Shut Up and Listen - Issue #6

“Dr. Death” comes to town 💀🔪

I have a confession to make: I have never listened to Serial.

If you’re ready to revoke my podcast aficionado card right here, right now, I would understand.

Let me dig myself into a deeper hole: S-Town? Dirty John? My Favorite Murder? I don’t know her.

Historically, true crime podcasts have never been my thing. But that changed in one fell swoop after seeing an article with this headline: “This True-Crime Podcast Is the Grossest Thing I’ve Ever Heard (and I Love It).”

The podcast in question is Wondery’s Dr. Death, and I took this article as a personal challenge. Gross? Gory? Deeply disturbing? Bring. It. On.

I binged all 4 episodes in one day, and can confirm Dr. Death is every bit as horrifying as promised. It’s also a fantastic, well researched, completely engrossing story that is expertly explored by health and science journalist Laura Beil. She exposes not only the potential motives (or lack thereof) behind Dr. Christopher Duntsch’s gruesome and often fatal surgeries, but the way the American healthcare system repeatedly failed to protect his victims.

All I’m trying to say is, please listen to it, so we can scream about it together.

(Also, shoutout to Mickaela Fouad who convinced me to start listening, and has dealt with many furious DMs from me as we tried to make sense of Dr. Death’s twisted actions).

All physicians are taught, “First do no harm.” But what happens when a doctor does harm his patients?

Chris Duntsch was a promising medical student, with a bright future ahead of him. The friends who knew him were shocked at the doctor he would later become. And no one believed they knew Chris Duntsch better than his best friend, Jerry Summers.

Kimberly Morgan was attracted to Christopher Duntsch from the moment she met him, but she also saw another side to him. Duntsch’s behavior led many people who came into contact with him to wonder: Was he an impaired physician? A terrible surgeon? Or a cold-blooded killer?

If a doctor is fired from a hospital, you have to do two things: the first, is to report them to the state medical board. The second is to report him to the National Practitioner Data Bank. Baylor-Plano did neither of those things.

Zazie Beetz is back, with her writer-actor boyfriend David Rysdahl. Justin also brought his boyfriend, Rick Proctor, into the studio. Both baes are white. We discuss the deep personal growth and public perils of our interracial love.

Angel Lopez is the new mold of Hollywood gatekeeper: gay, Latinx, a producer who also writes, a professional astrologer. He and Justin get real about being your authentic self in an industry built on sameness that’s obsessed with sales and sequels.

During this New Moon, we’ll feel the presence of much deeper aspects of Virgo. To make the most of this Moon’s promise, we will want to dive into the mythic roots of this sign.

Jen and Lou talk about the astrology and numbers of the coming New Moon and the energies around it.

In 1984, crack cocaine is becoming an epidemic in Detroit. Several African-American drug gangs are battling each other for territory. On the east side of the city, a white teenager is about to find himself at the center of it all when the FBI asks him to learn everything he can about the drug dealers in his neighborhood.

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