GUY BENSON SHOW: Dr. Drew Pinksy Weighs in on the Failures of CA Government, Trump’s Health Administration Picks

Dr. Drew Pinsky, a board-certified physician in Internal and Addiction Medicine, television host, and author, joined The Guy Benson Show to discuss the devastating wildfires in Southern California and the failure of state leadership to prevent such disasters. Dr. Drew explained why he holds Democrats accountable for these shortcomings and said that he senses a change in the way that people are looking at CA government because of the Democrats’ governing. Dr. Drew then shared insights on healthy ways to cope with trauma and loss caused by the wildfires. Dr. Drew also gave his thoughts on Trump’s healthcare appointments, expressing both excitement and mixed emotions. Listen to the full interview below!

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Guy Benson: Well, joining us now is the one and only Dr. Drew. Dr. Drew Pinsky, a board certified physician in internal and addiction medicine, also a popular TV and podcast host. He’s an author, a public speaker. Check out Dr. drew.com for all of his work and various podcasts. Dr. Drew, always great to talk to you. Welcome back to the show.

Dr. Drew Pinksy: Thanks, Guy. Appreciate it.

Guy Benson: I wanted to start with some of your thoughts on California, the wildfires. Obviously, there’s a human toll here. Then there is a leadership and political component to this. Some of the destruction completely unavoidable, Some of it maybe. Could have been mitigated or avoided to some extent. But obviously it’s just been awful for so many people in that region. I know that you have spent so much of your life out in Southern California. Just want to get some of your thoughts as this crisis continues to unfold.

Dr. Drew Pinksy: Well, I’ve got a lot of thoughts. And you mentioned that I grew up out here, which I did, and I still live in Pasadena, and we got hit very hard. The first thing I would point out is that you notice you don’t hear a lot of complaints about what happened and the firefighting in Altadena and Pasadena because Pasadena is a almost like a separate country in Southern California. We have our own mayor, own public health, our own everything, water and power, everything is completely separate. And guess what? Everyone understands this was a terrible act of nature. But the leaders and the few people fighting the fire did their job that they were supposed to do. It went the way it’s supposed to go. And it was a tragedy. It didn’t turn out well. But there wasn’t a failure of the system. You notice you just just think about the you don’t hear about what happened in Pasadena because there wasn’t a failure of literature, leadership. And think about how different that is. Mayor Karen Bass in Los Angeles, who went and just simply confronted more than once about the fact that she decided, in spite of giving her word, she would not travel so much and go to Africa with a red flag. Fire warning underway. Santa Ana wind conditions where we always have fires. She gets on a plane and goes to Africa. And when asked if she regret it, she looks at the ground and freezes. It is ridiculous. It was a great opportunity for actual leadership just to say, look, I took my off the ball. I shouldn’t have done it will never happen again and I will get to the bottom of our failures. And I’ve your absolute you have confidence that I will correct these things. Nothing like that was said. Instead, there was a bunch of finger pointing. It’s your fault. It’s his fault. It’s their fault. This didn’t happen. Give me a break. It was a catastrophe. And it didn’t have to be in the setting of a complete breakdown in failure of governance, which is the general theme here in California and in L.A. City in particular.

Guy Benson: Yes, she had promised as a mayoral candidate that she would not travel internationally as mayor of Los Angeles. And The New York Times, as we mentioned here on this show, reporting that she has done so at least 4 or 5 times since she became mayor. So breaking that pledge in this one, really coming back to bite her very hard. Even if she had been there, though, there were a lot of other problems, preexisting, probably even her mayoral ship. But. I’m not sure that her being physically present, the optics certainly would have been better. I don’t know if the outcomes would have been better because a lot of the. Scenarios that should have been undertaken. A lot of the conditions that could have been set to minimize this risk had not been right. And this is an issue for years. I’m not an expert on this, doctor, but people who are. Have said and some of them have warned about this very loudly for quite some time, we are not doing the type of forest maintenance that we’re supposed to we’re not doing the brush clearing. We’re not doing the controlled burns. It takes forever to get anything approved were done. There are water issues. We weren’t maintaining reservoirs properly. The water is not being kept on hand for emergencies. I mean, you can sort of rattle off a lot of these failures. And I’m not sure if they stop at the doorstep of any one person or one politician, but certainly some of these politicians need to take some ownership. And we haven’t really seen very much of that at all.

Dr. Drew Pinksy: None of it. None of it. And it looked the legislature in California, the super majority of Democrats in California, have mismanaged this state into the ground. And it needs to be looked at honestly and called out for what it is. But if indeed it’s where they put their money, that is completely out of control. We have the highest taxes in the country and we have the least to show for it. Here’s the deal. People that are pointing at climate change as sort of the big issue in all of this, if indeed let’s lead into climate change. Okay. It’s climate change. Guess what, Mr. Climate Change Concerned Citizen that the fires not including this most recent fire, the fires from 2020 to 2024 put so much CO2 into the atmosphere that it undid all the climate change interventions of the preceding 20 years times two. So if indeed climate change is your concern, your numero uno intervention should be forestry management. As I said, I grew up in Southern California, so in high school you look up at the San Gabriel Mountains, it was crisscrossed with firebreaks. Firebreak Fire management was a year round endeavor. I remember.

Guy Benson: Why did it stop? Can I just jump in? Like, why did it stop? Because we can talk about the misadventures and the insane projects that the leadership of California have decided to spend your money on and taxpayer money on, whether it’s the high speed train debacle, that whole boondoggle that’s now spanned so many years, or whether it’s free health care paid for by tax dollars for illegal immigrants, you can go down the list. I just don’t understand how this, of all things was thrown off the list of what the government should do well by people who believe the government should always do more. But what not this less on this front?

Dr. Drew Pinksy: Yes. Especially we know things we have things are required to burn here. It’s part of the ecosystem. It’s just a necessary piece of what happens in this region. By the way, the boondoggle of the the train for between Bakersfield and shoot. It’s like another town you’ve never heard of. That was where a high speed rail was going to go. We’re at $100 billion over budget and not one rail has been laid down. And a lot of that is due to the regulations, particularly the environmental regulations and the amount of legal and regulatory hoops that must be jump through in order to build anything. Let’s go back to the fire breaks. My memory is the the year they stopped doing the fire breaks was in the early 80s and they stopped it. I remember this headline, I may be getting it wrong. I’ve not been able to confirm it, but my recollection was the original issue was migration of a field mouse, that the firebreaks were interfering with the migration of a field mouse. And that was the beginning of an avalanche of, quote, environmental concerns unquote, that led to the complete undoing of all forestry management. I wonder how the field mice are doing now with being burned up. The deer bear, mountain lions are all coming down into our backyard because they’re not doing well.

Guy Benson: And there’s a fish right There were also making a lot of these detrimental changes to protect an endangered fish. And it’s like, okay, at what cost? By the way, we looked it up. It was Palmdale, Bakersfield to Palmdale. That’s, you know, a very important corridor that a ton of people are going to be wanting to travel on. Even if you wanted to get from Bakersfield to Palmdale after all this time and all this money, you still can’t. To your point, that was just a a side note on the trains, but it all points in the same direction, which is deeply, deeply misplaced priorities at the highest levels of governance locally and statewide in California. And the last political question on this I’ll ask you, Dr. Drew, is you have a lot of friends still who live out there full time. Do you get any sense like there’s maybe a moment, a realization, a dawning on people that something. Has to change. Leadership has to change. The way that voters approach their politicians has to change. Because this is what years of one party rule has led to.

Dr. Drew Pinksy: The answer is yes. I think there is a moment here. I mean, people are literally dying, being burned up. Look, the entirety of our governance system is not focused on governing on behalf of the citizens anything but. And they’re getting tired of it. I you know, I have I spent a lot of time in New York City also, where the tax structure is very similar. But you can complain what you want about New York and New York City, but you get so much. You walk out of your apartment and you see what you get. You live in it. In California, you get the opposite. You get either nothing or horrible crime, horrible homelessness, horrible fire. It’s just it’s just anything but governing. You know, they’ve actually put us on a road there. They’re desperately trying to get us out of the automobiles. Our freeways don’t work. So then the side streets have been narrowed to try to get us out of the side streets. And they put bike lanes along side streets like Adams Boulevard that runs along the ten Freeway. I have not seen a bike in that in that bike lane in ten years. And yet emergency vehicles can’t get through anything but the well-being of the citizens, and particularly people like Palisades and Santa Monica who are the champions of all of this, are starting to look at themselves in the mirror and think, maybe there are other priorities we ought to examine.

Guy Benson: Dr. Drew, I want to ask you about the psychological impact on these fires on so many people, whether it’s kids or anyone. Right. Because setting aside the people who have lost their lives, which is especially tragic, but for many, many families, their entire lives have been turned upside down and will not be the same, maybe ever, certainly for a long period of time. During this rebuild, people felt like they had security and a home and belongings and then all of that up in smoke. Do you have any best practices or thoughts on how people can get through this trauma? Because I don’t think that that is overstating it at all. This is a huge psychological in some cases, physical trauma to children, to families, even to single adults. How can people get through this in a healthier way than some of the other coping mechanisms that might crop up?

Dr. Drew Pinksy: Well, I mean, not to be glib, but of course, you know, drinking and using drugs, not not not a good idea, but people are going to be prone to that. But here’s here’s how you get over it. You can’t. You can’t. It is a major trauma. And it is actually as someone sitting in the middle of all this, when I see the press going, what does it feel like? What do you think it feels like? What do you think? It feels exactly like you think it does. And I have people asking me to come on their shows. And let’s talk about best practices. There are no best practices. You know, you’re in survival mode. You’re trying to survive. If anything, we should think about future events. And those of us that are thinking about that are buying pool pumps and fire retardant for a yard and thinking about earthquakes and getting generators. And yes, as much as you can control your environment. But to me, the level of we asked a guy, how can I say on the radio I’m losing track of what I can say on the radio, what I can’t these days.

Guy Benson: But therefore.

Dr. Drew Pinksy: Yeah, it requires people to stand up with a firm backbone and move forward. And guess what we could use at a time like this is great leadership. It makes you feel better. We don’t need platitudes. It’s so funny. I watch James Woods in an interview on CNN and he started crying about the pastor losing his house. And the anchor was like, that’s strength to strength that you’re crying. And it felt so awful to hear her saying that. It’s like he is having an emotion. Your job is to just be there, just be present and watch a struggle. You can’t take it away from us and nor should you. And it’s either strong or not strong. We are in survival mode here, and we’re doing our best and our damnedest. And we’ve come together pretty well. By the way, there’s been a sort of extraordinary community support for people in terms of giving them food and belongings. And, you know, toiletry has been the thing that people needed more than anything, it turns out. But that doesn’t take away from the loss and it doesn’t take away from the the intensity of how extraordinary it is to is to try to get up, get up, get a daily practice, you know, daily pattern of life going again when everything you thought you had, you don’t have anymore. It is. And unless we have even gotten into the insurance issue, which is just reprehensible and again, 90% of that is on the state once again, because they refuse to let the insurance companies raise their premiums so they could cover an event like this. And then the fair plan, which is what the backup plan with the state has, doesn’t have 30% of what it needs to cover all this without being bankrupt. It’s disgusting. It’s disgusting. We are all disgusted. And so don’t try to make us feel better. Let’s get us to change our state and see if we can do this better next time with real leaders.

Guy Benson: Dr. Drew Pinsky, I want to ask you on a separate note, we have a new presidential administration coming in in a matter of days. We know that the Senate is very busy looking at a lot of these nominees across various portfolios and departments. As you look at the public health team that Donald Trump has nominated from RFK Jr to the surgeon general and beyond. What are some of your thoughts? Do you have a generally positive view on the choices he’s made? Mixed views. I’m just curious what you think.

Dr. Drew Pinksy: I am thrilled, but I’m emotionally mixed because I want us to be very careful. You know, as Edmund Burke says, you know, things, institutional structures and sort of priorities in a society exist for a reason. Not it’s not they’re not nonsensical. You so you don’t want to dismantle everything. You want to do it carefully. And we certainly need that. I am an RFK Jr fan. I got to him early a couple of years ago and my first interview with him, he said, You know, you’re so courageous to even talk to me. And I thought, my God, for an attorney and a doctor to talk together, talks requires courage. Well, turns out he was right. I got lots of crap for it. And we need to be. We need to, you know. And I stood behind him, and I’ve been saying the whole time, this man needs to be in Washington and the fact that he’s in HHS, I am thrilled to see what he intends to do. The fact that Jay Bhattacharya, who is the poster child, he’s a consummate professional, a professor, an epidemiologist at Stanford, a wonderful human being, he is the poster child for the excesses of the Covid era cancellation and censorship. He’s the poster child. It is poetic justice that he’ll be at the head of the night and he will do a wonderful job. Jeannette, I know her well as the surgeon general. She’s an. Excellent doctor and excellent human beings. I’m excited to see what she can do. And then finally, they have offers over Medicare. Medicaid. Brilliant. Oz has so much intellectual horsepower. People don’t understand how bright he is. Perfect choice for that. I look forward to going out and visiting all of them and seeing what their plans are. I talked to JFK about a week ago, RFK, rather, and he said it’s worse than we thought. The level of corruption and distortions and the magnitude of what’s been going on. So it’s good news that we are in there. He is a brilliant. His job has always been to take chide organizations, pull them apart, look at the corrupting influences, an undo them. And God knows we need that now. And he is in there doing that job.

Guy Benson: Well, you mentioned censorship. That’s also been something you’ve been dealing with recently. Were up on a break. So we don’t have time to get into that this time. But maybe based on some of the movement in social media and beyond, maybe we’re getting to a moment where a new leaf is being turned over on that front as well. One can hope. Dr. Drew Pinsky, our guest on The Guy Benson Show. Dr. Drew, of course, we so appreciate your time, your insights here. And we look forward to our next conversation. Thanks so much.

Dr. Drew Pinksy: Thanks, Guy. Appreciate it.

Guy Benson: We’ll take a quick break. We’ll be right back. It’s the happy hour here on The Guy Benson Show.