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PART-1_Time to Discuss the Real Reasons Driving the Violence

Dr. Chris Martenson:  And hello. Hello, everyone. It’s great to be here with you today on episode number nine of Informed Consent. And tonight, a little bit of a dark subject, but we’re going to get to the bottom, I think, of where this violence is actually coming from. And, of course, I’m referring to one of the most recent horrific actions in the United States, which is the shooting that happened down in Texas in the elementary school. We need to talk about that. We’ve got some data, of course. You know how I like my data and we’re going to get to the I think the bottom of this is a really important conversation to be having, because I’m not going to be talking about what the guns were that were used or anything about gun debate around that. I think it’s obviously for me, it’s it’s a very weird thing for people and ofttimes the same people cheerleading, sending 40 billion in lethal hardware somewhere else and then wanting complete safety at home. Kind of a weird position for me because I think you should scenario we’d really want to be consistent. So there’s something we have to talk about though that in terms of I think which is the root source of this violence, I think watching Bowling for Columbine, which was the Michael Moore film, came out a long time ago and I felt like he got this close to explaining part of it, remember, you know, looking at gun violence and other forms of violence. But he he got down to one part of the story. He was looking at Detroit versus Windsor, Canada. Hey, they share the same TV programs, same air, drinking from the same lake, pretty much the same environmental factors all around. So you would think with those explanatory things out of the way, what’s left is sort of your signal in this in the story.

 

[00:01:44] And Detroit, highly violent. Windsor, Canada, not so violent. And you can’t just say it’s because, well, there’s more guns here than there. It’s not that simple. He got this close to figuring it out. And to me, it’s it comes down to the fact that Canada actually has a real safety net for people and the United States doesn’t. And so what the consequence of that is that when people feel like they have nothing left to lose, that’s when they become particularly violent or dangerous. So that’s one element of the story. And so that I think helps us get down to the root of the story a little bit. Canada, extraordinarily strong social safety net relative to the United States, which has practically none. Oh, did you lose your job? Sorry. You’re going to lose your apartment, be homeless. Oh, did you come back with PTSD from a war? So sorry about that. I have a yellow ribbon on my car, but that’s the extent of what I’m going to do for you. Otherwise, good luck under the bridge. Homeless vet. Right. So that level of sort of Darwinist stick approach that happens in the United States, most people deal with it, but a few crack. Right. And I think that begins to explain at least part of it. It’s a very obviously when you get down to something is grossness via foul is violence like we’re talking about. People have to be pushed really far. And one of the ways that we’re pushing ourselves, which we don’t have to, is chemically I’m going to be talking about the role of psychoactive drugs in particular. The SSRI is also the ADHD meds, what the data says about their role in violence, especially as it pertains to young men, particularly men below the age of 25.

 

[00:03:20] There’s some pretty strong data there comes to us from Sweden, comes to us from inside the United States. Probably time to have that conversation. So love to have that conversation. Remember, this is a live show. So you’re participating in it. Your comments are being viewed and looked at and when or if we have time and we’ve got a particularly awesome comment, we’ll bring it in and have that be part of the conversation. Love to have that liveness so that this is a conversation we can have. And so please feel free to leave comments and we’ll take a look at them and hopefully get to them because I would love to have a full conversation with all of you amazing people out there. So where do we go with this? Well, you know, me, I was I was I was have a few slides to talk about. So let’s go there. Let’s talk about this, which is why so much violence in United States. Let’s talk about this Texas school shooting. But first, a reminder, let’s not be rats in a cage. All right. So if you haven’t watched that episode, it’s a really critical one. Helps understand and frame for us, I think, what the world in which we live in. And the story briefly for those who haven’t seen it goes like this. If there’s a single rat in a cage and you shock that rat, you have an unhappy rat. It curls up. Basically, it figures out how to deal with it if you put a second rat in the cage. And by the way, the construct of this cage is such there’s no escape. There’s nowhere to go. There’s nowhere no heart, no way to get away from the shocks. You put a second rat in the cage.

 

[00:04:42] Now, they’re both being shocked as seen here in this little drawing, and they’re unhappy with that. Well, now they have something that they can direct their anger, their pain against. They kind of accuse the other rat in the cage in shock. Induced aggression is a really well-studied phenomenon in all social animals. It’s been well-studied in dogs, monkeys. Humans, I would submit, but as well in rats. So what is this shock induced aggression? Well, it’s simply that when an animal, a socially animal, is being in some way shocked. Could be an electric shock, but there are other shocks that could apply. Then it’s going to seek an outlet for its aggression, for the discomfort that it feels. So rats in the cage are a real thing that’s studied within the environmental field of psychology, but it applies to humans, too. So there’s lots of things that are shocking out there. If you’re not feeling shock today, you probably haven’t been paying attention or you’re missing some wiring. It’s shocking what’s going on out there in the world today vis a vis what’s happening in Ukraine, what’s happening with the energy story, what’s happening with species loss, bumblebees, you know, the energy, the economic system and money printing on and on. There’s a lot of things happening. And so these to provide the form of shocks that I think are another contributory factor to why some people, some rats in this story act out and act out violently. So that’s why I do what I do is because I think if we have the context, if we at least can understand that shocks are happening to us and that in many cases these shocks are deliberately being applied, then we have the opportunity to rise above the response, the reaction that might happen within us as an organism and not point our fingers at other people who aren’t actually responsible for our discomfort.

 

[00:06:38] But to understand where the discomfort is actually coming from, we have a system that is doing shocking things and is causing shocks. And by the way, when you do that across hundreds of millions of people, there are going to be a few outliers in that story that behave very badly or violently. So that’s and I think the world in which we live. And so the opportunity here for us is to understand that and not get caught up in it, not be rats in the cage, even though it might be unpleasant to be have, you know, be in a place where these shocks are being administered, at least then we have a chance of not simply reacting to them. We can take the head space and respond and find a way to navigate away from those shocks. Don’t allow that to have the impact on us that it might otherwise have if it went unexamined or unnoticed and just shocked us without going passing through our cortex and just coming in through our our brainstem. So that that’s that’s the context here. I think there’s some rat in a cage element going on here. Boy, was this really unhappy, though, seeing this part here. This was really this was difficult. So in the context of the shooting, this has come out a lot. We saw a lot of this early this morning, late yesterday. There were a lot of stories about this. But now it’s become pretty clearly obvious that the police showed up and did nothing for a long time. The timeline is, I think somewhere around 1119 or so, a call comes in through 911 and says, hey, there’s a guy crashed his car, he’s kitted out, he’s got a rifle in a backpack and he’s headed towards an elementary school.

 

[00:08:14] And it was an hour and 40 minutes after that first call that he was finally neutralized, as they said. So a lot happened in that hour and 40 minutes. And there was a disturbingly long period of time as a father of three children, all grown up now. But I can easily understand the immense and intense anguish of a not knowing what’s happening in there, be showing up and still hearing gunfire, apparently, and see seeing all these cops standing around with their battle rattle on. Right. They’ve got one or more rifles on them. They’ve got handguns, they’ve got flashbangs. They’ve got all the gear. But they just stood around. So they say here this is a particularly disturbing story. This mother was trying to save children. It involved the elementary school, involved Texas, and she was handcuffed. Handcuffed. And so here, quote, after it was revealed on Thursday that not only did police delay their response to sending tactical teams into the school amid a school shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead but prevented parents from entering. The Wall Street Journal reported that one mother sprinted into the school to get her children over objections from law enforcement. And Julie Rose Gomez drove 40 miles to the school. 40 miles. She had time to drive 40 miles. Upon hearing of the shooting and she arrived, said the police were doing nothing. They were just standing outside the fence. They weren’t going in there or running anywhere. And while state officials. Said that police were at the school mere moments after the teen gunman entered the school, barricading himself in a classroom, firing on young students and the teachers that were in there. They also said officers were unable to gain access to the classroom.

 

[00:10:08] Unclear what that means. Gomez said that she was only one of several parents at the school. Demanding that officers stop waiting around and go into the school. And it was then that federal marshals approached her and put her in handcuffs. The Journal reports the marshals told her she was being arrested for intervening in an active investigation. End quote. That’s the level of callousness on display there. A police and federal marshals not going immediately to do your jobs, to run in there and help not only the children that haven’t been shot yet, but maybe the ones who have been shot and still could be saved to just stand around. And then to use your authority to handcuff a mother who’s coming in, who’s obviously distraught, the level of compassion or lack thereof. This is astonishing. This is really shocking what just happened here to me and to a lot of other people. Just shocking, which is what even what even is there police there to be doing? I mean, I don’t understand this. They’ve been fully militarized. They’ve got MRAPs, which are those hardened vehicles. They’ve got every piece of equipment you could possibly imagine that law enforcement could possibly have in terms of weaponry. And they just showed up and they stood around this. It’s pretty shocking. All right. Chet Chisholm right here in Canada. We have tons of guns. We also have mandatory safety courses, background checks for gun licenses and cooldown periods where you have to wait a few weeks to pick up a gun you just bought. Yeah, we have. It depends state by state, Chet. In my state of Massachusetts, there’s a mandatory course you have to take. I actually think it could be stronger. You know, I’ve gone out and taken lots of handgun training courses.

 

[00:12:00] One of my favorite places to do that place called Frontside in Pahrump, Nevada. Their four day defense of handgun course starts right at the beginning. If you don’t come out of there deeply, deeply respectful of the weapon and having muzzle awareness, trigger awareness, never, ever, ever doing anything that would be unsafe in any way, shape or form and really respecting the power that you have in your hand. They don’t just teach you how to shoot there. They teach you what I consider to be absolutely essential, which is they take you through various scenarios like this is happening. What would you do that’s happening? What would you do? Like, it’s very complex. There’s it’s a huge responsibility. So I am actually a big fan of people being trained. I don’t think people should just be able to pick up a handgun or a rifle and consider themselves to be in any way, shape or form ready to make the decisions and judgments that would be required to use that in a lethal fashion. And I’m a big Second Amendment fan. I am. But there’s just some people that I mean, come on. I mean, if people aren’t going to take that that tool extremely responsibly, then I don’t know if they should be really holding it in their hands. But but they should make that decision, obviously, on their own. You should you should know that. Right. To be like like who would try and just fly a jet without any training? Who would try and operate, you know, a giant crane with a wrecking ball without any training? Right. A knucklehead would. So I don’t think knuckleheads ought to be in possession of wrecking balls or jets or things like I mean, it’s just. Come on.

 

[00:13:27] So there’s there’s a level of training. Now, these police involved here have high, high levels of training, obviously, or should have. So going back to this story real quick, once freed, Gomez moved away from the crowd, broke into a run, jumped the fence, ran inside to rescue her children, and she sprinted out of the school with them. So go, mom. Right. That that’s that’s of course, that’s what moms do. It’s bravery, right? I would like to think I would have done the same thing in that circumstance. So I totally understand what she did and why I get it. The shooter says he had 40 minutes to an hour before law enforcement went in to neutralize him, eventually was shot and killed by a Border Patrol agent who also sustained injuries, end quote. That’s an unconscionably long period of time with nothing happening 40 minutes. Can you even imagine being one of those parents standing around outside wondering? I would be thinking the worst. I’d be thinking, my child’s in there, they’ve been shot and they’re bleeding out and minutes matter. And all the police are doing is milling around, handcuffing, you know, the concerned parents yelling at them, but not doing their jobs, which is to go in there and be brave and do what they can do. So, I mean, look at this. Look at this. Here’s some pictures from this. This is from one of the more disturbing videos you can see. You’ve got like six and a half million views and probably more than that by now. I picked this up earlier. But what you can clearly see in here, I mean, this is a full on probably an automatic rifle. This gentleman here has one, too, hanging out here and there.

 

[00:15:13] If you look at the videos, I mean, this is like high quality equipment they got here. These things have good scopes on them and professionally maintained and some of them probably are even full auto. So in any right or have the capability to select fire at full auto or at least burst fire. So I mean, they got the hardware right, they got the gloves on. But instead what we see here is we see they’ve got somebody on the ground. A couple of them have their stun guns out ready to contain the crowd. Right. And because that’s all they’re really willing to do in this particular story. So this is the this is this is the evolved SWAT team standing around looking tough. But what’s the point of going through all that toughness if the only thing you’re going to do with that is serve a no knock warrant at three in the morning? I mean, when it really matters, these people look like they’ve got the training. They look like they’ve got the esprit de corps to to go and do what needs to be done. And maybe they want to do. We need some answers as to why more wasn’t done in this particular story. So, SWAT, what does SWAT stand for? What is SWAT stand for? Apparently it’s stands for sit, wait, neck tough. I’m really disappointed in what happened here. And so I think a lot of people are and so I’m not alone in. That. But this is this was really a disturbing episode. I can’t even. Where’s the compassion? Let me put it this way. I am 99% positive. The same people. If it was the local country club with the the leaders of the of the town or the state were in there, I believe really aggressive breaching actions would have been undertaken right away.

 

[00:16:52] I believe that because it was children. Because it was children of, you know, blue collar people and maybe immigrants that that somehow weighed in on the decision, said that that’s just it’s disappointing that I think that way but I do that was that wrong of me to think that way? I don’t know. I just get the sense that if the Davos crowd was being attacked, the people there would have would absolutely have been much more vigorous in their response. So check this out. This was so disturbing that they lost the left on this, even right, which normally would be in a situation like this, I think more concerned with talking about the guns involved, because that seems to be a go to on the left is talk about the the actual specific platform of the gun. That’s not something I ever engage in because the tool isn’t the issue, it’s the user of the tool. We’re going to get to that in just a minute. But Sink and leaguer you, Eiger, I forget how to pronounce the name anyway from the Young Turks writes, You know why police didn’t go inside as kids were being butchered in Uvalde? Because we teach our cops to be cowards. I’ve been saying this for a decade. This is a perfect example how we train them to let citizens die or kill them rather than risk any danger to themselves. Keith OLBERMANN The teachers of Texas without guns tried to save this kids. The police of Texas with guns did not. They stood there. Cowards f cowards. Fred Wellman, they’re lying. The police and the mayor are lying about everything they did. They stood outside for 40 minutes, and that’s why they’re mad at Beto O’Rourke. The cowards let kids die and are covering it up.

 

[00:18:24] 19 children, two adults killed in Texas school rampage. I think by the time you’ve lost, this is a real huge issue for the police in this case. And they haven’t helped themselves by putting out what I consider to be really obvious. Cover your ass CIA statements, right about oh, we got there. And as quickly as we could, we assembled a team, we breached the room and neutralized. They’re trying to make it sound like like they did. So it’s really weird what happened in this particular case. There was apparently a confrontation of some kind with the school resource officer, the SRO armed don’t know if shots were exchanged, but the SRO apparently was ineffective. Apparently, there were two early cops. They say they were injured in an exchange, but it they’ve left it unclear where they injured, tripping over the doorway as they hustled out of there. Were they injured by bullets? We don’t know. But the whole storyline just stinks to high heaven where the police are trying to say we showed up. And because of our brave people, you know, we we limited the damage. That’s clearly not what happened in this point. They let the Parkland kids die, too, and they were wealthy. That’s actually a good point. So we’re talking about Parkland, Florida. There was a shooting there. I think I got a piece of snippet of an article from that. We’ll talk about that one in just a second. So, Mary, and good point on that. They even lost NPR on this one. So by the time you lose NPR, I think you’ve pretty, pretty significantly lost the plot line of the story. And so the police have a lot of explaining to do at this point in time, but not just the police in Uvalde.

 

[00:20:02] I think there’s a wider discussion that has to happen at this point in time. So if we look at this slide right here, this is Sally Hunt writing in Cops are useless cowards. Only the people we can keep are only we. The people can keep our own community safe. Onlookers urge police to charge into the school. They didn’t. 40 minutes, 40 agonizing minutes and NPR, noting that onlookers urged police to charge into that school. Just just a horrifying situation. I can’t even imagine the anger. I would feel if I was one of those parents in that situation. I feel plenty of anger right now, and I’m not one of those parents. This was just really just speaks to something very broken in our society that dozens of trained armed police officers with full battle gear with with their protective gear on somehow couldn’t figure out how to get into that school and do what needed to be done, which was their jobs. Right. You know, the whole idea of running towards the danger. Somehow that just skipped out right here. So let’s look now. There were some criticisms here, a lot of criticisms. Hassan Darby writing can’t get over the fact that the most murderous police force armed with everything but an effing tactical nuke shot at this dude and let him walk into the school to kill 19 kids and three adults. I’m not sure if that’s true. Maybe it is the three part. What more could we have given them? 40% of the town’s budget. 40% of the town’s of Duvall’s budget already went to the police force there. And NBC News reporting via Tom Wynter down below the gunmen involved Texas were body armor during the attack and initial officers were unable to bring down the shooter and had to wait for tactical teams there say saying he’s wearing body armor.

 

[00:21:57] In fact, the reports I’ve heard is he was wearing a vest that was had the capability of having tactical plate, ceramic or steel plates in there, but didn’t have the plates, which meant that was that was pretty light. It best it was a Kevlar vest, front and back. Those are actually fairly easily defeated, particularly if you’re a decent shot and you don’t shoot for that. Any of that Kevlar, even with a pistol, you aim for the hips, you aim for the head game, for the arms, whatever you need to. But the idea that this spin by Tom Winter saying, oh, but this this person wore body armor as if they’re impregnable and nothing can be done. That’s actually not true. It’s a bad spin for this one. How about this? Buster Hall wrote, I was a school resource officer, an SRO supervisor for three years. We trained for this. You do not wait. You go in, you stop the shooter. If you go down, you go down, but you go in. That’s the training that’s was supposed to happen. If I was a parent there and I had my little peashooter Ruger LC nine horrible shooting little gun, I would run in there with that and take my best chances at that. Of course I would be a parent, I’d be highly motivated. But the fact that none of these people went in, somebody had to have made that decision, you know, that that wasn’t all the officers there. There were some that were champing at the bit saying, I got to go in. In fact, I think that’s what had finally happened if I read between the lines correctly carrying on. So Roxane Gay writing every single cop who stayed outside like cowards while teachers protected their students should resign immediately.

 

[00:23:31] They should live the rest of their lives in abject shame. What is the purpose of police if they don’t do their jobs? I know the answer. I know. But Jesus Christ, Tim. Writing. Lot of folks starting to understand the cops are cowards and that the only people cops consistently brutalize are unarmed people who are not a threat to them in any way. They are bullies that almost always punch down. So whether these are fair criticisms or not, they’re here. And these are the sorts of corrosion that happen when people finally lose the thread and that social cohesion. So you can feel that cohesion ripping rights. We are now in that rats in the cage sort of moment where you can feel the finger pointing. The cops are going to feel ultra beleaguered after this. The ones who are there for sure, other police forces around. We’ve heard recently about police doing no knock warrants, which I’m not a fan of busting in, because they’ve got a warrant for somebody they’re looking for. Not like, you know, no knock. I get it. If there’s if there’s a hostage situation and it’s ongoing and it’s live. Don’t bother to knock boss the door down and run on in. But I mean these no knock warrants where they’re looking for some petty person who’s just violated something or other, maybe a drug crime or something, and they break the doors down at three in the morning and then they shoot the place up. And we’ve seen a lot of that happening lately. And so, you know. That’s really not appropriate. And I don’t like that. We saw Breonna Taylor get a totally innocent person being killed by wild police fire at one of these no knock raids. We’ve seen a lot of deaths right where the police have just smashed in, shot the place up, often with very itchy trigger fingers.

 

[00:25:06] And next thing you know, you’ve got a dead person on your hand. And and too often it’s an innocent person. You see babies injured by flash bang, great grenades, just, you know, chucked in. So so that’s on one side. And of course, that breeds resentment. Obviously, it would breed resentment if the police were sort of like, yeah, we don’t really care. You know, we’re not going to take the time to find out we have the right address or if there’s a baby inside, we have a job to do, you know, and that’s fine as long as you do your job every time. It’s not it can’t be like that scene in an anchor barn. You know, 60% of the time we do our job every time. Right. Can’t be that to do the job every time. So when it matters, they didn’t do their jobs. And this is one of those times when it really mattered. And so, yeah, remember this. So the Parkland shootings in Parkland, Florida. So thank you for that comment, Miriam. So this was in 2019. And so there’s shooting going on. And what happened, quote, when Broward County deputy Josh Stambaugh arrived at the school, he heard gunshots, put on a bulletproof vest, took cover behind his coal truck patrol car. After 5 minutes, he got in his vehicle, drove to a highway overlooking the school, taking him away from the police response. And Deputy Edward Eason also heard gunshots when he arrived. And instead of going toward them, he went in the other direction to a nearby middle school where he remained. So I think there’s a pattern here. Right. And so this is actually totally inappropriate. And it speaks to the idea that the police, at least in these instances and probably some other departments we could imagine, have somehow gotten on to the idea that they’re not paid enough to actually risk their lives or that, you know, there are certain circumstances where the and the risk benefit ratio just it doesn’t feel quite right to them, where you and I might think that they get a lot of latitude in order to wear the badge and they get a lot of latitude with qualified immunity.

 

[00:27:11] And we give them a lot of legal leeway to do things. So cop shows up, dog sort of looks menacing, shoots the dog, nothing happens to the police officer. You do that? I do. That stuff happens to us. In fact, all the defense of handgun training I’ve ever done, they tell you whether no matter how justified the shooting was as a civilian, you need to be prepared to defend yourself to the tune of about $50,000 per bullet you send down range, right, in a situation where you’re shooting. Why? Because you’re going to get in trouble, right? The bar for a civilian shooting is much higher than for a police shooting. Well, okay. The reason that gap exists is because we’re counting on the police to do their jobs all the time, not just some of the time. So this was an extraordinary display of police standing around and doing nothing when they should have been doing something. And that is absolutely clear. And so I do think we’re going to see a lot of repercussions from that. And by the way, let’s just let’s just go there for a second, because one of the things that we hear a lot and I know we hear it from the Police Benevolent Association, is that it’s a dangerous job. That’s a very dangerous job. So the question is how dangerous of a job is it? And well, let me see. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to Ryan, I’m going to go slightly off script here and I’m just going to grab this and I’m going to put this into a browser real quick. And we’re going to take a look at this, because this is from the Industrial Safety Hygiene News, ISC, and they’re looking at what are the most dangerous jobs.

 

[00:28:47] And so let’s go there. Pull this up real quick. The 25 most dangerous jobs in the United States. And I’ll just pull this over a little bit more so we can see it all more. Yeah. All right. Well, what are they? Well, let’s see. Logging workers, number one, fatality rate, 111 per 100,000 workers. Average salary, 41 grand. So, okay. Number one, loggers to aircraft pilots and flight engineers at a rate of 53 per hundred thousand derrick operators in oil, gas and mining. All right, well, hold on. Police must be here somewhere up top. Roofers. Yeah. Fallen off a roof is no good, earning 42 grand ironworkers earning 53 grand delivery drivers, farmers groups. I got I have to be more careful around that tractor. I’m a firefighter, firefighting supervisors, power lineman at number ten, ag workers at 11. Crane operators at number 13, construction helpers at 14, landscaping supervisors at 15 get embarrassing highway maintenance workers at 16, cement masons at 17, small engine mechanics at 18. Superb guys. It’s whole lot. It’s getting silly now. Supervisors of Mechanics at 19. Heavy vehicle mechanics at tow, ground maintenance workers at 21. And oh, here we go. Number 22 at a rate of 14 per 100,000 workers. And obviously, you know, police do have a very tricky job. I think they deserve a lot of support. However, I think there’s something that’s gone wrong in the mentality or the training somewhere along the way where the idea that, hey, I’m earning a paycheck here, but it’s not worth rushing into that school where I’m actually going to get shot at. That’s not actually the deal. That’s not the deal. Or if it’s going to be the deal, then let’s just, you know, disarm the police. And it’s like, okay, well, then if you’re just going to walk off when when conditions aren’t right, then let’s strike a different deal.

 

[00:30:51] But I think it’s very clear there’s some soul searching that has to happen here and there’s some things that need to be looked at and talked about because that was completely inappropriate. By the way, I’m not the first person to say that. There are already calls for investigations with Congressman Joaquin Castro, saying state authorities have provided the public with conflicting accounts of how the tragedy unfolded. I’m calling on the FBI to use their maximum authority to investigate, provide a full report on the timeline, the law enforcement response and how 21 Texas were killed. So there will be potentially some blowback and consequences from this. And I’m glad for that because we need to have a larger conversation, which is what’s the role? And if you’re going to be fully militarized and you have access to, you know, select fire, automatic weapons, and you have access to basically every piece of hardware gear and you’ve got great training and access to training. Then maybe there maybe there ought to be some use for that, because otherwise we suffer from this corrosion of society that’s that’s happening. And this is contained in that idea of rats in a cage we shouldn’t like. We need to be all working together on this. And I just it’s just shocking to me that when there are children’s lives on the line, that somehow the decision was made for dozens of well-armed people to just stand back. I belong to a gun club, I guarantee you. My gun club. I’ll. I’ll give you that. I’ll give you the eight oldest guys at my gun club. I’ll give you, like, a random assortment of ten people. From there, they would have all done something and move towards that because I know them and I know them well and I know how they’re built.

 

[00:32:27] And I know their their mentality in this. And their mentality would have been, I have to go do something because I can. It would have been a responsibility. So there’s that. But I’m going to talk actually, today is actually more about I think we’re still not having the right conversation. I think there’s conversation to be had around police. Okay, that’s fine. And we should have it. But there’s something else going on here, which is now why why is this happening? As The Onion was famous for saying, you know, we’re the only nation where this happens over and over again. And and we get we seem puzzled by it. So I want to talk about the possible possible root causes. And I think this is actually something that we haven’t talked about yet as a nation at all. And it needs to be talked about. And this is in the larger context of what the FDA does or doesn’t do in the role of pharma in getting its way and pushing things out and hiding all the tail responses that actually happen. I think we have to talk about the role of antidepressants and certain other drug classifications in young men in particular, in ways that end up causing violence and violent reactions. All right. So let’s go to this now. Here’s an article in the BBC in 2017, antidepressants linked to 28 murders in three decades. It doesn’t sound like too much. You know, we look at what’s in this particular story here. That’s from 2017. We got better data now. But I thought they did a decent job of sort of explaining what’s going on here. Quote, Antidepressants have been associated with 28 reports of murder referred to the UK Medicines Regulator in the past three decades, according to a new BBC investigation.

 

[00:34:16] Murderous thoughts were also believed to be linked to the medication on 32 occasions, according to Panorama. Although the possible connection does not necessarily mean the drugs caused the events they’re talking. This panorama was investigating a very specific antidepressant. In 2016, over 40 million prescriptions were made for sore eyes, a type of antidepressant, the boost levels of the chemical serotonin in the brain. And then it goes on to note that like, oh, actually, when those prescriptions started coming along, there were other things that came along for the ride, including of violence. So, so but this whole idea like, well, even though the possible connection does not necessarily mean the drugs caused those events, you know, who’s like totally lame on this. So in researching this and I’ll show you some actual data that’s pretty solid that says, yeah, these things do cause this and here’s the data. It’s very it’s very strong, actually. I, of course, run across the inevitable PolitiFact article that debunks that whole idea. And they talked to six experts and got a couple of quotes from a couple of them saying, oh, we don’t think that’s actually happening. And of course, you read about who those experts are and every one of them is up to their eyeballs. Conflicted in pharma money. PolitiFact over and over again is just they’re running interference for big corporations while it’s pretending it’s a progressive, left leaning publication. Their fact checking is second to none, the worst out there. They’re awful at it. I mean, it’s just so transparently bad. I don’t know how they sleep at night, and I would totally encourage the people who are running the fact, you know, I got fact checked by PolitiFact. The fact checked an episode of mine where I was simply reporting that the Danish had actually taken the pharma company’s own vaccine data.

 

[00:36:01] And then they looked at it and they said, this stuff doesn’t prevent any mortality. All cause mortality in the Morrone vaccines. But it does in the end, a virus vector vaccines. That was the data. It’s pharma companies own data. I got fact checked by some I don’t know arts major at PolitiFact who declared that false, that I’d gotten it all wrong, that in fact, these were very safe and effective medications. I like listen, it’s just data and it’s the pharma companies own data and that’s what the data said. But I got fact check. So anyway, leaving that aside, how awful our fact checkers happened to be. Let me see. Yeah, carrying on. This is also from that same article they talked about some cases, one was a father who strangled his 11 year old son, was among the cases thought to be linked to the drugs. Professor Peter Tyrer, a psychiatrist at Imperial College London who has been studying SSRI, said You can never be quite certain with a rare side effect whether it’s linked to a drug or not, because it could be related to other things. But it’s happening just too frequently with this class of drug to make it random. It’s obviously related to the drug, but we don’t know. Exactly why. This is a huge deal. This is a giant story. So besides being very young, our my first question is, what else did these shooters have in common? So the alleged shooter was an 18 year old male buffalo market shooter was an 18 year old male Parkland shooter, was a 19 year old male Sandy Hook shooter, was a 20 year old male. The Columbine shooters were ages 17 and 18, both males. See in the pattern here yet they’re of an age and they’re male.

 

[00:37:41] So the first thing we should be asking as a society, as a culture, is, is that meaningful? What does that tell us? What is what does this say? And of course, people can try and inject gender into it. They could try and inject race into it, because I believe these were all white males or Hispanic or in your Kool-Aid case. But but leaving all that aside, they’re young men. And so here’s this is pretty interesting. So this actually noticed down here this comes from Sega dot dot gov. This is on the Connecticut government website. And so this was a conference put on by a group. And so this was some notes from the conference. And this reads, quote, I’m Sheila matthews, co-founder of Able Child, a national nonprofit parent organization with over 25,000 members. Our mission is fully informed consent. I love informed consent and the right to refuse psychiatric drugs and services. Able Child is funded by parents and does not take any special interest money, which is important. Why? Because you show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome. So I already trust these people. It’s, you know, I like the way they’re going with us. And reading down a little bit, I found the section on psychiatric drugs and mass murder. There’s a connection there. And they noted that in Huntsville, Alabama, February 5th, 2012, a 15 year old on Prozac, Xanax and Ambien. School shooting Cleveland in Ohio in 2007. A 14 year old storm through a school with a gun in each hand, shooting and wounding four before taking his own life. He was on the antidepressant Trazodone Red Lake, Minnesota, March 2005 six year old shot and killed his grandparents. Oh, that’s a familiar ring, then went to a school where he shot dead seven students and a teacher and wounded seven more before killing himself was on Prozac.

 

[00:39:31] The list of mass shootings in the link between psychiatric drugs and violence goes on and on. In fact, the common denominator in these shootings is that the shooter, nine out of ten times is on a psychiatric drug with known violent side effects. I put the word no one in there and I’ll show you why. I can add that word known in just a second. Here’s just some more of their data. They just have list after list after list. There was depressingly too many pages that read down like this, but you get a sense of, I think, what happened here in each of these cases. So, you know, you had a 15 year old Herman man shot and killed another Discover middle school student. But mine had been had been a history for being treated with ADHD and depression. He was taking Zoloft and other drugs for the conditions. So something maybe related to ADHD. He’d been seeing a psychiatrist and a psychologist in Finland, a 22 year old culinary student shot and killed nine students and a teacher wounded another student before killing himself, was taking an SSRI and a benzodiazepine. Was also seeing a psychologist, by the way, benzo. All of these are these are actually horrifyingly terrible drugs in terms of what they do. They should never be used in a chronic situation. In fact, if somebody is really, really, really unhappy, you can try and mask the symptoms with a happy drug or you can try and figure out if something in their environment is not agreeing with who they are and their overall life path. So. I think the first thing you should do is figure out if you if you find you have to take millions and millions and millions of people and give them a happy pill so they can just exist within the system.

 

[00:41:09] The problem might be with the system, not with the people, but we spin it as if there’s something wrong with these people’s brain chemistry. Take a pill and somehow that fixes it. Yes, we’d laugh my ass off. Being fact checked false is something to be proud of nowadays. In fact, I am. I take a little I take a little perverse pride in being fact checked. That’s always that’s always fun. It’s happened to me a few times so far. In every single case, my my facts checks are wrong. Pete, thank you. Yes. Pete Hossain, please hit the like button. Thanks. Yeah, please. Listen, we’re trying to get our message out, and the algorithms like it when people engage with this material. So there’s two ways you can engage like buttons really easy subscribing to the channel. If you haven’t, that helps as well. But most importantly is if you share this video with somebody who you think needs to see it. And so if you pass that along, those are the things that the algorithm in all of its silicon glory says is important, and so it carries on with that. All right. So what I really want to say about this is that this is a tapestry of chaos and despair. And it says to me, there’s something actually wrong with what we as a culture are doing, that this many people are this unhappy. Because, again, my model of humans says that people only lash out like a wounded animal when they’re really cornered, when they have nothing left, when they’re at the end of any reserves they might have had, when they have nothing else to look forward to, that’s when you get that final, Hey, I got nothing left to lose. Off you go and do something really horrifying.

 

[00:42:47] And so J Krishnamurti said it really, really well, I believe, and said, quote, It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society, end quote. That, to me captures that. If we’re if we have so we homeschooled our children, and I’m really glad we did, not just because of the, you know, avoiding that, the risk of the sort of random acts of violence that might happen out in a school setting. But because schools would be interested in particularly taking my boy, because boys seem to have more trouble with this than girls and forcing them to do something that’s completely unnatural, which is sit still for long stretches of time and focus on things and then shift their focus and do something completely different. Just the whole structure of it is not exactly everybody’s cup of tea. And for a lot of them the answer is, Oh, you know what? We can fix this kids problem. They need an ADHD medicine because the problem is with them, they can’t fit into the system. And in fact, they have that exactly backwards. The problem is the system that so many kids don’t fit into and a healthy culture would look at that and fix the system, not try and fix the chemistry of the kids brain. That’s ass backwards, right? It’s just wrong. And we’ll figure that out someday. At least leeches have been resurrected as a reasonable thing under certain circumstances. So in the future, Museum of Derelict Medical Practices will be this idea that you can just monkey with brain chemistry and and things will turn out well. That’s just such a broken philosophy. But it’s being defended and being defended aggressively by a system of conflicts of interests at the FDA, the pharma companies, Don, and on and on and on.

 

[00:44:27] But we need to start having this conversation if we want to get to the bottom of why so many people are unhappy and why too many of them are lashing out with violence, pretty bad violence. So from Richard Brett Weinstein’s talked about the importance of a rite of passage to manhood. Any thoughts? Yeah, Richard, I do. I think that’s incredibly important. And so what’s missing, too? We’re adding up some factors that seem to be missing from people’s lives, a strong sense of bonding and connection with society, feeling marginalized, you know, having your brain chemistry dysregulated by having somebody shove pills down your throat or the equivalent the loss of meaning and purpose that fundamentally comes from living in a society where it’s very easy to have no meaning, no purpose. These are all factors in a big one, of course, is not having that rite of passage is really a way for the elders in your society to really see the people before them, to see not just a child in the child. Seven So at seven years old, this is what must happen. But that seven year old child, you, you, the specific person, are being seen and held by elders who have a ritual that that contains within it the idea that we’re going to see that you were here and now you’re going to step across this threshold and you’re going to be a new person. And that’s not a symbolic stepping across the threshold only it’s a literal stepping in, a metaphorical stepping in the sense that once you’ve. Gone through that rite of passage. You are no longer a boy. Now you’re a man and a man has different responsibilities, and you’ll be held to a different standard and a steep learning curve as you step out of boyhood into into manhood.

 

[00:46:09] That that would be an example of of a critical threshold. Typically, right around the early tween years, that would be essential. There’s a big, big, big for all children from seven around the year of seven and four women in particular, to you stepping into womanhood, all of that. And then even later, as we come out of the early stage of adulthood into a more mature stage and then maybe into our elder stage, each of those stages of our life, the arc of our life. Clearly, there’s a role for ritual and recognition in rites of passage around that. And we know that’s important because every single culture that you could have studied before it became consumer eyes commoditized and, you know, global capitalism came in, wrecked all of it and sold back. Our most treasured holidays to ourselves is hallmark moments to consume things every single culture Inuit, Aboriginal, Native American, they all had these rites of passage. So here’s a tip. If people everywhere came across this stuff on their own in very disparate sort of environments is probably important. And it’s a it’s a human thing. So I’m a huge fan of those rites of passage, and I really support the groups that are out there that are bringing these back as best they can. So thanks for that question. It’s an awesome one. I think it’s really important, but I would suggest that potentially some of these young men here who are deeply unhappy. They’re just adrift, right? Maybe they hope their parents didn’t engage in a certain way. It doesn’t really matter whether you come from a rich family. I think the Columbine kids came from fairly well. Did you families? Many people grow up in a poverty of emotional content, whether that’s a violent, you know, poor father or a totally disinterested or violent rich father doesn’t really matter.

 

[00:47:52] You can grow up in a poverty environment almost anywhere. This is and most all of these boys are without fathers and medicated by mothers. I think they’re supposed to say, yeah, well, masculinity and being a man is completely under attack in my country. Right. It’s like there’s, you know, there’s really toxic masculinity or you got to be a beta male. There’s we don’t have really strong. I don’t believe that. I see we have really strong articulations anymore of what it is to be a strong, divine, masculine, strong, powerful, masculine source. It’s like it’s it’s been, it’s been really convoluted and polluted for a while. So it’s really under attack. Remember, the WEF said Western values will be increasingly come under attack, right. Or well will be increasingly under pressure. We’ll be stretched to the breaking point. I think they said, what would those values be? Right. Is that having a nuclear family where there is a father and a mother in fairly traditional roles and so we blurred those roles. Is it that we can’t have any true expression of masculine challenge? Right. Because, boys, I remember my boyhood, we did some crazy stuff, me and my pals, you know, we were out there pushing and challenging each other and doing really kind of insane stuff. And and that was part of our learning curve. And we learned where our edges were. And I found out what I could and what I couldn’t do and what I was really good at and what I actually wasn’t all that that was then. I do feel that there’s a lot of people who are adrift. And by the way, a lot of this incredible disconnection, this loss of of bonding, connection and actual sense of role comes about the same time that we had screens become dominant.

 

[00:49:38] I’m really glad I didn’t grow up as a young child with a screen dominant in my life because I see how how addictive they are to me at this age. Right. But as an eight year old, like, there was nothing to do inside. And my mom would make me clean if I stayed inside. I was outside the whole time, like, you know, that was classic, like late to dinner all the time. Like, didn’t hear the bell. I roved really far. Me and my buddies went really crazy distances on our bikes at very young ages. That was my growing up and I’m glad for it because I think that taught me a lot about myself and gave me a sense of boundaries and edges and a sense of adventure and a lot of things. So the screens though, they control a lot of these things, including our dopamine responses. And I think the screen time actually can alter our brain chemistry in ways. Well, listen, they know how to push our dopamine buttons, the infinite scroll on Reddit or Twitter or something like that on your phone that’s designed to to keep you engaged. So. Right, I missed that one. What was that one that just came up? R 29 SSRI saved my life. Fiance She took her own and I quickly spiraled down, got help instead. 14 months s arise for acute MDD would also like to study the effects of breakdown of nuclear family, loss of communities and societal emasculation of men. So yeah, buck, buck. I think that all the medicines we have specific certain roles like, for example, benzodiazepines. They should not be used chronically. They create horrible dependencies within people. And I’m talking physical dependencies, not psychological dependencies, horrible dependencies and people, and they have an incredibly good role for an acute situation.

 

[00:51:23] Somebody comes in with a legit panic attack. Their, you know, heart rate’s up at 150 or something like that or they’ve got a seizure. You give them a good strong dose of benzodiazepines, knocks that back. Great one and done maybe two doses. But you can find cases where people are on benzos for a year, two years, ten years, 20 years, not how they’re supposed to be used. The alter fundamentally the wiring in the brain chemistry that takes a long time to fix when people finally decide they want to wean themselves off, often with symptoms that are as bad as the ones that were corrected on the front end, if not worse. That’s those. SSRI is similar story. I think they have a role for some people at certain times. But the idea that we have I think the last thing I saw was close to 16, 17% of people in the United States are on them. Like that’s a lot of people. I don’t can’t believe that 16 or 17% of people are in a deep crisis that requires that that holding for a period of time. But, you know, that’s that’s where we’re at at this point in time. So carrying on, this was just more of these things from that earlier paper I showed you from the Connecticut website. But just noting here, this is all violence. But number four had been taking anti-depressants. Number five had been placed on the antidepressant trazodone. Number six was on Prozac. Number seven had been taking medication for depression. Number eight had been taking the antidepressant Effexor. Number nine, antidepressant Celexa in effects or number ten on Prozac. So that’s the data that’s starting to be accumulated. These are anecdotes here and from another article here.

 

[00:53:04] Let me get this thing out of the way because it’s I don’t like it my way. This was another article here talking about how Israelis have been linked to the increased risk of suicide. Quote, In one study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, patients suffering from depression but free of serious suicidal ideation were given fluoxetine. Within 2 to 7 weeks of starting the medication, six patients developed an intense preoccupation with violence, suicide, although all were immediately taken off the medication, this preoccupation persisted from three days to three months, depending on the case. In all six cases, the patient had never experienced such a severe level of depression or troubled state of mind before or with other psychotropic prescriptions, end quote. So couple of things pop out from this. One is that sometimes people will have the experience of saying, you know, it’s like with the vaccines, they go. Well, sure, I got COVID and I got sick, but think how much worse it would have been if I hadn’t had the vaccine. People are on these medications. They have the belief that they’re going to help and then they have these really horrible episodes and they go, Well, think how much worse it would have been if I hadn’t been on the happy pills. Right. In some cases, they have it exactly backwards. It’s that the medication actually caused the thing that they are now crediting the medication with, helping it not be as bad as it might have otherwise been. That made all sense. Following through all of that. So and the second thing is that it’s it’s in that moment there’s another hint here, which is it’s upon starting it’s when they started this that that first dysregulation often it’s that moment of either starting or changing the dose or stopping.

 

[00:54:43] Those are the critical moments here that are going to merge. And I’ll show you some more data on that in just a second. The CDC surveillance test 2013 noted that 35.3% of those who committed suicide tested positive for antidepressants at the time of their death. That’s a really high number. And, of course, you know, chicken or the egg, because people who would be seeking help, you know, are getting antidepressants often might be at higher risk for suicide, obviously. But at the same time, it’s a very high number. If you only have 16 or 17% of people on anti-depressants and 35% of those committed suicide test positive. So that gives you a signal that maybe there’s something to look at here. Maybe we should be a little bit more curious. Carrying on quote the risk of SS a rise in suicide is most prevalent in patients under the age of 25. Now we’re starting to see the same sort of risk stratification by age that we always have to be aware of when it comes to medications. We’ve learned that about the vaccines. Right. Same thing here. So they’re saying, well, we can’t just say how many people are on these and how many suicides. In fact, when you stratify it, you find that the risk is concentrated in the under 25 crowd. There’s a huge, huge signal there. So I kept digging and I found this. This is the PLoS One article. Prescription drugs associated with reports of violence towards others. Thomas More, Joseph Glenn Mullan and Kurt Furberg. Did this piece on Get My drawn to a lot here the context was violence towards others is a seldom studied adverse drug event. Why is it seldom studied and an atypical one? Because the risk of injury extends to others.

 

[00:56:21] So how would you study that? You know, I guess the adverse event drug database tells if something happened to you but doesn’t it didn’t do it in poor job of capturing when that drug led to something bad happened to other people around you or things that didn’t happen but you thought about doing right. At any rate, what can they do? The objective here was to identify the primary suspects in adverse drug event reports describing thoughts or acts of violence towards others and assess the strength of the association. So they’re going to dig around some data, take a peek. And they did. And here’s what they found. The methodology was they use the FDA adverse event reporting system that airs. Remember, Bayer’s is for vaccine adverse events, in particular airs as is the adverse event reporting system, and that’s for all of the drugs. So they went through that air system data. They extracted, quote, all serious adverse event reports for drugs with 200 or more cases received from 2004 through September 2009, they identified any case report indicating homicide, homicidal ideation, physical assault, physical abuse or violence related symptoms. The main outcome measures here were disproportionality in reporting was defined as five or more violent case reports, at least twice the number of reports expected, given the volume of overall reports for that drug. And see a p value of less than 0.01. So it had less than a one in 100 chance of happening randomly or by accident. So that’s it. Were there, you know, excessive numbers of violent case reports? And what were those numbers? At least twice what would be expected compared to other things that happened within that. And so then they looked at us. That’s a way of just filtering down, because there’ll be a lot of noise in this data, but maybe that allows that to sort of pop out and we find the real signal within all of that noise.

 

[00:58:13] What did they find? They found that out of 435 different drugs they looked at, 31 were linked to 78.8% of all violence in that FDA database. So they identified 1527 cases of violence disproportionality disproportionately reported for 31 drugs. Primary suspect drugs included varenicline an aid to smoking cessation, 11 antidepressants, six sedative hypnotics and three drugs for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder ADHD. The evidence of an association was weaker and mixed for antipsychotic drugs and absent for all but one of the anticonvulsants mood stabilizers. Two or fewer violent cases were reported for 435 out of 484. So nothing really happens for for a lot most of the drugs. But for ten for 31, it was bad and it’s they just jumped right out. Then conclusions here acts of violence for others are a genuine and serious adverse drug event associated with a relatively small group of drugs that included antidepressants with certain to Nordic effects were the most strongly and consistently implicated. I dug through the study. Here are the ten worst that they found out of the 31 that would include fluoxetine, which is Prozac, chantix, paxil, Lariam, HALCION, Effexor, Lubbock’s plastique and Strattera and amphetamines. And most of the ADHD drugs are actually in that amphetamine class. So these are the ones. So I don’t remember ever hearing a doctor say, Hey, listen, if you take this, please watch out for these sorts of suicide ideation or other violent thoughts. These can happen the rare, but when they do happen, they’re actually very serious. They can completely mess your life up because you might do something that you didn’t intend to do or you wouldn’t otherwise have done. This is a side effect that can happen when we interfere with the brain chemistry of people and not just people, but in particular young men.

 

[01:00:22] So let’s go there real quick, because this was a really good study also in PLoS 2015. Swedish study strongly linked this rise in violence, especially in young men. Their study is titled Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors as Accessories in Violent Crime A Cohort Study. Here are the people involved here. So what did they do? Very quickly. The methods here, they went into the Swedish national registers and they extracted information on 856,493 individuals who were prescribed SSRI. So this is a very large cohort that are going to be able to do some really good matching. They’ll be able to tease out ages, they’ll be able to tease out genders. Obviously, they’ll be able to tease out other drugs that people might be on and have fairly robust sized groups to compare to each other. So this is actually a good sized cohort study they can do. They used a stratified Cox regression analysis to analysis to compare the rate of violent crime while individuals were prescribed these medications with the rate in the same individuals while not receiving medication, same individuals. So they’re able to even look, that’s an even better cohort. You are your own cohort. In the study, when they were able to do that, adjustments were made for other psychotropic medications. Information on all medications was extracted from the Swedish prescribed drug register with complete national data on all dispensed medications. Information on violent crime convictions was extracted from the Swedish national crime registers. They’re comparing two awesome things that should have been done a long time ago, which is what’s happening, what drugs are these people on all the different various combinations? And then what? Let’s compare that to the National Crime Registry. In a country like Sweden, they keep great records. So they can do that and they can say, is there any sort of a signal here? And sadly, unfortunately, there’s a huge signal here, a really big signal.

 

[01:02:12] So that was the methods. Let me go now to the findings in this particular study. Quote, In yellow, using within individual models. So that’s persons who had it before they started taking it and then started taking it using those within individual models. There was an overall association between SSRI and violent crime convictions with a hazard ratio of 1.19 with a P value of 0.001 to 1 in a thousand, the absolute risk is 1%. Now, that doesn’t sound like a lot the absolute risk of 1%, but it’s actually very high when you’re giving this to tens of millions of people. 1% is actually a big number of people getting in trouble, ending up in violent altercations and ending up in trouble with the police and ending up in your national crime registry. So that absolute risk of 1% is actually shocking. It’s a it’s a tiny little piece of the belt and that’s saying that happens to everybody. In fact, it’s going to happen to almost nobody, but for 1%, it’s going to be a big deal. Achilles von Blucher, writing under 25 brain, not fully developed. Totally agree. I think there’s some brain chemistry for that. I’ll tell you, I didn’t really mature up till I was in my forties. I’m pretty sure about that. So but yeah, I’m it’s absolutely true. Men in particular, our brains just don’t really sort of come online as mature adults till your mid twenties if we’re lucky, and later than that if, if we’re a little slower to the game. So like I like to say about myself, I am a quick learner. Eventually I think I came on a little later than most I think I’m not sure. Maybe I’m still not there. Who knows? All right.

 

[01:03:54] Carrying on. So. With age stratification, there was a significant association between a sister rise in violent crime convictions for individuals aged 15 to 24. There it is. There’s that age hazard ratio of 1.43, absolute risk of 3%. This is enormous. This is a giant that should be brown shaking information that ought to ripple right through the FDA, right through the entire equivalent in other countries, and ought to say, we have to be really careful with this in how we use this, particularly when the individuals are aged 15 to 24. However, quoting GREENE, there were no significant associations in those aged 25 to 34 has a hazard ratio of 1.2, but the P value is just 0.1 to 5. So note no significant association, although hazard ratio might stay possibly something there, but p value doesn’t support it. Absolute risk of 1.6% in those aged 35 to 44. P-value 0.66. Nothing going on there whatsoever or those aged 45 years or older. P-value 0.59 for nothing there. No statistical relationship but a hugely, hugely powerful relationship aged 15 to 24. P-value 0.001. So age matters a lot in this story. I know a lot of people whose boys this age 15 to 24 have been put on these things, and I’m not aware of any of them. You know, I’ve had this conversation with them, have received the warning to say, listen, in this age group, until they get over the age of 24, there’s actually a really high a very a non it’s a non insignificant a totally significant relationship between starting these medications and bad stuff happening over that adjustment period of time. That’s what the data says. Everybody should be aware of this, particularly people in the business of prescribing these things. And they should be they should know more about it than me or you or anybody else.

 

[01:06:03] And they should be the ones on the front line of giving full, informed consent about these risks. Hey, your son or daughter happens to be in a tough spot. We think these would be the benefits if they go on this stuff. Downside is there are these risks and it’s bell curve, tiny little tail at the end. But for some of them, it’s pretty bad. So here’s what you need to watch out for in. If that happens, bring them right back on in and we’ll get them off of the stuff. And, you know, we’ll try something else. All right. Carrying on in yellow down here, uh. Yeah. Associations in those age 15 to 24 years were also found for violent crime arrests. With preliminary investigations again, p 0.001 nonviolent crime convictions. P 0.001 nonviolent crime arrests again. P001 non-fatal injuries from accidents, p001 in emergency inpatient or outpatient treatment for alcohol intoxication or misuse. P001 with age and sex stratification, there was also a significant association between stories and violent crime convictions for males age 15 to 24 p value of 0.002 highly significant in females age 15 to 24 with a p value of 0.0 to 3. So still significant, but not quite as significant as for males. However, there were no significant associations in those age 25 years or older. Hmm. So that’s really compelling right there. Those are really powerful p values. It’s a really big study. 800 plus thousand and 63 plus thousand people I think is the number they were able to do within it, within individual do matching and then across different cohorts, they were able to grow drugs. Really good study. This is the kind of data where the first thing that should happen is we need to have a really good conversation about it.

 

[01:08:04] Right now, if I was in charge of all of this, I would say zinc. We are not just willy nilly prescribing these things to 15 to 24 year old males or even females. Right. That there’s just the cat. The brain is not settled as the comment came in. The brain is just not developed. And apparently that developing brain is well, listen, that age of 15 to 24, I mean, look at all the stuff going on. You’ve got all those hormones raging around. Your brain is still wiring itself up. You’re basically just sort of coming on line. Teenagers. I’ll speak for myself. I did some dumb stuff when I was a teenager. Right. You’re just your impulse control, isn’t there? There’s all kinds of things that just aren’t wired up. And on top of that, now, hey, let’s just mess with the brain chemistry. Let’s just let’s just drop some things in there that are going to fundamentally alter the brain chemistry at a time when it’s a little wobbly. That’s the idea. And so now that we have this data, we would say that’s a really stupid thing to do. Let’s not do that anymore. That would be the the the conclusion from that. So now let’s go back to this. Remember, these are all troubled young men, the right in the age bracket where they would be most susceptible to drug induced violence. And I don’t know about either the Wolves aid or the Buffalo shooters at this point, but the rest of them have all been implicated as having been on these drugs that we’re talking about, these very same compounds that we’re talking about. It’s not to excuse their behaviors, but it’s to explain them. And maybe there is an excuse in there because, you know, we can read things like like stories like this one here.

 

[01:09:40] In 2000, one, Corry based guard in Washington, Lucky High School in Washington, was first prescribed Paxil, which caused hallucinations that wasn’t working out, then switched to Effexor. He started at a 40 milligram dosage that over the course of three weeks increased to 300 milligrams. Oh my God. On the first day of that high dose, he woke with a headache, returned to bed. Then he got up, took a rifle to his high school, held 23 classmates hostage, best guards testimony claims he has no recollection of the event or of his principal convincing you to put the gun down and release the hostages. Or in the 2002 BBC special documentary Panorama, which focused on paroxetine. That’s the name of the substance. I forgot it before the producers received 31,374 emails from viewers, the majority of whom told stories of violence or self-harm while taking the medication, particularly when starting and when increasing the dosage. So this ought to be part of the full informed consent. And this is a conversation we’re not having. I’ve been all over Twitter. I’ve read a bunch of news, thousands of inches of columns written about this particular story right now that happened to New Vaid. And, you know, the bought the buffalo thing is already somewhat off the news. But my first question is I want to know I want to know some things. I want to know some things about these young men. What compounds were they on? Had they suddenly started or stopped or changed their dosing in any way, shape or form? Who exactly had they been talking to online? You know, are they getting any nudges or encouragement by anybody out there when they shouldn’t have been? I need to know these things because these begin to help me understand what’s actually happening.

 

[01:11:20] I can’t say I can blame the antipsychotic and SSRI medicines. That wasn’t anti-psychotics, antidepressants and the ADHD medicines entirely. But I know it’s a factor. It’s just a factor because if these are known side effects and they happen and you give these things to millions of people, you’re going to have a few incidents, tens, hundreds, maybe a few thousands of these sorts of things happening. That’s what happens when you take a rare side effect and you put it into tens of millions of people, you get a few. And so I think that’s clearly something that we need to talk about. We need to have a national conversation about it. I’m not seeing any conversation about this in the media. It’s just like relegated to the edges. And you’ll be called a conspiracy theorist because the pharma trolls and bots are out there making sure that they defend their very profitable business lines. I get it. But what I don’t get is I don’t get how our regulators and other people who are in their positions of authority, the just the same as it was those police jobs to run into that school as soon as they possibly could. It’s the FDA’s job to make sure that these rare side effects aren’t hidden, squelched and just allowed to run rampant across the young men of our society, in our culture. And this isn’t a U.S. thing. I talk about it from your position when I was interviewing Matthias Desmet, who will be interviewed here again shortly, he talked about how in Belgium there were 300 million doses of anti-depressants administered within a population amount of, what, 13 million people or something? It’s just an astonishing number of doses. Those would be doses, right? So one person could take, I guess, 365 doses in a year.

 

[01:13:01] But it’s an astonishing amount of use of these things and it’s going to have its impacts. And we’re not talking about this in impacts. That’s just crazy to me. Again, in a hundred years, people will look back and go, who did what you did, what you took developing brains with their delicate, sensitive, wobbly brain chemistry. And you basically ran a sledgehammer through the center of that cortex. That was dumb. Wow. How did that turn out? Not well. We have a lot of people who are who are not well-adjusted to this profoundly sick society. And so part of that lack of adjustment, I think, is a number of factors, but not least of which is instead of actually seeing the people on the other side of this without actually really holding our precious young men and women and really encouraging them and seeing them and giving them appropriate rites of passage, we’re like, guys, kids, a little troublesome. Here’s a couple of pills or here’s four different pills. It’s not uncommon to hear about people who are on a whole cocktail of things. And I’ll tell you, this is much as doctors don’t even understand single side effects from single drugs, there’s no possible way they can know about combinatorial side effects that compound and cascade across multiple different drugs. So it’s not uncommon to find people who are on opioids and arise maybe with some benzos on and on and on. Right. They could be having a whole cocktail in there. The chance of any doctor having any clue what the combination of those side effects will be in that individual is exactly zero. But they will pretend like they know because. They’re doctors and that’s their job, right? But in fact, they don’t know.

 

[01:14:37] And if they do say they know, they’re just they’re just lying. So at any rate, I think that’s a big explanation here. Rocco family, right. Say and saying my daughter went to a therapist to talk about some issues in her life and the therapist immediately tried to put her on anti-depressants, got her a dog instead. Hey, congrats, Rocco. That’s the way to go. It’s astonishing, but that’s a very common story, right, Rocco? That and other people listening that you go and you’ve got a situational. Issue. Right. There’s two reasons that depression shows up in society, too. One is situational, the others chemical. People can have actual chemical imbalances where they need a little assistance to get re equilibrated. That happens. Okay. But most of it is actually situational. I’m having a little trouble in life. I’m not adjusting. I didn’t. I’m not. I’m trying to navigate my own rite of passage. It isn’t going well. My grandma died. Those things require us to just some support and we talk our ways through that. But too often those are treated as a chemical thing, which is lazy. Any therapist who takes a situational depression and decides to treat it with a chemical intervention is a lazy S.O.B. lazy. They should take that shingle and just throw it in the trash because maybe they should take up some other profession. It’s not the right way to go. It’s wrong. And the data is voluminous about why that’s not the right thing. And even if you do have a chemical intervention, it should be short duration. It’s not a lifetime. It’s not like, oh, well, this fix their chemistry. So I guess they have to stay on it for 40 years. That’s that’s not how it’s supposed to work either.

 

[01:16:09] And I know I’m probably triggering a few people out there who are on these things, but I’m telling you, there’s some some stuff you should be looking at here. These are not meant to permanently rewire our brain chemistry. They could be used as a temporary intervention. And then the goal is to get off of them as quickly as possible and find out how to persist with whatever your native brain chemistry actually wants to be and should be. So that’s absolutely true. Now, when it comes to young people, I wrote an article a while back around this extraordinary, extraordinary article that was written. By Guy New Zealand. John I forgot his last name, but it talks about in young people that it used to be that the median age of people showing up at a psychiatrist’s office or other place for intervention who are showing up with depression. The median age was was somewhere in the mid-forties, and that wasn’t that long ago. Today, that median age is somewhere around 25. It’s dialed way back. And that, in fact, by the time they’re 21, some 50% of people, kids these days will report having some sort of a depressive episode. It’s just off the charts compared to what it used to be historically. So why is that? What’s happening? Well, the other part of the story that really caught me was this psychiatrist was saying, you know, this is really kind of weird where. The. Kids who are showing up are not. It’s neither situational nor chemical like it’s very resistant to treatment, this depression that they’re showing up with. It just isn’t. It’s very difficult to address in any way, shape or form. And so they realized they needed a different name for it because it wasn’t depression, because again, depression is either chemical or situational.

 

[01:17:55] It’s resolvable through classic therapy is pretty amenable to treatment. This stuff wasn’t treatable. You could try everything you wanted and it wouldn’t go away. So they came up with a different word for it. They said, this isn’t depression, it’s actually demoralization. Now that’s a different beast because demoralization is neither chemical nor situational. It’s a fundamental disagreement in your brain between your cognitive map and the reality around you. So if your cognitive map says. I come from a country that values life and democracy, and if I work hard, get good grades, go into debt for school, I’ll get a good job in this law will resolve itself. But the reality is none of that’s actually true. You have a cognitive mismatch and you can’t line those up. And or maybe you’re really smart, kid. And you went to school and your teachers were saying, hey, the world’s catching on fire. We’re having this global warming stuff. And the whole thing’s, you know, existential crisis. Listen, it’s just going to catch on fire and all life’s going to exterminate. And you should study hard and get good grades. You know, it’s like this cognitive mismatch between messaging that’s very hard to resolve. So a lot of kids would actually slip into what’s called demoralization. It looks like depression. It’s a low energy state, but it’s not depression. It’s demoralization. And once you see that, you begin to understand that some of the kids out there, young people who are showing up as depressed, are not depressed. They’re demoralized. And often they’re the smart ones. They’re the ones who’ve sort of resolved in their brain that they’re that’s what they’re being told by their elders, their olders and by the popular culture is actually bullshit. Right? Here’s all the things you should do.

 

[01:19:40] Only none of this will actually work out for you, right? You know, work hard. It’s an even playing field, actually. It’s not like the smart ones figured that out. And then it’s actually a healthy response to say, why bother, right? It’s literally sometimes you find these kids who are demoralized. The smartest thing you can do is to just recognize it and say, yeah, you know what? Don’t don’t try and talk them out of it. Remember, it’s no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society. If there are young people who have somehow come cognitively to the conclusion that none of this makes sense and it’s not worth participating in, the first thing you say is not, Hey, let’s figure out how to fix that. Let’s give you a happy pill. Let’s alter your brain chemistry. Let’s try and get you back on the on the the magic carpet ride of of the consumer culture. Instead, you should look them square in the eye and say, you know what, you’re absolutely right. There is no point to any of this that you have you have sussed this through. You figured it out. And I’m not going to try and fix you around that. I’m not going to try and make you see it differently so that you can let go of this ennui and this demoralization you have so that you can participate fully in the system that you’ve already resolved on some level is either corrupt or broken or not worth your time, because it’s fundamentally not about meaning and purpose. And so smarter kids, more intelligent ones, sort of figure that out. But then they retreat into this demoralization and we try and fix them with pills to get them back over here.

 

[01:21:09] Operating within a system that they’ve already decided doesn’t have any of their best interests at heart, doesn’t care about them. We’ll just as soon have them die is not. And that’s sort of part of the message that I saw in that shooting down in Texas. Those cops are staying around like they didn’t like that that my kid or whatever, you know, they didn’t they didn’t feel the urgency to go in because we don’t have that shared connection as a culture at this point in time. So at any rate, that’s if you want, I will figure out how to get that article. I’ll probably I’ll put it down in the show notes of this afterwards. It’s a really good one. Soon as I understood the difference between demoralization and depression, I was able to have different conversations with people because this is actually an interesting condition, because it’s it’s it’s I think the people’s brains have rightly sussed out that it’s not worth their participation, so they’re not going to participate. But that’s actually the way you get to reach these people, is you acknowledge that straight up and you say, you’re right. I totally get it. I’m not going to try and fix that. And this is your one and true and precious life. And so there’s lots of things you can and should be doing in your life if you want to. And but I’m not going to try and convince you to go over here and participate fully in this life over here, which you’ve already judged, isn’t worth your time. It shouldn’t. But there are other things we can do. But first we have to let go of the dominant culture and then say, okay, well, what is there that’s worth doing that would actually bring your soul into a sense of meaning and purpose that would be relevant and important for you? Like, why are you here? You know, what’s your what is your purpose in this time? Yeah.

 

[01:22:50] David Bagley writing spiritual illness, not mental illness. It’s absolutely right in the mental illness approach saying, Oh, we would give you a pill to fix. That is the wrong approach at this stage. And it’s easy to understand where their spiritual illness will come from and how that could arise in a culture that values what we value, at least in my U.S. culture, right? So, I mean, every year I get terrorized. You know, I get terrorized. The apple blossoms come out, which they did just a couple of weeks ago. And I stand out under the tree and there are no bees. There’s no bees buzzing around. I know what they used to be like because I’m of an age when we used to have bees. I know what it’s like to have to stop because there were turtles on the road and I used to stop all the time in the spring and I don’t stop anymore. Not because I’m uncaring, but because there aren’t turtles in the road anymore. They’re gone in my lifetime, substantially gone. Those sorts of things terrorize me because I see that those impacts that we’re having are just like the impacts that we’re having on the brain chemistry of young boys and girls of this of this country in the world. We’re not talking about them. And we should be. We absolutely should be. It’s a it’s a spiritual dilemma that we’re not attending to our own long term health and that worse, we’re not leaving behind a world that’s worth inheriting. That’s the ultimate tragedy to me. And so we should have those conversations. I think people want to have those conversations. That’s why I’m having this conversation here with you. Love to have more of that back at our website, Peak Prosperity.

 

[01:24:16] Because this this is this is what we have to do. It’s time to fix this as best we can. And it starts with having appropriate context. So we just need to know like what is actually happening. And then I think we have a chance at figuring out what our responses are going to be to that. Robert Mills saying, I’ve been saying this is demoralization for a long time. People need a meaningful purpose in life. Robert, you’re going to love this article if you haven’t read it. But it is. It’s demoralization and it’s a fundamental mismatch between our cognitive map and the reality that we’re experiencing around us. And when those get bad enough, you just check out. It’s just it’s just not worth it. And so so once we understand that, I think it provides actual, really important ability to move past it and name it for what it is. And we don’t fix it with pills and we don’t fix it with pills that fundamentally sledgehammer their way into young brain chemistry. And we don’t do it particularly in males of a certain age. And we especially don’t do that and then leave them unwatched, unmonitored, uncared for, unloved, so that things can happen that shouldn’t happen. Right. That that’s not how culture should be operating. And I get it. Not everybody comes from an ideal family background and all of that, and we don’t come from that caring village. But this is we got to get back to that somehow. This is this is the sickness. The sickness that happened both in the police not doing their jobs is a sickness on display. The violence that that shooter I can’t even imagine that level of violence and hate. It’s just you must be chemically, fundamentally disconnected from your soul in some critical, important way.

 

[01:25:59] So that was that was sickness on display. So let’s talk about that sickness, that spiritual poverty, that meaning and purpose poverty and the fact that we’re using these chemical sledgehammers to try and mask over it all and make a few bucks in the process. It’s just. GROSS And that the regulators aren’t doing their jobs. The regulators aren’t seeing the same studies that I just showed you and coming to immediate action, springing through the doorway to save those children, as it were, in this larger metaphor, it is just absolutely unacceptable to me at this point in time. Unacceptable. I have nothing in common with those people. None. And I hope you don’t either. So, listen, that’s all I have for you today. And it’s big romp. I didn’t plan to go down this whole rabbit hole, but I did because this is where open curiosity leads me to things like this. I’m not interested in talking about which particular guns should be banned. I want to know why this is happening because. That’s the only way we’re actually going to get to the root of this and actually talk about real things that actually matter. All right. So that’s what I have here. By the way, there is a part two to this that’s going to be over at my website at Peak Prosperity. And there I’m going into some of the larger things that I think are contributing to that really strong sense of anxiety. I’m beginning to carry that there’s something really wrong in this story economically and the energy side. So I do talk about a little bit more of sort of official FDA malfeasance around this, but I don’t go down this rabbit hole much further over it. Part two, I’m shifting gears a little bit, talking about.

 

[01:27:34] This incredibly extraordinary energy crisis that is now before us and is going to impact all of our lives, all of ours, and the coming economic crises that are going to impact all of our lives because of the same kind of official malfeasance and neglect at the institutional level, where the people who should have been doing their jobs was doing something else and not their jobs. Right. And so I think a lot of our institutions have failed us pretty comprehensively. Federal Reserve Big Fail Capital F, FDA f, CDC f an h f. There’s a lot of feeling going on. And that’s, of course, kind of late stage for turning stuff. Anyway, that’s what’s happening over Peak Prosperity and hey, Arthur Roby. Arthur’s been one of a long time, very dedicated follower of mine and is a great contributor at our site. So. Hey, good to see you here, Arthur. So thanks a lot for being here and face the screen. At my career, I’ve been watching the chat. You’re a good moderator. Thank you. Yeah. Mike is part of our team. He’s an amazing moderator. So thank you, Mike, for doing that and thank you for calling him out there. Appreciate that as well. So, hey, that’s it. That’s all we got today. I see one other comment there. Listen to Yuri best novel in the 1980s explaining demoralization. I will do that. Thank you for that suggestion. I appreciate that. Yeah, that’s demoralization. It’s actually a really big thing. And it sounds. Sounds sort of unpleasant, but it’s not. Would that would that understanding? I think it’s actually possible to resolve through it. I love knowing why things are happening. I don’t want to be a rat in a cage. I like to know who’s administering the shocks or at least where the shocks are coming from.

 

[01:29:20] And demoralization is one of those framing things that allows me to get out of the cage and understand what’s happening. Because you want to make sure that you can respond intelligently to things, not just react to them. And when you’re getting shocked, it’s a very reactive place to be. This thing that happened in Texas. Shocking, right? But if we can understand some of this larger context and we can begin to respond rather than react to it. All right. Hey, that’s all I have for you today. Thanks very much for being here. If you want to come see part two. Peak Prosperity, please do. And become part of our tribe. Love to have you there. And you have my invitation. Until then, I’ll see you next time. Hit like hit. Subscribe. Share this. If you liked it and got something from it. I get it. All right. We’ll see you next.