Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1718 - Dr. Sanjay Gupta
Uploaded: 2021-10-13T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1718 - Dr. Sanjay Gupta' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-10-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1718 - Dr. Sanjay Gupta' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-10-13. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1718 - Dr. Sanjay Gupta

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
What's up? How are you?
I am delighted to be here, Joe.
I'm delighted to have you. Thanks for reaching out, man.
It's nice to talk to you. It's been nice to get to know you.
You too. You too. Thanks.
Are you enjoying Texas?
Yeah. You know, it's funny. I hadn't been to Austin in some time,
and it's changed in a really good way.
I was staying at a hotel downtown, walking around, tons of cool restaurants,
and I guess Austin City Limits has their little stage that's downtown.
Yeah.
There was a big thing going on there last night, and it was great.
Yeah, they've recovered.
A few months ago, it was pretty rough with the tents and all the homelessness
stuff,
but they moved those folks into hotels, and they've purchased some hotels.
Have they done that?
Yeah, they've done. The mayor's done a good job of trying to, like, clean up
the situation.
It's all over the country, anywhere you go, any big city, you have this fairly
unique situation
in terms of, like, modern times of people camping on the street.
I mean, I don't remember that as a child. Do you remember?
When did you remember first seeing tents?
I mean, you know, I grew up in small towns in the Midwest.
Yeah.
I never lived in big cities.
I think I saw it sometimes when I visited those cities, maybe, when I was a kid,
but it wasn't a thing.
It was very rare.
It was very rare, for sure.
Yeah.
I think maybe California, to be honest, was the first time I really saw it, you
know?
I was just back in L.A. a couple of weeks ago, and it's overrun. It's crazy. I
don't know how they ever fix it.
Are you happy with your move?
I love it here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Where do you live?
I'm in Atlanta.
I'm not from there, but we moved there about 20 years ago now.
Took a job at the hospital.
And Michigan.
I lived in D.C. for a while.
Various places.
But, yeah, it's good.
It's different than what I ever, you know, knew growing up, but I've...
Atlanta's nice.
Call it home now.
I like Atlanta a lot.
I've got three girls that I, you know, born and raised there, so it's good.
There you go.
Cool.
Yeah.
So what made you want to come on the podcast?
Yeah, well, I like listening to you, Joe.
I think you're an authentic guy.
No, see, I listened to your podcast for a long time.
And you take on some big issues, and I feel like there's a conversation to be
had.
You know, it's interesting times, obviously, with this whole pandemic.
And I've struggled at times, you know, really understanding not what people
think.
I think that that part you can get, what people think.
It's the how people think.
So what I would say is I was curious how you think.
I mean, you know, how you approach things.
And frankly, you know, I was going to ask you sort of the same thing, like why
you would
have me on your podcast, right?
I mean, if there's value to be added, if the conversation is useful.
I think it is.
I mean, I'll take it even a step further.
You know, so I'm on CNN.
And I feel like the audience that shows up for CNN kind of gets it, gets what I'm
saying.
They hear it.
They've heard it for a long time.
Preaching to the choir, I guess.
Not even the converted, because they weren't converted.
They've believed this.
But there's obviously a lot of people who think, who aren't watching CNN, who,
like,
if I wanted to reach them in some way, I mean, you reach them.
And I thought to myself, if there's one person, really, that I would have a
conversation and
say, hey, man, just listen to how I think about these things.
I want to hear how you think about it.
Listen to how I think about these things.
Who would that one person be in the United States?
And it was Joe Rogan.
It was you.
How weird.
Well, does that surprise you?
That doesn't surprise you.
It does.
It still surprises me.
I wanted to have you on, first of all, because I really respected that you made
this change
of opinion publicly when you were first talking about marijuana.
You were talking about it as if it had no medical benefit.
And it was really just a recreational drug that was possibly or probably
harmful.
Is that an assessment that you agree with?
I think it certainly didn't seem to have any medicinal benefit.
Right.
Yeah.
But then upon further examination, you publicly changed your position.
And in doing so, you actually examined all the scientific evidence that pointed
to, for
many people with diseases, many people that are on chemotherapy, many people
with some serious
ailments, marijuana can be very beneficial.
And you talked about that.
And I really admired that.
Because that takes a lot of courage.
Because a lot of people, when they have an idea and they proclaim it publicly,
they double
down.
And they just use confirmation bias and whatever echo chamber news sources they
can get to sort
of confirm their initial position and you didn't do that.
And I thought that's a real thinking person who is trying to honestly figure
out what's going
on instead of just working on being right.
Well, I look, I appreciate that.
And I have been very, it was very illuminating for me because I think the way
that we become
a more knowledgeable society, I think sometimes surprises people.
I do think, and maybe this will dovetail even to a little bit of what's going
on now, but
the thing is that when you looked at the, so if you were just to look at the
bulk of evidence
around cannabis at that, and I'm talking, I wrote this Time Magazine article
back, you
know, this is probably 12, 13 years ago.
And I looked at the bulk of evidence and you say, okay, I'm going to just look
at the 400
most recent papers.
I'm going to read the abstracts.
I'm going to dig in deep on some of them.
And 94% of them were basically the hypothesis was, where's the harm here?
Show me the harm, right?
The hypothesis was not, show me the benefit.
That was only true for about 6%.
So right away, you're dealing with a sort of very biased sort of set of data.
And that's one stream up.
Now, if you're just looking at papers, you're like, well, this one potential
lung harm, this
one possible addiction, this one gateway, you know, you're seeing all those
individual
studies.
But at a broader level, one step upstream, you realize that most of the studies
that are getting
funded are designed to look for harm, right?
Yeah.
So when I saw that, that was the first time I thought, well, why are the
studies that are
getting out there, why are they all designed to look for harm?
Then I started looking at other countries and some really good research out of
places like
Israel in particular, a guy named Rath Meshulam, who's 91 years old now.
He was the first guy to ever isolate THC and then synthesize it.
He's been doing this work forever.
He may get the Nobel Prize before he dies for his work in this.
They were talking about the use of cannabis for all sorts of ailments,
including refractory
seizures in kids.
And that one really, that really got to me for a couple of reasons.
One is that I think when you're trying to do studies on things like pain, it's
hard.
It's a subjective thing, right?
And so you think is, how do you, how do you really have conclusive proof that
this is working
the way that you think it is?
Someone says their pain is better and that's important, but how do you measure
that?
A little child who's having 300 seizures a week and is now not having seizures
is a much
more specific sort of metric.
And it seemed to work really well in kids who did not respond to existing
seizure drugs, which
was kind of amazing to me.
And I think I told you when we've spoken before that to me, in some ways, that
wasn't just a
medical issue at that point.
It was a moral issue because nothing worked for these kids.
And they were thinking about even compounding veterinary medications for them.
And these parents are like, you know, in their kitchen sinks, stirring up, you
know, cannabis, trying to get the
formulation right to turn it into an oil or a tincture they could put
underneath the kid's tongue.
And it was working.
And, you know, I did stories on these kids and they were emblematic of
thousands of more
kids.
These weren't just anecdotal stories.
And that's when I said, you know, there's something here.
But I got to tell you, when I wrote the article saying I changed my mind on
this, you know, you hit send at night and then you wake up in the morning and I
work at a university.
I'm a practicing physician, you know, I live in that world.
And part of me did wonder, like, what is the response going to be?
I felt very comfortable with what I had written.
What I did not know was how it would be received.
Yeah.
And that's always a challenge, I think.
How was it received?
I think, well, I'm still employed, so that part of it was good.
You know, I didn't know if my chairman would say, hey, look, you know, I may
agree or not agree with you.
That's beside the point.
You shouldn't have done this or whatever.
You know, I had no idea how they were going to respond.
I think it was received well, Joe.
I think that it added to the knowledge tree of how we advance as a society.
It's a sign of the times, I think.
I think if you had done that a couple of decades ago, maybe there'd been a lot
more pushback.
I think people are coming to much more of an understanding and also the logical
aspect of it.
Like when people look at all the things that human beings are allowed to
consume, including this that you gave me here.
This looks pretty spectacular.
I'm pretty proud of my gift that I've given you here.
Serious bourbon here, but thank you for that.
For the man who has everything.
This is legal, you know.
I mean, we can enjoy a glass.
It's normal.
It's a normal thing.
And we all agree to that.
It's a, you know, it's a longstanding tradition for people to drink alcohol
socially.
Marijuana, for whatever reasons, and we could go into that if you want, but it's
been demonized unfairly.
And people know that.
It's not like heroin or crack or things that you've seen people's lives fall
apart on a regular basis.
And I think most people are aware of that now.
So in the era that you publish that, people have come to an understanding that
it's not one of the hard drugs.
It's not the most dangerous thing in the world.
It's not good for kids.
It's not good for some people.
It's not good for some people maybe with possible schizophrenic tendencies.
I think there's a real concern there.
No, I mean, yeah, you know, you raise a really important point.
You know, one thing I tried to stay away from whenever I wrote about this was I
felt like it was a little bit of a trap to get into the moral equivalency of
things.
Like I think things should just stand on their own two feet.
You know, well, it's better than this, right?
What you're saying is true.
I feel like alcohol can be a sledgehammer to the brain.
I really do.
If you think about the way alcohol affects the brain, very different than the
way cannabis affects the brain.
And that part of it is true.
But the idea that it could be a medicine in particular, I mean, you know, I
think that that is really quite striking.
And it's a plant, you know, and there's all these things.
And I listen, like I said, I listen to your podcast.
I listen to Brett and I listen to others.
And I get the points that they're making about that in terms of can you look to
the earth to heal?
And oftentimes you can, you know, we've been given a lot of things.
But I think that with cannabis in particular, the evidence, I'm not the first
to say this.
Obviously, people have been saying this for a long time.
Maybe the timing was right.
But two decades ago, people were saying this.
Three decades ago, people were saying this.
This was on the formulary in the United States in the 1940s.
Post-Reefer Madness, which I think was like 1936 or something like that.
People were already saying, hey, wait a second.
This could be used to treat addiction.
This could be used to treat, you know, even Parkinsonian-like