Dhru Purohit Show - Whistleblower Exposes the Dirty Tactic that Coca-Cola Used to Rig the System and Keep Vulnerable Populations Unhealthy with Calley Means

Episode Date: January 19, 2023

This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker, Joovv, and Beekeeper’s Naturals. Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Calley Means to discuss his viral Tweet stating that he “saw inside the room” of Coca-Cola’s tactics to ensure sugar-sweetened beverage taxes failed and that soda was permitted in government-funded nutrition programs. Calley and Dhru talk about why diet and nutrition guidelines are a bipartisan issue that deserves equal attention from the left and the right.  Calley Means is the founder of TrueMed, a company that enables Americans to buy exercise equipment and healthy food with FSA/HSA dollars. He is also the coauthor (with his sister, Dr. Casey Means) of an upcoming book on food as medicine. Earlier in his career, he was a consultant for food and pharma companies and is now exposing the practices they use to weaponize our institutions of trust. He is a graduate of Stanford and Harvard Business School.  In this episode, Dhru and Calley dive into: -Calley Mean’s viral tweet about the soda industry’s hidden agenda (2:35) -The biggest lie we’re taught is that health and nutrition need to be complicated (14:40) -How processed food and nutrition play into mental illness (19:23) -Calley’s message for policy change is non-tribal and bipartisan (30:03) -Controversies around Ozempic, the “miracle weight-loss drug” (35:30) -How we’ve lost our way when it comes to diet and health care (45:00) -Doctors aren’t incentivized to help people get healthy (50:11) -Calley’s mom’s abrupt cancer diagnosis and how it changed his views on diet, nutrition, and cancer treatment in medicine (58:30) -The tipping point that inspired Calley to pursue a career that educates and empowers people to make good health choices (1:10:38) -How Calley plans to incentivize health and his company, True Medicine (1:17:24) Also mentioned in this episode: -https://www.truemedicine.care -Sign up for Calley’s daily newsletter here.   For more on Calley Means, follow him on Instagram @calleymeans and Twitter @calleymeans.  InsideTracker provides detailed nutrition and lifestyle guidance based on your individual needs. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 20% off. Just go to https://www.insidetracker.com/DHRU to get your discount and try it out for yourself. Enhance your health with red and infrared LED light therapy with Joovv. Right now, Joovv is offering an exclusive offer on your first order. Head over to https://www.Joovv.com/dhru and apply my code DHRU. Right now, Beekeeper’s Naturals is giving my community an exclusive offer. Just go to https://www.beekeepersnaturals.com/dhru and enter code “DHRU25” to get 25% off your first order. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Processed food companies spend 11 times more on fundamental nutrition research than the NIH. And I can tell you that it's not out of philanthropic goodwill to advance unbiased scholarship on nutrition. What if I told you that some of your greatest concerns about how corrupt big food is were actually true? And your hunch that they often use money and influence to completely rig the food system are actually taking place. Welcome to the Drew Proet podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Callie Means. And Callie is a whistleblower, an entrepreneur who's sounding the alarm on big food, specifically Coca-Cola, and the nefarious tactics that they've used in the past to subvert the conversation on how bad sugar water is for the public and especially the most. vulnerable of populations. Specifically, Callie is here on the podcast today to share that when he was working for the

Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank, Coke approached them and essentially hired them to come up with a plan to help them ensure that soda taxes that were being proposed around the country failed and that Coke continued to be included in food stamp funding. What did Callie and the Heritage Foundation do? they came up with a plan to give money to civil rights groups like the NAACP to call opponents of Koch's agenda racist. Out freaking rages. Well, there's a lot more to the story, so we invited Cali onto the podcast to talk about it all

and some of the shady tactics that Big Food uses to keep the system rate. Now, a little bit more about Cali before we jump in. Callie Means is the founder of True Medicine, a company that enables Americans to buy exercise, and healthy food with FSA and HSA dollars. He's also the co-author with his sister Dr. Casey means, who's also a dear friend and a past guest of this podcast of an upcoming book on food as medicine. Callie is a graduate of Stanford University

and Harvard School of Business, and he's recently become a dear friend. Now, if you care about the topic of protecting your health and protecting the health of your loved ones and looking out for the most vulnerable populations that are out there, this episode is 100% for you. Stay tuned. Callie Means, welcome to the podcast.

It's a pleasure to have you here. I'm going to jump right in with a tweet that literally kind of set the world on fire that you wrote. And I'm going to read from the first part of it, and you're going to get a chance to continue from there. So quoting from you, early in my career, I consulted for Coke to ensure sugar taxes failed and soda was included in food stamp funding. I say Coke's policies are evil because I saw inside the room. The first step in the playbook was paying the NAACP plus other civil rights groups

to call opponents of the soda tax racist. Now, this tweet has thousands of comments, 15,000 plus retweets, 57,000 likes and most importantly, it was seen over almost 12 million times. Take the story from there and tell us what happened. Once the tweet went out. Once the tweet went out. Or actually even expand on that tweet. How is it that you were an insider in the room and Coke was using this playbook of calling

opponents of removing soda from food stamps racist? How did the whole thing come to be? So early in my career, as you alluded to, Coke was trying to keep spending on soda for food stamps. And this is an important government nutrition program. This is $110 billion. 15% of the American people depend on this program from nutrition. And 10% of that funding goes to soda, goes to sugary drinks. 70% goes to processed foods.

Obviously, this makes no sense. Sugar consumption among kids has gone up by some measures, 100%. X in 100 years. Diabetes now, pre-diabetes among children is 25%. This used to be called adult onset diabetes. You know, doctor that treats diabetes didn't see one child their entire career who had diabetes a generation ago. Now it's very common. So that's what's happening. Obviously, this doesn't make any sense, but Coke wanted to keep the status quo. So they bring these consultants in. And as you talked about, there's a three-part playbook that I saw. So around this food stamp debate, we literally, I was sitting in a room with the NWACP and Coke.

executives and it was very unsettling. It was Coke executives telling the most prominent civil rights groups of the United States, we're going to pay you millions of dollars and we needed to call our opponents racist to shut down the debate. And the opponents in this case were parents that were concerned about their kids eating too much sugar. And that happened. It was reported in the New York Times at the time in 2012. There was an onslaught against opponents of taking sewed out of food stamps around really toxic racial lines, which did shut down the bait and they were successful. But it's bipartisan. We also went to the Heritage Foundation. I grew up, in my politics have changed. Some degree, I don't know what my politics are these days, but I grew up

conservative and interned at the Heritage Foundation, which is the most prominent conservative think tank, really the gold standard. And I was despondent to see that I would then shuttle these executives from pharma, from processed food into the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks. And it would be as transactional as ordering a Big Mac ordering a slanted study. There'd be an exchange of funds and then the Heritage Foundation would do PR and studies saying how we've got to keep these kids having their Coke and got to have government support and subsidies for Coca-Cola. So that happened on the left and the right with think tanks which are very influential

on the public debate. And the last, and I think the most important and I think least understood, it's been a long process for me is I was shocked that public relations executives in Washington, C. are creating lists of what universities to fund and what the research should say. And we're talking prominent research institutions. Process food companies spend 11 times more on fundamental nutrition research than the NIH. And I can tell you that is not out of philanthropic goodwill to advance unbiased scholarship on nutrition.

When companies pay billions of dollars, they want something and they're getting something. The foundational research for the food pyramid. in the 90s that we know is disastrous was Harvard. Was Harvard research funded by sugar companies? Up until today where you have processed food companies funding foundational research, you know, like this recent food compass from Tufts in the NIH, that's saying, and there's some ridiculous, absurd headlines here, but it is saying lucky charms are healthier than eggs and things like that

and systemically overrating processed food. And that would be funny if this wasn't going directly into childhood nutrition policy and wrecking the cells of our children. So I felt they need to speak out. You know, when a lot of people saw this tweet, and since that time you've been invited on a lot of major talk shows and radio programs and we're thankful for you to come on this podcast, there was a genuine sense of,

I knew a lot of this was happening, but to hear about it from somebody makes me so upset because it really feels that the system is rigged in many ways. What kind of comments have you been getting back from people who saw this tweet? Is that the sentiment that the system is rigged? And do you feel that that's the case? So the message I've taken from this and the message I want everyone to have from this is it sounds very depressing. I mean, it is crazy how systematically our institutions to trust are rigged.

But the message, and I think the takeaway from this is optimism. The first step to health empowerment is understanding the incentives that we exist in. And what I've seen is it's really been astounding just to have a small window into this. But as you said, the tweet went viral. I think I had 3,000 new followers. And I received hundreds of messages primarily from moms. I think there's a lot of frustration out there and confusion around what the heck is happening. I mean, you go to a classroom, you know, the CDC reported then in 2021, 40% of, Five to 12-year-olds are morbidly obese or obese, like not overweight obese. You go look at the 25% of kids having prediabetes. 15% of children have fatty liver disease. We're wrecking the cell. This is cellular dysfunction among our kids.

You know, ADHD, SSRIs are up 40% in the past five years among children. You know, we keep throwing more drugs at the situation and it's clearly not working. And then you obviously get to adults, you know, where 93% of adults have metabolic dysfunction of some sort, 50% pre-diabetes or diabetes. There's something wrong happening. And my argument is it's a devil's bargain. You have our food system, which has systematically poisoned people over the past 50 years, and a health care system with very good people inside it.

But this $4 trillion health care system, which is engineered to profit off interventions on people that are sick. Thus has been standing by, standing silent as this devastation has been happening to the health of Americans. An example is, for my sister Casey, is that Stanford, Med School, Harvard Med School, 80% of med schools in the United States don't require one nutrition course. And it's just very simple. Follow the money.

Going back to my experience. I mean, there were printed lists in a public relations office in Washington, D.C., of billion-dollar donation strategy. to universities, to top universities, and that dictates where they focus. And when, you know, 50% plus of funding for medical schools in the United States somehow touches pharma or comes from pharma, that that is more of an intervention-based system than a food-based system. So I think being able to speak out surprisingly, and fortunately, it's been gratifying to hear from people, has given a little bit of voice to what people have been feeling.

You know, there's a lot of people that are out there, especially many people in the elite class, again, both sides of the aisle, they'll say, we know this is a problem. We know in particular kids are getting fatter, are getting sicker, are getting more depressed, all the things that are there. But we just don't know why it's happening. In fact, there was a reporter from the Washington Post, I believe that recently there was an exchange between you and her on Twitter. You were kind of commenting in it. And also Dr. David Ludwig. Yeah, yeah. Lustig. Lustig. From Harvard, who does a lot of research. Ludwig. Ludwig.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ludwig. Ludwig. He caught. He was like, actually, hey, I wrote this op-ed in the Washington Post. But anyways, the synthesis of what she was saying is that this is happening, but we don't exactly know why this is happening. And I thought, you know, not to pick on her.

Yeah. But actually, because the conversation has been so. rigged, a lot of people feel that they're at a loss because we have the best healthcare, right? People believe that. We spend the most amount of money more than any other country in the world, I think more than the top 11 countries combined on health care. If it was so obvious that it was food and things like soda being included in food stamps and it was cellular dysfunction, wouldn't have the research.

Figures figured it out. What would you say back to that? The American patient has been sold an absolute bill of goods over the past 50 years. And the greatest lie that's been propagated, I believe, on the American people, the most consequential lie, is that this is complicated. We have systematically, over the past 50 years, gotten sicker, fatter, more infertile, you know, male sperm counts plumbing 50%, PCOS, female infertility, skyrocketing, and more depressed. 25% of the American people are on a mental health medication. We continue to get more depressed than suicides now, the second leading cause of death for young adults. These trends have all been happening.

At the same time, we've been spending more and more in health care. Usually, you know, and I've been in tech for a long time, innovation means lowering the cost and hiring the quality. Health care is now the fastest growing and largest industry in the United States, and outcomes are just declining and declining. We're going to spend ourselves into becoming a completely non-rengthy. non-competitive society and going to go bankrupt. And the biggest incentive here, if you look at the incentives, there's a incentive for this to be complicated. You know, media institutions that have to

report something and are funded in many cases more than 50% by pharma and processed food companies, you know, have an incentive to muddy the waters. In my mind, and this comes a lot from, you know, being sisters with Dr. Casey Moons, who's been on here and on the shoulders of a lot of, you know, metabolic health leaders, like Dr. Hyman, like you, but, but this is, this is my takeaway. The food system's been weaponized. The foundation of our diet is three things right now. It's highly processed grains. And this is a key thing. Those are new in the past hundred years. Highly processed grains are, are a new invention. And the processing takes that fiber out so that grain is a sugar bomb, right? It's weaponized in our kids food. It's the primary ingredient in

processed foods, which is 70% of our diet. And it turns into sugar. and becomes addictive and very unhealthy in the body. Then, of course, added sugar, which essentially didn't exist 100 years ago. You know, it's over 100 times up. And particularly in sugary drinks, which are basically a new phenomenon, which are diabetes bombs, highly addictive. So that's another obvious component of our food. And then seed oils, which were invented in 1909 and now the top source of American fat and highly

inflammatory and make the food more addictive. So our food has been weaponized. It's become cheaper. It's become more self-stable. But it's all correlated to that. You know, the obesity is a symptom of metabolic dysfunction. There's a lie being propagated that it's this disease that you can treat. And in some cases, it's a good symptom.

You know, the cellular dysregulation of fat cells making us obese, at least we can see that. As I mentioned, fatty liver disease. That's another leg of the stool. We've been convinced these are all isolated incidents. heart disease, diabetes, even I think as you talked about Alzheimer's, now called type 3 diabetes. We have overcomplicated health. You know, a doctor chooses one of 42 medical specialties and then 82 subspecialties. We've divided the body into 42, then 82 parts.

Our cells are under threat because what we're eating, 90% of health care costs are going to chronic conditions. They're fundamentally tied to cellular dysregulation caused by food. If you change those three ingredients I mentioned, added sugar, seed oils, processed grains, if you systematically, from a public policy perspective, work to take those out of the American diet, heart disease and diabetes would be gone. Alzheimer's, it appears, it would be gone. Kidney disease, COVID deaths. I mean, we are talking like it is the foundation.

And I think when you really peel it back and really push, you know, even medical professionals who argue something different, push them on this, I don't think there's even much disagreement. But there's so much, it's the most employed industry in the United States is health care. And everyone's incentivized to make the situation more complicated. You know, we're recording this podcast episode here in Los Angeles. And there recently was a mayoral race that happened. And the number one topic here in Los Angeles during the race was homelessness, right? People who are homeless who, that word is, you know, tricky sometimes because there's people that actually choose that their preferred method of living would be on the street.

It's easier for them to live in these open-air drug markets, et cetera. But really tied with it is this mental health crisis. Sure. Is it not just people that have run down on their luck, although there's some instances of that. It's a lot of individuals that are suffering from really, really terrible mental health, schizophrenia, etc., etc. We recently had on Dr. Chris Palmer on the podcast, and he's out of Harvard's number one psychiatric Hospital in the world, McLean University, and his book Brain Energy, essentially talking about the same elements you're talking about, but he has case study after case study, and now he has

three active randomized clinical control trials that are happening at Harvard, showing that when we restore balance to the brain and we remove the primary source of fuel as sugar through refined carbohydrates, added sugars, et cetera, we can actually restore home. homeostasis back to the brain and many of these illnesses, mental health disorders that are crippling this country in like decimating cities. I can't tell you how many friends have had move out of Los Angeles because they genuinely were concerned about their safety. And you have so much empathy for the people that are suffering from that. They're just doing whatever they think that they're doing. But if we remove these things, he's shown case study after case study how we can reverse some of these

diseases that are never thought to be even your best hope is you can manage them over a period of time. Again, schizophrenia, hardcore PTSD, hardcore trauma, hardcore depression, drug resistance depression. And I think when I look out and the reason that I brought this example up, what's beautiful and really the internet is allowing this, you have all these people in these different pockets around the world. You know, you came from a background

in consulting and politics. He's over there. There's people that are working in policy like Dr. Mark Hyman. And they're all sharing their narrative. And now the public is getting a chance to see that, no, there's an overwhelming group of people that are out there

that are working on this on all side of the spectrums who are really raising the flag and saying, if we don't do something about this, our species is headed for its own version of an extinction event. I have so much gratitude to be, and that's how I see myself as a small foot soldier in a generational battle with led by Dr. Mark Hyman and others to shift society in the right direction. And I am optimistic. I think what's being discussed in these podcasts, what's being discussed on Twitter, what's being written about in books that millions of people are reading, I think people are raking up.

And the threat I'm trying to add a little bit more to is the incentive. So you talk about the homeless debate. You know, I saw this. There are people sitting around the table, you know, paid a lot of money. You know, pharma and food are two of the biggest lobbying spenders. Pharma spends $350 million a year on just lobbying, not even public relations and the donations to all the places. And they ask, how can we confuse people and distract people? That's the playbook.

It's how do we distract people, right? So you can talk about homeless and mental health, a lower income person that, the lowest income bracket, a man in the United States, dies 15 years younger than a man in the richest income bracket. That is because of one thing preeminently, it's diet, it's nutrition, right? It's the cells of that American being absolutely under threat. And there's other obviously metabolic factors, chronic stress, environmental toxins, exercise, things like that. But food is preeminent. And we are being systematically distracted, talking about a lot of other issues. The fundamental like discussion around, I believe, around inequality in this country has to be, it starts with the

cell. It starts with that, you know, a person not having a leg up because there you have an inflammatory diet and their cells are under stress and they're going to have metabolic conditions. 20% of cells are in the brain. And that's inevitably going to go to the brain as Dr. Palmer has bravely been dating. You know, you look at just this week, we have a metabolic disease crisis where we're systematically getting sick or fat or more depressed, more infertile, and we're talking about gas stoves. We're literally saying gas stoves cause asthma. Asthma, autoimmune conditions, chronic disease, obesity haven't all been skyrocketing in the past 30 years, particularly among children, because of gas stoves. They've been skyrocketing because of food. Now, I am a humble,

former political consult, now an entrepreneur, you know, you can please use common sense. Take, take, take, take, take, take, you know, think about what I'm saying. But, but it does seem to be that this is very simple. We have an inflammatory diet that is poisoning ourselves and a medical system that is standing silent and profiting. You know, you mentioned that, uh, you grew up and your politics were, uh, very idealistic and you came from a conservative background. It's kind of the viewpoint that you had to that time, a big part of your message right now. And you also kind of expand on that. You said, you know, I don't know what my politics are right now. And I think like you, a lot of people are actually in that same boat where they care strongly about topics. And there's also a lot of nuances that are there. And they don't want their political ideology, personal political ideology, to be co-opted by the left or the right. They want to be non-tribal, right? So, you know, If one group believes hardcore this way or another group believes hardcore this way, there's a lot more people that are feeling like, I have a lot of layered thoughts about a lot of different subjects. Right.

Right. And more people are identifying as kind of independent. Like on this area, I'm more conservative. On this area, I'm more liberal. On this area, I'm this area, I'm this. Why have you been, I've listened to a lot of your interviews. And so far it's been a lot of conservative shows that have been inviting you on. And great for anybody that's willing to get out this message because it's an important message. But one thing that you've done so well is regardless of who's invited you on, you're constantly reminding them that this issue is bigger than politics. It's a bipartisan issue. Tell us why that's so important. for you to get that message out there. Let's just take first principles of public policy. We want happy, productive humans. And our brains and bodies perceive reality. Like, it's just become so simple in my head. Our brain, like, when we think about the goal of everything, of politics, of public policy, it's to produce, like, meaning in people's lives. And if the brain cells, like, diabetes is, is cellular dysfunction. Like, I didn't even understand that until a couple years ago. Like, diabetes is the cells malfunctioning.

It's not an isolated disease. Metabolic dysfunction, you know, our cells being overwhelmed with too much glucose, too much inflammation. It's the underpinning. That's why 99% of people with diabetes have another comorbidity, and they usually die of something else. But we're all on some spectrum of that. And when you think about public policy, if that's happening in our brains and bodies,

if that's clouding our reality, that's the first order issue. And my whole life from being ideological, you know, wanting to impact public policy in D.C. growing up, you know, that's always been my goal. And I think this issue, this food health nexus transcends politics. You know, two examples, just from my experience, right? Right now, Davos is happening this week. And you have, you know, top public relations and, you know, consultants who are on the left, right, talking about issues of the world and how to help people. At the same time, they are accepting millions of dollars unreported, right, from processed food companies and pharma. And those executives who are sitting at Davos, talking about bringing the world together and helping the less fortunate,

their Hampton's houses are purchased by campaigns to systemically keep kids addicted to soda. So definitely saw that. Then on the the right, I think you've totally co-opted this free market argument. Even well-meaning smart friends on the right are like, well, you can't take soda away from food stamps. You can't try to, you know, talk about restricting a kid. That's patriarchal. That's anti-free market. It's a nanny state. That's a nanny state. This is my key point to them. You can't have a free market if the market is rigged. Coke paying tens of millions of dollars to get tens of billions of dollars of government subsidies buying sugar water isn't a free market. So what we have and conservatives fall

into this time and time again is we've just stood back as the market is totally rigged. And then when anyone questions the fact that the market's rigged, it's patriarchal and nanny state. We need to get back. I actually still come from it from that perspective. We need a free market. We need a market that's not rigged. I think Coke should exist. I'm very libertarian. I think most drugs should be illegal. Coke sugar is a drug. I do not think that should be subsidized with tens of billions of dollars of government nutrition money. That is causing violence to children. And there's a lot of examples of policies like this. You know, it's such an important message because the audience that listens to this podcast, like a lot of health podcasts that are out there, I'm sure the levels podcast

that Casey has and Mark's podcast, Dr. Mark Hyman. wellness has become so mainstream that the audience that listens is actually pretty 50-50, right? I got people from all sides of the aisle or identified by different things, even a ton of people that don't identify by any particular component. And I think what's important as we talk about this is that the health movement kind of started from what people might identify as like granola or hippie or sort of left ideology and left politics. And as people obviously saw that eating healthier is good for everyone, and

a lot of the message that you shared, it became a universal thing that everybody wants to be healthy. Like, guess what? People on the right want organic food as well, too. People on the left want this. And we start to see how the elites are the ones that are kind of controlling a lot of the situation. And if we can get that out of the way and you can actually set up a true free market, people want to make better choices because they see the impact that these things have. or the food is no longer as cheap as they want it to be. Now, that all being said, I think one criticism for a lot of my friends that are on the left

is they think, well, we just need to ban these companies. We need to ban and we need to completely shut them down. And I think that the fallacy inside of that is that you give the power to any group, as we saw during like the COVID lockdowns and things, you give the power to one group who you identify with their ideology now. Well, then the next president comes. in and they still have that power and they may disagree with you and they can turn it into another thing. So we don't want to give power to a top down mechanism of people that can control our

lives. We want to educate the public and we want to empower people and also we want to address these incentives as you've said. Anything else you want to say about sometimes how the left might look at things? You talk about the right and the nanny state. Anything else you want to add about how the left might look at things? Two comments there. I think that this bipartisan, cross-partisan awakening, listening to your podcasts and the other leading podcasts in the health space and reading the books and learning more about their bodies with the biosensors, it honestly makes me giddy thinking. It makes me optimistic. I really think people are waking up and it's cross-partisan. Yeah, here's my message to the left.

This is the bipartisan issue of our time. don't get goaded into thinking about this in a partisan box. Before we talk about bans, before we talk about taxes, there's, I think, something that we can all agree on, which is that we are subsidizing poisonous food, tens of billions, if not more, dollars. Not just the rigged food stamp system. We spend more on agriculture companies than I think the rest of the developed world combined, and it is on 90% on just a cost.

couple items, grains which turned into highly processed grains and corn, which turns into high fructose corn syrup, which if you pointed out, is actually a very weaponized sugar. It's very cheap, but that fructose shuts off our hunger signals. So our kids' food is literally being laced with a specific type of sugar that evolutionarily makes us less hungry. So that's being subsidized. So it's a public policy and sanity when you think about it. The U.S. government, us as taxpayers, spend tens of billions of dollars to make processed grains and sugar cheaper than particularly lower income people, but everyone is eating that food, and it's causing trillions of dollars of downstream impacts to our health system to taxpayers. A 30-year-old on Medicaid that has diabetes is going to cost the American

taxpayer millions of dollars. That is what is bankrupting our country. And we are actually paying for that to happen on the front end. So to my message is let's not get into this box. The first question we should be asking is how do we stop paying for this devastation to happen? And then the second question, and this is, again, cross-partisan, is how do we change the fundamental incentive in health care, which is that every institution, from the hospitals to the pharmaceutical companies to med schools. They all make more money when more people are sick for longer periods of time and they lose money when people are healthy. 95% of healthcare spending goes to treating patients after they're sick. And everyone makes more money when that patient's sick and they need to be

sick for longer periods of time. That is the fundamental incentive of our healthcare system. And there's a lot of cross-partisan solutions to ask how do we change that? Let's just take neutral. Let's take the $4 trillion we spend on health care. Again, 95% of that is going to pills, surgeries, procedures to basically put band-aids on people that are already sick. It hasn't worked. The more stands we prescribe, the more heart disease goes up. The more metformin we prescribe, the more diabetes goes up. The more SSRIs we prescribe, the more depression and suicide go up. You think that's a Zimpeg, giving this now to 12-year-olds? I was going to ask you about that. So a lot of people on our podcast are not familiar,

and they might not be in following. So what is Zizmik? Why is it, you know, being talked about so much in why is like 60 minutes doing, you know, basically commercials for it. And how has it become a hot button topic that you want to jump in the mix on? Well, let me try to take this from kind of my perspective of seeing the rig system and kind of how I would think about it early in my career as a consultant. So this is reported. The parent company of the Zimpik over the past several years has paid $30 million a year in direct consulting fees to obesity doctors, this new field of obesity. And just to add in, a Zempic is basically being touted as this miracle weight loss drug.

Yeah. A lot of celebrities are on it. It was reported that maybe Elon Musk is on it. And it's been catching a lot of excitement in the public. It's a miracle obesity cure. It's a weekly injection that you have to take for life. According to the description, the recommendations that you, the recommendations that you you take it forever because if you stopped taking it many of the patients that stopped actually ended

up gaining more weight back because they went back to eating exactly how they eat more weight back and there is unknown and not fully understood metabolic impacts because the the injection is fundamentally impacting your metabolism so it's recommended that you never stop taking the weekly injections the weight comes back there's potentially some other metabolic factors that that are negative. So that's the drug. But it's being billed as a miracle obesity cure. So we've had this like plethora of press. It just feels inevitable, you know, culminating in this 60-minute segment, the most watch news program in the United States, where they had doctors that were paid on as a big payroll saying that obesity is caused by genetics, is not caused by choice. Okay. So let's just

look back the past couple of years and how the system is rigged and how we rigged institutions of trust for this. Okay. So first, you, you have this document. OZIPIC has paid obesity specialists, $30 million in direct payments, not research payments, consulting fees, direct payoffs. So that's on the CMS. That's on the website. There's been over 400,000 payments per year, individual payments to so they have absolutely strangleholded the obesity treatment profession. Big conferences, direct payoffs, $30 million a year in the lead up to this, right? Also, then the FDA approval, the FDA has fast-tracked disapproval. They fast-tracked the approval for teens in less than 30 days.

70% of FDA funding directly comes from pharmaceutical companies. There's been an absolute, this has the potential to be one of the most profitable drugs in the history of the United States. And the boards, the obesity boards, and you see this time and time again that actually approve and decide whether to fast-track drugs, whether even approved drugs. They're not FDA bureaucrats. They're blue-robin panels. And they're blue ribbon panels of obesity specialists that are on OZemic payroll.

Okay. Then you have 60 minutes, the news media, okay? The majority of their funding, literally the OZMPIC segment before and after, pharma ads run. So you have the news media carrying the water. You just had yesterday a doctor go on CNN who was billed as a nonpartisan, non-biased advocate. I actually looked into it. She was actually on Ozimic payroll.

Yeah, you went to, what was the website you went to and you looked into? Yeah, the CMS website. She's on as a big payroll. She was billed as a nonpart. So it's weaponizing institutions of trust. Now, where does this rubber hit the road? As I mentioned, during COVID, 40% of children between 5 and 12 obese. The American Academy in Pediatrics, which is not some fringe organization. It credentials pediatricians. It's the gold standard. The majority of their funding, comes from pharmaceutical makers. That's on the website. And they say that the data is great and we recommend surgery and ozimic for obese teens. That's 40% of teens. Okay. And then there's lip service. This wasn't even really in the guidance.

There's one line on nutrition interventions. And then doctors on Twitter are saying, well, we're going to do a nutrition. They don't make money on nutrition. And as I said, 80% of those doctors didn't take one nutrition class. You know, I've spoken to diabetes specialists, obesity specialists from Harvard who have not taken one nutrition class in their lives, right? So that's a fallacy that there's going to be some like, we've all been to the doctor. Oh, eat your fruits and vegetables, go on your way. There's no real nutrition advice from the doctor.

Health doesn't happen in the doctor's office. But that is Zimpic. And again, these are good people. I'm not, but let's just look at the raw economic incentives dispassionally. that is weekly ejections. They're literally cells will go berserk if they stop taking it for life. That's regular doctor's appointments for their entire life. And I'm not reflexively anti-drug, but let's dig into that.

Let's dig into that. So let's take a teen. And they're obese. They're obese because of food, right? They're eating primarily three things. Process grains, which turn into sugar, which converted to fat when they overwhelm the cells with glucose, sugar, which is off the charts, as we know, and inflammatory seed oils. If they take Ozypic, which changes the metabolism, you know, it changes dynamics in

your gut to make you less hungry, they might be eating less canol oil, less sugar, less inflammatory oils, but they're still eating these inflammatory ingredients that are causing violence to the cells. This is why the stats I just mentioned on statins being correlated with increased heart disease, metformin, diabetes, all these things. It's because there's underlying issues. We're still ingesting inflammatory foods. The American Diabetes Association until 2018, by the way, the American Diabetes Association, which credentials diabetes doctors, was funded by Coke and said, literally, their guidance until 2018, as Dr. Robert Lustig has pointed out, said you can eat whatever you want if you're diabetic as long as you take your insulin. That's just one biomarker. The

stands or one, they impact one biomarker. We're eating inflammatory food. It's the fuel. I don't know, it seems so simple to me. It's the fuel for our bodies. And if they kid, right, the obesity could be seen as a warning sign. I will guarantee you, and we can play this back, I will guarantee you. I hope it was impic this is overturned. But it is not going to result in long-term obesity reduction for children. And it is going to result in increased comorbidities. Because the cells are still under threat. And that's what so, it's not reflexively anti-drugs, but it's like opportunity costs. It's like the $4 trillion. Why now, of course, this whole PR campaign is leading to the American taxpayer paying for this injection, you know, for tens of millions of Americans.

What if that money went to incentivizing healthy food? It's such an important topic. And sometimes it feels so big. And sometimes it can feel a little bit confusing. right i want to talk about some pushback and things that is brought in and just anything from your perspective that is brought in that you've noticed since your tweet has been viral and you've been going on different you know shows and things one of the things that i see is that the big food often the argument will be well if you look globally and you look at over the last hundred years there's so many fewer people that are dying, that are not dying from extreme starvation, right? So extreme starvation, they're now, those numbers are way down.

And a lot of that credit they feel goes to the fact of processed foods. Just call it processed foods as a whole and the more availability of those processed foods. Now, the way I look at it and I'd love to get your point of view is that, You know what? That might even be a little bit true in terms of starvation if that's the only measurement that we're getting a chance to look at that calories are being spread more around the world. And organizations like the UN or other eight organizations are making sure that especially these cheap processed, in some cases, ultra-processed calories get to people who maybe through war, displacement, other stuff really had not much available to them.

And the question is, at what cost does that come in on the other side? So could both be true that, yes, less people are dying because of processed foods making their way around the world. And those people are also individuals. And globally, we see based on the numbers that we're getting sicker, that the life expectancy, especially in countries like the U.S., which is a little bit complicated because of COVID, opioids, you know, et cetera, but his life expectancy is going down. Any thoughts about that argument that is shared? Absolutely. I mean, you're speaking what I would have said a couple years ago,

right? Oh, you know, there's some issues, but the American food system and the American pharmaceutical system has led to miracles that's fed the world and led to medical miracles that have doubled life expectancy in the past 120 years. And I think that's what a lot of people, I think it makes sense, right? You kind of brush, oh, yeah, we got some issues. But I want to unpack a couple things there. Let me actually go to pharmaceuticals first, and then we'll get to food. So, and the overall health system. I think what the health system has dug kind of along that argument is they've taken the trust rightfully engendered up until 1960. So I just want to make a quick point there. When we think of medical miracles, and it's the same kind of point you're making. It's, oh, we've medical innovation, you know, double life expectancy. anything I think you could think of is an acute cure, something that was going to kill you right away discovered before 1960, antibiotics for infections, emergency surgical procedures for, you know, a complicated childbirth, which was one of the most deadly things a person could do just 100 years ago. I think several percent of women died not too long ago in American history,

you know, an appendicitis. These procedures that, and if you are imminently going to die, If you have a gunshot wound, if you have a penicitis, if you have a complicated shot, but yes, like 100%. We have miracles that save life there. But what happened, and this was very systematic. And it was actually the Sackler family that led to the opioids later. The grandfather invented marketing. And they saw with the birth control pill in the 1960s, which was the first chronic treatment in the ever in American history.

He saw the birth control pill. He's like, hmm, what other lifetime conditions can we treat? And he marketed and created Valium, which in the 60s and 70s, 25% of women were on, very highly addictive. And that's led up to today, the benzos and the SSRIs and all these lifestyle posts. But now, 95, 90, 95% of our entire medical budget is chronic conditions. Up until 1960s, it was only acute. The most of the antibiotic strains, you were discovered pre-1960.

So there's just not a lot of incentives to discover a pill that if you give to somebody, they're immediately better. So I just want to unpack that a little bit. If you look and even if you explore life expectancy, you know, the founding fathers lived to their 70 and in their 70s. When people got past childbirth, they actually were, their immune systems were pretty good. And it really was around childhood and it was really around these acute conditions. Right. When people say that we used to die at 35, they're. looking at infant mortality. It was like 50%. Exactly. So I just think that that helped me a little bit

because that's always been, that was always a block in my head. Well, well, okay. And then on the food system, and I'd say this also with healthcare, these great advancements are because of capitalism. It's because of free markets. It's because of, you know, opening up freedom for people. That's, that's the trend that's led to these outcomes in the past 100%. And we have done some amazing things. We've done amazing things in healthcare. And we've done amazing things on Like, like, we should be optimistic, right? We should be proud. But we have lost our way. We have lost our way when it comes to food and it comes to help. And just because, and I just ask everyone to consider this, just because there has been miracles that we've achieved over the past

hundred years doesn't mean this isn't an existential threat. I think America particularly is very good at overcoming existential threats. But just mathematics. I mean, we hear about health care costs so much, it's just white noise. It is the largest and fastest growing industry in the United States, and it's increasing. And we're getting sick or fat or more depressed, more infertile. Like these trends, there's nothing stopping these trends. It's going to be 40% of GDP in 15 years. And we all kind of assume it's going to change.

We have to talk about this. And for your listeners, you know, what these podcasts, your conversations have changed my life because they empower people to think for themselves. And I would just posit that this shouldn't be depressing. It's understanding these incentives convince you hopefully to think for yourself. I think the American patient has been systematically gasslet in the past 40 years to not ask questions. Trust the science. Don't ask questions. Don't self-diagnose. The medical system deserves zero benefit of the doubt when it comes to chronic conditions. The medicalization of chronic conditions in the United States has been rigged and has been a travesty. And Americans should not be consulting

their doctor often when it comes to preventing chronic conditions. That is bad advice. A lot of people on your show come on and say, well, be sure to consult your doctor. What validity, what have they earned? What has the medical system earned on chronic conditions to earn that trust? This system is rigged from the 1960s onwards. You know, you're talking about incentives. Another thing that's there is that for the doctors that have good intention that are working within the system, my brother-in-law is a cardiologist. I met him, the great guy.

And, yeah, we all were hanging out together. You know, he'll often talk about that sometimes he has to use. Again, the patient is open and he brings it up with a lot of patients about the dietary changes that he thinks that they could make, that could significantly move the needle forward instead of them, you know, just asking for a pill. He'll often have to, like teachers who have to pay for office supplies with their own money, he'll have to go into his bank of just making extra time, cutting into his lunch break, because that time spent and all these times spent with patients and all the things have to have,

you know, the respective insurance codes that are there. And sometimes you cannot get reimbursement for those hours. Maybe you might get $10, $15. You know, I hear from a lot of doctors that have come on this podcast. And that's, again, goes back to this idea of incentives. You know, insurance saying, well, we're not going to pay for that. And then doctors saying, well, we don't get reimbursed for that. So we don't even have the time to be able to go into it.

Not to mention that we're seeing 40, 50, 60, 80 patients in a day. So we have, you know, barely enough time to eat our own lunch. And now you can see that, you know, nobody designed this system on purpose, but if somebody sat down and said, how do we create such a fucked up system where everybody loses? This is exactly it. There's probably some evil people. There's very few, I think, evil people. I think the head of pharmaceutical companies, the medical school deans, right, obviously agriculture executives, I think they're good people. I know a lot of them. A lot of them, my friends from business school, you know, work in pharmaceuticals or processed food

companies. I think the genius of the system is it's so large, right? It's $4 trillion for health care, $6 trillion for food. The invisible hand has created a dynamic where everyone individually can feel good, but the results are evil. I would say evil. And everybody can cross their arms and say, hey, it's not my job. Yeah, including, and in my opinion, the trusted medical organizations should be screaming at the top of their lungs, a very simple point that the point of health care policy should be to keep people healthy. But that's not what our health care system does. It's waiting for people to get sick and then managing that. And even government institutions like the NIH, the NIH is a grant-making organization, right? The vast majority of that, funny, it's not internal,

it's going to people at universities. And, you know, a case in point, that Tuft study, millions of dollars from the NIH went to professors at the Tufts Nutrition School that have been paid tens of millions of dollars by processed food companies over their careers and for this specific study, which in a joint press release with the NIH was called the most comprehensive dietary and nutrition analysis. in history. The NIH funding went in with food company. It's on the website. It's on the Tufts. It says it's funded by Danone, a large processed food company, some front groups, and the National Institute of Health. That document with the NIH seal is immediately, and I used to do this, right, it's picked up by the food companies and brought to the FDA. It's brought to school boards, Right. That is a violent weapon being used to destroy children's cells. Now, these people making these studies are good people, I think. But the result is evil. And a big influence here, as you know,

is my sister, some of the listeners might know Dr. Casey Means. And she was the pride of the family, right? She used Stanford Med School, you know, president of her class, you know, a surgeon, had a neck surgeon. I was so proud of her. And when she told me that she was quitting, I was stunt. And I wasn't on the program yet, right? I'm like, what are you doing? You're top of society right now. You're at the top of the ladder.

And when you say quitting, you're talking about her quitting. She quit surgery. Exactly. She quit surgery after 11 years of training. And she couldn't quite put her finger out, but she looked at me and she said, I was doing my, you know, 300th surgery for the sinusitis. operation, my third of the day, over somebody cutting out, you know, surgically cutting out the sinus infection. And she realized that the majority of her patients, she sees again, under the knife, the

inflammation comes back. And she realized that she was not going to help this person passed out under the knife, cutting out that because she wasn't curing the underlying cause. And she realized, you know, after going to the best medical institutions in the country and after really almost completing surgical residency, she didn't understand why people were sick. So systemically, I think high level, it's actually very sad and very concerning that the medical system takes some of the best, brightest, most mission-driven people in the world to the United States and puts them into this system that is incentivized to make people say.

Casey saw doctors being reprimanded for not doing enough surgeries. And there is incentive-based pay. Now every patient gets a survey. So if you mention weight to them or any type of challenging thing, you can actually be docked as a doctor for having bad reviews. So to kind of close this, you know, I think Casey did the extreme case, which I'm very proud of her to doing. And I would say to any doctor, you know, kind of thinking about going outside the system,

there is hope. And she had no plan. She just started posting food as medicine stuff on Instagram and seeing individual patients. I thought it was a very, I was like, wow, this is super small, unscalable. You know, in three years she'd started, she had started levels, which is having a huge impact and scaling that impact. But there is hope. But also talking your brother and talking to, you know, hundreds of people within the

medical system, there's absolutely, of course, room to fight these incentives within the medical system. But as you mentioned, fundamentally, insurance is another institution that profits when people are sick. By law, they can only take 15% medical loss ratio. They can't get more money if they drive better outcomes. They actually only can take a 15%. They need to pay the rest out by law.

So their foundational incentive, almost every insurance company, is for the pie to be bigger, which means more sick patients. I've talked actually, and this tweet's led to some crazy things, but I've actually talked to the C-suite of leading insurers, like people in the top four executives. And they're depressed. I mean, it is absolutely a foundational incentive. Nobody is sitting around the boardroom saying we want more people to have diabetes. But that is absolutely where the incentives are going because they'll be fired.

Like, they will be fired. These are public companies. Like, if more people don't get sick and the pie doesn't grow, they'll be out of a job. You know, I want to go back to your original tweet. You know, you called out Coke by name. Have you heard it all from Coke or anybody that works there or represents them? No, I mean, they must have been getting advised by, you know, somebody as smart as me back then on their PR because I think it would be dumb for them to do that.

But I'm, I would love, you know, any, any dialogue they want to have and have not heard. But if they want to chat, I'm happy to. Again, I thought that this would be a little bit more nerve-wracking. And I'm no by no means perfect, right? I'm on a health journey too. But I really think it's two things. Everyone, a lot of people have kids and they're looking at kids and there's something really bad happening. And our parents, I mean, my huge emphasis on this is my mom.

Casey, my best friend, very healthy, vibrant, the light of our lives, abruptly was diagnosed with stage four, pancreatic cancer when she had a little pain in her stomach when she was walking she went in and was diagnosed with that and called us we went we went to her in 2021 and she died 13 days later and this is as i was really kind of exploring what to do and case and i dug into pancreatic cancer you know it's not something we knew much about and it's something like 85 90 percent of people with pancreatic cancer have pre-diabetes or diabetes some clanded glucose rate so So it's like more correlated, like glucose dysregulation, pancreatic cancer is more correlated than smoking as to lung cancer.

Wow. Like you start peeling back the onion. It's like we're gaslit to think cancer and a lot of these conditions are random. It's like. Well, when you go to like WebMD and you type in cancer and you look at something like sugar and refined carbs, WebMD, I screenshot of this because I interviewed Dr. William Lee, who I'll get to in a second. And it says that there is no evidence that cancer is fueled by sugar or that excess sugar consumption increases your risk of cancer.

So then I had Dr. William Lee on the podcast who has written some incredible books. And separate from his books, he's been involved with over 200 different drug development. And he's the head of and founded the Angiogenesis Foundation. And, you know, angiogenesis and this idea of using blood vessels and how we can regrow them, cancer cells, what I learned from Dr. Lee, cancer cells, which become these dysfunctional cells that grow at all costs, they use something like angiogenesis to grow all these vessels and they're preferred. They have two preferred forms of fuel for growth. One is sugar and also one is. protein, which in the case of somebody who has active cancer, there could be recommendations to, you know, cut down both to try to starve off the fuel. And he's like the idea that cancer, which we all have cancer cells inside of us, but it's when it gets out of control, does not

feed on sugar is crazy. We know through our research that that's not the case. Cancer does feed on sugar. They're literally, that's their preferred fuel. That's their preferred fuel. We have reading a hundred times more unprecedented, I mean, think our cells use glucose for energy and just imagine a machine getting 100 times more input, just almost, I mean, in the span of evolution, right, we're just at the split second. And then cancer cells, it's their preferred fuel. It's their, it's like pouring gasoline on it. And metabolic dysfunction, blood sugar dysregulation is like astoundingly correlated with many leading forms of cancer. cancer. So again, it gets this idea of, I really do think we make things a little bit more complicated.

And you might, and this is, I think, an important point of my mom in that way I look at it. She did end up dying of cancer, one of the, you know, nightmare scenarios. It's hard to put this into words, but it was one of the most life-affirming and positive experiences of Casey in my life because of what she gave us and what lives on, I think, I see with her within us. She knew that she had at sugarage regulation and pre-diabetes. And the final years of her life, her room was just stacked of books by Dr. Mark Hyman and a lot of the other folks that you have on the show. And she was learning about her body and having, I would say, more awe for the connections within her body because she was a normal patient, right? When she had me, she had distational diabetes. Oh,

it's fine. That's normal. Then she had a little bit high cholesterol. Oh, take a stand. That's very normal. Then she had, you know, the fasting glucose. Oh, metformin. that's normal. There were all these things where it's like a right of passage, you know, to be on these things. It could have been a warning sign, right? You know, if a woman is experiencing PCOS or gestational diabetes, that's a warning sign of underlying metabolic dysfunction that will probably lead to something like this, or at the very least, you know, be highly correlated with mental health issues, you know, the links, as you mentioned, between diabetes and blood sugar regulation and various, you know, depression, anxiety, fatigue, we should have awe for these things. And I actually look at,

I don't see it as a defeat with my mom. She, even going on this journey, I think, and I think this is like an individual thing and a lot of your listeners are doing, but from a public policy perspective, we should just have more awe and encourage more of an understanding of the, of the links of these things between our bodies. And I think that's just a very like, you're never going to get the full answers, but even like going on that journey, I think it's very positive. And it changed my mom's life and it impacted us. And Casey and aren't trying to carry that forward, which is really gratifying. And I feel like she lives on with that.

Yeah. Yeah. The way that you and Casey, and I've talked with Casey about this as well, but, you know, first of all, so traumatic to lose your mom and how quickly it all happened and just my condolences for the whole family and the way that you and Casey have taken your mom's legacy because, you know, you kind of grew up in a family that was like pretty health forward, right? Like being a little bit more mindful about things. Yeah.

And still, you know, people can have. not the best understanding of metabolic health or other stuff, but there was at least some ideas that were there, which has played a little bit of influence in, you know, in Casey's life. I know that. So, you know, the way you guys are keeping your mom's legacy alive through the work that you're doing is just incredible. So hats off to both of you. And I want to say as somebody who's mom also has suffered from cancer and knock on wood, you know, it was very early. It was not pancreatic cancer. Was it, you said pancreatic cancer? Yes. Yeah. It was, it was early breast cancer. We had a great team, including Dr. Liz Baum, who's one of our physicians at the Ultra Wellness Center, who's also a cancer survivor herself, and then ended up going to nutrition school as a medical doctor.

She had a great team around her. Obviously, there's a lot of layers with cancer, environmental toxins, play a role. Stress plays a role. Out of whack hormones, which are also influenced by metabolic health plays a role. So, you know, again, we've done whole episodes on that we can link to in the show notes. You know, I want to come back to another thing when I was asking about Coke. very interestingly, the way you worded it in your original tweet, you say, I say Koch's policies are evil because I saw inside of the room. And I think another thing that you've done

a good job on is you separate out that there's individuals that are in these companies, you know, researchers, people, human beings. And a lot of these bigger companies, especially as the young guard starts to come in, these young executives, other stuff, who themselves are eating very similarly to how we eat and are listening to podcasts like, you know, Joe Rogan and Dr. Hyman and, you know, Peter Atia, like they're starting to make changes in their own life. And you're starting to see just the beginning stages of these companies now looking to make acquisitions in the space and try to bring on, you know, healthier companies, right? I look at these companies as like dysfunctional families.

that are in a wacky system. And again, as long as the people up top are supported by the incentives that allow them to go out of whack, that will happen. But I do want to acknowledge that there are some moves in these companies. We're just, again, very premature

where some of the largest exits inside of the health space have happened. And I'm a health investor. I've invested in a lot of different companies. And that, from a capitalist standpoint, creates more incentives for people to go and leave maybe invests, investment banking or, you know, political, you know, consulting, which could have good merits

inside of it and go and create companies. Because maybe if these bigger companies get involved and get excited, then we have the opportunity to scale some of these ideas and bring it out to the larger public. Any thoughts on that? You think the question of outside versus inside is really interesting. And there is an argument that a lot of change in America has happened, not totally from the outside. It's changing the inside. You know, just just one. anecdote that pops to mind, you know, that I'm very passionate about is, you know, I went to Harbor Business School. And, and it's interesting to me. It's very striking. When you're there, you talk to everyone, and they all wrote their admissions essays about changing the world,

about doing something the outside, about changing the food system, about changing the health care system, about helping lower income people. And then 85% of the class goes to large companies. And there's this centrifugal force when you're there, and I think in the a lot of these institutions where it's like you got to stay in the club and you got to get that extra credential you got to then go to the next the next name and I think it's very insiduous. You know, I know somebody that wrote their essay about, you know, transforming health and helping, you know, and really, really disrupting health care. And they went to McKinsey and we're working with a team that helped Purdue Pharma prescribe more opioids. And it leads to a lot of

depression. There was a study being at HBS where the most depressed cohort of people that this professor studied, a various socioeconomic classes were HBS students 10 years after graduation. So I do think in that, in a lot of spheres, there's still this like push to like the traditional sectors that I think are like not changing fast enough. And I think, just think anyone listening to this kind of thinking about like it's too risky to jump outside of the traditional system. I do think like a lot of these startups, a lot of these people that are speaking out, a lot of these people that aren't as beholden to like staying within the club, which has very bad. I think very influences like being like civil. Civility is good, but like,

you know, not saying the wrong thing, not calling it out. It's like that Upton Sinclair quote. Yeah. I think it's, it's hard to get a man to see the truth. I'm just paraphrase. phrasing here, if their salary depends on them not seeing it. Yeah. Yeah. So what I think is happening, I agree with you 100%, Drew. I think I think consumer behavior is pushing the system forward, which is great. I mean, you saw that happen with gluten. I think what happened with gluten is fine, right? It's like there was more knowledge about gluten and now food companies and restaurants are upcharging for you to have gluten free. I think that's going to happen with seed oils, where are you going to have an upcharge? I'd happily pay an upcharge.

to do olive oil instead of an inflammatory seed oil, you know. And I think I think that's happening. The sliver, again, I would add to the debate here is like, and I just think for people listening is like, your worst fears about the incentives behind the American Academy of Pediatrics or a peer-reviewed study or a civil rights group or a think tank study, that. They're probably worse. Like, I can affirm that. And there's trillions of dollars still slanted against, right, the American patient and the American consumer, right? It's like vegetables are 0.4% of subsidies right now.

They're considered specialty crops. So I think consumers are moving us in the right direction, but there's still trillions of dollars of incentive slanted against them, which I think we should be aware of. and speak out against and try to change that too. You know, talk about the influence that your sister and your mom had on you. Sure. And kind of, you know, you weren't kind of drinking the Kool-Aid before when it came to metabolic health and these changes. What tipped you over in addition to that? Were there things that had you, you know, again, you have a Stanford background, then you went to Harvard Business School.

It could have been just as easily for you to be part of the system that's out there. And obviously having a sister and having a mom and her story and her background and the family you did, obviously was a massive influence. Was there any other things that kind of tipped the scale in the favor where you were like, you know what? I need to be on the side of fighting for the right for people to be healthy. I don't know if we were planning to talk about this. I mean, the immediate thing that comes to mind is experience of psychedelic mushrooms, which is the most profound experience in my life. You know why I knew that you're going to say that? Because you're on your Twitter bio, in your header.

And literally it's on my screen right now, right in front of me. You have, for those that are not watching on video, and Patrick, we can slice this in on there. You have a screenshot taken from a study as your header, which is showing the impact that psilocybin has on the brain. I believe this is from the work of Roland Griffiths. I saw him present and share this slide at the Institute of Functional Medicine Conference. conference and it shows the brain and the neural activity not on psychedelics and the sort of default neural network. And on the other side, it's like a massive rainbow of colors of all this activity of a brain

on psychedelics. So not to derail the conversation, but hey, this is what the beauty of the podcast is. Tell us about your impact and how psychedelics influenced you. Yeah, I actually think it's very tied. I think we're systematically been moved, kind of that acute versus chronic incentives to band-aids. And I think we've got to get to root cause solutions. That's food.

And I actually, I think with mental health, it is a massive, I'm not saying it's good or bad, but it is a under-discussed and consequential societal development that 25% one and four of the American people are on a mental health medication. that fundamentally numb you out a little bit more from reality. Do not get to your core, you know, cause of the trauma. And Roland Griffiths, as you mentioned at Johns Hopkins, one of the most prominent neuroscientists in the country, you know, towards the end of his career after, you know,

just I think probably hundreds of peer-reviewed papers came upon this, you know, the epitome of inside the system, right, not some hippie. And Harvard's picked it up, UCS. staff, other leading institutions. And to a person, the research on psilocybin, neuroscientists are calling the most profound and positive study data they've seen in their careers on reversing depression that was not able to be treated. And as Roland Griffiths said in a study, 75% of people studied with this compound said it was one of them of five most meaningful experiences in their lives. So when you think about public policy and thinking about the mental health crisis, thinking about the health crisis, and again, just thinking about the foundation of how we should think about like incentive or even prioritization, right, how we should think about prioritization.

if you can have an experience, if that's true, if 75% of people that take it says it's one of the most five impactful experience of their lives that made them a more empathetic, loving person and changed how they think about the world for the more positive. That's like we're being gaslit to not take that a little bit more seriously. Just Roland Griffiths, just as an aside, is dying right now. He's got a couple months to live. and he's speaking incredibly eloquently about death, much more eloquently about some of the insights I was trying to talk about with my mom about just the gratitude and just not really feeling like

it's a bad thing. So he might be an amazing person to talk to. He's giving some incredible interviews on that. But yeah, to me, to me it's a root. It's not the panacea. But for anyone feeling like their treasier. wrapped in the matrix a little bit, I think it's very helpful and I think it's very positive. And my experience around, you know, when my mom died and when we were selling my other

previous company, which was in the e-commerce space, super inspired by Casey, a little bit despondent about where the world was going around COVID. And, you know, 2020 was deep with George Floyd and COVID and looking at what's happening with health. and really getting desponded about the root cause of COVID, seeming to be metabolic dysfunction as far as the severity. So, you know, kind of trapped, trapped in the house, you know, dealing with personal and, you know, kind of worried about societal things, which I've always worried about. This had a huge impact on me.

And I say probably, you know, the most impactful experience of life because it tied in kind of the mission, kind of what I've learned from Casey, my mom's death. my son who was just born. It's just like, it kind of like show me like as a guy that's always tried to like get the stamp from Harvard, get the, it's like, it's all kind of BS. Like we've got a very limited time here. And I do think, you know, we should be speaking out. And, um, and, you know, there's no right way to live your life. But like, you don't need to be in the boxes people set up for you. So it was positive for me in that respect. And I'm just happy. I mean, this is very selfish for me. I think this is the preeminent issue, the food health system, and it's really gratifying to be

speaking about it. I want to chat about incentives and also encouraging people and being part of the, you know, you're not just here to criticize what's wrong, although calling out and calling up, right? I think there's room for both. Calling out is the idea of like, hey, look, here's what's wrong. And calling up is like, hey, I know we can do better, right? I know bigger companies, Coke, et cetera, other stuff. do better and we can work on it together if they want to genuinely be a part of it.

You're also working on a company and I'm proud to say that I'm an investor in the process. Talk to about true medicine and how does that fit into this idea of incentives and helping people make better decisions. Yeah. So around this time I was explaining, you know, previous company sold, my mom, birth of a new son, kind of thinking about what I'm trying to do. I was stuck on one question, which is how do you change the incentives. and that's the goal of this company.

And we landed on something I'm kind of excited about. And again, as you said, there's got to be a lot of foot soldiers and a lot of solutions. We've got to chip away at changing the incentives. The fact that unhealthy food is subsidized heavily and health care only kicks in once you're sick. It's this, you know, 80% of people being overweight is not everyone systematically trying to shorten their lives. There's something really bad happening here with incentives. So how do you change that? So a partner, Justin Maris and I, Justin's an amazing guy.

He started kettle and fire in perfect keto, these category leading healthy food brands. He was working in tech years ago and had his own health issues, went on a keto diet, transformed his life, started those amazing companies, passed those off. And we really bonded over this question, hired some lawyers, talked to some doctors. We found this area of HSA FSA. So it's kind of this boring area of your health plan. Justin and I always ignored it. So the majority of Americans have these tax-free. house. And they're kind of scary. And I think kind of emblematic of the broken system where,

you know, particularly the FSA, it's like you lose the money. You contribute it pre-tax. You're saving like 30, 40 percent if you spend it. But it's like you lose it at the end of the year if you don't use it on things. And it's usually around things once you're sick. Yeah. And do you know anything about the history of like why they were created in the first place? And yeah, I mean, the HSA, I think was created like around the Affordable Care Act, I believe. And the FSA, say it's been around, but it's good public policy, right? These are tax-advantaged couch that the aim of them is to give consumers choice, right? And they actually, according to the guidelines, right, they're to be spent on anything a medical provider deems appropriate for the prevention

or alleviation, but prevention too. And if you think about a lot of pharmaceuticals are preventative, statins, metformin, you know, 30% plus of men over 40s, they're preventative. So you can actually use it as prevention. And what we did is they're like, well, how do you actually keep people healthy with that? And we dug into the food as medicine research, which Dr. Mark Hyman has been a big proponent, obviously a vanguard on. And obviously, there's thousands of studies saying that for almost any condition, food and exercise, is just demonstrably a better intervention to prevent a reverse most conditions.

And if a doctor certifies that in a note, you can purchase compliantly, food, exercise, supplements, other things that improve metabolic health with these HSA FSA funds. And that's $7,200 a family can contribute to that. So I've never used it. My wife's never used it. Now we have $7,200 that's pre-tax. So we're going to be saving thousands of dollars on items that actually keep us healthy. And that's where health care policy has to go.

I refuse to agree to the idea that's pushed that the American people just want to be lazy and kill themselves and be obese and sick. If you use change incentives, if you actually can bend the cost curve, you know, of healthy food, of an eight sleep, of exercise equipment, of a sauna, of a cold plunge, of these things that you talk about that improve metabolic health from food on down, you know, you do start changing behavior. So that's what our company's doing. We're making it very seamless.

So it's true medicine, doc care. And we'll be launching this in a couple months with leading brands. Think, you know, your favorite supplement brands, your favorite exercise brands. and it's just going to be like a payment integration just like PayPal, where you can take a couple question async survey, pay right in that flow with your HSAFSA, and then a doctor will review that asynchronously and get you a note for compliance. There is some compliance work that we need to do, but we've been working with some great people to make that very seamless.

So this is an example. We really, it seems to be building up an army where this isn't just a transactional thing to save a little bit on your taxes. You know, that money is now going to go to pharma. I actually think it's kind of messed up when you think about it. It's going to go away from farming. Yeah. Well, it's designed.

Every bill is designed. And there's $140 billion right now sitting in HSA and FSA accounts. A hundred billion in the HSA, which stays. It's not invested by and large. And it's kind of just that fund there. Like people are, oh, God, when I get heart disease, I'll just buy my stance with this. You can use that right now to stay healthy. So we're on a mission to do that, and we think it's one area.

But Justin and I are devoting our lives to this. This is the mission of our lives. And what's been gratifying is we're pushing that forward. And also through speaking out, Justin wrote a viral article on the food compass I mentioned earlier. You know, we're getting contacted by members of Congress. We're getting, you know, Bill Ackman, a leading hedge fund manager, you know, retweeted our tweet calling for a class action lawsuit like the cigarette companies against soda companies. we really want to devote our lives to changing the incentives of the system that involves potentially some actions like the class actions.

We're talking to members of Congress about investigations as other companies and being however helpful we can on that. And the positive incentives, which we're really building a community around with true medicine. I think a lot of listeners this podcast probably feel as I do, it's like, okay, we spend all this money on insurance. And it's great if I ever get into an accident or a situation or whatever. but a lot of people that are already even live very healthy or are trying to live very healthy. People that listen to this podcast are feeling like, man, like my insurance doesn't really get me that much, right? And then I have these HSA FSA accounts, like many of the team members in my company, have those accounts that are there. And they're feeling like, well, what can I use this for really?

Like eyeglasses stuff and like, you know, contact solution. Contact solution. Like I can't really use this for much. And when you originally had shared what you guys were working on, I was like, holy shit. Like now all of a sudden people who even are hearing from a lot of people on this that listen to these podcasts. Like many of these community members, they are, even if they're not in health care. Right. And many of them are not.

They're what I call like pro ams. They're professional amateurs. They're the healthiest person in their friend group. And they're trying to get their family, their cousins, their friends, to even. eat, live, and be healthier. And often one of the biggest complaints that comes in, which is warranted, right, is it's expensive. It's expensive and insurance doesn't pay for it. And it's like, it's just that much harder to do. Now, if you can have a little bit of cost savings in the process and use pre-tax dollars on it, it's like it's a small part of the puzzle, but who knows

what kind of roadblock, what sort of snowball effects ends up happening. And it's actually not just a small part. It's a pretty big part of the puzzle too. Well, you read Food Fix and you, you know, listen to your podcast and others. It's like, it's kind of manifestly obvious. This shouldn't be, probably isn't surprised as many listeners. It's like food needs to be the foundation of how we think about medicine. And this is one, you know, it's several thousand dollars it can save for family. But what our hope is, like we want to execute on this. We're going to be launching in a couple months. And, you know, you can follow true medicine and be part of that community. But I really do think it's a model for. for where health care policy needs to go. You know, when you think about that four, if you look at that four trillion we spend on health care and just blue sky, how do we keep people healthy? We, instead of waiting for a lower income person to get diabetes and spending millions of dollars, we should be absolutely incentivizing food for them, right?

We should absolutely be changing the cost curve to make non-inflammatory oils, you know, good, whole food healthier. And we're the first part of that. and it's it you know have a lot of gratitude to be a part of that you talked about your son and you've shared a lot about how having a son has changed this let's close off here with just some final thoughts on on legacy and what it really means in your view about you know leaving the world better off than we found it yeah i mean i'm on the psilocybin experience i mentioned earlier the big defining vision I had was my mom, I visioned all the people that she met in her life. And

actually around the final days of her life, hundreds of people sent in handwritten letters to her. And she was just covered, the floor was covered with, you know, and she was just reading letters about the impact that she had on their lives. And it's just this indelible image of, you know, her, you know, that impact, the impact that she had on so many people. And in my vision, it was just that all these people, the light of her literally lived inside of them. And as Casey has mentioned, she actually did literally by knowing them change their cellular biology. So she literally actually has changed them and does live in them. And that image was indelibly in my head to the degree that, like, I am not sad about her dying. Like she is living within all of us. And I just think all we can do,

It's so gratifying. It's been a huge awakening for me. I know many of your listeners are on this journey. I think we need to incentivize this with our public policy. It's like just asking more questions, is being more curious about the human body, about the connections. We've been lied to that diseases are on silos. We need to think about ourselves. I mean, to incentivize policy and ask questions and not just fully trust these rigged institutions

that are telling us, you know, that there's a miracle cure for everything. And I actually think that's like a key to happiness of understanding. our bodies better. So when I think about my son, I'm going to make a lot of mistakes, but I think it's just being on this journey of him really understanding, you know, that his body and brain are what determines the rest of his reality, you know, and these foundational health habits, these simple health habits around understanding food, understanding sleep, understanding movement are just foundational to a happy life. And I think like, I think there's something about understanding your body and being on this journey that just leads to more happiness. I'm convinced

of that. So that's that's kind of the mission I'm on and that that's the legacy. I hope to help to leave to my son that he can push off to other people. While people wait for true medicine to launch, you have a newsletter. It's become one of my favorites. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Because you write with a strong voice. Thank you. And you cover a lot of topics that people feel like, well, there seems to be confusion about it, but you really lean in and are like, okay, here's the part that's not confusing. And I just want to highlight it, whether you're talking about, you know, exercise or whether you're talking about when I first read your original newsletter before the tweet and I emailed you and you were a lobbyist essentially and how this whole thing happened with

Coke. I was like, holy shit. Like this is like I got to like talk about this thing. Where's a news where's a newsletter? Where can people sign up and um, you know, how often does it come out? Yeah. Thank you, Drew. Well, the newsletter is really from so I'm helping Casey. We're writing a book and, uh, and I think there's two important things for people understand about this. It's the incentives. It goes into the incentives, what she saw, you know, going through the medical system, and then really tangible solutions and really going through actionable, particularly around, which we didn't even talk about, but understanding data and bio-awareables and dozens of tips on metabolic health. So I've been, as I've been working with her on that, taking just small, tangible ideas that have impacted my life and

putting them right now in a daily newsletter. And I don't have all the answers, but I do feel privileged to chatting with people like you, chatting with people like Dr. Hyman, you know, dozens of others on this journey and on writing this book and building this company, a lot of ideas that have impacted me. So I'm just trying to share those daily. So for right now, Cali Means at Twitter, I've never been a big Twitter guy, but I really am enjoying sharing this, trying to share my experience, seeing the rig system. We're going to have more on TrueMed there. but you have my newsletter sign up there. So Cali means on Twitter with the link to my newsletter.

And then, yeah, we're really, really excited about the true med launch and incentivizing people. And it seems like a lot of parents. I mean, a lot of parents want their kids to be healthy. You can use your FSA, HSA, money on your dependents. And also looking at their kids, they want to be healthy. And we really want to help people on a health journey, you know, to slant the curve a little bit for them to give them a little bit more. chance to to purchase items that that that that improve cellular health so thank you callie thanks for spreading the message doing the work that you do again we need people working on this on all

sides of the spectrum right we all need to take our own unique corner of the world even if we don't have an MD even if we're not a researcher there's a way that we can all be a part in our unique corner even somebody listening today is a teacher and they're just trying to create some healthier snack options for their classroom. You know, somebody listening today, you know, is trying to make a little bit better of a breakfast for their, you know, kids. You know, even that's tough, right? Kids get stuck on processed food.

They don't want to eat. But you're doing, everybody's doing their little part. And when somebody hears a story like yours, they're encouraged that even that little part can become a much bigger part. You never know who's listening to your story. You never know whose life you're going to impact. And that's why we all got to show up. So thank you for showing up and putting a message.

Thank you so much Drew.