How smartphones are reshaping childhood and attention

0:00Informed dissent, the intersection of healthcare and politics with Dr. Jeff Markey, board-certified primary care physician, and Dr. Mark McDonald, board-certified child adolescent and adult psychiatrist. Mark, are you addicted to social media? Unfortunately, I have needed to physically distance myself from my phone at times because the alerts are too difficult to resist. Welcome to another episode of Informed dissent. I saw an interview you did. I think it was on OAN One American News. Oh, yeah, with Dan Bowle. Yeah. And amongst other things, you talked about the pervasive addiction to social media that nobody is actually talking about. That's right. They asked me why social media is problematic, what it does to adults and children, and what we can do to limit its pathologic influence.

1:00What's the longest you've been in recent past without a cell phone? When I was in the Middle East, I didn't have any coverage for some time. So I had to use my computer. What's some time? Probably a few weeks. And what was it like when you first got there and did you realize before you went over there that you wouldn't have cell phone coverage? I knew that because I knew that there was no service in that area unless you got a special local phone and I didn't want to deal with it. And when you got there, did you have withdrawal symptoms? I didn't mind losing the social media at all. In fact, that was actually a relief. That's like 80% of my notifications. But what bothered me was the inability to be able to communicate with people directly through text messaging. That was probably actually more difficult and also be able to communicate to people locally like taxi drivers and restaurants and so on because I couldn't make phone calls.

2:03So you had no cell service at all. You couldn't even use like WhatsApp or any of those. I think I was able to use Wi-Fi if I would go to stores and shops and connect. But I didn't have really any access when I was out and about unless I got back to my computer. And when you're on your computer, you're on Wi-Fi and then you can access messaging and various things. Yes. And if I wanted to, social media, but social media is not designed for laptops. It's designed to interrupt in your pocket. So it doesn't really function that well in a computer. Well, I don't have notifications on my social media. So it's not vibrating or beeping or making any sounds. I have to physically look at my phone to see if somebody commented on a post or if I want to look at a post, etc. Otherwise, it's too disruptive. For a bit, I had an Apple watch and the same thing. It was so annoying to feel a little vibration on my wrist. And then it was like that rat that keeps hitting the lever to get a piece of food.

3:03I just keep looking at my wrist and looking at my wrist and I feel the vibrations and it was driving me crazy. I couldn't wear the watch anymore. I think that's actually the bigger problem. It's not the availability of access to pushing things out. It's actually the reminders to consume the content that comes in. And that comes from notifications. So if you turn off the notifications, I think that actually the stimulus disappears because most people are content creators. Yeah. I mean, the desire to see what's going on on social media for me, I post a lot on social media that's part of what I do and to look and see who's commenting and trying to respond to comments. And all of that is can be overwhelming at times for sure. Most people are addicted to intermittent reinforcement. And that doesn't come from creating videos. It comes from being reminded to watch them, the ones that other people are making.

4:06That's actually something that you know, you hit on that's probably the most accessible and easy way to limit social media consumption is to just turn off the notifications. I think that probably solves most of the problem. Part of what you were talking about on OAN was parents blaming social media companies for their algorithms that encourages continued use and almost addiction to it. When although that's true and if I was a social media company, I would do the same, similar to the way retail stores advertise to get people into the stores, that's a whole idea. But at the end of the day, it's a parental problem, not necessarily a social media algorithm problem. And what's happened here in our country is the parents are no longer in control. Kids have way too much free time on their hands without adult supervision.

5:07And certainly without healthy adult supervision. And I mean, you've seen this. I can't tell you how many times I've gone out to a restaurant. And when there's a group of kids, none of them are talking to each other. They're all on their phones or an iPad. Or families that are at restaurants and the kids are on an iPad as a way to pacify and entertain the children as opposed to parents actually talking to the kids. And that's a horrible thing. And it's very unfortunate, but it's on parents and not to blame parents, but it's ultimately the parents fault. Contrast that, I went to Wisconsin a few weeks back. My daughter, son-in-law, granddaughter, lived there. My granddaughter is, I think she's 18, 19 months now. And my daughter and son-in-law have a no device policy. So she doesn't look at an iPad. She doesn't have a phone, obviously, at 19 months.

6:07The TV is not on. There's no teletubbies or Sesame Street or anything else on TV. The only time the TV is on is usually there's a sporting event or if there's the watch on Netflix series or something like that. But they don't allow Claire to have devices or access to TVs. So they have to play with her. They interact with her. We read her books and do all kinds of things that aren't electronic. And I think they go a little bit overboard, but I think ultimately it's a healthier existence, especially at such an earlier age. Oh, I would completely agree the development of a child is contingent on the frequency and depth of immediate, poly-sensory experience, touching, hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, in three dimensions. You don't get that when you're looking at something that is actively stealing your attention

7:10for what's essentially an infinite amount of time. You could attend to a bird eating seeds outside your window as long as the bird was there and then it would fly away. But if you had an app on your phone that just showed birds picking at seeds, it would go forever and you'd never pull your attention away. And if you stop looking at it, then it would show a bigger bird or a cat eating the bird in order to pull your attention back. It's designed to keep your attention. That's the difference between these algorithm stimuli and what actually happens in nature. And parents are driven by their own reinforcement of laziness to give these devices to kids because it makes their jobs easier in the short run, a lot easier. That's the problem. It feeds into human nature being complacent and wanting to offload responsibilities to a third party.

8:12What are the consequences that you see as a psychiatrist and you're boarded in both adult and childhood psychiatry for a child that's raised during the formative years, especially early on, with devices and screens and distractions and not human interaction? Well, it's much worse than just inattention and distractability, which everybody complains about now. It also leads to autism. It leads to an inability to feel comfortable and engage appropriately in social interactions with your peers and with adults. It leads to a neurotic fixation on chasing stimuli rather than being able to entertain yourself by being creative and exploring and building. So it kills curiosity.

9:12And it also, due to all of the stress responses that come through the brain by watching all this stuff, it also affects hormone levels. So it has effects on the body. It's a stress response. Most of the social media consumption is driven by excitement. And often it's fear. And if you're driven by excitement and fear all the time, your body is in a constant state of alertness and hypervigilance, which doesn't happen when you're just sitting and watching the sun go down. So birds fly and eat in nature or birds flying and eating in nature. You said something interesting. I've never thought about this before. I said, what are the consequences? One of the consequences you listed is it could lead to autism. It's interesting. We talk a lot in the holistic health world. Vaccine laws changed in the 1980s and suddenly there was an onslaught of all these vaccines. Now kids get up to 70 shots in order to make it through high school.

10:13And surely there is a relationship between vaccines and the chemicals that are in them and chronic health problems, including autism. But something else happened in parallel during that same time frame. And that was the advent of cell phones and technology and screens and television and Netflix and all of the above that not only kids but adults were now becoming focused on. And I wonder if that's played a role too. Now all of a sudden our kids are spending more hours watching screens than they are reading a book and mix that maybe with some toxic chemicals and it's a perfect recipe, a perfect toxic soup for autistic behavior. You'd have to control for the presence or absence of vaccines within within the group. I suspect that parents of kids who don't push vaccines on them are probably also less

11:17likely to push iPads and cell phones. Yes. So you need a group that is screen free with vaccines and screen free without vaccines and then compare them. I don't think that exists. People often compare to vaccine free communities like the Amish for example. I'll bet there's not a lot of TVs in Amish homes to really compare to. They don't even have electricity or a lot of them on our conveniences and that's the beauty of the Amish for better or for worse is they are connected with nature and each other and distance from the technology world that we all otherwise live in. I don't know of any communities that have a mixed bag like that or unlike that, unlike the Amish. Most groups of people tend to pull multiple healthy life practices together. It's rare to have a person who buys into a lot of the unhealthy nonsense and then excludes

12:23one particular unhealthy thing. If you have three or four major unhealthy life practices that are pretty much accepted and known to be bad, you're not going to consciously choose to include one and maintain it when you know that it's unhealthy when you excluded all the others. So I don't know how you get to that kind of a group. Yeah, I don't think they exist, but I think the premise that the escalating screen time and attention to technology is detrimental. Now, does it actually cause autism? I don't know. But clearly it creates all kinds of other social bonding, interaction problems that we've never ever seen before. I mean, kids no longer know how to write, no longer had a speak. He talked with teenager and every other word out of their mouth is like this, like that.

13:30Even that young country singer that we interviewed, I think she was 15, 16, I don't even know what her name was, super sweet girl. Even her vocabulary, she used the word like a lot. And I almost want to go into schools and start coaching kids about how to speak properly and how not to sound like they're an idiot and many of them sound like that. And you've traveled a lot more than I have. And I have a feeling if you were to talk to teenagers in, I don't know, almost any other country, but here they would be much further along in their speech and writing and ability to communicate than what our teenagers are here in America. Something that I always enjoy about talking to young people who have learned English as a second language and learned it properly in school is that even though they may make

14:31grammatical mistakes, they don't have the affectations, the annoying, irritating affectations that American born children and teenagers have, for example, they don't use the word like. Yeah, I can't stand that talking to a teenager and every other word is like, like, you know, like this, like that, you know, like, you know what I mean, you know what I mean? Like, like, it drives me crazy. There's filler words that are used from, I believe a, an immersion in poor quality English that you don't see with people who are learning English academically. Yeah, absolutely. When you're talking to people that are learning English as a second language, they simplify their communication.

15:32And it's as if, you know, me trying to talk to somebody in Spanish, I don't really know Spanish that well, basic Spanish, some medical Spanish, but I just use really simple words to communicate because I don't have a huge vocabulary. So similarly, when you talk to kids that are learning English, they communicate in a similar way. It's actually kind of refreshing to, kind of refreshing to hear. What at what age do you think a kid should be given a cell phone? I don't think a kid should be given a cell phone at all. At what age should anybody be given a cell phone? Well, nobody should be given a cell phone after age 18 because that would be like an Obama phone and we know where that went. But you should have the legal right to purchase a cell phone at the end of the year. No, I mean as a parent. What restrictions, limitations on cell phones would you suggest? No cell phones. That's all. Zero. Just cell phones. Yeah. No. But there's no reason why a child should be carrying a computer in his pocket that has access

16:32to the internet. I think that the negatives outweigh the positives. And in fact, if I were powerful enough and had magic, magic potions or spells to cast, I would eliminate the smartphone from existence. I think that the smartphone has done more damage than it has helped us since its introduction. Now, I can't do that and you can't remove something from the market unless it, well, I was going to say unless it causes harm but that's not really true because a lot of things cause harm that are removed from the market. But it's not feasible to remove the cell phone. But were we not to have the cell phone? I think we would actually have a much higher quality of life. Yeah, you know, it said that our generation, yours and mine are the last generation that

17:33will know what it was like to grow up without a cell phone. When I was a little kid, my dad who was a physician was one of the first people to have a mobile phone in his car. And I remember it was analog so the sound wasn't very good, the reception wasn't very good. And he would need to call a mobile operator and then that mobile operator would place the call for him. That was the beginning of the cell phones, mobile phones and cars. And then it evolved from there and eventually got digital. And then when I was in medical school and then into residency, that's when people were starting to get cell phones. And the first cell phones looked like a giant motorola shoe phone, of course I had one. And then they evolved and eventually got smaller and smaller into flip phones and then eventually into computers that we all carry around. But this generation, people that are born today, teenagers, whatever we call them, I don't even know what we call them anymore, millennials or whatever the younger generation is called,

18:34they don't know what it was like to not have a cell phone. I remember a buddy of mine, John and I, I'm still really good friends with. We traveled to Europe between high school and college and there were no cell phones at the time. And I remember periodically we would want to call home and let our parents know that we were okay and they were actually phone booths or we'd have to make a call from a hotel that we were staying at. We didn't have cell phones to navigate around Europe. We'd have maps, ask directions and have to navigate like the old Thomas guides. And I remember before you would go somewhere, you'd sit down with your Thomas guide and start thumbing through it and you'd take out like a pencil or a highlighter pen and you'd mark the streets of where you'd want to go and then you'd hop in your car and you'd have a Thomas guide to guide you somewhere if you didn't know otherwise how to go. And now, I mean, I'm guilty as anybody, I don't really have a great sense of direction. I can barely get home from wherever it is I went unless I had GPS.

19:39And I think people are now dependent on this technology to a point that I don't think they know how to live without it. I think it would be, it'd be shock, be pure shock. If suddenly the grid went down, we had no cell phones, GPS in our cars didn't work. There'd be, there'd be pandemonium, it's like think about it. And do you know how to get home from work if you didn't have GPS like how would you go? What side streets would you go on? Would you actually know how to go from point A to point B? You know, if you live far away, many, many people wouldn't. So it's yeah, it's times are definitely changing for sure. You'd have to rely on interacting with your environment and that includes people. And that's essentially what's been lost, isn't it? We're not interacting with our environment and we're not interacting with people anymore. That's the fundamental problem of the cell phone putting aside all of the addictive social

20:40media issues and the autism. I think that restricting your interactions in the world to essentially a phone removes the ability to learn, to grow, to build communication, skills, to build survival skills, to acquire real knowledge, not just what's been pushed at you in the phone. It creates a posity of human experience. My boy Ty Kickboxing coach today said he went to lab quest yesterday to get labs drawn for him and his eight year old daughter and he didn't have an appointment. He'll never go back again without an appointment. He thought he could just show up put his name on a list like we used to do 10 or 12 years ago and they would just call it out from the list. Yeah. Johnson Smith, table for two.

21:41Well, he walked into the lab to the waiting room and he said, and do you know what I saw? I think to myself, yeah, I know exactly what you saw. I saw nothing there but a kiosk and a window with a lock on it where there used to be a receptionist, closed off and a bunch of chairs and not a single human there. And I looked around and there was this wall with instructions that said, scan your driver's license, take a photo of your face, do it for you and your, in this case, daughter and then press a bunch of buttons to indicate what you want and then we'll just, we'll just come out when there's a slot with no time availability, no, no nothing. And meanwhile, every 30 or 40 minutes, one person would walk in and sit down for two minutes, scan a driver's license, go in, get labs drawn and then leave. No one else was there sitting. No one was talking. There was no receptionist. There was no nurse. There was nothing. Just a locked door and a locked window on the inside of the waiting room. He said, and you know, I waited there for four hours. After one hour, after two hours, they called out Sarah, Sarah, Sarah wasn't there.

22:42So the door was cracked open and I, I pushed my head inside the door to the secret back area that I don't have access to and I said, hey, can I just take Sarah's slot? No, sir, you can't do that. Well, how long is it going to be? Oh, probably another two to four hours. Why do I have to wait? My daughter's here. Can I go back? Can I, he went on and on and on with the story? And he said, this is inhumane. He's from Brazil. He said, this is inhumane. For me and for my daughter, this is scary to not have human beings involved in the process of going to an office to see a clinician, to be in front of just a locked door and a locked window, not even people to talk to in the waiting room. He said it was very, very scary and disconcerting and he's never going to do it again unless he has an appointment, which you can't make once you're there. You can only make it in advance before you show up. This is just one example of this is the stuff that started in 2020 that we're all subject to. Same thing with food pickup, same thing with home delivery. Our whole lives are being dictated by non-human interactions, but we're not actually learning

23:47about how to solve problems. The guy at door dash doesn't even ring the doorbell. You just get an alert that your food is waiting outside your door. You go to restaurants now and they ask for your cell phone number and they'll text you when your table is ready. It's like we have created the DMV in society. It's just like the DMV. Yeah, it's unfortunate. And I'm hoping that companies and organizations, service organizations or otherwise thrive that throw out that model and go back to a high-touch customer service model. We need people. If you're waiting for a table at a restaurant and you're around 10 or 20 or 30 other people in the lobby, you're going to start talking. Yeah. You're going to start meeting people. You're going to carry conversations. Is this your first time here? Yeah, I hear you come here every Thursday. What do you like about it? It's our first time. Oh, have an anniversary. That's great. Wow, how long have you been married? Suddenly you have conversations. What happens when you put in your cell phone number?

24:50Do you stand around there at the desk and you leave? You leave. What do you do? You probably go back and sit in your car and check your social media until it beeps within a word. Right. I remember a day where you'd be driving somewhere and you'd get lost and you know what you do? You'd pull over and you'd be pulling to a gas station and you'd go, I'm lost. I'm trying to get so and so and the gas station attendant would grab a map with you and show you where to go or you try to discover it together, you go, hey, thank you. And the guy a couple bucks by some gum or whatever and then you'd leave. We don't do that anymore. We got chat GPT and Google and online GPS and we don't need people anymore and that's a problem. It's a huge problem. The moment that people don't need people and all we need is electronics devices and robots which by the way, my coach said that Tesla is now manufacturing a domestic robot that will wash clothes and cook dinner and do dishes and once that happens we won't even need

25:51wives anymore. Perfect. Well, listen, we got to take a quick break when we come back and want to talk to you about a couple articles you wrote. One is on the recent state of the union and the other is an article that I think is accurate and is a bit provocative and it's called intelligence, mutes, happiness. We'll be back in just a second. Let's get real. Let's get loud. An America loud talk news. Yes, this is Dr. Peter McCullough and I'm personally inviting you to join me in Nashville on July 2nd, 3rd and 4th for Historic Experience in 2026. America loud news, 250 slash 10 Nashville, along with Clear and the Wellness Company we're celebrating two big milestones, 250 years of America and 10 years of America loud news. I'm calling all Patriots to this historic weekend with inspiring entertainment, incredible fireworks and nationally recognized speakers who proudly stand for freedom.

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29:00Most energy bars are based on chocolate or fruit and are held together with serps or sweeteners. To learn more, just visit bearbar.com slash out loud. All right, we are back in form descent with Dr. Mark McDonald and I am Dr. Jeff Barkey. Thanks for listening, by the way. Leave us some comments and all hate mail to Dr. Mark McDonald. I don't have any more room in my inbox. Don't you hate people that when you call their cell phone and you get voicemail? It says, I'm sorry, this voicemail is full and cannot accept more messages. I hate that and then I'm not sure which one I hate more or I'm sorry, you cannot leave a voicemail. Their voicemail system has not been set up yet or they don't actually have a message and it's just a generic robot voice that says you have reached 213-654-542-1, beep. How hard is it to just record your stupid message on your phone so at least that you know you got the right person? That's grounds for capital punishment.

30:03He wrote an article recently and the title of it is intelligence, mutes, happiness, subtitle. Is it true that the stupid are happier? What say you, Dr. McDonald? The... I think the stupid are always happier because they don't know any better. Once you learn something or once you start to think, you start to see all the problems and you want to solve them and you can't solve them. So you just get frustrated and it leads to neurosis. I think people who are not intelligent are more easily content with what they see in the immediate environment and I think that they don't dig deeper and so it's much, much simpler and more efficient to be self-contented when you don't have to look into all of the

31:08ambiguities and the paradoxes and the second and third and fourth levels. It's like Tom Sol said, you probably heard him repeat this, certainly when Larry Elder was interviewing him, he repeated this off and he called it first level thinking. Yeah. It's like, let's put the minimum wage out and that's going to raise salaries. Absolutely, say the stupid. That sounds like a great idea and then you go off and you get your $19 per hour dishwashing job at Burger King and you think everything is great. But if you're a second level thinker, you ask additional questions, well, if we can't pay people less than $19 an hour, then that basically means anybody that doesn't have a skill set that's worth $19 an hour is going to be unemployed and perpetuity. Isn't that going to keep blacks out of work? Isn't that going to keep underage adults out of work? Isn't that going to keep new immigrants without English skills out of work? Oh, I didn't think about that and then it starts to get frustrating to you and you're

32:10not as happy as you are when you just think, well, let's just pay everybody a lot of money and it's not going to cause any second or tertiary effects. That's just one example. You can't be intelligent and happy. I think the more intelligence you are, the more cursed you are to live a life of dyspondency and dissatisfaction. I know some pretty intelligent people and I think they're happy. They're probably using drugs or drinking a lot, exactly, they're self-medicating. The first way intelligence undermines happiness is by pulling a person out of the present moment. The more intelligence you are, the more activity is going on in your brain, the more easily bored you are, the more you get distracted. People who are stupid tend to be much more highly focused because they're using all of their brain on one task. It's hard to use all of your brain on one task if you're intelligent.

33:11You need to be focusing on multiple tasks at once and when you do that, then you're not present. The more intelligence you are, the more you have to actually practice presence and meditation. When you're stupid, it just happens naturally. Right, but practicing being present is a good skill. It's a helpful skill. It's a healthy skill. Of course, but how many people do that? Smart people generally don't do that because they're too busy doing other things. Smart people may also be self-aware that they're not happy and they want to seek happiness. As you know, Prager wrote a book about this, Happiness is a serious problem, and he has a whole bunch of anecdotes to or solutions, rather, to be happy in one of them, of course, his gratitude and being present and of a variety of other things. I haven't looked at his book in a while. That requires the person, though, to be really acting against their nature. I don't think most people like to do that. I think people follow what their reinforcements are.

34:13So the more intelligent you are, the harder it is, you're not saying it's not possible, but the higher the hurdle it is to attain a level of happiness, because now you need to be very self-aware of what you're doing, and you need to, with intention, do things to create that level of presence and ultimately happiness and satisfaction. Yes. It's similar to why most of the fat people in the U.S. live in the Midwest. Everywhere you go, friedly people live in the Midwest. Well, they become fat when they live there, because they're all eating really, really unhealthy food, and they're watching sports on TV and in bars and drinking a lot. That's because their environment reinforces obesity. There's very little activity for seasons out of the year in the Midwest. There's also a lot of really unhealthy food that's sold in restaurants and fast food places.

35:15There isn't a lot of education or information that comes through locally to encourage people to eat better. So are there pockets? Of course, there's pockets of healthy people, but obesity is an enormous problem in that part of the country, because it requires much more effort to not be fat in the Midwest than it does in, let's say, California. There's a lot of fat people in California. Well, most of them moved here from the Midwest. You go to the mall on any Sunday, you could pull up a beach chair and just people watch, unhealthy people walk by all day long. The percentage of obesity, though, is significantly higher in the middle part of the country than it is in California. If you're from Kansas, send hate mail directly to Dr. Mark McDonald. The second burden is compulsive need to understand. The second burden to being happy if you are intelligent is the compulsive need to understand. And stupid people don't generally care to understand things that are complex because

36:18they recognize that it's outside of their capabilities. So they just don't bother looking for resolutions to complex issues. They just shrug their shoulders and say, well, leave that up to God. It's outside of my area of responsibility. The people who are smart, they're constantly preoccupied with trying to understand what is not clearly provable or contains a lot of discrepancies. This is, of course, general. There are some smart people who are indolent and don't care. But generally, if your brain is active, you're looking, you're squaring, you're searching for things that are incongruent. And so you're very preoccupied with trying to understand what's around you. And I don't think that stupid people really, I don't think they make that a priority. If you're an intelligent person, can you become stupid?

37:22Well, most of the smart people became stupid in 2020 because they started to push masks and vaccines. And that was pretty stupid. That's true. They became stupid, huh? Yeah. Well, they either became stupid. They either became stupid or they weren't actually as smart as we thought they were. So they could have just been posing as being intelligent. Yes. They were intelligent posers. They were actually stupid to COVID to reveal the underbelly of their stupidness. The third affliction is the inability to be satisfied if you're intelligent. I think that's one of the biggest problems. People are stupid or much more easily contented, easily pleased, easily satisfied because they don't have aspirations that require a lot of challenge. People who are smart are often discontented until they achieve a higher goal or bypass

38:23another challenge. And so pushing yourself constantly to achieve more and to solve greater problems means are going to be certainly much more disappointed most of the time. Sure. So you could create this article and rewrite it. You should a recipe to be a recipe for happiness if you're an intelligent person. And one is practicing living in the present. The second is being satisfied with not being able to fully understand everything. The third could be learning to be satisfied with what you have. And there's your three-part solution to try to be a happier person if you're intelligent. That sounds like the front page of the health and wellness section of the Epic Times paper.

39:24There you go. You should write for them. Everyone I know seems to be writing for them. I don't know why they haven't asked me. Yeah, there you go. Robert Malone, Joel Salaton, the brownstone founder with the bow tie, what's his name? We interviewed him, right? We interviewed him on our podcast about a year and a half ago. I'm not smart enough. That's why I'm happy to remember his name. But he's a very good writer, Mark Boundstein. There's probably six people that I know personally who are now on staff at Epic Times writing articles every week. It's a good paper. I've heard people complain on social media how the media is lying to us and people are angry, whether it's at Fox or CNN, not telling us the truth and so forth. The reality is just stop watching.

40:25That's actually the easiest solution. I haven't owned a television since 2007 and that was an enormous protection for me until the iPhone came out and then you just get pushed junk all day long in your phone. But I didn't have to worry about junk content for quite a while. And now it all goes through apps and social media dictums. But you can certainly reduce a lot of the nonsense that you get fed by not watching television. You know, everywhere I go now, you can go to a doctor's office or a dentist's office and they've got CNN on the flat screen constantly everywhere you go. You can't go to a restaurant without flat screen TVs. People are just fixated to these screens. And it's always junk. It's not national geographic learning about migratory bird patterns. It's some idiot in a suit with a chiron running underneath it screaming about Donald Trump

41:28and how he's a fascist for protecting the United States against fundamental Islam. We have a TV in the office, but we have just pictures on, it'll be a sunset scene or a beach scene or just a beautiful scenery of flowers and water and waterfalls and so forth. We never have news or shows streaming. And I don't really watch a lot of TV anymore, certainly not news. I'll watch some sporting events. There's some Netflix series that I enjoy that I'll binge watch and so forth. But it's not just the constant backdrop of Fox News CNN or any other show on. I just, I don't enjoy it anymore. I don't know what to believe anymore. I don't need to be up to date on whatever political nonsense is going on. I'll watch a few things that I think are worth watching like the annual state of the union.

42:29I thought that's interesting. And by the way, whatever political party is in power, I think it's both entertaining and informative and sort of a encapsulation of whatever is going on in our political world. And speaking of the state of the union, you wrote an article actually, a really good article about this recently, the title is State of the Union Address. And if you're interested, and I would encourage you, Mark's a really good writer. He's often very edgy and controversial. He loves to provoke, but many of his pieces are worth your reading. And he writes under the website of dissident, D-I-S-S-I-D-E-N-T, dissident, M-D, to subscription based model, kind of like Substack, but he has his own thing going. And it's worth a few bucks to read what he has to write. So your article recently, State of the Union Address, the horror subtitled Democrats once

43:33again reveal themselves as the heart of darkness. What did you mean by that? Well, I'm referring to the novel Heart of Darkness by Conrad that was written 100 plus years ago, which was turned into a movie called Apocalypse Now that starred the now deceased. What's his name? The Godfather. Marlon Brando. Yes. Who played General Kurtz. And it involves a rescue mission, which was actually an assassination of a patrol boat going up a river. I forgot if it was in the Amazon or somewhere in Africa to take out. It was Vietnam, wasn't it? Was it in Vietnam? Okay, it was in Vietnam. The original book took place, I think, in the United States. But this was up in Vietnam. And the guy went rogue. General Kurtz or Colonel Kurtz went rogue.

44:34And there was an assassin that was sent up to shoot him. And as the writer of the boat captain went further and further up the river, he realized he was getting into a much darker and darker part of the human psyche because things just became almost irrational and very ugly. Who became confused about his mission? I'm supposed to take this guy out because he went rogue. But maybe this guy is not so crazy after all. And at the end of the movie, right before he shoots Marlon Brando and assassinates him at the end of the river in the heart of darkness, essentially, Marlon Brando says to him the horror, the horror, because what he had seen is what made him see things so darkly. And I use that as a metaphor because what was revealed by the Democrats in their reaction to the State of the Union, both those that were sitting in the chamber and also by those

45:37who were talking about it later, is that there is universally a heart of darkness within the Democrat Party and all those who speak on their behalf and those who support them share that heart of darkness. It's ugly, it's full of hate, it's not productive, it's deconstructive and not constructive, it's irrational, it's psychotic, it's sadistic, it is truly a mental illness. And I don't see really any exception at the national level to this mental illness by Democrat politicians. And I don't see any exception to the irrationality of those who support them and vote for them. I cannot understand, after having seen that State of the Union address and the responses to Donald Trump's talk in the moment and following it, how anyone coherent and rational can support this party anymore, John Federman, ah, that's interesting.

46:42So he's an example of somebody who seems to be heading in the direction of Tulsi Gabbard. Nobody would be surprised if tomorrow John Federman announced that he's becoming independent and is no longer a Democrat and then a few months later or a year later now he's a Republican. Exactly, that's how I see him going because he's actually expressing the same level of disgust that Tulsi Gabbard did a few years ago at a party that he just kind of fallen into, grew up with, assumed was always on the right side of things and is noticing now that on every single major issue, they're on the wrong side. And not only are they the wrong side, they're actually attacking the good that the Republican party does, which is insane. It used to be there was disagreement but that when one party did something that was obviously good for the country, like protecting children from illegal aliens raping them, there would

47:45be broad, broad agreement and at least some, ah, reasonable support for that position. But the Democrats, they actually are angry that Donald Trump is announcing that those who rape children will be arrested and deported or closing the border so illegalals can't come across. For example, why is this controversial or supporting the idea that you need to be a citizen and show ID to vote? It seems to be the case that the Democrats are not simply in disagreement about the best way forward to support the country. They are in disagreement about supporting the country. They don't want to support the country. They want the country to fail. What do you think that is? Well, this is why I say it's the heart of darkness.

48:47I think they're deranged. I think that they're actually sick. I think that they have been taken over by an ideology that is based purely on that which is dark. For example, envy, sloth, gluttony, basically they're driven by all of the cardinal vices. They don't express any virtues at all. There's no gratitude, there's no kindness, there's no perseverance, there's no sobriety. There's no honesty, there's no chastity, there's nothing really that they support or express that would build a community or even build a family. They're purely driven by chaos and disorganization. They're simply deconstructing what has already been built and calling it progress. That's it. That's all they do.

49:48What do you make of Ilhan Omar and Rashida Talib? Well I think they're evil. I think they're driven by hatred. They seem to be in the same camp as those men that were tried years ago for conspiring to crash planes into the World Trade Center. They're so consumed by hatred of others. In this case it would be hatred of Americans, despite the fact that they're sitting members of Congress that they don't actually think in the same way that a normal healthy person would. They resemble very much to me Islamist, ideologue extremists who command terror organizations. I don't really see much difference actually between them. What do you think so many have difficulty calling evil evil and calling out an identifying

50:52darkness? That's actually the more profound question isn't it? The fact that we have evil people running around is not really surprising. It's that there are Americans that elected them into Congress and that believe that these people are the most fit to serve in their communities. Not one or two people, not outliers, but a majority of the people who decided to vote. I suppose a partial answer to that has to do with cell phones, getting back to social media. I don't think that the people, many of the people who are voting for them actually know what these women believe, what they've done in the past, what they wish for the future, and what they value. I don't believe that many people actually know that. I don't think that a majority of Americans actually want the country destroyed, and yet a majority of people in their communities vote for individuals who want to destroy the

51:57country. Therefore, they must not know that these women want the country destroyed. It's interesting with all President Trump's roughness and gratuitous insults and purposefully inflammatory rhetoric, he never hesitates to call a spade a spade and he calls out these people and does so publicly. That may be one of the reasons why they're so inflamed. They're used to people deferring to them out of fear that they're going to lose their social status. It's like the people who were calling out the idiots that were wearing masks all the time in 2020 to 2022. Most people didn't because they were scared that they'd be accused of disrespecting public health and not caring about the lives of others.

52:58But the retort should have been bullshit. You're wearing a mask not because you believe that you're protecting public health. You're protecting your social status. Yes. That's the correct answer, and that's kind of what Donald Trump does. He looks them straight in the face and he doesn't apologize, he doesn't defend his position. He actually attacks them for being on the wrong side. He doesn't need to defend his side, his side is correct. It's funny, Mark, when John Fetterman was running for Senate, he was running against Dr. Oz, as I recall, and I was certain Dr. Oz was going to win. He was a public figure, he was well known, he was on TV, he was respected as a physician, and it was a shock that John Fetterman won, especially considering that somewhere along the campaign trail, he had a stroke. He was no longer able to talk, and it's like, are you kidding me? We're going to elect a guy that just had a stroke. We don't know what his future is going to hold over a public respected physician.

54:02Well, Fetterman went on in one. He then ended up in the hospital with severe depression, and of course, you know, because you're a psychiatrist, and I know as a physician, I've treated patients with severe depression, and it is no fun, and it's very difficult. Yet, in some regard, I'm glad the guy won. He is now showing himself to be intelligent, thoughtful, moderate, his positions are, I think, correct. I don't know what else all his positions are. He shook the hand of the sitting president, as he walked in for the State of the Union, the only Democrat that did that, that never used to be the case. Back in the Ronald Reagan days, he and Tip O'Neill would go head-to-head during the day, and then at night, they'd go off and have a cocktail together. They'd be friends, and now that no longer happens before. So the John Fetterman's of the world don't exist, and I'm glad to see him.

55:04I'm glad he's rational, I'm glad his ideas are moderate, and glad he had the courage, because I'm sure he got all kinds of grief from his Democrat colleagues. How dare him shake President Trump's hand, and then later now support what's going on in Iran, whatever your perspective is. He's supporting the military, he's supporting the commander-in-chief, and I applaud him for what he's doing. He's got courage to do what he's doing. Well, and yet he doesn't fit in the party anymore, just like we'll see Gabbard. I think this is just more proof that that party is so thoroughly toxic. But even the individuals within it that are doing some good are not accepted by their own party, and then they end up leaving. And I think this is really essentially why we should all agree that that party needs to be excised. It's basically a cancer. I don't think any good can come from it anymore. I think it needs to be removed, and I think the good people that were part of it need

56:07to form a different party, and they need to grow it. It can be an opposition party, the Republican party. That's fine, but it needs to be principled opposition, not just deconstructing opposition. Otherwise, I don't really see how this party is going to serve the needs of anybody. It has done absolutely nothing at a national level, and most very little at a local state level in the last five to ten years that has been even remotely positive. For sure. Talk great work with this piece about State of the Union, you don't normally write about politics. I'm glad you did, and I hope a lot of people read it. So we'll leave it at that. Another great episode of Informed Descent, and we will see you next time. You've been listening to Informed Descent with Dr. Jeff Barkey, Board Certified Primary Care Physician, and Dr. Mark McDonald, Board Certified Child Adolescent and Adult Psychiatrist, Informed Descent, The Intersection of Healthcare, and Politics.