O'REILLY Dr. Anthony Fauci shows up to get grilled and takes the Fifth Amendment.
OZ We told people to do things because it matched the politics of what we desired.
O'REILLY It is just lined up with garbage.
OZ I think it came out of the laboratory.
O'REILLY Hey Bill O'Reilly here, welcome to another edition of We'll Do It Live, and we have a very big newsmaker to share with you. I love sharing, don't you love sharing? I love reaching out and sharing. That's the kind of guy I am. But let's bring him in right now, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is currently, I'd say, the most powerful health official in the country, I mean it's just my opinion. He has the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which seniors are 100% dependent on in the United States. So he's a big guy. And people really, including me, we're confused about the nexus between our own personal situations, health-wise, and the government. And we get a lot of stuff floating around out there. Doctors, you know we're gonna run out of money. We're gonna do this, we're going to do that. But let's begin with the news cycle. Dr. Anthony Fauci shows up to get grilled in the Senate subcommittee and takes the Fifth Amendment. That surprise you?
OZ I was surprised. I figured if he's going to show up, he would defend actions that he was for a long time quite prideful about. He was aggressively supported by one side of the aisle, as you saw, but I am stunned, actually. And the material that was released by Secretary Kennedy was material that was on a government computer. And so, by definition, it's owned by the government. I know that to be the case on my computer. And the things he wrote on that computer were released to the committee, as they should be, and many of those seemed to confirm our worst fears about what was happening during COVID.
O'REILLY What were our worst fears? I mean, everybody didn't want to get it, want to protect themselves and their family, but what was the worst fear in your estimation about COVID?
OZ My biggest concern in our management of COVID was that it became politicized, that we told people to do things because it matched the politics of what we desired. And in particular, some issues that were brought up, ranging from medications that are currently approved in America to be used. For example, well, I won't get into medications because you can go down a long rabbit hole, but you talk about the hydroxychloroquines and ivermectins, not even arguing that these are effective against COVID. But we would not allow clinical trials to be done on some of these options that were out there. And there was a lot of shaming that was done. And historically, as a doctor, you're taught to treat the problem, prevent it as well. But if you happen to come to someone who's in trouble, do your best to support them. And during COVID, as a clinician, I felt that frequently we were told just, you know, do what you can do for now, but we're really not going to have anything we can meaningfully do to impact patient well-being until we have vaccines available, and who knows how many years that could be because it normally takes years. Now, the president was able to push through a vaccine in the first year of the pandemic, which was in itself a remarkable technical feat. But the fact that there were other possible ways that might have mitigated the symptoms, might have saved lives in the meantime, and it appears that there was an acknowledgement that some of these tools may have been valuable, but they were nevertheless discarded, put to the side. Even things like antivirals who the heck knows if they work or not, but they weren't really widely touted or discussed. In fact, if you talked about some of these options in that first year or two of the pandemic, you were shamed. That's not how we practice medicine and people in medicine don't say follow the science, they say let's do our best to figure out what the science is but the science changes continually especially in a fast-moving arena like a pandemic So it was disappointing to see a leader of that endeavor, saying different things to himself in a document he was writing for himself than he was saying to the American people.
O'REILLY But as you know, Joe Biden pardoned Fauci, which is why he took the Fifth Amendment, because anything that he did before the pardon, nothing can happen to him, okay? But if he were to go in and Rand Paul was hitting him between the eyes and Fauci slips up, then he can be charged with perjury or whatever. He'll still be charged with contempt of Congress, I believe that'll happen. But I don't think it's gonna get anywhere because of the blanket pardon that Biden gave him. So I think that was the strategy on the part of Fauci and his attorneys.
OZ Bill, I think you read the tea leaves correctly. I'm sure they thought through this very carefully. They realized what you said to be true. And again, it reflects poorly on, at least, the decision-making process that Fauci was using five years ago during the pandemic. Part of the issue here, however, is in the court of public opinion, where do the American people feel they are? Were they wronged by what the government did during COVID, or was it the right thing to do? And you're seeing Democrats and Republicans split on that issue. And a lot of Republicans are very animated by this for understandable reasons. And it doesn't just affect the feelings on Fauci, it affects concerns about the government not being able to take information from different sources and provide some kind of real, trustworthy content for Americans to consume. And we're smart people. We see through this honest narrative pretty quickly. And even in the fearful moments of the beginning of the pandemic, there were already arguments that were arising, smothered initially, and as you know, we've talked about this and other venues, by tech companies and the others. So we need to have open discourse, we need to be able to see what we feel. You can't get penalized or isolated or canceled because you happen to think there's a treatment for a problem that others might want to know about.
O'REILLY All right, but you can get canceled, and that's what happens. Now, Fauci's a longtime guy, a longtime swamp creature. For 34 years, the guy who was involved with the U.S. Government and medicine. And one of the most damning accusations against him is that he lied, is that the National Institutes of Health, and we have the data right here, donated at least $600,000, probably more, to the Wuhan lab. So the U.S. and the Chinese were working side by side on this COVID situation. And then, Fauci takes the side that it was just natural, it was animal interaction. And that's what happened, got into the Taiwanese market, and boom, to China, into Wuhan, and then it spread all over the world. That was Fauci's point of view, while others said no, this was invented, if you want to use that word, in the lab. It was weaponized by the Chinese scientists to kill people, biological weaponry. So it became more than a political voting thing. It became a what are you doing? And now it looks like that Fauci was, or at least sympathetic to, the lab theory when all his public appearances said, no, no, no, it wasn't Wuhan, we didn't throw money in there, which they did. So that's a pretty big falsehood, right?
OZ It's a massive breach of trust, especially when you're a virologist, and this is an area of expertise for you, but he wasn't alone. I think he was either influencing others or maybe they were getting on the bandwagon on their own desire because they wanted to stay safe, because it's often safe if you stay with the tribe, and they were all out there touting the fact that this must be a wild, arising virus that came from these bat caves 1,000 miles away and somehow got to the Wuhan wet market. But nevertheless, that's probably what happened because it wasn't really possible to have constructed a virus of this nature in a laboratory. The best evidence we have now is that such not a true assertion and the condemnation of people who said, wait a minute, is it possible that this was actually just sloppiness, that there was a laboratory experiment that went bad and they weren't really wearing good-quality material to prevent contamination, and they got some people infected months before the world was told about the existence of this virus that ultimately led to the pandemic. That's all part of the argument that you have to consider if you really want to understand how to prevent this from happening in the future.
O'REILLY Where do you come down on it? I mean, I come down if and I'm looking at it from a journalist point of view Look, you've got this lab. All right, and then this accident, call it whatever you want, releases the virus. The Chinese shut down the whole province of Wuhan, shut down the whole province, the Chinese government. They're not doing that because a couple of apes a thousand miles away did something. And then of course the Chinese don't tell us anything, don't tell the world, and still allow planes to fly in and out of China, which is why COVID spread all over the world so quickly. So from a journalist's point of view, it's got to be the lab. No?
OZ You make compelling arguments, all the ones that I make all the time, and I believe that you're right. I think it came out of the laboratory. Now, why they were doing it? What were they trying to do? How did it escape from the lab? Those are issues I wish we knew about.
O'REILLY It's the Chinese. They're never going to tell you why. They don't do that. But Fauci pumping in hundreds of thousands of dollars of American taxpayer money into the lab certainly should be as skeptical as you and I am, right? I mean, he wasn't skeptical at all. He was pushing, pushing, pushing for this kind of explanation. And then there were the kids. So then he comes out, and he says, well, you know, hey, even though it's shown now, I believe, and you correct me if I'm wrong, that COVID was not driven toward children, he's going, no, stay home from school. No, you gotta wear, all kids wear masks or whatever, destroys the U.S. Educational system for at least a year and a half, at least. And does it on what? On what? What was the basis of doing that? Do you know?
OZ I don't know why he did it, but I mean, add some more facts. You'll use these in future conversations. Within a month or two of the pandemic starting, we were already seeing that in Europe and Asia, they had reopened their schools and they didn't seem to have problems.
O'REILLY No, right?
OZ The teachers weren't even developing it. And so when we started talking about that, and I did it myself, I remember having a conversation with your good friend Sean Hannity in April, and I made this comment. Oh my gosh, the vitriol, the possibility that you would purposely want to hurt children and their teachers and the families by luring children into schools and making them cesspools or petri dishes for virus spread. It was shocking. The fact is you couldn't have even voiced that opinion. And I was reporting at the time on published articles saying exactly what you and I are both reflecting today. It wasn't like it was newfangled, just made it up, thought about it last night while I was asleep. Literally published information in peer-reviewed journals saying. It doesn't seem to be that much of a problem to put the kids back in school. And I have a foundation, it's all over the country. We raised $100 million for it, been around for 20 years. I deal with schools and kids in schools, teenagers in particular, quite a bit. They were harmed in a very big way by our actions locking them at home. And when states did not do that, like Florida, for example, those kids didn't have those bars put around them and locked away, and so they were able to get their education as they were designed to. Think of how much we learned every year of our lives for the first 15, 18 years of our lives. Really important. Lost all that for two, three years. In some parts of the country, cities did not open their schools fully for over two years, Bill. It's a long time.
O'REILLY Now, you ran as a Republican for the Senate in Pennsylvania. Fetterman beat you. But you might have an insight into why the Democratic Party, particularly the Biden administration, which wasn't bullish. I mean, Trump was a lot more bullish on COVID, as you pointed out. He got Operation Warp Speed passed and then bought the vaccine. He basically bought it from these people in less than a year, which was a monumental achievement. But the other side of the aisle, the Biden people, when Trump left office and Biden came in, they were very militant, backing up Fauci, particularly the media. CNN couldn't get enough of Fauci. Do you have any idea why? Why would you throw up behind that guy? He was to me, he's a weasel, and that's probably unfair. I don't know him personally. But he's, he is a swamp creature, 34 years. And what he's saying isn't adding up when you look at the data from China, from Europe, from Florida, doesn't add up. Yet you had a whole party, a whole movement backing him. Why?
OZ I have no idea. I guess one argument is that it seemed like the President and the Republicans were getting unhappy with his performance, his handling of the pandemic. And so just as a countervailing force, they naturally, instinctively went over to his side. But I don't understand it. Again, I'm thinking as a physician at this point. I'm not quite sure why there was almost a blind adherence to the dogma that was coming from Fauci when it wasn't actually reflected in the beliefs of many physicians. And Bill, you know, in my job right here at CMS, I was spending a lot of time trying to understand what happened to doctors in general. Like, how come we lost our mojo? I think part of it is driven by money. A lot of doctors now, most primary care doctors are owned by a hospital or a company or private equity. So there's a lot of doctors who no longer are truly out there on their own who can say what they want because they don't have a boss. But there are definitely changes that have happened in the culture of medicine and the healing in general, and that is a big, big challenge for the entire country. It's one of the issues that Secretary Kennedy is dealing with in the MAHA movement. You know, why is it that most moms in America today think it's harder to take care of their kids, to raise healthy kids, than it was for their moms to raise them? Why is it that we seem to have so much more chronic illness? 70% of the money I spend, Bill, I spent two trillion dollars out of this building that go out to take Medicare and Medicaid and chip programs, Obamacare, $2 trillion, 70% at least, is driven by chronic disease. Where do they come from? Why are we twice as fat as Europe?
O'REILLY I'll tell you in a moment, but I got one more question on the COVID Fauci vaccine thing. Now there's a report that I can't substantiate that President Trump is pressuring Kennedy to find a link between childhood vaccines and autism. Have you read that report?
OZ I saw the news reports, yes.
O'REILLY Okay, now I'm saying to myself, why, number one, I guess the president, because I haven't talked to him about it, feels that this is a reality, that there is or could be a linkage, because autism is, I do a lot of work with them, is growing. And he wants a definition from you guys about whether that is a reality, childhood vax leads to autism. Any opinion on that?
OZ The most important thing we have to do is pull data that the government should be able to pull to answer that very question. And that is a question the president has asked, and he's absolutely right to do that because many Americans now know that the incidence of autism has skyrocketed to about one in 30 children. And when we see these kinds of numbers, and you see from my side the numbers of children in treatment that states are struggling to provide to these kids. As you know, in Minnesota, it was one of the big issues with their fraud, waste, and abuse problem is they took a program for autism five years ago was supposed to be, you know, one, two, three million dollars. They paid four hundred million dollars for that program last year. And so now people are seeing treatment of autism as an opportunity to make money illicitly. And so we're now struggling to try to find out, you know, what is this burden coming from? Families all over America are being hurt and harmed. And so, we need to pull all that data, which Secretary Kennedy is doing. He's got a very thoughtful process by which he's going to evaluate things like what happens to kids who have all their vaccines versus none of their vaccines? Is there any difference in allergies or problems with their intestines or maybe even behavioral abnormalities like autism? But to do that, you have to take these data sets...
O'REILLY So that research is underway now? All of that's underway?
OZ Yes.
O'REILLY Okay.
OZ It is.
Because that's what you have to do, because Kennedy, he's got the stamp of being anti-vaccine. You know that. Again, I just want to see what the data is. I don't care what Bobby Kennedy Jr. thinks about vaccines. I want to hear the data. All right. Let's get to Make Americans Healthy Again. I'll tell you what. This is the driving force behind chronic illness as Americans get older: sugar. And it is as pernicious as tobacco, all right. And why has the federal government not put warning labels on cereals, on snacks, on whatever, saying this is loaded with sugar, and sugar may cause you harm? Why has that not happened?
OZ There's a lot of people who argue that we don't want a nanny state where the government tells you things. A lot of folks say...
O'REILLY You can't even read it? You still got it if you want it, but it's like cigarettes.
OZ I think the way you get ahead on sugar is by showing more and more information, demonstrating that it is a major driver of obesity in America, that we've changed where it is on the food pyramid. You know, Secretary Kennedy, as you know, in the MAHA movement, we took this food, the dietary guidelines, the food pyramid, and we flipped it upside down the way it was supposed to be. So no longer are we vilifying the fats, we're actually going after the biggest culprit that we can easily modify, which is sugar. But Bill, think about this a little bit. Why is sugar so popular? Why does it work so well? Because it stimulates your brain to release chemicals- feel-good chemicals- that get you through stressful moments, loneliness, if you're tired, it gives you energy, but not the kind of energy you want, just like the frenetic energy to keep you going. But the real foods you should be eating, when they're vilified, you're not left with many options.
O'REILLY It's not that easy to require. Look, I went to my local 7-Eleven today, okay, out here on Eastern Long Island. There wasn't one product that you could eat in the whole damn store that wasn't going to hurt you. I mean, it was just lined up with garbage, you know? And okay, I know it's fast food. I know you go in there for a snack. I'm not trying to crucify 7-Eleven. But the volume of sugar-laden products with diabetes and all of these other maladies stemming from the consumption of sugar, and the government just sits there and goes, well, we can't be a nanny state. Come on! You've got to protect the population.
OZ We are protecting the population, but I don't think we do it best by telling them something they already know. I mean, who out there thinks that...
O'REILLY They don't know!
OZ Well, I actually think most people do know, but they don't realize exactly what a problem it is. I'll give you some concrete examples. When I was in medical school, there was no nutrition class in my school. I actually ran for class president, and I won on the platform that we're gonna introduce nutrition in the medical school. Now, why is that important, Bill? Because if you go to medical school and you don't learn something, it means it didn't matter. So we have a generation of doctors out there practicing who have never had a nutrition class. Therefore, by implication, it's not important that they care about nutrition. So they'll take care of folks in any way they can, but they won't bring into that mix the reality that you have to be able to deal with the consequences if you eat the wrong food. So yes, I'll give news to you just from last week because we're also traveling around the country, getting all the medical schools today now to incorporate nutrition in their classrooms so that future doctors get this message. But here's the good part. We're going to all the hospitals. And asking hospitals to change the food they're serving patients, because that's a much better way of getting people to eat... I'll give you a concrete number. I went to Moffitt Cancer, I was in Tampa, Florida, Moffitt Cancer Hospital, a top-tier institution in this area, and they actually have research showing that if they put you on a keto diet, a low-sugar diet, for two weeks prior to giving you immunotherapy, cancer therapy, they could improve your body's ability to deal with the treatment. They also have evidence. They showed me these scary pictures of cancers, where all the cancer cells stay together. But when you add artificial sweeteners to these cancer cells, some of them begin to move a little bit. They get away. They escape. They might metastasize. So this is all very early data. But this stuff, as they begin to publish it and share it, you get goosebumps thinking about the complications and opportunities. You could dramatically improve survival rates for some bad problems if you might be able to use the diet. At that same time, I went to visit Tampa General. The hospital, a beautiful big hospital, they have completely revamped their food service, and this is important to understand. When you go to most hospitals in America, they give you hospital food, which is a pejorative. It doesn't taste very good. You end up throwing about a quarter of it away because patients don't like it. They won't eat it. So in this Tampa General Hospital, now all across the country, this is happening. The hospitals are signing a pledge to join the food pyramid as a guidepost for making their meals. Patients order their meals themselves. They're given only meals that have natural sugar, no added sugars. They're very specific on the kinds of things that are better for your particular condition. We're training people to have taste buds that appreciate healthy food. Bill, the reason people go to that store and buy only sugar is we have infantilized their taste buds. Go to a school today in America. Here's what you're gonna see. Kids drinking the following. Not whole milk, which we know would be okay for them, but because whole milk has whole fats in it, we told generations of dietitians in schools, take the fat out. It becomes skim milk. Skim milk is sugar milk. Have you ever had skim milk? It tastes terrible. And so kids know that.
O'REILLY I drink regular stuff. I'm not, I'm not a, right.
OZ Exactly. You're smart. But in order to get the kids to drink the skim milk, which has had all the good fats taken out, they have to add chocolate syrup to it. Now you have chocolate syrup skim milk. Same calories as wholesome, real milk, except all it's got in there are some fake sugars, some real sugars, but they're going to taste really good to you. And kids have taste buds that behave like they're five years old, even when they're 25 years old. That's the problem. We get people addicted to a simple carbohydrate diet, which is devastating. And you know who pays the price? All of us. It drops our survival rates, gives us illnesses, and it also makes us fat. And obesity by itself, number one driver of health expenses in America.
O'REILLY Well, unless Congress rehabs the medical care industry, and that includes what you do, Medicare and Medicaid, because you can't be charging people $65,000 a day to go to the hospital. I mean, there's got to be some kind of sanity that's injected into this because average life expectancy, women, of course, live longer than men, and there's a lot of reasons for that. We don't need to go into it. But it's hovering around 80. And people go, oh, 80, that's a pretty good number. But by the time you're 60, you're hobbling around. Okay, and you gotta go and take 18 blood tests to figure out why you don't feel good or why something's going wrong. Yet, what we see is the fast food nation. And people are addicted to it, just like marijuana, just like alcohol. All right, they are addicted to these fast foods. They're lazy, people don't wanna cook. I got it. They go to the drive-in, and they just glop this stuff on there, and they eat it. I haven't had fast food, I can't even tell you the last time that I ate that stuff. And you know what happened to me when I was coming up as a kid and I didn't care, I ate the stuff, not all the time, but now it repels me. I can even look at it. I can't even look at it. Because I know what it does, and just the aftertaste alone. But you know, kids, happy meal. I want to nickname it happy you're dead meal. Can we do that? Can we slap that on there? And this is just unbelievable surge from Juneau, Alaska, to Key West. I mean, it's convenient, it tastes good. And then it comes down to money. You want to buy a steak, you want your protein, you better have a pocketful of change because the whole food cycle as far as finance is concerned is way out of whack. Now, I know the government can't control wages and prices, but I think Americans have got to take this, they've got to put this up as priority number one, particularly parents, to make sure your kids are healthy and eating correctly. But I'm not seeing a lot of public service announcements on that. And I'm getting back to the labels. Labels should be mandatory for the sugar-laden stuff.
OZ Bill, if you look at the stock prices of the companies that make the junk foods that you're speaking to, since we came into office, they have generally gone down quite a bit. I think it reflects the fact that the American people are hearing the message and they don't want that kind of food in their pantry anymore. They don't wanna buy that kind of food. And there's another product, which is the GLP-1 drugs, the fat shots, as the president calls them, that are also entering into the mix. For the first time in my lifetime, We're actually seeing less obesity than the year before. Obesity rates in America are down about 8%.
O'REILLY Yeah, but they're taking the pills. They're taking the pills to get the weight off. I don't know if that's healthy.
OZ Yeah, I don't, it's not about just the pills. You know, the doctors don't just, it's a shot usually, as you know, but most of the time, and you should anyway, have a physician prescribing these for you while also telling you that this is not the solution. This is just a way of jumpstarting your process, kickstarting the process. You gotta eat the right things. You have to sleep better, get the right activities, exercise. That's part of a holistic approach. Most people go on these products, they seem to come on them, off them, they take them for a while, they go off. But you know, if you're playing weight, maybe it's when you're, I don't know, 20 years of age. That was your ideal body habitus. And maybe you're, I'm making this up. What were you when you were 20 years of age, 200 pounds?
O'REILLY Yeah, about 210.
All right, so that's your playing weight. If you're 270 or 300, it's hard to do things that an active person can do. Your knees hurt, your back hurts, you don't sleep well. You don't feel good about yourself. So getting someone to lose 50 pounds, even if it takes a shot or some other approach, once they're back to a playing weight, where they feel better, they can stay there more readily. It's harder to lose weight than to maintain your weight. And that's how these medications may be working. But I'll tell you, our projections, and as you know, the president was adamant about the whole issue of drug prices. He's concerned about it because one in three Americans go to a drug store to buy a branded medication, and they can't afford the medication.
O'REILLY I know. It's crazy. Something's got to be done.
OZ But the reason, let me put it quickly, the part of the reason for that is that we pay in this country three times more for the exact same medications, even when they're made in these facilities based in America, than people in Europe or Asia are paying. So the president said no more, we're going to get most-favored-nation drug pricing. We want everyone to understand whatever your drug price is in Germany, it's going to be the same in America. We are dropping drug prices in America dramatically. That makes it more affordable. And for everyone watching who's on Medicare, not only have we made these prices much more affordable in this country, but on Medicare in particular, if you're over the age of 65, you can get, if you're eligible, these fat shots, the GLP-1 drugs, for 50 bucks a month. It used to be over $1,000 a month, so a dramatic change mainly because we asked. We said, we're not taking this anymore. We want fair prices for Americans, and we've got those prices, and we did this in part because we believe that within two years of taking these medications, we're going to start to show savings for the American taxpayer. That you're actually going to have less disease, less illness, less cancer, less reason to go to a hospital, and therefore we'll be able to rebate money to the American people.
O'REILLY Okay, you need to get more publicity on that because what you just said is not widely known. You know, I was looking at your friend Oprah the other day. Oprah is a good example of somebody who's – every time I see Oprah, I don't know how she's going to look. I mean, sometimes she looks like Dolly Parton, and sometimes she looks, and will leave you to fill in the blank. So, Oprah's got that thing. But if a person like Oprah enlisted in a national campaign paid for by the federal government, it would just be lights out getting this kind of word to the folks, particularly the poor folks, okay? Particularly them. That's the hardest market to get into, but the one that's most needed. All right, AI. So, AI is going to change nutrition in this country. Are you working on that? Do you agree with me on that, and is there anything you can give us in that area?
OZ We are definitely working on it. We had a major meeting, a public gathering on Monday for the health tech ecosystem. And by that I mean, for the first time ever, we are paying technology companies to make digital tools, apps in particular, but these tools can be used to help you do better in all the decisions you're making, including some of the ones you brought up. And so if we can use artificial intelligence and other digital technologies to give you better advice customized to your needs, we think you'll use those bits of advice. Now, here's the way it works. And this is something you should understand for everybody, not just for people who want to lose weight. You, from now on, don't have to use a clipboard. You can just take your phone, take your medical records, and put it on your phone in a QR code. In that QR code, the doctor's office will just scan it, and they'll know everything about you, so we don't have to give you, you know, they need to change your medical beneficiary number, give credit cards. All those things get stolen, by the way. We have millions of Medicare beneficiary numbers that are lost to the ether, stolen by foreign countries, used to create fictitious bills. So we wanna take all that away. But the real benefit for you is you now control your medical records. They're on your phones. You can send that information, if you desire, anywhere you want, including to companies that are creating tools to help you pick better foods, get better lifestyle choices based on your medical records. They know you can't run a sprint, but they know you do sit-ups. So they know you don't like these foods, but you're better at those foods. Or you've got diabetes, you really have to cut back on the sugar, versus you have a little high blood pressure, your problem is more salt. And so giving you advice customized to the medical records that now those companies can use if you give them permission, empowers, it turbocharges the system. And I do believe that's the major change that's happened just in the last year since we've been in office. A year ago, Bill, 5% of people, 5%, were able to take their medical records from wherever they were getting care and exchange it as they desired. Now it's over half the population, and it's growing rapidly. What's holding us back is the American people. Folks watching the show, for example, who don't know this is possible, might not be curious, may not want to try. We're desperately trying to get that message out because when we have that message out to you, at the same time we're talking to you, we can give you other bits of insight, like advice on when to take a fat shot, a GLP-1, or how to push back on certain bad advice that might be out there in the ecosystem that you might want to ignore.
O'REILLY Okay, older people have a hard time with all that technology, and I'm an older person, so I know that. But that program that you're working on seems to be very, very positive. But this is the first I'm hearing about it, and I am in the business of gathering information. So, when is the federal government going to start a campaign based upon we're gonna help you help yourself get healthier, and here's what you have to do. Because it's gonna take that to get through to the people who are driving into the windows, ordering all this garbage. You're gonna have to pound them with this. Same thing happened with tobacco. I mean, at one point, more than 50% of Americans smoked cigarettes after World War II. Serious smokers, Eisenhower smoked five packs of cigarettes a day, okay? And then as soon as the federal government got involved and said, caution, cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health or tobacco, whatever it was, it slowly started to go down, all right? This one, because it's so personal for people's appearance, they want to look good, this would be supercharged if you could organize a campaign. And you know it's really ironic, I don't know whether you watch a lot of television, I don't, but whenever I turn on linear TV, all the advertisements are for drugs. All of them! You know, this advertises, this will do this, this'll do that, call this, your toes will fall off if you take it, but that's okay, boom, boom, boom. The television industry is totally reliant now on pushing these drugs for various elements. So my quest is to simplify and to make it clear to everybody that there is a better way, and I haven't seen it yet.
OZ Well, have you heard of TrumpRx.gov?
O'REILLY Yes.
OZ And if you haven't... Good, okay. So that was the first step that we made just to get people to understand that if they use their phones, no matter what age you are, my father-in-law is 90 years old. He still has a smartphone. He's still able to do basic conversations. And you can click on that TrumpRX.gov site, and it will tell you exactly the prices of all the medications, not just the fat shots, all the medications, that you're maybe looking for in all the pharmacies around you. So that gives you a reason to be talking to us because we can give you transparency.
O'REILLY Right.
OZ We can do the same thing for, for example, the food choices you're making, but we have to have a bunch of use cases. All those are rolling out this summer, and the beautiful part is we can run ads against some of these ideas, but you know who's gonna be the best person to tell a patient? Their doctors. And so we're telling the doctors, if you use these digital tools, if you let your patients benefit from these tools, we can make it worth your time. They can save you time. A lot of the information you might want to spend time talking to your patient about, the device could actually do as well as you because it can customize it to your care, and it'll tell the patient when they're about to eat a bad meal, hey, not such a good idea. So it turbocharges what you described happened with the cigarette industry. But Bill, part of the problem is the people we need to speak to the most are the least willing to hear the message. Telling cigarette smokers that cigarettes are bad for them doesn't work. It's been tried a lot. You know what works?
O'REILLY Yeah, but it's down big. It's like only maybe 15% of the American population smokes cigarettes, down from more than 50.
OZ And in all the countries where it's been done, it's done basically this way. Get the families that tell their loved ones why it matters to them that they stop smoking. And then, once the person's made the decision to stop smoking, give them tools. Give them, if they need medications or surrogates, or give them patches or other things that can make it easier so it's not painful to do it. We're trying to do the same thing. The MAHA movement fundamentally is about making it easier to be healthy in America. So your default is to do the right thing. And we do that by making sure families take care of each other, get the message out there, get mom pestering you, telling you all the things that you and I are talking about now, and then give you the extra little ability to act on it. So for example, you go to your doc, we give them these tools. I just talked about the AI-powered digital tools. If you want them, you can use them because you're taking it on your own. You're not feeling like you're being forced upon. Your family is told the same thing because those medical information tidbits can go to your family if you let them have it. They'll also be pushing you. Hey, Dad, you know, your blood pressure is too high. You've got to deal with it the following ways. And then we get a holistic, more 360 approach. That's what we think will move the needle. And then the last thing in there, you know what, if you want to lose weight and that's the reason your blood pressures high, we've got this great opportunity that Medicare has given all seniors that they are eligible, for 50 bucks, for $50, not $1,000, for $50, you can get an injection that can help you lose weight so that you can to a place where you're happy. Your blood pressure's down, your family's happy, you can take care of your kids better, and all in a while, we're making it easy to do the right thing. Again, fundamentally what the president and Secretary Kennedy want.
O'REILLY It's great in theory, but it's more difficult in practice. But I'm praying that you guys can get it up and running. Is there any meaningful opposition? I know there's opposition to Kennedy. He's been demonized by the progressive left primarily and his own family for going over the Trump side. But is there any meaningful opposition on the Hill against all of the things that you're talking about, which is basically an awareness of how you can deal with your own personal health? That's what you're selling here, doctor, okay? And we're going to make it as easy and as cheap as possible for you to do that, but you've got to help yourself. You've got to figure out how to put the thing on here and send it to where you want to go. But is there anybody resisting this? Are the food companies, the sugar companies, are they resisting this?
OZ You definitely have stakeholders who are not going to do as well in this new world, because they're going to be seeing customers nudged in a different direction. You know, advertising, Bill, is primarily about moving your hand from here on the shelf, as you make a purchase, to here. Right? It's moving you just a couple inches. People spend a lot of money to make that move. And that's one of the realities when you shake up the Etch A Sketch, and you create a new world. There are new winners, and there are new losers. And people get concerned about that. For example, I think some of the angst about AI is driven by Chinese misinformation. But some of it is driven by very thoughtful Americans who just are scared about this technology for good reasons. Who the heck knows what it's gonna do to us? And as you know, if you go watch a movie, when's the last time you saw a movie where AI was the hero, right? It's always some dystopian post-apocalyptic world that everyone is, you know, in a miserable condition, all because AI took over the planet. That is possible. There are real fears about this. On the other hand, in my specialty of medicine, it's the one place where a lot of Americans think, hey, you know what? If I had a coach in my pocket, if I had curbside consult all the time, and I could just whip it out and get a quick bit of advice, what would Bill O'Reilly do? And literally, by the way, they can now find out the advice that folks that they care about might have given them. It might get them psyched up not to have that ice cream sundae when they're depressed. You know, most of these bad behaviors were adaptive at one point in your life, they became maladaptive. And that's when they take you in the wrong direction.
O'REILLY So we're gonna hold Dr. Oz over for our Premium Members to BillOReilly.com in a segment called Killing Time. Everybody else, we hope you enjoy the conversation. I think that Dr. Oz is one of the most informative guests we've ever had on this forum. And you know how wide, and this is a worldwide forum, it's not just the United States. And I hope you think about what we have said and look out for yourself because there's people who love you. All right, they want you to be healthy, but you gotta work it too. Okay, we'll be back in a moment.
