The Checkup with Doctor Mike - Uncovering Corruption From Health "Experts" | Scott Carney

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

Follow Scott Carney here: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3PyxGKt94kLzVqkkjEgRFw Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sgcarney/ Twitter/X: https://x.com/sgcarney 00:00 Intro 01:55 Organ Trafficking 19:55 Traumatic Buddhist Retreat 23:48 Wim Hof 42:22 Antibiotics / Placebo 52:50 David Sinclair 1:00:19 Peter Attia 1:07:08 Bryan Johnson 1:09:10 Making Money 1:11:55 Athletic Greens 1:16:36 Andrew Huberman 1:21:30 Are Institutions To Blame? 1:25:55 How Friendships Change You 1:32:50 Words I Never Use 1:37:42 The Problem with “Longevity” 1:44:33 Fame Is An Illness 1:53:00 Friendship with Andrew Huberman 2:04:00 Getting Sued / Criminals Executive Producer and Host: Doctor Mike Varshavski Produced by Dan Owens and Sam Bowers Art by Caroline Weigum Contact: [e-mail]

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Festival of Authors October 29th to November 2nd. Details and tickets at festivalofauthors.ca. I feel like I have a duty to tell the truth to my audience to tell the truth. And it is just a legitimately hard thing to do. I am not a clinical psychologist. I'm not qualified to give diagnosis. That said, if you look at the diagnosis

for grandiose narcissist, it's really, really close to my experience with Andrew Huberman. Yeah, I think making diagnoses is really hard. And there's like a really important distinction to be made between a narcissistic action, a narcissistic trait, a narcissistic personality disorder. Right at the outset, I have to say this conversation did not go as I thought. To give a little background, Scott Carney is an investigative journalist, accomplished author, and anthropologist whose work focuses on crime, conspiracy, and corruption. His work has taken him to covering organ traffickers in India, spiritual leaders in the Netherlands, and health influencers right here in the United States.

And if you've ever watched the channel, you know I have criticism towards the medical advice shared by those influencers, as some of it just doesn't vibe with modern scientific consensus, doesn't apply to the average person, or just flat out wrong, especially when it's surrounding protocols and supplements. My focus has always been about telling the truth so you can better navigate our broken health care system and understand what we know and don't know about our bodies. And honestly, I was excited to sit down and find out what Scott's investigative work uncovered on the topic. However, I have to point out. that the conversation did go into direction of personal criticisms and controversies quite a few times.

Again, the goal is science criticisms, not personal, and I should have done a better job in bringing the conversation back to fact-checking the science. Because bias can impact us all, and it's important to point out when it does. So please stay tuned for my notes at the end of this episode. Let's get started. Okay, flights on Air Canada. Oh, wow. Mayorka, that's new. Oh, nice. But Vienna is a classic Mozart, palaces and schnitzel. Now you're cooking.

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Oh, hi, buddy. Who's the best? You are. I wish I could spend all day with you instead. Uh, Dave, you're off mute. Hey, happens to the best of us. Enjoy some goldfish cheddar crackers. Goldfish have short memories.

Be like goldfish. Let's start by talking about how you get into the world of fact-checking medical information online, in media. How does one end up there? Like, how did I get there as in my career? Yeah. How does one do it? Well, how does one find the passion for it? And then on a practical level, what happened that led you down this path?

Yeah, it's a really long story. But it probably comes from all of my family are doctors going back like four generations to like a faint, like the first hiatal hernia surgery ever done in America was done by my great-grandfather. And then like all of my cousins and like everyone. So I've been steeped in medicine my whole life. And my feeling was there's no way I want to go into medicine because I've seen the doctor lifestyle. It's hard.

I admire what you do. And instead I went towards the anthropology route. So I got my, I didn't get my PhD. I dropped out at the dissertation. But it involved medical anthropology and cultural anthropology. And the first book I wrote was on organ trafficking. So I was looking at all over the world, people buying and selling human organs. And that's a thing that exists because I'm completely unaware of this world.

Totally. And there was actually a big scandal here in Brooklyn just a few years ago where the Hasidic community had like an enormous kidney selling ring right near, like right near here. Wow. But I was working out of India where you had like so many cases, thousands of kidney stealing cases. And what used to happen would be, like this happened in Bangalore, about a thousand cases where someone would come in with like an appendectomy, you know, inflamed and horrible, and they'd leave with a nephrectomy. And they would never tell them, nephrectomy is a kidney removal. And they would never tell the patient. And they did this en masse for decades. And, you know, we have this idea. Who do they sell to? So that's a good question. The research was done by Lawrence Cohen. of anthropologist out of UC Berkeley, and that was in the 80s. So I wasn't there, but I think that these were sort of waiting patients in the local

population. You know, diabetes is huge in India. There's just a need for kidneys, and this was a reliable way to get them. And... Reliable, very loosely being used. No, reliable in an economic terms. Ah, okay, got it. Not an ethical, reliable.

No, no. Ethically, it was a horrible thing. But that was sort of like my first foray into medical grift, medical crime. And, you know, I spent six years on the trail of like organ brokers on the trail of bone thieves. Like, you know, you studied osteology and you probably studied on human bones. Well, where did those bones come from? Donations. Some, well, in my institution, that's what it was.

Where we actually learned about the person and their family consented to it. It was like a whole process for us. Oh, great. Well, until 1980, every, just about every skeleton in medical programs in around the world came from Calcutta, which was exporting 60,000 human skeletons every year. That's a huge number. Think of how many people are in Calcutta, and 60,000.

Like, if you died, you were harvested, you were defleshed, and you were scrubbed off, and you were mailed. With no, obviously, rights. I mean, I think the boxes were sometimes, marked, ethically sourced, whatever that means. So one of my first big stories was actually looking at that skeleton trade and how it operated illegally. You know, it actually was shut down eventually because they exported a train car load of child

skeletons because child skeletons are more valuable because they show. Rare? Yeah, they're rarer, right? And they show growth changes and things like that. And so, you know, where you could get a $300 box of bone. for just normal human, you know, adult skeletons, you would get like 1,500 for a child, and a fetal skeleton would be even more.

But when they found, I think there was 1,500 child skeletons in this shipment, they realized they had to be murders. You know, they had to be something like that. And this galvanized the Indian government to make it illegal, and then that impacted. Wait, hold on a second. It wasn't illegal beforehand to kill children for their bones? You know, the killing them was illegal.

The actual just taking their bones after the fact. Right. The actual like, well, you raise an interesting question. So, you know, at one point I was, I was talking to a cop in India. And I was like, we have these organ crimes going on. And like, here's a guy who has, I think it was like 200 skeletons. And they were, he was in, and I was interviewing. This was in 2007.

And I was like, this is a crime. And he's like, yes, but who can file the complaint? Right. because the complainant is dead and they don't know who it is. So there were actually some really interesting legal questions there. But after I did all this reporting, I will say it's one of those rare instances

where investigative journalism made a change is that it's no longer legal in India to take out human remains and your carry-on baggage out of India and that was because of me. Wow. What a legacy to leave behind. I know. And so specific. How were medical schools and scientific institutions

are okay with the fact that one area was supplying all of their education. They didn't, that didn't raise any suspicions for them. Well, I mean, it goes back to the colonial legacies of the British in India. You know, I mean, this, it dates back into the 1800s and even earlier, you know, you have this need for skeletons, so where are you going to get them? And there was a, I don't remember the date of this, but it's called the Burke and Hair murders in Edinburgh, where a guy who ran a hotel, when someone wouldn't pay their fare he would kill them with their names were burke and hair and there's a you know there's a play about them and they would kill them and sell them to the edinburgh medical school and i think there were i i forget the number but it's probably around 12 people were killed doing this and then england was like this is not a great way to supply bodies uh and eventually the the methodology the supply chains moved to india because that was a british colonial

holding. And I don't know, colonialism was brutal. And the, you know, the people who were complaining in India were not being paid attention to. So it became a huge center for that. Meanwhile, in the United States, there were anatomy riots for, and you probably learned about this, man, you know Frankenstein. Yeah. Right? We have the guys with the pitchforks and going after the medical school. Well, those are based on real events where, really? I actually never heard about this. So this is cool. Oh, yeah, like doctors in, and I think there were 13 or 14, you should put this on Wikipedia because this is off the cuff of my cuff, but 13 or 14 anatomy rights in the United States where medical students in some instances would be, you know, they have a new cadaver. And unlike you, where you're like, we learned about the person, there's respectful, because now we have a very good system here. But it used to be you had 18 year olds, you know, doing dissections and, you know, playing with body parts. And there were instances of like them waving dead. arms out the window at passurvise and this made and one of the stories is that someone recognized their relatives arm i don't know how they did that but you know this is just the story

and then whose rings maybe something yeah and then they burned down the medical school and that happened like the anatomy riots happens something like 14 times in the united states wow and so procuring bodies is a really hard thing it's a hard thing to do ethically um and there's this whole industry of skullduggery where you pay grave robbers to go rob a grave in india i was offered to go along on some of these runs like this still does occur and i mean it's interesting to be involved in these these markets and to see where the the culture and economics and medical necessity all interact and i've been fascinated by that for at least 20 years i'd say that's incredible for people who are watching and are worried that this is still happening to some degree here in the United States.

Is it? Yeah, not exactly the same, but my home state of Colorado, where I live, we have frequently funeral homes are being raided because human skin, human bones are making their way into commercial markets. So it's a smaller trade, but oftentimes when you go into a mortuary, you're dead, there is a market to harvest body parts and then sell them either on the curio market,

sort of like the, you know, there's a guy named here named John's Bones who might be involved in this. You should have them on your show sometime. Okay. He's in Brooklyn. Harvard was just busted with their anatomy lab

was sending out body parts. Wait, Harvard was sending their body parts where? To a guy in Pennsylvania. to do what he's like full facial tattoos i didn't i'm not totally up on this case okay got it uh i will say that it's it's a large thing so there's a got the pbsos alister alister cook uh his bones were stolen and sold to the medical graft market uh there's actually a photo of like like a pvc pipe in i believe it's in his leg um that that they after they exhumed him i guess

They found that his body parts were stolen. It's not an infrequent thing. It doesn't happen at the same scale or same level that it happened in the 1800s. And they're not going to harvest you from a grave, but it still could happen. It still could happen at a mortuary because you have a supply of body parts. And I don't want to scare people on this because, you know, it's probably not going to happen here. But it certainly does, and it's certainly a thing that the FBI continually monitors and continually gets cases around. Wow. What about there's a claim that's frequently made and, you know, I've debunked it from my side of things explaining how our organ process works for people who are worried that, oh, when I go to a hospital, they won't take care of me because they see I'm an organ donor and they need organs. Yeah. Has that ever played out to be true or not really in that way?

I, so I, my primary research has been in India and abroad. Got it. So my knowledge of what happens. in the American medical institutions and the crime space is limited. There are cases that I can point to. There was a famous case of a guy in Texas. This came out a few years ago where here's the story. I will tell you the story

and maybe you should run the, you should look at the news clip and fact check me on this. But here's my memory of it. Is that this Texan dad, his son ended up in the brain dead, probably motorcycle accident, And they're like, we're going to have to, you know, unplug him.

And I guess because he's Texas, he takes out his gun and threatens everyone. So, no, my son's going to live. Very junk you. Yeah, very. And then the son wakes up. And then the guy goes to, the father goes to jail, but his son lives. Now, this is a story that I've read a few times. Did I personally fact check it and go down there and check it out?

And this is one story, like, we have to be careful telling stories because there's really, really strict protocols. here, like even when I was working in a hospital and we had a patient coming in who was an organ owner whose life ended, I had to wait to do the proclamation of death before any of the organ team is even allowed to be near the patient. So they're all standing until me as like the doctor clears it, says no more harpy, patient is officially clinically dead, now the organs are available. I mean, you know, I think it gets into this very sticky question of when clinical death is, right? It's hard to know exactly when death occurs. It's not like they raise a flag and say, now I'm dead. Like you are as a doctor looking for signs of death. You're trying to make a judgment call.

And it's not always clear. And I think there's a lot of pressure on the doctor, especially when the organs like, hey, we can harvest these. There is going to be a lot of pressure. And there's a lot of financial incentives out there to, you know, even a good doctor wants to save a life. And they're like, this person needs, will die. And this person could be saved. and you will have pressure. And could it happen where you, acting out of your best, you know, ethical space, move your judgment to one side or the other? I think it is possible.

I don't think it's common. Yeah. I think it can happen. It's not something that I would worry about overly if I was, you know, having to take my friend to the ER. Right. Right. I think you're probably, if we're looking at statistics here, getting struck by lightning. We usually don't think about that when we're walking around outside.

but statistically, it can't happen. Right. And yet we don't worry about it. And I think this falls into largely the same category. Yeah, Mountain lions can attack you while you're... Exactly. That's what we talked about earlier. Yes. Well, joccing.

So it's a thing that can happen. I wouldn't, again, I wouldn't want to spread fear around, especially in the United States and other well-regulated countries. Yeah. But that's not to say that these organ markets do not operate around the world in very unethical ways. And what you will see frequently, and there were cases out of New York, people who are on that, the transplant list, and they realize that they're low down on it.

It could take 10 years to get a kidney. I mean, how they make that list work is very complex. But they don't want to stay on dialysis. And there is incentive for them to go to other countries and search for kidneys, especially in countries that already have a domestic organ procurement policy. that's sort of more sort of less restrictive than what happens in the united states and in the philippines in egypt in china you can get an executed prisoner's kidney and it's that's i mean i don't know if you can do it today but you certainly could have done it five years ago

where where they would tissue type people who are in um sort of political prisons and i'm talking specifically Falun Gong prisoners. And this is congressional testimony that was reported here. I see the protests right outside of this building here for the Chinese embassies here. And it was relatively straightforward to go get an organ out of China. And China always says, we've shut down this thing. And then like a few years later, it's like, oh, no, we didn't. There are people still doing it.

So I don't know what the current status is. I'm sure the Chinese government says they're not doing it. but it was remarkably easy to procure a kidney in that manner. And same thing in India, same thing in Pakistan. In Pakistan, there are hospitals that say we have ethically sourced kidneys. And it's about $14,000, which is much less than the United States. So there's all these economic incentives that are pushing people out there. And also to be clear, it's not the sort of thing where they steal kidneys.

You know, the tourist goes and they get drugged and they want. wake up and they have in her bathtub full of ice you probably heard this story yeah that's not what happens what happens is you find a dirt poor person uh often a victim of a like in india where i was where there's a tsunami refugee camp and uh we i was with national geographic and we just took a camera down along all of the women we just had the nephrectomy scars on all of them and what happens is you take advantage of poor people you offer them a small amount of money um you know five between $500,000, and then they will willingly sell their kidney. And now some people will say that's just economics doing its economics thing.

On the other hand, it's also people taking advantage of people in very desperate situations. And so that is the most common way the organ trafficking business. And then what about the appendectomy nephrectomy situation? Were you going in for one condition and something else happens? I have not heard of any instances of the happening since the 1980. I'm not going to say it's not existing. Sure. Because I read new stuff all of the time.

It's evolving, I'm sure, changes and pendulums from one side to another. Sure, and when something doesn't work, you can do it another way. I mean, what happens is I think the way that organ traffic, the way to think about is when you have like a world-class medical system, India has great hospitals. Next to abject poverty. You have the precursors for the organ trade. Right. You know. A dry forest.

for the forest fire exactly and then all you need is a doctor and they're always you know it's funny when you're interviewing these organ traffickers uh there's several levels there's the doctor in the lab coat there's the organ procurer who like sort of sets things up and you know it's this hierarchy but when you talk with the doctors involved they always tell you how they're saving lives right they always tell you like this is I am you know I'm going out there and like no one's really hurt and they have a way of thinking about this where where people don't really get hurt and And we paid them. And there's a way that they rationalize what becomes sort of big human and economic harm.

And I think this is maybe a good way to segue into what we were probably why you had me here. Because you didn't bring me here for organ trafficking. Absolutely. I did. I mean, that's so valuable. I mean, these are stories I've never heard and I should be aware of this. So this is equally as valuable as the rest of it. But you're right in that that idea of rationalizing what you're. you're doing to make it okay is something we need to constantly be on guard for ourselves as not

just physicians, but especially as influencers. And these days, it seems like your focus has shifted from the Oregon traffickers to more the individuals that are trafficking in maybe not clearly misinformation, but at least in false promises. Take me through where you're at with that work. Oh, man. I'm just doing so much of it right now. It's hard to sort of like tone it down. So, you know, I, well, how did the pivot happen? How did you go from organ traffickers to health grifters? Health gurus and grifters, yeah. Again, it's a long story.

It's a 20-year journey. So I was doing this work on organ trafficking. And the thing that actually, the literal thing that got me into that was I was, so I was an anthropologist. I just dropped out of grad school. And I was leading abroad programs throughout North India. So I was going to Varnasi and, and, um, up to Mitha Dalai Lama and Darmshala. And I had, I think, 12 students underneath me.

We went to a 12-day silent meditation retreat in the Buddhist tradition, Tibetan Buddhist tradition in Bodhaya, which is where the Buddha attained enlightenment about 2,800 years ago. And on this silent retreat, my best, my brightest student, climbed up to the top of the monastery after the retreat was over and jumped off. And as the program leader, I was involved with trying to understand why, there was a murder investigation. It was a hellacious, terrible time. But the thing that I found in her journals were that she had believed that she had become enlightened, that she had

achieved some sort of spiritual mastery with bliss, nirvana. That moment made me realize that there's something weird about the pursuit of spiritual perfection. And at the same time, I was dealing with her corpse. You know, it was 110 degrees out. There's things. that happen to bodies that aren't pleasant, and I have to bring her back to the United States. Very, very traumatic, very anatomical time period. And I saw people sort of fighting over her body parts, all right? And this, wait, literally, like, so when a person dies, you go from being you and me, we're in this, like, flesh sack called a human skin, and then you die, and then all of a sudden there are stakeholders, whether it's police taking parts of her brains or kidneys for,

pathology, right? And the parents being like, we need her whole corpse, whether it's in the insurance company being like, we don't want to spend $60,000 on a private jet. Like all of those players are suddenly involved. And no, they weren't selling her, but all of a sudden to go from man or woman in her case to meet was for me a profoundly important and I want to say enlightening and also disturbing lesson. So after that, there was this sort of split part of my life. One thing I was, like, looking at that man versus meat question. On the other side, I was like, how does spirituality make you occasionally go crazy?

Sure. I started collecting journals of people who were dying on meditation retreats. I talked to, like, a whole bunch of Tibetan llamas and robes. And I was like, was she enlightened? Was she not? Like, you know, there was a whole thing that went there. And eventually I wrote a book called The Enlightenment Trap about that sort of psychosis. that exists in spirituality.

And I am a spiritual person. I like spiritual. I like thinking in that way. But there is something dangerous about it as well. And I wanted to understand where that click went over. So I wrote this book and it was like I became the anti-cult guy. I found a cult figure who, you know, I found some people who died while meditating on a mountain in Arizona.

And I sort of wrote this story about that. And then, like about a year later, I saw a photo of a guy on an iceberg in, in his like skivies and and he was like 55 at that time and I was at that point I was living in LA and I was like how are you doing that he's like he's like you know was this picture of vitality and I went out to meet him and I wrote a story about his breathwork and ice immersion techniques and his name was Wim Hof and now he's super famous and I sort of was very involved in bringing him into like reality but I went there with the intention of debunking him as like a guy who was going to get people killed because you can't sit on

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i sort of got him famous i was one of those people who sort of was on that beginning of that journey And, oh, and I practiced the Wimhoff method every day. I did the breathwork before I came here. I do ice baths. You know, I'm one of those guys. You've seen them. They're very annoying on Instagram. I get it.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry that you're seeing this. And, you know, after doing this for 10 years, what I saw with, at least with Wim, is that he went from someone who is really charismatic, someone that has a really good heart. And I think he really, really genuinely wants to save the world. He genuinely wants to do that, but he's also not capable of handling the fame around him. And now that thing has become about money. And I started, like, after being with him for 10 years, I'm like, I just couldn't be the guy supporting this guy.

And, you know, I started tracking deaths related to the Wimhoff method. At this point, I've found 32 people who have died. And I've gone from being, like, the number one proponent of the Wimhoff method. I mean, you can find footage of me on Dr. Oz, I'm sorry, talking about Wim Hof, and I feel like now the message has to get out that this sort of rise into fame. And the thing that happens when you are presenting yourself on social media, it can decay that beautiful thing that's underneath it. So I'm in this weird place where I'm trying to, at one side, be like, save the good. Like, go take your rice bath. go do your breathwork.

Don't do them together and drown, which is what is happening with the way Wim Hof presents. So I started doing that, and that was probably about a year or so ago. I started going into that. And then, I guess, about eight months ago, this whole thing broke with Andrew Huberman, who's obviously a very important podcaster right now,

and he was another guy that I was friends with. Like, I would go on hikes with him. I would do things, and I noticed some also weird things with his personality. and then all this big sex scandals broke in New York Magazine. I was part of that article. And just in the last few months, I've decided that I need to deploy my investigative talents to looking at these people who are, you know, usually they start off really promising, right? They start off in a way there is something genuine, something impressive, something charismatic, something beautiful.

And then money changes it. Fame changes. And I think fame is a mental illness. And I'm trying to, you know, that's my, the, what I'm trying to do on my channel is expose this. And it's actually really interesting to be here with you because your doctor, you understand medicine. And I have a, I'm a smart guy, but I get medicine from a distance, right? But I can use my investigative journalism talents to look at patterns of, you know, criminal cases. I can interview people they've known

and I can go deep to sort of understand how that person goes from being wanting to help and save the world to suddenly thinking they're saving the world but they're really just enriching themselves in various ways. And yeah. So specifically let's like backtrack

to the Wim Hof of it all. The issue you have with it is with the method or is it with the method, the health dangers, the promises that are made or is it with the person? who's at the helm? It's a little bit of column and a little bit of column B because it's not, everything is multifaceted.

And I think ice bathing is good. It makes me feel good. I think that the breathwork is good. It makes me feel good. I think the science behind it is very promising. I think if you're going to grade it, you would give them B pluses, right? Well, what's the grade represent?

You know, between F and A. What do you mean represent? Represent quality of research, represent quality of outcomes, represent safety. What is the great? Quality of research, like the underlying physiology. So there's something called the endotoxin experiment. That's the famous Wimhoff one where everyone's like, oh, that's really interesting, where Wimhoff claimed that he could inject himself with endotoxin, which is an E. coli

bacteria that has been killed. So it doesn't actually hurt you, but has the antibodies, sorry, the antibodies, not the antigen. What's the word? Antigens to present themselves. Right, the antigen that presents itself on the cell. that would trigger a primary immune response. He said, you can inject me with endotoxin and I won't have a reaction.

And they did, they did it under very good conditions in Lab and Holland. And he showed both in vivo and ex-vivo that he didn't react to the endotoxin the way most people did. Not only that, it was repeated on, I believe it was 13 active subjects showing that they did the same thing.

It was really, really interesting this study. And I think it shows that there's at least the potential that ice bathing and breathwork can be potentially beneficial for autoimmune illnesses as sort of like, hey, that's cool. That's B plus science. It's not a study among thousands of people, but that's like, you know, it's not that billion dollar research that we, you really need to make clinical claims. I'll tell you sort of my take on that world. I think what happens is, in general, we underutilize the power of the brain as a medical society. That's for certain.

We underutilize it in disease states and in just health states where you're trying to optimize someone's health. Because the idea when someone's depressed in our current system is to make them in the middle. But what about bringing them above and making sure that they also have happiness and fulfillment in their life and things that are positive, not just getting rid of the negative? And we've done a bad job at that. And we've been done a bad job because largely it's hard to monetize to do research to show

how certain types of therapies, where breathwork I consider it even a form of therapy, if you will. Hypnosis, all those things carry benefit because through function we can actually change our physiology, how the body works, how the brain works, how hormones work, how neurotransmitters work. And the same way that patients that disbelieve that therapy works, because they say I have a chemical and balance, therapy won't help. Well, therapy can change chemicals in your brain, just like how in this situation it was shown that you can control your response to an antigen that usually causes a strong response. So there's no doubt that these things work. The issue that flags for me

as a primary care physician is a lot of steps are usually skipped. You get the B plus preliminary research. And then there's this huge jump into, I want to be the guru. I want to be the guru. I want to be the person that takes ownership of this. I want to monetize this. And the intentions are good, but that skipping is almost like a lethal step. And it seems like what you've seen is the reason why people take that skip is for financial reasons and for the fact that our current society doesn't, from a health care standpoint, actually put value on this type of thinking. Is that true? Yeah. And I would say it's not just financial. It is also, ego. It's also that desire for fame, the desire to feel like you're special, and desire to feel like

you are doing good. If you get affirmation from everyone around you, and then you, the naysayers, you're like, they don't understand and you block them or whatever else. There's no controls. And being that guru is actually incredibly isolating. And isolation is part of mental illness. And I think that's going on. And in addition, the money is, is, you know, it all depends on what type of person you are the spiritual journey at which you went on the retreat where the person ended up jumping on the mountain um and i use those words specifically just to not create an algorithm issue for us with the podcast um jump out the roof but yes oh jumping off the roof there is a um there's a world where it's like okay people have mental illness these things happen is this just unique to the spiritual

journey or would this have happened in religion this would have happened in religion this would have happened health care. This would have happened if they were a writer. And it would have happened regardless of the place where they found themselves. Or do you believe that the spirituality component is causative here? Well, life is a preexisting condition. Right? We all come life. We all have all of our baggage. And if things before were different, would the present be different? I can't answer that question. It's too difficult. What I can say that there are triggering events and she, that, that intensive meditation can be that thing, whether or not she had that preexisting condition, that that triggered it over. Or I also think that you can just go crazy because of it.

And there is actually really interesting research. There's Willoughby Britton, who's up at Cheetah House at Brown University, who is one of the only neuroscientists in the world who studies the negative outcomes of meditation. And she found, in a study that I think took over, again, you'll have to fact check me by looking at the actual papers, but I think it was about a 10-year study. She found that of meditation practitioners, 30% reported clinically bad results at least once during their meditations. And, you know, most of them, it wasn't bad, but some of them end up in mental health facilities. I think it happens, the more intense, the experience, the more likely you have to have that psychotic break. It's sort of like if you take acid, if you take a little bit, maybe it's not so bad.

I don't know, I'm not very well experienced with acid. I don't know what you do. But a little bit of acid versus like all the acid, I think the all the acid guy is going to have more trouble. Well, it's dose dependent as with anything in life, you know. Carrots are health food, but you eat enough, you turn orange. Water is essential, but you can drown yourself or you could dilute your electrolytes so bad

that your brain stops functioning. So it is largely dose-dependent. And I'm really curious what we're labeling as the harm of the Wim Hof methods, let's say specifically to take one by one. What is the harm of buying into the philosophy from what you've seen? There's a couple potential ones.

So on the basic physiological basis, you could say the heavy breathwork can lead to tinnitus, not very well talked about, but sort of this activation of your sympathetic nervous system can leave ringing in your ears that just doesn't go away. I see that a lot, and that's unexpected for a lot of people. At another level, you can see things like increased anxiety. It's a hyperventilation breathwork, and if you are already prone to anxiety, that can make it much worse. Not always, sometimes you can break through and go the other side and you actually get less. anxiety. But depending on the patient, you can have different things. That's on the physiological level.

You can also have the types of harms where somebody has cancer and they think they can breathe cancer away and they don't listen to their doctor. That's yet another type of harm. And in fact, one case of this, Wobo Ackles, who is the only Dutch astronaut, was dying of cancer. And eventually he decided to go all in on the Wim Hof method. As I understand this story, he died. He died. right around the time when he was all in on the Wimhoff method. He might have died anyway, right? But there is this tendency for people to go to wellness solutions that don't actually fit the clinical protocol.

So I think you always have to work with doctors. And when you listen to Wimhoff and when you listen to the people in this wellness world, they often have this conspiratorial dialogue where they're like the big farmer's out to get me. You know, they profit on chronic illness. And, you know, to some degree, hey, there are problems in Brigh, pharma like i am not an apologist of course same however when you start placing everything in this conspiracy theory logic then wimhoff always has to be right your wellness solution always has to

well to truth wrapped in a lie right so like the truth is pharma has been corrupt pharma hasn't been as transparent as they should be they do make money from chronic illnesses and then the lie is that they do it all the time that they're not interested in helping patients whereas if you interview the people behind the scenes in the pharmacology space who are working day in and day out to find cures and treatments, you're going to find out that there's a lot of lie there. So they gave you the kernel of truth and then they wrap it in the lie in order to somehow make their message more correct. Yeah. And usually there's some kind of middle ground there, some nuanced point that is largely missed because we live in the era of 60 second shorts where people want

bite-sized pieces of information and who's to blame because there's so much information coming at us at all times. We do want to be thinking fast rather than thinking slow. It takes a lot of effort to think slow. And a lot of people have success in convincing people that my method is better than everyone else's.

And at least Big Pharma, let's apologize for Big Pharma for a second. At least they have regulations that they have to follow. Like they have standards of evidence which can be corrupted, which can have all these problems, but there's someone at least looking over the shoulder.

And they have liability. Yeah. So if something goes wrong with one of these methods or protocols, what do you do? They're not your doctor, they're not your company that is monitored by the FDA,

so there's no recourse. Well, in fact, just today, Wimhoff put out a newsletter. I know this will come out about a month after this, but like Wimhoff put a newsletter today saying that we're aware that some people have died, you know, attributing it to Wimhoff method, but it was only rogue agents involved with,

you know, instructors who were doing it wrong or other people who are ripping off the method, but our method is safe, if you follow our safety instructions, not admitting any culpability in the fact that Wimhoff frequently presents himself doing the breathwork in the water, and when you do hyperventilation breathwork followed by a certain type of retention,

you increase the likelihood you pass out. And when you spread this message to millions of people, you will result in deaths. And he, and that organization is unable to accept responsibility or even effectively change their message because, honestly, the fit dude, hyperventilating and holding his breath underwater for a long time looks a lot better on Instagram

than hanging out on a cushion on your bed and hyperventilating. Let me play devil's advocate in this scenario. Medications that we commonly use over the counter, acetaminophen, we use it to break fevers, pain medication, et cetera. Same principle, helps a lot of people in some cases, expanding into large scale,

Tylenol is one of the leading causes of liver inflammation, acute liver injury in the United States. People die from it. Isn't the benefit of treatment worth looking at in comparison to its harms as opposed to just looking at the harms? Yeah, I mean, I think obviously there's balance here.

Obviously, you have to say, well, I would love to see, acetaminophen is at least well studied, right? Our actual clinical understanding, this is where that B plus science comes in. You have a promising result. Now you've spread it and say, hey, everyone should go do this.

And they do some research, but a lot of it's canned. A lot of it is not very good quality. And then to say that the Wimhoff method benefits millions of people, that's a great statement. Where is the data? Where is the data saying that?

You know, if you look at, you know, he has a movie coming out, and the movie poster says 91 million followers of the Wimhoff method. And it's like, so that's like six times the size of the Mormon church? Like, where are you getting these numbers? Where are you pulling that out of? I think that when we talk about acetaminophan, we can make a rational understanding

because we have the numerator and the denominator. We have actual clinical evidence. When you just have clinical promise, well, what are you basing this on? Personally, I believe it's beneficial. my life has been greatly improved. I have an autoimmune illness that was like raging through my body and it went away because of this method.

I think there's something wonderful about it. However, let's stay rational and let's try to get the data to do it. And that opens up another hornet and that's because where's the money for that data to come in? Like, why don't we have a medical system that will actually really examine whatever this thing called the placebo effect is? You know, I do feel like when we look at a medication, let's say pseudofed, okay? You know, if you look at the package, it says new pseudofed or pseudofed of 20 years ago? Oh my God.

It's a very big difference. Good question. I don't have an answer. I'm pulling this out. Okay, so you just picked a random thing. I picked a random thing. And it says on the bottle, like, you know, take this and seven to ten days later, your symptoms will be better. Well, your symptoms were going to be better in seven to ten days for most things anyway.

So you attribute the medication. maybe not the scientist, but the lay person, the pseudofed cured me. I took the suit of fed. I did this action and then I got better, so therefore the suit of fed was the causative agent. That may not be the case. You know, I looked at this,

I was trying to argue the devil's advocate positioned to this a few days ago on a different podcast. I think I was with Christy Harrison, who's a, you know, a dietitian, nutritionist. And I was like, let's talk about the placebo effect for antibiotics. And I thought, in my mind, antibiotics always work. They cured everything.

You know, they killed the bacteria, and it's great. So I looked up the studies, and you can just do this now. What is the antibiotics for conjunctivitis and appendicitis? And there was one other one that sort of just shows up immediate when you do the first Google result. And the active result was something like, oh, I'm going to mess this up. I know I'm going to mess it up. And I think that you should, can you flash on the, on the camera what the actual number

are but it was something like 85% of people got better with the um with the antibiotic for which conditions because this is so yes minutia and needs to be so specific yes maybe we can cut this out if it doesn't make sense well let's take it was for conjunctivitis and appendicitis those were the the two so and conjunctivitis is already one of those conditions where like antibiotics are largely useless and we jump to using them way too often 100% so like that versus appendicitis which is a life-threatening surgical condition that really needs IV antibiotics? A hundred percent because,

and I think that all of those issues play into this question, right? Because if you're doing it... Well, what's the point of the thing that you were trying to make? Just in general. What I'm trying to say, when prescribed the drug, right?

So the clinician says, they look for signs and that they make a clinical decision to say, well, I'm gonna give you antibiotics, right? So that's generally the frame that we're looking. We're not looking at, you know, in a petri dish, right? So the doctor sees a sign and then they prescribed this drug.

And it was the active group, it was something like 85% or 90% with the antibiotic got better. And the placebo group was like 70%. Okay? So you're saying the placebo group also gets an effect. A huge effect. Of course.

30% is largely the referenced figure that people said. Well, in this case, it was closer to 70. Well, so there's a difference between placebo effect and natural healing of the human. body. Okay. So, for example, if I, I'll give you some research that I am familiar with, of strep throat. So if I have a group of patients who have strep throat and I separate them one into placebo and one into not, the people who I give the placebo and no treatment to, the difference between giving antibiotics and not, like literally not giving antibiotics,

the symptoms last only about 18 hours shorter for treatment. And the reason we treat the strep throat is to prevent the complications of rheumatic fever, which happen at a higher rate when you don't treat with antibiotics. But the actual body's ability to heal itself is going to be part of that 70%, not just placebo. But when you compare placebo effect

to actual intended medicine effect, placebo from zero to placebo is usually around 30%. Interesting. So this is fact, can we nerd out for a second? Yeah, of course. Okay, so what is the, how do you rate the natural healing abilities of the body versus placebo?

Like what are the studies that are not looking at the drug intervention, but just like a natural neuroceo and how do we differentiate what those are? When you have the control groups, you have the control group of placebo, but you also have no intervention groups. Okay. So in the no intervention group

versus placebo versus active medication, which usually in a double-blinded study, patients don't know what they're getting, participants don't know, and doctors don't know or researchers don't know. So in those situations, you see people who, let's say, got no intervention, healed at a rate of one,

because the body does heal itself. And then those who are in the placebo group healed at a rate of 1.3, which is 30% more than one. And then the people who were given the actual active ingredient medication healed at a rate of 1.5. Okay. So everyone healed from zero. Yeah, yeah. Because the human body heals. Right. The question is who heals better

and placebo is better than nothing. Yeah. But still medication was better than placebo in evidence-based medicine. Fascinating. So why don't I see those three-arm trials in everything? Because largely they're separated. So first you have the active trials to see what the medication does. Then once you have already pre-existing data for strep throat,

you don't need to constantly repeat that. You could use the standardized data across and then do a non-inferiority trial where you see if your new medicine in comparison to old proven medicines is better. Hmm. So there's like stages at which the research is done. Wow. Yeah. I would love to dig more into this.

I find it so fascinating. All of it is to say that the mind is powerful. And the mind has the placebo effect as well as the nocebo effect where you could actually implant symptoms and things happening. There was a great study a few years ago. You probably saw this where a guy was on an antidepressant trial in, I think it was in Charles, it was in, it was in sort of on the East Coast. And he admitted to, he had a fight with his girlfriend, admitted to the, the nurse, whoever, the intake, with sepsis, like really low,

low blood pressure. It's like, I took all the pills, dropped it and passed out. And, you know, red alert, the hospital, they're trying to figure out what's going on. They called and they found, they found that he was in the placebo group of this trial when they told him it was, he was like, Oh, okay, I'm fine. But it's interesting to see that an acute clinical effect from a nocebo. Yeah. And that's the difference. Placebo makes things go away.

Nocebo creates some kind of something, whether it's good or bad, because it can happen in both scenarios. That's why there's a very fine line in practicing medicine where you want patients to be educated about risks of medications, but then you have to really know the individual by naming every risk. Are you going to raise the risk of that happening to them? and fuel anxiety of the medication. So you kind of have to straddle this thing like,

hey, I'm going to give you the information. Read it only if you're confident that you know it's not going to create anxiety. And you have to have that conversation and very fine line there between getting a good result but also keeping the patient informed of potential risks. Very, very difficult and will change patient to patient.

That's where the art and subjectivity of medicine really come in. The placebo effect is powerful. The nocebo effect is powerful. Even the idea of infecting is probably the wrong word. Creating memories, thoughts, feelings in patients can happen. That's why there's even rules in certain psychological societies where you're not allowed to advertise patient reviews on your own website.

Because it's very easy when a person is going through difficult moments to create influence. And that could be unethical. And that's why it's very unethical for a psychologist to date their patients. And it goes for most health care providers, but specifically in the mental health space. Because there's that power dynamic. And what is so fascinating about this entire dynamic that we're talking about is that when we look into the wellness world or that sort of the popular science communicators is that they are working in that sort of no effect, placebo effect, versus like, M, B plus science world. and omitting the doctor-patient relationship, admitting the actual clinical questions

that you have to engage with on a almost philosophical level. I mean, there's a great book by, I think it's Lester King on medical thinking about what a doctor does in an initial consult. You're looking for signs, but someone's presenting symptoms. Symptoms are subjective.

You're looking for objective things that correspond to what might be in a medical manual. and it is, and there's no certainty. Like, we want certainty as a patient and you cannot deliver it as an honest clinician. Correct. Whereas in an influencer, it could be like, you know what, if you just take NMN,

you're going to be 18 times smarter. Like, what does that even mean? Right. And that's where my issue with health influencers who do that start creeping up because of the loss of trust and health care for missteps of our societies or CDCs or WHO's, mistakes that were genuine that we all learn from and we adapt from and changing of science,

et cetera. There's been a loss of trust. But then also there's a loss of trust because when a patient comes to see me and says, I have this symptom in my abdomen and I say, I don't think it's appendicitis. I can't say with 100% certainty that they don't walk out and develop appendicitis. But because I have to hedge my bet, and that's the correct way of practicing medicine, you say, here's my differential, here's a list of things that I think it can be. Here's why I think this one is number one. Here's why I think this number two. Here's why I think this one because it's more deadly than number one. There's all this nuance to it. And yet when you watch someone, Gary Breck is a popular example that I use quite often in my videos where he'll

make a short where it's like you get headaches, it's because you don't take enough pink Himalayan Seasalt. Where does that certainty come from? Because it's not to say that pink Himalayan Seasol has never cured someone's headache. Maybe it has. But the idea of where that would be on the list of reasons why someone has a headache and that you could be so confident that it is completely out of nowhere. How does that happen? Do you think these influencers believe what they're saying is right or they are okay with it at being wrong because of the benefits that come along with it? And sometimes that confidence helps the placebo effect. Of course. Yeah. And yeah, it's a really tough nut to crack because, you know, as a doctor, you have to deal with inethical and logical

parameters. And an influencer has none of that oversight, has none of, and like the way they get paid, everything leads them to pushing overconfident solutions. And yeah, it's, it's, I don't know how you fix this, other than to point out where these problems are. Because, well, point us some out. Give us some examples. Sure. All right. Where do we want to start? Let's talk about David Sinclair. So I just did this recent video. This is just, just on my mind just because I worked on it, where he is a very respected scientist at Harvard in the longevity space who was published, I think it's about 560 papers, which have been cited 96,000 times. He is a rock star in that world. And it's all in the longevity space.

Now, when he started in the late 90s, he had initial results about the Sertuin hypothesis, which is, let's not get into all these details, but essentially resveratrol, which is an ingredient in red wine. If you've ever seen the red wine will make you live longer, that's David Sinclair.

And he did these results that showed sort of longevity increases in mice. When taking this. We're taking the supplement. So animal models. But he found the mechanism and he found a target that a pharmaceutical company could try to hit. And he goes out, he publishes on TED Talks, he's writing books, he's going out there on the lecture space. And he sells his company for $720 million to Galaxos Smith-Kline.

Meanwhile, no one has been able to replicate his results. It only happened in his lab. Even his lab partners can't figure it out. And it comes out to probably an honest mistake. Like probably he sort of messed up his methodology and juked the results. But then was like, hey, these results are great. How does a company that's so powerful and probably has brilliant people working for them make that mistake? The marketing team.

So I was talking to somebody who knows people at GSK. So this is, I guess, technically hearsay. But it seems reasonable because every scientist was like, this is not working. within the company we're saying that no no in the public right his public results were never be able to replicate and there was controversy even then gsk comes in and the i mean they're thinking if we had a pill that made someone live just a little bit longer right just a little bit you're going to make billions of dollars right it doesn't it doesn't even it can just be significant which doesn't mean substantial exactly very important and yeah can we do an explainer on that we need to do that

explain it to reporters because reporters will be like, oh my God, this is a, you know, statistically significant research shows and it's like shows what? Is it clinically significant? Because statistically significant and clinically significant are two very different things. We use that word colloquially to significant to mean substantial. And it just doesn't. And there's obviously this misunderstanding that's out there. Anyway, so the reason GSK wanted is because like, I guess it's like what if. Like it's like this venture capital mindset. And this is where we can actually talk about Big Pharma being a real problem is because they look for sometimes Hail Mary results and exciting results, results that you can get lecture tours on and get

people passionate about because if it just gets a little bit of effect, you can sell it for a lot of money. Right. But GSK lost their whole nut. And GSK scientists were for this purchase? No, the marketing team was, as I understand it. I mean, I didn't interview the scientific team, but I interviewed people who knew, had the signed the scenes on. The guy I talked to was Robert Sclafani, who was at CU School of Medicine

Anshutes, Anchutes, Aurora. Anyway, Professor Emeritus in this sort of space. And it was the marketing team that sort of overrode the scientific team, as he explains it. Anyway, the company goes on and, you know, David Sinclair gets a cut. Harvard gets a cut, because obviously Harvard gets a section of the IP. I mean, a lot of people are making money on this, just G.S.K. didn't and they just took the bed and it failed and so his resveratrol hypothesis sort of falls apart and then just a few years later he's going on joe rogan and being like you know i was proven dead wrong but now i've got a new pill now nmn is going to be the next thing and he says this on rogan and all of a sudden the nmn supplement market explodes because this harvard scientist is doing

this. And I was looking at some shipping invoices to, and we, we imported about 2,000 tons of NMN. And for an enzyme, that's a huge amount that comes into America. And this whole sort of secondary market comes up. And how is he making that recommendation based off what research or knowledge? Animal, so he has some, so he has a TED talk where he has a mouse, two mice on a treadmill, one mouse looks like it's running a little better than the other mouse, and they're both have gray hairs on them. So clearly, this is a huge deal. And, you know, most of the scientists that I spoke to, and again, I'm not a scientist. I'm a reporter. I look for patterns. Right. You are a doctor, so you can probably read some of these studies better. But essentially, what I notice is it's the

same grift, right? It's the same idea. The problem is we're all going to die. And we would rather not die. This has been, this goes back to the very beginning of literature, Gilgamesh, the very first written sort of long-form thing ever was about the quest for eternal life. We have been doing this this entire time. And now we have respected scientists who were like, oh, yeah, you're probably the type of guy he'd be able to figure this out. And I don't want to undercut. He's probably, he is a very smart guy. Yeah, I think it's less about the person or the motivation, like all these things, those patterns are somewhat interesting. The pattern that's interesting is that we have very smart scientists who take animal data and then apply it to humans when we've seen

99% of pharma investment in research when shown promise in a petri dish or an animal model, when done with humans fails. So if we know that, how does a scientist take animal data and say do it when we know 99.9% of the time it fails that's the pattern to me that doesn't make sense and have you seen a personality trait some kind of reason as to how they justify making that leap when they become public figures i think you have to put an asterisk on it especially when they're talking about the new awesome thing right if they have the thing that will fix the problem um and they're going having their ted talks and they're going on on that I think you, I don't want to be suspicious.

I want to be, I want to be amazed and I want to have healing. And I want to be like, yes, you figured it out. Like, I want, we all want that. I mean, that's why I went to school for it. Right. But it tends to be the hard-nosed researchers who aren't seeking public approval that end up being the people who make these big changes. I mean, look at Theranos, right?

It was a problem and it was a brilliant problem. I'm like, it sucks getting blood draws. Wouldn't it be great if you just had a pinprick? And then all of the investors came in. And it's related to Stanford. Stanford has these early for-profit partnerships, right? They encourage their professor to immediately seek market potential. And it was interesting.

There's this Peter Atia video that came out sort of recently where he was, and I'm a critic of Peter Atia as well, but he was talking with money and influence. We can get into that in a sense. second. Hungry now. Now. What about now? Whenever it hits you, wherever you are,

grab an O. Henry bar to satisfy your hunger. With its delicious combination of big, crunchy, salty peanuts covered in creamy caramel and chewy fudge with a chocolatey coating. Swing by a gas station and get an O'Henry today. Oh hungry, oh Henry.

When I found out my friend got a great deal on a wool coat from winners, I started wondering. Is every fabulous item I see from winners? Like that woman over there with the designer jeans. Are those from winners? Ooh, are those beautiful gold earrings? Did she pay full price? Or that leather tote? Or that cashmere sweater?

Or those knee-high boots? That dress, that jacket, those shoes. Is anyone paying full price for anything? Stop wondering. Start winning. Winners, find fabulous. for less. If you could just warm us up into it. Sure. Well, Peter Attia makes, he's a medical doctor. He's very popular right now. He has a book called Outlive that people are buying left

and right, New York Times bestseller. And I'll tell you my take and maybe they'll stimulate your thoughts a bit on the situation. He's a practicing physician that practices in a different world than where the average doctor practices. I work at a community health center where people have real problems. They have difficulty accessing medications. They have barriers to get to the hospital. They work multiple jobs. Even if they are well off, they still have difficulty getting insurance, all these problems that arise in addition to the typical problems of chronic diseases, diabetes, high blood pressure, all the things that are killing all of us. And the way that I approach to those situations is very different

than someone who charges six figures for an annual membership and gets labs more often than the medical societies recommend that often over tests and over diagnosis to potentially catch something earlier with if we were to take that model

and extrapolate into the real world we'd have so much overtesting that the harms would greatly outweigh the benefit but maybe if you have someone monitoring you and taking such one-on-one care maybe they could get better outcomes, but it's not generalizable to the world. So I take issue with taking that concept

and saying, I've done this with myself, as in Brian Johnson's case, who the person was trying to live forever, or I've done this with my select group of biased patients because they're paying you and they're bought into your system. They're already going to get better outcomes than if they came to me and got the same system.

And as a result, then taking that and saying, it will work for everybody. So here's the information that I've learned from this journey. you gotta be careful and mindful of that bias. And I think the good scientists that you mentioned earlier that oftentimes don't get their recognition are the ones that are constantly trying to disprove themselves

as opposed to prove themselves right. Because good science doesn't study the hypothesis to be true. It actually seeks to disprove. They put the null hypothesis forward. So good science is all about disproving what we currently know. Whereas I feel like there's this world where it's like, let's prove what I believe in. And I feel like that could be really problematic.

And most of the information shared by Dr. Atia is one to one with what I share, medical society share. But then there's that little bit that actually brings the popularity that is actually inaccurate. And I feel like if you're gonna put out medical information, make it all accurate.

Right. Why just have some of it be inaccurate or at least not vibe with general medicine? I think it's also important to look at, I mean, I agree with, with everything you're saying, but it's also important to look at their character and their history. And with Atia, he comes through medical school. He's a resident, and then he drops out to work for McKinsey, right? So he goes into these sort of like very commercial consulting

things and then comes back into doctoring to become a public-facing doctor. I think that's like a little, that should be like, hmm, that's interesting, why did you do that? And the reason why, and I agree that he's like the best of them out there in a lot of ways. Like he he he much of his medical advice is really good. But why I focused on him is because he actually, there was this lawsuit that came up between him and aura ring, which I wear, right? I think health tracking data is interesting. And the lawsuit, it was it was basically a TIA felt like he got ripped off by aura and he wanted more money. So he explained in this lawsuit why he deserved more money from aura ring. And that was what fascinating because it showed a window into the finances that

push social media influence. And in the suit, some of the things that he was tasked with is to get aura ring used in clinical studies. So where the aura ring is actually, like those clinical studies become marketing for the distribution of aura ring. And that doesn't say anything of whether not the or a ring is good or not. But it's a moment where we see academic journals are unprepared for how they are being used by venture capital, by these corporations. And that made me really question. And then you also see the amount of money in the contract. You know, to his credit, he does disclose his relationships on his website and often in his tweets, like, you should buy an order ring. I work for ordering. He'll say things like that. And that's good.

but that also doesn't like a disclaimer doesn't say that you didn't say it right it's still it's still a commercial relationship and when you're working in the same field if you're in the longevity field and you're like i work for or ring because i believe in it and and you know you should go buy one it's still a recommendation that is still bought and paid for and i don't think a disclaimer sort of makes that conflict of interest go away it just makes you aware that there is one and then the other things you just start seeing all of the companies that he's involved in and and they're sort of like um there's He has a something called a blank check company. I think it's incorporated in like the Cayman Islands and it's involved in like

healthcare innovation, you know, move fast and break things sort of things. And like what is actually going on or how much money is involved? And I can't answer all of those questions. I can point to the fact that this stuff is potentially problematic. And then when we add on to his concierge medicine, which I believe is like $100,000 each for a patient to go see him, his profit motive is obvious. And when we have doctors making millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars, where, what are their incentives really?

Are they incentivized in helping the individual patient or are they incentivize in increasing their purchasing power, increasing their ego? And I find this problem like, and I don't actually despise Atia at all. I think that actually he's really promising. He actually does provide a lot of really good information. As you said, though, there's that 10% of, like, why is he saying that? Why is he so certain about this? When we talk about longevity in humans, to really do that data, to really do that trial, you can't

just look at promising studies, you can't just look at B plus science, you actually have to watch humans live and die. You can't make recommendations on longevity that are certain. It's just not possible, not with our scientific paradigm, not with the way evidence gets put out. And, you know, you did mention Brian Johnson. I think of him as the wellness vampire because... Well, he was sitting right here not too long ago. No, he was.

And, you know, I'm trying to reckon with what I think about him because he's in that space. He's certainly pushing boundaries. And he has this thing, olive oil that he sells. It's literally called snake oil, you know, which you should be like, okay, Q, he's making it as a joke, but we should all be aware that that's there. On the other hand, there is something that I sort of.

of respect about him, which is he's doing self-testing and he's just trying things. And I'm like, that's sort of cool. Like, it's sort of cool to, like, you know, you are your own guinea pig and you are testing yourself. And I don't know how it's going to work out, but you have all these resources to do it. So why not go do that? The thing that worries me about him are, again, like, I don't know why the billionaire needs to sell olive oil. Like, I don't get that. I don't get why he has to do the conferences, the don't die conferences. I don't understand what is the motivation there, whether it's to spread awareness or whether and like do all good things or whether it's like, I really like my ego getting stroked and I love being here.

I feel like it's so hard to look for meaning and why other people are doing things. I think we're not even good at figuring that out for ourselves, let alone trying to figure out for someone else. I try not to dig too deep into those scenarios because I feel like there's a lot of false flags that come up and then assumptions biases from our own worlds come up. I think what really needs to happen is in my conversation with him, I thought he was very pleasant. I thought he was very passionate about doing these experiments, as you said on himself. My only thing is like, let's not make these generalizations to the public.

Let's not say that this is something that's recommended, make it clear that this isn't something that people should do. And then by all means, like your patient autonomy, you're allowed to do whatever you want on yourself in this regard. So by all means, do it. Just be careful that you're not convincing healthy people to do unnecessary. things or unhealthy patients to skip out on proven medical modalities, which happens quite often as we talked about earlier. So with the Peter T. of it all, I think the money also, like people are allowed to make money. Actually, this is a prime example. We do really well on this YouTube channel. And part of

what we do is we turn out like 99% of sponsorships that come our way. Because if it feels like there's a conflict, like it smells off, it shouldn't be done. But at the same time, I feel like we need to be open to the idea of doctors being successful and not villainizing doctors who traditionally have taken advantage of the financial model. Because what ends up happening is when you villainize it with a broad brush, it's something that's happened that we're seeing play out on social media. When doctors used to be on television, a lot of them were marketers selling snake oil. When doctors early days of social media were the one selling snake oil. So when I was a young doctor in, as if I'm like not young anymore, but when I was

early stages, I mean, 10 years of practicing medicine already. So, and I'm not 35 yet. Thank God. I'm fighting these last four months. The world where I entered and I said, we need to get this information of evidence-based medicine, all this good work that real researchers are doing that no one knows about. We need to put on social media. I was met with a lot of hatred because people, Broadbrush, would say anyone on social media is a charlatan and is just selling snake oil. I was like, but we're not. In fact, one of the first statements that I would get when I would tell people what I did was, oh, so you're like Dr. Oz. Yeah. And I'm like, but that's not what I am. We don't do that. And we don't sell those supplements. We're against that. We actually use some of the same

marketing techniques that people use to sell snake oil, but to sell evidence-based medicine to get people excited. The same way that someone who's selling some miracle potion gets you to click on their video is the same way we try and get you to click on a video to learn about why that's BS. Yeah. It's so hard. It's really hard. I mean, there's no answers and you have to be constantly mindful. And at some point, even good people can go off the rails. Sure. You can go off the rails. Of course. I can go off the rails. You know, you, viewer, you can go off the rails, even if you don't want to. We're humans. Right. And. And. And I think that what we need is a public dialogue from people who do hold truth to power.

And I think that your channel does a great job at that, especially from the medical side of things. As an investigative journalist, I, you know, I have a long history of investigating crime. I'm very interested. You said that we, you know, you sort of intimated that looking at character is problematic because it introduces your personal bias and other bias. But we can also look at criminal records. We can look at court cases. We can look at patterns. We can look at things like, you know, there's this enormous supplement called AG1, which is, you know, one of the most successful YouTube.

No, the number one question I probably get that I don't answer is tell me what you think about athletic greens. Yeah. Well, I will tell you what you can think about out of the greens. All right. Athletic Greens is a is very expensive spirulina with some other stuff in it. It probably isn't bad for you. Like, you know, on a, on a just an objective level, you know, there have been some instances. where they found lead in it, and there's a warning in California that says, you know, has lead

in excess of California levels, which are very tight. But I will say that the founder has was convicted on 54 charges of real estate fraud. A real estate, it's not fraud. It was a violation of the New Zealand Commerce Clause. Fair business, trade. And so what he did is in the 90s, he had all of these rent-to-own contracts that were really atrocious. And New Zealand convicted him of this unfair trading. And during his court trial, he fled the country. He, you know, his lawyers say he went backpacking, but he left. And he went to Arizona and founded AG1 as his next movement.

That to me says that what he did was he capitalized on the loose regulations around supplementation in America. He was a known grifter who then found a griff that really worked. And now in terms of its efficacy, it's probably more expensive than what it's worth. And it has thrived, though, because he shares so much money with his influencers, right? And you see people like Andrew Huberman or Atea, Tim Ferriss, all these people who are making large amounts of money selling this powder. That's really not much better than everything else. And their recommendations are directly based on their finances that come in.

And that, to me, starts screaming problems because, you know, one, we should be able to make money. And I would like a real profitable business model for YouTube, right? I would like one for all of these places. But when it gets into health, when it gets into selling things, you ought to, you have to compromise yourself. And the more money you make, you get more compromise. I'm a big fan of the quote behind every great fortune is a great crime.

And I found that holds true across the crimes that I have documented throughout my career, not just the sort of more recent stuff in the health grifter space, that money does corrupt. And there's this upton Sinclair quote, which I will now butcher, which says, when a man's livelihood depends on not understanding the truth, it is going to be very difficult to explain the truth to him. Yeah. What role do you think these health influencers play in helping misguide people in making their health decisions?

Like, are they causing mass confusion? Is this innocent them selling a powder that who cares? Like, is there harm being spread by these influencers? Yes. When you're giving people just hope, that's a problem. Like hope is good when, you know, your confidence lets you get through sort of a minor issue. But if someone's taking a treatment that, like, I don't know, like a light enema or a coffee enema to cure their bad gut. And now these doctors are not recommending that sort of extreme stuff in general.

But if you're taking an inappropriate treatment for an actual condition, or you're trying to treat your anxiety, your hypervigilance, which is what is, you know, when you create a problem, hypervigilance is like this over attention to health symptoms. And let's let me look at the aura ring. I wear an aura ring. It gives me all sorts of data about my sleep. There's a score with it.

All this information. And I'm like, well, my readiness score is low. Why is my HRV lower than the mean or whatever? And that probably doesn't matter at all. However, it gives you the sense that there is a problem, and then you're going to try to treat that problem. Okay, now I need a supplementation because my HRV is low. Maybe I need X, Y, and Z. And this creates sort of a general anxiety that is being responded to by the commercial markets.

And the very successful influencers all seem to profit on that. And I find this really, really problematic. And, you know, what other harm? Look, let's talk about a doctor who then goes beyond their knowledge. Now, Andrew Huberman, he has this sort of sex scandal that's around him. That's one thing. Let's just put that to the side. Let's just talk about his knowledge base.

He often will platform people who are fringe, who get excitement about ideas, and, like, they'll get a lot of clicks, but are definitely not the mainstream. And, you know, I think when he started, and I did know him pretty well before he was famous, and he was narrow in ophthalmology and he was interested in some ice baths and saunas and stuff like that. But he had a very narrow focus. And I actually think early Huberman's great.

But as you go further and further, all of our knowledge decreases. You know, if you keep on doing this podcast for another 15 years, you're like, well, what do I talk about now? I've talked about everything. And there's this tendency to broaden your expertise and present yourself as more knowledgeable than you are

and where that, and usually you are even able to fool yourself that you're smarter than you are. And, you know, I can say that my expertise is largely in ice baths, right? So I know a lot about ice baths. And I see his protocols, which are ridiculous in the ice bath space. One of his things he says, you want to lose weight, get into an ice bath and just shiver a lot. And like you shiver, shiver, shiver, and that fidgeting will help you lose weight. Well, that's a terrible recommendation. Like, one, I don't know if it works, right?

Like, maybe you would do, but I don't know anyone who gets into an ice bath. Well, it's probably talking about, like, the non-exercise thermogenesis that happens and trying to leverage that somehow. But again, that's jumping a lot of steps. A lot of steps. And also, it's miserable. Anyone who's done this, and like, when I get in an ice bath, the technique is you get in there, and then when the ice bath is telling you, like, oh, I'm a shiver.

You're supposed to, like, mind over matter. I'm going to relax. And that's where you get the anti-anxiety benefits and these, other sort of, we were talking about how you change the chemicals in your brain. Well, that's a very powerful way to do that. I think it's very profound. But if you're now doing it with weight loss and you're going to innovate all of that and try to accentuate those negative feelings, you're going to have a lot of bad health outcomes, even if perhaps there's a metabolic pathway that could be correctly do it. I'll also say that he platformed this woman named Susanna

Soberg. And this is a real problem. He was on the editorial board of cell reports. medicine, which is an Elsevier publication. Elsever is a huge, you know, medical academic journal. And, and her thing was she was a, she was, I think she was in GSK, but she works for a pharmaceutical company in Denmark. And she did a very small study on ice bathing, why ice bathing increases your brown fat activation and that, you know, why ice bathing should be good. And in her results, she noted that there was about a 600% more energy burned by brown fat than had ever been recorded in any other study. And she did it with a PETCT scan and a thermal camera. And it was just her note was that's interesting. Interestingly, this was more than anyone else had ever

studied before. And then she just went on and said basically these eight ice bathers or 12 ice bathers I studied. Is this the military study that came out with the soldiers? That's a different one. a different study. These were just a Danish ice bathers. Got it. And and then Huberman, who is on the editorial board of cell reports, that her article ends up on the cover of cell reports. And then he has her on his podcast. And then ice bathing gets, you know, really big. And then from there, she more or less quit science and sells ice bathing courses for, you know, a few thousand bucks each. And you just see this movement from a scientific result, which at worst is fraud, but more likely just

problematic. Like I made an error somewhere there, like, oops, but then double and tripling down. That's also what we saw with David Sinclair. And it's that jumping to conclusions that now you found a new business model, a new grift. And, you know, Huberin was involved, the bad science was involved the journal was involved like there's all of these different players who are profiting on this and the viewer is also involved because they want to get excited by something that's simple and you know and is going to change their physiology and it's such a hard nut to crack and i i do when i when i put out these videos i sort of point at huberman partially because he's the most he's the person who provides the platform to it but it's important to realize that that that

everything is interconnected. Yeah, of course. What role do you think the institutions play in all this? Stanford, Harvard, in the Sinclair case. So I am investigating that right now, and that's sort of like a future video that I'm working on. And I haven't completely cracked this nut. I will say that VC partnerships with, you know, the Stanford model is to get early science, get people excited about that science and then get partnerships with venture capital early to found a company that then will then go that will then go big. If it's not finished science, all you're doing is selling hope. And investors love hope. We love a good story. And when you have that good story, that's where the more money comes in, the more extravagant your claims, the more money

that will come out. I have a metaphor for this that I'm curious if you like. Just like how I'm not a fan of just scanning everyone's bodies to catch things early, because unfortunately there's some things known as false positives, where you'll find things that were actually completely useless, not lumps, bumps, things that would have gone away on their own, no clinical significance, and maybe investigating them causes more harm that had not knowing they were there. When you have this model where you're like, let's put everything into the VC funnel, you think, well, that's great because then we'll be able to accelerate if something magical does happen. And sometimes it does.

But then there's also times where because there's so much hope and there's so much financial leverage here that actually false positives happen. And they're through oversight because there's so much incentive to make it happen and become a reality. You have blood drawing companies coming out with fake data. You have supplements that don't actually do anything coming out. And it's just in the same way where some scan will save someone's life. life. But also, do enough of those scans. You're going to have people getting really bad side effects

from biopsies they didn't need. So you have to kind of leverage the pendulum so that you're not just saying, let's VC all of our preliminary research, but let's VC the things that actually have promised that stand up to scientific rigor. But you're saying that you think these institutions aren't doing that. I think they profit on the sale. I think that when David Sinclair sold his company to GSK, I think Harvard got a cut of that sale, and I think it's usually about 25%. So that's a huge financial incentive for these institutions to look the other way. They also have incentives to have celebrity scientists. You know, when a donor comes to Stanford, wouldn't it be great to have a meeting with Andrew

Huberman? You know, there's a reason why, you know, there's this organization called YPO, which is the Young President's Organization. young president's organization, and they are sort of like the business leaders of the world. You know, it's like sort of an old boys company, a club, there's a high membership fee. You have to be a high net worth individual to do this. And they always bring in the top health influencers to go speak with them. And they're not the bench scientists.

They're the Andrew Huberans. They're the T.S. Brian Johnson. I think they were all actually there at the last one. and it's we like that flashy story we we we platform these people and those people because they're able to sell hope become financially lucrative regardless of the underlying merit of whatever it is that they're claiming because celebrity is the thing you're selling and how to untangle that is really really difficult because i do think we should have public scientists i think that carl sagan was a benefit to the universe and it was important for him to get out there

and be the scientist and be a great communicator. And, and, but there's, but where does the ethical training, as a journalist, I have ethics, right? I have to have ethics. There are journals who don't, but you have to have ethics to know that you don't take sponsorships because that will influence it. You don't pay sources. Like, there's just things you do that are not trained in the medical influencer space. I think that every influencer who wants to give like credible information should probably

taken a journalism ethics course to know what what where you can get like moved off off and you will make mistakes one thing that i've learned as a as you know hard way especially with this whimhoff stuff is that when you become friends with a source you can get like tilted like yeah i put a book out new york times bestseller and i i platformed wimhoff because there are good things with them but that platforming also like that friendship sort of it took me long to come out and be like, no, we have to correct the issue. This episode is brought to you by Square. You're not just running a restaurant.

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Because when you're doing big things, Your tools should to. Visit square.ca to get started. Same with Andrew Huber. I was friends with him. And then it took longer to be like, no, I have to not be a friend. I have to be a journalist. And I think with these influencers, you also look like Lex Friedman. Well, he's a terrible interviewer, but he's like chummy with people. Same with Rogan.

They rely on these friendships and they put their ethics to the side. And it's a problem in social media. in general and it's a problem that journalism is dying uh and yeah what why um specifically do you see that in influencers and podcasts of them being chummy and not challenging one another where do you see a conflict there well you should always challenge somebody right if you just if you're just here to platform somebody if you're just trying to go on the air and be like you have your protocols and i'm gonna you're gonna come on my channel and you'll let you shill your protocols or you'll let me chill your programs, that's a mutual benefit association. That's not a

a hermeneutic to understand truth. And it's because influencing is so inter-networked, and you see that there's a sort of like tier at the top of all these top influences, you watch them going around in circles supporting each other. I mean, that's the same thing that psychopaths do in prison. Like, you'll notice it's in prison populations. And I was having a conversation with Kate Ballastrari a few months ago who works in prisons. And she was telling me is like, yeah, the people who are clinically diagnosed as psychopaths often go hang out with each other because they recognize that there's a benefit to hanging out with other psychopaths. And there's this reciprocity that occurs there regardless. But that happens with all sorts

of personality traits. Sure. So like they could be hanging out with each other because they have a mutual interest in some subject. In psychopathy? Well, no. Well, that's psychopathy. But there's also groups, I'm sure that hang out for different reasons in the prison. So you mentioned psychopathy in the same vein that you're mentioning these influencers. Sure, it goes to my understanding of fame being a mental illness. And the things that make you famous

are being supported by other famous people, right? And having, you know, Dr. Oz, you know, help, you know, you're going on Dr. Oz, that benefited you and Dr. Oz. There was this mutual cooperation. And when that cooperation is the main driver for having someone on, and then you don't challenge someone, that is a problem. Because where is the fundamental truth to it? Like if, for instance, Rhonda Patrick just interviewed Andrew Huberman, had him on. And I actually reasonably respect Rhonda.

I think she's a, she's generally pretty measured. But when it comes to, let's, let's, let's, let's question about some of these are real issues of these ethical underlying issues that have been all over the press. She throws them softballs. The questions are, well, how hard is it for you to have the press come after you? And that's not a question of like, what do you say to the sexual abuse allegations? Like, what do you, what do you say about people to say that you're, you're shilling fake science? Like, those are more hard-hitting questions. And it's hard to do that. It's embarrassing to do that you don't want to do that and it makes them not like you and they may not come back on your on your show and so that this is why we see sort of this almost geological um rise of people who who don't press

and don't ask for truth and and the people who actually are truth tellers generally um don't get as much traction which is so interesting because i don't really totally understand how you got so famous I'll tell you, I think men's health summarized it the best. They did a list, and you're going to love this list, of the most trusted. The sexiest doctors, wasn't it? No, no, no. That was a long time ago. That was People Magazine.

But that was 10 years ago. Men's health, like as early as last year, did top 10 or 20 most respected and accurate health influencers? Do you know what's number one? Please don't say Dr. Oz. No. Was it you? Huberman.

No. So Huberon is obviously the spread, the special and all. And I was somewhere ninth or something on the list. And they said, you know, Dr. Mike, kind of the OG of influencers, great at sharing evidence-based information, but can get corny at times. And to me, that's the greatest compliment on the planet. And they don't realize it. Because in order, as you said, once you have enough information out there,

you need to keep creating more and more stuff. You end up deciding to corrupt the medical information for viewership. So what happened with Dr. O's Show? Dr. O's show started off great. Dr. O's was a great cardiothoracic surgeon. I was on the show talking about exercising with patients, like something super benign and boring, which now would never be on that.

I mean, the show doesn't exist, but as of recently it was like, how your zodiac sign impacts your heart health as opposed to whether or not exercise is valuable. And the idea that I took, or the route that I took to success in the social media sphere, was I will corrupt my corniness. The scandal will be that you're watching the hot doctor

or that he's corny or he's trying to give puns or he's trying to leverage comedy into health care respectfully and doing that instead of corrupting the medical information can get viewership. But no one, because it's much harder to do that.

Like the amount of time it takes to come up with one video concept that's catchy, edgy, still medically ethical, doesn't actually say something ridiculous in the title of thumbnail is hard. Yeah. But it's doable. and most people don't do that path

or they do it incorrectly and then cross that really thin threshold of being disrespectful, laughing at a patient's pain. And I've made mistakes, you can't be perfect. We're 800 videos deep. Right, right. But the idea is that you constantly learn to try and do it a little bit better.

You learn how the platforms work. You look at what signals they like. And to me, it's like learning about the human body. And what people fail to realize when they study the algorithm is you're really studying human psychology. Why people click, why people watch, how to get them to watch,

but watch responsibly so they're getting value out of it. And it makes it harder to make content for sure, but there's still a way to do it successfully. So it bothers me that people end up corrupting the medical information because it's like, they started off so good. There's so much value here. There's so much good science to talk about.

But instead of talking about the science, we're talking about the cure all, or we're talking about the protocol. Like the word protocol, longevity, vitality, like all these buzzwords, superfood, as a practicing doctor in my clinic, like they're never said. Right.

They're never said. Maybe I'm talking about someone's insulin protocol or something, but the idea that there's these researchers talking about these protocols, when they've never practiced clinical medicine, it's so problematic because they don't know what they're actually creating. Well, it's interesting that these top doctors

you're talking about are not, clinicians. You might be able to call them Dr. Huberon because he has a PhD, but that is not a clinician, which is probably why you're more reasonable out here, right? I also think like Rohan Francis, a British doctor, fantastic. Been on the channel many times. Oh, great. Love Rohan. There's also Adam Rodman, he has bedside rounds, a great podcast. Like, there are people who understand the clinical dialectic that realize that there's as art to medicine that is central and important to wrap your mind around. And then you have these people who are like,

their whole career is designed to find a target and be like, this is the problem. And now we're going to hit the target. And it's just a different thing. And when they move from that PhD world into the clinical world, it's very easy to make huge errors. And to build on that thought,

I want to say that, you know, the COVID-19 pandemic did a lot of damage to the world. And one of the, what I think is one of the most significant, sorry, substantial problems with it was that the whole world suddenly had to understand the uncertainties of medicine, right? Everyone was suddenly, you know, forced into this situation, was like, look, you know, Fauci said one thing and now the things have changed and I wanted certainty and they lied. But that's not what the doctor-patient relationship really is about. You present with symptoms, you look for science. There's this dialectic searching for evidence. And I think people became disillusioned

with medicine, mainstream medicine, because mainstream medicine has to deal with uncertainty. And we had this fiction that we told ourselves that doctors actually knew answers. And when that became apparent that they don't, they just can give good recommendations, they moved towards people who offered certainty. I think that's exactly what we talked about in the beginning of this conversation. Did I repeat you what you said? I mean, it doesn't matter who said it first. It's just the premise is so true.

That's why he keeps hammering home again that there's a reason why the only Ted talk I've ever given is the power of saying I don't know. So I don't know. I can go look for some good research. I can guide you in some direction. But the reality is we don't know so much. and any true PhD realizes that they have way better questions than they have answers.

Totally. That's like the norm of like the knowledge curve that the higher you get, you actually drop off and realizing how much knowledge you don't have. But then there are those outliers who oftentimes become popular where they're immune to that effect. And actually Lane Norton,

who talks frequently about fitness and nutrition, expert PhD, pointed out, Nobel Prize syndrome, of people who win Nobel Prizes oftentimes convince themselves that they're experts in every field. Totally. Yes. Right. So that like expertise and, and huge success, oftentimes not necessarily causes, but correlates with this belief that I know better than everyone in every scenario. Well, and the patients also want this, right? You want the best, like as a patient, I present with a symptom. I want to go to the best. I want to be at Johns Hopkins. And what

they found is that the so there's this this um cardiology study is like you know with with heart attacks right the people who survive the best in heart attacks are the people who go to the hospital when the the lead cardiologists are all at a cardiology conference out of town because they just stick to the general practice tried and true protocols instead of trying something special which is also why you see really rich people often have worse at clinical outcomes because they're trying the new thing they're looking for that new that that that the what is on the cutting edge. In general, you don't want to be on the cutting edge. I want to be tried and true. I want to have a basic physical and I want the doctor to be like,

yeah, you have some levels that are a little high, but you're fine. Because we try to outsmart health and we can't do it. We just need good, honest clinicians who say that I don't know. Yeah. My whole issue with the longevity space in general is that it's a form of hyper-optimization, which just fails at the outset of how the human body works, the human body tries to stay in a balance of homeostasis. Never wants to be too hot or too cold, not too acidic, not too basic, very carefully monitored. And any time you're in one direction or the other,

it could be a problem unless it's for a good reason. You become hot for fever to battle off an infection, so there's tradeoffs. But then hyperoptimizers say we want more of the good thing. Vitamin C is good for us. Let's get mega doses of it. And, you know, Linus has proven that to be not necessarily beneficial and not necessarily valuable in all instances.

And as a result, you have people who are very competitive, people who want to be on the forefront, who are cutting edge, who are doing some preliminary research that may love sports where the smallest amount makes a difference, like Formula One, like racing. And they say, I want to hyperoptimized to get a little bit more out of my car. Great, do that with your car. Human body is not like that. Whenever we try and push and make perfect, we get bad outcomes. And that's the same reason.

I'm so glad you pointed out that the rich oftentimes have bad outcomes. There's like a term for that. It's called VIP syndrome. Right. Where people come in and want more when less would actually be better. And then on the flip side, our healthcare system sucks. So people who don't have insurance don't get any access and they get bad outcomes for that reason. So it's like both outliers struggle in this regard. And I see that and we talk about it so

often on the channel where you ultimately can't purchase good health. Yeah. And we see that with celebrities, Michael Jackson requesting certain medications, Steve Jobs, trying to go the natural route for treatments of cancer. It's not to say that there would have been a different outcome, but just examples like this are very common. And I see it in my practice because in my practice, I work with a very unique subset of patients. It's a wealthy area. So there's patients who are well off. And the other side, you have people who are caretakers for them who struggle with access for medication and we have charity care to help them out. So we see both sides of this spectrum and we see how everyone looks at health quite differently and how really there's this like middle ground that we need to be in

and yet the middle ground is not sexy in social media. Who is going to get popular saying eat your fruits and vegetables and that's it. Well, we also follow like in general, we're interested. in the top performers. Like, you know, David Goggins is popular. He's the most Goggins guy. He's the Navy SEAL who does everything. You know, Laird Hamilton, who is actually a friend of mine. Like, he's the best big wave surfer out there.

And like, we, there's this feeling that you should follow the top athletes. We all want to be Michael Jordan. But you're not going to be Michael Jordan. Like, like, we're not competing for that top 10th of a percent. We're competing just to be okay. And I actually think that we're in the middle of the decline of, a new cultural movement. Like in the 70s and 80s, there was something called the human potential movement. And this is the rise of the idea that the human body has unlimited potential and you

can access it by doing things. Usually it's by putting yourself in extreme situations. There's also, you pay attention to your sensations. There's biofeedback comes out of this. There's a spiritual component where the tantraub got very famous in that. LSD, psychedelics, there was a whole free love key chain key swapping parties all of that sort of is part of this human potential movement and where it declined where it started to fall apart was when this book came out called jogging right with a huge bestseller which was like what if we just don't try to go the most extreme and we just started I don't know jog and it created a more sort of sensible sort of health movement that lasted a few years and I think that we've in recent years gone

through a second human potential movement where, you know, I was part of it. Like, I'm the ice bathing guy. I'm the breath work guy. Like, I'm there. It probably started with Christopher McDougal's book, Born to Run. You know, evolutionarily, we didn't have shoes. So now let's go run without shoes. And look at these, you know, the Tara Humara, who are great long-distance runners, and they have, you know, bad shoes. Now everyone got five-finger souls. And that was more evolutionary sound. And there is some truth to all that. I'm not going to totally... Truth wrapped in a lie. Right. Right. And and then there's this ice bathing and we're trying to encounter more and more intense experiences. I believe that we're sort of that second human potential movement is starting to get the same

decadences that occurred with the first human potential movement, which sort of fell apart because, you know, acid is interesting, but then you didn't do much acid, right? And, you know, trying to go into the elements actually got people hurt. And I think we're seeing that now again, where there's this, a movement back towards rationality that will, my prediction is in the next sort of five years, we're going to see more people saying like, no, let's try to reassert science.

And there will be this pendulum swing that goes back and forth because it's also human nature, because there is truth in that sort of, those sort of more far-out concepts. but we always need to rein it back in with evidence. And that dialectic will, I hope, continue and it will let us lead happier, better, more productive lives.

And in thinking about the question you asked me earlier, like, why is this become so successful? I think it's become successful because of the existence of the misinformation. Like had there been no misinformation, I don't think this would be as successful. No. So I think the reason why we're successful is because all that stuff exists. And then there's a yearning for it.

There's a yearning for this information because we want credible people. We want people to say, I don't know. Yeah. Like that's maybe we can rebrand to do a side channel. We don't want people to say, I don't know. No, we do want now. Oh, you're saying now people are starting. Now we're trying to get to a point.

Like maybe you could do a side channel called, I don't know. I mean, with Dr. Mike. I can't tell you how often like we're watching some grazed down your reaction. I'm like, I have no idea what's happening. or I don't know this condition. This is rare. And I think that's valuable for people to see that we don't have all of these answers

and that medicine can be magical to some degree, but it's still largely imperfect and we're continually making it better. And when we say follow the science, we don't say follow one scientist. We say follow this ever-evolving information, gathering, fact-checking over and over, replicating study that we do.

And I'm curious because of my position of where I am with fame, you said fame is a mental illness. Tell me more about that, why you feel that way. I think it's isolating. I think that as you, and I, you probably know more famous people than me, but I've run into my fair share of them. And what happens is that as you get put on that pedestal of fame, people, A, see you through the lens of fame, but they also start, especially if you're trying to present yourself

as a credible person, I am famous because I have knowledge, people will not question that knowledge, and they will say that you're right. you're right, you're right. And the famous people usually also have another mechanism to block and cast out people who are naysayers, who are actually the important checks and balances. And what I see over and over again is as people get more famous, they get more calcified in their understandings of the world, which makes them less plastic, less able to deal with information, which contradicts their strongly held beliefs. I want people with a lot of lightly held beliefs. Like, you know, Max Weber said, you know, spirituality should be like a lightly,

lightly worn cloak that you can cast off. And I want to be like pretty certain about my B plus science, be like, this is really good. I like this B plus science. Let's go. And I need to know where the data stops. I can be enthusiastic after the data. Sure. But I'd be like, but I need to be able to correct course. I'd be like, oh, actually I overstep the data. Ice bathing doesn't cure cancer, right? But it's still pretty good for this other stuff. And I also would like to see a pathway for those mega big influencers to realize, oh, I can correct course. Because I do think that Andrew Huberman and Davidson Clare and Peter Rattia are all like really impressive, smart people with huge backgrounds who maybe have been pulled off into the fame thing. But they're not permitted to say, I don't know anymore, right?

They have to get put on to that pedestal where they are the sort of professor of certainty. And with every case, it's a little bit different because every human is a little bit different. But I would like to see a place where we can find a pathway to bring some of those really impressive people back in line with credibility. And I have some faith that that will happen. It does, unfortunately, involve taking some hits. Well, that's why I started this podcast in hopes. of inviting individuals like that to come and have these conversations.

Andrew, talk with Dr. Mike. You don't want to talk to me, but talk to Dr. Mike. Yeah, as far as the mental illness of it all, I think that I would say fame is mentally definitely unhealthy. Yeah. You know, being a clinician and labeling something in illness

means something to me from like a criteria standpoint. And it's easy to say something that has strong effects is an illness, but because something has effects doesn't necessarily make it an illness. I would say it's a risk factor. I think fame is a risk factor for mental illness. I mean, it certainly doesn't show up in the DSM,

but the DSM is also a cultural creating document. Exactly, that's random. But the reason why I say it is because in experiencing my level of fame, how big or small it is, it is isolating. It is easy to get carried away. It is easy to get a big head.

it is also super depersonifying where there's got to be a better way than that there's a definitely depersonification something happens when you become popular where maybe not with your close friends maybe they're kind of isolated from that but people who don't know you super well but on the outside are still like your acquaintances right will no longer see you as the person you were to them and instead you're now the public figure that they imagine Right. And everyone, when they think of a public figure, has different things that they think about. It's like that thinking fast model where they're just, they associate you with one thing and you're that.

Right. And that oversimplification is dehumanizing. That's probably the better word. Yes, there it is. And that is tough. And that does definitely make you feel sad, anxious at times, lonely. It's absolutely true. And I've seen it with people who are in this space.

But to say it's an illness across the board is hard. It's almost like saying gaming is a disorder where like gaming addiction is the disorder because it follows with loss of friendships and all those difficulty holding down jobs. You're right. You're bringing nuance to a gunfight. And I think, yes, risk factor is probably the more appropriate word. But we're on the social media. So we have to use sort of stronger length.

I believe that they're, again, this is the balance, right? You're absolutely right. It's more of a risk factor. There are people who can do fame better than other people. And I think that underlying mental illness makes fame even more of a risk factor. For sure. And we platform people who do risky crazy. Look at jackass, right?

Look at those people who are. You're naming guests that we're sitting in this chair. Steve goes here. Well, Wynn is like that too. So Wim, you know, we climbed up Mount Kilimanjaro together. I was shirtless. It was negative 30 degrees out. It was amazing that I didn't die.

But, you know, there was something beautiful about putting myself in the elements and it takes a crazy person to want to even teach that method in the first place. Wim also almost got us killed on the top of Kilimanjaro. It was a very complex moment at sort of that end of my book,

What Doesn't Kill Us? And I believe that his mental instability would have protected him from the crowd saying you're great. Instead, it made them love him more. And then as he builds up, that underlying instability just gets reinforced and reinforced and reinforced. And then you see him going all the way out and saying legitimately crazy things, like breathwork will cure AIDS or cancer or COVID or these things. You know, risk factor is the right word, but it's a strong risk factor. and I think it's rare for people to really be able to handle the chains that fame give us.

You know, we see spiritual leaders very frequently having real problems. And we have to realize that humans are complex. And even that famous person is still a human. And they need support and they probably need less adoration. And it's too bad also that an algorithm only really wants adoration. I don't know. Or hatred. I mean, algorithms help that too.

We also love some good hatred. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, yeah, it's hard. It's, the way that I summarize it, it's unnatural. You know, as we evolved as humans, our tribe was small. And when you're managing your reputation, you're managing it usually amongst maybe 100 people, let's say a thousand people. But now, every word you say is monitored by millions of people, those who hate you, those who don't know you, those who love you, those who have some preexisting belief of you,

Might be true, might be not. Like, how do you manage that? This isn't completely unnatural. You know, interestingly, to support Andrew Huberman in this case, he has a really great line about this, which is like dealing with the internet is like dealing with a borderline personality syndrome person. It's like whether they love you or they hate you. It's these very bifurcated responses.

And that is accurate. Like you were dealing with sort of an insane algorithm and that, that, you're dealing with sort of an insane algorithm them and that really, you know, either is love or hate. And that means that anyone who is in that famous position is constantly in communication with this borderline personality creature. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. And that's why part of what we do as clinicians in those situations is try and remove stimuli.

So interact less. Don't necessarily feed into that situation. So actually limit how much you participate. It's not about raising your voice. It's not about being too quiet. It's just about being flat and normal and appropriate to who you are and ignoring the noise. Right.

And I think that's the healthiest way probably that I've seen fame be managed. Not easy, very difficult. Lots of minefields, obviously, across the way and missteps will be taken. I'm curious in your scenario, knowing Dr. Huberman, how does that vibe from an investigative standpoint, right?

You're investigating health claims, claims, whether or not things are accurate, the finances behind all of these things. What role does your friendship play in all this that you said you had? Or the fact that like you're making a video about whether or not he's running for presidency or that he has a herm of women or, sorry, a governor,

or that he has a herm of fans. How do you balance that? You know, there's some lines in almost famous is that you don't get close to rock stars. And I think it was an ethical lapse on my part, to engage in a friendship with him. I think he wanted the friendship in order to manipulate me,

but maybe not like he was a mastermind, like, you know, evil person trying to do that. I think that's sort of like, it's a natural thing to do, to try to generate rapport with somebody, and that's very easy to become friends with some very interesting, thoughtful people. And what I've had to really,

really, look, do some deep work on is to understand that the friendship has to be secondary to the journalism and you have to hold them to account, which has been, you know, honestly painful. It, like, the common thing, you know, he often goes on podcast and talks about the importance of loyalty. You know, Wim says, I am, I was, I am Judas in the Wimhoff world now because I'm talking about this, this stuff. And it is legitimately hard to do that because these were valuable friendships to me. I feel like I have a duty to tell the truth, to my audience, to tell the truth, and it is just a legitimately hard thing to do.

There's also a part of me to, again, I am not a clinical psychologist. I'm not qualified to give diagnosis. That said, if you look at the diagnosis for grandiose psychopathy, sorry, grandiose narcissist, it's really, really close to my experience with Andrew Huberman where there's a public face that's very calm and measured. And then you get this flip where it's like outrageous anger, outrageous manipulative tendencies that he would tell me, you know, I don't want our friendship to get in the way. I don't want your work to get in the way of our friendship.

That's one of the quotes that he told me. like as if my work was like my friends also want my work to go well and and and it was when I was critical of him he didn't want the work to come first he wanted the friendship to be first and I feel like that is manipulative especially when dealing with a journalist maybe people shouldn't be friends with journalists because I have an ethical obligation to like if you told me I like you with we've had a really nice conversation you're really nice person um if we get out to drinks later I think that would be fun that would be cool uh if then two days later you you murder somebody, I'm going to report on everything that we did and I'm going to reinterpret

everything we've said in relation to that murder. For the record, Huberman has not murdered anybody, to my knowledge. And that's just sort of one of the hard things about this job of being a journalist is that our natural human impulse to get close to the people you spend time with and that you're impressed by needs to be ultimately subservient. to the ethical imperatives of being credible. Yeah, I think making diagnoses is really hard. Sure. From, again, I'm always in this clinical state, right?

So, like, frequently, you'll hear people diagnose presidential candidates. And they'll say, this is what's going on from a personality standpoint. And there's, like, a really important distinction to be made between a narcissistic action, a narcissistic trait, a narcissistic personality disorder. and there's levels to all of these things and people exhibit them in different ways they exhibit them in different environments sure so the way that one person might be on television is not the way that they are with their family or with their dog or with their employees so assuming that seeing one person in one aspect of their life tells you everything about their life is largely inaccurate from my experience as a physician but which is why it's important to pay attention to the people who have a broader experience with somebody. For sure. If somebody displays sadistic, and I'm not talking specifically about an individual, but if someone displays sadistic traits, let's say they hurt animals a lot, well, do you want a bank with that person? Like totally different spheres, but a tendency of acting

one way in a interpersonal space to think that there is no bleed over, whether or not we put a label on it. Like, okay, I can give up any label that I've given him that I've already admitted that I don't have the clinical background to give. But if someone's an asshole to all of his friends and lies all the time, why do you expect that he will not lie on camera when there's a financial incentive and an ego incentive to continue doing that? I think that that is a very, I think that if we believe that there are firewalls, that is a false belief.

Yeah, I don't think there's firewalls. I think it's just difficult to make these all or none statements. So someone lies all the time. Does anyone lie all the time? No, no, that's fair. And again, that was hyperbole on my part. Right, but in analyzing a person or having discussions with someone, we have to be wary that it's our cognitive bias.

And one person, or maybe multiple people, can have different experiences in those scenarios. So it might not be that an individual is firewalling themselves from a certain environment, but naturally they're different in those environments. And there's a multitude of reasons why they change in. environments and there's also individuals that change under certain substances that we may not even be aware of so that person's an asshole and you know my employees will say that person's an asshole and then I realize every time they're at work they're taking substances uppers to make them perform at work and they're an asshole at work when they go home they're awesome but don't you think character matters

like if if you find somebody who has a criminal record for assault okay um you can say that everyone has the ability to change, right? And I agree with this in principle. I also think that we should be mindful of that criminal charge on assault to inform how someone might act in the future. And this is, again, really complex territory. There's not, you're right, like you could talk about the worst person in history. I can't believe I'm going to bring up Hitler. Because this is going to go well. It happens. Right. But Hitler was not wrong about it. everything he probably liked his pets right right and and to say that he 100% did everything wrong does a disservice to the whole idea of truth because not everyone could be wrong about everything

all the time um that said i don't think that i that that um i'm going to stop talking about hitler i think i think what my takeaway from these situations is that it's so funny that we're back to this is that it's a risk factor yes that if you have someone lie in many other situations where other people know them to say they've lied, there's a chance that they're going to lie in another situation. And we could use that to guide our evaluation of the, so for example, if I have a scientist that in the past has lied, maybe I'll check their work more carefully. But it doesn't mean I'm going to disbelieve automatically what they say. Why not? So a counter example. Yeah. A guy comes over here and, you know, his name is Ponzi. And he has run 25 Ponzi schemes that

have made him incredibly rich. And he says that, you know, that's all true. But this time, Dr. Mike, all I, look at this setup here. You're going to get so rich and he gives you a really good pitch for why this bridge that you're going to buy is going to make you a lot of money. Why are you going to give him the benefit of the doubt even once? I don't think I necessarily would in the scenario that you described. But if someone does and they do their due diligence, I don't think that there's anything wrong with that. I think society has a duty to protect people from perpetrators. Well, isn't the due diligence, the protection?

They're not automatically buying what that person's selling. They're evaluating. But you want to take people out of certain... It's like the boy who cried wolf. I can see how someone could cry wolf so many times that you end up disbelieving them. But if someone wants to go check up on that, would you say that person is completely wrong? I think we have to do due diligence, but do we always have the capability to do diligence, especially in the presence of a lot of charisma.

Like look at the David Sinclair thing. His research was not replicated by anyone, and GSK still bought it for $720 million because the scientists did their due diligence. The marketing team was like, let's go. Was it that they were buying his company? Was it the patents, IP on something? It was the IP company. I think he had a sort of.

a company that was acquired that owned the IP, I'm not privy to all of the details that were involved. The reason why I asked is because I'm so skeptical of everything. I try not to be cynical because I feel like I'll miss something when I'm cynical. And I look at a scenario like this and it's easy to label the GSK in this scenario, they're so stupid for falling victim to this trap. But maybe they saw, and I'm charitable thinking here, which is what we advise in CBT, sure maybe they saw that there was an issue with the work they saw that it didn't add up but they saw value in the preliminary work that they thought they could do something with it in a positive way would you say their mission was stupid then was it a mistake that um the way i understand

it went down the way you framed it no but the way i understand that it went down it was the marketing team overruled the scientific team because that's often the way the world works so in the way you phrased it, no, probably not in the way I think it, as I understand, it really went down. And again, I guess my understanding is still hearsay. Which is again, I'm so skeptical. Right. No, absolutely. And I think that's, you know, I don't think anyone is all bad, right? I do think that there are people who would display patterns in their life and understanding those patterns is really important. And I think that there's a lot of effort to hide those patterns from the public. And I think that the people who often present truth, often present whistleblowing evidence,

and present things, get threatened, they get, they get silenced, they, they, you know, I, you were just threatened with a lawsuit for sure, over, over, over, over some guy who said that smoking makes you healthier, right? You, a lawsuit. To clarify, he said, uh, those who live long live live, smoke, so maybe we should look into that. Right. I mean, you know, I, I, I get a lot of legal threats as well. And, and, and it strikes me that the people who are most likely to sue, at least in my experience are usually not the ones with the best case. It's usually the heavy hand that comes down. And I view that action.

And the very fact that you publish that video and the reason that's effective is because it shows the hypocrisy. It demonstrates the hypocrisy. And I think that we have an obligation to present that fact. And honestly, you were being so reasonable in the discussions of like, you know, I do believe I push.

maybe, I push hard on people, right? And I think I put more weight on actions. And I think you're giving people more of the benefit of the doubt, probably because you're a nicer person than me. Don't give me that credit. Maybe you're a good person, Dr. Mike. Again, you're trying to get the good or bad labeling. It doesn't exist.

I'll tell you what drives me to do that and has nothing to do with good or bad. Strictly because my self-interest is truth-seeking. I want to see the truth no matter how bad or good or ugly it is. So I'm just curious like what actually happened. Yeah. Like my curiosity for going into health care was always figuring out, well, if this person is doing this, why? Is this working? Will this fix me?

As an athlete, will I get better? Is this true? And I had all these questions and a hunger for them. So I wanted to truth seek. And truth seeking is really uncomfortable because if you're doing honest truth seeking, you're oftentimes challenging yourself and realizing you failed over and over and messed up over again. And if you're okay with that failure and you're willing to learn from it, it can get a little bit better.

But it's hard. And some of the most uncomfortable conversations are truth-seeking conversations. That's why even like with a partner, if someone or a friend that comes to you and shares to something that happened to them, part of what I do as a friend, something I've learned, is not necessarily to truth-seek immediately. Because some people just want emotional support, whether it's right or wrong. Right, right. And if I'm going to be talking about someone's character or their medical information, it's like, let's truth seek for real and see what the actual truth is as opposed to what sounds nice, what sounds plausible.

But actual truth often doesn't come out of the person's mouth. For sure. And I think, you know, or it doesn't come out of someone else's mouth. Right, but it's trying to create facts and creating a case of facts that's very difficult, complex work, and there's all sorts of laws around that. For sure. And, you know, one thing I will say is I have. have met a lot of criminals, like legit criminals in my life.

Organ traffickers and mafioso, I've met soldiers who are involved in war crimes. And all of them think they are doing good. All of them have a logic for why they're doing good, why they're necessary, and some of that logic is even solid. All right? Sure. And I find this, I met this Mafia Don in Bangalore a few years

ago. It was an article in Wired called The Godfather of Bangalore. And his job was to get land for IT campuses to show up and other things too, but like IBM and things like that were, you know, supposedly related to his work. And what, and the Indian courts are so bad that it takes a hundred years to adjudicate these land claims for a number of reasons. And what he did was he would go there and be like, okay, he gather all the people together and be like, I'm going to pay you a lot of money and you're going to give up your land claim. We're going to sell it to this other company. If you don't like it, I will kill you and your family. And it was amazingly effective. It was an amazingly effective way to work. Everyone basically made good money because the real

estate prices were going up in Bangalore. He didn't get a lot of disputes and it solved the problem of land claims so that Bangalore could expand. He's still a bad person, right? He's still a murderer, right? He still showed me his guns and swords and various murder. limits and talk to be about how he shot people. So I think I can make a moral judgment on this man. I also think that we can sort of go back and say there's complexity, but at some point you'd have to be able to point a finger and say you got, you did something wrong. And I appreciate the way that you want to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, because

that's a very noble, I guess not good, but a very noble pursuit. But even then, it's like you're trying to put into a nice thing. it's not nice it's how do we figure out what the truth is but it is but truth is important right and and and i think that sometimes we have to judge people on their actions and then we have to make a judgment call about how those actions will present going forward because this guy his name is matapa rai you know then he ran as a politician right he ran for governor of the state he didn't win but but those past actions inform what results you're going to get in the future and we have these ideas of like character judgment

that are predictive to some degree. And it's not maybe always 100% fair or 100% accurate because I can't predict the future, just like you can't predict how a patient will go. But I see my job as trying to diagnose some of these underlying problems and also admitting that a lot of these people have a tremendous amount to still offer the world. And you have to sort of sit in that complexity.

And you're right. It's not all just good or not all just evil. I do think that judgments, though, are valuable. Are valuable. Well, let me ask you this. What do you view the difference between an investigative journalist and a gossip columnist? Facts. And can you support this stuff with factual assertations that would hold up in court at the end of the day, right?

And not just a, like, you can have a, so the way libel works, right? You have to present facts and you can present opinions on facts. I would say that there's probably some gossip columnists that do that and it's just fine. I feel like I find information that is maybe not in the public and then I tried to build a case on it. I mean, I don't read a lot of gossip columnists, so I don't... Well, because to me, the way that I think about it is an investigative journalist sort of functions like a doctor where we work off facts, we try and just present the facts without the judgment. but then a gossip columnist introduces the judgment and functions a lot of hearsay and this person

said this and we may have seen them there and then they go into their personal lives and they make judgment calls based off incomplete information whereas i feel like investigative journals don't necessarily do that am i wrong in that assumption i think the very notion of objectivity in journalism is a false one i don't think any human is able to truly be objective with other interpersonal situations. And we have tried this. There was a whole movement in the 15, 60s and 70s that was in anthropology, which is my background, where you thought we could have an objective understanding of a culture. Like, we could look at Indians and the Indians are like this, right? It's bullshit. It doesn't work. Same with a journalist. I go into an interview and I'm talking to a

person. And I have all of my own biases involved there. To pretend that I don't is also a crime, right? Sure. I cannot be objective any more than you can be objective. Of course. What I can do is try to understand my errors, understand my biases, and then present that, and try to present the fairest picture possible. But to say that I am, I'm not a subject in this would be just a lie. Yeah. Do you think that, though, like in talking about people you've become friends with, like Huberman's example, that you're not the right person to be doing an investigative piece on because of the biased nature there? Everyone's bias, though. But uniquely, right? I think that people should look at my work and say, this person was a friend and they have had a

change and that should factor into their assessment of my work. And I think that is 100% fair. I'm still doing my best to be honest in that whole time. If somebody says, look, I really want another objective external view, then great. Go get another external view. But don't discount me just because I've had a personal experience because then you can discount everybody, right? You can just count the whole concept of journalism. Luckily, I have corroborated. I have the receipts of the things that I say. And I'm aware that those receipts need to be able

to hold up in court. At the end of the day, there is a legal process that could theoretically be invoked. And I'm probably more aware of that than most other people, which holds me to a standard. Maybe it's a low standard, right? But there is a standard that's there. and I don't like the idea of people looking at a journalist, seeing a report that doesn't fit with their own positionality, their own bias, and their own parasocial relationship with a celebrity, and then saying that's a hit piece, because you're not evaluating the evidence that's presented. I am able to see facts just like everyone else, and I should be able to present them.

So that's my feeling. With the case of, like, Carrie Howley and Andrew Huberman's thing, because everyone called calls that a hit piece. That's the most frequent thing because they're talking about the sorted details of his sex life. I will say that there is a fact-checking process that happened at New York Magazine. I was a source in that article. They called me. They also called at least five of the seven women who were in that group. That had to go through extreme vetting because they're worried about multi-million dollar lawsuits going up against very powerful people. Yeah, it's not so much about the, like, legality aside, the value for me or I thought

for you, for like the investigative perspective of talking about whether or not something is accurate from a health perspective. It seems it's deeper with you because you're more interested in learning about the people involved at these situations as opposed to the science of what they're recommending. Is that fair? I'm very interested. I'm very interested in the science, but I'm not a doctor. And I'm not going to, I generally try not to give medical advice because I'm a responsible human in myself. I will talk to doctors and get them to weigh in. And sometimes I'll put some of my, my understandings into the videos because how can you avoid that? However, my role as an investigative journalist is I'm looking at other sets of facts.

I'm looking at trends. I'm looking at patterns in someone's life. Or sometimes I'm trying to show that they are an actual criminal. Like there are those sorts of investigation. organs. Right. This guy murdered that guy. He said it on tape. Like, you know, that, that's not what I'm doing with these health grifters in general. But, but I, and I'm looking at also, it's not just the individual. I don't really honestly care about any of the people that I spoke about. I want to know about the, the, the problems that these people have caused to science in general, to health in

general, because I'm trying to make a case that's much bigger than an individual. It doesn't matter if Andrew Hewerin continues or he falls or Wimhoeff continues or he falls. What matters is do we trust the concept of the reality of science? And we have to hit that from many, many different sides. We have to do it from the scientific side, the medical side, the clinician side, and the investigative jurisdiction. Because we have to build a case that comes from multiple directions. Because we always see scientists coming out there being like, well, the science says this. And sometimes they overstate the case and sometimes they understate But the science says this, and that isn't convincing to a lot of people.

So we need another piece of evidence. This person had a sex scandal. Okay, well, that's going to make some people go off. And other people, we have a fair number of politicians who have had sex scandals who are doing just fine. But 10 years ago or 15 years ago, they would have dropped the ball. So we need to use every tool in our arsenal to build a larger and larger fact-based case. on people so that they can make understandings.

And I again, but I also don't believe in canceling people. Like I'm not coming here being like cancel humor and cancel, you know, all these Gryfters. Because I do believe that there's a chance that they can come back around and they can become return to credibility because we all have the ability, I hope, to change our ways. How do you define Gryfter? Oh, man. I don't know. I don't know how I understand.

Oh, that's such a hard question because it's, I think it's, we're trying to look at disingenuousness, and that comes in many, many different flavors. I think profit, both financial and emotional profit, are part of what the grift can be. But usually it involves either deception in multiple ways. It could be, I am, I know this is wrong, and I'm going to sell you on something just to make profit, because I'm an evil person. But usually it's, it's more like, I believe this is right.

and I'm going to overstate my case. And then I'm going to double and triple down on that because I don't want to see evidence to the contrary. That's usually how it works. And then sort of the outlandish profiting that happens. Like I don't go after every person who says something disingenuous on the internet. I am really trying to look at the people

who have massive influence. Because sometimes talking to those people who don't have massive influence can give them influence. A hundred percent. So that's why I try not to, react to some obscure video that someone sends me of someone saying something ridiculous. Because I'm like, the last thing I want to do is make this a fad by fact-checking it. So you have to also be careful with that respect when it comes to social media.

Messy world we find ourselves in. Oh, my God. Suffice it to say. I mean, in this conversation, I'm really appreciating because it's actually making me think about some things that I have, you know, also am calcified in my thinking because I think that we all get calcified. And, like, getting down to whatever truth is is very, very. very, very hard. And, you know, that's the, that's the Socratic problem. Like, the more you know, the less you know.

Yeah. And I think that this pursuit is never going to be, to arrive at an ultimate knowledge. Like, I can't go in somewhere and present that I know something. Even based on all of the evidence, all I can do is make a case for what I think is happening. And, yeah. Well, we thank you for your work. Thank you for your service. to send people to watch your content, read books.

Yeah, these days, I mean, I'm mostly doing things on YouTube. You are on YouTube right now, so come over to my channel. It's Scott Carney Investigates. And I also have many, many books. I've written seven books, and they're not just on this stuff. They're on climate change and organ trafficking, and I've got some sort of wellness hacks that you can try, too. Like, I'm pretty open to a lot of things.

Scottcarney.com is my website. But really just go to my YouTube channel. That's a great door. Perfect. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you. I'm really grateful for this conversation with Scott.

I definitely wish I encouraged them to go into more scientific details as opposed to personal controversies. You know that my goal with this podcast has always been about improving the way we discuss health topics. And I feel like I could have done a better job keeping this conversation more focused towards that direction. Truly, I just don't think I got down to the medical specifics enough. And I want you to know that in the future, I will be doing a deeper dive. into the factual accuracy and inaccuracies within the world of health influencers and podcasters. If you enjoyed this podcast, please don't hesitate to give us a five-star review, given it's

the best way to help support our show. I highly recommend you check out another episode like when I went head-to-head with Dr. K on Ayurvedic medicine. As always, stay happy and healthy.