Larry King On His Career, Health Crisis, and What Keeps Him Going Strong
He’s a true television legend. Larry King’s media career has spanned over five decades, and while he’s covered thousands of stories, today we’re tackling an issue closest to his heart: cardiac health. In 1987, Larry suffered from a life-changing heart attack that nearly killed him. In this interview, Larry reveals how he survived that day, and what he credits for keeping him healthy after all these years. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The feeling when you light up a cigarette of, I own the world with this little thing in my hand.
And the desperation when you don't have any is incredible.
It owns me.
But I know that if I didn't have that, here's a bad thing making good, Doc.
I didn't have the heart attack, I'd be dead today. - Hey everyone, I'd be dead today. - Hey everyone, be dead today. - Hey everyone, I'd be dead today. - Hey everyone, Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
He's an Emmy award-winning host.
He's been called by TV Guide as the most memorable talk show host on TV ever.
And Time Magazine calls him the master of the mic.
He's done more than 40,000 interviews throughout this half century of broadcasting, including exclusive sit-downs with folks like U.S. President, in fact, every U.S. President, This is Gerald Ford, so I can list them all to you individually.
He's done those interviews.
He's talked about and with Muhammad Ali.
He's been inducted into all the halls of fame you can be inducted into.
And the part about his story that a lot of you don't realize is his philanthropic side.
He's the founder of the Larry King Cardiac Foundation, which has raised millions of dollars and provided life-saving cardiac procedures for lots of needy kids and adults.
He's also donated money to numerous universities and to broadcast foundations.
And so I have the great honor today of having Lawrence Harvey Ziegler, that's his original name, born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of a garment worker and a restaurant owner.
And he's joining us today, Larry King.
Let's talk a little bit about this epiphany you had about 20 years ago.
And I actually heard from a mutual friend of ours, Wayne Isom, a little bit about the story, but I'd like to hear it from you.
Yeah, Wayne was my surgeon.
In 1987, After many, many years of smoking and being overweight and never exercising, I had a heart attack in February of 1987. I had never planned on it.
I didn't take care of myself.
And frankly, Doc, I was shocked.
Larry King wasn't going to get a heart attack.
Other people were going to get it, but not me.
In fact, Eul Brynner, the great actor who had died of lung cancer, before he died, he taped a commercial that In which he said, I'm dead now.
Please don't smoke.
Whenever that commercial would come on, I would turn off the television or switch channels because it wasn't going to pertain to me.
Anyway, I had the heart attack in Washington, D.C. and recovered from it.
And six months later, during a test, a stress test, they took me off the treadmill in one minute and said that I needed bypass surgery and subsequently went to New York for a second opinion and Dr. Wayne Isom, who you mentioned, performed the surgery.
I wound up with a quintuple bypass at New York Hospital in December of 1987. The heart attack was in February.
And I changed completely.
I was a good patient.
I never smoked again.
I started exercising.
I changed my diet.
I changed my outlook on health and life.
And then a year later, we were sitting around one day, a bunch of friends, and someone asked me, How much did the surgery cost?
And I didn't know because insurance had paid it.
And I got to thinking about people who can't afford this.
And I started the Larry King Cardiac Foundation, the purpose of which was to help people who couldn't afford it.
And we have a panel of doctors.
We work with hospitals and really grew.
And my wife is chairman and my son, Larry Jr., runs the organization.
It's not a huge charity, but we do work.
We do events.
I give proceeds from book royalties and speeches I make, and we've helped a lot of people, saved a lot of lives.
But all of it stemmed from that heart attack in February of 1987. Let me applaud you for the foundation, by the way, and just to be all listeners.
The doctors will donate their time, hospitals, try to donate facilities, companies provide donated, you But at the end of the day, there's often an outstanding balance, and the Larry King Cardiac Foundation pays that remaining balance so folks aren't left with debt.
And it's an interesting problem that you're addressing because 1,000 years ago, El Cid, the biggest hospital in the world at the time, it was in Cairo, when they sent you home from the hospital, they would give you money because they knew the time that you're most in need is when you're recovering from illness.
And it turns out the biggest cause of bankruptcy is illness.
Four of the biggest stressors in our lives are financial in nature.
So to add a financial burden on top of a physical illness is one of the best ways to guarantee people aren't going to get better.
And also, frankly, you look around the world at the countries that have insurance.
I think one of the most shameful things in America is that 47 million people don't have health insurance.
I mean, I think health is a right.
Not a privilege of the state.
I think we're entitled to the best health we can get.
Everyone, that is.
And I think it's absurd.
Harry Truman proposed it in 1948. It's never gotten really out of committee.
You know, he never had a vote on national health insurance.
No.
And to me, I can't understand it.
I mean, what's more important than we spend so much money in so many other areas Not to spend it on health is laughable.
Now, when we look at the per capita cost to take care of an American, at least what we're paying in health insurance fees, and this is a big issue obviously in the national debate now, a lot of folks will say, well, you know, we'll never be able to afford these kinds of expenses.
But one of the reasons that it costs us so much to take care of people in America compared to, for example, Europe, Which wears half the price, is that we are twice as sick.
We've got a lot more chronic disease.
Besides obesity rates, a lot of different lifestyles that we've adapted have changed that.
You have a family history of heart disease by the very fact that you had heart disease.
So for the children that you've spawned, how do you get them to take charge of their health so they don't become yet another cost item in the healthcare budget?
Bill Clinton, by the way, to his credit, is leading the drive here for children and health and eating the right foods.
You work at it.
My father died of a heart attack.
My brother didn't have a heart attack, but he didn't need bypass surgery.
I have two young boys.
I have three grown children who appear to be okay.
They get checked.
But by two young boys, the odds are one of them would have a heart problem, right?
That's right.
Yeah, based on natural 50-50.
We try the best we can to take them away from French fries and into string beans.
It is not easy.
The one good thing they have is they're both very athletic.
So they're playing all the time, running all the time, so we have no weight problem.
They stay exercise well.
They learn about it in school as well.
A lot of it is fingers crossed and doing the best you can.
And I don't want to interview you, but if you can give me a certain method how to get a kid...
To not want that french fry or that pop tart.
How do you do that?
Well, the two techniques that we found to be most helpful, I did a show at the BBC on this recently.
We had it on Oprah as well.
We have one, peer pressure, which is incredibly effective.
And that means finding friends for the kids who actually have parents with similar values as you do.
So the kids sort of feel a sense of coolness if they eat the right things.
And the other reality is it takes about a dozen tastings for a kid To be able to change their taste desires.
So when you fail four, five, six, nine, ten times, it doesn't matter.
You've got to keep going.
Kids have a lot more taste buds than adults do.
They're not supposed to taste exotic foods or like the kinds of good-for-you foods that a lot of adults get used to.
And the biggest challenge I find in America, Larry, is that we have infantilized our taste buds.
Our taste buds never mature.
There are 35-year-olds that have the taste buds of a six-year-old.
And so they continue to eat the junk that they got used to when they were young when it was okay to have a sugary meal because that's all their taste buds would encourage them to have.
So that's why we have, I guess you'd call it, an epidemic of atherosclerosis.
That's why, by the way, our foundation doctor has partnered with us against atherosclerosis.
To help raise awareness about atherosclerosis and mobilize Americans to improve their health.
Is it an epidemic?
Without question, it's an epidemic.
And it's one of the reasons, again, why we'll never balance our health care budget until we have a broader awareness of how much of an influence you have on your health.
And you control two-thirds of your health destiny.
So whether it's the risk factors you're carrying through life, and you were dealt the handed cards that included heart disease as one of them, and you dealt those saying cards to your kids, programs like the one you mentioned are important because if you can get America to fight against Athero or have folks deal more rationally with other programs like Health Across America, another program I know you're involved with, then we'll be able to get folks to be proactive in the ways they need to because we're not We're never going to be able to legislate this from Washington.
Tip O'Neill used to say, I don't know if you knew him, would say that all politics was local, but all healthcare is personal.
We've got to do it ourselves.
Well put.
Anthro is, basically, it's the buildup of plaque right in the arteries.
It's the rusting of our arteries.
It's the number one cause of heart disease, right?
Heart disease, stroke, probably the major reason people get dementia, kidney disease, impotence, and even wrinkles are all caused by atherosclerosis because the arteries don't carry the blood where it needs to go.
That's why the penis is the dipstick for health for men.
Because if the penis is not working correctly, that means the blood vessels inside the penis have developed changes that are along the lines of athero.
And if that dipstick's not working, it means the same problems are happening in your kidneys, your brain, your heart, and elsewhere.
Wow.
That's something to think about.
What do you do about it?
There's a lot to do about it.
You know, you got that.
What a great interviewer Larry King is.
Now all of a sudden I'm getting interviewed on my own show.
I mean, what do you do about that if the penis is a structure for your health?
And you notice changes.
What do you do?
Well, there are a couple of things that are profoundly important.
Belly fat converts testosterone to estrogen.
So men, even if their testes are normal sized, if they've got extra belly fat on board, the testosterone that's made by the testes will be actually changed to estrogen.
So you become feminized.
That's why guys with big guts develop breasts, but they also, almost across the board, will develop erectile dysfunction.
Getting rid of the belly fat is a great approach.
There are also drugs that block that conversion, so you have the testosterone you want in your body.
If you don't have testosterone, you can't make muscle.
If you don't have muscle, then you don't have a metabolic furnace chewing up calories.
If you're not chewing up the calories, you'll start to accumulate more fat.
What you want to do is to maintain a lot of muscle mass so that you can eat what you want to eat and not put on belly fat.
And if you maintain that kind of a body physique, then the penis will begin to work again because the blood vessels going to it, which are important to engorge it with blood when you're excited, will begin to function.
But even more importantly, the same process will be taking place in organs you can't see from the outside.
Wow.
I never knew that.
I'm glad we came to work today.
Let me tell you what we're doing, though.
Okay.
We're urging people, there's a program called the Athero IQ program, in cooperation with AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical company, to learn about this condition, receive important information, and help prevent it.
Anyone listening now can sign up.
You log on to our foundation website.
It's www.lkcf.org.
Or the United States Against Athero at www.athro.com.
And everyone who registers, a donation is made to the Larry King Cardiac Foundation in support of the Foundation's mission, which is to save a harder day.
We're doing the best we can in many areas in addition to just helping others, but we're trying to get more information to people about how they can be healthier.
Your foundation has done some very innovative work along these lines.
You probably have some favorite stories that come to mind.
I'll tell you one that just drops out at me.
We don't just help people in America.
There was a young boy in Afghanistan who had a heart problem that they didn't know how to work on.
And in cooperation with, this was during the Afghanistan war, during cooperation with the Pentagon contacted us and said, if we fly this young man over with the Larry King Cardiac Foundation, it was a valve condition, would we cover the cost of his valve condition?
As you said, we contacted our doctors.
They work it for nothing or a little cost.
The hospital reduces its charges.
The Pentagon flew the boy over.
I went and visited him when I walked into that room.
It was such an emotional moment.
He couldn't talk English.
And neither could his father.
He was there but the feelings in that room.
There's a worldwide feeling that says thank you.
And so the joy that we get at the Foundation in helping you.
We help someone almost every day.
And then to see the look in that young man's eyes.
And to know that someday he'll know that he was helped by Americans in an American hospital.
The Pentagon was just a classic example of people working together to help someone.
Another great thing that I get, doctor, is that I get to, after we decide we're going to do this patient, a team of doctors looks over the circumstances.
I make the call.
I tell John Smith that we're going to do his surgery or his whatever procedure he needs.
We're going to do it.
And the thrill in hearing that from on the other side of the phone, and then after we do it, if it's anywhere close to where I'm at, I go visit the hospital and go see the patient.
And when you walk into that room, and then we have a gala we do once or twice a year in Washington and Los Angeles, and we invite patients to the gala.
And we had our 20th anniversary last week, and there were patients there, and some of them got up and spoke.
And there were tears all over the audience because you know there's nothing better than saving a life.
You're a doctor.
You know that.
What's the best reward you get?
It's good karma.
And I tell you, it's not about managing time in life.
It's about managing energy.
And when you get involved in programs like Larry King, Cardiac Foundation, you're managing energy in a good way.
Got a lot more questions to get to, but first, a quick break.
You've become such a movie star now.
How does that affect your broadcasting?
Well, the first one was Ghostbusters.
And they called.
I'd never done a film.
And I was on national radio.
And I had the first really national radio talk show.
And I was doing local television.
And the producers called up and said, I would like to be in a movie.
It's Ghostbusters.
But you would be on the air doing the Larry King show.
And some woman would call in, frightened.
About ghosts.
And I did the scene, by the way, through the whole scene, I'm smoking.
That's right, that's right, yes.
I was just blown away, smoking.
And that was the first scene shot in that movie.
And Ivan Reitman directed it, and of course it became a classic.
Such a hoot and then suddenly people started calling and I wound up.
I did Shrek 2 and 3 and Shrek 4. I did the B movie.
And I'm in another film, Kevin Costner's movie.
Well, your voice is too memorable.
My friend Al Pacino told me that if I do a movie as someone else, it can't be a walk-on, it can't be a bit part, because no one would accept that.
I would have to be in the movie continuously, so that after the initial shock, they would accept the fact that I'm a judge.
Well, throughout this long and storied broadcasting career, there were probably some high points, obviously, and some low points.
With regard to your health, there must have been low points that sort of were re-emphasized.
And I'm going to come back to the cigarette point again.
You know, you're a smart man.
Your father died of heart disease.
You were still smoking.
Was there a time before you had the heart attack when you were still smoking, when you said to yourself, God, you know, I'm just a mess up.
I'm just not able to do even the simple things right.
Yeah.
Doctor, did you ever smoke?
No, I'm not.
I'll tell you about smoking.
Smoking is terrible because it's wonderful.
In other words, it really is a dichotomy.
The feeling when you light up a cigarette is a very good feeling.
And there's a lot going on at once.
It's not just that the body has taken to an addiction to tobacco.
There is a sexual feeling to it.
There is a hand-to-mouth motion feeling to it.
There's a feeling of, I own the world with this little thing in my hand.
And the desperation when you don't have any is incredible.
What shocked me the most, and listeners should pay attention to this, is how damn easy it was to stop.
I had a heart attack.
I stopped that day and never wanted one again.
I had a doctor friend.
You tell me if this is right.
He thinks I was scared, scared straight.
And I got so scared by the heart attack and the three days in the hospital when I couldn't smoke that I lost it.
Do you buy that?
How do I stop that day?
Well, I do buy it.
Obviously, since I do heart surgery as well, I see what is often occurring in the minds of patients who are finally facing the reality of death.
For men especially, we grew up thinking we're immortal.
We don't actually say that we think that, but we act that way.
And what changes our behavior is not because we understand at a very cerebral level what's going on.
It's because deep down in our reptilian brain, something clicks.
Whether it's the realization that you're not going to see your kids grow up, the love you have for your wife, or even for yourself.
And the biggest problem we have with cigarette smoking is we always try to smash the ash, right?
We make people who are scared more afraid.
We take people with low self-esteem and we insult them, and we wonder why they don't stop smoking.
And I think you just described it beautifully.
For smokers, not only does it feel good, but smokers tend to be very uncomfortable being uncomfortable.
So when life's not okay, they panic.
And I think for most of us, probably sort of realize that not feeling okay is part of life.
And you sort of get through it, go to the next thing.
In fact, your most creative times are when you're not okay.
That's probably true for you.
I mean, if you look back on your career, 50 years of interviewing just about everybody, Probably some of your downest times, times where your saddest or most concerned about what was going on was when you did your most creative work because you were stimulated to change.
Correct.
And you're driven.
You get driven by the downs.
The downs you make up.
You make the downs work for you.
Give me an example of a down that you had that allowed you to break out of a mold you were in or get out of the rut you were stuck in.
Oh, I've had a lot of them.
Long ago, I had a financial problem.
I didn't handle money well.
And because of that, I'd lost a job once.
This is 40, maybe 45 years ago.
And I was at the lowest end.
And I got hired by another station.
And I said to myself, I'd never let this happen again.
And I was so up I knew I was a good broadcaster.
I became a 100% better broadcaster from that knockdown.
You know, it's very good, it's weird to say this, but it's very good to have something bad happen to you.
Because it measures you, and you can use it.
And I've used that ever since.
I have a firm in Boston that handles all my finances.
That was not my strength.
That is their strength.
I pay them to do it.
They take care of it.
You know, I have never seen a CNN check.
I don't know what they look like.
How do you know they're paying you?
They go to Boston.
Boston would tell me if they didn't.
And I have a credit card.
I mean, I don't go nuts, but I don't have $40,000 sitting in my pocket that I could just go out and spend.
So that's something I did.
But I overcame it by...
Knowing I had talent, being mad at myself for letting that talent get hurt, and then working harder at it.
You were talking about smoking.
I'll tell you a story about how tough it is when you smoke.
You never smoked, right?
No, I did not.
All right.
I'm smoking.
I'm smoking three packs a day.
I'm living in Virginia.
I'm single.
I'm by myself.
It's a snowstorm.
I get up, open my eyes.
It's three in the morning.
No cigarettes.
Now, I'm in total panic.
I'm running around the apartment like a maniac.
I'm in the garbage looking for cigarette butts.
I can't find any.
So, okay, I put on my clothes.
It's a snowstorm.
This is 7-Eleven, three blocks from the house.
I go down to get the car, but the garage door is snowed in.
It won't open.
I've got to walk to the 7-Eleven.
At 3 in the morning.
Put on the boots.
3 in the morning.
The snow is whacking in my face.
I run.
I try to run.
I fall.
I get into the 7-Eleven.
I go behind the counter.
I take a pack of cigarettes, open it, and light up before I pay.
And I'm looking at myself like, I am owned by this.
It owns me.
Mm-hmm.
But you're saying I was smart and everything, couldn't do anything about it, or I thought I couldn't do anything about it.
In other words, I was under the myth, you can't stop smoking.
That's a myth, by the way, audience.
You can stop smoking.
Now, did I need an event, a heart attack?
Maybe.
But I know that if I didn't have that, here's a bad thing making good, Doc.
Mm-hmm.
I didn't have the heart attack, I'd be dead today.
Oh, that's a great line.
I would have kept smoking.
That's a great lie.
The heart attack saved my life.
I never put it that way.
Love talking about this.
Stay with us right after the break. - Let's finish up talking about religion a little bit.
At some point in your life, you became agnostic.
I want to talk about Powerful Prayers, your 1998 book, but why did you become agnostic?
What happened that sort of got you going in that direction?
I don't know.
Powerful Prayers was a book I enjoyed writing, and I wrote it with a rabbi, and I was fascinated by people who get benefits from it and who have strong beliefs.
And I'm impressed with her.
My wife is a devout Mormon.
Most of my friends are believers.
I became agnostic early on.
I was bar mitzvahed.
And I started to question rabbis, and the answers never satisfied me.
And the problem was, when I started becoming a broadcaster, and I would interview religious leaders, as much as I respected them, I could never accept answers like, let me explain the Holocaust.
We don't question God's ways.
God knows more than we do.
We can't have the answers, but you're teaching it.
So it confounded me.
And then, or sometimes they'll tell you, well, it's, God gave us free will, right?
Yep, yep.
What did that have to do with Katrina?
What did that have to do with the earthquake in China?
Or nothing to do with free will.
So I became, I don't, I'm not an atheist.
An atheist says, there is no God.
Right.
I don't know that.
In fact, atheism is kind of a religion.
I say I just don't know.
I have no idea if anything happens to me after I die.
And truth to be told, I think most people really don't know.
And they latch on to faith.
It's a thing I wish I had.
I can't grab it.
I can't accept the fact that someone is up there looking down for me or that I will go somewhere after I die.
But I don't know that I won't.
I sure hope I do.
I hope the believers are correct.
I've heard faith described as the belief that when it's all over, there's either something solid to stand on, or God will give you wings to fly away if there's not.
But you make an interesting point there that deep down, most of us don't know.
In your quietest moments with your wife, who's a Mormon, and she does have a belief system around this, how do you resolve that?
We don't.
What we do is we wind up off on not talking about it.
Because when an event happens, by the way, you can't This I've learned.
Argue or discuss faith.
We could discuss it, but it doesn't go anywhere.
For example, the earthquake in China.
So I casually say to my wife over the breakfast table, why didn't God prevent this?
He's all-powerful, omnipotent.
Why didn't he prevent it?
And then she gives me one of these answers.
You ever want to belt the wife?
She says...
She's next to me right now.
She says, it's nature.
I said, what is nature?
It's nature.
God made the world to revolve a certain way.
He made nature.
So the nature then killed 100,000 people in an earthquake or however it killed.
They were the victims of nature.
I wasn't.
The nature didn't hit me in L.A. It hit them in China.
Why them?
I can't understand it.
On the other hand, admittedly, it's hard to swallow the reality of that many people dying in the earthquake in China, in a hurricane in Southeast Asia, in Katrina.
But as humans, we need free will, right?
We need to be able to make mistakes, see problems, address issues.
I mean, it's our opportunity to change.
Absolutely.
It's essential.
And if there was a God, He gave us free will.
But if there was a God, why did He let a Katrina happen?
That had nothing to do with free will at all.
Well, it's not a matter of us.
If all the things that are happening around us were good, then where do we show our free will?
Where do we actually make the big decisions that allow us to fight a war in Europe to address a totalitarian regime that did cause a holocaust?
Where's the opportunity to go and help people in other parts of the world?
I mean, I'm of Turkish origin, and when the big earthquake hit Turkey, Uh-huh.
Almost ten years ago now, and just outside of Istanbul, and there were 25,000 people who were killed almost immediately.
The first people who came to help were the Israelis and the Greeks.
Now, the Turks and Israelis have a close relationship, but the Greeks and Turks have been fighting for millennia.
And that actually really helped their relationship, that the Greeks felt the pain the Turks were experiencing and went to their help.
So, you believe this was part of some master plan?
No, I don't.
But I'm only asking the more provocative question of whether bad things are allowed to happen to us because it's part of the free will.
It's not so much that God wants it to happen.
I will say.
One of the best books I ever read was Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People.
That was a rabbi.
I think he passed away.
I don't know, but if he didn't, I'll get him on the show.
Yeah, you are.
I'm not sure.
He may or he may not.
One of the great books you've ever written.
I want to thank you very much for all your foundation work.
Give us the information again one more time, just in case folks missed it before.
You bet.
If you can sign up, log on our foundation website, www.lkcf.org.
That's Fights Atherosclerosis.
And you will do a wonderful thing.
You'll be getting lots of information.
And importantly, everyone who registers, everyone a donation is made by AstraZeneca to the Larry King Cardiac Foundation.
So it's www.lkcf.org.
And thank you for this opportunity, Dr. Oz.
Look forward to seeing you again soon on our show.
