The Pomp Podcast - #1157 Calley Means | Whistleblower Exposes Corrupt Food Industry

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

Calley Means is the co-founder of True Med. In this conversation, we talk about the incentives in the food and pharmaceutical industries. We also break down why eating sugar and processed wheat is so bad for you. We uncover what exactly is keeping so many people sick for so long, who is profiting from it, why he is speaking out, and what the response has been.   ======================= Announcing LYCEUM | Miami, a day-long event on March 4th in Miami Beach hosted by Pomp. We’re gathering an explosive group of experts to engage in a series of bold discussions, covering topics from investing, emerging tech, longevity, space exploration, entertainment and more.The speaker lineup includes names such as investing legend Cathie Wood, NYT bestselling author Vivek Ramaswamy, billionaire Christian Angermayer, master of Contrarian Thinking Codie Sanchez, Modern Wisdom host Chris Williamson plus many more. Listeners will receive an exclusive 40% discount on VIP and Insider Pass tickets with code POMP40.  General Admission tickets are free of charge. Spots are limited so head to lyceummiami.com to buy your ticket today. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 200,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ =======================

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Callie Means is the co-founder of TrueMed.

In this conversation, we talk about the incentives in the food and pharmaceutical industries. We also break down why eating sugar and processed wheat is so bad for you. We uncover what exactly is keeping so many people sick for so long, who's profiting from it, why he's speaking out, and what exactly the response has been from both food companies, pharmaceutical companies, and big government. I always enjoy talking to people who question the system and have inside knowledge and are willing to speak out when they deem that it is appropriate.

Once you get done listening to this episode, jump onto Twitter and let us know what you think, what you liked, what you didn't like, what you agree with, and what you don't agree with. The feedback always helps us create better conversations and better topics. Here is my conversation with Callie Means. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows.

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dealer today for more details. If you pull a muscle, all of a sudden you realize how often you use that muscle. So the bladder is exactly like that. When it's working well, we don't think about it. But when it's not working properly, you're getting up at night or in the cases of many men, you may have some leakage. If this is something that's affecting your quality of life, there are really good solutions these days. Depend makes the guard and the shield. The shield would be if you have some leakage on occasion, if you have heavier leakage, you could use the guard. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat

any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Callie here with me. You had this mega viral tweet thread basically just saying that all the incentives in the food, beverage, and pharmaceutical industry is completely off. People have been saying that for a long time, but your messaging specifically resonated because of your experience. What is going on? So here's what I think happened. We're all getting sick, right? We're exponentially getting sicker, fatter, more depressed, more

infertile. Autoimmune conditions are up. Allergies are up. Childhood obesity is up. All these things are randomly up. And I think it's clear to everyone it's tied to food. And I think the devil's bargain with the healthcare industry is that every institution in the healthcare industry, from pharma to your doctor to med schools. They profit from people being sick, and they've been silent on why we're getting sick, which is food. So I think people implicitly feel that.

I think there's clearly something off when you look at a kid's classroom and 50% of five-year-olds are overweight or obese now, according to the CDC. 50%. 50% during COVID of folks between five and 12. And just as a new parent, I know you have a one-year-old too.

It's just there's something very concerning, I think, viscerally. And what I think this tweet tapped into is that now I'm working to change these. That is earlier in my career. I saw inside the room. So I was, you know, a good young conservative guy, worked in politics, worked on campaigns. Inevitably, folks in the left and the right inevitably are across the table from special interests. You go into consulting. And I worked for both soda companies and pharma companies.

So I can go in a little bit. One of the soda companies, I think, is the funny part is when people hear that, like big soda right like what what exactly does it mean to work with the soda companies yes they work i'll go exactly into the playbook so i worked for uh the american beverage association in 2011 2012. okay and they all hide behind these front groups and specifically what they were trying to do in 2011 2012 is keep soda in food stamp spending so food stamps are the number one nutritional program for lower income folks 15 of americans depend on it 110 billion dollars to spend on it and the number one item purchased is soda really 70 percent of all food stamps

spending go to processed food but 10 percent go to sugar water diabetes water and if you look at any scientific study on like what's really contributed to obesity and diabetes and this this chronic disease crisis we're in it's this weaponized sugar in liquid form has really led to that and that's 10 percent of all food stamps fun thing so people are questioning this obviously it makes no sense it's it's it's criminal public policy because we're giving our country you know obesity diabetes and then paying for that trillions of dollars down the road so people are questioning that and what coke does is they get a bunch of consultants in the room and they have a playbook and the playbook revolves around how do we rig how do we pay off how do we weaponize

institutions of trust okay that's the and it's not that complicated but i watched as we put together a list of prominent civil rights groups and it was very transactional you go into the the NAACP in this case, and there was reporting in the New York Times in 2012, Coke paid millions of dollars under the American Bedroids Association to the NAACP. And the conversations were shockingly transactional. It's parents are complaining and worried that their kids are drinking 100 times more sugar than they did 100 years ago. We need to label our opponents as racist and keep soda in food stamps spending. And that's exactly what the NAACP, the Hispanic Federation, other leading civil rights groups did. And what is their argument? Their argument is if you go after

the food stamp programs, then you're racist. I think this is really important because it's not like evil conspiring, but it is like, you know, kind of a wink wink. It's like, hey, you know, and it's very patronizing, actually. It's like, hey, these under lower income folks, they love their Coke. It's a treat. Let's not take that Coke away from them. You know, this is this is nanny state. It's ironic because they weaponize conservative language to nanny state. But what is being questioned is the fact that government money is being paid for soda. It's actually in the opposite direction. But it's kind of that language. It's like, you know, we're trying to tell these lower income folks what to what to eat and drink. Let's not do that. You know, not

debating what whether it's good for those lower income folks to be having government subsidized diabetes water, not acknowledging the point that a man in the United States who's at the lower income bracket, the lowest income bracket, dies 15 years younger than a man at the upper income bracket. I mean, that's entirely because of nutrition. And the communities are being decimated. 25% of children right now have prediabetes. And that's disproportionately impacting lower income communities of color. So of course, this is a disastrous policy for the groups they're professed to represent. But yeah, that's the type of language. We can't take away choice. So weaponizing race is just a key part of the playbook. Whenever you're trying to

win a debate, it's how do we weaponize and call our opponents racist? That was in the playbook. And why is it controversial to take the position that the government shouldn't be buying non-nutritional food for anyone forget income brackets but like if we're going to spend government money then is it a controversy to say hey it shouldn't be spent on things that are going to make people unhealthy which will then create a draw on the health care system and create other problems down the road which kind of just puts the government in this spiral of having to constantly fund for uh the food and beverage that people consume which then leads to them having to pay for their health care as well? This is obviously the bipartisan issue of our time. I mean, we're

debating trivia right now as 25% of kids have prediabetes. As we talked about, 50% of American adults have prediabetes or diabetes. 93% of Americans have some biomarker of metabolic dysfunction. Now, what is that? What does that mean, metabolic dysfunction, diabetes? Literally, it means cells are malfunctioning diabetes is cellular dysregulation but all of us almost all of us are on some level of cellular dysregulation of metabolic dysfunction and that means the american people our bodies and brains like are literally malfunctioning and you know what you tie it and there's a lot of studies on this right but 20 of our cells are in our brain and now 25 of the american people are on a mental health medication according to the cdc during

covid 25 of teenagers contemplated suicide obesity autoimmune conditions allergies all these things the the underlying branch is cellular dysregulation tied to food and as you mentioned and as you said we actually subsidize that not just with food stamps spending the number one item that goes to but tens of billions of dollars of subsidies uh crop subsidies 0.4 percent of subsidies in the United States for agriculture go to fruits and vegetables. They're considered specialty crops. 90% go to corn, which turns into high fructose corn syrup, and grains, which turn into processed grains. We take the fiber out. They're the basis of our diet now, and they turn into sugar. So we're subsidizing these things. And again, it's because the food companies,

they understandably want to make the food more addictive when you load it with sugar, load it with processed grains, also inflammatory seed oils, which are subsidized. It becomes inflammatory, but also very addictive and cheap. The criminal part is the handoff to pharma and healthcare. We would expect the NIH, we would expect Stanford and Harvard med schools to be waving the alarm about why people are sick. But the key thing I think most folks don't understand is that every institution in healthcare, they make money when there's interventions on sick people, right? 95% of all healthcare spending is on sick people, is an intervention or a prescription. So everyone in that system is incentivized to make money when people are sick.

And what's happened is there's been silence on why people are getting sick. So I've got to kind of tying this all together. So when I was working for 2011, 2012 on the food stamp issue, you know, again, Coke paid off, the civil rights groups, think tanks, research institutions, they process food, gave 11 times more money than the NIH to nutritional research. So the debate was rigged but the american medical association the american academy of pediatrics medical schools nowhere to be found completely silent but today they're being very vocal because just this year we now have approval and it's coming online a new obesity drug intervention okay ozempic semi-glutide you might have been hearing about this it's predicted to be the most successful

pharmaceutical product in history um so right after i would meet with the food companies you know another the biggest spender in dc the biggest spender on this stuff is pharmaceutical companies and the key thing to understand is like again everyone in that room thinks they're they they justify and they're creating life-saving drugs but nobody's asking why people are getting sick they're profiting from people getting sick so now tied to these policies like the food stamp like the subsidies we talked about. Now, as we talked about, over 40 percent of teenagers and kids are obese or overweight. And this drug, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the association that credentials and gives guidelines for all pediatricians in the country, said that every

overweight or obese teenager should have a weekly injection of this new obesity cure. All right. So hold on a second. The food companies are incentivized to sell various types of food and beverages that obviously are addictive. They may say they're not doing it, but obviously they're doing it. What percentage of, let's say, Coke sales come from selling sugar water versus other types of products that they have? Do we know that answer? coke it's the vast majority and then pepsi co has a lot of big food on but coke is it's increasingly becoming but it's it's the majority of their revenue yeah and then the pharmaceutical companies are like hey we need sick people because that's ultimately who our customer basis right pharmaceutical companies aren't looking at their market opportunity map and saying okay here's the

healthy people let's target them they're saying no it's the sick people that's who we need to target But this idea of an obesity shot, a weekly shot that they supposedly want to give to, is it just young people or is it to anyone that has obesity? Obesity or overweight, which is getting close to 80% of adults. So potentially up to 80% of adults who are obese or overweight, they want to give a weekly shot to, and what do they claim that the shot will do? Well, let's get at the playbook. So what the pharma companies have done, what Novo Nordic, the parent company, has done is they made $420,000.

I helped orchestrate this, but this is on the government websites. They gave $420,000 unique payments to obesity doctors in 2021 and absolutely flooded the zone on donations to the major associations like the American Academy of Pediatrics. also they're the largest funder pharma is the single largest funder of news so you had as a perfect storm so a couple weeks ago you had a 60 minutes special on obesity the doctor dr fatima stanford from harvard uh on that special said that obesity is genetic she literally said that your choices and lifestyle and what you eat and how much movement you have does not have a large impact on obesity it's genetic obesity is a problem in the past 50 years a japanese person in the united states has three times higher obesity rate than a japanese person in japan

the this doctor from harvard who has been funded tens of thousands of dollars in the past year by this drug company set on 60 minutes which is funded by pharma before and after this segment aired there were pharma ads that obesity is genetic the next week this is not a joke this is not a joke so what did the journalists say when they said completely like just just accepted like it was completely unquestioned the new york times the daily podcast ran a very similar piece recently parents are listening to this who are suffering and she is saying that obesity is a genetic condition and it has to be treated with pharmaceuticals and it's an urgent imperative that parents don't really question or stigmatize what their kid is eating but need a pharmaceutical

injection is this also part of the whole like um uh basically if someone's fat you have to be accepting of that it goes into the whole like dad bod it goes into the mannequins at the stores and try to normalize it and it's this idea that like if someone's fat you can't say to them yo you should eat healthy work out sleep and like generally take care of yourself and you won't be fat anymore like that has now become somewhat taboo to talk about if you go to any nutrition panel any conference on nutrition the the buzzword is let's not stigmatize any food stigmatize let's not stigmatize let's not stigmatize any food that no particular food is bad it's how we're you know how we're eating it getting back to the food and again let's just let's again it's it's it's we're

getting sick and then there's profit from that so let's talk about that the uh food pyramid right right, which has really led to the chronic disease crisis. I think the most deadly public policy document in American history, right, the document in the 90s that said we should eat more carbs, more sugar, less healthy fats, which actually doesn't make you fat. It sounds great. Absolutely. Absolutely. You can trace the food pyramid, which we all know about, to trillions of dollars of budgetary loss and millions of lives cut short or lost. That study was directly funded by Harvard Research from the Sugar Council. They didn't even try to hide the back then the sugar council which said sugar doesn't cause obesity and we need a high carb diet

that went into the dietary guidelines today as i said the food companies absolutely have a stranglehold on nutritional research there's tens of thousands of nutritional studies put out every single year god knows what they say i think it's actually pretty simple and the foundational nih guidance the millions of dollars funded by the nih nutritional study the food compass was also jointly funded by food companies and says that Lucky Charms are three times healthier than beef and that Honey Nut Cheerios are healthier than eggs and that Cheerios are as good as quinoa.

And it says that orange juice should be highly encouraged for children, which is, again, just diabetes water. It doesn't have the fiber. Terrible. It should be encouraged. And kids can drink that every day. This is a foundational study that is being used actively right now funded by the NIH to influence childhood marketing and nutrition guidelines. So you've had

this nutrition ecosystem totally dependent and funded by food companies saying that there's no bad food. Are there people inside of these research institutions, whether they're at universities or they are kind of publicly funded things or even private research laboratories, are they dumb are they just bought off and they're in on the the game or is somehow are they told hey run a study this way and it's like stacked against them and they're just you know kind of monkeys executing plans like like how is it that you have worked your entire career to be a researcher a scientist a nutritionist or whatever and then you say with a straight face and put your name on a document that says that lucky charms are three times healthier than beef so we all know the

system screwed and rigged right what i'm really trying to do i think is resonating is use my experience to really paint the specifics and i actually have a specific story on this so my life's calling right now with my partner justin mares we have a company trying to change food incentives but we are trying to call attention to specifics of the rigged system so we are proud that we brought attention to this lucky charm study it was released a year ago uh but he wrote a piece on on mike solana's sub stack and um and a tweet i did went viral Mike Solana is fantastic. He's the man.

He's the man. So he was pushing it. Pirate Wires. Yeah. It's the best subscriber. And it's driving real change. So I'll explain to you how it's actually, I believe Pirate Wires, I think it's actually on question, it saved lives in this case.

So the Pirate Wires article went viral. I did a tweet that went viral of that. Joe Rogan saw it. So Joe Rogan posted about it. um fox news which is the only network that will cover uh anti-pharma stories which we can get into uh covered at nightly um and there was a lot of pressure okay what i've heard is that there was active efforts to have these labels that said lucky charms cheer you know honey chairs are great on literally packaging standardized throughout africa and in the u.s and the rockefeller

Foundation, other big funders of this study and the research and the kind of community because of the pressure actually stopped that effort to have these labels saying that these terrible foods are good because of that pressure, which is great. Why is the Rockefeller Foundation or any other foundation that is alleged to be involved in this stuff, why would they want to get those labels on there? Is it because they're investors in the food companies or something else? So let me get, I can get a little bit into the motivations specifically. So with that attention, I was contacted by the lead author of the study, a guy named Dariush, a doctor is his first name. and he was at davos and called me uh pretty upset he said he's getting uh hundreds of angry emails to which i replied that 25 of kids have free diabetes right now because of rig studies like

this and i understand why people are angry and i'll just go through and i dug into these questions with him and i'll just tell you what he said i said you've been paid personal payments so it studies to close not not just research funding but personal payments from a manifold of processed food companies, as many nutrition researchers get. The study itself was funded by Danone and other processed food companies. Danone makes almond milk, the number one dairy item in this study, not Greek yogurt, grass-fed. It was chocolate almond milk. Chocolate almond milk was the number one rated dairy. And Danone, which is the chief funded study, was the main funder. You can't even make it up. I asked him point blank, when a group or company gives you millions

of dollars does he said absolutely not do your personal payments influence your research absolutely not i asked him specifics he said oranges should be encouraged for children he spent literally it was comical 15 minutes explaining why lucky charms are not only magically delicious but also should be encouraged what is his art i mean let's just stay on that for a second what is his argument as to why lucky charms uh should be encouraged for kids i i wouldn't give my kid lucky charms if it was my choice right obviously kids kids want to eat stuff right well they get addicted i mean they're weaponized with sugar and processed yeah and so to some degree like you don't want to uh not allow your kid to ever have sugar no matter what or whatever but i think most parents are like

look i want my kid to be happy but i also want my kid to be healthy right and so if i want my kid to be happy and healthy i'm not going to feed them lucky charms every day maybe they get it every once in a while it's kind of like a treat ice cream whatever right i don't think you want your kid to live like they're in like a prison but at the same time like dude how can you say that you should encourage kids to eat lucky charms every day yeah i mean cyber on the on the drug i agree i'm not you can't be just a total zealot with your kids but i think it is important that just because something's normalized doesn't mean it's very very wrong i think doctors used to smoke in the 60s in their offices and i do think actually sugar and the fact that it's so normalized for

kids, we're going to look back on with shame. I really do believe that it's a highly addictive dopamine trigger. I think it's indistinguishable from many other drugs and it is very dangerous. So I just, you know, as a new parent, I agree you can't be a zealot, but like it is, I think, highly problematic that sugar is normalized to the specific question, what he specifically said. And again, I am a tech pro. I'm not a medical, you know, professional, but, you know, again, I think I actually have a really good perspective on this because I saw early in my career, unimpressive people rigging the system and i will tell you like you have grain companies paying him you have any any reading of the literature or any just common sense highly processed grains are an

absolute disaster the shift to highly processed grains which take out the fiber all the nutritional value to make the grain shelf stable they don't do this as much in europe like they they it's outlawed there are these grains that are sprayed with Cheerios has so many pesticides on it. It needs to be differently formulated in Europe. Like, like these are very, very problematic. And he aggressively argued that these highly processed shell shelf, stable Franken foods, these grains, which are then fortified with, with vitamins. You basically just like in a lab, put some vitamins on are just as good as a whole grain as quinoa or another whole grain, you know, that's natural that humans are evolutionary, created over hundreds of thousands of years to eat.

He said the fortified processed grains. And I just think that's just completely wrong. I mean, it's not that much. I don't think it's that much of a stretch to look at what's happening to the American people, to look at what's happening to health, and trace it to food. And it's three things with food. It's highly processed grains. It's sugar, which we're eating 100 times more of.

And it's these industrial seed oils, which are highly inflammatory. These are all processed grains. were created just a hundred years ago. They're new inventions. Same with seed oils and added sugar is basically a new thing in a hundred years. Everything, and doctors, I think any doctor would agree with this, the underlying theme of disease is inflammation. Why are we chronically inflamed? Because we're eating as a foundation of our diet, things that we are not made to eat. These are new processed inventions. So he argued that that is not the case. And that highly processed grains, Lucky Charms are okay, not even addressing the fact that that has a lot

of added sugar too. And I don't, for the life of me, understand the CDC says that a two-year-old, it's okay for 10% of their entire calorie intake to be sugar. I do not understand why there is not just a unanimous beating at the table among the nutrition communities to say that it should be zero for a small infant. But this is a good example, right? So NIH, CDC, all these organizations, a lot of people uh probably never even heard of these places before all of the uh covid stuff um and the whole experience there i think a lot of people are like ah they seem to not really kind of understand all the details there was a lot of uh waffling back and forth so i think most of the american public or a large percentage of them are kind of like i don't know what's going on over

there but when i hear something like the cdc or the nih is saying yeah 10 of an infant's diet should be sugar and that's okay literally the question i passed in my head is like are these people dumb or are they being malicious or like what's going on okay hey guys what's going on i hope that you're enjoying this conversation but i wanted to interrupt for a quick second and tell you about a brand new conference that i'm hosting on march 4th at the miami beach convention center the event is called lyceum miami and tickets are completely free for anyone who wants to come i'm bringing together many of the most popular guests from the podcast over the last couple of years. Some of the guest speakers that we've already announced are people like Vivek Ramaswamy

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And as I mentioned, anyone from anywhere can come to this event completely for free. All you need to do is go to LyceumMiami.com and you'll be able to pick up a free general admission ticket. Make sure you claim your ticket in order to get in through the doors. Lyceum Miami is going to be a great time. So come check it out. Come hang out with me, many of the popular guests from the podcast, and other like-minded individuals. Lyceum Miami, March 4th, Miami Beach Convention Center. I hope to see you there. All right, let's get back into this conversation.

So I was in Texas recently. Greg Abbott has done some great things. He was bragging in a speech that the Texas Medical Center, which is now I think the largest hospital in the country, can be seen from space. These things, food, health, they've become jobs programs. They're industries, right? So it's just not questioned in the case of nutrition that there's this multi-billion dollar ecosystem of nutrition research there's people whose jobs it's at at these institutions like the gates foundation the rockefeller foundation to fund nutrition research and they have a quota there's this guy who runs the tough nutrition school and and as a chair of the the white house conference on nutrition like that is his life that is his calling if there's

not nutrition research to do he doesn't have anything to do so and and in his head he is he is thinking that he's doing right, I think. He's bragging that he's done 500 peer-reviewed studies. I believe that the greatest lie the American people are being told is that what's happening is complicated. You know, that we need thousands of nutrition studies. If we cut seed oils, cut sugar, cut highly processed grains, we are eliminating diabetes, Alzheimer's, which is type 3 diabetes, heart disease, obesity. I mean, it's actually not that complicated how you can actually structure public policy and societal change. But instead, the $4 trillion of the healthcare system and the $4 trillion and then $6 trillion of the food system, it's all incentivized

to make things more complicated. So that's what's happening. And I think everyone can kind of tell themselves their stories, right? So this doctor getting to the kind of how it all ties, who went on 60 Minutes and said that obesity is genetic, she was appointed the next week to the FDA panel to set the nutrition guidelines for the United States in 2025. The panel at the FDA in 2020, 95% of the academics on that panel had direct conflicts of interest either to food or pharma companies. So you have this situation, right? You have to understand an NIH panel that decides research funding or an FDA panel that decides drug approvals. It's not government bureaucrats that are appointing people from outside, and those

people are allowed to have conflicts. When I was working in this area in 2011, 2012, opioids were a big deal, right? And there was a blue ribbon panel in 2012 from the NIH on opioid guidelines. And they picked the most prestigious person you could pick, the dean of Stanford Med School, who was a pain expert. He established the panel. The majority of that panel had direct payments from opioid companies in the past several years. And the year that the dean of Stanford Med School was appointed to that panel, Pfizer, which is one of the largest opioid makers, gave him a $3 million donation. To him personally or to his group?

To a group, to the school, to the school, which is the currency for the school, but made a direct, and there was a ton of opioid funding of opioid companies to Stanford. That panel recommended, which totally funded, up and down, bought off by opioid companies, recommended looser opioid standards,

which has led to devastation. 90% of overdoses from opioids today, illegal opioids, heroin and stuff, it started with illegal prescription that derived from that panel. Today, there's obesity panels with this woman who's paid directly. Also, let's understand their incentives. Pain doctors have an incentive to prescribe. That's what brings them patients. Obesity doctors now, this is a miracle for them. A weekly injection that requires you to stand up for life, that's a lifetime patient. So there's huge financial conflicts. And they're the people that are appointed to actually make the guidelines and both for food and for pharma. So again, it's like we kind of assume these institutions have

our best interests at heart. But even the bureaucrats that are at the institutions, I mean, no greater example than Scott Gottlieb, who is the FDA director, right, and immediately then went to Pfizer to the board, getting paid hundreds of thousands of There's this constant revolving door. But yeah, as a consultant for these companies, it's not that complicated. You're creating lists of the people that could potentially be appointed to these panels, and you're donating either direct payments, which again, $30 million from the obesity maker in 2021, we don't know through 2022, and then billions of dollars of research funding, guiding where research goes. So I think that enables, and that's really, to me, the true brilliance, you could say, of the system is that it takes some of the smartest and, frankly, most dedicated people, doctors, nutrition researchers, you know, scientists trying to discover new therapeutics. Every one of them feels like they're doing the right thing. They're saving a patient. They're creating pharmaceuticals.

Nobody's asking why heart disease is exploding. why so many people are getting sick. There's zero incentive for anyone to ask that question because the party's going and everyone feels like a hero that they're saving folks and nobody's calling out. And it's actually actively stigmatized to talk about root causes like diet. My sister, Casey Means, the founder of Levels, you know, she was top of her class stand for med school at the graduation for, you know, when doctors finished med school, they choose between 42 subspecialties they break the body into 42 areas she focused was focusing her career on one square millimeter on the head and neck she was a head and neck surgeon and when she tried

to suggest nutritional interventions her boss at the time said don't be a pussy and that is very much what the culture is and it's in the invisible hand right it's let's be warriors and serve the people that are getting sick but nobody is asking why folks are getting sick is there a problem if we just made a rule i don't know who would make the rule but somehow there was a rule made that said uh you can't conduct nutritional research that then is used to form public policy or uh frankly be published to public citizens if you were taking direct payments from these food companies like if we you know i've always thought politicians as an example when politicians get uh elected i have seen people suggest that they should have to wear uh like f1 or nascar jackets with all the

people who put them there right just wear the logos of the different companies but i said look it'd be hilarious i get it right the internet loves that stuff but actually what probably would be impactful is if you get elected you are not allowed to oversee legislation for industries that put you in office so just you're not if the pharma industry puts you in office you can't weigh in on pharma issues and what my guess is what would happen is immediately there would be a lot less donating going on and so same thing here is if we just said look you can't conduct nutritional research if you're being funded by any of these companies that are pushing any sort of food or beverage from a dietary standpoint one would there be anybody left to actually do research and two

could we make a system work in that sense i mean we're in a pickle here because health care is the largest and fastest growing industry in the United States. It's a behemoth. Like I said with the governor of Texas, it's this jobs program. And in the majority of U.S. states, the largest employer is a hospital system. So think about what that means for incentives for various lawmakers. Unwinding that is existential. We're going to go bankrupt with healthcare costs. They're just growing at an increasing rate. Our eyes kind of gloss over when we talk about healthcare costs. It's stated so much, but it's 20% of GDP growing at an increasing rate faster than any other industry. And it's not slowing down. It's going to be 40% of GDP in 15 years,

and we're all getting sicker, fatter, more depressed, more infertile. Literally, male sperm count has plummeted. PCOS, the leading cause of female infertility, is skyrocketing. There's something really bad happening, and it's only increasing. But it's this jobs program. So unwinding that, unwinding the nutrition research industrial complex, the pharma industrial complex, the hospital industrial complex. I mean, obviously, in every city in the country, the biggest, most gleaming, you know, building as a hospital. That's going to take, but we have to do it. But yeah, so as far as public policies, I mean, I think the first thing we need to do is understand these incentives. I think the key to being an empowered patient is just understanding

them. And I do think there's going to be a bottoms up revolution because the math actually demands it. Like, and I think it's being led by parents who are seeing what's happening to kids. So I think understanding this, I'm a free market guy. Like I think Coke pharma companies should be able to exist but we should definitely talk about it right and if i was if i had a billion dollars i would i kind of similar to what you said maybe maybe a little bit more of a free market so i would form a pack and counteract to any politician all of their pharma and food funding i would i would replace that and guarantee that they'll be replaced that funding for life we need to somehow there's not a pack for diabetic kids, right? There's a lot of money for pharma. There's a

lot of money for food. So there needs to be a counterbalance for politicians that's on the side of diabetic kids. And again, if I had billions of dollars, I think that would actually be the highest leverage thing you could possibly do. Because once you change, it's all about incentives, right? It's all these politicians, everyone, they all have plausible deniability. They all plausible because they can all say, you know, oh, I'm doing a nutrition study. If I had a button I could press, it would eliminate all nutritional research in the United States. The thing that we are doing, the thing that, you know, these academics, I don't think the folk, the guy I talk to who's a lead researcher in the country even understands this. You have unimpressive PR executives in Washington, D.C. creating a strategy of donations to nutrition research.

We don't even care what the nutrition research says. The fact that there are thousands of studies is the goal. It's confusion. It's obfuscation, right? um but yeah it's changing the incentives of uh of the politicians the other thing i would do getting getting to the medical school is a crazy statistic is that today 80 of medical schools in the united states do not require one nutrition class like fundamentally like doctors in the united states are not trained why people get sick my sister who who as i said left medicine and

started a metabolic health company, her out-of-body experience was five years into residency when she was doing her third surgery of the day, looking down at a passed out patient, cutting open their sinuses to relieve inflammation of sinuses. She had this out-of-body experience where that patient had been with her under her knife like six months before, and she had no idea why they had inflammation. She had literally done hundreds of sinusitis surgeries and never learned why the inflammation even occurred a diabetes doctor couldn't most likely from harvard i've talked to them can't even explain the underlying dynamics of what happens with diabetes literally like they are just there it's pharmacology it's what to prescribe and um yeah the incentives on the med

school is if i had a billion dollars too i you know you'd attack the politicians but more than 50 percent of medical school funding somehow touches pharma the research the grants you know every med school, there should be some kind of fund where it's basically clean money because the money dictates the incentives, which is pharmacology. I saw a working paper. So I don't know how far through the research process they are. And I'm not a scientist, but I was reading it. I can't remember if it was like on MBER or maybe it was BLS or, you know, one of these like government organizations, they have kind of all their working papers. So I just go and check out what's on there. And there was a study that was trying to really zero in on what is the impact

of kids eating sugar when they're younger, but the impact was not so much on their health. It was on literacy, on wealth, on all of these other things in their life. And what was interesting to me was health is one important piece. But when you say to someone, are you healthy or are you not? A lot of people I think would say like, yeah, I'm healthy. Right. Or yeah, I, and then And they tell you something that they do that is generally healthy. I go for a walk every day, right? But they don't think about it in terms of data. They don't think of like, are you actually overweight?

Are you doing certain things? Are you eating correctly? Like all that. Now, if you tell a parent, do this and your kid will be healthy. Do this and your kid won't be healthy. I actually don't know how many parents even understand what healthy is, right? But if you say to a parent, if you give your kid sugar, they will be poor, which is essentially what this study was showing was that there was a very material drop

in uh the lifetime earnings of a kid who was given sugar at a younger age uh i do think parents listen to that i do think that parents want what's best for their kid but they don't understand so much what health is or nutrition in terms of they're probably not that healthy or that nutritious themselves and so instead if you can put it into terms of education or money all of a sudden they're like wait wait a second you're telling me that every time i give my kids sugar it's making them dumber and they're going to make less money over their lifetime do you think that would actually change it this is what this is what's so criminal why i'm actually optimistic why it's kind of dispiriting what's happening right now people first off want to be healthy they don't want

their kids you know there's this whole thing oh people are going to be lazy no 80 of americans don't want to be overweight or obese and they don't want their kids to so i looked it up december 2022 this study was published the title uh it's on the nber national bureau of economic research and it says the sweet life the long-term effects of a sugar-rich early childhood and they claim in kind of the abstract we show that sugar-rich diet early in life has large adverse effects on the health and economic well-being of adults more than 50 years later excessive sugar intake early in life led to higher prevalence of chronic inflammation which we've been talking about diabetes elevated cholesterol and arthritis it also decreased post-secondary schooling

having a skilled occupation and accumulating above median wealth which feels like that sec that last sentence is actually what's going to hammer home to parents if you say that having too much sugar is going to decrease post-secondary schooling having a skilled occupation and also decrease the ability to accumulate above median wealth? All of a sudden, parents are like, oh, I never heard sugar being mentioned in those terms. This is what's so depressing for right now, but why I'm optimistic. People listen to medical elites, right? When the Surgeon General, shamefully late, just as we're late on food, but shamefully late, but in the 80s said that smoking's bad, smoking plummeted, right? Lives were saved. When, as we talked about, the food

pyramid said to eat more carbs and sugar, that's what people did. It increased 20% of our diet. People don't want to be sick. They don't want their kids to be sick. And what's happening, I think what's tragically happened is these health issues have become normalized. I think another huge lie in medicine is that our friends, people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s are healthy. We've normalized chronic fatigue. We've normalized depression. We've normalized anxiety. We've normalized obesity we've normalized like you literally like my sister says she would talk to a a patient who's on five different medications you know and and doctors say oh you're healthy we've normalized all of you know i think there's 17 prescriptions filled per american per year

you know which obviously there's some power users there but but but people don't want to be unhealthy or watch their kids be obese but they're really actually following the guidelines and the incentives right the incentives are we heavily subsidize crappy food and then health care kicks in later and we have leading academics from harvard saying that obesity is not a big deal so if we change it yeah so i have two other things on this specifically um i uh was in a rural north carolina town um probably two three years ago and uh i was driving with my wife and uh in this town there's about three stoplights maybe four stoplights so it's not a one stoplight town but it's not a city or anything like that and on the main strip we happen to be at the furthest end

and i just said look up look around and we looked straight down and it was every fast food chain you could think of there was wendy's and mcdonald's and there was arby's and there was uh sheets and there was you know you just go down the line literally it was all of them and i said to her i said right now if we wanted to get a healthy meal in this town where would we go outside of going to grocery store knowing what to buy and then going home and cooking it and the conclusion we came to is like how much of the nutrition problem in america is actually a poverty problem it is a lack of access problem and not just i don't have money to buy food but hey i gotta work three jobs to actually have enough money to live and therefore i'm so tired when i get home i don't

cook healthy food so you know what mcdonald's is pretty cheap and let me go grab a one dollar burger And, you know, stuff that in my mouth before I go to sleep and do it all over again tomorrow. I think we need to be really clear. It's a slight variation of what you just said. We have a rigged system problem. So this idea that there's not enough money to buy healthy food, you know, is just erroneous, right? Every single thing you saw on that street, this processed food diet, that is what's bankrupting our country. like a person with type 2 diabetes who's on medicaid who's lower income you know 35 they're

costing the system millions of dollars you know 99 of people with diabetes have comorbidities and it's the underlying foundation of disease so so so what we're doing right when i see that that row of restaurants what i'm seeing is food stamp spending which is a big you know source of the it's 110 billion dollars as we talked about it's subsidized to go to those things right i see grain subsidies and all these subsidies for that toxic food when there's no subsidies for vegetables right i see a medical system that's not speaking out about that that our cells are completely under assault right a medical system that actually wants all that food to be eaten right you always have the hospitals next to all those fast food restaurants and fast food served

within hospitals because they're profiting so i you know that's because a lawmaker and various people who represent these industries actually are representing people where the largest jobs are the food and the pharma so i see a rigged system right i see folks in those cities or when you go to a public space and see so many people clearly unhealthy you know i actually see people trying but there's the weight of these incentives just totally and utterly against them one of the data points um that i recently uncovered is i went through and i was trying to break down the federal government spending right so with the debt limit debate and just kind of hey where the hell are these trillions of dollars going. And I want to read you something that I pulled out of that

research where I said, when we look at spending by agency, it is shocking to see spending by the Department of Health and Human Services is double the Department of Defense military spending and the Department of Homeland Security combined. Additionally, we spend double the amount on Social Security compared to the Department of Education. Now, when you unpack what is in the Department of Health and Human Services, there's a whole bunch of stuff, right? It's not just this type of stuff. But what you see is that this mandatory spending by the government, which is literally by law, it is mandated that they spend, is now making up 60 percent of all government spending. And it's not just Health and Human Services. It's not just Department of Education

or whatever. But what you're starting to see is that actually government spending more and more is becoming the safety net. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, all these different programs. And what I wonder is if you were able to solve for, let's say, anyone under the age of 20 today, and you're able to say, you know what? We can wave a magic wand. Everyone is going to start eating healthy. They're going to start exercising, kind of doing all the right things. Food companies, you're going to stay out of this, and we're going to actually give these people super nutrient-dense food that they are going to stay committed and disciplined, and they're going to eat this stuff. what would be the impact 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now in the difference in the amount of

money the government would have to spend to take care of these people or healthcare companies or pharmaceutical companies would have to actually spend to be able to make sure that these people live anywhere near a normal life compared to if we allow them to keep eating what they're eating now. It's got to be a massive number. This is radical, right? 85% of healthcare costs go to preventable chronic conditions you know and again everyone should do their own research for this but it but it sounds hyperbolic but eight of the ten killers of americans leading killers are directly tied to food right heart disease if you had that simple public policy pump of i would call it thinking about our precious human capital thinking about the cells of a child and working to

incentivize the most important lever on those cells which is the one ton of i call genetic information that they eat which is now just totally processed inflammatory crap you're like how do we actually like as a public policy matter like on the front end try to get a human to eat fuel that's nourishing that helps you right that doesn't like lead to inflammation prediabetes, which is highly tied to depression and other mental health issues. A book just came out called Brain Energy, which actually very convincingly ties most brain disorders to metabolic issues, to food. It's totally tied. What would that do? Think about the impact that human... It's just very simple. Our society is humans, right? We are feeding ourselves

absolute crap as fuel. It's showing itself in the metabolic dysfunction numbers we've said. So we have every member of society going through life, right, with literally malfunctioning cells that's leading to exploding health care costs. I would just argue declining happiness. Yeah. And and then what would it do? What your policy would do? And it's literally my whole argument. We've got to engineer all health, all food policy to get back to basics, to feed people good food, which would dramatically lower health care costs and curtail the eight of the 10 leading killers of Americans. it would curtail depression and it would be the most gasoline you could pour on human capital of america i mean when a when a person is overweight that's visible cellular dysfunction it's literally the glucose being overloaded in the cell and the glucose turns into fat because

it has nowhere else to go it's visibly like dude don't use science don't use science come on what are you talking about like literally it's okay it's genetic uh we have we have i mean that's we're fucking talking about though right is literally like you immediately to describe obesity you just went to a scientific understanding of how glucose can overwhelm a cell and literally create fat that is end ends up on a human body and somebody else is saying like no dude it has nothing to do with they're putting in their body it just has to do with their genetics and there's nothing they could do about well the criminal thing to me going back to you know people under 20 the criminal thing to me is like actually it's a to me a welcome warning sign we need to look at

symptoms as gifts. If a child is obese, actually, thank God, we can actually see that their cells are having issues. You know, the CDC recently reported as well, 15% of teenagers have fatty liver disease. This is something only seen in alcoholics. A lot of the times that's in thin people. You know, actually your fat cells, you don't need to get too into the science, can be insulin resistant and you actually have trouble growing fat. The excess glucose can be stored other places. It could be stored in the brain and cause dysfunction in the brain. It could be stored in the liver. So 15% of kids having a disease right now that used to be only reserved for elderly alcoholics, right? That's a problem. So just getting a little bit into this and why your

policy is so important and really thinking about cells, thinking about food. Right now, we've siloed everything, okay? And my mom's my big inspiration. So I was born 12 pounds, which is a sign right there that the mom has some metabolic dysfunction. If you're born massively overweight, the mom probably has some kind of gestational diabetes. It's funny you say this because I recently read this book. It's called Countdown. Yeah. How our modern world is threatening sperm counts, altering male and female reproductive development and imperiling the future of the human race is written by Shauna Swan. And this is one of the things that she talks about is that you actually start to have an impact on your child when the child is in the mother's room

in terms not just of alcohol and things that, you know, smoking or whatever that people generally know. But literally, if you are drinking Coke, if you are eating a bunch of sugary foods, if you're eating, you know, poorly, like your kid is getting a negative impact from your decisions. We're passing on metabolic dysfunction in utero. So the fact that I was born overweight showed that my mom and me actually were born with metabolic dysfunction. Okay. And that was hand waved by the medical system. Oh, that's very normal. Gestational diabetes. Take this pill. Then a couple of years later, my mom had high cholesterol. Oh, this is a rite of passage for women in their 40s. Here's a statin. No problem. Then several years later, she has high fasting

glucose. Oh, here's some metformin. That's a drug, one of the most prescribed drugs in the countries. This is a rite of passage for people your age. Very normal, right? Getting a statin as a man that's just that's just normal it's like okay on your way no flag raised high blood pressure you know she's on a number of medications going into her 70s like anyone then thinks she's perfectly healthy never had any warning signs to a doctor and then feels a pain in her chest goes in gets a scan learns she has stage four pancreatic cancer and dies 13 days later. And digging into pancreatic cancer, highly tied to metabolic dysfunction and pre-diabetes, which she had. We can link lung cancer to smoking. We can just as easily link many other forms of

cancer to food. As I mentioned, Alzheimer's, kidney disease, COVID deaths, obviously diabetes and heart disease, almost everything you can causally link to the food. And what's tragic about the story i think it's very relevant to every american is these little steps along the way are seen as siloed here's a drug i actually my heart goes out to many of our friends right and a lot of women right now struggling with pcos pcos literally like like it's not like a like a link you're pulling out it is literally metabolic dysfunction like like like it is on the span of diabetes it's the same thing and there's almost no women i know who are struggling with PCOS, who are being told not that that's just something you should take an estrogen pill for,

get a procedure for, but that's a blaring warning sign that unless you start having curiosity about the interconnections in your body and the interconnections of your cells and disease, that if you don't get that under control, that you're going to have continued results of metabolic dysfunction, probably leading to an early death. And again, it's been profitable able to silo health. That has been the biggest disaster in health, seeing things in silos, seeing things with a different pill to treat, instead of having curiosity, which we've been robbed of, of the interconnectivity of disease. And that's the mission Casey and I are on, is if we can have, as a matter of public policy, just be curious about what's the underpinning

of why we're getting sick, which inevitably leads to shifting the $4 trillion we spend on healthcare more to subsidizing nutritious food quite frankly i mean it sounds so simple but it's literally that like that's where we need to move policy i see with my daughter right is um i don't think i understood how unhealthy so many of the baby foods were they're just packed with sugar i mean three ingredients i mentioned it's literally nuts and um i do think that there's like this like luxury of time where if you have time to make whole foods for a child then uh, you can obviously help them eat nutrition, uh, at a higher dense nutrition level. But what ends up making me think about is like when your kid goes to school, they're feeding them all kinds

of crazy stuff, right? Instead of a cafeteria or whatever. And then also you start asking yourself, is it, are we at a point as a society where there's a trade-off between health and convenience, right? Or can there actually be a convenient, quick solution to food, whether you're an adult or a child and it be healthy and what it seems like the food companies have done is they said that's not the trade-off we're willing to actually try to achieve what we are going to do is we are going to try to drive convenience and profit and that ends up being a major problem here's my theory of change the system is screwed i actually think that's an empowering message so what the first step is this is a bottoms-up revolution so parents right you buy like regulation i got it i

think we all get a sheet from the american academy of pediatrics about childhood diet and the first thing on there is processed grains it's like give you give your kids little puffs the american academy pediatrics is paid by coke when i was working for coke turns they paid the american academy of pediatrics millions of dollars in the american academy pediatrics had coke's logo on its website okay so just understanding that dynamic my message is this as a parent first principles you should have the courage to ask questions think about what a child ate 10 000 years ago were they eating little processed grains no they were chewing on stuff they were chewing on natural food that is where this needs to start and i do think there's a revolution

happening with parents so we've got to like resist frankly i'll just say it what are pediatricians saying and what a lot of the medical establishment is saying. Then we get to more of a public policy. The bottom's up, but then we get to the public policy. And I believe that this idea of convenience and this idea of, oh, well, you know, this is said a lot, right? This was said by the nutrition researcher. I find it kind of patronizing when he said this. The poor people are busy. You know, there's not enough options for them. That's like kneecapping someone and then saying, they can't, you know, we've kneecapped everyone. The incentives are what they've created this system. And it's very inconvenient right now. 25% of teenagers contemplating suicide,

45% being obese or overweight, that's leading to massive inconvenience. The entire worldview of these kids with their cellular dysfunction is being massively degraded. 25% of American adults being on a mental health medication. Like, that's a big warning. There's a lot of inconvenient things happening here. Those are small numbers compared to 85% of all Americans being on a obesity or overweight weekly injection. Well, that's why they're saying it's going to be the best-selling drug ever.

And what do they claim that's going to do? So we can get into the mechanics of Zympic. And this actually touches, I think, on the dynamics we were just talking about on siloing. so let's just back up and then we'll get into ozempic chronic cure treatments every chronic cure treatment is correlated with more of the disease it's trying to treat the more stands we prescribe the more heart disease goes up the more metformin we prescribe the more diabetes goes up the more ssris is again most prescribed over the country right now the more depression suicide go

up. I guarantee you that the more Ozempic we prescribe, the more obesity is going up. Why is that? It's because these are not siloed things, right? They're actually moral hazards. You literally, the guidance from the American Diabetes Association until 2018 was that if you take diabetes medication as a diabetic, you do not need to worry about what you're eating. You can continue to eat whatever you want as a diabetic. The guidance on Ozempic, it's the same thing. But let's think about this. You're taking your insulin, you're taking your Ozempic. Maybe your fasting glucose levels are going down. Maybe your weight is going down because what it does is it messes with your metabolism, your gut, and makes you less hungry. If you're still feeding

yourself with inflammatory toxic food, if you're feeding horrible gas into the engine, even if it's a little bit less, you're still, your body, the fundamental genetic information, the information you're putting into your body is bad, is dirty. It's poison. It's poison. You're still, so 30% less poison. Again, obesity, the lie is that obesity is the disease in and of itself. Obesity is the warning sign of the underlying issues. So if you're putting 30% less in your body, but but think about what that's going to do to 40 those 45 percent of kids think about the message that sends when 60 minutes the new york times is saying okay this is good it's genetic then the kid loses a little bit of weight but it's still eating terrible food do you think that's going to

end well right do you like like that's why right from the 1960s is it today in 1960 zero there weren't chronic disease treatments it was all acute all medical miracles right it was emergency surgical procedures for childbirth for an appendicitis for a you know imminent that going to die of a heart attack uh antibiotics pills that you went off once you were cured until 1960 there was not a chronic treatment the birth control was the first one now it's 95 of spending because it's profitable it's recurring revenue right but in the age of chronic treatments where costs have been skyrocketing right um we've actually been declining life expectancy so for the most sustained period well before covet it's for the

the past six years, life expectancy in America has been going down. That's the longest and most sustained period since 1860, right? This is unprecedented. So in all these cures, life expectancy is going down. So that is the problem with Ozempic, number one. Number two is the opportunity cost, right? They are pushing, of course, for government subsidized Medicare, Medicaid, and various other programs, as you said, the HSH budget, for spending, because this is such a horrible disease that it's an isolated as they're telling us just imagine blue sky there's hundreds of billions of dollars that they're predicting of government money that's going to go to this drug just imagine blue sky what you could do with that money imagine that you're an

alien that comes down to earth and looks at what's happening everyone's fat everyone's sick with diseases that are obviously manifestly tied to food right and imagine that alien was smart and you gave that alien four trillion dollars. They would never say to continue trying to get everyone sick and then try to superficially drug the problem. That's not what anyone, this is not obvious what we have. It's totally actually crazy. If an alien came down to earth and had four, they'd subsidize food. They'd invest in regenerative agriculture. They would invest in programs to teach kids meditation, you know, to get control of their brains, you know, and understand the trauma that that's being caused they would invest you know in they would think

about a child's cells when you see this all playing yeah can we change the existing system or do we have to build a new one one of the things in like the bitcoin world right is like you're not going to be able to change the fed you're not going to be able to change the legacy financial system we got to build a new one from scratch competition don't try to tear down what they have just out compete them in the market what do you think is uh kind of the solution here do we have to go build all new food companies that are healthier that can compete eventually with coca-cola or what yeah i think i think the math again demands that there's going to be rapid change so my investment kind of spent on this is that by definition something unsustainable has to

change eventually and i do think in the u.s we eventually get there we get there late but we we are having a robust debate there's a lot of discussions on podcasts from joe rogan on down really talking about essentially these core issues so i i think from an investment perspective you have to ask, is the company, is a new company incrementally helping or augmenting the existing system? Are they putting a millennial pink packaging on Viagra or making a better UX for electronic medical records for the existing system? That's where a lot of money is going, right? And I think my spin would be fundamentally, if we believe something unsustainable has to change eventually, there's literally only one way it's going to change. It has to be trillions of

shifting from Band-Aids once people get sick to things that actually keep people healthy. We actually have to change policy eventually to keep Americans healthy, because the fact that we're getting so sick is making us an uncompetitive country, and it's going to bankrupt the country. Literally, it will bankrupt the country. So it's not going to be more drugs. We're actually told by many leaders that the problem is access, that literally the problem with healthcare is not enough people have access to enough drugs. That's, of course, bullshit. We have to eventually... So I think there's actually investment philosophies. I think it's why I like levels, giving people more data, the biowareable revolution.

I think that is an example that in 10 years, we're going to basically have what Theranos said they were going to do, which is actually a good idea, have a full MRI on what's going on in our body, and we're not going to have to go to the doctors. We're like literally in many states right now, a patient isn't legally allowed to have their medical information. We have a total silo of what's going on in our body. We know nothing. That's going to change.

I think there is a market demand and more education around food, but food companies that are trying to be healthy are really at a disadvantage because there's just hundreds of billions of dollars of various subsidies going to unhealthy food. So I think we're slowly talking about this, but I think the headwinds are going to happen. And again, it's the bottom up. It's podcasts. There's millions of books being sold, millions of people buying buy wearables. What are the best books you think for people to read if they're interested in this stuff? Yeah. Again, what I'm trying to do, and if one person listens to this, it's not getting the answers in this podcast. It's a journey of curiosity for the interconnections

and just awe and wonder for what's going on in our bodies. I think that's the core. Mark Hyman, he's an investor advisor at our company. We're so fortunate. And that really got me started. So Food Fix is an incredible systemic overview of the dynamics. A doctor named robert lustig of two books metabolical and hacking of the american mind had a profound impact on me um those are two places i'd start and then you can really go down the rabbit hole um you know i think you know every podcasts are talking man huberman i think a lot of people are listening to him but goes into this very well mark hyman has a podcast i honestly think joe rogan is one of the vanguards of medicine and the scientific method he's actually having and scrolling through

his podcast is having a lot of doctors on talking about metabolic health and actually pursuing the scientific method of having different views on and asking questions. The number one target of the medical system from NIH and medical schools trying to shut him down, having people talking about how food exercise and looking at the sun, maybe we should do a little bit more incentivize that. So I just think going down the rabbit hole and being able to ask questions for you and your kids is very important. And those authors are a good place to start. What is your aspiration in terms of what are you guys trying to do with this company that you've referenced? What is kind of the goal of the business? And like, what do you think your contribution to kind of making these

changes? Yeah, the existential challenge that we asked, I could give you a little bit of the story if that's okay. But after my mom kind of abruptly died, and at the same time, you know, several years before my sister leaving the medical system, which was a big family event. I mean, she was the pride of the family in the medical system abruptly quit because she was so horrified with what she saw started levels um and i had sold uh our previous e-commerce company thinking about what i want to do and and the core idea i i just can't get out of my mind and what i'm devoting my life to is changing the incentives the problem is that every level of health is incentivized for people to be sick and that's the invisible hand creating our system we're all getting sicker for longer

periods of time which is what makes the system money so a partner justin mares and i bonded over that question. And we asked, how can we use existing entities to change incentives? And we really got into this idea of food prescriptions. Is there a way actually to make food, to make exercise tax-free? And we actually found a way. So Mark Hyman and other functional medicine doctors on a micro level at clinics and stuff actually are writing food prescriptions and exercise prescriptions for patients with metabolic issues that are not being handled well by the medical system and if you have a note from a doctor you can actually use hsa fsa money these pre-tax accounts that are very under optimized to buy food and exercise you need a doctor's note the

hsa fsa accounts most people most of your listeners probably have access to them justin me a lot of people never use them they kind of because it's like oh it's money to use or lose it for when you're sick we're all sick this is the key we all should be aggressively we all have metabolic dysfunction brewing within us and it's totally within the spirit and letter of regulations what is a food uh prescription and exercise prescription yeah so so so our implementation is we're partnering with exercise companies food companies you can go on our website trumad.com we're in a payment integration so just like a firm you'll see it right when you're buying your supplements when you're buying your eight sleep um for instance we're they're investors

and we're chatting with them but products like that you'll be able to click on that and answer a couple asynchronous health questions and if you qualify if you're trying to prevent or reverse a condition we can approve you right away and you can actually use your hsa fsa card your hsa fsa funds right in the payment flow and that's a 30 40 savings you save your entire income tax i will put an eight sleep which improves your you know sleep and there's data on this i would put broccoli i would put exercise i would put that against any pharmaceutical treatment and there's studies on this that we have backing us up so we through the payment flow integrating with these merchants which were very rigorous to have a clinical team improving um can enable that

spinning so i've never used my hsa fsa but this past year our family did 7200 bucks and we're going to be able to use that on food and exercise and things that keep our family healthy. And so what does the individual contribute into it? And it's basically kind of pre-taxed dollars go into these accounts? It's through your HR platform. The majority of Americans have access is when you're kind of clicking through your open enrollment. It's one of those things where like, do you want to contribute? And most people just ignore it. There's $140 billion sitting in the accounts right now. About 30, 40% of your listeners probably have money in there. But it's at open enrollment. So you click, you contribute up to $7,200 for a family, and that pulls directly

from your paycheck. Getting into the weeds here, it's actually kind of cool. It's like a tax-free loan because you get that money up front on January 1st, and it pulls over the whole course of the year. So it's like a tax-free loan, basically. And then you can use it for healthcare costs, or in this case, you guys have figured out how to do it for food and exercises. Yeah, it's very under-optimized. I mean, there could be trillions in these accounts. There's 150 billion and now most people have access to them but they're really designed by pharma most health care policy is designed by pharma and these little accounts for once you're sick to basically buy pharma that's how they're designed but according to all health care regulate you know

health a medical intervention medicine is something a doctor denotes to prevent or reverse a condition and food and exercise are that's our goal of our company our goal is to change incentives to put food and lifestyle habits i mean the four pillars it's not that complicated but it's food, it's sleep, it's movement, and it's management of chronic stress. We want to put that at the center of health. What we want to show, we're building a movement, you know, is you can really use your health care dollars, these dollars that are supposed to go to pharma, for core root cause issues,

and we're building a movement around that, which we've been honored to speak out on. What we want to do is really create that, and we're already engaging with a number of members of Congress who reached out to us on this campaign. you know, we're going on Dan Crenshaw's podcast and folks on the left too. Cory Booker's been huge on this. We want to use this as a model of public policy. This is where public policy has to go. We have to give folks, and this happens in some European countries, we need to incentivize them to buy doctor-approved healthy food. Yeah. It seems like such a bipartisan issue,

right? Like we want people to be healthy. We want them to be eating the right foods. We want them to generally be metabolically healthy. And if they understand how to do that and they are doing it, they both can pass the knowledge in kind of an adult-to-child relationship, but they also can show the child just through their own actions. Hey, here's the food we eat. Here's the type of exercise we do. Here's the things that we do to be healthy.

And you can, similar to teaching a family personal finance and change the trajectory of them financially, you can actually teach them nutrition and exercise. You can change the trajectory of that family for many generations to come because it gets passed down from generation to generation. I really put it at a spiritual level. I mean, somebody asked me, what do we need to do from a policy perspective?

What do we need to do societally to really radically change this? I joke, we should put psilocybin in the water supply, but I'm only half joking. I really do tie that to this, that 25% of folks on ISS Rise, we generally, everything we incentivize kind of numbs you for mental health

or the food we're eating is really taking us away from reality, and taking us away from awe. I really see this just personally speaking, and I know a lot of your listeners are on this journey. I think it ties very well into Bitcoin. I mean, I think the people this is really resonating on with Twitter are moms and people who support Bitcoin. I mean, I think it's people that are waking up and questioning the system. But I think actually questioning the system, actually having awe and curiosity for interconnections and really investigating you know what your kid is eating and how movement you know i i never thought about

exercise until recently about just like it's not just for vanity it's it's it's it's understanding that that helps your cells i i really do think right the more we can foster that wonder about the interconnectivity of our body as a personal and public policy you know why aren't we teaching kids about how their cells work and how food impacts their cells and how to meditate and why sleep is important i mean we don't even talk to people about that um so it starts at home but it's like i really do feel and our mission what i hope to see in the world and what casey and i are you know it's it's really amazing to work on with her on we're writing a book on this um is that this becomes the center of public policy it's just like thinking about the individual

and i put you know food on that i mean this is a whole nother podcast but the the psychedelic renaissance i actually think is a massive societal we've been totally gaslit on on what a good drug is and what a bad drug is um and uh and i i think that's actually related so yeah where can we send people to find you on the internet if they want to learn more yeah so uh we're starting this company trumed.com um to specifically very simple value proposition right to to enable you to if you're qualified to um to purchase exercise food certain supplements tax-free uh so go to trumed.com we're launching that soon uh have a really great team of mission-based people we're really excited about that and devote the next 20 years to that um callie means on twitter

i've never been a big tweeter but you know it's been it's been amazing you're warming up i'm warming up yeah and um and and these these uh topics have resonated so we actually just for our brand marketing for our company. We just need a lot of people to know about us. That's our kind of raw business. But what Justin and I are doing is we're going to continue exposing and speaking out about these issues. We're going to hire investigative journalists. We're working with members of Congress now. Bill Ackman retweeted my tweet. We're speaking now to billionaires and prominent lawyers about organizing a class action lawsuit. As our company kind of brand strategy, we're going to try to continue this mission forward of kind of on that level exposing and

trying to change the system from the top down. And what we see True Medicine as is changing it from the bottom up by incentivizing healthier behaviors. I really do think, right, if you can save a family 30, 40% on healthy food, it's just basic economics. It's basic incentives. We need to do more and more of that. So that's what our company is trying to do. So truemed.com, Cali means on Twitter. I love what you guys are doing. As soon as I saw the tweets, I was like, oh boy, here we go. So please keep it up. And I think people not only learned a lot, but it's an inspiring mission in terms of wanting people to be healthy and kind of change their lives. So I appreciate everything you guys are doing and we'll definitely do it again in the future.

Well, thank you, Pop, for questioning various systems and putting amazing vibes out there. Really appreciate you.