Dr. Drew Pinsky details his loss of trust in legacy media, citing the COVID-19 era and RFK Jr.'s revelations about pharmaceutical regulators as catalysts for his political shift from liberal to libertarian-leaning pragmatist. He condemns Los Angeles' negligent handling of homelessness as homicide, contrasts it with San Francisco, and links lockdown-induced isolation to rising youth depression, anxiety, and gender confusion. Critiquing "safety uber alles" and post-structuralist academic trends since 2010, he warns of societal atomization and compares modern cancellation culture to historical guillotining, ultimately expressing hope that reality will prevail over prevailing ideologies while praising Florida's environment over California's. [Automatically generated summary]
So I've been gone for about two and a half years now, and you were considering, at least for a brief period... We're still kids, we talk about it all the time.
You know, the main thing that has been my sort of What's making me so deeply disturbed, what started my problem in California was the way they dealt with the homeless.
Because these are people that I, these are my patients.
When people get severe enough mental illness, severe enough addiction that they end up on the street, that is the most seriously deteriorated, and they die.
They die on the streets of L.A.
County, and they die seven to eight per day.
And in my opinion, that is negligent homicide, period.
And it's been that for Eight years and it just hasn't changed.
It's so clear what to do.
It's easy.
It's not a problem.
San Francisco did it.
They moved them out in one day and they could have gone, hey, come with me.
We've got a place for you and created a therapeutic living environment with, you know, steps, sent them through it to get vocational rehab, return them to a meaningful life.
Maybe you wouldn't find this funny as a doctor, but I always found it kind of funny driving around LA.
There would be signs, billboards all over the place for LA mental health, blah, blah.
And I always thought, well, That would be the worst place to get your mental health fixed, in some L.A.
city hospital.
To me, that would be crazy.
I suspect you'd be up to something different, but do you think that the people there, the machinery there, has the will to do anything that would actually work?
What, what keeps, all right, you said that your family, you said that deep roots and family, but like, do you have, do you think that there is enough good people there to turn any of this around?
I don't mean just that they can maybe get one good drug hospital or this or that.
So that was, oh gosh, that was what I was thinking when I started thinking about it.
First I thought, Well, damn, Schiff is my congressman.
He doesn't do anything for us, and he was running again at the time, and I thought, I should run for that position, because somebody's got to do something.
I can't believe you've not been a South Park watcher all these years.
But let's make sure we don't leave that out.
Okay.
Television is a medium of hits.
And when you do get involved with a hit, there's almost nothing more powerful than that.
It does reach a lot of people.
And in terms of doing something that makes a difference, I still miss that Trying to get a large audience and move them and change them and, you know, affect them in certain ways.
And maybe this, I have a suspicion that Rumble and, you know, all these other platforms might get there.
You're ending up doing essentially a broadcast because you're on so many different platforms talking to so many different people.
What I do like about this that's different from that Because you have such highly motivated audiences.
They appreciate it.
They're tired of people disdaining them or selling them things when they feel like whoever the company is that's selling them something actually hates them.
How much, we've talked about this a little bit before, but how much did your political evolution shift because of the COVID craziness?
Because when I had you on last time in studio, still in LA, so it's about over two and a half years ago, you were still sort of saying some nice things about Fauci.
And I know you guys have a history.
I sense you've shifted a bit on that, or at least you're amenable to some other ideas.
I was going to tell you that my interview with RFK, my first interview with RFK Jr.
He was so reasonable and so smart and so many interesting ideas and enlightened me to this cozy relationship between the regulators and the pharma companies, which I really wasn't aware of.
I mean, I can't let a pharma company representative into my office to give me a pen With a drug name on it, and yet those guys are living together and cross-pollinating jobs.
I mean, that's mind-boggling to me.
And that he had a very sensible, didn't necessarily fully agree with it, but a sensible idea about vaccine research that he would like to push forward.
Not that vaccines are bad, his family's all vaccinated, my family's all vaccinated.
And at the end of that interview, He said something to me, I've met him now many times since then, he goes, oh my goodness, Drew, you are so courageous to talk to me and I thought, it blew me back in my chair, I thought,
I need courage to have a conversation with an adult in a public setting.
And he was right.
This is a time where I didn't realize how much speech was being suppressed, how much was being manipulated.
Then what happened after that was the Twitter files and started seeing what was going on.
To me, this is all reprehensible.
And what has happened as a result, I don't think I've shifted my political views.
I've just really, I never imagined I'd be in this point in my life at this age and place in my career.
Freedom and freedom fighting and the courage to stand up for it have been the most important thing in my life right now.
And that's crazy!
That is crazy!
I live in the United States of America and I have to worry about freedoms?
I have to fight for freedom?
That is an insanity!
And I'm hoping it's something that will pass soon.
Yeah, well, you know, there's a far less chance they're going to put you in a gulag in the free state of Florida rather than the communist... Come to Florida, come to Florida.
...people of California.
All right, I've sold Florida enough.
What do you think psychologically, this is one of the things I talk about on the show a lot, that basically psychologically now, if you were somebody that watches corporate press... Yeah.
Pretty much think that is true.
And then you're someone that maybe watches this or Rogan or you or just that mix of people, RFK in there too, of course, that your worlds are so different now that psychologically as a nation, how do we put that together?
Like you could literally be basically living in a completely different world than your neighbor.
And it's actually makes me sad Because it prevents any kind of discourse and conversation.
I can feel their stomach muscles tightening up when I just try to have a conversation, and that's so disturbing to me.
I think what's going to happen, I think enough Uh, sort of slowly uncovering of how much distortions have gone on and how arbitrary and capricious and dangerous and horrible consequences these decisions have had.
It's going to come to light.
I don't know if it's going to be that there really are excess deaths.
I'm worried that there are.
If there are, that's going to keep happening and we're going to see something.
I don't know if it's COVID.
I don't know if it's COVID plus vaccine, but these conversations will evolve with time.
And eventually I think people will start to go, oh, I'm starting to see a bigger picture.
I think a turning point was when Fauci admitted the six foot distance was invented out of whole cloth.
It was invented from thin air.
Completely, yeah.
And I knew that two years ago.
by talking to all these canceled doctors. And I talked to a guy named Paul Alexander two years ago
who was in the room when Redfield made the decision. He goes, Dr. Ray, why six feet?
This is an aerosolized virus. It'd be 30 to 60 feet, certainly 10 feet. And they actually agreed
on maybe 10 feet. They took 10 feet to the White House, and some political operative said, well,
no one will ever agree to that. I'll just say six feet. And so it was never a medical decision.
It was no scientific basis to it whatsoever. It's had no utility. And yet, I mean, think about this,
The whole world adopted it.
The entire world.
That, to me, is the really astonishing part about that experience of COVID.
That lockdown was adopted by the world, six feet was adopted by the world, masks were adopted by the world, with none of it being considered for risk reward analysis, like what might
happen as a result of this.
And it was obvious to me there was going to be horrible mental health consequences.
Do you think there will ever be any reckoning whatsoever?
I mean, basically everyone who got us into this either still has their job or have retired with cushy retirement and or made hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in stocks on these things.
I hope at minimum, particularly young people, become furious.
They should be outraged and angry at what was done to them.
If that happens, I will think, personally, I think that's enough.
Now, I know there's a lot of people that want retribution, all kinds of legal action, civil or criminal.
I really worry about that.
I'm telling you, the present moment, I've become obsessed with Revolutionary France.
Obsessed.
And I wanted to put a chapter in my book On narcissism, on pre-revolutionary France, because that was the only period of history that I could find with as much narcissism and childhood trauma.
And one of my conclusions that I wanted to put in that chapter, which my editor told me was too speculative, was that there would be scapegoating.
There would be guillotines.
Guillotine is just massive scapegoating.
And never heard of cancellation, but here it came.
So scapegoating became this social media phenomenon that I predicted.
Why did I bring this up?
So the problem is that if you pull people up on the guillotine The guillotines just keep going, and eventually everybody goes.
It's a mathematical certainty of scapegoating.
Eventually, everybody.
First it was the Jacobin, then it was the Saint-Culottes, and then it was the Royalists.
So if that's not possible or not realistic, or you're sort of afraid of what the enemy... And by the way, the other part is that you'll never get to the truth.
So would the bigger problem then be that the pharmaceutical companies seemingly have done none of that internal research or investigation or anything, right?
Like, as far as I can tell, they're still into all of this and WEF is talking about disease X and the rest of it.
We were like this group trying to put information out, trying to continue to share ideas.
And if you're nine years old and you're telling them that shelter in place and you're going to kill your family and no peer contact, of course there's going to be depression, anxiety and developmental delays and cognitive issues.
It's just inevitable.
And on top of that, the economy to the young people that I've spoken to looks bleak.
Not only does the economy look bleak, the usual sorts of Motivations for engagement.
They can't get inspired by it.
There are a lot of like, who cares?
Why do I?
Everything sucks.
We suck.
America sucks.
You boomers suck.
Why do I want to dedicate my time and life to some pursuit?
What am I going to do with it?
It's really sad.
It makes me crazy.
That's why I said when I was walking around Coconut Grove and seeing a lot of young people out there socializing, I'm like, please, yes, more of this.
I mean, from a therapist's perspective, what would you do if you're talking to now a group of 12-year-olds who, okay, they were nine when this was happening, they're anxiety-ridden, they're confused about a bunch of stuff, like, what do you actually do?
Where do you think the prescription drug, I would say pandemic, falls into that?
Maybe that's not your word.
The over-prescribing?
Yeah, I saw something I think a week ago, we showed it on the show, that about 10% of American adults are on something for ADHD, you know, either Adderall or one of these things.
And to me it seems like Even if a huge percentage of those people, it's necessary in some respect in helping them.
Yes.
A society that 10% of its people are drugged one way or another, there's something much bigger going on here.
And in terms of the medication, I think we are, this is what always happens in mental health, we are at once over-prescribing And under-prescribing.
I mean, again, look at the streets.
People who need medication aren't getting it, and if they don't want to take it, you're supposed to just go, okay.
They die because they don't, and then there are people that come in with a little...
Ordinary misery.
When Sigmund Freud first, I don't know if this is an apocryphal story or not, but Sigmund Freud apparently when he hit the shores in New York, reporters came up and said, Dr. Freud, what do you hope to achieve here in America?
And he said, well, I hope to understand the difference between real mental illness and ordinary misery.
And when I first started thinking about this different, I thought, oh yeah, my heroin addicts are super happy, first hit of the day.
Is that, are they happy?
Is that happiness?
But they're happy in that moment, but it's not happiness.
Happiness, and you know, I sort of, lately I've been, people have been resonating with this when I say, look, Jesus Christ lived a purposeful, good life.
Wasn't always happy.
If he had focused on hedonic tone, on that kind of happiness, things would have turned out quite differently.
And often a good life is a life of sacrifice, a life of engagement, a life of work, of doing hard work.
So how do you, all right, we talked about how you can get people off some of the drugs, let's say.
How do you get people off all of the wrong ideas now when you also have a generation that is confused about Sexuality, they're confused about the founding of the nation, just that freedom is bad and up is down and two plus two is five, all those things.
I think reality, I'm watching, you know, sort of my children's peer age kind of wake up in the real world and kind of go, oh, well, maybe that isn't so, maybe that wasn't so true, or maybe I was a little deep in it.
You can constantly push historical sort of tidbits out so people come to understand what What this country is founded on and what the other histories of other countries have been that we can learn from, that they seem totally disconnected from.
And so it's, I just think persistence.
I think keeping it going and allowing reality to assert itself.
And then I'm hoping a real anger will emerge in young people where they go, hey, I was taught some bullshit and I believed it and now it didn't serve me well and I'm angry about it.
Is the, I guess, counter to that, that the doom scrolling and the endless amount of information.
It's nice to have the good information out there, but that thing also, and the filters on pictures and nobody thinks they look right and all of the rest of it.
The horse is out of the barn for a lot of generations.
Particularly sort of millennial age, you're not going to take them away from screens, and Gen Z probably not either, but there needs to be a consensus of limiting screen time for the younger kids.
You've got to do it.
It's hard, and the only way it'll happen is if all parents in every given community do it together, because otherwise it'll be just sharing screens during the day and stuff.
Right.
So, okay, so you have a bunch of... So we're your kids.
Yeah, but it's like, it's not flashy and it's not fast and it's not destroyed.
So she's the one.
So basically the only thing I watch now is Miss Rachel.
But we don't even give, even that, we try to limit it to just a few minutes just before dinner so we can sit down for a second.
But I can see the challenge and it's almost, to me it strikes me as just an unwinnable, there's just no win because we all wish we were better with these things.
Even me, a guy that takes a month off in August and I try not to tweet on weekends and all that stuff.
So what you're referencing for people that haven't seen is we've put out a couple of these videos where I'm watching South Park for the first time, which was, it was my guy's idea.
So the reason, so you must've missed that.
The reason that we did it the first time was because I was a Simpsons guy.
That was obviously before Bill had, well, I guess he was having his adventures, but there was this big debate because they were both on at the same time, which one was going to take over.
And I loved Cosby and I loved the Simpsons.
And then I went the Simpsons route and then that was 89.
And then around 95, 96, South Park came up, but Simpsons was, you know, season seven, season eight, primo, best years of the Simpsons.
Gentlemen, get them the one where PC Principal is at the fraternity house going down the hall with the Because when that happened, I thought, oh, I thought, oh my God, you know, then I thought, oh, and now it happened.
Well, even I did watch one or they showed me one when they were doing this member berry thing that like everything is just like a I think it's a combination of factors.
before, and that also sort of seems, I think sort of psychologically why we're kind of screwed
at the moment, that we can't, as a society, we don't create anything new anymore.
We reboot Star Wars, we re-skin a Marvel movie.
That our dreams are now just becoming like vestiges of an earlier, more creative time.
Well, I was just, as you were saying that, like, it seems to me also partly what's missing is that we've so atomized sex now, because porn is now everywhere, and it's a private thing for people, and it's like we can joke about it, but nobody talks about it.
And it's, it is, um, It's been a grave concern of mine from the addiction standpoint because that's where we're seeing lots of that.
We don't have any idea the full impact on young people.
I will tell you what I saw, I've seen over the last 15-20 years is young males Feeling frightened.
They don't want to be seen as objectifying women or being toxic masculine.
So they pull back.
They certainly wouldn't talk to somebody who has a beer in their hand because that's, you know, they can't consent then, you know, you were again seen as a predator.
Still happens a lot where men are told that that's the case.
They pull back.
They head off into the porn.
And they sort of hide there, like, okay, I'm okay.
I got my porn.
And they miss the developmental milestones of dating and, you know, learning to do those things.
And for the first time, I had a show that just ended this year.
It's kind of a sort of a Loveline-esque show called Dr. Drew After Dark over at your mom's house, Tom Seger and his wife, Christina P.
And on that show, for the first time in my career of talking to young people, young males were starting to talk about visiting prostitutes.
This was becoming part of the option to deal with the loneliness and the disconnect, and that's not good.
That's actually exactly what I wanted to ask you next, because I'm seeing a ton of that.
I know a lot of girls, like let's say 25 to 40 year old girls, that are single, cool, good looking, good jobs, seemingly together, and they cannot find guys, period.
And that's a really weird thing.
I didn't even think of the, well now they find older men thing.
And there's no sense of that or what even a family does.
I mean, why that is important in terms of the foundational sort of units of culture and a society and the most appropriate healthy environment to raise children, two people committed to each other.
Susan was saying that she thinks also women also are sort of unrealistic about what men are, how they work, and because they're not doing the kind of dating where you learn what men are in these heterosexual couples, they're unclear about what it would even be like to be with a young male.
I didn't sit in judgment or mistreat my patients in any way.
And then I remember when my kids went to college, so it had been around 2011, is when boom, it just all of a sudden was everywhere, this theory, theory.
And I, you know, Jordan Peterson talks about this, that this whole Reliance on theory is ideology, right?
And he sees it as coming out of this post-structuralism and the fact that post-structuralists took hold in academia in this country, and therefore the truth has no meaning, right?
That's sort of one of the post-structuralist principles.
It's just, you know, whose truth?
And, you know, it's so funny, I've heard a couple French philosophers talk about post-structuralism and their thing is like, I cannot believe the U.S.
philosophers or the U.S.
academics are so interested in these guys from 75 years ago, 100 years ago, that we cast out in the 1960s or 70s.
They're just useless and they were wrong.
That's the other thing, guys like Michel Foucault.
Just demonstrably incorrect in what he was saying, and the rest of them just poisonous in terms of saying that he's not sensing his truth.
I was talking to Bill Maher the other day, and he went to Cornell, and I said, you know, we were taught to ascend to an approximation of the truth, to struggle to try to get to the truth.
And I said, I see it in you.
I know that's your training.
And he sort of reflected back that, yeah, we kind of have that heritage together, and it doesn't really exist that much anymore.
It's funny, my audience, because I talk about Bill a lot, obviously, and my audience is always like, Dave, but he always ends up voting the wrong way and supporting all the wrong people.
Post-structuralism, a lack of theory, all this reliance on theory, ideology takes hold, and it reached some critical mass around 2010, I think, and that's when it just kind of So do you connect all that to the craziness of our politics, too, that then people have just sort of injected politics as if politics is going to give them meaning?
Everything else has been kind of blown apart and ripped apart.
Do you think there's a weird, this is sort of what I was thinking with DeSantis all along, not to get so into the granular part of politics, but sort of sticking with what we're doing, that I kept thinking, at the beginning especially, that people were so angry over COVID, so finally understood what freedom was, finally understood all of this stuff, saw the migration patterns and everything, all of the stuff that people finally were going to be like, all right, I want a serious leader who's decent and competent and blah, blah, blah.
And that's exactly what he gave them, but what I subsequently realized, maybe at a national level, is that people really just want the show.
They want the bread and the circus in a way.
I hate to think of it as show.
as someone that I don't have Trump derangement syndrome and I voted for him last time
and I'm most likely voting for him this time.
But that in a weird way, he's giving them something that clearly has nothing to do with politics.
It's just he's giving them something that they just kind of want inside
rather than waking up every day and being like, wait, there's no show?
I'm gonna have to just go about my life, something.
What would it look like if we started repairing some of this stuff?
I mean it from where we started with, like, mental health and we started repairing some of our institutions and the media.
Like, do you think, like, we actually could do it?
I'm starting to just come around to, like, oh, it really can't be done, but we'll just have pockets of places, either online or in reality, perhaps, again, this state, that, like, yeah, it'll work.
And then for large swaths of formerly free, sane people, they're just gonna live in, like, the desolation of craziness.
We were like, oh, we're going to South Florida where everyone's happy and we get to see Dave.
He keeps saying that it's going to be safe spaces and octagons.
That he sort of conceives of it that way.
It's going to be more masculine, more male, more aggressive, more extreme activities of various types, and more safety, and more lockdowns, and more safety uber alice.
This idea of safety uber alice is the most, one of the more toxic ideas right now.
The fact that That we destroyed the world, we shut the world down to have safety as the only priority.
The one and only priority, not a consideration.
No, everything else has to go over here.
And safety uber alis, that's it.
That, again, back to Jesus.
If Jesus was concerned with safety uber alis, Would have turned out quite different, quite different.
It is not a way to lead a good life.
I'm not saying you should be heedless, but I'm saying you put safety as the one and only priority in your life, that is back to safe space as an octagon.
They were horrible, especially if you were an adolescent.
It really, they blew.
And I remember- What about discos?
I was in college at seven.
There were people that had fun, but they blew for the most part.
And, you know, just look at the architecture and the clothing.
That's all you got.
They tore down Penn Station because it was old.
You know, come on.
That's the kind of stuff was going on in the seventies like crazy.
And I remember, I would get the Boston Globe every day.
I was in Massachusetts going to school, and I remember going out there one morning and seeing this helicopter debris strewn all over the desert.
It was a botched attempt at saving the Iranian hostages.
And everyone just went, oh my god, we suck.
This country's done.
We're over.
That's it.
Get used to it, everybody.
It's just done.
The economy sucks.
There are no jobs.
Do the best you can, but this country is going to, something else is going to happen here.
And so I go to medical school, and I'm about three months into medical school, and I remember I went to a house party, which I had never seen anything like that, first of all.
I mean, never really anything was happening like that.
And there were a lot of people there, and I just remember, all of a sudden, Devo Whippet came on the loudspeaker.
And 100 of the people stood up and started dancing and celebrating, and I thought, huh, this is totally different than two months ago.
This is joy.
People are happy again.
Something has changed.
I just remember that moment.
Now, I don't know that you can put it into some... The economy still sucked then.
We had 18% rates, and things were not good, and I don't even think Reagan was in office yet, was he?
I'll tell ya, I said it on the show the last couple days, I think something about this border thing is so obviously wrong, and now more and more people are seeing it so that it's finally bubbling up to the mainstream, that it might, to me, seem like the one that could actually break people out of the malaise.
Because gender was too confusing for people, and it's too weird, it's sexual, you don't wanna talk about it, it's just like, it can't be discussed over the dinner table.
There's something about watching an invasion of thousands of people Yes.
I was going to look it up before I came in here with you.
Maybe you've read it, but I don't understand the little article in the Constitution they're relying on to do this, because it seems to me it's kind of a secession argument of sorts, which doesn't really exist.
But I mean, people just forget what the Constitution, the primary purpose, form a more perfect union amongst the states.
The states are the primary units.
And if the states are being destroyed by the federal government, the states... I mean, but this is what the secession argument was.
It's just that there is no There's no thing called secession, seceding, because this is a contract of equals, and so both sides have to dissolve it, or nobody dissolves it.
Well, the inherent problem ultimately would be that the red states, I think, would leave and be quite happy about it, and the blue states will never let them leave.