Undoctrinate Yourself - #36 - James Li

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

James Li is an independent investigative journalist and contributor to Breaking Points. Find James on all platforms @5149jamesli⁠X⁠: https://x.com/5149jamesli⁠Instagram⁠: https//www.instagram.com/5149jamesli⁠Youtube⁠: https://www.youtube.com/c/5149withJamesLi⁠Tiktok⁠: https://www.tiktok.com/@5149jamesli⁠⁠Follow Alexis on Instagram: www.instagram.com/dralexisjazmynFollow Alexis on X: https://x.com/dralexisjazmynFollow the podcast: www.instagram.com/undoctrinateyourselfpod

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Undoctrinate yourself. Today, I'm joined by the incredible James Lee, who's an investigative, independent journalist, also contributed to breaking points. And funnily enough, we ran into each other at Rescue the Republic in D.C. like a month ago or so at this point. And he interviewed me on light and mitochondria because I was wearing my shirt, make Maiticondria great again. And so we had this great interaction. I went home. I ended up, I was on X, kind of just like putzing around. And I found somebody who had this incredible post and turns out. thought it was James, but I gave him a follow from that, not realizing that this was the same person I had just spoken to. And so in this like twist of fate, I feel like our worlds are meant to collide. And I'm really excited to chat with you today. I think you have just, you just have a wealth of information to offer people. And I'm really excited to learn about how you got into this work and how everything's going post-election because, you know, it's November 11th right now. The last week has been pretty crazy. And so I'm excited to get into that with you as well. Yeah. Yeah. It was so nice to kind of connect on at,

in person, but then later on realize, oh, yeah, that's also the same person. That's always a fun serendipitous thing. And yeah, I would say, you know, that's a good, thank you for that intro. I would say, you know, I have, there's things that I research, things that I look into, but I am by no means sort of the arbiter of truth when, you know, when it comes to any, any issue. I just try to, I'm a curious guy, so I just try to research things online. And then I basically tell people what I've found out. And then I always try to encourage other people to do the same thing and to fact check me and do all kinds of stuff. So I think that's kind of the new era of media that we're in. And I think a lot of is good, probably a little, some downside there too.

But it's just encouraging people to take ownership of information versus just being fed information and then internalizing it without doing, you know, your own due diligence. Totally. I mean, I think that's a really valid point. We're kind of seeing this bifurcation where if we look at like the traditional news media that's kind of this failing industry right now that people don't really have trusted anymore, especially post-COVID and like how just it's been really exposed as propaganda for the most part. And then we have like simultaneously, we have this emergence of like TikTok and short form content that's like really gripping the younger populations. But at the same time, we have this burst of long form content like Rogan's podcast has become so popular and people

want to hear full fleshed out stories and explanations. They don't necessarily want these quick sound bites. And so I think it's like a really interesting time to be alive, especially in the world of like, let's say journalism, where it's like on one hand, people want the quick bits. But on the other hand, actually a larger subset of people perhaps want some more nuance and detail and want to be able to kind of make up their minds for themselves. So I think it's a really important time to have people like you in journalism because there is this thirst and hunger for higher quality information and more nuanced information. Absolutely. I think that's, I mean, that's, that's kind of the big fear in mainstream media right now. I think just talking about the election a little bit,

this is like the first real sign that the mainstream media does not have the same amount of power in terms of controlling the narrative. As you could see, you know, one candidate got, you know, just an absorbent number of Hollywood endorsements that didn't make any difference. And one candidate was smeared all over the media as some, you know, as a fascist and Nazi, whatever they like to call Trump. It didn't work. The American media did, or the American people didn't buy what the media was selling because now there's such a powerful ecosystem of alternative new media that people are just getting their information elsewhere. So maybe they're not even hearing those messages or those messages are being effectively combated with other information, which is what I think free speech is all about, right? You know, the journey to truth shouldn't be, you know, closing off certain avenues of finding out information is to just be, hey, I have information, you have information. Let's go to battle. If you believe what you're saying, okay, let's talk about it and then see, you know, which side wins versus censorship, which, by the way, can only serve the means of the people who are already empowered because only those people have the ability to censor at all.

Totally. And I mean, we really saw that in full blaze during, during COVID and like Zuck coming out after the fact. We're more recently saying, you know, like, hey, we got pressure from the White House, et cetera, to not let this content be live, whether it's the Biden laptop or, you know, vaccine misinformation or like the lab leak hypothesis and all these things that were considered misinformation at the time that have slowly come to light that actually, you know, this is probably the prevailing theory now and everybody who's kind of in agreeance on that. And I mean, that just points to the importance of, you know, if anything is going to be deemed as misinformation, like who are the people that are deciding what's misinformation because that's going to dictate what information actually gets out to people. And so I think still on Instagram, not ecosystem, even though I've built my business on there and I've like forged so many beautiful connections and met clients and students on there.

But like the censorship aspect on Instagram is just brutal with the fact that like these shadow bands that they still don't admit are real. Like you could just be docs like all of your engagement just tanks because you're, you know, maybe tagging the wrong people or saying the wrong things. things and it's just a real shame that I hope we can kind of make some progress there in the next few years because, I mean, Twitter or X rather, is emerging as this major platform where people can actually speak their truth. And so I think is that like where you're primarily active or are you also active elsewhere? Yeah, it's funny you bring up the censorship on Instagram and I was

about to interject, have you tried using TikTok? Because TikTok is probably in my experience, the most censorious because of the fact that they're on the verge of being banned, right? Right now they're going through the court system. I mean, the law is already, or the bill has already passed. And now they're just fighting the, the, through the court system. But that's where I've found the most censorship because there's, they're much more quick triggered when it comes to like taking down videos, censoring videos, demonetizing videos, you know, killing accounts.

That's, that's much more. in my experience, that's much more common actually on TikTok versus Instagram. Instagram, it almost seems like they're taking a more manual approach to the, sometimes to say like, oh, yeah, you're kind of small, so we're not going to deal with you right now. But like once you're straight to certain size, then that's where they start to kick in. That's what I've noticed. But in terms of like where I am, I'm basically because of you don't know what's going to happen, right, with social media and the different regimes of social media, I am very diversified.

I'm trying to be as diversified as possible. My biggest account is on TikTok, which is kind of where I got the most traction initially before TikTok became not TikTok anymore. But I'm also on Instagram, which is a more recent thing for me because I just started like, I'm just going to post everywhere just in case. And also on X, which is probably where,

honestly, it's the most freeing place to communicate information. Because sometimes on the other platforms, I have to be a little bit more obtuse and like use euphemisms and this and that to try to skirt algorithmic suppression. Whereas on X, I can just say directly what I mean. But I'm also on YouTube as well. And that's where I produce some more longer forms. So I'm both in like short form where it's like one to three minute videos versus YouTube, maybe

10, 15, 20 minute videos where I'm taking like a deeper dive more of a mini documentary style into a certain subject. So I'm all over the place because I think, you know, you kind of need to be. just because you don't know what's going to happen, right? One day some new person could come in to YouTube and change up the whole thing, demonetize, and then you're like, if you're just on there, then you're kind of screwed versus if you're everywhere, it's really hard or it's harder for them to contain you.

Yeah, totally. I mean, I feel like the community notes kind of compromise on X is a really good one. I feel like that should be actually just across the board used versus these like nebulous fact-checking organizations where like I'll get fact checked on something. I'm like, hey, wait, I got my PhD. And like, I can talk about this stuff. Like, I'm actually speaking from an informed perspective, but some nebulous expert from a fact checking organization is like, no, this is like lacking context or whatever. So I think the community. You know what the thing about the fact checking. I looked into a fact checking recently from a big fact checker, AFP. It's like the French press.

Okay. And there was a whole like scandal that nobody really talked about when I looked into it. They were basically, from internally, they were investigated. And to do the fact checking, they basically had, you know, they're like 10 minutes per fact check. They get paid $2.50. These people who are doing the fact checking, $2.50 per fact check and 10 minutes to do a single fact check. And they're all paid by, you know, Google and all these big tech companies. And so then there becomes, then that's where I look at, that's where I'm most fascinated by is that the conflict of interest. It's like, okay, so are you actually?

an independent fact checker if you're just being paid by these platforms to fact check and these platforms as you know a lot of these content moderation teams are very strongly if not directly tied to intelligence agencies one example is meta a lot of the people on their content moderation team are like former CIA people they're loud and proud about it you just go on LinkedIn and it just says oh yeah former CIA not even hiding it so I know I don't know how many people are paying attention to that kind of stuff, but it does, it does kind of align with, you know, how people try to, or how these agencies for many, many years and decades have tried to control information flow, except now it's just a little bit more transparent because I think people are looking into it.

Yeah. We're at a really interesting place societally with the information age kind of in full, full blast, because, I mean, I think up until this point, up until the past few years, maybe even, it was much easier to hide information from the general public just because, as you controlled the narratives and the stream of information that was reaching them through certain news outlets. But now with people being able to access information at unprecedented levels, it's really hard to contain that. And so I think we're kind of at this precipice now where we see people like John Kerry saying that, you know, the First Amendment is standing in the way of the ability to rule over the people and that we need to, you know, censor and Hillary Clinton saying the same thing,

that like we need to control the information as a way to rule over the people. And it's just like, what is this dystopian reality? It really, yeah, it's kind of, they're just trying to, I guess it's where the, the, what the means justify the ends. But then when you get into that line of thinking, you start to be able to justify all kinds of heinous things, not just censorship, but all kinds, you know, killing people and doing, you know, for me, it's like, oh, you know, we have to do this, you know, for example, we have to do this genocide because it's, it's going to be good for security, you know, and that kind of thing. where it gets darker and darker.

You know what I mean? It's like you start to be able to put, you know, you start to be able to do stuff where normal humans would be like, that is just, no, I don't want to do that. Right. Just saying, you know, in the United States, you're basically saying you don't want the, the Constitution is not the Constitution.

It's not that important. We can sacrifice the Constitution for, quote, unquote, democracy, which is kind of like a contradiction. If you just think about it. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I was just going to say maybe we can dive into how you got into this line of work because, I mean, I think it's great. You're a super curious person.

I'm a very curious person. I went the science route. You went the journalism route. And I, there's a lot of overlap, too, but I think between being a good journalist and being a good scientists and we see a lot of scientists today are not actually scientists. They're more like technologists and propagandists themselves. So that's been very discouraging for me to see from the inside. And also after like leaving academia, like reflecting on the behaviors and just the way that academia is structured as this kind of this bias generating machine for the pharmaceutical industrial complex, let's say. But let's hear about how you got into this line of work and what's motivated you to get to the point where you're at right now. Yeah. Before I get to talking about myself, I do want to say

that you're definitely, to me, when I was talking to you at the rescue of the Republic rally, I'm like, oh, this person is like super interesting because you come from that scientific space, but then you're willing to also go against, you know, the cultural norms within that community, which is also, you know, it's a very courageous thing to do because I'm sure people will frown on you and then say like, oh, you're causing all kinds of distress to the entire world, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, okay, that's great. That's awesome. So at some point in the future, where I'm going to, you know, circle back to to doing a profile at you. But in terms of myself, I did not mean to get into journalism. that was not my intent.

I actually come from, well, I come from a kind of a non-traditional background into a traditional background in the sense that I went to business school. I went to New York University. It's considered one of the top business schools. I got an MBA. And I worked in management consulting for four and a half, almost five years. So I was doing consulting work for Fortune 500 companies. Mostly, honestly, in the pharmaceutical space, actually, most.

Most of my clients were big pharma companies. So I have a little bit of insight, you know, pre-COVID and also during COVID of what was going on in there. But it was through that journey. I think COVID really woke me up. There was like a couple of awakenings I had. First, it was kind of the Bernie Sanders 2016 run. That's where my activation in politics came about when I saw how his campaign was entirely just, you know, smeared and completely destroyed by the Democratic Party who didn't want. him to be the candidate. And I'm like, oh, wow, that's when first awakening to, there's something

wrong with the Democrats. Because I had always been kind of a Democrat growing up, as Todd is that that's kind of a good party. That woke me in that space. And then COVID was my second awaken, along with many other people, right, in America, what we saw public health figures, make decisions, hide information that was not in, you know, in pursuant to public, actual real public health, right? They were hiding information. They were obfuscating facts and they were just trying to more or less, you know, control people's behavior. And I saw that and I kind of saw that within the own work that I was doing. I'm like, hey, I'm doing work that's basically like gutting America from the inside out, you know, basically taking these approaches where we're going into

a certain company and we're saying where the quote unquote efficiencies are and we're exploiting it. and were decimating communities all throughout America. One of the cool parts about the job that I was doing was I got to travel to all kinds of small towns and met a lot of talk to a lot of different types of people and met, you know, just a diverse perspective. I just saw a more diverse perspective than what I got, you know, in New York City or in Los Angeles. And then I realized, wow, this is, if I continue to do this work, I'm going to be contributing to this mess. And so one of the blessings of COVID is that I got to be at home because before that I was traveling. I think in 2019, I spent like 200 days on the road, just in hotels, just going to different, you know, being at the client's side and everything like that.

And COVID, I was at home. I was no longer traveling because it was shut down. And so then I was just doing the work versus like the fun aspect of traveling around. I don't know how much you know about the consulting world, but it's a lot of is like kind of, glossing over the work and just like, oh yeah, we're going to go out to dinner at this place and we're going to stay at this hotel, blah, blah, blah. It's, that's where you kind of lose your, you know, you self-aggrandized. Like, oh, I'm really important and this and that. But then when I was just doing the work, I'm like, oh, this is horrible.

And that's when I just started posting videos on YouTube and talking about it. And, you know, just kind of my first dive into just exploring different topics. And now looking back on some of those videos, I'm like, oh, wow, this is like extremely surface level stuff. I'm even embarrassed that this is online, but it was a part of a journey to discover things, right? But it was just a very public way to do it. And I just continued to do it until I just,

that I decided I couldn't do the consulting work anymore. And now more or less I'm diving into this, you know, full time. Just trying to, to find out, you know, it's a good journey to gain knowledge, to find truth, but also to share that with the world. and hopefully inspire. You know, part of my thing is like trying to inspire other people to do the same thing. You know, just not rely on other people to just feed you information.

But, you know, seek out information for yourself. And also, you know, even if it's a person you really like, you know, let's say they really like your work, I would say, okay, take the information that you've given and then, you know, fact checker, go down other avenues and then come back and be like, hey, I, you know, totally agree with like 80, 90% of what you said, but have you thought about this? And that's when a lot of things have happened when people respond to me in the comments. It's like, hey, that's, you know, I agree with you mostly. But then have you looked into this?

And I'm like, oh, fuck, I didn't look into that. Sorry for cussing. You can cuss. Yeah. And so then that's, that's where, you know, you go down all these rabbit holes. And that's why I think looking back four years now, I'm like, oh, that stuff was what I was putting out was so surface level. But you have to go down this journey and I hope other people do it too. So that's kind of a little bit of a summary.

and about my journey into doing this work. That's awesome, very organic transition. And honestly, COVID was like a huge awakening for so many people. And that way it was a major blessing. I think there was, I mean, obviously negatives to it, but also net positive effects, I would say, overall on our awakening and like, let's say the evolution of our consciousness as a population or maybe even globally as well.

So also with regards to Bernie Sanders, I feel like, you know, it was pretty insane that they thought they could get away with that because he was clearly the popular vote there. Like he would have been chosen as the candidate and got smeared and then kind of cast away. And then the same thing happened again with Bobby as, you know, the candidate. So it's like how like this is happening very publicly. I don't know why they think they can just do that. And like at the same time call themselves with the party of like democracy and like that Trump is the anti-democratic one when they're literally not even holding a primary because they don't want the popular choice, let's say,

to be chosen as their candidate. So there's just so many contradictions at play there. But I think, I mean, they're kind of, I think they're kind of reaping what they, they sow now because it has become a party of no, no idea, no coalition.

Because they couldn't speak to any of the voters, and they got into all of this kind of shenanigans. I call it shenanigans. And therefore, nobody likes them. Nobody wants to vote for them. the candidate was never voted for and they thought it was a great idea. And they were convinced, I think, internally that it was a great idea. And I think it's going to take them a while if, you know, not.

And it depends on how well, you know, because for me, supporting Trump, I've never been a big Trump fan. But at least I appreciated his willingness to talk to people and at least go on, you know, and have conversations with Americans and whether or not he was lying to them or not. I don't know. But if he does an actual half decent job in this administration, it'd be hard to fathom how the Democrats could win another election for basically a generation because it was just such a disaster. In my opinion, these are all opinions. But to me, as a person who grew up a Democrat, the party is not at all what it seems. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I was actually raised in a Republican household. and then in college I had my little rebellion phase where it's like, no, I'm, I'm a Democrat or whatever.

And like, it's just kind of this group think aspect. And also academia is just completely permeated with this stuff. It's like I actually have friends who were texting me from campus saying, because I made a post, there's this like publication on campus called The Daily Princetonian. And they made a post about like 80% of campus is Kamala support or whatever. And I comment and I was like, you know, basically no surprise there because it's like all indoctrination and anybody else feels comfortable to speak up, because they'll literally get bullied. And I had people reach out to me from that comment being like, hey, yeah, like, I'm, like, voting for Trump this election. I literally feel scared to, like, speak my mind and I'm, like, in political science or I'm in sociology. And it's just completely

captured. And it's just like, what a shame from it, from an academia perspective. Like, that's supposed to be the place where ideas are shared and, like, the best ideas rise to the top. And that's not happening whatsoever because people who are right-leaning or just not left-leaning can't actually speak up because they're afraid of retaliation and like overt harm to their their personal like their their their their life or their um physical body even like I just think it's very immature the way that people on the left have been handling themselves and conducting themselves over the past I don't know maybe eight years or something like this it's just gotten worse and worse the division and just like the demonization of others essentially it's like this concept that

anybody who doesn't agree with you is automatically, like, evil in some way. And actually this reminds me, I was listening to Tim Dillon's episode on Rogan's podcast yesterday. And he brought up a really, really good point. That was actually something my partner and I had been talking about the day before, which was like, what is actually wrong, let's say, like, ideologically speaking with the Democratic Party right now? And we're thinking about how essentially there's nothing sacred that's considered sacred by the left right now. And so when you cast out culture, like, and you cast out tradition. and you throw away everything, like all the wisdom of the people before you, what are you actually left with? I mean, you're basically left with materialism and, you know, there's no meaning to anything.

And I feel like that's kind of what we're seeing also with people projecting, let's say, religious circuitry in their brain onto things like science or medicine or politics where it's like there's no belief systems anymore because all of that's been cast out as like silliness or the past. And we want to be forward thinking, but now not realizing that there's a little bit. like a part of being human that requires some form of spirituality, I think, and that's just completely absent from the left. Yeah, I have no, I mean, funny when you speak of the, your sort of academic bubble, because at NYU, we, there was, I guess, some sort of secret Republicans club that it was like very, very underground. And I only knew about it, like, very right before I graduate, because I was talking to a couple of the guys who I was friends with. You know, we were having a real conversation about politics and Trump and yada yada.

And I was sharing them some of my thoughts. And they're like, oh, man, you're a good dude. Like basically they're like, oh, you're kind of one of us. You know, I was like, I don't know if I'm there, but I'm like, I'm open to all kinds of ideas. I was very early on in 2016. I'm like, Trump probably will win this thing. And nobody thought that. And then our whole, you should have, I mean, in 2016, it was nuts when when we went to school.

Because the day after the election, everybody was like, it looked like somebody, you know, everybody's grandma. had died on the same day. And, and professors, they could not conduct class. You know, they weren't in the mood to do class. I'm like, are we not here? We're not here to do the class anymore. And they were just having this like post-mortem of like, oh, what are we going to do now? And I'm just in my head. I didn't say it aloud. But I was like, did you guys not see this coming at all? It was kind of a wild experience. And yeah, now I think it is a party that's just Like they thought, I think to give them, I guess, some benefit of the doubt, I think they thought that they could build the coalition through this kind of more, you know, social causes combined with liberalism combined with some never Trump people. Turns out just not that many of those people out there, right?

It's just like when people's material needs are not being met, it's very difficult to say, oh, we need, you know, not to denigrate, you know, trans people or anything like that. but it's really hard to them to say, oh, that is the most important issue when inflation is out of control. And people on the, they don't understand inflation in the sense that I think normal people understand. They look at the inflation rate and they say, oh, inflation is back to normal. But they're not accounting for the fact that it went up so much in the past two years that the prices are like double what it has been. So let's say it's not increasing at that rate anymore. It's still increased double over a very short period of time. I mean, they don't understand that that is still hurting.

It's making a difference. And they all just point to, oh, well, the economic indicators are so good. And I don't think they're looking at like data, but not, they're not really able to speak to regular people. And the way they try to get their message across isn't to meet, you know, the voters where they're at, is to kind of shame them into think, oh, well, you don't understand the economy. You know, it's just so good. You just don't know how to read the chart. And I'm like, how is that a good message? How is that effective? Yeah, the gaslighting is pretty

crazy. I mean, there's a lot of detachment from the real world situations that like 90% of the population is facing at least like middle America, which, you know, the middle class is like rapidly collapsing. We can't continue on the trajectory where we're on. It's like unsustainable. Like between my partner and myself, like up until recently, we had like a 200,000 plus household income and we were living paycheck to paycheck. It's like what? is happening here. Like we both went to Princeton. Like we both have great degrees, but it's like the pay isn't keeping up with the rates of inflation and the cost of goods rising. And it just seems insane to gaslight people for that. And I think, again, like there's nothing necessarily

wrong with identity politics and all of this stuff. But why are we governing the like 99% of the people over the issues of one percent of the population? It's, I mean, that doesn't mean we shouldn't care about people who have, you know, who are on this on LGBTQ, et cetera, like that they're important too, but we can't impress all of their needs on the whole population because it doesn't apply to most people. And so I think, I also think that people on the right, like most people just want to be able to be left alone, like make money to take care of their families. And they want that for everybody. We shouldn't have to cater to a subset of the population because, you know, the cost of eggs is so expensive. And I saw some memes from the left like during the election like right

after and they were like glad to see that like trans and women's rights aren't as important as like being able to feed yourself. But actually like you have to have the baseline needs met in order to care about higher order things like, you know, the issues of people that, you know, maybe aren't even in your community. So pretty wild. Pretty wild. Pretty wild. Yeah. Rhetoric we've seen. Absolutely. And and I think that's the part that I think, you know, was as unfortunate the way history has transpired, right? Because I think, you know, just looking back at Bernie, I think he had the ability to merge both sides of like,

he was able to speak in this kind of universalist language where he didn't, he cared about, you know, the same things as Democrats do now in terms of like making sure that gay people have the right to marry and all the social causes, right? But he did it in a very universalist way versus like in a way where it's very exclusionary. if you notice a lot of the language on the left is very exclusionary, and that we are, you know, we're in this circle.

And if you're not, you don't look like that. You cannot not even comment on these issues. You don't have the authority to speak on it unless you're in this circle. Versus like I would hark back to maybe more of like a Martin Luther King type of approach where it's like, oh, no, we're all in this big circle where, you know, big corporations are coming to get us. And there's elites that are unelected deciding policy. and they're coming for all of us.

It doesn't matter what race you are or, you know, what you look like. We're sort of in that same box versus now it's like, oh, well, you're not, you're not black, so you can't speak on this issue or you're not Asian. You can't speak on that issue versus just saying, hey, we're all kind of, you know, we're all just people. And we should be able to make, you know,

we should be able to have our voices heard and our needs listen to, which I think is, has, you know, like I said, the Republican Party has actually done a decent job of at least going to the voters and then making them feel like they're hurt, right? At least Trump is saying, hey, there's a big problem, you know, inflation's a problem. We have wars all over the place versus the Democrats are saying, you know, you don't understand the war is really important. We have to do the war, you know, for the good of democracy. So it's just like a different approach that I don't know. I'm not a political strategist, so I'm going to leave them to figure it out. I'm just going to be here trying to

find information and educate the public, but I'll let I'll let the, the, the, the, two parties figure out, you know, their path forward. I think, you know, if Trump does a good job, I think he'll, the Republican Party will be set for a long time. The Democrats, their only hope is that Trump doesn't do a good job or else, I think their, their whole thing is, is capit because I think

they're no longer, because I mean, if you look at all the donors, I mean, they're all rich people. There are no working class support. I mean, in the waning days of the 11th, You know, they're campaigning, instead of campaigning with, you know, a union leader like Sean Fane, they were campaigning with the Liz Cheney and, you know, warmongers. You know, nobody likes those people. Not one single Republican or Democrat is a fan of Liz Cheney.

So I don't know how many votes that drove in. I would be curious, you know, in an exit poll to say, okay, did anybody vote for Kamala because of Liz Cheney's endorsement? How many people are out there like that? Is it 1%? Is it half a percent? I don't know. Yeah, totally.

So speaking of like the war in Ukraine, have you looked into like the bio weapons programs over there as it relates to like our, our bio weapons programs leaving after the Patriot Act and kind of going overseas to China and Ukraine and like the role that that's playing in our drive to be there right now? I have not looked into the bio weapons specifically. I do know obviously the entire, you know,

military industrial complex is pushing that long, But I'd be now that, see, this is what I've heard of thing. I'm talking to you. You're like, hey, have you looked into this? And I'm like, no, I haven't. Now I should. But what do you know about it? Well, so do you know who Dr. Jack Cruz is?

I think I might have mentioned him in our interview. Actually, there have a couple podcasts you should listen to him. He laid out the history of like medical tyranny in the U.S. Starting back in like the 1800s up through present day in like a one four-hour podcast and a two-hour webinar. And he talks about how in, in post 9-11 and the Patriot Act roll out, which apparently Patriot Act was like on the floor of the Senate or the House like for months prior to that. And nobody thought it would be able to pass. And then of course, 9-11 happens and then suddenly it gets ushered through.

And one of the stipulations of the Patriot Act was that no bio-weapons labs could be on U.S. soil. And that apparently from that point on, it was outsourced to specifically Ukraine and in China. And we, of course, saw like the EcoHealth Alliance Lab or whatever, the Wuhan funders that resulted in the leaking of the SARS-CoV-2 in 2019 or 2020. So that's kind of how he teed it up. I'm sure that you would be the perfect person to kind of dig into that a little bit more, though, because I think there's a lot of juice to squeeze. I'm going to put that in my to-do list for sure. What are some projects that you've been, like that you've worked on recently? How about like around the election, were you doing some projects related?

to that coming up to the to the fifth yeah that's for the I try to stay honestly I try to stay out of sort of partisan politics because that really isn't my interest because I don't that's not where I think the most value that I can add to to the discourse is not talking about like oh the Democrats are going to do this for your life the Republicans are going to do this and I just I find that all to be kind of theater you know if you look at it most of them you know it's just the when you look at the bills that pass, it's like, oh, a lot of, you know, those bipartisan ones are like, oh, just for war, for, you know, national security. So it's like all of those issues, they're totally in agreement on. And then they try to divide people through these kind of cultural issues, which really have no

answer. They're cultural. And so people have different opinions about it. And then they leave us kind of fighting about these things. So I try to look, I try to look into, I think, more universalist type of issues where people, I can bring people together. So, you know, I look into a lot of health things, you know, kind of more consumer advocacy side. I'm like working on a couple of interesting things right now. I know fluoride is a big discussion point recently and I'm starting to dig into that. I've just recorded a fun piece with someone where they're like kind of like a tampon investigator. So I'm like, oh, I'll learn about that. Yeah, like what's in tampons? Let's go. So that's that's on the horizon because there's all kinds of like crazy.

chemicals and synthetic materials. And I'm like, just putting that in the body and it's cool. Turns out maybe not so cool. And so, yeah, that's kind of what I'm looking to. I also look into a lot of stuff that's related to like foreign policy, Israel, Ukraine type of stuff and see like, why are we doing the things that we're doing? You know, is it really what they're telling us or are there other interests that might be fueling the decisions that we're making. And I think everybody, so I try to look at these issues where I think most Americans agree

and we just need to realize that we agree. So then maybe we can bring these to the forefront versus continuing to argue about, you know, kind of unsolvable issues where we just, you know, let them, let people kind of live in peace, right? If some group of people, you know, like the guns, let them have the guns. And other people, you know, if you don't want to, have a gun, then don't have a gun, right? And I don't think there's any kind of thing that we can really figure out there. But I think everybody's against pollution, right? And so if we can say, hey, these guys are polluting, then I think we can make a lot more progress versus just like continuing to argue about issues and then just letting them sort of pillage the country,

you know, without us making a fuss about it. That's kind of where, that's kind of my philosophy. Although I know a lot of people don't agree with that philosophy, but that's kind of where I'm coming from. Yeah, I mean, the pollution thing kills me because I remember when, like, climate change first began to be like a topic that was discussed when I was at Princeton, really. It was like really hot topic. And I remember thinking to myself, like, climate change is such a nebulous phrase to use for this issue because if we actually call it what we really care about, which would be pollution, then it becomes really clear, like how we're each contributing to the problem, like, what action steps can I take to reduce. my pollution of the natural environment versus climate change sounds like this just completely depersonalized issue that is like, you know, you can't really control it. Only like the higher ups can do anything about it because it's just this foreboding thing that is also just not very

non-specific as well. And I mean, the more I look into this stuff with regards to also like geoengineering and cloud seeding and stratospheric aerosol injections and how, you know, in the case of SAI, for example, claim that it's only experimental not being used, but I found PubMed papers showing that there is a paper trail of it actually being used for years now. And so that's something I think a lot about because especially like, I think like Helene hitting Asheville and like Western North Carolina was like a very alarming thing that happened. And then I ended up going down the rabbit hole and finding like Operation Storm Fury from 1948. And they basically, there was a hurricane coming into the Gulf. And they wanted to see if they could weaken it. like I guess it was maybe some version of, not harp, but one of the departments that deals with geoengineering and they were basically fucking around with it to see if they could reduce the steam that it had

and they ended up steering it into Georgia and like catastrophizing an entire, like the entire southern area of Georgia. And so that whole program apparently got nixed after that. But like, it's pretty crazy though because I was posting about this stuff in my story is just like, you know, news articles and papers and actually,

somebody from Princeton, what was it, Atmospheric Science Program, reached out and they were like, I'm sure, I can tell you certainly that we don't have the ability to manipulate hurricanes in any way. And I was like, well, we actually did something back in 1947. So if we don't think that's been developed in any way, I think that's kind of naive. I kind of, you know, I'm on the same page there. It's like, do we have the ability to create hurricanes and guide the direction of it entirely? Probably not. I don't think so.

Probably not. But to say that there are, there's no ability to influence it would be a lie. And it's almost like they don't want the public to know what they have. So therefore they just kind of say, oh yeah, that's just crazy conspiracy versus just like, hey, just disclose what it is that we can and cannot do. And it's about transparency, right? I think that's why I am totally okay with engaging and looking into conspiracy theories is because there are so many things that, you know, was a conspiracy. theory and now it's like, oh, that's just a conspiracy. And so I'll look into it. I'm like, is, is it possible? Maybe there's, you know, the truth is oftentimes like somewhere in between

where it's like, yes, some weird things are happening, maybe not in the way that the conspiracy theories are saying. But it's definitely not the way that it didn't, it definitely didn't happen the way they're telling us. It's probably somewhere in that middle ground. And I think there's a lot a power in just seeking the truth because it helps, you know, that's how, I think that's how, you know, if I were to think about how, how does the scientific community, how would they make a comeback from COVID after we've lost faith? It's just like, hey, just be transparent. And over a long period of time, if you continue just to be transparent with the public about what you know and what you don't know, you'll build credibility again. Versus now it's like they're just trying to,

it's almost like you're trying to simplify the message because they think we're too dumb to understand it or something. And then when they're wrong, they're just like, oh, no, no, it's just you don't understand. Like we, it's so much damage. It's like, it's the whole thing when I made the video about the food dies. They're like, oh, well, maybe they're right about the food dies. But then that could lead to all a bunch of other things that they can question. I'm like, good. They should start questioning. We should start questioning all these things that we're doing in our food supply and the agriculture and, you know, glyphosate and all these things that, that some I won't name names because I don't want to come after me again. But some people out there say, oh, it's a low toxicity chemical.

I'm like, what is what do you mean low toxicity? So like every single thing that we eat has this low toxicity chemical. What's the impact of that? Can we just not do that? Right. So it's kind of this, I think that's, that's what I'm trying to do is to maybe prove, you know, because to me I want people to have a, you know, safe food. And I don't mind.

I think institutions are important. I'm not trying to destroy institutions. I'm just trying to make it clear to them that what they're doing is not working. I'm going to expose you until you change your behavior, right? Until you are a scientist that's not getting your research funded by these big ag or big chemical companies, which I'm sure you know, you can design a trial in a way where a certain outcome is going to be predetermined, right? It's based on the way you set up your variables or whatnot. And I'm like, okay, don't do that.

It's like if you take money from or if you're affiliated with some certain company, you're going to be incentivized to protect them, right? Because that's also protecting yourself, right? That's how you make money. And so I'm trying to make it, I'm trying to make it impossible or just like nuclear to not have those relationships. I'm trying to incentivize good behavior because I think, you know, the line or the saying goes, you know, show me the incentive and I'll show you to come. outcome. So I'm trying to say, hey, that's, you can't have those. Like, because they're like,

because people always attack me for saying, oh, you don't, you're not even talking about the science. I'm like, I don't need to talk about the science because I don't know the science. Because if I talk about the science, you'll just say that I'm not a scientist, I don't know what I'm talking about. But I do know incentives, right? I've worked in business for long enough to say, having these conflicts of interest will influence the outcome. So just by having that conflict of interest is already, you know, it's already, it's corrupting your ability to make good judgment. And so hopefully, you know, I don't know if it's going to change, but that's kind of my theory of change is to make people, or make people within the scientific community

wake up to the fact that what they're doing now is not working and it's not serving the people. And there's still an opportunity to do that. If there's enough of them that say, hey, we're going to band together. We're going to be scientists that we're not going to take any money. We're going to fund our research in a different way. And so we're going to regain the trust of the people. I mean, that's exactly why I'm not going to start my light lab until I can do it in a decentralized fashion that I don't require funding from the three-letter agencies. Because I saw the rat race and like the hamster wheel of that is when I was at Princeton.

Like literally all of the PIs there, they spend like 90% of their time writing grants from these agencies. They don't have time to mentor their students. They don't have time to really be involved in the lab. So there's a lot of mentorship that goes on between postdocs and grad students and the PIs tend to be very hands off. And they literally are just hyper-fixated on getting more funding all the time. And that's, you know, just not a good way to do science because then you don't actually have the bandwidth to be able to make, you know, informed decisions or be able to guide students to be able to think more critically about certain issues. and it just becomes this place where if you're going for your PhD,

you basically get handed a project and you already kind of have an idea of what outcome should be happening. You may be unconsciously or consciously biasing yourself towards receiving that outcome that will then get you more funding or whatever it is. And I mean, we saw in the case of like Alzheimer's and the plaques, like the plaque formation, all the fraud that was like recently found within the past couple of years within those initial studies that showed that these plaques were causal in Alzheimer's

and they developed drugs and the drugs and the drugs and, inhibited plaques and like no outcome benefits. And it's like, okay, we just went on like a 12 year tangent because of falsified data that now is setting us back all of that time. And that's just one example of like how the incentives can dictate the outcomes. And if you want to get a certain result, you know, you will get that even if you're only subconsciously telling yourself that is what you want. So I think the way that science is structured, it also goes back largely to like the

1940s, 50s, because prior to that, it was all blue sky research really. Like you would get funded as an individual, as somebody who's a good thinker, and they would just tell you to take this money and go off and do what you think is interesting versus now the funding model and the journal model. It's like so corrupt. And actually funny, Gilean Maxwell's dad is the one who started the journal model where it's like, and it's a pretty crazy industry too, because if you want to publish a paper as like a PI at a major institution, you have to pay to get it published. And if I wanted to publish a paper in nature as an independent scientist, it would cost me like $12,000. Then so. you have to pay to get your paper published there the people who review the paper the peer reviewers they don't get paid anything it's all like you know pro bono and so also the schools as themselves have to pay the journals in order to have the journals available to you know the students at their school to be able to read so the journals are just raking in all this money and everybody is like giving it to them willingly and it's like what is this model like how did anybody get this approved how is this a thing right now and it's majorly corrupting science because if you can't get your your research published

in reputable journals and seen by people than like what good is it really so we really need to have better ways to publicize science in a way that's far less biased too because when you're submitting a paper for peer review you give them a list of the people you think should review your paper which is weird to begin with and so there's already some bias built into that um obviously just like the kind of the gatekeeping as well with regards to the finances needed to publish out these major journals like cell nature science so anyway the whole system needs to be blown up we need something new Yeah, I am curious to hear your take on how do we implement like a decentralized scientific community where, you know, I think we're starting to see journalism figuring that out, right? How do we do decentralized journalism? And there's still a lot of things to be hashed out of like, okay, how do we properly verify sources and make sure that the information we're giving out is true, right?

Because right now it's kind of like chaos, which has its own problems. But I'm curious, like, if research, shouldn't be funded in that same way of like trying to get to a certain outcome, what are the different funding mechanisms that could potentially be developed where people can go back to doing like what you said, Blue Sky Research, because of the guys that, you know, the penicillins and all that, because they pointed, oh, I was a, there was some person who, who commented on, on Twitter and say, oh, you don't want, you don't like antibiotics. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure antibiotics would not develop by big pharma. I think it was just some scientists who who discovered it, not through that channel. And so I'm curious.

to hear what your take is like how do we how do we get back to that yeah i mean i think we could have a pool of government money available for that but i think because like the the cdc the n i h the fda they have specific objectives in place where they're like we want to create new drugs for cancer or we want to you know it's basically we want to create drugs for x like we're not looking to do science it's actually like why is this happening because it opens this can of worms where it's like now everybody's paychecks are compromised because they've been in dorsing these behaviors for so long. And so it's like, as long as those incentives, those incentive structures are in place within places like FDA to keep, you know, the pesticides on the food and the

chemicals in the food or whatever else and the NIH to keep spending money on and like, you know, developing drugs that they can sell for, you know, millions and billions of dollars. Like, you look at Ozempic and the types of profits they're making from that. It's crazy. Meanwhile, we're just not addressing like, why are people obese? And like, they're literally suggesting six-year-olds get on ozempic versus like why are they getting obese like let's look at uh the types of foods they're eating let's look at their light environment the fact that they're on screens all day and they never get outside and they're not playing around in nature and like we're just completely stripping childhood from children like maybe that could be why they're obese and not because you know

they're drug deficient they're not ozempic deficient so the those incentive structures because pharma is just like this major pathway for funds to be injected into it's kind of like bi-directional too. That needs to be cut off. And I think that's what Bobby is going to try to do to a certain extent when he's, you know, in a position to be able to do that. And I think it's pretty funny, like, over the past week, I've seen a lot of backlash from more centralized docs and scientists about, like, you know, how Bobby being in this position is like the worst case scenario for science and medicine and, like, people supporting fluoride and dies and pesticides and, like, we all, we need it in order to have food available for the population. And it's like,

can we just like take a beat here and realize like what we're even saying right now? I think we need to maybe rethink the way that we're feeding people because if we're feeding people things that are poisoning them like sure, you're keeping them alive acutely, but at what cost? And like they're just becoming part of this hamster wheel of like the pharmaceutical medical industrial complex where it's like you know, you're basically guaranteeing, you know, customers in the future, let's say. So I think, yeah, it's a whole mess. But I think we can have a pot of money that's like not geared.

towards any one particular outcome. And this also goes back to basic science in general. And Princeton in particular is supposed to be like the best basic science research institute. And even among basic research labs where it's like we're not supposed to be looking for translational outcomes. We're just supposed to be exploring for the sake of doing science. And if something happens, that's great. Even the basic labs are now like trying to get into that pot of money from pharma because it's like there's so much available there. So I think we really just need to reconstruct and reconfigure the way that money is moving and like what the incentives are in place for like what outcomes are are being desired because well we can just get back to being curious and

being honest I think that's when we're going to get the most benefits societally speaking. Yeah that's I think I'm on the same page and I'm trying to this is one of those messages that I'm still trying to craft in how do I convince people to buy into you know doing stuff because it's the right thing to do on a long-term scale. Maybe short-term, you're not going to read those profits immediately, but long-term, you could find something that could be very valuable, but you just don't know. And I think that goes to outside of even the scientific community, the business community, right?

How do you incentivize behavior that's good for the long-term? And the example that I use is always Boeing, where the company is about to, basically, I mean, it's in the verge of collapse, you could say, in terms of at least the quality of the product because they've always, they've incentivized short-term thinking for so long that they're having trouble building airplanes that are, you know, as safe it was as it was before.

Because I know at this juncture, our planes shouldn't be getting less safe. It should be getting more safe. And they've done that for, I mean, I analyzed the crash rates for, you know, the previous generation of Boeing planes. And they were much safer than they are. Just from a statistical basis, they crashed less often.

There are fewer deaths. Now there are more deaths, except the deaths, you know, there's still not so many deaths that people are freaking out like every day about it. But it's definitely less safe than it was before. And so then how do we incentivize these long-term behaviors and like, what do we want for this country? Because I spend some time, I like talking about people when I travel, you know, outside the country and just to get like a different perspective on, you know, if there's things that

we can do here that's better in America or that we can implement here in America to make it a better place. Because in argument that this is a great place to live. And America is awesome. But there's also weaknesses. And it's like, why aren't we not trying to fix those weaknesses that we can take from other countries and say, okay, yeah, let's try to make this ex-behavior. Like, let's try to expand public transportation. Because if people can move about freely, that might boost the economy in the long run because people are transacting. It's easier for workers to get around. They might be able to do more work versus now they're spent like four hours on a bus

that that's very inefficient. What if it's much more efficient? Now they're producing more. And so I don't think people think like that necessarily or they're not incentivized at the individual level like each company is not thinking. They're just trying to maximize for the now. But it actually probably will hurt long term. but that's still like I'm just thinking a lot but that's that's still something that I

haven't fully figured out how to communicate that in an effective way to to get people to buy into it because right now I think we're still stuck on a lot of that like shareholder maximization and we need to just try to make as much money as possible and not thinking down the road the impact that this this could have and I think you know so this is where I'm trying to practice what I preach and like I'm not going to shame people for thinking that shareholder maximization is bad, but I'm trying to figure out a message where I can bring more people in and say,

hey, this might be even better in the long run. Have you thought about this, right? I'm not trying to say like, oh, yeah, we got to go communism. I don't think that's, you know, if you've seen really real communist places, doesn't really work. So it's not, that's not the solution.

But it's like, okay, if you want to make money, okay, how can we craft a society that helps you make more money, but in a way where it's sustainable. Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is why I think a lot about like the light story first, because when we learn about the effects of like artificial light on our nervous systems, just like a basic level, making us more like more sympathetic out of just a baseline. So if we're like slightly more sympathetic in that fighter flight state, we're just going to be focused more acutely by default because we're in more of that survival mode that is preventing us from seeing the bigger picture, both literally and figuratively. So when you're in that sympathetic state, it shuts off your peripheral vision. So you literally can't see. see as much. But figuratively, within your mind, you also can't see as much from your higher mind, like, see the long game versus our ancestors, like, we're great at seeing the long game and planning for, like, generations ahead versus now we're like really just trying to survive

moment to moment because, I mean, there's so many insults our environment from like the screens and the artificial energy efficient lights to the poisons in our food to, you know, a lack of connection to nature and never going outside and, you know, the chemicals we're exposed to inside, It's like there's so many insults from every direction that our bodies are literally just trying to make it. And we can't think beyond in order to actually see like, oh, crap, like we're actually doing, you know, these things wrong. We need to change this in order for two generations from now to be successful and unhealthy. It's like we're not even, we're just thinking like day to day, basically. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I think it'll take like a shift in people's way of thinking.

I don't know. I'm curious because like, okay, so there was one time, I don't know if you've heard of, the product appeal where they're applying this coding to Yes. The organic foods we're getting. It's from like Gates, right? Yeah. So I actually had the opportunity to interview one of the founders. She's like the highest scientists within that company.

And I mean, I found her to be a good person. And she, I didn't release this interview publicly because like she like broke down mid interview because she was very curious about what, why I was sort of. exposing them because they're like, we're just trying to do good. And I'm like, well, this is the downstream effect that people have. This is why people don't like what you're doing right now. And I think it's the realization of like once you take the Bill Gates money, you can't, you're no long, you've compromised your, whatever your original mission was. Like it's incompatible. You can't take that money and also do what you're wanting to do before. And that's kind of the,

the realization why I tried to get across to it's like you can't, like, you can't, like, you you can make the money. Like now you're just making money. Like that's what you're doing now. You're no longer trying to help, you know, food sustainability or like food access. Like that's not the point anymore. It's just to monetize this thing. So, so like I think that was one moment where I realized, okay, the scientists that are so, you know,

so called promoting these big pharma talking points, not necessarily bad people, but they've been in it for so long and they don't understand, you know, like taking the grant money has an impact on your work. You can't, you know, depending on where the grant's coming from a force, but if you take it from a certain, you know, big pharma, if big pharma funds your obesity research, then the result will be, OZEPIC is the way to go.

And so then I, it's part to, back to like, I want to treat people as people. Like, I understand where the incentives are. It's like, you're not a bad person. It's just you can't have both. You know, you kind of have to choose one, right? It's like, I can't both be a good journalist, but also seek to have insider access to, you know, high, high up people because the incentives are

misaligned because if they allow, if like the most powerful people allow you to have access to them, that necessarily means that you won't be able to do the story that you want to do because they, they wouldn't have give you that access. That access comes with like strings attached, is what I'm saying. And so, you know, you have to figure out where do you stand? Do you just, do you want to do the good journalism or do you want the access? He can't really have both. Mm-hmm.

And I mean, speaking to that a little bit, before I went to Princeton, I did a gap year and I was at Bristol-Myers Squibb for about 10 months. And I was already kind of red-pilled. I mean, even since a young age, I was very against centralized medicine just because it had screwed me over so many times. Like, I literally saw like, this is not helping me whatsoever. But I was in this gap year and I was like, you know, I'll make some money, which the money also sucked there. So I ended up leaving. But anyways, so I'm there. And I have this realization that the people who are working there was in.

in like, um, um, uh, immunotherapy development for different cancers. And they actually thought that they were like saving the world every day that they were doing the most important work that was going to save humanity. And it was just like an awakening because at some level, I mean, people may think that, you know, they're just in it for the money and they don't, they couldn't possibly think that they're doing good. But I mean, people actually do. And again, comes back to this very short-minded thinking where you're like, let's deal with the cancer in a way that, you know, creates more cancer down the line because like acutely we're going to be helping this person but like you know in 10 15 years i mean at the very least we'll have plausible deniability that this treatment caused that so like

no issues from a liability standpoint and uh and acutely we can make them think we're saving their lives so like it's a good done deal but like on the other hand we need to think about the chronic implications of everything we're doing as you were saying but i mean in particular in pharma it's like there's no consideration of the effects 5 10 15 20 years down the line we're really just focused on getting things out the door and into people. And then, you know, we'll cross that bridge when we get there, so to speak. Yeah, yeah. I have a friend who he works as like some sort of project manager or, I don't know what

you call this position, but he manages the sales, the business side of one of the allergy drugs. I can't remember which one, like Claritin, one of the allergy drugs. And he's like, oh, I was asking how it's going. He's like, yeah, yeah, product is growing. It's great. You know, business is good. and I just said, well, that means that more people are developing allergies.

Is that concern you at all? Like, do we want to figure out why that's happening versus just, oh, yes, things are going great because more people are buying this drug and this medication? We should maybe start to think about why are people more susceptible to allergies today versus in the past, like what's going on here? Same with like Ozempic, right? People are becoming more obese. Why are people becoming more obese?

versus just saying, oh, yeah, business is good. Yeah, yeah, it's very short-minded. I mean, you mentioned the dyes earlier. Do you want to give us a little dive into, like, what you found when you were doing that story? So the stuff about the dyes, so I always, you know, clarify, I don't know, like, I know what the research says, right? The research says that the dyes are, they could be very disruptive in terms of, like, mental health and all kinds of other endocrine disrupting things. And that's, as far as I would understand about the science of it. And of course, the FDA says it's safe, except the FDA has not actually evaluated the safety of that drug since 1971 or 73 or something like that.

So I'm like, okay, so at least let's evaluate it again. And I think the point of the food dies is it's the bigger story of like, why do we use this in the United States? And I think that's the part that's resonated with the most people is that we have a product that's the same thing, the fruit. or whatever, you know, the other one is, that is being sold in other countries with a different formulation that doesn't have the same. They're using other ingredients to dye the food from like natural concentrates and whatnot, which could still, I mean, people are like, oh, those fruit loops are also bad for you. I'm like, yeah, probably true.

Probably shouldn't be eating those all day. But they have some other formulation of it that's at least a little bit better for you. And why do we sell that? Why do we sell the most toxic version here? And obviously the toxicity level could be arguing. And that's the part where it's like the hang up is that they're having. It's like, well, no, this is, this is safe. This is, there's no, there's no study that's been proven or whatever it is.

They're like, oh, that's just an animal study. That's in mice and that. And, and it's like, what are we defending? It's like, the part where I'm, you know, the loudest is like, what are you exactly defending here? So you're defending the use of food dyes. Why are you defending that? Is there a reason?

Why can't we just get rid of it? because there's no study that says it's good for you. There's no positive health benefits of this particular thing. It just makes the food look more appetizing. Yep. And so that's kind of what I found. So like I said, I dabble in the science to kind of show, hey, there is scientific research being done that says that this is possibly bad.

Of course, you can find other studies that have been funded by different people that will show that it's okay. None that says it's good, but some say it's okay. Others say it's bad. I've heard testimonies of people who I've talked to about food dyes where they said, okay, yeah, my teenagers, young kids, they can see a big difference in behavior when they're consuming those types of foods. And maybe it affects some people, not others, right?

But that's the thing with everything. Some people are fine. Some people are not fine. But it's like, are we trying to protect everybody or just, you know, it's almost, you know, we can get away with it because only a few people are suffering. and as long as we make sure that they don't make a lot of noise, we just push on. And that's kind of, I think that's kind of the story there.

I think from the scientific establishment is like, okay, this is food dies right now. But what if they go after other things that are even potentially more disruptive to the supply chain? What do we do, then? And I think that's like the big, big story with people pushing back on, let's say, fluoride or glyphosate because that's used in some. much, you know, big ag production. It's like, oh, what if we have to totally change up the way we

produce food? That could be a huge disruptor. And now we have to invest in a lot more, you know, new equipment. And these are, these are things. It could make new jobs, though. You know, it could make new job, but it'll cost money, you know, in capital expenditure. And coming from like business school, I know this is how you think, right? This is like, this is going to be a big hit. And we don't want to take this. If we could avoid this hit, Why do we want to do it? Because we're not going to get any benefit from it. And so it's all about compliance.

I remember learning this is a lesson that I was taught in business strategy. It was like a course that everybody had to take there. And they said at the time it was called CSR, consumer sustainability. CSA, what does that say? It's like consumer responsibility, basically. And they said that that is, doesn't matter. We don't care. other than complying with the law.

So as long as we comply with the law, it's fine. Like we don't care about making things more environmentally safe than what the law requires. And that's what we were taught. We were also taught other things in a business school like, okay, here's what you should do. If unions are making a big fuss, this is the way to bust unions. Here's what you need to do. Here's the blueprint. Like if you, you know, you need to train your workers or you need to train your office workers to do tasks that the factory workers are doing.

You know, so we're taught all these kinds of strategies that are from one perspective. And so I kind of understand what they're thinking when they say, oh, well, this would be a huge disruptor because that's kind of how they think. They don't think in terms of like overall health of the country. They only think right now, what is this going to mean for us? Yeah, I mean, with regards to like recipe differences, I think one common one a lot of people know is like Coca-Cola. Like if you get Coke from Mexico, it's made with cane sugar. And I think it's like 30% less sweet. And like if you get it here, it's like made with high fructose corn syrup and it's much more sweet than like anywhere else in the world because I don't know what they think.

Like the American palate is just so desensitized that we need more sweetness in order to actually buy the product. I don't know. It's pretty insane. But that was one example. And with regards to like the effects of food dies, like like you said, I mean, if there's there's a risk benefit analysis to anything basically. And there's also, of course, dose response issues too. But if we can make some progress on one front, given the amount of insults we're facing as modern humans, I think we should do it. Because, again, this is also something that really bugs me within, like, the vaccine research space is that we're giving, like, kids up to two years old.

They're getting, like, 27 vaccines within the first two years of their life. All of those vaccines are studied in isolation. We don't study them together. And yet, sometimes kids will get five vaccines and one doctor's visit. So we haven't actually studied that that's safe. If we've only studied individually that, you know, they're safe in most people, even though adverse events do happen and that's well known. And yet we would prefer to gaslight parents and people who have had adverse events versus actually try to understand like, okay, why are some people more susceptible than others? Like we have quantum computing emerge and like we can figure that out if we want to, but it starts with like stop gaslighting people into thinking this isn't the issue and start acknowledging that, yes, we know that all pharmaceutical interventions are going to have some people will die from them.

people will have very scary, you know, issues that arise from using the products. And we need to figure out why in a subset of people is that happening and, you know, start to do better, more transparent, like you mentioned earlier, science around this instead of myopically focusing on like, okay, this is helping this many people. But, I mean, we have to look at both sides of the coin. If we're being honest, it's going to hurt a certain percent of people, too. And especially if you're mandating these things, that's a problem. Like, that's medical tyranny. And this is also what Jack talks about with regards to back in like the founding fathers days, Benjamin Rush wanted to put into the Constitution a clause about medical tyranny. And apparently the other forefathers,

Jefferson and the rest of them looked back into history. They couldn't find any examples of it being leveraged. And so they didn't put it in. And meanwhile, we see that actually is the point of leverage that's being used against us as a population today because it's this hole that hasn't been addressed. And so I think, I mean, I know the constitutional amendment that Jack wrote for El Salvador is Bobby's hands now. And so hopefully something happens with that. And it makes perfect sense why, given like your perspective about like trying to optimize for the bottom line that you wouldn't want to have new laws put in place because like you said, the law is what's going to structure how the companies behave. And so if laws are changing to make things more stringent and more

protective over the people, then they're going to be forced to change it accordingly. Yeah. One of my favorite lines that I've heard is how we do business is how we do justice because that drives everything in terms of behavior. And just to give a story about vaccines is that I told you, I'm going to try to tell the story without revealing too much because I don't want to get sued. But I was working with one of the major vaccine manufacturers during COVID, not on the development of the drug, but I was a supply chain specialist. And so we were helping them with inventory.

And so we did this full-scale, like end-to-end inventory analysis of like how much supply they had and projecting it out over the next year. And, you know, our report showed that there were, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. I can't remember the number now, but hundreds of millions of dollars of supply that was not, you know, they didn't have any sales for. And not, you know, maybe like a few weeks later, I'm just like watching CBC. And, you know, the CEO of this company just says,

oh, well, we need to do another booster of this. of this vaccine. And at that point, because I was like, I don't know if you saw this report, I'm sure everybody knew within a company. I'm like, okay, this is starting to sound non-scientific. It's starting to prove that they're making business decisions

versus public health decisions, right? When they say we need to take, I mean, it doesn't make any sense why this would even be considered a vaccine. I'm not going to try to go too deep into this, but I'm not a science guy, but for me a vaccine is like it should protect you from a certain disease. But if you have to take it every, you know, three to six months and it doesn't do it even,

then I don't understand how this could be even considered a vaccine. And I had a friend from Europe too. He's like a Swiss guy and the Swiss are very knowledgeable. I mean, they're a big, you know, they're a huge, big pharma production. And they're like, vaccines take years to develop. Yeah, 10 years. And this thing was developing like, six months, you know, even less, because they started doing trials very, very quickly.

And he's like, I'm not taking this. This doesn't make any sense. And at that time, I wasn't awoken yet. And so, so I, you know, to be fully disclosed, yeah, I, I was like, okay, yeah, I think we should do it. You know, I was, I was buying it on the message until I, I don't know, until I was on the inside. I'm like, oh, it doesn't look like it's what it is at all.

What did they say it is. And so I think the only way to get back to it, like you said, is. transparency and changing the incentive structure or else, you know, it's always going to be sort of an uphill battle. But I guess the good news is that I think more people are bringing attention to this. And so there is change, right? I mean, I couldn't, I mean, pre-COVID, if you were talking in this way, I mean, you would be sort of very much an outcast in society. And today, perhaps still an outcast, but there's a lot more people in your community. Totally. I mean, Andrew Wakefield made a point. He was the one who, like, first linked autism to vaccines. And he made the point that, like, before COVID, nobody was really talking about, like, vaccine injuries and, like, the potential harms of vaccines. And now, like, 50% of, like, around the dinner table, 50% of homes is at least a discussion about, like, you know, is this shit good or bad? Like, is it harming us? Like, what are the issues here? So it has definitely sparked that conversation. And actually, just to tell a brief story. So when I was at Princeton, I graduated in 2021 December. So when the vaccines rolled out,

We were, you know, I was in school. And I remember telling a couple of my peers, like, I don't know how I feel about this because, like, you know, they've had like six, eight months or whatever to develop it. And, you know, it doesn't seem like enough testing to know, like, long-term harms. And I literally got shamed for even bringing that up. And then that was like the absolute nail in the coffin for my connection with academia because I was like, these are people I considered friends. And they literally shame me. And I was like, nobody can be trusted here, basically. Yeah, it's, and also too, it's like there are people, there are people today that still say it was not mandated.

But I'm like, it was definitely mandated for a lot of people. I had to get it. Even if I didn't want to get it, I had to get it because I couldn't continue working. Like my job was like, we need to verify your vaccine or else you're no longer going to be able to come to the office. Yep. And so then that puts people in a tough spot because if they need to make a living, they're threatening their livelihood. Exactly. So I think, yeah, so even the, I think the soft mandate at the time was.

like sort of a brilliant move on the part of the government to say like we're not mandating it it's the companies there and but the reality is that they're like one and the same you know they're all talking to each other like how do we do this how do we get people to take this and then they're like oh this is the best way to do it just you know we'll do economic warfare yep yeah it can never happen again i mean i think at least we're all on high alert that and sometimes like people will because i'll talk about this topic frequently because i want to bring it up like i went for a walk during the lockdowns and there was caution tape on the playgrounds. People are like, why are you still talking about that?

I'm like, because this literally cannot happen again. This was like the worst possible thing that could have been done to us as a society. Like we should have been told to be outside as much as possible, not quarantined in homes, like breathing recirculated air and like, you know, with other people. That's just increasing the likelihood of having an infection or like exacerbating respiratory illnesses in general if you're not getting enough of that fresh air and biodiversity to help support your immune system. And obviously the natural aspects of UV light too in reducing viral replication is huge. And so we just literally got the worst advice possible and we're told to follow it

less we, you know, suffer consequences. And we literally cannot let that happen again. It's, it was absolute insanity. I think people are at least much more aware that that's a possibility now at this point. Yeah, I don't mean to relitigate, continue to relitigate COVID. But for me, it had a pronounced psychological effect because I was, you know, I'm living in California. There was much more stringent restrictions here. And I think it still does. And it's like I've worked with like therapists on this personally. Like it actually changed my fear level of just like being around people and and going to

different places where I didn't used to have that kind of anxiety. But just like by means of like participating and doing what I was told to do for a period of time, it like changed my psychology like increase the fear level of you know whether it be right or wrong or good or bad fear but it's definitely changed the way like the the prescription of the the fix might have been worse than the actual disease itself kind of kind of idea where now I'm having your years later trying to undo some of those those things that they were telling us So like, oh, you need to stay certain, you know, people are dangerous, you know, if you don't go far away from them, they're dangerous. And I'm like, is that really what we want to be, you know, communicating to people over a long period time?

It doesn't seem like it's, and also it seems like some of it was, yes, fear driven in the beginning, right? We didn't understand it. I'm totally fine with that. But then after you knew it was wrong, you continue to do it because of certain financial interests or or you didn't. want to be wrong or you wanted to maintain your control. And then you're starting to feed us information that you know is basically wrong. Mm-hmm. I also see. Yeah. No, go ahead. Sorry. Oh, no, I was going to just make a comment on Fauci, which is why I do so much reporting on him and try to say, hey, this is not a good dude. Because even after you knew, let's say, the social

distancing didn't have any scientific backing, he continued to push those same policies. Right? Because in the beginning of year, you don't know. Okay, fine. Let's do it for a period of time. Let's figure out what the hell that's going on here. And then once they figure out all these studies came out, it's like, okay, that didn't make any difference at all. But then you still have the same policy. Then I'm like, what are you doing? Is it, are you, why are you lying to us now? Yeah. And he was also, he had that quote of like, if you're like going against Fauci, you're going against science. That's right. Yeah. And I was with, yeah, I was, I was definitely late to the game, but it was, it was like in 2021 where I started to speak out against Fauci.

And that's when I was still working as a consultant. And so I felt, felt there was a bit of distance. And I started as I was working, this is a story that, you know, I even spoke up, this is not about vaccines or anything, but like part of the work that we were doing was telling this big pharmaceutical company in the U.S. that they should start outsourcing production and this and that because it saves the money. And I kind of like raised my hand in the meeting of pretty high up people. I'm like, do we really want to be outsourcing production of, like, do we really want to be

outsourcing like one of the most important capabilities? abilities that your company has because it saves a little bit of money now? Like what if we, you know, need the production? You know, what if we need to, you know, like we can't just produce everything in China or wherever and hope that works out. It's like, we need to have some strength here, right? We can't just like deindustrialize America. That was not well received in that meeting.

That was like a big slap on the wrist and probably led to just like my exit from that project. Yeah, that was my exit from that big pharma project. because we were like, all right, this is a kind of a loose canon guy here. We can't, we can't have this. But it's just like when you're in that space, it's like, it's sometimes you're like, are these people insane or do they not know or are they just afraid to speak out? Like, what's happening here? I mean, there's definitely a bit of a fear aspect, I think. And I mean, it's pretty crazy. That's one of the major things that Trump was campaigning on, too, that I think is really important that we develop more of the things that we use and that we need here on our own soil because

is then we're less interdependent on other nations or if like supply chains go down, God forbid, like we at least have an ability to still access things. It's like it's from a security standpoint, it's like you're basically setting yourself up to have a more consistent and predictable future, which seems like it makes a ton of sense. So the fact that like the globalists, I mean, makes sense because they're globalists are pushing for our supply chains to be elsewhere because then we are dependent on what will. I mean, I guess on the podcast. side of things, you could see. It's like, we're one interconnected world. And like, it's great. But then, like, a solar flare happens and our grids go down. Then what? Like, really great to be able to produce things locally. The global, I don't buy into the globalist propaganda in that they say that it's for the interconnectivity of the world. But then in practice, it's really just because it's cheaper right now to do it like that. And that's the same when they talk about climate change or like, you know, these kinds of issues where we're polluting. And then instead of just

fixing the pollution. They come up with the scheme of like carbon credits where like people are selling like they're they're tokenizing forests that already exist by the way. It's not like they're planting need. They're just tokenizing the carbon that exists and then they're trading it with one another. And so they're basically making this like money. They're basically making this scheme where now things are worth something and that's how we solve it. But in essence, like we have the same amount of carbon that's going around. And so like that's not even the solution. So I think a lot of what they sell, the messaging is not at all what the end goal is, right? The end goal of globalization is not to bring more people together. It's to generate more

money in the short term for businesses. The same way, climate change, it's a way to monetize something that wasn't monetized. Before, there were no tokens for forests. It wasn't, it was, it's not, it was, they're now commodifying it and selling it as a good. you know, virtually, which is what the goal was. There probably some person on the inside was like, yeah, that's a good idea. Let's, let's do that. And then, and now we have all those whole thing versus like, hey, maybe just stop doing the Davos thing every year.

Yeah, that'll have a bigger impact, whatever the hell you're doing. Yeah, literally. I mean, it seems pretty insane to focus on carbon when like we're polluting the earth with things that actually can't break down very well. Like, we have great systems to deal with carbon dioxide. It's called having plants that do photosynthesis. Like they're really good at that. Carbon is not the biggest fish to fry right now.

We need to really be thinking about like, what are all like the man-made chemicals that we're spilling into the waters and into the earth that are like killing the soil life and that are polluting the waters of the planet that's having all of these externalized effects to the commons? Like, why don't we focus on those things? That actually really matters from an ecosystem standpoint. But instead we're focused on this nebulous carbon issue

that is like, how important is it really? I think we just need to be more honest and transparent in that area. Like somebody said something about like any science that has the word science in its name, like climate science or atmospheric science isn't a real science, political science. It's like not a real science, coy. Right. It's like it's biology.

That's real science. Exactly. Yeah, the last, yeah, the thing I want to add to that commentary is that these, like it's the, remember right before the election, the peanut the squirrel? That was like a huge thing. That was just a travesty, to be honest. And then I looked into it, the New York Department of Conservation, environmental conservation. And they somehow thought this, that the squirrel thing, which I admit probably illegal to do, right?

Not allowed. But there was a different approach to that. And maybe they could be like, okay, here's how you could bring your home up to code to be, to allow that to exist. Versus doing the thing they did, which is to kill the squirrel in the record, which is crazy. I mean, and then I looked into them more. And there was two years in the city of Brooklyn where there's these toxic chemicals that were being emitted from the soil that was seeping into the canal, the Gowanus Canal there, because of all the new construction, this soil that hadn't been, I guess, that hadn't been

disturbed for hundreds of years. And these toxic chemicals are seeping out. And it took them the same agency two years to notify the public that this was happening. And people in the neighborhood were getting cancer. Like there's reported cases of like the residents there getting cancer from these toxic chemicals. And I'm like, this is why these agencies need to be gutted in terms of like at least, at the very least, reformed because they're not prioritizing the right thing. Because the reason why they waited two years is that, oh, there was a lot of development happening. You know, Kathy Hokel had like these real estate low income housing and fair housing things that she was trying to develop in that area.

And this would like slow that down because then it would need to do. stop the build and like figure out what the hell is going on. And so it's like always because of these business interests, they said, oh, well, this will, you know, let's just try to hide this until like we can't hide it anymore. Versus like, oh, let's just go and just kill this dude squirrel because, you know, somebody called the agency. And there's like no accountability.

Yeah. After the fact, like they just pretend it didn't happen, basically. Yeah, exactly. So then when people, when people, you know, say that it's bad to gut these institutions, and I'm like, yeah, I think it is, but these institutions aren't doing what they're supposed to do. So at the very least that we need to clean house. And from my understanding, RFK Jr., you know, who I agree with a lot of ideas that he has,

he's not saying that we just need to get rid of it. He's like, we need the FDA to do what the FDA is supposed to do. They're supposed to regulate food and drugs. These people are not doing that. You know, they're all kinds of interested. The FDA people are coming from big pharma or they're coming from big food. They're not at all doing what they're supposed to do. So they got to go.

So I'm like, yeah, they do have to go. Yeah, that shouldn't be an unpopular opinion. I think, and I think for the most part, it's not, but the way the media, like CNN, MSNBC and like the centralized shill scientists and doctors online are framing it as if it's like this major coalition of people. But I think probably the majority of people are in agreeance with that. they are and that's why they do that's why in terms of the media they go with a character assassination route of like oh r k junior is a big lunatic he has the brainworms he has the bear thing in central park and he has this and that which is unrelated to his health policy like yes he's lived a very colorful life i mean his you know he's part of the kennedy family we can't discount that he had you know certain privileges where he was able to participate in all this stuff and major trauma and major trauma i was like his dad and his uncle was

before the age of like 12 by the government by deep state i mean that deep state some say intelligence agencies abroad there's a lot of theories but it certainly we see those files in a couple well so i think yeah that's what i'm saying is like i think um you know i think a lot of us are still you know even if we're not trump people like i want trump to succeed yeah we should all want that because we should all want that and we should and then i'm starting to see that on x which is a great sign that people are actually scrutinizing his picks. Like people, supporters of Trump are saying, hey, this person coming in has certain ties. Like, we need to put that out versus like in the past people, I think more people would be like, let's just not talk

about it. Yeah. Now I see a lot of Trump supporters say, hey, we don't want, you know, these neocons in office. Today I saw a bunch of people blasting Elias Stefani, because she's like the new ambassador into the UN and they're like, no, we don't, this is not a good pick. And so I'm glad that people are doing it now, which is like, I think this is like my, my hope and dream is that people will hold their own side accountable and say, hey, we don't want this guy, you know? Yes, yes. At least they're voicing that opinion. And we didn't see that in the past. And it's definitely not tolerated in the Democratic Party, by the way, in terms of like, if you're, that's like, you're out. Because I think there's a big difference in the philosophy of Democrats and Republicans in that Republicans,

ideology is more individualistic. So they're more willing to do that kind of stuff. Whereas if you step out of line as an establishment Democrat, it's cast out. You're cast out. It's not at all the same vibe going on, which is I think why the Democrats were able to kill Bernie Sanders metaphorically, politically, versus Trump was not a Republican insider. They did not want Trump, either in 2016 or in 2020 or in 2024. They try to run other people like to San Francisco. Haley, but there's not that same kind of like top down party apparatus control, which I think it could be a good thing. I think, you know, there's good and bad for everything. You know, we need collectivism, but we also need individualism. And so to demonize one idea over another

is, I think, just unproductive. Yeah, they're definitely both important. I think we can strike a balance too. And I mean, a lot of this comes back to just like our forefathers had a lot of foresight about the state of affairs in the future. Pretty remarkable when you think about it. Like how specific they were in the Constitution and how like we're butting up against that now almost as if they predicted this point would come. And like that's why the First Amendment is in place

and it's pretty wild to see that play out. That's true. That is if you just go with the Constitution, things actually just work out. The problem comes when people try to subvert the Constitution past laws that are. Right. antithetical to the document itself, right?

They're saying, oh, the First Amendment is there, but in certain cases, the First Amendment is not allowed or we're allowed to surveil you or we're allowed to, or even a big, big issue that I've been looking into is like the waiving of the Seventh Amendment, which is your right to a jury trial. And there's a lot of cases if you see with arbitration clauses that you're signing day and day out, just like going to the grocery store, just growing to like the amusement park or signing up for service, you're waiving your right. to the Seventh Amendment by doing that.

I had a recent colonoscopy, which I think it was a good thing people should do colonoscopies for just checking up gut health. And that's because I was dealing with all kinds of gut issues personally, which is like kind of my personal journey to eating better food and stuff like that. But before the surgery or the before I went to see the doctor, there was like an arbitration class thing. And I went out, I was like, do I have to sign this? And they said, no. And I'm like, so they will still do it if I don't sign this. And they said,

yes. Wow. And so I didn't sign it. And then I would turn around to everybody in the waiting room. I was like, by the way, I don't think anybody should be signing this arbitration agreement because you have no, there's no positive benefit for you. So just don't sign this thing. Oh my God. That's insane. They try to really sneak things in the fine print. Yeah, because if something happens to me, let's say, you know, the off chance that something goes wrong. then now I can't sue them anymore. There's no accountability, right? There's all kinds of ways to subvert accountability. And there's a reason why these amendments are there in the Constitution. And I'm totally fine, too.

Let's, like, if we need, there's ways to amend the Constitution, legally speaking. So let's do that versus all these things where carveouts of like national security or, you know, whatever the reasons they come up with to subvert it. side note the things that kill me about colonoscopies in particular is they're marketed as this thing that's completely harmless like we're just going to take a look but you nuke your microbiome every single time you do a colonoscopy with the prep because it's literally like anything that flushes fluid through your colon decimating the microbiome so it's you know okay once in a while especially if you're actively having issues people going yearly i don't think that's a good idea from a preventative standpoint i don't think are people going yearly because i i felt like pretty bad for for a while after that yeah because i i went in and they did find some things in there, which I'm, you know, glad that the polyps were removed or whatnot. Um, but it certainly was not like non-invasive. Like I felt pretty off for at least a week in terms of like my gut and like eating and it just did not feel right. Um, so I believe that I, so then what is, yeah. So that's like the overall thing of like, we need to just, because the reason why people are needing to get.

colonoscopy is younger and younger because there's an increase in colon cancer that's caused by all kinds of weird stuff that's in our food that that's disrupting something and causing issues. But instead of doing that, then we always rely on the healthcare industrial complex, right? This is only good because now more people are getting these surgeries than a cost buddy and this is good versus like we just have to fix it at the source. Yeah. I mean, also there's a gut skin axis that's activated by UVB. light that of course UVB is increasing vitamin D production, but it's also directly acting

to increase gut microbial diversity, which is supporting colon health. But, you know, we're not telling people that whatsoever. We're not telling them that, you know, UV light's an essential nutrient and said we're telling them they have to slip, slap, slap, slap sunscreen and wear their sunglasses every time they go outside and causing their issues. I mean, it's just a rabbit hole. But like, and everybody who listens to this podcast will already know all this. But it's still, it's just very frustrating that I hope that we can begin to shed some light

on this and at least reverse the incandescent bulb band because that is just. it's just the energy efficiency push is just such a sham in so many ways but um incandescent bulbs are the last source of infrared light in the indoor environment and most people don't have any of them now and so all your window glass blocks all infrared light LED fluorescent bulbs no infrared light device screens no infrared light and infrared light and infrared light anytime you're outside during the day you're getting an abundance of near infrared light and infrared light even if you're in the shade and so the fact that we're not acknowledging it as this essential nutrient when we know that mitochondria require infrared light to be functioning sufficiently and efficiently is just,

it's just insane how far the industry is willing to go. And like the whole energy efficiency push in tech, it's not considering the health implications whatsoever. There's no guidelines with regards to the effects of light on health. And that's what's really missing in the current, you know, the tech development space and the lighting space. There's no health aspect to it, even though we know at this point, we've known for decades that light is a really important aspect of health. Yeah, that's the part that I was awakened a little bit to when I came up to you, obviously, because I saw your shirt. I don't know what that means, but I want to find out what that means. And so I think there's more to discover. I think there's, I mean,

when you talk about people, you know, with a sun and sunscreen, there's obviously very opposing views on that. But I don't know for sure if the science, quote, unquote, is settled. And so to say blankedly, oh, you know something to be true, that's the part where if somebody's like too overconfirmed about something, I'm like, I don't know if that's, you know, that probably should be scrutinized more. Right. Yeah. I always present. Like, hey, I'm just giving you information. I don't.

This is what I know so far. But it's, you should scrutinize me 100%. Like the person who says like, oh, this is 100% fact is probably wrong. Totally. I mean, especially when it comes to anything that, like, there's nothing that's all bad, really. There's always a risk-benefit situation going on. The problem with the centralized narrative around the sun is like, it's marketed as all bad. And that can never be true.

And we also have decades worth of literature to show that there's major benefits. Actually, you're protected against cardiovascular disease and neurodegeneration and multiple cancer types, including colon, breast, prostate, and blood cancers. And your risk for increased skin cancer really only happens if you're frying yourself regularly, which nobody needs to do that. sunburn is not inevitable. And so there's so much more to the story that's just not discussed. And that's what really gets me going because it's like, you know, I was lied to about this for years. And then when I actually looked into it myself, I'm like, wow, there's a ton of science in this area. Just nobody is talking about it. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I think that's, there's a lot. I mean, there's never ending. That's the,

you know, to kind of wrap the conversation. There's so much information out there. And, you know, part of my journey is just like, hey, well, it's. And that's the beauty of like decentralized journalism is because everybody has their interest, right? Not everybody's interested in everything. But if we have enough people looking into different things, that's how we're going to acquire knowledge versus I think the more centralized model of information is these are the things that you should care about. These are things that we don't care about. And those things are never talked about.

But here and now we have distribution paths for people who talk about things that, you know, that wouldn't have been covered before. and now people are doing it. And there's a path to, let's say, sustainability or at least be able to make a living doing it. And I think that's going to be a cool thing to see. Just because now we have, you know, you can go online and you can find people talking about anything and doing research on just about every topic. And that's so cool because before it was like, whatever the New York Times cared about,

that was it or whatever the newspapers, right? It's like, oh, we don't care about this thing. We're not going to even cover it. And now they're not choosing. what is important. I heard he's speaking of Tim Dillon. I was listening to one of his, he's so funny by the way. He's also like, yeah, he's funny, but he's also making like good points at the same time. He does. Yeah. And he was saying that Hollywood and sort of the controlled media, they don't have the same sway in terms of of the discourse, of controlling the

discourse anymore because by the time Hollywood has made some certain movie or some documentary, like there's been 10 YouTube videos made about it already, right? Because I can produce YouTube videos much faster. I can probably do it in a week or two, whereas Holly, it takes them like six months to do something or even more like a year, two years. By the time they've made their Boeing documentary,

I already know all about the Boeing thing because I've done four videos about it. And that's what people are consuming now. And that's like, that was like a very positive thing for me to hear. I'm like, oh yes, things are changing,

right? They won't have this kind of control forever. And now more people are, like I said, looking into whatever topic they want to look into and people, there's an audience for it. Because, you know, it may not be the biggest audience for it, but there is, there's like, there's something for everybody. And that's what's great about the new journalism is like, people can just do it. They don't need permission. Just, just look into it. Yeah, that's awesome. So what can people expect to learn from you recently? I mean, Dr. Stacey Whitman told me to say hi to you.

She said that you're going to be on some fluoride stuff, which is awesome. But where can people like keep track of you? You said you're mostly active on X and TikTok or, other places as well. Yeah, I'm active on basically every social media platform. My handle is exactly the same. It's 5149, 5149, James Lee, Lee spelled, L-I. It's the same on every platform. I'm on X as well as TikTok and Instagram. Those are where you can find more of like my short form content, one to three minutes, just kind of digging into something that I find interesting. And then YouTube is where I post longer form stuff that are 10 minutes plus looking at whatever issue. It might be like I said that.

Yeah, I will definitely be looking into fluoride. I'm looking into I have videos planned on the TikTok ban. Like what's going on with that and dig diving. You know, why do we have this ban in place? Is it national security or maybe some other potential reasons for that? So I'll be digging into that. Like I said, I shared earlier. I have a collab working on, you know.

women's hygienic products, which I learned. Because that's like the kind of guy. It's like, even if I'm never going to use one of these products, I'm like, okay, this is, this is fascinating to me. And we're like breaking down like the absorption. We're doing experiments of like, oh, this is like a completely synthetic tampon versus a cotton tampon. And like the absorption is like completely different.

Even though the companies will tell you, and this is I just learned this the other day, the companies will do the thing when they show on commercial, then like sucks up all the water really quickly. And they said, oh, the absorption has been completely the same because they've been slowly reformulating the ingredients and the materials to make them cheaper and yada yada. And they're saying, oh, no, it just works just as effectively. But it actually doesn't because they only test it with water versus like, you know, versus liquid that's like more closer to the viscosity of blood. Yeah, makes that. And so it actually doesn't work as good. And I found that to be crazy. That is crazy. So yeah, that's, that's, that's me. So it's really just doing stories that I find

to be interesting that I find to be a public, like, you know, it's good for public knowledge to have. It's like, hey, did you know this? And if you didn't, you know, here's the starting point. And most of the time I don't give people, like, because I don't know everything. So like my videos are not meant to be like all encompassing knowledge of like, oh, you watch my video, you understand the whole thing. It says, hey, this is where I am right now. And then there's other resources and go out there. If you're interested in this particular topic, you know, go find more of it. And that's, you know, that's kind of the journey where I'm at. And we'll see. we'll see where it takes me.

I love it. Thank you so much for coming on. I'm excited to share you with my audience and I'm really excited to follow your work and your journey. I think it's very important work. So thank you for doing what you're doing. And I'm going to stay too. Yeah, I'm so happy.

Like we cross paths and we're able to like connect beyond that, just, you know, that one conversation that we had in D.C. This is, it's pretty cool. It's like one of the first things, or one of the first times of this happening, we're like, oh, you meet somebody. And you're like, okay, let's continue to talk and just like out of a random chance scenario.

Yeah, I love it. We can definitely collaborate in the future. I think it would be fun. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, because like I said, I'm on, I do like segments, conversation segments on breaking points as well. Oh, that's the last part. I'm also on breaking points. I contribute. I contribute segments to them once every couple of weeks. And I usually try to bring some kind of perspective that people don't have. It's kind of supplemented. the topical news that they cover every day. So, you know, love to dive. You know, I think you'd be potentially a very awesome guest to talk about it.

I'd love it. You know, yeah, let's do it. Yeah. So I'm sure we'll be talking again not too long from now, I'm sure. All right. Sounds good. We'll have a great day. Thank you so much again for your time.

I know we went a little bit longer than we initially intended, but I really appreciate. It was a good conversation. So it didn't feel right. to put a posit just like i was like all right i'll get to the other thing when i when i get to it well i appreciate that and uh yeah thanks to leicis thank you all right thanks bye