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

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

Robert is joined again by Matt Lieb to continue to discuss Dr. Oz. 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 and 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. This is behind the bastards. The podcast will be neg our audience in order to make them more closely drawn to us. It's a tactic I learned from pickup artists from pickup artists. Yes. Really, this whole show is based on the lessons I learned as a pickup artist. You can't see it, but I'm wearing an enormous hat with ostrich plumes coming off, made out of purple felt. It's an incredible hat. The most fuckable hat. The most fuckable hat. Yes, that was actually the first name I pitched for this podcast, but Sophie said that that means nothing and no one will listen to it. He always puts lies on my name and saying that I turned down his ideas. That's just not the case. Sophie, I think we can all agree that one of the best

things to do is to lie about things your colleagues didn't do because it's funny. I agree with it. Thank you. On to the show. We're talking about Dr. Oz. And as we left the last episode off, he had just, you know, gotten Oprah, right? Started his TV career. Got an Oprah hard. So he started his TV career, and he also starts right on the same time he gets on TV for the first time. He starts a daily morning radio show on Oprah Winfrey's Serious XM channel. Never a good idea. Serious XM. No, terrible idea. What is it about giving people three hours of uninterrupted airtime? You know,

there's just something about it. I, you know, this is an opinion that's pretty controversial within I Heart Radio. I think radio should be illegal. And I think it should be a felony punished by prison time for being on the radio or having a radio or thinking about the radio. I think the only form of entertainment that should be legal is specifically my podcast. Yeah, yeah. And there should legally only be one Sopranos podcast allowed, which as it turns out is the case. So I think if we if we could get Chuck Schumer's ear, we can make this happen. We'll tack this onto the pot bill. No one will notice. So Dr. Oz has the Dr. Oz show. He's got a radio show on Winfrey's XM channel where he

covers very scientific topics like how God changes your brain and the happiest people in the world. Now, I found a New York Times article that was written just a few months into his tenure with his TV show kind of at the start of his burst into stardom. And the interviewer who talked to Oz for this article seems as impressed as everyone always is by the manic somewhat inhuman pace at which Mehmet Oz works. By this point, he'd also written six books with titles like You the Smart Patient, You on a Diet, and You Having a Baby. It's like the series is the yeah, the famous series colon, whatever. And he co writes these books with another doctor. I can't tell you how much of the writing was a lot of times I'm not saying this is the

case with Dr. Oz because he's a wild workaholic. But a lot of times when you have a guy that's his kind of famous and they write a bunch of books, they write like 10 percent of the book and they have someone else, a co author or a ghost writer do the rest. I don't know that's the case here. There's always one one Damon who's writing most of Goodwell Hunting and then there's a Ben Affleck who gets top booking. And I do believe Matt Damon writes most of his books. Oh, 100 percent. Yeah. So nine million copies of his various titles are in print by this point, like the first year of his show. So he is he is a very wealthy and successful man, pretty much out the gate. Like money machine getting the start on Oprah kind of guarantees

it. Basically, if Oprah likes you enough to put you on her show more than once, you're going to get rich. Damn. Yeah. I just I just should have spent my my youth trying to get on Oprah. We all should have. We all should have. So Dr. Oz gets a semi regular column for Time Magazine, because again, they see this guy get famous and like, we got to get some of that Oprah money, too. We get this guy on time. People start reading time again. And yeah, it's interesting that they give him a column and in 2008, they included him on their list of the world's most 100 most influential people. So before they hire him to a column, they call him one of the world's most influential people. And as soon as he gets listed as one

of the 100 most influential people on the planet, Dr. Oz calls his dad, right? Like, yeah, this has got to be the thing. How can he not be impressed by this? So when he tells his dad, his dad's first question is what number? How high are you on the list? And this is not a ranked thing. Like it's not the top like going to one. It's just 100 people are all very influential. It's not a listicle. Yeah, it's not a listicle. But Dr. Oz, in this interview, seemed to acknowledge that the fact that his dad reacted that way said a lot about both, you know, his dad and about their relationship.

He told an interviewer, quote, he wants to know what number. Are you kidding me? There are six billion people on the planet. It's a rounding error. God, but but like, but like what number though? Because you wonder how high are you motherfucker? Yeah, come on. How influential are you? You're basically me. Yeah. So that interviewer along with the New York Times wrote, quote, it's also the kind of thing that goads the sun to climb mountain after mountain seldom pausing to enjoy the view. The good doctor did admit to engaging in a number of time saving measures. Over the years, he did numerous columns which were often just recycled from other columns or chunks of his books. He provided the same list

of skin moisturizing or metabolism boosting tips in different magazines or online articles. Even so, his workload was enormous. The Dr. Oz show was instantly one of the most popular shows on the planet and Mehmet was contracted to record 175 hour long episodes per year, which is a fucking brutal work schedule on its own. And the man continued to practice as a surgeon, albeit at a reduced rate. The New York Times interviewer who visited him in 2010 seemed to find his behavior and kind of his compulsive workaholism somewhat unsettling. I never saw him without a portable larder of baggies, plastic containers and thermoses of food and drink and all of it. Every crumb, every drop was healthful. Low fat Greek yogurt mixed with brightly colored

berries, spinach, slaw, raw almonds, raw walnuts soaked in water to amplify their nutritional benefit. A dark green concoction of juices from vegetables including cucumber and parsley. Roughly every 45 to 60 minutes, as if on cue, he would ingest something from his movable buffet, but only a little bit. His portions assiduously regulated like an intravenous drip of nutrition. It was the most efficient joyless eating I have ever seen. That is so weird. I'm sorry. That's so weird. That makes me so uncomfortable to just listen to. He's cool, dude. Like that's, you know, he's living life in the most drab way possible. Just trying to make TV shows and do heart surgeries, you know? Who has time to enjoy anything when

you're daddy? Joyless, efficient eating. He's like, I don't either drink anything that I would enjoy. You're welcome. That's just so unsettling. I mean, you know what? I have known a couple of people in my life, all very skinny, who have told me like, I just don't really like eating. Like, yeah, there's some foods that I prefer to others, but I just don't really enjoy it one way or the other. Like, I've noticed like some of those people wound up on the soylent thing. And I guess like, I mean, yeah, fine. It's like, it's whatever, you know? It's your life. If you want to eat monkey food, eat monkey food, but don't, you know, be surprised when I judge you, you know? Yeah.

Like, it's that's weird. At the start, the Dr. Oz show was broadly inoffensive from a medical perspective. He gave a lot of fairly good common sense health advice, health advice and provided a lot of people with a friendly medical face willing to explain things their doctors might not have the time or the bedside manner to properly lay out. But Oz's fascination with alternative medicine was present from the beginning. And as time went on, he veered more and more in that direction, following both the topics that consistently drew the most viewers and the topics that were easiest to put together, because 175 hours of content a year is a lot. I mean, really though, like at some point, you run out of shit to talk about. You have to just be like,

pendulums over the heart. Do they work? Yeah. Punching people in the dick. Could it improve your bowels? Yeah. I mean, you know, we have to do, I don't know how much content we have to do per year, 52 weeks, two hours a week. Yeah, we do like 110 maybe like with some of the episodes that go over 120 hours of content for this show. And that's a lot. 175 hours of video content is huge. Like you can't. There's not that much good and also entertaining medical advice that you can give in a year, let alone every single year. I mean, just like there's only so many organs to talk about, you know, after a while, you just got to invent shit. Yeah. And it's this thing. It's this kind of this inevitable churn of capitalism leading us all into this the specific

kind of nonsense because you can't not have content. Yeah, you're contracted to. But also, you have this whole team of people whose ability to pay their rent, whose ability to afford their homes to keep their kids in school is dependent upon you doing this show outside of just the fact that he's rich. Yeah. Like he's fine. But he like it's this thing you have to keep putting out the thing and you will never have enough meaningful shit to put out to do it. Right. So you start in his case, doing nonsense about mediums and shit. And in our case, doing episodes about Dr. Oz. When you run out of bastards, eventually you just got to find one on TV. We're not out of bastards. But like last week, I spent 30 hours reading about the protocols of the Elder's Zion.

I needed an off week, you know, God, we all need off weeks. That is that is one of my favorite absolutely real documents to read. Yeah. That's why we brought you on actually. Yeah. I'm actually one of the elders of Zion and I got some protocols for you. Oh, good times. So for an example of the kind of nonsense creep, I guess you'd call it that like advanced upon his show in March of 2012, Dr. Oz did a show titled medium versus medicine. Oz's guest was a psychic who claimed she could communicate with the dead. This was one of several. And by this point, probably dozens of episodes dedicated to people who claim to talk to the dead energy healing was, you know, on the fringe, certainly. But at least it was something that when he started doing it, there were scientific

studies saying there might be something to it. Those studies have since been to a large extent discredited. But when he started doing that, there was some evidence it was a thing to try. You know, he wasn't completely out of left field. Yeah. People were at least testing it out. Doing episodes on mediums talking to the dead is well outside of plausible deniability territory, right? Like you're just doing nonsense at this point. You know, it depends how they're talking. If you go up to a dead body and start talking to it, you are technically talking to the dead. Now, that would be a fun show. Dr. Oz breaks into morgues and talks to corpses. Yeah. Hey, how'd you die? Just just just having his bodyguards, mace police officers rolling into a crime scene

be like, who did this? Have this go down. Are you okay? I am a doctor. Do you want some almonds? They're soaked in water for more nutrition. All right, someone get me a crystal. So, yeah, he had, yeah, Dr. Oz had among his psychic guests, famous grifter king, John Edwards on his show, not the politician, the talks to dead TV show guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he praised the reading that he received from John Edwards saying, quote, let me tell you what changed my life. I've learned in my career that there are times when science just hasn't caught up with things. And I think this may be one of them, which is almost exactly what he said about John of God, the guy who raped hundreds of people.

Yeah, that's how you know, like to stay far away from anything when he's just like, man, this is a, this is a brand new groundbreaking territory. And you can go, all right guys, it's a rapist run. It's one of those things, part of how he's like the intelligent way to frame this is you start with the true thing, which is there a thing science can't explain. One of those things is the nature of consciousness and what happens to it after, you know, vital sciences, we don't know. There's not an objective answer to that. But it going this way is kind of like being like, yeah, you know, we can't explain like the slit box experiment. Like there's a bunch of shit in physics. I don't know. I'm not a science guy, but like, you know, particle and wave shit,

you can't explain that. So you can't explain magnets. Yeah. How do they work? How do they work? It's this, it's this jump from yes, there are things we can't explain to. So let's listen to this man talk to the dead. Millions of people gather around gather around. He's going to channel your dead aunt. Yes. Maybe not, not a reasonable way to take a reasonable starting point. Yeah, especially when you're a doctor on TV. Yeah. Yeah. And I want to quote from a write up I found in the Journal of the Missouri State Medical Association, quote, during another show, Oz interviewed Dr. Mosara Fali, a miracle healer to Sylvester Stallone, Prince Charles of England and others regarding his use of iridology. According to the widely debunked bizarre belief,

each part of the iris corresponds to a specific area of the body and a person's state of health could be diagnosed by examining particular regions of the iris. After expressing his amazement at Dr. Ali's diagnostic abilities, Oz stated, I want to applaud Dr. Mosara Fali because these are ancient traditions and they have been around for centuries. So who am I to dismiss them? Other than a very well educated man, a doctor, Dr. Mehmet. You had me at Prince Charles. Yeah. It's like, you know, there's a lot of cultures who say that you should remove the clitoris surgically. Yeah. Because it's it's it's it's healthier and it stops dangerous masturbation. It's ancient. Who are we to say this is a bad idea? Who are any of us to say anything wrong?

Yeah. Oh my god. I love it too. Just like, yeah, I was amazed by his ability to look into my eyes and diagnose that my dad will never love me. How did he know? How did you know? It does bring me joy that Prince Charles got fucked with this fuck. Oh yeah. I wonder what his eyes said. It's funny. It said the same thing. It said your dad will never love you. That's all he does. He goes to famous people and he goes, your dad will never love you. Your dad will never love you. Thank you so much. There's this one of the big aspects of this guy's success and of the success of the things he pushes is is Orientalism, right? Right. Like this idea of like the forbidden and strange and wondrous and magical East and all of the we don't understand all of these like,

oh, India is so mysterious. Yeah. What if you were to say like, well, for centuries, tobacco companies have said that tobacco can cure like different lung ailments. Who are we to dismiss these ancient traditions? Yeah. The Q zone could be real. Exactly. Like it stops people from stuttering, do more cocaine. I mean, yeah, just the idea and I've always found this in general to be the biggest load of horse shit is when people have have said, you know, this is like an ancient healing technique. And it's like, you mean like bleeding people with leeches, you know, you mean like cutting off someone's leg because he got a fucking a small infection on his toe. Ancient. It's this fucking thing with Dr. Oz. Like it's one thing if you're just like traveling to another

part of the world, you see some sort of medical or treatment you've never seen before. And you're like, well, who am I to say anything about, right? Like, I don't know. Dr. Oz is a doctor on TV talking to millions. You're literally the person who should be saying something about the legitimacy of this. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You're the guy. You're the person. You are, in fact, the person who should say something about this. Who am I? You're you. Yeah. He's the most famous doctor in America. Yeah. And that's what that that right up in the Journal of the Missouri State Medical Association notes. Quote, who Dr. Oz is a trained clinician and scientist, someone who can read a scientific article with a critical eye. He is someone who can filter out the noise of the placebo effect or

discern the simple carnival tricks of his charlatan. The problem is that most people in his audience cannot. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's he has a literal responsibility to tell people that these guys are full of shit, but he also has a responsibility to his show sponsors and to the network for ratings, you know, you know, who else has a responsibility to the show sponsors? Wow. I know. That was, I think that's gotta be the first time. That's gotta be the first time it's ever actually been a relevant segue. So fucking good. So good. Anyway, here's products. 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

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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

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Ah, we're back. Talking about Dr. Oz, having just a great time. So obviously, the fact that Dr. Oz, I mean, probably the fact that most of his audience couldn't discern whether or not any of these nonsense treatments were real is a big part of why the Dr. Oz show became an overnight success. Before very long, it was being watched by 4 million viewers every single day. Over the next half decade or so, he won two Emmys. His guest list included First Lady Michelle Obama, who loved Dr. Oz for his focus on healthy diets for children, and in general, his crusade to get Americans to lose weight. Dr. Oz claimed through medicine, through math that I cannot verify, that his show inspired Americans to lose 3 million cumulative pounds per year. I don't know, maybe.

Yeah, they based that on what? Like, did people call in to say how many pounds they've lost to the show? I mean, I'm sure he found some way to like make the claim or whatever. But it's very, it's, I don't know, maybe. It is one of the things that he does that is, we'll talk about, there's problems with some of the diet tips he gives people, actually, significant ones. But telling, like, inspiring people to lose weight is not usually bad for their health, although it can be. Sometimes people take it too far, and it causes significant health problems, you know? It's a mixed bag, I guess we'd say. But the other stuff isn't a mixed bag. So I guess we'll call that his great success. So, yeah, it is good. I will say it is unequivocally good that Dr. Oz

continually pressed his audience of millions of people to eat more fruits and vegetables to get better sleep, to exercise regularly, and to get their flu vaccinations. That's all rat, right? Yeah. But shit, I could have told you that. Give me a TV show. Yeah, you don't have to, you don't have to be a doctor to say that. You don't have to be a doctor, no, that shit. Yeah. Eat better, piggies. But he's charismatic. People like him. It's good that he does that, at least. They don't trust me, so they won't give me the show, but they should, because... Yeah, the unfortunate part is that this guy gained, because he's handsome, a lot of ladies out there think Dr. Oz is hot. Yeah, he's a doctor. He's very charismatic. He's very charming,

and he gains this enormous influence with Middle America, and he uses that influence to do some really fucking questionable shit. And I'm going to quote now from a write-up in the AMA's Journal of Ethics. He has told mothers that there were dangerous levels of arsenic in their child's apple juice. There weren't, and suggested that green coffee is a miracle cure for obesity. Federal regulators discovered altered data in hyped coffee bean evidence. The Food and Drug Administration tested for arsenic in apple juice and found the vast majority of apple juice tested to contain low levels of arsenic. And given these levels, was confident in the overall safety of apple juice consumed in this country. Dr. Oz also featured two guests on his show who claimed that

genetically modified foods were cancer-causing, despite repeated safety reports that found no adverse effects. Man, I mean, he's getting there. I'm watching him slowly go from Mehmet to Mangola. Come on, let him be Mangola. It is too good a pun to skip. I get that you want to be fair, Robert, but let's go for it. All right, we're doing it. But no, we're watching him turn into a snake oil salesman, and it's very exciting. Yeah. So Dr. Oz's enthusiasm for alternative medicine has had the effect of creating instant fads over any health product he even vaguely suggests on his show. When he mentions the purported health benefits of white mulberry, red palm oil, or brown seaweed, all of which he's claimed can do things like cut weight,

reduce aging, or beat the flu, those products fly off the shelf. Oz often doesn't endorse specific brands, but he doesn't need to. Online retailers watch closely and immediately slap as seen on Dr. Oz on their pseudoscientific products. Yes, I've seen this. I've seen this. This is where we get to the big harm. He did one episode that focused on so-called relaxation drinks and included a close-up shot of five cans of beverages he said might help calm you down. It's just a Miller high life. Yeah. He just puts a can of Coke 45 on the table. Billy Dee Williams walks out. It's a steel reserve. Trust me, you'll be relaxed. You'll be calm as shit. Exactly. You might yell at your mom, but it'll be fun after.

Go away. Yeah. You will very calmly put your hand through a taxi cab window. As soon as the episode aired a, quote, liquid sleep aid called I Chill bragged on their website, Dr. Oz is talking about a new way to wind down with relaxation drinks. They are the newest trend in helping you relax and calm down. And the best news is they contain natural ingredients already known to promote relaxation. Mulberry. I remember the I Chill. That turned into like an entire thing. There's so many. We're about to talk about it. Yeah. And also if there was a lot in them drink, I would be buying it. So the problem with all with this is that all of these different relaxation drinks are filled with a variety of

chemicals like melatonin and theanine and toerine. These drinks are unregulated as they are not medicines or dietary supplements, but the chemicals they include all have actual impacts on the central nervous system. Pregnant women and children are often advised to avoid products with some of these chemicals, but the beverages in question rarely note this. No data exists on how these chemicals might impact people in the quantities they are added to in these beverages or when combined with other chemicals or when combined with medications people drinking them might be taking. Responsible doctors writing for the journal Nature Neuroscience wrote a warning about these beverages that specifically called out I Chill by name.

Existing research on the potential benefits and harms of some components of relaxation drinks suggests that they may not always be safe. Indeed, the FDA issued a warning last year to the manufacturers of melatonin-laced brownies citing safety concerns from the literature including effects on the autonomic nervous system and visual system and increased expression of symptoms in a sleep disorder. Other components of relaxation drinks such as L-theanine or amino acid such as toerine may be considered safe for consumption only at some doses by the FDA, but relaxation drinks are not subject to such regulations nor are they required to disclose the amounts of their ingredients.

It's not the same as relaxation. One is like an ambient brownie and the other one is like a brownie that makes you hungry for more brownies. Pot brownies make sense. If ambient brownies exist, I would love one. Thank you very much. I mean, I guess I'd rather do that than just swallow an ambient, but man, that is... I'm like gets to sleep and also got a brownie. Sounds awesome. It's bad for your health. I'll tell you that much. Apparently. Am I remembering this correctly, Robert? But wasn't the eye-chill like the bottle and the marketing like similar style to like an energy drink similar to like a five-hour energy?

That was like the aesthetic. No, no, no. I think those were those were they had like a weird different shaped plastic bottle. But like the problem is that, again, number one, you've got a lot of people with like who are on medications that this shit interacts with. Which is crazy that like literally a relaxation drink could be contraindicated for your prescription medication. Okay. So everything Dr. Oz recommends, I guess outside of like death psychics, comes with this caveat. Some of the herbs and natural medicines that he recommends do have health impacts, but they also have consequences. Medications they might not interact well with.

Dr. Oz does not bring this up when he shotguns half-assed advice out to an audience of millions. That article in Nature Neuroscience that I referenced, warning about the relaxation drinks Oz recommended, it's been read 10,000 times. So the article warning people that these things could be contraindicated and might have impacts on your health and your central nervous system, read 10,000 times. Dr. Oz's episode suggesting these drinks, listen, watched four million times. God damn. Yeah. People started to notice that this was a problem by the mid-auts. Doctors had been complaining for a while, but in 2013 Forbes wrote a listicle laying out the silliest things Dr. Oz has suggested on his show, including the fact that having 200 orgasms a year

would extend your life by six years. Here's how he explained that bit of math on his website. Dude, I'm about to live to 200 years old. I ain't never dying, motherfucker. I ain't never dying. I get one out at least once a dirt. 365. Here's his website. If you have more than 200 orgasms a year, you can reduce your physiologic age by six years, Dr. Oz says. He bases the number on a study done at Duke University that surveyed people on the amount and quality of sex they had. They looked at what happened to folks that are receiving a lot of intercourse over time, and the fact is it correlated. Wait, is it sex? Because he didn't say nothing about sex. He said orgasms, and I do that on my own. He talked to him about the amount and quality of sex they had,

but it's correlated. Again, he's basically lying here. Number one, what is the possibility that people who are having a lot of good sex are in better health and that's why they're able to have a lot more good sex because they're like they're physically healthy. And so it's easier for them to like what are the odds that if you're having more sex, you're more social, you're more likely to have a long term romantic partner that increases your lifespan. Yeah. Again, I'm of all people never going to be the guy to say there's not health benefits to sex. There sure is. But Dr. Oz is exaggerating this. He's taking an actual study that showed some interesting stuff, and he's turning it into a lie. Yeah, he's turning it into pretending he has quantifiable data,

and that correlation is causation. That's what he's trying to do. Yeah, there is data that suggests that regular intercourse reduces men's mortality risks by 50%, which doesn't mean that fucking stops men from dying, particularly because it's men who benefit in this way. It means that men are less healthy than women, tend to die faster, and when men have partners that they live with, they are more likely to have a medical problem noticed if they have a heart attack. Someone's going to be there to call. Like there's a lot of reasons why this is the case. Yeah, they're not dying alone. Yeah, it's not the fact that just fucking magically adds like reduces your age by six years if you do it enough. Like that's nonsense. It's nice to think it though. It makes

it nice to think it. I'm going to print out that article, show it to my girlfriend, and say, hey, you got to help me live longer. Not coming enough. I'm going to die. We got to do this more. Yeah, just start fucking in public. And when the cops come, be like, this is medicine. Yeah. Do you want me to die six years earlier than I should? I have a right to this. Dr. Odd said I should fuck more. Now, on its own, recommending that people get more sex is, you know, fine. I'm very pro sex. But I am anti encouraging people to misunderstand health science. The nature of Dr. Oz's audience and the sheer breadth of things he suggests makes it difficult to analyze the total health impact of his show. But there are some dire case studies as Vox notes

in their write up quote, there's the case of a man who followed Oz's suggestion of curing insomnia by pouring uncooked rice into socks, heating them in a microwave and wearing them to bed. The man got second and third degree burns on his feet. And the reason he got burned is because he was diabetic. He didn't have the same level of feeling in his feet. Oh my God. If he had gone to a doctor and said, hey, I heard about this thing that might help with insomnia, the doctor would say, well, you're diabetic. You don't have as much feeling in your feet. I'm worried you might burn yourself. Dr. Oz is just saying, hey, this will help you sleep. Do it. Whoever you are. Do it, idiots. You're talking to four million people. It will be bad advice for some of them.

It's like this all feels very much like when Trump was telling everyone about the wonders of hydrochloroquine. Hydroxychloroquine. We're kind of talking about that later. And then people are eating fucking fish food or like fish tank cleaner and dying. And people are like, how could people be so stupid? And it's like people are stupid. You can't tell them to eat the fucking fish ball cleaner. Yeah, they'll do it. They'll fucking do it. So this guy sued, but the case was thrown out because the judge determined that Oz cannot establish a physician-patient relationship through TV. I agree with the judge. That's my problem with his show is that he is a physician purporting to be giving medical advice, but is also not taking anyone's individual circumstances

into account and, more to the fucking point, not liable if he does any of the irresponsible things that would lend a physician doing their job traditionally in trouble. I mean, it is medical malpractice, whether or not he's legally liable for it or not. I would agree. And I'm going to continue that quote from Vox. Not everyone agrees with the judge's reasoning. Rochester, New York medical student and blogger Benjamin Mazer has been publishing anonymous stories sent to him from health professionals about the impact Oz has had on patient care. One reported that her dad had a heart attack and five stents placed in his heart, which required him to take aspirin and plavix to prevent blood clots. He was watching Dr. Oz,

who said plavix was not necessary, so he stopped taking it. About a month later, he had another massive heart attack and coded and had to be shocked back to life. She continued, my dad admitted to following Dr. Oz's advice and not asking his own cardiologist. Man, yeah, that's really bad. Did he have a did he have like an alternative or was he just like decided one day that plavix was going to be the thing? I'm sure it was. If I know my Dr. Oz, I'm sure it was. You don't need to take plavix, eat these different heart healthy foods and avoid these foods, and that'll do all that plavix will do. Yeah. Yeah. Eat some beans and put your face in some boiled water and you should be fine. I suspect it was dietary advice that if you're

someone who doesn't really need plavix is fine or might even help you to not need it later in life if you adopt healthier habits. But the problem is, again, the way he's framing it, there's going to be a lot of people who are like just had stents placed in their heart. I don't need plavix. Fuck it. Yeah. Yeah. Dr. Oz, the TV doctor said, I don't need this medicine. I just need more acai in my belly. The TV doctor also said he can talk to ghosts. So I'm going to go talk. I mean, you will be talking to ghosts faster if you follow all of Dr. Oz's advice. Yeah, exactly. I want to talk to ghosts. I'm going to stop taking my plavix and die of a stroke. Now, on his show, Dr. Oz claims that the trust of his audience is the entire reason for his

relevance. Quote, the currency that I deal in his trust, and it is trust that has been given to me by an audience that has watched over 600 shows. He repeatedly references the fact that he is responding to the very real and very understandable, unfilled needs of Americans who feel alienated from modern health care, which is an expensive and often inhumane labyrinthine bureaucracy. True. This is true. Yeah, absolutely. 100% true. Yeah. How you exploit it is a very different thing. But the thing he is replacing it with is by and large nonsense. And I'm going to quote from that right up in the Journal of Ethics again. When it comes to epistemic boundaries, Dr. Oz admits he applies different standards of evidence compared to those accepted in the

medical establishment. When challenged by a reporter for The New Yorker about his questionable evidentiary standards, he replied that all data could be differentially interpreted. You find the arguments that support your data, he said. And it's my fact versus your fact. It's not that he doesn't offer data. It's common for Dr. Oz to offer some plausible mechanism from test tube experiments conducted by manufacturers combined with personal anecdotes from his own or consumer's experience to support the products he's promoting. A study of 80 recommendations made on the Dr. Oz show in early 2013 found that published evidence supported 46% of recommendations, contradicted 15% and did not support 39%.

Got to love a good, like, coin flip on whether or not he's fucking lying to you and having an adverse effect on your health. If your doctor said, hey, you know, 46% of the time, I give pretty good advice. You would be like, I think I might get another doctor. But he would reframe it to be like, I'm batting 500 here. And you'd be like, 500. That's a good batting. If you assume medicine is like baseball, I'm a great doctor. No, he's crashing it. Yeah, doing a great job. Now, to his credit, the journal does note that a decent chunk of the blame for Dr. Oz's success lies in the very, very flawed state of mainstream medical science. Quote, we settle for incomplete, selectively published data in journals heavily subsidized

by pharmaceutical companies and for outcomes that don't give firm answers. While not on par without offering anecdotes as evidence, the fact that debates persist about what constitutes sufficiently high, unbiased quality evidence to support decisions in the profession as a whole creates a wedge that Dr. Oz seems to exploit. Again, this is the Journal of Ethics being like, the fact that you can pay to get a study done, the fact that we pharmaceutical companies lobby to allow them to market things in dishonest ways, the fact that doctors are bribed by companies like Purdue Pharmaceutical with vacations, recommend people take medication that is not in their best interest to take. That's why this motherfucker has a job. And the fact that

healthcare is expensive, right? The fact that we don't have a single pair of healthcare. It all combines to the fact that a lot of people who are not idiots, I'm not saying as you can be, I'm sure there's people who are brilliant electricians who fucking are brilliant at whatever, who are great at whatever it is they do, but they're not fucking doctors because most of us aren't. And it's hard to get. I am very fortunate in that I have a couple of good friends who are doctors and I am luckier than I can. One of them is a guy who was on the show recently, Kavahoda. I'm luckier than I can that I can say to be able to like every now and then send them a message being like, Hey, what should I do here? Yeah, it's a question of like, I'm having this problem.

I don't know what kind of doctor to see to like get this dealt with. I don't know whose job this is. And I don't want to like my my ex a while ago had a non-cancerous brain tumor and he was a fucking nightmare figuring out it took a series of different doctors and tests to figure out what kind of doctors she needed to go to to get the medication that would help. And it's of course people are like, Well, this guy is explaining things and he's nice. And he's saying that I have the power to deal with this change my diet. If I do this, if I do that, he's giving us alternatives to dealing with the bureaucracy of medical institutions in this country. I have a Kaiser and I had to go to a rheumatologist and I tried to get ahold of him on the phone. And they sent me through six

different call centers to finally get to his specific office. And then I asked the lady, Oh, can I get the extension so that I don't have to deal with that? And she's like, Oh, sorry, we're not allowed to do that. And so now, now I'm just recording every phone call and just, you know, freestyling to the hold music, because it's the only thing I can do. I'm like, you know what, I might as well turn this into content because this is fucking ridiculous. You know, there's like the amount of bullshit you have to go through makes people like Dr. Oz feel like a good alternative. You know, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's, it fucking sucks. It's just really fucking sucks. And it fucking sucks because there's a lot of wonderful people

who are part of the medical system, like the fucking doctors in the in the ER who were with my mom in her last days, like incredibly competent and compassionate and amazing people who in their entire careers will never be able to do as much good as Dr. Oz does harm because he has four million people watching him every day. Yeah, it's a bummer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's you know, it's not a bummer. Capitalism is actually a bummer, but it's the water we swim in. So here's some fucking ads. 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 Aaronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you get 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 with like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass 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 podcast. 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 podcast. 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 offending 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 podcast. We're back. So in 2014, Mehmet Oz was called before a Senate subcommittee

to answer questions about his unfounded claims about dietary supplements. Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill went off on him saying, I don't know why you need to say this stuff because you know it's not true. Why when you have this amazing megaphone and this amazing ability to communicate, would you cheapen your show by saying things like this? He just pulled out a lot of money and he just started making it rain all over Congress. Do you know how many houses I have? She pointed out several examples of the things he cheapens his show by saying he had called green coffee extract a quote magical weight loss cure. Recent research has suggested that long term use of green coffee extract causes bone density loss in animals. But you are in fairness, you're losing weight,

your bones are lighter, that's weight, bones are heavy as hell. It was everywhere when that came out. It was literally not just like bed, bath and be everywhere. Get light bones, you can fly like a bird. And again, those are studies in animals. But it's the kind of thing where a responsible doctor would say, well, some studies in animals have shown that this might cause bone density loss. So unless your weight is a really disastrous health situation and your bone density is fine, I wouldn't recommend this. Dr. Ross is just saying it's a magical weight loss cure. I mean, he's not wrong. He's not wrong. Yeah. Oz called raspberry ketone quote the number one miracle in a bottle to burn your fat. This is a fun one. First of all, it's all gasoline part of white

people. Well, actually, part of why part of why people are attracted to stuff like this is that like raspberry ketone, that's natural. It sounds like, Oh, if I just like getting raspberries, that's going to help me lose weight, this chemical in a natural healthy fruit. Of course, it makes sense that like some wonderful plant based medicine would be able to help me lose weight. Yeah. Raspberry ketones don't come from raspberries. They can, but it takes 90 pounds of fresh raspberries to produce a single dose. As a result, they are manufactured synthetically. A fact Dr. Oz did not feel the need to explain because again, he's really critical of GMOs and it might seem hypocritical to note that raspberry ketones are actually synthetic lab nonsense.

I love when people say things like it's natural. It's like, I think cyanide is natural. There's like a, there's a lot of like natural poisons out there. Fucking snake venom is natural. The fucking arsenic in the apple juice that he's worried about is natural. Yeah. It is possible based on animal studies that these ketones may have some ability to reduce or slow weight gain, but no studies have ever been conducted on how raspberry ketones impact human beings. There have been reports that they increase blood pressure and heart rate in humans. Dr. Oz does not warn about this. Likewise, when Dr. Oz told his viewers that Garcinia cambosia may be the simple solution you've been looking for to bust your body fat for good,

he did not also warn them that it can interact negatively with diabetes medications, pain killers, and psychiatric medications. Oh my God. Why would you need to warn people that? Look, what are the odds someone looking to lose weight has diabetes medications? Zero. What are the odds that someone who has diabetes is sitting around watching Dr. Oz's show? Zero. What are the odds that a middle class American is addicted to pain killers? Zero. During the Synod Inquiry, Senator McCaskill pointed some of this out, and she told Dr. Oz, quote, when you feature a product on your show, it creates what has become known as the Dr. Oz effect, dramatically boosting sales and driving scam artists to pop up overnight using false and

deceptive ads to sell questionable products. Yeah. In the wake of this, which was a fairly bad day on Capitol Hill for him, Dr. Oz released a somewhat contrite statement where he noted, I took part in today's hearing because I am accountable for my role in the proliferation of these scams and I recognize that my enthusiastic language has made the problem worse at times. We're good so far. Yeah, no, not bad. Pretty good so far. Oz added in his statement, to not have the conversation about supplements at all, however, would be a disservice to the viewer. In addition to exercising an abundance of caution in discussing promising research and products in the future, I look forward to working with all those present today and finding a way

to deal with the problems of weight loss scams. God, I, I, it's amazing. I'm just talking about, I'm just asking the question. We have to have conversations about this. You know, a conversation would be noting, for example, green coffee extract causes bone density loss in animals and perhaps be worried. That's a conversation. Yeah. That's a conversation. Well, you and I have had about these things as a conversation. Yeah, I love it. I love people who are like, I'm just asking the question. I mean, I'm not a doctor. I'm a guy who's addicted to an unregulated plant. Oh my God. Which I just took more of while standing next to my unregulated gun. Yeah, dude, you're living the unregulated dream right now. So Dr. Oz, also making this

statement, pointed out that he believed the greatest disservice he'd done to his audience was to not recommend specific products, which had provided room for a wide industry of shysters to stick his name on their website. So like, oh, I was just saying green coffee extract and a bunch of companies I couldn't verify started selling with my name on it. I should have recommended a specific brand. Yeah. What I need to do is cut deals with specific companies so that you can only be taking their bone density loss drugs. Yeah, I mean, exactly. Good call. Fucking amazing. Yeah. So in the wake of this day on Capitol Hill and this amazing response, physicians across the country asked Columbia University in a letter, basically, what the fuck? Why is this guy still

on your faculty? Columbia claimed it was because of their commitment to, quote, the principle of academic freedom and to upholding faculty members' freedom of expression for statements they make in public discussion. It's a hell yeah, dude. Yeah, that's like of the like anti-cancel culture letter. You know, they're just like, stop trying to cancel Dr. Oz. It's freedom of speech. You have freedom of speech. Yeah, I mean, doctors also are held to different standards than the rest of us. They take an oath. They help me. Come on. If like your Uncle Jimbo says, hey, you know, take some green coffee extract. It'll help you lose weight. Yeah. Nothing wrong with that. Yeah. It might not be good advice, but yeah, that's just a guy saying

a thing. Doctors are held to a different standard. Yeah, it's on you if you listen to your crazy Uncle Jimbo. It is definitely on the doctor if he recommends you lose some bone density so that you look better in that dress. Mm hmm. It's it's it's awesome. Yeah. So on April 15, 2015, 10 prominent physicians sent a letter to Columbia University calling Oz's faculty position there unacceptable and citing his, quote, egregious lack of integrity. The only change wrought by the congressional inquiry and the flood of condemnation from the medical community seems to be that Dr. Oz started endorsing specific supplements and pseudo medicines. God, he's Alex Jonesing it. He's Jonesing it hard. He's so much smarter

than Alex, though. Yeah. You focus it just on the hell. None of this nonsense, like political shit. Everybody is going to love you and you'll make way more money. Mm hmm. Yeah. A 2018 analysis of his show by the health news review found, quote, in the Dr. Oz show 13 out of 19 68.4 percent shows had ads relating to general show content. 57.9 percent had specific products mentioned by the host using their commercial name and 36.3 percent of shows mentioning products by name named more than one product. It also found that 78 percent of the medical statements made on the Dr. Oz show did not align with, quote, evidence based medical guidelines. So if those guidelines mattered, they'd make more money, dog. Half a decade earlier, 46 percent of his statements

are more or less fine. Mm hmm. Now it's down to what Jesus 22 percent. Wow. So we're seeing again, he met the quality of the because again, you're running out of good content. You only have so much good medical advice you can give when you're doing an hour a day, 175 times a year for fucking 15, 16 years. Eat fruit. Exactly. The actual amount of things that an average person can reasonably do to improve their own physical health doesn't really take that long to explain to you. It's pretty simple stuff. And most of us know a lot of it already. We know when we're, I know that pounding cratum and Coke zero isn't a wise healthcare decision. No, no. But you know it and you can, you know, fucking, you don't need a Dr. Oz to tell you that. You know, you just,

no, you know, I know that the fact that I bought the $100 entire smoked leg of pig from Costco, the giant for Shido leg that you can go. Wow. I know, I know buying that and not also purchasing, I don't know, salad in order to have sufficient. I recognize that was the poor health decision. Yeah. No one tricked me about this. And at no point did I think this $100 worth of smoked ham is a solid healthcare move, you know, smoke. What could be so bad with it? It's good for my Q zone. Traditional medicine. Yeah, this is really good for all of my kidney meridians. I need all the smoke tabs I can get. All my meridians are fucking rocking right now. I'm peeking in meridians, bro. Let me fucking tell you, my meridians are as hard as a goddamn rock. Feel my kidneys. Feel

my kidneys. It's just like, why is your kidney swollen? The Dr. Oz show is still on the air. In 2018, President Trump appointed Dr. Oz to a council on sports, fitness, and nutrition as part of the Department of Health and Human Services. Oh, man. He is still on that council under Joe Biden bipartisan, baby. Two years later. Oh, no politician is dumb enough to want to piss off Dr. Oz. You're never going to hear Joe Biden throw it. Well, except for, except for Claire McCaskill. God bless her. She was the only one who had the guts to stand up to Dr. Oz. I think other people did. I'm not an expert on what went down in that congressional thing, but she seems to be the main one who was really angry at him, which good on you, Claire. I love that a bipartisan

decision is just like, let's share this grifter, you know, between administrations, like good, you know, we all agree that you should be able to lie about healthcare as an MD. That's that's so 2018 is when he gets appointed to this council. Two years later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he and he endorsed hydroxychloroquine. Later that year, he endorsed reopening schools saying, I tell you, schools are a very appetizing opportunity. I just saw a nice piece in the Lancet arguing the opening of schools may only cost us two to 3% in terms of total mortality. What the fuck? That's barely anybody dying. That's barely hundreds of thousands of deaths. He'd said two to 3% as if that's not a huge number of people. He's losing his goddamn mind.

And it's one of those things, not making a point pro or against gun control either way. But if somebody against gun control said, what, keeping these things legals only going to cost us 1% of the country, you'd be like, you're a fucking maniac. You are a dangerous person. But he's like we got it. And he didn't. Yeah, this outraged a lot of people and I was apologized as he apologized for the hydroxychloroquine. Yeah, he did. He claimed regret that his comments had confused and upset people and basically pointed out the Lancet wasn't saying two to 3% of the country was going to die. It was, I think, more like 2% or 3% of like schools or something like get sick. But the way he phrased it was it's only going to cost us two to 3% of the country.

I don't care what the actual study. Again, I don't care what the study is. I care what you said to your audience of millions. And also I care about the fact that in any case, that's fucking evil. Yeah, that's an evil thing to say. Yeah, it's it's it's pretty wild to just look at two to 3% of the country as like expendable. If it means that my fucking dirtbag ass fifth grader can be stuck inside in a school all day. And listen, I get it, people with kids, they want their kids to go back to school. But you don't say the quiet part out loud. You know, it's one thing to say, hey, look, living in a society, there's all kinds of cost benefit sort of analysis. Sure, we have to do like, right, cars improve a lot of efficiencies in certain ways and people

like have them, they're also going to cost X many lives, you know, we could change these sorts of laws, but it would it would lead to this sort of problem. You know, we have certain freedoms that may cost lives and like to be like that. That's just living in a society, right? There's no we our society is not angled around absolutely more reducing mortality in every way. And there's a cost to not having these schools open. And it's a very real cost. And like, we have to like, that's a way to say that I'm not saying that's the argument I'm making, because I'm not, I'm thinking, no, I don't think we should open schools out until we actually have, I don't know, like 80% of the fucking country vaccinated or whatever. But like, but that's a way you could

that's a way you could make that argument and not sound like a gibbering sociopath. And it's weird to like, you know, be like, all right, it was a poor choice of words. And it's like, bro, at this point, saying words out loud to millions of people is your job. Yeah, you're choosing to do the job. You could never work another day in your life. And you would never you're rich. You don't need to do this, you're choosing to so go fuck yourself with that explanation. Fucking fix some hearts already. Stop talking. We're getting to that. So today, Dr. Oz works to continue to monetize his brand with his wife and business partner, who he also writes books with. His daughter seems to be getting in on the grift to with books like the dorm room diet, which she

wrote when she was in college, I think. It's just free pizza and dick. The dorm room diet. Hey, you know, if you pour coffee into instant ramen, I've done that, by the way, not proud of it. We've all been there. Kind of proud of it. It's real good if you add in vodka. He is worth tens of millions of dollars and is not in any danger of being worthless anytime soon. We've talked a lot about the harms of his specific recommendations and the disinformation he spreads. But at the end of this all, I keep coming back to that 2010 New York Times article. Specifically, it's in when I think about what may be his worst crime against medicine. Quote, on the stairs at Columbia Presbyterian, apropos of nothing, he began talking about certain Japanese

Sardinian and Costa Rican populations that live unusually long and said that their shared trait was activity, activity, activity. His first column for Time magazine, Living Long and Living Well, ran in a section called How to Live 100 Years. At another point in his Rockefeller Center office, he said that so many people thrill to being on television because, quote, there's an element of eternity to it. You are storing you. You are taking your life force for that brief moment when you're on camera and you're storing that for all eternity, which makes you someone who will never truly die. That is a fucking bonkers way of looking at being on TV. Holy shit. That is out of its goddamn mind. He is literally one year away from wanting

to be buried with his cats, you know, like this dude wants some pyramids and some live cats in a casket with him. He's a pharaoh. Yeah, I'm going to continue the quote. And he described his own investment in television by saying, I've always felt that when I looked at my tombstone, it shouldn't say Mehmet Oz banged out 10,000 open heart operations. I've probably done 5,000. Am I any better at it than 10,000? He shook his head. It's just a different number on the tombstone. No, it's not. It's 5,000 other people whose lives you extended. Those are actual human beings. It's not about how better it, you're already great at it. It's about saving additional lives. My God, that it's that's wild. One of the he has dramatically, he still does perform surgery,

I think sometimes. He certainly was in the late aughts because he's a doctor. He just doesn't do nearly as much. He used to do a lot more and he's he's cut it by more than half the amount of actual heart. And it's the one thing he's good at. I mean, I almost he's amazing. So one of the things that I should note here is that right now, even with the assumption that every available training position for cardiothoracic surgeons is filled, we are looking at a projected shortage of 1500 cardiothoracic surgeons or 25 percent of the workforce by 2025. Four years. Fuck. Fuck. There is a desperate need for the thing that he's definitely one of the best in the world at a tremendous and terrible need for it. And he has stopped doing that in order to give people bad

medical advice that will hurt some of them on TV. And I want to be really clear here. I am not saying that just because you become a cardiothoracic surgeon, you have to do that until the day you drop. You don't. You can quit. You can and that's not immoral. It's not evil to be like I've done enough. A good friend of mine was a cardiologist for 30 something years and quit to travel around the world as a photojournalist. And I don't think there's anything immoral. You do not owe the world doing just because it's valuable and there are enough people doing it forever. I am not. And you don't you don't have to quit to do some other valuable job. You can just quit to enjoy your life with your family. I'm not saying that. Yeah. But he didn't quit to be with his family.

He quit to give people bad health advice. Yeah. He quit to do crimes. Yeah. He is he is doing something that should be illegal instead of performing an additional 5000 life saving surgeries. Right. Yeah. That's evil. Yeah. No. That is bad. That is that is definitely immoral to to like have the ability. It's like being Superman and having the ability to save someone from a burning building but being like fuck dude. I'm kind of on my way to do this TV interview. It's going to get me more. Yeah. But I'm going to sell people pills instead. Lex Luthor can suck it. You know. I got pills to move. The way that he phrases that is incredibly telling. Right. Like it shouldn't say Mehmet Oz banged out 10,000 open heart operations.

Am I any better at it than 10,000? It's like that's not. I care that you get better at it to the extent that it improves patient outcome. But like I don't care. Like the the thing that's good about performing 10,000 open heart operations is presumably somewhere near 10,000 people have had their lives extended because of you. Right. Yeah. And that's amazing. That's tens of thousands of cumulative cumulative years added to the lives of people who are loved and who do things themselves who who do incredible like who have their own ways of contributing to society who have children. Like it's such a sick way of looking at it. It's really fucked up. I'm already really good at it. So I decided I want to go get into TV now. It's like if he if he'd been like

I I you know I did my car. I performed 5000 surgeries. Now I want to become an actor. Like you have that right. Absolutely. I'm never going to say that. I mean, it depends on the movie. But yeah, yeah. Sure. Yeah. If you're in Michael Bay movies, we might have another talk. But that's again what it's not that he's decided he wanted to go into TV. It's not that he decided to go into entertainment. It's that he decided to do a job to go from doing a job where he was unequivocally saving lives to doing a job where he often gives people advice that could shorten or at least reduce the quality of their life. I mean, I guess he got tired of helping people and was like, you know, time to make some fucking bank. Yeah. It's I mean, it's not just make some bank,

but he's like, man, I saved 10,000 lives. I'm going to have to kill 10,000 just to fucking net neutral this shit. You know, you know, he's just trying to he's trying to balance the scales of his good and evil. It's so fucking frustrating. I really dislike this man. Yeah. Yeah. He's so handsome, though, dude. I mean, he's very handsome. He's very handsome. He made a lot of money. So that's good. And, you know, he's he's he's out there every day given given hope to people who are currently dying of a very, very treatable ailment and saying, nah, dog, put your feet in some hot rice and see what happens, dude. Just see what happens. You know, like someone's got to be doing that job. It's this fucking thing.

Part of the Dr. Oz problem and the part of it that that he is he is leaning into, but it's not his fault is this thing that's a broader problem that I've gotten trapped in that a lot that everyone is a public figure is at risk of getting trapped in, which is the fact that if you're good at something and also have some measure of fame or popularity, you you start to think you can extend your skills to everything. I was in the gym the other day since I'm in Texas with my family and since I'm vaccinated and, you know, everyone wears a mask, but I've been going to a gym and my family's vaccinated. It's like it's the thing we get to do now. OK. Yeah, you're allowed. Yeah. I've been going to a gym and the gyms have like news

programs on right. And I saw Dr. Oz on and it was Dr. Oz true crime because I guess Dr. Oz has added a true crime thing where he's like talking about this woman who murdered her kids and interviewing like the ex-wife of the husband of the woman who murdered her kids and like doing these things like you don't have any. Why are you doing this? Like because because it's popular with the same people who like her show. And why why like why not? Why not stick your hand into this thing that is deeply painful for a lot of people and make money off of it? Why not do it because if you're if you're famous and good at one thing, there's no reason not to do absolutely everything. I just hate it. Yeah, it's especially since it's it's again, he he has the God given

skills to actually do good and help people and he chooses, you know, this shit. And I got to say, I blame his dad. I blame his dad, too. Is that you, Mustafa? Son of a bitch. You fucked up, dude. I mean, you did a great job by pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and yada yada. But, you know, maybe you should have maybe you should have maybe been more encouraging for him to just maybe, you know, pick one thing and stay with it rather than, you know, venture off into television. I will say at least with the true crime stuff that like, I know he's like he's a little bit kind of like getting into kind of our territory here with the podcast business. And I don't like that. But I'm glad I don't have a true crime podcast that he's currently cannibalizing.

If he starts a Sopranos one, I will lose my fucking mind. If Dr. Oz decides one day, like, I want to do a prestige TV rewatch show for CNN. That'll be it, dude. Oz, you'll be on my goddamn list. I don't think his podcast publishers anymore, the one that he was doing, I don't see any new episodes. That's 2019. Well, I mean, he's he's doing a true crime show. That's that's as close as you get to the podcast business. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Those are the number one pods out there, dude. This is me all cast my pods. All right, guys. That's the episode. Have any any plugs? Yeah, plug the plugs. My name is Matt Leib. And, you know, I'm on Instagram, Matt Leib jokes Graham. Yeah, I'm on the Graham. I'm also on Twitter at Matt Leib. But follow me on Instagram.

And yeah, and if you like the Sopranos, pod yourself a gun. It's pod yourself a gun, baby. Well, get out there. And again, find Dr. Oz in the street. And Sophie, what what is the legal definition of incitement? I'm not for legal reasons. I'm not going to answer that question. All right, well, just just go out and wander the streets, angry and and and agitated. Yeah. So without any clear goal. Yeah, angrily wander the streets agitated with an unclear goal. That's what I want all of my listeners to do. 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 sorted 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.