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

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan podcast, check it out!

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by Day, Joe Rogan, podcast by night, all day.

00:00:12.000 I like them, but if it's just me wearing them, it feels stupid.

00:00:15.000 Why do you wear them?

00:00:16.000 I like it because it locks me in.

00:00:18.000 Just locks me in.

00:00:20.000 The only thing I hear is a person's voice, and I can't hear Jamie's chair moving.

00:00:25.000 I can't hear anything else.

00:00:27.000 And it just like makes me really focused on the conversation only.

00:00:33.000 I have ADHD.

00:00:35.000 I had 11 siblings, and I have seven kids.

00:00:38.000 So I can work.

00:00:40.000 I can focus.

00:00:41.000 No matter what.

00:00:42.000 No matter what.

00:00:43.000 It's a skill.

00:00:45.000 It's a thing to learn.

00:00:47.000 If you're the person that can focus without distraction, you're a good person to be in the job you're at.

00:00:54.000 Yeah.

00:00:55.000 What is it like?

00:00:56.000 So since you've been appointed, I haven't talked to you on a podcast.

00:01:01.000 I know.

00:01:04.000 It's the best job I could ever have.

00:01:08.000 I feel like I was designed for the job.

00:01:10.000 And I just have so much fun.

00:01:13.000 I mean, it's a target-rich environment.

00:01:16.000 So there's so many ways that you can effective and be effective and improve people's lives every single day.

00:01:22.000 And part of that is because the agency was just such a mess.

00:01:26.000 You know, it wasn't doing healthcare. 0.64

00:01:30.000 It was doing sick care and just managing all of these perverse incentives.

00:01:37.000 And have us spending $5 trillion a year two to three times per capita when any other nation spends.

00:01:44.000 And we have the sickest population in the world.

00:01:47.000 We have the highest chronic disease burden in the world.

00:01:51.000 And we're the best at medicine in this country.

00:01:55.000 But that's when people get sick.

00:01:57.000 You'd rather get sick here than any place in the world.

00:02:00.000 But you're more likely to be sick here than any place in the world.

00:02:04.000 And, you know, and then it was just a big political patronage operation.

00:02:11.000 And it still is.

00:02:13.000 And, you know, we're putting an end to that now.

00:02:15.000 I mean, the amount of fraud that goes through that place, we lose just in Medicaid and Medicare $100 billion a year.

00:02:25.000 And it's all just this really, you know, shocking, blatant fraud where it's become industrialized.

00:02:32.000 I mean, there's foreign nations like Russia.

00:02:36.000 Everybody's heard of Somalia, but also Cuba.

00:02:39.000 Has this operation in Florida where it's they open up these little PO boxes for durable medical equipment is like knee braces and wheelchairs.

00:02:56.000 And then they don't have any knee braces or wheelchairs, but they have patient identification numbers.

00:03:05.000 So they just claim to be shipping them to people.

00:03:08.000 And we found one hotel.

00:03:10.000 It had like 129 rooms and everyone was a different company that was selling durable medical equipment.

00:03:18.000 And we go in and shut them down and they immediately go back to Cuba. 0.99

00:03:23.000 The whole thing is apparently run by the Cuban government.

00:03:26.000 But Russia's doing the same thing with hospices.

00:03:30.000 Where do they get the patient ID numbers?

00:03:33.000 They can buy those numbers on the black market.

00:03:37.000 Really?

00:03:37.000 Yeah.

00:03:39.000 And Russia does the same thing in Los Angeles with hospice care.

00:03:46.000 So there's more hospice care in Los Angeles than the entire rest of the country combined.

00:03:53.000 It's all fraudulent.

00:03:55.000 And we're just pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into these fraudulent operations.

00:04:01.000 The same thing that the Somalis did in Ethiopia. 0.95

00:04:04.000 A lot of that money was going back to Bo Go Herang and terror groups over there.

00:04:10.000 But they were, it was a lot of it was based.

00:04:13.000 The Medicare stuff is different.

00:04:15.000 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.

00:04:23.000 It was never used before.

00:04:25.000 There was no effort at program integrity.

00:04:27.000 In fact, the Biden administration deliberately, purposely ordered them, they ended the program integrity office.

00:04:35.000 So they went from hundreds of people to six people.

00:04:38.000 And they said, we don't want you doing program integrity.

00:04:40.000 We just want you doing enrollments.

00:04:44.000 And so we got all this fraud.

00:04:48.000 Most of it came from these waivers that the states got, all the states got them for home care and community care.

00:04:58.000 So, you know, 30 years ago, Medicaid, Medicare, if you've got a hernia operation, we paid for that.

00:05:07.000 And you could tell somebody got the hernia operation because they had the scar.

00:05:12.000 They used a licensed nurse. 0.66

00:05:13.000 They used a licensed doctor.

00:05:15.000 It was all documented.

00:05:17.000 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.

00:05:25.000 So if you let us pay family members to do home care, the patient won't have to go to the hospital.

00:05:34.000 They won't have to go to the emergency room and we'll save a lot of money.

00:05:38.000 So it was well-intentioned.

00:05:40.000 But then what happened is people immediately started abusing it.

00:05:45.000 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.

00:06:00.000 Balancing your grandmother's checkbook, driving her to a medical visit.

00:06:08.000 So then you had this, you know, organized fraud where, and this is what happened in Minnesota.

00:06:15.000 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.

00:06:27.000 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.

00:06:36.000 It's happening all over the country because there was no, it's very, very difficult.

00:06:42.000 The guardrails on that system were very pervious, and anybody can defraud it.

00:06:48.000 If you are inclined to do fraud, this was an irresistible opportunity.

00:06:56.000 How long was this going on for?

00:06:58.000 When did this fraud begin, do you believe?

00:07:00.000 It really accelerated during the Biden administration.

00:07:04.000 We expected to pay for the Minnesota program just for autism care for kids who have autism.

00:07:12.000 The 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.

00:07:22.000 So who's going to take care of them?

00:07:26.000 So in legitimate circumstances, you would want to pay for that.

00:07:30.000 But what happened is they just started this wholesale fraud.

00:07:34.000 We expected the cost of that program to be about $3 million a year in Minnesota and Minneapolis.

00:07:41.000 It got up in over a three-year period.

00:07:44.000 It got up to $400 million a year.

00:07:46.000 So it was all fraudulent, almost.

00:07:50.000 I just don't understand.

00:07:51.000 So this accelerated during the Biden administration, but when did it begin?

00:07:55.000 It's not on program integrity.

00:07:55.000 Like how long?

00:07:58.000 They told specifically, they told people in my agency, and I've talked to them, we don't want to do program integrity anymore.

00:08:06.000 We now just want to focus everything on enrollments.

00:08:10.000 In other words, enrolling more people in Obamacare and the programs.

00:08:14.000 And, you know, you could say there was bad motives there because one, the states don't pay.

00:08:22.000 The states pay a tiny fraction of it, but it all goes to the federal government.

00:08:27.000 So the states don't really want to do fraud detection because all that money is coming into their state.

00:08:36.000 And then every time you enroll somebody, you're registering them to vote.

00:08:41.000 And so, you know, they may have had ulterior motives, let me put it that way.

00:08:46.000 But, you know, right now, what we're doing is we're saying to the states, we have audited you.

00:08:52.000 We expect that we believe that 50% of the program dollars you're spending were fraudulent or possibly fraudulent.

00:09:03.000 You show us a corrective action that you're going to take, or we're going to withdraw that money the next time.

00:09:11.000 The money's not being withdrawn from any individuals.

00:09:14.000 We're not reimbursing the state for it until they told us.

00:09:18.000 Now, the red states have all said, yeah, we'll do it.

00:09:21.000 But 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.

00:09:35.000 So is there financial incentive?

00:09:40.000 Are these people that are making all this money from fraud, are they donating to any specific groups?

00:09:47.000 Like, is there a direct turnaround?

00:09:49.000 The Cubans in Florida.

00:09:50.000 And Florida, you know, they get mad at Trump because they say, oh, all the states you're designating are blue states.

00:09:57.000 That's just because the blue states refuse to cooperate.

00:10:00.000 But Florida's a red state, and we're really going after them.

00:10:03.000 We're shutting down all durable medical equipment, reimbursements for the whole state because it was all being run.

00:10:11.000 It was probably being run by the Cuban government.

00:10:14.000 But I don't understand how no one saw it.

00:10:17.000 No one from the government saw it.

00:10:19.000 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.

00:10:25.000 But was anybody making money outside of these crime organizations?

00:10:32.000 I would say no.

00:10:33.000 The money was not, the states were making money.

00:10:36.000 Right.

00:10:36.000 But there was a lot of talk online about donations to parties and donations to NGOs.

00:10:44.000 That is probably true, too, although I don't have any evidence of that.

00:10:48.000 No evidence.

00:10:49.000 Okay.

00:10:50.000 So it really just rings.

00:10:52.000 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 that donation motivated the bad behavior.

00:11:04.000 But 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.

00:11:16.000 And that fraud's not that big a deal.

00:11:20.000 I mean, what's the all-told number that's been stolen from this stuff over the, if you had to take a wild guess.

00:11:28.000 It's at least $100 billion a year.

00:11:30.000 $100 billion.

00:11:31.000 Just from Medicaid and Medicare.

00:11:34.000 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.

00:11:43.000 Yeah.

00:11:44.000 I mean, I listen, I was a Democrat my whole life.

00:11:49.000 And, you know, one of the things, and then I, you know, now I'm kind of, first of all, it's illegal for me now to vote in any state.

00:11:59.000 So I don't really have a party affiliation because, you know, they challenge.

00:12:04.000 I was a New York state resident when I was running.

00:12:08.000 They sued me and they said, oh, you don't really live in New York.

00:12:11.000 You live in California.

00:12:14.000 I said, yeah, but my driver's license is from New York, my law license is from New York.

00:12:19.000 I have an address in New York.

00:12:20.000 My car is registered in New York.

00:12:23.000 My falconry license is in New York.

00:12:25.000 My hunting license is in New York.

00:12:26.000 My fishing license is in New York.

00:12:28.000 And I intend to return to New York.

00:12:30.000 And there were hundreds of cases, just blackletter laws saying the only measure is if you intend to return there at some point.

00:12:39.000 We got crooked judges, and they said, no, you're not a New York resident.

00:12:44.000 I'd already said I'm not a California resident.

00:12:46.000 I don't intend to stay there.

00:12:49.000 So now I'm not, you know, I'm not legally allowed to vote in any state.

00:12:57.000 But, you know, I saw this with the party.

00:13:02.000 My father hated partisanship because he thought it was dishonest.

00:13:07.000 And he said, he always told us you should buff with the man, not the party.

00:13:11.000 Or, you know, he said the man, because at that time it was predominantly men.

00:13:16.000 But I saw this when Trump, you know, I grew up in a Democratic Party that was very anti-NAFTA.

00:13:25.000 So it was against working people and labor unions.

00:13:29.000 Then Trump said that he was anti-NAFTA.

00:13:33.000 All of a sudden, the Democratic Party was pro-NAFTA.

00:13:36.000 And that's what turned my head the first time.

00:13:39.000 And 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.

00:13:55.000 My uncle, Ted Kennedy, was very much on the side of medical freedom.

00:14:01.000 And it was evenly spread.

00:14:03.000 But as soon as Trump said that, it became part of the dogma of that party.

00:14:08.000 And then, you know, when I ran, we were, you know, it was one of the things I ran against was the Ukraine war.

00:14:16.000 And the Democrats were always the anti-war party.

00:14:21.000 But as soon as Trump questioned that war, they became the pro-war party.

00:14:25.000 And they invited the CIA director to speak at the Democratic Convention.

00:14:30.000 And it just is, it's the entire party's only agenda is we hate Trump.

00:14:37.000 And anything he says, we're going to do the opposite of it.

00:14:40.000 And it makes me very sad for the party.

00:14:44.000 And I don't think it's a sustainable way to operate.

00:14:49.000 No, there has to be some sort of an appeal to people in the middle that left when things went crazy.

00:14:56.000 Just let us know you're not crazy anymore.

00:14:58.000 Let us know you've abandoned a lot of this crazy stuff.

00:15:01.000 And also, like, recognize what's good for everybody, right?

00:15:05.000 Hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud is not good for any of us, the whole country.

00:15:10.000 So we should all be together on this one thing.

00:15:12.000 Like, this is terrible.

00:15:13.000 This is stealing from your tax money, all of our tax money.

00:15:17.000 Us, American citizens, we should all be united on stopping any kind of fraud.

00:15:22.000 Forget about who's the fucking president and who's going to get responsibility for it.

00:15:28.000 Who's going to take responsibility?

00:15:29.000 Who's going to get the accolades?

00:15:30.000 Like, who cares?

00:15:31.000 Stop fraud.

00:15:33.000 We're all together.

00:15:34.000 You shouldn't have criminals from other countries living here just stealing money from Medicaid.

00:15:39.000 That seems like that should be a bipartisan issue in a rational society.

00:15:45.000 Yeah.

00:15:46.000 And, 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.

00:16:01.000 And there are dozens.

00:16:03.000 I read 76 studies over a weekend.

00:16:06.000 And 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.

00:16:15.000 There's overwhelming science that says you shouldn't take it, particularly, you know, it's okay normally.

00:16:23.000 You 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.

00:16:34.000 You 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.

00:16:47.000 And so we issued a warning.

00:16:49.000 We didn't ban Tylenol.

00:16:50.000 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.

00:17:01.000 It's better than taking ibuprofen or aspirin.

00:17:06.000 Why is aspirin there?

00:17:07.000 They have, because of Rise syndrome.

00:17:09.000 It has a clear association with Rise syndrome, and they all have problems.

00:17:13.000 What is that word, Rise syndrome?

00:17:14.000 Rise in.

00:17:15.000 R-E-I-E-S. 1.00

00:17:16.000 What is that?

00:17:18.000 It's I'm not sure exactly what it means.

00:17:23.000 Put that into our wonderful sponsor, Perplexity.

00:17:26.000 And if you put aspirin use and Rise syndrome, you'll see that.

00:17:29.000 So is this just with pregnant women or with people in children?

00:17:32.000 They're not pregnant in pregnancy or young children.

00:17:34.000 Oh.

00:17:35.000 So baby aspirin?

00:17:37.000 Didn't they always used to have children?

00:17:39.000 Yeah, I don't know if they do it anymore.

00:17:40.000 Rise 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.

00:17:53.000 Wow.

00:17:54.000 Aspirin.

00:17:56.000 I always thought of aspirin as like the most natural and healthy out of all those things that you take for pain.

00:18:01.000 Oh, I think it is pretty safe, but it's.

00:18:06.000 Avoid aspirin and what's that word?

00:18:09.000 You say it.

00:18:10.000 Celicia.

00:18:11.000 But is it?

00:18:12.000 Cellocyte containing psilocyte containing meds in children, teens with flu, chickenpox, or cold.

00:18:18.000 Use acetametophen or ibuprofen instead.

00:18:21.000 Vaccinate against flu and chickenpox and screen newborns for metabolic risks.

00:18:26.000 So it's acetaminophen is the issue in Tylenol, right?

00:18:29.000 Yeah.

00:18:29.000 Because I read this terrible story about a lady who died during COVID because she did not from COVID from Tylenol.

00:18:36.000 She just kept taking Tylenol.

00:18:37.000 Well, Tylenol shuts down your liver if you take it off of it.

00:18:40.000 That's what happened to her. 1.00

00:18:41.000 What I was saying is, you know, when we issued this warning, it was immediately condemned by the Democrats.

00:18:49.000 Oh, you know, here's Trump and Kennedy doing, you know, weird science again.

00:18:55.000 And then you had all of these videos, these viral videos on TikTok of pregnant women eating Tylenol.

00:19:03.000 Yeah, to say fuck Trump.

00:19:05.000 It's crazy.

00:19:06.000 I hope they didn't really do it.

00:19:07.000 I hope they were pretending because that's so dumb.

00:19:10.000 It's just so stupid.

00:19:11.000 Why would you even want to risk that?

00:19:12.000 Like, well, how is that not a thing that you just abandon all party affiliation and go, the health of my child?

00:19:20.000 This is science.

00:19:21.000 They're not saying don't take Tylenol.

00:19:23.000 Like, you could still buy Tylenol.

00:19:25.000 It's a good thing to know that if you take too much of something, it's bad.

00:19:29.000 There's a lot of things that are fine if you take one or two pills.

00:19:32.000 But if you're that poor lady with COVID, if you just keep taking it over and over and over again, you'll die.

00:19:39.000 We should know that.

00:19:40.000 It doesn't mean you shouldn't take aspirin or you shouldn't take Tylenol.

00:19:44.000 But it just means know when to take it and when not to take it and know how much to take.

00:19:48.000 Like, that's all information that everybody should want to be out there.

00:19:51.000 The fact that people want to connect that to Trump, and I'm going to take Tylenol while I'm pregnant.

00:19:56.000 Like, oh, is this what, like, imagine the aliens watching us and going, they're not ready.

00:20:02.000 They're not ready for sophisticated time traveling technology.

00:20:06.000 These fucking dopes, like, what are they doing? 1.00

00:20:08.000 They're fighting over nonsense.

00:20:10.000 You know, and it's like it's all heavily accelerated by social media.

00:20:15.000 Yeah.

00:20:16.000 Yeah.

00:20:17.000 I mean, the algorithms just amplify that polarization.

00:20:23.000 Yes.

00:20:24.000 They're just telling you what you want to hear and validating your worldview all the time.

00:20:30.000 And also just outraging you, just outraging you all the time.

00:20:34.000 I've been off it for a while now, and it's like it frees your brain.

00:20:38.000 It'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.

00:20:51.000 And they're just bombarded by sensation, bombarded by anger and frustration and angst.

00:21:00.000 It kind of liberates the darkest impulses of the human spirit.

00:21:05.000 I mean, I don't use it either, but I post stuff.

00:21:10.000 You know, if I started reading my comments and take them seriously.

00:21:15.000 No, it's terrible.

00:21:16.000 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.

00:21:34.000 And we can all come together and work together.

00:21:37.000 That's what I thought naively.

00:21:39.000 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 dies.

00:21:49.000 Like no matter what it was, people were ideologically opposed to you being correct about anything because now you're connected with Trump.

00:21:58.000 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.

00:22:11.000 And it is just an ideological thing.

00:22:13.000 Yeah.

00:22:16.000 I mean, it's like it's dogma and it's part of its tribalism.

00:22:22.000 It's these, you know, these connectors in our brain that evolved over millions of years of us living in these little tribal communities.

00:22:34.000 And, you know, and now you've got now you've got machines that can activate those parts of the brain.

00:22:42.000 And, you know, they're being manipulated all the time.

00:22:45.000 And then there's a bunch of people that are commenting that aren't even real people.

00:22:45.000 Yeah.

00:22:49.000 There's that too.

00:22:50.000 There's a lot of manipulation that's going on on social media where who knows who's doing it?

00:22:55.000 There's a bunch of different groups doing it.

00:22:57.000 But they're not real people that are outraged.

00:22:59.000 They're not real human beings that are saying these things.

00:23:02.000 And they can kind of shift a narrative into a certain direction sometimes.

00:23:06.000 It's a fascinating time to be alive.

00:23:08.000 You 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?

00:23:20.000 Like, did anything really surprise you?

00:23:28.000 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.

00:23:40.000 And that actually makes me a lot more resilient because if you don't have expectations, you never get disappointments.

00:23:46.000 And so you can never get crushed.

00:23:50.000 But I would say that, you know, I had not spent a lot of my life hanging out with Republicans.

00:24:01.000 And 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.

00:24:16.000 And they're immensely idealistic.

00:24:19.000 And, 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.

00:24:29.000 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.

00:24:36.000 And the level of idealism that I see at every level in the White House and my agency is inspiring.

00:24:49.000 And then the level of the capabilities, just the, you know, the competence of the people who I'm surrounded with.

00:24:57.000 I 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.

00:25:10.000 Nobody 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.

00:25:18.000 You know, I think HHS is the sixth biggest country in the world if you look at its budget.

00:25:27.000 It's got the biggest budget in the federal government, bigger than the defense budget.

00:25:32.000 And yet we are absolutely miserable at what we did.

00:25:37.000 I 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.

00:25:51.000 And nobody's asking why is that happening?

00:25:55.000 When I was a kid, the typical pediatrician would see one case of juvenile diabetes over a 40 or 50 year career.

00:26:08.000 Today, 38% of teens are diabetic or pre-diabetic.

00:26:14.000 So one out of every three kids who walks through his office door.

00:26:18.000 Why isn't anybody noticing?

00:26:19.000 As the autism rates have gone from one in 10,000 in 1970 and people knew what autism was.

00:26:25.000 They knew what it looked like in 1970.

00:26:28.000 They did the biggest epidemiological study in history to answer the question, what is the percentage?

00:26:34.000 And they came up with 0.8 per 10,000.

00:26:38.000 So less than 1 in 10,000.

00:26:40.000 And today it's 1 in 31.

00:26:42.000 In California, it's 1 in 19.

00:26:44.000 And 1 in 12.5 boys.

00:26:47.000 That's crazy.

00:26:48.000 We are, you know, so crazy.

00:26:50.000 One in 12.5 boys is crazy.

00:26:53.000 And when my uncle was president, you know, I was a 10-year-old boy.

00:26:58.000 We spent zero on chronic disease.

00:27:00.000 Zero.

00:27:02.000 And today we spend $4.3 trillion a year.

00:27:06.000 And it's the fastest-growing item in the federal budget.

00:27:10.000 And it's existential.

00:27:13.000 We can't sustain it.

00:27:14.000 And the Republicans and Democrats have been arguing for years about whether we do the single payer, Obamacare, this or that.

00:27:21.000 It's all about throwing money.

00:27:23.000 Who gets to keep the money?

00:27:26.000 And we're throwing it in a system that's completely broken.

00:27:28.000 It's not a healthcare system.

00:27:29.000 It's a big system of getting sicker and sicker.

00:27:31.000 It's like changing deck chairs on the Titanic.

00:27:34.000 Why is nobody focusing on how do we get people healthy?

00:27:39.000 Because that's how you solve the healthcare cost problem.

00:27:42.000 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.

00:27:53.000 So, you know, it's clear.

00:27:56.000 And Americans don't want to be sick.

00:27:59.000 They're being made sick.

00:28:01.000 The obesity rates have gone from 5% in kids when I was a kid. to now close to 20%.

00:28:09.000 And in adults, 70% of adults are obese or overweight.

00:28:13.000 That was not true when we were kids.

00:28:16.000 And it's not because Americans got indolent or lazy or hungry.

00:28:21.000 It's because they were being mass poisoned and the vested interests that are making money on – everybody makes money on keeping us sick.

00:28:34.000 The food companies make money on getting us sick, but pharma makes money on keeping us sick.

00:28:40.000 You would think insurance would want to keep you well, but it doesn't.

00:28:43.000 It actually makes more money if more people are sick.

00:28:48.000 The hospitals.

00:28:50.000 How does the insurance company make more money if people are sick?

00:28:52.000 Well, I mean, think of it this way.

00:28:54.000 If you're Lloyds of London, do you want one ship, and you're insuring all the ships in the ocean?

00:29:04.000 Do you want one ship to sink a year, or do you want a thousand to sink?

00:29:10.000 If a thousand sink, everybody's going to be paying you premiums to insure themselves against that eventuality.

00:29:16.000 And you're making money on the friction.

00:29:19.000 So you're making the money that comes into this.

00:29:22.000 You're making your money on the money that comes to the system.

00:29:26.000 So the more that you pump up that volume of money, the more you make.

00:29:30.000 So, you know, nobody is interested.

00:29:33.000 Nobody is economically incentivized to make people well.

00:29:39.000 And 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.

00:29:47.000 We end the chronic disease epidemic.

00:29:48.000 And that's what we're doing now.

00:29:50.000 We're trying to realign all those perverse incentives.

00:29:55.000 For example, the medical system pays out on fee-based service.

00:30:02.000 That 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.

00:30:16.000 So he is not incentivized to get you well.

00:30:20.000 We ought to be paying him a flat fee at the beginning of the year and saying anything, any cause from this patient.

00:30:28.000 The rest of the year come out of your pocket.

00:30:30.000 And then he's like, okay, how do I get this guy from getting sick?

00:30:33.000 And he starts studying nutrition books.

00:30:36.000 That's actually an interesting idea.

00:30:39.000 It seems so captured at this point.

00:30:41.000 It's going to be difficult to unravel all that.

00:30:43.000 It's difficult, but it's not impossible.

00:30:45.000 And we're doing it.

00:30:47.000 But three years from now, you're going to see a different healthcare model in our country.

00:30:51.000 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.

00:31:01.000 Most people just hear about it.

00:31:03.000 Healthcare people are sick.

00:31:04.000 They need health care.

00:31:05.000 Why would they cut health care? 0.64

00:31:06.000 Cutting healthcare is bad.

00:31:07.000 That's what they would just immediately think.

00:31:10.000 I think most people are, they think of the fraud stuff and they want to dismiss it.

00:31:14.000 Like I've heard all these people dismiss this Nick Shirley kid and what he exposed in Minneapolis.

00:31:20.000 But the reason why is because it's the wrong party.

00:31:23.000 If this was a Democrat that was exposing Republican fraud, then they would be all into it.

00:31:29.000 It would be on every newspaper.

00:31:31.000 But instead, they're trying to dismiss it as not, you know, not relevant.

00:31:35.000 Yeah.

00:31:35.000 And To me, it's weird because I know Democrats are human beings and they care about the same things that I do.

00:31:44.000 I've known all of these guys, almost all of them, for many of them for 40 years.

00:31:48.000 Bernie Sanders, I've known for 40 years.

00:31:51.000 Their only solution is more money to the system, a system that is broken, that is making us sicker and sicker.

00:31:58.000 And what President Trump wants to do is he wants to fix the system.

00:32:02.000 Stop.

00:32:03.000 Most of that money is not going to the patients.

00:32:05.000 It's going to the insurance companies and the PBMs and all of these middlemen that are, you know, are milking the system.

00:32:12.000 And that's why President Trump says, you know, the answer is to not pay the insurance company.

00:32:18.000 It's to pay the consumer directly and put him, make him the CEO of his own healthcare so that he can spend money.

00:32:29.000 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.

00:32:45.000 Or to do alternatives, you know, to do preventative care.

00:32:50.000 And he wants to say, he's going to want to save money.

00:32:54.000 Right now, nobody is in that position of accountability.

00:32:59.000 We 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. 0.99

00:33:07.000 Government pays, but they then decide to allocate that, how to allocate that money.

00:33:13.000 And then we need to make the system transparent.

00:33:16.000 And that's, you know, one of the things that we're doing.

00:33:19.000 During his first term, Trump passed a transparency bill.

00:33:23.000 But because Trump had passed, everybody wanted transparency.

00:33:28.000 If you're a woman, you're pregnant, you want to know how much it's going to cost to have that baby. 0.97

00:33:36.000 There's no way you can find that out for most of them.

00:33:39.000 You can go nine months on a phone every day, how much it's going to cost, and you'll never get a straight answer.

00:33:46.000 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.

00:34:02.000 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.

00:34:11.000 Now 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.

00:34:17.000 If you go to a restaurant, the prices are on the menu.

00:34:21.000 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 buy it.

00:34:30.000 Nobody would operate that way, but that's how our medical system operates.

00:34:34.000 So I looked at, we have a mock-up of this website.

00:34:39.000 We're right now, during the Biden administration, because Trump had passed that law, the Biden administration just refused to enforce it.

00:34:46.000 So we're in the same position now where there's no transparency.

00:34:50.000 We're changing that now.

00:34:53.000 We've sent out over 1,000 letters to hospitals, you know, warning letters.

00:34:59.000 This says, you've got to post them right now.

00:35:02.000 And we just finalize new regulations.

00:35:06.000 If they don't do that, they're going to pay a huge fine.

00:35:08.000 So I saw the mock-up of the website.

00:35:13.000 And I said, I asked the question, how much does it cost in the hospitals within a mile of Manhattan to have a baby?

00:35:23.000 One of them was, there were about 30 hospitals that I could visualize on one page.

00:35:29.000 One of them was $1,300.

00:35:32.000 That was the lowest.

00:35:34.000 The highest was $22,000.

00:35:37.000 In Detroit, it is the cheapest place to have a baby is about $5,000.

00:35:47.000 And the most expensive is $60,000.

00:35:49.000 And it's the same service, the same quality care.

00:35:54.000 Nothing changes except that price.

00:35:56.000 Why do we have that information chaos?

00:35:59.000 We have it because the industry wants to hide what it's doing.

00:36:03.000 And so there's no market.

00:36:05.000 There's no ability for people to make good choices.

00:36:08.000 And when, you know, I was staying with Dr. Oz during the transition at his house in Florida.

00:36:17.000 And one day, Prime Minister Rudd, who was the former Prime Minister of Australia, came by.

00:36:23.000 And after he was Prime Minister, he had been appointed to run a commission to reduce healthcare costs and improve quality.

00:36:30.000 And they were very successful.

00:36:32.000 But 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.

00:36:42.000 So we're now going to do that.

00:36:45.000 And people will be able to shop.

00:36:49.000 And, 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.

00:37:05.000 So as far as making good choices with food, I like what you guys did.

00:37:10.000 I love what you guys did with the food pyramid.

00:37:12.000 You 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.

00:37:24.000 And now it's things that we've known for a long time.

00:37:28.000 It's whole food, actual real food.

00:37:30.000 That's what you're supposed to be eating.

00:37:32.000 The problem is getting people to change their habits and change their ways.

00:37:36.000 And 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?

00:37:48.000 Well, here's what's going to happen.

00:37:50.000 First of all, the food pyramid.

00:37:52.000 I inherited a food pyramid from the first way.

00:37:56.000 I came into office one year and two weeks ago.

00:38:01.000 A week after I got in, I was handed the food pyramid that the Biden administration had.

00:38:06.000 It wasn't even the food pyramid.

00:38:07.000 They got rid of that.

00:38:08.000 They just were doing the dietary guidelines.

00:38:10.000 So it was the recommendations that would be reflected in the food pyramid.

00:38:15.000 It was hundreds of pages long, and it was incomprehensible.

00:38:20.000 And it was driven by all the mercantile impulses that had corrupted the fruit pyramid for 50 years.

00:38:27.000 And it was written by lobbyists.

00:38:30.000 It 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.

00:38:38.000 Fruit loops were at the top of the foot.

00:38:40.000 They were at the top recommendation of the food pyramid.

00:38:42.000 You can ask them to look up the old food pyramids.

00:38:46.000 I need to see where fruit loops stand.

00:38:48.000 Don't they throw some vitamins on fruit loops? 1.00

00:38:51.000 Isn't it like vitamin origin?

00:38:52.000 Oh, yeah, as if that's good for you.

00:38:55.000 It's good for you.

00:38:56.000 They add vitamins.

00:38:57.000 Do they even have vitamins?

00:38:58.000 They're just cyanide.

00:38:59.000 And it's not going to make it any better for you.

00:39:02.000 No.

00:39:03.000 No, I'm joking.

00:39:06.000 It was a ridiculous.

00:39:08.000 So how did you get it?

00:39:09.000 So what we did is we got the best nutritionists in the country.

00:39:13.000 We got Mark Hyman and we got the nutritionists from the best universities in the country and we put them all in a room.

00:39:20.000 And I thought it was going to take a month.

00:39:22.000 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.

00:39:29.000 But, you know, some of the stuff was raped because of regulatory malpractice all these years.

00:39:34.000 Some of the studies simply haven't been done.

00:39:36.000 So there are knowledge gaps which we should not have.

00:39:43.000 So now we have a food pyramid.

00:39:45.000 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 okay on the food pyramid.

00:39:55.000 So now 70% of the food that our kids eat is ultra-processed food, 70% of the calories they get.

00:40:01.000 And it's just poisoning them.

00:40:03.000 And they took off the good stuff like whole milk, which is nutrient-dense, which is feeding their brain.

00:40:09.000 We have two generations of kids that grew up without milk, without the proper nutrients for their brain.

00:40:14.000 We have the first country in the face of the earth that has chronic obesity, and in the same people, malnutrition.

00:40:23.000 So you have immensely obese people, and they're malnourished.

00:40:27.000 They're medically malnourished.

00:40:30.000 And it's because the food pyramid was so messed up.

00:40:34.000 So what's going to happen now, Joe, is that we are going to be able to drive that.

00:40:40.000 We're going to be able to change dietary culture.

00:40:42.000 Just the food pyramid is going to change dietary culture.

00:40:45.000 And here's how.

00:40:47.000 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. 1.00

00:41:10.000 And so those programs now are going to get good food because the dietary guidelines dictate what they can and cannot feed kids.

00:41:19.000 The military and the VA also are changing.

00:41:22.000 Now, this week I met with a guy, Chef Robert Irvine, who is a television chef.

00:41:31.000 He's been hired by Pete Hegseth to come in and change all the military meals.

00:41:36.000 Military, and he's already on five bases.

00:41:39.000 By the end of this month, he'll be on 20.

00:41:42.000 What he's done is the food that we give our military is so bad, they won't eat it.

00:41:48.000 So they're going out and they're spending their money on fast food.

00:41:53.000 And fast food is not cheap.

00:41:55.000 A Big Mac meal costs $12 to $14.

00:41:59.000 It's not a cheap meal.

00:42:00.000 You can get a really good food for that price.

00:42:03.000 You could feed yourself the whole day for that price with good food.

00:42:07.000 Mark Hyman's new book has a diet, $10 a day diet, three meals, great food.

00:42:13.000 Anyway, Robert Irvine has gone into these places and he gives them all fresh food, almost all of it locally sourced.

00:42:21.000 As it turns out, it's cheaper.

00:42:24.000 The military is spending $18 a day for three meals for each soldier.

00:42:29.000 He's spending $10 a day and giving them real food, good food.

00:42:34.000 And the lines now are around the block and nobody's going to fast food.

00:42:38.000 Everybody's fighting to get in.

00:42:39.000 And what he says is it doesn't cost more.

00:42:43.000 We don't need any more money.

00:42:45.000 We just need to buy smarter and to be smarter about how we do it.

00:42:50.000 And, you know, we're going to be able to do that.

00:42:53.000 One of the things that we're doing with the dietary guidelines is the SNAP program.

00:42:58.000 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.

00:43:06.000 You can no longer get it.

00:43:09.000 Soda.

00:43:10.000 That was 18% of SNAP purchases.

00:43:13.000 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.

00:43:24.000 Many of them are being treated for diabetes.

00:43:26.000 We're paying to give them the disease and then we're paying to treat it for the rest of their lives.

00:43:31.000 And we're changing that.

00:43:32.000 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.

00:43:43.000 We're working with farmers.

00:43:44.000 We're working with entrepreneurs to make sure every American can get high-quality food that is affordable.

00:43:51.000 I don't know how anybody would be opposed to that.

00:43:54.000 That all sounds fantastic.

00:43:55.000 It's weird that they are.

00:43:57.000 How could you, the way you just laid it out?

00:43:58.000 How could anybody be opposed to that?

00:44:00.000 That all sounds great.

00:44:01.000 Especially for the soldiers.

00:44:01.000 I mean, what the definition is.

00:44:03.000 The fact that they were getting terrible food that they didn't want to eat is just, that's really offensive.

00:44:08.000 You know, you think about what you're asking of them, and then you're giving them garbage that they don't even want to eat.

00:44:13.000 Like, what do they, how do they feel that you care about them?

00:44:17.000 Well, and, you know, one of the things that Robert Irvine, the chef, told me, he said, you know, it costs $9 to get a frozen salmon.

00:44:27.000 It costs $6 to get a fresh salmon.

00:44:30.000 So, you know, food, good food is actually, if you cook yourself at home, the good food is much, much less expensive.

00:44:40.000 The problem is Americans have forgotten how to cook. 0.99

00:44:44.000 And so, and cooking is really important because it's important for family cohesion, for a sense of community.

00:44:53.000 It's a daily, it's almost sacred ritual.

00:44:56.000 And, you know, taking that away from our lives has amplified the spiritual malaise that we're in.

00:45:03.000 And one of the things we're going to do is to start sending federal workers out to teach people how to cook.

00:45:10.000 They don't have the implements.

00:45:12.000 They don't have the cutting boards.

00:45:13.000 They don't have, you know, they don't know how to buy groceries.

00:45:17.000 And, you know, you can go into any big grocery store in this country.

00:45:22.000 If you go and buy a steak, it's still pretty expensive.

00:45:26.000 But if you buy the cheaper cuts, it's great meat and it is very, very affordable or liver or all these alternatives.

00:45:35.000 Chuck Rose.

00:45:36.000 You said, you know, how can you be against that?

00:45:39.000 Well, I told you, 20 states have applied for the SNAP program, and we've granted them SNAP waivers.

00:45:47.000 Why would you want taxpayers?

00:45:48.000 If you want to drink a Coke, you ought to be able to.

00:45:50.000 We live in the United States.

00:45:51.000 We're not going to take anything away from anybody.

00:45:55.000 But the taxpayer shouldn't be paying for it, particularly when we're paying for it on the other end in diabetes.

00:46:00.000 So this just makes sense to anybody.

00:46:04.000 20 states have applied.

00:46:06.000 Only two of them are blue states.

00:46:09.000 Bernie Sanders has been fighting for this for years, but Vermont won't apply for one.

00:46:16.000 And it's all partisanship, and they're putting their hatred of Donald Trump ahead of their love for their own children.

00:46:25.000 And until we learn to stop doing that, the healthcare in this country is not going to improve, at least in those states.

00:46:33.000 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.

00:46:49.000 It's like love and health.

00:46:52.000 Those are the top ones that we all want.

00:46:56.000 It just seems insane that we would choose this as a battleground.

00:47:01.000 And it seems insane that it's connected to one party or another.

00:47:04.000 It shouldn't be.

00:47:06.000 It should just, we should all be united on at least this.

00:47:09.000 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.

00:47:20.000 Things could probably be worked out more amicably, especially among friends.

00:47:25.000 It's like having good health improves virtually every aspect of your life.

00:47:32.000 For everybody.

00:47:33.000 I'd say two things.

00:47:35.000 The food ties directly into your mental health.

00:47:38.000 Yes.

00:47:39.000 And we now know that this is so well documented that there's a gut-brain connection.

00:47:43.000 And that depression, ADHD.

00:47:46.000 Chris Palmer up at Harvard is dramatically reducing the symptoms of schizophrenia simply by changing people's diets, using a keto diet.

00:47:59.000 Like what kind of percent?

00:47:59.000 Dramatically?

00:48:00.000 They're losing 30% of their symptoms.

00:48:03.000 Really?

00:48:05.000 Just from ketone.

00:48:06.000 From keto.

00:48:07.000 Have they done anything with that?

00:48:08.000 The same thing is true. 0.92

00:48:09.000 I mean, you know, there are now, there's a big paper about to come out on losing a bipolar diagnosis, a bipolar diagnosis.

00:48:19.000 Kids who lose bipolar diagnosis simply by changing their diet.

00:48:22.000 We know that ADHD is driven by all these food ties and stuff, and that's very well documented.

00:48:28.000 But 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.

00:48:44.000 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.

00:48:53.000 And the level of violence goes down by 40, 45, 50%.

00:48:57.000 The use of restraints in juvenile detention facilities goes down 75%.

00:49:03.000 The number of incidents dramatically drops.

00:49:07.000 And so it's a public safety issue in the prisons.

00:49:09.000 And, you know, I've been meeting now with all the prisons.

00:49:13.000 Prisons have a real problem because they're allocated, the state prisons are allocated to 60 cents a day to feed the prisoners.

00:49:21.000 And it's all for them, it's all about shelf life.

00:49:25.000 So they're just feeding them the worst kind of poison that you could possibly, it's all just chemicals.

00:49:31.000 Oh, my God.

00:49:32.000 But, you know, well, we've kind of given up on the idea of rehabilitation.

00:49:38.000 It's just all about punishment.

00:49:39.000 And then this model is public safety.

00:49:42.000 It's guard safety.

00:49:44.000 And 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.

00:49:57.000 Yeah.

00:49:58.000 Because that, you've got to be able to find common ground with other people.

00:50:02.000 And if you don't talk to them, you don't see their humanity.

00:50:05.000 Right.

00:50:06.000 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.

00:50:15.000 And you show your curiosity about them.

00:50:19.000 And you get to hear their rationale.

00:50:22.000 And a lot of times, I'll listen to somebody on this show.

00:50:25.000 I'll say, I don't like this guy.

00:50:28.000 And then I'll listen to his rationale and I'll think, oh, actually, he's making a lot of sense.

00:50:33.000 And we have to stop hating people because of the label on them and start listening.

00:50:41.000 And it's really important we do that now because these algorithms are designed to drive us all apart.

00:50:49.000 And we've always had political polarization in this country.

00:50:54.000 I mean, I grew up during the 60s and there were bombs going off and people being shot.

00:50:59.000 And it was very, very violent and vitriolic when my dad was running.

00:51:06.000 And the polarization probably was the worst since the American Civil War.

00:51:13.000 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.

00:51:23.000 It's not just the algorithm.

00:51:25.000 It's also the method of communication.

00:51:27.000 When you're only talking to people through angry tweets back and forth with each other, you were saying like, sit down and talk to people.

00:51:35.000 No one's doing that anymore.

00:51:37.000 There's a few FaceTime conversations going on.

00:51:37.000 Very few people.

00:51:40.000 You see your friends if you go out with them.

00:51:42.000 People are not talking that much anymore.

00:51:44.000 And they're not sitting down and talking.

00:51:46.000 And when you do, everyone's distracted.

00:51:48.000 Everyone has their phones out.

00:51:49.000 Everyone's checking text messages.

00:51:51.000 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.

00:51:57.000 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.

00:52:07.000 So more than half the states so that kids can't use cell phones in schools.

00:52:12.000 I went to a school in Loudoun County the other day and the states love them.

00:52:17.000 I went to Loudoun County and the students had fought and fought against this against getting their cell phones.

00:52:27.000 So the way they do it, all of the schools, school districts and states do it differently.

00:52:33.000 But in that state, they can bring their cell phones to school, but they have to leave it in their backpack.

00:52:39.000 And if the parent calls and needs to talk to them, they can do it.

00:52:44.000 But I walked into cafeteria, 600 kids in that cafeteria, and they're all talking to each other.

00:52:50.000 They're sitting across the table.

00:52:51.000 Nobody's looking at their labs.

00:52:54.000 The parents came that day.

00:52:57.000 I polled the students and I said, how many of you think this is a good idea?

00:53:01.000 And they all put their hands up and they said, we all hated it for the first two weeks and now we love it.

00:53:07.000 The parents said, it's the best thing that ever happened.

00:53:10.000 My kid is not driving with their cell phone in the car anymore because they know they can live without it.

00:53:16.000 Or eating dinner with the family and we're actually having conversations.

00:53:20.000 And 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.

00:53:30.000 So it's just like a no-brainer.

00:53:32.000 But 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.

00:53:48.000 It's just so stupid to not recognize the kids are distracted.

00:53:53.000 It's just one of those things.

00:53:55.000 Why does that have to be a right or a left issue?

00:53:58.000 It's stupid.

00:53:59.000 This is a United States issue.

00:54:01.000 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.

00:54:11.000 And as soon as you allow them to use their phone all day, it's too addictive.

00:54:15.000 No one can put them down.

00:54:17.000 You're going to lose 30% of your concentration or more easily, I would imagine.

00:54:22.000 The fact that that would be a partisan thing is just nuts.

00:54:24.000 It just shows how goofy we are.

00:54:27.000 I don't know how you get people to talk, though.

00:54:30.000 I mean, other than, I mean, I do it on a podcast, but that's my job.

00:54:38.000 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.

00:54:47.000 I don't know how many opportunities I would ever even get to do that.

00:54:50.000 What you're doing is so important.

00:54:52.000 And now, you know, there's a thousand people imitating you.

00:54:56.000 Many really good podcasts.

00:54:59.000 But it's teaching people to have conversations.

00:55:03.000 I mean, you are the best teacher, mentor on that.

00:55:07.000 And people admire you.

00:55:12.000 I have seven kids, and they grew up with devices and stuff.

00:55:17.000 And I would look, you know, I had slap them out of their hand.

00:55:21.000 And also they couldn't concentrate on long, you know, long points, long conversations.

00:55:26.000 They're like, get to the point.

00:55:27.000 You know, I only got five seconds.

00:55:30.000 You got to make your point.

00:55:32.000 And then I see them sitting for three and a half hours and listening to a Rogan podcast.

00:55:37.000 That was a cultural phenomenon.

00:55:39.000 That was a cultural change.

00:55:42.000 This generation of kids, I have so much hope for because they grew up with that.

00:55:46.000 And, you know, they want it.

00:55:48.000 So I do have a lot of hope that we're going to be able to do this.

00:55:51.000 And then, you know, I think Charlie Kirk did that too, as an example to a lot of those kids.

00:55:58.000 Because whether you agree with him or not, and he had very strong opinions that people, you know, consider terrible.

00:56:05.000 But the one thing that he really did is he talked to people he didn't agree with.

00:56:10.000 And he always gave them the microphone and allowed them to amplify their voice.

00:56:15.000 And then he had a civility.

00:56:17.000 And he talked to them.

00:56:18.000 And he used logic a lot of times destructively, but not in an angry way.

00:56:24.000 And so I think, you know, he was teaching people how to have conversations again.

00:56:31.000 You're teaching people how to have conversations again.

00:56:33.000 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 people with whom they disagree.

00:56:45.000 It would be nice.

00:56:46.000 But 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.

00:57:16.000 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.

00:57:27.000 And I'm like, okay.

00:57:29.000 They're just a human being.

00:57:31.000 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.

00:57:40.000 Like what do you believe?

00:57:42.000 Why do you believe that?

00:57:43.000 And find out why and ask them.

00:57:45.000 And don't cut them off.

00:57:47.000 Let them talk.

00:57:48.000 Let them express themselves.

00:57:49.000 Help them if you can.

00:57:51.000 Try to figure out what makes someone actually think.

00:57:54.000 Instead of just thinking that your ideas are a part of you, they're just ideas.

00:58:00.000 Like they're not you.

00:58:01.000 Like some ideas you can hold in your mind and they're bad for you.

00:58:06.000 They're bad.

00:58:07.000 You haven't examined them.

00:58:08.000 You're acting on them like they're doctrine.

00:58:10.000 And then you're stuck with that idea because you've already espoused it so many times.

00:58:14.000 You don't want to be a flip-flopper.

00:58:16.000 And so people get mad.

00:58:17.000 And you get this weird cycle of shitty communication and nobody ever breaks out of it and nothing ever gets done.

00:58:24.000 And there's no common ground is ever achieved.

00:58:26.000 And the only way you're going to ever break that is to stop talking to people like that.

00:58:31.000 You got to just talk to them.

00:58:33.000 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.

00:58:42.000 Talk to them like a person that, you know, in any other circumstance, maybe even could be your friend.

00:58:48.000 Just talk to them.

00:58:49.000 People can do that.

00:58:50.000 It's possible.

00:58:51.000 It just takes discipline.

00:58:52.000 You have to learn how to do it.

00:58:53.000 Took me a while.

00:58:54.000 Took me a long time to learn how to talk to people better.

00:58:57.000 But it can be done.

00:58:59.000 It's a technique.

00:59:00.000 But 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?

00:59:15.000 That's more of what I was getting at, honestly.

00:59:17.000 Is there's some shows that do that, but like some of these CNN shows, it's just these crazy ideological battles.

00:59:23.000 And yet, also, guys, pro tip: you can't have fucking six people at a table all yelling out for seven minutes. 0.68

00:59:31.000 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.

00:59:40.000 It's stupid, it's a stupid way to talk about things.

00:59:42.000 You know, I mean, Cheryl went on and it was that.

00:59:50.000 It 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.

01:00:04.000 Yes, yeah, well, just have a conversation with someone.

01:00:07.000 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 hens squawking all at her. 0.95

01:00:18.000 It's just like you see it over and over again when they oppose somebody.

01:00:21.000 It's like they're all chiming in, and it's just not the way you could ever like thoroughly cover a subject.

01:00:27.000 And they're limited by their format.

01:00:29.000 That format is very limiting.

01:00:31.000 It's a shitty format where you go to a commercial at predetermined times, period, no matter what.

01:00:38.000 Like maybe you got a little leeway here or there, but you've got to get that commercial in.

01:00:42.000 And that's crazy because if you're in the middle of talking, a lot of points take a long time to flesh out.

01:00:47.000 Like, just think about all the stuff you just explained about Medicaid.

01:00:50.000 Imagine if you try to do that.

01:00:52.000 And you can't.

01:00:54.000 You can't do it.

01:00:55.000 And they would try to stop you.

01:00:57.000 You're too in the weeds.

01:00:58.000 No one's going to pay attention to this.

01:00:59.000 It's like, I don't think that's true.

01:01:01.000 And I think we've learned that because of podcasts, because there was no production, there was no executives.

01:01:07.000 There was no one there.

01:01:08.000 People were just putting on a webcam and talking.

01:01:11.000 And so we realized, like, well, people actually do like conversations still.

01:01:15.000 They just don't get a lot of them.

01:01:17.000 Not real ones.

01:01:18.000 You know, you get interviews where someone has like a sheet of questions.

01:01:21.000 You know, you get where someone is, you know, playing a role.

01:01:25.000 You're playing a role of a person who interviews people.

01:01:29.000 You don't really give a shit about what this person has to say.

01:01:32.000 But people do want connection.

01:01:34.000 They still do.

01:01:35.000 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.

01:01:44.000 And that's what people have to get past.

01:01:46.000 I don't know how to do it.

01:01:47.000 Tell everybody, start your own podcast.

01:01:49.000 You know, you and I were talking before we came in here about Larry King.

01:01:52.000 Yes.

01:01:53.000 He did that to a lot of people in the 70s and 80s, David Suskind, and all of these other people who were actually having conversations.

01:02:05.000 Yeah, Larry King was great.

01:02:06.000 Good cabbage.

01:02:08.000 I love when you asked D.J. Khaled, how'd you gain all the weight?

01:02:12.000 What did he say?

01:02:13.000 He said, I ate too much.

01:02:15.000 What do you want me to say?

01:02:17.000 Such a crazy question.

01:02:18.000 How did you gain all the weight?

01:02:20.000 Like, what, Larry?

01:02:21.000 What are you talking about?

01:02:22.000 That's crazy.

01:02:23.000 That's a wild question to ask someone.

01:02:25.000 But, you know, he would just have a conversation with you.

01:02:27.000 You know, and I think people have a hunger for that.

01:02:30.000 And a lot of this infighting comes from no face-to-face communication.

01:02:35.000 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.

01:02:44.000 Things 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.

01:02:51.000 Like, that's probably not the best way to talk about stuff.

01:02:55.000 And I think human beings naturally understand one-on-one conversations.

01:03:00.000 We've had them for all of human history.

01:03:02.000 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.

01:03:11.000 Now I know how you feel about things.

01:03:14.000 I know, at least for this brief three-hour conversation, I get more of a sense of how you approach things.

01:03:20.000 And then people put that into their own mind and go, maybe I should approach things a little bit differently.

01:03:24.000 Maybe I should think about things a little bit differently.

01:03:26.000 And we miss that.

01:03:28.000 We're missing that.

01:03:29.000 And social media robs you of that.

01:03:31.000 It gives you the exact opposite of that.

01:03:34.000 Yeah.

01:03:35.000 Yeah.

01:03:36.000 I mean, you know what Charlie Kirk was doing?

01:03:38.000 You're right.

01:03:40.000 You know, it was less of a conversation and more of a being in the ring.

01:03:48.000 You know, it was like being in the ring.

01:03:50.000 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.

01:04:02.000 Yeah, 100%.

01:04:03.000 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.

01:04:14.000 My uncle, my father, said we should be able to debate.

01:04:17.000 We should be able to win these debates and the marketplace ideas.

01:04:21.000 If we can't, then we need to examine ourselves.

01:04:24.000 It was a core tenant of the Democratic Party.

01:04:26.000 Yeah.

01:04:27.000 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.

01:04:37.000 It was this huge thing.

01:04:38.000 They were trying to close down Howard Stern because Howard Stern was very critical of Bush.

01:04:43.000 And 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.

01:04:54.000 You know, and that was a right-wing thing.

01:04:57.000 And we always thought of it as a right-wing thing.

01:05:00.000 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.

01:05:12.000 It's so dumb.

01:05:13.000 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?

01:05:30.000 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?

01:05:38.000 It's the dumbest thing ever.

01:05:39.000 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 standards.

01:05:52.000 The White House ordered me to be removed from Instagram.

01:05:55.000 I lost a million followers.

01:05:57.000 Insane.

01:05:58.000 37 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.

01:06:08.000 And then you look at what's happening in England now.

01:06:11.000 People going to jail for Twitter posts.

01:06:14.000 12,000 people this year.

01:06:17.000 12,000 in the last year.

01:06:19.000 And the Magna Carta was written, and now it's just a dictatorship.

01:06:26.000 Well, they got rid of trial by jury, except for murder and rape and a couple other things.

01:06:31.000 Now it's just a judge.

01:06:33.000 So whatever it is, if it's a social media infraction, there's no reasonable judge by a jury of your peers.

01:06:41.000 No, you're getting judged by a judge.

01:06:45.000 And that's the Soviet system.

01:06:47.000 It's like Kafka.

01:06:48.000 I just can't believe how quick it happened.

01:06:51.000 When you look at the social media arrests, they were always disturbing.

01:06:56.000 If you go back even four or five years, they had quite a few of them a year.

01:07:00.000 But it really ramped up, really ramped up over the last year or so.

01:07:03.000 And it's just insane to watch.

01:07:05.000 And a lot of it is criticism of immigration, like legitimate criticism of immigration and legitimate criticism of crimes that have been committed.

01:07:15.000 And people outraged, which is completely normal.

01:07:18.000 But instead of like doing anything about that, they want to arrest people from complaining.

01:07:23.000 And it's just really weird to watch.

01:07:27.000 Yeah.

01:07:29.000 It's going to get worse with the A.I.

01:07:38.000 It's scary.

01:07:40.000 Well, 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.

01:07:52.000 That seems like an existential threat to all critical thinking, all communication and debate.

01:08:00.000 As soon as you start arresting people for opinions, that's crazy.

01:08:05.000 You're getting nuts.

01:08:06.000 Like anything that you deem might incite violence or like outrage, people are outraged.

01:08:11.000 They have a right to be outraged.

01:08:14.000 If you can put them in a cage because they're outraged, that's nuts.

01:08:19.000 That's really nuts.

01:08:20.000 Now they have a pub law.

01:08:21.000 Do you know this one?

01:08:22.000 No.

01:08:22.000 Oh, find that, Jamie.

01:08:24.000 They're trying to pass this thing.

01:08:26.000 I don't know if they passed it, where someone's, I don't want to speak out of turn.

01:08:31.000 I don't want to fuck this up because it was disturbing enough without me misinterpreting it.

01:08:38.000 But the idea was to stop people from saying things on social media that you get arrested for.

01:08:44.000 Stop them from saying those kind of things in pubs.

01:08:49.000 Where is this in England?

01:08:50.000 Yes.

01:08:51.000 See if you can find it.

01:08:52.000 I know I saved it, but it'll take me too long to pull it up.

01:08:57.000 You find anything like that?

01:08:58.000 I'm trying to make sure it's legit.

01:09:01.000 Yeah.

01:09:03.000 I mean, I wouldn't imagine it's not.

01:09:05.000 I mean, it's not outside the realm of what they're capable of doing if they're arresting 12,000 people a year for social media posts.

01:09:15.000 If that was happening in America and they were only arresting Republicans, I don't think you'd hear a peep out of the Democrats.

01:09:20.000 I think they think it's important.

01:09:21.000 We have to stop misinformation.

01:09:23.000 Yeah.

01:09:25.000 It passed?

01:09:26.000 I know, I don't think it passed.

01:09:27.000 You don't think it passed?

01:09:30.000 Okay, so what is the legislation aimed, blah, blah, blah, but it says you're still free to converse?

01:09:37.000 No, the law, now place the system. 0.97

01:09:39.000 I don't know.

01:09:41.000 What was the what were they trying to okay?

01:09:43.000 Point free speech in UK pubs, employer responsibilities.

01:09:47.000 It requires employers to take reasonable steps to prevent staff from experiencing harassment by third parties, such as customers.

01:09:54.000 Well, that's normal, right?

01:09:56.000 You don't want to be harassed by a couple.

01:09:58.000 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.

01:10:13.000 It should not be misinterpreted as a ban on lawful, polite, or controversial speech.

01:10:18.000 Who's to decide what's controversial, though?

01:10:20.000 Third-party harassment.

01:10:21.000 Legislation focuses on addressing harassment rather than banning specific topics of conversation entirely.

01:10:27.000 Just any regulation of conversation is nuts.

01:10:31.000 It's one thing you're harassing the staff.

01:10:34.000 I've never known a pub owner who would allow people to come in and harass his staff.

01:10:41.000 He already has an economic and management incentive to not allow that.

01:10:47.000 It's not the kind of thing you need to legislate.

01:10:49.000 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.

01:10:59.000 Well, that's where things get weird.

01:11:01.000 Because 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.

01:11:10.000 You know, microaggressions, dumb shit.

01:11:12.000 There's a lot of people that just want to be offended.

01:11:15.000 And if this is a law, that could lead to a lot more problems.

01:11:19.000 It's just a slippery slope, and they're not going in the right direction.

01:11:22.000 And I don't know how they course correct if they've fallen this far that quickly.

01:11:27.000 12,000 arrests is crazy.

01:11:29.000 That's a crazy amount of people go to jail for social media posts.

01:11:35.000 And it encourages self-censorship, so you don't get a real sense of what people want or don't want.

01:11:40.000 Because people don't want to be involved.

01:11:41.000 They don't want to go to jail.

01:11:42.000 They don't want to take a chance.

01:11:46.000 The framers of the Constitution, free speech was everything to them.

01:11:50.000 And they put it in the First Amendment because they knew all the other rights and guarantees were dependent on it.

01:11:59.000 If you have a government that can silence its opponents, it has a license for any kind of atrocity.

01:12:07.000 It's just shocking that all other Western nations haven't adopted that.

01:12:13.000 Well, most of them don't have constitutions.

01:12:17.000 So crazy.

01:12:18.000 It's just so ridiculous.

01:12:20.000 It's so ridiculous that free speech, which is like we all agree, especially in America, it's one of the most important things.

01:12:26.000 The only way to find out what's real and what's not.

01:12:30.000 You got to let people talk it out.

01:12:32.000 You know?

01:12:33.000 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've got a real problem.

01:12:44.000 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.

01:12:53.000 And when there's a lot of money involved and a lot of businesses involved.

01:12:56.000 I typed it into perplexity and it just gives a little context on it because the pubs were the same, the pub thing.

01:13:03.000 Reverses 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.

01:13:15.000 Critics call it a banter ban, fearing landlords will police conversations to avoid lawsuits, chilling speech in social venues.

01:13:24.000 That makes it sound like if someone was doing that, the business was getting in trouble versus the person who was saying it.

01:13:31.000 Right.

01:13:32.000 So they removed a third-party harassment liability.

01:13:36.000 So they removed the pub owner being in trouble.

01:13:40.000 They removed that.

01:13:44.000 Because it says it passed when I was looking at it.

01:13:46.000 It said it passed a couple months ago.

01:13:48.000 So that makes pub owners liable again.

01:13:52.000 So it removed a 2013 removal of third-party harassment liability.

01:13:56.000 It made them liable.

01:13:57.000 I don't think I think it's back to reverses that.

01:13:59.000 Reverses making them liable.

01:14:01.000 No, no, no.

01:14:02.000 No, it reverses the removal of the third-party harassment liability.

01:14:07.000 So they removed the liability, now making pubs liable.

01:14:11.000 So it now makes them liable if they overhear comments.

01:14:13.000 So what this does is it encourages the pub itself to censor people, which makes sense.

01:14:20.000 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.

01:14:30.000 Yeah, 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.

01:14:44.000 And which is not a good thing.

01:14:45.000 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.

01:14:56.000 You could just, you could commit fraud.

01:14:59.000 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. 0.95

01:15:08.000 That's not outside of what I think a shady person would do.

01:15:12.000 If 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.

01:15:21.000 This is a giant loophole for people to come in and sue people and silence everybody's speech.

01:15:26.000 And the fact that this is not being recognized, it's very disturbing that people don't understand human behavior.

01:15:33.000 It's very weird that they're willing to accept this kind of stuff.

01:15:39.000 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?

01:15:52.000 I mean, I've been surprised by how much President Trump has supported me on this stuff.

01:16:00.000 Because I'm going after the biggest, big pharma, big insurance, the insurance.

01:16:09.000 Big food.

01:16:10.000 Big food.

01:16:13.000 And these have all been, you know, those were all taboos for every administration, Democratic, Republican.

01:16:19.000 There was little incremental things that you could do under Democratic administrations, but nothing like this has ever happened.

01:16:26.000 You 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.

01:16:37.000 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.

01:16:47.000 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.

01:16:58.000 Why is that?

01:16:59.000 We do buy more drugs than anybody, but it's because we pay a higher prices.

01:17:04.000 We pay two to three to five times what they're paying in Europe.

01:17:09.000 For example, and President Trump likes to talk about this, Ozempic, the list price was $1,350 in America.

01:17:19.000 You could buy the same drug in any pharmacy in London for $88.

01:17:25.000 And it's made in the same factory in New Jersey.

01:17:29.000 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 anymore for it.

01:17:36.000 They would set the price.

01:17:37.000 And that was the maximum.

01:17:38.000 There's a lot of drugs they don't have.

01:17:40.000 There's a lot of cancer drugs they don't have in Europe because they just wouldn't pay the price.

01:17:45.000 And so President Trump, you know, every president has vowed to stop this.

01:17:52.000 Clinton tried to stop it.

01:17:55.000 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.

01:18:06.000 And President Trump literally called me sometimes once a day, called late at night, 11.30 at night, and say, where are you on MFN?

01:18:18.000 And we ended up getting the, it seemed to me even it seemed insurmountable.

01:18:24.000 But he said, I'm going to use tariffs.

01:18:27.000 I'm going to force the Europeans to raise their drug prices. 1.00

01:18:31.000 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.

01:18:41.000 We could pretty much force them to lower their prices. 0.56

01:18:45.000 But it would put them out of business.

01:18:47.000 So, and he didn't mind, he wants us to continue to be the center for innovation in this country.

01:18:52.000 And 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.

01:19:01.000 And so we sat down with them for months and we came to agreements with 16 of the 17 pharmaceutical companies.

01:19:10.000 Now Americans are getting the lowest prices in the world.

01:19:13.000 If somebody lowers a price in Europe, we get that price or lower.

01:19:17.000 And people can get that today on Trump RX.

01:19:20.000 They can go for the most popular medications and get the cheapest price in the world.

01:19:25.000 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.

01:19:40.000 They increased stock values by 1.3 trillion among them.

01:19:46.000 And they've all agreed to onshore their production.

01:19:48.000 So Lilly is building six plants here, new plants, including one of the biggest API facilities in the world.

01:19:55.000 The API are the pharmaceutical ingredients that we ran out of during COVID.

01:20:02.000 We need to be making them here because otherwise other countries can blackmail us.

01:20:06.000 Pfizer, Merck, they're all building big facilities here, and drug production is now going to come to the United States.

01:20:14.000 We are going to be the center of the world in terms of drug production.

01:20:18.000 And those negotiations were very, very tough, and they were extraordinarily complex.

01:20:26.000 We have a really good suite of talented individuals, high-caliber individuals who've left billion-dollar businesses.

01:20:36.000 One of them is a guy called Chris Klump, who's immensely talented.

01:20:40.000 He walked away from a company that does data management for 85% of the hospitals in this country.

01:20:47.000 And he walked away from a billion-dollar company.

01:20:50.000 He divested it, lost a lot of money to come just because he wants to improve things.

01:20:56.000 He ran the negotiations, and the pharmaceutical companies fell in love with him because they realized they could trust him.

01:21:03.000 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.

01:21:13.000 And that's going to change everybody's experience.

01:21:16.000 Can I ask you how that applies?

01:21:18.000 Is it the same if someone has insurance or if they don't have insurance?

01:21:21.000 Like, how does insurance bill it versus how does someone buy it on their own?

01:21:29.000 It's going to lower price for everybody.

01:21:31.000 Anybody can go on Trump RX, whether they have insurance or not, and they can get it there.

01:21:36.000 And they would buy it themselves.

01:21:37.000 Yeah.

01:21:38.000 And so it would be at a substantially lower price than they would have had in the past.

01:21:43.000 They buy it themselves.

01:21:43.000 Exactly.

01:21:44.000 But what if people are just getting it through insurance?

01:21:48.000 Does insurance lower it as well?

01:21:50.000 Yeah, the copay is lowered.

01:21:53.000 Okay.

01:21:54.000 And, you know, we had the first woman to buy a drug on it. 1.00

01:21:59.000 The first customer was a woman who has been trying for years to do IVF. 0.78

01:22:04.000 And the drug cost $4,000.

01:22:06.000 And now I think it costs something like $600.

01:22:11.000 Really?

01:22:13.000 So, 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. 0.93

01:22:23.000 And IVF is going to be really important because our birth rates just dropped.

01:22:27.000 I mean, dramatically this year.

01:22:29.000 They dropped to 1.75.

01:22:32.000 Yeah, people don't understand that.

01:22:34.000 We've had a few conversations on this podcast about population decline, and people just, most people are not aware of it.

01:22:40.000 They just see how many people are on the highway.

01:22:43.000 They think we're overcrowded.

01:22:45.000 They don't understand this replacement number that we're going to need unless we want to.

01:22:50.000 The U.S. is in a different situation than other countries.

01:22:54.000 Japan is in total crisis.

01:22:56.000 China is in an existential crisis because its population is going to drop dramatically.

01:23:04.000 South Korea?

01:23:05.000 Yeah.

01:23:06.000 But people want to immigrate here so we can make up the deficit through immigration.

01:23:12.000 It's going to, you know, and we have that advantage.

01:23:16.000 But it's still the birth rate has dropped.

01:23:19.000 It dropped one and a half or it dropped from 1.9 this year to 1.75.

01:23:28.000 And that affects Social Security.

01:23:30.000 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 rate.

01:23:40.000 So it's not a good thing.

01:23:43.000 And, you know, American women want to have babies, and a third of them cannot have as many children as they want. 0.89

01:23:51.000 What was the pushback when it came to things like removal of dyes?

01:23:58.000 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.

01:24:12.000 And a lot of them came in and said, yeah, you know, we know we've got to change.

01:24:17.000 Really?

01:24:18.000 Yeah, the only one that really...

01:24:19.000 Did you ever ask him, why did you do it a long time ago?

01:24:22.000 Well, they didn't have options.

01:24:25.000 And what we did.

01:24:26.000 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?

01:24:34.000 Yeah, the ones in Canada.

01:24:35.000 But in our country, we hadn't approved a bunch of them.

01:24:39.000 So we only had one or two vegetable based dyes.

01:24:44.000 Marty McCary, who's done a fantastic job at FDA, has now fast-tracked it this year, seven new ones.

01:24:52.000 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.

01:24:58.000 And that's going to, you know, that's.

01:25:00.000 So instead, they'll use just food-based dyes?

01:25:03.000 Yeah, just vegetable and mineral-based dyes.

01:25:07.000 And 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.

01:25:20.000 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.

01:25:33.000 So 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.

01:25:46.000 And, you know, it was infuriating for people and really devastating and heartbreaking for a lot of them.

01:25:54.000 And 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.

01:26:06.000 It's a very small number now.

01:26:07.000 I think 15% of the procedures still have it.

01:26:10.000 And those are procedures we want prior authorization because there's a potential for abuse.

01:26:16.000 For example, spinal surgeries.

01:26:18.000 A lot of people don't need the surgery.

01:26:21.000 And Medicaid and Medicare wants to make sure that they actually need that surgery and it's beneficial to them.

01:26:27.000 But for all the other ones, you will now know at point of care whether or not you're insurance.

01:26:33.000 So you go to your doctor.

01:26:35.000 He says you need a knee surgery.

01:26:37.000 Before you leave his office, you'll know whether the insurance company approves of it or not.

01:26:40.000 And that's going to dramatically change the medical experience.

01:26:44.000 Another 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.

01:27:02.000 So your medical records are owned by you, but you can't get access to them a lot of times, most of the time.

01:27:12.000 The data company won't give them to you.

01:27:15.000 And so we've got them all to agree to stop doing that.

01:27:19.000 So by the end of this year, every American will be able to get their medical records on their cell phone.

01:27:24.000 And that's going to dramatically change the medical experience.

01:27:27.000 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.

01:27:40.000 Now, or you come in unconscious and they don't know what to do with you.

01:27:43.000 They don't know anything about you.

01:27:45.000 Now your medical records are on your cell phone.

01:27:48.000 They can see if you have allergies.

01:27:49.000 They can see what your blood type is.

01:27:50.000 They can look at all of your previous medical records and make good decisions about how to treat you.

01:28:00.000 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.

01:28:20.000 This choice is bad for you and offer you a better choice, et cetera.

01:28:23.000 And there's an app like that, Yucca Now, but there's a lot of them coming online.

01:28:27.000 What is it called?

01:28:28.000 Yucca is the one, I think 50% of the people in France use Yucca.

01:28:32.000 Can you spell it?

01:28:33.000 I think it's Y-U-C-C-A. 1.00

01:28:36.000 Or Y-U-K-A. 1.00

01:28:36.000 Okay. 1.00

01:28:38.000 I don't know.

01:28:39.000 You can look it up.

01:28:42.000 We use it.

01:28:42.000 My wife uses it.

01:28:44.000 You go into the grocery store.

01:28:47.000 You 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.

01:28:59.000 And then it makes you a recommendation for a healthier one if it's bad for you.

01:29:03.000 And 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.

01:29:16.000 It's not the only one out there.

01:29:18.000 But what about preservatives and processed foods?

01:29:21.000 They're always going to exist, right?

01:29:23.000 You're always going to have a certain amount of preservatives and processed foods.

01:29:27.000 Well, 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.

01:29:38.000 One is by April, we will have a federal definition of ultra-processed foods, first time in history.

01:29:48.000 And as soon as we do that, we're going to do front-of-package food labeling.

01:29:52.000 So every food in your grocery store will have a label on it.

01:29:56.000 It'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.

01:30:03.000 Oh, wow.

01:30:04.000 And that, you know, and it's going to evaluate all of the ingredients, et cetera.

01:30:10.000 So, you know, I think we're not going to change this overnight, but we're going to change it pretty quickly.

01:30:15.000 And if you want to be healthy, we're going to give you the information to take control of your own health.

01:30:22.000 People just don't want to be healthy and don't care.

01:30:25.000 There's not much you can do about it.

01:30:27.000 Most Americans want to be healthy.

01:30:28.000 And we've seen that when they're allowed to make a healthy choice, they do not want to be eating this poison.

01:30:35.000 Yeah, and ironically, the people that don't want to be healthy, they feel that way because they're not healthy.

01:30:39.000 If they wanted, they would want to stay healthy.

01:30:43.000 They're just part of the reason why they're feeling this way is because they're unhealthy.

01:30:48.000 That's why they don't care.

01:30:49.000 Well, it's also like the mountain is so big.

01:30:49.000 Yeah.

01:30:52.000 If 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.

01:31:01.000 And I don't know, other than by example, how you can get a large group of people to go along with that.

01:31:07.000 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.

01:31:14.000 So there's some kind of an example of a guy who just completely changed his lifestyle around, could change what he eats.

01:31:20.000 And he did it without GLPs.

01:31:22.000 It's pretty amazing.

01:31:22.000 Yes, he did.

01:31:24.000 Which brings me to peptides.

01:31:26.000 Like where are we at right now on peptides and getting them regulated and making sure it's not this weird gray area?

01:31:33.000 Because we know they're effective, but we also know that there's a lot of pushback on peptides.

01:31:38.000 Yeah, I mean, I'm a big fan of peptides.

01:31:40.000 I've used them myself and used them with really good effect on a couple of injuries.

01:31:50.000 What 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.

01:32:12.000 So, 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.

01:32:30.000 Maybe they had an allergy to the commercial brand or whatever.

01:32:34.000 And the compounding pharmacies, and peptides was part of that group.

01:32:37.000 There were 19 peptides that were widely formulated by compounding pharmacies during the Biden administration.

01:32:45.000 They illegally moved those to category two, which says do not formulate.

01:32:52.000 It was illegal because they're not supposed to do that unless there's a safety signal.

01:32:58.000 And they didn't have a safety signal.

01:32:59.000 They're not allowed to look at efficacy.

01:33:01.000 They're not allowed to say, well, we don't believe these are efficacious or whatever.

01:33:06.000 They can only look at safety.

01:33:09.000 They move those to category two, which means do not formulate.

01:33:12.000 What happened?

01:33:14.000 There was huge demand for peptides.

01:33:17.000 And so a black market came out.

01:33:19.000 And the black market is run by companies that say that they're making the peptides for animal use or for research purposes.

01:33:32.000 And that peptide now basically completely replaced the legal market.

01:33:37.000 The legal market for peptides, the pharmacies, the compounding pharmacies were getting those peptides from FDA-inspected facilities.

01:33:52.000 And some of them in India and China, but they were the same one that the pharmaceutical industries are buying.

01:33:56.000 I mean, we inspect those.

01:33:58.000 You know, you're getting a good product.

01:34:01.000 You know, you're getting what you bought, what was advertised.

01:34:07.000 With the gray market, you have no idea.

01:34:09.000 And a lot of this stuff that we've looked at is just, you know, is very, very substandard.

01:34:15.000 Oh, I'm very anxious to move not probably not all of those peptides.

01:34:20.000 Some of them are in litigation, but about 14 of them back to making them more accessible.

01:34:28.000 And FDA is in the middle of, I think within a couple of weeks, we will have announced some kind of new action.

01:34:39.000 And my hope is that they're going to end up with, they're still looking at the science.

01:34:46.000 My hope is that they're going to get moved to a place where people have access from ethical suppliers.

01:34:52.000 That's ultimately the problem with all this black market stuff, right? 1.00

01:34:56.000 A lot of people are getting bogus peptides.

01:34:59.000 And they don't have any idea if they work, whether to test them.

01:35:03.000 They just take a chance.

01:35:04.000 They take a risk.

01:35:05.000 They get a little flyer in their email or something.

01:35:08.000 And they hear from somebody else.

01:35:10.000 I got it from this place.

01:35:11.000 They don't even know.

01:35:11.000 And they try.

01:35:12.000 And you're getting nonsense, bogus peptides.

01:35:15.000 I mean, we created the black market.

01:35:17.000 Yeah.

01:35:19.000 It's a very dangerous black market.

01:35:20.000 Which they've done during prohibition.

01:35:22.000 They're doing it right now with everything else.

01:35:25.000 It's unfortunate.

01:35:27.000 I know there's been some talk about psychedelics.

01:35:32.000 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 serious opioid addictions.

01:35:48.000 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 these initiatives.

01:36:03.000 I think there's some stuff that can help a lot of people.

01:36:06.000 I mean, how many people are addicted to opioids in this country?

01:36:09.000 It's pretty high.

01:36:10.000 How many of you have?

01:36:11.000 48,000.

01:36:12.000 48 million.

01:36:13.000 Have you looked into the Ibogaine stuff?

01:36:15.000 Yeah.

01:36:16.000 What's your thoughts on it?

01:36:18.000 I don't know enough, and I don't think it's well documented enough about whether it's a long-term impact on addiction.

01:36:26.000 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 PSDD.

01:36:51.000 PTSD.

01:36:52.000 Yeah, PTSD, sorry.

01:36:54.000 And also some forms of depression, et cetera.

01:37:01.000 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, particularly to the military soldiers who have suffered these injuries to get access to these products.

01:37:29.000 We're working through that process now.

01:37:31.000 You have Marty McCary.

01:37:35.000 I mean, we're all working on it and trying to make it happen.

01:37:40.000 It would be great to extend that to police officers, too, probably.

01:37:43.000 Yeah.

01:37:43.000 You know, I mean, a lot of the same type of PTSD they experience, it just doesn't get brought up as much.

01:37:50.000 And, 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.

01:38:03.000 There'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.

01:38:15.000 And so we're looking at that as an entire category of interventions that people ought to be able to study.

01:38:24.000 They ought to have good access to, and we should get it out to the public as quickly as possible.

01:38:29.000 What would be the hurdles to something like that?

01:38:35.000 I think that we're going to get it done.

01:38:38.000 So how would that be implemented?

01:38:40.000 Would it be implemented in a clinical setting?

01:38:42.000 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.

01:38:53.000 In others, it would be, there would be very strong guidelines.

01:38:59.000 I mean, this is what we're envisioning, so I can't tell you exactly what we're going to do.

01:39:03.000 But very, very strong guidelines for therapeutic guidelines.

01:39:07.000 So how they're applied, what kind of follow-up, because a lot of these things rewire your brain.

01:39:13.000 If you don't do follow-up, it doesn't work, or you have a failure rate.

01:39:18.000 So those kind of protocols are all stuff that we've been developing and studying.

01:39:24.000 And I think most of the people in the administration are anxious to make this happen as quickly as possible.

01:39:30.000 And I know Doug Collins over at the VA already has, I think, 21 studies going over there.

01:39:36.000 And they're very, very promising.

01:39:39.000 And what are they using at the VA?

01:39:41.000 I think they're using combinations of MDMA and psilocybin.

01:39:46.000 Maybe using Ibigain.

01:39:50.000 And I think they're looking at a number of things, including ayahuasca and Epigaine.

01:39:55.000 They shot down something fairly recently in California where they were going to decriminalize.

01:40:00.000 Were they going to decriminalize psilocybin or they were going to allow it for clinical use?

01:40:08.000 But I think the problem that they had was they didn't say we're completely opposed to it.

01:40:13.000 They 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.

01:40:20.000 Yeah, you need those guidelines because you don't want to make the Wild West.

01:40:24.000 Exactly.

01:40:24.000 You're going to have horror stories overnight because people, as you know, some people can have very, very bad experiences on that.

01:40:33.000 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.

01:40:43.000 I mean, we're looking at ways to get it done so that it's in a very controlled setting.

01:40:49.000 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 cop or just a regular person, could be able to go to a place like that and get treatment?

01:41:04.000 For me, personally, I would like to see that.

01:41:09.000 But we need to move in baby steps with this because you don't want to create a situation where people are getting hurt.

01:41:20.000 You don't want to create a situation where mentally unstable people snap, which can happen.

01:41:25.000 Which can happen.

01:41:26.000 Yeah, that is a, these are very powerful tools you're working with.

01:41:30.000 It's like everything else.

01:41:31.000 You can do it wrong.

01:41:34.000 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 have taken these substances have experienced.

01:41:52.000 Like it's not a cure-all for everything.

01:41:54.000 It's not going to fix everybody.

01:41:56.000 It's not even for everybody.

01:41:57.000 But you should deny people access.

01:42:00.000 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.

01:42:12.000 It doesn't make any sense.

01:42:14.000 No, it doesn't, especially when so many of them have come back with these stories.

01:42:18.000 Guys Sean Ryan, a bunch of my friends have done it.

01:42:21.000 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 him.

01:42:36.000 Did Ibogaine got off him?

01:42:38.000 He's like, oh my God, more people have to be aware of this.

01:42:40.000 This really works.

01:42:42.000 This is a thing that has been shown.

01:42:44.000 I think it's in the 80% range when you do one treatment where people don't relapse.

01:42:50.000 And it's in a 90% range with two treatments.

01:42:53.000 I mean, it's incredibly effective.

01:42:54.000 There's nothing like it.

01:42:56.000 And yet we've been denied.

01:42:58.000 It also has no chance of you being addicted to it.

01:43:00.000 It's a terrifying experience, apparently, or at least very uncomfortable.

01:43:04.000 It takes 24 hours.

01:43:06.000 Nobody wants to hop in and do it again.

01:43:08.000 It's not like, hey, let's party and take Ibogaine.

01:43:11.000 It's always an ordeal.

01:43:13.000 It's an ordeal, exactly.

01:43:15.000 And that ordeal is extremely beneficial to people, but also severs the impulse of addiction in a lot of people.

01:43:23.000 It's very successful at it.

01:43:25.000 Yeah, I mean, I had a family member whose life was transformed by it.

01:43:32.000 And, you know, I've been in recovery for 43 years.

01:43:37.000 So, and I go to a meeting every day.

01:43:39.000 So it's pretty hard to convince me that you can fix what's wrong with you by taking something outside of you.

01:43:47.000 But 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.

01:44:07.000 You 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.

01:44:21.000 Yeah.

01:44:22.000 Well, I sincerely hope that more people consider it.

01:44:25.000 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?

01:44:37.000 Legalized marijuana, legalized psychedelics.

01:44:41.000 You didn't hear about it from former Republican governors like Rick Perry.

01:44:44.000 But 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.

01:44:56.000 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 73.

01:45:06.000 When he put out that rumor that Ed Muskie was addicted to Ibergane.

01:45:11.000 Brazilian witch doctors were coming in and giving him Ibogaine.

01:45:15.000 It ruined that guy's career.

01:45:19.000 But it's so funny that he chose that drug because it's like no one's addicted to that.

01:45:25.000 That's not the risk.

01:45:27.000 The risk is heart attacks.

01:45:28.000 The risk is you have to have your heart monitored while you're doing it.

01:45:30.000 It's like it's very stressful for a lot of people.

01:45:33.000 But on a clinical setting, it's shown to be incredibly effective.

01:45:38.000 And I don't think we should ignore these things.

01:45:40.000 I think it's foolish.

01:45:41.000 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.

01:45:54.000 But seeing it from the right is very encouraging because I think it's something for human beings.

01:46:00.000 It's not for everybody, but it's something, it's a tool that I have seen benefit many, many people.

01:46:05.000 And we should use every tool that could help us be healthier and happier, period.

01:46:11.000 That that shouldn't be a right or a left issue.

01:46:12.000 That's just silly.

01:46:14.000 It's just dumb.

01:46:17.000 Agreed.

01:46:17.000 Yeah.

01:46:18.000 I mean, it's shocking that that is an unusual perspective.

01:46:22.000 But I think we've been propagandized for so long, particularly on certain things like, you know, just the blanket term of drugs.

01:46:32.000 All of them fall into this category of you trying to escape reality.

01:46:36.000 And this one is literally the opposite.

01:46:39.000 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.

01:46:49.000 I think that'd be great for everybody.

01:46:51.000 I agree.

01:46:52.000 Yeah.

01:46:54.000 You've got, you're already a year in here, plus.

01:46:58.000 And, you know, is it going as fast as you'd hoped, like some of these reforms?

01:47:04.000 Is there, is there, what are the main frustrations that you have to deal with?

01:47:09.000 I mean, I didn't know what to expect.

01:47:11.000 And, you know, I didn't know when I came in, I didn't know the president that well.

01:47:16.000 So, you know, but from the beginning, he was empowering me.

01:47:24.000 And, you know, I never made an agreement with him about anything.

01:47:27.000 But the first time he asked me whether I wanted to be HHS secretary, I said, I don't think so.

01:47:34.000 I wanted to do some, I wanted to be maybe a health czar in the White House.

01:47:37.000 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.

01:47:48.000 And it has 82,000 employees and the biggest budget in government.

01:47:56.000 And that would actually give me the power to change the system.

01:48:00.000 And so then I went back to him and I said, you know, I want HHS.

01:48:04.000 And he said, fine.

01:48:06.000 And then he allowed me to appoint all of my sub agency heads, which no president has ever done with an HHS secretary in history.

01:48:15.000 He allowed me to appoint Marty McCary, choose Marty McCary at FDA, Jay Bhattachara, Dr. Oz, and CMS, and everybody else below them.

01:48:28.000 So nobody's ever been able to do that.

01:48:30.000 And then he gave me a very prominent job on the transition committee to set this all in motion.

01:48:38.000 And then once I got in, he supported me on everything.

01:48:42.000 And that, I think, was allowed me to do things more.

01:48:47.000 I 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.

01:49:08.000 I'm pleased with what we've done, but there's still, I mean, it's 20% of our economy.

01:49:17.000 And so it's a huge agency and there's, you know, it's in everything and there's a lot to do.

01:49:22.000 But I think we're moving really fast.

01:49:25.000 So better than you'd hoped?

01:49:29.000 I 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.

01:49:39.000 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 going to be.

01:49:46.000 That's not how I approach it.

01:49:48.000 I just did it one thing at a time.

01:49:50.000 And there's something to fix every single day.

01:49:54.000 And I have the smartest people in the country working with me.

01:50:00.000 And, you know, we meet every day, me and Oz and Jay and Chris Klum and Marty.

01:50:10.000 We have a meeting every morning and we talk about what we're doing and about where we need to help each other.

01:50:17.000 And, you know, it's a really, it's a very, very congenial team.

01:50:22.000 We all feel like family with each other and we vacation together.

01:50:26.000 And, you know, it's, I think because of that, in former times, the HHS Secretary has always been at odds with his departments.

01:50:37.000 And, you know, under Biden and even under the previous Trump administration.

01:50:43.000 Why do you think that was?

01:50:46.000 Because I think part of it is personalities.

01:50:49.000 They're all kind of, you know, alpha people.

01:50:52.000 They have different ideas.

01:50:54.000 And then they, I don't know.

01:50:57.000 I mean, we think a lot of that is just personality and struggling for power and influence and all of that kind of stuff.

01:51:13.000 You know, you want to run your own agency and you don't want interference.

01:51:18.000 And we've been able to do it in ways that are very, very collegial.

01:51:25.000 I wanted to ask you about pesticides.

01:51:27.000 So what was the recent ruling on glyphosate?

01:51:31.000 I 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.

01:51:48.000 And, you know, I've, listen, I've spent 40 years fighting pesticides.

01:51:53.000 It 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.

01:52:09.000 By the end of our trial, Bayer-owned Monsanto.

01:52:13.000 But, you know, pesticides are poison.

01:52:15.000 They're designed to kill all life.

01:52:17.000 It's not a good thing to have in your food.

01:52:21.000 But I also, so it's not something that I was particularly happy with.

01:52:26.000 Let me put it that way mildly.

01:52:29.000 But I also understand the president's point of view.

01:52:31.000 The president didn't create this system.

01:52:34.000 He'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.

01:52:56.000 Glyphosate is the foundational pesticide of our food production system.

01:53:02.000 So 97% of corn in this country is produced with glyphosate and can't be produced without it.

01:53:10.000 98% of, you know, you could do it.

01:53:14.000 You could change it.

01:53:15.000 There's organic corn producers in this country.

01:53:18.000 It's like 3%.

01:53:21.000 98% of soy is produced with glyphosate.

01:53:25.000 If 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.

01:53:36.000 How crazy is that statement?

01:53:38.000 The American foods, the entire system is based on using poison.

01:53:43.000 Right.

01:53:44.000 The farmers don't like it.

01:53:46.000 You know, let me just explain what the EO did.

01:53:51.000 Right now, according to the industry reports, 99% of our glyphosate comes from China.

01:53:58.000 So the Pentagon and others said this is an extreme national security vulnerability, that China controls the U.S. food system.

01:54:08.000 We can't afford to let that happen if we got in some kind of tangle with them.

01:54:12.000 It could literally cut off our food supply overnight and cripple the country.

01:54:18.000 And so that's what the president was responding to.

01:54:21.000 But we all know we've got to transition off of glyphosate.

01:54:24.000 We all know that.

01:54:25.000 And the farmers hate it.

01:54:28.000 One, they're now starting to see these chemical-resistant weeds that can't be treated with glyphosate.

01:54:38.000 Now it's predictable.

01:54:40.000 Two, they hate the inputs.

01:54:42.000 It's cost them a lot of money.

01:54:45.000 Three, the foreign countries won't allow them to export.

01:54:50.000 Like Europe doesn't allow, most European countries don't allow the export of our crops to their countries.

01:54:56.000 Well, how are they doing it?

01:54:59.000 They use less glyphosate than we do.

01:55:02.000 But they use some.

01:55:05.000 They use it.

01:55:05.000 But, you know, our system is all Roundup Ready corn and Roundup Ready soy.

01:55:12.000 And so they don't, you know, they don't use it like we do over here.

01:55:16.000 Ideally, that we would transition away from that, right?

01:55:20.000 Yeah, and it's also, they know it's destroying their soil.

01:55:23.000 And they're all suffering from runoff.

01:55:25.000 You know, it destroys the microbiome and the soil.

01:55:28.000 And because of that, the soil can't, you don't get water infiltration in the soil.

01:55:36.000 And so the soil then runs off.

01:55:39.000 And, you know, it's destroying their farms.

01:55:42.000 It's not sustainable.

01:55:43.000 Everybody knows that.

01:55:44.000 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.

01:55:53.000 We could see this clear line where all the runoff is going into the river.

01:55:57.000 Yeah, but Will Harris will also tell you the same thing that I said, is that what he did is very hard.

01:56:07.000 It took 20 years.

01:56:08.000 It took him 20 years.

01:56:09.000 It took him 20 years, and it's not applicable to every farmer.

01:56:14.000 He understands the problem, too.

01:56:16.000 We all understand that this is a huge problem.

01:56:18.000 So 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.

01:56:36.000 So that would mean that if the federal label says that this is safe, that these state lawsuits now cannot be brought.

01:56:50.000 So 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.

01:57:04.000 It takes away all incentive for them to make the product safer.

01:57:09.000 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 lawsuit, they're just about to sign another $7.6 billion settlement.

01:57:23.000 There'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.

01:57:31.000 So the president is hearing that.

01:57:33.000 The farmers are hearing that.

01:57:35.000 And they're saying, you know, this is a temporary fix.

01:57:39.000 We're putting huge amounts of money into studying the impacts of glyphosate right now in my agency.

01:57:45.000 I'm doing that.

01:57:47.000 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.

01:58:07.000 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.

01:58:20.000 So, you know, vegetables, lettuce, celery, all of these vegetables now they're using a lot of them.

01:58:28.000 You know, you're going to see a very quick transition.

01:58:32.000 It's an attachment that's dragged by a tractor.

01:58:37.000 It kills the weeds at every stage of their life.

01:58:39.000 It identifies their species and kills them instantly all the way down through their root system by exploding them with this laser.

01:58:47.000 And yeah, here's one of those.

01:58:49.000 This is what it looks like?

01:58:50.000 Yeah, that's what it looks like.

01:58:52.000 And this guy.

01:58:55.000 So I can ask you this?

01:58:56.000 Does this have any negative effect whatsoever on the food?

01:58:59.000 No.

01:59:00.000 In fact, you get a 30% increase in productivity of the farm.

01:59:06.000 And the growing season is shortens by three weeks for onions.

01:59:11.000 And that is a huge economic boom.

01:59:13.000 Just zap the weeds.

01:59:14.000 It pays itself back.

01:59:15.000 And for some of these farmers, it pays itself back in nine months.

01:59:23.000 It's a million dollar, that's a million dollar machine, but it pays back.

01:59:26.000 They're paying vegetable fields.

01:59:28.000 This onion producer in South Texas, the biggest onion producer in Texas, she has 8,000 acres. 0.89

01:59:35.000 She was paying $1,500 per acre for pesticides for mainly glyphosate and for manual labor. 0.83

01:59:44.000 And now with this machine, it's $300.

01:59:47.000 She's saving over $1,000 an acre.

01:59:50.000 She's got 8,000 acres. 1.00

01:59:50.000 Is this showing how it does? 1.00

01:59:52.000 So it's a million-dollar machine, which sounds like a lot, but you've got 8,000 acres and you're paying $1,500 an acre per growing season.

01:59:59.000 They missed one.

02:00:01.000 Maybe I'll put another one.

02:00:02.000 And now they're making them on drones.

02:00:04.000 Maybe there's a crop.

02:00:06.000 Interesting.

02:00:06.000 There'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.

02:00:14.000 What the president wants to do is accelerate that.

02:00:18.000 He says, yeah, we can't allow the company to go bankrupt.

02:00:23.000 We can't allow foreign interference, but we've got to get off of this stuff. 1.00

02:00:27.000 We'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.

02:00:33.000 Without crashing the food system.

02:00:35.000 So this is a bridge.

02:00:36.000 This is a bridge to healthcare.

02:00:38.000 Exactly.

02:00:38.000 This is what path do you think would be technologies like this for weeds?

02:00:41.000 What about for bugs?

02:00:43.000 You know, it's harder.

02:00:45.000 These systems are more difficult.

02:00:49.000 They're not yet economic in the cornfield, the row crops.

02:00:55.000 They're economic for organic corn.

02:00:57.000 And I talked to an organic corn farmer who's in love with his machine.

02:01:02.000 But, yeah, they can do it for bugs, too.

02:01:04.000 So they just zap the bug?

02:01:06.000 They zap the bug. 0.97

02:01:06.000 They identify them and zap them. 0.97

02:01:09.000 But in the row crops, these guys, the vegetable crops are paying $1,500 an acre.

02:01:16.000 The row crops are $50 an acre.

02:01:20.000 And so to get economically to their level, they have to scale enormously.

02:01:24.000 So that is, you know, how do we help them do that?

02:01:28.000 How do we bring Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and billionaires in to start investing really heavily in these kind of technologies?

02:01:35.000 And let's get off of this stuff.

02:01:37.000 What are the primary health concerns about people that consume too much glyphosate?

02:01:42.000 Or is there a threshold?

02:01:44.000 I know there's like a safe level that's supposed to be detectable in your blood.

02:01:49.000 Like what does that mean in terms of – I don't know if there's any safe level.

02:01:52.000 I don't know.

02:01:54.000 I shouldn't even say there is a.

02:01:56.000 That is what we are trying to figure out right now.

02:01:59.000 And it's associated with Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

02:02:04.000 It's a so, you know, there's a scientific association, but it's not strong enough for people to litigate on.

02:02:13.000 The litigation was all about non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

02:02:16.000 Only that.

02:02:17.000 Yeah, because that's the one thing that they had a critical mass of scientific studies supporting.

02:02:24.000 Now, what about when they use it at the end of production?

02:02:26.000 Definitely.

02:02:28.000 It definitely disrupts your gut biome.

02:02:31.000 Yes.

02:02:36.000 The advantage of glyphosate is unlike the other poisons, it doesn't harm organic tissue, but it goes after plants, not animal tissue.

02:02:47.000 Your stomach microbiome is plants.

02:02:50.000 And so, you know, there's, you know, it may contribute to the celiac disease and all these gluten allergies.

02:03:01.000 It was coterminous with that.

02:03:03.000 You know, the introduction of glyphosate of Roundup Ready corn.

02:03:11.000 You know what Roundup-ready corn is, right?

02:03:14.000 It means that you can spray the field and everything green dies except for the corn, which is immune to glyphosate.

02:03:21.000 That's why it's so advantageous to them.

02:03:24.000 It saves huge labor costs and it allows them to, you know, to sell the corn at a price that people could afford.

02:03:34.000 You know, one of the most controversial uses is a desiccant.

02:03:38.000 And that means that there is no Roundup Ready wheat.

02:03:42.000 So normally they weren't using this in the wheat field.

02:03:46.000 But around 2003, they started using it to dry out the wheat just before harvest.

02:03:51.000 And that way they can harvest it without getting fungus on it and without getting mold on it.

02:03:57.000 And for the first time, they were spraying it right on food.

02:04:02.000 And so that is real, you know, the major vector for getting into human beings.

02:04:06.000 And, you know, around 2003 is when you started seeing these explosions in celiac disease and gluten allergies.

02:04:14.000 There'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.

02:04:24.000 They should have been looking at this 30 years ago.

02:04:30.000 But we're doing it now.

02:04:32.000 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.

02:04:41.000 And then also people coming from Europe and eating in America and getting sick. 0.86

02:04:46.000 And I don't know whether that, there's no telling whether that's glyphosate or other pesticides or whatever.

02:04:51.000 But it's just something.

02:04:54.000 I have a son who had chronic eczema from when he was a kid, the disease I never heard of as a kid, and everybody's got it now.

02:05:03.000 And he would get it any time that he ate spaghetti or bread or, you know.

02:05:09.000 And he went and he went to the University of Bologna.

02:05:12.000 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.

02:05:19.000 And so, and you hear there's, you know, there's hundreds of stories like that that we've all heard.

02:05:25.000 I feel different when I go to Italy.

02:05:27.000 When I go to Italy and I eat over there, I feel different.

02:05:29.000 I feel different if I use, there's a restaurant that called Gaetano's in Las Vegas and Henderson, and they use all Italian flour.

02:05:39.000 They import it all from Italy.

02:05:40.000 It tastes different.

02:05:42.000 It feels different.

02:05:42.000 You don't feel terrible after you eat it.

02:05:45.000 Something's wrong with our food.

02:05:47.000 And everybody knows it.

02:05:49.000 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.

02:05:56.000 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.

02:06:07.000 And 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.

02:06:20.000 How do we get those people to ultimately transition?

02:06:24.000 And if they do, could they even produce enough of their product to stay viable?

02:06:32.000 I mean, I've met with over 100 farmers and developing the food guidelines, our team.

02:06:38.000 And, you know, I've been doing agricultural issues for 30 years.

02:06:41.000 I can tell you farmers are the most hardworking people that I've ever met.

02:06:47.000 They are good people.

02:06:49.000 They want to produce the healthiest foods.

02:06:52.000 And they don't want the inputs are killing them.

02:06:56.000 Seven out of ten years, farmers lose money.

02:07:00.000 And there's no young people moving to the farm country anymore.

02:07:04.000 So we really need to do what we can to make sure we don't lose any more farms in this country.

02:07:10.000 And that's what the president's worried about.

02:07:12.000 And that has to be his priority.

02:07:14.000 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.

02:07:24.000 And we're putting huge amounts of money into regenerative agriculture.

02:07:28.000 People 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?

02:07:41.000 How do we help other farmers to do what you're doing?

02:07:43.000 And that is a priority for the administration.

02:07:49.000 Do you envision a possibility, a real possibility of a country that is all regenerative agriculture with no pesticides?

02:07:58.000 Is that even possible?

02:08:00.000 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.

02:08:08.000 I mean, I think that's going to happen.

02:08:10.000 I think technology is going to allow us that to happen.

02:08:16.000 But you're going to have a lot of robotic farming happening.

02:08:20.000 And that's another question.

02:08:23.000 Well, that's robotic with these lasers. 0.73

02:08:25.000 That's essentially what you're doing.

02:08:27.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:08:29.000 So that would be.

02:08:30.000 You're going to have drones doing this. 0.99

02:08:32.000 You'll have drone swarms over farms killing insects.

02:08:36.000 What about industrial fertilizer?

02:08:39.000 What would be the solution to that?

02:08:41.000 That's a little more difficult, particularly in some parts of the country.

02:08:46.000 You need nutrients in the soil, but there's ways of growing.

02:08:52.000 And Harris has shown this, where you can dramatically reduce the amount of petroleum-based fertilizers that you're using, dramatically, almost eliminate them.

02:09:05.000 Sure, but the scale of his farm and the scale of the production in comparison to these monocrop agriculture places that produce corn.

02:09:12.000 I mean, these people are dealing with enormous amounts of crops.

02:09:17.000 The question is, could that be scaled regeneratively?

02:09:20.000 Could you get it to a point where you have organic farms only?

02:09:27.000 I think with technology, you're going to eliminate a lot of the pesticides and the herbicides.

02:09:33.000 I think it's going to be much slower when you talk about fertilizers.

02:09:42.000 But is there a pathway for that?

02:09:45.000 I hope so.

02:09:46.000 But you haven't so far off.

02:09:50.000 Yeah, I mean, that's going to be after my three years before that happens.

02:09:55.000 Do you I mean if someone else wins and they want you to stay, are you going to stay?

02:10:02.000 Do you have a thought of that or do you want to do as much as you can in four years?

02:10:05.000 Well, 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.

02:10:17.000 And if I get more time, then I would probably take it.

02:10:23.000 How many days a week are you working?

02:10:26.000 Well, I work.

02:10:28.000 I mean, I'm working.

02:10:30.000 When I'm home, I'm working.

02:10:32.000 It doesn't stop.

02:10:33.000 It's just your life.

02:10:34.000 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.

02:10:43.000 He says, were you sleeping 2 o'clock in the morning?

02:10:46.000 Yeah, no, no, of course not.

02:10:48.000 I was working.

02:10:52.000 He's an interesting guy to work for.

02:10:54.000 Yeah, he's got a lot of energy for it.

02:10:56.000 He's got an incredible amount of energy.

02:10:58.000 I've never seen anything like it, particularly with the food he eats.

02:11:01.000 Yeah.

02:11:02.000 I don't know how he is.

02:11:03.000 He's still eating mostly.

02:11:06.000 I've never seen it.

02:11:07.000 Well, let me put it this way.

02:11:09.000 When he's on the road, he eats like fast food because he trusts it.

02:11:16.000 He doesn't want to eat in some local place where he gets food poisoning or something.

02:11:23.000 But when he's at home at the White House or Mar-a-Lago, it's all like locally sourced, incredible food.

02:11:34.000 Oh, that's good.

02:11:35.000 So he eats well.

02:11:36.000 But he still drinks.

02:11:38.000 Dana White told me that he's known him for 20 years and he's never seen him drink water.

02:11:43.000 Just drinks Coca-Cola?

02:11:45.000 What does he drink?

02:11:45.000 Diet Coke, right?

02:11:47.000 Doesn't he, you know, I just had Michael Mouse in here.

02:11:49.000 He was talking about how he got off aspartame and how his brain fog just completely cleared up.

02:11:54.000 He's drinking Diet Coke every day.

02:11:56.000 That is a really sleazy saga about how that got into her.

02:12:01.000 We talked about it the other day.

02:12:02.000 Yeah, we brought it up.

02:12:03.000 That was Donald Rumsfeld.

02:12:05.000 Donald Rumsfeld.

02:12:06.000 Yeah.

02:12:07.000 And there was a really good FDA commissioner back then named David Kennedy.

02:12:14.000 No relation, but he was a guy from Stanford.

02:12:19.000 I think he was the president of Stanford for a while.

02:12:22.000 And he was really good, had total integrity.

02:12:24.000 He was like David Kessler, another really great FDA.

02:12:29.000 And he banned aspartame.

02:12:32.000 And Rumsfeld came in there and just overruled him.

02:12:36.000 Rumsfeld had owned Searle, which was making it.

02:12:44.000 That's how it worked.

02:12:45.000 Well, that's why this time with you in office has been encouraging.

02:12:52.000 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.

02:13:02.000 I had read your Fauci book, and I'm like, if anybody could do something about this, it's you.

02:13:08.000 And I'm kind of amazed at how much you have been able to do.

02:13:11.000 And also, you know, watching the struggle, the difficulties of getting things pushed through that should have been pushed through easily with rational thinking.

02:13:22.000 It's a fascinating time because we are in a time of change.

02:13:26.000 Some of it's good, some of it's bad.

02:13:27.000 But we're definitely in a time of change.

02:13:30.000 And that's not something you can say about every administration.

02:13:33.000 It's definitely not something you can say about everybody that's been the head of the HHS.

02:13:37.000 You're the first guy that gave me hope when you got in there.

02:13:40.000 I'm like, okay, maybe we'll see some meaningful change with some things that are really important for people's health.

02:13:46.000 I think.

02:13:47.000 Oh, we're doing it.

02:13:48.000 I think you are.

02:13:49.000 I think you're doing that.

02:13:50.000 Is there anything else you want to talk about any other subject you want to cover?

02:13:54.000 You ask me about immigration because I know that that's something that's disturbed you.

02:13:59.000 Well, what are your thoughts on immigration on what's going on?

02:14:04.000 You know, here's the background of my kind of assumptions.

02:14:08.000 During the last 10 years of his life, I worked very closely with Cesar Chavez.

02:14:14.000 And I worked with he had two issues.

02:14:16.000 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, his workers were experiencing from pesticides.

02:14:27.000 And the other issue he had was immigration.

02:14:29.000 He wanted to shut down the border because he saw the way that it was impairing this huge influx of illegal migration across the border.

02:14:42.000 It was impairing his ability to get, to bargain, to leverage good wages and conditions for his workers.

02:14:50.000 When I grew up, the Democratic Party was against immigration.

02:14:54.000 And it was the Republican Party who wanted it because the big corporations wanted cheap labor. 0.83

02:14:59.000 The Chamber of Commerce was firmly embedded in the Republican Party, and they were all about open borders.

02:15:07.000 Today, the Chamber of Commerce is with the Democratic Party.

02:15:10.000 And so it's one of these switches that is kind of inexplicable to me.

02:15:14.000 But I think, again, it happened because President Trump said, I'm going to fix it with the wall.

02:15:20.000 And that became, you know, it suddenly became open borders, suddenly became a calling card for the Democratic Party.

02:15:28.000 But there's a reason, you know, and I see it in my agency, the cause that it's imposing on our country.

02:15:35.000 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.

02:15:53.000 And every country has to do that.

02:15:56.000 President Trump ran on this issue.

02:15:58.000 He's now, and he ran that he's going to enforce it and deport, particularly the bad people.

02:16:04.000 This is what you don't hear.

02:16:06.000 70% of the people that they've arrested have criminal records.

02:16:11.000 What the Democrats are always saying is, oh, only 14% of them have been convicted of a violent crime.

02:16:16.000 Well, they've been convicted.

02:16:18.000 But 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.

02:16:29.000 The other 30%, a lot of them are gang members.

02:16:32.000 When they go looking for an immigrant, they're not just randomly searching restaurants.

02:16:39.000 They're going after particular people who they've gotten their names from local law enforcement and from others.

02:16:46.000 During the Biden administration or during the Obama administration, President Obama deported more people than President Trump did, most in history.

02:16:55.000 Nobody cared.

02:16:57.000 And there were 76 people shot during that process.

02:17:03.000 During the Biden administration, none of it made headlines.

02:17:06.000 About half of those people were killed.

02:17:10.000 None of it made the news.

02:17:12.000 Now, because it's Trump doing it, you have the entire Democratic Party and the media establishment saying, oh, look at the horrible things.

02:17:20.000 He's a dictator, but he's doing what he promised to do to the American people.

02:17:25.000 It's very disturbing watching what you see on TV.

02:17:30.000 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.

02:17:44.000 If you, that's not how protests usually work.

02:17:49.000 If 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.

02:17:56.000 They think it's counterproductive.

02:17:59.000 You wouldn't send people to try and interfere with people who are arresting a drug dealer.

02:18:06.000 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.

02:18:18.000 And when you have crowds doing that, it's going to blow up.

02:18:23.000 And so, you know, I see this, you know, nobody is happy with the way that things have looked, particularly in Minnesota.

02:18:34.000 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 set up a situation.

02:18:48.000 I mean, if you were, you're a dad, I wouldn't send my kids out to interfere with a law enforcement operation.

02:18:56.000 There's other ways to protest.

02:18:59.000 But so I think that, you know, I think now they're pulling out of Minnesota.

02:19:04.000 They're going to do this, you know, in other states where they're not going to get that kind of crowd interaction.

02:19:11.000 But a lot of the people that they're arresting are not.

02:19:15.000 You know, they're people who are actually, you know, have, like I said, 70% of criminal records.

02:19:22.000 Yeah, we've actually covered that here.

02:19:24.000 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.

02:19:30.000 It's a different thing.

02:19:31.000 It's a different thing when you have at least 10 million people.

02:19:35.000 They don't even know how many for real.

02:19:37.000 Yeah, it could be 20 million.

02:19:38.000 They don't know.

02:19:39.000 And that's a lot.

02:19:40.000 And to have that happen all at once is pretty crazy.

02:19:44.000 I think what disturbs people is, again, obviously these violent interactions.

02:19:50.000 What should disturb them is that these are not organic protests.

02:19:54.000 These protests are organized and paid for.

02:19:56.000 And that's crazy.

02:19:58.000 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.

02:20:06.000 It's organized.

02:20:07.000 They have signal chats.

02:20:08.000 There's been a lot of people online talking about being paid to protest in certain places.

02:20:12.000 And that's kind of insane that that's even legal, that you can organize a mob and pay them to go and make a bunch of noise.

02:20:20.000 It's like the color revolution.

02:20:22.000 Right.

02:20:22.000 Exactly.

02:20:23.000 And that it has to do with it just happened to take place in the place where hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud was being exposed.

02:20:30.000 So then the narrative completely shifts away from the fraud and onto this unnecessary violence with ICE.

02:20:36.000 And then there's the natural thing that people have, this distrust of people wearing masks.

02:20:42.000 They don't like that.

02:20:43.000 They don't like officers wearing masks.

02:20:46.000 But 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.

02:20:57.000 So if it wasn't for organized protest, I wonder if those particular interactions would have even happened, would have even taken place.

02:21:06.000 And I know you're saying that they don't, that they're targeting specific people.

02:21:12.000 They're going after bad people.

02:21:14.000 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.

02:21:22.000 So there's probably a lot of people that are just people that got duped into coming to this country thinking they're going to be welcomed.

02:21:28.000 And then they come over here and they're trying to get jobs and now they're getting arrested and deported.

02:21:32.000 You know, it wasn't their fault that they were encouraged and brought into this country, but they did break the law.

02:21:38.000 And I understand.

02:21:40.000 I understand that perspective.

02:21:42.000 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 people into this country over the last four years, at least, being charitable.

02:21:55.000 It's kind of nuts.

02:21:56.000 And I was down at the border and I was during my presidential campaign.

02:22:00.000 I 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.

02:22:11.000 It was like the Boston Marathon in the beginning of it just a sheer number.

02:22:15.000 And they all had a plan.

02:22:17.000 The cartels were all running the whole thing.

02:22:21.000 They were advertising all over the world and bringing people in.

02:22:25.000 And everybody was the Border Patrol is completely demoralized.

02:22:30.000 They were told, don't arrest anybody.

02:22:33.000 Just fingerprint them.

02:22:34.000 If they're a criminal, turn them back.

02:22:37.000 But, you know, most of these people, they couldn't figure that out.

02:22:42.000 and otherwise put them on a bus or a plane to anywhere they wanted to go in the country.

02:22:46.000 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.

02:22:58.000 The whole thing was crazy.

02:22:59.000 And one of the complicated issues is that you have now a bunch of sanctuary cities and sanctuary states.

02:23:06.000 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.

02:23:19.000 So ICE would then come and local law enforcement would transfer to ICE.

02:23:25.000 In the sanctuary cities, they don't do that.

02:23:27.000 They just let them go.

02:23:28.000 And, you know, it's not.

02:23:31.000 How is that legal?

02:23:32.000 That seems insane.

02:23:33.000 That seems like it's a violation.

02:23:35.000 It wasn't a law.

02:23:35.000 It was just a policy that law enforcement always cooperated with each other.

02:23:41.000 Now, because Trump's in there, they're saying, okay, we would rather take the side of a criminal than take the side of the president.

02:23:53.000 So they're choosing sides.

02:23:55.000 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. 0.70

02:24:14.000 And not a single Democrat stood.

02:24:17.000 How can you do that?

02:24:19.000 Well, that's what we were talking about earlier, what you were saying.

02:24:21.000 It's just they're ideologically captured.

02:24:24.000 Yeah.

02:24:24.000 I mean, that should be something.

02:24:26.000 If you want to be taken seriously, you're a reasonable person.

02:24:28.000 You would stand up for that.

02:24:30.000 Yeah.

02:24:31.000 Yeah.

02:24:32.000 It 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.

02:24:41.000 You know, that's part of the problem, too.

02:24:43.000 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.

02:24:54.000 It's actually, I think, higher.

02:24:56.000 More American citizens were arrested during this Obama thing.

02:25:01.000 You just never heard about it.

02:25:02.000 Also, 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.

02:25:14.000 Like if you listen to the things they were saying back then, it was very much the Republican perspective.

02:25:19.000 Well, that was the Democratic Party always was against an open border.

02:25:25.000 Yeah.

02:25:26.000 Bernie even said that it's like open borders are a Republican idea.

02:25:30.000 They want cheap labor.

02:25:31.000 Yeah.

02:25:33.000 So, all right.

02:25:35.000 Anything else?

02:25:36.000 Before we wrap this up, listen, thank you very much for all your hard work.

02:25:39.000 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 that's genuinely going to help.

02:25:50.000 And I think, you know, so far you're on a good path.

02:25:53.000 So I hope we can get all the other stuff done, too.

02:25:55.000 Well, thank you, John.

02:25:56.000 Thanks for the conversation.

02:25:58.000 And thanks for all of your conversations.

02:26:00.000 My pleasure.

The Joe Rogan Experience - February 27, 2026

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

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