Monday, April 5th, 1999 - #917
Guest: Bob Guccione Jr.
Host: Adam, Dr. Drew
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Show Summary:
Bob starts the show with 18 minutes of stats and studies his magazine did for an article about AIDS. I'm not sure what is true or not, but Dr. Drew stays silent through most of it. You wonder if he disagress with what Bob is saying just to be a polite host, but really wants to question what he's hearing.
Bob is a great guest. He's obviously intelligent and participates in many of the phone calls.
Recording Info:
Added: 8/2/2017
Recorded By: ?
Transferred By: ?
Size: 131.64 MB
Length: 1:35:52
Bitrate: 192kb/s CBR
Gabba
Bob starts the show with 18 minutes of stats and studies his magazine did for an article about AIDS. I’m not sure what is true or not, but Dr. Drew stays silent through most of it. You wonder if he disagress with what Bob is saying just to be a polite host, but really wants to question what he’s hearing.
Bob is a great guest. He’s obviously intelligent and participates in many of the phone calls.
Drew stays mostly silent because Bob doesn’t really say anything that Drew can argue with. His basic points are that (1) there is no heterosexual AIDS epidemic in this country, and (2) in Africa, malaria kills far more people than AIDS does, but virtually all of the attention and money go to AIDS. Those are basically facts.
Despite Drew’s continued hatred of Bob (that continues into his April 2012 ACS appearance), they appear to get along fairly well. Bob is also an excellent guest….a sleeper classic as Gio might say.
Drew does argue with Bob, but he does it very subtly, although he does concede that HIV positive heroin addicts live surprisingly long. Bob’s points about “proteins” sound suspiciously like the theories on “toxins” that Drew and Adam like to rag on. Adam also gets in a nice dig at Bob’s points about the animal kingdom’s sexual freedom when a 14-year old calls in wondering if she’s too young to have sex – “Well, Bob told me raccoons start having sex at age two, so you do the math.”
I thought I wouldn’t like him since I usually do disagree with anyone who drew disagrees with being subtley or not. There was a couple of weird things he spoke of but he picks up on childhood trauma the way drew and Adam do. I also found his point on the traumatized being more charismatic interesting. Not true for everyone of course but still something to think about.
Bob was a good guest. He seemed to be trying to make some kind of argument that promiscuity is okay. But at the same time he seemed insightful and compassionate and laughed at Adam’s shiznit.
Commenters being way to nice about guest Bob Guccione Jr. His jag is proliferating fringe hypothesis and conclusions from less than reliable sources, despite consequences. The more controversial the better, as he is trying to sell magazines after all. Drew has a hard time rebutting his bullshit because he often mentions his facts are derived from new studies, and I know drew is thinking “well that doesn’t sound right but I haven’t read that study so I can’t really comment”.
Bob states flat out that “there is no heterosexual AIDS epidemic – There never has been, NEVER WILL BE. That is a fact”. Drew has to interject the “in America”. He agrees with drew reflexively, then immediately argues that Cause-of-death related data is unreliable in Africa and Asia, with the undertone that in fact his statement was not just about America.
Drew misses several opportunities in the discussion to interject that AIDS in fact kills no one, and that there are only AIDS-related deaths from infections… such as Malaria. And of course there is a heterosexual AIDS epidemic in Africa (1 in 40 people), we know this by sampling and statistics, not from AIDS testing every infection.
The pentacle of his bullshit is when Bob states that anti-viral therapies are more likely to kill an HIV positive individual than their un-treated disease… I shouldn’t have to say anything about this one but here is from the (antiviral) wiki “Treatment has been so successful that in many parts of the world, HIV has become a chronic condition in which progression to AIDS is increasingly rare” – these facts were well known by 1999.
America got a little more ignorant and misinformed, on this day April 5, 1999.
Not nearly as as bad as I thought it might be.
Thought he was a really good guest: articulate and entertaining. But, yeah, his statements about antiretroviral therapy were absolute garbage.