The Ben Shapiro Show - The Decay Of The American Medical Establishment | Dr. Drew Pinsky

00:00:00.000 Folks, as you know, there's some material that we can't cover here.

00:00:02.000 So if you want to see the full episode with Dr. Drew, head on over to the Daily Wire Plus app and watch it over there.

00:00:08.000 This is something I did not know until the COVID outbreak.

00:00:11.000 70% of physicians are employees.

00:00:13.000 I didn't know that.

00:00:14.000 They raise their hand, they lose their job.

00:00:16.000 And they were afraid.

00:00:16.000 There was fear, fear, fear.

00:00:18.000 Fear was rampant in my profession.

00:00:21.000 And so people just shut the hell up.

00:00:23.000 And you had hospital administrators dictating how doctors treated patients.

00:00:29.000 Dr. Drew Pinsky is a board-certified internist and addiction medicine specialist with over 35 years of experience in national TV and radio, as well as a New York Times bestselling author and host of the Dr. Drew podcast.

00:00:46.000 All within the past couple of years, crises like COVID-19, the fentanyl epidemic, and skyrocketing rates of chronic illness have pulled discussions about America's national health to the forefront.

00:00:54.000 Dr. Drew's nuanced focus on public health has become a valuable resource to millions of Americans, particularly as our trust in our expert class has deteriorated to a historic low.

00:01:02.000 In today's episode, Dr. Drew shares his personal experience being censored by the legacy media and his biggest frustrations around the pandemic and its aftermath.

00:01:10.000 He also surveys the decay of the American medical establishment and highlights the backward incentives in our governmental agencies.

00:01:16.000 While we navigate an extremely polarized political moment, the restoration of Americans' physical and mental well-being should be of paramount importance to all of us.

00:01:23.000 Don't miss this important conversation with Dr. Drew Pinsky on this episode of the Sunday Special.

00:01:27.000 Well, Dr. Drew, thanks for stopping by.

00:01:38.000 Really appreciate it.

00:01:38.000 It's good to see you.

00:01:39.000 It's been a minute.

00:01:40.000 It has.

00:01:40.000 It's been a while.

00:01:41.000 Yeah.

00:01:41.000 So, you're now joining us in Florida, but you're still living in L.A., so I'm going to start by badgering you about that.

00:01:46.000 How's L.A.

00:01:47.000 treating you?

00:01:47.000 Why are you still there?

00:01:48.000 Am I allowed to say it's a s*** show? 0.99

00:01:50.000 You are? 0.95

00:01:52.000 I love coming to South Florida because everybody is happy down here.

00:01:56.000 It's crazy how much more vibrant and palpably happy everybody is, and particularly young people.

00:02:03.000 It drives me crazy in California, young people look at the economic opportunity, they look at the landscape, they're like... 0.98

00:02:09.000 Everything sucks. 0.98

00:02:09.000 Why should I do this? 0.98

00:02:10.000 Where am I supposed to put my bed?

00:02:11.000 I mean, should I become a doctor?

00:02:13.000 Why would I do that?

00:02:14.000 You know, it's like, really, it's so discouraging and it depresses me.

00:02:19.000 And here, the vibrancy just, you can see it.

00:02:22.000 You can smell it.

00:02:22.000 So it's nice.

00:02:23.000 So congratulations to Ford.

00:02:24.000 No, thank you.

00:02:25.000 And most of the country does not know that, but I visit here and I see it.

00:02:28.000 This is one of the things I think that California gets away with, especially if you're in a big city.

00:02:32.000 So I grew up in L.A.

00:02:33.000 I spent my entire life in L.A.

00:02:34.000 I spent three years in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

00:02:36.000 But aside from that, I was in L.A.

00:02:38.000 my whole life.

00:02:39.000 And one of the things they do when you're in L.A., when I say they, I just mean kind of just living there.

00:02:42.000 It's not a person.

00:02:43.000 You were in the valley, weren't you?

00:02:44.000 I was in the valley.

00:02:44.000 I was in the valley, where everyone looks down their nose at you because you're from the valley and they act like you're on a farm or something.

00:02:50.000 But living in L.A., the treatment is sort of like in New York.

00:02:53.000 There are only a few places on the map that actually matter.

00:02:55.000 And if you're anywhere outside those places, that's not actually like an important place in the universe.

00:02:59.000 And then you spend five minutes outside of L.A., in say, South Florida, or hell, in Iowa, and you're like, this country's amazing.

00:03:05.000 And there are amazing places here that are way easier to live and where people are a lot nicer than in L.A.

00:03:09.000 Yeah, and so it's why I like traveling around and doing things.

00:03:12.000 It gives me a break from back there.

00:03:13.000 But I'm stuck there.

00:03:15.000 We've lived there forever.

00:03:16.000 My practice is there.

00:03:17.000 My kids, it'd just be impossible.

00:03:18.000 So here we are.

00:03:20.000 I'll visit you guys.

00:03:20.000 You should.

00:03:21.000 And then you should buy a house here.

00:03:22.000 And just like everyone else, you'll end up here as well.

00:03:23.000 I swear to God, Dave Rubin says every time I speak to that guy, it's the same thing.

00:03:27.000 I got two of you on me.

00:03:28.000 And I owe you another apology.

00:03:30.000 You'd forgotten this, but Adam Kroll and I do a podcast still to this day.

00:03:34.000 And you called in one time and I said, Ben, I apologize because I told you I don't forget where I told you this, but I made the case that media wasn't biased.

00:03:44.000 I was on HLN and CNN for years.

00:03:46.000 They never ever got involved with what I said until I ran afoul of them.

00:03:51.000 And then it was on.

00:03:53.000 They were very censoring.

00:03:55.000 And so, apologies again.

00:03:58.000 I look for opportunities to apologize, and this is one of them.

00:04:01.000 Listen, I look for opportunities to receive apologies, so we're definitely in sync here.

00:04:04.000 But why don't we start with that?

00:04:06.000 What happened?

00:04:07.000 What lines did you cross at CNN and LHLN that made you persona non grata over there?

00:04:13.000 So, I used to do Don Lemon's show almost every night, particularly during the run-up to the 2016 elections.

00:04:21.000 And Don was trying to figure out who was Donald Trump, like, what is up with this guy?

00:04:24.000 And I was like, well, you know, I don't really know him, but, you know, there's some narcissistic qualities, but, you know, it's not a malignant narcissist because his family, you know, you can't maintain a relationship with your family when you're a malignant narcissist.

00:04:34.000 And he never sleeps, so maybe there's a little bipolarity.

00:04:36.000 And then I would say, But be careful.

00:04:39.000 We have had presidents, great presidents, with bipolar disorder, with alcoholism, with depression, and some of our best presidents have been people with certain proclivities.

00:04:48.000 I mean, that's an extraordinary office, extraordinary people should go into it, and that comes with certain liabilities.

00:04:54.000 Not all liabilities are, strictly speaking, a problem.

00:04:58.000 It's only when they affect functioning.

00:05:00.000 Like Abraham Lincoln, his depressions were profound.

00:05:02.000 There's a story of him dragging, I think it was Willie behind him, or Ted, Robert, in a wagon, and the wagon spilled over while he walked to the Capitol building.

00:05:11.000 He left his kid like a mile back, and he was so lost in his depression, he didn't even notice it.

00:05:16.000 Any event, so the next morning I come into my radio station.

00:05:18.000 I had a daytime radio show at the time, and the general manager goes,

00:05:22.000 hey, that was really interesting.

00:05:23.000 Could you do that for 30 seconds for our website?

00:05:26.000 And I said, I think I can get it down to 30 seconds, and I did.

00:05:29.000 And then I was getting up, and he goes, you know, it's an election season.

00:05:33.000 We have to have balance.

00:05:35.000 Can you do 30 seconds on Hillary? 0.99

00:05:36.000 I said, funny thing, her doctor has just released her medical records this morning.

00:05:41.000 She had a transverse sinus thrombosis and a stroke.

00:05:44.000 They had her on armor thyroid for unclear reasons. 0.69

00:05:47.000 They were treating the hypercoagulability without a workup.

00:05:51.000 I had lots of questions about what her doctors were doing.

00:05:54.000 So I did 30 seconds on why I thought there was concerns about her medical care. 0.93

00:05:59.000 Not that she was unfit for office, not that there was anything wrong with her physically or mentally, just that these medical records made me very concerned.

00:06:07.000 Drudge report next morning, headline, finally a doctor says she's not fit for office.

00:06:12.000 And I was like, uh-oh. 0.97

00:06:14.000 Well, that, I heard from the highest echelons of CNN, shut up. 1.00

00:06:21.000 Just shut up, no more from you, no more talking. 1.00

00:06:26.000 And I was like, I'll help you set the record straight, shut up. 1.00

00:06:30.000 We had decided a month before that we were gonna cancel my show.

00:06:34.000 The following week, the cancellation date was coming, or maybe two weeks hence, we cancelled the show.

00:06:39.000 It looked like it was cancelled.

00:06:40.000 I said, let me go on the air and straighten this all out. 0.99

00:06:43.000 Shut up. 0.95

00:06:45.000 So, and then I was not allowed to speak ever again on that network. 1.00

00:06:49.000 So, there you go.

00:06:50.000 I mean, it is amazing the rules around what you're allowed to say about various presidential candidates.

00:06:54.000 So, I'm old enough to remember when John McCain was running for president in 2008, and there were all sorts of questions about his health and his fitness because he was 72, which now looks like a spring chicken in American politics.

00:07:05.000 I mean, he's 12 years older than Tim Walz is right now, 13 years older than Kamala Harris, and fully nine years younger than the current president of the United States, and he was running at 72.

00:07:14.000 And whatever questions you had about his health, his fitness, all of those were perfectly appropriate.

00:07:20.000 Then you hit 2016, and you couldn't ask what the hell was going on with Hillary when she was collapsing into a van in the middle of the race. 1.00

00:07:26.000 By the way, that happened like two days after my crisis.

00:07:30.000 And so everyone went, C! 0.60

00:07:31.000 C's right!

00:07:33.000 People connecting these dots that are unrelated, too.

00:07:36.000 And then he got to 2020.

00:07:37.000 And it was perfectly obvious that Joe Biden was already diminished from what he had been.

00:07:40.000 And he was no Great Shakes, but certainly wasn't unhealthy in 2016.

00:07:43.000 But he was clearly diminished by the time he had hit 2020.

00:07:46.000 And if you mentioned that, then this was considered completely out of bounds.

00:07:49.000 You were not allowed to talk about his age.

00:07:51.000 He was a grand old man of the Republic.

00:07:53.000 And then for three long years, we were told that you're not allowed to ask anything about what's going on with him.

00:07:58.000 How about my profession?

00:07:59.000 You're not allowed to believe your lion eyes.

00:08:02.000 I mean, there are things in medicine that are just, that when we treat medical students, we show them videos and pictures, so when they see it in the clinic, they'll know it.

00:08:11.000 One of those conditions is Parkinson's.

00:08:14.000 Parkinsonism, not Parkinson's disease.

00:08:16.000 That's a diagnosis.

00:08:17.000 But if you want to see Parkinsonian features, Mask-like faces, not very expressive, that's Parkinsonism.

00:08:25.000 We would show a video to a medical student of someone like Joe Biden and say, that's Parkinsonism.

00:08:31.000 But if you said that publicly, how dare you make a diagnosis?

00:08:36.000 No diagnosis, just describing what we're seeing.

00:08:39.000 We're seeing Parkinsonism.

00:08:40.000 Just like if we saw a rash, we could describe the rash.

00:08:43.000 We might not be able to say what causes it, but we can describe it.

00:08:46.000 No, it's totally amazing.

00:08:47.000 So my wife, the family doc.

00:08:49.000 So, you know, obviously when you're training in medical school, you're doing exactly what you're talking about.

00:08:53.000 I mean, it's not as though you're seeing patients from your first days as a medical student.

00:08:57.000 You see videos and pictures.

00:08:58.000 Correct.

00:08:58.000 They're showing you features and they're saying, if a symptom looks like this, then give a differential diagnosis to all the things this could possibly be with this set of features.

00:09:06.000 So, this is the part that people miss.

00:09:08.000 So, I'm going to shine a light on that, because what we do as physicians, we see those features that we saw in the pictures and videos in medical school, and we learn the list of possibilities and how to differentiate amongst those potential causes, and then what kind of workup we need to differentiate it.

00:09:22.000 Yeah.

00:09:22.000 Exactly.

00:09:22.000 And you give a probability.

00:09:24.000 I mean, like, Legionnaire's disease, probably not happening.

00:09:27.000 Right.

00:09:27.000 But Parkinsonianism, you know, maybe that's what's going on.

00:09:30.000 Well, and you can say Parkinsonism has these common causes, Parkinson's disease being one of them, vascular dementia, Lewy body dementia.

00:09:38.000 There are various things that can cause it.

00:09:41.000 Joe Biden has had two neurosurgeries, right?

00:09:44.000 He had an aneurysm, he had two neurosurgeries, and that can cause something called gliosis, which can lead to Parkinsonism.

00:09:50.000 But meanwhile, you were allowed to, for years and years and years, speculate about Donald

00:09:54.000 Trump's psychological condition.

00:09:55.000 Absolutely.

00:09:56.000 When it comes to psychology, psychological diagnosis is actually super tough because

00:10:00.000 the symptoms are very often quite vague.

00:10:02.000 I mean, you're talking about symptoms like he talks a lot about himself.

00:10:07.000 You can say things like he never sleeps.

00:10:10.000 Right.

00:10:11.000 You can say that and go, hmm, what kind of people never sleep?

00:10:13.000 Well, hypomania makes you never sleep.

00:10:16.000 But guess what?

00:10:16.000 Lots of very successful people are chronically hypomanic and it's not a condition because it doesn't have any functional significance.

00:10:23.000 Right.

00:10:23.000 Exactly.

00:10:24.000 I can say that.

00:10:25.000 Exactly.

00:10:26.000 But you get all these diagnoses.

00:10:27.000 If he has narcissistic personality disorder, this means he's going to blow up the world or he has sociopathy or something like that.

00:10:32.000 That was perfectly fine.

00:10:34.000 So for three and a half years, if you mentioned anything about Joe Biden, you were totally out of bounds.

00:10:38.000 So much so that they shut off the entire Democratic primary process to prevent anyone, including RFK Jr., with whom you're friends.

00:10:42.000 Yep.

00:10:43.000 From really running against him in the Democratic primaries.

00:10:45.000 They assured that he received pretty much every vote possible in the Democratic primaries.

00:10:49.000 And then the minute that he did that debate and showed everybody what we'd all been seeing, then all of a sudden it was like, wait, this guy, he's actually suffering from senility.

00:10:57.000 Something's wrong.

00:10:59.000 Right, something is happening.

00:11:00.000 And within a month, he was out of the race.

00:11:02.000 They had supplanted in Kamala Harris.

00:11:04.000 I mean, it's enough to make your head spin.

00:11:07.000 Well, remember everybody, I want to educate your audience for a second.

00:11:10.000 May I speak directly to them?

00:11:12.000 Here's what happens.

00:11:14.000 20% of the people are hypnotizable immediately.

00:11:17.000 They are the ones that respond to propaganda and there's nothing you can do about it.

00:11:21.000 They're the ones that were calling in Tim Walz's helpline to report their neighbors because they weren't wearing a mask.

00:11:26.000 That's 20%.

00:11:28.000 10% throws the BS flag right away and is thinking it is autonomous because this doesn't feel right to me, let's figure this out.

00:11:36.000 70% is everybody else.

00:11:37.000 And that 70% is the group we need to gaffe into reality and keep them fighting for things like freedom of speech and things that they need to fight for because they just want to live their lives and be left alone.

00:11:47.000 But that 20% is the one you need to worry about. 0.91

00:11:49.000 And those are the ones that get swept into these propagandistic shifts so quickly and they feel like That's what's happening.

00:11:59.000 It's the 70% that needs to become more objective about this and look at it.

00:12:02.000 And the sort of media bias, this sort of indoctrination that's been occurring.

00:12:06.000 100% go with it.

00:12:07.000 And it has massive downstream effect because the reality is that institutions

00:12:11.000 in order to function always require a core level of trust.

00:12:14.000 Any institution that functions has to have trust.

00:12:15.000 The police have to have trust, your doctor you have to have trust with, and when you have another institution, the

00:12:21.000 media in this case, that just says that there are certain things you can talk

00:12:24.000 about, certain things you can't talk about, promotes actual false narratives about health, for example,

00:12:28.000 then what it ends up doing is infecting these Yep.

00:12:31.000 these other institutions.

00:12:33.000 And those institutions respond to incentive structures.

00:12:35.000 They don't want to be smacked by the media.

00:12:36.000 So they start changing how they do business in order to avoid getting clubbed by the media,

00:12:41.000 which takes us to COVID-19 and medicine, a lot of the stuff that you've been talking about,

00:12:45.000 which is sort of the perversion of the medical industry.

00:12:47.000 So let's talk about that.

00:12:48.000 I want to talk about that in the context of sort of your own experiences, COVID-19, big pharma, and also with regard to RFK Jr., which I mentioned earlier, you and he have become pretty close.

00:12:57.000 So let's talk about, you know, what has happened to the medical industry, the lack of trust that people have.

00:13:02.000 It's sort of like how people feel about Congress.

00:13:04.000 It's like 8% love Congress, 80% like their congressperson.

00:13:07.000 Most people still like their doctor.

00:13:09.000 Yeah.

00:13:09.000 Most people hate the entire medical system and don't trust any of it.

00:13:12.000 What's going on?

00:13:13.000 Let me take it all the way back.

00:13:14.000 Let me start at the beginning.

00:13:15.000 This is going to take a few minutes, okay?

00:13:17.000 So I started practicing in the late 80s.

00:13:20.000 If you remember at that point, the HMO phenomenon was occurring.

00:13:25.000 So people were being considered risk pools.

00:13:28.000 They were part of a risk pool and you could reduce the medical cost by putting people into these giant

00:13:33.000 populations where the organizations, the insurance resources, made

00:13:38.000 money by restricting your access to care.

00:13:41.000 That's literally what they were doing.

00:13:43.000 There was also just private practice at that time.

00:13:46.000 My dad was a family practitioner, my uncle was a psychiatrist.

00:13:49.000 Thank God I got some of their judgment, and I saw what they went through.

00:13:53.000 They lived in sort of a golden age.

00:13:55.000 All they concerned themselves with was the well-being of the patient.

00:13:59.000 In front of them, they had deep relationships.

00:14:01.000 With all of them, that was being systematically dismantled in the 80s.

00:14:04.000 So this has been going on a long time.

00:14:06.000 And there's one story I experienced that really was the cornerstone of insight into what was happening back then.

00:14:14.000 I started running a drug treatment program.

00:14:16.000 So my story is I'm an internist by training.

00:14:18.000 I was doing general medicine when you could do intensive care medicine.

00:14:21.000 I was doing hospital medicine, doing outpatient medicine, but I also had this second job in a psychiatric hospital where I was running medical services and I ended up running their addiction services.

00:14:30.000 So I was just getting going running the addiction services in the program at this freestanding psychiatric hospital.

00:14:36.000 And I got a call from a friend of mine who was a really excellent physician who had become essentially an insurance administrator running an HMO.

00:14:44.000 He started developing those models.

00:14:46.000 And he called me and he goes, hey, you know, I need a three-day detox from your program.

00:14:51.000 I go, look man, three-day detox.

00:14:53.000 We've been doing the three-day detoxes for your patients.

00:14:56.000 They come back in two weeks.

00:14:57.000 Of course they come back.

00:14:59.000 It does nothing.

00:14:59.000 What are we doing here?

00:15:01.000 I said, I'll tell you what, you name your price.

00:15:03.000 I will treat them across my resources.

00:15:05.000 We'll manage them as an outpatient and we'll keep following them.

00:15:08.000 My staff can't tolerate these three-day detoxes.

00:15:10.000 These people come back, come back and then die.

00:15:12.000 And he goes, no, I want a three-day detox.

00:15:14.000 I go, I think they're not going to bounce back.

00:15:16.000 He goes, oh, no, they'll bounce back.

00:15:18.000 But if they do that three times, they'll lose their job.

00:15:21.000 Then they're no longer my concern.

00:15:24.000 I was speechless.

00:15:25.000 I was like, you're a physician.

00:15:26.000 How can you?

00:15:27.000 And he literally, I was like, he could tell I was just like dumbfounded.

00:15:32.000 And he said, he goes, I'm an insurance resource now.

00:15:34.000 I'm not a social agency.

00:15:35.000 So I can't tell you whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.

00:15:39.000 Okay, that was HMOs.

00:15:41.000 So that's where we started falling off the cliff.

00:15:44.000 The next great misadventure in medicine was the opiate crisis, which I was fighting mightily against.

00:15:50.000 Here's how that worked.

00:15:51.000 Can I?

00:15:52.000 Please.

00:15:52.000 Okay.

00:15:53.000 And this will sound very familiar to you.

00:15:55.000 In fact, I'm going to correlate it with COVID as I tell you the story.

00:15:59.000 In the end of the 19th century, the hypodermic needle was developed, as well as morphine sulfate and methadone.

00:16:05.000 And at the end of the Civil War and during Reconstruction, we physicians brought the first opioid crisis to America.

00:16:12.000 We literally were the distributor, we were the source of everything, we were the drug dealers.

00:16:17.000 And it was a massive opioid crisis.

00:16:19.000 The Harrison Narcotic Act was a response to that, that put physicians in prison for prescribing of opiates.

00:16:26.000 That stopped it immediately.

00:16:28.000 It created an absolute phobia of prescribing opiates to patients.

00:16:33.000 When I was in training, we would use them only very occasionally in surgical setting.

00:16:38.000 You would not give them to cancer patients. 0.98

00:16:40.000 Well, in the 70s, a group of nurses and doctors realized that was dumb. 0.76

00:16:45.000 and we should be developing a way of managing pain with opiates for cancer patients. 0.86

00:16:51.000 Of course we should.

00:16:52.000 So they had a great idea, but then they kept going.

00:16:55.000 They said, oh no, no, you know what?

00:16:57.000 The answer's always been here all along.

00:16:58.000 It's the poppy flower, it's the opium.

00:17:01.000 We should get rid of pain in America.

00:17:04.000 There should be never anybody experiencing pain everywhere, anywhere.

00:17:08.000 They were starting to catch on, they were getting some momentum,

00:17:11.000 the pain management world developed, and then some wise attorneys realized

00:17:17.000 that they could step outside of the malpractice system and civilly prosecute physicians and criminally

00:17:24.000 for inadequate treatment of pain.

00:17:26.000 Now that the standard of pain management had developed in North Carolina, in Florida, in California, doctors were having these million-dollar suits and going to prison for inadequate, not giving enough pain medication.

00:17:39.000 Well, that stopped this again.

00:17:41.000 Everybody stopped in place and we sent all of our pain patients to the pain management doctors who took the position that they were a white hat profession.

00:17:49.000 I have quotes from them saying, literally, we were the salvation.

00:17:52.000 We were evangelists.

00:17:54.000 We were going to save America from pain.

00:17:56.000 Pain became the fifth vital signs.

00:17:58.000 And there were several certain personalities that went around and got the VA.

00:18:02.000 Pain is the fifth vital sign.

00:18:04.000 Got the medical societies.

00:18:05.000 Pain is the fifth vital sign.

00:18:07.000 Then the standard of care in all the sub-specialty professional societies.

00:18:12.000 Pain is more important than your pulse.

00:18:14.000 And you couldn't leave an ER without a pain scale and 60 Vicodin in your pocket if you've ever had a knee twinge.

00:18:23.000 This became the standard of care.

00:18:25.000 And so I was fighting mightily against it.

00:18:27.000 I was getting sanctioned by the Department of Health, by the California Medical Association, by my own hospital administration.

00:18:33.000 Why?

00:18:33.000 Because I wasn't treating my heroin addicts in withdrawal who were uncomfortable with an opiate.

00:18:39.000 Think about how insane that was.

00:18:41.000 So this was going on until... I don't know if people know how it stopped.

00:18:45.000 I was actually at a White House symposium and Jeff Sessions came in.

00:18:48.000 This was...

00:18:50.000 He stopped it.

00:18:51.000 People don't know that he did this.

00:18:52.000 He came in, he goes, yeah, I see what's happening here.

00:18:54.000 He goes, there's something with his little Southern drawl.

00:18:56.000 And he goes, I'm going to stop this in about three to six months.

00:18:58.000 You watch, I'm going to do it.

00:19:00.000 He put a bunch of doctors in prison for over-prescribing.

00:19:03.000 The whole thing stopped right away.

00:19:05.000 And then people started looking around like they woke up from some sort of trance going, well, what have we been doing here?

00:19:10.000 And of course, no apologies to me.

00:19:12.000 I had 15 years of fighting it.

00:19:14.000 Sound familiar?

00:19:15.000 In COVID, you have an evangelist.

00:19:19.000 Dr. Birx running around saying lockdown is the only way to do things, masking is the only way to do things, society is picking it up, regulators picking it up, and all of a sudden an evangelical physician Who gets a hold of the regulatory system and now it's on.

00:19:35.000 It's the same exact playbook as the opioid crisis.

00:19:40.000 I think the thing that people have trouble understanding is how a scientific profession, purportedly, gets captured this way.

00:19:46.000 You understand how people get captured ideologically because it's all very vague and it's all kind of floating up there in the clouds.

00:19:51.000 When it comes to science, the general idea was that it was all data driven.

00:19:56.000 And when it came to things like pain as a fifth vital sign, when you're talking about, for example, self-reporting, it's completely unscientific.

00:20:02.000 I mean, people self-reporting their own pain levels, it's completely subjective.

00:20:06.000 There's no way to actually measure it on any sort of serious gauge.

00:20:10.000 Not only that, but there was never a single study that showed that opioids were useful in chronic pain.

00:20:17.000 In fact, I remember, because of the regulatory setup, you had to go to symposiums to maintain your license on pain management.

00:20:25.000 And I remember I went to one, and the doctor stood up and went, one of the pain specialists, he goes, yeah, you know, we've never really had any data that suggests opioids are useful, so let's figure out how to use them safely.

00:20:36.000 It's like, Why are you using them at all?

00:20:39.000 It's like, what are we doing here?

00:20:41.000 It's like, incredible.

00:20:42.000 The California Medical Society actually put out an encyclical saying that, like, no studies so far, but we're going to tell you how you should be using these things.

00:20:50.000 Never, ever any studies in chronic pain.

00:20:52.000 In fact, there still is no studies in chronic pain.

00:20:54.000 Occasionally, it's a little useful.

00:20:56.000 Suboxone is very useful in chronic pain, and we're having difficulty getting people to adopt that for some reason.

00:21:02.000 Wild.

00:21:03.000 But it's people.

00:21:04.000 It's human beings.

00:21:05.000 At its core, they're humans running all these organizations.

00:21:09.000 And it's shocking to me when that happens.

00:21:13.000 In COVID's case, it was flabbergasting.

00:21:16.000 It was gobsmacked.

00:21:19.000 That there was capture, stem to stern, to where the publishers, the great storied medical journals that I rely on and love, suddenly weren't publishing alternative points of view.

00:21:33.000 I mean, the way science evolves, it never all goes one way.

00:21:36.000 It just doesn't work like that.

00:21:38.000 There's just sort of a consensus that builds as you build more studies, create more studies, built on differing assumptions, different analytics, different experimental structures, and you start to learn, oh, this is probably the, probably, not necessarily, probably the truth, and we reach a consensus.

00:21:53.000 If you don't see other points of view, I only saw things in one direction, masking good, vaccine good.

00:22:01.000 I knew something was wrong.

00:22:02.000 And RFK Jr. was the guy that alerted me to the fact that there had been a capture.

00:22:07.000 And once he started pointing it out to me, I was like, oh my God, he's right.

00:22:11.000 What in particular did he point out to you that kind of woke you up?

00:22:13.000 First, it was the cozy relationship with the FDA and the pharmaceutical companies.

00:22:20.000 And then it was how media buys.

00:22:22.000 I never could understand why pharmaceutical companies were advertising this obscure medication that very few people would use.

00:22:31.000 I understand they'd be very expensive and maybe there's a big profit margin or something, but why would you be Why those medications that are just not that commonly prescribed?

00:22:40.000 And he meant, I think it was him that pointed out to me that, no, no, they're not trying to raise awareness about that product so much.

00:22:48.000 They want brand awareness, of course, but they want to capture the media.

00:22:52.000 They want the media companies to be their customer and to listen to them and to be unable to criticize them or to run afoul of their version of the reality.

00:23:03.000 I thought, oh boy.

00:23:04.000 And then he pointed out that he thought that the three majors the publications, and you could see it in the British

00:23:10.000 Medical Journal out loud, that some of the majors have been captured in some way. And he said he

00:23:14.000 was going to bring them in and say, you solve this. His theory was that they were captured by

00:23:18.000 the pharmaceutical companies. I'm not sure. But that you solve this or you're going to be

00:23:23.000 prosecuted as a RICO. And I thought, oh, I just woke up. I went, oh, yes, somebody's got to stop

00:23:29.000 this. So we get objectivity back into the medical literature. And one journal I could see

00:23:35.000 through was trying, was Annals of Internal Medicine. They published a study early in COVID on

00:23:41.000 a combination of Luvox and an inhaled And I thought, ah!

00:23:46.000 And it was a positive study.

00:23:47.000 It showed a positive effect on COVID.

00:23:50.000 Only study of any positive treatment other than vaccine therapies for COVID.

00:23:56.000 I thought, well, at least they're publishing something.

00:23:58.000 We'll get to more with Dr. Drew in just one moment.

00:24:00.000 First, listen up folks.

00:24:01.000 The situation in Israel is dire.

00:24:03.000 It's getting worse.

00:24:04.000 Families have been evacuated.

00:24:05.000 Communities are under constant threat.

00:24:06.000 There's a desperate need for food and basic supplies.

00:24:08.000 And of course, globally, there's been a massive rise in anti-Semitism and continued attacks on Israel.

00:24:13.000 It's more crucial than ever.

00:24:15.000 We stand with Israel and the Jewish people.

00:24:16.000 Now, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.

00:24:18.000 They're not just talking.

00:24:20.000 They're acting.

00:24:20.000 They're on the ground.

00:24:21.000 They're providing bomb shelters, emergency supplies, financial relief to families in distress.

00:24:25.000 But they're not stopping there.

00:24:26.000 As we approach the one-year mark of October 7th, the Fellowship is launching something extraordinary.

00:24:31.000 They've partnered with over 230 organizations across America for the Flags of Fellowship campaign.

00:24:35.000 Here's what's happening.

00:24:36.000 On October 6th, thousands of Americans will plant Israeli flags in their church yards.

00:24:40.000 Every flag represents a victim, a life cut short.

00:24:42.000 It's a powerful visual tribute that sends a clear message.

00:24:44.000 We remember, and we will not forget.

00:24:46.000 This isn't just about remembering the victims, it's also about honoring the heroes, praying for those still held hostage, and showing the world unwavering support of Christians for Israel and the Jewish people.

00:24:55.000 Let me tell you how you can help.

00:24:57.000 You can be a part of Flags for Fellowship.

00:24:58.000 There's a tremendous need for food and basic supplies for evacuated families trying to survive in communities impacted by the ongoing war.

00:25:04.000 So I'm asking 1,200 of my listeners today to make a gift of $100 to help provide emergency food boxes for displaced families in Israel.

00:25:11.000 Israel needs our support now more than ever.

00:25:13.000 So here's what I need you to do.

00:25:14.000 Go to BenForTheFellowship.org.

00:25:15.000 That's BenForTheFellowship.org.

00:25:17.000 Let's show the world that when Israel is under attack, we don't back down, we step up.

00:25:21.000 Remember, that's BenForTheFellowship.org.

00:25:22.000 God bless and thank you.

00:25:24.000 I mean, one of the things that was very hard during that period is if you were a person who was data-driven and sort of broke down into three groups, as you mentioned.

00:25:30.000 There were people who were immediately skeptical.

00:25:32.000 There were people who were immediately buying in.

00:25:35.000 And then there was, you know, a group of people in the middle.

00:25:38.000 I sort of counted myself in that group.

00:25:39.000 Me too.

00:25:39.000 People who were trying to follow the data.

00:25:41.000 Yeah.

00:25:41.000 The problem is that when the data is bad and when the data is skewed, it makes it almost impossible to follow the data.

00:25:48.000 For the physicians in that group, if they spoke up or raised their hands, and this is something I did not know until the COVID outbreak, 70% of physicians are employees.

00:25:57.000 I didn't know that.

00:25:58.000 They raise their hand, they lose their job.

00:26:00.000 And they were afraid.

00:26:01.000 There was fear, fear, fear.

00:26:03.000 Fear was rampant in my profession.

00:26:05.000 And so people just shut the hell up.

00:26:08.000 And you had hospital administrators dictating how doctors treated patients.

00:26:13.000 And telling patients to go home, come back when you're O2 sat at 60%, this was astonishing to me.

00:26:20.000 It was... I kind of actually get nauseated when I think about it.

00:26:24.000 It's just such a transgression of your oath.

00:26:28.000 And the immediate next thought I have, by the way, is a friend of mine, Aaron Carioti.

00:26:32.000 Have you ever talked to Aaron Carioti?

00:26:33.000 I don't think so.

00:26:34.000 You should speak to him.

00:26:35.000 Aaron Carioti is one of the principal plaintiffs in the Missouri versus Biden case.

00:26:41.000 He was the head of bioethics at University of California, Irvine Medical School for years.

00:26:46.000 He was a storied professor.

00:26:47.000 He was a psychiatrist.

00:26:49.000 People, the students loved him.

00:26:50.000 He was the chairman of their bioethics department for years, lecturing students on bioethics.

00:26:55.000 And one of his contentions was, you know, when it really comes along to take a bioethical stand, it's probably going to be hard.

00:27:02.000 And that's when you have to really walk the walk.

00:27:04.000 So the mandates came along and he looked at the data and said, I don't think you have criteria for a mandate here.

00:27:11.000 And I've warned you forever that I'm going to have to do the hard thing when the tough time comes.

00:27:16.000 I have to raise my hand now and say, you don't have proper justification for a mandate.

00:27:21.000 And I have a bioethical problem with what you're doing here at this school.

00:27:25.000 I mean, it was incredible to watch.

00:27:29.000 And I think even today, it's hard to tell what interventions were supposedly good, what interventions were— I mean, there are certain things we hear at this company.

00:27:37.000 We actually sued OSHA to prevent a national vax mandate that the Biden administration was attempting to push.

00:27:42.000 It went all the way to the Supreme Court.

00:27:44.000 We stopped that.

00:27:45.000 From happening, we internally at the company, we never had a mask mandate, we never had a vaccine mandate, we opposed all of that.

00:27:50.000 On a personal level, you know, I will say that I think early on in the pandemic, I bought what was being sold with regard to the vaccines, particularly.

00:27:59.000 I had said that... Yeah, I was certainly sympathetic.

00:28:03.000 I mean, they were out there publicly saying that it was 99% effective in preventing transmission.

00:28:09.000 Not that it was preventing death, that it was preventing transmission, which of course would make the case for some sort of herd immunity.

00:28:14.000 And I'd never been in favor of a mandate, but my case was, okay, well, I'm not going to get it.

00:28:18.000 I'm not going to die from it, but my grandmother might, so I should get it.

00:28:21.000 They still have improper endpoints in their studies.

00:28:23.000 They've not adjusted.

00:28:24.000 It's totally psychotic.

00:28:25.000 And that finally came out like a year and a half afterward, where Pfizer came out saying, oh yeah, we never even tested that.

00:28:29.000 We just kind of trotted out that statistic and it was parroted by everybody.

00:28:33.000 At the same time, you have people who have now taken this to, I think, the reactionary extreme, which is that no vaccines ever are good.

00:28:40.000 Vaccines in general are bad.

00:28:42.000 Yes.

00:28:43.000 And what should people think about when they're thinking about vaccines in general?

00:28:47.000 And also, where do you kind of come down when you look at the data with regard to how effective

00:28:52.000 or ineffective were mRNA vaccines with regard to COVID?

00:28:55.000 It seems like the data sort of suggests that if you were very obese and very old, that

00:28:59.000 it was better if you took it than if you didn't.

00:29:00.000 And otherwise, there was really no reason to take it.

00:29:03.000 Well, remember, most of the data was collected around Alpha and Delta, which was a completely different illness than Omicron.

00:29:10.000 And the Omicrons that have followed have all had different characteristics and features, but they've been much, much milder.

00:29:15.000 So my patients are all vaxxed and boosted.

00:29:18.000 My medical patients that I've followed for 30 years plus are old.

00:29:22.000 They looked at the data, we discussed it.

00:29:24.000 I actually didn't have the data to give them a proper Risk-reward analysis.

00:29:29.000 I really didn't have it.

00:29:30.000 I didn't realize I didn't have it, but I didn't.

00:29:32.000 But I still, I probably made the right call getting them all vaxed and then boosted.

00:29:36.000 But as it went along, I was like, I don't know what we're doing.

00:29:39.000 We're no longer vaxing against the current variant.

00:29:42.000 We're vaxing against the variant from 6 or 12 months ago.

00:29:46.000 The illness is so mild.

00:29:47.000 We have Paxilovir.

00:29:48.000 Paxilovir works like crazy in elderly patients.

00:29:51.000 What are we doing?

00:29:52.000 I don't know.

00:29:53.000 If you'd like to take it, please do.

00:29:54.000 But I don't know what we're doing.

00:29:56.000 I can't give you a risk analysis.

00:29:58.000 I can't do it.

00:29:59.000 It's just not available to me.

00:30:01.000 And that's insane.

00:30:03.000 That's insane.

00:30:04.000 And myocarditis, I don't know when myocarditis became a mild condition.

00:30:08.000 When my kids were growing up, whenever they got a viral illness, the thing I would always

00:30:12.000 worry about is, please don't let them get myocarditis.

00:30:14.000 Because it's a dreaded illness.

00:30:16.000 It can cause sudden death.

00:30:17.000 It can cause sudden death down the road, cause myocardial myopathies and require the need

00:30:21.000 for heart transplants.

00:30:23.000 It's just a mess.

00:30:24.000 That is, let's say it's one in 5,000.

00:30:27.000 That's as compared to zero in 5,000.

00:30:29.000 And you're mandating that?

00:30:30.000 I swear to God, I hope you'll take this on.

00:30:33.000 If you're a college-age student and your college mandated you to get this and you develop myocarditis, you should sue the hell out of them.

00:30:38.000 Oh, for sure.

00:30:39.000 Absolutely.

00:30:40.000 That is an insane, insane thing.

00:30:42.000 And not only did it not protect you, it didn't protect anybody, and it only put you at risk.

00:30:46.000 What are we doing?

00:30:47.000 I mean, the FDA was pushing it on kids.

00:30:49.000 I mean, I got vaxxed when it first came out, but certainly my kids are not vaccinated.

00:30:52.000 And listen, I've been looking forward to the mRNA platforms for cancer.

00:30:56.000 And again, different risk profiles.

00:30:58.000 Somebody's going to die of a cancer and you want to take a lot of risk, for sure, take tons of risk in terms of what you're doing to help fight that cancer.

00:31:07.000 But a 25-year-old healthy person, you're going to take a platform that maybe has some problems for that age group?

00:31:12.000 There are two other vaccines available.

00:31:14.000 You know, there's the Novavax and Covaxin.

00:31:16.000 You want to push vaccines, why don't you push those two?

00:31:19.000 Why aren't we pushing those two?

00:31:21.000 I can't understand it.

00:31:22.000 Why only those, the only mRNA platform?

00:31:25.000 There are two excellent vaccines available.

00:31:27.000 Push those if you've got to have a vaccine.

00:31:29.000 Go ahead, I'm sorry.

00:31:29.000 On the other side of the aisle, what happens when institutions get discredited or when they start to fall apart, the normal human response is to kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater.

00:31:37.000 So the idea is that Big Pharma in general, everything they produce is bad, which of course

00:31:41.000 is not true.

00:31:42.000 Big Pharma produces every drug that your grandmother is taking at the hospital.

00:31:45.000 Literally all of them.

00:31:46.000 I prescribe them, I take them, they've been my handmaiden for my whole career.

00:31:50.000 They've been my partner my whole career.

00:31:53.000 And it costs billions of dollars.

00:31:54.000 I don't use a knife.

00:31:55.000 I use Medicaid, I use pharmacology.

00:31:56.000 And it costs billions of dollars to develop these drugs.

00:31:58.000 Billions.

00:31:59.000 This idea that you can just cut off the money source for big pharma by cramming down pricing based on the federal government's demands, that's a great way to destroy all R&D.

00:32:08.000 Correct.

00:32:09.000 Isn't that in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act?

00:32:12.000 Didn't they do that to, like, Keytruda and things?

00:32:14.000 These are major breakthroughs.

00:32:17.000 It costs a billion dollars to bring a drug to market, and then you have five years to make your profit, and then it goes off patent.

00:32:24.000 That's why they're so expensive.

00:32:25.000 That's it.

00:32:26.000 And that's what's hard about policymaking is that there really is very little room for black and white thinking about these sorts of things. 0.99

00:32:32.000 You have to be as specific as humanly possible.

00:32:33.000 So, you know, again, the anti-vax movement has gained a lot of ground on both the right and the left in the aftermath of COVID-19.

00:32:39.000 Unfortunate.

00:32:39.000 Again, you can see why because people respond and they're like, okay, you lied about what the mRNA vaccines were doing or what they weren't doing.

00:32:44.000 It's made me nervous.

00:32:45.000 That's the kindest blush you can give to the medical literature.

00:32:47.000 So the natural reaction is, okay, let's open up all the books.

00:32:49.000 And again, I get that, especially because it's been true for legitimately decades that

00:32:55.000 many medical studies have either been p-hacked or have never been duplicated.

00:32:59.000 That's the kindest blush you can give to the medical literature.

00:33:02.000 The other thing is you can't get stuff published if it doesn't go with the narrative.

00:33:05.000 Right.

00:33:06.000 Do you know that, what's her name, the Danish physician that showed that 90% of the adverse

00:33:12.000 reactions were in a certain pool of vaccine?

00:33:14.000 It was a great study.

00:33:16.000 It took her like three years to get it published.

00:33:19.000 No one would publish it.

00:33:21.000 That's a very important observation.

00:33:22.000 It should have been an emergency we all came to.

00:33:26.000 Let's figure that out.

00:33:27.000 What happened?

00:33:27.000 They also won't publish papers that debunk things.

00:33:29.000 So they will only publish new things.

00:33:31.000 Yes.

00:33:31.000 Oh my God, you're upsetting me so much.

00:33:33.000 This is so disturbing to me.

00:33:34.000 Oh my god, you're upsetting me so much.

00:33:36.000 This is so disturbing to me.

00:33:37.000 There's no incentive for a researcher to duplicate a study to find out whether it's true or not.

00:33:41.000 If you duplicate it and you find out it's true, you're not getting published.

00:33:43.000 And if you duplicate it and you find out that it's false, you're probably also not going to get published.

00:33:46.000 Correct.

00:33:47.000 So it gets shelved. It gets drawed.

00:33:48.000 Or it gets obscure publication somewhere or goes on one of the, what do they call those websites where it's peer reviewed and no one reads it.

00:33:57.000 Exactly, exactly.

00:33:58.000 And so you can see why there's all of this mistrust.

00:34:00.000 How should people approach things like vaccine schedules for their kids, for example?

00:34:04.000 Oh, please don't do that to me.

00:34:07.000 It's an honest question.

00:34:08.000 I mean, I have four kids.

00:34:10.000 I would make sure you have a pediatrician who's willing to discuss it with you. 0.99

00:34:14.000 If they're saying, just take it, you're dumb if you don't, you've got the wrong doctor. 0.97

00:34:19.000 I understand it takes time. 0.98

00:34:20.000 I understand pediatricians have no time.

00:34:21.000 I get it.

00:34:22.000 It's impossible.

00:34:23.000 It's impossible to be a doctor.

00:34:24.000 It's impossible.

00:34:25.000 Particularly a general pediatrician, general medicine, family, I'm sure your wife tells you, to actually pay your employees and it's just impossible.

00:34:33.000 And to actually be independent and to the job, it's impossible.

00:34:37.000 So when a patient comes in and wants to chat about something like this, It's challenging, but you need to talk to your doctor about it.

00:34:43.000 I have a grandchild coming and I'm...

00:34:46.000 I'm worried about it.

00:34:47.000 I'm worried about it.

00:34:48.000 Because I've seen measles.

00:34:49.000 I've seen how horrible it is.

00:34:50.000 And most people haven't seen that.

00:34:52.000 They think they're never going to see that.

00:34:53.000 My first kid, she actually was vaccinated for pertussis.

00:34:56.000 She got pertussis anyway. 0.94

00:34:57.000 Pertussis is horrifying.

00:34:59.000 When you watch your kid turning blue, it is not a fun phenomenon.

00:35:02.000 Right.

00:35:02.000 And I am from the school.

00:35:04.000 You got to remember, I was from the school that vaccine therapies were one of the top three advancements in the history of medicine.

00:35:10.000 The only thing that really made a difference in medicine was vaccine therapy, sanitation.

00:35:13.000 I forget even what the third one was.

00:35:16.000 Maybe antibiotics or something, yeah.

00:35:18.000 Antibiotics.

00:35:19.000 And even that's got some problems.

00:35:21.000 And now I'm like Joe Rogan, I'm like, I don't know, maybe the world is flat.

00:35:24.000 I don't know.

00:35:25.000 It could be.

00:35:26.000 I'm open to anything now.

00:35:27.000 Right, and that I think is part of the problem.

00:35:29.000 How do we reestablish some form of credibility?

00:35:31.000 Well, that's the point.

00:35:32.000 And I think RFK Jr.

00:35:34.000 has the idea, which is you have to untangle the incentives and the cozy relationship with the regulators, and you have to really do the right research, and do it properly, and do it well.

00:35:45.000 and that observational studies are inadequate.

00:35:49.000 It's just, it's not okay to say, well, you use it a lot, it's generally okay.

00:35:52.000 It's like, that's not medicine.

00:35:54.000 I mean, this does raise bigger issues that RFK has talked about a lot,

00:35:57.000 which is, we've seen extraordinary increases in diagnosis of a wide variety of conditions,

00:36:02.000 ranging from obesity to autism in the United States.

00:36:06.000 And RFK Jr.

00:36:07.000 suggests that a lot of this is because of the food supply, problems with the food supply, environmental issues.

00:36:12.000 For sure, food supply.

00:36:14.000 I'm with him on that.

00:36:15.000 That our food supply is adulterated.

00:36:18.000 I've got great guests for you coming up.

00:36:19.000 Have you ever heard of Cali Means or his sister, his EMT doctor, Dr. Means?

00:36:23.000 One of the leading surgeons at ENT left her practice to go fight this fight, because she started looking at all that was coming in and said, there's a root cause here, and it's food.

00:36:34.000 And her brother was a lobbyist for the food organizations.

00:36:38.000 He left and became an evangelist, be careful, anybody's evangelizing about anything, be careful, for this project.

00:36:46.000 And he educated me that, you have to remember, the tobacco companies, when they pivoted, they pivoted to food.

00:36:54.000 And they brought with them their scientists, and their lobbyists, and their marketers, and have deployed the exact same strategies that they use with tobacco.

00:37:03.000 Make it addictive, protect it with the lobbyist, and market it aggressively and brainwash people.

00:37:10.000 That's our food supply.

00:37:12.000 And look at what it's doing to us.

00:37:13.000 You have to really be careful about what you put in your mouth.

00:37:17.000 We'll get to more on that in a moment.

00:37:18.000 First, my days are incredibly full.

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00:37:48.000 I love it.

00:37:48.000 My wife loves it.

00:37:49.000 We're big Helix fans at the Shapiro household.

00:37:51.000 Helix has a 10 year warranty.

00:37:52.000 You can try it out for a hundred nights, risk free.

00:37:54.000 They'll even pick it up for you if you don't love it.

00:37:56.000 Not sure that's ever happened.

00:37:57.000 Helix's financing options and flexible payment plans make it so a great night's sleep is never far away.

00:38:01.000 For a limited time, Helix is offering up to 25% off all mattress orders, plus two free pillows.

00:38:07.000 For our listeners, just head on over to helixsleep.com slash Ben.

00:38:10.000 That's helixsleep.com slash Ben.

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00:38:12.000 It will not last long with Helix.

00:38:14.000 Better sleep starts right now.

00:38:16.000 So what are the biggest problems for people to avoid, do you think, in terms of the food supply?

00:38:20.000 I mean, we've all got to eat, so what are the biggest lies that people ought to make?

00:38:24.000 I remember hearing this from nutritionists and dieticians way on, that real foods, things that come out of the ground, things that grow on trees, It's fine to eat chicken and fish and beet.

00:38:35.000 Please eat it.

00:38:36.000 Beans, nuts.

00:38:37.000 But things in a package, generally be careful about.

00:38:42.000 Be a label reader.

00:38:44.000 And when you see seed oils, vegetable oils, I mean, that whole story is another story that's crazy.

00:38:50.000 The fact that we pivoted off butter and tallow into things that are carcinogenic when you heat them up and get stuck in our fat and are metabolically destructive to us.

00:39:01.000 That's all marketing and lobbyists.

00:39:04.000 Not in the entire corn syrup industry.

00:39:06.000 It's unbelievable.

00:39:07.000 Corn syrup is way worse for you than sugar.

00:39:08.000 Both are bad.

00:39:09.000 And yes, corn syrup is worse.

00:39:11.000 And seed oil and vegetable oil, infinitely worse than tallow and butter.

00:39:16.000 And butter, it's still hard.

00:39:17.000 Margarine, way worse than butter.

00:39:19.000 Think about that.

00:39:19.000 Think how hard margarine was pushed on us.

00:39:22.000 You look at all these issues, and you're trying to just kind of make your way in the world, and it's very difficult to figure out exactly who to trust, how to rebuild those levels of trust, and it seems like... Trust Ben.

00:39:34.000 Yeah, I mean... Trust Ben Shapiro.

00:39:36.000 No, I think my answer is don't.

00:39:39.000 I mean, trust but verify would probably be the answer.

00:39:41.000 For everybody.

00:39:42.000 For everybody.

00:39:43.000 I think that this goes to government, it goes to health.

00:39:45.000 More importantly, it goes to media and marketing.

00:39:49.000 There are...

00:39:51.000 The persuasion and brainwashing game is at an all-time high in this country.

00:39:56.000 I have something that stayed with me from the 70s.

00:40:00.000 I don't know why it stayed with me, but it came back to me during COVID, which was I was watching a TV news interview, like a 60-minute type interview, and it was on Pravda.

00:40:12.000 And somebody like one of the old 60-minute guys was in Russia talking to the lead anchor on Pravda television.

00:40:20.000 Mike Wallace, perhaps.

00:40:21.000 Mike Wallace was hammering this guy, like, but you totaled the line to the government.

00:40:26.000 You don't do the objectivity.

00:40:28.000 You don't only prioritize the brainwashing.

00:40:30.000 He was really hammering the guy.

00:40:31.000 And finally, the guy went, hey, he goes, we have a different set of priorities than your media and your country.

00:40:37.000 In our country, media is a political instrument.

00:40:40.000 In your country, it's a commercial instrument.

00:40:42.000 Trust me, there will be adulteration of your system. 0.99

00:40:49.000 And really what got me was all this panic, all this bullshit that was going on during COVID. 0.97

00:40:54.000 I thought at the beginning, I didn't realize the government was so involved with it. 0.98

00:40:58.000 I thought it was just to capture eyes.

00:40:59.000 If we make you panic, you'll watch us.

00:41:02.000 And that's a commercial.

00:41:04.000 Priority.

00:41:05.000 Watch us so we can sell airtime so we can make more money.

00:41:08.000 I mean, and you're right that it was a political priority as well.

00:41:11.000 I mean, there was an underlying moral system that had been set up by those who were pushing the COVID lockdown regime.

00:41:17.000 Did you see Zuckerberg just yesterday, a couple of days ago, just published this letter that he will not do that again.

00:41:24.000 I applaud him for that.

00:41:25.000 Yeah, for sure.

00:41:26.000 I mean, that's what I want.

00:41:27.000 I want people to go, you know what?

00:41:29.000 I made a mistake.

00:41:30.000 I will not do that again.

00:41:31.000 Everybody's got to do that.

00:41:32.000 I made mistakes.

00:41:33.000 I'm looking for opportunities to apologize wherever I can.

00:41:36.000 All of us need to do that.

00:41:36.000 What was amazing about the COVID crisis, or faux crisis, is that the unwillingness to even recognize basic medical facts, like people are not equally vulnerable to disease.

00:41:47.000 Like, this is like the number one thing that we all refuse to recognize.

00:41:50.000 It was like, if you're a 10-year-old child, you're just as vulnerable to this as an 85-year-old woman. 0.89

00:41:54.000 If one isn't safe, no one is safe.

00:41:56.000 One death is too many.

00:41:57.000 Right, exactly.

00:41:57.000 If one death is too many, we're not in a pandemic anymore.

00:42:00.000 Right.

00:42:00.000 Because pandemic is defined by excess death.

00:42:02.000 So if we have one death, I don't know what we're talking about anymore.

00:42:04.000 I remember from the very earliest days, I remember, because, you know, you're covering this stuff and it's like, OK, people want a proposal.

00:42:10.000 So my proposal was basically the proposal from Sweden, which was we tranche out the population. 0.99

00:42:15.000 So if you're 20, you should be in the workplace.

00:42:17.000 You shouldn't be at home.

00:42:17.000 You should be out working.

00:42:18.000 And then you know what?

00:42:19.000 They'll all get COVID and they'll all be fine.

00:42:21.000 And then you should tranche out everybody who's 40 and they'll all get COVID and they'll all be fine. 0.96

00:42:24.000 And eventually what you'll end up with is either herd immunity or shielding the elderly.

00:42:28.000 It's the Great Barrington Declaration.

00:42:30.000 Yeah, of course.

00:42:30.000 And Jay Bhattacharya was the lead author on that, is the poster child for the excesses of COVID.

00:42:36.000 This is a wonderful man, a brilliant epidemiologist, and you destroy him?

00:42:40.000 Fauci went after him?

00:42:42.000 By the way, when I was cancelled, somebody put together some videotape of me trying to get everybody to calm down in the early days and made it look as though I was saying, throughout the pandemic, you had no risk.

00:42:52.000 And they cut out the one thing I really got wrong at the beginning.

00:42:56.000 Which was, you know, we just went through this H1N1 pandemic.

00:42:59.000 I got that illness.

00:42:59.000 That was terrible.

00:43:01.000 It killed 300,000 people.

00:43:02.000 And the Obama administration did a good job with that.

00:43:04.000 And you don't even know what happened. 0.96

00:43:06.000 And now we're going to, this one may kill a million people.

00:43:09.000 It could, but we're going to destroy the world because of it.

00:43:12.000 Isn't there an intermediate step we could take?

00:43:14.000 And I would say the same thing at every comment I made.

00:43:16.000 I said, look, the CDC and Dr. Fauci have been guiding light through my whole career.

00:43:21.000 Just listen to what they say and they'll get us through this.

00:43:23.000 That's what I got wrong.

00:43:24.000 I didn't realize how adulterous, and of course they cut that out of every comment I made.

00:43:29.000 And that was the one thing I actually got wrong.

00:43:31.000 So, obviously, you spent a lot of time talking about physical health, but also about mental health.

00:43:34.000 Yes.

00:43:35.000 There's been a lot of talk about the mental health crisis in this country.

00:43:38.000 One of the things about psychology is that, again, many of the diagnoses in the DSM-5, it's very, very hard to diagnose things properly in psychology because, again, the symptoms are much vaguer.

00:43:49.000 If there's a rash, the rash is on your skin and you can look at it with a microscope.

00:43:52.000 I'm going to stop you and say we are both over-diagnosing And under-diagnosing at the same time.

00:43:57.000 I don't know how we get both ends wrong.

00:43:59.000 But to your point, the one thing that you must look at is, is it affecting functioning?

00:44:07.000 If it is not affecting functioning, it is not a diagnosable condition.

00:44:11.000 It is a trait.

00:44:12.000 It may become a disorder, but at this point it is a trait if it doesn't affect functioning in work or school, your financial health, your legal status, your relationships, your physical health.

00:44:23.000 If it's not affecting one of those areas, it's a trait.

00:44:26.000 And yes, you can get treatment for it.

00:44:28.000 We don't want it to become a problem.

00:44:30.000 Maybe a very enlightened, careful practitioner could say, you know, this could be a problem.

00:44:34.000 Most people aren't motivated to do the work, though, until it becomes a problem.

00:44:37.000 So it's very hard to treat people until they really have the motivation.

00:44:40.000 Now I want to kind of dig in on that because when it comes to something becoming a disorder

00:44:44.000 as opposed to a trait, and we say it's affecting function, in order to even define what it means

00:44:48.000 to affect function, there has to be some standard of what functionality looks like, which means

00:44:51.000 there has to be a norm. I mean, if for example, your trait means that you only want to work 30

00:44:58.000 35 hours a week as opposed to 40 hours a week.

00:44:59.000 Is that affecting function?

00:45:01.000 If it means that you're dating certain types of people, but not other types of people, is that affecting function?

00:45:04.000 How do we establish a baseline for function?

00:45:06.000 Not only that, the patients have denial about it, and so do the family.

00:45:10.000 So your notion of, hey, I can only dig 30 hours of work a week may be a functional problem,

00:45:16.000 but you don't identify it as such.

00:45:18.000 Uh...

00:45:19.000 Yeah.

00:45:19.000 So you end up, because functionality used to actually have a definition, which was the

00:45:22.000 norm, and because in this country we destroyed the norm and there is no norm anymore, the

00:45:26.000 real question becomes, aren't we all to a certain extent self-diagnosing?

00:45:29.000 Because instead of us looking at somebody acting bizarrely, I think I'm Napoleon, but

00:45:33.000 I can go to work and have a relationship.

00:45:34.000 You're like, well, but you think you're Napoleon, you got a problem.

00:45:38.000 Yeah.

00:45:38.000 As opposed to, you know, what it used to be, as opposed to what it is now, which is, well, I mean, as long as they can go to work and, you know, have relationships, even if he thinks he's Napoleon, is that really like a huge deal?

00:45:48.000 That's a very weird standard.

00:45:50.000 It is a weird standard.

00:45:51.000 It is the world we are in.

00:45:53.000 Okay, here we go.

00:45:55.000 Another thing you'd make me upset about.

00:45:56.000 And let me just say this one thing before I go on to this topic.

00:45:59.000 The physician-patient relationship has been under assault my whole career.

00:46:03.000 I've spent my whole career fighting it.

00:46:05.000 You know, by the insurance resources and the regulators and the hospital administration.

00:46:11.000 We lost.

00:46:12.000 We lost.

00:46:13.000 We saw it during COVID.

00:46:14.000 We lost.

00:46:15.000 We have to start empowering patients, which is, I know you read things for, advertisements for TWC, the wellness company.

00:46:21.000 That's why I got involved with them, because they are taking stuff right to the patient, and Dr. Kelly Victory is on my medical board with me, said, you know, five years ago I would have thought, maybe this is a little crazy, but now I think you're crazy if you don't do this.

00:46:33.000 You've got to be ready, you've got to be on your own, you've got to do it yourself.

00:46:36.000 So that's why I'm deeply involved with those guys, so, for the record.

00:46:40.000 I'm Napoleon side and homelessness, I want to get to a little bit next, this idea that practitioners can't judge, so to speak.

00:46:49.000 We have open-air hospitals in our cities.

00:46:51.000 These are psychiatric hospitals without walls, okay?

00:46:55.000 It's populated by serious mental illness and drug addiction.

00:46:58.000 That's what's there. 0.98

00:47:00.000 Think about it.

00:47:01.000 If you have serious enough brain disturbance that you cannot find a couch to sleep on or a family member to put you up for a minute, you have to lie down on the sidewalk?

00:47:14.000 That's a specific thing.

00:47:16.000 And you can't take advantage of the billion dollars of resources that are available, particularly in Los Angeles.

00:47:22.000 Lots of resources available.

00:47:24.000 So you have open-air hospitals being run by social workers.

00:47:29.000 Social workers are not trained to, they're not doctors, they're not nurses, they're not trained to even diagnose, let alone manage these conditions.

00:47:38.000 And they are trained to meet the patient where they are.

00:47:42.000 That is the most insane thing I've ever heard.

00:47:44.000 If I met my drug addict patients where they were, well then I'd probably be handing them heroin too.

00:47:49.000 You have to fight the illness, you have to be able to identify it, see through the denial.

00:47:53.000 Assess it and know what's needed to fight it.

00:47:56.000 It's hard.

00:47:57.000 You meet patient where they are, you just enable the illness.

00:48:00.000 That's what enabling is.

00:48:01.000 You have to have a team and you have to fight it to save that life.

00:48:06.000 A kid I've gotten to know now, he wrote a book called Crooked Smile, who told me the other day, he'd been off the street a few years now and he's thriving.

00:48:14.000 And he said, you know, when I was on the street, I would meet these caretakers and they would all pat me on the back and go, You're a victim of capitalism.

00:48:23.000 If we get socialism and communism in, this will all stop.

00:48:26.000 But in the meantime, here's your heroin.

00:48:28.000 Can you imagine that? 0.97

00:48:30.000 That's disgusting.

00:48:31.000 That is murder.

00:48:32.000 That is a form of negligent murder.

00:48:34.000 Or enabling.

00:48:36.000 It's giving a suicidal person a gun.

00:48:38.000 It's murder.

00:48:39.000 It's some sort of manslaughter.

00:48:40.000 And it's active.

00:48:42.000 And our politicians are participating in that negligent manslaughter.

00:48:47.000 If they didn't have qualified immunity, somebody would have to go after them.

00:48:49.000 Again, a lot of that relies on this bizarre redefinition of functionality, because we're both defining it up and defining it down.

00:48:56.000 So you're totally functional if you're living on the street and eating, you know, from a shopping cart.

00:49:00.000 Who are you to say, man?

00:49:01.000 It's their life, man!

00:49:03.000 Perfectly functional.

00:49:04.000 But also, you can diagnose yourself as perfectly dysfunctional if you are a college student Right.

00:49:08.000 who has feelings. You had a bad day and now your functionality has been broken,

00:49:13.000 harm has been done to you, and it's society's job to somehow care for you and you may need

00:49:17.000 medication. So the person who's living on the street in their own feces does not

00:49:21.000 need medication. That person just needs a different economic system. The person who is

00:49:25.000 rich and actually just needs to grow the hell up, that person

00:49:27.000 actually requires medication.

00:49:29.000 Apologies again.

00:49:31.000 Guilty.

00:49:31.000 I brought some of this thinking on.

00:49:33.000 I thought it was important for us to understand about mental health and to really be invested in it.

00:49:37.000 I had no idea where it was going to go.

00:49:39.000 But I think this is why, you know, when one institution falls apart, I think all of them fall apart to a certain extent.

00:49:44.000 You've made that point, and I think that is true.

00:49:46.000 And I think that the chief institution, and this is going to sound like out of right field, but it is, the chief institution that fell apart actually were churches and communities.

00:49:55.000 When churches and communities fell apart, everything fell apart.

00:49:57.000 Your doctor used to go to church with you.

00:49:59.000 That's who he was.

00:50:00.000 We're synagogue with you.

00:50:02.000 So did your banker.

00:50:03.000 Everybody had a functional community in which you knew each other and you had the same general orientations for what was true and what was false.

00:50:10.000 And when that fell apart and when truth became absolutely relative, truth cannot be relative in one area and remain stagnant and absolutely clear and set in another.

00:50:18.000 And so as a country that has moved into a post-truth era, we tried to divide off kind of the sciences from everything else.

00:50:23.000 We said scientific truth, It's a different kind of truth.

00:50:26.000 You can have falsification.

00:50:28.000 It's Karl Popper.

00:50:28.000 It either works or it doesn't.

00:50:30.000 But it turns out that's just as vulnerable to the same kinds of post-truth mentality that destroyed everything else.

00:50:36.000 We have a post-value, post-truth society.

00:50:38.000 And then we just applied that to medicine.

00:50:39.000 And we said, okay, well, you know, we'll redefine functionality, for example.

00:50:42.000 I hope people are listening to you because there is immense factual truth embedded in what you're saying.

00:50:49.000 And it's really where Bill Maher and I forged our relationship.

00:50:52.000 I went to Cornell, I went to Amherst, and our training was about ascending to the approximation of the truth.

00:50:57.000 Human brains can't get to the truth.

00:50:59.000 You know, that's why we have a spiritual life.

00:51:01.000 That's helping us, you know, ascend beyond what our limited instrument can give us.

00:51:08.000 The truth has become an old white guy concept and has no value.

00:51:14.000 And that is very dangerous.

00:51:16.000 And back to your point about church and community.

00:51:19.000 When I was growing up, what do the neighbors think, right?

00:51:22.000 So even just our neighborhoods, so our communities dissolved.

00:51:26.000 I mean, you're right, the church community, but that had many layers to it that dissolved all at once.

00:51:33.000 Yeah, krizgestalt.

00:51:34.000 I mean, communities create a broader, you know, ripple effect for broader communities, and that's what happens.

00:51:39.000 I mean, there's a reason that Burke suggests that families are the platoons of society.

00:51:43.000 I mean, that's what they are.

00:51:44.000 You expand that out and you have a community.

00:51:46.000 Have always been.

00:51:47.000 And so it turns out when you destroy all those things, What you get is just chaos.

00:51:51.000 So the community, and the family, and the relationships, these are things that we have to rebuild.

00:51:58.000 I mean, you're absolutely right.

00:52:00.000 And the truth has value, the truth has meaning, and we need to use our best practices to try to ascend to it.

00:52:07.000 I don't know what else to say but that, the fact that that is not, I get defeated thinking about this, because it's so discouraging to me that the system that I valued so much, higher education, is perpetrating all this.

00:52:21.000 And so you're doing nothing if you're not making the mind, changing the brains, changing the minds so that they continue to learn and continue to grow and continue to ascend to something like the truth.

00:52:32.000 If you're turning them into parrots, into things that just parrot what you say is the truth or what is relatively the truth.

00:52:40.000 I don't know where we go. I don't know where that goes. It just seems like an empty circle.

00:52:44.000 Well, it sort of brings us full circle. This is why we have to have experiments in democracy,

00:52:48.000 like California and Florida, so we can tell what works and what doesn't. And it turns out...

00:52:51.000 Nobody acknowledges it, though. That's the problem. It's not acknowledged as such.

00:52:55.000 I have found one beachhead in all of this.

00:53:01.000 And that is speech.

00:53:03.000 We should all at least be defending that.

00:53:06.000 If we can all defend speech and really stand up where it is most difficult.

00:53:11.000 Again, my peers as physicians who didn't do that because they're afraid of their bosses.

00:53:16.000 You must speak what you think is the truth and speak up and speak loudly and take risk and do whatever is necessary to maintain and protect that speech.

00:53:26.000 Then I feel like we'll find our way through this.

00:53:29.000 But if we allow speech to be undermined, it's just so easy to point at that as the one thing that could get us through this.

00:53:38.000 I mean, imagine we can't even have this conversation.

00:53:41.000 And who knows?

00:53:41.000 I'll probably get cancelled for having this conversation.

00:53:44.000 Right?

00:53:44.000 And you know what?

00:53:45.000 Fine.

00:53:45.000 It's the way it goes.

00:53:46.000 These days I'm like, okay, well that's not my... No, because that's not my job.

00:53:50.000 My job is to stand up and talk.

00:53:52.000 And if you don't like it, great, let's engage with it.

00:53:54.000 I'm delighted with that.

00:53:55.000 I saw where Jay Bhattacharya invited Peter Hotez to a Stanford event.

00:53:58.000 That'd be great.

00:53:59.000 I want to see those two guys talk.

00:54:01.000 But if we be quiet or get... Have you ever heard this notion of you're platforming bad people?

00:54:07.000 How dare you platform somebody like that?

00:54:10.000 What is that word even?

00:54:11.000 Platforming.

00:54:12.000 When I was on CNN, your beloved CNN and HLN, I used to interview Nazis and white supremacists to try to figure out what was going on with them.

00:54:20.000 That wasn't platforming them.

00:54:21.000 They gave their position.

00:54:22.000 They exposed themselves.

00:54:24.000 You judge for yourself what's going on with those guys.

00:54:27.000 Platforming.

00:54:28.000 That's the weirdest word in the world.

00:54:31.000 Anytime you hear somebody saying the word platforming, block them.

00:54:34.000 Dr. Drew, it's great to see you.

00:54:36.000 Hopefully we'll see much more of you down here in Florida.

00:54:38.000 I hope so.

00:54:39.000 This conversation has upset me, I'm sorry to say.

00:54:42.000 Oh, I'm sorry about that.

00:54:44.000 Not because of you, because it's reflective of so much we're contending with these days in this country.

00:54:50.000 And let me just say, I just think This country was founded on brilliant ideas.

00:54:55.000 And I was, I don't know, I was rereading some of Lincoln's speeches, you know, the better angels of our nature and the mystic cords that bind us and the grays of every patriot and malice towards none. 0.61

00:55:07.000 I mean, these are words that we should lean on right now and get ourselves back together and just realign with the principles that were laid out in these brilliant documents at the beginning.

00:55:18.000 They were an approximation of the truth.

00:55:21.000 They were based on The entirety of human experience with government prior to that point, and guess what?

00:55:28.000 They work if you let them work.

00:55:30.000 They're not just a piece of paper.

00:55:31.000 They're brilliant ideas that we can lean on and we should.

00:55:35.000 Well, again, it's great to see you.

00:55:36.000 Thank you so much for stopping by.

00:55:37.000 You bet.

00:55:38.000 The Ben Shapiro Sunday Special is produced by Savannah Morris and Matt Kemp.

00:55:47.000 Associate producers are Jake Pollock and John Crick.

00:55:50.000 Editing is by Phil Calatran.

00:55:52.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Corimina.

00:55:54.000 Camera and lighting is by Zach Ginta.

00:55:56.000 Hair, makeup, and wardrobe by Fabiola Cristina.

00:55:59.000 Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.

00:56:01.000 Executive assistant, Kelly Carvalho.

00:56:03.000 Executive in charge of production is David Wormus.

00:56:06.000 Executive producer, Justin Siegel.

00:56:08.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

00:56:10.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - September 29, 2024

The Decay Of The American Medical Establishment | Dr. Drew Pinsky

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