>> good evening, everyone, and welcome to warwick's. on behalf of four weeks, i want to thank you for your support. last year, what >> celebrated 135 years is the oldest continuously family owned bookstore in the u.s.. thank you very much. hopefully next year we will have our 126th year. what weeks -- warwick's is pleased to introduce andrew saul

who will discuss his book. he will be in conversation with dr. david lehman. andrew school -- skull received his phd from princeton university and is currently distinguished professor of sociology emeritus at the university of california san diego. in 2015, he received the roy porter medal for lifetime contribution to the history of medicine. in 2016, the eric ralston award of a lifetime contribution to the history of psychiatry. his previous books include "madness and civilization,"

"hysteria: the disturbing history," and "madhouse: a tragic tale of mega mania and modern medicine." he has contributed to many previous documentaries -- many pbs documentaries. he blogs for -- and has written for the atlantic, scientific american, paris review, wall street journal, and the nation among many others. dr. david lehman received his medical degree from washington university st. louis medical school and completed his psychiatry residency at university of california san diego. he is chief of cognitive disorders clinic at the v.a. medical center in san diego and

medical director of the inpatient unit. he is heavily involved in education at the university of california san diego ethical school and the residency training program. in addition, he is the associate director for the third year -- clerkship and the court nadir of the fourth-year medical student psychiatry sub internship. please give a very warm welcome to andrew scull with david lehman. dr. lehman: i did not realize

warwick's was that ancient and i am very pleased. we are grateful to have the advantage of a place like this. i am pleased to be with you tonight. the book that i just completed i first envisioned in the early 1980's. it would have been a different book had i published it back then. i had spent my early part of my career looking at the emergence of psychiatry and the rise of the asylum in victorian england. before i publish that book, because i was tired of it, my doctoral thesis, but i went around doing interviews and people said isn't the shutting down of asylums a good thing?

i said i have been buried in the 19th century, i don't know. i knew how much money and intellectual capital had been invested in the idea that the mental hospital was the solution to mental illness. i thought that would be in interesting topic and more convenient to my colleagues who regarded victorian england as strange. i wrote the book on deins -- on deinstitutionalization. it is not right -- it was not quite all that it seemed. i like to think it was a wish and book -- a precient book, the people who live with mental illness and watch that has resold -- what's that has

resulted into. i did books that spanned history and i started to work on the 20th century. the period i was initially working on was 1920's and 1930's which was a period of extraordinary experimentation. mental patients were shut up, locked away and their voices were stifled. anything that had to say was a product of mental illness. that meant given the desperation at the time that they were vulnerable. the title occurred to me when i was a student in london.

i always had this project and " madness in civilization" in my head. i wanted to put american psychiatry in a long historical context. how did it come to be? how did it evolve as the hopes that we could cure mental illness start to decline into hopelessness toward the end of the 19th century were psychiatrists and the culture dismissed mentally ill people as degenerates? as people who were no longer fully human and had to be locked away lest they breed and produce

more of their kind. it was one that was imbued with dozens of helplessness. one of the things we did, california was the leader in the u.s.. we started involuntarily sterilizing the mental ill. california did not stop doing that until about 1960. that legislation was the model for the nazis in germany. they produced compulsory sterilization but lacking the restraints of our political system. they exterminated en masse and then decided these people were useless teachers and so they kill them -- useless eaters so they kill them.

it was there the technology of the gas chamber was developed. about 250,000 patients were killed at the test -- at the behest of top german psychologists. psychologists who were not satisfied with just being housekeepers, running in the asylum and keeping the population under wraps, they wanted to be healers. they looked for various ways to intervene. unfortunately, that produced some terrible results. at this point i will shut up for a few minutes and let david talk about those middle chapters

>> first of all, let me thank you for inviting me. you have been training me since i was a resident in psychiatry. and probably more than anyone else, introduced me to the unpalatable nature of the history of psychiatry. that unpalatable history has had a dramatic and in the end very positive effect on my psychiatric career. and i would think it sad and perhaps horribly amiss if a resident were to graduate from a psychiatry program and really not be familiar with these warnings that you do so well and in such a devastating and horrifying manner reporting on

the history of psychiatry. >> i think one of the things that is very important to understand is there was a strain in my discipline and among some renegades in the 1960's to dismiss mental illness, to claim it was a myth or a matter of social labels. and that has never been my point of view. i have seen it close up with close friends, one whom committed suicide after postpartum depression. i am not in any sense anti-psychiatry, but i am very much somebody who thinks we need to face up straightforwardly to the truth of what we can i cannot do, what we understand, what we don't understand, the limitations or knowledge, the

kinds of things that in the present we really ought to be doing and are not. and so while the book is heavily critical in many ways of psychiatry, it is not meant to be, and i'm glad to say the critics who have responded to it so far have not seen it as, an attack on the field but more an attempt to analyze ways in which it has gone wrong, ways in which it has made some limited progress and at the last 50, 70 years. the limits of that at the moment and the ways in which i think has been captured by very monochromatic view of mental illness so we concentrate on genetics, we concentrate on neuroscience. the upshot of that for patients who are actually sick has

basically been nothing. you think that is me speaking as the outsider, so i will just say, and so he ran i am in h from 2002 happen 22015, when he stepped down, said, you know over the last period, i spent a lot of money, about $20 billion and we funded some really cool neuroscience and really cool genetics and the payoff for patients has been zero. he was being too kind. if you look to people with serious mental illness, someone in the audience will know, the life expectancy of those people is 15 to 25 years less than the rest of us and that gap is growing, not diminishing. that is not purely psychiatry's fault, it is the result of public policy. but it is a sobering reminder

that we have a long way to go. >> >> the way i think about it is this way, those comments, psychiatry is concerned with the mind. the mind is an abstraction of the brain and the brain is by far the most complex organ in the body. the questions psychiatry asks are vastly orders of magnitude more difficult than other branches of medicine. , and, what is consciousness is among the most difficult question that science has ever posed. so i don't think it should be a surprise that psychiatry has not come up with many answers very quickly. it will take time. as you point out in the book in

the 1990's there was some irrational exuberance, the decade of the brain when we made all kinds of promises that have not yet been delivered. but from my perspective, what i was say to thomas is i see no reason why science, given the time to not address, is very, very difficult questions in psychiatry going the same way i in other branches of medicine. it is not going to happen in the next decade. but i don't see why it cannot happen. >> what i would add is it seems to me the distinction that is often made between the biological and the social is false dichotomy. our brains are very plastic organs. they are very much the joint product of the brain we are born with and the brain that develops over those years and patents

that develop within the brain are very much a product of the social and the cultural environment in which that brain matures and that person matures. one of the problems i have, i'm not trying to say there should not be neuroscientific research and should not be research into genetics, although so far that has proved to be something of a dead end. what i would like to see is research as well that deals with the other die mentions a mental illness and as a clinician, you are only too well aware of that. we have -- we need research on how best to give families some relief. we need research on how we provide suitable housing and social support for people with serious mental illness. nimh has largely neglected that for two decades now. >> yeah, but i think it seemed

that biological psychiatry was the way to go and you mention in your book how the rockefeller institute really struggled with this question what should they fund and who should they trust in terms of recommendations? there were so many advances that were happening so quickly with medical technology at the time that it seemed reasonable to place a bet on the sexy, exciting stuff rather than the quotidian, less fun and exciting questions of how you address loneliness and how you minimize the suffering associated with the human condition. >> i would agree, what many people may not realize, why it is important i think to have a historical perspective is that before the second world war,

there was essentially no federal involvement other than running one mental hospital in d.c. with no federal funding of medical research, let alone psychiatric research. the major actor filling that gap was in fact the rockefeller foundation, which made the rather brave and unorthodox decision on it early 1930's that it was going to find psychiatry as a least developed part of medicine and the one where it thought it could make the most difference. and it did spread its net quite widely. some of the directions it spent money, quite reasonable. others, and a delight of later developments, seemed rather problematic. for example, rockefeller founded -- funded the german nazi psychiatrists and continued to

do that right up until the break of world war ii. and was heavily involved. on the other hand, rockefeller also provided funds to try to rescue many psychoanalysts who were jewish from the nazis and bring them to america, and that proved to be a very difficult exercise. but it about doubled the number of psychoanalysts here and one of the preconditions for something that happened in america after the war which really had no counter anywhere else i'm aware of other than buenos aires, and that was the emergence and dominance for a period of about a quarter century of psychoanalysis in american psychiatry. understand that in 1950, there were a half-million people in america's mental hospitals and that continued to grow for another four or five years. those psychiatrists august the could not practice psychoanalysis -- obviously

could not practice psychoanalysis. it was in that environment the drugs revolution emerged, sort of the psychoanalysts. but if you look to academic psychiatry, if you looked to the high status growth of psychiatry on an outpatient basis, that was heavily psychoanalytic. and that was not just a matter of the profession. the whole of american culture, especially high culture, but also popular culture, was saturated with psychoanalytic ideas. freud was seen as the equivalent of darwin. we sort of raise a smile these days but intellectuals in all disciplines, the humanities of social sciences particularly, flocked to freudian ideas. look at the movie "spellbound," one of offered hitchcock's films

i think 1948, and you will see it is propaganda for psychiatry. it begins -- so there is that where people sought meaning in madness, tried to understand it on a psychological level, tried to treat it, and some american analysts went so far as to say that could treat schizophrenia with psychoanalysis. which freud himself had not thought possible. so it was really -- i can't stress -- other than washington using -- [laughter] david's alma mater. other than that, virtually every other department was headed by somebody who was either a psychoanalyst or sympathetic to psychoanalysis. and the best recruits to the profession went that way. that is where the rewards were. that is where the best patients were, those who had money and also were more interesting than

the ones stuck on the backboards at the state hospital. so it is curious in a way that the thing that marked a room revolution in psychiatry emerged not there and not in the university, but the mental hospitals, which is where the drugs, the antipsychotics, particularly thorazine and its copycat drugs, first emerged. what happened for many years is like a building being destroyed by termites, the structure looks solid. the psychoanalysts thought, we are in the saddle. with remarkable rapidity, that shifted. and we can date it is precisely in 1980, fueled by problems that had emerged about psychiatric diagnoses, the fact psychiatrists could not agree what was wrong, there was a

sustained effort to create a diagnostic system that at least was reliable -- which meant doctor here a doctor there look at the same patient, they would produce the same diagnosis. and it was an approach that was a theoretical by its nature but in fact underneath that, fueled by hostility to psychoanalysis and help to serve as the death mail for that branch of the profession. i think it is a complicated question. psychiatrists the generation who trained in the 1960's, psychoanalytic ideas. i know david can speak to that. >> if i have anything to do about it, they do. i have lots to criticize about psychoanalytic psychiatry, but

it is important to recognize that whatever the flaws in their doctrine and their ideas, whatever their flaws in the rigidity that produced in so many practitioners that in many ways they sowed the seeds of their own demise through the rigidity and esoterica. but they were and are the humanists in this story. and rather than sort of recorr ecting or redirecting some of the rigidity, they ended up throwing out the baby with the bathwater, wholesale of replacement of dynamic psychiatry with biological psychiatry. as troy gasper's would have pointed out decades previously,

that would be a dead-end. so far biological psychiatry is only part of the answer. and that needs to be recognized and is not always recognized. >> that is something i would concur with. i have my own quarrels with the rigidity of freud is him but it did give patients voice and that was very important. that is really lost now. it is interesting, there was a study done in the 1960's of what happens of psychiatric practice were like at that point. outside the institution, the average length of time somebody spent when they went to consult a psychiatrist was between 45 minutes and an hour. over the typical 55 minute hour. that meant there was a lot of exploration in the patient where now partly because of managed

care, partly because of the pressures of the insurance companies, partly the need -- psychiatry is not the best paid of medical specialties -- it has sort of become a pill mill. you see the psychiatrist for 10 minutes and that is barely time to really penetrate. it may be different but a lot of research has suggested that. there is a real decline on the profession part of delivering psychotherapy as well as the psychopharmacology the profession is come to terms on. indeed, one of the stories is the emergence of other professions in the psychiatric and psychological realms. so very many particularly patients with other kinds of disorders and up with clinical

psychologists and clinical social workers getting some of this psychotherapy they don't get when they go and see their md. >> this is an unpleasant topic. [laughter] these are economic forces that are driving this rather than theoretical forces, rather than ideas about what is possibly the best way to treat mental illness. and so in my mind, i separate out the mistakes made for theoretical, scientific, or ideological reasons from just the sheer market forces that every industry is going to respond to, producing either favorable or unfavorable results because of those incentives. >> i mean, what are the things that happen when the mental hospitals indeed out -- emptied

out, and it was mixed as my history shows, but there have been a long tradition of mental illness, unlike physical illness and this country, being a state responsibility, being something that was funded publicly. there was a very strong public psychiatric wing to the profession. it was obliterated, really. the profession did not protest, i would say -- some did, but not enough people protested about what was happening. but what was going on was not the product of the psychiatrists deciding this was the way forward. it really was the other forces that you were talking about, conscious public policy choices, pressures from the insurance industry, the availability over technology in the form of the drugs that looked like

conventional medicine and could be dispensed pretty quickly. and the insurance companies were not willing to pay decently for other kinds of care, and they still are not. >> yeah, unfortunately, that is the place that we find ourselves in right now. i think that one has to recognize if you're going to promote improved treatment for the severely mentally ill, you're going to have to recognize it is phenomenally expensive. i think your book comments when the asylums were open, it was the single biggest line item on the budgets of most states. that is jaw-dropping. and that was crappy care. that was snake pit care. so you can imagine the cost that would be involved in providing

beautiful state-of-the-art care for the severely mentally ill. and he brings up -- it brings up a very difficult question that most people do not want to look in the face, which is, should people with severe mental illness who are marginalized and do not vote get the majority of the resources that otherwise are going to people with mental illness but not asylum-level mental illness? >> i think that is -- i think one of the other things that i would say that is not confined to the history review here at the last 200 years or so but extends much through all of recorded history that i'm aware of, mental illness is something that it constantly is associated

with fear and rejection. and so this is a population, as david said, they don't vote so in that sense the politicians are not going to be responsive to them, but much of the problems are kind of hidden away . i think one of the things i saw in the years of the institutionalization, a lot of the burn originally fell on the families where they were still intact, and particularly on women who are often pulled out of the workforce to care full-time for the patient, eventually crumbled under that strain very often. it is just too much. those families who are very reluctant to make a lot of noise , and the reason for that is obvious. they did not want people to know that in their domestic bliss,

there actually was something else happening. it is amazing how when you become aware of this problem, people sometimes will open up and you realize what they have been going through. when that breaks down, in fact so called welfare reform has been worse, harder for them to get social supports. states have not replaced the moneys they used to for the most part to been on the mental hospitals. in new york state in 1950, it was 30% of the state budget was the mental hospitals. extraordinary number. so what we see as a result, we see the worst of it, i mean, living in california whether you are downtown san francisco, l.a., san diego, the problem of

homelessness -- which is not only a problem of mental illness but a subset, an important subset is in effect people with serious psychiatric problems who just cycle from the flophouse to the jail with an occasional stop of in the psychiatrist office to get a prescription and then back into the cycle all over again. it is a dismal part of life in a country as rich as ours, and that is what we face. >> i would suspect you and i differ politically this issue. when i read the book, one of the things that jumps out at me is how many of the devastatingly bad ideas were promoted by progressive ideas. so much of psychiatry involved unscrupulous people. but more of it was well-meaning

people who did hugely unscrupulous things. jaw-dropping. in the name of the ends justify the means. they were so enamored with their do goodism ideas that they lost the boundaries of western civilization's ideas. i think eugenics is an example of that and deinstitutionalization is an example of that and so i do worry quite a bit that the idea that if we just sit down and come up with yet another program to help the severely mentally ill and spend a lot of money on it, that that will then be the panacea. i have my doubts and i see these patients in the emergency room on riegler bases that i know the solution is going to be much more difficult and challenging

than convincing the state of california to spend more money. >> i don't disagree at all, david, actually. one of the great messages i think of the book is psychiatry would take to heart the hippocratic injunction first do no harm. that jumping into enthusiasm and refusing to see the evidence that runs contrary to one's enthusiasm and thinking you have a magic wand that will solve the problem, that is repeatedly happened over the last 200 years. the results have almost been uniformly disastrous. indeed, some of these people were perhaps -- many of them were absolutely sincere in their belief that they had discovered the royal road to intervening.

one of the figures in this book who also is in my book "madhouse" is a gentleman named henry kotten who ran the new jersey state asylum in trenton from about 1908 until he died suddenly in 1933. kotten decided, it is an idea he may have picked up from arguably the third major figure of times, that mental illness was the result of infections lurking under the body that were poisoning the brain. a. about a era, the only solution was to surgically eliminate them. this first targets were teeth. a lot of people had run into. you pull those, put and then -- and then pull tonsils.

the people did not get better, instead of thinking i'm on the wrong track, you have to have other areas of infections in the body and kotten starts eliminating stomachs and spleens and another pattern, women are disproportionately targeted for some reason. we can talk about what i think some of the reasons were but trust me, 65%, 70% of patients were female who operated on. when i say he was sincere, he decided any teeth were a potential menace and so he had his wife's teeth and his two children steve prophylactically removed. then one of his sons seem to be masterbating, he removed part of his colon. when he fell mentally ill under pressures of an investigation into him, he went to hot

springs, arkansas, and had his own teeth pulled. so he believed what he was doing but what he was doing was an absolute scientific travesty. it wasn't unique to him. he was praised when he went to london in 1927 as psychiatry's lister who had introduced antiseptic surgery. and that by the most prominent figures in british medicine. walter freeman was sincere. he was a moral monster and my eyes. he lobotomized kids as young as four. and boasted their brains could tolerate more damage. and when i took part in the pbs documentary, i think you can still see it online which is about his career, it is too sympathetic in my view to freeman but nonetheless two of

his children took part but so did one of his last lobotomy patients,, named howard who was lobotomized at 11 after his parents marriage broke up and his new stepmother decided he was acting out too much and needed to have his brain operated on. there's a lot of sincerity. sincerity does not cut it in my book. yes, very often -- the asylum experiment, it was small, intimate institutions. and the early years, they did. they had charismatic heads. but to do it with the hordes of patients who flooded into state hospitals, that just was not possible. i don't inc. we are that far apart -- i don't think we're that far apart. >> it is weird to note two of

the nobel prizes given out in psychiatry were given out to really horrific treatments. the nobel prize for injecting mentally ill patients would likely general creases of the insane with malaria. malaria was used as a treatment for tertiary syphilis. and then the great portuguese neurosurgeon got the nobel prize for the invention of the prefrontal lobotomy. close i should add that was 14 years after the first lobotomy. so one might have thought there been time to accumulate enough contrary evidence. but no. there really wasn't. into the 1950's, the operation continued in some instances even

into the 60's. there were a couple of enthusiasts in england and yale as well. the other thing to bear in mind is these were not necessarily patients visited on the poorest. we often think, oh, well, the extremity would have taken place -- the experimentation would have taken place on the most vulnerable. but in fact, perhaps the most famous case of botched lobotomy -- they were all botched as far as i'm concerned -- but one of the worst outcomes was rosemary kennedy, jack kennedy sister, whose father had her lobotomized in the early 1940's. she could barely walk. she was incontinent. she had to be trained to speak again. she was locked away in the kennedy family kept her out of sight and out of mind. i don't think ever visited.

again, the earliest lobotomy patients were all outpatients. they were people with money. they came because they heard about this miracle cure. they volunteered for it. the institute of living in hartford, connecticut what was and probably is a rather prominent private psychiatric facility. it was the first mental hospital to build a special surgical suite to perform lobotomy's. the maclean, which is probably still the most expensive psychiatric hospital in the country, also lobotomized a substantial number of his patients, particularly women. the narrative is very complicated. i think mental illness brings with it a great deal of honor ability, enormous amount of -- vulnerability, enormous amount of suffering. it is, as one of my fellow

strains, often a very solitary nightmarish place to be. then for everyone around them, just profoundly disruptive and disturbing and threatening. >> i would like to highlight the word "desperate" in the title of your book. this is an eight amash to dr. ebright band who i had the great fortune of having here today. he is emeritus psychiatrist here in san diego who has trained hundreds and hundreds of psychiatrists over his career. what is so important to learn and psychiatric training is the experience of desperation that you have. you have patients that are suffering in the most horrible ways.

some of them are violent. when we have one violent patient in our unit, that is very disruptive. i think about asylums with hundreds of violent, disruptive patients with no thorazine. what could you do? it is very scary to go to work being afraid you might be assaulted. that is very real. that is not an excuse in anyway for putting an ice fit in somebody's brain but unfortunately, it helps me understand how people got to such a desperate place. and what the doctor has told me is when you feel that desperation, then a part of your brain should be turning off and saying, oh, i know what happens next. so whatever i think i'm going to do next, i'm going to observe

and maybe get a second opinion and spend some time thinking about before i run off and try and save the world. >> i think that is very right. it is precisely the desperation which is the desperation felt by the patient. felt by the family, the therapist. do something. that sometimes doing something is worse than not doing anything at all. and that is a history we see again and again. it is the desperation that makes it possible for people to conceive a bright idea that takes you down a rabbit hole and persuades families and patients to accompany them down the rabbit hole. yes, the title is meant to have multiple meetings -- meanings. it is just such -- it is hard to

avoid despair when i was writing the book. so depressing. your conclusion you're like, yes, the drugs are better than not having the drugs but the drugs for some people are positively -- they create and those that is as bad or worse than the disease they are treating. as i look at modern psychopharmacology, i see patients falling into three groups. part of the problem for psychiatrists is we don't know in advance when a patient resents -- i should not say we. they don't know. i don't like to pretend the expertise absolutely don't have. but they don't know which groups somebody is going to fall into. for some of the patients,

antidepressants and antipsychotics to radical difference in a positive direction. they transform someone who is raving, hallucinating. they that down, possible contact with what the rest of us like to call reality. and there's a group of patients in the middle. with all medical treatments, there is no free lunch. there are always side effects. things we don't want that come with the things we do. with psychiatric medications, though side effects often are very severe, sometimes lifelong once you have contracted them. with the middle group of patients, they are expressing the side effects more than the first group us oak of, trying to weigh the benefit the drug perhaps produces against the problems it creates. then you have another group of patients who just don't respond.

if they get anything, they get the side effects. that is not what it is supposed to be about. any damages of this problem really. -- and the die mentions of this problem are really very great. a lot of the research done on drugs is been funded by the drug companies. unfortunate, deeply contaminated by that. it looks like evidence-based medicine. it is biased because they suppress the data they don't like and they cook the books. in 2005, there was a very large study called katie which appeared in the new england journal of medicine led by jeffrey lieberman was recently forced to step down after he made some rather unfortunate public remarks. but what that study showed, it looked at any original antipsychotic. one is the first generation

along with one from the 1950's. and three so-called atypical modern drugs. is it is the old drug inferior to the current drug and how well do these work? the answers on both fronts were not very reassuring. the new drugs did not perform better than the old drugs. they cost a lot more money because they were patented. they were not better. that different side effect profile but it was equally as serious. the other thing i found striking reading that study, depending on which drug -- there were four in the trial -- between 67% and 82% of the patients dropped out either because the drug was not working or they could not stand the side effects. so we don't have psychiatric penicillin. we have pills that help some people. if, god for bid, i had a relative who needed psychiatric care, i would not stand in the

way of a trial -- a careful trial of drug treatment but i would be very aware the odds were mixed about whether it was going to work in that particular case. i would be delighted if it did, but not surprised if it didn't. what do you think, david? >> i am big pro forma. i don't know if it is unexpected given this discussion, but i would be so sad to think of a career in psychiatry without the benefits of modern chemistry that the pharmaceutical companies have provided. lord knows they have been naughty at times in their marketing styles, brushing things under the rug. it's true. big pharma has really provided

the possibility of relief for so many patients. i am so thankful for that. >> on the other hand, and i agree with that -- i mean, i do not dissent. it is very important to understand that we have had some progress and that progress in many ways have been tied to the drug's ability to reach a substantial number of people suffering, but by no means all. but the others had thing is, as you know, big pharma has pulled out. they are no longer looking for new treatments, improved drugs. partly the reputation over the naughtiness david was talking about that i discovered in the book, but more than that, they could not see a way to make a profit. there was no obvious new avenue to explore.

there are some fly-by-night operations done using ketamine and psychedelic treatments. there are some people advocating for deep brain stimulation as a solution to depression as though we know where depression resides in the brain. we don't. so there are those things but the companies that for 60 years? there were heavily involved in the process of doing research on possible pharmacological treatments have gone away. they have disbanded their departments. they have stopped. they found other areas of medicine are more profitable. research follows profit in our system. it is not an ultra stick phenomenon -- altruistic phenomenon. a might be if there was public

funding, but there is not enough of that around. that is another facet of our contemporary situation that unless you are somebody who just like the scientologist dismisses psychiatric medications as poisons that have no therapeutic value, you cannot see that as a positive development for all the bad things the drug companies did along the way. >> should we take questions? >> i would love to if there are some questions. >> you talked about the issue of the homelessness and mentally ill. indeed when you read the current voter pamphlet, think anyone running from the board of equalization to governor to anything you can think of, director of finance, they all make reference -- and i wish to

solve the problems of the homeless. can you share your thoughts about what possibly might be effective? >> well, i don't think anybody has a good solution to that particular problem. simply throwing money at it isn't going to resolve it. san francisco spends on average i think $35,000 per head a year. anybody who spends time in that city as i do realizes they ain't getting much value for their money. it is a mess. one of the issues, and it is when we sort of skirted around, back in the days of the old mental hospital, most people got into the mental hospital forcibly, so to speak.

if necessary, the cops showed up and took them. so there was compulsion and they could not leave. even if they wanted to. these days that whole situation is very tricky and it is one of those political minefields -- currently there are some new ideas about this which potentially involve some degree of compulsion and civil libertarians are up in arms about that. and i get that having seen what it was like when people were shut up, as i said, in both senses of the term. it is very dangerous situation. on the other hand, many of those people are very resistant and getting treatment. the texture of life in our cities is being undermined by their presence. so i think politicians are

responding to the fact -- when i wrote my first book about it, is that these people were largely being returned to the poorest, most deprived areas of the city. that is where the social services such as they were were and those people had no political voice. they had no political clout. they could not protest. but what has happened as the numbers have multiplied is they are everywhere. we used to be able -- we used to be able to shut our eyes to what was going on unless you are in the biz. and now it is inescapable and it is provoking a backlash even in cities that think of themselves as progressive like san francisco. i think san francisco -- don't get me started. that city is in a really strange place. i don't know, do you have anything to add, david?

>> my perspective is that psychiatrists are not the people to solve the housing problem. i think economists would be a much better place to start. and so many mental health practitioners who weigh in on this question have absolutely no training in economics, which to me seems bordering on fraudulent. and i think milton friedman had a lot to say on the issues of supply demand. and if you don't have enough supply, how do you trust it. it may -- maybe a way to start would be to look at those questions. >> i agree substantially there. i think new b is him in california and the overload of regulation which is really

stymied supply of housing level that is needed contributed. by no means all the people you see in the street are people who are mentally ill8 drug addicted or alcoholic. many of them are people who literally can no longer afford a roof over their heads. anybody who has watched what happens to california housing crisis, it is no surprise -- you wonder how anybody with an ordinary job manages to put a roof over their heads my feed and clothe themselves and their kids, and have any margin beyond that. it just gets worse and worse. and it is, it is a supply demand problem. if you have millions of people and you don't build enough houses, you are going to face exactly that problem. not always what is going on -- in england, for example, in london, the housing is big

brought up by corrupt money. it is russian, chinese, arab, dirty money from all of the world. and many of those houses sit empty. they are a parking place for ill-gotten gains. i think in new york there's a bit of that phenomenon. here, not so much. here we really have created a problem for ourselves. and it is also people's expectations. houses just get bigger and bigger, they get more more complicated and expensive. and what that loses sight of is for ordinary people, that is not something they could ever afford or even -- they need a decent place to live and we don't have -- i agree with you, that is not a psychiatric problem. not at all. in fact, the institutionalization problem is created problem that some ways is psychiatric and psychiatry tries to cope with, but it is

the product of much larger social movements and social forces. and so to look to psychiatry to solve those problems seems to me a category mistake. >> great way to put it, category mistake. >> you made reference to psychedelic [indiscernible] is this our new desperate remedy? >> it is a little early to tell but it has some of the signs of it. >> yes, it does. >> i was reading a couple of papers this afternoon just before i came down about the emergence of a number of huge startups, billion-dollar companies, who are investing in this thing. once that genie is out of the bottle, it is going to be very hard to put back. i look at things like there has been this revival of interest in

lsd, magic mushrooms, blah blah blah. same thing with ketamine. ketamine, yeah, changes mood. we know that. for years it was a pretty drug, it was special k. it also produces hallucinations, can produce damage to the bladder. it has a lot of potential -- once it is given some sort of license, there will be unscrupulous companies and people who will set up shop. and i have been hearing about this infusion, people who are given infusions for other medical things saying, here's a great source of new revenue. unregulated -- yes, i do think both of those things have the potential to be a new desperate remedy. people used to always say to me when i talk about henry kotten, it couldn't happen now.

well, it would not happen exactly that way, but it could happen. you could have some damaging remedy take hold and then be out of control and hard to stop. and you see figures like michael pullen, for example, who has become a cult figure because of his very interesting writings on the food chain, now touting this -- it sounds like timothy leary reborn. and it is very dangerous. i do worry about exactly those developments very much so. >> do you have any idea compares to canada or europe with regard to the treatment of the mentally ill? and so forth?

especially with socialized medicine, are they worse off than us? better than us? >> i am most familiar with the english situation. i know little bit about things in europe and i was just there. homelessness was somewhat less visible in london in the last time i visited and i was a little surprise. out of the blue, a british psychiatrist i know who's is a member of the house of lords, elaine murphy, wrote to me and said, you know, one of the artifacts of the covid epidemic was the government swept those people off the streets because they saw them as reservoirs of infection for covid. so they move them to sheltered housing in a hurry. but says now they are leaking back out. so on the whole, i argue that one of the things that really drove deinstitutionalization were states were able to move patients off the state budget

and under the federal budget. medicare prompted a flood of people, old people being moved out of the asylum and into nursing homes and boarding care homes. when ssi came in, which provided some support regardless of your work history, then the young people started to be moved out at the hospital. so it was possible here to move -- it is a shell game. then as the feds cap back on some forms of welfare, that was not replaced and so the situation in some ways got worse. britain, like most of europe, has a more developed welfare state than we ever did. but nonetheless, i will tell you talking with well-informed and well-intentioned british psychiatrists whom i trust, psychiatry has i was got the short end of the stick. and even when the health service

was funded rather better under tony blair, for a few of those new resources trickled into psychiatry. it was always the stepchild. as david was saying earlier, this is not a politically powerful constituency. there is nobody arguing for them. if we are seeing arguments now about homelessness, it is not because we have sympathy for the people in the street. it is because they are affecting our quality of life and we don't like it. that is the honest truth. so a little bit better because there is more developed set of social services, but in the last dozen years under first the coalition and the conservative government and now with brexit, things -- public services have been slashed in britain and they're probably going to be slashed more because their

economy is going down the toilet. it is hard to find things when you -- fund things. i think politically you have to understand if the productive part of the economy is not thriving, you cannot afford to do all these nice things you think you would like to do. as we move toward potential recession, it is a very worrisome time because i have seen ed, mental health budgets -- seen it. mental health budgets are prime candidates to be cut. texas cut its mental health budget for other prattling and at the last dreadful week, and they redirected it to the show game of we're going to control the border because the feds are not doing it. and then there is a shooting and instead of saying that we have a problem with guns, it is blamed on mental illness.

the problem is not that we have too many crazy people, it is that we have, in my view, absolutely crazy gun laws. and that i don't see any fix for. when you have 400 million guns out there, it is hard. but maybe you don't allow 18-year-olds on their birthday to buy two high powered rifles, a munition, and body armor. maybe have some sensible restriction that we don't do that rather than thoughts and prayers after the slaughter of the innocents. sorry to be on a soapbox. that one really angers me. mental illness being blamed -- what that does as well is exacerbates something i talked about earlier this evening, namely the stigma that attaches mentally people. mental illness sometimes produces violence but i know is is it the case that everyone who is mentally ill turns violent.

to the extent we encourage that equation, we make that population fearsome and not something we want to look away. rather than deal humanely with. any more questions? >> i have a question. this is a favorite topic of mine involving psychiatric history and the editor of the dsm-iv has bemoaned the allowing the explosion of psychiatric diagnoses in dsm-iv and expanding the dsm-v. he fought a losing battle trying to prevent the dsm-v from growing even bigger. where do you stand on that? >> i think that all through the

200 years i have looked at the problem of what someone has called diagnostic can be seen. it happened in the asylum era, a lot of people got scooped up and probably could have been cope with in other ways, cope with, in other ways -- coped with in other ways. the dsm is the diagnostic and statistical manual. you have to have it to get insurance reimbursement and be diagnosed as mentally ill. alan francis was the editor in chief of the fourth edition, he said he created an nightmare in respect to autism which exploded in numbers.

that was a controversial thing to say. for parents with an difficult child -- with a difficult child, access to that diagnosis was actually something that they so ught because our educational advantage and things they have were not have gotten. when it was leaked that the tax force was considering changing the boundaries there was fears of backlash, it is easy to think this is all a the product of an realistic profession -- imperialistic profession. it is also public demand. i'll be thinking about the issue of, which has become a huge thing. a huge industry.

taking no stance on where mental illness came from, with ptsd, ptsd had a very clear ideology and it was not brain disease, it was a product of traumatic experience. that first emerged among vietnam veterans against the war. they allied themselves with two harvard psychiatrists who were sympathetic to them and they browbeat spitzer. eventually they succeeded to a point. they wanted to call it post-vietnam syndrome. he was not having any of that. it became posttraumatic stress disorder. over time, it expanded in ways that makes sense to me intellectually. for example, women who have been victimized by rape and sexual assault.

very profound change in their identity and lives. people who -- after texas, right? pretty soon, it was my college student is upset by what he is being asked to read in class, we need trigger warnings. we are going to suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder. that sort creep is very dangerous. -- that sort of diagnostic crete eep is dangerous. what do you say? >> ditto. >> thank you all for being such a patient audience, i hope we have imparted something. i would like to thank david who i have known for a lot of years now.

thanks to steve and david. when i have had a student with either a serious problems of self or with family issues, that i needed -- that needed somebody, he is who i refer people to. i wish i knew more clinicians like david. >> thank you both very much. this has been a very enlightening evening. the next time you write a book, i invite you back. thank you all for coming. [applause]

and joining now on book tv is, steve moore. his most recent book is gov zilla how the relentless growth of government is devouring our economy and our freedom. mr. moore, has government ever not? hi peter, good to be with you. love c-span. thanks for having. the book really through the whole history from the of our country and there's a lot graphs and charts in this that show we have had kind of a relentless growth of government but there have been periods. it's a good question, actually. have there been periods government has retrenched? and the answer is.

yes. so, for example for the first 50 to 100 years of our country, there really wasn't much growth of government. if government, you know, the federal government basically provided the postal service, built the roads, it provided the national and had a court system. but we didn't have all the, you know, social programs. and there was no education department or energy department back then. and and then, of course, the big. i think there were two or three things that happened in the united states that the big increase in government one was the adoption, the income tax. because remember, for the first hundred years of this country, the the constitution actually prohibited an income tax. and then we passed a believe it was the 16th amendment. but don't quote me on that i think was the 16th amendment back in around 1913 that enabled an income tax. well that provided this new revenue for the government. and yes what they did they started spending it. so you had a big burst of government at that period. and then, of course, you had the

new deal era where government got involved in all sorts of new social and things like that that had never really existed before. and then you had the the great society programs of the 1960s where we again expanded, the size and scope of government and then it just keeps going up and up. but there was a period where government actually fell back. and so, for example, the civil war, when you know, you got a massive increase in government during the civil war, then spending came way down after the civil war, after world war two, when the government almost half of the gdp to defeat the nazis and the japanese. then government spending went from like 48% of our gdp down to back, down to like less 20% of gdp. that's a big that's a big reduction. and then in the reagan era, we saw some cuts in spending, but nothing like what we're seeing today. incidentally, during the twice

21, we were at the height of the covid crisis for the first time in our country's history even more so than world war two, the government became almost half of our economy because so much of the business was shut down. so you mentioned reagan, who was a hero for many on the right, like rand paul. the introduction to your new book. yeah and he wrote, when i first came to washington in the year 1980 for the entire federal budget was the less than $1 trillion. and it was reagan who introduced the first trillion dollar budget. yeah i was working for reagan at that time. we weren't very proud of that, you know, and but it is i tell story because now here we are 30 some years later. later it's not 1 trillion. now it's 6 trillion. i mean, it's just amazing much we've seen government grow in areas that i think our founding fathers one of the ideas i'd like to install in this book is that our founders really have the idea of a very limited

federal government. now over time obviously that has expanded but there's something the enumerated powers in our constitution which basically say, you know, if powers are explicitly to the federal government, by the way, we're having a big fight about this, you know, on issues like guns and abortion and things like that, you know, where you divide the line between where the states have the rights and where the federal government has oversight of these things. but i believe that we would i believe in a federalist system that let the states do it. this this the idea of states being of democracy. if you have 50 states exploring, do we deal with welfare, how do we deal with health care? do we deal with our schools? how do we provide good transportation? the states do learn from each other. i think that's an ingenious system. i like to talk in the book about what i the forgotten ninth and 10th amendments and the ninth and 10th amendments. a lot of kids don't even know what that is but basically what

those two amendments say is that rights and power is explicitly given to the federal government reside with the states and the people the states and the people. and i love that. i'm i'm of libertarian. i don't like the government. so that was the idea behind our constitution. i think we've really moved away from that. well, thomas paine said, that government is a necessary evil, right. do you agree? i do. i do. and i think too many people think that government is is a is a positive good. and i'm look, i'm not calling for anarchy or anything like that. i do believe you need a strong defense. i believe we need good transportation. i, i believe in a safety net, a rich country. we don't want to go hungry or homeless in this. we don't want people to be living deprivation. we have a lot of work to do to on that score. but i also think that, you know, for example, if we're going to give somebody money, then they should have to do something in return for, you know. so i like what bill and gingrich

did back in the when we had the work where, you know, we're going to provide you with the funding but you actually have to either be working for work or in a job or training and. we've moved away from that right now. and i think that's been a big mistake. it's of the reasons a lot of businesses can't get workers. we're paying people money for in welfare benefits, but we're not expecting them to do something in return for that. what's the difference? the importance of government debt, government deficits? so i guess i get asked that question the time. so the deficit is the amount of the excess of the spending over the of revenue. so think of it as your your personal finance. if you make $2,000 in in a month and then you spend 20 $500 that month, you have a $500 deficit. right your your and that's we've been running is these annual deficits now what is the debt the national is the accumulation over time all those deficits and

so we are now depending on how you measure it. there's a lot of different ways you can our debt but it. 20 to $30 trillion of debt and again going back to 1980 485 at that time the debt was less than to show you. now we're up to 20 trillion. 20 or 25 or 30 trillion. so i'm sorry. i just worried that the story is not going to end happily. i think we have get our government spending under control. how do we do that? good question. well, let's go back to be enforcing the constitution let's move a lot of these powers back to the states and the people. i think we need to have some spending caps. i think i do believe in a balanced budget requirement, which i think most would like to see. and so a lot of it is just so the american people have to be educated about what our government is doing. that's why i'm such a fan of c-span because you do that every

day, you educate and you provide both sides of the story. but you allow people to make up their own minds about what's happening with our government. i'm a big fan of washington journal. i do that show maybe once every six weeks, but i watch it a lot. and listen to it on the radio because it it's educational. americans need to know what's happening with their government. so when government bonds are sold, where do they go? so that's a good one, too. so i've got to check. this is. i've been talking a lot about this because of the situation we're in right now. so in the last three years, two and a half years or so since covid hit, we've borrowed somewhere in the neighborhood of three or $4 trillion just in the last 30 months. and mr.. where did we borrow that from? okay, so i'm getting that. okay. okay. so we spent the $3 trillion more than we brought in. so then how does the government get the money to spend the money if it doesn't have the revenue?

well, that's your point. if it goes issues treasury bonds, it issues that it goes into. people buy the bonds. the government gets the money and then spends it. so then the question, of course, is this is tricky part. who buys the bonds. well, traditionally it's been americans who buy the bonds. in other words. so, for example during world war two, we had the war debt and people would buy, you know, it was patriotic. you would buy the number you'd buy the war bonds you know as your way of contributing to the war efforts. and that's been the case where throughout most of history the american citizens bought the so we kind of owed it to ourselves. but what's happened lately is two things. first of all, foreign governments are buying lot of our debt. and guess which country is buying the most of it? china. so that makes me a little nervous because i don't want to be indebted to our. but the other thing going on is the federal reserve board is buying the debt now. that's interesting. is it because that means is one arm of the government is spending the money, another arm

of the government is issuing debt and another of the government is buying lots. now, there's one other part of this chain where this the federal where does federal reserve board get the money to buy the bonds? well, they print it. they print it. and what that policy is is called that's called kind of nationalizing your debt. and what worries me is that that cycle that i just described, that's what's countries, argentina and venezuela and bolivia and, you know, and zimbabwe. do you know, there's a i don't have my wallet right. but, you know, $1,000,000,000,000 zimbabwe currency know, you think, oh, my god, i must be rich. this is trillion dollars. it's worth about $0.36, you know, so you depreciate the value of your currency. and that makes me nervous. and incidentally, i felt there's one other step in this chain when the federal government is buying all the debt, it's

issuing more money, it's printing more money. what happens to the value of the dollar when? the when the fed all that money, it goes down. and that's one of the reasons we have this inflation right now. we're spending borrowing way too much money from your book gov zilla. quote we will borrow trillions of dollars and pray that the continue to buy up our bonds. what okay. and i apologize the ignorance of this question. but do the chinese own a stake in the american government? so they you know, it's a tricky question. some people would say, well because they. what's the old saying? you know, if if you lower the $500, you're big trouble. you know, if you all the bank $5 million, the banks are in trouble. right. so there is to some. why are the chinese buying our bonds?

well, because they they they have confidence that americans will repay those bonds. they think that they're the best. but the saying the american dollar is that we the least rotten apple in the car. so the dollar is actually strong right now relative to all these other currencies, the euro and, you know, the peso, the other the because people do have confidence in america that we repay our debts. and i do, too. but at some point, when the debt gets so then that causes real hardship and means, by the way, that the next generation a lot of those taxes they're going to be paying peter are going to go to the chinese because they're going to be paying taxes to repay the debt that we've issued. so that's why i use this term fiscal child abuse in budget. and by that i mean, you know, you and i and all the people in this in this conference, we're all maybe in our 30, 40, 50, 60. our government is borrowing, borrowing or who's going to pay off that debt? our children and our grandchildren. so it's like call it fiscal

child abuse. steve, in the previous answer, you mentioned the federal reserve for about two days in 2020, your phone was blowing up because your name was floated. it was more than two days, by the way. was it more like two months? yeah. your name was floated. yes. potential. well, i was nominated by the president. president trump? i had worked for trump as a senior economic adviser during the campaign and had worked him in an unofficial capacity. he was the president and he you know, the quick story on this is he called me and he asked me to do the on the federal reserve board and, you know, i had never actually really thought it before. and i you know you don't say no to the president when he and then i had to go, oh, what does a former governor do? i mean, i knew what the federal reserve board does, but i wasn't really sure, you know, responsibilities of all the governors. but what happened was, as soon as was really nominated, all of a sudden all these and i didn't even know at the time when the president asked me to do this, that i would have to go through senate confirmation. and my advice to people is if

president ever asks you to do a job, you have to go through senate confirmation, say no, because you're put under the microscope and all of a sudden, i mean, literally, these reporters were calling girls dated in college. you know, did he ever, you know, mistreat you and, you know, look, i'm no say i have skeletons closet, you know, and if i did a lot of them so i finally just. one quick story about that, though, is i called the president a few times, said, mr. president, you know, this going well, you know, and i don't want to embarrass you. so i, i, i, you know, think i should probably resign, you know, step aside. and he was the one who kept saying, you know, and this is something i've known about donald trump. he's a fighter he said, no, i want you to keep going. you know, it's like you're boxer and you're getting forward. get back in the ring, you know, and then finally, when it became clear i didn't have the votes in the senate, we finally withdrew but it was a it was a painful experience because, you know every day is like, oh, what what did i say back in 1987 or

something that, you know, offended someone. and so, you know, it was it was a it was experience that i, i think it's like i said that it confirmation if you want attack my ideas. yeah i you know that's perfectly but to dig up all this dirt on me and like that i mean that's the ugliness of our current political system and as i said, i'm not a saint. i've done things, you know, that i'm not proud of, said things i'm not proud of, but i'm surprised by the way, peter, if this kind of toxic nature goes on that people are to want to do these positions, know in government and i know a lot of people are ralph mollified, just say i'm not i'm not going to go through that. back to gov zilla. california is textbook example of financial mismanagement. california, though, has a big budget surplus. yeah. you know where they got it from, sam? what happened was during covid,

the federal government gave all this money to california. and, you know, look, don't like that when the federal government gives money to states because think about it this way. the only way that the united states government can give money to california is by the money from the other 49 states. right. so it's just a glitzy game, you know. well, we'll give this money, you know, so i don't want the states, you know, federal to do that. but california really in i think really terrible shape. what's happened in san francisco angeles the the problems homelessness the problems with poverty the problems with the schools people are leaving. calif one out. this is one of the themes of the book. you know blue states like california grew up in the chicago area. illinois is losing a lot of this. caterpillar just left illinois, which is one of its iconic companies. boeing just lost illinois. elon musk is really famous now. he left california. you're seeing a lot of people just moving away from these high

tax, high regulation. and i think they better get their house in order because and by the way, you know where they're going. a lot of them are going to two states, texas, florida, two states that have no income tax. steve moore, as you've sidetrack me a little bit here is elon musk, a of yours or she's somebody who's good for the country, in your view. boy, a complicated question because he's really changed his political philosophy over the last 20 years. when when started with all these companies, like a solar power company and tesla and space x, he was getting all this government money. we called him the $5 billion man because i don't think there was money. whose companies got more money than elon musk yet. but i do i do like fact that he has kind of woken up to the dangers of wokeism that he is now like this show doesn't have any.

for example, he wants to he's an advocate of free speech and i have to you know, you have rights, you have the right to say what you want to say. i have the right to say what i want to say. this idea that i don't like. what's peter you're saying? so i'm going to shut your voice down. i don't think that's you know, we're pretty rare in this country among all the countries in the world that we have the bill of rights, which are really to sacred, you know, the right of assembly, right of religion, the right of free speech, you know, the right to bear arms, the right the right of a fair trial, all of these things are really in history, not very prevalent. so i admire that about elon musk at the end of godzilla. you have some reforms that you suggest to maybe get off this hamster. yes. and there are a lot of them are thought experiments, but if you want to ask me about it. i do. i do. yeah. term limits for congress. i've always liked vermont. i, i believe that we should not a permanent political class and

i don't know what the term all that should be. i would go for something maybe two terms in the senate that would be 12 years in the senate. yeah, maybe four or five or six terms in the house, maybe ten, 12 years in the house, and then you get back to it. and that was really the way the country what the reason in my opinion term limits were not never in the constitution is because nobody ever thought you'd have this permanent political. and if you go back to the early years of our country, i mean, george washington is the perfect example. there was no two term limit and he could have served. you know, he was the most popular president in history, could have served until his death. he could have. but he said, no, we don't want a ruling. we don't want tomorrow. and, you know i think that was one of the great things about george vi, is that it's for someone else to rule. so i'd be a big advocate of that. and having more of a citizen legislature with people from, farmers and businessmen and teachers and nurses people who know about america really making a lot of these decisions right now, it's lawyers and lobbyists who run washington.

steve moore, you also suggest a federal spending. yes, but at some point, aren't we in so deep? well, a small spending limit is that would be important. i mean, spending work when they're put in place in other countries and in states so i think it would work. but you're right. i mean we've dug ourselves in a pretty deep dish ditch. but peter, don't you think maybe we should stop digging? you know, that's my warning in this book. let's at least stop digging the ditch deeper. and this alone, we're going you know, joe biden's been bragging about, oh, we're only going to run $1,000,000,000,000 deficit this year. well, when you and i got started in this business. could you ever imagine trillion dollar deficits now that's heralded as some kind, a progress? oh, by the way, do you know how many zeros there in a trillion? peter, i just don't know. that would be a billion as 12, 12 zeros. thank you. i'm glad to learn that.

no, a lot of people know. that's the problem, though, isn't it? most people you can't write that. you get people watching. so we can't tell that of a million, 10 million, 100 billion. i mean, numbers are so large, we've become anesthetized. so, yeah, we're we're immune to these. exactly. aren't we. in other words, if i told you the government wasted $200,000 on a program, you said that's outrageous $200,000. that's more money than i make or something like that. but if i said it's $20 billion, you know, okay, you know, you can't even comprehend it. two more recommends options before we let go. privatize assets, but do that privatize federal assets. what does that mean? this is an important one. you we the federal government owns, a huge amount of the land in this country. i forgetting exactly but west of

mississippi it's over 50% of the land area is owned by the government. the government has not a very been a very good custodian. now, look, i'm not talking about our national parks. i'm not talking about our national treasures. i'm not talking about privatizing this smithsonian or, you know, yosemite or yellowstone. but there's home huge amounts of layered that could be the government could get by selling it. by the way, one of the ways that the united states raised revenue for the first hundred years of our country before we had an income tax. you know what? one of the major revenue raisers, land sales for, the federal government sold land and that the revenue it collected to do its purposes. so this is in perfect tradition with our country but it's not just land there's buildings there is huge amounts of energy resources that we have in this country. i mean, we're a very richly endowed country with energy, minerals and those kinds of things. we estimate that there's about

$50 trillion of assets, a buried treasure under our land. why don't we? why don't we at least land and have people a fee to get at those resources? and then we use that money to reduce our debt? i think that would be a great thing to do and back to gov zilla and your recommendations you no federal dollars 2 million no what federal. 2 million? yeah this is something the great late the late great walter williams who know you had him on his show. he was a very famous economist and black economist who was just became icon. and he and i came up with this idea of like, let's just say that nobody who makes over $1,000,000 or no company that makes over $1,000,000 gets any federal money. well, think of how much money we could save. and but i get most of the people listening so to say, yeah, let's not like right now there's a bill before congress that's

probably to pass and probably going to be signed into law though i'm fighting against it and calling it the china bill and this is a that's going to give all this money to intel and our chip makers and it's just corporate. it's like, why why should the federal government be giving money? they'll tell intel if they want to build new chips you know and we obviously why to be number one in technology but you know we are number one in technology. we're not you know, you look at our great companies like google and apple and amazon on and on and on. microsoft, those companies didn't do it by getting government money. they came up with great ideas. they innovated and silicon is a great example of how just free enterprise system can work. i like this idea of the government giving this money to industries because i think a lot of it will be wasted by steve moore. his most recent book is called give zillow o the relentless growth of government is devouring our economy and our freedom. thanks for being on book. thank you peter. good to be

my name is spencer canadian and. i'm the director of programs here at, freedomworks. we're really excited. have you all here today for this book party, which promotes america in perspective written by david sokol and our own president adam brandon a