The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The End of Us: A Story of Death, Deception and China’s Deadly Grip on US Healthcare by Tony Paquin

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

The End of Us: A Story of Death, Deception and China’s Deadly Grip on US Healthcare by Tony Paquin https://www.amazon.com/End-Us-Deception-Chinas-Healthcare/dp/B0CPWVGBCS In 2020, Tony Paquin’s small medical supply company faced an impossible task—fulfilling a federal contract to procure one billion needles and syringes for America’s COVID-19 vaccination effort. What followed was a high-stakes battle against cutthroat factory owners, shady middlemen, relentless scammers, and even the Chinese Communist Party itself. Through this ordeal, Paquin uncovered a dangerous truth: America’s dependence on China and foreign sources for life-saving drugs, medical supplies, and high-tech devices is a ticking time bomb. Nearly everything that keeps Americans alive is manufactured overseas—often under the control of a geopolitical rival. The End of Us is more than a real-life thriller. It’s an urgent wake-up call about a critical national security threat—one that could be weaponized in a future conflict. With firsthand insights from inside the global supply chain, Paquin exposes the hidden dangers of America’s medical dependence and lays out what must be done to reclaim control before it’s too late. About the author Tony Paquin is an acclaimed author, serial entrepreneur, and authority in the healthcare industry, known for pioneering Retail Healthcare. With over thirty years of experience leading public and private companies to groundbreaking achievements, Tony’s work has consistently focused on the intersection of healthcare, technology, and business innovation. His first book, “The Retail Healthcare Revolution,” established Tony as a forward-thinking voice in healthcare, proposing transformative business models that combine retail strategies with healthcare services. His insights into enhancing patient engagement and leveraging digital health technologies have influenced practitioners and policymakers alike.

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Some guests of the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it's not an endorsement or review of any kind. Today, we have an amazing young man on the show where you're talking about his book called The End of Us, a story of death, deception, and China's deadly grip. on U.S. Health Care by Tony Packwood, who joins us on the show. We're going to get into it with him. Find all the deeds and stories and all the interesting tidbits of what he's experienced and all that good stuff.

And it should be pretty enjoyable, as it were. So we're going to get into with him and find out more. Tony is a pioneering entrepreneur and healthcare innovator with more than 30 years of experience transforming the industry. As a co-founder and CEO of I Remedy Healthcare, he is championed. integration of retail strategies and advanced technologies to improve patient engagement, streamline systems, and strengthen the medical supply chain. He's a recognized thought leader. He authored the retail healthcare revolution, a groundbreaking book that reimagines health care

through retail principles and the aforementioned latest book we'll be talking about today. He delivers a critical examination of America's reliance on foreign medical supplies and its implication for national health and security. Welcome to show, Tony. How are you, sir. Oh, great, Chris. Great to be on the show. And congratulations on your daily production. I love people who are consistent and reliable. Oh, yeah. Three shows a weekday, Monday through Thursday. That's amazing. I can't feel my legs anymore, Tony. Anyway, Tony, give us your dot coms. Where can people find you on the interweb, sir? Simplest place find the me, which said my company, which is iR-E-M-E-D-Y-D-com. And I'm also

pre-active on X, formerly known as Twitter. So tell you back one. Hiremedy.com. So give us a 30,000 overview of the what's inside this book. So the quick story is, first off, we'll get into it. I'm a technology guy. We're a medical supply distribution company, and we got a call from the U.S. government during COVID.

And everybody and their brother was selling stuff in COVID. A guy used to be like a toy dealer in China, and now he's making gloves and masks. That's the way the industry went. But we were in the business. The government calls us up and they said, we need some needles and syringes for the vaccine. And we thought, oh, we hadn't thought about that. They're going to need needles and syringes. And so we quickly went out and we knew, because of our technology, we knew where everything is made in the world.

So we knew where the needles and syringes were made, which of course, is China. And we went to those factories, we signed them all up. And we kind of reserved the production. Oh, wow. Yeah. So one thing leads to another. And there's a global mad rush on needles and syringes. And we're right square in the middle of it.

And it was, it's a war. It was a con job. There was deception. There was war. There was the Chinese government. The militaries were involved. The White House Situation Room. And on and on and on.

We were at battle for about 12 to 18 months doing that project, literally. And that's what the book is about. The book is it reads like a Tom Clancy novel, but it's all true. So I complete that. Yeah, it's all true. What a wild place to be. I remember how wild that time was. The federal government refused to be the buyer, which it should have been.

And it made the states just fight with each other. So you had states fighting each other, Americans fighting each other for syringes and hospital supplies, right? Yeah. First off, it was a bizarre time. When in the history of the world, has everything shut down. So it's just really, really unusual time. But yeah, it was a crisis. People were in fear and bad things were happening. Oh, yeah. You didn't know what was going on. You thought you could be dead tomorrow. That's the thing. Like, you look back and everybody has a different view of it. But at the time, people were freaking out. And there was this massive global shortage. Because what happened is in the United States, it's obvious now, but before then, people didn't quite realize that where is this thing made? Where is this made? Or where is this thermos made and so on and so forth? The answer is everything is made basically in China. And with COVID,

the world stopped. So there was nothing, right? Remember, the joke was you couldn't get toilet paper, you couldn't get paper towels, all these things were happening. But most importantly, you couldn't get drugs. You couldn't get the things that were needed in a hospital just to stay open. And meanwhile, you're having the greatest health crises the country has ever seen. So it was a disaster. Yeah. Yeah.

It was definitely a disaster. It was, and like I say, you didn't know. I started my guy friends. We'd call each other, how you doing, man? You okay with all this stuff? What's going on? We started telling each other we loved each other. We're like, hey, man, I love you, man.

because we didn't know if we're going to see each other again. It was so bizarre. Yeah. And the horrible things that were happening, people would get sick and they'd be in the hospital or something, and they would not let them, they didn't have visitors. So I had a lot of people basically die alone in hospitals. It was horrible. They wouldn't let you first.

I think initially they wouldn't let you go to the funeral. That's right. And then they limited it to four or five people. They weren't sure it was like Ebola or anything. Yeah. Now in Florida, we kind of had a whole different approach. Florida opened up pretty quick. So we only had a couple months there in early 2020 that we were like shut down.

And then they opened up pretty fast. Yeah. Yeah. And nobody remembers, man. People were parking outside of hospitals at first coming together and and supporting nurses and stuff. But so you get caught, you tell the story of how you get caught in this whole menagerie of a mess and a global catastrophe and how you guys navigated it. And I guess at the forefront of this is what's in the title and the cover of the book, how China has a deadly grip on U.S. healthcare. Do you want to tease a little bit of that out?

Yeah, so it's an interesting development over the last maybe 30 or 40 years, like everything else, healthcare globalized and people go to make drugs and they go find the cheapest place to make those drugs and they move them to China. And before you know it, pretty much everything is in China. So the drugs you take, whether it's Tylenol or Advil or a cancer drug or insulin for diabetes, and the list goes on and on and on, odds are very high that it's ultimately made in China. Either it's made in China and or India and or the raw material required for that drug is made in China. So even if you happen to manufacture it in the U.S., the raw material you've got to have to manufacture it comes from China. So all roads lead to China.

Now here's the problem. Go ahead. Go ahead. Now go ahead. Over the last, over the last, I don't know, 20, 30 years or so, China has been making inroads in mineral-rich, places like Africa and different places to try and corner the market on these on these rare earth metals and and organics I guess and so they've done a they've done a really smart move about seeing that it's you can't really cut them off now because you need those they need that material for

chips we kind of saw there was a bunch of companies that we did reviews for back then and they were like Chris we can't we can't get our products sold or out because we can't get the chips And it was amazing how much chips went into everything. Just stupid stuff that you're like, you have chips in your backpack? Oh, yeah, we got everything's technology. You know, it was like, wow, okay. And just people ground to a halt production-wise, yeah. Yeah.

The scary thing is, so we came across us, and it's a really amazing story of, we had at one point the Saudis arrived at our manufacturing facility with an SUV full of gold bullion to bribe the loading dock guy to steal our inventory. Really? Yeah, so that kind of stuff was happening.

Holy crap. So it was wild and crazy. But, and we can talk all about that. There's all kinds of stories about that. But the interesting thing when we wrote the book. He melted protection for syringes. I'm telling you. And we couldn't get them on jets.

And no, it was no joke. We woke up one morning. We woke up one morning. and had a call. Every morning at 5 a.m., I'd get up, and I'd have a call because it's 5 p.m. in China. So I'd be like, okay, what happened overnight? And one morning we woke up,

and the Chinese Communist Party seized 40% of our inventory throughout the country of China, because we were at all these different factories, we were in warehouses, and we moved. We ended up moving 1.2 billion items. Wow. Think of that loading and unloading. a Costco store about 50 times.

Yeah. Yeah, so they just seized it one day. Not you can do it about Chutu's Communist Party. Oh, yeah. They're a lawyer. What are you going to do? Yeah. Yeah.

What a wild time. And here you are, you're trying to fulfill orders probably from your clients. And you're trying to balance this crazy inventory up and down being seized. And I remember one time, I wasn't, one of the governors flew stuff in. And then the Trump administration tried, was threatening to seize it. And so they had to put, I think, National Guard or something for the state to protect it. Yeah, that kind of stuff was happening. And then, yeah, a lot of the material was fraudulent.

You didn't know legitimate. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you had that kind of problem. We were working. A needle is technically considered to be a medical device. And it because it penetrates the skin. So as a higher level of FDA oversight requirement, we're talking to one of our factories. We maxed them out.

We're buying every needle made in the world. We were the number one. My company was the largest purchaser of needles in the world during that period of time. And so we're talking to this one factory, and he's, I can't make any more, but I got an associate down the street. And he can make him. I said, yeah, but as he licensed, there's a thing called the 510K. And he's, no, but he could use mine. And I'm like, no, that's not how it works, my friend.

Yeah, so a lot of times you're buying stuff, especially in that wild and crazy period, you didn't know if the drugs were real. Certainly most of the masks were garbage. That was a joke. Yeah, I remember studying the mask, so which ones to buy. And I ended up going Home Depot and I was buying the masks they'd have there

for the paints and stuff. And I remember you had to make sure you got the right rating. or else because the spores or pores or molecules and COVID could still get through. And it was like wild, man. You're just like, holy crap. Yeah. It was a mess. And what it showed you is the country was ill prepared for such a thing.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Now, the interesting thing is, is this dominance of our supply chain by China is not accidental. This is a strategy. And they actually wrote a chairman Mao back in like the 50s wrote a document called the 100 year marathon. And what they said is over a period of 100 years, they would slowly take over the world on several fronts.

And one of them is supply chain, the other's military. But it's a strategy. It's not like it just sort of naturally happened. It's part of the plan. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, you can't go to war with China. You can't do anything because you lose, you got to have those chips.

The whole Korean thing, it's definitely put us in play. And I've been reading about this for decades of how America's been asleep and China's been going around the world, digging up stuff, taking over ports, loaning money to Africa. And then when they don't pay them, of course, higher-risk loans, they, they seize property and then they seize resources. And then the Goomba stuff, some of the, when the Russians were at one point had, who was that the Warner Group or whatever? Warner. Oh, yeah, the Warner Group.

Yeah, the Warner Group was in. They were in, for a long time, they were in Africa. They were big in Africa. And in trade for resources. And yeah, it was just a huge resource group. And for years, I would read articles about how, why are American politicians overlooking the fact that Africa is being scraped by and locked down in contracts by Africa?

And we need that stuff. But Africa, you go to Jamaica, and they'll be put in a freeway. China is built in the freeway. You go to Africa, and there's these deep sea ports, and those ports are being built by the Chinese. They're definitely, they called it this, it's like a Silk Road initiative, is this idea that they had. They go around the world, and they would loan money to undeveloped nations, and then they would do infrastructure development. And it kind of gives them acres all over the world.

Yeah, yeah. And they were seizing ports. They were just like, hey, they didn't pair our loans. We're just going to take your airport. We're just going to take your port where you bring in your goods and now you have to pay us stuff. And what a crazy, what a crazy time that was. Yeah. And just just wild.

Now, people can read about this in your book. And do you do any speaking, touring, any of that sort of things to talk about some of these issues? No, I mainly, of course, I used Twitter and X for that. And, you know, like I said, at the beginning, we're pretty active there. And we continue to put our message in front of the government. I did testify at the U.S. Senate a couple months ago on this exact subject. And I will tell you that, yeah, people are waking up. If you go back to COVID or even the last four to five years ago, people were like, oh, yeah, everything's been China who killed. Now I would tell you that people are starting to go, oh, this is a problem. And they're starting to talk about how do we bring manufacturing back? And for example, this administration is focused on that. I think ultimately it's a bipartisan issue. Right now the Republicans are in charge.

And they're focused on bringing back factories and building factories, which is ultimately the only thing that you can do. You can try and improve supply chain, is what we do. You can track down what is made, where is it made. Are we inspecting it properly? The answer is no. No, we don't think about it. There's no such thing as a surprise inspection in China. They know, you land. You don't just show up at a building. And India does not have anywhere near the rigorous regulatory environment that the United States have. The FDA is the gold standard worldwide for quality management.

But we don't have robust FDA oversight in these other countries. We do have people there, but not enough. And if you're manufacturing drug in the U.S., the FDA just show up. And they will. They'll just show up, and they'll come in and they'll inspect that facility in a very serious way.

So surprising amount of detail that they'll get into. They can't really do that in charge. China. They show up in China, and China's AI has identified them the moment they got off the airplane and tracks every step of the way of what they're going and what they're doing. So that's the world. We had Catherine Ebon on several years ago, actually in September of 2020, and her book, Bottle Lies, the inside story of the generic drug boom. And she talked about the things you're mentioning where she tracked for 10 years the China drugs, the drugs made in India. from generic drugs and the ingredients they use and their preparation and all that stuff.

And my mom read that book and she won't ever order generics again. Yeah. And genetics might like, the way I describe it is, and there's a generic drug manufacturer here in the United States in Birmingham, Alabama. It's called Oxford Pharmaceuticals. And they're high-quality operation. But the assumption that your point is, is they make a drug. in Birmingham. And somewhere in India, there's a big company making that same drug.

The average doctor, pharmacist, and patient thinks that those drugs are the same, but they're not. They're different raw materials, different processes, different quality control. And really, dramatically, you don't know what's in that drug in India. You don't know if it's diluted or contamination. And there's factors on how fast is the drug dissolve? It's a science. You take that. And there's been a lot of studies that will show that patients taking drugs from India versus patients taking the same drug made in America. They're going to have different outcomes. Really? Oh, yeah. The average person just doesn't know that, right? That's a fact. That's an issue.

That's the way it is. And I've heard that from different medical doctors over the years that we've had on the show. And yeah. And kind of known, I don't know, where I learned it from, 60 minutes. or something, but I always kind of known that, yeah, sometimes on generics, they leave out some of the key components that are what you pay for. Some generics, they're pretty much the same. It's kind of a while. But you have to question what sort of ingredients went into it. And like you said, the prep, I think she found Catherine Ebaum in her tour of Indians,

found just deplorable safety conditions and health conditions. The story I tell is if the FDA goes to Oxford and from, And they're going to inspect it. Drugs are made in something called a clean room, as you would expect. You would hope. They would hope. And when they make the drug, they make all these drugs. And then now they're going to go, they're going to make a different drug.

So they'll empty that room out and they'll clean it. And then the FDA might be there. And they'll go in, they'll swab like the wall or the ceiling. And they'll test it to see if there's any dust left over from the previous drugs. It's serious stuff, right? Yeah. In India, they've had cases where they show up, and it's not a clean room. There's a hole in the roof, and it rains coming in, landing in a bucket.

That's just hydration, right? Yeah, it's natural water. It's fresh water, okay. But that's the kind of thing that's happening, and there's efforts to improve all this. And there are no doubt quality manufacturers in India, obviously. But you don't know. And ultimately the answer is to move it back to the U.S. So on the one hand, in India, you don't have the quality, controls that you do in the U.S. or in China.

And the reason is their political system is different. Each state that we would call it in India is kind of like its own country. They have their own language, their own laws, their own regulations. So they're not really, they don't have a national standard. China, on the other hand, because. Because it's a totalitarian society. Everything's under control by the Master's Central Party. So their quality can be pretty good, but they're not our friends.

They are, we're essentially a war with China. That's our family. And so our drug supply is controlled by our adversary. That's kind of the deal. Now, again, there's good companies there. There's good people there. All those things tend to be true. But we're just talking about as a nation, their values don't align with ours.

And they frequently work against us on the global stage. And of course, the ultimate challenge will come with Taiwan. Eventually, they're going to want those semiconductors, which are coming out of Taiwan. And they view Taiwan as China. in their definition of China. So, yeah, we're going to be in a position. We have this sort of complicated defense agreement where in theory we would help defend Taiwan.

It's not really a treaty like, say, NATO, but there is this sort of defense support agreement. Yeah, but I wrote a chapter in my book. We sort of did a war game that said, if China invades Taiwan, and then we come flying to the rescue with a couple of aircraft carriers, all China has to say is you guys need to turn those aircraft carriers around and go home, or we're going to cut off your

drug supply. Yeah. And a million Americans will start suffering and dying within about three months. Because they have about two to four weeks worth of drugs on hand. And yeah, yeah, things like blood pressure medicine. Yeah, it could be catastrophic.

People start having heart attacks and stuff. Diabetes and cancer drugs. So there's these real drugs. Now, they're really life and death kind of drugs that are out there that you can't live without. And so as soon as they make that threat, well, what are you going to do? You know what they could do to really win the war that they'll put all this in the hurt, threaten to ban caffeine. That everybody would be like, no, no, no, no, do that. Don't do that. I don't know if you track on that, but if you go back in Europe, go back like a thousand years,

everybody's drinking beer, right? They're beer and wine. When they're cruising around Europe, they have beer and wine. And at some time in the early, I think it was like in the 1200s or something, they're doing trade, and they discovered coffee. Oh, yeah. And then the entire population of Europe got wired on caffeine, and that actually amped up the economy because everybody was high strung there.

Yeah. That's a true story. That's how the economy's developed. The Germans went next level and we're feeding meth to everybody. That's where the pharmacy industry started. A lot of these big pharma companies were Hitler's methamphetamine factories. Yeah. I did not know that it was just commonplace to take to pop meth in Germany during the Hitler era,

which hopefully explains why they were able to be overthrown. nobody else will buy fascists but now they Hitler allegedly was addicted to meth oh yeah yeah and they would get their soldiers they had this super soldier idea they call them stormtroopers they were storming on meth yeah they would put these guys in these submarines that you peddled uh-huh and they'd pump them up with a bunch of meth they see how far they would go that's what they did some of them never came back yeah those pedal submarines, those are the best. They were really high and really excited. And then they came down somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic and it was a really bad,

it was a really bad crash apparently. Yeah. They say that's what helped them do the Blitzkriegs because they could have so much energy. Exactly. They even had British pilots jacked up so they could run. I think they were taking speed, Matterall or something. They were taking speed because they were trying to defend the island. They didn't have pilots and of planes.

They're trying to keep these guys up constantly. air. Yep, that's correct. And then like you say, the drug, all the, a lot of the drug stuff came out of there. The CIA discovered meth-emphetamines, and I believe they own the patent for. Yeah, and LSD came out of that. But even the big pharma companies today, they came from that era. They were founded in Nazi Germany. Now, I'm not saying they're Nazis, but that's where they came from. That's why you have Volkswagen. This came from there. Yeah. But they had that in. But they had that in industrial complex and they built freeways, they've made cars, the Volkswagen, they made airplanes and tanks, and they made drugs. And they addicted their army to meth and speed to try and make

them more powerful. And plus get rid of the morality clause. You're not going to consider the morality of killing or slaughtering another person, cooking them in ovens and the, in the horrors of the Jewish camps. The sadistic things that they did to the Jewish people, the torture, the one doctor who was looking about with people that were still alive, and just disturbing beyond reason. And you have to figure a lot of that was probably drug. You're not going to make the best decisions when you're on drugs. I'm drinking vodka.

I know what that means. But just the horrors of society that came out of that. But yeah, it's interesting how it's done. Let me ask you this, because right now we're in, I think, the 500 iteration of the settling of the Iran War here in 2026. We're watching this 10 years from now. Yeah, we're really close for the 3,000th time, which is weird because it's only been like two and a half months.

Anyway, the linchpin to this war has been the Hormuz Strait, and everyone saw it coming and everyone had played this out. Do you think the Hormuz Strait sort of situation where they can buy them? bottleneck and effect global world supply, China is now looking and going, we have that power too, their medical devices and stuff. No, I don't think China needed to learn that lesson. I think they probably taught that lesson. But your point is it illustrates it.

And what it shows you is this whole notion of global dependency is bad for business or bad for life. The idea, our whole meddling in the Middle East, frankly, was due to the fact that we needed their oil. Otherwise, why would we bother? Right. And if we, and we are moving away from that, right? We are honestly less dependent on their oil. And that's part why you can argue Trump didn't really care that much about the straight because we get most of our oil otherwise. But it shows you how a small country, relatively speaking, in terms of economic power,

They're geographically pretty big. But an economically small country can wield an unreasonable amount of power over the world, right? They can throw the entire world economy into disarray by just saying, yeah, we're not going to let anybody go down our little river called the Strait of Hermuz. And there's several of those around the world. But I think it leads to that de-globalization. I think people are going to start moving. Now, this takes a generation. Like, this isn't going to happen overnight.

AI, it's interesting, I would argue, because the white-collar jobs are going to go away a lot, not maybe as bad as everybody thinks, but they're definitely, if you're graduating from college, unfortunately, it's a very tough time. But the blue-collar jobs, what we used to call blue-collar, but think of it as a factory job,

they're going to have value. And so there's a lot of reason to build. And when you build a manufacturing facility today, I grew up in Flint, Michigan. My dad was a GM plant manager. Those jobs in the 60s and 70s are not anything like the jobs we're talking about today in a manufacturing facility.

If you have a drug manufacturing facility, I think it was Eli as building one in Alabama. It's a $6 billion project. Those jobs will be relatively skilled jobs. So we need those jobs, is my point. I think you're going to see, in the 80s, we were the information economy, and then we became the internet economy. We're going to go back to the making stuff economy.

Really? Yeah, yeah, sure, because the thing about how stupid it is, really, that you make this pill that costs a penny to make, and you make it in China, you truck it to. thousand miles across China, you put it on a container, you put that container on a freighter. That freighter takes a month to go halfway around the world, into a port, and on and on and on and on. There's no reason for that. And if you're environmentally concerned, what are you doing making pills in China, for example? Just the fuel to move that stuff around is absurd.

Can we absorb the cost of one of the problems we have here in America, there's a lot of rules and regulations, and Then workers' rights in China, they don't have those rights of Vietnam. They don't have those rights. And some of the times this manufacturing issue comes down to what you have to pay American wage workers to do. Is that feasible? Yeah, because there's two big factors. That high-cost thing you're talking about is a bit of an illusion. Oh, okay.

Yeah, and here's why. There's two big factors that impact that. One is the logistics. If I make something in Alabama and I'm shipping it to Kentucky, it's going to cost me about $20 to put a pallet on a truck and run it across the state. It's no big deal. I put that palette. And when these things are made in China, they're not made by the porch. China's massive.

It's like making it in Kentucky and shipping it to L.A. to put on a ship to go halfway around the world. So the logistics and distribution layers add a ton of costs. they had 25 to 30%. You don't have those costs when you make in America. The other thing is you don't really have that many people in these factories anymore. So you got my dad's factory at GM had 18,000 people. If you were going to build that factory today, it would probably have 2,000, 3,000.

Because automation and robots and modern technologies, you just don't have all those laborers. that we think of that we had in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s. Things are far more automated today. You still need people, though. You got to run the robots. You got to run the automation. There's still jobs to do, but you don't need as many people. So labor isn't that big of a part of the cost overall as it used to be.

There's still challenges. It's not an easy thing to solve, but it's not the problem that it used to be. Yep. Yep. That's interesting then because they're trying to bring manufacturing back, but that's one of the big things. But I don't know. Maybe we should have put in regards to the fields working in the factories for medical stuff or something. I don't know.

We have such a weird dynamic in this country of how we want low prices. We want those Walmart low prices, but we don't want to trade sometimes stuff for it or everything's about low prices. Yeah. No, you're exactly right, though. Right. The whole economy went low. low price. What's the cheapest thing? And then Walmart goes to China and they just buy everything. And that's the way it worked. But that's just not going to work going forward. You're going to see

that change. Now, cheap stuff like this mouse pad on my desk, like who cares? Yeah, I can come from China. But that's different than your drugs. Yeah, you're not putting on your body. Yeah, yeah, semiconductors, medical devices, key technologies, those things I think you're going to see move move home what do you what do you think about they had a question lined up for you the the safety of those drugs i think there's they have forever chemicals now and forever particles now are those finding their ways into these drug systems that aren't secure and and held to the highest standards well you know of course they are right and you go back to your biggest problem with india arguably is you just don't know the answer to that.

And think about how absurd that is, right? That's just insane. You got some medical issue, and I'm worried about getting, people are worried about the plastics in their thermos. What do they realize? They have no idea what they're putting in their body, right? And that's the biggest problem is, and at the end of the day, you won't know until you move it here.

Yeah, remember there's the controversy around where did COVID come from? The Wuhan lab thing. And in the end, it came from the Wuhan lab. We've all sort of agreed that that's where it came from. The next question would be, was it on purpose or not? Right. How nefarious was it? But it did come from the Wuhan lab.

We ran an analysis one time that in surgical gloves, there's powder. frequently. There's a couple different types. So let's have to put powder on because it's easier to put the glove on. China could easily just poison that powder, ship over 10 million gloves. And yeah, we'd be toast in about a month. Especially if it was high in these credible disease. Oh, think about it. Or even a chemical contamination.

You just wouldn't know. Would they? Are the nefarious? Are they evil? We have all those debates. But is it a risk you really want to take? Yeah. They do take on our money, but they're using that money, of course, to build armies and the biggest Navy in the world and all this. Yeah. So what happens is it's a bizarre thing, right? So what happens is we sent billions of dollars to China.

China then builds military in the Navy, as you pointed out. We built something like two or three ships per year, and they build 50. Yeah. So but then, so they build up their military. Then the, The response is we have to counter that. So we build our military. So it's like we're creating our own problem. Nuclear race, arms race. Yeah, except the difference. I'll get more bombs than you, even though one of these could just destroy everything.

Yeah, but the difference is when we did like with the Soviets and we had the nuclear arms race, we weren't sending them the money to make the nuclear bombs. That's the difference. It's a different situation altogether. We're giving them the money to build a military, which we then have to spend the money to counter that building. I think it actually brings up a really interesting issue ultimately, and that is the sustainability of the economics of this whole story. We are going broke. And how much further can we take that model that you just described?

One of the reasons we're broke is one is the high cost of health care. You know, we're out of control on our health care costs. Oh, God, yeah. Yeah. And then two is the high cost of our Defense Department, which is caused by the fact that we're enabling our adversaries to build up their military, and we have to counter to that. Yeah.

There seems to be a lot of people making money investing in buying stocks in wars, right, before wars are announced. That seems to be another big thing. It's kind of an interesting thing. And we've got people that are gaming the war things out. Recently it came out that for some reason hours or minutes before Trump makes an announcement, somebody's gaming the war stocks, right? Yeah.

And it's crazy. And that whole thing where Congress can buy stocks needs to end too. Totally. That's absolutely insane. Yeah, it is complete. They have firsthand knowledge. And that is insane. Yeah, look, they make, it depends, Congressman versus Senator.

but let's say they average $150,000 a year. Okay, you've had that job. And that's all you've done for 20 years. And now you're worth $92 million. Like, how's that possible? Yeah, man. And the answer is inside trading of stock throughout that 20-year period of time. They're outperforming every stock advisor on the planet.

Come on. Yeah. I mean, I came of age in the 80s during the I. Vioski era and Michael Milken insider trading. and it's just astounding to me that 65 years later, 40 years later, basically, they're still allowed to do it while no one else is. You go to jail for insider training from any corporation, but if you have senator, like you said, or house member on your thing.

Martha Stewart did a barely minor thing, and they sent her to prison. Oh, yeah. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, you can't tell me that, like, she's a stock whiz, all right? And she pounds out $50 million worth of profit. And it just makes no sense. It's across the board. And the right move is elected officials not be able to play the stock market. Yeah.

And that's half the reason they want to stay a year. They always promise, oh, we're going to do term limits. We're only going to go in for one term. We're going to do term limits. And they get in there and stay forever. And it's because they're making all this money, I'm sure. If you go back 20 years, I ran for U.S. Congress during this era. Really?

Yeah, Newt, Inrich had this contract with America. And if you remember, part of that was term limits. He was a term limits guy. In order to do turn limits, though, I think you have to have a constitutional amendment. So it was very difficult to pull off. But there was a congressman last week I saw. He announced an idea. It was a pretty good idea.

And that is, after Exxon. of years, you can still be a congressman, but you don't get paid. And you can't have a leadership position on one of the committees. Well, I'm telling you, as soon as you stop paying people, they'll be like, yeah, I'm going to go get a lobbyist job or something like that. That's the other money-making thing they do if they don't make it through Congress. They just go become lobbyists. And it's just the money just goes around. But as we go out, Do you want to plug anything that you guys do at irrimony.com, anything for people out there that might be potential customers of yours? Yeah, absolutely.

I'd love to do that. We service the government and the healthcare industry for medical supplies broadly. So hospitals, clinics, surgery centers, government agencies, state, national level, we're there to provide a reliable drug supply, very efficient. We cut out all the middlemen. We didn't talk about that much. but that's our big business model. We buy from the manufacturer. We deliver directly to the end user.

So that's a very big part of what we do. And meanwhile, the book is a big deal. I love for people who read the book. I am on a mission to promote this idea of improving our national security and quality of our drug supply and moving factories back to the U.S. I'm sort of known for that. And the more we can build that up, the better, because I'm doing my absolute best to influence the public policy people in Washington, D.C. to make changes.

So follow me on Twitter and read the book and visit us at a remedy. It would be fantastic. Thank you very much for coming to the show. We really appreciate it, man. Wonderful stuff, Tony. Thanks, Chris. And hopefully you can educate people and maybe get some of our politicians to change rules because they can pass some laws on this stuff.

They can just all agree to get along and stuff. Yeah. Do what's good for American people instead of money. There's a lot of guys seriously working at. There are good people in Washington, D.C., and they're trying to get some stuff done. I testified on Senator Scott's committee. He has this Senate committee on aging. He's seriously focused on this.

There's people who are focused on it, but man's tough. It's a hard thing to make changes like this. Yeah, yeah. It needs to start being about the American public's interests as opposed to big money, big corporations, but they're Citizens United. we do. So thank you very much, Tony, for coming the show. We really appreciate it. Thanks, Chris.

Thank you. And the Orupus book, where refined books are sold, it's called The End of Us, A Story of Death, Deception, and China's deadly grip on U.S. healthcare. Thanks for honest for tuning in. Go to Goodrease.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortess, Chris Foss,

Chris Foss won, the TikTok, and all those are the crazy places in the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next. You've been listening to the most amazing, intelligent podcast ever made to improve your brain and your life. Warning. Consuming too much of the Chris Walsh Show podcast can lead to people thinking you're smarter, younger, and irresistible sexy. Consume in regularly moderated amounts. Consult a doctor for any resulting brain bleed.