Dr. Peggy Polonis and Callie Means spotlight Casey Means—Stanford-credentialed surgeon-turned-health-advocate—as a pivotal 2024 Trump voter mobilizer, blending progressive metabolic health reforms with MAGA policies like FDA drug deregulation (e.g., 600% teen antidepressant surge) and RFK Jr.’s anti-geoengineering push. Her Good Energy book, credited with reshaping Polonis’ lifestyle, frames chronic disease (diabetes, obesity) as a corporate-capture crisis, clashing with Biden’s vaccine-focused Surgeon General report while targeting ultra-processed foods and school inactivity—linking 77% youth military ineligibility to systemic failure. The episode pitches Casey’s Surgeon General bid as a patriotic health revolution, merging policy and public engagement amid claims of pharmaceutical backlash. [Automatically generated summary]
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Welcome back.
You are back in the Stone Zone.
Joining me now is Callie Means.
He is the co-author with his sister, Dr. Casey Means, who was announced today by President Donald Trump as the next Surgeon General of the United States of a terrific book.
It is called Good Energy, The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health.
I want to be honest with you, this book literally changed my life.
Almost two years ago, Trump campaign manager, now White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, gave me this book, and I read it with enthusiasm.
It changed the way I eat and the way I live.
It's had a profound effect on me.
And then I got to know Callie Means, who I think was absolutely one of the key figures in building this grand coalition to bring voters who were previously Democrats and independents, people for whom health freedom was a priority, into the Trump coalition to win a smashing comeback victory.
So Callie Means, welcome into the Stone Zone.
Hey, Roger.
You've been a hero of the Maha Agenda since day one, and it's great to be on.
So I'm looking across the internet here, and I see a lot of what I think is very suspicious criticism of Dr. Casey Means.
So I want to take this in two parts.
First of all, let's talk about her academic credentials and her qualifications for this job, because one does not have to be a surgical resident and performing surgeries to be the surgeon general.
Yeah, Roger.
I mean, you know, just backing up, right, Casey, you know, is my sister, but she has been just an incredible, her life's mission for the past year and a half has been to communicate these Maha ideas through a conservative lens of how we can transform institutions and help President Trump get elected.
We, you know, she was integral in getting Bobby connected to him and, you know, going on Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, actually the most listened to podcast last year, Tucker Carlson, where she talked about the really civilizational imperative of getting Trump elected to take on these special interests.
Casey's story, the book, Good Energy, which has sold over a million copies, talks about her journey.
And Casey has been successful her entire career.
She was president of her Stanford undergrad class.
She was top of her Stanford med school class, and she was top of her surgical residency program.
But Casey has incredible moral courage.
And she shocked our family when she came to us.
And she said, after more than a decade of medical training, she's leaving the system because people aren't getting healthier.
She had no plan.
She did that over pure just insight over it's not working.
And what she did is she started a company and she started advocating.
And the impact that she has had on American patients.
And Roger, I appreciate your testimony on that.
She has impacted millions of people through empowering them to take matters into their own hands, to not listen to their doctor right away when they write that prescription pad out.
And she left the medical system.
That is the epitome of her story.
So when Bobby Kennedy announced her, he said that the fact that Casey has left the medical system, she is a doctor.
She's a graduate of Stanford Med School.
But the fact that she walked away, unlike so many other doctors who stay in that system, that's why she's Surgeon General.
That's why she's a nominee.
It's not in spite of that.
It is because she left the system.
And I think what's happening, Roger, here is, you know, there's been tremendous outpouring of support, of course, from Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson and Megan Kelly and Donald Trump Jr. and Charlie Kirk.
I mean, Casey's really mobilized an incredible MAGA Maha Army, and there was incredible support.
But I heard today, Roger, and I'll tell you this right now: I just got a call, an insider tip.
The pharmaceutical industry and special interests with President Trump talking about pharma pricing and with Bobby Kennedy taking action, decisive action, they've declared Casey enemy number one, and you're seeing a lot of interesting things pop up.
You know, she's both been called an unqualified radical, unqualified hippie, and she's also been called the deep state plant.
So they're throwing the kitchen sink at her, which is not surprising, but pretty interesting.
Rural Americans deserve access to the best of what our nation has to offer, especially health care.
Across every state and every community, America's rural hospitals are the first line of defense, protecting our families, neighbors, and loved ones.
No matter where you live, hospital care doesn't clock out.
They're there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Each year, America's over 5,000 hospitals care for millions of patients, providing 24-7 emergency care, delivering babies, cancer treatments, and other life-saving care that patients rely on.
Behind every one of those patients are doctors, nurses, and caregivers working tirelessly to keep people healthy and safe.
Hospitals are our community's lifelines.
They employ our neighbors and keep our families healthy.
But now, some in Congress are threatening access to care.
Tell Congress, protect patient care to keep America strong.
Don't cut rural health care.
Yeah, I smell the exact same thing.
We saw this before, by the way.
Remember, just a few weeks ago, we interviewed you here in the Stone Zone, and you had all of these so-called influencers who were pushing for the SNAP program that's basically the food stamp program to be able to spend money on soda.
That was all paid for.
That was orchestrated by a public relations firm offering these so-called influencers up to $1,000 per post to oppose reform in that program.
I see the exact same thing happen here.
I see paid influencers from Big Pharma and Big Ag throwing money around to certain conservative influencers to throw dirt on Dr. Casey Means.
It is outrageous.
And for those who say, well, she wasn't for Trump in 2016, exactly, which is why she was an important bridge, as were you, to people who worked for Trump in 2016, who supported Robert Kennedy and his agenda early, and then helped form this grand coalition to make both make America great again and make America healthy again.
This is the greatest single realignment in American politics since the 1960s.
And I think it will be a permanent one.
So as you look online and you see the aspersions being tossed her away, recognize that a lot of that is paid for.
And for those who don't understand, politics is about addition.
Politics is about expansion of your voter pool, not contraction.
Let's get into some of these issues here.
What will be the principal difference between your sister and, say, the Biden Surgeon General?
The Biden Surgeon General wrote a report for the Biden administration's priorities on health care.
That report did not contain the words diabetes.
It did not contain the word obesity.
It did not contain the word heart disease.
It did not contain the words chronic disease.
The report mentioned the word vaccine 47 times and the word equity 41 times.
The Biden administration, Surgeon General, said that the greatest threat to American health is misinformation, not diabetes or childhood obesity.
The Biden administration was completely asleep at the wheel on the chronic disease crisis that makes up 90% of health care costs and 9 out of 10 American deaths.
The industry and what the forces that want the same thing that we have today, which is higher costs and lower life expectancy than any other developed country, they see Casey, they see Bobby Kennedy as an existential threat because, Roger, this message is just common sense.
The reason President Trump is going to realign American politics is because the left has given up on protecting kids.
They've given up on common sense.
They became the party of the experts during COVID, right?
And they dropped the ball on talking about the chronic disease crisis.
The reason you had a lot of women be first-time Trump voters, a lot of young people, a lot of independents, is because President Trump's talking about common sense and he cannot be bought.
It is extraordinary, Roger.
I'm at the White House right now.
I'm looking at the West Wing, and President Trump is in that building, and he is telling Bobby Kennedy, he is telling Teeth Headset, he is telling Telsey Gabbard, he is telling these people, I've got your back.
Drive transformational change.
Now, Casey, along with Bobby Kennedy, is the greatest communicator for these common sense agenda items that exist in this world.
And Casey is going to do something extraordinary for President Trump beyond just policy.
She's going to make the moral case for how we need to transition our institutions to empower disease reversal.
That is an existential threat.
And you're absolutely right, Roger.
It's very easy to see.
They're literally using a quote that she said from a Joe Rogan interview about us not supporting President Trump.
We went on Joe Rogan and we prayed before that episode that we want to inspire undecided voters to support President Trump.
So we strategically went in there and said that we were brought along from a process in 2016, from not supporting Trump to believing his election was the most important in our lifetimes.
We strategically said that because we wanted to give license and talk to Maha moms to get them to vote for President Trump.
I think Casey led a great effort with Bobby Kennedy to talk to millions and millions of moms who eventually became first-time Trump voters.
They're trying to use that and an attack against her.
Now they're throwing the kitchen sink.
It's unbelievable.
But I do believe, Roger, that as power is being executed, as President Trump is giving green light to reform our institutions, you have forces that are going to be paying social media influencers, paying the media, doing every dirty trick in the book to not just malign Casey.
They're going to come after Bobby much harder.
They're going to be coming after the president.
They're going to be coming after everyone because we are trying to reform institutions here to create better outcomes for the American people.
Right now, the HHS is the largest department in government.
It's the biggest lying item on the federal budget, and we're getting sicker as a result.
We have to change this.
Yeah, I was very encouraged.
I think it was the day before yesterday when I saw that Robert Kennedy was leading a policy to do away with a number of dyes and additives that are already illegal to be added to foods in Europe, but still very prevalent in our food ship, particularly breakfast foods, for example, cereals.
You would think that we would be more enlightened than Europeans, but no.
Big ag, big food, big pharma has gotten away with murder, and now they're going to be held accountable.
Just the fact that you have a team here ready to deal with the question of chronic childhood disease, I think, is one of the most important goals of the Trump administration.
And Robert Kennedy and Dr. Casey Means are exactly the right people.
As far as the politics of this, I studied the polling because this is what I do for 50 years in American politics in the vineyard.
I studied the polling in these swing states, and it was the late breaking votes who had previously been inclined to vote for Robert Kennedy, particularly women, going for the Trump ticket that allowed us to win this smashing victory.
So for those who are looking for purity, oh, you weren't with us in 2016, politics is about addition, as I said earlier.
What would you say is the single biggest problem with the pharmaceutical industry today?
And how will your sister help tackle that?
So what Casey talks about and I talk about, and this is how I think the administration is seeing it from what I'm seeing, Roger, is that the problem isn't with the drug itself.
Like the problem that Ozimpic, this new weight loss drug, exists, that's not a problem.
We support American innovation.
The problem is that the drug is then recommended by the government, by our medical authorities, which are captured as the first line defense.
So Roger, I'm shocked putting together this report for President Trump on the chronic disease crisis.
Do you know that SSRI prescriptions, antidepressants, they've gone up 600% since 2020 among teenage girls?
Adderall prescriptions, which are stimulants, which are one molecule away from crystal meth, have gone up 300% among high schoolers in the past seven years.
We are over-medicating our children because that's what our medical authorities recommend.
They're now recommending Ozimpic, a weight loss shot that you have to take for your entire life to 12-year-olds who are obese.
So Ozimpic is great.
We should have American innovation, but we shouldn't be recommending those things as a first-line defense based on our corporate captured HHS.
And we shouldn't be paying 10 times more for these drugs than they do in Germany and Europe.
Roger, Eli Lilly, an American company who makes these GLP-1 weight loss drugs, an American company, charges patients in Germany and Sweden five to ten times less for the same drug.
That's un-American.
It's unpatriotic.
President Trump has talked about this.
He's not happy about it.
But we want mass deregulation at the FDA.
We want therapeutic innovation.
But these companies need to be incentivized to create products that promote life, that extend life, that reverse disease, not just get on this treadmill where we're giving kids antidepressants, Adderall, Ozippic, and a bunch of other drugs their entire life.
The system we have right now is corporate capture.
And it's going to be years to change.
Bending the System00:03:21
But what Bobby Kennedy and President Trump are going to do, and Casey, when she's confirmed, is going to communicate better than anyone in the country, is we need to get common sense, quick wins, one after the next, to start bending the system in a different direction.
Yeah, we've already seen that.
Robert Kennedy has hit the ground running his announcement yesterday that he was going to get back to the bottom of this geoengineering, what some people call chemtrails.
They used to call us nuts, crazy, when we talked about this.
But I'm sorry, there are toxins that are being sprayed into the air.
We need to get to the bottom of who is doing it and why.
I admire his courage, and I think that Dr. Casey Means is going to be a great addition.
Talk about your book for one second because it really did change my life.
Your book, Good Energy, The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health.
Folks, if you haven't read this book, I strongly recommend it to you.
As I say, it was given to me before I had ever heard of Callie or Casey Means.
It was given to me by Susie Wiles, who told me she swore by it.
It really has changed the way that I eat and the way I live.
Tell us what the most important thing in the book is.
Something Casey is going to talk about, and I think even more than any policy, Bobby Kennedy and Casey and the team at the HHS is going to talk to Americans about is that it's simple, Roger.
Right now, there are billions of dollars spent on nutrition research, huge bureaucracies on nutrition.
We just need to eat more whole food made by American farmers.
Right now, a child eats 70% of their diet ultra-processed food.
If they can just put 80% whole food on their plate, whether they're a vegan or a carnivore, just stick to whole food.
If schools, you know, the school lunches the federal government pays for gets more to whole food made by American farmers, that's a huge win.
We're more sedentary, Roger, than every other country.
You're going to see President Trump and Bobby Kennedy reinvigorate the Presidential Fitness Commission.
We're going to get kids moving again.
Kids spend less than an hour outside.
I mean, these are basic things that our institutions are letting people down.
And, you know, we're going to have common sense.
The greatest threats to pharma right now and the greatest way to compel that institution to create products that actually promote life is to get kids healthy, is to have a meeting whole food made by American farmers.
So Casey's not going to be putting out all these press releases, you know, with complications.
She's going to be steering Americans to the fact that health is simple and it's our patriotic duty to have healthy kids, to serve them good food.
And that's going to transform the country.
Right now, 77% of military-aged youth aren't eligible to join the military because of mental health issues or chronic disease issues.
She's going to drive that number down.
And a lot of this is communication and just rallying the country to this cause, which is happening.
You see this right now with Bobby Kennedy.
So that's what history is going to look back on the Trump administration on.
In 50 years, we're going to look at chronic disease rates.
They're going to be at an all-time high this year.
I mean this, Roger, because I think they're already, you know, you've seen them start to come down.
This will be the highest year we've ever had in history of chronic disease.
It's going to start going down, and that's going to be because of President Trump.
All right, we have to leave it there.
Transforming Health Through Education00:00:43
I want to thank my guest, Callie Means, for joining us today in the Stone Zone.
Whatever you do, folks, don't touch that dial because, well, we'll be right back.
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