Triggered - Donald Trump Jr - Healthcare Without Propaganda: Dr. Drew Pinsky On His Mission to Restore Medical Freedom | TRIGGERED Ep.125

00:00:00.000 you you

00:05:59.000 you Hey guys, welcome to another huge episode of Triggered.

00:06:28.000 And tonight's episode I've been really looking forward to for quite some time.

00:06:32.000 We'll be joined by Dr.

00:06:34.000 Drew Pinsky. You all know Dr.

00:06:36.000 Drew. He's one of the leading addiction medicine specialists.

00:06:39.000 He's a physician and produced television shows like Celebrity Rehab and so much more.

00:06:45.000 And Dr. Drew has also been a leading voice against medical tyranny, lockdown policies, and woke medicine.

00:06:51.000 So there's a lot of I think we'll have a lot of fun with this one.

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00:08:08.000 Now, Dr. Drew Pinsky is also the Chief Patient Officer at The Wellness Company, one of our great sponsors, which you've heard me talk about many times on the show.

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00:10:33.000 Well, guys, joining me now, Chief Patient Officer of the Wellness Company, the host of Ask Dr.

00:10:39.000 Drew, which you can find right here on Rumble, board-certified physician, addiction medicine specialist, Dr.

00:10:47.000 Drew Pinsky. Drew, good to have you on here.

00:10:49.000 It's good to have you. Good to be here, my friend.

00:10:51.000 It's just interesting. I just thought to myself, damn, if I only had done The Apprentice back in the day, we would have met in person.

00:10:56.000 I know. I think we have some friends in common, actually. 0.96

00:10:59.000 A bunch. A bunch.

00:11:01.000 If you remain friendly with people from that show after you dismiss them from the boardroom, I don't know.

00:11:06.000 Yeah, there's definitely a lot of overlap there.

00:11:09.000 Honestly, I try to maintain friends with everyone.

00:11:11.000 Not so easy these days once you get into the world of politics.

00:11:14.000 That becomes harder. I bet.

00:11:16.000 But I think as people sort of see the insanity of the world, maybe some of them come back around.

00:11:21.000 Who knows? That would be nice.

00:11:23.000 I mean, that's what I look forward to.

00:11:25.000 Someday, you know, some great, better angel of our nature take over.

00:11:29.000 I do believe we have a collective together as a country, but I'm not sure we've taught it to enough people for them to understand that.

00:11:36.000 Well, you know, again, I'm not going to hold my breath, but I'm hoping we get there because, you know, I think it's probably desperately needed.

00:11:44.000 Yes, sir. Indeed.

00:11:46.000 Well, you know, first, it's great to have you there.

00:11:48.000 And there's, you know, really so much to talk about.

00:11:51.000 I first just want to get your, like, let's call it, you know, 36,000 foot view of where we stand in medicine today.

00:11:59.000 I mean, the last few years has sort of been really kind of...

00:12:02.000 Eye-opening to that.

00:12:03.000 And there seems to be this growing politicization of medicine.

00:12:07.000 You know, the science doesn't actually seem like science, or at least the science can be changed to sort of suit a narrative very quickly.

00:12:14.000 We've especially noticed this post-COVID. We've seen, you know, the mandates, the lockdowns, you know, medical schools embracing DEI rather than competence and so much more.

00:12:24.000 What are your concerns beyond the obvious?

00:12:27.000 And what are your big missions right now in medicine?

00:12:31.000 Well, let me put that up front and then explain on the backside of that.

00:12:35.000 That's why I got involved with the wellness company, which I know you're involved with here, which is that I have been fighting my whole career to try to protect the sanctity and the autonomy of the physician and the physician-patient relationship.

00:12:50.000 I fought... Fought through the opioid crisis.

00:12:54.000 I'll tell you what that experience was like if you wish.

00:12:56.000 I fought insurance companies off.

00:12:58.000 I fought state regulators off.

00:13:01.000 And COVID was such an eye-opening experience for me that I figured it was just shocking and deeply disturbing to me how physicians behave during the pandemic that I thought, we've lost.

00:13:15.000 It's over. We have to get things to the patients directly.

00:13:19.000 And that's what wellness is all about, the wellness company.

00:13:23.000 When the pandemic started and I saw my peers literally refusing to care for patients, I mean, their sacred duty is to go in, do the best they can for that patient in front of them, improvise, figure something out, and follow up.

00:13:39.000 Instead, they stood down.

00:13:41.000 Why? Because it turns out three-quarters of them are employees, and their employer Big hospital systems, insurance, whoever it was, said, stand down.

00:13:52.000 Tell these people to go home.

00:13:53.000 It's too dangerous. Come back when they're blue, when they're dying.

00:13:57.000 This was disgusting. 0.87

00:14:00.000 I have never seen anything like this.

00:14:03.000 Then, anybody who wanted to try something, and this was the, I suppose I should reserve the word disgusting for this phase of the operation, Which was anyone who wanted to do something was vilified.

00:14:14.000 People wanted to improvise, wanted to try things.

00:14:17.000 They were literally publicly shamed.

00:14:20.000 No different than execution.

00:14:22.000 And it goes on to this day.

00:14:24.000 Yeah, ivermectin. It's a horse pill!

00:14:27.000 I mean, you know, oh no, a couple years later.

00:14:30.000 Well, it turns out to be very effective.

00:14:32.000 Like, well, we knew that then.

00:14:33.000 The one I talk about, because again, it doesn't take a physician to sort of get it, was the vitriol, the vicious attacks for anyone who said, hey, do you think maybe the Wuhan virus came from the lab in Wuhan, China that studied said virus?

00:14:51.000 And if you were in science and you said, I don't know Possibly?

00:14:56.000 Probably? Of course it's the most plausible.

00:14:58.000 We all know that now. I knew it then.

00:15:00.000 But if you were in medicine, that was it.

00:15:03.000 You were canceled.

00:15:05.000 You'd lose your research funding.

00:15:07.000 You'd lose tenure.

00:15:09.000 Of course it came from the lab that studied.

00:15:11.000 No, no, no. It came from four feet outside of the lab, Drew.

00:15:14.000 It came from right there.

00:15:15.000 There's a wet market two blocks down the street.

00:15:18.000 It came from there, not from the place that plays with this stuff on a daily basis.

00:15:22.000 And that, to me, was just shocking. 0.98

00:15:25.000 Just how blind everyone went and just how all in they went for something that literally you could be a borderline imbecile and still be like, yeah, it probably came from there. 0.98

00:15:36.000 Or at least be able to go, hmm, I wonder if that's a possibility. 0.99

00:15:42.000 And if you said that, you were crushed.

00:15:45.000 And by the way, I read the Nature letter.

00:15:47.000 It wasn't an article, by the way.

00:15:49.000 It was compelling.

00:15:50.000 Their argument was compelling.

00:15:52.000 That is science, which is considering all things, being objective, always updating your theory, updating your priors.

00:16:01.000 That is following the science, not declaring from on high that you know what is right and just and absolutely the truth.

00:16:08.000 That is hysteria.

00:16:09.000 And hysteria grabbed us.

00:16:11.000 And so here's the things that were really disgusting.

00:16:13.000 So look, I don't have a strong feeling about ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, but I do have a strong feeling about protecting a physician's privilege.

00:16:22.000 For he or her to use what they feel they need to do in the best interest of the patient.

00:16:27.000 It was interesting. When this was all going on, I was doing a nightly show here locally on the news, and my co-host, a great guy and a smart guy, we talked about something like this, and he says, what about the FDA? And I said, I don't...

00:16:42.000 Why do I care about the FDA? The FDA has nothing, nothing to do with the practice of medicine.

00:16:47.000 The FDA determines under what circumstance a product is brought to market by a company.

00:16:52.000 Then what is done with it is completely at the liberty of the physicians.

00:16:57.000 We can do literally anything with anything if we believe it's in the best interest of our patient.

00:17:03.000 That's it. I taught medicine for years.

00:17:06.000 At no point did I go, I don't know.

00:17:12.000 I don't know.

00:17:13.000 I don't know.

00:17:31.000 Maybe we want to focus on that and not have so many consequences downstream from taking actions for people that really have no risk.

00:17:39.000 Crushed. Crushed.

00:17:40.000 And need to be destroyed immediately.

00:17:42.000 This was... Look, the thing that gets me...

00:17:45.000 And this is what everyone in your audience needs to be aware of.

00:17:48.000 And this is what I talk about, not infrequently, on my Rumble stream.

00:17:52.000 Please do sign up, by the way, subscribe to my Rumble channel.

00:17:55.000 That's Dr. Drew. But is that whenever you see a scientist or a clinician evangelizing, I don't mean religiously evangelizing, I mean evangelizing on a topic.

00:18:08.000 All of your concerns should go up immediately.

00:18:15.000 People don't know that the story on the opioid crisis, people want to blame the drug companies, which were duplicitous, and they're paying a price for it.

00:18:23.000 But the real culprits, the people that created it and perpetrated it, were the evangelizing physicians who believed they knew what was best, and they were going to save the world from pain.

00:18:34.000 There should never be pain in the United States ever.

00:18:38.000 Sound familiar? Deborah Birx, evangelizing for lockdowns.

00:18:42.000 Immediately, we should be going, wait, wait a minute.

00:18:44.000 That is one person's opinion.

00:18:46.000 Let's get in the room and talk about this.

00:18:48.000 We shouldn't be caving to an evangelical point of view, ever.

00:18:52.000 Yeah, well, I saw it.

00:18:53.000 Honestly, one of the, let's call it, more aggressive conversations I've ever had with a doctor or, frankly, anyone outside of maybe some pretty aggressive business negotiations with my children's pediatrician at the time.

00:19:07.000 It was like, literally, We must vaccinate your kids!

00:19:10.000 And I'm like, wait, wait, wait. Please explain to me why.

00:19:12.000 Like, I'm not a doctor, and I'll be open to your logic, but I'm saying I am, you know, a finance guy.

00:19:21.000 I understand math. I can look at something, and I'm looking at, like...

00:19:24.000 There's a 0% chance within, you know, unless there's maybe some sort of, you know, gross pre-existing condition that we were aware of or not aware of, that, like, my children would be susceptible to this.

00:19:37.000 If you're, you know, my 85-year-old grandmother or my 97-year-old grandmother, man, that's different.

00:19:41.000 But it... My children at the time, all basically under the age of 12, they were in the 0% chance of major problems category, and yet they were like, we must do that.

00:19:54.000 I was like, just no. No.

00:19:56.000 But it was borderline sort of knock-down conversation.

00:20:01.000 I'm actually shocked that I had to get that stern on something that statistically seemed so obvious.

00:20:07.000 Well, you're making a great point.

00:20:09.000 So let's say, I think there were, what, 215 under the age 15 deaths in 23, something like that.

00:20:18.000 Yeah, I mean, and look, I'm not a pediatrician either.

00:20:22.000 I'm an adult medical doctor.

00:20:25.000 But risk-reward is what you're talking about.

00:20:27.000 And risk-reward analysis, or benefit-risk analysis, was abandoned in the name of this one priority.

00:20:36.000 Uber Alice! Safety!

00:20:38.000 Stop COVID! Now, if there was something about this virus that the public wasn't being told, that our government knew, In other words, it was a bioweapon or something.

00:20:49.000 It had potential to morph into something more serious because of the way they designed it.

00:20:53.000 Well, by all means, let's vaccinate because that is a serious unknown risk that we might be protecting ourselves against.

00:21:00.000 On the Vax side, I'm imagining at the point this was being recommended, we really didn't fully understand the risk of the vaccine to pediatric patients.

00:21:08.000 So you have essentially zero risk.

00:21:10.000 And again, risk reward in a pediatric setting is very different than adult medicine.

00:21:16.000 They don't accept any deaths.

00:21:18.000 In other words, if there's 80 measles deaths, we've got to vaccinate the whole country.

00:21:22.000 And that's sort of how they think about it.

00:21:23.000 As an adult, it's not how we think about it.

00:21:26.000 We think about what are the risks, how many years of life are saved, what kind of quality of life could be restored or lost.

00:21:33.000 It's all kinds of things we think about that pediatricians don't think about.

00:21:36.000 But by the way, speaking of pediatricians, remind yourself, Of the behavior of some of the public health officials during this COVID thing, which was bizarre.

00:21:46.000 I looked at who these guys were, these people were.

00:21:49.000 A lot of them were not doctors.

00:21:50.000 And those that were doctors were pediatricians.

00:21:53.000 Because pediatricians were the ones doing the vaccine distributions.

00:21:57.000 And so, like in our state, pediatrician was in there.

00:22:00.000 And I thought, oh, these guys don't know how to make adult medicine decisions.

00:22:03.000 They don't understand risk or even adults.

00:22:05.000 I didn't realize it was that different.

00:22:06.000 Because, yeah, like I said, in this conversation, it was by phone, right?

00:22:10.000 I'm getting very heated.

00:22:12.000 And, you know, my ex-wife at the time, she's involved, and she's a little bit more of a warrior than me.

00:22:17.000 And they... And the doctor literally said, I'm texting you this article.

00:22:21.000 And it was literally like, you know, 10-year-old dies of COVID. Well, so I actually get beyond the headline.

00:22:27.000 And at literally the end of paragraph one, well, you know, the child had an enlarged heart and seven other, like...

00:22:36.000 I felt terrible, but I'm like, that's not the example for me.

00:22:40.000 Vaccinate that kid.

00:22:41.000 Definitely vaccinate that kid. 0.76

00:22:43.000 For sure vaccinate that kid. 1.00

00:22:45.000 Fine. But there's a really interesting thing happening, which is that people are having difficulty right now understanding even the difference between the utility of the vaccine in, say, September of 2020 and And you tell you the vaccine over the last year.

00:23:06.000 It's a different illness now.

00:23:08.000 And so, again, the risk-reward analysis is different.

00:23:11.000 People are yelling at me.

00:23:13.000 I'm very, very, very worried about the young males because I've seen a lot of cardiac problems from the vaccine.

00:23:19.000 I've also seen a lot of what we call long COVID from the vaccine.

00:23:23.000 So this is a concern here, even in adult populations, but especially in young adult population males where we're seeing all this cardiac injury.

00:23:33.000 And, you know, people argue, oh, it's only 1 in 15,000.

00:23:36.000 It's only 1 in 5,000 and you're worrying about it.

00:23:39.000 Yes, it is only 1 in 5,000 or 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 15,000 that are going to be hurt for an illness for whom the risk for that population is zero.

00:23:49.000 Literally zero. So why would I do that?

00:23:52.000 Why would I take any risk in vaccinating that population?

00:23:57.000 The hysteria that captured us was really shocking to me.

00:24:00.000 And it captured my profession as well as everywhere else.

00:24:03.000 Yeah, I mean, you touched on it a little bit, but obviously a big part of sort of the COVID chaos seemed to be centered around those major institutions just trying to undermine medical freedom itself.

00:24:16.000 They've done a lot with speech, but it really seemed like it was just a power grab, right?

00:24:21.000 Well, was it?

00:24:23.000 I was skeptical. You're closer to it than I am.

00:24:25.000 I can fantasize all kinds of things that people were doing that I don't know if that's what they were doing, but it sure looked like that.

00:24:32.000 It looked like taking people who were prone that way Jumping all the way in and enjoying it.

00:24:41.000 Like our governor here seemed to enjoy locking down this state.

00:24:46.000 I don't know how else to describe it.

00:24:47.000 I'm sure he must have in his private moments not felt great about what he was doing to people, but it's something that if If I had done, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night.

00:24:57.000 I didn't do it. I had trouble sleeping at night.

00:24:59.000 I remember I kept thinking about Disneyland versus Disney World.

00:25:03.000 I thought, my God, the tens of thousands of jobs and businesses we've destroyed around Disneyland on our second year of lockdown versus Disney World where it's been open the whole time.

00:25:15.000 It's just, I couldn't, I can't understand how you can sleep at night when you know you have an A-B test.

00:25:20.000 You have it right there.

00:25:21.000 And it's failing.

00:25:23.000 Change direction. How skeptical should people like myself or yourself or anyone watching be of some of these bigger institutions like the World Health Organization or perhaps even our own CDC or the NIH? Because it feels like they're just, in the sort of case of the World Health Organization, it felt like they were like China's marketing department.

00:25:44.000 It was like, yep! China said this.

00:25:46.000 Sure. It doesn't have to make any sense.

00:25:49.000 It doesn't have to be real. Are you familiar with the treaty that they are passing around right now?

00:25:55.000 Do you know about this? Give us the outline.

00:25:57.000 Your audience needs to know about this.

00:25:59.000 So the World Health Organization has decided that not only did they do a great job during COVID, they need to make sure that they're given the necessary instruments when disease X comes along, which it sounds like they're actually planning it, When the next thing comes along, they can do whatever they want to keep us safe.

00:26:18.000 Safety uber alice.

00:26:20.000 Forget the consequences.

00:26:22.000 We're going to keep you safe.

00:26:23.000 Big Daddy's going to keep you safe.

00:26:25.000 In this treaty, they are literally going to usurp sovereign authority over all elected officials internationally should they feel it's necessary.

00:26:35.000 If the climate gets to be too far, they feel it's necessary.

00:26:38.000 If the food supply, too many McDonald's hamburgers being served, they might decide to do so.

00:26:45.000 And if there's a pandemic, the opposite of what we need to do.

00:26:48.000 Look, this conflict between over-centralization and decentralization has been at the centerpiece of how governments are...

00:26:58.000 Evolving since the French Revolution.

00:27:01.000 The Jacobins wanted to continue what the monarchs had, which was a massive administrative state, but they wanted it more bureaucratic and they wanted it run by the people, and the Giridins wanted it decentralized.

00:27:15.000 I would argue that anytime medicine, anything that adulterates or comes into and interferes with the patient-physician relationship, you are getting a less effective, less efficient, more expensive, worse care.

00:27:29.000 Anything. It's just, I'd seen it my entire career.

00:27:33.000 And so when you think about these larger institutions, my whole career, they were sort of advisory.

00:27:40.000 They were around publishing things that we would read.

00:27:42.000 That's their role. Their role is not to determine what I do for you.

00:27:46.000 That's what I have to do.

00:27:47.000 I have to decide what is in your best interest, the person sitting there.

00:27:52.000 We have become a profession of box checkers on the electronic medical record.

00:27:57.000 That is the opposite of Of practicing medicine.

00:28:00.000 You go to a doctor for the application of his or her judgment, not just their knowledge, but their judgment, which is making the right call for the complexities of your individual circumstance, your family, your life, your belief system, your biology, making that decision for you, and that it cannot be done with a bunch of checkmarks.

00:28:22.000 Yeah, I mean, in the case of at least the World Health Organization and probably CDC, I look at the things that they try to make pandemic, and you realize it's not a medical pandemic.

00:28:31.000 They're trying to do things so they can exert that control.

00:28:34.000 It doesn't matter necessarily how you feel about the topic, but I'm a big Second Amendment guy.

00:28:39.000 The gun crisis, we must ban the Second Amendment because it's a medical condition, and it feels like this is the framework. 0.59

00:28:45.000 To set that up, to eliminate eventually all of our rights, because there's some way that someone medically was affected somewhere along the line, and therefore we have total control.

00:28:55.000 The Bill of Rights was there to limit the power of government.

00:28:59.000 Our government was about limiting power of government.

00:29:01.000 We fought a revolution about limiting the power of government.

00:29:04.000 All of a sudden, we've decided that the government knows best?

00:29:07.000 That is just...

00:29:09.000 I don't know where I live anymore half the time.

00:29:12.000 You know, back to the opiate crisis...

00:29:14.000 I went to, you know, I'll go to anybody's White House and help.

00:29:18.000 When anybody calls on me, I go.

00:29:20.000 And your dad asked me to a couple of things.

00:29:22.000 And I went to one symposium in the darkest hours of the opioid crisis.

00:29:27.000 You probably don't even know this.

00:29:29.000 And there was a symposium we did all day.

00:29:31.000 Cabinet-level officials were there.

00:29:33.000 And it was really an interesting day.

00:29:36.000 And in the middle of all that, Jeff Sessions came in there and he said, you know, I know what's going on here.

00:29:41.000 I can take care of this. And nobody really recognized that this happened.

00:29:45.000 He goes, in six months, this is going to be over.

00:29:46.000 And what he did was he went in and he arrested a bunch of physicians that were doing the crazy overprescribing and stopped.

00:29:54.000 It stopped that day.

00:29:55.000 And people woke up, my profession woke up out of their stupor and went, maybe this isn't the right, maybe we're doing too much.

00:30:03.000 And that was what turned it around.

00:30:04.000 That's also what started it, by the way.

00:30:07.000 What started it was they put doctors in jail and fined them above malpractice for crimes when they did not adequately treat pain.

00:30:16.000 It was patient abuse.

00:30:18.000 That's when we froze.

00:30:19.000 That's what started this whole thing in the late 80s, early 90s.

00:30:21.000 And we froze, sent everything to pain medicine.

00:30:24.000 They were the evangelists, and off it went.

00:30:27.000 I never actually knew that, or the history of how it started.

00:30:30.000 It does not at all surprise me that our laws and regulations also started the problems.

00:30:36.000 I mean, I think we're the cause of and solution for all of our own problems.

00:30:40.000 Fascinating. That's an interesting one, but...

00:30:43.000 I guess with the opioid crisis, I'm not saying it's taken care of.

00:30:47.000 Obviously, it's still a... It's different.

00:30:49.000 It's probably on the decline while the fentanyl crisis across the country is just exploding.

00:30:57.000 Exploding. Can you talk about the differences, why fentanyl specifically is just, it's so addictive and so destructive, and, you know, the impact it's having across the country, and again, more importantly, how do we fix that one?

00:31:11.000 If you say, you know, sessions with a stroke of a pen could go in there and arrest a couple of guys that were clearly abusing the system for profit, and all of a sudden it's like, oh, well, I guess we'll just stop doing that, you know?

00:31:23.000 Even if you're perhaps innocently abusing it or kind of in between.

00:31:26.000 Maybe you're not a scarface, but you're getting close. 0.92

00:31:33.000 How do we fix the fentanyl side of that?

00:31:36.000 Because I can't go a day, and I'm on the trail a lot, so I speak to people.

00:31:40.000 But the amount of people that come out, I lost my son, my nephew, my brother, my best friend.

00:31:45.000 Just every demographic, every this, totally indiscriminate.

00:31:48.000 How do we fix that, and how did it start?

00:31:51.000 It's hard. It started, well, heroin's always been there, right?

00:31:57.000 The heroin sort of number has always been around for the last 50 years.

00:32:02.000 Well, the reason things started escalating is on the heels of stopping prescribing opiates.

00:32:09.000 So when my profession stopped being the dealers, because most of my peers don't really understand addiction, They took all those patients that were now, when they started looking at what was going on, and went, oh my god, these are drug addicts.

00:32:26.000 They're bad patients.

00:32:28.000 That is not the case.

00:32:29.000 What should have happened is the doctor should have called those patients back into the office and said, you know what?

00:32:36.000 You didn't intend this and I didn't intend this, but it turns out I wasn't aware, but now I see I caused a second problem here.

00:32:44.000 You have drug addiction, you have opiate addiction, And pain.

00:32:48.000 And there are people that are expert in this.

00:32:50.000 Let's get you some treatment and get this taken care of. 0.71

00:32:52.000 They did not do that.

00:32:53.000 I didn't see anybody do that.

00:32:55.000 Is that because of liability? They're worried, hey, if I acknowledge that I maybe did something wrong, I'm going to get sued and I'm going to lose my license and my practice.

00:33:02.000 I mean, some of it because, again, they were scared to death when doctors started going to prison, right?

00:33:06.000 They were like, oh my God, what's going to happen here?

00:33:08.000 And by the way, now you can't get pain treated.

00:33:11.000 Now they've gotten overly involved with not treating opiates, which is, we're so insane with this.

00:33:18.000 My peers don't understand addiction.

00:33:20.000 The DEA certainly doesn't understand addiction.

00:33:22.000 So here we go. So people got addicted.

00:33:25.000 They were cut off from their opiate supply.

00:33:28.000 Now, when you take an opiate addict and you cut them off, they will go somewhere to get something.

00:33:33.000 That's in the disorder.

00:33:36.000 They literally have to.

00:33:38.000 They will either kill themselves with alcohol or find a way to get more opiates.

00:33:42.000 Well, heroin's always available.

00:33:44.000 So they went to the streets.

00:33:45.000 They got heroin. Heroin started escalating rapidly.

00:33:49.000 Once you're addicted to opiates, you will always go to better, cheaper.

00:33:54.000 That's just the nature of the disorder.

00:33:57.000 So fentanyl, which is a good medication for pain in a hospital setting, they started manufacturing it for the street, and of course it took over.

00:34:05.000 The other thing that's happened, which is a secondary phenomenon within the crisis, Is they've started mixing it in with everything, and so people that may be sort of experimenting with stuff online are getting exposed to opiates and inadvertently overdosing.

00:34:21.000 Those people aren't even drug addicts.

00:34:22.000 That's a separate category, and that is a rapidly increasing category.

00:34:25.000 But the drug addict category, which is the massive problem, which is everyone on the streets here in Los Angeles, whom are dying at the rate of eight a day in LA County, it's tantamount to negligent manslaughter.

00:34:38.000 It is homicide. That's what this city allows.

00:34:41.000 All these city officials are duplicitous in homicide.

00:34:44.000 Now, you ask what the solution is.

00:34:46.000 I know how to run these programs.

00:34:48.000 I know how to treat these patients.

00:34:49.000 It is pretty simple. And by the way, less expensive than what they're doing.

00:34:53.000 But you have to create large centers.

00:34:56.000 They need to be social model. 1.00

00:34:58.000 You need to have patients for the acute psych.

00:35:00.000 You need to have for the dual diagnosis and the place for the straight addiction. 0.99

00:35:03.000 You have to staff it up.

00:35:05.000 Here's the problem. We don't have those facilities.

00:35:08.000 We have to create them. And there are people that know how to do that.

00:35:10.000 It'd be a very simple matter to get those people involved.

00:35:12.000 We need more psychiatrists.

00:35:13.000 That is a major problem in California, particularly.

00:35:16.000 We need more psychiatrists.

00:35:18.000 We don't have enough, literally, To meet the needs of what I'm talking about.

00:35:22.000 And then you need to tell the people that are dying on the street, you can't stay there.

00:35:28.000 You need to come with me.

00:35:29.000 I've got a lovely, I've got a bed for you.

00:35:30.000 I've got meals. I've got people who want to care for you.

00:35:33.000 Come with me.

00:35:34.000 That's it. That's all you got to do.

00:35:36.000 But if you're not allowed, like in California, to get near anybody and tell them they need help and try to help them, you're not allowed, well then they're going to die.

00:35:45.000 It's a fatal illness, and fentanyl addiction is a fatal illness.

00:35:50.000 It progresses and ends in death. 0.99

00:35:52.000 And so you're going to kill all these people. 1.00

00:35:54.000 Well done, State of California. 1.00

00:35:56.000 Well done. Well, can you talk a little bit more about what addiction actually or exactly is?

00:36:03.000 You said that even doctors, medical professionals, people who went to med school, your peers, maybe not in addiction, but they don't even understand what it is.

00:36:14.000 How does someone else understand what it is?

00:36:16.000 What does it mean to be addicted to something?

00:36:19.000 What's actually happening inside our brains?

00:36:22.000 And how do doctors not understand that?

00:36:25.000 Well, because it takes over all the functions of the brain.

00:36:31.000 All the priorities decline and one priority emerges, which is use that drug.

00:36:37.000 That drug, whatever the drug of choice is, becomes synonymous with survival.

00:36:42.000 And it causes so much strange thinking and strange behavior and strange motivation, it's hard to use a normal brain to understand what is happening.

00:36:52.000 So you have to have lots of exposure to how this condition affects people, humans, once they get going with it.

00:37:00.000 So fundamentally, addiction is a genetic disorder with a biological basis.

00:37:05.000 The hallmark is progressive use in the face of adverse consequence and denial.

00:37:09.000 That's pretty much it. Now, what's happening when that happens is we know some of the genetic potential and there's multiple gene influences.

00:37:17.000 I've treated literally 10,000 drug addicts in my career.

00:37:21.000 I could always see a family history in the background.

00:37:23.000 Even if it was shrouded in sort of euphemisms, you could see it.

00:37:27.000 It's always alcoholism or something there.

00:37:29.000 And so it's a genetic disorder.

00:37:31.000 Now, genes are not destiny, right?

00:37:33.000 Genes have to be activated by something.

00:37:34.000 Though some people have such profound genetic burdens that just exposure to a substance and off they go.

00:37:40.000 That's not usually the thing.

00:37:41.000 Usually it's trauma, dysregulation, emotional issues that get solved with the opiate or with the alcohol.

00:37:48.000 And that's what gets things going.

00:37:51.000 But that's a separate issue.

00:37:53.000 The part that is the second phenomenon, which is the addiction, gets triggered in the brain.

00:37:58.000 And it's a part of the brain called the medial forebrain bundle.

00:38:01.000 It's literally in the shell of the nucleus accumbens.

00:38:03.000 So there are cells that fire into a tiny region of our brain that essentially says, Do that again.

00:38:11.000 And it forces the brain to do that again as synonymous with survival.

00:38:16.000 Do that again. Eat, reproduce, defend yourself.

00:38:19.000 Those are the most powerful drives in our system are overtaken by this drive to use the substance.

00:38:28.000 Yes, you like it. Yes, you have withdrawal.

00:38:31.000 Yes, you feel uncomfortable when you come off.

00:38:33.000 But why do you go back always?

00:38:35.000 You go back because that motivational priority It's always there now if you're genetically predisposed to that switch being thrown.

00:38:44.000 But once the switch is thrown, all these other wonderful systems in our brain, our cognition, our thinking, our social functioning, all serve the false god of do that again, do that drug again.

00:38:58.000 I mean, are there sort of genetic markers that people can test for to see if they're more susceptible or less susceptible at certain levels?

00:39:04.000 Just, you know, because some people, obviously, you see it, I know it through a family history or something like that.

00:39:10.000 You see, you know, it went down the line and, you know, you got it.

00:39:13.000 Congratulations. We all know people like that.

00:39:17.000 But are there other ways that people can find out if they're not sure just so they never test it?

00:39:21.000 You know, I know there are people that can go out and have two, three glasses of wine, and I know that people...

00:39:27.000 One or two and, you know...

00:39:29.000 Off they go. Yeah, and it's gone.

00:39:31.000 So the answer is yes and no.

00:39:34.000 There are many, several different genetic markers that have been highly correlated with this condition.

00:39:41.000 One is a single amino acid substitution of the GABA-A receptor.

00:39:45.000 Another is the LL allele of the serotonin transporter.

00:39:49.000 They have other correlates associated with them, so it's not a great test, and there's other tests as well.

00:39:55.000 They have multiple candidate genes.

00:39:56.000 They are available on a research basis.

00:39:58.000 I'm not aware of anything really useful that is available on a commercial basis yet, but you can kind of tell.

00:40:04.000 I'll tell you what. In most genetic settings, the probability of one child getting the gene, whether one or both parents have it, is about 50%.

00:40:17.000 There are certain genetic heritages where it's higher.

00:40:22.000 Cherokee Native Americans seems to be higher.

00:40:25.000 Believe it or not, Mormon population seems to be higher.

00:40:30.000 There are different regions of the world where the penetration of the gene is higher.

00:40:36.000 But generally, it's about 50% per child.

00:40:39.000 And usually, that person kind of knows it.

00:40:41.000 And it's interesting. And the one that doesn't have it, of course, will be the one that's like, I'm never touching alcohol.

00:40:46.000 I'll never go near it.

00:40:48.000 That's the only one that's got any control.

00:40:49.000 That's the one that doesn't have the gene usually.

00:40:51.000 But the one that has it usually kind of knows.

00:40:54.000 And there are other behavioral markers.

00:40:57.000 Look, the really interesting question Is why, if this gene causes so much destruction, why is it still in the human genome?

00:41:06.000 Why isn't it burned out over all these years?

00:41:08.000 And, you know, we developed distilled spirits around the Mediterranean thousands of years ago.

00:41:13.000 Why didn't it just kill everybody off with this disease?

00:41:15.000 Well, you have to deduce that it must have some really significant adaptive value.

00:41:24.000 And the fact is, it does.

00:41:26.000 If you look at populations that have been extremely distressed, particularly with multiple generations of genocidal assaults, Scotland, North America, certain regions where populations have been isolated.

00:41:41.000 I mean, Scotland's sort of the greatest example of this.

00:41:44.000 And then assaulted repeatedly, repeatedly.

00:41:46.000 You find an emergence of this gene.

00:41:49.000 The conclusion, therefore, is that those were the better survivors in these extreme circumstances when they weren't using.

00:42:00.000 And if you look at people with disease, they make the best shortstops, fighter pilots, extreme athletes.

00:42:07.000 They are at their best in extreme circumstances.

00:42:11.000 And I used to amuse myself with, I give lectures to addicts and alcoholics every week.

00:42:16.000 And I would say, you know, hey guys, if a bomb went off in the parking lot, what would you guys do?

00:42:20.000 About 80% of them go, I'd go out there and see what's going on.

00:42:23.000 And I'm like, okay, well, that's not what I would do.

00:42:26.000 That is a distinctly different biology.

00:42:29.000 And you can keep going with that.

00:42:31.000 They make great, evidently, they keep their wits about them.

00:42:34.000 They fight better frontally than those of us without this gene.

00:42:38.000 And so it has adaptive advantage in extraordinary circumstances.

00:42:41.000 So the point being, don't be pejorative in relation to almost anything in the mental health sphere.

00:42:47.000 Things have adapted for a reason, and they have advantages in certain circumstances, disadvantages in others.

00:42:54.000 Talk about that a little bit, because it feels like there is, and I think it's getting better, but there is still sort of perhaps a stigma around being treated for mental illness or addiction or these sorts of things that perhaps prevents people.

00:43:10.000 I talk with a lot of people that are like, oh, I didn't know you were in therapy for a long time.

00:43:13.000 And they actually have such a better worldview about things that it actually is helpful.

00:43:18.000 Yet, even I have sort of that old school, like, I'm fine.

00:43:22.000 I'm good. Don't worry about it.

00:43:24.000 Yeah. I mean, again, when you live in the world where you're inundated with these conditions and things, you start to sort of see it as the spectrum of what the human experience is, right?

00:43:37.000 And it all is sort of beautiful, really.

00:43:39.000 I mean, it has liabilities.

00:43:41.000 People suffer. It's hard to be in relationships sometimes with people with these conditions.

00:43:45.000 But it's not, strictly speaking, good or bad.

00:43:48.000 Now, people in some of these conditions can do bad things because of the condition, but not because the human is bad or the condition is bad.

00:43:56.000 It's just the state they're in.

00:43:58.000 And there is such thing as evil, right?

00:44:00.000 Psychopathy, you know, when people don't appreciate that other people have value, meaning, feelings, anything, well, then I'm concerned.

00:44:07.000 That's a group that, all right, that's what that is.

00:44:09.000 But everything else is sort of things that happen to human beings, happen to their brains.

00:44:15.000 And you can be stoic, right?

00:44:17.000 You can say, I'm okay, and that's one way of adapting, and that's a good way of adapting for some people, and other people, they need something a little bit more.

00:44:24.000 Generally speaking, you know, there was a, was it, Abigail Schreier just wrote a book about the over-therapizing of particularly young people, and I agree with her. 0.78

00:44:35.000 I agree. We do too much of this.

00:44:37.000 We need to be thinking more about what it means to be a good person and lead a good life.

00:44:42.000 And we've lost track of that completely.

00:44:45.000 We don't talk about that.

00:44:46.000 And when we talk about happiness, we don't even know what we're talking about anymore.

00:44:49.000 It's time we talked about what it means.

00:44:52.000 And of course, your grandmother knew what this was.

00:44:55.000 We've known about it through most of human history.

00:44:57.000 We just have re-entrenched ourselves in what it means to be good and lead a good life.

00:45:03.000 And it's usually about service and about the golden rule.

00:45:07.000 It's about it. That's where real meaning-making is found.

00:45:11.000 And if anything is going on right now, That is affecting our mental health is a deficiency in our ability to make meaning of things.

00:45:18.000 We are meaning-making humans.

00:45:21.000 This is what we do. It's what, oh shoot, I'm blanking the name of the famous psychiatrist who wrote the book about the concentration camps in Germany.

00:45:28.000 His conclusion was, of course, same, which is people survive because they're able to make meaning of their circumstances.

00:45:34.000 That's what we must all do.

00:45:36.000 So, you know, it's interesting that you're, obviously, you're in Los Angeles.

00:45:39.000 You've treated many high-profile patients.

00:45:42.000 You had a show, Celebrity Rehab.

00:45:45.000 I'm wondering if you could talk at all about your experiences and how they've shaped your views on medicine and what is ultimately effective treatment.

00:45:55.000 You know, having sort of seen everything, right?

00:45:57.000 Dealing with treatment from, you know, the lowest levels to perhaps the highest levels, you know, of...

00:46:03.000 People in society and their ability to actually deal with it and how that changes.

00:46:08.000 Well, thanks for the softball. 0.96

00:46:10.000 What is the solution to life?

00:46:14.000 What is the meaning of life?

00:46:18.000 Well, here's one thing I've learned, and I bet you'll appreciate this, is that That because somebody has a public job or persona or platform, doesn't make them really any different than anybody else.

00:46:36.000 It's not like there's a handbook, like I have to open up a separate diagnostic manual for celebrities.

00:46:41.000 Humans are humans are humans.

00:46:43.000 They're all the same.

00:46:44.000 And whether the medical problems they get are the same, the psychiatric problems they get are the same, the interpersonal problems are the same.

00:46:51.000 There, of course, are specifics of any given circumstance, whether you have money, don't have money, Have a public thing, whatever it is that impact on it, but it's really all the same.

00:47:03.000 We're no different from one another.

00:47:06.000 And so to idolize people and to canonize people and to say, you know, these people are the...

00:47:14.000 The keepers of the truth, or they're monks, and they only can be followed.

00:47:18.000 These people, it's a huge mistake.

00:47:20.000 We're all flawed, we're all human.

00:47:23.000 I mean, the lack of religion right now, you've got to remember that the big injunction in religion was that we're sinners, we're flawed, we pray for forgiveness, and then be careful about our emotions, particularly be careful about envy and aggression.

00:47:38.000 Which are completely on the loose right now, completely being indulged.

00:47:43.000 So I worry about all that.

00:47:45.000 In terms of medicine, again, these are broad philosophical ideas I'm trying to present.

00:47:51.000 I'm really worried about how we have come to believe that The answer to our misery, whatever it might be, is in a pill or a solution.

00:48:03.000 They're a pharmacological agent.

00:48:04.000 That is a huge, huge, huge mistake.

00:48:06.000 My dad was an old family practitioner.

00:48:08.000 He raised me, hammered into me the notion that Only when it's worth the risk you take a medication.

00:48:14.000 I was never allowed to take an antibiotic until I was 15.

00:48:18.000 I remember the moment when he pulled it out because my pediatrician wanted and he had some samples and so he's following the direction of the pediatrician.

00:48:26.000 He put them on the table and he goes, all right, here we go.

00:48:29.000 Who knows what the consequence will be, but he wants you to take it.

00:48:32.000 Take the ampicillin.

00:48:34.000 All right, whatever. And I'll just never forget that.

00:48:38.000 And so I, again, this is back to where we started our conversation with the risk-reward considerations.

00:48:43.000 Risk-reward has just been weirdly abandoned.

00:48:47.000 People don't understand the risk or they don't.

00:48:50.000 Think about risk.

00:48:51.000 And if you imagine that the answer to all your concerns are in a...

00:48:56.000 Now, not to say that I use lots of pharmacology, but when the risk is worth it and the reward is worth it, it's not...

00:49:04.000 When I get to that point that I'm having to use medication, it's not a happy day.

00:49:09.000 It's like everything else has failed.

00:49:11.000 And back to...

00:49:13.000 Therapy, relationships, what Voltaire said, taking care of your garden, making meaning, being of service, golden rule.

00:49:21.000 It's all pretty simple.

00:49:22.000 We have to really re-entrench in those basics, I think, so we're not coming to people like me in real trouble and needing medication.

00:49:31.000 I gotta ask, because it's sort of a pop culture kind of thing right now, but every person I ever see in the last year that's actually lost some weight, I'm like, so did you start working out?

00:49:40.000 No, no, no, I got an Ozempic or Majordo.

00:49:42.000 What are your thoughts on that?

00:49:44.000 What's the risk-reward With those drugs, meaning obviously you're better off losing some weight.

00:49:50.000 What are the side effects, if any?

00:49:52.000 Are there long-term effects that we haven't even figured out as literally half the country seems to be on these things?

00:49:57.000 But I don't know anyone that's done it the old-fashioned way, just eating less without sort of chemical induction of appetite reduction.

00:50:05.000 Yeah. So I've gotten, I've been a workout fiend my whole life and it's getting more challenging maintaining my, and you know, and in terms of longevity, uh, my brother, my friend, Peter Atiyah said, I was, I was asking him about various things.

00:50:18.000 I had various ideas and he finally snapped at me and went vigorous exercise.

00:50:21.000 Vigorous exercise. That is the number one thing in extending life.

00:50:26.000 And I thought, yeah, that's about right.

00:50:28.000 And so if you're taking Ozembic as opposed to exercising, you are not enhancing your health.

00:50:33.000 It may be improving the weight situation a little bit, but we, back to your point, we don't know the long-term consequences.

00:50:40.000 I'll tell you the consequences I have seen.

00:50:42.000 Which is gastroparesis, which is a paralysis of the stomach's ability to contract and move food through.

00:50:48.000 And people hear that and they think, oh, what's that?

00:50:51.000 Big deal. It's horrible.

00:50:53.000 Chronic pain, chronic nausea, chronic feelings of, you know, the appetite problem.

00:51:00.000 It is a miserable condition.

00:51:02.000 And people that get it certainly wish they'd never taken the medication.

00:51:07.000 You know, it's interesting.

00:51:08.000 I had a couple of patients recently who'd struggled with their weight.

00:51:11.000 They were type 2 diabetics.

00:51:12.000 They were perfect candidates.

00:51:14.000 This is what Nocevic was created for.

00:51:15.000 And I offered it to both of them.

00:51:17.000 They refused it. So people that actually would benefit, because then think about it.

00:51:21.000 The risk-reward is worth it.

00:51:23.000 They've tried everything. It's failed.

00:51:25.000 And they have diabetes.

00:51:26.000 And their sugar control is not great.

00:51:28.000 Weight loss is the numero uno priority we could really impact on their life, as opposed to the Someone out here in Santa Monica that needs to lose five pounds, we don't know the consequence of that.

00:51:41.000 But it's never nothing.

00:51:42.000 It's never nothing.

00:51:44.000 And as opposed to diet and exercise, where not only is there no risk that I can think of other than turning your ankle or getting shoulder problems like I have, but other than that, it's only benefit.

00:51:56.000 Only benefit. And benefit in multiple ways, not just weight loss and feeling good and reducing insulin resistance and all those good balance, hormonal balance issues.

00:52:05.000 It also extends life.

00:52:07.000 And we have no evidence that Ozempic does that.

00:52:10.000 So, you know, it's interesting.

00:52:11.000 Now, since we started getting into the meaning of life, this was going to be sort of a question really about addiction.

00:52:17.000 But, you know, as it relates to the meaning of life and that being sort of a harder-to-figure-out goal for a lot of people, how do you think that technology and social media are affecting different types of addiction?

00:52:30.000 And, again... Perhaps even just the psychological impact.

00:52:34.000 I see people. I'm guilty of it myself.

00:52:37.000 I'm very present in the various platforms and large followings, but I also know other people who are, and I see the life that's on display for the world to see, and then I see them behind the scenes.

00:52:47.000 I'm like, these are two... Two very different people, but it's creating, I would think, again, there's an addiction component, but there's also got to be a very big psychological component where everyone who's following their favorite celebrity or otherwise thinks their life is perfect, thinks they're beyond reproach, thinks that they're this, that, and the other.

00:53:04.000 And it's so far flawed and true once you actually get to know these people.

00:53:07.000 But I imagine that's got to be causing serious, serious crises, both with addiction and mental health.

00:53:13.000 A hundred percent.

00:53:15.000 So on so many levels, we don't even know yet.

00:53:19.000 A friend of mine is a brilliant psychologist, and she spends her whole day just working with young women because of the consequences of social media.

00:53:28.000 She limits her kids to two hours a day, and that's it. 0.98

00:53:32.000 But there's so much consequence and so protein the consequences that you literally could build a practice of psychology just in one gender, the impact of social media.

00:53:44.000 And it is addictive.

00:53:46.000 It's designed to be addictive.

00:53:48.000 It's going at that same mechanism in the medial forebrain bundle.

00:53:51.000 I was telling you that people call it a dopamine surge.

00:53:55.000 I actually don't believe you feel anything when you get a dopamine surge except A impulse, which can come through multiple different screens in the brain, an impulse to do the behavior again.

00:54:06.000 The behavior may feel good, and that's the endorphin system, but the do-it-again part, I don't think you really feel anything.

00:54:13.000 But it reminds me to talk about a famous experiment in capuchin monkeys.

00:54:20.000 And, you know, you want to understand humans.

00:54:22.000 Look at our closest primate relatives.

00:54:25.000 We're not that different.

00:54:26.000 It correlates all the way down.

00:54:28.000 But these Cabbagy monkeys, they taught them to do a certain behavior and they'd give them a reward, which was a cucumber. 0.56

00:54:34.000 And these monkeys were in side-by-side cages.

00:54:36.000 Cucumber, cucumber, cucumber, cucumber.

00:54:39.000 And one day, the researcher comes in, gives a cucumber to the first monkey, and then gives a grape to the second monkey.

00:54:46.000 So the other monkey sees the second monkey getting the grape.

00:54:50.000 They go through the procedure again.

00:54:52.000 The researcher hands the first monkey the cucumber.

00:54:56.000 The monkey throws the cucumber back at the monkey.

00:54:59.000 The human primates will literally forego a reward that they were perfectly happy with five minutes before if some other like creature gets something more.

00:55:12.000 So think about that experiment.

00:55:15.000 That sounds brutal for our future prospects based on everything that I see on a daily basis.

00:55:19.000 I know. But then think about you're 15 and now think about social media.

00:55:23.000 All you see are people who look better, having more fun, doing more things.

00:55:29.000 How do you find happiness when all you see is people with more raining down on you?

00:55:35.000 It's in our nature to have feelings about that that are problematic.

00:55:40.000 And we have to, I don't know how we deal with it, frankly, because it's so deep in our psychology.

00:55:44.000 We have to figure out ways to sort of, again, it's back to what I was saying earlier.

00:55:49.000 Those things are really not meaningful for the human being, because the human being, what's actually meaningful is important relationships, service, meaning-making is much more important than all that stuff.

00:55:59.000 But that stuff gets in. It gets in, especially when you're an adolescent.

00:56:03.000 Yeah, no, it's a scary one.

00:56:05.000 And you're right, I guess we're going to have, you know, in the coming years, we'll figure it out.

00:56:08.000 We'll see the results a lot more, probably for the worst.

00:56:11.000 But I wanted to ask about, you know, during COVID, we saw this sort of emergence of a new genre of like, you know, so-called medical experts.

00:56:20.000 You know, I saw this a lot. It was like, you know, the telepsychologist, not really a psychologist, but, you know, I remember with my dad, he's like, well, he picked up a glass with two hands.

00:56:28.000 Therefore, he's in the later stages of dementia and Alzheimer's combined, or like, One time, I guess he was speaking, I think it was like the West Point graduation or something and it was raining and he's like, he's walking down a ramp in like, you know, business shoes that not exactly, you know, treads and stuff like that.

00:56:43.000 And like he held onto the railing and it was like, he's, it's all over.

00:56:48.000 They spend their time basically demonizing anyone who disagrees with them.

00:56:54.000 You've seen, whether it's one of them like Dr.

00:56:57.000 Peter Hotez, he's out there claiming now that there's a far-right conspiracy to discredit organizations like the FDA to promote alternative medicines like ivermectin.

00:57:09.000 Again, whatever you feel.

00:57:10.000 But what do you make of this?

00:57:12.000 It seems like an affront on anything that would be a natural check and balance.

00:57:21.000 Right.

00:57:26.000 Right. And this was a concern throughout COVID. And of course, it was all siloed. And you have to,

00:57:31.000 you sort of had to be repeating a party narrative, which was really wild to watch.

00:57:37.000 And Dr.

00:57:38.000 Hotez, whom I'm friendly with, and I believe in his heart he is really trying to do something to help people.

00:57:45.000 But he had to change his position 35 times along the pandemic, and he should talk about that and talk about how changing positions work.

00:57:53.000 And really, in terms of...

00:57:56.000 No, that's not my intent.

00:57:58.000 They disenfranchise somebody like me.

00:58:00.000 It's just out of our business.

00:58:02.000 Don't overreach in terms of what your job is.

00:58:06.000 And then I'm very concerned about the cozy relationship with the regulators, that people that are in the FDA then go work for pharma.

00:58:14.000 Look, I can't even allow a drug company into my office to give me a Exactly.

00:58:32.000 Exactly. So what?

00:58:33.000 You are not adulterated in your high position, but my lowly position as a caretaker, I'm going to be adulterated by a pen?

00:58:40.000 By the way, full disclosure, I took a cup of coffee from a drug company yesterday because it was a medicine I was prescribing for a patient and I wanted to get it for free for the patient.

00:58:51.000 But that's the only reason I would talk to a drug company.

00:58:53.000 But in any event, shoot.

00:58:56.000 So here's the biggest problem with all the experts on TV. And I actually had the opportunity to interview, do you remember the Yale professor of psychiatry?

00:59:07.000 Who was saying that your father had some sort of major, major...

00:59:11.000 I interviewed her and I said, look, I want to describe two cases to you.

00:59:17.000 And I described, first case, I said, well, this guy had suicidal depressions.

00:59:23.000 In fact, they were so bad that his friends would have to stand vigil over him and make sure no sharp objects were around him.

00:59:28.000 He became obsessed that he had syphilis.

00:59:30.000 He was very obsessional. He actually took mercury all the way until he went into office.

00:59:34.000 And that seemed to make his depression worse.

00:59:36.000 Should that guy be a president of the United States?

00:59:39.000 And I described how he was so depressed, he was dragging his son down the street one day, the son spilled out of the wagon, and he still walked another mile without realizing that the son was out of the wagon.

00:59:52.000 He was in such a fugue state.

00:59:53.000 And she goes, well, that guy, no way should he be president.

00:59:56.000 Okay, Abraham Lincoln.

00:59:57.000 Abraham Lincoln. So the point is, when you use these clinical...

01:00:03.000 Only humans are going to be in office. 0.92

01:00:05.000 And humans have liabilities.

01:00:06.000 Humans have traits.

01:00:08.000 I don't know what traits are right for a given office or a given circumstance of history.

01:00:13.000 I do know a fighter pilot should be a narcissist with alcoholism.

01:00:17.000 That's who I want flying my planes. 0.98

01:00:19.000 But I don't know who should be the chairman of the House.

01:00:24.000 I don't know what the qualities are.

01:00:26.000 That's the wisdom of the crowd.

01:00:28.000 That's why we have elections. 0.97

01:00:30.000 Hopefully the crowd picks the best person for the best circumstance, and sometimes they don't.

01:00:35.000 And that's, there's no way, there's no way to, what are we going to give, psych testing to everybody and decide what the scale should be of a given individual for a given office?

01:00:43.000 That's insane. That's not how humans work.

01:00:45.000 When we're talking about impact, having on the future of doctors and medical schools, if you remember back in, I guess it was 2022, pretty big medical university, there was a medical student that posted on social media that she intentionally botched a patient's blood draw because he laughed at her pronouns pins.

01:01:05.000 Yeah. Are politics infecting doctors' relationships with patients now?

01:01:11.000 I've heard it, same thing, you know, with nurses. 0.96

01:01:14.000 It's like, you could see, you know, this person, you know, reasonably famous person or a conservative, it was a liberal nurse, and you could see, like, they weren't You know, honoring their, you know, the Hippocratic oath, so to speak.

01:01:25.000 You know, they were clearly not functioning that way.

01:01:28.000 What do you see happening on with that?

01:01:29.000 I mean, imagine, I can't even imagine being, as a human, doing that to someone, but I guess it's happening.

01:01:34.000 It is happening, and unfortunately, politics has infected everything.

01:01:39.000 It's just so bizarre that we live in that world right now, and it's crept into areas where it has no business, and this is definitely one of those areas.

01:01:49.000 I remember once I was a resident and I was called down to the ER to see a case.

01:01:55.000 And I guess it was the DEA brought in these three guys.

01:02:01.000 They'd just been in a gun battle and had killed several agents.

01:02:07.000 They were horrific, violent drug dealers with an unbelievable record behind them.

01:02:14.000 And I thought to myself, I do not want to take care.

01:02:17.000 I kind of hope this didn't go well for these creatures that were down there.

01:02:23.000 But I put all that aside and did my job on behalf of the human being that I was asked to help.

01:02:31.000 I didn't allow my feelings, which were...

01:02:35.000 You know, who knows how right I was or not about how horrible this person was or what their life was, whatever.

01:02:40.000 My job was to put it all aside and take care of the human being in front of me, which I did.

01:02:45.000 And that phenomenon of putting it all aside Whatever your personal biases are, how tired you are, how sick you are, how miserable you are, that's why we worked in training those long hours.

01:02:59.000 That's why we were told three days in the hospital, and now I'm getting up again, I haven't slept in a couple days, and put it aside and make a good decision for that patient.

01:03:10.000 That isn't happening so much.

01:03:12.000 That training isn't even happening so much.

01:03:14.000 So without that training of doing that, I don't know how we bring it back except to stop making the profession of medicine something you punch in and punch out of and pass along to somebody else at 5 o'clock.

01:03:28.000 That's where the problem is getting...

01:03:33.000 Getting percolating. That's where it's happening.

01:03:35.000 It's right there. It's not just that politics is getting into everything.

01:03:40.000 It is. But what's happening as a result, because the training is not quite as rigorous as, you know, look, when I was in training, too, there were old 65-year-old doctors like myself going, when men were men, you know, when back in our day.

01:03:54.000 So I'm that guy. But I really do feel that strongly that we need to get much.

01:03:58.000 It's such a sacred profession.

01:04:00.000 And we've lost We've lost track of the importance and the sacrality of it.

01:04:04.000 We really have. And we see that a lot, right?

01:04:06.000 I mean, you see some of the DEI stuff coming out of medical schools and they're like...

01:04:10.000 Well, you know, we had to cut down residency requirements because, you know, it was weeding out, you know, too many, you know, people of whatever demographic it was that, I'm like, well, maybe should they have been there in the first place? 1.00

01:04:21.000 And that to me is really scary.

01:04:25.000 The priority is the patient.

01:04:26.000 That's it. And look, there are, I'm not saying there weren't things that, I like the fact that we're diversifying more amongst physicians.

01:04:35.000 It's a good thing. But to put that as a priority over the patient, or does it somehow leak into that?

01:04:41.000 Oh, now we got a problem. Now we got a problem.

01:04:43.000 So I guess lastly, when you host Ask Dr.

01:04:46.000 Drew, you know, what are the top issues and concerns viewers ask about?

01:04:50.000 And are there some that are sort of actually surprises, things that you wouldn't think would be such a big deal, but that keep coming up regularly that people got to be aware of?

01:04:58.000 Well, the thing, it's so interesting that that show, it's become my pride and joy right now.

01:05:07.000 My wife produces it, and it's something I really enjoy doing every day.

01:05:10.000 We do it mostly Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday at 3 o'clock.

01:05:12.000 That's sort of our slot.

01:05:15.000 And it started as me just essentially doing almost like a Facebook Live kind of thing.

01:05:22.000 I think it actually may have been where we started it.

01:05:24.000 Just trying to, in the darkest hours of COVID, I felt like I was literally the French underground.

01:05:31.000 Really, I kept saying, this feels like what the French underground must have felt like because I was trying to share information that would get me canceled if it were in the general media.

01:05:41.000 And I was sort of struggling out loud with what's going on?

01:05:45.000 What can we trust? What's happening here?

01:05:46.000 Why are people so hysterical?

01:05:48.000 Why is this happening?

01:05:49.000 There's a big thought bubble over my head, like, what's happening here?

01:05:52.000 I couldn't understand it.

01:05:54.000 And then one of my strategies became You know, these people that are being silenced, that are being canceled, almost without exception, are decorated professionals, highly published, great teachers.

01:06:10.000 These are the people we should be listening to.

01:06:13.000 Why are they being canceled?

01:06:14.000 And I think it's because that's made them more threatening, that they really had to make sure they canceled those people.

01:06:21.000 So I made it my business to interview any and all of them that had been canceled.

01:06:27.000 And I'll tell you what, I learned something from every...

01:06:30.000 I didn't agree with everything everybody said.

01:06:32.000 Some of them were over their skis on certain things.

01:06:33.000 But to me, I learned something from every single one of them.

01:06:37.000 It's interesting. I was interviewing Paul Alexander two years ago.

01:06:40.000 And he said, you know, the six feet thing, I was there when they decided that.

01:06:44.000 It was out of thin air. And I thought, well, that's what I... I don't know where they...

01:06:47.000 That's what I kept saying. I don't understand.

01:06:50.000 The molecules just magically stopped.

01:06:52.000 There's a wall. I knew it was bullshit. 0.99

01:06:54.000 Where did that come from? Because viruses go 30 to 60 feet when they're aerosolized, and masks I knew didn't work. 0.99

01:07:03.000 And so each of these guys gave me something that I thought, okay, well, there we go.

01:07:06.000 There it is. So letting the discourse happen, showing people that have, talking to people that have unpopular opinions.

01:07:15.000 And then I got to the point where I interviewed RFK Jr.

01:07:18.000 And at the end of that, he said to me, hey, you're so courageous for talking to me.

01:07:22.000 And I thought, I'm courageous for talking to another professional?

01:07:26.000 Where do I live?

01:07:27.000 I don't recognize this country anymore.

01:07:29.000 If it takes courage to talk to Don, if it talks to Robert, why?

01:07:34.000 Courage! That's insane!

01:07:35.000 I need to just keep doing it, and if something is sort of unpopular or stressful or...

01:07:43.000 Dangerous, that's sort of where I'm going now.

01:07:46.000 It's kind of a weird position to be in.

01:07:48.000 It's definitely not consistent with my psychology, but it is consistent with my belief system right now.

01:07:53.000 We have to stand up. We have to speak out.

01:07:55.000 We have to talk to people that have been silenced.

01:07:57.000 We have to not put up with the nonsense.

01:08:00.000 Again, my opinions are very moderate, and I'm always changing them.

01:08:05.000 And it's okay. And because of that, I have to go into situations that somebody may not like, or interview somebody that somebody may not like.

01:08:14.000 It's the way it goes. We're going to keep doing it.

01:08:16.000 Well, no, I think that's important.

01:08:17.000 It's sort of like the opposite of what you got out of like a Fauci, where it's like he's probably never the best doctor, but he was the best bureaucrat, and he was good at anyone who got in his way or prevented, you know, he'd figure out how to snake him.

01:08:28.000 It seems like he's been wrong for 35 years about literally everything, but it doesn't matter because he played that game better.

01:08:34.000 And we don't make the distinction between the bureaucrats and the doctors.

01:08:38.000 You're just like, well, he's got a high position of power.

01:08:39.000 I think we do now. Maybe that's one of the good things we've learned from COVID, because at the time, what do you know?

01:08:44.000 But in hindsight, looking back, you're like, wait a minute, this is crazy.

01:08:47.000 Bureaucrats, bureaucracy is the enemy. 1.00

01:08:50.000 Bureaucrats are just doing what bureaucrats do. 1.00

01:08:52.000 Bureaucracy is really the problem.

01:08:53.000 And to the extent that bureaucracy is, bureaucracy can't make good risk-reward decisions, it can't be nuanced, it can't change direction, stay out of our business system.

01:09:02.000 Let us do our job and stay out of it.

01:09:05.000 You know, Fauci is an interesting story.

01:09:09.000 He was somebody I admired very, very, very much, essentially all of my career.

01:09:13.000 Because I was very involved in the AIDS pandemic.

01:09:16.000 Very involved in that.

01:09:17.000 I was treating lots of AIDS. It was a dark period of history. 0.78

01:09:20.000 And what people don't appreciate, look, I was there when we opened the AZT boxes, and finally we had something we could do for these young men other than tell them they were going to die.

01:09:30.000 As a student and a resident, I was just constantly telling men they were going to die in six months.

01:09:34.000 That's all we did. Now I had something that maybe could extend their life by three months or six months, and maybe in that interval we can come up with another antiviral that extended another three months.

01:09:44.000 And that's what happened. And so, however it got there, I don't really have an opinion about those shenanigans, but it was something we could do for these young men.

01:09:52.000 It was in the darkest hours of a pandemic.

01:09:54.000 Don't forget, you know, the case fatality rate, their infection fatality rate for COVID is 0.2, 0.02, essentially.

01:10:02.000 Case fatality rate for AIDS was 100%.

01:10:06.000 100%.

01:10:08.000 A very different situation.

01:10:11.000 Yeah. Well, no.

01:10:13.000 That's incredible. Wow.

01:10:14.000 We could do a whole other show probably on that, unpackaging all of that.

01:10:18.000 But Dr. Drew, thank you so much for being here.

01:10:20.000 Guys, check out his show right here on Rumble as well.

01:10:24.000 You said, what, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday at 3 o'clock?

01:10:26.000 3 o'clock Pacific.

01:10:28.000 Just subscribe or go to drrew.tv.

01:10:30.000 We'll send you a blast out. 0.60

01:10:31.000 And we'd love to see your people there.

01:10:33.000 It'd be fun. And we also, we have chats going the whole time.

01:10:36.000 I'm going to start soon a post-show, sort of a Talking Dead for Walking Dead.

01:10:41.000 A post show on locals where we'll discuss what the guest said and that kind of thing.

01:10:45.000 I still do.

01:10:48.000 I'm very, very worried about free speech.

01:10:49.000 I'm very, very, very worried. I'm an absolutist.

01:10:51.000 And so I want an environment where people can speak their mind.

01:10:54.000 That's really what I'm trying to do on Rumble.

01:10:57.000 It's what I want to do in this post show.

01:10:58.000 It's like, just everybody, let's talk.

01:11:01.000 Let's speak our minds. Yeah, it really actually seems like there's a demand for that.

01:11:04.000 Sometimes if I'm going crazy, my show is just literally like an ask me anything.

01:11:10.000 I've functioned at a pretty high level in a lot of places, and it's just the questions, and you're watching the viewership, and people are actually really into that.

01:11:17.000 So I think there is both a general lack of discourse and a desire for just that sort of free speech absolutism.

01:11:27.000 So it's really important.

01:11:29.000 Isn't it weird that we live in a time with people?

01:11:31.000 It's hard to believe we're contemplating.

01:11:33.000 We don't exactly have that in sort of America in 2020, but there's a lot that's missing.

01:11:38.000 I could go on for hours on this one.

01:11:39.000 That would be my normal show.

01:11:41.000 Probably a lot more political about many of those things.

01:11:43.000 But, you know, again, I think people are starting to see it.

01:11:46.000 Well, I hope so, because it is so important.

01:11:49.000 I've fallen into a rabbit hole studying the French Revolution and early 20th century Russia, and the correlations are so profound.

01:11:56.000 And the protections we have, the brilliance of our system, the states, this is what's protecting us.

01:12:02.000 And right in the center of it is our ability to say, to talk, to speak to each other, to share ideas.

01:12:10.000 And, you know, Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1820s came out here and analyzed our system.

01:12:15.000 Democracy in America was his famous document, his famous book.

01:12:18.000 And he said, you know, you have the most extreme privilege of free speech in the law, but you actually can't practice it because of what he called the public square.

01:12:26.000 And that's what's happening right now.

01:12:27.000 We crush each other in the public square, and we got to not do that.

01:12:31.000 We got to let the speech happen.

01:12:33.000 I'm with you, man. Well, Dr.

01:12:35.000 Drew, thank you so much, guys. Check out Ask Dr.

01:12:38.000 Drew Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, 3 o'clock Pacific.

01:12:41.000 You know, you got to maybe pre-record one of them so you don't interrupt my show on Thursdays, but, you know, we'll make it happen.

01:12:46.000 We put them up as a podcast, and you can get them on YouTube.

01:12:50.000 It's all out there to see if you want to download them or look at them.

01:12:53.000 Thank you very much, sir. Good having you on.

01:12:55.000 You bet. Thank you, sir. Dr.

01:12:57.000 Drew, thank you so much.

01:12:58.000 Guys, that was awesome.

01:12:59.000 Thank you so much for tuning in.

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01:13:43.000 Also, if you want to check out and hedge against the insanity today, learn more about gold and converting an existing IRA or 401k into a gold version of that.

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Triggered - Donald Trump Jr - April 05, 2024

Healthcare Without Propaganda: Dr. Drew Pinsky On His Mission to Restore Medical Freedom | TRIGGERED Ep.125

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