Dr. Casey Means is the Co-Founder of Levels Health, which provides insights into metabolic health through real-time data. Calley Means is the Co-Founder of Truemed, which enables HSA spending on healthy food, supplements and exercise. They are the co-authors of "Good Energy." www.caseymeans.com www.calleymeans.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Showing by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. What's up? Nice to meet you guys. Great to be here. Thanks for having us, Joe. Thanks for coming here. I'm all happy, but this is not a happy subject. I don't know. It's probably a bad way to start off a podcast of how fucked we are.
But I really appreciate what you guys have been doing, and I think I first saw you on Tucker, and the details of all the stuff you guys have exposed, it's not, I mean, it's shocking, but it's not surprising. Yeah. It's really crazy. So can we get into this? Like you used to be on the dark side. Let's start with you. Tell everybody your background, like how you got started with this.
We were born and raised in Washington, D.C. And I thought being a good young conservative was supporting the farm industry or supporting the food industry, defending those industries. So I went to Stanford with Casey. She studied biology. I studied political science and economics and went on campaigns, but then was a lobbyist. Everyone bipartisan in D.C.
goes to work for the food and the farm industry. And on one morning, I'm working with the farm industry to literally steer money to the dean of Stanford Med School, who's a pain specialist, to be put on an NIH panel to say that opioids in 2011, that the issues around addiction were overblown. And we actually helped engineer an NIH panel to issue a report to say, opioid's okay, pain is a crisis.
And then later in the afternoon, working for food companies, working for Coke, steering money to institutions of trust, steering money to the NAACP to say that taking Coke off food stamps was racist. Coke soda today, to this day, is the number one item on food stamps. What I realized
fundamentally is that we are profiting the biggest industries the biggest spenders in the country are profiting from kids particularly getting addicted sick and fear and then and then drugging them and profiting from that what what is the conversation like when you guys are formulating a strategy to try to pretend that opioids aren't a problem
What are the conversations like? This is really important for people to understand.
The institutional design of the system, which was greatly impacted by Casey's Awakening, is that it takes good people and gives them plausible deniability. Nobody's in those back rooms conspiring and trying to be an evil person. They're literally talking to these junior staffers like me about the scourge of pain and how we have to get this innovation of opioids to the American people.
Now it's about obesity and trying to get Ozempic to 60-year-olds, which is now... the standard of care. In the rooms, it's about doing what's right and getting this innovation to the American people and everyone can kind of fool themselves. With the food, it's about getting cheap calories to kids.
You know, it's not we're going to buy off and weaponize these academic research institutions like Harvard to say sugar doesn't cause obesity and then pay the NAACP to say lower income people need to be getting their government subsidized Coke. It's that we're promoting choice. And I really did believe that and people believe that. I think...
There's pings that's coming through in so many ways of people realizing this really isn't going the right direction. I think you see it with suicide rate among doctors, the burnout rate among doctors, the fact that every friend I have from Harvard Business School who went into the pharma industry, who went into the food industry, there's chronic rates of depression among elite business people.
I think people are starting to realize this, but still, in these rooms, it's about doing the right thing. You convince yourself of that.
Wow. So it's just everyone's sort of captured by this thing and nobody steps out of the lines.
I mean, the highest level, Joe, you know, I think we don't realize that there's a defining existential issue in our country where our major institutions have been captured. I think there's like pings of consciousness trying to alert us to this, like, you know, you having people on that are calling this stuff out, trying to ring the alarm bell and people flocking to this show.
you know, iconic class from the military industrial complex, from the healthcare industrial complex. I think Elon being the richest person, the world's trying to sell us something. It's like, let's get resources to these people calling these things out. I think it's like Donald Trump. Like, I've been thinking about this a lot. Why is he the defining figure of our lifetime?
Like, why have voters again and again and again gone to him and said, you know, this MAGA movement, like, Why are we like supporting this person, making him the defining person of our generation? What does he represent? He represents like putting finger on something that's just not quite right with institutions.
And I think the problem is we can't quite wrap our hand head around how bad it is and how so many people are complicit. But there's all these signs right now. And I think I think we're going to be brought to our knees if we don't realize this, that our institutions have been captured. Like to me, health care, what Casey talks about is.
It's a really visceral example of something just not right with what's happening to food, what's happening to our kids' health. And I think it's happening to the military, too, or the military industrial complex.
Like, I'm truly worried that we're on the verge of almost a societal level collapse with what's happening to our food, what's happening to our health, what's happening with the potential nuclear war.
and i think we have people starting to realize this and they're trying to like lunge out for it um but we're being told it's alarmist we're being told it's a conspiracy theory and and to me that that's what we've kind of landed on this health issue let's just bring it down to the facts of what's happening to kids let's bring it down to just like let's forget the conspiracy theory what even anyone's saying this room let's look what's happening to our food and looks what's happening to kids because by the stats we're seeing there's something really dark happening like like
outside any conspiracy theory, just the statistics of what is happening to our health in this country and uniquely in America, it's dark.
This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience is brought to you by Call of Duty. You know, when a new Call of Duty drops, everyone's trying to find a way to squeeze in those extra hours of gameplay. I get it. Life is busy, but sometimes you just need it.
Hey, Joe, it's the replacer. Yeah, no, you. Hey, I'm going to take it from here so you can enjoy some Call of Duty Black Ops 6. Great. Now, listen up, folks. Life can be chaotic, but you shouldn't have to miss out on the latest Call of Duty just because you've got, I don't know, responsibilities. That's where I come in. I will handle the boring stuff like work, chores, even podcast ads.
So you can dive right into the fight. Call of Duty Black Ops 6 is out October 25th. So dive in because I've got your back. Remember, I replace you, Blade. It's that simple.
Man, the replacer always gets it done. Seriously, though, if you're hooked on Call of Duty, this is your time to jump in. Head over to callofduty.com slash blackops6 to get in the game. Call of Duty Black Ops 6. Pre-order now. This episode is brought to you by the Farmer's Dog. Dogs are amazing. They're loyal. They're lovable. Just having Marshall around can make my day ten times better.
I'm sure you love your dog just as much, and you want to do your best to help them live longer, healthier, happier lives. And a healthy life for your dog starts with healthy food, just like it does for us. There's a reason having a balanced diet is so important. So how do you know if your dog's food is as healthy and as safe as it can be?
Farmer's Dog gives you that peace of mind by making fresh, real food developed by board-certified nutritionists to provide all the nutrients your dog needs. And their food is human-grade, which means it's made to the same quality and safety standards as human food. Very few pet foods are made to this strict standard. And let's be clear, human-grade food doesn't mean the food is fancy.
It just means it's safe and healthy. It's simple, real food from people who care about what goes into your dog's body. The Farmer's Dog makes it easy to help your dog live a long, healthy life by sending you fresh food that's pre-portioned just for your dog's needs. Because every dog is different. And I'm not just talking about breeds.
From their size to their personality to their health, every dog is unique. Plus, precise portions can help keep your dog at an ideal weight, which is one of the proven predictors of a long life. Look, no one, dog or human, should be eating highly processed foods for every meal. It doesn't matter how old your dog is. It's always a great time to start investing in their health and happiness. So...
Try the Farmer's Dog today. You can get 50% off your first box of fresh, healthy food at thefarmersdog.com slash rogan. Plus, you get free shipping. Just go to thefarmersdog.com slash rogan. Tap the banner or visit this episode's page to learn more. Offer applicable for new customers only. This episode is brought to you by Crash Champions. Getting an erect sucks.
There's not much else worse for your plans, and that's exactly when you need a pro to help you out. Crash Champions can answer your call and get you back on the road quickly and safely with trusted collision repair backed by a lifetime warranty. They're the fastest growing founder-led collision repair company in the nation with 650 locations across the U.S.
It's not easy to build a company from the ground up. It takes dedication, the right people, and care to give your customers the highest quality service. And that should tell you all you need to know about Crash Champions. So the next time your plans get crashed, ask your auto insurance company about Crash Champions. Visit CrashChampions.com. to find a location near you.
And so, Casey, if you could do the same, sort of explain how you got on this path. You started off with medical school.
Yeah. So just like Callie, you know, we grew up in D.C. I was I loved biology, went to Stanford Medical School, went on to do surgical residency and head and neck surgery, climb the ladder, you know, do what every good medical student and resident is supposed to do, climb the academic ranks, publish papers, et cetera. And so I was heads down in that journey. And.
Just like Kelly's saying, like with what I think is happening with the American people right now and really more globally, like there was something inside of me that was whispering and then speaking a little louder. And then finally was a deafening call to me that like something is not right. Like I'm operating. I'm working eight hours a week.
I'm operating, you know, two, three, four or five surgeries a day. And, you know, in some ways, I feel good about that. You know, people, maybe their sinusitis is a little better for a little while. But fundamentally, when you pop up for just a second, which they don't want you to do in health care, you know, everyone's working their tails off.
But when you pop up for just a second and look around at what is happening to American health, children's health, health across the lifespan, as well as global health, it's a disaster. It's literally a disaster. And again, this isn't... People will say that's alarmist, but I... You know, in trying to understand, like, why don't I feel right about my work?
I just started looking at the data in a different way. And I started to look at what's happening with health trends. And if you just kind of run through the list of what's happening, it's unbelievable. Like we are getting destroyed and it's very recent and it's accelerating. The stats speak for themselves. You know, you know this very well. Seventy four percent of Americans are overweight or obese.
50% now of American adults have type 2 diabetes or prediabetes. These were diseases where there was 1% of Americans in 1950 had type 2 diabetes. Now it's 50% of Americans have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. Alzheimer's, dementia are going through the roof. Young adult dementias have increased like three times since 2012. So early onset dementias, we're seeing...
You know, this one in two Americans are expected to have cancer in their lifetime now. One in two. And young adult cancers are going up 79% in the last 10 years. We've got, of course, the autism rates are absolutely astronomical. One in 36 children has autism now in the United States. That was one in 150 in the year 2000.
And in California, where I live, it's one in 22, one in 22 with a lifetime neurodevelopmental disorder. We've got infertility going up 1% for a year. 25% of men now under 40 have erectile dysfunction, a quarter of the country. You know, this is fundamentally a metabolic disease. We've got 77% of young Americans can't serve in the military because of obesity or drug abuse.
We've got autoimmune diseases. Some studies are saying they're going up 13% per year. It's just, it's really unbelievable. And I could go through so many more diseases. Of course, we've got heart disease, which is almost totally preventable as the leading cause of death in the United States, killing around 800,000 people per year.
And I think what, as I kind of just looked around, and again, these are just statistics, I started trying to put the pieces together.
why is this happening why are these all going up all at once and that led me on what is now a seven eight year journey ultimately leaving the surgical world putting down my scalpel forever because what i realized is that when you go to the science with a root cause perspective you go back to pubmed with a slightly different perspective not how do i treat these diseases once they emerge but why are they happening you see a very obvious blaring answer which is why we had to write a book about it which is that it's all caused by metabolic dysfunction
A term that I never learned in medical school. I learned about metabolic syndrome and the different individual diseases that make it up. But there is a problem. There is a fundamental breaking of our core cellular biology that is caused by our diet and the world we're living in, the modern world we're living in today.
that is crushing the very way that the human body and our human cells can transmit food energy to life energy, to cellular energy. And so our bodies are essentially, I mean, fundamentally, because metabolic health is how we make energy in the body,
the way that our environment is now synergistic to you storing our metabolic health and the science is very clear about this it's basically like all of us are a little bit dead while we're alive that's what metabolic dysfunction is it's less energy in the body we're underpowered and that's very dark like when you step back and and say okay This is clear from the research, and I never learned it.
I didn't learn it at Stanford Medical School. I didn't learn it in my surgical residency. And we could fix it. We could fix it really quickly if we all popped up and woke up and looked at the data and put pieces together. But of course, we're not trained to connect dots. That's not our job in medicine. We are trained to follow algorithms and to be reactive. And so I think, you know, just to sort of
kind of back up to the bigger picture of why we're so passionate about this. I think that the reason there's a Maha movement, the reason that people are so passionate about your podcast that talks about this so much, people know that something's not right. And people know that this health issue is the tip of the iceberg. of what's actually happening in our world today. It is a reflection.
Our human health is simply a reflection of the destroyed ecosystem of our globe. The fact that we have forgotten that we're completely connected to nature and we're completely interdependent with nature. But the health crisis is simply a reflection of a destroyed ecosystem. And humans have become...
so powerful and so technologically advanced and so connected in the recent decades that we now actually do have the power to both destroy the world and destroy our health. And the health is just the tip of the iceberg of a much bigger thing happening that is existential. And I think that's... We all want kids to be healthy. We all want humans to be healthy.
But this is also... It's interconnected with all the systems and all the issues. And that's... I think it's hard for people to totally articulate that, but that is what's happening. And we actually have a choice right now. And I do believe this is the moment that we need to decide, are we going to address these interdependent issues?
And are we going to make the effort and be courageous enough to fight for this? Or are we going to let ourselves be told that there's nothing wrong? Nothing to see here while our health and the health of the planet is just absolutely being destroyed. So that's what our mission is.
I think one of the most disturbing things about it is how few people are speaking out when the data is so obvious. And then when you guys lay it out and when people like Brigham Bueller, Andrew Huberman, when any of these people that are very focused on what the problems are lay it out, The data is all there, but yet we're not being told this anywhere other than the internet.
It's only independent shows that don't rely on executives and networks where there's pharmaceutical drug companies advertising or food companies or any of these things. You don't hear any of this stuff, I mean, other than Fox News has allowed you guys on a few times, right? That's right. They're the only ones. Yeah. Well, kudos to them. Yeah, absolutely. It's a human issue.
And the fact that people are willing to take money to not talk about one of the biggest problems that we have. I didn't even know about the childhood dementia thing or the young adult dementia thing.
Type 2 diabetes used to be never seen.
Super rare.
you know, among kids in their career. Right. It used to be called early onset. They don't call it early onset anymore. As Casey said, 33% of young adults now have prediabetes. I mean, this prediabetes is not some isolated thing. It's the branch of the tree. It's cellular dysregulation. And every single disease is going down. Alzheimer's is now called type 3 diabetes.
If you don't have prediabetes or diabetes, you have a very diminished chance of having Alzheimer's. And, you know, so it makes total sense. But somebody from Harvard Medical School that specialize in Alzheimer's, their entire course load, their entire training, their entire focus is on accepting Alzheimer's that it's there, that it's growing, and then figuring out marginal improvements for it.
There's literally people that are the highest educated people in the world do not even understand what causes these diseases. They're just accepting that and making the cures for them, the marginal treatments for them.
And I would just say also, if you do step back and look at everything holistically, one of the biggest problems with the healthcare industry right now is that it's so siloed. We have over 100 different medical and surgical subspecialties. And the business model of American healthcare right now is volume. It's how many people can you see. And so that's what you get paid for.
You don't get paid for outcomes. You get paid for volume. And so- That has incentivized a structure of health care where it's most profitable to actually be seen by as many specialists as humanly possible. And that's what the average American is dealing with.
They go to the primary care doctor with a list of issues and they get eight, 10 referrals and they spend their life going through revolving doors of these different health care. offices and not actually really feeling better and they feel disappointed. And that's why I think people are frustrated.
So we've got all these doctors who are incentivized to really be head down in their specialty lane and not actually step out and look at the big picture of how things are connected when in fact it's all connected. We don't see the body anymore. And I'm just telling you this from like sheer experience of being In medical school, we are not trained to see the body as a unified system.
We're trained to see it as 20, 30 different parts. And so no one's seeing the forest for the trees. But like Kelly's saying, look at what's happening. You look at what's happening with kids. We've got ADHD through the roof, autism through the roof. These are neurodevelopmental issues. Then you look at midlife. Well, Women and men are depressed. We have huge rates of mental illness. 25% of women.
25% of women now are on SSRI. I mean, we're living in like the wealthiest, safest country in human history and 25% of people are on SSRI. That's insane. Then you go into menopause, perimenopause, that age group, and it's sort of brain fog. And then we have full-blown Alzheimer's going up. So we've got all these neurodevelopmental issues and neurodegenerative issues sort of across the lifespan.
And, you know, then you look at kind of the hormonal side of things. We've got girls going through puberty much earlier than they ever were. You know, we are the, of continents on Earth, we are the earliest puberty rates right now. That's gone down on an average six years since 1900. Our puberty rates are way earlier. So girls are reaching sexual maturity at like age 10.
Then you've got in midlife, you look at women and infertility is the roof. We've got PCOS is affecting 26% of women. This is a metabolic fertility issue. It's the leading cause of infertility in the country. Then we look at older age and like menopausal symptoms are a disaster for women.
This is why a book like The New Menopause is like the number one book in the country for a while because women are desperate. So if you step back and look at all these different things, we've got these neuro issues throughout the lifetime all exploding. These hormonal issues throughout the lifetime all exploding.
it's happening all over the place but no one stopping asking why like why is this happening instead we put adhd in a bucket we put depression anxiety bucket we put alzheimer's in a bucket um and so that's that's really the problem and i think you know when you think about some of these things it's like we're becoming infertile and we're losing our minds across the lifespan like what the hell is happening like that's what these diseases these buckets of diseases represent and i think
That's why I think it's... We talked about health is the tip of the iceberg of fundamentally a planetary issue. But the planetary issue is the tip of the iceberg of what I think is really, really going on here, which is a spiritual issue. We are not fighting for life in this world anymore. And I think that's more of a consciousness issue. We talk about, why is no one covering this? It's like...
I think people see it. I think in some way we have like totally lost respect for like the miraculousness of life. That's what our actions are reflecting. Like we know a lot. We have the technology, the money and the resources to fix all of this, the planet and health. And we're not. And that's why I think there's something darker happening on like the consciousness level.
And I think we could get our way out of this if we like, I think it's going to be hard to get our way out of this. If we stick to like partisan politics and quibbling about individual policy ideas, I think it has to start with like, are we committed to life and to awe and to connecting with source and then listening and moving our way out of here? Or are we not? Yeah.
And if we choose not, which is what I think we're doing, I mean, I think there's huge light happening because that's why everyone's interested in this. That's why a lot of people are interested in this issue right now. But, like, if we don't, like, I do think we're on the road to existential disaster because we're that powerful now. And so, you know, I think...
So step one is us deciding, like, what choice do we want to make in this lifetime? Do we want to do we want to believe that humans are that life is a miracle? This universe is a miracle. Our bodies are miracles. And we want to connect with God in this lifetime. We want to build and respect these temples that are interconnected with the earth to do that. Or do we not?
And like, that's the choice we have right now. And I think we have to take that very seriously. And I think a lot of the political stuff that's happening, Maha, it's all just reflection of people. wanting to find a way to fight for life and not knowing how. But on the biggest level, that's what I think is kind of happening here.
And wanting life to make more sense than just this constant state of fatigue and constantly dealing with diseases. I want to talk about a couple of specific things you said and questions like, why are girls going through periods so much earlier?
Well, if you ask the New York Times, they'll write a headline that says girls are going through puberty weight weight earlier and no one has has any idea why. And of course, that's because there's not a double blind placebo controlled peer reviewed, you know, RCT in a in a journal that can exactly pinpoint the one reason why it's happening. But again, if we put the dots together.
Which, of course, I'm going to be called like not evidence based for saying that what's happening in our environment right now. So what drives early puberty is excess estrogens. Right. We're like we're pushing estrogens to basically, you know, spark that whole process of puberty. Well, look at our world. Where are these? Why would we be having extra estrogens?
Well, let's look at our environment, the plastics. So we've got plastics, as you know, everywhere. I love you were talking about this, I think, with Brigham, like you've got the metal cups and I love it. But like there have been eight.
billion metric tons of plastic produced on planet earth since about 1907 with when plastic was commercialized and the interesting thing about plastic is that when it breaks down it acts like a xeno estrogen an exogenous estrogen molecule that can literally bind to our estrogen receptors and act like estrogens so now we've got you know we've got you know this like we've got plastic
effing everywhere it's literally in the air we're breathing the nanoparticles it's in our food it's in our water it's in everything um and we've now found plastics in every human organ so of course that's affecting our bodies and our young girls bodies it's actually affecting our bodies in utero there was a recent study that was done that showed a hundred percent of placentas that were dissected had microplastics in them so that's one number two look at the pesticides
So there are pesticides actually where their molecular activity is to increase aromatase, the enzyme that converts testosterone to estrogen. So atrazine, which is banned in Europe, but we spray 70 million pounds of it per year in the U.S., increases aromatase, which converts testosterone to estrogen. Illegal overseas and illegal. It is – we buy it from other countries.
So China and Germany and other countries are selling us a chemical of which 70 million pounds are sprayed on our food, invisible and tasteless, which upregulates aromatase and converts testosterone to estrogen. So that's number two. And then you look at just the fat that we have on our bodies.
So fat, and especially visceral fat, the metabolically active fat around our midline, that is a metabolically active organ that actually converts testosterone to estrogen. So we are living in this wildly estrogenic era. environment that is created by humans and it's all invisible. And, and, you know, again, it's like, how would you even do the study right to show that?
And yet it's, if you put the pieces together, it's very clear. Now go into later life and talking about estrogens. We've got a huge percentage of American women on birth control pills. That's of course, post, hopefully post puberty, but we're, we're putting women on exogenous estrogens, for acne, for PCOS, for menstrual irregularity, sometimes, of course, for actual birth control.
But it's very ubiquitous now in the environment. And it's like, when you kind of know this stuff, you're like, How are we allowing this to happen? And then, of course, it's affecting boys, too. Right. You know, and so I kind of just think about this world we're living in where it's tons of estrogens. It's not like there's a bunch of exogenous testosterone. Right.
It's not like the plastics are also stimulating testosterone. So you've got these estrogens. Then we're.
barreled with sugar and it's literally like it's in our kids school lunches the sugar everywhere sugar is driving the visceral fat in kids which is turning estrogen testosterone so it's like we live in a world that's basically feminizing us which for women that's going to make puberty early for men it's going to feminize them you know and then we also have an entire food system that driving visceral fat to make us
more estrogen sort of rich. And what is this doing? I think in a lot of ways it's depleting American vigor, right? Like we're living in this estrogen stew that's hard to get away from.
This is where I think my experience ties is that on the foundational level why this is happening, it's because these studies are all funded by the chemical companies, by the food companies. We've almost been, I think, misled by the experts when it comes to chronic conditions and when it comes to nutrition to take leaves of our common sense.
Do we need to wait for a double-blind, placebo-controlled, human-randomized control study to know whether 0.5% of our brains being plastic is a good thing right now.
Do we need to have a human randomized control 10 year study to know whether an herbicide like glyphosate that's being sprayed on almost all of our food and our children's food that people have to wear hazmat suits to spray and kills every single organism in sight. Do we need to wait for a study?
Like, like we've been, we've, we've just as the medical system is siloed, we'd siloed all these questions and just taken leave of our common sense. Like, Animals in the wild, wolves in the wild are not getting chronic rates of obesity, diabetes, metabolic dysfunction.
We're born with an innate sense of knowing what's good for us, of knowing that the sun is good, of knowing that steak is good, that broccoli is good. We can't overeat those things. The problem is we've been lied to by the professors at Harvard, at Stanford, at Tufts Nutrition School.
that I believe are essentially, from my experience, PR for the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry that accepts all these things as a given. I mean, Tufts Nutrition School, 80% of their budget is from food companies. By our estimate, 50% of Stanford Medical School's budget somehow touches pharma.
So just fundamentally, on the grassroots micro level, these industries have co-opted our institution of trust and let us... You ask why we're the only people speaking out, because... Because we've made it that evidence-based medicine really accepts all this disease growing and happening. And 95% of medical spending right now is on disease once it's happened. It's on managing conditions.
And there's no higher levels of trust in our society than the NIH, than the FDA, than Harvard Med School, than Stanford Med School. So all of them are enforcing this. And then it's really just interesting where their emphasis is.
Like I was just reading the other day that California, the medical board, is checking the licenses of doctors, putting them under review if they write five vaccine exception notes. You literally are on the verge of losing your license if you even go outside the orthodoxy on vaccines. But where is that level of emphasis? Where is that level of focus?
Where is that level of rigor around metabolic health for kids, around nutrition for kids? I think it is a big deal of kids getting polio, but 50% of teens are obese or overweight right now. We have prediabetes skyrocketing. The medical system knows how to focus on something. They know how to tell Congress that there's no cost too high for something.
When it comes to pharmaceutical interventions, we're bankrupting the country with interventions once people get sick. I truly believe, and this gets to the solutions and how I actually think this is an optimistic story, people waking up, why it's an existential kind of knife's edge we're on right now. We can change this really quick.
The issue is that interest that profit from us being in fear, that just fundamentally is a statement of economic fact, profit from us being sick, profit from us being depressed, profit from us being infertile. They have co-opted our institutions of trust and they've co-opted the clinical guidelines.
Like literally when I was a junior employee, I helped Coke funnel money to the American Diabetes Association. OK, the American Diabetes Association says that if you have diabetes, you don't need to worry about your sugar intake. They say it's not tied to food. Right.
The American Academy of Pediatrics right now is saying that if your child is overweight, slightly overweight, overweight, 12 years old. Dietary infertility, don't wait. It says do not wait to see if dietary infertility works. Ozempic. It's now being studied on six years old. The American Psychiatry Association, right? The psychiatrist, the standard of care. If your child is a little sad, SSRI.
immediate intervention, right? SSRI rates have doubled among high schoolers in the past five years, right? If your child's a little fidgety, the standard of care, right? It's not asking whether they're in the sunlight, not asking if they're too sedentary, not asking if they're being force-fed ultra-processed food, which would make any animal crazy if we subject them to what kids are subjected to.
No discussion of that. It's just not in the clinical guidelines. So these doctors, these good people like Casey, go into the medical system. We're this magnet for smart people. We get them in for the right reasons. There's easier ways to make money. But they come in and they get saddled with one skill. They get saddled with a bunch of debt. And then they're realizing this is a rigged system.
Some people, few people, unfortunately, had the courage like Casey to drop out. I thought she was an idiot. I was like, what are you doing? We were kind of brainwashed to do the traditional system. I couldn't believe it. We didn't talk for a year. But it just is hard for people to understand that you can walk away from this because our society stamps these credentials on people.
Like what's better than being the dean of Stanford Med School? The dean of Stanford Med School right now was Casey's same specialty, head and neck surgery. And the way you rise up in medicine is you do a specialty, you focus on a couple inches of the face, and then he focused on a fellowship on an even narrower part of the body. Like that's how you rise up. You've siloed the situation.
Anything that's not siloed is considered not scientific, is considered wacky. They've called us the woo-woo caucus, talking about these nutritions. The medical system enforces this siloed view where diabetes, heart disease, depression, kidney disease, cancer, they're all separate things. If you have those conditions, you're seeing five separate doctors. They aren't speaking to each other.
That's very profitable.
This episode is brought to you by Kitanica. Looking for indestructible outdoor gear that can handle anything you can throw at it? Look no further than Kitanica. Sold factory direct at Kitanica.com. They handcraft the toughest jackets, pants, shorts, fleeces, and bags in the industry. Take their unrivaled Mark Series jackets constructed with heavy-duty thread and loaded with pockets.
Wearing a Kitanica jacket makes you feel invincible. Kitanica makes tactical, futuristic clothing that is built to last. So if you're into hunting, camping, fishing, contracting, or just love being in the outdoors, Kitanica has got you covered. Check out Kitanica. That's K-I-T-A-N-I-C-A dot com. Use the code ROGAN10 for 10% off Kitanica site-wide.
This episode is brought to you by Moe's Southwest Grill. Moe's has a huge variety of fresh ingredients and bold flavors that allow you to endlessly customize your burrito, bowl, or even try something adventurous like their stack full of steak or chicken. Don't forget to add a cup of their famous queso made with three cheeses and diced jalapenos or try all their free salsas from mild to spicy hot.
Chips come free with every meal, so go ahead and treat yourself. Stop by any of your Moe's Southwest Grill locations today and welcome to Moe's. Well, very problematic.
So the solution is truly just having the clinical guidelines of how diseases are assessed and how they're intervened changed to following the science, which is these are metabolic conditions. Ninety percent of the U.S. medical budget is tied to managing preventable and reversible lifestyle conditions.
If we had people on Medicaid, instead of jamming with the Stans, jamming them with Ozempic, jamming them with SSRIs, lower-income people were going bankrupt from Medicaid, $1.3 trillion. It's growing. It's a bigger part of the budget than the defense budget. If we literally just ask how do we have that money to spur thriving, to incentivize exercise, to incentivize healthier food for these folks –
we'd be a transformed country. It's literally that simple. But it takes that moral courage. It takes Americans actually saying, no, I am going to go against the NIH. I am going to ask questions. But of course, we have violent, just reading, you know, back, what was it, 2022?
Like every single public health official in America said you were like the enemy number one for talking about sunlight and talking about food and talking about healthy eating. COVID was a metabolic condition. COVID was a foodborne illness. Like if you were metabolically healthy, you did not die of COVID, like pretty demonstrably. And you were threat number one. Go ahead.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I think Callie's getting into something also that I think is part of the reason why... I mean, there are a lot of... Fortunately, there are a lot of doctors speaking out right now, and I have so much, like, gratitude for all the other, not only doctors, but, like, NPs, DOs, chiropractors, like, nurse practitioners, all these amazing people who are speaking up and getting a lot of shit for it.
But this is very tribal, you know? And I think that when you think about... And it's hard. Like, this is a primal instinct to not break out of the pact and to not go against what the norm is.
So I think in a lot of ways that we're dealing with like here is going to come down to like how courageous are we willing to be to move humanity back and by humanity very much also the Earth's health because they're interconnected. They're one in the same. How courageous are we going to be to stand up for that? Or are we going to let things slip through our fingers?
And I think the tribe, when I was in medical school, like it's amazing how
Because of the interest and the fact that Stanford got a $3 million grant from Pfizer while I was there to revamp the curriculum, and the fact that the American Diabetes Association that makes clinical guidelines is getting millions of dollars from Coke and Cadbury, and the American Diabetes Association is getting millions of dollars from Mead Johnson that makes formula, and Abbott Nutrition that makes formula, and vaccine companies that make flu vaccines.
The fact that the money, I mean, 8,000 major conflicts of interest were just reported at the NIH with food and pharma. So at every level, the medical guidelines that if you step out of, you are at risk for litigation as a doctor and the NIH, you know, like, you know, this thing that we all respect, tons of conflicts of interest and the medical schools accepting money.
The tribe that then you become a part of as a trainee is a tribe that only hears one thing. And so I have a lot of compassion for doctors because I was I did go through medical school and not learn anything. any of the things that I had to learn after to actually figure out how to help myself and others truly generate foundational cellular health to be healthy.
I just look back at what I've had to learn since medical school. I learned about basically Organ specific physiology, pharmacology. And then in residency, I learned how to do surgery. And then, of course, throughout the whole thing, I learned how to bill. But that that is ultimately those are not the tools that actually generate foundational cellular health.
You know, 80 percent of medical schools in the United States don't require a single nutrition course, not one minute of nutrition. And yet 90% of our health care costs are tied to diseases. The things that are torturing American lives are tied to food. And doctors, it's not a hammer in our toolbox.
I didn't learn at Stanford Medical School that 95% of the people on the USDA Food Guidelines for America Committee had a conflict with the food industry. I didn't learn that there were 8,000 conflicts of interest at the NIH. I didn't learn that there are 8 billion tons of plastic on planet Earth that are degrading into estrogen analogs.
I did not learn that there are 6 billion pounds of pesticides sprayed on our global food supply every single year, most from China and Germany, and that these are literally tied very strongly to Alzheimer's, dementia, cancer, obesity, mitochondrial dysfunction, infertility.
ADHD, liver dysfunction, I didn't learn that, you know, simply taking 7000 steps per day can slash your risk of obesity, type two diabetes, Alzheimer's, dementia, even gastric reflux by 40 to 60%. And the average Americans walking 3500 steps per day, like we're literally just not moving as a country. And if you just walk a little
bit, 7,000 steps, which takes like 45 minutes, you slash your risk of every major, you know, chronic disease. I didn't learn that we need to be getting sunlight because circadian biology dictates our cellular health. Like we are diurnal animals that have biologic processes that happen during the day and other biologic processes that happen at night.
And the way your body knows whether it's day or night is if you get photons hitting your retina and your skin cells. Pretty basic, pretty foundational for human health. Didn't learn anything about it. Didn't learn anything about sunlight. Didn't learn anything about photons. Didn't learn anything about sleep. You know, we're sleeping 20% less on average than we were 100 years ago.
And sleep is a huge risk factor. You can, in an experimental setting, take a young, healthy person and subject them to sleep deprivation for five nights and they become pre-diabetic. Well, 50% of Americans are pre-diabetic and type 2 diabetic and we're not sleeping well. And I didn't learn not one minute on sleep. So all the things and so many more, and of course, nothing about nutrition.
You know, and Marty Makary talks about this, like, I certainly didn't learn that medical error and medication is the third leading cause of death in the United States. I learned that patient comes in and I need to label their diagnosis and give them a pill. So When I speak of the tribalism, it's like I have so much compassion for doctors who feel stuck right now. They're stuck in a broken system.
The tribe that they're a part of has taught them a certain set of things. There are huge trillions of dollars of interest to make the things that they learn a specific myopic lens. And... Putting together dots is risky because if you step outside the guidelines, you're at risk for intense litigation and potentially ridicule.
I mean, I'm called pseudoscientific alt-right, you know, woo-woo caucus all the time. And so it's scary. And I think that fundamentally this is, again, why it comes down to like this is actually more of a consciousness and spiritual issue because it's like we need to pray for courage. We need to sit down every morning and decide what we want for the future. What do we want? We're all players.
We're all important. We all need to use our voices. Being complicit, like what future do we want and what are we willing to do for it? And get our priorities straight. Is our priority like our house and our mortgage and our boat and our comfortable life that's killing us? Or is it to elevate, to be stewards of the future and of the planet and to make some harder choices
And I think one thing I would just say, if there are doctors listening, I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but like this tribe on the other side, you know, that I think we're all in of like promoting health, like it's beautiful and people are really healthy and happy. And it's not that hard and it's not that expensive.
And everyone is welcome here in this tribe of trying to move humanity towards more health. harmonious future. And everyone is welcome. It's bipartisan. It's really about, like Brigham was saying, this is about team humanity. And team humanity always by extension will be team planet because they're interconnected. And so I think we need to break out of that sort of more
our past, you know, human selves of tribalism and really realize like, we need to be brave, we need to be courageous, we need to fight for life. And, and it's pretty, pretty bright and wonderful when we start doing that.
I don't think most people were aware of the problems in regards to the food system, in regards to pesticides, in regards to how people learn nutrition in medical school. I don't think they were really aware of that until about five or six years ago. I think it started to creep into the zeitgeist. I think before that, people just put all their faith in doctors.
And then I think COVID happened and people lost a lot of faith in the medical system. They lost a lot of faith in the NIH. They saw all the contradictory videos of Fauci saying, you know, you're not going to catch COVID and Rachel Maddow and all that shit. And you're like, oh, my God, this is all a bought and paid for system to promote profit.
Yeah, I think Jamal talked a little bit about this, but I think it's so important because nobody realizes this. I think a lot of people listening to us years ago, it's just like this sounds conspiratorial. And it's just like what actually happened? And there's a couple like really important dates that happened that are historical that I think like set this structure really intentionally.
The first was 1909, the Flexner Report incident. So literally John D. Rockefeller's personal lawyer wrote the report for Congress that basically set the standard today for medical education. And it literally says in the binding guidelines that holistic health and nutrition and anything about interconnections to the body is pseudoscience.
It says we need to name the condition and cut it out or prescribe it.
And what year is this? 1909. So they're still going by the recommendations of 1909. We still follow the Flexner Report.
That is so crazy. But like rescinding the Flexner Report and having updated scientific education and standard of care guidelines based on what we learned since 1909 about the majesty of the interconnectedness of our body is a really good first start because we're binded under a law. Just demonstrably, just like, again, not conspiratorial. John D. Rockefeller's personal lawyer wrote this report.
Why? Because John D. Rockefeller is the father of the pharmaceutical industry and created pharmaceuticals from byproducts of oil production and was the first investor into Johns Hopkins and other major medical schools, University of Chicago, and started the modern education program for health.
There were some big issues in the health of the Wild West, but he created Johns Hopkins and the standard of residency training as a way to silo diseases very intentionally, and then prescribe his products and interventions as the top pharmaceutical maker. And the medical schools that he created were basically a distribution system to him. Okay, so you get to World War II.
Up until World War II, around that time, the 1950s, 1960s, I would argue almost any medical miracle you can think of or any listener can think of was created before that time. It's all acute situations, emergency surgical procedures, sanitation procedures, antibiotics to make an infection not deadly.
Almost every medical miracle we can think of was something that was going to kill you right away, infectious disease. And then you take the pill or take the treatment for a finite period of time and you stop it or do the surgery quickly and you're cured. Those are medical miracles. And we had a lot of good things happen up until World War II.
Very intentionally, the medical industry saw the birth control pill in the late 1950s, 1960s. And the birth control pill was the first pill in world history that people took for longer than a couple weeks. It was the first pill ever that is like, oh, interesting. You can actually convince someone to take a pill for years, for almost most their life, recurring revenue.
And there was a huge emphasis of the medical industry to take the trust engendered up until 1960. RFK talks about this. We didn't spend money on chronic disease management. All medicine was acute issues. Chronic disease, diabetes, obesity, that was outside the doctor's office. They saw that you could medicalize chronic conditions. Today, 90% to 95% of spending is on chronic conditions.
So what do we do? In the 1970s, literally the Sackler family, their grandkids and kids did the opioids. Their forebears created Valium. And 30% of women in the United States in the 1970s were on Valium, Time Magazine, Valium Nation, Mommy's Little Helper. So we started creating all these psychiatric conditions. We started medicalizing heart disease.
We started medicalizing all these type 2 diabetes, started creating academic research totally funded by the pharmaceutical industry saying that type 2 diabetes isn't reversible, that it's basically genetic, heart disease, all these things, and started pilling them, started pilling them. Then what happened to food? Chronic disease wasn't that big of a deal in the 1970s, 1980s.
You look at the graph. You look at the graph of all chronic conditions. There's just a sharp turn in the 1980s. It's literally almost to the year of the Surgeon General report saying smoking wasn't great. So the second that report came out, Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds were two of the largest companies in the world. It wasn't like Microsoft and Google on the top companies list.
It was like cigarette companies. You know, dopamine is a really good thing to sell, which the tech companies do now. And they used their cash piles. And by 1990, the three largest M&A deals in American history, in world history, were cigarette companies buying food companies. So you had Nabisco bought by R.J. Reynolds. You had Kraft and U.S. Food buy.
And you see those graphs of all the food companies owned by like a couple companies? That was the cigarette companies. And they did two things very, very intentionally. They took over the institutions of trust to say ultra-processed food was healthy, and then they took their scientists and rigged the food itself to make it more addictive. Not to kill kids, but to make it more addictive.
So you had that literal food pyramid, which said ultra-processed food is great, low-fat, carbs, base of the pyramid. That was constructed literally by the cigarette industry to promote their addictive products. And this weaponization of food, as I call it, it's not just like this conspiracy.
Those two companies, Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds, were the two largest food producers in the United States. Like 50% of American food were created by cigarette companies in the 1990s. And they have got us addicted and weaponized this food, and all chronic conditions have just shot up.
It's because that ultra-processed food, literally, by tobacco industry scientists, hijacks our evolutionary biology. Again, you can't overeat grass-fed steak, but these food, with scientists much smarter than any of us, That's what they're doing. They're shutting off our society signals.
The byproduct of this cheap addictive food, which we don't even have research for yet, is that it's sprayed with all these chemicals. It's sprayed with 10,000 chemicals that are allowed in the United States when only 400 are allowed in Europe. to make the food addictive, to make the food cheap, to do the monocropping.
And that food is absolutely, and we don't need to wait for the research on this, these chemicals, these neurotoxins are destroying our cells, destroying our microbiome in ways we don't fully understand. So I just want to make clear to everyone, this has happened very intentionally. And it can be undone pretty quickly too, but we have to realize this isn't a conspiracy.
It's true corruption that happened deliberately.
I would just add a few more dates. I think one thing about the research, we're one of the only countries in the world where the burden of proof for harm, we allow these chemicals to just enter our food system. We have 10,000 chemicals in our food system. Europe, only 400 because they have to show that it's safe before they use it.
We're allowed to use it and then only if there's issues that crop up do people have to do research. There's this ridiculous
GRAS generally recognizes safe designation which is essentially a company self assesses whether the chemical that they are creating is generally recognized as safe no one's overseeing it and Brigham talks about this like compassion for the FDA they're overwhelmed there's a lot of stuff to do it's kind of like a hoarder's house where do we even start like I don't necessarily know if I buy that.
I think that it's pretty bad and bought off that we have all these chemicals. But they basically just have to self-designate if it's generally recognized as safe and then it can go into our food system. One thing that I find really interesting is like that I really reflect on a lot is like, what is the difference between a food chemical and a drug?
They're all just synthetic molecules that are made in factories, in labs by scientists. Do you know what the difference is? Intended use. So basically, if the intended use is for food, you can synthesize almost anything you want and put it in food.
We are being mass drugged and poisoned in our food system with 10,000 virtually unregulated chemicals, which have bought off papers saying that they are safe. I mean, you look at what happened with all the Monsanto litigation about non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. They had to release...
this whole thing called the monsanto papers they were declassified where they ghost writ scientific they ghost wrote scientific papers saying that glyphosate is safe so there's all this corruption in there where basically we have 10 000 unregulated chemicals in our food system and we're getting sick as hell obviously and then you've got the evidence-based people saying well we need to have a 10-year longitudinal study to show that glyphosate is causing xyz disease and it's like obviously that's not the right approach because first of all
It is the synergistic combination of all the toxins that are now in our environment that are leading to all these pleiotropic health issues. That's very hard to study. So we have to get our heads out of our ass and use our common sense and realize what's going on and not wait 10 years with these, you know, NIH-funded studies that are going to be corrupted. And, you know, I think...
That's just one thing about the food chemicals. I just wanted to add to your point, Cal, some other dates. You look at the processed food emergence. Processed food really didn't start taking off until these mergers. There was a little bit of a start of it. Ultra-processed foods did not exist before World War II.
And we needed to have shelf-stable food for soldiers and things like that that we could ship, and so there were maybe some good intentions there. But then there was an opportunity there that got seen. And we can also weaponize the feminist movement against, oh, being in the kitchen, you're a slave. Your value is outside the home. You need to climb the corporate ladder.
Here, have this convenience food that we basically made for soldiers, and we're going to tell you that this is actually your liberation. So, of course, we got people not cooking. Families aren't eating together anymore. Like, you know, kids are eating 67% of children's calories now are ultra-processed foods. These means foods that come from a factory made by food scientists.
Not just processed, ultra-processed, the highest form of processing, 67% of calories. Then you go to the 1970s, and we have the advent of high-fructose corn syrup, which, as Callie talks about, this preceded some of the mergers. But high-fructose corn syrup is a weapon of mass destruction that basically food scientists used in understanding about hibernating animals, like bears.
who, fructose is one of the only types of calories where instead of making you feel satiated, it makes you more hungry. And this is evolutionarily, and we knew this. In the fall, when animals are preparing for hibernation and they start eating fructose-rich berries, they need to put on a ton of fat for winter.
And so there's a feed-forward mechanism with fructose where it actually gets the bears to be hungry and even violent. to out-compete other animals to get as many berries as possible in a short period of time, to lay 3D print fat for winter.
So you have the scientists understanding this and say, hey, we can make liquid fructose a thousand times more potent than the fructose you'd find in berries, same molecule but in higher concentration, and we can add it to everything. We can add it to salad dressing. We're going to add it to ketchup. We're going to add it to children's school lunches. We're going to add it, obviously, to sodas.
And we're going to make people insatiable. We're going to make their bodies and their brains think that they're preparing for winter that's never coming. And there has been research that shows that high fructose corn syrup is associated with violence, ADHD in kids, all of these different things.
Just last thing I'll mention, flash forward 1986, I think another very important date, which is the date when the litigation went through that said we couldn't sue vaccine manufacturers.
And the Vaccine Safety Act, that's a very important date in the whole history because it is one of the first times where we were able to pass legislation through Congress that said that pharmaceutical companies could not be sued for wrongdoing. And that still is present today. They basically put together a little
Paltry little fund that people could apply to get, you know, no fault reimbursements for for for vaccine harm. But you cannot sue the company. So you start to get companies being legally immune from wrongdoing, which has then accelerated. And they're now starting to try and push things like that for pesticides as well.
So that's just some of the history of like why we're why we are where we are today. It's not rocket science. This has all been very institutionalized and structured. And it's the last 50 years. Like we can undo all of this with leadership. And so that's just a little bit of the picture of how we are where we are today.
Can I just say one thing about the fructose corn syrup? I'm so glad you brought that up because I didn't know that there was a unique way that it makes it more addictive and kills your satiety.
Oh, yeah.
Or increases it or kills it rather. Because I'd always thought that sugar was sugar. And this is one of the arguments that a lot of people that are poo pooing all this stuff like, oh, this is nonsense. Sugar is sugar.
Yeah.
Like there's no difference between the sugar and high fructose corn syrup versus the sugar in an apple.
No, it's really interesting. There's two amazing books on this. Richard Johnson from University of Colorado wrote Nature Wants Us to be Fat, and then David Perlmutter wrote Drop Acid. Both books are about a molecule called uric acid, which is unique to fructose metabolism.
So when fructose is metabolized in the body, not like glucose, it creates uric acid, which creates oxidative stress and mitochondrial dysfunction in the brain and the body. That if you have mitochondrial dysfunction, you're not going to be able to process sugars to energy. You know, mitochondria powerhouse the cell.
So you break the mitochondria with the excess fructose overloading the mitochondria with uric acid. And then what happens? You can't turn sugars to energy. So what do you do? You turn sugars to fat. So you start 3D printing fat because you break the mitochondria with excess fructose overloading.
And on top of that, the mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative stress when happening in the brain is what may inspire the violence and the ADHD and all that stuff to make the bears manic so they get as much berries as possible. This is what's happening in every kid in every classroom in America now. And so that's kind of some of the biology very simply about what's happening with fructose.
So the apple is probably a bad example, but like cane sugar. Is cane sugar fructose-based?
Well, it's... generally is going to have sucrose, which is going to have some amount of glucose and fructose. But this is the thing about fruit, is that we have 40 trillion cells, and we have the ability to clear uric acid, and we have the ability to process fructose in a physiologic amount.
We're never going to have the uric acid increasing and overloading the mitochondria if we're eating an apple. It's when you're eating 20, 30 times the fructose that an apple has, and you're literally pouring it down. That all of a sudden, imagine, you get this huge rise in uric acid in the body and other things that are happening. And that's when it overwhelms.
So it's a bit of that dose makes the poison because our body has the ability to excrete toxins. Our body has the ability to deal with some heavy metals. Our body has the ability to probably clear some level of glyphosate. But we can't clear all of it all the time, 24 hours a day, in 100 times the quantity of all these things together.
And the research and the evidence-based thing and this cult of the science, they love to ignore that. The idea of synergistic effects, of this of this overwhelming breaking of our cellular resources is just conveniently forgotten because we study things in isolation. That's literally the definition of how a double-blind, placebo-controlled study happens.
It's one variable and one thing that you're testing. That doesn't make sense. We live in a toxic stew.
The only answer of double-blind placebo-controlled studies, which every guest comes on is just like that's just the gold standard. Everyone just accepts that that's what you need. A double-blind placebo-controlled study, the only answer is a pill, like essentially. You can't test psychedelics on that way. You can't test food. You can't test exercise. You can't blind those things.
So anything that actually – recognizes the unison and the interconnectivity of why we're getting sick, can't be studied through a double-blind placebo-controlled study.
You actually have the FDA that's basically created, you saw this with the recent MDMA decision, it's basically rigged that the only thing that can be approved through the top way we study things and approve drugs is a synthetic pill. That's the only thing that it can basically lead to through a double-blind placebo-controlled study.
It's like with vaccines. It's like, yeah, I bet that one vaccine probably isn't causing autism. But what about the 20 that they're getting before 18 months? We don't look at it in synergistic. And so that's a big problem. And this is where the cult of the science, and I say the science specifically because science is beautiful.
Using the scientific method and using that way of inquiry into the natural world is a beautiful art. But weaponizing... papers that are often bought for or corrupted. And, you know, the leaders of some of our key medical journals have actually even said that 50% of scientific research that published ends up being wrong. So it's bought for corrupted or wrong. We rely on this.
And if one interesting trend that we're seeing in our world is that if we do choose to put dots together, use our intuition, our God given intuition, Anything other than this particular way of examining things, you are dangerous. You are dangerous. And I think that that's something we need to really question. You know, I think especially as a woman, like, and I'm thinking about having kids soon.
I'm like thinking about like, wow, like I am. I have the ability in my body to build a human, 3D print a human, pull in a soul to that human. I don't need a peer-reviewed study or a textbook to tell me how to do that. Our body and our intuition and our minds and the subtle things happening inside us are important. They are incredible.
We have now been told that you can't trust it and you are dangerous if you do that. And I think that's one of the reasons why I think parents are very frustrated right now is because parenting, I'm not a parent yet, but Callie is.
And, you know, when we're being told now that parents are the enemy for using their own judgment about their families and kids, like, I think that's probably it's deeply frustrating to people. And that's basically what we're being asked to do. Yeah.
I want to talk about Alzheimer's. That was the other thing that I want to talk about when you when we talked about early puberty. You you mentioned escalating risks of Alzheimer's. When did Alzheimer's become a thing? Because I was reading this article that was saying that it was before the advent of seed oils. You very, very, very rarely saw it, if at all.
No, it's been exploding like every single other chronic condition. I'll just quickly go to ties to Casey's point she just made. This year in 2024 is the highest rate in American history of Alzheimer's, cancer, autoimmune conditions, heart disease, diabetes.
Cancer, kidney disease, autism, every single chronic disease you can think of is at an all-time high, growing at an increasing rate as we spend more money to treat those conditions. So I think one point we're trying to make is that all of the NIH, all the FDA, it's all on accepting that trend as a given. It's totally wash their hands of it.
And how do we find marginal pills to make this a little bit better? Not asking why. And that question about Alzheimer's, the point we're trying to make is that when it comes to chronic conditions, which Alzheimer's is, you have to really not quit.
This episode is brought to you by SimpliSafe. I talk a lot about taking care of yourself, you know, working out and eating right. But that also means you should be doing what you can to stay safe. And no one does safe quite like SimpliSafe. They have some of the best home security systems on the market. And they make it so easy to protect what you care about most, you and your family.
With fast protect monitoring and live guard protection, their agents can respond within five seconds of receiving your alarm. They can even see, speak to, and deter intruders in real time. I really like that there's no bullshit with their pricing. There's no hidden fees or extra costs. You know exactly what you're paying for.
So if you're going to trust anyone with you and your family's safety, trust SimpliSafe. They've been named best home security systems by U.S. News & World Report for five years running. And right now, you can get an exclusive 50% discount on a new system, plus a free indoor security camera with fast protect monitoring. Just visit simplisafe.com slash rogan.
But this offer is available for a limited time only, so be sure to order today. That's simplisafe.com slash rogan. There's no safe like SimpliSafe.
It's the Alzheimer's question. You have to ask why that's one branch on this tree, obesity, right? This tree. And we talk about, and I think Casey has this amazing framework, you can literally look at five biomarkers, the biomarkers of metabolic dysfunction, HDL, triglycerides, blood sugar, blood pressure, and your waistline. And I'm not joking. I'm not being hyperbolic.
If we fired every single researcher and canceled every single grant in the U.S. government for all chronic disease research and all nutrition research and created all policy to maximize those five biomarkers in America, you, by definition, don't have type 2 diabetes. you almost have a 0% chance of getting heart disease. You have very close to 0% chance of getting Alzheimer's.
You are not obese by definition. Literally, you go down every single chronic condition that is torturing American life. If you're diabetic, you're four times more likely to be depressed or suicidal because there are cells in our head and diabetes is cellular dysregulation. So literally, on the research and the science thing,
I think there's great heroes who've been getting into the weeds on the research, but chronic disease is interconnected to basic lifestyle factors. I think this is a political issue, honestly. Every American needs to ask, is this an incremental issue where we need slightly better pharmaceutical interventions and slightly better research?
Or is this a radical shift of understanding how our bodies are interconnected and understanding that that needs to be a shift in medicine and, frankly, how we view the environment? Like, that is a question that we actually think is relatively urgent and relatively existential. Modern society is amazing. But as Casey said, this is dark right now.
Like, if you believe what Casey is saying about these statistics about chronic disease and you actually look at the math that we're growing two times with health care spending the rate of GDP. It's the largest and fastest growing industry in the country. The fastest growing industry in the United States is not AI. It's not tech. It's healthcare.
And as it grows, we get sicker, fatter, more depressed, more infertile. It is going to bankrupt the country and it's not slowing down. So if you actually believe this, believe we need a new paradigm, is it about getting better research or is it about actually saying the research is wrong? This whole paradigm of seeing chronic disease in silos is wrong.
So I'm sure you can talk more about Alzheimer's, but it's interconnected.
Yeah, no, I think the point about incrementalism versus radical is the question we need to be asking ourselves. Like, we're not, yeah. And so in terms of Alzheimer's, so I think something really interesting framing is that the brain, you know, it's only 2% of our body weight, but it uses 20% of our body's energy.
And there's been this theory with Alzheimer's of like, oh, it's the plaques in the brain. It's the tau and the tangles and the beta amyloid and all these things. And so we thought, OK, well, if we can get rid of those with a drug, like maybe that it'll improve. But no Alzheimer's drugs really work meaningfully.
And more recently, there's been this understanding of like, OK, metabolic dysfunction is definitely going up. We know metabolic syndrome and diabetes are going up and the brain uses 20 percent of the body's energy. And something that's happening in the body like diabetes is also happening in the brain. There's been this interest.
Chris Palmer talks about this in such an amazing way in his book, Brain Energy. But like we've somehow decided to separate the brain from the body as if they're different things when, in fact, they're all just made of cells. They're all just made of cells that do the same things. They need to do metabolism to keep the cell working.
So we've got this organ that uses 20% of our energy, and we've got 50% of Americans with prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, which is fundamentally a metabolic issue. And of course, the brain's basically underpowered. It's not getting the energy it needs, and that's going to express itself as dementia. So it's been increasing exponentially.
in parallel with everything that's happening with our increasing diabetes rates. And then the early onset dementia and Alzheimer's disease, that has tripled since 2013. So younger people, and that makes sense, though. We've got 30% of teens now with prediabetes. That was like 0% in the past. You didn't have kids with the adult onset diabetes in the past.
And so you've got now 30% of teens with prediabetes. You've got You've got middle-aged people now, 50% with prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. Of course, that's also creating an energetic deficit. So this neurometabolic, neuroenergetic theory of Alzheimer's, maybe with these cells crying out for help, maybe some of these plaques that we're seeing are actually a protective mechanism.
The brain actually laying down almost like protective shielding. It's a response to an underlying metabolic deficiency. issue as opposed to the problem itself. But of course, in our paradigm, we're like, we just got to get rid of that symptom of the problem.
When in fact, actually, if we could unencumber the brain to be able to make energy properly, make good energy properly, that's why our book is called Good Energy, they would actually be able to heal itself and to have the power to do its work, which is cognitive thinking. I was just going to say, an amazing book about Alzheimer's
That just hasn't gotten as much attention as I think it should, as Dale Bredesen's book, The End of Alzheimer's, because he talks about when you really look at the research, there are about 36 different biomarkers and factors. I think he calls them like the 36 holes in the roof of what creates like if it's raining and you plug one hole, your house is still going to be filled with water.
You have to plug all 36 holes to prevent or reverse infection. alzheimer's disease and of course all these are related in some way to metabolic health but it's things like your vitamin d levels your insulin levels um the amount of uh you know movement you're getting vitamin d insulin b12 other things like that these these things that we know are part and parcel with metabolic health so
And there was an amazing Lancet paper from a couple of years ago that showed that if we just got on top of some of the basic modifiable factors of our metabolic health, we could slash Alzheimer's rates from happening.
So, you know, I think, yeah, fundamentally, it's one more branch on the tree that is rooted in this metabolic dysfunction in our body, which is fundamentally rooted in three processes that uniquely really hurt the brain, which is oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction and chronic inflammation. These are the three hallmarks of metabolic dysfunction.
And the brain is so sensitive and such a complex, high processing power organ that these core cellular disturbances that make up metabolic dysfunction, which are caused by our environment and cannot really be addressed with drugs, mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress, chronic inflammation, they're showing up so prominently in the brain.
I'll just say there's kind of just a question with all we're hearing about these diseases. Is the reason Alzheimer's is skyrocketing because we don't have enough research and don't have enough drugs? Is the reason obesity rates are skyrocketing among kids because we don't have enough drugs or not enough research? That's the argument that's being given to us. We're literally being told.
After the lessons of COVID, which the COVID lockdowns and what the pharmaceutical industry did with their co-option of our government with COVID was the most significant public policy mistake in American history, at least since World War II. In modern times, I think we can all agree on.
We are still saying – and it's just people, I think, because we trust the medical system still so much, we are literally thinking societally that – that the fact that there's an obesity crisis among six-year-olds is a drug deficiency issue. It's a dark, I think, blind spot in our culture right now.
The reason why I brought up Alzheimer's, there's a couple reasons. One, the amyloid plaque research, wasn't that proven to be flawed deeply and maybe even corrupt? And then there was another, there's something that came out very recently. See if you can find this, Jamie. I think Jay Bhattacharya might have tweeted it.
You were talking about this with Max Lugavere. Yeah. Max Lugavere.
He tweeted it.
But Dr. J is great.
Yeah. So there was rampant corruption. Oh, yeah.
Well, this is coming out every day. We're hearing about a new premier researcher who's published hundreds of papers in their field who literally are... Western blots are one of these things you see in scientific papers that basically show you protein levels. Yeah.
copied and pasted Western blots in like papers across their career, like just made up data that then has served as foundational dogma for future research. So you think about the ripple effect.
Yeah.
Yeah. And so this but this is it really gets back to the core problem that's above all the problems, which is an incentive problem. Like it's a simple economic incentive problem that's basically causing all these problems. And I think it's that what we're striving for in this country is ultimately economic growth and value. That is what we care about.
And so, you know, in each industry, you see people fighting for that, including at the NIH, including researchers. We're all motivated by this carrot that is destroying us. And yeah, it's very, very dark because, yeah,
Jamie, see if we can find that Max Lugavere. Twitter wasn't working. Twitter's off. The Russians. Max Lugavere posted it on Instagram as well. Yeah, Max the man. Over a hundred and... Over 100 NIH-funded Alzheimer's and Parkinson's research papers contain completely made-up data according to new allegations, billions in funding, and years of research now in serious doubt.
Yeah. So with Max, actually, with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, with Marty McCary, Chris Palmer, a number of voices, we're engaging members of Congress. We're talking to helping whatever we can with RFK and Trump's leadership on this. But I had a somewhat out of body experience that kind of hits on what you're getting at. I was sitting across from the member of Congress
and I think it's the exact same issue on obesity, who introduced this Treat and Reduce Obesity Act. It has 150 co-sponsors, and it's to jam government-funded ozempics. So it starts with Medicare. 80% of people on Medicare, old people, are obese or overweight. So the second this bill is signed, You have open season on all people on Medicare.
And then the second something's approved for Medicare always goes to Medicaid for lower income people because why would an old person be eligible for something but not a poor person in the United States? So that immediately goes to Medicaid. That's the game. And then Medicaid, right, it's six years old. It's now being pushed for on six-year-olds.
The second this bill is signed, $1,600 per patient per month, taxpayer money, which is why Novo Nordics is the ninth most valuable company in the world right now, this Danish company expecting 90% of their profits from the United States on expectation of this bill's passage. So we're sitting across from him. And I bring these things up. And I bring up a simple question of,
Why is this one-size-fits-all jamming Ozempic into the average American's arm instead of opening up flexibility to potentially explore regenerative food or exercise or incentivizing those things? It's not even fully anti-drug, but why is this? What clinician said this is the cure, like this is the one cure?
Because it's not opening up any money for food or exercise or any other modality that could actually cure the root cause of obesity. And he looked at me fully, fully serious and said, I'd never thought of that.
And I told them that it's being pushed on kids and that there's an aggressive effort where Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, the top obesity researcher at Harvard, was funded significantly by Novo Nordics and millions of dollars in research grants and went on 60 Minutes where the top funder of 60 Minutes is pharmaceutical companies and said obesity is a brain disease and a genetic. She said that.
Top Harvard researcher. And she said, it needs to be aggressively intervened for kids. I said, there's open season on kids. The guy who introduced the bill, he said, that's not true. I'm going to put in the bill that kids can't use. I'm like, you'd be going against the FDA guidance on that. You can't do that.
I go, you understand, based on the JP Morgan estimates, where they literally presented the estimates of increasing obesity rates at the JP Morgan conference in San Francisco.
And all the investors clapped like seals, standing ovation, standing ovation as they presented a chart on rising obesity rates showing that as Ozempic increases in prescription rates, obesity in the United States will increase. Unpack that one for me. They show that graph and everyone claps because it's a lifetime drug, because it's a crash diet. It's liquid anorexia.
It makes you not want to eat. Crash diets don't work, right? And of course, more than 50% of the people that even have insurance funding for it go off of it within six months because it's the highest rate of side effects of any mass drug prescribed in American history. But he didn't know all that.
And he looked at me in the eye, the person who introduced this bill that is going to be one of the most expensive bills in American history, the market cap of the ninth most valuable company, the most valuable company in Europe. They passed LVMH, the fashion company. The most valuable company in Europe rests on this bill. This is the guy that essentially wrote it. He said, no, no, no.
It's a short-term solve. Ozempic's a short-term solve. Look at me right in the eyes. I'm like, no. It literally says there's metabolic issues and it warns somebody going off the drug. It says you have to take it for life. He did not know that. The corruption is you have Brad Winstrup.
If somebody wants to do something, if we want to change the world, email members of Congress, email Brad Winstrup, call his office and say, we think before we jab six-year-olds with Ozempic, we should fix our food system. This thought literally didn't occur to him. So what's happening with this corruption, what's happening with obesity, with Alzheimer's,
Is the corruption is like it doesn't even get to people even understanding that the boiling frog. It's just so it's just obviously we're just going to find a drug, not ask why people are getting Alzheimer's. Obviously, we're just going to jam 60 year olds with Ozempic and not ask why people are getting obese.
And they and then, you know, literally get talking points in the room as he starts thinking about it. Oh, it's hard. Dietarian instruments are hard. It's like what's happening now is hard. Like going to a playground with my two-year-old son and seeing every kid clearly having issues, clearly dealing with obesity, like 60 years old, you know, seeing processed food all over the playground.
Like what's happening now, poisoning ourselves en masse is pretty hard. So there are simple ways to do this. If Dr. Fauci in 2020 said COVID has strong metabolic links and we need to harden up our immune system, it's a problem. We're dying three times at a higher rate than the Japanese per capita. That's 16% of all COVID deaths are in the U.S. and we're like 4% of the population. Like-
This is a warning sign for our immune system. We need to shift the healthcare budget to getting fit, to incentivizing exercise, to fixing and talking to Will Harris and other regenerative farmers and consulting them on how to transform our food system, seeing that the medical system has co-opted what drugs are and what medicine is.
It's nothing short of a moral blind spot that food and exercise aren't seen truly as drugs. They aren't seen as interventions from the $4.5 trillion we spent on medical systems. They do that in Europe. The Italians are three times less obese and diabetic than us. I don't think the Italians are more vigorous. I don't think Americans are lazier than Italians.
There's something systemic happening where they spend three times less per capita on health care and two times more per capita on food.
And they're living eight years longer.
Eight years longer.
Well, and everybody notices it when you go over there and eat.
Oh, yeah.
You feel good. You feel good.
Eat that pizza. You know, it's like the only place in the world I can eat gluten because it doesn't destroy my gut.
Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, it's it's crazy. And it's weird that all these things that you say are so clear and they make so much sense. Yeah, it just doesn't occur being ignored. Well, just it speaks to capture.
Yeah.
Industry capture. I met with Nancy Pelosi two weeks ago. Looked her in the eyes because, you know, we've been helping RFK, helping Trump. And we should talk about that. I think there's a really, really important societal dynamic happening with that unison. But but I'm preparing as much as I can to foster this bipartisan conversation. I can tell you everyone in the room. Right.
Like is horrified by the statistics. Right. But every time, their staffers are slithering behind them. And the healthcare staffers in Congress are waiting for their next job with the pharma industry or the insurance industry, and they really drive the place and make the bills. But a real problem with the corruption is these people making policies, literally chairs of healthcare committees.
The simple ideas you're talking about, and we're trying to express on metabolic health, on this simplicity, really, of why we're getting sick, it's not being like corruption is leading them to deny it. It's like they just do not understand it. Like these meetings we're doing with – and this hearing we did with Max and Brigham and others, Julie Michaels and so many great people.
It literally was giving these ideas to these members of Congress for the first time. There will be a lot more on this. But I truly – it's so simple. But literally letting your lawmakers know. I hear two things again and again from meeting with over 40 members of Congress. It's like I don't understand this. I don't know this. And my phone is not ringing off the hook.
If I go against pharma, they're getting all the old people to call and say don't kill me. Right. Like, to me, this issue, why this issue is becoming so resonant is because we're all feeling, and I think it's actually, we're hitting on the most important issue in the country. I think it's why everyone's flocking to books on this issue. Why podcasts? Like, why your podcast is the number one podcast.
I mean, I consider you, I've learned more about metabolic health and healthcare listening to guests on your show than I think Casey's probably learned at Stanford Med School. So it's like people left to their own devices are flocking to this, and we need to channel We need to make a statement with our politics. This is unfortunately a political issue.
So you were one of the people that helped sort of broker the deal with RFK and Trump and bring the two of those together. Tell me how that got started. Tell me how that worked out.
Yeah. I mean, when I think about that story, I literally think about 2021, our mom abruptly dying of pancreatic cancer. She was taking a hike, got a pain in her stomach, got a text the next day after getting a scan saying she has stage four pancreatic cancer. We rushed to her side. She died 12 days later, just totally surprisingly. And Casey and I
on her grave site, literally hugged each other and said, we want to write a book and we want to make this and evangelize this, inspired by you and others. We want to evangelize this and add the chorus to prevent what's happening because so many Americans are on this pharmaceutical treadmill. And then the cancer is random. It's not random.
Like all these warning signs that were missed with my mom, her prediabetes, her high cholesterol, her high blood pressure, those were pilled, not seen as gifts to get to the root cause. And then she was Chopped down by cancer. This is happening to everyone. So we want to evangelize that. And we've been on the path as best we can with companies and evangelizing.
And through these amazing podcasts like like Tucker, we got connected with people. So got to know RFK, got to know Democrats and got to know the Trump campaign. And in the past year, I will say this, the Trump campaign has been extremely interested in the policy of why kids are getting so sick.
And if you go back a year ago, President Trump actually at rallies to loud applause has been talking very similar points to RFK. So we got to know RFK sitting watching the first assassination attempt. I had like a spiritual what I can call it kind of out of body experience. And I felt the need to call Robert. I think what he has done is historic.
The fact that he was getting up to 20% of the vote, highlighting this issue, tapping in, I think, to this consciousness and tapping into this stream that you're tapping into, I think it really showed something. And I had this vision for a year. Actually, it sounds very woo-woo, but I was in a sweat tent with him in Austin at a campaign event six months before.
And I just had this strong vision of him standing with Trump and how what RFK represents is actually what Trump represents and actually what almost every American's feeling, which is this frustration and this rigged thing and this thing that doesn't quite feel right that you can't quite put your finger on.
And it was so clear to me that how RFK talks about health personifies this overall kind of institutional capture. It makes it real for people in a really visceral way because it's clearly impacting their kids. So That was all the context.
Pick up the phone, called him and just urged him, you know, as a supporter, as a lowly supporter to consider maybe this is the time as President Trump put his fist up. You know, with all this momentum, there's rare moments in history where the deck can change.
And I really felt and he felt like this could be a realignment of American politics because that that moment felt very heavy after the assassination. So we went back and forth and he asked to, you know, he's like, let me talk to him. So I worked with Tucker and we connected them that night. And here's the key point I want to make from my small vantage point here. They had weeks of conversations.
And there was not a discussion of polling. There was not a discussion of the horse race and how this would impact the race. These were tear-filled conversations about why kids are getting so diabetic, about why we have such obese children in the United States, about why we have a fertility crisis.
This was a true connection of these two men and a true deep bond, which I think you're seeing out there on the campaign trail, that this transcends politics and Trump wants this to be a generational issue for him. And I just want to say something. I think we're at a big moment here. We're debating trivia. I think the two most existential issues are nuclear war or what's happening to our health.
And whatever you think, and I used to be a never-Trumper. Watching him care about this issue, watching what's happening with the RFK, watching what's happening of how that's resonating with voters, seeing from my small vantage point inside, there is tremendous connection of these two men and moral clarity of seeing what's happening.
And my question is this, and to anyone kind of considering voting in this election, Trump is going to say stupid shit. He is Trump. We know who he is. There's two important questions to ask. Who sees this corruption and institutional capture that's going to destroy our country, I think, to an existential level? And who is willing to suffer that blowback?
Who is willing to go up against these military-industrial complex, the healthcare-industrial complex, the education-industrial complex that's making us a non-competitive country? Like they are ready. Who is going to appoint? This is a question I have. Who do we believe is going to appoint people like RFK, people like Elon Musk? to stir stuff up. Who is gonna do that?
Like that to me is the foundational question. And I do consider this the most important election of my lifetime watching these two men, because it is so genuine. And there is like a genuine desire to truly transform, to see our broken corruption and institutions for what it is. And really, truly, I think prevent nuclear war and dramatically reverse
Our health crisis, Trump has said that his one big mistake last time was personnel, was that the pharma and the ag slithered in and gave him the list of names. Everybody should ask, do you think RFK is going to have an influence on those names based on what Trump has said? And I think he is. And I think people like Elon are going to be involved.
I think there's this coalition of people that are coming together and Trump's going to put in power and listen to. And this is a bipartisan issue. And no matter what happens, we have to solve this issue. But I will say this so clearly with the most conviction I can. We will vote.
be on the verge, I think, of a health population collapse, societally destabilizing event, unless true executive leadership sees this corruption and this issue for what it is, and says we need a radical transformation in how we see agriculture and how we see health, our two largest industries. I think we have to have that.
And every single member of Congress I meet with, including Democrats, say that in order for this issue to get done, we need a president to make this the priority to talk because that gives us air cover. And there could be transformational change if a president does that. So that's what I've seen from being in this.
And I can tell you, President Trump has kept every promise to RFK and deeply cares about this issue.
It also seems like if this isn't done now, they will take steps to make sure it can never be done in the future.
Look what they're saying about free speech. Yeah. Right now. You know, you probably covered this. It's just absolutely wild. The free speech comes from the rigging of the scientific research. Bill Gates said this week that we need immediate A.I. to scour the Internet and take any vaccine misinformation out the out of the Internet automatically on any format, any private Web page. This is wild.
And he said, because the second that virus spreads in people's minds, the damage is done. So his number one use case for AI is to scour the Internet and remove any vaccine misinformation from the Internet. That is because the largest and fastest growing industry in the country has completely co-opted the most trusted vaccines. parts of the country.
There's no higher level than the NIH, than Harvard Med School. They know that. Harvard Med School is a subsidiary of pharma, just demonstrably. The FDA is 75% funded by pharma. This isn't a conspiracy. And there's a revolving door. And you've got people like Scott Gottlieb, I think the people like Trump's talking about, still thinking he's going to have power.
This person that goes straight to Pfizer. And you've got him and people like this. And I've met with many of them. Oh, this book is amazing. Good Energy is amazing. The food, you know, of course, we've got to get kids healthier. We've got to work with pharma. We've got to work with all the stakeholders, insurance companies. You know, we've got to be incremental here.
There's a war right now between incrementalists. and radical change. We are living in a great time, but we have existential threats. And the question before everyone in this very important election is, do we need more incrementality or do we need a fundamental rethink of some of our major systems? I really think that's what's before us.
And as Casey said, I think we're in a good period of history right now, certainly, but we're facing, I think, more existential threats that I really think we don't fully appreciate.
It's such a unique time, and it seems like without a person that's a total outsider, like Trump, that's being so attacked. The fact that it's not just that they disagree with him, they attack him, it's that they do it in unison. They do it so coordinated that you realize there is a machine behind this, and that they repeat the same talking points over and over. It's like they're given a script.
And that there's no repercussions for lies. With the Russiagate stuff, with all the various different things that have been concocted to try to take him out, no one gets in trouble, and the same people are still disseminating the news. And more people, I think, are aware of that than ever before, and more people are aware of this institutional capture.
And I think this is why the freedom of speech issue is actually so important and so existential, because the thing that gives me hope right now, like this all sounds dark, but we're both extremely optimistic. But if the ability to talk about these issues is taken away, that is when I would lose hope. Right. Because the fact that, you know, independent media is.
is the most listened to form of media on planet earth right now that is a good thing we can still discuss ideas and the light can connect across the globe but when you start severing that ability like there's a beautiful force happening right now i think we all see it like people are waking up people understand that there's a problem like we see this every day and you know twitter has its issues and whatnot but like people are talking and connecting from around the world to try and
figure out how to solve these issues that we all know on some level in the quietness of our heart are a really big, big deal, and that the time is now. And if that gets taken away, I worry about what's going to happen.
Well, and it is getting taken away in some formats. There was something, I believe I retweeted it, see if you can find it, about YouTube taking down a podcast for medical misinformation. And there was none. And this is without Twitter, without X, without Elon buying it, and this person being able to post it. I think it was Schellenberger. Was it Schellenberger? See my Twitter feed? Is it up there?
Well, this is the... Oh, here we go. It's below the... Hold on. We need people like Dr. J and Power. Maybe I didn't tweet it.
Should we rethink the Constitution? Is the First Amendment a major roadblock?
These are questions that... I can talk a little... This game is known, so it may be obvious, but I don't think people realize this. The reason there's such a fight against you is because it's this... 100 year change of information sources where the biggest issues in the country can no longer dictate right what the information sources are so when we when we worked for when I worked for pharma and
The advertising budget, all this stuff you hear about like how much they spend on cable news and 50% of TV news spending is pharma. It wasn't to impact consumers. It was to impact the news itself. Like the spend on news shows came out of D.C. lobbying offices, not the New York, like Madison Avenue, like advertising offices. It was like we're going to –
put our budget it was in the lobbying budget it was like we're going to pay off all the news so we have a direct line so if you're paying 50% and a huge funder of all the tech companies ads their ad companies then you've got a direct line and then you've got the Harvard study
So when you have the Harvard study that's fully funded by pharma or the food industry, like the food industry, processed foods spends 13 times more on foundational nutrition research than the NIH, but even the NIH is really conflicted saying that Lucky Charms are healthier than beef, literally.
uh... you've got those studies so what so what is this person at the news station or or youtube to do when you got the harvard study right they've realized that you can weaponize this thing so that's how it's connect and then time and time and time again i hear from members of congress on major committees they're just that's the corruption that's for the corruption happens they got the lobbyists just throwing studies you know if you
restrictions on childhood nutrition, on federally funded school lunch programs, which is the top source, one of them, of calories for young kids. If you take sugary cereal like Lucky Charms off that, you're going against the science. You're going against the NIH. You can't be asking for farm fresh eggs. Farm fresh eggs are down here. Lucky Charms are up here.
Like, it's funny, these studies, but that's what they do with them. And then I hear time and time again from these members of Congress who are good people, but it's like, Callan, I'm a military guy, or I come from business. I don't understand this stuff. You just got to defer. So that's how the corruption works and that's that that's how the research connects to PR.
Yeah No, I know I saved it So give me one second and I'll pull it up off on my phone because I definitely saved it if I didn't retweet it but it's I think one of the things that we keep highlighting that I think is very important is that most people are not even really aware of this.
This is very new to most people in the zeitgeist of the common person, the common person who has just trusted their physician and trusted the medical establishment. I don't think I think this is it requires a real shift in consciousness of people and a real understanding of what's going on.
But there's pings of that consciousness happening. That's why I think the leadership is so damn important here, Joe. It's like when this stuff is under the shadows and when the FDA is able to lobby to fund the organization that's supposed to regulate it, when the USDA is lobbying – excuse me, when food companies are lobbying – you know, to have the USDA not have any conflicts of interest.
When these things, there's not attention on them, and Americans aren't being explained this, like, mass corruption that's compromising all of our scientific guidelines and standard of care where $4.5 trillion of incentives flows to. Like, it's hard. But I would push back.
I mean, I just... I don't think it's fully formed in people's heads, but, like, I think people are, like, clamoring to put these pieces together. Yes. And that is what... That is... I think RFK standing on the stage with Trump and them grasping hands and saying, make America healthy. I think it was one of the biggest political realignments and important moments in American history.
Kennedy endorsing Trump like like I cannot. I think a lot of us feel it. Like, I think you see it on the ground. Like this Kennedy Trump thing is powerful. Like the media denigrates it. But like Kennedy is explaining this.
The media denigrates it, but I don't think people have any faith in the media anymore. Even the New York Times, which used to be the number one, I don't think people have faith in the media anymore.
They're clamoring to this message. Watching RFK and Trump at a rally, it's the most electric political experience I've ever seen. It was the loudest applause I've ever heard. There's something visceral. When RFK starts talking about the CDC needing Dr. Jay Bhattacharya on there and the FDA...
you know, and the NIH and starts naming those agencies and starts saying we're going to get to the bottom of why our food for our kids is poison and we're going to reverse childhood chronic disease by taking on this corruption. When they say that, it's electric. It's like a release. It's like a release. So it's everything.
Everyone's been listening to you, reading these books, trying to put the pieces together. I think RFK is more effectively putting the pieces together. And I think people ask, oh, President Trump, he eats unhealthy. No, no. President Trump's the foundation of his existence is taking on corruption. Like that is why he's on the political stage.
That is why he's been the defining for whatever you think of in the defining political figure of our generation. Like because he's tapped into this frustration of voters that something isn't quite right. Yeah.
And that they're good people, and if we can get this corruption out of the way, that he's staying in the way of this corruption, and we can unleash the American people if we get this corruption out of the way. That thesis is correct. What he has tapped into is the defining political trend of our lifetimes, this populist uprising that's happening throughout all the world.
He has tapped into that in a very powerful way. He's talked for a long time about pharmaceutical corruption and these issues. He understands it innately. But RFK, really, I think better than anyone alive, is sharpening this issue. And he's arguing, as we're trying to argue, it's very simple. It's actually not that complicated.
You just need to put, truly, as a first step, put Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at the CDC, right? Put someone who's not trying to get their next job at pharma, who's aligned with this fundamental agenda at the NIH, at the FDA, at the HHS. And then have people like Elon. Elon saying he wants to run government efficiency. He wants to look at how government's performing.
HHS is the largest and the most expensive department in all of government. What if someone like Elon, people like Bill Ackman, who joined this cause, what if they were given an executive order to analyze the HHS and against the goal of promoting health and thriving and disease reversal for the American people. You have the smartest people in the world doing that. I mean, you'd have radical change.
If you can learn what the pharma has known for the past 30 years, that co-opting our institutions of trust, everything else is downstream of that. There's nothing upstream in culture or trust of those agencies because where do we go about that? Right. So they dictate everything. They dictate the nutrition guidelines. They dictate our agriculture incentives.
They dictate our standard of care that's jamming a drug down 40% of teens' throats right now. If you can not co-opt them like pharma is doing, but get them back to unbiased science. The NIH right now, 95% of NIH grants they're spending is on marginal pharmaceutical R&D. It's literally an outsourced R&D lab for pharma. Every person listening would expect the NIH job is to do foundational research.
That's literally what everyone's saying. It's not. Not at all. If you just with a swipe of a pen and leadership just demand day one that the NIH goes back to population-wide fearless studies about why we're getting sick. That's what we need. We literally need the NIH only asking that question. Why are we getting sick? What variables are tied to chronic disease?
have you anticipated what kind of backlash and how this would be handled like what kind of backlash would you get from these captured institutions if this did happen if trump and rfk get into office and they start implementing these policies and changing things and bringing new people at the helm there's one candidate they're shooting it yeah there's one candidate executive leadership is existential to this issue
Like, I have a company. I'm meeting with members of both sides. This doesn't change without executive leadership. It's just a factual statement. I hate that health is political. It's not. It's bipartisan. It is political in the next 40 days. This will not change if this issue resonates.
And if we believe that what's happening to our soil and to our bodies and to our kids' health is really the most important issue, it doesn't change without strong moral clarity and executive leadership, even if the person says stupid shit and tweets weird stuff.
Right, but even if they do get in office, this is my point, what happens? Like, have you thought about this? Like, the amount of money we're talking about these people losing...
every single member of Congress. Let me make this super clear. I want everyone to understand this. It's powerful, these interests, but we all know this. I think we can feel this too. They're not monolithic. It's a paper tiger. We can overcome this. It's because there's not focus and marshaling of the American people and light on these things.
Every single member of Congress tells me, they said, the only thing that beats money is grassroots focus, is Americans focusing on the issue. The most powerful issue in American politics actually aren't money issues. They're grassroots issues. Guns, abortion, those aren't money issues. Those are issues that people are focused on and vote on.
So what Trump and RFK are starting to do is really tie the foundation of Trump's candidacy, in my opinion, which is really taking the corruption out of the swamp. And there's other issues. Of course, we've got to get the border right, you know, defense, economic agenda. But health care is a glaring example of that.
where there's been a focus on the campaign and a promise of focus you know in real political i think uh... validity in focusing on that because people are getting really fired up about this i can express the stuff watch the rallies of our can trump there's real visceral political on focus on it so that if that anger right if that same energy stream that's leading people to listen your podcast and leading people to flock to you on
And leading, you know, leading to I think people, frankly, to go back to church. I mean, millennials are flocking back to religion. I like like there's all these streams inside where people are kind of like trying to check if leadership can channel that. You know, these are paper tigers. These are paper tigers. But you need the president to say F you.
to these industries that are profiting from kids being sick. And tell Congress, I'm giving you air cover. Tell those lobbies to get the hell out of your office. That's the message from the president. With that leadership. Now, are these powerful interests? Is this the biggest industries in the country? Right? Are these the most powerful industries in the country?
Yes, but again, whatever Trump is tweeting, whatever he's saying, you have to just ask yourself, and this comes from a person who used to be an ever-Trumper, who has the courage to stand up to these interests? Who has the courage? Does anyone think that Trump is afraid to put RFK, put Elon, put brave doctors in charge?
to put people that are distrustful of the military industrial complex in charge of our military. Does anyone think he's not going to do that? Does anyone think he's going to really stand their way and not take some blowback from these industries? He said this very clearly. The biggest mistake of his last presidency was not trusting his gut, was listening to the list of people from the industry.
Well, it's also, I would imagine, and if I talked to him, my number one question would be, what happens when you get in there? What is that experience like? Because no one really knows until you're in office. They don't tell you how it's going to go down if you don't make it. They don't reveal all that.
So what is that experience like, and how can you prepare for it without actually being elected president?
So from my opinion, from my small vantage points, what happens is you get bombarded with complexity, right? What the industries do, oh, you can't touch agriculture incentives even though they're broken. That's going to hurt farmers. You can't, you know, oh, health care. Oh, the PBMs. I'm hearing this all the time. The PBMs and the insurance companies, all these players.
You have to have clarity of vision and an agenda, which President Trump and RFK are talking about, that's super, super clear. It's like we are going to get pharma funding out of the FDA. We are going to reorient with an executive order the goal of the NIH back to foundational research. We are going to disallow people that make nutrition guidelines for kids to take money from Kellogg's.
Like there's 30 things that you can do. And I think I think what President Trump has talked about and what he says is like, let's stay high level. We're not going to have nuclear war. Right.
We're going to aggressively call out and push on major policy objectives to take the corruption out of the health care institutions to attack the incentive that every single health care institution in America today makes more money when a child is sicker for a longer period of time. Just demonstrably. Insurance companies, they make 15% by law profit margin. They want premiums to grow.
That's what's happening. Pharma companies make money on interventions when people are sicker for longer periods of time. Hospitals, as Casey talks about, makes money on interventions, does not make money when people are healthy. Medical schools make money from the sick care system. Just a clear-eyed set of objectives, I think it can fit on a small piece of paper.
What you do is you have a lobbyist come in and say it's complex. Right. There's just simple questions. Why are we paying 10 times more for drugs than Germany? Why in the United States is 10 times more expensive to buy Ozempic than in Germany or Scandinavia? There's these simple, simple things. You can do that. Trump's talked about it. Biden's talked about it. It's bipartisan.
It's not free market that we're paying 10 times more than Germans. We're the biggest buyer of drugs in the country. Why are we subsidizing the rest of the world and subsidizing the pharmaceutical industrial complex? That could be one stroke of a pen, right? One stroke of a pen to...
uh... reset and say what we do know price setting you can charge whatever you want but we're not gonna be more than germans charger if you want we have every right to do that that's one stroke of pen and then you get the blow back you get all you're gonna hurt innovation it's not our job to fund innovation for europe like chart charges the same price you're gonna hurt um... you know you're gonna lead to drug shortages will have few like charge a higher price it's like you can do he but it but it's like literally just like clear focus and and i think trump like he's talking about this he's seen it
So, you know, to anyone kind of and I've gone through this process, it's like he we know who he is, but we also know that he's going to put good people in charge and not stand in their way and wants to be bold.
And there is the benefit of him having already been in and understanding all the red tape and all the problems and all the influences and all the stuff that he couldn't correct in four years.
I also just can't imagine like if what's Callie's talking about from the top is happening and putting voice to power to some of these things that people feel and people know if this is actually right now it is silenced at the top. We went through four years of COVID without a single health care leader at an agency ever telling us to get on top of our metabolic health and how to do that ever.
And yet people were talking about it. So if we are able to give voice at the highest level to these concepts, I just wonder also what that ripple effect through our country is going to be like when people are part of that tribe and can actually speak about it without the fear of being called, you know... just totally all right, you know, crazy person for even talking about these things.
That grassroots momentum that I think could happen would be incredibly powerful where we can all come together to work on this because as opposed to it being adversarial with the top, it's connected to what the top is talking about. We so believe, you know, parents don't want their kids getting sick. We don't want to be sick. We don't want to see our parents dying of Alzheimer's and cancer.
And all of these diseases, there is this pervasive thread that Americans are lazy and they don't want to be healthy. I was indoctrinated with that message as a medical student and as a surgical resident. It's not true. People want to be healthy. There's a huge system rigged against them. You know, we've got people don't want to be feeding their kids this dead trash food that comes in a package.
But it is what is cheaper because of corrupt policies at the top with the farm bills. You know, people don't want their kids to be eating this plastic meat in school. But, you know, Lunchables and Kraft Heinz and the USDA forged a deal that's now putting Lunchables in schools that serve seven billion meals to children per year.
You know, and doctors then don't get a single minute of nutrition education in 80 percent of medical schools. So you just imagine like. We've got people who want to be healthy. We truly believe that Americans want to be healthy. And for the first time in many years, this could be an opportunity for that to be aligned with the country's vision and priority as opposed to adversarial to it.
And I think that that, you know, Jason Karp in the Senate hearing. who's one of the co-founders of Who Kitchen, talked about if 5% of revenue of some of these big companies like Kellogg's and General Mills drops because people are no longer willing to buy these food because there's a real movement about it, they will change. They will re-innovate towards what people actually want.
But right now, it's controversial to even push. You exercise your far right. You know, you have to have so much strength to be healthy in this country. And not only that, you have to have financial resources and strength, strength of courage. And so, you know, he says, yeah, if people change their buying decisions, which I think will be easier to do culturally now,
If we are talking about these things on the highest level, then it's going to change. I think also I think a potential light filled vision of what could happen is that some of these companies might adapt to consumer demand and do better, do better processes. Like we need as we need to get back to American agriculture being regenerative agriculture. We're totally screwed if we don't do that.
We cannot continue with this mass poisoning of our farmland. Not only is it horrible for our farmers who are dying at astronomical rates from chronic disease, but it's terrible for our children and our bodies. And if people start understanding that because people like RFK are in the leadership positions and that's becoming part of the zeitgeist,
It will change the way people buy and what they're willing to tolerate. But right now, the norm, because of corrupt incentives in a rigged system, is to be unhealthy. And I think when people get permission to push back against that, we could see an incredibly bright, beautiful future in a very short period of time in America. We believe that's possible.
I believe it's possible, too, and I think it's incredibly cynical and unpatriotic to think that all Americans are lazy. It's crazy. We operate on momentum, and if you have lived your life eating bad food and being sedentary, you're going to continue to do so unless something jolts you out of that. And if there's a moment in the zeitgeist...
where a good percentage of people start shifting in a very particular direction, taking care of themselves, and the people around them see that and see the benefits and see these people improve, and then they become inspired to do it, it could have a huge effect on the population. There's a lot of Americans that are not lazy. You know, I'm American. People want to live. Yeah.
People want to thrive. They want to be energetic. They want to have health. And they want to be successful in life. And one of the best ways to be successful in life is to have more energy to pursue the things you're interested in. Yeah. And the only way you do that is if your body's healthy.
Many listeners are battling surely chronic conditions, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, et cetera. I don't think any listener in their head wants to be sick. I don't think any man wants to not walk their daughter down the aisle. My mom wanted to be healthy. She wanted to meet her grandchild, which she wasn't able to do. Think there's the slur and this lie. We are a free country.
We should have sugary filled foods, right? We should have beer drugs should be legal, but we should not be subsidizing coca-cola with food stamps This standard of care is wrong. Like after my awakening with Casey. I thought what do I want to do with my life? I started a company and it writes letters of medical necessity doctor's notes for food and exercise and
We realized something that nobody in the healthcare system knows. Casey didn't learn this at Stanford.
I never ever learned in medical school or residency that I could write a prescription for food or exercise. It's totally legal. And if you do that, it can be covered by, you can use tax advantage dollars tax-free. Never learn that in nine years.
So you mean you could use tax dollars to give people gym memberships? Yes.
That is right now legal. I never learned that. It's called a letter of medical necessity.
Our company, TruMed, this year will do 500,000 gym membership recommendations from providers. We initially got a lot of questions from the industry because they've never heard these letters of medical necessity. We've walked in the law.
As much as Pfizer has tried when I worked for Pfizer, the definition of medicine in the IRS tax code is not a synthetic pill made by a large pharmaceutical industry. The definition of medicine is something that's recommended by a medical practitioner for the prevention, reversal, cure, mitigation of a condition.
The problem is that they've co-opted what medicine is in our brains, and at Stanford Med School, nobody understands this. So we've actually been educating members of Congress about this. But there's $150 billion in these HSA funds, and this is a message to everyone. Our company's doing it, but I would say it's much wider than that.
Go to your doctor and demand a letter of medical necessity when they're taking out the prescription pad for the statin, for the metformin, for the SSRI. Study after study shows they have two cohorts of people. They've got people that exercise and eat whole foods, and then they have people that do antidepressants and go to therapy.
the people that don't go to therapy no drugs but exercise any better food demonstrably better outcomes in depression so i think it is all over its road and this is an important thing i think from conservatives liberal it's not it's not about lecturing americans the answers of lecturing americans what do you mean they're buying books there no listening to doctor human a lot of people on a health journey with our clinical incentives we should be incentivize in the clinically appropriate
intervention for what health issues we're facing. We are facing a chronic disease metabolic health crisis. It's nine out of 10 killers of Americans and 95% of medical spending. So just clinically, and Europe is actually doing this, right? If you have PCOS, infertility,
in Europe, most countries, you get a subsidized keto diet because PCOS, which is the leading cause of female infertility, is insulin resistant. It's basically on the diabetes spectrum. And the most effective intervention to reverse PCOS and become more fertile is going on a 12-week keto diet. So what happens in the United States?
Doctors, good friends, and actually my good friend that I always reference is an OBGYN from Harvard now is educating his patients about this, and we've had good conversations. But doctors from Harvard Medical School who are OBGYNs do not know when they're sitting across from a patient who's infertile what causes PCOS. It's immediate.
The standard of care, the standard of care is immediate jamming hormone pills down that woman's throat and on a quick route to IVF. IVF should absolutely, of course, be legal, but that's an invasive procedure. procedure, right? And no woman listening, I'm sure, who's going through the traditional medical system and most women, many, it's an epidemic right now, PCOS, they're not told this.
They're not told this. So the key and the policy here is opening up flexibility for Americans to work with their doctor, to trust that they don't want to kill themselves. Sometimes drugs might be the answer. But we're way, way over-indexed on that right now.
Like, could you imagine what would happen if, you know, Americans who are pre-diabetic or their kids are obese had the ability, instead of the $1,600 that we're mandating for six-year-olds a month of government-funded money to get Ozempic, if that could give mom the choice? Give mom the choice. We would have a transformation of our food system.
And yeah, so that's what I kind of decided to push on in my life. And really, every American, the most defiant thing you can do personally, 80% of people have an HSA and FSA account. Max those out. If you're battling a chronic condition or even trying to prevent a chronic condition, get your eight sleep, get your athletic greens, get your gym membership. Talk to your doctor about it.
We want a revolution of people actually demanding – something Casey and I talk a lot about, acute versus chronic. This is very important. If you are about to die with an infection, a burst appendix, a gunshot wound – Go to the doctor. Go to the doctor. Take pause on chronic. Kids are being now kind of, you're anti-science if you don't get on those metformin, statins, SSRIs, Ozempic.
The studies are being kind of shaming those moms, these poor moms on Medicaid, single moms trying to make ends meet. Medicaid is just a disaster. We poisoned poor kids and then jammed drugs down their throat. Moms don't know what to do. Um, we just, we, uh, we just have to incentivize and just ask that question. And, and, and, and every patient should know you have the ability to, to step back.
Your, your kid's not going to die tomorrow if they don't take the statin. Like there's another route you can go. And our, we have a chapter, don't, uh, don't trust your doctor. What is it?
Trust yourself, not your doctor. But like the evidence on chronic conditions, which is where they have abjectly failed.
They failed.
Like, like, like, like, yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you think about what's happened over the past 50 years, all of these chronic diseases are exploding. And the more we medicate them, the higher the disease rates are. Like the more SSRIs we prescribe, the more depression we're getting. The more metformin we're prescribing, type 2 diabetes rates are going up.
The more clomiphene we are prescribing, the more we're having to do IVF procedures. You know, it's not making sense. The more hypertension, ACE inhibitors, you know, beta blockers, the more hypertension is going up. And so it doesn't really make sense that we would say, oh, they're crushing it on these diseases by prescribing more pills.
We're prescribing 221 million prescriptions for statins per year, and heart disease is continuing to be the leading cause of death in the United States. This doesn't make... any sense. And, you know, it's like Callie's saying, like, it is a free country and people should be allowed to make choice, but we don't need to pay for the bad choices for people, which is what we're doing.
We don't incentivize cigarettes for kids.
We're incentivizing sugar. We're putting it in their school lunches. We are also making those foods cheaper. Through the farm bills and through our complete and utter support of $500 billion program, the farm bill program. And it's all, in terms of the crops subsidies, going towards commodity crops that are turned into ultra-processed foods and making them cheaper. Less than 1%.
of the entire Farm Bill budget goes towards fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, legumes.
Regenerative ranchers like Will Harris, you know, who's a hero. And truly, I mean, if people want to do something before the election, they're trying to slide the Farm Bill five-year extension under our noses right now. They're trying to vote on that right now because they're trying to get it in before Trump gets in because they know Trump's going to blow stuff up.
If you want to call your member of Congress, take one minute, ask them to do food and, you know, not have just government-funded Ozempic before fixing our food system, the Treat and Reduce Obesity Act, and tell them it needs to be a one-year extension on the farm bill. This is happening right now. I'm getting literally from heroes and members of Congress are asking me to talk about this.
They're trying to jam this farm bill that it's 90% subsidizes ultra-processed food ingredients. I mean...
We're slanting.
We're just we, you know, as a conservative growing up, as a conservative growing up, I used to work for, you know, conservative think tanks used to pay us to along with the NAACP. Excuse me. We used to pay conservative think tanks, the pharma industry. So we rig the system, and then we pay conservative influencers to say it's nanny state to question the rigged system.
Think about how screwed up that is, right? We rig the system beyond recognition, tens of millions of dollars of lobbying spending to ensure that sugary drinks, that diabetes water is on food stamps. And then the moment you question that... you get attacked by the conservative influencers saying you're nanny state. We are still in that situation.
We're waking up, and I think Trump's really realigned the parties to where when I grew up as a young conservative, it's like you trust the farmer, trust food without question, and it's totally against orthodoxy on the conservative side to question any corporation. That's changed, which is a very good thing, but you still have little remnants of that.
Fixing a rigged market is not an attack on the free market. It's a necessity. The pharmaceutical industry spends five times more on lobbying and public affairs than the oil industry. There's five pharmaceutical lobbyists for every single government official. The healthcare industry, just as the economics, is the highest funder of TV news. They're the highest funder of politicians themselves.
literally by far. They're the highest spender on research. They fund the regulatory agencies themselves, right? They fund the NAACP and civil rights groups and weaponize issues like feminism, racism, and body positivity very strategically to get us to shut up. They are just demonstrably, the healthcare industry is the lifeblood of every single institution that we trust in America.
And to question that is not nanny state. That's something Trump and RFK have kind of bashed through. We need a reset. We need to come together with the farmers. You know, with the brave people in health care and have a reset. And I would just ask you, does it feel like it's a marginal issue or does it feel like, you know, we kind of need to have almost a spiritual reset here?
And that's kind of I think we can like if we keep focusing on this and keep pushing, I think we can really unleash what everyone wants, honestly. Yeah.
I think it's also an information ripple effect. And this is why it's so important to have people like you lay this out so clearly is that most people haven't heard it said. I think you guys have said it as clearly as anybody I've ever heard. And the message is so clear and it's so concise. And then it gets out there. This wasn't available five years ago. It just wasn't. I'd never heard it.
I didn't think that there was medical capture. I didn't think there was a problem with the NIH before COVID. I had no idea that there was this prevailing issue. I would have been the first person to defend vaccines. I would have been the first person to defend the medical establishment. They're working very hard to create drugs to help people with all these diseases, and we've got problems.
I didn't... People are getting the information now in a way they've never gotten it before through the Internet. And I think because it's not regulated, I think that's one of the things that freaks these people out. And that's why you have people like Bill Gates who have profited tremendously from vaccines.
and his global health care initiative, air quotes, that this guy would be so bold as to say we have to remove vaccine misinformation when what studies have been done on vaccines? Like you tell me what how clear are you when there is some sort of a correlation? There is a rise in all these issues and there's a rise in all these vaccines and children. And you're saying that the work has been done.
Show me that work.
Yeah.
Well, that work doesn't exist.
Right.
And that's why this medical misinformation label is fucking horseshit. Yeah. And it's scary that someone of great influence and extreme wealth would be promoting that.
Yeah.
When he profits off of it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, if all these medications were crushing it and there were no side effects, everyone should probably take them. Yes. Right? But if that's not really the case, then we need to silence anything that talks about it.
Which is crazy. Yeah.
I think COVID, obviously, as you've said, like it broke something open. It broke something open that I feel like is light because it's awareness. And, you know, I was probably a little more cynical having been in the health care system going into COVID because I was raised as a young surgeon with the mantra, as a surgeon, you eat what you kill.
Like that is the unofficial mantra of the surgical world, which is that as a private practice surgeon, what you eat, i.e. what your salary is going to be, is what you kill, how many surgeries you sell and book. And so it was very black and white to me to understand that the financial security of everyone in the health care system is dependent on how much we actually do to people, how much we –
unfortunately see these bodies essentially a box that we can either take things out of or put things in a in you know surgery is taking things out um or put medications in like that's it's very dark that's why i left that's why i literally just put down my scalpel because i was heading out of residency into private practice and i thought i can't i can't do this i can't that's crazy right that this is like the business model of my industry because it's very personal and then
You know, I had a really good friend who was with me in the hallway before taking a job as a as a cancer surgeon and, you know, tearful saying, you know, I don't know if I can do this. Like when people come through the doors of the surgical oncology department here, they are going to get a surgery whether they need it or not. Those are her exact words. And this is this is because it is. And again.
We I every doctor I know is a good person went into health care for noble reasons. But if you have if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If that's what you know and that's what you can offer people, that is what you're going to offer people.
And especially with cancer, when people are hopeless and desperate and you have something you can do for them and it happens to be really profitable. This this revolving door keeps happening. Yeah. And then just always getting back to systems issues, because that's where Callie and I really focus. You look at some of these things that sound good on paper.
And I think this is actually a lot what's happening with politicians, is they see these bills, lots of things coming across their desk, and they kind of sound good on paper. It's going to be good for farmers. It's going to be good for absences. It's going to reduce obesity. Sounds great, but the devil's always in the details. You look at what happened with...
obamacare and like they they did they did speak about this idea of value-based care which sounds really good it's like we're gonna have we're gonna pay doctors more for better outcomes which which is awesome so a doctor would have to show essentially that they're the patient is getting better and they're doing it for a lower cost that's the value equation and if that happens they get paid more well the
easiest, by far, evidence-based way to make a patient healthier for a lower cost is to have them eat real food and exercise and go in the sunshine and sleep, right? And manage their stress, obviously. Not drugging them for life. And unfortunately, even that... That whole project got co-opted by industry because what happened was industry got their fingers in it.
And the quality metrics that doctors were going to have to report on to get that increased payment, instead of it being quality, good outcomes, being a healthier patient who reversed their disease, quality, good outcomes was measured by how many of the patients in that doctor's practice were medicated on long-term medication therapy.
So a doctor, instead of saying, I reversed these 50 patients' diabetes and now they are non-diabetic, they would report that they had their patient panel on long-term diabetes medication and they were compliant with it. That was a good outcome. So even something that sounds good, Obamacare, value-based care, can get corrupted if we don't look at the details.
There's a new bill right now that's been introduced that's all about protecting farmers, that's basically going to allow the EPA, which is totally bought off, to decide at a federal level whether these different pesticides are safe or not.
And so if the EPA says that a particular pesticide is safe, then state by state, it's going to be similar to the vaccines where people cannot sue for harm caused by pesticide injury if it's got the label that the FDA said it was safe. So it's like, oh, well, this is going to create less complexity for farmers and we're going to have less litigation. But it's the devil's in the details.
And so, you know, I think that all that is to say, I think COVID broke something open that is good because it's basically giving people the courage in the face of total insanity that happened to ask why and to be a And but there's you know, there's a lot to clean up.
And I think that just seeing it firsthand in the health care system, like I have a little cynicism about it because of the way the incentives are in the business model. But I think like Callie said, with executive leadership, this could change rapidly.
This is it sounds complicated. This can be unwound very quickly. Nobody wants this. You need executive leadership, strong executive agenda and then a strong legislative agenda. priorities. And you need, with the executive agenda, to have transformational change eventually get to some real bipartisan.
But I would argue, just listening to what Casey's talking about in these systems issues, we all think, oh, we got to... Who are the experts, the uncorrupted medical experts who can figure this out? I think people like Elon Musk are much more important healthcare thinkers, systems thinkers.
We need systems thinkers to literally just start top down, looking at these agencies, looking at the web of incentives, and asking, what is something that makes sense to spur American health and disease reversal? We spend $4.5 trillion. This is on Parson, right? We spend $4.5 trillion. It's growing at double the rate of GDP on basically managing Americans poisoning themselves.
It's like, how do we successfully use that money to reverse these trends? It's actually when you get down to it and start going down these rabbit holes, there's some major things you could do that are very dramatic. And it does get to core bureaucratic change. And you get to incentive change. You get to reorienting the incentives of these industries.
And you get to eventually where all the money is, which is where are the subsidies going to and where are those $4.5 trillion of health care spend going to? And you just have to demand that that follows the science and go to the right standard of care. And frankly, again, I can't stress this enough. Just let Americans choose. Give the Americans the information. Like, fearlessly.
Let's give them the information on diabetes. Let's give them the information on obesity. Let's give them the information on the 72 vaccines. Let's give them the information on everything. And trust that the American people aren't suicidal enough to just want to kill themselves. We've infantilized the American people with our healthcare industry.
And I think there's actual cultural and spiritual ramifications from that. We have told, the USDA says that it's dangerous to grow food in your backyard. Right. Literally, there's a war on on whole food. Bill Gates says it's pseudoscience, as you said, that, you know, trees help with global warming. He's literally putting up sun blockers.
He's saying that it's anti-science to say that the future for developing country and feeding them is anything other than lab grown meat and ultra processed food. Like we're in a bizarro world here. We need moral clarity.
Do we need studies to tell us that regenerative ranching and more natural processes and not raping our soil to where there's only 40 crop cycles left and try to out hack everything and spray poison over all the crops? We just need to get back to basics.
I was just going to say, the immediate response to what Callie's saying is that's going to decrease access. People are going to starve. This is an equity issue. People can't afford regenerative agriculture. Yeah, by design, right? That is also a systems issue. The fact that people can't afford that food is because we're subsidizing the shitty food.
So it's like that's why at every level, you know, the immediate backlash to saying any of this is that, oh, that's elitist, classist, racist, whatever, you know, because not everyone can afford this. But that is literally by design. And that could be changed as well.
Well, just just think about these congressional meetings. And it's not a blink of an eye that that podiatrist, Representative Winstrup. Bill, Ozempic, $1,600, trillions of dollars in ramification. Not even a blink. He didn't even read the bill.
Of course we'll make this happen.
He didn't even read the bill. And then we get lectured at the next meeting. about how not poisoning kids is too expensive.
Or complicated. How are we going to get the food there? It's not complicated. You know what's complicated? Sitting a 12-year-old down once a week to get an injection for their obesity. This is insane. Like going to the pharmacy, having to pay for that, having to get the kid to accept the injection.
All the other comorbidities that kid is going to have because they're not addressing the root cause.
That kid's still going to be living in a toxic stew. They're still going to have a totally challenged life. Their mitochondria, you know, is that ozempic going to go into their cell and somehow clear out the mitochondria of all the other toxic crap that we're still living in? Absolutely not. So it's like we are being gaslit.
We are being gaslit to think that for some reason the pharmaceutical approach is the only one.
Only legitimate science.
It's the only thing we should be passionate about. It's the only thing that defies complexity or cost and silence on kids need to be outdoors playing. Right now, the average kid in America is spending less time outdoors than a maximum security prisoner. We should think about that.
The fact that the pesticides, the plastics, the sleep, all the things, and somehow that's all too complicated, but we can jam kids for life with a shot weekly for $1,600 a month.
There's no reason for this. Like you just hear this and if it makes sense and you ask like, how can this be undone? It's just like it truly like this could be undone. Like it's just it's just because we haven't had focus on it. But like you can get this done in a year. Like I truly believe that RFK, you know, and Trump will focus on this.
I think it's also something that truly should be a nonpolitical issue in terms of bipartisan. It's like I know they're labeling exercise and I've seen them even label red meat consumption as being some sort of a far right thing.
And liking sunlight.
Right. It's all horseshit. And I think most people realize it's all horseshit. It's not like the abortion issue. It's not like immigration. It's not like one of these things that people are ideologically captured to side on one side of the fence or the other. I think it's a fundamental human thing that would resonate with most folks if it starts getting going.
Everyone wants this. Everyone wants this. I mean, again, we are idealistic, but this is a legacy issue. It's not a partisan issue. Again, I think that executive leadership, we have to be clear-eyed. If we don't have moral clarity and people that are going to say, go away to these industries and have clear, level-headed thinking on what's actually happening, we're screwed.
But there are members of Congress and there's bipartisan appetite. Again, we've been meeting with dozens of them. I've been getting personal DMs from members of Congress on this journey, people are clamoring for answers here. And I do believe that a focus on chronic disease reversal can be a banner bipartisan initiative that will go down in history.
I think in a history book, if we're still around 100 years, we'll talk about this moment where we... I mean, the shame we'll have for what we did to kids on obesity, like childhood obesity. there's no greater moral standard in our country. It's like 3% in Japan. It's like 50% of teens are overweight or obese here. So just like, what are we doing?
And if we're not thinking about this, like what are we doing with our time?
Right.
You know, I just really don't understand sometimes, but I think that that gets into some of the tech and the more cultural issues. Like we're so distracted and by design, right? Like we're so obsessed with on our phones, technology, 10 hours a day. You know, the average kid, I think it's seven hours a day now on a screen. So we're not, we're totally funneled in on this stuff.
And then you've got these other cultural factors that may have good intentions. Like tech has a great side and feminism has a great side, but they get weaponized culturally to say like, yeah, you know, like we were talking about earlier, women, Don't cook. Being a mother is second class citizenship. It's associated with like being property and slave. Get out of the workforce.
Rise the corporate ladder. And women are now 25 percent of them on our SSRIs. Divorce rates are 50 percent. Men are lost because basically women are saying like men don't have a role anymore. You know, we got this. And kids kids are not being able to, you know, get that quality time with their family to play and to be wisdom to be passed down and to have home cooked meals.
And, you know, and I feel. It's obviously the beautiful sides to that, but also it's like we've totally lost our priorities and we're giving away our attention freely so that we're so distracted that we're missing the existential issues that are happening here now.
And I think that what Kelly and I really want to share is that there's a way to get back to, I think, deep fulfillment and genuine happiness.
health but it's it you know we do have to the chronic disease epidemic is just part and parcel with all of this because you know our brains and our bodies are basically getting destroyed and then it's a vicious downward cycle where if our bodies aren't strong and our minds aren't strong we're actually less strong to build a
to face and to push back against the things that are trying to capture our attention. You know, you get a kid who is eating the dead food filled with the sugars and the seed oils and their brains inflamed. They're on the dopamine treadmill from life. And so they're going to be more
um easy to succumb to the the phone that hits the dopamine or the drugs down the road i think you talked about this with brigham like you put the rats in a group and if they're in community and they have kind of that purpose of community they're not going to choose the heroin water right they're going to just choose the regular water but that's why the food is so interlinked with all of it like i just look at the food we're feeding our kids and we're we're doing this because families feel strapped for time and money you know and that's a societal issue
And we've also bought into this idea that both parents may be working all the time for women to have any value in society, which is insane, and forgotten that parenting is the most precious, incredible act we possibly could do, I think, as humans, and raising healthy, strong, critical-thinking people.
But because of all of these forces, we are just giving food to our families that is literally dead. Ultra-processed food is dead food. The second... People don't really understand this. Doctors certainly don't. The second food comes out of the earth or is killed, if it's an animal, like it starts degrading. That's just what happens.
And the food has tens of thousands of molecular components in it that work miraculously with our cells to generate health. And right now, the average piece of food, I mean, 67% of our calories are ultra processed food, totally dead, totally stripped of all those miraculous nutrients.
And the average piece of fresh food is traveling 1,500 miles from the soil to our plates and is usually out of the ground for weeks. So we are literally eating dead food that has lost all of its magic that is God-given for us to have cells that function properly.
And all of this is tied in to all these cultural societal factors that are being used against us to make us think that our priorities are basically just climbing the corporate ladder. It's all interconnected. And fundamentally, we need to just wake up and really focus on like, again, like get back to the core basics below all of this, above all of this, which is that our life is a miracle.
It is a miracle that we are here, that you're here, that I'm alive, that Callie's alive, that we're all here. It is so insane that we get to have this experience and privilege to be alive once.
And to have these finite number of days and we're squandering that because we're distracted and we are we are allowing ourselves to live in fear when in fact we don't need to have fear because we are these incredible miraculous beings. And I think so. That's why I think.
Just to, we're talking a lot about policy and it's really important, but I think it also like a lot of this is going to come down to us having a reckoning in our families and our communities with ourselves of like getting back to that higher level of like, Jesus Christ, like we're alive. This is insane. And this body is our temple. It's our one home.
and we're destroying it um and that's not the best idea like we could actually be doing it differently we could be honoring it respecting it letting it produce the energy it needs to produce to be able to reach our highest purpose in this one lifetime and it's not that complicated and i don't understand fully i reflect on this every day with cali like why are there dark why are there forces that don't want that to happen i don't understand i don't know if it's just money like
Because it's big, right? Like, everything we're saying is not the direction we're going in as a country, as a world. And, you know, I don't understand that. It feels like we have an opportunity to elevate consciousness here on this planet for future generations, and we're choosing not to. But we could make a different choice today, all of us, by...
by really digging deep into our spiritual strength and being bold right now. I think now's the moment. And it's above political. There are political tactics that I think can help bring it to fruition, but fundamentally it starts with us, each of us individually believing that this life is a miracle and fighting for it.
Well said. I think we might want to end it right there because that was so perfect. Anything else?
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you guys. Listen, this message is so important. You guys lay it out so well. And I think people are waking up. I really do. And I hope that this being connected to Trump doesn't put people off. to the point where they're not able to recognize that this is about all of us. It has nothing to do with political party. It has nothing to do with ideology.
It's just about being a human being and that money and that the pursuit of constant money from these corporations has created this diffusion of responsibility thing where each person inside that organization doesn't feel responsible for the overall result. And that they're not all bad people. And it's not demons running all these organizations.
They're people that have been captured by a system that's been captured. And it's all about money. And that's why those people cheered when they found out that Ozempic was going to be prescribed for everyone. Yeah. So thank you very, very much. Please tell people, is there obviously your book, Good Energy, that's available.
Is there a way, do you guys have a website where people can reach out to as well?
Yeah, I'm at caseymeans.com. I have a weekly newsletter that examines all of these things. I'm also the co-founder of a company called Levels, which is part of this whole mission, which is to basically empower people. We have democratized access to continuous glucose monitors so that people can actually understand their own metabolic health because it's the most important aspect of our health.
And right now that technology has been actually, by the healthcare system, been sequestered just to people who already have type 2 diabetes. And the vision of the company is to help people
before they get these diseases to understand how their diet and their lifestyle are affecting their metabolic health by using these totally available, not very expensive sensors and pairing it with intelligent software. So we've seen amazing things. We've had people lose 120 pounds just by having awareness of what this disaster food is doing to our blood sugar.
So levels.com, caseymeans.com, and then, of course, our book, Good Energy.
And I think the most important thing we can do today is steer our medical dollars to these root cause metabolic interventions like exercise. We could do that right now with HSAs, FSAs, which is why I started TrueMed.com. Everyone listening should look at your HSA, FSAs. You can go to TrueMed.com, figure out how to spend that money if you qualify on real medicine.
If we can get our dollars to real medicine and away from waiting to get sick for pharma, we can do some major things. And most people are doing their HSA contributions right now. Inchronicdisease.org is something I set up. It just connects you with your member of Congress with some scripts to talk about this. I do think if people are compelled, we talked about the political.
There's a real spiritual level here. And I think getting a little bit more involved, just calling your member of Congress for a couple minutes does make a difference. So I'd urge that inchronicdisease.org. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you both. Bye, everybody. Bye.