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The Sage Steele Show
Dr. Drew on Trauma, Addiction, and What’s Really Wrong with America | Sage Steele Show | EP. 67
01:39:35
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- [00:01]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. When you visit the doctor, you probably hand over your insurance, your ID and contact details.
- [00:09]
Sage Steele
It's just one of the many places.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
That has your personal info and if.
- [00:12]
Sage Steele
Any of them accidentally expose it, you.
- [00:14]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Could be at risk for identity theft. Lifelock monitors millions of data points a second.
- [00:19]
Sage Steele
If you become a victim, they'll fix it, guaranteed. Or your money back.
- [00:23]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Save up to 40% your first year@lifelock.com podcast terms apply.
- [00:30]
Sage Steele
Hi guys. I am here in beautiful Pasadena, California, actually in the driveway of the one and only Dr. Drew, where we just finished an awesome special conversation in his living room. And I can't wait for you to see it. Here's what we talked about. Many things, of course, his media career as Dr. Drew. It has been, it still is awesome and incredible, helping millions of people. And also, don't forget this. He's done this entire thing while remaining a practicing physician. So we discussed that. We discuss politics on a national and a local level, especially here in Los Angeles where he has a ton of ideas about the homelessness and how to fix that and the mental health Crisis. Listen to Dr. Drew about that. Also, we got pretty personal. Dr. Drew surprised me, opened up about some of his childhood trauma and how that trauma has helped him become and maintain empathy as a physician. And helping, I mean, so many of us, millions of us have benefited from, from the empathy that was created from his childhood trauma. So we go all over the place in this episode of the Sage deal show with Dr. Drew from here in Pasadena, California. I know you'll enjoy it as much as I did.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
Oh, is that what we do?
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Sage Steele
Oh, this is what we do.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
Okay, I'm good.
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Sage Steele
This is my. These are unworn. Thank you. I brought you the really feminine ones. Cause I knew how the same.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
How gay I am. Yeah. You're laughing. Are we recording this? I hope so. Good. Yeah.
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Sage Steele
Look, I'm the go with your eyes.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
Well, I'm the gayest straight man in America. Are you kidding me?
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Sage Steele
Ask my wife what I was just going to say. We'll talk to Susan.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
I'll tell you why. Because I'm as straight as straight can be. I'm a, you know, old fashioned grunt weightlifter from way back. You know, I was a beach kid, all this stuff.
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Sage Steele
Yep.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
I have, you know, no non gay instincts in my soul. Except I love musicals.
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Sage Steele
But you're gay.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
I like gay things. I just do. And so I. And so our buddy Dave Rubin and I, we convene at a lot of stuff we like together.
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Sage Steele
When you say I like gay things.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
Yeah.
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Sage Steele
That besides music, Musicals.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
Yeah. Not just musicals all the way.
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Sage Steele
What does that mean? Can you please explain? I like gay things, quote of the day.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
You know, I don't really know about it until my straight friends call me gay for liking these things.
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Sage Steele
And if that's a compliment coming from them.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
Yeah. I don't listen. This is the world we live in now. You gotta take it. Take it all. We should be very fluid, all of us.
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Sage Steele
Oh, we are, though.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
It just. It just means that I like art, essentially. Yeah.
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Sage Steele
Which. Why.
- [03:09]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
But I'm not. You know, let's say I'm not that into fashion, but I will take care of myself. You know, I like the gym. That's a kind of a gay thing. But I don't hide it. And, And, And I have lots of gay friends, so. Yeah, so does Susan.
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Sage Steele
So do you have a lot of black friends? Just keep saying them all. I have a lot of black friends. I have a lot of gay friends. I have a lot of Muslim friends. You have to, like, make sure everybody's happy right now.
- [03:33]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I know a lot of them. No, I make a point. I like people, and so I make a point of trying to expose myself to as much. I didn't used to call it diversity. I just called it people. I like experiences, I like culture. I like ideas. I like seeing things through other people's point of view. And, you know, so that's.
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Sage Steele
That's my jam experience.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
I. I love the human experience. And so because of that, I drift into gay topics. But, but, but, no but, but to get serious about this, you know, I practice. I, I. One of the great things I'm so grateful for is that I. I had this. I had a very rich clinical experience practicing medicine. Right. I'll tell you that story in a minute. But because of it, I got to see the human experience from a perspective that almost nobody gets to see. And I read history, and I love art, and I like musicals, and I like music. And so it's just. To me, it's really all about the richness of humanity and the human experience. So you're gonna ask me questions like how did this happen? And how did they get started? That kind of stuff. So I'm ready to deliver that one.
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Sage Steele
You're just assuming.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
Well, let me, let me. Because I want to tell you this one piece because you don't. I don't know if you know this about me, and by the way, I wouldn't. There's no one on earth I'd rather spend time with than this woman. So this is. This is just a joy for me. I only say what I mean. Be kind or otherwise. I say what I mean. My dad was a doctor, My uncle's a doctor. I was always sort of going down that path. But in college, I had my ass kicked in the sciences. So I declared, this isn't for me. I'm not that smart. I'm not up for it. Did arts and theater and all kinds of stuff for about a year and a half. Was incredibly unhappy. Thought maybe I am kind of good at that science stuff. And kind of found my way back and really got serious about it and had tremendous science training. Got to medical school, was so joyous. Every day I was in medical school, I thought. I just kept thinking, oh, my God, I'm so glad I'm doing this. This is so important, this work. And because of that, bought deeply into the ethic of the time, which is patient comes first. You know, work is. You're just doctor all the time, 24, seven. That's it. You are on the line all the time. No one can substitute. If you hand off, that handoff better be done completely and you better be still watching. And so as I got out into practice, that workaholism really kicked in. So I was doing ICU medicine. Back in the day when general internists could do icu, I did hospital medicine, I did outpatient medicine. And then I would do the second part of my day at around day would start about 5, 36. Second part would start about 2 or 3. I would go to the psychiatric hospital and I ran their medical services and eventually took over their addiction services till about 10pm and that was every day, Every day, Every day, every day. How I know? I don't know. I don't know. That went on for years and years. And to this day I just think, how did I do that? But because of that, I got this incredibly rich experience of the human experience. I saw the psychiatric, the medical, the death and dying, everything I saw. And no one doctor gets to see that. Today you're either doing hospital or you're doing outpatient, or you're doing in the psychiatric hospital or you're doing addiction medicine. I did it Alzheimer's, simultaneously. And it was just this incredible experience. So there's sort of nothing I don't have an opinion about as a result.
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Sage Steele
Because you've seen it all.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
I've seen it all. That's exactly right. And so what I tell people now is, hey, listen, I'm a Time traveler. I come from a different time and I've traveled into the future to tell you about bad ideas, which we have a lot of these days, and where things have gone wrong compared to when we've done things right in the past. And we did a lot of things wrong in the past, too, trust me. And then radio came along and all of a sudden that was five nights a week. And that forced me to come home for dinner and then go back out at 9 o' clock and do radio till midnight. Did that for 30 years. And then when television came along, these producers showed up and said, we want to turn your radio show into a TV show. We're like, I don't know, it sounds interesting. Everything for me has been, okay, sounds interesting. Let me see if I can make something of this. But I said, you're going to have to do it on Friday afternoon and Saturday afternoon, because that's all I have. And that's when we did Lovelines.
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Sage Steele
And they did it.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
We did four to six shows a day, Friday and Saturday afternoon for five years. That was Loveline and mtv.
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Sage Steele
My goodness.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
So that's sort of how it got.
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Sage Steele
Going, I think back to the beginning there. And not just physically, when I said, how did you do that? But mentally, when you go from the intensity of the ICU and emergency situations, potentially, right. And then what do you, like, get a coffee and go over to the psych ward? I mean, that's a. That's quite a transition. Just one is a lot.
- [08:36]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Yeah, I was. This is going to sound a little weird, but I was very good at what I did. And so it didn't stress me out that much. And. But, but because part of what I did that was good. I was constantly allowed contact with the nurses and the patients. And so I was constantly getting information and adjusting and responding. And I had consultants in and whatnot. So it was comp. And I'd done it all. I'd done it, done it, done it. So there was nothing that was sort of surprising or stressful because it was kind of routine for me at that point. But I had to keep constant eye on the ball. Is that sound bothering you or is.
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Sage Steele
It, oh, we just ignore all this. The only sound, the first sound I've heard here in.
- [09:25]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Okay, we have planes and helicopters here.
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Sage Steele
Exactly.
- [09:28]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
So. And. And I should. As long as I took this real quick.
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Sage Steele
That thing probably all right.
- [09:34]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
It goes.
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Sage Steele
Causes the whole time.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
But that's still. I still live now. Back in the day, I had a beeper.
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Sage Steele
I remember the beeper.
- [09:40]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
And and because of the pager now keeping in contact the way I did, the pager would go off. I'd run to a phone because if people were calling me, it was important. So I was. I'd immediately flip into action and the pager would go off day and night. Now I hate text. Can I say fucking hate text? I fucking hate text because I have a physical reaction. It's like the pager going up, like, okay, what? What do you want? And it's like some nonsense. It's like, text me if you really do want to reach me. Otherwise, send me an email.
- [10:13]
Sage Steele
Yes. Isn't there a pill for this?
- [10:17]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
There is a. Mindfulness would be the answer.
- [10:20]
Sage Steele
Exactly. I think it's incredible, and I'm sure that you have sat down and reflected on it. But to go from what you said, all the gay stuff, right? Getting the arts and the music and totally kidding. Calm down, everybody.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
And we have friends that are gay.
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Sage Steele
And, you know, some people would have ignored. Okay, science is calling me back here.
- [10:48]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
You know, I was so unhappy. It was not for me. I don't know what I was doing. I was a kid trying to find an identity, and I. But what I managed to do is integrate all these things. And so radio was sort of an expression of that for me. What I really like is public speaking. I like moving an audience, and I like educating and changing and moving them. And so radio was that. And that's why radio was so satisfying for me for all those years. And when it Originally started in 1983, what motivated me was two things. One was I was deep in the AIDS epidemic. I treated tons of AIDS patients. Because what happened back then is the younger doctors got all of it because we were trained in it, the older. Anybody over about 35, as a physician, you'd have to retrain because there was so much going on in HIV and HIV treatment. It was intense. But I. I did. It was such a dark chapter, too. I. You know, the only people remaining to tell the story are people like me or people that lost someone they loved because it was. Everyone died. It was 100% fatality. People miss that. They forget that. That's why. Again, why Covid was like to 1%, 2% fatality. Yes, let's get serious about this. But, wow, we were through one with 100%.
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Sage Steele
What is it now?
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
What is AIDS? AIDS, it's 100%, not 100% highly. It's a chronic illness now. It's no longer an acute illness that you die of. I, as a third and fourth year, Medical student was routinely telling wonderful young men they had six months to live. Routinely. And I was never wrong. They'd come in with their first episode of pneumocystis and there was nothing for us to do.
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Sage Steele
My goodness.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
That's why when people take aim at azt, I like it gave us something we could put. We could maybe get there. Yes, with terrible medicine, lots of toxicity, but. But we could extend their life another three months. While we came up with other antivirals. It was something as opposed to, I'm sorry you're gonna die in six months.
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Sage Steele
Oh, my gosh. Yeah, I know it's part of what you do, but how do you say those words, death and dying to another human being?
- [12:53]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
So what I do well, when it's a young person, I'm just. I'm devastated. I'm as broke up as anybody would be. But when it's an older person, which is mostly what I deal with, that has lived a good life, I try to coach everybody up on the dignity of death and that there's a time to celebrate a life that if you have lived a life well and people live in their 80s and 90s now, that's miracles. It's a miracle that we can do that. And we should really understand the reality of death and dying and aging. It just happens everybody. These don't die people, idiots. Happens to everybody. And we should live and live fully in the meantime and then celebrate lives that are well lived and grieved. For sure, it's painful, but it's a very death. And dying at the end of life is a very distinct reality for me. I mean, it's just like birth. It's no different for me. It's just another part of life.
- [13:51]
Sage Steele
But you initially as a doctor, sharing that news with someone had to get used to. I mean, would you bring it home to Susan? Like, how do you let that go?
- [13:59]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Remember, as a physician, you see a lot of death and dying a lot in training. Third, fourth year medical student, you're seeing a lot of it. And when I was a third year medical student, I do have a memory. I was on a neurosurgical ward and a kid rolled in from another hospital and he was brain dead on a ventilator and the family was outside. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? And our resident, he was a junior resident, he wasn't a senior resident or a surgical resident, stood in front of the family kind of pacing around looking like, well, look, I just have to say this to people all the Time he was horrible and his family was just like, destroyed. And I thought to myself, oh, I'm never going to be like that. That is what I'm not going to do. So a lot of my memories about things I will never do and do it differently. And, you know, if you do with it, it's a part of life. You don't, you don't. I don't like it. You know, I don't know. There have been times when I've been shocked by it and I may have been on the phone or something, and that will affect me the whole day.
- [14:55]
Sage Steele
But the empathy you have was evident the first time I met you in person, which did not surprise me because it came through on the TV screen and radio for. I mean, for all these years. I feel like that is what makes you so unique, along with the fact that you're still a practicing physician right now, despite all of the things that you do. Like, it's insane.
- [15:16]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I have no business being out there if I don't practice medicine. That's sort of my feeling. I mean, yeah, but.
- [15:21]
Sage Steele
But most don't.
- [15:24]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I know I can't do that. I just can't. I mean, plus, you know, when you're practicing, you. You're staying in touch with your colleagues. You're kind of very complicated. There's so much stuff going on in medicine. I just think about a case I just said a very complicated sort of pre leukemia case, and I learned a ton. Again, I'm still learning, learning, learning, even this late in the game about how to approach things that they used to do it very differently, and now we can do all these things. And point being, I want to go back to the empathy thing. I personally am so privileged to be in communion with people in very, very intense situations. And that's where I experience spirituality, is in this thing that goes on between two humans we call a relationship. And in addiction treatment, where I spent a lot of my time, that becomes a really important and dicey and highly intuitive experience because the addict brain is so distorted and affected by the disease that to find your way into a connection with that person requires extreme. You have to use your whole body as an instrument. You can't just use your ears or your eyes. You have to see what you feel and smell and think and music. And just whatever happens to you in that moment, it's coming from that patient who can't express it because they're in their disease. And you have to get very attuned to that stuff. And I'm very privileged to Be in that position.
- [16:55]
Sage Steele
So many different areas. I want to go.
- [16:57]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I don't think I answered your question.
- [16:58]
Sage Steele
No, no, you did. And I want to just touch on the addiction part really quickly.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
This isn't going to be quick, I promise.
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Sage Steele
Oh, gosh.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
So go ahead.
- [17:09]
Sage Steele
All right. Okay.
- [17:10]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Go on.
- [17:11]
Sage Steele
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- [18:27]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Recovering addict.
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Sage Steele
Recovering addict. Even if it's been almost 20 years.
- [18:31]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
In recovery.
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Sage Steele
In recovery. Okay. He said something to us, the family, when he was in probably his third rehab center. And he said that it kind of pissed him off to go to these AA and NA meetings.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
Robert Kennedy tells me the same thing because I hate him. I have to go every day.
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Sage Steele
Yes, yes, he said that to me when I sat down with him. But then you stick with it because you know what happens if you don't. Yes, with this person. He didn't mind the meetings per se. What made him mad is that what he perceived as was a lack of accountability.
- [19:10]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Oh, accountability is a part of the recovery.
- [19:12]
Sage Steele
But it was more about the terminology. He said, I don't believe this is a disease. He said to me that this is a sickness versus a disease. Because I'll just finish. Well, I know I'll just finish the reason why. Which made me think. And I appreciated his honesty about it because it would have been easy to say Yep. I was born with this. It's a disease. He's like, no one forced me to put that needle in my arm. I did that once I did that. It turned into something uncontrollable.
- [19:40]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
You have to step back. There's a lot packed into that. You have to step back and go, look. You can't know whether something is or is not a disease until you define disease. So I don't want to put you on the spot. I've literally been in university settings with attending faculty, and I propose that they give me their definition of disease. And they can't do it.
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Sage Steele
I can't.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
If you look at Harrison's Book of Internal Medicine, at the very opening they try to do it, it's a weak definition.
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Sage Steele
Wow.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
So let me give you a definition that I think is inclusive of all things that should be considered a disease. It is a complex relationship between the genetics of the individual and the environment. And that relationship results in a state of abnormal physiology. We call that pathophysiology. That pathophysiology is reflected in signs and symptoms. And somebody like me comes along and can read those signs and symptoms and infer the pathophysiology, because there's those signs and symptoms, and those signs and symptoms follow a predictable pattern. We call that a natural history. And then once again, people like me try to affect that natural history in a positive way, resolve it, you know, reduce the consequences. That's disease. That's all disease.
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Sage Steele
So what do you say when he says, yeah, but no one forced me to do that.
- [21:01]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
So he has a disease that he's activated, right? He's acting. So he had this genetic potential.
- [21:06]
Sage Steele
Don't we all when it comes to those kind of drugs?
- [21:09]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
No. You can make dependent. You make everybody dependent. But only 10% of the people will go back. When you get them off, you're taught.
- [21:17]
Sage Steele
Even meth and heroin, and the strongest.
- [21:20]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Heaviest you can get strung out on these things. But you don't go back. You stop and you go, jesus, I'm never gonna do that again. Addicts always go back, always progress. Progression is in the natural history of addiction. That's a feature of addiction. And the reason is because the region of the brain, the genetics and the intracytoplasmic messengers, and we know all the biology, we know it all. It's all pretty well worked out now. A lot of it is worked out. And it's, you know, we know the genes, we know the story now. We know what's going on there, and we know what works to make it better. We know what things make it better. The people are. People, unfortunately, don't do the work to help them get better. They just give them harm avoidance strategies, which sometimes is appropriate, but there's more to be done. Not one size fits all for any disease. Everybody. It's all the context of that given individual's life and ethics and family values and biology. Every patient needs their own treatment plan for all diseases. I just. The leukemia patient I was talking about, I was working with his family, trying to make some choices on what's right for him at his advanced age. And what, he wants to take a trip. Should he take a trip? And there's. There's always things to be thought out in the context of a particular patient. So. So the. So he's activated a disease. Right. He's willing to acknowledge that that disease has a treatment. Treatment is certain things. We can argue about what the treatment should be and we can interfere with that natural history very effectively with treatment. We can do it. Okay, so the question now is, so why did he. How did he get to the point where he activated that disease? Right. So the typical. And this is, I deal with this all the time. So I talk to families, I give them the lecture on the biology of the disease and the nature of the disease and what happens to all their brain function and why they can't think and reason and stop. They can't stop. It's all biological at that point. Then they will usually say to me, okay, okay, okay, he can't stop. I get it. Why do we use it the first way? Why? They always want to blame the patient. So, okay, let's look at why people use. Sometimes they're just a truck driver and start doing meth. I mean, sometimes that happens, but the vast majority of time. And if you have bad enough addiction that you need to see me, I only treated really severe drug addicts. If you had bad enough addiction, you need to see me. There's a 100% probability of childhood trauma. So childhood trauma is both the inciting influence and the rocket fuel behind bad addiction. Okay. So if you look at your family member, I would predict that he probably started other drugs earlier. He didn't get right to the heroin.
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Sage Steele
Right.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
And he's missing the connection that once you activate that genetics, there's a progression. That's in the biology. But he did smoke the weed to begin with or smoke, you know, drink alcohol or whatever it was he did to start with or take pills or whatever.
- [24:10]
Sage Steele
Yep.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
What was he doing? Why did he. Why did that work? For him, why did he. What was happening? The vast majority of time is childhood trauma, physical abuse, sexual abuse, abandonment, neglect, chaos in the family. It's almost always there and almost always more than one. And that results in a state of emotional dysregulation. And so these kids, as they hit adolescence, are walking around severely dysregulated, with emotions that are too prolonged, too intense and too negative, with a lot of toxic shame. Big burden of toxic shame. And when they, somebody in their circle goes, hey, smoke this shit or whatever, it goes away. You can't tell a 15 year old that they haven't found a solution to their problems. Now they get going. And also their brain is set up in such a way, their endorphin system, that it really works out for them. It's like they will tell you, for the first time in my life, I felt okay. Yeah, that's the kind of stuff they'll tell you. And, and they're young adults or their adolescents. You can't, they, they can't regulate at that point. They can't, they know the frontal lobes not developed. They can't go, oh, that's not a good idea. Or I can see where this is going. All they know is I feel okay for the first time in my life.
- [25:21]
Sage Steele
Yes.
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Dr. Drew Pinsky
And now it's on.
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Sage Steele
The shame is devastating.
- [25:27]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
The toxic shame that they're from childhood trauma.
- [25:30]
Sage Steele
No, I think in this particular case, forgiving himself for going there in the first place, for ruining his life for any certain amount of time, that period of time that then certainly affects everything after that. For disappointing your extended family, for giving away other opportunities like how long has he been sober? 19 years.
- [25:54]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
And he still feels all that.
- [25:56]
Sage Steele
It's better, but it is there. It is there. And I don't know how much therapy he has had and really dealt with. There's been some, there's certainly been some.
- [26:06]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
So that may still be toxic shame from the trauma he needs. There's so many good trauma therapies now, EMDR and trauma informed care and neurobiofeedback. There's so many good treatments and the shame just goes down when you treat that.
- [26:21]
Sage Steele
Do you think most addicts need that therapy after they've. They're clean?
- [26:28]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
It's a complicated question you're asking. The answer is yes, but. So not every addict has trauma. Some just get bad addiction or had horrible genetic burdens and poom. It explodes. But if they have childhood trauma and by the way, you know, the things they did in their disease, sometimes they need trauma therapy for sure. But most my patients all need it, for sure. The question then becomes when and what? Most bad addicts do not remember the first six months of sobriety. So to do stuff in the first six months is nonsensical. And even in the first year, it can evoke things that make them go use again. So you want to be very careful and very specific with where you apply this. And again, each individual case has to be assessed on its own terms. And there's, there's sort of trauma light therapies you can do, and there's sort of education, psychoeducation, things you can do to help them kind of realize, you know, what was going on and why they did what they did. But most certainly all my patients need that for sure. Just. It's just I object to people doing intensive psychological services in the first week of sobriety. Makes no sense to me at all.
- [27:43]
Sage Steele
I mean, just, just from the physical aspect where you're going through, they don't remember.
- [27:48]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
And it's just they need to get sober, clear the brain, stay with the basics, manage the addiction. And this takes time. Brain healing takes a long time. You're not just talking about the brain healing from the years of. Whatever they've done to it may have injured it, even with. With the, with the drugs and alcohol, but also the rewiring necessary to regulate emotions. That takes years, takes forever. It's. A brain is a slow instrument to heal.
- [28:14]
Sage Steele
It's been a long time since I've come to Los Angeles. Few years for sure. Was in San Francisco outside of San Fran in the spring, and what a mess.
- [28:24]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Wow. Welcome to the.
- [28:26]
Sage Steele
Wow. Yeah, listen, I get it. I look outside now, this area of Los Angeles, I get it. It's beautiful. And then you go back down and we're staying in West Hollywood and Airbnb there for a little studio. And I could not help this morning sitting on the balcony, just staring and watching what's going on.
- [28:47]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
And West Hollywood's pretty good.
- [28:49]
Sage Steele
Exactly.
- [28:50]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Compared to other areas down there.
- [28:51]
Sage Steele
Yeah. Where do you even begin? And I'm sure when you get out and you drive around, the empathy that.
- [28:57]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
You'Re led by like a surgeon who knows how to cut out a particular tumor and seeing people lying all over the place with that tumor and the state won't let you touch the patients. It's what I feel like. It's easy. It is not hard. President Trump issued an executive order that's started at least us talking about the fact that some people need custodial care, some people need to be held against their will because they're gravely disabled. Gravely disabled doesn't exist in this state anymore. We got to reinstitute gravely disabled. And we need to help people who are so sick sick that they have to lie down on the sidewalk. You can't do that. You got to come with me. And let's. Let's start rebuilding the infrastructure. We need an acute care facility with primary addiction, dual diagnosis, primary psych, hundreds of beds. Move people through it quickly to residential programs. People live in beautiful environments where they get ongoing residential care for maybe a year or so, get vocational rehab, then into some sort of structured living environment. These could be. They could be all kinds of things we could do that have therapeutic sort of structure to them, and then get people out into the workforce and move them into the independence. It's not hard. We used to do it all the time. It's how psychiatric care worked all the way from 1950 to maybe 1990. We had no problem with it.
- [30:20]
Sage Steele
But you didn't have this many patients walking the streets.
- [30:23]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
No, we didn't let it go this far. And we need a lot more psychiatrists. We need a lot more beds, and we need to take people by the hand and go, please, come with me. Let's go. Let's take a look.
- [30:31]
Sage Steele
Doesn't it also start with. And this is what our family friend, you know, doesn't also start with the patient wanting that help? Because I was told by them, like, you can do and say all that you want and bribe me and drag me, but if I'm not ready, it's not gonna work.
- [30:46]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
That's true. And so giving. What we do in this city is we give them heroin and give them rigs and remember, progressive illness that ends in death. I don't care who's doing the drugs. I know who's giving the drugs. I don't care if it's a doctor administering an iv. There's still a progressive illness that will end in death. That's the nature of addiction. And so this idea that, well, we'll just let them use it, give them their drugs, they'll be fine. Still a progressive illness. Yes. You have to. We got our. I don't know what our. Who's coming up here, but somebody's back in a truck up into our house.
- [31:18]
Sage Steele
Right up the driveway.
- [31:19]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Sorry, but I don't. Yes, you have. But a patient has to want to get better. So when do they want to get better? Begs that question. Do they just wake up one day and go, I'm not going to do drugs anymore? This thing that taken over my life. Now I realize that never. Here's where people find, find motivation. In jail, near death, lose your children, lots of relationship loss, physical loss, illness, injury. Then they go, oh, oh, oh, maybe this isn't a good idea. Maybe I need to do something. You have to break through their denial. You have to create the motivation. Then there's motivational interviewing. There are techniques you can use to get people to sort of have that moment. But you must, here's, here's at its core, the way I describe it, you must ask addicts to do something. If you don't ask them to do something, they will die. They will die. You have to say, you can't lie on the sidewalk, you can't steal. You gotta come with me. So loss of freedom, loss of life, loss of children, loss of important people. That's why people come to treatment. It's so interesting to me when people get, come in for a sex addiction treatment, say, and we've heard about that in the public, they go, oh, it's just because they got caught. What do you think? Why do you think anybody comes in for treatment? They don't come into treatment because they decide. They come in because their family brings them in or the, or the judge sends them in, or they come out of a near death experience and they're sent from the hospital to treatment. That's when people came to treatment for me.
- [32:53]
Sage Steele
But there's so many that seem, but.
- [32:55]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Understand this, the anosognosia, we call it the, the biological block of insight. The common word is denial. But it's so biological, it actually has a biological term. It's anosognosia. My, my charge, I used to entertain ourselves by asking patients we'd, we needed to know why they came in, just understand their motivation. We go, you know, why are you here? But we'd entertain ourselves with their answers, like they would. Like this one kid is there, he's like, he's paranoid. You have no idea. I'm so sick and tired of this. I've lost. This I've lost. I'm so sick and tired. I'm sick and tired of wa boohoo. And I open the chart and there he is in four point chains, shuffling into treatment. The judge sent him directly from the courtroom. And I go, did the judge have anything to do with this? Oh yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, a little bit. Like they actually don't even know what's happening, what's motivating them to come to treatment. That's why you must ask them to do something. That's why you must bring them to the environment where they can get care.
- [33:52]
Sage Steele
And for those who. Okay, I don't want to offend anyone. I don't know the right terminology. You. I mean, they're crazy. They're completely.
- [34:02]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
It feels like they have a brain disease and their brain is not working right. They lose insight.
- [34:08]
Sage Steele
You can't have that conversation with them. So then what happens to those people who, who are roaming the streets?
- [34:14]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
You bring them in. You say. You say you bring them in and you clear them up. You bring that. You go. Look, that's what the custodial care is. You go. You're gravely disabled. We need to help you. Here's what's insane. Look, if the same symptom complex is manifesting because of a dementing illness or a progressive neurological disorder, you are required by law to bring that patient in. You're guilty of patient abuse if you neglect, if you don't bring that patient in. So we privilege certain diagnoses in the law. It's crazy. And dementias and these severe neurological disorders don't get better. They keep getting worse no matter what we do. Schizophrenia, we can make them better. And if you let them run unchecked, they are irretrievable. Same thing with addiction. We can make them better. We can get. We can help them. And most of them can be helped. Dementia is that. Sorry, that's going to progress. But the progressive illness we're required to treat and then the stuff we can actually help, we're not allowed to touch.
- [35:14]
Sage Steele
Well, when you say we are responsible, you know, by law to bring them in, who should be doing that? Who should be going on the streets of Los Angeles right now?
- [35:24]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Social workers, cops. I mean, we don't have the places yet.
- [35:27]
Sage Steele
I was going to say, what are the facilities like?
- [35:29]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
We need the facility. We need to build this. We could have it up and running in six months. What wouldn't be hard. It would not be hard.
- [35:35]
Sage Steele
Six months.
- [35:36]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Yeah. Staff it up. Run it. Yeah.
- [35:37]
Sage Steele
So who should be doing that right now?
- [35:40]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
The Department of Mental Health, the state. Somebody should contract with somebody to build a program and. Wouldn't be that hard. HHI wouldn't be that hard.
- [35:49]
Sage Steele
I'm sorry.
- [35:49]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
And then Kennedy has this plan. Robert Kennedy has a plan of these addiction farms which are. Great idea. That's the third stage of what I was talking about. He's a little naive about how sick people are, brain wise, how bad their brains are. We need to stabilize them psychiatrically. We need to get them in a residential program where they have some stability and then out to the farms. Fine, good. Let's do it.
- [36:09]
Sage Steele
Do you think, logistically speaking here in Los Angeles, where is the space for them again?
- [36:17]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
The Sears building downtown has been open forever. Let's take that over and put a three tiered system in. We could get a medical director, hire a director of nursing and fire it up. Let's go. People can run hospitals. Psychiatric hospitals have been around forever. We know how to run them. They're still around. They're beautiful, they're lovely. And people think that we're talking about One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. One Flew over the Cuckoo. Ken Kesey wrote that book in 1959. We're talking about nearly 75 years ago that that book was written. And people when they saw the movie, thought they were watching a documentary. They were not. There were very few hospitals like that. And the fact is it's totally different. You don't think that treatment of brain diseases have progressed. Back then, by the way, we had Thorazine, Amitriptyline and Haldol. Now we have hundreds of medications to help people. Hundreds that all are good and work and help with brain disorders of various types. So stop it everybody. Do you think that treat the brain like everything, the pancreas, it's no different.
- [37:20]
Sage Steele
Yes. Do you think the proper leadership is intact here today to begin that process?
- [37:26]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
No, not at all. They continue to the. I have a friend who wrote a book called Crooked Smile. He got off the street about three years ago. Finally. He's now a carpenter. He's fully rehabilitated, he's doing great and he wrote this book. He's actually going to get a law degree now. Wow. And yeah, when you see people recovery, when you see recovery, it's like, it's wonderful. That's why I work in recovery and people. I would not have given a chance of hope to do this. So he said about three years ago when they were giving him his heroin, giving him a great his rig, they would pat him on the back and say, listen, this is all going to be, this is all going to end when we get communism. You'll be fine. That's who's on the street dealing with patients. The sickest of the sickest brain disorders that humans get is being cared for by people who are at that level of sophistication. It should be medical doctors, psychiatrists, nurses. That's who should be dealing with it, not social workers and not do gooders. These are medical problems and people are dying. These are outdoor hospitals without walls and if we had a hospital of that size that was losing six patients a day, like we're doing here in the streets of Los Angeles, people would be put in prison.
- [38:36]
Sage Steele
Yeah.
- [38:37]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
So it's so nutty cuckoo what we're doing. It's beyond. Anyway, I just wonder. It makes me so crazy to talk.
- [38:43]
Sage Steele
I know, I know. And that's, that's, that's what breaks my heart when you see it. And I just wonder if there's a lack of education, then just for the normal residents of this county who don't realize that it is doable, they're starting to mean they have to educate themselves. And then you have to vote differently.
- [39:02]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Yes. You have to vote differently.
- [39:03]
Sage Steele
It feels like that is hopeless here.
- [39:05]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I remember when I was. I was talking to a state assemblyman and we were talking about this and he said something he wanted to do and he goes, that's it. And I go, what do you mean that's it? He goes, I know. Do you have any ideas? I said, yes. We need to expand conservatorship. Get rid of AB 109. Repeal 87 of 47 or 47 of 57. Expand Lanterman, Petrie, Short. Create custodial care. Expand. I mean, there are so many things we could. We need to do to help these people. And it is kind of starting. It is kind of compared to where it was even three years ago. It's kind of moving in the right direction because the insanity of what's going on is apparent to everybody. This housing only thing is just because even that people that are advocates are going, turns out we put them in the room and turns out we're not done. Yeah, you're not done.
- [39:53]
Sage Steele
Well, I. The. The big picture that the world knows about. Yes. You see the homelessness and you hear about it. If, even if you're not here and the fires and the way if four.
- [40:03]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Walls could treat the most severe psychiatrically ill patients, my job would be so easy.
- [40:07]
Sage Steele
Yeah.
- [40:07]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I just put people in, in rooms that all. We would have no need for psychiatric hospitals. Just put people in hotel rooms and they'll be fine. That's insane. That's insane. I'm sorry. Fires.
- [40:17]
Sage Steele
Yeah. No, it's just again, for people to fully educate themselves and not stay in their bubble when it's uncomfortable sometimes to come out and say, okay, am I in my own way, as a single resident, you know, somewhat responsible because we see this, the problem keeps getting worse, but we keep doing the same thing.
- [40:34]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Get what you voted for insanity.
- [40:35]
Sage Steele
Right.
- [40:36]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
You get what you Voted for.
- [40:37]
Sage Steele
So why do you think there is hope here in Los Angeles for people to become educated and make a change with their vote and get the right people in to help?
- [40:44]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I think I don't know about getting the right people in because I've given up on the California vote.
- [40:47]
Sage Steele
So that's the part you have given up on that.
- [40:49]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I've given up on that. But. But I have faith in reality. And I'm seeing reality start to reassert itself. Not that there is like, let's look at the Sydney Sweeney thing, right? I was saying that yesterday about that ad. I was like, that's reality. People like looking at her, men like looking at her, women like looking at her, and they like buying the things that they like looking at. That's the way it goes. That's how humans work. You can pretend, you can do the ideology all you want. You're not going to sell your product. So reality comes in, okay? It's one of the wonders of capitalism. It's the invisible hand. It always requires people to stay in the real. And so when it comes to homelessness, you can't deny what's happening here. People are running around with machetes, people are getting harmed. These people are so sick. You can't pretend it's something else anymore because for a long time they pretended it was. It's the stress of being on the streets. Of course. They're like this, all right, stop it, stop it. Nonsense. So, so that is beginning there. There are community groups organizing, San Francisco being the model for this, that are going enough. We'll take care of it. They're taking care of it themselves now.
- [41:53]
Sage Steele
Oh, wow. Yeah, the people are doing it. If you had one message for Karen Bass, mayor of Los Angeles.
- [42:02]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Yes, I have one message to all the California representatives, will you please govern? Will you please govern? We need transportation, we need streets, we need. City of Pasadena does a pretty good job, by the way. That's why I'm acutely aware of this stuff. Our trash is good, our fire is good. Our. Most people don't complain about the Altena fire because response was good, that it was a tragedy, an act of nature. But it wasn't because of failures of the system. People did their job, they worked. And it. We did the best we could. We. We have things that work here in Pasadena. So you can see it in juxtaposition with Los Angeles where nothing works. I was going to drive, ride a horse. I used to have a radio show across town. I was going to ride a horse to work one Day because I wanted to make the point that the streets are more suitable for a horse. 100%. So freeways don't work. They narrowed the lanes in the. The parallel side streets for bikes that I'd never seen a bike in. And emergency vehicles can't get through. And the streets are in decay. They're falling apart. And so the site, as you go along, there's just potholes everywhere. It's ridiculous. And we don't have snow here. Why are there potholes in a place with no weather? It's insane. So please govern. Please govern. Stop worrying about all the things you like thinking about and worrying about. We need, you know, police, we need safety, we need roads, we need transportation. We need the basics of government.
- [43:22]
Sage Steele
She knows that. Gavin Newsom knows that. Screaming and going.
- [43:26]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I think they're so sad as they're so into their ideological sort of bubble about, you know, feeling good about talking about things. Don't. No more talking. No more talking. Just. Just pragmatic solutions for government. Just govern. Govern. If, if, if. What's the name? Rick Caruso knows how to save a. A fire zone. Do what he did. Do that, do. Figure out how to do that, how to fund that. That's all. Do the basics. Don't pay, don't worry about everything else.
- [43:56]
Sage Steele
Why do you stay?
- [43:56]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
We exactly what you're looking out here at. I can't. Plus my patients here, I practice medicine here. We have a whole. Our granddaughters here. We have a full, full, full life here that we couldn't really be very hard for us to live somewhere else.
- [44:12]
Sage Steele
It's home. It is home. I mean, you were born.
- [44:16]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Deep roots. Deep roots, roots. And thank God for Pasadena, because it's. Without Pasadena, I don't know. What if I could.
- [44:21]
Sage Steele
You might not.
- [44:22]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Yeah, I'd be in Orange County. That. That's right. Yeah.
- [44:25]
Sage Steele
Yes, that's. That seems like a different country.
- [44:27]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
It's a different country completely. One of our. Two of our sons live there now, and it's. They're both so much happier since moving there. Guess what? You. You go. Have you driven down her county lately?
- [44:37]
Sage Steele
Yes.
- [44:38]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
When you hit the county line, the roads open up and start working and everything's clean. It's like. It's like you like walking into Oz, you know, it's like, oh, I'm not in Kansas anymore. It's the same state. It's so crazy what's going on, I think.
- [44:55]
Sage Steele
And then it gets mocked. Oh, that's where all the right wingers live.
- [44:58]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
It's not true, though. It's not true.
- [45:00]
Sage Steele
It's definitely more red. More red than anything.
- [45:02]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
It's traditionally been more red there, but it's not so much now. But they work. They do, they govern.
- [45:10]
Sage Steele
Where does your empathy come from?
- [45:14]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Actually, it is the result of having been the subject of empathic attunement. When our. We have triplets and when our kids were one, one of our kids needed brain surgery. It was a very. We were in survival mode already. And then it's just my anxiety went berserko. And one day Susan called me at work and she goes, you know, you need to see it. There's therapist. And I'm like, I know I want to. It'd be good for my work. It's important I do it. No, no. And the hair stood up in the back of my neck. I was like, okay, I hear you. And I put the phone down and I called somebody else. I got a referral. I went and I stayed in therapy for 11 years. But it was such a great experience. And my therapist was so attuned, was so empathic and so skilled and talented that being the subject of that builds your own machinery. That's how that builds. And empathy is the highest order function of the human brain. And I had to reintegrate trauma and all this before good trauma therapies were available. So that's what took so long. I had to really reintegrate parts of myself. I was also severely traumatized as a child, and it just built my capacity to be available to other people in that fashion. It was very important for me. And so as a result, because, you know, I would have uncanny experiences as a patient in the therapeutic context, where time would expand and contract and things very, very wild stuff. And I thought. But I just would tolerate it. I would just. I would just learn to be able to be in it. And so in working with other people, when you have trauma, parts of yourself wall off. There's literally the wiring disconnects. But that part of yourself is so still there. And it communicates various ways with the outside world in uncanny ways. And if you're in a. Anybody who's been in a deep therapeutic context will have had these experiences where you have feelings or you hear music or smells that are just not you. You just. You cannot, because you're so clear where you are and your. Your boundaries are. You. You start to go, oh, I. I don't normally have pain back there. And. And you. You learn in a skilled way how to bring that into the room with the patient and go, and what they Will usually do. Often do. Is they'll move right through it because it's so matter of fact to them. That's just part of their chronic experience. Like, I remember I talked. I was like, is this meaningful to you? I'm having this pain back here. This one woman goes, yeah, well, that's. My dad used to kick me every. And she'd kick me there. And anyway. And anyway, because it was like, yeah, yeah.
- [47:50]
Sage Steele
Next.
- [47:51]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Not just next. If she wasn't denying it, it was like, well, of course you know that because I live with that all the time. Like she was in it. But. But it was a way to connect or. I've had other patients freak out when I bring stuff up and get upset and things. And. And I think it wasn't the right time to bring it. But they'll. I've never had an experience where it was wrong. I bet people come back the next day and go, how did you know?
- [48:14]
Sage Steele
Really?
- [48:14]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Yeah. I don't. It's just you. You. You're community. Some part of you is communicating to me, and I'm just here to receive it. But I. But. But it gives you a place to connect now that you can connect to that part of them. Start to bring that back into the room in a way.
- [48:30]
Sage Steele
How did Dr. Drew put the doctor aside as a father with a baby who had a brain tumor?
- [48:40]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Oh, my God. It was terrible. It was just. I can't even almost. Can't even think. It wasn't brain. It was a. It was an arachnoid cyst that got a. Wasn't a tumor, but it was needed brain.
- [48:50]
Sage Steele
I'm sorry. Surgery.
- [48:51]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Needed brain surgery. Yeah. They. But it was full success. That kiss, a lawyer, piano player, and all this stuff now. Overwhelming. Just overwhelmed. Just in sort of survival mode. Like. Like constant ptsd. Constant. Acute stress. Constant. Oh, my God. It was terrible.
- [49:07]
Sage Steele
How long did it last? The process lasts from diagnosis to. Not you. You not living in fear anymore. For him.
- [49:16]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Four months or so. I can't even think about it. It's just excruciating.
- [49:22]
Sage Steele
He was two.
- [49:23]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
He was one.
- [49:24]
Sage Steele
He was one.
- [49:25]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Yeah.
- [49:27]
Sage Steele
And you have two other babies.
- [49:29]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I know.
- [49:30]
Sage Steele
Triplets.
- [49:31]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Unbelievable.
- [49:32]
Sage Steele
But I think that's the part that I'm fascinated with because you are who you are and you're a fixer for everybody else.
- [49:39]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
No, you're just. Look, ask my wife. I'm just a husband. I'm just. I'm just. You're just reduced to that, you know, human. I have some special knowledge.
- [49:49]
Sage Steele
Yeah.
- [49:49]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Some special experience that helps me you know, really helps me follow treatment plans and things. It helps me do the things I'm supposed to do because I understand the context for them, but it doesn't mean I don't have to do them.
- [50:01]
Sage Steele
How did Susan handle that? And you as a couple?
- [50:06]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
We. I don't. I. We really are right now just reassessing our life and trying to understand how we got through all that. We don't full. Neither of us fully understand it. We were just in full on survival mode. And my workaholism, don't forget that, that was in full blossom, full bloom.
- [50:24]
Sage Steele
Did you sleep?
- [50:25]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
No, not for years.
- [50:27]
Sage Steele
Not for years.
- [50:28]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Are you sleepy now, Ring? I study my sleep every night. Because I'll tell you, I think when you get older, it gets much more important. You can kind of deal with no sleep.
- [50:36]
Sage Steele
When you're younger, did you. I mean, did you have to take time off of work? I mean, because you're still practicing.
- [50:39]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
We would take time off even before the kids. I remember we'd go down to Cabo or something. We spend like four days. It would take me two days to kind of come down. One day of vacation and then the next day of dread. Dread, the going back.
- [50:53]
Sage Steele
But during that time when he was sick, did you have to set the practice aside?
- [50:58]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
No.
- [50:58]
Sage Steele
Yeah.
- [50:59]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
No, I had to keep going. I couldn't. There's no way. I just. I couldn't. I now, I had to. I was, you know, at the hospital for him and stuff a lot, but. But I still also had to do my.
- [51:13]
Sage Steele
Why did. Why at that time were you dealing with ptsd?
- [51:18]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
It wasn't pt. Well, I, I so, so because I had childhood trauma, I was kind of carrying around PTSD all the time, and then this set it all off. I didn't realize that's what was happening. It just felt like acute stress. But it was probably reactivation of complex.
- [51:32]
Sage Steele
Post traumatic stress, bringing things back. So you had not dealt with that?
- [51:36]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
No, it was not. Till. When did I go into therapy with all that? Probably six months later, when we were on the other side of it.
- [51:46]
Sage Steele
Of him.
- [51:47]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Yeah, we were sort of out of the survival and I was still.
- [51:53]
Sage Steele
Certainly nothing you ever would wish on anybody.
- [51:56]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I'm having trouble thinking about it right now.
- [51:59]
Sage Steele
I wonder if the gift from that was you having to focus on yourself and going into that therapy.
- [52:11]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I mean. Yes, that's what triggered it. That's what triggered it. It's true. And, God, I. Youth is an amazing thing. I mean, you can tolerate a lot. And certainly I could. I was very Resilient and very able to tolerate so much. And I had a good instrument and so you know, I could do all those things.
- [52:33]
Sage Steele
I read that and I didn't realize this about you, that you had anxiety high levels and attacks episodes. So when, and this is when you were young.
- [52:44]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
So, so here's my story. So my mother was abusive, emotionally abusive when I was from 2 to 9 or so. And. And it left a. I didn't understand what had happened or what was happening to me. But, but I found workaholism and hyper achievement like junior year in high school. And it, it solved all my problems. So that's where, that's where it all came from. It's like, like your, your, your friend with the addiction, he. I'm sure the drugs solved his problems. Work, all of them solved my problems. For the first time. My mood was good. My, you know, I felt good about myself. My identity was sort of focused. I'm having horrible pains in my stomach thinking about all this stuff. I gotta tell you. Sorry, but it's fine. It's no problem. And so in college I didn't have the workaholism. I had the workaholism but I didn't have the hyper achievement quite thing. I was sort of just nobody working hard academically and I got started getting depressed and I thought, oh, I must be doing the wrong thing. I'm not up for this. And in reality, you know, the male brain needs to develop to be able to do the kind of academic work that was required of me. I was not there yet. I think when I came back two years later, one of the advantages was I had a more developed brain as a male and I could, I could really do it. Then I was shocked at how well I could perform, but it was, you know, same person. But not only was I recommitted, I could do it. The performance was just there. And so I, you know, like I said, I decided that must, I must not be up for this. I'm going to go follow my whims in music. I'm going to go become an opera singer. That was for a minute I was going to do that. All these things I was experimenting with. And then I really got to. I started having panic attacks. Like, like just disabling panic attacks. And I didn't really know what was going on. I had a sense it was psychiatric, but I went to. Oh my God, my college at the time. The psychiatric services were in the bell tower, in the belfry, literally in the belfry, bats in the belfry. And the medical services were down by the tennis courts, and it was run by some retired farmer doctor who was sort of donating his time. So I went to the belfry and they went, yes, you probably need us, but go make sure this isn't a medical problem first and go down and see if there's some medicine they can help you with. And that. That doctor at the facility looked at me and he went, you need to get your act together. Just take some long walk in the woods. I'm like, if I've tried everything, are you kidding? If that would take care of this, you think I wouldn't do it? Because I guess I'll prescribe you some Valium. They want you to have something up there.
- [55:26]
Sage Steele
Oh, my goodness.
- [55:27]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
He was very disdainful of, you know, these symptoms I was having. And by the way, they've just given me back then we did have tricyclic antidepressants. They'd give me a little bit of that. It probably would have saved me two or three years of misery. But no, they did not. And I was sort of mismanaged from then on. I really was mismanaged by everybody. I went to the psychological services. There weren't even psychiatric services up there. There were psychological services and started getting therapy and sort of got better. And that's probably why I was able to kind of change course and look at things and realize that, hey, I need to get back to who I am and what I like doing. And. And once I did that, I'm. Everything sort of came together. I started. My mood got better, my panic went away. I still had sort of generalized anxiety forever. I still have it now, to be fair, but it was kind of up. And in retrospect, it probably was PTSD still, you know, because I never had my trauma treatment treated. It was sort of complex. PTSD meets depression. And how do you.
- [56:32]
Sage Steele
How do you handle it? Today?
- [56:35]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I really. Except for right now, while I'm talking about all this stuff, I really don't have much anxiety anymore. And. And I did. I did tell my wife this morning. I said, you know, I think I'm getting a little depressed again. I am prone to depression, probably genetically, biologically, and I get over it by being, you know, present with my loved ones and working out more and sleeping Right. And that kind of thing.
- [56:58]
Sage Steele
That's the lesson for everyone, right? Because there doesn't feel like there's one cure for everybody. Just do this. Just do this. It's certainly not a walk in the woods, but for you, you Know today what you need.
- [57:11]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Remember, I've had lots of treatment, lots and lots and lots of treatment and I still am prone to ptsd. I still, I still can be triggered to that.
- [57:20]
Sage Steele
I, I don't know, I feel like you're, you're so hard on yourself.
- [57:25]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I am.
- [57:26]
Sage Steele
Always have been.
- [57:29]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Yeah, probably. Probably. I mean again, the, the, the. Well, but two aspects of that. One was a lot of the traumatizing for my mom was that stuff, you know, you're getting fat, your hair's like a lot of beating up about who I was and how I looked. I really. Screaming at the top of her lungs, traumatizing me. And so that's where some of that comes from. And the other is, I don't know, I just have high expectations and I've been able to kind of do that. I like doing that. It's not, I don't consider it a negative thing. I don't. It's like I think, I think, look, we have a live in a time when people are retreating into safe spaces. I think you lean in. That's how you develop self efficacy and you learn to tolerate things and expands your intellectual pursuits. Lean in. And so I, I prefer to think of myself now as less demanding and perfectionistic and more just leaning into stuff.
- [58:31]
Sage Steele
Did you forgive your mom?
- [58:34]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I did, I did. And I never got anything out of that relationship. But towards the end of her relationship, well into her 90s, and towards the end I just thought to myself, and I probably came to this in therapy, like I'm never going to get anything out of this, but I do need to do what I need to do for me to be a good son. So I was a very good son to her. And she's so funny. I mean she would call me and ask. She had lots of medical problems, ask complex problems and then start fighting with me and screaming at me about what I was telling her I thought she should do. And I was like, you don't have to. Don't call me that. You don't have to. Don't. It's okay. I don't. You don't have to ask my opinions. It's fine. You don't need to do that. And she said, just because I'm fighting and yelling doesn't mean I'm not going to follow what you're saying. I'm like, oh my God, I have to go through that. You're going to put me through that?
- [59:28]
Sage Steele
Wow.
- [59:29]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Okay.
- [59:29]
Sage Steele
But I, but I guess this is, this is what I've learned from you. Even in the last 24 hours when I was on your show yesterday. And it is okay. That is wrong and that hurts. And then you want. Then you have to ask why. Why is she doing that? Is that actually about you? Right. That's about.
- [59:49]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
She had really severe mixed problems and she was a very interesting constellation. It was hard to characterize her stuff.
- [59:56]
Sage Steele
Yeah.
- [59:57]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
God bless her.
- [59:59]
Sage Steele
But not.
- [60:00]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Yes, she made my dad happy. I'm glad for him. My dad was, you know, sort of not great to me growing up too, but he really redeemed himself as a grandfather. He was such a wonderful grandfather. I was like, all is forgiven.
- [60:12]
Sage Steele
Really?
- [60:12]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Absolutely.
- [60:13]
Sage Steele
That's beautiful.
- [60:14]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Yeah.
- [60:15]
Sage Steele
But what you experienced, I feel like millions of people have benefited from millions. People who don't even. Because of what you went through to get through that as a kid.
- [60:28]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I'm going to tell you a quick story. It's comical to me, but here it is. So Susan, my wife, all her friends are psychic and Psychic. Psychics. And she did psychic podcasts and things too. She has a show called Calling out if you like psychic. She knows them all. We're actually developing a television show around this.
- [60:47]
Sage Steele
Really?
- [60:47]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Yeah. I'll tell you about it. But. But one of them, who's quite talented, and I study them, I watch them, and I've actually wired them up and done brainwave studies and stuff. And we did that with. What's the Hollywood psychic kid, the young boy.
- [61:04]
Sage Steele
Oh, yes. He's incredible.
- [61:05]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Excellent. Yeah. And we. We did. And we. And it was his. Not normal. What was going on neurologically. It's the neuro. The neuroscientist said he's never seen a pattern like that ever. So somebody needs to figure out what they're doing. But one of them, whom I noticed has very non physiological eye movements when she's really in her mode, she was talking to me and she goes, oh, your mom's here. I'm like, all right. And she's. And. And she goes. She goes, look, I don't want to be rude, but would mommy dearest be a way to describe your relationship with her? And I'm like, absolutely.
- [61:37]
Sage Steele
Really?
- [61:37]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
The movie was my room.
- [61:39]
Sage Steele
No way.
- [61:39]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Was absolutely 100% what I experienced.
- [61:43]
Sage Steele
No way.
- [61:43]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
And. And I. And I went. And I was. Yep. And she goes, well, she's here. And she says. And she says, well, she's sort of sorry, but not really because things turned out okay. We did. We did pretty well. No, she said, quote, we did pretty well. And I thought that that's it.
- [61:59]
Sage Steele
That's my mom. Yeah.
- [62:00]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
And I actually had a very vivid dream where she wrote. She. A letter came in from her. Like, it was written in this beautiful handwriting, kind of took my breath away. And it was. And at the end, it said, this life is grand. And I should really remember that. I should stay with that. That was like a message from her because that's exactly the way she would talk to this. This life is grand. And I thought, oh, you know what the letter was that everything will be fine with everybody, like my kids and stuff, because I do worry about everybody.
- [62:27]
Sage Steele
So how did that, all of that affect you as a parent to these three babies that came into the world.
- [62:34]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
All at once hyper vigilant and anxious? As a parent, I'd say yeah. And perfectionistic and whatever.
- [62:41]
Sage Steele
But your relationship with them, I mean.
- [62:44]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
They may each have their own opinion. Thankfully, they're all different people. And so they'll each have their own opinion about that.
- [62:50]
Sage Steele
Yeah. I just think it's beautiful how you have. It is a choice. Right. On how you choose to use what happened. And we all have something. Right.
- [63:01]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Well, it's a choice. But some of it is just. It. It is, you know, intergenerational transmission of trauma and parenting styles and information is a thing. And some of it is inescapable.
- [63:14]
Sage Steele
But the.
- [63:15]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
But like my focus on education and stuff like that, that was just in me. I could. I don't know how to do otherwise.
- [63:20]
Sage Steele
I feel like you could have run from certain things and you eventually got there. Even yesterday, the conversation we were having about it was the story of the two gay men who somehow adopted a baby boy. But then there was. Ends up he was a one.
- [63:38]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Was. Had a pedophil. Pedophilia.
- [63:40]
Sage Steele
Pedophilia, yes. And I was pretty black and white about it. And like, no, he had a history of this. Why didn't they research it to find it before they allowed him to bring a little baby home? Maybe they did and maybe they did, and we're still learning the facts. Yes. And you said yes. And I just don't want to toss them off yet. Right. And I loved that about you because there's a real hesitation until it is.
- [64:04]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
100%, not just 100%, because I give every. I've seen, you know, irretrievable people become wonderful. You said you described your friend with the addiction as this wonderful person. They are generally wonderful people. They get a horrible illness that makes them do horrible things and puts them in horrible condition. But I see. I get to see who they are, where they really become, and it's it's why I got in the field. I just, these transformations are spectacular, but I am just sick and tired of everybody, the mobs being the judge and jury and that everything being, you know, that people basing their opinions on what they see on the Internet. We don't know the facts yet. Let's, let's let it out. I mean, and, and what I said was, and this, people could argue with me about that sometimes childhood pornography in particular is part of a sexual addiction where they, they end up there and that can be treated. That is not pedophilia in the sense of a, of a, of a preference. That's an addiction that sends them to bad places, like every addiction. And I don't know what she has. And I don't know if you even. And you said, well, I still think they shouldn't have kids. I said, okay, I can, I can accept that, but I still want this story to be fully fleshed out before I make a decision.
- [65:13]
Sage Steele
And that's, that's the part that, I mean, where, with the empathy.
- [65:17]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
People are complicated, where everybody has been turned into a cartoon figure by the media. And if you're a cartoon figure, you're, you're Cindy Sweeney. Did you see the video of her running, crying? I don't know if it's real even. We don't even know what's real anymore. But, but she's like, I'm just a person. I'm here with my kid, my dog, and I'm just. You're attacking me and I'm just a person. I just did an ad and I thought, yeah, she's a kid, she's 25 year old and she's being attacked. And they're, they feel at their liberty to attack people because these public figures have been turned into cartoon characters.
- [65:47]
Sage Steele
Yes.
- [65:47]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
They are not cartoons, they're humans. And we shouldn't be treating any humans like cartoon characters. I understand. Public figure, you take on a certain responsibility, but still you, you, if you're treating somebody like cartoon character, your humanity is suffering. The person doing that.
- [66:05]
Sage Steele
Yes, absolutely. That's what I remember my mother telling me that story when I had an experience on live TV from a woman that I looked up to working at ESPN and did something that was. And my mom happened to be watching and I got in the car and I was almost in tears because I was young and looked up to her and what did I do? And my mom's like, girlfriend, that is not you. It was directed at you. But it is something in her that caused her to Lash out, which softens the blow a little bit. But in general, it does take, maybe it's happening a lot to step back and not take it personally because that person's dealing with something.
- [66:44]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
And we're getting into a bigger zone here with this material in that the people that do that the most have cluster B personality traits, the narcissistic traits. And we are in a pandemic of that stuff now. And so much of what we are the object of is either projection. It's really. I'm actually doing that stuff and I going to tell you, you're the one doing it, or projective identification. I have horrible feelings of envy that I don't like. And I'm going to put them in you and manipulate them in you. Or just virtue signaling, which is. Which is also identity signaling. I'm here and I'm better than you.
- [67:29]
Sage Steele
Yes.
- [67:29]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
And I. And I need that. That's gross. All of it is disgusting. It's the opposite of empathy. And we are in it big time. Big time.
- [67:38]
Sage Steele
You have received a lot the last several years. And they're coming, coming at you from all angles. The attacks certainly.
- [67:46]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Did you just look that up yesterday or something? Because I feel like yesterday you didn't know how bad I've had it.
- [67:50]
Sage Steele
No, no, no, I did. And then even when we were setting up the shot and you talked about, you know, am I libertarian, am I this, am I that? And then people want to define you. I knew enough about you from past years and being such a fan. And then you just watch, you watch on the Internet and you watch what people say and do and you're like, my goodness, this man is obviously here to help others. And you're still getting attacks.
- [68:14]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Oh, yeah.
- [68:14]
Sage Steele
How do you handle that?
- [68:15]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I think some of it is, used to be at least that people have their own ideas of what is not okay for a doctor to do. And I was always. I was always going into environments where my philosophy was, look, the people that are watching, listening to radio and rock radio in particular, those are the people I want to reach and I need to get them to listen. And I don't know how to do that. But people that are funny or that know how to, you know, do create music, they know how to do it. I need to tag my caboose onto them and then get into those environments so I can reach these people.
- [68:51]
Sage Steele
Yeah.
- [68:52]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
And that's always been my philosophy. And people have varying degrees of discomfort about that. The very. I pushed that envelope all the way along, I think, just firmly enough. I don't think I've overstepped anywhere but it. I think that's what makes people uncomfortable. I think. And then people just have a lot of envy and jealousy.
- [69:10]
Sage Steele
And suddenly that is something that is not mentioned enough either.
- [69:13]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Envy. Let's. Let's even define envy. Vers. Jealousy. And jealousy is.
- [69:17]
Sage Steele
Can I wait. Can I try And I won't use any of the right terminology. Well, envy. Envy seems softer than jealousy. It's like. It's not. It's reversed. You're kidding.
- [69:29]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Well, think about. Think about religious injunctions against envy. Think about it. Every religion. Envy. Envy. Veno sin. Envy is a sin, not jealousy. They'll say, do not covet thy neighbor's ass. But, you know, But I mean, that's sort of jealousy. That's sort of. But if you actually take their neighbor's ass. Now you're into envy and so envy. So let me define jealousy is. Sage is so successful. Oh, she has what I want. That makes me uncomfortable. I'm gonna work hard and get that too. That's jealousy. Envy is. Sage has so much that I want. I'm gonna bring her down, that I'm gonna get her. That's envy, man. That is. That is the most destructive human. You know, whatever we call it, we know that there are these two different things, right? And when you need to take somebody else down because they have something you don't, that is a extremely. There are no more destructive emotions than that. That's it.
- [70:32]
Sage Steele
Have you lost friendships, relationships, based on these criticisms of the last couple of years and people who don't like your.
- [70:40]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Opinions and I mean, because. Because I was kicked off cnn, nobody would have me except Fox. I would happily go over to see. I'm moderate. I'd go over to. I use various news outlets. I used to be on everybody. I used to do all the news outlets. I didn't know that some places I was welcome and not Gutfeld. I did him back in Red Eye, back in the day at the same time as I had a show on cnn. Crazy, you know, I mean. But I was forbidden now from appearing on these other things. Fox encouraged me. So that's where I end up. And people don't like that.
- [71:10]
Sage Steele
Yeah, so. So for those of us who I.
- [71:12]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Don'T know if they. If be talking to you, we'll have a thing. Maybe. I don't know. Who knows? I don't know.
- [71:17]
Sage Steele
I hope not.
- [71:18]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
You had your hair touched, man.
- [71:22]
Sage Steele
That's three days in a row now. Three shows in a row where the.
- [71:25]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Hair thing is getting Fascinating the hell out of it. Go ahead.
- [71:28]
Sage Steele
And the fascination with hair. No, I think I feel like it's gotten better now because people are fighting back, saying, no, it's not okay to cancel someone just because you have a different opinion. Well, not only we're turning a little.
- [71:41]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Not only that, people are looking at some of the opinions that you were canceled for and going, oh, oh, maybe you were right. And oh, and, and then people that have sort of supported you all along will say thank you for sticking with it and staying and continue to speak your truth. You know.
- [71:57]
Sage Steele
Have you heard that?
- [71:58]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Yeah, yeah.
- [71:59]
Sage Steele
A lot does seem a little more rare.
- [72:01]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
It's funny. No, no, it is a lot because what is that noise?
- [72:04]
Sage Steele
Someone's mowing lawn or something.
- [72:07]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
So, you know, I, I've been in the public long enough to see fame to me isn't, Is an instrument. It's an instrument that I get to go educate, use to educate people and do these creative things that I'm so, so, so grateful for. I'm so, I mean, what a weird, crazy thing I've been able to do and make a living at it. And I'm just, I cannot be thankful enough. But it's, I've. Because there's never been any blueprint and I'm not building, planning an audience or anything. I just sort of, these opportunities come to me. I sort of think, well, okay, I'll try that, see if I can make something good out of it. And as a result, I've been through many different ways with different audiences. Right. It used to be 18 to 26 year old kids. I mean, that was for a long time.
- [72:54]
Sage Steele
Yeah.
- [72:54]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
And then as those kids got older, it was sort of, you know, 30 to 50 year olds. And then there was Celebrity Rehab. Then Teen mom was all women, you know, 25 to 40. And then they got older and now they're 40 to 60. And then. And they've all kind of gone away. And now it's almost exclusively. I can't walk across a casino in las Vegas without 65 year old men stopping me. No way. So Tyrus has the old ladies, I have the old men. But that's all Fox. I know. That's what. And they always say the same thing. Thank you for being willing to speak up and stuff.
- [73:27]
Sage Steele
Yeah, yeah. I think when it happens enough times, you start to say, okay, I can handle it. And I'm still standing the next day.
- [73:37]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Well, you get used to it. You do get kind of used to it. It's still painful. It's still painful.
- [73:40]
Sage Steele
It still hurts, and especially the relationship part. But what I have found, and I don't know how normal this is, but you get to the point where, yes, you get used to it. And therefore, I'm like, you know, my circle's a lot smaller now, and maybe that's easier. Maybe that's a blessing because you can try to find a silver lining and some pain. Right. But you can give the attention to the people who are your.
- [74:04]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I think the way I would say it is you. It makes you focus on your priorities.
- [74:09]
Sage Steele
Yeah.
- [74:09]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
You see, Reset your priorities a little bit. But, like, you know, even yesterday, I made some comment about Sydney Sweeney. Did you see all those comments? And they. They go at something that I used to be unable to tolerate. They start attacking my professional standing. And when I was, you know, doing, you know, seeing 60 patients a day, that was deep. That was outrageous to me. I was. I was furious when I was not.
- [74:32]
Sage Steele
See what I'm doing.
- [74:33]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
And now I'm like, whatever. It's like, I'm okay. You don't get who I am. You don't know what I've been through. And I'll be happy to tell you and share it with you, but you just don't understand. And it's usually younger people that really don't understand.
- [74:44]
Sage Steele
True. But just for you to list off all of the things. And I know there's a lot that you left out there, all of the things that we all know that you are doing, along with being a practicing physician the entire time. You've probably been asked this before, but I just wonder, with so much on the resume, so many important accomplishments have nothing to do with television. You know, what has moved you the most?
- [75:07]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Well, I still. I just yesterday got my lifetime certification as a. I don't know if I'm a fellow or just certified by the American board of addiction medicine. So I. I'm now at the very, very, very top of the addiction medicine professional status. I also am a fellow at the American college of Physicians. It took me a lot to get these positions.
- [75:31]
Sage Steele
Congratulations.
- [75:32]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I was an assistant clinical professor of both medicine and psychiatry for many years. But when I bring that up now, the university goes, you're not that anymore. I'm like, okay, all right. I'm not that anymore. But those positions were deeply meaningful to me. Those were things that took so much to attain. So many decades, decades.
- [75:51]
Sage Steele
And then.
- [75:51]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
And then, particularly as an internist. I'm an internist by training, teaching through the department of psychiatry for, like, 10 years. I thought that was pretty cool. And I took it pretty seriously. So those things are. Actually. Everything else has been a creative exploration that I've really enjoyed, but they're not meaningful. Like those sort of professional achievements. Have you ever so hard to achieve that stuff? And I worked so hard at it, and I thought it was so important. That's the thing. I think we've lost in medicine, thinking how important this job is. My peers, we thought we were doing the most important job on Earth. This was it. And that we needed to put. We need to subjugate ourselves and anything or comfort, anything, all for the patient. And I don't feel like we do that anymore. I think Covid taught us that most doctors are just employees. The fact that they sent people home and said, yeah, come back when you're blue. I couldn't believe it. I could not believe it.
- [76:49]
Sage Steele
I mentioned this to you yesterday, and we're going to wrap up here in a second.
- [76:52]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I can keep going.
- [76:54]
Sage Steele
I would love it. I know you have plans today, and the fact that you welcome this in here, it's such a blessing.
- [76:59]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I go into a little bit of a zone with you.
- [77:01]
Sage Steele
I love it. I'm so honored. I. Oh, gosh. What was c. Lost my train of thought.
- [77:06]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Well, that means where was I going? We'll find a way.
- [77:08]
Sage Steele
Where was I going?
- [77:09]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Find a way back to it. So what else. What else you want to hear about?
- [77:13]
Sage Steele
Wait, what? Wait, give me your last 10 seconds. It'll come back.
- [77:16]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
What else? I knew. Yeah, he's a celebrity. Rehab fight. So listen, slavery rehab. There's a lot to talk about there. I'm going to talk about it. So that. They came to me with that. Okay. That's why I keep a notepad with me all the time. But they came to me with that. And I was like, you can't do that. You can't do that. It's a great idea. We need to do it. We need to educate people about this. But no way. The producer. Oh, let me talk to the hospital. They left him out of the room. You can't even. Cameras. You can't have a camera around a hospital. Are you kidding me? And then they keep coming back to me. Well, maybe we should do it. But they were like, well, let's pitch it. So see what. Then VH1 showed interest. I'm like, oh, shit. And I thought, you know, there's that residential program up in northern Pasadena. Psychiatric psychiatrist, friend of mine owns it, and I wonder if I could just take my team and take over one of their wards, and we'll just do it there. And I can use their policies, procedures and nursing and stuff. And I went up and talked to psychiatrist. He was like, oh, it sounds like fun. Let's do this. We need to help people see what this is. And I was like, okay, here's one. You know, somebody I admire thinking it's a good idea. And still I hit out. When VH1 showed interest, I just like, I don't know. And Bob Forrest, the guy with the hat and the glasses, came in my office one day. He was my lead clinician. And he goes, I am. So we treated a lot of celebrities that you still don't even know about to this day, because we were very circumspective and people are very sick. And he goes, you know, I'm so sick of the problem. The news and the entertainment news presenting our patients as out on some sort of an excuse or some sort of spa vacation. They are sick and they work hard, and these are serious illnesses. And you know what? We need to do a TV show where we show that. And I was like. I said, I don't know if, you know. He goes, what? I go, somebody's approached me to do this. And he goes. He goes like this goes, we have to do it. He smacked his hand down. He's jumped up, and he walked out of my office. And I was like, we're gonna do it. I was like, okay, here's another one that I thought, well, maybe I'll go back and talk to them. And we just kind of kept moving forward, and all of a sudden we were doing it, and there's There. I'll give you an insides thing here that even. Even then, I was very nervous. I was like, oh, my God. Every day I would start group with. Are you okay? Are the cameras bothering you? Do you want me to put you down in the hospital, down the street? You know, we can do this. Yeah. Are you all right? You're right. And they're all like, hey, yeah. Yeah. I realized after a while, celebrities, even addicts, understand what they're stand standing up for when they get in front of a camera and do this kind of thing. It's not. It's not mysterious to them, even though it's very in. It's difficult material and stuff. They are willing participants, and they signed. They signed huge consents. And everybody in their life science consents before we took them in. And then finally, Mary Carrie, after about a week of me. Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay? Leans into me and goes, she's the porn star. And she goes, drew, I've done just about everything in front of a camera. I know what this means. I'm okay. I thought, oh, that's right. They do know what this is. And so he calmed me down. I was like, okay, we're all. You all get what the camera means. You know what it's doing for you. And they all had this incredible transformation, which I never, ever expected, and it was a blessing. And every season, it was the same thing. They ended up wanting to do well so they could be an example for other people.
- [80:44]
Sage Steele
That takes courage.
- [80:46]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
And I could push them and they wouldn't leave treatment. Normally, addicts bolt if you push too hard. They just go, fuck you. I'm out of here. I could push these guys hard. They'd stay because they wanted to get paid and they want to be on tv. Okay, good, sure, fine. But I don't care why you're here, as long as you stay and do the work.
- [81:01]
Sage Steele
But then it sounds like. And yeah, I mean, I remember seeing those clips. Like, by the end, it wasn't just about them. It was what you said, helping others.
- [81:10]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
And they realized that's why we did this. But they realized it too, and they wanted to be a part of that.
- [81:14]
Sage Steele
So the word trust brought this up to you yesterday when we had the author on talking about vaccines and the medical industry as a whole.
- [81:24]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I wanted to bring up with you too, today. All right. And that's gonna be my brain. All right. Trust. Yes.
- [81:29]
Sage Steele
Take turns, trust. Because that's what I don't have as much now with the medical community.
- [81:36]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Neither do I.
- [81:37]
Sage Steele
Well, that's scary.
- [81:38]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Yeah. Trust has to be built. Trust is not granted.
- [81:43]
Sage Steele
But they took it away.
- [81:44]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
They cash it in. They cash it in.
- [81:47]
Sage Steele
So when, you know, with. With obviously with COVID and the vaccines and then dishonesty, when you have Anthony Fauci then admitting that he made up the six foot rule and all the math and all these things, and when we were hook, line, and sinker. There's a lot of lessons to be learned for us for going hook, line, and sinker. My question now is, okay, we can sit here and complain about the past, learn from it, hopefully going forward. What would you tell? I know you probably do it every day. What do you tell me to be able to trust again? Because right now I'm doing the wrong thing. I haven't seen a doctor in two or three years.
- [82:17]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Okay. So first I would argue that anything centralized, particularly when it comes to medicine, is a bad idea. Totalitarian impulses is a terrible idea that and by the way that we. I remember now what John Leak told us yesterday. He said, you know, I started talking about how this totalitarian impulse took over and you know, people that weren't vaccinated or got Covid. Were you. They were, they were tainted in some way. And he said, you know, the Nazis sealed off the Warsaw ghetto in the name of public health because there was a typhus outbreak. And I thought of course, that's that totalitarian impulse.
- [83:01]
Sage Steele
Yes.
- [83:02]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Oh, and the. The bottom line is social ill is always done in the name of good. We're doing what's good for everybody. Yeah, always. So understand that. Do not comply. Keep the speech going. Speech is the remedy then in terms of rebuilding the trust. Which trust but verify. Take time. Work with individual practitioners who are willing to think autonomous. Autonomously from the mob, from the centralized authority, from the employers, from the insurance company. And be honest and direct and make decisions with you over time. Let it go for a while. See what you think. It's going to take a while. Going to take a while. But the medical decision should be doctor and patient, not anybody above the doctor telling the patient what to do. That is insanity. That's disgusting. So I bet you it'll rebuild pretty fast and you may change doctors and what you know, any doctor worth their salt wants you to change and be happy. Right. They want you to be happy with your healthcare. That's what we all want. So find someone that you're comfortable with first and who is thinking. People have. My profession has started looking everything up and stopped thinking. When somebody who's paying attention empathic and thinking about you and your case and your values, your family system, the socio historical context, your religious, your spiritual, all of it brought into the decision making with you for your medical care.
- [84:32]
Sage Steele
I'm thinking back to that moment with you as a third year residential and realizing how completely removed that doctor was from telling the patient.
- [84:42]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I was a third year medical student.
- [84:44]
Sage Steele
Medical student.
- [84:44]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I'm sorry, I'll never forget it.
- [84:46]
Sage Steele
And for you to feel what he wasn't doing for this family, that like that matters to me. You can be the most brilliant doctor on earth and an expert in this and that and say it all. But if I feel like you're just a robot and I'm not a human being to you, like I'm out. And I understand it's such a difficult profession for doctors right now to survive.
- [85:09]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Oh my God, it's impossible. You can't make a living. It's terrible. And especially the role that you're talking About. So I don't really care if the neurosurgeon is a robot. I want the neurosurgeon to do the best possible surgery. Okay, yes. But you got to have that primary care person doing the care and communicating with you and buffering the neurosurgeon and helping you understand what's going on and make choices. You know, like I said, I, you know, when I had my prostate cancer, when I had my prostate removed, first thing I asked, you know, my surgeon was, how many you done? 1200. What's your, what's your, what's your complication rate? Zero. I went, let's go, let's go. I don't want you and I don't want you thinking about my nutrition or my workout plan or my family or anything else. I want you doing that damn surgery better than anybody else. And that's it. You have to kind of understand that about the medical system too. We deal with disease and life threatening illness and you want us doing that a lot. And then there's a component within that you want to, that some part of medicine should also be doing preventative care. And the part, the actual caretaking which we've also relinquished. We're not doing it.
- [86:12]
Sage Steele
I'm glad that you brought up prostate cancer. I've lived it with my dad for 14 years. He's 79 now.
- [86:18]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
And let me say African American men are more likely to get it. More likely to get it, have an advanced or more aggressive tumor and be presenting at a more advanced stage. Not like Joe Biden. That, that Joe Biden. White, old white men don't present like that. We, it gets picked up way earlier. That's why there's some, something going on there.
- [86:37]
Sage Steele
Yeah, I didn't believe that from the.
- [86:38]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Get go when descent that happens. Okay. And we do a horrible job of, of educating these men to come in. They, they have two, they're two buffers. They only come in because their daughters and grandmothers bring them in. But they have two misconceptions. One is that there's going to be a digital retinal exam. There will not be, it will just be a blood test. Just a blood test. And then they have abject fear about what will happen if they lose their prostate. And I'm here to tell you everything's fine, normal, maybe even a little improved in certain ways. So it's fine. And you should be expecting, if not a cure, long term survival. Much like your dad.
- [87:16]
Sage Steele
Right. But it's a matter of going in and getting it detected especially absolutely but for you, because you had the robotic surgery, right?
- [87:27]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Yeah.
- [87:28]
Sage Steele
And how old were you?
- [87:29]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
52. You were way early. That's what I was pissed about. I was like, really? 50? I figured I'd get it at 70, but 50, yes. I was so mad, but happened.
- [87:40]
Sage Steele
And then they say, well, prostate cancer, that's okay. Everybody gets prostate cancer.
- [87:44]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Well, it is the one you want to get. It is the one you want to get. If you got to get cancer, that's the one you want to get.
- [87:48]
Sage Steele
Was there that fear, though, for you, that, okay, it's still the C word? And even though you're a doctor and you understood how did that affect you as a human being, not the doctor.
- [87:58]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
You have this weird feeling of falling through the floor when you get the diagnosis. You're like, oh, damn it. Then I was angry because I was too young. I knew I'd get it eventually because my dad had it, my uncle had it, and then you get rational. And I went on active surveillance. I was actually being biopsied every six months. We just watched the tumor because I knew it was slow growing, and I just wasn't ready for the operation yet. And by the time we got to the point where it started to grow, which was like, two years later, I was totally ready. I'm like, all right, let's go. My surgeon was my urologist. A couple of months, we'll do it. I was like, next week when, like, okay, I'm ready. And that was important for me to be ready.
- [88:35]
Sage Steele
And again, so important to keep talking about it. I. My dad. Dad's experience getting it. 79 now, so he was, you know, 65 or so, and certainly not young. But then I have brothers, and it's like, okay. And now they're religious about it. Fascinating. Why for black men. Why.
- [88:55]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Why is it worse? Yes, it's also worse for Norwegian men. It's just some genetic thing. Yeah, Norwegians really get a bad hand. Yeah, Scandinavians get a bad hand, and black African descent get a bad hand. We don't know why. But. But. But the. But the Norwegians know it and come in. Black men resist. And that's where things are falling down. Pcf.org pcf.org org Prostate Cancer Foundation. I'm very involved with them. That's Michael Milken's group. They. We have been pushing forward the research on prostate cancer, and it's the reason. They are the reason. It's a chronic illness, much like aids now. It's something we can deal with so well, and we will be curing it. Soon we have so much cool stuff coming. It's amazing.
- [89:35]
Sage Steele
Well, just thinking back to like we said earlier with HIV and AIDS and that way, I mean, you know, as a sportscaster, hopeful sportscaster at that point, and Magic Johnson's diagnosis and remember, I mean, we were sitting there staring at the TVs, and it was like, oh, my gosh, Magic is going to die.
- [89:50]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Yes, that's what we thought, 100%.
- [89:52]
Sage Steele
You're here in Los Angeles. Yeah. And to see, first of all, that he is more than thriving. Certainly some benefits, being able to afford certain kinds of treatment back then, but it is still amazing. And there's still so much great about medicine. That's why the trust question there. Yet you have to. I have to be careful because there's obviously so much more good and people committed to saving lives every single day.
- [90:16]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
There's a lot to be called out of that one is, you said that Magic got special treatment. That's a routine treatment. Now he got treatment that is just routine now. There's much even better treatment and more specialized. But I think, as I think about it, you know, part of the problem here is the American public has lost track of the fact that we are biological beings. But we were talking about with addiction, we're in denial that brains get sick. Brains can't get sick, but pancreas can't. Give me a break. And so we have to be more. I think Covid brought that out a little bit more realism about. Although we became histrionic about it, it at least brought up some awareness that we were biological and we are, and we die. And this denial of death thing that's going on is deeply disturbing to me because you miss the opportunity to live.
- [91:11]
Sage Steele
Then you're so focused on not dying.
- [91:14]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Yeah. And you will be sorely confused. You will not die. Well, it will be a very painful process for you. It's part of living. If you don't want to die, you don't want to live.
- [91:25]
Sage Steele
Live.
- [91:25]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
It's really that simple. And it's. I don't want to die, of course, and I don't wish it on anybody. But I want us to live fully along the way and to recognize that we are biological beings. And that is a constant probability issue. Biology is a giant probability equation. It's not digital, it's probabilistic. And shit happens to us. And you just gotta roll with it. You gotta roll with it and manage it. Manage your biology. You work out, lift weights, watch your diet. All this good stuff. The HHS is talking about.
- [91:55]
Sage Steele
You Are constantly. All over the place, all over the country, all over the world. You have your show upstairs. Beautiful set right upstairs. That's the way to do it. With socks on, please.
- [92:04]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
All right, I'm with you.
- [92:06]
Sage Steele
I'm going to send you all kinds of pretty fuzzy socks. I love them. How long do you foresee yourself doing this?
- [92:14]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
You know, I asked my dad myself that question every once in a while. I'm so fortunate that I just. I just love my work and. And I have to be careful. I said this to a therapist the other day. I was like, I'm gonna talk like an addict right now because. Ask that question. Like, I love my work. That's the way addicts talk about their drug of choice. But I love it. I love heroin. I love it.
- [92:35]
Sage Steele
This is a good addiction.
- [92:36]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
So it is my drug of choice. But I also feel like it's. It's balanced. I live. I live a pretty balanced life right now. And we live in this time when I can do all this stuff out of my house. It's so crazy.
- [92:46]
Sage Steele
It's amazing.
- [92:46]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I used to have to be driving all over town or all over the country to do stuff, and. I don't know, I just like doing it. As long as I feel like I'm doing something useful, I'll keep doing it. I have noticed that men that love their work, when they retire, they die pretty quickly right afterwards. I've seen that happen a lot. I don't know if that's coincidence. I don't know if that's. That's teleological or etiological in some way, but it scares me a little bit. And the fact that I do like work so much and I want to keep working, I guess I'll just kind of keep going from it.
- [93:18]
Sage Steele
Well, there's different ways to work. Certainly from your home makes it easier, but consulting, that's working. Continuing to talk to people on your show, I mean, that's.
- [93:28]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I love the human experience. I don't know if I can get enough of it. And I do drift into depression if I'm not productive, if I'm not doing something.
- [93:37]
Sage Steele
Wow. Yeah, wow. Do you realize how many lives you have not just touched, but saved?
- [93:45]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
If I don't want to think in terms of life saved and life's lost, that's going too far. But. But if I. On my tombstone, if it says, he made a difference, I'll be happy. So to know that I made a difference is. Is enough for me. That's enough.
- [94:06]
Sage Steele
Do you think you made a difference?
- [94:07]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I think I made a difference. I think. I think I did. I think. I think I still am in such. It's in a way that I never imagined, which is words like freedom suddenly on my lips. You know, it's free speech and defending that. I feel like that's one of my new tasks, and maybe it's my last one. I don't know. But I do think it makes a difference to stand up and say things. And so maybe more than ever, it's important to do that right now.
- [94:32]
Sage Steele
We need you now more than ever. Your kindness is just evident. I need to thank you in particular today for your vulnerability and going there with a couple of things. That's what I have found over the last few years, is the more you, like, let it go, the more people are helped.
- [94:53]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
We're all just humans. We're all just humans. And. And we have moved through a period where families were ripped apart for some reason or weren't valued and children were traumatized along the way. And from maybe your age on up to May, but maybe. Maybe younger than you, maybe 50 to 80, we move through a period where a lot of us are carrying that around, maybe some of the younger Gen Xers, too. And we should be talking about it. It won't hurt to talk about it.
- [95:27]
Sage Steele
When you're put on a pedestal because of your resume and accomplishments and achievements and accreditations, all of those things, I think people put you. Sometimes it's impossible, and it's like, oh, my goodness, yes. And look at. Look at how perfect. And look at this.
- [95:44]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Well, I don't want. I don't. I don't want to be that. No, no. Not only that is nowhere to go but down. Down from there.
- [95:49]
Sage Steele
Oh, you're not. But I just mean the why behind what you're doing is. Is incredible and was not easy. It was a journey to get here.
- [95:59]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Oh, my God.
- [95:59]
Sage Steele
From your childhood on. And I just think it's beautiful that you have chosen to be open about that.
- [96:04]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
But. But understand, I. I, as my mom said, through the psychic, we did okay. Like, I feel really good about it, and I'm grateful for it. And, yeah, it has not been easy by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm. But I don't think I would do it differently. I would do some stuff differently in terms of my workaholism and its impact on my family and loved ones and stuff, but I need to make some amends about that. I've been thinking about that lately, but.
- [96:31]
Sage Steele
They know your heart. Like, do you have to make amends? Is that for them or is that for you?
- [96:35]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
It might be for me. That's one of the questions. I've not reconciled that for myself yet. Because I really were doing the best we could, and we did okay. And I'm grateful for all that. I'm grateful.
- [96:47]
Sage Steele
God, I'm grateful for grand. Can you use your mom's word?
- [96:51]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Grand. Life is grand. Life is grand. And I thank you for reminding me of that.
- [96:57]
Sage Steele
Thank you. Why am I crying? Why didn't you make your fault?
- [97:03]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
But I don't. But it doesn't. You know why? Because I can hold it. It doesn't scare me. It doesn't. It's just. Just who we are.
- [97:14]
Sage Steele
A work in progress, all of us.
- [97:15]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
And if you're not. If you're. By the way, if you're all. For those of you that are really well put together out there, I'm sorry, but I'm not that interested in you.
- [97:24]
Sage Steele
You're very boring.
- [97:26]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
So. But then think about it. I mean, what is drama? What is a human? What is a play? Sick people acting sick. That's really what it is.
- [97:32]
Sage Steele
Oh, my gosh, you're so right.
- [97:33]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
It's just what all the reality shows are. They select for people who aren't so great. I was watching one of the dating shows yesterday. I'm like, oh, my God, I couldn't sleep. It was so. It's. Everyone's traumatized and the personality problems, and.
- [97:46]
Sage Steele
You want to help every single one.
- [97:47]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I don't want to help them. I just want to call it out because they're gonna. Because people hurt people. If they've had that stuff. Hurt people. Hurt people. So. All right.
- [97:54]
Sage Steele
Thank you for welcoming me and us into your beautiful home.
- [97:59]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
You bet.
- [97:59]
Sage Steele
Thank you.
- [98:00]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
Anytime. Literally anytime.
- [98:01]
Sage Steele
Thank you. Oh, careful. Did you hear that?
- [98:03]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I mean it.
- [98:04]
Sage Steele
Don't ignore the knock on the door.
- [98:05]
Dr. Drew Pinsky
I mean it, Sam.