The Dumbest Things Done or Said by Celebrity Smarty-Pants
If your “self-help guru” eats a lethal amount of swordfish, he was probably not very good at self-help.
Dr. Oz, Zodiac Shill
It’s hard to pick the shiniest turd out of multiple careers of professional grifting, so here are a few of our favorites: He’s claimed that eating sea bass can reduce the risk of ovarian cancer by “up to 75 percent,” astrological signs “may reveal a great deal about our health” and insisted that the abortion conversation should be between “women, doctors and local political leaders.”
Tony Robbins Almost Pescatarianed Himself to Death
The self-help guru was vegan for 12 years before adding fish into his diet. He ate so much swordfish and tuna that he gave himself mercury poisoning and almost died.
Dr. Phil, Small-Town Grifter
The guy has been a menace to society for the entirety of his career as a fake TV doctor, as evidenced by his impressive four-subheader “Controversy” section on Wikipedia. But he cut his teeth in low-level local grifting: In the ‘70s, he sold lifetime memberships to his family’s Topeka, Kansas spa, but quietly sold the subscriptions to another business before shuttering his and moving out of state. He got to collect some quick cash, while his former customers were legally obligated to continue paying for their memberships.
Carl Sagan’s Weird Whale Karaoke
Compared to other dudes on this list, Sagan is squeaky freakin’ clean. The only dirt that’s ever slung is usually along the lines of: He was kind of a jerk to his first two wives and some of his collaborators. One piece of evidence for the latter is that producers on Cosmos would sometimes design segments to embarrass him, like his much-memed attempt to mimic whale sounds.
Dr. Drew’s About-Face on COVID
Drew Pinsky isn’t the first or last celebrity doctor to lie about public health to gain conservative street cred. His lies weren’t even the dumbest or most brazen of the COVID pandemic, but his comeuppance was one of the most satisfying. After downplaying the virus in early 2020, calling it a “press-induced panic,” he later contracted the disease so hard he thought he had leukemia. He wound up apologizing for his statements and supporting mask-wearing.
Fred Hoyle Said Pandemics Come From Space
Hoyle was the wildly popular host of the BBC’s The Nature of the Universe throughout the 1950s. He popularized the term “the big bang,” and made countless other scientific concepts palatable to the masses. He also believed that illnesses are floating around in space, and that while the sun normally blasts them out of our atmosphere, pandemics like polio, mad cow disease and the 1918 flu were the result of low solar activity.
Dr. Ruth Tarnished Her Reputation in Palestine
Before she was an elderly sex therapist and talk show host, Ruth Westheimer was a member of what would become the Israel Defense Forces during the 1948 Palestine War. She says she’s never killed anyone, but she does have one war story that haunts her — doin’ it raw in a barn: “We visited that hayloft again and again (and that I didn’t wind up pregnant was a minor miracle, because we weren’t using any form of birth control). I know much better now and so does everyone who listens to my radio program.”
Mayim Bialik on C-Sections
Between playing a nerd on The Big Bang Theory and her real-life neuroscience PhD, she gets a lot of undue smarty pants cred. In reality, she’s got a laundry list of bad quotes and bad opinions: Hers is a “non-vaccinating” family, she believes that Harvey Weinstein’s victims perhaps “act(ed) flirtatiously with men” and it’s a perfectly valid scientific take on C-sections that “if the baby can’t survive a home labor, it is okay for it to pass peacefully.”
What Is Neil deGrasse Tyson Going on About?
Most of his media appearances and social media posts are pretty lib-coded, but a recent Twitter poll has people wondering if he’s done an about-face. He’s holding four red hats, with goof-ass kissy faces plastered on his mug, and the caption “Decisions, decisions. Which hat to wear today?” The options are “Relax It’s Just A Red Hat,” “Make Lying Wrong Again,” “Make America Smart Again” and “Make America Great Again.” Is he testing the MAGA waters, or is he doing 2015-era resistance uncle performative activism?
Stephen Hawking’s Double Standard
Hawking was surprisingly chill when his wife fell in love with a family friend, insisting only that they continue to keep their family together. Decades later, after his illness had progressed, he fell in love with one of his nurses, swiftly married her and departed the family home. They later divorced, Hawking moved back in and then briefly entertained an engagement with another woman 39 years his junior. Also, not for nothin’, but he did go to a party or two on Epstein’s Island.
Charles Darwin Looked at Marriage Like He Was Appraising Livestock
A couple of decades before On the Origin of Species would launch him into the public eye, Darwin was diagnosed with a heart condition and ordered by his doctor to “knock off all work.” While staying with family in the country, he fell in love with his cousin. After writing a pro/con list that included “Less money for books” and “Better than a dog anyhow,” he proposed.
David Attenborough Was a Real-Life Pokemon Trainer
Attenborough solidified his rep as the U.K.’s number one nature boy back in the 1950s, when he hosted a popular show called Zoo Quest. Each episode, he committed some light colonization and animal cruelty by traveling the world to capture exotic animals to be held in captivity back at the London Zoo. In his defense, his programs have become much more conservation-focused and less kidnappy in the decades since.
Steve Irwin’s Michael Jackson Moment
Michael Jackson caught a lot of flack for dangling his son Blanket off a balcony, and rightly so. Two years later, Steve Irwin was once photographed strolling into a crocodile enclosure with a fistful of raw chicken in one hand and an armful of his tiny infant son in the other. He argued that it was a misleading photograph and that besides, he’d been doing the exact same thing with his daughter “for like five-odd years.”
Albert Einstein: Bit of a Racist
When he wasn’t doing math or marrying his cousin, he was harboring cruel judgments about Asian people. In what The Guardian generously calls “disobliging remarks” in his private journal, Einstein called Chinese people “filthy and obtuse” and feared they might “supplant all other races.”
