Insider Truth About Big-Pharma & Big-Food w/ Calley Means | AMP # 461

Podcast Transcript:

AUBREY MARCUS: Cali. Thanks for joining me

CALLEY MEANS: I’m pumped to be here. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, absolutely. We are at the most interesting time right? Where the people who are supposed to be taking care of us, people who are supposed to be looking after our health seem to have a different agenda in mind. Seems to have a different motivating factor than actually the health and wellness of our people.

CALLEY MEANS: There's just a simple economic fact. Let's not get conspiratorial. Let's not get emotional. We're being poisoned as a population at scale. And that's happening because the largest industry in the country, again, just as a statement of economic fact, makes money when we get sicker, when we get more depressed, when we get more infertile. Healthcare is the largest industry in the country. It's the fastest growing industry in the country. More mortgages when we drive through a neighborhood are paid for by the healthcare industry. More people, their dignity is tied to that industry. It's an amoeba that's built to grow. And I worked for pharma and I worked for the food industry, which we can get into, they're very connected. And the raw economic fact is that those industries are fueled by an imperative, for not only for us to get sicker, but for kids to get sicker. Chronic disease is the greatest economic invention, the greatest profit maximizes invention in human history because of its recurring revenue. And we don't die right away, and we think our savior's in a pill. We live in fear. We're told to trust the system. And we keep racking up pills. There's close to five billion prescriptions per American per year, almost five billion prescriptions in America. And those are almost all for chronic conditions. So unpacking that as my life's work and really unwinding what I saw early in my career working with these industries. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, it's not only recurring revenue, but it's accruing, redoubling, momentum gaining revenue because as we get sicker, the more prescriptions we need, the more procedures we need until ultimately you get to, in the most cynical way of looking at it, the big payoff, which is the long cancer treatments or the things that are racking up the millions of dollars going through the insurance companies and, and this economic incentive people, it's funny people assume, oh, they would never be moved by their economic incentives. Well, in any game theory, when you set up the game theory with an economic incentive, the players in the game theory, even if it's self serving bias, where they're not aware of the fact that they're acting in accordance to the game theory to make more money, they find themselves doing it. And so we don't need to ascribe malice unnecessarily where there's just actually a heuristic, a blindness, a bias. But this is the system that we've created, a system where sickness equals profits and profits are the incentive for the people working within the system. 

CALLEY MEANS: I think the incentives are really important. So I was born and raised in Washington, DC. We were very success driven. Like that's the trauma I'm trying to get out from under, like it was all about rising up the traditional ranks. So I went to Stanford, studied economics, went into politics, and worked for the pharma industry. My sister went to Stanford med school, as a surgeon, top of her class, top of her residency. That was what success was and we were big defenders of the system. My sister is very formative for her, very formative for me, 11 years into training. So she's worked at the NIH, you know, top of our Sanford medical school classes, I said. President of her Sanford class, all the credentials, right? She's at the top of the game. And she realizes the patient passed out before her who had sinusitis. So the sinuses were so inflamed, she had to put that patient under and cut out the remnants of the sinus infection. She realized that the patient was under her knife six months before. And then she looked at the charts and it was 50 pages of charts, you know, diabetes, heart disease, depression, kidney issues, all the issues. She didn't even think, ever to ask the other doctor, she didn't speak to those doctors and she realized 11 years into training. She didn't actually understand why that patient had inflammation and she thought it was her fault at first, but then she started tracing the incentives and she started realizing that at Stanford Medical School, not one class, not one lecture was on nutrition and actually tracing her course notes, 90 percent of the lectures, 90 percent of her course load was in pharmacology. And then she traced a little bit more and more than 50 percent of Stanford Medical School's funding touches pharma in some way. So she realized 11 years out, not as an evil person, but she realized she was in this system that is basically adopted into her to cut open that patient but nobody, like zero from the medical schools to her boss at the hospital, the pharma companies, everyone had plausible deniability from asking why those patients were sick in front of her. And she abruptly left the system. This all came together for me with my mom. It was a classic American story. So my mom for 40 years, like the majority of Americans, is just racking up those chronic diseases. I was born at 12 pounds. 

AUBREY MARCUS: You were born at 12 

CALLEY MEANS: I was born at 12 pounds. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Heavy boy. 

CALLEY MEANS: And yeah, that's what everyone said. And it was high fives. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Heavyweight infant. 

CALLEY MEANS: It was high fives. And it was, the hospital gave her a fake award. They were excited. It was like, congratulations from the doctors. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Young Tyson Fury. 

CALLEY MEANS: Yeah. And only later, decades later did my sister and I realize that it's called fetal Meconoma. It's actually a condition, and, and it's actually a blaring warning sign that the mom has metabolic dysfunction. It's a huge warning sign if you're much over nine pounds. So no warning on that. Had trouble losing weight, that's normal. Had high cholesterol, statin. Had high blood sugar, metformin. Had high blood pressure, ace inhibitor. So all these appointments throughout the next 40 years after I was born, it was just one chronic condition after the next. No problem. Here's a pill. And actually at 71 years old in early 2021, she was complemented by her doctor on being healthy. On five medications, she was actually lower on the medication spectrum than an average 70 year old. And then she's hiking, she feels a pain in her stomach, she goes and gets a scan at Stanford Hospital, and she gets a text a day later saying stage four pancreatic cancer. She's gonna die in a couple weeks. And that is the story of the American patient, right? She processed hundreds of thousands, if not, well, over a million dollars in fees and doctor's appointments and pharmaceutical treatments and interventions over that normal trajectory of chronic condition and instead of just one time, right? If a doctor actually explained to her what high cholesterol actually means, what's happening for the cells inside of her body is what obesity actually means, what high blood pressure actually means not once. Even a well-educated family, a daughter who's a doctor. Not once did anyone sit her down and actually explain that these are all the same things. They're all underlying metabolic dysfunction. And then as you said, we've got all these chronic diseases exploding. And when Dr Fauci took over, basically, responsibility for chronic conditions. He had a lot of purview over that starting in 1980. Our rate was under 10%. Now, 65% of the American people have a chronic condition. 94 percent of us are metabolically dysfunctional. So chronic disease rates, particularly among kids, of course, are exploding. But it's also, as you said, then the big part is those are leading to the deadly things and life expectancy in America is declining for the most sustained period since 1860. We are actually dramatically decreasing right now in life expectancy because these things are leading to heart disease. They're leading to cancers, they're leading to Alzheimer's, which is exploding. So the little things are adding up to the big things and that's then racking up a lot of money.

AUBREY MARCUS: It seems like with the industrial revolution of modernity, we got into this factory mindset and where you have a machine, you tinker with it in the factory. And I think there's several parts of this. One is the efficiency from the factory system, like the assembly line. You go to the doctor now, and it's very much like an assembly line. You get three to five minutes. You know, they read through the chart as fast as they can. They prescribe whatever fix they need. Tighten this wrench with this pill, fix this screw, do whatever this sometimes I have to use other tools and actually get their welders and their solders and whatever else. If you want to use that analogy, like you're a car and then they just move you through as fast as possible because the more churn that they get, the more actually that the hospital will make money, the more the doctors will make money. So there's this factory efficiency model, but then there's also, another flawed element of this is to think of the human organism as a robotic machine. It's not, everything is interconnected. All of these things weave together the heart, mind, body, soul, psyche. This is all part of one continuum. And we know that as a fact, we test for the placebo in every single clinical trial, which is the fact that the mind is influencing the body for different outcomes, doctors are trained against the nocebo effect, which is when the mind is weaponized against the body, right? So we understand that this is all a continuum, except this model of body as a machine, and then the efficiency of a factory is just really how medicine is done in our country. And it's a huge fucking problem because then nobody's talking to the actual person, nobody's looking at the holistic history. And like you said, for me, you know, an uncouth, uneducated, ignorant thing, you're a heavy boy. Well, I'm not a fucking doctor. I don't know. Even though I know a lot of things, I haven't heard about that. So that might be excusable for me in my own ignorance, but for a doctor, no, they should start looking and then check in, there should be a system where it's like, Hey, we noticed this, this could be normal, but this could lead to these things. Let's help you out on this journey here. Let's make sure that you're going to navigate yourself towards greater health. 

CALLEY MEANS: The siloing of chronic conditions and a lack of any curiosity about the interconnectedness is the biggest issue in the country. It's the biggest medical scandal in the country. When my sister graduated from Stanford medical school, she had to choose like all doctors, one of 42 specialties. So when a doctor graduates, they choose one of 42 parts of the body to devote their entire lives to. She, as I mentioned, was head and neck. A couple square inches of the face. And then if you do really well, you're like the dean of Stanford med school during her time there who did a fellowship in an even more narrow part of the face. So he was focused on about two millimeters. He had a disease named after him in the face, a minor's disease, Lloyd minor. That's how you rise up, you silo more, more, more, but what's happening, 95 percent of healthcare costs, 9 out of 10 deaths in America are tied to foodborne illnesses, are tied to metabolic conditions, they're all essentially the same thing from diabetes to heart disease, even depression, which we can get into, this is all actually systematically put into effect in 1909 by John D. Rockefeller. So John D. Rockefeller as a byproduct of his oil exploration, and seeing some of the chemicals that were byproducts of oil. He actually started the modern pharmaceutical industry. And we actually had a lot of problems with medicine back then, but we were pretty good on chronic conditions. We were kind of holistic thinking and he said, no, no, no, we need to silo. We need to train doctors to Silo a condition because then it's treatable. Then we can drug it or then we can do surgery. And he was the largest funder of medical schools who profited from doing surgeries. So he funded his lawyer, actually wrote the Flexner report. And you won't even believe this, but this in 1909, it is the guiding document, the congressional law of medicine to this day. And it said every disease has to be silenced. We need to practice evidence based medicine. We need a placebo controlled trial for any intervention, which actually just necessitates a pharmaceutical solution because you can't have a placebo on exercise, right? You can't have a placebo on food. The entire construct of what the best in class research is, which we, I've just accepted that doctors, you know, everyone even that are awake like us, I've accepted that until various, Oh, we need a placebo controlled double blind study. You can only do those on drugs. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, I mean people try to do it on exercise and food, but it's 

CALLEY MEANS: It's almost impossible 

AUBREY MARCUS: It's a complicated process 

CALLEY MEANS: You can’t really do it in psychedelics

AUBREY MARCUS: So yeah, it'll be like, all right. You do the standard the standard american diet and you do a ketogenic diet and then that's 

CALLEY MEANS: but it's not placebo

AUBREY MARCUS: but it's not blind

CALLEY MEANS: And it’s not blind. So it's actually not, it doesn't count and you've got the people on instagram, the evidence-based community slamming. So you've actually, in this report actually delegitimize any form of holistic health, any form of nutrition, any form of lifestyle. And you actually enshrined into law this system where we have to silo conditions. For most of up until World War II, you know, the modern medical innovations are actually pretty good, right? We figured out antibiotics, we figured out emergency surgical procedures. We actually didn't have chronic disease medication until the birth control pill in the late 1950s. So in about 1960, we spent almost 0 percent of the healthcare budget on chronic conditions, but very systematically, what the medical system did is took the trust engendered by life saving procedures on childbirth appendicitis sanitation procedures, antibiotics, all these things that actually like had science at the all time trust. They said, okay, great. Now trust us on chronic. And right after birth control pills were Valium. And by the 1970s, 30% of women in the United States were on Valium, Time Magazine, Valium Nation, a very addictive drug. And then just one after another, after another, we started medicalizing chronic conditions. So, as Peter Atias pointed out, I think this is really something that's important for me to stress. You know, people listen to this, oh, well, the medical system's been a miracle. Life expectancy is extended by double. That is not because of chronic conditions. If you actually control for chronic conditions, life expects to have been flat in the past hundred years. It's almost all driven by sanitation procedures and things that would have killed you right away. Childhood mortality, giving birth for a woman in 1900 was like a two percent death rate, it was one of the most dangerous acts humans could do. So we did have miracles and I'll stress this as strongly as I can say if you have an acute issue, if something is about to kill your child, if they have an infection, if they have an emergency. A hundred percent our medical system is amazing. The problem is that's less than 10 percent of our costs. That's not what's plaguing American life right now. What's plaguing us is chronic conditions. And we've had a complete kind of inability as a country to differentiate between those two. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And one of the major issues here, and I heard you talk about this with Tucker Carlson, is that not only is this system in place, but getting the information out there, because information is now more readily available than ever, and this information is available, but getting it out there to the population in mass would require mass media to be able to get on board with this, but the problem is, is that every major broadcast is brought to you by Pfizer, brought to you by Pfizer, brought to you by Pfizer over and over again on all of these things. So there's a capture of both media. And then with all of the campaign contributions and donations, there's a capture of politics. So that our leaders and our spokespeople are not actually sharing this information either. So it's up to podcasts and people talking to other people to get this information out. But it's not moving fast enough to actually combat the effects of this deleterious system. That's been in a corrupt system that's been put in place. 

CALLEY MEANS: Let's just set the context. I mean, in my opinion we’re coming off the worst public policy mistake, the worst public policy disaster of our lifetimes, certainly since World War Two. One of the biggest mistakes in American history was I think the COVID response. We are going to be dealing with the economic spiritual crisis of the COVID lockdowns for the next generation. We shut down the schools and kept the bars open, right? During formative moments in children's lives, we kept them trapped, which we know just from all data that lacking connection for kids is a huge problem. In 2020, 25 percent of all young adults contemplated suicide, which is one of the most shameful statistics I can even wrap my head around. We also, you know, with what I call a foodborne illness, which is, I believe what covid was, where the research in early 2020 was clear that this preyed upon people that were metabolically unhealthy, you know, no matter what age you were, this killed people that had multiple other comorbidities. You'd be hard pressed to find a person at any age who had the five biomarkers of metabolic health, cholesterol, body weight, blood pressure, and blood sugar. If somebody had those in check, they had almost 0 percent chance of dying of COVID, but instead trillions of dollars of airtime of the government microphone of the media microphone was saying this was a pharmaceutical issue. You've talked about RFK. talks about Joe Rogan, talks about everyone on independent media is talking about that was one small, if any part of the puzzle. COVID was an enormous wake up call that our immune systems are weak in America. In Japan, the childhood obesity rate is 3%. Here it's about 25%. And the COVID death rates kind of track that too. We had a completely step function increase, in issues with COVID versus European and Asian countries because our immune systems are so weak. This is the biggest story in the world. The letdown of our medical system, the absolute violence that the American people are still railing with, is something that truly is societally, generationally definition. And there's no curiosity about examining that in the media. As you said, on independent media, it's the number one topic. Whether it's a comedy podcast, whether it's a spiritual podcast, whatever topic is, even a sports podcast, we're talking about metabolic health. You can call it other names, but we're talking about the fact that we're getting sicker as a country, that our kids are getting sicker. This is just inevitably what the American people gravitate to. It's why RFK is the most popular politician among women and independents. I think by some measures the most popular politician in America, despite being absolutely vilified. So why does this happen? And I think, I really am trying to evangelize because we know there's a big problem. Like what tactically is the reason for this. The reason is that the healthcare industry is the largest funder of mainstream media. It's the largest funder of politicians. It's the largest funder of medical research. It's the largest funder of civil rights groups. It's the largest funder of almost any institution we can think of. Points to an institution, their bills are most likely paid by pharma and their pharma is actually most likely the largest funder. Just take politicians, what I mentioned, the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry spends five times more on direct political donations and lobbying than the oil industry. Multiples more than any other industry. So, when you just go through a particular issue. I can take opioids, which I worked on 12 years ago. The opioid panel at the FDA that was approving and setting guidelines, 95 percent of the folks that were on the approving panel were paid for by opiate makers. There's no conflicts of interest on the FDA panels that approve drugs. So, you are actually able to get not only research grants, but direct bribes. Direct consulting grants to the people actually approving the drugs. Then the media is basically saying pain is a crisis. 60 percent of their funding on TV news comes from pharma as I talked to Tucker about that's not just to influence the consumer, that's to buy the news itself. The influencers, the groups, the chorus of voices on social media and the people speaking on the media are paid for by these groups. The NAACP is a registered lobbyist today for Ozempic and other pharmaceutical companies. So, these groups that we hold sacrosanct, the NAACP, Harvard, the NIH, the FDA. These groups are literally funded by the industry. And that industry, again, is a raw statement of economic facts, needs us sick. It is absolutely devastating to the healthcare industry. It will be devastating in the short term for the economy if we get healthier. Because our economy, so much of it is propelled by this industry that needs us sick. It's a simple message, but it simply follows the money and realize there are extremely unimpressive people sitting around conference tables in DC who just understand, you just need to funnel these people money. I was blown away as an intern, essentially, working for these consulting companies to see lists of Harvard doctors, of Tufts doctors, to see that still Tufts Nutrition School was putting out studies questioning whether sugar caused obesity. And that's happening today. It's very simple and we keep falling for it. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, you know, I think we're entering probably the most important election cycle. You could argue the most important election cycle in the history of the world, right? And we have what's emerging as three main candidates. Bobby Kennedy, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, or whoever comes in to assume the cadaver that is formerly known as Joe Biden, it is impressive that he's still animated as a being. 

CALLEY MEANS: Speaking of drugs.

AUBREY MARCUS: So in this one of the things that sometimes I think people mistake is they're like, ah, yeah, Donald Trump is going to drain the swamp. He was there for four years. He certainly had a chance. And I don't necessarily think he doesn't want to, but he actually can't see the swamp. He's like swamp blind. I mean, he was the one who pushed all of these fast vaccine programs and all like operation warp speed, all of this stuff. It's like, I'm trying to drain a swamp, but I don't actually know where it is. In some ways is actually what I think. And now that's giving like the best, that's probably giving the best interpretation of Donald Trump is like people like, oh, he's going to drain the swamp. Yo, he can't even see it. And if he could see it, maybe he actually would try to drain it. I don't know. I don't know the man, but I do know Bobby. And I know that not only can he see the swamp, he knows how to drain it. 

CALLEY MEANS: Well, a lot to unpack there. So on the issue of this being the most important election in our lifetime, I've been radicalized to this and I think a lot of people are waking up, but I think by design, by those incentives of the media, we're debating trivia when there is one issue that matters in this country. And that is that, let's just look at kids. I just cannot, and I know we gloss over these statistics, but 50 percent of young adults are overweight or obese. Like the childhood obesity epidemic, like that is a prime of our soul. Like that is not a personal choice among those kids. We are poisoning kids at scale. That is not supposed to happen. 25 percent of teens are having fatty liver disease. 30 years ago, a doctor that treated that disease would only see it with elderly alcoholics. Now it's 25 percent of teens. 33 percent of young adults have prediabetes, right? This used to be called early onset diabetes when somebody under 50 got it. Now it's like kids are now, they're building centers, diabetes centers for children. They're building cardiology centers for children. We are poisoning our kids at scale. It's that simple. I believe it's almost genocidal and it's so widespread and so normalized through a lot of these efforts, the food and the pharma companies fund that we don't even realize is happening. No other issue matters other than our brains and our bodies, which perceive reality. It's the first order issue. Of course, all of this physical harm that's happening to us at scale, impacts our brain. We talk about connections in medical school and doctors often see the brain is a totally disconnected entity. It produces 20 percent of our energy, 95 percent of serotonin, which regulates our emotions, is produced in the gut. Our emotions and our mental health are totally interconnected. And that's why 40 percent of high school seniors qualify as having a mental health disorder. Just looking at kids and then, of course, tracing it to adults where 80 percent are overweight or obese, 66 percent have prediabetes. We're going to become a non competitive infertile country. This is uniquely happening in America. Our population is just not at their best and their brains and our bodies which perceive reality. Also, I think it's a spiritual crisis because of the fact that we're letting this happen, right? The fact that we're totally disconnected from our soil, which produces our food, and what we're putting in our body, and in our core metabolic habits, sleep, stress management, movement, every animal on earth can regulate these things, right? We're the only animals with systemic metabolic dysfunction, which literally means our cells are just rebelling against us. You don't have obese giraffes in the wild or wolves. It's only happening to us and animals. We've domesticated. So I think we're at a tipping point and it's only getting worse. The healthcare industry is growing, largest and fastest growing industry in the country. For each dollar we spend, unlike any other industry businesses we've run, innovation is lower cost, better outcomes. And healthcare, it's the more we spend the worst things get and it's growing. So that's all we should be talking about. That's frankly what Americans are thinking about. As I said, that's what's being talked about around kitchen tables, and on independent media, then we get into the candidates. I think you're exactly right. The confusion, not being able to see the swamp is by design, a big thing I did working for farmer companies and food companies was funding research. On the food side, if you go to PubMed, there's been 50,000 nutrition peer reviewed studies in the past two years. Every single one of those, I'd argue, is worthless. It's actually net negative. The entire purpose of funding those studies is to cause confusion. The entire purpose is that if President Trump is in a meeting, and they go, Okay, the USDA guidelines are recommending that two year olds have 10 percent of their diet as added sugar, which they do, it's to say, Oh, the NIH says this is okay, there's some research, we don't want to go against the science here, there's a bunch of studies. That's what it's for. I've talked to 50 members of Congress one on one in the past year, they're not horrible people. As you said, the systematic design is so brilliant that good people do evil things. They want kids to be healthier, but they tell me they're like, I'm a military guy. Or I'm a financial services guy and I come in and I'm trying to make sense of this and I just have a stack of studies from the lobbyists. So all this ancillary funding, all this funding of influence, all this funding of research, that's all to influence decision makers. There was a big joke and a lot of laughs. I went on Fox and talked about it and Joe Rogan tweeted something we wrote about the Tufts food compass that said lucky charms are healthier than beef. And it caused a big hubbub and it was kind of like this funny meme. It's not funny because that study on the study. NIH Tufts Nutrition School, top brands you could have, it says, purpose of study, to influence childhood marketing guidelines for childhood nutrition. That was the entire point of the study. We were laughing about it, I was on Fox News having a giggle about it. That study was being brought to school boards. And now, when you go to school, you're seeing Lucky Charms. You're not seeing farm fresh eggs or beef. That's the point of these studies. And that's why it's extremely important to have somebody who can see through that bullshit. To have somebody that has their own moral compass. We have to understand that we are smarter than doctors when it comes to chronic conditions. We have to understand that all chronic disease research, the trillions of dollars we spent researching and managing chronic conditions and all nutrition research is a net negative for society. If you pressed a button and eliminated all research for chronic conditions and nutrition, we'd be healthier. This is public relations documents meant to obfuscate, and from the president, to members of congress, to me and you often probably, oh we gotta, I'm not a doctor, that's bullshit when it comes to chronic conditions, the record of chronic conditions could not be worse. There's never been a chronic disease treatment that I can find in American history that's led to lower rates of the chronic condition that it's trying to treat. We have more stans, more heart disease, more SSRIs, more depression, more metformin, more diabetes, more ACE inhibitors, higher blood pressure. And Ozempic, J.P Morgan estimates has all these financial models to underpin the stock price. It's now the most valuable company in Europe, the company that makes it. It projects higher obesity rates over the next ten years. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And what does Ozempic do for people who don't know? 

CALLEY MEANS: It's injectable now. It's on track to be the highest revenue generating drug in the country. It's a weekly injection for obesity and it's all the rage. A lot of people are taking it to lose a couple pounds, but there's an all out effort. I mean, this is the playbook here. Just going down the institutions of trust. The Danish company, Novo Nordisk, made 420,000 individual payments to doctors in the United States last year. It's on a government database, 420,000 individuals, not research grants, bribes, grants. They can do it. It's reported. One of those doctors at Harvard, the top obesity doctor, who had received about 100,000 of direct bribes and stands to have her entire practice grow significantly if this drug is approved because it's a lifetime drug, went on 60 Minutes. Number one founder of 60 Minutes, Pharma. She, undisclosed, that she was paid by the drug maker, said that obesity is a genetic condition. And she said, throw diet and exercise out the window. It's not about willpower. It's about a genetic condition. It's a brain disease. We need this as a first line defense, not when dietary interventions fail. We need this as a front line defense for all overweight or obese children. That was the same week a study or guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics, not some French group, but the group that sets pediatric guidelines in the United States, which is a pharma subsidiary. It's totally funded by pharma. They came out in unison with the 60 minutes episode and said 12 years and up, gotta do it, first line defense. Again, it's a weekly injectable for the rest of your life. You're not supposed to go off of it. The target market of teens is 50 and the target market of adults is 80 overweight or obese So you have this full court press, the Harvard doctor, amplified by the media, with fast tracking from the FDA, right? We've been 20 years for psychedelic approval. This was a 68 week study leading the FDA to say 12 years and up. Okay. 68 weeks. It's a lifetime drug. The study didn't even take into account bone, muscle mass. It came out later that they didn't even study that before approving it. And people are actually getting fatter technically cause they're not, they're losing so much muscle, which is a huge problem. So that's ozempic. It's on track to be the best selling drug in the country because there's an all out lobbying effort with all the dynamics I just described to get Medicare, Medicaid to pay for it, which will be 15,000 per person per year. And the point I've been making, the point I've been lobbying on is even if the drug was perfect, which it's not, it's going to be recalled, it's a disaster of a drug because of the fast tracking and corruption I just mentioned. But even if it was perfect, there's no world, there's no place where you would ever look at what's happening, where we're poisoning our kids, and having metabolic dysfunction, in every way, and say, instead of not poisoning ourselves, let's just shoot ourselves with a shot for 15, 000 a year for the rest of our, I mean, it's so absurd, you can't even wrap your head around it. My point is, what could we do with that 15,000?

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. Absolutely. 

CALLEY MEANS: We could literally for half of that, for a fourth of that, literally transform our entire agriculture system to regenerative. And the problem right there. It would demonstrably save us trillions of dollars a year in health care costs. This isn't a joke, right? We spend more on diabetes management right now than the defense department as the government. Like diabetes is like that, used to be close to zero. It is close to zero. In some countries, we can have a zero. It is a foodborne illness type two diabetes. You know, we've gone from 0% about a hundred years ago to 65, close to 70% ultra processed food consumption in the past a hundred years. If you just on that simple metric, you said, we're gonna shift to a regenerative agriculture system, we're gonna use that $15,000 actually to not have lower income kids be forced to eat poison on snap. We're going to do like they do in every European country and incentivize those lower income folks to go to farmers to incentivize a better food system for them. Save trillions of dollars of downstream health max.

AUBREY MARCUS: I mean what you're describing is the classic example of cancer and so our healthcare system is designed to treat cancer, but actually it is the cancer. And a cancer, what is a cancer? Cancer is when a group of cells are blind and have lost communication with the whole of the organism and they drive the organism to ruin for their own benefit. Right? So, and this is what we're experiencing. The health care system is growing. Those cells, call them those cells, are growing. They're growing in wealth and gravitas and size. And it's, Oh yeah, sure. That tumor is growing, but the whole organism of our body politic of the human race itself is dying from this tumor. And we're going to have to treat this. We're going to have to treat the healthcare system. Like we have to treat a cancer and get it back in communication with the body. And this is a whole other, even philosophical understanding. I've read Travis Christopherson's book, Tripping Over the Truth, The Metabolic Theory of Cancer that goes all the way back to Otto von Warburg. And it's brilliant, brilliant analysis, which is saying that even cancer has metabolic origins as far as. 

CALLEY MEANS: Feeds on sugar. 

AUBREY MARCUS: It feeds on sugar. And so when these cancer cells and these tumors grow, they lose communication and they start going back to a primitive form of energy sustenance, which is the fermentation of glucose rather than the normal ATP cycle. So he's recommending hyperbaric oxygen, restricted ketogenic diets, sometimes in conjunction with chemotherapy or radiation. But sometimes that's all actually, you need is ketogenic. Get the cells metabolically healthy, get them back in communication with the rest of the organism, and actually the organism will start to thrive itself. But until it's like the body is being controlled by the cancer, instead of the body controlling the cancer, the cancer is controlling the body, and this is the fucking problem that we're dealing with. We gotta get back in charge of the body of our whole humanity. 

CALLEY MEANS: A hundred percent. Two thoughts on that. My fear for my entire life, my greatest anxiety, what kept me up at night was thinking about my best friend, my mom dying of cancer. And I learned two things in the 13 days between her getting that abrupt diagnosis and her dying. It was 13 days from her being perfectly healthy to dead. One was that all our lives are random. We can all die. And there's not this endless goal to prevent everything and longevity and living 250. I'm not really with that. Like, I don't think that's the goal of medicine. What I learned during her 13 days is that we have a perverted view of death. That's propagated by the medical system. The medical system praises our fear of death. And it was eye opening sitting at Stanford oncology the day after diagnosis and they told us we have to fight, we have to do aggressive interventions. We have to do biopsies. We have to do X, Y and Z. And it was covid protocol. So we weren't gonna see her. She was gonna have these interventions. She was gonna be in a sterile room without her family. So I had a couple of thoughts there. I'm like, well, where was the fighting before? Was this preventable? We went to war once the cars crashed, but where was the fighting during those 40 years? Then my sister, we had the wherewithal. I think this was like 0.1 percent of cases where we had a surgeon who learned in that same center in that same hospital. She started asking about ratios and we learned that these interventions would have a 33 percent chance of extending her life two weeks, even though she'd be alone, 33 percent chance neutral, 33 percent chance actually negative. So we had to go against medical bias and took her home. And she received hundreds of letters overlooking the beach from people about how she impacted them. And in her final moment of consciousness, she asked to be carried. She was so weak. She carried a mile down the road to the beach. And she embraced my dad in her final moment of consciousness and gave him a hug and said, thank you for this amazing life. And just like that, it was beautiful. And so that was one lesson from cancer. It's just like, it pales in comparison, right, the years, what matters is right now, and the impact we have on others, and as my sister mentioned, all those letters, she's actually biochemically changed people's cells, when you meet somebody. And that literally just demonstrably, like you live on in them. So that was one thing that made me angry. I think my view of death, all of our views of death, is kind of weaponized against us. And it kind of has this spiritual problem of robbing us of gratitude. The second more tactical thing, the kind of getting to your points about cancer was that that Stanford oncologist said that her cancer was unlucky. One of the top oncologists in the world. It's like, oh, this is such a tough break, Gail. And that is a lie. Many forms of cancer are as tied to diabetes as smoking is to lung cancer. You can get lung cancer without smoking, but it's highly correlated. Metabolic dysfunction to the pancreas and many other forms of cancer are just as connected. Food cancer is a foodborne illness in many, many cases. It's that pronounced and that simple. And that's like radical news to most people, right? That is not broadcast in public health campaigns. It is a total lie when your doctor tells your loved one or you, that the dementia, or the kidney disease, or the cancer is unlucky. Dementia, Alzheimer's, as we know, rates are exploding. Just as they dropped the early onset, the early stage kind of diabetes label, the early onset Alzheimer's, they're gonna drop that soon. So, teenagers are getting dementia. Like it's all coming down. Alzheimer's is now called type three diabetes. If you don't have prediabetes or diabetes, you have a very low chance of having Alzheimer's. If you're metabolic healthy, which is totally under your control, for the vast majority of folks, you're not getting Alzheimer's. You're almost certainly not getting most forms of cancer. By definition you aren't getting diabetes. That literally is just the definition of high blood sugar, which is under your control. You're almost by definition, not getting heart or cardiology issues, you can just go down the list of nine of the ten top killers of Americans. You're not becoming obese. So there's just that image of that doctor, and just the tough break and that kind of idea permeating throughout our chronic disease crisis. It's a lie

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. And that is also even looking at just the physical correlation and not the psycho spiritual correlation. You really start to understand that the physical body will manifest psychic malignancies physically. And just as the psychic body will manifest psychic malignancies from physical, because it's all on a continuum. So this is the other piece like, all right, let's actually understand what the physical contributing factors are, whether this is additional EMF, whether this is additional, whatever glyphosates or whatever adjuvenations have been in your vaccines or whatever the other things that might be that are contributing, whatever poisons might be environmental, whatever this, whatever physically is going on, whatever your metabolic health. All right, let's look at your psycho spiritual health and let's see how much fear, how much stress, how much repression of your emotions and how much shame you've kind of locked inside your body. Like all of these things. We have to bring the whole picture back together to actually understand systemic health.

CALLEY MEANS: Yeah, I mean after my mom died, my sister and I vowed to make it our life's mission to try to stop that cycle. My mom was an American patient. I mean You truly the majority of people are following in her footsteps with the cascading comorbidities. That's eventually gonna lead to something bad. But at the very least, a suboptimal life and increasing comorbidities. You decided to write this book, which is coming out soon. The last chapter, the most important chapter. It's about the mind and there's a, we talk about how the mind literally, and we go to the science controls your metabolism, the constant barrage of chronic stress that particularly our kids are facing to an unprecedented degree with everyone having obviously a weapon of mass destruction or chronic stress in their pocket and just the trillions of dollars of incentives that are just basically profit and are entirely focused on hijacking our attention, hijacking our dopamine, hijacking our fear, that has serious impacts. And in the mental health world I think there's many scandals in medicine, but as RFK has talked about and something I'm extremely passionate about is the mental health industry particularly is an absolute full blown scandal. 25 percent of women in the United States right now are on some kind of psychoactive drug. Legal, you know, SSRIs on down, an antidepressant. And I'm not full of anti pharma, and I really just think we should follow the science. But science isn't putting one fourth of women on a drug that fundamentally numbs you from reality and does not help you process your trauma. And does not help you really get to the root cause of what's holding you back in life. That's not right. And actually the underlying science on the chemical imbalance of depression has been totally debunked. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, I mean, so if you go into this a little bit more, there's something called the active placebo hypothesis. And I've gone down this and I'm sure you have as well. Whereas basically everything double blind placebo controlled. Well, when you take an SSRI, you have a noticeable and tangible effect. You're aware that you're on a drug, right? So you're in a clinically controlled trial, double blind, right? One thing that you take, you're aware that you're on it. The other thing that you take, it's a placebo, right? Nothing is happening. And so when you're taking this SSRI, you're aware that something's happening. And then your belief kicks in, Oh, I'm in the group that's getting the drug. I'm in the group that's getting this new novel magic bullet treatment for depression. So gosh, darn it. I feel better. I'm taking this thing and gosh, darn it. I feel better. And then the people who are like, I don't feel anything. I must be in the placebo group. So I don't feel better. So what they actually showed is they tested, actually and I don't know the exact details. But they tested, you might be able to fill me in on the rest of this.

CALLEY MEANS: Yeah, the FDA does not require efficacy, it requires a safety test. And the drug companies do not have to show the actual studies. They just have to give a top line report out to get FDA approval. Later on, far after, you know, a huge chunk of the country has been prescribed SSRIs, the underlying research that got the initial approval came out and it showed that the SSRIs were no better than a placebo. Again and again and again in these studies, um, SSRIs, don't match or are equal to the placebo group. In many, many cases. 

AUBREY MARCUS: I mean, I was looking into it. We were showing like there's studies that showed gardening had a better effect, the gardening had a better effect than SSRIs. And then just follow this active placebo thread. They tested a variety of other things that had the chemical model of depression. So they tested a variety of other drugs that also had a tangible effect. You could basically give somebody niacin, 

CALLEY MEANS: Right

AUBREY MARCUS: Effectively, which is like, Oh shit, I'm on something and then that thing knowing that you're on it will create the placebo effect to a higher degree than actually when you're like, I don't think I'm on something and that'll in large numbers as you pump out for these big clinical trials that will show enough efficacy that you can get your whatever the fuck approved.

CALLEY MEANS: This goes back to the core principle, trust the system on acute, don't trust it on chronic. You'll probably have to do a disclaimer saying consult a doctor. My message is very simple, you should listen to your doctor, sure, but do not trust your doctor when it comes to chronic conditions. I have had so many people come out of the woodworks on many of these issues, but particularly on mental health, where they're basically being shamed by their mental health practitioner not to go off the SSRIs. Oh, that's dangerous. Oh, you got a lot coming up. That's a little risky. That's like Ozempic. It's a recurring revenue engine, right? Ozempic requires the continued appointments for that kid for the rest of their lives to get the shots and the prescriptions and all the blood tests to see how all and inevitably all the all the issues that actually cause depression because it messes with your guts. You got to get the SSRIs, right? It's not just pharmaceuticals. It's all the ancillary things. Of course the SSRIs require continued appointments. It requires all these ancillary issues, there's huge problems with SSRIs. They actually cause weight gain. So they're actually blending the Ozempic clinics with the mental health facilities. No joke. So it's a godsend for the industry, but I'm telling you, you should absolutely consider going against your mental health practitioners advice if they're trying to keep you on them. The underlying. It's just a statement of two facts, the actual studies that led to FDA approval showed no better benefit than a placebo and the actual underlying science you can Google this from last year. It's been debunked, the chemical imbalance theory of depression. So that you see just again and again, Stands, which we've spent a trillion dollars on worldwide, when you add it all up, based on definitive best in class studies. They tried to add up how much they extend life expectancy. They got to four days. That was the conclusion that statins on average extend life expectancy four days 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, this is a lot. So for somebody who's naive to this conversation. They're like, wow, this is too much and this is the interesting world that we're in where we have a whole group that's still kind of bound by the fear of, and they are already suffering from some conditions. And then the doctors in the white robes or the new priestly class, and they're going to bring them to their own salvation with the new Scientology. So to speak, even though that is another whole cultish religion thing, it is this, like the religion of scientism that they're going to their priests and they're looking for their sacrament, their next little wafer that's going to be their salvation and they're really bought into this fundamentalism. And we're almost going into a new renaissance period, a new enlightenment where there's still the old fundamentalists that want to burn the witches at the stake, want to jab the people with the ozempic, want to do the old system and the old priestly class. And then there's the enlightenment thinkers. Being like, no, no. We have to get beyond this fundamentalist dogma and actually start to see the truth once again. And it's interesting because while in some ways this is kind of widening, people are doubling down and then other people are really becoming awake to the facts, and then there's all of the kind of spectrum in the middle, the bell curve, people just starting to kind of wake up a little bit. And I guess. That's if I had to say despite the horror of what we've experienced over the last few years, one of the blessings is that it has started to wake people up because this system is, they're over pressing their hand. 

CALLEY MEANS: A hundred percent.

AUBREY MARCUS: They've gotten too greedy and they're overplaying their hand. And it's like, Oh, wait. You've been bluffing like, like you get called on enough bluffs. Then you all of a sudden understand that. Oh, I get the game. And I think that's what we're seeing. And that's what we'll continue to see. And it's just my prayer that we see it soon enough that we can start to actually move in a different direction.

CALLEY MEANS: Okay. So you said something earlier. I mean, a couple of things, but you kind of dismissed it. I heard, like Independent Media, that the deluge from mainstream press is too much. I've got to say, I'm more optimistic. I think what you're doing with the leaders of independent media. I believe what's happening is one of the most important historical dynamics in American history. I really do mean that when you actually look at great changes in American history, what led to the revolution was the idea of the printing press and pamphlets. And people really kind of like the Federalist Papers, which were just kind of like in periodicals. And that led to that, right? I think for the past 70, 80 years, we had kind of a top down information system. And for a while, that was pretty good. They held the government to account in many cases, because of this corporate takeover, because of the fact that they're literally, their lifeblood now is pharmaceutical dollars is the healthcare dollars. They're no longer checks on power. They're referees for power. I mean, no curiosity about why 33 percent of young adults have prediabetes, right? Literally calling parents practically war criminals for asking why we've gone from 20 immune system changing injections to 70 in 20 years. Shouldn't that be at least an open area of inquiry? For the people that are supposed to be holding institutions to account, shouldn't it be an interesting area of inquiry that we have this dynamic where it's probably the only industry in the country where the second you get approval or something, you're mandated to the entire country to take something? Hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue? Isn't there an incentive there to get more shots on the schedule like not taking away any benefit of the drugs. Isn't there like an unrelenting incentive that once you get something approved you've mandated it for the entire country, the government's gonna pay for it and then you have the media and government vilifying anyone who questions it and the tech companies censoring any dissent. There's not a product in America where there's a greater kind of perverse incentive to jam more on that list of things we jam three month olds with. So, no discussion of that, right? You are a war criminal for even asking a question in the media, right? They've totally abdicated their role. And people have turned to independent media and what do we have there? We have leaked emails from the NIH saying, you and others are dangerous people. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Sure. 

CALLEY MEANS: And I want to get to kind of that spiritual crisis and kind of what this means and what the stakes are with this election. You mentioned gardening. And that's kind of like, okay, sounds kind of trite. I think that's deathly serious for depression, like being outside, moving your body in the sun. That's not a joke. We should be prescribing gardening. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, cultivating life, connecting to that cycle of like,

CALLEY MEANS: Life connecting to the soil

AUBREY AUBREY: Wow, the sun and rain and this soil is actually allowing life to grow out of the soil and allowing me to harvest that either in beautiful flowers or food. It works on so many different things. 

CALLEY MEANS: It literally, it's not a joke at all. I would have thought I was born and raised in D.C., a very conservative guy. I would have thought that sounded like hippie bullshit. But it's just science. It's just following the science. We are right now systematically taking a child. Right? Who's born and likes to be outside, likes to play, is predisposed to natural food, has awe for the universe. And we, in systems design during the industrial revolution and by Rockefeller, our modern education system where he said, I want a nation of workers, not a nation of thinkers. We still have that system today, just as we have the same healthcare system. We sit kids in windowless rooms, sedentary for eight hours, basically with a feeding tube of ultra processed food, and chronic stress all day. 

AUBREY MARCUS: You know that you may not know this story, and I don't know the exact details of it because I read it in Tyson Yunkaporta's book, Sand Talk. I don't know if you're familiar with that book, but he traces the origin to modern education, which was adopted by the Rockefellers and for the Industrial Revolution to the conquest of the Prussiak people in Prussia, where they actually Realize that for empire to have total control of the population, they figured like, all right, well, how do we control? How do we break a wild animal? Well, how we break a wild animal, is you isolate the wild animal from their parents during the daylight hours and you confine them in an enclosed space and you isolate them from their family from the daylight hours. And then actually breaks the wildness out of the animal and you're able to control the animal and they're like, Aha, what if we do that with kids and then we'll be able to break the wild out of the kids will be able to break their wild thoughts will be able to break their wild impulses, then we can control them entirely. And that model was so effective for what I call Empire to be able to control populations that are industrial magnets and tycoons. We're like, yeah, that's a really good model for education. Let's imprint that. And that's literally what we're doing. We're domesticating and breaking the wild thinking and breaking the wild healing that comes from a life lived in accord with the circadian rhythms and cycles of nature and life and family. And we're breaking that out of people. For what? So that they can remember some obscure dates that they'll forget fucking three months later when the test is over? We're not even teaching people how to think. We're not even doing actual good things in our education for the most part. I mean, yeah, some stuff is somewhat helpful. You learn about a periodic table, whatever. I'm not saying that all education is useless, but we're not looking at this in the right way, and we're not seeing the hidden origins and agendas of our current education system, which is linked into this whole puzzle as well. 

CALLEY MEANS: Five years ago, I would, maybe a little more than 10 or just said you were crazy to say that I would do anything other than do what I did, you know, try to go to a good private school. Trust the health care system. I think a lot of people are still stuck in this box. It is, I think, hard for people to understand how the rules of this game, how bad they are, how people with those intentions to literally break children have created these structures that haven't changed in a long time. A huge motivation for me is having a little two year old, my first child, and it's just like, it is just the thought of every child, like the human capital and the curiosity, if that's channeled correctly, just the incredible serendipity and incredible production of some kind that they're going to produce and how we put them on this assembly line. My story is, you know, I went to business school, Harvard business school and they're really smart people but everyone is dealing with this kind of trauma and expectations. And every single person writes their essay ostensibly smart people and it's all about changing the world. It's not one essay about working at McKinsey. It's not one essay about working in investment banking. It's all about dreams of changing the world. And we have this at that level right? like this conveyor belt of conformity, just like Mackenzie sponsoring everything. Just completely orchestrated stress to take advantage of your parents expectations and kind of shame you go the traditional road and 90% of the class comes in with these dreams. And then in two years later goes into traditional industries into the industries that they agree are destroying the country. My friend who wrote their essay about changing health care, went to work for Mackenzie and was on the pharma group that helped pursue Pharma prescribed my opioids. And they actually did a study and among different cohorts of people and the Harvard Business School grads 10 years after school, were the most clinically depressed group of any type of cohort, any type of socioeconomic group they've studied. Because it's people that have high dreams, have high potential, and then come in and are just propping up industries. That they know we're doing wrong, but I think it's happening everywhere. I think fundamentally at various levels, like that kind of treadmill of taking like dreams and taking like human capital and breeding it into widgets into the system that we know is failing us. The invisible hand is producing that. And I think it's a huge problem. I think it ties to healthcare. Because it's bigger than healthcare, right? We're fundamentally, to me, as you kind of alluded to, the health care system robs us of, ah, it robs us of any understanding of connection. It robs us of understanding about our finite place here with the kind of fear of death and how ephemeral life is. I think there's like the systematic kind of, again, spiritual crisis with how we've been taken away from our metabolic habits, which again is managing our stress, eating correctly, moving, looking at the sun, understanding our circadian rhythm, and it's just our basic biological needs. We've been totally kind of told that's not under our purview anymore. I think that's made us, more inferior, more risk averse. It's really damaging human capital. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And I think I am also actually optimistic. And I certainly didn't mean to downplay the impact of independent media because obviously I'm participating in it. And obviously this is what's allowed me to have the awareness that I have, is that I have been listening to podcasts and reading books put out by these different thinkers who are thinking outside of the box. And so I do believe in that fundamentally. And I also really believe in the power of psychedelic medicine and in the ceremonial use of psychedelics, which has obviously radically shaped my life. And now we're at this also. So we've talked about all of these pessimistic, this kind of diagnosis of the state that we're in, but all right, where are some points of optimism? Well, we're about to enter another psychedelic renaissance. And what is that giving people access to? Of course, we're studying the ability of MDMA to treat treatment resistant post traumatic stress disorder, which has all kinds of downstream effects on the entire system. All right. So that's just one thing. All right. Psilocybin is treating end of life anxiety and depression. So we're looking at these because we have to write for the medical system to get approved. We're looking at these small things, but really what's also happening at the root of this is it's getting us back in touch with what we actually know as we're connected to the divine field of life itself. We're getting back in touch with our ontology, like anthropos, our body, what our actual body, spirit, soul, heart knows ontological, what is real. We're getting in touch with what our body knows is real. Like, I can recall one particular large heroic psilocybin dose. And just from a skeletal muscle system kind of construct, I've been given lots of guidance about different things to eat and just information pouring in as I'm actually able to communicate with my body's own intelligence, which is connected to the collective intelligence and for people who haven't experienced psychedelics, what is this hippie talking about? But I've felt this happen, but even on a simple thing, like on these higher dose mushrooms, I was just guided to stretch in certain ways for just hours and shake for hours as I'm shaking things out of my somatic tissues and out of the storage of that. And where was that knowledge coming from? It was coming from the intelligence of my body itself. And so I think this is another one of the optimistic things that's happening. Yeah. All right. You may go for your MDMA psychotherapy for your trauma, for your PTSD, but it might actually connect you to your heart and the wisdom of your heart, you may go to treat your anxiety or depression with psilocybin or smoking cessation with psilocybin or whatever other things it gets approved for, but you might actually get back in touch with our innate intelligence, which will know that actually when you have that bowl of lucky charms and you have that ranch grown grass fed ribeye on one side, you'll know what your body is actually craving to eat

CALLEY MEANS: A hundred percent. 

AUBREY MARCUS: That you'll know, you'll actually know. And so that's what's on our side. Everything else is this web of illusion and delusion fueled by fear. But there's knowledge. There's a gnosis that we actually have, and it comes from the truth and not only are people speaking about it, but we're going to be able to find it for ourselves. So you're going to be able to listen to somebody on a podcast like this, or listen to Joe Rogan. Then you're going to be able to experience something where you go, Oh yeah, that's true. I feel it's true. I actually know it's true. I got both the information and I have the gnosis inside of me. And I think those things are converging and it's going to make a really dramatic impact. Now, couple that with a leader like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who's actually speaking the truth, changing policies, breaking these lines of corruption and capture. Well, all of a sudden we're moving into a whole different type of world. 

CALLEY MEANS: I believe that the single most important thing and actually an existential thing for the country, if I were to have one policy, it's encouragement and availability of therapeutic psychedelics, as you said, in an intentional way. And it actually encouraged that as a government, people have to be called, but have it available for any American. I'm glad we can kind of unpack this. So, I'm kind of going down the health tips, but truly my life's goal is that. I think it is existential to the Resurgence of the country because at the end of the day, I think we're losing our minds.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

CALLEY MEANS: I think we're totally being taken by trillions of dollars of interest away from, awe and interconnectedness, and I don't think it's about, like, command and control policies for people to eat better. I think we have to reset the downsides of modernity. I like modernity. I like the fact that we have artificial light and phones and travel, which disrupts our circadian rhythm and some agricultural innovations, but probably not really, you know, frankly, entertainment that's messing up our sleep. There's a lot of great things about modern life, temperature control. But these things are wreaking havoc on us. I think of being hijacked and we have to kind of reset and get back to the interconnect. So I'm here because of psychedelics. I'm talking to you because it was psychedelics. As I said, I grew up super traditional, super conservative. And you know, listening to what you just said five years ago, I'm like in one ear out the other kind of hippie stuff. After my mom died. A person I really respected said, why don't you try this very intentional ceremony? And I just kind of jumped right. I had no context at all. And those four hours were the most important moment of my life. More important than my mom dying than my son being born, getting married because it tied everything together. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah

CALLEY MEANS: And it helped resets

AUBREY MARCUS: Four hours sounds like psilocybin, 

CALLEY MEANS: Four to six, four plus a lot of unpacking.

AUBREY MARCUS: It could be Ayahuasca. 

CALLEY MEANS: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: It’s four to six

CALLEY MEANS: A little psilocybin. And I'll just share that it's been a passion of mine to evangelize that on the right side of the aisle where I used to work and I'm kind of all over the place now, but I talked to Tucker about it on a show a year ago. I've been working with a lot of members of Congress. We have to believe in people, the banning of psychedelics, in the face of incredible research by Nixon with leaked audio recording of him telling the Vietnam generals that people are thinking for themselves too much, banning it, I think 1971. And then tying any research partnership in the United States to the other country, banning that. So immediately having 200 countries just wiping off the face of the earth was out of fear. It was literally the stated purpose from Nixon was people were thinking for themselves too much. And my personal experience, as I said, the Harvard business school kind of traditional, it did just completely just kick my ass of like, with the lesson of my mom, just how short our time is here.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

CALLEY MEANS: And that was my journey. And it's why I'm on this fight, but I don't know many people who've done it intentionally, who haven't shared a similar view that it, it's not a panacea and I'll be all for me, but it is a blunt force instrument to show you the truth and kind of inescapably show you the truth. And then you can decide what to do with that. I think most people, if they're called that, should see that quite. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah and look, it may be too much truth too fast, 

CALLEY MEANS: It's gonna be called

AUBREY MARCUS: It is a path of fire, but it's a path that, so I'll never recommend psychedelics outright unless like you said, as someone's called, but there are some things that I will recommend carte blanche every single fucking person. That's breathwork. That's breathwork, right? This is when you're actually going, like Wim Hof breathing, but even deeper than Wim Hof breathing into that shamanic holotropic breathwork, like Dr. Stanislav Grof, propagated from the old tummo pranayama techniques and all of these things. They've been around for a long time, but it's been this really recent, this resurgence in breathwork practitioners and breathwork practice. And Wim's been a great contributor to that, but there's so many different practitioners. And there is literally, in my mind, zero downside and only extreme upside to practicing breathwork. Like, there's no risk. It's only a health benefit. You're going to alkalize your body. You're going to go through positive physiological changes, massive catharsis, which is also one of the deep fundamental structures of medicine. If you go back to ancient Greece, right, catharsis was one of the main strategies of health. It was a diagnosis, catharsis. And then finally they would get to medicine at the very end, after they moved to the psycho spiritual body. But this is one of those tools. It's like. All right, get in there. Some same thing like sensory deprivation tanks or a dark room retreat. You know, it's okay if you don't want to take any of these plant medicines or any of these psychedelics, but you have to find a bridge to get back in touch with the intelligence of your body and understand how to heal. And this is a starting place where it's like, yeah, a hundred percent every single person.

CALLEY MEANS: Here's where I'm convinced. Like, it sounds like a political slogan. It kind of is, but I think it's true. It's just like believing in the American people. There's such cynicism about the American people. Like, I think the system, we just have trillions of dollars that slant us into one mechanism. We've been gaslighted and battered over the head. That a prescription pad or a scalpel or medical interventions, all that works. My dream and what I'm really trying to operationalize and thinking about policies and incentives, helping RFK, is that there's 4. 7 trillion. We follow incentives, unfortunately. So those 4. 7 trillion of healthcare are slanting people into this pharmaceutical. We don't necessarily need to dictate people to do breathwork, but those could be incentives, if we're going to have them, if we're going to have that 4.7 trillion dollars, it could foster and nudge people into more of a path of curiosity. It could use

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, sure.

CALLEY MEANS: All I'm asking for is to follow the science like it's just again, if an alien came down that kind of blind to what our policy solutions were and looked at the science and then looked at what's happening with like constant trauma, people detached from interconnect of everything, are soil dying because we have so little understanding of metabolic health and what we're eating. 70 percent ultra processed food, our cells just rebelling against us, right? And they'd look at the science and just look at like, they would say, okay, we need to drive public policy to breathwork. Like we need to drive public policy to farming. We need to drive public policy. And that to me is where the rubber hits the road on RFK's policy. It's unwinding where the money's going and where the incentives are and actually just falling to science. I've been through kind of this traumatic experience with my mom, my sister dropping out of the medical system, kind of being kicked in the ass out of this kind of conservative trajectory into more of the stuff I considered hippie, but it's absolutely changed my life. And I know most of your listeners are on a much better path, longer path than me on this. It's the most important part of my life, like not any specific tactic. And this is why I kind of take issue with some of the optimization bros who are like, you need to cold plunge for 12 minutes and go in the sauna for 57 minutes. I think it's more actually and we talk in the book about a path of exploration and really just getting more in tune with your body and that's just what I would say. That's where I'm trying to play is like you can enshrine this into the policy, like you can literally prescribe, I'm not even joking, you can prescribe farming or gardening to somebody with depression. My non-profit and company for people with depression, we have a quick digital health survey that can assess you and literally write a doctor's note. A third party provider can, if they choose to write a note for exercise, for healthy eating, for various vitamin deficiencies. And you can buy your gym membership if you qualify with HSA FSA dollars. That's a 40 percent savings instead of waiting to go to pharma. Like, there's ways to do this and pour gasoline on those policies. We transform the country. 

AUBREY MARCUS: That’s amazing

CALLEY MEANS: We would transform the country and that's just simply following the science. I don't even have an anti pharma diet tribe, I just say follow the science and SSRI or a path of exploration with breath breath work, maybe doing some cold plunging exercising, you mentioned gardening. I think literally gardening in a in a controlled study would be more effective than SSRIs But there's study there is 

AUBREY MARCUS: There is a controlled study on on gardening

CALLEY MEANS: Yeah, 

AUBREY MARCUS: We can we can link it in the show notes 

CALLEY MEANS: And there's study after study saying, two cohorts of people SSRIs and therapy and I'm not against therapy. But just for the sake of the study SSRIs and therapy versus people that eat unprocessed food and workout. The people that eat whole food and workout crush, like, on remission of depression. The people who are doing therapy and SSRI. So, it all sounds kind of, I used to think it sounded hippie, but this stuff is just scientifically validated. Obviously the right journey we should be prompting the American people on, but we're not, I think, because of fear. We're not because I think it's hard to control a population whether they're doing psychedelics or just any type of modality that's giving them more awe for the world, that's helping them process their trauma, that's helping them get outside the matrix, any modality that helps with that is repressed. It's why

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

CALLEY MEANS: We're fast tracking ozempic in 68 weeks. We pop out SSRIs to now teenagers in high school like candy. It's like a running joke. I get high school counselors reaching out to me. The stat, I think it's like doubled the rates of prescriptions among teens in like the past. We'll have to check this. But it's like a very short period of time. It's like less than 10 years. We've had a doubling and there's a black box warning on the ssris for suicidal ideation. You have to explain to me how the antidepressants cause an acute increase in suicide and suicidal ideation for teens. But there's a warning and it's like doubled very quickly the rate of prescription for teens whereas psychedelics where, and I'm sure many folks know this, but just to be clear, I was just chatting with Rick Doblin the other day about this, but it just to a person, he's going through the different schools, Harvard, UCSF, the most elite institutions in the country. I mean, in this case, they're doing some good research. The neuroscientists say it's the best research they've seen in their career. It's the best, most efficacious, and lowest side effect reversal of PTSD and depression ever studied. And that's being slow walked. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

CALLEY MEANS: It's been totally slow walked. I'm completely indignant, um, with the mental health crisis. Why hasn't this been improved yet? 

AUBREY MARCUS: Sure. 

CALLEY MEANS: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And if people are wondering, well, how would this happen in scale? Well, look, we have State and government institutions that all have gymnasiums. And guess what? They're not always full, I went to public high school, great public high school, even Westlake, Westlake high gymnasium, not always full. You could easily have daily breathwork available open to the public

CALLEY MEANS: 100 percent

AUBREY MARCUS: In every middle school and every high school and elementary school and for all people to come in and just put in some kind of application and then get in there and get trained breathwork practitioners or have workouts in the park. There are lots of for profit businesses have done this and you go Barry's bootcamp and it's out on the fucking beach or whatever, but we could have just whole, just slews of people from government subsidies actually working in the right way. And clearly we had no issue generating trillions of dollars out of thin air to lock people down during the pandemic. So this would take a fraction of that. And then we would recoup that money. And in multiples, exponential multiples, as time went on, if we actually rolled this out, it wouldn't actually be that enormous of a lift. There would be an educational aspect of this, and then there would be a rollout. But we have the spaces available. We have the resources available. We just need to encourage and apply those resources.

CALLEY MEANS: I think one of the most nefarious lies is these things are hard to do. Well, lifestyle interventions are hard. They take a long time. Oh, It's hard to get people to change their diet. Well, my sister started medical school from the first day. They said the American patient's lazy. They actually breed systematically a cynicism about the American people into the doctors, they say that the skyrocketing rates of heart disease and diabetes are predetermined, that we're never going to solve that. What they fail to realize is this all just happened in the past 40 years, right?

AUBREY MARCUS: Right. 

CALLEY MEANS: We haven't systematically gotten a death wish as a society as a species in the past 40 years, our genetics haven't changed. Like, our environment has been poisoned, period. Our metabolic inputs, stress, food, movement, sunlight, down the list, sleep, have been poisoned. And then, working for these companies, you actually pay influencers and pay doctors. And pay people to say how hard it is, there's literally research saying dietary inferentials fail. What's like, who do you have weaponized addictive food that we allow? We're the only country in the world that allows thousands of additives in our food because the food is covered in glyphosate, which is being banned in every other country. Our food is literally poison. Of course they fail. So I think that’s the point about being hard. What’s hard right now is that we are going to go bankrupt from this crisis? And again, my eyes kind of gloss over that often looking at the stats, but the largest industry in the country, 20 percent of GDP growing faster than any other industry. It's gonna be 40 percent in 15 years. So it's like it's going to bankrupt our country and I can tell you having a mom dying of cancer, having chronic rates of diabetes, having chronic rates of heart disease, what's happening right now is pretty hard. Walking to a classroom is hard. With the mobilization of covid can, in six months, change the stuff. I think that's why it's really important RFK entered our conversation last week. And I think the most important statement of political candidates made in my lifetime is, he said he's going to take the covid state of emergency, this state of emergency, the power president has for public health to take decisive action, he's going to take that and throw that covid emergency out, but declare an emergency for childhood health. Now that sounds kind of aggressive, but the president absolutely. And the founders interpretation and what the founders wanted is, has responsibility to take decisive action for public health and we have an existential moment where our leadership and institutions have completely failed. If there is one issue in our lifetime where decisive action is needed, where somebody who knows about the swamp and how to navigate it, who knows and has an ingrained plan of what to do, we have to take decisive action to change the incentives, changing the incentives of health, having research not go like today with NIH grants to 80 percent of professors who have a conflict of interest, who are paid by the drug companies for the core disease they're actually getting a research grant on, right? Not an agriculture system that has a hundred billion dollars that go to subsidize ultra processed food, not a mental health program that goes, we're literally Harvard was having a conference recently and they could not find a mental health professional, a doctor who wasn't paid for by a SSRI maker. They literally couldn't find one to speak to. You can take very decisive action. And I think that state of emergency, quite frankly, day one on childhood health, is warranted and very important. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, and it's also one of the things that I find frustrating about people who say like why do you even care about politics? It doesn't even matter, they're so disenchanted 

CALLEY MEANS: Right 

AUBREY MARCUS: With what leadership has done in the past. And I understand that there's a reason for disenchantment, but it doesn't mean that the actual process of putting systems in place can't actually be creative and helpful to the populace. Like, come on, y'all, of course, a good president can actually change the course of a nation. Of course they can. And it's like, this is one of the ways that I think the empire has seeded this doubt and cynicism. Like I'm not even going to vote at all. Okay, great. You know, who loves that the most, the ones who are really profiteering right of all of the diseases that are ubiquitous. 

CALLEY MEANS: I completely agree. I mean, the guests you have on, who are predominantly talking about personal empowerment and bottoms up solutions and kind of how to improve ourselves and not ranting about kind of high level politics like has changed my life, right? And I think it's got to be an individual empowerment journey. And that's generally what I like to listen to and has changed my life is kind of, and we try to talk about them in the book, personal empowerment tips given my background growing up in the swamp, being a swamp creature for a while. I'm trying to add that to the debate that I want to be really clear. The bottom up empowerment and people waking up and being, I think, radicalized by Covid is leading to the environment we're in right now, which I think we might be in the most consequential year of our lifetimes with this election and basically all powers of the elites telling people to shut the hell up. But people are rebelling back. I know, you obviously, I think, have some cynicism about Trump potentially. But, you know, I think it is actually for better or worse than, a lot to say about all candidates. But the fact that Trump and RFK are getting over 70 percent of the vote in a three way race and the fundamental rationale, whatever you think about those individuals, the fundamental rationale about those candidates is essentially, I think, very similar, which is that our institutions are totally failing us. And RFK says this, better than anyone, obviously. But when you talk about institutions, healthcare is number one. I mean, there is a truth, despite every effort of all institutions, despite trying to vilify and savage RFK and not let them have any platform, this is breaking through. I think that's because of this bottoms up awakening, but we are not going to be successful with this albatross of trillions of dollars of incentives against us. We have to change that. And that's where I'm devoting my life to. We have to use all the systems that are being used against us. We've got to use the free market. We've got to use the legal system. We can talk about that. Executive orders, bold executive orders for better or worse. We're in a situation where Congress is completely paralyzed. We have to have bold executive action, and eventually we need to have legal and law change. But we've got to use those systems

AUBREY MARCUS: And just simple game theory of changing the incentives, and I even look at something like the prison industrial complex, right? For example, 

CALLEY MEANS: Hundred percent 

AUBREY MARCUS: Like they're paid more to keep more people in their beds. It's like a hotel

CALLEY MEANS: Right

AUBREY MARCUS: They want full occupancy, right? Like that's their profit incentive. So are they actually genuinely from a game theory perspective, incentivized for a great recidivism reduction program that keeps people out of coming back to prison? No, they want repeat customers as well. So these are the things that a government can do to actually switch the incentive structure. And I don't know exactly how. But this is wise, you know, an executive could actually start thinking about it. All right, let's switch the incentives. Let's switch the incentives. If you're a hospital in this region and you have fewer and fewer people coming, all right, then you get rewards. If you're in a prison and you have fewer and fewer people returning to that prison, it means you're doing a good job in allowing people to come back and reintegrate non criminally back into society. Like let's reward that. Let's find a way to actually flip the incentive structure. And my mind likes money well spent and the free market can handle some of that. But for something like the prison system, it can't really handle that exactly. Right. So we may need some actual governmental ways in which we can actually encourage correctly, incentives to change the game theory 

CALLEY MEANS: So when I go to policy conferences in DC. It's nauseating, right? We have a chronic disease crisis out there where we're literally being brought to our knees by metabolic dysfunction and diabetes, heart disease, cancer rates. We talked about obesity, overweight 80%. And you go today. I was at one last week in DC. And it's like literally people giving speeches about page 300 of the Medicare Part D law and how we need to change like two lines of it, right? It's minutia. And the fundamental thing we need presidential leadership for is actually killing the sacred cows like the fundamental structure of, it's not editing page 300 of medicare party. It's that every system of healthcare is incentivized for us to be sick. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yep. 

CALLEY MEANS: We have to attack those incentives and it's actually with courage, not that hard. And this again, I'm trying to really study what RFK is saying. And we've got lawyers drafting executive orders and really actually lawyers who have expertise with the FDA and creating policies, working with some of his team members to really have things ready to sign on day one. But for example, you can go down the list. There's many of these, but with a stroke of a pen, with a stroke of a pen, tomorrow, you can cut pharma ads on TV news. Now, what will happen? What would a normal kind of environment look like? You would have unrelenting protests and every media entity in the country saying that this is an assault on free speech, it's cutting their revenue.

AUBREY MARCUS: Ironic. 

CALLEY MEANS: He'd be called 

AUBREY MARCUS: Given the assault on free speech.

CALLEY MEANS: He'd be vilified. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Sure. 

CALLEY MEANS: Right? You need somebody with the balls to say, fuck you, it will cost jobs. Right? This will immediately cost tens of thousands of jobs in the media business. It will destroy a large part of an industry, you have to have some of the balls and moral core courage to put the pen across that paper, that's going to cause real issues. Another one, the US, we have to get out of this idea that the US is leading the world on anything with healthcare. I'll just say this, I'd ask anyone listening, tell me a chronic disease treatment that has really led to rates of the currency going down as we talked about. 

AUBREY MARCUS: No. The only thing that the US is probably leading in is maybe like Achilles repair surgery. 

CALLEY MEANS: A hundred percent. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Brother Aaron Rodgers. He got a pretty good

CALLEY MEANS: That’s seven percent. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And it's acute. 

CALLEY MEANS: That's seven percent of cost. I got an Achilles last year. It was great. A hundred percent. Although you can actually repair an Achilles without surgery, I got it. Totally agree. That's in the framework. But another stroke of a pen. You can, and frankly this is a bipartisan issue right now, Biden's talking about it, you can make it, that drug company, in the US, can't charge a 10x lower price. The US drug companies in other countries, even Europe, charge 10 times lower for drugs. You can't even make this up. They're bilking the US taxpayer because of the system that they've rigged. Ozempic is more than 10 times less expensive in Denmark, the home country. They have a law where their own companies can't extort their own government. So, Ozempic is, like, under 100 dollars in Denmark and 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, this is just usery.

CALLEY MEANS: You could pass a law that US companies, we can't do that, that you have to have flat rates and we're not going to subsidize this like the sick care system. You would have immediate hand wringing right. You'd have pharma saying that you're crushing the engine of innovation. It's like what innovation? If this is innovation, what's happening with chronic diseases, we can stop the innovation. But you need a president that has the moral courage that when you have hundreds of millions of dollars of ads of him pushing an old person off a cliff which will run, right? When you have the NAACP saying he's being racist, because they're paid by these pharma companies, etc. You need somebody with balls to stand up to that.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, 

CALLEY MEANS: That's the key as long as you have that, the last thing i'll just say is the conflicted research, the NIH is a grant making organization. That is outsourced pharma R&D. As I said, dr. Fauci oversaw, if you add it up, it's hundreds of billions of dollars potentially more. He was the largest check writer in the country for medical research since 1980. Again, just a dramatic increase in autoimmune conditions, which he had oversight on, of chronic disease, which he had huge amounts of oversight on. He propelled this system that profited and grew from the fact that chronic diseases were growing up. And then all of this research went to ways to marginally treat that. You could tomorrow say that the NIH can only do foundational research into why people are getting sick. That's not what they do right now. They outsourced pharma R&D. That will immediately, you'll be accused, the president of attacking science, of attacking medical research, right? Even if you're not touching funding, even if you're just saying that it can't go to conflict researchers. You just need somebody with the balls to stand up to those things. This really actually isn't complicated or hard. It's about leadership. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yep. And this is, in many ways, this is analogous to right now, Mordred, the deceiver has taken over Camelot. And America for all of its problems and for all of its civil rights issues and for all of its challenges, it represented Camelot. It represented a place of freedom, it represented a place of hope. There was an American dream. Everybody wanted to immigrate here legally. They wanted to be part of this energy that we had cultivated, we were cultivating. And again, not glossing over the problems. Of course we had problems. Everybody had problems. We had problems too, but now clearly Mordred, the dark wizard, the deceiver has taken over and is ruling from the shadows and all of these sock puppets and all of these talking heads are really being guided by Mordred behind the scenes. And now what we really need is the return of the King, the return of the King to come back and set the land back in order. And we need that now more than ever. And look, I think some people are, I think there's a trump derangement system syndrome. They call it where they like to see trump and they just tilt like a pinball machine where all the lights go off. And I'm not like that at all. I just think that there's a far more fucking capable human being. There's a real, someone who really stands with his heart forward, his eyes clear, and the absolute courage to do what is necessary. And the vision, eagle eye vision, I think it's also an unbelievable synchronous metaphor that he's a falconer and he can see with that eagle's eye vision, the eye of the Falcon to actually see what the fuck is going on and actually affect the change that we need affected. And he's just, he's the right guy. He's the right guy. And so from now until that moment, when the last ballot is cast, like I'm just pouring out that message. I've never been political. I've never even voted because I've never had belief in the system. I was probably libertarian by kind of, I had to choose. But now it's like, no, this matters more than ever. And it's the return of the King's time. And that's the part of the story we're in. And we're all a part of this fight. And I just deeply applaud you for your efforts in being one of the Knights of the round, that is helping to give hope for Camelots to return. 

CALLEY MEANS: Thank you. I'm a small foot soldier and just trying to use the tools at our disposal is something I'm interested in fighting these battles and there's a bottoms up uprising happening. And there's cavalry coming from the top down, working with billionaires who are funding lawsuits against the food companies, who are drafting executive orders. Lawmakers are waking up. I am optimistic. This is a great country. I think it still is the beacon on the hill I really do. I mean still we have so much going for us, right? I really do think like talking to so many people on this journey and hearing about their health issues. I think people want to be healthy and our country is still great but we've got to get this right. We’ve got to get this right. Let's not get distracted with the bullshit issues they're trying to distract us on. We've got to stop being poisoned. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

CALLEY MEANS: And we've got to stop having the largest industries in our country wanting us sick. We've got to attack that incentive. If we don't change that incentive, nothing else matters. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Amen. Okay. Hey, let's fucking go, sir. Calley Means. Yeah. Thanks for coming on, brother. And thanks for all the work that you've done. And just also thanks to everybody else. Who's given you a platform as well, to Tucker and all the people. I mean, that's one of the first places I found out about you. And just kudos to all the independent media that also has the courage to stand up and host people like yourself who can spread these messages. 

CALLEY MEANS: It's the bipartisan issue of our time. This is not divisive. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, right on. Thank you everybody. We love you. See you next week.