518. Courage in Controversy: Medical Tyranny & Jan 6th Riots | Dr. Simone Gold

Jordan Peterson sits down with physician and lawyer, Dr. Simone Gold. They discuss her personal story of becoming both a doctor and a lawyer, running an ER clinic through the Ebola scare, why she spoke out during the COVID pandemic, how the machine attempted to destroy her public image, January 6th, being raided and imprisoned by the U. S. Government, and why she will not back down. Dr. Simone Gold, MD, JD, is America’s expert voice of common sense and scientific clarity in the information war against Medical Marxism. Dr. Gold is an emergency physician, Stanford University - educated attorney, and the visionary who led the pivotal press conference event that broke the spell of the corona virus panic in 2020. Creating the most viral moment in modern media history, Dr. Gold became the founder of America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS), the nation’s premier medical civil liberties organization. The mission of AFLDS is to provide independent information from the world’s top experts in medicine and law, empowering people to protect their health and exercise their inalienable and Constitutionally guaranteed rights. This episode was filmed on December 23rd, 2024 | Links | For Dr. Simone Gold: X https://x.com/drsimonegold Watch the film “What is A Doctor?” here https://americasfrontlinedoctors.org/whatisadoctor “I Do Not Consent: My Fight Against Medical Cancel Culture” (book) https://a.co/d/0k7mpnw Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 2:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's very unlikely that you went to the University of Chicago Medical School. That's really hard. And to follow that up with Stanford Medical School, like, is there anyone else who's done that?

• 2:57Speaker 05

  All the doctors knew hydroxychloroquine was safe until media told them otherwise. I said to the world, "You need to stop living in fear. There's no reason to live in fear." I had no idea that was going to completely upend my life. The first amendment exists not just so you can hear what I have to say, but humans have a need to speak truth.

• 3:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, everybody who's watching and listening should pay careful attention to that.

• 3:18Speaker 05

  Living in lies, I might as well be dead.

• 3:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's worse than death.

• 3:22Speaker 05

  I'm in my apartment, working, scream, banging on the door. "FBI, FBI, FBI!" Battery ram, 20 guys in tactical gear, huge weapons pointed at me, as close as I am to you. And I remember thinking, "Oh."

• 3:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity today to talk to Dr. Simone Gold. And she had quite a story to tell. Interweaving medicine. She's a physician, emergency room physician for 20 years. A lawyer, graduate of Stanford Law School. And she was one of the youngest. Physicians who ever graduated in the United States and then also went to Stanford Law School. So those are stellar accomplishments. And I say that to establish her credentials because she has been profoundly pilloried as a quack, in her own words, because of her stance on COVID, the COVID mandates,

• 4:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  on hydroxychloroquine more particularly, but the mandates really more broadly. And has also served time in prison in consequence of her appearance on January 6th. And so what did we talk about today? Well, we talked about physician training and its positive elements and its inadequacies. We talked about the stunning lack of curiosity that Dr. Gold emerged among her colleagues when COVID made itself manifest on the public scene. We talked about her experiences attempting to share her knowledge with regards to hydroxychloroquine

• 5:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  and its effectiveness as an antiviral treatment, particularly with viruses of the sort that COVID was. We talked about the consequences of her training in law. We talked about January 6th and the events there and the particulars of her so-called participation and then the details of the FBI's pursuit of her. In the aftermath of that event, they, 20 of them, dressed in their full gear, broke down her apartment door and hauled her away. And she was imprisoned for 60 days for plea bargaining down to a misdemeanor, trespassing misdemeanor.

• 5:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so like any one of those stories is enough to occupy two hours and we managed to cover all of them. And so if you want to take a trip through the labyrinth of law and medicine and the judiciary in the United States and...

• 6:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  With a side trip into the, what would you say? The complexities of the prison system. Then join us and we'll walk through all that. So Dr. Gold, when you trained as a physician, did you foresee in any way that you would be legally entangled and politically active?

• 6:43Speaker 05

  I did not.

• 6:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, so let's go back to when you, when you started your academic training. Where did you train as a physician?

• 6:51Speaker 05

  I was very young when I went to medical school. I started medical school at 19. I was at Chicago Medical School and I graduated when I was 23 and planned to be a physician. And I, that was my plan. My father was a doctor and I was raised to believe being a physician was the best thing a person could do with their life. There's a law in Judaism called "pikua nefesh", which means "to save a life". And to save a life, "pikua nefesh", was the highest honor a person could do, best thing you could do with your life. And that's what I thought I would be doing.

• 7:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, how did you get into medical school when you were 19? That's hard. That's a good medical school, a great medical school even. So how do you manage that?

• 7:27Speaker 05

  I finished college, I finished high school at 16 and I did college in three years. It's interesting, the paperwork is so onerous these days. I don't even think it's possible to get through school early, at least in America. So, but back then, if you worked really, really hard and fast, you actually could go fast.

• 7:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 7:42Speaker 05

  It was very uncommon.

• 7:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  You took extra courses?

• 7:44Speaker 05

  I took extra courses and to be fair to myself, when I was the youngest person in America at that time, the day that I graduated, there are other people who have done that. There's, I understand, someone who was 22 at a later point, but it is certainly very unusual.

• 7:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and so you graduated from medical school at 23 and that's when you started your internships, your residencies?

• 8:04Speaker 05

  Yes, I did my internship. I did that in Virginia. I had planned at that time to go to law school. I was super interested in health policy and learning as much as I could, just being as academic as I could. And I moved to Virginia for a year, did my internship, and then I zigzagged and I went to Stanford Law School.

• 8:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so tell me about that. You said that from a very early age, you were inclined in the medical direction. And why law? And that you went Stanford Medical, Stanford Law School.

• 8:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's also very difficult.

• 8:38Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 8:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  So where did you do your undergraduate?

• 8:40Speaker 05

  So I did my undergraduate close to home. I grew up in New York. That was City College of New York. I lived at home. That was my parents' preference. I was 16.

• 8:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 8:49Speaker 05

  So I could drive into the city or take the train into the city. So I was still very protected, I would say. My father was Eastern European, just very protective. And I finished that by 19, started medical school, went to Chicago, finished my medical studies. But to practice medicine in America at that time, you had to do an internship.

• 9:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 9:08Speaker 05

  So the M.D. is when you graduate, but the internship is you got your license.

• 9:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  How was the internship?

• 9:12Speaker 05

  One year.

• 9:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  One year.

• 9:14Speaker 05

  So after that one year, I zigzagged and I went to law school. The reason was, I really wanted to, my vague idea was to fix the healthcare system in America.

• 9:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, that's a hard one.

• 9:26Speaker 05

  I thought, a lot of people suggested I should get an M.P.H. Very funny, we should return back to that. But it just didn't feel right to me. I said, "No, no, let me understand the law." Many of our founding fathers were lawyers. I just wanted to understand it. So that was what led me to Stanford Law School, which is incredibly difficult law school to get into.

• 9:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right.

• 9:44Speaker 05

  Very small law school, 147 people. Harvard is about three times the size. So to get into Stanford was amazing. And it was, I would say, the most intellectually interesting years of my life, was being at Stanford Law School.

• 9:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  So what was your undergraduate degree? What was your major?

• 10:02Speaker 05

  Um, you know, I don't even recall. It was some kind of pre-med. It was something pre-med.

• 10:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so it was mostly scientifically oriented?

• 10:08Speaker 05

  Yes, yes.

• 10:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Like something approximating a B.S.C.?

• 10:11Speaker 05

  Yes, yes.

• 10:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 10:12Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 10:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. And so from there to medical school at the University of Chicago, and you did your internship. What did you specialize in your internship?

• 10:20Speaker 05

  So I was starting on a path towards emergency medicine, which is what I eventually started finishing. I was captivated, though, by law school. It was just extremely interesting. Medical school and law school are very, very different. This all played into what's happened over the last few years. But medical school was a lot of memorization, a lot of learning material that was presented to you, much like you would a grade school child. Here's this material, memorize it, learn it. Ask, in a way, kind of approved questions.

• 10:54Speaker 05

  But law school was completely different. Law school was really training you to think a certain way, a very critical way of thinking, to go back and forth in different people's opinions. We would read Supreme Court opinions a lot. One justice would say this, one justice would say that. So it was very, very different. I think you don't see more doctor-lawyers because they are extremely different types of intellectual abilities, night and day. People think it's the duration of time for the schooling why, you know, nobody would be a doctor and a lawyer. That's too much. But in fact, there's a lot of M.D., PhDs. There's a fair number of M.D., MBAs, right? There's very few doctor-lawyers. And I think it's because you need a kind of intellectual, broad perspective to be comfortable in both.

• 11:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 11:37Speaker 05

  Completely comfortable in both. I sometimes joke that I'm bilingual. It's just one in the same to me. One wasn't easier or better. They were completely different. And I was very comfortable in both.

• 11:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  So I worked with physicians on the research front. Well, and I taught physicians clinical psychology for a while as well. But I worked with physicians on the research front. And one of the discoveries I made was that physicians and scientists were not the same creatures. And you just made allusion to that, I think, in that when you were in medical school, you characterized it as an extension of grade school, essentially, that there was a lot of memorization, a lot of facts thrown at you that you needed to know and that you could ask the approved questions, right? That's very unlike training for, to be a scientist because you have to learn to think critically above all.

• 12:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  And I trained as a clinical psychologist. And the model for clinical psychology was the Boulder model, Boulder, Colorado model. And that was scientist-practitioner, but scientist first. And that meant critical thinking because... Science isn't, in large part, an adversarial enterprise like law in that regard. So now, so how would you characterize the difference in your experience at medical school and at law school with regard to your ability to think critically? Because you didn't say anything about learning to think critically at medical school, but you definitely said, well, that adversarial training is, you're always looking for like five sides to an argument, right?

• 13:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  And learning how to make the case for every side simultaneously. Necessary thing if you're going to think scientifically, right? So, so what, so can you contrast that and characterize also what you think now about medical education, not only given your experience in medical school and in law school, but also given everything else that happened to you afterward?

• 13:39Speaker 05

  Right, so I'm so glad to be able to sit here and explain this to you. They could not be more different. Medical school is a lot of, a lot of work. It would be 12-hour days, 15-hour days, including classes. And you were presented with material by a teacher. You scribbled notes as fast as you could or you typed them. And you would memorize them, you'd learn them, you'd regurgitate them. And you really were only being led to ask approved questions because you had specific material. It might be like doing a reading comprehension test. You, you read a paragraph, you ask the questions on that paragraph. So I would say there was no critical thinking. It's certainly no critical thinking in the first two years of medical school. It's not.

• 14:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  So the implicit presumption there is that what you're taught is correct?

• 14:27Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 14:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  And your job is to learn it and then demonstrate that you have that knowledge?

• 14:32Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 14:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 14:34Speaker 05

  Exactly. When you got into the third year of medical school, we would do hospital rotations and you'd be at the bedside. So you were expected to read up about the disease that the patients had on your service. And you could ask questions about that situation, but the, it's senior physician on rounds would answer those questions. So they were still, in retrospect, in comparison to law, very circumscribed, very circumscribed. Why, why this? This drug, why this treatment? How long should the treatment be? How's the oxygen level? It was very, it was almost mechanical in comparison to law. It was never outside the box. It was always within the box.

• 15:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, if what you're being taught is correct, then learning the algorithm is the right thing. But the problem is, is that often what you're being taught is not correct, either diagnostically or with regard to treatment. And that can be a major problem.

• 15:23Speaker 05

  That is true, but it's, it isn't, you're even being a smidge generous because it's always changing. Even in medicine, it's always changing the direction of new medicines, new treatments, new tests. So for, it's just so different. So for example, you would be learning, if somebody came in with a heart attack or chest pain, you would do X, Y, Z. But next year, there might be a different lab test and you would just add that lab test to your group of lab tests. You never actually deleted a lab test. You just kept adding and adding and adding. I mention that because our healthcare expenses are out of control. So you would never, you would never, you would never think about, well, what's the critical improvement on this test versus that test? Let's just eliminate this test. I came up with that very directly.

• 16:07Speaker 05

  There was a test when I was growing up. It was called a CK, the CK MB that was elevated in heart attacks. Then the troponin test came out. That was much more specific, much more sensitive. And I would say to my instructors, why are we not eliminating the CK test? It's not as specific, it's not as sensitive. Nobody knew, we just did them all. So you were not-

• 16:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  That means you're also multiplying the probability of false positives.

• 16:29Speaker 05

  You multiply false positives.

• 16:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's a big problem.

• 16:31Speaker 05

  You multiply the false positives. You chase rap, you know, red herrings all, all the time. And I think worse of all, you were not teaching the practitioners to think and maneuver in new times, right? Because they should be paying attention. Oh, the troponin test, it is more sensitive, it is more specific. I will eliminate this other test. We were never taught to think how to maneuver and grow. I would say we would not talk to grow. We were taught to stay here and maybe expand a little bit, more testing. I'm not sure if this all makes sense.

• 17:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, it's making sense. Okay, so with regards to- So most of the physicians that I interacted with were psychiatrists because there was some overlap in our research orientation. And one of the things also I saw that was that the psychiatrists who did research tended to outsource their statistics. And you can't do that, right? Like, that's not an acceptable means of doing research because statistics aren't algorithmic. They're an investigative tool. And unless you do your own statistics, you don't know your data and you have no idea what you've discovered. And so that was... But also, it was also the case that, like, learning to analyze scientific research, that's a very difficult skill to master. And I would say it's probably something more

• 17:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  akin to law than medicine, because you have to think extraordinarily critically. And it wasn't obvious to me at all that the physicians that I interacted with had been trained, in the least, to really critically assess the relevant research literature. So, now, is that too harsh? Or what do you think about that?

• 18:03Speaker 05

  I think you're exactly right. So, first of all, I was quite weak in biostatistics, for example. It was not a strong suit of mine. And it never precluded me from becoming an excellent physician.

• 18:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 18:13Speaker 05

  So, we would always have classes on statistics. Nobody was very good at them. Honestly, it was something we all dreaded. We were not good at it. We are not at all trained how to recognize good research from bad research.

• 18:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's a problem, because most research is bad.

• 18:27Speaker 05

  Terrible. You know, I vaguely remember, but I was coming at this from the perspective some of the headlines that NIH-funded studies were so kind of foolish, I didn't even understand why we were doing these kinds of studies, funding them. But we were not really taught how to finally distinguish good from bad.

• 18:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 18:44Speaker 05

  And Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who I'm sure you know, about a year or two years ago, he tweeted out that one of the problems in medical training is doctors simply don't know how to analyze data critically. I would say 100%. I learned virtually nothing like that in medical school, and a little bit in my residency training. And I never, I wouldn't have, I'm not even sure I got, I would deserve a C minus.

• 19:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah. Well, it's, the problem is, is it's hard to learn to be skeptical enough. I mean, psychology has gone through what the psychologists like to describe as a replication crisis. Which is their discovery, mostly by social psychologists who dreadfully deserved their replication crisis, that, you know, at least 50% of what's published is simply not true. Now, that never shocked me, because I presume fundamentally that if 5% of what we publish was actually true and original, we'd be, that's a 5% improvement in knowledge, in the total knowledge base on the research side per year. That's a stellar accomplishment, but it does mean that 95% of it's chaff and not wheat.

• 19:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that's a very, very hard distinction to draw. You can't just read the research literature and think that because it's published, it's true, because it's not true. And that's not surprising, right? Because it's actually hard to discover something new. But I was struck by the fact that that, you know, because the lay public, and this is partly why I'm pursuing this line of questioning, the lay public don't know how to distinguish between physician and scientist. And physicians also don't know that and presume that they're scientists. But generally speaking, well, most scientists aren't scientists and damn few physicians are. And partly, it's a consequence of not being able, not being taught to think critically. Now, you learned that in law school, and you enjoyed that.

• 20:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and, yeah, and you enjoyed that in a way that you didn't enjoy medical school? Is that fair?

• 20:35Speaker 05

  Yes, 100%, first of all, I didn't even understand the difference between physician and scientist. I will, but I'm validating that American medical schools do not teach critical reasoning skills, and they do not teach us how to analyze science, for sure. That is 100%.

• 20:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's also a major problem on the diagnostic front. Because part of being a good diagnostician really is thinking like a scientist. It's like, here's the presenting problem. Well, maybe, like, have we fleshed it out enough? What are the potential contributing factors, all of them? You know, if you go to diagnosis and then you have algorithmic treatment, well, that's fine if you got the diagnosis right. But getting the diagnosis right tends to be an extraordinarily difficult thing.

• 21:18Speaker 05

  The diagnosis is all of it, and I'll just digress a little bit here, just because I share with you some of my training. So I had a very unusual circumstance, because I went to my internship, which was my first year of residency. Then I went to law school, then I went back to residency training. In that three, four years, something had changed in American medical training.

• 21:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  What years were these?

• 21:38Speaker 05

  This was around 1990.

• 21:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 21:41Speaker 05

  So what happened was, perhaps you've heard of the Libby Zion scandal. What had happened in America was a young girl had gone to the emergency department, and she was very sick, and she was sitting in this emergency department. She ends up dying. Turned out her father, I think was a reporter for the New York Times, very well-connected person, and he decided that this happened because the medical residents were so tired and sleep deprived.

• 22:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, yes.

• 22:03Speaker 05

  Overworked.

• 22:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 22:04Speaker 05

  So in the years that I was away.

• 22:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  And they often are.

• 22:07Speaker 05

  In the years that I was away, but I'm gonna blow your mind a little bit.

• 22:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 22:11Speaker 05

  Because in the years I was away, they changed how resident physicians were trained. Up until that moment, so in my internship, in my first year, we routinely did 36-hour shifts. You'd start at 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning, you'd go till 7:00 or 8:00 the next night. You'd crash, you'd go to sleep, and then you'd have a couple more days of like 8:00 to 6:00 or 8:00 to 7:00, and then you'd come back every third or fourth day, do that. There's no question that it's brutal.

• 22:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, a friend of mine drove off the road and broke her arm as a consequence of that. Hawaii physician that I know, radiologist.

• 22:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, for sure.

• 22:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  There's some, there's something bordering on sadistic about that.

• 22:43Speaker 05

  But I'm going to show you a different side of it.

• 22:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 05

  So, because on the surface, and to policymakers, that sounds brutal, that sounds terrible, that sounds like it contributed to Libby Zion's death or caused her death, right? That's how it sounds to all the politicians. Okay, whoa, I did that my first year, very hard. Went to law school, went back to residency, and the rules had changed. The rules had now said, no, no, residents have to get enough sleep. So the work schedule became, on every fourth day, the first day was like 8:00 to 6:00, the next day was maybe 8:00 to 10:00 p.m., then the third night. Basically, you worked during the day and you had a night float. So you could work eight or 10 hours, then a night float would come in. This is maybe how nurses worked, which is you have shift work, graveyard shift maybe,

• 23:28Speaker 05

  and then cross over, but you didn't have responsibility throughout the whole cycle. So doctors became shift workers. Now, this was a terrible decision. If you want the doctor to understand disease from the bedside, if we're not scientists, right? We can't analyze the data, read the data, really understand it. Then our best hope of helping patients is to really understand the disease from the bedside, right? To be with that patient for 36 hours. What happened when I went back to my residency with the change in work hours was resident physicians, young physicians, were no longer following a disease kind of from beginning to end for the progression. They were checking in 8:00 a.m., checking out at 6:00 p.m. The crisis would happen at 10:00 p.m. or midnight on the night flow. The night flow didn't care about the patient, didn't really know about the patient. You come back in again that next day.

• 24:14Speaker 05

  It became very sluggish. You didn't see the disease progression from beginning to end. A person would come in with congestive heart failure. And you, there was never a situation anymore where you followed the disease to see its whole natural course.

• 24:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right. It's very unlike clinical psychology practice where that wouldn't necessarily be, that wouldn't be necessary.

• 24:33Speaker 05

  It wouldn't be necessary, but for physicians.

• 24:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's not as much of a crisis.

• 24:36Speaker 05

  When you are seeing a mid-career physician who's 50 years old, you want them to have gone through that full cycle of seeing the disease at some point in their career. The only way you can have that is if you're really in for uninterrupted. When they switched it to shift work, I saw firsthand the shift in how doctors interact with patients, treated patients. No longer did you feel such ownership over the patient. This was your patient. It was like kind of your patient for eight or 10 hours, then it was somebody else's patient for eight or 10 hours, then it was your patient again.

• 25:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  So there's a diffusion of responsibility.

• 25:06Speaker 05

  Diffusion of responsibility.

• 25:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, that's a.

• 25:08Speaker 05

  And you didn't follow.

• 25:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Generally a bad thing.

• 25:10Speaker 05

  And you didn't follow the disease the whole time. So in my first year.

• 25:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Did that increase finger pointing?

• 25:16Speaker 05

  I think, yes, but it was deeper than that. It was, um, nobody was really in charge, quite frankly. It was just a checkbox or template that was in charge. Before that, if my patient crashed in the middle of the night, I was there and I knew it. And so I became a better doctor through those exact experiences. That was gone once the work hours changed. And I don't think policymakers had any idea that there would be a downside. But it sounds all positive to protect the work hours.

• 25:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's the iron law of unintended consequences.

• 25:45Speaker 05

  I just wanted to share that.

• 25:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, so let's, well, let's go back to law school. So now you really enjoyed that and.

• 25:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  What would you, how would you say it shaped your thinking about medicine? And also about your future as a physician lawyer? Like, so you had a completely different kind of training. So now you're looking at the medical profession from a different perspective. Now you go back and you do another internship. What this time is another emergency?

• 26:15Speaker 06

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• 26:44Speaker 05

  Then I did, my internship was one year. I was rotating internal medicine, all the diseases of the internal organs. And then I did three years of emergency medicine. In between, I did law school. I just kept myself very focused on the law in those three years. I moonlighted as a doctor to support myself. So I was working as a doctor.

• 27:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  This is during law school?

• 27:04Speaker 05

  During law school, yeah.

• 27:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  You moonlighted as a doctor?

• 27:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  While you were at law school?

• 27:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  How did you do in law school?

• 27:10Speaker 05

  I did very well. I only became a quack much later.

• 27:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, yes, okay. Well, this is, yeah, well, okay. Well, so, yeah, that's very difficult, what you did, to go to Stanford Law School and to do well at Stanford Law School and to work simultaneously as a doctor.

• 27:25Speaker 05

  I took...

• 27:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, that's hard. So, you know, kudos to you for what that's worth from me, because I know how difficult that is. So, okay, so, but now you come out of law school, but you decide to continue as a physician.

• 27:37Speaker 05

  Right. So, I think, looking back at my life, I looked at the two, and I didn't have a clear path in my mind as to what a doctor or lawyer would do or could do. Other than politics.

• 27:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Why do it then? Like, if you didn't have a destination in mind, and those, as you said, those are very different forms of academic pursuit. Like, what do you think it was that was driving you in both of those directions simultaneously? Now, you said something earlier about a dream, a vague dream of fixing the healthcare system, which is a very vague dream and also a very grand dream and ill-formed. But I suspect that that ambition has something to do with what motivated you in both directions simultaneously.

• 28:22Speaker 05

  Yes. So I did two short stints in Washington. One time I worked for the Surgeon General, and one time I worked for the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee.

• 28:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  When did you do that?

• 28:32Speaker 05

  One was around 1990, another was around 1993 or 94.

• 28:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, place that in your academic career.

• 28:37Speaker 05

  First was at the end of medical school, I worked for the Surgeon General.

• 28:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that was before your internship?

• 28:43Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 28:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay. And how long did you work for the Surgeon General?

• 28:45Speaker 05

  Just three months.

• 28:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that was in DC?

• 28:48Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so you got a taste of that?

• 28:49Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay.

• 28:51Speaker 05

  When I went back to medicine, I missed the opportunity to make a change in health policy. So I went to work for the Labor and Human Resources Committee, which kind of oversaw Medicare and things like that. And that was in the middle of my training as an emergency physician. I know this is hard to follow because this is a very unique path. Nobody really does this sort of thing where they zigzag back and forth.

• 29:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right, right. So policy, law, and medicine?

• 29:21Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 29:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Fundamentally.

• 29:22Speaker 05

  I was very interested.

• 29:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Three of those.

• 29:24Speaker 05

  I kept looking for this, but when I went back to work for the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee in Washington DC, I was working for Senator Jeffords, who's an independent from Vermont. And I really think the system was too dirty to fix the healthcare system. That was my conclusion.

• 29:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  How long did you work for him?

• 29:42Speaker 05

  Also, just three months. These were just three-month stints.

• 29:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that was, put that in your academic career.

• 29:46Speaker 05

  That was during my emergency medicine training.

• 29:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  After law school?

• 29:49Speaker 05

  After law school.

• 29:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so you had two doses of being involved in the policy world.

• 29:54Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 29:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  The second time that you got involved, you just said that you felt it was too complex, too, you said dirty, though.

• 30:00Speaker 05

  I said, you know, dirty, not complex, dirty, so.

• 30:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, yeah, those are different.

• 30:04Speaker 05

  My. Before I worked for Senator Jeffords, I thought politicians didn't get it right because they didn't understand, they didn't know. And as soon as a smart person who's on the inside can advise them, they would be able to fix it. You know, it was very idealistic.

• 30:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 30:21Speaker 05

  I thought, oh, great, I will, you know, I'm a bedside physician, I could help them understand this. No, no, no. They understood the problem and they couldn't get the job done. So I was there, and I remember they were talking about Medicare going bankrupt. By the way, same song, different year now. And I remember talking to my senator about that. And the obvious solution was to raise the age. Because when the Medicare Act was signed into law, it was, I think, 1965, and the average life expectancy, I think, was 67. Fast forward in the 90s, Medicare still kicks in at age 65, but life expectancy, I think, was 76. Well, they never planned to have 11 years of Medicare coverage versus two years of Medicare coverage.

• 31:05Speaker 05

  People were... Anyway, when you looked at all the options, you know, overcharging wealthy people.

• 31:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  And arguably, if you're not a coal miner, you're not necessarily old at 65.

• 31:13Speaker 05

  Correct. Times have changed. And also, the other options of funding Medicare were worse. They were just, you know, make all rich people pay for it, which, by the way, would never have filled in the gap.

• 31:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 31:24Speaker 05

  Limit options, like you do in Canada.

• 31:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Rich people are pesky, but they're scarce, too.

• 31:29Speaker 05

  But they're scarce, that's a good one.

• 31:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes.

• 31:31Speaker 05

  Limit options, like, much like you did in Canada.

• 31:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, you just let people die or help them.

• 31:36Speaker 05

  But that was not... with me, right?

• 31:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 31:39Speaker 05

  That was not... That's not palatable to Americans. So we heard from all these people... Correct, yet. We heard from all these people about ways to fix it. And everyone, every single advocacy group that was presenting to us was in favor of raising the age from 65 to 67. We had Ralph Nader's group, we had the American Heart Association, we had, I think, the American Medical Association was on board. Everyone, we heard from like 12 company organizations. And over here, we heard from one organization. That was called the AARP.

• 32:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. American Association of Retired Persons?

• 32:14Speaker 05

  Persons, I think. I was unfamiliar because I was young. And that was the only organization that spoke against raising the age limit.

• 32:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 32:22Speaker 05

  And I remember walking with my senator. And I said, well, you know, obviously, the solution is, you know, of all the solutions, it's to raise the age limit. And he looked at me and said, this gold. Do I know what the most powerful organization in lobbying organization in DC is?

• 32:39Speaker 05

  AARP.

• 32:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Those people vote.

• 32:41Speaker 05

  And I, my heart kind of sunk because I knew that's the only solution that I could see at that time was just to raise the age limit. And nobody would have it, nobody would do it, nobody would talk about it. And I just remember feeling pretty discouraged. That, well, what's the point of my?

• 32:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, this is a diagnosis problem. Again, you know, you think you know how a system works till you, till you try to, till you actually investigate it, try to change it. And then you find out that the problems you thought were the problems aren't the problems. And the solutions that you think are solutions won't work for things, for reasons you didn't know.

• 33:14Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 33:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and that's actually, that's actually part and parcel of starting to think like a scientist. It's like, I read this great book years ago called Systematics, which I would highly recommend to anyone watching and listening. It's a cult classic and it consists of about 100 axioms that you have to adopt if you're going to learn how a system works. And one of the axioms I never forgot, which I think is absolutely brilliant is, the system does not do what its name says it does. Right, and so you have to approach a complex system like you're approaching an organism that you know nothing about. And it'll have a name, but that's not what it does. You can figure out quite quickly what it actually does

• 33:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  by looking at what it spends most of its time on or its money. So I learned this in Alberta. I worked in Alberta Social Services when I was like, I don't know, 18, something like that. I had a summer job that turned into a year-long internship. So when I got some policy experience and.

• 34:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Alberta Social Services at that time did not have sufficient data gathering capacity to answer the question: "How much of the money that we spend is spent on the end user?" Well, the answer was very little, because, like with most charities, almost all the money spent by social services was spent on the administrators of the social service program. And so, you know, your first pass diagnosis of a system like that is that, well, it's clearly there to employ the people on whom it spends the bulk of the money. Now, a side effect might be the delivery of some services, maybe, but if they're not even collecting data about whether those services are administered, you know exactly

• 34:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  how low on the priority list that service actually is. And so, you were trying to, you were looking at a system purely from the perspective of logic, I suppose, something like that, and very unidimensionally, not understanding, for example, that the AARP is not to be messed with, no matter what. Right, right.

• 35:19Speaker 05

  So...

• 35:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. Why don't they just raise the age a month a year? Like, would that cause too much, is that too administratively complex?

• 35:28Speaker 05

  No, no, no, I don't think so. I think it's just that the AARP was telling the politicians what to do, and so they did it.

• 35:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 35:36Speaker 05

  They weren't even messing with it. And that was a huge life lesson. And I learned for me, in my life, I don't need to spend my time doing that. At least practicing medicine is honorable. And so, I shifted just back to practicing medicine.

• 35:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, see, that's a problem too, isn't it? Because...

• 35:54Speaker 05

  You chase out the good people.

• 35:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, yeah, yeah, well, and it's like, to say something on the side of the politicians here, just momentarily, like congressmen in the United States...

• 36:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  They spend a tremendous amount of their time traveling back and forth between DC and their home constituency. They are running for election almost all the time, right? So it's like, that's hard, that's hard, right? Because what, they're on a two-year cycle? I mean, they're just campaigning all the time. And then they spend, if I remember correctly, they spend 28 hours a week fundraising, right? And they can't do that in their offices, because that's illegal. So they have these ratty, horrible offices instead, with drop ceilings and fluorescent lights, and they're full of mold, and that doesn't help them out at all. And they're on the bloody phone for 28 hours a week, basically acting as telemarketers for the parties. Well, God, how demoralizing is that?

• 36:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  And then, so you have that 28 hours a week, you have your travel, you have your, um, you, well, and that's completely independent of the fact that you have way too much to learn about absolutely everything. So now you're entirely dependent on your staff. All of that's demoralizing, and the consequence of that demoralization is, particularly because they're campaigning all the time, they can't take a long-term view, and everybody who can leaves. Well, so then what the hell do you do about that? I mean, that's, that's, you can throw up your hands and leave, and you said, well, you go back to medicine, because it's honorable, but, you know, that's, it is a real problem when the most competent people can't involve themselves in the government, because it

• 37:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  would mean, it would mean, looks like it's the sacrifice of something potentially more productive and useful. Okay, so, so that is why you decided, you just had to go back to medicine?

• 37:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 37:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so you left the policy field, and what was your conclusion at that point? You were just, you were gonna stay away from the political? That didn't work out, by the way.

• 37:53Speaker 05

  You can't take, you can't avoid your destiny.

• 37:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, yeah, right.

• 37:57Speaker 05

  You really can't. If you asked me...

• 37:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  You can kick and scream about it.

• 38:00Speaker 05

  When you're going in that direction, I wanted to fix the healthcare system. I mean, that was my childhood dream, and I...

• 38:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, why? And what do you mean, childhood? How early?

• 38:09Speaker 05

  I think, first of all, my dad was a doctor.

• 38:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 38:11Speaker 05

  I was raised to be a doctor. I always knew I would be a doctor. But the system was so dysfunctional that I think I just always wanted to make it better. Just, it was so dysfunctional. There are things that are wonderful. The doctor-patient relationship with a caring doctor and a patient that they know. With modern medicine, it could be beautiful. It could be amazing. You have a smart advocate who's on your side. That part's amazing. The actual practice of medicine is terrible. That's why so many good doctors go on free mission trips. They donate their time and their money to practice medicine in third world countries so they can actually do some good. I mean, it's a beautiful thing to be a doctor. That's the truth. But the practice of medicine in America, and probably Canada as well, is, you know, it's not, it's not great. So I, I've always known that.

• 38:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Is that, is that, is that a consequence of bureaucratic complexification? I mean, what's the essential problem? You know, I mean, I love being a clinical psychologist when, when, when you could still do that and tell the truth, which wasn't that long ago. But there were no intermediaries.

• 39:09Speaker 05

  So I'll tell you exactly the moment it started changing. Because I learned this in my health policy law class from Professor Hank Greeley in Health Law and Policy at Stanford. Lyndon Johnson Medicare Act of 1965, the preamble paragraph says, "Nothing in this Medicare Act should be construed to interfere with the practice of medicine." And I was sitting there as a young doctor, law student, and I raised my hand and I said, "Every single thing Medicare has done has interfered with the practice of medicine. Hundred percent."

• 39:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's why they put that preamble there to begin with.

• 39:44Speaker 05

  Nothing in this should, everything came from interfering with the doctor-patient relationship. Everything. Every, there's intermediaries. There is no more doctor-patient relationship for most patients. It's, it's in a big insurance company right in the middle. Or a big hospital corporation right in the middle.

• 40:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Or in Canada, you just can't get a physician.

• 40:04Speaker 05

  I, when I-

• 40:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  One in five now, with no physician in Canada.

• 40:06Speaker 05

  What's happening, you know, in your country, um, we could talk about for days.

• 40:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes, it's a series of catastrophic miracles.

• 40:14Speaker 05

  It's, it couldn't be worse.

• 40:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, and we've substituted paying, we substituted dying for paying.

• 40:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, which is not a great substitution.

• 40:23Speaker 05

  We write a lot about the maid. It's horrific.

• 40:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 40:25Speaker 05

  It's horrific.

• 40:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, well, it's gonna get worse before it gets better, so.

• 40:30Speaker 05

  So I just, I think I just always kind of, I think my dad was, was a brilliant man. Um, he was a Holocaust survivor, comes to America, does extremely well, smart, amazing guy, wanted to be a doctor, I was a doctor, we were all doctors. But we also saw patients in our house, that was something my dad did. He would do hospitals and nursing homes all day, and then we'd have patient hours at night. So I saw the care between a doctor and a patient, so I know what it can be. I, I know what it can be. And I'm holding on to that and saying, I don't understand how in modern times, why can't we also have that?

• 41:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, well, yeah, right, that's what you want.

• 41:06Speaker 05

  But you've, you have so many-

• 41:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Because it's a relationship, right? I mean, you should have a relationship with your patients, right?

• 41:13Speaker 05

  Basically, a doctor, like another educated consultant. When, when you pay a lawyer, I'm sure you have a lot of lawyers, you are, they're working for you, they're not working for the government, they're not working for a big corporation, they're working for you to serve your interests. If they're not good enough, you move on, you get a different lawyer, right? Why do we not have that in medicine? Because the world has told us medicine is too complicated. Medicine needs an intermediary, the patient can't understand medicine. Even Trump during COVID couldn't understand, he sort of left it to the experts.

• 41:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 41:43Speaker 05

  I am done with that. A person can make their own medical decisions with the advice of a smart consultant, exactly like they do when they buy a house, when they fill out their tax forms, when they see a lawyer or an accountant. There's nothing magical and so black box that a patient can't understand. I'm an emergency physician, I could explain any disease to a person, either the two or three minute version, or the 15 minute version.

• 42:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 42:06Speaker 05

  Hundred percent of diseases can be explained in three minutes or 15 minutes.

• 42:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, and if the patient isn't in charge- ...of their own decisions. They're not going to comply with the recommendations of the physicians anyways. I mean, compliance is a big problem, and you don't get compliance from patients unless they trust you.

• 42:21Speaker 05

  Unless the trust is everything.

• 42:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, and that's a hard thing to build, especially when people are in crisis. So I, so one of the last things I did in preparing for this discussion was read your Wikipedia page.

• 42:31Speaker 05

  Oh, gosh.

• 42:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, I know, it's really something. And, but this is worth highlighting, because I've noticed this before. It's very easy to damage someone's reputation. It's very, very easy. And I think the reason for that is that, you know, each of us can, can in potential, interact with a very wide range of, very large number of people. And so, if you ever read anything or hear anything about someone that isn't above board, the cost, the apparent cost of writing that person off is basically zero, because there's so many other people you can turn to. The downside of that is that it's unbelievably easy to destroy someone's reputation. Now, when I read your Wikipedia page, it's just like

• 43:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  a never-ending stream of assaults on your character, essentially. And, and there's a reason I'm highlighting that. It's because, and it's also partly why I took the route into talking to you today, the way I did. Because even though I know that people's reputations are savaged continually, I've seen that firsthand. I know dozens of people who are qualified, to whom that's happened. I know that as well as anyone could know it, I would say. It's still effective. It's still effective, you know? Because I thought, when I read that, I thought, well, just who is this woman? And like, why are all these terrible things being written about her? And does she know what she's talking about? And so, part of the reason I wanted to inquire into your academic history was to find out,

• 43:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  well, you know, what's your base level of qualification? And so, it's very interesting to note that your base level of qualification is extremely high, right? It's very unlikely that you went to the University of Chicago Medical School. That's really hard, particularly given how young you were. And to follow that up with Stanford Medical School, like, is there anyone else who's done that? Right, but that also makes you unique in another way. Like, one of the things that marks people out for peculiar destinies is that they operate at the intersection of two rare skill sets. Right, because you're rare as a physician, because there are not that many physicians, and you're rare as a lawyer, because there aren't that many lawyers. But physician lawyers, it's like, how many of them are there?

• 44:41Speaker 05

  Well, when I graduated, actually, there were about 3,000 to 5,000 in all of America.

• 44:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right. So that's a very rare intersection, and then you have the public policy experience as well. Right, so at some point, this is intersectionality on the academic side, you get enough intersections, so there's like one of you. Right, then you're, then you're poised, if you're competent, to make a real qualitatively distinct contribution, because there isn't anyone else who knows what you know. Okay, so let's move from your background, which we've delved into in some depth, to...

• 45:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, let's tell us what, tell us what happens next, and let's move towards COVID and everything that transpired around that. So you spent three years in an internship in emergency, in emergency, internal medicine?

• 45:31Speaker 05

  A residency in emergency medicine.

• 45:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, that was three years. Okay, okay, and then now you're an ER physician?

• 45:36Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 45:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, and so, how long are you, and where, where are you?

• 45:40Speaker 05

  I moved from New York back, and then I moved to California, and I spent the next 20 years working as an emergency physician full-time.

• 45:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Where?

• 45:48Speaker 05

  Oh, various hospitals.

• 45:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, but it's all in California?

• 45:50Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 45:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Why do you make the fateful decision to move to California?

• 45:54Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 45:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, you were in, you were at Stanford.

• 45:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, I knew, I knew California. I had some family, personal reasons to be there.

• 46:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay.

• 46:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 46:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, and you spent 20 years?

• 46:02Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, and how does that go?

• 46:05Speaker 05

  I, I had a perfect reputation.

• 46:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so detail that.

• 46:09Speaker 05

  Let's, let's talk about that.

• 46:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  So among your patients, any complaints?

• 46:13Speaker 05

  There was never been any complaints.

• 46:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Lawsuits?

• 46:16Speaker 05

  Nope. And by the way, to be in a practicing emergency physician and have no malpractice lawsuits, very uncomfortable.

• 46:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes, that's exactly why I'm investigating that. Because the default is that you're gonna get nailed by, well, you'll come across a nice psychopath at least once during your practicing, who will take you to task and make your life miserable.

• 46:35Speaker 05

  Especially in emergency medicine, because there is no deep doctor-patient relationship. Patients do not have loyalty towards you.

• 46:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, things can go very wrong.

• 46:43Speaker 05

  Things can go very wrong.

• 46:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  No doubt often do, since it's an emergency and all that. Twenty years.

• 46:48Speaker 05

  Twenty years. And I was, I would say I was very well-respected. Many people loved working with me.

• 46:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  So your patients didn't complain?

• 46:56Speaker 05

  Nope.

• 46:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Your colleagues?

• 46:58Speaker 05

  Loved me.

• 46:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Nurses?

• 46:59Speaker 05

  Loved me.

• 47:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's particularly telling, right?

• 47:02Speaker 05

  And it's a challenge. As a female physician, there's a whole dynamic going on there. And I know that I was very well-respected and well-loved, because when I was attacked, many of them stood up for me. So it's not my fantasy wish. Not only were there no complaints, there's no paper trail against me. You can't find anything negative said about me prior to 2020. It doesn't exist.

• 47:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. I had the same experience in university. Right? And so it's useful to have that kind of background, although it's not necessarily enough to defend you, but it's a start. It's a good start.

• 47:32Speaker 05

  I remind people of that. I said, "Just try to find something nasty that someone said about me prior to 2020." It isn't there.

• 47:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, prior to 2020.

• 47:41Speaker 05

  And not of that, prior to July 27th, 2020.

• 47:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. Okay, well, so let's move to July. So you have a perfectly... And are you happy?

• 47:52Speaker 05

  I'm happy. So I got married, I had two children. I was working as an emergency physician. I'm Jewish. I was exploring Judaism more. It was great. I was living in Beverly Hills.

• 48:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Doing anything with your legal training?

• 48:03Speaker 05

  I was not. I did a little bit of writing, a little bit of policy writing for some independent people on the side. And I was always very interested, but I was in the years of raising kids and working.

• 48:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right. Any pull toward the political during those times, apart from the policy investigations?

• 48:22Speaker 05

  So I'm super, obviously, as it turns out, as a human, I'm super interested in fixing systems. I'm super interested in efficiencies. But politics, no. So I never even considered going to politics.

• 48:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Did you do any work at the systemic level when you were an ER physician? Or were you mostly concentrating on patient care?

• 48:40Speaker 05

  So, thank you for the question, because everywhere I worked, I was always pulled in to do something, to fix how the ER was running. For example, an efficiency that you could have in emergency rooms, where I don't know how it is in Canada, but in America, there's long lines. It's very inefficient. And I said, well, we should put a doctor up front, right in triage, because at least a third of our patients could go home immediately.

• 49:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right.

• 49:04Speaker 05

  So it's called PIT, physician in triage. So physician in triage is super efficient. So I was a big proponent of that, for example, and everywhere I worked would pull me in to organize the systems. And that's also when I learned, nothing really ever gets done typically. You know, I write up these big plans, I do tons of volunteer hours. I'm like, this is how you have to do it. I was like that eager beaver, like, this is how you do it. It'll be so much better, it'll be so much more efficient. And then, you know, it would fall flat, there's...

• 49:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, I don't know. So tell me if it works the same way in large hospitals. I suspect so. So when I first went to the University of Toronto, the first year I was there, the chair asked me to serve on the psychology departments. We had a position on the planning committee for that faculty. And they were making a five-year plan. And I thought they wanted to make a five-year plan. So I actually worked on it a lot. And I consulted with a lot of my colleagues. And we came up with a list of recommendations that were appropriate and implementable and well-designed. And they... Not only did they ignore all of them in their final report,

• 50:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  which was quite remarkable to actually ignore all of them, despite asking for input, continually input. As soon as you hear that word, you should be wary. It's like, we want input. That's like content in the legacy media. And then they put forward their own plan. And then the plan they implemented bore no relationship whatsoever to the plan they produce.

• 50:36Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 50:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  And then, but there was more to it too, because part of the reason for that was that many administrative positions change hands quickly. And so even if you have established an arrangement with someone that's genuine, the probability that it'll be implemented over, say, a three-year period or a four-year period is very low because, well, if they're competent, they're going to be promoted upward, and if they're incompetent, it's not going to be implemented anyways. And so you get to a point where you can't plan over more than a certain time range because the system itself is so fluid that nothing can, nothing's going to happen. And people also, this is something else I learned very painfully. It took me a long time to understand this, even psychologically, is the typical person

• 51:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  is far more risk averse than opportunity hungry. And so the general attitude, especially to, for a career bureaucrat or a middle manager, is not, will this do any good? It's, is there any way my name could be associated with this under any conditions if anything ever went wrong?

• 51:41Speaker 05

  Right.

• 51:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? Risk minimization.

• 51:44Speaker 05

  So that is so disappointing about human nature. That took me forever to realize people didn't want to actually fix the problem. I got a tip from a colleague of mine when I was so disappointed that the plans, much like you had, nobody's implementing them, nobody's doing these better plans. And a friend of mine, a colleague, said, "Don't you know why they have hospital committees? Why? That's to delay things." He goes, "I successfully delayed this policy that I didn't want to have happen for two years, and when I could delay it no longer, I quit the committee." That was advice from a colleague. So I was a little bit, well, you know what? I'm not going to, one thing I won't do is waste my time. So I was kind of done.

• 52:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  That was the last planning committee.

• 52:22Speaker 05

  That was correct.

• 52:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  I thought, oh.

• 52:24Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 52:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay. I see. This was a colossal waste of time.

• 52:28Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 52:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's not going to happen again.

• 52:30Speaker 05

  Not, I'm not, I'm not wasting my time. My, my time's.

• 52:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  But then you can see what happens there too, is the committees get occupied by people who have nothing else they would rather be doing than wasting time.

• 52:42Speaker 05

  Right.

• 52:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right?

• 52:42Speaker 05

  So that's exactly it. But I want to share with you because it's, it's interesting and became relevant later. I was working, I always had a heart for working.

• 52:51Speaker 05

  With minority communities, poor, underserved communities. So really, that's what I did all of my career. I was working in just super hardcore. You might have heard of The Boys in the Hood, the movie. Took place in Inglewood, like, super hardcore. Like, I was the only white face there. And I liked that kind of work. I gravitated towards that kind of work. So I was working at Centinela Hospital for a lot of years in, you know, the heart of Inglewood, California. Happens to be about 15 minutes or so, 20 minutes from L.A. International Airport. Now, UCLA is five to 10 minutes further. Cedar Sinai Medical Center is five to 10 minutes further. Those are both world-class research institutions. 2014 rolls around, and we get the Ebola scare. And the powers that be decide

• 53:35Speaker 05

  that my hospital should be the receiving hospital for any potential Ebola patients that somehow flew from West Africa to LAX. So they're landing here. Now, this is a foreshadow of what came during COVID. This is 2014. And I'm puzzling over this thing, wondering why you would be bringing Ebola patients to this poor inner-city hospital that has no resources. I'm saying that you could probably be in central Mexico, and it would be about the same. And I was stunned by it. Now, my peers, not thinking, thought this was sort of exciting. And I, as an ER doctor, love the excitement of emergencies, but this made no sense. So we start the Ebola training that we're going through, and they break out these hazmat suits that we were seeing during COVID, the blue, right?

• 54:19Speaker 05

  And I was like, well, this doesn't stop the Ebola virus. Like, why are we doing this? Like, why are we putting on paper, blue paper, like, over our... Like, what... And nobody was asking those foundational questions. And I was the highest-ranking person at the time there. And so people listened to me. And I said, you know what I'm doing? If a potential Ebola patient comes here from LAX, what are you doing, Dr. Gold? Yeah, I'm leaving. And people were so shocked to hear me say that, right? Because I'm compassionate and I'm kind. I said, "No, no, no, no, no. It's not even about me." I said, "Who's being put at risk? My poor inner-city black nurse, who just shows up for work that day. She's supposed to be exposed to Ebola. I don't even know. I'm the doctor. I can like stand back and just be thinking. She's the one who has to draw blood.

• 55:03Speaker 05

  She's the one who has to get close to the patient. And you're saying, because somehow the CDC is failing to capture someone 7,000 miles, you know, away, they're on a flight, and they're coming to the poor inner-city hospital, and they're not going to UCLA, and they're not going to Cedars-Sinai. That's okay? I said, "This is not okay." And I put my foot down, and I completely refused. And it was very stunning.

• 55:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  This was 2014.

• 55:24Speaker 05

  This was 2014, and people were stunned, because I'd never reacted like that before. But let me tell you what the problems were. One, it was irrational what they were trying to teach us. Blue paper, not going to stop the Ebola virus. Two, don't bring me someone who flew, managed to fly 7,000 miles, and somebody in Washington is going to say, "But that's okay. We'll just bring them to this like, poor hospital that has no resources." As if she gets stuck with a needle and dies from Ebola two days later. That, that's no big deal. I had a huge problem with that. And it taught me that whoever's making these decisions either was totally incompetent or completely compromised. How come they weren't going to Cedars-Sinai or UCLA? Why? Like, did they lobby better? Did they say, "We don't want the Ebola"? Well, it made no sense. It made no sense whatsoever. I hope I'm being clear. It's just that I couldn't, I couldn't live with it. So I stopped that policy.

• 56:09Speaker 05

  And fortunately, no Ebola, potential Ebola patients came. But I was horrified that my nurses were expendable. And that was the only calculation that could have been. I mean, anybody with any resources didn't go to my hospital. You went to Cedars-Sinai, or you went to UCLA. Why were they, why, why was the choice made in Washington DC that we'll send them to the poorest, worst, least, um, provided, least equipped?

• 56:37Speaker 05

  Hospital in the area.

• 56:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, it seems kind of self-evident when you put it that way.

• 56:42Speaker 05

  Well, I was, I was in the ground.

• 56:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  You objected to that. And what, what happens as a consequence of you objecting?

• 56:47Speaker 05

  You know, if any Ebola, a potentially Ebola patient had landed, I would have walked out.

• 56:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 56:52Speaker 05

  It didn't happen. I was a beloved doctor, so I stayed.

• 56:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Did that do anything to your reputation?

• 56:57Speaker 05

  I'm not even sure people understood what I was saying.

• 57:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, okay, okay.

• 57:02Speaker 05

  Do you know what I'm saying?

• 57:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so, okay.

• 57:03Speaker 05

  And they had a very hard time finding doctors in these poor, innocent hospitals, so I was fine.

• 57:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  But that was a foreshadowing of things to come.

• 57:09Speaker 05

  I forgot about it until years later.

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• 58:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Huh, okay. Okay, well, let's fast forward to July 27th, 2020. Okay, tell us about July 27th.

• 58:19Speaker 05

  So all through 2020, as we started hearing about this China virus, which is how it was referred for five months or so, till China, you know, threw a hissy fit. I was researching everything and honestly, I was excited. I'm an ER doctor. I like emergencies. You know, for me, this is exciting stuff. I read every journal article that came out and I'm talking about it with my peers and, and I was discovering that my peers were completely incurious. I was... Shocked. I don't even know. I was devastated. I was devastated. I didn't know that my peers were not curious about diseases and emergencies. I still don't talk about it.

• 58:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  How did you not know that by that point? I mean, what was revealed to you with that new information that you hadn't seen before?

• 59:05Speaker 05

  Because I think up until that point, you know, you would talk to your peers. A person would come with a hip fracture. They come with a pneumonia or an asthma or heart attack. And so you're all doing kind of the same thing, right? Because it's kind of the right thing to do.

• 59:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's local as well.

• 59:16Speaker 05

  And so you just, you know, you maybe ask a question here or there, but it was never outside the box. None of us were outside the box at all. But all of a sudden, we had a brand-new disease, brand-new thing, and nobody knew what to do, right? The whole world doesn't know what to do. But I was reading all the literature, and it was patently obvious that hydroxychloroquine worked. Now, it wasn't a coincidence.

• 59:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Justify that, Clayton.

• 59:37Speaker 05

  The reason we knew it worked is because SARS-2 virus, which caused COVID-19, was 78% identical to SARS-1 virus. SARS-1 virus was 15 or 18 years earlier, and chloroquine fixed it. Chloroquine treated it. So very early on, scientists doing research in the clinic, in the labs, discovered that hydroxychloroquine also stopped the SARS-2 virus. Not a surprise. They're like, oh.

• 1:00:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, draw the connection between those viruses again.

• 1:00:06Speaker 05

  Okay, so COVID-19 was caused by the SARS-2 virus. Everyone kept calling this the novel coronavirus.

• 1:00:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:14Speaker 05

  I have no idea to this day. Talk about misnomers, which you're an expert at.

• 1:00:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18Speaker 05

  What was novel about it?

• 1:00:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's a good question.

• 1:00:21Speaker 05

  It was 78% identical to SARS-1. So there was a SARS-1 18 years earlier.

• 1:00:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  And it was a coronavirus. How much overlap between?

• 1:00:29Speaker 05

  78% identical.

• 1:00:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  And with the typical coronavirus, because corona virus is...

• 1:00:33Speaker 05

  Oh, I'm not sure. I don't have a precise...

• 1:00:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  But they're in the same cat, clock, so they must be, they must overlap substantively.

• 1:00:38Speaker 05

  So the SARS-1 respiratory virus, also from Asia, chloroquine was very helpful, and it worked, and there you go. So when SARS-2 came around, scientists in China, scientist Didier Raoul in France, started studying hydroxychloroquine, which by the way is... Is mechanism of action is like the same as chloroquine, but safer. So if you see a chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine study, they're all equally good. So they start studying it and low and behold, unsurprisingly, completely unsurprisingly, of course, it worked against SARS 2, it worked against SARS 1. Not a shock, 78% identical. So I'm reading.

• 1:01:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  And this is in 2020?

• 1:01:15Speaker 05

  This is in, um, yes, February of 2020 was when the first studies came out. I don't think in January 2020, but this is very, very early. This is when you just start, there wasn't any coronavirus task force committee, I think until February or March of 2020. So the studies.

• 1:01:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  So this is well before the lockdowns, before the general panic.

• 1:01:35Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:01:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. So why are you on this so quickly?

• 1:01:37Speaker 05

  Because I'm interested, because I'm an ER doctor. So for me, this was fun. Don't mean to sound like crazy people.

• 1:01:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that's how scientists think.

• 1:01:44Speaker 05

  Right. It's like, oh, my God, there's an emergency. I'm an emergency doctor. This is coming to me. Let me read about it. I was so curious about the whole thing. Every free minute, I was reading about it. I mean, this is, I can't even describe. You're like, if you were an emergency, if you loved cars and you're a car mechanic and there's a new car that comes out, you'd be so excited to like, check it out, right? Okay, I'm an emergency doctor. There's an emergency all across the world. Nobody knows what it is. Let me die.

• 1:02:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  So you're prepared.

• 1:02:07Speaker 05

  I'm getting all excited, prepared, reading, and I know that they're going to be my future patients.

• 1:02:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 1:02:11Speaker 05

  Like, it wasn't just my ego satisfaction. It's like, I'm going to be on the line. And everybody was panicked, which I don't panic. So I was even more excited. I'm like, let me just be calm and read everything. I read everything. There were studies in China.

• 1:02:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  So is that a marked characteristic of yours not to panic?

• 1:02:25Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:02:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  So are, so I'm curious about that psychologically, like low, low anxiety?

• 1:02:33Speaker 05

  I'm probably a little bit neurotic.

• 1:02:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, but you don't panic?

• 1:02:38Speaker 05

  I don't panic.

• 1:02:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Why not?

• 1:02:40Speaker 05

  Why not?

• 1:02:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:41Speaker 05

  Um, I just think you can figure it out.

• 1:02:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, okay, that's a good answer. So you think you can figure it out. That's your presumption.

• 1:02:48Speaker 05

  That's my basic presumption.

• 1:02:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  Your father had anything to do with that?

• 1:02:51Speaker 05

  I mean, I think you grew up as a daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Maybe you're. You put things in perspective. I mean, I wouldn't panic over things most Americans would panic over just because I knew what my father went through.

• 1:03:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, I'm more curious about your implicit presumption that if a problem comes your way, you can figure it out. Because that's not a presumption that most people share. It's relatively rare. Now, that's a very effective presumption if you also happen to be the sort of person who can figure things out. But most people can do more of that than they think. Okay, so you're excited about this. You're keeping up with the cutting-edge research. You conclude, and you're not even doubtful about it, that hydroxychloroquine works. And there's reason to presume that. The literature shows it. But there's also more compelling reason, which is, well, we've seen this before.

• 1:03:41Speaker 05

  There have been many, many respiratory viruses and pandemics throughout human history, and also even in American history.

• 1:03:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Like every year.

• 1:03:48Speaker 05

  Like all the time. So I was a little... I mean, I'm a human too, and living in America, you're pummeled all the time with this. It became the subject... It was the only subject people were talking about. So I would say I considered the possibility that I was wrong. So I would say for the month of March, I was cautious. Like, I would come home from the ER, and I would strip my clothes off and change my clothes outside, and I'd wash up before I'd go in. So I thought there's always possibilities. There's something I didn't know. Like, maybe this is the only virus in the history of the world to act a certain way. And so I was humble about it. You know, I said, well, maybe there's something. But everything that people were saying was contradictory to everything.

• 1:04:33Speaker 05

  It contradicted Public Health 101. It contradicted how viruses worked. Everything was off. So in March, when our country... I don't remember exactly when Trump said, "We'll do 15 days to stop the spread." It was March, I think, March of 2020. And that's also when, March 15th or something, is when he spoke out in favor of hydroxychloroquine. And the world turned upside down for me right then. So that's a really critical moment. Up until the day Trump mentioned...

• 1:05:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Because he was pilloried for that.

• 1:05:02Speaker 05

  Yes, I think it was March 17th he said it. So on March 17th, Donald Trump spoke in favor of hydroxychloroquine. Now, I had been talking to my peers for the previous two months. What do you think about hydroxychloroquine? The response was, "Ah." And I said, well, don't you don't you aren't you going to use it when you get your first COVID patient? And people are like, oh, yeah, probably, I guess, I don't know. Incurious, like nobody was reading, which I found weird. Okay, all right. March 17th, he gets pilloried for hydroxychloroquine. My next ER shift?

• 1:05:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:05:36Speaker 05

  Oh, my gosh. Nobody, it was, oh, no, I'm never going to use that. That's terrible. It's dangerous, terrible stuff. And I looked at my peers, but then my peers still, I didn't know what was coming. I was like, huh, why? Like, what, like, last week, you didn't care. Oh, no, it's very bad, very dangerous. I'm like, why is it? And they start saying whatever they heard on the news.

• 1:05:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:53Speaker 05

  Or in Facebook. And that was my lesson number two. Wow, you're just incurious. You're, you're literally like a Facebook. Like, why do people pay you as a doctor? Like, I didn't get it. Like, you were literally just saying what, what they said at, at a press conference. I thought it was weird that they went from not caring about hydroxy, no problem, to saying, oh, verboten. Now, a couple of months-

• 1:06:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, that's, that's sensitivity to, what would you say? Reputation savaging. It's contagious, right? If you associate with someone whose reputation is being damaged, then it, it affects you.

• 1:06:25Speaker 05

  So I hear what you're saying. That is a good point.

• 1:06:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:27Speaker 05

  I happened, that ER job where I do most of my work-

• 1:06:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:30Speaker 05

  Was in a politically kind of conservative area. It's where Kevin McCarthy is the congressman. So I don't, it wasn't like a hatred of Trump in that area, but the world had come down against hydroxychloroquine.

• 1:06:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 1:06:43Speaker 05

  And my doctors-

• 1:06:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  And why was that? Why was the, why, why did the world come down against-

• 1:06:48Speaker 05

  Oh, well, we know the answer now. We know the answer now.

• 1:06:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, let's lay that out just briefly, and then we'll return to the story.

• 1:06:54Speaker 05

  Right. So it was, first of all, in real time, it was bizarre, people coming out against it.

• 1:06:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:58Speaker 05

  It's 70 years approved by the FDA. It's completely benign across the world. It's over the counter. It's-

• 1:07:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, yeah, so those are the reasons.

• 1:07:04Speaker 05

  Well, it turns out in America, to release the vaccine on an EUA, an emergency use authorization schedule-

• 1:07:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:13Speaker 05

  The prerequisite is that there's no other treatment available.

• 1:07:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:19Speaker 05

  So if-

• 1:07:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  So that's the, that's the, that's the damning clause right there. If anything else worked, that had been pre-approved, you couldn't do it.

• 1:07:26Speaker 05

  By law, you would not able to release the size of the shots.

• 1:07:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  So what's the campaign, then, from the pharmaceutical companies? Like, what, what orders go out to make hydroxychloroquine verboten?

• 1:07:39Speaker 05

  Everything, so everything happened to hydroxychloroquine. So, so starting in the middle of March 2020, you were-

• 1:07:47Speaker 05

  I mean, it was like poison. You know, people were scared, people were rejected. Specific policies that I know you wouldn't know. CVS, the chain pharmaceuticals were instructing their pharmacists not to prescribe it. Like if a patient came in, the pharmacist would get a red box flashing on their screen to double, triple, quadruple check hydroxychloroquine safety. So pharmacists at the drugstore were being empowered to interfere with the practice of medicine, which in America is illegal. In America, pharmacists is only allowed to dispense and to clarify mistakes or dosage, some kind of error.

• 1:08:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 1:08:23Speaker 05

  So they can clarify. They're not, they're specifically by law not allowed to interfere with a doctor's decision. All day long, that's all they did. So if you found yourself a doctor who would prescribe it, the pharmacist blocked it. The hatred on hydroxychloroquine was huge. The World Health Organization was, came out, it was unbelievable. This is when I really learned how bad the science was. I'm sure you're familiar with the Lancet article that was retracted. Or maybe not, we have different worlds.

• 1:08:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Lay it out.

• 1:08:50Speaker 05

  So Lancet is one of the three most famous medical journals in the world. And so if you say you're published in the Lancet, that is just career.

• 1:08:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  JAMA and British Medical Journal.

• 1:08:58Speaker 05

  I would say, yeah, I would say, I would say those are the exact, or New England Journal of Medicine.

• 1:09:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:09:02Speaker 05

  And then maybe JAMA would be fourth. But it's like number one, number two in the world. You don't get published in JAMA by accident. It's utterly impossible. There's committees, there's layers.

• 1:09:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's very hard.

• 1:09:10Speaker 05

  It's very hard. I mean, I.

• 1:09:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  And it takes a long time.

• 1:09:13Speaker 05

  Years and you have to be, you've coming from a prestigious university and there's a team of people. And so I just want to be crystal clear, you cannot be published by accident in the Lancet. You, you have a team of researchers, you have a team of researchers who are approving it, you have an editorial board that's doing it, there's.

• 1:09:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  And those are career-making publications.

• 1:09:30Speaker 05

  Totally. You got published in the Lancet, you could then go off and be a professor, associate professor, et cetera. So this Lancet article comes out, saying that hydroxychloroquine was, you know, unsafe and ineffective for COVID. And the headlines from this Lancet study went all around the world. Everybody who was paying attention at the time read that study. And all of a sudden, it was considered poison and terrible and awful. But independent researchers looked at. The study and cried foul. It didn't make sense. The numbers of people they had in the study were in the tens of thousands. I think they said they had 60,000 or 70,000 people in the study. I'm not certain of the number. It crossed like five continents, hundreds of hospitals. And everyone's scratching their heads. They're like, how did we not hear about this study?

• 1:10:14Speaker 05

  And how did they compile data from all over these geographic locations in different languages and different countries? Like so rapidly and da da da. So the independent physicians who became America's frontline doctors raised their hands, published online. They said, this, this doesn't, this doesn't make sense. And they complained. And so the Lancet got a little embarrassed. The Lancet goes to the authors and they said, show us the data. Show us the proof. They could not prove it was authentic. They had no way to prove it. And the Lancet had to publish a retraction. I think it was only about three weeks. So kudos to the independent doctors who called foul. The Lancet had to retract it. I've never in my career seen that. Where the Lancet retracted. It never happens.

• 1:10:57Speaker 05

  Now, do you think that the headlines from its retraction made worldwide news? They did not. Let me tell you what happened from the original Lancet's study. The World Health Organization and studies all across the world on hydroxychloroquine's effectiveness in COVID were halted. They said, oh, you've got to stop doing it. It's very dangerous, ineffective. It was almost impossible to restart those studies again. It interfered. So, and, and the other thing is that the damage was done. The, the reputational damage to hydroxychloroquine was complete. Forevermore to this day, people think it's unsafe. And that, and that's, that was what it was. And I witnessed this in real time. I'm watching it.

• 1:11:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  So what's the effect on you?

• 1:11:32Speaker 05

  So, well, for, I was the, the most, just on a personal level, I couldn't believe that my peers, who were more than capable of learning all of this, I was no more sophisticated than they were, were not, they were not paying any attention and they simply followed the headline de jour. That's it. Oh, today, when the EE Way for hydroxy was authorized, oh, we can use it today. And again, I said to my peers, What changed today? And they'll literally quote Facebook or a press conference. And so I learned that doctors were not curious. And I didn't understand why patients are paying most doctors. Because you could get this stuff right off of Google, right off a committee hearing. And it was very demoralizing. The good part about the internet was I found many, many other independent doctors online.

• 1:12:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:15Speaker 05

  And we all came together. And we said, we've got to like, speak up about this. This is just terrible. We didn't know how, because we were very censored. Anybody who put anything about hydroxychloroquine. Like, if you had the word hydroxychloroquine in a tweet, you were taken out. So you'd find creative ways of writing. You'd write initials, like, people would get it. But you couldn't do it. But we, one by one, we found each other.

• 1:12:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Twitter, Facebook, same problem.

• 1:12:38Speaker 05

  A hundred percent. It was worse on Facebook than even Twitter. It was everywhere. But we all had like, a burning passion to say the truth. The independent doctors. So we found each other. And I would say, maybe there was a hundred that we found, just all over. Just people who just, like me, could not be silenced, couldn't stand it. And so I said, you know, we've got to speak to the American people. And I also know America is the world. And so I just started reaching out to people. And I started doing interviews. And started getting my reputation attacked. And then I decided, you know what? I'm going to do something that was just going to put doctors in front of the world. I said, let's stand in front of the Supreme Court. Because, actually, it was supposed to be the Capitol. But there was, couldn't, so we went in front of the Supreme Court. And I said, let me just bring YouTube influencers.

• 1:13:23Speaker 05

  That's what I called social media influencers. I said, let's bring some YouTube influencers and doctors. And we're just going to stand there.

• 1:13:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Who'd you bring? Who were the YouTube influencers?

• 1:13:31Speaker 05

  I randomly called people. So the biggest name was, actually, was Breitbart News, which wasn't an individual. And then I think everybody else was just random influencers who just showed up. You know, these are people who were upset.

• 1:13:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  But with Breitbart, you're going to get the right wing tag instantly, too.

• 1:13:47Speaker 05

  Right. But, you know, so we're just doing our thing. We doctors were giving education. We spoke for hours on the science. You know, it's 78% identical, and hydroxychloroquine is safe, and all these things, and policy. And then, we did that in a room. But then we walked over to the Supreme Court. And I remember the Breitbart guy videotaping it, looked at his peer, and he said, "We have 178,000 concurrent viewers." I have no idea what that means. And so I say to him, is that, is that good? Is that bad? Like, I have no, he's like... We've never had anything, even 10% of that. I'm like, whoa, that's interesting.

• 1:14:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  Your life's over.

• 1:14:23Speaker 05

  So I had no idea. We stand in front of the Supreme Court. I don't know if you ever saw it because it was taken down very quickly. But I said to the world, you need to stop living in fear. There's no reason to live in fear. There's early treatment available if you should want it. Masks don't stop respiratory viruses. And, you know, this is, this is gonna be fine. Like, let's not have lockdowns. We had about 12 doctors up there. Dr. Joseph Ladapo, a future surgeon general. We had pediatricians, we had internists, we had orthopedists. A bunch of us, white coats, all of that. I had no idea that was going to completely upend my life. We were just speaking truth. And that was July 27, 2020. And I didn't sleep, again, about 36 hours or 48 hours

• 1:15:08Speaker 05

  because the world, my world, just was lit on fire.

• 1:15:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  After that?

• 1:15:12Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:15:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, okay, so I'll walk us through that.

• 1:15:15Speaker 05

  I was a completely private citizen. I had perhaps 100 people on Twitter, friends and family. That's it. And one week later, I had 101,000 followers on Twitter. In one week. When they talk about overnight, it was literally overnight. Coincidentally, two days after the White Coat Summit, there happened, coincidentally, to be a big tech hearing in Congress. And Zuckerberg was in the hot seat. And Congressman asked Zuckerberg, "Why did you take down this video of doctors?" And he says something like, "Well, it's dangerous disinformation and looking out for people." And I remember being shocked. Zuckerberg knows my name and is talking about me. It was very surreal.

• 1:15:58Speaker 05

  And everybody asked me to be on media and I did a lot of TV shows. And I also got fired from my jobs. I was working-

• 1:16:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  Jobs.

• 1:16:07Speaker 05

  I was working two ER jobs. One was in this more conservative area. The other was, which I don't talk about so much, I was working for a Native American hospital. I would go down once a month for once a week and I would live on the native site.

• 1:16:22Speaker 05

  Work with the native population and I told you earlier on that that's kind of where my heart is, just to help people. They were very appreciative people and they both summarily fired me and

• 1:16:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  And what was the

• 1:16:32Speaker 05

  The reason, it was very clear. I got a text message from one, which I still have, which says, they loved me by the way, loved me. And they said, I appeared in an embarrassing video, so I couldn't work there anymore. That was the exact wording. I appeared in an embarrassing video. Wow. Well, I just, and so on a human level, as a psychologist, I had trained a long time to be, you know, well-paid and have a job that I enjoyed.

• 1:16:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  And you had a reputation, a good reputation.

• 1:17:02Speaker 05

  I had good reputation. I started being called a quack everywhere.

• 1:17:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:17:05Speaker 05

  Everyone called me a quack. I collected 87 pages of media that had attacked me. Huffington Post was the most clever, because what they did, they clearly had experienced

• 1:17:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  They still exist?

• 1:17:14Speaker 05

  They do. They still have

• 1:17:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Barely.

• 1:17:17Speaker 05

  Right. But they must have experience with defamation lawsuits, because what they wrote was, a group of people in white jackets claiming to be doctors.

• 1:17:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:17:26Speaker 05

  Right? Like death by like, right? I thought, oh, I can't really sue them, because that's true.

• 1:17:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, man, that's so psychopathic.

• 1:17:33Speaker 05

  We had ABC, we had CBS, we had CNN, everyone defamed me. They, everyone called me quack. Everyone, the other thing, everyone quoted each other. People didn't even look what I said. It was gone. It was off the internet. You couldn't even find it. So I

• 1:17:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. So people couldn't even refer to it. I wonder if Zuckerberg had been instructed specifically by the Biden White House to dispense with that?

• 1:17:52Speaker 05

  We know that now.

• 1:17:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, and?

• 1:17:54Speaker 05

  We do know that now.

• 1:17:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Was that a direct order?

• 1:17:56Speaker 05

  I don't have proof of that, but Fauci has been asked under oath about my organization. He said, I don't recall, which he said with everything. But later on, there was a lawsuit, Missouri versus Biden, and it came out that the Biden White House was censoring like crazy. But if you remember, this was during the Trump White House, when I was getting massively censored. So media was just defaming me. So, so in that time, but I, just on a human level, it's a very frightening thing to be fired and also to know

• 1:18:33Speaker 05

  That I would not really be employable again as an emergency physician, which is a very high-paying profession in America. But these hospitals weren't going to have me, other hospitals were not.

• 1:18:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:43Speaker 05

  And I will tell you, I was scared. Now, I was always frugal, so I had enough money to live on for a while. But that was my career as an emergency physician.

• 1:18:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, and your career and your reputation.

• 1:18:52Speaker 05

  And my reputation. I think in retrospect, I was very, very hurt by the reputational damage. But I was much too busy to focus on it. Everyone told me to bring defamation lawsuits. And I had a choice to make how I'm using my time. Like, I collected the data because it's evanescent, you know, it disappears.

• 1:19:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Defamation lawsuits, they're very difficult.

• 1:19:13Speaker 05

  Very difficult.

• 1:19:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  And they take forever.

• 1:19:14Speaker 05

  They take forever. So I, how am I going to spend my time? So I put it in a pile over here. But I was busy. The whole world was contacting me. So a week later, I had 101,000 people on Twitter. And, and I started getting so much support by the world that I realized, oh, people might want to hear what I have to say. So I, I just stepped into a new lane, a new role. But it was scary, like, especially in that week. I didn't know how I'd support myself. You know, you can't go to work as if...

• 1:19:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  So how did you end it? Okay, so talk to me about that transition, okay? So now you have 100,000 followers on Twitter.

• 1:19:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:19:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so, and you're, you observe in that mess an opportunity. So, so tell me how you negotiated your way forward? And how you put yourself back on, like, relatively stable financial footing, assuming that you did?

• 1:20:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:20:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Like, how did you? And how long did it take you to, to make the shift?

• 1:20:06Speaker 05

  Yes. So, uh, when I realized that I was fired, it was scary. I didn't know how I'd support myself. But I was very busy. The whole world descended on me. Everyone in the conservative side wanted to interview me. So I made a decision.

• 1:20:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Did you think you were a conservative at that point?

• 1:20:20Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:20:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, how would have you classified yourself politically?

• 1:20:24Speaker 05

  The irony is, I had taken, like, a year before, I had taken one of those little tests that show you where you are politically.

• 1:20:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Quadrants, yeah.

• 1:20:30Speaker 05

  I was dead center.

• 1:20:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Uh-huh, okay. So you're a centrist.

• 1:20:33Speaker 05

  I'm, I would say I'm a, um...

• 1:20:37Speaker 05

  I believe strongly in the Bill of Rights, which nowadays is being maligned as being right-wing. But the Bill of Rights, I believe, is really the center between anarchy and tyranny. And I'm probably slightly towards anarchy than tyranny. And that's where I would put myself, which is I believe in free speech. I believe in the ability to defend yourself. I believe in a minimal government. So these things are now considered very conservative.

• 1:20:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  And did you believe that at that point as well?

• 1:21:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, I did, yeah.

• 1:21:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:21:02Speaker 05

  If you asked me, I might have said libertarian. Not really fully understanding, but...

• 1:21:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, but you were.

• 1:21:07Speaker 05

  But I voted Democrat much of my career. I would have said I was pro-choice. I would have said, you know, my children had all their shots. I had shots. I didn't, you know, I thought the government was irresponsible a lot of the times, doing dumb policies.

• 1:21:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Mostly you were working as an emergency...

• 1:21:22Speaker 05

  Mostly I was just working.

• 1:21:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 1:21:24Speaker 05

  I was so... Am I conservative? I say the things that we now call conservative values were not solely conservative values in the past. I mean, now in America, being patriotic was considered conservative. Not wanting to kill babies, you know, like in the sixth month of pregnancy. That's considered a hardcore conservative value now. I don't process that.

• 1:21:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I was thinking back then. I know things have shifted so bizarrely now that there's no...

• 1:21:51Speaker 05

  I would have said I was kind of centrist.

• 1:21:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, okay, okay.

• 1:21:55Speaker 05

  Maybe a little right of center, maybe a little left of center.

• 1:21:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 1:21:58Speaker 05

  I always appreciated Dennis Prager. I liked what he had to say. But I was not particularly political. I voted.

• 1:22:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 1:22:07Speaker 05

  I didn't.

• 1:22:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so now you see an opportunity. Do you see an opportunity that quickly?

• 1:22:12Speaker 05

  Well, I had...

• 1:22:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Or is that desperation as well?

• 1:22:14Speaker 05

  No, no, no. No, I was almost like a crazy person. I was possessed by having to spread the truth. I mean, I was possessed, like, I couldn't, I can't stand lies. Lies are what led to my father's reality of the Holocaust.

• 1:22:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, that's for sure.

• 1:22:28Speaker 05

  I stand on truth. So I couldn't believe the doctors were lying, the media was lying, the government was lying.

• 1:22:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  The journals were lying.

• 1:22:36Speaker 05

  The journals were lying, the doctors were lying.

• 1:22:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's the worst, I think.

• 1:22:38Speaker 05

  It was so painful, that the journals were lying.

• 1:22:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, yeah, it's so bad.

• 1:22:41Speaker 05

  And then when you start looking, you're like, oh, a lot of other people do know. Like, the former New England Journal of Medicine author, Marcia Angel, I think, who wrote a whole book on the journals not telling the truth. And then I start discovering that a lot of people are not telling the truth. But in my personal life...

• 1:22:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  What's the book?

• 1:22:55Speaker 05

  I have to get it back to you on that.

• 1:22:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  What's her name?

• 1:22:57Speaker 05

  I think it's Marcia Angel. She wrote a book many years ago about how the journals are not telling the truth. And she was a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. So you'll be able to find it.

• 1:23:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, I gotta find that.

• 1:23:10Speaker 05

  And I had made a decision, though, at that time, to spread my message. And so I, in my mind, I said, I will speak to any large group that will have me. That was a decision.

• 1:23:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay.

• 1:23:22Speaker 05

  And about two weeks later, somebody called, many calls, I did as many as I could. Daystar called me, I don't know if you know them, but they are a Christian television network. And I said, am I free that day? Yeah, I am, I'll go, I'll go. And it turns out, they would fly me down there and put me up in the hotel. And I was like, wow, that's so nice. You know, I wasn't even used to that. And I show up and I discover it's a very big Christian organization. They would laugh if they heard me say this, but I'm Jewish, I didn't know, I never heard of them. But I had made a decision, I'll go to anybody who will have me if I can.

• 1:23:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, I'll talk to people who will listen.

• 1:23:59Speaker 05

  So I'm sitting there and I'm being interviewed by them. And in the middle of it, something like clicked. And the stars of Daystar, the lambs, turned into their camera. And Marcus Lamb said, we want you to donate to Dr. Gold. Something like, she said something very nice about me. And goes, and we are going to match every dollar that you donate. And I went like this. I mean, you could see on the air, I was like, I was like really stunned. And his wife, who's co-hosting, said, no, no, he doesn't do this for everybody. Look, I had no experience. I was like, huh. And then I went about my life. And I'm doing this, that, and that talk. And about a month later, I got a check for something like $179,000.

• 1:24:40Speaker 05

  And I remember thinking, first of all, I could exhale, probably people want to hear what I have to say. And probably I'll be able to keep saying it. So I didn't think past that.

• 1:24:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 1:24:51Speaker 05

  I knew I could eventually do something in life. Like, I wasn't worried about me, eventually. But I was worried I couldn't keep talking. And now I realize I could keep talking.

• 1:25:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  So why was that more important? You kind of alluded to it. You made some allusion to, well, your father's circumstance. And, you know, you said something that we bounced over very quickly. You know, you said that the catastrophe that enveloped the people around your father was a consequence of lying. See, that isn't something that everybody knows, right? Because people think, well, the really naive people think that if you see a dictatorship... You have a dictator and his henchmen, and they're oppressing a whole mass of freedom-loving people. And if you just take out the dictator, well, then democracy will bloom. What they don't understand is that...

• 1:25:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  What would you say? The dictator is just the biggest devil in hell. And in a really totalitarian state, every single person is lying about absolutely everything they say and do, all the time to themselves and everyone. And the totalitarian state is actually the grip of the lie. The dictator is just the... He's the face of the lie, that's all. But every time someone in that totalitarian state lies, they're participating in their own demise. Insolent and detailed out. I thought this was so remarkable that there were nowhere near enough committed communists to run the Gulags. The prisoners had to run them. Right, right. There's a totalitarian state for you.

• 1:26:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  It's a prison... It's a... It's an inmate-run prison. And the prison is lies. Right, so why did you know that?

• 1:26:31Speaker 05

  That is a great question.

• 1:26:35Speaker 05

  I couldn't... I found it more difficult to live with lies than anything else. Nothing else mattered.

• 1:26:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Why?

• 1:26:42Speaker 05

  But speaking the truth, I think living in lies sucks your soul, sucks your energy. You're depressed. You can't wake up. You don't have... You wake up, but you don't really want to get out of bed. There's no reason. There's nothing to do. For me, living in lies, I might as well be dead.

• 1:27:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  No, it's worse. It's worse than death. That's hell, eh? Hell is worse than death. Right, that's a hard thing to understand.

• 1:27:08Speaker 05

  I had to...

• 1:27:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  But I'm very curious about how... Why you knew this? It's very telling, because that makes your willingness to seek opportunity and your desire to be able to keep speaking, that explains why that's paramount. Now, the reason I'm making a case of that is because, well, I don't know how many physicians leapt to your side, but I've seen how many psychologists in Canada have leapt to mine, and it's basically zero. Right, zero is a very low number. And so, even though what has been done to me, although not particularly successfully, yet...

• 1:27:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  Could easily be done to psychologists and they're all being compelled to lie in Canada, as are the physicians, but people won't speak up. So now you did and you wanted to, and you put that before even your concern about what you were going to do economically after your jobs disappeared. Okay, so that's, that's weird, right? And I don't, you tied it a bit to what had happened to your father, but I don't understand how you knew this.

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• 1:29:38Speaker 05

  I, I, I just can't imagine why you would want to live in a perpetual lie. I can't even think of anything harder.

• 1:29:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Short-term gain.

• 1:29:51Speaker 05

  Well, I will tell, maybe this will help you as a psychologist. Once a psychologist, always a psychologist. I was never particularly interested in things that were faddish. So, for example, I didn't care about fashion, which is something girls usually care deeply about. Because I always knew it was just a form of peer pressure. Not saying it in even a negative way. I'm just saying I wasn't moved by it. It didn't, it didn't influence me. So, all of those things that made me different. Doctor, lawyer, Holocaust daughter, curious, not susceptible to the whims of fashion. It never, and I also wasn't a person who lived very grandly. So, would I be able to get by? I mean, my income was really good. My plans for myself, when this happened, the reason I was working two ER jobs was I was going to work really hard for two years. Then I was really going to back off.

• 1:30:36Speaker 05

  I was saving a lot of money. It's not like I'm immune to earning money. So, but all of that went by the wayside if I had to live in a lie. There's just no, it's not even a close call.

• 1:30:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right, no, I.

• 1:30:47Speaker 05

  And, and I do, it's probably somewhat of my nature, but the nurture element, you can teach as a parent how dangerous it is to live in lies. I mean, it's true, my background was Jewish. But people think, you know, Hitler just happened and it just, you know, just happened. No, no, no, no, no. There were a lot of lies to support.

• 1:31:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, like hundreds of thousands of them.

• 1:31:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, but I remember, one that I remember as a little girl is a lot of scientists were in, back in, in Germany, were measuring Jews' heads. And they determined they were different size and different shape than Aryan heads. And I remember saying to my dad, well, that's weird. Like, why didn't the scientists, they couldn't have found that? Because it's not true. And I remember thinking, that's so odd. I think I learned that when I was 10 years old. I'm like, well, that's so odd. Like, why didn't the scientists say anything? Were they just writing false numbers in their papers? Like, what were they doing? That they allowed them to conclude that the circumference of the head was different amongst Aryans and Jews. And I remember thinking, that's hell. You're right, it is hell, it's not death. It is hell to live in a world where you can't speak. You know, the First Amendment exists not just so you can hear what I have to say, but humans have a need to speak truth.

• 1:31:50Speaker 05

  They have that need inside of them. So, it's both.

• 1:31:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, if they're not, if they haven't corrupted their soul.

• 1:31:55Speaker 05

  Right, but a baby, growing up until you've, I mean, a North Korean child learns very quickly she can't speak. But if you grow up in relative freedom, like we did in Canada and America, you have, I think, an inborn human need to speak and be heard. And all of a sudden, nobody was speaking truth. I know you didn't know hydroxychloroquine is safe. But if somebody said to you, water isn't wet. You'd say, and that you had to say that. You'd be like, "I'm not saying that." I'm like, "That's what they said when they said hydroxychloroquine wasn't safe." They were telling me to say water's not wet. How am I supposed to say that? And wake up every day.

• 1:32:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  I felt the same way about Bill C-16 in Canada.

• 1:32:31Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:32:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  I have to call a woman a man.

• 1:32:34Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:32:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, maybe I would, just to be polite. But I have to? It's like, no, I don't think so. What do you mean, "have to"? Exactly.

• 1:32:42Speaker 05

  And then for me, mine was slightly different in the sense that mine was just like a specific fact that I knew.

• 1:32:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:48Speaker 05

  That maybe not everybody knew. But all the doctors knew hydroxychloroquine was safe until media told them otherwise. So let me, this nifty trick they did, they're safe and effective. So if the media and the journals had just said, "Oh, it's not effective."

• 1:33:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:33:05Speaker 05

  Maybe I would have fallen for it. I don't think so, but maybe. But when they started saying it wasn't safe, when we've had it for 70 years, when there's a government database on, called FAERS.

• 1:33:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:15Speaker 05

  The FDA Adverse Events Reporting System, which keeps track of all side effects of drugs. And hydroxychloroquine is much safer than Tylenol in that database. They started saying it's not safe. I knew this is a big lie. And I just knew that it's soul-crushing. I didn't want to live with a lie.

• 1:33:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, okay, okay. Okay, so now you turn, now you're developing a career as a public speaker. Now you have a bit of, you have some financial backing.

• 1:33:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:33:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  So you're a little more solid. What happens?

• 1:33:40Speaker 05

  So we, so we formed a formal nonprofit and people started flooding me. I couldn't keep up. I had to start hiring people, but I had not enough money to hire people. I was having tons of volunteers. And then...

• 1:33:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  And this is happening over what span of time?

• 1:33:56Speaker 05

  Oh my gosh.

• 1:33:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Months?

• 1:33:57Speaker 05

  I'm telling you, instantly.

• 1:33:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:59Speaker 05

  I spoke July 27th. I was fired. August, I spoke at Daystar. I'm saying by November, I had that foundational check of 170-something thousand dollars. I didn't, but I didn't really have enough money. I had like one person work for me, two people. And I had a bunch of volunteers. And then they started coming out with the shots. And I knew my lane. Kicking and screaming was dragged into my lane, which is my lane was to stop mandates. I didn't even care so much about the average person who wanted to take medicine or didn't want to take medicine, or even the average person that wanted to take the shots or didn't want to take the shots. I cared about everyone being lied to so they're making bad decisions. But I really cared about making sure mandates never became the law of the land,

• 1:34:42Speaker 05

  because mandates would have survived COVID. Mandates would have become, "Show me your passport, Jew."

• 1:34:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:48Speaker 05

  Hundred percent, which they kind of did in some nations. "Show me your vaccine passport." They did. And if I was, I would go to my death stopping passport, the social credit score system in America, or I will die trying. That was my mission. So I, and I say that because everyone wanted me to provide hydroxychloroquine to the world. I mean, we, we got thousands and thousands of emails to my nonprofit asking how they can get the medicine. So for two years, that was the question. So at that moment, around December or November 21, I had to decide, would I go and find a way to give medicines to people? Because I only have 24 hours in a day. Or would I work to prevent mandates from becoming the law?

• 1:35:33Speaker 05

  And it wasn't even a question for me. This was my lane. It wasn't the medicine and the science. Whatever how bad this was, this was temporary. This was permanent. Are we losing our constitutional freedoms? So I went down this road. And starting in 20, sorry, 21, I started bringing lawsuits against everybody who against mandates. And that was my mission.

• 1:35:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  Explain that.

• 1:35:54Speaker 05

  Yes, so we, we, you know, they started bringing out the shots for kids. And we sued to stop that.

• 1:35:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Sued who?

• 1:36:00Speaker 05

  That specific lawsuit was probably the CDC. I've brought so many, it's hard to recall. That was our very first one in May of 21.

• 1:36:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, and what possible justification?

• 1:36:09Speaker 05

  There was none. I'm still bitter.

• 1:36:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, well, one of the, like, part of the reason, I presume, that you were so terrified of the mandates, apart from the sociological effects that you described, is that enforced medical treatment, first of all, that violates the Geneva Convention in a major way, and for good reason. But it's worse than that. And, and we haven't seen this all play out yet. Like, typical people whose eyes are open no longer trust physicians or public health. That's a catastrophe. Because it means, to the degree that that was a viable enterprise, which was quite substantive for quite a long time, that's...

• 1:36:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  All that trust has to be reestablished, and I suspect it probably won't be. Because, and so, I have no idea what the consequences of that could be.

• 1:36:56Speaker 05

  I'm so glad you mentioned that. So, there's so much to say here. Public Health 101 says you don't inoculate in the middle of a respiratory pandemic. Public Health 101 never held that you inoculate everybody. It was always the high-risk group, and you let it kind of travel through the society, and the lower-risk group, like the kids, kind of spread it, and then grandma, maybe you inoculate grandma. Like, everything was thrown out the window. And so, the trust should be lost from the public health because they completely sold out the public.

• 1:37:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 1:37:24Speaker 05

  They completely sold out the public.

• 1:37:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, and we don't even know how bad yet.

• 1:37:26Speaker 05

  Oh, it's, I, I think trust in doctors went from 70 or 80% to 40%, and I think that that's completely appropriate. So, in May of '21, they start saying that they want to bring the shots out to the kids. Now, this is horrific. Why? Because kids were not dying from SARS. In fact, by the CDC's own numbers, children-

• 1:37:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, it still says in your Wikipedia page that you're spreading misinformation about the fact that children don't die from COVID. And yet, they don't. And that's very well-established.

• 1:37:55Speaker 05

  Very well-established.

• 1:37:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  What, it's as risky for a child as the typical cold, I presume. It's something, it's, it's, those are basically the numbers. And what, the average person who died from COVID had like five major comorbidities? And was older than the average age of death. Right, Jesus.

• 1:38:11Speaker 05

  Right, the average of four comorbidities, and it was like 77, age of death, longevity was like 76.

• 1:38:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:17Speaker 05

  It was criminal, and it was very criminal to do it to the kids. And we were-

• 1:38:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, that was in, that was inexcusable.

• 1:38:22Speaker 05

  Why are they doing it to the kids? So, that, there is a whole financial motive, which is if you put it on the vaccine schedule, there's a lot of money involved, et cetera. But we fought that very hard. And I'm pretty proud because we brought that lawsuit in May of '21, and we had been told that they were probably going to release it right around May or June. So, we worked really hard to get it out. And in fact, they didn't release the kids, the shots to the kids, until a few months later. So, I know we delayed it by a few months. Nonetheless, the moment they rolled it out, you asked why they did it. As soon as the shots were legally able to be given to kids, you then in America saw local jurisdictions that took the power from the parents and gave it to the kids. So if a kid wanted to get a shot, but the parents were awake and didn't want to get the shot, them to have the shot,

• 1:39:07Speaker 05

  the kid was able to get the shot themselves. I think the age was 14 in certain local jurisdictions. That became very clear that this was Marxism, which is to take away the parental rights and give them to the state. The state was subbing in for the parents. Now, that's never happened in America before. In America, you know, the parent has a shine.

• 1:39:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  So why would you leap to Marxism as an explanation for that? Because that's a big leap. I'm not disputing, but it's a very big leap.

• 1:39:31Speaker 05

  Well, fascism, maybe not. I think of Marxism and fascism as the same. I would say that that, I was influenced a little bit by my father, growing up in a communist nation. So in Russia.

• 1:39:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:39:41Speaker 05

  So in Russia, a child who went to school, they're 13 years old, might come home from school one day and tell their mom, "Oh, the dentist pulled two teeth today." In other words, the parent wasn't involved in the decision.

• 1:39:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, the kids there were invited to inform on their parents too. And it's part of classic Marxist doctrine that the familial structure should be decimated and that it's fine for, the Russians made heroes of children who informed on their parents.

• 1:40:04Speaker 05

  So how?

• 1:40:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  But, but, but to see that playing out in, in the United States and to attribute that.

• 1:40:12Speaker 05

  Well, I thought it was obvious. But you asked me how I thought, because, because it only took two weeks. So, so in other words, the CDC said you could give it to 14-year-old kids. And then two weeks later, San Francisco and I think Baltimore, but there was a few jurisdictions that allowed 14-year-olds to do it.

• 1:40:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:28Speaker 05

  And I was like, well, well, isn't that nifty? Parents are not, parents are expendable now.

• 1:40:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:32Speaker 05

  That's why I said it's Marxist, because you're separating parents.

• 1:40:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:35Speaker 05

  That was.

• 1:40:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, the ground had obviously been prepared for moves like that.

• 1:40:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:40:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:40Speaker 05

  So that, I felt that and, and then I kept, even though we couldn't stop the shots, I was very. Heck, hell, vent on stopping mandates. So we sued the Department of Defense. We sued UCLA. We sued on behalf of the COVID-recovered soldier, the COVID-recovered college kid. They were saying ludicrous things like natural immunity didn't work.

• 1:40:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:40:59Speaker 05

  So we had these like really robust arguments. That's when I learned that judges were really just also quite incurious. And judges were very afraid, I think, to even look at what we were writing. I know that because one of our best lawsuits.

• 1:41:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, they're not accustomed to having to adjudicate disputes between, like profound disputes between credible physicians, right? I mean, you can't expect judges to be able. You know what I mean? The judgments are going to stay intact as long as the physicians are basically playing a straight game. And all of a sudden now, everything's thrown up in the air. You can't even trust the damn journals.

• 1:41:35Speaker 05

  But from a status quo perspective, a judge's natural tendency is to keep the status quo.

• 1:41:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes, well, depends on the judge.

• 1:41:42Speaker 05

  Well, no, but I'm saying in general. Or in medicine, it's to be risk averse.

• 1:41:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:47Speaker 05

  Most doctors were telling.

• 1:41:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Do harm.

• 1:41:49Speaker 05

  And they were telling pregnant women, you know, don't take a bite of sushi. Don't have a smoke.

• 1:41:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:54Speaker 05

  Don't drink a glass of wine.

• 1:41:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 1:41:55Speaker 05

  But all of a sudden, roll up your sleeves and take the new stuff. I'd never seen that in my career. You didn't have doctors saying that. It was bizarre. I thought it was like, you know, invasion of the body snatchers. It made no sense. It was completely the opposite of how doctors usually acted. And then when we went to judges and we said, judges, look at these, we've got these world-class experts saying, whoa, halt. They were just not doing the job, in my opinion, and couldn't, said they couldn't decide, they couldn't figure it out. So they deferred to the executive branch agencies. This is all relevant to being a doctor and a lawyer. Because last summer, the Supreme Court has pulled away from the executive branch agency deferrals that judges acquiesced to. There was a very important case called Inloper Bright,

• 1:42:38Speaker 05

  where the Supreme Court reversed 40 or 50 years of judges just deferring to the executive branch agencies. Wasn't the NIH or the CDC, but other executive branch agencies. Judges had been given permission in their mind, oh, you know, the executive branch agency unelected bureaucrat said to do this, I'm just going to do that. Well, that's what we were coming up against in COVID. We were asking the judges in retrospect. Here's these world-class, amazing physicians saying, "Whoa, halt." But over here is the NIH and the CDC saying, "Give it."

• 1:43:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:10Speaker 05

  And the judges were just deferring to these agencies. Okay, but we have some hope in America because a few months ago, in June of '24, in low per bright enterprises, the Supreme Court held that judges were giving too much deference to executive branch agencies, and that's unconstitutional, and they have to adjudicate fairly. They can't just say the unelected bureaucrats are correct.

• 1:43:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  They can't pass the buck.

• 1:43:31Speaker 05

  They can't pass the buck. It's a very important legal decision.

• 1:43:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:43:33Speaker 05

  Does that make sense?

• 1:43:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  You think that will affect...

• 1:43:36Speaker 05

  I think it will change the landscape slowly going forward. I didn't understand that so much legally when I was bringing lawsuits in '21 and '22, that part of the reason judges were so reluctant to believe independent physicians is that the judges had been trained, lulled into thinking their job was to just go with what the executive branch agency said. That was ripped up this summer.

• 1:43:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that'd be convenient if it was possible.

• 1:44:00Speaker 05

  Exactly. But that's not our system. The judges are supposed to be independent. So that actually, it was called the Chevron doctrine, and it was thrown out. And thank God, it's been 50 years, and it's been thrown out. So going forward, bringing lawsuits, the judges can no longer hide behind, "The FDA said this," or, for example, "The EPA said that," right?

• 1:44:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  So that'll have effect there, too, environmental protection.

• 1:44:20Speaker 05

  Any agency, the judge has to adjudicate, looking at the evidence, not just give...

• 1:44:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that's well timed for the new administration.

• 1:44:28Speaker 05

  Undue deference. He said they were giving undue deference.

• 1:44:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so we're nearing the normal closing time, but I still want to talk to you about J6, so we'll go a little longer. And then I think, on the Daily Wire side, for all of you who are watching and listening, I think we'll talk about your vision, your opinion of the new administration and what's going to happen when Trump takes office, and what your hopes are and what should happen, what role you might play there, at least, I don't know how associated you are with the new people who are coming in. So we'll do that on the Daily Wire side, but I would like to... Well, there's still places we haven't gone, and I'd like to hear about January 6th as well. Because there's a huge story there that we haven't even delved into. So is it reasonable to leap to that?

• 1:45:11Speaker 05

  Pretty much.

• 1:45:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, let's do that then.

• 1:45:12Speaker 05

  Yeah. Okay. In the middle of all these lawsuits, I have this burning passion for two to three years just to keep speaking publicly. And one of those days of speaking publicly happened to be January 6th in Washington DC. My perspective was it was another speaking engagement. I spoke January 5th in Washington DC. I spoke January 3rd in Florida, January 10th in Florida. But the 5th and 6th, I was scheduled in Washington DC.

• 1:45:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  Where were you supposed to speak?

• 1:45:35Speaker 05

  January 5th, no problem, Freedom Plaza. January 6th, scheduled to speak on the east side of the Capitol with a permit. There you go.

• 1:45:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay.

• 1:45:43Speaker 05

  With a permit. People don't know that. So I was there to speak when I...

• 1:45:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Who, who were you speaking with or to?

• 1:45:49Speaker 05

  I don't know who organized it. I had a team at that point, and there were about 20 speakers, including incoming Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, another representative. There was, it was a pretty high-profile speaking opportunity. People were, of course, speaking about their concerns that the election was stolen. But my lane was to speak about medical freedom. I had a prepared medical freedom speech that I did the day before, no problem, Freedom Plaza. And I was intending to do the same thing on January 6th, the east side of the Capitol Building. It's called Section 8, and I had a permit. And when we speakers presented ourselves at the location, we were told by the organ, whoever was there, that we couldn't speak. Now...

• 1:46:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  That you couldn't speak?

• 1:46:31Speaker 05

  They wouldn't allow, there was a stage set up, but they weren't allowing anybody to speak. Everyone asks me why. I don't know, still don't know. I, I think because the crowds were so large. I, I don't know. If you have a large crowd, it seems to me, you ought to let people speak so there's a positive energy source for the crowd to pay attention to. But for whatever reason, they would not let the speakers speak. So I was there. On the Capitol, basically, ready to give a speech. So I said, "Well, I'm speaking." And so I scampered up to the top of the steps, and I started speaking. But I have zero microphones or anything. And of course, within a minute or two, I stopped because no one can hear me. There's a lot of people, and I'm standing at the top of the Capitol steps. And people are pouring in by the second, because Trump had finished speaking,

• 1:47:16Speaker 05

  and everyone was walking over. And I'm telling you, every minute had another thousand people showing up there. Because that was the time Trump had stopped. And so I'm just standing there, and I'm kind of smushed against the wall. And all of a sudden, the doors opened from the inside. And I was swept into the building. This is all on video. I can't imagine what they would say about me if there was no video. Because you can actually see on the video that I kind of tumble and I almost fall into the building, because there's a surge behind me. And I find myself in the Capitol. And it's hard to remember what life was like before J6. But we have a long history in our nation of political protests.

• 1:47:58Speaker 05

  Now, when conservatives landed in the Capitol, standing there, everywhere I was was very peaceful, completely peaceful. I find myself in the rotunda. It's beautiful. And I'm walking between the ropes. And I'm looking up here, because it turns out there was video everywhere. I didn't know. And you can see me walking peacefully in between the ropes, looking around, and I've got my speech in my hand. And I think to myself, it is a fine idea that I should give my speech. Because this is a political day, and let's give a speech. And there's a lot of people here. So I give my speech, and that is also seen on video. And it's kind of funny when I'm thinking back on it, but that was my mission. And then a little bit later, I give my speech again. And then an officer taps me on my shoulder and says, "I have to move along."

• 1:48:43Speaker 05

  And I'm startled, I look at him, and then I move along. And then I exit the building. And that was my sojourn into the Capitol on January 6, 2021. And I had no idea. What was being said about the day as an eyewitness on the east side of the Capitol, no violence, kumbaya, literally grandmas singing kumbaya, moms with strollers. And that's what it was. It was very large. It seemed more like the energy of a sporting event or a concert, large, and that was it. And then we leave and we got dinner and I didn't have any news on it.

• 1:49:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Did you think anything of it after that?

• 1:49:22Speaker 05

  No, so I didn't. And I was in DC another day and I'm always working and I'm just typing away and people are saying it's something and I'm like, no, no, it was nothing. And I'm just typing and I meet friends that night for dinner and the friends are very, very, very alarmed when I said we were, we were at the Capitol and, and, and they said, oh my God, it was an insurrection. It was an insurrection. I'm like, and I start laughing, like, what are you talking about? Like, I, I, I just thought, I was like, no, I was there. Like, no, no, what are you talking about? And they were very, very worried for me. And I'm sitting at dinner and I get a phone, a message on my phone and there's a picture of me on the FBI's most wanted list with my picture.

• 1:50:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, oh, that's a problem.

• 1:50:03Speaker 05

  And I look at it.

• 1:50:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Wow.

• 1:50:04Speaker 05

  And my first reaction was, well, this was photoshopped. This is like a joke.

• 1:50:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:50:10Speaker 05

  I mean, I just, I still can't believe it.

• 1:50:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, I, I appreciate.

• 1:50:14Speaker 05

  I'm on the FBI's most wanted list.

• 1:50:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, wow.

• 1:50:17Speaker 05

  And so they have a picture of me. Somebody handed me a megaphone and I was giving my speech and that was the picture of me on the FBI's most wanted list. And I was like, no, and I, and I just couldn't believe it. And then the next day I started getting a little bit worried. But I went off four days later and I give another speech in Florida. And I went back years later and I watched that speech and I never even mentioned January 6th, just to give you perspective that I, I didn't think. And then 12 days later, I'm in my apartment working and the most horrific, loudest, I can't do it justice, scream banging on the door, FBI, FBI, FBI. So loud that I immediately thought, well, that can't possibly be the FBI because this must be a Columbia cartel coming to murder me. Of course, this

• 1:51:02Speaker 05

  couldn't be the FBI. Like, I remember thinking, couldn't possibly be the FBI. Like, They would have called me, like, and they're screaming. And I'm looking and I'm looking at the person I'm working with. I'm like, is that real? And he says, no, no, that's not real. I mean, I just couldn't process it. About thirty, forty seconds go by and I stand up and I, and I turn to kind of come and they break the door down with a battering ram.

• 1:51:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  This is at your home?

• 1:51:28Speaker 05

  Yep, two bedroom apartment and battering ram, twenty guys in tactical gear, bulletproof vest and tactical gear, huge weapons pointed at me, the laser side beams, as close as I am to you. And I'm looking, I'm like, that's weird. And you asked me if I panicked and I remember thinking, oh. And I got really calm. And as soon as I realized that, oh, before that, he had said to me, um, turn around, turn around, turn around, turn around, turn around, like screaming. And I was disoriented and I took a step forward.

• 1:52:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:52:03Speaker 05

  And I thought later, oh, he definitely could have been justifiable homicide. I looked like I was, and then I saw the side beams, like, oh. And I got really calm and I was fine and, and I put this, and they are coming to arrest.

• 1:52:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  So the emergency room training came in handy then?

• 1:52:19Speaker 05

  Oh, and you know what else kicked in though about the ER? So they're, they're taking us off of handcuffs and shackles. It was crazy. And I said, I was very calm. I said, hey, you took my phone, you took computers, you took everything. Could I take some cash with me? Because at some point you're going to release me and I'm going to need a way home.

• 1:52:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:35Speaker 05

  Nope, can't do that. I'm like, okay. I say that not incidentally. So they whisk us off, we go to jail, perp walk in front of the neighbors.

• 1:52:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:52:44Speaker 05

  Shackles.

• 1:52:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, yeah. So that's the point of the theater.

• 1:52:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, the theater is, I think the whole thing was to intimidate and scare me and others.

• 1:52:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Did it work?

• 1:52:53Speaker 05

  You know, it backfires is what it does. Oh, at the time, yes, but now I, there's, I don't think there's anything I'm afraid of now. I mean, if you had said to me beforehand, would you be afraid of being in prison? Would you be afraid of being in isolation? What is worse? What is worse than that? And now I'm like, I don't like it, it's unpleasant, but okay. Like you can't scare me with it. Like you could probably still scare you with that. You can't scare me with that. Like, it's terrible, granted, but okay. So, no, it totally backfires on people like me. I mean, it's literally, it's a foolish move if you're trying to silence people like me. It's just backfires. Now, they don't know ahead of time who's strong and who's not strong, but. Handcuffed, shackled, walking right good in front of the neighbors. Doors, you know, broken. I happen to have had a gun in the house. They asked me where it was. I told them where it was.

• 1:53:38Speaker 05

  We get taken off, etc., all this stuff. I mentioned just two small things because they're trying to be as dehumanizing as possible. One is when I, when they released me, it goes, I go from being like this hardened criminal to being released in a matter of one minute, basically. The judge is like, you can be released. And then they shackles off and they literally kick me out on the street, downtown Los Angeles. I have no shoes because they didn't let me take shoes. And I said, how am I going to get home? And the officer says, you should have thought of that. And I just got so snippy. I said, you know, I am an ER doctor. I know exactly what it's like to show up somewhere unprepared. And I wasn't going to. And I wanted to bring money. You didn't let me. How am I going to get home? I had no way, I had no phone, no money. It was insane.

• 1:54:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  Wow.

• 1:54:20Speaker 05

  So I'm just sharing that they, it's done to break you. And the other thing that they did that was very effective, they took all of our computers and phones.

• 1:54:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:54:28Speaker 05

  And so my piece of advice for anyone listening is have backups and not to worry too much about what you're writing, assuming you're doing lawful activities. Just have lots of backups everywhere.

• 1:54:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. Okay, now you went to trial for this.

• 1:54:41Speaker 05

  So this is very funny. You will enjoy this story. So for, there's no right to speedy trial, even though that's in our constitution. They delayed, delayed, delayed until the government was ready to go. And then my judge couldn't have been faster. So I found out I had been charged.

• 1:54:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Where were you tried?

• 1:54:56Speaker 05

  All J6 defendants were being tried in the District of Columbia.

• 1:55:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55:00Speaker 05

  Nobody, that was intentional.

• 1:55:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Uh huh.

• 1:55:02Speaker 05

  And none of us are from the District of Columbia. And the District of Columbia voted 96% for Biden. And this was a political issue. So it's not, and it's a company town. The largest employer, I think 30% of people or 20 or 30% of people that live in DC work for the federal government. So by definition, it's a company town. Plus it's politically, it's a political trial. So not moving was really unfair to J6 defendants. So I had any intention of fighting and pleading not guilty until I saw the charges. So the charges included a bizarre 1512(c)(2) felony that's 20 It's bizarre. It's an accounting kind of firm. Remember the Enron scandal? The theory was that Arthur Andersen, their accounting firm,

• 1:55:47Speaker 05

  shredded documents. So to close that loophole is called closing the Arthur Andersen loophole. Somebody 20 years ago came up with this 1512(c)(2) statute, which is witness tampering and evidence shredding. That is what they charged me and hundreds of J6ers with. You might ask why? Because it's wholly irrelevant. Has nothing to do with us. Um, 20 years. That was why. This is how they got J6ers to take a plea.

• 1:56:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, I see. That was the biggest club they could wield.

• 1:56:14Speaker 05

  And I'm a lawyer too, and I'm looking at this. I said, what does this 1512 witness tampering and evidence shredding statute have to do with me? I was literally walking through crowds and gave a speech. I understood trespass. I understood parading. Then we could talk about selective prosecution. Like, why are you prosecuting me and not everybody from the Summer of Love?

• 1:56:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Conservatives don't get to protest. That's really the rule.

• 1:56:36Speaker 05

  But this was weird. This 20-year felony was weird. It had no relation at all to us. And I couldn't, it's 20-year penalty. So this is how they got virtually everybody to roll over. They were very, very eager for J6ers to just take a plea. So the narrative is, oh, we all pled guilty. It was just a terrible thing. So when I discovered it was a 20-year felony, I did take the plea. I couldn't afford a felony as a doctor and a lawyer. There was no way I could keep my light. I mean, as a practical matter, I would have lost my licenses. And I had an organization to run. I couldn't be put away for years. It was out of the question. And on a personal level, it's pretty scary. So for all of those reasons, I accepted the plea. And I plead to a misdemeanor trespass. Now, exactly how many misdemeanors do you find going to prison?

• 1:57:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:57:22Speaker 05

  Low number. That zero number that you like.

• 1:57:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:25Speaker 05

  No misdemeanors in America go to prison. So I was expecting, when I showed up at trial, to...

• 1:57:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and that would be an expected part of the plea too, right? That would have been your presumption.

• 1:57:36Speaker 05

  That, I mean, you have no, you go through the person's past. Does she have a violent past? Has she ever been convicted of anything? You know, is this a gang offense? Is there violence here? You know, does she have a way to employ herself? You know, there's a lot of risks that go into when you put someone into prison or not. Of course, I didn't think I was going to prison.

• 1:57:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:51Speaker 05

  Now, we don't have a ton of time, but I will share with you a very cute little story, which is that my judge was a fellow named the Honorable Christopher Cooper. Now, I didn't recognize the name. Except when I showed up in court... That was Casey. Casey was my classmate at Stanford Law School. Class of 147 of us. 147. Of course, we knew each other. We kind of lightly dated.

• 1:58:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Wow.

• 1:58:17Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:58:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Wow.

• 1:58:18Speaker 05

  And I thought that if anything, he would have been

• 1:58:25Speaker 05

  nicer to me. Like, certainly, we had nothing negative, really. But he should have recused himself.

• 1:58:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 1:58:31Speaker 05

  Because the standard for recusal is not just conflict. It's the appearance of impropriety. It's not the actual impropriety. It's the appearance of impropriety. I mention this little interesting aside because the District of Columbia judges, almost to a man, are so smug that they don't even think they're going to be overruled if you've been to school and dated a defendant. They're like, oh, no, that's no problem. And I am sad, as a lawyer, to know that's the standard.

• 1:59:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:00Speaker 05

  So the appearance of impropriety, which of course this is. And I bring it up because when I stood before him, I felt this heat of hatred and anger emanating from him. All the other hearings every month were on Zoom. But for sentencing, I had to show up in person. And there was so much hatred from him towards me that I will never know if it was personal or just his beliefs on J6. And he should never have been in that situation. That is why judges who have an appearance of impropriety are to recuse themselves.

• 1:59:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 1:59:30Speaker 05

  And I just want everyone to be cognizant of how the infrastructure fascism is kind of already there in America. No one's checking him. Anyone responsible would have said, you know, get off this case. It's crazy. There's other judges. You didn't. So that exists. Anyway, he sentences me to 60 days, which was insanely harsh. And then the Bureau of Prisons puts their thumb on the scale. And instead of sending me to a camp.

• 1:59:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:56Speaker 05

  Right? They send me to a maximum.

• 1:59:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Really?

• 1:59:58Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm, yeah. So you ask me.

• 2:00:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  So you got 60 days in prison for a misdemeanor?

• 2:00:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:00:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Despite your record?

• 2:00:05Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:00:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, everybody who's watching and listening should pay careful attention to that.

• 2:00:10Speaker 05

  It's uh...

• 2:00:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:11Speaker 05

  Wow. It's really scary.

• 2:00:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  So like, what was going on in your mind when you heard that? I mean, were you in a state of disbelief again?

• 2:00:20Speaker 05

  I was utterly, utterly shocked. It's one of the few times over the past four years that when I got outside, I started to cry. I couldn't believe it. I've... in my whole life.

• 2:00:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  What was the shock? Was it the sentence or the fact that this had happened? I mean, I'm obviously both.

• 2:00:38Speaker 05

  No, you have the greatest questions. Standing in a courtroom, and I heard them say the United States of America versus Simone Melissa Gold. This is my country. I'm an enemy of the country? Like, it was so awful that moment. But when he sentenced me to prison, it was like, I couldn't even process that. Again, I'm a person who's not prone to panic. It was such an overwhelming moment.

• 2:01:08Speaker 05

  It was such an overwhelming moment.

• 2:01:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  So you've talked about a couple of things that have happened to you that you couldn't believe.

• 2:01:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Has that left you with any post-traumatic stress disorder? Do you know? Because that derealization, you know, that sense of this can't possibly be happening, that's a good predictor of post-traumatic stress, right? Because that means you've been affected at a level that's so fundamental that it's easier to believe that things aren't real than to assume that what's happening is happening, right?

• 2:01:38Speaker 05

  Yes, I think so. It hasn't changed my actions, and it won't. But it is extremely traumatic.

• 2:01:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  Nightmares or anything like that?

• 2:01:48Speaker 05

  I did not. I don't. I think, I thank God, my upbringing, my personality, no. But I have become, I've become more cynical, suspicious.

• 2:02:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Realistic?

• 2:02:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, it's a tough one, right?

• 2:02:05Speaker 05

  To watch the judicial system do wrong.

• 2:02:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:08Speaker 05

  I watched the judge not recuse himself. I watched the prosecutors lie. Remember, I read all the evidence as a lawyer. I know the prosecutors lied.

• 2:02:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:15Speaker 05

  So I watched the doctors and the medical industrial complex collapse. I watched the legal system collapse. But in a paradoxical way, I think it energizes me. I think I know that there's a chance in America. I know that we're not living in China, North Korea.

• 2:02:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:02:32Speaker 05

  Right?

• 2:02:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, we'll turn to that on the Daily Wire side. So, one final question to close this off is like, how do you do in prison?

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• 2:03:41Speaker 05

  So my advice to anyone going to prison, which could be a lot of people going forward, a lot of people who might know, right? Is have a plan. That's the truth. So I said, if I'm in there for 60 days, what's my plan? Okay, I'm going to talk to every woman who will talk to me. I'm going to interview every single woman and get their backstories. And that was how I spent my time.

• 2:03:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so, well, tell me about that. How'd that work for you?

• 2:04:02Speaker 05

  First, they put me in isolation for eight days because that's normal. That was terrible.

• 2:04:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so what did isolation mean? Did that mean solitary?

• 2:04:09Speaker 05

  Isolation, solitary was a 6x10 cell

• 2:04:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:12Speaker 05

  with a sliver of a window

• 2:04:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:14Speaker 05

  and a sliver in the door where they passed you your food.

• 2:04:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, yeah. And why'd they do that?

• 2:04:18Speaker 05

  No explanation. As it turns out, that was how... I didn't get an explanation until after. That was what they did at this prison for women coming in for COVID. Now, this is... July or August of 22, there was no COVID at all. And I was in Miami, there was no COVID. So it was a pretext. So they put the women there because they didn't want to staff up and put women separate. I guess I understand a prison being slow and to get with the policy. But you could have had women in a separate wing if they were incoming women, right? And they're high risk. But that's what they did for the men. For the women, they just shoved us into isolation cells. It was insane, it was ludicrous. And I didn't know how long I'd be there.

• 2:05:02Speaker 05

  For all I knew, I'd be there all 60 days. It is the single worst thing you can do. Well, there's bad, worse things probably, but it's, it's bad.

• 2:05:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, solitary is bad enough so that you can punish the most antisocial people with it. Right? I mean, that's how social human beings are. It's that you can take the most antisocial people there are and punish them by isolating them. Right?

• 2:05:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:05:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right?

• 2:05:23Speaker 05

  So it was terrible.

• 2:05:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so let's just close this with an ending to the story. Although we're going to continue it on the Daily Wire side. When did you, when, did you serve the full 60 days? You did. They kept you in the full 60 days. Okay. When, when were you released?

• 2:05:39Speaker 05

  September 22.

• 2:05:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay. And in a relatively brief period of time, what have you been doing since then? And what are you planning to do?

• 2:05:50Speaker 05

  Right. So America's Frontline Doctors was never a COVID organization. We are medical civil liberties. So COVID mandates, you know, we were against the vaccine mandates, et cetera. But we put our eye and our attention and our expertise towards medical civil liberties issues.

• 2:06:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  So how big is the organization now?

• 2:06:06Speaker 05

  We have almost a million subscribers and we probably have about 2,000 doctors or allied health professionals. It's just a volunteer, it's free, it's a charity, it's a nonprofit. And the donations go really towards two things. They go towards us submitting amicus briefs on important medical civil liberties cases. You might know the USA versus Skermetti case that just went to the Supreme Court. So physician licensure.

• 2:06:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes, I know that case.

• 2:06:33Speaker 05

  There's the transgender is a big issue these days. And then also the other lane I speak up a lot on, America's Frontline Doctors, is on physician licensure. Making sure physicians are losing the license for First Amendment speech violations. So I fight that heavily and I fought the California Medical Board aggressively and I won. And that was an almost three-year battle. We just won at the appellate level. And there's a federal case pending that I expect we will win as well. This then becomes precedent for future physicians that hopefully the government won't be able to pull their licenses for speaking words that the government doesn't like.

• 2:07:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  How come you're not beaten down? Or are you? Like, you don't appear to be at all. Like, your demeanor is very positive. I don't really see any signs of anything like depression.

• 2:07:13Speaker 05

  No.

• 2:07:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, that's a lot, right? I mean, your life was thrown up in a variety of different ways. And then you were hit hard after that. Like, my experience with people who've been hurt is the best way to hurt someone is to hurt them. And then just when they're getting up, hurt them again. And then if you can do that twice, that often finishes people. But you're like, you seem to be cruising along quite...

• 2:07:40Speaker 05

  So, by the way, it's interesting you said that I was hit again. When I got out of prison, I was immediately hit with a board member who lied about me and defamed me and said that I stole money from my organization. So as soon as I was getting out, whack.

• 2:07:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:54Speaker 05

  There's something inside of me that refuses to give in and I am grateful that we still have a chance. If I lived in China or North Korea, I would have folded up shop.

• 2:08:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so your fundamental belief has remained intact, right? At the lowest or the most profound possible level. Right, great. Well, that's a good segue to the next part of this conversation, which will continue on the Daily Wire side because I'll talk to you about your, well, your future plans and your feelings about, your thoughts about this new administration and what you can see and why you remain hopeful in the face of, that's a lot, in the face of all of that, right? So for everybody watching and listening, join us on the Daily Wire side. And so, thank you very much for coming to Toronto and... Well, telling that story, which is quite the story. Is it rare? It's a lot less rare than it was 20 years ago, unfortunately. Right, right.

• 2:08:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  And, you know, maybe things will turn around and I guess we'll talk about that on the Daily Wire side. Very nice to talk. Thank you so much. Yeah, you bet. And to the film crew here in Toronto, thanks very much for arranging this. And to the Daily Wire for making this possible. Well, and to all of you watching and listening for your support. It's much appreciated, your time and attention. Yep. Ciao.

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