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Aug. 1, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
58:52
“THEY’RE CRIMINAL!” | Ex-Coke Whistleblower EXPOSES Big Food & Pharma - Stay Free #180
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So, so
so so
so In this video, we're going to...
In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello there, you Awakening Wonders!
Thanks for joining me today.
If you're one of the 6.5 million people watching this on YouTube right now, there's a link in the description.
Sneak over to Rumble, home of free speech, because you are gonna love today's show.
Kali Means, since he came on our show, I know some of you have seen him on Tucker, let me know in the chat where you saw him first, has made such an incredible impact on our show.
He's been on the inside of Big Food and Big Pharma, and he knows what they're keeping in their bowels.
He helped write the policies and plans that have enabled them to co-opt our systems and implement corruption, avoid proper regulation and profit from sickness.
He believes that sickness is being perpetuated as an industry and is now able to expose those practices plainly.
We spoke at Community Festival, my festival, you've got to come next time.
And we covered a variety of very important topics, including the reasons behind RFK's surge in the polls, how nutritional foods have been replaced by poison, and how the fear of death was weaponised throughout the pandemic period.
This is a fantastic conversation, you're gonna love it.
With me now on Stay Free From Community is Callie Means, founder of TruMed.
Thank you for joining me, Callie Means.
It's been an amazing weekend.
It's been amazing, and we've had such a positive response to your content, both here at Community but also on our channel on Rumble.
People love the way you describe the problems that we face in the food industry, the way that nutrition has been replaced with poison, The way that money has infiltrated the system to the degree that it's very difficult to get the truth out here.
And here we are at a time that feels like we're surrounded by an immersive crisis, and yet there is some hope in the candidacy with my future pull-up opponent.
We're doing a pull-up competition.
Yeah, no, don't look at my biceps!
I've got no chance.
I've got no chance, Callie, is the answer.
I'm talking, of course, about RFK.
What does his emergence as a candidate tell us?
What challenges will he face?
And what is so significant and important to you about RFK and him standing, Callie?
So being here with thousands of people, thousands of people who follow you, Russell, something's very heavy in the air.
And I think it's that we're coming off of the biggest public policy mistake of our lifetimes.
And we haven't really grappled with that.
I mean, the healthcare system has led us down to a historical degree.
We had a pandemic that essentially only killed people who are metabolically unhealthy, people that didn't eat well, people that didn't exercise.
And in response to that, we closed down gyms but kept the bars open.
We told kids to wear masks and stay inside for two years, to the point where 25% of children, according to U.S.
and EU health authorities, contemplated suicide during COVID.
And we spent every second of the government and media microphone talking about a pharmaceutical intervention when we could have had an international conversation about being better, about putting better food in our bodies, about exercising, about looking at the sunlight, these positive habits that would have prevented COVID deaths and also 80% of the other cause of death in the developed world.
We have missed that opportunity.
Pharma companies and the healthcare industry have completely let us down and now we're being asked to trust them.
Merck and GlaxoSmithKline, the two largest pharmaceutical makers, have paid billions of dollars of criminal penalties in the last decade.
Both of those companies have been found liable, criminally liable, for lying about their drugs to patients, leading to deaths of thousands of patients, and paying off doctors.
Those two companies.
May I just ask, is that outside of the pandemic, and is it, as you say, that's actually a criminal finding?
You can move that however you're comfortable, by the way.
Are those actually criminal findings, or are they out-of-court settlements, Callie?
So actually, there's been some criminal liabilities that were out of court, but criminal admission of guilt for Pfizer, billions of dollars of fines for Merck, for GlaxoSmithKline.
These companies that may very well create some life-saving drugs, but have literally, as RFK has said, are criminal enterprises.
So after letting us down systematically during COVID, which I don't think we're still fully have grappled with as a society.
What do you mean by that?
Why do you think we've not grappled with it?
We told everyone to stay inside in fear.
This was a test run.
This was a test run of making everyone wear masks, of making kids stay home, of not questioning the science, of literally government, media, and technology companies essentially outlawing any questioning of science, as they call it.
Which was actually questioning these pharmaceutical companies that have been found criminally liable for misleading and killing patients, but because they give five times more money than the oil industry, more money than any other industry to government, because they spend 50%, and I helped steer this, but 50% of news funding comes from pharma, they completely co-opted The both the government and the news sources to make it that the media instead of asking questions, asking questions why it's whether it's a smart idea to lock kids inside and not have them go to school, whether asking questions of, you know, is the fact that we have a 50% diabetes rate connected to the fact that only metabolic and healthy people are dying of COVID.
They weren't curious about that.
They were a referee.
They were the hall monitor to make sure nobody questioned the pharmaceutical solution.
I think you're actually onto something here, Callie.
You may look like a nerd superman, but I think actually you're describing exactly what happened.
You said in one of our previous conversations that the money that these industries, whether it's Big Food, but in particular Big Pharma, spend on advertising is not actually to reach a market and an audience, but it's actually to control the information and data.
Will you tell us a little bit more about that, but also how it pertains to the candidacy of my pull-up opponent, RFK?
Yes, so I think we just have to, we've been gaslighted to just not use common sense.
If an entity receives 55% of their entire funding to keep their lights on and employ their folks, that's going to impact their decision making, right?
If the biggest advertisers on social media companies are food companies, pharma companies, things like that, Again, and I just want to hit this point home, 55% of news funding in the United States comes from one industry, from pharma, right?
This is going to impact the coverage, and working for pharma companies early in my career, I just cannot make this point strongly enough, and I don't think people fully understand it.
Is that the reason pharma companies give so much in advertising dollars is not to impact customers.
When you see those goofy pharma ads in the US, you know, people dancing around, it's always like, well, no, it's not to impact you and me.
It's to buy the news.
So we had a situation, and let's just, again, let's just set the table and tie it to RFK.
And I'll just set the table again.
We had a pandemic with the worst policy response, a pharma-centric policy response when it was really a metabolic condition.
We have 80% of the American people overweight or obese.
Rates of autism, allergies, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, every disease is going up all at once at the same time, as we're spending more to treat them with pharmaceutical drugs.
Oh my goodness.
This is all happening.
Drink your coffee in that case.
Do I need to get more wired here?
Yeah, you're coming across as lacking passion.
And slowly.
That's good, that's good.
It's amazing what you're saying, mate, because even the stuff, like, listen, everything you want to say, you are going to say, and I'm going to hear it, so don't worry about that.
That's why I'm loading you up with caffeine, baby.
Get it down you.
Because what's really interesting to observe in, let's say, the mainstream media news cycle, in the mainstream media news cycle, what we're seeing is, like, the slow admission that the distancing laws were arbitrary.
That's mainstream news.
You can say that on YouTube.
We're witnessing Chris Whitty, he's the UK expert, the scientific expert in the UK, say that lockdowns were a political decision.
This is in an inquiry in the UK, this is public information.
That the lockdowns were not a scientific decision, but a political one.
What we witnessed, and I think this really plays into your area of expertise, and indeed the endeavours of RFK, ...is an attempt to collapse dogma into science, perhaps in the same way that religious dogma used to be collapsed into the way that society was ordered.
It's extraordinary to experience that, isn't it?
Do you think, then, that what's being admitted to in the mainstream is just the half of it?
Do you think there's much more to be admitted and revealed?
It's the biggest issue in the world, right?
We're debating part, you know, page 300 of Medicare Part D in the United States, these arcane healthcare legislations.
We're getting sicker.
As we've talked about, we are being poisoned by a food supply that's 70% ultra-processed food.
In the U.S., we have thousands of chemicals that are on our food that are illegal in every other country, loaded with glyphosate, which is a neurotoxin.
That's causing damage to our kids' cells where, again, where 20% of kids now have fatty liver disease, where 40% of high school seniors qualify as having a mental health disorder.
We have devastation happening to our children, all because of a similar reason.
And there's very limited curiosity about that.
There's no questioning about that.
You're anti-science.
You're a wacko.
So I think what's happening Let me just make one point on what the strategy is, what the strategy I saw is.
The strategy very clearly among interests like pharma and food is not to debate ideas but to attack the question itself.
So if you've noticed there's been a wider and wider aperture of what we're not even allowed, not even to have an idea, we're not even allowed to ask a question.
So I think what's resonating about RFK is vaccines Uh, you know, wider than the COVID vaccine.
Vaccines probably have done a lot of good, but why are we being hall-monitored from even asking a question of why vaccines basically that are mandated throughout the EU and the US have gone from 20 15 years ago now a six-year-old is basically required to get 71 shots that by their own admission of the vaccine makers The purpose of the vaccine is to irreparably change their immune system 71 shots made by literally just factually speaking companies that are criminal enterprises that have paid more criminal penalties than any company in the history of the world
That is, maybe vaccines are fine.
I think they probably are for the most part.
But why the hell, especially after all we've seen with COVID, are we, our parents, our parents are considered anti-science.
They are reprimanded at the pediatrician's office for even asking a question.
I think that's one thing RFK is tapping into.
Yeah, it's very curious, Callie, because part of the discrediting and mainstream media attacks that Bobby, my friend, is receiving, RFK is receiving, is in no small part as a result of his stance currently and previous stance on vaccine.
This is on vaccine and vaccine issues.
This is a subject people really do not want Publicly discussed.
And it's interesting and valuable to hear that you believe, in the most part, many vaccines may be effective.
And I've heard RFK say the same thing also.
So what exactly are you driving at, mate?
Why do you think that you're not allowed to ask these questions if you're saying that the vaccines themselves are healthy?
If RFK, in significant part, are healthy?
What is it that you're actually saying?
What is being masked?
What is being controlled?
what is being curtailed? Well I think you should obviously be extremely skeptical
when somebody's trying to restrict speech or even questioning of something.
I mean that's just, history teaches us that. There's never been a side that's
systematically trying to prevent speech on a societally important issue that's
So I think that immediately, you know, in Europe and in the U.S.
where we value free speech should perk our ears up a little bit.
Why?
The argument is very simple on the vaccines.
It's that this is such an important institution that we are too stupid to ask questions because it'll confuse people if we even have any nuance.
That's literally the verbatim argument that the health authorities give.
Dr. Fauci has said that, essentially.
That we're too stupid to even have a nuanced debate.
And this is a battle.
This is a battle that you're at the forefront of, and Barry Weiss, and Joe Rogan, and many... I think it is, not to puff you up too much, but this is a historical moment where there's a fight right now.
Because these large industries, tech, pharma, pharma's the biggest spinner of them all, is trying to police the debate and not even have questions.
I'll take it one other somewhat hot topic, but I think it's probably very likely that, you know, some trans children might need some interventions.
But we should absolutely be able to talk about it without being called transphobes,
of whether this is wise that we're doling out millions of puberty blockers in the United States.
But that debate, and I'll tell you, this is the exact playbook I saw,
there's billions of dollars on the line for pharma.
And pharma companies, large pharma companies, are donating millions to civil rights groups and gay rights
groups to explicitly call anyone who even asks a question homophobic and transphobic.
So when you shut down the debate, it protects their power, but it should perk our ears up.
And we should be able to talk about these kinds of things.
Of course you should be able to talk about everything.
There's several subjects here that are beginning to align and coalesce, Callie, and I want to make sure that we cover them all.
One is that we are being treated as children by the corporate state partnership.
It's become a didactic, pedagogical relationship where we are instructed and informed and we are not allowed to ask questions.
Even children at school have a period where they're allowed to ask questions.
As long as we put their hands up nicely, you are allowed to legitimately ask questions.
That's interesting and it's frightening.
When we have a figure with some significant heft, like RFK, appear in this space, they're being shut down and closed down.
When berserker figures, who I know a lot of our audience love, like Trump, emerge, they're shut down for being too right-wing.
RFK is too, well, not left-wing, but too wacko and too conspiratorial.
As you say, the aperture for accepted discussion is increasingly being closed down.
And I recognize that this, the issue around, because I believe in freedom and my belief in individual freedom is absolute.
Therefore it encompasses all the entire spectrum.
If people, people with regard to their identity, their gender, absolute freedom.
I feel that it's no one else's business and everybody should be welcomed and celebrated and this is a mutual relationship that we afford one another.
So I'm completely happy with that.
This infantilization, this disempowerment is most interesting.
It's most interesting.
Everyone is being spoken to as if they are children.
And how are our children actually being treated when it comes to food and when it comes to pharma?
What emergent trends have you observed, Callie, that are significant?
So we've been talking a lot this weekend.
A lot of people have been coming up to me, it's like, you know, we need to throw people in jail.
You know, everyone at pharma companies, the healthcare industry, what's happening to our kids is criminal.
And I've been thinking a lot about the motivations, because kids are getting slaughtered and we can go into that, but the motivations.
I think the problem with the system, or really the genius of the system, is that it takes good people.
You know, healthcare is the most employed industry in the United States.
Most doctors get in for the right reasons.
Most pharma researchers get in for the right reasons.
It takes good people and all of them have plausible deniability.
All of them are treating patients one-on-one, creating, you know, doing research, running the pharma company, whatever.
Nobody has any culpability in asking why everyone's getting sick.
And this invisible hand of the largest industry in Europe and the United States, healthcare, has produced incentives where this industry makes more money when somebody is sicker for longer periods of time.
And we've had type 2 diabetes.
It used to be called early onset diabetes when you got it below like 40.
They've dropped early onset.
Now 30% of new diabetes cases are among teenagers.
Now Alzheimer's is dramatically getting younger and younger and younger.
They're gonna drop their early onset Alzheimer's label because Alzheimer's is later stage diabetes.
So everything's going younger and younger.
Again, I always talk about this diabetes statistic with kids.
That's important, I didn't understand.
Are you saying that there's a direct corollary between diabetes and Alzheimer's?
You're saying it's the same condition?
Alzheimer's is called now type 3 diabetes.
Why?
Alzheimer's is a metabolic condition of the brain.
If you have normal metabolic health, if you have normal fasting glucose levels, normal cholesterol levels, normal blood pressure, the biomarkers of metabolic health, you have an almost 0% chance of having Alzheimer's and those biomarkers are under control.
There's very few people with Alzheimer's that don't have prediabetes or diabetes.
Diabetes is a very misunderstood topic.
I've talked to Harvard doctors who treat diabetes that don't even understand how it's caused.
Diabetes is really the underpinning of a lot of other conditions.
Diabetes is blood sugar dysregulation, which is cellular dysregulation.
Glucose, which is a key energy source for our cells, can come from our bodies.
it doesn't even need to come from food.
As we've ramped sugar up, sugar intake up 100x in 100 years, you know, had government guidelines
in the food pyramid in the 1990s, which were transferred to Europe,
saying that we should eat more carbs, less, you know, meat, less healthy fats, things like that.
That has wreaked havoc on our metabolic health.
So our organs are nothing more than cells.
And when diabetes is cellular dysregulation, as our cells are dysregulating,
that impacts, you know, liver failure.
That impacts our heart, right, which is heart disease.
It impacts our brain, which turns into depression and other mental health symptoms.
Metabolic health is the underpinning, and yes, Alzheimer's is highly tied to that.
But as I've talked about here at the conference, when my sister graduated from Stanford Med School, she chose between 42 subspecialties.
A doctor, when they graduate, chooses between... We have aggregated the body into 42 parts.
My sister became a head and neck surgeon, and then she would do a fellowship to do a smaller part of the face.
Her mentor had a fellowship and devoted his entire life to one square millimeter of the
body.
That's advancement in medicine and it's very profitable.
But you can imagine, let's talk about a kid, right?
And let's talk about tying it back to kids, why it's so profitable to get people on the
chronic disease bandwagon.
If a kid is overweight, which 50% of teens are right now, and they're told no problem,
take Ozempic, which we've talked about, a drug, and they keep eating bad food, they're
going to inevitably have high blood pressure, need a statin.
They're going to have high fasting glucose, need metformin.
They're going to be on this treadmill as they keep putting bad food into their bodies.
It's very simple.
Keep not moving, being sedentary, but the drugs are moral hazards and they're telling
the kid this is doing something, but it's not.
That's why as we prescribe more drugs, all disease rates are going up.
It's amazing.
sort of self-sustaining system. It's sort of miraculous.
Yeah, it's amazing. It's very impressive. No, it's very impressive.
It's gone out of hand though, hasn't it? It's plainly gone out of hand.
We've lost our way.
In a sense, you see that the, in a way what has happened is we've reached
almost immersive total commodification, where the all that remains is that
you're just the sentient blob that you can patch stuff onto, that you can
extract energy from, that you can punch drugs into. When you say, and I was
struck by this when you said it in our conversation yesterday here at
community, that we had, and you said it just then again, you're actually
getting a bit repetitive.
I'm not mucking about.
I'm not mucking about.
I can't get my head around, Callie, but we eat a hundred times more sugar now than we're evolved to.
In this baffling, confusing space where we try to mesh together respect for people's traditions, respect for progressivism, necessary respect for diversity in all of diversity's forms, whether that's traditional or newly emergent and newly described, if not newly emergent.
Some of the things that I reach towards are, how did human beings live for a long, long while?
And diet is one of the ways that we can kind of track that and observe it.
Human beings, their diets would have been determined by geography and environment.
Human beings that lived in this place would have eaten these foods.
It's plain and well understood that we would not have encountered sugar except for in fruit, and we would have encountered it in most cases, seldom and rarely.
So when our food concentrates these highly addictive substances, these refined and extracted highly addictive substances, like sugar, like seed oils, which of course you've spoken about lucidly and extensively before, I recognize that we have, and this is important to me as an addict, a sort of a model of addiction.
We stare at screens that they have evolved to make highly addictive in the way we interact with them, and make the content rewarding and addictive in a way that we're not evolved to appreciate or control the way that it affects our dopamine levels, for example.
When it comes to diet, we are not evolved to deal with sugar in this degree.
I say this as a parent.
I'm trying my best with my kids, man.
You know, when it gets too much, I'm like, screen, sugar.
You know, like that's how one of the... it's become like a defa... and I'm a person that is working about as hard as I can to awaken.
So what do we do when we're living essentially outside of our nature, outside of our own evolutionary trajectory?
There's a centrifugal institutional force to train.
At Stanford Med School, they told my sister day one that patients are lazy.
That we stand at the hospital with our prescription pad and our scalpel to help this lazy American population that's going to eat their Big Macs and drink their Cokes.
They have engendered into the medical system this cynicism about the American people.
What I think is actually happening is we have a drug problem.
I think we've totally been gaslighted over how even a drug is defined.
If you look at the biggest killing drugs, sugar is by far number one.
Sugar counts by all of the definitions as a drug.
If you show a brain scan of a child that just chugged a Coke and somebody on another illicit
drug, obviously there's ranges of the degree, but the areas of the brain that light up are
the exact same.
Sugar meets every definition of a drug, and if you tie just sodas, they tie that to 200,000
needless deaths a year, just sodas.
This is a totally new invention, just really in the past 60 years that's been popularized,
of sugar liquefied that goes straight to the bloodstream.
You'd have to eat like 30 oranges to get the amount of sugar in one Coke that you can drink
in one minute, and the oranges have fiber that blunt the glucose impact.
So these are real weapons of mass destruction that go directly.
So you can imagine the cells again use glucose for energy.
It's bombarding those cells to an evolutionary unprecedented degree.
With the energy source.
And it pumps out.
That's why our blood sugar levels are going up.
Because the glucose should be used by the mitochondria actually to burn and produce energy.
But it's saying too much, too much.
And that's what blood sugar represents.
That's why blood sugar diabetes represents an overall issue.
Because it represents that we have too much energy.
And that energy turns to fat.
So that's what's happening.
So yeah, it's been weaponized.
It's interesting because when you said that about the deluge of glucose, I felt like the deluge of information, and the amount, the amount, the sort of, uh, the diluvian measure, uh, amount of information that we're swamped with, flooded with, that was the image that I had.
We're flooded without, we're flooded within.
But I get the impression from speaking with you, Callie, that you're not a regulation guy, that you're not like, well that's why the state needs to come in and ban sugar, and that's why Coke shouldn't be sold, and that's why all McDonald's should be shut shut down, get Ronald McDonald, ba-bam, shoot him in the
face.
I don't feel like that's what you're saying.
What are you, what do we, you know, what do we do now, mate, that you have this access?
Of course, in case you don't know this before, of course, Cali worked in the food industry,
and earlier on you referred to it, you said something like, almost referred to almost
a strategy that you said that you started to, that you dreamed up.
So what I've been talking with you before is, you know, my baptism in this more than
a decade ago was around the food stamp debate where still to this day on our biggest program
for lower income nutrition subsidence, 10% of that goes to Coke in the United States.
Now that's up for debate right now to be renewed for another five years.
The food stamp program?
Yeah.
Because when you mentioned this yesterday, right, this is what I hear as a good, as a person that's very sympathetic to people that are on welfare.
I've received welfare numerous times in my life.
I was a kid that got free school dinners at school.
I signed on, lived on welfare for a while.
My mum, single mother benefits and stuff like that.
So when I hear arguments around diminishing welfare, what I hear is an attack on the poorest, most vulnerable people.
So what are you describing?
So I am not a fan of regulation, but I think actually this anti-regulation conservative principles,
and I consider myself a libertarian, have been kind of bastardized.
I think what happens is you have food companies lobbying tens of millions of dollars
to have government programs go to subsidize things like soda, which is the number one item on food stamps,
and then it's crying foul if people ask whether that's a smart idea of where to use government money
for a government nutrition program.
It is criminal to have a single mom who's dependent on a government program for her child's nutrition.
She's assuming there's at least some sanity in that program.
But 70% of that program, we're the only country in the world.
In Europe, you're not allowed to buy soda, which is diabetes water, which is downstream
effects of trillions of dollars to the health budget.
It's just insanity.
And that's not taking something away from- What do you do then?
You say, buy food stamps, then suddenly hungry children.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
What do we do?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
We should, no.
The highest leverage, this is what I'm more, and Marco Rubio on the right, Cory Booker
on the left, they're talking about this.
This is a bipartisan issue.
No, no.
We should be the biggest, the greatest thing we can do when we fund that soda for lower
income kids.
We're signing our own bankruptcy as a country.
We talk about the military-industrial complex, we talk about all of these issues.
We are spending two times more on diabetes management in the United States budget than the Defense Department.
No!
No!
You're spending more money on diabetes!
Healthcare is what is bankrupting the country.
It's multiples more than the Defense Department.
The U.S.
experiment will end.
And the main, if it does, if the U.S.
experiment ends, it's not going to be because of the military issues.
It's not going to be because of these social issues we're talking about.
It's going to be because we let our population get sicker, fatter, more depressed, more infertile, while bankrupting the country.
It's 20% of our GDP right now, and it's the fastest growing industry in the United States.
So it's going to be 40% of our GDP in about 15 years.
And most of that's coming from the government.
The government's fighting most of that bill.
So we're actually subsidizing that destruction. Right. It's all and again, I just want to
hammer this home. 85% of health care costs are tied to preventable metabolic conditions.
You could wipe out heart disease and diabetes, which are two of the largest killers tomorrow
if you change the food. Go on. How? How would you do it?
I'll tell you right now.
So on a program like Food Stamps, we need to stop funding the food that's leading to our destruction.
So no, no, absolutely.
And this is bipartisan.
We don't want to end Food Stamps.
We should, on a government nutrition program, be steering families to food that's nutritious.
Steering.
Where does this become regulating?
Because I think you're right.
If you're spending as a government $150 billion to help lower income folks get food, you should ensure that that is whole food.
It's just that simple.
You should not be subsidizing cigarettes.
You shouldn't be subsidizing marijuana.
Because what that starts to sound like is excessive regulation for the poorest, vulnerable people, but not the regulation that's necessary for the corporations that are creating this food.
Now, I'm down for making sure that people get supported and eat healthy food.
That is the aim.
But one of the challenges, I think, with libertarianism, and this is a big topic, man, If the problem here is the billions Pfizer are spending on advertising, if the problem is Big Food's ability to capture and control a market and control information, where does the regulation happen?
Some poor cow bringing up three kids, you know, have an apple.
You know what I mean?
It can't be that.
Well, I'd say as a high level, I hear you, but I'd say as a high level, we do through food stamps, through subsidies, through federal lunch programs, which are totally bought off by food companies that go to really unnutritious meals.
We subsidize ultra processed food to the tune of over $100 billion per year.
So I would just say at a high level, don't subsidize ultra processed food.
And I do think in a free market, if you actually have rational, not subsidizing poison and subsidized healthy food, you would have companies come in and try to provide better options.
But the Food Stamps SNAP program does pervert the market to where you talk about these food deserts and no nutritious options.
That's because the main program for lower-income communities is all going to highly addictive processed food.
So I think at a high level, I would say if people want to do one thing,
it's call your member of Congress and say, you know, we really need to have food stamps be a
nutritious program.
I think that's important.
But we subsidize it.
And then RFK's talked about this, but there's a couple quick things we could do.
The executive order could happen tomorrow to make the US not the only country in the world that
allows these pharmaceutical ads.
Again, they're the number one ad spender right now, and it's buying the news.
Only New Zealand allows that.
European countries don't allow that.
That could be struck in tomorrow.
Why isn't Joe Biden doing that?
I don't know.
What could you do?
You could say no pharma ads.
No pharma ads.
You could say pharma's not allowed to do advertising.
That's another good rule.
You could say pharma's not allowed.
And then the main issue is...
Is that the USDA right now, again, says 10% sugar.
So when I was working for the food and pharma companies, we would have a donation strategy to academics.
And the key thing to understand is that these panels that make nutrition guidelines, these panels that approve drugs, aren't individual employees at the NIH or other government bureaucracies.
They're outside experts.
In the case of the nutrition guidelines, which the U.S.
requires the EU to accept as a matter of research, grant funding, partnerships, 95% of the people that make the nutrition guidelines are directly paid.
Directly paid by food companies, by sugar companies, and by pharma companies.
So you have a 95%.
Dr. Fatima Cody-Stanford, who's the doctor we've talked about before from Harvard, who says obesity is a brain disease and genetic, she is on the guideline committee.
of what our children should be eating, of the preeminent nutrition guidelines.
So the US can also just say kids shouldn't eat sugar. If the US said that, if the guidelines
actually said that, there wouldn't be, there would be more stigma to serving kids sugar.
Do you know one of the miracles of our age, the miracle is the information that gets amplified
and the information that gets obscured. You know, some information you can tell that they're just
like, turn up this information.
What about the rights of the individual?
What about people can be who they want to be?
Rank that up.
Good information.
Information that advertising is completely funded by Big Pharma.
Turn that shit down.
That these expert confederations are receiving their information by paid for experts.
That's all turned down.
It's like almost white noise.
The reason I was keen for you to meet Vandana Shiva, who's also been appearing here at Community Festival, was because when you're talking about the necessity for whole food to be eaten, and she's talking about the necessity for farmers to have control of the land, you recognize that in Confederacy, In alliance, in cooperation, we have a chance.
But the, let's call it them for simplicity's sake, the institutional elites that are in both the corporate and state spaces, that are systemic rather than individual personalities, let's say gracefully, they are Cooperating in order to... The agriculture is being shut down.
Farmers aren't able to farm anymore.
Synthetic food is being created.
The food companies are ensuring that you don't have access to the correct data.
The Heart Federation accept money from big food.
Diabetes, they accept money from big food.
So the people that are giving you advice on what food to eat if you have cancer, diabetes or heart disease, accept money from people that make food that's bad for you.
They can't outright say... You're sort of saying, If tomorrow we just went, only eat locally grown food, don't worry about the vegan arguments, even though I'm a vegan, eat healthy food that's, you know, that's grazed or grown near where you are, wherever possible.
The first challenges that people face there are like, oh no, shit, that breaks a lot of monolithic models down.
Of course it presents a lot of challenges to change the agriculture.
You know, the thing is, I suppose, is that we have a big ideological conversation to have, Callie, because I agree with you on the libertarian... The aspect of libertarianism I'm 100% on.
Individual freedom.
Individual freedom.
The challenge that we have is, we as individuals cannot confront this massive... So it obviously has to be consensual, democratic opposition to globalization.
Without consensual, democratic opposition to globalization, we are fucked.
Double-fucked fast, I think.
From the food, agriculture, pharma, globalism, culture, censorship, surveillance.
It's coming at us at every single angle.
So that's why one of the things we emphasize here is get over your culture arguments really, really quickly.
Really quickly.
If you hate Trump voters, just go, oh, fucking, I don't care about it.
If you hate people because they're well into trans issues, drop that shit.
Drop it now.
Drop it.
Unless someone's directly making you vote for Trump or wanting to do your genitals.
Drop it!
Drop it!
Unless it's you, drop it!
Yeah, man.
But look, there's a lot there.
There's so much.
Because you bring such good information, and because you retain information so well, and you communicate so brilliantly, almost every sentence you talk about could have its own little sidebar or little drop-down.
But what I want to ask you now, because I know it's important to you, is the way that you were personally impacted by the loss of your mother during the coronavirus.
era and how you bring that together mate with what you're saying about these are
metabolic deaths and how that personally fueled your mission and purpose
as well as that of both your father and your sister. I know you have a lot of love for
and a lot of respect for and you call her an inspiration and stuff so
tell us about that. So I think this is the classic American story but
my mom, I was born at 12 pounds and the doctors were like okay
Too big. Yeah, the doctors were like high-fiving her, great job.
Then she had trouble losing weight after I was born. It's like oh that's normal
50 percent of Americans are overweight. Then she got a blood test,
elevated cholesterol, statin prescription.
A couple years later, elevated blood glucose level, metformin, high blood pressure.
So she was on, by the time she was 70, five drugs and was called healthy by her doctors.
That's normal.
There's nine prescriptions per American per year in the United States.
The average American sees 19 doctors of different specialties before they die.
So it was all these rites of passage, all these normal things.
And of course my big birth was a sign of metabolic dysfunction.
And then during the COVID era, she was taking a hike with my dad, had a pain in her stomach, went to get a scan, stage four pancreatic cancer.
And we talked to the oncologist and the oncologist said, we need to do immediate interventions right now.
And my sister, who's a surgeon trained at Stanford, said, wait a minute, what is this going to do?
What are these interventions going to do?
What's our chances?
30% it was going to extend her life three weeks, 30% neutral, 30% it would actually harm her.
And to the protest of the hospital, we took her home, and the 12 days that we spent with her as she died, it was only 12 days, was the most impactful of my life.
The final moment, we carried her to the beach, which she loved in Northern California, and she embraced my dad, and she said, life is so beautiful, and looked over the ocean, and then literally lost consciousness.
Yeah.
And that would have been taken, A, if we listened to the doctors who were jumping into action once there was something to treat.
Those interventions would have made millions of dollars.
The system jumped when she had the cancer, when the car had already crashed.
There was no warning sign, no warning sign over 40 years of all of these rites of passage for an average person, right?
The statin, the metformin, all these biomarkers that the doctor kind of throws a pill at.
Those were warning signs of the underlying metabolic dysfunction.
So that's, that's why I'm in this fight.
My sister and I really galvanized to, we need to see symptoms as gifts.
We need to have curiosity about the interconnectedness of our body.
Yes.
And the doctors at Stanford, the lead oncologists in the world, were saying it was a tough break, unlucky, that my mom got pancreatic cancer.
No, pancreatic cancer, many forms of cancer, almost any disease you can think of, is highly tied to these warning signs you're inevitably facing.
And that's the paradigm we have to shift.
And I'll just say real quick, you know, what to do.
And it is daunting thinking about.
But I would say, and you're pushing this so hard, let's not put ourselves in this left-right, you know, do you support industry, do you not?
We're put in these boxes almost by, I think, the powers that be.
We have to be critically thinking.
When it comes to chronic conditions, the medical system does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
We deserve to ask our own questions.
We know our bodies better.
We are the only animal, us and animals we've domesticated, that have chronic metabolic dysfunction.
There's not chronic rates of cancer and diabetes in wild animals.
A wolf has a 1% cancer rate.
A dog that we've domesticated and feed processed crap and keep inside sedentary has a 50% cancer rate.
Amazing.
The studies are there.
There's your control group.
Yeah, that's what we took from my mom.
And I really do feel that gift that we got from ignoring the medical system in her last 12 days,
watching her really embrace us and embrace life and read hundreds of letters from people she's impacted,
it put into my sister and I this idea that if we can just use our small time here
to try to push this forward, it's got to be an individual awakening.
And that's going to lead to cultural and societal change, I'm guaranteed, if we can keep the free speech channels
open, which there is, I believe, historical level attack.
I think people are very fearful of the free speech that's happening, quite frankly.
It's very disruptive to large industries, so that's why we're in the fight.
Nice one, Kelly Means.
That was really, really beautifully articulated.
Excellent, excellent.
What a beautiful mission, what a beautiful purpose you've chosen.
I mean, you didn't talk about RFK enough.
But other than that, it was absolutely perfect.
That's why we need, obviously, figures that are willing to come to the mainstream and raise these issues, debate these issues, highlight these issues.
And thank God we have the diffuse media space that we currently have, where someone that's excluded from the mainstream, except to be smeared there, can still have a voice.
Kelly, thank you so much.
Thanks for that wonderful conversation.
Thanks for joining us on Stay Free with Russell Brand, live from Community.
Until next time, stay free.
Thanks for refusing Fox News.
I'm on the do.
No.
Here's the fucking news.
Are we on the brink of a psychedelics revolution where wellness and well-being are enhanced by medicines that have
been available in some cases for centuries?
Or is it just gonna be another big pharma con?
BLEH!
Where you can get more consciousness, apparently, is by using powerful psychedelic substances.
Tell us if you think this is a vital part of the future.
Tell us if, like Elon Musk and Sergey Brin, you believe that these medicines will enhance your consciousness, enhance your personal experience, and enhance our collective experience, or whether they will become commodified and controlled by the same big pharma interests that perhaps kept this technology down for a long while.
Let's see how the mainstream media are covering this topic.
Lots of people drink coffee before they go to work.
Of course, others, believe it or not, drop acid.
Can you imagine that?
I like to see a good bit of mainstream news.
Others just take acid.
It's illegal, so we're not endorsing it, but I don't know where we are anymore.
The world's changing.
It's illegal, but only on 5 Tonight, Kate Cogearan on the growing number of Bay Area professionals who say tiny doses of LSD give them the competitive edge they need.
How odd to see LSD and psychedelics more broadly which in a sense are essentially about dissolving the self and looking beyond egoic motivation and recognizing that your conditioning can be overcome.
To see that rebooted, rebolted and redirected and utilized towards gaining wealth, becoming more effective at work.
We've seen this many times.
Meditate so that you can be better at your job.
Do yoga.
So that you can be better at your job?
Everything is directed towards in order that you can fit into this system.
The problem with psychedelics is it's fundamentally about breaking systems and of course we must create new systems.
I'm not suggesting that we live in chaos or the type of anarchy that suggests a total lack of order.
I'm talking about the type of anarchy that suggests a lack of domination, freedom, Maximum amount of freedom.
When people awaken individually, perhaps because of psychedelic experiences, let me know if you've had any.
I've, in the past, had those type of experiences.
I'm in recovery now, so it's not something that I can get involved in.
But the idea that this will become commodified is an obvious one.
It's obvious that the kind of interests that are able to dominate media and big pharma will apply their existing methodology to a technology or medicine that could be utilized to truly change things.
San Francisco is still the center of the psychedelic universe, but those who now drop acid and why they do it might surprise you.
It's very small.
It's a very small amount.
They're not hippies, they're tech bros, artists, investors, even entrepreneurs.
I suppose what was exciting about the 1960s is the suggestion that culture and society could be reordered through innovation.
Of course, society continually evolves, but many of the innovations, psychological at least, that occurred during the 1960s have been colonized by the mainstream.
The spirit of we can do what we want in the 60s, certainly by the 1980s, has become I can do what I want.
As long as our perspective is individualistic, materialistic, and about commodity, commerce, and personal gain, real change will be difficult to achieve.
So psychedelics, if they are about personal growth in order that you can fit into existing systems, are, I would argue, pointless.
Psychedelics that we may change society in order to create something more harmonious, more beautiful, which of course means individual freedom, which of course Of course means freedom of speech, which of course means allowing people to be different.
That is the kind of revolution I'm interested in.
But obviously what that would quickly lead to is the observation and recognition that it's impossible for any of us to be free as long as there are powerful authoritarian forces that govern and control our lives, try as best they can to deny their own existence through their management and control of media spaces, big tech platforms, And often endless bureaucracy.
This will become observable if people continue to awaken through psychedelics.
On a personal note, as someone who's 20 years clean of recovery, I'm pretty irritated that now ketamine, MDMA and psilocybin are regarded as wellness.
Sort of things you could buy at a supplement shop now.
Like, oh I'm doing some wellness.
Wellness?
Didn't that used to be drugs?
They're taking a tiny dose, about a tenth of a normal dose, to be more productive and creative.
It's called microdosing.
People are finding that low-dose LSD permits their mind to be a little bit more expansive in terms of problem-solving.
So it's like, you can expand your mind enough to exist within the system and solve problems that are amenable to the system's goals.
But if you expand your mind to the point where you go, hey, but what about the whole system?
Why don't you retract back down again?
Yeah, but what's the point?
Who's this that's pushing my mind in?
The EU!
The IMF!
The WEF!
We're keeping you in there!
They will respect the law.
And yet at the same time, they're able to stay focused.
You can have a spiritual awakening, as long as your awakening doesn't make you a bad co-worker.
Veteran software engineer Kevin Herbert says LSD helped him solve some tough technical problems when he was working at Cisco.
Software engineering and hardware engineering Incredibly complex.
The idea that entrepreneurs and even geniuses have used psychedelics is not a new one.
I mean, in fact, that is the nature of psychedelics.
They give you access to parts of consciousness that are inaccessible in what we might call normal consciousness.
We all know that Steve Jobs had experiences with LSD.
It's pretty common knowledge that Elon Musk has experiences of this variety and having a different perspective on reality is part of the nature of innovation, part of the nature of genius.
But it's so typical of our time and our systems of domination that they would regulate this to keep you productive.
Essentially.
Let's give you a little bit of LSD.
Okay, wow, I guess I probably could... Oh yeah, I guess, look, I could make this spreadsheet a little simpler.
Let's give you a little bit more LSD.
What's the point of this spreadsheet?
I mean, why don't we all grow our own food and challenge these systems of domination?
Get back to your spreadsheet!
Sorry, boss!
Brad Burge is with MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
He says in 1966, when LSD was declared illegal, promising research abruptly stopped.
Wait a minute, this stuff's waking these kids up!
Cut the LSD!
Cut the LSD!
Oh, sorry.
I was taking life seriously.
But Professor James Fadiman got a glimpse.
We were quietly doing this research in Menlo Park.
In the 60s, Fadiman conducted pioneering psychedelic research when it was still legal.
He recruited volunteers, many in high tech, to take a moderate dose of LSD.
There were theoretical physicists.
There were chip designers.
Each volunteer brought to the session technical problems they could not solve.
But after dropping acid, success.
We had 48 problems, 44 solutions.
It's pretty amazing there are realms of your personal individual consciousness that are embargoed and foreclosed.
That you, as an individual, cannot take certain substances because the state deems them to be schedule this or schedule that.
It's ridiculous when you consider that what you are is an advanced tribalized ape and your consciousness is your own private domain.
It's only because we live in a highly regulated space, whether that's in terms of our consciousness, our speech, our actions, our economic role, that we even tolerate it at all, I suppose.
Well, there are a variety of methods to distribute the drug, but most commonly it's found diluted in liquid in dropper bottles.
But again, experts warn no one knows what dose is actually safe.
So be careful.
We're trying to look after you, okay?
So just do what we tell you.
Wait till it's got Pfizer on the bottle, and then you can have it all safe and FDA approved.
Always remember that one day all this drug monkey business will be legal.
They won't leave it to people like me.
Not when they finally figure out how much money there is to be made.
Elon Musk takes ketamine.
And that's the end of the news.
Good luck in that fight with Zuckerberg.
Send me location.
Sergey Brin sometimes enjoys magic mushrooms.
Executives at venture capital firm Founders Fund, known for its investments in SpaceX and Facebook, have thrown parties that include psychedelics.
Routine drug use has moved from an after-hours activity squarely into corporate culture, leaving boards and business leaders to wrestle with their responsibilities, and sometimes each other, in a cage if it's Zuckerberg and Musk, for a workforce that frequently uses.
Other vanguard are tech executives and employees who see psychedelics and similar substances, among them psilocybin, ketamine and LSD, as gateways to business breakthroughs.
Wow, it used to be a gateway drug to harder drugs, now it's... Here!
Don't you be smoking that marijuana!
Why not, then?
Oh, you might become a tech billionaire!
Screw you!
You don't know me!
There are millions of people microdosing psychedelics right now, said Kyle Goldfield, a former sales and marketing consultant in San Francisco, who informally counsels friends and colleagues across the tech world on calibrating the right small dose for maximum mindfulness.
It's the fastest path to opening your mind up and clearly seeing for yourself what's going on, said Goldfield.
In a sense, what we're interrogating is the vision of what society is and what society might be.
We're continually foreclosing possible futures as we yield power to centralised authoritarian systems, EU, NATO, the American government or various unelected
private or apparently globalist forces.
What awakening means at the level of the individual is you will start to question how society
could be different.
So obviously the only context that we're granted when it comes to psychedelics is this will
make you more effective within an existing system.
We don't want to start challenging whether the system itself could change.
We're all one!
We're all exactly the same!
And not only do I understand that now cerebrally, I feel it viscerally!
My job is to love and to serve!
Once people start thinking like that, it's very difficult to make them go to work for 12 hours a day to do something they're not enjoying.
The value of the psychedelic drug market...
Oh, Timothy Leary, your dream has come true.
Which includes companies engaging in research and trials to legalise the use, is expected to reach $11.8 billion by 2029, up from $4.9 billion in 2022, according to research firm Brand Essence.
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
Buy!
Buy!
Sell!
Sell!
Also, I don't like the name of that research, though.
I need my essence!
This is from Daniel Pinchbeck's Substack.
Over the last decade, the mainstreaming of psychedelics and the approaching legally regulated
use of these substances instigated a capitalist gold rush with hundreds of new companies forming,
including some like Compass Pathways and Atai Life Sciences, with market caps of billions
of dollars and the support of investors like Peter Thiel.
Hey Peter. And Christian Angermeier.
One focus of this initial search has been, somewhat surprisingly, ketamine, which already had medical uses.
I haven't met him yet.
No!
Not yet!
No!
It is now an approved treatment for depression and other mental health issues with clinics all over the US.
We encounter numerous paradoxes in the effort to fit the psychedelic experience into the framework of late-stage neoliberal capitalism, marked by excessive focus on personal healing and a fetishisation of the self while driving the whole planet off a cliff in a grey cloud of fuel exhaust.
I see this as connected to mindfulness becoming a movement that's just about personal growth and achieving more at work and the constant personal bureaucracies of Fitbits, measuring your own sleep, managing how many steps you've done each day, turning yourself in essentially into the manager of yourself.
How many calories have I eaten?
How many steps have I taken?
How am I sleeping?
Is it good enough sleep?
How's my social media sites doing?
How's my Facebook?
How's my Instagram?
It's just become like a little tiny corporation managing everything.
Of course I'm not being glib about the use of substances.
They are things that need to be respected and used cautiously and I'm certainly not recommending them or endorsing them in any way.
What I'm saying is it's interesting to see something that's clearly about expanding consciousness used within the framework of an already limited consciousness.
Indigenous medicine holders repeatedly express deep frustration at the co-option of their instruments for accessing the sacred within a particular context of tradition, culture and communion.
I don't blame them.
In Why the Psychedelic Renaissance is Just Colonialism by Another Name, Alnoor Lada and Rene Souza make many excellent points.
They write, In relation to the recent uptick of interest in psychedelics in the West, the current renaissance appears to be far from a deep intellectual and spiritual rebirth.
Remember that news report.
Is it a deep spiritual rebirth, or are they essentially saying, this helps me operate within the system?
Competitive edge.
Companies.
Competent.
More productive.
Grounded in something other than the survival instinct of Western modernity.
They want it to exist, but only in its current context.
They don't want to break down the context.
They don't want to break open the framework.
But how are we meaningfully going to change the world, whether that's personally or collectively, without challenging the structure itself?
That's why increased authoritarianism can never grant us real progress, because the system will always preserve itself above all else, and it wants us to continue squabbling and quarrelling within the framework that it's already predetermined.
As long as we're doing that, nothing's going to change.
Nothing meaningful.
As it is more akin to a reboot of modern society's failed attempt to reimagine and somewhat heal itself in the 1960s, while continuing to conveniently place the cost of its survival and continuity on other peoples and cultures elsewhere, i.e.
continued coloniality and exploitation as a sell for the existential woes of Western culture.
We're just moving pieces around on the board.
Oh, we can exploit the labour in that country, but that creates a crisis of labour in the United States or former European nations.
Oh no, what are we going to do?
Well, we've got AI coming out.
Brilliant, that's cool.
There's no actual revolution or progress, there's just continuing advancement of elite interest.
You could perhaps make an argument that that begins with agriculture, continues through industrialization, technology, and each advancement ensures at its heart that it preserves the interests of these elites.
Let me know if you agree in the comments.
Bye!
Tucked into the current notion of the psychedelic renaissance is the sense that it already knows where it wants to go.
More scale, more global distribution, more money, more people, more markets, more social impact.
Psychedelics are the new terra nullius, new uninhabited ground for the market to expand into and for human ingenuity to uncover.
Look at how the internet revolution went down.
First of all, it was Oh my god, we can do anything!
Napster!
Arab Spring!
Uh, actually, I think we're gonna bring in some new laws to control, uh, disinformation!
That's what we're gonna control!
Suddenly now, what has it become?
A new place for online Goliaths.
It's been totally colonized.
Google, Facebook, etc.
That's the way it operates.
Of course, similarly, with consciousness itself, the aim would be, if they could colonize the inside of your mind, they would.
And they're already beginning to.
And of course, ironically, we will need psychedelics to help us cope with the cascading collapses of crisis that have been created by the market system in the first place.
In his fantastic book, Mediated, Thomas de Zangocia calls this tendency of post-modern capitalism to seek out the authentic unknown, find a way to convert it to profit, then suck it dry and finally assimilate and abandon it, the blob.
The blob comes from all directions and no directions, he writes.
The media acts as the antibodies of the blob, first approaching, then anesthetising anything that might threaten hyper-mediated society with a truth it can't handle.
Consider this analysis from the perspective of what happened in the pandemic, what's happening in the current conflict, what happens with every story.
You were given information in a very particular way.
You are not allowed to have unmediated access to information or even experience.
You are invited to tread through your existence as if it were a series of pre-experienced tropes and cliches.
You're getting married.
It's a bit like Friends.
You're having your heart broken.
It's a bit like Friends.
You're dying.
It's not like we didn't really cover that in Friends.
Four weddings and a funeral.
Yeah, that'll do.
What must be covered is any event or personal deed that might challenge the blob with something like a limit.
Something the blob cannot absorb.
Something that could, in resistance or escape, become the one thing the omni-tolerant blob cannot allow.
Something outside it.
Something unmediated.
Something real.
Almost as if society and the structures that hang off the central establishment This is Pinchbeck.
I worry we might end up with a brave new world scenario in which some corporate marketed design of psychedelic or tactogen provides a shortcut to euphoria for the masses without inspiring a deeper collective confrontation with the prevailing system of exploitation and control.
Indeed!
If it is a psychedelic awakening brought to you by Pfizer or Johnson & Johnson, it's unlikely to challenge the system which frames their Weltanschauung and their entire economic raison d'etre.
In short, this system, be it media, governmental, Corporate or economic is unlikely to introduce methodologies that have stitched into it their own demise and their own demise is what we require.
Whether you are a left-wing person or a right person or an independent person or a person that just recognizes that all these labels float freely in a space that we ultimately are going to have to abandon if we're going to truly change the world.
What you will not be afforded is the opportunity to gain access to information that is unbiased and experience that is not contextualized ultimately by an agenda that they need you to believe in so they can continue to pursue it.
But that's just what I think!
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