation. I get it. But to pretend that things went well is just a
• 37:41
  what were the big mistakes? Because I want to get off COVID and talk about a bunch of other stuff.
• 37:44
  But if you had this type of stuff, I'm tired of it. What a thing. I'm tired of it. Can you give me two or
• 37:49
  three big lessons for the next pandemic? You know, if somebody asked me the other day, I thought,
• 37:56
  you know, it is really hard until we sit down and be objective about what the mistakes were.
• 38:03
  I would say quarantining healthy people is something that had never been contemplated
• 38:11
  in medicine, in human history, save one exception in the 12th century, which was a catastrophe.
• 38:19
  So I would think long and hard about quarantining healthy people. Number one,
• 38:25
  number two, if you're going to do that, you must do that on a limited basis. Number three,
• 38:30
  closing down economies has dire consequences and we have yet to see the full effect of that.
• 38:38
  Number four, keeping kids out of school is abusive and destructive and really can not happen again
• 38:48
  on the list. There's exquisitely good evidence that it needs to happen. I've been telling people,
• 38:52
  here I go, you know, I'm watching women and children go over the border from the Ukraine into Poland
• 38:59
  and the reporters are shoving microphones in these women's face. And the first thing they say is,
• 39:04
  yeah, we're worried about the men left behind. It was terrible. But these kids have been out of school
• 39:08
  for two weeks. They even have for two weeks to get them back in school. And they're putting in Polish
• 39:13
  speaking schools and go go to school. You can't be out of school more than two weeks. That's insane.
• 39:18
  Two years. Come to come to pass it in a two years. Okay. Well, I asked you for two or three
• 39:24
  and you gave me four. So you'll be here at some stage. It doesn't have to be awkward is your new book
• 39:30
  dealing with relationships, concerns and hard to talk about stuff. I mean, your other book is
• 39:34
  about addiction. And I think these are two of the huge looming uncomfortable things that people
• 39:41
  feel weird about talking about is really. That's odd to me that people wouldn't want to talk about
• 39:47
  addiction. You're talking about it all the time. Well, I talk about the problem of addiction. I don't
• 39:52
  mean that that I'm talking about the problem addiction. I mean that personally, it's uncomfortable
• 39:56
  for us to open up about the about substances that we misuse. Or is that not the case in your
• 40:03
  well, you know, people people and by the way, my my book before it doesn't have to be awkward,
• 40:08
  it was a book on narcissism. And I see that more as the the threatening the phenomenon that they
• 40:15
  they're the yes, right. Why we're having the phenomenological experiences we're having here.
• 40:21
  But as far as addiction goes, you know, there's a lot of people that I hear complaining about a stigma
• 40:27
  around addiction. I have treated 10,000 drug addicts. Never has one of them even gotten
• 40:33
  here complaining about stigma to me. That's not their concern is I'm in pain. I want more drugs.
• 40:40
  That's it. Okay. So maybe yeah, yeah, no, that's a good clarification. Maybe what I'm talking about
• 40:45
  is the fact that I'm assuming that there's a some kind of a spectrum of misuse here that I mean,
• 40:50
  I didn't I'm drunk in about eight and months. I didn't go through any program. I just felt like
• 40:57
  it was just the daily getting home and pouring a glass of wine because it was a habit. And then
• 41:03
  the reward the kind of reward the way it landed for me as a reward every time I'd get on a plane
• 41:08
  or I'd be in the lounge. All here's a good, you know, now I get to have a vodka now I get to have this
• 41:13
  it was not me making choices anymore. It was just a backdrop to my life and it was in a
• 41:20
  sufficiently large quantity. And I think this is true of many, many Australians and certainly most
• 41:25
  of my friends can I come from New Zealand Irish stock and Aussie. So, you know, heavy drinkers and
• 41:32
  that's just part of life. And then, you know, some proportion of you when you're 65 get liver cancer
• 41:37
  or some other related disease and you're off. And I just had kids that didn't want to I didn't want
• 41:43
  that to happen. That kind of thing I don't think we talk about and we don't talk about the quiet
• 41:50
  ways in which we might be, you know, having I don't know, popping a couple of codine before bed or
• 41:56
  whatever else makes us feel good or that's the it's the those edge cases, not the
• 42:02
  I'm an addict and I need help. So substance abuse rather than substance addiction really. Yeah,
• 42:08
  right. Yeah. And people do talk about a lot here. They do. They love talking about it. It's the
• 42:13
  common the common discourse is the mom and white wine. That's the that's the new version of our
• 42:20
  alcohol abuse and this kind of right. And people who have momentum with pills, I mean, it happens
• 42:26
  all the time that you know, the over prescribing was, you know, massively. Well, 90% of the
• 42:33
  viking and prescribed on earth by the time they got control of this problem was being prescribed
• 42:38
  here in the United States. So the pill problem was ridiculous. You know what what I did have I've
• 42:44
  done begun to zero in on though is you know, I had to fight that pill epidemic tooth and nail for
• 42:50
  a decade. My peers were killing my patients routinely with the over prescribing of opiates.
• 42:56
  And, you know, I was told I was a dinosaur and I wasn't interested in patient comfort and
• 43:02
  the joint commissioner hospital accreditation was up my took eye, took us and the department of
• 43:07
  mental health and my hospital administration. I mean, this was, you know, pain was the fifth vital
• 43:12
  side and it needed to be controlled. It was horrible. But I've learned through looking at that
• 43:19
  and looking now in the case of COVID in this country, we have a lot of people trained in public health
• 43:26
  and they were locked and loaded for a pandemic. Like, like, this was there, been waiting for this
• 43:32
  to lay it out. And I thought boy, when it comes to medicine in particular and this, but this might
• 43:39
  be a more generalizable phenomenon, which is that when authority gets centralized, which is
• 43:49
  common in medicine, we have, you know, academic centralization, but when it becomes centralized
• 43:53
  in dogmatic and when the leaders in those centralized authorities go on a holy mission of some type,
• 44:01
  a holy mission to eliminate pain, a holy mission to zero COVID, a holy mission to end mental illness,
• 44:08
  so we're going to do psychoso surgeries and we're going to get a Nobel Prize of the guy that
• 44:12
  invents the lobotomy and we're going to be on a holy mission. I mean, there's one holy mission
• 44:17
  after another that causes unbelievable devastation for humans. So beware centralized authority
• 44:24
  on a mission. That's how we get ourselves into trouble, it seems to me. And so on opioids,
• 44:29
  when you say that your colleagues were killing patients, is it, was it the actual drugs that they
• 44:33
  were prescribing that was killing them or was it the consequent addiction that drove the people to
• 44:37
  then go and get street drugs? No, that came much later. The doctors themselves were giving them
• 44:45
  sufficient quantities of the combination of opiate and benzodiazepine. It is that combo that
• 44:51
  is fatal. Wow. I was dealing with that constantly. And what were their repercussions for the
• 44:56
  physicians? No. And they still do it to this day, the crazy thing. But I mean, it says on the
• 45:03
  side of a pack of valium or Xanax, you can't take this with a, you know, with, I don't know,
• 45:10
  Tramodol or some synthetic opioid. And it says on the other that, in fact, I was just googling
• 45:15
  this because I was just in Thailand on a vacation with my kids. And I went in and asked for
• 45:20
  ibuprofen because I had a headache. Now, ibuprofen, you can't get over the countering
• 45:25
  Thailand. And so, and I didn't want a paracetamol, what do you call a sedimentation? And it's not,
• 45:31
  I don't find it very effective. So she hands me Tramodol, which is an opioid.
• 45:36
  The weak opioid, yeah. And I take it and it kind of gives me a nice buzz and the pain goes away.
• 45:42
  What, so, can you chart the course for me? I mean, presumably it's not bad enough that, you know,
• 45:46
  a whole bunch of Thai people aren't hopefully getting addicted to it and ending up dying.
• 45:50
  But on the side of the pack, it said, because then I couldn't sleep. And so I had some Xanax
• 45:54
  for the, for the flies. And I saw, I googled it and I was like, oh, oh, don't take Xanax with
• 45:59
  Tramodol. What's the, chart the course for me between that and me ending up either dead or with
• 46:05
  my kidneys impaired or any got it? Yeah, I mean, you're, you're, you're kind of zero in on this
• 46:10
  issue of when somebody crosses the threshold into addiction. When do you lose control?
• 46:17
  When is it a disorder? When, when are you abusing? When is it you have it under control? When is
• 46:21
  it a potential problem? And when is it actually a problem? And when it's escalating in spite of
• 46:28
  consequences and there's a family history, it's a genetic disorder, you have to have that potential
• 46:33
  for it. So if you can see a family history, you see the consequences and there's escalation.
• 46:39
  Usually it is the opiates that drive it, right? And so you're using the opiates escalating doses
• 46:47
  and now you end up in chronic withdrawal. So now you have back pain and headache,
• 46:51
  you're also, you're going through withdrawal at night and so you're not sleeping. So you go and
• 46:56
  you raise hell with the doctor and he gives you some ambient or some Xanax or some clonipin.
• 47:02
  Well, that works a little bit, but it's also during the day now, I'm feeling irritable and
• 47:07
  unconscious, you know, and, and out of its sort. So I'm just going to take this Xanax during
• 47:11
  the day and I certainly need more now at night and on that's it. And, and right.
• 47:15
  They're not breathing. And when you say that you have a family history, is that a family
• 47:18
  history of any addiction? Do those addiction pathways work the same for alcohol as they do for
• 47:22
  people? I mean, generally speaking. Yeah. What is it? Do we know? There's a lot of candid
• 47:29
  genes. I mean, it is essentially the ventral tegmental firing into what's called the shell of the
• 47:34
  nucleus accumbens. There's a series of intracidoplasmic mechanisms that are triggered and in some
• 47:40
  genetically prone individuals, those cytoplasmic transporters change permanently.
• 47:46
  There are those big woods that you took from college to the radio station. There you go.
• 47:49
  I finally got it right. And and and and and there's thought to be even genetic upregulation on
• 47:57
  changing that again, if you're if you're set up for that, it happens. And there is different genes
• 48:02
  and different mechanisms activated at different stages of the addiction cycle, right?
• 48:06
  But they're pretty well laid out. They're pretty well laid out. And so the problem is that
• 48:12
  addiction is a disorder of motivation. So you can get anybody off drugs or alcohol. It's pretty
• 48:17
  easy, but keeping them off is the illness part. Because the ill the the motivational disturbance
• 48:24
  takes over all the other brain functions that were used to relying on, our reasoning, our thinking,
• 48:33
  our feeling states. And so we start thinking things are good ideas that will eventually lead us
• 48:39
  back to the using because the brain is now manipulatorally the brain manipulates itself.
• 48:45
  And then when you're back in the using, even if you dip your toe into it presumably that also
• 48:49
  then generates thoughts that link your well-being and your satisfaction to the use.
• 48:56
  It makes it harder. And again, it's what we call stinking thinking, the brain tricks itself.
• 49:01
  And it just escalates. It's a progressive thing. This is the part that in this country,
• 49:05
  people seem weirdly sort of naive to which is addiction is progressive, particularly a strong
• 49:12
  these pharmaceutical addictions. Progressive ends in death. If you don't interfere with the progression,
• 49:18
  it does not go well. Right. Isn't the easiest thing then to say don't stop?
• 49:24
  Sure, but that's unrealistic in many situations. I mean the bigger, more interesting question is
• 49:29
  why do people start? And so they start typically if somebody's going to have an addiction problem,
• 49:34
  they start because of childhood trauma. And the issue that they're trying to manage as a result
• 49:39
  of that trauma is emotional dysregulation and a background of emotional pain that is walled off
• 49:46
  from access because of how trauma affects the brain. People think they've gotten over it,
• 49:52
  but it's there as a source of constant discomfort and it's sort of always looking for attention.
• 49:58
  And when you find something that works, you're aware of it. You may feel good for, you may feel
• 50:05
  like, okay, and your skin for the first time in your life. And when the culture says this stuff
• 50:10
  that you smoke is a natural herb and it's good for you, yes, start with that, sure. And your
• 50:15
  friends got a little bit of viking and they're like, whatever it's, Sally was using it at the
• 50:19
  party of the night. And of course alcohol everyone drinks. What's the big deal? And off it goes.
• 50:25
  Yeah. And when I say don't start, I don't mean to channel a kind of Nancy Reagan worldview,
• 50:28
  which is just just say no to drugs, but rather if from the physicians view, why are we using
• 50:35
  these things? Anyway, I mean, I don't know. What do you think about the sort of safe prescription
• 50:40
  of opioids? Are they actually necessary and effective for people? I'm not saying people should
• 50:45
  suffer. And if you have a surgery, you're going to need some opiates. That's, you know, if you study
• 50:49
  the, you know, the advent of opiate pain medication, it was a, it was a miracle. It was a magic,
• 50:55
  a hypodermic needle, which was invented around the same time as certain or brought in morphine
• 51:00
  sulfate. It was a magic wand. I mean, you could deal with, you could take away human suffering
• 51:05
  for the first time in history. It was, oh my god. And we just didn't understand that it could be
• 51:12
  overdone. And we had our first opioid epidemic in this country was in the 1890s. And then we
• 51:18
  developed very stringent laws against it. Physicians were scared shitless to describe it.
• 51:24
  Then a movement developed in the 70s and 80s to treat cancer pain more properly. Imagine this.
• 51:30
  We weren't treating cancer pain. Wow. I think how horrible that is. And, and then that got carried
• 51:36
  away. And that's where the, that's where it got going. Because a group that was originally there
• 51:40
  treating cancer pain went on a holy mission to eliminate pain altogether. And anything else
• 51:46
  was quote, opiophobia. You mentioned that, you know, there's this illusion that if you smoke a
• 51:52
  natural herb, then it's not going to lead you any bad places. So, you know, now there's been this
• 51:58
  revolution in the legalization of cannabis in the United States. That hasn't been copied in
• 52:04
  in Australia or the UK yet. But I know friends and family members who treat it like alcohol and,
• 52:12
  you know, have it three or four times a week to chill out by the, in front of the TV. You mentioned
• 52:17
  the, the, you know, the amount of opioids that were being taken in the 1890s. I mean, my understanding
• 52:22
  was that when it was legal that, you know, you had your Oscar Wilde sort of puffing on opium
• 52:26
  pipes occasionally. And it wasn't the deranging dysfunction that a heroin addict currently
• 52:31
  endures thanks to the war on drugs. What's your position on, on the legal status of this stuff?
• 52:36
  I don't care, you know, I'll, I'll, I don't feel like my job is to know that I don't care. I don't
• 52:41
  think it's my business to determine the law, the people to determine the law. And I'll deal with
• 52:46
  whatever the consequences of that. The cannabis thing, yeah, there are plenty of people that can
• 52:51
  use it quite nicely. But there are plenty of people to get in trouble with it too. Unfortunately,
• 52:57
  you're not allowed to talk about it. So it's weird. You know, there's this weird still political
• 53:01
  energy around it, even though I've seen some real serious problems. What do you mean you're not
• 53:05
  allowed to talk about it? When you're saying earlier that everyone's kind of banging on a bad
• 53:08
  addiction. Not about, and weed isn't addictive. Oh, how dare you. How dare you. So, yeah.
• 53:17
  You think there's more of this, but to be fair to people that argue that, look, the alcohol way
• 53:22
  worse, out in terms of cancer and, and, and, you know, years of productivity lost. And you name
• 53:28
  that you named the parameter alcohol is worse. And yet that one's legal. Right. Yeah, that's insane.
• 53:32
  That's yeah. Narcissism. Why does it underpin so much of this? What is it for a start?
• 53:38
  Well, narcissism is what comes out of these terribly dysfunctional childhood childhoods we've
• 53:46
  been having particularly in this country, abandonment neglect abuse, which is talk about a pandemic.
• 53:51
  That has been a pandemic. We call them also under the rubric of adverse childhood experiences.
• 53:56
  And it's uncommon not to have had at least two adverse childhood experiences. And if you have
• 54:01
  three of your risk of mental health problems goes way up. And so the, the injury, I mean,
• 54:08
  just I'll just sketch it fundamentally, that humans normally develop the capacity for regulating
• 54:16
  emotions through close contact with primary caretakers. And when people are injured,
• 54:25
  it's like, you know, when they have a abuse of some type when they're traumatized. And then one of
• 54:30
  the criteria of trauma really is the sense of, you know, that they really, their, their ability to
• 54:35
  survive is in question. They're, they're terrified. And part of that response is a freeze response,
• 54:41
  which is mediated by the vagal nerve. And it turns out when that is stimulated early and often,
• 54:47
  it changes the development of certain regions of the brain. It keeps us dependent on dissociation,
• 54:55
  which is what the vagus nerve mediates, sort of disconnecting from feeling states as our primary
• 55:01
  means of regulating emotions. It prevents us from developing emotionally, and it prevents us from
• 55:07
  developing the landscape of emotional regulation. So feelings are always too prolonged, too intense,
• 55:13
  and too negative. And part of that stuckness includes how our personalities develop,
• 55:20
  and narcissistic, narcissistic injury tends to result in narcissistic traits and often narcissistic
• 55:26
  disorders. So in the early 80s, mid 80s, when I was first working as psychiatric hospital,
• 55:32
  I ended up working that for 30 years, I noticed that the, the category of personality disorders
• 55:39
  was changing very quickly, where the usual, a range or array of personality disorders were suddenly
• 55:46
  clustering around the B type, the cluster B, the narcissistic disorders. And by the 90s,
• 55:53
  that is all we had. That was it, only narcissistic disorders. It was a borderline sociopath,
• 56:01
  narcissism, and a smattering of histrionic. And that was it. And I got kind of interested in
• 56:07
  what's going on. And of course, while I was doing the radio at the time, then all I was talking
• 56:12
  to was traumatized kids, every call, sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect, chaos in the home,
• 56:17
  just every single call. And of course, they were calling about dysfunctional relationships,
• 56:22
  because that's where the craziness gets acted out when you've been injured like that. It
• 56:28
  becomes difficult to maintain relationships for various reasons. So I could see the narcissism
• 56:33
  rising. I could just see it. Right. It was obvious. And it was obvious to me what the cause was.
• 56:38
  Now, the interesting thing was was left out of that book was I wanted to write a book about
• 56:44
  the French Revolution and the Aztecs, because that was the only group, the only period of history
• 56:51
  I can find where severe abuse of children was pandemic, was just routine. Right. You know,
• 56:58
  the French around Rousseau's era routinely just dump kibs off at an orphanage, only one out of five
• 57:05
  survived. And this was horrible. Rousseau, the great descriptor of the, what was it called,
• 57:13
  the native soul? Well, it was so romantic wasn't it? Yeah, it was very romantic,
• 57:19
  about the world people and the native. They were just living off the land and peacefully. Yeah.
• 57:24
  He was a shithead of colossal. Yeah, totally. I mean, a lot of what, a lot of what he was doing,
• 57:30
  I think, was just criticizing the French regime and using it. He didn't even travel to these places.
• 57:36
  He was just talking about how glorious life was for, you know, these nude natives.
• 57:40
  Right. The mean type means of criticizing. He dragged around this one woman as his sex slave,
• 57:46
  had five children with her that he forced her to leave them all at the footsteps of an orphanage.
• 57:51
  I mean, it just, it just was a horrible dude. Anyway, let's get off Rousseau. But, but I'm
• 57:56
  interested that you wanted to write a book about that. Did you, did you start researching it?
• 58:00
  Did you get any time? I did. And I found, I found, you know, the Aztecs had the thing called
• 58:03
  the Codex, which was a systematic way to abuse children violently. And, you know, and look at what
• 58:11
  came out of it. What was that? What did they do? They'd hold them over fires. They beat them,
• 58:16
  they pierced them. They, it was just one, you're just, this is what you just, you know, systematic
• 58:21
  abuse. Was that a lot of passage kind of thing? No, this is little children to turn them into great
• 58:27
  warriors. Wow. And which is what that does. That creates violent maniacs. Right. And when you have
• 58:34
  a population of violent maniacs on your hand, you have to find a way to focus that aggression
• 58:41
  so they don't turn it on themselves or each other. And that is the scapegoating mechanism.
• 58:46
  And this is in Renasierard had a very famous sort of synthesis of this. But I think it's more
• 58:51
  explicit. I think it's really psychological. The humans and mobs. If they've had a lot of injury
• 58:56
  and are very aggressive, they have to scapegoat one on a regular basis. And thus we have to kill
• 59:04
  somebody every day or we'll start killing each other. Thus the guillotines. And then of course,
• 59:10
  the mob action when the guillotines come out is nobody's pure enough. Everybody's a center.
• 59:16
  Eventually, everybody goes on the guillotine. This is what people don't get. The whole cancel
• 59:20
  culture of today. It's coming for everybody. Nobody gets left out. It just, it's just a mob behavior.
• 59:26
  And it just seemed to me, I wrote the book and like, probably it was 2004 or something.
• 59:33
  I was that long ago. And I just thought, I think we're going to see guillotines. It's something
• 59:37
  like that. There's going to be a scapegoating mechanism. And I never heard of social media at
• 59:42
  the time. And you could not have imagined something like cancel culture. But here we are.
• 59:46
  Here we are. It's interesting that you bring that kind of medical perspective to it. Because I
• 59:50
  always come at that phenomenon from a cultural perspective as being people of being essentially
• 59:56
  taught world views of victimization of fragility. It's almost a pseudo religious movement. There's
• 1:00:04
  a lot of high anti. And so the idea that it's actually stemming from some sort of childhood
• 1:00:11
  trauma that is manifesting itself in that. And I mean, of course, there are also technological
• 1:00:16
  reasons. There's things whipping it up, right? There's things fanning the flames.
• 1:00:21
  And there are legitimate things that people are upset about also. But it is this gathering
• 1:00:27
  and scapegoating mechanism that I anticipated that I'm seeing. And it is an acting out behavior.
• 1:00:34
  And right, you know, I've seen it for years. Listen, I was saying the other day that when I was
• 1:00:39
  seeing that shift towards cluster B personality disorders in the late 1980s, I noticed in the 90s
• 1:00:46
  that every borderline patient that came in the hospital had a minimum of 20 lawsuits under her
• 1:00:52
  belt. They were just they were just they were just act out through the courts. And the and the
• 1:00:59
  attorneys finally took them about 15 years. But they they they encourage it for many years. And
• 1:01:06
  then understood realizing these were so called frivolous lawsuits. And you know, there's all this
• 1:01:11
  slap reform and all this stuff that they did because they started waking up to what was going on
• 1:01:17
  here. But those same acting out behaviors are alive and well in people in government positions
• 1:01:23
  on social media. It's happening all over the place. So when people act out like that, what's the
• 1:01:29
  explanation for the fact that there are obviously societies where it's shitty to be a kid than in
• 1:01:34
  the United States where you don't see that kind of narcissism? Because I remember I was down in
• 1:01:40
  Mexico and I was thinking about this stuff at the time. And I was on an island that had not been
• 1:01:46
  developed yet. And I saw this woman sitting on a mud floor in a in a woodhouse. And her kids
• 1:01:52
  were running around all over the place. And I could see that the kids were put together. Everybody
• 1:01:59
  was happy. They were well nourished. They were loving each other. The dad was coming in and hugging
• 1:02:04
  the kids. It was it was not an abusive environment. It was a shitty environment. It was a stressful
• 1:02:11
  environment. But it was the opposite of abuse. In fact, quite the contrary, the systems that
• 1:02:16
  prevent that were intact. There was there was a grandmother there and a great there were
• 1:02:21
  multiple generations intact long term relationships, stability, shitty economic environment,
• 1:02:28
  but able to maintain what kids need to grow and develop. And we've just we just thrown that
• 1:02:34
  all out. How? And just said, families are not important. Families don't matter. Families
• 1:02:39
  are whatever you say it is. And I'm not saying that the family is a father and a daughter. I'm not
• 1:02:43
  saying that. I father and a wife or anything. No, but it is intactness of relationships over long
• 1:02:49
  periods of time. Right. The data shows that a single positive relationship with a child
• 1:02:55
  after the age of eight can change the trajectory of his or her life. Sustained, you know, after,
• 1:03:00
  from age eight to age 18, sustained relationship. And it can be outside the home. They'll be inside
• 1:03:06
  though. But the sustaining of relations is in the stability and the lack of chaos and
• 1:03:12
  predictability in the day and day out life. A guy named Robert Henderson who's a philosophy,
• 1:03:18
  actually a social psychology student at Cambridge right now has about read a book about his
• 1:03:22
  childhood in America. And I've been promoting friends of mine that are now well into recovery
• 1:03:27
  and are professionals. And they're talking about Tyrus, just wrote a book called Just Tyrus
• 1:03:32
  about his childhood. And you're seeing these same things over and over and over again. And what's
• 1:03:38
  interesting is these people that have made it out have a lot of clarity about what it takes to get
• 1:03:43
  out. And it's not at all what we're doing in this country. My dad grew up in France,
• 1:03:50
  true. He was born in a refugee camp during the war in Switzerland and grew up in an orphanage
• 1:03:55
  in Paris and came to Australia as a refugee. And so I've still got some family back in France.
• 1:04:00
  And I must say when I go back and I see the relationship between parents and kids,
• 1:04:05
  their kids seem so much more grown up at such a younger age. And the families seem so much more
• 1:04:14
  in one sense strict, but in another sense loving. They don't pop any shit from their kids.
• 1:04:20
  Yeah, firm. Yeah, no, you're going to eat that. This is what we eat. You're going to sit there
• 1:04:24
  until the meal is done. You're going to knock on a snack. You're not going to bring up the
• 1:04:28
  French. I have developed this weird obsession with the French.
• 1:04:35
  Well, now let me tell you something with Rousseau. You're moving up to the table.
• 1:04:39
  Yeah, I'm going to move on. I'm going to move on. And I'm going to skip Derrida and
• 1:04:45
  especially that I'm going to call. Yeah, you know, by the way, did you, I don't know if you've
• 1:04:52
  just hasn't aside, hold that thought, but I don't know if you've read Douglas Murray's latest book
• 1:04:56
  where he talks about how he needs a British cultural commentator. There is good reason to
• 1:05:02
  believe now that in the late 60s when Foucault was living in Tunis in Tunisia, he routinely
• 1:05:07
  raped boys. Oh, he's another Rousseau-esque guy. Look, he set up a system. We're still doing that
• 1:05:17
  here in this country where the belief was that there was no such thing as serious mental illness
• 1:05:22
  that institutions caused mental illness. That has killed a new role of people. I can't even count
• 1:05:28
  the number. So I don't, don't, please don't, that's our homelessness thing here. That's why we have
• 1:05:33
  homelessness in Southern California. Continue to thought about France and I want to look back to
• 1:05:37
  that. All right. So, so, you know, I've studied French for many, many years and the language.
• 1:05:45
  And I've always liked it. I've read a bunch of novels in France and seven. And whenever I'd go to
• 1:05:50
  France, I always was confused why I couldn't just speak because my, my understanding of my,
• 1:05:56
  my sort of training in it is good, but I could never speak French and I could kind of understand,
• 1:06:01
  but never really understand it. So, when I got COVID, I had long haul at a bad fall.
• 1:06:09
  And we were going to go to Greece to just get away from things. And I thought, you know,
• 1:06:14
  I've got this feeling that if I use my brain, like if I went back to the piano or started dancing
• 1:06:21
  or learn a language, we're going to Greece. I'm going to learn Greek. And so I went at it for
• 1:06:26
  about a month and in two weeks, my fall cleared completely clear. It was unbelievable. It was uncanny.
• 1:06:31
  And when I went to Greece, it was a rapid sort of acquisition, like not my normal relationship with
• 1:06:39
  language learning. And when I went there, they kept telling me how great my, my, my accent was,
• 1:06:46
  like, like, and I kept saying, you know, COVID is like getting hit in the head. So maybe, you know,
• 1:06:50
  you hear people get hit in the head and they wake up and they speak. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like,
• 1:06:54
  I wonder if something weird like that was happening. So when we got back, I went, I went,
• 1:07:00
  I went, you know what? I'm going to finally get my French together. I'm going to figure out why I
• 1:07:05
  don't, well, you know, I, no one ever taught me to speak French. That's really what it boils down to.
• 1:07:10
  And so I've been working on that. And my wife and I went to France last summer. And I'm pretty
• 1:07:17
  conversant now. And I started talking to young people because they were in the streets every night.
• 1:07:21
  They were protesting. And I said, what's going on? You know, what's happening here? And they went,
• 1:07:25
  look, they've been, they've been all over us through this pandemic in ways that to us do not feel
• 1:07:32
  like they are legitimate in terms of the overreach of this government. They have told us that young
• 1:07:38
  people that COVID is not a significant reach, a significant problem for us. You're going to
• 1:07:44
  probably do well. And now you're going to force us to take a chemical force us to take a vaccine.
• 1:07:50
  No, that is not what this country was founded on. And they literally, when I was leaving the
• 1:07:55
  country, I started, I was, I was, we were on United Airlines, but there was a French woman behind
• 1:07:59
  the tube counter. So I started talking to her about this stuff. And she came out from behind
• 1:08:03
  the counter. And she showed me her fish goes, you have to understand this is serious.
• 1:08:07
  Vivla Liberté. And I thought, oh my goodness, I am so attracted to what these kids are doing.
• 1:08:13
  And so opposite of what's going on here, she showed you her what drew, what did she say?
• 1:08:17
  She said her fish. Oh, right. Yeah, right.
• 1:08:19
  Right. You know, yeah, yeah. And it was so opposite of what young people are doing here, which is
• 1:08:25
  asking for more mandates and control. And it was just, it was sort of disgusting to me what's
• 1:08:31
  happened here versus what was so attractive about these young people asserting the founding
• 1:08:37
  principles of their government, of their, of their republic. They said, we always say, I think
• 1:08:41
  the republic was founded on this. We cannot allow it. I said, you're right. You're right. I'm
• 1:08:46
  attracted to that. So I'm going to, I really have fantasized about hands for three months.
• 1:08:51
  And you know, I'm so sick of this country. And the crazy thing is they have a high vaccine
• 1:08:55
  uptake than Americans because of course, of course, because they're, but they're in, you
• 1:08:59
  notice, they were informed in here in this country, young people don't understand their risk as
• 1:09:04
  lower than other populations. We were, they were, they were obscured from that. They understand the facts.
• 1:09:08
  Friends of mine in the States tell me that it's actually the younger, younger people who are the
• 1:09:12
  most anxious about it. And the old colleagues is sort of more, well, I said, we did that to this
• 1:09:16
  crazy. We injured them. We injured them. We did that to them. We should, disgusting. We should
• 1:09:21
  be ashamed of ourselves that we've done to a whole generation. Yeah. I was in, in New York when
• 1:09:26
  Omicron was exploding at Christmas time. It was my first trip. The Australia opened the borders.
• 1:09:31
  We let the virus in. I wanted to go and let my, let my kids go and see their grandparents
• 1:09:38
  in the States. So off we went. And you know, I don't know what it was like in Los Angeles in
• 1:09:45
  December and January, but certainly in, in New York, there was, you could feel the tension in
• 1:09:50
  the air as you walk down, you know, if they have any, because the cases were absolutely off the
• 1:09:55
  charts. But I was also in France just before that. And see, I was just visiting all the friends and
• 1:10:00
  family who I hadn't seen in two years. And, and this brings us to the point that you just made in
• 1:10:06
  passing about the homeless. At every, in New York, people haven't been there. The, the city has put
• 1:10:14
  in these stations where you can recharge your phone and which are Wi-Fi hotspots. So that as
• 1:10:19
  you're walking around the city, your phone will occasionally connect to a free city wide Wi-Fi. And
• 1:10:23
  if you need a top-up charge, you can plug in. Every single one is occupied by a homeless person,
• 1:10:30
  or I don't know if that homeless, but certainly occupied by a human being who was sitting there with
• 1:10:34
  a million devices all plugged in, surfing the web. And it's impossible to use them.
• 1:10:43
  Effectively, they're always taken forever. And I thought to myself, what would happen in Sydney?
• 1:10:50
  Like, why doesn't that happen in Sydney? And I thought, what would probably happen is that,
• 1:10:58
  at some point, people would get fed up and the cops would come along. And I was trying to think,
• 1:11:03
  why would that be different from the way the cops would come along in New York? And I thought
• 1:11:06
  in Sydney, the cops would probably come along and say, let us take you somewhere where, like, if you
• 1:11:12
  need this level of civilization, then you need a roof over your head. So let's take you to a
• 1:11:18
  facility. And if the person didn't want to, then pretty soon they'd get the message that every time
• 1:11:23
  they sit there plugging all their devices in, they're forced to spend a night in a charity shelter,
• 1:11:29
  where they actually don't want to be, and they'd get the message, and they would either stay in the
• 1:11:32
  charity shelter, or they would stop doing it. That doesn't happen in America. I presume because
• 1:11:38
  you've got activists who would say, who are the police to bully these people and move them along
• 1:11:42
  and put them into homeless shelters? They have every right to be out there dominating everybody's
• 1:11:46
  else's Wi-Fi. And then they get in this weird thing of, you can't, this is pretty good,
• 1:11:53
  this is in Southern California, you can't move them anywhere, unless you have a permanent
• 1:11:58
  structured housing of quality to offer them. Then you can, then if you've got that for all of them,
• 1:12:04
  just for them, or you made it, it can be communal. Well, here's cost about $500,000 per unit
• 1:12:11
  to build them, and we have 100,000 homeless people. Just do that math. And by the way,
• 1:12:17
  so in San Francisco, here's the great disaster and the whole thing. So this is what everyone
• 1:12:24
  doesn't understand, because this is my patients who are in the streets. These are my patients.
• 1:12:27
  I've treated this population for 30 years. I know what to do. I know exactly, and I know they're
• 1:12:32
  all going to die if you don't do something. In fact, we're going to start seeing the meth deaths
• 1:12:35
  very soon. We're just on, right on schedule for that. Is meth on the rise? All meth is ubiquitous
• 1:12:41
  on the streets here, but fentanyl deaths are six a day. And think about meth as you can do it for
• 1:12:46
  a number of years, and then all of a sudden people start dying. So that's the deaths are sort of
• 1:12:50
  protein. So in San Francisco, they fixed up some apartment buildings and hotels. They put a bunch
• 1:12:55
  of people into them and 10% stayed. That's it. That's a deal. They won't stay. And if you ask
• 1:13:02
  them to do to stop doing drugs, they really won't stay. So unless you have a treatment structure
• 1:13:06
  available to help them stop doing drugs, and they really do this, which you're not allowed to do.
• 1:13:10
  You can't get near them. You're not allowed to help them. Meaning that the treatment structure
• 1:13:14
  would be mandatory, and you would pay for it and put them through it. No, no, no, no, no. No,
• 1:13:18
  that there would be a team of people that you would be expected to participate in a treatment
• 1:13:24
  program. And that program would be able to use leverage to keep you going to keep you in
• 1:13:29
  treatment. That's why you that's what you do with a drug addict. You have to leverage them.
• 1:13:32
  They don't want no drug addict wants to stop. They want to find a way to keep using it. It's always
• 1:13:35
  the way it is. And you have to you have to say, hey, well, you can you can leave here, but you
• 1:13:40
  can't go live back out on the streets. You can't do that because they will do it. That's what they
• 1:13:44
  would write. Now that's what I mean by mandatory. I mean, not that you'd force them to take
• 1:13:47
  treatment, but that you force them to stay. You don't allow to leverage. I could say I think use
• 1:13:52
  the words like force and people immediately bristle. It's motivation. You take a little carrot
• 1:13:57
  and a stick. You have a carrot and a stick. We'll move you through. We'll give you vocational rehab.
• 1:14:01
  We'll build you know, build your community here. We'll have to step you through the treatment
• 1:14:04
  process and we'll get you back into the world because that's what happens when people get better
• 1:14:08
  from addiction. They do the miracle. That's why I work at this. I love working on the field. Or
• 1:14:14
  if you're so far gone, your brain injured, your schizophrenia, you have no resources. You don't
• 1:14:18
  want your opiate strung out. There are replacement therapies for you. There are things we can give
• 1:14:22
  you to make this thing better. Just makes me feel like both sides are so entrenched in their own
• 1:14:28
  positions that there's why is there? Do you have some pop psychology reads and why the culture
• 1:14:35
  will seem so hot at the moment? Why the culture will seem so hot at the moment? It's weird to me.
• 1:14:41
  It's because I'm super moderate and I see the excesses on both sides. You know, I was reading a
• 1:14:46
  tweet from a second epidemiologist or she may have been a jurisprudence scholar or something.
• 1:14:51
  And she goes, you know, I'm seeing the extremes on the left and right, but I'm wondering if that's
• 1:14:55
  not a political axis. Maybe there's something else going on. And I'm like, yes, that's the personality
• 1:15:01
  disorders. Right. And we have these extremely injured people on both ends that probably are 10%
• 1:15:07
  of both, you know, right and left. And they're the ones acting out their aggression constantly.
• 1:15:14
  And that's terrible. And then Trump, of course, inflamed everything. And then people started running
• 1:15:18
  from one side of the boat to the other, which is just a horrible, horrible piece of all this.
• 1:15:23
  I don't know if you saw John Heights piece in the Atlantic recently, but I was speaking to him
• 1:15:27
  on the show. And he makes the point that if you analyze, he was citing some research about Twitter
• 1:15:33
  that there's like a 6% of the population or 8% on the left or right that are the sort of the
• 1:15:42
  most extreme. And they comprise more than 50% of the conversation on Twitter. I'm so glad. Whenever
• 1:15:49
  I read his stuff, I just think, Oh, God, thank God Jonathan Heights still talking. I know,
• 1:15:52
  there's a grown up. Because he gets crucified, you know, and I just think, please, please,
• 1:15:56
  just keep going. Yeah. Well, they're rare. They're rare these days. Let's touch briefly before
• 1:16:01
  we go, unless you need to dash off right now about why you wrote a sex book with your daughter.
• 1:16:07
  Oh, it was the idea of a publisher. Well, they want to meet her right now. And it's not even a
• 1:16:13
  sex book. We actually keep it away from sex, sort of. We thought they wanted consent around the
• 1:16:20
  Me Too era. This was about five years ago, pre-COVID. And there was a lot of anxiety, particularly
• 1:16:26
  young people around how, you know, consent, you know, how do you do that? Why do I know when I've
• 1:16:31
  got consent? What is it? How do I? And so we wanted to take it away from the medical legal.
• 1:16:36
  We wanted to take it away from the sort of, we didn't want it to. There were lots of great
• 1:16:40
  books out there about sexuality and consent. We wanted to talk about navigating healthy
• 1:16:46
  relationships, really. So we talked about, you know, everything, all kinds of relationships,
• 1:16:51
  and how consent enters into it. Terrific. Droughts, love it and made you. Thanks for the chat.
• 1:16:56
  In mind, too, love it and meet you as well. And I love Sydney, by the way. Oh, great. Yeah,
• 1:17:01
  had the great, my son actually music directed a, you may have heard about it when it was there
• 1:17:07
  at the opera center. They had thrones the musical. And he was the music director for that.
• 1:17:12
  And he lived there for a month over on the rocks. And we had the good fortune of staying
• 1:17:17
  on the rocks when we were there. Right. And just just what a wonderful city. And it was one of
• 1:17:22
  the great surprises, frankly, for me, in terms of me traveling around the world. In terms,
• 1:17:26
  there's just the people, the way the city functions, it's just a lovely place.
• 1:17:31
  We do hide it under a bush a little bit. For some reason, Australia has decided to sell
• 1:17:35
  itself as crocodile dundee and the crocodile. There's that. And there's just that it seemed like
• 1:17:41
  another city, you know, but no, it's very special. It's a very special city. And it is a
• 1:17:46
  wonderful field to it. So I'd love to come back. Please do. Please do. And if you do, then
• 1:17:51
  I'll buy you a beer. I'm done. You owe me one. That's exactly right. Thanks, true.