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Jan. 12, 2024 - On Brand
02:45:44
OB #37 - Calley Means: Food Grifter

Russell has Calley Means, a semi-prominent food and health grifter on his show, and Al is forced to play a game of fact-checking every word that comes out of his mouth. Support us on Patreon! - patreon.com/onbrand Buy a magnet! - wesellACTUALgoldunlikeRussell

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This is On Brand, a podcast where we discuss the ideas and antics of one Russell Brand.
I'm Al Worth, and each week I go through an episode of Brand's Show with my co-host Lauren B. Hi, it's me, Lauren B. And hey, it's not just me.
Hello, we're back.
Back to doing the thing!
And I am the host that does not know the quagmire we're about to wade into, but it hasn't been good yet and I bet it won't be today!
No, it is not, which is why we do the good thing before the bad thing.
Lauren, what is your good thing before the bad thing this week?
So, it's a little belated, because it's Christmas.
Christmas presents, but I have visual aids.
We'll be describing for listeners, but I'm going to need you to help me out with a bit, real quick, because...
Christmas, I didn't get to this year, but usually Mike and I make stuff for each other for Christmas, which sounds like a macaroni necklace when you say that.
Yeah, right.
Which also, nothing to sneeze at in my opinion.
That's what I would make.
I live for glue and some macaroni onto a box, onto a cigar box, I think that's fantastic.
But we do get a little more spicy, right?
And this year, I think this may have been helped along by the fact that a previous good thing had been the Jersey Shore but I had a very like I had a partially Jersey Shore centric section of my Christmas present and so,
It's very stupid.
And I want to encourage everybody to be as dumb as you possibly can and use the skills that you have at your disposal.
I didn't get to make stuff this year.
I ran around and found stuff instead of making some stuff.
So I have a new shirt that Mike printed for me.
We were very surreptitious.
I tricked him so I could buy a cool button-up.
It was a lot of trickery.
A lot of deception went into this Christmas, which I'm always here for.
I'm going to stand up, I'm going to move my hair, and I need you to read the front of my shirt and then the back of my shirt, and my fellow Jersday observers will get it, and you'll see.
I almost certainly won't, but all right, let's do it.
Well, but it's also, but it's, you'll get it.
So, but it's, it's a way to represent what's happening in audio form.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
In my, well, in my head anyway.
We'll see how it actually goes, but all right, so I'm going to scoot back from the microphone.
Of course, I'm going to run into it.
Great.
Okay.
Knock some shit over.
All right.
Bam, says the front.
And the back says... Boo!
Bam.
Boo.
Yeah!
Then it's a crop top, it's like he figured out this specific shirt that I enjoy to wear, and this was like a whole elaborate...
Deception.
It was a Rube Goldberg device of deception for the nicest.
Okay.
One of the clubs they go to, where fights always happen on the show, is called Bamboo.
And all the big security guards have shirts.
And they've been funny to me since I first saw them on the show in, what, 2010?
The club is called Bamboo.
And all their security guards have big black shirts with big white lettering, and the front says BAM, and the back says BOO.
So I got the lady body version.
Okay!
That's great.
It's so stupid.
It's so stupid.
And in previous years- Incredibly dumb, but great, yeah.
If it's not both, I am not interested.
So in previous years, and I'm sure this is a life-size pillow of my dog Walter, who had to basically, because of COVID, had to go live full-time with his dad.
And so Mike made me a full-size pillow.
Of my little Korg babe, and in previous years, let's see, this was, man, none of these look really great, but he made, I think this is the first Christmas we were dating, LB2MP, Mind to Mind Communication Candle.
He got way into the CIA ESP tests, so made a candle, and We also experiment with our own creative stuff.
He was trying to figure out how to print on glass, so there's not a light abrasion on this glass and the picture's gone.
Oh, okay.
Because it's an experiment.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Let's see.
I grabbed some I made this weed grinder that says minimal water damage and it's got a picture of Mark Corrigan on it.
I figured that out one year.
And I have an old portrait of our dog George.
This is like, I think it was the same year, the next year from the candles.
This is a while back and this is...
That's George.
So I encourage everyone out there to get creative because it's kind of fun.
But the shirt is the dumbest thing.
Now I can put on my, ooh, my button up 'cause it's cold in here.
But yeah, it's the dumbest thing.
It's so stupid and I love it.
Yeah, yeah, no, it's fantastic.
So I needed to brag, because also Mike did us a big solid and did Off-Brand with me last week.
So, you know, it's a little brag on this person that helped us out.
Yes, yeah, Mike deserves all the love in the world.
Absolutely!
And yeah, and also his ideas are so dumb and good, so.
So yeah, what's your good thing before the bad thing?
Uh, it's a very simple one, but being able to vocalize.
Being able to... Oh yeah!
To speak!
Yeah, to actually say words.
To have things come out when I attempt to say things.
It's one of those things that you don't realize how much you need it until you don't have it.
Oh, I was texting you like, how do we, as human beings, avoid this like the fucking plague?
Yeah.
Because I know what's made me lose my voice.
Thank you, Six Flags, right?
Like, that's been the moment.
But like, yeah, there's a lot.
Yeah.
What's terrifying?
There are so many reasons it can just happen.
It really can.
Oh!
It really can.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's not happened to me before.
Not a fan.
Gotta be said.
And trying to communicate with a three-year-old through mime is less than ideal.
But you know what?
We got there.
We did it.
We did it.
And yeah, I'm just, I'm glad to be, I'm still not quite a hundred percent, but I'm most of the way there and ah, it feels good.
It feels good.
That is my very good thing before the bad thing this week.
Now, we have a show to deal with, but first we should thank some new patrons.
So, The Sun Won't Stop Shining, you are now an awakening wonder.
You are indeed an awakening wonder.
Thank you, The Sun Won't Stop Shining.
Thank you, how positive!
I live in Chicago, so bone to pick with that, but I appreciate the notion.
It's either positive or it's a complaint.
You know, the sun won't stop shining.
I've heard both.
You know what, and I see you and I hear you, from either direction.
Both are entirely valid.
Karen Cox, you are now an Awakening wonder.
You are indeed an Awakening wonder.
Thank you very much, Karen.
Thank you, Karen!
Very much appreciated.
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You are indeed an Awakening wonder.
Thank you, Eric.
Excellent name.
Thank you so much!
Stephan, you are now an Awakening wonder.
You are indeed an Awakening wonder.
Thank you, Stephan.
Thank you, Stephan.
I'm going to assume it's Stephan because... I went to SNL immediately.
That's where I went.
Well, there's a Welsh version of this name, but that has two Fs, so I'm going to assume it's Stefan rather than Stefan, because that's the Welsh kind of, you know, difference.
I went Bill Hader.
Interesting.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, fair, but Welsh, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I grew up with a lot of Stefans, so.
Also, I missed a message from one of our patrons last month, and I incorrectly gave them a shout-out under the name Guawa.
The correct shout-out is as follows.
Peter Popov has your inheritance.
You are now an Awakening wonder.
You are indeed an awakening wonder.
So thank you, Peter Pavlov, as you are now.
Yikes!
Yeah.
Welcome, welcome.
And if anyone wants to support us, you're right.
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Oh, man.
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Alright, so it has been a minute.
Feed show, which was also off brand. And please note that while you can easily listen to our
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listen in the Spotify app, the video will come up there too.
Oh, right. So it has been a minute. It feels like ages since we've done this, to be perfectly
honest. Last we covered was Russell's decidedly unfestive Christmas special with Jonathan
Pageau. And since then he's he's done his whole conspiracy theory to conspiracy fact
thing, which as predicted, was him stringing together a slew of his old editorials, which
we've already covered.
I love to see some new ideas, you know what I mean?
I know, right?
I know.
outset. Yeah, it was. I love to see some new ideas. You know what I mean? Like, right. I know.
But it's a clip show. What are you going to do? You know, is this? I mean, yeah. And your clip show.
It's reruns, isn't it?
Okay, fine.
Yeah.
If it didn't have the lie layer, it'd be like, well, I get it.
Yeah, it would be fine, yeah.
Yeah, not particularly thrilled with it.
There wasn't really much meat on those bones, just kind of same old, same old.
Yeah, since then, well, Russell has only in truth come back to work this week, as he had a few pre-recorded editorials and interviews which he put up to fill the space until January 8th.
Sounds nice!
It sounds great.
He's had, like, a few weeks, hasn't he?
Sounds pretty sweet.
Cool.
Cool for you, girl.
Yeah.
So in looking at those, I kind of had a choice of three things to cover.
Three guests, right?
All of which were decent contenders.
One was Vandana Shiva.
Who we may come back to at some point because of the conversation about farming and Bill Gates, and the fact that opposite Wim Hof, she was one of Russell's community festival headliners last year.
Oh, I do know her!
Okay, okay, yeah, yeah, I know who you're talking about.
Unfortunately, the conversation itself was a fucking snooze.
Just really dull.
I'm almost relieved to hear that!
I feel like that's good news, always!
Not for the show!
Yeah, no.
I do feel like less of an impact, you know?
I'm like, you know what, I'm fine with that.
She also has the typical kind of boomer thing of having the camera just pointed upward, like, you know, kind of at the neck.
Okay, but wait.
No, no, no.
It was very sweet and lovely that you posted a very festive photo.
On our Patreon.
I know that was from that perspective.
And you did the exact thing.
I did.
You did the exact same thing.
I wouldn't record an interview from that perspective.
No, that was purely to get my Christmas jumper in the shot.
I wanted that to be present.
But yeah, fair enough.
And also fair point!
Fair differential for sure.
I wouldn't spend an hour and a half with just a camera pointed upward at my neck being like, yeah, this is good entertainment.
This is a good view for people to look at.
Yeah, right?
We, like, talk to our parents, it's enough.
Like, that's all, like, boy, the ceiling's looking great, guys.
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, well.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, magnificent.
Noted.
Noted.
Yeah, so he also had... Oh, girl, oh!
He had Chris Hedges on, the left-wing Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges.
Now I do have some issues with Chris Hedges, namely his pro-Russia stances among others, but I don't know how much you know about the guy, but I think it's probably fair to say on balance that we would agree with him on a lot more things than the average Stay Free guest.
He does seem to be genuinely pretty Pretty lefty, for the most part.
The subject of conversation there was Israel-Palestine and the genocide that's being carried out in Gaza.
And mostly, Russell just nodded along, claiming that he was there to be educated.
You know, so he can be like, I don't know anything!
You tell me!
Though he offered pushback in defense of Israel a couple of times, but nothing particularly substantive.
I think it was just kind of his attempt to walk that middle line.
Because Chris Hedges was very much like, they're killing everyone, you know?
Which, yeah.
The best part for me was definitely Hedges describing Trump's base as Christian fascists, which did not go down well in the comments section.
I mean, show me the lie though.
Accurate!
Yeah, but given that Russell's audience is largely made up of Trumpers, did not go down well at all.
I can see how this, the Gaza genocide that's happening is putting a lot, like, I'm getting it here, you know, with our show, and a few other places, like, The strange bedfellows are not working out, you know what I mean?
No, it's weird.
Yeah, yeah.
Am I like, yay, let them fight, but also don't fight because one side is clearly in the right?
It's funny to see this shake out, and I wonder how it will pan out long term.
Because we're already in a place where like, oh, Rainn Wilson's not coming back on this show.
I don't think so.
And not even a year, that's a huge shift for the position of Russell's show.
That's just an example, but that's this one point of this one little fly in the ointment, and it seems like flies have been getting peppered into that ointment quite a bit more.
Am I crazy?
Am I crazy?
It's pretty much a fly ointment at this stage, is it not?
Is it more fly than ointments?
I think that it might get to more fly than ointments, and I'm like, I'm interested, because like, that's what I'm, you know...
I mean my Instagram like you know feed and content has become mostly trying to keep up to date and up to speed with like Palestinian journalists so it's been a very like.
This isn't going to go well for the propagandists.
It's interesting.
The only interesting aspect is Russell, he's not really had anyone that's been hugely pro-Israel on the show yet.
I imagine he probably will.
I don't know if he'll get fucking Ben Shapiro on or someone like that.
Oh, I don't know.
Yeah, right.
But every time someone does come on who is very much on the side of the Palestinians, he does kind of try and walk that middle line every single time, which is the interesting part.
He's just, he's refusing to pick a side.
Despite public opinion, I would say, going overwhelmingly in one direction, pretty much.
Even our governments are starting to, like, really.
Like, I have, like, little bits of hope.
Crazy.
I know.
Shocking.
Maybe I'm naive.
I'll be keeping an eye in the next couple of weeks to see how that goes.
Because, again, it was also recorded before Christmas, so I don't know if that makes any fucking difference in the world.
It might do in Russell's universe.
Yeah, it is a weird thing to keep tabs on, but I'm going to.
It's interesting, yeah, and to see the percentage of fly to ointment and how this is all going.
Because it's, yeah, I just, it doesn't seem like it's gonna go great with the bases that they're Yeah, no, they're kind of... I think they're not quite sure which direction to take it.
Russell certainly isn't, that's for sure.
I think there is that problem.
They'll get there.
They'll get there.
It just needs a little more time.
When are we on the battlefield where one side is the community, like woo-wee-woo?
Burlap and Pompous Grass Festival and the other side is his locals channel.
Like, when are we gonna get to that conflict?
Racist Trumpers.
It feels like that's gonna happen in some form.
You would think.
I suspect they marry together better than anyone would have thought.
That's what's in the back of my mind.
Yeah, time will tell.
Yeah, and I'm not necessarily... I don't know.
That's the thing.
I don't know what that will look like.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I'm curious.
I don't know.
A kind of civil war would be fascinating to see, but maybe we're being optimistic.
Oh, I'm not optimistic about any of it, and I don't want to even entertain that.
I'm interested as to see... I think observing is the right move, and noting.
Taking little notes and letting it fly, because what are we going to do?
That's kind of what we can do anyway.
So as for Chris Hedges, yeah, the most kind of interesting part was the Trump-Christian-Fascist thing, which was very, very funny and upset a lot of people.
Spicy.
That's a spicy meatball!
Yeah, on that show it was great.
But yeah, I do know that Russell was then saying in the kind of segments in between, hey, I know this is someone many of you will disagree with, but let's listen to opposing voices.
Which, fine, he's met his quota of opposing views for the next six months and can go back to purely hosting alt-right grifters.
And then he's still able to say, oh, I hear our both sides on this show.
Look, I had Chris Hedges on.
You know, it's the, yeah, that's, A good chunk of the focus.
Yeah, it's kind of crazy that he's not just a right wing... He's not a Ben Shapiro that's kind of... Or even a Candace Owens that's just been the one setting the whole time.
He's working the different aspects angle, and it's not gonna... I don't know of anyone, any other kind of propagandist person That's coming from where Russell is coming from, and which is part of why we started the show to begin with.
I'm interested.
I just feel like, what the fuck is with this guy?
This is a lot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the thing is, he's making that presentation and he's making a good effort to make that presentation.
And there's good reason.
You know, I think there's good money in it for him if he can present himself as balanced in some kind of way, even though he's absolutely not.
As we have covered in every single thing that he's ever done.
If he can pull it off, it could put him in the front of the pack.
Genuinely.
Maybe.
Maybe.
He does have a few legal cases working against him, sir, so maybe that'll slow him down a bit.
Well... Yeah, when he fucks off to Bali, it might be harder to lead the pack.
Okay, so now we have all these different races toward the mystery end of this- Oh, Jesus Christ.
But now we've got- You just gotta, like, pick your pony.
Put your money on the line.
Yeah, well, you know, Alex Jones is surging forward, Tucker Carlson was back there for a while, but he's comin' forward again!
Who knows, who knows?
Fuck these people.
I wish it wasn't so consequential.
Yeah, I wish it didn't affect literally every aspect of society.
Of our lives?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There we go.
Yeah, yeah.
Wonderful.
Anyway, all of that brings us to the person that we will be covering today, and it's a repeat guest on Russell's show who did in fact attend Community Festival as a speaker last year, actually.
Just lower down on the bill.
Let's let Russell introduce him.
Hello there, you Awakening Wanderers.
Thank you for joining me for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
It's an exciting episode today.
The first 15 minutes will be available on YouTube and various other platforms.
But because we've got Callie Means on today, who's a whistleblower, insider,
an activist against big food and big pharma, who will reveal to you information
that literally might save your children's lives, certainly will reduce the chances
of your children getting diabetes, might, if you're male, improve your chances
of remaining fertile, we will not be able to stream on legacy media and legacy media affiliated sites for long
because as you know, they are part of an organization, TNI specifically, the Trusted News Initiative,
that likes to control information that could potentially save your life
and improve your consciousness.
We'll be teaching you a little bit more about that over coming weeks in this conversation as well.
We'll be talking about the pharmaceutical industry and big food's role in funding legacy media.
Callie is, of course, the founder of TruMed, a company that enables tax-free spending
on food and exercise, simple things that might change and save your life.
He's also the co-author with his sister of Good Energy, which is coming out next year and available for pre-order.
There's links in the description for that.
We talk about a Zen pic, which you'll love hearing about and how they're pushing that on kids now.
One industry fattens them up, another industry benefits from their diabetes.
We'll be talking about baby foods and pesticides, a little bit about Bill Gates and the emergence of independent media and independent voices, as well as some stuff that relates to me personally.
Stuff that relates to Russell personally, I wonder what that could be.
Yeah, so a guy called Callie Means is who we're dealing with today.
Have you ever heard of him?
Only in basically being touched on with the conspirituality content.
Okay, interesting.
I know the direction that he's with the hippie shooting from vaguely.
So I've got a little inkling.
A little feeling as to the direction this is going to go.
Yeah, so he's been on Tucker's show, he's been on Fox News, he's been on Adam Carolla's show, Breaking Points, and various other shithead outlets.
I'm gonna read to you from his official bio on CaliMeans.com.
Ahem, quote.
Hi, I'm Cali Means.
My mission is to steer more healthcare dollars to incentivize metabolic habits at the root of disease.
Healthy food, exercise, sleep, stress management.
This is where the rubber hits the road to change our current trajectory.
Right now we have a sick care system where 95% of healthcare dollars are spent to manage disease after people get sick.
It is a big problem when the largest and fastest growing industry in the country is incentivized for us to be sick.
I am working to advance this mission in three interconnected ways.
TruMed, a company I started that enables tax-free HSA, FSA, spending on supplements, exercise and healthy food.
Good energy.
Yeah.
A book I co-wrote with my sister, Dr. Casey Means, that is coming out May 2024.
Media and advocacy about the broken incentives of the healthcare system informed by my early career as a consultant for the pharmaceutical and food industries.
I am writing a newsletter.
Yeah.
I'm writing a newsletter to 14,000 people with learnings from this work.
One a week focusing, he spelt focusing wrong, on systemic slash incentive issues and one focusing on health tips slash lessons that have had an impact on me.
Unquote.
Um, yeah.
So there's a lot already just in there, to be honest.
Figuring out how to get government money, not just individuals' money, for their supplements that they want to sell.
That's the first one.
Yeah, exactly.
TrueMed kind of acts as a kind of a go-between between the company selling the supplements
and the and you know wherever the fuck it is you know the the the the kind of
the the government funding yeah yeah yeah yeah that's like It's a business-to-business kind of situation, but they then also promote all of the supplements and other shit that these people will sell through their newsletter and whatever else.
I have some experience, I mean, I have a little more than some experience navigating the healthcare system in America as a poor person, and I know exactly what that is, and that's figuring out, because like, you can still get supplements Through, like, say, Medicare, Medicaid.
Basically, like, these kind of companies don't just want to go private.
Following the model of Elon Musk, they want that tax money teat, because they know that that's the plugging in.
That's like when you can supercharge your bullshit, is if you can convince the government to siphon money into your coffers.
Which, ALICE If you go onto their website, the main thing that you see across the top is like, would you like access to 1.5 billion dollars?
And you're like, okay.
This tells me...
This tells me exactly what direction we're going in here.
So yeah, we're off to a pretty bad start.
His sister, FYI, who he co-wrote that book with, is an MD who, according to Callie, bravely left traditional medicine in 2018, and who now seems to mostly tell people to eat vegetables on her Instagram in between spreading spurious medical statistics.
Great.
I bet her insurance bill has dropped massively.
Oh, I'm sure.
His much shorter bio on the True Med site reads, quote, Callie Means is a former food and pharmaceutical consultant.
Since losing his mom to pancreatic cancer in 2022, has been obsessed with understanding the root cause of our metabolic disease crisis, unquote.
Plastic!
I did it!
Well, yeah, right.
So, generally speaking, weaponizing someone's death for personal profit gives me the ick.
And connecting dots, there is also an underlying implication there that pancreatic cancer could have been prevented by changes in food, exercise, sleep, and stress management.
Guys!
Big fucking red flag!
No!
Big fucking red flag just from this guy's bios, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Acknowledging that, like, it's a tough thing to deal with.
Well, it's a tough thing to deal with, yeah, no, absolutely.
That's hard, sir.
I don't feel like you should be using it to sell your products, you know.
There's the rub, I think.
Yeah, that's the thing.
But that's tough, that's hard.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And as for him being a whistleblower, yeah, The only kind of whistleblowing that he's doing is bitching about the industries that he used to work in.
That's not really what I would define as whistleblowing, you know, in the traditional sense, but fucking whatever, I guess.
Well, I do think that these days there's like a separate whistleblowing definition that's like blowing I'm getting a whistle to say my supplements are on sale!
That's true, that's true.
Whistle, whistle, whistle!
That's true, and then there's the whistle that's like, I don't like black people very much.
They tend to do that one quite a lot as well.
Oh, that's an old one!
That's a gorilla!
I know, it's been around a while, but they still like to toot on that one.
Yeah.
Anyway, let's hear what Callie has to say upon arriving back home to stay free.
I'm so pumped to be a Russell.
Thank you.
I'm excited to see you.
Last time we spoke, it was at the Community Festival.
We had a wonderful conversation there.
I had the privilege of meeting your beautiful father.
I want to please pass on my regards to him.
And will you tell me, what have you been, have you been, is it true that you've been lobbying Congress?
I mean, I don't like to think... I'll pause it a second.
I'm sorry!
That's the most abysmal back- I'm sorry, I know it's aesthetic, I don't mean to- For listeners, it's painted black bricks behind him.
He's got a background of black bricks, and there's him sat there, he's got black hair, he's wearing like a black sports jacket type situation.
No, I don't think it's even that.
It's like a fucking jogging coat or some shit, I don't know.
Whatever.
And a white shirt.
Yeah.
Minimalism has gone too far, please!
This man needs help!
Obviously, I checked up on the guy and he seems to do all of his interviews from there as well, and I'm just like, why?
What was the choice here?
Man!
Some of these guys really make me feel very self-conscious that I have to record in my pathetic little apartment that doesn't get nearly enough attention, but wow!
This guy is like, this is...
I'm feeling good.
I'm feeling good.
Wow!
It looks like he's being punished.
Like this is him being allowed to speak from prison.
Yeah!
Yeah, it does have that kind of vibe.
If he wasn't so pleased about it.
I'm so sorry.
It just caught me.
I thought I would let you express that.
And the listener's like, oh boy!
Let's get back into the clip.
He was a lobbyist, but communicating at least with people from Congress.
To what end are you hopeful and how the hell have you gotten yourself involved in the system
when you are a renegade?
Russell, yeah, I've, through this, through this tirade, I've been on a lot of members
of Congress reached out.
So in the past couple of weeks, I've met with about 40.
I actually presented to a group of 50 congressional spouses too, which was very interesting, and they were very fired up as well.
What I'm consistently hearing behind closed doors... Did we elect them?
People are getting wind that this is the biggest issue in the country.
I mean, among kids, puberty among American children is starting years earlier now.
Literally, 70-year-olds are growing breasts at an alarming rate.
Like we're literally dragging puberty down because all the hormones and all the toxins in our food are changing our biology.
Infertility is skyrocketing in the country.
We're literally, and this is pronounced happening in America, but happening around the developed world, we're losing our ability to reproduce, to commit our main evolutionary function.
Infertility is skyrocketing.
Male sperm count is down 50%.
Okay.
Okay.
You can already tell that this guy is basically going to be an exercise in fact-checking for me, because he just loves to rattle off scary numbers and statistics.
We've talked about a lot 33% of teenagers having pre-diabetes.
I mean, this is the biggest issue in the country Okay
You can already tell that this guy is basically gonna be an exercise in fact-checking for me
Because he just loves to rattle off scary numbers and statistics. That was a heap of bullshit
He was doing that He keeps doing that.
It's really fucking irritating.
For real?
I've been hearing the, like, and I'm just saying this as an anecdotal reflection on my experience as an adult human that has lived in America the whole time.
I have been hearing the early development There's a reason for that, and I'll get into what I've come up with anyway.
But I'm going to deal with what he's just said in order.
It's mm-mm, mm-mm-mm.
I'm not even going to invoke maintenance phase.
That's just one that's like, dude.
There's a reason for that.
And I'll get into what I've come up with anyway.
But I'm going to deal with what he's just said in order.
So first up, yeah, we have puberty among American children starting years earlier now, and seven-year-olds growing
breasts at an alarming rate, which CaliMean says is because of the toxins in our food changing
our biology.
That's what he puts it down to, apparently.
So according to The New York Times, studies have confirmed in dozens of countries
that the age of puberty in girls has dropped by about three months per decade since the 1970s.
A similar pattern, though less extreme, has been observed in boys.
On average, girls will begin to develop breasts around age 10 in the US, according to one study of 17,000 girls, which is about a year earlier than previously thought.
No one knows what risk factor, or more likely what combination of factors, is driving the age decline, or why there are stark race and sex-based differences.
Obesity seems to be playing a role, but it cannot fully explain that change, so researchers are also investigating other potential influences.
In a 2009 study of nearly a thousand school-aged girls in Copenhagen, Dr. Juul and his team found that the average age of breast development had dropped by a year since his earlier study in the 90s to a little under 10, with most girls ranging from 7 to 12 years old in, you know, In terms of them developing.
Girls were also getting their periods earlier, around age 13, about four months earlier than what had been reported before.
Dr. Yule has become one of the most vocal proponents of an alternate theory that chemical exposures are to blame.
So the girls with the earliest breast development in his 2009 study, he said, had the highest urine levels of phthalates.
Substances used to make plastics more durable that are found in everything from vinyl flooring to food packaging.
Motherfucker, what did I say?
What did I say?
What did I say?
Yeah.
Dr. Russ Hauser, an environmental epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H.
Chan School of Public Health and a co-author of the analysis said, quote, the big takeaway is that there's few publications and a paucity of data to explore this question, unquote, which I think sums it up.
Callie Means is saying, oh, it's the toxins in the food.
And all right, Callie, show me the extensive studies that back that theory up.
And please explain to me why the scientific community collectively still do not know the answer when you apparently do.
The larger problem.
Can I just say, we didn't plan this.
I didn't say that.
I was not prompted.
There's no movie magic.
There were other things I probably could have said, but that's the top of my list, and I'm a little baffled right now.
Lauren, it turns out, knows some stuff, everybody.
Crazy, right?
That's all.
That's weird to me.
That's a little batty.
Go on.
The larger problem here, to me, is that for decades, medical textbooks have defined the stages of puberty using the so-called Tanner Scale, which was based on close observations between 1949 and 1971 of about 700 girls and boys who had lived in an orphanage in England.
No!
So that sample size over that time period in that specific stressful setting is apparently enough to base the entire of Western medicine's understanding of puberty on.
And people don't realise why there's a fucking problem.
It's BMI!
It's obesity and BMI!
It's the same shit!
Oh my god!
Right.
Because I also wrote down food insecurity.
That's also what I wrote down.
I promise we'll get into obesity in a bit.
But yeah, the scale itself, the Tanner scale, defines normal puberty as starting at age eight or above for girls and age nine or above for boys.
And if puberty begins younger than those cutoffs, doctors are supposed to screen the child for a rare hormonal disorder called central precocious puberty, which can spur puberty as early as infancy.
Children with this disorder often undergo brain scans and take prescribed puberty-blocking drugs to delay sexual development until an appropriate age.
There was a recent study from Dr. Juul's group in Copenhagen showing that of 205 pubertal children younger than 8 who underwent brain scans, just 1.8% of girls and 12.5% of boys had brain abnormalities indicating central precocious puberty.
However, lowering the age threshold is still a controversial thing among pediatricians, and I'm not a doctor, so I can't speak as to whether the costs outweigh the benefits in that situation.
Whether catching that 12.5% is worth, you know, the many, many, many, many, many children who are having to undergo these kind of procedures, you know, without having anything actually wrong with them.
Yeah, it also feels like they're on it.
Yeah, there is that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
People are pretty fucking on top of it, so that's good.
Now, we are losing our ability to reproduce.
Male sperm count is down by about 50% in just the last generation.
Scary stuff.
So, from the Scientific American this time.
Haggai Levine, an epidemiologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and his colleagues published an analysis in 2017 and an update in 2022 that evaluated a combined total of more than 200 studies that used a counting chamber.
These two papers found about a 50% decrease in sperm concentration, most notably in Western countries since the 1970s.
I've got a quote here.
It's very true that when you put the data from a lot of study cohorts together, there is also the concern of differences across studies, says Lydia Minguez Alarcon, a reproductive epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H.
Chan School of Public Health.
She believes that the large analyses indicating a drop have accounted for these differences.
However, the opinion of many reproductive epidemiologists, she says, is that in Western countries there has been a decline in sperm counts.
For non-Western countries, she claims that there just isn't enough data, basically, to say one way or another.
The 2022 updated study by Levine and his colleagues suggests a decline in sperm counts in South America, Asia, and Africa too, although Levine notes that there are fewer studies from those areas.
Other researchers acknowledge the drop in birth rate in many countries but question the reasons behind it.
Fertility is declining but I'm not sure it's through biology, Pacey says, another doctor.
About one in six people experience infertility and there are many possible reasons for this.
Pacey suspects social and economic factors play a key role.
Couples are waiting longer to have children and people may be having less sex.
Sperm count is also an imprecise measure of fertility.
Some data suggests that higher sperm counts are associated with faster time to conception,
but it's still possible to achieve a pregnancy with lower counts.
Yeah. Yeah.
So, hmm.
Whether we like it or not.
Yeah. Right. I've heard that too.
What I do know is that, you know, we as a planet hit eight billion people last year, so I think we're doing okay.
Well, it's also like infertility, like, how are we saying, like, having less children and the ability to have less children.
Wow, are those different.
Very different things.
And this is, yeah, this is, um, he, he, Callie Means is very much conflating the two things.
Um, some studies, yeah, yeah, no, not great.
Some studies have noted a strong link between obesity and infertility, um, potentially because of an impact on semen quality.
And obesity rates are increasing.
Endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the environment, such as phthalates or bisphenol A, BPA, have also been linked to a drop in sperm count.
Oh look, it's plastic again!
Ambient temperature also affects sperm count, and as global temperatures rise, that could hypothetically affect fertility.
So once again, Once again, there are significant indicators that pollution and climate change are causing our species to essentially unalive itself in slow motion, but according to Callie Means, no, no, no, it's all just down to toxins in the food.
I mean, they're in the food.
But which ones remains to be seen from his perspective.
Yeah, we get some more specifics in a little bit.
And finally, yeah, he rattled off a thing about 33% of teenagers having pre-diabetes.
It's not the number I could find.
In fact, what I could find was around 24%, but you know what?
Still a high number.
Um, so pre-diabetes means your blood glucose levels are higher than normal, but not high enough to be diagnosed as diabetes.
It usually occurs in people who already have some insulin resistance, or whose beta cells in the pancreas aren't making enough insulin to keep blood glucose in the normal range.
And without enough insulin, extra glucose stays in your bloodstream rather than entering your cells, and over time you could develop type 2 diabetes.
The common thinking is that obesity and lack of physical activity are major factors in causing this, but there are also a myriad of risk factors, including, if you are age 45 or older, if you have a parent, brother or sister with diabetes, If you are African American, Alaska Native, American Indian, Asian American, Hispanic slash Latino, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander American ethnicity, health conditions such as high blood pressure and abnormal cholesterol levels, if you have a history of gestational diabetes, if you have a history of heart disease or stroke, if you have polycystic ovary syndrome, PCOS,
Certain medicines such as glucocorticoids, some antipsychotics, and some medicines for HIV, also are a risk factor, are hormonal disorders such as Cushing syndrome and acromegaly, and sleep problems, especially sleep apnea.
All of those things are risk factors to prediabetes.
That covers quite a lot in my opinion.
Most body systems.
There was, like, checking them off in my mind, like, well, that seems too vague to even really draw conclusions that are not very specific and very controlled by the people who know best.
Yes, no, exactly.
All of this is to say that shitheads like Callie Means and Russell do usually have an underlying truth somewhere in what they're saying.
And the truth in this case is, yes, not just the US, but the world is undergoing an obesity crisis, exacerbated by the way we have allowed capitalism to run roughshod through the food industries over the last century.
The difference is what Kelly Means is saying is that, oh, they're poisoning us all to keep us sick and sell pharma products, so buy my book and take these supplements that we profit from, whereas the actual answer is severe systemic and societal overhaul of these entire industries.
As a planet.
But yeah.
And, like, the pumping of poison into fucking everything.
Like, that's real!
It's just not what they're talking about!
Yeah, it's just not what the fuck you're saying.
Anyway, this motherfucker's been putting me to work on the research side of things, so I'm gonna shut up and I'm gonna let Russell discuss some of his parenting skills.
Callie, with your own son, what foods will you absolutely not allow him to eat and which foods do you allow him to have a little bit of?
Because I've got young children and because I'm, I was not properly conscious and because it's easier, I allowed them access to things like, you know, some, they came back the other day from like a fair, they were eating like a blue dummy and like sort of like purple candy floss.
They're eating, even the colours of some of the food they're eating tell you that they are Not found in nature, and they're basically poison.
How rigorous are you with your, if you don't mind telling me, your child's diet?
Well, quickly on the addiction for kids, Russell, because I think no parent should feel shame.
I think we have a system that's rigged against us, and it's powering to understand that.
My dad, who you mentioned at the beginning, who loved meeting you, actually was at Stanford Hospital yesterday.
He's fine, but he had to have surgery.
And my sister accompanied him there, and she sent me a picture.
And the picture was the entrance to the cardiology unit at Stanford Hospital and there were two Coca-Cola machines and a vending machine selling ultra-processed food.
Now working for Coke, I actually worked with them to make sure that Coca-Cola machines were in pediatric wards and schools for young children.
That was a huge priority for Coke and it was very clear and it was very enunciated in the meetings That we wanted to get these things in pediatric units and schools to normalize that for kids.
You know, it's very hard to say that this is the root of all of our problems.
This is the root of all the cardiology issues, the diabetes issues, all the obesity issues, all the issues we're seeing with kids.
If literally as my son was being born, I walk outside the room in the pediatric ward in Arizona and there's a Coca-Cola machine.
So that's by design.
So there's a real effort to get your kids addicted and Russell, we've talked about this and, you know, all my knowledge of addiction, you know, once you get somebody addicted and you get them addicted early, it's very hard.
So I really feel for parents and kids, you know, that have sugar by all definitions is a highly addictive drug.
And we're getting kids hooked.
I don't know how many times I'm going to have to say this in covering Russell and the idiots who come on his show, but your problem is capitalism.
There being Coke machines in hospitals is a problem of capitalism.
They are the largest soft drinks manufacturer who can afford to pay to have their machines in places like this.
You want to solve the problem?
Regulate it.
It is the only fucking answer.
But good luck getting your right wing audience on side with that argument.
As for sugar being addictive, Sure.
But again, capitalism has run amok among the food industry for the last century, and good fucking luck putting that genie back in the bottle by selling your book and your supplements.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, our little off-brand, you know, Mike did us a big solid and hung in there, and so we talked all about logical fallacies.
And I'm...
Kicking myself for doing it, because everything that he's saying is so like, the false cause arguments he's making is like, Sir, you just told us how successful Coca-Cola is at selling Coca-Cola.
We all know that.
Yeah, and also it would have been a maternity ward you exited, not a pediatric ward, just saying different things.
I mean he wasn't maybe he should maybe should be a little more specific I think that that's maybe what we would like is a little more specificity with this person instead of just again it's like throwing out like well we know that coca-cola is like coca-cola and McDonald's let's that that's a crisis Those are crisis buzzwords that you can throw into any conversation about health.
I know that we have other Maintenance Phase listeners out there, too.
I'm a big fan of Maintenance Phase.
It's tricky because a lot of the medical establishment I'm accepting the wellness industry already as a given, but then also the actual medical establishment, in addition to alternative wellness, is very biased against fat at all in a way that is unhelpful and often eugenical.
It's a eugenics Basis and I can't make that argument here because I'm not the expert and it's but they make that argument very effectively all the time on maintenance phase and it's one of those things that like I I was more surprised than I have been about learning about a lot of stuff in my adult life
Hearing the extent, like, you know, with their coverage, the extent to which all science is still very biased against fact and will cloud their judgment in trying to find actual causes and not just correlation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, and, uh, yeah, I, I, I will say, um, we will learn throughout the course of this interview that Cali means is, uh, is not any better on this score.
Um, yeah.
Also, uh, yeah.
Russell's kids are eating basically poison.
Um, calm down, grandma.
I know the sweets he's talking about and they're literally just hard candy with food colorings in them and some flavorings.
That's it.
That's it.
It's just the blue dummies and whatever else like, yeah, it's in the shape of.
Are they in the UK?
So I know it's already safer.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
It's sugar, it's fucking E numbers in the colourings and it's flavourings, that's it.
I mean, it's not good!
But like, come on!
It shouldn't be a regular feature of your diet, but if your kids went to a fucking funfair, leave them alone, you piece of shit.
That kind of seems like the moderation suggestions that are made by healthcare professionals.
Yeah, exactly.
Jesus Christ.
The whole thing kind of does speak once more to Russell's intensely backseat style of parenting.
Like, oh, they came back from a funfair and they had all these things.
I thought, like, why were you there?
What were you doing?
I mean, I hope he's working, right?
Maybe?
But, like, it's a weekend?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I know.
I thought that.
I thought that.
That's all I want to say.
We can move on.
That's not life's life.
Personally, in my opinion, as a parent, the least interaction he has with children, the better.
So, including his own.
However, Callie Means has some more to say on this subject of children eating, so let's hear it.
The three ingredients to your question, and I think the core issue in the country, is the unholy trinity.
It's added sugar.
In one bottle of Coke, a child is drinking as much sugar as they had in their entire year a hundred years ago.
Sugar in liquid form.
is a weapon of mass destruction to blood sugar levels.
You know, that's a new phenomenon, really, Russell.
Just putting that sugar, it's like an IV, drinking it in liquid form, particularly in fructose, which is a highly weaponized form of sugar, which is in most sodas, right to the bloodstream.
Highly addictive, raises the blood sugar level.
So that's a big issue.
And particularly, you know, with a young cell where I can control it, obviously no sugar.
Seed oils, industrial byproduct created by John D. Rockefeller a hundred years ago.
Top source of American calories, very inflammatory.
They're omega-6 inflammatory fats instead of omega-3 fats, which we used to eat for all of human history, like olive oil and animal-based fats.
Those also make the food relatively addictive.
And then grains, highly processed grains.
You've got to ask why food is able to stay on a shelf for years and years and years.
It's not natural.
The processing is taking the fiber off, which blunts the glucose impact, and that's a lot of nutrition.
So this is frankenfood.
And for good measure, we are sprinkling and adding thousands of neurotoxins into the food in America that are not even legal in other countries.
If you measure the urine of Americans right now, 90% of them will have high degree of glyphosate
in their urine.
If you measure mother's breast milk, they've got glyphosate, which is a pesticide
we're putting on foods in their breast milk.
We have tons of neurotoxins that we're putting on food because we have a completely unregulated market.
When I was young and a conservative and working for these companies,
I used to say, "Well, we don't want the nanny state.
We don't want any regulations on these food companies."
That actually was a perversion of conservative principles.
What's a nanny state and what's a perversion of the free market is that these companies
have got in a completely free reign.
They're self-policing, there's no oversight, and they're literally putting poison in our food.
That is conservative values.
These people aren't dumb.
Uh, they employ thousands and thousands of scientists to make our food addictive and make it cheap.
Oh, okay.
This guy's a lot.
That was a lot!
He just loves, loves to rattle off the bullshit.
So, yeah, you'll get to it.
Go ahead.
Sorry.
Wow.
I also, before I forget, because I didn't write this down anywhere, I do also want to point out that having this conversation around all of this stuff, specifically released in very early January, you know, when everyone's fucking going to the gym and everyone's kind of starting new diets and all of that.
Incredibly intentional placement there, isn't it?
Which, can we appreciate that we did not do New Year's resolution content at the beginning of this episode?
Because they set people up to fail.
Thank you!
Didn't even have to discuss it.
Don't put that kind of pressure on yourself, folks.
You're doing great.
Do your due.
Yeah, you're fine.
And you can do a resolution at any time of the year.
That's one of the great things about them.
Anyway, I will try and be as brief here as I can.
So, first up, the dumb statistic that a child drinking one bottle of Coca-Cola is more sugar than they've had in a year a hundred years ago, right?
I mean, so we're talking 1924, right?
So there are 65 grams of sugar in a 20-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola in the U.S.
According to the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, the average annual consumption of sugar per person that year was around 100 pounds, meaning the average consumption of sugar was around 125 grams per day.
And so that, yeah, it's bullshit.
It's just complete nonsense.
And you would have flagged it the moment you heard it.
You're just like, well, that doesn't count.
Oh, yeah, I did.
I mean, even say, like, asterisk, you're like, sir, lie better.
Say refined sugar.
That's at least, like, some kind of qualifier that can get you, like, you can wig, be better at wiggling.
Say the corn syrup, they wouldn't have fucking had that a hundred years ago.
Would have been a thousand times more, you know?
Yeah, the whole thing, it's just fucking... Speaking of which, high fructose corn syrup agreed that that is a problem to a degree, and the EU have put caps on production of it, which is usually an indicator of something.
We do actually have it in the UK, contrary to popular belief.
We just call it fructose glucose syrup.
But because of the cap in the EU, however, we don't get corn syrup in our sodas over here, because there's just not enough of it to do that.
So we use other sugar.
So in America, at least parts of America, you go for the Mexican Coke because that has real sugar in it and it tastes way, way better.
That's actually like a coveted, like it's an intentional...
Okay.
It's like a treat.
Theoretically, it would be the same over here, I'm assuming.
You get the better stuff.
Yeah, it's better.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Just flavor-wise, is it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
And if you don't try it, you don't know.
And honestly, like it or not, food science is incredible.
Like, modern food science is amazing.
Results notwithstanding, it's incredible.
So like, yeah, it still tastes like Coca-Cola, but... The things that can be done are unbelievable.
Yeah.
A Mexican Coke is a treat because it's got... Willy Wonka up in this shit.
Yeah, it's got real sugar.
That's funny.
Plus, in the UK, we have a sugary drinks tax, which makes the sugar-free options cheaper.
So most of the population doses up on sweeteners like aspartame instead, they say, while drinking a sugar-free soda.
Anyway, when you ask the question, is corn syrup worse than sugar or other syrups, the overwhelming answer is usually, avoid having too much of any of that.
Because it's all the same!
Well, this was it!
So there was a recent study from Ratz et al., funded by Big Honey, concluding that actually honey is no better for you than corn syrup.
Make of that what you will, right?
It's all the same.
It's all fucking...
Well, I think the thing about corn syrup is it's very cheap, so it's easy to add.
Our brains crave it, so we are trained as humans to want it, and then whenever it's in there, we like it.
Oh, we love the sugar.
It's easy yeah it's it's an easy additive so it's more that like there's there's extra sugar hiding where you don't think it is that's the problem not the substance itself it's just a different sugar delivery system and yeah it doesn't taste as good so you want to put more in it like Yeah, I mean... It's a different problem than what they're saying, yeah.
I will say I have had a number of American foods.
I'm aware that your bread is sweet over there, which is weird to me.
I'm not a fan.
Not a fan, personally.
I like neutral bread.
Thank you.
Anyway, yeah, there is a problem there, but it's not specifically down to that.
It's just, yeah, it's such a convenient delivery system, as you say.
Apparently, according to this guy, John D. Rockefeller created seed oils, which is not true.
It's just not true.
I think he's getting confused with Procter & Gamble, possibly, who developed Crisco in 1911 from cotton seed oil, and other oils like vegetable oil and stuff followed as a matter of course over the coming decades.
So maybe he's gotten confused there, but even then... Then why would he say olive oil?
The ancient substance of olive oil.
Like, sir.
No, so he said that John D. Rockefeller created seed oils.
Seed oils.
Right.
Did he say that also?
He said olive oil is what we should be having.
Oh, okay.
All right.
Okay, you know what?
I misfiled that and I apologize.
It's okay.
The Goofy Wellness fake dietary, the new fad of what's bad is including olive oil, not just seed oils.
I'm sorry, my brain went there.
That was also part of the complaint, because I know, I know, I know.
That's a separate issue, I suppose, because that's not what Kelly Means is saying here.
Gotcha.
He's advocating for olive oil and, uh... Okay, my brain filled in that gap, I apologize.
Animal facts.
Um, yeah, so... Animal?
Okay, alright, yep, sure, okay.
Sources of omega-3 fatty acids, basically.
So, according to Chris Kessa, co-director of the California Center for Functional Medicine, the human body works best when its ratio of omega-6 fatty acids and omega-3 fatty acids is balanced.
Quote, seed oils are perhaps the most significant contributor to the imbalanced omega-6 to omega-3 ratio and thus play a significant role in chronic inflammatory diseases.
Unquote.
But the bigger issue I would say there is too much of one and not enough of the other.
Like, sure, people are consuming too much omega-6.
Largely down to these oils.
Fine.
But they are not consuming enough of the omega-3 oils from other sources to counterbalance it.
And if it is a case of balance, then eliminating these omega-6 oils from the diet would be an equal-but-opposite problem, leading to different fucking health issues.
Yeah.
You know, if two... yeah, you would... the seesaw would go too far the other way.
So really, treating vegetable oil as a big boogeyman is dishonest and extremely unhelpful to resolving the issue.
Means labeled it as an additive, as an addictive substance, which is actually just, it's true of any oil when combined with salt or sugar to a degree.
We as a species, any oil with salt and sugar, we fucking, we crave that shit.
We love that shit.
It's one of the many reasons why donuts are just the worst and best thing for us.
Oh, donuts and pizza.
Paul, fuck!
Anyway.
Well.
LIAM Yeah, fuck it, I'm having a pizza.
I couldn't find anything of his Franken-food claim, that food can be fine staying on the shelf for years and years and years because it's processed and has the fiber taken out, which blunts the glucose impact.
It's bullshit, that's why.
Also, What foods are fine on the shelf for years and years and years?
Like, he was talking about processed wheat, and I'm like, well, I can't... Bread certainly does not last years and years and years, certainly not by my estimation.
What fucking wheat products will sit, you know, to me... Is he citing the researcher Woody Harrelson from the research project Zombieland, talking about Twinkies?
Maybe, maybe.
And yeah, I mean, in fairness with Twinkies, I mean, they're basically radioactive.
There is a You know, there is an argument to be made there.
They probably would last for decades.
Oh, because they're full of preservatives.
Yeah.
But, like, I mean, I don't know.
It seems like simple answers.
You would think.
You would think.
But also plastic.
Because everything is wrapped in plastic.
So shit.
The pervasive nature of plastic in our food system is a problem in and of itself.
Like, ALICE Even then, if you look at the use-by date or whatever, like, stuff, even in plastic, stuff will start fucking rotting, y'know?
KATE Oh, yeah!
No, of course!
That was an absurd, like... ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah, no.
KATE That was absurd on its face.
ALICE Years and years and years, like, yeah.
I mean, canned goods?
Specific dried goods, maybe?
But, like, I dunno, man.
Seems like a fucking stretch.
Yeah, that's why it lasts.
I don't know.
Again, he never really cites any specific examples.
Food preservation is so important to our species, so we've worked really hard at learning lots of ways to do it.
That's true.
Yeah, okay, alright, okay.
Let's get to the pesticides.
I feel like I want to agree once.
There's a whole history discussion going there.
And finally, yeah, glyphosate, which Callie Means is saying is illegal in countries outside the US, and well, that just isn't true.
Glyphosate is a herbicide slash weed killer, not a pesticide like he said it was, that is used on crops worldwide.
Obviously, it's higher regulated in some places than others.
We regulate shit like that, pesticides and herbicides and that kind of thing, very highly in the UK.
And studies have shown that, yes, roughly 60 to 80% of the general population in the US had residues of glyphosate in their urine, as well as 44% in the EU, I will add.
And there has been concern over health effects of glyphosate on people's health and so a lot more research is being done at present.
The jury is still pretty much out though.
In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer of the WHO reclassified glyphosate as probably carcinogenic to humans.
But their conclusion has not been confirmed by the European Union assessment, who said, well, no, actually, it's probably not carcinogenic.
Or the recent joint assessment by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, which came to the same conclusion.
Studies in the US and the EU found no traces of glyphosate in the breast milk of lactating mothers.
So he's wrong on that fucking score.
However, there was one study done in Brazil in the area with the highest concentration of glyphosate in the country, which found that there was glyphosate present in the breast milk of lactating mothers from that area, which tells me extreme doses of the stuff in a less regulated environment can cause it to happen if left unchecked, but it's not an issue in the US or the EU at present.
Well, okay.
So there are class action lawsuits flying around over Roundup and have been for a long time.
Roundup being the Monsanto weed killer.
It's terrible.
And so I think we should be more strict with all of those things, generally.
Yeah, I don't disagree.
I don't disagree. Well, but I'm saying like, specifically about the class action lawsuits,
about trying to parse through the medical effects of Roundup and the health effects of Roundup.
There are specific cancers that they can include in these lawsuits. There is no earthly fucking
way. And that's just for people who can, like, think about the impetus, like what lawyers have
to prove the connection that these cancers happen because someone was exposed to Roundup when this
Roundup is so ubiquitous.
It's fucking every, it was everywhere.
My dad worked for Monsanto when, variately, and was horrified and left in like the 80s, late 70s?
I don't remember.
We've known about this for a long time, and I've specifically heard about it quite a bit when I was young.
Same dad that was having me read the back of a shampoo bottle at Walmart when I was eight.
Thanks, Dennis.
Doing me solid.
To a degree, I'm also terrified.
A roundup.
There are certain cancers certain diseases that they will accept as a claimant
in the in these lawsuits.
There has to be larger ramifications.
And anybody that is familiar with these massive corporate lawsuits and this gigantic amount of harm, the mitigation and the accountability is going to be a fraction of a fraction of what should be imposed on these corporations that are poisoning us.
It's not.
Yeah, absolutely.
And all of that, we need regulation.
We're living- We need regulation, we need more fucking information, we need more studies that aren't hampered by big fucking money interests coming into play.
Yeah, funded by biased actors.
And all of that is regulation and efficient government.
And all, like, oh boy.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So shitty.
So fucking shitty.
Yeah, there's a lot there.
There's a lot there that is actually horrifying, but that's not what Callie means is getting to with any of it, which is very frustrating.
Oh yeah.
It's very fucking frustrating indeed, and glyphosates do come up a little bit later as well, but We'll get to that when we get to it, but first we have Russell who tells us the depth of his research on these subjects in the next clip.
Last time we spoke about Ozempic, a purported weight loss drug, and how popular it was going to be, and that it was an unprecedented medicine, and there's great marketing behind it, and incredible projections behind it.
Now, I believe, based on what I've learned from you, that it's being marketed at six-year-old children.
So it seems like the partner to these devastating... It's a diabetes drug!
...is a pharmaceutical solution that may yet even inflame the situation further.
Let's go to that playground I talked about with my two-year-old son, right?
Every kid in that playground, you go to any area where there's a bunch of kids, they are being poisoned.
Okay.
Are you scared?
You should be scared.
Your children are being poisoned by my book.
Anyway, what I loved there was Russell's, I believe this thing is happening because, well, you've told me it is.
Didn't look at it any further.
Didn't do my own research.
You said it?
Well, then it must be true.
Well done, Russell.
Congratulations.
So he's asserted that what he's learned from Kelly Means is that a Zempik is being marketed at six-year-olds.
Making it sound like it's an ad shown on Saturday morning between cartoons, you know?
A Zempig for kids, now in sparkling pink, and military blue!
He's couching it as like a weight loss drug for children.
Well.
Is that not part of the conversation?
Do they at least talk about the fact that it's a diabetes drug in the conversation?
Because I didn't watch the whole thing you did.
Not really.
Not really.
That doesn't particularly come up because it is a diabetes drug, but it is also incredibly effective for weight loss.
And that is the thing.
Under very specific circumstances and pretenses and it is a side effect.
Yeah, that wasn't the intent, but that seems to be the direction that it's going in.
Six would be the earliest age that it would be safe for the child to take the drug, right?
That's the reality of that situation.
And I actually have a helpful sheet from the NHS here, specifically Southampton Children's Hospital.
It's information for children, families and carers who might have been given semaglutide, also known as Azempic and Wegovy, to help manage the child's weight.
It doesn't make it entirely clear upon, you know, in which circumstances it would be prescribed.
I don't know whether it's the more extreme situations in this country or what.
I don't know.
So it's a medication that is used for weight management in children and adults.
It is also used for management of type 2 diabetes in adults.
How does it work?
Well, after eating, your child's body produces a hormone called glucagon-like peptide 1, GLP-1.
This hormone sends signals to their brain and stomach to make them feel full.
Semaglutide is a protein that mimics the action of the hormone GLP-1, but to a stronger degree.
It works slowly around the day to make your child feel less hungry.
If taken over a longer period of time, semaglutide will alter your child's appetite and they will feel full more quickly after having a meal or a snack, which will result in weight loss.
Semaglutide will also cause your children's body to produce extra amounts of insulin during mealtimes, which will reduce the high blood sugar levels that can happen after a meal, which will then lower your child's risk of developing diabetes in the future.
It's given in a pre-filled injection pen to be administered once a week, right?
Your child will need to take semaglutide until they reach their target weight.
This will be agreed with their doctor.
How long this takes will be different for each child.
Some children who manage to lose a significant amount of weight are able to stop taking semaglutide without gaining weight back as their metabolism has permanently changed.
However, other children who stop taking semaglutide after losing weight may then gain some of this weight back.
Your child's doctor will discuss an individual plan for your child with you.
Yeah, there's a bunch more information on there, but that's the CliffsNotes.
I've got more, but you sound unhappy.
So, again, I don't know about, first of all, what is frustrating about that particular, like the wording of that, like I'm seeing it in my mind, the NHS kind of like handout thing.
Yeah.
Prescribing it for weight could mean and conflate diabetes and weight, which are two different things.
Very often correlated, but they don't actually know nearly as much as they claim to know.
This is exactly what I was saying.
The healthcare industry will blame a lot of problems on weight.
Kind of because they can and because it's a very often corollary but not necessarily connected.
So I don't, like, it's a chicken and egg.
Everything I know and have heard about Ozempic since it has kind of come onto the scene is that as soon as you stop taking it, you gain all that weight back.
And what people, especially doctors, fucking don't address and do not talk about when they should Is that every time you lose weight and gain it back, it's harder to do that cycle again.
And it's harder to keep it off, not reprogramming your metabolism.
That's just not like, uh, if listen, if that's the case, that is insane sounding because of what my lay person ears have heard thus far.
And it doesn't, it doesn't add up for me.
I could be wrong, but... Based on what I could find, it sounds like a fucking wonder drug.
Let's think about how that's gone in the past!
Yeah, this is the thing.
about how that's gone in the past. Yeah, this is the thing.
I think a degree of skepticism and concern is healthy around this.
Yeah, according to Bloomberg, pediatric obesity experts say that the availability of safe, effective medications is a game-changer, particularly as US childhood obesity rates have tripled in the last decade.
Around 20% of kids 6 and up have obesity, according to the CDC.
Which is one of the highest rates in the world.
In that demographic, obesity is defined as having a body mass index that is in the 95th percentile or greater for their age.
So I mean, 95th percentile, but also, yeah, done by BMI.
Yeah, which is already a flawed system.
That's a separate fucking issue.
The thing is, Osepic is an amazing drug for people with diabetes.
It's legitimately revolutionary.
Here's the problem, and I don't know if this is still the issue supply-wise in America, but I know that It is expensive and it's harder to get and because people are taking it as a weight loss drug, diabetics can't get it or it's too expensive and they can't get it.
So the popularity and marketing and like, you know, fads.
I don't think are considered enough when we're talking about these health concerns, and I think that health authorities are just as susceptible as the rest of us, and I think if you acknowledge that, that's the most responsible way to communicate.
I don't know.
I've heard a bunch of horror stories because of the content that I try to keep myself informed with.
A ton of horror stories about being on Ozempic.
It sounds awful.
I'm also just sad and worried about a kid being on it for weight loss.
If it's for diabetes, then it's great.
But if it's just to make the kid lose weight and start the yo-yo diet that they're going to have to deal with for the rest of their lives, it sounds terrifying.
That's the question and that's the problem.
So there's more here.
There's been slow acceptance among doctors, which is typical for any new medication, especially in kids, says Michelle Katzow, a pediatric obesity doctor at Northwell Health in New York.
General pediatricians don't want to take this on because there's still a lot of unknowns.
Yeah!
Yeah, fair.
Conversely, Kaylee Wood wishes weight loss medications were available to her daughter Natalie sooner, she said.
Wood and her husband have taken Natalie to doctor after doctor who have mostly recommended putting Natalie on diets.
Nothing worked until Wegovy.
Natalie has been on Novo's drugs since she turned 12 in May.
She's lost 17 pounds so far and her mom says she hasn't had any side effects.
It was worth driving an hour a day to find the medication when it was in short supply, Kaylee said.
Natalie has less anxiety about changing in the locker room for gym class, and the heavy periods caused by her polycystic ovary syndrome have started to normalize.
Yeah, so like, it's, for me, it's a very sticky fucking wicket, because like, I'm not a doctor, but I am a fat person from a fat family, and the struggle is real, particularly for kids and teenagers.
Like, around that age, it's just a fucking horror show of insecurities.
Absolutely.
So like, it's, you know, if something is both safe and effective, and it's not having to be taken in perpetuity, So big fucking asterisk there, then sure, great, why not?
Wanda drug it up, go for it.
The guidance on it does seem to generally advise lifestyle changes in terms of diet and exercise around taking the medication, which would help, if done.
And you know, exercise is easier when you have less fat, that is definitely true.
But yeah, yes.
And.
However, what I have heard, and I mean like, the claims are being made about Ozempic, it just does, it seems like what people's experience has been is the second that you stop taking it, it's like, you get like a, Like, snow coming off of your roof, just get all the weight tumped back on your body, and worse.
Yeah, yeah.
I think ultimately, just, we need to know more.
We need to know a lot more than we currently do, and we need to know fucking long-term effects.
There's no long-term effects, which we can't know yet, obviously, because it's a new thing.
And yeah, there's a lot more that needs to be done before I will personally be jumping on the Ozempic wonder drug bandwagon.
But yeah, it's... I'm just also, like, mom's saying, take your fun, fun.
No, no, no.
We've gone through this a couple of times before.
I'm very... And also, like, listen, I...
My mother and doctors had a bunch of conversations about me when I was a kid, too.
There's many things that I got saved from because we were too poor.
Yeah, that's fair.
I can't imagine being in this mom's position because suddenly your kid is happier and they're all just...
And if it's a cost-benefit, cool.
Because that's an analysis especially that doctors and healthcare professionals have to make.
It happens all the time.
But if we're not fully informed of the cost, How can we make an accurate cost-benefit?
Because especially like, you know, the gal that hosts Maintenance Phase, she's been on yo-yo diets her entire life, especially when she was a kid.
It's very fraught.
And the way that she talks about it is, I think, way more common than people even understand.
I didn't realize that the yo-yo diets, I fucking did the same thing whenever I was a kid.
And when you're growing is so, we're not even acknowledging how damaging, we as a society are not reckoning with how damaging this kind of biggest loser mentality is.
Because also if you read the accounts from people that were on that show, it is harrowing.
Yeah.
And we're not talking about that even in a health context.
It's just thin is healthy, fat is unhealthy, and that's just not, it's not that simple.
No, there's just not enough research into any of this.
That's the real fuckin' problem.
We need more information.
There's more of it being done, but nowhere near enough!
It's a whole fuckin' thing, and I dunno.
Wouldn't I be thrilled if these people were having an honest, like, good-faith conversation about the dangers posed to, you know, like, if they were, again, right, I said it, if they're having a good-faith conversation, and they're concerned, but they're not, they're using, right, like, they're, they're, they're fear-mongering, so this is just gonna make a bad problem worse.
It's, Yeah, so the reason I've got into this now is that I wanted to front-load this conversation before Callie Means goes on a little tirade about a Zempik, so here we go!
They're eating ultra-processed food, they're drinking liquid sugar, they're eating food covered in neurotoxins like glyphosate and colorings.
Like, we've allowed Our system to just lose its way and completely have, you know, moral blindness about what we're feeding kids.
The reason for that is because the food system has interest in making food addictive and cheaper, but the medical system, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Diabetes Association, they haven't said anything as we've seen obesity and all chronic diseases skyrocket among kids.
But right now, those organizations, those medical organizations, Which are almost fully funded by pharma.
They're being very loud and they are saying in unison that Ozempic, a weekly shot that is required to take for life, that that drug should be the standard of care for Obesity starting at six.
They are pushing and doing research and actually pushing this as the immediate intervention for an overweight six-year-old.
Now, about 30, roughly 30 percent of six-year-olds are overweight or obese.
50 percent of teens are overweight or obese.
And 80% of American adults are overweight or obese.
So the second this is approved and the second they're able to substantiate obesity as not something that's controlled by food or lifestyle, but something that's genetic, and let's be very clear, that is what doctors at Harvard are saying.
They are arguing aggressively that this is literally not tied to food, that obesity is genetic, not under control.
The second they're able to establish that, doctors will be able to prescribe this drug for life Again, to 30% of six year olds to 50% teens and 80% of American adults.
Fuck me.
This guy.
So to start, don't think I missed him calling glyphosate a neurotoxin.
I mean, technically correct, but only if you get a bottle of it and drink it.
Being sprayed as a herbicide is a different situation.
Farmers need to be fucking vigilant and people working with it, but consumers much less so.
Regardless, wash your veggies, everyone.
Store-bought or not, wash them.
It's just good food hygiene.
Now back to Ozempic.
So according to the CDC, for children and adolescents aged 2 to 19 years in 2017 to 2020, the prevalence of obesity was 19.7% overall and affected about 14.7 million children and adolescents.
obesity was 19.7% overall and affected about 14.7 million children and adolescents.
Obesity prevalence was 12.7% among 2 to 5 year olds, 20.7% among 6 to 11 year olds, and 22.2%
among 12 to 19 year olds. Again, high numbers, but nowhere close to the ones that he's citing at all.
I As for adults, nationally 41.9% of adults in the U.S.
have obesity.
As for being overweight, 34.1% of men are overweight, while 27.5% of women are overweight in the US.
Also, this is using...
Present!
Yeah, right. This is using BMI as its metric, which has its own fucking problems.
But maybe that's a topic that we need to get into for an off-brand at some point.
Oh no, it's just a dude measured Scottish sailors in the 1820s, and that's the standard that we've been using for Like, it was this tiny little weird section.
I'm only going off of memory completely, but yeah, it's just not... Yeah, there are a legion of fucking issues with it.
It's the same as the fucking puberty thing, you know, being based off of these fucking 700 children in an orphanage!
An orphanage!
Oh my god, in the 1950s, you know, what are you doing, people?
People just... Jesus Christ.
People don't understand that up until very recently have we had reliable access to food.
And of course, food insecurity is still a massive issue in America and a lot of places all over the world.
But generally speaking, around the 1960s-ish, there was a revolution in the ability for people to be fed in a way that isn't necessarily a problem.
It's just more reliable.
Historically, people fucking starved to death all the time for lots of reasons.
Too much rain?
Starvation.
Not enough- like, famine happened and it wasn't capitalistically manufactured, it was- I mean, the potato famine in Ireland was not that long ago.
That was not long ago whatsoever.
And that was conditions, that wasn't because- yeah.
Yeah, very fucking recent.
Yeah, we can't... To use early Victorian body size and shape to especially... I mean, for a start, we're so much taller.
It's insane!
Yeah, because we get to eat, and it's not a question... People do not understand how little nutrition The human beings we're getting a hundred years ago, it's insane!
My eldest brother, Ben, was a reserve firefighter for a bit.
And when he was kind of, I would probably say a peak fitness, that kind of thing.
I remember he was technically obese by BMI standards.
Because he's fucking six foot seven or whatever, but he's also incredibly lean, and you're obese, technically.
Okay, this seems like a system that works.
Anyway, all of those statistics that I just read off, none of it was anywhere close to the 80% that Cali means just tossed off.
Those were a lie.
Right.
As for obesity being genetic, which according to Kali, can't possibly be the case.
It has to be the food.
I'm going to read to you once more from the CDC.
In recent decades, obesity has reached epidemic proportions in populations whose environments promote physical inactivity and increased consumption of high calorie foods.
However, not all people living in such environments will become obese.
Nor will all obese people have the same body fat distribution or suffer the same health problems.
These differences can be seen in groups of people with the same racial or ethnic background and even within the same families.
Genetic changes in human populations occur too slowly to be responsible for the obesity epidemic.
Nevertheless, the variation in how people respond to the same environment suggests that genes do play a role in the development of obesity.
So, how could that happen?
Well, genes give the body instructions for responding to changes in its environment.
So, studies of resemblances and differences among family members, twins, and adoptees offer indirect scientific evidence that a sizable portion of the variation in weight among adults is due to genetic factors.
Other studies have compared obese and non-obese people for variation in genes that could influence behaviors such as a drive to overeat or a tendency to be sedentary.
Or metabolism, such as diminished capacity to use dietary fats as fuel or an increased tendency to store body fat.
These studies have identified variants in several genes that may contribute to obesity by increasing hunger and food intake.
Rarely, a clear pattern of inherited obesity within a family is caused by a specific variant of a single gene.
Monogenic obesity, that's called.
Most obesity, however, probably results from complex interactions among multiple genes and environmental factors that remain poorly understood.
Any explanation of the obesity epidemic has to consider both genetics and the environment.
One explanation that is often cited is the mismatch between today's environment and energy-thrifty genes that multiplied in the distant past when food sources were unpredictable.
In other words, according to the thrifty genotype hypothesis, the same genes that helped our ancestors survive occasional famines are now being challenged by environments in which food is plentiful year-round.
Other hypotheses have been proposed, including a role for the gut microbiome as well as early life exposures associated with epigenetic changes.
So, the argument that Callie Means is making is, oh, they're researching this to try to establish that it's genetics, and then as soon as they can nail that down and establish that, then it'll be ozempic for everyone!
And to me, if they actually manage to establish that with peer-reviewed evidence, that it actually is genetic factors, then Fuck it, sure, yeah, why not?
Ozempic for everyone.
Because if it's proven that you're gonna get fucking obese regardless what you eat, then yeah, probably medical intervention is the only answer.
Like, what else are you supposed to do?
Well, I mean, yeah.
I mean, but also understanding the ramifications of long-term use of Ozempic, which we absolutely do not know.
And then it's a cost-benefit.
Heavy asterisk still there.
But yeah, medical intervention of some description.
Yeah, and I think that this speaks to what I have a serious problem and constantly have to deal with in my own life as a sick person is that the issue that I absolutely have, I don't think that, I don't think any doctor wants anyone to be sick.
I don't think that they like it for a second.
And what the issue is, What capitalism has trained us to do and to expect as a solution is there is a quick fix and an instant solution you can buy.
And a medicine is a thing that you can buy and then it fixes a problem.
We are not...
You know, we are not drains to be snaked.
We are complex human beings living in a complex society, and when a society for a long period of time refuses to address all of these systemic problems and instead can slap a band-aid on it, they want to because it's just simpler.
It's what Congress and governmental bodies want to do.
Now, we're in a place where I've had this experience fucking till I'm blue in the face on an individual level thinking that you can buy one thing to fix a problem and that just isn't how it works.
And if they can't buy a solution, there's certainly health problems where I purchase a solution and I take it every day and that helps.
Yeah, yeah.
But there's other problems that are definitely genetic that doctors are like, they used to just say, well, you're lying.
And 25 years later, in this modern utopia of capitalism at 11, they're no longer like, you're lying.
They're like, well, we know that you feel fucked up, and we don't know what to do.
Yeah, we don't know why.
Suck to suck!
Good luck.
That's the leaps in technology that I've lived through.
That, to me, is the crux of the complaint, is you can't just buy a fucking fix for it.
Yeah, I think so.
And I think a huge deal of extensive research needs to be done into the subject of genetic obesity, because clearly it's very fucking complicated.
And guess how it's not biased, is if it's publicly funded and it's public research, not fucking Would be nice.
Right.
Would be nice.
Yeah.
Anyway, Lauren, how do you feel about fish tanks?
Great.
Love it.
Great.
Love it.
Vibes.
Beautiful.
Okay, well, I've got some bad news, because apparently ours is dirty.
This is why Russell Novo Nordics just passed LVMH, Louis Vuitton, as the most valuable company in Europe.
But what's interesting is that Ozempic is not... My message is very simple.
When are we going to realize that if you have a dirty fish tank, you've got to clean the tank.
You don't drug the fish.
We are drugging the fish in America.
We are giving people statins.
We're giving them metformin.
We're giving them blood pressure medication.
We're giving them SSRIs.
25% of women in the United States are taking one.
We're giving them Ozempic now.
That's the average American patient.
And as we do this, our costs are going up and our sicknesses are going up and our life expectancy is going down.
We've got these industrial complexes.
That's all true.
I will say the health industry has done a lot of good things in the past hundred years, but it's been co-opted.
We lost our way just like the education industrial complex and the military industrial complex.
These industries that have done a lot of good are completely losing their way.
And I think Russell, when you talk about optimistic or not, I'm optimistic that people are waking up listening to you and others, but these are existential threats.
If we let ourselves continue to get sicker, more depressed, more infertile, fatter, While bankrupt in the country, that is the top threat to America.
There it is!
Fat people are the top threat to America.
You heard it on Stay Free first, folks!
Now, I said- basically, I feel like I said the more rational version of, like...
Of what he's implying.
Because yeah, you can't just slap a bandaid on this, like, broken system.
Right?
I feel like you might be doing some filling in of the gaps for this game.
Of course!
But also, cleaning a fish tank, great idea, but there is specifically an additive that you can put in your fish tank to clear out the water.
You don't drug the fish, everybody!
Yeah you do.
Yeah you do!
And they're happier.
It's called ick!
Yeah, that's part of fish care.
And so like, yeah, I do think the fish tank is dirty.
Specifically, his little analogy, you can add chemicals that are fine to the fish tank!
He's terrible with metaphors, this guy.
Just do!
But you gotta do all of it!
He's got a few.
Cleaning it, but also...
Yeah.
Come on!
So anyway, fat people and SSRIs are the problem.
Blood pressure medication is the problem, and it's all making us sicker.
Yeah, fuck off.
It's stupid, it's dishonest, and it's very fucking obvious.
SSRIs save lives.
Like, I was put on one immediately post-suicide attempt, and I can say with absolute certainty that it helped my ass get back to something resembling normal thinking patterns.
Yeah.
Because it fucking did.
It was medically necessary.
It saves lives every day.
Blood pressure medication saves lives because of course it fucking does!
Yeah.
Like, this man is absurd.
He's completely absurd.
But no, let's just stop taking all medications and eat some fucking organic corn or take a supplement or buy a shitty book from a bullshit artist and his sister.
Oh my god.
Just rage.
Rage.
Rage at this man.
I'm on blood pressure medication.
Right. Does everybody think that I'm a person that's of the age and weight that like, is this
what you picture in your mind? I bet he doesn't. It's a thing. I don't eat meat. And like, my
doctor's like, that's fucking crazy. Why is this a problem?
And like, hey, have you been watching this for a long time?
And I'm like, yeah, it's always the same. It's like that's weird. Well, you're getting older
we're gonna put you on medication and bring this number down because
It doesn't like it could be an issue. Yeah, we want to make sure you stay alive
Like Yeah, of course
Oh my god.
I would love to have the thing is, is like, man, my entire fucking life, I've been surrounded by all these like, individual, like, blamey, it's your problem.
You are the only one who has a solution.
And everybody else is in the same fucking boat.
Like, man, I'm doing everything I fucking can.
And shit just ain't changing.
Like, Health is so complex.
The thing is, if we're looking at everything at an individual level, it does not make sense.
It just doesn't make sense.
We have to look at the systemic conditions that have gotten us here and stop trying to slap Band-Aids on it.
That's what I'm saying, and I'm saying we need regulation and we need to fund research that is not biased and isn't corporatized.
They're coming somewhere else.
It's just... ugh.
Come on.
Well, this is... just buy my book.
They're poisoning you, buy my book.
Fucking guy.
Next up, Russell does a little bit of projecting.
Yeah, you coined, or at least you used the phrase, 'chronic disease industrial complex'.
And I suppose what was indicated in your last answer is we have a kind of broken psychopathic
metric by which we measure our country's success, as much as you might describe and outline
the terrifying statistics, the diabetes, the infertility, even the more diffuse and difficult
to measure sorrow and despair that I sense is increasing across the world.
Those are the harder things, I guess, to get accurate metrics on, referring as they do
to people's subjective inner experience.
It seems that if that cannot be opposed...
We're in serious trouble and you know using the phrase industrial complex seems right because you know we've brought into play already the idea that it's beneficial of course for the food industry because whilst it might be creating decline it's also generating profit and addiction and an addict is a customer for life.
The pharmaceutical industry is benefiting from it.
One sense is that they're Legacy media are tied into these systems financially and ideologically in some way.
The state benefits from passive and consuming citizens.
It's a very difficult thing to imagine breaking down, isn't it, Callie?
And it requires probably, in essence, firstly, the recognition of the sanctity of the individual, the duty of the individual to awaken, and then some kind of organisation.
It is the duty of the individual to awaken, and then some kind of organization.
Subscribe to my locals channel.
Anyway, the world seems to be more full of sorrow and despair.
Is it the world, Russell?
Or is it you?
Just a thought.
Yeah, wow.
Russell's hopped on board.
He's just all fucking in.
He's like, yeah, all of what you've said.
I mean, these guys seem birds of a feather.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Again, I think this is the third appearance of this guy on the show, I think.
I think he first went on way back when, before Russell went on Rogan, back in March 2023.
Callie Means was on before that.
Can we buy Occam's Razors in bulk and just send one to each one of these guys?
The problems are so obvious, and they're making these obfuscating conspiracy theories, and it's just such a fucking waste.
Yeah, it's a waste of a lot of things.
Time and money to a lot of people, but they make a lot of money.
These two people make a lot of money from doing it, so it's very difficult to disincentivize them.
Genuinely, people, I mean, whether we like it or not, people are going to do whatever they're going to do with their money and their time.
But what the issue is, at the end of the day, is that they are distracting from any effort to come together and actually fix these problems.
That's my beef!
Yeah.
Genuinely.
That's why I show up here.
They are actively making these things worse by distracting from the actual cause of the issue.
And the potential remedies.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah, 100%.
But no, Russell doesn't give a fuck.
It's like, yeah, God, you're right, aren't you?
You're so great.
Callie Means explains a little bit next up about how he became such a radicalized shithead, and there's one big name with a big show specifically at fault.
Do you have any guesses who that might be?
You know what?
Let's roll the dice.
Let's see.
Roll that beautiful bit of footage.
I'm not even guessing.
Okay, okay.
I think you would have got it, but let's find out.
Yeah, I had two moments in the past couple years that were Powerful for me.
One was early on during COVID when I hadn't really heard of Joe Rogan and there's just absolute vilification of the guy.
You already said it.
I wasn't going to guess it.
That threw me off.
And it's just time after time, he's talking about exercising.
He's talking about being a good person.
He's talking about eating good food.
He's talking about looking at the sun.
He's saying this is the basis of health.
And it dawned on me.
It's like literally there's leaked emails from Dr. Fauci saying he's the number one threat in America.
This guy.
Who's on the podcast saying, basically, you know, it's not necessarily all health is a pharmaceutical issue.
It's almost a spiritual crisis we have where we need to take matters into our own hands.
And then, Russell, quite frankly, at the Community Festival with you, I have never been surrounded by more positivity.
By many speakers talking, you know, not in a mean way, but just in an empowering way, how to break free of a lot of the institutions that are profiting from us.
We had a direct line to every editor in the country, and we paid their bills.
What you heard at the end there was not an edit from me.
That's Russell's incredible team just shoving in an entirely different part of the interview.
Just jamming it in there, despite it being obvious and incoherent.
Still no credits at the end of the show, by the way.
But yeah, active listeners might have picked up on a little edit point earlier in a different clip as well.
There was another little cut there.
But yeah, I think there were some technical issues with this interview that they did.
But either way, it's just fucking absurd the way they've edited this together.
I mean, you can fix these things in post.
It's the point.
Anyway, let's all go outside and look at the sun, everybody.
Let's all go and slowly blind ourselves.
Joe Rogan as a picture of health?
It's the basis of health.
Excuse me?
The picture of health is an incredibly pink, vascular pink thumb.
Like six elk in his freezer.
And again, I know that that's what he looks like and I shouldn't judge based on what he looks like, but I just don't think that that, like, I hate to be hypocritical in this exact same episode, but what I'm saying is I don't think that, I think that health looks a lot different for a lot of people.
I don't think you should be that pink.
I don't think that's a healthy way to do it.
No, I think that man is stuffed to the gills with supplements and steroids.
That's what I think Joe Rogan is, but there we go.
It's a blood allocation situation, you know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah.
Fuck me.
So yeah, Fauci never said that Rogan was the number one threat to America in public or in any leaked emails, but had he said it, I'm not entirely fucking sure I'd disagree.
And Callie Means here is a good example as to why Rogan is such a dangerous idiot.
Yeah.
Because he inspires people like this.
Yeah, and legitimizes them and mainstreams them.
Like, if we're considering, like, you can't...
If we're going to acknowledge that a lot of people listen to Joe Rogan, and he's a new Johnny Carson, I'm not talking about the quality of the entertainment or anything at all.
It's just the people that are watching him for entertainment.
It is an entertaining person for a large chunk of people.
Yeah, he's fucking monolithic.
So then he's also, right, so then also to act like he's this health guru, it's just, we need to address things for what they are as an entertaining person with a talk show, and not like also a health and spiritual guru person, like we just need to be a little more fucking realistic, and we're not!
And this is exactly what happens.
This is the result.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
It's completely nuts.
And Rogan is a fucking moron as well.
I don't know if you heard, there was a recent episode of Cognitive Dissonance that I was listening to.
Where they covered a little clip of Rogan on his show attributing kind of a moment of senility to Joe Biden, but of course, and it actually turned out like he was fact-checked by Jamie in that moment of like, oh no, it was actually Trump that said this.
Ah, shit.
It was the whole thing of the Civil War airports situation.
It was that whole thing.
It was like, ah, Biden said this thing.
Shut up, you catastrophic idiot.
At least they got it, jeez!
At least Jamie caught it in the moment, that's an improvement!
That's an improvement from where it was, that's for sure.
Not a great sign.
No, and you look at his guest list, and I'm like, oh, this is 80% shitheads, and then a few famous people, what are you doing?
What are you doing?
Yeah, sorry to any- He's doing a talk show and making a lot of money is what he's doing, and that's it!
A hundred million dollars.
To treat it as anything more than that is wrong.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, yeah.
Fucking, fucking guy.
Um, anyway, there's, uh, there's a little more from Kali Means here where we learn, uh, that in fact, what he's doing is, is dangerous.
It's, it's risky.
It's.
The pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare industry at large spends five times more on political donations and lobbying than the oil industry.
Right?
They are the people that pay the politicians' paychecks.
Frankly, the RNC and the DNC's paychecks.
Ban lobbying.
And then tech companies, and then not even talking about research.
Obviously, it's the biggest funders of universities and academic research, more than 50% of the funding for Stanford Medical School and Harvard Medical School, such pharma.
So they control these organizations.
And I can tell you, this idea of patient empowerment, this idea of people asking the wrong questions.
It's very disruptive.
A kid that learns metabolically healthy habits and isn't on the bandwagon starting in high school
when they're on SSRIs, which are being prescribed widely to high schoolers,
on Adderall, which are 20% of high school seniors now, on statins, which are blowing up among high schoolers
'cause of the cholesterol issues, on an Ozympic now, if a kid isn't on that bandwagon,
they're losing out on millions of dollars for the pharmaceutical industries.
So this is serious business.
And I saw it.
These companies know how to attack and how to attack dirty.
Really, you saw it, did you?
Please, provide us with some evidence.
Some whistle that you could, for instance, blow, and provide us with just anything.
Anything to back up what you're saying.
It'd be lovely.
It sounds like he's blowing a whistle on healthcare marketing being bad.
Yeah.
We know.
Yeah, no fucking shit.
And what?
And what do you plan to do about it, sir?
It's serious business giving people metabolically healthy habits as he puts it which will be a blow to the pharma companies because they'll lose money and they attack and they attack dirty.
What we're of course supposed to infer here is that Cali means is just so brave to say the things he says and wow he could All of it.
taken down at any minute.
Sure thing.
I actually play this clip mostly just to examine Russell's response to it up next, but as it
was brought up, yeah, you're fucking right.
End lobbying.
End lobbying.
Absa-fucking-lutely.
Ban that.
All of it.
Tomorrow.
Again.
Let's do that.
Very good luck.
Very good luck trying to convince your right wing base that that's a good idea, but meh, meh, meh.
I do want to say a thing about stat institute because it's one of those things that like, it's another kind of hot button and I already put it out there.
Man, diet, exercise, all that stuff.
Obviously, I'm getting older.
I'm not in as great a shape as I used to be, but I used to fucking play competitive contact sport.
I was on a travel team.
It was hard.
I did a lot.
I do a lot of the stuff.
I don't do the wooey stuff, but I work really hard to try and do all The moderation and the reasonable eating and I don't eat animal mostly like I don't you know like there's all these things that like I have made changes and my blood test came back the same no matter what so something's going on and you know what I don't know what's going on it's a little crazy little weird.
And I'm not particularly confident about the amount of Superfund sites that were around my home, several named after the streets that my bus would take to school.
Mike has three times as many!
You know, that's what I'm concerned about, and we aren't talking about that!
ALICE Almost like that whole discussion about environment having an effect on genetics might have something to do with it!
JADE Might have a lot to do with that!
ALICE Yeah, maybe!
Maybe!
Yeah, maybe that's what we should be talking about.
Maybe we should talk about environmental regulations.
Hmm.
Maybe.
Doesn't come up in this interview, curiously.
Okay.
That's crazy.
That's fucking nuts.
Nah, just not mentioned whatsoever.
No, no.
Anyway.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah.
You've every right to be completely flabbergasted by that, but yeah, it just doesn't come up.
The environment in general doesn't...
It comes up tangentially in a minute, but for the most part, no, not really.
Anyway, being attacked by pharma companies, that's subject, right?
This is, well, I wonder where Russell's gonna go with it.
Yeah, you're describing an extraordinary amount of power.
Thank you for your kind comments about community.
I felt the same way, and obviously the recent attacks on me have been at points overwhelming and terrifying, and there are ways in which I've made myself vulnerable because of, as I've described, the promiscuity in my past.
But when I recently discovered that...
Moderna in particular were spying on me and hiring FBI agents.
It's difficult to see some kind of connection between the type of power that you've described and attempts to just remove voices that are anti-establishment by whatever means are available.
It seems like that to me.
Do you know much about Moderna's projects that seem to Beyond the remit.
This is just a company that's meant to be making medicine.
How do you go from making medicine to employing former FBI operatives, to spying on people, to even having an agenda of that nature?
When did it become so weaponized?
Is Moderna tapping your phone, Russell?
Is Moderna in the room with us right now?
So, I mean, good lord, if anyone ever got high on his own supply, this is it right here, right?
ALICE As we've mentioned previously, Russell definitely read that Lee Fang piece that we covered, because, well, his name was in it.
The Lee Fang piece, which was just made up bullshit.
We covered it.
Dismantled it, complete horse shit.
But, no, not according to Russell.
No, no, no.
He's taken it that Moderna are specifically hiring FBI agents to spy on him, and that somehow partly caused the very credible sexual assault allegations against him.
When I talk about people living in two different realities, it doesn't get much bigger than this, because holy fucking shit, Yeah, sounds fucking paranoid.
Okay, and another thing that we covered in our little logical fallacies discussion, and I think is very appropriate to bring up right now, is Darvo and how we combat Darvo in the conversation that we had but basically it's the what is it deny attack reverse victim offender that a narcissist is putting themselves in the position of a victim.
When they are the ones victimizing and he's doing it again well.
Told ya!
Told ya, guys!
Here it is!
Bingo!
I knew I wouldn't have to wait another episode.
I knew it'd come up.
I'm sad.
It's crazy.
Didn't take long!
Did not take long.
I also feel like I'm laughing a lot today, and I feel like I've gone over some precipice.
I haven't reached for the hammer, I'm just, I'm having a day.
Laughter is an entirely appropriate reaction to something so absurd.
Yeah, that's true.
Most of the things they're talking about is completely fucking absurd.
It's nuts.
It's complete batshit horse shittery.
It's just not, again, based in reality.
And yeah, you can either laugh or you can cry.
I tend to choose to laugh in most instances, unless this guy makes me angry again.
Yeah, laugh or hammer!
Yeah, pretty much!
Laugh or hammer, that should be the fucking motto of this podcast.
Callie Means has an explanation as to when this all became weaponized, and, well, he's got a banger of a source for us.
Well, it started becoming weaponized when this became the largest industry in the country.
Again, going back to talking to a Harvard obesity doctor off the record, she said she does feel uncomfortable with the wide prescription of Ozempic, but if they stop having obese people and more people don't get sick and more people don't get in their clinics as lifetime patients, she'll lose her job and drop the layoff of a bunch of people in the clinic they just built.
This is the incentive and it's an invisible hand that leads some bad people, but a lot of good people, to do things that are... I'm gonna stop that and rewind that.
We just missed that little shot.
This is the incentive and it's an invisible hand that leads some bad people, but a lot of good people, to do things that are really, really not great.
On the Moderna front, and Li Feng has been a champion on this, you know, I've been in touch with him and just incredible reporting.
This came out of the Twitter files, this came out in other email leaks that I mentioned with Dr. Fauci and Freedom of Information requests.
Okay, fuck me.
Of course he knows Lee Fang, and the fucking Twitter files, and the FOIA requests against Fauci, apparently.
What a crock of shit.
Yeah.
More importantly, shout out to our members of the Invisible Hand.
We love you guys.
Well done for pressuring doctors into prescribing weight loss drugs.
Apparently you can all add that to your resume.
Congratulations.
We see you.
Or I should say, we don't see you.
We don't see you.
What?
Unlike the obfuscating cloud, we see the obfuscating cloud.
It obfuscates.
Anyway, so according to this guy's unnamed off-the-record source, who is apparently a female doctor at the Harvard Obesity Clinic, if they don't prescribe a Zempik, they'll have to shut down the clinic and lay everybody off and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Penthouse litter girl, okay.
Yeah, right.
Cite your sources or get the fuck out, Callie Means.
Jesus Christ.
The notion that someone works at an obesity clinic and wants people to be fat is fucking an outrageous thing to say.
It is out, it is on another planet.
That's completely insane.
Yeah.
Now, a marketing executive?
Fuckin' sure.
But a doctor that's actually in the clinic?
Get the fuck out of here!
Medical professional?
Nah.
Absolute bananas.
God, God.
And speaking of fruit, actually, Lauren, do you like oranges?
How do you feel about oranges?
Oh, they're great.
They're great?
You like them?
Well, I have some bad news about oranges.
I bet you do.
Processed food is much easier to control and much more profitable than a natural food.
And there's been a massive shift to ultra-processed food.
It's gone from 0% of our diet to close to 70% in the past 100 years.
And I really do think that has led, obviously, to a health disaster, an economic disaster, because our human capital is being Destroyed.
But it's also to a degree, I think, a spiritual crisis because we were totally disaggregated from our land.
You know, an orange today, you needed, you need four oranges to get the nutrients that you had in one orange 50 years ago.
Our soil has been so depleted, right?
We've raped the soil so much that our food is like significantly less nutrient dense.
We're kind of causing this issue.
Shouldn't use that word around Russell.
Interestingly, there is some truth to what he's saying.
Not about oranges or the soil, but food generally is less nutrient dense than it used to be.
A 2004 US study found important nutrients in some garden crops are up to 38% lower than they were at the middle of the 20th century.
So on average across the 43 vegetables analyzed, calcium content declined by 16%, iron by 15%, and phosphorus by 9%.
The vitamins riboflavin and ascorbic acid both dropped significantly, while there were slight declines in protein levels as well.
So similar decreases have been observed in the nutrients present in wheat.
So what the fuck is happening there?
Prompted by food shortages after World War II, scientists developed new high-yield varieties of crops and breeds of livestock alongside synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides to boost food production.
Coupled with improvements in irrigation and the advent of affordable tractors, crop productivity increased dramatically.
The average global cereal yield rose 175% between 1961 and 2014, with wheat for example rising from
an average yield of 1.1 tons per hectare to 3.4 tons per hectare in around the same time frame.
So same amount of land, hell of a lot more thing.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
While yields went up, nutrient levels in some crops declined, bringing intensive farming techniques under scrutiny.
Could it be, as some have claimed, that the result of increased use of artificial pesticides, fertilizers, and other chemicals disrupting the fine balance of soil life, the health of crop plants, and therefore affecting the quality of the food we eat?
A 170 year study into wheat grown using different farming techniques in the UK suggests that there is more going on.
So the Broad Bulk Experiment is what that's called.
It's one of the oldest continuous agronomic experiments in the world.
It started in 1843 and it's been comparing the effect of inorganic fertilizers and organic manures on winter wheat.
It has specifically examined the levels of iron and zinc in wheat grown under different farming methods, explains Steve McGrath, a professor in soil and plant science at Rothensted Research in the UK.
First, our findings show that it isn't a lack of micronutrients in the soil that is driving the lower nutrients in the crop.
Those that are bioavailable, that is, in a form that the plant can absorb, don't change with intensive farming methods.
So in other words, it's not the soil has changed or has been damaged by farming practices.
It's that we're able to grow bigger crops and more of them just in the same amount of space, meaning the number of nutrients in the soil has to stretch further to each crop.
So the soil stays the same, but we're dividing that number among a larger number of crops.
That's that's what that comes down to.
That makes perfect sense.
Yeah, no, it's completely like as soon as you look at it, you're like, oh, yeah, no, of course.
Of course.
That's absolutely why that's happening.
Like, OK, it's probably less than ideal, but, you know.
Well, monocrops are a big issue because different plants, when grown in tandem, use different nutrients in the soil.
It's not all the same thing, so it is less efficient and you make less money if you grow a couple of plants together.
Money.
Money.
It's money.
Yeah, exactly.
And all of that is to say that, yes, oranges are less nutrient dense than they were in the 1950s or 70s or whatever, but you wouldn't need four oranges to account for one orange back then.
Everything that he's saying is just blown way the fuck out of proportion in the name of scaring the shit out of you.
Yeah, and the issue is like, okay, so then environmental regulation, EPA, and remedying the fucking food waste problem.
Food waste is such a fucking massive problem in this country, and we would not have to have such a... In this country and others, I'm just speaking from America, but we wouldn't have to Yeah.
Yeah.
don't like nutrients through more plants if we just grew, like didn't have to overproduce for capitalism
and then throw what, 40% of it away?
Like, I just, and that's again, government regulations.
It's like- - We come back to the same, honestly, every fucking show.
It's regulation and capitalism, you morons.
It's every time.
Oh, and as for processed foods going from 0% of our diet to nearly 70% of our diet in the last 100 years.
That's how time works?
Come on!
It's technology!
Right!
Firstly, it's about 60% according to the CDC, and secondly, duh.
Like, we didn't have that technology to process food in that way a hundred years ago, so of course it's fucking gone up from zero to... Idiot.
Yeah.
Idiot.
Yeah.
It's zero to any amount, because it just used to be fucking zero.
Because it didn't exist!
You're measuring from when it was zero!
Stupid!
That's crazy!
That's hilarious!
Dishonest moron!
We said we would get to Bill Gates at some point and well, here it comes.
And when I look at Bill Gates, who's making millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars from literally lab grown meat, he's preaching fake meat, he's preaching ultra processed food and denigrating the Gates Foundation is denigrating vegetables.
He recently said that anyone that says trees help reduce carbon, which is literally their function, isn't isn't practicing good science because he has Get him!
and millions of dollars invested in carbon scrubbers machines which are literally just basically trees
um so he's denigrating trees get him drag her uh yeah so so once once again i'm i'm
forced to defend someone i don't particularly like um
Bill Gates is denigrating vegetables and trees, apparently.
Get him.
I mean, Gates is a massive piece of shit, that is absolutely true, but for reasons that are actually based in reality.
Just him as a fucking person.
But the vegetables thing, that's just make-em-ups and bullshit, there's nothing to that.
Denigrating vegetables?
Denigrating vegetables!
Taunting them with your mama jokes?
Sir, what do you mean?
What Gates said about trees was that it was complete nonsense that planting enough trees would take care of the climate problem.
Uh-huh!
To which I say, correct!
Duh!
We are polluting far too much as a species for that to be a viable solution.
Yeah, and if you ever want to look at the results of all this, like, plant a tree for whatever, that's all greenwashing.
It is a fucking disaster, and it's been going on since I was a kid.
Like, well, we plant these trees!
Yeah, see how that actually has worked out.
Cause we know it's bullshit.
It's marketing.
It's all marketing.
In terms of fixing anything, it's complete whole shit.
Yeah.
Keeping the trees we have is what we need to do right now.
Old growth forests, not just planting.
And it's like, again, it's these like monocrops of like just, they just decide, just a couple of whites are like, these are the trees we're going to plant today.
Beep, bop, boop.
Fixed it.
Bye.
That's not how, Oh my God.
It's, Yeah, yeah.
Also, Bill Gates does fund companies who spend their time planting trees.
Like, he almost certainly does a lot more for trees than fucking Cali Means does.
Yeah, there's a way to do it, and there is a way to use it as marketing ploy, and to greenwash your company!
And it's one of those things, like, any fucking company describing themselves as carbon neutral or whatever else... That was bullshit.
It's fucking bullshit because in almost every single case it's, oh no, it's offsets.
We're not actually reducing the amount that we're using.
No, no, no.
We're planting some trees over here and that offsets all of the things we do and no, it fucking doesn't.
You lying pieces of shit.
No, we pay Tesla and we can say it's okay.
Yeah, right, exactly.
Fucking marketing nonsense.
Oh, what a fuckwit.
Anyway, they get to a thing about pesticides in baby food, which is just another case of misrepresenting bullshit from cunning means.
But after that, he finally does get to who he thinks the problem is, right?
In any world, if we had the USDA saying this is wrong on the baby formula, if we had Dr. Fauci saying that, we would stop that.
When medical leaders say something, we listen.
We listened to the Surgeon General in the 1980s.
Smoking rates plummeted when they finally talked out about smoking.
Frankly, we listen to Dr. Fauci when he said to get the COVID vaccine, more than 90% of people got it.
So we do listen.
We listened in the 1990s when the government told us to eat more carbs and sugar and the food pyramid, which led to disaster.
So if the medical leaders spoke out, and then a lot of times I hear from regulators, they're like, well, you know, that's gonna be too expensive to tell everyone to eat organic.
That's gonna be too difficult.
It's like, that's not their job.
Their job is not to worry about the policy.
The medical leader's job is to follow the science.
Right now, we tell the kids, two-year-olds, that 10% of their diet could be added sugar because of the heavy lobbying of the sugar industry to the people making the nutrition guidelines.
That is true.
That should be zero, okay?
It is not the regulator's job to think about public policy.
The health industry, the health leaders, need to say the truth.
That we should not be putting seed oils in baby formula that's covered in GMOs.
That we should not be recommending sugar to two-year-olds.
And then policymakers can do what they will of that.
But the breakdown here is that the medical leaders are asleep at the switch and corrupted themselves.
Medical leaders are the problem.
They corrupted themselves.
If Fauci just came out and told us to eat better, we would.
Sure.
That's absurd.
Like Fauci, who is considered a demon among your people.
Yeah, OK, you'd listen.
Sure.
Friend, can you walk out the front door and say that again and tell me with a straight face if that's true?
Like, really?
But genuinely, like, the food pyramid is fucked up, and again, maintenance phase is where I know that, but that's, I mean, so, like, it sucks that there's, like, there's, again, there's seeds in what he's saying that is correct, but, like, I'm sorry!
Also, that came out in the 50s, not the 90s.
The Food Pyramid?
Oh no, the updated Food Pyramid, that was the 90s, yeah.
Yeah, but it's way fucking older.
I mean, the one from way before was already a fucking problem.
Okay.
But like the, yeah, the changes in the 90s are like extra, like, it's just, it's, yeah, it's shit on shit.
It's a shit sandwich with shit chips on the side.
Sure.
But that's the thing is like, that's, that's the part that's like kind of right.
And yeah, okay.
Lobbying.
Bad.
We agree.
That's policy!
Lobbying bad, yes.
Americans two years and older should keep their intake of sugars to less than 10% of their total daily calories.
That's the advice, right?
Less than 10%.
Added sugars, specifically.
Added sugars as a category include sucrose, dextrose, table sugars, syrups, honey, and sugars from concentrated fruit or vegetable juices.
Um, so if you think about those things, as well as the more obvious components of, like, sweets, snacks, and desserts, like cookies, ice cream, donuts, pastries, etc.
Like, 10%, it's not extreme.
Like, if your kid has a muffin and a glass of OJ, that can easily account for 10% of their daily food, right?
That's, you know, that's not, um... Like, kids don't eat fucking huge amounts.
Um, so y'know, it's not absurd, um, but y'know, I think, I dunno, speaking as a parent of a toddler, I think we've come a long fuckin' way in terms of nutrition for kids.
Yeah!
Totally.
Y'know, like, most of the foods that I can buy for April are, y'know, fuckin' sugar-free this, and y'know, made with fruit, and blah blah blah, y'know.
That's just most of the food.
It's incredibly rare that, especially anything that is aimed at kids, has anything bad in it at this point.
Anything from that list, anyway.
Right.
Well, he's still existing in a world where sugar from fruit and honey is better or different than refined sugar.
He's already coming from a flawed premise, basically.
Yeah, this is the thing.
Also, it's 81% of adults in the U.S.
who got the first dose of the COVID vaccine, and 70% are considered fully vaccinated.
More than 90%, my fucking ass.
That's insane.
No, no, no.
Also, those numbers even sound high.
Yeah, I gotta admit, gotta admit.
Reports I've heard, well, I guess it is depending on where you're at, is like 60%.
It is regional, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh yeah, god, the difference is like state by state and regional, absolutely insane.
There are some portions where it's like fucking 20% of a state and you're like, whoa, that's bananas!
Anyway, we have one final clip from Callie Means and it's also another obvious edit from RB's team because somehow we get back to Li Fang.
But getting to Lee Fang and what's happening, the independent media revolution, I think, is on par of one of the biggest trends in American history.
I think it's like, you know, Ben Franklin level and a real shift of how media and communication is happening.
We've gone from a situation where there were a limited amount of networks.
Completely funded by the industrial complexes to a more disaggregated where the biggest eyeballs and ears are tied to people that have more of an independent voice.
This is extremely disruptive.
These are the folks like you that are hosting these conversations that are really asking core questions about society, about why so many kids are getting sick.
And there's absolute almost, you know, violent opposition.
I don't know.
happening, you know, using every single tool in the book.
So am I worried?
You know, Russell, I don't know.
I look at my kid and honestly, we talked about my mom who died, I think unnecessarily from
a metabolic condition.
I feel really good about pushing this forward.
I think I'm on the right side of history.
But there are dark forces at play here.
And I think if our message can continue getting out, it is extremely economically disruptive.
But that gives me meaning.
And I'll tell you, I think a lot of people are waking up.
And I think if we keep chipping away, we're going to change society.
But yeah, there's a lot of opposition.
Wow Callie, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you for that beautiful summary and thank you once again for your optimism.
Almost everything you've said I thought this needs to be brokered, put into a smaller clip and put out there because I think you're arming people with information that could change their lives and based on what you've said about your recent trip to DC, you're having an impact in places that can make a meaningful difference.
Thank you so much for the work that you're doing Callie and thanks again for coming on.
The idea of this guy making an impact in DC has a very different fucking feel after going through all of this.
Oh, the people that get to show up and talk are shocking.
We don't need to... That's a deep, ugly well.
Bad news for that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I also don't disagree that the things he's saying might change people's lives because, again, it's separating them into a different reality to the rest of us.
So yeah, definitely, definitely probable.
And disenfranchising their ability to make any kind of meaningful difference.
Yeah, abso-fucking-lutely.
Also, Russell Brand is Ben Franklin.
That was an interesting comparison.
It's Ben Franklin levels, honestly.
Oh, okay.
Famous sex-havers, I guess.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um.
Gosh.
Riddled with STIs, legendarily.
Sure!
Oh dear.
Um.
Yeah, that's, uh.
Is metabolic conditions his quantum physics?
Is that just his blanket magic word?
That's his magic word to describe all of the things that he says.
I fail to see how pancreatic cancer is a metabolic condition.
And do I!
Is it because it involves the pancreas?
Is that it?
I'm assuming that's it, but it's still cancer.
it's still it's still cancer like it's it doesn't really you know like
listen cancer's fucking scary like you know it is it is certainly it's an issue for humans and
it has been for a long time you know pancreatic cancer especially my grandfather died of that
That's one of the ones where, if you get it, you are fucked.
And that's it.
Because there's no way to deal with that as of yet.
I know a couple of years ago they managed to successfully 3D print a pancreas for the first time, and that was fucking...
I was like, what?
That's insane.
Yeah, I know!
It's crazy!
Not just for earrings anymore, hey!
Right?
But yeah, I wouldn't have considered it a metabolic disease.
That's not- I don't think that healthcare would qualify.
I don't think that a healthcare worker would put that under the heading of metabolic disease.
No.
Well, I'm interested to read this book when it comes out from him and his sister, because I imagine the subject will come up, right?
It'll surely- I hope so.
That'll be a fucking chapter in the book.
It's like, let's make some money from mommy's death, everybody!
Yeah, it's going to be grim.
I'm not excited at all.
But I'll be interested to see what kind of a slant they put on it.
It's not going to be good, I don't think.
Yeah, wow.
That's Callie Means, anyway.
We're done with him.
We're done with him, for at least the foreseeable.
Holy shit.
Just finishing on a little bit of ass kissing there.
I hope he makes it out of Solitary, eventually.
The space he puts himself in.
I know, I know.
He just, yeah.
He seems miserable.
It looks very sad and lonely, doesn't it?
Yeah.
It does, yeah.
There's a quality to painted brick that I think a lot of us maybe associate with, like, grades.
The most abysmal parts of our grade school, you know?
I mean, there are ways that you can make it look nice.
I mean, a splash of color might do you some good.
Take the paint off the brick!
Yeah, yeah, red brick looks lovely.
Yeah, you just, you take the paint off and it's, you usually get more money when you, for a rental space at least.
I watched it happen all over the fucking place in St.
Louis.
Sandblast some brick and magically you're gonna tack 200 bucks a month off of that.
Yeah, on the rent.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Man, this is, he's like, to say that, Making healthcare recommendations exclusively and then letting legislators legislate?
I'm sorry.
How do you think that works?
Plenty of legislators make medical decisions all the time, and it's a disaster in this country.
Gestures to abortion.
It's not, it's... The, like, either intentional or ignorance, like, it's either...
Intentional and underhanded, or it's just plain dumb.
The things that are said just about women's reproduction in a state house, say Missouri, one I'm familiar with, they shouldn't be in charge of themselves, let alone anyone else.
The misunderstanding is either so thorough or such a fucking nasty lie for their own devious reasons To blame doctors, it's on so many levels, especially after what all healthcare workers have been through in this country for the last three years, is fucking reprehensible.
It's crazy.
That's so just...
ALICE Yeah, yeah.
The things that this man is saying, they are fuckin' dangerous, because his solutions to any of these problems are, yeah, like, oh, let's eat fuckin' organic foods, let's sleep more, let's go out and fuckin' look at the sun, y'know?
That's his solution to actual medical problems.
I know.
Like, that's his solution to actual medical problems.
That's what he is proposing instead of SSRIs.
That's what he is proposing instead of fucking blood pressure medication.
It's stupid and dangerous.
This could very well lead to people getting killed because of the things that this man is saying.
It definitely does.
We have to accept that at this point.
It definitely does.
The way that I have had to learn how to talk to doctors, which, guys, It happens a lot, and it's always unpleasant.
But, and again, I've had to do it my entire life.
So, the change in how I have to couch what I don't believe for them to listen to me has changed drastically.
Like, okay, well, I am not doing my own research on YouTube and Google University.
I do not believe that essential oils are going to- because the way that they have to talk to me, Is very, like, gingerly and carefully, and they're navigating this, like, I can hear it when they're saying it to me, and I'd be like, whoa, whoa, okay, so I'm not bringing Woo into this room, and I'm not bringing, I'm not bringing, like, Whole Foods Crunchy Mom into this room.
I'm here to talk to you about some solutions, and they're like, oh, okay, good.
Well, then let's actually talk about it.
And it's not like this- listen, I'm not getting fixed, it's not any better, but at least we can have a conversation between two adults that aren't living in the fucking clouds.
Yeah, that's it.
We can have a conversation based in reality.
Unlike anyone who is gonna try talking to a doctor, I have to listen to this guy.
Good fucking luck.
Good fucking luck.
Well, and what is really, like, I brought it up in the last, my history corner that I did for the Last Off Brand, about, like, this neo-feudalism, like, creeping in that's terrifying.
And that was just an idea.
But, like, the understanding of the pervasive capitalist immiseration that we are not talking about, How dare these people insist you have to go to a job that gives you health insurance or else you will not get to pay for your healthcare and you will be out on your ass.
You will not have a place to live.
You will not have food to eat.
Good luck having a fucking family because you have to go to a job where you sit down all day every day, but you also definitely, it's a problem that you're sedentary and it's your fucking fault.
Yeah, right.
And you can't afford to eat well, so then take all this, like, it's just...
The pressure on the individual feels so fucking impossible, and what's terrifying for me is what I know a lot about, because I'm a curious little, you know, muskrat, and I want to know about the Victorian times, because there's a lot, especially it's in English if it's in Britain, so it's easier for me to understand.
And so I understand what they're saying, and y'all love keeping records, so there's a lot of them.
And so you have this idea of what people went through during the first industrialization pre-capitalist and early capitalism, and the way that people were fed into a meat grinder.
The poor, the working class.
Almost literally.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
Making fabric?
Good God.
And so you have this, like, the basis of our society, the actual essential workers, because they're essential to make the world go round, and the Class consciousness and the class solidarity at the top to inflict and to hold the line to immiserate the population and to reinforce it on every level.
And man, oh man, there are so many more tools with technology and the way that society is built today to ratchet up the immiseration and the isolation on steroids.
Yeah, absolutely.
The system from the jump was designed to fuck over the person doing the job.
That person is expendable, and we don't give a fuck about them.
Well, yeah, capitalism is built on the premise that you can just line go up forever.
Yeah.
A child understands that's not possible, that that's magical thinking.
The whole system is built on magical thinking.
I had this thought yesterday and I wrote it down and I thought, there's no way that it's going to come up in the episode.
It fucking has.
It's crazy.
Blaming the symptoms And blaming the individual for feeling the symptoms of pervasive capitalist immiseration of the people, capital T, capital T, capital P, the people.
Prohibition, one of the best.
Ooh, the Ken Burns.
Real good.
Prohibition was a result, was a very legitimate reaction to this pervasive alcoholism problem.
Guess what?
It's because the workers were absolutely miserable.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And this whole like this demonization this like puritanical like Carrie nation going and fighting dudes in a bar and being all who's he what's he and getting all up in people's faces when the problem was capitalism.
The crack epidemic!
The same thing, you are demonizing the very bottom, like the most vulnerable people in your society.
You are using them as a scapegoat, you are demonizing them, and you are othering them, the people that are fucking cleaning your house and picking your food, and you would not be able to survive without them.
And it's prohibition, the drug war, and the opioid crisis, these are all products Of a system that is fucking broken, and if you don't fix the system, you're just gonna have more scapegoats to feed through a meat grinder.
And it's a distraction!
Yeah, yeah.
It's why I have never, ever begrudged any homeless person who has wanted to get completely shit-faced with money that I give them.
Yeah, I would too!
Because I'm like, yeah, I fucking would!
Are you kidding me?
If I was living on the streets, yeah, I'd want to get shit-faced.
Yeah, no shit.
Abso-fucking-lutely.
You go to town.
But that's even, like, that's a misunderstanding that I think people have.
People do not understand how many houses, and this is in America, how many... I cannot imagine it's the same.
In the UK.
It just, from what I know... It's not great here.
It's not great.
Well, you're right, and I'm positive that's true.
Yeah, it's definitely not to American levels.
Wowie zowie!
And it's getting worse every day, but the amount of people that are homeless, that are houseless, are experiencing homelessness, and have a full-time job.
Have more than one job.
People do not understand that.
There's like, I mean, you know, it's anecdotes and I listen to a lot of reporting and stuff and I try to stay abreast of these situations, obviously.
So I hate using anecdotal, you know, kind of like stories.
There are numbers to back it up.
But like people working like for Disney World, But the gal that's homeless, and freezing to death in her car!
And she worked at Disney World!
And they all loved her and knew her, and had a big funeral, and it was so sad, and like... Guys!
What are we doing?!
What are we doing?!
The system, when the system is that fucking stacked against you from the start, Jesus Christ.
We're all like a slip and fall away from total annihilation.
There's nothing.
There's nothing.
Oh yeah, on a personal level, I think most people in the US and the UK are, what, two paychecks away from being in that situation?
Away from being houseless?
Something like that.
And in many cases, just one paycheck.
And it's terrifying that we're all just expected to live on the cusp of that at all times.
Well, and the programming and the... God, I don't want to sound like Russell, fuck me.
It's all the same words, it's all the same shit, but it's just slightly different, makes it completely wrong!
But here's the thing, we're talking about the actual problem, not the thing that they're saying is the problem.
I can still be mad that they made it more hard.
It's already hard to talk about!
That's the other thing, is it's already so hard to talk about because of the demonization of any collective anything in America.
Again, I'm turning 40 sooner than I'd want to, and the change in individuals, even the kind of shitty ones I interacted with as a kid, The change is fucking stark, even in that kind of rugged individual lie.
It's more impossible than ever.
And the mythos is more pervasive than ever.
We have this dichotomy that is just pulling itself apart.
Capitalism, dog!
It's capitalism!
And again, it's gonna be feudalism, if not already looking like feudalism, because even aesthetically, we have problems.
We have very obvious problems.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Abso-fucking-lutely.
Abso-fucking-lutely.
And just because we can play Candy Crush on our phone, they think that that's enough?
And that we'll just get by?
Like, it sucks.
Yeah.
It sucks.
That we're all fucking clinging on by the skin of our teeth every day.
Yeah, right.
Oh, boy.
Oh, boy.
Telling me people love their health insurance.
No.
No, they don't.
Not one.
Fuck off.
Stop feeding me lies.
Oh, dear.
Well, that's a show, everybody.
And if you have black painted brick in your home, I bet it's lovely.
I bet you styled it different or you're renting and you can't do anything about it.
I just think that it was a weird, it was a jarring visual and it just took me by the left field.
I dip all things.
I've seen precious, like this little, my stupid little curtains that I have that I found for $3 and I knew would look fine with the rest of my stuff that I got from a thrift store, which they have a blue version in, anybody that's seen the Mother God documentary, they have like the blue color, because it's a really popular, you know, hippy dippy bullshit thing to sell.
And it showed up and Mike paused the documentary and was like, Oh!
And then looked over and was like, we have the same curtain!
Like, honey, anyone that's ever smoked pot has the same curtain.
It's fine.
But it is very funny that the blue version is like, there's that kind of like, I'm used to this print being associated with Russell's Associates.
It's crazy to see solitary confinement cell that man popped up in.
It was just alarming.
Yeah, yeah.
Wow.
Everything about this guy is a lot, in a lot of ways.
I'm gonna post a picture on the Patreon publicly, if you wanna see it, go to our Patreon.
Even if you listen, you gotta see this.
It's just... it feels like a joke.
I'm being pranked.
Again.
Yeah, yeah.
Gulag is appropriate.
The ghoul in the gulag.
That's this fucking guy.
Jesus Christ, Kelly Means.
Wow.
Um, yeah, I'd love to say that, hey, we'll probably never have to deal with this guy again, but again, he's a repeat guest on Russell's show, so he's gonna come back.
Whether he says anything of interest is a different question, but he's definitely gonna come back.
I'm very interested.
I think it's really interesting how close he can get.
But not, but being wrong, like being.
So wrong, so wrong.
But it's like, I feel like they're getting close, it's not Jordan Peterson, Jordan Peterson is a looney toon.
Like he's just, oh, just, just like the little Kirby, just bopping around, being like a little pink ball having a time.
This is, this is a guy that sounds serious, sounds smart, sounds informed.
Yeah.
I said sounds.
Sounds.
And it's so, it's a lot closer to the real thing.
I'm interested to see how close they can get.
He's a pretty good communicator, I'll say that.
I imagine he was probably quite good at his job working for Pharma.
Awesome.
Immediate disqualification, I'm sorry.
No, no.
You worked in Pharma Marketing?
I do not believe a word that comes out of your mouth.
Bye.
Just by default, like, boop boop boop boop.
But no, he's a whistleblower now.
Okay.
Right, well, if you want to support us on what we do, go to patreon.com slash onbrand.
We would love that.
We'd love to have more of you.
And, you know, patrons, we do love you very much.
If you want to get in touch, drop us an email.
It's theonbrandpart at gmail.com.
There is a Facebook group full of wonderful people and that's On Brand Awakening Wonders.
Come and join there.
I posted a funny video there just today.
Have you seen that funny video yet, Lauren?
Probably not.
When have you ever seen any?
I just saw your email you sent me a week ago.
This is true.
You're still playing catch up.
There's a funny video that is history related that you will enjoy that I've posted to their Facebook group.
There you go.
There is a subreddit on brand underscore pod with some wonderful human beings there and our wonderful Mod Monica.
Who is being ever so gracious to us in the last week.
So thank you, Monica.
And socials!
The Ombra and Pod in most places.
And oh look!
And we have magnets!
A wild, wild magnet with gold on it.
We actually sell gold, we're a podcast that actually sells gold.
We sell real gold!
Actual, physical gold, delivered to your home in a nice package.
Someone put a picture of that somewhere on the Reddit, actually, and was like, holy... Did you not see that?
Oh yeah, someone was like, oh yeah, I got my thing, I got this, it was a while ago, someone was like, ah, I got my thing from Lauren, it's really cool, look at all this, you know?
It's really nicely packaged, it's really, you know, got this other thing here as well.
That's lovely!
I can't wait to see it!
Yeah, yeah, there you go.
Go check our... Everyone else, go and check our socials along with Lauren.
Do not make my life choices, go enjoy your socials, I will get there as soon as I can.
SEAN And personal socials, I'm at elworthofficial and Lauren is at may.by.lauren.b.
Any plugs this week?
Are we quiet for now?
Are we quiet for now?
LAUREN I was so thrilled with myself that I had a good old good thing that I forgot Yeah, I don't think there's any plugs other than just checking out stuff.
Buy a magnet, link is in the description.
I say buy a magnet.
Yeah.
Buy a magnet and check out the rest of Lauren's store while you're there.
Yeah, well and hopefully I actually do have more magnets now that I've got like the first play and catch up thing is having more dumb magnets.
Cool!
Because I can actually handle it now that Christmas is over and the holidays are over.
Now that hell month is finished.
Hell six weeks.
It's kind of not.
The prospects were pretty grim since like Halloween, I think?
Yeah, that's fair.
But we're getting there, yeah.
January's gonna be a lot more, at least, less insane.
Way less insane.
Less intense.
I miss y'all a lot.
Yeah, we've both been fairly quiet on the old socials lately, and there are reasons.
I have so many excuses.
I have so many excuses.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and Patreon might be the way.
You can follow us for free on Patreon, and we don't have a ton of public posts.
Access to everything is as little as a buck.
You won't get a shout-out, but you'll at least be able to find it and get all the paywalled content, and it just seems like a better idea to at least Because there's too many of the socials.
And some, a certain letter of the end of the alphabet are crazy.
So our little Patreon corner, you know, full of Nazis, pretty spicy.
So having like a little spot on Patreon, you don't have to pay anything just to follow us and to subscribe to what we do and putting out more kind of public stuff.
I am definitely posting a picture of that guy's wild ass like cave.
LIAM Yep, yep.
I'd love to know what room it is in this guy's house.
That's what I'm curious about.
What room did you decide?
Was this your office?
Was that the decision?
I don't know.
None of it's good!
Doesn't matter what room it is, it's not good.
Alright, well...
We'll see patrons for Off-Brand soon, and yeah, for everyone else, we'll see you next week for... I imagine another heap of shit.
It's gonna be good.
It's gonna be good.
Yay!
Yay!
Yeah, yeah.
Alright, well... Laugh or hammer, we'll figure it out when we get there.
Yep.
Maybe both!
Maybe both, we'll see.
Yeah, probably.
Alright, we love you everybody, we'll see you soon.
Bye!
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