Joe Rogan Experience #2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD

1. 0:00 – 5:45

   Intro

   1. CMCalley Means0:00

      (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

   2. CMCasey Means0:04

      The Joe Rogan Experience.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:06

      Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music) What's up? Nice to meet you guys.

   4. CMCalley Means0:14

      Great to be with you.

   5. CMCasey Means0:14

      Thanks for having us, Joe.

   6. JRJoe Rogan0:15

      Thanks for coming here. Uh, I'm all happy, but this is not a happy subject. I don't know. (laughs) It's probably a bad way to start off a podcast of how fucked we are. But, uh, I really appreciate what you guys have been doing, um, and get... I, I think I first saw you on Tucker and, um, the, the details of all the stuff you guys have exposed is... It's not... I mean, it's shocking, but it's not surprising.

   7. CMCasey Means0:39

      Yeah.

   8. JRJoe Rogan0:39

      It's, um, it's really crazy. So, can we get into this? Like, you used to be on the dark side. Let's start with you. (laughs)

   9. CMCalley Means0:46

      (laughs)

   10. JRJoe Rogan0:46

       Tell everybody, uh, your background, like how you got started with this. We were born and raised in Washington, DC and I thought being a good, young conservative was supporting the pharma industry or supporting the food industry, defending those industries, so went to Stanford with Casey. She studied biology, I studied political science and economics and went on campaigns, but then was a lobbyist. Everyone bipartisan in DC goes to work for the food and the pharma industry. And on one morning, I'm working with the pharma industry to literally steer money to the dean of Stanford Med School, uh, who's a pain specialist, uh, to be put on an NIH panel to say that opioids in 2011, that the issues around addiction were overblown. And he, we, we actually helped engineer an NIH panel to, to issue a report to say, "Opioids are okay. Pain is a crisis." And then later in the afternoon, working for food companies, working for Coke, steering money to institutions of trust, steering money to the NAACP, uh, to say that, uh, taking Coke off food stamps was racist. Uh, Coke, uh, soda, today, to this day is the number one item on food stamps. What I realized fundamentally is that we are, uh, profiting, the biggest industries, the biggest spenders in the country are profiting from kids particularly getting addicted, sick, in fear, and then, and then drugging them and, and profiting from that. What, what is the conversation like when you guys are formulating a strategy to try to pretend that opioids aren't a problem? Like how... What are the conversations like?

   11. CMCalley Means2:08

       This is really f- important for people to understand the institutional design of the system which was greatly impacted by Casey's awakening, is that it takes good people and gives them plausible deniability. Nobody's in those back rooms conspiring and trying to be an evil person. They're literally talking, you know, to these junior staffers like me about the scourge of pain, you know, and how we have to get this innovation of opioids to the American people. Now, it's about obesity and trying to get Ozempic to six-year-olds, which is now the standard of care. I- i- in the rooms, it's about doing what's right and getting this innovation to the American people and everyone can kinda fool themselves. Um, with the food, it's about getting cheap calories to kids. You know, it's not we're gonna buy off and weaponize these academic research institutions like Harvard to say, "Sugar doesn't cause obesity," and then pay the NAACP to say lower-income people need to be getting their government-subsidized Coke. It's that we're promoting choice. And I, I really did believe that and people believed that. I think there, there's, there's pings that, that's coming through in so many ways, um, uh, uh, of people realizing this really isn't going the right direction. I think you see it with suicide rate among doctors, burnout rate among doctors, the fact that every friend I have from Harvard Business School who went into the pharma industry, who went into the food industry, there's, there's chronic rates of depression among elite businesspeople. I, I think people are starting to realize this, but, but, but still, in these rooms, it's about doing the right thing. You, you convince yourself of that.

   12. JRJoe Rogan3:31

       Wow. So, it's just, everyone's sort of captured by this thing and nobody steps out of the lines.

   13. CMCalley Means3:37

       I mean, the highest level, Joe, you know, I think we don't realize that there's a defining existential issue in our country where our major institutions have been captured. Um, I think there's, like, pings of consciousness trying to alert us to this, like, you know, you having people on that are calling this stuff out, trying to ring the alarm bell and people flocking to this show. You know, iconoclast from the military-industrial complex, from the healthcare industrial complex. I think Elon being the richest person at, at the world's trying to sell us something. It's like, let's get resources to these people calling these things out. I think it's like Donald Trump. Like, I've been thinking about this a lot. Why is he the defining figure of our lifetime? Like, why have voters again and again and again gone to him and said, you know, this MAGA movement... Like, why are we, like, supporting this person, making him the defining person of our generation? What does he represent? He represents, like, putting finger on something that's just not quite right with institutions. And I think the problem is we can't quite wrap our hand, head around how bad it is and how so many people are complicit, but there's all these signs right now. And I think, I think we're gonna be brought to our knees if we don't realize this, that our institutions have been captured. Like, to me, healthcare, what Casey talks about, it's, it's a really visceral example of something just not right with what's happening to food, what's happening to our kids' health. Um, and I think it's happening to the military too, or the military-industrial complex. Like, I'm truly worried that we're on the verge of almost a societal-level collapse with what's happening to our food, what's happening to our health, what's happening with the potential nuclear war. And I think we have people starting to realize this and they're trying to, like, lunge out for it, um, but we're being told it's alarmist. We're being told it's a conspiracy theory. And, and to me, that, that's what we've kind of landed on this health issue. Let's just bring it down to the facts of what's happening to kids. Let's bring it down to just... Like, let- let's forget the conspiracy theory, what even a- anyone's saying in this room. Let's look what's happening to our food and look what's happening to kids. Because by the stats we're seeing, there's something really dark happening. Like, like, outside any conspiracy theory, just the statistics of what is happening to our health in this country, and uniquely in America, is dark.

   14. CMCasey Means5:36

       Mm-hmm.

   15. JRJoe Rogan5:37

       And so, Casey, if you could d- do the same, sort of explain how you got on this path. You, you started off with medical school.

2. 5:45 – 12:36

   Caseys Journey

   1. JRJoe Rogan5:45

   2. CMCasey Means5:45

      Yeah.

   3. JRJoe Rogan5:45

      And...

   4. CMCasey Means5:46

      Yeah. So, just like Calley, you know, we grew up in DC. I was... I loved biology. Went to Stanford Medical School, went on to do surgical residency in head and neck surgery. Climb the ladder, you know? Do what every good medical s- student and, uh, resident is supposed to do. Climb the academic ranks, publish papers, et cetera. And so, I was heads down in that journey, and they were never...... just like Callie's saying, like with what I think is happening with the American people right now, and really more globally, like there was something inside of me that was whispering and then speaking a little louder, and then finally was a deafening call to me that, like, "Something is not right." Like, I'm operating, I'm working eight hours a week, I'm operating, you know, two, three, four, five surgeries a day, and, you know, in some ways I feel good about that. You know, people, maybe their sinusitis will get a little better for a little while. But fundamentally, when you pop up for just a second, which they don't want you to do in healthcare, you know, everyone's working their tails off, but when you pop up for j- just a second and look around at what ha- is happening to American health, children's health, health across the lifespan, as well as global health, it's a disaster. It's literally a disaster. And again, this isn't ... People will say that's alarmist, but I, you know, in trying to understand, like, why don't I feel right about my work, I just started looking at the data in a different way, and I started to look at what was happening with health trends. And if you just kinda run through the list of what's happening, it's, it's unbelievable. Like, we are getting destroyed and it's very recent and it's accelerating. The stats speak for themself. You know, you know this very well. 74% of Americans are overweight or obese. Uh, 50% now of American adults have type two diabetes or pre-diabetes. These were diseases where there was 1% of Americans in 1950 had type two diabetes, now it's 50% of Americans have pre-diabetes or type two diabetes.

   5. (sighs)

   6. Alzheimer's, dementia are going through the roof. Young adult dementias have increased like three times since 2012, so early onset dementias. We're seeing, you know, this ... One in two Americans are expected to have cancer in their lifetime now. One in two. And young adult cancers are going up 79% in the last 10 years. We've got, of course, the autisms rates are absolutely astronomical. One in 36 children has autism now in the United States. That was one in 150 in the year 2000. And in California, where I live, it's one in 22. One in 22 with a lifetime neurodevelopmental disorder. We've got infertility going up 1% r- per year. 25% of men now under 40 have erectile dysfunction, a quarter of the country. You know, this is fundamentally a metabolic disease. We've got 77% of young Americans can't serve in the military because of ob- obesity or drug abuse. We've got a- we've got autoimmune diseases. Some studies are saying they're going up 13% per year. Um, i- it's just, it's, it's really unbelievable, and I could go through so many more diseases. Of course, um, we've got heart disease, which is almost totally preventable. It's the leading cause of death in the United States, killing around 800,000 people per year. Um, and I think what ... As I kind of just looked around, and again, these are just statistics, I started trying to put the pieces together. Why is this happening? Why are these all going up all at once? And that led me on what is now a seven, eight year journey, ultimately leaving the surgical world, putting down my scalpel forever, because what I realized is that when you go to the science with a root cause perspective, you go back to PubMed with a slightly different perspective, not how do I treat the diseases once they emerge, but why are they happening? You see a very obvious, blaring answer, which is why we had to write a book about it, which is that it's all caused by metabolic dysfunction, um, a term that I never learned in medical school. I learned about metabolic syndrome and the different individual diseases that make it up, but there is a problem, there is a fundamental breaking of our core cellular biology that is caused by our diet and the world we're living in, the modern world we're living in today, that is crushing the very way that the human body and our human cells can transmit food energy to life energy, to cellular energy. And so our bodies are essentially ... I mean, fundamentally, because metabolic health is how we make energy in the body, the way that our environment is now synergistic to restoring our metabolic health, and the science is very clear about this, it's basically like all of us are a little bit dead while we're alive. That's what metabolic dysfunction is. It's less energy in the body. We're underpowered. And that's very dark. Like, when you step back and, and say, okay, this is clear from the research, and I never learned it, I didn't learn it at Stanford Medical School, I didn't learn it in my surgical residency, and we could fix it. We could fix it really quickly if we all popped up and woke up and looked at the data and put pieces together. But of course, we're not trained to connect dots. That's not our job in medicine. We are trained to follow algorithms and to be reactive. And so I think, um, you know, just to sort of kind of back up to the bigger picture of, of why we're so passionate about this, I think that the reason the Maha Movement, the reason that people are so passionate about your podcast that talks about this so much, people know that something's not right, and people know that this health issue is the tip of the iceberg of what's actually happening in our world today. It is a reflection ... Our human health is simply a reflection of the destroyed ecosystem of our globe. The fact that we are, we have forgotten that we're completely connected to nature and we're completely interdependent with nature, but the, the health crisis is simply a reflection of a destroyed ecosystem, and humans have become so powerful and so technologically advanced and so connected in the recent decades that we now actually do have the power to both destroy the world and destroy our health. And the health is just the tip of the iceberg of a much bigger thing happening that is existential, and I think that's ... Pe- We all want kids to be healthy, we all want humans to be healthy, but this is also, it's interconnected with all the systems and all the issues, and that's w- m- I think it's hard for people to s- to totally articulate that, but that is what's happening, and we, we actually have a-

   7. People are failing it.

   8. We actually have a choice right now, and I do believe this is the moment that we need to decide, are we going to address these interdependent issues and are we going to-... make the effort and be courageous enough to fight for this, or are we going to let ourselves be told that there's nothing wrong, no- nothing to see here, um, while our health and the health of the planet is just absolutely being destroyed?

   9. JRJoe Rogan12:35

      I-

   10. CMCasey Means12:35

       So that's, that's what our mission

3. 12:36 – 16:21

   Farmers Dog Ad

   1. CMCasey Means12:36

      is.

   2. JRJoe Rogan12:36

      This episode is brought to you by The Farmer's Dog. Dogs are amazing. They're loyal, they're lovable. Like, just having Marshall around can make my day 10 times better. And I'm sure you love your dog just as much, and you want to do your best to help them live longer, healthier, happier lives. And a healthy life for your dog starts with healthy food, just like it does for us. There's a reason having a balanced diet is so important. So how do you know if your dog's food is as healthy and as safe as it can be? Well, Farmer's Dog gives you that peace of mind by making fresh, real food, developed by board certified nutritionists to provide all the nutrients your dog needs. And their food is human-grade, which means it's made to the same quality and safety standards as human food. Very few pet foods are made to this strict standard. And let's be clear, human-grade food doesn't mean the food is fancy. It just means it's safe and healthy. It's simple, real food from people who care about what goes into your dog's body. The Farmer's Dog makes it easy to help your dog live a long, healthy life by sending you fresh food that's pre-portioned just for your dog's needs. Because every dog is different, and I'm not just talking about breeds. From their size to their personality to their health, every dog is unique. Plus, precise portions can help keep your dog at an ideal weight, which is one of the proven predictors of a long life. Look, no one, dog or human, should be eating highly processed foods for every meal. It doesn't matter how old your dog is. It's always a great time to start investing in their health and happiness. So, try The Farmer's Dog today. You can get 50% off your first box of fresh, healthy food at thefarmersdog.com/rogan. Plus, you get free shipping. Just go to thefarmersdog.com/rogan. Tap the banner or visit this episode's page to learn more. Offer applicable for new customers only. I think one of the most disturbing things about it is how few people are speaking out when the data is so obvious. And then when you guys lay it out and when, you know, people like Brigham Bueller-

   3. CMCalley Means14:45

      Mm-hmm.

   4. JRJoe Rogan14:45

      ... Andrew Huberman, when any of these people that are, like, very focused on what the problems are lay it out, the, the data's all there. But yet, we're not being told this anywhere other than the internet.

   5. CMCasey Means14:57

      Right.

   6. JRJoe Rogan14:58

      It's only independent shows that don't rely on executives and networks, where there's pharmaceutical drug companies advertising, you, or food companies, or any of these things. You, you don't hear any of this stuff, I mean other than Fox News has allowed you guys on a few times, right?

   7. CMCalley Means15:14

      (laughs) That's right. They're the only ones.

   8. JRJoe Rogan15:16

      Yeah, well, kudos to them.

   9. CMCalley Means15:17

      Yeah, absolutely.

   10. JRJoe Rogan15:18

       It's, it's a human issue, and the fact that people are willing to take money to not talk about one of the biggest problems that we have. I didn't even know about the childhood dementia thing, or the young adult dementia thing.

   11. CMCalley Means15:29

       Well, t- type two diabetes used to be n- never seen-

   12. JRJoe Rogan15:33

       Super rare.

   13. CMCalley Means15:33

       ... you know, among kids in their career.

   14. JRJoe Rogan15:35

       Right.

   15. CMCalley Means15:35

       Uh, it used to be called early onset. They don't call it early onset anymore. As Casey said, 33% of young adults now have pre-diabetes. I mean, this pre-diabetes is not some isolated thing. It's the, it's the branch of the tree. It's cellular dysregulation. Um, and every single disease is going down. Alzheimer's is now called type three diabetes.

   16. JRJoe Rogan15:51

       Right.

   17. CMCalley Means15:51

       If you don't have pre-diabetes or diabetes, you have a very diminished chance of having Alzheimer's. And, you know, so, so it makes total sense, but somebody from Harvard Medical School that specialized in Alzheimer's, their entire course load, their entire training, their entire focus is on accepting Alzheimer's, that it's there, that it's growing, and then, uh, figuring out, uh, marginal improvements for it. There's literally people that are the highest-educated people in the world do not even understand what causes these diseases. They're just f- accepting that and, and, and making the, uh, the cures for them, the, the, the, the marginal treatments.

4. 16:21 – 21:38

   Healthcare Business Model

   1. CMCalley Means16:21

   2. CMCasey Means16:21

      And, and I would just say also, like, if you, if you do step back and look at everything holistically, like, one of the biggest problems with the healthcare industry right now is that it's so siloed. We have over 100 different medical and surgical subspecialties, and the business model of American healthcare right now is volume. It's how many people can you see? And so, that's what you get paid for. You don't get paid for outcomes, you get paid for volume. And so, that has incentivized a structure of healthcare where it's most profitable to actually be seen by as many specialists as humanly possible, and that's what the average American is dealing with. They go to the primary care doctor with a list of issues and they get eight, 10 referrals, and then they spend their life going through revolving doors at these different healthcare, um, offices and not actually really feeling better, and they feel disappointed. And that's why I think people are frustrated. So, we've got all these doctors who are incentivized to really be head down in their c- specialty lane and not actually step out and look at the big picture of how things are connected, when in fact it's, it's all connected. We don't see the body anymore, and I, I'm just telling you this from, like, sheer experience of being in medical school, like, we are not trained to see the body as a unified system. We're, we're trained to see it as 20, 30 different parts. Um, and so no one's seeing the forest for the trees. But like Kelly's saying, like, look at what's happening, like you look at, you look at what's happening with kids. We've got ADHD through the roof, autism through the roof. These are neurodevelopmental issues. Then you look at midlife, well, women and men are depressed. We have huge rates of mental illness. Um, you know-

   3. CMCalley Means17:45

      25% of women.

   4. CMCasey Means17:45

      25% of women now are on SSRI. I mean, we're living in, like, the wealthiest, safest country in human history and 25% of people are on an SSRI. That's insane. Then you go into menopause, perimenopause, that age group, and it's sort of brain fog, and then we have full-blown Alzheimer's going up. So we've got all these neurodevelopmental issues and neurodegenerative issues sort of across the lifespan. And, you know, then you look at kind of the hormonal side of thing. We've got...... girls going through puberty much earlier than they ever were. You know, s- it, we, i- we are the, of continents on Earth, we are the earliest puberty rates right now. That's g- gone down on an average six years since 1900.

   5. JRJoe Rogan18:22

      (inhales sharply)

   6. CMCasey Means18:22

      Our puberty rates are way earlier. So girls are reaching sexual maturity at, like, age 10.

   7. JRJoe Rogan18:26

      They're getting pubic hair, uh-

   8. CMCasey Means18:27

      Then you've got, um, in midlife, you look at women, and infertility is through the roof. We've got PCOS is affecting 26% of women as a metabolic fertility issue. It's the leading cause of infertility in the country. Then we look at older age, and, like, menopausal symptoms are a disaster for women. This is why a book like The New Menopause was, like, the number one book in the country for a while 'cause women are desperate. So we s- if you step back and look at all these different things, we've got these neuro issues throughout the lifetime all exploding, these hormonal issues throughout the lifetime all exploding. It's happening all over the place, but no one's stopping and asking, "Why?" Like, "Why is this happening?" Instead, we put ADHD in a bucket, we put depression and anxiety in a bucket, we put Alzheimer's in a bucket. Um, and so that's- that's really the problem. And I think, you know, when you think about some of these things, it's like we're becoming infertile, and we're losing our minds across the lifespan. Like, what the hell is happening? Like, that's what these diseases, these buckets of diseases, represent, and I think that's why I think it's... You know, we talked about, like, it's the tip of the ice- health is the tip of the iceberg of fundamentally, like, a planetary issue. But, like, the planetary issue is the tip of the iceberg of what I think is really, really going on here, which is, like, a spiritual issue. Like, we- we- we are, like, not fighting for life in this world anymore, and I think that's more of a consciousness issue. You know, we talk about why is no one covering this, da-da-da. It's like I think people see it. I- I think in some way, we have, like, totally lost respect for, like, the miraculousness of life. That- that's what our actions are reflecting. Like, we know a lot. We have the technology, the money, and the resources to fix all of this, the planet and health, and we're not. And that's why I think there's something darker happening on, like, the consciousness level, and I think we could get our way out of this if we... Like, I think it's gonna be hard to get our way out of this if we stick to, like, partisan politics and quibbling about individual policy ideas. I think it has to start with, like, are we committed to life and to awe and to connecting with source and then listening and moving our way out of here, or are we not? And if we choose not, which is what I think we're doing, I mean, I think there's huge light happening 'cause th- that's why everyone's interested in this i- that's why a lot of people are interested in this issue right now, but, like, if we don't, like, I do think we're on the road to existential disaster 'cause we're that powerful now. Like, our-

   9. JRJoe Rogan20:54

      Mm-hmm.

   10. CMCasey Means20:54

       And so, um, you know, I think step one is us deciding, like, what choice do we want to make in this lifetime? Do we wanna- do we wanna believe that humans are- that- that- that life is a miracle, this universe is a miracle, our bodies are miracles, and we want to connect with God in this lifetime, and we want to build and respect these temples that are interconnected with the Earth to do that, or do we not? And, like, that's the choice we have right now. And I think we have to take that very seriously. And I think a lot of the political stuff that's happening, maha, it's all just a reflection of people wanting to find a way to fight for life and not knowing how. Um, but- but on the biggest level, like, that's what I think is kinda happening

5. 21:38 – 26:07

   Why are girls going through periods so much earlier

   1. CMCasey Means21:38

      here.

   2. JRJoe Rogan21:38

      And wanting life to make more sense-

   3. CMCasey Means21:40

      Mm-hmm.

   4. JRJoe Rogan21:40

      ... than- than- than just this constant state of fatigue and-

   5. CMCasey Means21:43

      Yeah.

   6. JRJoe Rogan21:43

      ... constantly dealing with diseases. I want to talk about a couple specific things you said, and, uh, I have questions. Like, why are girls going through periods so much earlier?

   7. CMCasey Means21:53

      Well, if you ask The New York Times-

   8. JRJoe Rogan21:55

      (laughs)

   9. CMCasey Means21:55

      ... they'll write a headline that says, "Girls are going through puberty way, way e- earlier, and no one knows, has- e- has any idea why." And of course, that's because there's not a double-blind, placebo-controlled, peer-reviewed, you know, RCT in a- in a journal that can exactly pinpoint the one reason why it's happening. But again, if we put the dots together, which of course I am gonna be called, like, not evidence-based for saying that, what's happening in our environment right now? So, what drives early puberty is excess estrogens, right? We're, like, we're- we're pushing estrogens to basically, you know, spark that whole process of puberty. Well, look at our world. Where are these ex- why would we be having extra estrogens? Well, let's look at our environment, the plastics. So, we've got plastics, as you know, everywhere. I love, you were talking about this, I think, with Brigham, like, you've got the- the metal cups, and I love it. But, like, there have been eight billion metric tons of plastic produced on planet Earth since about 1907 with- when plastic was commercialized. And the interesting thing about plastic is that when it breaks down, it acts like a xenoestrogen, an exogenous estrogen mo- molecule that can literally bind to our estrogen receptors and act like estrogens. So now we've got, you know, we've got, you know this, like, we've got plastic effing everywhere. It's literally in the air we're breathing, the nanoparticles. It's in our food. It's in our water. It's in everything. Um, and we've now found plastics in every human organ. So of course that's affecting our bodies and our young girls' bodies. It's actually affecting our bodies in utero. Um, there was this recent study that was done that showed 100% of placentas that were dissected had microplastics in them. So, that's one. Number two, look at the pesticides. So, there are pesticides, actually, where their molecular activity is to increase aromatase, the enzyme that converts testosterone to estrogen. So, atrazine, which is banned in Europe, but we spray 70 million pounds of it per year in the US, increases aromatase, which converts testosterone to estrogen. Illegal overseas, and it is-... we buy it from other countries. So China and Germany and other countries are selling us a chemical, of which 70 million pounds are spread on our food, invisible and tasteless, which upregulates aromatase and converts testosterone to estrogen. So, that's number two. Um, and then you look at just the fat that we have on our bodies. So fat, and especially visceral fat, the metabolically active fat around our midline, that is a metabolically active organ that actually converts testosterone to estrogen. Um, so that, that's, so we are living in this like wildly estrogenic environment that is created by humans, and it's all invisible. And, and, you know, i- i- again, it's like how would you even do the study, right, to show that?

   10. CMCalley Means24:46

       Right. Uh-huh.

   11. CMCasey Means24:47

       And yet it's, if you put the pieces together, it's very clear. Now, go into later life and talking about estrogens, we've got a huge percentage of American women on birth control pills. That's, of course, post, hopefully post-puberty. But we're thr- we're putting women on exogenous estrogens for acne, for PCOS, for menstrual irregularity. Sometimes, of course, for actual birth control. But it's like, it's, it's very ubiquitous now in the environment. And, and it's like, it, when you kinda know this stuff, you're like, "How are we allowing this to happen?" And then of course, it's affecting boys too, right? You know, and so I kinda just think about this world we're living in where it's tons of estrogens. It's not like there's a bunch of exogenous testosterones, right? It's not like the plastics are also stimulating testosterone. So we got these estrogens, then we're barreled with sugar, and it's literally like it's in our kids' school lunches. There's sugar everywhere. Sugar is driving the visceral fat in kids, which is turning estrogen to testosterone. So it's like we live in a world that's basically feminizing us, which for women, that's gonna make puberty early. For men, it's gonna feminize them. You know, and then we also have an entire food system that's driving visceral fat to make us more, more estrogen sort of rich. And what is this doing? I think in a lotta ways, it's, it's, it's depleting American vigor, right? Like, we're living-

   12. CMCalley Means26:02

       Yeah.

   13. CMCasey Means26:02

       ... in this estrogen stew that's hard to get away from.

6. 26:07 – 32:48

   Why are we living in this estrogen stew

   1. CMCasey Means26:07

   2. CMCalley Means26:07

      This is where I think my experience ties, is that on the foundational level why this is happening, it's because these studies are all funded by the chemical companies, by the food companies. Like, like we've almost been, I think, misled by the experts when it comes to chronic conditions and when it comes to nutrition to take leave of our common sense. Like, do we need to wait for a double-blind placebo-controlled human randomized control sto-, uh, study to know, uh, whether 0.5% of our brains being plastic is a good thing right now?

   3. CMCasey Means26:35

      It's the reason data is showing.

   4. CMCalley Means26:36

      Do, do, do we need to have a human randomized control 10-year study to know whether an herbicide like g- glyphosate that's being sprayed on almost all of our food and our children's food, that people have to wear hazmat suits to spray and kills every single organism in sight, do we need to wait for a study? Like, like we've been, we've, we've, just as the medical system is siloed, we've siloed all these questions and just taken leave of our common sense. Like, animals in the wild, wolves in the wild are not getting, like, chronic rates of obesity, diabetes, metabolic dysfunction. Like, we're born with an innate sense of, of knowing what's good for us, of knowing that the sun is good, of knowing that, you know, steak is good, that broccoli is good. We can't overeat those things. The problem is we've been lied to by the professors at Harvard, at Stanford, at Tufts Nutrition School, that I believe are essentially, from my experience, PR for the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry that accepts all these things as a given. I mean, Tufts Nutrition School, 80% of their budget's from food companies. Um, you know, by our estimate, 50% of Stanford Medical School's budget comes, somehow touches pharma. So just fundamentally, like o- on the, on the grassroots, like micro level, these industries have co-opted our institution of trust and let us

   5. Yeah.

   6. ... still be this... And you ask why we're the only people speaking out, because, because we've made it that evidence-based medicine really accepts all this disease growing and happening. And 95% of medical spending right now is on disease once it's happened, it's on managing conditions. And there's no higher levels of trust in our society than the NIH, than the FDA, than Harvard Med School, than Stanford Med School. So all of them are enforcing this. And then it's really just interesting where their emphasis is. Like, I was just reading the other day that California, the medical board is checking the licenses of doctors, putting them under review if they write five vaccine exception notes. You literally are like on the verge of losing your license if you even go outside the orthodoxy on vaccines. But where is that level of emphasis, where is that level of focus, where is that level of rigor around metabolic health for kids, around nutrition for kids, right? I think it is a big deal, like of kids getting polio, but like 50% of teens are obese or overweight right now. Like we have pre-diabetes skyrocketing. Like the medical system knows how to focus on something. They know how to tell Congress that there's no cost too high for something. Like when it comes to pharmaceutical interventions, we're bankrupt as a country with interventions once people get sick. Like, like I truly believe, and this gets to like the solutions and how I actually think this is an optimistic story, people waking up, why it's an existential kind of knife's edge we're on right now, we can change this really click- it, the, the, quick. The issue is that interests that profit from us being in fear, that just fundamentally is a statement of economic fact, profit from us being sick, profit from us being depressed, profit from us being infertile, they have co-opted our institutions of trust and they've co-opted the clinical guidelines. Like literally when I was a junior employee, I helped Koch file money to the American Di- uh, Diabetes Association. Okay? The American Diabetes Association says that if you have diabetes, you don't need to worry about your sugar intake.

   7. Wow.

   8. They say it's not tied to food. Right?

   9. That is so crazy.

   10. The American Academy of Pediatrics right now is saying that if your child is overweight, slightly overweight, overweight, 12 years old, dietary inferences don't wait. It says do not wait to see if dietary inferences work. Ozempic, it's now being studied on six years old. The American Psychiatry Association, right? The psychiatrists, the, the standard of care, if your child is a little sad, SSRI-... immediate intervention, right? SSRI rates have doubled among high schoolers in the past five years. Right? If your child's a little fidgety, the standard of care, right? It's not asking whether they're in the sunlight, not asking if they're too sedentary, not asking if they're being force-fed ultra-processed food, which would make any animal crazy if we subject them to what kids are subjected to. No discussion with that. It's just not in the clinical guidelines. So these doctors, these good people like Casey, go into the medical system. We're i- we're, we're this magnet for smart people. We get them in for the right reasons. There's easier ways to make money. But they come in, and they get saddled with one skill, they get saddled with a bunch of debt, and then they're realizing this is a rigged system. Some people, a few people unfortunately had the courage like Casey to drop out. I thought she was an idiot. I was like, "What are you doing?" I was, you know, we were kind of brainwashed to do the traditional system. I couldn't believe it. We didn't talk for a year. But, yeah, it, it just, it just is hard for people to understand that you can walk away from this, 'cause, 'cause our society stamps these credentials on people. Like, what's better than being the, the dean of Stanford Med School? The dean of Stanford Med School right now was Casey's same specialty, head and neck surgery. And the way you rise up in medicine is you do a specialty, you focus on, you know, a couple inches of the face, and then he focused on a fellowship on an even narrower part of the body. Like, that's how you rise up. You've siloed the situation. Anything that's not siloed is considered not scientific, is considered wack, wacky. We... They've called us the what, the, the woo-woo caucus-

   11. CMCasey Means31:21

       Yeah.

   12. CMCalley Means31:21

       ... talking about these nutritions? The medical system enforces this siloed view where diabetes, heart disease, depression, kidney disease, cancer, they're all separate things. If you have those conditions, you're seeing five separate doctors not... They're not speaking to each other. That's very profitable, but very problematic. So, the solution is, is, is truly just having the clinical guidelines of how diseases are assessed and how they're intervened, uh, changed to following the science which is, these are metabolic conditions. 90% of the US medical budget is tied to managing preventable and reversible lifestyle conditions. If we had people on Medicaid, instead of jamming with the statins, jamming them with, um, Ozempic, jamming them with SSRIs... You know, lower income people who are going bankrupt from Medicaid, $1.3 trillion. It's growing. It's a bigger part of the budget than the defense budget. If we literally just asked, how do we have that money to spur thriving, to incentivize exercise, to incentivize healthier food for these folks, we'd be a transformed country. It's, it's literally that simple. But it, it takes that moral courage. It takes Americans actually saying, "No, I am gonna go against the NIH. I am gonna ask questions." But we... Of course, we have violent... I was just reading, you know, back, uh, what was it, 2022, like every single public health official in America said you were like the enemy number one for talking about sunlight and talking about food and talking about healthy eating. COVID was a metabolic condition. COVID was a foodborne illness. (laughs) Like, if you were metabolically healthy, you did not die of COVID, like pretty demonstrably. And you were threat number one.

7. 32:48 – 39:58

   How courageous are we

   1. CMCalley Means32:48

   2. CMCasey Means32:48

      Yeah.

   3. Go ahead.

   4. Yeah, yeah, no, I think, I think Cally's getting into something also that I, I think is part of reason that why... I mean, there are a lot of, fortunately there are a lot of doc- doctors speaking out right now, and I have so much like gratitude for all the other not only doctors, but like NPs, DOs, chiropractors, like nurse practitioners, all these amazing people, uh, who are speaking up and getting a lot of shit for it. But this is very tribal, you know? And I think that when you think about... And it's hard. Like, this is a primal instinct to not break out of the pact, and to not, um, go against what the, the norm is. So, I think in a lot of ways, what we're dealing with, like here, is going to come down to like how courageous are we willing to be to move humanity back. And, and, and by humanity, very much also the Earth's health, 'cause they're interconnected. They're o- they're one and the same. Um, how courageous are we gonna be to stand up for that? Or are we gonna let things slip through our fingers? And I think the tribe... When I was in medical school, like it's, it's amazing because of the interest and the fact that, you know, Stanford got a $3 million grant from Pfizer while I was there, to revamp the curriculum, and the fact that the American Diabetes Association that makes clinical guidelines is getting millions of dollars from Coke and Cadbury, and the American Diabetes Association is getting millions of dollars from Mead Johnson that makes formula, and Abbott Nutrition that makes formula, and vaccine companies that make flu vaccines. Like, the fact that the money... I mean, 8,000 major conflicts of interest were just reported at the NIH with food and pharma. So, at every level, the, um, the medical guidelines that if you step out of, you are at risk for litigation as a doctor, and the NIH, you know, ah, like, you know, this thing that we all respect, tons of conflicts of interest, and the medical school's accepting money. The tribe that then you become a part of as a trainee is a tribe that only hears one thing. And so I have a lot of compassion for doctors, 'cause I was. I did go through medical school and not learn any of the things that I had to learn after to actually figure out how to help myself and others truly generate foundational cellular health to be healthy. Like, I, it's, I just look back at what I've had to learn since medical school. You know, I learned about basically organ specific physiology, pharmacology, and then in residency, I learned how to do surgery. And then, of course, throughout the whole thing, I learned how to bill. But that, that is ultimately, those are not the tools that actually generate foundational cellular health. You know, 80% of medical schools in the United States don't require a single nutrition course, not one minute of nutrition.

   5. Wow.

   6. And yet 90% of our healthcare costs are tied to diseases. The things that are torturing American lives are tied to food. And doctors, it's, it's not a hammer in our toolbox. I didn't learn, you know, I didn't learn at Stanford Medical School that 95% of the people on the USDA Food Guidelines for America Committee had a conflicts of interest with the food c- with the food industry. I didn't learn that there were 8,000 conflicts of interest at the NIH. I didn't learn that there are eight billion tons of plastic on planet Earth that are degrading into en- es- uh, estrogen (laughs) you know, uh, analogs. I did not learn that there's six billion pounds of pesticides sprayed on our global food supply every single year, uh, most from China and Germany, and that these are literally tied very strongly to Alzheimer's, dementia, cancer, obesity, mitochondrial dysfunction, infertility, um, ADHD.... liver dysfunction. I didn't learn that, you know, simply taking 7,000 steps per day can slash your risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's, dementia, even gastric reflux by 40 to 60%, and the average American's walking 3,500 steps per day. Like, we're literally just not moving as a country. And if you just walk a little bit, 7,000 steps, which takes, like, 45 minutes, you slash your risk of every major, you know, chronic disease. I didn't learn that we need to be getting sunlight, because circadian biology dictates our cellular health. Like, we are diurnal animals that have biologic processes that happen during the day and other biologic processes that happen at night. And the way your body knows whether it's day or night is if you get photons hitting your retina and your skin cells. Pretty basic. Pretty foundational for human health. Didn't learn anything about it. Didn't learn anything about sunlight, didn't learn anything about photons, didn't learn anything about sleep. You know, we're sleeping 20% less on average than we were a hundred years ago, and sleep is a huge risk factor. You c- you can, in an experimental setting, take a young healthy person and subject them to sleep deprivation for five nights, and they become prediabetic. Well, 50% of Americans are prediabetic and type 2 diabetic, and we're not sleeping well. And I didn't learn not one minute on sleep. So, all the things and so many more. And of course, nothing about nutrition. Um, you know, and Marty Makary talks about this. Like, I certainly didn't learn that medical error and medication is the third-leading cause of death in the United States. I learned that patient comes in, and I need to label their diagnosis and give them a pill. So, it's, when I, when I speak of the tribalism, it's like, I have so much compassion for doctors who feel stuck right now. They're stuck in a broken system. The tribe that they're a part of has taught them a certain set of things. There are huge, trillions of dollars of interests to make the things that they learn a specific myopic lens. And putting together dots is risky, because if you step outside the guidelines, you're at risk for intense litigation and potentially ridicule. I mean, I'm called pseudoscientific alt-right, you know, woo-woo caucus all the time. And, and so it's scary. And I think that, that fundamentally, this is again why it comes down to, like, this is actually more of a consciousness and spiritual issue, because it's like, we need to pray for courage. We need to sit down every morning and decide what we want for the future. What do we want? We're all players. We're all important. We all need to use our voices. Being complicit, like, what future do we want, and what are we willing to do for it? And get our priorities straight. Um, is our priority, like, our house and our mortgage and our boat and our comfortable life that's killing us? Or is it to elevate, to be stewards of the future and of the planet and to make some harder choices? And I think one thing I would just say if there are doctors listening, I- and I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but, like, this tribe on the other side, you know, that I think we're all in of, like, promoting health, like, it's beautiful. And people are really healthy and happy, and it's not that hard, and it's not that expensive, and everyone is welcome here in this tribe of trying to move humanity towards more harmonious, you know, future. Um, and, and everyone is welcome. It's bipartisan. It's really about, like, like Brigham was saying, like, this is about team humanity, and team humanity always by extension-

   7. JRJoe Rogan39:38

      Yeah.

   8. CMCasey Means39:38

      ... will be team planet, because they're interconnected. And so, I think we need to break out of that, that sort of, like, more our past, you know, human selves of tribalism and really realize, like, we need to be brave, we need to be courageous, we need to fight for life. And, uh, and it's pretty, pretty bright and wonderful when we start doing that.

8. 39:58 – 40:41

   The Zeitgeist

   1. CMCasey Means39:58

   2. JRJoe Rogan39:58

      I don't think most people were aware of the problems in regards to the food system, in regards to pesticides, and, and, and r- regards to, like, how people learn nutrition in medical school. Mm-hmm. I don't think they were really aware of that until about five or six years ago.

   3. CMCasey Means40:15

      Mm-hmm.

   4. JRJoe Rogan40:15

      I think it started to c- creep into the zeitgeist. I think before that, people just put all their faith in doctors, and then I think COVID happened, and people lost a lot of faith in the medical system. They lost a lot of faith in the NIH. They, they saw all the contradictory videos of Fauci saying, you know, "You're not gonna catch COVID."

   5. CMCasey Means40:33

      (laughs)

   6. JRJoe Rogan40:33

      And Rachel Maddow and all that shit, and you're like, "Oh my God. This is all a bought and paid-for system to promote profit."

9. 40:41 – 47:08

   The History

   1. JRJoe Rogan40:41

   2. CMCasey Means40:41

      Yeah.

   3. JRJoe Rogan40:41

      And-

   4. CMCalley Means40:41

      Yeah, I think, I think, um, Jamaal talked a little bit about this, but I think it's so important, 'cause nobody realizes this, is I think a lot of people listening and us years ago, it's just like, "This sounds conspiratorial." And it's just like, what actually happened, and there's a couple, like, really important dates that happened that are historical that I think, like, set this structure really intentionally. The first was 1909, the Flexner Report. So literally, John D. Rockefeller's personal lawyer wrote the report for Congress that basically set the standard that's the standard today for medical education, and it literally says in the binding guidelines that holistic and nutr- holistic health and nutrition and anything about interconnectedness of the body is pseudoscience. It says we need to name the condition and cut it out or prescribe it.

   5. JRJoe Rogan41:23

      And what year is this?

   6. CMCalley Means41:24

      1909.

   7. JRJoe Rogan41:25

      So, (laughs) they're, they're still going by the recommendations of 1909?

   8. CMCasey Means41:30

      We still follow the Flexner Report.

   9. CMCalley Means41:31

      Yeah, some ... A policy, I mean, and it, it-

   10. JRJoe Rogan41:34

       That is so crazy.

   11. CMCalley Means41:34

       We can get, we can get to policies, but, but, like, rescinding the Flexner Report and having updated scientific education and standard of care guidelines based on what we've learned since 1909 about the majesty of the interconnectedness of our body is a really good first start, because we're binded under a law ju- just demonstrably just, like ... Again, not conspiratorial. John D. Rockefeller's personal lawyer wrote this report. Why? Because John D. Rockefeller is the father of the pharmaceutical industry and created pharmaceuticals from byproducts of oil production and was the first investor into Johns Hopkins and other major medical schools, University of Chicago, and started the modern education program for health. There were some big issues in the health. This was the Wild West. But he created Johns Hopkins and the standard of residency training as a way to silo diseases very intentionally and then prescribe his products and inventions as the top pharmaceutical maker. And the medical schools that he created were basically a distribution system to him. Okay. So, you get to World War II.... up until World War II, around that time, the 1950s, 1960s, I would argue almost any medical miracle you can think of, or any listener can think of, was created before that time. You know, it's all acute situations, emergency surgical procedures, sanitation procedures, antibiotics to make an infection not deadly. Almost every medical miracle we can think of was something that was gonna kill you right away, an infectious disease, and then, and th- and then it... you take the pill or take the treatment for a finite period of time and you stop it. Or do the surgery quickly and you're, you're cured. That... Those are medical miracles, and we had a lot of good things happen up until World War II. Very intentionally, the medical industry saw the birth control pill in the late 1950s, 1960s, and the birth control pill was the first pill in world history that people took for longer than a couple weeks. It was the first pill ever that it's like, "Oh, interesting, you can actually convince someone to take a pill for years, for almost most their life." Recurring revenue. And there was a huge emphasis of the medical industry to take the trust engendered up until 1960... RFK talks about this. We didn't spend money on chronic disease management. All medicine was acute issues. Chronic disease, you know, diabetes, obesity, that was outside the doctor's office. They saw that you could medicalize chronic conditions. Today, 95... 90% to 95% of spending is on chronic conditions. So, we... what did we do? We... In the 1970s, literally, the Sackler family, the d-... you know, the... their, their grand, uh, kids did and kids did the opioids. Uh, their, their, uh, their forebearers created Valium, and 30% of women in the United States in the 1970s were on Valium. Time Magazine, "Valium Nation," Mommy's Little Helper.

   12. Yeah.

   13. So we started creating all these psychiatric conditions. We started medicalizing heart disease. We started medicalizing all these, type 2 diabetes, started creating r- uh, academic research totally funded by the pharmaceutical industry saying that type 2 diabetes isn't reversible, that it's basically genetic, heart disease, all these things, and started pilling them, started pilling them. Then what happened to food? Chronic disease wasn't that big of a deal in the 1970s and 1980s. The-... You, you look at the graph, you look at the graph of all chronic conditions, there's just a sharp turn in the 1980s. It's the... literally to... almost to the year of the Surgeon General report, uh, saying smoking wasn't great. So, the second that report came out, Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds were two of the largest companies in the world. It wasn't like Microsoft and Google on the top companies list. It was like cigarette companies. You know, "Dope mean" is a really good thing to sell, which, which the tech companies do now. And they used their cash piles, and by 1990, the three largest M&A deals in American history, in world history, were cigarette companies buying food companies. So, you had Nabisco bought by R.J. Reynolds, you had Kraft and US Food buy, and you see those graphs of, of, of all the food companies owned by like a couple, a couple companies? That was the cigarette companies. And they did two things very, very intentionally. They took over the institutions of trust to say ultra-processed food was healthy, and then they took their scientists and rigged the food itself to make it more addictive. Not to kill kids, but to make it more addictive. So, you had that literal food pyramid which said, "Ultra-processed food is great, low fat, carbs," base of the pyramid. That was constructed literally by the cigarette industry to promote their addictive products. And this weaponization of food, as I call it, it's not just like this conspiracy. Literally, the cigarette industry, those two companies, Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds, were the two largest food producers in the United States. Like 50% of American food were created by cigarette companies in the 1990s. And they have got us addicted and weaponized this food, and all chronic conditions have just shot up. It's because that ultra-processed food's literally, by tobacco industry scientists, hijacks our evolutionary biology. Again, you can't overeat grass-fed steak, but these food, with scientists much smarter than any of us, that's what they're doing. They're, they're, they're shutting off our society signals. The byproduct of this cheap, addictive food, which we don't even have research for yet, is that it's sprayed with all these chemicals. It's sprayed with 10,000 chemicals that are allowed in the United States when only 400 are allowed in Europe. All these chemicals to make the food addictive, to make the food cheap, you know, to do the monocropping. And that food is absolutely... and we don't need to wait for the research on this. These chemicals, these neurotoxins are destroying our cells, destroying our microbiome in ways we don't fully understand. So, I just wanna make clear to everyone, like this has happened like very intentionally. Like, like a- a- and it can be undone pretty quickly too, but we have to realize this isn't a conspiracy. It's true corruption, um, that, um, that, that, that happened deliberately.

   14. CMCasey Means47:07

       I would just add

10. 47:08 – 53:10

    The Research

    1. CMCasey Means47:08

       a few more-

    2. CMCalley Means47:08

       Oh.

    3. CMCasey Means47:08

       ... like dates. I, like, you know, I think one thing about the research, you know, we're one of the only countries in the world where the burden of proof for harm, like we, we allow these chemicals to just enter our food system. We have 10,000 chemicals in our food system. Uh, Europe, only 400. Because they have to show that it's safe before they use it. We're allowed to use it and then, and then on-... uh, you know, only if there's issues that crop up do people have to do research. So, you know, there's this like ridiculous GRAS, Generally Recognized As Safe designation, which is essentially a company self-assesses whether the chemical that they are creating is generally recognized as safe. No one's overseeing it. And Friggen talks about this. Like, compassion for the FDA. They're overwhelmed. There's a lot of stuff to do. It's kind of like a hoarder's house. Where do we even start? Like, I don't necessarily know if I buy that. I think that it's pretty, pretty bad and bought off that we have all these chemicals. But they basically just have to self-designate if it's generally recognized as safe and then it can go into our food system. One thing that I find really interesting is like, that I really reflect on a lot is like what is the difference between a food chemical and a drug? They're all just synthetic molecules that are made in factories i- in, in labs by scientists. Do you know what the difference is? Intended use. So basically, if the intended use is for food, you can synthesize almost anything you want and put it in food. We are being mass drugged and poisoned in our food system with 10,000 virtually unregulated chemicals which have bought off papers saying that they are safe. I mean, you look at what happened with all the Monsanto litigation about non-Hodg- non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. They had to release this whole thing called the Monsanto Papers, they were declassified, where they ghost-writ scientific... they ghost-wrote scientific papers saying that glyphosate was-... is safe. So there's all this corruption in there where basically we have 10,000 unregulated chemicals in our food system and we're getting sick a- as hell, obviously. And then you've got the evidence-based people saying, "Well, we need to have a 10-year longitudinal study to show that glyphosate is causing XYZ disease." And it's like, obviously that's not the right approach, because first of all, it is the synergistic combination-

    4. JRJoe Rogan49:19

       Hmm.

    5. CMCasey Means49:19

       ... of all the toxins that are now in our environment that are leading to all these pleiotropic health issues. That's very hard to study. So we have to get our heads out of our ass and use our common sense and realize what's going on and, and, and not wait 10 years with these, you know, NIH-funded studies that are going to be corrupted. And, you know, I think... So that's just, uh, that's just one thing about the food chemicals. I, I just wanted to add to your point, Cal, like, um, some other dates. Like, you look at the, the processed food emergence. Processed food, like, really didn't start taking off until these mergers. Like, it's... There was a little bit of a start of it. Process- ultra-processed foods did not exist before World War II. We... And, you know, we needed to have shelf-stable food for soldiers and things like that, that we could ship, and so there were maybe some good intentions there. But then it got ex- there was an opportunity there that got seen. Um, and we can also, you know, weaponize the feminist movement against, you know, "Oh, being in the kitchen, you're a slave." You know, you, you don't... That your value's outside the home, you need to climb the corporate ladder. "Here, have this convenience food that we basically made for soldiers, and we're gonna tell you that this is actually your liberation."

    6. JRJoe Rogan50:26

       Hmm.

    7. CMCasey Means50:26

       So of course, we got people not cooking.

    8. JRJoe Rogan50:28

       Not worried about their kids.

    9. CMCasey Means50:28

       Families aren't, families aren't eating together anymore. Like, um, you know, kids are eating s- 67% of children's calories now are ultra-processed foods. These means foods that come from a factory, made by food scientists. Not just processed, ultra-processed. The, the highest form of processing, 67% of calories. Then you go to the 1970s and you, we have the advent of high-fructose corn syrup, which as Calley talks about, this preceded some of the mergers, but high-fructose corn syrup is a weap- uh, weapon of mass destruction that basically food scientists used an understanding about hibernating animals, like bears, who fructose is one of the only types of calories where instead of making you feel satiated, it makes you more hungry. And this is evolutionarily, and we knew this. In the fall, when animals are preparing for hibernation and they start eating fructose-rich berries, they need to put on a ton of fat for winter, and so there's a feed-forward mechanism with fructose where it actually gets the bears to be hungry and even violent to out-compete other animals to get as many berries as possible in a short period of time, to lay 3D print fat for winter. So you, so you have the scientists understanding this and say, "Hey, we can make liquid fructose thousand times more potent than the fructose you'd find in berries." Same molecule, but in higher concentration. And we can add it to everything. We can add it to salad dressing, we're gonna add it to ketchup, we're gonna add it to children's school lunches, we're gonna add it, obviously to sodas, and we're gonna make people insatiable. We're make- gonna make their bodies and their brains think that they're preparing for winter that's never coming. And that, and there has been research that shows that high-fructose corn syrup is associated with violence, ADHD in kids, all of these different things. Just last thing I'll mention, flash forward, 1986, I think another very important date, which is the date when the litigation went through that said we couldn't sue vaccine manufacturers, and, um, the Vaccine Safety Act. That's a very important date in the whole history, because it is the fir- one of the first times where we were able to pass legislation through Congress that said that pharmaceutical companies could not be sued for wrongdoing, um, and that still is present today. Um, they basically put together a little, paltry little fund that people could apply to get, um, you know, no-fault reimbursements for, for, for vaccine harm, but you cannot sue the company. So you start to get companies being legally immune from wrongdoing, which has then accelerated, and they're now starting to try and push things like that for pesticides as well. So, that's just some of the history of like why we're, why we are where we are today. It's not rocket science. This has all been very institutionalized and structured, and it's the last 50 years. Like, we can undo all of this with leadership. And so that's just a little bit of the picture of, of how we're, we are where we are today.

11. 53:10 – 54:45

    One Thing About Fructose

    1. CMCasey Means53:10

    2. JRJoe Rogan53:10

       And-

    3. Just real-

    4. ... before-

    5. Oh, please, yeah, please.

    6. CMCasey Means53:10

       ... can I say one thing about-

    7. JRJoe Rogan53:11

       Yeah.

    8. CMCasey Means53:11

       ... the fructose corn syrup? I'm, I'm so glad you brought that up, because I didn't know that there was a unique way that it makes it more addictive and, and kills your satiety. Oh, yeah.

    9. JRJoe Rogan53:20

       Or increases it or, uh, or kills it rather. Because it, I'd always thought that sugar was sugar, and this is one of the arguments that a lot of people that are pooh-poohing all this stuff, like, "Oh, this is nonsense. Sugar is sugar."

    10. CMCasey Means53:32

        Yeah.

    11. JRJoe Rogan53:32

        Like, there's no difference between the sugar in high-fructose corn syrup versus the sugar in an apple.

    12. CMCasey Means53:36

        No, it's, it's really interesting. There's two amazing books on this. Um, Richard Johnson from Univer- Usr- University of Colorado wrote Nature Wants Us To Be Fat, and then David Perlmutter wrote, um, Drop Acid. Both books are about a molecule called uric acid, which is unique to fructose metabolism. So when fructose is metabolized in the body, not like glucose, it creates uric acid, which creates oxidative stress and mitochondrial dysfunction in the brain and the body that, if you have mitochondrial dysfunction, you're not gonna be able to process sugars to energy. You know, mitochondria, powerhouse of the cell. So you break the mitochondria with the excess fructose overloading the mitochondria with uric acid, and then what happens? You can't turn sugars to energy. So what do you do? You turn sugars to fat. So you start 3D finting pra- you start 3D printing fat 'cause you break the mitochondria with excess fructose, um, and on top of that, the mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative stress, when happen in the brain, is what may inspire the violence and the ADHD and all that stuff, to make the bears manic so they can get as much berries as possible. This is what's happening in every kid in every classroom in America now. Um, and so that's kind of some of the biology very simply about,

12. 54:45 – 56:20

    Apple Fructose

    1. CMCasey Means54:45

       about what's happening with fructose.

    2. JRJoe Rogan54:46

       So the, the apple is probably a bad example, but like, cane sugar.

    3. CMCasey Means54:50

       Mm-hmm.

    4. JRJoe Rogan54:50

       Is cane sugar fructose-based?

    5. CMCasey Means54:52

       Well, it's, uh, generally is gonna have sucrose, which is gonna have some amount of glucose and fructose, but this is the thing about...... fruit is that we have 40 trillion cells, and we have the ability to clear uric acid, and we have the ability to process fructose. In a physiologic amount, we're never gonna have the uric acid increasing and overloading the mitochondria if we're eating an apple. It's when you're eating 20, 30 times the fructose that an apple has, and you're-

    6. CMCalley Means55:21

       Drinking it.

    7. CMCasey Means55:21

       ... literally pouring it down that all of a sudden-

    8. CMCalley Means55:23

       And Starbucks.

    9. CMCasey Means55:23

       ... imagine you just get this huge rise in uric acid in the body and other things that are happening, and, uh, and that's when it overwhelms. So it's, it's, it's a bit of that dose makes the poison, because our body has the ability to excrete toxins. Our body has the ability to deal with some heavy metals. Our body has the ability to probably clear some level of glyphosate. But we can't clear all of it all the time 24 hours a day in 100 times the quantity of all these things together. And the, the research and the evidence- based thing, and this cult of the science, they love to ignore that. The idea of synergistic effects of this, of this overwhelming breaking of our cellular res- cellular resources is just conveniently forgotten, because we study things in isolation. That's literally the definition of how a double-blind placebo-controlled study happens. It's one variable, you know, and one thing that you're testing.

    10. CMCalley Means56:17

        You can't do it on food.

    11. CMCasey Means56:18

        That doesn't make sense.

    12. CMCalley Means56:19

        Yeah.

    13. CMCasey Means56:19

        We live in a toxic

13. 56:20 – 1:15:33

    Toxic Stew

    1. CMCasey Means56:20

       stew. Um...

    2. CMCalley Means56:22

       The only, only answer of double-blind placebo-controlled studies, which every guest comes on is just like, "That's just the gold standard. That's just, everyone just accepts that that's what you need." A double-blind placebo-controlled study, the only answer is a pill, like essentially. You can't test psychedelics on that way. You can't test food. You can't test exercise. You can't blind those things. So anything that actually, uh, recognizes the, the unison and interconnectivity of why we're getting sick, uh, can't be studied through a double-blind placebo-controlled study. So you actually have the FDA that's basically created ... You saw this with the recent, uh, uh, MDMA decision. It, it's basically rigged that the only thing that can be approved through the, you know, top way we study things and, and, and approve drugs is a synthetic pill. That, that's the only thing that it can basically lead to through a double-blind placebo-controlled study.

    3. CMCasey Means57:08

       It's like with vaccines. It's like, yeah, I bet that one vaccine probably isn't causing autism, but what about the, the, the 20 that they're getting before 18 months? Like, we don't look at it in synergistic. You know? And, and so that's, that's a big problem, and this is where the cult of the science, and I say the science specifically 'cause science is beautiful. Using the scientific method and using that way of inquiry into the natural world is a beautiful art. But weaponizing papers that are often bought for, um, or corrupted, or, and, you know, they ... The leaders of some of our key medical journals have actually even said that 50% of scientific research that published ends up being wrong. So it's bought for, corrupted or wrong. Um, we, we rely on this, and if ... One interesting trend that we're seeing in our world is that if we do choose to put dots together or use our intuition, our God-given intuition, anything other than this particular way of examining things, you are dangerous. You are dangerous. And I think that that's something we need to really question. You know, I think especially as a woman, like, and I'm thinking about having kids soon. I'm, like, thinking about, like, wow, like, I, I have the ability in my body to, like, build a human, 3D print a human, pull in a soul to that human.

    4. CMCalley Means58:33

       Mm.

    5. CMCasey Means58:33

       I don't need a peer-reviewed study or a textbook to tell me how to do that. Our body and our, our intuition and our minds and the, the subtle things happening inside us are important. They are incredible. We have now been told that, like, you can't trust it and you are dangerous if you do that. And I think that's one of the reasons why I think parents are very frustrated right now, is because parenting, I'm not a parent yet, but, you know, Callie is. But, like, you know, w- when we're being told now that parents are the enemy for using their own judgment about their families and kids, like, I think that's probably ... It's, it's deeply frustrating to people. And, um, that's basically what we're being asked to do. So, yeah.

    6. JRJoe Rogan59:10

       Um, I wanna talk about Alzheimer's.

    7. CMCalley Means59:12

       Mm-hmm.

    8. JRJoe Rogan59:12

       That was the other thing that I wanted to talk about when you, when we talked about early puberty. You, you mentioned the escalating risks of Alzheimer's. Uh, when did Alzheimer's become a thing? Because I was reading this article that was saying that it was before the advent of seed oils, you very, very, very rarely saw it, if at all.

    9. CMCalley Means59:31

       Uh, no, it's been exploding like every single other chronic condition. I'll just quickly go, in ties to Casey's point she just made, this year in 2024 is the highest rates in American history of Alzheimer's, cancer, autoimmune conditions, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, kidney disease, autism. Every single chronic disease you could think of is at an all-time high, growing at an increasing rate as we spend more money to treat those conditions. So, I think what one point we're trying to make is that, you know, all of the NIH, all the FDA, it's all on accepting that trend as a given. It's totally washed their hands of it. And how do we find marginal pills to make this a little bit better, not asking why. And that question about Alzheimer's, the point we're trying to make is that when it comes to chronic conditions, which Alzheimer's is, you have to really not ask the Alzheimer's question. You have to ask why that's one branch on this tree. Obesity, right? This tree. And we talk about, and I think Casey has this amazing framework, you can literally look at five biomarkers, the biomarkers of, of metabolic dysfunction, HDL, triglycerides, blood sugar, blood pressure, and your waistline. And I'm not joking, I'm not being hyperbolic, if we fired every single researcher and every single ... And, and canceled every single grant in the US government for all chronic disease research and all nutrition research and created all policy to maximize those five biomarkers in America, you by definition don't have type 2 diabetes. You almost have a 0% chance of getting heart disease. You have very close to 0% chance of getting Alzheimer's. You are not obese by definition. Um, literally you go down every single-... chronic condition that is torturing American life. If you're diabetic, you're four times more likely to be depressed or suicidal because there are cells in our head, and diabetes is cellular dysregulation. So, so like, literally, I'm not ju- like, like on the, on the research and the science thing, you know, I think there's great heroes who've been, you know, getting into the weeds on the, on the research. But chronic disease is interconnected to basic lifestyle factors. I think this is a political issue, honestly. Every American needs to ask, is this an incremental issue where we need slightly better pharmaceutical interventions and slightly better research? Or is this a radical shift of understanding how our body's in- interconnected and understanding that, that it needs to be a shift in medicine and frankly, how we view the environment? Like, that is a question that we actually think is relatively urgent and relatively existential. Modern society is amazing, but as Casey said, this is dark right now. Like, if you believe what Casey's saying about these statistics about chronic disease, and you actually look at the math that we're growing two times with healthcare spitting the rate of GDP, it's the largest and fastest growing industry in the country. The larg- the fastest growing industry in the United States is not AI. (laughs) . It's not tech, it's healthcare. And as it grows, we get sicker, fatter, more depressed, more infertile. It is going to bankrupt the country and it's not slowing down. So if you actually believe this, believe we need a new paradigm, is it about getting better research or is it about actually saying the research is wrong? This whole paradigm of seeing chronic disease in silos is wrong. So I'm sure you-

    10. CMCasey Means1:02:32

        Yeah.

    11. CMCalley Means1:02:32

        ... can talk more about Alzheimer's, but, but it's, it's interconnected.

    12. CMCasey Means1:02:34

        Yeah, no, I think the point about incrementalism versus radical is the question we need to be asking ourselves. Like, we're not ... Yeah. And so in terms of Alzheimer's, so I think something, a really interesting framing is that the brain, you know, it's only 2% of our body weight, but it uses 20% of our body's energy. And there's been this theory with Alzheimer's of like, oh, it's the plaques in the brain, it's the tau and the tangles and the beta amyloid and all these things. And so we thought, okay, well if we can get rid of those with a drug, like maybe that'll, it'll improve. But no Alzheimer's drugs really work meaningfully. And more recently there's just been this understanding of like, okay, metabolic dysfunction is definitely going up. We know metabolic syndrome and diabetes are going up, and the brain uses 20% of the body's energy. And something that's happening in the body, like diabetes, is also happening in the brain. There's been this interes- Chris Palmer talks about this in such an amazing way in his book, Brain Energy. But like, we've somehow decided to separate the brain from the body as if they're different things, when in fact they're all just made of cells. They're all just made of cells that do the same things. They need to do me- met- metabolism to keep the cell working. So we've got this organ that uses 20% of our energy, and we've got 50% of Americans with pre-diabetes or type two di- diabetes, which is fundamentally a metabolic issue. And of course, the brain's basically underpowered. It's not getting the energy it needs and that's gonna ex- express itself as dementia. So it's been increasing in parallel with everything that's happening with our increasing diabetes rates. And then the early onset dementia and Alzheimer's disease, that has tripled since 2013. So younger people-

    13. CMCalley Means1:04:06

        Whoa.

    14. CMCasey Means1:04:06

        And that makes sense though. We've got 30% of teens now with pre-diabetes, that was like 0% in the past. You didn't have kids with the adult onset diabetes in the past. And so you've got now 30% of teens with pre-diabetes. You've got, you've got middle-aged people now, 50% with pre-diabetes or type two diabetes. Of course, that's also creating energetic deficit. So this neurometabolic, neuroenergetic theory of Alzheimer's, maybe with these cells crying out for health- help, maybe some of these plaques that we're seeing are actually a protective mechanism. The brain actually laying down almost like protective shielding. It's a response to an underlying metabolic issue as opposed to the problem itself. But of course, in our paradigm we're like, "We just gotta get rid of that symptom of the problem." When in fact actually if we could unencumber the brain to be able to make energy properly, make good energy properly, that's why our book is called Good Energy, they would actually be able to energi- you know, to heal, to heal itself and to have the power to do its work, which is cognitive thinking. Um-

    15. CMCalley Means1:05:09

        But is-

    16. CMCasey Means1:05:09

        There's-

    17. CMCalley Means1:05:09

        I- I sorry.

    18. CMCasey Means1:05:09

        I was just gonna say, the, the, an amazing book about Alzheimer's that just hasn't gotten as much attention as I think it should is Dale Bredesen's book, The End of Alzheimer's. 'Cause he talks about when you really look at the research, there are about 36 different biomarkers and factors. I think he calls 'em like the 36 holes in the roof of what creates... Like, if it's raining and you plug one hole, your s- house is still gonna be filled with water. You have to plug all 36 holes to prevent or reverse Alzheimer's dise- disease. And of course, all of these are related in some way to metabolic health, but it's things like your vitamin D levels, your insulin levels, um, the amount of, uh, you know, movement you're getting. Vitamin D, insulin, B12, other things like that. These, these things that we know are part and parcel with metabolic health. So, and there was an amazing Lancet paper from a couple years ago that showed that if we just got on top of some of the basic modifiable factors of our metabolic health, we could slash Alzheimer's rates from happening. So, you know, I think yeah-

    19. CMCalley Means1:06:07

        Yeah.

    20. CMCasey Means1:06:07

        ... fundamentally it's one more branch on the tree that is rooted in this metabolic dysfunction in our body, which is fundamentally rooted in three processes that uniquely really hurt the brain, which is oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, and chronic inflammation. These are the three hallmarks of metabolic dysfunction, and the brain is so sensitive and such a complex high processing power organ that these core cellular disturbances that make up metabolic dysfunction, which are caused by our, our environment, um, and cannot really be addressed with drugs. Uh, mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress, chronic inflammation, um, they're showing up so prominently in the brain.

    21. CMCalley Means1:06:45

        I'll just say, like, there's kind of just a question with all we're hearing about these diseases is like, is the reason Alzheimer's is skyrocketing because we don't have enough research and don't have enough drugs? Is the reason obesity rates are skyrocketing among kids because we don't have enough drugs or not enough research? That's the argument that's being given to us. We literally being told, right, after the lessons of COVID, which the COVID lockdowns and what the pharmaceutical industry did with their co-option of our government with COVID was the most significant public policy mistake in American history, at least since World War II. In modern times, I think we can all agree on. We are still saying, and it's just people, I think, because we trust the medical system still so much, we are literally thinking societally that-... that the fact that there's an obesity crisis among six-year-olds is a drug deficiency issue. Like, like, like it's, it's a dark, I think, blind spot, um, in our culture right now. The reason why I brought up, uh, Alzheimer's, there's a couple reasons. One, the amyloid plaque research, wasn't that proven to be flawed- Oh, man. ... like deeply and maybe even corrupt? And then there was another, uh, f- there's something that came out very recently. See if you can find this, Jamie. I think, uh, Jay Bhattacharya might've tweeted it.

    22. CMCasey Means1:07:56

        Yeah. You were talking about this with Max Lugavere.

    23. CMCalley Means1:07:58

        Yeah.

    24. CMCasey Means1:07:58

        Yeah, yeah.

    25. CMCalley Means1:07:59

        Oh, Max Lugavere. He tweet- he tweeted. But Dr. Jay is great. Yeah. Yes, yeah, so that there was like rampant corruption.

    26. CMCasey Means1:08:06

        Oh, yeah.

    27. CMCalley Means1:08:07

        And that-

    28. CMCasey Means1:08:07

        Well, this is coming out every... Every day we're hearing about a new premier researcher who's published, you know, hundreds of papers in their field, who like literally are... You know, western blots are one of these things you see in scientific papers, like that basically show you protein levels. Like copied and pasted western blots in like papers across their career. Like just made up data that then has served as foundational dogma for future research. So you think about the ripple effect of-

    29. CMCalley Means1:08:35

        SSRIs too.

    30. CMCasey Means1:08:36

        Yeah, yeah.

Episode duration: 2:22:40