Why YouTube’s favorite doctor won’t stop talking about politics

0:07Welcome to Mixed Signals from Semaphore Media, where we are tracking the wild changes in this media age. I am Max Tawney, media editor here at Semaphore. And with me, still from across the world, is our editor-in-chief, Ben Smith. Great to be dialed in. Well, this week we are sitting down with Doctor Mike. He is a YouTube physician with 14 million subscribers on the platform and counting. We're going to talk to him about some really interesting topics, including how to respectfully debate vaccine critics on the internet, why he doesn't take money from pharmaceutical companies for advertising, and where the legacy media falls short in its health content and coverage.

0:50Max:He really became a huge figure during the pandemic, and I'm very interested in what he learned then and what kind of he's learned since about health communication. Well, we'll dig into health communication, his relationship with RFK Jr., and a lot more right after the break.

1:15So, Ben, a blind spot that I feel that I have in my media consumption diet is stuff around health news. I think I'm a bit squeamish. I don't enjoy knowing all that much about what's going on inside my body. I'm not somebody who is, every time there's something wrong with me, I'm looking it up frantically on WebMD or something like that. So I didn't know who Dr. Mike was, but you did. You have been interested in him for a while. Your kids are kind of obsessed with him. How did you come across Dr. Mike? Are your kids kind of impressed that we're doing this one? Is this something that's like excited them?

1:53Max:Well, just to answer that last question first, my son, when I said, well, what should I ask Dr. Mike? He said, you should ask him if you can go on his show, that would be lit. And actually, I first wrote about Dr. Mike in the New York Times, and that's sort of when I first heard of him in 2020. It was a story about misinformation and kind of health misinformation and social platforms and the media. And like, these were simpler times, I would say. But I talked to Mark Zuckerberg, and I talked to the guy who runs YouTube, Neil Mohan, talked to Jack Dorsey, really on the theme of, finally, these platforms that have been in all these fights about political information have something that is very simple and straightforward, which is health.

2:34Max:And as I was working on this story, actually, one of my kids was like, oh, you got to talk to Dr. Mike. He's like the central source of medical truth in America. and in fact, basically true and emerges this enormous voice during the pandemic on YouTube and made this transition from being like this kind of cute internet doctor that people were excited about to being a major, major authority and filling a role that in previous generations was filled by like the Dr. Aziz and Sanjay Gupta's of the world, the big TV doctors. Young doctor practices in New Jersey, great communicator now has 14 million YouTube followers and I think is among other things, RFK Jr.'s, in some ways, biggest critic.

3:14Max:And, you know, has this huge connection to his audience in this new medium. You know, we're going to all wind up having heard of Dr. Mike. It's kind of interesting to me, you know, you mentioned Dr. Oz. Obviously, Dr. Oz has become a incredibly political figure, ran for office, lost to John Fetterman, which is kind of interesting. In retrospect, now is a member of the Trump administration. You mentioned that Dr. Mike is also, you know, political. He's become kind of critical of RFK Jr., which we obviously want to ask him about. But I just kind of wonder if it's impossible to be a doctor in a prominent media position and not dip into politics in some way.

3:54Is it possible to be an apolitical media doctor? Because, you know, medicine does become political when you reach a certain level, and obviously it's also science isn't perfect, and so it's something that you can argue about kind of endlessly. So I'm really interested to learn how Dr. Mike kind of navigates that.

4:12Max:Yeah. And I'm also curious, like I really last talked to him at the beginning of the pandemic and it didn't turn out to be as simple as we thought. I'm curious kind of what he learned from that whole experience. Well, Dr. Mike is actually waiting for us so we can ask him about that and a lot more right now. Why don't we bring him in?

4:31Max:Dr. Mike, thank you so much for joining us. And it's nice to see you again. Yeah, very great to see you. Troubling times we find ourselves in, but I'm optimistic that healthcare will find a bright new shining light. Yeah, and I guess I was hoping we could just introduce, because I think it's possible that some of our audience is not familiar with you, which I realize is kind of shocking at this point. And I just wanted to get you explaining a bit where you come from. And I realize I have a minor, minor connection to the beginning of your career. Because I was at BuzzFeed when I didn't edit this, but we ran a post titled, Um, You Really Need to See This Hot Doctor and His Dog, which apparently set you on a path toward kind of YouTube stardom.

5:15Yeah, what a way for a doctor to get popularity. But, you know, I immigrated to the United States when I was six years old. My father was a physician back in Russia. And when we came to the States, he had to do the entire medical journey all over again, which means medical school, residency. And I was of age to witness that entire journey. I fell in love with it. I said, this is exactly what I want to do. And then just like life tends to do to you when you least expect it, I had an opportunity to enter the media sphere because BuzzFeed, as you said, wrote that really silly article that, you know, initially I thought this is silly.

5:52I'll just move past it. But then I really viewed it as an opportunity to get people excited about health care in a way where perhaps I don't have to corrupt the health care information that I'm presenting. They can laugh about the superficial title. We can make jokes about health care. We can meet people where they are. You know, I'm a family medicine doc, so I go to where my patients are. If they're in the ER, I go there. If they're inpatient, there. Home visits, there. Even nursing homes, there. So social media is where they're all at now. This is billions of people logged online. The first thing everyone does when they have a symptom or they get a diagnosis is they take out their phone and search social media.

6:30So I realized that for me to be a good family medicine physician, I have to be there for them. So I'm really interested in your journey here. You basically decided after going viral, you went on television, you did a bunch of, like essentially it seems like daytime TV, you know, various TV hits where, you know, maybe you talked a little bit about health and also they asked you about being hot and that experience, which is great. But you said basically a year into your career of being a YouTuber, you decided to start a YouTube show after doing this media tour. I was watching a video with you and you said that after a year into launching your YouTube channel, that your partners thought it was a failure.

7:13And our producer actually tells me that your partners actually fired you. So why did you think it was a failure? And when did you feel like the switch had actually flipped and you had proved the people who fired you wrong? Yeah. So the reason I even got into the YouTube sphere was because the people who were functioning in the traditional media landscape were writing me off. They were saying, you're a young doctor. We got the superficial soundbites out of you. We're no longer interested in your medical information. And I viewed that as a missed opportunity. I thought I had a lot of value to offer to the audience.

7:48And YouTube was a place where I could bypass those gatekeepers and present the information in the way that I thought people wanted to receive it in a way where I didn't have to corrupt the medical information that I was presenting. We started the YouTube channel thinking that my 2 million followers off Instagram would come on over and start watching these dense educational videos. And it didn't really happen. over the course of the first year of making videos every single week. I thought we'd certainly get more viewership than we initially did. And so did our partners, the multi-channel network that we were working with.

8:24And after the year was out, they saw all the sponsorships that I turned down because of my medical ethics. I didn't want to present something to the audience that was not true or something that I didn't necessarily believe in. And they said, there's not a lot of money to be had here. We're firing you. Sign an NDA. Don't talk about this. And then we'll pay you your last bit of production dollars. I said, no need. Keep your NDA, keep your production dollars. And continued the venture completely on my own with a very small team that we started with. And literally three, four months later, if they had a little bit more patience, the switch flipped.

9:00We had a YouTube video go viral. We already had enough of a back catalog of other videos that people can watch after that video went viral. and folks just continued to grow with the channel. I mean, that viral moment happened in 2018. It's now 2025. We've passed 14 million subscribers on YouTube. Our monthly viewership is around 100 million viewers a month. I mean, those views are just astronomical. And this is also doing it with a very small team, never selling out on the medical ethics. Unlike a lot of the doctors that have been in the medical space historically, we don't do any supplement ads.

9:40We don't push any of these unproven miracle snake oil products. And we always just wanted to tell the truth and be as transparent as possible. And I think it's paid off because that viewership has only come because of the trust that has developed with the audience. I'm really curious, the decision to go to YouTube in 2018, were a lot of your patients essentially like, were they like bringing you YouTube videos? Were they saying like, Like, oh, I saw XYZ thing on YouTube and therefore I am convinced that I have some sort of insane malady or whatever or insane disease. Is that like part of the reason why you decided to do YouTube?

10:19Or was it literally just like this is the easiest way for me to kind of circumvent the traditional media, which is not taking me seriously? I think it's both reasons led me down the path of YouTube. It was even before that. 2018 was when the channel did really well. We ended up launching it in 2017. But in 2016 was when I really wanted to be on YouTube because what I was finding is in every encounter that I was discussing a medical topic with a patient, there was an influence of social media. There was a component of it, either something that their family member has seen, they have seen. It's led them down a path of Googling and WebMDing, some scary diagnosis.

10:59And a lot of times it was guiding them in the wrong direction. And actually in 2017, I was writing for a blog of the American Academy of Family Physicians, and I pointed out that the absence of good quality medical professionals on social media, that vacuum was going to create a huge problem of misinformation. And it was like crystal ball in that moment because just three years later during the pandemic, there were not enough doctors on social media to tell the truth about what was going on. And all the legacy institutions, the CDC, the FDA, when they rushed to do mass media communication, A, they weren't prepared for it.

11:38So they made a lot of missteps. B, they had no idea how to utilize social media in the correct way in order to maximize their viewership. I mean, how many times would I see a CDC Instagram post with 10 likes on it? That is literally the equivalent of not doing it because it's not helping anyone. So it's not just the same way that I saw as a med student, some physicians that were really great diagnosticians, they knew all the correct treatments, but they couldn't communicate with patients in order to translate that information effectively. I realized that they weren't an effective clinician. Same thing goes to the CDC.

12:15They could do all the great research. They could have all the correct information. But if they weren't translating that to the general public in a way that was understandable and trustworthy, it's like they weren't doing it at all. And I realized I needed to be there to fill that void. And in 2020, I mean, our channel absolutely exploded. We were on the front page of YouTube consistently delivering accurate, honest, and transparent information about a virus that we knew very little about when it first started.

12:42Max:Yeah. Yeah. And that's when we first met. And the context, I was just looking back at the story. It was a story where I talked to like Mark Zuckerberg and Neil Mohan and Jack Dorsey from then Twitter and to you. And the kind of central idea was there have been these debates about misinformation, about politics. It's all very difficult. But like finally, it was something pretty clear. It's going to be pretty straightforward. You have some actual experts like Dr. Mike who have like real expertise in how to communicate in this medium too. YouTube is promoting them. And like, this is going to work.

13:14Max:Like we actually have mechanisms for getting good information for people. And that was clearly totally wrong, right? People like believe more nonsense about medicine and health and science than they did before the pandemic. And certainly like more Americans are skeptical of vaccines than they were before the pandemic. What went wrong there? I think there's a lot of factors there. Just like you look at a health condition and you can't ever pinpoint it on one specific cause. It's usually multifactorial. Same goes for this issue. A big part of what went wrong during the pandemic was the mass communication by the big agencies wasn't done effectively.

13:51It wasn't done transparently. It had a lot of government overreach in it, a lot of confidence when we didn't have all the right answers, when we needed to show humility, we forgot about that. And if we approached talking to people during the pandemic in a way where we could say, here's what we know, here's what we don't know, here's where we're trying to find the right answers, and approached it that way, as opposed to making the universal decision to say, we're going to sound ultra confident because we believe that's going to give us the best results. I think short term, that was a good move.

14:29But long term, it ended up hurting trust and actually leading people to believe conspiracy theories. I mean, I just did a debate against 20 individuals who are either vaccine skeptical or full-on anti-vax, and hearing a lot of the reasons for why they've come to their conclusion where they're at now came from the fact that the government made so many mistakes in making decisions to put masks on toddlers, to recommend boosters in situations where perhaps they may have been overkill or inappropriate. Those small mistakes ended up being magnified by people who disagreed with the government, by people who disagreed with vaccines from the get-go.

15:11And I think it weakened our position as healthcare experts to be able to continue to tell the truth. Yeah, you mentioned this Jubilee video that you did where you debated 20 vaccine skeptics, which is actually one of my first introductions to you. He's not necessarily anti-vaccine, but he wants safe vaccines. Yeah, so I'm pointing out that I think RFK Jr. is a threat to public health. The reality is, if we don't get vaccinated with Jesus, we will face God on Judgment Day. I'm Dr. Mikhail Varshavsky, better known as Dr. Mike across social media. I'm a board-certified family medicine physician who makes content online improving health literacy.

15:49And today, I'm surrounded by 20 vaccine skeptics. What did you think of that experience? It struck me as pretty remarkable. Yeah, so I watched Jubilee and their Surrounded series for many years, even before it was the Surrounded series when they had something called the middle ground. And I even reacted to an episode that they had several years ago on the YouTube channel where they had those who were anti-vax versus those who were pro-vax. And I always saw it as an opportunity where if you're going to be an honest clinician, you could have a really good conversation that might not convince everyone in the room.

16:26But I think to the general public that are watching, that are vaccine skeptical, that perhaps heard a scary story and unsure about what to do, you can get good information to those people. So we were proactive in this Jubilee situation. We actually reached out to them and suggested the topic. We thought that this would be a prime time moment to get information out to a huge number of people. And I think what I learned from it, two big things. One is that people can and will change their minds. If you look at that video, it's about 10 million views. It's one of their best performers all year. The comments, largely positive pro-vaccine comments.

17:06Yes, there are some people who are anti-vaccine. Those are outliers. And a lot of them are the loud outliers, which is why we believe so many people distrust the government. There are folks who are, and that number is growing. That being said, when I'm seeing patients day in and day out, they perhaps are more skeptical than they used to be, but they are still trusting their family medicine doctor. They're still trusting the specialists that they're seeing. This giant situation of distrust that has formed really exists in the bubble of social media. And we need to control it because we don't want it to expand into our everyday life, as we're seeing in Texas with the measles outbreak.

17:46But we want to keep it there. We want a limited spread. And then the second thing that I learned is that traditional media still doesn't understand social media. The story, the Jubilee Surrounded series that went before me got less views, but it was a little bit more political, right wing versus left wing. Ton of rewrites, ton of media coverage. The story after me, the episode after me, ton of rewrites, ton of stories. My Jubilee episode, which is pretty historic. Doctors don't sit down with anti-vaxxers to debate them and they certainly don't do it for three hours with zero control over the content.

18:24That's where I place myself. At the mercy of those individuals, ask me anything. Let's talk it out. Let's get down to the truth. 10 million views, 100 million plus on the clips on X, 10 million on my channel, zero news articles. Not one Huffington Post, not one Vox, zero. And it's not because I'm hungry for media. Of course, that will help my business grow. But the truth is, the stuff that needs to be covered is missing in action. And it shows that there's a clear misunderstanding about what's valuable to the audience versus what they think is valuable to the audience. And there is a potential opportunity here to educate millions of people.

19:07Max:But I think there's the countervailing kind of traditional view on that one. And actually, particularly when it comes to social media, is not only should you not be talking to anti-vaxxers, that X and Meta and YouTube ought to be deleting their accounts and preventing anybody from talking to them. And I think that was actually, they were doing that for a while. I don't think it really worked, like maybe the opposite. But what do you make of that dynamic, of the attempts by the platforms to really like downplay and censor often quite crazy information? Yeah, they tried their best not knowing what they were doing.

19:41And I just spoke to Rene DeRista on my podcast about this. And they obviously went too far, and it ended up actually hurting the cause of putting out good information. I remember when the ivermectin crisis was going on and people were taking veterinary ivermectin because someone told them on a podcast to take it. The social media platforms overreacted. They said anyone that utters the word ivermectin, we're going to demonetize that content, shadow ban it, whatever strategy they had at the time. And it ended up hurting real physicians, people who were trying to talk about ivermectin responsibly.

20:18But it's a tough challenge for them because they have so much content being uploaded and they're always late to the party and they're being very reactive as opposed to proactive. And at the same time, they're not a medical organization to know what's true, what's not, where is debate appropriate, where is discourse should be happening. And as a result, it's become quite messy for the social media companies where sometimes they're taking everything down. Sometimes they're not taking anything down. And there needs to be some guidance from the government as to what is accurate? What is the truth?

20:49Where can we go for an honest debate about a topic without entering the era of completely spreading myths and disinformation?

20:56Max:I mean, do you actually want guidance from this government on that? This government? Absolutely not. We have to take a short break, but we'll be right back after this with more from Dr. Mike.

21:19Max:There's also a big political overlay to a lot of this. When you ask conservatives, like, why don't you trust any medical professionals anymore, at least kind of MAGA people on the right, who maybe sometimes know better about vaccines in particular, they often cite this moment when a lot of public health professionals signed a letter saying that even if you were locked down, you could go out and protest in the Black Lives Matter protests because racism was worse than COVID, basically. And I think for a lot of people on the right, that was a moment of like, I just can't trust these people at all.

21:49Max:This is totally cynical. It's kind of a mechanism of control. That's how they saw it. And I was curious if that was a big moment for you, if you think there's any legitimacy to that point of view. Yeah, if you think about the anti-vaccine movement, it's historically not a right-wing conservative movement. It actually started on the West Coast. I mean, it went back hundreds of years. We can even go back further. But you think about crunchy liberals on the West Coast who were saying that vaccines are not natural. And then that completely swapped, which was strange because if you think about 2020, 2021, Trump was calling it his vaccine.

22:29This was his celebration. He was running Operation Warp Speed. I'm surprised they didn't call it Trump vaccine. Like it was literally going in that direction. And I think the big change happened. Absolutely some of those mistakes that you mentioned. I mean, even during Thanksgiving of 2020, the fact that the CDC was just saying, absolutely do not gather instead of giving reasonable steps of how to gather safely, because telling people after a year to continue to not gather was just going to be a losing piece of advice. It's the same thing when doctors were saying that the only way we could prevent STIs is to preach abstinence.

23:07No, you can say that condoms work. You could find a middle ground and do risk reduction. And we missed that opportunity. But I think the biggest turning point, which was when government started overstepping recommendations and making them into mandates. And there were times where perhaps it was reasonable, but then it just continued and allowed government overreach to reach a critical point. And when it did that, it brought in the libertarian right that then adopted a lot of the messaging from the anti-vaccine movement on the left. If we think about RFK Jr. as an example right now, he was running for president as a Democrat, then went independent.