Joe Rogan Experience #2208 - Brigham Buhler

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The Joe Rogan Experience.

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(laughs) So- so tell me what it's like to testify in front of the Senate. What is that like?

Man, it was pretty wild. Uh, it all transpired so fast. I got a call from, uh, Calley Means, we've become pretty good buddies. I know you're having him and his sister, Casey, on the podcast. Uh, brilliant folks that are just patient advocates. I mean, at the end of the day, uh, they had the same experiences I had. Calley a little bit different walk of life, he was a lobbyist. Casey was a doctor, Stanford-trained surgeon, uh, realized that she was in a system where they didn't really heal people, they just treated symptoms and profiteered off disease states, and she said, "There's gotta be a better way." So their voice rung so loud after, I think, they did Tucker, that, uh, it led to momentum. And then, because of you having me on the podcast, that's how I met, uh, RFK. And so, Bobby's team had reached out to me, maybe about a year and a half ago, to come up to Dallas while he was doing a campaign there, and sit down with him. And he was just asking 100 questions about what's going on, and, "What did you see on the pharmaceutical side?" and, "What did you see owning pharmacies and billing insurance companies?" And so, when they had an opportunity to put this team together to testify in front of the Senate, the goal was to create a non-partisan group of individuals to take a new, fresh approach to what is going on with chronic disease in America, uh, because the chronic disease crisis is at an all-time high. I mean, we could go through all the statistics, and I know that Casey and Calley will when they're on here, so I don't wanna steal their thunder, but it's staggering. I mean, close to anywhere between 1.7 to 1.9 million people are dying a year of chronic disease. We talk a lot about war. Since the dawn of this country, roughly estimated between 1.3 to 1.5 million people total have died in war, American lives. So in a year, we're losing more people to chronic disease than all the wars combined.

Wow.

And we're not talking about it. So to me, I was excited when they said, "Hey, the Senate's willing to- to hear," and that's the beauty of a democracy. They- they did let us come in there and candidly take a dump on the (laughs) Senate floor on what's going on with this healthcare system-

Was any-

... and really dig into the weeds.

Did anybody try to take the side of the pharmaceutical drug industry? Did anybody question you or try to push back?

So prior, you do a debrief. So we did do a roundtable prior to going into the communal roundtable in front of the public eye, which they had no idea what was coming. They- they- they- the Senate didn't expect it. We had assembled a grassroots effort to get the word out there, and over 2,000 people took off from work. These are... This is a Senate hearing. Over 2,000 hardworking Americans took time from their busy day, flew to DC, had to sit in an overflow room to listen to these testimonies, and the level of feedback from people, from like real humans, real world people, was staggering. I mean, people afterwards came up in tears, sharing their story of how the system had let them down or a loved one down, misdiagnoses, like all the different issues that they've dealt with trying to navigate this system. Um, and to the Senators' credit, you know, behind closed doors, they- they did say, "You probably don't wanna go ultra hard after the food industry or ultra hard after the pharmaceutical industry, because it may limit our ability to get things done," but they did-