Ask Dr. Drew - Broken Science: Is Long-Term Statin Use Accelerating Heart Failure? w/ Emily Kaplan – Ask Dr. Drew – Ep 305

Episode Date: January 7, 2024

Though statins have been used for decades to fight heart disease, new research suggests an opposite effect: long-term statin use could actually be accelerating heart failure. “Statins impair the production of vitamin K, an essential vitamin in managing calcification,” reports The Epoch Times. “The researchers conclude statin side effects, including statin cardiomyopathy, ‘are far more common than previously published…’” Emily Kaplan has spent over 17 years as an investigative journalist covering topics including violent crime, technology, and health. She has written and produced for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, The Daily Beast, New York Daily News, 20/20, Primetime, and Good Morning America. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in History and Psychology from Smith College and a Master’s in Journalism from the Northwestern Medill School. Emily is a cofounder of The Broken Science Initiative, whose mission is to help “identify and object to the tyranny of bad science” in a world where “consensus has replaced predictive value in academic science, definitions have become subjective, and replication is no longer a requirement.” Follow her at https://x.com/emilykumler and learn more at https://BrokenScience.org 「 SPONSORED BY 」 Find out more about the companies that make this show possible and get special discounts on amazing products at https://drdrew.com/sponsors • PROVIA - Dreading premature hair thinning or hair loss? Provia uses a safe, natural ingredient (Procapil) to effectively target the three main causes of premature hair thinning and hair loss. Susan loves it! Get an extra discount at https://proviahair.com/drew • PALEOVALLEY - "Paleovalley has a wide variety of extraordinary products that are both healthful and delicious,” says Dr. Drew. "I am a huge fan of this brand and know you'll love it too!” Get 15% off your first order at https://drdrew.com/paleovalley • GENUCEL - Using a proprietary base formulated by a pharmacist, Genucel has created skincare that can dramatically improve the appearance of facial redness and under-eye puffiness. Get an extra discount with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew • COZY EARTH - Susan and Drew love Cozy Earth's sheets & clothing made with super-soft viscose from bamboo! Use code DREW for a huge discount at https://drdrew.com/cozy • THE WELLNESS COMPANY - Counteract harmful spike proteins with TWC's Signature Series Spike Support Formula containing nattokinase and selenium. Learn more about TWC's supplements at https://twc.health/drew 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 Portions of this program may examine countervailing views on important medical issues. Always consult your personal physician before making any decisions about your health. 「 ABOUT THE SHOW 」 Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. 「 ABOUT DR. DREW 」 Dr. Drew is a board-certified physician with over 35 years of national radio, NYT bestselling books, and countless TV shows bearing his name. He's known for Celebrity Rehab (VH1), Teen Mom OG (MTV), The Masked Singer (FOX), multiple hit podcasts, and the iconic Loveline radio show. Dr. Drew Pinsky received his undergraduate degree from Amherst College and his M.D. from the University of Southern California, School of Medicine. Read more at https://drdrew.com/about Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some of you may have been watching an interview with Megyn Kelly. Boy, you look at that history and these things resonate through time. Boy, things are getting clearer and clearer. That was a year ago video we were just looking at. Today, we're going to talk about some of these issues around misinformation and what is science and what's wrong with science and what's wrong with scientific discourse. We're going to talk to Emily Kaplan. She is an investigative journalist,

17 years in the business of journalism, working for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Daily Beast, Daily News, Prime. She's done it all. She is from Smith College. We share that history in the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts. Masters in journalism from Northwestern. And she's a co-founder of the Broken Science Initiative.

She's going to talk to us about where that came from, what the mission is, and how broken science actually has become. And I think COVID shined a bright light on that. So stay with us, we'll be right

with Emily Kaplan. By the way, some calls also towards the end of the show, hopefully. Be right with us. Our laws as it pertains to substances are draconian and bizarre. A psychopath started this. He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin. Ridiculous.

I'm a doctor for f*** sake. Where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying. You go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals. Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time.

Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. If you have trouble, you can't stop and you want help stopping, I can help. I got a lot to say. I got a lot more to say. Ladies and gentlemen, it is the holiday season, and our friends at GenuCell Skin Care want to give you the gift of younger-looking skin with their best sale of the year. For the first time ever, get over 60% off our favorite skin care bundles at GenuCell.com slash Drew.

GenuCell has so many products that Susan and I love. GenuCell's XV Moisturizer. It locks in moisture, making dry spots a thing of the past. It's especially great with the colder weather coming in. And with its immediate effects too, you can see these results in as little as 12 hours guaranteed or your money back. Susan loves GenuCell's Vitamin C Serum and the new Deep Correcting Serum with Lactic Acid. It hydrates your skin while preventing future wrinkles from developing. Take advantage of this amazing holiday savings by going to GenuCell.com and getting over 60% off right now. Plus, all orders are upgraded to free shipping for the rest of the holiday season. Use code DREW at checkout for an extra 10% off your entire order. That's Genucel.com

slash Drew, G-E-N-U-C-E-L.com slash D-R-E-W. And happy new year, everybody. I was sort of reviewing for myself so many of the interesting interviews and the sort of aha moments, the insights we've been granted by so many of these people that have come on the program this year alone. I mean, when I think about Dr. Freeman and his group, I want to bring everybody back and see where they're at now. We're going to bring Paul Alexander in in a week or so and see how things have changed. I would love to speak to Francis Collins because he seems to be backpedaling some of his positions. And Paul Alexander alerted us that he is a good guy and a thoughtful guy, and we ought to give a chance to talk. There's our upcoming schedule. Kilmeade, Brewer, Roseanne coming in, Paul Alexander on January 11th. So we will roll into the new year with a pretty

interesting schedule, and we have plans to ramp it up from there. We have lots of very interesting people that we're going to be interviewing this year. And so when I look back at this year, I feel yet again that things are getting clearer. Yesterday, or was it yesterday, as we spoke to Li Meng-Yuan, once again, she has evolved in terms of her understanding of what she can communicate to us. And it continues to be increasingly enlightening, and it tends to go in one direction. It's not as though some of the things we thought during COVID were just categorically wrong. The vast majority of these things are turning out to be correct. Maybe not the way we thought they were, but the actual concerns that people were registering are ending up being more

correct than not. So we thought a nice way to wrap up this year is with Emily Kaplan. She is from the Broken Science Project. BrokenScience.org is where you can find her. I'm going to give you all of her particulars. I'm sure Kayla will put some of those up. For her, Instagram is news, not noise for her Instagram. And Twitter is at Emily. Emily, you're screwing me up here. K-U-M-L-E-R. Please welcome Emily Kaplan. Emily, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. So Emily and I met at the, well, I think we met before, but we consummated at the RFK Junior fundraiser up in San Jose.

And Emily was telling me to come on a podcast, I thought, and I was unclear what was going on. And we ended up doing a pretty lengthy interview. And I thought, wow, this is fascinating territory that you live in, and I want to hear more about it. So talk to us about Broken Science, where it came from, and what you guys are doing now. Sure, so I mean, I think the Megyn Kelly clip

is actually a great lead-in, because I sort of think of COVID- And I'm going to ask you to kind of paraphrase what was in it, because a lot of people will not see that. It's just people that are on with us right now. But this goes up for a long time. So it was me and Megyn Kelly talking about the adverse events associated with vaccines and why certain questions weren't being answered. The relative risk of vaccine, the relative, was COVID an added risk or was it the primary risk or the two of them together the risk?

Why aren't we asking these questions? So go ahead, Emily. Yeah. And so, I mean, I actually think I may be one of the few people who thinks that COVID was sort of a gift to science because it exposed some of the inadequacies, the corruption, some of these things that were Greg Glassman, who's my partner in the Broken Science Initiative and I have been looking at for a couple of decades. And, you know, we've sort of been able, lucky enough to be around people who have been really exposing these problems in different pockets. So cardiovascular health is

one, cancer is one, the dietary guidelines and nutrition protocols and, you know, the American public and the obesity epidemic. These things actually are all really interconnected. And I think COVID really brought a lot of this to light and forced the issue on people to sort of recognize what is science. And when somebody says, you know, believe the science, like we're not talking about religion, we're supposed to be talking about something that can be proven, that can be replicated. And so the Broken Science Initiative really was born after Greg sold CrossFit. He really wanted to do a deep dive into what is happening with COVID. We had sort of like a break with his selling of the business. We also sort of had a reprieve from day-to-day business stuff that he was working on. And he gave me the luxury and the opportunity to

really dive into probability theory, the philosophy of science. And we've traced this back now. So we have a host of examples of broken science, a lot of which really focuses on medicine, although we are seeing this in other areas as well. But we like to sort of delineate between academic science and industry science. So I would say like Elon Musk does not have this problem. And they don't have a replication crisis in, you know, aviation and in technology, right? There's a lot of fields that are doing really well scientifically. But medicine in particular is in a full fledged crisis. And I would say, you know, a lot of people know about the replication crisis, but you even dial that back a little bit more. And a lot of the statistical tools that people are relying on, like p-values, are, you know,

purporting to do things they don't do in terms of validation. There's sort of a requirement in terms of being published in peer-reviewed journals. And it becomes this sort of, you sort of cyclical thing where you have all of these constraints put on academic scientists of the way they need to prove things or claim to prove things. Things aren't published unless they're significant. The general public is lacking in education to such a degree that I think most people have a really hard time sessing this stuff up. And I'd throw journalists in this camp too. So with COVID, a lot of times we saw things where there was a lot of reporting, as you said, sort of relative risk and absolute risk.

All you really care about is absolute risk. What are the chances that I'm going to die of this or that I'm going to suffer this consequence? The relative risk is really easy to make big, broad, you know, dramatic headlines. So they get a lot of attention, but they're not really accurate in helping an individual suss up, do I need this treatment? Is this, you know, the right way forward? And I think, you know, the Broken Science Initiative is really geared up to give people a kind of rubric for critical thinking, which I think we're lacking. And so the show that I interviewed you for is launching in January. It's called Emily Unleashed. And I'm talking to people who have challenged the status quo,

changed the paradigm to give people a blueprint for how do you do that? And also just sort of a general understanding that progress doesn't happen unless you challenge the conventional wisdom. And so we need to do more of that. And we need to do more of what you do so well, of asking questions and telling truth to power, which is why, you know, I got into journalism in the first place. That doesn't seem to happen quite so much. No, it does not. Indeed, the journalism has become the caring water for power, frankly, which is just so weird. But you packed a lot into that opening comment. So I want to kind of tease some of that out.

Were you surprised as you dug in and found this? And I noticed you didn't mention Thomas Kuhn, who sort of brought this up quite some time ago. Kuhn's, I think, an expert in this, which is essentially the idea that science moves in paradigm shifts, that there's a paradigm that builds off of discovery, and then it becomes bloated and obsolete, and a new paradigm comes in. Einstein being a great example of that from Newton. We go from Newton to Einstein as a paradigm shift. Did it surprise you, and why didn't you mention him?

Well, so actually this may surprise you, but Karl Popper is the one that we really place a lot of blame on, and Kuhn follows in Popper's sort of, you know, if you were to say like a provenance of ideas. And so while we actually sometimes joke that we need a big paradigm shift right now,

one of Kuhn's underlying principles really was this notion that nothing in science evolves or changes. So these paradigms come and go, but that we don't actually learn from those experiences. And we would argue that that's kind of nonsensical, right? Like clearly we've made progress in science. And so there's a philosopher in Australia. experiences and i we would argue that that's that's kind of nonsensical right like clearly we've made progress in science and so there's a philosopher in australia well yeah we we learn but it it feels like the the social world the social political world steps in and the business world uh and then it all gets adulterated at least that's the sort of modern story i've been exposed to well so i would push back on that a little bit. And I would say like, absolutely. And that's

analogous to freedom, right? That you have these sort of momentums of democracy around the world or the idea of free expression being essential in an open society. But it's a tension. And you're constantly going to see that people are going to try and take those away and the power is going to try and restrict that. And that, you know, it is up to the individual to speak up and have autonomy and demand certain rights. And I would say, if you put that into the realm of sort of scientific discovery, it is up to the individual scientists to maintain some, you know, self-criticism, ask for scrutiny, right? Some, you know, the idea of transparency and being able to replicate results by, you know, other scientists replicating your results. Like these are all things that build to a point where you have progress, but sure, there's

always going to be that idea that we'll, we would, you know, and we'll get into this. I'm sure if we are going to talk about or any of these other things that when you have a power set, let's say pharma, that is able to really influence regulation or government or media, you're going to find that level, I would say level of tension, right? That there is a bias, there's an impetus to have their results be what they want them to be. And there needs to be checks and balances to push back on that and question whether they are what they say they are. You know, I mean, I think when we look more specifically at examples of things that don't replicate, there was a great, Begley and Ellis did this big, you know, study for Amgen where they were looking at hematology and oncology. And they found that they could only replicate 11% of the results. So they tried to replicate these

really important, you know, cancer studies. And they promised the scientists, if we can't replicate them, we're going to want your help, right? So we need your buy in. So we're going to keep this anonymous. And none of the ones that couldn't replicate have been retracted. So those are still out there. And so there is this sort of, is this immoral? What, you know, what, what is this? Well, it has to be because people are still relying on those. And we see this in Alzheimer's research.

We certainly see it in, you know, cardiac care with the statin stuff. And we see it. It's pretty pervasive. I mean, Greg has a joke that like everywhere we look for corruption, we see it, it's pretty pervasive. I mean, Greg has a joke that like, everywhere we look for corruption, we found it. And it's like, they're just, you know, if we haven't looked, maybe we haven't found it yet. But we've looked in a lot of places. And it's so pervasive, that you have to at some level, acknowledge that the way we're doing this is broken. And why is that? And I think, you know, Greg, when he launched CrossFit, was the first person to really define what fitness was,

that there were all of these sort of subjective definitions of fitness, but that you needed one that you could actually, that could be measurable and that you could repeat in a scientific sense. And so that's really what, you know, CrossFit is based on Newtonian physics and that that's where that all came from. And I think we've come to a place where we feel like, well, wait a minute, we need to really define science. And we have this sort of tagline that when consensus replaces predictive value, science becomes nonsense.

And I love that because, I mean, it's sort of a great tagline. But it also is like we're in this place now where we have this, you know, expert sort of culture in academia in particular. You see this with the high impact journals where if they say it goes, it goes, even if it flies in the face of reason or you read, you know, the study and you realize that the results section say something quite different than what the abstract says. And you can't question it. And you can't push back on, you know, your doctors aren't, you know, maybe as well educated, because there's so many of these journal articles coming out. But we're really left in this place where I don't think the average person, let alone scientists could accurately define science as something that needs to be based on predictive value. And when I say that, I mean, you have to be able to do something, show that it did what you intended, right? And then do it again and get closer and closer to being able to give a predictive value to that outcome. If we're doing big, massive trials once,

or in the case of statins, not sharing that data so that other people can know how you came to that conclusion, we are not doing science. That's something else. And I think, you know, I know I'm sort of just going on a tear with this, but I think the other part that's really important to think a little bit about is this, you know, sort of notion of we're all deferring to authority on these things. And some of these things aren't really so complex that, you know, somebody who like I grew up saying, like, I'm not a math person, person right it's a little embarrassing to say that at this stage of the game but that's how i felt and so i didn't really want to get into it but you start looking at some of these things and you realize like damn you better get into it because your doctor may not and in order to you

know take care of your family and your own health you really need to be able to navigate some of these things much better than we're taught in school or than the media even realizes. So it's so easy to be misled. And I hope that broken science really offers people the antidote to a lot of that. So there is a giant leap from physics to chemistry to biology and biochemistry. These are gigantic shifts in being able to be predictive because of complexity becoming sort of infinitely, biology just gets infinitely complex. And it's all just one big probability equation. I would say the one thing that we do have in medicine that buttresses against some of this excess is our clinical experience. And I've noticed that physician clinical experience has been just taken out of the conversation.

It used to be the whole conversation. Like, hey, we're trying this stuff. And how did it work? Was it good? Do you think you did something? And then there would be some sort of studies to try to support what our clinical impressions were. But for whatever reason, doctors' clinical experience, which is extremely valuable, has been marginalized. And I worry about that. I noticed that particularly during COVID. So I'm guessing that was already

underway because COVID, again, just exposed us to the things that were already happening. And also doctors. The law in California that was passed that say that, you know, that regular speech doctors can have with patients about warning. I mean, that is so far out of the realm of respecting a doctor's wisdom, clinical experience, right? All of that. It's a, no, as a regulator, as a politician, I know better about what you should say to your patient and what you shouldn't.

It can't be in anybody's head. It's mind-boggling. Yeah. The further you move away from the patient-doctor relationship, the more inefficient you become, the more expensive you become, and the less well the patient is served. We have lost, as physicians, our control of our life. It's so clear now that we're all employees,

we are the insurance company of the hospitals. It's just the medical record that dictates what we can do and not do, which is this sort of now a checklist. It's just really sad. The patients themselves need to step up and take control again. And so that's what I've been advocating for for a while now. But let's get back to the science part. So Harvey Risch has been saying for a while that because biology is so complicated, the predictive power of our randomized control trials are essentially always inadequate

because we can't do big enough studies to have a predictive value. We can't get to the proper power for an RCT to be meaningful anymore. And that I think is some of what you're tilting at. The other part is the way we use statistics, which is, when I was trained, it was, you just did a null set, you did a null hypothesis, and you just did a straight chi-square or something, and it's either confirmed or not. It's like very – and the further – it was funny. I judged a research contest, a bunch of residents, and not one of them had done a null hypothesis. One knew what I was talking about. The others didn't even know what I was talking about. The others didn't even know what I was talking about. And they had these very elaborate studies that, you know,

and they applied these statistical models. And I thought, we can't say, I don't know what you're doing. You can't say anything based on these studies. And I feel like that's where biology has gone. Well, you're getting the answer you want. Right. You can do that too, right? You're going to manipulate it much more easily. Right. You can do that, too. Right.

You're going to manipulate it much more easily. That's for sure. Much more easily. Yeah, of course. Absolutely. And I think, you know, one of the things that I do definitely have sort of alarm bells about is we've done so much work with epidemiology. Right. right? And these sort of, I would say, a lot of times those are justified because the argument is made, it's too costly to do, you know, randomized clinical trials on people.

So let's just take population level data. Let's see if we can come up with some correlations. But you know what, that's a good starting point that is so far from figuring anything out about cause. And we have spent so many billions of dollars on those studies that I think have actually led us down the wrong path. I mean, certainly in nutrition, we see this acutely that it's really hard for me when people say like, oh, it's too hard or it's, you know, science is supposed to be hard. It's not supposed to be easy. And I, you know, used to have a podcast on sex differences in medicine where I looked exclusively at women's health. You know, and biologically, our brains are different.

Our lungs are different. Our hearts are different. Wait a minute, Emily. I don't know what you're talking about. What are you talking about? I completely can't understand what you're even saying. I'm going to have to define what a woman is. So let's, I'm really going to.

I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm completely confused. Yeah, that's the part that, why do we have, if men and women are the same, why do we have gynecologists? Why do we have urologists for men? I mean, what the hell? It's so nutty. I think we actually have women's, we should have doctors that are heart doctors for women. I mean, statins is a great example.

Oh, for sure. Then we have that now. We have some of that. We have some of that now. It's out there. So my thought was looking at people who were starting to get into this and a lot of it was women who had gotten to a level in their career where they could start demanding funding for you know female specific studies it used to be women weren't you know allowed in clinical trials really literally right so a lot of that frontier but i

think there were all these generalizations made and people would say like women's bodies are too tricky that you know those pesky hormones like there's too many variables we can't possibly study them so we'll just assume fantastic right but you look at things like yeah you know the mediterranean diet well people in the mediterranean eat a wide variety of food they are not all like chugging olive oil and eating fish for most of their meal but if you cherry pick those data points and you make some grand conclusion and you say like, oh, well, this was an epidemiological study, then people start assuming it's causal. And we have spent so much money on that, that if we had spent that same amount of money

doing randomized clinical trials on humans over the last 40 years, we would have made a lot more progress. So I hate the idea that people are like, oh, it's too costly or it's too hard. Well, what's the point of doing it, right? Like if you're not going to do it right, then you're not going to come up with anything that's meaningful. So I kind of throw that out. And I like Harvey, so it's not big at all. Yeah, yeah. No, I understand. And so maybe we use statin as a case study, right, of how things are off the rail. Why don't you give us a little primer on that? Well, so, I mean, I think the thing with statins are, and the way that I like to think about problems, and this is probably the journalist in me or some sort of innate way, I used to be called the Riddler because I couldn't stop asking questions, right? So bear with me. But I like to sort of like reverse engineer things a little.

So before we even get to statins, I feel like the question is, does LDL cholesterol actually indicate a risk factor for coronary heart disease, right? And I don't actually know that we have the answer to that because a lot of the research that was done is housed away in Oxford. And there's a group called the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists. And they basically sort of worked with all of the big pharma companies doing statin trials. And they said, hey, you guys, if you give us your data, we'll keep it here under lock and key. We won't share it with anybody.

And we'll do all of the publishing and the meta-analysis to say what this is. Now, shockingly or not, they haven't really ever published anything negative about statins. In fact, they have pushed for statins so hard that they even started pushing statins on people who don't have any risk factors, right? Don't have any predisposition rather for cardiac problems. So you have some big problems, right? You have one group that's holding all of the data. So most people cannot get at it. In fact, nobody can get at it. You can't then replicate what they've done.

You can't even look at how they've done it. There have been some over the last 20 years of this work, there have been some major inconsistencies where they say they've reported on adverse effects, or they've challenged people who said there were adverse effects. And then they've said, well, we don't actually have the data on adverse effects. So we actually don't even know what data they have. Like we don't know what the pharmaceutical companies have shared and what they haven't. We were told they had the individual patient data. And that's part of the reason that it was, you know, sort of kept proprietary. And then they said they didn't have the individual data. And so there, that is so

highly problematic, you add to that, that that group is actually funded by another group that's called the clinical trial status unit, I believe, which is out of Oxford. They get hundreds of millions of pounds, dollars, money from these pharmaceutical companies, and then they're funneling it to the people who are in that CCT group doing the work. So it's directly funded by the people in the statin industry. So it's so corrupted just at a very high level. This is the problem. Yeah, this is it. And then the people that are supposed to be regulating all that are themselves corrupted and back and forth between the industry and regulatory positions.

Or if they're in regulatory positions, they look... Stats are amazing. We should put them in the water supply, right? It's like, we don't know what they're doing, right? We don't really know what the data is. We don't even know if they're really necessary. So there was a study that just recently came out and they're actually going to be doing more results will be out in February, which I'm really excited about, which was a kind of amazing matchup. There's something called lean mass hyper responders. And there's Dave Feldman, if people are interested, who's done some work on that. I think you actually maybe talked to him. I did a couple of times. That's a really interesting cohort because they don't have

any of the metabolic syndrome, right? So they overweight they have small waist ratios they have you know low glucose all of the sort of health markers that are often like confounders and people who have high ldl so these guys super high ldl but they're otherwise sort of healthy and so they match them up with this group in Florida, and it's an incredible matching. So they're 50, like in their 50s, they're all men. They, you know, match them. If you have diabetes, you're matched with somebody else, right? Like they considered all of the sort of confounding variables that they could, and they matched them up to say, okay, these guys have super high LDL.

These guys have low LDL. Let's do heart scans on them over five years and see, does the high LDL group have more plaque, right? The sign, the main sign that we would look for coronary heart disease or not. What they have found is that they do not. There is no significant difference between these groups. So for me, like they're not on statins, but that goes to the idea of this whole, you know, lipid hypothesis

as a you know really important thing that we need to look at and i think so for me just going to the very basic part of this you have to say um maybe ldl is sort of like red blood cells right like they're they're present but they're not the cause or like they're necessary but not sufficient to say this is a risk factor. That's right. If we stop there, we say, well, why are we prescribing this drug, which certainly has side effects, makes women far more likely to develop type two diabetes. People are suffering from muscle pain. The heart's a muscle, right?

So muscle deterioration. Some of them have been pulled off the market for rhabdo. That's no joke so these are not drugs that are you know so innocent that you just think like well let's just give them like vitamin c like we'll just give it to people and then if they you know piss it out who cares right and if it does something yeah right so right there like we don't know that ldl is a risk factor so we're treating this thing with a drug that has side effects that we haven't studied long-term. The long-term data is locked away and we can't even look at it. Like this is

all so highly problematic that I think anybody who's making bold conclusions about it is full of themselves. It's not possible. It just reminds me, my dad was a family practitioner and he was just hammered into me how medicines are dangerous. They're dangerous. They're dangerous. They're only when it's worth the risk reward. Make sure you do the risk reward assessment. Make sure you do no harm. Do no harm. These are dangerous chemicals, dangerous. Just hammer that into my head. And so when I see sort of a casual attitude towards prescribing anything, psychotropics is a whole other topic where the similar kind of phenomenon gets in. And I can tell you back to the clinical experience, though, which is relevant, it's meaningful, that we're doing something with them. The question is,

are we doing the right thing for any given patient? That's the question. Is the risk reward right for that patient? And do we know how to properly assess that yet? As you said, we might just look at the LDL and go, oh, his LDL is high. Well, he's a thin dude without diabetes,

but hey, his LDL is high. Might be a huge mistake and might only put them at risk of harm from the medication. By the same token, ignoring body mass index, waist circumference, insulin resistance, these other factors that, as you say, go or cofactors into the effects of the, again, the smaller, the certain kinds of LDL. It's clear it's not all the LDL. And then what about the HDL? And that's a more complicated story too. And there's different components in that.

So these are all, and I really have a feeling that when the day is done, the statin itself, I believe we're going to think about it. This is a kind of a hand-waving thing to say. But when it really works, we're going to think about it more as an anti-inflammatory than as an anti-lipid. That there is a clearly, that it may actually be the case that macrophages in relation to the LDL and HDL and insulin may be hurting the lining of the artery and the LDL itself may be an attempt to heal that. It's like a scar in the harm that was done from an inflammatory standpoint. And there's good evidence to this. Now, is that the whole story? No. There's probably lots of different stories on

lipids and endothelium that we need to sort out still, which is why the excessive use of any medication concerns me greatly. But the other thing that concerns me that you're bringing up is we don't seem to be doing that work because the pharmaceutical companies are already making plenty of money from it. So there's no incentive for them to do it systematically the way we would like. And it feels overwhelming when I think about that because then each individual practitioner is sort of left trying to make up his or her sort of theory of what's going on and what's how to best serve the patient. Yeah. And not even right. Just deferring to what they're being told to do because they're not really empowered to do that. And I think to your point, like the more and more I'm convinced that mitochondrial health is the key to health. And we know that these statins have a negative

impact on CoQ10. And CoQ10 is an essential part. I mean, Q is an essential part of the electron transport chain. Without it, you're not going to produce ATP properly. There is no way that that doesn't have a long-term negative effect. And I think when they're telling people supplement with CoQ10, but we know that the supplement CoQ10 doesn't actually get into the mitochondria properly. And so people go off statins and then they, you know, recover and feel better. They go back on, they don't. So I think these are not, I don't, I mean, I tend to agree with you. And I think, you know, you talked to the more I spend a lot of time talking to doctors, you do too. And it's endlessly interesting to me how little doctors like to

go to the doctor, how little doctors like to take medicine, right? That should be telling to the average person, right? They're not running in and getting a script. They're trying to avoid it. And I think everything is a risk reward calculation when you're managing your own health and so you have to think does the risk or the benefit rather outweigh the risk and if you're not doing calculation in your doctor's office with your doctor you are missing the big picture and these things that are just I think doctors have become so specialized that they really want to help the patient treat the thing that they came into their office with, but they're not really thinking

about all the other things that are involved in long-term health. No, that goes to primary care, and then primary care has been relegated to just checking boxes and getting people in and out and not even seeing the patients. Frankly, it's physician extenders that see the patients, and they are strictly checking boxes

and worrying about liability and things such as that yeah it it is it is uh talking about paradigm shifts it is very concerning the direction we're going it's it's uh to say problematic is an understatement but you know um i i'm just thinking about the the coq10 supplement i i'm honest at and i take CoQ10 and I am aware that it may not be getting where I want it to go, but it's the best I can do. And I take a tiny dose of a statin

and it's because I have another version of vascular disease, large vessel vascular disease, horrible large vessel vascular disease in my family, which is probably a whole other physiology entirely than what we're, not entirely, but different than what we're thinking about when we're trying to prevent coronary disease. Let's take a little break. I want to get to some calls.

Susan, anything, I know you're interacting over there on the Rumble Rants. Anything going on over there? Yeah, we're having fun over here. Do they have anything they want to talk about or we're just talking about alternative things that you could take as a as opposed to the statin i i don't want to take a statin then don't i mean you're the indication for you is very limited i mean i i took it for a little while and then i forgot i got a refill and i forgot i had it and didn't take it for a while but my levels are still the same as they were. Often? Yeah. And they were really I mean barely at a point. And then you know somebody was saying natokinase and elastin F and NAC is that something that you can take that's

a natural? I mean yes I mean those have effects on those systems but I don't know they would measurely change things. I don't really have any kind of history in on those systems, but I don't know they would measurely change things. I don't really have any kind of history in my family either. Right. I don't know. I was a little surprised when somebody suggested to you, you have a high HDL, you have sort of modest LDL. Well, it just wasn't perfect. I had my first blood test and it wasn't perfect. Right. And it had changed too. It had gone up. Here's the other thing, just to interrupt, because I feel like, Susan, this might be of interest to you. And I'm pretty hardcore when it comes to women taking statins. The risks for us go up much more than for

men in terms of diabetes and all of these other things. But I made this little list. Let me just see if I can find it. So this is really- It's interesting. Now that you mentioned it, now that you mentioned it, I've only seen the muscle problem in women. So that's interesting. Yeah. I took one last week because I found it. And I was so sore when I was working out. I was thinking, gosh, why am I so sore? So it could be. And then you go, take a half.

So I took a half. But I don't know. I've only taken one and a half this week. I don't know. I just have this feeling that I shouldn't. You know, just a weird feeling. Okay. I want to see the list.

One of the things that's sort of interesting to me is what is, what is optimal and where are we getting that number from? Right. So like you kind of, these are the questions you want to ask about anything. And like with statins, like I can't really, nobody can tell me the answer. That doesn't make me feel very confident. So in 1985, the goal for LDL-C was anything that was less than 130 milligrams per deciliter, right? I remember that. Yep. 1985. In 1993, that drops to 100. 2001, the goal is less

than 100. 2004, it goes less than 100, but it's noted that anything over 70s, the 70 milligrams per deciliter, is very high risk for people in a risk category. So if you're in a risk category, you got to be less than 70, okay? So let's talk about where that came from. In my recollection, because I was practicing as all that evolved, my recollection is all that came from optimum treatment of people with coronary disease, like significant coronary disease, usually after an event. So they started saying, oh, these people with coronary disease who've had a heart attack do better when their LDLs are way, way down low. And they would then extrapolate that to healthy people with high LDLs.

I believe that's where that came from. I don't remember any studies that were prospective on a normal person without coronary disease that somehow that number they came up with for people with coronary disease was preventive of coronary disease per se, more so than an LDL under 130. I don't remember those studies. I have to look up the date of when the secondary prevention becomes the sort of like primary endpoint. My cynical brain is saying, as this time goes on, because now by 2019, it's 40, right? So 40 milligrams per deciliter compared to 130 is the goal. So like, are we trying to get to zero?

And here's the other thing. No one's properly studied. Like what happens if your LDL is in the toilet? Like, does that have a negative effect? Well, I remember studies showing that all cause mortality goes up with an LDL under 60. Particularly, I think colon cancer went up. And God knows what your hormonal system, these are the backbones of how your hormonal system,

you talk about more problems for women. How do you produce these sex hormones if your LDL is zero? Right, that's right. And so if the goal is, okay, so, and this is where I get cynical and you can say like, Emily, you've gone too far, but what are we also doing while we're lowering this rate? We are making a bigger market. More and more people are going to need to take it. So if we start at 130 and that's, let's say the average person has a hundred, we're not capturing the average person if we make it 40 nobody has 40 right so now it is literally everybody needs this that yeah i don't think that's a coincidence and we're we're recommending 40 based on what right this is it's bizarrely arbitrary. Mine was 130. I know.

I know. I know what yours were. I saw them. So that's fine, right? And your HDL is like 75 or something, right? That's the point. You have plenty of good stuff flying around. This is all like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah. And you do not have blood sugar problems. You don't have insulin problems. You don't have any. You're low blood pressure. You have no family history. It's none of the things that we used to use to determine whether or not somebody should be on a statin or not. We really only reserved it for people with multiple risk factors.

Yeah. Your point. HDL was 90. 90? 90? It's amazing. That's great. Oh, come oh come on yeah it's associated with longevity and no vascular we already know that stay off the stat inside and and and maybe it was the natto kinase i took maybe that's why maybe that's because i was taking that for a long time could be i'm gonna say going to sell some of that. This is the thing. Your yes is as good as anybody's because nobody knows. Right.

That's right. That's right. But had you told me this pre-COVID, I would have gone, Emily, Emily, we have departments of cardiology at all the university, the medical schools. They tell me that there's less heart surgery and we're doing so much better in terms of the coronary disease now. I really would have said that. Now, you say that to me and I go, oh, shit, I want to vomit. Here we are again with adulteration, inadequate science, and not an acknowledgement of because no one seems. Let me do one quick story before we take a break.

And then we're going to take some calls after the break too. When I interviewed for medical school, I went to this guy's office and he said, he was interviewing a nice guy, and he goes, what is the scientific method? And I described the scientific method to him. who was able to answer that question properly in three years of doing interviews of undergraduates with pre-medical scientific training, so-called. Yeah. And I see evidence, I think it's gotten worse. I think, again, when I see the research papers and things that people are doing, I don't think they understand the method,

the thing that is the science, which is a method of inquiry. I mean, you define science and not science the way you did. For me, it's a methodology. It's a method of inquiry that helps predict the behavior of nature. That's it. And hopefully can come up with some sort of laws

that effectively predict. I mean, when you think about physics, if the physics are not predictive, then you have nothing. And chemistry, similar, though more on a statistical basis because there's lots of things flying around. And then you get to biology

and it's just, it's like predicting the behavior of clouds. And we don't acknowledge that at all. Emily, give me your particulars. We're going to go to calls after this break. Where do you want people to find you and Broken Science? Well, so the Broken Science Initiative

is on Instagram and on Twitter. I think you guys have those handles somewhere, but you can easily find us too at Brokenscience.org is the best spot. And then I'm news, not noise, easy to remember, sort of silly, but on Instagram mostly. And I'm trying to get back on Twitter, but I don't really love Twitter. I feel like it's just this vast, like I fall into these holes where then I feel like I'm fighting with people. And I don't really want to do that. It's pretty easy to happen. The pretty cooking videos.

The pictures. On Instagram. But, you know, I think BrokenScience.org, we're actually launching our new website at the beginning of the year. It's going to be very interactive. And we have people like Malcolm Kendrick and Mariannene damasi who have really broken these statin stories so if this is a topic people are interested in i mean they're the experts i have a whole bunch of books that i pulled that i think are great um these are malcolm's that he did that are really i'll actually i can send you all copies of these two um he has another one called um doctoring data

and this one i mean he's written a lot on this and he's in the midst of this massive lawsuit with the mail on sunday where he's and zoe harcombe also are trying to prove that they were basically called mass murderers for being statin deniers now we know when somebody's called a denier right it? It's like a such a pejorative, but it doesn't mean what people are purporting it to say. And I think their lawsuit is going to be very, very, very interesting. It's a defamation case, but it could force this Oxford group to have to really show what data they have, which no one's been able to get at. And Marianne is somebody who was canceled. She's an Australian

journalist who was looking at all this stuff and was like, why can't we see the data? Why can't, you know, you won't show it to anybody. Had some emails back and forth, did a big show in Australia and was canceled massively for it. So, I mean, there is a trail of bodies when it comes to people who have tried to say what we're saying on the show, which is, you know, do we need statins and do statins do what they say they do? They come after you really hard, which is another one of these. And let me be clear, do not stop your statin without talking to your physician. Do not do that. And I'm of the opinion that I have done a lot of good with statins for a lot of people. But what we're talking about is the scientific process,

which is raising questions, asking for a renewed study, and maybe from a different perspective, answering different questions, so we can make the best assessment for every given patient. I will continue to prescribe statins. I think I know where they are done, have proper utility. But as you see, we just had a case here with Susan. She's got to talk to her doctor where maybe it's not in her best interest given her risk factors and what her metabolic profile looks like. I don't think he cares if I take it or not. Well, you should talk to me if Edmonds ever wants. I don't know why we got...

It's important for me to reiterate, too, that I've looked at all the research, but I've never treated a patient, right? So, for me, a lot of this goes to the idea of what are we asking questions of the research and of the researchers? And how are the researchers

influenced? And, you know, I mean, I think one of the other things that we saw so acutely with COVID was this notion of we have public health, which is really political, and then we have medicine. And these two converged in this way that is really detrimental to the individual where we're treating a population of people with a recommendation, but the doctors are doing it. The doctors are doing the prescription based on this population-based medicine. And the job of the doctor is to treat the patient in front of them. It's not to treat the one down the street that they don't see.

That's right. And that's what we're asking for is more refined information. The same thing we started with talking about Megyn Kelly. For a 25-year-old male standing in front of me who had no medical problems, what is his risk of COVID? What is his risk of the vaccine? I want that question. I want to know the absolute risk of each and the relative risk of each.

And that's it. So I can make an assessment for that patient, not for all people for all time. That doesn't work like that. We just can't do that. All right. So we'll take a little break here. And by the way, we noticed that Francis Collins is backing away from his sweeping recommendations that harmed a lot of people. He's sort of almost acknowledging that maybe that isn't the best way to pursue so-called public health. All right, we'll take a little break. We'll come back with some calls. Back with Emily Kaplan after this. If you're trying to figure out the right present for

someone, you will not go wrong with gifting the most comfortable sheets, clothing, and accessories that your friends and family have ever felt. Of course, I'm talking about Cozy Earth. Cozy Earth has the softest and most comfortable sheets, blankets, towels, PJs, joggers, and more guaranteed. Susan and I love them. In fact, we still have Cozy Earth sheets on our bed. I slept in them last night. I was thinking of how great they were. And look at this.

I'm wearing one of their super comfortable t-shirts right now. I just can't get enough of Cozy Earth. Their sheets are durable, machine washable, and come with a 10-year warranty against defects. So no surprise that Cozy Earth's brand has been featured on Oprah's favorite things for five years in a row. Whether it's their luxury pajamas, super soft bedding, loungewear, or plush bath towels, you will love shopping and gift giving at Cozy Earth. Here's my gift to you this holiday season. Go to CozyEarth.com, enter code Drew to save 40%. That's CozyEarth.com with code Drew. CozyEarth.com, code Drew, save 40%. I think everyone knows the next medical crisis could be

just around the corner. Whether it comes in the form of another pandemic or something much more routine like a tick bite, you and your family need to be prepared. That's where the wellness company comes in. You know the wellness company. we have their physicians on like Dr. McCullough frequently. The wellness company and their doctors are medical professionals you can trust. And their new medical emergency kits are the gold standard when it comes to keeping you safe and healthy. It's really, it's a safety net. It's an insurance policy that you hope you're not going to need, but if you need it, you sure as heck are going to wish you had it if you need it. Be ready for anything. This medical emergency kit contains an assortment of life-saving medications,

including ivermectin, Z-Pak. The medical emergency kit provides a guidebook to aid in the safe use of all these life-saving medications. From anthrax to tick bites to COVID-19, the Wellness Company's medical emergency kit is exactly what you need to have on hand to be prepared. Rest assured, knowing that you have emergency antibiotics, antivirals, and antiparasitics on hand to help you and your family stay safe from whatever life throws at you next. Go to drdrew.com slash TWC. That is D-R-D-R-E-W dot com forward slash TWC to get 10% off today. Just click on that link. We want to take some calls from you guys.

We're out on Twitter spaces. You raise your hand. Caleb, put the cartoon up there. You raise your hand and I will call you up and you just unmute yourself. So that's how you click on that button. Join spaces, right? And then you click on the request. And then when I call you up,

you unmute the call at the same button. So Emily, don't you have a PR firm or something you're associated with also? We haven't really mentioned them yet. Yeah. So I have a strategic communications firm that actually, part of the reason that Greg and I sort of linked up, we'd known each other for years, but he was called a racist and is not a racist and got some terrible PR advice about, you know, just resign, apologize, step aside. And he and I were talking because I was working on a long form story about a case that he had against the NSCA, which was sort of the competing body

to CrossFit and trainer personal trainer certification. And they had used a peer reviewed journal to publish a story that said that CrossFit caused injuries. And Greg recognized immediately that they'd falsified all the data. So he sued them, a federal judge called it the biggest case of scientific misconduct and fraud she'd seen in 35 years on the bench. And I was writing that up. So I knew him really well. We'd been friends. I knew he wasn't a racist like by any metric. But he had put out a tweet that people misunderstood wildly. And so he was getting this PR advice and he sort of asked me for advice and help. And I sort of said, I can't help you. I'm a journalist. And then those

allegations escalated to sexual assault, and then a toxic workplace and all kinds of other things. And I realized like, there's something weird going on here. This is not adding up to me, somebody's created this campaign. And all of these sort of influencers in the CrossFit space really jumped on the wagon to sort of virtue signal and call, you know, some had never met him and say these awful things about him and it snowballed. And so I realized I couldn't really sit on the sidelines and watch him be persecuted. And I had run a company that was, you know, in the Middle East and done a lot of training and negotiation at Harvard Law School. So I was comfortable and I covered murder, I was comfortable in high stakes situations. And so I sort of resigned from journalism,

jumped in, helped him figured out that there was a real targeted campaign that people were trying to devalue CrossFit in order to buy it for less. It may have had something to do with this lawsuit that was pending, he was going to get paid a lot of money and had refused to settle. And so I helped him navigate through that crisis and also through the sale of the business. And after, you know, he sold, we started working on broken science, but then with COVID, I started to recognize this is happening all over the place. The media is being misled to tell these stories.

And so a lot of the cleo group and cleo was the muse of history in ancient greece that's where that comes from but i realized that you know what the job that i loved so much as a journalist was giving voice to the voiceless and now somebody needs to help these people who are being wrongly accused in the media because no one's listening to them and they're just being so this is the craziness this this is you're you're zeroing in on the process that seems to be underway which is there there appears to be people that are manipulating sort of particularly social media uh sort of manipulating sort of the impressions and the ideas that are circulating around around somebody for some reason, just like there was some campaign against Greg, the really terrible and disgusting

part of this, and the part I'd like you to sort of give me your thoughts on, is when other people who are not part of that campaign just jump on board. That's the part that is really troubling. This sort of desire to become hysterical, to move into the mob, to scapegoat. That is a disgusting impulse. And that's really the problem. It's not these weird little campaigns that people are trying to build. It's once they build them to the point that they get traction, and then the traction is persisting and growing because of other people just getting into the action.

And this mob behavior is the problem of our time, I think. And people don't seem to understand that underlying it is somebody manipulating their opinions. I've just seen it over and over again. And it could be as simple as somebody doesn't like somebody. Because what goes viral is never what somebody said. As you said, he was accused of being a racist for something that people, it wasn't what he said. And of course, there's no opportunity for explanation.

People don't want to hear it because they're being manipulated and then they become hysterical. What is your take on all this? What do we need to do about it? Well, so, I mean, the analogy that I like to use is that it's like a stoning. That people are, you know, we walk by, you see somebody's, a bunch of people are throwing rocks at somebody and your instinct is, oh shit, I don't know why they're doing that, but I don't want them to throw rocks at me. So I better pick up a stone and start throwing it too. It's totally irrational, but you know, the Brownstone Institute, which I'm not sure if you're familiar with, but as a great outlet and is doing some, has done some of the very best reporting on COVID news. So Jeffrey Tucker is a, Jeffrey Tucker is somebody we interview here

regularly. Okay, so he invited me to a dinner that he had, I think, I guess it must have been like three, maybe four years ago when he started Brownstone. And it was a small group of us, and we were sort of trying to problem solve, you know, what are we going to do about the lack of critical thinking with COVID policy, specifically looking at lockdown. And there was a man who sat next to me at that dinner and he worked in aerospace. And I was saying to him how upsetting it was that so many people that I was friends with that I thought of as brilliant, critical thinkers had just rolled over and were, you know, just going along with this stuff. And in some cases didn't want me sharing information with them, like didn't want me sharing research because they it was too upsetting and they just they needed to just fall in line and he looked at me and he said you're missing something really important and this has stayed

with me and actually is really important when I think about solving these problems he said you you forget that we actually evolved to get along and that if you think about what life would have been like 100 years ago, or 1000 years ago, if you spoke up against, you know, the chief in your village, you'd be kicked out, you'd be left alone in the woods, you die. So there's some, you know, and this is a lot of what this Emily unleashed podcast show project is really trying to look at is how come some of us have the ability to say, wait a minute, this doesn't make sense, or this isn't right, or we can't treat people like that. Or let's take a minute. Let's listen to what he said. What did he say? How did he say it? Why are you so offended? What's why are you assuming he's guilty?

And try and process that because it seems to me and i mean i interviewed you and adam and um you know jay badacharya there's a i have some really great thinkers who have done this and i have to say i wonder a little bit if it's like a genetic defect because it doesn't make always for getting along with people but it does feel really essential in terms of society moving forward. And it comes with great risk. So how do we get over it? I think part of what we're doing is we're living through this period of such narcissism, which social media has clearly contributed to. You know, one of the depressing statistics right now is that 20 years ago, if you asked a kid what they wanted to be when they grew up, they'd say like a doctor, I want to be president.

Now they just say, I want to be famous. You say famous for what? And they're like, I don't care. I just want to be famous. Like we've lost our kind of sense of purpose in terms of giving back to community. And I think, you know, again, part of what we want to do at Broken Science is build these communities of people who could critically think and go back to their communities and critically think and live healthy lives. So, you know, it's diet, it's fitness, it's, you know,

how your brain works, it's probability theory, it's educating your kids better. But I also think, you know, when I was a child, my mom really imparted on me this idea that asking questions shows people that you're listening and listening is a sign of respect. So you need to be able to listen in a dinner party conversation, take in the information, process it and ask a really well-informed question based on the information you've just listened to. She trained the kids in our family that that was part of being polite, essentially. Now, I think asking questions seems to be like an aggressive, challenging, uncomfortable thing for people. I'd like us to

take that back. I don't think a question should ever be considered offensive. An answer? Okay, an answer might be offensive, but asking the question should not be. And so I think when people see these kinds of allegations being thrown around publicly, it's really important to ask some questions. Do I have enough information? You know, sort of like we've been talking about with these trials. Am I getting the information from an unbiased source? What would I think if I were in that situation? If somebody accused myself of this, right?

How would I respond? What if I didn't do it? How would I know if this person did it or didn't do it? I mean, one of the things that I've seen over and over again is how these issues get weaponized to the point where like an allegation is there's a threat that an allegation will be published and people are penalized for it. So big corporations are terrified of the idea that any of their executives or people on their boards are going to be accused of, say, sexual harassment. And so a whisper campaign that somebody might be saying something that somebody did something inappropriate is enough to get somebody fired.

That becomes such a problem in terms of fairness, justice, and also living a life where you feel like you're being honest and you're able to have direction. I mean, I think, again, to go back to something you said earlier about the doctor patient relationship and clinical, you know, significance clinically, that we've sort of taken away this idea that wisdom is a virtue and a value. And that as you grow older, you grow wiser and you have experience and sure the norms may change. But you have this collection of knowledge that you've grown to sort of encompass and that you therefore deserve some respect. So you look at newsrooms and they're like,

the average age of the newsroom is like half what it was 20 years ago. There aren't guiding sort of people in those positions to sort of tell the younger people, hey, whoa, that's a bad story. Or like, you haven't fact-checked that and i think there's such a fear that the younger cohort is going to cancel the older cohort for something the older cohort didn't mean to do right or didn't do right there's a massive amount of silencing that's happening and it's like feet you know a snake eating its own

tail like if you don't stand up to this stuff, it's going to get worse. And when I say to people, when I have to ask them, hey, look, your coworker, your best friend, whatever is being accused of this, will you stand up for them? So often people go into this self preservation mode where they say like, well, I don't want to because then people are going to be looking at me, or then I might be canceled. And what I always say is, you know what? You're far more likely to get canceled if you don't stand up to this. Because if you let your friend who's innocent be run over by the truck, then there's no rules that anybody's not going to come for you next. If we all start standing up and saying, hold on a second,

this isn't quite what you're saying, or this isn't so bad, right? Then you start peeling, you take that power back. But we have just, I mean, I hate the Me Too movement for like a huge problem because I think the people who have been really victimized are not going to be believed. This is such an injustice to real victims that it's crippling across, you know,

anybody with any good intention can look at this and say, we've got to do something about this this is not good for any right and and listen that there's a there's a fundamental mathematical certainty of history which is that when the guillotines come out they come for everybody eventually the people who brought the guillotines out robespierre goes up on the guillotine the sans-culottes go up on the guillotine. Everybody goes on the guillotine eventually until they're stopped, until somebody stands up and stops them.

That's just the way that goes. The other thing you mentioned, wisdom. I don't think people know what wisdom is anymore. That's why they bring in reams of paper from a Google search when you come to the doctor. It's like, they don't understand that, yes, yes, I knew that all second year medical school and for the last 40 years have been developing wisdom around the application of that information in thousands of different situations that are infinitely complex because they're biological.

But I have a sense of these things to make the right judgment for you. No idea what that is because information has become the most significant asset. And you mentioned that you think- If the enlightenment was, you know, like the age of wisdom or the age of knowledge, then we're living through the age of emotion. Everything is about how emotional something is. And the logic has left the building. It's all emotional reaction.

Well, that's narcissism. That's all narcissism. You know, I wrote a book on this, right? It's called The Mirror Effect. I wrote it 15 years and and uh maybe it's 20 years ago now i saw this coming i saw i saw it coming and i knew there would be mobs and scapegoating because that's how narcissists always act and um i was told not to write my chapter on pre-revolutionary france because it was too it was too uh uh what was the word they use a theoretic like it was too, what was the word they used? It was not likely to be true. It was too out there in our theory

that we were going through something similar. And I just knew there'd be guillotines. I knew it was coming. But you mentioned that the people that stand up may have sort of a genetic defect. And in fact, canaries in the coal mine always have great evolutionary value, right? Even though being a canary in the coal mine always have great evolutionary value, right? Even though being a canary in the coal mine may have adaptive disadvantages for the individual canary, being the canary in the coal mine is good for the population.

It's good. And that's why they persist. That's why people that can see this. My theory is I'm not sure I would have been somebody that could see it as clearly as I do did I not have the training I had in actual liberal arts education, which we don't have anymore. And I know you shared that heritage with me. And I was talking to Bill Maher and he and I said the same conversation. We took very seriously the pursuit of truth,

that the pursuit of truth was a process, could never be attained. You could at best approximate something like the truth, but you had to constantly check yourself and constantly update your previous, what's the Bayesian term for that? Your priors, update your priors and look at things again and question yourself

and subject yourself to questioning from others that is gone that is that not only is that that training not there that as a virtue sort of doesn't exist and i i think more than the genetic defect go ahead yeah the other thing about the liberal arts education which you and i have talked about privately but is this notion of like a you're getting a broad knowledge base right so you have to take classes in all of these you know different disciplines and in doing that you're getting a lot of um generalized knowledge about how to think it's training your brain to think and so a lot of people will say what i'm not going to get a go to spend all this training your brain to think and so a lot of people will say what i'm not going to get a go to spend all this money to go to college and get a

history degree which is what i did right because like what kind of job am i going to get from there but actually studying history is a profound way of learning how to think and solve problems across you know times or whatever and i think yeah it used to be that you know that's you you do that and then you'd go to grad school to focus on what it was that you wanted to specialize in that's right that's right but now that's gone i don't i don't think you can get that training that we had anymore i i really don't i i think it's just i i think we should withdraw funds those of us who are alumni of those sorts of institutions immediately cease any support until they return to an understanding

of the pursuit of the truth. Remember, we went through this huge wave of post-structuralism where there is no truth, right? And I was thinking about this today, that the history of our present moment kind of started with post-structuralism. And I remember about five years ago, I was listening to a French philosopher in some sort of podcast I was listening to. Hang on, Susan, can you run across here and get me that water? I'm

sorry, I should have gotten it. And she was a French philosopher and she's going, what is wrong with American academia that they have this preoccupation with these French philosophers from nearly 100 years ago that they've suddenly discovered them that we've been living with and they have no utility. It was sort of a joke. They were just sort of, it was a kind of a cognitive experiment that failed. And we have moved on from the post-structuralism 75 years ago. What's wrong with American academia? And then we move from that to changing words, changing everything, nothing is real, nothing exists. So until the truth is once again a virtue

and something that we can strive for, there's going to be problems. Well, and an acknowledgement that there is a truth, that it's not individual. I don't have my truth and you have your truth and your truth can make me uncomfortable. There are just some objective things in reality that we can all agree on and that that's okay. And I'm willing to accept that people have different versions of that and can have different ways of ascending to it. But we should all be trying to ascend to it. That it's not of no value.

We should, from all of our different perspectives, yes, they all have value. And let's use them all to ascend to something more significant for humans generally. I'm looking at these spaces now to see if anybody wants to ask questions. They're a pretty quiet group. Emily's over there. She said that there might be a glitch, but do you see Emily? Let's see if you wants to ask questions. They're a pretty quiet group. Emily's over there. She said there might be a glitch, but do you see Emily? See if you can pull her up. Well, Caleb did not make me a co-host.

I was literally about to say that, Drew. That's probably why you don't see. There's a bunch of callers there. It's because you're not a co-host. I just added you. Yeah, they're there now. They just lined up. Okay, so I can bring some of these people up.

All right, let's do it. Let's see and now it's not letting me bring them up hold on a second here uh there we go they had a speaker this is uh 42 believes or something that's here what the question do i have hey um can you hear me okay there we there. We got you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Mainly, I just wanted to come on because, you know, I really appreciate the conversation and, you know, all of those sentiments about like trying to get to the truth, trying to, you know, have the conversation. As you know, or maybe you don't remember, I previously was trying to have Steve Kirsch debate me on your

show because I am on the pro-vaccine side and I still very much am obviously pro-vaccine. And I actually am really excited because I've been doing a lot more work in this space recently, recently helped out with a Washington Post article, giving them some information. I know you don't know much about me as a person, but I've been doing this since before the pandemic, actually. My research first started in 2017 on the anti-vaccine movement, and I've been working in the pro-vaccine space pretty much ever since then. And just for any anti-vaxxer you've had on the show before, Del Bigtree, R.T. Jr., Steve Kirsch, if he wants to retract his running away, I'm more than willing to debate and have that conversation,

because I do believe that conversation is important to have, and I want to have it. Yeah. I don't know how I'll hook you guys up. Maybe, hmm, because you may win a million dollars. He's offering a million dollars to debate him, so you might be able to win that money um so all i asked all i i told him that my terms were very simple i just wanted to debate on someone else's show i he said he suggested you i agreed um the last time he and i talked about it he backed out because he said that um you guys weren't willing to host it but i i'm gonna want to assert myself and say that I know that I might seem nameless,

I might seem faceless. I do a lot of work in this movement, and I know I'd win. Is there something you want to do? Susan's the producer. We'll talk about it. Who's talking? This is Sarah. My name's Sarah. Send your information to

contact at drdrew.com send your info to contactdrew.com and then we will continue to talk about this it's more that I worry I haven't spoken to Stephen a lot I worry about I don't know

who we have debating these things maybe we should have little teams debating them or something. Okay. Let's get Marie up here. Marie. But I do, I think it would be a good idea maybe to have that debate.

I don't know. I would kind of like to. That's fine. Maybe, maybe it's time. Yeah. Marie, you're,

you're, you're, Caleb says yes. I think it's time. Well, so the, the, the real backstory behind that is that I made an executive producer decision to not bring her on the show because I did research.

And I thought that it would have the appearance of punching down when you have a multi, multi, multimillionaire like Steve Kirsch who does this 24-7 every day. And you have someone who is kind of like a person who has maybe 2,500 or 2,800 followers on Twitter. I didn't want that to be the person that's going to debate Steve Kirsch on such a large platform. I thought that would hit the appearance of being unfair. But if she's insisted, she's insisted to this multiple times

that she wants to come on, and I said, look, let's do it. I can make it happen. If you want to go into that lion's den, then that's fine. I'm all about, I wanted to go somewhere. I just wanted it happen. If you want to go into that lion's den, then that's fine. Something to talk about. Yeah. Well, I'm all about, you know, I just, I wanted to go somewhere. I just wanted it to be fair. Marie, you're up.

You just unmute yourself. All right. Well, that's. Hello. I think it's. Hi, Marie. What's up? Hi.

I just wanted to make a couple of comments. Hello. And I'm so glad that we're allowed to ask questions. I went into another room with a bunch of doctors that wanted to debate anti-vaxxers. It was scary, scary, scary. I had two women doctors, just so that everybody knows, I have had two of the shots. I've had two of the shots. I've had two of the Pfizer. So I'm not an anti-vaxxer, but I don't try to make people.

It's not my job. But anyway, it scared me to death. These women, these women doctors were going, ah, ah, ah, anti-vaxxer. They scared me out of the room. So just be very, very careful. And that's all I want to say. It's like I went, whoa. Whoa.

And then there's one male doctor. He is really mean to people. Oh, my God. Never mind. They're meanies. Well, that's an interesting but where you're you're you're bringing up something interesting which is that go ahead finish your thought put you back thank you sir they could be reassuring but instead they're condescending

condescending meanie weenies. Are they saying to you that she shouldn't have gotten vaccinated? I don't know. She must have asked a question that triggered them. But she brings up a really, really, really important point that's a corollary to what you and I have been talking about, which is that collegial discourse almost doesn't exist. It's all this weird, condescending, ad hominem. It's just early on in the pandemic,

every time a peer of mine would say something weird on Twitter, I would DM them and say, let's get on the phone. Let's talk about this. This is not the way peers interact. And I would say 80% of them refuse to come on, just refused to come on. And the 20% that I did get on the phone, of course, we had very little disagreement.

Of course, they were doing what we were talking about earlier, where they piled onto some bullshit that was underway in some sort of Twitter mob, where they were throwing the stones, the paradigm as you painted it. I'd love to know who those doctors were did i talk to them no the one that were the ones that were condescending and oh screaming i kind of don't care because it embarrasses me it's the opposite of what we should be doing and it's i and yeah i mean marie was a patient push back on is a little like i feel like people are so sensitive, right? So I grew up in a family where debate was really important. And you had to, my husband jokes that it's like dinner

at my parents' house is like hungry hippos, that everybody go, it's like a zero sound. Everybody go to the table and try to grab the balls. And I think it was lively. But my parents also, they expected us to be informed on issues and they expected us to bring something to the table. And if you couldn't, you kind of had to like BS your way through. Right.

And it was, that was how I was raised. And so I, sometimes I think I get accused of being too aggressive. Right. And I think part of that is like, it's kind of fun to get into it. And it doesn't mean that I'm insulting you and in other like we're not it shouldn't be personal but if i don't agree with you about something and actually adam and i talked about this in the interview i did with him where you know how do you have friends who you disagree with so much about some issues and then you just agree not to ever talk about it like that to me

feels like i want if i don't agree with you it doesn't mean i don't want to be friends with you in fact i'm way more curious about like how did you come to that opinion right that's my curiosity too i want to know i want to know what you're thinking how you get there you're somebody i respect what how do we how do we differ so much because and i was assuming i'm wrong that's my my my my my posture is i must be off i need to be corrected let's figure out how it gets the truth. That's it. What do I not know? What do you know that I don't know?

Exactly. I respect you. I'm going to push you hard to tell me where I'm wrong. Caller Chick Chad. But interestingly, just before I talked to the caller, Susan used to accuse me of, because I would have arguments with her and you'd accuse me of being mean back years ago. It's true. And I was just like, no, that's discussion.

But you know, a lot of doctors are condescending. Like you're actually a very nice doctor. You're very down to earth. My mother even said that when she met you. I mean, if you're not the brightest bulb in the pack and you're trying to understand medicine and you talk to a doctor, sometimes they sound like they're very condescending because they're trying to get a point across to you. I would recommend that. Because they're so intellectual. Back to Emily's point about discourse and being less sensitive. If somebody is condescending to you,

go, please, I can't understand you when you're so condescending. I had this experience. I had to work on a new prescription software and the guy opened up with, he goes, would you just put your bib about? I go, hey, this is not gonna go well with that kind of condescending stuff.

So please just speak to me straight. And he went, oh, I'm sorry. He went, I'm sorry. And I ended up writing a letter in support of that guy because he turned it around so much and helped me a ton. And he was, he caught himself and people sometimes don't know how they come across. Okay. This is a chick Chad, I guess it is. Drew, it's me. It's Emily. Oh, Emily, what the hell? Okay. You okay you wanted to you wanted to talk she's the queen she's our crack producer

booker yes go ahead hi Emily well hi Emily I have to think of a way of

what a good word for a girl who's a Chad and that's why I wrote Chick Chad if you know the Chad meme,

and I'm sure everybody knows the Chad meme. So here's my idea. It's not really. Whatever. There you go. There you go. Better. Oh, good.

All right. I am not a robot. So I have an idea. This should be sent to your friends and family who are on the fence with whom you tiptoe into different topics because you don't want to

have them shut down entirely this is a great episode to share share the YouTube link I hate to say it whatever, who cares because of Emily's background, if you look at her LinkedIn, you look at her website, and then you listen to the discussion that you guys just had. This is a great way to get somebody to go a little purple pill, red pill. And I use that term, you know, loosely,

whatever. I don't want to get too sweeping and cliche. Well, I know that, I know Emily, something has happened. Emily, Emily Kaplan, something has happened here because Emily Barsh has never, she's texted me a lot during her show, but has never called in during her show. So I know that

she was flying out of her seat with some of the stuff we were talking about. So that's, that is good news. So happy new year, Emily. Thank you for calling. You know, I would say like, you're trying to have discussions. So some of the training I did at Harvard Law School was on advanced negotiation. And we actually had to do these really interesting experiments. We are role playing, right? And you're trying to solve a conflict and they give you, you know, what conflict could be or whatever but with and then i did a year-long mediation training and in the mediation training one of the big things that i like to tell people is when you're really trying to solve a conflict

between two people you need to have a goal in the future so if people are arguing with their families like say about the covid vaccine or whatever you need to have a goal that you both agree to about, like, we want to be able to be at dinner together. Yeah. Yeah. And everything you do is about, is this getting us closer or farther from that shared goal?

And I think we, there was a lot of really destructive stuff that happened with relationships, both with friendships and with families through COVID. And there probably needs to be some repair where we can go back to this place where you can have dialogue about tricky issues without people being offended. It's not just COVID. I think it sort of went to Trump and Trump derangement

and God knows what else was, all that mishegas that was going on in 2016 created, to me, feels like where the hysteria began uh on both on all sides i'm not i'm not pointing a finger at anybody it just feels like this all got going then and then covid just put it into put gasoline all over it and i think that's a reasonable place yeah oh sorry go ahead goes back goes back even some of the like the um the intent of political correctness was to be more inclusive and be more respectful but i think what it did was it actually isolated people and it it changed it took the somebody's meaning for one thing and then made it

you know bad or a pejorative in some way that the person didn't intend it to and i think that creates a fear of speaking you don't want to say something to the wrong person because we're in the wrong way. And so then you're really limited. I think that builds resentment in people. So then they're like, I'm only going to talk to people who I know already agree with me or aren't going to be upset by what I'm saying. And that is a huge disservice to our republic. I think we have to be able to talk to everybody and be respectful of everybody and listen to different ideas and take them in and make the best decisions i think that's exactly correct and i think each of us in order to do so must i think kind of think of by ourselves on a tiny little way as somebody asserting freedom doing the work of this great

republic by trying to be a little more free a little more free in what we say and do uh so we can contribute to the whole and get to that shared goal which everyone people want to get along as you said that's that's genetically in us and i would say finish yeah just like start with the assumptive that people are good and that they're not trying to upset you right and then you can move forward with understanding their ideas and i or or i i i think that's why we're able to see these things because we do come from that point but a lot of people do feel that people are are not so good and need some authority on high to tell them uh and they see that there's sort of two different

versions of the human experience one is people think that people are good and authority tends to go bad and bad people tend to get into the authority and need to be spoken truth to power. And the other group says that people are kind of bad and need some kind of centralized authority to keep them in line. Whichever is your bias, acknowledge it.

Acknowledge it and examine it and see which one gets us to a better place. I think anytime you restrict freedom. That's missing. It's like, I think we've also forgotten about forgiveness. And I tend to think like if somebody really makes me mad, it's always helpful to say like,

maybe that person is having the worst day of their life. I have no idea what's going on with that person, but I'm going to give them this one as a pass. If it's a repeated pattern of behavior, you have to reevaluate. But I think this knee jerk to just respond to everybody as though they're out to get you, right? Some terrible thing. No, as though they're bad. That's right.

That's exactly wrong. I agree with you. I think a good default is that people are good. Caleb? Oh, I have a very quick story that goes along these lines from something that I did years ago that I think you would like. So back in, what is it, 2012, 2013, I was working on, back in my previous life of writing books, I found online a website, an entire website

that someone had made dedicated to Caleb Nation hate. They went line by line down my two books that had come out before that one, line by line making fun of everything that they could find in the book, just everything, blog posts, all this stuff. And I was at the time writing another book in a different series,

and I realized that the best possible beta readers for my upcoming book would be the people who would be the most honest to me, my biggest haters. So I dug up and found out who would be the most honest to me, my biggest haters. So I dug up and found out who was running this Caleb Nation hate website, found the two operators and begged them, would you please, please do all of your criticism on my book that's not out yet? Can you please preview it and tell me everything that's wrong with it? Because you don't care what I care, what I think about you. They totally did it. They flipped right over to the other side.

They were like, well, I didn't know you were going to be a nice person because they don't know who you are. They just want to attack people. Turned out to be the best critics of my work ever. They improved the book so much. I had to do all these rewrites based on what they said because who can you trust other than the people that say they hate you the most and then they

turn out to be on your side later on. Caleb, that also speaks so much to your level of confidence and self-awareness that you like put off by them. I really respect that. I've had a couple of situations where I've had the opportunity to confront people who have been really nasty to me. And it is, it's, it's both humbling and incredibly empowering, right?

To look in the face and say like, let's talk about it. Like, it seems like, you know, you have an issue with me and like, I don't know what that is, but I know I'm not perfect. So let's talk about it like it seems like you know you have an issue with me and like i don't you know what that is but i know i'm not perfect so let's figure it out and then you really find out very quickly that they don't actually have an issue with you they're just saying things out on the internet into the void thinking that you're not like a real person on the other side and so the moment that i left like one right they think you're a cartoon but the moment i sent one message the cartoonification process there's no way this is a real caleb nation emailing me it couldn't possibly be i'm like no guys it's it's from my caleb nation.com email i'm telling you i actually need your help when you

when you take people's humanity away from them you there's untold harm that can be done and i've noticed there's a cartoonification of people in the media so we got to wrap this up uh susan i have to react to run but but Emily, thank you. I think this is a great place to end the new year. I do know now that Emily Barsh is such a huge fan of yours. We will see you again in the new year,

no doubt, to continue this conversation. There's no doubt. Susan, any last words for the end of the new year? As we head into the new year. Happy new year. Happy new year, everybody. I've actually left this conversation.

I was feeling really down lately, Emily, in terms of where we are as a country and these sorts of issues as scientific discourse and collegial conduct. I leave this conversation with a changed attitude, which is a good sign. Well, that means so much to me. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm a big fan and I really just, it's pretty fun yep we'll see you again no doubt emily caplan and for everyone else we will see you in the new year there is the schedule sean baker on carnivore brian speaking of the lipid story he can get into that in detail he's a physician brian kill me jim brewer rosanne all coming up and paul alexander those are our next uh five guests So look forward to that. I believe all in our usual time slot, but keep an eye out

for me changing things as I tend to do. Looking at the schedule, it all looks on schedule. 3 o'clock Pacific time. And we'll see you in the new year. Have a great new year, everybody. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky. As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, or treatment.

This show is intended for educational and informational purposes only. I am a licensed physician, but I am not a replacement for your personal doctor, and I am not practicing medicine here. Always remember that our understanding of medicine and science is constantly evolving. Though my opinion is based on the information that is available to me today, some of the contents of this show could be outdated in the future. Be sure to check with trusted resources in case any of the information has been updated since this was published.

If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, don't call me. Call 911. If you're feeling hopeless or suicidal, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. You can find more of my recommended organizations and helpful resources at drdrew.com slash help.