The Megyn Kelly Show - 20220711_new-questions-about-bidens-cognitive-decline-and-c
Aired: 2022-07-11
Duration: 01:35:26


=== Age as a Political Weapon (07:15) ===

[00:00:00]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:00:11]  Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
[00:00:13]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show and happy Monday.
[00:00:16]  Lot to get to today.
[00:00:17]  Dr. Drew Pinsky is our guest.
[00:00:19]  And boy, do we have a range of stories and issues to get to with him.
[00:00:23]  We'll talk politics and we're going to get his thoughts on President Biden's age and mental fitness after a new viral clip appears to show the president grappling with the teleprompter again.
[00:00:33]  And another one shows him messing up his words again.
[00:00:37]  Plus, the New York Times has abandoned Joe Biden.
[00:00:41]  My goodness.
[00:00:42]  First, there was this report on Saturday about the president, quote, shuffling when he walks through the White House and the White House staffers living in fear that he will either trip over some sort of a wire in the White House or verbally stumble while in front of the cameras.
[00:01:04]  And of course, that happens all the time and they know it.
[00:01:07]  There's also just a devastating series of numbers out from a New York Times slash Siena College poll on how the Democrats feel about Joe Biden.
[00:01:17]  And long story short, and we'll start with this when we bring on Dr. Drew, is they want him gone.
[00:01:22]  They do not want him to be their nominee second time around.
[00:01:27]  This is the New York Times telling Joe Biden, get out, get out, save the party.
[00:01:32]  You are not our last best hope.
[00:01:33]  In fact, you are absolutely no hope.
[00:01:35]  So we'll talk to Dr. Drew about that.
[00:01:37]  And he's also fired up and ready to discuss California Governor Gavin Newsom, who clearly is gearing up for a potential 2024 run as he sees and smells opportunity in the Democratic Party.
[00:01:48]  Dr. Drew, as you may know, is an internist and an addiction medicine specialist.
[00:01:53]  He's the host of four different podcasts, one of them being the Adam and Dr. Drew show that he co-hosts with our pal Adam Carolla.
[00:02:05]  Dr. Drew, great to have you back.
[00:02:06]  How you doing?
[00:02:07]  Hey, great to be here.
[00:02:08]  Thank you so much for having me.
[00:02:10]  Well, I don't think I need a medical doctor to diagnose these terrible poll numbers for Joe Biden.
[00:02:14]  They spell sickness and near death politically.
[00:02:18]  Here's what the Times found in its poll, again, with Sienna College.
[00:02:22]  I like Sienna College because that's right by where I grew up, upstate New York.
[00:02:26]  33% approval rating, 33.
[00:02:29]  I don't remember seeing one that low, though somebody would likely correct me.
[00:02:35]  Just 26% of Democratic voters want him to run for reelection.
[00:02:40]  Okay, just 26%.
[00:02:41]  The New York Times describes this as, quote, an alarming level of doubt from inside his own party, quote, a sign of deep vulnerability and of unease among what is supposed to be his political base.
[00:02:53]  64% of Democratic voters say they want someone new.
[00:02:57]  Add to that, just 13% say the United States is moving in the right direction.
[00:03:01]  That dovetails on a Monmouth poll we saw last week, I think, from that shows 88% believe we're on the wrong track.
[00:03:07]  The overwhelming majority of Americans think the country's on the wrong track.
[00:03:10]  And now the overwhelming majority of Democrats, forget independents and Republicans, don't want Joe Biden to even run again in the second term.
[00:03:20]  I mean, I think you would say coming from California, what's happening in that state could be indicative of why we're seeing Democrats now jump ship.
[00:03:31]  But you tell me what you think is going to happen.
[00:03:33]  I hope so.
[00:03:34]  The fact that they reinstated Governor Newsom after that recall effort was just astonishing to me that he was able to easily overwhelm that effort.
[00:03:44]  I don't understand it.
[00:03:45]  California is such a mess.
[00:03:47]  The quality of life is so low.
[00:03:49]  You can't move.
[00:03:50]  You can't buy gas.
[00:03:51]  You can't feel safe wherever you are in that state.
[00:03:55]  It is a mess.
[00:03:56]  And how that person that has sort of seen the decline in what was once this glorious state, he's the guy you want to put as a president.
[00:04:06]  It's hard to know.
[00:04:07]  But this whole thing with Joe Biden for me brings up the question more than anything else.
[00:04:12]  What are we doing putting the very aged into positions of authority?
[00:04:18]  Everything you described, the shuffling, the difficulty with reading a prompter and fumbling with one's words, word finding difficulty, that is normal aging for some male in their 80s.
[00:04:29]  That is normative.
[00:04:31]  We should anticipate that.
[00:04:32]  A few people in their 80s, again, men age worse than women.
[00:04:37]  Few men make it through their 80s in the mid 80s with a certain amount of alacrity and persistent, you know, alacrity without neurological decline.
[00:04:48]  But that is the exception.
[00:04:50]  When you're in your 80s, you should have cognitive slowing.
[00:04:54]  You should have increased risk of fall.
[00:04:57]  It's very common for there to be sort of Parkinsonian quality about how they move about.
[00:05:01]  That's normative.
[00:05:03]  And the fact that we're looking at that and going, what's going on here?
[00:05:06]  That to me is astonishing.
[00:05:07]  And maybe that's what's behind the New York Times position.
[00:05:10]  They're really waking up to the fact that, oh my goodness, as he approaches 80, what's going to be like at 82?
[00:05:16]  And the voters know it.
[00:05:17]  I mean, 33% of those Democrats say the reason we don't want him to run again is his age.
[00:05:21]  And I think those are the kind ones.
[00:05:24]  They're seeing what we're seeing.
[00:05:25]  He would be at the end of his second term, if he were to win one, 86 years old.
[00:05:30]  I mean, 86.
[00:05:31]  We all know people of that age, and we all know that they are in no position to run the country.
[00:05:37]  Well, I'm afraid that's true.
[00:05:39]  And there's a weird denial in our country generally.
[00:05:42]  I've noticed practicing medicine.
[00:05:44]  I deal predominantly in my general medical practice with people in their eighth, ninth, and 10th decades of life.
[00:05:50]  And there is massive denial about the process of aging.
[00:05:54]  It's less so now because people have seen their aged parents and helped them through that process.
[00:05:59]  But as it pertains to the baby boomers aging, remember, baby boomers idolized youth.
[00:06:04]  They wanted to be youthful forever, and they have remained massively in denial about the reality of aging.
[00:06:10]  And there is a normative process.
[00:06:13]  You lose things as you age and cognition, physical skills, normal part of the aging process.
[00:06:20]  We have to get very realistic about that.
[00:06:21]  I know people have occasionally brought up the idea that we shouldn't, you know, same thing with physicians.
[00:06:26]  We're always evaluating whether or not, you know, how we should get physicians out of the practice of medicine if aging gets in the way of their ability to practice.
[00:06:34]  And we have a whole procedure for that.
[00:06:36]  There should be some procedure, it seems to me, in our government for something similar.
[00:06:40]  Yeah, at my old law firm, there was a mandatory retirement policy at age 65 for the partners because they understand just, you know, the mental acuity pass then starts to go down in a way that could compromise services to the clients.
[00:06:53]  And so that's why, you know, you would maybe go of counsel and you would be advising.
[00:06:56]  It's not that you're totally useless.
[00:06:58]  We all know that too.
[00:06:59]  It's just, let's be real.
[00:07:01]  We know what happens to people's brain functioning as they get, in fact, elderly, okay, elderly.
[00:07:08]  The Times is reporting that this just additional color.
[00:07:12]  He is now, he's going to the Middle East tomorrow.
[00:07:14]  He was initially supposed to go.

=== Trump's Declining Mental State (15:46) ===

[00:07:16]  They were going to attack it onto last month's trip to Europe, but White House insiders determined that was, quote, crazy for a man in his condition and of his age, that they're holding their breath to see if he makes it to the end of any of his public appearances without a gaffe, that he stays out of public view at night, that he's taken part in fewer than half as many news conferences or interviews as recent presidents.
[00:07:40]  And here are some of those numbers.
[00:07:41]  He's held 16 pressers, meaning news conferences.
[00:07:44]  That's less than half as many as Trump, Obama, or George W. Bush.
[00:07:47]  He's given 38 interviews so far as president, far fewer than Trump.
[00:07:51]  Trump gave by this point in his term, not 38, 116.
[00:07:56]  Obama had given 198.
[00:07:58]  That's just, and the others are all up near 100, except for Biden, who's down below 40.
[00:08:04]  There's a very good reason for that.
[00:08:05]  They know he's likely to misstep and public confidence will be rattled.
[00:08:11]  And Dr. Drew, what they do is then just try to gaslight us about what we've seen.
[00:08:16]  And the case in point on that, the most recent comes from Friday.
[00:08:20]  He got in front of the cameras to announce this attempted executive action he wants to do on abortion.
[00:08:25]  And this was pretty viral.
[00:08:27]  And the question was whether he had read aloud a teleprompter instruction.
[00:08:34]  For example, sometimes if I'm reading my teleprompter and there's a soundbite, my team might write in there, pause, or they might write sat, just to let me know.
[00:08:43]  They're sound playing.
[00:08:45]  The accusation is that he effectively read pause or sat when he read the following words, repeat the line.
[00:08:53]  Some of his defenders said, oh, no, that's not what happened.
[00:08:57]  Look, he, I'm going to play it.
[00:09:00]  You can judge for yourself.
[00:09:02]  Watch what he did.
[00:09:04]  It is noteworthy that the percentage of women who register to vote and cast a ballot is consistently higher than the percentage of the men who do so.
[00:09:12]  End of quote.
[00:09:13]  Repeat the line.
[00:09:15]  Women are not without electoral and or political or maybe precise, not and or political power.
[00:09:24]  I'm like, it makes no sense.
[00:09:26]  If it wasn't a teleprompter instruction, it makes no sense.
[00:09:29]  Let me just finish it up because then the White House scrubbed that from the official transcript, which claimed, this is the official transcript supposed to stick to the truth.
[00:09:39]  The transcript claims what he actually said was, let me repeat the line.
[00:09:44]  Can we just play it one more time, you guys?
[00:09:45]  Do we have it queued up so we can play it again?
[00:09:48]  That is not what he said.
[00:09:50]  He did not say, let me repeat the line.
[00:09:52]  He said, repeat the line.
[00:09:53]  Listen.
[00:09:55]  It is noteworthy that the percentage of women who register to vote and cast a ballot is consistently higher than the percentage of the men who do so.
[00:10:03]  End of quote.
[00:10:04]  Repeat the line.
[00:10:05]  Women are not without electoral and or political or maybe precise, not and or political power.
[00:10:14]  Okay.
[00:10:15]  So even if the way they spit it is not necessarily better.
[00:10:21]  That means he doesn't understand what he's saying.
[00:10:23]  When you say that's exactly right.
[00:10:25]  Yeah.
[00:10:26]  So either it read repeat the line, which he was just reading through the script, or he didn't understand, let me repeat the line, what that was all about.
[00:10:34]  And he didn't.
[00:10:35]  He did not repeat the line.
[00:10:37]  That's the thing.
[00:10:37]  So it's like, even if they had written in there, let me repeat the line, and he was supposed to go back and repeat the line, which he then did not do.
[00:10:44]  That's the best case scenario for him.
[00:10:46]  And then the White House assistant press secretary, Emily Simons, repeated that lie that the transcript had.
[00:10:53]  She tweeted, quote, no, he said, let me repeat the line in response to people claiming what I'm saying right here.
[00:11:01]  And she got completely ratioed on this.
[00:11:04]  Everybody was like, screw you and your lies.
[00:11:07]  We know what we saw and we heard.
[00:11:08]  Your lies aren't going to cover up the truth.
[00:11:11]  With all the 33% of the Democrats saying he's too old to run for reelection and 63% saying he should not run for reelection.
[00:11:19]  Those lies do nothing to obscure the truth.
[00:11:22]  We all see and feel it.
[00:11:25]  The horrible thing is we've all gotten so used to obfuscation and lies that they're depressed out, pushed out in the press that it barely registers anymore.
[00:11:36]  We really are finally in a time when people understand that they have to really examine everything, that what they're being told is the vast majority of time, either a distortion or an untruth.
[00:11:47]  Maybe that will bring us together.
[00:11:49]  Maybe that will cause us to kind of talk to each other a little bit rather than to listen to the echo chambers that are raining down on us.
[00:11:56]  I mean, it's every day we see something from him.
[00:11:59]  This is another one.
[00:12:00]  And yes, he clubbed a word.
[00:12:02]  It could happen to anybody, but it happens all the time to him.
[00:12:06]  Listen to this.
[00:12:07]  You'll hear it.
[00:12:09]  And she was forced to have to travel out of the state to Indiana to seek to terminate the presidency and maybe save her life.
[00:12:17]  Uh-oh.
[00:12:19]  Uh-oh.
[00:12:22]  I didn't see that one.
[00:12:24]  Yeah.
[00:12:25]  I mean, again, if I'd said that on this show, you'd be like, oh, you said presidency.
[00:12:29]  You meant pregnancy.
[00:12:30]  With him, it happens every other day.
[00:12:32]  And it's like, it's affected foreign policy.
[00:12:34]  He's said either what he actually feels or the wrong thing or changed policy.
[00:12:39]  And we're like, people are getting it.
[00:12:41]  That's my one consolation is people understand these numbers show, right?
[00:12:44]  That's correct.
[00:12:45]  I don't know.
[00:12:46]  It remains deeply disturbing to me.
[00:12:48]  You tell me because like, look, my one good friend, she's a doctor.
[00:12:51]  Her dad's a pediatrician.
[00:12:52]  He's 90 and he still sees some patients and he still sort of got a foothold in medicine.
[00:12:58]  And that's how he stays sharp.
[00:12:59]  And I believe, I believe that because he's a very sharp guy.
[00:13:03]  He's not running a practice.
[00:13:05]  He's not without support in the office.
[00:13:08]  It's not the same.
[00:13:10]  No, no, no.
[00:13:12]  Like you said, with your lawyer, legal colleagues, you could step down to levels of care that, you know, where you are at least being supervised or structured or, you know, the mental acuity that you would need at 35 is not the same at 75.
[00:13:27]  It's a kind of an easy thing to do in professional life.
[00:13:30]  It's not an easy thing to do when you're the leader of the free world.
[00:13:33]  And it really begs the issue for me.
[00:13:37]  It was obvious to me from the beginning we would be dealing with this.
[00:13:40]  And people were actually accusing him of dementia and Parkinson's and this.
[00:13:44]  I thought, no, I really didn't see any evidence of that.
[00:13:47]  Maybe some minimal cognitive change, but I really saw just normal aging, which is what we're talking about here.
[00:13:52]  And it begs the issue.
[00:13:54]  And if you notice, a lot of the rhetoric coming out of the White House is addressing this issue, which begs the issue, who is making the decisions?
[00:14:03]  Who is really doing the analysis here?
[00:14:05]  And how are these decisions being made with someone that is maybe not processing the way we would like him to?
[00:14:11]  And they've started trying to get ahead of that.
[00:14:13]  It seemed to be.
[00:14:14]  I've heard a lot of stuff coming out.
[00:14:15]  People say, oh, he's sharp as ever.
[00:14:16]  He's making great decisions, asks great questions.
[00:14:19]  I don't know if that's true.
[00:14:20]  That's the Times report.
[00:14:21]  Doesn't seem right.
[00:14:21]  Doesn't seem like he would be.
[00:14:23]  Yeah, that's exactly right.
[00:14:24]  Now, now we have to mention the fact Trump is 76.
[00:14:28]  So if that's now in 2022, in 2024, he's going to be 78.
[00:14:32]  And if he runs for office and wins, he'll be 82 when it's done.
[00:14:34]  It's like, I know a lot of people love Trump.
[00:14:37]  He's definitely got a higher approval rating within the Republican Party than Joe Biden does.
[00:14:42]  Well, actually, I'm not sure about that.
[00:14:43]  He has 70% support of Democrats, but not to not to run again, not to run again.
[00:14:47]  In any event, my point is he's also getting older.
[00:14:50]  And it's like Nancy Pelosi's about 200.
[00:14:53]  Is this the best we can do?
[00:14:55]  That is the question.
[00:14:56]  And no wonder millennials and Gen Z are upset.
[00:15:00]  There's been no transfer of authority, no transfer of anything to give them the opportunity to have a crack at this or very little.
[00:15:07]  And yeah, it's inadvisable to have a 78-year-old president.
[00:15:11]  Trump is way on the other end of the curve, right?
[00:15:14]  He has a lot of still, you know, he's very mental acuity.
[00:15:18]  He seems to be extraordinarily robust.
[00:15:20]  You know, if you remember when he was president, they did something called the MOCA test on him.
[00:15:24]  This is this Montreal cognitive assessment.
[00:15:26]  That is a really hard assessment.
[00:15:28]  And that absolutely tells you what's going on.
[00:15:31]  And according to, I think it was Dr. Jackson that did it at the time that it was, you know, he passed completely.
[00:15:37]  It was a 10 out of 10.
[00:15:38]  And that was not surprising.
[00:15:40]  You notice we don't see those tests.
[00:15:42]  We don't even see the minimum cognitive testing being done on President Biden because it wouldn't look the same.
[00:15:48]  It just wouldn't.
[00:15:49]  You can see it.
[00:15:49]  It just would not.
[00:15:51]  All right.
[00:15:51]  So now you've got DeSantis.
[00:15:53]  I think he's 43.
[00:15:55]  Gavin Newsome is young.
[00:15:57]  I can't remember.
[00:15:58]  I don't know the exact age, but he's late 40s or early 50s.
[00:16:01]  And Gavin Newsom's saber rattling about possibly getting in.
[00:16:06]  I mean, that's obviously why he ran this ad, took out an ad in Florida, ran it on Fox News, attacking DeSantis and attacking Florida and saying in California, they stand for freedom.
[00:16:16]  And look, I get that he thinks that'll be a winning move with Democrats.
[00:16:21]  And he's sort of this slick, perfect-haired, good-looking politician that, you know, to Democrats might look a little like, oh, it's the next JFK.
[00:16:30]  You know, he's a progressive and he's a what when you take a hard look at California, because that's what would happen.
[00:16:35]  If he actually ran and took on Joe Biden and managed to beat Joe Biden for the nomination and then was up against the Republicans, people are going to take a hard look at the record of California.
[00:16:44]  That's his state, San Francisco, as Michael Schellenberger called it, Los Angeles.
[00:16:51]  Both cities have either just recalled their DAs or are in the process of trying to recall their DA because crime is so out of control.
[00:16:57]  Homelessness is so out of control.
[00:16:59]  Drug use is so out of control.
[00:17:00]  This is something you've been paying close attention to.
[00:17:02]  So when you take a hard look at California and Gavin Newsom's California, what do you see?
[00:17:07]  Well, I'll get into that, but there's another piece of this that people don't, that us in California have looked at for a time and have been very upset about is he comes down on the populace with his emergency.
[00:17:20]  What is it called?
[00:17:21]  We still are under an emergency act of some type.
[00:17:24]  It's ridiculous.
[00:17:25]  And he comes down on all of us and then his kids, he closes the schools, caves to the unions.
[00:17:32]  His kids stay in school.
[00:17:34]  He goes out to restaurants in indoor environments with his peers, no masks.
[00:17:38]  He does whatever the hell he wants.
[00:17:40]  And this, this, this hypocrisy is what's going to get him.
[00:17:44]  That's the part that we in California see on a regular basis and are living under the oppressive regime he's put in place.
[00:17:52]  I have talked to the public health director of the state of California.
[00:17:55]  I said, what are you basing this on?
[00:17:56]  It's all, he's a pediatrician.
[00:18:00]  Pediatricians are not adult medical doctors.
[00:18:03]  They have a different way of thinking.
[00:18:05]  They have a different mindset.
[00:18:06]  They were put in that position because they are vaccine specialists, right?
[00:18:09]  That's why they go into that public health.
[00:18:11]  And childhood illnesses are a very serious public health issue.
[00:18:14]  This was an adult illness, end-of-life illness.
[00:18:17]  70 and above is where it became relevant.
[00:18:19]  And they are not good at making decisions on this illness.
[00:18:22]  It's the infectious disease community, people like Monica Gandhi and Vinay Prasad.
[00:18:26]  These guys, and he's an oncologist, but to be fair, these adult doctors understand the risk reward we're making in every decision we make.
[00:18:34]  The pediatricians that I've spoken to that were in positions of authority during the code mandates were scared to death of everything because they didn't understand the relative risk to an adult.
[00:18:46]  They thought in terms of pediatric risk, which this was nothing like that.
[00:18:51]  But back to what's going on in California.
[00:18:53]  Can I pause you there?
[00:18:54]  Can I just pause you there?
[00:18:55]  I do want to talk about California, obviously, but what you said reminded me of Gavin Newsome's latest hypocrisy, which is he banned any state-funded travel by like, you know, the legislature or so on to a state, to basically red states, right?
[00:19:09]  And Montana was one of them because he doesn't think their values align.
[00:19:13]  He doesn't want taxpayer dollars going into those states.
[00:19:15]  Well, guess where he just took his vacation?
[00:19:17]  Montana, Red State, Montana.
[00:19:20]  And when he got caught, because apparently his office releases where he goes on personal vacations to the public every time, because you need to know where your leader is.
[00:19:28]  Not this time.
[00:19:29]  Suddenly silent.
[00:19:31]  And so one intrepid reporter started calling the state house saying, where is he?
[00:19:35]  Where is he?
[00:19:36]  Where is he?
[00:19:36]  And finally, they had to admit he was in Montana, where I guess his wife's parents have a ranch.
[00:19:41]  And when the reporter asked, and my team will get me her name, it's not in front of me.
[00:19:46]  But when the reporter asked, so is he, because they said he's paying for the trip himself.
[00:19:50]  And they said, is he going with state-funded security?
[00:19:54]  Does he have security?
[00:19:54]  Like, are the taxpayers in California paying for security for him in Montana?
[00:20:00]  And the response was, we don't comment about security.
[00:20:02]  So the answer is yes.
[00:20:04]  He's such a hypocrite.
[00:20:05]  It's disgusting.
[00:20:07]  Disgusting.
[00:20:07]  It's a great example.
[00:20:09]  There's a lot of buzz about that in California.
[00:20:11]  We've come to expect that from him.
[00:20:13]  It's almost axiomatic now when he does stuff like this.
[00:20:16]  And look, he's rich.
[00:20:18]  He feels that none of this applies to him.
[00:20:21]  He does whatever he wants.
[00:20:23]  It's a bizarre situation.
[00:20:25]  And I imagine it'd be stunning if this doesn't all come to light when he's running for president.
[00:20:32]  Yeah, he went to Montana after taking aim at Montana.
[00:20:35]  And look, the guy, he won't answer questions.
[00:20:39]  He really, he's all very slippery at all times.
[00:20:42]  You know, he claims to be a man of the people, but he is a man above the people.
[00:20:48]  And by the way, he's 54 and the reporter was named Cal Matters or Cal Matters.
[00:20:53]  The reporter was named Emily Hoven of Cal Matters.
[00:20:56]  Okay.
[00:20:57]  So yeah, so moving on to the state of his state.
[00:21:00]  So yes, the COVID stuff is crazy.
[00:21:01]  And it's starting again, by the way.
[00:21:03]  It's starting again.
[00:21:03]  We're dealing with it in New York, recommended indoor masks and so on.
[00:21:07]  So that's, and I do, I have a lot to talk to you about on COVID, but let's stay on California for right now because it's a garbage thing going on.
[00:21:14]  LA County, the public health officials there are way out of line relative to the common wisdom.
[00:21:22]  But in any event, we have, here's what creates the homeless problem in Los Angeles.
[00:21:28]  People don't understand this.
[00:21:30]  There are literally tens of billions of dollars set aside to help the homeless.
[00:21:35]  People are always complaining.
[00:21:37]  Where's the money?
[00:21:38]  We need money to help.
[00:21:39]  No, no, we don't need money.
[00:21:40]  The reality is the way our state is set up, you can't help the homeless.
[00:21:46]  Here's what we have.
[00:21:46]  We have Prop 47, Prop 57, AB 109, and a terrible DA.
[00:21:51]  So you can come to our state.
[00:21:53]  You can use drugs freely.
[00:21:54]  You can traffic in drugs as long as you're trafficking in certain amounts.
[00:21:58]  And you can steal up to $900 a day to support your habit.
[00:22:01]  Now, I worked in the field of drug addiction for 25 years.
[00:22:04]  You tell a drug addict that, they're coming.
[00:22:06]  They'll be right there.
[00:22:07]  So they're coming because of that.
[00:22:09]  Then we don't enforce any laws on the homeless.
[00:22:12]  I just tweeted a thing from a physician who during the beach closures, which was one of the most really in the sign of the level of incompetency going on during the heat of the COVID crisis.
[00:22:24]  They should have encouraged people to go to the beach, but no, the beaches were closed.
[00:22:27]  Then they opened them and said, you can go, but you have to stand apart.
[00:22:30]  You can't lay a towel down.
[00:22:31]  It's disgusting incompetence behind those decisions.
[00:22:34]  But anyway, I retweeted a physician who during that April closure went out, pretended to be homeless so the police wouldn't bother him so he could go out and walk on the beach without a mask.
[00:22:45]  They do no enforcement on homeless.
[00:22:47]  We have no ability to treat them.
[00:22:51]  Most are drug addicted.
[00:22:52]  I go on, I very frequently will go out on Skid Row and assess what's going on there.
[00:22:56]  It's nearly all drug addiction out there.
[00:22:58]  And meth is the primary drug, opiates and fentanyl, the next drug.

=== Dangerous Beach Safety Failures (04:06) ===

[00:23:02]  And they are sick and need treatment and are dying at six a day in LA County.
[00:23:08]  Six a day.
[00:23:09]  If that were a hospital, we're essentially running an outdoor hospital.
[00:23:13]  If that were a hospital, there's no physicians involved in the organizations that allocate resources to that group.
[00:23:19]  There was one, he was the Department of Mental Health, but he was sort of marginalized, not a medical doctor, not an internist.
[00:23:26]  He was a psychiatrist.
[00:23:27]  But anyway, that's all no physicians involved.
[00:23:30]  If there were a hospital where six people were dying a day and you were doing nothing to change that and no physicians were involved in the care of these people, can you imagine that?
[00:23:39]  That's what we have, an outdoor hospital with people being untreated, allowed a diet six a day.
[00:23:45]  I think it's negligent homicide.
[00:23:46]  I just think it's manslaughter on a certain level because they know they know what's going on.
[00:23:51]  And they consistently, every day, six more people die.
[00:23:54]  And every year, the rate of daily death goes up by one.
[00:23:57]  Last year it was five per day.
[00:23:58]  Now it's six per day.
[00:24:00]  We have no ability to bring people in.
[00:24:02]  The Blanchement Pestry Short Act has been eviscerated.
[00:24:05]  So we can't bring people in against their will.
[00:24:07]  And when you're drug addicted and when you're severely psychotic and when you're on meth, you have something called anasygnosia, which blocks your ability.
[00:24:14]  It's a neurological phenomenon that blocks the ability to perceive what's happening to you.
[00:24:20]  Same thing happens in dementia.
[00:24:22]  We don't attack, if we don't go after the demented patient with anasygnosia, we are guilty of elder abuse.
[00:24:28]  We're guilty of abusing that patient and allowing them to wander on the street till they get hit by a car.
[00:24:33]  If they have schizophrenia or drug addiction, can't go near them, can't go near them.
[00:24:37]  And the term gravely disabled, which is how we used to bring people into treatment with these conditions, completely eviscerated.
[00:24:44]  You can't, you have to be imminently trying to hurt yourself or somebody else.
[00:24:49]  And if you just say, I no longer want to do that, I have a tent, I could go to McDonald's for a dollar, then you're out.
[00:24:54]  That's it.
[00:24:55]  Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:24:56]  So the mandatory hold isn't really worth the paper it's printed on because if they get in there and sit and say, I was just joking, then you're out.
[00:25:03]  We've seen that.
[00:25:04]  We've seen that with some of these school shooters lately, where they just say, I was joking, and they get out and then we see what happens later.
[00:25:10]  So San Francisco, can we talk about this for a second?
[00:25:13]  They, it's such a mess.
[00:25:15]  They just recalled their DA, but the homelessness there, I mean, it's why Schellenberger wrote that book, San Francisco, Sicko.
[00:25:21]  And when he was on a few months ago, he talked about this taxpayer-funded center where you could go and you could basically get your illegal drugs.
[00:25:32]  You could get your, you could get your needles, and it was, it became like a safe haven for druggies.
[00:25:38]  And this, this activist, this is a person named Ricky Wynn, 37, self-described recovering addict, who now sees the problems happening in that city.
[00:25:51]  And now Ricky posts videos of open-air drug markets and piles of garbage and the needles that are left behind.
[00:25:58]  And this, the latest video from Ricky shows children, elementary school children, walking past dozens of sickly users nodding out on the sidewalk.
[00:26:09]  We're going to show it to you.
[00:26:10]  I mean, you tell me whether you would want your kid getting off the school bus to this.
[00:26:14]  Watch.
[00:26:16]  Get home safe.
[00:26:23]  They got to walk through this shit.
[00:26:26]  Come on, man.
[00:26:34]  These little kids got to walk through this shit.
[00:26:36]  This shit is crazy.
[00:26:38]  Yeah, that is crazy.
[00:26:40]  Yeah.
[00:26:41]  That's that's that's Los Angeles.
[00:26:43]  If you want to go out to dinner, you get to walk through that.
[00:26:45]  That's wherever you go.
[00:26:46]  That's in that's California.
[00:26:48]  Now, here's the thing: those, I don't think that was one of the safe injections.
[00:26:54]  That wasn't one of the safe havens.
[00:26:55]  That was just San Francisco.
[00:26:56]  But the safe haven that Schellenberger was railing about is now closing.
[00:27:01]  It's going to close by the end of the year.
[00:27:03]  It was a total disaster.
[00:27:04]  Even San Francisco's London Breed, the mayor, had to admit, disaster.

=== Opioid Addiction Ends in Death (02:43) ===

[00:27:09]  It was, I think, 19 million of taxpayer cash put into this.
[00:27:13]  They treated one in every 1,000 users.
[00:27:16]  They failed to cut the fatal overdose numbers.
[00:27:18]  It was a complete and utter disaster as so many predicted it would be.
[00:27:22]  These light on crime look the other way, like fund drug habit policies have fallen through in every single instance in which they've been tried.
[00:27:32]  So, so here's where that came from.
[00:27:34]  It came from an idealization of similar programs in Vancouver and in Portugal.
[00:27:39]  Both were abject failures.
[00:27:42]  And here's the thing that everyone misses about the addicts on the street, everyone.
[00:27:47]  And I cannot emphasize this strongly enough.
[00:27:50]  And that is that, of course, it took time for those Portuguese programs and that Canadian program to fail because addiction in all situations is a progressive illness.
[00:28:03]  There's no such thing as letting somebody shoot heroin and the disease remains static.
[00:28:09]  That's not how it works.
[00:28:10]  It progresses.
[00:28:12]  It has a persistent, erosive effect on the brain and body.
[00:28:16]  So the thinking, the ability to fight off infection, all these things get worse and it ends in death.
[00:28:24]  It's a progressive illness, opiate addiction, opioid use disorder, particularly a progressive illness that ends in death.
[00:28:32]  Now, there are risk reduction measures and harm avoidance measures that have some utility and can be used in cases that can't, you know, can't be reasonably safely brought to full recovery.
[00:28:43]  Yes, that's different.
[00:28:44]  That's not continuing the practice of their underlying illness.
[00:28:48]  There have been wet houses around forever for alcoholics.
[00:28:51]  You let them come in and you drink.
[00:28:52]  And here's what they do there.
[00:28:54]  They descend on them and work on their motivation and get them to stop.
[00:28:59]  That's what those wet houses were for.
[00:29:01]  And they kind of work.
[00:29:02]  And if they don't, the person dies.
[00:29:04]  They progress and they die.
[00:29:06]  You have to understand giving the drug of choice will have a progressive quality that ends in death, whether it's alcohol or opiates.
[00:29:14]  This is supposed to be the humane approach to this issue.
[00:29:18]  Negligent.
[00:29:19]  Negligent, negligent.
[00:29:20]  Negligence.
[00:29:21]  And I'm not a lawyer, but look, if I were running a program that had those kinds of outcomes, are you kidding?
[00:29:31]  Forget malpractice.
[00:29:33]  They would come after me criminally.
[00:29:35]  That's the reality.
[00:29:37]  And London Breed can condemn this all she wants, but the voters are going to ultimately be asked whether she should be held accountable for these policies, whether it's the crime in San Francisco or the homelessness or what these kids are walking home past, whether she should be held accountable for that or not.

=== Accountability for Violent Fantasies (14:46) ===

[00:29:53]  And it won't just be London Breed.
[00:29:56]  All right, much, much more with Dr. Drew after a very quick break.
[00:29:59]  There's a lot to get to today.
[00:30:00]  I feel like I'm so glad you're here because there's so many things I want to talk to you about.
[00:30:02]  All right, stand by.
[00:30:09]  One of the things that we need to talk about is what's been in the news lately, and that is all these school shooters and the mass shootings.
[00:30:16]  And we know it's a contagion.
[00:30:17]  We know that when you see one, you're going to see several more.
[00:30:21]  And I had Gavin DeBecker on the show recently, you know, the world's most preeminent security expert who was predicting that as well.
[00:30:27]  And then we had another one in Highland Park, Illinois over the 4th of July holiday.
[00:30:33]  Jordan Peterson has got a lot of interesting thoughts on school shooters and mass shooters in general.
[00:30:39]  And he's with me for a long, long time.
[00:30:42]  I have not been saying the name of school shooters because I read guys like this a long, long time ago and I knew not to do it.
[00:30:49]  And Anderson Cooper, to his credit, he's been doing it along with me.
[00:30:53]  Ben Shapiro, when he launched Daily Wire, followed the same policy.
[00:30:57]  And Jordan Peterson has spoken out about this, saying he contacted the Canadian broadcast company saying, you're part of the problem.
[00:31:04]  You're part of the problem.
[00:31:04]  You're encouraging, as Gavin DeBecker would later describe it to me, sort of the loner loser staying at home who's a quota a nobody into recognizing they could be famous.
[00:31:16]  They don't care about infamous versus famous.
[00:31:17]  They could be famous if they do it.
[00:31:19]  This isn't exactly what Jordan says in this clip, but he is sort of getting into the psychology behind the mass shooter in a way that I think is interesting.
[00:31:26]  And I wanted to ask you what you think.
[00:31:28]  Here's Jordan.
[00:31:30]  My understanding of their psychology is that they're resentful.
[00:31:39]  They're low down on the status hierarchy.
[00:31:41]  They're not attractive to potential mates.
[00:31:44]  They're not necessarily very popular.
[00:31:46]  They don't, and they don't have a lot of hope for attaining any of that in the future.
[00:31:50]  So they're very, very frustrated by that lowly position.
[00:31:55]  And that makes them angry.
[00:31:57]  It makes them resentful.
[00:31:58]  Then it starts to generate compensatory fantasies, which would be, well, I'll do something.
[00:32:02]  I'll show them.
[00:32:05]  I'm going to be famous.
[00:32:06]  Everybody's going to know who I am.
[00:32:08]  And then they drift and they drift into.
[00:32:11]  they can drift into these violent fantasies.
[00:32:14]  Sometimes that's motivated also by thoughts of direct revenge because they've been bullied and they've been pushed around.
[00:32:19]  And so they have reasons to be angry, let's say.
[00:32:23]  I'm not saying any of this is justified, by the way.
[00:32:25]  I'm just saying how it works.
[00:32:26]  And then they brood for months, weeks, months, and years, developing these fantasies of violence, but more importantly, focusing on the consequences for notoriety of the violent act, even though it's notorious, it's hatred.
[00:32:45]  The idea is I'd rather be dead and infamous than alive and anonymous.
[00:32:52]  What do you make of that?
[00:32:53]  Yeah.
[00:32:54]  As usual, Jordan Peterson is spot on.
[00:32:56]  That has been my experience as well.
[00:32:58]  The notoriety piece, I have not noticed as much.
[00:33:01]  And again, we're talking about the kinds of shooters we have seen of late.
[00:33:05]  There is another layer in here, though, which troubles me greatly, which is, you know, remember the Denver shooter that he thought he was the joker.
[00:33:15]  He was absolutely psychotic.
[00:33:16]  He was a neuroscience student who became psychotic, who was referred to a psychiatrist, was referred to the school system that is supposed to capture people that are mentally ill.
[00:33:26]  And of course, the system said, oh, he's just fine.
[00:33:28]  He's just a kid with a fantasy.
[00:33:30]  He ends up shooting up a theater, believing, literally believing he is the joker.
[00:33:34]  That's part of the psychotic fantasy he was in.
[00:33:37]  These other kids we've seen lately, remember Parkland?
[00:33:40]  That kid was chronically in mental health services, doing well until his mother died.
[00:33:45]  Then at that point, no one could urge him into treatment.
[00:33:48]  He decompensates.
[00:33:49]  He becomes violent.
[00:33:51]  And behind a lot of the shooters is a similar kind of thinking to what Jordan Peterson was talking about, which is resentment, revenge, violent fantasies that finally become compelling to them.
[00:34:03]  Notoriety, I suspect, is just sort of the last piece.
[00:34:07]  It's not the fundamental piece, but it's the piece that allows them to say to themselves, it'll be fine because they'll all know that I'm showing them.
[00:34:16]  It'll be known widely that I was angry.
[00:34:19]  And I don't know what we do about that because whether it's suicide or cutting or eating disorders or shooting, they all have a contagion.
[00:34:27]  Most, as with most human, any human behavior, especially extreme behaviors, they have a contagion potential.
[00:34:33]  What do you make of Jordan saying, as if you look at the expanded remarks, he thinks if the news media would stop putting them on TV and saying the names, that the school shootings would, quote, stop.
[00:34:48]  Do you agree with that?
[00:34:49]  I don't, yeah, I don't think that's enough.
[00:34:51]  I think it would help.
[00:34:52]  I think it's very helpful because he's right that it seems like that piece does play a motivational role.
[00:34:57]  But listen, just Parkland and Denver, those were totally psychotic kids that really were not even thinking about those sorts of things at the time.
[00:35:08]  They were too psychotic to be thinking about that, or they would have rolled in some other motivation that would have made sense to them at the time.
[00:35:15]  But I do think that the Highland Park shooter, yeah, I think there might have made a difference.
[00:35:22]  Now we're learning more about him.
[00:35:24]  And as I say, we don't say the names, but we are learning more about the background.
[00:35:27]  And that's important to discuss.
[00:35:32]  His mother reportedly in 2002, left him in the car when he was two for nearly 30 minutes on an 80 degree day.
[00:35:42]  She was charged for that.
[00:35:44]  He lived.
[00:35:45]  And it's unclear whether that hot car incident left him with any physical or mental injuries.
[00:35:50]  But they also add that police were called to this family's home 10 times in response to reports of domestic violence in which the mother allegedly attacked the husband, one time with a screwdriver, one time hit him in the head with a shoe after he berated her looks.
[00:36:08]  Physical disputes on and on between the mother and father, including one drunken altercation.
[00:36:14]  Yeah, again, this is where the dad claimed she had hit him in the head with her shoe.
[00:36:19]  And she told police he had disrespected and belittled her, the husband had, by making disparaging remarks about her appearance, comments she claimed spurred her to drink.
[00:36:29]  Then there's a report from September of 2019 showing that the shooter, then 18, confessed that he had threatened to kill everyone in his family.
[00:36:40]  And somehow this brought law enforcement into his life.
[00:36:42]  I don't know if he was reported for it, but he told cops he had been depressed when he made the threats three days prior and nothing came of it.
[00:36:50]  I assume you're not surprised to hear domestic violence in his past, drinking, heavy drinking by the mother, an incident in the car, the hot car, neglect, and so on.
[00:37:00]  I have a million thoughts, but the most disturbing is that people that have overt thoughts of fantasy with a plan, I don't think they should have access to firearms for specified periods of time.
[00:37:11]  And they should be highly supervised.
[00:37:14]  And that supervision should be mandated.
[00:37:17]  And the fact that we don't do that is how people are going to die, including the patients, including the individuals themselves.
[00:37:23]  There's a very close association between homicide and suicide.
[00:37:27]  You just don't care about life.
[00:37:28]  Yeah, I've got a million thoughts about this.
[00:37:32]  When it comes to, I've spent 35 years working in a psychiatric hospital, even though I'm an internist, I worked in that setting for many years.
[00:37:38]  And I would say, generally speaking, because we can argue all day about the mom had something going on and whether that was an inherited thing that the kid got.
[00:37:46]  In general, I would say about in general, when it comes to mental health issues, it's about 60% is genetic and about 40% is environment.
[00:37:54]  And usually the environment is necessary to sort of trigger the genetic potential.
[00:37:59]  And only recently in the last 15 years or so has the medical community been talking about adverse childhood experiences.
[00:38:06]  We finally came up with a study out of Kaiser in California that showed, guess what?
[00:38:10]  If you have three or more adverse childhood experiences, your probability of measurable, severe mental health consequences and physical health consequences go up dramatically.
[00:38:20]  Well, what's an adverse childhood experience?
[00:38:21]  Things that we're in denial about, frankly.
[00:38:23]  A, divorce.
[00:38:25]  B, a family member in law enforcement.
[00:38:27]  C, a family member using drugs or alcohol.
[00:38:31]  D, whether or not there's any domestic abuse, let alone domestic violence in the home.
[00:38:37]  Abandonment, neglect.
[00:38:38]  They're just so, and then you can get the more severe adverse childhood experiences, physical abuse, sexual abuse, these sorts of things.
[00:38:45]  But it is not just those things.
[00:38:47]  It's these other issues that we minimize.
[00:38:49]  Oh, so dad spent a couple of years in jail.
[00:38:52]  Oh, mom drank a little bit.
[00:38:53]  Those are profoundly impactful on child development.
[00:38:59]  You know, I want to talk to you about this.
[00:39:00]  I'm very interested.
[00:39:01]  I totally agree with you that these people not only should not have access to guns, people who have identified as potential shooters, I mean, who have said, I want to kill my entire family.
[00:39:09]  Or as we saw in the Uvalde case, I want to kill everybody at my school.
[00:39:16]  So we need a system that institutionalizes those young men.
[00:39:21]  They're almost, I can't think of a situation in which it was anything other than a young man in the school's setting.
[00:39:27]  So how do we do that?
[00:39:28]  Like, how could it work?
[00:39:32]  Well, I mean, you're a lawyer, so I defer to the legal minds in this, but I would just say that let's look back at the Parkland kid.
[00:39:40]  When that kid was in treatment, he got better.
[00:39:44]  His violent fantasies went away.
[00:39:46]  He didn't need access to guns.
[00:39:47]  So the fact that those were restricted becomes moot.
[00:39:50]  They should just be restricted.
[00:39:52]  And I don't, whether they are reinstated, I guess, is up to the patient and the physician to determine that.
[00:39:59]  And how we would then go about that is a very complex issue.
[00:40:03]  Well, the gun issue, I mean, that can be up to the legislatures.
[00:40:07]  And I feel like at some point, instead of this like random legislation that may or may not get to the actual shooters, we do need focused, you know, they call focused protection on COVID, the Great Barrington.
[00:40:16]  We need focused institutionalization for these people.
[00:40:21]  But what about that?
[00:40:23]  Like, how do we get them behind mental health facility bars?
[00:40:26]  You know what I mean?
[00:40:27]  Like, we can stop them from getting the guns.
[00:40:29]  I do believe we can stop them from getting, but how do we get them behind bars?
[00:40:32]  I do a streaming show at 3 o'clock Pacific time every day, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
[00:40:38]  And I interviewed a psychiatrist from Great Britain.
[00:40:42]  And they routinely refer people into treatment where they are residentially kept for months to years.
[00:40:49]  And guess what?
[00:40:50]  They get better in the vast majority of cases.
[00:40:53]  And they are no longer a threat to anybody when they're properly treated.
[00:40:56]  They think differently.
[00:40:57]  They have insight into what's going on.
[00:40:59]  The brain heals extremely slowly.
[00:41:01]  It takes a long time to recover from these things.
[00:41:04]  And the ones that clearly are not recovering, they keep them in some sort of restricted care.
[00:41:10]  In this country, you're not, we do not have adequate numbers of psychiatrists.
[00:41:14]  We don't have adequate number of psychiatric beds.
[00:41:16]  We don't have residential treatment in most states.
[00:41:18]  And we don't allow the medical system to come in and help these people.
[00:41:24]  In some situations, they have something called assisted outpatient treatment, AOT, where judges, when people get into legal problem, maybe too late already, but when they get into the system, the judges are able to refer them to mandated assistant outpatient treatment.
[00:41:41]  And those people get better.
[00:41:43]  So at least, at least AOT, some sort of mandated care once you get into trouble.
[00:41:50]  Then for those who are not yet in trouble, we need to have some ability to find motivational sources and family input to get them in.
[00:42:00]  In California right now, back to the craziness in my state, when you go, families go to the state all the time, begging the state to allow them to have the ability to get their family member off the street and bring them home and give them a bed of food and a medical system that they're ready to provide for them.
[00:42:20]  And they are told to get out of here, scram.
[00:42:23]  Who do you think you are?
[00:42:24]  They're living their best life.
[00:42:25]  Who are you to say how they should live?
[00:42:27]  Not understanding that when somebody is sick, the brain doesn't work right and not even allow families to come in and help out to me is disgusting.
[00:42:38]  Well, and I mean, then you've got situations like this, this guy's family, the one I just went through, the one who shot up the parade in Highland Park, Illinois, where you got the dad helping him get his license for his firearm after knowing that he was suicidal, that he was potentially homicidal.
[00:42:55]  I mean, that's disgusting.
[00:42:57]  We really should have a talk about whether we expand the criminal law in a way that would get a dad like that, just so that there's skin in the game.
[00:43:03]  Apparently, the thought of mass deaths isn't enough.
[00:43:06]  Maybe if his own hide was on the line, he'd behave differently.
[00:43:10]  And oftentimes the parents, if you look at Sandy Hook, parent ends up dead because she didn't treat the kid, didn't mandate, didn't get him into care.
[00:43:19]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:43:20]  There has to be some accountability.
[00:43:23]  The denial has to get broken through on the family.
[00:43:26]  Family and there's often a parents behind the scenes going, oh, he's just an unusual guy, he's just a creative kid.
[00:43:33]  Oh, come on, stop it, he's fine minimizing denying, and we have to have mechanisms to break through that, because that that really is part of the problem and you're, you're pointing it out very clearly.
[00:43:44]  What about um i've, i've sort of and you were making this distinction at the top, there's the kids who are depressed and the bullied and alone and sad and feel unpopular.
[00:43:53]  Then there are the psychotic kids or the, the sociopaths.
[00:43:57]  And you can't be therapized out of being a sociopath no, so what do we do with them?
[00:44:02]  Well you, you can't.
[00:44:03]  Sociopaths can't group, psychopaths do not.
[00:44:06]  Uh and, like I said, in Great Britain, they keep them under supervision, they keep them in in restricted circumstances and those are usually people that have offended and are obviously there's, there's legal recourse to keep them in the system.
[00:44:17]  But look, there's such a thing as a pro-social psychopath.
[00:44:21]  You ever heard that term?
[00:44:22]  No no oh so so, so psychopaths at their core, they have difficulty experiencing the content of other people's minds.
[00:44:29]  They don't really appreciate that you have feelings or they, or when, when it's sort of more sociopathic and not psychopathic, they don't care that your mind has content, they only care about them.

=== Vaccine Risks and Sociopathy (18:16) ===

[00:44:39]  And there it's, it's.
[00:44:40]  These are narcissistic disorders, but they, if it serves them, if they get their needs met, they can learn to be extremely moral and rigidly so, because they don't have the usual sort of emotional sensibility about morality that the rest of us do.
[00:44:55]  It's a very cognitive rigid organization for them and they, they sort of set their compass and they can be very rigid about it, provided that it, it serves it they.
[00:45:05]  They find that it serves their needs.
[00:45:07]  So there is some potential to help these people, but most of that really needs to be done early, to be fair.
[00:45:13]  Oh, that's fascinating.
[00:45:14]  So if you because I know, I mean, i've interviewed these parents who give birth to children they know are sociopaths like, have absolutely no empathy or, and maybe potential psychopaths and are torturing the family cat, but are you telling me like, in the hands of the right parent, such a child could be programmed to be rigidly moral and you know, to make only good decisions?
[00:45:35]  Specifically, can't say it as you've constructed it.
[00:45:38]  What I can say is there appears to be some environmental component that would help move somebody in that direction.
[00:45:46]  There are many.
[00:45:47]  I i'm not going to name names because it's it's going to.
[00:45:49]  It would be too much.
[00:45:50]  But but I have talked to psychopath experts that point at a few of our former presidents and go, that's a pro-social psychopath, that's what that?
[00:45:57]  Oh my gosh, I can think of a few honestly like, and not not just recent, I mean.
[00:46:01]  I just I can think of a few too that i've wondered because didn't we talk about this before?
[00:46:05]  How narcissism is kind of on the line of some of these issues that we're talking about, and you kind of have to be a narcissist in order to become president and want to be president in the first place.
[00:46:16]  Yes, and you have to be a little manic too.
[00:46:18]  I mean my one of my favorite presidents, Teddy Roosevelt, he was narcissistic as hell.
[00:46:22]  He was manic as hell, you know, when he was police commissioner in New York City, wandered the streets at night and beat up criminals on his own.
[00:46:29]  It was manic crazy, narcissistic stuff.
[00:46:32]  And yeah, it's so it.
[00:46:33]  You kind of you want it for your fighter pilots, you want it for your generals sometimes, And sometimes you want it for your president.
[00:46:39]  So it's not when you make these assessments, that's what I always said about assessing the psychological construct of presidents and their personality makeup.
[00:46:48]  Be careful.
[00:46:48]  You may want some of that on board.
[00:46:50]  Careful what you wish for.
[00:46:52]  I've got so much more to go over, including the latest craziness with COVID.
[00:46:55]  It's coming back to a town near you, unfortunately.
[00:46:58]  So we'll get into it.
[00:47:00]  But in the meantime, don't forget that you can find the Megan Kelly show live on SiriusXM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at Noon East and the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megan Kelly.
[00:47:14]  If you haven't seen the video we posted last Monday of our 4th of July celebration, you should check it out and you will laugh.
[00:47:21]  If you prefer an audio podcast, follow and download our show on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:47:30]  It's free.
[00:47:31]  And there you're going to find our full archives, by the way, with more than 350 shows.
[00:47:34]  You can leave me a comment.
[00:47:36]  Been getting a lot of great ones.
[00:47:37]  I really appreciate it.
[00:47:39]  Including you can check out the first time Dr. Drew was on, which was episode 141, which I think was last summer.
[00:47:45]  I feel like I was here in the Jersey studio for that.
[00:47:49]  I remember it.
[00:47:50]  Enjoyed it just as much as today.
[00:47:56]  So, Dr. Drew, COVID, as much as I've moved on, you've probably moved on, most of America has moved on.
[00:48:03]  And in fact, in that New York Times Sienna College poll, they showed that COVID is now the top issue for exactly 1% of those polled.
[00:48:12]  Again, these are Democrats, just 1%.
[00:48:14]  So I'm hoping that it won't resurrect itself, you know, in any meaningful way come fall.
[00:48:20]  But it's starting to in the more blue, blue, blue cities like LA and New York.
[00:48:25]  And the latest out of New York City, this is from NBC, the BA.5 sub-variant of Omicron, the variant, that's Omicron, but then this is a sub-variant, BA.5, appears to escape immunity and transmit more easily, leading some to call it the worst version of Omicron.
[00:48:45]  All five New York counties have been added back to the CDC's high-risk category for COVID spread.
[00:48:51]  This is just this past Friday.
[00:48:53]  Face masks are now again recommended for everyone indoors in New York City and in any public setting, regardless of vaccination status.
[00:49:05]  They want the masks back.
[00:49:07]  They don't care whether you're vaccinated.
[00:49:09]  They haven't yet mandated it, but some of their left are freaking out that it's not a mandate.
[00:49:14]  So that could very well come.
[00:49:15]  And if these numbers go up more, I bet it will.
[00:49:18]  What do you make of it?
[00:49:20]  Well, I think it's important that we all have a certain amount of humility when we talk about COVID because this thing is nefarious and it changes.
[00:49:26]  And it's very hard to predict what's going on.
[00:49:28]  But let me just, couple thoughts.
[00:49:30]  The R nod on this thing is something like 17.
[00:49:33]  Masks aren't going to do much with this thing.
[00:49:35]  And let's be clear, the research shows very clearly the paper and surgical masks and cloth masks that everybody wears do next to nothing.
[00:49:44]  That if you want to protect yourself, you can with a properly fitting N95 mask worn religiously.
[00:49:51]  You have to wear it absolutely perfectly at all times.
[00:49:54]  You can protect yourself.
[00:49:55]  You're doing next to nothing for other people.
[00:49:57]  You're protecting yourself.
[00:49:58]  Just like when we go into a room with an infectious disease in the hospital, we don't mask the patient.
[00:50:03]  We put on the N95 mask and that protects us as caretakers.
[00:50:07]  So that's the one issue, the mask issue.
[00:50:09]  The other is the BA5 is here.
[00:50:10]  It's really coming on fast.
[00:50:12]  It is highly infectious, as I said.
[00:50:14]  And I've seen a lot of it.
[00:50:15]  I've seen a lot of it already.
[00:50:16]  And here's where things are different.
[00:50:18]  In people who are unvaccinated, I've seen some nasty BA5, but treatable.
[00:50:23]  We have a monoclonal antibody that is still effective against it.
[00:50:26]  We have Paxlivid.
[00:50:27]  We have Molipiravir.
[00:50:29]  Nobody's ending up in the IC or very few people are.
[00:50:32]  And so it's a completely different circumstance.
[00:50:34]  And even though I've seen some nasty cases of BI5, the majority of what I've seen has been like a nasty cold.
[00:50:41]  And that's been it.
[00:50:42]  And so for us to fly into another panic, here's where they tried to get us.
[00:50:46]  I don't know if you saw this last week, but a study came out and said, oh my goodness, if you've had COVID, you have a high probability of having end organ damage the rest of your life.
[00:50:57]  Did you see that study?
[00:50:58]  No.
[00:50:58]  Did you see it?
[00:50:59]  Okay.
[00:51:00]  Well, it was out and it circulated fast.
[00:51:02]  I started getting letters from people going, oh, you've had COVID twice.
[00:51:05]  Be careful.
[00:51:05]  Look, it's not what we see clinically.
[00:51:09]  I want to be humble in the face of this illness, but it is not what we see clinically.
[00:51:14]  And there was a study that I believe I read it in the New England Journal about two weeks ago that showed what we are seeing is if you have bad COVID and you end up in the ICU and on a ventilator, the probability of end organ problems, neurological problems, all the things that we see after somebody's been in the ICU is the same for COVID as any other severe ICU illness.
[00:51:36]  So it's not that COVID is-brain, liver, kidney, that we're seeing dysfunction.
[00:51:43]  And they, of course, they focus on the brain because the brain is injured.
[00:51:46]  There's a microvascular injury, just like getting hit in the head.
[00:51:50]  And people recover just fine from it.
[00:51:52]  This was the thing, remember earlier in our conversation, I was talking about how the pediatric vaccine specialists and public health officials are scared to death of these neurological fecures.
[00:52:02]  Your brain will shrink.
[00:52:03]  They showed it in England.
[00:52:04]  And guess what?
[00:52:05]  Yes, that happens after a lot of severe illnesses.
[00:52:07]  And then we recover.
[00:52:08]  We compensate.
[00:52:08]  Happens a lot in adult medicine.
[00:52:10]  This is not something strictly speaking unique to COVID.
[00:52:14]  However, I'll say it again, we should be humble in the face of this illness.
[00:52:17]  There's been a lot of surprises and twists and turns with it.
[00:52:20]  The mandatory vaccinations are still being required in several professions, most schools.
[00:52:28]  I mean, the military, the military enrollment is down at like record low numbers in the Army, in the Navy, in the Air Force.
[00:52:34]  The Marines, I think, is the only one that's on track to hit its recruitment numbers this year.
[00:52:39]  And they're saying in part, I mean, in part, it's because of the awokeness in the military.
[00:52:42]  There's a whole report out on this.
[00:52:43]  And they've asked some congressmen who are in the know and connected.
[00:52:47]  But in part, it's because of the vaccine mandates.
[00:52:49]  And these young people don't think they need it and they don't want it and so on.
[00:52:53]  And this in the wake of Vinay Prasad, you mentioned earlier, he tweeted this out in May.
[00:52:57]  CDC study didn't get a lot of attention.
[00:52:59]  We all know why.
[00:53:01]  That showed the second dose of the vaccine.
[00:53:03]  This is a Pfizer, but it's the same for all of them.
[00:53:05]  Second dose of the vaccine has zero effectiveness against Omicron by three months after the second shot.
[00:53:13]  Okay.
[00:53:14]  So you tell some guy to join the Navy, you have to be double vaxed.
[00:53:19]  And he says, okay, I'll do it.
[00:53:20]  And he doesn't really want to do it, but he does it.
[00:53:23]  And three months after that second shot, he has zero protection against Omicron, which is really the variant that we're dealing with.
[00:53:30]  What the hell is the point of this?
[00:53:33]  Look, there's even more damning data that shows that the second vaccine, particularly at the duration, the distance we're taking that second vaccine from the first, markedly increased the risk of myocarditis in young men.
[00:53:46]  This is this, look, I sort of look at it as in the initial phases of alpha and even Delta, it was sort of wartime decision making.
[00:53:55]  I mean, people were willing to take a lot of risk with this vaccine to try to get us out of this.
[00:53:59]  And I think that was probably appropriate.
[00:54:02]  Now, the same risk, maybe more are being taken.
[00:54:06]  And is that appropriate now with a vaccine that we know has a certain amount of problems with it?
[00:54:10]  That it's it, it, this is not, there is no perfectly safe vaccine.
[00:54:13]  And the mRNA vaccines, and frankly, most of the spike protein vaccines have their problems.
[00:54:20]  What I find interesting also, and I don't understand why they're delaying covaxin and the Novavax and the inhaled and intranasal vaccine.
[00:54:29]  What is going on with the CDC?
[00:54:30]  They rush the two out and then Johnson and Johnson.
[00:54:34]  And we know what happened with that one.
[00:54:35]  And then these other ones that look like really good alternatives, might be safer, don't require two vaccines necessarily.
[00:54:42]  They don't seem to be in any hurry to bring that out.
[00:54:44]  In the meantime, all these mandates are underway that seem sort of illogical in the face of the data we now have.
[00:54:52]  Yeah, I don't know how vaccinating young kids, those are hard decisions to make.
[00:54:56]  I don't know how you make that decision.
[00:54:57]  I'm glad I'm not making those decisions.
[00:54:59]  No, it's very disrupt me.
[00:55:00]  As the mother of three young children, I'm angry about the position I'm being put in.
[00:55:05]  Our school, our boy school, just sent out their doubling down on their mandatory vaccination policy.
[00:55:12]  They don't get expelled for not having it until they're 16.
[00:55:16]  And my oldest child is 12, almost 13.
[00:55:19]  But you can kiss school sports goodbye.
[00:55:22]  You can kiss field trips goodbye.
[00:55:24]  And so, you know, they're trying to twist all of our arms into doing it at the youngest age possible.
[00:55:30]  They don't care.
[00:55:31]  They don't care.
[00:55:31]  My little guy's eight.
[00:55:32]  They want me to stick a needle in him twice so that he can go on the damn field trip.
[00:55:36]  I mean, it's infuriating.
[00:55:38]  Well, it's infuriating.
[00:55:39]  And this is more of what was so awful about the COVID experience, which was the risk-reward analysis was completely obliterated.
[00:55:47]  And the decision-making was being carried out by people that have no experience making these kinds of decisions.
[00:55:56]  If somebody were to say to you, Ms. Kennelly, go work with your pediatrician and you and the pediatrician decide what you want to do.
[00:56:03]  Perfect.
[00:56:04]  And maybe that pediatrician is a little aggressive and says, I think you ought to do it.
[00:56:07]  Let me show you why.
[00:56:08]  Let me convince you why.
[00:56:09]  You and that pediatrician would decide what to do, as opposed to some bureaucrat who's not a medical person.
[00:56:17]  Or if they are a medical person, the director of public health in LA County is a sociologist.
[00:56:22]  She has zero clinical experience.
[00:56:25]  Let me follow up with you on that.
[00:56:26]  Because the American Society of Pediatrics, American Academy of Pediatrics, has been absolutely disgusting throughout this whole thing.
[00:56:33]  Everything they say is the most woke-ified AOC type recommendation you could possibly look for.
[00:56:39]  So I don't, I've lost some faith in them.
[00:56:42]  And while I love my individual pediatrician, he's very pro vaccine for everything.
[00:56:48]  I told the audience a couple of weeks ago, just on our wellness visit, you know, you do your annual wellness visit for your kids.
[00:56:54]  He wanted our 12-year-old to get the HPV vaccine.
[00:56:56]  I'm like, I'm not, he's a boy, first of all.
[00:57:00]  Listen, I'm telling you, the incidence of head and neck cancer and penile cancer is way up in men.
[00:57:06]  Get that vaccine.
[00:57:07]  Maximum effectiveness, age 10 to 14.
[00:57:11]  If you miss that window, you're not going to protect him against cancers that are becoming increasingly common.
[00:57:17]  Head and neck cancers.
[00:57:18]  You don't want it.
[00:57:18]  Trust me.
[00:57:19]  There are, no, I definitely don't.
[00:57:20]  I don't want any of that for my kids, but there are serious side effects to the HPV vaccine.
[00:57:27]  I've spoken to you honestly about my concerns about the mRNA vaccines.
[00:57:32]  The HPV vaccine has one of the most stunningly positive safety profiles of any vaccine in history.
[00:57:39]  It's one of the safest you can take and it prevents cancers.
[00:57:44]  I can't believe that we have resistance against this one.
[00:57:46]  That was the one that always bothered me.
[00:57:48]  Well, there's a lot of people who talk about what happened to their, like, if you, if you read Michelle Malkin, she talks about having her child.
[00:57:53]  There's a lot of people.
[00:57:54]  That's anecdotal, I realize, but the reports of negative vaccine effects after HPV, the vaccination, are pretty widespread.
[00:58:01]  I mean, like, even my very good friend and nurse is like, that's the only one you really want to avoid.
[00:58:06]  I'm sure it's not zero, but because none of them are zero.
[00:58:09]  None of them are zero.
[00:58:10]  But boy, you're going to have to have some very frank conversations with your sons because it is the incidence of head and neck cancer right now is really skyrocketing.
[00:58:20]  HPV vaccine prevents head.
[00:58:22]  What's head cancer?
[00:58:23]  Head and neck cancer, tongue, pharynx, larynx, throat.
[00:58:27]  This is this is way he has HPV related head neck cancer and he has talked about it and people it doesn't get really picked up by the press, but he has talked about it and that's what he has and it's it is common now and it's a terrible cancer.
[00:58:42]  You don't want it basically when he's from 10 to 14 because you want him to have it before they become sexually active.
[00:58:48]  Is that I mean, that's why that's it.
[00:58:51]  Yes, that is one aspect.
[00:58:52]  And the other aspect is you want to have it when it's maximally effective.
[00:58:57]  And that seems to be the maximum effectiveness.
[00:58:59]  But, you know, if we vaccinate all the females, maybe it gets very complicated.
[00:59:03]  This is probably not an appropriate conversation.
[00:59:05]  It's kind of a medical conversation, but you do want to prevent this cancer and it is coming increasingly common in men.
[00:59:13]  All right.
[00:59:13]  Well, I take your point because we had Gavin DeBeckeron, who's not a doctor, but he was ripping on it.
[00:59:18]  And now we have Yuan who's saying, no, no, no, I'm a doctor and there's a different side.
[00:59:21]  And my own doctor wanted it.
[00:59:22]  But my own doctor has been very, very pro-vaccine, even with the children, even with my babe.
[00:59:26]  You know, when this whole thing started, he was, what, six?
[00:59:29]  And I have serious doubts.
[00:59:31]  And I have serious doubts about the American Academy of Pediatrics.
[00:59:34]  And I, you know, I'm one of those moms who's like, I'm not exactly sure who to trust on this.
[00:59:38]  There is a very strange look.
[00:59:40]  First time I got COVID, I got COVID because I was trying to get the vaccine, but I wasn't, I didn't measure up to their equity standards at the hospital where I work.
[00:59:50]  I was being pushed to the back of the line, even though I cared for COVID patients because they had equity standards.
[00:59:56]  And I keep hearing that is motivating some of the need to vaccinate all children.
[01:00:02]  And I don't understand the logic.
[01:00:03]  I don't quite get it.
[01:00:04]  I heard it from our public health officials in Los Angeles.
[01:00:07]  And I thought, uh-oh, this does not sound like a medical thing at all.
[01:00:11]  I don't know what it exactly is, but there's something going on there.
[01:00:14]  And I suspect the American Academy of Pediatrics may be in a similar mindset.
[01:00:18]  And the risk is so low to them of getting COVID.
[01:00:21]  It's like, what's the point?
[01:00:23]  You know, of course, I want my 80-year-old mother vaccinated and she is.
[01:00:26]  By the way, today's her 81st birthday.
[01:00:27]  So happy birthday, Linda.
[01:00:30]  So, and she is, of course, and she's boosted and all that stuff.
[01:00:32]  But that makes sense, but not from the littles.
[01:00:34]  It makes so much less sense unless, you know, you can assess your own individual circumstances, but we're not being allowed to do that.
[01:00:40]  And you look at things like what happened, what's happening now to Novak Djokovic.
[01:00:44]  It's absurd.
[01:00:45]  He's, I guess he's technically ranked number three in the world, but he just won Wimbledon, his seventh Wimbledon title.
[01:00:52]  It's his 21st Grand Slam.
[01:00:54]  He's one behind Nadal.
[01:00:56]  He wants to win another one, but it's not going to happen at the U.S. Open because he's banned.
[01:01:01]  He's banned from entering the United States because he hasn't been vaccinated.
[01:01:07]  I refer you back to the CDC study that I just cited, tweeted out by Vanette in May.
[01:01:12]  Three months after your second vaccine shot, you have zero protection against Omicron.
[01:01:17]  That's the variant we're dealing with now.
[01:01:19]  So what is the point?
[01:01:20]  Novak had COVID.
[01:01:23]  He had it last year.
[01:01:24]  That's one of the things that popped up when he was in jail during the Australian Open for whatever happened with the weirdness there.
[01:01:30]  This is, even John McEnroe came out and said, this is ridiculous.
[01:01:33]  He said, quote, these politicians are getting in the way too much.
[01:01:36]  They did it in Australia.
[01:01:37]  Let's let the guy come in and play in the U.S.
[01:01:39]  This is ridiculous.
[01:01:41]  So, Megan, the enemy is bureaucracy and the centralizing of authority in medical decision making.
[01:01:48]  I've seen it.
[01:01:49]  I've just, I've looked at what we went through and I thought this is the problem.
[01:01:53]  We have over-centralized the decision making.
[01:01:56]  And I didn't realize how much we had done it in medicine, where most physicians are employed now by a system.
[01:02:04]  That system has specific guidelines that those physicians have to follow.
[01:02:07]  If they want to think for themselves, they risk losing their job.
[01:02:10]  They risk being disciplined in some way.
[01:02:14]  This over-centralization, medicine is meant to be practiced with two people, the patient and the physician making the decisions, a well-trained, caring physician and a motivated, informed patient.
[01:02:27]  That is your best unit.
[01:02:28]  Anything you put on top of that is inefficient and results in less good outcome.
[01:02:34]  So they put all this centralization in the name of, I don't know what, I don't quite, I guess it's the cost effectiveness.
[01:02:40]  I don't know why we've gone this direction.
[01:02:42]  And now, not only do we have the medical system layer of centralization, now we have the government centralization on top of that.
[01:02:48]  And you see the insanity.
[01:02:50]  You see the incompetence.
[01:02:51]  You see the lack of risk-reward analysis for a given individual.

=== Medical Education Under Attack (08:03) ===

[01:02:55]  And back to your point, I hope you interviewed Vinay Prasadi.
[01:02:58]  It's a great interview, but back to his point about the CDC article on Omicron.
[01:03:02]  That was the early Omicron.
[01:03:03]  The BA4, BA5 really gets around immunity of all types.
[01:03:07]  We know that for sure now.
[01:03:09]  Even having had the illness, BA5's not particularly clement towards those patients.
[01:03:15]  And the vaccine seems to have almost no activity, which is why we're going to have new vaccines in the fall.
[01:03:20]  And those will become mandatory too.
[01:03:22]  So if it's like you already stuck your kid twice and three times and you didn't even really want to, guess what?
[01:03:27]  It was all for naught because you're going to have to do it over and over and over until you wind up with God knows what.
[01:03:32]  I mean, like, I have real concerns when it comes to autoimmune disorders and so on and these vaccines.
[01:03:38]  And I've spoken to a rheumatologist about this and I know that they're not made up and they just don't talk about it.
[01:03:44]  You can't talk about it because fucking YouTube will take down your video.
[01:03:48]  I don't have to tell you that.
[01:03:49]  That just happened to you.
[01:03:50]  With all due respect, my friends at YouTube.
[01:03:52]  I've been in YouTube jail a number of times.
[01:03:54]  I've been in UTL jobs several times just for medications coming out of my mouth that just using the words of medicines that I've been using for decades, for years or decades.
[01:04:04]  And now when those words are uttered, you get taken off YouTube.
[01:04:07]  It's incredible.
[01:04:07]  Yeah.
[01:04:08]  Yeah.
[01:04:08]  That's exactly right.
[01:04:09]  So now I wanted to pick up on something you said for diversity reasons or equity reasons.
[01:04:13]  I don't know what that is.
[01:04:14]  I don't know what that is.
[01:04:15]  We're at the front of the line.
[01:04:17]  That's affecting so many professions, just this overarching and absurd obsession with equity.
[01:04:24]  And when it affects the medical profession, we're in trouble.
[01:04:27]  Now, this is something, this is a point Victor Davis Hansen has been making for some time.
[01:04:31]  You're like, okay, you want perfect equity in every profession, in every school.
[01:04:34]  And he always says in sports, okay, let's do it in the NBA.
[01:04:37]  How do you like that?
[01:04:38]  How's that work for you?
[01:04:39]  Right.
[01:04:39]  Oh, wait, that's not okay.
[01:04:40]  And it doesn't have to be white people.
[01:04:42]  How about Asians?
[01:04:42]  No.
[01:04:43]  Oh, you don't want it there?
[01:04:44]  Why not?
[01:04:44]  Okay.
[01:04:45]  But he says, do you want perfect equity when it comes to your medical doctors?
[01:04:49]  Do you want it when it comes to pilots?
[01:04:51]  Do you want just to promote people who have lower test scores just in the name of having certain skin colors better represented?
[01:04:57]  It's absurd.
[01:04:59]  And there's an article in National Review right now talking about how wokeism is corrupting medical education and quote endangering patients.
[01:05:09]  It's by Dr. Stanley Gopar, Goldfarb, who's a former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania, very well-respected university, the Perlman School of Medicine there.
[01:05:18]  And now, and what he's saying is the following: woke ideology is undermining this essential part of medical education in two ways.
[01:05:25]  Admissions and testing standards are being lowered in the name of diversity and equity.
[01:05:30]  And second, victimization culture is making it harder to give low-performing and unqualified residents the feedback they need to avoid endangering patients.
[01:05:37]  Let me give you a little bit more color.
[01:05:39]  At least 40 institutions and counting have given in, dropping the MCAT requirements.
[01:05:44]  That's like the test you need to take to see if you can get into medical school, like the LSAT, dropping the MCAT requirements mainly for those who are, quote, underrepresented in medicine.
[01:05:54]  The University of Pennsylvania waives the MCAT for certain applicants from historically black colleges and universities and several other institutions.
[01:06:01]  Studies show, he says, that lower MCAT scores predict poor performance in medical school, a greater likelihood of dropping out, and a lesser likelihood of comprehending the courses that matter most to patient care.
[01:06:13]  He says this year, the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam's first section, which residency programs have typically relied on to select candidates, has replaced objective grades with a pass bail system.
[01:06:24]  The medical school deans who approved this seismic shift away from merit explicitly did so to allow more minority students to qualify for competitive residency programs.
[01:06:33]  Quote, having retired from academic medicine in 2019, I have the freedom to speak out.
[01:06:38]  Yet the nonprofit I chair that opposes identity politics in healthcare, do no harm, is consistently, consistently hearing from physicians who are afraid of giving feedback to low-performing residents, lest they be accused of bias.
[01:06:52]  And some of the examples, Dr. Drew, a resident who left a tourniquet on a patient for too long at a top medical school told them that leaving this resident's mistake caused an above-the-knee amputation.
[01:07:05]  He received no, he or she, no negative feedback.
[01:07:09]  An attending physician believed that a residence came to work in the emergency room while under the influence of drugs.
[01:07:14]  Yet after raising the issue, the attending physician backed down following accusations of racism.
[01:07:20]  Another resident who did not know how to set a broken bone responded with physical threats to an attending physician who tried to step in and help, and the resident received no punishment in return.
[01:07:29]  An attending physician at a prominent institution recently told my organization that residents now have the power.
[01:07:34]  They're not afraid to use it against the physicians who are supposedly their supervisors.
[01:07:39]  It concludes as follows.
[01:07:40]  If these trends continue next July, we will see a larger crop of trainees and residents who are less capable and more likely to harm their patients with the medical establishment pretending nothing is wrong.
[01:07:52]  What do you make of it?
[01:07:54]  Well, I have definitely seen the consequence of the lack of ability to discipline residents.
[01:08:02]  And that has nothing to do with equity or inclusion or anything else.
[01:08:06]  I have noticed that physician, that the residents have specified hours, they can't be bothered.
[01:08:11]  You certainly can't be, let's say, rough with them, which is sort of was the way we taught.
[01:08:17]  And if there is any decrease in the quality academically of the students, I thankfully have not seen that.
[01:08:22]  I have not seen that.
[01:08:24]  But what I have seen is a shift in the physician ability to put the patient first, the priority of what they're doing and to care about what they're doing as the as a really sacred obligation to the patient.
[01:08:39]  It feels very sort of like, oh, it's just a job.
[01:08:42]  And we've done it.
[01:08:43]  We've gotten there.
[01:08:44]  That's where we are now.
[01:08:46]  And that is largely because the residents are not, they're not, it used to be a very military system.
[01:08:55]  It really was.
[01:08:55]  And maybe it was too much, but it did the job.
[01:08:58]  And if there were physicians in the program who were, say, of a lower academic standing, you could bring them up.
[01:09:05]  You could bring their performance up through really getting on them.
[01:09:09]  But now you can't get on them.
[01:09:10]  So if there is indeed some sort of shifting in the academic standards, you will eventually see it out there in the workforce as well.
[01:09:18]  But the main thing for me.
[01:09:19]  This challenge in medicine, and as Victor says, airline pilots for another example, really puts the whole wokeism thing to the test.
[01:09:28]  Like lowering standards when it comes to someone who literally has lives in his or her hands.
[01:09:36]  I mean, I'm not in favor of that.
[01:09:38]  Who's in favor of that?
[01:09:40]  But Megan, look what we've done to medicine anyway.
[01:09:41]  So here's what these young, I have a lot of my peers that are retiring and stepping out, particularly of academic settings, because they can't deal with residents and the young physicians.
[01:09:50]  They just can't deal with it.
[01:09:51]  They don't respond in the same way that we did.
[01:09:54]  But think about what we're doing.
[01:09:56]  So we put them, let's just take a gastroenterologist and you put them out there.
[01:10:02]  First of all, they're rarely going to see patients.
[01:10:05]  The physician assistant or the nurse practitioner is going to see all the patients.
[01:10:08]  And the doctor is going to review the records and try to render judgments on the care of the physician assistant and nurse practitioner.
[01:10:15]  Then he and she will be following dictates of a bureaucratic system that gives them clinical pathways to follow that determines that will determine whether or not they did the right thing, not their judgment for the given individual in that particular clinical setting.
[01:10:30]  So we're in.
[01:10:31]  We're there now.
[01:10:32]  Then COVID was a brilliant example of the consequence of all that on a large scale.
[01:10:38]  And I think that's where we are now.
[01:10:39]  And I remember I was on Anderson Cooper's show about, God, about eight years ago.
[01:10:44]  And I said, I said, look, you're not going to be seeing.
[01:10:46]  They were complaining about the cost of health care and the system not being unified.
[01:10:51]  And I said, you're not going to see a doctor.
[01:10:52]  You're going to see a physician extender.
[01:10:54]  And there was Anna Navarro and Anderson Cooper.
[01:10:56]  And they all were like, physician extender.

=== Diagnosing Borderline Personality Disorders (15:23) ===

[01:10:59]  What are you talking about?
[01:11:00]  I go, yes, that's the system you're putting in place.
[01:11:04]  You can't charge somebody a million dollars and train them for 17 years and then not pay them.
[01:11:11]  They're going to have to see so many patients that somebody's going to have to do that for them.
[01:11:15]  And that's the system we're in right now.
[01:11:17]  That's it.
[01:11:18]  That is so true.
[01:11:19]  Physician extender sounds like something you would order off of late night television commercial.
[01:11:23]  Oh, it sounds like a good idea.
[01:11:25]  Maybe the My Pillow guy will come up with that.
[01:11:27]  Comes up with everything else.
[01:11:30]  So we've talked about wokeism, you and I, before, and we were joined by your beautiful daughter, Paulina.
[01:11:36]  And she describes herself as woke, though she's absolutely lovely.
[01:11:40]  Sorry, because I rip on the woke a lot, but not on her.
[01:11:44]  But it's really kind of crossed over to absurdity now in some circles, including like if you just watch Libs of TikTok, you know what I mean.
[01:11:52]  And my team pulled this one example, Dr. Drew, of this one person.
[01:11:58]  The TikToker is named Friday is Funky.
[01:12:02]  Okay, that's the first problem.
[01:12:03]  That's the person's, that's what they go by.
[01:12:05]  Friday is funky.
[01:12:06]  And this one little video will give you some semblance of how difficult it is in modern day America to even stay, hold on to your grip of what it is they're trying to get us to go along with and how we're supposed to be, quote, respectful of the language.
[01:12:23]  Watch.
[01:12:26]  Okay, everyone's really confused.
[01:12:28]  So I'm going to explain this.
[01:12:30]  I am non-binary and I call myself bi and gay and queer.
[01:12:35]  Those are all terms I use for myself.
[01:12:37]  I say bi to like help people understand that I'm interested in like all people, like people that have the same gender as myself and people who have a different gender as myself.
[01:12:50]  But no matter who I'm dating, I'm always gay because I'm not cis, not a boy or a girl.
[01:12:57]  So it's gay.
[01:13:00]  Does that help?
[01:13:01]  Like I typically almost like exclusively go for other trans people.
[01:13:07]  So like the fact that my boyfriend is trans, like we're, we call each other boyfriends.
[01:13:12]  Like I'm his boyfriend too.
[01:13:15]  He's my boy.
[01:13:16]  We're boyfriends.
[01:13:19]  So I'm gay and bi and queer.
[01:13:22]  That's like the same for me.
[01:13:26]  No one understands that.
[01:13:28]  You know, I did and it did help me, but the, but when I see young people doing that, particularly that, I think she's so lovely and bright.
[01:13:38]  What a waste of her intellectual space.
[01:13:42]  She could be doing so much with that.
[01:13:44]  So much.
[01:13:44]  Go do whatever.
[01:13:45]  Go do your diet, whatever, identify as whatever, date, whatever.
[01:13:50]  But to be constantly preoccupied and taking up cognitive space with this must be exhausting.
[01:13:57]  It must be exhausting.
[01:13:58]  And I worry too.
[01:14:00]  Elon Musk or Steve Jobs.
[01:14:02]  You need to be thinking about bigger things.
[01:14:05]  I hope so.
[01:14:06]  I mean, there are more important things in life, like having a good life, leading a good life, being a good person.
[01:14:11]  But here's what I worry about with all that.
[01:14:14]  It's all good, whatever.
[01:14:15]  I love her.
[01:14:16]  Good.
[01:14:16]  She's lovely.
[01:14:17]  But I worry in my world of mental health, having a cohesive, consistent self-concept is an important part of mental health.
[01:14:28]  And when it's constantly shifting, I worry that there's something going on.
[01:14:32]  That's all.
[01:14:33]  That's all I worry about that.
[01:14:34]  No, you're right.
[01:14:35]  That's not all good.
[01:14:36]  That's not good.
[01:14:37]  There was an article that came out just this past week that I forwarded to my team where a parent was writing in about how at their child's school, I'm trying to find it.
[01:14:48]  The person, oh, here it is.
[01:14:50]  Headline.
[01:14:51]  This is on a sub stack.
[01:14:53]  When a quarter of the class identifies as trans.
[01:14:56]  And this person writes in, a quarter of the girls in my daughter's class identify as trans, a quarter, seven out of 28.
[01:15:04]  And says, like, when I said this on Twitter recently, I was around the attacker being a TERF who makes up ridiculous stories to harm trans people.
[01:15:10]  She says, I may be a TERF, I guess, but I didn't make this up.
[01:15:12]  A quarter of the girls and goes on to say that one of the girls had changed identity like four different times, had changed the name several different times.
[01:15:23]  And the school just keeps on going with it.
[01:15:25]  Okay, now you're this person.
[01:15:27]  Now you're that person.
[01:15:28]  And they don't involve the parents at all.
[01:15:29]  Nobody tells the parents.
[01:15:30]  In fact, there's a policy in at least the New York City privates not to tell the parents.
[01:15:35]  Do we affirmatively exclude them from all of this?
[01:15:39]  I just remember back in the day when a young adult or an adolescent would change their name, we would immediately in mental health just go, uh-oh, something's going on.
[01:15:47]  We got to help this person.
[01:15:48]  They need to get a cohesive identity.
[01:15:50]  I mean, one of the features of borderline personality disorder is unstable identity.
[01:15:55]  And that's not fun.
[01:15:56]  I mean, think about how you were when you were an adolescent trying to figure out who you are.
[01:15:59]  I don't know if you had any of that.
[01:15:59]  I had a bit of that.
[01:16:00]  It's very uncomfortable.
[01:16:02]  It's not a healthy place to be.
[01:16:03]  Now, if the cohesive identity includes, you know, all these categories and that they want to fine, fine.
[01:16:09]  But just let it be you and go do go engage in the world now.
[01:16:13]  Now we get in the world.
[01:16:15]  It's, I, I. What's interesting about the borderline personality disorder?
[01:16:19]  I want to ask you about that because I saw you, you suggesting something about Amber Heard on that front.
[01:16:24]  And of course, that was the testimony by Johnny Depps, expert, that she is one.
[01:16:31]  And so let me just pause it there.
[01:16:32]  I'll squeeze in a break.
[01:16:33]  And I do want to ask you whether you think she is one and what it means and follow up on what you just said.
[01:16:37]  That's an interesting thought that all this sort of like, here's the template of all the new things you can be, you know, just choose like a gender is no longer fixed.
[01:16:45]  Choose from 700.
[01:16:47]  Maybe that's not such a good thing.
[01:16:48]  Maybe that's causing some confusion where we don't, I mean, we know that, obviously, but like in a different way.
[01:16:56]  Let's just start with what is borderline personality disorder.
[01:17:00]  So let me just give you a little story that, you know, I started working at a psychiatric hospital in 1984, 85.
[01:17:08]  And at the time, there were these admission sheets.
[01:17:11]  And on the admission sheet, you'd put the primary diagnosis, mood disorder, bipolar depression.
[01:17:16]  On the second line, you'd put the personality disorder if you could make that diagnosis.
[01:17:21]  And when I got, it's called the Axis II diagnosis back in the day.
[01:17:24]  And I noticed when I got there, there were all sorts of dependent and obsessive compulsive and paranoid and this and that all, and then some narcissism and other things in there.
[01:17:34]  By about 1988, 89, I noticed it became predominantly the cluster B personality disorders.
[01:17:41]  And cluster B are the narcissistic disorders.
[01:17:44]  Borderline.
[01:17:45]  Cluster B is a cluster B or cluster B, cluster B. Cluster B, which is borderline, sociopath, narcissist, and histrionic.
[01:17:54]  And then people are, we talked a little earlier about psychopath versus sociopath.
[01:17:58]  They're very much related.
[01:17:59]  So those four make up the cluster B.
[01:18:01]  And by about 1992, I noticed it was only cluster B.
[01:18:05]  That was every patient that came in the hospital.
[01:18:08]  Now, for a while, the psychiatric literature was wondering, is this, are we overdiagnosing?
[01:18:12]  What do we do?
[01:18:13]  Why is this happening?
[01:18:14]  In my opinion, it happened because we really went through a pandemic of childhood abuse and destroyed families and abandonment, neglect, and physical abuse and sexual abuse.
[01:18:23]  And all the patients I was seeing had this history in the background.
[01:18:27]  And it is thought of as a common injury that results in these personality disorders.
[01:18:32]  And with borderline, it affects predominantly women, though not exclusively.
[01:18:38]  And the hallmarks are an unstable self-concept, as I said, unregulated hostility, difficulty managing relationships, preoccupation with abandonment to the point where they push other people away if they try to get close.
[01:18:53]  They make the abandonment happen.
[01:18:55]  And a lot of suicidality and self-destructiveness and drug use.
[01:18:59]  And one of the really key features that I think Amber Heard and Johnny Tupp did us a public service by showing publicly how messy these things are and how distorted people's perceptions can be.
[01:19:14]  Johnny, because he was loaded and out of his mind and maybe in a blackout, but Amber, because she has this disorder.
[01:19:21]  And you asked me, let me just talk about the distortions.
[01:19:24]  I can't tell you how many times I would always go in a room with another female nurse or whatever, because very frequently, if I went in the room with a borderline patient, we'd have a nice, you know, nice encounter.
[01:19:34]  I'd get her history, take her to an exam, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary for me.
[01:19:38]  I would leave and the patient would report he was abusive.
[01:19:41]  He touched me inappropriately.
[01:19:44]  They're not lying.
[01:19:46]  They're not lying.
[01:19:47]  They distort because they were so, one of the theories is they're so badly victimized at one time that they literally distort.
[01:19:54]  And then when you have that distortion and then put memory on top of it, and memory is a very seriously flawed instrument in our brain, you get really significant distortions of the truth.
[01:20:04]  And I think that was on display with Amber.
[01:20:06]  It wasn't made, wasn't not a lot of made of that, but her perception of what people accused her of lying.
[01:20:12]  I don't think she was lying.
[01:20:13]  I think that was her perception of what happened.
[01:20:16]  Wow.
[01:20:17]  That's an interesting legal question.
[01:20:19]  I have to tell you, because if she's not lying, if she actually believes it in her head, given the actual malice standard you have to prove under New York Times, Mrs. Sullivan, you might not have had her on defamation if she was truly deluded.
[01:20:32]  Well, it's not a delusion.
[01:20:34]  It's a distortion.
[01:20:35]  And let me just tell you that one of the things I noticed, and this is, you might be interested in this from a legal perspective, when back in the 90s, all through the 90s, when a borderline would come into the hospital, she would have a minimum of 20 lawsuits under her belt.
[01:20:51]  The legal system was used in the name of this pathology, and all the slap and anti-slap laws were really created in response to these what were called frivolous lawsuits.
[01:21:02]  But to the patient, they weren't frivolous.
[01:21:04]  They actually believed these things happen.
[01:21:06]  The legal system completely fell for it.
[01:21:08]  The problem is now the legal system has adjusted a bit, but some of these same problems are now out in the legislature.
[01:21:16]  Wait, I got confused.
[01:21:17]  I got confused.
[01:21:17]  You're saying a borderline personality will have filed 20 lawsuits or will have been the subject of the defendant in?
[01:21:24]  Filed, filed.
[01:21:25]  Okay.
[01:21:25]  Vexatious litigant.
[01:21:26]  Yeah.
[01:21:27]  Oh, they all, they were the system, the legal system was caught on to what was going on, but they were being used as an instrument in their psychopathology.
[01:21:36]  It was really disturbing at the time because a lot of people were harmed by it.
[01:21:40]  Well, if you look at somebody like Amber Heard, I'm not asking you to diagnose her.
[01:21:42]  We already had testimony from somebody who did, you know, interview her, though she says not for long enough, whatever it was, 12 to 18 hours, who says she is one.
[01:21:50]  Her expert said no.
[01:21:53]  When, like, could you have a borderline personality with as much commercial success in their life as she has?
[01:22:00]  There's lots of them out there.
[01:22:01]  I mean, I see them all the time.
[01:22:02]  Just like we talked about the pro-social psychopaths out there, people can adjust and their personality.
[01:22:07]  And by the way, you can have traits and not a technically, if you have a crude disorder, it should at least affect your functioning interpersonally or professionally or physically, like your health is suffering.
[01:22:20]  And usually all those areas are affected, but you could have traits that are really intense, but not actually affect your functioning.
[01:22:27]  As it pertains to her diagnosis, she wasn't just interviewed, as I understand.
[01:22:31]  Now, I wasn't there and I don't know the instrument she used.
[01:22:34]  The psychiatrist that interviewed her told, testified on the stand that she used specific neuropsychiatric instruments that are really just these scantron test sheets and they give you the diagnosis.
[01:22:46]  There really is not a lot of debate about, you know, whether those things, that is sort of the gold standard.
[01:22:53]  And she was not just borderline, she had borderline traits and histrionic traits, both.
[01:22:58]  And that's a pretty rough combination.
[01:23:00]  That is wrong.
[01:23:00]  So question both ways, because I know every woman I know who's single is worried about hooking up with a sociopath, like somebody who has no empathy.
[01:23:07]  Forget psychopath, that's obvious, but like a sociopath, you know, who's just like dead inside, has no empathy and doesn't care about feelings, but knows how to fake.
[01:23:14]  That's one.
[01:23:15]  But on the other end, now every man I know is worried about hooking up with an Amber Heard.
[01:23:19]  You know, there's that meme online, like after the trial, we're like, hey, fellas, she's available.
[01:23:24]  And you're just like, no, no, thank you.
[01:23:26]  And so what do you tell people on that?
[01:23:29]  There's a bunch of things I want to say about that.
[01:23:31]  One is, let's please not, let's not disparage people with borderline disorder or borderline traits.
[01:23:37]  Nobody suffers more empathy for them.
[01:23:39]  It says, I don't want to marry one.
[01:23:41]  I get that, but I just want to put it out there that nobody suffers more than the borderline him or herself.
[01:23:46]  They suffer a lot and they use something called projective identification, where they push their pain out into other people.
[01:23:53]  That's why they're so difficult to be around.
[01:23:55]  But I actually did very well with borderlines.
[01:23:57]  I do well with it when I'm out in practice with them because I just feel deep empathy for them.
[01:24:02]  I know they're in a lot of pain and you just got to contain them.
[01:24:05]  You have to know what you're dealing with.
[01:24:06]  But if you're in a romantic relationship with them, it's rough.
[01:24:09]  Here's another piece of advice.
[01:24:10]  If you have borderline personality traits, you are going to tend to attract and be attracted to sociopaths.
[01:24:19]  So, and if you're a sociopath, you're going to, again, you're going to be interested in and you're going to attract borderlines.
[01:24:24]  When we run a drug unit, those were the two personality diagnoses we had to immediately separate because they would end up in some sort of inappropriate contact.
[01:24:33]  And it's, there's, there is something, there are things in our personality landscape that determine what we're attracted to.
[01:24:41]  And that's one you can pretty much take to the bank.
[01:24:45]  So the borderlines and sociopaths go together.
[01:24:48]  Now, this is why I get the big bucks, Dr. Drew, because I can connect any thread.
[01:24:52]  We talked about mass shooters earlier.
[01:24:54]  Now we're talking about sociopaths and borderlines and so on.
[01:24:58]  One of my friends had a great idea, I thought.
[01:25:02]  And she said, one of the things we can do to lower the chance of more mass shootings or school shootings is we can increase the penalties for animal torture because that's a great way of getting sociopathic people into the criminal justice system at an earlier level to where they would be red flagged.
[01:25:22]  And I think that's exactly right.
[01:25:24]  Like a sociopath who might otherwise skirt the legal system could be identical.
[01:25:28]  Because, you know, to the question I'm asking you, how would I know if I was dating a sociopath?
[01:25:33]  You hear anything about animal torture?
[01:25:34]  Get out.
[01:25:35]  Get out.
[01:25:36]  Correct.
[01:25:37]  That is correct.
[01:25:38]  I love the idea.
[01:25:38]  I think it's brilliant.
[01:25:39]  I think it's a good idea.
[01:25:40]  And sociopaths can be very engaging, very entertaining.
[01:25:49]  I don't know if I want to say this, but it's sort of too good to be true.
[01:25:52]  But you got to check everything.
[01:25:54]  Trust but verify everything that people tell you.
[01:25:57]  Don't expect anything.
[01:26:00]  Expect distortions.
[01:26:02]  Lying, cultivate the word whatever, and always check everything through.
[01:26:07]  Don't assume what people say they are or say they're doing is what they are.
[01:26:11]  You have to be extremely circumspect with people.
[01:26:13]  And I think these days you're at a little bit of an advantage because you have the internet.
[01:26:17]  You can kind of check things out a bit.
[01:26:19]  Yeah, you need references.
[01:26:20]  It's like the line from madmen.

=== Dating Patterns of Sociopaths (03:29) ===

[01:26:22]  He has no people.
[01:26:23]  You can't trust a man like that.
[01:26:25]  They need to have some people.
[01:26:27]  There should be some people in their background who can effectively vouch for them.
[01:26:32]  Yeah.
[01:26:32]  Yeah.
[01:26:33]  I mean, that's a safer way to go.
[01:26:35]  I mean, again, that's how we used to do it back in the day, like, you know, big friends of friends is how people kind of hooked up, proximity, that kind of thing.
[01:26:42]  But the internet has expanded that quite a bit.
[01:26:44]  I remember when Doug and I first got together, we were basically set up at a blind date.
[01:26:49]  And A, when I went to meet him for the blind date, I had friends stationed in the bar, you know, who were pretending they didn't know me, just in case.
[01:26:58]  You never know.
[01:26:59]  He wasn't a psycho, as it turned out.
[01:27:01]  And I was happily married and the father of my three children.
[01:27:03]  But on date, he does.
[01:27:06]  When I saw him without any backup there, a friend of his from high school came, he was like in the bar, just happened to be in the bar in DC.
[01:27:14]  And he came over and said, Duggar, how you doing, blah, blah.
[01:27:16]  And then he says to me, you know, I don't know your status or anything.
[01:27:19]  He's like, he was the nicest guy in high school.
[01:27:21]  He was like, there were lots of clicks in our high school.
[01:27:23]  He never joined one.
[01:27:24]  He was one of those guys who was just nice to everybody.
[01:27:26]  In fact, they gave him this award, like best all-around guy, just like somebody who everybody, I'm like, this is a total plant.
[01:27:33]  This is so obviously fake.
[01:27:35]  But it wasn't.
[01:27:37]  He had a person.
[01:27:38]  Good job, Doug.
[01:27:38]  Well done.
[01:27:39]  Putting that guy in there.
[01:27:40]  Well, I want to have seen that guy later.
[01:27:42]  He's actually not really a great friend of Doug's.
[01:27:44]  They just knew each other in high school.
[01:27:45]  And I saw them at their high school reunion.
[01:27:46]  He's like, everything I said is 100% true.
[01:27:48]  So I'm glad I married him.
[01:27:49]  But yeah, you got to check out their people.
[01:27:50]  They got to have people.
[01:27:52]  And ideally, they come from a relatively stable family, though every family's effed up.
[01:27:56]  So I hesitate to even say that.
[01:27:57]  Right.
[01:27:57]  Right.
[01:27:58]  But here's another piece.
[01:27:59]  And this is really advice: which is if you have a pattern of attracting a certain kind of person, and if you're attracted to a certain kind of person, you are a perfect instrument.
[01:28:11]  Your body is a perfect instrument.
[01:28:13]  Even if you're sort of interested in a new person and he or she doesn't look anything like the other ones, if you're attracted and that's your pattern, it's going to be the same unless you get treatment.
[01:28:25]  And treatment can really adjust those things kind of quickly.
[01:28:28]  And you can sort of learn to really read those what we sometimes people call love maps or attract attachment patterns in such a way that you can form more secure attachment with healthier people.
[01:28:39]  But if your pattern is, why do I always pick the wrong guy?
[01:28:42]  You will continue to do so because your body, your attraction system is a perfect system and it does not change unless you do something active to change it.
[01:28:50]  And usually people end up with people that have some of the traits of those pathologies you used to be attracted to.
[01:28:56]  Some of that will be in there because that's what you're attracted to.
[01:28:58]  But on a low, you know, on a just sort of trait level, it doesn't have to disrupt relationship or functioning.
[01:29:05]  Yeah, you can make a logical choice to go a different way and try something new and then be accepting when the universe delivers that something new to you.
[01:29:15]  Well, but we always tell people you got to think butterfly is not lightning bolts.
[01:29:18]  If you're somebody that has to have lightning bolts, you have to be so attracted to that person and the person you're attracted to always ends up being the same guy or the same gal.
[01:29:26]  You either got to stop doing that or you got to get some treatment.
[01:29:29]  And the lightning bolt can be deadly.
[01:29:31]  So like it's, it may not be all it's cracked up to be.
[01:29:34]  Yeah.
[01:29:35]  And it tends to wane anyway.
[01:29:36]  Like, I don't know why I was thinking about this, but I was just thinking about Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.
[01:29:42]  And, you know, like when they got together, everything was so hot, hot, hot.
[01:29:46]  And he, I remember she tweeted out the naked photo of herself breaking the internet and he tweeted out all day long or something.

=== The Dangers of Chemical Addicts (05:35) ===

[01:29:51]  I was like, all right, we heard enough.
[01:29:54]  There's heat in the beginning in most relationships.
[01:29:56]  And that relationship's a good example.
[01:29:59]  If you don't have a profound intellectual, you know, mental, emotional connection that can get past that will still be there after the heat wanes, you don't have much.
[01:30:08]  You know, you don't have much.
[01:30:09]  The heat, the lightning bolt is not enough to hang your hat on.
[01:30:12]  You need all of it.
[01:30:13]  I mean, I'm a big fan of the heat as glue and long-term marriages and things, but you need all.
[01:30:17]  That's exactly right.
[01:30:18]  And when it seems excessive, that's what you're describing with Kanye and Kim.
[01:30:22]  When it's when you, the average person looks at it and goes, What is that all about?
[01:30:26]  There's something there.
[01:30:27]  There's something going on.
[01:30:27]  I don't need to know what you're doing all night long.
[01:30:29]  That's that's your business.
[01:30:30]  Right, right.
[01:30:30]  All right.
[01:30:31]  I've got to ask you about Paulina before we go because I know you have an update on her.
[01:30:35]  And she was such a doll.
[01:30:36]  I honestly think she might be the only woke person I've ever had on the show.
[01:30:39]  And I would have her back anytime she wanted to come.
[01:30:41]  You were promoting your joint book.
[01:30:42]  She was, she was kind of, she wasn't like one of the wokesters who's mean and wants to cancel everybody and it's just nasty.
[01:30:48]  It's just a worldview that she came by honestly.
[01:30:50]  But so what's going on with her?
[01:30:51]  So, so she we wrote this book called It Doesn't Have to Be Awkward, and it did very well.
[01:30:55]  And I, in the process of writing the book, I got to see her point of view.
[01:30:58]  It was a really interesting process of contact, which we all need to be practicing, which was, you know, I don't agree with a lot of her stuff, but I understood it and I respected it.
[01:31:06]  I thought, oh, this is, I see what she's doing.
[01:31:09]  I get it.
[01:31:09]  I know what she see her thinking.
[01:31:12]  So, in the meantime, she went through a major life-changing event and is now seven or eight months sober, deep in the program, and is kind of a new person.
[01:31:20]  It was really quite exciting to, you know, I've worked around recovery all the time.
[01:31:23]  And she and I kind of joke about now how that was something she would never consider because dad was always talking about it.
[01:31:29]  And she jumped in with both feet.
[01:31:31]  And boy, I started going to multiple meetings a day.
[01:31:33]  And she felt she really hit a bottom.
[01:31:36]  Her drug was a cannabis.
[01:31:38]  And I know people don't believe that cannabis can cause addiction, but let me tell you something.
[01:31:42]  When you're dabbing and doing wax, and these are such powerful chemicals now that trust me, it can not only cause addiction, it can cause mental health problems as well.
[01:31:52]  Mood disturbances, anxiety attacks, psychotic episodes.
[01:31:56]  People deny it.
[01:31:57]  It is just so.
[01:31:58]  And you could say, well, if you're not using so much, okay, maybe.
[01:32:01]  But at the rate people are using, if you're dabbing, really think about you may have a problem.
[01:32:05]  And she's becoming so dumb in this area.
[01:32:08]  What is dabbing?
[01:32:09]  It's sort of think of it as crack for cannabis.
[01:32:13]  It's like you have to specially prepare and light it and cook it.
[01:32:16]  And it's a whole thing.
[01:32:18]  And it's very, very, very potent, highly opioid type effect, but many other influences on the brain as well.
[01:32:24]  And you got to look at yourself.
[01:32:27]  Look, I don't believe in good drugs and bad drugs.
[01:32:29]  There's no such thing as a good drug and a bad drug.
[01:32:31]  There's just these chemicals and how they affect the human being and our relationship with those chemicals.
[01:32:36]  Be realistic about all of it.
[01:32:38]  Look, alcohol, yes, causes more.
[01:32:40]  Back we were talking about head and neck cancers.
[01:32:42]  Alcohol plus HPV pretty much guarantees you had head and neck cancer.
[01:32:45]  Alcohol is a carcinogen.
[01:32:47]  Alcohol has more public health consequences than any other drug for sure.
[01:32:51]  Drug, all unwanted contacts, accident, you name it, alcohol is there.
[01:32:56]  It's not worse than anything else.
[01:32:58]  It's just another drug that humans use and let's understand it fully.
[01:33:02]  And there are plenty of other drugs we use.
[01:33:03]  Some are not as bad, some are worse.
[01:33:05]  It's whatever.
[01:33:05]  It depends who you are too.
[01:33:07]  But she has changed herself completely.
[01:33:09]  And it's just been a joy to be close to somebody who's going through this process of transformation that we call recovery.
[01:33:15]  And she has embraced it.
[01:33:16]  And my goodness, it's just been extraordinary.
[01:33:18]  She's somebody who's had a lot of therapy under her belt too.
[01:33:22]  And this process of sobriety and recovery has been, I mean, life-changing for her.
[01:33:27]  It's been extraordinary and it's been great to watch.
[01:33:30]  She was super open when she came on the show and absolutely delightful to talk to.
[01:33:33]  I'm very glad to hear she's doing well and better than she felt she was.
[01:33:38]  And thank you for being so open and honest about it.
[01:33:40]  I'll end on the one happy note.
[01:33:42]  Met in Italy a guy who got his PhD in environmental architecture.
[01:33:48]  And one of the things he learned was how important open spaces and nature can be to any architectural space and to somebody's well-being.
[01:33:58]  So we talked about drugs being so bad for you.
[01:34:00]  Here's one thought to think about today on something that's good for you.
[01:34:03]  Outdoors, seeing the sunrise, seeing the sunset, seeing the mountains, seeing open vistas, seeing the ocean like I do here.
[01:34:10]  And it does make me happier, even though I'm not an ocean person because I don't like sharks and I don't like salt and I'm worried about the waves.
[01:34:16]  But I like to look at it.
[01:34:18]  So it's something you can do today.
[01:34:19]  Something small.
[01:34:20]  It could just be a walk in the park maybe rather than toke up or take the drink or take the whatever pill.
[01:34:27]  Anyway, that's I saw the last word on that.
[01:34:29]  Dr. Drew, great as always.
[01:34:30]  Such a pleasure to see you and send my best to Paulina too, please.
[01:34:33]  Absolutely.
[01:34:34]  Thank you so much, Megan.
[01:34:35]  All right, guys, and check out drdrew.com for more and where you can find all of Dr. Drew's shows.
[01:34:40]  Tomorrow, our friends from the fifth column are back with us.
[01:34:43]  Everybody loves when the guys from the fifth column come on, including yours truly.
[01:34:47]  And it sounds like Matt Welsh and I have a lot to talk about with respect to our terrible, terrible airline experiences lately.
[01:34:56]  Have you had one of your own?
[01:34:57]  You can go post about it right now on Apple at our show comment experience and maybe I'll read one on the air.
[01:35:05]  I'm still so ticked off about what happened between yours truly and Air France.
[01:35:11]  One of the many things we'll get to for the guys from the fifth column.
[01:35:14]  Don't forget to listen and watch.
[01:35:16]  And you can watch, by the way, at youtube.com/slash MeganKelly.
[01:35:19]  We'll see you tomorrow.
[01:35:22]  Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
[01:35:24]  No BS, no agenda, and no