The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
543. “You’re Not Gaining Weight Because You’re Lazy” | Dr. Mehmet Oz
Thu, 1 May 2025
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down for a candid discussion with Dr. Mehmet Oz, discussing the toxified food environment within the United States—pointing directly to its causes—and exploring not just possible, but immediate routes for change. These include better governmental oversight, but also the implementation of new technologies such as AI. Dr. Mehmet Oz, newly appointed by President Donald Trump as the 17th Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), is a cardiothoracic surgeon, professor emeritus at Columbia University, and former leader of the heart institute at New York Presbyterian Medical Center, known for innovations like the Mitraclip and over 400 publications in heart surgery, health policy, and complementary medicine. He gained national fame through The Dr. Oz Show, winning nine Daytime Emmys and authoring several New York Times bestsellers, before becoming the 2022 Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania. A Harvard and UPenn MD/MBA graduate, Oz also co-founded the influential health platform Sharecare and the nationwide teen wellness initiative Healthcorps. His public influence has been recognized by Time, Forbes, and Esquire, making him a high-profile figure at the intersection of medicine, media, and policy. This episode was filmed on November 13th, 2024 | Links | For Dr. Mehmet Oz: On X https://x.com/droz?lang=en On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dr_oz/?hl=en Dr. Mehmet Oz shares his vision for CMS https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/press-releases/dr-mehmet-oz-shares-vision-cms
Chapter 1: What are the key issues in America's food environment?
If you gave America the knowledge that they could use to improve themselves, to feel confident that they had jurisdiction over their own body, to actually play an active role in ensuring that they don't develop those chronic illnesses, that they'll do it. If people don't think they matter, then they don't show up in their own lives.
There's no uniting narrative, there's no union. It's a completely pathological claim because we live in a hierarchy of narratives that stretch in principle up to the ultimate pinnacle. There's that, then there's the fact too that now we're all connected. so things can spread much faster.
It's certainly possible that oversimplified, easily understandable pathological ideas like viruses spread the most rapidly.
Hello, everybody.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Mehmet Oz
Dr. Oz was an early advocate for me, a fair early advocate for me back as early as 2018, which made him unique in that regard on the legacy media side. And since then, we've had a number of public discussions and a much broader, a much larger number of private discussions. And that's been very good as far as I'm concerned. He's a very remarkable person, full of ideas.
exceptional level of energy and doing his best to aim upward as far as I can tell and quite effectively so and so it was a pleasure to have him today in Scottsdale where he is with his wife and what did we talk about? Well
We talked about the changing media environment and why that's occurred, the shift from legacy media to online media, and also the corruption of the legacy media enterprise over about a 10-year period, something that he got wind of as early, let's say, as 2012. And we tried to puzzle out why that was occurring, and that brought us into a broader discussion of
while corruption on the scientific and academic front, which is a manifestation of the same set of symptoms in a different area.
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Chapter 2: How does media influence public health perceptions?
The second author went to jail for Medicaid fraud. I haven't done any of those things, by the way, so they're not really my peers. But they read an article to the dean of Columbia asking for my ouster. I'm tenure faculty. You can't just fire me because you don't like me. So far. So far. That could change. We'll get to that.
That's the whole point of giving someone tenure, so they can speak their mind and have some job security. But the press published it before the dean got the letter. And you tell me how that happens. And then in the letter, they were complaining that I did a lot of bad things, including this GMO crazy idea that I had. And then I began to realize this is actually a very well-oiled machine.
It's a takedown. Because I bought Ink by the Barrel and published it, I'm on network television. I had a production team go out to the headquarters of these guys, which was a shell organization. There was no one there. And you begin to realize that you can get past these guys. But I had a lot of resources. A massive show with a lot of people, smart people working hard for me.
What about the people who don't have that? Which is everyone. Which is everybody else. And I began thinking, my goodness, these folks are, you know, if they're the only one putting their hands up, they're going to get shot. And then, boom, COVID came.
When COVID hit, we saw firsthand what happens when in a time of tension, when the answers aren't that obvious and people start offering ideas that you don't want to hear, it's a problem. So I began talking to doctors around the world. Didier Raoult was the main virologist, parasitologist in Marseille in France, and he'd had a lot of experience with hydroxychloroquine.
So I was curious, could that work? Maybe we should study if that works. Then I find out we're banning the prescription of that medication in New York State. The governor of the state is banning the right of a licensed doctor to prescribe a medication. It's never before happened in America. And there's not a real good reason for this.
In fact, we weren't even willing as a country to study whether this worked. I'm not making the argument that it would have saved anybody. Even to this day, there's still debate over this because it was never actually studied in a way that was acceptable. And we saw a general move away from looking for treatments of COVID infection to only believing that the vaccine was the answer.
And it's not that the vaccine is a problem. I was strongly supportive of the vaccine. We'll come back to what ended up happening with this creation. Why wouldn't you entertain another thought process that might be perfectly valid? Hey, historically, doctors treated the, you know, prevent the gunshot wound. But if it happens, treat the patient.
Don't lament the fact that the bullet went through the heart. Fix the problem. Put your finger in the hole. Deal with the hemorrhage. And that mindset just wasn't acceptable. And I remember very vividly, several months into it, I was really upset because there was so much published data that the school should not be closed. Right. And so I said it. Now, in retrospect, obviously I was right.
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Chapter 3: What role does government play in health and wellness?
If I was trying to challenge someone about the American Heart Association guidelines for cholesterol intake, the diet intake of fat, I couldn't do that. I mean, literally, who am I going to talk to? You walk into the learned organization where all the heart doctors are supposed to say what they think is important, no one's going to listen to you. They'll dismiss you and put you to the corner.
So the democratization... of information has allowed us to challenge dogma that was incorrect. That, I believe more than anything else, coupled with obvious errors during COVID, has allowed a lot of Americans now to believe that our country is not sick by accident. And by making America healthy again, it's both an achievable goal, but also one that will deal with our crisis.
I'll give you a little bit of math here because when I was in medical school, I went to business school at Wharton because I was interested in health care policy, just these issues. Like, how do you fix the game so that you actually get some benefits? And one thing you always track is what drives the big budget items.
90%.
If we deal with chronic disease- And the most common chronic diseases are- Metabolic syndrome is the root cause of all- Describe that. Metabolic syndrome means your pancreas, it makes insulin, but it's unable to make it in a way that allows your body to deal with the calories coming into your body. So the body reacts- by doing things that are maladaptive.
It'll deposit the fat in your belly, for example, in your mentum. Sounds like the momentum, but not the M. That fat tissue there was designed for our ancestors to store fat in times of feast, but you use it in times of famine. Right, at the harvest. The harvest is a good example. So you didn't die in the winter.
Good habit to have, which is why our ancestors had a uniquely effective ability to store fat. It's not a bad thing, except if you have to go hunting, you open the fridge, it doesn't work because you're not consuming calories to hunt your food anymore. And so metabolic syndrome is a series of problems that occur because the fundamental process by which you consume and use energy is off.
People who happen to have a healthy metabolism live a lot longer. They don't develop heart disease and Alzheimer's and cancers and a slew of other problems nearly as commonly. And people have those issues with the metabolism of their blood sugar and inability of insulin to keep up. And as a consequence, lots of inflammation in the body, including in the liver.
All of those complications drive most of the healthcare expense, at least half of the healthcare expense of the country.
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Chapter 4: How has the pandemic changed health discussions?
The fundamental postmodernist claim, actually, it's actually the defining claim of postmodernism is that there's no uniting narrative. And it's a completely pathological claim because technically, We live in a hierarchy of narratives that stretch in principle up to the ultimate pinnacle, let's say. And there are uniting narratives at every single level.
You can't just put an arbitrary cap somewhere and say, well, beyond this level, there's no uniting narrative. It's preposterous. There's no way of doing that. And so I think the fundamental postmodern claim is intractable. And I think part of the reason that postmodernists have turned to
the doctrine of power is because when you lose your uniting narrative, and that's something roughly equivalent to the death of God, let's say, then other competing narratives immediately emerge. And the three most likely candidates are sex. And of course, that's what Freud concentrated on in such a revolutionary manner in the early 20th century. Well, if it's not God, then maybe it's sex.
Fair enough, like reproduction, like that's a fair proposition. Well, if it's not sex, maybe it's power. Well, then you get the Marxists and you get the postmodernists, most of whom were Marxists, and you get the totalitarians. Nothing unites us except power, and all friendships are power relationships, and marriage is a power relationship, and all economic relationships are power.
It's like, well, you can make a case for that, or you can say,
Well, there's no essential union and we basically live in a nihilistic morass And those seem to me to be the three competitors to the idea of what's highest and every single one of those competitors is self-devouring and pathological so The question is what's what rules that is the question what rules and nothing is an answer But man, you pay a price for that answer.
I remember calling you, uh about two years ago. And I've always been impressed at your ability, your resilience. And I was struggling with some stuff. And I asked you if you thought there was a God. And you paused, pregnant pause, longer than usual. And you said, there better be. And it was interesting to me to hear you say that because we're better off living like there's a God.
I happen to believe there is a God, but you're better off living like there's a God. And sometimes in life, if you go along and try to understand why there's such power there, it begins to bloom. So you begin to see it in different ways. I think there's been a shift in America quite dramatically in that people aren't willing to give it a chance.
They're not willing to truly allow it to grow in their heart and to see if there's wisdom there. They almost feel like it's, It's a sign that you're a fool. You can't believe in a God. The big shift I would argue is, and I've seen some data on this, 30 years ago, a third of people believed strongly in God.
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