00:02:13.000And, you know, we're putting an end to that now.
00:02:15.000I mean, the amount of fraud that goes through that place, we lose just in Medicaid and Medicare $100 billion a year.
00:02:25.000And it's all just this really, you know, shocking, blatant fraud where it's become industrialized.
00:02:32.000I mean, there's foreign nations like Russia.
00:02:36.000Everybody's heard of Somalia, but also Cuba.
00:02:39.000Has this operation in Florida where it's they open up these little PO boxes for durable medical equipment is like knee braces and wheelchairs.
00:02:56.000And then they don't have any knee braces or wheelchairs, but they have patient identification numbers.
00:03:05.000So they just claim to be shipping them to people.
00:05:40.000But then what happened is people immediately started abusing it.
00:05:45.000So 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.
00:06:00.000Balancing your grandmother's checkbook, driving her to a medical visit.
00:06:08.000So then you had this, you know, organized fraud where, and this is what happened in Minnesota.
00:06:15.000These 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.
00:06:27.000And 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.
00:06:36.000It's happening all over the country because there was no, it's very, very difficult.
00:06:42.000The guardrails on that system were very pervious, and anybody can defraud it.
00:06:48.000If you are inclined to do fraud, this was an irresistible opportunity.
00:06:58.000When did this fraud begin, do you believe?
00:07:00.000It really accelerated during the Biden administration.
00:07:04.000We expected to pay for the Minnesota program just for autism care for kids who have autism.
00:07:12.000The kids need the care because they go to maybe a special school, but then they come home from school and the parents aren't there because they're working.
00:07:58.000They told specifically, they told people in my agency, and I've talked to them, we don't want to do program integrity anymore.
00:08:06.000We now just want to focus everything on enrollments.
00:08:10.000In other words, enrolling more people in Obamacare and the programs.
00:08:14.000And, you know, you could say there was bad motives there because one, the states don't pay.
00:08:22.000The states pay a tiny fraction of it, but it all goes to the federal government.
00:08:27.000So the states don't really want to do fraud detection because all that money is coming into their state.
00:08:36.000And then every time you enroll somebody, you're registering them to vote.
00:08:41.000And so, you know, they may have had ulterior motives, let me put it that way.
00:08:46.000But, you know, right now, what we're doing is we're saying to the states, we have audited you.
00:08:52.000We expect that we believe that 50% of the program dollars you're spending were fraudulent or possibly fraudulent.
00:09:03.000You show us a corrective action that you're going to take, or we're going to withdraw that money the next time.
00:09:11.000The money's not being withdrawn from any individuals.
00:09:14.000We're not reimbursing the state for it until they told us.
00:09:18.000Now, the red states have all said, yeah, we'll do it.
00:09:21.000But Maine, Minnesota, California, New York have said, no, we're not going to basically sent us corrective action that was just, you know, it was ridiculous.
00:10:52.000You 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 that donation motivated the bad behavior.
00:11:04.000But it just 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.
00:11:34.000That 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.
00:12:49.000So now I'm not, you know, I'm not legally allowed to vote in any state.
00:12:57.000But, you know, I saw this with the party.
00:13:02.000My father hated partisanship because he thought it was dishonest.
00:13:07.000And he said, he always told us you should buff with the man, not the party.
00:13:11.000Or, you know, he said the man, because at that time it was predominantly men.
00:13:16.000But I saw this when Trump, you know, I grew up in a Democratic Party that was very anti-NAFTA.
00:13:25.000So it was against working people and labor unions.
00:13:29.000Then Trump said that he was anti-NAFTA.
00:13:33.000All of a sudden, the Democratic Party was pro-NAFTA.
00:13:36.000And that's what turned my head the first time.
00:13:39.000And then, you know, when I was, then I saw how they, when Trump questioned vaccines during the 2016 election, the Democratic Party was, it was kind of that skepticism and the concerns were spread evenly across the party.
00:13:55.000My uncle, Ted Kennedy, was very much on the side of medical freedom.
00:15:46.000And, you know, on the, you know, I saw this, the craziness when we did the Tylenol findings because, you know, the science is really clear.
00:16:06.000And when, you know, when we were looking at this, and the studies that support Tylenol safety are very weak and they have huge holes in them.
00:16:15.000There's overwhelming science that says you shouldn't take it, particularly, you know, it's okay normally.
00:16:23.000You shouldn't take it during pregnancy and particularly the last days of pregnancy or in the perinatal period and perinatal period, which is immediately after pregnancy.
00:16:34.000You don't want to take it because the association with Tylenol usage at that point and neurodevelopmental disease is very, very high and pretty clear.
00:16:50.000We 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.
00:17:01.000It's better than taking ibuprofen or aspirin.
00:17:37.000Didn't they always used to have children?
00:17:39.000Yeah, I don't know if they do it anymore.
00:17:40.000Rise 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.
00:20:24.000They're just telling you what you want to hear and validating your worldview all the time.
00:20:30.000And also just outraging you, just outraging you all the time.
00:20:34.000I've been off it for a while now, and it's like it frees your brain.
00:20:38.000It's like all the weirdness of thinking about nonsense in the world, 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.
00:20:51.000And they're just bombarded by sensation, bombarded by anger and frustration and angst.
00:21:00.000It kind of liberates the darkest impulses of the human spirit.
00:21:05.000I mean, I don't use it either, but I post stuff.
00:21:10.000You know, if I started reading my comments and take them seriously.
00:21:16.000I 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.
00:21:34.000And we can all come together and work together.
00:21:39.000You know, obviously, once you guys got in there, it was you guys were MAGA and like health is bad and don't stop the dies.
00:21:49.000Like no matter what it was, people were ideologically opposed to you being correct about anything because now you're connected with Trump.
00:21:58.000So 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.
00:23:08.000You know, as far as what you thought this job was going to be before you get in, before you got in, and what it became, what was your expectations when you got in?
00:23:20.000Like, did anything really surprise you?
00:23:28.000I 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.
00:23:40.000And that actually makes me a lot more resilient because if you don't have expectations, you never get disappointments.
00:23:50.000But I would say that, you know, I had not spent a lot of my life hanging out with Republicans.
00:24:01.000And what I imagine that they were talking about is exactly the opposite of, you know, now I'm in an administration that surrounded by immensely talented people.
00:24:19.000And, you know, nobody, I always imagined the Republicans would get together and they'd be thinking about how do we screw the poor and how do we, you know, reduce the tax on the rich.
00:24:29.000And all they're, they're just narrowly focused on how do we solve these big problems and how do we make our country work.
00:24:36.000And the level of idealism that I see at every level in the White House and my agency is inspiring.
00:24:49.000And then the level of the capabilities, just the, you know, the competence of the people who I'm surrounded with.
00:24:57.000I think the thing that shocked me most was how bad the agency was, how, you know, just how inefficient, how nobody seemed to care that people were getting sicker and sicker.
00:25:10.000Nobody was taking accountability of the fact we're the health agency and yet we have the worst health and we have the richest health agency in the world.
00:25:18.000You know, I think HHS is the sixth biggest country in the world if you look at its budget.
00:25:27.000It's got the biggest budget in the federal government, bigger than the defense budget.
00:25:32.000And yet we are absolutely miserable at what we did.
00:25:37.000I mean, you know, we're literally presiding over this cliff where every American is getting, where people are just, 77% of American kids can't qualify for military service.
00:25:51.000And nobody's asking why is that happening?
00:25:55.000When I was a kid, the typical pediatrician would see one case of juvenile diabetes over a 40 or 50 year career.
00:26:08.000Today, 38% of teens are diabetic or pre-diabetic.
00:26:14.000So one out of every three kids who walks through his office door.
00:29:33.000Nobody is economically incentivized to make people well.
00:29:39.000And we are not going to get well until we align those economic incentives with the health outcomes that we want, which is nobody gets sick.
00:29:50.000We're trying to realign all those perverse incentives.
00:29:55.000For example, the medical system pays out on fee-based service.
00:30:02.000That means 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.
00:30:16.000So he is not incentivized to get you well.
00:30:20.000We ought to be paying him a flat fee at the beginning of the year and saying anything, any cause from this patient.
00:30:28.000The rest of the year come out of your pocket.
00:30:30.000And then he's like, okay, how do I get this guy from getting sick?
00:30:33.000And he starts studying nutrition books.
00:32:03.000Most of that money is not going to the patients.
00:32:05.000It's going to the insurance companies and the PBMs and all of these middlemen that are, you know, are milking the system.
00:32:12.000And that's why President Trump says, you know, the answer is to not pay the insurance company.
00:32:18.000It's to pay the consumer directly and put him, make him the CEO of his own healthcare so that he can spend money.
00:32:29.000He'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.
00:32:45.000Or to do alternatives, you know, to do preventative care.
00:32:50.000And he wants to say, he's going to want to save money.
00:32:54.000Right now, nobody is in that position of accountability.
00:32:59.000We need to make them the CEO of their own health so that they have responsibility and they're going to pay the costs if they get sick.
00:33:07.000Government pays, but they then decide to allocate that, how to allocate that money.
00:33:13.000And then we need to make the system transparent.
00:33:16.000And that's, you know, one of the things that we're doing.
00:33:19.000During his first term, Trump passed a transparency bill.
00:33:23.000But because Trump had passed, everybody wanted transparency.
00:33:28.000If you're a woman, you're pregnant, you want to know how much it's going to cost to have that baby.
00:33:36.000There's no way you can find that out for most of them.
00:33:39.000You can go nine months on a phone every day, how much it's going to cost, and you'll never get a straight answer.
00:33:46.000And 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.
00:34:02.000So 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.
00:34:11.000Now you're going to be able to go and look out of them all on a single page and figure out what the cheapest one is.
00:34:17.000If you go to a restaurant, the prices are on the menu.
00:34:21.000If 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 buy it.
00:34:30.000Nobody would operate that way, but that's how our medical system operates.
00:34:34.000So I looked at, we have a mock-up of this website.
00:34:39.000We're right now, during the Biden administration, because Trump had passed that law, the Biden administration just refused to enforce it.
00:34:46.000So we're in the same position now where there's no transparency.
00:36:32.000But he said the number one thing that they did that changed everything was price transparency, was showing people the price of what they're going to pay.
00:36:49.000And, you know, 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.
00:37:05.000So as far as making good choices with food, I like what you guys did.
00:37:10.000I love what you guys did with the food pyramid.
00:37:12.000You 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.
00:37:24.000And now it's things that we've known for a long time.
00:37:30.000That's what you're supposed to be eating.
00:37:32.000The problem is getting people to change their habits and change their ways.
00:37:36.000And if people don't start eating good food and if people don't start taking care of their body, what other things can you even imagine would shift this trend?
00:38:30.000It was written by the food industry lobbyists and the same impulses that put fruit loops at the top of the food pyramid, which isn't even a food.
00:38:38.000Fruit loops were at the top of the foot.
00:38:40.000They were at the top recommendation of the food pyramid.
00:38:42.000You can ask them to look up the old food pyramids.
00:38:46.000I need to see where fruit loops stand.
00:38:48.000Don't they throw some vitamins on fruit loops?
00:39:09.000So what we did is we got the best nutritionists in the country.
00:39:13.000We got Mark Hyman and we got the nutritionists from the best universities in the country and we put them all in a room.
00:39:20.000And I thought it was going to take a month.
00:39:22.000It took 11 months because they fought over every recommendation and everything is cited in the source so that we know we have good science.
00:39:29.000But, you know, some of the stuff was raped because of regulatory malpractice all these years.
00:39:34.000Some of the studies simply haven't been done.
00:39:36.000So there are knowledge gaps which we should not have.
00:39:45.000And because of the old food pyramid, people didn't like the food on it, and they were going to ultra-processed food, which was okay on the food pyramid.
00:39:55.000So now 70% of the food that our kids eat is ultra-processed food, 70% of the calories they get.
00:40:47.000Brooke 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.
00:41:10.000And so those programs now are going to get good food because the dietary guidelines dictate what they can and cannot feed kids.
00:41:19.000The military and the VA also are changing.
00:41:22.000Now, this week I met with a guy, Chef Robert Irvine, who is a television chef.
00:41:31.000He's been hired by Pete Hegseth to come in and change all the military meals.
00:41:36.000Military, and he's already on five bases.
00:41:39.000By the end of this month, he'll be on 20.
00:41:42.000What he's done is the food that we give our military is so bad, they won't eat it.
00:41:48.000So they're going out and they're spending their money on fast food.
00:43:13.000So 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.
00:43:24.000Many of them are being treated for diabetes.
00:43:26.000We're paying to give them the disease and then we're paying to treat it for the rest of their lives.
00:43:32.000And 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.
00:46:09.000Bernie Sanders has been fighting for this for years, but Vermont won't apply for one.
00:46:16.000And it's all partisanship, and they're putting their hatred of Donald Trump ahead of their love for their own children.
00:46:25.000And until we learn to stop doing that, the healthcare in this country is not going to improve, at least in those states.
00:46:33.000So 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.
00:47:06.000It should just, we should all be united on at least this.
00:47:09.000And 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.
00:47:20.000Things could probably be worked out more amicably, especially among friends.
00:47:25.000It's like having good health improves virtually every aspect of your life.
00:48:09.000I mean, you know, there are now, there's a big paper about to come out on losing a bipolar diagnosis, a bipolar diagnosis.
00:48:19.000Kids who lose bipolar diagnosis simply by changing their diet.
00:48:22.000We know that ADHD is driven by all these food ties and stuff, and that's very well documented.
00:48:28.000But 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.
00:48:44.000And 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.
00:48:53.000And the level of violence goes down by 40, 45, 50%.
00:48:57.000The use of restraints in juvenile detention facilities goes down 75%.
00:49:03.000The number of incidents dramatically drops.
00:49:07.000And so it's a public safety issue in the prisons.
00:49:09.000And, you know, I've been meeting now with all the prisons.
00:49:13.000Prisons have a real problem because they're allocated, the state prisons are allocated to 60 cents a day to feed the prisoners.
00:49:21.000And it's all for them, it's all about shelf life.
00:49:25.000So they're just feeding them the worst kind of poison that you could possibly, it's all just chemicals.
00:49:44.000And the other thing, 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.
00:50:06.000And, 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.
00:50:15.000And you show your curiosity about them.
00:50:28.000And then I'll listen to his rationale and I'll think, oh, actually, he's making a lot of sense.
00:50:33.000And we have to stop hating people because of the label on them and start listening.
00:50:41.000And it's really important we do that now because these algorithms are designed to drive us all apart.
00:50:49.000And we've always had political polarization in this country.
00:50:54.000I mean, I grew up during the 60s and there were bombs going off and people being shot.
00:50:59.000And it was very, very violent and vitriolic when my dad was running.
00:51:06.000And the polarization probably was the worst since the American Civil War.
00:51:13.000But 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.
00:52:57.000I polled the students and I said, how many of you think this is a good idea?
00:53:01.000And they all put their hands up and they said, we all hated it for the first two weeks and now we love it.
00:53:07.000The parents said, it's the best thing that ever happened.
00:53:10.000My kid is not driving with their cell phone in the car anymore because they know they can live without it.
00:53:16.000Or eating dinner with the family and we're actually having conversations.
00:53:20.000And then the teachers in the schools love it because the disciplinary problems go down and the test scores go through the roof because they're focusing on work.
00:53:32.000But again, the blue states are the hardest to convince to do it because they see it as a Trump, a part of the demonization of Trump being the tyrant or whatever.
00:53:48.000It's just so stupid to not recognize the kids are distracted.
00:54:27.000I don't know how you get people to talk, though.
00:54:30.000I mean, other than, I mean, I do it on a podcast, but that's my job.
00:54:38.000I 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.
00:54:47.000I don't know how many opportunities I would ever even get to do that.
00:56:18.000And he used logic a lot of times destructively, but not in an angry way.
00:56:24.000And so I think, you know, he was teaching people how to have conversations again.
00:56:31.000You're teaching people how to have conversations again.
00:56:33.000And 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 people with whom they disagree.
00:56:46.000But there's also a real genuine problem today in the marketplace of outrage and 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 putting people down and not having civil discourse, but trying to win, trying to dominate someone in an argument, trying to squash people.
00:57:16.000And 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.
00:57:31.000Like 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.
00:58:33.000Instead 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.
00:58:42.000Talk to them like a person that, you know, in any other circumstance, maybe even could be your friend.
00:59:00.000But as prevalent as that kind of vitriol is in the podcast world, It's it is incomparable to what's happening on television because there are no conversations on television, right?
00:59:15.000That's more of what I was getting at, honestly.
00:59:17.000Is there's some shows that do that, but like some of these CNN shows, it's just these crazy ideological battles.
00:59:23.000And yet, also, guys, pro tip: you can't have fucking six people at a table all yelling out for seven minutes.
00:59:31.000You 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.
00:59:40.000It's stupid, it's a stupid way to talk about things.
00:59:42.000You know, I mean, Cheryl went on and it was that.
00:59:50.000It wasn't like, like you say, you know, like let's have a congenial conversation with people and allow them to express themselves and to be fun and funny.
01:00:04.000Yes, yeah, well, just have a conversation with someone.
01:00:07.000If 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 hens squawking all at her.
01:00:18.000It's just like you see it over and over again when they oppose somebody.
01:00:21.000It's like they're all chiming in, and it's just not the way you could ever like thoroughly cover a subject.
01:01:35.000And 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.
01:01:44.000And that's what people have to get past.
01:02:23.000That's a wild question to ask someone.
01:02:25.000But, you know, he would just have a conversation with you.
01:02:27.000You know, and I think people have a hunger for that.
01:02:30.000And a lot of this infighting comes from no face-to-face communication.
01:02:35.000I 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.
01:02:44.000Things become very performative when 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.
01:02:51.000Like, that's probably not the best way to talk about stuff.
01:02:55.000And I think human beings naturally understand one-on-one conversations.
01:03:00.000We've had them for all of human history.
01:03:02.000And 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.
01:03:40.000You know, it was less of a conversation and more of a being in the ring.
01:03:48.000You know, it was like being in the ring.
01:03:50.000But 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.
01:04:03.000That'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.
01:04:14.000My uncle, my father, said we should be able to debate.
01:04:17.000We should be able to win these debates and the marketplace ideas.
01:04:21.000If we can't, then we need to examine ourselves.
01:04:24.000It was a core tenant of the Democratic Party.
01:04:27.000And, 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.
01:04:38.000They were trying to close down Howard Stern because Howard Stern was very critical of Bush.
01:04:43.000And it was like he was the 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.
01:04:54.000You know, and that was a right-wing thing.
01:04:57.000And we always thought of it as a right-wing thing.
01:05:00.000And 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.
01:05:13.000Because 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?
01:05:30.000To 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?
01:05:39.000And 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 standards.
01:05:52.000The White House ordered me to be removed from Instagram.
01:05:58.00037 hours after he got, after he took the oath of office, swearing to uphold the Constitution, they were ordering Mark Zuckerberg to take me down.
01:06:08.000And then you look at what's happening in England now.
01:06:11.000People going to jail for Twitter posts.
01:07:05.000And a lot of it is criticism of immigration, like legitimate criticism of immigration and legitimate criticism of crimes that have been committed.
01:07:15.000And people outraged, which is completely normal.
01:07:18.000But instead of like doing anything about that, they want to arrest people from complaining.
01:07:40.000Well, it's just strange that they couldn't do anything to stop that from happening and that anybody with anybody that's reasonable would be willing to let that happen because their side is imposing it.
01:07:52.000That seems like an existential threat to all critical thinking, all communication and debate.
01:08:00.000As soon as you start arresting people for opinions, that's crazy.
01:09:56.000You don't want to be harassed by a couple.
01:09:58.000Concerns 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.
01:10:13.000It should not be misinterpreted as a ban on lawful, polite, or controversial speech.
01:10:18.000Who's to decide what's controversial, though?
01:10:21.000Legislation focuses on addressing harassment rather than banning specific topics of conversation entirely.
01:10:27.000Just any regulation of conversation is nuts.
01:10:31.000It's one thing you're harassing the staff.
01:10:34.000I've never known a pub owner who would allow people to come in and harass his staff.
01:10:41.000He already has an economic and management incentive to not allow that.
01:10:47.000It's not the kind of thing you need to legislate.
01:10:49.000But 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.
01:11:01.000Because then, as we've seen, there's a lot of people that get really triggered about a lot of things that are pretty normal for most folks.
01:12:33.000I 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've got a real problem.
01:12:44.000And 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.
01:12:53.000And when there's a lot of money involved and a lot of businesses involved.
01:12:56.000I typed it into perplexity and it just gives a little context on it because the pubs were the same, the pub thing.
01:13:03.000Reverses a 2013 removal of third-party harassment liability, making pubs liable if staffs overhear comments deemed harassing based on protected characteristics like sex or race.
01:13:15.000Critics call it a banter ban, fearing landlords will police conversations to avoid lawsuits, chilling speech in social venues.
01:13:24.000That makes it sound like if someone was doing that, the business was getting in trouble versus the person who was saying it.
01:14:02.000No, it reverses the removal of the third-party harassment liability.
01:14:07.000So they removed the liability, now making pubs liable.
01:14:11.000So it now makes them liable if they overhear comments.
01:14:13.000So what this does is it encourages the pub itself to censor people, which makes sense.
01:14:20.000I 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.
01:14:30.000Yeah, so now the incentive is the pub owner to go out and police all the conversations so that if anybody crosses the guardrail, you know, the pub owner now has to go in and interrupt them.
01:14:45.000If 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.
01:14:56.000You could just, you could commit fraud.
01:14:59.000If 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.
01:15:08.000That's not outside of what I think a shady person would do.
01:15:12.000If you think about what you're just talking about with all the Medicare fraud and all the other fraud that we know has happened in the world, this is a giant loophole.
01:15:21.000This is a giant loophole for people to come in and sue people and silence everybody's speech.
01:15:26.000And the fact that this is not being recognized, it's very disturbing that people don't understand human behavior.
01:15:33.000It's very weird that they're willing to accept this kind of stuff.
01:15:39.000When 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?
01:15:52.000I mean, I've been surprised by how much President Trump has supported me on this stuff.
01:16:00.000Because I'm going after the biggest, big pharma, big insurance, the insurance.
01:16:13.000And these have all been, you know, those were all taboos for every administration, Democratic, Republican.
01:16:19.000There was little incremental things that you could do under Democratic administrations, but nothing like this has ever happened.
01:16:26.000You know, I mean, the agreement we made with the pharmaceutical industry could not have happened under any other president of the MFN agreement, the most favored nation.
01:16:37.000And 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.
01:16:47.000And so we have 4.2% of the world's population here, and over 70% of pharmaceutical profits and revenues come from the United States.
01:17:55.000Obama, 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.
01:18:06.000And President Trump literally called me sometimes once a day, called late at night, 11.30 at night, and say, where are you on MFN?
01:18:18.000And we ended up getting the, it seemed to me even it seemed insurmountable.
01:18:24.000But he said, I'm going to use tariffs.
01:18:27.000I'm going to force the Europeans to raise their drug prices.
01:18:31.000And because he didn't want to, he didn't, we had enough leverage on the pharmaceutical companies because of our Medicaid and Medicare programs.
01:18:41.000We could pretty much force them to lower their prices.
01:18:45.000But it would put them out of business.
01:18:47.000So, and he didn't mind, he wants us to continue to be the center for innovation in this country.
01:18:52.000And he also wanted the companies to reshore all their production so that we're making all the drugs here and they're not making it elsewhere in the world.
01:19:01.000And so we sat down with them for months and we came to agreements with 16 of the 17 pharmaceutical companies.
01:19:10.000Now Americans are getting the lowest prices in the world.
01:19:13.000If somebody lowers a price in Europe, we get that price or lower.
01:19:17.000And people can get that today on Trump RX.
01:19:20.000They can go for the most popular medications and get the cheapest price in the world.
01:19:25.000And 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.
01:19:40.000They increased stock values by 1.3 trillion among them.
01:19:46.000And they've all agreed to onshore their production.
01:19:48.000So Lilly is building six plants here, new plants, including one of the biggest API facilities in the world.
01:19:55.000The API are the pharmaceutical ingredients that we ran out of during COVID.
01:20:02.000We need to be making them here because otherwise other countries can blackmail us.
01:20:06.000Pfizer, Merck, they're all building big facilities here, and drug production is now going to come to the United States.
01:20:14.000We are going to be the center of the world in terms of drug production.
01:20:18.000And those negotiations were very, very tough, and they were extraordinarily complex.
01:20:26.000We have a really good suite of talented individuals, high-caliber individuals who've left billion-dollar businesses.
01:20:36.000One of them is a guy called Chris Klump, who's immensely talented.
01:20:40.000He walked away from a company that does data management for 85% of the hospitals in this country.
01:20:47.000And he walked away from a billion-dollar company.
01:20:50.000He divested it, lost a lot of money to come just because he wants to improve things.
01:20:56.000He ran the negotiations, and the pharmaceutical companies fell in love with him because they realized they could trust him.
01:21:03.000And 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.
01:21:13.000And that's going to change everybody's experience.
01:22:13.000So, and it's going to 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.
01:22:23.000And IVF is going to be really important because our birth rates just dropped.
01:23:30.000It 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 rate.
01:23:43.000And, you know, American women want to have babies, and a third of them cannot have as many children as they want.
01:23:51.000What was the pushback when it came to things like removal of dyes?
01:23:58.000The 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.
01:24:12.000And a lot of them came in and said, yeah, you know, we know we've got to change.
01:24:35.000But in our country, we hadn't approved a bunch of them.
01:24:39.000So we only had one or two vegetable based dyes.
01:24:44.000Marty McCary, who's done a fantastic job at FDA, has now fast-tracked it this year, seven new ones.
01:24:52.000So 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.
01:24:58.000And that's going to, you know, that's.
01:25:00.000So instead, they'll use just food-based dyes?
01:25:03.000Yeah, just vegetable and mineral-based dyes.
01:25:07.000And that's, you know, another thing that we did, again, through convenient two things that we did through convening industry because of President Trump's convening power, we fixed the prior authorization.
01:25:20.000So 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.
01:25:33.000So you go in, your doctor tells you you need a knee replacement, and then it gets you, it takes you six months for the company to approve, for the insurance company to approve the surgery.
01:25:46.000And, you know, it was infuriating for people and really devastating and heartbreaking for a lot of them.
01:25:54.000And we got, we got the biggest insurance companies representing 80% of the American public all voluntarily agree to eliminate prior authorization for almost all their procedures.
01:26:37.000Before you leave his office, you'll know whether the insurance company approves of it or not.
01:26:40.000And that's going to dramatically change the medical experience.
01:26:44.000Another thing that we did, again, through convening industry, is we originally got 63, the top tech companies together, and we ended up final agreement with 405 of them to agree to stop information blocking.
01:27:02.000So your medical records are owned by you, but you can't get access to them a lot of times, most of the time.
01:27:12.000The data company won't give them to you.
01:27:15.000And so we've got them all to agree to stop doing that.
01:27:19.000So by the end of this year, every American will be able to get their medical records on their cell phone.
01:27:24.000And that's going to dramatically change the medical experience.
01:27:27.000It'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.
01:27:40.000Now, or you come in unconscious and they don't know what to do with you.
01:27:50.000They can look at all of your previous medical records and make good decisions about how to treat you.
01:28:00.000And 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.
01:28:20.000This choice is bad for you and offer you a better choice, et cetera.
01:28:23.000And there's an app like that, Yucca Now, but there's a lot of them coming online.
01:28:47.000You go into the grocery store and you put it on the barcode and then it rates each of the products about whether or not they're, you know, whether it's good or a healthy one.
01:28:59.000And then it makes you a recommendation for a healthier one if it's bad for you.
01:29:03.000And that is going to change the food culture in our country because the company's already changing their ingredients so that they can get better scores from the Yucca app and from other apps that are like it.
01:29:23.000You're always going to have a certain amount of preservatives and processed foods.
01:29:27.000Well, I mean, first of all, we're not going to take processed foods away from people, but we're going to, I think we're going to change the amount of processed foods.
01:29:38.000One is by April, we will have a federal definition of ultra-processed foods, first time in history.
01:29:48.000And as soon as we do that, we're going to do front-of-package food labeling.
01:29:52.000So every food in your grocery store will have a label on it.
01:29:56.000It'll have maybe a green light, a red light, or yellow light, telling you whether or not it's going to be good for you.
01:30:52.000If you're 300 pounds, you're like, oh my God, it's so much work to do something about this and not fall back on the old behaviors.
01:31:01.000And I don't know, other than by example, how you can get a large group of people to go along with that.
01:31:07.000When 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.
01:31:14.000So there's some kind of an example of a guy who just completely changed his lifestyle around, could change what he eats.
01:31:26.000Like where are we at right now on peptides and getting them regulated and making sure it's not this weird gray area?
01:31:33.000Because we know they're effective, but we also know that there's a lot of pushback on peptides.
01:31:38.000Yeah, I mean, I'm a big fan of peptides.
01:31:40.000I've used them myself and used them with really good effect on a couple of injuries.
01:31:50.000What happened was there were 19 peptides that you can, just so people understand, there was a law written that to allow compounding pharmacies to make compounds that were part of approved drugs.
01:32:12.000So, you know, part of approved ingredients of approved drugs to make them individually for patients who did not have access to the particular formulation that they needed to fit them.
01:32:30.000Maybe they had an allergy to the commercial brand or whatever.
01:32:34.000And the compounding pharmacies, and peptides was part of that group.
01:32:37.000There were 19 peptides that were widely formulated by compounding pharmacies during the Biden administration.
01:32:45.000They illegally moved those to category two, which says do not formulate.
01:32:52.000It was illegal because they're not supposed to do that unless there's a safety signal.
01:35:27.000I know there's been some talk about psychedelics.
01:35:32.000And 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 serious opioid addictions.
01:35:48.000And 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 these initiatives.
01:36:03.000I think there's some stuff that can help a lot of people.
01:36:06.000I mean, how many people are addicted to opioids in this country?
01:36:18.000I don't know enough, and I don't think it's well documented enough about whether it's a long-term impact on addiction.
01:36:26.000But 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 PSDD.
01:36:54.000And also some forms of depression, et cetera.
01:37:01.000And 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, particularly to the military soldiers who have suffered these injuries to get access to these products.
01:37:29.000We're working through that process now.
01:37:43.000You know, I mean, a lot of the same type of PTSD they experience, it just doesn't get brought up as much.
01:37:50.000And, you know, if you can if you can treat depression and, you know, without using SSRIs, putting somebody a lifetime sentence to SSRIs, you can treat them.
01:38:03.000There's a number of things, not just psychedelics, but a number of interventions that we're looking at that are rapid interventions that are more transformative than the way that psychedelics seem to rewire your brain.
01:38:15.000And so we're looking at that as an entire category of interventions that people ought to be able to study.
01:38:24.000They ought to have good access to, and we should get it out to the public as quickly as possible.
01:38:29.000What would be the hurdles to something like that?
01:38:35.000I think that we're going to get it done.
01:38:40.000Would it be implemented in a clinical setting?
01:38:42.000Would 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.
01:38:53.000In others, it would be, there would be very strong guidelines.
01:38:59.000I mean, this is what we're envisioning, so I can't tell you exactly what we're going to do.
01:39:03.000But very, very strong guidelines for therapeutic guidelines.
01:39:07.000So how they're applied, what kind of follow-up, because a lot of these things rewire your brain.
01:39:13.000If you don't do follow-up, it doesn't work, or you have a failure rate.
01:39:18.000So those kind of protocols are all stuff that we've been developing and studying.
01:39:24.000And I think most of the people in the administration are anxious to make this happen as quickly as possible.
01:39:30.000And I know Doug Collins over at the VA already has, I think, 21 studies going over there.
01:39:50.000And I think they're looking at a number of things, including ayahuasca and Epigaine.
01:39:55.000They shot down something fairly recently in California where they were going to decriminalize.
01:40:00.000Were they going to decriminalize psilocybin or they were going to allow it for clinical use?
01:40:08.000But I think the problem that they had was they didn't say we're completely opposed to it.
01:40:13.000They said there's no guidelines in terms of like how's it going to be clinically applied, who are going to be the people, what's the dosage.
01:40:20.000Yeah, you need those guidelines because you don't want to make the Wild West.
01:40:24.000You're going to have horror stories overnight because people, as you know, some people can have very, very bad experiences on that.
01:40:33.000Also, 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.
01:40:43.000I mean, we're looking at ways to get it done so that it's in a very controlled setting.
01:40:49.000And 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 cop or just a regular person, could be able to go to a place like that and get treatment?
01:41:04.000For me, personally, I would like to see that.
01:41:09.000But we need to move in baby steps with this because you don't want to create a situation where people are getting hurt.
01:41:20.000You don't want to create a situation where mentally unstable people snap, which can happen.
01:41:34.000But 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 have taken these substances have experienced.
01:41:52.000Like it's not a cure-all for everything.
01:42:00.000You 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.
01:42:14.000No, it doesn't, especially when so many of them have come back with these stories.
01:42:18.000Guys Sean Ryan, a bunch of my friends have done it.
01:42:21.000And 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 him.
01:43:39.000So it's pretty hard to convince me that you can fix what's wrong with you by taking something outside of you.
01:43:47.000But I have seen so much overwhelming anecdotal evidence, but also clinical studies at a test who, you know, to the effect that is under some circumstances with some people or these medicines.
01:44:07.000You know, and I think you've got Jay Bhattachara at NIH and Marty McCary at FDA who are all, you know, doing whatever they can to make this happen.
01:44:22.000Well, I sincerely hope that more people consider it.
01:44:25.000And 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?
01:44:41.000You didn't hear about it from former Republican governors like Rick Perry.
01:44:44.000But when he sees the benefit that it has with veterans, which he cares very deeply about the veteran community, he's like, no, this is not something to ignore just because it's connected to hippies.
01:44:56.000You 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 73.
01:45:06.000When he put out that rumor that Ed Muskie was addicted to Ibergane.
01:45:11.000Brazilian witch doctors were coming in and giving him Ibogaine.
01:45:41.000And 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.
01:45:54.000But seeing it from the right is very encouraging because I think it's something for human beings.
01:46:00.000It's not for everybody, but it's something, it's a tool that I have seen benefit many, many people.
01:46:05.000And we should use every tool that could help us be healthier and happier, period.
01:46:11.000That that shouldn't be a right or a left issue.
01:46:18.000I mean, it's shocking that that is an unusual perspective.
01:46:22.000But I think we've been propagandized for so long, particularly on certain things like, you know, just the blanket term of drugs.
01:46:32.000All of them fall into this category of you trying to escape reality.
01:46:36.000And this one is literally the opposite.
01:46:39.000It'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.
01:46:49.000I think that'd be great for everybody.
01:47:11.000And, you know, I didn't know when I came in, I didn't know the president that well.
01:47:16.000So, you know, but from the beginning, he was empowering me.
01:47:24.000And, you know, I never made an agreement with him about anything.
01:47:27.000But the first time he asked me whether I wanted to be HHS secretary, I said, I don't think so.
01:47:34.000I wanted to do some, I wanted to be maybe a health czar in the White House.
01:47:37.000And 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.
01:47:48.000And it has 82,000 employees and the biggest budget in government.
01:47:56.000And that would actually give me the power to change the system.
01:48:00.000And so then I went back to him and I said, you know, I want HHS.
01:48:06.000And then he allowed me to appoint all of my sub agency heads, which no president has ever done with an HHS secretary in history.
01:48:15.000He allowed me to appoint Marty McCary, choose Marty McCary at FDA, Jay Bhattachara, Dr. Oz, and CMS, and everybody else below them.
01:48:28.000So nobody's ever been able to do that.
01:48:30.000And then he gave me a very prominent job on the transition committee to set this all in motion.
01:48:38.000And then once I got in, he supported me on everything.
01:48:42.000And that, I think, was allowed me to do things more.
01:48:47.000I think, I mean, I don't want to sound like, you know, vain or something, but because of the great team that we have and because this is where 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.
01:49:08.000I'm pleased with what we've done, but there's still, I mean, it's 20% of our economy.
01:49:17.000And so it's a huge agency and there's, you know, it's in everything and there's a lot to do.
01:49:29.000I would say, yeah, if you put this on the table and said, you're going to have this, you know, the first day I got into office, I would snatch it off and say, I'll take it.
01:49:39.000But 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 going to be.
01:51:27.000So what was the recent ruling on glyphosate?
01:51:31.000I was on the 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.
01:51:48.000And, you know, I've, listen, I've spent 40 years fighting pesticides.
01:51:53.000It was, you know, 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 then got an $11 billion settlement with Monsanto, which is now Bayer.
01:52:09.000By the end of our trial, Bayer-owned Monsanto.
01:52:29.000But I also understand the president's point of view.
01:52:31.000The president didn't create this system.
01:52:34.000He's dealing with a problem that was created long before over the past 60 years when, 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.
01:52:56.000Glyphosate is the foundational pesticide of our food production system.
01:53:02.000So 97% of corn in this country is produced with glyphosate and can't be produced without it.
01:53:21.00098% of soy is produced with glyphosate.
01:53:25.000If you banned glyphosate overnight or if you got rid of it or if somebody else cut off our supply, it would destroy the American food system.
01:55:44.000We 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.
01:55:53.000We could see this clear line where all the runoff is going into the river.
01:55:57.000Yeah, but Will Harris will also tell you the same thing that I said, is that what he did is very hard.
01:56:16.000We all understand that this is a huge problem.
01:56:18.000So 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, is asked for federal preemption.
01:56:36.000So that would mean that if the federal label says that this is safe, that these state lawsuits now cannot be brought.
01:56:50.000So it would throw out a lot of the state lawsuits and me effectively gives them immunity from liability, which is, you know, to me, it's not good to give any company immunity from liability.
01:57:04.000It takes away all incentive for them to make the product safer.
01:57:09.000Again, the president is dealing with bigger issues, which is the company that's making this has paid $11 billion to, you know, in my lawsuit, they're just about to sign another $7.6 billion settlement.
01:57:23.000There's 65,000 cases out there, and they've said, we're getting out of this business, you know, if we don't get relief.
01:57:47.000And 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.
01:58:07.000I 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.
01:58:20.000So, you know, vegetables, lettuce, celery, all of these vegetables now they're using a lot of them.
01:58:28.000You know, you're going to see a very quick transition.
01:58:32.000It's an attachment that's dragged by a tractor.
01:58:37.000It kills the weeds at every stage of their life.
01:58:39.000It identifies their species and kills them instantly all the way down through their root system by exploding them with this laser.
02:00:06.000There's all these kind of new, exciting technologies that give us light at the end of the tunnel to transition, and it could be very, very fast.
02:00:14.000What the president wants to do is accelerate that.
02:00:18.000He says, yeah, we can't allow the company to go bankrupt.
02:00:23.000We can't allow foreign interference, but we've got to get off of this stuff.
02:00:27.000We've got to 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.
02:03:03.000You know, the introduction of glyphosate of Roundup Ready corn.
02:03:11.000You know what Roundup-ready corn is, right?
02:03:14.000It means that you can spray the field and everything green dies except for the corn, which is immune to glyphosate.
02:03:21.000That's why it's so advantageous to them.
02:03:24.000It saves huge labor costs and it allows them to, you know, to sell the corn at a price that people could afford.
02:03:34.000You know, one of the most controversial uses is a desiccant.
02:03:38.000And that means that there is no Roundup Ready wheat.
02:03:42.000So normally they weren't using this in the wheat field.
02:03:46.000But around 2003, they started using it to dry out the wheat just before harvest.
02:03:51.000And that way they can harvest it without getting fungus on it and without getting mold on it.
02:03:57.000And for the first time, they were spraying it right on food.
02:04:02.000And so that is real, you know, the major vector for getting into human beings.
02:04:06.000And, you know, around 2003 is when you started seeing these explosions in celiac disease and gluten allergies.
02:04:14.000There's no clear scientific evidence that it's related, but there's some signals out there that now we're looking at it, HHS, for the first time.
02:04:24.000They should have been looking at this 30 years ago.
02:04:32.000Well, 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.
02:04:41.000And then also people coming from Europe and eating in America and getting sick.
02:04:46.000And I don't know whether that, there's no telling whether that's glyphosate or other pesticides or whatever.
02:05:49.000And 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.
02:05:56.000And 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.
02:06:07.000And 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.
02:06:20.000How do we get those people to ultimately transition?
02:06:24.000And if they do, could they even produce enough of their product to stay viable?
02:06:32.000I mean, I've met with over 100 farmers and developing the food guidelines, our team.
02:06:38.000And, you know, I've been doing agricultural issues for 30 years.
02:06:41.000I can tell you farmers are the most hardworking people that I've ever met.
02:07:14.000But he also wants to make sure that we accelerate the off-ramps, the development of off-ramps, that they can transition off of this.
02:07:24.000And we're putting huge amounts of money into regenerative agriculture.
02:07:28.000People like Mr. Harris and meeting with him and Brooke Rollins and meeting with these guys all the time, trying to figure out how do we help you?
02:07:41.000How do we help other farmers to do what you're doing?
02:07:43.000And that is a priority for the administration.
02:07:49.000Do you envision a possibility, a real possibility of a country that is all regenerative agriculture with no pesticides?
02:08:00.000That 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.
02:08:08.000I mean, I think that's going to happen.
02:08:10.000I think technology is going to allow us that to happen.
02:08:16.000But you're going to have a lot of robotic farming happening.
02:08:41.000That's a little more difficult, particularly in some parts of the country.
02:08:46.000You need nutrients in the soil, but there's ways of growing.
02:08:52.000And Harris has shown this, where you can dramatically reduce the amount of petroleum-based fertilizers that you're using, dramatically, almost eliminate them.
02:09:05.000Sure, but the scale of his farm and the scale of the production in comparison to these monocrop agriculture places that produce corn.
02:09:12.000I mean, these people are dealing with enormous amounts of crops.
02:09:17.000The question is, could that be scaled regeneratively?
02:09:20.000Could you get it to a point where you have organic farms only?
02:09:27.000I think with technology, you're going to eliminate a lot of the pesticides and the herbicides.
02:09:33.000I think it's going to be much slower when you talk about fertilizers.
02:09:50.000Yeah, I mean, that's going to be after my three years before that happens.
02:09:55.000Do you I mean if someone else wins and they want you to stay, are you going to stay?
02:10:02.000Do you have a thought of that or do you want to do as much as you can in four years?
02:10:05.000Well, whatever happens, because you can't tell what's going to happen in the election, that I will act as if I got three years to do everything.
02:10:17.000And if I get more time, then I would probably take it.
02:10:34.000And 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.
02:10:43.000He says, were you sleeping 2 o'clock in the morning?
02:12:45.000Well, that's why this time with you in office has been encouraging.
02:12:52.000I 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.
02:13:02.000I had read your Fauci book, and I'm like, if anybody could do something about this, it's you.
02:13:08.000And I'm kind of amazed at how much you have been able to do.
02:13:11.000And also, you know, watching the struggle, the difficulties of getting things pushed through that should have been pushed through easily with rational thinking.
02:13:22.000It's a fascinating time because we are in a time of change.
02:14:16.000He had pesticides, which were a huge issue with him, and that's what I worked with him on, on the dangers that, you know, his workers were experiencing from pesticides.
02:14:27.000And the other issue he had was immigration.
02:14:29.000He wanted to shut down the border because he saw the way that it was impairing this huge influx of illegal migration across the border.
02:14:42.000It was impairing his ability to get, to bargain, to leverage good wages and conditions for his workers.
02:14:50.000When I grew up, the Democratic Party was against immigration.
02:14:54.000And it was the Republican Party who wanted it because the big corporations wanted cheap labor.
02:14:59.000The Chamber of Commerce was firmly embedded in the Republican Party, and they were all about open borders.
02:15:07.000Today, the Chamber of Commerce is with the Democratic Party.
02:15:10.000And so it's one of these switches that is kind of inexplicable to me.
02:15:14.000But I think, again, it happened because President Trump said, I'm going to fix it with the wall.
02:15:20.000And that became, you know, it suddenly became open borders, suddenly became a calling card for the Democratic Party.
02:15:28.000But there's a reason, you know, and I see it in my agency, the cause that it's imposing on our country.
02:15:35.000And, 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.
02:16:18.000But a lot of them, the other ones, have been arrested and they just haven't been convicted yet because they jumped bail or they jumped their warrants.
02:16:29.000The other 30%, a lot of them are gang members.
02:16:32.000When they go looking for an immigrant, they're not just randomly searching restaurants.
02:16:39.000They're going after particular people who they've gotten their names from local law enforcement and from others.
02:16:46.000During the Biden administration or during the Obama administration, President Obama deported more people than President Trump did, most in history.
02:17:12.000Now, because it's Trump doing it, you have the entire Democratic Party and the media establishment saying, oh, look at the horrible things.
02:17:20.000He's a dictator, but he's doing what he promised to do to the American people.
02:17:25.000It's very disturbing watching what you see on TV.
02:17:30.000The 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.
02:17:44.000If you, that's not how protests usually work.
02:17:49.000If you don't like U.S. 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.
02:17:59.000You wouldn't send people to try and interfere with people who are arresting a drug dealer.
02:18:06.000And 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.
02:18:18.000And when you have crowds doing that, it's going to blow up.
02:18:23.000And so, you know, I see this, you know, nobody is happy with the way that things have looked, particularly in Minnesota.
02:18:34.000But a lot of it is because of this capacity of the press to take Trump derangement syndrome and amplify it into public outrage and set up a situation.
02:18:48.000I mean, if you were, you're a dad, I wouldn't send my kids out to interfere with a law enforcement operation.
02:19:58.000When 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.
02:20:43.000They don't like officers wearing masks.
02:20:46.000But on the other side, they have to wear masks because they're being doxxed and their families are being threatened and you're filming everything they do and you're these organized instigators.
02:20:57.000So if it wasn't for organized protest, I wonder if those particular interactions would have even happened, would have even taken place.
02:21:06.000And I know you're saying that they don't, that they're targeting specific people.
02:21:42.000But 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 people into this country over the last four years, at least, being charitable.
02:21:56.000And I was down at the border and I was during my presidential campaign.
02:22:00.000I went down there and I 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.
02:22:11.000It was like the Boston Marathon in the beginning of it just a sheer number.
02:22:34.000If they're a criminal, turn them back.
02:22:37.000But, you know, most of these people, they couldn't figure that out.
02:22:42.000and otherwise put them on a bus or a plane to anywhere they wanted to go in the country.
02:22:46.000So 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.
02:23:55.000It'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.
02:24:32.000It just, it really disturbs people when you see massed people grabbing people and arresting people, and a lot of them turn out to be American citizens.
02:24:41.000You know, that's part of the problem, too.
02:24:43.000But 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.
02:25:02.000Also, 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.
02:25:14.000Like if you listen to the things they were saying back then, it was very much the Republican perspective.
02:25:19.000Well, that was the Democratic Party always was against an open border.
02:25:36.000Before we wrap this up, listen, thank you very much for all your hard work.
02:25:39.000And 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 that's genuinely going to help.
02:25:50.000And I think, you know, so far you're on a good path.
02:25:53.000So I hope we can get all the other stuff done, too.