29.2 A Radically Genuine Conversation with Roger McFillin, PsyD, ABPP

[00:00:00] I think a lot of scientific advancements are withheld from the general public and even physicians to maintain this model. So first of all, the fundamental question that every psychiatrist would have to answer first, and how they answer it matters, is consciousness emitted from the brain? Is the brain responsible for consciousness? Somebody get this guy some help!

[00:00:34] Disclaimer, this podcast is for informational purposes only. The information provided in this podcast and related materials are meant only to educate. This information is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. While I am a medical doctor and many of my guests have extensive medical training and experience, nothing stated in this podcast nor materials related to this podcast, including recommended websites, texts, graphics, images, or any other materials, should be treated as a substitute for professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. All listeners should consult with a medical professional, licensed mental health provider, or other healthcare provider if seeking medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Or, put more simply... If you need help like this guy, call your own doctor. What is consciousness?

[00:01:02] Consciousness really is our awareness, our experience of reality in itself. And we're in this materialist paradigm that suggests because there's brain activity, that that is what is emitting consciousness. That if the brain no longer had brain activity, there would be no existence of consciousness. And we now know that's not actually true. There's a post-materialist science that has existed for quite some time.

[00:01:30] It's just withheld from the mainstream. It's just starting to be out there with podcasts and so forth. I'll give you a great example of the telepathy tapes. Have you been aware of that? I saw your interview. I saw your interview. I didn't listen to it, but I saw it on there and I wanted to ask you about that. Tell me a little bit more.

[00:03:15] In Italian. Okay. So they've never learned this. And of course, same thing with savants over the course of time, right? You know, kids without being told how to play the piano, play the piano. What is happening there? You're ones that can tell me what, you know, June 12th, 1947, what day of the week it was in a split second.

[00:03:36] Exactly. What was also fascinating is all these kids, autistic kids from around the world would speak about meeting together on a hill using the same words. Like they're actually meeting other people across the world, other autistics on a place they called the hill. So that lets us know that they are tapping into a consciousness, a field, or their consciousness is able to leave their physical body.

[00:03:59] And this fits other post-materialist research we have that exists on near-death experiences or no brain activity, yet the person is still able to communicate what their family member was experiencing in their home 15 miles away when they were in a coma.

[00:04:17] So not getting into all the complex science and especially around quantum reality and quantum physics and all those type of things, but the truth of the matter is, it is at least possible that our complex system, including the cells in our body, might be somewhat of a communicator to a greater sense of consciousness. And we have a survival mind that is meant to keep us alive in this body, but there's a soul.

[00:04:46] There's a consciousness that exists after the body dies, and it's not unscientific. That's very established science in this post-materia world. So why, if we just say that everything emits from the brain and it's an organ we don't understand its complexity, when you start experimenting on the brain and the way that we're doing it to induce an effect,

[00:05:11] we are assuming that that is somehow creating a better life or a better outcome. And I think all evidence would suggest that is not the case. If we had better outcomes, we'd see it in our culture, our society. We have less mental illness, right? Not more. We'd have less suicide. We'd have less incapacitation from these conditions, less people on disability benefits.

[00:05:34] We're at a tipping point that exists in our culture in how we think about human potential and the human experience. And you're going up against a transhumanist movement versus a humanist movement. There's an anti-human, transhumanist movement that says, hey, we are broken, and our experience needs to be upgraded in order to meet this higher way of being by merging us with existing technologies, where the humanist perspective is to say that we are connected to a greater divine.

[00:06:04] We have the ability to heal. We have the ability to evolve. We're connected with all of nature. And so those two paradigms are actually coming up against each other right now in a real critical battle. We're in a period of time where we have transhumanists, and then we have bioethical humanist people who are saying, put the brakes on this.

[00:06:30] The technology is advancing so much faster than our ability to predict the consequences. I love that you brought this up, and now we're going to go quantum with it and scare off all of our listeners and viewers. Once something is created in consciousness, there's an energetic transformation of information that can take place, which we know this to be the fact already, that our own thoughts and emotions can alter the molecular structure of matter.

[00:06:59] One of the foundational kind of experiments on this is like how our thoughts impact water or impact plants. You can try this at home, put two different plants in your home, one of them every morning as you're watering it or you're in its presence, just like loving, compassionate thoughts actually in your mind. Imagine this plant to really flourish and then go to the other plant and do something very similar,

[00:07:27] but with some very negative thoughts, even imagine it dying, and then see the difference between these plants and how they flourish. And all that's stating is that energetically there's a connection of all things. So like we're in this period of time where there's a lot of experimentation with psychedelics in mental health. And so I'm interested in like, all right, what are the mechanisms of action of this? If something's happening, what is that?

[00:07:53] Is it something that's just altering the brain or is there something in consciousness that's changing? And what people are reporting is that they understand their life experience differently. I understand that we are all connected and everything that has happened to me is part of a greater whole. And it's also very critical in my soul development or my growth or learning. So what I once viewed as a traumatic experience might have even altered their perspective to see it as necessary for transformational experiences, right?

[00:08:22] It's a shift, a profound shift in consciousness. When you were talking about lithium, for example, lithium being an element and it having like health value to maybe all of us, right? And then there's also the expectancy effects that exist, our own ability in consciousness to heal or to at least start a process of healing. And we see that with placebo studies.

[00:08:49] One of the things with SSRIs is we know there's a strong placebo response, a strong expectancy effect, so much so that the original experiments on this with pharmaceutical companies had a really difficult time being able to distinguish the placebo group from the drug group. So they had to really change their experimentation in order to give their drug a favorable response, which is not that difficult to do if you understand how to create experiments.

[00:09:13] So I would argue that even with those conditions that you were talking about, maybe the most severe OCD, the most severe depression, if someone has in consciousness the strong idea that they are physically broken, that there is no hope, and you as a physician say, well, we actually have an intervention that could heal you, right?

[00:09:37] Now you're entering into the idea of consciousness that the person is fundamentally medically ill and they have a disease, and you're giving them a medical intervention, which might have some value on its own anyway. That is a more humane, safe, and efficacious intervention because it has value from its place in the human body, but it also has value from an expectancy effect. Those should be frontline interventions.

[00:10:04] Being able to utilize expectancy placebo responses in mental health should be frontline interventions. So it's very difficult sometimes for us to distinguish what is the mechanism of action that's actually helping somebody. If someone comes to see me for therapy, and I say, I'm providing you cognitive behavioral therapy, right? And I administer some baseline measures, which I do, as my staff does.

[00:10:28] And after four weeks, you know, the person is dramatically feeling better from a severe depression score to one that is mild, very much in remission. And I haven't done much. We haven't really started cognitive behavioral therapy because I'm still assessing and creating a case formulation. But yet their presence with me or my reaction to them is enough to induce a positive response. What is happening there?

[00:10:56] Is it natural recovery? Is it maybe something energetically that's occurring in my own belief system that is influencing the client? Are they just being understood or listened to? These are the things that we don't tease out in our current culture where we've reduced everything to its simplest form in order to feed these industries. A couple of things I want to touch on that you said when you were talking about talking to your plants. I've heard of this research.

[00:11:25] There's a voice in my mind that is very skeptical. How in the world could talking to plants change? But I would encourage anybody who hears that and shares that same skepticism, just go do it. Do your own little experiment. I've had this idea, and we have so many ideas and you can't follow through with all of them.

[00:11:45] But to create an online platform, Simple Experiments, where everybody can engage in ethical research, but in their own research. And we can have an online database where everybody can post information on what they found, right? I mean, how empowering would that be to expand the role of the scientist to anybody who's willing to engage in experimentation? Do you have any pets? Yes.

[00:12:14] Do you have a dog by any chance? I do. Okay. I have two dogs. Not only have I tried these experiences with my clients, but I've done it with my dogs too, right? So dogs can respond to our voice, our facial expressions, right? So if they're like, oh, you're such a good boy. You're such a good boy, right? It's the tone of your voice. Okay. Now do the same thing. Turn your back to the dog. And in your mind, create the same thing.

[00:12:43] Watch their tails wag. So I've created it in my mind. Oh, you're such a good boy. You want to like even see myself petting. And then I could hear my dog's tail start wagging. There's been research on this too in post-material science where dogs actually have the sense when they're like owners are coming home and they've been able to measure it. So like when an owner's like leaving work or on their way home, or they went out somewhere

[00:13:09] and they started driving back, that dogs themselves can actually sense when they're coming back. It's the interconnectedness of all things energetically that we all have the ability to tap into. There's hard science around this. Like, and listen, seven, eight years ago, I wouldn't have believed this either. I would have thought this was nonsense because I was a materialist. I had distrust and I couldn't imagine anything outside the paradigm in which my mind created it. But try the same thing.

[00:13:39] Like when you're working with clients, just before you go get them in the waiting room or you're walking them back or you sit down, like create a love or compassion for them. Say a prayer for them, a blessing, something, right? And do something positive towards them and see how it affects them on an energetic level and do that over time. But also be mindful, like when you're in your own head, when you're stressed out

[00:14:03] and see the difference in the client's reaction around you when you're not doing that. I want to point out the difference between how I feel about what you said about the dog versus what I consciously think and how I behave. So as you're saying that, I notice that I feel this intense wave of skepticism and this is, you know, hogwash and this is pseudoscience, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:14:32] But I want to point that out because just because I feel that way, just because my automatic process or my mind is automatically skeptical does not mean that there is any harm in acting in a way where I go and try that out, where I look into it. I think that holds us back so often. I want to get to this mind, this kind of automatic part of our brain as this binary coder,

[00:15:01] because it's helped me to understand society in a much more complete way and how we tend to fall in 180 degree opposition in our viewpoints. Or we fall into a groupthink where maybe we agree with one issue in terms of the group, but then we find ourselves agreeing on every issue that the group believes in. You know, you're talking a lot about essentially what, you know, Carl Jung defined as the collective consciousness so many decades ago.

[00:15:31] I think everybody's had that experience where you think about somebody or you're even talking to your spouse or a friend about somebody else. First time, maybe you've even brought their name into your mind or into a conversation in months and months. And within a couple hours and sometimes even minutes, they're calling you or they reach out and they text you. And it's like, gosh, that seems kind of coincidental, but oh, that's just, that's craziness. If I believe there's any connection there,

[00:16:00] I want to bring it back to quantum physics. Quantum physics is a field in which we know very little, but we know that it has an impact, that there are these quantum particles that are flowing through us, flowing through our earth and flowing through space on an every moment basis. There's something that we're missing. And we have these, you know, 12, what are called antiparticles that we've identified.

[00:16:27] But, you know, ultimately the kind of primary experiment in quantum theory is this double slit experiment where the behavior of photons or light particles, it changes when there is an observer or a camera watching what is going on. And you've said that you're a big sports fan and I am trying to do more and more with sports psychology and psychiatry. And I see that same thing in sports.

[00:16:57] When I'm at the free throw line and I start thinking about the outcome of my effort, it makes it to where I'm a lot less likely to get that desired outcome. And so the other facet here with quantum physics is this idea of quantum entanglement. When you have a massive reaction of an imploding or dying star and it spews contents throughout the universe

[00:17:23] in one of these huge reactions that creates these beams of energy or light, you've got two particles that are spewed in 180 degree opposite directions that we have discovered. And don't ask me how. These are some very, very smart physicists that have their shop set up at the tops of mountains and they're triangulating things that are happening in other galaxies across the universe. But they've discovered that there are particles

[00:17:53] that are essentially quantumly entangled, AKA even though they are physically light years, I mean billions of light years apart, they act the exact same way. They respond the exact same way. How do these things affect our brains, right? And how do we tie in quantum mechanics and quantum physics into our mental and our physical health? Yeah, great question.

[00:18:22] I think one of the things you're speaking to at least is the humility that we must all have about the wonderment of the entire universe and our place in it. And so that humility is really important to me in every one of my decision makings. Whenever I think I know something, I accept that I may not or it's just a piece of information of something that's much greater. And that's why I respect the individual's choice at all times. I want to go back to what you said about the observer effect, right? Essentially like our own ability to like alter matter through observation on it.

[00:18:52] So how do I take that? It means that we are all creators of our reality. We are influencing consciousness. We are creating in it. And this is powerful. And I think we are intimidated by our own power that we can actually have an ability to, you know, create into the material world. And so I try to break it down to simpler parts for people to understand it.

[00:19:22] Right now I'm sitting in a little studio. All this had to be created first in consciousness before it was made into something physical. So everything is created in the mind. First, the idea of a pen has to be created in the mind, a podcast and so forth. You and I, I am in Pennsylvania. You are in Kentucky. And so we are having a conversation in real time.

[00:19:48] 200 years ago, if we would have spoken about this idea, we might've been burned at the stake. So we have to be careful with what we are creating in our minds, accepting to be true, and then limiting ourselves in it. How I use the observer effect is so first of all, in sports, and this is a great analogy, the moment that somebody creates an outcome in their mind, they can also then fear that outcome

[00:20:15] because that outcome is also possibly something we don't want. Well, what then is the impact of that thought? There's a chemical reaction. That chemical reaction impacts everything in your body. Your body won't know the difference between something real and what is created in the mind. They are the same, right? That's going to then alter your behavior. So the moment you are fixated on that negative outcome and you are creating in fear, you are increasing the likelihood of creating that feared outcome.

[00:20:44] Now, from a quantum physics perspective or even a greater spiritual perspective, what you're creating in consciousness is our lessons to be learned. And so you need to go through it in order to eventually overcome it. But let's imagine that there is no outcome, that you have taken a place in your life of faith and openness to what is, knowing that whatever is provided to you serves you. So actually missing that free throw,

[00:21:12] no big deal. In fact, it is inconsequential to who you are in your life, right? Then you are more likely then to be fully engrossed in the moment. And that moment in sports, if you talk to elite athletes, is that concept of being in flow. I played high school basketball. Football was my sport, but I played high school basketball and I was okay. Nothing really great.

[00:21:40] But there was a game I scored over 35 points. And I wasn't someone who's going to score 30 points a game, especially in a high school basketball game. But the hoop looked this big. There was like no thoughts in my mind. I feel like I could throw it up from anywhere and it was going and I was in complete flow. There was no fear of losing the game, of missing the basket. It was just complete and utter connection to the now, right?

[00:22:09] And so that increases our performance. And this is in lots of areas of our lives. Be aware of what your mind creates. In psychology, when your mind is fixated or attention to the worst case outcomes, you are creating in fear. You are living in fear. You are ultimately self-limiting. That exists a lot in our culture. This is why I'm really concerned about the sick care system that we're in. Because what is being created in consciousness? Well, they want to sell you to the idea of

[00:22:38] watch out for this disease. You need to depend on us. You need to find this early. You need our treatments. They don't realize what that is doing on every aspect of your existence in creating a fear-based consciousness and how you see yourself. If you see yourself as designed to heal, if you see yourself as having disabilities, you're not really focused on the outcome. Like you really don't care. Honestly, like you are completely detached by the length of your life. You though, if you are fully in the now

[00:23:07] and you are creating in the now, the only time we could ever create, the only time we could ever be, well, then you are fully committed to living life fully towards your passions and creating in that way. When life ends, life ends, right? Ultimately, you've kind of disconnected from that. And so that's powerful, I think, on the health of our body because you're more likely to be in a state of balance as opposed to being in a state of dis-ease where your body is not functioning optimally

[00:23:36] and then it is always trying to seek out homeostasis and symptoms become messages to us that you're out of balance. So I use this energetic quantum reality to understand that everything is energy, including our thoughts, our memories, and so forth. And we can actually train ourselves to be more fully connected in the now. And that's where meditation has come into my life. When I was in high school, I had a hard, very difficult time being able to pay attention. I felt like my mind was working.

[00:24:05] I was creating in my mind. I was thinking of scenarios. I was somewhere else. I was doing things. And I ultimately was able to learn that I could slow all that down. As an adult, I committed myself to meditative practices. What is meditation? Well, it is the ability to connect fully in the here and now and actually to slow down that aspect of the mind that's designed to work,

[00:24:32] that survival aspect of the brain. And that survival aspect of the brain, you know, are those thoughts, trying to think ahead, trying to problem solve, trying to evaluate, trying to predict the next thing. That mind is always working. And without understanding and attention to it, it is actually controlling us. So once I learned how to get into a meditative state and to practice that, then I felt the entire shift on my entire body.

[00:25:00] My body became at ease. I became sick less often. So I know it affected my immune system. And we have all this data too from this growing field of psych neuroimmunology. It's like really critically important to understand that the mind impacts the body. And so if you are sick and worried and fearful in your mind, your body does not know the difference. It is under threat.

[00:25:27] And your survival brain then only cares about that threat and being able to fight or run away, fight or flee in some way. And so we cannot survive under that constant stress. That's constant stress. That stress is only there to help us survive, not to be in it fully. So we have these powerful interventions, protocols, and ways about going about our lives to realize our full potential. But the medicalization of this

[00:25:57] is stopping us from realizing that full potential. I will say in my own personal experience, lithium supplementation helped to loosen up my own rigidity to make me more flexible to some of these ideas and to be able to put my ideas out there in a podcast to feel like I can do this. I can face the criticism that may come with doing this. I've seen similar reactions in patients, especially in autism.

[00:26:26] And I think what you talked about with autism and quantum processes is really interesting. If I break down autism very basically in a scientific sense, it is an individual who has had some errors in synapse pruning. Synapses are the connections between our neurons, and we have trillions, if not a quadrillion different connections within one brain. If you do not clip enough of those connections in development,

[00:26:53] then you're going to actually have a greater awareness and probably a greater level of consciousness in a way of having more of your brain connected. But there's so much stimuli going on that learning something like human language or especially nonverbal communication may be significantly more difficult. You could imagine that it's kind of like being in an environment where you are stimulated by thousands of different things a second

[00:27:21] versus 10 different things a second. Yeah, it's interesting. The work, this is Diane Hennessy Powell's work on the non-speaking autistics. And one of the things that she revealed to me was that the non-speaking autistics don't see themselves as disabled as we do. They actually see themselves as a higher state of consciousness. And they look at us, the normies, you know, the speakers with like compassion and empathy for like,

[00:27:50] we have not achieved what they've achieved. I see a different brain. That's how I would describe it. And again, we all have uniqueness in how our brains function. The example of the autistic individual who could tell me what day of the week someday was, you know, 20, 30, 40 years ago. So these individuals, I like to describe the brain in terms of gateways. We have our older evolutionary brain, that survival mechanism that operates much more animalistically,

[00:28:19] making us aware of any potential threats, kind of like the deer in the forest, you step on a twig loud enough, it immediately darts off. It is responding to its mind's threat, that potential for threat. Now, I'm not actually a threat to the deer, but that deer has fired off a, you know, in terms of binary coding, a one or a zero. It said, this is potentially a threat. I'm going to respond to it. That dynamic in the brain, those gateways between that part of our brain

[00:28:48] and in the human brain, these upper lobes, more recently evolved parts of our brain. If you think about it in terms of gateways between these different areas, you see some autistic individuals who have this just completely open gateway for biographical information. They can tell you what they wore eight months ago today. They can tell you the dates. They can give you birthdays of people who are close to them or familiar with them.

[00:29:18] Things that other non-autistic brains will struggle to, even though that information is in there for you and I, we don't have this 100% flow with these parts of our mind, which are, in my opinion, much more powerful, but also because of the massive amount of information that they experience on a day-to-day basis and how they try to order all of that information into a way that I can consciously experience and understand,

[00:29:47] they're also prone to make a lot of errors. So in that vein, first of all, what do you think about that binary code of a brain? And then also, what's the role of this massive amount of information in the age of internet technology that we've barely had any chance to evolutionarily evolve to become accustomed to? Yeah, I like to say that the most effective mental health interventions are actually free.

[00:30:15] And we can tie a lot of things together here when we're talking about consciousness. So like where our attention goes, our energy flows. So we have constructed a system to meet modern day, our modern challenges. So traditionally speaking, or even in other cultures, the challenges of living and the struggles that would exist were dealt with within small communities with elders, mentors,

[00:30:45] with stories, narratives passed down from generation to generation. Well, we were interconnected with a tribe serving a community connected to nature, eating foods that grew in our area. And we had to work with the seasons and availability and so forth. You didn't have a lot of time to focus in on yourself all the time, right? Like who am I in response to this person and social comparison and worry because your attention

[00:31:15] was into the now because you had to survive and you had to do your job and you had to be part of the community. We've evolved that way and now you pull us into this modern society where everything is rapidly transforming from the industrial age on to this technical age. We certainly have not adapted as quickly as one would need to. We have evolved to be a part of all those things and now what is happening is we are more isolated from each other. We are part of

[00:31:44] a capitalistic system that serves greater industries. There's technology that's advancing. It has the ability to hijack our brain. We're creating artificial food, fake food, new medical interventions which are fundamentally changing the human system and how it's evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. We have a lot of diseases of modern living. Those diseases have led to unprecedented amounts of chronic health conditions and obesity and a number of things which certainly impact our mind,

[00:32:14] which impact our energy levels, which impact our sleep. That way you can't really talk about a healthcare system or a mental healthcare system that doesn't understand the totality of all of that. And then so then if you put us all in isolation and you go to your psychiatrist, your psychologist for this condition, you go see your primary care for this, your internist for that, almost like we're these parts that are separate from each other. We are just further kind of maintaining the disconnection from the whole. And the pendulum is starting to swing back

[00:32:43] because the unprecedented degree of sickness is something that we no longer really tolerate. And what has happened during certainly COVID is we've been much more attuned and aware to the widespread corruption and the system that's kind of maintaining the sickness. And so we're getting back to more common sense approaches to think about life, eat real food, be outside, move your body, understand the harms of this technology. It could be a tool, but if it's your master, we're in big trouble.

[00:33:13] Right? Understand what it does to the mind, what it does to the body, what it does to circadian biology. Take a look at what you're putting into your system as a whole. Be more connected into the now with mindfulness and meditation. And that's the only way we're going to be able to restore our sense of balance that exists and be more connected to the greater ecosystem that's involved. And that's why there needs to be fundamental changes in the American healthcare system. One of the biggest areas

[00:33:43] that I see this polarization in thought is in politics. I mean, it could not be more pervasive than it is in politics. You know, I know you're a fan of Bobby Kennedy. I've been a fan of him for a long time now. And I will add that I can have some criticism for him in the fact that he is labeled as an anti-vaccine advocate, which is not true. You know, there's too many vaccines to say that they're all created equal. One of the criticisms I would agree with

[00:34:12] is that he has not clarified his stances on, you know, stating which vaccines he believes have good science behind them and which don't. But one of the things that I don't think I don't hear anybody arguing about and I don't see the mass media even putting into these articles is that he is saying he's going to try to take down big sugar, try to take out all of these really harmful chemicals in our food. Yet that's not something that anybody

[00:34:41] is talking about, which I think is just absurd. Like who on either side of the aisle could argue with that as a primary mission behind his drive to become Secretary of HHS? How do you relate this dichotomization or this polarization in thinking to the field of politics? Yeah, if you watched any of the Bobby Kennedy hearings, I think I can clarify some of his positions. When it comes to vaccines, I think what he's stating is they're a pharmaceutical product that has to be

[00:35:11] evaluated like any other product. If we're going to make the determination that vaccines are both safe and effective, we have to use good science to determine that. The problem that exists and why he can't come to any fundamental conclusion on it and neither can I is because there's been so many changes over the years from how the vaccines are manufactured to the amount of vaccines now part of the schedule. We don't know if it's the manufacturing. We don't know

[00:35:40] if it is overwhelming the immune system of a very delicate child. We don't know if there are some children that can accept that. Well, other people, other children cannot. We don't have science around it. And I think all he is arguing is that these vaccines require the same empirical scrutiny as we would any other product in order to determine safety and efficacy. Without that, you cannot come to any fundamental conclusions.

[00:36:10] And so, like, the idea of being able to inject us with a live virus and then our body is going to develop an immune response around that is pretty strong science. I would believe not being an expert in that. But how is that then administered? At what time? For who? Is something else going on that we're not aware of and who could be potentially harmed by that? There's so many questions and the reason why I think we reduce everything to these binary arguments

[00:36:40] is because it fundamentally induces that natural threat response that we've all evolved into for survival. There's an in-group and an out-group. You become part of a team and in order to become part of a team you have to demonize the opposition. That's what we're doing is we're reducing complex conversations into nothing more than talking points that devalues the other person's idea, misrepresents

[00:37:09] their belief system. That has worked for a long time in American public life and American politics. I don't think it's going to work anymore because now we're aware of what it's doing. We're now aware of the strategy and the strategy will no longer work when you have awareness of it. That's why I have a hard time understanding what a lot of Democratic senators were

[00:37:38] trying to do by not letting him talk, not letting him explain his position, and then reducing him to an anti-vaxxer. answer. There's so many. Answer it yes or no. Answer it yes or no. You can't answer a lot of these in a yes no way. It's so obvious now. When the mainstream media, who's discredited, puts out articles, anti-vaxxer Bobby Kennedy's fringe theories are going to ruin our health.

[00:38:09] Our health's ruined, folks. We're the sickest country on earth. Wake up. We're not going to ruin our health. Our health is ruined right now. It's ruined, and we're trying to save ourselves. Listen, we are on the verge of the republic becoming decimated physically, emotionally, mentally, politically, monetarily. We're trying to save our country. We're trying to save Western democracies. We're trying to save ideals here. One of those

[00:38:38] ideals is that you have a fundamental right to this information that they kept from you and that your politicians work for you. It was very clear who was funded by pharmaceutical companies in those hearings. Listen, Bobby Kennedy is the only guy, in my opinion, because he's put himself out there. He had a good life. He didn't have to put himself into this position where he was so discredited for years by the American public. He's created problems in his family.

[00:39:08] His integrity was challenged. This is what a lot of people fear is being put in that situation. Why people go along with the party lines? There's so much fear of standing outside what is the normal and the expected because I think we fear being kicked out of groups. That's the in-group, out-group psychology that exists. Anyone who has the courage to ask these questions and put themselves out there, I respect. One of the things that I'm most excited for should he get confirmed is

[00:39:37] how he says he's going to study medications and vaccines. I think that is absolutely paramount to figure out the long-term safety and efficacy profile, have good actual outcomes data, and not say, oh, this changes a biomarker, therefore it is effective for morbidity and mortality. There are some vaccines that I think speak for themselves. The polio vaccine is something that we don't have polio nowadays. We're not seeing an

[00:40:07] infection that was literally crippling to people having that same impact. MMR, I think, is similar in terms of looking at the rates of those. But then on the flip side, we're told that a brand new technology and a vaccine in terms of the COVID mRNA vaccine is completely safe and effective. And I'm not allowed to question that. You've got these RSV vaccines coming down the pipeline. You've got essentially an industry that is now trying to

[00:40:36] capitalize on this polarization of the vaccine issue, that you're either for vaccines or against vaccines. And they know that if there are enough people that think in that polarized manner, there will be enough people that will be, oh, I'm for any vaccine that comes out, therefore they are going to be willing to take it. the thing about history, it tends to be shaped by the victors, right? Those in war create their own narrative about how the war was won. Or if you

[00:41:06] have that much influence that if there's a medical intervention, you can create the idea around that medical intervention that it saved humanity. That doesn't mean that narrative is accurate. And that's what it means to be a true scientist, is to challenge narratives. And that's what science is. It's a method, a process. When they start talking about science as established facts that you must accept, and if you don't, then you are anti-science, well, then that's the

[00:41:36] most anti-science comment that you can particularly make. We have to continue to evaluate, and that's what is science, right? And it goes back to our conversation earlier about what we believe to be true at one point. What we hold in consciousness at one point is only temporary until we know something else. And that's where I think we have to take a step back when it comes to our health agencies, is that, no, we're not going to just accept narratives. We're going to continue the scientific process as objective with

[00:42:06] the highest degree of scientific inquiry that we possibly could have. And I think that's what he's saying. If he were to come in and say, well, this is fact, or this is fact, and he doesn't necessarily believe it to be true, or he doesn't even know yet, you know, then he is then following down the same logic that he has been opposing. You just want to be open and you want to be skeptical. I'm trying to play a little bit of devil's advocate here for the pursuit of skepticism and the flying spaghetti monster over here. But you also have

[00:42:35] a two-year-old and a one-year-old. You're more invested in this than I am who have three adult children now. So I can certainly understand where you're at. The stakes are so much higher for you as a parent right now. I agree with you. I'm trying to be skeptical, and I'm trying to understand the downstream consequences of if that skepticism in a brain or a mind of somebody who doesn't have insider awareness into what the underlying

[00:43:05] subconscious motivations that they're experiencing then takes that information to say, well, I'm not going to vaccinate with anything for any of my children. That obviously you could see the downstream negative impact of that. But to me, it's were these born out of necessity, for example, like the polio vaccine, or were these born out of profit-driven motivations, like the RSV vaccine, for example? I mean, respiratory viruses are

[00:43:34] always going to evolve to be more transmissible and less deadly. So the underlying motivations to me are extremely important in understanding the likelihood of them having an effectiveness or a positive safety profile. Yeah, so that's where we have to develop these hypotheses. I'm concerned about fear mongering because these are science narratives, not established science. True scientists would be more than open to identifying the potential competing

[00:44:04] variables here, and you just did, right? Okay, well, what about those communities? Is their lifestyle different than the ones who are more likely to vaccinate? Right? So those things are interesting points of comparison that in a free society with open debate, critical analysis, and the willingness to invest in scientific inquiry will do such a thing. Now, all Bobby Kennedy is saying is I want to put resources into creating gold standard science and eliminate the corruption.

[00:44:34] Now, I'm aware of the corruption because I've thrown myself into how SSRIs became approved by the FDA. I feel like at this point I've talked to so many people, I've read so much about it, including court documents, you know, from discovery processes. I'm guessing 99.9% of people aren't going to develop that obsession that I developed. Now, I'm pulling myself out of the obsession, right? I need to move on now, but I spent enough years being obsessed about

[00:45:03] SSRIs that I can definitively tell you they're harmful. And in my professional opinion, the costs of that intervention, so far outweigh any potential benefits that it is absolutely and fundamentally discrediting for anyone to call it a safe and effective intervention. You know, I've made a position right now for my practice, and then if I'm going to be on a microphone or I'm going to have people following me on social media or going to be listening

[00:45:32] to my work, that ethically, in order to be able to sleep at night, I have to be able to make that statement clear because I have no doubt in it, right? Now, that's something different than saying I should have it pulled from the market. Because there's so many people that are on SSRIs that now that's a public health concern. I just believe the market is what has to drive this. If everyone has freedom of information and can make decisions for themselves, well, that's going to drive whether a product is going to remain on the market or a product is going to

[00:46:02] get removed from the market versus saying the government should do that. Ultimately, I would have loved the FDA to be open about what that product does and doesn't do and be clear with doctors so they can really create an accurate risk benefit profile. But we haven't done that because of the corporate capture that exists in those agencies. If you're going to be funded by the pharmaceutical agency and then there's a golden parachute for you once you leave government to make

[00:46:31] millions of dollars for those companies, fundamentally, that's a conflict of interest. I don't even think I have the head space right now to go into this, but one of the things that made me the most angry I've probably been at my profession in the last since I've been involved is, and he's lucky, I can't remember his name right now, the Harvard psychiatrist who made the claim recently that SSRI should be over-the-counter drugs. I about, oh man, I about jumped out of

[00:47:01] my seat, sounded the alarm. I don't know what other euphemisms I can use to describe how upsetting that was to me. But that's such an important statement because that gentleman from a prestigious university then represents your profession. It doesn't represent you as the physician, but he is now speaking on behalf of your profession, so I couldn't imagine how infuriating that would be if I was a psychiatrist who didn't believe that, who doesn't practice that way, and that

[00:47:29] statement violates my ethical code and my strong stance in science. I don't think most psychiatrists are ignorant of these facts. I think that we have a system that lifts up people who are willing to play ball into those positions because, you know, I wrote a scathing comment on my Doximity profile when I saw that, and it got all kinds of different upvotes and follow-up comments by other psychiatrists

[00:47:59] saying what a harmful thing to do and harmful thing to recommend for a person in your position. We didn't have a chance to talk about that, how we tend to elevate narcissists willing to play ball excited for the chance at increasing the amount of power and authority that they have to these major positions in government or in healthcare. share. Thanks again for watching and or listening. If you're passionate about the subjects that I discuss on the channel, do me a

[00:48:29] favor and like, comment, subscribe, do whatever you can to make your voice heard, that these are problems that must be addressed in our society. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, I want to hear them. Feel free to reach out on social media or email us at renegadesyke at gmail.com. And if you'd like to be a guest of the show or you have a connection to

[00:48:57] somebody that you think would be a good guest, let us know. Thanks again for listening. I was curious to hear your view on the chief's latest run. I am a Philadelphia Eagles season ticket holder, right? So of course I'm going to be really aware of the discrepancies between the way that

[00:49:27] the Kansas city chiefs calls against their quarterback are going to be against my quarterback. And I'm just excited that the Eagles are in the Superbowl. I don't think they'll influence the Superbowl at this point. The money has been made. I mean, you're the money is being made now off of essentially in my opinion, Taylor Swift. Yeah. Right. Whether that is a real relationship or a concocted one, if there's money changing hands behind closed doors, I'm going to be, I'm going to lose all faith when she

[00:49:56] starts dating Joe Burrow next year and the Bengals and the Bengals make the Super Bowl. but I don't know if