Jillian Michaels details her political "wake-up call" regarding the left's dangers, sparked by pandemic-era conspiracy theories about Dr. Anthony Fauci and alienation from progressive friends who labeled her alt-right. She critiques billionaires like George Soros and Bill Gates for exploiting 2000s lobbying loopholes and Citizens United to manipulate food and pharma industries, creating addictive ultra-processed foods that drive obesity. While maintaining a rigorous organic regimen and skepticism toward mainstream medical advice, Michaels voted for Donald Trump as a "lesser evil" but explicitly endorses Tulsi Gabbard, arguing systemic corporate manipulation poses a greater threat than individual health choices. [Automatically generated summary]
What's weird is when you're talking to people who you've known for years and they don't recognize you, and I'm trying to explain it, and the craziest thing is every single conversation is, I don't want to talk about it.
And it's almost as though I love you too much to talk about it with you.
It's fascinating.
unidentified
I just did this with a friend last night, and she was sweating.
It's so interesting because from watching you and listening to you and the interview that I did with you, which is on your channel, we did it about a month and a half ago or so, it was really probably the most enjoyable interview I've done all year because it is so obvious that you are open, you are listening, you're on the path of learning, you're not judging, but I can also sense you're sensitive to having an audience that's kind of everywhere politically and you've been dragged into this in a bizarre way.
It's interesting that you just said that the people on the left feel alienated because generally it's been the people on the right over the last couple of years culturally.
But I think maybe inadvertently you just said something pretty profound because it's like the people on the left now are starting to realize they might be losing the culture war now because they're losing people like you and they lost people like me.
Nevertheless, the kid that made the film, it was completely locked out of media, shut out of all the film festivals, and he's like, I was a lifelong Democrat.
I don't even understand what happened.
My dad Was trafficked into a sweatshop.
I wanted to make a story about what my dad went through.
And now I've been labeled alt-right and nobody will cover the movie.
Well, first off, the fact that someone like you in the entertainment biz and that's been involved in all of this forever would have that feeling towards LA, which now sort of everyone has.
But I mention it because during COVID, when I would go to the open up the state, open up the city protests...
I thought I was going to meet all these Trumpers and these right-wing people and MAGA hats and whatever.
Every single person there was a Democrat who just owned a restaurant that wanted to go to work or they wanted to wait tables again or they worked in the industry and they wanted to be able to hang lights or anything else.
So this thing that we're talking about has made, I would say, largely apolitical people become very political.
And you had to wear a mask when you walked to the table.
But as soon as you sat down, you were below the COVID layer.
And you were all good.
And I remember thinking...
Do you mind if I... May I swear that it was the stupidest fucking thing I had ever seen in my adult life?
It was utterly nonsensical.
And I will never forget walking in and having forgotten my cot with this little blue trash mask that is on the floor, on the ground, in my bag, on the floor of the car.
It has been reused 50 times.
Probably got sicker from the mask that had a million germs that I touched my face, put it on the thing, touched my face again, touched the phone.
And I was like, I'm just literally going to that table 15 feet away.
And they're like, I'm sorry, you need a mask.
But nobody sitting down has a mask on.
And I was like, this is complete.
This is just, this is not, it's just...
Or even the fact that I knew you catch a cold through your eyes.
Touch something, touch your eyes.
Cold.
The mask is worthless.
I knew it was worthless.
I knew this because I worked in health.
I interviewed doctors all the time.
Immunologists, virologists.
This is what I did.
I spent 10 years doing a podcast interviewing doctors.
Your audience, which did not think of you as someone that was political.
And when I watch your show, I consistently find you are trying your best to talk to everyone and And I hate to tell you, but what I think you're going to find is it's going to get harder and harder to talk to a certain set of people.
It's interesting because since I'm a little, I would say, further down that road, for better or worse, I've gotten to a weird place where I really don't like a lot of those people anymore.
And I'm not saying that's a better place to be in any way whatsoever because I always think about this.
Greg Gutfeld wrote a book called The Joy of Hate.
It's not exactly that I hate these people because just holding hate is not good.
I was about to say to you that on a psychological level, it almost feels like, can I really trust this?
- Yeah. - But then I thought to myself, does it even matter?
If the right is being opportunistic and saying, hey, numbers matter.
So yeah, we don't love the fact that you're gay, and we don't love your opinion on A, B, C, D, and E, but there's room for you here, and we're okay disagreeing with you on those issues.
So you're going through this whole thing, but it's not really your, the political part, again, is not really your passion.
Your passion is the health part, and now health has become highly political.
I've had a ton of health people in here.
It's funny, because I'm finding a lot more interest suddenly in the health part, but these things are deeply intertwined.
So you must be thrilled about watching Bobby and his connection now to Trump and how this is suddenly, like we're talking about, you know, beef tallow for McDonald's french fries now and a whole bunch of other stuff.
These are all people, because they were on my podcast talking about metabolic disease or policy with regard to food lobbyists and pharma lobbyists or Brigham Bueller, who will talk to you about big insurance all day long and peptides, which I want to talk to you about for your knee later.
Nevertheless, All of a sudden, all of us have been thrust onto this stage.
You know, it's funny, I won't say his name, God forbid, but there was a guy who's one of the foremost leading experts in psychedelics.
And I had interviewed him years ago for four hours, and he's an absolute friggin' genius.
And he got canceled for doing nothing.
And long story short, he ended up at a great university and we've become good friends.
And he sent me something the other day.
He's like, hey, I know Cali's really...
Cali means he's like, I know Cali's really busy.
Will you pass on this paper to him?
Having to do with the FDA and psychedelics, this, that, the other.
And he's like, I can't even believe I'm saying this.
Citizens United was another big one because when you open up all of our politicians in such a huge way to big food and big pharma and big insurance, I think the biggest lobbying groups are big pharma and big insurance.
So you open up that door and you make each and every one of our politicians up for sale.
You've now taken our republic and you've turned it into an oligarchy.
So you let these guys in and in order to win it becomes a don't hate the player, hate the game.
So now they're in a situation where you might actually have a good person who wants to do the right thing.
And I've met many of those people.
But in order to get to a position where they could facilitate the right thing they have to take that money and then we're done.
So, from a perspective of, all right, how do we make food more profitable?
What are the raw economic incentives?
Oh, big tobacco got involved and everything changed in the 80s.
Like, my mom will tell you, I used to eat this stuff when I was a kid and we used to have this, this, this, and this all the time.
But if you look at her Reese's Peanut Butter Cop and our Reese's Peanut Butter Cop, there's like 20 different things that didn't exist.
And that really did start to happen after the late 80s.
So it is absolutely by design, but you have these monster corporations that have strategically, systematically gamed the system for absolute, complete and total influence, period.
If you look at it, Dave, and this is something that I didn't mention yet, is that it really is this.
What I call the catastrophic quartet of how they gained the big farming laws.
So how they manipulated the Farm Bill legislation so that all that money goes to Monsanto and all those companies to make these genetically engineered crops.
And then you've got this glut of cheap calories covered in pesticides because they're selling the chemicals to go with the seeds and it's all...
But then big food grabs those cheap calories, of which we make 500 more calories than every human in the country needs every single day.
Makes it omnipresent, puts one more spin on it with our food scientists, makes it super addictive.
Then big pharma is like, oh my god, you have a genetic disease.
That's why you're obese, despite the fact that no such disease exists.
So they come in and they reap the benefits, and then if you really, I mean, the true monster Is big insurance.
And the one that can explain that like no other is Brigham Bueller.
I don't know if you've spoken to him yet, but my God, Dave, if you want to go down a rabbit hole, he'll tell you that it's like big insurance is a megalodon and big farm is like a great white.
And I can't do it justice the way that he does, but he explains...
I'm going to butcher this.
They have a way of creating rebates for themselves.
So, for example, God, there's a great clip of him doing this on Rogan and on my show, but he'll tell you, like, let's say I'm the pharmacist and my cost for insulin is $2.
And, you know, you come in and I would normally charge you $3.
But your copay is $10.
I'm not allowed to tell you the cash price that it's $3.
So I know collect your $10 copay.
I get to keep my $3.
Guess who gets the other $7?
Insurance companies.
And that is the tip of the iceberg.
I am a complete novice in my understanding of that, but what I can tell you is the little that I grasp, it is terrifying beyond your wildest imagination.
So for everyone that is now starting to pay attention to this stuff, and they're getting off the seed oils, which I talk about constantly now, and we just did with Callie, so we don't have to do that.
And yet we have an entire industry based on kind of not letting you know that knowledge or just saying, hey, some shit's gonna happen to you and we'll just drug you enough to keep you going at the end.
I mean, they don't obviously all put their pants on the same way.
In other words, some are far better than others.
But the ones who practice upstreamism, and there's a great TED talk about this, that don't just do triage of, uh-oh, okay, you're sick, here's 15 drugs, why are you sick?
So, the metaphor is, you know, people are drowning in this river, doctors are trained to jump in the river, pull the body out, do CPR, try to bring them back to life, get them back on the road.
In other words, give them a bunch of drugs, off you go.
But a few people, a few rebels, started walking upstream.
And when everybody, you know, who was doing triage was like, where are you going?
I'm trying to figure out, like, how the hell are these people falling in the river?
When you started doing all this and you start getting people into better shape, what would generally be the thing that would knock them off of that?
Like, I'm sure you have a million stories you can tell me about the people that completely changed their lives for better and got better and everything else.
But did you find something that there was a psychological makeup or...
Something of the type of person, because I'm sure there's tons of people, and we've all been there.
You go on runs where you're like, oh, I'm fit and eating right and everything else, and then suddenly it's three weeks later and you're like, what the hell happened there?
By the way, if we look at these weight loss drugs, the mechanism by which they facilitate weight loss is that they make you not hungry.
You eat less food.
That's it.
You essentially starve yourself.
You eat as little as 500 calories a day in some cases, which is why people are losing so much muscle and damaging their metabolism.
Separate conversation.
So, I can have this individual with me at the Biggest Loser Ranch 10 years ago, or when I was actually allowed to be, had the time to be a personal trainer, and they'd be seeing me every week, and I'd be in their head and going to their grocery list, and they'd be texting all their stuff when I was a kid, and I'd miss that job.
It was so rewarding and so immediate.
So, nevertheless, I could get them to a really good place, but In most cases, when they would go home, those deeper issues aren't resolved.
So this is where someone who is, say, addicted to food or whatever else, but it's really an emotional wound that they have, whether it's mushrooms or now people are microdosing or resilient other things.
The stuff that I'm talking about is what the experts refer to.
Speak to Matt Johnson.
He's unbelievable.
He's at Shepard Pratt.
He's incredible.
He's the guy.
And they would refer to it as the heroic dose.
And Matt has used it for smoking succession, and I don't know what his research has led him to over the past couple of years, but he's had an 85% success rate in getting people to quit smoking after one session with a heroic dose.
All of these things have a process, whether it's Ibogaine or psilocybin or ayahuasca.
But this is one of the reasons that people like Matt or Callie or even Bobby are wanting to look into this as a way to treat people with addiction and PTSD. So for me, I've often been so desperate for the opportunity to use that.
I wish that there was another opportunity because My mother's a psychoanalyst and she'll tell you there's nothing harder than helping people give up this addiction because of what they're really giving up.
And then what happens is big food, they know this.
So what they do is they exploit your psychological vulnerabilities by making food omnipresent and extraordinarily addictive.
So the way food is designed is It games your satiety.
If you eat protein, fat, fiber, your satiety hormones would signal.
Like, yo, Dave, chill out, right?
We're full, buddy.
We're good.
- Relax.
If you have a soda, there's no protein, there's no fat, there's no fiber.
So not only is it not triggering your satiety hormones, it's going to stimulate a sugar crash because your sugar spikes, insulin dumps, clears the sugar out of the blood, now you have low blood sugar and you're hungry again and you're tired.
So not only does it not make you feel full, it makes you hungrier And in addition, it's gaming the pleasure center of your brain.
It's smacking that dopamine center.
And there are some people in our field that will tell you that's not true.
I would refer everybody to Dr.
Anna Lemke, who specializes in this, who's an addiction specialist.
And she wrote a book called Dopamine Nation, and she breaks it down better than anybody else.
And the other problem, Dave, is you just become almost Howard Hughes-ian.
You know too much.
And not only that, I also, unfortunately, have access to things like a Pernuvo MRI. And here you are, cruising along, and they're like, hey, you've got some white matter lesions on your brain.
Do we think it's the 10,000 chemicals in the crop that's on my face right now, or the crop that's on my hair, or the crop that's off-gassing from your furniture, or the crop that's in the water when I had to drink tap from the hotel earlier?
You want to keep it off the nether regions for sure, just FYI. So I buy that one big time.
That said, once you know that stuff, you try to mitigate it wherever you can.
And then when you have the ability to go, holy shit, it actually is doing something to me.
Every day you try a little bit harder.
That wake-up call, whether you're healthy or unhealthy, exists.
All you need to do is go looking for it with all these proactive screenings and genetics tests and comprehensive blood panels and full-body MRI. You don't even need it.
Don't bother.
I'm going to tell you they'll find 50 things.
So just do what I'm telling you now because they will find it without question.
But if you're like, well, I don't have $2,000 to do that, you're totally unrelatable.
Again, I defer to Brigham Bjorn because he's like, listen, get major medical, get a car crash, major, big disaster because you're not going to pay for all this other stuff.
With that extra money, invest $500 a month in your healthcare and you'll be covered in a cash pay model.
So they do comprehensive blood panels.
They're on top of your wellness 24-7.
People are going, I can't pay rent.
You stupid bitch.
This is where I'm saying, if you can't, if we're having that conversation and I'm totally unrelatable, you don't really need it.
So a good day is actually a day that's either a weekend so I can sleep in and I don't have to take my kids to school.
Sleep is so massive.
And unfortunately, I just have a lot of work.
So, you know, with kids, you pick it up at the end of the day.
Like, okay, you know, the school's work's done, and soccer's finished, or, like, you're dealing with little ones, but it's, like, home from soccer, home from tennis.
Everybody's fed.
Homework's good.
Okay, quality time.
Let's watch something together.
Okay, goodnight!
And then you have, like, three hours' worth of work to do.
So the ability to sleep in heaven, wake up, have a soft landing in the morning, my organic coffee, I usually try to get a minimum of 12 hours.
And there are a lot of people that are like, oh, you're not getting into autophagy, intermittent fasting doesn't facilitate that.
Whether it does or whether it doesn't, there's no question that giving your body a break from digesting food is going to be beneficial.
And then I usually push till about 10, but I'll have coffee with some heavy whipping cream because it's like no protein, no sugar.
So I try to get to like 10 in the morning.
And then I think, I'm a bit of a lunatic, so all I think about is microbiome, microbiome, microbiome.
So my breakfast could be like a yogurt parfait with polyphenols in my berries and then the good bacteria in the yogurt and then a handful of nuts and seeds and cocoa nibs on top.
And then I don't put the bananas in with the berries because they can block some of the polyphenols.
If I cave on it, it's usually like a hard-boiled egg, a piece of fruit, or something protein, or let's say we have this walnut, pecan, cinnamon, butter, and I'll have that on an apple or something of that nature.
Again, like healthy fat, clean protein, lots of fiber.
And dinner is usually where I eat more.
And my wife's a great cook.
Like you were saying, David's a great cook.
And so she'll make me wild salmon or grass-fed steak or roasted chicken.
I actually don't.
This is terrible.
I hate eating meat.
I don't believe that we need the amount that people are consuming.
But I do try to put protein in every meal.
And it's just, it's like...
It's an animal thing.
But I have given it up not for health because I'm a huge animal person and I'm anemic like that.
I don't need to go too crazy because when you're already a healthy body weight, you can maintain that with food.
If we needed to lose weight, it's all workout.
It's all work.
You can't starve.
I mean, you can, I guess.
You can do ozempic and starve it off, but you'd look like shit.
You'd feel like shit.
It has huge ramifications.
You lose muscle and bone, blah, blah, blah.
So you should not starve the weight off.
You should exercise it off.
That said, for me now...
I don't do a ton of stretching because I lift weights to a full range of motion which is, according to the most current research, as effective.
You don't need to static stretch.
I don't do that anymore at all.
I was never good at it anyway.
I purely hated it and never got any more flexible.
I try to do the HIIT training at least once a week, and I know you need to do more Tabata protocol, so it's like the 20 on, the 10 off for four minutes.
I try to do at least two rounds.
I hate it so much.
Like, I actually hate exercise.
I'm not the person that ever got the endorphin rush.
It was all about being picked on as a kid and feeling empowered via fitness and having fitness be transcendent for me and then using that as a tool to empower other people.
But I actually am horrendously unathletic by nature.
I have no flexibility.
I'm a tiny human.
I have no No endurance.
I am strong.
I can do just about anything once.
unidentified
If you were like, okay, give me a one-handed clapping push-up.
One of my big things has been, and one of the things that really got me into shape in the last year, was playing basketball with these guys who were largely in their late 30s into early 60s.
And then the guys in their 50s and 60s were suddenly bringing their 20-year-old sons and playing.
And I was like, wait a minute, I want to play And I started late as a parent.
So we didn't, I didn't have a kid until I was 46.
So it's like, I really have to, I need another, I want to be running full court in 15 years.
And he'll go to some island off the coast of Nicaragua and alter his genome.
He's out of his mind.
But the thing is, there is some low-hanging fruit there that you can grasp, and it's like...
The concept being kick the can down the road because medicine is advancing at such an exponential pace that with peptides and maybe mesenchymal stem cells and all these little nanobots, all these different things that they're able to do right now, if you can stay healthy long enough for medicine to catch up, you could go to 100 and feel good, but you've got to do the work.
It's not up here when a nuclear bomb goes off on the East Coast because there's Nuclear submarines off the coast of Miami.
It's not going to be up here when all of a sudden there's something you don't want to do with your body.
Like, when you don't want the monkeypox vaccine, because maybe you saw that video of Stephen Crowder showing Jay Varma explaining that it's all bullshit and it doesn't work, and they gamed the whole thing.
Maybe you're not going to want that, and then they shut down your social media, and then they fire you from your job.
Like, it will come for you.
What's that saying?
It's like, it came for them, then I stood by, and it came for those guys, I stood by, until it came for me.
It will come for you.
And that's the problem, is that I know it will.
So, he's not my first choice.
I don't endorse him.
I don't want to tell anybody who to vote for.
I don't.
There's one candidate in the world that I would...
Run over a broken glass floor.
And I hope that day comes and I've made that clear to this individual that I would endorse and go to town and bend over backwards and throw it all to the wolves.