So when I talk about the temples of the Aztecs and I talk about the guillotines, this is the modern version of that.

They are not happy until blood is spilled.

They go into frenzies and cancel is the modern guillotine.

And if they can't cancel, then they start making actual physical threats.

Hello and welcome to episode three of the unspeakable podcast. That was a taste of this week's

guest, internist addiction medicine specialist, and all-around celebrity physician Dr. Drew Pinsky,

who's known for a lot of things, but perhaps most of all for co-hosting The Call-in Show Loveline with Adam Carolla.

I am your host, Megan Down, and I'm coming to you from my still undisclosed, or I hope,

mostly undisclosed location in rural Appalachia. I bring this up by way of offering

a little context for this interview. If you follow me on Twitter, you may recall, although I'm

really hoping you don't recall, a dust up that occurred a few months ago over my apparently

unwise decision to publish an essay about

how I had come down here from New York in March to escape the coronavirus. A few people on Twitter

decided to interpret this as not only my somehow knocking Appalachia, which couldn't be farther from the truth, but as my being

a, quote, literal murderer because I was surely bringing the virus down here and infecting everyone

in my wake. This turned into at least a week-long major dragging on Twitter, and I mean

major. Like, people were demanding to know my location so they could

check health department statistics and numbers of hospital beds or something. And it got pretty out of

control, even by Twitter standards. Around the same time, my guest, Drew Pinsky, was getting a major online

pummeling himself, sparked by some of his initial comments about the seriousness of coronavirus

and whether the media was being alarmist. He thought it was. Then a social media user made a video

compiling a bunch of his comments. Some of them were taken out

...