00:00:36.000It showed that there was a real political animation around a Democrat working with a Republican.
00:00:42.000I think it showed the country that the Trump administration was going to fight not just partisan stuff but special interests and the swamp.
00:00:49.000I helped set that up, came in, dropped everything I was doing, came in, was a senior advisor at the White House, led MAHA implementation, fought really hard.
00:00:58.000I was optimistic because I'm a realist and things get done in politics.
00:02:11.000These were all just the system of DC does not want any change to happen.
00:02:14.000The fact that we had a voter coalition and could use that and say, this coalition, you, other people are going to be pissed off if we don't get things done.
00:02:22.000But the simple reality and why I left is that there is a very concentrated group of people in the Trump administration that are antagonistic to what people voted for and are frankly I think it's very clear.
00:02:40.000Doing things for other reasons, particularly in many cases to enrich their families.
00:03:01.000A lot of people were very excited about the coalition.
00:03:03.000They felt like this was one of the main things that I was excited about with Trump getting into office.
00:03:10.000Bobby Kennedy was going to be in there, and there was a lot of these things that you just discussed, a lot of these things about peptides and stem cells, for sure, the psychedelics, and then just making people aware of additives and food that were completely unnecessary, that were ruining people's health.
00:04:11.000We all know things are corrupt and bad, but I'll just get right into specifics.
00:04:16.000What I learned, and I don't think anyone would dispute this the way the White House, this White House is set up, is the most centralized control up to the chief of staff office of any administration in American history.
00:04:29.000So, I'll just get into details about who runs the White House.
00:04:33.000There's a picture I have of the key people.1.00
00:04:36.000But the White House - Susie Wiles is the most powerful chief of staff in modern American history.1.00
00:04:41.000And she has taken a stranglehold on any policy decision.1.00
00:04:45.000No policy decision gets done without her office giving it the okay.
00:04:51.000So, every single cabinet secretary - they're spending meetings constantly worrying about how to get on Susie's good side and how to win favor with her.
00:05:22.000These are the most powerful people in the country.
00:05:24.000Let me just go through dispassionately, just factually, who these people are.
00:05:29.000Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, before she joined the Trump administration, was one of the top lobbyists in the country.
00:05:35.000She spent her career taking money from Benjamin Netanyahu, who she was a top consultant for, the pharmaceutical industry, the pesticide industry.
00:05:44.000So, just passionately, just as a statement of economic facts, Suzy Wiles, her career has been taking money from the industries and foreign governments who would pay her the most money.
00:05:57.000James Blair, who was the head of political operations, is her friend from Florida and a long term political consultant.
00:06:08.000A lot of money from industries like the sugar industry, but that's been his career, running some campaigns, taking money from special interests.
00:06:14.000She brought him along and really propped him up with Trump.
00:06:17.000Tony Fabrizio is one of the most powerful people in the country.
00:06:20.000He's Trump's chief pollster, very good friends with Susie.
00:06:25.000He is on the outside the whole time, and every single policy issue goes through him because he tells the team whether it's politically appropriate to do or not based on his polling.
00:06:36.000As he's been working in the Trump administration in this extremely powerful role where every single cabinet secretary is trying to get on his good side, He is, and this is actually on his website.
00:06:47.000He takes money from pharmaceutical companies.
00:06:50.000He takes money from almost every single industry we're fighting against right now to this day.
00:06:54.000So he's taking money at the same time.
00:06:55.000I don't even know if President Trump fully knows that.
00:06:58.000But as we were fighting things like school lunch reform and getting an ultra processed food definition, 90 percent of the country wants this.
00:07:05.000We're going to define ultra processed food.
00:07:06.00070 percent of a child's diet is ultra processed food.
00:07:09.000We need to figure out what to do there.
00:07:10.000It's a widely popular promise from the administration.
00:07:13.000He is getting paid by Pepsi and giving political analysis that the juice isn't worth the squeeze on doing policies like that, as simple as school lunch reform.
00:07:22.000Every single issue goes through him, goes through James.
00:07:26.000Tony and James were also in charge of the midterm efforts.
00:07:30.000So James left the White House to be in charge of the midterm efforts, but still very involved.
00:07:35.000And the key thing Susie did is from almost day one, we made the midterm strategy the policy strategy.
00:07:41.000So they would often say, That we can't do certain things because that would hurt special interest configurations for the midterms.
00:07:50.000Walker Barrett is Susie's neighbor in Florida, junior guy, but extremely powerful.
00:07:57.000He was a congressional staffer for a long time.
00:07:59.000Richard Walters is a kind of mid level fundraiser.
00:08:03.000His whole career has been consulting and fundraising.
00:08:06.000He came from a lobbying firm in the past year that lobbied for pesticides, lobbied for pharma.
00:08:13.000Richard was, for a while, the most powerful person in the country because as Susie was out getting cancer treatment, Richard was effectively chief of staff.
00:08:21.000And Chris Lacevita ran the campaign with Susie.
00:08:27.000He's a lobbyist consultant, getting paid a lot of money by special interests.
00:08:32.000And the other thing I note: Susie's daughter became a lobbyist.
00:08:38.000And I don't know if you have the graph, continental strategies, but this is really interesting.
00:08:46.000Susie's daughter went to a lobbying firm, and it was an open discussion in the White House.
00:08:52.000If a company hired Susie's daughter, then that was getting a high priority.
00:08:59.000There's a chart that shows Continental Strategies, the group Susie's daughter worked for, had almost zero in revenue before the Trump administration, shot up to 30 ish million dollars a year in revenue.
00:09:11.000If you're a special interest and you want to get something done, the secret's out.
00:10:29.000That's then Ballard advising people on how to shift money to other dark money groups.
00:10:34.000So you probably put a 10x multiple on that.
00:10:37.000Ballard basically helps then pay other groups, pay other people to get things done.
00:10:46.000Ballard, again, the secret's out in D.C. You have to pay Ballard to get something done, and they've generated more revenue than any other firm in American history.
00:11:19.000It is absolutely true that his administration has been infiltrated by the very people that he energized voters to say he would get out of D.C.
00:11:27.000And what I'm going to talk about today and the specific things I'm going to talk about are not idiosyncratic to the Trump administration.
00:12:58.000Americans did not vote for Trump or, frankly, the Democrats recently, who are basically copying Trump's messages against the swamp, they didn't vote to have people like this that are accepting money from foreign countries while they're running the midterm strategy have their kids working at lobbying firms that are making tens of millions of dollars.
00:13:16.000And really having the most populist president ever elected, Donald Trump, have a centralized policy process that is.
00:13:25.000Entirely dictated, not by voters, but by who's paying a ballot.
00:13:31.000At one point, I was arguing for, I think, school lunches or this no brainer policy to Tony Fabrizio.
00:13:38.000And I said to him, I said, President Trump really galvanized a lot of voters with Bobby Kennedy.
00:13:45.000I know Joe Rogan's listeners would really love to see some getting healthier school meals.
00:13:50.000The processed food companies might not like that.
00:13:52.000And he said, it's not a big part of our strategy.
00:13:55.000He said, you know, those voters kind of dismissed me bringing up your listeners who I felt like I was advocating for.
00:14:02.000He said, that's not really, and Maha's not really a big part of our strategy.
00:14:06.000So I, you know, had What did he say the strategy was?
00:14:12.000They were obsessed with a highly kind of surgical strategy of redistricting.
00:14:18.000They were obsessed with redistricting.
00:14:26.000So James Blair and Tony Fabrizio and Susie.
00:14:29.000Their entire strategy to win the midterms was to gerrymander various states to change the congressional map so they're more favorable to Republicans.
00:14:38.000That's all they cared about with the midterm strategy.
00:14:45.000Then I can't speak to exactly what's in their head, but everyone has their own biases.
00:14:52.000When you come from this world where you're being paid at the current moment by Pepsi and all these other companies, all your friends are lobbyists.
00:14:59.000You know, everything, you kind of convince yourself that politics all rests on money.
00:15:05.000And Susie and James and other people said this a lot.
00:15:08.000Susie said to me many times, We need money for the midterms, Callie.
00:15:13.000So when you convince yourself that money is the most important thing for the midterms and for the future political dynamics, and this was the narrative in the Trump administration by Susie from almost the beginning, then you can justify almost anything.
00:15:28.000And what Tony Fabrizio did with this polling is that, oh, people don't really care about the food issues, people don't really care about the pesticide issues, people don't really care about the Care about the taking on farm or whatever.
00:15:37.000So that's the big shell game, I think, that happened everything in the political strategy was based on getting enough money for the midterms, not actually doing the things that would then energize voters enough.
00:15:49.000Well, what do they think people do care about?
00:15:51.000If they don't think people care about the very things that they voted for, that they were excited about with this whole coalition with Maha, what do they think?
00:19:03.000So, when he got into office, how do these people become a part of the cabinet?
00:19:09.000Is it simply that you have, because I understand that first administration that he had back in 2016, it was a giant issue that he had brought.
00:19:31.000Do you think there's 100 plus jobs to fill?
00:19:35.000There's no way he can micromanage all of them and sit down with every individual person and go in depth on their resume, what their plans are, what financial ties do you have?
00:19:53.000There's a lot of other cabinet secretaries that want to go hard.
00:19:58.000But those cabinet secretaries are often talking about how exasperated they are by these dynamics, by these Ballard dynamics, and by the absolutely centralized control and paralysis that Susie's driven.
00:21:11.000There was a big force to get her in as the chief of staff, and I was really excited about that.
00:21:18.000I worked with her and with Bobby and worked to get the Maha agenda through.
00:21:24.000But I think we're at a pretty consequential time in American history.
00:21:29.000I think, frankly, and we can get into specific stories, but I think what's happening is a case study, not just what's wrong with Trump, but what we need to exercise from the system in general.
00:21:38.000So you get in, and when do you start realizing what these issues are, and how does it unveil itself?
00:21:47.000I mean, I can go into what happened with glyphosate.
00:21:50.000Yes, please, because that's a big one.
00:21:52.000Because I mean, I really love Bobby, he's a great guy.
00:21:56.000But when he was on here, he seemed so dejected when he had to explain how they got blocked.
00:22:28.000We have the highest rates of autoimmune conditions, hormone conditions, cancer, pediatric cancer, diabetes, every chronic disease you can think of.
00:22:41.000We have the highest rates among kids of any society in human history.
00:22:44.000I definitely think that solving that was a major voter promise.
00:22:49.000Obviously, what we're spraying on our food is very important.
00:22:54.000The United States, we're 4% of the world's population.
00:22:57.000By some measures, we use 20% of the world's glyphosate.
00:23:03.000So, our system is addicted to these chemicals.
00:23:08.000It's also interesting to me when you look at us versus other countries, we actually spend half as much of our national income on food than Europe.
00:23:17.000They spend double the relative amount on food, but we spend three times more on health care.
00:23:57.000So, kind of in the administration, the first thing we had was the MAHA report, which was just basically listing what President Trump said he wanted to look into, such as pesticides.
00:24:08.000And it was the greatest fight I've ever experienced up to that time in my life.
00:24:11.000To have the word glyphosate in that report.
00:24:16.000The amount of almost violent reaction against that from industry calls to Susie, calls to everyone to have that word not even have it in the report, not even have a government report mention that this could potentially be a problem was the biggest policy battle I had seen up to that time.
00:25:35.000This is where bipartisan senators come in from agriculture states.0.92
00:25:39.000There's tremendous pressure on the NIH not to study it.
00:25:42.000I'm saying people are threatening appropriations if we even look into it.
00:25:46.000Aggression to not legitimize this topic, and it hasn't been legitimized.
00:25:52.000The MAHA report, literally saying that glyphosate might be a problem, was the first time the US government has actually ever recognized even that potential reality, but it was totally watered down.
00:26:27.000The top issue for them was getting those lawsuits off their back.
00:26:32.000They worked to go state by state and pass laws, jam laws through, giving them legal immunity, basically enabling making it the second product after vaccines in America that you can't sue for.
00:26:46.000Even in most deep red, very agricultural states, This was a step too far.
00:26:52.000So, they had trouble passing these bills in the states.1.00
00:26:55.000Then they tried to jam something into the farm bill in Congress, and there was such a maha uprising, including from Republicans, that this just doesn't make any sense.0.98
00:27:04.000They were having trouble getting it through Congress.0.89
00:27:07.000So, I knew being at the White House as the maha person, I knew that this was a politically explosive issue because it's obviously bad politics if the administration looks like they're putting their thumb on the scale to provide a product that has been proven to give.
00:27:37.000The administration, at the very least, should not be weighing in on this.
00:27:41.000We should not be putting that's a political disaster.
00:27:46.000Time goes on, and I was called into a room, and Susie's person, Walker Bear, is there.
00:27:57.000He puts an executive order down on the desk and he says, Please review.
00:28:04.000It was the glyphosate EO that Says as a national security issue, we need to have glyphosate and alluded to liability protection using national defense reasons.
00:28:16.000Trevor Burrus, yeah, national security.
00:28:17.000Trevor Burrus, to make sure that we have glyphosate use.
00:28:19.000Trevor Burrus, and I will tell you the Secretary of War, the major generals, they don't see our lack of glyphosate on U.S. farms as a national security issue.
00:28:31.000And the EO was all about farming, all about glyphosate.
00:28:33.000Nobody in military leadership sees this as a national security issue.
00:29:04.000Susie then called Bobby's office and said, We're not discussing this.
00:29:09.000I went and informed Bobby, and it was announced the next day.
00:29:14.000Around the same time, the Supreme Court was deciding whether to take a case that revolved around liability protection for glyphosate.
00:29:28.000I again, over previous months, had talked to many people and said this is a political disaster because the Trump administration had a decision of whether to weigh in on that case.
00:29:37.000So the Supreme Court probably wasn't going to take the case.
00:29:40.000And when the Trump Department of Justice, when the President's Department of Justice weighs in, they can basically weigh in and say, please take this case.
00:29:46.000And it was basically hinging on whether the administration weighed in and said, please take this case.
00:29:49.000And the administration can weigh in on cases.
00:29:52.000The Biden administration chose not to.
00:29:58.000Heidi Overton, who now is Susie's person, who's now up for the FDA commissioner, worked with the Department of Justice to construct a legal argument about why the Supreme Court could take the case.0.84
00:30:20.000And why they should be supporting liability protection for the pesticide makers.
00:30:26.000She did not consult Bobby Kennedy on that.0.78
00:30:30.000The Department of Justice brought in a lawyer named Sarah Harris to the Solicitor General's office.
00:30:37.000Sarah came from the law firm that is Bayer's main law firm, and she wrote an opinion saying that the Supreme Court should take the case and give liability protection to Bayer.
00:31:02.000The Supreme Court ended up siding with the case, which they wouldn't have taken without that brief and urging from the administration to take it.
00:31:09.000How is that possible that something that gives people cancer, that's known to give people cancer, gets liability protection?
00:31:17.000We've talked about it on the podcast before, but the idea that your food system, in order for it to function, It relies on poison is really insane, especially when you realize that that's not being used in other countries.
00:31:29.000Trevor Burrus Well, here's what I'd say, Joe.
00:31:31.000I'd say, Joe, it's even again, I'm not a realist.
00:31:38.000I wasn't in there to argue for unreasonable things.
00:31:42.000We have a very complicated, interconnected economy.
00:31:46.000I even buy the argument that we can't ban this stuff tomorrow.
00:31:50.00099% of corn is sprayed with it, 98% of soybeans.
00:31:54.000It's used in other countries, it's a lot less.
00:31:56.000What's also used in wheat, which is really crazy.
00:33:10.000And by cutting that out, it's actually an assault on the market because I was actually happy with what's happening.
00:33:17.000The MAHA is putting pressure on glyphosate.
00:33:18.000There's lawsuits, which is appropriate, and they're going to invest and they're going to figure out something different.
00:33:24.000And that's happening to a large degree.
00:33:25.000There's been a lot of success with the MAHA movement.
00:33:27.000Like every borderman in America realizes that people are pissed off.
00:33:30.000But to take the legal recourse out, to make it the second product after vaccines, where I mean, what does that say to moms whose kids have cancer?
00:33:42.000Tennessee teen drenched in glyphosate spent the next seven years fighting massive alien tumor.
00:33:52.000Just months after being completely doused by glyphosate while working on a cell tower maintenance crew, Tennessee teenager Arden Allison developed one of the worst cases of Hodgkin lymphoma his doctor had ever seen.
00:34:06.000Arden and his mother told chd.tv how the seven year battle transformed them into outspoken advocates pushing to get this disgusting poison.
00:36:53.000And this is like I've never seen him be presented an issue on the MAHA stuff, and I'm going to speak to the MAHA stuff and not his inclination not to go hard.
00:37:05.000That the glyphosate example is a case study of what is happening throughout the MAHA agenda and the health agenda, but also throughout the entire government.
00:37:20.000Did Americans vote for this extremely not transparent process where we have immunity for?
00:37:35.000Pesticide makers be jammed down our throats with no public discussion.
00:37:40.000At the very least, I think they voted for Bobby Kennedy with me and others at the table with whoever's arguing for the liability to have a discussion, for the chief of staff office to level that up to the president if there was an impasse and a real discussion.
00:37:58.000But what they frequently did is they tried to take Bobby out of the discussion.
00:38:04.000I mean, again, Susie's person sat me down, put the EO on the table, and said it's not up for discussion.
00:38:10.000Bobby was put in a really tough place.
00:38:13.000It is just extraordinary to me that people who were not elected can have that kind of power where they can push something through the Supreme Court where the president doesn't even know about it.
00:38:28.000And it's something that the mass percentage of our country that doesn't have a vested financial interest would not want to happen.
00:38:36.000Like that, that is something, especially the legal liability protection.
00:38:39.000There's not, I don't, if you had a vote, just if we just had a wide scale country vote, I think it would be like off the charts.
00:38:55.000And the 5%, like who the fuck are those people?1.00
00:38:58.000Like, this is not something that is necessary.0.99
00:39:02.000It's something that's necessary with the way the current system is structured.
00:39:07.000It doesn't mean that this is the only way to do it.
00:39:10.000It's not like this is the only way to grow food.
00:39:12.000People have been growing food throughout human history.
00:39:14.000Growing food throughout human history.
00:39:17.000The idea that the only way that we can grow food in the United States of America, the greatest country the world has ever known, is we have to grow food with poison because there are some corporations that profit off of this and that use this.
00:39:31.000The system does not want us to know the truth and they don't want us to talk about this stuff openly.
00:39:40.000Again, the other massive pressure from the industry was just not studying the issue.
00:39:46.000Listen, in order, everyone agrees corruption is a problem.
00:39:54.000Polling says it's the number one issue in America.
00:39:58.000You have to identify what the problem is before solving it, and there's a lot of forces that don't want us to identify it.
00:40:04.000I feel like it is vital to identify what the problem is specifically and how this works.
00:40:45.000It gets into legal complexity in a law that's rigged saying that the EPA should have preeminent authority over.
00:40:53.000So, they go by the Supreme Court, which mentions that EPA should be the dominant force.
00:41:01.000And it's not really the Supreme Court's job to note that the EPA is rigged to the point that glyphosate hasn't been reviewed in 30 years and the last review was thrown out for ghost-ridden research and bribery to EPA officials.
00:41:13.000So, the law itself says stuff about EPA supremacy.
00:41:16.000The case was kind of technical, and they went off what the laws are.
00:41:24.000The administration and the memo from the DOJ to take the case made them take the case, and we would not have had it if they didn't.
00:41:32.000Jamie, do me a favor and put this into perplexity, please.
00:41:34.000Ask what is the amount of money spent on glyphosate in this country annually?
00:43:18.000What the industry does first off, they're an aggressive lobby.
00:43:23.000I mean, you talk about when you're looking at the firms I mentioned, they're backing up the truck.
00:43:27.000Richard Walters, who came in and de facto chief of staff for a while, his former firm, FSG Global, was paid by Crop Life right before he left.
00:43:39.000So they're backing up the truck on traditional lobbying.
00:43:41.000The other thing that they have is that the large agriculture companies feel like it's existential to maintain their lead in low prices to have copious amounts of regulated pesticides and herbicides.
00:43:58.000So they've bought off the senators from farm states.
00:44:01.000You have an interesting dynamic where, because each state gets two senators, the small agriculture states are actually overrepresented.
00:44:06.000And a lot of the strategy was highly coordinated with those agriculture senators.
00:44:14.000It's changing though, and I think a positive sign is my friend Zach Lane.
00:44:19.000He lost, but he ran as a Republican governor candidate in Iowa, and his chief message was we're going to figure out what the hell is going on with Iowa's cancer rates.
00:44:28.000The number one issue in Iowa for the election was water quality because their water in Iowa is undrinkable with all the crap in the water from all the runoff.
00:44:36.000It's the number one issue in the state.
00:44:38.000Actually, both the Republican, this guy really led on the issue, and the Democrat who won.
00:44:43.000Both ran on opposing liability protection and really figuring out what the hell is going on with the cancer rate.
00:44:49.000So, even in Iowa, the epicenter of this, you've got people pissed off, which is a point I made to the political folks at the White House.0.87
00:44:59.000This is clearly a political loser to do.
00:45:04.000I don't even think it's right on the politics of the farmers.0.87
00:45:22.000But, Joe, the problem there's thousands of these issues.
00:45:28.000There's thousands and thousands and thousands of these things.
00:45:32.000And they're all very similar in that way.
00:45:34.000I'll talk about more stories, but I can give stories from my.
00:45:39.000I think more people should have the courage to say what's going on.
00:45:41.000I think there's way too much of a culture of just going along with the system.
00:45:46.000I mean, you tell me, like, are we at a time right now where it feels like we're just going to be status quo for the next four years?
00:45:54.000I'm worried about socialists taking over because I think unless the Republican Party actually has an anti corruption plan to actually fix this, Americans are going to vote for a different solution.
00:46:02.000They're going to vote for something different than whatever's defending the current.
00:46:05.000You know, Republicans are, you know, respond to socialists.
00:46:07.000Oh, we, you know, we support free markets.
00:46:10.000It's like talking points from 20 years ago.
00:46:12.000We don't have a free market in healthcare.
00:46:14.000We don't have a free market in agriculture.
00:46:16.000We don't have a free market in housing.
00:46:20.000If the Republican Party does not listen to what Trump said during the campaign, stop trying to subvert him, but actually try to do what he said and resonate with voters on, we're screwed.
00:46:32.000Before you have a free market, you have to fix this structural problem.0.60
00:46:37.000It's actually what President Trump is saying, very similar to what the people on the left are saying, to what AOC, El Sayed are saying.
00:46:45.000They're saying there's mass uniformity here.
00:47:34.000Aaron Ross Powell, Jr. I think he was caught off guard by the fact that Susie approved her two top deputies to go collect hundreds of thousands of dollars from a foreign government.
00:47:44.000I think he was caught off guard by that.
00:47:47.000My intuition would be that information has been protected so much he doesn't fully understand all these micro stories, nor could he.
00:47:59.000I'm giving a couple stories out of thousands.
00:48:01.000This is the culture that has been created.
00:48:04.000I mean, it's why we lost the midterms.
00:48:06.000We have been discordant from what was run on two years ago.
00:48:11.000That I believe President Trump wants to be a great president.
00:48:13.000I think actually there's a massive opportunity to correct the course and, frankly, take some of the Democrats at their word that they want to fix corruption and fix the swamp.
00:48:35.000But, Joe, like, I don't think anyone would say that I wasn't one of the most effective internal patient policy advocates in the White House.
00:48:47.000Susie sent me a text saying how much she admired me when I left and asked me not to speak negatively of her.
00:48:55.000But I was praised by the USDA, praised by the White House, praised by HHS.
00:49:01.000I tried, and I feel like the most important thing we can do again, it's either they've got the corporate money, they've got the complete and utter stranglehold of the D.C. You know, environment which is demonic.
00:49:41.000Americans need to understand that if they are getting whipped up and excited about policy promises through our existing structure, they are being duped and gaslighted and lied to.
00:50:36.000They created sets of checks and balances for that.
00:50:40.000The administrative state and what's happened has gotten out of control.
00:50:44.000I think the founders would be shocked that we have had so few amendments and structural changes to our system as we've modernized.
00:50:49.000Do simple things that 90% of people agree with.
00:50:54.000The hardest things to get done actually are not the partisan issues, but the things actually most people agree with because the swamp doesn't want that.
00:52:28.000There's an incentive for a presidential candidate to really run on reform because they are trying to be popular to the mass base of people.
00:52:35.000I do think there's an effort for President Trump, for additional presidential candidates to run on actual structural reform to blow up DC.
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00:56:24.000But do they actually understand the extent of how intertwined it is and how difficult it would be?0.88
00:56:31.000Just imagine the resistance a presidential campaign would receive from whether it's Congress or whether it's lobbyists or whether it's all this money if they knew that this guy's going to get in, this woman's going to get in office and kill the gravy train.0.56
00:56:49.000But it's hard to have that pressure when you're saying something that's Demonstratively obvious, and everyone agrees with.
00:58:39.000So there was a tremendous energy to diminish his impact on the election, to diminish him.
00:58:50.000I think based on some of these dynamics we're talking about, the Republican Party is not going to exist unless we listen to what Trump said during the campaign and become an anti corruption party.
00:59:03.000You cannot have a free market without fighting corruption first.
00:59:06.000Trevor Burrus Do you think it's possible?
00:59:33.000But if he did remove these people that you highlighted, that you say are the issue, Are there people that you could get into place that would not immediately be compromised?
00:59:45.000Aaron Ross Powell You need to, we have to get to a moment in America where presidents are running on true institutional reform.
00:59:53.000There's two ways that you can drive institutional reform in this country.
00:59:57.000One is, as I mentioned, the president jams it down as their top priority.
01:00:00.000There's actually a second route in the Constitution where states can create a constitutional amendment without Congress at all.
01:00:07.000It's never happened, but if two thirds of states actually vote to have a constitutional convention, They can meet all 50 states and pass amendments without the federal legislature.
01:00:19.000It's actually an issue that I think a lot of people should look into that's very interesting.
01:00:23.000But those are the two routes we can have institutional reform.
01:00:27.000My thesis is I think President Trump can save this presidency, can change staff, and get back on more of an America first fighting position against the swamp and get a lot done and maybe even get some things done with Democrats.
01:02:28.000I mean, it's just these are things we learn about in sixth grade civics class, but like everyone has motivations.
01:02:35.000Every single person that Bobby Kennedy works with on healthcare policy, almost to the person, maybe one or two exceptions, will be working for the industries that Bobby Kennedy is trying to fight the day they leave.
01:02:50.000And do you think that there's direct communication with these people to try to stop things, or do you think there's an understanding that there's an incentive?
01:02:59.000To do things that are beneficial for the industry because you're going to be leaving and entering into the private sector as soon as you get out of public office.
01:03:06.000One of my first couple months in D.C., I was invited to a dinner with Dave Ricks, the CEO of Eli Lilly.
01:03:36.000I expressed to him the opinions of Maha voters to pharmaceutical incentives and how we have a real problem that Americans are lashing out about, which is that our healthcare system is incentivized for Americans to be sick.
01:03:48.000He rolled his eyes, talked to the other person we were having dinner with.0.87
01:03:52.000She ended up leaving the White House and becoming a lobbyist.
01:04:53.000She then left and became the CEO of the Soybean Board, which is the Soybean Board is a glyphosate lobbying group.
01:05:05.000This doesn't even get attention, but that's who I was dealing with.
01:05:09.000She currently serves as the director of global supply chain at the National Security Council, USB's board of farmer leaders representing more than 30 states, ratified the decision at its July board meeting in Indianapolis.
01:05:26.000And, you know, I think at these meetings, right, with her and with Susie's people, I think about all the advocates, all the people that come on this podcast.
01:05:39.000It's like all the people that, like, Care about this issue, like people dying of poisoning.
01:05:45.000And it's like, these are where it happens.
01:05:47.000And people like her are really, really, really powerful.0.99
01:05:51.000And they just don't give a shit about what, you know, so many people have advocated, you know, left and right, you know, and they just, there's hatred.0.99
01:06:04.000Like, I don't think it's in their brains fully or in their hearts, but there's like a hatred in the system to like, It's crazy.0.99
01:07:31.000So, elemental phosphorus is also a critical precursor element for the production of glyphosate based herbicides, which play a critical role in maintaining America's agricultural advantage by enabling farmers to efficiently and cost effectively produce food and livestock feed.
01:07:48.000Boy, the way this is phrased is so crazy.
01:08:01.000So it's a critical component for manufacturing semiconductors that are central to numerous defense technologies radar, solar cells, sensors, optoelectronics, increasingly important in modern lithium ion battery chemistries.
01:09:07.000So, again, this gets to the cool point.
01:09:11.000We are not arguing to ban it tomorrow.
01:09:13.000The system, unfortunately, over the past several decades, has become addicted to this chemical.
01:09:17.000Europe is aggressively trying to and uses much less of it and is trying to get it out of their system, but is on the process of phasing it out much higher than America.
01:09:26.000Also, other major regulatory authorities have Recognize the cancer link.
01:09:29.000It is so notable that the EPA, right, and the review is coming up.
01:09:41.000And the HHS, I just will say this again, was extremely pressured in the run up to the EPA review not to study glyphosate.
01:10:22.000Has there been a single study by our government or others to come up with strategies to figure out a way to remove glyphosate and still maintain the food supply?
01:10:38.000See, this is where I don't even think it's that complicated.
01:12:44.000And, you know, our policy was, you know, let's not remove the Let's have the legal route and let's really promote regenerative farming and try to incentivize it.
01:12:55.000There was several billion dollars that moved from the USDA.
01:13:01.000I will say, Brooke at the USDA has been game.
01:13:04.000She dug in with us on trying to get some of this done.
01:14:21.000We have combated the woke mind virus, which is very important.
01:14:26.000There's a lot of cultural accomplishments that we've made.
01:14:30.000But he still has an opportunity to do what he wants to do, which is go down as a great president by really combating special interests, combating the swamp, combating the real institutions of DC that he knows is broken.
01:14:42.000He should not be trying to make friends with John Thune anymore, who's a demon, like the majority leader of the Republicans.
01:14:52.000He needs to go to war with Congress, go to war with the Senate, take some of the new lefties at their word that they are not taking corporate money and really want to drive institutional reform.
01:15:24.000So there's an opportunity for the president to get back to basics.
01:15:30.000I'm not going to name names on this one, but there's There's people in that administration and people that have left that will come back that want to drive historic reform.
01:15:43.000At the mid level, there's a lot of people that joined to drive historic reform.
01:15:49.000But it just seems like from your description that all of these elected officials are contacted and most of them are in one way compromised.
01:15:58.000The next president's going to win by running against the Senate and Congress.
01:16:41.000And unless people are talking about real structural reforms, if the rules of the game are rigged, we're just going to keep getting a rigged outcome, and the rules of the game are rigged.
01:16:50.000And this is not what the founders wanted.
01:16:51.000Like, we are not taking into account what the founding documents said.
01:16:54.000The founders would be shocked that we haven't reformed more.
01:16:57.000So we've got to have structural reform.
01:17:00.000And I think there's a serious incentive to have that more in the conversation.
01:17:07.000And I think the president could, frankly, inject that into the conversation.
01:17:11.000I think that there's an opportunity for him to do great things in the next two years, and I think he wants to.
01:18:24.000And Trump's sitting at 2 million people.
01:18:26.000So his staff is all completely compromised.
01:18:27.000For the most, especially the whole infrastructure, they were sending around a memo, a CIA manual about how to be a bad bureaucrat and subvert an institution from within.
01:18:36.000That's like sent around by all the career officials.
01:18:40.000Yeah, about how to be a bad bureaucrat and subvert from within by being incompetent.
01:18:44.000So, just like taking that, what I know, it's like, it's kind of, I'm not making excuses for anyone, but it's like, it's kind of crazy, right?
01:18:57.000This is an unruly government, and the president is orders of magnitude more than that.
01:19:04.000So, yes, I do think it's possible for him to recognize that there's frustration over the past two years of not aggressively moving on the policies that he ran on that are widely popular, that there's been a severe consolidation of power using the fact that he's very busy to slow many policies down.
01:19:33.000Speaking for many cabinet agencies, when I say this, I'm going to give my I'm happy to give more specific stories.
01:19:38.000But yes, he can make a change to his staff.
01:19:42.000The president knows who the people are that are not going to sell him out to a foreign government.
01:19:47.000The president knows the people around him that will try to go hard to really drive some compelling change to have an impact on the country that he wants to have.
01:19:57.000I think there's actually opportunity there's opportunity in the fact that the president ran on saying the same thing that people on the left are saying, which are actually not partisan.
01:20:07.000There is an opportunity to get some things done that are not partisan but anti institution, like reform the institution.
01:20:21.000I know there's been an incredible amount of resistance from the people that I worked with to meet with him at the White House about Ibogaine and psychedelic use for veterans, for people with addictions, and all the things that we talked about during that historic meeting.
01:20:36.000He signed the executive order and everyone.
01:20:39.000That's involved in it on my side is saying it's unbelievably bogged down.
01:21:44.000But I mean, to me, the fact that Heidi Overton is now going to be the FDA commissioner, was trying to block psychedelics without understanding what they were, it's just a representation of the demonic nature of DC.
01:21:58.000I mean, this is one of the great things the Trump administration is going to do.
01:22:02.000I promise you that there's people in there and me still, we're going to do whatever possible to make sure that gets out, which means that there's a path to have some of the drugs reviewed, that there's Fast-tracked on the research that this stuff gets out of the box.
01:22:18.000It's going to be one of the greatest accomplishments of the Trump administration.
01:22:26.000I know people think I'm naive or that I have some very idealistic and utopian view of what this stuff can accomplish, but we have a gigantic problem with people who have drug addictions in this country.
01:22:39.000It's one of the most effective things that's ever been studied by far.
01:22:44.000I don't understand what the resistance is.
01:22:46.000So, can you give me some information about that?
01:22:48.000Like, what and who is trying to slow this down and put the brakes on it and why?
01:23:05.000You always have to be vigilant for institutional blockages.
01:23:08.000But all I'm hearing until my last day is that things are moving about as well as they can.
01:23:14.000Psychedelics was interesting because it wasn't a widely Lobbied issue.
01:23:20.000I think there was a little bit from pharma because I do think it's very disruptive to have a substance that can be potentially one time and just transformative.
01:23:28.000It's not the usual pharma business model.
01:23:30.000But it was just institutional resistance to doing anything new.
01:23:37.000The top people at the White House, Heidi Overton included, didn't have a full understanding of what they were, no interest, right?
01:23:45.000She talked about these in the same class as street drugs.
01:23:48.000I'm like, people aren't doing recreational Ibogaine.
01:26:43.000Unexcusable that we're, you know, Coca Cola is making, you know, $8 billion or whatever it is from taxpayer money to give soda to kids who are then on Medicaid and bankrupt the system.
01:26:56.000And like 38% of teens have pre diabetes.
01:26:59.000I mean, it's like so we got say that number 38% of teens in the United States have pre diabetes.0.99
01:27:41.000You know, this is what was so popular, this is what's still popular.
01:27:44.000You know, Republicans, we believe in free choice, but when 38% of kids have pre diabetes, 45% of teens are overweight or obese, 20% of young adults have fatty liver disease, almost 80% of American adults are obese or overweight, we're beyond a personal choice issue.
01:28:00.000We have a systemic breakdown, and it's obvious.
01:28:03.000We have SNAP that 15% of Americans depend on.
01:28:08.000Its number one item is soda, number two, three item is candy, top item is potato chips.
01:30:26.000So I think any parent with high schoolers sees that it's a huge, huge issue and it's disastrous health impacts.
01:30:34.000On the surveys, it's clear that it's all about the flavored vapes.
01:30:40.000So, flavored vapes are very appealing to kids, and like 70% of kids said that people wouldn't vape if there weren't flavored vapes.
01:30:48.000So, some of these folks I put up earlier, there's significant money flowing around to some of the folks that I mentioned from the vaping industry.
01:31:26.000It was the single, in my opinion, the single most prioritized issue at HHS among any health issue for James Blair, who really has a stranglehold on policy.
01:31:52.000There's a law that says that this is from Congress that says before any FDA approval, you need to have a study saying that this isn't harmful to kids.
01:32:04.000Marty McCary, who was fired, was pounded on this, like meeting after meeting, West Wing.
01:32:12.000Like he wasn't getting called up to, you know, talk about, you know, our dietary guidelines reform or healthy food or, you know, anything that Bobby Kennedy talked about.
01:32:22.000And James and the other people, they said, this is where these guys, you know, being kind of immersed in this world and then being the gate on policy, but also the midterm strategy, he would argue that approving vapes was a core midterm issue that young men, that your listeners, I guess, really want their kids, you know, that really want their.
01:33:29.000I don't remember approving vapes being a top issue, but that was their argument.
01:33:35.000When I brought up how we really need to cater to your audience, who I felt like I was fighting for, and Maha voters and fast track some of these ultra processed food definitions and other things, James told me that we really got to be careful because these guys have played by the rules of the food industry.
01:33:52.000We don't want to beat up on them too much.
01:33:54.000Then Tony Fabrizio in other meetings said that juice wasn't worth the squeeze on some of those policies.
01:33:58.000But on vaping, no, no, this was a very important.
01:34:01.000So, Marty stood his ground and worked to kind of create some solution, but stood his ground.
01:34:15.000And when he was fired, Heidi Overton, who really just kind of did whatever Susie wanted, that's how you get ahead in D.C., did whatever Susie wanted, she wrote up a policy to relax standards on.1.00
01:34:33.000They released that, got sued by various people of the American Heart Association, noting the law that you need to have studies saying this isn't harmful for kids.
01:35:20.000It's like, and I think, you know, I won't name everyone, but like, there's people, one thing I'd say, these people just, and I don't mean this like in a really dismissive way, these aren't, The best and brightest, these staffers.
01:35:36.000They have tremendous power though, but they're just like DC, they play the game.
01:37:31.000It had a 0.8% absolute risk reduction, which is almost nothing, and a significant side effect profile based on the clinical trials.
01:37:39.000So they weren't even comparing it to the standard of care, even though they rigged the study.
01:37:44.000I'm going to be careful with my words, in my opinion, rigged the study, but I think that's safe to say given that they purposely used not the standard of care for what it would be compared to.
01:37:55.000Very, very low, based on that study, risk reduction, like almost negligible.
01:38:17.000There were deaths in the trial group and a host of other issues.
01:38:23.000And they were still trying to push it through.
01:38:25.000So Marty said, didn't even reject it, said, push it back, we need to do another study.
01:38:29.000Unrelenting pressure from the Ballard world and all that.
01:38:39.000If any special interest is watching and you're trying to rig the system, unless it changes, pay Ballard, pay Continental, Susie's daughter, pay Checkmate, Chrysalis Avida's son.
01:46:29.000So I thought it was like a safe alternative to people that were addicted to opiates.
01:46:34.000And I have heard that from other people that are very functional.
01:46:37.000And they said they've had problems with Oxycontin and oxycodone and all these pills in the past, but now they're taking Kratom and they're fully functional.
01:46:46.000And I'm like, okay, well, I guess for them, maybe, but it seems like it's addictive, at least for some people.
01:47:28.000But this is an opioid and it comes from a leaf.
01:47:32.000You can concentrate the 70H, which is the molecule, but it's through a legal gray area, has been able to be put into products that are sold at gas stations, stores, vases.
01:52:05.000This kratom opiate effect, why is it so different than, I mean, I haven't done Oxycontins or anything like that, but I did get an operation once on my knee and they gave me a drip of morphine, which is also an opiate.
01:52:20.000And I remember thinking, this is crazy.
01:54:51.000The whole promise of Maha is that we build bridges and really solve no brainer issues.
01:54:57.000I really worked to build bridges with Democrats and left wing groups because these issues have been talked about by everyone.
01:55:07.000One guy that was a great ally was David Kessler, who was the FDA commissioner during Clinton, who Really took bravery and put his job at risk by taking on the cigarette industry.
01:55:24.000He was commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration during the 1990s when he helped expose how the tobacco companies manipulated nicotine levels to hook consumers.
01:55:35.000I am here to provide you with actual instances of nicotine control and manipulation in the tobacco industry.
01:56:31.000He said on that 60 Minutes profile, which also interviewed Bobby, that Bobby Kennedy will be a historic figure, that he supports Bobby Kennedy on this issue.
01:56:39.000And what he did was he submitted a petition to the FDA, which would basically compel the FDA to ask about the amounts of sugar and refined carbohydrates in our diet from a real scientific area, like kind of with the tobacco industry, and actually start investigating in a real Scientific way whether this explosion of these simple things like sugar and refined carbohydrates in our diet have had an impact on children's health.
01:56:59.000It's like the most no brainer thing imaginable.
01:57:02.000We would do an FDA initiative with him, potentially have some of these food companies answer some questions.
01:57:10.000His mechanism that he found was really interesting because, as you might know, the FDA, up until we just closed it, did not know what's in our food, doesn't know.
01:57:19.000It's been a full self policing from the food industry where they are able to self certify both in the ingredients and, importantly, the amount of the ingredient having an impact or not.
01:57:28.000You have all these things marketed to kids with high sugar.
01:57:31.000They're actually legally responsible for having studies.
01:57:34.000Showing how the amount of sugar that they're recommending for daily use for kids actually doesn't harm kids.
01:57:41.000They're legally required to have that.
01:57:43.000This would open up the door to start that conversation, getting the truth out, nothing regulatory.
01:57:49.000We did a 60 minute, we got full White House approval, we went through the interagency process, and we were going to do a big initiative on basic food safety, asking whether the amount of sugar in a children's diet was appropriate.
01:58:01.000And that's where Susie told me, We can't do that.
01:58:13.000Aaron Powell, well, the point I would consciously make is why the hell aren't we doing these now because these are the highest polling domestic policy issues that the administration has in many cases.
01:58:22.000I mean, these things pull off the charts, obviously.
01:58:26.000And why would we be making deals with special interests and then stab the special interests in the back right after the midterms and we don't have a political reason to do it?
01:58:45.000They would say sometimes, I think, but they would, I assume behind that I don't understand the political calculations they're having to measure.
01:58:53.000These are core, core central campaign promises of MAHA.
01:58:58.000Not only that, but clearly it didn't work.
01:59:01.000Like whatever they're thinking about how you don't understand how the political system works and we need to win the midterms, they got destroyed.
02:00:04.000I was really surprised, you know, how kind of dismissive this world was to President Trump, you know, that explained to me that, you know, that you're.
02:00:12.000You know, coalition that you brought in, or maybe impacted didn't matter, that Maha didn't matter, you know, that the real populist messaging didn't matter much.
02:00:23.000It was really about the micro targeting.
02:00:25.000It was about getting the money for the targeted ads.
02:00:29.000Like it felt very wrong to me and very against what President Trump ran on.
02:00:34.000And that construct, which I don't think any cabinet secretary would really could possibly dispute this, that midterm kind of Paralysis impacted the administration about six months after the term started and it became the dominant guiding force.
02:00:59.000But you have to go into the motivations of people, right?
02:01:03.000And I don't want to assume what people are thinking.
02:01:05.000I can just look at what they've done in their lives, look at where they're probably going to work after, assume that they are motivated by getting money for their family, and look at where their children are working.
02:01:18.000Clearly, and also if that's the narrative, the whole thing is just about money, and that's the most important aspect of it.
02:01:25.000You can't imagine how accepted that belief is.
02:01:32.000The 90% of senator time being fundraising.
02:01:47.000We kind of just have like honestly, I feel like there's gaslighting about preventing Americans from just having common sense discussions on things 90% of people care about.
02:02:01.000Driving a strategy would be like, we're actually going to take a hold on policy for a year if we have a new administration.
02:02:09.000We are going to take on Congress, take on the Senate, take on DC and demand structural reform so we actually have more of a terrain where we can actually get some things done.
02:02:24.000Unless we fix that, we're not getting anything done.
02:03:35.000If you Google her name, there's tons of articles in the last 24 hours saying she should resign now.
02:03:40.000So, was she gaslighting him about the polls?
02:03:45.000Yeah, this is that they were going to win.0.62
02:03:49.000White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles in particular, would often shut down conversations regarding a likely onslaught of oversight probes into those operating at the highest levels of the administration.
02:04:23.000There was an article with quotes from Susie and James Blair.
02:04:26.000And the article is quasi blaming the president for the race and saying how brilliant their strategy was, like quotes from them before the election even happened.
02:04:34.000You know, during the campaign in 2024, you know, James had penned tweets and it was all about his political strategy.
02:05:14.000The cryptocurrency thing, there's a lot of stuff that's deeply unpopular.
02:05:18.000And there's a mass effort among staffers right now, senior staffers, to throw him under the bus when there's many finger pointing to go around.
02:05:29.000What you just said is completely right.
02:05:33.000I believe that there's still an opportunity to get stuff done in the next two years, and I believe that President Trump wants to be a historic president and do big things.
02:05:42.000I believe that, and I think there's an opportunity to do it.
02:05:46.000There was one interesting thing on the COVID.
02:05:48.000I actually thought Vinay Prasad, who got pushed out by Susie, who's a hero, and leading the vaccine stuff, and Marty, I thought they had a really elegant solution for the COVID vaccine where when they re approved Pfizer's model, they required that they do a test.
02:06:10.000They haven't done a safety test in a long time.
02:06:16.000They required that they have to do an immediate new study showing and that the approval was contingent on doing that study and that study showing efficacious benefit.
02:09:34.000Are we at the moment of fiddling around on incremental change, or are we entering an interesting time?
02:09:41.000We at least have to take the possibility of what some people are saying with AI that we're entering the most disruptive period of human history in the next four years.
02:09:48.000I mean, Elon thinks we won't be working soon.
02:10:14.000I think there's an incentive for political leaders at the presidential level to actually start jamming this in the conversation.0.96
02:10:19.000But I think Americans should be intolerant of any leader that does not talk about actually how to fix the rules of the game instead of just bullshit policies.1.00
02:10:33.000That's one of the biggest policies in the past 20 years, written by the insurance industry.
02:10:37.000Insurance premiums have gone up 1.5x since then.
02:10:41.000It's now 25% of the US economy is healthcare.
02:10:43.000It was written by the insurance industries.
02:10:45.000It created a thing where you can raise premiums and get 15% of a larger and larger pie, created direct incentives, and the stocks of insurance companies have gone up 15x.
02:10:54.000Like that was the great liberal populace.
02:10:56.000It was the worst law in American history.0.98
02:11:01.000We spend three times more than any other country today on healthcare, any country in the world, and live less than any other developed country.
02:11:08.000Like the policy process is broken, it has to be fixed structurally.0.98
02:11:16.000It's simple, but money in politics is a big fucking deal.
02:11:20.000And the leaders of the government, not President Trump that I've seen, but Susie Wiles, and she's the same as many others, left right, use this importance of money as an excuse to basically be antagonistic to what voters said and help gas station heroin, help vaping, help pharma companies, help glyphosate.0.97
02:13:42.000Maybe there would be some momentum eventually to have this on a label where states could pass laws to restrict it in school lunches, things like that.
02:16:31.000We spend more than any other country on school lunches.0.99
02:16:33.000You compare us to Japan, it's a national embarrassment.0.93
02:16:37.000And the industry comes in on this issue that's central to Bobby Kennedy, central to a political coalition, so popular and impactful, quite frankly.
02:16:51.000And they say it's going to hurt our sales.
02:16:54.000And I'm like, if we're going to block.
02:16:57.000School lunches and a quarter page definition of ultra processed food that doesn't even have a regulatory impact.
02:17:06.000When Bobby Kennedy is the most popular figure in America, this is the most popular part of the domestic policy.
02:17:13.000Not to mention that it's just critically important for the future of America that we continue the trend away from ultra processed food, which is literally destroying our country.
02:17:24.000And just hearing just a lot like lying to my face, you know.