Dr. Richard Bosshardt Reveals Deadly Truth: Most Surgeons Aren’t Fit to Practice. Here’s Why.

Dr. Richard Bosshardt has been a board certified surgeon for nearly 40 years. He’s watched the DEI race crazies lower the standards to such a frightening degree that he no longer trusts doctors. (00:00) Bosshardt’s War on DEI Within the Medical Industry (04:47) The Left’s Mission to Segregate Surgeons (11:03) Why They Banned Bosshardt From the American College of Surgeons (24:41) How the Left Has Criminally Lowered the Standards for Surgeons (33:00) The Next Generation of Surgeons Is Doomed Paid partnerships with: Eight Sleep: Get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra at https://EightSleep.com/Tucker Jase Medical: Promo code “Tucker” for extra discount at https://Jasemedical.com Hallow prayer app: Get 3 months free at https://Hallow.com/Tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:32Tucker Carlson?

  So let me ask you, you, 2022, became famous for a day or two because you got into it with the American College of Surgeons?

• 0:42Speaker 02

  I'm still into it with them, yes.

• 0:44Tucker Carlson?

  You're still into it?

• 0:45Speaker 02

  It's approaching, it's approaching its third year.

• 0:47Tucker Carlson?

  It's third year. Can you just give us a quick reminder of what that contraband was about, what happened?

• 0:54Speaker 02

  Sure. I am a surgeon, I'm a plastic surgeon, but I was a general surgeon for a while. One of the things that I did after I became a surgeon was to apply for fellowship in the American College of Surgeons, which is an honorary sort of a thing to have, you know, attached to yourself. If you become a fellow, you're allowed to put the letters FACS after your name.

• 1:20Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  And something I sought to do. So I became a fellow on the ACS, American College of Surgeons, and went along for 30-plus years as a practicing surgeon doing my, doing my thing. And then what happened was in, in and around 2018, 2019, you could say I woke up. I realized that there was something going on in my area of surgery.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  And it began with a transcript of a lecture by an invited lecturer to the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress that they have every year. The lecture was titled, "A Pathway to Diversity, Inclusion, and Excellence." That was the title of the lecture. And for reasons that I can't explain, I read it. I wouldn't normally have done that, but I read the entire transcript. I read it twice, and not once with excellence mentioned in there. And so I wrote a commentary that was actually published in the Bulletin of the ACS where I expressed some concerns about taking down excellence as the primary

• 2:48Speaker 02

  directive for surgery, for surgeons, and replacing it with diversity, inclusion. At that time, the equity, they didn't throw that in there. And that commentary didn't really do much. So, fast forward a couple of years, and you have COVID, which, you know, its own thing, and then you have the George Floyd killing. And I think you could realistically say that the country went crazy after George Floyd. I mean, everything from riots and whatnot to this mass movement to adopt the idea that the country was systemically racist, and every institution, every organization was racist, and we had to radically transform

• 3:30Speaker 02

  the country. And the American College of Surgeons was no different. They jumped right on that bandwagon. And within weeks after the George Floyd killing, I mean, literally weeks, they had assembled a task force on racism. And they published this in the Bulletin, which is their quarterly newsletter. And the Bulletin basically said that they were doing this to deal with racism in the ACS.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  It wasn't like, is there racism in the ACS? There was, there is racism and we need to ferret it out.

• 4:02Tucker Carlson?

  Like refusing to operate on black people?

• 4:05Speaker 02

  Not, that would be pretty extreme.

• 4:08Tucker Carlson?

  No, I'm joking. I mean, like, where was the racism in surgery?

• 4:13Speaker 02

  It's almost as bad, Tucker. It's, the idea is that, well, let me, let me take that step. They, they claim that surgeons were racist, that the ACS itself was racist, and that the practice of surgery was racist, okay? And the reason why they made that last claim was because there are known disparities. We know that the outcomes for surgery are not as good statistically for, we'll just call it black and white because it just makes it easier to, to deal with that, that is not as good for blacks as it is for whites. And so the idea is that there's some element of racism or discrimination that impacts the outcome of surgery. And of course, if you take that to the next step, it means

• 4:54Speaker 02

  that, you know, blacks are not getting as good care. Their surgery is not being as done as well and whatever. There's a whole lot of reasons why you can have disparate outcomes. But this was the one reason that they latched on to, and they have never let go. And then, have you heard of the term racial concordance?

• 5:12Tucker Carlson?

  No.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Okay, that's, that's a really important concept. And this is something that's being promoted by the ACS. The ACS has explicitly stated that blacks would do better if their surgeon is black. Simple as that. That's a racial concordance, that you are going to receive better care by a doctor, surgeon or other doctor, if they are of your same race, ethnicity, gender, that you might get better care, pardon me, better care if you're a woman by a female surgeon, for example. And they've hung on to that as well.

• 5:48Tucker Carlson?

  So that was the idea behind segregation in the South, of course.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Well, that's the whole thing. They're trying to redo that. They're trying to reinstall segregation into surgery, which, when you think about it, is a pretty despicable thing to do.

• 6:01Tucker Carlson?

  So I get a white male surgeon, is what you're saying?

• 6:03Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 6:04Tucker Carlson?

  Okay.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  Well, you might need to get a white male surgeon of whatever your ethnic heritage is.

• 6:07Tucker Carlson?

  Okay.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  You know, you might do better with...

• 6:08Tucker Carlson?

  Kind of happy with a Swedish surgeon, that's fine.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 6:11Tucker Carlson?

  I feel like I'm gonna win in this, yeah?

• 6:13Speaker 02

  I need a Brazilian one, because my mother is Brazilian.

• 6:17Tucker Carlson?

  Meaning German, by the way.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Well, I'm half German, half Brazilian. There you go.

• 6:20Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  So, what happened was this. The task force came out with the recommendations at the end of 2020. And the recommendations were, oh my gosh, I mean, it's just all litany. It was basically a playbook for how to instill DEI. They still weren't really calling it DEI that often. They were calling it anti-racism still. And that term kind of fell out of favor, and then DEI became the nice, the more acceptable term for adopting critical theory, critical race theory into surgery. So, the recommendations were to add anti-racism, Abram Kendi's anti-racism, into the ACS, as the value of the ACS. They opened up a branded department of diversity, which had not existed before.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  And this is what they call a regental department, meaning that the head of that department, the clinical director, was now one of the members of the Board of Regents, had its own clinical director, its own executive director.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  They installed all these initiatives. You know, they started training their staff and even the leadership on things like microaggressions, implicit bias, ally and active bystander, white privilege. And when I saw this, this is one that, I guess it really hit me.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  I never thought I would be doing this at this point in my career. I'm retired. I'm three months retired from 38 years as a surgeon. And to be an activist was never on my radar.

• 7:51Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  But I couldn't let this stand. It just really bothered me.

• 7:54Tucker Carlson?

  May I ask you to just go back to the core assumptions that drive this? Are they rooted in science?

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Absolutely not.

• 8:02Tucker Carlson?

  Okay, so is there any research at all that shows that the outcomes in surgery are better when the surgeon is matched racially with the patient?

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Duna Harm, the organization that I joined as a result of this whole issue, has actually published, you can go online and you can read it. They've done a systematic study, well, actually, they've looked at five systematic studies of this issue. Does racial concordance, does concordance of ethnicity and race and so forth correlate to better outcomes in surgery? Short answer is no. There's no scientific evidence that having a surgeon of your own race will provide better outcomes.

• 8:53Tucker Carlson?

  Has there ever been evidence?

• 8:54Speaker 02

  No.

• 8:55Tucker Carlson?

  So, I mean, just ask a dumb question.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Well, let me qualify that. There was a study put out that's been repeatedly referred to. I mean, even today, it's been completely discredited. But a study showed that the survival rates for black babies is better if they have a black doctor, whether obstetrician or whatever, than if it's not. And so, they keep repeatedly referring to the study. But if you look at the study, the study design is terribly flawed. The reviewer, if you're familiar with Vinay Prasad, who is a data geek and very good at parsing clinical studies and so forth, came out and said this study is catastrophically flawed.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  And even though this study does not by any stretch, you know, show that this is the case, it's still referred to as primary, the primary evidence for this idea that racial concordance is a real thing. And it's still in the ACS.

• 9:56Tucker Carlson?

  Were there any, was there any push to make certain that white patients got white doctors?

• 10:05Speaker 02

  When you say a push, but push by whom?

• 10:07Tucker Carlson?

  I'm just being perverse, like, do they really believe it when they said this? They didn't really believe it. This is just a way to lower the standards to change the racial composition of surgeons, right?

• 10:18Speaker 02

  I think the only thing that's pushing this is ideology. I think if you're really science-based, you know, if you follow the science, as the saying goes, if you look at that, you can't possibly believe that. So either you have an ideology that supersedes, you know, factual science.

• 10:35Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  Or you're clueless and you're following whoever it is that's taking the lead on this.

• 10:43Tucker Carlson?

  And who was taking the lead in the American College of Surgeons?

• 10:46Speaker 02

  I think it was a very, I can't give you names. I could probably name a few people that I know that were instrumental in pushing against me, pushing back. But I think it's a very small vocal group of very, very committed anti-racist or DEI zealots. And I think the others have gone along. I think some members of the ACS have really not researched this to the extent they understand it, and they kind of go along because it sounds, you know, DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, it sounds wonderful. Who would not be for those two things?

• 11:24Tucker Carlson?

  Are those the rules in surgery? Like if the other kids are for it, you just do it?

• 11:27Speaker 02

  You'd think not.

• 11:28Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, you would think not, yes.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  That's the thing that was so disconcerting to me. Let me carry the story just a step further down the road. I wrote to the president of the ACS and I expressed my concerns. And I'm a writer, right? This is what I don't, talking is not my thing, but I love to write. And I wrote a three-page, single-spaced letter in which I outlined my concerns. Never got a response from that. And so the next thing I did was I actually posted the ACS of the website, of course, and they have a thing called the Communities, which is a forum for surgeons to communicate with one another. If you have a question, you can pose it and surgeons will weigh in and provide, you know, advice or answers. If you have something, you want a topic you want to discuss, do the same thing.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  So the largest forum is the General Surgery Forum. And so I posted on that forum, basically that I was concerned about this rush to embrace anti-racism, DEI in the ACS. And if this continued, I didn't see how I could maintain my fellowship. I would drop my membership in the ACS, which is something I never imagined I would do because I've been a proud member of the ACS for over 30 years. And I'm not here to bash the ACS. I want to be very clear about that. I'm still, I'm still FACS. I'm still a fellow. They consider me a fellow, even though I'm permanently banned, which is kind of an interesting situation to be in. And so I posted this, this thing saying that I would leave the ACS if this continued. And that generated a comment thread. And if you're familiar with comment threads, if you look at the engagement in the comment

• 12:58Speaker 02

  thread, usually it's only about 1 to 10% of people that are reading the comment thread that actually engage because that's just the nature of things. That comment thread ran for four months and 75 individual surgeons and over 1,000 comments. It broke the system, basically. I mean, they had to open up a second comment thread because they'd never had this much engagement on anything. And 2/3 of the surgeons that engaged weighed in favor of my position as opposed to the ACS. And I kept saying, why are we doing this? Tell me where the racism is. Let's deal with the racism, but don't just call us racists and, and, and go with that. And they repeatedly refused to do that.

• 13:41Tucker Carlson?

  So by, who is they?

• 13:43Speaker 02

  This is the, the leadership of the ACS. And this is my, my beef is not with the ACS, with my fellow surgeons. My beef is with the leadership of the ACS.

• 13:51Tucker Carlson?

  It might be interesting just to hear if you can recall some of the names of the leadership who did that, just for the record.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  I don't have any problem because it's, it's public record. The, the general secretary was a fellow named Tyler Hughes, just retired.

• 14:01Tucker Carlson?

  Tyler Hughes.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, a general surgeon. And he was the editor in chief of the, of the Communities. So he was kind of moderating. And then he would weigh in sometimes if it seemed like, you know, surgeons were getting a little bit too, too heated and so forth. And my position was, you know,

• 14:16Speaker 02

  We're professionals. We're, you know, surgeons are opinionated. We're not shrinking violets. We state our case. We're certainly qualified to have conversations without a chaperone. And I didn't really like the whole chaperoning thing that was going on. And so this went forward and as common threads do, it kind of ran its life expectancy really beyond what you'd think for months. At which point I was thinking, it's okay. So I did that. What do I do now? And I was waiting to see what my next step would be, when the ACS leadership, the Board of Regents, reached out to me. Tyler Hughes reached out to me and said, we'd like to have you on a Zoom call. This was going to happen in 2022. They

• 14:58Speaker 02

  wanted to wait a little bit. It wasn't until March because they were bringing on board their new Director of Diversity, a doctor named Bonnie Mason, who is their Clinical Director of Diversity. And so the Zoom call consisted of myself and Tyler Hughes and Bonnie Mason and a Regent of the ACS, a member of the Board of Regents named Tim Everly, who is a very well-known, prominent surgeon in a big institution. And I had joined a group called FAIR, F-A-I-R, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. And I helped found FAIR in medicine, which has been working, kind of like doing no harm in the area of DEI medicine. And so I went to some of my colleagues in FAIR and said, hey, listen,

• 15:40Speaker 02

  I'm invited to this Zoom call. How do you think I should prepare for this? And the first thing they said is, don't go by yourself because you're going to get jumped on. I said, okay, that sounds like a reasonable piece of advice. So I invited a colleague of mine, who's a surgeon I worked with for 30 years. Her name is Celia Nelson. Celia is a Jamaican-born, black, female, general surgeon, which is unusual. She's definitely in the minority in the ACS. And she came on the call. So it was five of us on the call. Very, very civil conversation, well over an hour. We each stated our positions. I stated my concerns. She expressed the same concerns that I did from her standpoint as a woman, a black woman surgeon. And I left so encouraged from that. I said, wow, this is great. We've

• 16:24Speaker 02

  got a dialogue. And this is what I wanted, a dialogue. And I sent an email to everyone that was on the Zoom call and said, thank you so much. I hope this will be the start of a conversation where we can discuss these things. And a few weeks later, I couldn't get on the communities anymore. I tried to get on the website and get on the communities, and I couldn't get on. And I thought, okay, there's some glitch here. I think maybe it was on, the site had a problem. I waited, and I waited pretty close a couple of weeks before I finally said, I contacted Tyler Hughes. I said, Tyler, what's going on? I can't get on the communities. And this is when I was told, oh, by the way, you are permanently banned from access to the communities. And in addition, you're banned from access

• 17:06Speaker 02

  to the member directory of the ACS, and you're banned from your own private voicemail box. So it was a total, total isolation. And I said, why? Why am I being banned? And the answer was because of your continuous, and I'm basically quoting, your continuous use of disrespectful language and persistent posting of non-clinical material on clinical forums. So the thing was, I was being disrespectful, which I have disputed, and I can prove I wasn't. And my non-clinical material was posting this issue of DEI on the clinical forums.

• 17:43Tucker Carlson?

  That they brought up in the first place?

• 17:45Speaker 02

  That they, well, and what's interesting is this, they're the ones saying that clinical outcomes in surgery are being impacted adversely for minorities.

• 17:52Tucker Carlson?

  But I mean, you were a, I mean, you spent over 30 years just being a surgeon, cutting and healing people.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:59Tucker Carlson?

  You're not the one who brought this topic into the ACS in the first place. They did.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:05Tucker Carlson?

  But because you discussed a topic that they introduced, they said you weren't a serious doctor and needed to be banned.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  I was disruptive and I was being disrespectful. And so I did ask, I said, can you please show me a single example of anything that I have said at any time that justifies this ban? And they have never done that. I've asked it several times, they've refused every single time. So I appealed, I went to the Board of Regents and appealed and I said, you know, this is wrong. And they came back and said, we reviewed this and we uphold the ban. And this is interesting, they said, and we feel that you have received due process. Well, due process means that they're saying it went through the proper channels in the ACS. Well, the channels are, there's a fixed process for disciplining a surgeon.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  You have to be informed that you're being investigated for some issue. That has to go to their central judiciary committee, which is empowered to investigate their members. They decide if there's merit to this allegation, and if there is, they send it back to the Board of Regents, who then has to, you know, does the punishment, whatever that may be. Could be expelled, could be whatever. They never did that. It never went to the judiciary committee. They never informed me that I was being investigated for a possible lifetime ban. As a member of the ACS, I am entitled, my privileges include the right to having a hearing.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  If I'm looking at being disciplined by my organization, I have a right to have a hearing to defend myself. And they denied me that hearing. And the reason, it's like a catch 22, it didn't go through the central judiciary committee, therefore I don't deserve a hearing. The gaslighting is unbelievable, Tucker, it's just unbelievable. So I exhausted every avenue I had to address this with the ACS internally. And that's when I went public. And that's when I wrote my article to the Wall Street Journal, and that's when you invited me onto your show very kindly.

• 20:09Tucker Carlson?

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• 22:46Tucker Carlson?

  I wanted to hear more about it, not simply because you're the victim of grotesque injustice and authoritarianism, but because the consequences of this kind of thinking are so dangerous to the public health that I think people need to know. Because everything you're saying suggests that they're going to radically lower the standard for surgeons.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  Not that they are, they have. They have. That's, that's...

• 23:13Tucker Carlson?

  So how is that not a felony? How can you do that? How can you lower the standard for surgeons or air traffic controllers or anyone who's got a job with the public health in his hands, you know, a critical job, the critical jobs in our society? And you lower the standards for that? That's not a crime?

• 23:31Speaker 02

  I think the way you do it is you do it really slowly over a long period of time. And no one really notices until it gets to that...

• 23:37Tucker Carlson?

  Until people die?

• 23:38Speaker 02

  Well, until... Yeah, that's interesting thing you say that.

• 23:41Tucker Carlson?

  You work with a knife in your hand. I mean, this is like the highest level of trust. You're saying to somebody, "I'm gonna let you cut me open." Who would you say that to? Only a surgeon? And so the consequences are just beyond...

• 23:53Speaker 02

  If there was ever a field, you know, people talk about airline pilots, sure. If there was ever a field where excellence is a sine qua non of the field, it has to be medicine. And even beyond that, it has to be surgery.

• 24:05Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Because, you know, when you're, when you're the guy with a knife in your hand, first off, you know, if you're a decent human being, you want to feel like you are competent and doing the best you can for your patient. But, and I apologize, by the way, for putting you on the spot when we spoke. I think I may have... Remember I asked you a question? I said, "What's the most important thing you look for in a surgeon?" And you said excellence?

• 24:27Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  Which was exactly right. But I wasn't looking for excellence. I was looking for trust. You have to trust...

• 24:33Tucker Carlson?

  Well, one flows from the other.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  You have to trust your surgeon. And if you are wondering if you're gonna get the best care because your surgeon looks different than you do... Um, right off the bat, you're starting handicapped. I mean, you're, you're really, you know, hurting yourself and the patient if you can't, can't get that trust pretty quickly because when you walk into the ER, you don't have a lot of time to connect.

• 24:53Tucker Carlson?

  No.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  You can't go be doing those nice social things. Um, the other, so my ban remains in place. I'm still banned. The ACS will not engage with me.

• 25:02Tucker Carlson?

  They have not engaged with you in three years.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  Oh, no, not at all. Not at all. They, they, they refuse. Uh, I've, uh, I've written multiple letters. Uh, I wrote letters to the last two presidents. Um, I never get an answer back. Um, I wrote letters.

• 25:18Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I would just encourage anyone watching to, to, let's Google these people and do not accept medical care from them. You don't, I don't want to be cut by an unreasonable ideologue.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Problem is, you don't know who those ideologues are unless you start naming.

• 25:34Tucker Carlson?

  It would be nice to have their names. So, um, you said, uh, not only do they plan to lower standards, but they already have. Can you?

• 25:42Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 25:43Tucker Carlson?

  Tell us what you mean.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  In fact, I'm delighted you said that because I, I don't want this to be about me. Yeah, I'm the one sitting in front of the micro, microphone. I'm the one that, that was banned. Um, but the issue is so far beyond me. In my 38 years of surgery, I have gradually watched the quality of training in young surgeons deteriorate, you know, noticeably in my own little, you know, backyard, uh, watching young surgeons come out that have no business operating by themselves. And, um,

• 26:18Tucker Carlson?

  You've seen that?

• 26:19Speaker 02

  I've seen that. Oh yeah, absolutely. Um, I can, I can give you some examples.

• 26:24Tucker Carlson?

  Please do.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  Doing, I did a, I had a, a young, this is actually a few years back. I had a, a new surgeon in town at a hospital that I worked at and I do breast reconstruction. So I worked a lot with the surgeons. Uh, together we'll, you know, they'll remove the cancerous breast sometimes. A lot of times they'll remove the other breast simultaneously and then I will come in and do the reconstruction. And I was doing a lot of these cases where you take the abdominal tissue and you create one or two breasts with the abdominal tissue, which is a great procedure, but very significant, time consuming and whatnot. And there's a lot of things that have to be done. And this surgeon offered to help me close the abdominal part of the operation, or to do it for me, so that I could concentrate on the breast.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  I said, "Great, this probably cut an hour and a half or two hours out of my operating time." And so I glanced down to see what he was doing. And he's, he's taking these massive bites of tissue. And every time he ties a stitch down, I mean, the abdominal wall is being distorted. I'm looking at him thinking, "Wow." And I was able to, I couldn't watch more than two or three stitches put in. And I said, "Ah, you know, Joe, listen, you got things to do, you know, go ahead. I'm fine. I don't, I don't need the help." And he left.

• 27:42Tucker Carlson?

  And... Was this in a, someone who's out of medical school?

• 27:46Speaker 02

  This was a fully trained surgeon, just newly, just, you know, opened a practice in my community. And he didn't last very long. It became very obvious soon, because in small hospitals, you can't hide, that he was not very competent. And he eventually moved on. I don't know where he went or what he did.

• 28:01Tucker Carlson?

  But it was obvious to you, just from looking down, this guy was not qualified?

• 28:06Speaker 02

  This guy had no clue how to close an abdomen. I mean, it was really bizarre. And that's kind of an extreme example.

• 28:12Tucker Carlson?

  How did he become a surgeon?

• 28:14Speaker 02

  That's the thing. Lowered standards, basically.

• 28:18Tucker Carlson?

  Was this person from a protected racial group, or?

• 28:20Speaker 02

  No, no, he was not. He was your, your heteronormative white male like me, basically.

• 28:26Tucker Carlson?

  But he was incompetent?

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, I only saw this one example. But, you know, the thing speaks for itself. If, if a person is doing this in such a simple situation, such as closing an abdominal wall, then you gotta wonder what he's like. And I've, I've worked with other surgeons that were, you know, I, there's a couple that I refuse to work with that were so bad, that, you know, you, you often have to ask yourself, is this something that I report, I don't report? I've spoken to, you know, colleagues and so forth. And I've only actually reported one or two doctors in my career, because the circumstances are so egregious. And these didn't happen to be surgeons, by the way. But kind of getting off track a little bit.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  I, I work with a young surgeon, arguably a good surgeon. And I was doing, again, a breast reconstruction and he made a comment to me that I, I found astounding. One of the common accompanying things you do in breast cancer treatment is a lot of times you go after lymph nodes in the armpit.

• 29:27Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  Because you want to see if there's cancer there, or if there's cancer there, you'll want to remove the cancer. And that's called an axillary node dissection.

• 29:34Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Basic operation.

• 29:36Tucker Carlson?

  Even I know about it.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Every general surgeon learns that.

• 29:38Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  And we were doing a, a case and he was doing a biopsy in the, the armpit, removing a single lymph node. And he commented, says, you know, I'm really glad I don't have to do an axillary node dissection because I've never done one before. This is a fully trained, board certified general surgeon. Had never done an axillary node dissection in the course of his five years of general surgery training. Let me stick back a second to, to, when you ask about quality and how it's gone down. I don't, it's not a conscious thing, it's not been deliberate. I don't think that we have gone out deliberately to create a decline in the quality of surgery. I think a lot of circumstances have come to, together to do that.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  One was in 2003, the American Graduate Medical Education. They came out and they took a law that was basically confined to New York from 1964 and made it nationwide. And that law was a reduction of residency hours. In other words, you can't take a trainee in, in any medical specialty and make them work more than 80 hours a week or more than 24 hours at a stretch. And so that reduced residency hours dramatically because when I trained, it was not uncommon to work a 90 to 110 hour week. That was pretty typical. And be on call, you know, 36 hours straight. I once worked 48 hours straight. Not that that's a great thing, but you know, you do what you have to do and you learn.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  You learn to operate under circumstances when you're tired and things like that. And the idea was to reduce medical errors and things like that, which has been disproven. Studies have shown that that reduction in hours had nothing, did nothing to improve medical errors. But that was one thing that that cut back the hours for training in surgery. You know, you have a very limited-

• 31:25Tucker Carlson?

  What was the motive there?

• 31:26Speaker 02

  The, the idea behind it, the reason that it occurred was because of a death. A young woman died in New York because of a, a medical drug error, a very rare drug reaction. And her father happened to be a very prominent attorney. And he decided that the reason was that these residents were working too hard, they were too tired, and we needed to change that.

• 31:52Tucker Carlson?

  And there was this spate of New York Times stories about this.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:55Tucker Carlson?

  I remember this.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that was only confined to New York until 2003, then it became a nationwide thing. General surgery is a five-year residency program. Okay? In the first two years, you learn patient care. You learn how to take care of patients before and after. You assist in operations, you do diagnostic, differential diagnosis, and you learn how to work up a, a problem. And if you're good, if you're a good intern, if you're a good first-year, second-year resident, you know, they throw your bone on again. They'll let you do a hernia, and they'll let you do an appendectomy, and they hold your hand while you do it. And then in the, the third and fourth years, you start to operate more.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  But you're always operating under the direct supervision of a, a senior resident or an attending, attending as a fully-trained surgeon. And again, you're having your hands held. I mean, they have to let you work, they got to put the knife in your hand, but they have to be good enough to do that and keep you out of trouble. And if you get in trouble, to get you out of trouble. And so you spend those three to four years kind of honing your skills. And then in the fifth year, when you are what we call a chief resident, you're basically regarded as being a surgeon. And you, you get your, you do your cases, you assist the younger surgeons in their cases, and the only time you call an attending surgeon in is if you're doing something very major, very complex, and, and, or if you haven't done this before.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  And so, at the end of that fifth year, you should be able to walk out of the hospital and go anywhere and operate as a general surgeon and function fully independently.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  A study done in 2014 in the Annals of Surgery reported that 80% of the graduating general surgeons were not going into practice. They were going on to do a fellowship. Fellowship is additional. Eighty percent? Eighty percent. Fellowships and whatever, thoracic surgery, vascular surgery, colorectal, you name it. And that was in 2014. They surveyed program directors, these are the chiefs, the heads of surgical programs, to find out what these residents that they were getting, what these surgeons that they were getting in fellowships were like. They found out that

• 34:17Speaker 02

  66% of them could not be relied upon to operate independently for more than about 30 minutes. That something like 30% or so could not handle tissues in a manner that was appropriate, atra medically if you will. 20, 30% couldn't sew properly. Close to the same number couldn't identify the early signs of a complication. Some could not identify an anatomical tissue plane. These are people that are graduates of general surgery residencies coming out of these programs and going to fellowships. The saddest thing is that when they surveyed

• 34:57Speaker 02

  the surgeon, the young surgeons themselves and say, "Well, why are you going into this fellowship instead of going out and practicing?" More than half say it's because they did not feel comfortable operating independently after five years of training. So there's something very wrong with the training they're getting. They're not getting enough cases to do. They're not being allowed to operate. You know, in some places, the attending surgeons are very hesitant to hand over a case to a younger surgeon because, number one, they're responsible for that case. Number two, you're never going to be as efficient or fast as a young surgeon as you will later on when you've had more experience. So it takes longer and impacts your day, your schedule.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  The, the, it's, it's sad because they recognize this. I mean, these youngsters recognize this.

• 35:50Tucker Carlson?

  So the question is, I mean, it sounds like a total failure to train the next generation of surgeons.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  It's a system failure. And the ACS recognizes this. And you know how I know that? It's because since 2014, they've initiated what they call a mentorship program. And what they do is they try to find experienced surgeons that will mentor these young surgeons to help them come up to speed. Okay, so a young surgeon out of, out of training that should be able to work on their own and finds that they're struggling or not really able to do that, they would have an experienced surgeon to, I don't want to say hold their hand, but to oversee them, supervise them, scrub with them. They can't find enough surgeons to do that, for one thing. Here's where the DEI really comes in too, is they have this idea, racial concordance,

• 36:39Speaker 02

  that what they need to do is find, if it's a black surgeon, they gotta find a black mentor for him. And if it's a Hispanic surgeon, they gotta find a Hispanic mentor. And there's not enough of those to go around.

• 36:49Tucker Carlson?

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• 37:31Tucker Carlson?

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• 37:38Speaker 00

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• 38:10Tucker Carlson?

  So, most people don't wake up in the morning and decide to feel horrible, exhausted, foggy, disconnected from themselves. But it does happen and it happens slowly. You're working hard, you're showing up and then your energy disappears by midday. Your focus is dull, your weight won't move. A lot of people are told, "That's just getting old." That's what it is, but that's not actually true.

• 38:31Tucker Carlson?

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• 39:14Tucker Carlson?

  That's joyandblokes.com/tucker. Use the code TUCKER. 50% off labs, 20% off supplements. Joy and Blokes, get your edge back. So, in addition to what are demonstrable, provable failures of medical schools to train the next generation of surgeons? And can I just say parenthetically? I feel like if they're not training surgeons adequately, you know, surgeons are a small percentage of all physicians, probably the most important, but they're probably not, and probably the smartest and most driven, then they're probably failing.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  I'll agree with you on that.

• 39:47Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, yeah. They're surgeons, right? It's the most straightforward kind of medicine. So, but in addition to that, they overlay these racial mandates. They decide that racism is the real problem, not incompetence. And then they put these mandates in where like you have to somehow have doctors of all these different backgrounds, which you don't have. So, what happens when?

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Everything starts to go downhill, really quickly. I have, I get, people contact me just because of my, my profile has been elevated by being out there a little bit. I got a call from a young plastic surgery resident that had been fully trained in general surgery and went on to begin her plastic surgery training. And she was concerned because she wanted to get the most out of her training. And so she reached out to me to find out what things she could do. She told me things that were unbelievable. I mean, I, I'd never imagined these things. And this has been confirmed, not, it wasn't just my conversation with her, I've confirmed it from other sources as well. A couple of things.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  One, as she talked about the, the difficulty getting enough cases under your belt. That is, you know, not getting, given cases to do, not having operations that you can actually perform, not having the attendings turn things over to you. This I could not believe. One of the, the requisites to become board certified, at least in surgery, is you have to turn over to the Board of Examiners for the American Board of Surgery, the American Board of Plastic Surgery, a log of the cases you have done in the course of your residency program. So they list, you know, every case you've done as a surgeon, as an assistant and whatnot.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  Well, they're now permitted to list operations in there as part of the surgical experience that they've only watched. So if they sit behind the anesthesia screen or look over the shoulder of the surgeon and watch an operation, they can list that in the logbook as part of their surgical experience. And I can tell you personally that you don't learn surgery that way. You learn it by getting your hands in there.

• 42:03Tucker Carlson?

  I've, I've watched a lot of medical shows. I'm not a doctor as a result of, like, that's...

• 42:07Speaker 02

  And, and that's what's scary. And, and that allows them to, to qualify for taking their boards. The other thing they do, which is really...

• 42:14Tucker Carlson?

  What would be, again, the motive there? Why would you allow that?

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Well, the ACS has already anticipated there's going to be a shortage of 19,000 surgeons by 2030. Five years from now, we're going to be shy on nearly 20,000 surgeons in this country. Right now, the USA is short 1,200 trauma surgeons. There are places that need a trauma surgeon that can't get one because they're just not around. So, one idea, you know, as bad as it may be, is to put out anybody and everybody, and you don't want to drop anybody, just so you can get the numbers up there. The, the, gosh, there's so much to this, Tucker, that goes into this.

• 42:56Tucker Carlson?

  Well, back, back to the, I mean, all, all of this begins at the front end of the pipeline, which is medical school.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:05Tucker Carlson?

  So, the standards for admission to medical school have been dropped dramatically for race reasons.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:12Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, they've, they've taken the, the medical licensee examination, the three-part medical license examination, taken it from a graded exam to a pass/fail. And to pass it, you only have to be in, above the bottom 5% in grade. If you, if you are above the bottom 5%, you are going to pass the medical licensure examinations. And in spite of that, which is an abysmal standard when you think about it, in spite of that, something like 10% or more students at UCLA, 10% or more students flunk one or more of the exams, and a number of them flunked these exams two and three times. And yet, they're still being put through medical school. They don't want to drop you. I know what I wanted to say.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  Again, back to the DEI for a second. If you're an attending in a surgical training program, and you have a surgeon that is inadequate, he's just not cutting it. And I, I saw this, I, I had, in while I was in training, there were surgeons or people that came into the program that were dropped after year two, because it was clear that they weren't going to be able to do it. They just didn't have the dexterity, they didn't have the...

• 44:22Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  Whatever. Today, if you do that, and it's a minority or underrepresented in medicine, you know, minority surgeon, as an attending, if you hold them back, or if you drop them, what's going to happen is you're going to get reported. They'll get reported to the DEI establishment in that program, and invariably, they're going to side with the resident and not with the attending.

• 44:48Tucker Carlson?

  Why do they have the moral hide ground if they're putting people's lives at risk, which they are? I mean, I think that's a crime, but how did they get to attack you for upholding objective standards of surgery? I just don't get the... like, are there no sane people left in American medicine?

• 45:04Speaker 02

  Well, the thing is this: how do you recognize the quality going down? How do you recognize bad surgery? And one way that you recognize that is by complications. So the question would be, are people dying? Are complications going up, okay, in surgery? Right now, you can't answer that question. And one big reason why you can't answer the question is that, at least, and I'll just say, this is my opinion, I can't keep quoting this, but I know this is how surgery has evolved. The vast majority of surgery done today is done as an outpatient. So, you know, the people that are in the hospital and have an operation are not the majority, they're the minority. So if you do outpatient surgery,

• 45:48Speaker 02

  you do the operation, you know, the patient goes home that day, or after an overnight stay. Most complications don't arise immediately, you know. Bleeding occurs in the first day or two after, infections three, four days, okay, pulmonary problems. In my particular profession, if I do a flap reconstruction, I may not know if that flap is going to live or die for five, six, seven days or more. So when you do have complications, they occur after the patient's out of the system, so to speak, out of the hospital system. So there's no required reporting, it's all self-reporting. You know, you get a letter, you know, periodically from the hospital, say, "Hey, can you please tell us how all of your patients did? Do you have any complications?"

• 46:30Tucker Carlson?

  They did great.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  And it's human nature.

• 46:33Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  If a patient gets an infection, you treat them with antibiotics, you know, do you report that as a complication, and the patient ultimately did okay? You could argue, no, you would probably, you might not report that and, and you could rationalize that it's okay. So, that's one of the issues. The other issue, and I got this directly from one of the examiners, and I know someone who has been examining surgeons for 15 years for their boards. So, when you go to take your board examinations, so he's one of the people that sits in the room and asks you questions and whatnot. And what he's noticed is that a lot of, a lot of these residents who come in, he's looking at their cases, and he's thinking, oh my gosh, these, they're taking way too long to do these operations.

• 47:17Speaker 02

  Now, one thing that's, that's interesting is when you go for your boards, the cases that they look at are not cases you did in training. These are cases you've done since you've been out. You know, when you finish your residency, you're allowed to go out and practice. I could practice. I practiced for two years before I became board certified because it took two years to get my board certification. So, of course, I have to be able to practice. And I'm regarded at that point as a board-eligible surgeon. And I'm entitled to full privileges and all those things. So, when I go to take my board examination, I present them, you know, in my case, I present them with a log of everything I had done for the past year. And they select cases to examine you on and so forth. It's an interesting

• 47:59Speaker 02

  experience to do that. So, these are the cases that these examiners are looking at. And he's saying, they're taking way too long. You know, here's an operation that should normally take three to four hours. It's taking seven to eight hours for this person to complete this operation. And I've seen this locally. I've seen this in my, my own community where, you know, nurses who know the good surgeons from the bad surgeons say, Mr. Doctor so-and-so, he's so slow. He just takes forever to do, to do, you know, this operation. And complications are directly tied to length of surgery. I mean, absolutely positively correlated.

• 48:30Tucker Carlson?

  The longer the surgery, the more potential complication.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  Exactly. And this is recognized, and it's recognized in a very interesting way. The CMS, the Centers for Medicine, Medicare, Medicaid.

• 48:44Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  They've come out and they said, we are not going to pay for anesthesia beyond a certain time. So if we have, for example, a breast reduction, which for me is about a three and a half to four hour operation, you know, we're gonna, we'll pay for four hours of anesthesia for breast reduction. If it goes beyond that, we're not paying for that additional time. And the idea is they recognize that, you know, there, people are taking too long to do these things. Point is anesthesia has nothing to do with the length of surgery. They're just there to keep the patient asleep and stable and alive for you while you're doing your operation. But that's the only way they can think to penalize the surgeon because the surgical time does not come into play unless you look at hospital charges

• 49:29Speaker 02

  or anesthesia charges. And so they recognize this. And this is, goes back to what I said. You know, a lot of surgeons are not getting enough surgical experience to be able to operate, one, independently and two, I would say, you know, efficiently, competently, you know, to do. I'm not a speedster, but I can certainly hold my own with my peers in terms of how long it takes me to finish an operation and do a good job on it. I've never tried to be the fastest guy on the block. So all those things go to the fact that you're not going to really recognize this decline because it's so subtle in so many respects. And, and patients don't know that. And that's the other reason why I'm here, Tucker. I want

• 50:11Speaker 02

  this to be a wake up call to my fellow surgeons. This is, this is what can happen to you if you speak up and you try to promote excellence in surgery and you, and you try to object or push back against a liberal ideology, politics, ideology, call it what you will in surgery. And, and I would love for there to be a ground swell of surgeons coming saying, hey, wait a minute, what's going on in my profession?

• 50:36Tucker Carlson?

  Well, the fact that there isn't really bothers me because it's more than physical dexterity, you're counting on as a patient, reason. You want a fact-based, logical physician or else you could die. And so anyone who accepts clearly illogical, unreasonable,

• 50:58Tucker Carlson?

  Suppositions and doesn't push back against them is basically involved in witchcraft. Right? So if I could say to you something that is provably untrue and just on its face stupid, which is, you know, a black female patient needs a black female doctor. It's like, what are you even saying? What? Show me the evidence. There is no evidence. It's crazy on its face. It's Nazi stuff. If you go along with that, then you've disqualified yourself because you're not a rational person. You're a witchcraft practitioner. So that just freak, it freaks me out. So you could say, well, good people are going along with this. Well, no, they're disqualified by the fact they are going along with it. That's my, as a patient, someone

• 51:40Tucker Carlson?

  who's undergone two surgeries. That's, I mean, is that a fair view? Do you think?

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, think about this. You're, you're an intelligent person. You have probably a wealth of experience because of what you do. You weren't aware of racial concordance. And I mean, you ask any guy in the street about that, they're gonna just look at you like, you know, you have two heads. What the heck is that?

• 52:01Tucker Carlson?

  Well, is it true? And if it's true, how is that true? Again, the rest of us trust science, not because we trust the people who carry it out, but because the idea itself is inherently reasonable. Prove it, or I don't believe it. The burden of proof is on the practitioner, the scientist, the physician, the surgeon. And the whole system is based on that. If you can't prove it, then you can't know it. I thought that that's science, right?

• 52:27Speaker 02

  Well, that's what they call evidence-based medicine, which is-

• 52:30Tucker Carlson?

  Well, right.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:31Tucker Carlson?

  But that's, all medicine should be evidence-based medicine. And if it's not evidence-based medicine, it's not really medicine. It's witchcraft. So it freaks me out that the average doctor, average surgeon would, would for a second go along with this.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  Well, think about it from this standpoint, too. Think about the, for example, Celia Nelson, this, this, the female Jamaican black surgeon that was on the Zoom call with me. She's worked-

• 52:57Speaker 02

  As hard as anybody to get to where she is. She's an excellent surgeon. I mean, she's been through, she's, she's experienced racism. And she'll tell you flat out, yeah, she, when she first arrived there, people wouldn't mistake her for, you know, asked her to get a cup of coffee in the surgeon lounge.

• 53:12Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 53:12Speaker 02

  You know, those sorts of things. And, and she also noticed that sometimes when she'd walk into a, a, a examining room in the emergency room, that, you know, the, the look she would get was, you know, who is this? Is this someone good? And she's worked through all that. Okay. She's worked through that. She's, she's just put her head down. She worked hard. Um, and now she says what happens is when, when she goes into the ER, um, that patient has already heard from multiple staff, what a wonderful surgeons are getting. And she's going to be in there to see them. So, I mean, she's earned her place. Okay. But think how unfair it is for the people coming up now, the, the minority, if you will, surgeons that have to face this idea when they go into a room, that person, I

• 53:57Speaker 02

  mean, looking to say, gee, is this a DEI hire? Or is this a person that really?

• 54:01Tucker Carlson?

  I think everyone thinks that.

• 54:02Speaker 02

  That went through, that got here because of their excellence, because of their excellent academic performance in college and medical school, because their excellent performance in, in their residency, because they met all the standards, the, the standards that everyone should have to meet. Uh, or am I getting someone who's a little bit, um, less because of this?

• 54:23Tucker Carlson?

  Well, of course you're getting someone less. You're getting someone less overwhelmingly, and that's obvious. It's, and it has nothing to do with race, by the way. It's that preferences are always destructive of excellence. So if I, if you tell me that you're the CEO of a company that your family owns and you got the job because you're the first son, my first assumption is.

• 54:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:47Tucker Carlson?

  They lowered standards to make you CEO.

• 54:49Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 54:50Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, I, right? It's just, it's obvious. And so if I have a black female surgeon, my first assumption will be this person had to meet lower standards because the school or the certifying board was so anxious to say, we have a black female surgeon. And of course, it's unfair to the individual, but then the whole system is unfair. So should you be shocked that it produces unfair results? No, I mean, it's unfair.

• 55:13Speaker 02

  It is unfair on the face of it and in practice and every other possible way.

• 55:17Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 55:17Speaker 02

  You know, they, the thing about anti racism that was so, I think, despicable was it said that, you know, you cannot be against racism. You have to be for this whole anti racism shtick. So.

• 55:31Tucker Carlson?

  Attacking whites.

• 55:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, you know, if you claim to be not a racist, that's a racist statement. I mean, talk about the, the.

• 55:42Tucker Carlson?

  But why would anyone go, of, of course, I mean, it's a Chinese finger trap.

• 55:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:46Tucker Carlson?

  You know, the harder you pull to get out, the more stuck you are. But why would anybody, you're a surgeon, like you're at the very pinnacle of our system, like the science-based, reason-based civilization that we've built, which we consider superior to like, you know, to the witchcraft-based societies of the rest of the world. How in the world could you sit and let this happen? Anybody, any surgeon?

• 56:12Speaker 02

  Well, I'll, I'll tell you why I did it. I was too busy. I was just, I had my head in the sand.

• 56:18Tucker Carlson?

  Well, you're the anomaly. You actually stood up and got banned for standing up. I'm just saying, what about all your colleagues?

• 56:23Speaker 02

  You know, I'm, I'm fortunate in the sense that I was able to get through a career. And I'm at the twilight of my, no, actually at the end of my career. I have nothing to lose, Tucker. I mean, they can't hurt me. So I got many messages, private messages, which I can't access any longer from surgeons, including minority surgeons that said, you know, we agree with you, but we can't speak up because we're going to get pushed back. You know, we're, we're going to be called, you know, Uncle Toms or racist or whatever if we agree with the premise that you're putting out there. I don't have much to lose.

• 56:57Tucker Carlson?

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• 57:28Tucker Carlson?

  Powerful stories, prayer, you've grown in your ability to sacrifice. That's what Lent is. It's a sacrifice and taking thought provoking sermons and true stories of faith in action, which are amazing. This year is going to be the best Lent ever. Thousands of people praying together all over the world and you can be part of it through Hallow, which by the way, is in use in my house and a nightly topic of conversation. So you can sign up at hallow.com/talker. When you join, check out thousands of guided prayers, meditations, music and everything. There is a ton on Hallow, all designed to help you find peace and closeness to God. Download the Hallow app and jump onto the Lent Pray 40 Challenge right now. No, I mean, of course, I know that you're describing the real answer. That is the answer.

• 58:11Tucker Carlson?

  But it's just hard to let people like that off the hook. If you work in some, you know, normal company, it's one thing, but if you're a surgeon, you understand that lowering standards results in the deaths of people. The stakes are just the highest in any part of our society. You have the highest stakes. So sure, it could hurt your career. Sure, it could make you unpopular. Sure, they might call you names, Uncle Tom or whatever, but you balance that against the deaths of innocents and you think, I have to say something, don't you?

• 58:41Speaker 02

  That's where I found myself.

• 58:42Tucker Carlson?

  Then you're, I can tell and bless you. But if you, if you decide, you know, people will die, but my career is more important or not being called names is more important, then it's kind of a monster, aren't you?

• 58:55Speaker 02

  I don't want to say that.

• 58:56Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I do. I do. I think that if you give the power, that surgeons have the power to cut people open unsupervised and someone dies and you're the surgeon, you're like God in the operating room. You have that power. In exchange for that power, you have to hold yourself to the highest moral standards, don't you?

• 59:14Speaker 02

  I agree with that. I, you'll get no argument from me.

• 59:18Tucker Carlson?

  Who has more power than a surgeon? Nobody.

• 59:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. In that immediate moment, nobody does.

• 59:22Tucker Carlson?

  That's what I'm saying. I mean, actual power, not theoretical power.

• 59:25Speaker 02

  No.

• 59:26Tucker Carlson?

  A surgeon has more power than the president. He can cut open a person if the person's unconscious. He has total control over his operating room. Correct me if I'm wrong in any of this.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  The captain of the ship, basically.

• 59:36Tucker Carlson?

  Unquestioned, right? So, and he has a life in his hands, like actual, not theoretical, actual beating heart person. And so that person has to be of just the highest moral caliber or else innocents die. I mean, that's my view.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  Anything which works against that, you have to fight. I think you have to work against that. It's disconcerting to me. I have to say, maybe I could use stronger terms, but I had a lot of private affirmation from colleagues, from surgeons. I don't get a lot of public affirmation for that very reason, because some of them are older and don't want to deal with the blowback, the repercussions and the recrimination that can occur. Some of them, a few agree with the whole situation, crazy as it may be, all the D E I and so forth, and most of them were kind of like me. They were just going along and too busy taking care of their patients for the best of their ability. I understand that.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  To, and, you know, I've been doing this for 38 years, and it's really not until about three or four years ago that I popped my head above the water, so to speak, and looked around and said, "My gosh, the landscape out there has really changed. This is, this is not the field of medicine that I went into." And, you know, you'd like to think, when you've devoted your life to a career, a profession, that you're going to leave it a little better than you got it. You know, you're, I'm building my, I've built my practice on the shoulders of the people that went before, and I have a very strong sense of responsibility that I have to honor the traditions and the efforts on my behalf to get me to where I was. And you want to think that you've done somewhat the same.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  Now, I'm not, I wasn't a professor, I wasn't a researcher, but in taking care of patients, I've always tried to honor the efforts of the people that trained me and feel like I could go off. Well, I've got a generation behind me now. I've got a daughter who's a physician, I've got a son-in-law, her husband, who's a physician, and I feel a very strong sense of obligation to someday, when I can't do this anymore, to say, "Okay, I did the best I could to leave medicine in their hands better than I got it." And I can't say that. And that's tragic when you think about it, to think that you're leaving a profession that you love and have committed your life to, and it's in much worse shape than than when it was put into your hands.

• 1:02:05Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, this is not progress.

• 1:02:07Speaker 02

  I take responsibility for that. I take my own. But but at the same time, I think it's what happened to me. If they can, if the A E C S can ban me with the the impunity that they have done without accountability, without even following their own bylaws, for God's sakes, and they have no reason to engage with me, they can do this to anybody. I mean, there's nobody out there who's who's safe. And that's a pretty frightening proposition.

• 1:02:36Tucker Carlson?

  And and, you know, for those of us watching who, you know, aren't doctors, it eliminates all trust. Don't trust doctors. I don't want to go to the doctor. I don't like doctors. I loathe them.

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  I don't trust a lot of doctors.

• 1:02:49Tucker Carlson?

  You don't?

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  I don't.

• 1:02:50Tucker Carlson?

  Why?

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  My trust, COVID.

• 1:02:52Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. Me too. I haven't been a doctor since COVID and.

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  What what happened in COVID was so egregiously wrong that I just couldn't, I mean, I don't look at the the C D C, the N I A, H F D A in the same way any longer, public health officials. And the other issue, I don't want to open a can of worms here, but the gender affirming care. I mean, how in God's name do we get to a point where you have, in my profession, as far as surgery is concerned, is probably the one most closely involved in the whole process of gender affirming care because of the work we do. And to have this concept that there's no such thing as male and female, that you can take a biological male and convert them to a woman and they're really a woman.

• 1:03:37Tucker Carlson?

  Through plastic surgery.

• 1:03:38Speaker 02

  I mean, that is, when you talk about witchcraft and voodoo, that is witchcraft and voodoo, and all the scientific evidence is against it.

• 1:03:45Tucker Carlson?

  Do you know anyone who participates in it?

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:49Tucker Carlson?

  You know people personally?

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  No, I don't. I don't know people that are doing the gender-affirming care on minors. And I want to be very clear, you know, if an adult thinks, if an adult male man thinks he's a woman and God bless them, I feel sorry for them.

• 1:04:03Tucker Carlson?

  Me too.

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  You really have to. But they're, you know, they're an adult with agency to make decisions for themselves. That's one thing. Minors is a whole different thing.

• 1:04:12Tucker Carlson?

  Have you met any plastic surgeons who've done surgeries on minors?

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  Uh, not that I know of personally, no. I know some that are doing some of this, what they call euphemistically, top surgery, where they take off a breast. But they're doing this in women that are adults. They're taking off their breasts to turn them into, you know, make them look more male-like. I don't know anyone personally who's done this on children so far.

• 1:04:36Tucker Carlson?

  So you saw this with abortion. Even when I was a child, there were doctors who said, you know, I just, I just don't believe in it. I think it's immoral. I'm not participating in it. Now, it's my impression that it's pretty hard to be a doctor unless you commit abortion, like you kind of have to, as part of your training. If you're an OB-GYN, I don't, I don't know that you can get through medical school without participating in an abortion, an elective abortion.

• 1:04:56Speaker 02

  I can't speak to that because I think that there, I mean, I know from personally that that wasn't the case.

• 1:05:01Tucker Carlson?

  I'm aware. It was not the case. No, I know that.

• 1:05:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:03Tucker Carlson?

  But my sense is now, in practice, if not officially, that is the case. And it's extremely hard to be an OB-GYN resident and not participate in that. And I wonder if we're moving toward that scenario with transgender surgery, where maybe, maybe you don't get certified as a plastic surgeon unless you participate in, you know, mutilating minors in the service of ideology. Like, could you see that happening?

• 1:05:35Speaker 02

  Um, oh, I could definitely see it happening. I mean, it is happening. It is, it is being done. Now, are people being forced to do it? I don't think that's necessarily the case. I think people that are doing it are, are bought into the whole thing. And they're doing that because they're bought into it.

• 1:05:49Tucker Carlson?

  But that just seems to act against evidence, you know, scientific evidence as a scientist, physicians are scientists. It doesn't, I just, I just, I'm saying the same thing 10 times in a row, but it just seems like it just, like you shouldn't be allowed to conduct science if you've shown that you don't believe in it.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  As a resident in surgery...

• 1:06:13Speaker 02

  You don't have a lot of power in the sense of being able to say, I won't do this or I will do that. You can't pick and choose what you're going to do. When I was in training, we had an experimental clinical study going on to do bariatric weight reduction surgery.

• 1:06:33Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:06:34Speaker 02

  We were approaching these bypasses through the chest and not the abdomen.

• 1:06:39Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  And the attendings in our program came to us, the residents said, listen, we understand this is the experimental program. We're not going to make you do this. We'll let you decide for yourselves if you want to do these cases. There were three of us at my level and two of us said, no. I was one of those. And the third one said, sure, he'd do it.

• 1:07:03Tucker Carlson?

  That you did not want to participate?

• 1:07:04Speaker 02

  Did not want to do that. I didn't, I didn't think it was a good operation, a good idea. Long and short of that, the, the study showed that, yeah, she could lose weight by doing this, but the weight came back.

• 1:07:17Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:07:17Speaker 02

  These patients gained weight again. And so it was pretty much abandoned. And we're talking, you know, back in 1984, thereabouts. And of course, I remember one young woman who died, you know, directly as a result of, of the operation, which was, it wasn't that big a group of patients, and they had one death in that group. So, you know, you're not always allowed to make the decision about what you can do. Now, if you're in a residency program and you've got surgeons that are doing, you know, gender-affirming surgery and again, in minors, and you don't want to participate in that, I can't speak this. I can't say that the resident has the ability to say, no, I'm not going to do that, or I won't do that. I do know that, you know, are you familiar with the case of Eitan Heim?

• 1:08:01Tucker Carlson?

  I've interviewed him.

• 1:08:03Speaker 02

  Ah, okay.

• 1:08:04Tucker Carlson?

  What a man he is.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  One of my heroes. Now, there's, there's someone who has true courage. I mean, my courage is the courage of someone that doesn't have too much to lose. His is the courage of someone who has everything to lose.

• 1:08:14Tucker Carlson?

  That guy, I don't know if he's, I didn't ask him, I don't know if he's a religious man, but I could feel a moral power on that guy.

• 1:08:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:08:21Tucker Carlson?

  He is religious, okay. Well, that.

• 1:08:23Speaker 02

  I've, I've spoke, I'm, I've become friends with him and I really, I've, I've, actually,

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  Call these, you know, divine moments, if you will.

• 1:08:34Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:08:34Speaker 02

  I've made a couple of, just felt compelled to call him a couple of times.

• 1:08:37Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  And it just happened to be when he was in a really difficult down period. And just needed someone to, to affirm what he was doing and to encourage him and so forth. And so, um, you know, I just happened to be the person that made that phone call.

• 1:08:54Tucker Carlson?

  Good for you.

• 1:08:55Speaker 02

  So we become friends.

• 1:08:56Tucker Carlson?

  Good for you.

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  And he is a, definitely a religious person.

• 1:08:59Tucker Carlson?

  Good, I could feel that on him, I.

• 1:09:02Speaker 02

  And more than that, he's a, he's a moral person. And he, he has a strong sense of.

• 1:09:06Tucker Carlson?

  The other, no, it's, you're absolutely right. And of all the people I've interviewed, boy, it's funny you mentioned him. I've, I've thought about him many times since that interview.

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  No, he's still in the thick of it. And he's still under indictment and he's still facing trial and.

• 1:09:17Tucker Carlson?

  He's gonna win.

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  Oh, he'll win. And I, well, my suspicion is it's all gonna be dropped. Uh, cause the, the, the reasons that have been brought to, the accusations are so out there that they just can't.

• 1:09:30Tucker Carlson?

  Eitanheim, E T A N?

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  E I T H A N H A I M, Eitan, Eitan.

• 1:09:36Tucker Carlson?

  Eitanheim, Eitanheim. So for those following who wanna Google him.

• 1:09:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:42Tucker Carlson?

  So do you think that, um, this can be fixed?

• 1:09:47Speaker 02

  It can be fixed, yes. But you're talking about a long, you know, the pipeline for surgery is five plus years. So, you know, then you got the four years before the medical school. So if you're gonna fix the problem, you gotta go back to the medical schools. Honestly, you may have to go back to universities where the people are being indoctrinated in all this social justice stuff where they, they feel that that's more important than what they're doing. They, you know, the young doctors think that righting historic wrongs is more important than taking care of the patient in front of them. Uh, and you can't practice medicine that way. That's just not, that's not medicine. So it can be fixed. It's going to be a generational problem. It's going to take a long time. We're going to be seeing the effects of this and paying the price for these

• 1:10:32Speaker 02

  policies and these ideologies for probably my lifetime, I suspect. Which brings up the issue, you know, I'm a healthy guy, but every one of us is going to be someday needing a doctor. And I don't know who I'm going to go to. I somewhat semi seriously told friends and family, I said, don't go to a surgeon or a doctor under 40. They've been indoctrinated. Some of these guys are still wearing masks for Pete's sakes.

• 1:11:00Tucker Carlson?

  Masks?

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, there's some physician that's still mask, you know, patients and things like that. It's just crazy. There's crazy stuff out there, Tucker, that you know.

• 1:11:07Tucker Carlson?

  So if you're a doctor, I mean, and you're openly mentally ill like that, why doesn't anybody, no, I don't mean that as an attack. I'm saying that with sympathy, but if you have.

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

  It's a great question.

• 1:11:18Tucker Carlson?

  Why doesn't anyone in the physicians group or the hospital say something?

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  Well, first off, there's, there's too few doctors. I mean, there's so few that, you know, a lot of these guys, guys, you know, men, women, whatever, a lot of doctors are there because there's just not enough doctors. I mean, try to, if you tried to get a doctor recently and make an appointment, just a routine appointment, you're talking months down the road. You need something more urgently? Good luck with that. You know, you'll probably end up going to an urgent care center where you'll see a nurse practitioner or PA or someone that's got a fraction of the education, experience of a physician. So it's, it's not a real, there's not a simple cure for all of this. One thing I wanted

• 1:12:05Speaker 02

  to try to do with this conversation is not just simply bad mouth, you know, my organization, the ACS, or bad mouth medicine or surgery, because I'm devastated by what's happened. I really want, I want surgery to be elevated to where it should be, which is a very highly regarded profession that is dedicated itself to taking care of all comers regardless. Okay, we don't, you know, we don't judge on who or what you are when you're in front of us and you've got a problem that we're trained to fix. So my solutions, you know, my first solution, obviously, is get DEI out of medicine. Politics and ideology do not belong in medicine. I mean.

• 1:12:49Tucker Carlson?

  The Soviets proved that.

• 1:12:52Speaker 02

  The idea that you can take care of a patient if your first priority is to judge them based on their color, ethnicity is counter to everything that Hippocratic medicine is all about. The other is to reinstall standards of excellence. We have to quit lowering the bar. We've got to start elevating the bar again and requiring that doctors and prospective doctors meet minimum standards. There have to be some minimum, but they have to be higher than the lower 5% for Pete's sakes. They can't be that. We have to free the doctors in training to do what they have to do.

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  You can't have restricted hours when you've got such limited time anyway. In the overall course of a person's lifetime, three, four, or five years in surgery is a drop in the bucket. I mean, to ask a surgeon to devote themselves to learning the craft and what they call the art and the science of surgery, not only do you need the time, you need the person to apply themselves. One thing I heard, which again is kind of disturbing, is that a lot of young surgeons are more concerned about comfort, work-life balance, as it's often called, as opposed to learning to be the best doctor they can be.

• 1:14:16Speaker 02

  They want to know how much time off they have. They're very jealous of their time off. Five o'clock rolls around, they're done. They check out and they move out. One thing that they found in asking all the program directors about the surgeons coming into their fellowships was that a large proportion did not have ownership of their patients. And ownership means that you take that patient as your patient. That's not just someone that you take care of for a 12-hour shift and then you turn them over to the next person and then you may not ever see that patient again or not until two or three shifts later. So a lot of young doctors don't have ownership for their patients. I'm hearing that from colleagues.

• 1:14:56Tucker Carlson?

  So how do you treat a rental car? Do you ever change the oil in it?

• 1:15:00Speaker 02

  No, I don't. I don't rotate the tires. I don't tune it up.

• 1:15:03Tucker Carlson?

  That's exactly right.

• 1:15:06Tucker Carlson?

  Well, you've certainly wrecked my day, doctor, but I appreciate your doing this, taking all the time to explain this.

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  We still have a good medical system. It's probably still, in many respects, the best in the world. I have to believe that. But it's in disarray, and it's definitely, I believe, in decline. And I believe that it's going to take some effort, some will, from people that are willing to make those difficult changes.

• 1:15:31Tucker Carlson?

  Well, thank you for your bravery.

• 1:15:34Speaker 02

  I don't consider myself brave, but I appreciate that, appreciate the thought. Thank you.

• 1:15:39Tucker Carlson?

  Well, nobody else is, so.

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  And I can't thank you enough for giving me a pedestal in which to...

• 1:15:45Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, I had an emergency appendectomy once by Dr. Leon Paktor. He was an amazing surgeon, and it, you know, it saved me. So, and I think most people have had an experience like that, and, you know, it's important.

• 1:15:59Speaker 02

  I believe with an interesting little factoid.

• 1:16:01Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  Ibram Kendi, the author of Anti-Racism.

• 1:16:04Tucker Carlson?

  Not a surgeon.

• 1:16:05Speaker 02

  Not a surgeon. He's an author of Anti-Racism.

• 1:16:07Tucker Carlson?

  A moron.

• 1:16:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. He had colon cancer.

• 1:16:10Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:11Speaker 02

  And he reported that he went to, he interviewed several surgeons, black surgeons, showed the white surgeon for his surgery, because he was the most competent.

• 1:16:18Tucker Carlson?

  Shouldn't be allowed. Nope. You get the surgeon from Burkina Faso, Ibram Kendi. That's my opinion. Okay, thank you, doctor, but I'm obviously a vindictive bad person, so, anyway, thanks.

• 1:16:31Speaker 02

  I appreciate it. Appreciate the time.

• 1:16:38Tucker Carlson?

  We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day. We know the people who run it, good people. While you're here, do us a favor, hit follow and tap the bell so you never miss an episode. We have real conversations, news, things that actually matter, telling the truth always. You will not miss it if you follow us on Spotify and hit the bell. We appreciate it. Thanks for watching.