Joe Rogan Experience #2461 - Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Strain by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

I like them, but if it's just me wearing them, it feels stupid.

Why do you wear them?

I like it because it locks me in. Just locks me in. The only thing I hear is that person's voice. I can't hear Jamie's chair moving And I can't hear Jamie's chair moving. I can't hear anything else. And it just, like, makes me really, like,

focused on the conversation only.

I have ADHD. I had 11 siblings, and I have seven kids, so I can work. I can focus. No matter what? No matter what.

It's a skill. It's a thing to learn. you know, if you if you're the person that can focus without distraction You're in a good You're a good person to be in the job. You're at yeah What is it like so since you've been appointed I haven't talked to you on a podcast. I know

Yeah on a podcast. I know. Yeah. It's the best job I could ever have. I feel like I was designed for the job and I just have so much fun. I mean, it's a target-rich environment, so there's so many ways that you can be effective and improve people's lives every single day. Part of that is because the agency was just such a mess. You know, it wasn't doing healthcare. It was doing sick care and just managing, you know,

all of these perverse incentives. And have us spending $5 trillion a year, two to three times per capita when any other nation spends and we have the sickest population in the world. We have the highest chronic disease burden in the world. And you were the best at medicine in this country. But that's when people get sick.

You'd rather get sick here than any place in the world. But you're more likely to be sick here than any place in the world. And then it was just a big political patronage operation. And it still is. And, you know, we're putting an end to that now. I mean, the amount of fraud that goes through that place, we lose just in Medicare $100

billion a year. And it's all just this really, you know, shocking blatant fraud where that's become industrialized. I mean, there is foreign nations like Russia. Everybody's heard of Somalia but also Cuba as this operation in Florida where it's, they open up these little, they open up these PO boxes for durable medical equipment, it's like knee braces and wheelchairs.

And then they don't have any knee braces or wheelchairs, but they have patient identification numbers. So they just claim to be shipping them to people. And we found one hotel, it had like 129 rooms, and everyone was a different company that was selling durable medical equipment.

And we go in and shut them down, and they immediately go back to Cuba. The whole thing is apparently run by the Cuban government but Russia's doing the same thing with hospices. Where do they get the patient ID numbers? They can buy those numbers you know they on the black market. Really? Yeah and Russia does the same thing in Los Angeles with hospice care. So there's more hospice care in Los

Angeles than the entire rest of the country combined. It's all fraudulent. And we're just pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into these fraudulent operations. The same thing that the Somalis did in Ethiopia. A lot of that money was going back to Boko Haram and terror groups over there. But they were—it was—a lot of it was based—the Medicare stuff is different and we're able to—we're going to be able to catch almost all of that now because we're using AI to do it. It was never used before. There was no effort at

program integrity. In fact, the Biden administration deliberately, purposely ordered them – they ended the program integrity office. So they went from hundreds of people to six people and they said, we don't want you doing program integrity. We just want you doing enrollments." And so we got all this fraud. Most of it came from these waivers that the states got, all the states got them for home

care and community care. So you know, 30 years ago, Medicaid and Medicare play, if you got a hernia operation, we paid for that. And you could tell somebody got the hernia operation because they had the scar, they used a licensed nurse, they used a licensed doctor, it was all documented. Then some of the states said, you know, we're sending a whole lot of people to the hospital and we don't have home care providers. So if you let us pay family members to do home care, the patient won't have to go to

the hospital, they won't have to go to the emergency room and we'll save a lot of money. So it was well-intentioned but then what happened is people immediately started abusing it. So today, if you – these are services that are normally played by family members, performed by family members. Buying groceries for your grandmother and bringing them home, you now get paid for that. Balancing your grandmother's checkbook, driving her to a medical visit. So

then you had this organized fraud where and this is what happened in Minnesota. These organized crime companies would come in and say you designate this family, you designate all your children have autism now, even if they didn't. And we're going to now pay providers for each of them and we'll give you a few thousand dollars to do it, but then they would collect all the money and that's what was happening. It's happening all over the country because there was no, it's very, very difficult.

The guardrails on that system were very pervious and anybody can defraud it. If you are inclined to defraud, this was an irresistible opportunity.

How long was this going on for? Like when did this fraud begin, do you believe?

It really accelerated during the Biden administration. We expected to pay for the Minnesota program just for autism care for kids with autism. The kids need the care because, you know, they go to maybe a special school, but then they come home from school and the parents aren't there because they're working. So who's gonna take care of them? So in legitimate circumstances, you would wanna pay for that. But what happened is they just started this wholesale fraud.

We expected the cost of that program to be about $3 million here in Minnesota, in Minneapolis. It got up in over three year period, it got up to $400 million a year. So it was all fraudulent, almost.

I just don't understand. So this accelerated during the Biden administration, but when did it begin?

Like how long has it been going on?

Because they stopped doing program integrity. They told specifically, they told people in my agency and I've talked to them, we don't want to do program integrity anymore. We now just want to focus everything on enrollments. In other words, enrolling more people in Obamacare and the programs and you could say there was

bad motives there because one, the states don't pay. The states pay a tiny fraction of it, but it's all goes to the federal government. So the states don't really want to do fraud detection because all that money is coming into their state. And then every time you enroll somebody, you're registering them to vote.

And so, you know, they may have had ulterior motives. Let me put it that way. But right now, what we're doing is we're saying to the states, we have audited you. We expect that we believe that 50% of the program dollars you're spending were fraudulent or possibly fraudulent or possibly fraudulent, you show us a corrective action that you're going to take or we're going to withdraw that money the next time. The money's not being withdrawn from individuals.

We're not reimbursing the state for it until they told us. Now, the red states have all said, yeah, we'll do it. But Maine, Minnesota, California, New York have said no we're not gonna. Basically they sent us corrective action that was just, you know, it was ridiculous.

So is there financial incentive? Are these people that are making all this money from fraud, are they donating to any specific groups? Like, is there a direct turnaround?

The Cubans in Florida, and Florida, you know, they get mad at Trump because they say, oh, all the states you're designating are blue states. That's just because the blue states refuse to cooperate. But Florida's a red state, and we're really going after them. We're shutting down all durable medical equipment, reimbursements for the whole state, because it was all being run. It was probably being run by the Cuban government.

But I don't understand how no one saw it. No one from the government saw it. And would there be a reason why they weren't looking for it, other than they just wanted it? They were only thinking about recruitments but were they also was anybody making money outside of these crime organizations I would say no the

money was not this the states were making money right but there was a lot

of talk online about donations to parties and donations to NGOs and done

that that is probably true too although I don't have any evidence of that.

No evidence, okay. So it really just...

And you wouldn't have, you know, even if you get those kind of donations, it's not the kind of proof that I would talk about because you cannot prove that...

Right.

...that that donation, you know, motivated the bad behavior.

But it just, it really highlights how ideologically captured some people are, that because it's the right wing going after this Medicaid fraud, that somehow or another, that fraud is okay. And that fraud's not that big a deal that there's... I mean, like, what's the all told number that's been stolen from this stuff over the, if you had to take a wild guess?

It's at least $100 billion a year. $100 billion a year. Just from Medicaid and Medicare.

That anybody would not want to stop that kind of crime because it's attached to the wrong party is, it just shows you how weird this country is right now.

Yeah. I mean, I listen, I was a Democrat my whole life. And, you know, one of the thing and then I... What are you now? Now, I'm kind of, first of all, it's illegal for me now to vote in any state. So I don't really have a party affiliation because, you know, they challenge, I was a New York State resident. When I was running, they sued me and they said,

oh, you don't really live in New York, you live in California. I said, yeah, but my driver's license is from New York, my law license is from New York, I have an address in New York, my car is registered in New York,

my falconry license is in New York, my car is registered in New York, my falconry license is in New York, my hunting license is in New York, my fishing license is in New York, and I intend to return to New York." And there were hundreds of cases, just black letter laws saying, the only measure is if you intend to return there at some point. We got crooked judges and they said, no, you're not a New York resident.

I'd already said I'm not a California resident I don't intend to stay there So now I'm not leave, you know, I'm not legally allowed to vote in any state But you know I saw this with Party my father hated partisanship because he thought it was dishonest. And he

said, he always said, told us, you should vote for the man, not the party. Or the way, you know, he said the man because at that time, it was predominantly men. But I saw this when Trump, you know, I grew up in a Democratic Party that was very anti-NAFTA. So it was against working people and labor unions. Then Trump said that he was anti-NAFTA. All of a sudden the Democratic Party was pro-NAFTA.

And that's what turned my head the first time. And then, you know, when I was – then I saw how they – Trump questioned vaccines during the 2016 election. The Democratic Party – it was kind of that skepticism and the concerns were spread evenly across the party. My uncle Ted Kennedy was very much on the side of medical freedom and it was evenly spread.

But as soon as Trump said that, it became part of the dogma of that party. And then, you know, when I ran, we were, you know, it was one of the things I ran against was the Ukraine war. And the Democrats were always the anti-war party. But as soon as Trump questioned that war, they became the pro-war party and they invited the CIA director to speak at the Democratic Convention. And it just is – the party's only agenda is we hate Trump and anything he says, we're

going to do the opposite of it. And it makes me very sad for the party and I don't think it's a sustainable way to operate.

No, there has to be some sort of an appeal to people in the middle that left when things went crazy. Just let us know you're not crazy anymore. Let us know you've abandoned a lot of this crazy stuff. And also, recognize what's good for everybody, right? Hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud is not good for any of us, the whole country. So we should

all be together on this one thing like this is terrible. This is stealing from your tax money, all of our tax money. Us, American citizens, we should all be united on stopping any kind of fraud. Forget about who's the fucking president and what what's who's gonna get? Responsibility for it who's gonna take who's gonna get the accolades like who cares stop fraud stop We're all together. You shouldn't have criminals from other countries living here Just stealing money from Medicaid that seems like that should be a bipartisan issue in a rational society

yeah, and like that should be a bipartisan issue in a rational society. Yeah and you know on the you know I saw this the craziness when we did the the Tylenol findings because you know the science is really clear that and there were there are dozens done I read 76 studies over a weekend and when you know when we were looking at this and the studies that support time and all the safety are very weak and have huge holes in them there's overwhelming science that says you shouldn't take it particularly you know

it's okay for normally you shouldn't take it during pregnancy and particularly the last days of pregnancy or in the perinatal period, prenatal period, which is immediately after pregnancy. You don't wanna take it because the association with Tylenol usage at that point

and neurodevelopmental disease are very, very high and pretty clear. And so we issued a warning. We didn't ban Tylenol. We just sent a letter out to all doctors saying be careful about... We didn't want to ban it during pregnancy because as bad as it is, it's the best thing. It's better than taking ibuprofen or aspirin.

Why is aspirin bad?

They have, because of Reye's syndrome. It has a clear association with Reye's syndrome and they all have problems.

What is that word, Reye's syndrome?

Reye's syndrome, R-E-Y-E-S. What is that? It's, I'm not sure exactly what it does.

Put that in our wonderful sponsor, Perplexity.

And if you put aspirin use in Reye's syndrome, you'll see the...

So is this just with pregnant women or with people in general?

Yeah, for pregnant women. And pregnancy or young children.

Oh. So baby aspirin? Didn't they always used to have children's aspirin? Yeah, I don't know if they do it anymore. Why syndrome is a rare but serious condition causing sudden brain swelling and liver damage primarily in children and teens recovering from viral Infections like flu or chickenpox become very rare due to reduced aspirin use in kids Wow Aspirin

Yeah, I always thought of aspirin is like the most natural and healthy out of all those things that you take for pain

I think it is pretty safe, but It's um avoid aspirin and what's that word? those things that you take for pain. Oh, I think it is pretty safe, but it's, um.

Avoid aspirin and what's that word? You say it.

Phthalocyanine.

What is it?

Phthalocyanine containing meds.

Phthalocyanine containing meds in children, teens with flu, chicken pox, or cold. Use acetaminophen or ibuprofen instead. Vaccinate against flu and chickenpox and screen newborns for metabolic risks. So acetaminophen is the issue in Tylenol, right?

Yeah. Because I read this terrible story about a lady who died during COVID because she did not from COVID, from Tylenol. She just kept taking Tylenol.

Well, Tylenol shuts down your liver if you take enough of it. That's what happened to her. But what I was saying is, you know, when we issued this warning, it was immediately condemned by the Democrats. Oh, you know, here's Trump and Kennedy doing, you know, weird science again. And then you had all of these videos, these viral videos on Tick Tock of pregnant women eating, eating Tylenol. Yeah. To say

fuck Trump. Yeah, to say fuck Trump. It's crazy. I hope they didn't really do it. I hope they were pretending, because that's so dumb. It's just so stupid.

Why would you even want to risk that? How is that not a thing that you just abandon all party affiliation and go, the health of my child, this is science. They're not saying don't take Tylenol. You could still buy Tylenol.

It's a good thing to know that if you take too much of something, it's bad. There's a lot of things that are fine if you take one or two pills. But if you're that poor lady with COVID, you just keep taking it over and over and over again,

you'll die. We should know that. It doesn't mean you shouldn't take aspirin or you shouldn't take Tylenol. It just means know when to take it and when not to take it and know how much to take. Like that's all information that everybody should want to be out there. The fact that people want to connect that to Trump and I'm gonna take Tylenol while I'm pregnant like oh is this what like imagine the aliens

watching us and going they're not ready. They're not ready for sophisticated time-traveling technology. These fucking dopes, like, what are they doing? They're fighting over nonsense. You know, and it's like, it's all heavily accelerated by social media.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the algorithms just amplify that polarization. Yes. They're just telling you what you want to hear and validating your worldview all the time.

And also just outraging you, just outraging you all the time. I've been off it for a while now and it's like it frees your brain. It's like all the weirdness of thinking about nonsense in the world just, you're aware of it peripherally But it's not in your face all day which I think most people are dealing with a lot more even than I was and they're just

bombarded by sensation bombarded by anger and frustration and angst and

Kind of liberates The darkest impulses of the human spirit. I mean, I don't use it either, but I post stuff. But, you know, if I started reading my comments and taking them seriously, I would.

No, it's terrible. I genuinely thought when you joined forces with Trump and then Tulsi did as well, I was like, okay, maybe this will unite us more and make more people realize that there's a lot of people that are being left out, that are in the center of all this and we can all come together and work together.

That's what I thought naively. You know, obviously once you guys got in there, it was you guys were MAGA and like health is bad. And don't stop the dyes. Like no matter what it was, people were ideologically opposed to you being correct about anything

because now you're connected with Trump. So it's like I was watching liberals, the people that are always worried about food ingredients, just dismissing all of this talk about preservatives and glyphosate and red dye and all these different things. And it's just an ideological thing.

Yeah. I mean, it's dogma and it's part of tribalism. It's these, you know, these are, these connectors in our brain that evolved over millions of years was living in these little tribal communities. And, you know, and now you've got, now you've got machines that can activate

those parts of the brain and, you know, they're being manipulated all the time.

Yeah. And then there's a bunch of people that are commenting that aren't even real people. There's that too. There's a lot of manipulation that's going on on social media where who knows who's doing it. There's a bunch of different groups doing it,

but they're not real people that are outraged. They're not real human beings that are saying these things. And they can kind of shift a narrative into a certain direction sometimes. It's a fascinating time to be alive. As far as what you thought this job was going to be before you got in and what it became, what was your expectations when you got in?

Did anything really surprise you?

I mean, you know, I try to go into every part of my life without expectations and just focus on, really narrowly, on what I'm doing day by day. And that actually makes me a lot more resilient because if you don't have expectations, you never get disappointments. And so you can never get crushed.

But I would say that, I had not spent a lot of my life hanging out with Republicans. And what I imagined that they were talking about is exactly the opposite of, you know, now I'm in an administration that is surrounded by immensely talented people and they're immensely idealistic. And, you know, nobody, I always imagined that Republicans

would get together and they'd be thinking about how do we screw the poor and how do we reduce attacks on the rich. And all they're, they're just narrowly focused on how do we solve these big problems and how do we make our country work. And the level of idealism that I see at every level

in the White House and in my agency is inspiring. And then the level of the capabilities, just the competence of the people who I'm surrounded with. I think the thing that shocked me most was how bad the agency was, how inefficient, how nobody seemed to care that people were getting sicker and sicker. Nobody was taking accountability of the fact we're the health agency and yet we have the

worst health and we're the richest health agency in the world. I think HHS is the sixth biggest country in the world if you look at its budget. It's got the biggest budget in the federal government, bigger than the defense budget. And yet, we are absolutely miserable at what we did. I mean, we're literally presiding over this cliff where every American is getting good work. People are just 77% of American kids can't qualify for military service and nobody's asking why is that

happening. We've gone when I was a kid the typical pediatrician would see one case of juvenile diabetes over a 40 or 50 year career. Today, 38% of teens are diabetic or pre-diabetic. So one out of every three kids who walks into this office door, why isn't anybody noticing as the autism rates have gone from 1 in 10,000 in 1970 and people knew what autism was. They knew what it looked like in 1970.

They did the biggest epidemiological study in history to answer the question, what is the percentage? And they came up with 0.8 per 10,000. So less than 1 in 10,000. And today it's 1 in 31. In California, it's 1 in 19. And one in 12.5 boys.

That's crazy.

We are, you know.

That is so crazy. One in 12.5 boys is crazy.

And when my uncle was president, you know, I was a 10-year-old boy. We spent zero on chronic disease. Zero. And today we spend $4.3 trillion a year. And it's the fastest growing item in the federal budget. And it's existential. We can't sustain it. And the Republicans and

Democrats have been arguing for years about whether we do the single payer, Obamacare, this or that. It's all about throwing money. Who gets to keep the money? And we're throwing it at a system that's completely broken. It's not a healthcare system. It's like changing deck chairs on the Titanic. Why is nobody focusing on how do we get people healthy?

Because that's how you solve the healthcare cost problem. Right now, 40 cents out of every dollar that you spend in federal taxes is going to healthcare and about 90% of that is chronic disease. So you know it's clear and Americans don't want to be sick. They're being made sick. The obesity rates have gone from 5% in kids when I was a kid, now close to 20% and in adults, 70% of adults are obese or overweight.

That was not true when we were kids. It's not because Americans got indolent or lazy or hungry. It's because they were being mass poisoned. And you know, the vested interests that are making money on keeping – everybody makes money on keeping us sick. The food companies make money on getting us sick. But pharma makes money on keeping us sick.

The insurance – you would think insurance would want to keep you well but it doesn't. It actually makes more money if more people are sick. The hospitals.

How does the insurance company make more money if people are sick?

Well, I mean, think of it this way. If you're Lloyd's of London, do you want one ship, and you're insuring all the ships in the ocean, do you want one ship to sink a year or do you want a thousand to sink?

If a thousand sink, everybody's gonna be paying you premiums to insure themselves against that eventuality. And you're making money on the friction. So you're making the money that comes into this. You're making your money on the money that comes into the system. So the more that you pump up that comes into this, you're making your money on the money that comes to the system.

So the more that you pump up that volume of money, the more you make. So, you know, nobody is interested, nobody is economically incentivized to make people well and we are not gonna get well until we align those economic incentives

with the health outcomes that we want, which is nobody gets sick, we end the chronic disease epidemic. And that's what we're doing now. We're trying to realign all those perverse incentives. For example, the medical system pays out on fee-based service. That means that the more tests the doctor orders for you, the more drugs he prescribes you, the more contact he has with you, the richer

he gets. Oh he is not incentivized to give you well. We ought to be paying him a flat fee at the beginning of the year and saying anything, any cause from this patient, the rest of the year come out of your pocket. And then he's like, okay, how do I get this guy from getting sick?

And he started studying nutrition books.

And you know, that's actually an interesting idea. It seems so captured at this point. It's going to be difficult to unravel all that.

It's difficult, but it's not impossible. And we're doing it. About three years from now, you're going to see a different health care model in our country.

I think talking about it has a big impact, because most people are just not aware of how the whole system works and what is actually wrong with it. Most people just hear about it. Health care, people are sick. They need healthcare. Why would they cut healthcare? Cutting healthcare is bad. That's what they

would just immediately think. And I think most people, they think of the fraud stuff and they want to dismiss it. I've heard all these people dismiss this Nick Shirley kid and what he exposed in Minneapolis. But the reason why is because it's the wrong party. If this was a Democrat that was exposing Republican fraud, then they would be all into it. It would be on every newspaper.

But instead, they're trying to dismiss it as not relevant.

Yeah, and to me, it's weird because I know Democrats are human beings and they care about the same things that I do. I've known all of these guys, almost all of them, for many of them for 40 years. Bernie Sanders I have known for 40 years. Their only solution is more money to the system, a

system that is broken, that is making us sicker and sicker. And what President Trump wants to do is he wants to fix the system. Stop. Most of that money is not going to the patients. It's going to the insurance companies and the PBMs and all of these middlemen that are milking the system. And that's why President Trump says the answer is to not pay the insurance company.

It's to pay the consumer directly and make him the CEO of his own healthcare. Oh, that he can spend money. He's now incentivized to do prevention and to maybe do holistic medicine or take vitamins or take vitamin D, which, you know, is as you know, it's kind of miraculous.

Or to do alternatives, you know, to's kind of miraculous, or to do alternatives, you know, to do preventative care. And he wants to say, he's gonna want to save money. Right now, nobody is in that position of accountability. We need to make them the CEO of their own health so that they have responsibility and they're gonna pay the cost if they get sick.

Government pays, but they then decide to allocate that, how to allocate that money. And then we need to make the system transparent. And that's one of the things that we're doing. We're, during his first term, Trump passed a transparency bill,

but because Trump had passed, everybody wanted transparency. If you're a woman, you're pregnant, you wanna know how much it's gonna cost you to have that baby. There's no way you can find that out for most of them.

You can go nine months on a phone every day, how much it's gonna cost and you'll never get a straight answer. And so, you know, in New York, for example, what we're doing now is we're going to make all of the hospitals and all the providers post a menu of their prices so that are available to everybody and that are available on a website that we're creating.

So if you want an MRI, and there's 40 places around your home that offer MRIs, you can't right now figure out what they cost. Now you're gonna be able to go and look at them all on a single page and figure out what the cheapest one is. If you go to a restaurant, the price are on the menu. If you go to buy a car and the guy said to you, yeah, you can buy the car,

but I'm not going to tell you how much it costs till after you bought by it. Nobody would operate that way, but that's how our medical system operates. So I looked at, we have a mock up of this website. We're right now during the Biden administration because Trump had passed that law, the Biden administration just refused to enforce it. So we're in the same position now where there's no transparency.

We're changing that now. We've sent out over a thousand letters to hospitals, you know, warning letters. He says, you got to post them right now. And we just finalize new regulations. If they don't do that, they're gonna pay a huge fine. So I saw the mock-up of the website

and I said, I asked the question, how much does it cost in the hospitals within a mile of Manhattan, if a baby? One of them was, there were about 30 hospitals that you could visualize on one page. One of them was $1,300. I was the lowest.

The highest was $22,000. In Detroit, it is the cheapest place to have a baby is about $5,000 and the most expensive is 60,000 and it's the same service, the same quality care, nothing changes except that price. Why do we have that information chaos?

We have it because the industry wants to hide what it's doing and so there's no market. There's no ability for people to make good choices. And when, you know, the – I was staying with Dr. Oz during the transition at his house in Florida and one day Prime Minister Rudd who was the former Prime Minister of Australia came by.

And he had – after he was Prime Minister, he had been appointed to run a commission to reduce healthcare costs and improve quality. And they were very successful, but he said the number one thing that they did at Change Everything was price transparency,

was showing people the price of what they're gonna pay. So we're now gonna do that. And people will be able to shop. And now we also have to shift all of that money away from the insurance companies and put it in the hands of the public so that they are incentivized,

maximum incentivized to make good choices.

So as far as making good choices with like food, I like what you guys did. I love what you guys did with the food pyramid. It essentially flipped it on its head, which is kind of crazy. That for the longest time,

we are being told that the most important things, the primary diet should be grains and rice and wheat. And now it's things that we've known for a long time. It's whole food, actual real food. That's what you're supposed to be eating. The problem is getting people to change their habits and change their ways.

And if people don't start eating good food and if people don't start taking care of their body, how – what other things can you even imagine would shift this trend?

Richard Vedder Well, here's what's going to happen. First of all, the food pyramid – I inherited a food pyramid from the first – I was – I came into office one year and two weeks ago. A week after I got in, I was handed the food pyramid that the Biden administration had. It wasn't even the food pyramid. They got rid of that.

They just were doing the dietary guidelines. So it was the recommendations that would go be reflected in the food pyramid. It was hundreds of pages long, and it was incomprehensible. And it was driven by all the mercantile impulses that had corrupted the fruit pyramid for 50 years. And it was written by lobbyists.

It was written by food industry lobbyists and the same impulses that put Froot Loops at the top of the food pyramid, which isn't even a food. Froot Loops were at the top of the food— Froot Loops were at the top recommendation of the food pyramid. You can ask them to look up the old food pyramid

I need to see where fruit loops stand don't they throw some vitamins on fruit loops. There's only vitamin No But So You know, it's not gonna make it any better for you. No, I'm joking but but it was a ridiculous so

The law so how did so what we did is we got the best nutritionist in the country you know, we got Mark Hyman and we got the nutritionist from the best universities in the country and we put them all in a room and I thought I was gonna take a month It took 11 months because they fought over every recommendation and everything is cited in the source so that we know we have good science.

But you know, some of this stuff, because of regulatory malpractice all these years, some of the studies simply haven't been done. So there are knowledge gaps which we should not have. So now we have a food pyramid and because of the old food pyramid, people didn't like the food on it and they were going to ultra-processed food which was OK on the food pyramid. So now 70 percent of the food that our kids eat is ultra-processed food. Seventy percent of the calories they got and it's just poisoning them.

They took off the good stuff like whole milk milk which is nutrient-dense which is feeding their brain we have two generations of kids that grew up without milk without the proper nutrients for their brain we have the first country in the face of the earth that has chronic obesity and in the same people malnutrition so you have immensely obese people and they're malnourished. They're medically malnourished.

It's because the food pyramid was so messed up. So what's going to happen now, Joe, is that we are going to be able to drive that. We're going to be able to change dietary culture. Just the food pyramid is going to change dietary culture. Here's how. Brooke Rollins who's an incredible USDA secretary, she administers $405 million a day that she

gives out to food subsidies, her school lunches, the WICS program, the SNAP program, Indian Health Services and all of these other programs. And so those programs now are going to get good food because the dietary guidelines dictate what they can and cannot feed kids. Military and the VA also are changing. Now I, this week I met with a guy, Chef Robert Irvine, who is a television chef. He's been hired by Peter Hexeth to come in and change all

the military meals. Military, and he's already on five bases. By the end of this month he'll be on 20. What he's done is the food that we give our military is so bad, they won't eat it. So they're going out and they're spending their money on fast food. And fast food is not cheap. A big Mac meal costs $12 to $14. It's not a cheap meal. You can get a really good food for that price. You could feed yourself the whole day for that price with good food. Mark Hyman's new book has a diet, $10 a day diet, three meals, great food. Anyway, Robert Irvine has gone into these places and he gives them all

fresh food, almost all of it locally sourced. As it turns out, it's cheaper. The military is spending $18 a day for three meals for each soldier. He's spending $10 a day and giving them real food, good food. And the lines now are around the block and nobody's going to fast food. Everybody's fighting to get in and what he says is it doesn't cost more. We don't need any more money. We just need to buy smarter

and to be smarter about how we do it. And you know, we're gonna be able to do that. One of the things that we're doing with the dietary guidelines is the SNAP program. SNAP, we have 20 states now that have applied for SNAP waivers

and have been granted so that you can no longer get candy on SNAP, you can no longer get soda. That was 18% of SNAP purchases. So we are taking the 63 million poorest kids in our country, giving them taxpayer-funded diabetes and then 78% of them end up on Medicaid, many of them being treated for diabetes. So we're paying to give them the disease and then we're paying to treat them for the rest

of their lives. And we're changing that. And one of the things that Brooke is doing is she's going to require that any retailer that accepts food stamps has to double the amount of real food in their establishment. We're working with farmers, we're working with entrepreneurs to make sure every American can get high quality food

that is affordable.

I don't know how anybody would be opposed to that. That all sounds fantastic.

It's weird that they are.

How could you, the way you just laid it out, how could anybody be opposed to that? That all sounds great.

I mean, what the Democrats-

Especially for the soldiers. The fact that they were getting terrible food that they didn't want to eat is just... That's really offensive. You know? Yeah. You think about what you're asking of them and then you're giving them garbage that they

don't even want to eat. Like what do they...

How do they feel that you care about them? Robert Irvin, the chef, told me, he said, you know, it costs $9 to get a frozen salmon. It costs $6 to get a fresh salmon. So, you know, food, good food is actually, if you cook yourself at home, the good food is much, much less expensive. The problem is Americans have forgotten how to cook.

And so, and cooking is really important because it's not a – it's important for family cohesion, for a sense of community. It's a daily, almost sacred ritual and you know taking that away from our lives has amplified the spiritual malaise that we're in and one of of the things we're going to do is to start sending federal workers out to teach people how to cook. They don't have the implements.

They don't have the cutting boards. They don't have – they don't know how to buy groceries. And you can go into any big grocery store in this country. If you go and buy a steak, it's still pretty expensive. But if you buy the cheaper cuts, it's great meat and it is very, very affordable or liver or all these alternatives.

You said, how can you be against that? I told you 20 states have applied for the SNAP program and we've granted them SNAP waivers. Why would you want taxpayer – if you want to drink a Coke, you want to be able to. We live in the United States. We're not going to take anything away from anybody.

The taxpayer shouldn't be paying for it particularly when we're paying for it on the other end in diabetes. So this just makes sense to anybody. Twenty states have applied. Only two of them are blue states. Bernie Sanders has been fighting for this for years, but Vermont won't apply for one. And it's all partisanship and they're putting their hatred of Donald Trump ahead of their

love for their own children. And until we learn to stop doing that, this, you know, the healthcare in this country is not going to improve, at least in those states.

So what strategies, if any, could you ever imagine that could be implemented that would kind of unite people on these things and get them to stop being so partisan about – one of the most important aspects of being a human being is staying healthy. It's like love and health. Those are the top ones that we all want. It just seems insane that we would choose this as a battleground. And it seems insane that it's connected to one party or another. It

shouldn't be. It should just, we should all be united on at least this. And I think if people were a little healthier and they were a little more fit, they'd probably have a lot less anxiety, probably a lot less conflict when it comes to political disagreements. Things could probably be worked out more amicably, especially among friends. It's like having good health improves virtually every aspect of your life.

Yeah, I mean, for everybody. I'd say two things. The food ties directly into your mental health.

Yes.

And we now know that this is so well documented that there's a gut-brain connection and that, you know, depression, ADHD. Chris Palmer up at Harvard is dramatically reducing the symptoms of schizophrenia simply by changing people's diets. He's using a keto diet. There are …

Trevor Burrus dramatically? Like what kind of percentage?

They're losing 30 percent of their symptoms.

Really?

Just from ketones. From keto. have they done anything the same thing is true I mean, you know, there are now there's a big paper about to come out on Losing a bipolar diet a bipolar diagnosis kids who lose by a bipolar diagnosis simply by changing their diet We know that ADHD is driven by all these food diets and stuff and that's very well documented. There's all of these. You go on the internet

and you look for studies that show what happens when you change the food in prisons and juvenile detention facilities. They'll put it in And they, you know, they'll put it in one wing of the prison, they'll put good food and then they'll put the standard food in the other. And the level of violence goes down by 40, 45, 50 percent. The use of restraints in juvenile detention facilities goes down 75 percent. The number of incidents dramatically drops.

And so it's a public safety issue in the prisons. And I've been meeting now with all the prisoners. Prisons have a real problem because they're allocated, eight prisons are allocated to 60 cents a day to feed the prisoners. And it's all, for them it's all about shelf life. So they're just feeding them the worst kind

of poison that you could possibly – it's all just chemicals. Trevor Burrus Oh my God. Ronald McClendon Well, we've kind of given up on the idea

of rehabilitation. It's just all about punishment and then locking them up.

Richard Wagner But this is also public safety. It's guard safety. Trevor Burrus Of course, yeah.

Richard Wagner And the other thing, the answer to your first then locking you up. But this is also public safety. It's guard safety. Of course. Everything else.

And the other thing, and the answer to your first question about how do you sort of, you know, mitigate the polarization, I would say the only way that you do that is by getting people to start talking to each other. Because that, you got to be able to find common ground with other people. And if you don't talk to them You don't see their humanity, right? And you know, that's one of the things that you do that is so great

Which is you bring a lot of people on here who you disagree with and you have a civil conversation about them and you You show your curiosity about them and you you know You you get to hear their rationale and a lot times, I'll listen to somebody on this show, I'll say, I don't like this guy. And then I'll listen to his rationale and I'll think, oh, actually he's making a lot of sense.

And we have to stop hating people because of the label on them.

Yeah.

And start, you know, listening. And it's really important we do that now because these algorithms are designed to drive us all apart. And, you know, we've always had political polarization in this country. I mean, I grew up during the 60s and, you know, there were bombs going off and people being shot and, you know, all it was very, very violent and vitriolic when my dad was running and the polarization

probably was the worst since the American Civil War. But today, when it is amplified by the algorithms, it's hard to see where it's going to end up in a good place unless we start learning to talk to each other.

Trevor Burrus It's not just the algorithm. It's just the – it's also the method of communication. place unless we start learning to talk to each other. It's not just the algorithm, it's also the method of communication. When you're only talking to people through angry tweets back and forth with each other, you were saying sit down and talk to people. No one's doing that anymore.

There's a few FaceTime conversations going on. You see your friends if you go out with them. People are not talking that much anymore and they're not sitting down and talking and when you do everyone's distracted, everyone has their phones

out, everyone's checking text messages. I'll tell you one of the most important things that we're doing right now as part of the Maha legislation from my agency, we're going state by state and we're asking them to do bell to bell legislation so that…and 26 states have now already done it, so more than half the states, so that kids can't use cell phones in schools. I went to a school in Loudoun County the other day and the states love them. I went to Loudoun County and, you know, they had the students had fought and fought against this, against getting their

cell phone. So, the way they do it, all of the schools, school districts and states do it differently. But in that state, they can bring their cell phone to school, but they have to leave it in their backpack. And if the parent calls and needs to talk to them, they can do it. But I walked into cafeteria, 600 kids in that cafeteria, and they're all talking to each

other. They're sitting across the table. Nobody's looking at their laps. The parents came, you know, that day. I pulled the students and I said, how many of you think this is a good idea? And they all put their hands up and they said, we all hated it for the first two weeks and

now we love it. The parents said, it's the best thing that ever happened. My kid is not driving with their cell phone in the car anymore because they know they can live without it. We're eating dinner with the family and we're actually having conversations. And then the teachers and the schools love it because the disciplinary problems

go down and the test scores go through love it because the disciplinary problems go down and the test scores go through the roof because they're focusing on work. So it's just like a no-brainer. But again, it's the blue states that are the hardest to convince to do it because they see it as a Trump, part of the demonization of Trump being the tyrant or whatever.

It's just so stupid to not recognize the kids are distracted. It's just one of those things. Why does that have to be a right or a left issue? It's stupid. This is a United States issue. The best way to have a group of people that succeed in this world is make it as clear a path for them as possible. And as soon as you allow them to use their

phone all day, it's too addictive. No one can put them down. You're going to lose 30% of your concentration or more, easily, I would imagine. The fact that that would be a partisan thing is just nuts. It just shows how goofy we are. I don't know how you get people to talk though. I mean other than, I mean, I do it on a podcast but that's my job.

I don't know how many conversations I'd be having with people who I was politically opposed to or ideologically opposed to or just didn't see eye to eye with them and wanted to know how they think. I don't know how many opportunities I would ever even get to do that.

What you're doing is so important. And now, you know, there's a thousand people imitating you. Really good podcast. But it's teaching people to have conversations. I mean, you are the best teacher, mentor on that, and people admire you.

I have seven kids, and they grew up with devices and stuff. And I would look, I'd slap them out of their hand, and also they couldn't concentrate on long, you know, long points, long conversations. They're like, get to the point. You know, I only got five seconds. You got to make your point. And then I see them sitting for three and a half hours and listening to a Rogan podcast. That was a cultural phenomenon. That was a cultural change. This

generation of kids, I have so much hope for because they grew up with that and they want it. So I do have a lot of hope that we're going to be able to do this. And then I think Charlie Kirk did that too as an example to a lot of those kids because whether you agree with him or not, and he had very strong opinions that people consider terrible.

The one thing that he really did is he talked to people he didn't agree with and he always gave them the microphone and allowed them to amplify their voice and then he had a civility and he talked to them and he used logic a lot of times destructively, but not in an angry way. Yeah. sometimes destructively, but not in an angry way. And so I think, you know, he was teaching people how to have conversations again. You're teaching people how to have conversations again.

And it's, you know, I think that's, you know, one of the big hopes that I have for the future, that people learn to talk to each other with whom they did – with people with whom they disagree.

It would be nice. But there's also a real genuine problem today in the marketplace of outrage that a lot of people, a lot of their podcasts are just focused almost entirely on outrage and of like having arguments and screaming matches with people and you know putting people down and not having civil discourse but trying to win trying to dominate someone in an argument you know trying to squash

people and I guess in a sense some of that is really good because it exposes bad ideas but it just encourages that kind of discourse where if someone's ideologically opposed to you, they are the enemy and you want to destroy them. And I'm like, okay, they're just a human being. Like find out why they got to where they are, that is a different perspective than you have,

and why you got to where you are, and try to figure out if there's some middle ground in there. Like, what do you believe? Why do you believe that? And find out why and ask them and don't cut them off. Let them talk, let them express themselves, help them if you can. Try to figure out what makes someone actually think instead of just thinking that

your ideas are a part of you. They're just ideas. Like, they're not you. Like, some ideas you can hold in your mind and they're bad for you They're bad. You haven't examined them You're acting on them like their doctrine and then you're stuck with that idea because you've already espoused it so many times You don't want to be a flip-flopper and so people get mad and you you get this weird cycle of shitty Communication and nobody ever breaks out of it and nothing ever gets done. And there's no common ground is ever achieved.

And the only way you're gonna ever break that is to stop talking to people like that. You gotta just talk to them. Just instead of talk to them like they're the enemy, just talk to them like they're a fellow human being about some ideas.

And just treat them with respect. Talk to them like a person that, you know, in any other circumstance, maybe even could be your friend. Just talk to them. People can do that, it's possible. It just takes discipline, you have to learn how to do it.

Took me a while, took me a long time to learn how to talk to people better, but it can be done. And-

It's technique, but it's prevalent as as you know that kind of vitriol is on in the podcast world, right? it's It is Incomparable to what's happening on television because there are no conversations on television, right?

That's more of what I was getting at honestly is there's some shows that do that But like some of these CNN shows it's just these crazy ideological battles. And you also, guys, pro tip, you can't have fucking six people at a table all yelling out for seven minutes. You don't have enough time to get a real point across, and it becomes a battle of like,

who's got the best prepared sound bites, or who's got the best snarky quip. It's stupid, it's a stupid way to talk about things.

I mean, Cheryl went on the view Like you say, you know, like let's have a congenial conversation people and

Allow them to to express themselves and to be fun and funny. Yes. Yeah, well, just have a conversation with someone. If you disagree with them about certain things, like they disagree with her, it would have been far more productive to have a one-on-one conversation instead of this gaggle of hands squawking all at her.

It's just like you see it over and over again when they oppose somebody. It's like they're all chiming in and it's just not the way you could ever like thoroughly cover a subject. And they're limited by their format. That format is very limiting. It's a shitty format where you go to a commercial at predetermined times, period, no matter what. Like maybe you got a little leeway here

or there, but you've got to get that commercial in and that's crazy because if you're in the middle of talking a lot of points take a long time to flesh out like just think about all the stuff you just explained about Medicaid imagine if you try to do that and again you can't you can't do it and they would they would try to stop you you're too in the weeds no one's gonna pay attention to this it's like I don't think that's true. And I think we've learned that because of podcasts because there was no production There was no executives. There was no one there people were just putting on a webcam and talking and so we realized like well people actually

Do like conversations still they just don't get a lot of them not real ones You know you get interviews where someone has like a sheet of questions, you know, you get where someone is you know playing a role you're playing a sheet of questions, you know, you get where someone is, you know, playing a role, you're playing a role of a person interviews people, you don't really give a shit about what this person has to say. But people do want connection, they still do. And the fact that we don't get it from social media, but most of our time is in social media is just accelerating this detachment we have from each other. And that's what people have to get past.

I don't know how to do it. Tell everybody to start their own podcast.

You know, you and I were talking before we came in here about Larry King.

Yes.

He did that. There were a lot of people in the 70s and 80s, David Susskind and you know, all of these other people who were actually having conversations.

Yeah, Larry King was great. I love when he asked DJ Khaled, how'd you gain all the weight?

What did he say?

He said, I ate too much.

What do you want me to say? That's such a crazy question.

How did you gain all the weight?

Like, what, Larry? What are you talking about? That's crazy. That's a wild question to ask someone But you know, he would just have a conversation with you, you know And I think people have a hunger for that and a lot of this infighting comes from no face-to-face communication I think when people get a chance, especially if it's not performative

That's part of the problem like the Charlie Kirk stuff or some of the other things that people do in front of a crowd, things become very performative where there's a bunch of people watching and cheering and then you know how the audience feels and you play to them a little bit like, ah, that's probably not the best way to talk about stuff. And I think human beings naturally understand

one-on-one conversations. We've had them for all of human history. And so when you get a chance to hear people talk one-on-one for hours at a time, it expands your understanding of the world. Now I know how you feel about things. I know, at least for this brief three-hour conversation, I get more of a sense of how

you approach things. And then people put that into their own mind and go, maybe I should approach things a little bit differently. Maybe I should think about things a little bit differently. And we miss that, you know, we're missing that. And social media robs you of that.

It gives you the exact opposite of that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, you know what Charlie Kirk was doing, you're right. You know, it was, it was less of a conversation and more of a – Trevor Burrus Sometimes it was a conversation. Richard Wagner It was like in the ring. It was like being in a ring.

But it's a lot better than what's happening elsewhere which is just blanket censorship of people and not any willingness to just shutting people down and canceling them.

Trevor Burrus Yeah, 100 percent.

Richard Wagner That's another weird thing that that's a Democratic Party impulse because it was the opposite of the Democratic Party I grew up with, you know, which was unafraid of any debate. My uncle, my father said, we should be able to debate, we should be able to win these debates in the marketplace of ideas. If we can't, then we need to examine ourselves.

It was a core tenet of the Democratic Party. Yeah. And, you know, the unfortunate shift in that it's just like, you know, I remember during the Bush administration, when the FCC was going after Howard Stern, it was it was this huge thing. They were trying to close down Howard Stern, because Howard Stern was very critical of Bush. And it was like, he was guy out there fighting for free speech and they were getting fined like enormous fines, enormous fines for things that he had said, you know, they deemed to be obscene, you know, and that was a right wing thing. And we always thought of it as a right wing thing. And when you see what's happening today, just like any, the wanting silence of your political opponents is the dumbest way to cut off your own hand. It's so dumb, because if you can't see that this could be used against you, if someone else gets into a position of power,

if all of a sudden some enormous right-wing corporation buys these social media platforms and only pushes right-wing agendas and silences all left-wing agendas. Like, do you know how fucking crazy that is? To just give that kind of power willingly to an anonymous group of people

that you supposedly align to because you're in the same tribe. It's the dumbest thing ever. And the fact that people on the left weren't outraged when they read the Twitter files and found out how much involvement there was

in silencing real information and removing people who were from Stanford and MIT.

The White House ordered me to be removed from Instagram and I lost a million followers.

Insane.

37 hours after he took the oath of office, swearing to uphold the Constitution, they were ordering Mark Zuckerberg to take me down. And then you look at what's happening in England now, you know, people going to jail for Twitter posts.

12,000 people this year. 12,000 in the last year.

And this was the Magna Carta was, you know, written and now there's now it's just and now it's just a dictatorship.

Well, they got rid of trial by jury except for murder and rape and a couple other things. Now it's just a judge. So whatever it is, if it's a social media infraction, if it's – there's no reasonable judge by jury of your peers. No, you're getting judged by a judge.

That's nuts.

It's the Soviet system. It's like Kafka.

I just can't believe how quick it happened. When you look at the social media arrests, they were always disturbing. Like if you go back even four or five years, they had quite a few of them a year. But it really ramped up, really ramped up over the last year or so. And it's just insane to watch. And a lot of it is criticism of immigration. Like legitimate criticism of immigration

and legitimate criticism of crimes that have been committed. And people outraged, which is completely normal. But instead of like doing anything about that, they wanna arrest people from complaining. And it's just really weird to watch.

Yeah.

It's going to get worse with the AI.

It's scary.

Well, it's just strange that they couldn't do anything to stop that from happening and that anybody that's reasonable would be willing to let that happen because their side is imposing

it.

That seems like an existential threat to all critical thinking, all communication and debate. As soon as you start arresting people for opinions, that's crazy. You're getting nuts. Like anything that you deem might incite violence or outrage, people are outraged. They have a right to be outraged. If you can put them in a cage because they're outraged, that's nuts.

That's really nuts. Now they have a pub law. Do you know this one? No. Oh, find that, Jamie. They're trying to pass this thing. I don't know if they passed it,

where someone's... I don't want to speak out of turn. I don't want to fuck this up, because it was disturbing enough without me misinterpreting it. But the idea was to stop people from saying things on social media that you get arrest for, stop them from saying those kind of things in pubs.

Where is this, in England?

Yes. See if you can find it. I know I saved it, but it'll take me too long to pull it up. You find anything like that?

I'm trying to make sure it's...

Legit?

Yeah.

I mean, I wouldn't imagine it's not. I I mean it's not outside the realm of what they're possible They they're capable of doing if they're arresting 12,000 people a year for social media posts. I mean If that was happening in America, they were only arresting Republicans, I don't think you'd hear a peep out of the Democrats I think they think it's important. We have to stop misinformation

Yeah It passed You don't think it's important. We have to stop misinformation Yeah

It passed you don't think it passed Okay, so what is the What was the what were they trying to okay, free speech in UK pubs, employer responsibilities. It requires employers to take reasonable steps to prevent staff from experiencing harassment by third parties such as customers. That's normal, right?

You don't want to be harassed by a, concerns have been raised that debates on, for instance, gender identity or political matters could lead to staff complaints resulting in patrons being asked to leave if the behavior is deemed aggressive or harassing. It should not be misinterpreted as a ban on lawful, polite, or controversial speech. Who's to decide what's controversial though? Third party harassment legislation focuses on addressing harassment rather than banning

specific topics of conversation entirely. Just any regulation of conversation is nuts. If it's one thing you're harassing the staff or...

I've never known a pub owner who would allow people to come in and harass his staff. He already has an economic and management incentive to not allow that. It's not the kind of thing you need to legislate.

But to say that someone doesn't feel safe if people are having a civil conversation about gender identity, you don't feel safe if you work there and that you're getting harassed by people's opinions that you don't agree with, well, that's where things get weird. Because then, as we've seen, there's a lot of people, they get really triggered about a lot of things that are pretty normal for most folks.

Microaggressions, dumb shit. There's a lot of people that just want to be offended, and if this is a law, that could lead to a lot more problem. It's just a slippery slope, and they're not going in the right direction.

And I don't know how they course correct if they've fallen this far that quickly. 12,000 arrests is crazy. That's a crazy amount of people go to jail for social media posts. And it encourages self-censorship so you don't get a real sense of what people want or don't want. Because people don't want to be involved. They don't want to go to jail. They don't want to get it, take a chance.

The framers of the Constitution, free speech was everything to them and they put it in the First Amendment because they knew all the other rights and guarantees were dependent on it. If you have a government that can silence its opponents, it has a license for any kind of atrocity.

It's just shocking that all other Western nations haven't adopted that.

Well, most of them don't have constitutions.

So crazy. It's just so ridiculous. It's so ridiculous that free speech, which is like, we all agree, especially in America, it's one of the most important things. The only way to find out what's real and what's not, you got to let people talk it out.

You know? I mean, when you're living in a world where the government has the power to dictate what's real and what's not real, and they don't have an obligation to be correct, you got a real problem. And if there's no consequences for them being incorrect and they've silenced correct speech, they've gotten away with something that's real slippery

and real dangerous. And when there's a lot of money involved and a lot of businesses involved.

I've typed it into perplexity and this gives a little context on it because the pubs were being-

The same, the pub thing? Yeah. Reverses a 2013 removal of third party harassment liability, making pubs liable if staffs overhear comments deemed harassing based on protected characteristics like sexual race. Critics call it a banter ban, fearing landlords will police conversations to avoid lawsuits, chilling speech in social venues.

That makes it sound like if someone was doing that the business was getting in trouble versus the person who was saying it.

Right. So they removed a third party harassment liability. So they removed the pub owner being in trouble. They removed that. It says it passed when I was looking it up, so that passed a couple months ago, so that makes pub owners liable again So removed 2013 removal of third-party harassment liability them liable. I don't think I think it's back to

Reverses that reverses making them liable no no, it reverses the removal of the third party harassment liability. So they removed the liability, now making pubs liable. So it now makes them liable if they overhear comments. So what this does is it encourages the pub itself to censor people, which makes sense. I mean, if you all of a sudden can now sue a pub

that you went into and you didn't like this conversation about gender identity that was taking place next to you, you have the basis of a lawsuit now.

R.C. Yeah, so now the incentive is the pub owner to go out and police all the conversations so that if anybody crosses the guardrail, the pub owner now has to go in and interrupt

them, which is not a good thing. Adam Bateman If you weren't a charitablerail, you know, the pub owner now has to go in and interrupt him, which is not a good thing. If you weren't a charitable person, you could imagine that there are certain groups that would have people go to places, have conversations, and set up a lawsuit. You could just, you could commit fraud. If the pub is liable, you pay some kook to go in there and start yelling about transsexuals, and then next thing you know, you collect a lawsuit.

That's not outside of what I think a shady person would do. If you think about what you've just talked about with all the Medicare fraud and all the other fraud that we know has happened in the world, this is a giant loophole. This is a giant loophole for people to come in and sue people and silence everybody's speech. And the fact that this is not being recognized, it's very disturbing that people don't understand

human behavior. It's very weird that they're willing to accept this kind of stuff. When you look at the challenges of getting things done, what has been the most frustrating in terms of what you wanted to get done and what you were actually able to get

done or in the process of getting done? I mean I've been surprised by how much President Trump has supported me on this stuff because I you, I'm going after the biggest, you know, big pharma, big insurance, the big food. And these have all been, you know, those were all taboos for every administration, Democratic, Republican. There was little incremental things that you could do under Democratic administrations,

but nothing like this has ever happened. You know, I mean, the agreement we made with the pharmaceutical industry could not have happened under any other president. The MFN agreement, the most favored nation. And the way that that worked is, you know, we've been paying for the last 40 years the

highest price in the world for medicine. And so we have 4.2% of the world's population here and over 70% of pharmaceutical profits and revenues come from the United States. Why is that? We do buy more drugs than anybody, but it's because we pay higher prices. We pay two to three to five times what they're paying in Europe. For example, and President Trump likes to talk about this, Ozempic, the list price was $1,350 in America. You could buy the same drug in any pharmacy in London for $88. And it's made in the same factory in New Jersey.

And the reason that was allowed to happen is the Europeans just said, we're not going to allow, we're not going to pay any more for it. They would set the price. And that was the maximum. There's a lot of drugs they don't have.

There's a lot of cancer drugs they don't have in Europe because they just wouldn't pay the price. And so President Trump – every president has vowed to stop this. Clinton tried to stop it. Obama, Bush, all of them tried.

And Biden all said we're going to get rid of the MFN price and none of them did anything on it and President Trump Literally called me Sometimes once a day called late at night 1130 at night and you know say where are you on MFN? And we ended up getting the assembled to me even it seemed insurmountable But he said I I'm going to use tariffs.

I'm going to force the Europeans to raise their drug prices. And because he didn't want to – he didn't – we had enough leverage on the pharmaceutical companies because of our Medicaid and Medicare programs. We could pretty much force them to lower their prices. But it would put them out of business. So – and he didn't – he wants us to continue to be the center for innovation in this country

and he also wanted the companies to re-sure all their production so that we're making all the drugs here and they're not making it elsewhere in the world. And so we sat down with them for months and we came to agreements with 16 of the 17 pharmaceutical companies. Now Americans are getting the lowest prices in the world. If somebody lowers the price in Europe, we get that price or lower.

And people can get that today on Trump Rx. They can go for, you know, the most popular medications and get the cheapest price in the world. And not only that, but the pharmaceutical industry, because we gave them certainty and because President Trump forced the European countries to raise the price that their citizens pay for drugs, the companies actually did well.

They increased stock values by 1.3 trillion among them. And they've all agreed to onshore their production. So Lilly is building six plants here, new plants, including one of the biggest API facilities in the world. That is the API or the, the pharmaceutical ingredients that, you know,

we ran out of during COVID. We need to be making them here because otherwise other countries can blackmail us. Pfizer, Merck, they're all building big facilities here and drug production is now going to come to the United States. We are going to be the center of the world in terms of drug production. Those negotiations were very, very tough and they were extraordinarily complex. We were – we have a really good suite of talented individuals, high caliber individuals

who have left billion-dollar businesses. One of them is a guy called Chris Klump who's immensely talented. He walked away from a company that does data management for 85% of the hospitals in this country and he's, you know, he walked away from a billion-dollar company, divested, lost a lot of money to come just because he wants to improve things. He ran the negotiations and the pharmaceutical companies fell in love with him because they

realized they could trust him. And we worked out this extraordinary agreement where now Americans have gone from paying the most in the world for drugs to the least in the developed world for drugs. And that's going to change everybody's experience.

Can I ask you how that applies if someone – is it the same if someone has insurance or if they don't have insurance? Like is – how does insurance bill it versus how does someone buy it on their own?

If they, it's gonna lower price for everybody. Anybody can go on TrumpRx, whether they have insurance or not, and they can get it there.

And they would buy it themselves?

Yeah.

And so it'd be at a substantially lower price than they would have had in the past. Exactly. If they buy it themselves. But what if people are just getting it through insurance?

Do they-

Again, you know, then there-

Does insurance lower it as well, or do they-

Yeah, the copay is lower.

Okay.

And you know, we had the first woman to buy a drug on it. The first customer was a woman who has been trying for years to do IVF. The drug cost $4,000 and now I think it costs something like $600. Really? So it's gonna allow, you know, women, one out of every three women in this country does not have as many children as she wants and she can't have more. And IVF is gonna

be really important because our birth rates just dropped. I mean dramatically this

year they dropped to 1.75. So yeah people don't understand that you know we've had a few conversations on this podcast about population decline and people just most people are not aware of it. They just see how many people are on the highway they think we're overcrowded. They don't understand this replacement number that we're going to need unless we want our population.

I mean, the US is in a different situation than other countries. Japan is in total crisis. China is in an existential crisis because its population is going to drop dramatically.

South Korea?

Yeah. But people want to immigrate here so we can make up the deficit through immigration. We have that advantage, but still the birth rate has dropped. It dropped one and a half or it dropped from 1.9 this year to 1.75 and that affects Social Security, it affects, you know, it makes it so that the cliff for Social Security was pushed ahead by another year because of that drop in birth rates.

So it's not a good thing and And American women want to have babies. And a third of them cannot have as many children as they want.

What was the pushback when it came to things like removal of dyes?

The removal of dyes, again, we were, I think because of President Trump's leadership, we were able to convene the industry and talk to them about it. And a lot of them came in and said, yeah, we know we got to change. Trevor Burrus Really? Richard Wagner Yeah.

The only one that really –

Trevor Burrus Did you ever ask them why didn't you do

it a long time ago?

Richard Wagner Well, they didn't have options. And what we did-

But didn't most of them, like for cereal, for example, didn't they have to have no unnatural dyes when they sent it to Canada?

Yeah, the ones in Canada, but in our country, we hadn't approved a bunch of them. We only had one or two vegetable-based dyes. Marty McCary, who's done a fantastic job at FDA, has now fast-tracked it. This year, seven new ones. So we're working with the industry to make sure they have the dyes and they're supposed

to get rid of all the dyes by the end of this year. And that's going to, you know-

And so instead they'll use just food-based dyes?

Yeah, vegetable and mineral-based dyes. And that's – you know, another thing that we did again through – two things that we did through convening industry because of President Trump's convening power, we fixed the prior authorization. So one of the most frustrating things that people go through when they encounter the healthcare system is that they have to wait for prior authorization from their insurance

company. So you go in, your doctor tells you you need a knee replacement, and then it takes you six months for the insurance company to approve the surgery. And it was infuriating for people and really devastating and heartbreaking for a lot of them. And we got the biggest insurance companies representing 80% of the American public all

voluntarily agreed to eliminate prior authorization for almost all their procedures. It's a very small number now. I think 15% of the procedures still have it and those are procedures we want prior authorization because there's a potential for abuse for example with spinal surgeries. A lot of people don't need the surgery and Medicaid and Medicare wants to make sure that they actually need that surgery and it's beneficial to them. But for all the other

ones, you will now know at point of care whether or not your insurance. So you go to your doctor, he says you need a knee surgery. Before you leave his office you'll know whether the insurance company approves it or not and that's going to dramatically change the medical experience. Another thing that we did, again, through convening industry, is we originally got 63 the top tech companies together, and then we ended up final agreement with 405 of them

who agreed to stop information blocking. So your medical records are owned by you, but you can't get access to them a lot of times, most of the time. The data company won't give them to you. And so we've got them all to agree to stop doing that. So by the end of this year, every American will be able to get their medical records

on their cell phone and that's going to dramatically change the medical experience. It's going to save lives because if you get hit, you know, you live in New Jersey, you get hit by a car in Portland, Oregon. You go to the hospital and you spend the first two hours while you're bleeding out, you know, making out clipboards. Now, or you come in unconscious and they don't know what to do with you. They don't know anything about you.

Now your medical records are on your cell phone. They can see if you have allergies. They can see what your blood type is. They can look at all of your previous medical records and make good decisions about how to treat you. And also, you're going to be able to sync that with food purchases apps so that you'll be able to go into a grocery store and the app will tell you, this one is bad for you.

This choice is bad for you and I'll offer you a better choice, etc. And there's an app like that, Yucca, now, but there's a lot of them coming online.

What is it called?

Yucca is the one, I think 50% of the people in France use Yucca, but it's...

Can you spell it?

I think it's Y-U-C-C-A. Okay.

Or Y-U-K-A.

I don't know, you wife uses it. You go into the grocery store, you go into the grocery store and you put it on the barcode and it rates each of the products about whether or not they're, you know, whether it's good or a healthy one

and then it makes you a recommendation for a healthier one if it's bad for you. And that is gonna change the food culture in our country because the company's already changing their ingredients so that they can get better scores from the Yook app and from other apps that are like it.

It's not the only one out there.

But what about preservatives in processed foods? They're always gonna exist, right? You're always gonna have certain amount of preservatives in processed foods, they're always gonna exist, right? You're always gonna have a certain amount of preservatives in processed foods.

Well, I mean, first of all, we're not gonna take processed foods away from people. But we're going to, I think we're gonna change the amount of processed foods. One is, by April, we will have a federal definition of ultra-processed foods, first time in history.

And as soon as we do that, we're gonna do front-of-package food labeling. So every food in your grocery store will have a label on it. It'll have maybe a green light, a red light, or a yellow light telling you whether or not it's gonna be good for you. And that, you know, and it's gonna evaluate all of the ingredients, etc

So, you know, I think we're not going to change this overnight, but we're gonna change it pretty quickly And if you want to be healthy We're gonna give you the information to take control of your own health and people just don't want to be healthy and don't care

There's not much you can do about it. don't want to be healthy and don't care.

There's not much you can do about it. Most Americans want to be healthy. And we've seen that when they're allowed to make a healthy choice, they do not want to be eating this poison.

Yeah, and ironically, the people that don't want to be healthy, they feel that way because they're not healthy. If they were healthy, they would want to stay healthy. They're just part of the reason why they're feeling this way is because they're unhealthy.

That's why they don't care.

Yeah. And well, it's also like the mountain is so big. If you're 300 pounds, like, oh my God, it's so much work to do something about this and not fall back on the old behaviors. And I don't know other than by example, how you can get a large group of people to go along with that.

When someone like Jelly Roll loses, I think it's close to 300 pounds, when someone like that does that, that's going to help a lot of people. So that's some kind of an example of a guy who just completely changed his lifestyle around, changed what he eats.

And he did it without GLPs.

Yes, he did. Pretty amazing. Which brings me to peptides. Where are we at right now on peptides and getting them regulated and making sure it's not this weird gray area? Because we know they're effective, but we also know that there's a lot of pushback on

peptides.

Yeah. I mean, I'm a big fan of peptides. I've used them myself and used them with really good effect, you know, with a couple of injuries. What happened was there were 19 peptides that you allow compounding pharmacies to make compounds that were part of approved drugs. So part of approved ingredients of they needed to fit them.

Maybe they had an allergy to the commercial brand or whatever. And the compounding pharmacies and peptides was part of that group. There were 19 peptides that were widely formulated by compounding pharmacies during the Biden administration. that were widely formulated by compounding pharmacies during the Biden administration, they illegally moved those to category two, which says do not formulate. It was illegal because they're not supposed to do that unless there's a safety signal.

And they didn't have a safety signal. They're not allowed to look at efficacy. They're not allowed to say, well, we don't believe these are efficacious or whatever. They can only look at safety. They move those category to which means do not formulate. What happened? There was huge demand for peptides and so a black market came out and the black market is run by companies that say that they're making the peptides for animal use or for research purposes.

And that peptide now basically completely replaced the legal market. The legal market for peptides, the pharmacies, the compounding pharmacies, were getting those peptides from FDA inspected facilities. And some of them in India and China, but they were the same one that the pharmaceutical industries are buying them and we inspect those.

You know you're getting a good product. You know you're getting what you bought, what was advertised. With the gray market you have no idea and a lot of this stuff that we've looked at is just you know is very very substandard. Oh I'm very anxious to move not probably not all of those peptides some of them are in litigation, but about 14 of them back to making them more accessible.

And FDA is in the middle of—I think within a couple of weeks, we will have announced some kind of new action. And, you know, my hope is that they're going to end up with—they're still looking at the science. My hope is that they're going to get moved to a place where people have access from ethical suppliers.

Trevor Burrus That's ultimately the problem with all this black market stuff, right? A lot of people are getting bogus peptides and they don't have any idea how they – if they work, whether to test them. They just take a chance. They take a risk.

They get a little flyer in their email or something and they hear from somebody else, I got it from this place. They don't even know and they try it and you're getting nonsense, bogus peptides.

I mean we created the black market.

Yeah.

Which we do with everything.

And it's a very dangerous black market. Which they've done during prohibition, they're doing it right now with everything else. It's unfortunate. I know there's been some talk about psychedelics, and I know that in particular Ibogaine, what's going on in Texas with the Ibogaine initiative where former Governor Rick Perry and Brian Hubbard have been helping a lot of veterans, a lot of people with like serious opioid addictions.

And this is the plan to have this and run some programs where you have this very effective way of getting people off addictions that we have for some reason banned in America up until, you know, these initiatives. I think there's some stuff that can help a lot of people. How many people are addicted to opioids in this country? It's pretty high.

How many people are alcoholics?

48,000. 48 million.

Have you looked into the Ibogaine stuff? Yeah. What's your thoughts on it?

I don't know enough, and I don't think it's well-documented enough about whether it's long-term impact on addiction. But in terms of just sort of the field of psilocybin and MDMA, there are lots and lots of good studies now that clearly demonstrate that or strongly suggest that it is effective against PTSD and also some forms of depression, etc. And so, I would say everybody in my agency and over at VA, at Doug Collins' agency, is very anxious to get a rule out there that will allow these kind of studies, will allow

access under therapeutic settings, you know, particularly to the military, soldiers who have suffered these injuries to get access to these products. We're working through that process now. And you know, you have from Marty McCary, I mean, we're all working on it and trying to make it happen.

It would be great to extend that to police officers too, probably.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, a lot of the same type of PTSD they experience, it just doesn't get brought up as much.

And if, you know, if you can treat depression and, you know, without using SSRIs, putting somebody a lifetime sentence to SSRIs, you can treat them. There's a number of things, not just psychedelics, but a number of interventions that we're looking at that are rapid interventions, are more transformative than the way that psychedelics seem to rewire your brain. And so we're looking at that as an entire category of interventions that people ought

to be able to study, ought to have good access to, and we should get it out to the public as quickly as possible.

What would be the hurdles to something like that?

I think that we're gonna get it done.

So how would that be implemented? Would it be implemented in a clinical setting? Would it be somewhere that-

Well, for some of them, you know, for some of them, it would be that you can do, you know, to encourage more clinical trials. In other words, it would be very strong guidelines. I mean, this is what we're envisioning, so I can't tell you exactly what we're going to do. But very, very strong guidelines, therapeutic guidelines.

So how they're applied, what kind of follow up, because a lot of these things rewire your brain. If you don't do follow up, it doesn't work. Or you have a failure rate. So those kind of protocols are all stuff that we've been developing and studying.

And I think most of the people in the administration are anxious to make this happen as quickly as possible. I know Doug Collins over at the VA already has, I think, 21 studies going over there. And they're very, very promising.

And what are they using at the VA?

I think they're using combinations of MDMA and psilocybin, maybe using Ibogaine, and you know I think they're looking at a number of

things including ayahuasca and Ibogaine. They shot down something fairly recently in California where they were going to decriminalize, well they're going to decriminalize psilocybin or they were gonna allow it for clinical use But I think the problem that they had was they didn't shut they didn't say we're completely opposed to it They said there's no guidelines in terms of like, how's it gonna be clinically applied?

What's the dosage yeah, you need those guidelines cuz you don't want to make the wild west exactly

You're gonna have a horror stories overnight because people as you know Yeah, you need those guidelines because you don't want to make the wild west. Exactly.

You're going to have horror stories overnight because people, as you know, some people can have very, very bad experiences on that.

Also, some people are on medications and they should be very aware that this medication would go really badly with X amount of whatever the substance is.

Right. So, I mean, we're looking at ways to get it done so that it's in a very controlled setting.

And so would you envision a place like that, like once it's implemented, where someone who's suffering from depression or PTSD, regardless of whether they're a soldier or a cop or just a regular person, could be able to go to a place like that and get treatment for me You know personally I would like to see that

but you know I we need to move in baby steps with us because you don't want to create a situation where People are getting hurt right now. You know what I create a situation where mentally unstable people right now Which can happen which can happen. Which can happen.

Yeah, that is a really, these are very powerful tools you're working with. It's like everything else, you can do it wrong. But it just makes sense that if you had less depressed people, more happy people, more people connected, more people that can kind of let go of whatever traumatic experience they went through and just live a more joyful, productive life, which many people that can kind of let go of whatever traumatic experience they went through and just live a more joyful productive life which many people that have taken these substances have experienced. Like it's it's not a cure-all

for everything, it's not gonna fix everybody, it's not even for everybody,

but you should deny people access. You shouldn't have a soldier who has given everything for the country, who has suffered terribly, who has to go to Tijuana to get these treatments, who has to leave our country in order to get the treatments. It doesn't make any sense. And…

No, it doesn't, especially when so many of them have come back with these stories. Guys like Sean Ryan, a bunch of my friends have done it. And I had a good friend who – my friend Ed Clay, who runs the CPI down in Tijuana, the Cellular Performance Institute, which is an amazing stem cell clinic down there. He went down there because he hurt his back and he got on pills and he couldn't get off them.

Did Ibogaine, got off them. He's like, oh my God, like more people have to be aware of this. This really works. This is a thing that has been shown. I think it's in the 80% range when you do one treatment where people don't relapse, and it's in a 90% range with two treatments. I mean, it's incredibly effective. There's nothing like it. And yet we've been denied it. It also has no chance of you being addicted to it. It's a terrifying experience,

apparently, or at least very uncomfortable. It takes 24 hours. Nobody wants to hop in and do it again. It's not like, hey let's party and take Ibogaine. It's an ordeal. It's an ordeal, exactly. And that ordeal is extremely beneficial to people but also like severs the impulse of addiction in a lot of people. It's very successful at it.

Yeah, I mean, I had a family member whose life was transformed by it. And you know, I've been in recovery for 43 years, and I go to a meeting every day. It's pretty hard to convince me that you can fix what's wrong with you by taking something outside of you. But I have seen so much overwhelming anecdotal evidence, but also clinical studies, a test to the effect that is under some circumstances with some people or these medicines.

And I think you've got Jay Bhattacharya at NIH and Marty McCary at FDA who are all doing whatever they can to make this happen.

Yeah. Well, I sincerely hope that more people consider it. And I think one of the big hopes that we have is when you have someone like former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who's a Republican, looking at this instead of from like, for the longest time, that was a left-wing perspective, right? Legalized marijuana, legalized psychedelics. You didn't hear about it from former Republican governors like Rick Perry. But when he sees the benefit that it has with veterans, which he cares very deeply about the veteran community

He's like, you know, this is not something to ignore just because it's connected to hippies you know, I don't know if you remember this but hunter Thompson during Whatever election he covered in fear and loathing on the campaign trail. It's when he put out that rumor that Ed Muskie was addicted to Ibogaine. Brazilian witch doctors were coming and giving him Ibogaine. It ruined that guy's career.

But it's so funny that he chose that drug because no one's addicted to that. It's got, that's not the drug because it's like no one's addicted to that. It's it's got that's not the risk The risk is heart attacks. The risk is you have to have your heart monitored while you're doing it It's like it's very stressful for a lot of people but on a clinical setting It's shown to be incredibly effective and I don't think we should ignore these things I think it's foolish and I think that is one that seems to have a bipartisan agreement on, because a lot of

people on the left have always been in favor of some kind of psychedelic therapy just based on experiences they've had that were positive. But seeing it from the right is very, very encouraging, because I think it's something for human beings. It's not for everybody, but it's a tool that I have seen benefit many, many people, and we should use every tool that could help us be healthier and happier, period.

That shouldn't be a right or a left issue. That's just silly. It's just dumb.

Trevor Burrus Agreed.

Michael O'Hanlon Yeah. I mean, it's shocking that that is an unusual perspective. But I think we've been propagandized for so long, particularly on certain things like, you know, just the blanket term of drugs. That all of them fall into this category

of you trying to escape reality. And this one is literally the opposite. It's like you confronting reality and finding out why the pathways to certain destructive behaviors were set in your life and how to correct it.

I think that'd be great for everybody. I agree.

Yeah.

You've got, you're already a year in here plus, and is it going as fast as you'd hoped like some of these reforms? Is there, what are the main frustrations that you have to deal with?

I mean, I didn't know what to expect and you know, I Didn't know when I came in. I didn't know the president that well, so, you know, but from the beginning he He was empowering me and you know, I never made an agreement with him about anything. But the first time he asked me whether I wanted to be HHS secretary, I said, I don't think so.

I wanted to do something. I wanted to be maybe a health czar in the White House. And then I thought about it for a while and thought, no, I really won't be effective unless I'm in this agency and can actually, you know, get into the weeds and has 82,000 employees and the biggest budget in government

and that would actually give me the power to change the system. And so then I went back to him and I said, you know, I want HHS and he said fine. Then he allowed me to appoint all of my sub-agency heads which no president has ever done with an HHS secretary in history. He allowed me to appoint Marty McCary, choose Marty McCary, and FDA, Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Oz, and CMS and everybody else below them.

So nobody's ever been able to do that. And then he, you know, he gave me a very prominent job on the transition committee to set this all in motion. And then once I got in, he supported me on everything. And that I think was allowed me to do things more during I I think I mean, I I don't want to say sound like, you know vain or something but

because of the great team that we have and because this is worth the president we've been able to Accomplish more in one year than I think any other HHS secretary has done in history in four years. I'm pleased with what we've done, but there's still—I mean, it's 20 percent of our economy. And so it's a huge agency and there's—you know, it's in everything and there's a lot to do, but I think we're moving really fast.

Trevor Burrus So, better than you'd hoped? You know, it's in everything and there's a lot to do, but I think we're moving really fast.

So better than you'd hoped?

I would say, yeah, if you put this on the table and said you could have this, you know, the first day I got into office, I would snatch it off and say, I'll take it.

But I mean, I could only imagine staring at that mountain when you're at the foot of it and realizing what a climb this is gonna be

That's not how I approach it I just did it one thing at a time and there's something to fix every single day and I have the smartest people in the country working with me and you know, we meet every day me and Oz and Jay and Chris clomp and Marty. We have a meeting every morning and we talk about what we're doing and about where we need to help each other. And it's a really, it's a very, very congenial team.

We all feel like family with each other and we vacation together. And, you know, it's I think because of that, in former times, the HHS secretary has always been at odds with his departments. And, you know, under Biden and even under the previous Trump administration. Why do you think that was? Because I think part of it is personalities. They're all kind of, you know, alpha people. They have different ideas.

And then they, I don't know. I mean, we, I think a lot of that is just personality and struggling for power and influence and all of that kind of stuff. You know, you want to run your own agency and you don't want interference. And we've been able to do it in ways that are very, very collegial.

I wanted to ask you about pesticides. So what was the recent ruling on glyphosate?

I was on an EO, which is an executive order, from the president saying that we're going to make the ingredients for glyphosate in this country and for elemental phosphorus and you know I've listen I've spent 40 years fighting pesticides it was I was part of the trial team on the Monsanto case which was the team that you know we won three cases in a row and and then got an $11 billion settlement with Monsanto, which is now Bayer.

By the end of our trial, Bayer owned Monsanto. But pesticides are poison. They're designed to kill all life. It's not a good thing to have in your food. But I also, so it's not something that I was particularly happy with, let me put

it that way mildly. But I also understand the president's point of view, the president didn't create this system. He's dealing with a problem that was created long before over the past 60 years. When we, you know, through federal policies and subsidies and the management of farming in this country, the agricultural management, we have addicted our farmers to these pesticides

and particularly glyphosate. Glyphosate is the foundational pesticide of our food production system. So 97% of corn in this country is produced with glyphosate and can't be produced without

it.

98% of – you know, you could do it. You could change it. There's organic corn producers in this country. It's like 3%. 98% of soy is produced with glyphosate. If you ban glyphosate overnight or if you got rid of it

or if somebody else cut off our supply, it would destroy the American food system.

How crazy is that statement? The American food, the entire system, is based on using the poison.

Right. The farmers don't like it. Let me just explain what the EO did. Right now, according to the industry reports, 99% of our glyphosate comes from China. Oh, the Pentagon and others said this is an extreme

national security vulnerability that China controls the US food system. We can't afford to let that happen if we got in some kind of tangle with them. It could literally cut off our food supply overnight and cripple the country. And so that's what the president was responding to.

But we all know we've got to transition off of glyphosate. We all know that. And the farmers hate it. One, they're now starting to see these chemical resistant weeds so that that can't be treated with glyphosate. Now it's predictable.

Two, they hate the inputs. It's cost them a lot of money. Three, the foreign countries won't allow them to export. Like Europe doesn't allow – most European countries don't allow the export of our crops to their countries.

Well, how are they doing it?

They use less glyphosate than we do. But they – They use less glyphosate than we do. But they use some. They use it, but our system is all Roundup Ready corn and Roundup Ready soy. So they don't use it like we do over here.

Ideally we would transition away from that, right?

Yeah. And it's also, they know it's destroying their soil. And they're all suffering from runoff you know, it destroys the microbiome in the soil and because of that the soil can't you you don't get water infiltration in the soil and

So the soil then runs off and you know that it's destroying their farms. It's not sustainable

Everybody knows that we had will Harris from White Oak Pastures on here and he showed us the literal line in the river between his organic farm and the next-door neighbor's farm. We could see this clear line where all the runoff is going into the river.

Yeah, but Will Harris will also tell you the same thing that I said, is that what he did is, you know, is very hard and it's not...

Took him 20 years.

What?

Took him 20 years. It took him 20 years and it's not applicable to every farmer. Right. You know, he understands the problem too. We all understand that this is a huge problem. The president was dealing with national security and they did something that I really don't like which is to

support there's a lawsuit about that's now before the Supreme Court but in the lower court they supported it as for federal preemption so that would mean that if the if the federal label says that this is safe, that the state lawsuits now cannot be brought. So it would throw out a lot of the state lawsuits and may effectively give them immunity from liability which is, you know, to me it's not good to give any company immunity from liability.

It takes

away all incentive for them to make the product safer. Again, the president is dealing with bigger issues, which is the company that's making this has paid $11 billion to, you know, in my loss, they're just about to sign another $7.6 billion settlement. There are 65,000 cases out there and they've said, we're getting out of this business, you know, if this, if we don't get relief. So the president is hearing that, the farmers are hearing that, and they're saying, you know, this is a temporary fix. We're putting huge amounts of money into studying the impacts of glyphosate right now in my agency. I'm doing that. And we're doing, and the president has made a big commitment, a

billion dollar commitment, not only to regenerate farming, but also to developing new ways of chemical, of dramatically reducing the amount of chemicals in our agriculture. I met this week with three farmers who are using this new system of lasers, which is now the cheapest way to control weeds

in the vegetable fields. So, vegetables, lettuce, celery, all of these vegetables now they're using a lot of them, you know, you're gonna see a very quick transition it's a it's a an attachment that is dragged by a tractor

It kills the weeds at every stage of their life It identifies their species and kills them instantly all the way down through their root system by exploding them with this laser. And yeah, here is one of the-

This is what it looks like?

Yeah, that's what it looks like. And this guy, so I-

Can I ask you this? Yeah. Does this have any negative effect whatsoever on the food?

No, in fact, you get a 30% increase in productivity of the farm and the growing season shortens by three weeks for onions. And that is a huge economic boom. It pays itself back. And for some of these farmers, it pays itself back in nine months.

It's a million-dollar that's a million dollar machine. But it pays back, they're paying, vegetable field is, the onion producer in South Texas, the biggest onion producer in Texas, she has 8,000 acres. She was paying $1,500 per acre

for pesticides for mainly glyphosate and for manual labor. And now with this machine, it's $300. She's saving over $1,000 an acre.

Is this showing how it does it to you?

She's got 8,000 acres. So it's a million-dollar machine, which sounds like a lot, but you got 8,000 acres, and you're paying 1,500 bucks an acre per growing season.

I missed one.

And now they're making them on drones. Maybe it was a crop.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Interesting. There's all these kind of new exciting technologies that give us a light at the end of the tunnel to transition and it could be very, very fast. What the president wants to do is accelerate that. He says, yeah, we can't allow the company to go bankrupt. We can't allow foreign interference, but we gotta get off of this stuff.

We gotta give these farmers an off ramp so that they can get off it because they don't want to be on it and nobody wants to be on it.

Without crashing the food system. So this is a bridge. This is a bridge to an alternative.

Yeah, exactly.

So the path you think would be technologies

like this for weeds, What about for bugs? You know, it's harder. These systems are more difficult. They're not yet economic in the corn field, the row crops. They're economic for organic corn, and I talked to an organic corn farmer who was in love with his machine. But yeah, they can do it for bugs too. So they just zap the bug? They zap the bug, they identify them and zap them.

But in the row crops, you know, these guys, the vegetable crops are paying 1,500 bucks an acre. Row crops are 50 bucks an acre. And so to get economically to their level, they have to scale enormously. So that is, you know, how do we help them do that?

How do we bring Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and billionaires in to start investing really heavily in these kind of technologies and let's get off of this stuff?

What are the primary health concerns about people that consume too much glyphosate? Or is there a threshold? Like I know there's like, a safe level that's supposed to be detectable in your blood. Like, what does that mean in

terms of I don't know if there's any safe level. I don't know. You know, I shouldn't even say there is a that is what we are trying to figure out right now. And it's associated with non alcoholic fatty liver disease. There's a scientific association, but it's not strong enough for people to litigate on. The litigation was all about non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Only that?

Yeah, because that's the one thing that they had a critical mass of scientific studies supporting.

Now what about when they use

it at the end of production? It definitely disrupts it. Sorry, your gut biome. Yes. It is, it's the advantage of glyphosate is unlike the other poisons, it doesn't harm organic tissue, but it goes after plants, not animal tissue. But your stomach microbiome is plants. And so, you know, there's, you know, it may contribute to the celiac disease

and to all these gluten allergies. It was coterminous with that, you know, the introduction of glyphosate, of Roundup Ready corn, you know what Roundup Ready corn is, right? Means that you can spray the field

and everything green dies except for the corn, which is immune to glyphosate. That's why it's so advantageous to them. It saves huge labor costs and it allows them to, you know, to sell the corn at a price that people could afford. You know, one of the most controversial uses is a desiccant. And that means that there

is no Roundup Ready wheat. So normally they weren't using this in the wheat field. But around 2003, they started using it to dry out the wheat just before harvest. And that way they can harvest it without getting fungus on it and without getting mold on it.

And for the first time, they were spraying it right on food. And so that is real, you know, the major factor for getting into human beings. And, you know, the major vector for getting into human beings. And you know, around 2003 is when you started seeing these explosions in celiac disease and gluten allergies. There's no clear scientific evidence that it's related, but you know, there's a, you know, there's some signals out

there that now we're looking at it HHS for the first time they should have been looking at this 30 years ago and But you know, they're not but we're doing it now

Well, there's a lot of anecdotal stories about people going to Italy or Spain and France eating bread over there Not having any problem with it at all and being so confused and then also people coming from Europe and eating in America and getting

sick all and being so confused. And then also people coming from Europe and eating in America and getting sick. And I don't know whether that there's no telling whether that's glyphosate or other pesticides or whatever. Right. But it's something. I have a son who had chronic eczema from when he was a kid. A disease I never heard of as a kid and everybody's got it now. And he would get it anytime that he ate spaghetti or bread or, you know. And he went to the University of Bologna, he went to Brown and then he took a year at the University of Bologna and he ate spaghetti three meals a day and

had no problem. And so, and you hear there's, you know, there's hundreds of stories like that that we've all heard.

I feel different when I go to Italy. When I go to Italy and I eat over there, I feel different. I feel different if I use, there's a restaurant that I called Gaetano's in Las Vegas and Henderson, and they use all Italian flour. They import it all from Italy.

You could, it tastes different. It feels different. You don't feel terrible after you eat it. Something's wrong with our food. And everybody knows it. And the fact that it's become a left-wing or a right-wing issue is one of the dumbest decisions we've ever made as a country. And I know that a lot of it is, again, a lot of propaganda, a lot of these narratives trying to push people into thinking that things aren't dangerous because right-wing people believe in them and that it's nonsense.

It's just, I don't know what that pathway is. When you're dealing with monocrop agriculture and you have these enormous farms and you say 98% is based on glyphosate use or whatever it is, how do we get those people to ultimately transition?

And if they do, could they even produce enough of their product to stay viable?

I can tell. I mean, I've met with over 100 farmers and developing the food guidelines, our team. And, you know, I've been doing agricultural issues for 30 years. I can tell you, farmers are the most hard-working people that I've ever met. They are good people. They want to produce the healthiest foods and they don't like the inputs are killing them. They're, you know, seven out of ten years farmers lose money and there's no young people moving to the

farm country anymore. So, you know, we really need to do what we can to make sure we don't lose any more farms in this country. And that's what the president's worried about. That has to be his priority. But he also wants to make sure that we accelerate the off-ramps, the development of off-ramps that they can transition off of this.

And we're putting huge amounts of money into regenerative agriculture. People like Mr. Harris and meeting with him, Brooke Rollins, meeting with these guys all the time, trying to figure out how do we help you, how do we help other farmers to do what you're doing.

And that is a priority for the administration.

Do you envision a possibility, a real possibility, of a country that is all regenerative agriculture with no pesticides? Is that even possible, that we could get to a point, whether it's a decade from now or two decades from now, where we've completely eradicated the uses of these harmful chemicals?

I mean, I think that's going to happen. You know, I think technology is going to allow that to happen. But, you know, you're going to have a lot of robotic farming happening. And that's another question. But, you know, but... Well, that's robotic robotic with these lasers. This is what you're doing. Yeah. Yeah So that was drones doing this, you know, you'll have drones worms over farms killing the insects

What about industrial fertilizer?

Will be the solution of that and that's a little more difficult, particularly in some parts of the country. You know, you need nutrients in the soil. But there's ways of growing, and you know, Harris has shown this, where you can dramatically reduce the amount of petroleum-based fertilizers that you're using dramatically almost eliminates them.

Sure, but the scale of his farm and the scale of the production in comparison to these monocrop agriculture places that produce corn, I mean, these people are dealing with enormous amounts of crops. The question is, could that be scaled regeneratively? Could you get it to a point where you have organic farms only?

I You know, I think with technology you're gonna eliminate a lot of the pesticides and the herbicides. I think the That the it's gonna be much slower when you talk about fertilizers

But is there a pathway for that? I hope so. But you haven't? No.

She's so far off? Yeah I mean that's gonna be after my three years before

that happens. Do you, I mean if someone else wins and they want you to stay are you gonna stay? Do you have a thought of that or do you want to do as much as you can in four years?

Well, whatever happens, because you can't tell what's going to happen in the election. I'm going to act as if I've got three years to do everything. And if I get more time, then I would probably take it. How many days a week are you? Well I work I mean I'm working when I'm home I'm working it doesn't it doesn't stop. It's just your life. And

then we have a president who has you know never stops working and he's up till 11 12 at night you know which you can get a call at that point yeah he says were you sleeping two o'clock in the morning? Yeah, no, no, of course not. I was working. He's an interesting guy to work for.

Yeah, he's got a lot of energy for an old guy.

He's got an incredible amount of it. I've never seen anything like it, and particularly with the food he eats. I don't know how he's still he's still eating mostly I mean he I've never seen it. Well, let me put it this way When he's on the road, he eats like fast food because he trusts it He doesn't want it. He doesn't want to eat in some local place

Where you know, he gets food poisoning or something But when he's at home at the White House or Mar-a-Lago, it is the, you know, it's all like locally sourced, incredible food.

Oh, that's good.

So he eats well. I mean, but he still drinks. Dana White told me that he's known him for 20 years and he's never seen him drink water.

Just drinks Coca-Cola. What does he drink, Diet Coke? Diet Coke, yeah. Doesn't he, you know, I just had Michael Malice in here, he was talking about how he got off aspartame and how his brain fog just completely cleared up. He was drinking Diet Coke every day.

That is a really sleazy saga about how that got into her.

We talked about it the other day. Yeah, we brought it up. Donald Rumsfeld.

Donald Rumsfeld. And there was a really good FDA commissioner back then named David Kennedy. No relation, but he was a guy from Stanford. I think he was the president of Stanford for a while. And he was really good, had total integrity.

He was like David Kessler, another really great FDA head. And he banned aspartame. And Rumsfeld came in there and just overruled him. Rumsfeld had owned Serl, you know, which was making it. That's how it worked.

Well, that's why this time with you in office has been encouraging. I mean, you doing the things that you wanted to do was, to me, the most interesting thing about this administration going in because I knew your conviction. I had read your Fauci book, and I'm like, if anybody could do something about this, it's you. And I'm kind of amazed at how much you have been able to do

and also, you know, watching the struggle, the difficulties of getting things pushed through that should have been pushed through easily with rational thinking. It's a fascinating time, because we are in a time of change. Some of it's

good, some of it's bad, but we're definitely in a time of change and that's not something you can say about every administration. It's definitely not something you could say about everybody that's been the head of the HHS. You're the first guy that gave me hope when you got in there. I'm like, okay, maybe we'll see some meaningful change with some things that are really important for people's health. I think...

Well, we're doing it.

I think you are. I think you're doing that. Is there anything else you want to talk about? Any other subjects you want to cover?

Why don't you ask me about immigration? Because I know that that's something that's disturbed you.

Well, what are your thoughts on immigration?

On what's going on with… R.C. Spiering Well, you know, here's the background, my kind of assumptions. During the last 10 years of his life, I worked very closely with Cesar Chavez. I worked with him. He had two issues. He had pesticides, which were a huge issue with him and that's what I worked with him

on, on the dangers that, you know that his workers were experiencing from pesticides. And the other issue he had was immigration. He wanted to shut down the border because he saw the way that it was impairing this huge influx of illegal immigration across the border. It was impairing his ability to get to bargain to leverage good wages and conditions for his workers. When I grew up the Democratic Party was against immigration and it was the Republican Party who

wanted it because the big corporations wanted cheap labor. The Chamber of Commerce was firmly embedded in the Republican Party and they were all about open borders. Today the chamber of commerce is with the Democratic Party and so it's one of these switches that is kind of inexplicable to me but I think again it happened because President Trump said I'm gonna fix it with a wall and that became you know it suddenly became open borders suddenly became a calling card for the Democratic Party but there's a, you know, it suddenly became open borders, suddenly became a calling card

for the Democratic Party. But there's a reason, you know, and I see it in my agency, the cause that it's imposing on our country and, you know, on health care, diminishing health care for Americans and housing and jobs and all of these places where it hurts that we need workers in here and we need legal immigrants in here. But they should come in legally and every country has to do that.

President Trump ran on this issue. He's now and he ran that he's going to enforce it and deport particularly the bad people. This is what you don't hear. 70% of the people that they've arrested are have criminal records. What the Democrats are always saying is only 14% of them have been convicted of a violent crime. Well, they've been convicted. A lot of them,

the other ones have been arrested and they just haven't been convicted yet because they jumped, you they jumped bail or they jumped their warrants. The other 30%, a lot of them are gang members. When they go looking for an immigrant, they're not just randomly searching restaurants. They're going after particular people who they've gotten their names from local law

enforcement and from others. going after particular people who they've gotten their names from local law enforcement and from others. During the Biden or during the Obama administration, President Obama deported more people than President Trump did, most in history. Nobody cared. And there were 76 people shot during that process.

During the Biden administration. None of it made headlines. About half of those people were killed. None of it made the news. Now because it's Trump doing it, you have the entire Democratic Party and the media establishment saying, oh, look at the horrible things.

He's a dictator, but he's doing what he promised to do to the American people. It's very disturbing watching what you see on TV. The thing that makes it most disturbing is because there's so much interaction with protesters, which is weird that the Democrats are telling protesters to go out there and stop law enforcement from doing its job. If you – that's not how protests usually work.

If you don't like US drug policy, which you don't, you know, and a lot of people don't. A lot of people don't like the war on drugs at all. They think it's counterproductive. You wouldn't send people to try and interfere with people who are who are who are arresting a drug dealer. And when you have thousands and thousands of people doing that, there's going to be

thousands of interactions. And some of those are going to end badly because you have armed people doing dangerous things. And when you have crowds doing that, it's going to blow up. And so, you know, I see this, you know, nobody is happy with the way that things have looked, particularly in Minnesota. But a lot of it is because of this capacity of the press to take Trump derangement syndrome and amplify it into public outrage and then set up a situation.

I mean if you were a dad, I wouldn't send my kids out to interfere with law enforcement operation. There's other ways to protest. So I think that, you know, I think now they're pulling out of Minnesota and they're going to do this, you know, in other states where they're not going to get that kind of crowd interaction.

But a lot of the people that they're arresting are not, you know, they're people who are actually, you know, have, like I said, 70 percent of them have criminal records.

Yeah, we've actually covered that here. And then there's also the issue that this is the first time in history that the border has been wide open for four years. It's a different thing. It's a different thing when you have at least 10 million people. They don't even know how many for real.

Yeah, it could be 20 million.

They don't know. And that's a lot. And to have that happen all at once is pretty crazy. I think what disturbs people is, again, obviously these violent interactions. What should disturb them is that these are not organic protests.

So these protests are organized and paid for. And that's crazy. When you find that out and you find out that people can actually be paid to protest and that they provide them with signs, they tell them what they do, it's organized, they have signal chats. There's

been a lot of people online talking about being paid to protest in certain places and that's kind of insane. That's even legal that you can organize a mob and pay them to go and make a bunch of noise. It's like the color revolution. Right, exactly. And that it happened- That they're doing it here. ... just happened to take place in the place where hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud was being exposed.

So then the narrative completely shifts away from the fraud and onto this unnecessary violence with ICE. And then there's the natural thing that people have, this distrust of people wearing masks. They don't like that. They don't like officers wearing masks. But on the other side, they have to wear masks because they're being doxed and their families are being threatened and you're filming everything they do and you're

these organized instigators. So if it wasn't for organized protest, I wonder if those particular interactions would have even happened, would have even taken place. And I know you're saying that they don't, that they're targeting specific people. They're going after bad people. But also they're showing up at Home Depot and just grabbing people too and trying to find out if someone is a bad guy or a good guy. So there's probably a lot of people that are just,

people that got duped into coming to this country thinking they're gonna be welcomed, and then they come over here and they're trying to get jobs, and now they're getting arrested and deported. It wasn't their fault that they were encouraged and brought into this country, but they did break the law.

And I understand, I understand that perspective. But it's kind of insane that no one is pointing the blame at the fact that they let at least 10 billion people or 10 million, excuse me, people into this country over the last four years, at least being charitable. It's kind of nuts.

I was down at the border and, you know, I was on when I during my presidential campaign, I went down there and went down a bunch of times. But the first night I went down there and went down a bunch of times but the first night I went down there to Tucson and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was like the Boston Marathon in the beginning, which was the sheer number and they were you know they all had it planned. The cartels were all you know running the whole thing. They were advertising all over the world and bringing people in and everybody

was saying the Border Patrol is completely demoralized. They were told don't arrest anybody, just fingerprint them. If they're a criminal, turn them back. But, you know, most of these people, they couldn't figure that out. And otherwise put them on a bus or plane to anywhere they wanted to go in the country. So it was just...

And at the same time, you have legitimate people that are doing it the right way that have to go through a long and difficult, lengthy process to attain citizenship and to come here or get a green card and come here.

The whole thing was crazy. And one of the complicated issues that you have now, a bunch of sanctuary cities and sanctuary states, and it used to be that if somebody who was an illegal immigrant was arrested for a crime and put in the local jail, ICE was notified. So ICE would then come and the local law enforcement would transfer it to ICE. In the sanctuary cities, they don't do that.

They just let them go. And it's not-

How is that legal? That seems insane. That seems like it's a violation.

Oh, because it was never a law. It was just a policy. The law enforcement always cooperated with each other. Now, because Trump's in there, they're saying, OK, we would rather take the side of a criminal than take the side of the president. So they're choosing sides. It's like the other day during the State of the Union speech when President Trump said – he was talking about

immigration and he said, please stand up if you think that law enforcement should protect the American people over illegal immigrants and not a single Democrat stood. How can you do that?

Matthew Feeney Well, that's what we were talking about earlier and what you were saying. It's just they're ideologically captured. Yeah. I mean that should be something. If you want to be taken seriously, you're a reasonable person. You would stand up for that. Trevor Burrus Yeah.

Jonathan Well, it just, it really disturbs people when you see masked people grabbing people, arresting people, and a lot of them turn out to be American citizens. You know, that's part of the problem too. But I did look at a chart recently because I thought it was fascinating, the number of American citizens that were arrested, what percentage during what Obama did versus during Trump. It's actually, I think, higher. More American citizens were arrested during this Obama thing. You just never heard about it.

Also, if you hear Obama talk about immigration, if you hear Obama talk about immigration, if you hear Hillary talk about immigration or if you hear Bill talk about immigration, you would swear they were running for president as a Republican. Like if you listen to the things they were saying back then, it was very much the Republican perspective.

Deirdre McCloskey That was the Democratic Party always was against an open border

Yeah, Bernie even said it's like open borders or that's a Republican idea. They want cheap labor. Yeah So, all right Anything else? No, we wrap this up. Listen. Thank you very much for all your hard work And it's really it's very exciting for me to have someone like you doing what you're doing because I do know that you really want to push for meaningful change. It's genuinely gonna help.

And I think, you know, so far you're on a good path. So I hope we can get all the other stuff done too.

Well, thank you Joe. And thanks for the conversation. My pleasure. And thanks for all of your conversations. And thanks for all of your conversations.

My pleasure.