AT FIRST THE interview looks like any you’d find on network TV: two men, both in sport coats, set off in boxes beside each other, speaking directly to the camera. The chyron beneath them has “Ask Dr. Drew” on the left and the name of his guest on the right: Warner Mendenhall. Mendenhall comes into the interview hot, talking about how the COVID vaccine was “completely ineffective” and that it’s caused “tremendous damage.” Then he says, “I believe about half a million people have died from taking the shot.”
If you’re not familiar with him, Mendenhall is a lawyer who claims that some of his clients have become ill and suffered injuries due to the vaccine.
You’re probably already familiar with Dr. Drew.
Drew Pinsky, MD, is 66 now, and he’s been a physician and media presence for more than 40 years. He’s board-certified and practices as an internist and addictive medicine specialist. And he looks remarkably unchanged since he was doling out sex and relationship advice on MTV’s Loveline in the ’90s and counseling addicts with star power on Celebrity Rehab a decade later. Toned, bespectacled, and brainily telegenic, Dr. Pinsky could pass for at least a decade younger.
During the January 2025 interview, as Mendenhall lists the supposed harms caused by the COVID vaccine, Dr. Pinsky nods. He stares ahead with patient concern, listening, his lips closed above his microphone.
This interview didn’t go out over any of the cable channels where Dr. Pinsky used to appear all the time. Instead it aired on YouTube, which later flagged it for being in violation of the platform’s policies around medical information. (It’s been estimated that COVID vaccines prevented more than 18.5 million hospitalizations, 3.2 million deaths, and nearly 120 million infections in a two-year period, according to a 2022 study by the Commonwealth Fund, an independent health research entity.) After YouTube’s decision, Dr. Pinsky took to X to air his grievances. Among his arguments against the platform, he stated, “YouTube is free to stay on the wrong side of history.”
The media landscape that made Dr. Pinsky a household name—a landscape dominated by cable channels and media conglomerates, talent bookers and fact-checkers—has been upended by social media, podcasting, and streaming. As this world shifts around him, Dr. Pinsky seems committed not only to continuing to work but to staying in the spotlight. It’s unclear what that will look like for a man who was once called one of America’s most trusted physicians.
But one thing is sure: Dr. Pinsky believes he has more work to do. After all, across America, trust in traditional health experts and institutions is down. Maybe he’s the cure for a country in crisis. Or maybe he’s something else entirely.
DR. PINSKY LIVES in Pasadena, California, in a sprawling Spanish colonial house that, despite its size, reads more like “generic boomer dad” than “Hollywood celebrity.” When I visited him late last year, there was an oil painting of his triplet children over the fireplace. In his expansive kitchen, a book on the French Revolution—a recent preoccupation of his—sat on the counter.
Lately, Dr. Pinsky says, he’s been thinking a lot about the lessons of history, as well as about his own longevity. Health and fitness have always been a priority. As he’s gotten older, this has only become more true. Gym equipment—a squat rack, a cable machine, a treadmill—occupies a good portion of the garage. As a teenager, he stumbled into weight training with bodybuilder Bill Pearl, a former Mr. Universe, whose gym was three blocks from Dr. Pinsky’s high school.
“They lifted very heavy weights—four sets, eight reps,” Dr. Pinsky recalls. That’s more or less the routine he followed until his 60s, when persistent shoulder issues made him realize he needed to find a program “more appropriate for my age and joint situation.” Now that means more reps of lighter weights, more cables, more abs, more bursts of high-intensity cardio—preferably first thing in the morning, and while listening to French radio on YouTube.
His plan appears to be working. Dr. Pinsky is as ripped as ever, and he gives much of the credit to V Shred, the viral diet and workout plan for which he’s been a spokesman—and the brand’s only spokesperson who’s a practicing physician—since early 2024.
Dr. Pinsky may look ageless, but he’s no fan of health influencers who make outsize claims about extending lifespans. “Longevity influencers, I’ll be honest, kinda piss me off, because I know they’ve never been around a 90-year-old,” he says. “Aging is inevitable, and people are in massive denial about our biological agency.”
That said, he’s an advocate for an approach to longevity that’s grounded in fundamentals: Eat lots of protein and leafy vegetables, commit to resistance training, and get enough sleep. He’s also happy to be living in what he considers the “golden age of supplements.” His daily regimen includes DHA omega-3s, a mineral blend, and nicotinamide riboside, a form of vitamin B3 touted for supporting healthy aging.
But he’s also a realist: “I think it’s important to point out [that none of this] means I don’t get medical problems. I’m a prostate cancer patient. I’m hypertensive—my dad had terrible vascular disease, and I started taking a statin probably 20 years ago. So, working out, taking vitamins—that’s not the whole story. You have to work on both ends of longevity, treating the things that shorten life as well as try to lengthen it.”
The man speaks from personal experience but also professional experience. On our way to his medical practice in Pasadena, as Dr. Pinsky confidently backs his Porsche out of the driveway, he admits to having been “severely sleep-deprived” for much of his career. He describes his rise to media fame in curiously passive terms: “Doors opened for me, and I walked in.”
In the ’80s, when he was a 24-year-old medical student in Los Angeles, he was invited to dole out medical advice during a segment on the local alternative rock station KROQ. Dr. Pinsky was not yet a doctor, but he was game and young and engaging. That gig eventually evolved into a role cohosting the radio show Loveline in 1984, later joined by comedian Adam Carolla.
At its best, the show was educational without being preachy. Dr. Pinsky and Carolla helped popularize ideas that are now commonplace: that addiction is a disease and not a moral failing, that childhood trauma is all too common, that people’s gender identity doesn’t always align with the genitals they were born with.
At the same time, Dr. Pinsky began his residency at Las Encinas Hospital in Pasadena, working with psychiatric patients, many of whom were also addicts, and practicing general medicine at Huntington Memorial Hospital.
Despite the success of Loveline, which was syndicated to radio stations across the country, Dr. Pinsky was initially ambivalent about being a public figure. “I didn’t use my last name. I didn’t want people to know it was me. I felt like, Leave me alone so I can practice medicine,” he says.
Yet when MTV wanted to turn Loveline into a weekly television show, Dr. Pinsky agreed, still thinking of media as a side hustle. “I thought, Well, if you can put [all the filming] into Friday and Saturday afternoon, I can pull it off. And that’s what we did.”
The MTV show became a hit. Dr. Pinsky and Carolla sat on a stage in front of a wall of screens, listening as callers presented dilemmas that ranged from the poignant (like the many callers who revealed their histories of abuse) to the bizarre (like the caller who claimed to have a blood fetish and asked if it was safe to use pig’s blood during sex). The show launched the national media careers of both men. With his mixture of wonkishness and entertainment value, Dr. Pinsky helped usher in a fresh flavor of celebrity doctor for the tabloid TV era, bridging the gap between Dr. Ruth and Dr. Phil.
Whatever media reluctance Dr. Pinsky felt in the early days faded. In the decades since, he has appeared on more than a dozen television programs and produced a fair number as well, including Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, which ran for six seasons and spawned two spin-offs (Celebrity Rehab Presents Sober House and Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew, both in 2009).
In the 2010s, Dr. Pinsky appeared on everything from Teen Mom, another MTV hit, to The Greg Gutfeld Show, Fox News’s bawdy after-hours talk show. He appeared on The Masked Singer in 2019 disguised as an eagle and jumped from a helicopter for Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test, a military-themed reality competition series, in 2023. (On both, he was eliminated in the first round.) Throughout all of this, he has still seen patients seven days a week, while appearing on national media to talk about addiction and public health.
Over the course of his career, Dr. Pinsky has proven that he has a knack for keeping old friends around. Our next stop in the Porsche is Adam Carolla’s studio, where the two record a weekly podcast. When we show up, ahead of schedule, the chilly, high-ceilinged space is littered with the remnants of a recent holiday party: a pink Christmas tree in the corner, unopened bottles of Carolla’s Mangria Wine Cocktail on a foldout table. On the wall, there’s a promo poster from the early MTV days. Dr. Pinsky looked then as he does today, just blonder.
As we wait for Carolla to arrive, Dr. Pinsky describes their on-air dynamic to me, likening it to a pill wrapped in hamburger meat, an old trick for getting a dog to swallow medicine: Audiences tune in for the comedian’s deadpan rudeness and receive Dr. Pinsky’s expertise along with it. “Adam’s the burger, I’m the pill.” Dr. Pinsky has remained loyal to Carolla, even as the comedian’s controversial opinions have alienated some of his former colleagues. (Howard Stern and David Alan Grier reportedly refuse to work with him anymore.)
When Carolla eventually strides in, I can tell he’s cranky. Late the previous night, he was evacuated from his Malibu home due to the threat of a nearby wildfire. (Both Carolla’s and Dr. Pinsky’s homes remained intact during the recent Southern California fires.) The men duck into a recording booth and quickly slip into their dynamic. Carolla plays the provocateur; Dr. Pinsky chuckles gamely and wedges in some context where he can.
The subject on their minds this week is the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. When we were chatting earlier that morning, Dr. Pinsky unequivocally condemned the murder, but he also offered some pointed critiques of the health-care system. “By 2010, our ability to protect the physician-patient relationship was already getting eroded,” he said. “You can’t imagine how awful it was.” On-air, though, Dr. Pinsky largely cedes the mic to Carolla, who rants about people complaining about health insurance companies: “Go get better insurance! Go with someone else!” he barks. “How about that?”
Later, I ask Dr. Pinsky why he didn’t push back more against what Carolla was saying. “It’s his world, and I’m a guest. I’m not allowed to say no,” he says. “[That’s probably due to] years and years of coaching.”
IN THE OLD days of network television, it was something of an ordeal for Dr. Pinsky to reach an audience. He’d have to drive to a studio for taping and then sit patiently as a makeup artist slathered a thick layer of foundation on his cheeks. (Funnily enough, all that heavy powder may be one reason his skin is so unlined: It contributed to flare-ups of adult acne, which he treated with retinol long before the cream became a skin-care staple.) After makeup, Dr. Pinsky would show up on set, give a two-minute sound bite, and if he wasn’t filming another talk show, he would head back home again.
Then the pandemic changed everything—including who Dr. Pinsky thought of as his audience, what they wanted to hear, and how he reached them. In the early months of 2020, as the virus was spreading throughout Italy, one of the first COVID hot spots, Dr. Pinsky was initially dismissive. “I know how the press works,” he tells me. “They’ll do anything to get eyeballs. I thought they [were using the] panic so people come to the TV every night to watch them.”
He’d built his career on appearing to be the reasonable one in a room full of people losing their shit, and he’d always been quick to call out others for getting hysterical. When a local television station brought him on to do regular updates on the virus, he told the audience to relax: They were more likely to be “hit by an asteroid” than catch the virus.
Then the world shut down. Dr. Pinsky quickly realized that he’d grossly underestimated the virus. He apologized for his previous statements and urged people to listen to Dr. Fauci and follow CDC recommendations, but the damage had been done. Someone made a supercut of Dr. Pinsky’s prior comments, which also included encouraging people to go to the movies in the early days of the pandemic.
The backlash was severe. “Many, many people saw [the supercut],” Dr. Pinsky says. “And what happened was we got attacked—and by ‘we,’ I mean everybody in my family started fearing for their safety.” The experience alarmed him, but it also convinced him that he shouldn’t let his critics silence him.
When shelter-in-place orders put TV productions on hold, Dr. Pinsky began producing more of his own content: recording podcasts, uploading videos to YouTube. He converted the triplets’ former playroom into an ad hoc studio, complete with sound baffling on the walls and flattering lighting. His wife of 30-plus years, Susan, began taking a bigger role in editing and publishing his videos and podcasts.
Susan grew so good at wrangling the technology that nowadays she’s the creator and producer of his streaming project. She even hosts a show of her own, in which she explores spiritual phenomena and which features a rotating cast of psychics, mediums, and celebrity guests trying to communicate with the dead. Tomorrow, Drea de Matteo was coming on, she told me brightly, referring to the Sopranos star and outspoken COVID anti-vaxxer. “I invited Mama Cass. We’re going to talk about Mama Cass!”
As the pandemic dragged on, Dr. Pinsky says he grew frustrated with public officials’ approach to the virus, particularly in highly cautious California. He started posting YouTube videos in which he questioned conventional wisdom about the pandemic. “My great concern was that the risk-reward [calculus] got thrown out the window and that people refused to look at the data, which is what medicine is about,” he tells me.
In retrospect, some of Dr. Pinsky’s contentions—that schools were closed for too long, that the lab-leak theory was worthy of consideration—were certainly defensible. But he didn’t stop there. He increasingly made time on his podcast for the COVID-skeptic crowd, a motley mix of doctors, academics, and self-styled experts who downplayed the seriousness of the virus, spread fear about the vaccines, and promoted questionable cures.
In 2023, Dr. Pinsky offered little to no pushback when writer Naomi Wolf made the unsupported statement that the COVID vaccine was a “bioweapon” and later that it made women’s breast milk unsafe. In December of that year, Dr. Pinsky sat back when Mary Talley Bowden—a doctor whose privileges at a Houston hospital were suspended amid the hospital’s concerns that she was spreading “dangerous misinformation”—claimed that ivermectin was effective as a treatment for COVID-19. (Multiple scientific studies have shown that ivermectin is not an effective treatment for COVID-19.)
In a follow-up interview, I asked Dr. Pinsky about the January interview with Warner Mendenhall that YouTube censored. On Mendenhall’s unsupported claim that the COVID vaccine killed 500,000 people, Dr. Pinsky told me, “I thought, I don’t know that that’s true. I should have said, ‘I’m not sure I agree with that.’ ”
All of this makes spending time with Dr. Pinsky a head-spinning experience. In conversation, he comes off as a cogent, personable guy who expresses concern that childhood vaccination rates are dropping. Then the cameras click on and he’s contemptuous of the woke mob in one breath and discussing the threat of vaccine injuries in the next.
Mendenhall’s interview wasn’t the first time YouTube censured Dr. Pinsky. In fact, when the company initially penalized his channel for airing misinformation three years ago, he broadened his efforts to the video streaming platform Rumble, a site that’s been a refuge for figures exiled from more traditional media channels. Its content creators have included Infowars’ Alex Jones and self-proclaimed “misogynist” Andrew Tate, as well as conservative voices like Steven Crowder and Steve Bannon.
On Rumble, Dr. Pinsky found an audience eager to hear that mainstream authorities were wrong and the outsiders were right. His roughly 530 videos on the site—on topics ranging from gender transition to the so-called deep state—have racked up millions of views. Although Dr. Pinsky describes himself as a libertarian and a moderate, the guests on his Rumble show, called Ask Dr. Drew, have included far-right figures: Mike Lindell of MyPillow fame, alt-right Pizzagate conspiracy promoter Jack Posobiec, British convict Tommy Robinson. And at the same time, he’s no longer producing his more mainstream The Dr. Drew Podcast.
Dr. Pinsky has various explanations for how his content and audience have shifted. He says he’s an advocate for contrarian voices and freedom of speech. When I push him on his recent promotion of the Wellness Company, a business headed by Peter McCullough, an anti-vax doctor who has had his board certification revoked, Dr. Pinsky defends himself on the grounds of “medical freedom.” But it’s also true that pushing back against his guests would likely be bad for business. Dr. Pinsky’s most-viewed videos feature some sort of anti-vax distrust.
There’s now a term for content creators continuously giving their followers more of what they want, resulting in more follower engagement: audience capture. “It’s the idea that influencers become radicalized by their audience,” says Jonathan E. Howard, MD, a New York City–based neurologist and psychologist who has written about the phenomenon. “They see what sort of thing earns them clicks, likes, reshares, and customers, and, consciously or not, they begin to produce more of it.”
IT’S MIDAFTERNOON AS I watch Dr. Pinsky begin recording his Rumble live stream. Off-air, I sense a weariness creeping into his voice—he hasn’t eaten lunch, and he’s on his fourth hour of recording for the day—but when the camera comes on, he snaps back into alertness. Susan loads an ad for a supplement purporting to defend against “cellular fragility syndrome” into the teleprompter, and Dr. Pinsky reads it with practiced ease.
The show’s guest that day is actor-director Justine Bateman, of Family Ties and Californication fame. More recently, Bateman has been posting about how excited she is for Trump’s election. For roughly an hour, Dr. Pinsky and Bateman chat good-naturedly about the dangers of AI and cancel culture.
Bateman has also been learning about the French Revolution, it turns out. She and Dr. Pinsky trade recommendations of books about mass delusions throughout history. “I don’t want to judge people for being human,” Dr. Pinsky says. “Seventy percent of people in mass formations just want to be left alone. Five or 10 percent throw the BS towel, and 20 percent are brainwashed.”
Dr. Pinsky gives the camera his steady, confident gaze, like a fond father who is disappointed by our foolishness and hopes we’ll come around soon. “And if you have a tendency to be brainwashed, you should know that about yourself.”
Earlier in my time with Dr. Pinsky, I tried to bring up the R-word. I figured that after holding down two jobs—physician and media machine—for more than 40 years, he’d want to give up at least one. But Dr. Pinsky wouldn’t even let me say “retirement.”
“Do you ever think about—” I started to ask, but he cut me off before I could finish. “No,” he said, anticipating the question and flashing a smile. The kind of genuine, bright-white smile that certainly hasn’t hurt his long career. “Because I love what I do. And as long as I feel useful and I can make a difference, I want to keep doing stuff.”
