From Infamous Scandals to Fierce Feuds: A Deep Dive into Celebrity Culture

So you love scandalous stories about power struggles and feuds, or you wouldn't be here listening to infamous. And now I have another podcast for you to check out. It's hosted by Delta Work and Kelsey Padgett, and it's called Fierce Rivalries. The two of them talk about Hollywood divas like Betty Davis and Joan Crawford, or historic icons like Cleopatra and Julia Caesar. It's all about intense competition between friends or between enemies or, you know, frenemies. So here comes a clip of Fierce Rivalries. ♪♪♪ Today's rivalry has everything. It's got cannibalism, cows, and Oprah, of course. I don't think there's anybody that can rival Oprah, so I'm curious as to what this is going to be, because it has to be like Oprah versus Jesus, or like Oprah versus oxygen. Totally unrelated. How much do you like burgers, hamburgers? I love hamburgers, but I'm really sort of picky in the sense that, oh, it's so funny. I say I'm picky, I'm not that picky. I have preferences, but I generally, like, if I get like a McDonald's, if I go to McDonald's, I like to have the two cheese burger combo, but I have to have them plain. I don't want any sauce or pickles or anything on them, but if I have like a gourmet burger as it is, I like all kinds of stuff on it. I hate those little onions and McDonald's. You don't like those? Get out of here, tiny onions. Well, anyway, we could go off about onions. But today, burgers and Oprah, all the beef industry. There you go. I knew this was coming. So you say, oh, the beef industry tells me that you're familiar. Oprah had a beef with the beef industry, but I don't even remember all the intricacies. I don't remember if it was like she was going vegan, maybe. I don't know. I mean, it could be anything or she was telling people not to eat it because, you know, tell me all of it. I'm going to tell you all about it. All of it. And I got to say, there's going to be some gross meat stuff in this today. So if you don't want to hear that, this is your sign. I should say, if anybody is not familiar with Oprah, Oprah Winfrey was a daytime talk show host and her show, the Oprah Winfrey Show, ran from 1986 to 2011. At its peak, it had 42 million viewers a week. And the era that we're going to talk about is the mid 90s. At this time, Oprah had successfully molded her show into something different than the rest of the daytime TV landscape. Instead of being like shock value TV, like, you are not the father or my cousin slept with my husband and then married my aunt. Her show became what she liked to call change your life TV. She was doing spirituality and health stuff and just like self-improvement stuff to create positive change in her viewers' lives. Oprah walked so goop could run. I love the idea of constantly wanting to improve and evolve, but I feel like there's so many people that sort of regurgitate the same thing over and over. Sometimes it feels like it only applies to people who don't have real-time problems that they're kind of dealing with. We can't all eat, pray, love every summer. We just can't. We should be able to find the time to do it. Well, Oprah would also have, you know, topics that were serious. She'd talk about racism, sexual abuse, and addiction on the show. She really wanted her viewers to also be reading. So she started Oprah's book club. Her first selection was in September 1996. The book was called The Deep End of the Ocean. And it only had 100,000 copies in print. After she plugged it on her show, it sold 3 million more. Wow. And just like the books, every time she talked about a product on her show, that product would have increased sales. This became known as the Oprah effect. Some have even claimed that the Oprah effect gave Barack Obama 1 million extra votes in 2008. Oh, wow. Okay. Celebrity endorsement is a big deal. True. But in 1996, the Oprah effect worked backwards and backfired and landed Oprah in a rivalry with an entire industry, the beef industry. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Okay. So 1996, Bill Clinton is the president. One of my favorite songs. It's all coming back to me now by Slain Deons on the radio. Twister just came out. Love that movie. Bargo. Train spotting. This is the time that we're in. And on April 16th of 1996, Oprah aired an episode on food safety with a segment called Dangerous Foods. Okay. And here is where we're going to have some gross cow stuff. One part of her episode focused on mad cow disease. Do you remember mad cow disease? I do. There was always, there's always the times where it's like the mad cow disease or bird flu or obviously now COVID. Mm-hmm. All you have to just mention though is not like, I remember who I was at that time, what it was doing. Oh, yeah. You know, yeah. So yeah, mad cow disease. Blast from the past. Mad cow disease was on everybody's tongues in 1996. Hopefully it's not on your tongue though because mad cow disease is very deathly. So it is bovine spongiform encephalopathy. It's a neurodegenerative disease, meaning it wastes away the brain. You can get it as a human if you eat beef from a cow who has had mad cow disease. Right. Yeah. It's very scary because there's not a cure. All you can do is just sort of be like, well, here we go. And also like you could contract it and then not have symptoms for many years. But once symptoms start, then it is most definitely fatal. So in 1996, there was an outbreak of mad cow disease in the UK that this time it had caused 10 deaths. Eventually it ended up causing 178 deaths. But at the time in 1996, it was down at 10 deaths. British ranchers. They were destroying the cows that they had found were infected with mad cow. But the disease was continuing to spread to other cows and then therefore to humans who ended up dying. It's very tragic. And they were like, well, why is this happening? Why are we still spreading this disease even though we are killing the cows that have it? Well, there is a practice amongst farmers that goes back to the 1800s and it is that you use everything. And so if a cow is destroyed or killed, it would be rendered and then turned into a substance called MBM meat and bone meal. Okay. And then MBM was used as a protein supplement in the feed for other cows. This didn't cross anyone's mind that this, wow. Okay. Oh, that is disturbing. It's so disturbing. Cow cannibalism. Yeah. You know, so they stop doing this in the UK once they find out that this is the cause, right? But on the Oprah show, she's telling the audience about this for the first time. She has a vegetarian animal rights activist who his name is Howard Lyman and he's like, if you turn just one infected cow into a protein supplement, then it can go on to infect thousands of other cows. And that it would be really horrible if that happened here. Right. And it's true in the UK, they ended up having to incinerate 4 million cows. Wow. To stop the spread of this. Yeah. But then Howard Lyman made some really big claims on Oprah show that it was probably already present amongst American cattle and that it was, could be so bad that it would make AIDS look like the common cold. That's a claim. Yeah. Quite the thing to say, right? That's, that can be dangerous when you don't have, when you're just surmising. Right. I don't know. It's like a, just a very scary thing to say and Oprah doesn't really question him on it. She's just like, whoa. Turns out this doesn't happen. Obviously we're living here way past 1996 and I haven't really heard about mad cow in a long time. There has only ever been six cows in the US that, that contracted mad cow. And the first one wasn't until 2003. So, so Howard Lyman, he's telling Oprah that the mad cow is probably already here and it's got to make everybody dead and it's so crazy and it's very shocking. And Oprah is shocked too. And you know, what she says next on the show has some huge consequences. Oprah turns to the audience and she says, now, doesn't that concern you all a little bit hearing that? It has just stopped me cold from eating another burger. I'm stopped. These are just a few examples of the stories you'll hear on fierce rivalries. Whether you're looking for drama or intrigue or just a good laugh, it's got you covered. Listen on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.