CZM Rewind: Part Two: Dr. Oz: Why 'America's Doctor' Is A Bastard

It's still a CZM Rewind week! Enjoy the second part of this unfortunately prescient episode where Robert is joined by Matt Lieb to discuss Dr. Oz.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is behind the bastards the podcast. Will we nag
our audience in order to make them more closely drawn
to us. It's a tactic I learned from pickup artists.
From pickup artists. Yes, really, this whole show is based
on the lessons I learned as a pickup artist. You
can't see it that I'm wearing an enormous hat with

(00:24):
ostrich plumes coming off made out of purple felt. It's
an incredible hat, the most fuckable hat, the most fuckable hat. Yes,
that was actually the first name I pitched for this podcast,
but Sophie said that that means nothing and no one
will listen to it, so we will.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
We always pushed lies on my name and saying that
I turned down his ideas.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
That's just not the case, Sylvie. I think we can
all agree that one of the best things to do
is to lie about things your colleagues didn't do because
it's funny.

Speaker 3 (00:55):
I agree with it.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
Thank you. Onto the show. We're talking about doctor Odds,
and as we left the last episode off, he had
just you know, gotten Oprah right, started his TV career,
gotten Oprah hard. So he started his TV career, and
he also starts Right around the same time he gets

(01:17):
on TV for the first time, he starts a daily
morning radio show on Oprah Winfrey's Serious XM channel. Never
a good idea, Serious XM, No terrible idea.

Speaker 4 (01:27):
What is it about giving people three hours of uninterrupted airtime?

Speaker 1 (01:32):
You know?

Speaker 3 (01:33):
There's just something about it, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
And this is an opinion that's pretty controversial within iHeartRadio.
I think radio should be illegal, and I think it
should be a felony punished by prison time for being
on the radio or having a radio or thinking about
the radio.

Speaker 3 (01:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
I think the only form of entertainment that should be
legal is specifically my podcast.

Speaker 4 (01:54):
Yeah yeah, one podcast, yeah yeah, And there should legally
only be one Sopranos podcast allowed, which, as it turns out,
is the case.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
So I think if we, if we could get Chuck
Schumer's ear, we can make this happen. We'll tack this
onto the pot bill, no one will notice. So Doctor
Oz has the Doctor Oz Show. He's got a radio
show on Winfrey's XM channel where he covers very scientific
topics like how God changes your brain and the happiest

(02:26):
people in the world. Now, I found a New York
Times article that was written just a few months into
his tenure with his TV show, kind of at the
start of his burst into stardom, and the interviewer who
talked to Oz for this article seems as impressed as
everyone always is by the manic, somewhat inhuman pace at
which Memet Oz works. By this point, he'd also written

(02:49):
six books with titles like You the Smart Patient, You
on a Diet, and You Having a Baby. It's like
the series is the Yeah, yeah, the famous You colon whatever.
And he co writes these books with another doctor. I
can't tell you how much of the writing was a
lot of times. I'm not saying this is the case
with doctor Oz because he's a wild workaholic, but a

(03:09):
lot of times, when you have a guy that's his
kind of famous and they write a bunch of books,
they write like ten percent of the book and they
have someone else, a co author or a ghostwriter, do
the rest. I don't know if that's the case.

Speaker 4 (03:19):
Here's one Matt Damon who's writing most of Goodwill Hunting,
and then there's a Ben Affleck.

Speaker 3 (03:25):
Who gets top booking.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
And I do believe Matt Damon writes most of his books.
Uh yeah, So nine million copies of his various titles
are in print by this point, like the first year
of his show, So he is he is a very
wealthy and successful man, pretty much out the gate like
money machine. Getting the start on Oprah kind of guarantees it. Basically,
if Oprah likes you enough to put you on her

(03:50):
show more than once, you're going to get rich.

Speaker 3 (03:53):
Damn.

Speaker 4 (03:54):
Yeah, I just I just should have spent my youth
trying to get on Oprah.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
Should have we all should have. So doctor Oz gets
a semi regular column for Time magazine because again they
see this guy get famous and like, we got to
get some of that Oprah money too. We get this
guy on Time, people will start reading Time again and yeah,
it's interesting. They give him a column, and in two
thousand and eight they included him on their list of

(04:22):
the world's most one hundred most influential people. So before
they hire him to a calumn they call him one
of the world's most influential people. And as soon as
he gets listed as one of the hundred most influential
people on the planet, Doctor Oz calls his dad right like, finally, Yeah,
this has gotta be the thing. How could he not
be impressed by this.

Speaker 3 (04:41):
Am I enough for you?

Speaker 1 (04:43):
Pa? So when he tells his dad, his dad's first
question is what numbers?

Speaker 3 (04:48):
Enough? How the list?

Speaker 1 (04:53):
And this is not a ranked thing, like it's not
the top hundred, like going to one. It's just like
these hundred people are all very not a listical. Yeah,
it's not a listical. But doctor Oz in this interview,
seemed to acknowledge that the fact that his dad reacted
that way said a lot about both you know his

(05:14):
dad and about their relationship. He told an interviewer quote,
he wants to know what number? Are you kidding me?
There are six billion people on the planet. It's a
rounding error.

Speaker 4 (05:25):
Oh god? But but like, but like what number though?
Because you want how high are you? Motherfucker? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (05:32):
Come on, you're basically me.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
Yeah. So that interviewer, along with The New York Times,
wrote quote, it's also the kind of thing that goads
the sun to climb mountain after mountain, seldom pausing to
enjoy the view. The Good Doctor did admit to engaging
in a number of time saving measures over the years.
He did numerous columns which were often just recycled from
other columns or chunks of his books, he provided the

(05:56):
same list of skin moisturizing or metabolism boosting tips and
different magazines or online articles. Even so, his workload was enormous.
The Doctor Oz Show was instantly one of the most
popular shows on the planet, and Mehmet was contracted to
record one hundred and seventy five hour long episodes per year,
which is a fucking brutal work schedule on its own.

(06:17):
And the man continued to practice as a surgeon, albeit
at a reduced rate. The New York Times interviewer who
visited him in twenty ten seemed to find his behavior
and kind of his compulsive workoholism somewhat unsettling.

Speaker 3 (06:30):
M hm.

Speaker 1 (06:30):
I never saw him without a portable larder of baggies,
plastic containers and thermoses of food and drink, and all
of it, every crumb, every drop was healthful. Low fat
Greek yogurt mixed with brightly colored berries, spinach slaw, raw almonds,
raw walnuts soaked in water to amplify their nutritional benefit,
a dark green concoction of juices from vegetables including cucumber

(06:51):
at parsley. Roughly every forty five to sixty minutes, as
if on cue he would ingest something from his movable buffet,
but only a little bit. His poorsche assiduously regulated like
an intravelant, like an intravenous drip of nutrition. It was
the most efficient, joyless eating I have ever seen.

Speaker 4 (07:08):
That is so weird.

Speaker 1 (07:09):
I'm sorry, that's so weird.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
It's so uncomfortable to just.

Speaker 4 (07:15):
Like he's cool, dude, Like that's you know, he's living
life in the in the most drab way possible, just
trying to just trying to make TV shows and do
heart surgeries.

Speaker 3 (07:25):
You know, Yeah, who has time to enjoy anything when you're.

Speaker 1 (07:28):
Daddy joyless efficient evening eating.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
He's like, I don't eat or drink anything that I
would enjoy.

Speaker 1 (07:36):
Yeah, you're welcome. That's just so unsettling. I mean, you
know what, I have known a couple of people in
my LIFs, all very skinny, who have told me like
I just don't really like eating, Like, yeah, there's some
foods that I prefer to others, but I just don't
really enjoy it one way or the other. Like I've
not like some of those people wound up on the
soilent thing, and I guess, like, I mean, yeah, fine,
it's like it's whatever, you know, it's your life.

Speaker 4 (07:56):
You want to hear lucky food, eat monkey food. But
don't you be surprised when I judge you? You know, yeah,
like it's, uh, that's weird.

Speaker 1 (08:05):
At the start, the Doctor Oz Show was broadly inoffensive
from a medical perspective. He gave a lot of fairly
good common sense help advice, health advice, and provided a
lot of people with a friendly medical face willing to
explain things their doctors might not have the time or
the bedside manner to properly lay out. But Oz's fascination
with alternative medicine was present from the beginning, and as

(08:25):
time went on, he veered more and more in that direction,
following both the topics that consistently drew the most viewers
and the topics that were easiest to put together, because
one hundred and seventy five hours of content a year
is a lot.

Speaker 4 (08:36):
I mean really though, Like at some point you run
out of shit to talk about and you have to
just be like, uh uh, pendulums over the heart?

Speaker 3 (08:44):
Do they work?

Speaker 1 (08:45):
Yeah? Yeah, a punch of people in the dick? Could
it improve your bowels? Yeah? I mean, you know, we
we have to do. I don't know how much content
we have to do per year, fifty two weeks, two
hours a week. Yeah, we do like one hundred and
ten maybe, like with some of the episodes that go
over one hundred and twenty hours of content a year
for this show. And that's a lot. One hundred and

(09:08):
seventy five hours of video content. Is he like, you can't.
There's not that much good and also entertaining medical advice
that you could give in a year, let alone every
single year.

Speaker 4 (09:18):
I mean, just like there's only so many organs to
talk about, you know, after a while, you just got
to invent shit.

Speaker 1 (09:25):
Yeah, And it's this thing. It's this kind of this
inevitable churn of capitalism leading us all into this this
specific kind of nonsense, because you can't not have content
legally you're contracted to. But also you have this whole
team of people whose ability to pay their rent, whose
ability to afford their homes, to keep their kids in

(09:46):
school is dependent upon you doing this show outside of
just the fact that he's rich. Like, he's fine, but
he like, it's this thing. You have to keep putting
out the thing, and you will never have enough meaningful
shit to put out to do it right. So you start,
in his case, doing nonsense about mediums and shit, and
in our case, doing episodes about Doctor Oz.

Speaker 4 (10:11):
When you run out of bastards, eventually you just gotta
find one on TV.

Speaker 1 (10:14):
We're not out of bastards. But like last week, I
spent thirty hours reading about the Protocols of the Elders
of Zion. I needed an off week. You know, God,
we all need off weeks.

Speaker 4 (10:24):
That is one of my favorite, absolutely real documents to read.

Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah, that's why we brought you on.

Speaker 4 (10:32):
Actually, yeah, I'm actually one of the Elders of Zion,
and I got some protocols for you.

Speaker 1 (10:38):
Yeah. Oh good times, So good time for an example
of the kind of nonsense creep I guess you'd call
it that. Like advanced upon his show. In March of
twenty twelve, Doctor Oz did a show titled Medium Versus Medicine.
Oz's guest was a psychic who claimed she could communicate
with the dead. This was one of several, by this point,

(11:00):
probably dozens of episodes dedicated to people who claim to
talk to the dead. Energy healing was, you know, on
the fringe, certainly, but at least it was something that
when he started doing it, there were scientific studies saying
there might be something to it. Those studies have since
been to a large extent discredited. But when he started
doing that, there was some evidence it was a thing

(11:22):
to try. You know, he wasn't completely out of left field.

Speaker 3 (11:24):
Yeah, people were at least testing it, alling.

Speaker 1 (11:26):
Episodes on mediums. Talking to the dead is well outside
of plausible deniability territory, right, Like you're just doing nonsense
at this point.

Speaker 3 (11:35):
Yeah, you know, it depends how they're talking.

Speaker 4 (11:38):
If you go up to a dead body and start
talking to it, you are technically talking to the dead.

Speaker 1 (11:43):
Now, that would be a fun show. Doctor Oz breaks
into morgues and talks to corpses.

Speaker 3 (11:48):
Yeah, hey, how'd you die?

Speaker 1 (11:51):
Just just having his bodyguards mace police officers rolling into
a crime scene and be liked to this, had this
good out.

Speaker 3 (12:02):
Are you okay?

Speaker 1 (12:05):
I am a doctor. Do you want some almonds?

Speaker 3 (12:12):
They're soaked in water for more nutrition?

Speaker 1 (12:17):
So yeah, he had. Yeah. Doctor Oz had among his
psychic guests famous grifter King John Edwards on his show
Not the Politician, The Talks to Dead TV show guy.

Speaker 3 (12:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:34):
Yeah, And he praised the reading that he received from
John Edwards saying, quote, let me tell you what changed
my life. I've learned in my career that there are
times when science just hasn't caught up with things, and
I think this may be one of them, which is
almost exactly what he said about John of God, the
guy who raped hundreds of people.

Speaker 4 (12:55):
Yeah, that's how you know, like to stay far away
from anything when he's just like, man, this is uh,
this is a brand new, groundbreaking territory and you can
go home, all right.

Speaker 3 (13:05):
Guys, It's a rapist ron and it's one of those things.

Speaker 1 (13:08):
Part of how he's like the intelligent way to frame
this is you start with the truth thing, which is
there things science can't explain. One of those things is
the nature of consciousness and what happens to it after
you know, vital sciences. We don't know. There is not
an objective answer to that. But it going this way
is kind of like being like, yeah, you know, we
can't explain like the slit box experiment. Like there's a

(13:29):
bunch of shit in physics. I don't know, I'm not
a science guy, but like, you know, particle and wave shit,
you can't explain that.

Speaker 3 (13:35):
So much shit you can't explain magnets.

Speaker 1 (13:38):
Yeah, how do they work?

Speaker 3 (13:39):
How do they work?

Speaker 1 (13:40):
It's this, it's this jump from Yes, there are things
we can't explain to. So let's listen to this man
talk to the dead. Millions of people gather around, gather around.
He's going to channel you're dead on Yes. Maybe not
not a reasonable way to take a reasonable starting point.

Speaker 4 (14:01):
Yeah, especially when you're a doctor on TV.

Speaker 3 (14:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (14:05):
And I want to quote from a write up I
found in the Journal of the Missouri State Medical Association. Quote.
During another show, Oz interviewed doctor Mossarafali, a miracle healer
to Sylvester Stallone, Prince Charles of England, and others, regarding
his use of iritology. According to the whitely debunked bizarre belief,
each part of the iris corresponds to a specific area

(14:26):
of the body, and a person's state of health could
be diagnosed by examining particular regions of the iris. After
expressing his amazement at doctor Ali's diagnostic abilities, Ah stated,
I want to applaud doctor mossaraf Ali because these are
ancient traditions and they have been around for centuries. So
who am I to hasmissed them.

Speaker 3 (14:44):
Other than a very well educated man, a.

Speaker 2 (14:47):
Doctor, a doctor memet, Prince Charles.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
Yeah, it's like, you know, there's a lot of cultures
who say that you should remove the clitorists surgically. It's
it's it's it's healthier and it stops dangerous masturbation. It's ancient.
Who are we to say this is a bad idea?

Speaker 3 (15:06):
Who are any of us to say anything wrong?

Speaker 2 (15:11):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (15:11):
My god, I love it too, just like Yeah, I
was amazed by his ability to look into my eyes
and diagnose that my dad will never love me.

Speaker 3 (15:19):
How did he know? How did you know?

Speaker 2 (15:21):
It does bring me joy that Prince Charles got sucked with.

Speaker 1 (15:25):
Oh I wonder what his eyes said.

Speaker 4 (15:27):
It's funny he said the same thing. It said, your
dad will never love you. That's all he does. He
goes to famous people and he goes your dad will
never love you. Your dad will never love you.

Speaker 1 (15:34):
You so much, there's this. One of the big aspects
of this guy's success and of the success of the
things he pushes is Orientalism, right, like this idea of
like the forbidden and strange and wondrous and magical East
and all of the Yeah, we don't understand all of
these like, oh, India is so mysterious. What if you

(15:58):
were to say, like, well, for centuries, tobacco companies have
said that tobacco can cure like different run ailments. Who
are we to dismiss these ancient traditions?

Speaker 3 (16:09):
Yeah, the Q zone could be real.

Speaker 4 (16:11):
Exactly, like it stops people from stuttering, do more cocaine?

Speaker 3 (16:19):
I mean, yeah, just the idea.

Speaker 4 (16:21):
And I've always found this in general to be the
biggest load of Horseshit is when people have said, you know,
this is like an ancient healing technique, and it's like,
you mean like bleeding people with leeches, you know, you
mean like cutting off someone's leg because he got a
fucking a small infection on his toe.

Speaker 1 (16:40):
Ancient. It's this thing with doctor Oz, Like it's one
thing if you're just like traveling to another part of
the world, you see some sort of medical or treatment
you've never seen before, and you're like, well, am I
who am I to say anything about? Right? Like, I
don't know, doctor Oz is a doctor on TV talking
to millions. You're literally the person who should be saying

(17:01):
something about the legitimacy of this, right.

Speaker 3 (17:04):
Yeah, Yeah, you're the guy.

Speaker 1 (17:06):
You're the person you are, in fact, the person who
should say something about.

Speaker 3 (17:10):
Oh am I you are you? He is the most
famous doctor in America.

Speaker 1 (17:14):
Yeah, and that's what that That write up in the
Journal of the Missouri State Medical Association notes, quote who
doctor us is a trained clinician and scientist, someone who
can read a scientific article with a critical eye. He
is someone who can filter out the noise of the
placebo effect or discern the simple carnival tricks of his charlatan.
The problem is that most people in his audience cannot.

Speaker 4 (17:35):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's he has a literal responsibility
to tell people that these guys are full of shit.
But he also has a responsibility to his show sponsors
and to the network for ratings.

Speaker 3 (17:49):
You know, you know who.

Speaker 1 (17:50):
Else has a responsibility to the show sponsors.

Speaker 4 (17:53):
Wow, that's got to be the first time.

Speaker 3 (17:58):
That's got to be the first time it's ever.

Speaker 1 (18:01):
So fucking good.

Speaker 3 (18:03):
So good.

Speaker 1 (18:04):
Anyway, here's products Ah, we're back talking about doctor Oz
having just a great time. So obviously, the fact that
doctor Oz, I mean, probably the fact that most of
his audience couldn't discern whether or not any of these

(18:24):
nonsense treatments were real is a big part of why
the Doctor Oz Show became an overnight success. Yeah, before
very long, it was being watched by four million viewers
every single day. Over the next half decade or so,
he won two Emmys. His guest list included First Lady
Michelle Obama, who loved Doctor Oz for his focus on
healthy diets for children and in general, his crusade to

(18:46):
get Americans to lose weight. Doctor Oz claimed through Medicine
through Math that I cannot verify that his show inspired
Americans to lose three million cumulative pounds per year. I
don't know.

Speaker 4 (18:59):
Maybe yeah, they based that on what, like did people
call in to say how many pounds they've lost to
the show.

Speaker 1 (19:07):
I mean, I'm sure he found some way to like
make the claim or whatever. But it's it's very it's
I don't know. Maybe it is one of the things
that he does that is we'll talk about that. There's
problems with some of the diet tips he gives people,
actually significant ones, but telling like inspiring people to lose
weight is not usually bad for their health, although it

(19:27):
can be. Yeah, yeah, sometimes people take it too far
and it depends on health problems.

Speaker 2 (19:32):
You know.

Speaker 1 (19:33):
It's a mixed bag I guess we'd say, yeah, but
the other stuff isn't a mixed bag, so I guess
we'll call that his his great success. So yeah, it
is good. I will say it is unequivocally good that
doctor Oz continually pressed his audience of millions of people
to eat more fruits and vegetables, fruits and vegetables, to
get better sleep, to exercise regularly, and to get their

(19:55):
flu vaccinations. That's all rat right, Yeah, but shit, I
could have to you give me, you know, you don't
have to.

Speaker 4 (20:02):
You don't have to be a doctor to say that
doctor that ship, Yeah, eat better piggies.

Speaker 1 (20:07):
But he's charismatic. People like him. It's good that he
does that at least.

Speaker 4 (20:11):
Yeah, they don't trust me, so they won't give me
the show, but they should because Yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:16):
The unfortunate part is that this guy gained because he's
he's handsome. A lot of a lot of a lot
of ladies out there think doctor Oz is hot. He's
he's very charismatic, he's very charming, and he gains this
enormous influence with Middle America and he uses that influence
to do some really fucking questionable ship. And I'm going

(20:38):
to quote now from a write up in the a
m a's Journal of Ethics. He has told mothers that
there were dangerous levels of arsenic in their child's apple
juice there weren't, and suggested that green coffee is a
miracle cure for obesity. Federal regulators discovered altered data and
hyped coffee being evidence. The Food and Drug Administration tested
for arsenic and apple juice and found the vast majority

(21:00):
of apple juice tested contained to contain low levels of arsenic,
and given these levels, was confident in the overall safety
of apple juice consumed in this country. Doctor Oz also
featured two guests on his show who claimed that genetically
modified foods were cancer costing despite repeated safety reports that
found no adverse effects.

Speaker 4 (21:18):
Man, Yeah, I mean he's like he's varying, he's getting there,
Like I'm I'm watching him slowly go from memet to mangola.

Speaker 5 (21:29):
You yeah, come on, it is too good a pun
to exist that you want to be fair, Robert, But.

Speaker 3 (21:39):
Let's go for it, all right, We'll do it.

Speaker 4 (21:41):
But no, we're watching it like turn into a snake
oil salesman, and it's it's very exciting.

Speaker 1 (21:47):
Yeah. So Doctor Oz's enthusiasm for alternative medicine has had
the effect of creating instant fads over any health product
he even vaguely suggests on his show. When he mentions
the purported health the fits of white mulberry, red palm oil,
or brown seaweed, all of which he's claimed can do
things like cut weight, reduce aging, or beat the flu,

(22:07):
those products fly off the shelf. Oz often doesn't endure
specific brands, but he doesn't need to. Online retailers watch
closely and immediately slap, as seen on Doctor Oz on
the pseudoscientific products.

Speaker 3 (22:20):
Yes, I've seen this.

Speaker 1 (22:21):
Yeah, this is where we get to the big harm.
He did one episode that focused on so called relaxation
drinks and included a close up shot of five cans
of beverages he said might help calm you down.

Speaker 3 (22:33):
Just a Miller High Life.

Speaker 1 (22:35):
Yeah, he just puts a can of on the table.
Billy d Williams walks out.

Speaker 3 (22:45):
It's a still reserve. Trust me, You'll trust me.

Speaker 1 (22:49):
You'll be calm as shit exactly.

Speaker 3 (22:52):
You might yell at your mom, but fun afterwards.

Speaker 1 (22:56):
Yeah, you will very calmly put your hand through a
taxi cab windows as soon as the episode aired, a
quote liquid sleep aid called eye Chill ragged on their website.
Doctor Oz is talking about a new way to wind
down with relaxation drinks. They are the newest trend and

(23:16):
helping you relax and calm down. And the best news
is they contain natural ingredients already known to promote relaxation.

Speaker 3 (23:24):
Mulberry love them.

Speaker 2 (23:28):
I remember the I shill that turned into like an
entire thing. There's so many.

Speaker 1 (23:32):
Yeah, we're about to We're about to talk about it. Yeah.
And also if there was a Laudanum drink, I would
be buying it. So the problem with all with this
is that all of these different relaxation drinks are filled
with a variety of chemicals like melatonin and thianine and tourine.
These drinks are unregulated as they are not medicines or

(23:52):
dietary supplements, but the chemicals they include all have actual
impacts on the central nervous system. Pregnant women and children
are often advised to avoid products with some of these chemicals,
but the beverages in question rarely note this. No data
exists on how these chemicals might impact people in the
quantities they are added to in these beverages, or when

(24:13):
combined with other chemicals, or when combined with medications, people
drinking them might be taking responsible Doctors, writing for the
journal for the journal Nature Neuroscience, wrote a warning about
these beverages that specifically called out echill by name. Quote.
Existing research on the potential benefits and harms of some
components of relaxation drinks suggests that they may not always

(24:34):
be safe. Indeed, the FDA issued a warning last year
to the manufactures of melatonin laced brownies, citing safety concerns
from the literature, including effects on the autonomic nervous system
and visual system, and increased expression of symptoms in a
sleep disorder. Other components of relaxation drinks, such as l
fhionine or amino acids such as taurine, may be considered
safer consumption only at some doses by the FDA, but

(24:57):
relaxation drinks are not subject to such regulations, nor are
they required to disclose the amounts of their ingredients.

Speaker 4 (25:04):
Oh my god, I mean, first of all, did you
say melowtnin brownies?

Speaker 3 (25:10):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (25:11):
Buddy, what the fuck?

Speaker 4 (25:12):
Like I want to eat and just get tired immediately?
Like that is very strange. It like, here's the thing
about brownies. I've never eaten one and been like, I
just want to relax, Like, no, I'm trying to get
a little.

Speaker 3 (25:24):
Sugar rush to be honest.

Speaker 2 (25:26):
To be honest, a sleepy town brownie delightful, I would
be very down.

Speaker 3 (25:31):
Listen. Pot brownies are very different.

Speaker 4 (25:33):
It's not it's not the same as relaxation brow Like
one is like an ambient brownie and the other one
is like a brownie that makes you.

Speaker 3 (25:41):
Hungry for more brownies. Pot brownies makes sense.

Speaker 2 (25:44):
Ambient brownies exist.

Speaker 1 (25:46):
I would love one, thank.

Speaker 4 (25:47):
You very I mean, I guess I'd rather do that
than just swallow an ambient But man, that is.

Speaker 2 (25:51):
I'm like, I'm like gets to sleep and also got
a brownie. I'm sounds awesome.

Speaker 3 (25:57):
It's bad for your health, I'll tell you that much.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
Am I remembering this correctly?

Speaker 1 (26:02):
Robert?

Speaker 2 (26:02):
But wasn't the ichow like like the bottle and the
marketing like similar style to like an energy drink, similar
to like a five hour energy that was like the esthetic.

Speaker 1 (26:12):
No, no, no, I think those were those were They
had like a weird different shaped plastic bottle. But like
the problem is that again, Number one You've got a
lot of people with like who are on medications that
the shit interacts with.

Speaker 4 (26:23):
Which is crazy that like literally a relaxation drink could
be contraindicated for your prescription medication.

Speaker 1 (26:31):
Okay, so everything doctor Oz recommends, I guess, outside of
like death psychics comes with this caveat. Some of the
herbs and natural medicines that he recommends do have health impacts,
but they also have consequences medications they might not interact
well with. Doctor Oz does not bring this up when
he shotguns half assed advice out to an audience of millions.

(26:54):
That article in Nature Neuroscience that I referenced warning about
the relaxation drinks Oz recommended, It's been read ten thousand times.
So the article warning people that these things can be
contraindicated and might have impacts on your health and your
central nervous system read ten thousand times. Doctor Oz's episode
suggesting these drinks listened watched four million times.

Speaker 3 (27:15):
God damn yeah.

Speaker 1 (27:18):
People started to notice that this was a problem by
the mid aughts. Doctors had been complaining for a while,
but in twenty thirteen Forbes wrote a listical laying out
the silliest things Doctor Oz has suggested on his show,
including the fact that having two hundred orgasms a year
would extend your life by six years. Here's how he
explained that bit of math on his website.

Speaker 3 (27:38):
Dude, I'm about to live to two hundred years old.

Speaker 1 (27:41):
Yeah, I never dieing, motherfucker.

Speaker 3 (27:43):
I never died.

Speaker 4 (27:44):
I get one out at least once a dirt five.

Speaker 1 (27:50):
Here's his website. If you have more than two hundred
orgasms a year, you can reduce your physiologic age by
six years. Doctor Oz says he bases the number on
a study done at Duke University that surveyed people on
the amountain quality of sex they had. They looked at
what happened to folks that are receiving a lot of
intercourse over time and the fact is it correlated?

Speaker 3 (28:09):
Ohkay wait wait.

Speaker 4 (28:10):
Wait wait yea is it sex? Because he didn't say
nothing about sex. He said orgasms, and I do that
on my own.

Speaker 1 (28:18):
I know he talked to them about the amountain quality
of sex they had, but like, it's correlated. So again
he's basically lying here, Yeah, because yeah, you number one,
what is the possibility that people who are having a
lot of good sex are in better health? Well, that's
why they're able to have a lot more good sex
because they're like, they're physically healthy, and so it's easier

(28:40):
for them to like, what what are the odds that, like,
if you're having more sex, you're more social, you're more
likely to have a long term romantic partner that increases
your live span. Yeah. Again, I'm of all people, never
going to be the guy to say there's not health
benefits to sex. There sure is. Oh yeah, doctor Oz
is exaggerating this. He's taking an actual study that showed

(29:04):
some interesting stuff and he's turning it into a lie.

Speaker 4 (29:07):
Yeah, he's turning it into like pretending he has quantifiable
data and that like correlation and correlation is causation like that.

Speaker 3 (29:16):
Yeah, that's that's what he's trying to do.

Speaker 1 (29:18):
Yeah, there is data that suggests that regular intercourse reduces
men's mortality risks by fifty percent, Which doesn't mean that
fucking stops men from dying, particularly because it's men who
benefit in this way. It means that men are less
healthy than women tend to die faster, and when men
have partners that they live with, they are more likely
to have a medical problem. Noticed if they have a

(29:38):
heart attack, someone's going to be there to call it, like,
there's a lot of reasons why this is the case.

Speaker 3 (29:43):
Yeah, they're not dying alone, you know.

Speaker 1 (29:45):
Yeah, it's not the fact that just fucking magically adds
like reduces your age by six years if you do
it enough. Like that's nonsense.

Speaker 4 (29:54):
It's nice to think it, though it makes it.

Speaker 1 (29:56):
It is nice to think it.

Speaker 3 (29:58):
I'm going to une.

Speaker 4 (29:59):
Out that article, show it to my girlfriend and say, hey,
you got to help me live longer.

Speaker 1 (30:04):
You know, not coming enough. I'm gonna we gotta do
this more. Yeah, just start fucking in public and when
the cops come, be like, this is medicine.

Speaker 4 (30:13):
Yeah, do you want me to die six years earlier
than I should?

Speaker 1 (30:17):
I have a right to this.

Speaker 3 (30:19):
Doctor Odd said I should fuck.

Speaker 1 (30:21):
More now on its own, recommending that people get more
sexes is you know, fine, I'm very pro sex, but
I am anti encouraging people to misunderstand health science. The
nature of doctor Oz's audience and the sheer breadth of
things he suggests makes it difficult to analyze the total
health impact of his show, but there are some dire
case studies. As Vox notes in their write up quote,

(30:44):
there's the case of a man who followed Oz's suggestion
of curing insomnia by pouring uncooked rice into socks, heating
them in a microwave, and wearing them to bed. The
man got second and third degree burns on his feet.
And the reason he got burned is because he was diabetic.
He didn't have the same level of feeling in his feet.

Speaker 3 (31:02):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (31:02):
If he had gone to a doctor and said, hey,
I heard about this thing that might help with insomnia,
the doctor would say, well, you're diabetic. You don't have
as much feeling in your feet. I'm worry you might
burn yourself. Doctor Oz is just saying, hey, this will
help you sleep. Do it whoever you are. Again, you're
talking to four million people. It will be bad advice
for some of them.

Speaker 4 (31:23):
I mean, it's like this all feels very much like
when Trump was telling everyone about the wonders of hydrohalkout
that later and then people are eating fucking fish food
or like fish tank cleaner and dying everyople like how could.

Speaker 3 (31:42):
How could people be so stupid? And it's like people
are stupid. You can't tell them to eat the fucking
fishball cleaner.

Speaker 1 (31:50):
Yeah, they'll do it. It's they'll fucking do it. So
this guy sued, but the case was thrown out because
the judge determined that Oz cannot establish the physician patient
relationship through TV. I agree with the judge. That's my
problem with his show is that he is a physician
purporting to be giving medical advice, but is also not

(32:11):
taking anyone's individual circumstances into account, and, more to the
fucking point, not liable if he does any of the
irresponsible things that would lend a physician doing their job
traditionally in trouble.

Speaker 4 (32:25):
I mean, it is medical malpractice, whether or not he's
legally liable for it or not.

Speaker 1 (32:31):
I would agree, and I'm going to continue that quote
from Vox. Not everyone agrees with the judge's reasoning. Rochester,
New York medical student and blogger Benjamin Maser has been
publishing anonymous stories sent to him from health professionals about
the impact OZ has had on patient care. One reported
that her dad had a heart attack and five stints
placed in his heart, which required him to take aspirin

(32:52):
and plavix to prevent blood cloths. He was watching doctor Oz,
who said plavix was not necessary, so he stopped taking it.
About a month later, he had another massive heart attack
and coded and had to be shocked back to life.
Will continued, My dad admitted to following doctor Oz's advice
and not acting his own cardiologist.

Speaker 3 (33:11):
Man, yeah, that's really bad.

Speaker 4 (33:13):
Did he have a did he have like an alternative
or was he just like decided one day that plavix
is gonna be sure it was.

Speaker 1 (33:20):
If I know my doctor Oz, I'm sure it was.
You don't need to take plavix. Eat these different heart
healthy foods and avoid these foods, and that'll do all
that plavix will do.

Speaker 4 (33:28):
Yeah. Yeah, eat some beans and put your face in
some boiled water and you should be fine.

Speaker 1 (33:34):
I suspect it was dietary advice that if you're someone
who doesn't really need plavix, is fine, or might even
help you to not need it later in life if
you wouldn't tell your habits. But the problem is, again
the way he's framing it, there's going to be a
lot of people who are like, just had stints placed
in their heart. I don't need plavix. Fucking yeah, you know.

Speaker 4 (33:50):
Doctor Oz, the TV doctor said I don't need this medicine.

Speaker 3 (33:54):
I just need more ASA in my belly.

Speaker 1 (33:57):
The TV doctor also said he can talk to go,
So I'm on go talk. I mean you will be
talking to ghosts faster if you follow all of Doctor.

Speaker 3 (34:07):
I want a talkt to ghosts. I'm gonna stop taking
up Lavix and I have.

Speaker 1 (34:10):
A stroke now. On his show, Doctor Oz claims that
the trust of his audience is the entire reason for
his relevance. Quote the currency that ideal in his trust,
and it is trust that has been given to me
by an audience that has watched over six hundred shows.
He repeatedly references the fact that he is responding to
the very real and very understandable unfilled needs of Americans

(34:32):
who feel alienated from modern healthcare, which is an expensive
and often inhumane, labyrinthine bureaucracy. Truth is true, Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 4 (34:43):
Yeah, how you exploit it is a very different thing.

Speaker 1 (34:47):
But the thing he is replacing it with is by
and large nonsense. And I'm gonna quote from that rite
up in the Journal of Ethics again. When it comes
to epistemic boundaries, doctor Oz admits he applies different standards
of evidence compared to those accepted in the medical establishment.
When challenged by a reporter for the New Yorker about
his questionable evidentiary standards. He replied that all data could

(35:08):
be differentially interpreted. You find the arguments that support your data,
he said, And it's my fact versus your fact. It's
not that he doesn't offer data. It's common for doctor
Oz to offer some plausible mechanism from test tube experiments
conducted by manufacturers, combined with personal anecdotes from his own
or consumer's experience, to support the products he's promoting. A
study of eighty recommendations made on The Doctor Oz Show

(35:30):
in early twenty thirteen found that published evidence supported forty
six percent of recommendations, contradicted fifteen percent, and did not
support thirty nine percent.

Speaker 4 (35:40):
Gotta love a good like coin flip on whether or
not he's fucking lying to you and yeah, having an
adverse effect on your health.

Speaker 1 (35:48):
If your doctor said, hey, you know forty six percent
at the time, I get pretty good advice, yeah, you
would be like, I think I might to get another doctor.

Speaker 4 (35:56):
But he would reframe it to'd be like, I'm back
in five hundred here, really five hundred.

Speaker 1 (36:02):
If you assume medicine is like baseball, I'm a great doctor.

Speaker 3 (36:07):
Yeah, do a great job.

Speaker 1 (36:09):
Now, to his credit, the journal does note that a
decent chunk of the blame for doctor Oz's success lies
in the very, very flawed state of mainstream medical science. Quote.
We settle for incomplete, selectively published data in journals heavily
subsidized by pharmaceutical companies, and for outcomes that don't give
firm answers, while not on part without offering anecdotes as evidence.

(36:31):
The fact that debates persist about what constitutes sufficiently high
unbiased quality evidence to support decisions in the profession as
a whole creates a wedge that doctor Oz seems to exploit.
Mm So again, this is the Journal of Ethics being
like the fact that you can pay to get a
study done, the fact that we pharmaceutical companies lobby to

(36:51):
allow them to market things in dishonest ways, the fact
that doctors are bribed by companies like Produe Pharmaceutical with vacations. Yeah,
I commend people take medication that is not in their
best infest to take. That's why this motherfucker has a job.
And the fact that healthcare is expensive, right, the fact
that we don't have single pair of health care. It
all combines to the fact that a lot of people

(37:13):
who are not idiots. I'm not saying you can be.
I'm sure there's people who are brilliant electricians, who fucking
are brilliant at whatever, who are great at whatever it
is they do, but they're not fucking doctors, because most
of us aren't, and it's hard to get I am
very fortunate in that I have a couple of good
friends who are doctors, and I am luckier than I can.

(37:33):
One of them is a guy who was on the
shore recently, Cavajoda. I'm luckier than I can that I
can say to be able to like every now and
then send them a message being like, hey, what should
I do here? And that's a question of like, I'm
having this problem. I don't know what kind of doctor
to see to like get this dealt with. I don't
know whose job this is, and I don't want to Like.

(37:53):
My ex a while ago had a non cancerous brain
tumor and it was a fucking nightmare figuring out it
took a series of different doctors and test to figure
out what kind of doctors she needed to go to
to get the medication that would help. And it's of
course people are like, well this guy is explaining things,
and he's nice, and he's saying that I have the
power to deal with this, change my diet if I

(38:15):
do this, if I do that.

Speaker 4 (38:17):
He's giving us alternatives to dealing with the bureaucracy of
medical institutions in this country. I have a kaiser and
I had to go to a rheumatologist and I tried
to get a hold of him on the phone, and
they sent me through six different call centers to finally
get to his specific office.

Speaker 3 (38:36):
And then I asked the lady, oh.

Speaker 4 (38:38):
Can I get the extension so that I don't have
to deal with that, and she's like, oh, sorry, we're
not allowed to do that. And so now now I'm
just recording every phone call and just you know, freestyling
to the hold music because it's.

Speaker 3 (38:52):
The only thing I can do.

Speaker 4 (38:53):
I'm like, you know what, I might as well turn
this into content, because this is fucking ridiculous. You know,
there's like the the amount of bullshit you have to
go through makes people like doctor Oz feel like a
good alternative, you know.

Speaker 1 (39:07):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and it's it fucking sucks. It just
really fucking sucks. And it fucking sucks because there's a
lot of wonderful people who are part of the medical system,
like the fucking doctors in the in the er who
were with my mom in her last days, Like incredibly

(39:27):
competent and compassionate and amazing people who in their entire
careers will never be able to do as much good
as doctor Oz does harm because he has four million
people watching him every day. Yeah it's a bummer.

Speaker 3 (39:41):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's you know, it's not a bummer.

Speaker 1 (39:44):
Oh wow, Capitalism is actually a bummer. But it's the
water we swim in. So here's some fucking ats. We're back.
So in twenty fourteen, Memet Oz was called before a
Senate subcommittee to answer questions about his unfounded claims about

(40:05):
dietary supplements. Missouri's Senator Claire McCaskill went off on him, saying,
I don't know why you need to say this stuff,
because you know it's not true. Why when you have
this amazing megaphone and this amazing ability to communicate, would
you cheapen your show by saying things like this?

Speaker 4 (40:22):
And he just pulled out a lot of money and
he just started making it rain all over Congress.

Speaker 1 (40:26):
Do you know how many houses I have? She pointed
out several examples of the things he cheapens his show
by saying he had called green coffee extract a quote
magical weight loss cure. Recent research has recent research has
suggested that long term use of green coffee extract causes
bone density loss in animals. But you are, in fairness,

(40:50):
you're losing weight. Your bones are lighter.

Speaker 3 (40:53):
That's weight.

Speaker 1 (40:54):
Bones are heavy as hell.

Speaker 2 (40:55):
It was everywhere when that came out. It was that literally,
not just like it's not like bed, bathroom, be everywhere.

Speaker 3 (41:02):
It was get like bones you can fly like a bird.

Speaker 1 (41:06):
Mm hmmm h And again those are studies and animals,
but it's the kind of thing where a responsible doctor
would say, well, some studies and animals have shown that
this might call bone cause bone density loss. So unless
you know your weight is a really disastrous health situation
and your bone density is fine, I wouldn't recommend this.
Doctor us is just saying it's a magical weight loss here.

Speaker 3 (41:28):
I mean, he's not wrong, he's not wrong.

Speaker 1 (41:31):
Yeah, Oz called raspberry ketone quote the number one miracle
in a bottle to burn your fat. This is a
fun one. First of all, it's all gasoline. Part of
why people. Well, Actually, part part of why people are
attracted to stuff like this is that, like raspberry ketone
that's natural. It sounds like, oh, if I just like
getting raspberries, that's gonna help me lose weight. This chemical

(41:52):
in a natural, healthy fruit. Of course, it makes sense
that like some wonderful plant based medicine would be able
to help me lose weight. Raspberry keytones don't come from raspberries.
They can, but it takes ninety pounds of fresh raspberries
to produce a single dose. As a result, they are
manufactured synthetically, a fact Doctor Oz did not feel the

(42:12):
need to explain because again he's really critical of GMOs
and it might seem hypocritical to note that raspberry ketones
are actually synthetic lab nonsense.

Speaker 4 (42:22):
I love when people say things like it's it's natural.
It's like I think cyanide is natural. There's a there's
a lot of like natural poisons out there. This fucking
snake venom is natural.

Speaker 1 (42:34):
The fucking arsenic in the apple juice that he's worried
about is natural. Yeah, it is possible, based on animal studies,
that these keytones may have some ability to reduce or
slow weight gain. But no studies have ever been conducted
on how raspberry ketones impact human beings. There have been
reports that they increase blood pressure and heart rate in humans,

(42:57):
Doctor Oz does not warn about this. Likewise, when Doctor
Oz told his viewers that garcina cambogia may be the
simple solution you've been looking for to bust your body
fat for good, he did not also warn them that
it can interact negatively with diabetes medications, pain killers, and
psychiatric medications. Oh my god, why would you need to

(43:17):
warn people that? Look, what are the odds someone looking
to lose weight has diabetes medications? Zero?

Speaker 4 (43:25):
What are the odds that someone who has diabetes is
sitting around watching Doctor Oz's show?

Speaker 3 (43:30):
Zero?

Speaker 1 (43:31):
What are the odds that a middle class American is
addicted to painkillers?

Speaker 3 (43:36):
Zero?

Speaker 1 (43:37):
Zero? During the Senate inquiry, Senator McCaskill pointed some of
this out, and she told doctor Oz quote, when you
feature a product on your show, it creates what has
become known as the Doctor Oz Effect, dramatically boosting sales
and driving scam artists to pop up overnight using false
and deceptive ads to sell questionable products. Hmm.

Speaker 3 (43:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (43:59):
In the wake of this, which was a fairly bad
day on Capitol Hill for him. Doctor Oz released a
somewhat contrite statement where he noted I took part in
today's hearing because I am accountable for my role in
the proliferation of these scams, and I recognize that my
enthusiastic language has made the problem worse at times.

Speaker 3 (44:16):
Good so far, yeah, good, pretty good so far.

Speaker 1 (44:19):
Oz added in his statement, to not have the conversation
about supplements at all, however, would be a disservice to
the viewer. In addition to exercising an abundance of caution
and discussing promising research and products in the future, I
look forward to working with all those present today and
finding a way to deal with the problems of weight
loss scams. God, yeah, it's just amazing.

Speaker 3 (44:39):
I'm just talking about I'm just asking the question.

Speaker 1 (44:42):
We have to have conversations about this, you know, a
conversation would be noting, for example, green coffee extract causes
bone density lost aries and perhaps be worse. Yeah, that's
a conversation. Well, you and I have had about these
things as a conversation.

Speaker 4 (44:57):
Yeah, I love people are like, I'm just asking the question.

Speaker 1 (45:01):
I mean, I'm not a doctor. I'm a guy who's
addicted to an unregulated plant, Oh my god, which I
just took more of while standing next to my unregulated Gunyah.

Speaker 3 (45:15):
Dude, you're living the unregulation now.

Speaker 1 (45:20):
So Doctor Oz, also making the statement, pointed out that
he believed the greatest disservice he'd done to his audience
was to not recommend specific products, which had provided room
for a wide industry of shysters to stick his name
on their website. So like, oh, I was just saying
green coffee extract, and a bunch of companies I couldn't
verify started selling with my name on it. I should

(45:42):
have recommended a specific brand.

Speaker 4 (45:44):
Yeah. What I need to do is cut deals with
specific companies so that you can only be taking their
bone density lost drugs.

Speaker 3 (45:53):
Yeah, I mean exactly good calls.

Speaker 1 (45:56):
Fucking amazing.

Speaker 3 (45:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:59):
So, in awake of this day on Capitol Hill and
this amazing response, physicians across the country asked Columbia University
in a letter basically, what the fuck why is this
guy still on your faculty? Columbia claimed it was because
of their commitment to quote the principle of academic freedom
into upholding faculty members freedom of expression for statements they
make in public discussion.

Speaker 4 (46:21):
Hell yeah, dude, Yeah, they're like anti cancel culture letter.

Speaker 3 (46:28):
You know, they're just like, stop trying to cancel, doctor ows.
It's freedom of speech.

Speaker 1 (46:31):
Your freedom of speech. Yeah, I mean, doctors also are
held to different standards than the rest of us. They
come on if, like your uncle Jimbo says, hey, you know,
take some green coffee extrac it'll help you lose weight.
Nothing wrong with that. It might not be good advice,
but that's just a guy saying a thing. Doctors are

(46:52):
held to a different standard.

Speaker 4 (46:54):
Yeah, it's on you if you listen to your crazy
uncle Jimbo, it is definitely on the doc. Sure, if
he recommends you lose some bone density so that you
look better in that dress, it's it's it's.

Speaker 1 (47:08):
Awesome, it's what.

Speaker 4 (47:11):
So.

Speaker 1 (47:11):
On April fifteenth, twenty fifteen, ten prominent physicians sent a
letter to Columbia University calling Oz's faculty position there unacceptable,
in citing his quote egregious lack of integrity. The only
change wrought by the congressional inquiry and the flood of
condemnation from the medical community seems to be that doctor
Oz started endorsing specific supplements and pseudo medicines.

Speaker 3 (47:32):
God, he's Alex jonesing it.

Speaker 1 (47:34):
He's jonesing it hard. He's so much smarter than Alex though. Yeah,
you focus it just on the health, none of this
nonsense like political shit. Everybody is gonna love you and
you'll make way more money. Yeah. A twenty eighteen analysis
of his show by The Health News Review found quote
in the Doctor Oz Show, thirteen out of nineteen sixty

(47:56):
eight point four percent shows had ads relating to general
show content, fifty seven point nine percent had specific products
mentioned by the host using their commercial name, and thirty
six point three percent of shows mentioning products by name
named more than one product. He also found that seventy
eight percent of the medical statements made on The Doctor

(48:18):
Oz Show did not align with quote evidence based medical guidelines.

Speaker 4 (48:23):
So if those guidelines mattered, they'd make more money.

Speaker 1 (48:26):
Doug half a decade earlier, forty six percent of his
statements are more or less fine. Now it's down to
what jesus twenty two percent.

Speaker 3 (48:37):
Wow, So we're seeing.

Speaker 1 (48:39):
Again he matt the quality of the because again you're
running out of good content. You only have so much
good medical advice you can give when you're doing an
hour a day, one hundred and seventy five times a
year for fucking fifteen sixteen years, eat fruit. Exactly. The
actual amount of things that an average person can reasonably
do to improve their own things. Health doesn't really take

(49:01):
that long to explain to you. You know, it's pretty
simple stuff, and most of us know a lot of
it already. We know when we're I know that pounding
kraton and coke zero isn't a wise healthcare decision.

Speaker 4 (49:13):
No, no, but you know it, and you can you know,
fucking you don't need a doctor oz to tell you that.
You know, you just know, you know.

Speaker 1 (49:21):
I know that the fact that I bought the one
hundred dollars entire smoked leg of of pig from Costco,
the giant leg that you can got, well, I know,
I know, buying that and not also purchasing uh, I
don't know, salad in order to have sufficient I recognized
that was the poor health decision. Yeah, no one tricked

(49:44):
me about us, and no point that I think this
one hundred dollars worth of smoked half is a solid
healthcare move. You know, smoke, what could it? Smoked? It's
good for my cue zone traditional medicine.

Speaker 4 (49:59):
Yeah, this is real for all of my kidney Meridians.
I need all the smoke dams.

Speaker 1 (50:04):
Like all my Meridians are fucking fucking right.

Speaker 3 (50:07):
I'ms bro.

Speaker 1 (50:09):
Let me fucking tell you my Meridians are as hard
as a goddamn rock.

Speaker 3 (50:14):
Feel my kidneys, Feel my kidneys. It's just like, why
is your kidney swollen?

Speaker 1 (50:20):
The Doctor Oz Show is still on the air. In
twenty eighteen, President Trump appointed Doctor Oz to a Council
on Sports, Fitnish and Nutrition as part of the Department
of Health and Human Services. He's still on that council
under Joe Biden two years later. Oh, no politician is
dumb enough to want to piss off Doctor Oz. You're

(50:40):
never going to hear Joe Biden throw it. Well, except
for Claire meccastal, God bless you.

Speaker 4 (50:46):
Like she was the only one who had the guts
to stand up to Doctor.

Speaker 1 (50:51):
I think other people did. I'm not an expert on
what went down in that congressional thing, but she seems
to be the main one who was really angry at him,
Which good on you, Claire.

Speaker 4 (50:59):
I love that A bipartisan decision is just like, let's
share this grifter, you know between administrations like good, you
know what, God.

Speaker 1 (51:09):
All agree that you should be able to lie about
healthcare as an MD. That's that's so. Twenty eighteen is
when he gets appointed to this council. Two years later,
during the COVID nineteen pandemic, hero he endorsed hydroxy clorquin.
Later that year, he endorsed reopening schools, saying, I tell you,
schools are a very appetizing opportunity. I just saw a

(51:31):
nice piece in the Lancet arguing the opening of schools
may only cost us two to three percent in terms
of total mortality.

Speaker 3 (51:37):
What the fuck?

Speaker 1 (51:39):
Two to three percent of the cart that's barely anybody dying.
That's barely hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Speaker 4 (51:45):
He said, two to three percent, As if that's not
a huge number of people.

Speaker 3 (51:49):
He's losing his goddamn mind.

Speaker 1 (51:51):
And it's one of those things. Not making a point
proer against gun control either way. But if somebody against
gun control said, what keeping these things legal is only
gonna cost us one percent of the country, you'd be like,
you're a fucking maniac, Like you are a dangerous person.
But he's like we gotta and he didn't. Yeah, this

(52:12):
outraged a lot of people in as apologized as he
apologized for that hydroxy Yeah, he days he did. He
he claimed to regret that his comments had confused and
upset people, and basically pointed out the lance. It wasn't
saying two to three percent of the country was going
to die. It was I think more like two three
percent of likes or something like it gets sick and
like it was he but the way he phrased it

(52:35):
was it's only going to cost us to three percent
of the country. I don't care what the actual study. Again,
I don't care what the studies. I care what you
said to your audience of millions. And also I care
about the fact that in any case, that's fucking evil. Yeah,
Like that's an evil thing to say.

Speaker 4 (52:52):
Yeah, it's it's it's it's pretty wild to just look
at two to three percent of the country as like
expendable if it means that my fucking dirt bag ass
fifth grader can be stuck inside in a school all
day and listen, I get it, people with kids, they
want their kids to go back to school, But that's
you don't say the quiet part out loud.

Speaker 3 (53:13):
You know.

Speaker 1 (53:13):
Yeah, it's one thing to say, hey, look, living in
a society, there's all all kinds of cost benefits sort
of analysis. Sure we have to do Like, right, cars
improve a lot of efficiencies in certain ways, and people
like have them. They're also going to cost x many lives.
You know, we could change these sorts of laws, but
it would it would lead to this sort of problem.

(53:33):
You know, we have certain freedoms that may cost lives
and like right to be like that, that's just living
in a society, right, There's no our society is not
angled around absolutely more reducing mortality in every way, and
there's a cost to not having these schools open, and
it's a very real cost, and like we have to
Like that's a way to say that. I'm not saying
that's the argument I'm making because I'm not I'm thinking, Oh,

(53:55):
I don't think we should open schools out until we
actually have I don't know, like eighty percent of the
fucking country vaccinator or whatever. Yeah, but like, but that's
a way you could That's a way you could make
that argument and not sound like a gibbering sociopath.

Speaker 4 (54:10):
And it's weird to like you know, be like, all right,
it was a poor choice of words, and it's like, bro,
at this point, saying words out loud to millions of people,
is your job?

Speaker 1 (54:19):
Yeah, you're choosing to do the job. You could never
work another day in your life, and you would never
You're rich. You don't need to do this. You're choosing
to So go fuck yourself with that explanation.

Speaker 3 (54:31):
Fucking fix some hearts already, stop talking.

Speaker 1 (54:34):
We're getting to that. So today, doctor Oz works to
continue to monetize his brand with his wife and business partner,
who he also writes books with. His daughter seems to
be getting in on the grif too, with books like
The Dorm Room Diet, which she wrote when she was
in college.

Speaker 3 (54:47):
I think is diet. It's just free pizza and dick.

Speaker 1 (54:52):
The dorm room Diet. Hey, you know, if you pour
coffee into instant ramen, Yes, I've done that, by the way,
we all been there, kind of proud of it. It's
real good if you add in vodka. He is worth
tens of millions of dollars and is not in any
danger of being worth less anytime soon. We've talked a

(55:14):
lot about the harms of his specific recommendations and the
disinformation he spreads. But at the end of this all,
I keep coming back to that twenty ten New York
Times article, specifically its end when I think about what
may be his worst crime against medicine. Quote on the
stairs at Columbia Presbyterian apropos of Nothing, he began talking
about certain Japanese, Sardinian, and Costa Rican populations that live

(55:38):
unusually long, and said that their shared trait was activity, activity, activity.
His first column for Time magazine, Living Long and Living Well,
ran in a section called how to Live one hundred years.
At another point in his Rockefeller Center office, he said
that so many people thrill on to being on television
because quote, there's an element of eternity to it. You

(55:59):
are storing you, You are taking your life force for
that brief moment when you're on camera, and you're storing
that for all eternity, which makes you someone who will
never truly die. That is a fucking bonker's way of
looking at being on TV. Shit, that is It's goddamn.

Speaker 4 (56:18):
Mine is he is literally one year away from wanting
to be buried with his cats. You know, like this
dude wants some pyramids and some live cats in a
casket with him.

Speaker 3 (56:31):
This is he's a pharaoh.

Speaker 1 (56:33):
Yeah, I'm going to continue the quote, and he described
his own investment in television by saying, I've always felt
that when I looked at my tombstone, it shouldn't say
memet Oz banged out ten thousand open heart operations. I've
probably done five thousand. Am I any better at it
than ten thousand? He shook his head. It's just a
different number on the tombstone. No, it's not. It's five

(56:56):
thousand other people whose lives will actual there's a humor.
It's not about like you're how better it? You're already
great at it. It's about saving additional lives.

Speaker 3 (57:07):
My god, that it's that's wild.

Speaker 1 (57:10):
One of the he has dramatically. He still does perform surgery.
I think sometimes he certainly was in the late aughts
because he's a doctor. He just doesn't do nearly as much.
He used to do a lot more, and he's he's
cut it by more than half the amount of actual hearts.

Speaker 3 (57:25):
And it's the one thing he's good at. I mean,
I almost He's amazing. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:29):
So one of the things that I should note here
is that right now, even with the assumption that every
available training position for cardiothoracic surgeons is filled, we are
looking at a projected shortage of fifteen hundred cardiothoracic surgeons
or twenty five percent of the workforce by twenty twenty five.

Speaker 3 (57:50):
For years fall.

Speaker 1 (57:51):
There is a desperate need for the thing that he's
definitely one of the best in the world at a
tremendous and terrible need for it, and he has stopped
doing that in order to give people bad medical advice
that will hurt some of them on TV. And damn,
I'm want to be really clear here, I am not
saying that just because you become a cardiothoracic surgeon, you

(58:12):
have to do that until the day you drop. You don't.
You can quit, you can, and that's not immoral. It's
not evil to be like I've done enough. A good
friend of mine was a cardiologist for thirty something years
and quit to travel around the world as a photojournalist.
And I don't think there's anything immoral. You do not
owe the world doing just because it's valuable and there
are enough people doing it forever. I am not, and

(58:33):
you don't. You don't have to quit to do some
other valuable job. You can just quit to enjoy your
life with your family. I'm not saying that. Yeah, but
he didn't quit to be with his family. He quit
to give people bad health advice that he quit. Yeah,
he is doing something that should be illegal instead of
performing an additional five thousand life saving surgeries.

Speaker 3 (58:54):
Right.

Speaker 1 (58:55):
Yeah, that's evil.

Speaker 3 (58:56):
Yeah, No, that that is bad.

Speaker 4 (58:58):
That is that is definitely immoral to like have the ability.
It's like being Superman and having the ability to save
someone from a burning building, but being like, fuck, dude,
I'm kind of on my way to do this TV interview.

Speaker 3 (59:12):
It's gonna get me more.

Speaker 1 (59:14):
Yeah, but I'm going to sell people pills instead. Lex
Luthor can suck it, you know, I got pills to move.
The way that he phrases that is incredibly telling, right,
Like it shouldn't say Memotas banged out ten thousand open
heart operations? Am I any better at it than ten thousand?
It's like that's not. I care that you get better
at it to the extent that it improves patient outcome,

(59:35):
But like I don't care. Like the thing that's good
about performing ten thousand open heart operations is presumably somewhere
near ten thousand people have had their lives extended, because
that's amazing. That's tens of thousands of cumulative, cumulative years
get added to the lives of people who are loved
and who do things themselves, who who do incredit like,

(59:57):
who have their own ways of contributing to society.

Speaker 3 (01:00:00):
Children Like, it's such a sick way of looking.

Speaker 4 (01:00:02):
At it, really, because it's just like, I'm already really
good at it.

Speaker 3 (01:00:06):
So I decided I want to go get into TV.

Speaker 1 (01:00:09):
Now, it's like if he if he'd been like I, I,
you know, I did my car, I performed five thousand surgeries.
Now I want to become an actor, Like you have
that right, absolutely. I'm never gonna say that's.

Speaker 3 (01:00:19):
I mean, it depends on the movie.

Speaker 1 (01:00:21):
But yeah, yeah, sure, yeah, if you're in Michael Bay movies,
we might have another talk exactly.

Speaker 4 (01:00:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:00:25):
But that's again what it's not that he's decided he
wanted to go into TV. It's not that he decided
to go into an entertainment. It's that he decided to
do a job. To go from doing a job where
he was unequivocally saving lives to doing a job where
he often gives people advice that could shorten or at
least reduce the quality of their life.

Speaker 4 (01:00:42):
I mean, I guess he got tired of helping people
and was like, you.

Speaker 1 (01:00:46):
Know, time to make some fucking bank.

Speaker 4 (01:00:49):
Yeah, it's I mean, it's not just make some bank.
But he's like, man, I saved ten thousand lives. I'm
gonna have to kill ten thousand just to fucking net
neutral this shit. You know.

Speaker 3 (01:00:59):
Yeah, you know, he's just trying to He's trying to
balance the scales of uh is good and evil.

Speaker 1 (01:01:05):
It's so fucking frustrating. I really dislike this man.

Speaker 4 (01:01:11):
Yeah, he's so handsome though, dude, I mean very handsome.
He's very handsome. Uh he made a lot of money,
so that's good. And uh, you know, he's he's he's
out there every day given given hope to people who
are currently dying of a very very treatable ailment and saying, nah, dog,
put your feet in some hot rice, put your feet

(01:01:33):
in some hot and see what happens. Dude, Just see
what happens. You know, Like someone's got to be doing
that job.

Speaker 1 (01:01:40):
It's this fucking thing part of the doctor Oz problem,
and the part of it that that he is he
is leaning into but is not as fault. Is this
thing that's a broader problem that I've gotten trapped in
that a lot of that everyone who's a public figure
is at risk of getting trapped in, which is the
fact that if you're good at something and also have
some measure of fame or popularity, you start to think

(01:02:03):
you can extend your skills to everything. I was in
the gym the other day since I'm in Texas with
my family, and since I'm vaccinated, and you know, everyone
wears a mask, but I've been going to a gym. Yeah,
and my family's vaccinated. It's like it's the thing we
get to do now, Okay.

Speaker 3 (01:02:18):
Yeah, you're allowed.

Speaker 1 (01:02:19):
Yeah, I've been going to a gym. And the gyms
have like news programs on right, and I saw Doctor
Oz on and it was doctor oz True Crime, because
I guess doctor oz has added a true crime thing
where he's like talking about this woman who murdered her
kids and interviewing like the ex wife of the husband
of the woman who murdered her kids, and like do
this and he's like, you don't have any why are

(01:02:41):
you doing this? Like, oh, because because it's popular with
the same people who like your show, And why why like,
why not why not stick your hand into this thing
that is is deeply painful for a lot of people
and make money off of it? Why not do it?
Because if you're if you're fam missing good at one thing,

(01:03:01):
there's no reason not to do absolutely everything. I I
just hate it.

Speaker 4 (01:03:06):
Yeah, it's especially since it's it's uh again, he he
has the god given skills to actually do good and
help people, and he chooses you know this shit, And
I gotta.

Speaker 3 (01:03:19):
Say I blame his dad.

Speaker 1 (01:03:22):
His dad too is.

Speaker 3 (01:03:25):
Yeah, you fucked up, dude.

Speaker 4 (01:03:28):
I mean, you did a great job by pulling yourself
up by your bootstraps and the YadA YadA, but uh,
you know, maybe you should have maybe you should have
maybe been more encouraging for him to just maybe you know,
pick one thing and stay with it rather than you know,
venture off into television. I will say, at least with
the true crime stuff that like, I know, he's like

(01:03:49):
he's a little bit kind of like getting into kind
of our territory here with the podcast business, and I
don't like that. But I'm glad I don't have a
true crime podcast that he's currently cannibalizing. If he starts
a Sopranos one, I will lose my fucking mind. If
doctor Oz decides one day like I want to do

(01:04:09):
a prestige TV rewatch show for CNN, that'll be it. Dude, Oz,
You'll be on my goddamn list.

Speaker 2 (01:04:16):
I don't think his podcast publishers anymore. The one that
he was doing. I don't see any new episodes. That's
twenty nineteen.

Speaker 4 (01:04:23):
Well, I mean he's doing a true crime show. That's
That's as close as you get to the podcast business. Yeah,
you know what I'm saying. Those are the number one
pods out there. Dude, pisses me off.

Speaker 1 (01:04:37):
Can't just my pods? All right, guys, that's the episode.

Speaker 2 (01:04:45):
Do you have any any plugs?

Speaker 1 (01:04:47):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:04:48):
Plug the plugs.

Speaker 5 (01:04:50):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (01:04:51):
My name is Matt Leib and uh, you know I'm
on Instagram matt Leeb jokes. Yeah, I'm on the Gram.
I'm also on Twitter at matt Leeb. But but follow
me on Instagram.

Speaker 2 (01:05:01):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:05:02):
And yeah, And if you like the Sopranos, Pod Yourself
a Gun, it's.

Speaker 1 (01:05:06):
Pod Yourself a Gun?

Speaker 3 (01:05:07):
Baby.

Speaker 1 (01:05:08):
Well, get out there and again find doctor Oz in
the street and Sophie, what what is the legal definition
of incitement.

Speaker 2 (01:05:19):
I'm not. For reasons, I'm not going to answer that question.

Speaker 1 (01:05:23):
All right, No, just just go out and wander the
streets angry and and and agitated. Yeah, with a clear goal. Yeah,
angrily wander the streets, agitated with an unclear goal. That's
what I want all of my listeners to do.