The Jordan Harbinger Show - 72: Dr. Drew Pinsky | Give the World the Best You Have Anyway

Episode Date: July 24, 2018

Dr. Drew Pinsky (@drdrew) is a celebrity doctor who has been hosting shows -- from radio to television to podcasts -- for more than 30 years, most well-known for Loveline from 1984 to 2016. His current hosting duties include The Dr. Drew Podcast and The Adam and Dr. Drew Show among many others. What We Discuss with Dr. Drew: How Dr. Drew reaches to the heart of an issue in seconds with his callers by listening with his whole body. People who seem to "have it all" are dealing with the same issues as everyone else. The difference between how Dr. Drew used to respond to criticism of his work compared to today. What experiencing imposter syndrome usually reveals about you. How we can spot the behaviors of addiction in others as well as ourselves. And much more... Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course!  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! Full show notes and resources can be found here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy med yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFilippo. Today, really excited to have Dr. Drew Pinsky on the show. He's been doing radio for something like 30 years. I grew up with Loveline, just like many of you.

In fact, that's Jason probably where our entire generation kind of learned where things were, what things were happening to our body, how we're supposed to use them, how we were not supposed to use them, that kind of stuff. of all comes from Dr. Drew. And what's really funny is I don't see him as that much older than me right now. And so when I was 13 listening to Loveline, he was like in his 20s or early 30s or something like that, which is incredible. Yeah, it's crazy. It's like I think Dr. Drew is like, you know, a contemporary of mine.

I'm 47 and he can't be that much older than me. But I remember sitting in my car in my 20s at like midnight waiting for it to come on just so like my girlfriend and I could listen and really get some good info out of him. But now I'm just like, oh, you know, I can just sit down and have. have a beer with him like he was one of my homies. Yeah, exactly. And it's fun to hang out with him and Adam Carolla, of course. And I just, I love learning to read between the lines with people. And that was kind of my intro to all this was how Dr. Drew was able to do that on the show. He just really got to the heart of issues. He's my number one radio influence, which should come as a surprise to pretty much nobody. And today, we'll explore how Dr. Drew reaches to the heart of an issue in

seconds with his callers. This is practice, of course, but we'll learn how else this develops. And we'll discuss the idea that people who have it all can be dealing with the same stuff as everyone else. And we'll be getting personal here with Dr. Drew. We'll also learn how we can spot addict behavior in others and even in ourselves. This and much more with one of my favorites here, Dr. Drew, there are worksheets with every episode, including this one, if you want to learn how to really hammer the stuff home that we talked about here today. Those worksheets are in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast.

So don't forget to check out Dr. Drew on Adam and Drew on podcast one and the podcast one app and his own show, the Dr. Drew show, also on podcast one and in the podcast one app. Now, here's Dr. Drew. I grew up with Loveline just to make you feel old. I grew up with Loveline. Done and done. And you really do reach to the heart of the issue with the callers. And I always thought that was so interesting.

And I remember talking with. other FM show hosts that I'd met over the years on satellite hosts when I was on satellite. And I was like, how do these people do that? You know, because it's almost like it's almost like a psychic level of reading between the lines. And for a while, I thought some of these are probably fake. And there was one that I thought was fake. Well, I can usually tell fake. You can tell fake.

Yeah, that's pretty easy because you feel that and your gut right away. It just things don't line up. You're like, okay, something's not right. Oh, I mean, I thought you had people that were calling in. And then you would read them. This is a long time ago. I don't think that now, obviously. But there was one that I thought, like, how is this, this isn't, this is too, it's like a movie

script. This person was saying a bunch of crap, didn't make any sense. And then you said something along the lines of, is there someone else in there I can talk to? And then they were like, sure. Yeah, I could tell it was a multiple. Yeah. That's pretty easy thing for me to tell. Because how do you, how do you do that?

That was incredible. It's a multiple personality disorder. Yeah. not doing that much of that work on the radio right now, so I'm not as honed as I was, but I remember I would get like this icy feeling. And it would be a, see, I, your question was, how do you do this? Will you listen with your whole body? Okay. You don't listen with your ears. I mean, your ears are part of it. So you're, you're, you're listening to the vocal prosody, the vocal qualities. You're listening to the affect being communicated by that.

You're listening to the words in the story. And then you're listening to your body's reaction to it. And I could really tell how my body reacted. It would just tell me. It would just tell me that here's one of these. When it reacted like that, I knew it was one of two things. It was either multiple or bogus, one of the other. And I just had a feeling. I know it's when you're talking about, call your time about it because I had this very

strong feeling. I thought, oh, no, this one's multiple. I could just tell. So are you detecting the switch in personality that the person has or are you getting that this person has this disorder before they switch personalities? Before they switch. So that's incredible. Where they switch.

There's something about them. They tell me about their trauma or something or they seem dissociated in some way to me. And that, again, that disconnect I feel like literally in my body. And so that informs me. What does dissociated mean for people who do not? Association is what happens in the setting of trauma, essentially. When, you know, we have these, what's called this Jacksonian dissolution, which is our body, as we get more and more stressed or distressed, we break down into lower and lower. sort of strategies within our evolutionary biology.

So we start with fight or flight. If we get about to be attacked, we go to fight or flight. And then we go from fighter flight to freeze, which is a freeze response, which is sort of a way of conserving energy and anticipating attack. When you can't escape, it's apparently a higher level of survival. And then finally, there's psychological sort of survival, which is dissociating from the situation. People will describe hovering above it or blacking out or all kinds of different ways. And young kids that are severely traumatized when their body is the source of the misery will sort of cut off and dissociate from their body. Interesting.

And then their body becomes all kinds of trouble to us internists later. Sure. Not just from the manifestation of medical problems, but they experience everything that comes out of their bodies as overwhelming and disorganized. So they'll describe it as pain or misery. They can't quite get it. Unfortunately, my profession isn't really taught on this, but I spent a lot of time working with people like this. And I just found you have to stop them and go, stop. What exactly?

Because they'll just go, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain. You go, okay, hold on, hold on. You said pain, but then you describe weakness. So let's go here. What is this? And you have to really break it down for them because they can't process it. They just overwhelms them. And there's a part of the brain called the insular cortex that probably is the source of all that chaotic.

misery. And literally, literally, when we dissociate, your brain doesn't wire. So trauma therapies are all about getting access to those disconnected parts and bringing them back into the integrated hole. So the fight or flight, that's anxiety. A lot of people have that, right? Among other things, it can be anxiety. It's different. Fighter flight is literally a, you know, it's a autonomic, sympathetic, autonomic response. Anxiety includes a sympathetic response. Okay. And then the freeze thing we've heard about that dissociation seems a little more abstract because when I read about trauma or when people describe it and I think this is one of the problems when people don't talk about trauma for years and then they do people don't believe them all the time because they say oh I'd repress

these memories and people who don't have that go oh that's that's bullshit yeah you suddenly remembered this it's more than repressed memories it's it's a feeling that it doesn't bother me anymore I need to forget about this because they want to push your body wants to push it back So it no longer remains, there's no longer an explicit memory, but it becomes an implicit memory in your body. So your body becomes the source of the memory. And you can develop things like PTSD where it's always remembering it in the body's response. That sounds terrible. Yeah, it's awful.

That's, that's truly awful. So, okay, so you get practice reading people like this, of course. We didn't talk to a lot of multiple types. And people, we can go, no, and please don't attack me for even using the term to social identity or multiple personalities. people argue whether that really exists. But you know what I'm talking about. It's severely dissociative individual. Yeah, yeah.

I misuse the term. You're just doing that for the sake of clarity. I'm doing that for the sake of not having to deal with the trolls online. I noticed that you deal with a lot of criticism. In fact, what was I watching? Yeah, Celebrity Rehab. And as soon as one of those people, 10 years later, passes away, it's your fault somehow. Correct.

Yeah. A die of heart disease. It's still my fault. Right. Still your fault. Or teen mom, you're doing a reunion show. hosting. Not their doctor.

I spend a day when I host and use my physician skills a little bit to interview them, not their doctor. I offer myself as a resource to them. I can't practice medicine across state lines. They're not my patients. They all have social workers and doctors and things that take care of them. I need to fix them. Right. And if they get a DUI five years after that celebrity or that teen mom, how dare you?

Right. How do you do? It's weird. deal with that. And I used to be exquisitely sensitive to criticism because I wanted to, I wanted to be perfect and do only good, only good, only good, only good, and I remember everyone Adam and I wrote our first book, it was just sort of a advice book years ago. And we just wanted to make a difference. You know, we wanted to help. And I remember it was the beginning of Amazon and there was, you were allowed to have comments from readers in your little book section.

Oh, man. I was devastated by some of the things people were saying. And what they were saying then was nothing compared to what goes on these days. I mean, nothing. And I was so hurt and so upset and so affronted professionally. And my reputation had been harmed. And, you know, as a physician, your identity is tied up in doing that job. Sure.

And so it hurt as a person. Now I just, I don't know. You get used to the pummeling. It seems like it would be tough to get used to that. I know one of the things... And I just... You have to find your compass. You know, you have to always go, you always go, I'm doing what's right.

I'm doing what's good. And I have to trust my instincts. I have to trust what I know to be good and right and just keep going. And what people think about it, just like Teddy Lamar said, do it anyway. Yeah. He moved. I think you said something about a doctor who is treating Hillary Clinton. It wasn't even about...

Oh, yeah. It was like, about the doctor treating her. Yeah. And it was just like, oh, Dr. Drew hates Hillary Clinton. Yeah. That's exactly what happened. Let's tear him apart. That's exactly what happened.

And then when they... decided, this is how messed up the presses. So we had decided to stop my HLN show about a month before that whole thing went nuts. So we stopped the show about three weeks after that. He was fired because of the- Oh, he got fired. We had nothing to do with it, nothing whatsoever. That's insane. And people don't care about the facts.

They do not care about the facts. I mean, there are people when they write to me and they disagree with something, I try to entertain them via email, Twitter, whatever. But if I look at your Twitter after you disagree with something and you say, hey, look, there's no real evidence the Earth is around. I just can't even. Because we're not going to get to that ground level whether the ground is flat or round. Yes.

We're not going to get to that level in any short period of time. And I've sort of learned that when people have these sort of strange ideas, it's not about convincing them otherwise using rational thought or evidence-based inquiry. it is because then you get a backfire effect oftentimes you know where they'll double down in other crazy areas sure that can be worse than whatever was you were fighting about and so I think I'm I've not had the opportunity to really duke this one out but I think what has to be discussed is people's worldviews

not not the facts of the issue at hand but what are your worldviews why do you not believe these things yeah and that I imagine a flat earther's worldview is the world's an unplace safe. People lie to me. The government is some evil institution and NASA is part of the government. Therefore, I can't believe them. Therefore, if somebody, somebody I can trust, it shows me evidence. I'm going to believe that.

As opposed to my worldview where trigonometry and calculus and physics work and where we can explain that mathematically. And if my worldview needs to change, well, this thing suddenly, this phone I'm holding, suddenly stops working. Or floats upwards. Yeah, floats upward. Oh, these lights don't work. I mean, magically, all the things that are part of my worldview in application work, so I'm going to stay with them.

A lot of people say that they don't, oh, I don't care what people think. I don't care. I don't have any opinion about that. Oh, people, haters are going to hate or whatever. Yeah. I don't really believe that everyone thinks that way. Of course. Well, if you really do, you're a sociopath.

Yeah, that's true. Right. That's true. So, of course, we care deeply about what other people think. and our very self emerges in intersubjective context, right? Without other people, we don't exist. So to, you know, if everybody hated or everybody, you know, disdained or thought ill of, that would not feel good, I don't care who you are unless you're a sociopath or a severe narcissist.

But to be able to sort of have equanimity, you know, given the world we live in, I advocate for that because it's just the way it goes now. is this just negativity no matter where you go. But usually if there's negativity, there's also some positive. You have to start trusting that if your moral and personal compasses lined up. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Dr. Drew Popinski. Thanks for listening and supporting the Jordan Harbinger Show. To learn more about our sponsors, visit jordanharbinger.com slash advertisers.

And if you would be so kind, please drop us a nice rating and review in iTunes or your podcast player of choice. It really does help us out. If you want some tips on how to do that, head on over to Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe. Now, let's get back to Jordan and Dr. Drew Pinsky. So as a personality that's highly visible, how do you deal with criticism? Taking it as feedback or taking anything as positive or negative feedback, because of course, it's really tempting to go, all right, all the people who say the Jordan Harbinger show is great, they're clearly, they got their head on straight. But this one person who says, screw to you because of this, that, and the other thing, well, he's a crazy person or I can't let. that get to me. What I tend to do is I read feedback, both good and bad, and I look at the bad

stuff and go, all right, is there a kernel of truth to the truth? Yeah, sure, if you can. It drives my wife freaking crazy because she's like, why are you still thinking about this guy? Well, if you're so thinking because you upset you, then that's one thing. But if you upset you because there was something in there that rang true, that's tough. That's hard. It's hard to make that determination in the moment, though. I usually have to set it aside, come back to it in a week and go, all right, because in the moment, I'll read somebody's email and go, well, you know what? Screw this guy. But then I'll read it in a week and I'll say, oh, no, this person's unreasonable.

Or, oh, you know what? I was upset because that is true. And sometimes it's the style with which they approach it that you can't get past. A lot of tone deaf emails. Yeah, just see if they're angry or whatever hostile aggressive. It's hard to hear it. But, you know, there's, I, Corolla criticizes me for being too much adaptive, listening to people too much.

Yeah. I mean, I've been there when he's done that. Yeah. So, but that's just me. I mean, I really try to take input from the world and see if there's something useful there. I don't know. It's kind of tricky.

It's a tricky balance. Especially, I looked at your Twitter. You have like three million Twitter followers. You can't listen to those people. You can't listen to 99% of those people. I can't respond to them, which is what's really weird. Because as a clinician, you're just, you're not allowed to respond. You can't say anything or do anything that could adversely impact on somebody.

So you can't throw back. Oh, so you're just. Just if someone's like you're a crazy person. If somebody is horrible to me, I just got to like let it roll. Oh, man. I didn't realize you had ethical implications there. And I just assume when it's really crazy that it's somebody's not well. And so I.

And you have to always think to yourself, what do I represent to them that they, because that's not me. So what do I represent to them that? Because I'm so. I mean, I'm politically moderate. I'm not. There shouldn't be anything really objectionable unless I represent. You your Wikipedia talk page. And you will find.

Well, I'm not going to. You're highly objectionable. No, don't read it, actually. Right. It's terrible. What zone am I a problem in generally? You know what? I'm not even sure.

Being a physician and using medication. Yeah, there was that. But that's all we have as doctors. What are we supposed to? We have a knife and we have pharmacology. Yeah, I don't know. I think a lot of it is people misinterpreting things that you say. Probably.

And I think that happens to everyone at a certain level. Yeah. Yeah. Most people will never face the same level of vitriol that a public personality faces. No, I never. And as somebody who's, I'm sort of shame-based already. And so I always think to myself, what have I done to contribute to this? Because I must be doing something to contribute to it. And so whenever, and sometimes there's sort of repetitive cycles of abuse that I get from, and I thought, what, I must have created that. I must have done, contributed somehow. But you're not advising that

people think like this. No, I'm just, this is a weird thing I do. It's like, because I, because I feel like we're, you know, essentially responsible for our reality, essentially. I mean, not entirely, but essentially. And one of the things you can do is look at your own contribution to everything. I mean, we, you know, we contribute to pretty much everything that happens in our life. I'm not in, sometimes it's in a very, very, very small way. Sometimes it's in a very big way. I just want to make sure I'm not missing something or doing something that I shouldn't be doing.

I feel like we have that same. I hate to say syndrome because you're a doctor and I'm misusing that word. No, it is. It really is like that, right? It's sort of the opposite of the Dunning Kruger effect, right? Dunning Kruger is where you have a cognitive sense that you know a lot when you know very little. Right. Or you have a great ability when you have crappy ability because you've never seen.

You've never, you've never experienced anything more. If you've experienced a lot and have a lot of training, there's sort of the opposite, which is the imposter effect. The imposter effect, yeah. Yeah. And part of that is there's something wrong with me is I should be doing something different. You sort of feel a sense of shame or guilt all the time. It is very common. What I always tell my audience is that the imposter effect.

What's great about this is it's an indicator that you are probably a high performer or at least a deep thinker. No, that's right. And it sort of goes back to something I think it was Einstein that said like the more you know, the more you know you don't know. And part of that makes you feel like an imposter even though. And plus if you have sort of low self-esteem like I do, you sort of feel like if I can master this stuff, I'm sure everybody knows. Sure, exactly. Yeah, that's very true. When I give talks to high schoolers and I say, who here feels like, you know, you're the only person who does an

understand this, that, and the other thing. And the answer, they never raise any of their hands. And then I'll go give a talk to a bunch of, like, funded startups that are running companies that are just at the beginning. They're doing really, really well. They're these unicorn funded startups or unicorn companies, social media companies, places where the founders have billions of dollars and options. And the whole room raises their hand and says, yeah, I feel like I'm the guy who doesn't

belong here. And it's just so funny to see a room of high schoolers be like, no, I'm. I know a lot of stuff. Yeah. Millennials are particularly guilty of this. Yeah. And so it's like, oh, boy. Because the phone gives them a false sense of knowledge.

Yeah. They have information. They don't have knowledge. On the other hand, those same millennials are the ones running these companies. I'll tell you. There's older millennials generally. I'm sure there are ones amongst them that have the imposter as well. Yes.

Yeah. I think we can agree on that. I mean, you have kids. So I would imagine you saw a change in the generation as you raise your kids. Yeah. I mean, I saw us, you know, the mistakes that our generation did. So it's over-parenting and over-rewarding and worrying about esteem and stuff like that. Although I personally didn't worry too much about that.

I was much more worried about education, education, education, and don't do drugs. Those were sort of my things. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the addiction. Man, you had a front-row seat to all of that, not only given your profession, but hearing all these younger people call an unloved line. Yeah, yeah. I mean, think about it. We'd get, what, 30, 40 calls a night.

And so we would know what we would hear exactly what was going on in real time. And strangely recently, people have been asking for it again. It's just McCroll and I both noticed like the last six weeks, people like a lot just say, hey, bring it back. Please bring it. Oh, I was, you know, it's funny. I was going to ask if you were ever going to bring it back to. I guess. I would be thinking about it?

I would be could or I don't know if Adam wants to or not. But it's certainly of need. I was working with some millennials a couple of like two weeks ago. I had like 300 or 400 of them I was talking to. And I started talking about STDs. because there's been such an increase lately, and I saw them, their eyes kind of glaze over.

And I was like, yeah, well, you know, how many, what about condoms? I could tell, huh? And so I said, wait a minute, how many of you were, what percent, show our hands, how many are using condoms? What percentage of millennials

you figure using condom? How many percent in that room? This is going to be depressing. 20 percent. Zero. I couldn't find one. I could not find one who had used a condom. That's insane.

Then I dealt with another group the next week, and I asked same question. Zero. So there's something going on now that's a little different. That's crazy. When I was growing up and everyone listened to Lovelin, so I'm not saying it was Lovelin that did this. Every single person used the Conner. Yeah, but there was the AIDS epidemic and we've done such a great job with all that.

Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, STDs are on the rise again. That's really bad news. Yeah. And so stupidly avoidable. I know. So ridiculous. Unbelievable.

God. Hey, but good times. Yeah. Yeah. There's that. I love the idea of reading between the lines and I love the idea of being able to read people that is outside of practice. And outside of outside of just getting reps in.

Like, you know, if you're on Loveline for how long did that show run, like 35 years? 35 years. So if the first five years you were wrong a lot, the last five years, you're probably never wrong on this. Right, right. So is it just the practice or is there some other skill set that, like, if you were training somebody else to be the item or you on Lovelin, what would you do you do? Well, I started focusing my training.

areas that would help that. You got to remember, because I started doing the show when I was a medical student. That's right. Last year of medical school. And then as I came on through residency, I started working in a psychiatric hospital and just got interested in things that were coming up all the time on the radio show. And I would really pile into those topics and got good at it. I knew a lot about them.

And they were coming up commonly. So I made sure I knew what I was talking about. And if I were advising somebody to be able to do that show, I would have them do a medicine, followed by a psychiatry residency. I would go good medical school, medicine residency, and a psychiatry residency. That person could handle the show. There you go. Yeah, because whenever I listen to your answers on that show or anyone's answers on that show, you or Adam, it's always so there's a lot of insight.

Unless Adam's just making fun of them, those answers aside, there's a lot of insight there that you can't just get. And he was a good study too. You know, he's good instinctively, right? So he always said, you know, if I were studying polar bears and I've studied 30, I pretty much know how polar bears were. And so he got pretty good at sort of hearing the stories over and over again. Yeah, I suppose that's true. I've always found when I did my show on satellite, we had live callers asking us similar questions, I guess because Loveline was probably off the air and they had nowhere else to go.

I always was able to really solve only people that had kind of my own problems. Thankfully, I had so many of my own. That's good. You had experience. But I'd worked so hard at solving those that I'd put so much time into thinking about them, right? It's good. Is your instinct to solve other people's problems or to give that advice, I should say. you're not really solving the problem.

Were you mostly relying on conscious study, or were you kind of able at one point to just go, all right, all these things, your subconscious brain just plotting everything in and out comes the answer. Like how mechanical was that at the end? It initially, like every skill set, it was initially study, study, study,

experience, experience, experience, experience, like for, you know, a decade. And then it became a little more instinctive, like where I could trust whatever was going to come out of my mouth. I could pretty much trust it. And that really started happening with dealing with drug addicts out in the clinic because they pull you into a vortex. They're bullshitting. They're upset.

They're, oh, my God. And you have to like, you have to like pull out of this mess something real and reach them. And I got to the point where I would just trust anything came out of my mouth. And sometimes I sort of shudder. I like, oh, God, what did I just say? Yeah. And it was never wrong. And it towards, you know, the last 15 or 10 years of my practice.

What do you mean by vortex? I'm trying to make this applicable because I think there's people listening right now who go, oh, yeah, my brother's doing drugs. Yeah. How do you know if you're in this vortex? You feel spinning, like your emotions are spinning around. You don't know what you've done, what you've not done. You feel responsible, but you're not.

You just feel very, you can feel confused. It's just like an emotional vortex. And they create drama and chaos as a way of sort of smoke screening so they can keep using. So that's just kind of how it works. Geez. What do we look for? Well, I mean, it depends what age and what drug and stuff. But whenever I, in my, a lot of stuff happens in my mind's eye.

Like, I hear things and music and sounds and things that I know mean something to me. Like, if I hear the sound, you know, the little cartoon with these. Yeah, sure. I know I'm with a drug addict. Okay. But I hear that yugita yuggerna sound in my head. I got up drug. Somebody's doing drugs.

I just know it. So that's your brain doing that? That's my brain. I'm just going to be sitting here listening to somebody going, huh, huh, huh. And all of a sudden I go yuggetty yuggerna. I go, oh, okay, I got it. It's like, I can stop listening now and just start asking what they're taking, how much they're on, that kind of stuff. That makes sense because I remember listening to a call, again, in prep for this.

And it was something like, this woman was talking about, it was a relationship question. And she was saying, well, you know, this happened, this other thing happened. And then you went, when's the last time you used heroin? Yeah. And she was like, well, I'm not, what, I'm not calling about that has nothing to do with it. Yeah. And I went, how the hell did you do that? It was like a real life.

I just knew. Yeah. And then again, that's just, you know, people that do these drugs have sort of characteristic behavior patterns, behavior and relationship and thing. And I just can, when I see it, I know it. I just know it's there. It's like a fingerprint. They can't know. It's like an accent.

They call and they go. Yeah. Yeah. And they tell you this story and you're like, you're Irish. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's an accent.

It's strangely more than that. It's, they usually are tells. Like, they'll say something. of all I go, wait a minute. And there's sometimes I can't even explain why I know it. I can't. And I just know it. When I know I know that somebody's using drugs or has an alcohol history or something,

I just know it. Yeah, it's like a superpower. It is a little bit of weird superpower. And it's because people that do these things have different, they fit differently in relationships. You know when you're fitting with them, you know, when you're with them. And people lie in bullshit constantly, both on the radio and in real life and the clinic when I'm seeing somebody as an outpatient or whatever, inpatient.

And so I have to learn not to listen, to listen, but not to expect truth. And if something's not lining up for me to really, again, start listening with my whole body and see what comes up. That is, it never ceases to impress. And it reminds me of the, when I started answering the dating questions a lot on satellite radio, far less cool of the superpower, by the way. Somebody would say something like, oh, I'm trying to date this kind of girl and that kind of girl. or I've, you know, I had all these relationships with these strippers and stuff. And then I'd be like, oh, so you don't get along with your mom.

And it's like 99 times out of home. So that's the tell, right? Yeah, well, it's a tell. It's like, they're dating strippers all the time. I wonder what that's about it. And I can, you cannot underestimate the value of what's called therapeutic wonderment. Like, what's that all? Even though you know, you know something, I wonder what that is.

And you'll hear me do that all the time. People can't resist. They'll just come out with some real information. then that's when you, and at the other hand, if you go at them shields up, they're shutting down. This is the weird misconception people have in this country that you can somehow attack people or out them in some way, that you're going to change their behavior, give them insight by it. It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen. I think there's too much daytime television. I think that's probably true.

Yeah. Literally. I think it's like that's not how humans work at all, at all. Something you had mentioned probably, I don't know, 20 years ago now was that people kind of want to tell you, what's going on, especially if they call into a radio show, but generally people want to tell somebody what's going on. And I don't remember exactly how you phrased it. But it was something along the lines of your therapeutic wonderment comment got me.

I think it was, you say something like, do you have a theory about why you might be like that? And generally, people have a really good theory that is exactly, or at least close to why this is. I just ask it more simply. What's, what do you think that's about? What do you think? And then they'll give you good information then. They'll tell you something. It may not be the whole story, but they'll give you something good.

We'll be right back with more from Dr. Drew Pinsky after these brief announcements. Thanks for listening and supporting the Jordan Harbinger Show. Your support does keep us on the air. So for a list of all the discounts from our amazing sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash advertisers. And don't forget to check out our Alexa skill. Go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash Alexa or search for Jordan Harbinger in the Alexa app. Now for the conclusion of our interview with Dr. Drew Pinsky. Why is it that you're also a GP even now?

You do TV, you got radio, you've got podcasts. Why still run a clinic? Multiple reasons. One is most of these people are patients I followed for 30, 35 years. And so they're all like in their 80s and 90s, at least in their 70s. And they have lots of interesting medical problems, which I like taking care of. Okay. They, you know, play the guilt card on me.

You promise you'd stay with me until the end. You promise you'd be here all the way. And if I'm calling myself a doctor, I better. be a doctor. That's what I was wondering. Yeah. You know what I mean? And you'd be surprised how quickly you can pull out of the what's happening in medicine. It moves fast. And it's not just about reading the literature. It's about what's the practices. And so I'm around peers. I talk to peers. I share things. I hear things. And so I get to kind of keep up on what's going on a little bit. Not the way I used to. I used to be like insane. They used to be like, leave me alone,

practice medicine and just we'll do a little television radio or something over here. But just leave me alone to practice medicine. I did that for years and years. years. Last time you and I spoke was a couple of months ago, and you said you were thinking about just going back and doing medicine or going back and doing clinical work and you weren't sure if you were. Yeah, I was getting, I was getting to, I was in a real bad mood. I don't know why. I'm still sort of there, but I have this fantasy that I'll just go back and become work in the hospital. Yeah. Just work. Just see patients. Is that sort of escapism or or, or it has something to do with what you were talking about earlier with all the negativity and stuff. It's like,

if people are so negative and I can't help anybody and I'm such a piece of crap, I'll just go back and take care of patients and say, I know how to do that. I'm good at it, so just go do it. Let my old patients yell at me, not some turd on the internet. Well, at least there, I'm in a system and I'm, you know, it's just different. They don't, people want to attack you. And they just don't in real life. Yeah. Well, that's true. They don't have the cover of the interwebs behind him.

Yeah. I mean, what they do is if something goes wrong, they hire an attorney. That's a different thing. could be a little worse than a Wikipedia edit work. Except, frankly, it's just more of a waste of time. Whenever I've been sued, I've been involved in malpractice suits, it's been the biggest waste of time. I mean, it's been ridiculous.

Yeah, you spend like 30 grand, and then the judge goes, yeah, there's nothing here. Never, they never go to trial, right? That's stuff I've involved with. I get stuff like I had a case once where this woman was in the locked board of the psychiatric hospital and she was so floridly psychotic. They couldn't get near her to do her physical exam. So I was on call one night. They called me and they said, hey, this woman has an air exam still.

It's day three. Get up here, try to do it. I went, okay. And then they, like a half hour later, they called me. Something's changing her too. You better hurry. I went right there. Look at the chart.

You can see these doctors trying to do it. Too wild, too wild, too wild. Can't get her. You know, can't get vital signs. Can't get anything. And I go to her and she is comatose. She's not responsive to deep pain. And I was like, well, this is not psychiatric.

Whatever that was was not psychiatric. We got to get this woman out of here. And she had fasciculations in her arms, like these peculiar muscular activities. And I thought this is, I don't know if she's seizing. I don't know what's going on. This is neurological. This goes. Get her out of here.

She ended up on a ventilator four hours later. She had had encephalitis. So within 10 minutes of my arrival, I had saved her life, got her to the hospital, and she recovered with no sequelae, as far as I heard. Sued for delay in treatment. Unbelievable. Personally. Unbelievable.

Another one. I was sued on a case for a patient, not my patient. I was aware of it because people were talking about the case on the unit. Difficult case, I don't want to get into it, but there was a patient that eventually died in hospice care. Like, it was a patient that the family wanted to stay in the psychiatric hospital, so he had some quality of life towards the end. Again, sued for wrongful death.

This guy had no chance of survival wrongful death. Why was I sued? because when the patient was being discharged, I was sitting with his doctor, and the nurse leaned in and said, hey, Mr. So-and-so was being discharged, and his doctor said, thanks, nurse-so. And in the chart, the nurse reported patient discharge, Dr. Karpinski and Dr. Smith aware. Unbelievable. That was the totality of my involvement in the case, months of depositions. That's, oh, God, I was going to say they probably just threw it out right away. Nope.

They did after months of deposition. Unbelievable. We have to do the, what do you call it, the discovery. God, that's irritating just hearing about it, and I'm an attorney. Yeah, I know. It's, well, that's somebody, I was talking to Dak Shepard on his podcast, and he asked why he heard me, or he heard, I'd talk to my kids and said, no, don't do medicine unless you really, unless you have a call. It has a calling. It's a greatest thing in the world.

But if you don't have that calling, it's difficult, it's painful. And this is, these are the reasons. There's just so many reasons. It's just so painful to practice medicine these days. That's super depressing. Lawyers can malpractice all day, and they basically just have to apologize, unless it's so egregious that a company will prove that they messed up. But you have to be terrible generally to have that happens. The opposite with doctors.

You just have to be literally in the room. Right. You have to be unlucky or have not crossed some tea. Like literally some documentation wasn't exactly what it should be. That's it. There's your smoking gun. You're screwed. Jeez.

Yeah. You mentioned before the self-esteem. thing. And obviously, you're successful, you're married, you're well-known, people love you. Obviously, not everybody has evidence. Apparently, a lot of people don't, yeah. You know, you got kids that are doing well. Self-esteem obviously doesn't care if you're successful. Right. Self-esteem is something established, I think, by age five, I remember, right? That's depressing. Yeah. And it turns out, I mean, you can enhance it and you can move it a little bit, but most of it is set early. And mine was bad. I said, mine is my, and, but I don't, but it doesn't bother me and I sort of use it.

Like it makes me double check myself. It makes me, you know, never feel like I've done enough or good enough. I might use it as a motivator, which is painful when you get a lot of negative stuff flying at you. But it's kind of nice if, you know, if you want to motivate to do something good, it helps you. How do you get to that point? Because I think there's probably somebody or a lot of people listening right now who go, yeah, I have low self-esteem. How do you use it as a motivator instead of just. going my whole life is going to be really bad is if my life were falling apart or something

and I low self-esteem that would be like a multiplier then I would cause me to tumble down the hill of feeling crappy in terms of feeling good it's like well you feel like you can never do enough right and I don't mind that I if that tormented me I'd that would be bad but I feel like I always have checked myself I was to make sure that if something bad happened like I'm saying I must have had something to do with it so let's evaluate it because hey it's me and I'm no good. So therefore I don't feel bad. It's not like a walk around feeling bad.

It's just sort of a point of view almost, right? It's a perspective. Yeah. But this never gets solved per se, right? So they say. So they say. Well, they include you, man. I think, yeah.

I think what it is, you know, through years and years of therapy, it just doesn't bother you. It's just not troubling. It's just sort of a position, right? You get the negative or the positive pole. I got the negative pull. And it's okay. It's fine. It's just a position.

It is interesting that you were able to parlay it into something that is useful. Because I think a lot of people who feel like they have, even if it's low self-esteem or something else, they feel like they're stuck with that and it's going to limit them forever. It doesn't have to. No, no, no, no. I mean, Adam has it, too. We joke with each other all the time. It's that we both have these very low self-esteem. And so it makes us, like, not talk about our own stuff and not spontaneously remember to promote things and stuff like that.

Because it's like, it's my stuff. It's like, who wants to hear about that? Well, if that's low self-esteem, then I got it, too, because my producer and my business partners are always like, dude, we've had this free mini-course at advanced human dynamics. com slash level one for like three months and you've never said anything. There it is. Now it's been said. Finally, my self-esteem is the intact now.

How do you find out if you have that? Like, I know you're going to say, you know about it. Do you have a lot of, yeah? How do you know? I imagine there are scales out there. Sure. I mean, how did you find out, for example? I always feel bad about myself.

Well, there's that. Yeah, I mean, I think I probably started thinking about it when all the esteem literature came up. You know, people started talking a lot about esteem and enhancing esteem and young people and that kind of stuff. And that sounded like a good thing to me because I thought, well, there were times in my life when that did not feel good. You know, when you're an adolescent and stuff and you have a low self-esteem, it's really

hard to be effective. But it also made me strive to do things to film, you know, make myself feel better about myself and to succeed. And I think that's where sort of the workaholism comes in, too. So it has a liability there. Yeah, I definitely have the workaholism thing. And I think I got it from my dad just because he's a super hard worker. But there's also a part of me that wonders, wait a minute, do you try harder at everything to prove to yourself that you can do it because maybe there's a part of you that thinks, yeah, you probably can't. Yeah, right. And some of that, and that's can be very subtle and doesn't have to be overt low self-esteem. It can be just sort of,

And it could be your dad. You're trying to impress some internal representation of your dad. But he's very much external and still around. No, but the reason we respond to it is that we internalize it. Of course, yeah. You know, and some people theorize. And, yeah, that's okay. That's all right.

You know, it just if it gives you trouble, if it makes you feel bad, if it gives you symptoms, it pairs your functioning, that's therapy time. Okay. But did you ever try therapy for that? 11 years. Oh, my God. Not for that per se. I was having overwhelming anxiety. That was my main reason.

At least that's my wife's reason for sending me. I always wanted to go. I always, like, I always just, I've always been fascinated by introspection and stuff. And I really did not know what I was doing or, you know, I was starting to work in a psychiatric hospital. I was starting to work in addiction medicine and stuff. And, you know, I knew what was going on intellectually, but I was getting taken advantage of, for lack of a better way of describing it, by certain kinds of patients.

They were able to manipulate me and things. and I couldn't figure out why. But I knew I was contributing. Again, I knew something I was doing. Years and years of therapy. I solved those problems. Wow. Yeah, if I had millions of dollars to spend on, and this sounds weird, a hobby,

I would get a therapist that was a rock star every day. I don't think there's any serious thing going on. I just want to do that kind of. You need time. You need time, too. So what you want to do is three, maybe five days, yeah, five days, week psychoanalysis. It would be fantastic. Wouldn't that be awesome?

If I had time and money for that, are you kidding me? I would do it this minute. I don't know how many people really want to go to a psychoanalyst five days a week. I think we probably have some sort of weird. To me, it would be better than a sensory deprivation tank or something. You know what I mean? Yeah, that would be exactly what I want to do? It sounds like the most interesting thing I could possibly.

Yes. What could be more interesting than exploring your mind? Yeah. So if anybody out there is listening to this and they want to volunteer for that. I would do three days a week happily. I just don't time for it. I'm time. That's another fantasy I have.

One day I'll go back into analysis. There you go. Yeah. I think that stuff is fascinating because there's a always. There's a, I don't want to make a distinction for people what we're talking about. There's a difference between mental health and mental wellness and then sort of actualization or, you know, that we need like a different set of terms for people that want to really fully fulfill the exploration of their minds and beings. And it's not, strictly speaking, a spiritual journey. It's a psychological journey.

I mean, you may along the way discover, oh, I have some spiritual needs I need to attend to also. And now we're spending our whole day meditating with analysts. That would be bizarre. That seems less interesting to me, at least right now. Yeah, me too. I definitely would love the analysis. Speaking of, since we're talking about your emotional problems or whatever. On that note, I'm all in.

I was listening to a show with a mutual friend of ours, Caleb Bacon, this man-school show that you guys recorded. it, I don't know, half a decade ago or something now, probably. A couple years ago, I think, yeah. And you're recording while you're lifting weights. Yeah. And you had mentioned that you'd been lifting weights since you were, I don't know, 15 years old. Yeah, 15, yeah. Just religiously.

It doesn't feel religiously. It just feels like part of my life. Yeah. Okay. Religious may be the wrong word. Yeah. I think maybe somebody, you or him had used that word. But that you had OCD and anxiety around fitness because of something that I was not super

familiar with body dysmorphia. I've heard of it. Of course, I know what it is, but I never really thought that much about guys having this. Oh, it's common. It's common. A body dysmorphia originally was preoccupations with little tiny aspects of the face. And then it became, yeah, that was the original description, people, you know, picking its skin and getting nose job and things like that. But it's become more generally in the common lexcon applied to how people see themselves in their body, particularly as it pertains to eating disorders.

Where people are never thin enough. if they see a fat person, even though they're terribly thin. Sure. And it's just, you know, you see imperfections. I don't have, I'm sort of being flipping about it. I don't really, really have it. But I have something. I have something that has me attended that very regularly and try to be okay all the time.

Seems quite healthy. Yeah, I'm using it. Yeah, it's another thing I seem to be using in a positive way, even though it's a part of, it's sort of, for me, it's part of my OCD and anxiety. It's all tied together because it's very OCD to be able to work out every day. That's only kind of OCD people can really do that. And it relieves my anxiety when I work out. And I get sort of a meditative quality from it. So there's a lot of stuff to kind of fit.

And I think I can tend towards sort of an exercise bulimia. Like if I eat too much, I want to work out more. That's not a good impulse either. No, that could be a lot of trouble. Especially don't your joints. I mean, your joints aren't going to get. My joints are, you know, I'm 60 this year. And my joints are getting a little messed up.

And I'm worrying about that now. Yeah. Yeah, no jiu-jitsu for you then. I have to get on growth hormone and steroids, that's all. Yeah, right, yeah, sure. Didn't you used to work? Yeah, that was also part of that show. You used to work out at a gym a long time ago,

and all the guys were asking you to prescribe steroids. Yeah, yeah, a long time ago. Yeah. Right when I was getting my license, I heard what they were doing. They would come to me and ask for stuff. And the whole back then, this is like the 80s, massive denial that there was such thing as steroids.

In fact, the medical literature was, they don't make you strong. Steroids, there's no reason they would do steroids. Yeah. Crazy. Wow. You read that literature from 80s. It made me crazy because I heard and then saw what happened to them.

I mean, Jesus. It's obvious. Yeah, of course. And it's like all they needed to do to disprove that particular theory was put one or, of course, a control group of people that don't use it. And put a handful of people on it and watch them balloon inside. I know. They would just go. Yeah, it was ridiculous.

It was so bizarre. So that's what makes people maybe distrust modern medical literature, too. Listen, there's lots of, on the behavioral health side, there's lots of crappy literature. Almost all the addiction literature is crap. I mean, I shouldn't say quite that glibly. A lot of addiction literature is crap because they don't do unbiased. They don't do observe screening. They don't screen for multiple substances.

They believe what the patient says. They rely on questionnaires. Patients lost a follow up or just lost a follow up instead of relapsing. And the durations are all too short. Way, way, way too short. What are some of the biggest myths that you think that people, believe or that are persistent in medical literature right now that people take as, well, this is the common belief that the only way to treat an opiodatic is with replacement therapy.

So like methadone or whatever. Methadone or Suboxone. That you are a dangerous person if you do anything else. And that is a terrible message. Also that an average physician with limited experience with addiction should be able to prescribe to 250 addicts with replacement. I know what I'm doing. I don't think I can handle 30.

It's, it's, they are very difficult patients to properly treat. 250 is nuts. That's absolutely insane. The caseload of 250. With the, of active addiction, trying to treat with replacement, harm avoidance therapy. That's just insane. Because you can't just, you just can't give them enough attention. They need a lot of, a lot of attention.

Yes. They need a lot of attention. They need a lot of, and a lot of time and a lot of intensity of services. And it's very difficult to deliver that properly. This might sound like an obvious question or, a simplistic question, but how do we know if we're addicted to something? Because I think a lot of people think it's not drugs. I just like video games. Right. So it's progression. I mean, I don't like the over deployment of the term addiction, you know, so be careful. I mean,

I like to see a biological heritage. In other words, I like to see evidence that the gene is there that causes real addiction, you know, true, true addiction. And so family history of alcoholism, family history of drug addiction, particularly in first degree relatives. And then, Again, progression or preoccupation, progressive preoccupation, in the face of adverse consequence. Worker school, finance, health, legal, or relationships. So any of those areas of your life are being affected and you're continuing there's something wrong with that relationship with whatever is you're doing. Most people, when they have a significant area of their life affected, they adjust course. So here's a, this is a question that again, I'm not sure you can answer.

So what if there's somebody who does cocaine while they're at work and it's fine because they do their job well? There's no consequences to the relationship. That might not be full on addiction. That might be drug abuse. Drug abuse. Okay. As opposed to addiction. Yeah.

And that's somebody who's doing something that's dangerous. Sure. But I can't predict the course the way I can if it's the full disease of addiction. Right. Okay. But drug. Okay. That makes sense.

You don't really hear that separated. Well, oh, now the DSM-5 separates it. It's a hundred different way. Okay. Yeah, yeah. I guess we just only hear about addiction or people who use get lumped into that. Yeah. This is what bothered me about a lot of the suicides recently.

Is this, oh, depression, suicide. Each one of those cases was very different, very, very different. You recently mentioned that you weren't sure what was next for you, and we sort of touched on this a little bit. But how do you go about making a transition after doing something like this for so long? Something like radio, television for so long. Is your identity not tied so strong? into this? Yeah, my identity is tied to sort of everything I do, I guess.

But I just, I have no blueprints for what I'm doing. It's all a big improvisation. It's an experiment. And so I'm looking for a door to go through or a couple doors to go through and trying to figure out which one to go through and how fast to go through. And I can always tell when I'm antsy. It's like I'm not satisfied. I don't feel like I'm doing anything.

I need to create something different. I'm definitely in that mode right now. definitely and I'm a workaholic yeah and so when I start getting not crazy busy I miss it now I don't want to be crazy busy all the time but I wouldn't mind for six months being crazy busy yeah yeah super crazy busy I don't know what it looks like though I don't know what that's going to be I just don't know yet I I got a lot of different things a lot of shit I'm thrown at the wall a lot and none of it really sticks right yeah yeah so we'll see yeah I'm looking for Mostly I'm looking for a new home for, I would love to do a talk show again.

I get somebody, I really see the HLN show when we were doing with an audience. That was something I really enjoyed doing. That was starting to take form. And so I would bring something like that back. If only you didn't say those negative things about Hillary Clinton. Hillary's doctor. Oh, Hillary, yeah. Do you know what I said, right?

No, I didn't. Did that come up in the Wikipedia thing too? No, maybe it was in there. But I could only skim your talk page. It was too much. I'd done 20 minutes the night before on Don Lemon about, he was asking me about Donald Trump's mental health. And I was saying, well, narcissism, maybe, I don't know, demania, hypomania, sure. And I was saying, you know, plenty of presidents of had mental health issues, Teddy Roosevelt, Lincoln.

And we were just sort of talking about it. And so I went into my radio station the next day. And my boss said, hey, would you do 30? That was good. Do 30 seconds on it for our website. I said, yeah, 30 seconds. And as I'm getting up, he goes, you know, maybe you had to balance that out. You got 30 seconds on Hillary, something about her?

And I go, well, as a matter of fact, they just released her medical record. And what her doctors are doing to me is a little suspect. And I got some issues with something. She has a really serious. She had a stroke and a transverse sinus thrombosis in her skull. I mean, like, really serious stuff I didn't know about. And I was shocked. And I was like, and the way they were treating it.

And the arm or thyroid causes hyperquagulation. And I was worried that was maybe causing the problem. I mean, she had two clots in her leg and one of her brain. And it was like, for God's sakes. And so I said, okay, I could do that. Well, next day, Drudge picks that up as doctor says, not fit. Which was not what I said.

I said, I'm wondering this and, you know, anyway, so it was terrible. Just twisted it. What does it like to read something about you that is just totally false? It's the worst feeling in the world. It's really a bad feeling, especially when you, you meant nothing by it other than trying to educate or explain something. and then you're accused of all kinds of sinister motivation or intent or that's what I go, oh, Jesus, was I? Did I? Are they right? Am there something wrong with me? Did I, you know, I always go into that mode. And then I, of course, feel guilty that people are reacting to something I said in a way that has negative impact. It's not my intent.

Yeah, for me, that would drive me insane because I struggled to be as clear as possible on the show. I'm always trying to be very careful with my word choice a lot of the time. and you have to be even more so. I think as doctors and lawyers. Why do I have to be more? Yeah, you need to be a doctor's lawyers for sure, but why do I need to be more so? I'm exquisitely careful. Oh, no, no.

I just mean you have to be more so than me. I don't know. Not more so. These days, everybody needs to be. Well, that's true. Everybody does. But I'm happy to be. Yeah.

You know what I mean? And here's what drives me crazy. Is if I've done or said something wrong, I am delighted to adjust course because, you know, it's me, so I'm like, I must, okay. It's going to keep you up at night anyway. Well, this is the stuff. that Adam complains about, that I take too much input from people and stuff. And I'm like, but I do.

And I'll take course, I'll adopt and adjust and thank you for the feedback. They don't allow that anymore. That's not allowed. What do you mean? That's not allowed. No one's given a second chance. Oh, yeah. Everyone's just destroyed.

That's it. You have to be destroyed now. I've never seen. I would argue that there's been nothing like this since pre-revolutionary France, where people are routinely put on the guillotines. Why? Because no due process. I mean, think about it.

Yeah. I mean, that's true. The Soviets did it if you sort of spoke ill of somebody in the Communist Party, you would lose your job. You didn't go to the Goulog. You just lost your job. McCarthy did it. If you were thought to be a communist, you'd lose your job. Boom, no due process.

But even then, at least you had to come before a committee. Now you say something, you step in the wrong direction. You say something. You're immediately destroyed. It's scary. Immediately. Yeah, it's scary. Yeah.

Do you worry about that at all? Yeah, because you never, you literally anybody can destroy you. Yeah. Somebody who just doesn't like you or doesn't like something you said or they can, what they say doesn't have to be factually true. That's true. Yeah. They just have to have a few people agree to it or say, yeah, that happened to me too.

And that's it. You're done. It scares me. And I'm not even a, I'm not a famous person. And I'm not, and I'm not, and when I say me too, I'm not talking about the Me Too movement per se. I'm talking about just any universe. You know, in whatever these sort of unforgivable sins we have today of language. And the fact that you just had to clarify that is a full example.

Right, right. And by the way, I have this weird relationship with this whole phenomena in that I like the fact that we're doing this and we're holding people accountable and we're, you know, all this stuff is not bad. It's good. It's just excessive. The excessive sort of consequence that is going on and people being truly harm. that maybe shouldn't be harmed. And isn't that what our Justice Department, a justice system is all about,

not harming people who aren't guilty? Yeah, in theory. Yeah. Bottom line, that's our greatest concern. And we've just completely gone around that now. Yeah, I mean, the idea, and I got to look up where this came from because of the, well, we're going to get emails about it anyway.

But there's something like, it's better that 100 guilty men go free than one innocent. Right. I think it was like John Adams or something. It was way back. It's going to be one of those. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's our greatest preoccupation. And yet we've thrown that to the wind completely. Yeah, it's terrifying. Yeah. It's terrifying. I mean, think about it. You're better off with a manslaughter charge. You get your day in court.

You know what I mean? Yeah, that's true. We can return to work if you're not guilty. It's no harm, no foul. Turns out, Dr. Didn't kill that guy. Yeah, right. Or, you know, it was an accident or whatever.

You're giving you service. It's just negligence. Yeah, right. Right. Whatever. It's like you, now, no, no, no, no. It's instant, instant beheading. Yeah, good point. Yeah, you'd rather run someone over with your car just because it was raining and you couldn't see them than to be accused of some sort of other harassment or some sort of other transgression. Transgression in the eyes of social justice warriors. Before I let you go, I'm done to know this. And I've always wondered this question, actually, after you hang up with somebody or let's say love line.

Yeah. After you hang up with somebody on the phone, how often do you think about that person after the show? Do that fade over the time? Because I would think a lot of those calls, I would be haunted by them forever, like forever. Some of them, some for a couple of days. I'd worry about or think about. Most of them were so, the kinds of phenomena were so commonplace to me. Sure, yeah.

That I know they're not in real danger. I hope they'll learn from it. I hope they'll go see their doctor or therapist or whatever that they would, my, my, greatest desire in any of these things, just motivate them to get help. I don't want them to think they're getting help. I want them to think I'm elucidating their situation and motivating them to get help and where to get help, what kind of help. That's all. So if I feel like I've done that effectively, there are times when I, if I can't think of anything specific, but if I didn't like hit it just right or if I didn't feel the person really heard me properly, I'll, I'll

obsess about that a little bit. Are there any that you remember even now where you just, you still think about like two or three random just the all all time i don't want to say best of or favorite because that's that's kind of the opposite of what i mean anything that it just haunts you that's that always has you know we we we have there's things i can when people always ask those kinds of questions and so we sort of will pick a call oh that that's the one that we rehearse and we'll always put out that's that one but i can't think of anything that uh haunts me yeah i can think of things i remember I'm thinking right now of this guy that called us and wanted to know, women always freak out when they find out what I was in jail for. And we started talking to, we were maybe when Adam was doing jokes or whatever, we started talking to him.

And all of a sudden Adam goes, wait a minute, find out that you were in jail or find out what you were in jail for? He goes, what I was in jail for? And we go, oh, well, what were you in jail for? I broke into a mausoleum and I twisted it off the head of an old lady and boiled it to a skull because I needed it for my little brother. snakes aquarium. Wow. And I thought, wow. Wow.

And you don't understand that might be a little disturbing to me, well, why? Okay, so he was psychopath. Psychopath, yeah. Okay. That is unbelievable. That's a haunting one. Yeah, that I can see. I have another one.

Now funny that you, this feeling, see, this is how I work is with feeling. So the feeling I'm having right now is what it feels I had to talk to a psychopath. I remember we had another caller, kid that called in and said, I think I'm a psychopath. And I go, why? And he describes psychopathy. And I said, well, look, good. You can work with that. You can accommodate it.

It's if you, you know, are feeling aggressive and violent and you don't, you know, appreciate other people exist. It can get you in real, real trouble. But you should, you know, go talk to somebody, learn how to develop some mechanism. It probably won't be empathy, but some way of managing this liability. And people do. 10% was it? What percent? 1% of population.

I think it's 4%. Yeah. So there are people out there walking around like that. And provided they were one percent, yeah, you're right. Yeah, probably they weren't abused when they were kids and provided they're sort of otherwise sort of healthy, they can accommodate it. Do you ever interview? You should interview James Fallon. I was going to ask if you saw that I interviewed him.

It was really fascinating. Isn't he a great interview? He was a great interview. And the fact that he had been able to make the distinction between what creates a harmful psychopath versus a functional psychopath. And he sort of tilts at the idea that there's different kinds of psychopaths. They have not yet been fully characterized. In his case, in his family's history of psychopathy and psychopathy is a genetic, biological thing. They kill their family members.

Right. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? When I interviewed him, what he told me was, he goes, yeah, so I rushed home to tell my wife. And what she said was, yeah, I'm not surprised at all. And then he said he went to his kids. They're like, yeah, we know you're an asshole. And so he then started paying attention.

He realized he treats his family like crap. Yeah. But the rest of us, the rest of us, he's charming and entertaining. he sort of adopted that style. Yeah, yeah. I asked him if that style was something he'd always been like. And he said, yeah, but that's because smart psychopaths, they're nice, they're charming, they're outgoing, they're charismatic, because it works better.

And that was a little bit scary, and he didn't really realize why that was scary. Yeah, he didn't. You are true something. Right. Yeah. And he had a weird thing, too, in his adolescence where he became hyper-religious. Oh. Did he tell you about this?

Yeah. And it was some sort of compensation or something for the... Like, super Catholic. Crazy religious, like over the top. Yeah, that makes sense. I read that in his book, and I didn't really put those two things together like that, but it makes sense that it was compensation. He told me he felt it might have been some compensation for what he was dealing with. Yikes.

Yeah, he was a fascinating interview. Willing to that in show notes just in case people are new to this particular episode. You can't get enough of James Fallon. Absolutely. Dr. Drew, thank you so much. My pleasure. It's only taking us, you didn't say, Tuesday. That's seven years to get here.

Yeah. We'll do another one, hopefully, sooner than that. Fair enough. So there we go. Dr. Drew only took us seven years, Jason. Yeah, seriously. Talk about his scheduling snafu to get him on the show. But, man, I tell you what, this guy's intuition is so sharp that he just doesn't even know he has it at this point.

It's like he's done so many of those calls and seen so many patients in the real world that he can just like narrow in with laser focus on the problem with just vocal tonality over the phone. And the whole thing with the person with multiple personalities blew my mind. that he's that good and so attuned to what people need in the instant. It's crazy. Yeah, it's really next level incredible. I know people are like, oh, well, you know, all this and then just celebrity rehab. I mean, we talked about that on the show, but really he's just an incredible guy all around. And a great big thank you to Dr. Drew.

He's just such an awesome dude. Like, of course, I'm fanboying out, which is fine. I don't care. As you all maybe know, I am a regular on Adam and Drew every month. on their shows, which, as you can imagine, is also kind of just every day I sit in that studio. I'm just like, what is going on right now? I can't believe it. You know, it's like I'm on Loveline, only I'm in studio with these guys taking callers.

It's incredible. So that's just a lot of fun. And this sort of come full circle has been awesome for me in the past couple weeks. So great big thank you to Dr. Drew, of course, for everything, not just this show, but for influencing my entire career path and life. How's that? If you enjoy this one, don't forget to thank Drew on Twitter as well. Tweet at me your number one takeaway here from Dr. Drew.

I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. And don't forget it. If you want to learn how to apply everything you heard from Drew, make sure you go grab the worksheets also in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. This episode was produced and edited by Jason DePhilippo. Show notes are by Robert Fogarty. Booking, Back Office, and Last Minute Miracles by Jen Harbinger. And I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger.

The feed for the show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, which should be in every episode. So please, share the show with those you love and even those you don't. We've got a lot more in the pipeline, and we're very excited to bring it to you. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way.

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