Joseph Ladebo, MD and PhD is the State Surgeon General of Florida and a Professor of Medicine at the University of Florida where he conducts research on cardiovascular risk in low income and disadvantaged populations. He is the author of the new book, Transcend Fear, which explains how he was able to maintain critical thinking in the midst of a pandemic and orchestrated fear. Dr. LadeBOE also discusses his childhood trauma and how it shaped his ability to empathize with others, and how he managed to overcome a disabling childhood trauma that prevented him from empathizing with other people. He also discusses how he overcame his trauma and overcame his fear to become the first African-American to serve as Florida s first state surgeon general and the first black man to do so, and why he should be remembered as someone who was brave enough to stand up to the establishment and speak out against the fear that was holding us back from doing what was best for us. In this episode, he also talks about how he became the first person in the country to write a book about his own trauma, and shares the story of how he got to where he is today, and what it took him to do what he does in the face of fear and how that story led him to be the person he is now doing what he s doing today. This episode is sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the most important thing he can do to improve the lives of others, not only in the world, but in his career, and in his personal and personal life, not just in his own home. . Thank you for listening to this episode. I really appreciate it, and I really do appreciate it. I hope you enjoy it. Thank you, Dr. Joe. -Bobby and I appreciate you, too, for being kind enough to share it with the rest of your friends and family and your support, and for sharing it on social media, your words, your support is so much more than you can be a voice for me, and your words of encouragement and support in my life, and so much of it is so important, so that I can have a chance to help other people s voice be heard in the next episode, and you can help me spread the word out there. and I hope it s a little bit more than just that I know that it s going out to the world - Thank you. XOXO, Joe Ladebao
00:00:06.000Ladebo, MD and PhD, is the State Surgeon General of Florida.
00:00:11.000He also serves as a professor of medicine at the University of Florida, where his research examines behavioral economic strategies to reduce cardiovascular risk in low income and disadvantaged populations.
00:00:25.000His research has been much published and it is supported by the National Institute of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
00:00:34.000He's written about smoking, weight loss and other interventions, non-medical interventions for improving health and reducing coronary disease.
00:00:46.000He's been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and many, many other predominant journals.
00:00:54.000He graduated from Wake Forest, received his medical degree from Harvard, and a PhD in health policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
00:01:05.000He completed his clinical training in internal medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
00:01:12.000Where he received the Harvard Medical School's Class of 2012 Resident Teaching Award.
00:01:18.000And he's got so many other credentials and awards and qualifications here that I just can't read them all on this podcast.
00:01:27.000But all of those credentials are probably the least...
00:01:31.000The most impressive thing about Joe Lattopo to me, and the most impressive thing is that he's probably the only health commissioner or director in the country that was not subsumed in the orthodoxy, that did not give in to the fear, which had a disabling effect on critical thinking during the pandemic.
00:01:59.000And cause people to simply do what they were told and comply with the official orthodoxies rather than ask common sense questions and do personal first original research.
00:02:17.000Talk to doctors, talk to epidemiologists, to independent thinkers, and try to figure out how do we actually treat this pandemic.
00:02:52.000I always wonder how the people who are resisting the orthodoxy How they arrived at that ability to continue critically thinking in the midst of a crisis and orchestrated fear.
00:03:34.000And Bobby, I want to thank you again for having me on.
00:03:36.000I want to thank you for your friendship because I really appreciated it because I admire you and your bravery and integrity.
00:03:43.000I'm glad we got to meet you in person, my wife and I, before we left California since it's harder now.
00:03:50.000It is true, ironically, that I had to really be quite consumed by fear in order to basically wreck my internal, my personal life in terms of my relationship with my wife and my relationship with other people who are close to me, family members, and the relationship I was building with my kids.
00:04:14.000To be in a position where I had no choice but to accept help, and my wife found me to help.
00:04:21.000You came from a childhood drama, which possessed you during your first...
00:04:28.000You describe yourself as having powered through this education despite this, you know, really almost a disabling capacity to even empathize with other people because you were so traumatized by what happened to you as a child.
00:04:46.000And I didn't even know, I mean, I didn't know the extent of the effect that that experience had on me until, you know, basically my life kind of fell apart when sort of the act that I had been putting on fell apart when I fell in love with my wife.
00:05:03.000Because one of the things about love is that all the things that aren't working in your life, it brings them to the surface.
00:05:10.000And so I was forced to deal with things and face things that I either didn't know were there or knew were there, but thought were, you know, things that were fine, but they weren't fine at all.
00:05:26.000Sexual, physical, you know, psychological.
00:05:29.000They just affect people in different ways.
00:05:31.000And for me, I was sexually abused by a babysitter when I was like four years old.
00:05:38.000And I thought, you know, I remembered it from, you know, as I got older, and I thought it wasn't a big deal.
00:05:46.000I thought, you know, it happened, but it didn't affect me.
00:05:50.000But in fact, what it did was it basically kind of froze my emotional development in terms of, and not even just froze it, but really almost placed it into sort of a prison or a lockbox and kind of took its sort of life and ability and expression out.
00:06:10.000Essentially, I kind of went through life Basically, emotionally numb, you know, not reacting to things the same way as other people, unable to create genuine emotional connections, genuine connections with other people.
00:06:26.000And I thought it was normal, because that's how I was.
00:07:02.000He was an expert in fear management, essentially.
00:07:05.000Yeah, he's actually an expert in trauma.
00:07:08.000You know, and helping people shed their trauma and all the effects that trauma has on our physical being, our mental being, our emotional being, our spiritual being.
00:07:19.000And I met him, my wife told me to go see him.
00:07:24.000And I think it was around October of 2019.
00:07:26.000So it was like 14 years, 15 years into our relationship.
00:07:31.000And as you can imagine, she was like, she was way beyond the end of her rope.
00:07:35.000And basically dealing with me and she, you know, fortunately, she could see I was a good man, am a good man inside.
00:07:42.000But, you know, I was struggling with You name it.
00:07:46.000Because, you know, everything with our relationship, everything with our kids, because I was locked in, I was afraid of everything.
00:08:33.000He talks about fear ultimately as a gift, if we handle it correctly.
00:08:38.000But he also notes what happened during this pandemic is that sinister forces can manipulate people by orchestrating fear in order to promote an agenda.
00:09:25.000I actually, it's funny because Gavin, I think, as I was reading his book, he makes it not clinical, but almost scientific.
00:09:31.000You know, I don't know if Gavin would agree with me, because beyond the scientific, there is an intuitive sense of different things, including, you know, danger and how people are and what people's intentions are and motivations are, that is not learned, at least not learned from our own kind of experiences in this lifetime.
00:09:54.000And, you know, my wife, for example, her ability to know things about people and about what's motivating people and what they're thinking about and what they want, that's a gift from God for her.
00:10:09.000There's a difference between that and the fear.
00:10:12.000The fear that's more, it's not even anxiety necessarily, but that can be, you know, a form of it.
00:10:19.000But sort of living in it as if that's the frequency of life rather than the frequency of joy and openness and expression and curiosity.
00:10:36.000You know, during the pandemic, now you, Governor DeSantis chose you, and it was kind of, it was a courageous, unusual decision for him to bring this doctor from California.
00:11:03.00095 out of 100 people, maybe 98 out of 100, were really saying the same thing in terms of this nonsense about staying in your house and avoid other human beings because they could kill you or you could kill them.
00:11:33.000But in the beginning, there weren't many.
00:11:35.000And it just so happened that the week that Governor Newsom shut down the state of California, I was working in the hospital at UCLA, Ronald Reagan, in Los Angeles, and some of the patients I took care of were patients with COVID. So not only did I get to take care of patients with COVID that week, but I also got to see what was happening around me.
00:11:59.000In terms of the hospital leadership and administration in just full-out panic, my residents, people on my team, lots of fear and panic, and patients, some of whom were actually completely fine, but who thought they were going to die because of the news reports.
00:12:18.000Who had COVID. You know, so I wrote an article that was accepted into USA Today right after that, that week, and I got some feedback that was critical from my wife, ended up writing another, I think about a dozen articles in the Wall Street Journal.
00:12:35.000You know, that kind of put me on the radar a bit.
00:12:37.000And it was part of how Governor DeSantis' team came to know me.
00:12:44.000Those were critical of the official COVID response, those articles.
00:12:57.000Fauci, oh no, I never said the kids couldn't go to school.
00:12:59.000And of course he said the kids couldn't go to school.
00:13:02.000You know, he said it on tape that everything should be locked down.
00:13:05.000Man, it almost makes my head hurt, Bobby, how, like, they're all pretending that, like, it's okay not to have the vaccine passports and it's okay not to do all these terrible things they were doing.
00:13:16.000What's great is that you look at stuff that you wrote, I wrote, and other people wrote, and it's the same.
00:13:25.000Not all this changing the story about what you think should happen.
00:13:29.000You know, I had a guy who I took a hike with, and he's a guy I didn't really know him.
00:13:35.000He's my wife's ex-husband's best friend, and he was staying at my house for the weekend.
00:13:41.000It was the first time I met him, but we took a hike, and he's a liberal Democrat.
00:13:45.000He's from Denver, and he said to me...
00:13:49.000He was very aligned with me on the response, and he said the thing that turned him around...
00:13:55.000Is that he depended on exercise, playing basketball every afternoon.
00:14:01.000The neighborhood where he plays, there's a public court in Denver, and it's a very kind of diverse, it's blacks, whites, Hispanics, and they all play.
00:14:11.000And he said that the day they declared a lockdown, Parks Department and Police came to that basketball court and all the other basketball courts and they either padlocked them if there was a fence around them or on his basketball court where there was no fence, they removed the rims on the baskets. Parks Department and Police came to that basketball court and
00:14:30.000And, you know, here in Venice off of Los Angeles where I am, they took the skate park or kids skateboard outside and they put sand, they covered it in sand so the kids couldn't skateboard themselves.
00:14:46.000They dropped the volleyball nets down all along the beaches, outside nets.
00:14:51.000And when the people came back and put up nets of their own, The Parks Department came and removed all the posts.
00:14:58.000They were ticketing surfers and another guy in a kayak who I know who got a thousand dollar ticket for being on the ocean.
00:15:07.000Now this is a disease that spreads indoors.
00:15:10.000So they're taking all these people who are getting sunlight and vitamin D and being outside, and they're putting them inside where, you know, it's like Brad Weinstein said to me, everything they did was the inverse of what you would want to do if you were actually trying to prevent everything they did was the inverse of what you would want It was really quite striking.
00:15:31.000I couldn't agree with you and your friend more, Bobby, It's so sad.
00:15:36.000They took the rims down in the local park that we took our kids to, and we kept taking our kids through throughout the pandemic.
00:15:43.000And even when they were the only ones out there, we'd take them there early on.
00:15:50.000I just, it made me, it was so heartbreaking to me.
00:15:53.000I mean, the basketball, pickup basketball, that is like, it may not be quite as American as baseball, but boy, you know, so many neighborhoods, people coming together, all different backgrounds, like the basketball court is an equalizer.
00:16:10.000And it was really heartbreaking and frankly infuriating to see people do things like that.
00:16:17.000Particularly in the poor neighborhoods, because now you're locking people in homes where many of them don't have air conditioning.
00:16:32.000I just did another little book that talks about the impacts of the COVID countermeasures on the poor.
00:16:41.000It was like a war on the poor in this country.
00:16:45.000And all the additions of social deterioration, drug addiction, suicide, loss IQ, loss vocalization and reading ability, declines in math and sciences and arts and history, dramatic declines in learning, the starvation of hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
00:17:07.000And lost income, it was really just like a direct hit on the board.
00:17:12.000The only indicia of social deterioration that actually improved during the pandemic was that child abuse reports dropped dramatically.
00:17:24.000The reason they dropped is because the schools were closed.
00:17:28.000And the schools is where child abuse gets reported.
00:17:33.000Most of those reports emanate from the schools.
00:17:35.000So they took these kids who were abused and they locked them at home with their abusers during the two years of the pandemic.
00:17:42.000You know, you can get the exact data by looking at my book, which is called A Letter to Liberals.
00:17:53.000These stats, many of our leaders now are just completely ignoring that stuff.
00:17:58.000So, you know, another stat that came out of a study from some researchers at Harvard, which I'm sure you're familiar with, basically showed that these academic gaps, you know, between black and white and Hispanic and white children widened during the pandemic.
00:18:14.000Especially in states that kept the schools closed, but not in states like Florida that didn't.
00:18:21.000There was no widening of the gaps in Florida.
00:18:32.000So they do this stuff, and then they don't want to be responsible for these things that they did.
00:18:38.000So I look forward to reading more of the things that isn't getting news coverage, but is critically important.
00:18:45.000They don't really know how to handle you because the liberal media really wants to discredit you, but I think because you're Black, they have to tiptoe a little bit around it, but they have hammered you a lot.
00:18:59.000Can you talk about that a little and how you react to that internally, how you process those kind of attacks?
00:19:09.000You know, I don't know if they're pulling any punches, Bobby.
00:19:12.000They probably It's been pretty brutal, man.
00:19:15.000It's interesting because one of the things that came out of my work with Christopher, so definitely kind of my ability to connect with other people emotionally, that was so huge for me.
00:19:25.000And that happened actually after the first day from some of the, he uses a combination of Chinese medicine techniques and a lot of techniques related to improving the flow of, increasing the flow of chi and like meridian theory and stuff.
00:19:41.000Which I didn't understand, don't really fully understand now, but still I'm a beneficiary of it.
00:19:46.000But in addition to that, right, there's other stuff that we deal with.
00:19:49.000So there's shame, there's fear is really the central one, but shame is another big, powerful emotional challenge that many of us have in different ways.
00:19:59.000And with the attacks, most of the time, I was getting videotaped for something and the guy said, oh man, they're really coming after you.
00:21:15.000No, this was an innocent private meeting that turned into national news.
00:21:20.000And during that time, it was very intense, and I felt shame during that time.
00:21:28.000And one of the techniques that I learned, first of all, my wife was like incredibly helpful, kind of helping, because you can't make good decisions when you're, you know, entangled up in emotions that aren't, you know, you're authentic you, that they're, you know, stuff that just comes up.
00:21:45.000So whether it's fear, shame is another one.
00:21:51.000And between my wife and some techniques that I actually learned from working with Christopher, I was able to get through that and sort of see it clearly.
00:21:59.000So sometimes I use some techniques to kind of stay within myself when the projection from the media kind of gets to me.
00:22:07.000But for the most part, it doesn't really bother me.
00:22:10.000It's mostly nonsense and, you know, I've got a mission.
00:22:15.000And normally I was not wearing a mask during the pandemic because I actually read the science on the masks and they don't, you know, I saw what the science was saying.
00:22:27.000Every scientific study we could find en masse, we were assembling at CHD and posting on our website whether they were supportive of mass, which were very few, or whether they were exploding, the theory of mass.
00:22:42.000The cloth mass actually have no efficacy and actually have a negative efficacy in that they're associated with respiratory injuries, with gum injuries, with skin injuries.
00:23:01.000But if somebody asks me to wear a mask on the airplane you got over there, they're going to throw you off and your name goes on a list and you never fly again.
00:23:11.000So I got used to putting them on those airplanes.
00:23:15.000But normally if somebody, if I was in a senator's office and they said, well, you put on a mask, I would say, okay, You're possessed in the fear, and I'm going to go along with you to band it with you, but you had made a decision that even when they ask you, you're not going to do it.
00:23:33.000Did you make that decision before you went in there, or did you just say, I'm not going to do this at that moment?
00:23:40.000Yeah, it was in the moment, just because I read the room, and it wasn't hard to read her and Intentions and motivations behind what she was saying.
00:23:50.000So, you know, I haven't worked in the hospital.
00:23:52.000I mean, at UCLA, I wore one when I'd walk around the hospital, and I hated it because I find them incredibly uncomfortable.
00:24:04.000I think no one should have to wear one if you're not comfortable with it, with the exception of, like, if you're a doctor and you just, yeah, it's just a protocol, like you're seeing a patient with tuberculosis or something like that.
00:24:15.000Even if they quote-unquote worked, people have a right to control what happens with their face, you know, and their nose and their mouth.
00:24:29.000And even today in the store, I saw people walking around with them.
00:24:32.000And it's just like, guys, this is not evidence-based and it's mostly nonsense.
00:24:38.000Yeah, you know, the guy who took the walk for me, the guy from Denver, he said one of the other things that occurred to him.
00:24:45.000And he's not, he did not really even know what I do.
00:24:49.000So it was kind of a case of first impression from him.
00:24:53.000And he was just talking about these misgivings that he had.
00:24:57.000But one of the things he said, he said, when they started asking me to wear a mask, he said, my wife has been in chemotherapy for five years.
00:25:04.000And nobody was wearing a mask to protect her.
00:25:08.000You know, there are people who out there, there are kids and adults who are immune compromised all the time, who have special vulnerabilities to bacteriological and viral infections.
00:25:22.000We don't make a law that says everybody's got to wear a mask to protect them.
00:25:56.000You know, it's been a learning experience since it's completely different from what I did before as a doctor and a researcher.
00:26:03.000But I enjoy the job and I'm mostly, more than anything, I'm just, I'm grateful to, I'm certainly terrific to work with Governor DeSantis and grateful to have an opportunity to have a bit of a louder voice than I had when I was a, you know, professor at UCLA. You know,
00:26:20.000one of the things you and I have talked about in the past is this problem that the CDC tightly controls the databases, like the Vaccine Safety Database, VSD, which is the biggest repository for vaccine and health information.
00:26:37.000And it's been frustrating for 15 years for me that they won't let any independent scientists in to see it.
00:26:47.000So they have, for 10 million Americans, they have all their vaccine records, and they have all their health records.
00:26:53.000So you could do pretty easily, you could do a...
00:26:58.000A cluster analysis or machine counting, you know, an AI analysis, where you go in there and you look at the intervention, whether it's hepatitis B vaccine, and then you see if there's an increase in diabetes and ASD, ADHD, autism, or whatever.
00:27:14.000And you can answer all these questions that people have been wondering about.
00:27:19.000But the CDC will not let anybody do those kind of studies.
00:27:41.000You, as the director of the Florida Health Department, you have a huge database in Florida, and potentially you can open it up and allow some of these studies to get done on very, very large populations.