The Bossticks - Dr. Drew Pinsky - Sex, Drugs, & Social Media.. Addiction, Adderall, Celebrity Rehab, Therapy, & The Opiate Epidemic

Episode Date: February 12, 2019

#169: David Drew Pinsky, commonly known as Dr. Drew, is an American celebrity doctor who is a board-certified internist, addiction medicine specialist, and media personality. He serves as producer and starred in the VH1 show Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, and its spinoffs Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew, and Celebrity Rehab Presents Sober House. On this episode we discuss addiction, social media addiction, sex addiction, celebrity rehab and the opiate epidemic.   To connect with Dr. Drew Pinsky click HERE To connect with Lauryn Evarts click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697) This episode is brought to you by FOUR SIGMATIC We have been drinking this company's mushroom-infused elixirs and coffees for over a year now. When we need a break from coffee but still need that extra morning jolt and focus the Mushroom Coffee with Lion's Mane and Chaga is the way to go. Lauryn also drinks the Mushroom Matcha which is a green tea designed as a coffee alternative for those of you who want to cut back on caffeine without losing focus and cognitive boosts. This stuff doesn't actually taste like mushrooms, it's delicious. All of these blends have a ton of nutrients and amino acids to give you balanced energy without the jitters. To try FOUR SIGMATIC products go to foursigmatic.com/skinny and use promo code SKINNY for 15% off all products.  This episode is brought to you by RITUAL Forget everything you thought you knew about vitamins. Ritual is the brand that's reinventing the experience with 9 essential nutrients women lack the most. If you're ready to invest in your health, do what I did and go to www.ritual.com/skinny  Your future self will thank you for taking Ritual: Consider it your 'Lifelong-Health-401k'. Why put anything but clean ingredients (backed by real science) in your body?

The following podcast is a dear media production. This episode is brought to you by Ritual. You guys know I'm a human guinea pig and I'm still here taking ritual and loving it. It's filled with iron, vitamin E, magnesium, folate, and omega-3. Kind of everything. It's made in the USA without synthetic fillers. 95% of women do not get the vitamins and minerals they need on a daily basis, so Ritual created a smarter vitamin with the nine essential ingredients women lack most.

Go to ritual.com slash skinny today. to choose clean ingredients backed by science. Sign up now at ritual.com slash skinny. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you alone for the ride.

Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to the Skinny Confidential, him and her. I, as someone resisting it and speaking out against it, was threatened. threatened with legal action, threatened with criminal action. For 15 years, I was saying, this is insane, this doesn't work. I take these people off the opiates, their pain goes away. By other doctors. They only would come to me when they also were aware that they were doing cocaine and drinking and doing other things on top of their opiates, which a lot of them did.

And they were, oh, my God, you're a terrible person. You're a drug addict. So I'd come and take them off everything. Their pain would go away, or maybe a four or five on a scale of 10. When they came in the door, they'd always say the same thing. 15, 18, 20 on a scale of 10. And always, they said the same thing. Take them off, pain goes away.

And when Keith Ledger dried, there's footage of me and Larry King going, this is a tsunami. You don't understand what's happening here in this country. And now people understand. Now people understand. Boom, boom, boom. That clip is from our guest of the show. None other than Dr. Drew. This episode covers addiction, sex addiction, the opiate epidemic, celebrity rehab, recovery, and therapy.

Happy Tuesday, guys. Welcome back to the show. this week is Valentine's Day, and I cannot wait to see what Michael Bostick has up his sleeve for me on Wednesday or Thursday. Well, I'm going to flip it on its head. I'm all about empowering women, Lauren, and this year I'm going to let you plan Valentine's day, pamper me, cater to me, where's my flowers, where is my woo, where is my, you know what? You know, I might get you a card because you're really about cards.

You know what, scrap the card and give me something that's more of the physical nature if you catch my drift. I do not need a card. I screenshoted a bunch of things that I want for Valentine's Day and sent them to you on Instagram. So be sure you check that out. You know, my DMs have been pretty slam lately, so I don't know if I'm going to be able to get to those in time. All right. On this show, we had Dr. Drew.

I feel like everyone knows who Dr. Drew is. He's kind of iconic. Pro on the mic. Pro on the mic. It's been, it was interesting to watch because you could tell, like sometimes you interview people are like, okay, this guy is maybe media trained. This person has done this before. This person hasn't done this before. This guy, he's done this before, and he's done a lot.

Yeah, he gets in. there. I mean, he did do Love Line. I feel like he's done this many, many, many times. You could tell when we podcast with him. It's always nice to podcast with someone that really understands the art of podcasting. For us, we just keep having to practice, practice, practice, but it is something that it kind of does have an art to it. I'm going to do that thing when I go to other people's do. He was like gripping the mic and whipping it around with no cares. Doing whatever he wanted. Yeah, I liked it. I was into it. I actually read his book recently on vacation. I read the book cracked. I highly recommend it. It's very, very good.

And in that book, he not only talks about his patients, he talks about how it is to be a doctor on the other side. And it's so interesting for him to go into the feelings of a doctor. So often I feel like we don't look at the feelings of a doctor. We look at them as so clinical. And so to hear how he perceives the patients is super interesting. Yeah, a lot of this interview, well, not a lot, but a good majority of it was spent kind of asking him and grilling him what it's like to be on that other side, like Lauren said.

and, you know, when you've seen the type of trauma that Dr. Drew's seen, you know, with addiction and families breaking up and all sorts of just dark sides of human nature, I mean, we were basically talking to him. That's got to take a toll at some point on an individual. And so we get into that with him as well as many other things. And it was just interesting to hear that perspective because we all see, you know, the celebrity rehab presentation, the love line presentation. We don't really get to see what it's actually like from his perspective, treating people with this type of trauma. This conversation hops all over the place and he gives me some really good tangible advice and I actually might be going to see a therapist weekly after this episode. I think that he shed some light on why it's so important to deal with trauma or guilt and you'll hear that all in this episode. Since this episode does have to do with mental health, I thought it was important to talk about mental health when it comes to social media. This is something that has taken me a really long time to understand. I was, you know, Instagram storing seven days a week, creating content seven days a week for years and years and years and years and years. And then I sort of hit a wall and I realized that it's really important to have days where you're just on blackout. And what I mean by that is take a day off social media, whether it's twice a month, some people do once a week, whatever it is.

For me, it's twice a month. I just will do a blackout weekend and just completely be super present. And I found that that really helps with my anxiety. I don't know if there's fellow content creators out there that are listening or influencers. To be on 24-7 all the time, seven days a week can be super overwhelming. And I found that stepping back, taking a break, I call it a commercial break. And coming back on a Monday is super refreshing. Well, and it's just like for your, not even just for that aspect of it, but for taking, just basically disconnecting from technology.

I think I'm going to go and get one of those burner phones, you know, the little like black ones that the sketchy people carry and it's you you know you can't really reach him you know they call it the burners i want to get one of those and i want to take that and use that on the weekend so if somebody like really needs to get to me for an emergency i can use that but if not like just not having that phone you know taking some blackout periods taking some time to reflect self-reflect that's really important taking some time to read books read articles you know whatever you got to do just to kind of get outside of that social media world is important this weekend i reread part of awaken the giant within by Tony Robbins. I listened to Robert Green's book on tape. I read a lot of books on my books app. I'm

obsessed with reading on my phone right now, which is probably pretty bad for you. But I finished Anthony Kedas's book, Scar Tissue. It was just such a good book. You guys have to read it. And I meditated a lot and just really sort of refueled. I feel like I'm like a cell phone battery. I have to recharge or I'm not my best. On that note, talking about mental health and stability. Let's introduce Dr. Drew Pinsky onto the show, commonly known as Dr. Drew. He's an American celebrity doctor who's board-certified internist, addiction medicine specialists, and media personality. He's hosted the nationally syndicated radio talk show Love Line for years and years. He's also been on television for years.

Most of you know him from Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, sex rehab with Dr. Drew, Celebrity Rehab presents Soberhouse and more. He hosts a podcast with Adam Carolla and many more things. With that, let's introduce Dr. Drew Pinski. to the him and her podcast. Before we get into the interview with Dr. Drew, I want to talk to you guys about Noom. Okay, guys, accountability is something that you know I'm very serious about. You know this if you read my blog.

I talk about it all the time. You know, I like to count my steps. I just like to see what I'm working with, you know, like clear in front of me. So especially with the new year, I think accountability is more important than ever, especially for me. So if you're looking to stay super accountable into. 2019, there's this app. I've talked about it before. It's called Nume. So basically, this is an app that has to do with accountability, but not dieting. So you don't feel restricted. You know what I mean? It helps you to sort of

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and then if you want, you can also count your calories. Personally, like I said, I'm very into the fiber count in my food. Nume also is a tool that you can utilize to teach you about moderation. Moderation is key. I am a big fan of, you know, adding more greens to my plate, not subtracting, and to see it all in front of me is super helpful. Basically, what you do is you take an easy 30-second online evaluation that shows you how much weight you can lose. So I did it and it really does take 30 seconds. I mean, I feel like everyone has 30 seconds just to try it out and see what they think. Noom is designed for results. Meet your resolutions by signing up for your trial today at Noom.

That's N-O-O-M dot com slash skinny. What do you guys have to lose? Visit Noom.com slash skinny to start your trial today. Again, that's Noom.com slash skinny. Start losing weight for good. All right. Now let's get into it with Dr. Drew. This is the skinny confidential, him and her.

We're just talking about millennials. and relationships with millennials and how it's different from your generation when you had to actually sit and talk to each other. Right. And what I was saying was that you don't hit the normal developmental milestones of asking people out, going on dates, finding girlfriends, breaking up, forming again. It doesn't happen. It just you sort of hang out for a while. I think pornography is a big diversion. And so the eye of the tigers sort of taken away a little bit. And then you hit young adulthood and it's all kind of mysterious, right? and now you're supposed to kind of find a relationship and there's a lot of misfiring, let's say. Can you give us specifics?

There's one of the more common calls. At the time we wrapped up Love Line was now about three or four years ago, something like that. We were starting to get this call very commonly. Hi, my name's Joe. I'm 24 years old, 25 years old. I met this girl. She is the one. She is it.

She's the girl in my dreams. I asked her out. We went out. Didn't work out at that moment. She was busy. You know, she had things in her life. She was busy. so she didn't want to really, you know, go any further.

So we're now friends, and I've been waxing her car and cleaning her carpet and doing her laundry for the last three years. And now it's time. Now it's time. I'm like, what? Time for what? Time for her to step up and get in this relationship. It's time.

It's been three years. Three years of stalking behavior. That's what that is, ladies. That is full-on stalking behavior. No matter how you characterize it. And I've heard that call every time I go on the radio, every time, you know, I'm talking somebody will call it with some version of that. Now, some of the stalking goes on in social media,

but a lot of it is in person masquerading as, I'm just that nice guy, I'm that friendship. She is always with the wrong kind of guy, and one day she'll see that I'm the, that's stalking. What about on the other end with women? Do you find that women stocking men? No, I don't see. Well, that's more of the online stuff.

Michael kind of stalked me before we got together, so maybe he could go through that course. I didn't have social media, though. We remember when we were 12, so I didn't back then. Oh, my God. You were a little stocky at 12, I feel like. Well, that's sort of, but to be fair, a 12-year-old kind of don't have, this is the point. A 12-year-old doesn't have the social skills to do otherwise, right?

So he's just hanging on for dear life. You're supposed to have skills at 23 when you know when the girl goes, let's just be friends. Let's just be friends. Let's just be friends. This is not going anywhere and move on, dude. And, oh, no, no, oh, no. Now, women will do the social media stalking a little bit, and they may do it for too long, but it's not it doesn't feel so sinister.

What other? He's the nicest guy. He's been cleaning my car. Yeah, right. He's just my good friend. Oh, no, no, no. Oh, no. Come on now.

The best of intentions. What other behaviors that you see in millennials is problematic? It could be in relationships or just in general. You know, I wouldn't, I don't, I don't, it's far be it for me to call any millennial behavior problematic because I don't know how it's all going to work out. But the one thing, you know, the staying at home long, which. you know, my generation, we were freaking tunneling out. Yeah.

Like, like gnawing our way out as fast as we could. There's no hurry, which I noticed. And as a parent, I kind of dig that. I kind of like it. And maybe it's my fault because I, maybe I'm encouraging it in some level. And you have triplets. Yeah. Yeah.

And they're 26, 27 now, 26. And on the other hand, that's very smart economically. It's very smart. And they think of it that way. Like, no, no, I'm not going to pay rent right now. And I got my own exit over here. and you guys don't bother me that much. You know, you're weird, your parents, whatever.

And so, on one hand, that may work out very well. Now, what's concerning to me behind that is most of that kind of, I don't want to call it Farrier-Lons, that sort of delaying autonomy is trying to find your sort of ultimate course. Like there's a, rather than get a job and make money, it's trying to find sort of your ultimate expression of what you want to do. and on one hand that is amazing right that's fantastic on the other it's like uh-oh what if they never find it and do they really understand how to make a living and so that's that's

i go through this with my younger siblings which like they're like well i got to find the perfect thing i got to find my passion so the way you find that is you go out and you you know eat not work yeah that's right but here's the thing okay how old are younger for siblings uh they probably they're in their 20s early 20s yeah and this is the age group i'm talking about and but they they will eat shit and they work really hard when they need to yeah but They're just like finding the right spot. And then they run out of steam pretty quickly if that doesn't result in something. I notice there's too a lack of patience.

That's what I'm talking about. Yeah. It's like they want it now. Yeah. Like we were kind of talking about in the relationships. Like you have access to everything at your fingertips and they want it now, now, now, now, now. And it doesn't happen like that. I mean, you know, look at your career has been like such a journey.

I told you I had read your book cracked. Thank you for that. It's such a good read, you guys. I think it's on the skinny confidential book club. You have to read it. It's my favorite writing experience. I wrote that with Judith, Regan and we had really I don't know people hear the story but it was really experienced people wanted

me to write a narcissism book at that point and I wrote sort of a treatment that somebody helped me with and Judith calls me she goes let's have lunch and she said the treatment sitting on her on her table the whole time we're having lunch she didn't say one word about it at the end of lunch she goes what's this and I go some you know she didn't write that I go no I somebody helped me she goes I want you to write something I go what she goes I don't know write me 20 pages and so I went out with a tape recorder running and a story emerged about that main character just came out of me. I went home and I wrote it down.

I transcribed it. And she goes, that's your book. And she gave me the only direction that she gave me for the next six months was keep writing. And she also did Janice's book, I think. She's genius. She's a freaking genius. I'd never been a creative process like that. And she was so interesting.

And 9-11 happened right in the middle of it. And for about four months, I couldn't write a word. It was terrible. The whole book was so vulnerable. I mean, you opened up as a doctor. Normally you would expect that book to be all about addiction in the addict, but you opened up the other side of the doctor, which was, I mean, eye-opening, what doctors go through when they're dealing with an addict.

Yeah, yeah. Well, that's what I want to get into with you because you've seen so many, I don't want to say horrific, but you've seen so many traumatic life experiences. Yeah, yeah. That has to have an impact. It has an impact, but you get spun and turned upside down by addicts. And your job is sort of to hold the line and stay. present. As I sort of

do less and less of that work and look back at it, I see the importance of the team I had. The guys you see, cracked as eventually it became celebrity rehab. And Bob Forrest, the guy with the hat and the glasses and... I love him. And Shelley, and these are people I worked with

every day. I used to watch that show, and I don't watch a lot of TV, but I watched that show. We did what we intended to do, which was to pull the curtain back on how tough this work is, and celebrities that are out getting treatment are so ill and working so hard, and they're not on a publicity campaign. They're not on a spa vacation. We got so sick of that because we were treating celebrities and we'd see the press about them. No one ever knew we were, but the press

was just ridiculous. And Bob, it was actually Bob Forrester came in one day and said, we got to a TV show where we show this. I'm like, okay, if you think so. I was a big Guns and Roses fan, so watching. Stephen. Yeah, Stephen, that was, that was difficult to watch. He's doing great. He's doing great now. He's fantastic. And the ones that aren't, didn't do great and passed away, I hope people now understand. That's the opiate crisis. I got them off the, opiates and then my peers would put them back on and then they would die every single one. It was so heartbreaking. That's kind of why I got backed off the field because I got sick of that.

I couldn't stand it. Wait, wait, wait, walk me through that. So you would help them get off the open. Jeff Conway had back problems, all the usual oral opiate problem. It makes pain worse. And he was taking massive amounts of all kinds of stuff. And I get him off it. He literally, if you go back and watch the Rehab, he tap danced.

He had such little pain. He was up tap dancing. And, of course, when he left us, he went back. to his doctor, you know, an addict will come back and go, oh, I have pain, I have pain. The doctor went, why'd you come off this stuff? Why didn't you listen to me? Go back on it, dead. And same thing with Mike Starr.

Same thing. He called me, he's having back pain. He said, Mike, please, we got him sober. He was living in sober living for years. And he was just doing better than he'd ever done in his life. And he called me one day and he goes, I'm having back pain. I said, Mike, whatever you do, do not tell a doctor that you have back pain. Why are we seeing such an increase in opiate addiction?

You guys don't understand this. You read a book called Dreamland. Dreamland. by a guy named Sam Cunonius. Okay. 95% of the opiates prescribed on earth are prescribed in this country. What happens to these doctors? Because we grew up in San Diego, and I don't remember the name of the doctor.

Maybe I don't even want to press them out. The doctor feel good, we call them. But he was basically known for prescribing opiates to basically anyone not walking. You understand that there was a philosophy that I, as someone resisting it and speaking out against it, was threatened, threatened with legal actions. threatened with criminal action. For 15 years, I was saying, this is insane, this doesn't work. I take these people off the opiates, their pain goes away. By other doctors.

I take the, they only would come to me when they also were aware that they were doing cocaine and drinking and doing other things on top of their opiates, which a lot of them did. And they were, oh, my God, you're a terrible person. You're a drug addict. So I'd come and take them off everything. Their pain would go away or maybe four or five on a scale of 10. When they came in the door, they'd always say the same thing. 15, 18, 20 on a scale of 10.

And always they said the same thing. Take them off, pain goes away. And when Keith Ledger dried, there's footage of me on Larry King going, this is a tsunami. You don't understand what's happening here in this country. And now people understand. Now people understand. And also what I see a lot of, too, and tell me, if you see this as well, is a lot of women on Adderall. Yeah, Adderall is your next problem.

Benzodiazepines, the Ativan, Zanax, sleeping pills. That's a big problem. That's why people die on opiates. It's the combination with that. It suppresses their respiration synergistically. But the Adderall is a story yet to be told. Adderall is how my patients go out again. In other words, patients who are sober for a long time, they're trying to work hard,

they're working long hours, they're having trouble focusing as all addicts do. They go to a doctor and say that and do it because, oh, I've got a perfect thing for you. Here's some antarol. And Philip Seymour Hoffin, who died of his heroin addiction. There was a bottle of Adderall on his bedside. I guarantee you that's how the whole thing started. So women are using this as a weight loss supplement. Can you speak on that?

It's amphetamine. The name of the Adderall's generic name is Dextro-Amphetamine. But it fucks with your hormones, and in the end, you just end up gaining weight. And I can tell by someone's face if they're on it. There's something that sucks the life and water out of their face. Amphetamine. I had a buddy. One of my best friends when we were in college, he took it for studying, and he went home

to get a summer job at a construction site. They drug test you, right, to make sure that they're not hiring addicts. And he tested positive for amphetamine. And he's like, what the hell is going on? His dad gets in. His dad's like, you're on meth? What's going on? He didn't realize there's the adoral.

So if someone is out there listening and maybe they are struggling with some kind of addiction, where would you tell them to start? It depends on how sick they are and whether they detox, things like that. The easiest thing always to do is go to a 12-step meeting, raise your hands, say, I need help. Are there doctors in the area? They will know at the meetings where the good resources are. And there's about to be what's called a Cochran Analysis Relief, which is the highest level of meta-analysis,

clinical studies to show how effective 12 steps are and how evidence-based they are. So if you're going to, if you want to get up drugs, that is free and effective. And if you're looking for resources, people that are struggling with their sobriety, they know. So does people call you all the time telling, telling you that they're struggling with addiction and you recommend they go to 12 steps? Well, I mean, it depends what I'm dealing with. I mean, usually there are people that are way down the line and need to go away for something. And what about the family? We kind of spoke on this before we got on, but do you recommend Al-Anon to people 100%. Okay.

If anyone doesn't know what that is, can you explain what that is? It's another 12-step meeting for family members of addicts. And it's the craziest thing. People, and I would, you know, for years, this was the experience I had. I'll do anything for my son. I'll do anything. I'll do anything. I go, great.

Stay out of it. I got him. I need you to do one thing. Go to Al-Anon. I'll do anything. What do you want me to do? Go to Al-Anon. Well, no, no, I don't need that.

Anyway, what do you want me to do? I mean, every time, every time. Why is that? What's the resisting? Because people don't want to realize they're a part of the game, part of the thing. Because they don't want to realize their role and like maybe enabling. Right. And also that they want it to be that person's problem.

They've suffered enough and they don't want to have to do any work. I don't blame them. That's all true. But the reality is that if you have a loved one of the addiction, it's an interpersonal disease. You are in it too. And you wouldn't have to get treatment necessarily in your life if you didn't have that person in your life that you were involved with.

But you do. And if you're going to do what you need to do to help that person, You can either get out of their life. You can do that. You can leave with love or you do Al-Anon. That will change the way you. You've got to have other people in your corner in order to understand how to manage that person. Because particularly as a parent or a loved one, every instinct you have is wrong when it comes to dealing with a drug addict.

So in all your experience, you know, like people say, oh, you got to let them hit rock bottom. That's easier said than done. You can't do it as a parent. It's so against every instinct you have. You just can't do it. You cannot do it by yourself. There's no way. You can't sit there and watch it.

So Alon helps you. Alon helps you do that. Because they have been there. They've been through it. and they help you do these things that are so difficult, so difficult. You know what I want to talk about? Fentanyl. There's a lot of people right now that are...

It's terrible. It's wiping people out. And I know a lot of people that, you know... You're more likely to die of a fentanyl overdose or opiate overdose right now than a car accident. And what's happening, yeah, that's crazy. And what's happening is people are lacing this stuff into other stuff. I know. Maybe people think they're doing cocaine and you don't realize.

Cocaine. It's in all kinds of stuff. The next thing you know, you're having a heart attack or you're dropping dead. You're dropping dead. You don't even know. You don't even mean to do that. Correct. This conversation is getting intense.

Let's cool down, take a quick break, get a little focus. I myself am taking this 4-Sigmatic mushroom focus shot by one of my favorite finished companies, 4-Sigmatic. So we've talked about this brand multiple times on this show, but I really want to tell you guys why I love these products the most and why Lauren loves them too. So how many of you are out there drinking coffee, feeling the jitters, getting headaches, having bad come-downs, not being able to sleep at night? Trust me, you're not alone. I'm in that boat as well, and I've been in that boat. That was before I discovered 4Sigmatic and their beautiful, great tasting mushroom elixirs. My favorite in the one that I got turned on to first was the mushroom coffee.

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And then I discovered the rest of the line. They have the Chaga mix, which is for wellness. They have their Rishi, which is for winding down at night. And I just fell in love with the products. Lauren fell in love with them, too. She takes the hot cacao mix right before bed. Give her a little bit of that in her hot tea. Make her fall right to sleep if she's getting on the old nerves.

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plus that 50% off sale that's taking place right now until the 17th. Guys, I'm telling you this stuff is a game changer, and you will thank me later. So let's talk about mental health a little bit. Can we dive into depression and anxiety in this day and age? And also you wanted to talk about women and white wine. Oh, we're going to talk about women and wine.

I asked him before you guys. We're going to need a little bit more time. Women and wine. We've got to talk about that too. That's on the list too. So does depression and anxiety, it's kind of like the chicken or the egg? Does that come before the addict gets addicted or after the addict gets addicted or does it depend? It depends.

It's not a universal thing. What I always tell people is that if you have bad enough addiction that you need to see me, again, this is not all addicts. These are severe addicts. I treat severe addicts. There's 100% probability you have childhood trauma. So trauma is the thing that causes the emotional dysregulation. Depression can be part of it, anxiety part of it, but it's really unregulated emotions, too prolonged, too intense, too negative. That causes them to look outside of themselves for a solution.

And if then you have the gene for addiction, now you trigger a second problem. of trauma and addiction, and the drugs work to quell the pain of trauma. And people will say, for the first time my life, I felt okay. The voice, you know, things were all right. I could manage. I felt okay. And then the addiction gets triggered. So now you have two problems.

So, yeah. And by the way, once you trigger the addiction, no matter the inciting influence, until the addiction is treated, you can't really go after the other stuff. In other words, or let's put it this way more firmly. treating the other stuff will not stop the addiction. So you've buried the trauma and triggered the addiction and you're basically created two problems. You're fighting a war on two fronts. Correct.

Women and wine. So I just, I see so many moms have like mom juice and like it's funny and stuff. And I talk about my wine all the time. But I do see, and one of my friends, her name is Kara from the Champagne Diet. She did a whole podcast on this. Well, listen, I'm not the don't drink, don't do drugs guy, right? Right. I don't bum people's high.

I don't care. You like a margarita? Oh, sure. Look, listen, these people use substances. That's part of the human experience. But I'm interested in people that can't stop and want to stop. That's who I want to help. But we're having consequences from their using and yet keep using.

So that's the group I'm interested in. So you've got to look at yourself and go, hmm, first of all, do I have a family history of alcoholism? First, your grandpa, mother, anybody in my family with alcoholism or even hint to look like alcoholism? because oftentimes families go to great length to hide those things, right? Or, and by the way, the alcoholic would go to a great length to have anything besides alcoholism, depression, suicide, whatever it is. They'll want treatment for everything else. Just don't take my alcohol away.

So you've got to look at your family history very critically. And if you have a first-degree relative, it's a 50% probability you've got that gene. And if you like, like, like, if you like, like it, alcohol, like you love it, hmm, you've got to be really careful. Now, I'm not saying you can't drink. I think that's a little unrealistic. but you've got to be careful not to trigger something, which the triggering is...

Well, the triggering is you lose control. And, you know, we don't know where that biological threshold is for a given individual, but if you start having consequences like relationships are affected, you know, your health is affected, and that you keep going, it's like, hmm, be careful, be careful. It's a hard thing to watch. No kidding. But I don't have to tell you that.

And you feel, you know, you feel helpless because you are. You are, and that's the horrible thing. You are for the most part, and it's very painful. Why did you decide to get into addiction? Total accident. How? I was, I'm an internist. I was going on to be a cardiologist, but I started moonlighting in a psychiatric hospital.

I got fascinated with that. And so I just sort of stopped at primary care and critical care medicine and then kept doing this stuff at the psychiatric hospital, and then I ran their medical services. And then all the medical problems were down on the drug unit, and I got really good at taking people off drugs, didn't know a damn thing about addiction. But I was hanging out there all the time. And I started learning about it. And then the director of the program said, you know, listen, I need an assistant director.

No big deal. You'll just cover me when I'm a vacation. It's no big deal. Just kind of hang, you know, okay. Now I'm the assistant director of a drug unit. I started learning more and more and more. And then about a year later, this guy quit. Now I'm the director of a drug unit.

And as an internist, particularly back then, that was like 1991. Very unusual job for an internist to have. And so I just hung on to it with both hands, got all my training and board certifications and really made it my something I learned about it. And it was a great experience. I mean, it was really the crossroads of everything. Family therapy, biology, neurobiology, psychiatry, medicine. It's all there in an addiction field done properly.

And so I really enjoyed it. And I did it for 25 years. And so what is it like when a patient comes to you to detox? Because we see in movies like people sweating and shaking and throwing up. I mean, is that really true? Is it that gnarly to detox? It depends. It depends what you're detoxing from.

I mean, alcohol is the one that's fatal. potentially. Opiates are the ones that's tough. Now with things like Suboxone and Methadone and stuff, people don't often go through withdrawals anymore even, or they don't go the kind we used to go through. Benzodiazepines are miserable, and a lot of doctors don't really understand how to detox people properly, so they do go through a lot of misery. But we never had any, we were so good at detoxing people. I never once thought to myself, how are we ever going to get people off these drugs? We can't do it. It's like, we got everybody off everything. No problem. No problem. That's why I sort of was not a super fan of Suboxone, which is this

You know, supposedly to tape with people off drives. But then again, people have withdrawal until they stay on it. It's like, get them through the withdrawal. It's so easy. We never had a problem with that. And we had lots of severe, severe heroin. What about the jail system or the prison system? Do you see people going to prison and actually getting sober from prison?

Or do you see them getting worse? Well, not usually. Sometimes worse. But a lot of people, you know, getting people's attention and into recovery is often about cumulative loss, right? There's your kids, lose your health, lose your relationships, lose your job. Losing your freedom is a pretty powerful motivator. And so a lot of people do find sobriety in prison, but I'm mixed on it.

Have you been following the Artie Lang stories? Have you been following it? I know already very well. You know, I imagine that's intense because, you know, he almost did lose his freedom there for a minute. Might have helped him. You think? Maybe.

You know who it helped? I just read Ryan O'Neill, Farrah Fawcett's ex-husband or boyfriend's book, and he talked a lot about his son, Redmond, and how Redmond ended up in jail. And supposedly, now he's out and he's sober. So that's someone that it did help. My sister. Bob Forrest. Yeah.

He was treated 24 times. It was prison that really got his attention. Wow. Wait, so is he a celebrity? I feel like I've seen him somewhere besides celebrity rehab. He was a rock star in the 80s. Okay. Because he looks familiar.

There's a documentary about him called Bob and the Monster. Who was your favorite patient at a celebrity rehab? Who was your one that you look at and you're so proud? Well, proud and favor, there are two different things, right? You know, I'm proud of Jenny Ketchum, right? We treated her in sex rehab and it turned out she was addicted to a bunch of other. thing she's now a social medical social worker up in doing clinical work up in washington she's unbelievable unbelievable this is like a new human being and a professional and all you know she was a

porn star and a drug addict and all that shit she went through she uses in her clinical work and she's amazing favorite probably jeff conway i don't know why i love jeff i love jeff okay and so him his i was at his bedside when he died it was really rough and so let's talk about sex addiction i don't think a lot of I think that word is thrown. People just throw it around. I'm a sex addict. I cheated on somebody. Oh, fuck.

I'm a sex addict. No, no. And a lot of people, you know, we've just seen this whole movement go through here in Hollywood. Like, people, I'm a sex addict. What do you think about all that? Well, I mean, sex addiction. It's a fully loaded question. Yeah.

There's a great website called Center for Healthy Sex. If you want to sort of look on what's available and what that is, learn about it. But real sex addiction, when you see it, there is no mistaking it. I mean, people literally like their genitalia are bleeding. You know what I mean? from the stuff they do to themselves. Oh, yes. Or like having peronis and horrible things.

I'm going to pull that clip from Lawrence Face and we just said that. And or, wah, wah. Quick zoom in. And or horrible social consequences. A horrible emotional kind of horrible disease.

I mean, it's just, and the crazy thing about it, when you sit down and you get them into treatment, they'll always say the same thing. All, and these are people that may be with hundreds of people in the last few months,

will always say the same thing. I just want to have a relationship. They just don't know how to have, how to, how to, how they don't, they're missing the emotional connection. They can't get in the frame. They're just doing the physical. They can't get in the frame, which is trauma. It's, it's intimacy disorder.

So what about everybody else that's just, you know, maybe they're not in actual out of it. I've got in trouble here. Yeah. Get your shit together, a whole. Yeah. So is Tiger Woods a sex addict? You know, dancing around it. Yeah.

Careful here. Let's put it this way. He, because I. treated Rachel, you could tell. I remember that. I know some stuff that, you know, I can't really talk about. And I would just frame it this way. You can't admit somebody to a treatment program unless they meet criteria for the disease

they're being treated for. There's state regulations. There's professional regulations. So if you have an addiction treatment program and you somebody, now they could be entered for assessment to see if they have an addiction, but he was in treatment. And if you're in treatment and there's an issue. You have to meet criteria. the program will get shut down by the state.

You can't just make everybody everything. How many porn stars do you see that have sex addiction and or addiction? I don't see a lot of them. I mean, you know, Mary Carey, treated her, treated Jenny Ketchum. And so that's my experience. You know, I'd feel like. Jenna Jaminson, I follow her on Instagram. She just got sober and she's like really killing it.

Does she see yourself as a sex addict now? I don't know. She's never mentioned that on Instagram. I mean, I've known Jennifer for years and years. And she's really a dynamic person, right? right and you ought to ask her she probably should probably come on the show her and janice dickens i'll grab up to janis janis is another favorite by the way can you tell us about janis because i'm obsessed to you know like you know how we got you on the show is because our good friend dave our mutual

friend he said dave yeah exactly oh is he the guy that would not invite me on the cruise that you invited me on the second i met you yeah is it that guy yeah see we thought we're like listen we've got to fill the boat like dr drew once again we're going to have you come psychoanalyze all of us on the road i am so i he uh he uh pussed He's no longer my friend. Yeah, you were supposed to go on the yacht with us. Oh, my God. There was a lot of drinking, though.

I don't know how you would have felt about that. Yacht rehab. Once you guys have fun. We might be having a whole different interview if you went on that. Next one. Next one. I want to know about Janice Dickinson because I loved her books and she talks about you and her books. And she's sober now.

And I would love to hear about her journey because she's at Studio 54 drinking with the best of them. And now she lives a completely different life. She is a wonderful human being, as you might imagine. I think the way I got she used to come on Love Line back in the day and I remember one time I met her in the aisle at like an American Idol final or something she goes I got a Xanax problem I got me help me help me help me help me and then nothing and then she came in at celebrity rehab and we got her up Zana or what I think it was Xanax at the time and she had a horrible withdrawal and it was miserable and she was at recrudescence of horrible symptomatologies and then she got involved in the program and she did really great and she has horrible horrible trouble trauma, right? She told me about that Bill Cosby incident during treatment. Really? Yeah. Yeah, she didn't talk about that in her book.

She didn't use his name. She was so open about being molested by her father in her book and the horror that he put her through. I mean, she was open in her book. That's the trauma. She didn't talk about Bill Cosby, but it came out later about him. So it sounds like she was put through the ringer. Yeah. I mean, Janice, and he wasn't the only one.

He had other people that mistreated her. And that's what happens when you're a trauma survivor. You are naturally attracted to and trusting of people that reenact the traumas of the past. Isn't there something so special for you, though, to be able to sit back and see all these people that you've helped and they're thriving and their life and sober now? Yeah, but as one of my, my patients always humble me. One of my, some of my toughest cases will all go, you didn't do anything. You just sort of turned me in the right direction. And they're right.

They do the work. How do you compartmentalize all of this? Because for someone, someone that's in your position, you're hearing about some of the worst forms of human behavior. A lot of times, you're learning about the trauma. How do you... Well, a lot of my own therapy, right? Years and years and years and years and years and years of my own therapy. You're going and seeing your own person.

Oh, yeah. Guy or girl? Girl. Okay. And which I think for the stuff I needed was critically important. I had a sort of a deficiency in the reprochement phase of my relationship with my mother, which is the kind of going and coming. Awful.

And healing my own stuff. put me in connected to my own feelings in a much more vivid way and helped me draw a line between my feelings and another person's feelings, right? So I can, I got very, very good. This was my main instrument was being present with another person, listening with my whole body, feeling what they were feeling, not in a contagious sense. And my own understanding that my own stuff was sort of meshing, blending with theirs and we were co-creating an experience, but I could knew that everything I was experienced is when I sit with somebody who's been through some horrible stuff.

It's not all mine. I understand theirs versus mine because I'm deeply understand my own stuff now. And you're not overtaken by it. You're not overcome by it. You're just a witness to it. Do you? And that's a very powerful experience. Do you find yourself having a negative outlook of everyone just like human beings in general?

No, I'm super positive. You are. Okay. Super positive. So we talked about depression and anxiety. What about other disorders? We didn't really talk about depression anxiety. You asked me a trip to depression anxiety with addiction.

What do you want to know about depression? I have depression anxiety. Do you think? Do you? Do? Do you? My question, I have anxiety. Yeah.

I don't think that I have depression. I think I have anxiety. Did you ever have a depressive episode? Like when you were a teenager or anything? Before we talk about mental health, let me tell you about ritual. If you're a listener of this podcast and you haven't tried ritual vitamins, you guys are missing out. I have been taking them for. the last eight months every single day. They're by my tongue scraper and I am a big believer that they've

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Sign up now, ritual.com slash skinny. All right. Now let's get back to the show. I didn't. My mom committed suicide when I was 18. So depression does run in my family. And I think... And you weren't after that depressed?

I mean, I was horribly sad and devastated. And I would say I was depressed, but it wasn't depression where I couldn't... It was grief. It was grief. Okay. But so I'm, I think I'm also very preventative in allowing myself to get there, maybe. Get into the grief? Yeah, no, get into a depressed.

You wouldn't let yourself get there. I do a lot of preventative measures to try to, like I work out every day. I do things that are very preventative, so I don't have to ever get there. But I struggle with anxiety. Me too. I know a lot of people struggle with anxiety. Me. Me.

I had panic attacks when I was 1920. Horrible. How do you deal with anxiety? for me therapy was a key piece but I think part of my anxiety anxiety is many many different things right and part of it is a genetic thing right we're sort of set up for it it it overlaps in some situations with obsessive compulsive disorder and if you have any of that stuff yeah I got a bit of that too and they do tend to kind of dovetail together and you're well he says he makes fun of me he's like you're so OCD and I can't I don't make funny but I can't you can't sometimes sometimes she'll get into a rhythm

where like she'll be like she'll get a little bit OCD and start cleaning the house you won't even know what she's cleaning and where things are going. It's just like, it's like almost like on autopilot. Sometimes that's mood management. Sometimes you're feeling depressed. Yeah. So it's social. That's a sign.

And sometimes anxiety management. It might be a sign of that too. It's the way of, you know, sort of discharging and ordering your, you know, feels better when you do all that. Not necessarily dysfunction. It's in us. It's our biology. I mean, if you, if you took four hours to get out of the house doing rituals, okay, now we got a problem.

But just engaging in a little bit of OCD stuff because OCD actually has lots of assets associated with, right? She read my book in an afternoon. and if she needed to study something. I bet she'd be all over it. You know, that kind of stuff can work to your benefit, too. But for me, the anxiety that was miserable was largely for me. And this is, again, it's different in different context. But for me, it was because I was unregulated emotionally.

I was not in touch with my feelings. And so, and I didn't, I wasn't hooked up to them. I just couldn't quite get there. What does that stem from? A dis, not adequate time with mom, literally. Not attuned. from the mom. What about your father?

He was okay, but it's different. It's different. And he's a little narcissistic and stuff. So he never really, really provided that kind of what was needed. And therapy did it, no problem. So have you had to have conversations

with your parents after this? No. There's been something you've come to on your own. I mean, well, they're all gone now, but they're their own people. They had their struggle and struggles. You know, my mom had all kinds of stuff. And there's no way she could have done

what she needed to do as a parent. And when you have empathy and compassion, I think that helps a lot for the parent. Well, listen, there's two words that when people utter, I know they're doing pretty good emotionally. One is forgiveness, when they can find forgiveness or sort of a way of understanding other people's experiences, even when those people have been unkind to them.

And the other word is gratitude. If you're feeling grateful for what you have, I know things are going pretty good. Because gratitude is a very powerful, very important emotion to have. You talked a couple of times about narcissism. Can you sort of talk about narcissism in 2018? We're all there.

We're all there. We're all there. We've had a turn. We've had a turn. We're all there. We've had a turn. There's like narcissism was sort of uncommon. Okay.

And it's funny when I was first working in that psychiatric hospital, when I was moonlining there as a resident in the early 80s, we know, we had these forms that would be in the front of every patient's chart. It would be something called their axes diagnosis. So one of the axes was their personality disorders. And I would see every time I'd look at their chart and there'd be all kinds of personality disorders, you know, these OCD disorders and dependent personality and all kinds of stuff. And then around 89, 90, I noticed all of a sudden all those other disorders went away

and only the what are called cluster B disorders were on every chart. So that's borderline personality disorder, narcissistic disorder, sociopathic disorder, histrionic. So these are all narcissistic disorders. And that's all we saw. And I thought, oh, man, this has got to mean something. and people have argued whether or not it was just over-diagnosing or whatever. I think we had a turn.

I think there's been a turn. And I think everything we're seeing with our tribalism and the crazy aggression we act out and the expression of everyone's got envy. Right? You understand these difference in envy and jealousy? Yeah. jealousy is, hey, these guys have a cool podcast. I want that. I'm going to have to go do that. I'm going to work hard and get that. I don't begrudge you having that. I don't want to destroy you for having. Envy is you want to destroy. I got destroy you because you have something. Are you familiar with the author Robert Green? Oh, yeah. We just had him on the show last week on. I'm going to talk to him. Oh my God. We just had a great, he just wrote the book, The Laws of Human Nature. It's fascinating. We literally got into envy and jealousy. You got to have him on your podcast. I'm going to. I immediately I heard him on something else and I set a note off. He said, get him. Get him, please. He's so fucking smart. He talks about all the different levels of narcissism. Yeah, there are different levels. All the different types. You know, they're different types. How do you deal with someone, though, that's off the charts narcissistic? Like, you've never seen anything like it. Or do you not deal with them? Better not to

deal with them. Okay. That's what he says too. Yeah. There's a book called, why is it always about you that tells you how to deal with narcissists in your life, job relationships, whatever. And yeah, I mean, you're not going to change them. You got to just sort of know what you're dealing with and be very clear about it. There was a question that came in before you can, because we, you know, we all just cared the audience about what they want to hear. There's like, do you find it ironic that you guys will be talking about narcissism and we have a podcast and a platform and you have a show? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, it's not ironic. It's, it's, you got to own your narcissists. I'm kind of what's called a

what's called a guy named oh crap what was his name there's a famous theorist in the 90s oh I can't remember his name but he called it closet narcissism or reverse narcissism which is really codependency right codependence are all about

I need you to be okay I need I get to fix you you why really it's for me I need to fix you right that's narcissistic wait so you could even say that that's how it is when you're a parent with an addict

well that's codependency right Yeah, so it's the same kind of thing. It's like they want the daughter or the son to be fixed so they can feel better. Yeah. And that's why they need to go to Al-Anon. Right. Yes. And so for me now, I can differentiate between my needs and other people's needs, my feelings

and the other person's feelings. I used to see people in pain, like even when I was working in the psychiatric hospital. And I'd have to stop. I'd have to make them better. And I thought because I could feel. I understood what they're, no, it's because it triggered me. It triggered my discomfort. I probably have that tendency.

Yeah. It's not on the book. Yeah, I did write about the book. Yes. By being honest, I probably have that tendency. It's pretty common. Yeah. It's for sure.

Al-in-Nod. So what is a day in the life for you? I mean, you're so, yeah. Can you just like you're doing your podcast? Are you writing another book? Like, give us. I am working a little bit. I'm sort of, okay.

I'm not sure what I'm doing, to tell the truth. I've declared 2019 the year of action. So I'm just doing whatever, I'm filling my day with whatever I can fill it with. I still see patients. I still do medical practice. It's mostly, you know, people septuagenarians, octogenarians, people I follow up for 20, 30 years. So I love doing medicine. I could never stop doing that.

A day doesn't go by that I'm like getting a call about an addict or an alcoholic, something to help out to guide people. I'm not doing that work day and day out. I do a radio show on 7.9 a.m. here in Los Angeles and KBC. That's three hours a day. I work out every day. What kind of workouts are you doing? I do heavy weights, lift heavy weights. I do a health fitness podcast called Soul Patrol.

I do one with Bob Forrest, the guy called This Life. you live. I do... You're putting out a lot of content. Yeah, I do... I do a lot of content. I do me and Adam do a show every day. I do them by myself. And yeah, and I'm going to do some stuff with Tom Segura on the your mom's house platform. What do you find the time for all this? This is such a vacation compared to practicing medicine full time. You have no idea. When I used to get up at 5.30 in the morning and struggle to get home by 10 at night for years. And that was hard. Okay, I know that Dave talked about your wife and what a great relationship you have and we booked this through your wife. So how did you guys balance that when you were coming home at 1030 at night?

I don't know how she did it. Yeah. She's a very autonomous person, right? She's very independent. Now I get up in her stuff a little bit and she's like, go to work. She's like, what are you doing? I'm like, leave. Let me do my morning routine.

Do you have a morning routine? I do, but I mean, it depends. Everything day is different. Every day is different. But I try to at least do 30 or 40 minutes. My gym is in my garage. Okay. And I've got everything there.

That's my spot. And I listen to podcast and I lift weights just before I get in the car. Well, podcast. What kind of podcast you listen to? I'm going to listen to you guys now. I'm going to look at the Robert Green thing going immediately. That'll be next week or two weeks from now. But no, honestly, that was one of my favorite interviews you ever done.

Well, I think I heard him on rationally speaking or there's something about something inquiring minds. I think it is. I would listen to Econ Talk. I listen to Sam Harris. I listen to Jordan Peterson stuff. Those sort of ones I film. You listen to Dave's radio show. Who?

Well, I'm on Dave's radio show. occasionally sort of remembers me. You ever do Howard anymore? Yeah. I'm going to be host, co-hosting the after show in about three weeks. Wait, I didn't know you did stuff with Howard. Ron, you got to get into Stern history. Is he cool?

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. He's amazing. Okay, good. And, you know, his, you know, I've been in the main seat three times, and I'm going to tell you, I was super clear that his psychoanalysis, his own psychoanalysis, is what he was deploying in following his instincts in his interviewing. Like I felt like I was on the couch.

I felt that I know what that is when somebody really attunes to you and starts following the feelings as they interview you. And he does that. He's got to be one of the best interviews of all. He doesn't get enough credit. But now, now.

And I'm telling you it's his treatment. I could feel it when I was being interviewed. He does not get enough credit. You're right. He does not get enough credit for how, you know, we run this network and I always tell people it's not, everyone's like, you know,

I'm going to get this guest. I'm going to get this celebrity. It doesn't matter. It doesn't move the needle as much as people think, right? I'm sure this, unless it's you, this one's going to be massive. But I tell people, I said, you know, I use him in an example and say the reason people listen to Stern is not because of the guest is because you're interested in what Stern is going to ask that guest. So it's two things.

It's like the world's best off a soap opera, right? So you're interested in all the guys and, you know, Gary's world. Sal, Richard. Everybody and how Richard wiped his ass and shook my hand. Did you hear a whole thing? Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. Richard.

Yeah, I forgot about that. He wiped his ass and shook your hand. because he was in the bathroom. Yes. And then there was a whole thing. We were walking. I was walking out of the bathroom. And then he went into the thing.

And I was back in the green room. I'm like, oh, my God. His crap hand. Oh. Yeah. So you have to go back on the Howard 101 want to find that. But the other thing is not only that you wonder the questions you'll ask, I kind of want to know at least how I'm going to feel about that person,

wonder it's under Howard's scrutiny because I know I'm going to have a whole different take on that person. You're getting a lot more depth. You're getting the part. person. When Howard gets his hands on him and he's able to really interview them, I know I'm going to see who this person really is. And more often than not, their stock goes up in my eyes. Lindsay Lohan, though, wouldn't give him anything. I noticed that. I know. She didn't give him anything. No, I know. She's so media trained or she's not maybe like. I don't know what that was. Yeah, it was almost like she has a guard up over her. There was a guard. I think the media has been

really cruel to her. And we don't know what kind of treatment she's been in recent years and whether there's medicines may be blocking. I don't know. But whatever, she's better. Let's be fair. She's a lot better. And so I sort of took a pass on that one and said, well, she's better. I don't want to just, wouldn't want her destabilize. I'm sure Howard feels the same way. If there's one celebrity that you could help right now and really, and meet with and really give them the care you think they need, who would it be? Some of it I can't tell you about it because I'm sort of involved with stuff on a level that, you know, but an easy one for me would be, I have a great feeling for Artie. I love Ardy. It would want to. Well, the reason I ask is that I know.

I know your history, and I'm a huge stern fan. I've been back from the days when he was on E. You know, we grew up watching, and then I would drive back and forth to Arizona and just listen to all this stuff when Artie was on the show and all that. So that's why I asked because I knew that you might have some insight. But no, I helped Artie a bit along the way there and that he had a horrible time, the time before. And then he seemed better and now something's going on. So poor guy.

Would you recommend therapy to everyone? Sure. Everyone. Sure. Well, not everyone needs it. I mean, I mean, 50% of us really need it. Yeah. But that narcissistic turn, I think, is because we've had a style of parenting that's not been fully attuned and fully, I don't know what word, fulfilling, I guess would be the word, you know, fully.

Okay. Here's what, here's a question I have. At what point does it become that you're blaming your parents? Yeah. And you're taking the victim around. If you feel grateful and you're forgiving everybody, you're not blaming anybody. Yeah. just it's just what happened to me and it's you know it's a left me with a little thing and i got need

to fill that and that's what this is the topic that comes up pretty frequently on this show talking about you know like victimizing saying like you know we'll talk about simple example like oh this person has this because they're they had this upbringing or you know i would be there if i had that same like how do you feel about that mentality and would yeah how do you kind of combat that it's a little dangerous right because plenty people go through bad things and end up may amazing right and so a friend of mine uh kind of Chapman, he's got a website out there called Waking the Hero, and he went through horrible abuse. And I think at age of 10, he tried to commit suicide 15 times or something.

Like really? Like for real. So, and at like 11 or 12 or something, he woke up and went, this wasn't supposed to be my life. And he started embracing treatment and getting better and doing it. And now he was just this amazing human being, right? So it's possible to get better and to be part of the solution. And when you're, you know, better or when it doesn't have a whole. horrible effect on you, you feel fairly sorry for bad about the people that mistreated you,

because you know they're equally injured and horrible and must be miserable. And you feel grateful for what you got and you feel forgiving or at least, I'm just thinking about my own stuff. I'm not forgiving because it's not okay to treat children that way. It's just not okay at all. But it's like, it's the best you can do. What do you do as a parent when you've had this mistrust in your childhood and now your parenting at triplets, which is crazy.

Like, how did you try to be a better parent than your mom was to you? Just try to be present. Yeah. Yeah. Just be, it's very simple. You just be there. And my daughter was busting my balls the other day that I wasn't around enough because I was workaholic.

Yeah. So there was my version of what I did wrong. Yeah. You know what's happening now, though? It's parents are there, but they're on this. Yeah. And people are holding up my phone. We are not good at attuning to one another.

We have to really attune and really listen and really be present. And there's a lot of parenting that's about making kids feel better or have esteem. That's not the job. That's not the job. The job is to be there attuned to the child while the child struggles with regulating their emotions and builds their esteem and builds their sense of themselves. Your job is not to dictate it or rescue them from what their feelings are because then they lose the opportunity to regulate.

Would you still call yourself a workaholic? I mean, he's doing 15 shows. Well, I tend to workaholism, but I don't have, I never have dread. I never feel out of control. I really love what I'm doing. I feel grateful in time. If all that stuff went away, then I would like,

okay, watch out. You know, I just got an argument with my mother. She's probably going to be mad if she hears this because she was saying that, you know, Michael, it's not all about words,

but I was telling her, I was like, you know, I understand being a workaholic, but I also, there's the other side that I really enjoy what I do. You love your work.

It's hard. I doesn't feel, I feel like I would be on, like, she's like, hey, you know, go home, take it easy for four hours. I was like,

I wouldn't be happy. I don't think I would be, at least at this stage of my life. I've been a workaholic that experienced dread for years, by the way, where I was just, I was just, I was on a mill and I couldn't get off of it. And, you know, sort of, it's interesting. You know, one of the things that makes people happy, right? Happiness is an interesting topic is being able to be of service to other people. And I always had skill where I could help people and do things for people.

And I almost, I think I overindulged it. I didn't know it was possible to do too much of it. I did it. And so... You talked about that in your book a lot. Yeah, I'm grateful that I could do that. But I overdid it. I overdid it.

Like this stuff's exciting to me because I feel like there's certain people that could listen and actually get a benefit. You know, like me going and like doing some closing, some big deal, somebody like that doesn't get me as excited as doing stuff like this. But you should know that there's something about... I fully support your position and it's true. But there is something about one human in the frame with another human that is fulfilling in a way that other things are not.

So look for those opportunities. I'd say. You don't have to do all the time like I did. Just look for an opportunity. What about guilt? Out of all the emotions that I have, I don't know if it's negative, but the negative emotions I have, guilt is huge for me. Do you have any advice for people that are dealing with guilt? There's a lot of guilt. Yeah. Are you guilt? I'm trying to figure out a way to explain this. Are you, when you feel guilty, are you shattered by it? And so you avoid it at all cost. And so most of the time you don't feel guilty. You spend more your time being perfect so you don't feel guilty. now we're getting into it, Dr. Drew. Yeah, I think that my thing, I did, I did like a course with someone and my thing was, like, the way I got attention when I was little was what I perceived as perfect and an over-accomplisher. But I think the guilt maybe comes from obviously with what happened with my mom,

but it's something that I still feel every single day. Like I feel guilt when I can't be in more than one place, or I feel guilt when I have to work. And I always just feel that emotion a lot and I don't know how to deal with. She'll feel guilty even if maybe like something happens, like something good happens for her brand and it's progress. So here's what it feels like to me, and I'm pretty good at sort of feeling people's stuff,

is the perfectionism is one piece. And part of that perfectionism is never wanting to let people down or feel guilty or you want to be perfect, right? And then lo and behold, in spite of that, your mom committed suicide. And so that guilt of not being there or being somewhere else and not being able to be in two places at once and being around her and being for her,

and being for her, whatever that crazyness spin is, is with you. It's unresolved grief is really what that is, right? So what do you do? You go to therapy? Yeah, it would be pretty easy to get through that. You'll have to tell me who your therapist is off air. Okay. I feel like if Dr. Drew's therapist, I bet, is a real killer.

I've got some out this way too, so I've got things in my back pocket. Okay. But I see the pain that even talking about it, so that's with you to this moment. And I don't think that's really guilt. You think it's grief. I think it's grief. Yeah, maybe. But that the,

I'm sorry. No, it's okay. Yeah. That's maybe what it is. But it's attached to your perfectionism and all this stuff. It's gotten attached to that somehow, but really it's the grief,

I think. Okay. All right. So it's left to peace. So if you're like me and you have guilt is one of your main emotions, and so maybe you need to deal with grief. So part of, I have this weird because I can,

because this is all developed with me and I, see, I can't believe drug addict. I can't listen to what drug addicts say after like sit in the frame and feel what they're, feeling and stuff. So I get pretty good at that. Your mom would be so pissed, would hate it to know that you were feeling this. Yeah. She'd be so pissed. Yeah. So come on now. Yeah. Right. I got to deal with the grief. It sounds like that's the foundation of it. Yeah. She'd be pissed, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What is a book,

a resource, a podcast that you can recommend to our audience? And it could be someone that's dealing with addiction in their family, maybe mental health. Just one thing that you would leave them with that's really life changing. A podcast? Could be a podcast. Could be a podcast. Could Could be a book, could be an article. There's not one thing. There's not one thing. And it's different for different people. It sounds like Al-Anon and the 12-step is big for you.

Big because it works. Yeah. A lot of work. It's very hard. It's very difficult for people. But I would say, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed with the task you've given me. Yeah. Except to say that do it every day.

Read, listen to podcasts, think about things. pay attention, try to learn, always learn, always learn, always grow. And then if you have stuff that's, you know, still digging at you emotionally, go go get treatment. It's not a big deal. Yeah. How often do you recommend therapy? I don't know. It's different all around.

My guess is you may want to go a couple times a week for a little while. A couple times a week. For a little while. Like by little while, I mean like a few weeks to get. Okay. Because it feels like somebody's got to jump on. That sounds heavy. Okay.

All right. Yeah, yeah. Because it is heavy. That's why I'm saying that. But it's important to deal with because if you don't deal with the investors. And then it may sort of be over, right? It may be kind of, you can be a pretty quick thing, this kind of stuff. We try to always, like, you know, there's a lot of people looking to externals to, you know,

fix issues or problems or, you know, and there's very little actually looking internal. Yes. Let me, let me, you ask such a huge question. And let me just say, the answer is other human beings. Whatever, whatever question you have, the answer is other. people. Happiness, fulfillment, meaning it's all about others. That's the way we're constructed giving things. Giving around. Around, participating with being part of whatever it is. It's all about other people. Everything. I mean, think of your podcast. It's just interviewing people, right? And we're

talking about people's experiences. And even more than that, what makes me happy is that there's valuable takeaways from the podcast that we have that the audience can go and apply to their own life. So you're helping people, right? And that is, you know, when we look at the great myths or some of the great philosophers, they always come to that same conclusion. Like, take care of your own garden, be of service to your community. Yeah. Be around people.

Be helpful. Tony Robbins-esque. Well, I don't, oh. Uh-oh, hit a cord. No, I'm just saying, I don't, I don't, that stuff to me is so transient. I'm looking for stuff that's more substantial, permanent. meaningful, you know, go read philosophy and, you know, read the great works and it's all in there. We're big readers of stoicism.

Oh, yeah. All the stoics, yeah, Seneca's my favorite. My buddy Ryan Holiday, you've got him on the show. You've got it. You've got it. You know, good. You know, it's funny. We've had him on the show.

You didn't mention me? Well, it was a while ago. I'm the one that got him into stoicism. You don't know this? No, I actually do. No, do you know what? Actually, I do know this? And you know what's funny.

And I think you probably know this right now, but Robert Green was his mentor. I did not know that. So Ryan menteed under Robert for years. Oh my God. That's crazy. We're actually working on... Wait, you got him into stoicism. I did.

You have to tell us more about that. It's pretty simple. I was doing something for somebody and I was at a college event and I was talking to the college journalist. And he came up to me afterwards. He goes, what are you doing? What are you reading? And I go, you know, I don't know. I'm a nut.

I read, I read, read, read, read. And right now I'm reading the sky Epictetus and trying to understand Stoic philosophy. You might look at it. It's kind of interesting stuff. And he went and did it and just kept going. And he became Ryan Holiday. And now he's going. Now he's a stoic.

Holy crap. Epic Titus had it. He had it kind of rough that guy. He did. And I'm not, I'm not, I was a bit of a fan. I'm not a fan presently.

Really? Yeah. Or do you like that? Marcus Aurelius, probably. Like Seneca. Seneca, for sure. But I, but I,

what I do is I more listen to Stoics, like Ryan and Mossimo and guys like that. And he, I like their very, version of the application. It's such an applied philosophy. It's not a good, it's not a cohesive system of philosophy. It's like a way of living. You can actually take action on those philosophies. With, with, with, Estenica particularly, and again, Marcus Reel's, but with Epictetus, it was too much, you know, accept everything in your life. And, you know, if you feel bad about it, that's on you.

Well, you're talking about a guy that was imprisoned or whatever, you know, enslaved and imprisoned. So he might have had a different perspective than the emperor. He absolutely did. I get it. And it's how he might. manage that. Yeah. And that's a good way to manage that. But I'm not sure it's a good way to manage average life. So.

Dr. Drew, you're amazing. Can we keep talking? No, no, no, we can keep talking.

We can keep talking. I mean, shit. Now that, because, you know, we always are cognitive people's time and schedule, but we're having fun here.

So, okay, there's actually, there's another thing I wanted to ask you. So we had an individual on this podcast that practice open relationships. Oh, this is a good question. Here is the bottom line. Peace and love,

peace and love. Yeah, That's a code for me. How does that, like, what's the psychology there? And how does that play out over time? Here's the bottom line. And I'm very simple on this, which is peace and love. I hope they enjoy themselves.

I don't care. Whatever. They can enjoy. They can have multiple. I don't care. I don't care. Oh, neither do we. But all I know is that there are armies of professionals just trying to get two people to have

an okay relationship. You bring in another person. It becomes just one more person. it becomes exponentially more complex. And my experience has been, even in people that claim to be in these wonderful polyamory things, there's always unhappiness when you close the door and talk to some of the people. And there's always a meltdown down the line that has to be dealt with. I just kind of like look at it. Like, okay, maybe I'm with Lauren and then with someone else. Like what, you know, say, thank you for your time today, girl over here. I'm going back to Lauren.

Like, what happens to her now? Or same thing, if Lauren was with someone. It's not intimacy. You can't spread real intimacy around. It's hard to do that. We're just not wired for that. And so if you are avoidant of intimacy and you don't, you know, then, okay, then you can have pieces of yourself here and there and hide parts of yourself and not be fully present and open in a relationship because you just got your one thing and one thing and one thing and another. And God bless you, if that's how you manage your relationships. But man, my experience has been that tends not to go well. and usually it's somebody complying with somebody else's wishes that they get into these things. That's kind of what I got from that interview.

Playing off that, what about people that cheat? Like the Ashley Madison scandal that happened. Very common. Cheating is very common. It makes me sad. Are they cheat? Like, what is the reason that they're cheating? Is there one reason or is it a medley?

Medley. I mean, men are cheating. Women are cheating often because they're not getting emotional needs mad. You know, and men are cheating because the can. their animals. They're not really, they just, yeah, it's more sexual, physical. How does it end up normally? How does it end up?

Yeah. Always in disaster? No, not always. But it's, again, it diminishes the relationship. And, you know, and people usually kind of know something's going on. They feel they usually blame themselves or they feel something and it makes you a little crazy. If you feel like something's up and you don't know what it is and then the partner doesn't come clean about it, it can pass over time.

It can. And it can pass even when the patient, the other person becomes, presents it and there can be forgiveness. But it changes things. It does change things either way. With your wife and you said you were home at 10.30 at night. I mean, I can only imagine you working all day, working for other people, helping other people and then coming home and being married and having to turn that intimacy card on, whether it's, you know, sexual or romantic or whatever.

How did you guys maintain that flame when you were working your ass off? it wasn't hard for me I don't she never said she will have you have doctor I mean for me I was when you're your workaholism you're just in it and and when we had the kids and stuff I felt like I was spending more time at home

I felt like I was around a lot even though my family tells me I wasn't so I don't know you know we were in a survival mode a lot of early part of our marriage on two friends you know me working so much and trying to survive financially and then trying to survive three kids simultaneously

I mean, that happened in our first year of marriage. Triplets in the first year. Yeah. So we were into survival mode almost immediately. So we went from this couple that were traveling and having fun and joining each other to this like, oh man, we've got to survive this. And it took about five years to get over that hump. Three kids at once, three newborns at once.

That is gnarly. That's great. It was great. It was great. My hair turned gray. It was that color. The year one and turned gray. That is gnarly.

Three crying babies. Did you guys have help? Oh, yeah. You had to. You had to. Yeah, of course. And, you know, it's very stressful. I can't even talk about it anymore. But when we had, we became pregnant of triplets, the obstetrician set us down and said,

don't do this. Have twins. We'll reduce. They called selective reduction. And we were like, and he handed me all this data. It's like, the marriages don't last. The kids have emotional problems. He goes, I'll get to three healthy babies, but don't do this.

Don't do this. This is not advisable. And so we went, we spent a weekend at the Dana Point, Ritz Carlton, you know, just, locked herself in the room. I was like, what do we do, what do we do? And finally, I felt like a poker player took all the chips, just went all in. We're just all in with this.

We can't do this. We can't do it. And we just both committed completely, everything we had. And it worked out for us. And now where are your kids, they're at college, I think you said in your book. Graduate schools and stuff. You know, they went to great colleges. Any doctors?

No. No. No. No. Anyone want to be an addiction? No. No. No.

They saw how tough that work was. Yeah. Why do that? Yeah. Like, no way. So if you were to recommend to our audience one book, because I know you've written a couple of where to start, would you say to start it cracked? That's the book I love the most. Okay.

I really like that book, you guys. The narcissism book is a little outdated right now. So I am, I'm, you go to my website. I've got a ton of stuff there. I've got the history of the opium addiction crisis. I've got, I'm going to write a series on narcissism. I'm working on that right now. So I'm going to write an updated thing about narcissism.

You should write it with Robert Green together. You wrote a book with 50 cent. You and Robert Green is like dream collab. I would, because you've got the doctor expert and someone that's been through the addiction and all these different behaviors. And then you have someone like Robert who is so, you know, smart with history. And he's such a good writer and he puts it in layman's terms. That would be a fucking back. I'm going to go back Ryan about that.

His books are books that I told him this when we interview. They're books that you don't just read, but they like get inside you and you have to study them. It's just, I don't. He did like the 24 ways of human nature or something. Yeah, he did that just recently. He did the 48 laws of power. He also said on this podcast that he likes writing books with people that you wouldn't expect him to write a book with.

So maybe like someone like Ryan. Put in a good word for me. Yeah. I think you and Robert Green. Let's do it. I'd be into that. Where can everyone find you, pimp yourself out? Go to my website.

That's everything. Okay. Dr. And at Dr. Drew, right? For Insta. Yeah. No, Instagram is Dr. Drew Pinsky. D.R. Drew Pinski.

But Twitter is at Dr. Drew. Love it. And yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time. This is fun. Open invitation. Come on anytime. Sorry, it took so long to book.

That was on me. No, no, no. That's everyone. That's everyone. It takes a long time. We'll take it into consideration when we're doing the boat list. Yeah. No.

Blame your friends. Krista and Dave for that. Krista and Dave. Who used to be my friends, whom I will never forget. Thank you for taking the time. Thanks, Dr. Drew. Your support is what keeps this show going, you guys. And we're always looking to see what guests that you want

on the show. So, would love to know who you want to see. Tag someone that you want to see on my latest Instagram. And if we pick the person that you've recommended, I will send you some TSC swag, some stickers, pop socket, maybe a bookmark. I'll DM you, drop in your DMs and surprise you. Definitely let us know who you want to see. Just tag them on my latest Instagram. Get creative with it. If this show has brought you guys any kind of value, please make sure you're subscribed and you've rated the show on iTunes. Thank you again, always for your support, and we'll see you next Tuesday. This episode is brought to you by Ritual. You guys know I'm a human guinea pig, and I'm still here taking Ritual and loving it. It's filled with iron, vitamin E, magnesium, folate, and

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