November 26, 2024 • 56 mins
It's a CZM Rewind week! Enjoy this old, but prescient, episode where 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
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
What lighten my dumpster? First, I'm Robert Evans hosted Behind
the Bastards. That little introduction was in honor of my hometown, Portland,
which just had a police officer murder a man who
is having a mental health crisis. And we'll probably be
lighting some dumpsters on fire tonight, although you won't hear
it the day that this happens. But anyway, that's all
(00:24):
beside the point right now, because the point right now
is that I'm introducing our guest today, the inimitable.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Matt leeb Baybe. What's going on, Matt? How 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?
Speaker 1 (00:44):
You do a Sopranos podcast and the name is it
really pod yourself a gun?
Speaker 2 (00:47):
That's right podcast? All right? Gun? Yeah, that's my world's
only Sopranos podcast. Don't go looking for any other ones,
because they do not exist.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Little known TV show, the Sopranos. You might have heard
of it, very obscure.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
A niche, a niche TV show that only people who
really like art understand. And that's that's why we talk
about it. We talk about the art.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
You bought a gun.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
I did, 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.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Yeah, you woke up with a blue moon in your
eye and you decided, I'm gonna go get.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Myself a gun and then I'm gonna commit crimes. And
the Pine Barons of New Jersey. Yeah, they do that
a lot in the show, right, a lot of Pine
Barren crimes.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
They do it at least once.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
And it's great, yeah that they're chasing that guy through
the yeah, yeah, the Russian Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
And they leave their DNA everywhere, well they.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Pee everywhere, and you know they look.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
We Italians are not a subtle people.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
No.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
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 twelve hours. It's the most Italian in
the world.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
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?
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Oh? I'm so excited.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Are you settling in? Yes, doctor z I never introduced
them like that. We're talking about doctor fucking Oz today. Yes,
that's right.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Who the thought he'd be a bastard? A TV doctor?
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Who the fuck a TV doctor could be a bad man?
Speaker 2 (02:40):
No, they take an oath TV doctors, they say, do
no harm and get good ratings. That's the hippocratic oath
they do.
Speaker 4 (02:49):
They also oath to be bad guest hosts on Jeopardy
because he sucked and I didn't enjoy it.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Honestly, if you are going up against LeVar Burton for
any job, your first action should be like, you know what,
I'm bowing out ye immediately, I'm not going to compete
with LeVar Burton off fighting Jeordi fighting, Kunta Kinte, fighting whatever.
The reading Rainbow guy's name was. No, I think LeVar.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yeah, yeah, No. I did not watch him on Jeopardy,
but I have seen the show and had no idea
he was a bastard.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Yes, he's a piece of shit. He's he's a different
piece of shit. We're also going to be talking in
the very near future about doctor Phil, who's a much
worse person. Doctor 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 will we'll
have us a nice talk about at the end of
this episode. So I've always said that one of the
(03:48):
great tragedies of American public life is that our very
best doctors are usually like kind of schlubby dudes and
ladies who maybe aren't the best at at social graces
and certainly don't have enough time because they're wildly overworked
to do TV appearances.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. They're not hot. I've always
said is the bottom of they're not hot. I look
at them and I'm like, ill, Like.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
We need to put a couple of billion dollars into
a national program for more fuckable doctors.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Come on, yes, yes, doctors who fuck that's the next
level of healthcare in America. It won't be universal healthcare,
but at least doctors will look fuckable.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Now, I mean, I think the problem is not their fuckibility,
because it's inherently hot to be a doctor. It's more
the fact that they're not necessarily if. Even the ones
who are 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
this show of grifter health influencers and scam artists selling
(04:46):
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, who are 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
(05:07):
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
(05:27):
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. He's kind of made worse. We'll
talk about this a lot by the fact that he
is he's a he's a heart surgeon, and he's an
exceptional heart surgeon.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
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 Carson turned out to be a
Trump guy. He was like, but you're so good.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
The surgeons which you talk to doctors, they'll be like, yeah,
of course, it's always surgeons, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
And they're the ones who think they're gods, right, yes,
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 yes, politics and shit like that.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
I think good surgeons are so prone to being also
like nonsense, like so many of our nonsense public doctors
or surgeons, for the same reason that so many of
our terrorists are engineers. There are 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.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
That's great. It just makes me glad that I never,
you know, got really proficient in anyone's skill.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Never gain skills. I never ever learn how to do things.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
You'll become too smart for yourself and think that you
are God. If no one.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Learned to do anything, we would still be living in
the mud and eating grubs. And you know what, we
wouldn't have salesman, or that we would have very little
at all. Mimet Senga's Oz was born on June eleventh,
nineteen sixty to parents Sunna and Mustafa Oz, who must
(07:12):
have fucked at some point in October of nineteen fifty nine.
In order to conceive him. We have to assume his
parents fucked in in October.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
I don't know that.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Yeah, he could be immaculate conception.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Wow, yeah, you know possible, I would say right now.
The most likely theory is that they fucked sometime in October.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Ah, all right.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
His father, Mustafa had been born in Boskir, 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, you're dealing with a different kind
of poverty than even like our grandparents dealt with here.
(07:50):
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 nineteen fifty five.
So this is a This is a hard working man
and a man who has to struggle, I'm going to
guess in ways that are kind of difficult to imagine
(08:13):
for most of it's even as difficult as our present
times are.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
He is like a true lift yourself up by your bootstrap,
yes kind of guy.
Speaker 4 (08:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Came from the middle of 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 nineteen fifties immigration system. That's that's an achievement.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Good for him started from the bottom and now he's
on TV selling cures.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
That's his dad, that's that's not men. Yeah, yeah, that's Mustafa.
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
(09:05):
of money. As befits his more modest upbringing, Mustapha was
an observant traditional Muslim. Soon his 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
(09:25):
young from a young age, ambitious, starving for success and
his father's approval. He was wont 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
(09:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
What the fuck? So that's way too much stock into
the year of what animal?
Speaker 1 (09:58):
The rat?
Speaker 2 (10:00):
At least he wasn't born into the Year of the Pig.
And he's like, well, what you gotta do is you
gotta take your snout and put it into the trough
of life.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
And just you shut your face into food as hard
as you can.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
You roll around in the shit, and then you hope
that someday you find another piggy to fuck, and then
you have little piglets. It's like, look, I was.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Born in the Year of the Pig, and that's why
it disposed of bodies for the mob.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
It's just what you do. Well, that's it's a nice
take on Year of the Rat.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
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
achieve things, and I don't think about whether or not
they're good or bad. I just I have to achieve.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Yeah, he just wants that cheese.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
Yeah, he wants that cheese. It's ambition without an analysis,
I think, is what you'd call it. And he's he's
pretty open about that.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Now.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Mustapha his dad, repeatedly told the growing doctor Oz who's
not yet a doctor obviously, that when he grown up,
when Mustapa 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 can't take a moment off.
(11:16):
You always got to be hustling. And that's how Memet
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 ninety three on a test,
He'd say, did anyone get better? That was always the question,
he asked, cool death, It sounds like.
Speaker 5 (11:33):
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
(11:54):
were a couple of kids who had to get like
taken in by an ambulance because they would just like
one in one case easing as a result of stress.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Like Jesus good to put this kind of pressure on
a kid.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Develop skills.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
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 gotta love.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
You no matter what.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Yeah, exactly, Stop caring about your dad, you know, just
coast coast.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Some dirt, eat some grubs. You'll be fine.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Yeah, start a Sopranos podcast. That's all you got to.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
Do, dude, really bringing it back there.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
So Memet 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 ten.
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 ten. My father waited until he
was out of earshot and said, I never want you
(13:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Momet go kill that kid.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Kill that kid, fucking cut it.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Murder that loser kid, and tell me what you want
to do with your life. God damn, that is way
too much pressure. Way waits so.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Much pressure to put on a kid.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
By the time Memmett was ready to start school, his
father was wealthy enough to pay to send his son
to Tower Hill School, a K through twelfth grade private
college preparatory school in Wilmington, Delaware.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Jesus, that sounds horrible.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
I know, it sounds like a fucking nightmare.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
Fancy boy, yeah, sounds uniforms ties.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
Yeah, probably like your choice during the summer.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
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,
(14:38):
everyone kind of recognizes this kid is brilliant. Everyone recognizes
he's got the drive he's going to achieve, you know,
so good for him.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
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 gonna be.
No one was like I'm a doctor, you know. It
was it was mostly just like, you know, how's your
(15:05):
hip hop album working out? And they're like good and
they're like cool, and that was the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
That's interesting. I think it was different for me because
there was definitely a lot of pressure to have something.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
You know.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
I went to a public school. Yeah, 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 Isabella, 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
damn not a high end educational.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
But once I'll do in a public school. Yeah yeah,
oh damn.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
They still did that in Oklahoma back in them days. Yeah,
you got to sign the paddle afterwards too.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
It's nice.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
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 is a lot of drive
to achieve, like I said, a lot of like kids
who were really motivated by their parents achieve And so
you either were kind of planning to be a doctor
(16:05):
or you know, something on that level, or you were
planning to join the military. Because it was Texas and
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.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Yeah, yeah, I went to yeah, public school, you know,
in 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.
Speaker 4 (16:31):
So see, my brother is a doctor and knew he
was going to be a doctor from that. He's my
older brother too, from the time that he was like seven,
so like, and I'm like, la la la, no idea
that I'm.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
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's just
they always have that like sense where they're trying to
get there. You're you're some sort of stepping stone into
there what ever their career path is. And I don't
like it.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
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 onto like becoming a doctor,
that's the only kind of break. So I guess that's
his gap year is being in the Turkish arty.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
I'm just gonna take a break, have a gap year
and join the military of a foreign country.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Yeah, helps suppress you know, Kurdish liberatory movements and stuff. Whatever.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Yeah, they got to stop trying to have their own thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Yeah, this is very there's a lot of foreshadowing going
on a shadow.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
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 doctor Phil later. Doctor Phil I don't think
is very smart. He's incredibly good at reading and manipulating people,
He's not particularly a genius. Meme At Oz is a
genius like I think almost certainly is an actual genius.
In nineteen eighty five, at age twenty five, he married
(18:23):
Lisa Lemole, who was the daughter of a cardiothoracic surgeon
who worked with his father. They met it 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,
in change, doctor Oz's career zoomed forward. He became triple
(18:45):
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 certain.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Yeah, I got zero boards under my not a one
fun not.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
A single board between the three of us.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
So we really should find a board just to get
us some certifications, guys.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
Just to get certified. If you're a board, if you're
a medical board is a board out there. Well, actually,
you know what, the State of New Jersey has certified
me as a reverend doctor, so I'm one board certificate.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
I assume that we're out there. Is there a board
in the Universal Life Church? Because I am a minister
slash Jedi night, I'm gonna say that counts all right,
I'm board certified. Can you get me painkillers? You know?
I know a guy.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
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 apart, he's
good at the science part. Over time, he authors hundreds
of peer reviewed articles and he's awarded eleven patents. One
of them is for a solution to preserve transplanted organs.
(19:51):
Another is for an aortic valve that can be implanted
without open heart surgery. Like, he's not just really good
at the mechanics of surgery, he's an ex scientist. Yeah,
eleven patents is pretty good.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Seriously, one might say he's the Wizard of Oz there.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
I think I read like six articles with variations of
that title on the.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Guard right, Well, I gotta go.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Then it's just a thing. Journalists can't fucking help themselves.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Anybody you see Oz and you're like, I got a
calm a wizard.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
Got a columb A wizard. Doctor Oz was hired by
Columbia Medical School as a teacher, and as you know,
he's also working. They've been a hospital. He's working there,
but he's also teaching, and he very quickly rises to
the level of full professor and becomes the vice chair
of the cardio of the heart surgery department. Basically at
this point he's in his thirties.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Oh man.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Yeah, Like everything I've read right now on its own
would be a career trajectory. Any doctor in medicine would envy.
Like you could die happy with that being your fucking resume.
Like that's a hell of an achievement.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
In nineteen ninety five, a New York Times profile referred
to doctor Oz as quote, probably the most accomplished thirty
five year old cardiothoracic surgeon in the country. 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.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
I mean, I don't know any other heart surgeons by name,
so fuck yeah, I mean he's the guy.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
Yeah. Now, the article that I found that quote in, however,
gives some hints about what was to come, because that
article was about doctor Oz's increasing experimentation with alternative medicine.
It opens with the story of one of his patients,
a forty nine year old diabetic smoker who suffered a
critical heart attack. She went under Memet's knife for a
dangerous surgery quote at the invitation of Oz and his patient.
(21:50):
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 fifty two year
old healer named Julie Mox 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
(22:12):
and units of lydacane. Motts called softly to Smith to
move her hands from the small toe of the patient's
right foot to a point on the soul 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,
(22:34):
as kings once did to treat subjects with scropula, and
as Jesus is said to have done, and as shamans
and mothers and Chinese quigong 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. Of the kidney meridian, Yeah,
you gotta get that meridian. That's the best part of
(22:55):
the Kidney's the meridian.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
That's the most delicious part of the kidney is the maridian.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Man with fucking on a ritz cracker slice, then I
love me a little little bit. They 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
a little bit of char you know.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
I mean, this all feels like he's going to start
turning his patients into fois gras, and I'm very excited
for what's to come, this heel turn that he's gonna take.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
And now's 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 with my kidney meridian.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
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 harmon seeing you know, And in that case,
if you're actually doing it in the medical context, you're
guaranteeing everybody's taking proper sanitation procedures. Fucking whatever.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Yeah, it seems like from what I can tell, that
sounded non invasive. It's not only yeah, they were just
doing energy work or whenever they were throwing you know,
crystals and doing fucking pendulums over him.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
It falls through the category of it couldn't possibly hurt,
so why not give it a shot, right, which is
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
(24:47):
by exactly forty five minutes, so you know, spend all
your money and gain immortality. We're back. Uh, we're talking
about doctor Oz, who in the mid nineties has started
some weird alternative medicine stuff. Now he's not the person
(25:07):
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 how. You know the thing if television has
taught me accurately, all of the doctors are fucking constantly
m hm.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Doctors fucking teach, that's what they 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 Planetar It 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
(25:45):
whole thing came about because in nineteen ninety three, 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, do this start a magic doctoring school. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
Done to help them.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
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 like she went through chemo and it did nothing.
(26:40):
You know, I get it. You go through something like that. 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.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
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 in modern medicine.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
I might 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 gonna 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
(27:24):
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
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.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
They're dead them. Yeah, they're dead.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
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 if something happens.
I'm not against the basic idea of testing some of
this shit is what.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
The worst thing you're going to get out of that
is a really cool TikTok video of electrocuting a dead body.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Absolutely, and then you get a fuckload of followers, and
then you start selling brain pills.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
It's a perfect plan.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
Uh 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?
Speaker 2 (28:15):
You know what?
Speaker 1 (28:16):
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. Doctor 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
(28:38):
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 of fraud, practitioners of fraud.
It's my feeling that the Rosenthal has been promoting fraudulent
(29:01):
alternatives is 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
doctor 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,
(29:22):
and then they dropped out of a heart attack because
it doesn't replace a valve.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
You know. I'd like to think that even at a
hospital or research facility with Western medicine, that they still
peer review and try out different you know, like alternative medicines, right,
you know, like.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
Some of them, some of them work, some of them work.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Like there was a time when you know, acupuncture was
seen as kind of like a croc and now it's
like kind of just a standard part of Western medicine.
It's just you know, so.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Yeah, and 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 that.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
I know.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
It's one of those things where there's a number of
divergent opinions on actuature. But a number of things that
were initially considered alternative medicines have been found to have
medical benefits. Not that that's the norm, but it has
happened in a 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
(30:35):
picketed the college when the Rosenthal Center opened. None of
this dissuaded doctor 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 sew bypass grafts and even
(30:57):
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 wu new age that can help
with depression and that can help with healing. And he's
(31:19):
right about that. That's 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. Doctor
Oz told The New York Times that he felt ethically
(31:41):
obliged to experiment in new directions in medicine. The article
makes it clear that doctor 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, Memet 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
(32:02):
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 is a fraction of a full memic unit.
He runs down lobs, sizes, tennis partner, mentor and department
chairman doctor Eric A. Rose, who at forty four, is
(32:23):
one of the top transplant surgeons in the world.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
So 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,
could I get that? I do?
Speaker 1 (32:44):
It is a matter we'll talk about the ZN two.
We don't have enough of these guys. It's actually a
major health problem. How few people there are that can
do this. Yeah, but it is exhausting everything you read
about this guy's daily 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 we still like he has
(33:07):
to always be moving towards something.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Yeah, he's got his dad in the back of his
head exactly telling him to murder that kid in the
ice Cream show.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
Yeah, to kill that fucker kill.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
He doesn't know what he wants to be, just like, Yeah,
I mean I imagine that would create a bit of a
problem later in life with stillness.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Yeah, I feel for him a little bit of that.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
Sure. Now.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
The article also goes into more detail about how doctor
Oz's wives fam. Doctor Oz's wife's family piqued 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 oar to relax patients. His
mother in law had developed a special low fat diet
(33:54):
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, doctor Oz, about using
arnika for sore muscles and herbal tea for stomach aches.
So he gets brought in in part to alternative medicine
(34:16):
by these people who have a real medical background and
are doing things that aren't widely accepted but also may help.
You know, music, I think there's there's some data now
and how music can help with the curtain aspicts of
the healing process. Right fat fat mother in law seem
to be on the cutting edge of that.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
When you send the rock Doc, I got concerned. I
thought he was going to like replace people's hearts with
crystals and shit.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
Yeah, oh no, oh no, they all die, but my god,
their hearts are pretty So this is how memeic 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. That's in it.
There's extremely reasonable stuff in the article in general, Like
(35:00):
doctor Oz points out that in nineteen ninety five, 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
(35:23):
time when a lot of stuff that like just wasn't
that is kind of now common sense medicine wasn't, And
I think that kind of opens his eye to like, well,
maybe all this other shit works.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
Yeah, maybe everything in my head is correct. Yeah, only
getting to him turning into a complete narcissist.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Yeah, and the article kind of veers right from yeah.
Having loved ones in the room can influence how well
you heal to doctor 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. She now has her surgical sea legs under her,
(36:03):
but the first time Motts 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 ind 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 soupie trance
(36:26):
music for the bypass team. It was quite a novelty
to hear Mott's 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 Motts was not
looking so good herself, Oz asked a burly assistant to
take her outside for some air. When he returned, he said,
(36:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Oh my god. I swear she's like she seemed like
she is just describe having her own feelings and then
just ascribing them to an open heart.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
Yeah, I think, 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.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Checking the vibes, dude, she's checking the vibes, just making sure,
you know, the vibe dipstick is filled with oil.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
I should not, 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.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
I don't know what riki is I've heard of it?
Is it like when mister Miagi rubs his hands together
and then he.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
Kind 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,
(38:11):
further studies were commissioned after these early studies, which starting
in the early two thousands, were more negative. A number
of hospitals did, however, add wreki practitioners to their stable
of available providers, in part as a result of the
work that doctor Oz in the Center at Columbia was doing.
You can find these people in hospitals now. And it's
(38:33):
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 doctor edzard Ernst.
Speaker 2 (38:53):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
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
(39:16):
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.
(39:38):
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
(39:58):
is still scientifically un resolved.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
Man, we are just veering into anti vaxx territory and
like anti mass territory. People who just they google stuff
and then they go this article right here says that
mass actually can.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
They can't, they can't analyze. And it's from a government
science organization. You know, these guys like and here's a
study that's and it'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 nineteen ninety eight, three years
(40:34):
after the New York Times article about doctor Oz and
the Alternative Medicine Center at Columbia was published. Now, doctor
Oss 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
doctor Oz. I don't know, you can't say that for certain,
(40:57):
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. Colombia 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
(41:18):
organization is filled with people who already believe in it,
carrying out tests that are flawed, and it helps prepare
this culture believing too much in this stuff.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
Oh my god, it's just like it's a real life
Facebook group, you know. It's just like everyone already believes
in all the stuff and they just keept like just
co signing each other's bullshit.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
And it's one of those things like I again, I
know people who swear by Riki, who gain you know,
emotional benefits from it, who think it helps with you know,
a number of things, including like physical including emotional pain,
and like if you find something that helps you alleviate
your emotional pain in power to you know, never gonna
hear me say damn against it.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
You know, go with God. That's that. That's all great,
But uh, I mean you want to relieve pain, Yeah,
try some morphine though, dog, because that ship oh mark morphine.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
There's no downsides to morphine.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
No, I can't think of one downside to morphine.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
It's a single one.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Yeah. It just feels good the whole time, and you
just need to take more.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
My issue is not so much with any particular treatment,
not that 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. Really is not going to solve your
blocked cardiac pathways. You know, it's not going to fix it.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
Yeah, I mean, energy is great, but plavix works wonders.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
You know, this is a lot better. And it's it's
it's more to the point, even more than that, is it.
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
(43:11):
where the roads I have more of a problem with
than doctor 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 helps put it, he
helps put our national foot on the gas pedal into
the post science age.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
So yeah, it's a slippery slope to that, you know,
downing that brain octane oil.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
In exactly exactly. So yeah, at this point, though we're
talking still in the mid nineties, everything doctor 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,
(43:58):
He's right.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Yeah, he is not yet a bastard.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
It's certainly not impossible for this kind of stuff to
have a mental impact which can positively affect recovery. Okay, 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 Prefecture professional who was performing
(44:24):
something like two hundred and fifty heart surgeries a year.
You know, that's two hundred and fifty lives a year extended.
That's great. He's not a bastard yet.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
Yeah, he's doing great work so far. Yes, despite the
weird heart stuff. Fine, a little bit of energy, a
little bit of heart surgery. It works out.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
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 doctor 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 pressed,
very good at getting on TV, at getting in the news.
I think he he is at this point crafting his
career to make himself into an ideal candidate for famous
(45:05):
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
(45:26):
perfectly for that to happen, and he tried in the
early two thousands, 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 get in.
She's very much his business partner to develop himself into
(45:46):
a media personality, and he eventually succeeds in two thousand
and four in getting invited to Oprah Winfrey's show, Now
Memmet 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
(46:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
Man. That is uh. I mean, I'm I'm low key
impressed that he impressed Oprah with the doodoo shapes.
Speaker 1 (46:29):
It's mom's stuff.
Speaker 2 (46:30):
You know.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
Moms love poop.
Speaker 2 (46:31):
They love talking about doo's.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
And that's what like Oz does exactly the right things
to endear himself to like millions of middle class moms,
which is the best market in the It's.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
An incredible market.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
You can make all of the money if you can
get a few million middle class moms to love you.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
Yeah. I worked at this digital uh 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 you know, lady in a car yelling at people
(47:13):
about kids and uh. 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.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
Yeah, I mean, it's it's the power of particularly middle
class moms can't be exaggerated. Like the cops in the
Feds were able to fuck over as many people as
they wanted until they started gaessing moms. The whole country's pissed.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
Yeah, they're like like, hey, listen, you can do that
to people of color, but those are moms.
Speaker 1 (47:45):
Those are white moms.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
Those are white moms. That could be my mother.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
Yeah, you know what else?
Speaker 3 (48:00):
You know, what else did your mom? That's where I
thought you were going with you?
Speaker 1 (48:03):
Now what else is your mother? The products and services
that support this podcast. We're back.
Speaker 3 (48:13):
So we've all disagreed that Matt is very fine. That
was the discussion over the break.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
You made this one into a two parter, Matt, So
you audience can thank you for two episodes about doctor
Oz this week.
Speaker 2 (48:27):
All right, or they can blame you.
Speaker 1 (48:29):
And if they blame or blame him, Matt's home address
is we love to dox our guests.
Speaker 2 (48:37):
Baby.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
So Oprah had Doctor Oz on her show fifty five
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.
Speaker 2 (48:56):
Just appealing to the lowest commons denominator the stupidest human being.
Speaker 1 (49:01):
Marry doctor and if you look at the health of
the average American, you can tell the quality.
Speaker 2 (49:05):
Of job he's done.
Speaker 1 (49:09):
More breadboat bread. Well, actually that's the one thing he is.
He's actually pretty good about like weight low. Well, I
don't know, that's still debatable.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
Stop defend. I'm not going to defend.
Speaker 1 (49:21):
I just love to be fair.
Speaker 2 (49:22):
You know, I know you too, You're very fair.
Speaker 1 (49:25):
Look say what you will about Hitler, you will.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
He was a vegetarian, and that's good for the environment.
Speaker 1 (49:32):
The man cared about animal rights. By two thousand and nine,
it was clear that doctor 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 blockbuster news series. Her
show celebrated the launch of Doctor Oz's show with an
(49:52):
entire episode dedicated to Doctor Oz, which acted as something
of a coming out party for his brand. From a
press release on oprah dot com, this is talking about
the special Doctor Oz episode. Moving personal stories and extraordinary
surprises are featured throughout the hour as Doctor Oz meets
viewers who share how his advice saved their lives, from
(50:12):
those who noticed life threatening diseases their doctors missed to
those who lost weight thanks to his diet tips from
doctor Oz. Real people step forward to offer their thanks
to America's doctor. Plus, it's the reunion that Doctor 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.
(50:34):
He's like the fucking perfect, perfect guy for this.
Speaker 2 (50:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:57):
But years of mostly dangerous health based content.
Speaker 2 (51:01):
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 doctor Oz
and having people come up to him like you save me, fucking.
Speaker 1 (51:15):
What it's worth noting in terms of his bastardrey that
and kind of the acceleration from hey, maybe energy healing
works to becoming a monster. The early two thousands of
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.
Speaker 2 (51:35):
Yeah, oh of the of the Brazilian of God's yohl.
Speaker 1 (51:39):
And on the episode in which she introduces John of
God to America, doctor 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 ex science can explain what this man
is doing, basically giving a real doctor's opinion that this
guy's gotta be legit. John of God later turned out
(52:01):
to be a mass rapist on these on a scale,
hundreds of victims, on a scale almost incomprehensible. We did
a two parter on John of God. You can listen
to it. It's a fucking nightmare. This guy never gets
half the following that he has if it's not for
Oprah and doctor Oz.
Speaker 2 (52:18):
So wow, holy shit.
Speaker 1 (52:22):
Uh it's good shit, good shit. I found a fascinating
New York Times article written a few months into doctor
Oz's new show. It notes that in transitioning to his
own series, Doctor 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.
(52:44):
His show tackles topics is diverse and diversely weighting a
skin cancer, kitchen burns, sleep eating, and pubic hair loss.
Returning constantly to the same television mother load, Winfrey profitably
mined weepy, overweight guests who vow and often fail to
get in shape, and it is taken in it star
far away from any sort of traditional medical practice. He
explains that transition as the product of frustration. Too often.
(53:07):
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
to all aspects of their health head to toe before
(53:27):
they reach a point of no return, lose weight, go
to Brazil and get sexually assaulted by a con man.
Speaker 2 (53:33):
Oh god, oh wow. 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
(53:54):
that's crazy. But you know, hey, John of God, your
os they also sound like great people.
Speaker 1 (54:03):
Yeah, yeah, and it's 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.
Speaker 2 (54:14):
Yeah, because he's got to keep up all those TV dates.
Speaker 1 (54:17):
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 is 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
(54:39):
for being a nonsense doctor. But he's making millions of dollars.
Speaker 2 (54:43):
Yeah, and in America, that is the ultimate marker of
doing the right thing.
Speaker 1 (54:49):
Yeah. That's the only thing that tells you whether or
not you're doing the right thing.
Speaker 2 (54:52):
Is you're making 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.
Speaker 1 (55:00):
Yeah, morally righteous, righteous wealth.
Speaker 2 (55:05):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (55:05):
You know what else is righteous, Matt?
Speaker 2 (55:09):
Is it the products and services?
Speaker 1 (55:12):
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 pluggables.
And I just decided to compliment you before were.
Speaker 2 (55:24):
Yeah, that's very nice 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 end or service called pod Yourself a Gun. It's
a Sopranos podcast and uh uh yeah, if you like
the Sopranos, or even if you don't, check it out
on the you know wherever the podcasts store is.
Speaker 1 (55:45):
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
doctor Oz and scream at him. Give'm a good screaming
Speaker 3 (56:17):
M
What lighten my dumpster? First, I'm Robert Evans hosted Behind
the Bastards. That little introduction was in honor of my hometown, Portland,
which just had a police officer murder a man who
is having a mental health crisis. And we'll probably be
lighting some dumpsters on fire tonight, although you won't hear
it the day that this happens. But anyway, that's all
(00:24):
beside the point right now, because the point right now
is that I'm introducing our guest today, the inimitable.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Matt leeb Baybe. What's going on, Matt? How 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?
Speaker 1 (00:44):
You do a Sopranos podcast and the name is it
really pod yourself a gun?
Speaker 2 (00:47):
That's right podcast? All right? Gun? Yeah, that's my world's
only Sopranos podcast. Don't go looking for any other ones,
because they do not exist.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Little known TV show, the Sopranos. You might have heard
of it, very obscure.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
A niche, a niche TV show that only people who
really like art understand. And that's that's why we talk
about it. We talk about the art.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
You bought a gun.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
I did, 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.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Yeah, you woke up with a blue moon in your
eye and you decided, I'm gonna go get.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Myself a gun and then I'm gonna commit crimes. And
the Pine Barons of New Jersey. Yeah, they do that
a lot in the show, right, a lot of Pine
Barren crimes.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
They do it at least once.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
And it's great, yeah that they're chasing that guy through
the yeah, yeah, the Russian Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
And they leave their DNA everywhere, well they.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Pee everywhere, and you know they look.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
We Italians are not a subtle people.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
No.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
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 twelve hours. It's the most Italian in
the world.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
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?
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Oh? I'm so excited.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Are you settling in? Yes, doctor z I never introduced
them like that. We're talking about doctor fucking Oz today. Yes,
that's right.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Who the thought he'd be a bastard? A TV doctor?
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Who the fuck a TV doctor could be a bad man?
Speaker 2 (02:40):
No, they take an oath TV doctors, they say, do
no harm and get good ratings. That's the hippocratic oath
they do.
Speaker 4 (02:49):
They also oath to be bad guest hosts on Jeopardy
because he sucked and I didn't enjoy it.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Honestly, if you are going up against LeVar Burton for
any job, your first action should be like, you know what,
I'm bowing out ye immediately, I'm not going to compete
with LeVar Burton off fighting Jeordi fighting, Kunta Kinte, fighting whatever.
The reading Rainbow guy's name was. No, I think LeVar.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yeah, yeah, No. I did not watch him on Jeopardy,
but I have seen the show and had no idea
he was a bastard.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Yes, he's a piece of shit. He's he's a different
piece of shit. We're also going to be talking in
the very near future about doctor Phil, who's a much
worse person. Doctor 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 will we'll
have us a nice talk about at the end of
this episode. So I've always said that one of the
(03:48):
great tragedies of American public life is that our very
best doctors are usually like kind of schlubby dudes and
ladies who maybe aren't the best at at social graces
and certainly don't have enough time because they're wildly overworked
to do TV appearances.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. They're not hot. I've always
said is the bottom of they're not hot. I look
at them and I'm like, ill, Like.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
We need to put a couple of billion dollars into
a national program for more fuckable doctors.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Come on, yes, yes, doctors who fuck that's the next
level of healthcare in America. It won't be universal healthcare,
but at least doctors will look fuckable.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Now, I mean, I think the problem is not their fuckibility,
because it's inherently hot to be a doctor. It's more
the fact that they're not necessarily if. Even the ones
who are 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
this show of grifter health influencers and scam artists selling
(04:46):
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, who are 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
(05:07):
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
(05:27):
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. He's kind of made worse. We'll
talk about this a lot by the fact that he
is he's a he's a heart surgeon, and he's an
exceptional heart surgeon.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
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 Carson turned out to be a
Trump guy. He was like, but you're so good.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
The surgeons which you talk to doctors, they'll be like, yeah,
of course, it's always surgeons, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
And they're the ones who think they're gods, right, yes,
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 yes, politics and shit like that.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
I think good surgeons are so prone to being also
like nonsense, like so many of our nonsense public doctors
or surgeons, for the same reason that so many of
our terrorists are engineers. There are 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.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
That's great. It just makes me glad that I never,
you know, got really proficient in anyone's skill.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Never gain skills. I never ever learn how to do things.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
You'll become too smart for yourself and think that you
are God. If no one.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Learned to do anything, we would still be living in
the mud and eating grubs. And you know what, we
wouldn't have salesman, or that we would have very little
at all. Mimet Senga's Oz was born on June eleventh,
nineteen sixty to parents Sunna and Mustafa Oz, who must
(07:12):
have fucked at some point in October of nineteen fifty nine.
In order to conceive him. We have to assume his
parents fucked in in October.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
I don't know that.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Yeah, he could be immaculate conception.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Wow, yeah, you know possible, I would say right now.
The most likely theory is that they fucked sometime in October.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Ah, all right.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
His father, Mustafa had been born in Boskir, 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, you're dealing with a different kind
of poverty than even like our grandparents dealt with here.
(07:50):
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 nineteen fifty five.
So this is a This is a hard working man
and a man who has to struggle, I'm going to
guess in ways that are kind of difficult to imagine
(08:13):
for most of it's even as difficult as our present
times are.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
He is like a true lift yourself up by your bootstrap,
yes kind of guy.
Speaker 4 (08:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Came from the middle of 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 nineteen fifties immigration system. That's that's an achievement.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Good for him started from the bottom and now he's
on TV selling cures.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
That's his dad, that's that's not men. Yeah, yeah, that's Mustafa.
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
(09:05):
of money. As befits his more modest upbringing, Mustapha was
an observant traditional Muslim. Soon his 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
(09:25):
young from a young age, ambitious, starving for success and
his father's approval. He was wont 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
(09:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
What the fuck? So that's way too much stock into
the year of what animal?
Speaker 1 (09:58):
The rat?
Speaker 2 (10:00):
At least he wasn't born into the Year of the Pig.
And he's like, well, what you gotta do is you
gotta take your snout and put it into the trough
of life.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
And just you shut your face into food as hard
as you can.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
You roll around in the shit, and then you hope
that someday you find another piggy to fuck, and then
you have little piglets. It's like, look, I was.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Born in the Year of the Pig, and that's why
it disposed of bodies for the mob.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
It's just what you do. Well, that's it's a nice
take on Year of the Rat.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
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
achieve things, and I don't think about whether or not
they're good or bad. I just I have to achieve.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Yeah, he just wants that cheese.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
Yeah, he wants that cheese. It's ambition without an analysis,
I think, is what you'd call it. And he's he's
pretty open about that.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Now.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Mustapha his dad, repeatedly told the growing doctor Oz who's
not yet a doctor obviously, that when he grown up,
when Mustapa 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 can't take a moment off.
(11:16):
You always got to be hustling. And that's how Memet
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 ninety three on a test,
He'd say, did anyone get better? That was always the question,
he asked, cool death, It sounds like.
Speaker 5 (11:33):
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
(11:54):
were a couple of kids who had to get like
taken in by an ambulance because they would just like
one in one case easing as a result of stress.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Like Jesus good to put this kind of pressure on
a kid.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Develop skills.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
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 gotta love.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
You no matter what.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Yeah, exactly, Stop caring about your dad, you know, just
coast coast.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Some dirt, eat some grubs. You'll be fine.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Yeah, start a Sopranos podcast. That's all you got to.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
Do, dude, really bringing it back there.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
So Memet 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 ten.
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 ten. My father waited until he
was out of earshot and said, I never want you
(13:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Momet go kill that kid.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Kill that kid, fucking cut it.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Murder that loser kid, and tell me what you want
to do with your life. God damn, that is way
too much pressure. Way waits so.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Much pressure to put on a kid.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
By the time Memmett was ready to start school, his
father was wealthy enough to pay to send his son
to Tower Hill School, a K through twelfth grade private
college preparatory school in Wilmington, Delaware.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Jesus, that sounds horrible.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
I know, it sounds like a fucking nightmare.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
Fancy boy, yeah, sounds uniforms ties.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
Yeah, probably like your choice during the summer.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
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,
(14:38):
everyone kind of recognizes this kid is brilliant. Everyone recognizes
he's got the drive he's going to achieve, you know,
so good for him.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
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 gonna be.
No one was like I'm a doctor, you know. It
was it was mostly just like, you know, how's your
(15:05):
hip hop album working out? And they're like good and
they're like cool, and that was the whole thing.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
That's interesting. I think it was different for me because
there was definitely a lot of pressure to have something.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
You know.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
I went to a public school. Yeah, 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 Isabella, 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
damn not a high end educational.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
But once I'll do in a public school. Yeah yeah,
oh damn.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
They still did that in Oklahoma back in them days. Yeah,
you got to sign the paddle afterwards too.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
It's nice.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
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 is a lot of drive
to achieve, like I said, a lot of like kids
who were really motivated by their parents achieve And so
you either were kind of planning to be a doctor
(16:05):
or you know, something on that level, or you were
planning to join the military. Because it was Texas and
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.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Yeah, yeah, I went to yeah, public school, you know,
in 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.
Speaker 4 (16:31):
So see, my brother is a doctor and knew he
was going to be a doctor from that. He's my
older brother too, from the time that he was like seven,
so like, and I'm like, la la la, no idea
that I'm.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
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's just
they always have that like sense where they're trying to
get there. You're you're some sort of stepping stone into
there what ever their career path is. And I don't
like it.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
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 onto like becoming a doctor,
that's the only kind of break. So I guess that's
his gap year is being in the Turkish arty.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
I'm just gonna take a break, have a gap year
and join the military of a foreign country.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Yeah, helps suppress you know, Kurdish liberatory movements and stuff. Whatever.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Yeah, they got to stop trying to have their own thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Yeah, this is very there's a lot of foreshadowing going
on a shadow.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
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 doctor Phil later. Doctor Phil I don't think
is very smart. He's incredibly good at reading and manipulating people,
He's not particularly a genius. Meme At Oz is a
genius like I think almost certainly is an actual genius.
In nineteen eighty five, at age twenty five, he married
(18:23):
Lisa Lemole, who was the daughter of a cardiothoracic surgeon
who worked with his father. They met it 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,
in change, doctor Oz's career zoomed forward. He became triple
(18:45):
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 certain.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Yeah, I got zero boards under my not a one
fun not.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
A single board between the three of us.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
So we really should find a board just to get
us some certifications, guys.
Speaker 1 (19:03):
Just to get certified. If you're a board, if you're
a medical board is a board out there. Well, actually,
you know what, the State of New Jersey has certified
me as a reverend doctor, so I'm one board certificate.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
I assume that we're out there. Is there a board
in the Universal Life Church? Because I am a minister
slash Jedi night, I'm gonna say that counts all right,
I'm board certified. Can you get me painkillers? You know?
I know a guy.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
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 apart, he's
good at the science part. Over time, he authors hundreds
of peer reviewed articles and he's awarded eleven patents. One
of them is for a solution to preserve transplanted organs.
(19:51):
Another is for an aortic valve that can be implanted
without open heart surgery. Like, he's not just really good
at the mechanics of surgery, he's an ex scientist. Yeah,
eleven patents is pretty good.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Seriously, one might say he's the Wizard of Oz there.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
I think I read like six articles with variations of
that title on the.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Guard right, Well, I gotta go.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Then it's just a thing. Journalists can't fucking help themselves.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Anybody you see Oz and you're like, I got a
calm a wizard.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
Got a columb A wizard. Doctor Oz was hired by
Columbia Medical School as a teacher, and as you know,
he's also working. They've been a hospital. He's working there,
but he's also teaching, and he very quickly rises to
the level of full professor and becomes the vice chair
of the cardio of the heart surgery department. Basically at
this point he's in his thirties.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Oh man.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Yeah, Like everything I've read right now on its own
would be a career trajectory. Any doctor in medicine would envy.
Like you could die happy with that being your fucking resume.
Like that's a hell of an achievement.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
In nineteen ninety five, a New York Times profile referred
to doctor Oz as quote, probably the most accomplished thirty
five year old cardiothoracic surgeon in the country. 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.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
I mean, I don't know any other heart surgeons by name,
so fuck yeah, I mean he's the guy.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
Yeah. Now, the article that I found that quote in, however,
gives some hints about what was to come, because that
article was about doctor Oz's increasing experimentation with alternative medicine.
It opens with the story of one of his patients,
a forty nine year old diabetic smoker who suffered a
critical heart attack. She went under Memet's knife for a
dangerous surgery quote at the invitation of Oz and his patient.
(21:50):
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 fifty two year
old healer named Julie Mox 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
(22:12):
and units of lydacane. Motts called softly to Smith to
move her hands from the small toe of the patient's
right foot to a point on the soul 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,
(22:34):
as kings once did to treat subjects with scropula, and
as Jesus is said to have done, and as shamans
and mothers and Chinese quigong 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. Of the kidney meridian, Yeah,
you gotta get that meridian. That's the best part of
(22:55):
the Kidney's the meridian.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
That's the most delicious part of the kidney is the maridian.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Man with fucking on a ritz cracker slice, then I
love me a little little bit. They 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
a little bit of char you know.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
I mean, this all feels like he's going to start
turning his patients into fois gras, and I'm very excited
for what's to come, this heel turn that he's gonna take.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
And now's 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 with my kidney meridian.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
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 harmon seeing you know, And in that case,
if you're actually doing it in the medical context, you're
guaranteeing everybody's taking proper sanitation procedures. Fucking whatever.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Yeah, it seems like from what I can tell, that
sounded non invasive. It's not only yeah, they were just
doing energy work or whenever they were throwing you know,
crystals and doing fucking pendulums over him.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
It falls through the category of it couldn't possibly hurt,
so why not give it a shot, right, which is
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
(24:47):
by exactly forty five minutes, so you know, spend all
your money and gain immortality. We're back. Uh, we're talking
about doctor Oz, who in the mid nineties has started
some weird alternative medicine stuff. Now he's not the person
(25:07):
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 how. You know the thing if television has
taught me accurately, all of the doctors are fucking constantly
m hm.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Doctors fucking teach, that's what they 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 Planetar It 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
(25:45):
whole thing came about because in nineteen ninety three, 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, do this start a magic doctoring school. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
Done to help them.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
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 like she went through chemo and it did nothing.
(26:40):
You know, I get it. You go through something like that. 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.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
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 in modern medicine.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
I might 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 gonna 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
(27:24):
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
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.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
They're dead them. Yeah, they're dead.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
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 if something happens.
I'm not against the basic idea of testing some of
this shit is what.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
The worst thing you're going to get out of that
is a really cool TikTok video of electrocuting a dead body.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Absolutely, and then you get a fuckload of followers, and
then you start selling brain pills.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
It's a perfect plan.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
Uh 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?
Speaker 2 (28:15):
You know what?
Speaker 1 (28:16):
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. Doctor 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
(28:38):
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 of fraud, practitioners of fraud.
It's my feeling that the Rosenthal has been promoting fraudulent
(29:01):
alternatives is 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
doctor 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,
(29:22):
and then they dropped out of a heart attack because
it doesn't replace a valve.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
You know. I'd like to think that even at a
hospital or research facility with Western medicine, that they still
peer review and try out different you know, like alternative medicines, right,
you know, like.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
Some of them, some of them work, some of them work.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Like there was a time when you know, acupuncture was
seen as kind of like a croc and now it's
like kind of just a standard part of Western medicine.
It's just you know, so.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Yeah, and 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 that.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
I know.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
It's one of those things where there's a number of
divergent opinions on actuature. But a number of things that
were initially considered alternative medicines have been found to have
medical benefits. Not that that's the norm, but it has
happened in a 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
(30:35):
picketed the college when the Rosenthal Center opened. None of
this dissuaded doctor 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 sew bypass grafts and even
(30:57):
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 wu new age that can help
with depression and that can help with healing. And he's
(31:19):
right about that. That's 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. Doctor
Oz told The New York Times that he felt ethically
(31:41):
obliged to experiment in new directions in medicine. The article
makes it clear that doctor 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, Memet 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
(32:02):
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 is a fraction of a full memic unit.
He runs down lobs, sizes, tennis partner, mentor and department
chairman doctor Eric A. Rose, who at forty four, is
(32:23):
one of the top transplant surgeons in the world.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
So 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,
could I get that? I do?
Speaker 1 (32:44):
It is a matter we'll talk about the ZN two.
We don't have enough of these guys. It's actually a
major health problem. How few people there are that can
do this. Yeah, but it is exhausting everything you read
about this guy's daily 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 we still like he has
(33:07):
to always be moving towards something.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Yeah, he's got his dad in the back of his
head exactly telling him to murder that kid in the
ice Cream show.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
Yeah, to kill that fucker kill.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
He doesn't know what he wants to be, just like, Yeah,
I mean I imagine that would create a bit of a
problem later in life with stillness.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Yeah, I feel for him a little bit of that.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
Sure. Now.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
The article also goes into more detail about how doctor
Oz's wives fam. Doctor Oz's wife's family piqued 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 oar to relax patients. His
mother in law had developed a special low fat diet
(33:54):
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, doctor Oz, about using
arnika for sore muscles and herbal tea for stomach aches.
So he gets brought in in part to alternative medicine
(34:16):
by these people who have a real medical background and
are doing things that aren't widely accepted but also may help.
You know, music, I think there's there's some data now
and how music can help with the curtain aspicts of
the healing process. Right fat fat mother in law seem
to be on the cutting edge of that.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
When you send the rock Doc, I got concerned. I
thought he was going to like replace people's hearts with
crystals and shit.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
Yeah, oh no, oh no, they all die, but my god,
their hearts are pretty So this is how memeic 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. That's in it.
There's extremely reasonable stuff in the article in general, Like
(35:00):
doctor Oz points out that in nineteen ninety five, 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
(35:23):
time when a lot of stuff that like just wasn't
that is kind of now common sense medicine wasn't, And
I think that kind of opens his eye to like, well,
maybe all this other shit works.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
Yeah, maybe everything in my head is correct. Yeah, only
getting to him turning into a complete narcissist.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Yeah, and the article kind of veers right from yeah.
Having loved ones in the room can influence how well
you heal to doctor 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. She now has her surgical sea legs under her,
(36:03):
but the first time Motts 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 ind 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 soupie trance
(36:26):
music for the bypass team. It was quite a novelty
to hear Mott's 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 Motts was not
looking so good herself, Oz asked a burly assistant to
take her outside for some air. When he returned, he said,
(36:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Oh my god. I swear she's like she seemed like
she is just describe having her own feelings and then
just ascribing them to an open heart.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
Yeah, I think, 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.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Checking the vibes, dude, she's checking the vibes, just making sure,
you know, the vibe dipstick is filled with oil.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
I should not, 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.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
I don't know what riki is I've heard of it?
Is it like when mister Miagi rubs his hands together
and then he.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
Kind 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,
(38:11):
further studies were commissioned after these early studies, which starting
in the early two thousands, were more negative. A number
of hospitals did, however, add wreki practitioners to their stable
of available providers, in part as a result of the
work that doctor Oz in the Center at Columbia was doing.
You can find these people in hospitals now. And it's
(38:33):
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 doctor edzard Ernst.
Speaker 2 (38:53):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
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
(39:16):
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.
(39:38):
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
(39:58):
is still scientifically un resolved.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
Man, we are just veering into anti vaxx territory and
like anti mass territory. People who just they google stuff
and then they go this article right here says that
mass actually can.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
They can't, they can't analyze. And it's from a government
science organization. You know, these guys like and here's a
study that's and it'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 nineteen ninety eight, three years
(40:34):
after the New York Times article about doctor Oz and
the Alternative Medicine Center at Columbia was published. Now, doctor
Oss 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
doctor Oz. I don't know, you can't say that for certain,
(40:57):
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. Colombia 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
(41:18):
organization is filled with people who already believe in it,
carrying out tests that are flawed, and it helps prepare
this culture believing too much in this stuff.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
Oh my god, it's just like it's a real life
Facebook group, you know. It's just like everyone already believes
in all the stuff and they just keept like just
co signing each other's bullshit.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
And it's one of those things like I again, I
know people who swear by Riki, who gain you know,
emotional benefits from it, who think it helps with you know,
a number of things, including like physical including emotional pain,
and like if you find something that helps you alleviate
your emotional pain in power to you know, never gonna
hear me say damn against it.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
You know, go with God. That's that. That's all great,
But uh, I mean you want to relieve pain, Yeah,
try some morphine though, dog, because that ship oh mark morphine.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
There's no downsides to morphine.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
No, I can't think of one downside to morphine.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
It's a single one.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Yeah. It just feels good the whole time, and you
just need to take more.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
My issue is not so much with any particular treatment,
not that 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. Really is not going to solve your
blocked cardiac pathways. You know, it's not going to fix it.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
Yeah, I mean, energy is great, but plavix works wonders.
Speaker 1 (42:49):
You know, this is a lot better. And it's it's
it's more to the point, even more than that, is it.
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
(43:11):
where the roads I have more of a problem with
than doctor 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 helps put it, he
helps put our national foot on the gas pedal into
the post science age.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
So yeah, it's a slippery slope to that, you know,
downing that brain octane oil.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
In exactly exactly. So yeah, at this point, though we're
talking still in the mid nineties, everything doctor 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,
(43:58):
He's right.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Yeah, he is not yet a bastard.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
It's certainly not impossible for this kind of stuff to
have a mental impact which can positively affect recovery. Okay, 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 Prefecture professional who was performing
(44:24):
something like two hundred and fifty heart surgeries a year.
You know, that's two hundred and fifty lives a year extended.
That's great. He's not a bastard yet.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
Yeah, he's doing great work so far. Yes, despite the
weird heart stuff. Fine, a little bit of energy, a
little bit of heart surgery. It works out.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
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 doctor 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 pressed,
very good at getting on TV, at getting in the news.
I think he he is at this point crafting his
career to make himself into an ideal candidate for famous
(45:05):
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
(45:26):
perfectly for that to happen, and he tried in the
early two thousands, 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 get in.
She's very much his business partner to develop himself into
(45:46):
a media personality, and he eventually succeeds in two thousand
and four in getting invited to Oprah Winfrey's show, Now
Memmet 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
(46:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
Man. That is uh. I mean, I'm I'm low key
impressed that he impressed Oprah with the doodoo shapes.
Speaker 1 (46:29):
It's mom's stuff.
Speaker 2 (46:30):
You know.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
Moms love poop.
Speaker 2 (46:31):
They love talking about doo's.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
And that's what like Oz does exactly the right things
to endear himself to like millions of middle class moms,
which is the best market in the It's.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
An incredible market.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
You can make all of the money if you can
get a few million middle class moms to love you.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
Yeah. I worked at this digital uh 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 you know, lady in a car yelling at people
(47:13):
about kids and uh. 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.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
Yeah, I mean, it's it's the power of particularly middle
class moms can't be exaggerated. Like the cops in the
Feds were able to fuck over as many people as
they wanted until they started gaessing moms. The whole country's pissed.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
Yeah, they're like like, hey, listen, you can do that
to people of color, but those are moms.
Speaker 1 (47:45):
Those are white moms.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
Those are white moms. That could be my mother.
Speaker 1 (47:50):
Yeah, you know what else?
Speaker 3 (48:00):
You know, what else did your mom? That's where I
thought you were going with you?
Speaker 1 (48:03):
Now what else is your mother? The products and services
that support this podcast. We're back.
Speaker 3 (48:13):
So we've all disagreed that Matt is very fine. That
was the discussion over the break.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
You made this one into a two parter, Matt, So
you audience can thank you for two episodes about doctor
Oz this week.
Speaker 2 (48:27):
All right, or they can blame you.
Speaker 1 (48:29):
And if they blame or blame him, Matt's home address
is we love to dox our guests.
Speaker 2 (48:37):
Baby.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
So Oprah had Doctor Oz on her show fifty five
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.
Speaker 2 (48:56):
Just appealing to the lowest commons denominator the stupidest human being.
Speaker 1 (49:01):
Marry doctor and if you look at the health of
the average American, you can tell the quality.
Speaker 2 (49:05):
Of job he's done.
Speaker 1 (49:09):
More breadboat bread. Well, actually that's the one thing he is.
He's actually pretty good about like weight low. Well, I
don't know, that's still debatable.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
Stop defend. I'm not going to defend.
Speaker 1 (49:21):
I just love to be fair.
Speaker 2 (49:22):
You know, I know you too, You're very fair.
Speaker 1 (49:25):
Look say what you will about Hitler, you will.
Speaker 2 (49:28):
He was a vegetarian, and that's good for the environment.
Speaker 1 (49:32):
The man cared about animal rights. By two thousand and nine,
it was clear that doctor 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 blockbuster news series. Her
show celebrated the launch of Doctor Oz's show with an
(49:52):
entire episode dedicated to Doctor Oz, which acted as something
of a coming out party for his brand. From a
press release on oprah dot com, this is talking about
the special Doctor Oz episode. Moving personal stories and extraordinary
surprises are featured throughout the hour as Doctor Oz meets
viewers who share how his advice saved their lives, from
(50:12):
those who noticed life threatening diseases their doctors missed to
those who lost weight thanks to his diet tips from
doctor Oz. Real people step forward to offer their thanks
to America's doctor. Plus, it's the reunion that Doctor 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.
(50:34):
He's like the fucking perfect, perfect guy for this.
Speaker 2 (50:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:57):
But years of mostly dangerous health based content.
Speaker 2 (51:01):
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 doctor Oz
and having people come up to him like you save me, fucking.
Speaker 1 (51:15):
What it's worth noting in terms of his bastardrey that
and kind of the acceleration from hey, maybe energy healing
works to becoming a monster. The early two thousands of
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.
Speaker 2 (51:35):
Yeah, oh of the of the Brazilian of God's yohl.
Speaker 1 (51:39):
And on the episode in which she introduces John of
God to America, doctor 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 ex science can explain what this man
is doing, basically giving a real doctor's opinion that this
guy's gotta be legit. John of God later turned out
(52:01):
to be a mass rapist on these on a scale,
hundreds of victims, on a scale almost incomprehensible. We did
a two parter on John of God. You can listen
to it. It's a fucking nightmare. This guy never gets
half the following that he has if it's not for
Oprah and doctor Oz.
Speaker 2 (52:18):
So wow, holy shit.
Speaker 1 (52:22):
Uh it's good shit, good shit. I found a fascinating
New York Times article written a few months into doctor
Oz's new show. It notes that in transitioning to his
own series, Doctor 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.
(52:44):
His show tackles topics is diverse and diversely weighting a
skin cancer, kitchen burns, sleep eating, and pubic hair loss.
Returning constantly to the same television mother load, Winfrey profitably
mined weepy, overweight guests who vow and often fail to
get in shape, and it is taken in it star
far away from any sort of traditional medical practice. He
explains that transition as the product of frustration. Too often.
(53:07):
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
to all aspects of their health head to toe before
(53:27):
they reach a point of no return, lose weight, go
to Brazil and get sexually assaulted by a con man.
Speaker 2 (53:33):
Oh god, oh wow. 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
(53:54):
that's crazy. But you know, hey, John of God, your
os they also sound like great people.
Speaker 1 (54:03):
Yeah, yeah, and it's 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.
Speaker 2 (54:14):
Yeah, because he's got to keep up all those TV dates.
Speaker 1 (54:17):
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 is 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
(54:39):
for being a nonsense doctor. But he's making millions of dollars.
Speaker 2 (54:43):
Yeah, and in America, that is the ultimate marker of
doing the right thing.
Speaker 1 (54:49):
Yeah. That's the only thing that tells you whether or
not you're doing the right thing.
Speaker 2 (54:52):
Is you're making 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.
Speaker 1 (55:00):
Yeah, morally righteous, righteous wealth.
Speaker 2 (55:05):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (55:05):
You know what else is righteous, Matt?
Speaker 2 (55:09):
Is it the products and services?
Speaker 1 (55:12):
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 pluggables.
And I just decided to compliment you before were.
Speaker 2 (55:24):
Yeah, that's very nice 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 end or service called pod Yourself a Gun. It's
a Sopranos podcast and uh uh yeah, if you like
the Sopranos, or even if you don't, check it out
on the you know wherever the podcasts store is.
Speaker 1 (55:45):
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
doctor Oz and scream at him. Give'm a good screaming
Speaker 3 (56:17):
M
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