Brigham Buhler and Joe Rogan expose how the U.S. healthcare system fails 1.9 million annual chronic disease deaths—more than all wars combined—due to Big Pharma’s $8B yearly advertising, FDA funding tied to industry (50%+), and siloed medicine ignoring diet/lifestyle. Buhler’s Senate testimony with Casey Means and Callie Means revealed systemic misdiagnoses, opioid crisis neglect (747-plane deaths daily), and insurance barriers blocking preventative care like testosterone therapy. Rogan compares this to Ukraine war funding vs. Maui wildfire relief, critiquing bureaucratic control over land and corporate capture across sectors. Their bipartisan push for AI-driven, proactive health models clashes with ideological tribalism, proving real reform demands breaking financial incentives—not political ones—to finally prioritize biological truth over profit. [Automatically generated summary]
I know you're having him and his sister Casey on the podcast.
Brilliant folks that are just patient advocates.
I mean, at the end of the day, They had the same experience as I had.
Callie, a little bit different walk of life.
He was a lobbyist.
Casey was a doctor, Stanford trained surgeon.
Realized that she was in a system where they didn't really heal people.
They just treated symptoms and profiteered off disease states.
And she said, there's got to be a better way.
So their voice rung so loud.
After I think they did Tucker, that it led to momentum.
And then because of you having me on the podcast, that's how I met RFK. And so Bobby's team had reached out to me maybe about a year and a half ago to come up to Dallas while he was doing a campaign there and sit down with him.
And he was Just asking a hundred questions about what's going on and what did you see on the pharmaceutical side and what did you see owning pharmacies and billing insurance companies.
And so when they had an opportunity to put this team together to testify in front of the Senate, the goal was to create a nonpartisan group of individuals to take a new fresh approach to what is going on with chronic disease in America.
Because the chronic disease crisis is at an all-time high.
I mean, we could go through all the statistics and I know that Casey and Callie will when they're on here, so I don't want to steal their thunder, but it's staggering.
I mean, close to anywhere between 1.7 to 1.9 million people are dying a year of chronic disease.
We talk a lot about war.
Since the dawn of this country, roughly estimated between 1.3 to 1.5 million people total have died in war, American lives.
So in a year, we're losing more people to chronic disease than all the wars combined.
And we're not talking about it.
So to me, I was excited when they said, hey, the Senate's willing to hear and that's the beauty of a democracy.
They did let us come in there and candidly take a dump on the Senate floor on what's going on with this health care system and really dig into the weeds.
So we did do a roundtable prior to going into the communal roundtable in front of the public eye, which they had no idea what was coming.
The Senate didn't expect it.
We had assembled a grassroots effort to get the word out there, and over 2,000 people took off from work.
These are...
This is a Senate hearing.
Over 2,000 hardworking Americans took time from their busy day, flew to D.C., had to sit in an overflow room to listen to these testimonies.
And the level of feedback from people, from like real humans, real-world people, was staggering.
People afterwards came up in tears sharing their story of how the system had let them down or a loved one down, misdiagnoses, all the different issues that they've dealt with trying to navigate this system.
And to the senator's credit, you know, behind closed doors, they did say you probably don't want to go ultra hard after the food industry or ultra hard after the pharmaceutical industry because it may limit our ability to get things done.
It's a really healthy, good thing to talk about what you're going through with people.
The good and the bad.
Don't keep it all bottled up.
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That's BetterHelp.com slash JRE. If there was a real easy way out...
Like, if there really was a pill with no side effects that cured all your ales, sure, people would want that.
And this is the problem.
The advertising, that $8 billion a year, it leads you to believe that there is some sort of a solution in the bottom of a prescription bottle.
And that's not real.
That's the problem, is that they've been misled so long and so far down the line, and here they are, chronically ill, suffering, and they're hoping it's the next pill.
And our hope was to break down from the start of...
How do we process these foods?
How do we grow, harvest, and what do we do with our soil?
What do we do with our pesticides?
How do we bring these products to market?
How do we regulate our food industry?
That's all new to me.
That's not my expertise.
My expertise and my testimony was focused on what I saw as a drug rep, what I saw as a med device rep, what I saw billing insurance companies, and that was a part of the talk that we didn't even get to dive deep into, but the goal was to explain to the Senate From the food processing,
growing, harvesting, chemical treatments, to the packaging, to the ingredients we add into our food, to the hospital systems, throughout the system, front to back, the American people are set up for failure.
In the 1950s, the FDA had approved 700 different ingredients in our food products.
That's it, 700. Today, there are over 10,000 chemicals and petrochemicals in our food products in the United States.
In Europe, still 700. Jesus.
And what gets crazier is when Food Babe, she's an influencer, right?
And that's been, you know, crapped on by the media.
But she's an advocate and she's just a voice, a mother out there saying, hey guys, what's wrong with this picture?
Let me show you what's in Froot Loops in America and let me show you what's in Froot Loops in Canada.
The same manufacturer, Kellogg's, is selling one product to the American people and a safer product.
Less ingredient, less chemical-filled product outside the United States.
They have the ability to sell it here, but they don't.
Because they know they can sell more addictive, more colorful, vibrant, that attract kid food sources here in the U.S. It's so dark.
And so we walked through all of that.
It blew my mind on the food front.
And we know, you and I have talked, like, in the healthcare system, my main message was...
We're here to talk about the boom in chronic disease.
We know that food and our environment has a huge impact on that.
But so does preventative care.
And so does building an ecosystem that allows clinicians to troubleshoot and diagnose and prevent chronic diseases from evolving in the first place.
These are all metabolically related disease states.
All the chronic diseases that are killing us can be traced back to diet, lifestyle, and nutrition, but none of our clinicians are trained on diet, lifestyle, and nutrition.
That's the hard pill for people to swallow, diet, lifestyle, and nutrition.
It's very hard for people who are addicted to shitty food, who are lazy, who don't have a history of exercise, and their lifestyle sucks, and they get home from work and they like to drink.
You and I have talked about this with some of your comedy friends that have become my friends too.
To watch the evolution.
You just gotta give people momentum.
We just gotta get some wins on the board.
We gotta give them hope.
And we've gotta start by having the conversation.
And that's what I was optimistic about.
For the first time in my adult life, The Senate is willing to sit down with a group of individuals and have a deep conversation about where our food comes from, how our food is being processed, what ingredients are in our food, and how that could potentially lead to chronic disease.
And it got labeled by some of the I would say hatchet job media outlets that have come out, and we can dive into that.
But it's just stunning that people are willing to whore themselves out to write a hit piece on someone trying to help human beings find healthier choices and realize the root cause of all the diseases that we're facing.
And the people on that panel, too, to their credit, I was the least qualified of anyone to be in that room, and I was there to talk about my experiences as an industry insider.
I am not telling you that I am an expert on metabolic disease.
I can tell you that I'm an expert on fuckery.
Because I've been in healthcare long enough to see what they're doing, and I know their equation.
I know their offense.
But other than me, you had Casey Means, Stanford-trained surgeon.
You had Dr. Palmer, a psychiatrist from Harvard, who was breaking down metabolic disease and how it's astronomically impacting the mental health crisis in America.
One of the stats he dropped on us in his testimony was, we're at an all-time high in suicide and death of despair, greater than during the Great Depression.
More Americans are dying of suicide and death of despair, more than ever.
More children are being diagnosed with metabolic disease, diabetes.
Girls are starting periods six years younger.
I don't need a double-blind study to tell you something's wrong.
Remove ingredients from certain states, stop chemicals in certain food sources.
They're actually going to march to Kellogg on the 10th of next month to hand a petition signed by over 100,000 Americans coming out the tail end of that, asking them to remove dangerous chemicals that they don't put in food products in other countries and just match it.
That's all they're asking.
Hey, why don't we just match what you're doing outside the US and all these other countries where they've said these products aren't safe?
Why are we allowing you a mulligan on the US population when it comes to food?
And they've never been studied.
That's the other wild thing.
The FDA doesn't have the bandwidth to study every time a new ingredient is added to a food source.
So you and I have gone down the rabbit hole on the FDA's attempt to try and regulate and rein in big industry like big pharma and big medical.
And I know I've told your listeners for over 90% of the products in the operating room have never been through an FDA human safety trial.
It was an entity built at a time to serve a purpose.
And I just think they're drowning.
And I think there's a lot of Industry influence and spit being swapped that can skew decisions and viewpoints and that's dangerous.
It's dangerous and it's spooky that you get pushback after that.
So let's talk about the pushback because it was immediately afterwards you started texting me like, dude, holy shit, these hit pieces are nuts.
Because you could see the machine moving against you.
So you could see that someone saw this Senate hearing, realized that it could potentially have an impact and tried to do their best to mitigate those potentially positive effects for the health of American people.
But it could cost them money.
So they started pumping money into these media outlets.
And this is what I've seen before, owning a compounding pharmacy.
When I went on Jillian Michaels' podcast, she is very opinionated and passionate about this.
And it took me 10 minutes to explain to her that compounding pharmacies aren't bad guys.
And because she had only heard...
The corporate media narrative of compounding pharmacies are dangerous.
People are getting drugs from these compounding pharmacies that are in garages and they're just willy nilly making compounds and shipping them into the marketplace.
And I had to methodically walk her through.
Compounding pharmacies fall under the FDA's jurisdiction.
My pharmacy's been inspected three times in 18 months.
Every single ingredient we buy is an FDA-approved ingredient.
Every single compound we compound, we send off to an independent third-party lab to verify, okay?
And I say all this just to lay the groundwork.
We've treated over a million patient lives at our pharmacy, over a million patient lives nationwide, and What they do in that environment is the media will list any recall, any mistake a compounding pharmacy makes,
but sweep under the rug that big pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly and Pfizer have moved most of their manufacturing overseas where the FDA has to submit before they can come do an inspection and has to give them two months' notice because they're coming into a foreign country and they've got to get visas and approvals and all these things to come inspect those facilities.
They can't just walk in like they walk into my facility.
And so, Lilly, Eli Lilly in particular, one of the reasons they're struggling with back orders right now is their facilities have been popped for egregious action by the FDA. But none of that is in the public eye.
You have to scour.
I think Reuters is the only one that wrote an article.
Little Compounding Pharmacy in Texas recalls 28 vials proactively for a mislabel, and the New York Post makes it national news, but you didn't cover Eli Lilly's nationwide issues on all these products, or the fact that over 2,000 manufacturing facilities owned by Big Pharma haven't been inspected in five or more years.
Well, she gave us that she sent us and said it was very vague.
I get a voicemail.
We want to write an article on your pharmacy.
I find out at three o'clock.
I'm in meetings.
We draft a response explaining all the things we do to go above and beyond and how our vision is to bring, you know, cost effective prescription drugs to the American people for pennies on the dollar, typically less than your copay or deductible.
What part of that?
And in this article at the end, I shit you not, the girl puts...
And by the way, Eli Lilly slicing prices by 50% on their weight loss drug.
That's how the article ends.
And I'm like, how is this not an advertisement?
And so I looked, and now that I've...
I've seen it when I was a drug rep.
I saw it when I owned pharmacies and labs.
I saw it as a device rep.
But I went and looked and said, okay, who owns the New York Post?
And when you peel back the layers to that onion, the New York Post majority holders of stock are Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street.
Now, let's go look at who are the majority owners into Eli Lilly.
Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street.
So the same folks who own the pharmaceutical companies who have the most to gain by keeping the narrative the same and driving America towards the chronic disease crisis and monetizing your chronic disease with all the things you and I have discussed before, whether pharmacy benefit managers, insurance companies, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, front to back, top to bottom, We've lost our way.
We really have lost our way, Joe.
It's all about quarterly earnings and quarterly profits.
And I'm not saying that they're intentionally poisoning the American people to set them up so that they can knock them down.
I just think it's so siloed and so compartmentalized and everybody's fighting for that extra dollar that quarter, that day, that month, that they're just blocking and tackling and preventing the narrative from rising in their siloed bucket.
But you have to, like in humans, we have to take a look out and go, hey, I'm not just treating your knee or your brain health or your heart health.
The body is an organism that works together.
We have to do a deeper dive to assess where the disease started, what caused it, and can we uncover the root cause and fix the root cause?
We have to do the same thing in our systems and our protocols and our procedures.
We know that corporate capture is real.
We know that corporate capture has somewhat happened with the FDA, somewhat happened with Congress and the Senate.
You know, everyone's scared to fight these guys.
And they can wreck your lives.
It's scary.
And it's hard to fight when they control the media.
They control all the funding to the advertising on the news networks.
Yeah, and to even further highlight the level of corruption and corporate capture, I sent you and Jamie an article.
I don't even remember the news outlet.
But when you look, who owns that news outlet?
Okay, well, it says most of its funding comes from this PR firm.
Then when we go to look at who owns the PR firm, it's Monsanto that owns the PR firm that got this other...
And it's always layered.
It's never abundantly clear.
Like, it's hard.
The other one we talked about was...
The Atlantic, you know, and as I peel the layers back to the Atlantic, it was owned by Bradley, who made his money being a consultant for Big Pharma and pharmacy benefit managers.
He sold a big chunk of his company off to Optum, which is one of the dirtiest pharmacy benefit managers out there.
And we broke that down on your previous podcast.
The pharmacy benefit managers, for those listeners that don't know, were established in the 70s and 80s with the goal of driving down the cost of prescription drug care for America.
But it got captured by the insurance companies.
So Cigna, Aetna, CVS Health, all of those companies now own these middlemen that are negotiating rebates.
So it's important to understand because those rebate dollars are held at that company and they're making billions off of chronic disease.
Billions!
So if you're on a GLP-1 weight loss drug for the rest of your life, and they've negotiated rebates to the pharmacy benefit plans that they own, they're oftentimes holding 40-50% of their profitability in a shell company that's not disclosed to the American public or the US government.
And when they establish a Medicare price point on a drug, they base it off of the average wholesale price in America.
And that's important because they artificially inflated the fucking average wholesale price.
And they're giving themselves a rebate on the back end, but the government doesn't have line of sight into that.
And they know it's happening now.
It's been exposed.
We talked about this again on your last five, but it's like, I think it's the state of Idaho uncovered $230 million in fraud in one year.
From the PBMs.
One year.
Now multiply that times all the states in the United States.
I want to believe that, like, I want to believe that people are looking for the truth.
How cute.
How sweet.
And I told you this, even with the DOJ and what I saw with enforcement bodies.
When your data sets are corrupt and the only info you're receiving is from bad sources that are pushing agendas, but those sources also are your future employment when you come out of government service, it just becomes a dangerous, dangerous, slippery slope.
There are often times where enforcement changes legislation through enforcement.
Like right now, the DEA is reviewing if they're going to allow telemedicine companies to continue to prescribe testosterone.
And that's crazy to me because it's like all these issues we have, all the chronic disease, there is not a testosterone crisis.
Your perspective is for chronically obese, like really morbidly obese people, we need to do something.
And this is a very good step.
And it does work.
And it can help people.
It is a very good step.
I'm the hardcore discipline guy.
I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about?
This is something that you can solve just by eating less.
Something you can solve by cutting out sugar, cutting out sodas, eating whole ingredient foods, eating fish and chicken and red meat and vegetables and cutting out all the bullshit.
Well, and that's where I'm like, if I was pushing an agenda, I have a ton to gain by GLP-1s going gangbusters.
I'm not on that bandwagon.
I literally sat there with the Senate meeting and said, this is crazy if we government fund prescribing GLP-1s to children.
That's insanity.
We need to fix our food products in schools.
We need to limit soft drinks and advertising to children.
There's a million things we could do that are way more logical and reasonable than starting to stick a kid with an injectable that they're going to take the rest of their life.
Another example of that is that, you know, we were a foster family growing up.
So we had up to seven foster kids at a time in my house.
And I remember that the hep V vaccines that all those little kids had to get.
And I didn't think about it at the time, but again, hearing some of my friends like Callie and Casey talk about it, the vaccine schedule's crazy because you're giving a child, a brand new baby, essentially a hep B vaccine.
The only two ways to contract hepatitis B is basically you're injecting drugs or sex.
Sexual activity.
An infant's not going to have that.
So why expose them to the risk factor of a potential adverse event when we know autism rates are through the roof?
All of these different health issues for children are climbing.
And at some point we have to assess what we're doing and say, isn't there a better way?
But I know enough about how that system works and how things are negotiated on the back end and the lobby.
And now it's established and now it's hammered home.
And then you assemble and you go have a meet with all the pediatricians nationwide and you have people as spokesperson that push that agenda and get senators and congressmen and women on the hook to go, yes, we need these vaccines incorporated as part of our policy to protect these children.
And I don't think...
It's not that it was...
I don't think everyone's in on it.
I think people are being duped and it's so siloed.
That's one of the other things you and I have talked about historically with medicine.
Medicine's so siloed.
They don't look at the full human body.
They look at, I'm a knee guy and I'm going to look at the knee.
Or I'm a mental health specialist and I'm going to talk to this patient about their mental health.
But your mental health is intertwined with your physical health.
Your mental health, and this is what Dr. Palmer from Harvard talks about, you know, if we have metabolic disease and all these metabolic crises, it's going to lead to mental health issues.
What scares me, and again, not to shit on the GLP-1s, because we prescribe GLP-1s, we utilize GLP-1s, they are a tool in the tool belt, and when utilized appropriately, they can help people.
But a hammer can kill someone if used inappropriately.
And so, if we make it our frontline defense, and again, we go back to the chronic disease crisis in America, and we say, okay, the food system's broke, then the people end up chronically ill, then we don't really assess people, and our assessment tools in a primary care market are based off a sick patient population.
If we base the demographic off the average American, That is dying of chronic diseases and that is our measuring stick.
Then why are we shocked when we continue to have a boom in people dying of chronic diseases and being diagnosed with chronic diseases?
Cancer, all-time high.
I think there's gonna be two million new cases of cancer diagnosed this year.
I want to talk about you because one of the things that's interesting about this is like You were unhealthy at one point in time, and you were overweight, and this is how you kind of started this journey.
Maybe a lot of people aren't aware of that.
You had to learn all this stuff, and you had to learn all this stuff through your own personal health crisis.
So I was a surgical rep, and I had to be in the OR by 7 a.m., and so I would go do CrossFit every morning, then I'd go to the OR, I'd be in cases all day, I would eat whatever I could.
I would drink a Starbucks Frappuccino, not realizing there's 1,800 calories of sugar and chemicals and no nutrients.
I just didn't know.
And I grew up in a family, again, a foster family, where We were middle class America, but maybe it was the 80s.
Eating healthy was like eating wheat bread instead of white bread.
It was eating low fat Lay's potato chips and a Diet Coke.
That's literally what my family thought was healthy.
And that's a lot of Americans.
They don't know.
And you just stay with what you're indoctrinated into.
So I started seeing a nutritionist in my 30s and I did lean down and I lost weight and I was getting healthier and I was headed the right direction and I was still training.
But he was like, if you're doing everything I'm saying, let me take a step back.
I would go to a primary care and it would take three months to get in with a primary care.
Then they would just pull a basic lipid panel.
And then I would say, well, can we look at my hormones?
No, no, we don't need to look at hormones.
We're going to look at your lipid panel.
We're going to do a wellness check.
Well, that doesn't include hormones in this country.
It's not a deep dive because they're scared to do that because the insurance companies control what they'll reimburse and not reimburse.
And so clinicians in this country are terrified to do the deep dive and they only have six minutes with you.
Long story short, six months later, still fat, still trying to lose weight, working out every day, seeing a nutritionist.
A nutritionist said, I want to refer you to a urology buddy, Dr. Larry Lipschultz, who's one of the godfathers of urology and hormone optimization in the United States.
And when I went and met with Larry, he was shocked after he pulled my blood work.
We actually did it twice because he just didn't believe my readings.
And my testosterone level after seeing him was 98. Oh my god.
Oh, we prioritize protein, one gram of protein per pound of lean muscle mass.
We cleaned up my diet.
If you make protein the basis of your diet, because you need a gram of protein per pound of lean muscle mass to maintain.
If you're trying to gain lean muscle mass, you have to up that protein intake.
And then based off diet or lifestyle and activity level...
And so we would prioritize my carbs through certain times of the day.
We would keep me at a caloric deficit and we'd prioritize protein in that caloric deficit.
And what you'll find is mind-blowing.
You aren't as hungry.
If I don't eat a Muffin and a Starbucks coffee loaded with sugar, I don't have that insulin response that causes the hunger cravings a few hours later where I'm back to eating another unhealthy meal choice.
If you eat protein first, eggs, hearty, heavy foods, dense, nutrient-packed foods, your appetite is suppressed.
And so we prioritize proteins, healthy proteins like chickens, fish, all of those sources, and then healthy carbs.
Get away from sugars, whites, starches, prioritize healthy carbohydrate sources that are slower burning that allow you to metabolize the protein that you're absorbing.
I literally went, well, starting on diet, I probably lost about half of the weight that I was trying to get off.
So I know body fat percentage, he got me from 25 down to about 15. And then when we added hormone optimization, not testosterone at the time, it was HCG and clomiphene, which boost your natural testosterone levels, being monitored by a clinician within physiological norms, right, to try and make sure that we're optimizing my health, not trying to get jacked and tanned.
Literally helped me go from 15 to, at the time, I think I dropped down to around 7%.
And I did not change anything.
I was working out the same way, eating the same way.
And now I walk around 12 to 15. That's sustainable.
And I think in my 40s, that's a level that makes sense to me.
I think the way to do that is you don't wait for people to get chronically ill.
I should have never been at 25% body fat.
If we were getting proactive and predictive and we were truly doing deep dives into individuals and taking the time for our clinicians in this country to sit down and assess you at the biological level Then we can prevent these chronic diseases.
And I'm not talking about through pharmaceutical intervention.
We can prevent these through diet, lifestyle, nutrition, and helping teach the patient that there's a better way.
And if we need to involve pharmaceutical intervention, it's there.
There's options out there that can help patients kickstart their health and wellness, especially people in their 40s.
And that's what gets crazy with the insurance model.
So a lot of people don't know this.
Most insurance carriers in the U.S. don't practice preventative.
So testosterone would be considered a lifestyle drug.
The challenge with an issue like the DEA, if they really do over-regulate testosterone and shut telemedicine companies down from prescribing it, it's going to limit accessibility for these patients because primary carers don't want to prescribe it, right?
And so they're going to pump them off to a urologist.
Typically, for an insurance company to cover it, you've got to have two or more fasted blood tests of a testosterone below 250 nanograms per deciliter.
So that's a chronically ill man.
I mean, that's...
To come back twice, that's going to take you six months to get in with that urology.
That's in the dream world.
So just to get the insurance coverage, you're talking six months to a year.
And by then, that patient has been chronically ill, headed towards metabolic disease, diabetes.
We know that testosterone is important to insulating us from certain types of cancer.
It's important to our metabolic health, our bone mineral density, our lean muscle mass.
All of these tie into Do you think that the reason why they make it very difficult to get hormone optimization is because if more people get hormone optimization, more people are not on these medications?
Because those creams cost hundreds of dollars, whereas an opioid's like, I think, $10 a month, right?
And then the other thing you'll find is the pharmacy benefit managers, who the insurance companies own, have reimbursement deals on certain drugs.
So when you get a drug, it's not because it's the best drug or the most efficacious drug.
It's because the PBM, Pharmacy Benefit Manager, has negotiated a rebate and decided to place that drug on Tier 1 or Tier 2 based off their financial incentive in that drug.
Testosterone's been on the market so long, it's compounded a million places.
There is no rebate for the big pharmaceutical companies or the big insurance companies on testosterone.
Right?
And so it's just an additional cost.
And so the more they can obstruct things that cost money but don't pay dividends back to them, they'll put obstructions in the way.
So another example is not only did they shut down alternatives to opioids during an opioid crisis, they also cut lab reimbursements on toxicology screenings.
At the same time that we're on an opioid bender as a nation, They got rid of the last safety net, which was if you come into a pain clinic asking for opioids, they're going to make you do a toxicology screen to make sure that you're not abusing other drugs, that you're not diverting the drug, that this medication's actually in your system.
All of those reimbursements used to be covered by insurance companies, but they got rid of that.
And so as soon as they got rid of that, there was no checks and balances.
Jamie, pull up that tweet that I sent you from Jay Bhattacharya.
So Michael Pollan, you know, he's highlighted the dangers of pesticides.
The USDA funded a PR organization that worked with agricultural interests to downplay the harms of pesticides in farming and to compile defamatory dossiers on opponents of pesticide use.
Including food writer Michael Pollan.
Just imagine that the USDA spends money to defame people.
Using your tax dollars spends money to defame people that are trying to tell you that there is poison in your food.
Revealed the US government's funded private social network attacking pesticide critics.
So what does it say about this?
In 2017, two United Nations experts called for a treaty to strictly regulate dangerous pesticides, which they said were a global human rights concern, which, by the way, Roundup is illegal in a lot of countries, citing scientific research showing pesticides can cause cancers, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's, and other health problems.
Publicly, the Pesticide Industry's lead trade association dubbed the recommendations unfounded and sensational assertions.
But what's crazy is this is Monsanto, which is also Bayer.
And we talked about that.
This is the company that knowingly infected people with HIV and shipped it to third world countries because their hemophilia drug had been contaminated.
And they knew they'd get busted if they shipped it in the US. So they shipped it to third world countries and knowingly infected thousands of people with HIV. And we're trusting these people?
Publicly, the pesticide industry's lead trade association dubbed the recommendations unfounded social assertions, and private industry advocates have gone further.
Derogatory profiles of the two UN experts, Hilal Elver and Baskut Tansak, are hosted on an online private portal for pesticide company employees and a range of influential
Members can access a wide range of personal information about hundreds of individuals from around the world deemed a threat to industry interests, including the U.S. food writers Michael Pollan and Mark Brittman, the Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva, and the Nigerian activist, you say that one, How do you say that?
Many profiles include personal details such as the names of family members, phone numbers, home addresses, even house values.
The profiling is part of an effort which is financed in part by U.S. taxpayer dollars to downplay pesticide dangers, discredit opponents, and undermine international policymaking according to court records, emails, and other documents obtained by the non-profit newsroom Lighthouse Reports.
It corroborated with The Guardian, the new lead, Le Monde, Africa Uncensored, and Australian Broadcast Corporation, and other international media partners on the publication of this investigation.
The efforts were spearheaded by a reputation management firm in Missouri called vFluence.
The company provides services that it describes as intelligence gathering, proprietary data mining, and risk communications.
The revelations demonstrate how industry advocates have established a private social network to counter resistance to pesticides and genetically modified crops in Africa, Europe, and parts of the world while also denigrating organic and other alternative farming methods.
I mean, it doesn't, it's just, I think it was Jason during the testimony, he said, and this resonated with me, Do we need double-blind studies to know that chemicals we spray on pesticides and chemicals we spray on fields that cause disruption in mitochondria of insects and destroy them at the cellular level might possibly, can we at least say, might possibly create some sort of issue in other biological beings?
The only way it's going to affect people is these viral video clips have to go online and people have to share them on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter.
Thank God they can, you know, because who knows if the government could clamp down on it the way they have in other countries.
Other countries have severely clamped down, and there's been some real issues in America, but America still is the best place to distribute information.
I mean, X is banned in Brazil right now, right?
There's a lot of shenanigans going on all throughout the world where people are trying to control narratives, and it's fucking spooky.
If we look at it, if we really look at it, if it wasn't for you, I would have never met RFK. And if it wasn't for coming on your show, I would have never got my message out there.
If it wasn't for Tucker's podcast, Callie would have never got his message out there.
I'm just glad there's a voice, because we've got to get the message out there that there are alternatives.
And this...
It's almost like a fairy tale that they've told the American people that, hey, if it's an FDA-approved product and it's in a hospital or your doctor tells you it's good as gold, it's science.
I can tell you, GSP, he's coming in again this week, and he's talked about us, I think, on your pod.
He's posted about us.
He's the man.
He's amazing.
But when I met him, he was a skeptic, and he said, I know I'm talking to you because of Joe, but, like, my doctor said this is bullshit.
I'm up in Canada, and he said that there's no such thing and that I have to have surgery to fix this shoulder.
We fixed his shoulder.
He's posted about it.
He never had surgery.
He went back in.
The doctor's like, I don't know what you're doing, and there are Dozens of NFL athletes we've worked with, I don't think any of them, other than Aaron Rodgers, has told their doctor that they're working with us.
Like, big name athletes, but they're scared of the team doctor.
And I think the doctors aren't doing it because they're bad people.
I think they don't know.
I think they don't have time to do the deep dives.
Most doctors, how much peer-reviewed literature do you think most doctors who are in orthopedic surgeons, who are in practice, how much are they absorbing?
How much time do they have between malpractice insurance, between medical school bills that they're in debt with, between the overhead that they have to run their practice?
I mean, they have to get people in and out of the office quickly.
Well, and you also go back to who funds studies and who funds...
When I worked as a med device rep, I can tell you we funded studies, but those studies were going to be focused on and geared towards moving our products.
And so we didn't have a stem cell or biological product because we sold hardware and we wanted ACL surgery, shoulder surgeries, knee surgeries, because that's how the company made its living.
And so, again, it wasn't that we were against it or trying to destroy it.
It was more of, if you can trivialize it and focus on what makes you your check, that's where everyone's at.
And everyone's so compartmentalized, it's easy to almost have plausible deniability.
So, like, somebody comes in to a primary care, and they're overweight, and they're diabetic, and they're anxious, and they're not sleeping.
The doctor's gonna write them five drugs and push them out the door, not because they're a bad person, but because that is how we teach clinicians to practice medicine in this country.
It is amazing, and it's unfortunate that this kind of resource is not available to more people, where more people don't have access to a doctor that's going to look at them comprehensively, look at their whole body.
If you're going to take care of your yard, if you're trying to grow plants in your yard, and your trees are all dying, your vegetables weren't growing, if you have the resources, you can go to a botanist.
Or you could go to someone who understands farming, someone who's a scientist, and you could say, what's wrong?
And they could do soil analysis.
My friend Steve actually did this.
He was trying to put a garden in his house in Brooklyn.
And they found that leaded gasoline from all those years, from like the 1960s, all those years where they used leaded gasoline in Brooklyn, because it's polluted, all that shit had gotten so deep in the soil That his backyard was contaminated with leaded gasoline.
And so you have to do a detox on the backyard.
So there's certain plants that you can plant that can help in that process.
There's certain treatments to the soil that can help in that process.
It's expensive, and it's because the lab we use is expensive, but it is amazing, and it's a cancer screening.
And so we, in our healthcare system today, only screen for essentially, proactively, five different types of cancer.
Tumor-based cancers.
Okay, well, there's a blood test that can screen for over 200 tumor-based cancers, and it can tell you when you're at level zero, right?
Undistinguishable, because usually how they're diagnosing is through Imaging.
And so the challenge with imaging is pixelation, right?
The image can't capture the cellular level.
Blood work can.
So at the cellular level, we can tell you when you're at stage zero on a cancer, up to seven years prior to you developing cancer, on over 200 different types of cancer, why would that not be implemented into our healthcare system?
Or at minimal, what I argued with the senator about was, okay, Let's just say we can't afford this for all Americans.
Why in the hell wouldn't we at minimal be doing this for our firefighters, our military veterans?
We know that over 70% of firefighters and military veterans will develop cancer in their lifetime.
It's staggering because of dealing with ballistics and weapons and guns and all those are carcinogens.
Firefighters are dealing with smoke and smoke inhalation and all the different chemicals they come in contact with.
Like, that was the message I wanted people to get...
Yes, we were talking to senators, but the truth is we were talking to the American people.
And it was, guys, we don't have...
My thing to the public is, I'm not here to tell you that I have the answers to the test.
I'm here to tell you I have the questions to the test.
And I'm telling you what I saw.
And I'm being honest.
And I'm trying my best.
I am not fucking political.
Left, right...
Different wings to the same bird.
Like, I will say, right now, the right is talking about this because of Bobby Kennedy, and I know that Trump is wanting to meet next week as a health expo to dive in and try and understand from people in the industry what's going on behind the scenes and how we're headed towards this chronic disease crisis.
But what gets scarier is if we don't get this under wraps, we've got a rapidly aging patient population.
We have a rapid decline in the amount of primary cares.
You know, I talked about this last time.
We're going to have a 30% shortage in primary cares, and it already takes three months to get in with a primary care.
We're headed over a cliff.
We have got to get chronic disease under control in this nation, and we got to do it fast.
There's a lot of people that vehemently disagree with a lot of this stuff, and there's a lot of people online, like the people that write the articles, the woo-woo stuff.
They just don't know.
There's no way they actually knew what was going on in a comprehensive way and would still write those articles.
You would have to be evil.
I don't think those people that are writing those articles are evil.
I think they're doing a job and I think they're being directed.
I think they're being directed by people that have a vested interest in this information, just like we talked about with that USDA thing.
They have a vested interest in this information being dismissed.
And they are fully convinced that all of his negative character traits, all these negative things are unbefitting to a president, and therefore he shouldn't be president.
Yeah.
I think anybody who wants to be president is fucking insane.
They're all insane.
I think it's just like kind of everybody else that's a leader in almost every industry.
I think they're insane people.
I don't think you get to the top of any heap unless you're out of your fucking mind.
And you could be out of your mind in a vicious sort of demeaning, attacking all your enemies way like Trump is.
And it's still the same drive is what led that guy to deal with this shit for four years where they were trying to put him in jail so that he doesn't run again and still run again.
And they try to kill him twice and he's still running.
And my point is, the only way you get someone who's not affected by that is you have to have an insane person.
It's literally the best tool for the job, because everybody else, all the 34 counts, which were not felonies, which they upgraded from a misdemeanor, which passed the statute of limitations, all of them were bookkeeping errors or mislabeling things, which is illegal.
They're minor offenses that would not get anybody prosecuted.
Much less put in fucking jail.
Real potential for him being in jail.
And people want him to put him in jail.
They want to put him in jail for a long fucking time.
And it's crazy.
You're doing this at the same time where ICE admits that what are the numbers of murderers and convicted criminals that have made it into this country?
It's something bananas.
And this is just verified.
This is verified data.
Do you know what it is, Jamie?
Because I could find it.
Because somebody sent it to me, and I literally couldn't believe it's real.
So I'll send it to you, and you can find out if it is real.
Because if it's true, it's fucking bananas.
And just the sheer numbers, they're scary.
These are scary numbers, man.
It's like no one thinks this is a problem.
Look, I am the product of immigration.
My grandparents came here at a time where it was very easy to come here.
And I just sent you a screenshot, see if you can find out if it's true.
It was very easy to come here, and a lot of people who came here were criminals.
Look, a lot of people in my family were criminals.
They were Italians in the 1920s.
My grandmother went to jail.
When I was a kid, my grandmother went to jail for bookmaking.
These are people that came over on a fucking boat before YouTube.
They didn't even know what it was like over here.
They took a chance.
They took a chance.
So I am completely sympathetic to immigrants, but you can't let in fucking gang members.
There's got to be some kind of screening.
You want to make it easier to get in for people that are hardworking, people that just want a better job?
I'm with you.
I'm with you.
Just make it easier for them to get in.
Make it easier for the people that have been here for 20 years to become citizens.
Make, yes.
I know people.
I know a kid who was, she's 28 now.
She was born in America.
No, she was born in Mexico, but her parents brought her over here when she was a baby.
So she doesn't speak Spanish.
She has been in America her whole fucking life, and she's not an American citizen.
So she can't vote.
She's limited in the kind of jobs she can do.
It's fucking weird.
It's weird that we do that, but yet my grandparents just came over on a boat and fucking they write a piece of paper and they're in.
It's nuts.
Yeah.
We should have a screening process to keep evil people out.
That's it.
Everyone else, look, you imagine if you're born in Guatemala, wouldn't you want to come over here and get a job as a landscaper?
Fuck, you could make $600 a week, $700 a week, oh my god, and then you live in a family, in a house with a bunch of people, which they're used to doing anyway, and then someone branches off and makes their own business, and all of a sudden you're living the American dream.
But if you just walk in, they'll give you money, they'll house you, they'll give you an EBT card, they'll give you food stamps.
What the fuck are we doing?
Well, we must be doing something.
So it's either one of two things.
Either we want cheap labor, and this is what Tim Dillon thinks.
He thinks that the cheap labor market for construction and all these jobs that most people don't want to do anymore, it's falling off a cliff.
And the best way to sustain those industries is to bring in cheap labor, and the best way to do that is to bring in migrant workers.
Because they're willing to do jobs that a lot of people won't.
And this is the positive side of like Springfield, Ohio, where people talk about the Haitians that moved there.
The people that employ these Haitians say these people are hard workers.
They're so happy to be here.
They want the American dream.
That's great.
That's what we want.
We want more of that.
That's all good.
You can't make it insanely difficult for a college-educated person from Norway to move here because they want to do – literally, like, when Chamath was on, he explained that when he was over here going through his visa process, they had to show that he was doing something that an American couldn't do.
I mean, you can get a green card and eventually become a U.S. citizen.
But it's a long process and a difficult process because every year when you go to get your visa renewed, you're at the whim of this person.
Who knows if they had a bad day?
Who knows if their fucking wife just started fucking the mailman and they found out about it and she drained their bank account and he's like, fuck you!
Go back to Canada!
They can do that to you.
They can do that to you at a whim.
But if you walk in, Nancy Pelosi wants you to get amnesty.
Department of Homeland Security Spokesperson Turden Newsweek.
The data in this letter is being misinterpreted.
The data goes back decades.
It includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this administration.
Okay, but you are still saying that those people are here.
Noted in his letter that ICE is bound by statutory requirements not to release certain non-citizens from its custody during the pendency of removal proceedings.
He added that most non-citizens who are convicted of homicide are typically not eligible for release from ICE custody.
Like, listen, if you fucking kill people, if you're an illegal alien and you sneak across the border and you kill Americans, how about nobody's eligible for release?
Well, I mean, if you think about it, if you're a felon in the United States, you're not allowed to vote.
So wouldn't it make sense that we don't accept, you know, somebody with a criminal record into the United States?
Like we have, you know, we have a lot of fights that we're already fighting and a lot of budgetary restraints as a society that we can't really dig ourselves out of the hole with right now.
It may be shocking to hear the Biden-Harris administration is actively releasing tens of thousands of criminal illegal aliens into our communities, but their own numbers conclusively prove this to be the case.
This defies all common sense, read a statement.
Newsweek has contacted the Harris campaign for comment via email outside of standard working hours.
What does that mean?
What is standard working hours?
Oh, that's why they didn't get back to them?
It was outside of standard working hours.
The email arrived at 5.15.
Put that back up again.
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told Newsweek the date in this letter is...
This is the one that says it's being misused.
So this is a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson says it's being misused.
Scroll that down.
Scroll that down a little bit further.
See what it says there.
Congressional Republicans voted against them twice.
Democratic presidential candidate added, we took executive action to reduce unlawful border crossings.
See, this is the thing that gets weird.
It's like, you know, they say that Trump, the Biden administration is trying to say that Trump blocked some sort of border wall bill because he wanted it to be something that he could campaign against.
So he instructed the Republicans to vote against it.
There's so much that kind of fuckery.
I don't know if that's true or not, but it's the possibility of that being on the table.
I'm not accusing anyone of doing that, but imagine a world where a person could conspire, and I'm not saying they did, but a person could conspire to make something happen because that would be something that they could campaign against.
Look what you did.
And that's how dirty this game is.
That's why nobody wants to do it, unless you're fucking crazy.
Unless you're crazy like Trump.
And he just waits.
He sent Mark Cuban a letter when Mark Cuban's television show failed in like 2004 or whatever the fuck it was.
And someone posted it on Instagram today.
See if you can find it, Jamie.
But it's so petty.
It's so petty.
And the fact that he signed it and sent it to him, took time out of his day to have someone draft a letter, probably didn't type it himself, have someone draft the letter and send it to Mark Cuban in the mail.
This is from 2004. Mr. Mark Cuban, Dear Mark, I'm truly sorry to hear that your show has been canceled for lack of ratings.
When I initially called you to congratulate you on The Benefactor, little did you or I realize how disastrous and embarrassing it would turn out for you.
If you ever decide to do another show, please call me and I'll be happy to lend a helping hand.
But what's hard is people use those things to distract us and to divide us.
And like, even with my neighbor, I know we agree on 80% of the things.
It's like, hey, I'm not against or for...
Anyone like I'm not against Kamala.
I'm not against Trump.
I'm I'm for team humanity I am for I am too and we work together to solve the problem and whoever wins whether Trump or Kamala I hope that we can continue the momentum in the dialogue and I hope that you know we can truly have an open conversation that gains traction and what I love about it being Public is it's forever memorialized in public record.
Yes, and I think it will and especially in today's day with I've seen so many videos sent me of your testimony And I've had them recommended to me on Instagram to from accounts.
I don't even follow so it's getting around but I think what's also interesting is that social chaos is It unveils things.
It unveils things about human beings.
And that is one of the benefits of having a guy that you can decide is Hitler.
Even though half the country loves him.
Half the country loves that dude.
Maybe more than half the country now.
There's a lot of silent loves that guy people.
Because they realize there's not a lot of other options out of this other than a fucking crazy person who would write Mark Cuban a letter like that.
It is insanity, because even at a smaller level, just testifying in front of the Senate, the level of hate and just, like, misrepresentations of truth.
I don't even want to call it lies, but to me it's lies.
The level of, like, misrepresentation and taking things out of context, and it just...
It just doesn't seem genuine and it doesn't seem like people are really fighting for truth.
You were genuinely shook by it, but what I told you is the truth.
Nobody cares.
Don't read it.
Nobody cares.
Don't read anything about yourself, even good things.
Nobody cares.
People know what the fuck is going on.
They get to hear you talk in forms like this.
They get to hear you actually talk and lay it out.
They know who the fuck you are.
All this is all just noise.
But the good thing about this kind of noise, this social chaos, is that it unveils all this corruption.
It unveils the orcs that are hiding in the forest.
You see it.
And I am convinced If they know the efficacy of foreign countries using social media bots to attack people, they know that that works.
They know that that shifts narratives, especially for people that are sitting on the fence.
They know all that stuff works.
If you don't think that there's companies in America that we're not aware of that organize social media campaigns and have bots attack certain individuals like yourself for having a dangerous narrative, If you don't think that, you're crazy.
But what's insane to me, Joe, is what part of saying, hey, we need to better understand how we're growing our food, how we're processing our food, how we're preserving our food.
Maybe leftover petrochemicals aren't the best way to preserve our food products in America.
You're not allowing that in other nations, and we're looking at the data, the statistics, and the numbers, and we're saying something's not right.
The point of that conversation was to say, today's the day we start the dialogue.
You know, the journey of a thousand steps starts with one.
And I look at it and say, my message was, how do we fix this?
Well, we start by acknowledging there's a fucking problem in the first place.
This is just about money and just about justifying the things that you're saying, the narratives that you're pushing to try to get that money.
If they came out with an article If someone did a peer-reviewed study that showed that if you drink exactly 13 glasses of water a day, you never get sick and you never get cancer, there would be articles the next day saying if everyone drinks 13 gallons of water or 13 glasses of water a day, there'll be no water for black people and people of color and indigenous people.
The trans people would die of dehydration and the wells would dry up and then the crops and we're not gonna have food and there's a lot of impoverished people.
You don't need 13 glasses of water a day.
There would be some sort of a justification.
If you came up with some sort of a diet that you could follow and everyone would live to be 150, there would be an article about how dangerous it is to tell people to stay healthy.
Because if we all live to be 150, the resources will all be dobbled up.
And that's where I say, at my company, I'm not a philanthropist.
We make money, and we're doing it for a fraction of the cost of the system today.
We really are.
The patient's getting a deep dive into over 70 biomarkers, an hour on the phone with a clinician.
The only way I can scale this and make it better for people and more cost effective is AI and large language models, which is what I'm rapidly running towards, which even in that Hatchet Job article, she says, and he's illegally using AI to prescribe, I'm not prescribing medicine using AI. Yeah, she said something to that nature.
Yeah, Mike, we are using AI to assess blood work, and then it is reviewed by a board-certified clinician that then reasserts the AI's homework, and the AI is just there as an additional tool.
Now, the vision of the future, and I think this will happen, is I think AI will replace a lot of primary cares in America.
And anybody denying the efficacy of AI at this point is ignorant.
You have to be ignorant, willfully.
You have to be willfully ignorant.
They have used AI right now to diagnose diseases that people miss.
They believe that AI is going to allow to assess breast cancer in a much more effective way because it can do something with visuals that human beings can't see with the naked eye because you're detecting things.
AI is going to be able to have a much, much higher percentage of Of a chance of catching that cancer.
Even at a great cash pay clinic, you know, like I think Ways to Well is a phenomenal clinic.
I think there's hundreds, if not thousands, of phenomenal cash pay clinics.
Peter Attia is brilliant.
In any of those practices, the clinician has to do a chart review before you come in.
That's going to take them at least 20 minutes if they're doing a good job.
Then they're going to spend 45 minutes to an hour with you, walking you through everything in your chart, what they saw, family history, genetics, epigenetics, cross-reference that with blood work.
You don't have time to get on the phone for 40 minutes with a provider.
No problem.
You log into the app and you ask Alan.
Alan, hey, remind me again, what was my blood work on testosterone?
And then Alan's going to tell you, and then you can ask this AI anything.
And it is backed by all the peer-reviewed journal studies, white paper studies, all the data that we've loaded in that has been cross-referenced by our clinical team, and we're guiding that.
It's not an open architecture, but we're allowing it to essentially help practice medicine in a way that we believe is the appropriate approach to medicine.
This is how crazy the world is that something that straightforward, the way you laid it out so brilliantly, someone could label that as bad or woo or woo-woo.
Because you would know the AI, imagine the world where, and again, sword cuts both ways, every tool can be good or bad, but what I'm envisioning is AI monitoring you 24-7, tying into your wearables.
We know your REM sleep, your heart rate variability.
You've gone through and you've done a DEXA. I know how much lean muscle mass you have, how much visceral fat, how much subcutaneous fat.
I have your epigenetics, your genetics all loaded in.
I know your family history.
We've done a cancer screening.
I know that you have no forms of cancerous tumors in your body at this moment.
From there, now we have a clean bill of health and a starting point, but we're tracking you.
I know that Joe slept five hours on Saturday.
I know that Joe got one hour of sleep on Saturday.
And then we can accrue those data sets and begin to cross-reference it.
Like right now, we have over 60,000 patients at Ways to Well.
Imagine when it's nationwide and we have millions.
If you'll give us access to that data, we'll know what date you started prescription care.
You'll be able to refill your medicine straight through the pharmacy because it's vertically integrated.
Here's the challenge with traditional medicine.
Every software is based on how to get paid from the fucking insurance company.
That's it.
Pharmacy software is 30 years old.
It is purely based on how do I get my money from CVS? How do I get my money from United?
It's not meant to be a tool that helps drive health span and health care.
But if we vertically integrate pharmacy software with the medical practices software, with the AI, the rareables, the REM sleep, it then knows what date Joe started...
Glutathione or whatever, a peptide or whatever it is.
And we're going to see if we can track a marked improvement in heart rate variability, REM sleep, and all those variables.
And then at the end of a year, we reassess you proactively and personalized through a DEXA and a VO2 max.
And we say, look, Joe, you gained one pound of lean muscle mass.
You didn't put on any additional body fat.
Your visceral body fat is at an all-time low.
Your chronic disease score is an A+. We do not think you're headed towards a chronic disease.
We are proactive.
Not sitting back waiting for you to get cancer.
We're going to roll our sleeves up and go to fucking work.
And it's not hard.
This does not cost a fortune.
It is totally affordable.
I hear all the time like, this is your body.
This is the one.
This is how I ended my speech to the Senate.
And I believe this.
400 trillion to one.
400 trillion to 1 are the chances you are alive in this room today.
What are we going to do with it?
Are we going to let these bastards at Big Pharma and Big Medical profiteer off of our family members and profiteer off chronic disease?
Or are we going to take sovereignty and accountability?
Are we going to test ourselves and drive our health span and take ourselves out of their fucking shitty life raft that's going down?
Like, it doesn't matter if you have a first...
Republican Democrat, congratulations, you have a front row seat on the fucking Titanic.
That's where we're headed if we don't get proactive.
It is not a left or right issue.
This is an American issue.
That's all I keep trying to hammer home.
And thank God the Republicans are talking about it.
And I hope the Democrats will start talking about it.
That's what's so fascinating about ideological capture.
That the thing that you would think would be one thing we could all agree on.
We should all be healthy.
That that would get attacked.
And that it would be more cost-effective, you could use technology, and you could have a much more comprehensive understanding of your health, and that gets attacked.
That's how upside-down things are.
And there's people that, if they think it...
It helps their career or it helps them in journalism.
It helps them get more connected.
They will be the attack dog.
They'll be the attack dog and go after someone with about as straightforward a message as you can get.
One of the things that RFK said that I think it really did resonate with me was we have to stop.
We have to start loving our kids more than we hate each other and seeing like I won't name it, but I know a little girl who struggles with her weight, and I look at that, and this kid is doing all she can.
And it's hard to tell a little kid, like, your friends can eat that candy, but you can't.
Everyone in school is drinking their soft drinks and all these things, and it's bad for all of them.
It's just some kids are metabolically showing it sooner, you know?
But it isn't good for anyone.
Who's consuming these things and they're insanely addictive to and it's also creates an environment.
Yeah, that this is an addiction issue now and then that leads to a mental health issue and low self-esteem and You're part of the problem with the addiction of food too is you have to eat food You know, it's not like anything else Addiction and gambling.
And that's where the GLP-1s, where I do say, like, morbidly obese, chronically ill, diabetic, pre-diabetic, patients headed over a cliff, it has been rebranded as a lifestyle drug for any girl who's trying to lose weight for spring break.
And it is dangerous to say that there is no risk-reward to prescribe that in children.
We don't know the long-term ramifications.
It's a little bit different risk analysis when we're talking about a chronically ill obese patient in their 40s headed towards chronic disease crisis that's going to kill them.
That's a different...
Risk profile and safety profile analysis than a 12-year-old little girl who's overweight.
That's a totally different talk track.
So, you know, I have some differing viewpoints from the other folks on that committee, but that's the beauty of a democracy.
We can disagree on topics, but agree on the issue of we've got a lot of work to do and some things to fix.
You could disagree all day long, but What you're saying is so straightforward and so beneficial to everyone across the board.
If there's anything that you would want in life, like, have you ever been sick, real sick, and you're like, God damn it, I can't wait to be better again.
It doesn't matter if you're rich, it doesn't matter if you're happily married, you love your job.
If you're fucking dying, you're in bed and you literally can barely get up to pee, and then you crushed and you lay back down in bed, you go, oh, what did I do to fuck this up?
How did I get so sick?
I am going to take care of myself.
I am going to fucking get back on track.
A lot of people don't, but some people actually do.
They actually do realize at that moment, like, I can't let this happen again.
Like, whatever I did to my immune system, pulling all-nighters, working at the job fucking 16 hours a day, and then you get, like, a horrible flu, and you're bedridden for two weeks.
Yep.
During that time, the one thing you want more than anything is to be healthy.
You ask a healthy person what they want, they give you a thousand things.
You ask a sick person what they want, they want to be well.
They want to be well.
If you told a person who's worth, like, Bill Gates money, if you said to Bill Gates, hey, you know, you could have the flu for the rest of your life and keep all that money, or give it all up.
You're going to have to start from scratch, but you'll be healthy.
I sit at dinners when I get the opportunity to be with my family and I look around the table and I really do think, Joe, ever since losing my brother, I am so present in those moments.
And I just want everyone to be healthy.
And I want the good memories to last.
And I want to be able to watch people live happy lives.
And all the data and numbers and statistics, they're so overwhelming that people lull over.
And that's why in front of the Senate, I brought it back to, I'm just going to talk about people.
I didn't even talk about statistics because there were way smarter people out there than me from Harvard, Stanford, all these academic types that are brilliant.
And I'm like, but at the end of the day, guys, if the Senate doesn't understand, these are your children, your wives, your brothers, your sisters, your husbands, your wives.
These are family members.
This is not just a number.
These are real lives.
1.9 million people dying a year of chronic disease.
That doesn't even include deaths of despair, suicide, opioid abuse.
We are a chronically ill society and those impacts destroy families.
Destroy families.
The ramifications are so far beyond Finances in numbers, but even finances in numbers, 24% of our federal budget, healthcare.
Number one budget concern federally is healthcare.
Number one concern for most states, healthcare.
Number one reason for bankruptcy in the United States for an individual, healthcare.
It is a huge problem, but that's the dollars and cents of it.
The real cost is paid in human lives and lost loved ones.
And that's all I wanted them to hear is, don't sweep this under the rug.
How much of an effort has been put forth after the whole Sackler family crisis and the opioid crisis to mitigate the amount of these things that are prescribed?
I think a tremendous amount, but the problem is then you swing that pendulum to over-regulation and you've created a drug addict in the marketplace and all those addicts turned to fentanyl and black market products.
I would even argue that the market we live in now is...
A pharmaceutical insurance cartel.
You know, they are glorified drug dealers monetizing people's chronic disease and they have such a stranglehold over academia, the universities, they fund most of the studies, the NIH. I mean, we just systematically go down from the food system to the government regulatory bodies to the enforcement committees to everything they control, the media.
Like as soon as somebody gets, you know, get a little mouthy, anything, they come and hammer you.
I know, but most people aren't going to spend the time to go, like, I looked because I'm like, who is this attacking me?
I want to understand their viewpoint.
It wasn't, oh, ha ha ha, gotcha, I'm going to bust these people.
It was more of, let me try and understand the other side and try and see what we could have said that would have been so inflammatory because the message is...
That's, I think, also a real problem with liberals during this election.
The concept of make America healthy again is so bipartisan and so universal and so clear in the fact that the Republicans are running with it.
They're so mad.
Like, that should have been something the Democrats.
The Democrats used to be anti-poison.
The left used to be anti-corporations dumping pollution in the waters.
They were against big corporations.
They were pro-free speech.
They were against censorship.
I mean, they were pro-reasonable discourse.
They weren't...
about censoring people and that everything's just gone so topsy-turvy that to have the left be against a movement even you what you should be saying is yeah fuck Trump but This Make America Healthy Again thing, it's a good idea.
We should probably do it, too.
We should probably just steal their idea.
We should probably say, whatever you guys are going to do, we're going to do it, too.
But we're going to be a better president, so go with us.
If they were smart, that's what they would do.
People would go, oh, you stole that idea from Trump.
And that's where I go, who has the most to win by dividing us?
It's not the Democrats.
It's not the Republicans.
It is...
The powers that be.
And when we peel back the layers, BlackRock, Vanguard, that own the majority shares of these pharmaceutical companies, that own the majority shares of most of the media outlets, that own the left and the right, they push agendas and they can control everything essentially except podcasts and free speech.
And that's one of the things that Jordan Peterson said in a meeting the night before we testified was he implored us to stop trying to cater to The mainstream media because he said it's a lost cause.
It's a lost hope.
I hate to say that to you guys, but the world is giving up on them.
Why are you guys wasting your time with them?
Focus on podcasts, books, areas where you can truly, in a long-form format, expose the truth and ask and respond to hard-hitting questions.
And we talked about you and your platform, and this is...
People try to label it as misinformation at times.
And I'm like, what part is...
Anytime I've come on, I've cited all my references on the Ways to Well website.
I list reference after reference, study after study.
I went to bed and I was exhausted after that Senate hearing.
I posted it.
I'm a nobody.
I didn't expect...
I went to bed and I want to say I had 1.3 million views.
And I posted a rebuttal about one of the periodicals that was misrepresentative.
And I just posted, hey, Not a fair assessment of what happened today.
2,000 American people traveled from around the country to sit and hear an open dialogue that was bipartisan, backed by some of the best and brightest minds in medicine.
Harvard, Stanford, Stedman Hawkins, all were present.
This was not a bunch of influencers, blah, blah, blah.
Shame on you.
That was all I posted.
Didn't get into the weeds.
Woke up the next day and all the momentum was gone.
We still, I think, are sitting at 1.3 million.
I don't believe, and then Casey got messaged, hey, they'll de-platform you, be careful if you start naming specific news outlets, and I still believe that somehow we got de-algorithmed or de-prioritized after we began to push back On the media for the stuff they were saying.
And you probably got attacked anyway once they realized that it was gaining momentum.
It's very creepy.
And I wonder, like, at what level they can manipulate things at Google and at YouTube.
I mean, there's a level that they can actively suppress videos and they can actively suppress social media accounts and social media posts.
You know, when my special was gonna go live on Instagram, or on Netflix rather, on Instagram, Cam Haynes put a thing in his story saying that it was gonna go live, and they said that he couldn't mention me.
It was going crazy and then I would see 100 new follow, 100 like, whatever, and then the next morning, dead.
Totally dead.
Yeah, like literally right after we were all trading texts about that article and we're like, I just cannot believe they reacted with an article this fast and it's a total misrepresentation of what occurred today.
But they're smart in that all they need is one or two articles in a respected publication to cite, to point towards the fact that this is misinformation.
And someone from whatever organization would look at that and gloss over it and look like, oh yeah, we'll suppress that.
When I even think one step further, I feel like...
I feel like, for example, the New York Post article, I honestly, the way they worded that, they tried to make it sound like I'm just a regular on your podcast and I come on here and just shit all over the FDA. And I'm like, I'm doing my best to be transparent and say they're at a disadvantage, they're underfunded, they didn't build this model, they were put in this model.
And they're doing their best to navigate, but they're underfunded, understaffed, and chronically corrupted.
By the environment itself, but I would tell you the same thing with academia, the same thing with hospital systems.
Also, the people that work in the FDA, if you've been working in the FDA for four years, how much of a dent do you think you could put in the momentum of the machine that's behind you?
What are you going to do?
You're going to stick your neck out?
You're going to get it chopped off.
You're not going to move up the corporate ladder.
It's not set up that way.
And that's just the reality of being a human being, and you go, hey, I do my best.
Most of those people, like most people, they're good people.
Most people in all walks of life are good people.
But sometimes good people do bad things because they can or because they have to.
The biggest thing I saw in healthcare was doctors were exhausted, whether orthopedic surgeons, neurosurgeons, you know, I mean, I told you this, my buddy, he's a prominent sports medicine surgeon.
He's a team doctor for multiple teams.
You know, he's had highest positions at hospital systems.
Even he says, what am I going to do, man?
What am I fucking supposed to do?
I need to do surgeries.
I've got to do a certain amount of surgeries to make all of this flow and work.
And I've got to hold my team accountable for the amount of surgeries and their volumes.
And you're never supposed to make it about volumes.
But all of these hospital systems are incentivized off volume metrics that are based off...
Cranking out the most amount of surgeries and so there is a tremendous amount of pressure from the top down and with insurance companies dwindling reimbursements and dwindling like even primary care reimbursements, but also surgical reimbursements, you're not going to be able to innovate.
when it's a race to the bottom, right?
A total joint's paying less now.
It's going to take an 8% haircut every year, and it has for like the last 15 years.
So nobody's going to go out and buy some brand new state-of-the-art joint or even innovate a brand new state-of-the-art joint because it's all about commodity, commoditizing it and driving down the cost right now to make it affordable to even get a joint.
There's not that many claims with landslides, but this is one that was like...
California has some real natural disaster problems, and the big one happens every 20, 30 years and hasn't happened since 1993. The earthquake thing.
Yeah, that fucking thing that happens over there all the time where everything fucking shakes and houses fall down and like, highways pancake.
I came, the first time I ever came to Hollywood, I was doing this thing for MTV and I came out here right after the earthquakes in 93. And I was like, this is nuts, man.
I remember driving by a highway that had collapsed on another highway.
The biggest one I've ever been in was a small one.
It was like a 5.5 and they said it was actually an aftershock of the Northridge earthquake.
But it was right after I moved to LA. So it was like 94. I was sitting in my apartment.
And all of a sudden, my apartment moved like a refrigerator box.
You know, if you're a kid, you'd play, like someone got a new refrigerator, your kids would play in the box and fuck around, make a little hut out of it.
You know, carve little windows out of it and shit.
It was like that.
The whole apartment moved like that.
It wasn't even any noise.
It was just the shaking of the building.
But it seemed so flimsy.
That's all I could remember.
I remember being like, oh my god, I thought you guys were tougher than this.
Well, they have senses that I think we have, too, that we just don't have anymore.
You know what I'm saying?
You and I talk about that when you go hunting and by day two or three, you almost feel like you're more aware, more in tune to every noise, you feel the temperature more, everything gets enhanced.
Well, you know, it's all these interests and I think the social chaos aspect of today, this is what I find interesting because I think it forces these kind of conversations.
It forces people to deal with these problems.
It forces it.
Instead of like this healthcare issue being this insidious, never talked about thing that slowly crept up and just became ingrained in society to the point where everybody just accepted it.
Instead of that, You have this rebellion.
And you do have this Make America Healthy Again movement, which everyone should embrace, but yet it becomes ideologically captured by the right somehow.
And if you are with that, if you think, hey, that's a great idea those guys have.
I know they suck when it comes to women's right to choose.
They suck when it comes to whatever, fill in the blanks.
The example I can give you is one of the bills that they are putting in place is to cover GLP-1s for every American that wants it.
That's $1,500 a month right now because of what the pharmaceutical and insurance companies have done to price, gouge, and mark it up.
Shouldn't be that.
It should be under a couple hundred dollars a month.
But it's not, and it's not going to be.
And so I look at that and go, okay, for $1,500 a year, You could get the DEXA, the VO2 max.
You could be monitored with AI 24-7.
You could get, at minimal, blood work twice a year, comprehensive consult, one hour deep dive into your biologics, and we could treat the root cause of the issue.
Because I said this on Jillian's podcast with GLP-1s.
I am not against them.
I'm still a believer in them when utilized appropriately.
But prescribing a GLP-1, a weight loss drug, Without talking about diet, lifestyle, and nutrition, it's like brushing your teeth while eating fucking Oreos.
But what I'm saying is that just the concept of getting all these things out of our food supply, making people healthy, getting people off of all these prescription drugs, making people more metabolically healthy...
We're so stupid with our tribal shit that just that concept has been pushed into the realm of right-wing.
What gives me hope is the Democrats were in that meeting and there were Democrat senators that were interested and I don't believe that it's the Democrats.
I believe it's an agenda beyond the Democrats and it's not.
I just think people are trying to intentionally create that strife and that separation and I don't believe it's the Democratic Party.
I believe it's people attempting to hijack the Democratic Party and attempting to trivialize this message by portraying it as A political agenda rather than the facts of life of where we're at as a nation.
It doesn't mean they're not still trying to sell it.
I was watching the Beetlejuice movie the other day.
So in the beginning of the Beetlejuice movie, they play all these fucking cool previews.
Oh, that's coming out.
That looks fun.
And then they have a John Legend COVID vaccine commercial where he talks about how he says, I'll protect myself from COVID while he's fucking playing the piano.
And he like rolls down his sleeve to show you a fucking band-aid.
But the insanity of it is, Joe, let's even look at COVID. If we look at the people that died of COVID, it was because of chronic disease and comorbidity.
Which goes back to when we talk about it, and one of the things that's built into the new Ways to Well AI algorithm app that monitors your blood work is a calculation on your all-cause mortality risk.
The goal is to drive down all-cause mortality risk.
What people don't understand is if you're like you, a physically fit, lean muscle mass, low body fat, healthy individual...
It reduces your risk of everything that could kill you.
Everything.
A car accident, which sounds crazy, but think your body is metabolically healthy and fit.
Your chances of surviving and recovering are higher.
This is crazy that they're saying, now, think about allocating that kind of money towards healthcare.
102, the death toll from the deadliest wildfire in over a century has risen to 102. Yeah, but what I asked you is, what did the governor say about acquiring the land?
One of the things – and again, I don't know enough to – I'm curious because I know you've interviewed a lot of smarter people than me.
I was told that one of the leverage points for the Ukraine in order to get funding was to put up land as collateral through...
Like, their farmland is put up as collateral on the loans that are being provided, and those loans are essentially being provided by these big conglomerates.
You get that from Michael Schellenberger, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald.
You get that from those type of people.
You don't get that from anywhere else anymore.
And it's good that we have those type of people, that they're there and they'll hold people accountable and tell you the real numbers of things and You know, and give you the facts behind what caused conflicts, not just report on the conflicts, but explain to you what happened.
He said, I'm already thinking about ways for the state to acquire that land so we could put it into workforce housing, to put it back into families, or to make it open spaces in perpetuity as memorial to people who are lost.
That is a crazy thing to say, because as soon as you say, state to acquire that land, and we'll decide the awesome things to do with it.
That's now, you took very, very, very valuable land, and you could say, hey, we're going to sell it to a resort, and the resort is going to donate to all these wonderful funds.
But I think the problem is when they can say 102 deaths confirmed and they don't say, but yet there's 990 people missing.
You can say that because it's very difficult to confirm who these people are.
There's not much left.
It's so scary.
Fire is so fucking scary.
And when you've been evacuated by fire, there was one time where I was coming home from the comedy store.
I got evacuated the same day.
But as I was coming home from the comedy store, as I was driving to my house, the whole right side of the highway over the tops of the hills was in flame.
Like, all the hills, like, as you get, like, woodland hills and shit, in flames.
Just in flames.
Like, fire coming over hills.
You're watching houses go up in flames.
It's such a weird feeling because that's when you realize that we all have this very naive idea.
And, by the way, people working on wildfires and those firefighters who work 24-7 and just fucking stayed alive on coffee.
Do they, I don't know enough about, do they do control burns and all that in California now to try and stop, like create stopgaps and all that for the fires?
What it says right here is, within a day, I'm reading it, 388 names of people unaccounted for following the deadliest U.S. wildfires in more than a century.
More than 100 of them or their relatives came forward to say they're safe.
So this was in August.
So 100 of the 388 people.
So that number of 1,000 was just the initial number.
Well, and then I know, too, I mean, it's taken forever for people to get their insurance claims and their money, and that happens even here with hurricanes.
It's a – if you don't have the money to pay for stuff yourself, you're stuck battling the insurance company.
If you don't have the money to battle the insurance company, then you're really in a tough spot.
I had a, during a hurricane in Houston at our pharmacy, I had a tree damage the roof, but then it wasn't covered by flood insurance because they said it was wind-driven rain.
Anyways, it was like $60,000 in damage that the insurance didn't cover.
Because they could say it's wind-driven rain, not rising water.
Yeah, they have different ways of loop pulling out of paying your coverage.
And so for somebody who's, it's their house, you know, who maybe doesn't have the money to fight the insurance companies, they just put a tarp on the roof and live with it as long as they can until they can afford to fix it.
As great as we are as humans, we are tribal, like you said.
said so we find reasons to see how we're different and where to argue and where to fight and I think that allows corruption to creep in oh yeah it it's insidious it's It spreads.
Apparently San Francisco, according to some people that I know that are living there, is getting better because of AI. So Chamath was saying that when the super nerds are running things, everything's great.
But as soon as the mid-level people start taking over, they get through with ideology.
They get through with progressive virtue signaling, and that's how they get ahead, because they're mostly mediocre people.
And so when they start to get a grip of the city, you're kind of fucked.
But if the AI becomes the dominant force in the industry again, then the super nerds will be back in control again.
And if the super nerds are in control, they'll fix all these things.
Because it's logical.
It's logical to not have people camping on the streets and fucking shooting up in the middle of...
I wonder, even with AI, like, as we get down to that, like you were talking about, it's a way more complex conversation than today, but, like, what are they gonna do with the massive displacements in jobs between AI and robotics and humanoid robots?
I mean, there's ten companies out there that are launching robots, not just Elon, and those are backed by ChatGPT and large language models that are rapidly approaching the level of human knowledge and intellect that Of the average human.
And that's a real technology that's available now.
And it should be available if there's a situation where there's a fucking terrorist and he's in a house and he's got a suicide vest and you can use Wi-Fi to locate him and know exactly where he is and you protect all these other people.
So that's justification for having some kind of technology in the hands of some intelligence agents.
But, you know, if you're using it to gather dirt on old Brigham, because Brigham's got a big old mouth when he's talking about the pharmaceutical drug, and, you know, you have a fucking group of people that are working to put together a dossier on you.
Well, with the AI and the way things are headed, too, though, like, when we talk about displacement of jobs, so many people think it's going to be, like...
Trade workers.
And I'm like, no, this is going to replace clinicians.
This is going to replace doctors, lawyers, you know, a lot of...
Like in Viktor Frankl's A Man's Search for Meaning, he survived that Nazi concentration camp because he had a purpose, a higher calling.
I can tell you, when I'm just eating shit sandwiches and getting my head stomped in, right now running these companies, over 300 employees, DEA, FDA, You know, fighting big pharma, all the things we battle.
There are a lot of days I go to bed with anxiety and stress, but I go to bed feeling like I'm really on the right side of something positive.
I really, truly do.
When I was a device rep, I made good money.
But I went to bed miserable every night, and I felt like I'm just kind of a pawn and a scheme, and we're not really making an impact.
So I go back to, I think people, humans, we need a purpose.
And so that scares me the most, is a lot of people's purpose, if it's not being a mother or a father or a sibling, they find purpose in their trade and their craft and their job.
So what do we do when— That's a really good question.
If you wanted to look at it long term, if you're being objective and not taking into account human emotions and suffering and the disruption of lives that it's undeniably going to cause, if you just wanted to look at us objectively, you would say this is an inevitable transition, a very painful transition into a technological world.
And human beings are going to have to adapt.
And if this was available to them when they were babies, they would have adapted to exist in that world.
They would have found things to do for a living that only humans can do.
Because they're very personal things that only humans can do.
There's always going to be a market for handmade things.
There's always going to be a market for...
I like a painting that I know the guy who made it.
I think they were saying the male primates are like five or six years old, so they become really hard to domesticate or keep as a pet because they get violent.
But you also live in that imaginary world where you've created this character and then at what point does the character become you when you've done it for 30, 40 years, whatever it was?
But if you want a career in pro wrestling, and you want to be a fucking animal, and you want to get hit by a chair every night, like you're traveling across the country, probably a good drug.
We've had the opportunity to work with several big WWE wrestlers and they have put their bodies through hell.
For, I mean, I would say even more than jujitsu and MMA guys and NFL guys, out of everybody we've worked with, the wrestlers are the most beat to shit.
But there's been so many instances like that in history of like groups of unbelievable savages that accomplished insane things just by pure barbarism and slaughter of innocent people.
You need a guy who's got DNA. And what was the number, Jamie, when we last looked at, like, what percentage of the population in Asia has Genghis Khan's DNA? It's something nuts.
Like, 5% of everybody.
Like, still has this fucking guy who lived in, what, 1200?
He came back, and I'm blanking out on his name, but fought for the Irish because they were basically raping their wives and making sure that they were raising British noble-born instead of Irish people.
They didn't really get into in the movie, but when we did Europe, we did a tour where they were breaking down how bad they tortured him and mutilated him in a public setting prior to killing him.
Was there any cave people that were male feminists?
They were barbaric.
They killed each other.
They stole wives.
I remember reading this book about Comanche where they were talking about this one Comanche warrior who wanted this other Comanche's wife So he killed the guy and ate a piece of his heart and then took his wife.
That's why if you've ever played Oregon Trail in elementary school, that's what they had when I was in elementary school, I would always die of syphilis or dysentery.
I would never survive.
Dysentery or, what was it?
Dysentery or you get killed by Indians or whatever it is.
But you look at how statistically unlikely it is that we're all here.
Well, at the very least, if we're not here for something, at the very least, we can maximize our time here.
You know, one of the things, the reason why this is very important to me is everything I do, I need energy.
Everything I do.
I need a lot of energy.
I need a lot of energy to do stand-up.
I need a lot of energy to do jujitsu.
I need a lot of energy to do archery.
I need a lot of energy to do podcasts.
I need a lot of energy to do UFC shows.
If you're weak and tired, you won't be as good at anything you do.
Anything you do.
And the one thing that you have control over...
If you're a person who takes care of your diet and exercise, the one thing that you're going to have control over is you will be able to give your vehicle more energy.
If you really do the right things in terms of with your health, you rest accordingly, eat the right foods, take vitamins, work out, People say so often that eating healthy, working out, it's expensive, it takes time, but being chronically ill is way more expensive.
It takes way more time.
And you have to choose your heart, but there is no path that's just going to be a cakewalk.
Well, and it makes total sense because, again, not to say – when you're in it, you think you're doing right.
I don't think that people are out there trying to harm humanity.
I don't.
I really want to hope that's not the case.
But when I was a drug rep at 22 and you bring in a thought leader from Harvard that tells me all the ways that they're using this brilliant mental health drug off-label – And then you put tremendous pressure and give me an expense account and send me out to drinks with a doctor.
And I'm sitting there and the doctor's like, where else can I use this drug?
You're like, do I tell him what that guy from Harvard told me?
Because I also signed a contract that said I wouldn't, but then the company taught me all that and put me in this environment.
And it's like a wink, wink, nod, nod.
And the pressure is to grow the patient population on a drug.
That's why GLP-1s went from being for diabetic, obese people to now let's help people lose weight for spring break.
And that's what people do with everything, though.
They want to think that it's the most eye-opening thing having got behind the scenes and met you and then met Cam and met Aaron Rodgers and met all the...
Every person that you have introduced me to works their ass off.
The level of dedication and commitment...
And their schedules are crazy.
And the pressure is crazy.
And the stress is crazy.
And they have kids and families.
And they find to wake him up at, what, 3 in the morning to go run 30 miles?
Cam was running marathons in the morning before work when he was working eight-hour days.
He would get up 3.30 in the morning, run a fucking marathon, and then take three days off of work, take his, you know, vacation time, and go run the Moab 240. Run 240 miles through the fucking mountains.
Like, that's a regular...
A regular guy with a regular job.
And if you don't get inspired by that and realize, like, there's more in the tank than you think there is.
And people like that, the benefit of people like that is that through their discipline, you can learn that you could do these things too.
You can get inspired by, not maybe, maybe you can't run the Moab 240, but you will most certainly hold yourself to a higher standard when you know there's someone out there that's really busting their ass and trying to make things happen.
Like, Phillip Rowe, I know, we've become really good friends.
Philly Fresh from UFC. Love that dude.
Dude, working as a UPS guy, raising two kids, training MMA in his spare time, and, like, trying to get all his work in, makes it into the UFC. I mean, that's insane.
And if you did, everything that you could do to make yourself healthy wouldn't even have the urge to look at someone else and say, oh, she's on Ozempic.
What you see is people, momentum creates momentum.
And even individuals I know that have taken Ozempic.
A lot of those people, they just needed wins on the board and they needed to create momentum.
And these really obese individuals, when they start seeing there's hope and the weight starts coming off, as crazy as it is, the diet, the lifestyle, the nutrition, all that starts to fall in line more and more.
And then they get a win on the board and now they're the guy who's going to the gym three days a week.
Because there are people whose lives are seemingly on paper amazing and they're still depressed.
But I guarantee you they probably have their priorities off, and I guarantee you they probably don't exercise, and if they do, it's some rare imbalance that some people do have.
I can tell you, I mean, running businesses, of course everyone has stress and anxiety.
If I didn't do an ice bath or go do Muay Thai, If I take a week off, my anxiety is terrible.
I mean, I would have almost crippling anxiety, but doing physical activity and doing hard things and doing the ice bath and doing the sauna and going through that method and that process...
And if you have no adversity, adversity is very difficult to handle.
But if you give yourself voluntary adversity that far exceeds anything you're going to experience outside of that, you're way better at handling stuff.
If your workouts are so fucking brutal, and I've seen you do Muay Thai, it's fucking hard, man.
It's hard.
It's exhausting.
And everything else seems easy.
Because when you're on, like, round five, and it's a five-minute round, and you're three and a half minutes in, and he's trying to get you to...
He's trying to get you to do a switch kick over and over and over again.
Your fucking heart is beating out of your chest.
You gotta finish the round strong.
And when you're done, when that bell goes off, you're like, oh my god.
This is not, I don't want to go get the shit beat out of me and work my ass off for an hour, but every time you leave, even no matter what, I'm like, oh, thank God I did that.
When I owned a toxicology, I was in the toxicology lab and the non-abusive stuff after my brother passed from opioids and I was trying to educate clinicians on that.
One of the things I did was hire an expert, Dr. Bill Massey.
And he came in and he sat on Obama's opioid abuse campaign committee and was...
He was helping guide me on what makes sense and how do we do this.
But one of the things he shared with me that was wild was this study that he did for Obama with rhesus monkeys, where they gave one set of rhesus monkeys basically a cage with metal and no warmth, no interaction with other monkeys.
They got water and food, but at erratic times, there was no consistency in that monkey's life.
Then they took another subset of rhesus monkeys where they gave them warmth, shelter, let them stay with their family for the right amount of time until they reached maturity.
And what they found is when they introduced drug, heroin and cocaine to these monkeys, disproportionately the monkeys that were deprived died.
And OD'd.
Whereas the monkeys that had that love and affection and warmth and comfort and essential needs met died at a much lower rate.
Most of them actually survived.
And he was breaking down that if you grow up in an environment with minimal dopamine response, When you light up that dopamine, maybe it's a boxing match, right?
You're a kid who's been poor, and you get in that boxing match, you knock a guy out, you're hooked.
This is it.
This is the best I've felt.
Everyone's cheering me on.
For some people, unfortunately, what they find first is a drug, or an alcohol, or a substance.
But that same person could be...
The future Albert Einstein, the future Muhammad Ali, the future, you know, whatever it may be.
Insert here.
They have that ability.
It's just can we give them a shot?
Can we buy them the time and get them out of this?
Because I've seen a lot of people beat drug addiction, but I've unfortunately lost a lot of people to it, too.
Alexander's experience in the 70s had come to be called Rat Park.
Researchers had already proved that when rats were placed in a cage all alone with no other community of rats and offered two water bottles, one filled with water, the other filled with heroin or cocaine, the rats would repetitively drink from the drug-laced bottles until they overdosed and died.
Like pigeons pressing a pleasure lever, they were relentless until their bodies and brains were overcome and they died.
But Alexander wondered, is it about the drug or might be related to the setting that they were in?
He put in rat parks where they were among others and free to roam and play, socialize, and to have sex.
And they were given the same access to two types of drug-laced bottles.
When inhabiting a rat park, they remarkably preferred the plain water.
Even when they did imbibe from the drug-filled bottle, they did so intermittently, not obsessively, and never overdosed.
A social community beat the power of drugs.
And you gotta wonder if that would be the case with human beings.
You know, if everyone, I mean it's not possible right now in the world that we live in, but if everyone had a productive, happy, healthy life and was raised in a positive environment, how much less drug abuse and drug addiction would we have?
It's a good question, because if it really is this horrible childhood that is causing a lot of people to seek these things out, but that's not my friend.
My friend who got addicted, he wasn't from abuse like that.
He was talking about normal family.
Everything was fine.
It was him dealing with pain, and back pain is some of the worst pain.
It's fucking debilitating.
I mean, I've known multiple friends who've had back surgeries.
When they're in pain, it's just like, It takes over everything.
Like, I've had knee surgery, and you can kind of deal with knee pain.
It's like, yeah, it sucks, but it's gonna get better.
It'll be okay.
But it's not your whole system.
It's just your knee.
The back feels like your whole being is hurt.
It's a particular type of pain that people want relief from.
My buddy's dad has been in and out of the hospital.
He's in his 80s now.
And he used to go on the elk hunts with us and everything.
He was a coach.
They had him loaded up on pain meds and everything was starting to fail.
He had been in the hospital for months.
They were about to move him to hospice.
And my buddy said, we're done.
I don't want any more pain meds.
And he talked to his dad and he said, dad...
Can you survive without the pain meds?
And he didn't think he could.
And he battled, like, feeling terrible, everything.
Long story short, he went from they were going to put him in hospice because his kidneys and organs and all this were failing to he drove a car last week.
His organs were shutting down because they were just pushing more and more and more.
And I don't want to be too sinister, but there's a lot of money in keeping somebody in a hospital and billing that insurance company during those time frames and then moving them over.
You know, I stood in surgeries where I watched them do neurosurgeries on people they knew were going to die.
But they could bill them $800,000 and collect the insurance payment, and so the hospital's going to do the surgery.
It's just because our incentive systems are flawed, like what you were talking about earlier.
Dopamine wins reward systems.
If we build a reward system based off Money and numbers and finances, we shouldn't be shocked when we have killer earnings and really bad health outcomes.
I'm glad you can speak about these things the way you can with so much information.
You're so knowledgeable about it, and you can pull it up at any moment.
It's a daunting task that you have, but I think your message has changed a lot of people's lives.
I really do.
I think there's a lot of people that recognize that between you and all these other people in the space, Peter Atiyah and Andrew Huberman and all these people, Dr. Rhonda Patrick, all these people talking about health and what you can do to improve and studies and all these things you can do to change the path that you're on.
Thank you for giving me a voice and thank you for having me on here.
And also thank you to the US Senate for being brave enough to let us sit there and hammer the US government and critique them for their choices and power to them for at least having the honesty and integrity to let us have an open forum.
Yeah, let's hope they keep doing it and this Make America Healthy Again idea is one of the most promising political ideas I've heard in a long time because it's long overdue.
There was a long time where they were denying that cigarettes cause cancer.
They denied it as long as they could and then eventually they couldn't deny it anymore.
And I would hope that we would learn our lesson from all these other things they did.
All these other things that they used to push and now they realize they're dangerous and they really regret that they did it and people went along with it.
Time has come.
Time has come to change the way we approach food and health.