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

It's a CZM Rewind week! Enjoy this old, but prescient, episode where Robert is joined by Matt Lieb to discuss Dr. Oz. FOOTNOTES: https://www.oprah.com/pressroom/oprah-bids-farewell-to-dr-oz-as-he-launches-his-own-show-september-14#ixzz6ryQsKlGx https://www.oprah.com/pressroom/oprah-bids-farewell-to-dr-oz-as-he-launches-his-own-show-september-14#ixzz6ryQsKlGx%C2%A0 https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2018/02/pulling-back-the-curtain-on-the-doctors-and-the-dr-oz-show-what-our-analysis-reveals/ %C2%A0https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2018/02/pulling-back-the-curtain-on-the-doctors-and-the-dr-oz-show-what-our-analysis-reveals/%C2%A0 https://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/the-dr-oz-health-quiz/all#ixzz6ryqeqPD3 https://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/the-dr-oz-health-quiz/all#ixzz6ryqeqPD3%C2%A0 https://www.nature.com/articles/nn0412-497 https://www.nature.com/articles/nn0412-497%C2%A0 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6167233/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6167233/%C2%A0 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/how-dr-oz-effect-has-hooked-american-consumers-n134801 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/how-dr-oz-effect-has-hooked-american-consumers-n134801%C2%A0 https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/magazine/18Oz-t.html https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/04/reiki-cant-possibly-work-so-why-does-it/606808/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/04/reiki-cant-possibly-work-so-why-does-it/606808/%C2%A0%C2%A0 https://quackwatch.org/nccam/research/energy/ https://quackwatch.org/nccam/research/energy/%C2%A0 https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/case-dr-oz-ethics-evidence-and-does-professional-self-regulation-work/2017-02 https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/case-dr-oz-ethics-evidence-and-does-professional-self-regulation-work/2017-02%C2%A0 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/dr-oz-slammed-for-suggesting-it-may-only-cost-us-2-to-3-of-american-lives-to-reopen-schools-2020-04-16 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/dr-oz-slammed-for-suggesting-it-may-only-cost-us-2-to-3-of-american-lives-to-reopen-schools-2020-04-16%C2%A0 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/business/media/dr-oz-apology-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/business/media/dr-oz-apology-coronavirus.html%C2%A0 https://www.businessinsider.com/dr-oz-false-misleading-baseless-medical-claims-coronavirus-2020-4#a-strawberry-and-baking-soda-mixture-can-whiten-teeth-oz-said-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/dr-oz-false-misleading-baseless-medical-claims-coronavirus-2020-4#a-strawberry-and-baking-soda-mixture-can-whiten-teeth-oz-said-8%C2%A0 https://www.vox.com/2015/4/16/8412427/dr-oz-health-claims https://www.vox.com/2015/4/16/8412427/dr-oz-health-claims%C2%A0 http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2013/01/can_you_trust_dr_oz_his_medical_advice_often_conflicts_with_the_best_science.single.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2013/01/can_you_trust_dr_oz_his_medical_advice_often_conflicts_with_the_best_science.single.html%C2%A0 See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:35Robert Evans?

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• 1:36Robert Evans?

  What's lighting my dumpster fires? I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards. That little introduction was in honor of my hometown, Portland, which just had a police officer murder a man who was having a mental health crisis and will probably be lighting some dumpsters on fire tonight. Although you won't hear it the day that this happens. But anyway, that's all beside the point right now. Because the point right now is that I'm introducing our guest today, the inimitable Matt Lieb.

• 2:07Speaker 04

  Hey, what's going on?

• 2:09Robert Evans?

  Matt? How are you doing?

• 2:11Speaker 04

  I'm doing well. I'm excited to be here. A big fan of the pod. Love me some bastards.

• 2:17Robert Evans?

  And you are, you do a Sopranos podcast and the name is, I believe, Pod Yourself a Gun?

• 2:21Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 2:21Robert Evans?

  That's right.

• 2:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're the world's only Sopranos podcast. Don't go looking for any other ones because they do not exist.

• 2:29Robert Evans?

  Little known TV show, The Sopranos. You might have heard of it. Very obscure.

• 2:33Speaker 04

  A niche, a niche TV show that only people who really like art understand. And that's, that's why we talk about it. We talk about the art.

• 2:42Robert Evans?

  It's fun thinking about that because I believe the song that introduced that show was something about waking up in the morning and getting yourself a gun, which is what I did this morning.

• 2:51Speaker 04

  You bought a gun?

• 2:52Robert Evans?

  I did, I did. I did buy a gun this morning. Not for Sopranos-like uses. Although I am Italian, so you can't really know for sure. You can't really know for sure.

• 3:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, you woke up with a blue moon in your eye and you decided, I'm gonna go get myself a gun.

• 3:09Robert Evans?

  And then I'm gonna commit crimes in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.

• 3:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:13Robert Evans?

  They do that a lot in the show, right? A lot of Pine Baron crimes?

• 3:15Speaker 04

  They do it at least once and, and it's great.

• 3:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that they're chasing that guy through the, yeah.

• 3:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, the Russian.

• 3:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, and they leave their DNA everywhere.

• 3:25Speaker 04

  Well, they pee everywhere and, you know.

• 3:28Robert Evans?

  Look, we Italians are not a subtle people.

• 3:31Speaker 04

  No, they spend that whole episode literally like dying of like cold and they're lost in the woods, but they spend all the time talking about how they're starving because they haven't eaten in 12 hours. It's the most Italian thing in the world. But I want to hear about this gun.

• 3:47Robert Evans?

  Oh, it's just a gun. Um, but today we have something much more exciting than a gun. We have a bastard and our bastard. Are you ready for this?

• 3:56Speaker 04

  I'm so excited.

• 3:57Robert Evans?

  Are you settling in?

• 3:59Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 4:00Robert Evans?

  Doctor. Mehmet Oz. I never introduced them like that. We're talking about Dr. Fucking Oz today. Yes, that's right.

• 4:08Speaker 04

  Who'd have thought he'd be a bastard? A TV doctor?

• 4:11Robert Evans?

  Who would have thought a TV doctor could be a bad man?

• 4:14Speaker 04

  No, they, they, they take an oath, TV doctors. They say do no harm and get good ratings. That's the, the Hippocratic oath.

• 4:22Speaker 05

  Do they, do they also oath to be bad guest hosts on Jeopardy? Because he sucked and I didn't enjoy it.

• 4:29Robert Evans?

  Honestly, if you are going up against LeVar Burton for any job, your first action should be like, you know what? I'm bowing out.

• 4:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, immediately.

• 4:37Robert Evans?

  I'm not going to compete with LeVar Burton.

• 4:39Speaker 05

  Respectfully fuck off, sir.

• 4:41Robert Evans?

  Fighting Jordy, fighting Kunta Kinte, fighting whatever the reading rainbow guy's name was? No, sir. No, sir. LeVar, yeah.

• 4:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I did not watch him on Jeopardy, but I have seen the show and had no idea he was a bastard.

• 4:59Robert Evans?

  Yes, um, he's a piece of shit. Uh, he's, he's a different piece of shit. We're also going to be talking in the very near future about Dr. Phil, who's a much worse person.

• 5:07Speaker 05

  Fuck Dr. Phil.

• 5:08Robert Evans?

  Oz is bad for some reasons that you'll suspect, you know, the pseudoscience stuff, but also for some, I think more complicated reasons, which will, will have us a nice talk about at the end of this episode. So I've always said that one of the great tragedies of American public life is that our very best doctors are usually like kind of schlubby dudes and ladies, uh, who maybe aren't the best at, at social graces and certainly don't have enough time because they're wildly overworked to do TV appearances.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. I, yeah, I agree. They're not hot. I've always said doctors, the problem with them. They're not hot. I look at them and I'm like, ew, like.

• 5:44Robert Evans?

  We need to put a couple of billion dollars into a national program for more fuckable doctors. Come on.

• 5:50Speaker 04

  Yes, yes. Doctors who fuck. That's the next level of healthcare in America. It won't be universal healthcare, but at least doctors will look fuckable.

• 5:59Robert Evans?

  Now, I mean, I think the problem is not their fuckability because it's inherently hot to be a doctor. It's more the fact that they're not necessarily, even the ones who are, have a good bedside manner are good at explaining things, just don't have the time to spend a lot of it on television because they're busy saving lives. This has led to a thriving industry, well documented in this show, of grifter, health influencers, and scam artists selling people poison with honeyed words and practiced smiles. Today, though, we're talking about a different kind of medical grifter, kind of a grifter who helps to launder those more shady grifters, the guy, people who aren't doctors, people who have no medical training, who are just trying to sell you nonsense cures. The guy we're talking about today exists to give them credibility and launder them into the

• 6:39Robert Evans?

  public consciousness, and his name is Mehmet Oz. Mehmet Oz is maybe the most influential public physician in the country, possibly the world. He is, in every professional sense of the word, an excellent doctor, exceptionally even. Within the bounds of what it is he is trained to do, he may be one of the best in the world at what he does. And he uses his, you know, the thing that makes him a bastard is that he uses these exceptional qualifications, along with his charisma, his handsome face, to sell millions of people on nonsense cures every single year. And that's, that's a bad thing to do. It's kind of made worse, we'll talk about this a lot, by the fact that he is, he's a, he's a, he's a heart surgeon, and he's an exceptional heart surgeon.

• 7:22Speaker 04

  That's so sad. It's always sad when, like, an amazing doctor is a piece of shit. This is like how I felt when Ben Con, Ben Carson turned out to be a Trump guy. I was like, but you're so good at the brain surgery.

• 7:35Robert Evans?

  It's always surgeons. Which, you talk to doctors, they'll be like, yeah, of course, it's always surgeons.

• 7:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're the ones who think they're gods, right? They essentially have a god complex, and they'll be really good at one thing, and then they'll also think that they're good at, like, politics and shit like that.

• 7:53Robert Evans?

  I think good surgeons are so prone to being also, like, nonsense, like, so many of our nonsense public doctors are surgeons for the same reason that so many of our terrorists are engineers. They're people who get really good at a specific thing, and it lets them convince themselves that they know what they're talking about in a wider variety of things than they really do.

• 8:11Speaker 04

  That's cra- it's, it just makes me glad that I never, you know, got really proficient in any one skill.

• 8:17Robert Evans?

  Never gain skills.

• 8:19Speaker 04

  I never, never.

• 8:20Robert Evans?

  Ever learn how to do things.

• 8:21Speaker 04

  You'll become too smart for yourself and think that you are God.

• 8:25Robert Evans?

  If no one learned to do anything, we would still be living in the mud and eating grubs. And you know what we wouldn't have?

• 8:32Speaker 04

  Snake oil salesman?

• 8:33Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. Or, or that. We would have very little at all.

• 8:39Robert Evans?

  Mehmet Sengiz Oz was born on June 11th, 1960 to parents Suna and Mustafa Oz, who must have fucked at some point in October of 1959 in order to conceive him. We have to assume his parents fucked in the, in October.

• 8:52Speaker 05

  You don't know that.

• 8:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, he could be immaculate conception.

• 8:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:56Speaker 04

  You know?

• 8:57Speaker 05

  Robert.

• 8:57Robert Evans?

  Possible. I would say right now, the most likely theory is that they fucked sometime in October.

• 9:02Speaker 04

  Oh, all right.

• 9:03Robert Evans?

  His father Mustafa had been born in Bozkir, a village in southern Turkey. He had grown up poor in the countryside during the Great Depression, uh, and obviously, you know, Great Depression, bad time everywhere. Real bad time if you're like in rural Turkey, you know?

• 9:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:18Robert Evans?

  You're, you're dealing with a different kind of poverty than even like our grandparents dealt with here.

• 9:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:24Robert Evans?

  So he had to work himself to the bone in order to make something of himself, in order to get into medical school and distinguish himself enough that he was able to earn scholarships, which allowed him to immigrate to the United States as a medical resident in 1955. So this is a, this is a hardworking man. Um, and a man who's, has to struggle, I'm going to guess in ways that, that are kind of difficult to imagine for most of us, even as difficult as our present times are.

• 9:49Speaker 04

  He's like a true, uh, lift yourself up by your bootstraps kind of guy.

• 9:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. Came from the middle of like nowhere rural Turkey and worked himself into becoming a good enough doctor that he got it, uh, you know, he was able to get over the racism of the fucking 1950s immigration system.

• 10:10Robert Evans?

  That's, that's an achievement.

• 10:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, good for him. Started from the bottom and now he's on TV selling fake cures.

• 10:16Robert Evans?

  That's his dad. Um, that's his dad. That's not Mehmet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's Mustafa. So, uh, we're talking about his dad and his mom right now. His mom, Suna, uh, came from a much wealthier background. I don't know if this is what helped his dad get into the country or not. It may have been. Her father was a successful pharmacist, uh, and both sides of her family came from Istanbul. She grew up with a lot of money. As befits his more modest upbringing, Mustafa was an observant traditional Muslim. Suna's family was more moderate and secular. Mehmet and his two sisters grew up split between both approaches to religion. The Oz kids spent their childhood speaking Turkish and English fluently at home, so they grew up in a bilingual house.

• 10:58Robert Evans?

  Mehmet was from a young, uh, from a young age ambitious, starving for success and his father's approval. He was wont to note that he was born in the year of the rat, according to the Chinese zodiac. In one interview, he noted of this, quote, "You run the maze. If you put cheese in that maze, I swear to God, I'll get to it, and I'll get to it really fast. But should I be running after that cheese? Am I in the right maze? All of these questions, which people much greater than I am think through, I put on the back burner as I'm running after that cheese."

• 11:27Speaker 04

  What the fuck? Like, he said, so that's way too much stock into the year of what animal he was born into. At least he wasn't born into the year of the pig. And he's like, well, you, what you gotta do is you gotta take your snout and put it into the trough of life and just laugh at all the slop.

• 11:42Robert Evans?

  You really gotta just shove your face into food as hard as you can.

• 11:46Speaker 04

  You roll around in the shit and then you hope that someday you find another piggy to fuck and then you have little piglets.

• 11:52Robert Evans?

  Look, I was born in the year of the pig and that's why I dispose of bodies for the mob. It's just what you do.

• 11:59Speaker 04

  Well, that's a, it's a nice take on year of the rat for him.

• 12:04Robert Evans?

  It is, it is telling because what he's saying there is like, I don't think about why I'm doing what I'm doing. I just, I just strive to, to, to achieve things and I don't think about whether or not they're good or bad. I just, I have to achieve.

• 12:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, he just wants that cheese.

• 12:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he wants that cheese. It's ambition without an analysis, I think is what you'd, you'd call it. And he's, he's pretty open about that. Now Mustafa, his dad repeatedly told the growing Dr. Oz, who's not yet a doctor, obviously, that when he'd grown up, when Mustafa had grown up, he hadn't been able to relax for even a second on his road to escaping poverty and establishing himself as a cardiothoracic surgeon. So he's like telling his kid as he grows up, like, you know, like, if you want to succeed, you can't relax for even a second. You can't take a moment off. You always got to be hustling.

• 12:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:51Robert Evans?

  And that's how Mehmet grows up. He's an excellent student, but no amount of success is ever enough for his dad. He later recalled, "I'd say I got a 93 on a test." He'd say, "Did anyone get better?" That was always the question he asked.

• 13:04Speaker 04

  Cool dad.

• 13:06Speaker 05

  Sounds like a fun guy would hang.

• 13:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, the school I grew up in, because of just where we were in North Texas, like about half of the kids in my school were either from India or from China or Japan. And so you had a lot of kids who would talk that way about their parents, right? And some of them had, especially around our senior year, there were a couple of kids who had to get like taken in by an ambulance because they would just like, one in one case seizing as a result of stress, like, it's not good to put this kind of pressure on a kid.

• 13:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, straight having like nervous breakdowns just from like trying to get good grades.

• 13:45Speaker 05

  Right.

• 13:46Speaker 04

  Once again, don't get good at anything. It's not worth it.

• 13:49Robert Evans?

  Develop skills.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  Don't develop skills. You'll get seizures. You're at risk of seizures. You're at risk of your of your dad not loving you. You know, you just gotta fucking-

• 13:58Robert Evans?

  He won't love you no matter what.

• 13:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Stop caring about your dad, you know, just coast, coast through life.

• 14:04Robert Evans?

  Find some dirt, eat some grubs, you'll be fine.

• 14:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, start a Sopranos podcast.

• 14:09Robert Evans?

  Start a Sopranos podcast.

• 14:11Speaker 04

  That's all you gotta do, dude.

• 14:14Speaker 05

  Really bringing it back there.

• 14:19Robert Evans?

  So Mehmet decided to become a doctor when he was just seven years old. He recalls standing in line at an ice cream parlor. Quote, "I remember it like yesterday. There was a kid in front of me who was 10. My dad, just to pass the time, said, 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' The kid said, 'I don't know. I'm 10.' My father waited until he was out of earshot and said, 'I never want you to tell me that if I ask you that question. I never want you to tell me you don't know. It's okay if you change your mind, but I never want you to not have a vision of what you want to be."

• 14:49Speaker 04

  Mehmet, go kill that kid.

• 14:50Robert Evans?

  Kill that kid. Fuck it, cut him.

• 14:54Speaker 04

  Murder that loser kid and tell me what you want to do with your life. God damn, that is way too much pressure. Way, way too much.

• 15:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's so much pressure to put on a kid.

• 15:04Speaker 04

  And it seems like the kids like that always end up becoming the, like going into the career that their father wanted them to do. And then eventually their dad dies and then they're like, oh, fuck. I didn't get to do what I wanted to do with my life and now I'm miserable.

• 15:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's a real bummer. Um, it's not, just don't put pressure on people. There's plenty of grubs. Yeah. By the time Mehmet was ready to start school, his father was wealthy enough to pay to send his son to Tower Hill School, a K through 12th grade private college preparatory school in Wilmington, Delaware.

• 15:37Speaker 05

  Jesus, that sounds horrible.

• 15:39Robert Evans?

  I know. It sounds like a fucking nightmare. Sounds. The fancy boy prep.

• 15:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, uniforms, ties.

• 15:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, probably like weird shorts during the summer.

• 15:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 15:51Robert Evans?

  The fancy boy prep school worked well enough that Mehmet was accepted to Harvard, where he played football and water polo. His grades were, as always, exceptional. One of his roommates later recalled, "He was very competitive. There was never any question that he wasn't going to be a doctor. He wanted to be a fantastic surgeon." So people around him, like everyone kind of recognizes this kid is brilliant. Everyone recognizes he's got the drive, he's going to achieve, you know, so good for him.

• 16:18Speaker 04

  I mean, it's just like, I just look back now at my own childhood and I'm like, god damn it, if I can think of one friend where I, where I knew what they wanted to do for a career. I don't think we ever talked about like, what's your career gonna be? No one was like, I'm a doctor, you know, it was, it was mostly just like, uh, you know, how's, how's your hip hop album working out? And they're like, good. And you're like, cool. And that was the whole thing.

• 16:43Robert Evans?

  That's interesting. I think it was different for me because there was definitely a lot of pressure to have something. You know, I went to a public school. Um, I didn't go to a private school, but I went to a public school in, my early schooling years was in a dirt poor farming town called Idabel, Oklahoma. And the school was as good as it could be in a place like that. Like they paddled us and stuff like it was not, not a high end educational.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  Wait, they paddled you in a, in a public school?

• 17:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:10Speaker 04

  Oh damn.

• 17:11Robert Evans?

  They still did that in Oklahoma back in them days. Yeah.

• 17:15Robert Evans?

  You got to sign the paddle afterwards too.

• 17:17Speaker 04

  Nice.

• 17:19Robert Evans?

  But when I was in, I don't know, third grade or so, um, I moved to Plano, which is a, a fairly wealthy suburb of Dallas. And the schools, the public schools are very good and there is a lot of drive to achieve. Like I said, a lot of like kids who were really motivated by their parents to achieve. And so you either were kind of planning to be a doctor or, you know, something on that level, or you were planning to join the military because it was Texas and I was in ROTC. So me and all my friends, I think we all kind of assumed we're all going to join the army, you know?

• 17:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. I, I went to, yeah, public school, you know, my entire life. And I think most of my friends either wanted to, they were either gonna go into the army or they were, or they wanted to be famous musicians and/or athletes. So.

• 18:05Speaker 05

  See, my brother is a doctor and knew he was gonna be a doctor from the, he's my older brother too, from the time that he was like seven. So like, and I, and I'm like, la la la, no idea.

• 18:18Speaker 04

  I'm just saying, like, a level of ambition at a very, very young age has always been a turnoff for me when it comes to like friends, because it just, they always have that like sense where they're trying to get, you're some sort of stepping stone into their, whatever their career path is, and I don't like it.

• 18:36Robert Evans?

  So Oz took only one break during his relentless progress through medical school. And that break was to do a compulsory, I think it was a one-year term of service in the Turkish army in order to maintain his dual citizenship. Other than that, straight on to like becoming a doctor. That's the only kind of break he's, I guess that's his gap year is being in the Turkish army.

• 18:58Speaker 04

  I'm just gonna take a break, have a gap year and join the military of a foreign country.

• 19:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, helps suppress, you know, Kurdish liberatory movements and stuff, whatever.

• 19:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, they gotta stop trying to have their own thing.

• 19:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 19:13Robert Evans?

  He got a four-year degree in biology and then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he doubled up, working on both an MD and an MBA. He succeeded in earning both, so that's interesting to me. He gets both, he gets at the same time as he's getting his MD, he also gets a business degree.

• 19:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is, it's very, there's a lot of foreshadowing going on.

• 19:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's some foreshadowing. He earned both, obviously, with flying colors. He's an incredibly intelligent man, right? This isn't just a guy, like, we'll talk about Dr. Phil later. Dr. Phil, I don't think is very smart. He's incredibly good at reading and manipulating people. He's not particularly a genius. Mehmet Oz is a genius. Like, I think he almost certainly is an actual genius.

• 19:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:54Robert Evans?

  In 1985, at age 25, he married Lisa Lamoll, who was the daughter of a cardiothoracic surgeon who worked with his father. They met at like a party or something. This relationship gradually opened him up to alternative medicine and Eastern mysticism, because Lisa's mom was hardcore into homeopathy, meditation, and other new age stuff. We'll talk about that more in a little bit. For the next decade and change, Dr. Oz's career zoomed forward. He became triple board certified, which I don't know what that means, but it sounds impressive.

• 20:22Speaker 04

  It's at least three boards.

• 20:24Robert Evans?

  It's at least three boards. That's three more than I've been certified with.

• 20:27Speaker 04

  I got zero boards under my belt.

• 20:29Robert Evans?

  Not a one. Not a single board between the three of us. So.

• 20:33Speaker 04

  We really should find a board just to get us some certifications, guys.

• 20:36Robert Evans?

  Just to get certified. If you're a board, if you're a medical board, hit us up.

• 20:40Speaker 04

  A board out there.

• 20:41Robert Evans?

  Well, actually, you know what? The state of New Jersey has certified me as a reverend doctor. So I'm one board certified. I assume that counts.

• 20:48Speaker 04

  Is there a board in the Universal Life Church? Cause I am a minister slash Jedi knight.

• 20:54Robert Evans?

  I'm gonna say that counts.

• 20:55Speaker 04

  All right, I'm board certified.

• 20:57Robert Evans?

  Can you get me painkillers?

• 20:59Speaker 04

  I, you know, I know a guy.

• 21:03Robert Evans?

  That sounds legal enough.

• 21:07Robert Evans?

  So he starts working as a heart surgeon and he's very good at being a heart surgeon. And he's not just good at the heart surgery part. He's good at the science part. Over time, he authors hundreds of peer reviewed articles and he's awarded 11 patents. One of them is for a solution to preserve transplanted organs. Another is for an aortic valve that can be implanted without open heart surgery. Like he's, he's not just really good at, at the mechanics of surgery. He's an excellent scientist.

• 21:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:36Robert Evans?

  11 patents is pretty good.

• 21:38Speaker 04

  Seriously. One might say he's the wizard of Oz.

• 21:43Robert Evans?

  There, I think I read like six articles with variations of that title on the guy.

• 21:47Speaker 04

  All right. Well, I gotta go then. Bye guys.

• 21:51Robert Evans?

  It's just a thing. Journalists can't fucking help themselves.

• 21:54Speaker 04

  Oh, you can't help yourself if you're anybody. You see Oz and you're like, oh, I gotta call him a wizard.

• 21:59Robert Evans?

  Gotta call him a wizard. Dr. Oz was hired by Columbia Medical School as a teacher and as, you know, he's also working. They've got a hospital. He's working there, but he's also teaching. He very quickly rises to the level of full professor and becomes the vice chair of the cardio, of the heart surgery department, basically.

• 22:17Speaker 04

  How old is he at this point?

• 22:19Robert Evans?

  He's in his 30s.

• 22:20Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 22:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like, everything I've read right now on its own would be a career trajectory any doctor in medicine would envy.

• 22:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:30Robert Evans?

  You could die happy with that being your fucking resume. Like, that's a hell of an achievement.

• 22:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, my god.

• 22:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah. In 1995, a New York Times profile referred to Dr. Oz as, quote, "probably the most accomplished 35-year-old cardiothoracic surgeon in the country."

• 22:46Speaker 04

  Jesus.

• 22:47Robert Evans?

  He might be the best at what he does in the entire United States at this point.

• 22:51Speaker 04

  I mean,

• 22:51Robert Evans?

  I don't know how to measure that, but he's, he's very good.

• 22:55Speaker 04

  I mean, I don't know any other heart surgeons by name, so fuck. Yeah, I mean, he's the guy.

• 23:01Robert Evans?

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

• 23:44Robert Evans?

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

• 24:25Speaker 04

  The kidney meridian?

• 24:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you gotta get that meridian. That's the best part of the kid, he's the meridian.

• 24:31Speaker 04

  That's the most delicious part of the kidney is the meridian.

• 24:34Robert Evans?

  Oh, man, with fucking on a Ritz cracker sliced thin. I love me some little like you just wanna get, you wanna get like some duck fat or some butter and you wanna get it sizzling in the pan and you just slap that meridian on for like a half a second and it's good to go. That's all you fucking, which is a little bit of, little bit of char, you know?

• 24:51Speaker 04

  The, I, I mean, this all feels like he's gonna start turning his patients into foie gras and I'm very excited for what's to come. This heel turn that he's gonna take.

• 25:04Robert Evans?

  So, yeah, that's, that's, that's silly. I, I, I think that's silly.

• 25:09Robert Evans?

  But at the other hand, like it's in a hospital, these people are clearly following sanitation guidelines. They're not getting paid, the patient's not getting charged extra, so I don't have a problem with that.

• 25:19Speaker 04

  And he's the smartest doctor in the world. It's like one of those things where you're like, I feel like this is wrong, but I don't know enough to dispute it. So I'm gonna let him fuck with my kidney meridian.

• 25:31Robert Evans?

  I, I, I'm not willing to morally condemn him for that, even though I think it's silly, just because like, yeah, yeah, what's the fucking harm in seeing, you know? And in that case, if you're actually doing it in a medical context, you, you're guaranteeing everybody's taking proper sanitation procedures, fucking whatever.

• 25:46Speaker 04

  And it seems like, from what I can tell, that sounded, uh, non-invasive. It sounded like

• 25:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, they were just doing energy work or whatever.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  They were throwing, you know, crystals and doing fucking pendulums over, over him.

• 25:59Robert Evans?

  It falls into the category of it couldn't possibly hurt, so why not give it a shot, right? Which is, we'll talk about this more later, but that's kind of what they were going for. You know what else can't hurt?

• 26:11Speaker 04

  I don't.

• 26:11Robert Evans?

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• 28:35Robert Evans?

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• 28:45Robert Evans?

  We're back. Uh, we're talking about Dr. Oz, who in the mid 90s has started some weird alternative medicine stuff. Now, he's not the person who starts the alternative medicine program at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, which is also like a teaching hospital, whatever. It's one of those hospitals that they have a medical school with, you know, you know, the thing. If television has taught me accurately, all of the doctors are fucking constantly.

• 29:09Speaker 04

  Mm hmm. Doctors fuck and teach. That's what they do.

• 29:12Robert Evans?

  Doctors fuck and they teach. That's all they do, you know? When you're not teaching, you're fucking. And Columbia Presbyterian was among the most reputable medical establishments on planet Earth. Still is, as far as, as I'm aware. So this alternate medicine program there is kind of an odd thing. It was not started at the behest of anyone at the top of the school. The whole thing came about because in 1993, a retired utility executive named Richard Rosenfall gave them three quarters of a million dollars as a private grant in order to establish a center to study alternative medicine.

• 29:44Speaker 04

  Just gifted money and just said, "Start a magic doctoring school."

• 29:51Robert Evans?

  And they're like, "All right." Yeah, okay. Now, Richard had been motivated by having several close friends of his get terribly sick in such a way that doctors told them there was nothing that could be done to help them. And his response was to basically throw a bunch of money into a hole to see if alternative medicine could come up with solutions. And it's one of those things I could make fun of. Like, this is almost exactly a week after my mom just died of a type of cancer that when you get diagnosed with it pancreatic, there's basically nothing they can do, you know? It's, even like, like she went through chemo and it did nothing, you know? I get it. You go through something, I think, "Okay, well, let's try other shit," you know?

• 30:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:32Robert Evans?

  So I can't, I can't even blame Richard for, like, it seems like he was motivated out of grief to do this, you know?

• 30:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can't blame people for trying to try any other alternative to, I mean, you know, something in which there is no cure in modern medicine. It makes sense.

• 30:49Robert Evans?

  I will blame the snake oil salesman. I'm never gonna blame someone who's like, "Well, doctors said they..." They can't cure me, so I'm gonna eat this root, you know? Fuck it, why not?

• 30:57Speaker 04

  Go for it.

• 30:58Robert Evans?

  Who gives a shit? Like, it can't hurt if you're definitely gonna die.

• 31:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:03Robert Evans?

  Um, and it is, to be honest, like, it is kind of within, even you could argue within kind of medical best practices. Because one of the things, if, like, I took EMT training years ago. One of the things they tell you is that you're not supposed to use an AED, you know, like paddles to restart a heart. You're not supposed to use them on an infant. But if an infant is in, you know, the state where, like, you use them on them because they're dead.

• 31:27Speaker 04

  Shock the shit out of them.

• 31:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they're dead. You can't make dead worse, so like, why not? So I guess, like, yeah, you can't, I don't know, can't make it worse. Why not see if it, if, if something happens? I'm not against the basic idea of testing some of this shit is what I'm.

• 31:41Speaker 04

  The worst thing you're gonna get out of that is a really cool TikTok video of electrocuting a dead body.

• 31:45Robert Evans?

  Absolutely, and then you get a fuckload of followers and then you start selling brain pills.

• 31:52Speaker 04

  It's a perfect plan.

• 31:55Robert Evans?

  So, yeah, um, so I can't blame the college for this. I can't blame the guy for funding it. It's a reasonable thing, why not? You know what? That's kind of my attitude is, is why the fuck not? And that's more or less what the dean of faculty of medicine at the college said. Like, all right, well, we're not paying for it. Why not give it a shot? That said, a lot of medical professionals were really angry about the idea. Dr. Victor Herbert, a Columbia Medical School graduate and a professor of medicine at Mount Sinai and a board member of the National Council Against Health Fraud, publicly lambasted the lecturers brought in by the program as con artists and sociopathic liars. And knowing the kind of people who get into the selling this shit business, I don't know if he's wrong about that. A lot of these people are fucking sociopaths, you know?

• 32:40Robert Evans?

  He says, quote, "I am nasty. I call practitioners a fraud, practitioners a fraud. It's my feeling that the Rosenthal Center has been promoting fraudulent alternatives is genuine." And I get his critiques, you know, that is one of the like, I can say on one hand, what's the harm, but also maybe the harm is that people hear this stuff is being done in a hospital, so it must help when it doesn't. And maybe some of those people do that, not the way Dr. Oz is doing it, where we're going to do the normal medical procedure, we'll have this done. Maybe some people decide, I just want to have the energy work done. And then they dropped out of a heart attack because it doesn't

• 33:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 33:12Robert Evans?

  replace a valve, you know?

• 33:13Speaker 04

  I'd like to think that even at a hospital or a research facility with Western medicine, that they still peer review and try out different, you know, like alternative medicines, right?

• 33:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like some of them, some of them work.

• 33:30Speaker 04

  Some of them work. Like there was a time when, you know, acupuncture was seen as kind of like a crock. And now it's like, kind of just a standard part of Western medicine. It's just, you know, so.

• 33:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And there's a, there's a lot to be said about even acupuncture, you know, I, I went through a lot of it as a kid and it did nothing for me, but my grandpa swore by it for his Parkinson's. And even if it was, I don't know, you could say it's like fucking, whatever placebo, but he experienced relief. So I don't care.

• 33:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I don't know. I'm not going to get into like, cause I don't know, I don't know all of the, I know it's one of those things where there's a number of divergent opinions on acupuncture, but a number of things that were initially considered alternative medicines have been found to have medical, you know, benefits. Not that that's the norm, but it has happened in history, you know, different kind of traditional or whatever treatments.

• 34:18Robert Evans?

  So this is very controversial, though, is the point I'm making. And a number of people even picketed the college when the Rosenthal Center opened. None of this dissuaded Dr. Oz from participating in it. His explanation as to why he embraced alternative medicine was, to be quite honest, kind of brilliant. He said that his, by this point, vast experience as a real doctor, had really informed him of the limits of medical science. Specifically, he said that while he could sew bypass grafts and even implant a new heart into someone's chest, he couldn't change the habits that had made them sick in the first place. Nor could he cure the emotional issues that they were dealing with. Depression, he pointed out, was a major risk factor in heart patient recovery post-surgery. And things like meditation, right? That's kind of considered woo, new age.

• 35:03Speaker 04

  Right.

• 35:03Robert Evans?

  That can help with depression and that can help with healing. And he's right about that.

• 35:06Speaker 04

  No, 100%.

• 35:07Robert Evans?

  Bad point to make.

• 35:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:09Robert Evans?

  So he seemed to insinuate when he was talking to the New York Times, why wouldn't a caring physician want to try everything possible to improve his patients' odds? He could point out that meditation had shown some benefit for heart disease patients. Who was to say that other stuff wouldn't work? Dr. Oz told the New York Times that he felt ethically obliged to experiment in new directions in medicine. The article makes it clear that Dr. Oz had not let up one bit in the workaholic tendencies that he inherited from his father as well. And I'm going to quote from the Times again here. Mehmet Oz is one of those rare beings who seem incapable of sloth. He's doing a heart transplant right now, his secretary says on the phone, and he's got a double lung transplant waiting, and those are in addition to his two regularly scheduled open hearts.

• 35:52Robert Evans?

  And then at three, he's supposed to fly to Boston to deliver a lecture. So exceptional is Oz's energy that some of his colleagues use him as a benchmark, correlating their own vitality as a fraction of a full Mehmet unit. He runs down lobs, sizes tennis partner, mentor and department chairman, Dr. Eric A. Rose, who at 44 is one of the top heart transplant surgeons in the world.

• 36:13Speaker 04

  So I can't tell you how nervous I would be going into a lung transplant procedure and then hearing like this doctor's got to do a heart after you and then got to fly to Boston. I'd be like, you think you could maybe take your time with this, bro? Like, could you?

• 36:29Robert Evans?

  I get that. I do. It is a matter, we'll talk about this in two. We don't have enough of these guys. It's actually a major health problem, how few people there are that can do this.

• 36:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:40Robert Evans?

  But it is exhausting. Everything you read about this guy's daily, like you're just one of those people who I think, I kind of get the feeling, I don't want to psychoanalyze someone, but you get the feeling, he can't be alone and still. Like, he has to always be moving towards something.

• 36:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's got his dad in the back of his head, you know, telling him to murder that kid in the ice cream shop.

• 37:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, to kill that fucker.

• 37:02Speaker 04

  Kill that fucking kid. He doesn't know what he wants to be. Yeah, it's just like, I mean, I imagine that would create a bit of a problem later in life with stillness.

• 37:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I feel for him a little bit in that.

• 37:17Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 37:18Robert Evans?

  The article also goes into more detail about how Dr. Oz's wife's family piqued his interest in alternative medicine. His father-in-law was one of the surgeons on the first heart transplant team in Texas. He'd also been nicknamed "The Rock Doc" by Rolling Stone for playing music in the OR to relax patients. His mother-in-law had developed a special low-fat diet for her husband's cardiac patients, and this was really before it was accepted that low-fat diets would be good for heart patients. She once refused surgery for her own inflamed gallbladder and handled it instead by altering her diet. She taught her son-in-law, Dr. Oz, about using arnica for sore muscles and herbal tea for stomach aches. So, he gets brought in, in part to

• 38:02Robert Evans?

  alternative medicine, by these people who have a real medical background and are doing things that aren't widely accepted, but also may help. You know, music, I think there's some data now on how music can help with certain aspects of the healing process. Low-fat mother-in-law seemed to be on the cutting edge of that.

• 38:18Speaker 04

  When you said "The Rock Doc," I got concerned. I thought he was gonna like, replace people's hearts with crystals and shit. And I was like, "Oh, no. Oh, no."

• 38:26Robert Evans?

  They all die, but my god, their hearts are pretty.

• 38:31Robert Evans?

  So, this is how Mehmet gets introduced to the wide world of quack cures. And it makes sense. He enters it through largely reasonable ways, alternative treatments that have some positive impact on people. There's extremely reasonable stuff in the article in general. Like, Dr. Oz points out that in 1995, American hospitals had only recently allowed family to stay in the hospital with a patient. While in Turkey, it was common for families to do this. And of course, having loved ones nearby can help a patient's morale, which can influence how well they heal. No one, I think, today would even, like, think to disagree with that. It didn't used to be common. It changed. So, he's in medicine during a time when a lot of stuff that,

• 39:10Robert Evans?

  like, just wasn't, that is kinda now common-sense medicine, wasn't. And I think that kind of opens his eye to, like, well, maybe all this other shit works.

• 39:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Maybe everything in my head is correct. We're slowly getting to him turning into a complete narcissist.

• 39:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and the article kind of veers right from, "Yeah, having loved ones in the room can influence how well you heal," to Dr. Oz's love of energy work, particularly his work with a lady named Mots, who believed she could sense the energy of heart transplant patients. The Times article certainly does not portray this woman in a particularly positive light.

• 39:47Robert Evans?

  She now has her surgical sea legs under her, but the first time Mots observed open heart surgery, she had a shaky debut. She had been standing at the patient's head outside the sterile field, periodically telling Oz what changes she was able to sense in the patient's energy. The patient was obviously not awake, but probably had some awareness, most likely smell and perhaps hearing. Open heart patients are often fitted with headphones and provided with tapes to listen to, including if they want Oz's own specially recorded soupy trance music. For the bypass team, it was quite a novelty to hear Mots report that she was registering the patient's moods in her body, various states of fear, anger, or satisfaction perceived as roughness in her chest or turbulence in her stomach. At one point, seeing that Mots was not looking so good herself, Oz asked the burly assistant to take her outside for some

• 40:31Robert Evans?

  air. When he returned, he said, "I sense a change in my stomach. It's a tenseness. No, it's a growling. No, wait a minute. I'm just hungry."

• 40:41Speaker 04

  Oh my God, I swear, she's like, she seemed like she is just describing her own feelings and then just ascribing them to an open-heart surgery patient.

• 40:52Robert Evans?

  But yeah, it's, it's one of those things. I'm not sure exactly what type of energy work this person is doing, because there's a few different kind of categories of it.

• 41:01Speaker 04

  She's checking the vibes, dude. She's checking the vibes. Just making sure, you know, the vibe dipstick is filled with oil.

• 41:08Robert Evans?

  I should note, if I'm going to be totally fair, that Reiki, which has its origins in Japan, has been shown in some early scientific studies to help diminish the symptoms of chemotherapy and to significantly alter people's experience of physical and emotional pain. And I have some friends who swear by it for kind of physical and emotional pain in particular.

• 41:29Speaker 04

  I don't know what Reiki is. I've heard of it. Is it like when Mr. Miyagi rubs his hands together and then he puts his warm hand?

• 41:35Robert Evans?

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

• 42:18Robert Evans?

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

• 43:00Robert Evans?

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

• 43:43Robert Evans?

  the efficacy of energy medicine is still scientifically unresolved."

• 43:47Speaker 04

  Man, we are just veering into anti-vax territory and like anti-mask territory, people who just, they Google stuff and then they go, "This article right here says that masks actually cause COVID."

• 44:00Robert Evans?

  They can't analyze, and it's from a government science organization, you know, these guys like, and here's a study that's, and it's like, well, okay, but you actually look at scientists who don't have a vested and often financial interest in this, and they point out all these very obvious flaws in the study. It's worth noting that the NCCAM was founded in 1998, three years after the New York Times article about Dr. Oz and the Alternative Medicine Center at Columbia was published. Now, Dr. Oz at this point was not yet on Oprah's show, but he had been featured on TV several times for his pioneering work with mechanical hearts, as well as his embrace of alternative medicine. You can draw a direct line. I don't know if we would have an NCCAM without Dr. Oz. I don't know. You can't say that for certain. But he is someone who,

• 44:45Robert Evans?

  before his embrace of alternative medicine, starts to be well-known as an exceptional doctor and scientist. He embraces this stuff. Columbia starts studying this stuff. And even though everything they find is pretty inconclusive, the fact that it's in an actual hospital lends it legitimacy. This organization is started in order to test this stuff. The organization is filled with people who already believe in it, carrying out tests that are flawed. And it helps prepare this culture believing too much in this stuff.

• 45:15Speaker 04

  My God, it's just like, it's a real-life Facebook group, you know? It's just like, everyone already believes in all the stuff and they just keep, like, just cosigning each other's bullshit.

• 45:24Robert Evans?

  And it's one of those things, like, again, I know people who swear by Reiki, who gain, you know, emotional benefits from it, who think it helps with, you know, a number of things, including like, including emotional pain. And like, if you find something that helps you alleviate your emotional pain, more fucking power to you, you know? You're never gonna hear me say a damn word against it.

• 45:46Speaker 04

  You know, go with God. That's, that's all great. But, I mean, you want to relieve pain, try some morphine, though, dog, because that shit, oh my God, morphine.

• 45:56Robert Evans?

  And there's no downsides to morphine. That's the best part of it.

• 45:59Speaker 04

  I can't think of one downside to morphine.

• 46:01Robert Evans?

  Not a single one!

• 46:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, it just feels good the whole time and you just need to take more.

• 46:07Robert Evans?

  My issue is not so much with any particular treatment, not that, not even an issue that people would like. It's number one, a lot of people will eschew

• 46:18Robert Evans?

  Actual medical treatment in favor of some of this stuff and it's not going to I I I I'm trying to be as fair as I can. Ricky is not going to solve your blocked cardiac pathways, you know?

• 46:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:30Robert Evans?

  Like it's not gonna fix it.

• 46:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, energy is great, but Plavix works wonders.

• 46:36Robert Evans?

  Plavix is a lot better. Um, and it's, it's, it's, it's more to the point, even more than that is it, it gets us on this, this road of increasingly accepting and legitimizing things that there's no, there's not a scientific basis for. And that leads us to shit like, let's drink bleach to cure the coronavirus. Like, you know, it's where the road ends I have more of a problem with than Dr. Oz experimenting with an energy worker during a surgery. Like, it's where that leads to, and he plays a major role in legitimizing that. He's, he, he helps put it, he helps put our national foot on the, the gas pedal into the, the post-science age.

• 47:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a slippery slope to that, uh, you know, downing that brain octane oil, you know?

• 47:24Robert Evans?

  Exactly. Exactly. Um, so yeah. Uh, at this point though, we're talking still in the mid nineties. Everything Dr. Oz is saying is reasonable from a certain point of view. He's not claiming that Ricky's gonna cure cancer. He's not even claiming it's gonna cure your heart disease. He's saying it could help with recovery and a lot of recovery is mental. And he's not, you know, it's possible he's right, you know?

• 47:45Speaker 04

  He is not yet a bastard.

• 47:48Robert Evans?

  It's certainly not impossible for this kind of stuff to have a mental impact, which can positively affect recovery. Okay?

• 47:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:54Robert Evans?

  Um, so yeah, he's not a bastard at this point. Nearly all of his alternative medical claims were things that you could argue were at least to some extent reasonable based on the way he framed them. And he was most importantly, regardless of whatever kind of woo woo stuff he got into, an exceptionally gifted medical perfection, professional who was performing something like 250 heart surgeries a year, you know? That's 250 lives a year.

• 48:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:16Robert Evans?

  Extended. That's, that's great. He's not a bastard yet.

• 48:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's doing great work so far, you know?

• 48:23Robert Evans?

  Despite the Little weird.

• 48:24Speaker 04

  Heart stuff.

• 48:25Robert Evans?

  Fine.

• 48:26Speaker 04

  A little bit of energy, a little bit of heart surgery. It works out.

• 48:30Robert Evans?

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

• 49:15Robert Evans?

  And he tried in the early 2000s, he tried with his wife to start a TV show. They like filmed a pilot episode. It didn't really take off, but he succeeds and I think he's pushing and his wife is pushing him to to get in. She's very much his business partner to develop himself into a media personality. And he eventually succeeds in 2004 in getting invited to Oprah Winfrey's show. Now Mehmet immediately endeared himself to Winfrey's audience with his willingness to discuss frank health details in a way that was demystifying and humorous. He most famously explained that healthy poops tended to be shaped like an S and should hit the water like an Olympic diver with very little splash.

• 49:57Robert Evans?

  Oprah herself later recalled, "When he made it okay to talk about the shape of a good poop, I knew he could talk about anything. He always found ways to make the human body endlessly fascinating."

• 50:08Speaker 04

  Man, that is, I mean, I'm, I'm low key impressed that he impressed Oprah with the doo doo shapes.

• 50:15Robert Evans?

  It's, it's mom stuff, you know, moms love poop.

• 50:18Speaker 04

  They do. They love talking about doo doo. That's the thing.

• 50:21Robert Evans?

  And, and that's what like Oz does exactly the right things to endear himself to like millions of, of middle-class moms.

• 50:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:29Robert Evans?

  Which is the best market in the country.

• 50:31Speaker 04

  It's an incredible market.

• 50:33Robert Evans?

  You can make all of the money if you can get a few million middle-class moms to love you.

• 50:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, I worked at this, this digital, what do you call it, like a Digital production company and the the most famous person that we dealt with was a famous Facebook mom who had millions of followers and I would watch her stuff and I was like, this is, you know, maybe the most awful shit I've ever seen. It was just a, you know, lady in a car yelling at people about kids.

• 51:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 51:01Speaker 04

  And, uh, but the, she was a famous mom. I mean, if you can become a famous mom, you will be one of the most famous people in the country.

• 51:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I mean, it's, it's the power of, of particularly middle-class moms can't be exaggerated. Like in Portland, the cops and the feds were able to fuck over as many people as they wanted until they started gassing moms. And then suddenly the whole country's pissed.

• 51:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. They're like, like, hey, listen, you can do that to people of color, but those are moms.

• 51:31Robert Evans?

  Those are white moms. No, sir.

• 51:33Speaker 04

  White moms. That could be my mother.

• 51:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 51:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. You know what else?

• 51:42Speaker 05

  Yeah. Where are you going with that? Where are you going with that, Robert? I thought you were gonna say, you know what else is your mom? That's where I thought you were going with that.

• 51:49Robert Evans?

  You know what else is your mother? The products and services that support this podcast.

• 51:56Speaker 01

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• 54:02Robert Evans?

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• 54:12Robert Evans?

  We're back!

• 54:13Speaker 05

  So we've all just agreed that Matt is very funny. That was the discussion over the break.

• 54:19Robert Evans?

  You made this one into a two-parter, Matt, so the audience can thank you for two episodes about Dr. Oz this week.

• 54:26Speaker 04

  All right.

• 54:27Robert Evans?

  Or they can blame you. And if they're going to blame him, Matt's home address is...

• 54:34Robert Evans?

  We love to dox our guests, don't we, Sophie?

• 54:36Speaker 04

  Dox me, baby!

• 54:38Robert Evans?

  So Oprah had Dr. Oz on her show 55 times over the course of five years. She gave him the nickname "America's Doctor", which stuck, and although I'm not saying this in a positive sense, is unfortunately accurate. He's definitely America's doctor.

• 54:55Speaker 04

  Just appealing to the lowest common denominator, the stupidest human beings on earth.

• 55:00Robert Evans?

  America's doctor, and if you look at the health of the average American, you can tell the quality of job he's done.

• 55:08Speaker 04

  Eat more bread. Everybody eat bread.

• 55:12Robert Evans?

  Well, actually, that's the one thing he is. He's actually pretty good about like weight law. Well, I don't know. That's still debatable.

• 55:17Speaker 04

  Stop defending Dr. Oz, Robert.

• 55:19Robert Evans?

  I'm not gonna defend. I just love to be fair, you know?

• 55:22Speaker 04

  I know you do. You're very fair.

• 55:24Robert Evans?

  Look, say what you will about Hitler.

• 55:27Speaker 04

  Say what you will. He was a vegetarian and that's good for the environment.

• 55:31Robert Evans?

  The man cared about animal rights.

• 55:35Robert Evans?

  By 2009, it was clear that Dr. Oz had more than enough star power to justify a shot at his own show. Oprah's production company had little trouble finding a buyer for what was sure to be a blockbuster new series. Her show celebrated the launch of Dr. Oz's show with an entire episode dedicated to Dr. Oz, which acted as something of a coming out party for his brand. From a press release on Oprah.com, this is talking about the special Dr. Oz episode. Moving personal stories and extraordinary surprises are featured throughout the hour as Dr. Oz meets viewers who share how his advice saved their lives. From those who noticed life-threatening diseases their doctors missed, to those who lost weight thanks to his diet

• 56:16Robert Evans?

  tips from Dr. Oz. Real people step forward to offer their thanks to America's doctor. Plus, it's the reunion that Dr. Oz never imagined would happen, as Oprah's show producers tracked down a young boy he cared for in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the two reunite for the first time. He's like the fucking perfect, perfect guy for this.

• 56:36Speaker 04

  I mean, I love that it's literally sounds like an hour-long special of people just thanking him, which might be the most narcissistic thing I think I've ever heard.

• 56:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 56:47Speaker 04

  I mean, like, it's one thing for Oprah to do that, because I think America does legitimately owe her thanks for just years of content, you know, but...

• 56:57Robert Evans?

  Years of... Mostly dangerous, health-based content.

• 57:01Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, no, I mean, it's awful content, but the fact is it's it's quantity over quality in America and, you know, but an hour of just thanking Dr. Oz and having people come up to him like, you saved me is fucking wild.

• 57:15Robert Evans?

  It's worth noting in terms of his bastardry that in and in kind of the acceleration from, hey, maybe energy healing works to becoming a monster. The early 2000s is the period in which Oprah becomes aware of a Brazilian healer named John of God, who believes he can do psychic surgery and like remove tumors.

• 57:32Speaker 05

  Oh, John of God.

• 57:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 57:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh, of of the of the Brazilian of gods.

• 57:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And on the episode in which she introduces John of God to America, Dr. Oz comes on and gives his professional opinion that like, he seems like he's really having an effect on people and I can't explain it. I don't think medical science can explain what this man is doing, basically giving a real doctor's opinion that this guy's gotta be legit.

• 57:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:59Robert Evans?

  John of God later turned out to be a mass rapist on these on a scale, hundreds of victims on a scale almost incomprehensible. We did a two-parter on John of God. You can listen to it. It's a fucking nightmare.

• 58:12Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 58:13Robert Evans?

  This guy never gets half the following that he has if it's not for Oprah and Dr. Oz, so.

• 58:17Speaker 04

  Wow. Holy shit.

• 58:21Robert Evans?

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

• 59:06Robert Evans?

  "Too often," he told me, "he would sit in an office And be telling you stuff too little, too late, that if you'd been able to lose a little weight, or if your diabetes had been managed more aggressively, then it would have dramatically altered your destiny, which is now to go downstairs and have open heart surgery. With his TV show, he can exhort Americans to end all aspect, to tend to all aspects of their health, head to toe, before they reach a point of no return. Lose weight, go to Brazil and get sexually assaulted by a con man.

• 59:32Speaker 04

  Oh, boy. You know, there's always that point, you know, I've listened to your show and there's always that point in the episode where the comedian or the guest has no other option but to just say, fuck, that sucks, dude. There's no other comment, but what? Oh, that's crazy. But, you know, hey, John of God, Dr. Oz, they're, they all sound like great people.

• 1:00:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's going to get worse, you know? He, he, this is kind of the period, one of the things he starts to do in this period is he starts cutting back on his surgical practice and performing fewer surgeries.

• 1:00:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, because he's got to keep up all those TV dates.

• 1:00:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah. In order to tell people about John of God, the mass rapist, and in order to tell people about, I don't know, some stuff that's good, right? Telling people to eat healthier is a good, America's diet sucks. His diet advice, I think, is, well, we'll talk about that later. It's also problematic. Anyway, he's trading objectively useful medical work for being a nonsense doctor, but he's making millions of dollars.

• 1:00:42Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and in America, that is the ultimate marker of doing the right thing.

• 1:00:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah. That's the only thing that tells you whether or not you're doing the right thing.

• 1:00:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. If you make a lot of money, then whatever you're doing is the right thing to do.

• 1:00:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:56Speaker 04

  It's morally correct to make a lot of money.

• 1:00:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Morally righteous, righteous wealth.

• 1:01:03Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:01:05Robert Evans?

  You know what else is righteous, Matt?

• 1:01:08Speaker 04

  Is it the products and services?

• 1:01:11Robert Evans?

  No, my man, it's you. Because the episode's over. Part one is over and we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna sail out. But first you've got to plug your pluggables. And I just decided to compliment you before we.

• 1:01:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's very nice. Here, here I thought you were just trying to get me to talk about products and services. Well, I, uh, thank you for having me on. Um, I have a product and or service called Pod Yourself a Gun. It's a Sopranos podcast and, uh, uh, yeah. If you like The Sopranos, or even if you don't, check it out on the, you know, wherever the podcast store is.

• 1:01:45Robert Evans?

  Podcast. All right, well, this is the show that it is. And we're done doing the things that we do. So go out into the world and I don't know, find Dr. Oz and scream at him. Give him a good, give him a good screaming.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

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• 1:03:16Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.