Films That Broke Men's Brains: The Wolf of Wall Street

Dr. Kaveh Hoda is joined by comedian Butch Escobar and Dr. Jason Rosenbaum for the latest entry in their ongoing series on films that broke men's brains. The trio digs into Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) — a movie that proposes to be a cautionary tale about Jordan Belfort's reign of fraud, drugs, and excess, but may have accidentally created a hero for every hustle-bro in a boiler room.

They debate whether the film works as satire or celebration, why Belfort's victims are almost entirely absent from the story, and how the movie compares to better-constructed cautionary tales like Goodfellas and The Big Short. Butch draws on his own experience working in a boiler room and his past struggles with substance use, offering a raw and personal lens on the drug culture the film glamorizes. Jason breaks down why the movie's structure undercuts its stated intentions, and Kaveh — a physician who admits he reluctantly enjoyed the film — walks through the real history of Quaaludes, the neuroscience of addiction, and why doing cocaine to counteract a sedative overdose is a terrible idea.

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