George Tolis: TAVR, Broken Training, and What's Really Wrong With Cardiac Surgery. Dr. George Tolis, section chief of coronary and general cardiac surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital, joins Drs. Koka and DiGiorgio for a wide-ranging conversation on the state of cardiac surgery. He makes the case that TAVR — while genuinely transformative for the right patient — is being systematically applied too broadly, driven by industry incentive and the erosion of meaningful surgical consent. He discusses his collaboration with John Ioannidis that found no statistically significant mortality benefit for any new cardiac surgery technique introduced over the past 35 years, the paper's rejection by every major surgical journal, and what he paid out of pocket to make it open access. The conversation moves to the collapse of surgical training — fragmented pathways, work hour restrictions that leave residents unprepared for attending life, an academic promotion system that ignores teaching, and a culture that routes incompetent trainees around rather than out — and closes with a brief on Vasily Kolesov, the Soviet surgeon from Leningrad who performed the world's first documented coronary bypass years before Favaloro, and whose work was buried by the Cold War. Chapter Markers 00:00 Introduction 01:02 Air-cooled VWs, concert piano, and how Dr. Tolis got here 02:40 TAVR: genuine breakthrough or being abused? 08:02 Finding the TAVR threshold — and why informed consent is the real problem 11:46 Collaborating with John Ioannidis: no mortality benefit for 35 years of new techniques 20:02 Why the major surgical journals wouldn't touch the paper 21:52 Minimally invasive surgery: minimal access vs. minimally invasive 26:24 When do CABG survival curves diverge — and what does it mean? 30:05 Surgeons signing off on TAVRs in young patients 33:51 Health system economics and the heart team dynamic 37:50 How to actually pick a good surgeon (ask the scrub nurses) 40:36 Cardiac surgery training: the three pathways problem 44:04 Work hour restrictions and the residency simulation gap 51:16 General surgery is like MTV — they don't operate anymore 53:21 A resident who finished training without ever applying a cross-clamp 56:34 How to evaluate if a program actually trains 59:27 Academic promotion has nothing to do with teaching 01:01:33 Dr. Tolis's resident outcomes database and three papers nobody cared about 01:05:32 The training timeline: finishing at 49, no runway left 01:07:08 One-size-fits-all RRC rules for cardiac surgery and psychiatry 01:09:16 Cardiac surgery as a disposition, not a therapy 01:12:24 When ECMO becomes the final common path 01:13:38 How you become nationally recognized without being a good surgeon 01:17:16 Vasily Kolesov: the Soviet surgeon who did the first bypass Co-Host Handles @anish_koka and @drdigiorgio Show Handle @drsloungepod Subscribe Links Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/44vw8e… Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas… YouTube: youtube.com/@TheDoctorsLoung…