The Adam and Dr. Drew Show - #1776 Free Speech, Medicine & Government Overreach

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

Dr. Drew & Mark Geragos are back for some more nuanced and deep conversations about free speech, medical semantics & government overreach. Mark Geragos talks about some of the work he is doing in local LA counties helping various people & businesses that were negatively affected from some of the mandates that were enacted in the years previous. Please support our sponsors: Shopify.com/AdamAndDrew Angi.com

Globally, humans are facing massive problems that are widely ignored by governments and the media. Like personal space invaders. I've had it with these couples that sit on the same side of the booth. Yak mouths. Stupid stick figure bumper stickers. Almond milk. You cannot milk an almond. Hi, I'm Jennifer.

And I'm Angie. We call her Pumps, and we're the hosts of I've Had It. Pumps, tell the listener where they can find us. Apple, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts. Nailed it. See you next Tuesday. Recorded live at Corolla One Studios with Mark

Garagos and board certified physician and addiction medicine specialist, Dr. Drew Pinsky. You're listening to The Mark and Dr. Drew Show. I gotta get it on. No choice but to get. Drew Show. Get it on. I got to get it on.

No choice but to get it on Monday. Get it on. My friend Mark Geragos, attorney at law, joins me. I'm Dr. Drew. Adam is away. And that intro just launches us with good spirits every time. It never gets old. Maybe it does for others.

Not us. And speaking of good spirits, as this airs, your birthday is tomorrow. Yes. Happy birthday. Thank you. Have you joined me in Medicare? Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

Are you already there? I'm already there. Okay. So it's something, I'll tell you. Yeah. What was the old, was it Mickey Mantle who said, if I knew I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself? He had fun.

But it did, you know, 60 didn't bother me. 62 didn't bother me. But around 63, I started noticing stuff. I felt like the wheels were starting to come off the wagon. So there was a guy guy that i he's long since passed away and i never understood what he was talking about when he said it except now i'm living it he says the body is designed to get you to the seventh he used to pronounce it decade of life yeah and he says when you get to the seventh decade, which is 60 to 70, that's when the parts and the wheels start falling off.

Well, he's right. He's right. And you can affect that. My friend Peter Attia, do you know, are you familiar with him? Are you kidding? Peter Attia is somebody that I have, I've read his latest book twice. Outlive. Yep. Yep.

Yeah. So I had dinner with him when that book was coming out. And please, everybody, get that book if you have any interest at all. It is so phenomenal. I'll tell you, my biggest takeaway, and I have told this, I can't tell you how many people, Drew. His five factors for metabolic syndrome that he's got, you know, the blood pressure, the resting glucose, and your HDL. It's genius. Yeah, and that's pretty standard stuff.

What's interesting is I'm on a statin for years because I didn't want to have what my dad had, but I could never get my HDL up, my triglycerides down until I really cut out sugars and breads. And then, boom, HDL went up, triglyceride came down. And I definitely have an insulin resistance syndrome. And now I'm losing weight through this V-Shred thing I'm working on. Hey, what are you doing to lose weight now? It's essentially a more liberal diet, a lot of vegetables, a lot of cycling of carbs and fats.

Protein is something I eat a lot of anyway. But I've lost like 13 pounds doing it. How? But tell me, like, give me that. I love when people tell me that. They don't give me that. Well, they have a menu. They have a diet that Susan – this is Susan's project, right?

This isn't really even my project. She got me into it. I went, ah. Well, here's what I was going to tell you is that my shoulders are fucked up. I destroyed my shoulders by lifting heavy weights. And so I'm going to have stem cell stuff. I'm going to have all these things done. But when I looked at the x-rays of my shoulders, I was shocked.

But I'm in pain all the time, and I can no longer lift heavy weights. And so I was ready for a change. And these guys had a training program. I was like, oh, this will be good for me. And I was absolutely right. But she does the menus, and she follows the thing and everything. And that's helpful. And then, but number two is time under tension, more sets, higher reps, hit cardio, this short

burst, exhaustion cardio, that massively changed everything for me. So it really, for me, it was more on the workout side that it just changed my metabolism. How often do you do HIIT? Every day. Really? Yeah. But I sort of, I do my own little version of it. When we were in France, a friend of mine was with me and we go, let's do this sort of Navy Seal type workout, which we did. And that has the HIIT cardio in between, HIIT abs, HIIT cardio in between every set.

And man, I just responded to that. And so that's what I'm doing now. And so there you are. That's my secret. That's what's working. Well, it's working if you've lost 13 pounds. Yeah. And I've-

At our advanced ages, that's not inconsequential. No, I know. And it's a major thing. But back to Peter Attia, two things in that book. A, it's the best discussion, the clearest discussion, and the easiest to understand discussion of lipid metabolism, right? Cholesterol metabolism, lipid metabolism. It is all there. It's in like – he – in about 10 pages.

He covers everything, and it's all easily understood, number one. Number two, he makes the point, back to your friend with the seventh decade thing, that there is a fall off. He's famous now. He's actually got a post where you see him. He has a chalkboard and he goes, I forget what the y-axis is, but on the x is age. And he's going along and he just shows this cliff you fall off to exemplify what happens. And it includes muscular wasting, it occurs strength decay. It's just, it's an essence.

It just happens. And you have to really systematically fight that back. And it can be done. It's so true. When I was reading that, by the way, his discussion of HDL and LDL and the kind of the interplay and getting into the apolipoproteins lp little a he gets into all that it's all like easy to understand yeah i mean it's just it was phenomenal i mean reading that book got me to do make certain changes just because it was so clear in understanding what he was talking about.

And so much of that is so right. And his journey to where he is. Oh, yeah. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You must know that. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, he's a brilliant dude.

And he was a cancer surgeon. And he did some of the stuff, you know, same thing we all do. He's like totally into it, 24-7 doing it. And then was like, am I really helping people with this? Maybe I want to do something a little different. Well, his idea of medicine 2.0 and the other, it just resonated because you could see it. No, he is the right guy for that job because he stays absolutely true to evidence base and has, you know, has tons of clinical experience and great judgment. And so, no, he is perfect person for this stuff. So I recommend that book.

He's also, what is the name? It starts with an R, RAP. He's got a, where he's rapison or rapison that he thinks shows so much promise that he he's been dealing with that it's just fascinating it made me when you were talking about the stem cells for your shoulder yeah so he you know i was pimping him about that stuff when i had dinner it was a while ago probably six or eight months ago we had dinner because he lives in austin too he's part of the austin mafia part of the mafia yeah and um and he uh i was going yeah how about Metformin? How about this? He finally – he's kind of an aggressive guy in a nice way. And he snapped at me and he goes, vigorous exercise.

Vigorous exercise. That's the one thing I can tell you for sure, vigorous exercise. And I thought – and that stayed with me. And in my head I was thinking, well, I already do that. But now I'm doing that. I'm really actually doing more what's appropriate and then the other thing finally the last thing is something charlie munger has pointed out uh warren buffett's partner for many years was that who's 99 who's obviously got he has some wisdom about how longevity and he has said out loud the greatest threat to my health is

falling and so i have to not fall. And he's right. And if you can maintain some balance, some muscle mass, some cognitive, you know, sort of protection, there you go. Let me make a quick break before we get back into the stuff. Talk about our friends at Shopify. Selling a great product on a bad platform is like doing stand-up with no mic. Reach your business audience like never before with Shopify. It is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or IPO-ready, Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run, and grow your business. Shopify puts you in control of every sales channel from the in-person POS system or offering our Shopify's all-in-one e-commerce platform.

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at shopify.com slash adamanddrew, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash adamanddrew to take your business to the next level today. Shopify.com slash adamanddrew. So let's get back to Greg Lukianoff. Lukianoff. Lukianoff. That's how you pronounce it.

So he was – I've been trying for two and a half shows to talk about this guy. He was making the point about how if we don't pay attention to culture of free speech, we will end up with a system that doesn't value free speech and a systematic decay of our freedoms. And I saw some data yesterday. I forget what it was on. But something like 52% of people believe that free – no, that 52% was actually, people were in favor of masking. And if the government needed to mandate a mask, that was shocking to me. But this was 57% saying that free speech should be curtailed in certain circumstances. And as I don't understand why people don't understand that slippery slope of who decides what those certain circumstances are.

And isn't one of the most famous statements about free speech is the one I fight to protect is the one I hate the most. Correct. And by the way, it's the tyranny of the majority. Yes. the revolution, the American Revolution was based on is that you're the whole idea of the Constitution is this idea that we're not going to basically kind of have a vote on certain fundamental liberties. You can have a democratic republic that elects people, but that doesn't mean that you have a vote on what religion or what speech or the other things that are fundamental to what it is to be an American.

And so this guy, Greg, makes that point. It says, you know, we all looked at the McCarthy era as horror, horror, and it'll never happen again. And this is what he explained. Somewhere in the late 50s, there was a law. Because 100 college professors lost their jobs because of not towing some line that a minority of college students decided needed to be towed. So it's a tyranny of the minority, something that our constitutional conventions never contemplated. And it's accelerating. So we've gone well beyond mccarthy era techniques or or horror

and people don't seem to recognize it as his point what say you well i i couldn't agree more i mean some of the things that are going on now twist me inside out in terms of where I started. We used the term ideology last episode. Where I am, where I have been, and where we are right now is just astonishing. The idea that I remember when both the idea of being a criminal defense lawyer and a journalist, for instance, where you were supposed to challenge authority, you're supposed to challenge the government, you're the check and balance against them. Well, something happened at a certain point where the journalist or journalism started to become a cheerleader for the government. And that was a growth out of it being a cheerleader for the prosecution. Prosecution and the government started to be identified with one another. And this idea of being a check on the government, you got kind of a caricature of a criminal defense lawyer being a slick lawyer who's just trying to get

somebody who's guilty off as opposed to you know the the second president of the united states john adams was defending um uh the people who were considered to be traitors at the time yeah and that was the core of what the Constitution and the American Revolution was about. And I keep using the word astonishing as you do because it's amazing how we've just done a flip-flop on this. And that is what I think has happened with free speech as well. For sure. And my profession's had a weird flip-flop too where they're – Your profession blows me away even more. Yes.

I don't understand what has happened except – and I know it's easy to blame insurance companies or big pharma or whatever. But I don't know that that's – where are the doctors who are pushing back against? Something like 60% or 70% are employees now. And as such, they're afraid. They're afraid to lose their job. They're afraid to speak up. They're afraid to stand up to the hospital authorities. And they're just out there doing a job.

And it's a catastrophe. On top of that, there is a very systematic effort to get rid of doctors taking care of patients, particularly in the primary care setting, and put nurse practitioners, physician extenders, so-called. It's funny. I remember being on Anderson Cooper's show years ago, probably 10 years ago, and Anna Navarro was at the table. And what's his name? David Gergen is there. And they were asking questions. Back when Charlie, the producer, used to do the round table. Yes, yes, exactly.

And you'd be there sometimes. And the issue of sort of, I don't know, something about health care came up. And I just, in my discussion, I said, well, physician extenders and blah, blah. And Anders Cooper screamed at me. He said, physician extenders? Oh, my God. What is that? I said, you don't understand.

You're not going to see physicians. You're going to see nurse practitioners and physician assistants that are called physician extenders, and they're going to be doing your care. And they must follow protocols because they're not trained to use their judgment the same way. We are trained to think independently on our feet and to constantly try to make the best call for that patient that's sitting in front of us. That group is trained to follow certain protocols. And that is clearly where healthcare is headed, clearly. Well, and by the way, that's because it's a tremendous way to cut costs. Correct.

And you can argue good, bad. I think it's pushing us towards a two-tiered healthcare system is what it's doing. Because eventually- Well, yes, it's exactly right. Because now you have the growth of concierge medicine, basically. Correct, correct.

It has become, it's a cottage industry. It is. It's like senior in New York. It's right around the corner. However, my profession condemns it on ethical grounds. And so this, again, is this freedom issue that comes up as people are not free to do what they want to do. And all that has to happen, and this happened during the opioid crisis, which is why we got the opioid crisis, all that has to happen, and people don't understand this, two things. Some sort of legal liability, if there's any legal liability in concierge practice, if attorneys figure out a way to create a liability, which you guys do, they found that in the opioid crisis. People don't understand that that was what really put the rocket fuel in the over-prescribing, which was they put a couple doctors in prison and they find them a million

dollars outside of their malpractice for patient abuse for inadequate, not enough pain medication. And that was that. Okay, there was that. And then the other thing is if the evangelist, which is what happens in my profession once in a while, people start to evangelize. I don't mean Christian evangelist. I mean enthusiast. The true sense of the word, which is proselytizing. Proselytizing, exactly. They get a hold of the professional agencies and the regulators. So if the American College of Physicians takes the position, you can't be a fellow or a member of the American College of Physicians if you're doing something so unethical as concierge practice.

It's over. It just stops. And by the way, speaking of big pharma, what that reminds me of is, and I remember 20 years ago doing a doing a case where the suing a drug company and every expert they put on from the fda had either just left or was going back to one of the drug companies well this is this is rfk jr's thing right the capture of our regulators that's what he is worried about that's's what I'm worried about. If you should look at it, if you're interested in this stuff, I did an interview with a guy from Louisiana, a great researcher, and he had a research consortium that was excellent

physicians. And they reopened the Pfizer data and the FDA, and they came up with very significant problems with the way the approval process went for the vaccine. And it was significant enough that the FDA met with the group, the whole regulating group, the panel of regulators were like, hey, you have a point here, let's talk about this. And two things came out of that, that aside from the fact that they agreed, there were some shortcomings that were sort of built on the assumptions that they use in creating the trials. But the two other things that flew out of that interview, and he recorded it because in Louisiana, it's a one-way thing. You can record everything. Right, one party.

Yeah. And so he recorded. Two parties consent. He recorded one was a pediatrician who said to the regulators, he goes, you guys are not keeping up with the reports on adverse events. And they're like, oh, no, no, we have a system. And he goes, I've been calling you for two months about a child that died two days after getting a vaccine, a five-year-old.

Two months, you did not respond to my emails. You did not respond to my calls. And they were like, oh, I must have fallen through the cracks. They should have been beside themselves, mortified. They were like, well, normally we pay attention to the children. They were laughing about it. I was like, well, normally we pay attention to the children. They were laughing about it. I was like, what? They should have been absolutely gobsmacked that that happened.

I agree. They said, we've got to figure this out. Yes, quite the contrary. Like, oh, let me check at it. I'm sure it's in there. Typical bureaucrat nonsense. The other thing is, and they asked a very significant question, which was, as you look at the data

going forward, how do you decide whether something is or is not a vaccine reaction? You say what's reported in VAERS, the majority of what you're seeing there is not a vaccine reaction. How do you decide? And you know what their response literally was? Well, we got a guy. We got a guy that goes, so imagine if this were the Vioxx prosecution, and you were trying to decide if Vioxx was causing the coronary events that were being observed. And if you had a guy that just went out, I don't think so. Maybe, I don't think. You can't do that.

The data is the data. And they dismiss stuff based on their guy. The guy goes out and he looks at it and he decides. The guy decides. That is, again, astonishing. I have to use your word before you get into this. What shocks me is people who, you know, you can say what you will about trial lawyers, but the trial lawyers have, speaking of Vioxx, because I tried one of those as well. When they taught, when you have

the, and I had the chief medical officer of one of the pharmaceutical companies on the stand, and we were talking about adverse events. And they were getting furious with me because I said, you mean when you kill somebody? Yeah. And that's what an adverse event is. That's one of them. That's one of them. One of the worst adverse events about Vioxx was killing people. Yes, it was.

And by the way, it was only like, and this is going to sound weird, I'm saying it, but Vioxx was an amazing medicine. I have patients to this day that have never been the same since Vioxx was taken off the market. It was phenomenal. But it did kill like eight people, am I right? Eight or so? Oh, yeah. And did some real damage in addition. Okay.

So let's say 30 people? Yeah. Okay. real damage in addition okay so let's say 30 people yeah okay now we have a vaccine that there's concerns about children dying and thousands of people being affected and long covid syndromes and their response is yeah anyway right anyway well you know what we're gonna do well it's just unbelievable to me what we how we just set aside everything. We just kind of temporarily said time out on our brain and just set everything aside. Because anybody who had ever witnessed what was happening over the last 50 years would have just been appalled by what was happening.

During COVID you're talking about. Oh, yeah. Yeah, during COVID, where our civil liberties were destroyed. Destroyed and not even having a second thought. I mean, I'm still fighting the spanky Burbank there with Tin Horn Flats. Yeah. They're with Tin Horn Flats. Yeah.

People now kind of looking at what was done at Tin Horn Flats and trying to say that was a one-off. Oh, no. Oh, no. Let me take a quick break and talk about our friends at Angie. Homeowners, you know how much work it takes to maintain that home, whether it's everyday maintenance or repairs or just taking on a dream project in addition to your home. It can be hard to even know where to start. All you need is Angie, your home for everything home. Find a skilled local pro who will deliver quality and expertise. Over 20 years of home service experience. Bring them your project online or with the Angie app, answer a few questions and Angie can handle the rest. Nothing could be better.

It's so confusing, particularly for people like me that are, let's just say I'm a little challenged. Take care of just about any home project in just a few taps. Download the free Angie mobile app today or visit Angie.com. Again, that is Angie, A-N-G-I.com. All right. So if you want to see that interview about the FDA, I did two of them, but the last one was actually with the recording.

It's Dr. Freeman, F-R-A-I-M-E-N. Yeah, where do I? I do want to listen to that. Dr. Drew.TV. It's the last one I did with him, Dr. Drew.TV. And it's particularly towards the end. We talked to him for like an hour and 20 minutes. It's particularly that last 20 minutes.

But John Campbell also talked to him him and same data was presented there and then to to your point about this one-off and destroying people's careers and this is back to the cancel thing again uh the mayo clinic quietly has now said you know hydroxychloroquine can be used to treat early covid mayo clinic and the cdc on their website now says that you can use ivermectin to treat COVID. Yes. Horse. Horse. Horse tranquilizer.

Horse paste. Does anybody – so this is my question. So these were gross transgressions. People were harmed in untoward ways. The mental health of the country is disastrously affected. The mental health of the country is disastrously affected. I'm going to do an interview with a guy that's a psychiatrist who was the lead witness in the New York attempt to prosecute the school system for mandating masks. And he's a psychiatrist.

He's like, you have harmed kids. And let me tell you how. And again, the individuals like Tina Horne-Flatts and my friend Jay Bhattacharya and all these folks, what is the legal response? Is it Biden? You don't know? I only know the one little area or niche. I mean, mind you, I was, as you know, you've teased me about it. I was fighting along with Harmeet all of these COVID restrictions.

Two more unlikely bedfellows you could not meet than Armie Dillon and myself. And so I'm still fighting. I've got one case down that was just argued within the last week by one of the lawyers in the office with a nail salon that they had destroyed and forced into bankruptcy down in Orange County. And I've got another one, as I mentioned, in the L.A. County, where I'm fighting both L.A. County and the city of Burbank. And the thing that is just so unbelievable, because I've used astonishing and appalling too many times, is the lengths to which the government is still trying to justify what they did.

Well, that's, that's astonishing. Yeah. I'm on motion number motion for to dismiss or summary judgment or judgment on the pleadings number three and four. Um, I, they're still trying to prosecute on. And, uh, even though they, they took away the business, it's just – I wish I could practice law the way the government does where there was no concern for resources. Well, it's what makes me concerned about some of the CDC and the NIH positions on things like vaccinating everybody over six months of age. It's like, why are you doing that? Help me understand why. I just want

to know why. We've sort of established that the spike protein is really maybe the source of all the toxicity of COVID. So why would you want to increase that exposure to only get people- Because nobody talks about that because you dumb you you dumb it down you dumb it down to where you read it goes back to what the health czar said the day yeah he was asked about the judge's opinion in invalidating outdoor dining yes and he said well we know that there's really nothing there but we just want to get people indoors well by the way now we know that there's really nothing there, but we just want to get people indoors. Well, by the way, now we know that was the worst thing you could do. And so what are the remedies?

There needs to be something that sort of scares them next time. And now we have the World Health Organization wanting to go above our government and have a treaty that gives them fiat authority in situations like this. Well, the problem is immunities, which we'll talk about next episode. Immunities. All right. Immunities. Yes. And not the kind of immunity, not natural or vaccine.

COVID, yeah. We're talking legal immunities. Yeah. I've been worried about immunities for a long time because if these assholes that made the decision had skin in the game, they would think harder about it. Right? We'll talk about immunities next episode. All right.

Let's do that. Where can people find you, Mark? Where do you want people to go? You know, at Mark Garagas on Twitter or garagas.com. Okay. And for me, it's doctor.tv. You can find that interview we were talking about and many other sort of challenging interviews. I'm just trying to put the pieces together and understand what the hell is going on here.

I love talking to you. As Dr. Kelly Victory joins me on some of those, she has very different views than I do, but that's what makes a ballgame. And Dr. Freeman, again, F-R-A-I-M-E-N, but there's several others. And let's see, even as you hear this, you might want to check out Ed Dowd because he was going over some numbers and it would be interesting to hear what he has to say. So, it's Dr. Drew on behalf of Mark Geragos and Adam McCullough-Carola in absentia saying mahalo. Dive into true crime on Pluto TV. Unravel the mysteries with forensic files and 48 hours. Investigate crimes with Dateline 24-7 and unsolved mysteries.

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