Dr. Drew Goes Scorched Earth: Newsom, Medical Lies, & The Homeless Addiction Crisis

Summary

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Keeping It Real with Jillian Michaels

Episode Summary: Dr. Drew Goes Scorched Earth – Newsom, Medical Lies, & The Homeless Addiction Crisis

Date: December 14, 2025
Host: Jillian Michaels
Guest: Dr. Drew Pinsky

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Overview

In this unfiltered, wide-ranging discussion, Jillian Michaels sits down with Dr. Drew Pinsky—one of America’s best-known addiction medicine specialists and medical commentators. Together, they tackle some of today's most volatile topics: the distortion of public health policy, vaccine controversies (focusing on hepatitis B and COVID-19 for children), hormone replacement therapy, and the entrenched crisis of homelessness and addiction in California. Dr. Drew draws on decades of experience and candidly discusses the political, ethical, and systemic failures perpetuating these crises—calling out propaganda and misplaced incentives along the way.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Reality, Propaganda, and Medicine (00:07–08:24)

• Dr. Drew’s Worldview Shaken

  • Dr. Drew opens by reflecting on how much propaganda and external agenda have shaped his—and the public's—understanding of reality, especially during COVID-19.
  • “I’m at the point now where I’m starting to think most everything about my sense of reality…was colored by someone…with an agenda, who shaped my reality my entire life.” – Dr. Drew (05:00)

• Skepticism is Necessary

  • Both Jillian and Dr. Drew agree on the importance of distrust and critical thinking in an era flooded by contradictory messages across media and social platforms.
  • “It is healthy not to trust anything right now.” – Dr. Drew (07:32)

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2. Vaccine Controversies: Hepatitis B and COVID-19 for Children (09:39–29:00)

Hepatitis B Vaccine Debate

• Origins and Justification

  • The hepatitis B vaccine was added to the CDC's schedule in 1991 to prevent chronic infection and related fatalities, but Dr. Drew underscores historical context: the concern was mainly for mother-to-child transmission in specific at-risk populations, not universal application.
  • “All that people are asking for is the opportunity to make a decision when to get the hepatitis B vaccine when it’s appropriate…not have it mandated on day one of life.” – Dr. Drew (22:19)

• Modern Testing

  • He critiques the “mad doctor” mentality: if a mother has hepatitis B today and it goes undetected, it’s malpractice—modern screening makes universal, immediate newborn vaccination less justifiable in the US.

• Risk, Reward, and Blind Spots

  • Says the original studies on safety for neonates were only five days long.
  • “Why do we deal with [vaccines] differently than other biological agents we give children? …It is the public health influence…we need to protect the herd.” – Dr. Drew (33:18)

COVID-19 Vaccines and Black Box Warnings

• Potential Black Box Warning for mRNA Vaccines in Children

  • They discuss unconfirmed reports (from Alex Berenson, cited by Megyn Kelly) that the FDA may add a black box warning to COVID mRNA vaccines for children due to possible links to deaths.
  • Dr. Drew’s key point: The PREP Act grants broad immunity to organizations that mandated vaccines, removing liability for harm.
  • “It’s the PREP act…you need to understand that has been in place for a while and needs to be undone.” – Dr. Drew (17:43)

• Polarization of Vaccine Debate

  • Jillian laments how nuance is lost: “...you’ve got the group that [say] they’re all bad, and then...they’re all good, and neither side actually wants to have this conversation.” (19:53)

• Clinical Considerations

  • Drew differentiates between the biological environment of newborns and older children or adults, emphasizing the increased risk of introducing substances to the developing immune system.
  • “The closest biological tissue in your body to the brain is your immune system...during development, this infinitely complex [system]…we are prone to error.” – Dr. Drew (31:00)

Vaccine Risk-Benefit: Case Study of Whooping Cough

• Jillian shares her experience with severe adult pertussis, arguing the case for targeted vaccination.
  • Dr. Drew supports “selective, timely” vaccination strategies, rather than blanket mandates.

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3. Medical System Failures & Empowerment (38:21–46:11)

• Loss of Personalized Medicine

  • Drew bemoans the algorithmic nature of modern medicine and the reduction in physician-patient relationships.
  • “When medicine is so algorithmic, there’s no caring physician there…It’s much more easy to just follow an algorithm.” – Dr. Drew (37:47)

• Nurse Practitioners and PAs

  • While praising many extenders for genuinely caring, he warns patients to be aware of their tendency to stick to strict protocols.
  • “I’m seeing [NPs and PAs] think more carefully than my peers, which is a terrible indictment.” – Dr. Drew (40:57)

• Patient Agency

  • Jillian: “You got to be the commander of your own ship here. You just do.” (39:09)

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4. The Value and Politics of Hormone Replacement Therapy (46:11–55:15)

• Undoing the Women’s Health Initiative Mistakes

  • Dr. Drew strongly supports early hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for women, stating medical authorities catastrophically harmed women’s health by misrepresenting HRT risks.
  • “It was my experience when I was mandated to stop hormone replacement therapy…I watched women fall apart.” – Dr. Drew (48:08)
  • He asserts HRT reduces cardiovascular disease, mortality, bone fractures, and dementia risks.
  • Critiques the continued stigma, including testosterone, especially in women.

• Political Context: Newsom’s Veto & Halle Berry

  • Halle Berry’s viral criticism of Gov. Newsom for twice vetoing the Menopause Care Equity Act becomes a flashpoint for the politicization of women’s health.
  • Dr. Drew: “Are you trying to ask me to make sense of Gavin Newsom? That is not something I’m capable of.” (55:15)

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5. The Homeless Industrial Complex: California’s Crisis (57:19–76:42)

• Medical Neglect by Design

  • Dr. Drew explains how California’s homelessness crisis is exacerbated by policies that make it nearly impossible to intervene in severe psychiatric/addiction cases.
  • “All my staff were recovering opiate addicts…they were thriving and continue to thrive…I treated people all the time for opiate addiction quite successfully. There was never a problem.” – Dr. Drew (58:22)

• Legal and Policy Failures

  • Dr. Drew rails against the “Housing First” model and explains how Prop 47 and related laws have decriminalized the behaviors associated with addiction, removing the leverage needed to compel treatment.
  • “By downgrading drug possession and theft…California removes the stick from the carrot and the stick approach…destroy[ing] the intervention tool.” – Jillian (67:13)

• Corruption and Waste

  • Billions of dollars are funneled to a “billion-dollar ecosystem” that profits from perpetuating homelessness, with little oversight and a perverse incentive to increase not reduce homelessness.
  • Drew: “It’s disgusting. It’s killing people. A thousand people…in the streets of Los Angeles die.” (65:55, 66:13)
  • Jillian highlights the outrageous per-unit costs for homeless housing ($600–800k each) and exposes Project Home Key and other headline scandals.

• Therapeutic Nihilism

  • Many social service providers are “not medically trained…they don’t understand what they’re doing.” Fails to address medical and addiction needs—the very causes of homelessness.

• Personal Experience with “Gel Man Amnesia”

  • Dr. Drew recounts being misrepresented in the Los Angeles Times and how credentials and perspectives that challenge the status quo are vilified. (74:19–76:42)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It is healthy not to trust anything right now.”
  — Dr. Drew (07:32)

• “The scientific method is rational uncertainty trying to ascend to an approximation of the truth. Humbly understanding that we'll never get there… But we are in a weird time when everything is certain and that’s not science.”
  — Dr. Drew (29:21)

• “When medicine is so algorithmic, there’s no caring physician there…It’s much more easy to just follow an algorithm.”
  — Dr. Drew (37:47)

• “Are you trying to ask me to make sense of Gavin Newsom? That is not something I’m capable of.”
  — Dr. Drew (55:15)

• “There’s a power in place that should not be or a motivation—money—that is going in the wrong direction. We have to unravel this. It’s disgusting. It’s killing people. A thousand a year in the streets of Los Angeles die.”
  — Dr. Drew (66:13)

• “We are in a time of…irrational certitude. The scientific method is rational uncertainty.”
  — Dr. Drew (29:21)

• “You got to be the commander of your own ship here.”
  — Jillian Michaels (39:09)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:07 – Dr. Drew’s bio and intro
• 05:00 – Discussion on propaganda, perception, and reality
• 09:39 – Vaccine controversy: Kennedy, vaccine schedule changes, and blind spots
• 17:43 – The PREP Act and immunity for mandates during COVID
• 22:19 – Hepatitis B vaccine: history, risk vs. benefit, and real statistics
• 30:34 – Immune system complexity in children versus adults
• 37:47 – Shift from personalized to algorithmic medicine
• 46:54 – Hormone replacement therapy, politics, and the Women’s Health Initiative
• 53:22 – Newsom’s veto, Halle Berry’s reaction, and political fallout
• 58:22 – The “homeless industrial complex” and the treatment of addiction
• 67:13 – Legal consequences hampering addiction intervention
• 72:07 – Housing costs and the economic incentive to perpetuate homelessness
• 74:19 – Dr. Drew’s experience with media misrepresentation
• 77:20 – Final thoughts on agency and patient empowerment

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Closing Thoughts

Dr. Drew and Jillian urge listeners to stay curious, empower themselves with information, and fight for nuance and rationality in debates around health, politics, and society. From flawed public health policies to systemic corruption and the decay of individualized care, their message is clear: take agency, vet your sources, and be relentless in the pursuit of truth and effective action.

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Where to Find Dr. Drew

Dr. Drew’s live streaming show:

• Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2 PM PT | Wednesdays, 4 PM PT
• Interviews with controversial and forward-thinking medical experts
• Social: DrDrew.com, YouTube, Instagram, and podcast platforms

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“In an era of irrational certitude, we need radical critical thinking and humility. And patient agency is our only defense.”
—Paraphrased from Dr. Drew Pinsky

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Transcript

[Jillian Michaels]

Doctor Drew Pinsky has been on the front lines of medicine and media for over three decades.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

I'm an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry, medicine, pediatrics and have taught all in for decades. I was a clinical director of a large treatment program. I'm board double board certified in medicine and addiction medicine. I have a lifetime certification from the American Board of Addiction Medicine.

[Jillian Michaels]

And today he's covering the full spectrum of medical controversy in the news from the hepatitis B vaccine being pulled off the CDC's childhood schedule.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

It's mad doc. Doctors are supposed to. It's when doctors don't consider risk reward. Then you have a mad doctor.

[Jillian Michaels]

To the exploding conversation around a potential black box warning on Covid shots for kids and teens.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Show me the reward and show me the risk and let's balance it out. Do you know that public health does not is not tasked with contemplating risk. Do no harm does not exist in the public health mandate.

[Jillian Michaels]

We also get into the political firestorm surrounding Halle Berry's public attack on Gavin Newsom after he vetoed the Menopause Care Equity act for a second time. And of course, why denying the dramatic benefits of HRT for both men and women in midlife is a travesty.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

I would argue that what they did with the Women's Health Initiative so profoundly, profoundly destroyed women's bone health profoundly that this conversation needs to be in a different universe relative to the Women's Health Initiative. With public health again gleefully delivered and dropped on the heads of women and are only slowly crawling back.

[Jillian Michaels]

And then finally, we go deep on the crisis in California's backyard. The homeless industrial complex.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

There's a power in place that that should not be or a motivation money that is going in the wrong direction. And we have to unravel this. It's disgusting. It's killing people. A thousand people. What is it? A thousand a year. In the streets of Los Angeles. Die.

[Jillian Michaels]

Dr. Drew breaks down exactly how California has built a system that's designed to profit from bureaucracy while keeping addicts sick, untreated and dying on the streets. Here we go. Keeping it Real with Jillian Michaels. What are you listening to?

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Is a recording of the. I gotta find it here. Hold on. Yeah. 200 years of Le Figaro, the magazine and how it interfered with some of the great moments in French history. Nothing obscure about that.

[Jillian Michaels]

This is what you do in your spare time.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

This is what I do in the mornings. And right now. See, I'm off base here. Let me come over. Okay? I'm really desperate for, like, stimulation because Scott Adams, I don't know if you listen to Scott Adams at all, but he is in the hospital with advanced prostate cancer. I'm trying to distract myself with other things. So you should listen to him. If he. If he makes it back from this, which I think he should. You got to check him out. Seven a.m. pacific Time, every morning. Seven. Seven days a week.

[Jillian Michaels]

What does he talk about?

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

He talks about the news through the perspective. I didn't know we were going to. Are we rolling on that? We are.

[Jillian Michaels]

No, you're rolling. Yeah. Like, I'll. I'll find a natural entrance here, but.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Actual friends just chatting like we normally do. But anyway, he. He does this. He's a hypnotist, and he created the cartoon. I'm blanking on the name of the cartoon. The bald guy with the glasses in the workplace. Help me, everybody.

[Jillian Michaels]

Hold on. I will go to the Internet. Who is the bald guy with the Dilberg?

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Dilbert. He created Dilbert. He's the Dilbert cartoonist. I don't think of him that way because he's a friend and he does all this other stuff. But he'd been doing this. I caught him maybe about. In the first Trump presidency, and I was trying to get my head around Trump. I couldn't understand what was going on. The first Trump presidency was a mystery to me.

[Jillian Michaels]

Yeah, me too.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

And. And Scott goes, no, no, no, no. This guy's using persuasion techniques that are well established and are well sort of ironed out. And let me explain to you what he's doing. And it became all less. More sensible to me and sort of digestible, and I could just hear more what was going on rather than being like, hey, don't stop. Don't talk like that. Stop, stop. And. And he's just been really reviewing the news ever since through the perspective of essentially propaganda. Like, what is propaganda? What isn't? And God knows, we've been through this period of inundation with propaganda where. Jillian, I'm at the point now where I'm starting to think that most everything about my sense of reality, other than when I applied the scientific method properly and carefully, everything else was colored by someone who. I'm just going to call Don Draper. Some Madison Avenue something, some persuasion something, somebody who had a agenda, who shaped my reality my entire life, whether it was eating Sugar Flakes in the morning or Frosted Flakes or whether it was watching all the Family at night, Whatever it was, it was all under the influence of people who had a. A point of view and a thing that we're trying to Persuade with their, Their, Their stuff. And I thought, wow, we, we are more affected by this. And it's gone completely out of whack now. Now it's gone completely to the moon with this stuff. And Covid, of course, was the. Was the prime example of where propaganda just went. Can I swear, please? Fucking apeshit went fucking sideways. So that's where I've been ever since that. But I didn't realize how much of my perception is affected by, by all that. So I'm trying to be very, very careful in my thinking.

[Jillian Michaels]

It's definitely something that happens on Both sides though, 100%.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

I'm not pointing fingers anywhere.

[Jillian Michaels]

I know you would be the last.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

My version of reality is under the influence of a bunch of Don Drapers who, if you watch Mad Men, is not exactly the most ethical, of course, of operators, right?

[Jillian Michaels]

Of course not.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Why should they be? They're only interested in getting their across. So.

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay, doc, I, I didn't plan on discussing this with you, but since we're here, I don't feel like I can trust anything. Some of it just seems so insane. And I'm not talking right now about like, legacy media or, you know, government institutions. I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about all of this shenanigans that we're seeing online now, like.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Right.

[Jillian Michaels]

It is so crazy and inverted.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

It's literally why I. Other than trying to exercise my brain. The reason I started working on French is I noticed after I had a bad long Covid in 2021, and I learned Greek because we were going to Greek that summer, and it helped. It cleared my fog, it cleared my brain fog. So I thought, oh, I. I should wear. I should get my French together. So I started really working on French language. But I do it now, not so much for that as to look at what their perceptions are and how their perceptions are distorted by their media and their politics and their world. And it helps me see through the prism of my own propaganda world. And yeah, it's. It's everywhere and it's. I would argue it is healthy not to trust anything right now. I don't know if it's always that way or always will be that way, but right now I would argue everything you read, I mean, one of the things I'm concerned about for. I. I hope I don't speak on your behalf with unjust cause, but I think you and I, we read stuff in social media, we look at it and we feel like we're informed and, And I look at maybe 40 of the country that's never been exposed to any of what I'm looking at. And I think, well, how much of what I'm looking at is propaganda? How much is actually accurate? And if it's really accurate, why don't. How can this 40% not see it? But there we are.

[Jillian Michaels]

My God. I think part of the not seeing it is the tribal piece. So, you know, you, you want to be validated in your position. So you read something, it validates your position and you don't look into it further, which is a real exceptional shame. I was watching this YouTube guy, Dr. Mike. I'm sure you're familiar with this guy. And he. A jubilee and one, you know, and he seems to be. I didn't, I didn't see much of it. I saw a few clips, and he seems to be against Kennedy. And I thought, I'm going to listen to this. And he, he made a few good points with regard to some of Kennedy's lawsuits and the fact that Kennedy hadn't fully divested from the lawsuits he had prior to becoming head of HHS and he'd given the benefits of one of these big lawsuits to his son.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

That is, that is the main complaint I hear about him from people who don't trust him. And I sort of don't care if he's entitled to that. He should have that. But people see that as an ethical violation. I don't. Maybe it's my own problem, but I'm interested in what he's doing for Melanie, you know, But I have heard that complaint.

[Jillian Michaels]

Well, you know, that is the only thing this guy said that I thought I did not know that. And the reason that I would arguably take an issue with it is because people question his motives now.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Jillian Michaels]

So it's like when he's doing things like removing hepatitis B from the schedule, which I want to talk to you about, it's like, well, you know, he has an interest in crashing these pharmaceutical companies. So now the conversation that we've been having for a decade about hepatitis B is compromised, despite the fact that it arguably is one of the best things we can do for newborns. But he did say, and here's. Here's something that it was a bit frustrating for me. He got into a conversation about fluoride with a young person who was debating him. And the part that the kid debating him didn't know is that the stuff going into our water is literally toxic waste.

[Alex Berenson]

It's.

[Jillian Michaels]

It's not pharmaceutical grade fluoride. And that should have been before we even get into whether or not you should ingest fluoride and how much fluoride is safe and whether you should be medicating, you know, an entire population of hundreds of millions of people when they could take fluoride tablets if they wanted to before you can even. It's not even pharmaceutical grade fluoride. It's getting scraped out of a smokestack. And I thought, okay, does this guy not know that, or is he just, you know, a big pharma shill? Cause I find it unlikely that he doesn't know that. But of course the kid didn't know that. And at the same time, I didn't know that Kennedy hadn't fully divested. And I thought, wow, that's a big blind spot for me. I'm surprised I didn't know that.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

And the problem it creates is exactly what you're pointing out. It causes people to question his motivation when he's doing other things. And okay, that's a legitimate concern. I get it. And let's see if he can square that circle in some way. I don't know, circle that square, whatever it is. But, but just the fluoride thing, it really goes at this basic problem I'm having, which is the, the, the infinite distance between medicine and public health and the free society America was attempting to create and this centralized authority around public health again. So let's look at fluoride. Fluoride. My understanding of the primary motivation was for bone health. Correct. Am I getting that right? That you want to reduce osteopenia, osteoporosis, and bone stability as we age?

[Jillian Michaels]

Is that accurate document? I think that somehow they noticed, I don't know, I can't remember. I actually did a whole segment on this, that if you, that there was a population like, I don't know, 100 years ago somewhere in America where there was a high amount of fluoride in the water and they had better outcome with regard to cavities in oral health. But this is before tooth toothbrushing. This is before tooth fluoride toothpaste. This is before proper oral care. And then it seems to me from everything I've researched, the benefits come from topical application, not necessarily ingestion. And the argument for ingestion was, well, if you ingest it, then it will come out in the saliva and it will coat the teeth.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

But let's, let's give it, let's posit effect of ingesting fluoride. Let's just accept that even though it's in question let's just accept it argument. I have not noticed that people's bone health or teeth health is vastly superior because of 300 million people being exposed to this. In fact, I would argue that what they did with the Women's Health Initiative so profoundly destroyed women's bone health profoundly, that this conversation needs to be in a different universe relative to the Women's Health Initiative, with public health again gleefully delivered and dropped on the heads of women and are only slowly crawling back. You know, Doc, I risk reward in all situations. Show me the reward and show me the risk and let's balance it out. Do you know that public health does not is not tasked with contemplating risk. Do no harm does not exist in the public health mandate. Which is why Francis Collins can stand up publicly and go, yeah, we didn't worry about what the consequence of school closure or mask. We're just going to stop that virus. It's like, are you kidding me? That that interview was the most despicable, outrageous it should be in the historical annals as how it's mad doctor shit. Doctors are supposed to. It's when doctors don't consider risk reward, then you have a mad doctor. Then you have something that's motivated out of. I don't know what. Just my will to do good on you regardless of the risk. That is not good. That is how things go bad. And I'm here to tell you, most of what you and I worry about is the public health system run amok. It has got to be leashed in some way. It's got to be collared. And I feel like that's kind of what Bobby's doing, Bobby Kennedy's doing. I mean, I don't know if he thinks about it the way I think about it, but the. The outcome of what he's doing is pulling this back a bit.

[Jillian Michaels]

Well, it. It seems like it. I. Last year, Instagram launched teen accounts, which default all teens into automatic protections for who can contact them and the content they can see. And we'll continue adding new safeguards for teens to help give parents peace of mind, explore teen accounts, automatic protections and all of our ongoing [e-mail] teenaccounts.

[Medical Expert / Pediatrician]

I.

[Jillian Michaels]

Want to show you this clip of Megyn Kelly talking about the fact that she's heard through the grapevine they're going to potentially label Covid vaccines with a black box warning for kids. So, Doc, it seems like this isn't confirmed yet. Take a look.

[Alex Berenson]

Alex Berenson reported this and I have been reliably informed that we are fine to go with this reporting and that this will be borne out in the coming days. His headline is, and it was an exclusive to him, the FDA may add a strict black box warning on the MRNA Covid shots for kids and teens, millions of whom have already been given this thing. A black box warning, he reports the FDA may soon place this warning on the vaccines to alert physicians and parents of their link to childhood deaths. This is the strictest an agency can impose this kind of warning. It's generally the last step they take before forcing a manufacturer to stop selling it. They're also considering an alternative, forcing Moderna and Pfizer to stop selling them to kids and teens, period. The potential move, he reports, follows the FDA's report on Friday that its reviewers had found Covid MRNA jabs killed at least 10 children and adolescents, and likely many more. He said they'd asked the FDA for comment. Waiting to hear back. My sources tell me this safe reporting this, this actually is under consideration and we're going to hear a report confirming this within days from the highest levels. This is an outrage. Chamath. This was forced on us. Every school, including my own, they were expelling boys who would not take the vaccine. That's good guys once they hit 16 and so on.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Thoughts a lot here?

[Jillian Michaels]

Yeah, there's a lot here.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

First of all, let me start with the last part. My reaction to that, which is that if people are not aware of what the PREP act is, you should become aware it is what ultimately gives immunity to all these organizations that mandated, unethically mandated and then harm people with their mandate. They have no liability. We're not talking about the Emergency Use Authorization. It's the PREP act. And you need to understand that has been in place for a while and that needs to be undone. I don't understand why it's still in place. I don't even fully understand what it does, but I know that it takes away the immunity or the the liabilities to anybody who was actively mandating any behaviors during COVID no matter how much how harmful they were. Check out Sasha Latapova if you want to see that topic, her substack or her interviews with me where she goes into that with in great detail. The other thing I would say is there are certain people that have stood out during the COVID debacle that if you choose to attack or doubt their opinions, you do so at your own peril. And Alex Berenson is one of those people. If he is reporting something, I am inclined to say the 85% probability is it's accurate. Not 100%. Nobody's 100%. But Alex Berenson has been years ahead of everybody on everything. He just. He has been spot on on every propagandistic narrative that has harmed people is looked at it, whether it's homelessness or effects of cannabis or COVID vaccine. He has been absolutely. My daughter is several years now sober from cannabis, had a horrible time with it, severe addiction, and she read his book tell your children after she'd been sober about a year and a half, and she was like, why did you tell me, why did you read this book? And I said, I did. You didn't want to hear it. You were in your thing. And that's the problem with. With all of this. The people that are really in it don't want to hear it. So. And I suspect that that's sort of a. An interesting sort of phenomenology that we could apply to the Covidians as well.

[Jillian Michaels]

You know, doc, I find the vaccine conversation to be so polarizing. Like, you've got the group that, you know they're all bad, and then you've got the group that they're all good, and neither side actually wants to have this conversation. I reached out to you the other day about what was going on in the news with hepatitis B and Kennedy removing it from the CDC's vaccine schedule for kids. I was supposed to do a segment on News Nation about this, and they clipped the entire segment after I, like, went to, you know, fact checked everything. And people just don't. They either they're all bad or they're all good. And you and I got into a bit of a nuanced conversation before. I thought I was going to do this with regard to a whooping cough versus a hepatitis B. So first I want to show you CNN and the way they portrayed Kennedy removing hep B from the childhood schedule. You know, a newborn getting a hepatitis B shot on its first day of life. Take a look at this.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Why was this vaccine given to babies in the first place?

[Medical Expert / Pediatrician]

Thank you for asking that, because I think we've kind of forgotten the history of hepatit. So in 1991, the ACIP and the CDC made a universal recommendation. It was not a mandate, it was just a recommendation to give a birth dose of hepatitis B because we were seeing so many kids and teens with chronic hepatitis B. Now it's always been an option for families to talk to their individual pediatrician like I talk to my families, and in some cases choose to delay it. By a few days, a few weeks, or a few months. But what this universal recommendation did was it gave us a huge safety net and it decreased the number of babies that got hepatitis B. It dropped it by 99%. So we went from 16,000 cases a year to less than 20. And when newborns catch hepatitis B from their mom, and in most cases the moms don't know they have it, they have a 90% chance of going on to get this chronic hepatitis B, which is liver failure, liver cancer, and even death. And there is no cure.

[Jillian Michaels]

So, so basically she's saying this was there to protect children from liver failure. And the evil and crazy Kennedy has now taken this away. Can you eviscerate everything that she just said there for our audience?

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

I don't want to eviscerate because if you, if you listen carefully to what she said, she was actually somewhat reasonable. She goes, oh, we delay the vaccine for my kids and my patients. And that's all that people are asking for, is the opportunity to make a decision when to get the hepatitis B vaccine when it's appropriate. And you take that decision with your doctor and you don't have it mandated on day one of life. So. And she said many, many interesting things here that I can refute. So I was around the original research on the hepatitis B vaccine. It was the early 1980s and we were. It was actually my residency director that was doing this research, one of the lead researchers in the world on this. What he was worried about, he was a Chinese gentleman and was worried about mother to child transmission in China and healthcare workers here. That was our only concern. We had no thoughts about other people except those really out risk group. Why? Because when a mother has hepatitis B in this modern era, we know it, if you do not identify hepatitis B in a mother, you would be guilty of malpractice. You have to be talking about someone who got no prenatal care now who has chronic hepatitis B. All, well, IV drug addicts can get it, but even in that group, we're vaccinating them, we're making sure they don't get it. You know, it's less, it's not nearly as pervasive.

[Jillian Michaels]

She's like, it's, you know, so many kids and then said 16,000.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

I'm like less than 20 now. Less than 20. And so where does it come from? So, so it's almost exclusively, and I mean almost exclusively in immigrants from certain regions of Asia where they still have a problem with hepatitis B. And guess what you would do as A practicing physician, if you have a. Somebody's contemplating pregnancy from those regions, is you check their hepatitis screen. And then they go, oh, there's some people that may, they may come into the wind when you haven't detected it. Yeah, well, guess what? If they're in that window, their liver enzymes will likely be elevated. And if their enzymes go up, we're going to test you again. So in this era, it is an insane idea that we have to do it blindly because God knows. So the other problem is they're saying, well, yes, okay, I had a family member resist hepatitis B vaccine. The pediatrician literally said, that kid could get a needle stick in the park. There's no park. The kid doesn't walk. They will talk about the hepatitis B vaccine later. That's fine. But it was just the pediatrician could not, was, could not think. Was not thinking when what doctors don't think, once again, it's a problem. So spurious ideas why they should be getting it. So the main reason that people argue reasonably for it is household transmission in people with chronic hepatitis B. Again, how many people are walking around this country with chronic hepatitis B? Whom? We don't. We have no idea that is the case, right? There must be less than 10. And then how many of those have the requisite level of the E antigen, which is what makes it very infectious? Maybe then 10% of those 10. So maybe there's one person walking around this country that, I mean, I'm being hyperbolic. Admittedly, I may be way, way loose with those numbers. Let's say it's 10,000 walking around that we don't know it. Still only a thousand that could transmit it in their household. And that is then the mandate of the doctor is to do their job. Not that every child born in America should bear that responsibility. 3.6 million with unknown effect on the newborn. The safety testing on newborn was five days, right? Five days. Okay. We don't know, number one, number two. And then they go, well, we've, we've used it everywhere. It seems perfectly safe. No, no, people are questioning because we're not sure these things aren't safe because we are seeing problems in these kids that seem to come from nowhere. Maybe it's the vaccine. Okay, so, so what was the last thing I was going to say about this? God, it gets, it gets crazy on crazy when you really think, oh yeah, she, she. You said moms don't know they have hepatitis B. I don't know that that mother exists in America, maybe in Southeast Asia or something. We Got it. We got a reason to be doing these vaccines. And then day one is weird. This is my last point. Why did we vaccinate? Why did that, that, that protocol develop that she mentioned developed? Because there was frustration with the adult uptake of the hepatitis B vaccine. Not enough adults were taking it to measurably affect the, the infectivity of this virus. And they decided, let's just give it to newborns, right? Because adults are tolerating it so well, which we do. Do not equate the adult vaccine schedule with the infant vaccine schedules. Those are two different biological environments and two different decision matrices. I am all about adult vaccinated. People get weird on that too. I've taken the varicella vaccine. I'm a little weird on flu right now, worried about it. But I will take, I will take and give flu vaccines properly. Properly risk reward, you know, inform patients if I talk to them about what the, what my concerns are. Same thing with COVID I have plenty of COVID patient patients that take boosters still. I'm not sure what we're doing. I discuss it with them. They want to do it. Beautiful. Do it. And here we are, you know, and remember, COVID vaccine does not prevent illness, does not prevent transmission, may for a couple months affected the severity of illness. But in the days of Omicron, nobody's getting severe illness.

[Jillian Michaels]

Right?

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

So what are we doing? And by the way, the vaccines are developed for variants that aren't here, aren't around, right? So.

[Jillian Michaels]

Right.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

And then, then they wave their hands and go, well, it still seems to affect the severity of illness and people getting the current omicron, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, you're not doing the right, you're not doing it. You don't, you're not going enough data to say that. You're just saying that. And so we are in a time of, you know, when science, science has been taken over many times through history by religion, politics, you name it, it has been taken over many times. Wall street, you look no, look no further than Galileo.

[Jillian Michaels]

Right?

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

And the Spanish Inquisition, by the way, was not this out of control, murderous body you imagine. Particularly at the time of Galileo. They were a thoughtful academic bureau who said to Galileo, hey, look, if you're right about heliocentrism, it's really going to change our interpretation of all these biblical stories. And we think those biblical stories are properly interpreted. So we're having trouble with your heliocentrism. Settle down, dude. Be quiet for a little while while we kind of think about this For a while that was what they did. He would not settle down. And he got insulting to the Pope and then he got that was that so, so there you go. It's not, it's not always evil empires doing their thing. It's people who are in a way of thinking that is not accurate and not right. But, but, but get. Become too hubristic. And you know Joseph Freiman, I did a great interview with him. You should check out from like last week, F R I F R A I M A N And he and I were talking about how our profession has been captured by irrational certitude. The scientific method is rational uncertainty trying to ascend to an approximation of the truth. Humbly understanding that we'll never get there and that we'll always need to reconsider and always need to re update our priors. But we are in a weird time when everything is certain and that is not science.

[Jillian Michaels]

Could you explain one more thing that you elaborated on for me the other day where you spoke about the clinical environment and of a young body versus a slightly older body and you, you spoke about it just now like two different environments. But what do you mean? Like if I, if I take a newborn and a four year old. Yes, a newborn and an adult. Why? What, what exactly is different? Just so people understand what you mean.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

So let me try to model it in a way that's understanding. People understand that when a child is born they can't walk, they can't talk, they are, you know, they have lots of brain growth ahead. Right. The brain grows by interacting with the environment. Is that, Jillian, am I stating something that would be obvious to everybody?

[Jillian Michaels]

100%? Yes.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Okay. And it grows by interacting with environment. And certain genes are turned on and off and connections are made and wiring happens. Well, the closest biological tissue in your body to the brain is your immune system. It comes out of the same region during embryological development. And the, and the immune system is first of all very tied to the, the central nervous system, which is kind of interesting and odd. Same with the endocrine system. The endocrine system, the immune system and the neuro systems are very tightly tied together and developmentally tied together. But the immune system is designed very similarly to the brain system in that it's designed to interact with the environment and develop and grow and change and develop strategies for reacting and protecting from that environment, much the way the brain grows and develops. And that's exactly what's happening all throughout childhood, particularly in infancy. And so during that time, what I was Telling you, Gillian, not only is there growth and development of muscle and bone and the core of the body and the organ systems, but the DNA is more open. The DNA is open during development in the sense that we are reproducing in cells and developing cells constantly in such a way that they're interacting with each other and that DNA plasticity is opportunities for errors and problems. Wow. And so it is, it is just a reminder that during development this infinitely complex. I mean if you want to have faith in a God, go look at how DNA directs development and particularly embryological development. It's uncanny, it's. You can't believe it when people look at it, they go, this can't have evolved. This. Somebody did this. This is too, this is too elegant, it's too spectacular. Has to have come from somewhere.

[Jillian Michaels]

I have chills. It's just so cool.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

We are prone to error. We are. We have a whole system of DNA repair because errors happen and that system is not perfect. And we want to protect from outside, let's use a word that I hate, toxins, outside material.

[Jillian Michaels]

But there is aluminum in these, Doc. There's aluminum in some of these. And you have told me previously that even as an adult ingesting aluminum is a very different thing than injecting aluminum, let alone in a newborn.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Yeah, everything's different in Newport. That's the point. Everything. And so it should be. And everything's different in a pregnant woman. Which is why things should be dealt with with absolute caution, with, with paramount risk, reward, analysis of every move we made. Let's go back to the Hepatitis B vaccine. Let's say there's a medication that a child once needs to take for a relatively dangerous condition, but you're not sure if it's going to have long term consequences or not. But you. We're going to give you a medicine that we've really not tested on newborns. We, I have a five day trial once that was done. But this medicine has not really been tested. I want your child to take that medicine. Why is a vaccine any different? Why do we deal with it differently than other biological agents we give children? It's the weirdest thing. And that it should be held to this exact same standards. And it is the public health influence. It is this blush of we need to protect the herd. Everybody's of benefit from this. We'll take risk with it. We won't even consider risk. If we see a net benefit to the group that's gotta stop, that's no good. And by the way, it blinds you from looking at the potential risks.

[Jillian Michaels]

So I wanna flip the script for a second now, because if there's somebody who's watching and thinking, oh, my gosh, you know, my kid didn't need hepatitis B and the COVID shot is contraindicated. But now the issue is every vaccine becomes suspect and terrible. Whereas you and I were discussing whooping cough. And I've had this conversation with a couple different people who disagree with me. But I can't get over the fact that I had whooping cough in February of this year. And I've said this before, and I will say it again. I have never been so sick. I was sick for 100 days. I needed intravenous antibiotics, antibiotics numerous times. I took two Z packs before they put me on that. I was on bronchio dilators. I was on inhaled steroids, nebulized steroids. I mean, Doc. And of course, you know, one argument that I had with Dr. Bowdoin, who I like a lot, she's like, well, this is your fault because you didn't catch it soon enough. If you'd been on antibiotics early enough, I would have put you on it. But here's my argument, Doc. If you're the parent that doesn't want to give your kid vaccines, you're certainly not the parent. Parent that sees a sniffle and throws the baby on a Z pack like you're. You're the parent that avoids that Z pack come hell or high water. So in our cost benefit analysis, whooping cough seems like that would kill a child. Am I. Am I being dramatic?

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

I. I mean, it can. Let's. Let's be clear that this. It's a serious illness. It's horrific. In adulthood, I revaccinate people all the time.

[Jillian Michaels]

Oh, my God, I wish I'd known, Doc.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

But it comes in. It comes in. And see, this is one of the things I've been thinking about lately, and I don't have a fully formed notion about this, but my thing is, why can't we vaccinate when things sweep in? That's what I do with adults. When it's clear that we are in a time when the potential risk is going up, then we start talking about vaccinating everybody. And why don't we do that with kids? I don't quite. I mean, is there. There's a weird. My sense is that pediatricians have a different risk tolerance than an adult doctor.

[Jillian Michaels]

I see.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Like it's any kid that gets. He needs hospitalization. Oh, my God, it's the end of the world. And I. I'm not sure we live in the era where we should think that way necessarily. I. I'm not sure. I mean, I don't have a fully formed idea about this yet, but I'm. I'm worried that we are so wedded to the idea of elimination of infectious diseases, we're not thinking in terms of palliating and effectively addressing infectious diseases when they show up. Does that make sense?

[Jillian Michaels]

It does.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

I think you can do it better.

[Jillian Michaels]

Adults, you're looking for an improved strategy with regard to how to apply these medications.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

I just go, oh, hey, whooping cops in here. I've got a case. You got you. I just. Everybody. I revaccinated. Let's reconsider. When was your last vaccine for whooping coughs? Let's look at it. So. And we do it and that's that it's over.

[Jillian Michaels]

Right?

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

It's. But it's. It's not. Oh, my God. Well, that's a whole other topic, which is, you know, we live in a time when medicine is so algorithmic that there's no caring physician there thinking about this for the patient. It's just somebody that sweeps through that day and, you know, his job. It is for those hours to see that person and may not be thinking fully or not be caring fully about things. It takes energy to think about, think everything through. When you see a patient. It's hard to discipline, and it's much more easy to just follow an algorithm and whatever.

[Jillian Michaels]

Right.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

That's what we live in now.

[Jillian Michaels]

But we have to be thinking for ourselves. And I. I think that what we can do is educate ourselves on what to ask that doctor when you see them for even if it's seven minutes. I'm actually working on a book right now, and it's part of it. There's a part in there. Mostly it looks at the ways in which, you know, ag, food, farm and insurance kind of work against us, and then subsequently how to take control back. But there's a whole section in there of what to do, even if you only have that doctor for seven minutes. What to ask, how to be strategic, how to get the answers. You need it. And the more we watch, the more we have access to people like you. We can comprehend the nuance.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Yes.

[Jillian Michaels]

And then utilize that healthcare professional as an ally. But you, you got to be the commander of your own ship here. You just do.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Well, that's why. That's why I work with the wellness companies. We got very early. We're like, oh, look what they've done. They've taken your access and your freedom away from it. We've got to restore it to the patients. I used to be fighting for the patient doctor relationship. Now I'm just fighting for the patients. My gosh. And Kelly Victory, you ought to interview Kelly in here so you'd enjoy. Do you ever interview Kelly Victory? No. Oh, you'd enjoy her. I'll get you hooked up with her. She, she was an early, what shall I say? She was exorcised early by what was happening. And she turned out to be, of course, right. But she said to me the other day, she goes, you know, if, if, if you had told me what we're doing, wellness company we were going to do, like six years ago, I would have thought, you're out of your mind. You got to stop this. And she goes, now, I think you're out of your mind if you're not doing this, because we've seen what they can do. But I want to remind you that this is back to the patient empowerment notion. I was on, I used to do Anderson Cooper show, like, almost like a couple days a week. I mean, people forget. I was on CNN for years when CNN was much more, I don't know, it was different place, I guess. I had a show on HLN and it was great. I have no quarrels with CNN at all. But I was on the show with Anna Navarro and Andiston Cooper, and this is when he had a roundtable going and I said, well, you know, you're only going to see physician extenders. And the entire table went, physician extenders? What are you talking about? You will not see a physician anymore. The vast majority of you will not see an M.D. you will not, you will see a P.A. or nurse practitioner. That's it. That's what you're going to see. And, and I want to say clearly, many of them are excellent.

[Jillian Michaels]

Yeah.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

And frankly, I'm seeing them think more carefully than my peers, which is a terrible indictment. I mean, terrible thing, but there you are. So I, I, I would say that they, they are, here's what you need to know in terms of going to work with an NP or, or a pa, because they are not given the same liberty that a physician is given. They're a little more prone to following algorithms. Okay. So be careful. You ask them to speak outside of the algorithm, but they're also likely to be more caring. They really, the one, a lot of them that I have worked with, I just think, oh, these people, they're really good. I had a nurse anesthetist for my last colonoscopy. Best anesthesia I ever had. She was fantastic. And I was like, well, she, because she was. I'll tell you why. She, like, she gave me some lidocaine IV before I had an upper endosterous. I'm giving you this to, you know, suppress your cough. The GI guy may want that cough suppressed, so I'm going to give it to you and you'll hear a little warm buzzing in your ears. I'm like, that's exactly what I'm experiencing. And while my experienced anesthesiologists in the past were like, you ready? Boom. Bye. And I thought, yes, yes, this is good. It is good that we have these extenders that are doing a great job. So it's something you need to not be afraid of, but you need to learn how to work with and ultimately decision making may go upstream to an md, but that person is rubber stamping a lot of stuff. I talked to you today about Scott Adams at the beginning of the podcast. He is in a Kaiser system. He sees a new doctor every day. I just went through this with a family member in Kaiser and I literally, I identified something that really was terribly wrong that they had not, they had missed for three days because they didn't pull the blankets off her legs. And I started describing it to this guy and he goes, I, I'm not sure I really know what you're talking about, but I'm, I'm off service this evening. You talk to the guy tomorrow about it. And I was like, oh, wow. Yeah, we're there. We are there.

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[Jillian Michaels]

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[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

That's it. He was not trained fully to, to know the nuances of really careful. It was really careful neuro exam stuff and didn't care enough to listen or do his job that day because he was off service. So there, there you go. That's, that's the medicine of the future. Everybody in primary care, by the same token, we had excellent procedural work and stuff. The people that actually make money in medicine still are still doing good work, but when they get squeezed out, I don't know what's going to happen to that part of the game. Also.

[Jillian Michaels]

Doug, want to, I want to shift gears to something that you, you mentioned a little earlier because it seems as though practicing prevention is going to be a big part of protecting yourself. And you know, we've all said an ounce of prevention. Pound of care. Everybody knows this. But people tend to think of it as I'm practicing prevention by exercising. I'm practicing prevention by eating right. But now it seems the practicing prevention in mid age is hormone replacement therapy. You just mentioned it. And I want to show you this clip of Kennedy talking about how he removed the black box warning on hormone, I guess, estrogen, progesterone. I'll let you weigh in on this, guys. Can you show Dr. Drew SOT 2 for me?

[Hormone Replacement Therapy Advocate]

For more than two decades, the American medical establishment turns its back on women. Millions of women were told to fear the very therapy that could have given them strength, peace and dignity through one of life's most difficult transitions. Menopause that ends today. The FDA is initiating the removal of a broad black box warnings from hormone replacement therapy products for menopause. We're challenging outdated thinking and recommitting to evidence based medicine that empowers rather than restricts. When prescribed responsibly and started early, hormone replacement therapy transforms the lives of women. Hormone replacement therapy has been been found to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and mortality by as much as 50%, Alzheimer's disease by 35%, bone fractures by 50 to 60%, as well as reducing cognitive decline and all cause mortality. In other words, extending the lives for as much as 10 years.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Okay, so that was 100% accurate. And any practicing physician would tell you, yeah, that's been my experience. And it was my experience when I was mandated to stop hormone replacement therapy when the New England Journal was running editorial saying, you are no better than a witch doctor if you don't listen to the findings of this women health initiative. It scared me into telling every single patient, I think we have to stop this. And I watch women fall apart. And many of my patients elected to go back on in spite of the black box warning because it was so awful. And we all saw the same thing. Mortality reduced, bone density up. Dementia down. Cardiovascular disease down. Why do you think women have less heart disease? It's because of estrogen. You take the estrogen away, they get more heart disease. Why the hell there's all this initiative about paying attention to women and heart disease? Oh, sorry, we left this part out. See how screwed up we are? It's such a mess. And are there risks to hormone replacement therapy? Look, not giving women the hormones replaced when your ovaries fail is the same as same phenomenology as not giving someone thyroid medicine when their thyroid fails. You just have to replace what? Aging shuts down. It just is part of the process. We, we have the Ability now to replace these things, not give you extra physiological levels, give you what your body is no longer producing. Now there. Are there risks to hormone replacement? Possibly. Should you discuss those risks with your patients? Of course. And if you have a broca gene or if you have first degree relatives with early breast cancer, you have certain other things that we worry about, by the way, ovarian cancer down in patients on estrogen therapy. But breast cancer may be up in certain populations. We do the decision for each patient based on the risk reward profile of that patient, that patient's setting, in other words, how miserable they are and also what their risk, that patient's risk tolerance is. Does the patient want to. I have patients say, I'll take any risk, do it, help me. You know that we, we do dangerous things in medicine all the time in order to try to improve things for the patient. Last thing, what's consistently left out of the hormone replacement conversation is testosterone. And that needs to get back into the conversation. We talk about progesterone because that protects the uterus. And people all pretty much always give progesterone with estrogen. And there's concern about the breast and stuff. But there is data out there that suggests if you add a little testosterone, breast cancer risk actually goes down, not away down relative to untreated group. So. And God knows your bone density goes up, your libido goes up, your affect goes up. I'll tell you a quick my own, my own wife's story. She won't mind if I tell you she had a premature ovarian failure in her family. Then she had fertility treatment. So her ovary started failing in her 30s. Didn't know it. Got depressed, overwhelmed. We had triplets, went back to a gynecologist multiple times. It kept saying, oh, you're depressed, you're overwhelmed, it's triplets, what do you expect? You know? And she's like, something's wrong, something's wrong. Put her on multiple antidepressants. Of course, some kind of worked up a little bit here and there. And finally 15 years later, someone said, you know, I got on hormone replacement, I feel so much better. And she went in and she was furious when, when she felt all of those symptoms, literally everyone evaporated because no one had said, hey, let's check your fsh, let's check your pituitary hormones. Let's see if this may be somehow related to perimenopause. We've been treating you like a incubator for 10 years in your fertility treatment. Maybe that's had an effect. We, we really there. There is still pervasive sexism and medicism in medicine. I've been guilty of it a few times. I. I'm shocked when I see it completed to my thinking. And I'm watching for it everywhere, and I see it a lot.

[Jillian Michaels]

Really? Okay. But men also benefit, correct? From TRT?

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, RFK Jr. Is on testosterone, right? I wish I could take testosterone, I guarantee you.

[Sponsor / Advertisement Voice]

Right.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

I can't because I have prostate cancer. Right now there is debate about whether it causes prostate cancer. I'm of the opinion it does not cause, but it definitely feeds prostate cancer. So if you, if you have it, it will accelerate it. Prostate is a highly androgen sensitive hormone. And testosterone replacement of males is a very complicated landscape. You know, I, I have days where I've got normal is 200 to 1200, essentially, or maybe 800. The different, different testing ranges out there. And I've gone in complaining. I think my testosterone low. They check it and I'm like 1400. I'm like, all right. I can't explain it.

[Jillian Michaels]

Maybe I just watched the news too much today and other things are going on in my head.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Right. Jillian.

[Jillian Michaels]

Good God. Doug, I want to show you this clip of Halle Berry unleashing on Gavin Newsom.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Let me just say we are desperately trying to get our hands on her for me to interview her, because I love what she's doing. I love what she's saying. She is so. And she's diabetic, don't forget. So her hormonal system has to be carefully regulated. Right. And she insulin dependent, diabetic.

[Jillian Michaels]

I actually have no idea. I don't look that up if I don't follow it.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Okay, she is. She is. But it makes it even more important for her to have her biological environment stable. So let's see it.

[Jillian Michaels]

Back in my great state of California, my very own governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed our menopause bill not one, but two years in a row. But that's okay, because he's not gonna be governor forever. And with the way he's overlooked women half the population by devaluing us in midlife, he probably should not be our next president either.

[Sponsor / Advertisement Voice]

Boom.

[Jillian Michaels]

Oh, my word. That's not good. Yeah. Not good.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Good.

[Jillian Michaels]

And I wonder. This, this really throws me for a bit of a loop here, because this is a guy that's come under fire for giving free health care to people who are in the country illegally. And, you know, everyone's like, oh, I don't do that's. Not it. He does. Look, look into it. Watch previous shows. He does. Even them just going to the emergency room. And the thing is, you. I've seen them make the case for this, and we don't even. I don't even need to touch that one today. But the. Why in the world would he veto this bill? And then. This isn't good. I mean, you've got a, a woman of color who's probably liberal turning on you in California like that's career suicide. Why in the world would he make that choice? What am I not getting?

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Are you trying to ask me to make sense of Gavin Newsom? That is not something I'm capable of. It's just. He. I. It just seems to be whatever is politically convenient.

[Alex Berenson]

Or.

[Jillian Michaels]

Doc, is it because it's so expensive? Like, what. What am I not understanding?

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

I. You. You. You don't live in California. I walk around like that all the time with this look. I've got, I've got patients lying in the streets dying. I'm going, why. Why can't we treat everybody? What is going on here? Why can't you at least acknowledge they need treatment?

[Alex Berenson]

Right.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Oh, no, no. The homeless industrial complex is a much more important political.

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay, you just jumped to.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Well, hold on. Let me, Let me tell you about Hallelujah.

[Jillian Michaels]

Like, don't.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

You.

[Jillian Michaels]

You went there and, and so. All right, I'm. I'm tabling that for a minute, but I need another time with you to cover that.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

So I know insane amounts of things to say about that. We better start the hour over. But, but, but, but Halle Berry had a very unusual situation. She was originally diagnosed with, with type 1 diabetes, was put on insulin. It appears that she was. She actually had type 2 diabetes and was able to regulate her diabetes with essentially diet and certain medication and things. So, so she is a very. I want to be really clear about this. A thin, young diabetic with relatively good insulin production is a very rare situation biologically. And so she represents a very interesting subset of diabetes, but she is diabetic nevertheless. But she is somebody that can be managed in the manner in which a type 2 could be managed. And these days, we have so many good treatments for type 2 diabetes. It's. I'm not surprised that. But the other thing about being a thin, relatively young type 2 diabetic, in my experience, they get lots of complications. They get neuropathies and things like that. So she has to be very, very careful, which is, again, more motivation for her paying attention to her biological hormonal. Environment with things like estrogen replacement therapy. So there you go, right? Homelessness. What do you want to know?

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay, well, here's the thing. You know, on our other fun little project that we do with Dave Rubin and Sage Steele, actual friends.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Yeah, we.

[Jillian Michaels]

I can't even remember the clip, but. Oh, oh, oh, blowing up drug boats in Venezuela. And then fentanyl came up and you said something about how you can actually treat fentanyl addicts very effectively and successfully, but the state of California prohibits you from doing that. And I thought, okay, and you know, in that format, I was not allowed to suddenly start interviewing you about it. And I would love for you to elaborate. I did a little homework on it. And the homelessness industrial complex sounds about right. I mean, there's so much going on to block people from helping the homeless get off of the streets. But explain to me this drug piece first before we get into the corruption there. Everyone thinks this is impossible to break an addiction to opioids and all that.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

All my staff were recovering opiate addicts and they were thriving and continue to thrive. I had a doctor tell me it was no such thing thing as recovery from opiate addiction. I treated people all the time for op addiction quite successfully. There was never a problem. And now we have other replacement therapies, so called sort of medically assisted treatments that make the outcomes even more positive. And the problem is we've let people go so far, they're so far gone on meth and fentanyl now that medically assisted treatment is probably the only thing that's going to work, at least in the short term. But yes, we want to get people off everything and treatment works, but you have to ask drug addicts to do something or else they were sit in their disease and die. It's a motivational disturbance. And when they're not said, when they're not creating, you have to create consequence for drug addicts. You can't lie on the sidewalk, come with me. You can't do drugs legally. Come with me. You can't. You just have to put them into care, come into treatment because they wake up one day and go, oh, I'm ready for treatment. Now that they come into treatment because the consequences mount to the point where they break through their denial. It's a disturbance of thinking. Their thinking is wrong and they end dead. It causes them to die. It's a progressive illness that ends in death. And if you don't create consequences, the denial is so profound. Let me tell you a quick story. My nurse and I Used to sort of, we didn't want to know where a patient was at when they came in the door, what was motivating them and whatnot. And we'd sort of amuse ourselves like, hey, why'd you come in today? And they would just bullshit and obfuscate. They, they didn't even know why they were there. And the, the best example, that was this one guy, he was lying there going, oh Doc, you don't know how it's. I'm so sick and tired of being sick and tired. I decided this is it, I'm done, I gotta get well. And I opened the, open the chart and there's a picture of him in our middle office in four point chains, hands, arms, big hog tied. And he was brought in directly from court. And I just go, did the judge have anything to do with why you're here? Oh yeah, yeah, something. Oh yeah, I guess that was part of it. They, they're thinking is just off. They're not thinking normally and that. And their motivational system is pursuing the drug, come what may. Their survival system is usurped where survival itself is a less important priority than pursuit of the drug. Even when they don't like it, they don't like what's happening to them. The wanting system of the brain, the liking system starts to get overwhelmed, but the wanting system takes over. And that is in the disease. And it causes them to think poorly. The thinking is distorted. We call it stinking thinking. And you must create consequences and go, look, we have a great place for you now. So instead there is this thing in place when. Housing first. Housing first. If you just house everybody, my God, if I could just put the most, most advanced psychiatric illnesses in the planet in a room and that would treat their psych disturbance. Oh my God. My, my, my. 30 years of working in a psychiatric hospital have been so much easier. But you have to. And it's so funny. I was talking to a young woman who was well meaning and she was doing placement and she goes, yeah, we placed like 800 people and. But it turns out once we get them in there, we're not done. I was like, no, you're not done. You haven't even started. These people are ill and you're preventing them from getting access. We need to train more psychiatrists, we need to open more psychiatric beds, we need to create thousands of more residential treatment programs, state beds. And we need to say, you can't lie on the street, come with us, we have a place for you. That's it, that's all and let's go. Let's, let's do this. You're dying. Let's, let's get you out of here. Let's go, let's go. It's all very simple. For decades, decades. And now we have even more things available to help treat those patients. Good, let's do it. And RFK is going to come up with it. He keeps telling me he's going to call me to work on this. He has this plan where he wants to put together essentially work farms where people can stay for a year or two, which is a great idea, that people will get sober in these structured environments that have, where people are using their hands and then have the sobriety program that they're following at some sort of mutual aid society and also treatment while they're there. But getting people in shape where they can tolerate that. We got a lot of work to do first. We got people that are so, so sick. These are open air psychiatric hospitals without ceilings and walls and without doctors and nurses. It's being run by social workers. And social workers are wonderful. They have no training in advanced medical psychiatric illness. It's literally like asking a physical therapist to do orthopedic surgery. Physical therapists are wonderful. They're not trained to do orthopedic surgery. Social workers are wonderful. They're not trained to take care of advanced medical and psychiatric illness. That is for people highly trained, highly experienced in those conditions. And it takes a lot of work and a lot of skill and a lot of structure. And what I hear all the time from the social workers is, well, we need to meet patients where they're at. That is the craziest fucking statement I've ever heard. Here's what you do. A drug addicts, you go, hey, you're not thinking right. Come with me. You see what's happening here? Let's go, let's go, let's go. Man, this is ridiculous. This is your third overdose. You're going to die. Let's go meet people where they are. That is, where they are is sick. It's like, like, let's meet a cancer patient where they are. Just go, okay, Your cancer seems to want to kill you. Ok, let's go. It's so dumb. We are. I was at a national convention for county leaders and I said this, I said, you're lady, what are you doing? And they all the room just went. They all went. Well, the guys before us, that's how they did it. They said that we're supposed to do this. I'm like, what Are you doing? What are you doing? You got to stop. Let's take care of this. Let's go.

[Jillian Michaels]

Doc, I was. I was looking into this and everything you just described this fentanyl fold where people will refuse medical. Medical care, even with necrotic limbs. Like, they don't care because they're. They'll decline shelter, food, hygiene, and they'll stay on the street because it lets them use free. It's everything you just talked to me about.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Just let them use. They're in their disease. It's why it's a disease. It's a brain disorder. The crazy thing, Gillian, is if. If dementia, like for both schizophrenia and drug addiction, you're not allowed to touch them. If they say no, if they're demented with the exact same symptom complex and you don't treat them, you're guilty of patient abuse. Why is there that difference? Everybody, why? Why? One brain disease is prioritized. The symptoms of the brain disease are prioritized in the law, and the other symptoms are ignored by the law. Same symptom complex. Disorganized, psychotic, disturbed thinking, not caring about their limbs rotting off. All the same. But there are three different illnesses that we approach completely differently in the law. It's insane.

[Jillian Michaels]

Do you have a theory as to why? Because it says the combination of fentanyl and P2Pmeth, which, by the way, what is P2P? Meth?

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

P is. Is the worst. It's a brain rot, essentially, made with mo. You know, things you find in a car garage.

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

They discovered they could make them meth with that people liked. And it's really, really, really dangerous. Causes psychosis.

[Jillian Michaels]

It's everything you just said. Like, it's the exact same same thing as full blown dementia. Paranoia, hallucinations, loss of executive function, like, completely disorganized thinking. And then, you know that they will turn down detox, rehab, shelter, medical intervention for all the reasons you just discussed simultaneously. Drug gangs are controlling these encampments.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

When we take families who have resources and physicians and a bed to put that patient in up to Sacramento, they are told, hey, who are you to say? Scram. The patient's doing what they want to do, man. It's living their best life. I. There. There's something distorted in this system. It's, you know, what we've discovered about what we were just saying at the beginning of this program about NGOs and Don Draper and manipulation. Something is out of line here. There's a motivate. There's a power in place that should not be or a motivation money that should. Is going in the wrong direction. And we have to unravel this. It's disgusting. Busting. It's killing people. A thousand people, what is it? A thousand a year in the streets of Los Angeles die. And predictably, they will all die. They will all die. This is the other part they leave out of the they are thinking is a progressive illness that ends in death, period. What are we doing? Well, the prognosis is worse than most cancers. We're airlifting you to City of Hope when they have a cancer, we're prevented from treating you. If you have this one.

[Jillian Michaels]

You know, I pulled up some of the ways they prevent it legally because you know, you got. Obviously I started diving into the. So one of of which was Prop 47, which people voted to repeal, I think it was, was with Prop 36. And Newsom won't fund it. He will not fund it. But by downgrading drug possession and theft under $950, California removes the stick from the carrot and the stick approach. Ultimately, the threat of jail, as you just said, was the only thing that compelled many addicts into court ordered rehab. And now police don't even bother arresting the suspects because they'll be out in hours. And you destroy the intervention tool. As you just said, harm reduction versus treatment. Los Angeles in particular follows a harm reduction philosophy and hands out clean needles, pipes and Narcan without mandating treatment. So they're enabling the addiction instead of facilitating treatment.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

I have a story for you. There's a guy named Jared Clickstein, Kickstein, who got, he wrote a book called Crooked Smile. He got off the streets. He was a heroin addict. He's now about five years sober. He's a carpenter. You should interview him. He's a great kid. And he, he said to me, the last year or two years, he said on the street he was getting his drugs and his brigs from the people, the, the personnel there, the social workers. And he said they all patted him on the back and said, he said, every person said this. Maybe I'm remembering this wrong, but this is how I remember what he told me. Every person patted him on the back and said, you know, when we get communism in place, you'll be fine. This, this will take care of all this. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So there you go. Okay. Yeah, okay. Killing people with that. So allowing people to die of medical and psychiatric illness in the name of some crazy fucked up ideology. And so it's Prop 57, Prop 47, AB109, I think it is. It all made drug use legal.

[Jillian Michaels]

Housing first trap that you brought up. All of it.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Yeah, it made drug use legal and the drug use, drug trafficking even legal and the ability to steal to support your habit. And so addicts from all over the country came. Of course. Of course my patients would come. Here they go. They're very much affected by, like you said, the carrot and the stick. It's part of the condition. And so they go where they can use and they can do it. They'll do it.

[Jillian Michaels]

So let's, let's just catch us up to where we are. A little recap here. The laws literally facilitate, literally by giving you the paraphernalia you need by allowing you to get away with it legally to commit these crimes and not have any consequence for it.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

But Jillian, the harm avoidance piece. And listen, if you were really doing. Harm avoidance was originally sort of designed around medically assisted treatment. That's really. They were the same thing then.

[Jillian Michaels]

Harm avoidance, avoidance. Doc, I'm sorry, can you, can you explain.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Avoidance is, oh, you're going to die and get AIDS if we don't give you your stuff. We got to give you clean needles. You're going to die and get AIDS if we don't get. And the fact is they die anyway. And maybe they don't get AIDS or hepatitis, but they, they still recklessly use and stuff. But in any event, let's say it works. Let's say it works for infectious diseases. It does not work because even if a nurse is in infusing the fentanyl, the progression of the disease always takes hold. And they're also recklessly using other substances, like you said, methamphetamine. So look, harm avoidance is failed. It leads to death, and it's, it's a failed strategy. Harm avoidance should be connected to medically assisted treatment. That's where it originally was designed. And they deny categorically the progressive element of these because they're not medically trained. These are not medically trained individuals. They don't understand what they're doing.

[Jillian Michaels]

Well, I wonder if some people do because you, you brought up the homelessness industrial complex. So I pulled a full a few things on this. Of course, we all know famously, Gavin Newsom has spent.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

You're making me crazy.

[Jillian Michaels]

I know, boss.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

I'm sorry. Sorry.

[Jillian Michaels]

Spent 24 billion on this and the problem has only gotten exponentially worse. Nobody knows where the money is, but it seems like actually we do know where a lot of the money is. So it's a billion dollar ecosystem. Okay? The crisis Equals the funding. Billions of dollars. The funding equals jobs. The jobs have political influence. The influence begets more of these contracts. So, like, we're going to give you the money to go build these homes, hence the concept of housing first, because that's where the money is. And of course, the more the contracts exist, the more incentive there is to increase homelessness, which is exactly what's happened. And then I pulled a few of these. So check this one out. These units, by the way, Doc, that they're building, they're 600 to $800,000.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

800 on average, by the way. So we can put people in there to keep doing drugs and die? Yep. Okay. That's what we're doing, Right. Like I said, the people that are putting people in there, the actual people that give a shit, are going, hey, we're not done. And when you hear the term they. They've stopped saying this because I called it out for so long. They're going, oh, we give them wraparound services. Wraparound services. That's. That's what we do in a psychiatric hospital. That's psychiatric care. Let's call it what it is. We're trying to give them psychiatric services without psychiatrists. Wraparound services is everything except the psychiatrist. It's occupational therapy, it's physical therapy, it's nursing, it's maybe chemical dependency counselor and that kind of thing. That's wraparound services. You don't give wraparound services to a appendicitis patient. You give it to a psychiatric patient. But people digested that wraparound services as some sort of. Oh, you're giving them everything they need. No, you're not. No, you're not. It's at the end, it's people who are not medically trained trying to. Trying to do the best they can. It ends up a catastrophe.

[Jillian Michaels]

Well, they obviously, as you mentioned, they're putting these people in those positions because they don't want this to get better. So just one scam, Shangri La Industries. Federal prosecutors charged the cfo, this guy Cody Holmes, with defunding, or, sorry, defrauding the state of California out of hundreds of millions of dollars, right through this thing called Project Home Key. Are you ready for this? So they got 114 million specifically from Project Home Key, which is Governor Newsom's flagship homeless housing program. The historical connection is that Shangri La, this organization was founded by Steve Bing, who I Guess died in 2020, but he was a massive donor and a friend and a backer of Newsom. And this list goes on and on. Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. They falsified metrics, they lied about how many beds they had. They went, they went after the whistleblowers who apparently investigations confirmed that LAHSA leadership retaliated against staff who reported quote ghost policies such as hiring unqualified associates.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Hey Jillian, look at the LA LA Times article on me from about four years ago where the board, the chairman of the LA County Board of Supervisors called me and said would you please serve on that panel? Okay? And I thought, oh, that sounds like, it sounds awful. But you know what? She had to beg me and I said you know what? I should really get inside and learn what they're doing. And I'm going to go in with an open heart and an open mind. I'm going to keep my mouth shut. So she goes, please do an article with this Jackie something. And I said I do not do print, I will not do prints because they distort and fuck up everything.

[Alex Berenson]

Yeah.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

And she goes please, please, please. So I do it. And I said the exact same thing. I said look, I'm going in with an open heart and an open mind. I'm gonna just try to learn what it is they're doing. I've been very critical, but you know what? It's not fair. I'm going to try to learn everything they're doing and see if I can, see if I can make a difference. Go read that article. Go read that article. I ended up calling that woman back going why did you not ask me what my credentials are? I've got a list of, of I've got, I'm double board certified. I've been a professor in three different departments. Why didn't you ask me? What is wrong with you? So what she did was go read the article. I urge you to do it because it shows you how. It's gel man amnesia everybody. You'll see, you'll see it in full blossom. They, she went, she goes, she goes. We called the state and he has a license in good standing. That's how they presented my credentials. I'm an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry medicine, pediatrics and have taught all in for decades. I was a clinical director of a large treatment program. I'm board double board certified in medicine and addiction medicine. I have a lifetime certification from the American Board of Addiction Medicine. None of those things were reported and instead they talked to a homeless advocate in New England who attacked me as wanting to put people in jail and criminalize. Blah blah blah blah blah blah. Read the article if you want to know how, how things Jackie Cargrove, I think was her name. I'll never forget that woman. If you want to see how the press distorts things, go read that article. And it, and it caused me to be. Caused all the board of supervisors to pull down my nomination. They were so scared by it. Yeah. And I was relieved, frankly. I don't want to deal with that. Why do I want to get into that? I'm trying to help. My life destroyed by you assholes. I want to help.

[Jillian Michaels]

They won't let you help. But this is where the final thought right, is the system does not want to be fixed because it benefits the few substantially. So I had really high hopes from. Aha. We've made some incremental progress. There's a lot that's happened that's disappointing. A lot that hasn't been able to happen. I don't blame Bobby, obviously. I know that there are major lobbies in play and. Obviously. But ultimately this, this is the ultimate rebellion is going to have to be taking agency as much as we possibly can.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

How do we. We end up in the same place, don't we? Every time?

[Jillian Michaels]

What. What do we tell people? Like, I would say, watch your podcast, educate yourself. And if you're like, I don't have the time to learn all this stuff. Okay, fine, but then point and shoot. When, when, you know, you gotta look into something specific, you know, you've hit midlife and you've got health problems, then go watch that frickin podcast with a doctor that you trust. And now you can have an educated conversation like, what are we telling people here?

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Well, unfortunately, you and I are probably preaching to the choir right now, right, people to listen to your podcast. My podcast already are pretty well informed and unfortunately, we're just making each other all upset here. I'm not gonna make it to my take because you've hit on every one of my hot points and I'm like, I'm literally having a panic attack.

[Jillian Michaels]

Alone every time. Like, we're an actual friends. I don't get to drag you down into these rabbit holes because we're always like, moving on. But, but, but, but here's the thing, Doc.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

No, no, let me. I'm going to say something. You have a great mind and you're. And I, I'm so. I value your friendship so much and I'm so appreciative of what you're doing out there. And I'm. I'm glad you're the one person I want to have these conversations with because it's accurate. It's Careful. It's thoughtful. And so let's. I'm grateful. I'm. In spite of my panic attack, I'm grateful. So I thank you for this opportunity, but I am literally having.

[Jillian Michaels]

I'm sorry. Okay, okay, hold on. Here's what I would just simply say. What would.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

I would.

[Jillian Michaels]

I love so much about you is not obviously, your credentials, which are exceptional, but the fact that you. That you. You are so thoughtful and you are so nuanced and you are not tribal. And what I. What I would like to do is encourage the audience to reach one and teach one. Get their friends who may not be listening to. At least listen when it's something that directly touches their lives. Be proactive in your own care. And there are so many incredible experts out there. This information is freaking free. You're making it free. Utilize it and vote accordingly. By the way, does that work?

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Yes, yes, yes. Please, please. I. I think today we covered a lot of territory. I'm looking. I. You caught me glancing at the actual Friends episode that is going up. Check that out too. And look for. We. We get into some interesting stuff. And I. I'm just so grateful for that little hour we spend together. And it leads to this because then we can get in deeper in conversations like this. And.

[Jillian Michaels]

Doc, where does everyone find? You tell.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Yeah.

[Jillian Michaels]

Give them everything.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Yeah, I do. My main. Like, my main focus these days is this streaming show. We do Tuesday and Thursdays at 2 Pacific, 4 Pacific on Wednesday, and I interview Jillian, and there I interview all these great people. And it is. It's something that came out of COVID where I was just like, oh, my God, the people are so confused. I just started doing sort of Instagram live streams, and then we did Facebook Live. And then all of a sudden, our. Our clinical. Our technical director said, you know, it's time for a good quality streaming show. We should do maybe a streaming show. And like, okay, what's that? Let's do it. And then we started. And then I thought to myself, all these doctors that have been canceled, they. They must have. These are not trivial people. They must have something to say. So I went. Reached out to some of these people, like Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Mackere, Beth Hogue, all these people that are now poetically almost like a Shakespearean play, are now in charge of our government and these policies that had run so far, amok. And yes, lo and behold, every one of them, I learned something. I didn't agree with everything every one of them said, but I learned something from every one of them. And this idea of canceling. And if I ever hear that word deplatforming again, I swear to God I'm going to punch somebody. And taking people down for having an opinion is anathema. It's anti scientific, it's anti American, and we must stand up. I never thought that at this stage of my life, the word freedom would come off my lips. So many, so often. And we must speak up and defend speech.

[Jillian Michaels]

And here we are, an absolute treasure. Thank you so much and I'll talk to you on Wednesday when we do actual Friday.

[Dr. Drew Pinsky]

Cannot wait. See you then.

[Jillian Michaels]

Love you. Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed the podcast, please, like, comment, subscribe and share. And make sure to let me know what guests you want to see on in the future.