 on this episode of Skeptico, a show about mental health reform and COVID and ultimately a show about evil. I have an interview coming up in a minute with Dr. Peter Bregan, psychiatrist and someone who really has, well, an unparalleled career in terms of mental health reform. You'll hear all about that. But what you'll also hear and what I found particularly interesting from this kind of Skeptico perspective we have is he says that the biggest obstacle that he faced in just convincing people in his community, you know, psychotherapists, that what he was finding in the mental health field in terms of corruption and deception and completely immoral stuff that was going on, the biggest problem in convincing people that was true is that just didn't want to accept evil. They didn't want to accept the idea that, you know, people were doing really, really bad things on an individual level and at an institutional level. So the reason I say it's kind of a Skeptico thing is it does seem like we've run into that again and again on this show. We're really smart people. People you wouldn't expect to be lying to. What we all understand is that there's just some people that are really messed up and that maybe they're messed up at a level beyond this biological robot level, which we'll get into in a minute. And I always like these movie clips. I think it's interesting how we've understood it from that kind of cultural perspective. So I have one for you today from Backdraft, a movie from 20 years ago with some really amazing actors. And here is Donald Sutherland playing the psychopathic arsonist in front of the parole board until our buddy Robert De Niro jumps in. Here's the clip. The parole board has received Mr. Bartel's fitness report. Endorsement from a section award Dr. Norris. In supervising psychiatrists I would describe Mr. Bartel's progress as remarkable. Mr. Bartel, do you regret your crimes? Yes, and I'm aware of the pain that I have caused. Excuse me, excuse me. Do you remember this Ronald? Do you remember who it belonged to? What did you do to that little girl Ronald? You burned her. What do you do to old ladies, Ronald? And what about the world, Ronald? What would you like to do in the whole world? So of course it's Hollywood dramatic and this one especially dramatic of that era. But you got to wonder if the kind of wacky dogmatic scientism you are just your brain. So the psychiatrist on the parole board like, I've looked at my numbers, I've done my tests, you know, you got to be all right. You can't really be evil. You got to wonder. I got to wonder if that's not at the root cause of a lot of this stuff we see. Here's a clip from the upcoming interview with Dr. Peter Bragan. You mentioned very earlier consciousness and the people we're dealing with who are managing public health. They actually don't believe in consciousness. They don't believe people have free will. They don't believe that there's such a thing as love. They actually think we're objects. The people who want to drug all our children and the same people who want to vaccinate all our children, they don't really think then of the children as beings, as spiritual creatures, as people with a need and a desire to live and to be themselves, to grow up and explore the world and everything done under COVID-19 has been to destroy that, cover our faces with masks so we can't relate to each other. We can't care about each other. The whole works is about destroying human connection. Bragan is great. He's a giant. We stand on the shoulders of people like this. Stick around. My interview with Dr. Peter Bragan is coming up here on Skeptico. Welcome to Skeptico, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Cares, and today we welcome Dr. Peter Bragan to Skeptico. He's here to talk about his new book, COVID-19 and the Global Predators. Dr. Bragan is a Harvard train medical doctor, psychiatrist, longtime practicing psychotherapist, and he has had just a truly remarkable career, really unsurpassed career as a reformer in the mental health field. And I bring that up mainly because I think it's super relevant to everything we're going to talk about today and about his book. So when I say that, let me put that into context. This guy, Dr. Bragan, is battle tested in a way that few other people are, like when they were still doing lobotomies on people, which isn't that long ago, if you read this guy's history like 1970s, he was one of the few people to stand him and go, no, this is not right. This is morally wrong. In addition to being ethically wrong, he stood up. He stood up to electroshock therapy, which unfortunately isn't completely banned, but somebody who stood up. He stood up to giving very dangerous psychiatric drugs to children. He stood up for that for decades. What that's brought to him in his life in terms of even death threats, believe it or not, but battles and being shunned by a lot of people in his community, all that he has fought against because he felt that it was the right thing to do. It was the morally right thing to do. Isn't that the kind of guy we need to fight this battle? I think that's what we need. So that's why I was super excited when Dr. Bragan agreed to come on and join me on Skeptico. So I'm so glad you're here. Thanks so much for joining me. Thank you for the very nice introduction. I really deeply appreciate it. And for mentioning the book, it is surprising that no one else has written a book that looks at the deep dive of just who is behind all of the COVID-19 stuff. You mentioned Robert F. Kennedy's excellent book on the real Anthony Fauci. He was very generous in saying that this book, that our book, was the one, oh my goodness, you're on top of things. Here's what he wrote. No other book so comprehensively covers the details of COVID-19 criminal conduct. It's pretty direct, as well as its origins in a network of global predators seeking wealth and power at the expense of human freedom and prosperity. Wow. I think that's a powerful, powerful statement. And I think it's true in terms of what your book is all about. Yeah. There is something in us humans that it's very hard for us to accept that people in power are actually planning their own increase in power and wealth without any regard for our well-being whatsoever. They're just interested in the PR image they create as they basically exploit the rest of humanity. This is a really hard, hard concept for people to accept. As children, we want to believe our parents are well-meaning, of course, and they're not always. Parents are not always well-meaning, but we hope they are. And they're a lot more well-meaning because they're tied to us by affection, by love, by parental responsibility. But as we go further up the line of authority and grow up and we start thinking about what is Bill Gates doing? What is Klaus Schwab doing? What's Michael Bloomberg doing? These are people who organize international conferences of powerful people. What is Tedros doing at the World Health Organization? What is Xi Jinping doing in China? Because he plays a very big role in a lot of what's happening to us through his connections to Bill Gates, his very strong Chinese communist leaders, very strong connections to Bill Gates. At least Bill Gates thinks so and is working with him. And it's hard for us to imagine that these people don't have a lot of consideration for us. Rarely we get a glimpse into it. There's a fellow named Harari, who is a very close associate of Klaus Schwab, who is the creator of much of this supra order above states, but he works with all the top businesses in the world, the top billionaires in the world, deciding among themselves how to run things without regard for human rights, without regard for government sovereignty. And he talks about the dispensability of human beings, but most of them don't just openly let us know what they're thinking. You know, that's an interesting point. And one of the things I want to try and not do is get lost in all the names and all the power elite kind of things. Because what I think you really bring throughout your career, if somebody really traces what you've been about, you know, your battle for mental health reform is really a battle about how we understand our human consciousness, how we understand our humanness, how we understand sovereignty that goes with consciousness. I thought I'd play a little clip from a YouTube that you did that in a way isn't related and in another way is related. And this is a series you did on psychiatry, psychotherapy, just to help people understand some of the basics. Let me play this for folks and then let's chat about it for a minute. I'm Peter Arbregan, MD, and I am a psychiatrist. Let me say that I've been doing psychotherapy since 1968. And during this entire time, I've never had a suicide in my practice. I think some of it is luck. But I think another big reason is that I never give psychiatric drugs to people for their problems. I don't start people on drugs. So if you come to me feeling suicidal, I don't give you a drug. Why would I give you an anti-depressant when it's got a big box warning on it that up to age 24, you even see an increased suicide rate on anti-depressants and control clinical trials? In depression, what happens is there's a total loss of hope. So what's the answer to depression from the viewpoint of a therapist? Well, the most important thing is to be hopeful. And does your average psychiatrist look hopeful? Go to an American Psychiatric Association meeting. Because people will give drugs and diagnose people that they become unhappy people. They're not hopeful people. It's good. Oh, it's great. Tell us about some of the points that you're trying to make there, which you're trying to get across and how that fits into your long career in trying to help people inside of this model that seems to be in a way that is echoed in your latest book in a system that seems to try to be pulled people down in a way. Yeah, you mentioned very earlier consciousness and the people we're dealing with who are managing public health and trying to control what we're doing here in America. They actually don't believe in consciousness. They don't believe people have free will. They don't believe that there's such a thing as love. They want to crush religion. They want to crush a belief in God. They want to crush even the idea that we have personal freedom, all of which is relevant to psychotherapy. I mean, what do we bring to psychotherapy if we don't bring those spiritual aspects to it? But they are devoid. They literally are devoid of a concept of it. You know, I was thinking last night with Ginger and this really perked her up. I said it's like they're all functioning, but they're autistic. They actually think we're objects. The old initial definition of vortism, which is still the best, is that it's a person who probably for developmental reasons in their relationships with family doesn't develop a concept that there are actual people who are caring and who love us and we can relate to them and they're very different than objects and machines. But the people who want to drug all our children and the same people who want to vaccinate all our children, they don't really think then of the children as beings, as spiritual creatures, as people with a need and a desire to live and to be themselves, to grow up and explore the world and find some comfort in basic spiritual concepts like there's a loving God or that the world has a spiritual force within it. So it's a world devoid of all of the things that most of us who are thoughtful, believe are important, particularly the idea of love that we should love one another and that failures of relationship, which is what I was talking about in the video ultimately, that depression, sadness, misery, the worst psychoses, all of it is about a loss of trust, faith, connection with other human beings and or with any concept of God or of a good spirituality in the universe to which we can connect. And once people can connect with that with a hopeful therapist with a caring therapist or another human being, a minister, a priest, a friend, a family member, if that connection can be restored to just one other human being, then we have strength and then we begin to get our vitality back. What the book is pointing out is that everything done under COVID-19 has been to destroy that cover our faces with masks so we can't relate to each other, we can't care about each other. The whole works is about destroying human connection. I think very early on in the book you mentioned, I thought from a medical perspective, something that I didn't know, but you said it's well understood that the way that we deal with a pandemic is kind of cooperation of hope moving forward. And then when we contrast that with the way that they've handled the pandemic, it's been exactly the opposite of that, which makes you wonder why was it about fear just ramping up the fear from the beginning? Why was it about isolation? Why was it about all these other things? So that's why I really appreciate that you're approaching this from a spiritual perspective. And I'm not a religious person, but I think that fundamental to this is an understanding that we are more, we are more than biological robots. And that's what you've been really essentially battling with your whole life in terms of, so like in this video I just played one of the things I thought was just so beautiful, but in a subtle way, you said, I embrace someone who comes to me who is suicidal because they shows that they have feeling, they have passion, they have a vision for how their life could be. What disturbs me, you're saying, is when someone comes and they're devoid of feelings, they don't have any feelings. And then when we play that back into the situation that we're in, and we look into those gatesy in eyes and we go, oh my God, I feel for this person, he's someone who has somehow lost his soul. He doesn't, in some way, he doesn't have feelings. We can just, we just see it in these people and so many of these people. And I wonder if we don't have to start being more honest about talking about it at that level. If that isn't really the root cause of it, I think your work tells us, your whole career tells us that that is what it's really all about. Well, that's very interesting and exciting because you're actually giving me a reorientation to really what the fundamentals are because they want us to completely lose track of that. And they do not believe in it. They don't think it exists. They don't have a personal experience of what you and I are talking about now, sounds to them like gibberish. The interesting thing that I've found, I'm Jewish and my wife is Christian. And we very much believe in a loving God, but neither of us is deeply involved in religion, per se. We're involved in this spiritual level of how God presents to us. And almost everybody who is risking their careers and their lives in this movement and the vast majority, not everybody, but almost everybody we meet are Christians. And they're very sincere American Christians. They're generous. They're caring. They believe that Jesus was right when he talked about, we should love one another and love God. They know that what they're doing is something they have to do on a spiritual level. And this has been very striking to us. We've never been in that group before because when I was my whole life really working on the psychiatric issues, it was mostly with people who don't share a lot of spirituality. Most of them were hurt by psychiatry and psychology precisely because they didn't have a good grasp of this and they were still struggling with it. Some of them are psychologists and therapists, but most of them were not committed to a life of doing what they thought God or goodness or rightness expected of them. And this marks these people as the opposite of those who are trying to control us, subdue us, keep us from thinking we have an individuality that matters. And to those of you out there who are feeling apathetic and down, we got an interesting call from a friend of ours, so closely fits with us. It was about the apathy. She said, you know, I'm seeing these young people and they just have apathy about life now, young adults. They don't have enthusiasm. They don't have excitement. And that is precisely what they want from us. They want us to be as some people call a sheeple, not people, but sheeple sheep. And we have to know that and say, no, we're going to have energy. We're going to have life. We're going to love each other. We're going to band together. We're going to stand up for freedom and for basic spiritual quality and nature of human beings. Dr. Bergen, I wonder, since you do have this long history in working with people, and one of the things you said in that video that we didn't get to that I think is quite impressive is you spent your whole life in therapy with people, working with people, having people come in and talk to them and comfort them and be a part of their life, bring in their family. You're a people helper on that kind of personal level, empathetic level. But I'm sure you've also run into people in your practice who have these issues with control, have these issues with dominance. How do you understand them from that deeper level of having worked with so many thousands and thousands of people through the years? Well, what's going on with them? Well, I think to some extent it's beyond our understanding. I mean, I just want to start with that. I think evil, bad intention is beyond our understanding to a great extent. I think it's almost another world phenomena. It isn't just simply a matter of there being badly injured in childhood. It is not just simply a matter of that. I have worked with some of the most injured people imaginable and who as little children while they were being abused or tortured as two, three, four-year-olds, I mean, literally that, said to themselves, I will never be this way when I grow up. I don't think it's reducible to just the, you know, let's feel sorry for folks who are violent. I think they make wrong decisions early on and I can't explain it. So in that sense, it's unknowable. The second thing is I mostly see these people in my medical work. I've been involved in over 100 trials, often involving people who have committed violent crimes while under the influence of drugs, but also against the drug companies, a whole variety of things. And that's mostly where I get to see these people. And it's hard to have people open up when you're kind of trying to help them not be in trouble with the law. But I'll give you a few simple examples of how I deal with it and how I try to help people with it. One example, never put this quite together, will be, say, a five-year-old and another, say, a 50-year-old. So a five-year-old boy comes into me. He's brought in by his mother and his father. I do not try to see five-year-olds alone. I want to help their mother and father and big sister or brother help them. I believe that whenever a person's young, if you can help change the family around them, that does help them hugely. And the little boy comes in and the parents say, and yesterday he hit his little sister. And I approach him as like a being, you know, a person. And I say, come on over here and sit on the stool. Let me tell you something. I said, you know, I'll tell you one of the secrets for your life. And this is five-year-old. When you go up, your sister could be best and most thorough friend. There's nothing that a young girl and a woman appreciates more than a big brother who's there to back them up, because men have a special strength for women. And you must use that strength to protect your sister. Let me see your muscles. I call one of his muscles. See, listen, you don't use that to hit your little sister. You just have to protect her. And you'll just find that you grow up with a best, automatic best friend by being a good big brother. And children will change almost overnight when they get it. Providing they don't then see their parents fighting or their dad hits them or something else completely reverses the process, which then has to be worked with. And I'll give you now, go to an example of a 50-year-old to say in therapy, come in and usually these people do not volunteer to come to therapy. So you don't get to see them as the primary patient. The people who come to therapy are the people who are trying really hard to do good and to be right, not to put their pain on others. My definition of evil, the best one I have is it's inflicting your own pain on somebody else. People who are like that don't generally come much for therapy, but they bring in their husband. So they're sitting together and the wife is saying something and I see the husband's right here in Twitch and I see her quiet down. And I look at him, I say, you hit your wife. And I don't deal with rage. I do it with like, whoa, that's otherworldly. And it seems like that to me that a man would hit his own, hit a woman. What are you doing? Where's that from? And at first he'll deny it and she'll say, and she'll try to interrupt. I say, no, no, no, I really want to be honest here. So did you hit your wife last night? Is that what this is about? I don't remember. So he gets something like that. And I'll put it to the man. I'll say, look, first of all, you have to stop today. I hope your wife will report you to the police the next time you ever hit her again. And I think that you need to decide to give it up. And that's really good news. So I'm giving you an order. That's really the best one you've ever had. Always do something other than hurt your wife when you're mad at her. And I'm going to teach you something else, which is the great news. If you stop that and become a tender loving giant, you're going to get more affection than you ever knew was possible on the face of the earth. Because I can tell you wouldn't be hitting your wife if you have a loving mom. And then we'll get to that later. Believe me, it's true. And you did if you had a really loving mom taking care of you for the first 18 years of your life, you're not going to hit women for God's sakes. Unless your father was hitting her, my father hit my mother. Okay. Do you love your mother? Yeah. So, okay, well, let's get pissed being dad then. And let's let's love your wife. And I'll talk to him about the value of it and the importance, but the absolute moral forbiddenness of hitting. And it is surprising that people will listen to this, but they are people who at least are accompanying their wife to therapy. You know, so it's a very special circumstance. And it depends more on these people who come than a magic with the therapist, but you at least have to identify these people spiritually, no matter how young they are, and talk to them directly about what they're doing and the right and wrong of it and what they can expect if they become loving. Because if you're five or 50, if you become more loving, if you can get more of that out, become more source of love, the shining light of love, the more you do that, the more that you will have happiness around you, the more you'll help people. And if you're going to spend your life in this world battling, as Alex has said, battling, which I certainly have done, you don't want to be angry and you don't want to be really battling. You want to be there to speak what you are certain is the truth about how people need to relate to each other. But the folks like Fauci, and I do name names because I want people to know I'm actually going to draw the full picture for them. There are people out there who are not loving, don't have the faintest idea what it's about. And if they are loving to their wife or children, they have cut themselves off from the people that they control and torment. That's quite beautiful and profound. I think anyone who listens to that is like, gosh, I want to talk to this guy when I have trouble because it's so beautiful and it's so artistic almost in the way that you manage those situations. Let's extend that one step further. Because you said a couple things in there that, again, I think, and I think you're admitting that you think this too, even though you don't talk about it very much, is really central at the core of this very, very important book that we're talking about today, COVID-19 and the global predators. It is, as we read the quote from John F. Kennedy Jr. and there's many other blurbs that you'll see on here. Just fantastic. There's Ginger. That's my wife, Ginger, passing by co-author of My Life and the book. The book has been very successful, very well received. We have 100,000 copies that you've sold basically without any promotion. It's not like anyone in the mainstream is reviewing this book even though they should be. So it's basically your effort on its own. But what I was getting to, that I want to try and close the loop on is, you said a couple interesting things. One in that ultimately, it's hard for you to understand evil purely in this realm and this material realm and this, gee, I got to make more money, gee, I want to get ahead. We certainly understand that that's part of it. But there does seem to be, if we're honest, and other worldly part of that. And I don't know, I can't put my hands on it. I don't know what it is. Again, I'm not religious. I don't have that orientation. But it does seem to extend beyond that. From your experience, what is that all about? You said that you can't really help those people. You don't reach those people. Those people don't come in. What is that all about? And then if you can't extend that one step further, because when you move into the domain of dealing with institutions, like you've done, medical institutions, corporations, where the evil gets concentrated, and that's what this book is about, global predators. So how do you, as a therapist who has a pretty good handle on human nature, how do you understand that evil and then how that evil becomes institutionalized? What do we think is going on there? What's your best guess? Well, this is very interesting. By the way, very few people who interview me raise these kinds of issues. So this is actually kind of a little exploratory for me too. Your audience should know how rare it is to be interviewed by somebody who wants to talk on this particular level. And I think it is the, I mean, ultimately it is the level that things are about. I think from just a simple evolutionary viewpoint, we developed over several million years from being little bipeds and trees clinging together while the tigers, you know, wandered below, maybe, and we threw coconuts at them occasionally if they tried to climb the tree. We've evolved in essentially that model of a close-knit extended family. It is not until a very mere 10,000 years ago, in the beginning, I think it's a little longer than that, but 10 is that usually what anthropologists, archaeologists, and so on, say, 10,000 years ago, we did not live in large groups. In the moment we begin to live in large groups in small cities, which happens rather rapidly around eight or 9,000 years ago, very short time ago, we are already building walled cities. We're already having signs of warfare, outright warfare, and even earlier than that, but it doesn't go back a lot more. It's just hard to track. We don't find mass murders before living in cities and states, except on rare occasions, there's some evidence that hunter-gatherers might attack another band and bash their heads in and things like that. But it's hard to dig all that literally up out of the earth and figure it out. I think we were essentially meant to be in small groups. I don't think there's any question about it. And the larger our group gets, the more divorced we get from the rest of the people around us, and yet we're in very close proximity to them. And I think it also tends to fracture our relationships with each other because you're not just dealing all day long with your parents, your grandparents, your mother's best friend, or whoever else is in this group. You're dealing with teachers, you're dealing with police, you're dealing with school counselors, and nowadays you may be getting the worst garbage in the world being dumped on you in school as a kindergartner and on and up. I think we just get more divorced from people. And that basic concept of a mother and child of whoever is the primary caretaker and child, that looking in the eyes, that touching, that being like a oneness of being made of each other, that is the reality of early life, literally made of each other with mothers, milk preferably, with the food brought to us by our parents, by our brain grows in response to our parents and our nurturers, brain doubles in size in the first year. And it's all about socialization. That somehow all that stuff doesn't make it for many, many people. And then the higher up they get in any organization, the more remote they are, and also who gets higher up in an organization. Often pretty good people do build organizations you read about, I suspect the Walton family and senior Waltons are really good people, but that's not who runs their billions of dollars anymore. It's CEOs that run it. It's people who got to the top. They didn't make what they built, they got to the top. And people who get to the top get there because of particular qualities, and it is not generally love. I mean, the story of Jesus is that, if you really get a lot of attention bringing love into the world, they crucify you. It's real. Whether it's metaphor or actually happened, certainly Jesus happened and the sayings of him were recorded in various ways by various people. Those are not the people that get to the top. It's a bunch of spirals that gets to the top. It's the Pharisees who get to the top. So I think that there's just a lot of different things that go into being the alienation of people in power. I mean, it's just a reality. It has not gotten better, it's gotten worse. So as we've gotten more power, more communication ability, Chinese communists starting with Mao have killed probably 100 million Chinese, so their own people. Hitler didn't just kill Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals. He killed lots of Germans and he killed at least 20 or 30 million people outside of the battlefield. Stalin was very fond of murdering people, intentionally killing people up to maybe 50 million of his own people. So this lies inside human beings. It's there. You know, but the other thing that lies inside of human beings, and we've touched on it, is hope, is this desire to connect. You know, I was reading an interview you gave. You have so many really amazing books that you've read. There are so many amazing books that you've written, and I think people who are interested in any of these topics we're talking about, and any of these topics in terms of mental health reform over the years, if we've perked your interest at all, please go and read these books. But one was an excerpt from a book, and it was very early on, and I wonder if you could tell this story. As I recall, you were early in your career, you went to a mental health hospital in New York, and you were a very young man and you had that figure, that desire to do good, and what you saw was just deplorable. I mean, it was just inhuman at a level that's hard to comprehend, but at the same time, I wonder what made it made you see hope in that situation, because that is a hope, that as you described it, sounded like a hopeless situation. Like a lot of people feel about the situation we're in now, and the great reset, and these forces that seem insurmountable. How could we ever do anything? How could we ever be anything other than apathetic? But you weren't apathetic. You were face to face with this, and you weren't apathetic, and you moved forward. Can you tell that story and tell what was going on inside of you? Yeah, and also, let's also talk more about the people who are taking on these issues now, because there are millions of us, and I want to encourage people to get involved, because a part of spirituality, I think, is to get involved in the best possible ways with other human beings. I'm not a monk. By the way, the book that has captured most of the hearts of people from the earlier writings is toxic psychiatry, and it's still available. It's sold hundreds of thousands of books, and the subtitle of toxic psychiatry, I don't even think I can repeat, but it's about how the biochemical theories and the electroshock and the brain surgery or psychosurgery of the psychiatry has to be replaced with love and relationship. Here it is. Toxic psychiatry, why therapy? Empathy, which has become a whole movement inside of your practice. Empathy and love must replace the drugs, electroshock, and biochemical theories of new psychiatry. If I can, I want to add one other quote that I found that just struck me. I don't want to get too, people think I'm just a big fanboy, but brilliant. You write, what's wrong with treating emotional crises the way we treat medical emergencies? As if that isn't an obvious answer. Why should we transform ourselves in the process of trying to help other people? How can we fine-tune ourselves to the feelings of others? That relates, I think, to this empathy thing that you're so tapped into. I'm sorry though. Please continue. Well, it's good. I was a freshman at Harvard. It wasn't New York. It was Massachusetts. I was a freshman at Harvard and a friend invited me out to the state mental hospital, the local state mental hospital to volunteer. He and his older brother were both at Harvard and they had started this program. I eventually ended up leading the program for about a year in AAF. That's how I got from being a potential professor. I was in a special American history and literature program at Harvard that was grooming to be a professor of history and literature, maybe a lawyer. I wasn't sure. I loved psychology, but I had no interest in going into medicine. When I walked into the state mental hospital, I was immediately struck with my uncle Dutch's descriptions of liberating a Nazi extermination camp. Also, I was struck by my feelings as a 10-year-old in a movie theater watching a movie-tone newsreel that my parents and I did not expect to see about the extermination of the Jews. It was some of the first films that came out of heaps of Jews lying dead and others hanging onto a barbed wire, barely having enough strength to hold themselves up and stuff. I knew these were people. I just knew it. I cannot tell you why. See, this is to me inexplicable. I cannot tell you why, exactly at least, how I managed to connect and say there, but for the grace of God go I. And I don't think I even believed in God. At that point, I was a real, you know, relativistic kind of a person and everything, which I think some of the best adolescents are. Hopefully it doesn't go on forever and you'll find some good values. But it was just clear to me. And the other part of it was it was clear these people were in despair. And a lot of them, when they saw young students who were reasonably well-dressed and really looked like they wanted to help, they just loved us. In four years of being on the wards, often on my own, eventually as the leader, I managed to get myself a pair of keys. I could go anywhere. I never was threatened on the violent wards, never. And I very early on figured that this was not like the playground where you didn't threaten Peter Reagan because even though he wasn't very big, he would just regret it. It was more like, oh, God, these people just need me to be absolutely nonviolent. They just need me to be the least threatening human being on the face of the earth. I don't know where that came from. I honestly cannot tell you. I did not have a religious upbringing. But the only time I heard love words, love discussed with seriousness was when a Christian girlfriend of mine, Mary, took me to a Methodist church. I was just, what was she talking about? So I don't know where it comes from. And I think that a lot of our lives are inexplicable. They're gifts. They're gifts. And I think we should respect them. I think each person should look at their gifts and say, okay, what I've been given these gifts. I'm good with people or I'm good with writing or I'm good as a caretaker. I'm as good as a leader. I'm good with ideas. What are your positive gifts? And how do you want to bring them into the world? And I guess I didn't know that at the time. But I had a gift for being with disturbed people and making them feel comfortable letting them, that's not making letting them feel comfortable. And we set up a program much against the wishes of the superintendent, but he didn't want us to take our program elsewhere. I already visited other state hospitals. And they were very interested in our program. And I said, we want like 15 of our students to have their own patients. We had several hundred going through the wars from Harvard and Radcliffe. And finally they gave us each one of our own patients that would be there when we got there on a particular day and we'd go every week. It's a big commitment. And we had a social worker, a very gentle kind social worker who at least one or two of the staff tried to tell us just was a little kooky or something. He was a very sweet man. And he supervised us. He was very gentle. And we got these patients who were so bad off that we couldn't hurt them. That was the theory. We got almost every one of them out of the hospital. It's like, whoa. Now psychiatry in those days had room for social psychiatry, psychological psychiatry, psychoanalytic psychiatry, no room in psychiatry and medicine for that now, because the drug companies have taken over completely. But then I got a lot of encouragement for that. And I well, I wonder if you got a lot of encouragement or if you created a lot of encouragement. And I'd like you to speak to that. I don't want to hear a story, but you're talking about bringing love into the situation, bringing light. And we don't know where that light comes from. But we know that light always shines and it shines through brighter in some people than others. But you brought the light and the light was able to affect the darkness that you found. Because when you walked in there, it was very, very dark, as I understand it. I mean, very dark. What they were doing to people was unimaginable. And so I want you to speak to that in terms of because it as it relates now as it relates to your current book, COVID-19, global predators, all that stuff. Isn't that the solution? We got to bring the light because the light has a magic way of transforming the evil. That's what your career is all about everywhere you go. It's impossible. That is an impossible situation. One of the things that Ginger and I, Ginger's been with me for 40 years. The reform work goes back another 35 to when I was at whatever the numbers are till I was 18. But we've been together 40 years and we've been through an enormous amount and we loved having the reputation of being the conscience of psychiatry, Peter and Ginger. But when this came along, we were very nervous about getting into it because we knew how violent we'd been treated by the pharmaceutical industry. And they were kind of the cutting edge of this COVID-19 oppression. They're not the essence of it. It's way beyond them. It's in the people who invest in these companies. It's in the people who invest in the UN and into a world order, a new world order and who really want to change things and get rid of a lot of us. Things I never thought I would say two years ago, but it's there folks. You'll be convinced if you look at the book. The book convinced me. They're writing a book. I didn't want to come to these conclusions, such grim conclusions. But we looked at each other and basically we eventually looked at each other and said, look, our gifts are unique. There's nobody else here doing this work. All the people we've met who has done deep dives into drug company fraud and who has looked at the interrelationships between the FDA and the drug companies the way I've done in my books. In many of my books, I talk about these interrelationships and we said, and what are our gifts? What gifts do we have? We're too old to do this. I'm going to be 86 for context. My wife is a bit younger, but we looked at it and we said, well, that's what we're supposed to do. This is obviously what we're supposed to do. This is what the gifts are. She laughed and she said, we always thought that the two of us were brought together to do this reform work in psychiatry. She said, I think that was prepped for taking on these globalists. But then we just kept meeting other bright souls. We no longer felt like the conscience of anything as a movement. We were just one of millions of consciences and we've met a lot of hundreds of them personally or written to us or communicated with us. So folks, if you get involved with wanting to do something on some political level, some spiritual level, it could just be in a group, in your neighborhood, creating a group for like-minded souls to grow. It could be a political group. If you're looking for people who really do think that they're supposed to use their gifts, get involved in this movement. The book will introduce you enough people you'll kind of get the idea about who to check out. And you're going to find so many people who shine with love. We have never met many couples like us who really built lives together, doing real purposeful lives together. But among these mostly Christian people we're meeting, there are so many who have these deep spiritual convictions. And I know many in your audience will be a little different from that. And you will have a more personal idea of spirituality. You'll have a kind of spirituality that is about your comfort and about finding peace and finding good things like that. But also consider what it would be like if you actually meet like-minded people who are concerned about humanity and what's happening. It's so amazing to become involved on that level. But again, if you take care of yourself spiritually, you're doing number one. You're doing the first thing because you want to, as much as possible, when you get involved more with the universe, you want to be in a loving mode. I had to give up being the angry young man in my 30s because I wasn't going to do the right things and I was going to wear myself out. So think about how can you bring more love into this world? How can you do it? That's a really good starting point for your very spiritual and loving audience, I think. You know, it's interesting what you say because it kind of turns the paradigm upside down. It's like, how do we take action? You mentioned earlier on some of the response that you've gotten from the book. Again, COVID-19 and the Global Predators is the name of the book. You can find it at bregon.com where you can order it directly. Yeah, it's a little complicated. You can get it directly in the United States at a discount at wearethepray.com. You can just set up a special dedicated book site, wearethepray.com. If you want the e-book, you can get it at Amazon and your girls get the book at Amazon and all the other book dealers around the world. But in the US at least, just for the book itself, not the e-book, you can get it at wearethepray.com. And we made the price of the e-book very low so that at $2.99 so that people can really buy it and feel comfortable just spending a few bucks to get it. That's fantastic. So the book is a starting point. I think that all the stuff we've talked about here can be a good lead into the book because the book can be heavy if you're not indoctrinated, if you haven't woken up, as they say, to this stuff. I mean, you're talking to, we're listening to Dr. Peter Breggin, who's fought these battles, who's had the pharmaceutical companies call him up and threaten him in the middle of the night with death. He found a phony FBI agent came by and the next thing you know, he finds a gas leak in his house. I mean, this is real at a level that, and if you think any of that doesn't happen, I mean, just go read other accounts by other people. These guys are in it to win it in a way that we don't even want to think about. So you don't get too hung up on that. Think about what he's saying now about what if this is an opportunity to understand why you shouldn't be apathetic, to understand how and why you could connect, what could happen on the horizon of your life. If you get to the other end of this, what if the great reset could be turned into a positive great reset, a great reset of love and connection of community. And that's what I hear you saying. Well, I love what you're saying and it's an emphasis that I haven't had this or so strongly on any of the shows I've been doing. So very, very good for getting to the heart of it. It is definitely what life is about. To me, life is about bringing love into the world. We all are spiritual beings and the essence of that is we can love. Period. And everything else is BS and craziness. And even in therapy, if you can deal with a person who's profoundly disturbed, but they can experience that you are a caring human being and they get a sense that they could like you, they'll stop hallucinating for 20 minutes while they talk to you. And then you've got a lot of work to do as they'll fall back, they've been hurt. But it's about shining love. And that's what the Judeo-Christian tradition is about. It's about there's a loving God. And it's about, you know, that's, from my viewpoint, that's what it's about, that you want to bring love into the world and not act out of anger or anxiety or rage in anything you do in your life, but act out of reason and ethics and the feeling of love. Not easy to do, but it gets easier because it works so well. And it's just, it works really, really well. You know, the last point I wanted to comment on, because I really wanted to commend you on this, and that is your treatment of the Trump thing, because I know you were a big supporter of, I think, the spirit of what a lot of us thought Trump was about, was about being our personal best and as a country becoming our best and what that reflects and what that taps into. But I think your willingness to see that maybe that was tainted in a way. And, you know, for you to acknowledge that, like you do in the preface and say, hey, now I'm having trouble really squaring what I thought with his actions. And now I have to pull back and I have to change course. Because I think that's another part of this process, right? Part of the process is there's going to be tricky moments where we're going to have to go, oh, the assumptions I made, maybe they weren't right, but maybe I can still find my direction hasn't been totally thrown off course, because that's what I see you doing, saying, hey, everything I'm saying is still important, I just need to readjust here based on this information. Do you want to speak to that at all? Yeah, well, virtually everybody that I know who is fighting for America's survival and our freedom and who believe in loving ways of relating actually supported Trump and probably would still vote for him again. But something dreadful happened along the way. I mean, he got it was either getting completely taken in and overwhelmed by the deep state and convinced that that actually this was wonderful stuff, Operation Warp Speed, this was great and so on, you know, supporting Moderna and Pfizer with billions of dollars and letting them push through essentially GMO vaccines, turning us into GMO people, let alone worrying about eating GMO corn. The vaccines literally are making us into GMO organisms. He either got completely overwhelmed by that, or maybe also he just got pragmatic in his own mind and decided that if he was against the vaccines, that he couldn't get reelected. I don't know which it was. But one of the things that I make so clear in the book is that by supporting America and every country to say, you take care of yourselves first, by supporting individual freedom and by aligning himself against the global predators, he actually fought globalism even as he was electioneering. He fought the Koch family, supposedly the great saviors of the Republicans who are supposed to be freedom loving libertarians, really just another another bunch of global predators. And Trump spotted that and said, I don't care if you don't give me any money. In his typical manner, you may be good guys, you're good guys, I like you, but I don't want your money. And he really got on a terribly wrong track. He's now come and modified it somewhat, but not completely. I don't know if he's man enough to say, I got bamboozled or I made a wrong choice, I thought I had to do this politically, God forgive me. So there's a lot of discussion about what were his motives. But the problem always is you don't get to generally speaking to a position of great leadership without somehow being willing to make serious compromises. And that's a grave misfortune. I don't think that we've probably had an untainted largely untainted leadership since the first few presidents in the United States. I mean, George Washington, yes, he was not a perfect man. He had slaves, also the only man who ever freed all his slaves on his wife's death out of all these slaveholders. But the Washington really didn't want to take over the nation. That is so unusual. I mean, if when the war was over, he was presented by his troops with a deep like insistence that he become king, that they march on the Continental Congress and tell them they had to get paid and they had to be better taken care of. And Washington found out they were having this meeting actually in a church. And he went there and he put on his glasses, which he never did. He really played to how sad and tired he was. He said, we fought for freedom, this is what I've done all these years, Valley Forge, all this I've given you and now you want to make me a king. And he didn't. And they all felt guilty and there was no takeover. And it is literally the first time in history in the world, which gives you an idea about what happens to leaders. This early question where a man who had an army at his back and could have taken over a country and most of the people in the country would have been absolutely delighted, probably including the monarchists. And he said, no, we're about something new, human freedom under God. That's what he believed. And very few people like him and Trump is not exactly that. You know what I think we keep coming back to in this discussion, this wonderful, wonderful sharing that you've done for so many for all of us today is the idea that that moral compass that is inside us, that is more than just this sack of meat up there. We're more than a biological robot in a meaningless universe. We know it. We knew it from our earliest baby thoughts. But that that moral compass is always there and we can follow it. That's what keeps coming through in your work. And even if you get duped by a politician here or there, don't look to the politician. Look to the ideals behind it, because that's what we love about America. And it's OK to say we love America. Oh, God bless you for that. We love the ideals. We love the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness that we can always stand on. And that's why I'm very, very pleased that you're able to make that shift and able to say, you know, hey, I'm there like everyone else. Maybe I went down the train a little bit too far with this guy. Screw that. What I'm about is the ideals of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. And you just come back to that like you're rock is is what comes through in your your most recent work. So tell us what is going on now. What is it? You do a podcast. You do a lot. We're doing a lot of things. A lot of things. Yes. Well, we I think we may be doing too many things. The way to keep track of what we're doing is to go to bregon.com and get our bregon alerts. They sometimes call frequent alerts. So we're changing it to bregon alerts, whichever you see, get the alerts and they're free. They go out to about 45,000 people. And the opening rate for them is is like 50%, which is unheard of opening rates for online things like this are like 8, 10%. So people really like what we're doing. That's the best way to find out about us. In addition to our website, America Out Loud. We, my wife and I do columns there once a week. We have a column on America Out Loud. It's a great place. You'll see Peter McCullough there. He's the greatest scientist today of COVID-19. Peter McCullough is regularly there. And we are doing on Thursday nights. And this is going to be the first time this Thursday. We will be on the air at 5 o'clock. Ginger and I together. You want to hear the first show in 40 years we've done together? Tune in Thursday night at America Out Loud or get the show later on. It gets archived. And we're a little edgy. We're a little not yet working together. And yet we are. You'll get a real good sense of she and I trying to do something we've never done before, which is partner on the air. She's always pushed me on the air and refused to go with me. And then I have a regular TV show, which is you can get on Roku. So it's real TV and it's on the station is Brighton. We were taken down off YouTube 45 minutes after I did my first video on the book. 45 minutes after I did my first video on the book. For life taken down. And so we are on Brighton.com for our videos. So and we do I'm on other regular things. The best way to find me is get the frequent alerts and the TV show, which I love on which is live. It's actually live at Wednesdays at 6 p.m. Wednesdays at 6 p.m. live on Brighton.tv. Terrific. And we'll obviously have all those links up there. And I wasn't aware that they've made this book available for $2.99 on Amazon. So there's absolutely no barrier. The ebook, no barrier. Exactly. There's no barrier to the basic information. And the basic information is hard to swallow, but it's life changing. It's life changing. It opens up a new door. And you have to go there. Who wants to be keeping their head in the sand? No matter what it is, we can handle it. You can hear as a guy who's fought for years and years and he's handled it. That's what we're here to do is bring the light. Like our guest, Dr. Peter Brighan, has brought the light today. Dr. Brighan, thanks again so much for joining me. It's just awesome to be in your presence and to hear you. So thank you. Well, this has been a gift to me actually. It's the first time somebody kept bringing me back down to the basic basics. It's interesting. I've given hundreds of interviews. Yours is the one that actually kept coming back to the basics that we live by. And I fought you a little bit on it because I always want to tell people about the global predators. You did a great job. Thank you. You gave me a gift today. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks again to Peter Brighan for joining me today on Skeptico. The one question I tee up from this interview, it's kind of a repeat question, but it always looks different when you talk to somebody new, when you talk to somebody who's really so talented and has such an amazing background as this guy. But it's the question of evil. And it's with this ability for some people to not to connect, to not see other people as spiritual beings. Is that ever, ever, ever under any circumstances, something more than biology, something more than nature or nurture? Is it ever possible that that could be influenced by what I call this extended realm? You know, a couple of interviews ago, we did the interview with Dean Raiden, and I was pretty hard on them in a couple of respects, but you know, don't forget that parapsychology and these sci experiments do show that there is more, right? So even if you take like the simple pre sentiment experiment, you know, the one where they show the image on the screen and before the image is even selected by the computer, your body reacts, well, that says there's more. That says the clock isn't in play like we think it is in materialistic epiphenomena, mind equals brain stuff. It really falsifies that. But people aren't willing to make and you don't have to, but now people aren't willing to make that theoretical leap to saying, is that does that open the door for maybe evil being more, maybe good being more, maybe light being more? I think it's rather obvious. I think it's rather self evident, but obviously not everybody sees it that way. What's your opinion? Let me know. And I do have a lot more coming up on skeptical. So stay with me for all of that. Until next time, take care and bye for now.