Behind the Bastards - Part One: Dr. Oz: Why 'America's Doctor' Is A Bastard

Episode Date: April 20, 2021

Robert is joined by Matt Lieb to discuss Dr. Oz.FOOTNOTES: https://www.oprah.com/pressroom/oprah-bids-farewell-to-dr-oz-as-he-launches-his-own-show-september-14#ixzz6ryQsKlGx   https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2018/02/pulling-back-the-curtain-on-the-doctors-and-the-dr-oz-show-what-our-analysis-reveals/  https://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/the-dr-oz-health-quiz/all#ixzz6ryqeqPD3  https://www.nature.com/articles/nn0412-497  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6167233/  https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/how-dr-oz-effect-has-hooked-american-consumers-n134801  https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/magazine/18Oz-t.html  https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/04/reiki-cant-possibly-work-so-why-does-it/606808/   https://quackwatch.org/nccam/research/energy/   https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/case-dr-oz-ethics-evidence-and-does-professional-self-regulation-work/2017-02  https://www.marketwatch.com/story/dr-oz-slammed-for-suggesting-it-may-only-cost-us-2-to-3-of-american-lives-to-reopen-schools-2020-04-16  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/business/media/dr-oz-apology-coronavirus.html  https://www.businessinsider.com/dr-oz-false-misleading-baseless-medical-claims-coronavirus-2020-4#a-strawberry-and-baking-soda-mixture-can-whiten-teeth-oz-said-8  https://www.vox.com/2015/4/16/8412427/dr-oz-health-claims  http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2013/01/can_you_trust_dr_oz_his_medical_advice_often_conflicts_with_the_best_science.single.html  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. What's lighting my dumpster fires? I'm Robert Evans, host behind the bastards. That little introduction was an honor of my hometown, Portland, which just had a police officer murder a man who was having a mental health crisis and will probably be lighting some dumpsters on fire tonight. Although you won't hear it the day that this happens. But anyway, that's all beside the point right now. Because the point right now is that I'm introducing our guest today, the inimitable, Matt Leib. Hey, what's going on? Matt. Hey, what are you doing? I'm doing well. I'm excited to be here. A big fan of the pod. Love me some bastards. And you are, you do a Sopranos podcast. And the name is, I believe, pod yourself a gun. That's right.

That's right. Yeah, that's right. World's only Sopranos podcast. Don't go looking for any other ones because they do not exist. Little known TV show, the Sopranos, you might have heard of it. Very obscure. A niche TV show that only people who really like art understand. And that's why we talk about it. We talk about the art. It's fun thinking about that because I believe the song that introduced that show was something about waking up in the morning and getting yourself a gun, which is what I did this morning. You bought a gun? I did. I did buy a gun this morning. Not for Sopranos like uses. Although I am Italian, so you can't really know for sure. You can't really know for sure. Yeah, you woke up with a blue moon in your eye and you decided,

I'm going to go get myself a gun. And then I'm going to commit crimes in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. Yeah, they do that a lot in the show, right? A lot of Pine Barren crimes. They do it at least once and it's great. Yeah, they're chasing that guy through the yeah. Yeah, the Russian. Yeah, and they leave their DNA everywhere. Well, they pee everywhere and, you know, they also look, we Italians are not a subtle people. No, they spend that whole episode literally like dying of like cold and they're lost in the woods, but they spend all the time talking about how they're starving because they haven't eaten in 12 hours. It's the most Italian thing in the world. But I want to hear about this gun. Oh, it's just a gun. But today we have something much more

exciting than a gun. We have a bastard and our bastard. Are you ready for this? I'm so excited. Are you settling in? Yes. Doctor Mehmet Oz. I never introduced them like that. We're talking about Doctor fucking Oz today. Yes, that's right. Who would have thought he'd be a bastard? A TV doctor? Who would have thought a TV doctor could be a bad man? No, they take an oath. TV doctors, they say do no harm and get good ratings. That's the the Hippocratic oath. Do they do they also oath to be bad guest hosts on Jeopardy because he sucked and I didn't enjoy it. Honestly, if you are going up against Lavar Burton for any job, your first action should be like, you know what, I'm bowing out. Yeah, immediately. I'm not going to compete with Lavar Burton.

Respectfully fuck off, sir. Fighting Geordie, fighting Kuntekinte, fighting whatever the reading rainbow guy's name was. No, sir. I think it was Lavar. Lavar, yeah. Yeah, no, I did not watch him on Jeopardy, but I have seen the show and had no idea he was a bastard. Yes, he's a piece of shit. He's a different piece of shit. We're also going to be talking in the very near future about Dr. Phil, who's a much worse person. Dr. Oz is bad for some reasons that you'll suspect, you know, the pseudo science stuff, but also for some, I think, more complicated reasons, which we'll have us a nice talk about at the end of this episode. So I've always said that one of the great tragedies of American

public life is that our very best doctors are usually like kind of shlubby dudes and ladies maybe aren't the best at social graces and certainly don't have enough time because they're wildly overworked to do TV appearances. Yeah, yeah, I agree. They're not hot. I've always said doctors. They're not hot enough. They're not hot. I look at them. I'm like, ew, like we need to put a couple of billion dollars into a national program for more fuckable doctors. Come on. Yes. Yes. Doctors who fuck. That's the next level of health care in America. It won't be universal health care, but at least doctors will look fuckable. Now, I mean, I think the problem is not their fuckability because it's inherently hot to be a doctor. It's more the fact that they're not

necessarily even the ones who have a good bedside manner are good at explaining things. Just don't have the time to spend a lot of it on television because they're busy saving lives. This has led to a thriving industry well documented in the show of grifter health influencers and scam artists selling people poison with honeyed words and practice smiles. Today, though, we're talking about a different kind of medical grifter, kind of a grifter who helps to launder those more shady grifters, the guy people who aren't doctors, people who have no medical training or just trying to sell you nonsense cures. The guy we're talking about today exists to give them credibility and launder them into the public consciousness. And his name is Mehmet Oz. Mehmet Oz is maybe the most

influential public physician in the country, possibly the world. He is in every professional sense of the word, an excellent doctor, exceptional, even within the bounds of what it is he is trained to do. He may be one of the best in the world at what he does. And he uses his, you know, the thing that makes him a bastard is that he uses these exceptional qualifications along with his charisma, his handsome face to sell millions of people on nonsense cures every single year. And that's that's a bad thing to do. It's kind of made worse. We'll talk with us a lot by the fact that he is he's a he's a he's a heart surgeon and he's an exceptional heart surgeon. That's so sad. It's always sad when like an amazing doctor is a piece of shit. This is like

how I felt when Ben, Ben Carson turned out to be a Trump guy. I was like, but you're so good at the brain surgeons, which you talk to doctors, they'll be like, yeah, of course, it's always surgeons. Yeah. Yeah, they're the ones who think they're gods, right? They essentially have a God complex and they'll be really good at one thing. And then they'll also think that they're good at like politics and shit like that. I think good surgeons are so prone to being also like nonsense. Like so many of our nonsense public doctors are surgeons for the same reason that so many of our terrorists are engineers. They're people who get really good at a specific thing and it lets them convince themselves that they know what they're talking about in a

wider variety of things than they really do. That's great. It just makes me glad that I never, you know, got really proficient in any one skill. Never gain skills. I never ever learn how to do things. You'll become too smart for yourself and think that you are God. If no one learned to do anything, we would still be living in the mud and eating grubs. And you know what we wouldn't have? Naquile salesman? Oh, yeah. Or that. We would have very little at all. Mimit Sengiz Oz was born on June 11, 1960 to parents, Suna and Mustafa Oz, who must have fucked at some point in October of 1959 in order to conceive him. We have to assume his parents fucked in October. You don't know that. Yeah, he could be immaculate conception. Yeah. You know.

Robert. It's possible. I would say right now the most likely theory is that they fucked sometime in October. All right. His father, Mustafa, had been born in Bozkir, a village in southern Turkey. He had grown up poor in the countryside during the Great Depression and obviously, you know, Great Depression, bad time everywhere. Real bad time if you're like in rural Turkey, you know. Yeah. You're dealing with a different kind of poverty than even like our grandparents dealt with here. Yeah. So he had to work himself to the bone in order to make something of himself in order to get into medical school and distinguish himself enough that he was able to earn scholarships which allowed him to immigrate to the United States as a medical resident in 1955. So this is a

this is a hardworking man and a man who has to struggle. I'm going to guess in ways that are kind of difficult to imagine for most, even as difficult as our present times are. He's like a true lift yourself up by your bootstraps kind of guy. Yeah. Yeah. Came from the middle of like nowhere rural Turkey and worked himself into becoming a good enough doctor that he got. You know, he was able to get over the racism of the fucking 1950s immigration system. That's an achievement. Yeah. No, good for him. Started from the bottom and now he's on TV selling fake cures. That's his dad. Oh, that's his dad. Yeah. That's Mustafa. Yeah. So we're talking about his dad and his mom right now. His mom, Suna, came from a much

wealthier background. I don't know if this is what helped his dad get into the country or not. It may have been. Her father was a successful pharmacist and both sides of her family came from Istanbul. She grew up with a lot of money. As befits his more modest upbringing, Mustafa was an observant traditional Muslim. Soon as family was more moderate and secular, Mehmet and his two sisters grew up split between both approaches to religion. The Oz kids spent their childhood speaking Turkish and English fluently at home. So they grew up in a bilingual house. Mehmet was from a young, from a young age, ambitious, starving for success and his father's approval. He is want to note that he was born in the year of the rat, according to the Chinese zodiac.

In one interview, he noted of this, quote, you run the maze. If you put cheese in that maze, I swear to God, I'll get to it. And I'll get to it really fast. But should I be running after that cheese? Am I in the right maze? All of these questions, which people much greater than I am think through, I put on the back burner as I'm running after that cheese. What the fuck? That's way too much stock into the year of what animal you were born into. At least he wasn't born into the year of the pig. And he's like, well, you what you got to do is you got to take your snout and put it into the trough of life and just you really got to shut your face into food as hard as you can. You roll around in the shit. And then you hope that someday you'll find another piggy to

fuck. And then you have little piglets. It's like, I was born in the year of the pig. And that's why I dispose of bodies for the mob. It's just what you do. Well, that's a it's a nice take on year of the rat for him. It is it is telling because what he's saying there is like, I don't think about why I'm doing what I'm doing. I just I just strive to to to achieve things. And I don't think about whether or not they're good or bad. I just I have to achieve. Yeah, he just wants that cheese. Yeah, he wants that cheese. It's ambition without an analysis, I think is what you'd call it. And he's pretty open about that. Now, Mustafa, his dad repeatedly told the growing Dr. Oz, who's not yet a doctor, obviously, that when he'd grown up, when Mustafa had grown up, he hadn't

been able to relax for even a second on his road to escaping poverty and establishing himself as a cardiothoracic surgeon. So he's like telling his kid as he grows up, like, you know, like, if you want to succeed, you can't relax for even a second, you can't take a moment off, you always got to be hustling. Yeah. And that's how Mehmet grows up. He's an excellent student, but no amount of success is ever enough for his dad. He later recalled, I'd say I got a 93 on a test, he'd say, did anyone get better? That was always the question he asked. Cool. That sounds like a fun guy would hang. Yeah, I mean, this, the school I grew up in because of just where we were in North Texas, like about half of the kids in my school were either from India or from China

or Japan. And so you had a lot of kids who would talk that way about their parents, right? And some of them had, especially around our senior year, there were a couple of kids who had to get like taken in by an ambulance because they would just like, one in one case, seizing as a result of stress, like, it's not good to put this kind of pressure on a kid. Yeah. Like straight, having like nervous breakdowns just from like trying to get good grades. Right. Once again, don't get good at anything. It's not worth it. Don't develop skills. Don't develop skills. You'll get seizures. You're at risk of seizures. You're at risk of your, of your dad not loving you. You know, you just got to love you no matter what. Yeah, exactly. Stop caring about your dad. You know,

just coast, coast, find some dirt, eat some grubs. You'll be fine. Yeah. Start a Sopranos podcast. Start a Sopranos podcast. That's all you've got to do, dude. Really? Really bringing it back there. So Mehmet decided to become a doctor when he was just seven years old. He recalls standing in line at an ice cream parlor. Quote, I remember it like yesterday. There was a kid in front of me who was 10. My dad just to pass the time said, what do you want to be when you grow up? The kid said, I don't know. I'm 10. My father waited until he was out of your shot and said, I never want you to tell me that if I ask you that question. I never want you to tell me you don't know. It's okay if you change your mind, but I never want you to not have a vision of what you want to be. Mehmet,

go kill that kid. Kill that kid. Fucking cut him. Murder that loser kid and tell me what you want to do with your life. God damn. That is way too much pressure. Way, way too much pressure to put on a kid. And it seems like the kids like that always end up becoming the like going into the career that their father wanted them to do. And then eventually their dad dies. And then they're like, oh, fuck, I didn't get to do what I wanted to do with my life. And now I'm miserable. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's a real bummer. Yeah. It's not just don't put pressure on people. There's plenty of grubs. Yeah. By the time Mehmet was ready to start school, his father was wealthy enough to pay to send his son to Tower Hill School, a K through 12th grade private college

preparatory school in Wilmington, Delaware. Jesus, that sounds horrible. I know it sounds like a fucking nightmare. The fancy boy. Yeah, sounds uniforms, ties. Yeah, probably like weird shorts during the summer. Yeah. The fancy boy prep school worked well enough that Mehmet was accepted to Harvard, where he played football and water polo. His grades were, as always, exceptional. One of his roommates later recalled he was very competitive. There was never any question that he wasn't going to be a doctor. He wanted to be a fantastic surgeon. So people around him like everyone kind of recognizes this kid is brilliant. Everyone recognizes he's got the drive he's going to achieve. So good for him. I mean, it's just like I just look back now at my own

childhood and I'm like, God damn it. If I can think of one friend where I knew what they wanted to do for a career, I don't think we ever talked about like, what's your career going to be? No one was like, I'm a doctor. It was mostly just like, how's your hip hop album working out? And they're like, good. And they're like, cool. And that was the whole thing. That's interesting. I think it was different for me because there was definitely a lot of pressure to have something. You know, I went to a public school. I didn't go to a private school, but I went to a public school in my early schooling years was in a dirt poor farming town called Ida Belle, Oklahoma. And the school was as good as it could be in a place like that. Like they paddled us and stuff. Like it was not

not a high end educational. Wait, they paddled you in a public school? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, damn. They still did that in Oklahoma back in them days. Yeah. You got to sign the paddle afterwards too. It was nice. But when I was in, I don't know, third grade or so, I moved to Plano, which is a fairly wealthy suburb of Dallas. And the schools, the public schools are very good. And there's a lot of drive to achieve. Like I said, a lot of like kids who were really motivated by their parents to achieve. And so you either were kind of planning to be a doctor or, you know, something on that level, or you were planning to join the military because it was Texas. I was in ROTC. So me and all my friends, I think we all kind of assumed we're all going to join the army, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. I went to public school, you know, my entire life. And I think most of my friends either wanted to, they were either going to go into the army or they were, or they wanted to be famous musicians and or athletes. So see, my brother is a doctor and knew he was going to be a doctor from the, he's my older brother too, from the time that he was like seven. So like, and I, and I'm like, no idea. Yeah. I'm just saying, like a level of ambition at a very, very young age has always been a turn off for me when it comes to like friends, because it just, they always have that like sense where they're trying to get there. You're some sort of stepping stone into their whatever their career path is. And I don't like it.

So Oz took only one break during his relentless progress through medical school. And that break was to do a compulsory, I think it was a one year term of service in the Turkish army in order to maintain his dual citizenship. Other than that, straight on to like becoming a doctor, that's the only kind of breakage. So I guess that's his gap year is being in the Turkish shark. I'm just going to take a break, have a gap year and join the military of a foreign country. Yeah. It helps suppress, you know, Kurdish liberatory movements and stuff, whatever. Yeah. They got to stop trying to have their own thing. Yeah. He got a four year degree in biology and then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania,

where he doubled up working on both an MD and an MBA. He succeeded in earning both. So that's interesting to me. He gets both. He gets at the same time as he's getting his MD, he also gets a business degree. Yeah. This is very, there's a lot of foreshadowing going on here. Yeah, there's some foreshadowing. He earned both obviously with flying colors. He's an incredibly intelligent man, right? This isn't just a guy like we'll talk about Dr. Phil later. Dr. Phil, I don't think is very smart. He's incredibly good at reading and manipulating people. He's not particularly a genius. Mehmet Oz is a genius. Like I think he almost certainly is an actual genius. Yeah. In 1985, at age 25, he married Lisa Lemole, who was the daughter of a cardiothoracic surgeon

who worked with his father. They met at like a party or something. This relationship gradually opened him up to alternative medicine and Eastern mysticism because Lisa's mom was hardcore into homeopathy, meditation and other New Age stuff. We'll talk about that more in a little bit. For the next decade and change, Dr. Oz's career zoomed forward. He became triple board certified, which I don't know what that means, but it sounds impressive. It's at least three boards. It's at least three boards. That's three more than I've been certified. Yeah. I got zero boards under my belt. Not a one. Fuck. Not a single board between the three of us. So we really should find a board just to get us some certifications, guys, just to get certified. If you're a board,

if you're a medical board board out there, please, you know what? The state of New Jersey has certified me as a Reverend doctor. So I'm one board certified board out there. Yeah. Is there a board in the Universal Life Church? Because I am a minister slash Jedi knight. I'm going to say that counts. All right. I'm board certified. Can you get me painkillers? I put, you know, I know a guy. That sounds legal enough. So he starts working as a heart surgeon. And he's very good at being a heart surgeon. And he's not just good at the heart surgery part. He's good at the science part. Over time, he authors hundreds of peer reviewed articles. And he's awarded 11 patents. One of them is for a solution to preserve transplanted organs. Another is for an aortic valve that can be implanted

without open heart surgery. Like he's he's not just really good at the mechanics of surgery. He's an excellent scientist. Yeah. Yeah. 11 patents is pretty good. Seriously. One might say he's the wizard of Oz. There I think I read like six articles with variations of that title on the guy. All right. Well, I got to go then. Bye guys. It's just a big journalist can't fucking help themselves. Oh, you can't help yourself. If you're anybody, you see Oz, you're like, I got to call him a wizard. Call him a wizard. Dr. Oz was hired by Columbia Medical School as a teacher. And as, you know, he's also working, they've got a hospital. He's working there, but he's also teaching. He very quickly rises to the level of full professor and becomes the vice chair of the

cardio of the heart surgery department, basically. How old is he at this point? He's in his 30s. Oh, man. Yeah. Like everything I've read right now on its own would be a career trajectory. Any doctor in medicine would envy. Yeah. You could die happy with that being your fucking resume. Like that's a hell of an achievement. Yeah. My God. Yeah. In 1995, a New York Times profile referred to Dr. Oz as quote, probably the most accomplished 35 year old cardiothoracic surgeon in the country. Jesus. He might be the best at what he does in the entire United States at this point. I mean, I don't know how to measure that, but he's very good. I mean, I don't know any other heart surgeons by name. So fuck. Yeah. I mean, he's the guy. Yeah. Now, the article that

I found that quote in, however, gives some hints about what was to come because that article was about Dr. Oz's increasing experimentation with alternative medicine. It opens with the story of one of his patients, a 49 year old diabetic smoker who suffered a critical heart attack. She went under Mehmet's knife for a dangerous surgery, quote. At the invitation of Oz and his patient, there were two other people on hand in surgical gowns and masks. A second year medical student named Sally Smith stationed at the patient's feet and a 52 year old healer named Julie Mottz, who was standing at the patient's head. As volunteers in Oz's cardiac complimentary care center, they worked for free through the operation seldom moving except to reposition their hands.

As Oz requested sutures and clamps and units of lidocaine, Mottz called softly to Smith to move her hands from the small toe of the patient's right foot to a point on the sole known as the bubbling spring. What they were doing, no one else in the operating room knew how to do or had ever seen done during a coronary bypass or had ever thought worth doing, even as an experiment. In this ultimate theater of scientific medicine, the women were using their hands as kings once did to treat subjects with scropula. And as Jesus has said to have done and his shamans and mothers in Chinese Qigong practitioners still do, they were using their hands to run a kind of energy which science cannot prove exists into the patient's kidney meridian, which also may or may not exist.

The kidney meridian? Yeah, you gotta get that meridian. That's the best part of the kidney is the meridian. That's the most delicious part of the kidney is the meridian. Oh man, with fucking on a Ritz cracker slice, then I love me a little bit of just want to get you want to get like some duck fat or some butter and you want to get it sizzling in the pan and you just slap that meridian on for like a half a second and it's good to go. That's all you fucking which is a little bit of little bit of char. You know, I mean, this all feels like he's going to start turning his patients into foie gras. And I'm very excited for what's to come. This heel turn that he's going to take. Yeah. So yeah, that's that's that's silly. I think that's silly. But at the other hand,

like it's in a hospital, these people are clearly following sanitation guidelines. They're not getting paid. The patient's not getting charged extra. So I don't have a problem with that. And the smartest doctor in the world. It's like one of those things where you're like, I feel like this is wrong, but I don't know enough to dispute it. So I'm gonna let him fuck with my kidney meridian. I'm not willing to morally condemn him for that, even though I think it's silly just because like, yeah, yeah, what's the fucking harm in seeing, you know? And in that case, if you're actually doing it in a medical context, you you're guaranteeing everybody's taking proper sanitation procedures, fucking whatever. And it seems like from what I can tell that sounded

noninvasive. It's not like they were just doing energy work or whatever. Yeah, they were throwing, you know, crystals and doing fucking pendulums over over him. It falls into the category of it couldn't possibly hurt. So why not give it a shot, right? Yeah, we'll talk about this more later. But that's kind of what they were going for. You know what else can't hurt? I don't the products and services that support this podcast, guaranteed to not harm you. In fact, every one of the products of ours that you buy extends your life by exactly 45 minutes. So you know, spend all your money and gain immortality. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated

the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the good bad ass way, and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast,

or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the

iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space,

313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. We're talking about Dr. Oz, who in the mid 90s has started some weird alternative medicine stuff. Now, he's not the person who starts the alternative medicine program at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, which is also like a teaching hospital, whatever. It's one of those hospitals that they have a medical school with, you know, the thing. If television has taught me accurately, all of the doctors are fucking constantly. Doctors fucking teach. That's what they do. Doctors fucking they teach. That's all they do. You know, when you're not teaching,

you're fucking. And Columbia Presbyterian was among the most reputable medical establishments on planet earth, still is, as far as I'm aware. So this alternate medicine program there is kind of an odd thing. It was not started at the behest of anyone at the top of the school. The whole thing came about because in 1993, a retired utility executive named Richard Rosenthal gave them three quarters of a million dollars as a private grant in order to establish a center to study alternative medicine. Just gifted money and just said, start a magic doctoring school. Now, Richard had been motivated by having several close friends of his get terribly sick in such a way that doctors told them there was nothing that could be done to help them.

And his response was to basically throw a bunch of money into a hole to see if alternative medicine could come up with solutions. And it's one of those things I could make fun of. Like this is almost exactly a week after my mom just died of a type of cancer that when you get diagnosed with it, pancreatic, there's basically nothing they can do. You know, it's even like she went through chemo and it did nothing. You know, I get it. You go through something. I think, okay, well, let's try other shit, you know? Yeah. So I can't I can't even blame Richard for like it seems like he was motivated out of grief to do this. You know, you can't blame people for trying to try any other alternative to I mean, you know, something in which there is no cure and modern modern medicine.

It makes sense. I will blame the snake oil salesman. I'm never going to blame someone who's like, well, doctors said they can't cure me. So I'm going to eat this root. You know, fuck it. Why not go for it? Who gives a shit? Like it can't hurt if you're definitely going to die. Yeah. And it is to be honest, like it is kind of within even you could argue within kind of medical best practices because one of the things if like I took EMT training years ago, one of the things they tell you is that you're not supposed to use an AED, you know, like paddles to restart a heart. You're not supposed to use them on an infant. But if an infant is in, you know, the state where like you use them on them because they're dead. Shock the shit out of

them. Yeah, they're dead. You can't make dead worse. So like why not? So I guess like, yeah, you can't, I don't know, can't make it worse. Why not see if it if something happens? I'm not against the basic idea of testing some of this shit is what the worst thing you're going to get out of that is a really cool TikTok video of electrocuting a dead body. Absolutely. And then you get a fuckload of followers and you start selling brain pills. It's a perfect plan. So yeah. So I can't blame the college for this. I can't blame the guy for funding it. It's a reasonable thing. Why not? You know what? That's kind of my attitude is why the fuck not. And that's more or less what the Dean of Faculty of Medicine at the college said, like, all right,

well, we're not paying for it. Why not give it a shot? That said, a lot of medical professionals were really angry about the idea. Dr. Victor Herbert, a Columbia Medical School graduate and a professor of medicine at Mount Sinai and a board member of the National Council against health fraud publicly lambasted the lecturers brought in by the program as con artists and sociopathic liars. And knowing the kind of people who get into the selling this shit business, I don't know if he's wrong about that. A lot of these people are fucking sociopaths, you know? He says, quote, I am nasty. I call practitioners a fraud, practitioners a fraud. It's my feeling that the Rosenthal Center has been promoting fraudulent alternatives as genuine. And I get

his critiques, you know, that is one of the like, I can say on one hand, what's the harm, but also maybe the harm is that people hear this stuff is being done in a hospital. So it must help when it doesn't. And maybe some of those people do that, not the way Dr. Oz is doing it, where we're going to do the normal medical procedure. We'll have this done. Maybe some people decide, I just want to have the energy work done. And then they dropped out of a heart attack because it doesn't replace a valve, you know? I'd like to think that even at a hospital or a research facility with Western medicine that they still peer review and try out different, you know, like alternative medicines, right? Some of them work. Some of them work. Like,

there was a time when, you know, acupuncture was seen as kind of like a crock. And now it's like kind of just a standard part of Western medicine. It's just, you know, so. Yeah. And there's, there's a lot to be said about even acupuncture. You know, I went through a lot of it as a kid and it did nothing for me. But my grandpa swore by it for his Parkinson's. And even if it was, I don't know, you could say it's like fucking whatever placebo, but he experienced relief. So I don't care. Like, yeah, yeah. I don't know. I'm not going to get into like it because I don't know, I don't know all of the, I know it's one of those things where there's a number of divergent opinions on acupuncture, but a number of things that were

initially considered alternative medicines had been found to have medical, you know, benefits. Not that that's the norm, but it has happened in history, you know, different kind of traditional or whatever treatments. So this is very controversial, though, is the point I'm making. And a number of people even picketed the college when the Rosenthal Center opened. None of this dissuaded Dr. Oz from participating in it. His explanation as to why he embraced alternative medicine was to be quite honest, kind of brilliant. He said that his, by this point, vast experience as a real doctor had really informed him of the limits of medical science. Specifically, he said that while he could so bypass grafts and even implant a new heart into

someone's chest, he couldn't change the habits that had made them sick in the first place. Nor could he cure the emotional issues that they were dealing with. Depression, he pointed out, was a major risk factor in heart patient recovery post surgery and things like meditation, right? That's kind of considered new age. That can help with depression and that can help with healing. And he's right about that. That's not a bad point to make. So he seemed to insinuate when he was talking to the New York Times, why wouldn't a caring physician want to try everything possible to improve his patient's odds? He could point out that meditation had shown some benefit for heart disease patients. Who was to say that other stuff wouldn't work? Dr. Oz told the New York

Times that he felt ethically obliged to experiment in new directions in medicine. The article makes it clear that Dr. Oz had not let up one bit in the workaholic tendencies that he inherited from his father as well. And I'm going to quote from the Times again here. Mehmet Oz is one of those rare beings who seem incapable of sloth. He's doing a heart transplant right now, his secretary says on the phone. And he's got a double lung transplant waiting. And those are in addition to his two regularly scheduled open hearts. And then at three, he's supposed to fly to Boston to deliver a lecture. So exceptional is Oz's energy that some of his colleagues use him as a benchmark, correlating their own vitality as a fraction of a full Mehmet unit.

He runs down Lobb's size as tennis partner, mentor and department chairman, Dr. Eric A. Rose, who at 44 is one of the top heart transplant surgeons in the world. I can't tell you how nervous I would be going into a lung transplant procedure and then hearing like this doctor's got to do a heart after you and then got to fly to Boston. I'd be like, do you think you could maybe take your time with this, bro? Like, what could you please? I get that. I do. It is a matter. We'll talk about the ZN2. We don't have enough of these guys. It's actually a major health problem, how few people there are that can do this. But it is exhausting. Everything you read about this guy's day, like you're just one of those

people who I think, I kind of get the feeling, I don't want to psychoanalyze someone, but you get the feeling he can't be alone and still like he has to always be moving towards something. Yeah, he's got his dad in the back of his head, telling him to murder that kid in the ice cream shop. Yeah, kill that fucking kid. He doesn't know what he wants to be. I mean, I imagine that would create a bit of a problem later in life with stillness. Yeah, I feel for him a little bit of that. Sure. Now, the article also goes into more detail about how Dr. Oz's wife's family peaked his interest in alternative medicine. His father-in-law was one of the surgeons on the first heart transplant team in Texas. He'd also been nicknamed the Rock Doc by Rolling Stone for playing

music in the OR to relax patients. His mother-in-law had developed a special low-fat diet for her husband's cardiac patients. And this was really before it was accepted that low-fat diets would be good for heart patients. She once refused surgery for her own inflamed gallbladder and handled it instead by altering her diet. She taught her son-in-law, Dr. Oz, about using arnica for sore muscles and herbal tea for stomach aches. So he gets brought in, in part, to alternative medicine by these people who have a real medical background and are doing things that aren't widely accepted but also may help. Music, I think there's some data now on how music can help with certain aspects of the healing process. Right. Low-fat.

Mother-in-law seemed to be on the cutting edge of that. When you said the Rock Doc, I got concerned. I thought it was going to replace people's hearts with crystals and shit. And I was like, oh, no. Oh, no. They all dive. My God, their hearts are pretty. So this is how Mehmet gets introduced to the wide world of quack cures. And it makes sense. He enters it through largely reasonable ways, alternative treatments that have some positive impact on people. There's extremely reasonable stuff in the article in general. Dr. Oz points out that in 1995, American hospitals had only recently allowed family to stay in the hospital

with a patient. While in Turkey, it was common for families to do this. And of course, having loved ones nearby can help a patient's morale, which can influence how well they heal. No one, I think, today would even think to disagree with that. It didn't used to be common. It changed. So he's in medicine during a time when a lot of stuff that just wasn't, that is kind of now common since medicine wasn't. And I think that kind of opens his eye to like, well, maybe all this other shit works. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe everything in my head is correct. Yeah. We're slowly getting to him turning into a complete narcissist. Yeah. And the article kind of veers right from, yeah, having loved ones in the room can influence

how well you heal to Dr. Oz's love of energy work, particularly his work with a lady named Mottz, who believed she could sense the energy of heart transplant patients. The Times article certainly does not portray this woman in a particularly positive light. Quote, she now has her surgical sea legs under her. But the first time Mottz observed open heart surgery, she had a shaky debut. She had been standing at the patient's head outside the sterile field, periodically telling Oz what changes she was able to sense in the patient's energy. The patient was obviously not awake, but probably had some awareness, most likely smell and perhaps hearing. Open heart patients are often fitted with headphones and provided with

tapes to listen to, including if they want, Oz's own specially recorded Sufi trance music. For the bypass team, it was quite a novelty to hear Mottz report that she was registering the patient's moods in her body. Various states of fear, anger or satisfaction perceived as roughness in her chest or turbulence in her stomach. At one point, seeing that Mottz was not looking so good herself, Oz asked the Burley assistant to take her outside for some air. When he returned, he said, I'd sense a change in my stomach. It's a tenseness. No, it's a growling. No, wait a minute. I'm just hungry. Oh my God, I swear she's like, she seemed like she is just describing her own feelings and then just ascribing them to an open heart surgery. But yeah, it's, it's one of those things. I'm not

sure exactly what type of energy work this person is doing. Because there's a few different kind of categories of it. She's checking the vibes, dude. She's checking the vibes, just making sure, you know, the vibe dipstick is filled with oil. I should note if I'm going to be totally fair that Riki, which has its origins in Japan, has been shown in some early scientific studies to help diminish the symptoms of chemotherapy and to significantly alter people's experience of physical and emotional pain. And I have some friends who swear by it for kind of physical and emotional pain in particular. I don't know what Riki is. I've heard of it. Is it like when Mr. Miyagi rubs his hands together and then he puts his warm hands? It's like energy work, I guess. I don't

know. It's not a kind of thing that I particularly believe in. And I kind of think in a lot of cases it's that you have a good relationship with the practitioner and you trust them and it can be, you know, an emotionally soothing thing, which I don't know. There were early studies, scientific studies that showed that it could diminish the symptoms of chemotherapy and reduce people's experience of pain. Now, further studies were commissioned after these early studies, which starting in the early 2000s were more negative. A number of hospitals did, however, add Riki practitioners to their stable of available providers. In part, as a result of the work that Dr. Oz and the Center at Columbia was doing, you can find these people in hospitals now.

And it's worth noting that a number of the positive studies about Riki and other similar things were conducted by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Their work is problematic to say the least. And I'm going to quote now from an analysis of several studies conducted by this organization by Professor Dr. Edzard Ernst. Quote, Three studies suggested that energy medicine had an effect, but their authors either applied statistics inappropriately, confounded the effects of energy healing by adding unrelated interventions to the experimental condition or failed to design or blind equivalent placebo controls. Their results are therefore untrustworthy. The two studies that were well designed failed

to demonstrate effects from energy and healing. The odds of generating a useful result of a clinical trial of energy medicine are small. Moreover, what impact would negative studies have? Scientists will simply say, we could have told you so, and proponents are unlikely to change their mind. Proponents may then claim that the negative study must have been flawed or that energy medicine cannot be investigated by the tools of science. Or they might rely on the NCCAM, that organization I talked about, funded studies that generated biased but apparently positive results. The NCCAM's approach encourages a self-perpetuating cycle of misinterpreting research and conducting flawed research, which inevitably generates some studies that erroneously

claim positive effects and give the false impression that the efficacy of energy medicine is still scientifically unresolved. Man, we are just veering into anti-vax territory and like anti-mass territory people who just they Google stuff and then they go, this article right here says that mass actually caused COVID. They can't analyze and it's from a government science organization. You know, these guys like and there's a study that's like, well, okay, but you actually look at scientists. You don't have a vested and often financial interest in this and they point out all these very obvious flaws in the study. It's worth noting that the NCCAM was founded in 1998, three years after the New York Times article about Dr. Oz and the

Alternative Medicine Center at Columbia was published. Now, Dr. Oz at this point was not yet on Oprah's show, but he had been featured on TV several times for his pioneering work with mechanical hearts as well as his embrace of alternative medicine. You can draw a direct line. I don't know if we would have an NCCAM without Dr. Oz. I don't know. You can't say that for certain, but he is someone who before his embrace of alternative medicine starts to be well known as an exceptional doctor and scientists. He embraces this stuff. Columbia starts studying this stuff and even though everything they find is pretty inconclusive, the fact that it's in an actual hospital lends it legitimacy. This organization is started in order to test this

stuff. The organization is filled with people who already believe in it carrying out tests that are flawed and it helps prepare this culture of believing too much in this stuff. My God, it's just like it's a real-life Facebook group. It's just like everyone already believes in all the stuff and they just keep co-signing each other's bullshit. And it's one of those things. Again, I know people who swear by Reiki who gain emotional benefits from it, who think it helps with a number of things, including emotional pain. And if you find something that helps you alleviate your emotional pain, more fucking power to you. You're never going to hear me say a damn word against it.

You know, go with God. That's all great. But I mean, you want to relieve pain. Try some morphine though, dog, because that's shit. Oh my God. And there's no downsides to morphine. That's the best part of it. I can't think of one downside to morphine. It's not a single one. Yeah, it just feels good the whole time and you just need to take more. My issue is not so much with any particular treatment, not that not not even an issue that people would like. It's number one. A lot of people will issue actual medical treatment in favor of some of this stuff. And it's not going to. I'm trying to be as fair as I can.

Rinky is not going to solve your blocked cardiac pathways. You know, yeah, like it's not going to fix it. Yeah. I mean, energy is great. But Plavix works wonders. Plavix is a lot better. And it's it's it's it's more to the point even more than that is it gets us on this this road of increasingly accepting and legitimizing things that there's no there's not a scientific basis for. And that leads us to shit like let's drink bleach to cure the coronavirus. Like, you know, it's where the road ends. I have a problem with and Dr. Oz experimenting with an energy worker during a surgery like it's where that leads to. And he plays a major role in legitimizing that he's he he helps put he helps put our national foot on the the gas pedal

into the the post science age. Yeah, it's a slippery slope to that, you know, downing that brain octane oil, you know, exactly, exactly. So yeah, at this point, though, we're talking still in the mid 90s, everything Dr. Oz is saying is reasonable from a certain point of view. He's not claiming that Ricky's going to cure cancer. He's not even claiming it's going to cure your heart disease. He's saying it could help with recovery and a lot of recovery is mental. And he's not, you know, it's possible he's right, you know, he's not yet a bastard. It's certainly not impossible for this kind of stuff to have a mental impact, which can positively affect recovery. OK, yeah. So yeah, he's not a bastard at this point.

Nearly all of his alternative medical claims were things that you could argue were at least to some extent reasonable, based on the way he framed them. And he was most importantly, regardless of whatever kind of woo woo stuff he got into, an exceptionally gifted medical perfecture professional who was performing something like 250 heart surgeries a year. You know, that's 250 lives a year. Yeah. Extended. Yeah. That's that's great. He's not a bastard yet. Yeah, he's doing great work so far. You know, despite the little weird hard stuff. Fine. A little bit of energy, a little bit of heart surgery. It works out. And the thing, though, that is, I think is happening during this period. And I don't know

how conscious a choice this is by Dr. Oz. I think it is because of the fact that he gets an MBA as well and the fact that he's very good at getting press, very good at getting on TV, at getting in the news. I think he is at this point crafting his career to make himself into an ideal candidate for famous TV doctor. I think he is building a background that will allow him to establish his celebrity career later. It is not hard to see how a handsome doctor with TV experience, a New York Times profile talking about alternative medicine and a seriously impressive resume was going to wind up eventually on Oprah Winfrey's radar. He almost built himself perfectly for that to happen. And he tried in the early 2000s. He tried with his wife to start a TV show. They

like filmed a pilot episode. It didn't really take off. But he succeeds. And I think he's pushing and his wife is pushing him to to get into very much his business partner to develop himself into a media personality. And he eventually succeeds in 2004 in getting invited to Oprah Winfrey's show. Now, Mehmet immediately endeared himself to Winfrey's audience with his willingness to discuss Frank health details in a way that was demystifying and humorous. He most famously explained that healthy poops tended to be shaped like an S and should hit the water like an Olympic diver with very little splash. Oprah herself later recalled, when he made it okay to talk about the shape of a good poop, I knew he could talk about anything. He always found ways to make the human

body endlessly fascinating. Man, that is, I mean, I'm low key impressed that he impressed Oprah with doodoo shapes. It's it's mom stuff, you know, mom's love poop. They love talking about doodoo. That's the thing. And that's what like Oz does exactly the right things to endear himself to like millions of middle class moms. Yeah, which is the best market in the country. It's an incredible market. You can make all of the money. If you can get a few million middle class moms to love you. Yeah, I worked at this, this digital, what do you call it, like a digital production company. And the most famous person that we dealt with was a famous Facebook mom who had millions of followers and I would watch her stuff. And I was like, this is, you know, maybe the most awful

shit I've ever seen is just a lady in a car yelling at people about kids. Yeah. And it but the she was a famous mom. I mean, if you can become a famous mom, you will be one of the most famous people in the country. Yeah, I mean, it's it's the power of particularly middle class moms can't be exaggerated. Like in Poland, the cops and the feds were able to fuck over as many people as they wanted until they started gassing moms. Right, exactly. The whole country's pissed. Yeah, they're like, like, hey, listen, you can do that to people of color, but those are moms. Those are white moms. Those are white moms. That could be my mother. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know what else? Where are you going with that? Where are you going with that?

I thought you were saying you know what else is your mom. That's where I thought you were going with that. What else is your mother? The products and services that support this podcast. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives

a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991. And that man,

Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So we've all just agreed that Matt is verifying. That was the discussion over the break. You made this one into a two-parter, Matt. So the audience can thank you for two episodes about Dr. Oz this week. All right. Or they can blame you. And if they blame or blame him, Matt's home address is...

We love to dox our guests. Dox me, baby. So Oprah had Dr. Oz on her show 55 times over the course of five years. She gave him the nickname America's Doctor, which stuck. And although I'm not saying this in a positive sense, is unfortunately accurate. He's definitely America's Doctor. Just appealing to the lowest common denominator, the stupidest human being on earth. America's Doctor. And if you look at the health of the average American, you can tell the quality of job he's done. Eat more bread. Everybody eat bread. Well, actually, that's the one thing he is. He's

actually pretty good about like weight loss. Well, I don't know. That's still debatable. Stop defending Dr. Oz, Robert. I'm not going to defend. I just love to be fair, you know? I know you do. You're very fair. Look, say what you will about Hitler. He was a vegetarian. And that's good for the environment. The man cared about animal rights. By 2009, it was clear that Dr. Oz had more than enough star power to justify a shot at his own show. Oprah's production company had little trouble finding a buyer for what was sure to be a block buster new series. Her show celebrated the launch of Dr. Oz's show with an entire episode dedicated to Dr. Oz, which acted as something of a coming out party for his brand from a press release on

Oprah.com. This is talking about the special Dr. Oz episode. Moving personal stories and extraordinary surprises are featured throughout the hour as Dr. Oz meets viewers who share how his advice saved their lives from those who noticed life threatening diseases, their doctors missed to those who lost weight thanks to his diet tips from Dr. Oz. Real people step forward to offer their thanks to America's doctor. Plus, it's the reunion that Dr. Oz never imagined would happen as Oprah show producers tracked down a young boy he cared for in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the two reunite for the first time. He's like the fucking perfect, perfect guy for this. I mean, I love that it's literally sounds like an hour long special of people just thanking him,

which might be the most narcissistic thing I think I've ever heard. Yeah. I mean, like it's one thing for Oprah to do that because I think America does legitimately owe her thanks for just years of content, you know, but years of mostly dangerous health based content. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, it's awful content. But the fact is it's it's quantity over quality in America. And, you know, but an hour of just thanking Dr. Oz and having people come up to him like, you saved me. It's fucking wild worth noting in terms of his bastardry that in kind of the acceleration from, hey, maybe energy healing works to becoming a monster. The early 2000s is the period in which Oprah becomes aware of a Brazilian healer named

John of God, who believes he can do psychic surgery and like God. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, of the of the Brazilian of God. Yeah. And on the episode in which she introduces John of God to America, Dr. Oz comes on and gives his professional opinion that like, he seems like he's really having an effect on people. And I can't explain it. I don't think medical science can explain what this man is doing, basically giving a real doctor's opinion that this guy's got to be legit. Yeah. John of God later turned out to be a mass rapist on these scale hundreds of victim on a scale almost incomprehensible. We did a two-parter on John of God. You can listen to it. It's a fucking nightmare. Wow. This guy never gets half the following that he has if it's not for Oprah and

Dr. Oz. So, holy shit. Oh, it's good shit. Good shit. I found a fascinating New York Times article written a few months into Dr. Oz's new show. It notes that in transitioning to his own series, Dr. Oz had to spice up his act for a daily, for a daily daytime audience, quote, potentially distracted by the tantrums of a toddler or the yelping of a labradoodle. They go on to summarize his early episodes. His show tackles topics as diverse and diversely weighty as skin cancer, kitchen burns, sleep eating and pubic hair loss, returning constantly to the same television motherload Winfrey profitably mined, weepy overweight guests who vow and often fail to get in shape. And it has taken its star far away from any sort of traditional medical practice.

He explains that transition as the product of frustration. Too often, he told me, he would sit in an office and be telling you stuff too little, too late, that if you'd been able to lose a little weight or if your diabetes had been managed more aggressively, then it would have dramatically altered your destiny, which is now to go downstairs and have open heart surgery. With his TV show, he can exhort Americans to end all aspects, to tend all aspects of their health, head to toe before they reach a point of no return. Lose weight, go to Brazil and get sexually assaulted by a con man. You know, there's always that point, you know, I've listened to your show, and there's always that point in the episode where the comedian or the guest has no other option,

but to just say, fuck, that sucks, dude. There's no other comment, but what? Oh, that's crazy. But, you know, hey, John of God, Dr. Oz, they all sound like great people. Yeah, yeah, and it's going to get worse. You know, this is kind of the period, one of the things he's just to do in this period is he starts cutting back on his surgical practice and performing fewer surgeries. Yeah, because he's got to keep up all those TV dates. Yeah, in order to tell people about John of God, the mass rapist, and in order to tell people about, I don't know, some stuff that's good, right, telling people to eat healthier, a good America's diet sucks, his diet advice, I think is, well, we'll talk about that later.

It's also problematic. Anyway, he's trading objectively useful medical work for being a nonsense doctor, but he's making millions of dollars. Yeah, and in America, that is the ultimate marker of doing the right thing. Yeah, that's the only thing that tells you whether or not you're doing the right thing. Yeah, if you make a lot of money, then whatever you're doing is the right thing to do. Yeah, it's morally correct to make a lot of money. Yeah, morally righteous, righteous wealth. Yes. You know what else is righteous, Matt? Is it the products and services? No, my man, it's you, because the episode's over, part one is over, and we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna sail out. But first, you've got to plug your plugables,

and I just decided to compliment you before we roll out. Yeah, that's very nice. I here, here, I thought you were just trying to get me to talk about products and services. Well, I, thank you for having me on. I have a product and or service called Pod Yourself a Gun. It's a Sopranos podcast. And yeah, if you like the Sopranos, or even if you don't, check it out on the, you know, wherever the podcast store is podcast. All right, well, this is the show that it is, and we're done doing the things that we do. So go out into the world and, I don't know, find Dr. Oz and scream at him. Give him a good, give him a good screaming. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you,

hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself

stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.