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Mark Hyman, MD with Brianna Bella-Hyman, Food Fix Uncensored: Inside the Food Industry’s Biggest Cover-Ups
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health
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Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
I like them, but if it's just me wearing them, it feels stupid.
Why do you wear them?
I like it because it locks me in.
It just locks me in.
The only thing I hear is that person's voice.
I can't hear Jamie's chair moving.
I can't hear anything else.
And it just, like, makes me really, like, focused on the conversation only.
I have ADHD.
I had 11 siblings, and I have seven kids, so I can work.
I can focus.
No matter what?
No matter what.
It's a skill.
It's a thing to learn.
You know, if you're the person that can focus without distraction, you're a
good person to be in the job you're at.
Yeah.
What is it like?
So, since you've been appointed, I haven't talked to you on a podcast.
I know.
Yeah.
It's the best job I could ever have.
I feel like I was designed for the job, and I just have so much fun.
I mean, it's a target-rich environment, so there's so many ways that you can be
effective and improve people's lives every single day.
And part of that is because the agency was just such a mess.
You know, it wasn't doing healthcare, it was doing sick care, and just managing,
you know, all of these perverse incentives.
And have us spending $5 trillion a year on two to three times per capita when
any other nation spends, and we have the sickest population in the world.
We have the highest chronic disease burden in the world, and you were the best
at medicine in this country, but that's when people get sick.
You'd rather get sick here than any place in the world, but you're more likely
to be sick here than any place in the world.
And, you know, and then it was just a big political patronage operation, and it
still is.
And, you know, we're putting an end to that now.
I mean, the amount of fraud that goes through that place, we lose just in
Medicaid and Medicare $100 billion a year.
And it's all just this really, you know, shocking, blatant fraud that's become
industrialized.
I mean, there's foreign nations like Russia.
Everybody's heard of Somalia, but also Cuba, has this operation in Florida
where it's – they open up these little – they open up these P.O. boxes for
durable medical equipment.
It's like knee braces and wheelchairs.
And then they don't have any knee braces or wheelchairs, but they have patient
identification numbers.
So they just claimed to be shipping them to people.
And we found one hotel.
It had like 129 rooms, and everyone was a different company that was selling
durable medical equipment.
And we go in and shut them down, and they immediately go back to Cuba.
The whole thing is apparently run by the Cuban government, but Russia is doing
the same thing with hospices.
Where do they get the patient ID numbers?
They get – they can buy those numbers, you know, they – on the black market.
Really?
Yeah.
And Russia does the same thing in Los Angeles with hospice care.
So there's more hospice care in Los Angeles than the entire rest of the country
combined.
It's all fraudulent, and we're just pumping hundreds of millions of dollars
into these fraudulent operations.
The same thing that the Somalis did in Ethiopia.
A lot of that money was going back to Boko Harang and, you know, terror groups
over there.
But they were – it was – a lot of it was based – the Medicare stuff is
different, and we're able to – we're going to be able to catch almost all of
that now.
Because we're using AI to do it.
It was never used before.
There was no effort at program integrity.
In fact, the Biden administration deliberately, purposely ordered them – they
ended the program integrity office.
So they went from hundreds of people to six people.
And they said, we don't want you doing program integrity.
We just want you doing enrollments.
And so we got all this fraud.
Most of it came from these waivers that the states got – all the states got
them – for home care and community care.
So, you know, 30 years ago, Medicaid, Medicare play – if you've got a hernia
operation, we paid for that.
And you could tell somebody got the hernia operation because they had the scar.
They used a licensed nurse.
They used a licensed doctor.
It was all documented.
But then they – some of the states said, you know, we're sending a whole lot
of people to the hospital, and we don't have home care providers.
So if you let us pay family members to do home care, the patient won't have to
go to the hospital.
They won't have to go to the emergency room, and we'll save a lot of money.
So it was well intentioned, but then what happened is people immediately
started abusing it.
So today, if you – these are services that are not normally played by family
members, performed by family members.
Buying groceries for your grandmother and bringing them home, you now get paid
for that.
Balancing your grandmother's checkbook, driving her to a – to a medical visit.
So then you had this, you know, organized fraud where – and this is what
happened in Minnesota.
These organized crime companies would come in and say, you designate this
family – you designate all your children have autism now, even if they didn't.
And we're going to now pay providers for each of them, and we'll give you a few
thousand dollars to do it.
But then they would collect all the money, and that's what was happening.
It's happening all over the country because there was no – it's very, very
difficult.
The guardrails on that system were very pervious, and anybody can defraud it.
If you are inclined to do fraud, this was – you know, this was an irresistible
opportunity.
How long was this going on for?
Like, when did this fraud begin, do you believe?
It really accelerated during the Biden administration.
We expected to pay for the – the Minnesota program just for autism care for
kids who have autism.
The kids need the care because, you know, they go to maybe a special school,
but then they come home from school, and the parents aren't there because they're
working.
So who's going to take care of them?
So in legitimate circumstances, you wouldn't want to pay for that.
But what happened is they just started this wholesale fraud.
We expected the cost of that program to be about $3 million a year in Minnesota,
in Minneapolis.
It got up in – over a three-year period, it got up to $400 million a year.
So they – you know, it was all fraudulent, almost.
I just don't understand.
So this accelerated during the Biden administration, but when did it begin?
Like, how long has it been going on?
Because they stopped doing program integrity.
They told – specifically, they told people in my agency, and I've talked to
them,
we don't want to do program integrity anymore.
We now just want to focus everything on enrollments.
In other words, enrolling more people in Obligare and the programs.
And, you know, you could say there was bad motives there because, one, the
states don't pay – the states pay a tiny fraction of it,
but it all goes to the federal government.
So the states don't really want to do fraud detection because all that money is
coming into their state.
And then every time you enroll somebody, you're registering them to vote.
And so, you know, they may have had ulterior motives, let me put it that way.
But, you know, right now what we're doing is we're saying to the states, we
have audited you.
We expect that – we believe that 50 percent of the program dollars you're
spending were fraudulent or possibly fraudulent.
You show us a corrective action that you're going to take or we're going to
withdraw that money the next time.
The money is not being withdrawn from individuals.
We're not reimbursing the state for it until like they told us.
Now, the red states have all said, yeah, we'll do it.
But Maine, Minnesota, California, and New York have said, no, we're not going
to – basically, they sent us corrective action that was just – you know, it
was ridiculous.
So is there a financial incentive?
Are these people that are making all this money from fraud, are they donating
to any specific groups?
Like, is there a direct turnaround?
Well, I like, you know, the Cubans in Florida and Florida, you know, they get
mad at Trump because they say, oh, all the states you're designating are blue
states.
That's just because the blue states refuse to cooperate.
But Florida is a red state and we're really going after them.
We're shutting down all durable medical equipment, reimbursements for the whole
state because it was all being run.
And it was probably being run by the Cuban government because this is –
But I don't understand how no one saw it.
No one from the government saw it.
And would there be a reason why they weren't looking for it other than they
just wanted – they were only thinking about recruitments.
But were they all – was anybody making money outside of these crime
organizations?
I would say no.
The money was not – the states were making money.
Right.
But there was a lot of talk online about donations to parties and donations to
NGOs.
Well, that is probably true, too, although I don't have any evidence of that.
No evidence.
Okay.
So it really just ramped –
And you wouldn't have – you know, even if you get those kind of donations, it's
not the kind of proof that I would talk about because you cannot prove that –
Right.
– that that donation, you know, motivated the bad behavior.
But it just – it really highlights how ideologically captured some people are,
that because it's the right wing going after this Medicaid fraud, that somehow
or another that fraud is okay.
And that fraud is not that big a deal that there's – I mean, like, what's the
all-told number that's been stolen from this stuff over the – if you had to
take a wild guess?
It's at least $100 billion a year.
A hundred billion a year.
Just from Medicaid and Medicare.
That anybody would not want to stop that kind of crime because it's attached to
the wrong party is – it just shows you how weird this country is right now.
Yeah.
I mean, I – listen, I was a Democrat my whole life.
And, you know, one of the things – and then I –
What are you now?
Now I'm kind of – first of all, I – it's illegal for me now to vote in any
state.
So, I don't really have a party affiliation because, you know, they – I was a
New York State resident when I was running.
They sued me and they said, oh, you don't really live in New York.
You live in California.
I said, yeah, but my driver's license is from New York.
My law license is from New York.
I have an address in New York.
My car is registered in New York.
My falconry license is in New York.
My hunting license is in New York.
My fishing license is in New York.
And I intend to return to New York.
And there were hundreds of cases, just black letter laws saying the only
measure is if you intend to return there at some point.
We got crooked judges and they said, no, you're not a New York resident.
I'd already said I'm not a California resident.
I don't intend to stay there.
So, now I'm not – you know, I'm not legally allowed to vote in any state.
But, you know, I saw this with a party.
My father hated partisanship because he thought it was dishonest.
And he said – he always said, told us, you should vote for the man, not the
party.
Or, you know, he said the man because at that time it was predominantly man.
But I saw this when Trump – you know, I grew up in a Democratic Party that
was very anti-NAFTA.
So, it was against working people and labor unions.
Then Trump said that he was anti-NAFTA.
All of a sudden, the Democratic Party was for NAFTA.
And that's what turned my head the first time.
And then, you know, when I was – then I saw how they – and Trump questioned
vaccines during the 2016 election.
The Democratic Party was – it was kind of that skepticism and the concerns
were spread evenly across the party.
My uncle, Ted Kennedy, was very much on the side of medical freedom.
And it was evenly spread.
But as soon as Trump said that, it became part of the dogma of that party.
And then, you know, when I ran, we were – you know, it was – one of the
things I ran against was the Ukraine War.
And the Democrats were always the anti-war party.
But as soon as Trump questioned that war, they became the pro-war party.
And they invited the CIA director to speak at the Democratic Convention.
And it just is – it's the – the party's only agenda is we hate Trump.
And anything he says, we're going to do the opposite of it.
And it makes me very sad for the party.
And I don't think it's a sustainable way to, you know, to operate.
No, there has to be some sort of an appeal to people in the middle that left
when things went crazy.
Just let us know you're not crazy anymore.
Let us know you've abandoned a lot of this crazy stuff.
And also, like, recognize what's good for everybody, right?
Hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud is not good for any of us, the whole
country.
So we should all be together on this one thing.
Like, this is terrible.
This is stealing from your tax money, all of our tax money, us, American
citizens.
We should all be united on stopping any kind of fraud.
Forget about who – who's the fucking president and what's – who's going to
get responsibility for it?
Who's going to take – who's going to get the accolades?
Like, who cares?
Stop fraud.
Stop – we're all together.
You shouldn't have criminals from other countries living here just stealing
money from Medicaid.
That seems like that should be a bipartisan issue in a rational society.
And, you know, on the – you know, I saw this, the craziness, when we did the
Tylenol findings because, you know, the science is really clear that – and
there were – there are dozens – I read 76 studies over a weekend.
And when, you know, when we were looking at this and the studies that support
Tylenol safety are very weak and they have huge holes in them.
There's overwhelming science that says you shouldn't take it particularly –
you know, it's okay normally.
You shouldn't take it during pregnancy and particularly the last days of
pregnancy or in the perinatal period – perinatal period, which is immediately
after pregnancy.
You don't want to take it because the association with Tylenol usage at that
point and neurodevelopmental disease is very, very high and pretty clear.
And so we issued a warning.
We didn't ban Tylenol.
We just sent a letter out to all doctors saying be careful about – we didn't
want to ban it during pregnancy because as bad as it is, it's the best thing.
It's better than taking ibuprofen or aspirin.
Why is aspirin bad?
They have – because of Reye's syndrome.
It has a clear association with Reye's syndrome and they all have problems.
What is that word, Reye's syndrome?
Reye's syndrome, R-E-Y-E-S.
What is that?
It's – I'm not sure exactly what it does.
Put that into our wonderful sponsor, Perplexity.
And if you put aspirin use in Reye's syndrome, you'll see the –
So is this just with pregnant women or with people in general?
Yeah, for pregnant.
Only for pregnant women.
We're young children.
Oh.
So baby aspirin?
Didn't they always used to have children?
Yeah, I don't know if they do it anymore.
Reye's syndrome is a rare but serious condition causing sudden brain swelling
and liver damage,
primarily in children and teens, recovering from viral infections like flu or
chicken pox become
very rare due to reduced aspirin use in kids.
Wow.
Aspirin.
I always thought of aspirin as like the most natural and healthy out of all
those things that
you take for pain.
Oh, I think it is pretty safe, but it's –
Avoid aspirin and – what's that word?
You say it.
What is it?
Salicyate containing meds.
Salicyate containing meds in children and teens with flu, chicken pox, or cold.
Use acetaminophen or ibuprofen instead.
Vaccinate against flu and chicken pox and screen newborns for metabolic risks.
So acetaminophen is the issue in Tylenol, right?
Yeah.
Because I read this terrible story about a lady who died during COVID because
she – not
from COVID, from Tylenol.
She just kept taking Tylenol.
Well, Tylenol shuts down your liver if you take it off of it.
That's what happened to her.
But what I was saying is, you know, when we issued this warning, it was
immediately condemned
by the Democrats, oh, you know, here's Trump and Kennedy doing, you know, weird
science again.
And then you had all of these videos, these viral videos on TikTok of pregnant
women eating
out – eating Tylenol.
Yeah, to say fuck Trump.
Yeah.
It's crazy.
I hope they didn't really do it.
I hope they were pretending because that's so dumb.
It's just so – why would you even want to risk that?
Like, how is that not a thing that you just abandon all party affiliation and
go, the health
of my child, this is science.
They're not saying don't take Tylenol, like you could still buy Tylenol.
Right.
It's a good thing to know that if you take too much of something, it's bad.
There's a lot of things that are fine if you take one or two pills.
But if you're like that poor lady with COVID, if you just keep taking it over
and over and
over again, you'll die.
We should know that.
It doesn't mean you shouldn't take aspirin or you shouldn't take Tylenol.
It just means know when to take it and when not to take it.
And know how much to take.
Like, that's all information that everybody should want to be out there.
The fact that people want to connect that to Trump and I'm going to take Tylenol
while
I'm pregnant.
Like, is this – like, imagine the aliens watching us and going – they're
not ready.
They're not ready for sophisticated time-traveling technology.
These fucking dopes.
Like, what are they doing?
They're fighting over nonsense.
You know?
And it's like it's all heavily accelerated by social media.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, the algorithms just amplify that polarization.
Yes.
They're just telling you what you want to hear and validating your worldview
all the time.
And also, just outraging you.
Just outraging you all the time.
I've been off it for a while now, and it's like it frees your brain.
It's like all the weirdness of thinking about nonsense in the world just –
you're aware
of it peripherally, but it's not in your face all day, which I think most
people are dealing
with a lot more even than I was, and they're just bombarded by sensation, bombarded
by anger
and frustration and angst and –
It kind of liberates the darkest impulses of the human spirit.
I mean, I don't use it either, but I got – you know, I post stuff, but, you
know, if I started
reading my comments and taking them seriously, I would –
No, it's terrible.
I genuinely thought when you joined forces with Trump and then Tulsi did as
well, I was like,
okay, maybe this will unite us more and make more people realize that there's a
lot of people
that are being left out that are in the center of all this, and we can all come
together and
work together.
That's what I thought naively.
You know, obviously, once you guys got in there, it was you guys were MAGA, and
like health
is bad, and don't stop the dyes.
Like, no matter what it was, people were ideologically opposed to you being
correct about anything,
because now you're connected with Trump.
So it's like I was watching liberals, the people that are always worried about
food ingredients,
just dismissing all of this talk about preservatives and glyphosate and red dye
and all these different
things, and it is just an ideological thing.
Yeah.
I mean, it's dogma, and it's part of—it's tribalism.
It's these connectors in our brain that evolved over millions of years was
living in these little
tribal communities, and now you've got machines that can activate those parts
of the brain,
and, you know, they're being manipulated all the time.
Yeah.
And then there's a bunch of people that are commenting that aren't even real
people.
There's that, too.
There's a lot of manipulation that's going on on social media where who knows
who's doing
it.
There's a bunch of different groups doing it, but they're not real people that
are outraged.
They're not real human beings that are saying these things, and they can kind
of shift a narrative
into a certain direction sometimes.
It's a fascinating time to be alive.
As far as what you thought this job was going to be before you got in and what
it became,
what was your expectations when you got in?
Did anything really surprise you?
I mean, you know, I try to go into every part of my life without expectations
and just focus
on really narrowly on what I'm doing day by day.
And that actually makes me a lot more resilient because if you don't have
expectations, you
never get disappointments, and so you can never get crushed.
And I would say that, you know, I had not spent a lot of my life hanging out
with Republicans.
And what I imagined that they were talking about is exactly the opposite of,
you know, now I'm
in an administration surrounded by immensely talented people.
And they're immensely idealistic.
And, you know, nobody – I always imagined the Republicans would get together
and they'd
be thinking about how do we screw the poor and how do we, you know, reduce the
tax on
the rich.
And all their – they're just narrowly focused on how do we solve these big
problems and how
do we make our country work.
And the level of idealism that I see at every level in the White House and, you
know, in my
agency is inspiring.
And then the level of the capabilities, just the, you know, the competence of
the people who
I'm surrounded with.
I think the thing that shocked me most was how bad the agency was, how – you
know, just
how inefficient – how nobody seemed to care that people were getting sicker
and sicker.
He was taking accountability of the fact we're the health agency.
And yet we have the worst health of – and we have the richest health agency
in the world.
I think HHS is the sixth biggest country in the world if you look at its budget.
It's got the biggest budget in the federal government, bigger than the defense
budget.
And yet we are absolutely miserable at what we did.
I mean, they – you know, we're literally presiding over this cliff where
every American
is getting – where people are just – 77 percent of American kids can't
qualify for military
service.
And nobody is asking why is that happening.
We've gone – when I was a kid, the typical pediatrician would see one case of
juvenile diabetes
over a 40- or 50-year career.
Today, 38 percent of teens are diabetic or pre-diabetic.
So, one out of every three kids who walks through his office door.
Why isn't anybody noticing us?
The autism rates have gone from 1 in 10,000 in 1970, and people knew what
autism was.
They knew what it looked like in 1970.
They did the biggest epidemiological study in history to answer the question,
what is the
percentage?
And they came up with 0.8 per 10,000, so less than 1 in 10,000.
And today, it's 1 in 31.
In California, it's 1 in 19.
And 1 in 12.5 boys.
That's crazy.
We are –
That's so crazy.
1 in 12.5 boys is crazy.
When my uncle was president, you know, I was a 10-year-old boy.
We spent zero on chronic disease, zero.
And today, we spend $4.3 trillion a year.
And it's the fastest-growing item in the federal budget.
And it's existential.
We can't sustain it.
And the Republicans and Democrats have been arguing for years about whether we
do the single-payer
Obamacare, this or that.
It's all about throwing money.
Who gets to keep the money?
And we're throwing it in a system that's completely broken.
It's not a healthcare system.
People just keep getting sicker and sicker.
Yep.
It's like changing deck chairs on the Titanic.
Why is nobody focusing on how do we get people healthy?
Because that's how you solve the healthcare cost problem.
Right now, 40 cents out of every dollar that you spend in federal taxes is
going to healthcare.
And about 90 percent of that is chronic disease.
So, you know, it's clear – and Americans don't want to be sick.
You know, they're being made sick.
They're being – the obesity rates have gone from 5 percent in kids when I was
a kid to now close to 20 percent.
And in adults, 70 percent of adults are obese or overweight.
That was not true when we were kids.
And it's not because Americans got indolent or lazy or hungry.
It's because they were being mass poisoned.
And, you know, the vested interests that are making money on keeping –
everybody makes money on keeping us sick.
The food companies make money on getting us sick.
But pharma makes money on keeping us sick.
The insurance – you would think insurance would want to keep you well, but it
doesn't.
It actually makes more money if more people are sick.
The hospitals –
How does the insurance company make more money if people are sick?
Well, I mean, think of it this way.
If you're Lloyd's of London, do you want one ship – and you're insuring all
the ships in the ocean – do you want one ship to sink a year or do you want a
thousand to sink?
If a thousand sink, everybody's going to be paying you premiums to insure
themselves against that eventuality.
And you're making money on the friction.
So, you're making the money that comes into this.
You're making your money on the money that comes into the system.
So, the more that you pump up that volume of money, the more you make.
So, you know, nobody is interested – nobody is economically incentivized to
make people well.
And we are not going to get well until we align those economic incentives with
the health outcomes that we want, which is nobody gets sick.
We end the chronic disease epidemic.
And that's what we're doing now.
We're trying to realign all those perverse incentives that reward you.
For example, the medical system pays out on fee-based service.
That means that the more tests the doctor orders for you, the more drugs he
prescribes you, the more contact he has with you, the richer he gets.
So, he is not incentivized to get you well.
We ought to be paying him a flat fee at the beginning of the year and saying
anything – any cause from this patient the rest of the year come out of your
pocket.
And then he's like, "Okay, how do I get this guy from getting sick?" and he
starts studying nutrition books and, you know.
That's actually an interesting idea.
It seems so captured at this point.
It's going to be difficult to unravel all that.
It's difficult but it's not impossible and we're doing it.
About three years from now, you're going to see a different healthcare model in
our country.
Talking about it has a big impact because most people are just not aware of how
the whole system works and what is actually wrong with it.
You know, most people just hear about it, healthcare, people are sick, they
need healthcare.
Why would they cut healthcare?
Cutting healthcare is bad.
That's what they would just immediately think.
And I think most people are – they think of the fraud stuff and they want to
dismiss it.
Like they – I've heard all these people dismiss this Nick Shirley kid and
what he exposed in Minneapolis.
But the reason why is because it's the wrong party.
If this was a Democrat that was exposing Republican fraud, then they would be
all into it.
They would be – it would be on every newspaper.
But instead, they're trying to dismiss it as not relevant.
Yeah, and to me it's weird because I know Democrats are human beings and they
care about the same things
that I do.
I've known all of these guys, almost all of them, for many of them for 40 years.
Bernie Sanders I've known for 40 years.
Their only solution is more money to the system, a system that is broken, that
is making us sicker and sicker.
And what President Trump wants to do is he wants to fix the system.
Stop – most of that money is not going to the patient.
It's going to the insurance companies and the PBMs and all of these middlemen
that are, you know, are milking the system.
And that's why President Trump says, you know, the answer is to not pay the
insurance company.
It's to pay the consumer directly and put him – make him the CEO of his own
healthcare.
So that he can spend money – he's now incentivized to do prevention and to
maybe do holistic medicine or take vitamins or, you know, take vitamin D, which,
you know, is – as
as you know, it's kind of miraculous – or to do alternatives, you know, to do
preventative care.
And he wants to say – he's going to want to save money.
Right now, you – nobody – nobody is in that position of accountability.
We need to make them the CEO of their own health so that they have
responsibility and they're going to pay the cause if they get sick.
Government pays.
But they then decide to allocate that – how to allocate that money.
And then we need to make the system transparent.
And that's, you know, one of the things that we're doing.
We're – during his first term, Trump passed a transparency bill.
But because Trump had passed – everybody wanted transparency.
If you – if you're a woman, you're pregnant, you want to know how much it's
going to cost you to have that baby.
There's no way you can find that out for most of them.
You can go nine months on a phone every day.
How much is it going to cost?
And you'll never get a straight answer.
And so, you know, in New York, for example, what we're doing now is we're going
to make
all of the hospitals and all the providers post a menu of their prices that are
available to everybody
and that are available on a website that we're creating.
So if you want an MRI and there's 40 places around your home that offer MRIs,
you can't right now figure out what they cost.
Now you're going to be able to go and look at them all on a single page
and figure out what the cheapest one is.
If you go to a restaurant, the prices are on the menu.
If you go to buy a car and the guy said to you,
yeah, you can buy the car, but I'm not going to tell you how much it costs till
after you bought by it.
Nobody would operate that way.
But that's how our medical system operates.
So I looked at – we have a mock-up of this website.
We're right now, during the Biden administration, because Trump had passed that
law,
the Biden administration just refused to enforce it.
So we're in the same position now where there's no transparency.
We're changing that now.
We sent out – we've sent out over 1,000 letters to hospitals, you know,
warning letters.
He says, you've got to post them right now.
And we're going to – and we just finalize new regulations.
If they don't do that, they're going to pay a huge fine.
So I saw the mock-up of the website, and I said – I asked the question,
how much does it cost in the hospitals within a mile of Manhattan to have a
baby?
One of them was – there were about 30 hospitals that I could visualize on one
page.
One of them was $1,300.
That was the lowest.
The highest was $22,000.
In Detroit, it is – the cheapest place to have a baby is about $5,000.
And the most expensive is $60,000.
And it's the same service, the same quality care.
Nothing changes except that price.
Why do we have that information chaos?
We have it because the industry wants to hide what it's doing.
And so there's no market.
There's no ability for people to make good choices.
And when the – I met – I was staying with Dr. Oz during the transition at
his house in Florida.
And one day, Prime Minister Rudd, who was the former prime minister of
Australia, came by.
And he had – after he was prime minister, he had been appointed to run a
commission to reduce healthcare
cost and improve quality.
And they were very successful.
But he said the number one thing that they did that changed everything was
price transparency.
It was showing people the price of what they're going to pay.
So we're now going to do that.
And people will be able to shop.
And now we also have to shift all of that money away from the insurance
companies and put it in
the hands of the public so that they are incentivized, maximum incentivized to
make good choices.
So as far as making good choices with, like, food, I like what you guys did.
I love what you guys did with the food pyramid.
You essentially flipped it on its head, which is kind of crazy, that for the
longest time we are
being told that the most important things – the primary diet should be grains
and rice and wheat.
And now it's things that we've known for a long time.
It's whole food, actual real food.
That's what you're supposed to be eating.
The problem is getting people to change their habits and change their ways.
And if people don't start eating good food and if people don't start taking
care of their body,
what other things can you even imagine would shift this trend?
Well, here's what's going to happen.
First of all, the food pyramid.
I inherited a food pyramid from the first way I was – I came into office one
year and two weeks ago.
A week after I got in, I was handed the food pyramid that the Biden
administration had.
It wasn't even the food pyramid.
They got rid of that.
They just were doing the dietary guidelines.
So it was the recommendations that would go and be reflected in the food
pyramid.
It was hundreds of pages long and it was incomprehensible.
And it was driven by all the mercantile impulses that had corrupted the food
pyramid for 50 years.
And it was – it was written by lobbyists.
It was written by the food industry lobbyists and the same impulse that put
fruit loops at the top of the
food pyramid, which isn't even a food.
Fruit loops were at the top of the –
Fruit loops were at the top recommendation of the food pyramid.
You can ask them to look up the old food pyramid.
I need to see where fruit loops stand.
Don't they throw some vitamins on fruit loops?
Isn't it like vitamin enriched?
Oh, yeah.
As if that's good for you.
It's good for you.
Right?
They add vitamins.
Do they even add vitamins to fruit loops?
You know, it's not going to make it any better for you.
No.
No, I'm joking.
Obviously.
But it was a ridiculous – so how did –
So then what we did is we got the best nutritionists in the country.
And, you know, we got Mark Hyman.
And we got the nutritionists from the best universities in the country.
And we put them all in a room.
And I thought it was going to take a month.
It took 11 months because they fought over every recommendation.
And everything is cited in the source so that we know we have good science.
But, you know, some of the stuff – because of regulatory malpractice all
these years,
some of the studies simply haven't been done.
So there are knowledge gaps which we should not have.
So now we have a food pyramid.
And because of the old food pyramid, people didn't like the food on it.
And they were going to ultra-processed food, which was okay on the food pyramid.
So now 70 percent of the food that our kids eat is ultra-processed food.
70 percent of the calories they get.
And it's just poisoning them.
And they took off the good stuff like whole milk, which is nutrient-dense,
which is feeding their brain.
We have two generations of kids that grew up without milk,
without the proper nutrients for their brain.
We have the first country in the face of the earth that has chronic obesity.
And in the same people, malnutrition.
So you have immensely obese people.
And they're malnourished.
They're medically malnourished.
And it's because the food pyramid was so messed up.
So what's going to happen now, Joe, is that we are going to be able to drive
that.
We're going to be able to change dietary culture.
Just the food pyramid is going to change dietary culture.
And here's how.
Brooke Rollins, who's an incredible USDA secretary,
she had – she administers $405 million a day.
She gives out food subsidies for school lunches, the WICS program, the SNAP
program,
Indian Health Services, and all of these other programs.
And so those programs now are going to get good food
because the dietary guidelines dictate what they can and cannot feed kids.
Military and the VA also are changing.
Now, I – this week I met with a guy, Chef Robert Irvine, who is a television
chef.
He's been hired by Pete Hegseth to come in and change all the military meals.
Military – and he's already on five bases.
By the end of this month, he'll be on 20.
What he's done is the food that we give our military is so bad, they won't eat
it.
So they're going out and they're spending their money on fast food.
And fast food is not cheap.
A Big Mac meal costs $12 to $14.
It's not a cheap meal.
You can get a really good food for that price.
You could feed yourself the whole day for that price.
With good food.
Mark Hyman's new book has a diet, $10 a day diet, three meals, great food.
Anyway, Robert Irvine has gone into these places and he gives them all fresh
food,
almost all of it locally sourced.
As it turns out, it's cheaper.
The military is spending $18 a day for three meals for each soldier.
He's spending $10 a day and giving them real food, good food.
And the lines now are around the block and nobody's going to fast food.
Everybody's fighting to get in.
And what he says is it doesn't cause more.
We don't need any more money.
We just need to buy smarter and to be smarter about how we do it.
And, you know, we're going to be able to do that.
One of the things that we're doing with the dietary guidelines is the SNAP
program.
SNAP, we have 20 states now that have applied for SNAP waivers and have been
granted so that you can
no longer get candy on SNAP.
You can no longer get soda.
That was 18% of SNAP purchases.
So we are taking the 63 million poorest kids in our country,
giving them taxpayer-funded diabetes.
And then 78% of them end up on Medicaid.
Many of them are being treated for diabetes.
So we're paying to give them the disease and then we're paying to treat them
for the rest of their lives.
And we're changing that.
And one of the things that Brooke is doing is she's going to require that any
retailer
that accepts food stamps has to double the amount of real food in their
establishment.
We're working with farmers.
We're working with entrepreneurs to make sure every American get high-quality
food that is affordable.
I don't know how anybody would be opposed to that.
That all sounds fantastic.
It's weird that they are.
How could you, the way you just laid it out, how could anybody be opposed to
that?
That all sounds great.
I mean, what the Democrats—
Especially for the soldiers.
The fact that they were getting terrible food that they didn't want to eat is
just—
That's really offensive, you know?
Yeah.
You think about what you're asking of them and then you're giving them garbage
that they
don't even want to eat.
Like, what do they—how do they feel that you care about them?
Well, and you know, one of the things that Robert Irvine, the chef, told me, he
said,
you know, it costs $9 to get a frozen salmon.
It costs $6 to get a fresh salmon.
So, you know, food—food, good food is actually—if you cook yourself at home,
the good food is much,
much less expensive.
The problem is Americans have forgotten how to cook.
And so—and cooking is really important because it's not a—it's important
for family cohesion,
for a sense of community.
It's a daily—it's almost sacred ritual.
And, you know, taking that away from our lives has amplified the spiritual malaise
that we're in.
And one of the things we're going to do is to start sending federal workers out
to teach people
how to cook.
They don't have the implements.
They don't have the cutting boards.
They don't have—you know, they don't know how to buy groceries.
Right.
And, you know, you can go into any—any big grocery store in this country.
If you go and buy a steak, it's still pretty expensive.
But if you buy the cheaper cuts, it's great meat.
And it is very, very affordable.
Or liver or, you know, all these alternatives.
Chuck roast.
Now, you said, you know, how can you be against that?
Well, I told you 20 states have applied for the SNAP program, and we've granted
them SNAP waivers.
Why would you want a taxpayer—if you want to drink a Coke, you ought to be
able to.
We live in the United States.
We're not going to take anything away from anybody.
The taxpayer shouldn't be paying for it, particularly when we're paying for it
on the other end in diabetes.
So this just makes sense to anybody.
But 20 states have applied.
Only two of them are blue states.
Why—Bernie Sanders has been fighting for this for years, but Vermont won't
apply for one.
And it's all partisanship.
And they're putting their hatred of Donald Trump ahead of their love for their
own children.
And until we learn to stop doing that, this, you know, the health care in this
country is not going to improve, at least in those states.
So what strategies, if any, could you ever imagine that could be implemented
that would kind of unite people on these things and get them to stop being so
partisan about—one of the most important aspects of being a human being is
staying healthy.
It's, you know, it's like love and health.
They're all—those are the top ones that we all want.
It just seems insane that we would choose this as a battleground.
And it seems insane that it's connected to one party or another.
It shouldn't be.
It's a—it should just—we should all be united on at least this.
And I think if people were a little healthier and they're a little more fit,
they'd probably have a lot less anxiety, probably a lot less conflict when it
comes to political disagreements.
Things could probably be worked out more amicably, especially among friends.
It's like having good health improves virtually every aspect of your life.
Yeah, I mean, I would say—
For everybody.
I would say two things.
The food ties directly into your mental health.
Yes.
And we now know that it's so well documented that there's a gut-brain
connection and that, you know, depression, ADHD.
Chris Palmer up at Harvard is dramatically reducing the symptoms of
schizophrenia simply by changing people's diets.
He's using a keto diet.
There are—
Dramatically?
Like what kind of percentage?
No, losing 30 percent of their symptoms.
Really?
Yeah.
Just from ketones?
From keto.
What about—have they done anything with like—
Same thing is true.
I mean, you know, there are now—there's a big paper about to come out on
losing a bipolar diagnosis.
Kids who lose bipolar diagnosis simply by changing their diet.
We know that ADHD is driven by all these food ties and stuff, and that's very
well documented.
There's all of these—you go on the internet and you look for studies
that show what happens when you change the food in prisons and juvenile
detention facilities.
And they, you know, they'll put it in one wing of the prison, they'll put good
food,
and then they'll put the standard food in the other.
And the level of violence goes down by 40, 45, 50 percent.
The use of restraints in juvenile detention facilities goes down 75 percent.
The number of incidents dramatically drops.
And so it's a public safety issue in the prisons.
And, you know, I've been meeting now with all the prisons.
They—prisons have a real problem because they're allocated—the state
prisons are allocated to
60 cents a day to feed the prisoners.
And it's all—for them, it's all about shelf life.
So they're just feeding them the worst kind of poison that you could possibly—it's
all just chemicals.
Oh my god.
Oh my god.
But, you know—
Well, we've kind of given up on the idea of rehabilitation.
It's just all about punishment and then—
But this is also public safety.
It's guards, safety, everything else.
Yeah, of course.
And the other thing, and the answer to your first question about how do you
sort of, you know,
mitigate the polarization, I would say the only way that you do that is by
getting people to start
talking to each other.
Yeah.
Because that—you've got to be able to find common ground with other people.
And if you don't talk to them, you don't see their humanity.
Right.
And, you know, that's one of the things that you do that is so great, which is
you bring
a lot of people on here who you disagree with, and you have a civil
conversation about them,
and you show your curiosity about them, and you, you know, you get to hear
their rationale.
And a lot of times, I'll listen to somebody on this show, I'll say, "I don't
like this guy."
And then I'll listen to his rationale, and I'll think, "Oh, actually, he's
making a lot of sense."
And we have to stop hating people because of the label on them,
Yeah.
And start, you know, listening.
And it's really important we do that now because these algorithms are designed
to drive us all apart.
Yeah.
And, you know, we've always had political polarization in this country.
I mean, I grew up during the 60s, and, you know, there were bombs going off and
people being shot.
And, you know, it was very, very violent and vitriolic when my dad was running.
And the polarization probably was the worst since the American Civil War.
But today, when it is amplified by the algorithms, it's hard to see where it's
going to end up in a good
place unless we start learning to talk to each other.
It's not just the algorithm.
It's also the method of communication.
When you're only talking to people through, like, angry tweets back and forth
with each other,
you were saying, like, "Sit down and talk to people."
No one's doing that anymore.
There's a few FaceTime conversations going on.
You see your friends if you go out with them.
People are not talking that much anymore.
And they're not sitting down and talking.
And when you do, everyone's distracted.
Everyone has their phones out.
Everyone's checking text messages.
I'll tell you one of the most important things that we're doing right now as
part of the Maha
legislation from my agency.
We're going state by state, and we're asking them to do bell-to-bell
legislation so that—
and 26 states have now already done it, so more than half the states,
so that kids can't use cell phones in schools.
I went to a school in Loudoun County the other day, and the states love them.
I went to Loudoun County, and the students had fought and fought against
getting their cell phones.
So the way they do it, all of the school districts and states do it differently.
But in that state, they can bring their cell phones to school, but they have to
leave it in their backpack.
And if the parent calls and needs to talk to them, they can do it.
But I walked into the cafeteria, 600 kids in that cafeteria, and they're all
talking to each other.
They're sitting across the table.
Nobody's looking at their laps.
The parents came, you know, that day.
I polled the students, and I said, "How many of you think this is a good idea?"
And they all put their hands up, and they said, "We all hated it for the first
two weeks, and now we love it."
The parents said, "It's the best thing that ever happened.
My kid is not driving with their cell phone in the car anymore because they
know they can live without it."
They're eating dinner with the family, and we're actually having conversations.
And then the teachers in the schools love it because the disciplinary problems
go down,
and the test scores go through the roof because they're focusing on work.
So it's just like a no-brainer.
But again, it's the blue states that, you know, are the hardest to convince to
do it because
they see it as, you know, as a Trump part of the, you know, the demonization of,
you know,
Trump being the tyrant or whatever.
It's just so stupid to not recognize the kids are distracted.
It's just one of those things.
Why does that have to be a right or a left issue?
It's stupid.
This is a United States issue.
The best way to have a group of people that succeed in this world is make it as
clear a path for them as
possible.
And as soon as you allow them to use their phone all day, it's too addictive.
No one can put them down.
No.
You're going to lose 30% of your concentration or more easily, I would imagine.
The fact that that would be a partisan thing is just nuts.
It just shows how goofy we are.
I don't know how you get people to talk though.
I mean, other than,
I mean, I do it on a podcast, but that's my job.
I don't know how many conversations I'd be having with people who I was
politically opposed to or
ideologically opposed to or just didn't see eye to eye with them and wanted to
know how they think.
I don't know how many opportunities I would ever even get to do that.
What you're doing is so important.
And now, you know, there's a thousand people imitating you, many really good
podcasts.
But it's teaching people to have conversations.
I mean, you are the best teacher, mentor on that, and people admire you.
So they, you know, and my, I have seven kids and they grew up with, with
devices and stuff.
And I would look, you know, I'd slap them out of their hand and I, and also
they couldn't
concentrate on long, you know, long points, long conversations.
They're like, get to the point.
You know, I only got five seconds.
You got to make your point.
And then I see them sitting for three and a half hours and listening to a Rogan
podcast.
That was a cultural phenomenon.
That was a cultural change.
This generation of kids, I have so much hope for because they grew up with that
and, you know,
they want it.
So I do have a lot of hope that we're going to be able to do this.
And then, you know, I think Charlie Kirk did that too, was an example to a lot
of those kids
because whether you agree with them or not, and he had very strong opinions
that people,
you know, consider terrible.
But the one thing that he really did is he talked to people he didn't agree
with.
And he always gave them the microphone and allowed them to amplify their voice.
And then he had a civility and he talked to them and he used logic a lot of
times destructively.
But not in an angry way.
And so I think, you know, he was teaching people how to have conversations
again.
You're teaching people how to have conversations again.
And it's, you know, I think that's, you know, one of the big hopes that I have
for the future,
that people learn to talk to each other with whom they did, with people with
whom they disagree.
It would be nice.
But there's also a real genuine problem today in the marketplace of outrage
that a lot of people,
a lot of their podcasts are just focused almost entirely on outrage and of like
having arguments
and screaming matches with people and, you know, putting people down and not
having civil discourse,
but trying to win, trying to dominate someone in an argument, you know, trying
to squash people.
And I guess in a sense, some of that is really good because it exposes bad
ideas.
But it just encourages that kind of discourse where if someone's ideologically
opposed to you,
they are the enemy and you want to destroy them.
And I'm like, okay, they're just a human being.
Like find out why they got to where they are that is a different perspective
than you have
and why you got to where you are and try to figure out if there's some middle
ground in there.
Like what do you believe, like why do you believe that?
And find out why and ask them.
And don't cut them off.
Let them talk.
Let them express themselves.
Help them if you can.
Try to figure out what makes someone actually think.
Instead of just thinking that your ideas are a part of you, they're just ideas.
Like they're not you.
Like some ideas you can hold in your mind and they're bad for you.
They're bad.
You haven't examined them.
You're acting on them like they're doctrine.
And then you're stuck with that idea because you've already espoused it so many
times.
You don't want to be a flip-flopper.
And so people get mad.
And you get this weird cycle of shitty communication and nobody ever breaks out
of it
and nothing ever gets done.
And there's no common ground it's ever achieved.
And the only way you're going to ever break that is to stop talking to people
like that.
You got to just talk to them.
Just instead of talk to them like they're the enemy,
just talk to them like they're a fellow human being about some ideas.
And just treat them with respect.
Talk to them like a person that, you know, in any other circumstance,
maybe even could be your friend.
Just talk to them.
People can do that.
It's possible.
It just takes discipline.
You have to learn how to do it.
It took me a while.
It took me a long time to learn how to talk to people better.
But it can be done.
And it's technique.
But as prevalent as, you know, that kind of vitriol
is on in the podcast world.
Right.
is it is incomparable to what's happening on television because there are no
conversations on
television.
Right.
That's more of what I was getting at, honestly, is there's some shows that do
that.
But like some of these CNN shows, it's just these crazy ideological battles.
And yet also, guys, pro tip, you can't have fucking six people at a table all
yelling out for seven minutes.
You don't have enough time to get a real point across.
And it becomes a battle of like who's got the best prepared sound bites
or who's got the best snarky quip.
It's stupid.
It's a stupid way to talk about things.
Yeah.
I mean, Sheryl went on.
The view.
Yeah.
The view.
And it was that.
It wasn't like you say, you know, like let's have a congenial conversation with
people
and allow them to express themselves and to be fun and funny.
And yes.
Yeah.
Well, just have a conversation with someone.
If you disagree with them about certain things, like they disagree with her,
it would have been far more productive to have a one on one conversation
instead of this gaggle
of hands squawking all at her.
It's just like you see it over and over again when they oppose somebody.
It's like they're all chiming in.
And it's just not the way you could ever like thoroughly cover a subject.
And they're limited by their format.
That format is very limiting.
It's a shitty format where you go to a commercial at predetermined times,
period, no matter what.
Like maybe you got a little leeway here or there, but you've got to get that
commercial in.
And that's crazy because if you're in the middle of talking,
a lot of points take a long time to flesh out.
Like, just think about all the stuff you just explained about Medicaid.
Imagine if you try to do that.
And again, you can't, you can't do it.
And they would try to stop you.
You're too in the weeds.
No one's going to pay attention to this.
It's like, I don't think that's true.
And I think we've learned that because of podcasts, because there was no
production.
There was no executives.
There was no one there.
People were just putting on a webcam and talking.
And so we realized, like, well, people actually do like conversations still.
They just don't get a lot of them.
Not real ones.
You know, you get interviews where someone has like a sheet of questions.
You know, you get where someone is, you know, playing a role.
You're playing a role of a person who interviews people.
You don't really give a shit about what this person has to say.
But people do want connection.
They still do.
And the fact that we don't get it from social media, but most of our time is in
social media,
is just accelerating this detachment we have from each other.
And that's what people have to get past.
I don't know how to do it.
Tell everybody to start their own podcast.
I mean, there were people who did that.
You know, you and I were talking before we came in here about Larry King.
Yes.
He did that.
There were a lot of people in the 70s and 80s.
David Suskind and, you know, all of these other people who were actually having
conversations.
Yeah, Larry King was great.
Dick Cavett.
I love when he asked DJ Khaled, how'd you gain all the weight?
What did he say?
He said, I ate too much.
What do you want me to say?
Such a crazy question.
How did you gain all the weight?
Like, what, Larry?
What are you talking about?
That's crazy.
That's a wild question to ask someone.
But, you know, he would just have a conversation with you.
You know, and I think people have a hunger for that.
And a lot of this infighting comes from no face-to-face communication.
I think when people get a chance, especially if it's not performative, that's
part of the problem,
like the Charlie Kirk stuff or some of the other things that people do in front
of a crowd.
Things become very performative, where there's a bunch of people watching and
cheering,
and then you know how the audience feels, and you play to them a little bit.
Like, that's probably not the best way to talk about stuff.
And I think human beings naturally understand one-on-one conversations.
We've had them for all of human history.
And so when you get a chance to hear people talk one-on-one for hours at a time,
it expands your understanding of the world.
Like, now I know how you feel about things.
I know, at least for this brief three-hour conversation, I get more of a sense
of how you approach things.
And then people put that into their own mind and go, maybe I should approach
things a little bit differently.
Maybe I should think about things a little bit differently.
And we miss that.
You know, we're missing that.
And social media robs you of that.
It gives you the exact opposite of that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you know what Charlie Kirk was doing?
You're right.
You know, it was less of a conversation and more of a—
Sometimes it was conversation.
It was like in the ring.
You know, it was like being in a, you know, the ring.
But it's a lot better than what's happening elsewhere, which is just blanket
censorship of people
and not any willingness to just shutting people down and canceling them.
Yeah, 100 percent.
Well, that's another weird thing that that's a Democratic Party impulse because
it was the
opposite of the Democratic Party I grew up with, you know, which was unafraid
of any debate.
My uncle, my father said we should be able to debate.
We should be able to win these debates in the marketplace of ideas.
If we can't, then we need to examine ourselves.
It was a core tenet of the Democratic Party.
Yeah.
And, you know, the unfortunate shift in that, it's just like,
you know, I remember during the Bush administration when the FCC was going
after Howard Stern.
It was it was this huge thing.
They were trying to close down Howard Stern because Howard Stern was very
critical of Bush.
And it was like he was the guy out there fighting for free speech.
And they were getting fined like enormous fines, enormous fines for things that
he had said,
you know, they deemed to be obscene, you know.
And that was a right wing thing.
And we always thought of it as a right wing thing.
And when you see what's happening today, just like any that the wanting silence
of your political
opponents is the dumbest way to cut off your own hand.
It's so dumb because if you can't see that this could be used against you, if
someone else gets
into a position of power, if all of a sudden some enormous right wing
corporation buys these social
media platforms and only pushes right wing agendas and silences all left wing
agendas.
Like, do you know how fucking crazy that is to just give that kind of power
willingly to an
anonymous group of people that you supposedly aligned to because you're in the
same tribe?
It's the dumbest thing ever.
And the fact that people on the left weren't outraged when they read the
Twitter files
and found out how much involvement there was in silencing real information and
removing people
who were from Stanford and MIT.
The White House ordered me to be removed from Instagram and I lost a million
followers.
Insane.
37 hours after he got — after he took the oath of office swearing to uphold
the Constitution,
they were ordering Mark Zuckerberg to take me down.
And then you look at what's happening in England now.
You know, people going to jail for Twitter posts.
12,000 people this year.
12,000 in the last year.
And the Magna Carta was, you know, written and now there's — now it's just a
— it's just a dictatorship.
Well, they got rid of trial by jury except for murder and rape and a couple
other things.
Now it's just a judge.
So, you know, whatever it is, if it's a social media infraction, if it's —
there's no reason
a reasonable, you know, judge by a jury of your peers.
No, you're — you're getting judged by a judge.
And that's nuts.
It's the Soviet system.
It's like Kafka.
I just can't believe how quick it happened.
When — you know, when you look at the social media arrests, they were —
they were always
disturbing.
Like, if you go back even four or five years, they had quite a few of them a
year.
Yeah.
But it really ramped up — really ramped up over the last year or so.
And it's just insane to watch.
And a lot of it is criticism of immigration, like legitimate criticism of
immigration and
legitimate criticism of crimes that have been committed.
And people outraged, which is completely normal.
But instead of, like, doing anything about that, they want to arrest people
from complaining.
And it's just really weird to watch.
And it's going to get worse with the AI.
It's scary.
Well, it's just strange that they couldn't do anything to stop that from
happening and that
anybody that's reasonable would be willing to let that happen because their
side is imposing it.
That seems like an existential threat to all critical thinking, all
communication and debate.
As soon as you start arresting people for opinions, that's crazy.
You're getting nuts.
Like, anything that you deem might incite violence or, like, outrage — people
are outraged.
They have a right to be outraged.
If you can put them in a cage because they're outraged, that's nuts.
That's really nuts.
Now they have a pub law.
Do you know this one?
No.
Oh, find that, Jamie.
They're trying to pass this thing — I don't know if they passed it — where
someone's — I don't want to speak out of turn.
I don't want to fuck this up because it was disturbing enough without me misinterpreting
it.
But the idea was to stop people from saying things on social media that you get
arrested for.
Stop them from saying those kind of things in pubs.
Where is this?
In England?
Yes, see if you can find it.
I know I saved it, but it'll take me too long to pull it up.
You find anything like that?
I'm trying to make sure it's —
Legit?
Yeah.
I mean, I wouldn't imagine it's not — I mean, it's not outside the realm of
what they're capable of doing if they're arresting 12,000 people a year for
social media posts.
I mean, if that was happening in America and they were only arresting
Republicans, I don't think you'd hear a peep out of the Democrats.
I think they think it's important.
We have to stop misinformation.
Yeah.
It passed?
No, I don't think it passed.
You don't think it passed?
I'm going to find out if it passed or not.
Okay.
So what is the — what were they —
It was legislation aimed, blah, blah, blah, but it says you're still free to
converse, know the law, not play a position, I don't know.
What was the — what were they trying to — okay, point — free speech in UK
pubs, employer responsibilities.
It requires employers to take reasonable steps to prevent staff from
experiencing harassment by third parties such as customers.
Well, that's normal, right?
You don't want to be harassed by a couple.
Concerns have been raised that debates on, for instance, gender identity or
political matters could lead to staff complaints resulting in patrons being
asked to leave if the behavior is deemed aggressive or harassing.
It should not be misinterpreted as a ban on lawful, polite, or controversial
speech.
Who's to decide what's controversial, though?
Third party harassment.
Legislation focuses on addressing harassment rather than banning specific
topics of conversation entirely.
Just any regulation of conversation is nuts.
If it's one thing you're harassing the staff or —
I've never known a pub owner who would allow people to come in and harass his
staff.
He already has an economic and management incentive to not allow that.
You know, it's not the kind of thing you need to legislate.
But to say that someone doesn't feel safe if people are having a civil
conversation about gender identity,
you don't feel safe if you work there and that you're getting harassed by
people's opinions that you don't agree with.
Well, that's where things get weird because then, as we've seen, there's a lot
of people that get really triggered
about a lot of things that are pretty normal for most folks.
You know, microaggressions, dumb shit.
There's a lot of people that just want to be offended.
And if this is a law, that could lead to a lot more problem.
It's just a slippery slope and they're not going in the right direction.
And I don't know how they course-correct if they've fallen this far that
quickly.
12,000 arrests is crazy.
That's a crazy amount of people go to jail for social media posts.
And it encourages self-censorship so you don't get a real sense of what people
want or don't want.
Because people don't want to be involved.
They don't want to go to jail.
They don't want to take a chance.
The framers of the Constitution put free speech was everything for them.
And they put it in the First Amendment because they knew all the other rights
and guarantees
were dependent on it.
If you have a government that can silence its opponents, it has a license for
any kind of atrocity.
It's just shocking that all other Western nations haven't adopted that.
Well, most of them don't have constitutions.
So crazy.
It's just so ridiculous.
It's so ridiculous that free speech, which is like, we all agree, especially in
America,
it's one of the most important things.
It's the only way to find out what's real and what's not.
You got to let people talk it out, you know?
I mean, when you're living in a world where the government has the power to
dictate what's real
and what's not real, and they don't have an obligation to be correct, you got a
real problem.
And if there's no consequences for them being incorrect, and they've silenced
correct speech,
they've gotten away with something that's real slippery and real dangerous.
And when there's a lot of money involved and a lot of businesses involved...
I just typed it into perplexity, and this gives a little context on it,
because the pubs were being...
The same, the pub thing?
Yeah.
"Reverses a 2013 removal of third-party harassment liability,
making pubs liable if staffs overhear comments deemed harassing based on
protected characteristics
like sex or race.
Critics call it a banter ban, fearing landlords will police conversations to
avoid lawsuits,
chilling speech in social venues."
That makes it sound like if someone was doing that, the business was getting in
trouble,
versus the person who was saying it.
Right.
So they removed a third-party harassment liability.
So they removed the pub owner being in trouble.
So they did.
Yeah.
They removed that.
Because it says it passed when I was looking it up.
It said it passed a couple months ago.
So that makes pub owners liable again.
Uh...
So it removed a 2013 removal of third-party harassment liability.
That made them liable.
I don't think...
I think it's back to reverses that, reverses making them liable.
No, no, no.
No.
It reverses the removal of the third-party harassment liability.
So they removed the liability, now making pubs liable.
So it now makes them liable if they overhear comments.
So what this does is it encourages the pub itself to censor people, which makes
sense.
I mean, if you all of a sudden can now sue a pub that you went into and you
didn't like this
conversation about gender identity that was taking place next to you, you have
the basis of a lawsuit now.
Yes.
So now the incentive is the pub owner to go out and police all the
conversations so that if anybody...
If anybody crosses a guardrail, you know, the pub owner now has to go in and
interrupt them,
which is not a good thing.
If you weren't a charitable person, you could imagine that there are certain
groups that would
have people go to places, have conversations and set up a lawsuit.
You could just, you could commit fraud.
If the pub is liable, you pay some kook to go in there and start yelling about
transsexuals.
And then next thing you know, you collect the lawsuit.
That's not outside of what I think a shady person would do.
If you think about what you've just talked about with all the Medicare fraud
and
all the other fraud that we know has happened in the world, this is a giant
loophole.
This is a giant loophole for people to come in and sue people and silence
everybody's speech.
And the fact that this is not being recognized, it's very disturbing that
people don't understand
human behavior.
Very weird.
They're willing to accept this kind of stuff.
When you look at the challenges of getting things done, what has been the most
frustrating in terms of
what you wanted to get done and what you were actually able to get done or in
the process of getting done?
I mean, I've been surprised by how much President Trump has supported me on
this stuff.
Because, you know, I'm going after the biggest, you know, big pharma, big
insurance, big food.
And these have all been, you know, those were all taboos for every
administration,
Democratic, Republican.
There was little incremental things that you could do under Democratic
administrations.
But nothing like this has ever happened, you know.
I mean, the agreement we made with the pharmaceutical industry could not have
happened under any other
president of the MFN agreement, the most favored nation.
And the way that that worked is, you know, we've been paying for the last 40
years the highest price
in the world for medicine.
And so we have 4.2 percent of the world's population here.
And over 70 percent of pharmaceutical profits and revenues come from the United
States.
Why is that?
We do buy more drugs than anybody.
But it's because we pay higher prices.
We pay two to three to five times what they're paying in Europe.
For example, and President Trump likes to talk about this.
Ozempic, the list price was $1,350 in America.
You could buy the same drug in any pharmacy in London for $88.
And it's made in the same factory in New Jersey.
And the reason that was allowed to happen is the Europeans just said,
we're not going to allow, we're not going to pay anymore for it.
They would set the price.
And that was the maximum.
There's a lot of drugs they don't have.
There's a lot of cancer drugs they don't have in Europe because they just
wouldn't pay the price.
And so President Trump, you know, every president has vowed to stop this.
Clinton tried to stop it.
Obama, Bush,
all of them tried and Biden all said, we're going to get rid of the MFN price.
And none of them did anything on it.
And President Trump literally called me sometimes once a day, called late at
night,
11:30 at night and, you know, say, where are you on MFN?
And we ended up getting the, it seemed, to me even, it seemed insurmountable.
But he said, I'm going to use tariffs.
I'm going to force the Europeans to raise their drug prices.
And because he didn't want to, he didn't, we had enough leverage on the
pharmaceutical companies
because of our Medicaid, Medicare programs, we could pretty much force them to
lower their prices.
But he, but it would put them out of business.
So, and he didn't, he wants us to continue to be the center for innovation in
this country.
And he also wanted the companies to reassure all their productions so that we're
making all the
drugs here and they're not making it elsewhere in the world.
And so we sat down with them for months and we came to agreements with 16 of
the 17 pharmaceutical companies.
Now Americans are getting the lowest prices in the world.
If somebody lowers the price in Europe, we get that price or lower.
And people can get that today on TrumpRx.
They can go for, you know, the most popular medications and get the cheapest
price in the world.
And not only that, but the pharmaceutical industry, because we gave them
certainty and because
President Trump forced the European countries to raise the price that their
citizens pay for drugs.
We, the companies actually did well.
They increased stock values by 1.3 trillion among them.
And they've all agreed to ensure their production.
So Lilly is building six plants here, new plants, including one of the biggest
API facilities in the world.
The API are the, um, the, the pharmaceutical ingredients that, you know, we ran
out of during COVID.
We need to be making them here because otherwise other countries can blackmail
us.
Pfizer, Merck, they're all building, um, big facilities here.
And drug production is now going to come to the United States.
We are going to be the center of the world in terms of drug production.
And those negotiations were very, very tough and they were extraordinarily
complex.
We were, you know, we have a really good suite of, of, um, talented individuals,
high caliber individuals who've left billion dollar businesses.
One of them is a guy called Chris Klump, who's immensely talented.
He walked away from a, uh, company that does data management for 85% of the
hospitals in this country.
And he's, you know, he walked away from a billion dollar company, divested,
lost a lot of money to come just because he wants to improve things.
He ran the negotiations and the, uh, the pharmaceutical companies fell in love
with him
because they realized they could trust him.
And we worked out this extraordinary agreement where now Americans have gone
from
paying the most in the world for drugs to the least in the developed world for
drugs.
And that's going to change everybody's experience.
Can I ask you how that applies?
If someone, is it the same if someone has insurance or if they don't have
insurance?
Like is, how does insurance bill it versus how does someone buy on their own?
If they, um, it's going to lower price for everybody.
Anybody can go on TrumpRx, whether they have insurance or not, and they can get
it there.
And they would buy it themselves.
Yeah.
And so it'd be at a substantially lower price than they would have had in the
past.
Exactly.
If they buy it themselves.
But what if people are just getting it through insurance?
Do they get, you know, then there's insurance lower it as well, or do they?
Yeah, the, the copay is lowered.
Okay.
And, you know, we had the first woman to buy a drug on it.
The first customer was a woman who has been trying for years to do IVF.
And the drug costs $4,000.
And now I think it costs, uh, you know, something like $600.
Really?
Yeah.
So, and it's going to allow, you know, women, uh, one out of every three women
in this country
does not have as many children as she wants.
And she can't have more.
And IVF is going to be really important because our birth rates just dropped.
I mean, dramatically this year, they dropped to 1.75.
So.
Yeah.
People don't understand that.
You know, we've had a few conversations on this podcast about population
decline.
And people just, most people are not aware of it.
They just see how many people are on the highway.
They think we're overcrowded.
They don't understand this replacement number that we're going to need,
unless we want our population to grow up.
I mean, the U.S. is in a different situation than other countries.
Japan is in total crisis.
Right.
China is in an existential crisis.
Because, uh, you know, its population is going to drop dramatically.
South Korea.
Yeah.
But, you know, people want to immigrate here.
So we can make up the deficit through immigration.
It's going to, you know, uh, and that we have that advantage.
But we, you know, it's still, the birth rate has dropped.
It dropped one and a half, uh, or, um, it dropped from, uh, 1.9 this year to 1.75.
And that affects social security.
It affects, you know, it, it makes it so that the cliff for social security was
pushed ahead
by another year because of that, uh, drop in birth rate.
So it's, um, it's not a good thing.
And, you know, American women want to have babies.
And a lot of them, a third of them cannot have as many children as they want.
Um, what was the pushback when it came to things like removal of dyes?
The removal of dyes, uh, again, we were, I think because of President Trump's
leadership,
we were able to convene the industry and talk to them about it.
And a lot of them came in and said, yeah, you know, we know we got to change.
Really?
Yeah.
The only one that really.
Did you ever ask them, why did you do it a long time ago?
Well, they didn't have options.
And what we did.
But didn't most of them, like for cereal, for example,
didn't they have to have no unnatural dyes when they sent it to Canada?
Yeah, the ones in Canada, but in our country, we hadn't approved a bunch of
them.
We only had one or two vegetable-based dyes.
Marty McCary, who's done a fantastic job at FDA,
has now fast-tracked it this year, five new or seven new ones.
So we're working with the industry to make sure they have the dyes.
And they're supposed to get rid of all the dyes by the end of this year.
And that's going to, you know.
And so instead they'll use just food-based dyes?
Yeah, just vegetable and mineral-based dyes.
And that's, you know, another thing that we did, again, through convening,
two things that we did through convening industry because of President Trump's
convening power,
we fixed the prior authorization.
So one of the most frustrating things that people go through when they
encounter the healthcare system
is that they have to wait for prior authorization from their insurance company.
So you go in, your doctor tells you you need a knee replacement,
and then it gets you, it takes you six months,
the company to approve, for the insurance company to approve the surgery.
And, you know, it was infuriating for people and really devastating and
heartbreaking for a lot of them.
And we got the biggest insurance companies representing 80% of the American
public
all voluntarily agreed to eliminate prior authorization for almost all their
procedures.
It's a very small number now.
I think 15% of the procedures still have it.
And those are procedures we want prior authorization because
there's a potential for abuse, for example, with spinal surgeries.
A lot of people don't need the surgery.
And Medicaid and Medicare wants to make sure that they actually need that
surgery and it's
beneficial to them.
But for all the other ones, you will now know at point of care whether or not
your insurance.
So you go to your doctor, he says you need a knee surgery.
Before you leave his office, he'll know whether the insurance company approves
it or not.
And that's going to dramatically change the medical experience.
Another thing that we did again through convening industry is we originally got
63
the top tech companies together.
And then we ended up final agreement with 405 of them
to agree to stop information blocking.
So your medical records are owned by you, but you can't get access to them a
lot of times.
Most of the time you're the data company won't give them to you.
And so we've got them all to agree to stop doing that.
So by the end of this year, every American will be able to get their medical
records on their cell phone.
And that's going to dramatically change the medical experience.
It's going to save lives because if you got hit, you know, you live in New
Jersey, you get hit by a car in Portland, Oregon.
You go to the hospital and you spend the first two hours while you're bleeding
out, you know, making out clipboards.
Now or you come in unconscious and they don't know what to do with you.
They don't know anything about you.
Now your medical records are on your cell phone.
They can see if you have allergies.
They can see what your blood type is.
They can look at all of your previous medical records and make good decisions
about how to treat you.
And also, you're going to be able to sync that with food purchases apps so that
you'll be able to go into a grocery store.
And the app will tell you, this one is bad for you.
This, you know, this choice is bad for you and offer you a better choice, et
cetera.
And there's an app like that, Yucca now.
But there's a lot of them coming online.
What is it called?
Yucca is the one.
I think 50% of the people in France use Yucca.
But it's…
Do you spell it?
I think it's Y-U-C-C-A or Y-U-K-A.
I don't know.
You can look it up.
We use it.
My wife used it.
You go into the grocery store.
You go into the grocery store and you put it on the barcode and it rates each
of the products
about whether or not they're, you know, whether it's good or a healthy one.
And then it makes you a recommendation for a healthier one if it's bad for you.
And that is going to change the food culture in our country because the company
is already
changing their ingredients so that they can get better scores from the Yucca
app
and from other apps that are like it.
It's not the only one out there.
But what about preservatives and processed foods?
They're always going to exist, right?
You're always going to have a certain amount of preservatives and processed
foods.
Well, I mean, first of all, we're not going to take processed foods away from
people.
We're going to, I think we're going to change the amount of processed foods.
One is by April, we will have a federal definition of ultra-processed foods.
First time in the history.
And as soon as we do that, we're going to do front of package food labeling.
So every food in your grocery store will have a label on it.
It will have maybe a green light, a red light, or a yellow light telling you
whether or not
it's going to be good for you.
Oh, wow.
And that, you know, and it's going to evaluate all of the ingredients, etc.
So, you know, I think we're not going to change this overnight, but we're going
to change it
pretty quickly.
And if you want to be healthy, we're going to give you the information to take
control
of your own health.
If people just don't want to be healthy and don't care, there's not much you
can do about it.
Most Americans want to be healthy.
And they are, you know, we've seen that when they're allowed to make a healthy
choice,
they do not want to be eating this poison.
Yeah.
And ironically, the people that don't want to be healthy, they feel that way
because
they're not healthy.
If they wanted, if they were healthy, they would want to stay healthy.
They're just part of the reason why they're feeling this way is because they're
unhealthy.
You get demoralized.
That's why they don't care.
Yeah.
Well, it's also like the mountain is so big.
If you're 300 pounds, you're like, oh, my God, it's so much work to do
something about
this and not fall back on the old behaviors.
And I don't know other than by example how you can get a large group of people
to go along with that.
You know, when someone like Jelly Roll loses, like, I think it's close to 300
pounds.
When someone like that does that, you know, that's going to help a lot of
people.
Yeah.
Some kind of an example of a guy who just completely changed his lifestyle
around,
changed what he eats.
And he did it without GLPs.
Yes, he did.
It's pretty amazing.
Which brings me to peptides.
Like, where are we at right now on peptides and getting them regulated and
making sure
it's not this weird gray area?
Because we know they're effective, but we also know that there's a lot of pushback
on peptides.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm a big fan of peptides.
I've used them myself and used them with really good effect, you know, on a
couple of injuries.
What happened was there were 19 peptides that you can, just so people
understand,
that there's a, there was a law written that to allow compounding pharmacies
to make compounds that were part of approved drugs.
So, you know, part of approved ingredients of approved drugs
to make them individually for patients who could, did not have access to the
particular
formulation that they needed to fit them.
Maybe if they had an allergy to the commercial brand or whatever.
And the compounding pharmacies and peptides was part of that group.
There were 19 peptides that were widely formulated by compounding pharmacies.
During the Biden administration, they illegally moved those to category two,
which says do not formulate.
It was illegal because they're not supposed to do that unless there's a safety
signal.
And they didn't have a safety signal.
They're not allowed to look at efficacy.
They're not allowed to say, well, we don't believe these are efficacious or
whatever.
They can only look at safety.
They moved those to category two, which means do not formulate.
Well, what happened?
There was huge demand for peptides.
And so a black market came out.
And the black market is run by companies that say that they're making the peptides
for animal use
or for research purposes.
And that peptide now basically completely replaced the legal market.
The legal market for peptides, the pharmacies, the compounding pharmacies,
were getting those peptides from FDA inspected facilities.
And some of them in India and China.
But they were the same one that the pharmaceutical industries are buying them.
And we inspect those.
You know you're getting a good product.
You know you're getting what you bought, what was advertised.
With the gray market, you have no idea.
And a lot of this stuff that we've looked at is just, you know, is very, very
substandard.
Oh, I'm very anxious to move probably not all of those peptides.
Some of them are in litigation.
But about 14 of them back to making them more accessible.
And the FDA is in the middle of I think within a couple of weeks we will have
announced
some kind of new action.
And, you know, my hope is that they're going to end up with – they're still
looking at the science.
My hope is that they're going to get moved to a place where people have access
from ethical suppliers.
That's ultimately the problem with all this black market stuff, right?
A lot of people are getting bogus peptides.
And they don't have any idea how they – if they work, whether to test them.
They just take a chance.
They take a risk.
They get a little flyer in their email or something.
And they hear from somebody else.
I got it from this place.
They don't even know.
And they try it.
And you're getting nonsense, bogus peptides.
I mean, we created the black market.
Yeah.
Which we do with everything.
And it's a very dangerous black market.
Which they've done during Prohibition.
They're doing it right now with everything else.
It's unfortunate.
I know there's been some talk about psychedelics.
And I know that, in particular, Ibogaine, what's going on in Texas with the Ibogaine
initiative where former Governor Rick Perry and Brian Hubbard have been helping
a lot of veterans, a lot of people with, like, serious opioid addictions.
And this is the plan to have this and run some programs where you have this
very effective way of getting people off addictions that we have for some
reason banned in America up until these initiatives.
And I think there's some stuff that can help a lot of people.
I mean, how many people are addicted to opioids in this country?
It's pretty high.
How many people are alcoholics?
48,000.
48 million.
Have you looked into the Ibogaine stuff?
Yeah.
What's your thoughts on it?
I don't know enough.
And I don't think it's well documented enough about whether, you know, it's
long-term impact on addiction.
But in terms of just sort of the field of psilocybin and MDMA, there are lots
and lots of good studies now that clearly demonstrate that or strongly suggest
that it is effective against PTSD.
PTSD.
Yeah, PTSD, sorry.
And, you know, also some forms of depression, et cetera.
And so I would say everybody in my agency and over at VA, at Doug Collins'
agency, is very anxious to get a rule out there that will allow these kind of
studies, will allow access under therapeutic settings, you know, particularly
to the military.
Soldiers who have suffered these injuries to get access to these products.
We're working through that process now.
And, you know, you have Marty McCary.
I mean, we're all working on it and trying to trying to make it happen.
It would be great to extend that to police officers, too, probably.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, a lot of the same type of PTSD they experience.
It just doesn't get brought up as much.
Yeah, and if, you know, if you can, if you can treat depression and, you know,
without using SSRIs, putting somebody a lifetime sentence to SSRIs, you can
treat them.
There's a number of things, not just psychedelics, but a number of
interventions that we're looking at that are rapid interventions are more
transformative than the way that psychedelics seem to rewire your brain.
And so we're looking at that as an entire category of interventions that people
ought to be able to study, ought to have good access to, and we should get it
out to the public as quickly as possible.
What would be the hurdles to something like that?
I think that we're going to get it done.
So how would that be implemented?
Would it be implemented in a clinical setting?
Would it be somewhere that...
Well, for some of them, you know, for some of them, it would be that you can do,
you know, to encourage more clinical trials.
Now, there would be very strong guidelines.
I mean, this is what we're envisioning, so I can't tell you exactly what we're
going to do, but very, very strong guidelines for therapeutic guidelines.
So how they're applied, what kind of follow up, because a lot of these things
rewire your brain.
If you don't do follow up, it doesn't work or you have a failure rate.
So, you know, those kind of protocols are all stuff that we've been developing
and studying.
And we're, you know, I think most of the people in the administration are
anxious to make this happen as quickly as possible.
And I know Doug Collins over at the VA already has, I think, 21 studies going
over there.
And they're, you know, they're very, very promising.
And what are they using at the VA?
I think they're using combinations of MDMA and psilocybin, maybe using epigame.
And, you know, I think they're looking at a number of things, including ayahuasca
and epigame.
They shot down something fairly recently in California where they were going to
decriminalize.
Were they going to decriminalize psilocybin or they were going to allow it for
clinical use?
But I think the problem that they had was they didn't shut.
They didn't say we're completely opposed to it.
They said there's no guidelines in terms of, like, how is it going to be
clinically applied?
Who are going to be the people?
What's the dosage?
Yeah.
You need those guidelines because you don't want to make the wild west.
Exactly.
You have horror stories overnight because people, as you know, you know, some
people can have very,
very bad experiences on that.
Also, some people are on medications and they should be very aware that this
medication would
go really badly with X amount of whatever the substance is.
I mean, you know, we're looking at ways to get it done so that it's in a very
controlled setting.
And so would you envision a place like that, like once it's implemented, where
someone who's suffering
from depression or PTSD, regardless of whether they're a soldier or a cop or
just a regular person,
could be able to go to a place like that and get treatment?
For me, you know, personally, I would like to see that.
But, you know, we need to move in baby steps with this because you don't want
to create a
situation where people are getting hurt.
Right.
And you don't want to create a situation where mentally unstable people snap,
which can happen.
Which can happen.
Yeah.
These are very powerful tools you're working with.
It's like everything else.
You can do it wrong.
But it just makes sense that if you had less depressed people, more happy
people,
more people connected, more people that can kind of let go of whatever
traumatic experience
they went through and just live a more joyful, productive life, which many
people that have
taken these substances have experienced.
Like it's it's not a cure all for everything.
It's not going to fix everybody.
It's not even for everybody.
But you should deny people access.
You shouldn't have a soldier who has given everything for the country,
who has suffered terribly, who has to go to Tijuana to get these treatments,
who has to leave our country in order to get the treatments.
It doesn't make any sense.
And no, it doesn't, especially when so many of them have come back with these
stories.
Guys, I'm Sean Ryan.
A bunch of a bunch of my friends have done it.
And I had a good friend who my friend, Ed Clay, who runs the CPI down in Tijuana,
the Cellular Performance Institute, which is an amazing stem cell clinic down
there.
He went down there because he hurt his back and he got on pills and he couldn't
get off them.
Did Ibogaine got off them?
He's like, oh, my God, like more people have to be aware of this.
This is this really works.
This is a thing that has been shown.
I think it's in the 80 percent range when you do one treatment of where people
don't relapse.
And it's in a 90 percent range with two treatments.
I mean, it's incredibly effective.
There's nothing like it.
And yet we've been denied.
It also has like no chance of you being addicted to it.
It's a terrifying experience, apparently, or at least very, very uncomfortable.
It takes 24 hours.
Nobody wants to hop in and do it again.
It's not like, hey, let's party and take Ibogaine.
That's not what people do.
It's an ordeal.
It's an ordeal, exactly.
And that ordeal is extremely beneficial to people, but also like severs the
impulse of addiction
in a lot of people.
It's very successful at it.
Yeah.
I mean, I had a family member whose life was transformed by it.
And, you know, I've been in recovery for 43 years.
And I go to a meeting every day.
So it's pretty hard to convince me that you can fix what's wrong with you by
taking something outside
of you.
But I have seen so much overwhelming anecdotal evidence, but also clinical
studies,
at a test who, you know, to the effectiveness under some circumstances with
some people
or these medicines.
You know, and I think you've got Jay Bhattacharya at NIH and Marty McCary at
FDA,
who are all, you know, doing whatever they can to make this happen.
Yeah.
Well, I sincerely hope that more people consider it.
And I think one of the big hopes that we have is when you have someone like
former
Texas Governor Rick Perry, who's a Republican, looking at this instead of from
like for the
longest time, that was a left wing perspective, right?
Legalized marijuana, legalized psychedelics.
You didn't hear about it from former Republican governors like Rick Perry.
But when he sees the benefit that it has with veterans, which he cares
very deeply about the veteran community, he's like, no, this is not something
to ignore
just because it's connected to hippies.
You know, I don't know if you remember this, but Hunter Thompson,
during whatever election he covered in "Fear and Loathing" on the campaign
trail,
when he put out that rumor that Ed Muskie was addicted to Ibogaine,
that the Brazilian witch doctors were coming in and giving him Ibogaine,
and it ruined that guy's career.
But it's so funny that he chose that drug because it's like no one's addicted
to that.
That's not the risk. The risk is heart attacks. The risk is you have to have
your heart monitored
while you're doing it. It's like, it's very stressful for a lot of people. But
on a clinical setting,
it's shown to be incredibly effective. And I don't think we should ignore these
things.
I think it's foolish. And I think that is one that seems to have a bipartisan
agreement on,
because a lot of people on the left have always been in favor of some kind of
psychedelic therapy,
just based on experiences they've had that were positive. But seeing it from
the right
is very, very encouraging. Because I think it's something for human beings. It's
not for everybody,
but it's something, it's a tool that I have seen benefit many, many people. And
we should use every
tool that could help us be healthier and happier, period. That shouldn't be a
right or a left issue.
That's just silly. It's just dumb.
Agreed.
Yeah. I mean, it's shocking that that is an unusual perspective. But I think we've
been
propagandized for so long, particularly on certain things like, you know, just
the blanket term of
drugs, that all of them fall into this category of you trying to escape reality.
And this one is
literally the opposite. It's like you confronting reality and finding out why
the pathways to certain
destructive behaviors were set in your life and how to correct it. I think that'd
be great for everybody.
I agree.
Yeah. You've got, you're already a year in here plus. And, you know, is it
going as fast as you'd hoped,
like some of these reforms? Is there, what are the main frustrations that you
have to deal with?
Well, I mean, I didn't know what to expect. And, you know, I didn't know when I
came in, I didn't know the
president that well. So, you know, but from the beginning, he, he was
empowering me. And, you know,
I never made an agreement with him about anything. But, and the first time he
asked me whether I wanted
to be HHS secretary, I said, I don't think so. I wanted to do some, I wanted to
be maybe a health
czar in the White House. And then I thought about it for a while and thought,
no, I, I really won't
be effective if I, unless I'm in this agency and can actually, you know, get
into the weeds. And it has
82,000 employees and all the biggest budget in government. And that would
actually give me the
power to, to change the system. And, and so then I went back to him and I said,
you know, I want HHS.
And he said, fine. And then he allowed me to appoint all of my sub, sub, you
know, agency heads,
which no president has ever done with an HHS secretary in history. He allowed
me to appoint,
Marty McCary choose Marty McCary at FDA, Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Oz and CMS and
everybody else below them.
So nobody's ever been able to do that. And then he, you know, he gave me a very
prominent job on the
transition committee to set this all in motion. And then once I got in, he
supported me on everything.
And that I think was allowed me to do things more during, I, I think, I mean, I,
I, I don't want to
say it sound like, you know, vain or something, but because of the great team
that we have,
and because of the support of the president, we've been able to accomplish more
in one year than I
think any other HHS secretary has done in history in four years. Oh, I'm
pleased with what we've done,
but there's still, I mean, it's the, uh, it's 20% of our economy. And so it's a
huge agency and there's,
you know, it's in everything and there's a lot to do, but I think we're moving
really fast.
So better than you'd hoped.
I would say, yeah, if you put this on the table and said, you can have this,
you know,
the first day I got into office, I would snatch it off and say, I'll take it.
But I mean, I could only imagine staring at that mountain when you're at the
foot of it
and realizing what a climb this is going to be.
That's not how I approach it. I just did it one thing at a time. And there's
something to fix every
single day. And, um, I have the smartest people in the country working with me.
And, you know, we meet every day, me and Oz and Jay and, um, now Chris Klomp,
um, and, uh, and Marty.
We have a meeting every morning and we talk about what we're doing and about
where we need to help
each other. And, you know, it's a really, uh, it's a very, very congenial team.
We all feel like
family with each other and we vacation together. And, you know, it's, uh, I
think because of that,
in former times, the HHS secretary has always been at odds with his departments
and, you know, under
Biden and, uh, uh, even under the previous Trump administration. Why do you
think that was?
I, because I, I think part of it is personalities. They're all kind of,
you know, alpha people. They have different ideas and, um, and then they, I don't
know. I mean, we,
I think a lot of that is just personality and, um, struggling for, for, um,
for power and influence and all of that kind of stuff. You know, you want to
run your own agency
and you don't want interference. And, um, but we've been able to do it in ways
that are
very, very collegial. Um, I wanted to ask you about pesticides. So what was the
recent ruling on
glyphosate? I was an EO, which is an executive order from the president saying
that, um,
we're going to make the ingredients for glyphosate in this country and for
elemental phosphorus. And,
you know, I've, listen, I've spent 40 years fighting pesticides. It was, you
know, I was part of the trial
team on the Monsanto case, which was the team that, you know, we won three
cases in a row and then got an
11 billion dollar, um, settlement with, with, uh, Monsanto, which is now Bayer.
By the end of our trial,
Bayer owned Monsanto. But, you know, pesticides are poison. They're designed to
kill all life.
It's not a good thing to have in your food. So, but I also, so it's not
something that I
was particularly happy with, let me put it that way mildly, but I also
understand the president's
point of view. The president didn't create the system. He's dealing with a
problem that was created
long before over the past 60 years when, um, you know, through federal policies
and subsidies and
the management of farming in this country, the agricultural management, we have
addicted our
farmers to these pesticides and particularly glyphosate. Glyphosate is the
foundational
pesticide of our food production system. So 97% of corn in this country is
produced with glyphosate
and can't be produced without it. 98% of, you know, you could do it, you could
change it. There's organic
corn producers in this country. It's like 3%. 98% of soy is produced with glyphosate.
If you ban
glyphosate overnight or if you got rid of it or if somebody else cut off our
supply,
it would, uh, it would destroy the American food system. And how crazy is that
statement? The American
foods, the entire system is based on using poison. Right. The farmers don't
like it. I mean, you know,
let me just explain what the EO did. Right now, according to the industry
reports, 99% of our glyphosate
comes from China. Oh, the Pentagon and others said, this is an extreme national
security vulnerability,
that China controls the U.S. food system. And we can't afford to let that
happen. If we got it in
some kind of tangle with them, it could literally cut off our food supply
overnight and cripple the country.
And so that's what the president was responding to. But we all know we've got
to transition off of
glyphosate. We all know that. And the farmers hate it. One, you know, they're
now starting to see
these, uh, these chemical resistant, uh, uh, weeds so that that can't be
treated with glyphosate. Now
it's predictable. Do they hate the inputs? It's cost them a lot of money. Um,
three, the, uh,
foreign countries won't allow them to export like Europe doesn't allow. Most
European countries don't
allow the export of our crops to their countries. Well, how are they doing it?
They use less glyphosate than we do. But they, or they use some, they use it,
but you know,
our system was, is all Roundup ready corn and Roundup ready soy. Right. And so
they don't,
you know, they don't use it like we do over here. Ideally that we would
transition away from that.
Right. Yeah. And it's also, they know it's destroying their soil and they're
all suffering
from runoff, you know, it destroys the microbiome and the soil. And because of
that, the soil, um,
can't, you, you, you don't get water infiltration in the soil. And so the soil
then runs off and,
you know, it's, it's destroying their farms. It's not sustainable. Everybody
knows that.
We had Will Harris from White Oak Pastures on here, and he showed us the
literal line in the river between
his organic farm and the next door neighbor's farm. We could see this clear
line where all the runoff
is going into the river. Yeah. But Will Harris will also tell you the same
thing that I said,
is that what he did is, is, you know, is very hard and it's not. It took him 20
years.
What? It took him 20 years. It took him 20 years and it's not applicable to
every farmer.
Right. And he, you know, he understands the problem too. We all understand that
this is a huge
problem. So the president was dealing with national security and they did
something that I, I really
don't like, which is to support. There's a lawsuit about, that's now before the
Supreme Court,
but in the lower court they supported, is asked for federal preemption. So that
would mean that if the,
if the federal label says that this is safe, that these state lawsuits now
cannot be brought. So it
would throw out a lot of the state lawsuits and me effectively gives them
immunity from liability,
which, um, which is, you know, to me, it's not good to give any company
immunity from liability.
It gives, it takes away all incentive for them to make the product safer. Again,
the president is
dealing with bigger issues, which is the company that's making this has paid $11
billion to, you know,
in my lawsuit, they just, uh, they're just about to sign another $7.6 billion
settlement,
65,000 cases out there. And they've said, we're getting out of this business,
you know, if this,
if we don't get relief. So the president is hearing that the farmers are
hearing that,
and they're saying that, you know, this is a temporary fix. We're putting huge
amounts of money into
studying the impacts of, of glyphosate right now in my agency. I'm doing that.
And we're doing,
um, and the president has made a big commitment, a billion dollar commitment,
not only to regenerate
farming, but also to, uh, developing new ways of, of chemical, of, of
dramatically reducing the amount of,
of chemicals in our agriculture. I met this week with three farmers from, um,
who are using this new
system of lasers, and which is now the cheapest way to control weeds in the
vegetable fields.
So, you know, vegetables, lettuce, celery, um, all of these vegetables. Now
they're using a lot of them,
you know, the, you're going to see a very quick transition. It's a, it's a, uh,
an attachment that
is dragged by a tractor. It kills the weeds at every stage of their life. It
identifies their species
and kills them instantly all the way down through their root system by
exploding them with this laser.
And yeah, here, here is one of those. This is what it looks like? Yeah, that's
what it looks like. Whoa.
And this guy, so I, can I ask you this? Yeah. Does this have any negative
effect whatsoever on the food? No.
In fact, you get a 30% increase in productivity of the farm and the growing
season is shorter,
shortens by three weeks for onions. So, and that is a huge economic boom. Does
that the way it pays itself
back? And for some of these farmers, it pays itself back in, um, in, uh, nine,
uh, nine months. It's a
million dollars. That's a million dollar machine, but it pays back. They're
paying vegetable field. This
onion producer in South Texas, the biggest onion producer in Texas, she has 8,000
acres. She was paying
$1,500 per acre for pesticides for mainly glyphosate and for a manual labor.
And now with this machine,
it's $300. She's saving over a thousand dollars an acre. Is this showing how it
does? She's got 8,000
acres. So it's a million dollar machine, which sounds like a lot, but you got 8,000
acres and you're paying
$1,500 an acre per growing season. They missed one. And you know, now they're
making them on drones.
Maybe it was a crop. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. There's all these kind of new
exciting technologies
that give us a light at the end of the tunnel to transition. And it could be
very, very fast. What
the president wants to do is accelerate that. He says, yeah, we've got, we can't
allow
the company to go bankrupt. We can't allow foreign interference, but we got to
get off of this stuff.
We got to give these farmers an off ramp so that they can get off it because
they don't want to
be on it and nobody wants to be on it. Without crashing the food system. So
this is a bridge.
This is a bridge to the path you think would be technologies like this for
weeds. What about for
bugs? You know, it's harder. These systems are, are more difficult or not yet
economic in the,
in the, the cornfield, the row crops. They're, they're economic for organic
corn. And I talked
to an organic corn farmer who is in love with his machine, but yeah, they can
do it for bugs too.
So they just zap the bug. They zap the bug, they identify them and zap them.
But in the row crops,
you know, these guys, the vegetable crops are paying 1500 bucks an acre. The
row crops are 50 bucks an acre.
And so to get economically to their level, they have to scale enormously. So
that is, you know,
how do we help them do that? How do we bring Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and
billionaires in to start
investing really heavily in these kinds of technologies? And let's get off of
this stuff.
What are the primary health concerns about people that consume too much glyphosate?
Or is there a
threshold? Like, I know there's like a safe level that's supposed to be detectable
in your blood.
Like, what does that mean in terms of- I don't know if there's any safe level.
I don't know,
you know, I don't think- I shouldn't even say there is a- That is what we are
trying to figure out right
now. And it's, it's associated with, um, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. It's
so,
you know, there's a scientific association, but it's not strong enough for
people to litigate on.
The litigation was all about non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Only that? Yeah, because
that's the one thing that
they had a critical mass of scientific studies supporting. Um, now what about
when they use it
at the end of production? And it definitely- it definitely disrupts it. Sorry,
your gut biome.
Yes. It- it- it is, um, it's the- the advantage of glyphosate is unlike the
other poisons,
it doesn't harm organic tissue. But it goes after plants, not animal tissue.
But your stomach
microbiome is plants. And, uh, and so, you know, um, there's, uh, you know, it
may contribute to this,
the- the celiac disease and all these gluten allergies. It was coterminous with
that, you know,
the introduction of glyphosate of- of- of Roundup Ready corn. You know what
Roundup Ready corn is,
right? It means that you can spray the field and everything green dyes except
for the corn,
which is immune to glyphosate. That's why it's so advantageous to them. It
saves huge labor costs,
and it's- it allows them to, you know, to sell the corn at a price that people
can afford. Um,
the- you know, one of the most controversial uses is a desiccant. And that
means that there is no
Roundup Ready wheat. So, normally, they weren't using this in the wheat field.
But around 2003,
they started using it to dry out the wheat just before harvest. And that way,
they can harvest it
without getting fungus on it and without getting mold on it. And for the first
time, they were spraying it
right on food. And so, that is real- you know, the major factor for getting
into human beings. And,
you know, around 2003 is when you started seeing these explosions in celiac
disease and gluten allergies.
There's no clear scientific evidence that it's related. But, you know, there's
a- you know,
there's some signals out there that now we're looking at at HHS for the first
time. They should
have been looking at this 30 years ago. And, um, but, you know, they're not-
but we're doing it now.
Well, there's a lot of anecdotal stories about people going to Italy or Spain
and France,
eating bread over there, not having any problem with it at all, and being so
confused. And then,
also, people coming from Europe and eating in America and getting sick.
And I don't know whether that- there's no telling whether that's glyphosate or
other pesticides or
whatever, but- Right. But it's just something.
I have a son who had chronic eczema from when he was a kid, a disease I never
heard of as a kid,
and everybody's got it now. And he would get it any time that he ate spaghetti
or bread or,
you know. And he went- and he went to the University of Bologna, he went to
Brown,
and then he took a year at the University of Bologna, and he ate spaghetti
three meals a day,
and had no problem. And so- and you hear- there's, you know, there's hundreds
of stories like that,
that we've all heard. Yeah.
I feel different when I go to Italy. When I go to Italy and I eat over there, I
feel different.
I feel different if I use- there's a restaurant that- called Gaetano's in Las
Vegas in Henderson,
and they use all Italian flour. They import it all from Italy. It tastes
different. It feels different.
You don't feel terrible after you eat it. There's a- something's wrong with our
food.
And everybody knows it. And the fact that it's become
a left-wing or a right-wing issue is one of the dumbest decisions we've ever
made as a country.
And I know that a lot of it is, again, a lot of- a lot of propaganda, a lot of-
a lot of these
narratives trying to push people into thinking that things aren't dangerous
because right-wing
people believe in them and that it's nonsense. And it's just- I don't know what
that pathway is.
When you're dealing with monocrop agriculture and you have these enormous farms
and you say 98
percent is based on glyphosate use or whatever it is. Like, how do we get those
people to
ultimately transition? And if they do, could they even produce enough of their
product to stay viable?
I can tell- I mean, I've met with over 100 farmers and developing the food
guidelines, our team.
And, you know, I've been doing agricultural issues for 30 years. I can tell you
farmers are the most
hard-working people that I've ever met. They are good people. They want to
produce the healthiest foods.
And they don't- the inputs are killing them. They're, you know, seven out of 10
years farmers lose money.
And there's no young people moving to the farm country anymore. So, you know,
we- we really need
to do what we can to make sure we don't lose any more farms in this country.
And that's what the
president's worried about. That has to be his priority. But he also wants to
make sure
how we accelerate the off-ramps, the development of off-ramps, that they can
transition off of this.
And we're putting huge amounts of money into regenerative agriculture. People
like, you know,
Mr. Harris and, you know, and meeting with him, Brooke Rollins, meeting with
these guys all the time,
trying to figure out how do we help you? How do we help other farmers to do
what you're doing? And,
you know, that is a priority for the administration.
Um, do you envision a possibility, a real possibility, of a country that is all
regenerative
agriculture with no pesticides? Is that even possible? That we could get to a
point, whether
it's a decade from now or two decades from now, where we've completely eradicated
the uses of these
harmful chemicals? I mean, I think that's going to happen. You know, I think
technology is going to
allow us that to happen. Um, but, you know, you're going to have a lot of
robotic farming happening.
And that's another question, but yeah. Yeah. But, well, that's robotic with
these lasers. That's
actually what you're doing. Yeah. Yeah.
So that would be the solution. And you're going to have drones doing this.
Mm-hmm. You know, you'll have drone swarms over farms, uh, killing insects.
What about industrial fertilizer? What would be the solution to that?
Uh, and that's a little more difficult, particularly in some parts of the
country.
You know, you need, um, you need nutrients in the soil, but there's ways of, of
growing. And,
you know, Harris has shown this where you can dramatically reduce the amount of,
uh, of, uh,
petroleum-based fertilizers that you're using dramatically, almost eliminate
them.
Sure. But, uh, the scale of his farm and the scale of the production in
comparison
to these monocrop agriculture places that produce corn. I mean, these people
are dealing with enormous
amounts of crops. That's the question is, could that be scaled regeneratively?
Could you,
could you get it to a point where you have organic farms only?
Uh, I, you know, I think with technology, you're going to eliminate a lot of
the pesticides and the
herbicides. I think the, um, that the, uh, it's going to be much slower when
you talk about fertilizers.
But is there a pathway for that?
I hope so.
But you haven't?
No.
No.
Do you use it so far off?
Yeah. I mean, that's going to be after my three years before that happens.
Do you, uh, I mean, if, uh, someone else wins and they want you to stay, are
you going to stay?
Do you, do you have a thought of that? Or do you want to do as much as you can
in four years?
Well, I, whatever happens, because you can't tell what's going to happen in the
election,
that I will, I'm going to, I'm going to act as if I got three years to do
everything.
And if I, you know, get more time, then I would probably take it.
Um, how many days a week are you working?
Well, I work, uh, I mean, I'm working when I'm home, I'm working. It doesn't,
it doesn't stop.
It's just your life.
And then we have a president who has, you know, never stops working and he's up
till 11,
12 at night, you know, which you can get a call at that point.
Yeah.
He says, were you sleeping two o'clock in the morning? Yeah, no, no, of course
not. I was working.
Oh, he's an interesting guy to work for.
Yeah. He's got a lot of energy for an old guy.
He's got an incredible amount of it. I've never seen anything like it. And
particularly with the food he eats.
Yeah.
I don't know how he does it.
He's still, he's still eating mostly. I mean, he, I've never seen it. Well,
let me put it this way. When he's on the road, he eats like fast food because
he trusts it.
He doesn't want it. He doesn't want to eat in some local place
where, you know, he gets food poisoning or something.
But when he's at home at the White House or Mar-a-Lago, it is the, you know, it's
all like
locally sourced incredible food.
Oh, that's good.
So he eats well. I mean, but he still drinks.
Dana White told me that he's known him for 20 years and he's never seen him
drink water.
Just drinks Coca-Cola. What does he drink? Diet Cokes, right?
Diet Cokes, yeah.
Doesn't he, you know, I just had Michael Mallison here. He was talking about
how he got off
aspartame and how his brain fog just completely cleared up. He was drinking
Diet Coke every day.
That is a really sleazy saga about how that got into her.
We talked about it the other day.
Yeah, we brought it up.
That was Donald Rumsfeld.
Donald Rumsfeld.
Yeah.
And there was a really good FDA commissioner back then named David Kennedy.
No relation, but he was a guy from Stanford. I think he was the president of
Stanford for a while.
And he was really good, had total integrity. He was like David Kessler, another
really great
FDA head. And he banned aspartame. And Rumsfeld came in there and just overruled
him.
Rumsfeld owned Searle, you know, which was making it.
That's how it worked.
Well, that's why this time with you in office has been encouraging. I mean,
you doing the things that you wanted to do was to me the most interesting thing
about this
administration going in because I knew your conviction. I had read your Fauci
book and I'm like,
if anybody could do something about this, it's you. And I'm kind of amazed at
how much you have
been able to do. And also, you know, watching the struggle, the difficulties of
getting things
pushed through that should have been pushed through easily with rational
thinking. It's a fascinating
time. Because we are in a time of change. Some of it's good, some of it's bad.
But we're definitely
in a time of change. And that's not something you could say about every
administration. It's definitely
not something you could say about everybody that's been the head of the HHS.
You're the first guy that
gave me hope when you got in there. I'm like, okay, maybe we'll see some
meaningful change with
some things that are really important for people's health. I think we're doing
it. I think you are.
I think you're doing that. Is there anything else you want to talk about? Any
other subjects you want
to cover? You know, why don't you ask me about immigration? Because I know that
that's something
that's disturbing you. Yeah. Well, what are your thoughts on immigration? On
what's going on?
Well, you know, here's the background of my kind of assumptions. During the
last 10 years of his life,
I worked very closely with Cesar Chavez. And I worked with, he had two issues.
He had pesticides,
which were a huge issue with him. And that's what I worked with him on, on the
dangers that,
you know, his workers were experiencing from pesticides. And the other issue he
had was
immigration. He wanted to shut down the border because he saw the way that it
was impairing this
huge influx of illegal immigration across the border. It was impairing his
ability to bargain, to leverage
good wages and conditions for his workers. And when I grew up, the Democratic
Party was against immigration.
And it was the Republican Party who wanted it because the big corporations
wanted cheap labor.
The Chamber of Commerce was firmly embedded in the Republican Party. And they
were all about open borders.
Today, the Chamber of Commerce is with the Democratic Party.
And so it's one of these switches that is kind of inexplicable to me. But I
think, again,
it happened because President Trump said, I'm going to fix it with a wall. And
that became,
you know, it suddenly became open borders, suddenly became a calling card for
the Democratic Party.
But there's a reason, you know, and I see it in my agency, the cause that it's
imposing on our country.
And, you know, on health care, diminishing health care for Americans and
housing and jobs and all of
these places where it hurts that we need workers in here and we need legal
immigrants in here. But
they should come in legally. And every country has to do that. Isn't Trump ran
on this issue?
He's now and he ran that he's going to enforce it and deport, particularly the
bad people.
This is what you don't hear. 70 percent of the people that they've arrested are
have criminal records.
What the Democrats are always saying is only 14 percent of them have been
convicted of a violent crime.
Well, they've been convicted. A lot of them, the other ones have been arrested
and they just
haven't been convicted yet because they jumped, you know, bail or they or they,
you know,
they jumped their their their warrants. The other 30 percent, a lot of them are
gang members.
When they go looking for an immigrant, they're not just randomly searching, you
know, restaurants.
They're going after particular people who they've gotten their names from local
law enforcement and from others.
During the Biden or during the Obama administration, President Obama deported
more people than President
Trump did. The most in history. Nobody cared. And there were 76 people shot
during that process,
during the Biden administration. None of it made headlines. About half of those
people were killed.
None of it made the news now because it's Trump doing it. You have the entire
Democratic Party in the media
establishment saying, oh, look at the horrible things. He's a dictator, but he's
doing what he promised to
do to the American people. It's it's very disturbing watching what you see on
TV.
And the thing that makes it most disturbing is because there's so much
interaction with protesters,
which is weird that the Democrats are telling protesters to go out there and
stop law enforcement
from doing its job. If you that's not how protests usually work. If you don't
like U.S. drug policy,
which you don't, you know, and a lot of people don't. A lot of people don't
like the war on drugs at all.
They think it's counterproductive. You wouldn't send people to try and
interfere with people who are
who are arresting a drug dealer. And when you have thousands and thousands of
people doing that,
there's going to be thousands of interactions. And some of those are going to
end badly because you
have armed people doing dangerous things. And when you have crowds doing that,
it's going to blow up.
And so, you know, I I I see this, you know, I nobody is happy with the way that
things have looked,
particularly in Minnesota. But a lot of it is because of this capacity of the
press
to take to take Trump derangement syndrome and amplify it into public outrage
and set up a situation. I mean,
if you were a dad, I wouldn't send my kids out to interfere with law
enforcement operation. There's
other ways to protest. But so I think that, you know, I think now they're
pulling out of Minnesota
and they're going to do this, you know, in other states where they're not going
to get that kind of
crowd interaction. But a lot of the people that they're arresting are not, you
know, they're,
they're people who are actually, you know, have, like I said, 70% of have
criminal records.
Oh, yeah, we've we've actually covered that here. And then there's also the
issue that this is the
first time in history that the border has been wide open for four years. It's a
different thing.
It's a different thing when you have at least 10 million people. They don't
even know how many for
real. Yeah, it could be 20 million. They don't know. And that's a lot. And to
have that happen
all at once is pretty crazy. What I think what disturbs people is, again,
obviously these violent
interactions. What should disturb them is that these are not organic protests.
So these protests are
organized and paid for. And that's crazy. Right. When you find that out and you
find out that people
can actually be paid to protest and that they provide them with signs. They
tell them what they
do. It's organized. They have signal chats. There's been a lot of people online
talking about being paid
to protest in certain places. And that's kind of insane that that's even legal,
that you can organize
a mob and pay them to go and make a bunch of noise. It's like the color
revolution. Right.
Exactly. And that it just happened to take place in the place where hundreds of
millions of dollars
of fraud was being exposed. So then the narrative completely shifts away from
the fraud and onto
this unnecessary violence with ICE. And then there's the natural thing that
people have, this distrust of
people wearing masks. They don't like that. They don't like officers wearing
masks. But on the other
side, they have to wear masks because they're being doxxed and their families
are being threatened and
you're filming everything they do. And you're these organized instigators. So
if it wasn't for organized
protest, I wonder if those particular interactions would have even happened,
would have even taken
place. And I know you're saying that they don't, that they're targeting
specific people. They're going
after bad people. But also they're showing up at Home Depot and just grabbing
people too, and trying to find
out if someone is a bad guy or a good guy. So there's probably a lot of people
that are just
people that got duped into coming to this country thinking they're going to be
welcomed. And then
they come over here and they're trying to get jobs and now they're getting
arrested and deported.
You know, it wasn't their fault that they were encouraged and brought into this
country, but
they did break the law. And I understand. I understand that perspective. But it's
kind of insane
that no one is pointing the blame at the fact that they let at least 10 billion
people or 10 million,
excuse me, people into this country over the last four years, at least being
charitable.
Yeah, it's kind of nice. And I was down at the border. And you know, I was on
when I during my
presidential campaign, I went down there and went down a bunch of times. But
the first night I went
down there to Tucson. And I couldn't believe what I was saying. It was like the
Boston Marathon,
the beginning of it just the sheer number. And they were, you know, they all
had a plan. The cartels
were all, you know, running the whole thing. They were advertising all over the
world and bringing
people in. And everybody was, the border patrol was completely demoralized.
They were told don't
arrest anybody, just fingerprint them. If they're a criminal, turn them back.
But, you know, most of
these people, they couldn't figure that out. And I and otherwise put them on a
bus or plane to anywhere
they wanted to go in the country. So it was just. And at the same time, you
have legitimate people
that are doing it the right way that have to go through a long and difficult,
lengthy process to
get attained citizenship and to come here or get a green card and come here.
The whole thing was
crazy in that, you know, one of the complicated issues that you have now a
bunch of sanctuary cities
and sanctuary states. And it used to be that if somebody who was an illegal
immigrant was arrested
for a crime and put in the local jail, ICE was notified. So ICE would then come
and local law
enforcement would transfer it to ICE. In the sanctuary cities, they don't do
that. They just let them go.
And, you know, it's not how is that legal? That seems insane. That seems like a
violation of law.
It was just a policy when, you know, that law enforcement always cooperated
with each other.
Now, because Trump's in there, they're saying, OK, we would rather take the,
you know, the side of,
of, you know, a criminal and take the side of the president. So they're all
they're choosing sides.
And as part of it, it's like the other day during the, um, during the State of
the Union speech,
when President Trump said he was talking about immigration and he said, please
stand up if you
think that law enforcement should protect the American people over illegal
immigrants and not a
single Democrat stood. Yeah. How can you, how can you do that? Well, that's
what we were talking
about earlier and what you were saying. It's just, they're, they're ideologically
captured.
Yeah. I mean, that should be something. If you want to be taken seriously, you're
a reasonable
person. You would stand up for that. Yeah. Yeah. Um, it just, it really disturbs
people when you see
masked people grabbing people, arresting people. And a lot of them turn out to
be American citizens,
you know, that's part of the problem too. Um, but I did look at a chart
recently,
because I thought it was fascinating. The number of American citizens that were
arrested,
uh, what percentage during what Obama did versus during Trump, it's actually, I
think higher,
more American citizens were arrested during this Obama thing. Um, you just
never heard about it.
Also, if you hear Obama talk about immigration, if you hear Hillary talk about
immigration, or if you
hear Bill talk about immigration, you would swear they were running for
president as a Republican.
Like if you listen to the things they were saying back then, it was very much
the Republican perspective.
Well, my, that was the Democratic Party always was, was, you know, against an
open border.
Yeah. Bernie even said that it's like open borders are, that's a Republican
idea. They want cheap labor.
Yeah. So, all right. Um, anything else before we wrap this up? Listen, thank
you very much for all
your hard work. And, uh, it's really, it's very exciting for me to have someone
like you doing what
you're doing. Cause I, I do know that you really want to push for meaningful
change. It's gen, genuinely
going to help. And, uh, I think, you know, so far you're on a good path. So I
hope we can get all the
other stuff done too. Well, thank you, John. Thanks for the conversation.
Thanks for all of your
conversations. My pleasure. Thanks for giving me. All right. All right, buddy.