Dr. Mehmet Oz was an early advocate for me, a fair early advocate of me back as early as 2018, which made him unique in that regard on the legacy media side of the business. And since then, we ve had a number of public discussions and a much broader, much larger number of private discussions, and that s been very good as far as I m concerned. He s a remarkable person, full of ideas, an exceptional level of energy, and doing his best to aim upward. And so it was a pleasure to have him today in Scottsdale, where he is with his wife.
00:04:43.560I'll tell you the story very briefly, but it's a wonderful reflection of what I think is the ultimate hypocrisy that happens often, certainly within media.
00:05:10.880I had listened to you, I was intrigued by the battle that you'd waged around compelled speech in Canada, and I thought big thinkers ought to be heard.
00:05:19.260And my job as a television host, I was trained, was to, you know, expose the public to ideas that are worth hearing so they can judge for themselves.
00:05:26.880It's, you know, most clear with your health where you really should be taking charge because you're going on the wrong path otherwise.
00:05:33.160But it's true for almost any other important thing you do is to make sure you have an opinion on what's best for you.
00:05:38.780So when I invited you on, I heard different things.
00:05:41.680And I heard back from no one except one individual, a senior producer, very capable, well-respected, said that you're homophobic.
00:05:52.480And it was fascinating because it was you talking on a social site to two gay men, advising them to be thoughtful about their adopted child, because that adopted child might face hardship because it's an untraditional, nontraditional family they're having.
00:06:09.820I thought you were very caring and loving.
00:06:11.260This is a psychologist would be in that setting.
00:06:13.600And I confronted my producer with that, and he refused to back down, but he didn't quit.
00:06:20.260And at that point, I realized that it really wasn't about whether you truly were those ad hominem attack words, but the fact that they just didn't like you to be able to say what you wanted to say because they didn't agree with what they thought you should be saying.
00:06:33.100And that is the biggest risk, I think, to free speech in America.
00:06:37.480And I'm reminded of a very close friend who grew up in Hungary, and he left Hungary when he was about 20 years of age.
00:07:04.420So, you know, as is often said, democracy is based on common truths, and totalitarian governments are based on common lies.
00:07:10.440And he just did not want that, this older gentleman who's such a patriotic American after having immigrated here, fled from Eastern Europe.
00:08:03.300And I said, well, I mean, I love my country.
00:08:05.560And, of course, I'm going to do my best for it.
00:08:07.260But why are you warning me about that?
00:08:09.900And he said, in our country, we have several warring groups, people who don't naturally get along, different ethnic groups, religious groups.
00:08:18.560And every time we're about to blow ourselves up and crush that thin veneer of civilization that protects us, someone looks up and says, guys, guys, America pulled this off based on a piece of parchment 250 years old.
00:08:32.960If they can do it, again, based on something that was written, we can do it too.
00:08:38.840So America is a role model for the rest of the world.
00:08:46.780And that's why the crisis that we have felt over the last several years, exacerbated by COVID, which really just sort of boldened and underlined what was going wrong, is such an opportunity for us as well as potential risk.
00:09:01.040An opportunity to put things right again.
00:09:03.520To wake people up to what has happened.
00:09:26.300And any time you, anybody who's listening now, if you read a newspaper article or anything that's, you know, a commentary, and the first thing they do is attack the person rather than the idea, you know that they're on weak ground.
00:09:38.060Because if I got you on the idea, why would I bother wasting my time attacking you personally?
00:09:43.220I only attack you personally because you're not worth listening to.
00:09:46.300I think the arguments around RFK Jr. are a good example of this.
00:09:50.180I mean, if you can argue against his ideas, and gosh, there are lots of ways you could do that, then argue them.
00:09:55.640But stop wasting your time attacking him.
00:09:57.860Well, it's also the sign of someone who's juvenile and relatively simple-minded because it's a juvenile approach to go for the person.
00:10:06.980It's simple-minded to avoid the nuances of the situation, you know.
00:10:11.320And I can understand to some degree why people do that, I think, with me, but also with RFK Jr.
00:10:16.140because it's hard to believe that the things that I pointed to, let's say in Canada, were actually a danger.
00:10:24.420And it's hard to believe that the things that he's got his finger on can possibly be true.
00:10:30.480You have to do a lot of thinking and a lot of reorganization of your beliefs in order to give RFK Jr., for example, credence.
00:10:38.900And, you know, when I objected to Bill C-16 in Canada in 2016, I had some thoughts about where legislation like that might go if things didn't work out well.
00:10:52.640And, of course, at that point, I still thought they were most likely to because Canada had been such a remarkably stable country.
00:10:59.800Since then, by the way, we've gone from GDP parity with the U.S. to 60% of GDP per capita in Canada, right?
00:11:10.120We are on average poorer than people in Mississippi, which is the poorest American state, right?
00:11:16.340And we have real estate costs that have spiraled out of control and incredible internal divisiveness in Canada on a scale that is completely historically unprecedented.
00:11:26.120It doesn't take much of an assault on free speech like Bill C-16.
00:11:30.620They extended the provisions of protection, let's say, to gender identity and gender expression, which I thought was insane beyond comprehension.
00:11:41.760The outcome of that has actually been worse than I had originally suggested.
00:11:46.260I did tell the Senate in 2016 that they would produce an epidemic, a psychological epidemic, among young women by confusing them about their gender.
00:11:59.420Of course, they just told me that I was, you know, transphobic or whatever the hell their, like, epithet of the day was.
00:12:05.920So tell me, let's talk about free speech and the media in a broader context.
00:12:12.340Now, you've watched this transition, right?
00:12:15.760At least that's what it looks like to me.
00:12:18.700And I think it's driven by the fact that YouTube made digital bandwidth essentially free.
00:12:24.720I think that's the fundamental issue at stake here.
00:12:26.860And I can't see the legacy media doesn't seem to be able to compete with that.
00:12:30.940They dropped production costs to zero.
00:12:33.160There's more going on than that, but that's the technological aspect of it.
00:12:36.620I think the rot was happening much earlier.
00:12:39.600And just to rewind this a little bit, I mean, I trained in a fairly traditional way.
00:12:44.380My father was educated, actually, in World War II in Istanbul, Turkey, which may have been the best medical school in the world because all the Jews from Europe had fled to Turkey.
00:12:55.220And for that reason, he got a superb education.
00:12:57.200And when he finished first in his class, he was recruited to America because he wanted people like that.
00:13:02.960I mean, I'll come to your students from high-quality universities coming to America.
00:13:09.000But I was completely indoctrinated by his way of thinking about a hard science approach to taking care of patients.
00:13:15.720And at the time, 50s, 60s, 70s, there was remarkable advances being made in the treatment of diseases.
00:13:22.240You know, the skate saves, metaphorically.
00:13:24.680You know, the people are about to die, and you get in there, and you fix the heart, and you take out the problem, and they're better again.
00:13:31.140And there was no wrong in traditional medicine.
00:13:34.540When I started my career at Columbia University, where I'm on the faculty, you know, I was for many years, tenured, because I published and I worked hard and made sure that I was on the cutting edge of a lot of different fields.
00:13:48.840I wrote patents around the repair and replacement of heart fowls from the groin.
00:13:55.820I was involved in mechanical heart, heart transplant programs.
00:14:00.620I mean, these are like hard science ideas.
00:14:03.100So there was nothing wishy-washy about my career.
00:14:06.140But I began to realize that the patients had not read the same books that I had read, that they were getting it wrong at a very fundamental level and taking care of themselves.
00:14:15.880So I can throw as much high-tech out there as possible, but without some of the lower-tech preventive ideas, we weren't going to get the desired responses.
00:14:23.500And, you know, my wife, Lisa, she won't be silenced.
00:14:26.280She kept saying, you know, they're getting it wrong because you're not giving it to them.
00:14:29.540If you gave America the knowledge that they could use to improve themselves, to feel confident that they had jurisdiction over their own body, to actually play an active role in ensuring that they don't develop those chronic illnesses, that they'll do it.
00:14:42.980That's why I even started doing media.
00:14:46.120In the operating room, in the ivory tower at Columbia University, having the time of my life, you know, stunning scientific things and, you know, making sure that those advances religion.
00:14:54.580My dad intensely disliked that I stepped out of that traditional approach to medicine to start talking on the airwaves about health.
00:15:02.360In the beginning, I didn't think what I was doing was all that controversial.
00:15:05.640I was literally telling you everything that we knew within medicine.
00:15:43.560And so America banned the use of arsenic in that setting so that the apples, when you harvest them, when the apple juice is squeezed out of the apples, there's no arsenic in them.
00:15:57.540What if the Chinese farmers continue to spray with an inexpensive product like arsenic, and then multinational companies buy those apples, squeeze the juice out of it, put it in cartons, and ship it to America?
00:16:44.560And then I started realizing that no one was talking about this.
00:16:47.060And I wanted to make waves because I didn't think it was right.
00:16:51.000We did a show, and I just saw a tsunami of negativity.
00:16:54.920Much of it led by media, who had clearly been played.
00:16:58.620And I say that because when we finally got the data from the government, which was released the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, which anyone who knows press and PR knows, you release data the day before Thanksgiving to bury it.
00:17:10.680Because you don't want anyone to see it.
00:17:13.060But, you know, friends came, you know, people who had been attacking me came out and shared openly that they had been incorrect.
00:17:20.680And there was actually a concern about this.
00:17:22.560And today in America, we have limits on the amount of arsenic that can be imported with the apple juice.
00:20:07.280They got 10 doctors, so-called peers of mine, even though their lead writer was the head of the cigarette disinformation program, cigarette smoke disinformation program for big tobacco in Europe.
00:20:18.180The second author went to jail for Medicaid fraud.
00:20:21.740I haven't done any of those things, by the way.
00:23:17.560Are those kids different biologically than Americans?
00:23:20.020So why would we only take our orders, we think, from special interests, teachers unions, around these school openings and closings?
00:23:28.100Why wouldn't we, at least in our own country, acknowledge that some states were doing better than others and they were having their schools open?
00:23:33.720This became a major battle, but, I mean, the kind of vitriol that I felt personally, just by raising the issue, solidified, steeled me to the reality of where we had come, where we no longer could have open discourse.
00:23:48.400We had Nobel laureates getting canceled.
00:23:50.660You know, we had people who had domain expertise in the area of COVID offering thoughtful suggestions about how to manage the crisis better.
00:23:59.300We ought to be careful in dismissing those ideas.
00:24:02.660In the operating room, as a heart surgeon, if I'm having an issue and someone else comes in who happens to have expertise in the area and offers me an idea about how to put a stitch or what kind of valve to use or a different technique for opening the chest wall to get in there, I'm at least going to hear them.
00:24:17.780I'm not going to have them escorted from the premises never to return because I didn't want their intrusive thoughts in my mind.
00:24:23.680There was a fragility around our policy that compelled me to want to eventually run for the Senate.
00:24:32.660But it also, in many ways, highlighted many of the things we've been fighting for.
00:24:37.800In the Maha movement, the Make America Healthy Again movement, the ideas that are being raised are ones that came up on the show over and over again.
00:24:45.140And not just my show, they were coming up in many other places, but they never could get any air cover.
00:24:52.320They get smothered, suffocated, before they could sort of get airborne.
00:24:56.620What's happened that I think is very promising is that we're at least now seeing some pushback on ideas about whether or not fluoride is actually a beneficial thing to have in our drinking water.
00:25:07.360Should there be mandates around vaccines?
00:25:09.320Can we talk through the revolving door of our federal agencies and the agency capture that is perceived by some?
00:25:18.480Why is the NIH not actively studying prevention with any kind of aggressiveness?
00:25:26.020I mean, it's just a trivial part of their budget.
00:25:27.740They're not doing it because they think other things are, you know, curing these other illnesses is more important, which I do that too, if you want.
00:25:35.340But you have to study prevention because no one else will do it because there's no money in it.
00:25:39.460Companies aren't going to profit by studying how to not use their products.
00:25:43.080Well, cure without prevention often indicates relapse as well, right?
00:25:47.440I mean, if the conditions are there to make the disease possible to begin with and you don't change that, then why is there any reason to presume that it won't recur?
00:25:56.280I know there are situations where it doesn't recur, but, you know, even that dichotomy between prevention and cure seems to be odd from a conceptual perspective.
00:26:04.640George, I think metaphorically, if it may help, the issue of prevention is about the soil.
00:26:10.920We have to till the soil, fertilize the soil, protect the soil, use regenerative techniques on your biology to make sure that you're resilient enough to deal with illness and other insults to your well-being.
00:26:22.800That's what longevity is fundamentally about.
00:26:26.640It's about being resilient enough that when bad stuff happens, you can cope with it.
00:26:30.040And we have actively in America, without intending so, I don't believe, but it nevertheless actively made it difficult for people to do the right thing.
00:26:39.460We've chummed the waters with products that make bad behavior simple.
00:26:43.800Federal policies have over and over again subsidized products that aren't as healthy for us.
00:26:49.120And we, you and me, and our brethren, have let the country down because the intellectual elite, you know, knowledge worker groups haven't been honest, or at least haven't been willing to challenge some of the fundamental assumptions we've made about our well-being.
00:27:10.160So we now have bad science or bad conclusions from science being infused into products made by industry, which aren't in our best interest, wrap that in bad policy, and then dish it to people, serve people with that.
00:27:26.840And that's also had an effect on the legacy media.
00:27:30.240Like we've got three things sort of in the air now that we're discussing simultaneously, and it'd be useful to see if we can untangle them to some degree.
00:27:37.940We have the transformation that you described on the legacy media landscape that started to take place around 2012.
00:27:45.680We have the complicitness and the malfeasance and the silence of the scientific and medical community, let's say around COVID, but even more broadly on the scientific front, right?
00:27:57.600And then we have this emergent, emergent Make America Healthy Again movement that, interestingly enough, is being captained now by the very person who has been pushing it in the most extreme manner in the public sphere for the last 20 years.
00:28:14.180So these things are related in some way, right?
00:28:17.360There's been some massive shift in the last 10 years on all these fronts, and it's driven by something that's, it's driven by factors that are similar across all the areas.
00:28:28.980And it's very difficult to put finger on exactly what that is.
00:28:32.360I think some of it's, we talked a little bit about the fact that technological transformation, let's say on the YouTube side, has put a tremendous amount of pressure on the legacy media.
00:28:41.720Because YouTube basically brought the price of production, television production, and dissemination to a much broader audience than was ever conceived of as possible.
00:28:55.700And so that's, I thought back in 2003, I think I started putting my YouTube videos up, maybe it was somewhere between 2010 and 2013, when YouTube was still mostly for like cute cat videos.
00:29:09.140But I looked at it and I thought, you know, this is, there's something, this is very weird, because we have video on demand, it's free, and it's permanent.
00:29:18.740Like that's, I thought, is that like the Gutenberg printing press?
00:29:22.940Like, is this something completely different in a revolutionary way?
00:29:28.300Not only on the price side, but video is now permanent and indexable.
00:29:32.720Well, that's like, what the hell does that mean?
00:29:35.080Well, we're kind of seeing what it means.
00:29:36.800It means a radical shift in the way people communicate.
00:30:02.660I think there have been good ideas that have spread rapidly.
00:30:06.940And I think YouTube's probably been the best for that of all the social media networks, because it facilitates long-form communication.
00:30:13.360But it's certainly possible that once you're all connected, pathological ideas, oversimplified, easily understandable pathological ideas like viruses spread the most rapidly.
00:30:26.300And so that's driving this as well, because we're hyper-connected.
00:30:29.860And then maybe there's the effective policy.
00:30:35.240I mean, there was a legal change, and I don't remember how many years ago, in the United States that made it possible for pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to the consumer, right?
00:30:45.280And this was something, this is a policy that characterizes the United States relatively uniquely.
00:30:51.020And from what I understand, that means that 50% of the advertising budget for the legacy media networks in general is now pharmaceutical company-driven, and 75% of the advertising for the legacy news associations.
00:31:09.940And so that means the pharmaceutical, giant pharmaceutical companies have a hammerlock on public communication, apart from the, you know, emergent new media.
00:31:19.100So that's a lot, like, that's a lot of technological transformation in 10 years, right?
00:31:24.100I mean, that's stirring the pot in a major way.
00:31:26.200The question is that, would it have happened anyway?
00:31:28.940And I think bad ideas, they can be viral, but I think of them more like bacteria.
00:31:34.760They'll burrow under your skin, and if you don't expose them to light and oxygen, then they'll become abscesses and fester.
00:31:43.040The sores are painful, and they can kill you.
00:31:45.240And what I think technology did, to a large extent, is expose a lot of mediocre ideas to the reality of what happens when you try them.
00:31:55.660Because, you know, ideological movements sound great conceptually, but when you actually put them into use, they don't pan out so much.
00:32:03.840And the motivation for the movement might be positive, but the results are not.
00:32:08.800I'll give you a concrete example, because I think it plays into what you're saying.
00:32:11.620Long before we had iPhones and YouTube or anything else, Ansel Keys went to Europe and did a seven-country study to look at what happens to people when they eat certain foods and what kinds of problems does it cause with their heart.
00:32:23.600He happened to collect the data during Lent, which, of course, skewed the data a bit, and the local scientists didn't like it.
00:32:28.780But he brought it back, and because our nation was desperately looking for solutions for heart attacks, President Eisenhower had just had one.
00:32:36.220We had data that a lot of young men were dying.
00:32:38.520They jumped at the possibility that a low-fat diet might be better for you, because that's what seemed to come out of this early data.
00:32:44.980Now, again, this is long before we had any technologies.
00:32:51.380Because of his allies politically supporting him and no one being able to challenge him, but successfully, because anyone who tried to raise their hands and say something got taken out, we now develop a formal national policy to advocate for low-fat diets.
00:33:07.260So low-fat usually means high-carb, too.
00:33:10.580Somebody's got to make up the calorie difference.
00:33:12.160So companies started making high-carb solutions.
00:33:15.360Simple carbohydrates, high-pructose corn syrup, unhealthy foods, which directly correlated to weight gain.
00:33:24.180And diabetes, and heart disease, and Alzheimer's, and all the things that come out of Metabox syndrome, disarray.
00:33:29.380But as you look back on the history of all this, which is only possible now because you have so many ways of telling the truth, and lying, by the way, but you have ways of telling the truth, you look at things like the Minnesota Heart Study, which was commissioned to prove that this theory was right, and they never published the data.
00:33:43.880And years later, 15 years later, they finally are forced to publish it because it showed, proved, that low-fat diets do all the things we now know they do, and they do not in any way help with heart attacks.
00:33:58.280So all that data was very easy to cover up, and you never know it was hurting you, and you think it was bad luck, you think you're gaining weight because you're lazy, or other people are gaining weight because they're sloths.
00:34:08.360You start making all these excuses about why we have gone in the wrong direction without addressing the fundamental flaw, which was we're giving people bad ideas.
00:34:34.380We aimed people in the wrong direction, and then we allowed industry to co-opt that process because it was easier for them to make those foods, less expensive, and they were very much, had a best interest in making sure that ideology stuck.
00:34:48.300A lot of physicians sacrificed their careers trying to do so and didn't succeed.
00:34:53.240What's allowed us to finally take these on in a very aggressive way, and they're wonderful scientists now who are getting big enough that what they say, you know, has gravitas, and people hear them, listen to them, and act on them, is because they can get their word out through podcasts like this in ways that were never before possible.
00:35:08.760If I was trying to challenge someone about the American Heart Association guidelines for, you know, for cholesterol intake, you know, the diet intake of fat, I couldn't do that.
00:35:20.960You walk into the learned organization where all the heart doctors are, you know, supposed to say what they think is important, no one's going to listen to you.
00:35:28.080They'll dismiss you and put you to the corner.
00:35:29.580So the democratization of information has allowed us to challenge dogma that was incorrect.
00:35:37.460That, I believe, more than anything else, coupled with obvious errors during COVID, has allowed a lot of Americans now to believe that our country is not sick by accident.
00:35:48.140And by making America healthy again, it's both an achievable goal, but also one that will deal with our crisis.
00:35:54.820I'll give you a little bit of math here because, you know, when I was in medical school, I went to business school at Wharton because I was interested in healthcare policy, just these issues.
00:36:01.740Like, how do you fix the game so that you actually get some benefits?
00:36:05.520And one thing you always track is what drives the big budget items.
00:36:09.740So in America, the big budget item that's really stripping a lot of competitiveness away is the healthcare budget.
00:36:15.120It's $1.5 roughly, right, $4.5 trillion, trillion with a T. It's a lot of money.
00:36:20.52090% of the healthcare budget is driven by chronic disease, 90%.
00:36:31.860Metabolic syndrome means your pancreas, it makes insulin, but it's unable to make it in a way that allows your body to deal with the calories coming into your body.
00:36:41.320So the body reacts by doing things that are maladaptive.
00:36:45.600It'll deposit the fat in your belly, for example, in your momentum.
00:36:49.220Sounds like the momentum, but not the M.
00:36:51.480That tissue there was designed for our ancestors to store fat in times of feast, but you use it in times of feast.
00:37:06.980It's not a bad thing, except if you're storing—if you have to go hunting, you open the fridge, it doesn't work because you're not consuming calories to hunt your food anymore.
00:37:14.900And so metabolic syndrome is a series of problems that occur because the fundamental process by which you consume and use energy is off.
00:37:25.840With Mother's Day just around the corner, I wanted to share an amazing organization that's making a real difference for mothers in need.
00:37:34.120Their network of clinics provides love, support, and hope to pregnant women who are feeling scared, alone, or pressured about their pregnancy decisions.
00:37:41.420These choices can affect not just their baby's life, but their own emotional well-being as well.
00:37:45.680When a woman walks into a preborn clinic, she's welcomed with compassion and offered a free ultrasound so she can see and hear the little life growing inside of her.
00:39:17.700You know, and my attitude towards that has shifted a lot in the last 10 years.
00:39:23.240When I see someone overweight now on the street, I would say probably 15 years ago, I was slightly more judgmental.
00:39:30.900I'm not a particularly judgmental person when it comes to people's health, because it's generally very complicated.
00:39:36.980But it was easy enough to think, well, if they just exercised more and ate right, they'd do fine.
00:39:41.800And then I learned that, well, I learned many of the things that you just described, you know, broadened my knowledge in that area and started to understand that these high-carbohydrate diets were making people obese.
00:40:52.740Small things, small steps done right every day, all of a sudden life's beautiful.
00:40:58.060And that's why it's so painful for me to see so many of my brethren, other Americans, feeling ill, thinking it's their fault and thinking there's no way out.
00:41:08.940The nihilism around health is stunning.
00:41:11.620And these are focused on longevity, wellness issues because there's so much opportunity there.
00:41:19.920You know, not just because we've got AI now that can customize recommendations for you just exactly what you need, including when you hear the recommendation because you're not always receptive equally.
00:41:28.620But we also have much better technologies that are available that can help you get on the right path.
00:41:34.200There's medications that in some instances make sense.
00:41:37.640But these are all crutches that fundamentally to get you to realize that you can do it, to empower you, the person whose ultimate destiny is so tied to your own will.
00:41:47.880Which is, Jordan, why the messaging that you're delivering is so critical.
00:41:51.320Because if people don't think they matter, then they don't show up in their own lives.
00:41:56.400We have a kids' foundation, which you've been incredibly helpful on, called Health Corps.
00:42:01.000It's based on the principle of the Peace Corps.
00:42:03.200So we go around the country with young college grads who, like the Peace Corps, would train them to do great things.
00:42:08.760Instead of sending them off to Botswana to build dams, you put them in schools in America.
00:42:12.780In fact, here where we're taping in Arizona, the Department of Education has given Health Corps a $5 million grant to go into 100 schools and build digital platforms to deal with this issue that I just discussed.
00:42:39.140If you're listening, think about your childhood.
00:42:40.900If someone told you that showing up would change the world, that if you actually studied math or became a doctor, a nurse, a construction worker, a union person, if you did something with your life, that the world would be a better place for it.
00:42:56.620If you don't think that's true, Jordan, you're not going to do your homework in school.
00:42:59.340And you aren't going to go to practice because why would you bother?
00:43:02.220And so what we try to do more than anything else is get young people to, first off, very narcissistically focus on themselves, their own bodies.
00:43:24.440So start focusing on what's in front of you.
00:43:26.960Show up in life by showing up in your school.
00:43:29.740So we're brought in to tell young people things through the lens of health that historically was told to them by their teachers and by their parents or just by society at large, by messaging.
00:43:40.340Because culture eats strategy all day long.
00:45:10.420That's what we try to do with HealthCourse.
00:45:12.200But there are other ways of getting that message out that aren't being used.
00:45:16.880And most importantly, we don't have the luxury of sitting back on our butts and wondering what happens next and complaining about this process.
00:45:24.920You need to pick up an oar and start rowing.
00:45:26.340And ideally, you get someone across the hole from you, so you're rowing in straight, not in circles.
00:45:31.500But it's a reality that has an epidemic taken over like a brain worm our young people.
00:46:09.140So ideally, someone who's close in age to them goes in there and says, hey, listen, the man wants to take advantage of you by selling you junk food.
00:46:57.080I use health as a crowbar to open them up to get into their bodies the thoughts that I think they need to hear about how valuable they are.
00:47:03.400Because if the most precious thing you're ever given by your family is seen by you as being worthwhile, all of a sudden you're worthwhile.
00:47:13.240Oh, my goodness, I've got this incredible body and I've got all these opportunities.
00:47:16.860Now I'm going to start paying attention and maybe get past all these thoughts that were racing in my head that were taking me in the wrong direction.
00:47:23.380And then we can use that as an excuse, a trampoline to develop mental resilience.
00:47:28.580Because what I really want to do is workforce development.
00:47:30.860I want to get these young people to believe they can enter American culture and help.
00:47:36.120And if they have the mental resilience to recognize that, that if they can change what's happening in their body, Jordan, they can change the world outside of it.
00:47:43.260If they can actually get that idea in their heads, you can't stop them.
00:47:48.300What's been your experience introducing HealthCore into the schools?
00:47:51.360What kind of response are you getting from kids?
00:47:53.560Jordan, I've raised with my wife Lisa $90 million for the foundation.
00:47:57.280We've touched the lives of 3 million plus kids.
00:47:59.260We're getting large, multi-million dollar grants from states and foundations.
00:48:04.340Of course, we raised a lot of the money privately as well.
00:48:06.540It costs about a dollar per year of life lived by the kids.
00:48:19.860The thing that I found most uplifting when I was campaigning, and I saw it on the show as well, is the average American thinks they can live their life.
00:48:39.340And the government, they definitely don't want to round because the government's rarely going to be useful to them in a positive way.
00:48:44.720So, you know, but they, you know, they want to-
00:48:48.060It's an interesting approach to ask people about their neighbors.
00:48:50.740I read of a pollster recently who was doing that when trying to predict the outcome of the election, which he apparently called correctly.
00:48:57.460People are more likely to, what would you say, maybe they're less guarded when they're asked about how their neighbor thinks or how their neighbor is going to vote or how their neighbor is doing, for example.
00:49:09.520So, you know, you get some sense of their picture of the generic other, and that might be an extremely effective way of gathering information.
00:49:18.320All right, let's go back to the legacy media issue and the Maha nexus, let's say.
00:49:26.020So, in principle, now RFK is going to be running the show on the health front.
00:49:31.640I don't know what that's going to look like or how he's going to manage it.
00:49:35.840One of the fundamental problems I think that he's going to have to address, and this is an incentive problem.
00:49:42.560I mean, if you want to make a system work properly, you have to get the incentives aligned with the aim, and that's very difficult.
00:49:49.300It's something that behavioral psychologists specialize in.
00:49:51.940And then one of the problems on the prevention side is that it's very difficult to give people credit for prevention.
00:49:58.080You know, if you go for a drive and you don't have an accident, nobody pats you on the back.
00:50:02.700You know, but you've prevented innumerable catastrophes if you drive, you know, 100 miles safely.
00:50:09.120You're not going to get credit for things that you do intelligently that stave off a catastrophe that doesn't exist.
00:50:16.640And so, it's very difficult to associate scientists, let's say, or physicians with effective preventative strategies because the evidence that they've done something good is subtle and it takes a long time to make itself manifest.
00:50:30.900That's way different than, well, was it Barnard who did the first heart transplant?
00:50:39.900He learned how to do the transplant at Stanford and Texas Heart, but because of our regulatory issues in the United States, he took the technology, flew back to South Africa and did it there.
00:51:15.900But we take shows in the, you know, we had New York Med, which is a news show that was filmed in the hospital that did very, very well, airing on primetime television, right?
00:51:24.660On the show, the Dr. Oz show, we'd go into hospitals and show these dramatic moments.
00:51:52.620Well, that's the incentive issue, of course.
00:51:54.360And that's where I believe our government has been of very minimum value, because if the NIH was able to put some support behind looking at the actual tactics that might work, getting rid of the ones that are ineffective, reinforcing the ones that do help Americans, then we'll start to develop mechanisms to make our lives a little better.
00:52:15.280Ironically, there are differences between different parts of the country and the health of our people.
00:52:19.100Just learning from that would be effective for us.
00:52:21.460But no private sector business is going to do that because they're not going to be able to pay their shareholders back for that invested money.
00:52:28.180That's something we as a people should do for ourselves.
00:52:31.060And that's an example of one of the topics for the Maha movement.
00:52:35.640You know, regulatory bodies should be responsive to us and should at least be able to explain why they're not spending money in a way that might make sense for the betterment of the average American.
00:52:45.800We also should not be directly misleading them.
00:52:48.480I mean, you chum the water by telling people to eat a low-fat diet.
00:53:14.120Someone long ago, because these ideas are not new, these ideas have been battled for decades, someone long ago should have been honored by at least hearing their ideas.
00:53:31.040Okay, so let's talk about something more radical.
00:53:34.760When you were talking about the NIH and these granting agencies, I thought about a conversation I had with Larry Arnn, who's the president of Hillsdale College.
00:53:44.220And Larry is quite the force of nature, and Hillsdale is a remarkable institution, right?
00:53:48.420It's one of the few universities, legacy universities, let's say, which has maintained its appropriate function.
00:53:55.060They have a 1% first-year dropout rate, right?
00:54:24.740Like, I don't exactly know what to make of this, because in the beginning stages of my career as a researcher, which was quite extensive, because I published about 100 papers.
00:54:35.700And the reason I'm saying that is because I want people to know that I know what I'm talking about when it comes to discussing the research environment.
00:54:41.640And so I did research at McGill and Harvard and the University of Toronto, and that all went really, really well.
00:54:49.880The only fly in the ointment that entire time was the emerging power of the research ethics boards, which became, in my opinion, corrupt beyond belief and absolutely 100% counterproductive and woke.
00:55:03.420And they started out bad, and they got rapidly worse.
00:55:06.820But something, again, seemed to happen somewhere around 2014.
00:55:12.740And the research enterprise, which was in the main, in my field, in psychology, free of, relatively free of careerism and relatively free of corruption.
00:55:24.220Like, not everybody who was doing research was a great scientist, but you can't expect that.
00:55:29.460And most research wasn't true, but you're not going to have a lot of misses.
00:55:33.520But everyone, virtually everyone I ever met who was seriously involved in the research enterprise was doing it above board and ethically, and they weren't careerists.
00:55:42.860And also, the scientific journals were trustworthy.
00:55:48.900And then something twisted in the last 10 years, and I think none of that's the case now.
00:55:53.520I mean, science, the greatest magazine in the world, greatest scientific journal in the world, and nature have both become ideologically corrupt.
00:56:00.540Scientific American is pretty much gone.
00:56:02.480I mean, that's more on the public side, but it's emblematic of the same thing.
00:56:06.420I mean, the replication crisis, so to speak, never shocked me, because I never thought that most things that were published were true.
00:56:18.000Now I wonder, like, I don't see a pathway forward, an easy, a straightforward pathway forward to rectify the granting agencies.
00:56:28.420I mean, even 20 years ago, the typical scientist in the United States was spending one-third of their time writing grant applications that failed.
01:27:27.760Well, the simple reason is if everything's focused on you, subjective identity.
01:27:32.720If your identity is radically subjective, no one is going to want to be around you, right?
01:27:39.060The degree to which any of us is tolerable to other people, let alone welcome, is directly dependent on how much of our own individual whim and power drive, let's say, that we sacrifice to the relationship.
01:27:51.740Obviously, we know that with children, two-year-olds can't do that, so they don't have friends.
01:28:01.240Three-year-olds start to learn to do that, and the three-year-olds that are expert at that, by four, are desirable play partners, and they're socialized by their peers properly for the rest of their lives.
01:28:12.520And now we're reverting, you know, we're telling all our young kids, it's like, act like a two-year-old.
01:28:43.720You know, I used to tell my socially anxious clients, suggest to them that when they went to a party, whenever they started worrying about how they were fitting in, that they flipped that to trying to make other people comfortable.
01:29:15.700Some people were socially anxious because they just didn't know how to behave.
01:29:18.720And that was a more complicated problem.
01:29:21.340But, well, that all tangles back into the idea that the community is founded on sacrifice.
01:29:26.980This realization, it just flattened me.
01:29:30.560Like, because one of the things I understood, I think, was that we have, in the West, in the Christian West most particularly, have been looking at an image of sacrifice for 2,000 years without understanding why.
01:29:47.520Like, our towns, European towns were literally founded around a sacrificial center, right?
01:29:55.240The cross, the altar, the cathedral, the town, the country.
01:30:00.820Why is the sacrifice at the center of that?
01:30:03.660Well, the answer is, well, sacrifice is at the center of the community.
01:30:07.220It's like, oh, okay, obviously, it has to be.
01:31:16.520But if you encourage them out into the world and ask them to pursue nothing except what's best,
01:31:26.620then they'll know you're on their side and you'll get them back.
01:31:30.500And of course, you know, the atheist types, Dawkins is guilty of this, point to God's demand to Abraham that he sacrifice Isaac as proof of the superstitious quality of the Old Testament narratives
01:31:42.700and the fundamental malevolence of the God of, let's say, Jacob and Abraham.
01:32:40.800And it is the aim that our respect for free speech is predicated on.
01:32:45.100It is the aim that all of the freedoms that make the West what it is and a desirable place to immigrate for everyone in the world who votes with their feet.
01:33:51.380It was their faith-based traditions, because they put something above each and every one of us, implored us to tell the truth because we weren't reporting to you.
01:34:00.040Because smart people are really good at lying to themselves.
01:34:36.220You know, he didn't illustrate that part with his thesis.
01:34:38.660But, you know, these are smart people who come up with these fantastical ideologies that are so destructive.
01:34:43.660But if the purpose of science is to find truth, someone has to hold you accountable.
01:34:48.340And we've all witnessed this because you get into a debate and people will cherry pick the facts that they like, which is the opposite of telling the truth.
01:34:55.660Because you're entitled to your own opinion, as Moynihan often said, but not to your own facts.
01:35:00.140And we are dishonest, intellectually dishonest about the data, the facts that we're using, which is rampant now.
01:35:13.220And half of them are suspect because people get rewarded not just monetarily, but with tenure, with pride, and ego, and all those things that trump the truth.
01:35:26.060And we're left without a deeper belief that the truth matters.
01:35:30.140The whole system begins to implode, right?
01:35:31.820The gyre begins to spin faster and faster.
01:35:34.960And as we crash land, the public is watching this and saying, I thought those guys knew what they were doing.
01:35:40.920And now I'm seeing them actually censor each other in a way that I wouldn't censor the guy who works at a local deli.
01:35:46.560I let that guy say his piece, so I can say my piece.
01:35:48.940And these guys aren't doing the same thing.
01:35:50.900Again, Nobel laureates being censored because you don't like what they're saying reinforces a pathology that the public begins to appreciate.
01:35:58.520And I think that was directly correlate with what happened in this election.
01:36:02.960And that's why the Make America Healthy Again movement got traction.
01:36:06.140Because some of the things that are being said, there is no way that you'd be able to accept this, even two, three, four years ago.
01:37:08.300This is, you'll, I love your psychological interpretation of what's going on here.
01:37:12.380So this is a vaccine that's effective, reducing the incidence of a very bad illness called hepatitis B that destroys your liver, leads to liver cirrhosis and transplantation.
01:38:11.200So this weekend, I'm at an event, and a woman who's, I'm speaking, so I deliver a little bit of this message.
01:38:19.180And a woman comes up to me afterwards, and she says, I'm a doctor, and I'm a little alarmed by what you said.
01:38:25.300And I said, well, what part of you bothered you?
01:38:27.120And she said, well, you know, I just had a baby, and I vaccinated the baby.
01:38:31.620So, you know, I think it's helpful for them to have the hepatitis B vaccine.
01:38:35.280So I said, I know you vaccinated the child, or you allow the vaccination, but do you still think that it really was helpful to have it the first day of life?
01:38:45.180Could they have had it, you know, when they were 10 or 12 or 15 or 18?
01:38:49.040Because I vaccinated my kids, but they were about to enter into college.
01:38:52.780There was actually a possibility they might get exposed to it.
01:38:56.860And I saw the wheels turning and the panic in her eyes.
01:39:02.100And then she said, well, at least it's safe, which is an unfortunate comment to make, because I'm not going to argue that it's safe or not safe.
01:39:12.560But if there's no value, then I don't want to even ask the second question.
01:39:17.320She was going through something that I think many Americans are suffering from.
01:39:21.580Because she realized that she didn't really understand this and had taken the advice of the experts, she couldn't acknowledge the expert advice might have been wrong.
01:39:31.880Well, there's also another psychological fact that you're running up against there, which is that we rapidly bring our beliefs in line with our actions.
01:39:41.700Like people think you believe and then you act.
01:39:45.040It's like, well, some of the time, much of the time you act, you watch yourself act, you draw the conclusions about your belief that your actions indicate, and you bloody well stick to those beliefs.
01:39:57.320Well, why? Well, you've already committed yourselves to them behaviorally.
01:40:01.340So this physician that you're describing, she had a real conundrum at hand because it wasn't a mere abstract issue for her.
01:40:16.240Yes, exactly. Right. On its first day.
01:40:18.600Right. Well, you know, you could imagine the evidence would have to stack up pretty high before she's going to be willing to swallow that bitter pill.
01:40:25.380That's why I think when it happens, it'll be a tsunami.
01:41:36.140And when she is shamed by the nurse or physician taking care of the baby about the fact that she must not love her child if she's not willing to follow the state law which mandates vaccination and isn't able to ask in that confused moment a couple extra questions, they take that person...
01:41:55.900And we're starting to see that in lots of other areas.
01:41:58.860If fluorinating the water is not really, really important to do for the betterment of society, then you start to feel that you may have tacitly allowed something to happen that puts your family at risk.
01:42:10.460So there better be a good explanation, a good reason.
01:42:43.740That kind of stuff gets people, because it's very personal, to start to think differently about who's on their team.
01:42:49.580And I believe the reason this issue is so critical is because you have an opportunity on the Republican side to take a generation of people who didn't have strong sentiments.
01:43:03.740If some of those people all of a sudden begin to think, you know what, I'm believing that this Republican Party cares about issues that I care about, they start to become Republicans.
01:43:30.020I think that would be a good conversation.
01:43:31.820I'd like to lay out, I'd like to hear more about your thoughts regarding the Maha movement in general, how you think that could go right and how you could, how you think it could go wrong.
01:43:42.500Underneath that, there's obviously this broader discussion of this massive shift in the political landscape that has taken place that we don't understand.
01:43:52.340Because at one level of analysis, it's the Republicans defeating the Democrats.
01:43:56.860But Trump, Kennedy, Gabbard, Ramaswamy, and Vance, those are very strange Republicans, right?
01:44:07.860First of all, most of them were Democrats.
01:44:10.540So I'd like to delve into that a little bit.
01:44:12.480So all of you who are watching and listening, you can follow us on the Daily Wire side for another half an hour.
01:44:17.880And we'll dig more deeply into the possibilities that are going to be laid out in the coming months and years as this radical shift propagates itself through the political system.
01:44:28.060Thank you very much for talking to me today.
01:44:31.060And also, I should say, too, thank you for interviewing me back in 2018.
01:44:36.820You know, you, I've had very few American, in particular, mainstream media interviews.
01:44:42.160Like, I can certainly count them on the fingers of one finger, really.
01:44:46.380So, you know, that was quite seriously, like it's, you know, it's fine and it's fine.
01:44:53.640But the reason I'm bringing that up isn't to bemoan the fact because it hasn't mattered that much.
01:45:00.760But it does also highlight the degree to which you took a risk and very early on.
01:45:26.320Lisa and I spent weeks preparing for it because you were explaining things that were so fundamentally important for folks to hear all over the world.
01:45:34.540And so I do the interview and I think, oh, it's too bad it's so long because people aren't going to listen to it.
01:45:40.100More than 5 million people have listened to a two-hour, 42-minute interview, which means, in my mind, there is an appetite, a voracious appetite if the information truly is life-changing.
01:45:51.580And so it highlighted to me that although there are many benefits of network television, reach, obviously, you know, you can-
01:45:59.660You can begin to get people to think, you know, similarly around important issues, particularly valuable when we have crises like COVID.
01:46:05.520But if you want to go deep into the kind of topics that change your life, it's nice to take those little sparkly ideas and go deep with them.
01:46:14.060So first, thanks for coming out and trusting me to host you because I know it was a difficult time.
01:46:18.120But also for awakening me to the possibility that we could talk about stuff with a lot more depth than ever thought possible.
01:46:24.620Yes, well, we can also discuss that on the Daily Wire side, too, because I'd also, I'd like to discuss the, what would you say?
01:46:32.220Well, expand on exactly the distinction between what's happening in the new media world, let's say, and the legacy media.
01:46:40.360We can take that apart in some detail.
01:46:42.100Well, so infinite bandwidth, right, and permanence, those are radical changes, low cost.
01:46:48.220And they do change the dynamics of the social landscape in ways that we're barely beginning to understand.