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Oct. 22, 2023 - Viva & Barnes

01:54:55

Interview with Dr. Drew! Talking the Latest on Covid and MUCH MORE! Viva Frei Live

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	I think technically it's the afternoon by a few seconds, so good afternoon East Coast and good afternoon West, good morning West Coast.
	This is another, they're all amazing interviews, but I've got Dr. Drew in the house.
	I know my mother is watching and she's saying, my boy has finally made it, he's interviewing Dr. Drew.
	In the house, Dr. Drew in person.
	Going to take some questions at the end of this from our locals community, but for those who don't know, Viva Frye, Montreal litigator turned Floridian rumbler at the local studio now.
	Been doing a lot of these in-person interviews in the studio.
	It's fantastic.
	It's beautiful.
	And I have an amazing guest today.
	Dr. Drew, who people might not know, your real name is, well, your full name is Dr. Drew Pinsky.
	Yes, that's my real name.
	Born, like, from birth, real name is Drew Pinsky.
	David Drew Pinsky, to be really wild about it.
	But yeah, I used that name, Dr. Drew, because I started doing radio in 1984, and I really didn't want anybody to know it was me.
	I thought I was doing community service, I didn't want to be accused of promoting myself or anything, and this was deep into the AIDS pandemic.
	And Anthony Fauci at the time was coaching us young physicians to go out there and educate about this thing that we had just started calling AIDS like a year before.
	It was GRIDS before that.
	And I was deep in it, deep in it.
	What did GRIDS mean?
	Gay-related intestinal disease syndrome.
	And it was, we didn't have a causative aging yet.
	Soon we were calling it HTLV3, if you remember that, but you were too young for all that.
	I was one year old at that time.
	The term safe sex hadn't been coined yet, and yet we were talking about condoms very early, and no one was talking to young people about this.
	Nobody.
	Because the American culture assumed adolescents not having sex.
	And yet we had just been through the sexual revolution.
	I had just been an adolescent, and I'm here to tell you that was wrong.
	So I knew what they were up to, and I thought, well, somebody's got to talk to them.
	There's a ton to unpack in what you just said already, but we're going to back it up all the way to the beginning.
	Why am I here?
	No, well, okay, why are you here?
	I'm here because I'm giving a talk to a pharmacy group in Orlando.
	I'm here to see Viva Frye.
	I'm quite serious about that.
	One of the goals of coming down here was, I was going to say hi to Dave Rubin, who...
	Skipped out of town.
	And I said, well, I've got to see Viv.
	I've got to meet him in person, finally, after all this time.
	And we were going to have dinner, but I got too busy because I'm working on a television show with Star Entertainment.
	I believe it's going to be called Health Uncensored.
	It'll be on Fox Business.
	So let's come on up, look for that.
	Dr. Drew, that's not what we're supposed to remind the world.
	Oh, we're supposed to remind the world.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	So my wife's going to kill me.
	So I am going to be on October 28th.
	Let me say this direct to camera out here.
	Get rid of that one.
	Let's go over here.
	October 28th.
	There we go.
	Thank you.
	October 28th, I will be at the San Jose Convention Center with RFK Jr. and Aseem Malhotra.
	And we're going to be talking about the excesses of...
	You know, the capture of medicine and food supply and our agriculture.
	I am not an expert in that area, but I'm fascinated by that topic.
	RFK Jr., my first interview with him, he sort of alerted me to this, and I thought, oh my God, I see what you're talking about.
	And so I've been gravely concerned about it ever since.
	But this is, please get your tickets.
	You can get it at...
	I'm looking at the...
	DrDude.com slash something.
	If you go to the interwebs and you look up reclaiming food and medicine, Oh, my God.
	And we got RFK Jr.
	This has got San Jose Civic Center, I guess, is October 28th.
	Susan, text me.
	Then you got Dr. Vandashiva.
	Yes.
	Vandashiva.
	I'm going to excuse.
	Sorry, everybody.
	Dr. Drew Pinsky and Dr. Asim Mohatra.
	So that was...
	May I say your wife?
	She said, don't let him forget to...
	Yes, I know.
	Put the message out there.
	There were two things I was supposed to promote.
	That was one.
	And the other is on...
	We're going to get into Dr. Drew's age in a second.
	On November 6th, she is producing a show at the Chelsea Market.
	There's a comedy club underneath.
	And we're going to sort of reproduce After Dark, which is a podcast I do that I've also forgotten to promote, with Kat Timph and Jimmy Falla from The Greg Gutfeld Show.
	And they're going to come and join me on stage.
	And please join us.
	That's on November 6th.
	It's a great venue.
	We've actually...
	Explored it a bit.
	And so if you like Kat, if you like Jimmy, if you like me, and we'll interact with the audience and stuff, it should be a lot of fun.
	So check that out.
	But really, I want to see people on October 28th at the San Jose Convention.
	I think that's an important event.
	You don't have to be an advocate for any of the people that are showing up for that event.
	You have to be...
	You have to be interested in doing a better job.
	I mean, we've been through this thing.
	We're going to talk about this COVID thing.
	And the excesses of that, you can start to understand when you understand kind of where the cozy relationship with our government and the regulators and the drug companies, things like that.
	Now, we're going to back it up all the way at the beginning, but I'm not going to spend too much time on your childhood.
	Born and raised in California, correct?
	Yes, yes.
	Your grandparents were immigrants from the Ukraine?
	Ukraine, Belarus, yep.
	And what did your parents do?
	My dad was a physician.
	My mom had a She's a whole story.
	She had a life before us that I didn't find out about until I was 50. What does that possibly entail?
	She was married to a silent film star, had a stepson, lived...
	And during that time, she was an opera singer and then sang in Vegas for years, but had a film career and a television career and all kinds of crazy stuff.
	Actually was in film noir, and that's where she's most...
	She has a fan base from the film noir era.
	That's very cool.
	And very interesting.
	And then she became a housewife.
	And siblings-wise?
	I have a sister.
	What did she end up doing in life?
	She really was a paralegal, but was really raising kids.
	You know, it's interesting to me.
	My wife's another good example.
	We had triplets, right?
	And so she was, thank God, she was in the home raising these kids.
	But now that we're on the other side of that, she's becoming a professional in her own right.
	We did.
	It's amazing to see that.
	I think we went through this period where women were told they could be all things to all people all the time.
	Can't.
	Everything in life has to be done in stages.
	You have to pay attention to that.
	We've been in the car together.
	We drove down.
	We've been in the car for an hour.
	Some of the stuff we've discussed, and I said, some stuff I'm going to have to ask you live because...
	Wikipedia, not for the detailed stuff, just said you had three kids, triplets, and I made the joke to you in the car, was everyone, was their hormones, or what do they call it?
	Fertility campaign.
	Always.
	Always.
	Almost never are they natural.
	In the early 90s, there was a lot of super multiples because they hadn't figured out how to control that yet, and they routinely implanted five embryos if they had them, because they, at the time, felt that increased the probability of one.
	And so...
	How long did it take them to figure out that with five embryos it increased the likelihood to two or three?
	They knew that that was happening too.
	It was obvious, but they didn't know what to do with it.
	I don't know what they're doing now to increase the implantation rate.
	To me, it sounded like the episode of The Simpsons when Manjula was getting the stuff from everybody, the doctor, her husband.
	So triplet kids.
	And that was it.
	Obviously after that, no more kids.
	People might not know this.
	I don't know which camera I look into here.
	People might not know this.
	Dr. Drew is an actual doctor and still practicing.
	So what is your field of expertise or what are you a doctor in?
	So this is a long story, right?
	So I was trained in internal medicine.
	I ended up being chief of an internal medicine, chief resident in a residency program.
	I ended up teaching internal medicine for a lot of years.
	Along the way, I started moonlighting in a psychiatric hospital.
	So I'm board certified in internal medicine and taught medicine.
	Board certified internal medicine.
	Internal medicine.
	General medicine.
	Everything that doesn't involve a knife.
	Anybody who's a cardiologist, a gastroenterologist, an endocrinologist, all the different subspecialty fields, you're first an internist.
	That's the general medicine.
	And then you go into the subspecialty.
	I was actually heading towards cardiology.
	But I was moonlighting all along in a psychiatric hospital, and I became fascinated with that whole world.
	And I became the head of their medical service department, so I got quite good at dealing with the medical care of psychiatric patients.
	A lot of the medical problems were down on the drug unit, so I was spending a lot of time down there.
	I got very good at drug withdrawal.
	People started asking me to see more drug addicts to get them off drugs.
	And I watched people go from, young people, go from dying to amazing.
	And I was like, what is that?
	I got to understand that more.
	So I got very involved in addiction treatment.
	I was doing both general medicine and hospital medicine.
	Back in the day when I could do ICU, I volunteered for the physician COVID team in New York when they were in the dark days of their thing, of the pandemic.
	And I was going to go to New York and work in the ICUs.
	And I went through the whole interview process.
	And by the time they finished assessing me, the whole thing just stopped.
	And they just ended the program.
	I did tons and tons of that.
	You're not a hospitalist?
	No.
	General internal medicine included all that back in the day.
	I've got to ask you this, and someone in our local community had the same thought.
	What interest in psychiatry, or psychiatrics, most people want to avoid that at all costs.
	Psychiatry?
	I really was into neuroscience.
	I was there in the early days of neuroscience and neurobiology, and that was a lot of my focus as an undergraduate.
	I was a biology, you know, trained as a biologist, but neuroscience was my thing.
	And so all the way through medical school and later, I always kind of had a thing for that.
	I always was interested in it.
	No, like, no family experience with mental illness?
	No.
	Well, my mom probably did, but my uncle was a psychiatrist.
	I say psychiatrists are the most either type A or cluster B. I don't know what the name is for the personalities.
	I've never met a normal psychiatrist.
	You've got to remember, the history of American psychiatry is a book called Shrink, I would advise you to read, that chronicles the history of American psychiatry, and it's a very strange history.
	So in the turn of the 20th century, did you ever see the TV series The Nick?
	I have not.
	Oh, it's a great series about surgeons at the turn of the 20th century as a New York hospital.
	But in part of it, there's a psychiatric sort of thing.
	And the psychiatrists then ran big hospitals, and they were medically oriented.
	They were convinced that psychiatric illness was caused by bacteria that came from your teeth or something out of your gut and things.
	And they would do crazy stuff.
	That's how lobotomies and things got going.
	I, as the internist at the psychiatric hospital, I was taking care of all of the aftermath of that.
	Believe me, it was like a museum of psychiatry, and I had patients that had cingulotomies and lobotomies and all kinds of crazy shock therapies and things.
	It was wild what psychiatry was doing.
	And then, in the middle of the century, psychoanalysis took over American psychiatry.
	We were the only country other than Austria for which it took over.
	And it was the only legitimate practice of psychiatry was psychoanalysis.
	And I will just say humbly, those guys were assholes.
	They thought they knew the answer to the human experience.
	They knew everything.
	They took over the medical establishment of the government and they dismantled care of the chronic, psychiatrically ill in the name of Foucault and all these, and then Goffman and all these horrible theorists that said mental illness comes from hospitals and institutions.
	That's why people get brain diseases.
	They're exposed to this stuff.
	Bullshit.
	They needed, they have medical illnesses that needed a lot of structure, but at that time, they dismantled everything without any plan for those patients.
	None of them had ever been exposed to a psychiatric hospital.
	None of these assholes.
	And all those patients were sent to the streets, the nursing homes.
	And the prisons, where they remain.
	What year is this, late 70s, give or take?
	The 50s, 60s, 70s, yes.
	And then they set up community mental health centers, which were going to prevent mental illness.
	Impossible.
	Didn't work.
	They were worthless.
	And then Reagan closed all those in the 80s because they were abject failures.
	Abject failures.
	So anyway, the point being, how did I get into this?
	So psychiatry.
	So then psychiatry became, then psychiatrists said, no, no, no, wait a minute, we're doctors.
	These are brain disorders.
	And now we've gone way the other way with everything's pharmacology, everything's medical.
	And that's good.
	I mean, that's great that we're, because that's the holy grail.
	But there are spiritual, social, other kinds of things we have to pay attention to as well.
	So you get into psychiatry, now the interplay or at least...
	Oh, by the way, I became an assistant clinical professor in psychiatry as a result of that too.
	Okay, that's fascinating.
	And I became board certified in addiction medicine.
	Well, that was it.
	So now the interplay from psychiatry or the interplay between psychiatric disorders and drug addiction.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I know...
	So how did you get involved in that and what is the...
	Well, like I said, so everything medical, a lot of the predominant medical problems were down on the drug units.
	I was down there.
	I got good at that.
	I got exposed to that and I got certified in that.
	And the fascinating thing about addiction, it's the crossroads of everything.
	Everything crosses there.
	Psychiatry, psychology, family systems, philosophy, spirituality, brain disorders, everything.
	Medical problems, all right there.
	And I loved it.
	And it's such an incredible...
	I love human beings and I love the human experience.
	I don't understand people that aren't fascinated by us.
	Because, I don't know, that's what we're here for, is us.
	And it's such a window into how our brains work when the survival system has a distorted motivation.
	Rather than survive, love your children, go to work, deal with your hygiene, all the things associated with thriving, one priority takes over.
	Do drugs.
	Do that drug.
	Do that drug.
	And all the other systems serve this false god.
	And you can see how they all work.
	They all start functioning, but they're serving this distorted motivation.
	So everything else, thinking, feeling, interpersonal functioning, all becomes weirdly distorted, and it's a great window into the human experience.
	Something we didn't even mention in the car now, but I'm sure you're following what's going on in Canada in terms of...
	Probably not.
	Well, in terms of offering...
	They call it medical assistance and euthanasia.
	Now they're trying to expand it to the mentally ill and to addicts.
	A question to lead into this.
	I've had Mark Rober on a number of times.
	Everybody knows he's had experience with addiction, recovery.
	And my question to him is, what is addiction?
	And where do you draw the distinction between addiction, compulsion, bad habits?
	Versus addiction as a disease which carries its own, maybe, potential problems for labeling.
	No problems labeling.
	I'll get to the problem.
	I'll get to...
	I've never met an addict that complained about stigma.
	Ever.
	Families complain about stigma.
	Addicts complain about not getting drugs.
	That's all they're concerned with.
	My question...
	Let me just...
	So addiction, I use a loose definition.
	We've parsed it into many different categories in the DSM-5.
	Primarily for research purposes and treatment purposes.
	But the reality, the umbrella definition of addiction was established in the mid-90s, early 90s by a multidisciplinary panel.
	It was published in JAMA.
	People in addiction medicine generally use this broad, broad definition, which is it is a biological disorder with a genetic basis.
	Addiction, a biological disorder with a...
	Genetic basis.
	Okay.
	Treated 10,000 addicts in my day.
	I've sat down and tried to think of anybody that I couldn't see the family history.
	I came up with about four or five.
	I'm sure it's there, but I couldn't see it.
	So there's a gene.
	There's a group.
	We have several candidate genes we're working with, so I can give you some explanations of that if you want.
	Biologically or a genetic basis, the hallmark is progressive use and preoccupation in the face of consequences, work, school, finance, health, legal, consequences in those areas, yet...
	And progression is left out of everybody's understanding of the illness, especially the Canadians who are giving drugs.
	Even if I administer the drug, it progresses in spite of that.
	Progression and then denial.
	And denial has many, many different qualities to it.
	It's so profound as the disease progresses that it really goes under the category of anasognosia.
	And anasognosia is a...
	A term coined by a famous neurologist named Babinski that was originally to talk about stroke patients where when they have a right-sided stroke, they lose the left side of their body, and they lose the left side of the world, and they're not aware of it.
	It's a lack of awareness of what's happening as a result of their illness.
	And trust me, mental illness, that is a characteristic.
	Of addiction and mental illness.
	Which is why it is insane to meet people where they are with their addiction.
	You might as well meet your coma and stupor patients where they are.
	Because it's a brain disorder with massive distortions.
	And you can't, if you meet people where they are, you're allowing them to die and progress.
	And then meet them where they are is sort of the California method.
	That's a social work term.
	Physicians would never do that.
	Never, ever, ever.
	Okay, that's fascinating.
	Now, when I say that the issue with the label...
	And by the way, the reason I bring up the social work thing, God bless them, social workers are wonderful, but we are running open-air hospitals in our cities without doctors and nurses.
	It's literally like running an orthopedic surgery unit with physical therapists.
	Physical therapists are wonderful.
	They can't do surgery.
	Social workers are wonderful.
	They don't deal with medical illness.
	That's us and nurses.
	Homeless population, California, give or take 100,000.
	That's just the city.
	What percentage would you estimate are either on drugs or suffer from mental illness?
	85%.
	That's no doubt about that.
	And now the question is, when I said that the label of referring to addiction as a disease, does that not create, on the one hand, a sense of defeatism in the patient?
	No.
	If I say you have depression and it's an illness in your brain, is you defeated?
	Well, on the one hand, maybe.
	But on the other hand, I'll say, okay, good.
	If it's a disease, then just give me the drugs that I need to get off the drugs.
	I'll give you the treatment, sure.
	You have to go to these programs.
	You have to do these work.
	But part of the disease is you're unwilling to surrender.
	You fight it.
	That's part of the illness.
	And until you surrender to the treatment for the illness, really what's under that is you want to be fixed so you can keep doing drugs.
	Remember, all priorities are superseded by the desire to use.
	All priorities, including survival itself.
	And so that's why people start flirting with nearly dying.
	And if that gets through their anosognosia, then they become willing to work, to do the work.
	Fascinating.
	So where is the biology?
	So where people get hung up with the illness of addiction.
	Let's put it this way.
	How do you define a disease?
	Define disease for me.
	A disease we would presumably...
	You would assume it's in your genetics.
	I guess you're predisposed for a disease.
	Somehow genes are involved, yes.
	I've always struggled with disease versus virus, for example.
	When they referred to COVID as a disease, I was confused by the label.
	I don't actually know how to distinguish between any form of an illness and a disease, but a disease is something you would think is...
	Illness and disease are the same word.
	So you say something beyond your control.
	Well, now that you make me ask the questions, I was going to say, beyond your control, a matter of genetics or a matter of environment.
	You get cancer from bad air quality.
	So, you're correct.
	And so, I've asked this question in medical schools, in front of fellows and things.
	Nobody has definition.
	Nobody thinks about this.
	I think about it because everybody has an opinion about whether addiction is or is not a disease, yet none of those people can define what a disease is, so we can decide whether addiction is or is not a disease.
	So, how do I know disease?
	Is disease, right?
	A disease, I mean...
	You got the gene environment part, right?
	When you say a disease is something beyond your control, whereas...
	Beyond your control, I mean, you can cause a disease.
	But then you can get, that's the thing, you can get lung cancer because you smoke, in which case you still have a disease that comes from a bad habit, but no one would refer to the smoking as the disease.
	It would be the behavioral choice that could lead to a disease.
	The environment, right, leads to the behavior.
	So the environment and the genes, not everybody that smokes gets cancer, right?
	So gene, environment, interaction, always, always, right?
	I mean, if a piano falls on your head, you have to have the genes for having a head.
	I mean, genes are always involved somehow.
	Even if it's just, if your arm gets pulled off, you have to have an arm, whatever.
	And environment, sometimes more involved than not, but always gene, environment, interaction.
	That results in...
	Abnormal physiology.
	We call that pathophysiology.
	Abnormal biochemistry, right?
	So how do you know if there is pathophysiology?
	How would I recognize it as a doctor?
	I don't know.
	Okay.
	I would see signs and symptoms, right?
	And because I've studied this constellation of pathophysiologies, I know when these particular signs and symptoms appear, that's the physiology causing the signs and symptoms.
	It's studied.
	And we know something about the gene environments that...
	Create that pathophysiology.
	Then, what happens to those signs and symptoms?
	They manifest.
	Okay.
	Over time.
	Over time.
	And what happens over time?
	I would have failed this test, Dr. Drew.
	What if I have a cold?
	What happens over time?
	Well, it'll get worse and then presumably it'll heal itself.
	It resolves.
	What if I have lung cancer?
	That will not necessarily heal.
	Demise.
	Demise.
	And what if I have emphysema?
	That'll be degenerative.
	And chronic.
	Yeah.
	So we call that a natural history.
	So there's a natural history, a predictable natural history based on our study of the gene environment, pathophysiology, signs and symptoms progressing in a predictable pattern that we know.
	What am I trying to do to that natural history?
	Me as a doctor.
	Resolve it.
	Make it better.
	Improve it.
	We call that treatment.
	Okay?
	So gene environment interaction, abnormal physiology, The way you describe it actually seems to fit a definition of...
	Disease.
	Right.
	So people get a little freaked out because the disease is in the brain.
	I guess people get freaked out because they, at some point at the most fundamental level, believe the disease begins with a conscious choice.
	Now, and I've known people who have had mental illness triggered by the decision to take drugs.
	But that's a separate question.
	So now you're asking a different question.
	Why did people do drugs in the first place?
	Because I would get this all the time.
	I would give these lectures to families all the time.
	And they would go, okay, okay, okay, it's a disease.
	We actually know exactly what's going on in the brain.
	We know exactly where it occurs.
	We know exactly how it occurs.
	We know the epigenetics.
	We know the gene candidates that cause it.
	We know a shit ton about the biology of this thing.
	And I have lectures where I explain that.
	And people go, okay, okay, okay.
	But why did they do drugs in the first place?
	They're pissed because people who are addicts do terrible things.
	They make people suffer.
	Not because they're terrible people.
	Because this distorted motivation makes them do horrible shit.
	And people get pissed.
	And they want to blame them.
	They want to be angry at them.
	And so if you explain that there's a biology going on in their brain.
	Now, they are responsible for their recovery.
	And to the extent that they don't do recovery.
	And let's say they go out and drive a car and kill somebody.
	Well, that's not me anymore.
	That's the legal system.
	You could have listened to me before.
	You didn't.
	You killed somebody.
	You're going to jail.
	Sorry.
	But early on, why do you do drugs?
	Why does somebody reach for a drug?
	There's various reasons.
	But in my world, if you have addiction bad enough to see me, you had childhood trauma.
	Childhood trauma is the rocket fuel.
	It's the inciting influence.
	And what it causes, and we know a lot about that biology, too, about the dysregulation caused by childhood trauma of various types.
	And we went through a pandemic of childhood trauma in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, really.
	Wait, hold on.
	The 70s, 80s, and 90s because of the...
	Childhood trauma, we went through a pandemic of that.
	I watched it in real time on Loveline.
	I watched it come on.
	I watched it in the psychiatric hospital.
	I saw it.
	I saw it happen.
	And there it was.
	I mean, what is the...
	What's the threshold for something to be qualified as childhood trauma?
	That's a great question.
	Which is essentially a severe violation of boundaries, often body boundaries, sexual abuse.
	But the fundamental experience is helplessness.
	The sense in the child that going on being is not possible.
	So it literally shatters the upper regulatory limits of the brain's regulatory system.
	So they become dysregulated.
	Parts of them get walled off.
	There's actually a biology of disconnecting called somatoform and psychological dissociation.
	And the other thing that happens is it ruptures trust.
	And trust is necessary for closeness.
	Closeness is necessary for building the emotional regulatory system in a normal fashion.
	So they are now dysregulated.
	They can't go back to the interpersonal context where the regulation is built and they're searching for solutions the rest of their life.
	They find their way to a thing that works, a substance.
	There's no talking them out of it at that point.
	That's actually...
	Fascinating.
	Now, you're living in California, which has its own problems now.
	You've understood the genesis of those problems.
	What's the solution and where are they going in terms of that solution?
	You need to allow doctors and nurses to help people with brain disorders.
	Period.
	And we have no problem.
	It's just you take the patients and you go, you're not in your right mind.
	I know how to talk to them to get them.
	And you're coming with me.
	We're going to put you in a place.
	We're going to give you a place.
	We're going to make you feel better.
	Well, I say involuntarily.
	We were talking about this.
	No, there's nothing about talking about it.
	It's just they're not in their right mind.
	There are ways to motivate people into treatment.
	It's what I did all the time.
	And to go, oh, we're going to meet you where you are.
	It's like meeting a coma patient where they are.
	We say that the old trope is mentally ill people don't know they're mentally ill.
	Correct.
	That's called anasognosia.
	Anasognosia.
	And so the idea that you'll try to rely on their self-assessment of desires.
	It's allowing them to destroy themselves and die.
	What is the state of California?
	It's manslaughter.
	Let's call it what it is.
	You tell me it's not manslaughter, you're actively allowing somebody, people like me know that there's things to be done and you're preventing that from happening.
	I call that manslaughter.
	We'll take it one step further.
	In Canada, I'm calling it state-sanctioned murder because what they're allowing to do is the people who are out of their right mind make the decision to...
	End their own lives so long as they get the certification of two doctors.
	Yeah, that's awful.
	Mental illness and drugs.
	But in California now, is it still going in the wrong direction policy?
	No, it's slow.
	Just last week, there was a slight turn where they expanded conservatorships.
	That's a slight move in the right direction.
	So somebody's waking up.
	Somebody's getting through to them.
	I have had this discussion with my wife, who's a neuroscientist.
	I'm sure everybody knows out there.
	But is there a point of no return in terms of the damage that...
	Addicts may have done to their brains in terms of there is no healing at the point where they're at.
	It can happen.
	Same thing with schizophrenia, by the way.
	Schizophrenics, if you treat them early, do great.
	They can be returned to a relatively stable life.
	You let them sit out in the street for five years, they're never retrievable.
	They never come back.
	Now, here's the insanity.
	If a dementia patient...
	Somebody with Lewy body dementia, which looks like a schizophrenic, wanders out into the street and I don't help them?
	It's an all-points bulletin.
	A demented adult is now missing.
	And I'm guilty of patient abuse.
	I've actually abused somebody by not treating them.
	Yet a patient with a separate diagnosis, same symptom complex, who, by the way, if we intervene early, will get better?
	You're not allowed to touch them.
	The dementia patient is going to progress no matter what.
	The schizophrenic, you can prevent them from a life of destroyed life.
	Same thing with drug addiction.
	How insane is that?
	When you verbalize it like that, I think many people are going to...
	I'm driven crazy by it all day, every day.
	Oh my God, you're going to make me talk about the opiate crisis too.
	This stuff makes me insane.
	We're going to get there as well.
	I mean, I would just say that my viewers know that in the early days of my legal career, we used to do these things called motions for confinement.
	You'd go to court, have a doctor say this person is a danger or risk to themselves or others.
	They need to be confined.
	We get 24 to 72 hours and then we reassess.
	Yes.
	You can't do anything in 72 hours, by the way, with these patients.
	Well, I mean, you dope them up and then they get totally...
	You can't do anything.
	It's nothing.
	It's a waste of time.
	No, when you explain it that way, that if you have a senile, demented elderly person, they go missing.
	Not even a senile, it's just a Lewy body dementia, which looks like schizophrenia, but it's a progressive dementing illness.
	If you don't intervene, you can get in big trouble.
	Okay, the opioid crisis, because that, other than the astronomical numbers.
	I'm going to have a stroke here.
	70,000 to 100,000 a year at the peak of the opioid crisis we're dying.
	Right now it's 100,000 a year.
	Right now.
	In the United States.
	The framing in the media is that the opioid crisis since the...
	What was the Sackler's company?
	The one that was...
	Since they've been penalized and whatever, the opioid crisis is sort of not over but being dealt with.
	The physician...
	The component of it is under control.
	In fact, it's gone too far.
	It's actually gone too far.
	Okay, so back it up all the way to the beginning.
	The opioid crisis.
	All right, so here's how it went down.
	There's grave misunderstanding about it because everybody wants to blame the drug companies, which I'm all on board for.
	The drug companies are duplicitous.
	They have plenty of guilt.
	They should have suffered at the hands of, you know, they should have...
	Purdue.
	It was Purdue Pharma.
	Yeah, Purdue did tons of horrible things, but they were breathing wind into the sails of the problem caused by us.
	Yes.
	My profession did it.
	So here's what happened.
	It's a long story.
	Can I tell the whole story?
	Please do.
	It's what I'm going to tell the pharmacy group next on Thursday, Friday, when I go talk to them in Orlando.
	Essentially, I'm going to shorthand it a little bit.
	We had an opioid crisis following the Civil War.
	Morphine sulfate was invented.
	The hypodermic needle was invented.
	The Civil War is in the...
	The American Civil War.
	The American Civil War in the 1860s.
	Following that, a huge wave of opioid use came onto this country and a craze of proprietary cures all contained opium and laudanum and cocaine, all kinds of stuff.
	And by the early part of the 20th century, the opioid crisis hit a high pitch, all being 100% distributed by the physicians.
	The Harrison Narcotic Act came in.
	Actually, 20,000 physicians were sanctioned under that act.
	Several hundred were imprisoned because of the Harrison Narcotic Act for excessive opiate prescribing.
	So whenever the legal profession steps in with doctors, we freeze.
	We freak out.
	We don't know what to do.
	We're too busy to pay attention to what you guys are doing.
	You, lawyers.
	I was one of the good ones, I hope.
	And so we froze, and we didn't prescribe any opiates for like 50 years.
	Now the 60s come along, the 70s, and suddenly we're having people with cancer survive long periods of time with horrible pain.
	The pain medicine movement comes in and says, this is ridiculous.
	You have opiophobia.
	You're afraid of opiates.
	We need to prescribe them for these cancer patients.
	Totally legitimate.
	A thousand percent legitimate.
	Couldn't agree more.
	But then the same pain specialist thought, huh, we should be able to take care of all...
	There should never be pain in this country again.
	All pain.
	And the answer is in the poppy plant.
	That's the answer.
	And we know the answer.
	We are enlightened.
	You guys are afraid of opiates.
	And a couple of, there was a famous letter called the Porter-Jick letter, which was ridiculous, but it became the foundation for prescribing opiates to anybody in pain at any time.
	Now, then the legal profession came in.
	In North Carolina, Florida, and California, there were criminal and civil actions for under-prescribing of opiates.
	Patient abuse.
	Because you didn't prescribe enough opiate.
	We all heard about it.
	We froze.
	We sent everything pain to the pain specialist.
	And pain specialist said, that's right.
	Then...
	It's like a vicious, not a vicious circle, but just like a pendulum that keeps swinging back from one end to the other.
	When they were over-prescribing opiates in the wake of the Civil War, people are getting injured, it works on the battlefield.
	When did they start learning of the nefarious effects of opiates?
	It took a while.
	In fact, they were prescribing it to treat alcoholism.
	Cocaine to treat opiate addiction.
	Opiates to treat...
	I mean, they were out of control.
	It was totally ridiculous.
	And, of course, then there were advocates then, too.
	You're just afraid.
	We need more opiates.
	Give it to them.
	It's what they want.
	Yeah, a little withdrawal, but so keep giving it to them so they don't go into withdrawal.
	It was nutty.
	Same thing now.
	Except now, this was the pernicious part.
	And keep your eye on COVID if you want to know how that happened.
	Same thing happened in the opiate crisis.
	Evangelical physicians, there were several of them, that got into the world, think Deborah Birx with COVID, evangelized that pain should never be experienced in this country.
	In fact, it's so important, pain should be the fifth vital sign.
	Do you remember that?
	Pain the fifth vital sign?
	That I don't care what the patient's pulse is.
	It could be zero.
	I want to know what their pain assessment is.
	I got in lots of trouble for my heroin addicts in withdrawal experiencing some discomfort and refusing to give them heroin.
	I was in trouble for that.
	That's how insane it got.
	So they got control first of the VA, who adopted pain as the fifth vital sign, then the professional societies, then the regulatory agencies, then the state medical boards.
	And they all signed on.
	The Joint Commission on Hospital Accreditation, if you didn't put pain as the fifth vital sign, your hospital would not get accredited.
	So every one of these regulatory agencies...
	Jumped on board because of evangelical physicians.
	Not the drug companies.
	The drug companies were there.
	Well, they saw their opportunity afterwards.
	Come, go talk about it.
	Yeah, let me put you in touch with people.
	They were facilitating it.
	Let me ask the totally ignorant question.
	The first four vital signs?
	Temperature, pulse, blood pressure, respirations.
	And then pain.
	And pain assessment.
	I've never, I mean, look, I've...
	I haven't been to the hospital in a while.
	They got rid of that.
	Well, on a scale of 1 to 10, it's like, well, if I've got a high threshold, then what does that mean?
	And if I'm willing to tolerate pain...
	That's why they turned it into a little happy face scale, from unhappy face to very happy face.
	My patients in drug addiction had kind of unhappy faces.
	Normal for somebody in drug treatment.
	I was hit by the Department of Mental Health, my hospital administration, the insurance companies were also in on it.
	Everybody was in on it.
	And I was fighting it like an M-effer for...
	15 years.
	And I was told I was an opiophobe.
	I was a dinosaur.
	I was dangerous.
	I was interested in patient suffering.
	It was unbelievable.
	And it's one of the reasons I actually left the treatment field.
	Because my patients, I would get them all cleaned up, get them going.
	They'd be doing great.
	They'd be thriving.
	Because they're drug addicts, their thinking is messed up.
	And they would go, yeah, I got to go see that pain guy again.
	Really not even thinking that they want to do drugs.
	It's just, I'm having some pain.
	That's how pernicious the disease is.
	It's an amazing thing also in terms of framing and labeling is you give it a medically prescribed label term and then people feel more comfortable taking it.
	Whereas if it were a street drug, doing the exact same thing with the exact same components, it would have a stigma that people would not feel comfortable.
	Not for addicts.
	Addicts are just cheaper, better, they'll go for it.
	But they can get it for free from the drug.
	The insurance company pays for it.
	So they go to the pain guy and the pain says, literally, Why are you listening to those people?
	They're brainwashing you.
	I told you, you're going to need these medicines the rest of your life.
	Dead in two weeks.
	Do you know how many of my patients were killed that way?
	500?
	500.
	And it got to be too much for me.
	It got to be too much.
	And by the way, treating those patients, the chronic pain patients with opiate addiction and stuff, it's very difficult.
	And now we think I'd have Suboxone, which is really, really good for the chronic pain group.
	But back then, oh my God.
	So the pendulum swings back.
	Doctors who were...
	Now too much.
	Now people with pain can't get painkillers.
	It's really crazy.
	Because they don't know addiction.
	They don't understand addiction.
	That's the biggest problem.
	I guess this is a question without getting too far into it.
	I didn't get through the entire painkiller docudrama series.
	I don't really like it.
	It's a docudrama, but I understand what happened.
	They understood the addiction, and I guess the problem was with Purdue, the Sackler family, going into downplaying or outright lying about the addictive aspect of it.
	Correct.
	I had the OxyContin people sit in my office.
	The Xanax people say the same thing.
	Years before Sackler, Upjohn, side of my office, before we understood how addictive Xanax was, I had patients developing seizures.
	And the Upjohn patient guy comes in and goes, Oh, they just have a seizure disorder.
	If they'd stayed on the medicine, you would have controlled the seizure.
	And that's all them climbing the walls like that?
	That's just their anxiety, underlying anxiety.
	Our drug doesn't do that.
	There's no withdrawal from Xanax.
	That was in 1987.
	The Sackler thing wasn't until the 90s.
	And I, in the 90s, had Sackler guys, you know, that company produced sitting in my office going, we now have the non-addictive opiate.
	And you know what I said to them?
	Bullshit.
	I said, get the fuck out of my office.
	Get the fuck out of here.
	Because you are full of shit.
	I'm not even going to discuss this with you.
	Well, from a very one-on-one perspective, you know, people say like melatonin is not addictive, but it'll help you sleep.
	Anything that helps you feel better and do what you want to do.
	No, not true.
	Okay, so where is addiction?
	I think anything that would relieve pain.
	Addiction is the medial forebrain model.
	You have to have an activation of the shell of the nucleus accumbens.
	And not everything does that.
	Okay.
	And you have to do it in an extra physiological level.
	There's two systems in the brain.
	There's wanting and liking.
	You're talking about the liking system.
	Liking doesn't have to trigger the wanting.
	And the wanting in addiction takes over.
	So even when you don't like it anymore, you still want it.
	Amazing.
	Okay, so now you practiced, you're still practicing.
	This is one heck of an amazing analysis of your history.
	You have a radio voice.
	Now I'm putting it together, and you've been on the radio as well for...
	35 years.
	So when did you make the decision, and what was that decision like to sort of interplay...
	Public personality with practice.
	Like I said, I didn't use my real name.
	I was always like, no, no, no, no, no.
	And this is back before everyone could just easily Google and find out exactly who you were.
	That's right.
	So I thought I was doing community service.
	I did radio for free for 10 years.
	I thought I was helping with the AIDS patients.
	I was dealing with AIDS patients like crazy.
	I mean, I was really deep in it.
	I was there when we opened the first box of AZT.
	I can tell you what actually happened and how much good that did.
	Whatever the excesses were of getting it there.
	It helped at the time, but anyway.
	So RFK and I crossed horns on that a few times.
	I know that I don't have enough of a knowledge base.
	I just was there.
	I read the book.
	I know, but I was there.
	You know what I mean?
	I lived these things.
	But anyway, so 10 years of free.
	Then all of a sudden they decided they wanted to do it five nights a week.
	And at that point, I was practicing medicine 14 to 16 hours a day.
	Speaking of having a wonderful spouse, I don't know how she, I do not know how she put up with that.
	And like a day off on the weekend, I still worked for eight hours.
	On my days off, I would go to nursing homes and things.
	Is that her texting me?
	Somebody's texting me?
	No.
	And this is, you know, patient, you're seeing patients today.
	60 a day.
	60 patients a day.
	In ICU, hospital, Outpatient medicine, psychiatric hospital, addiction unit.
	Just all day.
	I loved it.
	I loved it.
	I thought I was doing something so important.
	That was the thing about medicine back then.
	It felt so important.
	I don't indulge in it.
	I just couldn't, I could not do it any different way.
	I didn't know how else to do it.
	And my health suffered.
	I'm sure my wife wasn't happy with it.
	My kids bring it up now, you know, in retrospect.
	I don't want to be glib if I say some people are addicted to work.
	Oh, I'm a workaholic, for sure, for sure.
	Much better these days.
	Now I just kind of like it.
	Then I was addicted.
	But what was my point?
	What were you saying about that?
	In terms of radio and merging.
	Oh, so the whole while, I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	I mean, I liked having a public outlet.
	I like public speaking.
	I like that kind of stuff.
	But I was always kind of uncomfortable.
	And then these guys came around and wanted to do TV.
	I'm like, well, I don't really know what that is.
	But I can probably squeeze Friday from noon to 8 and Saturday from noon to 8. And if you can do it there, I guess we can do this TV, whatever that is.
	And that's where we did it.
	We did it Friday afternoon and Saturday afternoon.
	And that was the MTV show.
	And then things kind of exploded.
	And I was like, okay, that's interesting.
	Because the radio then also exploded, I had to dial down my evening work.
	I'd have to go home for dinner.
	I'd have to go out to radio afterwards.
	And it kind of helped me curtail some of my workaholism.
	So now I was doing medicine seven days a week, but not 12 hours a day.
	I was doing it like...
	10 hours a day.
	And, you know, still getting up at 5 in the morning and still kind of nutty.
	And just didn't really, I don't know, I was just always just like, okay, well, do you guys have something else you want me to do?
	I'll try it.
	And then these guys came along and they said, we want to do this thing called celebrity rehab.
	And I was like, you can't do that.
	I was like, come on.
	You want to take cameras into a psychiatric hospital?
	Zero probability.
	And they go, let us talk to the hospital.
	I said, okay, talk to the hospital.
	They laugh them out of the room.
	You've got to be kidding.
	You can't even bring a camera near a psychiatric hospital.
	And then they were like, what are you going to do?
	And I'm like, I don't know.
	And I thought, God, you know, I know the psychiatrist that runs the residential program up the hill.
	I bet I could take my hospital team.
	Use their policies, procedures, and licensing in my team and insert it into their unit and run a program.
	And I went up there and talked to psychiatrists.
	I was like, yeah, that would be fantastic.
	Oh, so exciting.
	How fun.
	And I was like, okay.
	Anyway, I kept pitching it.
	And then VH1 showed interest.
	And then I just was like, no, no, no, I can't do this.
	I don't feel comfortable.
	And Bob Forrest.
	Did you ever see a celebrity rehab?
	The guy with the hat and the glasses.
	People know him.
	He's been treated 25 times.
	He was a famous drug addict.
	Now he's a wonderful treatment professional.
	And he came into my office one day and he goes, you know, we were treating a lot of celebrities at the time.
	And he goes, you know, I'm so sick of these media outlets talking about our patients as though they're on a...
	On a vacation or they're doing it just as an excuse for their behavior.
	These people are sick and they're working hard.
	We need to do a TV show where we show that.
	I was blown away.
	I really, to this day, thought maybe somebody put him up to it because I went into hiding.
	I was not following up on anything because I just was very uncomfortable.
	And I go, Bob, somebody had approached you doing this and there's an interest out there.
	And he goes, we have to do it.
	And he smacked his hands on his knees and he walked out of the room.
	And I thought, okay, if that's his instinct, I'll kind of keep going forward.
	And that was celebrity rehab.
	That's fascinating.
	Now, hold on.
	You did mention something.
	I want to go back to the AIDS epidemic.
	It's an amazing thing.
	I can understand my own...
	Life backwards based on my own neuroses.
	And I remember I was a kid in the 80s and I had an irrational fear of AIDS.
	We did that.
	And we were proud of it.
	It was, I mean, in retrospect, so bloody irrational where I was like, if you sit on a toilet seat or shake hands.
	Well, we were trying not to do that.
	But we were trying to get you to understand the sexual kind.
	We were trying to do things.
	I was a, Tony Fauci was my hero.
	All of my career.
	I just saw a little record scratch recently.
	But at the beginning of the pandemic, everyone that criticized me at the beginning, I was just trying to calm people down.
	And you're talking about COVID.
	And by the way, just so you know, what you will not find online is what I actually said.
	Every time I said, stop it.
	What I would say was the following.
	I said, we just went through a pandemic with H1N1.
	It killed 300,000 people.
	And you don't even know it happened.
	And now you're going to close the world down over this thing.
	I said, it's going to be bad, but just listen to Fauci and the CDC.
	They will get us through it.
	I said that every time.
	They cut that all off of everything I said.
	H1N1 was 2009, give or take.
	Correct.
	I had it.
	It was terrible.
	I don't remember anything.
	I remember my wife was pregnant.
	Oh my God, it was bad.
	But don't get back.
	By the way, it was extra bad in Canada because Toronto had a huge outbreak in the Chinatown.
	And I remember I was doing...
	I was doing some movies, some media up there, and I went running that day, and people were like, you're not going to run through Chinatown, are you?
	And I was like, yeah, I'm going to run through Chinatown.
	And I did.
	Unreal.
	I don't remember.
	I don't know.
	I was working as a lawyer, so I know that I was in my own bubble, and I don't remember anything.
	Apparently, I took whatever the flu shot was for 2009 because it was mandatory.
	Yeah.
	That was well after the epidemic.
	I guess 2008 was the epidemic, though.
	But now, bring it back to the AIDS epidemic, because that's something where, having lived through that, it's going to be crazy.
	So the point is, the techniques of the AIDS epidemic, we congratulated ourselves for.
	The technique as in the fear-mongering.
	The fear-mongering.
	And the overstating.
	Living through it.
	You're in an era where people start developing an illness and nobody knows what it is.
	Let me just finish this one thought.
	It was not appropriate for this latest pandemic.
	It was the wrong approach.
	The media works differently.
	Public health works differently.
	Social media works differently.
	It was the wrong thing.
	And they should still be adjusting course.
	But that's a different topic.
	It was the wrong thing if you think they didn't do it on purpose.
	They did do it on purpose.
	Then it wasn't the wrong thing.
	It was the right thing for the wrong reasons.
	I remember showing the videos of people dropping dead giving online classes.
	Don't see those anymore.
	People dropping dead from COVID in the streets.
	Why aren't we seeing those videos anymore?
	Because it never happened.
	But let's go back to HIV and the thing.
	So, what?
	Well, so you're in, it's what, late 70s?
	I'm in medical school when this thing is breaking out.
	You're in medical school?
	80 to 84, I'm in medical school.
	And how does that materialize?
	People show up to the hospitals with what symptoms?
	Weight loss, diarrhea.
	That was the first thing.
	Within what period of time?
	Within short order.
	Well, they're not showing up until they're really sick, right?
	So they show up weight loss, diarrhea.
	Yeah, and then there's these other things that keep happening, these opportunistic infections.
	That's the next thing they notice, which is pneumocystis pneumonia, which, by the way, it took a while for them to recognize that.
	Kaposi's sarcoma.
	What's going on here?
	Toxoplasmosis.
	What's Kaposi's sarcoma?
	The purple, purple, it's just a cancer that takes over everything.
	And nobody had seen Kaposi's.
	It was a rare illness before that.
	And they're trying to figure out what's going on.
	The crazy thing about that epidemic is people went, I can't believe it took forever for them to figure it out.
	It was the most extraordinary.
	Representation of our medical system in the history of human existence.
	That in a short period of time, like seven years, we came up with, we defined the syndrome, we came up with a causative agent, and came up with the epidemiology and then an effective treatment.
	Took us a thousand years to figure out syphilis.
	A thousand years.
	Seven years.
	Whole thing.
	Getting under control.
	That was mind-blowing.
	Which is, by the way, that experience being in that, Helped inform me when I was telling people to calm down about COVID.
	I kept saying, we're going to get this.
	We'll figure it out.
	We'll have treatments.
	We'll have vaccines.
	I know it.
	I know how we work.
	I've been through this.
	No.
	You have to close the world.
	And demographically, it's politically incorrect.
	It was known at the time within the gay community and drug addicts?
	Or was that not known until, I don't know, a couple years in?
	The drug addict part and the Haitian part came later.
	But it was gay-related intestinal disease syndrome.
	I'll tell you one thing.
	I feel very ignorant.
	People misnome it to this day.
	They call it gay-related immune deficiency syndrome, but it was really called gay-related intestinal disease syndrome.
	Because of the diarrhea.
	Okay, that's...
	And then we won't get into the entire AZT and other stuff, but you've listened to the real Anthony Fauci.
	I will just tell you that we opened the boxes.
	Look, I'm a fourth-year medical student, and I'm telling young men every day they have six months to live.
	It's a fourth-year medical student because there was this tidal wave of these guys, and the students had to take care of them because there were too many of them.
	And I was telling them they'd come up with their first episode of Pneumisistis, and we'd say, you have six months to live, and we were never wrong.
	Now we're opening boxes on something that...
	Gave us an extra three months.
	Three months to push it back a little bit and come up with some more treatments, which we did.
	That's exactly what happened.
	Yes, AZT was not a great treatment, but it gave us a little more time to help these guys.
	And it was something.
	The argument would be that it was not a great treatment, but something for those who are within six months to live, but those who are asymptomatic when it was given would have been the cause of their death and not the cause of their treatment.
	No way.
	No way.
	No, if you took too much of it, which if you look at the movie, even the Dallas Buyers Club movie, shows the guy was overdosing on it.
	Yeah, you take too much, you get sick.
	Now, at the time, were you also noticing what we now see in retrospect as the suppression of non-prescription or the suppression of, what's the word I'm looking for, over-the-counter treatments for HIV?
	No.
	In fact, what I saw...
	Was we were encouraging it because we had nothing.
	And if these guys could find something that made them feel better, please.
	But here's what went bad.
	Those same organizations, the Dallas Buyers Club and whatnot, for years continued to say, don't listen to your doctors.
	They're making you sit.
	We have the solution.
	When we finally had treatment, they were undermining our ability to help people.
	And that was a big, big problem.
	Okay, interesting.
	And now Fauci was a hero, and I'm not saying this to Fauci.
	He was my hero.
	My hero.
	Until now.
	Until he said, until he couldn't answer the question about whether or not people should go into large groups and demonstrate.
	That was the moment for me where I went, uh-oh.
	Because he was telling us everything else.
	Now, I do happen to believe you should be able to go out and demonstrate because you're outside.
	There's been...
	Zero transmission of COVID out of doors.
	I think there was one case of an Irish couple.
	I beg your pardon.
	No, no.
	There were two cases.
	There were two cases.
	Not an Irish couple.
	I read in the Irish Times.
	Two cases.
	In China.
	In China.
	So now, COVID hits.
	Your faith in the medical system, I guess, had not taken massive hits until recently?
	Correct.
	I don't know, but you saw massive hits because I lived through the opioid crisis.
	To me, that seemed like an anomaly.
	It seemed like I can't, what's going on here?
	Okay, but now COVID comes around.
	Now I'm seeing the same thing again.
	Again.
	Same exact thing.
	Evangelical physicians.
	People go, there's nothing wrong with being a Christian.
	It's not what evangelical means.
	Evangelical means an enthusiast, like an overly enthusiastic individual about a topic.
	Evangelical physicians on Deborah Burke's cases, In the case of pain management, pain is the fifth vital sign.
	Those are evangelical positions.
	Would you not say that those are the results of a capture of the industry?
	Yes.
	Now I would say that.
	Now I'm concerned about that.
	Really concerned about that.
	I can't even believe I'm concerned.
	I'm concerned about the...
	The medical journals that I've relied on my whole life.
	All the publications go one direction.
	That's never happened before.
	It's always a back and forth.
	The only major that I have found to be showing reasonable articles that have interesting alternative opinions is Annals of Internal Medicine.
	But doing the journal, JAMA, it's just going one way.
	It's weird.
	But I'd say for...
	You had faith in Fauci at some point.
	I didn't, you know, a lot of us were...
	40 years.
	A lot of us were not aware.
	Hero.
	Hero.
	By the way, I kept saying, all through the pandemic, I kept saying, he's going to revert to the mean.
	He's going to revert to the mean.
	There's going to be a reversion to the mean here.
	There has to be.
	He's going to come back from this somehow.
	I still have a weird little belief of that, and I still have some faith in that.
	You hear him say, though, he comes out and says that natural infection, after I thought it was sort of a cornerstone of virology that natural infection provides the best immunity, you hear him come out and negate things which are, I presume, in the medical field, not taken for granted, but are You know, basic knowledge, non-starters, if you try to contradict them?
	Well, you'd have to show your work.
	Like, on what basis do you say that?
	I'm open to, you know, medicine, you've got to be open to everything all the time.
	And so if somebody has an opinion, you just look at the data.
	You can't, you can't have, you've got to watch your bias all the time.
	I mean, I don't want, we won't do a full dissection of your analysis of the COVID response, but what were some of the most shocking things that you say this is?
	Offensive to my medical conscience in real time as you're seeing it.
	Six feet is going to save lives.
	Do you know where that came from?
	Someone's butt?
	I mean, I want to say like out of thin air.
	Thin air.
	Correct.
	They were in a locked room in Washington thinking, inventing a term called social distancing, which had just come around like a year before as sort of an idea.
	No one had ever studied it really.
	And they were like, God, it probably needs to be like more 30 to 60 feet, but they'll never agree to that.
	They'd probably agree to three feet.
	We could probably get that.
	Six feet, six feet.
	That's good.
	Sell that.
	That's it.
	Six feet, six feet.
	Never any evidence ever out of thin air.
	And the world adopted it.
	That to me is like...
	Mind-blowing.
	I am...
	That's one of the many little things like that that I've learned by talking to people who've been canceled, by the way.
	I interview on...
	I do a thing called Ask Dr. Drew.
	My wife would also kill me if I didn't promote this.
	Remember, go to October 28th if there are more people here.
	October 28th in San Jose Convention Center.
	Go Reclaiming Food and Medicine.
	Go see that.
	Me, RFK Jr., Asim Malhotra.
	Please go see that.
	And also on November 6th in New York City at the Chelsea Market that evening.
	Me, Kat Tim, Jim Fela.
	Jimmy Fela.
	Okay.
	Maybe I can get Jim Norton up there, too.
	I'm going to try that also.
	Ask Dr. Drew is Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday at 3 o 'clock.
	It's a streaming show we do.
	Rumble, Locals, we do it everywhere, but it's also on YouTube.
	And one of the things we've been doing, I'm a pure free speech advocate.
	And as soon as somebody has canceled my immediate...
	Sort of interest is I want to go talk to them.
	I want to hear what they have to say.
	I mean, why were you canceled?
	What did you have to say?
	And the playbook of cancellation seemed to be to go after most vigorously the people with the most esteem and the most significant career, you know, sort of record behind them.
	To me, the poster child for this was Jay Bhattacharya.
	Jay Bhattacharya is the poster child.
	This is an extraordinary human being, an extraordinary professional, a decorated teacher.
	Aaron Cariotti is another one.
	He's the one that spearheaded Missouri versus Biden.
	He's a bioethicist who lost his job at UC Irvine because he said, I don't think you have the criteria to mandate a vaccine to these young people.
	Those schools are going to be sued for that.
	I said that at Megyn Kelly.
	That's my prediction.
	Because there's going to be enough serious consequence that people are going to go, you made me do it, I'm going to sue you.
	We're going to get into it probably in a little bit.
	I think eventually the pharma companies are themselves going to get sued because it wasn't a question of them having satisfied the obligations under their contracts.
	They knew stuff that they didn't disclose and it was fraudulent from the beginning.
	I'm willing to accept that they didn't.
	I'm willing to accept that it was an emergency and we had to We had to get there as fast as we could, and the extraordinary risks were taken.
	I have no problem with that.
	Now let's do the work.
	Now let's pull back.
	Now that the pandemic's over.
	But they're pushing with the same intensity.
	That's the part I have an issue with.
	Some people say it's a mistake if you think they're doing it.
	By accident, or it's on purpose if you think there's an underlying agenda.
	It feels like hysteria.
	At this point, I didn't get on the bandwagon of an underlying agenda.
	At this point, I think it is, in fact, just doubling down on the mistake.
	And if they admit it now, then they expose themselves to more repercussions than if they just double down.
	I talked to Megyn Kelly about an article which I'd just seen five days before.
	I thought it had just been published.
	Turned out it was published in July because I couldn't believe the world wasn't talking about it, which was a Hong Kong study.
	Okay, this drives me insane.
	Okay, thank you for giving me a chance to talk about this.
	I don't know where we're going right now, but I'm very curious.
	I'm going to tell you, the study was in circulation, which was a major cardiology journal.
	It studied for a year adolescent males who had myocarditis.
	38 out of 100,000 got myocarditis.
	Was it 38 out of 100,000?
	I'm forgetting the numbers.
	I'm sorry, they had 38 cases.
	I think the incidence is like 5 out of 100,000 or something in terms of how often myocarditis shows up.
	Again, that's being debated.
	I don't know that number.
	But this was a study on 38 adolescent males who got myocarditis from the vaccine, diagnosed, established, vaccine-related, not COVID-related.
	And I get it.
	COVID caused some myocarditis too.
	Listen, I had terrible COVID and I was climbing some stairs with a fever 102 and my pulse was 50. I announced right then this thing affects the heart.
	Of course it does.
	It does.
	But in these 38 males, more than half of them had persistent myocardial damage on MRI a year out.
	50% of 38. Dr. Drew, you'll correct me if I'm wrong on this, that the myocardial tissue doesn't heal.
	It can do lots of things.
	It can form a scar, and that scar can be okay in terms of performance.
	But scar tissue doesn't flex and pump the way a heart is supposed to.
	But it still can preserve the performance.
	But it can be a source of arrhythmias.
	So now you're seeing all this literature on arrhythmias from the vaccine.
	Known that for two years.
	I've seen it a ton.
	Not seen anything in elderly patients.
	For whatever reason, I vaccinate my elderly patients.
	They are vaccinated, boosted, and they're benefiting, in my opinion, because COVID is a very serious risk for them.
	I've seen zero side effects so far.
	In adolescent men and middle-aged men, I've seen a ton of side effects.
	I know you're probably going to get flack on the internet for this because people are going to say, if you're not seeing it, you're not looking for it.
	But what is the average age of your patient?
	All Medicare age.
	I'm probably 75. And multi-diagnosed.
	I have people with complex, multiple medical problems.
	I had a patient with tuberculosis who got liver failure from the tuberculosis meds and then got COVID.
	I was happy he was vaccinated.
	He would have died.
	He could have died easily.
	And I don't know how much the vaccine did, but it was enough to give me a little bit of comfort because I couldn't treat him with anything.
	And by the way, all this vaccine data we're looking at does not take into account the fact that we have treatments.
	We have molipiravir.
	We have Paxlovid.
	People have all kinds of early treatments they're trying, but we have fluvoxamine and imudesonide have shown to be useful for treatment.
	All the vaccine studies...
	Do not take into account the fact that we have treatment.
	That works.
	So, unfortunately, it's going to be $1,300 for the PaxLivit, which...
	Someone in the locals would ask, why the heck is it so expensive?
	There's a good reason, I presume.
	It's because it takes five years for them to make back their...
	They only have five years to make back their investment.
	I'm going to ask this stupid question.
	Does PaxLivit actually work?
	I've heard...
	In the recent variances...
	A year and a half ago, I was seeing a lot of rebound.
	And people, oh, it's not rebound, that's just the cytokine.
	It was rebound.
	Shut up.
	It was rebound.
	It was very different than, it was a lot of upper airway stuff.
	It was not cytokine activation.
	In the recent variant this summer, man, did it work in elderly patients.
	Oh, my God.
	It worked so fast and so well.
	In the recent variant, like at the present moment, not so much.
	It's not working so well.
	But, so, it depends on the variant.
	It seems like, again, the literature catches up with the clinical.
	We see it in real-time clinical.
	The literature eventually catches up with it.
	It's how medicine works.
	Circulation article.
	38 men, half of whom, more than half of them, it's like 59% or something, had persistent myocardial damage.
	So, arrhythmias, exercise performance problems the rest of their life, and maybe for some of them...
	Cardiac transplant.
	They will end up with cardiomyopathy.
	The second one is performance for the rest of their lives.
	They can't run and they can't do sports the way they want to.
	There's a, I won't say a trope, a meme, or whatever.
	There's an internet legend that myocarditis, your chances of being dead within five years, are 50%.
	There's some wildly high number.
	What does it do in terms of reduction of life expectancy?
	We don't know because this is the first study.
	This is the first study.
	It's one year.
	First study.
	So here's what's happening to me on the internet.
	People are going, it's only 38 men.
	He's only talking about half of 38. Yes, I'm talking about...
	Half of the 38 for whom it was officially diagnosed, recognized...
	With persistent problems.
	20 men.
	To save less than, far less than, one per 100,000.
	An illness that doesn't hurt them.
	And there's treatment that works.
	This is an illness that doesn't harm that age group.
	We are going to take any of them and make them chronically ill.
	That is anathema to the practice of medicine.
	That is do no harm is our first charge.
	And we are harming healthy people for whom we were saving them from.
	What's the risk reward?
	Their risk of COVID is way less than one per 100,000.
	While their risk from...
	Biocarditis looks like it may be very serious.
	At the very least, the last statistics I heard, which were the most charitable because it's coming from the government, so if you believe it, was still one in 5,000.
	But when you say this, people have to appreciate this.
	And half of those will get...
	Persistent problems.
	That's 1 in 10,000.
	It's to save 1 in 100,000.
	Less than 1 in 100,000.
	And what would be the age?
	It's.005 per 100,000.
	And the average age of that, let's just round it up to 1 in 100,000.
	No, no, in terms of the saving from COVID.
	I'm looking at just 15-year-olds.
	Essentially mid-adolescence.
	I'm looking at mid-adolescence.
	Okay.
	They don't die of COVID.
	Unless they have some serious underlying illness.
	In Canada, I think there were eight that were claimed to have been the direct cause of COVID.
	In that age group.
	In that age group, it was 19 and under.
	But once you found out that one of them was...
	19 and under, be careful.
	When they say 19 and under, they're usually talking about very young.
	Well, one of the under 19 happened to be a 14-year-old kid with stage 4 brain cancer who was in a coma, and they tested him right before death.
	No healthy kids.
	No healthy kids get, get, get diabetes.
	Myocarditis.
	Especially now with the treatments.
	The treatments work and are good.
	People are going to say that, and they say it, it's the retort.
	COVID causes myocarditis.
	Correct, it does.
	But now, and my retort to them is I'm just a lawyer idiot.
	Well, then why would you compound the risk of myocarditis by giving them a jab that doesn't...
	It's different.
	It's different, right?
	So they need to tease that out.
	How much is COVID?
	How much is COVID plus vaccine?
	How much is vaccine?
	They need to ask the questions, but just asking the questions will get you canceled as an academic.
	So, okay.
	So you need to ask the questions, number one.
	Number two, yes, it causes myocarditis.
	I've got it on my phone.
	All inflammatory viruses.
	There are some long-term studies now on COVID, long-term illness and stuff.
	It all seems to go away at a year.
	All of it seems to go away at a year.
	So here we have the vaccine not going away at a year.
	We have COVID going away at a year.
	Keep studying it, everybody.
	Let's take a good look.
	Maybe that's wrong.
	You have to reproduce this stuff many, many times before it becomes factual.
	Theory.
	No facts in medicine.
	No headlines in medicine.
	Ugh.
	So, you said something that got me going here.
	Oh, but there's a bioethical question here that people are missing.
	It is different to say we are taking a finite risk to save somebody from an illness that has consequences versus we are making a healthy person sick.
	With an uncertain benefit.
	Making healthy people sick is bioethically a violation.
	Not in all situations, but at its outset.
	It's a bioethical transgression to make a healthy person sick.
	And you're definitely not allowed to do it if it's just to help a different person.
	Potentially help a different person.
	If that's your reasoning, that's a bioethical...
	If it's to help the individual, well then look at the numbers.
	Way less than 100,000 versus 20 per 100,000.
	Wait a minute.
	This doesn't look right.
	You're going to make healthy people sick to save them from what?
	And by the way, none of that data took into account good treatments that we have?
	Okay, there's a problem here.
	There's a problem.
	It drives me crazy, the feedback I get on Twitter.
	It's so...
	It's so biased.
	It's so unenlightened.
	It's so distorted by the people's cognitive dissonance.
	It's unbelievable to me.
	And I constantly ask myself, where am I getting it wrong?
	How am I getting it wrong?
	I've got to understand the other side of the table.
	I must be getting it wrong somehow.
	I always think this to myself constantly, constantly.
	What am I missing?
	What am I getting wrong?
	I want to know.
	I want to take that and try to figure it out.
	I'm trying to figure it out for pregnant women right now.
	Vicki Mail presented some great data on pregnant women and it helping.
	And I thought, okay, that's good.
	But it was all from Alpha and Delta.
	I don't see any recent data on that.
	But have you not seen also stats in terms of stillbirths?
	I've seen the data, but it's not well established in the literature.
	There's good literature that says it's safe and effective, so to speak.
	But by the same token, there was just an article in Lancet a year ago that said...
	COVID and pregnancy, time to breathe easier.
	It's not an issue.
	And yet we're still pushing the vaccine.
	Why?
	Why are we pushing?
	This is the Lancet.
	This is the same Lancet that said it was racist to suggest that the virus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, that 18 months later says it's always been a perfectly plausible theory.
	These institutions have lost, not only they've lost the credibility, I just presume that what they're saying is a lie.
	I don't know how you come back for it.
	It's crazy.
	I've never been anti-vax in my entire life.
	I'm not anti-vax.
	I'm practicing medicine.
	I'm looking at the risk-reward for any treatment at all times.
	My elderly patients, all vaxed, all boosted, all in there.
	My 25-year-olds, what do you think?
	I work with them on that.
	I work with the patient on that.
	The thing is, I'm not anti-vax for what I regard as a vax.
	I will not regard this as a vaccine, period.
	Call it the jab, because if it doesn't prevent transmission, I'm not...
	It's my opinion, so you know.
	Yep.
	My opinion, anything that stimulates the immune system to fight a pathogen as a vaccine.
	Well, hold on.
	Let me ask them the question, the reductio to that.
	Is vitamin C or vitamin D a vaccine as well, then?
	It doesn't stimulate the immune system.
	I'll have to take your word on that.
	It doesn't create an activation against a specific pathogen to ready an antibody army against that pathogen.
	It doesn't create an army of B cells, a clone of B cells ready to go should they see that pathogen.
	I'll digest that because I know the limits of my own knowledge and I defer to your expertise.
	I did just historically take for granted that vaccines were either made with the, what do they call them, the inactive or the inorganic residual in order to trigger that response?
	Sometimes it's just a piece of it.
	And then I also just assumed that vaccines, by the traditional definition, actually prevented infection and not reduced severity of symptoms.
	I never assumed that.
	Every year we gave the flu shot and said, this is our best guess.
	But even with the flu shot, you never really called it a flu vaccine.
	It was called the flu shot for a reason, but the tetanus shot is a vaccine.
	You will never see the flu shot referred to in the literature as anything other than...
	The influenza vaccine.
	I'm going to defer to you on this, even though I think I want to disagree with it, but I'm not going to be stubborn in my own comments.
	Flu shot is the common lingo.
	Flu shot is as people talk about it that way.
	Okay, now that was going back to I've never been anti-vaccine in my life, but now I do question.
	What's wrong with questioning, by the way?
	So I have three kids and I go to our GP.
	What's wrong with questioning your medical care with your doctor?
	So they say, here's a chickenpox vaccine.
	I was like, why would I get a chickenpox vaccine?
	I had chickenpox.
	I got shingles as an adult, maybe if it would have prevented that.
	But the excuse I got, or the explanation was, you can get the flesh-eating virus from scratching the things and the scars.
	Almost never.
	So when the chickenpox vaccine came around, my kids were leaving.
	And I wouldn't let them get it because I thought this is a new vaccine.
	I want to see some more time with this before we understand fully the risk benefits because chickenpox has no risk really.
	Except for later on in life shingles.
	That we have a good vaccine for.
	Now I'm skeptical to take that one.
	Take it.
	I took it.
	It's a good vaccine.
	Take the RSV vaccine.
	It's a good vaccine.
	There's good vaccines out there.
	I'm now scared.
	I was scared of everything to begin with, but now I'm scared as cynical.
	There's no medical intervention that cannot harm you severely.
	No, I agree.
	That's why I'll just leave myself alone in as much as humanly possible.
	There's nothing we do that's not potentially really harmful.
	Yeah.
	I gave the flu shot to a friend of mine.
	He had a severe anaphylactic reaction.
	But this is why I'm now, well, now that I know of this regulatory capture, now that I know about the fundamental corruption, about the money-making that goes on with it, and they say, take this and take that, I'm skeptical of everything, whereas I wasn't before as much.
	And you asked what to do with the journals.
	One of the things RFK Jr. did that caught my attention that I really liked, he said day one, if he was president of the United States, he'd bring the...
	Editors of the big three in and go, I'm going to prosecute under the RICO laws unless you unravel this situation because what you're publishing is biased.
	And you give me a full report on how you're going to do it or else we're going to court under RICO.
	I thought, wow.
	Well, now that they've softened up the RICO rules to go after Trump and gang in Georgia.
	Now you can really do it.
	So you're still...
	I say the most shocking elements that compromise your trust.
	I am practicing medicine the way I always have, which is I'm just trying to do no harm.
	I'm always looking at the risk reward.
	My dad was a family practitioner, as I told you, and he reared me on the idea that medications are dangerous.
	Dangerous, dangerous, dangerous.
	You only use them when the risk of not using them is worse.
	Hammered that into my head.
	I never had an antibiotic until I was 15. I remember he actually brought samples of a liquid home of ampicillin.
	And he gave it to me as I'm all right, because I'd seen a pediatrician he wanted me to take it.
	And he was like, here we go.
	Here we go.
	God knows what's going to happen to you because of this.
	You're taking a penicillin.
	You didn't end up being allergic.
	I did not end up being allergic and I didn't end up dead.
	Profoundly concerned that I was taking some penicillin.
	Profoundly.
	And that was the orientation I was raised with.
	So there's got to be a benefit, a clear benefit in taking these risks.
	Even if you're going to walk through the threshold of my office, you could fall down.
	There's got to be a reason, and the benefits got to outweigh any risks that you incur by interacting with me.
	I sent you an article before.
	It was early this morning, so I don't know if you read it.
	So the new concern is that they're apparently finding DNA in some of the shots, and I don't understand the impact of that.
	It's complicated science.
	Let me ask a stupid question.
	There's DNA.
	I presume there's DNA in meat that I'm eating.
	I mean, I know that there is.
	So this is a plasmid that's used in E. coli to create the RNA.
	And it's supposed to be purified out of the vaccine before it goes into your arm.
	And certain fragments are allowed and a certain amount of it is allowed, but it really needs to be highly, highly purified because there are promoter genes within that plasmid that can take that DNA.
	And incorporate it into your DNA.
	I'm trying to look smart as I listen to all of this process.
	By the way, if it can find its way into the nucleus, which I'm not sure it can.
	So I'm skeptical of this whole thing, but I'm listening.
	Stuff I wouldn't listen to before, I'm listening.
	And the fact that it, for a while, was being dismissed as, no, it's not.
	And then, oh, yes, there is, but it doesn't matter, already has me concerned.
	Well, that's the standard.
	It's not happening, but if it is, it's not so bad for you.
	If it's bad for you, it's less bad than the alternative, and we have no choice anyhow.
	Right, but the alternative now is what?
	No illness, no hospitalization?
	Is it a manufacturing issue, or is it just a matter of fact?
	It's a manufacturing issue.
	I've talked to people like Sasha Latapova, and...
	Blankens, the name of everybody I've spoken to.
	But they have had concerns about the size of the vats and the way the admixture is going.
	And then, of course, we have the Danish study that took two years to be published, which already is suspect.
	It was a great study that showed that in the early days of vaccine distribution, 10% of the vaccine was responsible for 90% of the adverse reports.
	And no one has followed up on that.
	That's weird.
	We would always follow up on that stuff.
	Now, the good news is the arrhythmia and the myocarditis, that is breaking into the discussion finally.
	Finally.
	Whether or not there is anything real around cancer and DNA plasmids, we'll see.
	I don't think so, but we'll see.
	I mean, we'll have to see.
	And now, you're still living in California.
	Unfortunately.
	How does Florida look by comparison?
	Oh, Florida's the happiest place on Earth.
	And I don't mean Orlando.
	I mean Southern Florida.
	We've known that for a long time.
	Whenever we come down here, people are just so happy.
	It's crazy.
	Dave Rubin's been on me for a while.
	Like, get down here!
	What are you doing, you idiot?
	I've been there my whole life.
	About two years ago, I thought to myself, no, California's worth fighting for.
	Last six months, I've been thinking, yeah, it may be worth fighting for, but it is impossible.
	But they're going to be in so much financial trouble soon.
	You're going to start hearing about massive debt in California, that they're going to have to do something.
	I thought I'd been hearing about that for years, if not a decade already.
	We had a surplus.
	And they were very irresponsible with that, too.
	But I'll never forget talking to somebody on the budgetary committee in the state of California, and she was like, we're going to have problems.
	We have significant shortfalls.
	And I go, yeah, well, what are you going to do?
	Thinking she's going to cut the budgets.
	And she goes, well, we can't print money.
	But the federal government can.
	They need to print some money and give it to us.
	And I thought, oh!
	You're in the state budget.
	Oh, my God.
	Oh, my God.
	And then COVID hit.
	And then we saw what happened.
	And here we are in the inflationary cycle we're in.
	Now, you said childhood trauma leads to addiction.
	I didn't say that.
	Sorry, sorry.
	I didn't want to mischaracterize.
	But childhood trauma is one of the factors that you know.
	It's an inciting influence.
	It's rocket fuel.
	And if you have bad enough addiction, you need to see me.
	You had it.
	Looking at the last three years of COVID response.
	Yeah.
	To a child's development.
	Oh, my God.
	I announced early we are destroying 8 to 15-year-olds.
	Destroying them.
	Because that period of development, they are so dependent on their peers for their sense of being, their sense of who they are and how they function in the world.
	And you're withholding them from that and telling them that your parents and grandparents are going to die any second?
	It's just so crazy.
	It's so crazy.
	And now what are we seeing?
	You know, the incident is like 40% now of serious mental illness, which means they have trouble functioning.
	Do you know, is there any state breakdown on that?
	I don't know.
	And have some states fare better?
	I'm sure.
	It has to be, right?
	This state didn't do it.
	This state didn't lock down.
	This was the...
	Number one thought process in my decision to move down to Florida, if only temporarily, is that we were, you know, I'm in Quebec.
	Five and a half months of curfew.
	I got three kids under 12 at the time.
	It's just terrible.
	Right in a sweet spot age, too.
	Oh, yeah, no, no.
	What was it?
	I mean, I can't remember.
	How old were they?
	Four.
	I'll give her four, seven, ten.
	Eight to 15, man.
	Eight to 15 is what we destroyed.
	No sleepovers.
	No, like, criminalizing, socializing.
	I said this, my kids were in line at a...
	There's no second cup out here, right?
	It's like a Starbucks for Canada.
	It's crappy coffee.
	But they're in line.
	People are fighting because they're not socially distancing enough.
	And my kids come in the car and they say, some man just called an old lady an effing bee.
	This is not a normal life for people.
	I hope these kids grow up angry.
	They should be furious about this.
	I hope they're angry.
	Because they've got to make sure it doesn't happen during their adult life.
	They should be furious with what was done to them.
	Well, I can tell you, as a parent of young children at the time, I'm furious.
	I still say forgive and forget.
	I'm not going to forget.
	I might forgive.
	My kids are just in their early 30s, and they were taken down by it.
	Their life was sent off trajectory.
	See, I don't know when it's even harder.
	At 30, your entire professional development, social life, how do you date?
	How do you get married?
	None of it.
	People are wondering why men are in trouble right now.
	Oh, my God.
	We've hit them with multiple roundhouse punches.
	Now, we won't get into the politics of things, but...
	By the way, just so we stay here on Locals and Rumble, wherever you are, people who watch my stream know I am a moderate, moderate, moderate.
	You cannot call me a conservative, although moderate suddenly becomes like...
	It's a label I've given up on moderate, conservative, liberal.
	It's red pill and blue pill in terms of who still believes the government is up to good and who understands the government needs to be.
	I don't understand.
	I don't even know how to evaluate those kinds of questions anymore, but I do think we've been through a hysteria.
	I do not understand people's delight in telling other people how to live their lives, and I do not understand people who want somebody to tell them how to live their life.
	That, to me, is...
	I can't get my head around it.
	Can't get my head around it.
	Drew, do you mind if I take some questions from...
	I mind very much.
	I've never taken questions before on the media.
	Well, I love it.
	Except for 35 years on the radio.
	I don't do the call-ins, but we got...
	Okay, so he says, Pasha Moyer says, my dad worked with Swedes.
	He used to tease them with the Diddy...
	20 Swedes ran through the reeds, chased by one Norwegian.
	That's not a question.
	What is that?
	What is that?
	Be careful.
	Get a screener in here.
	Somebody read these questions before people get the hold of them.
	Well, I'm going to see if I got any more questions.
	I can look at them.
	I'm pretty good at reading questions and picking good ones, if you want.
	Well, I wanted specific.
	Well, I'll go to Rumble and see what's going on in the Rumble chat.
	You give me that one, and you look at Rumble, and I'll look at that one.
	Okay, look.
	The Rumble rants?
	I love these guys.
	I can't see any Rumble rants there, but...
	So here's somebody who says, I estimate around 500,000 people have died from the jab.
	We don't have a number yet.
	We really don't.
	People are saying 250 is high.
	I don't have a number.
	People do the factor of the varicose.
	I don't have a number.
	Come on.
	And you're still prescribed.
	You're going to get flack for this, but you still believe in the jab for the elderly vulnerable population.
	To be 100% accurate and clear, all of my elderly patients who are...
	See, I like to take care of sick people.
	That's what I've done my whole life.
	I've seen the human experience, obviously, in a way that nobody gets anymore.
	You're not allowed to go to the ICU and the outpatient and the psychiatric hospital as an internist.
	I did all of it.
	I saw all of it.
	I want to share that with people now that I've seen all that.
	I have been vaccinating my elderly patients.
	They have done exceedingly well.
	I've not had anybody die.
	I've not had anybody eating new arrhythmias.
	I've not had anybody develop myocarditis.
	And nobody, I had one patient die of COVID, a couple of patients die of COVID before the vaccine.
	There are patients who specifically, I would have predicted, would have done poorly with the illness.
	And in the most recent vaccine for the XBB.1.5, I'd say half of my patients have asked me to allow them to refuse it.
	Maybe I don't know if I'm framing that right.
	They've come to me and said, should I really take this one?
	What do you think?
	When they've told me that, you know what I've said?
	XBB.1 is gone.
	There's some evidence that this vaccine has activity for a few months against EG, which is around, but I think that one was probably here this summer.
	Everything is regionally different in terms of the variants that are around.
	I don't know that this vaccine is doing anything.
	I have Paxlovid.
	That was before it was $1,300.
	I at least have Moldupiravir still.
	And it'll work.
	So...
	No, I don't think that we really know what we're doing with this vaccine.
	So if you don't want to take it, I wouldn't recommend it necessarily because we don't know what we're doing.
	You've got to open your phone again for me.
	The one question here is from Russell.
	Dr. Drew, have you seen a change among colleagues regarding the efficiency and adverse events of the mRNA program?
	If so, what percentage would you speculate is for or against the program?
	What do they mean by the program?
	I'm not sure either.
	Dr. Drew, have you seen a change among colleagues?
	So I've seen, look, just look at how many people are being vaccinated.
	It's rare now.
	It's very few people who are taking the vaccine.
	Give me the rumble.
	Here we go.
	Okay, do this here.
	I had another question that came up.
	Anecdotally, and I appreciate it's anecdotal, but that's still a basis of science.
	Not among your patients, but among your friends, children, children's friends.
	Have you noticed any of them have any adverse reactions from the jab?
	Oh, yes.
	Mostly arrhythmias.
	Arrhythmias.
	But most of the arrhythmias I've seen have been in middle-aged, like men in their 30s and 40s.
	Seriously, they need ablations, their lives are turned upside down.
	Now, they're not going to have long-term consequences, except they have a dangerous procedure to deal with the rhythm problem.
	But no, I've not seen a lot of myocarditis that I can think...
	I've not seen that age group, you know what I mean?
	It should be telling that it's almost like I think everyone has the...
	Equally reflexive.
	Of course, I've seen a lot of adverse effects.
	I've seen adverse effects among my, I think, to the people I've known, people in their 40s who've dropped dead within close proximity of the jab, an elderly person who nobody knows because old people die all the time, teenagers who got myocarditis, and the parents try to convince everybody it's a mild case.
	The old saying, is there any such thing as mild myocarditis, or are you in a position to answer that?
	Myocarditis throughout my 40-year career.
	It was a dire medical emergency.
	Whenever my kids got viruses, what I would worry about was them getting myocarditis because it is such a dreadful thing.
	When people present young with cardiomyopathies, it's because of viral myocarditis.
	It's a horrible illness.
	It's horrible mostly because in the acute phase, you can drop dead suddenly.
	It causes arrhythmias, sudden death.
	Not so uncommon in myocarditis.
	And the percentage that develop cardiomyopathy is not actually known.
	So myocarditis, when people were dismissing it as, oh, well, no big deal, mild.
	A, we didn't have the data to say that.
	And B, never before has myocarditis been dealt with like that.
	So that to me was odd, to say the least.
	And the reports of myocarditis, whether or not one is going to attribute it to COVID versus the jab, they are in fact.
	Undeniably through the roof compared to statistical averages.
	Say that again.
	The diagnoses of myocarditis.
	Now Pfizer has it in its package insert.
	It's no longer debate.
	It's axiomatic.
	The question of how much...
	Here we go.
	You want to get me some...
	You don't mind seeing hate?
	Why does Drew continue?
	Are you kidding?
	I've gotten inured to it.
	It's like it's all the time.
	Why does he encourage the vax even when evidence showed its toxicity?
	The one who wouldn't give people any unnecessary meds.
	I've seen benefit and no risk.
	And now you've seen no myocarditis or heart issues among the adults.
	When I was growing up, my mom always told us, like, a young person having a heart attack is more likely to die than an old person because of the alternate routes of blood.
	Correct.
	She's right.
	Collateralization.
	My mom is an old...
	She's not a doctor, but she's a neurotic hypochondriac as well.
	So is that not possibly one of the reasons why you wouldn't notice as much myocarditis or heart issues?
	No, myocarditis is...
	That's coronary disease.
	That's coronary artery disease.
	Myocarditis is a direct illness of the muscle.
	Okay, now the internet's going to say that I'm a totally...
	I'm a bad hypochondriac.
	Okay, so that plausible...
	That explanation could not possibly apply.
	Drew shouldn't tell anyone to get a vaccine.
	He's kind of a doctor, so they're kind of...
	You know, to be fair, I always make my decisions with my patients.
	I don't tell anybody to do anything they really don't want to do.
	Now, if it's super dangerous and they don't want to do it, I might have to refer them to somebody else because I don't want to take that responsibility.
	The opioid crisis being one crisis in America, there is...
	There's also the overprescription of, I believe we would call them psychotropic drugs for children.
	Is that the word for head?
	Yeah.
	Psychotropic.
	One of the things I'm going to talk about when I talk to the pharmacist next week or later in the week is deprescribing.
	There's too much.
	There's overprescribing.
	We used to just call it polypharmacy, but old people are on too many meds.
	That's the way it goes.
	That's for sure.
	For sure.
	Have you seen...
	Sad that Drew isn't fully awake.
	I see.
	I was going to say, it's not that you have not abandoned any and all faith.
	It's that you are operating in a system where you know that you are still one of the good doctors who trusts the science and follows the science in the meaningful way, and you have not lost total faith in the institution because you're still a part of it.
	From an outside perspective, I have lost faith in the institution, and I don't give the benefit of the doubt where I think you still give the benefit of the doubt.
	A to medicine, and also to the media, because...
	No media to benefit of the doubt.
	Do not give them the benefit.
	They are the evil empire.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	They're the problem.
	They are the ones brainwashing everybody.
	On either side.
	Everywhere.
	They're the problem.
	I have my clinical experience.
	I read the literature carefully, now with a jaundiced eye.
	I'm talking to people who have been canceled to sort of flush out my understanding of things, and then I'm charged to make the best decision for the patient in front of me.
	These people that are criticizing me are young, healthy people.
	They're not 80-year-olds with 12 different diagnoses for whom the slightest thing can kill them.
	I am trying to give them the longest possible life and thriving life, life of meaning.
	It's an extremely nuanced decision-making position I'm in.
	Is there an absolute right, an absolute wrong?
	There actually isn't.
	People don't understand this about medicine.
	The people I argue with are scientists that only read medical literature.
	There's a reason that the book part of medical school is only two years.
	And the part after that is 8 to 10 years.
	That's the residency part?
	Residency and clinical years and fellowship.
	On average, it's six years minimum, and it's eight to ten years on average to be able to go out in the world.
	And even then when you go out in the world, you're still kind of refining things for the next five to ten years.
	It's amazing.
	You describe it like that, and I compare it to the practice and the training of law, which is the exact inversion.
	It's three to four years of the books and then six months of an internship or a stash.
	And my initial boss said it should be the other way around.
	You should get the experience and then go study so that you can actually understand what you're studying.
	In medicine, it sounds like that's the way it goes.
	But the thing about medicine, this is what people don't get.
	Biology is strictly a giant, it's like predicting the behavior of clouds.
	It's a probability equation.
	It's not a linear equation, ever.
	There's nothing that works that way in biology.
	Everything is a probabilistic.
	All the way down to physical chemistry, it's all where the electron clouds, where the electron's likely to be, and what are the energy states of these proteins likely to be?
	It's always a scattergram.
	It's always a probability.
	And that goes all the way up to physiology, where you're trying to make a call based on your experience.
	The experience informs you far more.
	Then the books and the literature.
	The literature is where you turn to to reinforce your experience and make sure you're seeing this right.
	But then how have you not lost total faith in the institution when an administrative body comes in and says to doctors, you no longer get to make decisions based on your experience, based on your own expertise of treating a patient as an individual, and it's a one-size-fits-all blanket application.
	That is a catastrophe.
	I had no idea that was happening until COVID.
	And it was a shock to me to see how many doctors were under that umbrella.
	It's a shock.
	And a lot of it, just so you understand, so where does that come from, right?
	Why is there all this centralization?
	A lot of that is being done to protect liability.
	So the attorneys, again, should not be involved in the practice of medicine, protecting liability.
	And the other is to create protocols so we can pull the expensive doctors out and put the nurse practitioners and physicians assistants.
	And they can follow the protocols because they're not trained to make those kinds of decisions on their own.
	They're good.
	And by the way, they're excellent.
	I love them.
	They're wonderful.
	But it's a different training.
	It's more about protocol.
	And that's cheaper.
	And the insurance companies love that.
	And the government loves that.
	So here we go.
	Now, I don't want to get the political part of this.
	Are you optimistic for the future of America?
	This whole thing is created.
	I'm getting involved with organizations and delivery systems that are popping up all over the place.
	My son was just texting me about some more of the telemedicine organizations and the wellness company.
	I'm getting involved in fitness.
	Susan made me talk about the...
	V-Shred, this thing, we've lost 15 pounds, and I'm getting involved in all these other things that are popping up, and we're finding there's a hungry market of people who want something different.
	They want this different, doing things on the patient's behalf to make them better and healthier and stay healthy.
	There's an incredible opportunity here if it keeps happening.
	So I'm kind of optimistic about it.
	At least I'm enjoying that.
	I'm enjoying that there are people there ready to hear alternative ways of doing things that are not encumbered, that are more about health and wellness.
	And by the way, even on the sort of supplement side, which I was always very skeptical about, there's some good data on some of this stuff.
	There's some things I'm going to get involved with that I'm like, oh my God, this data looks fantastic.
	I'm taking these things myself and giving them to my family because there's stuff happening.
	And this has accelerated all that, I think.
	And so there's a reason to be somewhat optimistic about this.
	Now, I just forgot the last question I was going to ask.
	Hold on.
	I'm going to look for a question to distract me from this.
	I don't want to get political.
	Politics ruins everything.
	Oh, that was the question.
	I'm sorry.
	Oh, ruining everything?
	No, well, I'm ruining everything.
	Have you felt backlash?
	I mean, you're sort of...
	I won't say...
	It's not milquetoast and it's not fence-sitting.
	You're more circumspect and...
	I'm just doing what I've always had.
	There's nothing different about what I'm doing.
	But have you been blackballed outcasts?
	Oh my god, yes, of course.
	And my favorite criticism, I used to admire you.
	It's like, really?
	That type of guilt and shame is...
	It's like, how fucking grandiose do you fucking have to be to say something like that to anybody?
	I would never say that to somebody.
	I used to admire you, but now, oh my God, you've changed.
	I have not changed one bit.
	That's the thing.
	I'm doing what I've always done, but now it's really being called for on an acute razor's edge to use what I've developed over 40 years.
	And I just know what I know what I know.
	I've done what I've always done this way.
	And it's been a pressed in steel to this point.
	I can be wrong about things, for sure, and I'm prepared to be wrong all the time, but there's some things I know, having been through so much, that I need to share with the world.
	I used to admire you so much.
	To me, one of the great, aside from dividing everybody into impressors and impressing, which now how I kind of understand the left's point of view on that, once you understand that frame, it helps you understand what they're saying.
	But, oh shit, that was the other thing I was going to say about...
	It was on the issue of being blacklisted.
	Admiring somebody.
	Grandiose you have to be to say you once admired someone.
	One of the great viruses of our time is grandiose caring.
	I cares!
	I cares!
	That is narcissism and grandiosity full on.
	I was at a presentation recently and there was a comedian up there and he'd been a drug addict forever and he used a term that was derogatory.
	Consider derogatory.
	It used to be axiom, just routinely used, but it was about a gay and lesbian transgender person.
	It was just a term that we don't use anymore.
	I'm trying to think.
	Are you allowed to?
	I'm not going to say it.
	I'm not going to say it because it misses the point.
	Well, and also someone's going to snip and clip it and just play that over.
	I'll try to figure it out afterwards.
	Okay.
	Somebody behind me was like, Boo!
	Boo!
	You're just screaming at the guy.
	And I thought, wow.
	If you actually cared about the language that guy used, you would go up to them after the event and go, hey man, I know you were using drugs that whole time, but we just don't use that word anymore.
	I really offended.
	It hits wrong.
	I know you don't want to be seen that way.
	And maybe we change that.
	That's caring.
	That's caring.
	This is not caring.
	That's pure narcissism.
	But are we not living through a time, and I don't want to use the term flippantly, Narcissism.
	Well, not institutionalized, but rather just democratized mental illness where we are actually either not diagnosing or actually fomenting what would otherwise be clinically diagnosable mental disorders.
	Or not treating, valorizing.
	What time is it?
	It's 1.37 and we can't, I don't know how much longer we can go.
	So here's the deal.
	We are conditioning people to have what would otherwise be diagnosable mental illnesses, in my humble opinion, as a neurotic.
	And a hypochondriac.
	Well, I mean, you've got to be careful with the terms we toss around, right?
	There's depression and anxiety that...
	What was the famous phrase that Freud said when he arrived in the United States?
	A reporter put a microphone in his head, in his face and said, Dr. Freud, what do you help to establish here in the United States?
	He goes, well, well, I'd like to understand the difference between...
	Serious mental illness and ordinary misery.
	Ordinary misery is part of life.
	And it's important to experience ordinary misery.
	And a component of ordinary misery, depending on our genetic makeup, creates anxiety and depression and grief and maybe some acting out behaviors and maybe some alcohol use and smoking some weed and things, all kinds of things.
	Still ordinary misery.
	Until it becomes protracted and it affects functioning.
	And that is where I really think on a diagnosable scale we are at a place where it is...
	Impeding functioning, proper functioning in a civil society.
	Well, but hold on now.
	So, okay.
	So, I watched the narcissistic turn happen in real time.
	It's another thing I experienced in real time.
	So, when I first got to the psychiatric hospital and I was moonlighting, I would always read the admission sheets and the diagnosis codes for the personality disorders was all over the place.
	I saw all kinds of personalities.
	And somewhere in the late 80s, it started zeroing in on cluster B. Narcissist, borderline sociopath.
	Particularly borderline at that point.
	And then by the 90s, it was all cluster B. Only.
	And primarily narcissistic disorders.
	I watched it happen in real time.
	And I could kind of see it.
	And I thought, oh, that's all the trauma.
	It's all the childhood trauma, which are called narcissistic injuries.
	What was the childhood trauma of the 60s, 70s, 80s?
	Child abuse?
	What was going on in society?
	I think it was two things simultaneously.
	The devaluing of families and marriage.
	So there's a lot of abandonment, chaos, divorce, all this stuff.
	And kids are fine.
	They're resilient.
	They're like little adults.
	Screwed up kids.
	A lot of substance use came in during that period.
	Think of the 60s, the summer of love and stuff.
	A lot of drug abuse in family systems.
	And then the sexual revolution where, hey, kids are just little sexual beings too.
	If they want sex from an adult, that's on the kid.
	You still hear that shit from NAMM.
	We're hearing that more and more these days.
	That is disgusting stuff.
	And so I saw it come.
	Then I started thinking, I wrote a book about narcissism because it was so pervasive.
	It was just everywhere.
	And we did some studies on narcissism, and lo and behold, it's up, it's up, it's up.
	And I started thinking, God, where in history has there ever been this much childhood trauma and this much narcissism?
	And the only thing I could come up with was pre-revolutionary France.
	And I actually wanted to write a chapter about it in my book on narcissism, and they told me it was too speculative.
	And I kept saying that there's going to be, when there's a lot of narcissism, There's a lot of aggression flying out through the mob, and the mob will form and focus its aggression and scapegoat so they don't tear each other apart.
	That's how narcissists work in a mob.
	We might be witnessing a lot of that in real time currently.
	So I kept saying, they're going to be guillotines.
	The guillotines are coming out.
	I know it.
	They're going to come out.
	I didn't know anything about social media.
	I didn't know about cancel culture.
	That's the modern guillotine.
	And I will tell you, because I've become obsessed with revolutionary France because of this, there's a mathematical certainty that when you bring out a guillotine, you will end up on the guillotine.
	That seems to be a mathematical feature of history.
	So prepare yourself, everybody.
	Unless you calm this thing down, it eats everybody.
	Was it Lenin or somebody said?
	The revolution devours its own children?
	Correct.
	And there's the other one which says...
	The members of the party just end up being the last ones on the wall.
	Nobody escapes it.
	There's no question.
	We're seeing it in real time.
	The only question is, when they talk about the fall of Rome...
	I don't like the fall of Rome.
	As an analogy, it's overused and also maybe abused.
	But nonetheless, something happened.
	Something existed after Rome.
	So what happens after the fall of what we refer to as the West now?
	What would be the future of the fallen West?
	I don't know what it looks like, but...
	Well, Michael Malice says it's going to be 50 independent states in this country.
	Yeah, well, that's...
	Have you interviewed him yet?
	Oh, yeah.
	No, I have not interviewed Michael, but I met him a couple of times.
	I read the book.
	I read The White Pill.
	My God, The White Pill.
	And I'm reading a Lennon biography, and you sort of see where that all came from.
	It's like, oh, my God.
	Well, when I ran into him, I said, oh, The White Pill, your White Pill was a troll.
	The White Pill was that 80 million people have to die horrible, horrible deaths in order for people to realize the right and the wrong.
	I don't think we need to do that.
	The balkanization of America could be, you know, the state divorce maybe.
	I wonder.
	I don't see it.
	I think the only people that ever say that don't understand the logic of the Civil War.
	The federal government, we've lost track of it.
	Federal government was for one reason.
	To form a more perfect union of the states.
	It is a collaborative contract.
	It's not a contract that can be unilaterally broken.
	If it's broken by one, the whole must bring them back into alignment.
	That's why Abraham Lincoln always called them the Confederate states, so-called, because they were in insurrection.
	Andrew Jackson had a, what do they call it, crisis, a secession crisis.
	He was the first to invoke that logic, that there's no ability within our constitutional framework for a state to leave the Union.
	It's an insurrection at that point, and it must be put down.
	And anyone who talks about the balkanization doesn't know that history so well.
	Well, I mean, it might just be more of a de facto where you're going to end up having the people who are fed up moving from California to Florida.
	That's going to happen.
	And then there's going to be economic catastrophes in certain areas.
	Well, someone actually just said, how could the richest state in the union have the most homelessness?
	Because they created laws that make it impossible for us to treat them.
	I could take care of this in six months.
	No problem.
	I know exactly where to put them.
	I know how to build the program.
	I know how to staff it.
	I know exactly what we would do.
	We would save six deaths a day in L.A. County.
	We would save.
	I know exactly what to do.
	It's not hard.
	You need to first get doctors and nurses involved in their open-air hospitals.
	Those are hospitals they're running, and they're having social workers run the hospital.
	They're not trained for that.
	It's just disgusting.
	Oh, my God, it's so disturbing.
	Those are my patients out on the street.
	Have you thought about ever getting into politics if you would ever wish that?
	I came very close to running for governor during the...
	Recall of Newsom.
	I'm glad I didn't.
	Susan is saying no.
	She's an absolute no, no, no.
	I just keep saying I've got to do something.
	I feel like I've got to do something.
	My something now is just getting involved in these telemedicines and different ways of delivering health care and stuff.
	That's my solution.
	I don't think good people survive in politics.
	I think you're right.
	However, I went so far as talking to Arnold Schwarzenegger about this.
	It was one of the best conversations I've ever had with anybody in my entire life.
	What an extraordinary man.
	He's a good person.
	He survived politics.
	You may not agree with him.
	Nobody made a mistake about screw your freedoms and stay at home and smoke your cigars.
	Don't make the mistake of thinking that makes him a bad person.
	He's a wonderful person.
	Have you watched his documentary?
	No.
	Please watch the documentary.
	It's three hours.
	Please watch it.
	I'm going to ask nothing else of you.
	Oh, no.
	A thousand percent.
	It's on Netflix.
	And I hold a grudge, but that's not an unforgivable mistake.
	Like...
	Other mistakes from politicians are unfamiliar.
	And by the way, I don't think he would have sustained that the way it was sustained in Florida, in California rather.
	But also, people at some point in time become victims of their own, I don't use the word privilege, but victims of their own circumstance.
	For him, it wasn't so bad and just stay at home, but you try to lock three kids in a house and it's not the same world.
	Look, I know, and I understand what it was doing to people.
	I saw it.
	You know, the other thing I saw was DeSantis' symposium he held with the Nobel laureates and stuff down here to try to decide whether he should lock down.
	And I watched that whole symposium, and Bhattacharya was one of the people that presented it, and he said, you know, DeSantis devoured all the literature we gave him.
	He understood it.
	He asked great questions.
	He made a decision based on what we were telling him.
	And we had a discourse, a scientific discourse, and he made his call.
	And it was the right call.
	And the stupidity which drives me nuts is, you know, the Gavin Newsom say, California did X percentage better in terms of death.
	Like, oh, even if it's true, Florida was in the middle, California was three up.
	What did you sacrifice for that marginal benefit that's not going to be generationally suffering down the line?
	People are running away screaming from California.
	They can't get out.
	I would get out if I could.
	I would go to Tennessee.
	I would go to Florida.
	Well, I mean, Texas is right.
	Texas, I do spend a lot of time out of California, so that's probably why I'm okay with it.
	But, you know, one of the places I spend a lot of time is New York City, right?
	And it's very similar to New York, to California, except one thing.
	There's one thing very different about New York.
	You get so much for the taxes you pay.
	You see it.
	You use it.
	It's all around you.
	California is the opposite.
	You get nothing for the taxes you pay.
	What you get in New York for the taxes you pay is a well-run...
	I love it.
	I went back once since COVID.
	It was when they had the vaccine passports.
	I'm, again, fearing everything.
	I didn't feel safe.
	I don't think I want to go back.
	It's different.
	Plus, I need green and fresh air.
	California, I see for what you...
	Waste in taxes you make up for in natural beauty.
	And that's how they get away with it.
	Well, there's no question.
	It's the most geographically beautiful state.
	That's how they get away with it.
	Newsom was on Adam Carolla's show, and he was like, where are you going to go?
	Where are people supposed to go?
	So where else do you get this?
	Utah's beautiful, but I don't know what life in Utah is like.
	He goes, I know a family that packed up and went to Salt Lake City.
	They love it.
	Dude, what's the point you're making?
	They love Salt Lake City.
	They got out of your godforsaken state.
	What are you saying?
	It's beautiful.
	People will deal with the awfulness of the high taxes because it's geologically...
	You have the beach.
	You have the mountains.
	It's amazing.
	But...
	You pay a price.
	My kids have to move.
	My 30-year-olds can't possibly live there.
	When I was at a gas station and in the time I couldn't figure out how to open up the gas thing and I'm getting approached by people who are clearly on drugs and it felt like a zombie town and I didn't feel good.
	It is a zombie town.
	Dr. Drew, we've stayed longer than we can here.
	Way long.
	Okay, remind everyone again one more time.
	Hold on.
	Okay, so here's what I want you to do.
	All of your stuff, you've got to be sure.
	October 28th, San Jose Convention Center in San Jose.
	Me, RFK Jr., Asim Malhotra, Shiva, what's her last name?
	I don't know her.
	She's a food...
	I don't know her first.
	It's Dr. Vandana Shiva.
	Vandana Shiva, who's a captured...
	The family food's been captured too.
	I want to hear what she has to say.
	I want to hear it.
	I may not agree with them, but I think you've got to hear what these people...
	It's important that we hear the canceled.
	My God, I've learned so much talking to people that other people don't agree with.
	That's what science is.
	That's what human interaction is about.
	I've been talking to people you agree with.
	It's a discourse.
	Look, Galileo was a misinformation advocate.
	He was seen by the Spanish Inquisition to be dangerous.
	He was saying that God created a universe that didn't revolve around the earth.
	This man must be exiled.
	Galileo.
	Copernicus.
	Einstein.
	Until the Copenhagen synthesis.
	This is some nut from Switzerland.
	He's some nutty clerk.
	Some nut with some crazy idea.
	Who is this asshole?
	Today he would have been silenced.
	This is anathema to how science is done.
	It's always the people that are on the fringes that bring the new ideas in.
	You don't have to agree with them just because they say them.
	You can listen to them respectfully, by the way.
	You don't have to attack them.
	And then move on.
	Move on to something else.
	By the way, the more you suppress that, the more people's paranoia goes up.
	35 years on a site cash cost, everybody.
	You want to create paranoia?
	You suppress these positions.
	But people believe that that's exactly why they're doing it.
	It is so absolute distrust and discord in the entire system because a divided population is easy to govern over.
	Correct.
	I'm not going there.
	So, October 28th, be there at the San Jose Convention Center.
	12 Pacific Time in San Jose.
	Tickets are at drdrew.com forward slash...
	R-F-M.
	Romeo Foxtrot Mama.
	It's Restore Food and Medicine?
	What is it?
	Reclaiming Food and Medicine.
	R-F-M.
	Reclaiming Food and Medicine.
	It's Dr. Drew.com forward slash R-F-M.
	Then in New York City at about 8 o 'clock.
	November 6th at 8.30 p.m. at the Chelsea Music Hall with Kat Timph.
	That's T-I-M-P-F.
	Jimmy Fiala and the Gutfeld Show.
	Tickets at Dr. Drew.com forward slash NY Comedy.
	Dr. Drew.com forward slash nycomedy.
	And do check out Dr. Drew.tv and Dr. Drew.com.
	Dr. Drew.tv especially for the streaming show.
	And I will try to get Jim Norton.
	Jim, if you're listening, I'm going to get you for the Chelsea Market Show.
	I love that guy.
	Dr. Drew, thank you very much.
	We have another hour drive back.
	I'll ask you about my personal medical questions on the way.
	Thank you very much for coming.
	I'm happy to do it.
	I'm going to have a stroke because this stuff upsets me so much.
	No, it's...
	But now I've...
	Everyone says it's a good thing.
	I've gotten to the point where I will go to a doctor only when I'm hunched over in...
	Well, that's always good.
	You come to us enough, we'll hurt you.
	Because that's, like I told my dad, like, just stay away from the doctor unless you need us.
	You have to come to us.
	And going...
	Medicines are not going to make your life better.
	They're only going to help you when it's not ordinary misery and it's a dangerous condition that's affecting your functioning.
	And we can maybe...
	Restore you back to something like health.
	But not without risk.
	Always risk.
	Everything we do.
	Everything.
	Amazing.
	All right.
	Everybody, I don't know what the schedule for the week is, but there'll be other good stuff coming.
	Dr. Drew, thank you very much.
	Everyone out there, you know where to find him.
	See you on the interwebs and we're going to end this.
	On the interwebs?
	On the interwebs is my word for the internet.
	Oh, by the way, let me just say something before we close it all off.
	It's such a pleasure to meet Viva Fry.
	It's one of the reasons I came down here is to see him in person because I'm just inspired by you walking the walk and not just talking the talk.
	I lost my mind.
	My filter is done and the world has gotten...
	Too crazy to stay silent.
	I called Gad sad yesterday because he was being threatened and stuff.
	I feel like people need to kind of stick together and meet each other and enjoy each other and share ideas.
	Keep this thing going forward because there's something wrong.
	We're sick.
	We're not well.
	It's a society.
	We have problems as a society.
	We're being fragmented into ever smaller and smaller pieces of shrapnel.
	Let's get it together.
	It's broken glass.
	It's a broken glass and you can't walk.
	Those of you who are at me for vaccinating my elderly patients to my best judgment, let's not not be friends.
	You know what I mean?
	We can still listen to each other.
	I'll still listen to you.
	You listen to me.
	I'm happy to do that.
	I say focus on the real enemy, for lack of a better word, but the real problem.
	The media, guys.
	Watch the media.
	They're brainwashing you.
	The media with the government.
	That is the infrastructure.
	It's brainwashing.
	Read your history.
	Read your history.
	This has happened before.
	Many times.
	And we'll see how it ends this time.
	Dr. Drew, thank you very much.

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