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Aug. 16, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender

29:27

Surgeon General of Florida Dr Joseph Ladapo

The Surgeon General of Florida, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, discusses the issues of today with RFK Jr in this episode. To purchase Dr Ladapo's new book, Transcend Fear, please click the link below: https://smile.amazon.com/Transcend-Fear-Blueprint-Mindful-Leadership/dp/1510774718/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2RNG7HSSTU1QM&keywords=dr+joseph+ladapo+book&qid=1660620445&sprefix=dr+joseph+la%2Caps%2C195&sr=8-1

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	Hey everybody, my guest today is my friend and colleague, Dr.
	Joseph Ladebo.
	Dr.
	Ladebo, MD and PhD, is the State Surgeon General of Florida.
	He also serves as a professor of medicine at the University of Florida, where his research examines behavioral economic strategies to reduce cardiovascular risk in low income and disadvantaged populations.
	His research has been much published and it is supported by the National Institute of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
	He's written about smoking, weight loss and other interventions, non-medical interventions for improving health and reducing coronary disease.
	He's been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and many, many other predominant journals.
	He graduated from Wake Forest, received his medical degree from Harvard, and a PhD in health policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
	He completed his clinical training in internal medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
	Where he received the Harvard Medical School's Class of 2012 Resident Teaching Award.
	And he's got so many other credentials and awards and qualifications here that I just can't read them all on this podcast.
	But all of those credentials are probably the least...
	The most impressive thing about Joe Lattopo to me, and the most impressive thing is that he's probably the only health commissioner or director in the country that was not subsumed in the orthodoxy, that did not give in to the fear, which had a disabling effect on critical thinking during the pandemic.
	And cause people to simply do what they were told and comply with the official orthodoxies rather than ask common sense questions and do personal first original research.
	Talk to doctors, talk to epidemiologists, to independent thinkers, and try to figure out how do we actually treat this pandemic.
	And Dr.
	Ladebo has a new book out, which I've written the introduction called.
	It's called Transcend Fear.
	It's a very apropos title because it really explains that dynamic.
	How do you preserve your capacity for critical thinking during a crisis?
	And Dr.
	Latipo has a very, very unusual...
	I always wonder how the people who are resisting the orthodoxy How they arrived at that ability to continue critically thinking in the midst of a crisis and orchestrated fear.
	And Dr.
	Latipow probably has one of the most unusual stories for how he arrived at that place.
	And I'd like to talk to you about that, if you're willing, Dr.
	Latipow.
	You do talk about it in your book.
	And it's a fascinating, fascinating story because you were literally...
	Disabled by fear during more than half your life.
	Tell us about that.
	Oh, thanks, Bobby.
	And Bobby, I want to thank you again for having me on.
	I want to thank you for your friendship because I really appreciated it because I admire you and your bravery and integrity.
	I'm glad we got to meet you in person, my wife and I, before we left California since it's harder now.
	It is true, ironically, that I had to really be quite consumed by fear in order to basically wreck my internal, my personal life in terms of my relationship with my wife and my relationship with other people who are close to me, family members, and the relationship I was building with my kids.
	To be in a position where I had no choice but to accept help, and my wife found me to help.
	You came from a childhood drama, which possessed you during your first...
	You describe yourself as having powered through this education despite this, you know, really almost a disabling capacity to even empathize with other people because you were so traumatized by what happened to you as a child.
	Yeah, that's exactly right, Bobby.
	And I didn't even know, I mean, I didn't know the extent of the effect that that experience had on me until, you know, basically my life kind of fell apart when sort of the act that I had been putting on fell apart when I fell in love with my wife.
	Because one of the things about love is that all the things that aren't working in your life, it brings them to the surface.
	And so I was forced to deal with things and face things that I either didn't know were there or knew were there, but thought were, you know, things that were fine, but they weren't fine at all.
	With trauma, different types, right?
	Sexual, physical, you know, psychological.
	They just affect people in different ways.
	And for me, I was sexually abused by a babysitter when I was like four years old.
	And I thought, you know, I remembered it from, you know, as I got older, and I thought it wasn't a big deal.
	I thought, you know, it happened, but it didn't affect me.
	But in fact, what it did was it basically kind of froze my emotional development in terms of, and not even just froze it, but really almost placed it into sort of a prison or a lockbox and kind of took its sort of life and ability and expression out.
	Essentially, I kind of went through life Basically, emotionally numb, you know, not reacting to things the same way as other people, unable to create genuine emotional connections, genuine connections with other people.
	And I thought it was normal, because that's how I was.
	And that's how I remembered.
	And that's just how things were.
	And then, I mean, part of your story is a wonderful story.
	You fell in love with your wife.
	You hit a crisis in your life because you were incapable of intimacy and incapable of...
	She saw these huge holes.
	She loved you but saw these huge holes in the pain that you were in.
	And in order to save that relationship, you ended up being saved by a very unlikely guy, who was a Navy SEAL. That's right.
	His name is Christopher Mayher.
	He was an expert in fear management, essentially.
	Yeah, he's actually an expert in trauma.
	You know, and helping people shed their trauma and all the effects that trauma has on our physical being, our mental being, our emotional being, our spiritual being.
	And I met him, my wife told me to go see him.
	And I think it was around October of 2019.
	So it was like 14 years, 15 years into our relationship.
	And as you can imagine, she was like, she was way beyond the end of her rope.
	And basically dealing with me and she, you know, fortunately, she could see I was a good man, am a good man inside.
	But, you know, I was struggling with You name it.
	Because, you know, everything with our relationship, everything with our kids, because I was locked in, I was afraid of everything.
	And I'm not exaggerating.
	Like, literally, that was the frequency in which I lived and operated, was the frequency of fear.
	You know, it's interesting because one of the people we kind of have in common is Gavin DeBacker.
	And I don't know if you've ever read his book, The Gift of Fear, which was a bestseller.
	And, you know, he's been an incredible advisor to Democrats and Republicans and presidents, etc.
	He's probably the leading expert on security in the world.
	But also, he's been an advisor to Governor DeSantis on some of these issues.
	And he's very bipartisan.
	He talks about fear ultimately as a gift, if we handle it correctly.
	But he also notes what happened during this pandemic is that sinister forces can manipulate people by orchestrating fear in order to promote an agenda.
	Absolutely.
	I read Gavin's book and really enjoyed it.
	There is listening to your You know, your intuition.
	And that's, you know, I'm not going to put words into Gavin's mouth, but as I understood his book, that's kind of the intuition, really.
	And sometimes your intuition is, you know, tells you something's not right here, and there's fear.
	And, you know, and your intuition says other things.
	So there's that, which is incredibly important.
	That's a gift from God.
	I actually, it's funny because Gavin, I think, as I was reading his book, he makes it not clinical, but almost scientific.
	You know, I don't know if Gavin would agree with me, because beyond the scientific, there is an intuitive sense of different things, including, you know, danger and how people are and what people's intentions are and motivations are, that is not learned, at least not learned from our own kind of experiences in this lifetime.
	It is a gift from God.
	And, you know, my wife, for example, her ability to know things about people and about what's motivating people and what they're thinking about and what they want, that's a gift from God for her.
	There's a difference between that and the fear.
	The fear that's more, it's not even anxiety necessarily, but that can be, you know, a form of it.
	But sort of living in it as if that's the frequency of life rather than the frequency of joy and openness and expression and curiosity.
	That's a different phenomenon.
	Same word, but it really means different things.
	Yeah.
	You know, during the pandemic, now you, Governor DeSantis chose you, and it was kind of, it was a courageous, unusual decision for him to bring this doctor from California.
	He's a Republican.
	You're a Democrat.
	He brought you from California to manage the pandemic in his state.
	How did that happen?
	So during the pandemic, as you remember, there weren't many voices initially.
	I mean...
	95 out of 100 people, maybe 98 out of 100, were really saying the same thing in terms of this nonsense about staying in your house and avoid other human beings because they could kill you or you could kill them.
	All that nonsense.
	The kids can't go to school.
	Almost everyone either was saying that or believed that it was okay to do that.
	There were a few people that weren't.
	You were one of those people.
	I mean, now there are many.
	But in the beginning, there weren't many.
	And it just so happened that the week that Governor Newsom shut down the state of California, I was working in the hospital at UCLA, Ronald Reagan, in Los Angeles, and some of the patients I took care of were patients with COVID. So not only did I get to take care of patients with COVID that week, but I also got to see what was happening around me.
	In terms of the hospital leadership and administration in just full-out panic, my residents, people on my team, lots of fear and panic, and patients, some of whom were actually completely fine, but who thought they were going to die because of the news reports.
	Who had COVID. You know, so I wrote an article that was accepted into USA Today right after that, that week, and I got some feedback that was critical from my wife, ended up writing another, I think about a dozen articles in the Wall Street Journal.
	You know, that kind of put me on the radar a bit.
	And it was part of how Governor DeSantis' team came to know me.
	Those were critical of the official COVID response, those articles.
	They were.
	And they were just sensible.
	I mean, you know, what's good is, I mean, you look at these guys, right?
	They're like, oh, you know, Dr.
	Fauci, oh no, I never said the kids couldn't go to school.
	And of course he said the kids couldn't go to school.
	You know, he said it on tape that everything should be locked down.
	Man, it almost makes my head hurt, Bobby, how, like, they're all pretending that, like, it's okay not to have the vaccine passports and it's okay not to do all these terrible things they were doing.
	What's great is that you look at stuff that you wrote, I wrote, and other people wrote, and it's the same.
	It's as true then as it is now.
	Not all this changing the story about what you think should happen.
	You know, I had a guy who I took a hike with, and he's a guy I didn't really know him.
	He's my wife's ex-husband's best friend, and he was staying at my house for the weekend.
	It was the first time I met him, but we took a hike, and he's a liberal Democrat.
	He's from Denver, and he said to me...
	He was very aligned with me on the response, and he said the thing that turned him around...
	Is that he depended on exercise, playing basketball every afternoon.
	The neighborhood where he plays, there's a public court in Denver, and it's a very kind of diverse, it's blacks, whites, Hispanics, and they all play.
	And he said that the day they declared a lockdown, Parks Department and Police came to that basketball court and all the other basketball courts and they either padlocked them if there was a fence around them or on his basketball court where there was no fence, they removed the rims on the baskets. Parks Department and Police came to that basketball court and
	And, you know, here in Venice off of Los Angeles where I am, they took the skate park or kids skateboard outside and they put sand, they covered it in sand so the kids couldn't skateboard themselves.
	They dropped the volleyball nets down all along the beaches, outside nets.
	And when the people came back and put up nets of their own, The Parks Department came and removed all the posts.
	They were ticketing surfers and another guy in a kayak who I know who got a thousand dollar ticket for being on the ocean.
	Now this is a disease that spreads indoors.
	So they're taking all these people who are getting sunlight and vitamin D and being outside, and they're putting them inside where, you know, it's like Brad Weinstein said to me, everything they did was the inverse of what you would want to do if you were actually trying to prevent everything they did was the inverse of what you would want It was really quite striking.
	I couldn't agree with you and your friend more, Bobby, It's so sad.
	They took the rims down in the local park that we took our kids to, and we kept taking our kids through throughout the pandemic.
	And even when they were the only ones out there, we'd take them there early on.
	That's how it was.
	I just, it made me, it was so heartbreaking to me.
	I mean, the basketball, pickup basketball, that is like, it may not be quite as American as baseball, but boy, you know, so many neighborhoods, people coming together, all different backgrounds, like the basketball court is an equalizer.
	And it was really heartbreaking and frankly infuriating to see people do things like that.
	Particularly in the poor neighborhoods, because now you're locking people in homes where many of them don't have air conditioning.
	They're crowded homes, overcrowded.
	I just did another little book that talks about the impacts of the COVID countermeasures on the poor.
	It was like a war on the poor in this country.
	And all the additions of social deterioration, drug addiction, suicide, loss IQ, loss vocalization and reading ability, declines in math and sciences and arts and history, dramatic declines in learning, the starvation of hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
	And lost income, it was really just like a direct hit on the board.
	The only indicia of social deterioration that actually improved during the pandemic was that child abuse reports dropped dramatically.
	The reason they dropped is because the schools were closed.
	And the schools is where child abuse gets reported.
	Most of those reports emanate from the schools.
	So they took these kids who were abused and they locked them at home with their abusers during the two years of the pandemic.
	You know, you can get the exact data by looking at my book, which is called A Letter to Liberals.
	You know, it was a war on the poor.
	I totally agree with you.
	And I'll read your book, Bobby.
	These stats, many of our leaders now are just completely ignoring that stuff.
	So, you know, another stat that came out of a study from some researchers at Harvard, which I'm sure you're familiar with, basically showed that these academic gaps, you know, between black and white and Hispanic and white children widened during the pandemic.
	Especially in states that kept the schools closed, but not in states like Florida that didn't.
	There was no widening of the gaps in Florida.
	You know, Dr.
	Fauci never mentioned that.
	At least my doctor.
	Dr.
	Walensky.
	So they do this stuff, and then they don't want to be responsible for these things that they did.
	So I look forward to reading more of the things that isn't getting news coverage, but is critically important.
	They don't really know how to handle you because the liberal media really wants to discredit you, but I think because you're Black, they have to tiptoe a little bit around it, but they have hammered you a lot.
	Can you talk about that a little and how you react to that internally, how you process those kind of attacks?
	Yeah, yeah, totally.
	You know, I don't know if they're pulling any punches, Bobby.
	They probably It's been pretty brutal, man.
	It's interesting because one of the things that came out of my work with Christopher, so definitely kind of my ability to connect with other people emotionally, that was so huge for me.
	And that happened actually after the first day from some of the, he uses a combination of Chinese medicine techniques and a lot of techniques related to improving the flow of, increasing the flow of chi and like meridian theory and stuff.
	Which I didn't understand, don't really fully understand now, but still I'm a beneficiary of it.
	But in addition to that, right, there's other stuff that we deal with.
	So there's shame, there's fear is really the central one, but shame is another big, powerful emotional challenge that many of us have in different ways.
	And with the attacks, most of the time, I was getting videotaped for something and the guy said, oh man, they're really coming after you.
	You must have really thick skin.
	And I said, no, I don't.
	Actually, I feel everything.
	But I let it pass through me.
	I just go with it.
	And very little of it affects me, at least in my conscious mind.
	Sometimes I'll feel like probably the most intense period was when the senator, the whole mask incident with the senator.
	Put on a mask.
	No, I don't want to.
	Why don't we go outside?
	Put on a mask.
	No, I don't want to.
	Wait a minute.
	Was this DeSantis told the kids to take off your mask?
	Where did you go?
	Not that.
	This was one of the senators in Florida.
	And there was an incident in her office where she was trying to force me to wear a mask.
	And I said that, you know, she stated that she had some health concerns and I suggested we go outside.
	She was concerned about health since that's much lower risk than sitting in an indoor office.
	There was a ton of media attention.
	Colbert even did jokes about it.
	Was there media?
	In the room when this was going on?
	No, this was an innocent private meeting that turned into national news.
	And during that time, it was very intense, and I felt shame during that time.
	And one of the techniques that I learned, first of all, my wife was like incredibly helpful, kind of helping, because you can't make good decisions when you're, you know, entangled up in emotions that aren't, you know, you're authentic you, that they're, you know, stuff that just comes up.
	So whether it's fear, shame is another one.
	And I was dealing with shame.
	And between my wife and some techniques that I actually learned from working with Christopher, I was able to get through that and sort of see it clearly.
	So sometimes I use some techniques to kind of stay within myself when the projection from the media kind of gets to me.
	But for the most part, it doesn't really bother me.
	It's mostly nonsense and, you know, I've got a mission.
	I fly a lot.
	And normally I was not wearing a mask during the pandemic because I actually read the science on the masks and they don't, you know, I saw what the science was saying.
	We were assembling all the science.
	Every scientific study we could find en masse, we were assembling at CHD and posting on our website whether they were supportive of mass, which were very few, or whether they were exploding, the theory of mass.
	So I knew that the mass didn't work.
	The cloth mass actually have no efficacy and actually have a negative efficacy in that they're associated with respiratory injuries, with gum injuries, with skin injuries.
	And then also the spread of disease.
	So there is a negative efficacy.
	But if somebody asks me to wear a mask on the airplane you got over there, they're going to throw you off and your name goes on a list and you never fly again.
	So I got used to putting them on those airplanes.
	Right.
	But normally if somebody, if I was in a senator's office and they said, well, you put on a mask, I would say, okay, You're possessed in the fear, and I'm going to go along with you to band it with you, but you had made a decision that even when they ask you, you're not going to do it.
	Certainly not.
	Did you make that decision before you went in there, or did you just say, I'm not going to do this at that moment?
	Yeah, it was in the moment, just because I read the room, and it wasn't hard to read her and Intentions and motivations behind what she was saying.
	So, you know, I haven't worked in the hospital.
	I mean, at UCLA, I wore one when I'd walk around the hospital, and I hated it because I find them incredibly uncomfortable.
	I think they're ridiculous.
	I think no one should have to wear one if you're not comfortable with it, with the exception of, like, if you're a doctor and you just, yeah, it's just a protocol, like you're seeing a patient with tuberculosis or something like that.
	Even if they quote-unquote worked, people have a right to control what happens with their face, you know, and their nose and their mouth.
	Like, that is your God-given right.
	So it's this whole mask thing.
	I just, I wish it would end.
	And even today in the store, I saw people walking around with them.
	And it's just like, guys, this is not evidence-based and it's mostly nonsense.
	Yeah, you know, the guy who took the walk for me, the guy from Denver, he said one of the other things that occurred to him.
	And he's not, he did not really even know what I do.
	So it was kind of a case of first impression from him.
	And he was just talking about these misgivings that he had.
	But one of the things he said, he said, when they started asking me to wear a mask, he said, my wife has been in chemotherapy for five years.
	And nobody was wearing a mask to protect her.
	You know, there are people who out there, there are kids and adults who are immune compromised all the time, who have special vulnerabilities to bacteriological and viral infections.
	We don't make a law that says everybody's got to wear a mask to protect them.
	So anyway, it was just interesting.
	No, you're right, Bobby.
	I mean, it is political, the persistence of it.
	It's unfortunate because what I would love is for us to go back to where we were, where it wasn't the norm.
	But people whose intentions were to sort of normalize it, unfortunately, they have made a little bit of ground.
	And it's unfortunate that they've had that success.
	How are you liking their job?
	I enjoy the job.
	You know, it's been a learning experience since it's completely different from what I did before as a doctor and a researcher.
	But I enjoy the job and I'm mostly, more than anything, I'm just, I'm grateful to, I'm certainly terrific to work with Governor DeSantis and grateful to have an opportunity to have a bit of a louder voice than I had when I was a, you know, professor at UCLA. You know,
	one of the things you and I have talked about in the past is this problem that the CDC tightly controls the databases, like the Vaccine Safety Database, VSD, which is the biggest repository for vaccine and health information.
	And it's been frustrating for 15 years for me that they won't let any independent scientists in to see it.
	It's the database for the top HMOs.
	So they have, for 10 million Americans, they have all their vaccine records, and they have all their health records.
	So you could do pretty easily, you could do a...
	A cluster analysis or machine counting, you know, an AI analysis, where you go in there and you look at the intervention, whether it's hepatitis B vaccine, and then you see if there's an increase in diabetes and ASD, ADHD, autism, or whatever.
	And you can answer all these questions that people have been wondering about.
	But the CDC will not let anybody do those kind of studies.
	They absolutely kill them.
	And nobody's allowed...
	Even scientists who ordered the CDC, there's a pair of scientists, and Congress ordered CDC to allow them open access to the records.
	CDC still refused.
	They do not want anybody in there.
	You, as the director of the Florida Health Department, you have a huge database in Florida, and potentially you can open it up and allow some of these studies to get done on very, very large populations.
	Yeah, that is correct, Bobby.
	That's right.
	And we don't, I don't know what's happening in the CDC, but they clearly want to control what people believe is true.
	And we don't have any interest in that.
	We just are interested in the truth.
	So we don't have the same agenda as they do.
	That agenda, I hope, crumbles at the CDC because it's an awful agenda.
	It basically serves pharmaceutical companies first and not patients first.
	Truth is not something to be afraid of.
	Dr.
	Joe, where can people get your book?
	They can get it on Amazon.
	I think Barnes& Noble has it too.
	Big mega monster Amazon, though, I think is probably going to be the...
	It's called Transcend Fear by Dr.
	Joseph Latipo.
	The book is fascinating and I hope you'll get it and I hope you get onto the bestseller list and it's a way of all of us supporting Dr.
	Joe and supporting actually somebody who really, a medical bureaucrat who actually cares about public health rather than career.
	Thank you very much, Dr.
	Joe Latipo.
	Where can people find you on social media?
	They can go to Twitter.
	We have a Florida Surgeon General Twitter thing.
	Thank you very much, Dr.
	Joe Latipo, Surgeon General of Florida.
	Thank you.

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