#1157 Calley Means | Whistleblower Exposes Corrupt Food Industry

Calley Means is the co-founder of True Med. In this conversation, we talk about the incentives in the food and pharmaceutical industries. We also break down why eating sugar and processed wheat is so bad for you. We uncover what exactly is keeping so many people sick for so long, who is profiting from it, why he is speaking out, and what the response has been. ======================= Announcing LYCEUM | Miami, a day-long event on March 4th in Miami Beach hosted by Pomp. We’re gathering an explosive group of experts to engage in a series of bold discussions, covering topics from investing, emerging tech, longevity, space exploration, entertainment and more. The speaker lineup includes names such as investing legend Cathie Wood, NYT bestselling author Vivek Ramaswamy, billionaire Christian Angermayer, master of Contrarian Thinking Codie Sanchez, Modern Wisdom host Chris Williamson plus many more. Listeners will receive an exclusive 40% discount on VIP and Insider Pass tickets with code POMP40. General Admission tickets are free of charge. Spots are limited so head to lyceummiami.com to buy your ticket today. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 200,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. We have no advertisers on this podcast, so it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Callie Means is the co-founder of TruMed. In this conversation, we talk about the incentives in the food and pharmaceutical industries. We also break down why eating sugar and processed wheat is so bad for you.

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  We uncover what exactly is keeping so many people sick for so long, who's profiting from it, why he's speaking out, and what exactly the response has been from both food companies, pharmaceutical companies, and the government. I always enjoy talking to people who question the system and have inside knowledge and are willing to speak out when they deem that it is appropriate. Once you get done listening to this episode, jump onto Twitter and let us know what you think, what you liked, what you didn't like, what you agree with, and what you don't agree with. The feedback always helps us create better conversations and better topics. Here is my conversation with Callie Means.

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• 2:43Speaker 03

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:06Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Callie here with me. You had this mega viral tweet thread, basically just saying that all the incentives in the food, beverage and pharmaceutical industry is completely off. People have been saying that for a long time, but your messaging specifically resonated because of your experience. What is going on?

• 3:25Speaker 04

  So here's what I think happened. We're all getting sick, right? We're exponentially getting sicker, fatter, more depressed, more infertile. Autoimmune conditions are up, allergies are up, childhood obesity is up. All these things are randomly up and I think it's clear to everyone it's tied to food. And I think the devil's bargain with the healthcare industry is that every institution in the healthcare industry, from pharma to your doctor to med schools, they profit from people being sick and they've been silent on why we're getting sick, which is food. So I think people implicitly feel that. I think there's clearly something off when you look at a kid's classroom and 50% of five-year-olds are overweight or obese now, according to the CDC.

• 4:08Anthony Pompliano?

  50%?

• 4:09Speaker 04

  50% during COVID of folks between five and 12. And just as a new parent, I know you're a relative, you have a one-year-old too. It's just, there's something very concerning, I think viscerally. And what I think this tweet tapped into is that now I'm working to change these, instead it was earlier in my career. I saw inside the room. So I was, you know, a good, young, conservative guy, worked in politics, worked on campaigns. Inevitably, folks in the left and the right inevitably are across the table from special interests. You go into consulting. And I worked for both soda companies and pharma companies. So I can go in a little bit of the playbook.

• 4:45Anthony Pompliano?

  What the soda companies, I think, is the funny part is when people hear that, it's like, big soda, right? Like, what exactly does it mean to work with the soda companies?

• 4:52Speaker 04

  Yes, they work, I'll go exactly into the playbook. So I worked for the American Beverors Association in 2011, 2012.

• 4:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 5:00Speaker 04

  And they all hide behind these front groups. And specifically, what they were trying to do in 2011, 2012 is keep soda in food stamp spending. So food stamps are the number one nutritional program for lower income folks. 15% of Americans depend on it. $110 billion is spent on it. And the number one item purchased is soda.

• 5:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 5:21Speaker 04

  70% of all food stamp spending go to processed food, but 10% go to sugar water, diabetes water. And if you look at any scientific study on like, what's really contributed to obesity and diabetes and this, this chronic disease crisis we're in, it's this weaponized sugar in liquid form has really led to that. And that's 10% of all food stamp spending. So people were questioning this, obviously, it makes no sense. It's criminal public policy because we're giving our country, you know, obesity, diabetes, and then paying for that trillions of dollars down the road. So people were questioning that. And what Coke does is they get a bunch of consultants in the room, and they have a playbook, and the playbook revolves around, how do we rig, how do we pay off, how do we weaponize institutions

• 6:03Speaker 04

  of trust? Okay, that's the, and it's not that complicated. But I watched as we put together a list of prominent civil rights groups. And it was very transactional. You go into the NAACP in this case, and there was reporting in the New York Times in 2012, Coke paid millions of dollars under the American Beverors Association to the NAACP. And the conversations were shockingly transactional. It's, parents are complaining and worried that their kids are drinking 100 times more sugar than they did 100 years ago. We need to label our opponents as racist and keep. Soda and food stamps spending and that's exactly what the NAACP, the Hispanic Federation, other leading civil rights groups did.

• 6:45Anthony Pompliano?

  And what is their argument? Their argument is if you go after the food stamp programs, then you're racist?

• 6:50Speaker 04

  I think this is really important because it's not like evil conspiring, but it is like, you know, kind of a wink, wink. It's like, hey, you know, and it's very patronizing, actually. It's like, hey, these under, you know, lower income folks, they love their Coke. It's a treat. Let's not take that Coke away from them. You know, this is, this is nanny state. It's ironic because they weaponize conservative language too, nanny state. But what is being questioned is the fact that government money is being paid for soda. It's actually in the opposite direction. But it's kind of that language. It's like, you know, we're trying to tell these lower income folks what to, what to eat and drink. Let's not do that. You know, not debating what, whether it's good for those lower income folks to be having government subsidized diabetes water, not acknowledging the point that a man in the

• 7:34Speaker 04

  United States who's at the lower income bracket, the lowest income bracket dies 15 years younger than a man at the upper income bracket. I mean, that's entirely because of nutrition. And the communities are being decimated. 25% of children right now have prediabetes and that's disproportionately impacting lower income communities of color. So of course this is a disastrous policy for the groups they're professed to represent. But, um, but yeah, that's the type of language. It's a, we can't take away choice. So weaponizing race is, is, it's just a key part of the playbook. Whenever you're trying to win a debate, it's how do we weaponize and call our opponents racist? That was in the playbook.

• 8:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And why is it controversial to take the position that the government shouldn't be buying non-nutritional food for anyone? Forget income brackets, but like, if we're going to spend government money, then is it a controversy to say, hey, it shouldn't be spent on things that are going to make people unhealthy, which will then create a draw on the healthcare system and create other problems down the road, which kind of just puts the government in this spiral of having to constantly fund for the food and beverage that people consume, which then leads to them having to pay for their healthcare as well?

• 8:54Speaker 04

  This is obviously the bipartisan issue of our time. I mean, we're debating trivia right now as 25% of kids have prediabetes. As we talked about, 50% of American adults have prediabetes or diabetes. 93% of Americans have some biomarker of metabolic dysfunction. Now, what is that? What does that mean? Metabolic dysfunction, diabetes? Literally, it means cells are malfunctioning. Diabetes is cellular dysregulation. But all of us, almost all of us, are on some level of cellular dysregulation, of metabolic dysfunction. And that means the American people, our bodies and brains, like, are literally malfunctioning. And, you know, you tie it, and there's a lot of studies on this, right? But 20% of our cells are in our brain.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  And now 25% of the American people are on a mental health medication. According to the CDC, during COVID, 25% of teenagers contemplated suicide. Obesity, autoimmune conditions, allergies, all these things, the underlying branch is cellular dysregulation tied to food. And as you mentioned, and as you said, we actually subsidize that. Not just with food stamps spending, the number one item that goes to, but tens of billions of dollars of subsidies, crop subsidies. 0.4% of subsidies in the United States for agriculture go to fruits and vegetables. They're considered specialty crops. 90% go to corn, which turns into high fructose corn syrup, and grains, which turn into processed grains.

• 10:20Speaker 04

  We take the fiber out, they're the basis of our diet now, and they turn into sugar. So we're subsidizing these things. And again, it's because the food companies, they understandably want to make the food more addictive when you load it with sugar, load it with processed grains, also inflammatory seed oils, which are subsidized. It becomes inflammatory, but also very addictive and cheap. The criminal part is the handoff to pharma and healthcare. We would expect the NIH, we would expect Stanford and Harvard med schools to be waving the alarm about why people are sick. But the key thing I think most folks don't understand is that every institution in healthcare, they make money when there's interventions on sick people, right? 95% of all healthcare spending is on sick people, is an intervention or a prescription.

• 11:06Speaker 04

  So everyone in that system is incentivized to make money when people are sick. And what's happened is there's been silence on why people are getting sick. So I've got a kind of tying this all together. So when I was working for 2011, 2012 on the food stamp issue, you know, again, Coke paid off the civil rights groups, things, tanks, research institutions, they processed food, gave 11 times more money than the NIH to nutritional research. So the debate was rigged. But the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, medical schools, nowhere to be found, completely silent. But today, they're being very vocal because just this year, we now have approval and it's coming online, a new obesity drug intervention.

• 11:50Speaker 04

  Okay, Ozempic, semaglutide, you might have been hearing about this. It's predicted to be the most successful pharmaceutical product in history. So right after I would meet with the food companies, you know, another, the biggest spender in DC, the biggest spender on this stuff is pharmaceutical companies. And the key thing to understand is like, again, everyone in that room thinks they're, they justify and they're creating life-saving drugs, but nobody's asking why people are getting sick. They're profiting from people getting sick. So now tied to these policies like the food stamp, like the subsidies we talked about, now, as we talked about, over 40% of teenagers and kids are obese or overweight.

• 12:29Speaker 04

  And this drug, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the association that credentials and gives guidelines for all pediatricians in the country, said that every overweight or obese teenager should have a weekly injection of this new obesity cure.

• 12:46Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So hold on a second. The food companies are incentivized to sell various types of food and beverages that obviously are addictive. They may say that they're not doing it, but obviously they're doing it. What percentage of, let's say Coke sales, come from selling sugar water versus other types of products that they have? Do we know that answer?

• 13:08Speaker 04

  Coke gets the vast majority, and then PepsiCo has a lot of big food arm, but Coke is increasingly becoming, but it's the majority of their revenue.

• 13:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. And then the pharmaceutical companies are like, hey, we need sick people because that's ultimately who our customer base is, right? Pharmaceutical companies aren't looking at their market opportunity map and saying, okay, here's the healthy people, let's target them. They're saying, no, it's the sick people, that's who we need to target. But this idea of an obesity shot.

• 13:35Speaker 04

  Right.

• 13:36Anthony Pompliano?

  A weekly shot that they supposedly want to give to, is it just young people, or is it to anyone that has obesity?

• 13:42Speaker 04

  Obesity or overweight, which is up, which is getting close to 80% of adults.

• 13:48Anthony Pompliano?

  So eight, potentially up to 80% of adults who are obese or overweight, they want to give a weekly shot to, and what do they claim that the shot will do?

• 13:58Speaker 04

  Well, let's get to the playbook. So what the pharma companies have done, what Novo Nordisk, the parent company, has done, is they made 420,000, and I helped orchestrate this, but this is on the government websites. They gave 420,000 unique payments to obesity doctors in 2021, and absolutely flooded the zone on donations to the major associations like the American Academy of Pediatrics. Also, they're the largest funder, pharma is the single largest funder of news. So you had is a perfect storm. So a couple of weeks ago, you had a 60 Minutes special on obesity. The doctor, Dr. Fatima Stanford from Harvard, on that special said that obesity is genetic.

• 14:42Speaker 04

  She literally said that your choices and lifestyle and what you eat and how much movement you have does not have a large impact on obesity.

• 14:51Anthony Pompliano?

  What?

• 14:52Speaker 04

  It's genetic. Obesity is a problem in the past 50 years. A Japanese person in the United States has three times higher obesity rate than a Japanese person in Japan. This doctor from Harvard, who has been funded tens of thousands of dollars in the past year by this drug company. Said on 60 Minutes, which is funded by pharma, before and after the segment aired, there were pharma ads that obesity is genetic. The next week, this is not a joke.

• 15:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that nerve, but like, hold on a second. So, what did the journalist say when they said that?

• 15:27Speaker 04

  It was completely unquestioned.

• 15:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Just accepted like of course?

• 15:30Speaker 04

  It was completely unquestioned. The New York Times, the Daily Podcast ran a very similar piece recently. Parents are listening to this who are suffering, and she is saying that obesity is a genetic condition and it has to be treated with pharmaceuticals, and it's an urgent imperative that parents don't really question or stigmatize what their kid is eating, but need a pharmaceutical injection.

• 15:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Is this also part of the whole, like, basically, if someone's fat, you have to be accepting of that? It goes into the whole like dad bod, it goes into the mannequins at the stores and trying to normalize it. And it's this idea that like, if someone's fat, you can't say to them, yo, you should eat healthy, work out, sleep, and like generally take care of yourself and you won't be fat anymore? Like, that has now become somewhat taboo to talk about?

• 16:15Speaker 04

  If you go to any nutrition panel, any conference on nutrition, the buzzword is let's not stigmatize any food.

• 16:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Stigmatize?

• 16:23Speaker 04

  Let's not stigmatize, let's not stigmatize any food, that no particular food is bad, it's how we're, you know, how we're eating it. Getting back to the food, and again, let's just, again, it's, it's, it's, we're getting sick, and then there's profit from it. So, so let's talk about that. The food pyramid, right, which has really led to the chronic disease crisis, I think the most deadly public policy document in American history, right? The document in the 90s that said we should eat more carbs, more sugar, less healthy fats, which, which actually doesn't make you fat.

• 16:52Anthony Pompliano?

  It sounds great, though.

• 16:55Speaker 04

  Absolutely, absolutely. You can trace the food pyramid, which we all know about, to trillions of dollars of, of, of budgetary loss, and millions of lives cut short or lost. That study was directly funded by Harvard Research from the Sugar Council. They didn't even try to hide the name back then. The Sugar Council, which said, sugar doesn't cause obesity, and we need a high carb diet. That went into the dietary guidelines. Today, as I said, the food companies absolutely have a stranglehold on nutritional research. There's tens of thousands of nutritional studies put out every single year. God knows what they say. I think it's actually pretty simple. And the foundational NIH guidance, the millions of dollars funded by the NIH nutritional study, the food compass.

• 17:39Speaker 04

  Was also jointly funded by food companies and says that Lucky Charms are three times healthier than beef and that Honey Nut Cheerios are healthier than eggs and that Cheerios are as good as quinoa. And it says that orange juice should be highly encouraged for children, which is again, just diabetes water, doesn't have the fiber, terrible. It should be encouraged and kids can drink that every day. This is a foundational study that is being used actively right now funded by the age to influence childhood, marketing and nutrition guidelines. So you've had this nutrition ecosystem totally dependent and funded by food companies saying that there's no bad food. When-

• 18:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Are there people inside of these research institutions, whether they're at universities or they are kind of publicly funded things or even private research laboratories, are they dumb? Are they just bought off and they're in on the game? Or is somehow are they told, hey, run a study this way and it's like stacked against them and they're just, you know, kind of monkeys executing plans? Like, like, how is it that you have worked your entire career to be a researcher, a scientist, a nutritionist or whatever, and then you say with a straight face and put your name on a document that says that Lucky Charms are three times healthier than beef?

• 19:01Speaker 04

  So we all know the system's screwed and rigged, right? What I'm really trying to do, and I think is resonating, is use my experience to really paint the specifics. And I actually have a specific story on this. So my life's calling right now with my partner, Justin Mares. We have a company trying to change food incentives, but we are trying to call attention to specifics of the rigged system. So we are proud that we brought attention to this Lucky Charm study. It was released a year ago, but he wrote a piece on Mike Solano's Substack and a tweet I did went viral.

• 19:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Mike Solano is fantastic.

• 19:32Speaker 04

  He's the man. He's the man. So he was pushing it.

• 19:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Pirate Wires.

• 19:35Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's the best.

• 19:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Subscriber dies.

• 19:37Speaker 04

  And it's driving, and it's driving real change. So I'll explain to you how it's actually, I believe Pirate Wires, I think it's actually unquestioned, it's saved lives in this case. So the Pirate Wires article went viral. I did a tweet that went viral of that. Joe Rogan saw it. So Joe Rogan posted about it. Fox News, which is the only network that will cover anti-pharma stories, which we can get into, covered it nightly. And there was a lot of pressure. Okay, what I've heard is that there was active efforts to have these labels that said Lucky Charms,

• 20:17Speaker 04

  you know, Honey and Cherries are great, on literally packaging standardized throughout Africa and in the US. And the Rockefeller Foundation, other big funders of this of this study and the research and the kind of community, because of the pressure, actually stopped that effort to have these labels saying that these terrible foods are good because of that pressure.

• 20:39Anthony Pompliano?

  But why is the Rockefeller Foundation or any other foundation, right, in that is alleged to be involved in this stuff? Why would they want to get those labels on there? Because they're investors in the food companies or something else?

• 20:51Speaker 04

  Well, let me let so let me get I can get a little bit into the motivations specifically. So with that attention, I was contacted by the lead author of the study, a guy named Dariush, a doctor is his first name. And he was at Davos and called me, pretty upset. He said he's getting hundreds of angry emails, to which I replied that 25% of kids have pre-diabetes right now because of rigged studies like this, and I understand why people are angry. And I'll just go through and I dug into these questions with him, and I'll just tell you what he said. I said, you've been paid personal payments. So his study is to close not not just research funding,

• 21:33Speaker 04

  but personal payments from a manifold of processed food companies, as many nutrition researchers get. The study itself was funded by Danone and other processed food companies. Danone makes almond milk. The number one dairy item in this study, not Greek yogurt, grass-fed, it was chocolate almond milk. Chocolate almond milk was the number one rated dairy. And Danone, which is the chief funded study, was the main funder. You can't even make it up. I asked him point blank, did does when a group or company gives you millions of dollars, does? He said, absolutely not. Do your personal payments influence your research? Absolutely not. I asked him specifics. He said oranges should be encouraged for children.

• 22:13Speaker 04

  He spent, literally, it was comical, 15 minutes explaining why Lucky Charms are not only magically delicious, but also should be encouraged.

• 22:25Anthony Pompliano?

  What is his, I mean, let's just stay on that for a second. What is his argument as to why Lucky Charms should be encouraged for kids? I wouldn't give my kid Lucky Charms if it was my choice, right? Obviously, kids, kids want to eat stuff, right?

• 22:38Speaker 04

  Well, they get addicted. I mean, they're weaponized with sugar and processed grains.

• 22:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and so to some degree, like, you don't want to not allow your kid to ever have sugar, no matter what, or whatever. But I think most parents are like, "Look, I want my kid to be happy, but I also want my kid to be healthy." Right? And so if I want my kid to be happy and healthy, I'm not going to feed them Lucky Charms every day. Maybe they get it every once in a while. It's kind of like a treat, ice cream, whatever, right? I don't think you want your kid to live like they're in like a prison. But at the same time, like, dude, how can you say that you should encourage kids to eat Lucky Charms every day?

• 23:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, so I borrow on the, on the drug point. I agree. I'm not, you can't be just a total zealot with your kids. But I think it is important that just because something's normalized doesn't mean it's very, very wrong. I think doctors used to smoke in the 60s in their offices. And I do think actually, sugar and the fact that it's so normalized for kids, we're going to look back on with shame. I really do believe that. It's a highly addictive dopamine trigger. I think it's indistinguishable from many other drugs, and it is very dangerous. So I just, you know, as a new parent, I agree, you can't be a zealot. But like, it is, I think, highly problematic that sugar's normalized. To the specific question, what he specifically said. And again, I am a tech pro. I'm not a medical, you know, professional. But, you know, again, I think I actually have a really good perspective on this because I saw early in my career unimpressive people rigging the system.

• 23:55Speaker 04

  And I will tell you, like, you have grain companies paying him. You have any, any reading of the literature or any just common sense. Highly processed grains are an absolute disaster. The shift to highly processed grains, which take out the fiber, all the nutritional value to make the grain shelf safe. They don't do this as much in Europe. Like, it's outlawed. There are these grains that are sprayed with, Cheerios has so many pesticides on it. It needs to be differently formulated in Europe. Like, like, these are very, very problematic. And he aggressively argued that these highly processed

• 24:33Speaker 04

  Says shelf-stable Frankenfoods, these grains, which are then fortified with vitamins, you basically just like in a lab, put some vitamins on, are just as good as a whole grain, as quinoa or another whole grain, you know, that's natural, that humans are evolutionary created over hundreds of thousands of years to eat. He said the fortified processed grains. And I, I, I just think that's just completely wrong. I, I mean, it's not that much, I don't think it's that much of a stretch to look at what's happening to the American people, to look at what's happening to health and trace it to food. And it's three things with food. It's highly processed grains, it's sugar, which we're eating a hundred times more of, and it's these industrial seed oils, which are highly inflammatory. These are all processed

• 25:17Speaker 04

  grains were created just a hundred years ago. They're new inventions. Same with seed oils and added sugar is basically a new thing in a hundred years. Everything and doctors, I think any doctor would agree with this, the, the, the underlying theme of disease is inflammation. Why are we chronically inflamed? Because we're eating as a foundation of our diet, things that we are not made to eat. These are new processed inventions. So he argued that that is not the case. And that grain, highly processed grains, Lucky Charms are okay, not even addressing the fact that that has a lot of added sugar too. And I don't for the life of me understand, the CDC says that a two-year-old, it's okay for 10% of their

• 25:59Speaker 04

  entire calorie intake to be sugar. Like, I do not understand why there is not just a unanimous, like, like beating at the table among the nutrition communities to say that it should be zero for a small infant.

• 26:11Anthony Pompliano?

  But like, this is a good example, right? So NIH, CDC, all these organizations, a lot of people, uh, probably never even heard of these places before, all of the COVID stuff. Um, and the whole experience there, I think a lot of people are like, ah, they seem to not really kind of understand all the details. There was a lot of waffling back and forth. So I think most of the American public or a lot, a large percentage of them are kind of like, I don't know what's going on over there. But when I hear something like the CDC or the NIH is saying, yeah, 10% of an infant's diet should be sugar, and that's okay. Literally, the question that pops in my head is like, are these people dumb? Or are they being malicious? Or like, what's going on? Hey guys, what's going on? I hope that you're enjoying this conversation, but I wanted to interrupt for a quick second and tell you about a brand new conference

• 26:56Anthony Pompliano?

  that I'm hosting on March 4th at the Miami Beach Convention Center. The event is called Lyceum Miami, and tickets are completely free for anyone who wants to come. I'm bringing together many of the most popular guests from the podcast over the last couple of years. Some of the guest speakers that we've already announced are people like Vivek Ramaswamy from Strive Asset Management, or Delian and Mike Solana from Founder's Fund, Chris Williamson from the Modern Wisdom Podcast, Codie Sanchez from Contrarian Thinking, and billionaire Christian Augermeier, among many others. I've got a number of amazing surprise guests as well, some that you definitely will not expect, and others that come from walks of life that you will be scratching your head as to how I even got them to show up.

• 27:41Anthony Pompliano?

  But come check out Lyceum Miami on March 4th. The Lyceum was a public gym in Athens, Greece, where people used to come together, talk about ideas, and debate topics that were important to society. I want to meet people in person, in real life, once again, after three years of a hiatus from real-life events. And so, I'm hosting the event, and as I mentioned, anyone from anywhere can come to this event completely for free. All you need to do is go to lyceummiami.com, and you'll be able to pick up a free general admission ticket. Make sure you claim your ticket in order to get in through the doors. Lyceum Miami is gonna be a great time, so come check it out,

• 28:26Anthony Pompliano?

  come hang out with me, many of the popular guests from the podcast, and other like-minded individuals. Lyceum Miami, March 4th, Miami Beach Convention Center. I hope to see you there. All right, let's get back into this conversation.

• 28:39Speaker 04

  So, I was in Texas recently. Greg Abbott, he's done some great things. He was bragging in a speech that the Texas Medical Center, which is now, I think, the largest hospital in the country, can be seen from space. These things, food, health, they've become jobs programs. They're industries, right? So it's just not questioned, in the case of nutrition, that there's this multi-billion dollar ecosystem of nutrition research. There's people whose jobs it's at at these institutions like the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation to fund nutrition research, and they have a quota. There's this guy who runs the Tough Nutrition School and is the Chair of the White House Conference on Nutrition. Like, that is his life. That is his calling.

• 29:20Speaker 04

  If there's not nutrition research to do, he doesn't have anything to do. So, and in his head, he is, he is thinking that he's doing right, I think. He's bragging that he's done 500 peer-reviewed studies. I believe that the greatest lie the American people are being told is that what's happening is complicated. You know, that we need thousands of nutrition studies. If we cut seed oils, cut sugar, cut highly-processed grains, we are eliminating diabetes, Alzheimer's, which is type 3 diabetes, heart disease, obesity. I mean, like, like, it's actually not that complicated how you can actually structure public policy and societal change.

• 30:02Speaker 04

  But instead, the $4 trillion of the healthcare system and the 6 billion, excuse me, 4 trillion and then 6 trillion of the food system, it's all incentivized to make things more complicated. So that's what's happening. And I think, I think everyone can kind of tell themselves their stories, right? So this, this doctor is getting to the kind of how it all ties, who went on 60 Minutes and said that obesity is genetic. She was appointed the next week to the FDA panel to set the nutrition guidelines for the United States in 2025. The panel at the FDA in 2020, 95% of the academics on that panel had direct conflicts of interest either to food or pharma companies.

• 30:46Speaker 04

  So you have this situation, right? You have to understand, an NIH panel that decides research funding, or an FDA panel that decides drug approvals, it's not government bureaucrats that are appointing people from outside, and those people are allowed to have conflicts. When I was working in this area in 2011, 2012, opioids were a big deal, right? And there was a blue ribbon panel in 2012 from the NIH on opioid guidelines. And they picked the most prestigious person you could pick, the dean of Stanford Med School, who was a pain expert. He established the panel. The majority of that panel has had direct payments from opioid companies in the past

• 31:31Speaker 04

  several years. And the year that the dean of Stanford Med School was appointed to that panel, Pfizer, which is one of the largest opioid makers, gave him a $3 million donation.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  To him personally, or to like his group?

• 31:45Speaker 04

  To a group, to the school, to the school. So Pfizer, which is the currency for the school, but made a direct, and there was a ton of opioid funding of opioid companies to Stanford. That panel recommended, which totally funded, you know, up and down, bought off by opioid companies, recommended looser opioid standards, which has led to devastation. 90% of overdoses from opioids today, illegal opioids, heroin and stuff, it started with the legal prescription that derived from that panel. Today, there's obesity panels with this woman who's paid directly. Also, let's understand their incentives. Pain doctors have an incentive to prescribe. That's what grins them patients. Obesity doctors now, this is a miracle for them.

• 32:27Speaker 04

  A weekly injection that requires you to stand up for life, that's a lifetime patient. So there's huge financial conflicts, and they're the people that are appointed to actually make the guidelines. And both for food and for pharma. So again, it's like, it's like, we kind of assume these institutions have our best interests at heart, but even the bureaucrats that are at the institutions, I mean, no greater example than Scott Gottlieb, who was the FDA director, right? And immediately then went to Pfizer to the board, getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. There's this constant revolving door. But yeah, as a consultant for these companies, it's not that complicated. You're creating lists of the people that could potentially be appointed to these panels,

• 33:12Speaker 04

  and you're donating either direct payments, which again, $30 million from the obesity maker in 2021, we don't know through 2022, and then billions of dollars of research funding, guiding where research goes. So I think that enables, and that's really, to me, The true brilliance, you could say, of the system is that it takes some of the smartest and frankly, most dedicated people, doctors, nutrition researchers, you know, scientists to try and discover new therapeutics. Every one of them feels like they're doing the right thing. They're saving a patient. They're creating pharmaceutical. Nobody's asking why heart disease is exploding, why diabetes, why so many people are getting sick. There's

• 33:57Speaker 04

  zero incentive for anyone to ask that question because the party's going and everyone feels like a hero that they're saving folks and nobody's calling out and it's actually actively stigmatized to talk about root causes like diet. My sister, Casey Means, the founder of Levels, you know, she was top of her class at Stanford Med School. At the graduation for, you know, when doctors finish med school, they choose between 42 subspecialties. They break the body into 42 areas. She focused, was focusing her career on one square millimeter on the head and neck. She was a head and neck surgeon. And when she tried to suggest nutritional interventions, her boss at the time said, don't be a pussy. And that is very much what

• 34:41Speaker 04

  the culture is. And it's in the invisible hand, right? It's let's be warriors and serve the people that are getting sick. But nobody is asking why folks are getting sick.

• 34:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there a problem if we just made a rule? I don't know who would make the rule, but somehow there was a rule made that said, you can't conduct nutritional research that then is used to form public policy or frankly, be published to public citizens if you are taking direct payments from these food companies? Like if we, you know, I've always thought politicians as an example. When politicians get elected, I have seen people suggest that they should have to wear like F1 or NASCAR jackets with all the people who put them there, right? Just wear the logos of the different companies. But I said, look, it'd be hilarious. I get it, right? The internet loves that stuff. But actually, what probably would be impactful is if you get elected, you are not allowed to oversee legislation

• 35:37Anthony Pompliano?

  for industries that put you in office.

• 35:41Anthony Pompliano?

  So just you're not, if the pharma industry put you in office, you can't weigh in on pharma issues. And what my guess is what would happen is immediately there'd be a lot less donating going on. And so same thing here is if we just said, look, you can't conduct nutritional research if you're being funded by any of these companies that are pushing any sort of food or beverage from a dietary standpoint. One, would there be anybody left to actually do research? And two, could we make a system work in that sense?

• 36:11Speaker 04

  I mean, we're in a pickle here because healthcare is the largest and fastest growing industry in the United States. It's a behemoth. Like I said, with the governor of Texas, it's this jobs program. And in the majority of US states, the largest employer is a hospital system. So think about what that means for incentives for the various lawmakers. Unwinding that is existential. We're going to go bankrupt with healthcare costs. They're just growing at an increasing rate. Our eyes kind of gloss over when we talk about healthcare costs. It's stated so much, but it's 20% of GDP growing at an increasing rate faster than any other industry. It's going, and it's not slowing down. It's going to be 40% of GDP in 15 years, and we're all getting sacked, sicker, fatter, more depressed, more infertile. Literally, like male sperm count has plummeted. PCOS, the leading cause of female infertility is

• 36:56Speaker 04

  skyrocketing. Like, there's something really bad happening. And it's only increasing. But it's this jobs program. So unwinding that, unwinding the nutrition research industrial complex, the pharma industrial complex, the hospital industrial complex. I mean, obviously, in every city in the country, the biggest, most gleaming, you know, building is a hospital. That's going to take, but we have to do it. But yeah, so as far as public policies, I mean, I think the first thing we need to do is understand these incentives. I think the key to being an empowered patient is just understanding them. And I do think there's going to be a bottoms up revolution because the math actually demands it. Like, and I think it's being led by parents who are seeing what's happening to kids. So I think understanding this. I'm a free market guy. Like, I think Coke Pharma Company should be able to exist,

• 37:38Speaker 04

  but we should definitely talk about it. Right? And if I was, if I had a billion dollars, I would, kind of similar to what you said, maybe, maybe a little bit more of a free market. So I would form a PAC. And counteract to any politician, all of their pharma and food funding, I would, I would replace that and guarantee that they'll be replace that funding for life. We need to somehow, there's not a pack for diabetic kids, right? There's a, there's a lot of money for pharma, there's a lot of money for food. So there needs to be a counterbalance for politicians that's on the side of diabetic kids. And again, if I had billions of dollars, I think that would actually be the highest leverage thing you could possibly do. Cause, cause

• 38:21Speaker 04

  once you change, it's all about incentives, right? It's, it's all these politicians, everyone, they, they all have plausible deniability. They all plausible, because they can all say, you know, oh, I'm doing a nutrition study. Um, if I had a button I could press, it would eliminate all nutritional research in the United States. The, the thing that we are doing, the thing that, you know, the, these academics, I don't think the folk, the guy I talked to, um, who's a lead researcher in the country even understands this. You have unimpressive PR executives in Washington DC, creating a strategy of donations to nutrition research. We don't even care what the nutrition research says. The fact that there are thousands of studies is the goal. It's, it's confusion, it's obfuscation, right? Um, but yeah, it's changing the incentives of, uh, of the politicians. The other thing I would do, uh, getting, getting

• 39:06Speaker 04

  to the medical school, is a crazy statistic, is that today, 80% of medical schools in the United States do not require one nutrition class. Like fundamentally, like doctors in the United States are not trained why people get sick. My sister, who, who, as I said, left medicine and started a metabolic health company, her out of body experience was five years into residency when she was doing her third surgery today, looking down at a passed out patient, cutting open their sinuses to relieve, um, inflammation of sinuses. She had this out of body experience where that patient had been with her under her knife, like six months before, and she had no idea why they had inflammation. She had literally

• 39:48Speaker 04

  done hundreds of sinusitis surgeries and never learned why the inflammation even occurred. A diabetes doctor couldn't, most likely from Harvard, I've talked to them, can't even explain the underlying deniability of what happens with diabetes, literally. Like they are just, they're, it's pharmacology, it's what to prescribe. And yeah, the incentives on the med school is if I had a billion dollars to, you know, you'd attack the politicians, but more than 50% of medical school funding somehow touches pharma, the research, the grants, you know, every med school, there should be some kind of fund where it's basically clean money because the money dictates the incentives, which is pharmacology.

• 40:30Anthony Pompliano?

  I saw a working paper, so I don't know how far through the research process they are, and I'm not a scientist, but I was reading it, I can't remember if it was like on MBER or maybe it was BLS or, you know, one of these like government organizations, they have kind of all their working papers, so I just go and check out what's on there. And there was a study that was trying to really zero in on what is the impact of kids eating sugar when they're younger, but the impact was not so much on their health. It was on literacy, on wealth, on all of these other things in their life. And what was interesting to me was, health is one important piece, but when you say to someone, are you healthy or are you not, a lot of people I think would say like, yeah,

• 41:15Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm healthy, right, or yeah, I, and then they tell you something that they do that is generally healthy. I go for a walk every day, right? But they don't think about it in terms of data, they don't think of like, are you actually overweight, are you, you know, doing certain things, are you eating correctly, all that. Now, if you tell a parent, do this and your kid will be healthy, do this and your kid won't be healthy, I actually don't know how many parents even understand what healthy is, right? But if you say to a parent, if you give your kid sugar, they will be poor, which is essentially what this study was showing, was that there was a very material drop in the lifetime earnings of a kid who was given sugar at a younger age. I do think parents listen to that.

• 41:59Anthony Pompliano?

  I do think that parents want what's best for their kid, but they don't understand so much what health is or nutrition in terms of they're probably not that healthy or that nutritious themselves. And so instead, if you can put it into terms of education or money, all of a sudden they're like, wait, wait a second, you're telling me that every time I give my kid sugar, it's making them dumber and they're going to make less money over their lifetime? Do you think that would actually change it?

• 42:22Speaker 04

  This is what's, this is what's so criminal, why I'm actually optimistic, why it's kind of dispiriting what's happening right now. People, first off, want to be healthy. They don't want their kids. You know, there's this whole thing, oh, people are gonna be lazy. No, 80% of Americans don't want to be overweight or obese, and they don't want their kids to.

• 42:39Anthony Pompliano?

  So, I looked it up. December 2022, this study was published. The title, uh, it's on the NBER, National Bureau of Economic Research, and it says, "The Sweet Life: The Long-Term Effects of a Sugar-Rich Early Childhood." And they claim, in, um, uh, kind of the abstract, "We show that sugar-rich diet early in life has large adverse effects on the health and economic well-being of adults more than 50 years later. Excessive sugar intake early in life led to higher prevalence of chronic inflammation," which we've been talking about, "diabetes, elevated cholesterol, and arthritis. It also decreased post-secondary schooling, having a skilled occupation, and accumulating above median wealth."

• 43:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Which feels like that sec- that last sentence is actually what's gonna hammer home to parents? If you say that having too much sugar is going to decrease post-secondary schooling, having a skilled occupation, and also decrease the ability to accumulate above median wealth? All of a sudden, parents are like, "Oh, I never heard sugar being mentioned in those terms."

• 43:40Speaker 04

  This is what's so depressing for right now, but why I'm optimistic. People listen to medical elites, right? When the Surgeon General, shamefully late, just as we're late on food, but shamefully late, but in the 80s, said that smoking's bad, smoking plummeted, right? Lives were saved. When, as we talked about, the food pyramid said to eat more carbs and sugar, that's what people did. It increased 20% of our diet. People don't want to be sick. They don't want their kids to be sick. And what's happening, and I- I think- I think what's tragically happened is these health issues have become normalized. I think another huge lie in medicine is that our friends, right, people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, are healthy. We've normalized-

• 44:24Speaker 04

  Chronic fatigue, we've normalized depression, we've normalized anxiety, we've normalized obesity, we've normalized, like you literally, like my sister says, she would talk to a patient who's on five different medications, you know, and doctors say, oh, you're healthy. We've normalized all of, you know, I think there's 17 prescriptions filled per American per year, you know, which obviously there's some power users there. But, but, but people don't want to be unhealthy or watch their kids be obese, but they're really actually following the guidelines and the incentives, right? The incentives are we heavily subsidize crappy food and then healthcare kicks in later and we have leading academics from Harvard saying that obesity is not a big deal.

• 45:08Speaker 04

  So if we change it, yeah.

• 45:10Anthony Pompliano?

  So I have two other things on this specifically. I was in a rural North Carolina town, probably two, three years ago, and I was driving with my wife and in this town, there's about three stoplights, maybe four stoplights. So it's not a one stoplight town, but it's not a city or anything like that. And on the main strip, we happened to be at the furthest end and I just said, look up, look around. And we looked straight down and it was every fast food chain you could think of. There was Wendy's and McDonald's and there was Arby's and there was Sheetz and there was, you know, you just go down the line, literally it was all of them. And I said to her, I said, right now, if we wanted to get a healthy meal in this town,

• 45:53Anthony Pompliano?

  where would we go outside of going to the grocery store, knowing what to buy and then going home and cooking it? And the conclusion we came to is like, how much of the nutrition problem in America is actually a poverty problem? It is a lack of access problem and not just, I don't have money to buy food, but hey, I gotta work three jobs to actually have enough money to live and therefore I'm so tired when I get home, I don't cook healthy food. So you know what, McDonald's is pretty cheap and let me go grab a $1 burger and you know, stuff that in my mouth before I go to sleep and do it all over again tomorrow.

• 46:29Speaker 04

  I think we need to be really clear. It's a slight variation of what you just said. We have a rigged system problem. So this idea that there's not enough money to buy healthy food, you know, is just erroneous. Right? Every single thing you saw on that street, this processed food diet, it is, that is what's bankrupting our country. Like, like a person with type 2 diabetes who's on Medicaid, who's, is lower income, you know, 35, they're costing the system millions of dollars. You know, 99% of people with diabetes have comorbidities. And it's the underlying foundation of disease. So, so, so, so what we're doing, right? When I see that, that row of restaurants, what I'm seeing is food stamp spending, which

• 47:11Speaker 04

  is a big, you know, source of the, it's $110 billion, as we talked about, it's subsidized to go to those things. Right? I see grain subsidies and all these subsidies for that toxic food, when there's no subsidies for vegetables. Right? I see a medical system that's not speaking out about that, that our cells are completely under assault. Right? A medical system that actually wants all that food to be eaten, right? You always have the hospitals next to all those fast food restaurants, and fast food is served within hospitals because they're profiting. So I, you know, that's because a lawmaker and various people who represent these industries actually are representing people where the largest jobs are the food and the pharma. So I see a rigged system, right? I see folks in those cities, or when you go to a public space and see so many people

• 47:54Speaker 04

  clearly unhealthy, you know, I actually see people trying, but there's the weight of these incentives just totally and utterly against them.

• 48:02Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the data points that I recently uncovered is I went through and I was trying to break down the federal government spending, right? So with the debt limit debate, and just kind of, hey, where the hell are these trillions of dollars going? And I want to read you something that I pulled out of that research where I said, when we look at spending by agency, it is shocking to see spending by the Department of Health and Human Services is double the Department of Defense, military spending, and the Department of Homeland Security combined.

• 48:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Additionally, we spend double the amount on social security compared to the Department of Education. Now, when you unpack what is in the Department of Health and Human Services, there's a whole bunch of stuff, right? It's not just this type of stuff. But what you see is that this mandatory spending by the government, which is literally by law, it is mandated that they spend, is now making up 60% of all government spending. And it's not just Health and Human Services, it's not just Department of Education or whatever, but what you're starting to see is that actually government spending more and more is becoming the safety net. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, all these different programs. And what I wonder is, if you were able to solve for, let's say, anyone under the age of 20 today, and you're able to say, you know what? We can wave a magic wand, everyone is going to start eating healthy, they're going to

• 49:15Anthony Pompliano?

  start exercising, kind of doing all the right things, food companies, you're going to stay out of this, and we're going to actually give these people super nutrient-dense food that they are going to stay committed and disciplined, they're going to eat this stuff. What would be the impact 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now in the difference in the amount of money the government would have to spend to take care of these people, or healthcare companies, or pharmaceutical companies would have to actually spend to be able to make sure that these people live anywhere near a normal life compared to if we allow them to keep eating what they're eating now? It's gotta be a massive number.

• 49:46Speaker 04

  This is radical, right? 85% of healthcare costs go to preventable chronic conditions. You know, and again, everyone should do their own research for this, but it, and it sounds hyperbolic, but eight of the 10 killers of Americans, leading killers, are directly tied to food, right? Heart disease, if you had that simple public policy pump of, I would call it, thinking about our precious human capital, thinking about the cells of a child, and working to incentivize the most important lever on those cells, which is the one ton of, I call, genetic

• 50:28Speaker 04

  information that they eat, which is now just totally processed inflammatory crap, you're like, how do we actually, like, as a public policy matter, like, on the front end? Try to get a human to eat fuel that's nourishing, that helps you, right? That doesn't like lead to inflammation in prediabetes, which is highly tied to depression and other mental health issues. A book just came out called Brain Energy, which actually very convincingly ties most brain disorders to metabolic issues, to food. It's totally tied. What would that do? Think about the impact the human capital, it's just very simple. Our society is humans, right? We are feeding ourselves, right? Absolute crap as fuel.

• 51:11Speaker 04

  It's showing itself in the metabolic dysfunction numbers we've said. So we have every member of society going through life, right? With literally malfunctioning cells. That's leading to exploding healthcare costs. I would, I would just argue declining happiness.

• 51:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 51:27Speaker 04

  And, and then what would it do? What your policy would do, and it's, it's literally like my whole argument. We've got to engineer all health, all food policy to get back to basics, to, to feed people good food, which would dramatically lower healthcare costs and curtail the eight of the 10 leading killers of Americans. It would curtail depression and it would be the most gasoline you could pour on human capital of America. I mean, when, when a, when a person is overweight, that's visible cellular dysfunction. It's literally the glucose being overloaded in the cell and the glucose turns into fat because it has nowhere else to go. It's visibly like.

• 52:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Dude, don't use science. Don't use science. Come on. What are you talking about? Like literally, it's okay. It's genetic.

• 52:13Speaker 04

  Uh, we have.

• 52:14Anthony Pompliano?

  We have. I mean, that's what we're fucking talking about though, right? Is literally like you immediately to describe obesity, you just went to a scientific understanding of how glucose can overwhelm a cell and literally create fat that is end, ends up on a human body. And somebody else is saying like, no dude, it has nothing to do with their putting in their body. It just has to do with their genetics and there's nothing they could do about.

• 52:35Speaker 04

  Well, the criminal thing to me, going back to, you know, people under 20, the criminal thing to me is like, actually. It's a, to me, a welcome warning sign. We need to look at symptoms as gifts. If a, if a child is obese, actually, thank God, we can actually see that their cells are having issues. You know, the CDC recently reported as well, 15% of teenagers have fatty liver disease. This is something only seen in alcoholics. A lot of the times, that's in thin people. You know, the, the, actually, your fat cells, we don't need to get too into the science, can be insulin resistant. And you actually have trouble growing fat. The, the excess glucose can be stored other places. It could be stored, you know, in the brain and cause dysfunctional brain. It could be stored in the liver.

• 53:17Speaker 04

  So 15% of kids having a disease right now that used to be only reserved for elderly alcoholics, right? That's a problem. So this, just getting a little bit into this and why your policy is so important and really thinking about cells, thinking about food. Right now, we've siloed everything. Okay. And I, and my mom's my big inspiration. So, so I was born 12 pounds, which is a sign right there that the mom has some metabolic dysfunction. If you're born massively overweight, the mom probably has some kind of gestational diabetes.

• 53:46Anthony Pompliano?

  It's funny you say this because I recently read this book. It's called Countdown. Yeah. How our modern world is threatening sperm counts, altering male and female reproductive development, and imperiling the future of the human race is written by Shauna Swan. And this is one of the things that she talks about is that you actually start to have an impact on your child when the child is in the mother's womb in terms, not just of alcohol and things that, you know, smoking or whatever that, that people generally know. But literally, if you are drinking Coke, if you are eating a bunch of sugary foods, if you're eating, you know, poorly, like, your kid is getting a negative impact from your decisions.

• 54:23Speaker 04

  We're passing on metabolic dysfunction in utero. So the fact that I was born overweight showed that my mom and me actually were born with metabolic dysfunction. Okay. And that was hand waved by the medical system. Oh, that's very normal. Gestational diabetes. Take this pill. Then, a couple of years later, my mom had high cholesterol. Oh, this is a rite of passage for women in their 40s. Uh, here's a statin. You know, no problem. Then several years later, she's, has high fasting glucose. Oh, here's some metformin. Um, that's a drug, one of the most prescribed drugs in the countries. This is a rite of passage for people your age, you know, very normal, right? Right? Getting a statin as a man, that's just, that's just nor, it's like, okay, on your way. No flag raised.

• 55:06Speaker 04

  High blood pressure, you know, she's on a number of medications going into her 70s like anyone. Then thinks she's perfectly healthy, never had any warning signs to her doctor, and then feels a pain in her chest, goes in, gets a scan, learns she has stage four pancreatic cancer, and dies 13 days later. And digging into pancreatic cancer, highly tied to metabolic dysfunction and prediabetes which she had. You know, we can link lung cancer to smoking, we can just as easy link many other forms of cancer to food. As I mentioned, Alzheimer's, kidney disease, COVID deaths, obviously diabetes and heart

• 55:47Speaker 04

  disease, almost everything you can causally link to the food. And what's tragic about the story, and I think it's very relevant to every American, is these little steps along the way are seen as siloed, here's a drug. I actually, my heart goes out to many of our friends, right, and a lot of women right now struggling with PCOS. PCOS, literally, like, it's not like a, like a link you're pulling out, it is literally metabolic dysfunction. Like, like, like, it is on the span of diabetes, it's the same thing. And there's almost no women I know who are struggling with PCOS who are being told, not that that's just something you should take an estrogen pill for, or get a procedure for, but that's a blaring warning sign that unless you start having curiosity about the

• 56:32Speaker 04

  interconnections in your body, and the interconnections of your cells and disease, that if you don't get that under control, that you're gonna have continued results of metabolic dysfunction, probably leading to an early death. And, again, there's profitable, it's been profitable to silo health. That has been the biggest disaster in health, seeing things in silos, seeing things with a different pill to treat, instead of having curiosity, which we've been robbed of, of the interconnectivity of disease.

• 57:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 57:01Speaker 04

  And that's kind of, that's the mission Casey and I are on, is like, if we can have, as a matter of public policy, just be curious about what's the underpinning of why we're getting sick, which inevitably leads to shifting the $4 trillion we spend on healthcare, more to subsidizing nutritious food, quite frankly. I mean, it sounds so simple, but it's literally that, like, that's where we need to move policy towards.

• 57:23Anthony Pompliano?

  I see it with my daughter, right, is...

• 57:26Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think I understood how unhealthy so many of the baby foods were.

• 57:31Speaker 04

  It's crazy.

• 57:31Anthony Pompliano?

  They're just packed with sugar.

• 57:32Speaker 04

  The three ingredients I mentioned, yeah.

• 57:33Anthony Pompliano?

  It's literally nuts.

• 57:34Speaker 04

  And I do think that there's like this like luxury of time where if you have time to make

• 57:41Anthony Pompliano?

  whole foods for a child, then you can obviously help them eat nutrition at a higher dense nutrition level. But what ends up making me think about is like when your kid goes to school, they're feeding them all kinds of crazy stuff, right? Inside of a cafeteria or whatever. And then also you start asking yourself, is it, are we at a point as a society where there's a trade off between health and convenience? Right? Or can there actually be a convenient, quick solution to food, whether you're an adult or a child, and it be healthy? And what it seems like the food companies have done is they said, that's not the trade off we're willing to actually try to achieve. What we are going to do is we are going to try to drive convenience and profit.

• 58:27Anthony Pompliano?

  And that ends up being a major problem.

• 58:28Speaker 04

  Here's my theory of change. The system is screwed. I actually think that's an empowering message. So the first step is this is a bottoms up revolution. So parents, right? You buy like regulation. I got it. I think we all get it. A sheet from the American Academy of Pediatrics about childhood diet. And the first thing on there is processed grains. It's like give your, give your kids little puffs. The American Academy of Pediatrics is paid by Coke. When I was working for Coke, they paid the American Academy of Pediatrics, millions of dollars and the American Academy of Pediatrics had Coke's logo on its website. Okay? So just understanding that dynamic, my message is this, as a parent, first principles, you

• 59:13Speaker 04

  should have the courage to ask questions. Think about what a child ate 10,000 years ago. Were they eating little processed grains? No, they were chewing on stuff. They were chewing on natural food. That is where this needs to start. And I do think there's a revolution happening with parents. So we've got to like resist frankly, I'll just say it, what our pediatrician's saying and what a lot of the medical establishment is saying. Then we get to more of a public policy, the bottoms up, but then we get to the public policy. And I believe that this idea of convenience and this idea of, oh, well, you know, this said a lot, right? This was said by the nutrition researcher, very, I find it kind of patronizing when he said this. The poor people are busy. You know, they, they, there's not enough options for them.

• 59:57Speaker 04

  That's like kneecapping someone and then saying, hey, can't, you know, we've kneecapped everyone. The incentives are what they, they've created the system and it's very inconvenient right now. 25% of teenagers contemplating suicide, 45% being obese or overweight. That's leading to massive inconvenient, the entire worldview of these kids with their cellular dysfunction is being massively degraded. 25% of American adults being on a mental health medication. Like, that's a big warning. There's a lot of inconvenient things happening here.

• 1:00:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Those are small numbers compared to 85% of all Americans being on a obesity or overweight weekly injection.

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  Well, that's why they're saying it's going to be the, the best selling drug ever.

• 1:00:42Anthony Pompliano?

  And what do they claim that's going to do?

• 1:00:44Speaker 04

  So, we can get into the mechanics of Ozempic. And this actually touches, I think, on, on the dynamics we were just talking about on siloing. So let's just back up and then we'll get into Ozempic. Chronic cure treatments. Every chronic cure treatment is correlated with more of the disease it's trying to treat. The more STANs we prescribe, the more heart disease goes up. The more metformin we prescribe, the more diabetes goes up. The more SSRIs, as again, most prescribed over in the country right now, the more depression and suicide go up. The, I guarantee you that the more Ozempic we prescribe, the more obesity is going up. Why is that?

• 1:01:26Speaker 04

  It's because these are not siloed things, right? They're actually moral hazards. You literally, the guidance from the American Diabetes Association until 2018 was that if you take diabetes medication as a diabetic, you do not need to worry about what you're eating. You can continue to eat whatever you want as a diabetic. The guidance on Ozempic is the same thing. But let's think about this. You're taking your insulin, you're taking your Ozempic. Maybe your fasting glucose levels are going down. Maybe your weight is going down because what it does is it messes with your metabolism, your gut, and makes you less hungry. If you're still feeding yourself with inflammatory toxic food, if you're, you know, feeding horrible gas into the engine, even if it's a little bit less, you're still, your body, the fundamental

• 1:02:11Speaker 04

  genetic information, the information that you're putting into your body is bad, is dirty.

• 1:02:17Anthony Pompliano?

  It's poison.

• 1:02:18Speaker 04

  It's poison. You're still, so 30% less poison. Again, obesity, the lie is that obesity is the disease in and of itself. Obesity is the warning sign of the underlying issues. So if you're putting 30% less into your body, but think about what that's going to do to those 45% of kids. Think about the message that sends when 60 Minutes, the New York Times is saying, okay, this is good, it's genetic, then the kid loses a little bit of weight, but is still eating terrible food. Do you think that's going to end well? Right? Do you, like, like, that's why, right? From the 1960s to today, in 1960, there weren't chronic disease treatments. It was all acute, all medical miracles, right? It was emergency surgical procedures for childbirth, for an appendicitis, for, you

• 1:03:02Speaker 04

  know, imminent that you're going to die of a heart attack, antibiotics, pills that you went off once you were cured. Until 1960, there was not a chronic treatment. The birth control was the first one. Now, it's 95% spending because it's profitable, it's recurring revenue, right? But in the age of chronic treatments where costs have been skyrocketing, right? We've actually been declining life expectancy. So for the most sustained period, well before COVID, it's for the past six years, life expectancy in America has been going down. That's the longest and most sustained period since 1860. Right? This is unprecedented. So in all these cures, life expectancy is going down. So that is the problem with Ozempic, number one. Number two is the opportunity cost. Right?

• 1:03:46Speaker 04

  They are pushing, of course, for government subsidized Medicare, Medicaid, and various other programs, as you said, the HSH budget for spending because this is such a horrible disease that it's isolated, as they're telling us. Just imagine, blue sky, those hundreds of billions of dollars that they're predicting of government money that's going to go to this drug. Just imagine, blue sky, what you could do with that money. Imagine that you're an alien that comes down to Earth and looks at what's happening. Everyone's fat. Everyone's sick with diseases that are obviously manifestly tied to food. Right? And imagine that alien was smart and you gave that alien $4 trillion. They would never say to continue trying to get everyone sick and then try to superficially drug the problem.

• 1:04:30Speaker 04

  That's not what anyone, this is not obvious what we have. It's totally actually crazy. If an alien came down to Earth and had four, they'd subsidize food. They'd invest in regenerative agriculture. They would invest in programs to teach kids meditation, you know, to get control of their brains, you know, and understand the trauma that this is being caused. They would invest, you know, in, they would think about a child's cells.

• 1:04:56Anthony Pompliano?

  When you see this all playing out, can we change the existing system or do we have to build a new one? One of the things in like the Bitcoin world, right? It's like you're not going to be able to change the Fed. You're not going to be able to change the legacy financial system. We got to build a new one from scratch. Competition, don't try to tear down what they have, just outcompete them in the market. What do you think is kind of the solution here? Do we have to go build all new food companies that are healthier, that can compete eventually with Coca-Cola or what?

• 1:05:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, I think the math, again, demands that there's going to be rapid change. So my investment kind of spent on this is that by definition, something unsustainable has to change eventually. And I do think in the US, we eventually Get there. We get there late, but we are having a robust debate. There's a lot of discussions on podcasts from Joe Rogan on down, really talking about essentially these core issues. So I think from an investment perspective, you have to ask, is the company, is a new company incrementally helping or augmenting the existing system? Are they putting a millennial pink packaging on Viagra or making a better UX for electronic medical records for the existing system? Like, that's where a lot of money's going, right?

• 1:06:04Speaker 04

  And I think my spin would be fundamentally, if we believe something unsustainable has to change eventually, there's literally only one way it's going to change. It has to be trillions of dollars shifting from Band-Aids once people get sick to things that actually keep people healthy. Like, we actually have to change policy eventually to keep Americans healthy. Because the fact that we're getting so sick is making us an uncompetitive country, and it's going to bankrupt the country. Like, literally, it will bankrupt the country. So, how do you, it's not going to be more drugs. We're actually told by many leaders that the problem is access. That literally the problem with healthcare is not enough people have access to enough drugs. That's, of course, bullshit.

• 1:06:44Speaker 04

  We have to eventually, so I think there's actually investment philosophies, and I think it's why I like levels, giving people more data, the biowareable revolution. I think that is an example that in 10 years, we're going to basically have what Theranos said they were going to do, which is actually a good idea. Have a full MRI on what's going on in our body, and we're not going to have to go to the doctors. We're like, literally, in most, in many states right now, a patient isn't legally allowed to have their medical information. We have a total silo of what's going on in our body. We know nothing. That's going to change. You know, I think there is a market demand and more education around food. But, you know, food companies that are trying to be healthier are really at a disadvantage because there's just hundreds of billions of dollars of various subsidies going on healthy food.

• 1:07:26Speaker 04

  So, you know, I think we're slowly talking about this, but I think, I think that the headwinds are going to happen. And again, it's the bottom up. It's podcasts, there's millions of books being sold, millions of people buying biowareables.

• 1:07:38Anthony Pompliano?

  What are the best books, you think, for people to read if they're interested in this stuff?

• 1:07:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, again, what I'm trying to do, and if one person listens to this, it's not getting the answers in this podcast. It's a journey of curiosity for the interconnections and, you know, just awe and wonder for what's going on in our bodies. I think that's the core. Mark Hyman, he's an investor advisor to our company. We're so fortunate and that really got me started. So Food Fix is an incredible systemic overview of the dynamics. A doctor named Robert Lustig, two books, Metabolical and Hacking of the American Mind, had a profound impact on me. Those are two places I'd start and then you can really go down the rabbit hole. You know, I think, you know, every podcast are talking about Huberman, I think a lot of people are listening to him, but goes into this very well. Mark Hyman has

• 1:08:26Speaker 04

  a podcast. I honestly think Joe Rogan is one of the vanguards of medicine and the scientific method. He's actually having, scrolling through his podcast, having a lot of doctors on talking about metabolic health and actually pursuing the scientific method of having differing views on and asking questions. The number one target of the medical system, from NIH and medical schools trying to shut him down, having people talking about how food, exercise, and looking at the sun, maybe we should do a little bit more and incentivize that. So I just think going down the rabbit hole and being able to ask questions for you and your kids is very important and those authors are a good place to start.

• 1:09:04Anthony Pompliano?

  What is like your aspiration in terms of what are you guys trying to do with this company that you've referenced? What is kind of the goal of the business and like what do you think your contribution to kind of making this changes?

• 1:09:14Speaker 04

  The existential challenge that we asked, I could give you a little bit of the story if that's okay, but after my mom abruptly died and at the same time, you know, several years before my sister leaving the medical system, which was a big family event. I mean, she was the pride of the family in the medical system abruptly quit because she was so horrified with what she saw started levels. And I had sold our previous e-commerce company, thinking about what I want to do. And the core idea, I just can't get out of my mind of what I'm devoting my life to is changing the incentives. The problem is that every level of health is incentivized for people to be sick. And that's the invisible hand creating our system. We're all getting sicker for longer periods of time, which is what makes the system money.

• 1:09:58Speaker 04

  So a partner, Justin Maris and I bonded over that question and we asked, how can we use existing entities to change incentives?

• 1:10:07Speaker 04

  And we really got into this idea of food prescriptions. Is there a way actually to make food, to make exercise tax-free? And we actually found a way. So Mark Hyman and other functional medicine doctors on a micro level at clinics and stuff actually are writing food prescriptions and exercise prescriptions for patients with metabolic issues that are not being handled well by the medical system. And if you have a note from a doctor, you can actually use HSA/FSA money, these pre-tax accounts that are very under-optimized, to buy food and exercise. You need a doctor's note. The HSA/FSA accounts, most people, most of your listeners probably have access to them. Justin, me, a lot of people never use them. They kind of, because it's like, oh, it's money to use or lose it for when you're sick. We're all sick.

• 1:10:52Speaker 04

  This is the key. We all should be aggressively, we all have metabolic dysfunction brewing within us. And it's totally within the spirit and letter of regulations.

• 1:11:03Anthony Pompliano?

  What is a food prescription and exercise prescription?

• 1:11:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, so our implementation is we're partnering with exercise companies, food companies. You can go to our website, truemed.com. We're in a payment integration. So just like a firm, you'll see it right when you're buying your supplements, when you're buying your 8-sleep, for instance, we're, they're investors and we're chatting with them, but products like that. You'll be able to click on that and answer a couple asynchronous health questions. And if you qualify, if you're trying to prevent or reverse a condition, we can approve you right away and you can actually use your HSA/FSA card, your HSA/FSA funds, right in the payment flow. And that's a 30, 40% savings. You save your entire income tax. I will put an 8-sleep, which improves your, you know, sleep, and there's data on this.

• 1:11:51Speaker 04

  I would put broccoli. I would put exercise. I would put that against any pharmaceutical treatment. And there's studies on this that we have backing us up. So we threw the payment flow, integrating with these merchants. Which we're very rigorous to have a clinical team approving can enable that spinning. So I've never used my HSA, FSA, but this past year, our family did 7,200 bucks. And we're going to be able to use that on food and exercise and things that keep our family healthy.

• 1:12:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And so what does the individual contribute into it? And it's basically kind of pre-taxed dollars go into these accounts?

• 1:12:28Speaker 04

  It's through your HR platform. The majority of Americans have access. This is when you're kind of clicking through your open enrollment. It's one of those things where like, do you want to contribute? And most people just ignore it. There's 140 billion dollars sitting in the accounts right now. About 30, 40% of your listeners probably have money in there. But it's at open enrollment. So you click, you contribute up to 7,200 for a family. And that pulls directly from your paycheck. Getting into the weeds here, it's actually kind of cool. It's like a tax-free loan because you get that money upfront on January 1st and it pulls over the whole course of the year. So it's like a tax-free loan, basically.

• 1:13:04Anthony Pompliano?

  And then you can use it for healthcare costs? Or in this case, you guys have figured out how to do it for food and exercise as well?

• 1:13:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's very under-optimized. I mean, there could be trillions in these accounts. There's 150 billion and then now most people have access to them. But they're really designed by pharma. Most healthcare policy is designed by pharma. And these little accounts for once you're sick to basically buy pharma. That's how they're designed. But according to all healthcare regulators, you know, a medical intervention, medicine, is something a doctor denotes to prevent or reverse a condition. And food and exercise are, that's our goal of our company. Our goal is to change incentives to put food and lifestyle habits. I mean, the four pillars, it's not that complicated, but it's food, it's sleep, it's movement, and it's management of chronic stress. We want to put that at the center of health. What we want to show, we're building a movement, you know, is you can really use your healthcare dollars,

• 1:13:54Speaker 04

  these dollars that are supposed to go to pharma for core root cause issues. And we're building a movement around that, which we've been honored to speak out on. What we want to do is really create that. And we're already engaging with a number of members of Congress who reached out to us on this, on this campaign. You know, we're going on Dan Crenshaw's podcast and folks on the left too. Cory Booker's been huge on this. We want to use this as a model of public policy. This is where a public policy has to go. We have to give folks, and this happens in some European countries, we need to incentivize them to buy doctor-approved healthy food.

• 1:14:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It seems like such a bipartisan issue, right? Like, we want people to be healthy. We want them to be eating the right foods. We want them to generally be metabolically healthy. And if they understand how to do that, and they are doing it, they both can pass the knowledge in kind of an adult-to-child relationship, but they also can show the child just through their own actions. Hey, here's the food we eat. Here's the type of exercise we do. Here's the things that we do to be healthy. And you can, similar to teaching a family personal finance and change the trajectory of them financially, if you could actually teach them nutrition and exercise, you can change the trajectory of that family for many generations to come, because it gets passed down from generation to generation.

• 1:15:08Speaker 04

  I really put it at a spiritual level. I mean, somebody asked me, what do we need to do from a policy perspective? What do we need to do to society to get to really radically change this? I joked, you know, we should put psilocybin in the water supply, but I'm only half joking. I really do tie that to this, that 25% of folks on ISS Rise. We generally, like, everything we incentivize kind of numbs you, you know, for mental health. Or, you know, the food we're eating is really like taking us away from reality, taking us away from awe. I really see this, just personally speaking, and I know a lot of your listeners are on this journey. I think it ties very well into Bitcoin. I mean, I think the people this is really resonating on with Twitter are moms

• 1:15:49Speaker 04

  and people, you know, who support Bitcoin. I mean, I think it's people that are waking up and questioning the system. But I think, like, actually questioning the system, actually having awe and curiosity for interconnections, you know, and really investigating, you know, what your kid is eating and how movement, you know, I never thought about exercise until recently, about just like, it's not just for vanity. It's understanding that that helps your cells. I really do think, right, the more we can foster that wonder about the interconnectivity of our body as a personal and public policy, you know, why aren't we teaching? Kids about how their cells work and how food impacts their cells and how to meditate and why sleep is important. I mean, we don't even talk to people about that.

• 1:16:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:34Speaker 04

  Um, so it starts at home, but it's like, I really do feel and our mission, what I hope to see in the world and what Casey and I are, you know, it's really amazing to work on with her on, we're writing a book on this, um, is that this becomes the center of public policy. It's just like thinking about the individual and I put, you know, food on that. I mean, this is a whole nother podcast, but the psychedelic renaissance, I actually think is a massive societal. We've been totally gaslit on what a good drug is and what a bad drug is. Um, and, uh, and I think that's actually related. So, yeah.

• 1:17:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Where can we send people to find you on the internet if they want to learn more?

• 1:17:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, uh, we're starting this company, true med.com, um, to specifically very simple value proposition, right? To, to enable you to, if you're qualified to, um, to purchase exercise, food, certain supplements, tax free. Uh, so go to true med.com. Uh, we're launching that soon. Uh, have a really great team, uh, mission based people who are really excited about that and to go in the next 20 years to that. Um, Callie Means on Twitter. I've never been a big tweeter, but you know, it's been, it's been amazing.

• 1:17:42Anthony Pompliano?

  You're warming up.

• 1:17:43Speaker 04

  I'm warming up. Yeah. And, um, and, and these, these, uh, topics have resonated. So we actually just for our brand marketing for our company, we just need a lot of people to know about us. That's our kind of raw business. But what Justin and I are doing is we're going to continue exposing and speaking out about these issues. We're going to hire investigative journalists. We're working with members of Congress now, you know, Bill Ackman retweeted my tweet. We're speaking now to billionaires and prominent lawyers about organizing a class action lawsuit. As our company kind of brand strategy, we're going to try to continue this mission forward of, you know, kind of on that level exposing and trying to change the system from the top down. And what we see true medicine as is changing it from the bottom up by incentivizing healthier behaviors. I, I really do think, right? If you can save a family 30, 40%.

• 1:18:28Speaker 04

  Unhealthy food, it's just basic economics, it's basic incentives. We need to do more and more of that. So that's what our company's trying to do. So truMed.com, Callie Means on Twitter.

• 1:18:35Anthony Pompliano?

  I love what you guys are doing. As soon as I saw the tweets, I was like, oh, boy, here we go. So please keep it up. And I think people not only learned a lot, but it's an inspiring mission in terms of wanting people to be healthy and kind of change their lives. So I appreciate everything you guys are doing and we'll definitely do it again in the future.

• 1:18:51Speaker 04

  Well, thank you, Pop, for questioning various systems and putting amazing vibes out there. Really appreciate you.