#912 - Brigham Buhler - Ex-Pharma Rep: Why American Healthcare Is So Broken

The number one cause of bankruptcy in America is healthcare costs.

100%. Why? How did we end up there? It's a long, twisted road.
One of the things I've talked about a lot is, you know, in medicine, if you're going to understand or treat a disease state, you have to find the root cause. And if we go to find the root cause of the broken healthcare system in America, it runs deep, and it's insidious and it's widespread.

So it's a lot to unpack, but it starts with our food, our diet, our lifestyle, our nutrition, our food sources. What you and I were talking about right before we went on the air is all the contaminants in our food, all the ingredients in our food.
you know a good friend of mine Bonnie Hari has been beating the drum on all these media outlets lately exposing like in the United States

in the 80s in our food. You know, a good friend of mine, Bonnie Hari, has been beating the drum on all

these media outlets lately, exposing like in the United States in the 80s, we had 700 approved

ingredients in our food. Now we have 10,000.
In Europe, it's still close to 700. Why in America

do we have 10,000? One set of ingredients for Americans in the same factory and a different

set of ingredients for Canadians, whether it's Froot Loops or whatever it is. But that's one

Come on. and one set of ingredients for Americans in the same factory and a different set of ingredients for Canadians, whether it's Froot Loops or whatever it is.
But that's one component of the issue. Then we go to the checks and balances.
Like if we have a primary care in America that only has six minutes with a patient and they're controlled by what the insurance companies do, the main message that I have for people is it comes down to corporate capture.

If you show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcomes.

And our entire incentive systems in this country are based off monetizing and capitalizing

off chronic disease.

It's all about quarterly earnings, quarterly profits.

Nowhere in anyone's business school or any of these executives is their priority to drive

Thank you. It's all about quarterly earnings, quarterly profits.
Nowhere in anyone's business school or any of these executives is their priority to drive healthspan or to cure chronic disease. Oddly, it's actually quite an American approach to things.
You know, profits first is very important to us. It is.
It's wild. There's a few areas that we maybe should put profits second or third, perhaps.
Yeah. And health care is definitely one of those.
And so throughout the system, the checks, the balances, all of that has been ripped out, even with the collusion of our three-letter alphabet organizations. Whether we're talking about the FDA, the NIH, the CDC, all of these various entities have also been corporately captured.
A lot of their funding, a lot of their goals and initiatives are based off of helping these giant institutions that are monetizing these things. How recently has it been since saying stuff like this didn't sound like crazy conspiracy theories? You know what's wild is I was telling Joe this stuff like five years ago.
And one day, Rogan's like, come on the podcast. And when I went on there, nobody was talking about some of these things, like especially the insurance part.
The insurance is one of these hidden monsters that people just don't know. And even to this day, they don't know.
And even after doing some of these bigger platforms like yourself, you know, now the message is getting out. And I've had people like Bobby Kennedy reach out and I went and sat down.
And even a guy who's been in the trenches, who's battled big pharma, who's battled these big corporate captured institutions. When I brought up PBMs, he said, I don't what are you talking about a PBM? I don't have a PBM.
I have insurance. And that's the feedback most people give me.
I don't know. I don't have a PBM.
And so I have to like methodically walk them through what a PBM is, how it's hurting America's health. So if we look back to this whole profits first model, we talk so much about big pharma, big pharma, big pharma.
The big five insurance companies made four times the revenue of the biggest five pharmaceutical companies last year. 4x the revenue.
They control every surgery, every drug, every treatment, when, where, and how you can access healthcare and treatments and preventative care. I actually think the UnitedHealth CEO shooting for me was a real eye-opening moment because I just thought a guy shoots another guy on the street, obviously there's going to be public outcry about this.
And I didn't realize how strongly the American populace feels against all healthcare insurance companies. It was, I mean, again, I'm an immigrant here.
I know you can understand most of the words that I say, but I was just fucking shocked. I come from a country that's got national health service, right? If someone had gone and shot the head of the NHS, who'd been like what the fuck are you doing yeah i think it's just it's well i never condone violence and obviously what happened is terrible and tragic but so are the 1.7 million people dying every year of chronic disease in this country we spend more on health care than any other nation but we're one of the fattest sickest and, and most chronically ill societies in the history of the world.
More people are dying every year. You brought up SSRIs in the very beginning.
More people are dying every year of deaths of despair in the United States than ever before in the history of the world. We have more people dying now than during the Great Depression of suicide and deaths of despair.
Why? What we're doing is not working. People have a hard time.
Even what that guy Luigi did is terrible and it's tragic. Terrible way to deliver the message, right? Nobody's condoning that.
But it's also equally terrible and tragic to delay, deny, and depose people's ability to get the care they so desperately need. When people pay their hard-earned paycheck every month and all they expect is to have you there when you need it, and then you don't allow them to access care, and I can explain why, and I broke this down before, these insurance companies, right, they've made four times the revenue of the big pharmaceutical companies.
Ask yourself how,

how they don't have a product. Their product is to be there in a time of need and provide you with care.
And insurances were started right in Texas, uh, in Baylor in Houston, Texas, where I was a device rep for literally 15 years and Baylor college of medicine realized we need to be able to help people finance, essentially, preventative care and protect their bodies. Let's build in a monthly fee and then we'll allow them accessibility to stay healthy.
But that eventually became a profit center. And as these big insurance companies came in and acquired all the middlemen and all the checks and balances, 60% of the revenue of UnitedHealthcare last year, which was $361 billion with a B, 60% of it came from prescription drugs via an entity called a pharmacy benefit manager.
Here's why this is a problem. You have now incentivized the insurance companies to put you on drugs.
The average American's on four or more fucking prescription drugs. Why? We're not lazier than we've ever been.
I don't buy that. Do we have some lazy people? Yeah, we do.
But there's no way. What came first, the chicken or the egg? Did we get chronically ill and chronically obese and then became lazy? Or did we become lazy because we were chronically ill and chronically obese? I don't know.
But we do know we're chronically ill, chronically obese, and probably a little lazy. I thought there was supposed to be caps on insurance company profits.
Is that not the case?

I'm unaware of any caps. The way that this is structured is, so PBMs were established in the 80s and the premise was this.
The federal government here in the United States, as capitalistic as we are, realized we had a problem. And they said, look, these pharmaceutical companies are out of control.
Their profit margins are through the roof. We've got to make medications affordable for the average American consumer and patient.
We're going to establish these pharmacy benefit managers that will go out and negotiate on behalf of companies, corporations, and the little man. And they will fight for us to drive down the cost of healthcare.
And so they did. For a period of time, they went out and they negotiated with Big Pharma and they got big corporations and companies together to lobby and put together our buying power to drive down the cost of a prescription drug, making it affordable, you know, for grandma and grandpa.
Those were captured in the late 80s by the insurance companies. And so what you saw, and one prime example I use all the time is insulin.
Why does Eli Lilly make the same exact profit margin on insulin almost 30 years later, but the price of insulin has forexed? Where's the money going? It's like, where's the money Lebowski? Where's the money? And when you peel back the layers to the onion and you look, the money is going to the insurance companies. And so it's a little tricky to explain.
So I'll walk you through it as seamlessly as I can. Insurance companies say, hey, there's these middlemen.
Let's go buy them. They bought the middlemen.
At that point, they controlled the negotiations with the pharmaceutical companies. And rather than negotiating down the price of the drugs, they said, aha, what if we negotiate up the price of the drugs via rebates and what we would call kickbacks in any other industry? So they negotiated rebates on almost every major pharmaceutical product.

And if you want to be on UnitedHealthcare's plan, you got to pay to play.

If you want to be on Medicare and Medicaid, that is all an illusion.

Medicare and Medicaid are outsourced to who?

The big five insurance companies.

And so throughout the chain of checks and balances in the system, they are now monetizing chronic disease. They're incentivized for you to be on more and more medications because it's a profit center for them.
And so to explain how that works, people go, well, wait a second. Why would an insurance company mark it up? Because they're the ones paying for it.
Bullshit. They don't pay for it.
Insurance companies pass that bill on at the end of the year to your employer. And 92% of people's insurance are from their employer.
So most people never realize. And then they also have what's called gap pricing.
So the only reason I know all this, just to take people walk through like history and me is I had the touch points. I was a drug rep and I went from that.
I sold, you know, I launched Cialis in North America, the Viagra competitor, which was a blast. Like it was fun.
Everyone loved it. Nobody was complaining about Cialis.
But then I got pivoted to antidepressants and antipsychotics and I saw the dark side of big pharma. And within eight months I was out of there and I would have to go be a device rep where I stood in surgeries with the best and brightest surgeons in the world and I saw those those problems.
And then from there, I became a serial entrepreneur in healthcare, where I attempted to work within the insurance framework. And what I saw was so eye opening, it made it all finally make sense.
I was like, Oh my God, this is what they're doing. And once you know the magic trick, you can see it over and over and over again.
And so the magic trick is we push people to medications and prescription drugs. A real world example would be the opioid crisis.
What nobody realized in an article came out maybe two months ago, I think in the New York Times, 30% of the money and revenue generated from opioid abuse in this country went to the big insurance companies. Never did they get indicted.
Never did they get questioned. Never did they get sued.
They skated scot-free, but they had negotiated rebates on opioids. Why that's important is I owned pharmacies that offered alternatives to opioids.
I would go out and educate clinicians on the importance of not prescribing opioids because I lost my brother to opioids. They pushed it into the market.
They let Big Pharma ramrod it via a deal with the FDA. The head of the FDA then went to go work for Purdue Pharma, who brought that drug to market for a big, huge, fat salary three years later.
Purdue Pharma, who created the Valium crisis in the 70s, then perpetuated the opioid crisis in the 2000s, in the 90s. And then all of that was profiteered by big pharma and big insurance.
Where are we at with Purdue Pharma now? I've watched at least two or three documentaries or series that have been made about that situation i think in the last half decade uh what's the current state of purdue and what's the current state of opioids uh accessibility how hard they're being pushed in america so opioids are very hard to get at this point however the equivalent to a 747 jet worth of people are dying every day to opioid related deaths because now that they cannot get opioids via clinicians, they've turned to black market.

You've already created and perpetuated the problem. Now you've cut off the source and these people are turning to, you know, products from Mexico that are indirectly coming from China that are cut with fentanyl.
And that's candidly what killed my brother. And so it's tragic.
And then the most frustrating of all is Purdue Pharma's new blockbuster drug for opioid abuse. They are now selling the cure to opioid abuse, which is a new product that does help reduce opioids and has way less side effects, but it is also addictive.
So you're giving a new addictive product to an addict and now monetizing and perpetuating the problem you created. And then they're also trying to obstruct the ability to products like Ibogaine in the United States, which, you know, is a one-time treatment and has over an 85% success rate.
Getting people off. Yes.
Getting people off these drugs. Although it may be a slightly challenging process for 36 hours or whatever when you go through it.
Yeah. So what happened with opioids? How have they been pulled? So opioids, they put a lot of restrictions in place to make it harder.
It's called triplicate. Clinicians have to document, document, document, and then prove they can justify and their license is at risk.
And people went to prison because they were over against overprescription. Correct.
Because what happened is it like any boom, unfortunately, where there's a lot of money, there becomes a lot of bad actors. And that's what you're seeing today with even GLP ones and weight loss drugs.
You know, I mean, it's it's popped up on every corner. Every every single frickin telemedicine company is candidly prescribing GLP ones.
and weight loss drugs. You know, I mean, it's popped up on every corner.
Every single freaking telemedicine company is candidly prescribing GLP1s. And I'm not against them because we prescribe those at our company as well, at Ways to Well.
But are they being overutilized, overprescribed, and inappropriately utilized? For sure. I remember I came to LA maybe 2018, something like that.
And this would have been, I think, before California legalized weed, but when you could get it with a medical marijuana card. And I remember the first time I ever went to Venice Beach, oh my God, I'm going to go and see Muscle Beach.
It's going to be so cool. I'm like, you know, just living the dream, right? So late twenties, first, one of the first times I've come to America and a famous Venice boardwalk.

Every third little kiosk was some guy that could give you a medical marijuana card. Like how many marijuana doctors are there that exist on Venice boardwalk? And, you know, for every legislative loophole, there is an opportunity for people to capitalize on it.
And, you know, I suppose you also have, during COVID, people got lazy, OnlyFans did well. Over the last 50 years, people have got fatter, which now has opened up the opportunity for anorectics, similar drugs to come through.
And it's a good tool in the tool belt if you're chronically obese, diabetic, and sick and headed towards chronic disease. Of course, I'm never here to judge.
We've got to put wins on the board and we've got to get the weight off. But I say this all the time, prescribing a GLP-1 without talking about diet, lifestyle, nutrition is like brushing your teeth while eating fucking Oreos.
It's very counterintuitive. It's just, you've got to address the root cause.
And the root cause is diet, lifestyle, and nutrition. So the opioids have been pulled, access to those has been made more difficult.
That's resulted in people having, they've still got the dependency, but the supply is now being cut off. And if we walk through like how, so take a step back, I guess at this point, almost 14 years ago, as an entrepreneur, I had steps and protocols and procedures in place.
So I would go meet with clinicians around the country and I would educate them on the importance

of not prescribing opioids lightly.

And the message was this,

these can be very valuable to treat chronic pain.

When utilized in the right patient,

it can be life-saving.

But if you utilize this in the wrong patient,

you're gonna kill somebody.

And so why not take the proper steps? There is a non-abusive, non-addictive alternative to opioids. And that is a ketamine based pain cream.
And it can't be abused. You can't, you can't separate out the ketamine.
You have no way of abusing it. Like it's a topical, but for orthopedic injuries, knees, shoulders, elbows, joints, backs, they were prescribing opioids for two months at a time, you know, right in like 60 day prescriptions.
You're perpetuating this problem and then those get diverted. And so here were the safety nets.
Don't prescribe it. Prescribe a non-abusive, non-addictive pain cream.
That's option one. Option two, you think this patient needs it.
Okay. Toxicology screen this patient to make sure that they're not abusing other drugs and or diverting this drug.
Option three, you should at minimal pharmacogenetic test, which was a simple cheek swab that tells me if you have a propensity to become addicted, it tells me, can you even metabolize this drug? Because 23% of opioid users can't even metabolize it. All of those checks and balances within a year, the insurance company said, we're not covering any of it.
Put them back on an opioid. Why? And at the time I'm going, why? We're literally giving life rafts.
We're saving lives. Why would you do this? I didn't realize they were making money off of it.
30%. Because if ketamine topical ointment is non-addictive, what's the reason for

people to keep coming back? Keep coming back. And the insurance companies had negotiated rebates

because that was a compounded drug. So insurance companies hate compounding pharmacies.
Can you

explain what compounding pharmacies, like, you know, white label, like what that is? Because

I always hear people talking about it and I have no idea. Yeah, this is actually crucial, especially

current events. Hems and Hers did a Super Bowl ad, set the world on fire.
People were pissed because what they did was they kind of captured the Maha message and made it look like it's about being healthy. But the real message was, oh, and by the way, we'll sell you GLP ones, call us today, the weight loss drugs.
And so that upset, you know, the health advocates and rightfully so.

But then it upset Big Pharma because Big Pharma said, look, this is the problem. You know, you make us follow these rules and we have to give disclaimers and side effects.
But these guys didn't. And the problem with that is it went from a conversation about a telemedicine company potentially acting in a way that some people think was unethical to a full-blown

attack on compounding pharmacies. And the reason that attack was perpetuated is big pharma is

attempting to every day discredit and scare people away from compounding pharmacies.

What's a compounding pharmacy?

So a compounding pharmacy compounds medications unique to the patient. They also are utilized

anytime there is a shortage in the marketplace. And so do not be fooled.
I own one of the biggest

Thank you. unique to the patient.
They also are utilized anytime there is a shortage in the marketplace. And so do not be fooled.
I own one of the biggest compounding pharmacies in the country. And every single product we make is FDA improved ingredients that come from the same exact suppliers as Big Pharma.
Every single batch we make is independently third party verified by an independent lab. Every single dosage we ship out the door, we then retest to make sure that it's exactly what we thought it was, said it was, and it is.
There are dozens of checks and balances, and the FDA has been in my building three times in 18 months. There are over 5,000 big pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities that the FDA has not inspected in five or more fucking years.
Why? Because they've moved their facilities overseas. They're in India.
They're in these third world countries that are hard to get to. The FDA has to file for a visa and then go over there and stay in a hotel with sometimes no running water.
They don't want to do that. So they just don't go look.
And the reason we're on a GLP-1 shortage here in America is because Eli Lilly's American facility got shut down because of a whistleblower. And so big pharma's out there trying to scare people away from companies like, you know, all of these telemedicine companies, all these compounding pharmacies and tell people these are dangerous.
These are unsafe. No, it is no more dangerous than what you're doing.
And in fact, I would argue what big pharma is doing is astronomically more dangerous because they don't have the checks and balances and they have the lobbying power. What happened with the Eli Lilly thing? Eli Lilly ended up getting hammered at one of their facilities.
They came in and there were barefoot people in the sterile rooms. They literally had destroyed records.
Their efficacy data wasn't correct. I mean, there's a book called Bottle of Lies where this investigative journalist goes over to India with the FDA just to follow them and they're literally burning records.
Not Lilly, but a big pharmaceutical company was literally burning records. And we can go back in history to the long, sordid, jaded history of big pharma.
A lot of people talk about Monsanto when we were talking about food. You know, Bayer, Monsanto are the same company, right? They're owned by the same holding company.
So Bayer that produces drugs is owned by Monsanto, our sister corporations, and Monsanto produces chemicals that create cancer. Bayer sells cancer drugs.
But before that, Bayer sold hemophilia drugs and they knowingly infected people with HIV in the late 80s, early 90s when it was a death sentence. So they cross-contaminated a hemophilia drug with HIV.
They could destroy the batch and lose revenue for that quarter, or they could ship it into the marketplace and risk infecting patients with HIV. What do you think they did? They shipped it to third world countries at a time when HIV was a death sentence.
And then back to compounding versus big pharma, compounding pharmacies came out and said, we can make HIV treatments for literally $12 a month at a time when big pharma was charging 12,000 a month. And they got sued by all the big pharmaceutical companies for trying to provide life-saving treatments to third world countries.
Finally, there was enough of a voice, overwhelming swell of angry Americans and Europeans that they had to back down. But it was two years of an obstruction mentality.
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That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. What are the drugs that you're most worried about at the moment? You know, if we started to put opioid crisis, everyone was talking about that.
It seems like this is something that in yet there's some downstream complications, but I have to assume that getting them into a high level of scrutiny when it comes to your prescription is better than where we were before. So, okay, something has been started.
What are the drugs that you're most concerned about for the future of America? So it's a duality that's a challenge. It's the drugs and the treatments that big pharma suppresses coming to the market.
So one example would be peptides, right? GLP-1s are peptides. Why were they not on the bulks list that got banned by the FDA? Because they've been patented and monetized by Big Pharma.
Why did BPC and these other drugs go on the naughty list? Not because they were dangerous. That's an absolute bullshit lie.
They went on the naughty list because Merck has over 200 patents in process for peptides. They are attempting.
So in one breath, they say, oh, no, no, no, no, you got to get rid of these things. These are dangerous FDA.
You got to shut these guys down. But then what they do is they come and capture those molecules, patent them, and sell the exact same thing that compounding pharmacies were already providing to the public for a fraction of the dollar amount.
So like a GLP-1 is $,600 through the insurance, big pharma model. Most compounding pharmacies are providing that compound for under $300 a month mailed to your doorstep.
And depending on your dosage, it may be like $100 a month, which is just mind boggling. The big ones that are, that are worrisome for me and have been forever.
And this is partially why I left being a drug rep all these years ago, when you look, and this is one of the things Bobby Kennedy's kicked a hornet's nest over, is these SSRIs, these antidepressants. Literally, if you look at the data of over 75 studies in a meta-analysis, 85% of the efficacy of an SSRI was related to placebo.
These are their own studies. These are big pharma's own studies.
85% was related to placebo. It has a 50% failure rate or relapse rate.
It causes increased suicidal ideation, violent thoughts. You know, when we talk about the gun crisis in America, look at how many of these mass shootings involved antidepressants.
These are dangerous compounds and they don't have the efficacy that the American people have been sold on. In fact, even in the studies on a 52 point scale, a depression scale, it differentiates from placebo by one to two points.
One to two points. We could give you sugar pills with none of the side effects, but then we don't even talk about diet, exercise, lifestyle.
If I don't work out, I'm an anxious wreck, man. I mean, it's just the way my mind is.
I have to go work out. I don't want to.
I'm like everyone else. Like, and once you get in it, you enjoy it.
But I think it's just a matter of like reframing things for the American people and helping them see the answer is not at the bottom of a pill bottle, man. It never has been.
It never will be. What do you think the future of the sort of psychiatric drug world is? Surely this is ripe for some new formulation, SSRIs.
I saw that study that dance was the most effective way dancing regularly was the most effective way. It was exercise based.
It was a big study that was like exercise versus SSRIs. It's some absurd amount more effective, but that when you actually looked at the list and they put it in order of what was the most impactful dancing with another person was the highest impact thing.
But I think that's kind of a bit of a cheat because you're not just looking at an exercise modality there. You're looking at something that's pro-social.
You're looking at something that's, you know, got other people involved and so on and so forth. It's like, hey, that's a little bit of trickery.
But anyway, surely psychiatric, mental health world, is there not something, I think we, as much as we're connected, we're also isolated. Think about it.
Like, think about how much we're on our phones. Think about the reward system.
And I've, I've heard you have podcasts where you've talked about it. It all elevates our cortisol levels.
It all devalues our self-worth. It all creates and perpetuates this problem of mental health.
And it starts now at a very young age. And our diets, our lifestyles, our ability to exercise and get fresh air and build community, you know, as woo-woo as that sounds, those are real answers to these problems.
And the other part is there were answers and have been answers for thousands of years, like products like Ibogaine, like it's not a product. This is a plant-based medicine that was used on the plains of Africa 8,000 years ago.
Why have these things been suppressed and hidden and villainized? Well, we know why. The same old narrative, right? The establishment wants to suppress and prevent things from coming into the marketplace.
I'm very optimistic about a treatment like Ibogaine or psilocybin. And even at Wastewell right now, we're doing a project called the Minds Project affiliated with Dell Medical School, where we're diving into using psilocybin for problem solving and complex problem skills.
because one of the lead scientists, Dr. Bruce Danner, worked at NASA and had an experience on psychedelics where he solved an equation that NASA had been working on for like seven years.
There's so much to the human brain and the complexities, even products like, and so much is controlled by the insurance. I hate to keep going back to that, but like one of the treatments we do that I learned about less than two years ago, you know, there's a brain scan, an EEG brain scan that has over an 85% success rate on depression, anxiety, and insomnia.
It's mind blowing. The numbers are overwhelming.
And what they do is they assess your brain with an EEG. It's called wave neuroscience.
Assess your brain with a simple EEG loaded into an AI algorithm. The AI tells us where neurons are misfiring.
It could have been from chemical abuse. It could have been from head trauma.
It could have been from an extended period of depression and anxiety where your brain has now been rewired and these neurons are becoming beta waves in different aspects of the brain. The future's bright is where I'm going with this.
It's not that there's one solution. It's that we've been looking in the wrong place in my mind.
And we've been looking in the wrong place because insurance in big pharma is telling our government where to look. And the people historically, until COVID, I feel like the veil came off.
And now we all are going, hold on a second. I don't know if I believe you anymore.
At least I am. That was an eye opener for me.
I think it was for me as well. The agencies, the media, the people that are supposed to be in charge and know what they're doing did not shower themselves in glory during that time.
And there's only so many situations where you can publicly face plant that badly and then have to walk it back or you'd get called out for hypocrisy or just like ignore the fact that you once said something that you've now got to say the opposite of. I think it really opened an awful lot of people's eyes and it doesn't surprise me that we're kind of, it was very fertile ground in some ways a good thing because it did lay some fertile ground for the questions that people are asking now, causing them to dig deeper into what's going on.
But I guess, you know, there's a lot of people that listen to the show who aren't American, who aren't subject to the American healthcare system. Can we just have a look at sort of what the state of health is like for a modern American? What's the sort of health outcomes that they've got?

How do they deal with the issues that are coming up?

What's the kind of care that they get?

Go through that. So if you're the average American

and you're trying to get in to a primary care,

for instance, through the insurance model,

let's use Luigi as an example,

the assassin of the United Healthcare CEO.

Why would this guy do such a terrible thing?

What happened to this kid? If you look at the average spine patient in this country, you have a spine injury. Okay, this particular spine injury causes your extremities to feel like they're burning and on fire, right? Neuropathic pain in your fingers, your feet, but also neuropathic pain in your genitals is a common side effect of this spine injury that Luigi was suffering from.
And you now have to go first, if you're in the insurance model, you got to go to a primary care. It takes you three months to get in with a primary care because there's a wait list and they have to see a patient every six minutes.
They see 40 patients a day on average. You're in and out of there, right? So they get you in and that doctor says, well, out of my wheelhouse, I'm going to prescribe you a pain med and push you out the door and we'll get you scheduled with a specialist for spine.
You go see that spine specialist. They go, I can't do anything.
How long was the wait to get the spine specialist? Months, usually three to six months. Now you get in with that guy.
You've been taking opioids this whole time. Now they tell you, we need to get an MRI in order for me to be able to give you a thorough answer to what's going on here.
So that takes time. Now, a lot of times the insurance companies denies the MRI.
You have to fight the insurance company. So they delayed your care, delayed your ability to go from person to person.
They deny the coverage of the care. Okay.
And now the last shoe to drop is you finally get the MRI. You finally get the surgery approved.
You go out, you interview clinicians, you find the best and brightest surgeon in your geographic region. This is a spine surgery.
It's not something you take lightly. You find the surgeon you want, you set your date for surgery, and the

insurance company says, no, you're not allowed to use that surgeon. That surgeon is not on our preferred plan.
You've got to use this surgeon over here. So you're not getting the best surgeon for you.
You're getting the best surgeon for the insurance company's pocketbook and what they could negotiate the rate down to the cheapest reimbursement rate. And then where insult comes to injury, after you've paid all that insurance in all these years, you typically on a surgery have a $10,000 copay or deductible to scare you out of doing the surgery.
So imagine being a 26-year-old kid. You're miserable.
You've been on opioids. Your genitals are on fire.
Now you finally get a surgery done by a doctor you didn't want to do it and you pay $10,000 out of your pocket that you're on the hook for. That's why the number one reason for bankruptcy in America is healthcare.
They've essentially made the hospitals, the MRI centers, the surgery centers, any of the touch points in the ecosystem, subprime mortgage lenders. You don't have a choice as a hospital.
You're taking United Healthcare. What are you going to do? Turn around, turn away thousands of patients a month.
That's your lifeline to keep your doors open. So you eat the bill of the $10,000 and do your best to get the patient to pay.
And so for that patient, now you get your surgery. And in this particular instance, the guy supposedly botched the surgery.
He had bad outcomes. And those bad outcomes can lead to permanent erectile dysfunction.
It can lead to permanent neuropathic pain. Not to mention, you know, anywhere from 40 to 50% of patients who have a spine surgery will go back under the knife within 18 months for another spine surgery.
And so you are caught in this feedback loop system where you're perpetually in pain, perpetually prescribed drugs, and hoping that you can just get an answer and you can't ever get an answer. And this is the loop that these American people are trapped in.
And this is why people are so angry and so frustrated, you know, when their cancer treatments are denied or whatever it is is denied. And that's a whole racket too.
Even in oncology, what people don't realize is anywhere from 60 to 70% of an oncologist's income comes from marking up your chemotherapy drugs. So every part of the system has incentivized people to make money off you being sick.
And so then we're sitting here shocked. I heard Russell Brand go, oh, yeah, it's shocking, America.
Like you're all in awe over the fact that you're perpetually sick and that profits are at an all time high. But you built a system to have all time high profits and make yourselves perpetually sick.
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That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Yeah, I mean, it's wild to hear that sort of process happen, especially coming from the UK.
And look, you know, for the American people that might look at a nationalized healthcare, I actually am kind of superbly in favor of making some level of basic healthcare available for absolutely everybody for free. And I think that it seems kind of barbaric that you get hit by a bus and you've got to walk it off because if you don't walk it off, you're bankrupt.
Like the choices between having a broken leg for the rest of my life that doesn't heal properly or being bankrupt and maybe being homeless. And then, you know, the cascade goes down from there.
All of that being said, and my, you know, very small area of socialist beliefs, one of which is in healthcare, I have to just explain for the people in America that might look at the UK and go, my God, like, this is so fantastic. The standard of care that you have in the UK is, it's not good.
It's not fantastic. You know, I walked in when I was 22, 23, and started talking about the fact that I had a low mood.
And the doctor looked at me and said, well, what's wrong? I'm like, there's like nothing ostensibly wrong other than just like, you know, the weight of existing. I don't really know what's happening.
I haven't had a recent grief. You had a recent breakup.
You're in financial straits. You're in blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
No, no, no, no, no. You sort of gave me this puzzled luck and then gave me a single page printout and sort of said, go on your way.
So, you know, in the UK, GPs, general practitioners that are our sort of first port of call, you've got something up, you've got a cough, your back hurts, you've got something that you're worried about, you go and see them. they have 10 minutes to get you in, introduce, diagnose, explain, recommend, and get you back

out of the door again and that's just cycled through over and over and over again like a turnstile all day long so you know try you don't get to choose choose your fucking surgeon in the uk it's the nhs good luck like yeah uh you know you don't have the same kind of uh of care in that way. You know, in the UK, every time that I post about blood work, every single time I post about blood work, I get tons and tons of messages from friends, from other people.
Where can we get this done in the UK? I'm like, I fucked if I know, man. There is no such thing.
Like when I came over here and I was introduced to the idea of an annual physical or a six monthly checkup. And they said, well, when was when was your last six-monthly checkup? And I'm like, I've never had this.
We don't have- You don't do preventative. There is no, there is zero preventative care.
It's crazy. But the main reason there's zero preventative care is that the power users of a nationalized healthcare system, the people that are the sickest, are the ones that take up the most time for the doctor.
So if you, a relatively well person, tries to get from wellness to fitness as opposed to sickness to wellness, he looks at you and goes, dude, I've seen someone who's going to fucking lose their leg because of their diabetes earlier on this morning. Your lower back pain, meaning that you can only deadlift 80% of your max as opposed to 100% is not my problem.
Get the fuck out. You know, because the anchoring bias that they're used to is so skewed toward the sickest members of society.
Quite rightly, they're the people that need the most care. But there is this odd adjustment bias where they can't make the site actually come back down to point at someone much closer to them, which is, I'm not absolutely catastrophic, but I'm not as good as I could be and I would like to become better.
The first time i moved to america i got uh i had an assessment so i could start working with telehealth and this is just normal physical gotta get you in for normal physical so they bring me in and they do the knee tap thing and the height and the weight and all the like basic shit and then they said we'll do an eye exam okay cover this please and read that and i'm like ah p q, P, Q, I can't read that one. She goes, okay, we'll go one bigger.
Like S, V, and she's like, we'll go one bigger. And we finish up this eye exam.
She's had a couple of cracks at it. We finish up this eye exam and she goes, you can't legally drive without glasses.
I'm like, what? It's like, yeah, yeah. Your eyes are really bad.
And I'm like, what are you talking about? My eyesight's perfect. I don't know.
I've never had bad eyes. She's like, no, your, your eyes are pretty bad.
I'm like, and then I did notice I'd been squinting a lot when looking at texts, stuff that was far away had been a little bit blurry. I was like, holy fuck.
Went and got my eyes tested. I'm like, yeah, you need glasses.
Then I went and got LASIK, which is why I don't need these.

These are just because I look cool.

I love it.

That was like, I didn't know that I had vision problems.

Because especially when it's anybody that's transitioned from seeing perfectly

to seeing a little bit less than perfectly.

You're like, ah, is stuff always this blurry? It's far away. Who knows if it's supposed to be sharp? You know, is it fucking 360p or 4K? I don't know.
And none of that stuff was picked up. There is no preventative care in the UK at all.
There is no such thing as an annual physical. Now you can have Bupa, Nuffield.
You can have your, those are private medical companies. You can have those things.
And maybe if you went in and you had some like indications your doctor would say let's get your bloodstone and let's do the whatever i have no idea what like this is what it feels like in the uk healthcare feels like you have to do you have to say this weird series of secret incantations and do some special rain dance thing to get your gp to do test, to do the thing that you want them to do.

Yeah. What you're saying is my back hurts.
Yes. I've been through all of the different things.
It's not referring down my leg. I've got this issue.
I've done this thing. I've done rehab.
I've making sure I'm active. I'm sleeping in this bed.
I've checked my bed. I've checked my sleeping posture.
I'm walking all day. I would just really love to get a scan.
Well, what we really need you to do. I'm like fucking so many times someone goes in to try and get their particular pathology moved forward on the medical side of the scenario and they're left with something that you have to do.
And maybe on average, that's actually what needs to be done because lots of people go in and they say, my feet hurt. And it's like, dude, you're 50 pounds overweight.

Yeah.

We need to hear some leaflets on healthy eating.

Here's some ideas about what Kaiko is and how you can reduce your calorie, calorie

consumption, stuff like that.

Maybe that's actually on average what most people need.

But the fact that you're on this 10 minute long conveyor belt speed date thing means

that no one is ever prepared to look at somebody. What's crazy is you're also describing the American healthcare system.
That's where we've gone to because it's all insurance based, the average clinician has six minutes with a patient. And so another example is I owned blood labs and I went out and I educated clinicians across the country on the importance of getting proactive and predictive.
What do I mean by that? The diabetes you develop in your 30s started in your 20s, right? The atherosclerosis that manifests in your 40s started in your 30s. The cancer you get in your 50s started in your 40s.
If we get proactive and predictive, if we start by taking a look under the hood, if we truly do a deep dive into you at the biological level and create checks and balances like you would in a business, like you would in any other aspect of life, you like to go, hey, am I headed towards my goal? And Peter Atiyah talks about this. If your goal is to live to be a happy, healthy centenarian, which I think is a great goal for most people, if you could be physically healthy and lift your grandkids and enjoy life and go on hikes, we have to assess you periodically and gauge are we trending the right way or the wrong way.
And the system's not built to do that. The system is built to push you in, push you out, monetize your chronic disease and profiteer off of the drugs.
And doctors are nothing more than an unwitting patsy in the process. Unfortunately, you know, a lot of the time people point the finger at sort of medicine overall.
I've got friends that are doctors, at least doctors in the UK. I think I've maybe one or two friends are doctors in the US.
I don't know a single one of them that got into the job of being a doctor in healthcare because they wanted to push some fucking new world order, nefarious agenda. They don't need to help people.
They do. You know, caregivers or druids or wizards or a medic or some shit.
They're so beat down, Chris. They're beat down.
But what's the level of restriction, complicity, ignorance, neglect? I mean, I can tell you real world, the doctors care. They're exhausted.
There's a massive shortage in primary cares. A study done by Harvard said there's going to be 30% less primary cares in the next five years.
Most primary cares when interviewed said they are not happy with their job and they don't want to be doing it in three to five years. It is an exhausting beat down of a job.
And it's because of this pace. They're not.
It's the pace. It's that you don't allow them to solve problems.
It's that it's been corporately captured. Most primary cares in America are now part of big conglomerates.
So even let's go back to big insurance. Blue Cross Blue Shield went out and bought Kelsey Siebel.
Kelsey Siebel is one of the biggest primary care practices in the country. It is owned by the insurance companies.
Okay. When I owned a blood lab and I went out and educated clinicians on the importance of running that comprehensive blood work annually, and my clinicians started running that thousands of clinicians around the, within months, they all got letters from the insurance carriers saying, what are you doing? We don't want you running this blood work.
It cost us money. Go back to running a basic lipid panel.
Knock on the knee, look in the ear, test their eyes, and look at a basic lipid panel of triglyceride cholesterol, which tells us minimally nothing, right? Because you don't have the full range of what's going on. And that's the challenge.
We can't get proactive and predictive and preventative if we aren't able to look. And the existing insurance ecosystem in America will not allow the clinician to look.
Because if you were looking early on, you would catch diseases, which then wouldn't be monetized further down the line. I think it's a multitude of things.
I hate to go that far, but one, an easy low-hanging fruit that we could all agree on is the insurance companies look at that and go, why do I want them to run a $500 blood test when I can pressure them into running a $50 blood test, right? And now, why would I want uncover something that could lead to a surgery that costs me more money? Because they're not monetizing the surgery, but they are monetizing the drugs. And so there's an incentive system to keep you on drugs.
And then people go, well, eventually they're going to need surgery. So wouldn't that be catastrophic for the insurance? No, because I go back to my previous statement.
Most people's insurance comes from their employer. And guess what happens in America? The average American switches jobs every two and a half years.
So if I'm an executive at, let's just say Cigna, so I don't keep picking on United. If I'm an executive at Cigna and I've got Joe Bob and he's pre-diabetic and he's, Bubba's headed towards being morbidly obese and losing a foot.
I know that he's got two years before we reach that chronic crisis. And by then he's somebody else's problem.
And I'm incentivized on my- Because he's going to be a new employer that's got United or Blue Cross Blue Shield. You got it.
You got it. Right.
So this is weird. This is kind of a game of Russian roulette, sort of a mutually assured United destruction where they're going to send you their sickest.
and it's a game of pass the parcel. Yes.
And at some point musical chairs and at some point the music's going to stop and you are going to be left holding this diabetic. You got it.
Obese bag. But where the sad part is most of the time that these huge health care expenses happen are when they become the taxpayer's problem.
Once you're over the age of 65 and you're Medicare or Medicaid and you're no longer on an employer's plan is when the years and years and years of chronic abuse, overprescription, all of that, the bill gets passed to who? Us, the taxpayers, right? And so the insurance companies play this whack-a-mole, kick the can down the road, delay, delay, delay, deny, depose, like let's stay away from it. We'll just let somebody else deal with it because it's all about hitting the quarterly number.
And even at the hospital systems, I would be at the hospital and they're like, we got to get our surgical volumes up. We've got to hit our number this quarter.
We're down 25%. You need to see more patients today.
You need to find knee surgeries, you need to find knee surgeries you need to find spine surgeries it is all about generating revenue the entire ecosystem the checks and balances all of it's been thrown out the fucking window man it is all crank crank crank this shit is print money this shit is fun can we can you just kind of explain zoom out a more, this loop, this cross-pollination loop between food producers, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, FDA, regulatory authorities, what is the like simplistic process or structure or format of how they feed into each other? Yeah. So one of the challenges is let's, let's go to like, let's go to even, let's go back to just red dye, right? This is really easy.
Even when we got together that first Maha group and we testified in front of the Senate, I think in, I don't know, September of last year, there was an article that came out days after we testified, called us the woo-woo caucus, talked about how none of us have clinical experience and don't know what we're talking about. Let's be real.
I was the only one not qualified to be in that room. We had, you know, Marty Macari, who's now the head of the FDA.
So I'm very optimistic. I know I've been very disgruntled about the FDA.
I'm very optimistic about Marty at the helm of the FDA, hopefully fixing the chronic problem

there.

We had Chris Palmer, a Harvard professor, you name it.

I mean, this was a lot of very intelligent people.

I was, again, the least qualified to be in that room.

And I was there as an industry insider, just explaining what I'd seen. The day, two days after a hatchet job article comes out.
When you go and look who funds that article, it was funded by Bayer Monsanto. The Bayer Monsanto funded this article.
Why? Why would they have funded this hatchet job article? Because Bayer is a drug company and Monsanto is a chemical company. And those chemicals are part of what's causing and perpetuating disease states in this nation.
And then we go to the red food dye. Like everyone laughed about red food dye.
Well, why did the FDA decide now that RFK is coming into power right at the tail end of Biden's administration to remove red food dye? Again, I'm not out here saying that it's like going to save the world, but it is tied to ADHD and in children and red food dye can perpetuate ADHD in children and

hyperactivity. And yet we're prescribing ADHD and hyperactivity drugs at an all time high.

And there's, those are chemical straitjackets that then perpetuate the depression and anxiety

that children have in high school and into their adult lives. And so there is no such thing as a free lunch.
And I don't think it hurts to begin to question the narrative. And I'm not saying it's some big bad conspiracy to do it.
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Well, this was sort of a big question that i had you know especially coming from the uk and look again not to beat on the uk in many ways it's great that we're like this um but at 96 of people in the uk i think around about 96 took their first dose of the covid vaccine it was about 90 second dose and then in the 80s for the third the booster, something like that. My point being that we're a very orderly bunch, right? You give us a set of instructions and people will follow.
I think that it's in the 90s, although I may be told I'm wrong by the internet. Point being, it was way higher than it would be in America.
That sense that there is someone looking over you that we're not adversarial with the key suppliers of our infrastructure, of our sort of life-saving care. Nobody looks at the NHS.
People look at the NHS and they think, that's shit and that is inefficient. The NHS uses Windows XP still, right? That tells you everything that you need.
You fax things in the UK, right? Windows XP and fax, okay? So you have inefficiencies, you have this sort of lumbering behemoth, which is essentially impossible to upgrade, all the rest of the stuff. But nobody looks at it and thinks it's malicious.
They think it's incompetent. Yeah.
In America, same isn't true. People have this sort of very adversarial relationship.
Well, it feels very malicious, and that's where I was going. But historically, I would have said it's compartmentalized, it's silo, much like the human body, right? We have built an entire health ecosystem of siloed experts.
The body is one organism. The gut biome impacts your chemical levels in your brain.
It's it's the second brain to the body you know and that has a direct impact on your serotonin your dopamine all of that so to silo off these different areas and we are so niche and specialized that in a way we're missing the big picture it's interesting how the approach to health is similar to the structural approach to healthcare that you don't have somebody that is holistic and looking at the, I mean, you do now just about to start with holistic healthcare stuff like you do or Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, et cetera.
100%. But my point was, is there nobody in America that fundamentally the book stops with? Because in the UK, we have this sense that someone is on our side.
Yeah. That if you got 100,000 petitions together on whatever, parliament.org or something, it has to be presented.
It has to be presented on the floor. Yeah.
Is there no one? Who is responsible? Who's driving the cart? Whose job is it to look after health? Well, it comes down to I mean, people would say the NIH and the FDA, you know, and HHS, you know, human health services. But then we go back to corporate capture.
So I'll just systematically go, OK, let's look at the FDA. OK, out of the FDA, almost every single one of the heads of the FDA for the last 20 something years have gone to work for the exact institutions they were supposed to be protecting the American people from.
So the FDA has been captured, corrupted and colluded with industry. Okay.
Then we go to HHS, you know, HHS directly during Obamacare helped create what are now all these big insurance companies and PBMs and their unilateral control of our health care system. They created carve outs and safety nets that allow for non-disclosure on how much money is being held at a PBM.
Again, corporate capture, collusion, corruption. What was the NIH? Okay.
80 to 90% of the NIH funding comes from the American taxpayer. Okay.
And out of 356 blockbuster drugs over the last 15 years, how many of those do you think started at the NIH funded by us? I don't know. 100 fucking percent.
100% of these drugs came from American taxpayer dollars.

Then what happens is Big Pharma goes, we innovate.

We innovate.

Do you?

No.

You offered a deal to the NIH because there's so much collusion.

They basically come in and offer a program where they get a royalty.

The NIH gets a royalty off of Big Pharma's blockbuster drug. But we, the people, funded that drug, then we, the people, don't get access to that drug because Big Pharma says we have a patent on it and you're not allowed- The insurance company won't pay for it even if you do get access to it or they'll make you pay over the odds.
Boom. Wow.
Okay. Now I fully understand.
And so all of our checks and balances have been corrupted. And this is wild.
One of the things I said in my Senate speech was, I hear so often the healthcare system is broken. The healthcare system is broken.
I want to be clear. Our healthcare system's not broken.
It's rigged. And we're the ones fitting the fucking bill.
It's not paid in tax dollars. It's paid in human lives and human capital.
It's brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. We are losing people at a breakneck speed to chronic disease.
More people are dying of chronic disease every year than every fucking goddamn war we've ever fought as a country. That's how big this is.
If we were killing moreocaust and and and all of these catastrophic events in human history every year why is somebody not ringing the bell yeah and why why is anybody that begins to ring the bell accused of being a conspiracy theorist or somebody that is like team cuckoo land or whatever it was uh yeah i i don't know, man. Look, I understand, especially post-COVID, I was made to feel uncomfortable with a lot of the Facebook status theorizing that went on.
There was a super famous WhatsApp image of one squaddy, one army guy walking down the street in London, basically saying that martial law was about to be begun and that from tomorrow, that you're going to be held in your houses and all the rest of this stuff. This thing went fucking interstellar online, right? You know, have you ever seen on WhatsApp where it says forwarded many times? Have you ever had one of those? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's a little label. It's like, ah, you should probably be a little bit cautious about this.
It might be it might be bullshit yeah and um nobody was held to account for that every single person was like this is i've got a text from my brother and he's part of the 143rd battalion of the whatever's highlanders they're gonna do this thing like all right is anyone calling your fucking brother or retard sister for that fucking facebook status out like what's going on here so i understand that there was um a lot of additional room for speculation to be injected that caused people to first off waste fucking brain cycles thinking about it but secondly get agitated and concerned uh in a way that they didn't need to causing unnecessary stress and stuff like that and making them doubt um paths that would have been actually more evidence-based, more efficacious, although there wasn't many of those in COVID first instance. However, when we've got ourselves to a much more sort of peaceful, sedate situation like this, it does, I mean, look, you guys are going to continue to bang this drum and very, very slowly, more conversations like this.
Vani's been on the show. Callie's been on the show, et cetera, et cetera.
Eventually, I think we will get to catch up at this conceptual inertia, right? Where people are so slow to be dragged along and that it has to be like these realizations that to me seem pretty obvious. America is not a healthy country.
Since moving here, all I've done for the last 18 months is try and fix my health, which had been perfect until I moved here. Right.
I've only been here for three years. I'm the fucking split.
I'm not fucking everybody. Right.
But I'm a pretty good split test. Perfect health until I was 33, moved to America by 34 and a half.
SIBO, H. pylori, candida, gut dysbiosis, environmental mold exposure, kicking off EBV, maybe some lime.
I'm like, and I'm now spending 18 months fixing it. There's so many environmental toxins, the food.
A friend of mine, he's British, Ben Woolis. I don't know if you ever heard of amazing kickboxer.
And he was here to get some treatments. And we hung out and he's like, can i not get fucking like i just tried to buy like a basic croissant at the store and i saw the list of ingredients compared to like back home and he was like mind blown yeah on sugar it's just insane it's and so and i go to europe and i eat whatever i want and lose weight i really do like.
Like it's, it's fucking wild. So my point, all of that together being, I just wish that we could use a little bit more tasteful discernment when it comes to the level of scrutiny, because it seems like a lot of the time scrutiny is applied, not against ideas that don't have merit, but against people that you don't like from sides of the aisle that you don't know.
A hundred percent. You know, if it hadn't been for the fact that RFK was on the right side of the aisle and had been attached to people like Elon and Trump and Tulsi and all the rest of it, you know, remembering that not so long ago, they would have been on a different side of the aisle.
And you just watch the reaction online can be determined by whether or not they used to be on your team or they are now on your team. And I know to me, it's so disheartening.
What you're saying is spot on. And I and I said this to the Senate.
This is not a Republican issue or Democrat issue. This is a humanity issue.
Chronic disease doesn't see your political leanings. This is hurting all of us.
And it's unfortunate that we're trying to now make it politicized left versus right, but this is humanity versus corruption. Don't get fooled.
Don't let the deep state, whatever you want to call it, the corporate powers that be be of course they want us to fight each other but we're in this together and it's not republican versus democrat it's humanity versus corporate capture humanity versus corruption and collusion like the facts are going to speak for themselves i don't even with the vaccine stuff, the up in arms over RFK asking questions like

people aren't saying correlation is causation, but people are saying correlation is justification

to investigate.

Should we not look at is there something more going on here?

We do know the history of big pharma.

We do know like fool me nine out of 10 times.

Shouldn't we take a look at the one time we didn't think we were being fooled?

I mean, because... big pharma we do know like fool me nine out of ten times shouldn't we take a look at the the one time we didn't think we were being fooled i mean because the history and the track record does not look good and so so you know you've been close to the rfk unit how much impact can rfk really have do you think like surely there's going to be so many barriers in the way of him making real change when it comes to healthcare.
New FDA head, how much change can- I think a tremendous amount. I really do because a lot of it would be, let's just say we get rid of direct to consumer advertising for pharmaceutical drugs.
That's a big win. Let's just say we get rid of the corruption and all of the collusion at the FDA.
I mean, it's not going to change tomorrow, but that is a big win. What would you, that's a good point.
Let's say that you had the FBI most wanted list. If you had a top three, top five changes that you would make, what would they be? oof uh well i mean those two.
We've got to get rid of the cross-pollination and the collusion of these big pharmaceutical conglomerates with our regulatory bodies. So that's if you work for one of the bodies, you can't go to the pharma company.
Correct. We've got to limit the ability or prevent you from being able to swap spit with somebody you're supposed to be regulating.
That's a mega problem. And its your judgment.
It really does. Just on that point, is there as much of an issue with pharmaceutical company people going into the FDA? Because presumably the FDA wants people that have got expertise and there's only a certain half of people that have got that expertise.
There is. And then the problem is they go back forth, back forth.
Right. But would you be happy with them going pharma to FDA, but not FDA to pharma? That's a tough question, because you do want them to have expertise, but then there's those ties there.
But that's, it's- Of course, because you're now in the regulatory body. It's either regulatory body gets paid for off before they leave and then gets a cushy job, or person who still mates with all of the people in their WhatsApp chat.
Because then they take a job on a board and they're a consultant, even though they don't, they're just setting themselves up for a future career. But that's a difficult one.
And every angle's another workaround. Where's a fucking biochemist gonna, you know, molecular biochemist? Every solution does create a new challenge.
But there's certain things like, okay, direct-to-consumer advertising. That's just, to me, that is insanity.
And I understand why. It's hereia here in australia are the only two places in the world question which i don't even know how that works because they have to give all the examples of how and at the end of that i've never gone well those people look happy but i want to use that and risk uh heart attack stroke diabetes they just start rattling off all this stuff.
Have you ever heard, like if Joe does an advert

for some gambling company or whatever,

and you've got a 60 second advert

and 45 seconds at the end

are not available in Nebraska.

And if you have a gambling problem,

please call 551.

If you're in New York,

you need to call this number.

And I'm like, holy fuck.

Like, well, I suppose it's in there as protections,

but you're right.

They're not the most sexy ads in the world, given that 50% of them are talking about the disclaimers that they've got that go at the front. But even separate from that, one of the other challenges is the ability for big corporations to influence and drive legislative and governing body decisions.
What do I mean by that? Psychedelics, how hard they are to get in this country, why they're so obstructed, but separate from psychedelics, let's look at products like stem cells. Why? Why is it so hard? Because you've got big pharma, big medical, big surgical breathing down the neck of the FDA, influencing them.
And like we have an AI algorithm that we utilize at WasteWell. One of the things I

talk about is data in, data out. If you put bad data into AI and large language models, you're going to get bad decisions from large language models.
If we give our governing bodies a skewed lens, a bias viewpoint, bad information, bad facts, bad data, you're going to get bad legislative in governing decisions. And we see it.
Why? Like the peptides. Why would you come in and ban these peptides? What is the real agenda? The real agenda is big pharma put pressure on the FDA had nothing to do with safety.
It did not have anything to it was an overwhelming amount of pressure and it was an easy layup. And they even do it with as soon as let's say Joe Bob compounding pharmacy has a recall in Nebraska, right? Why in the hell is that on national news? Like if somebody recalls eight vials of trizapatide, the weight loss drug, how did that get on national news? When Eli Lilly recalls thousands of vials and it never makes the news or Pfizer or whoever, they'd have recalls every day that never make the news.
The reason being they deploy their PR arm. They push an agenda.
They scare the hell out of people. They document it.
Then they send all that news shit onto the FDA and go, look at this, man. You guys are just going to let this happen.
We got to step up. We got to get these guys out of the marketplace.
And the FDA has an incentive to do so because in 12 months, they're going to be interviewing for a job going to work for those guys. A quick note, I partnered with Function because I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to understand what's happening inside of my body.
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how big of a uh panic do you think there is behind the scenes for this odd combination of increased transparency governmental transparency through stuff like doge

elon floating around rfk, Tulsi. Like, I mean, I just have to assume, you know, you were talking about the papers being burned earlier on.
There's people with just no fucking shoes or socks on sprinting around, just trying to like shred USB files. And you know, I think they're terrified.
I a hundred percent think they're terrified. And I know, but I don't think to your question earlier, is there an opportunity for change? And is the opportunity better than ever? It is, but they are not going to go silently into the night.
These are some of the biggest, most powerful institutions in the world. And don't think for a second that politicians aren't scared of those people, right? This is a dance and they've got to find where they can put wins on the board.
Another easy win on the board would be the PBMs. Nobody's defending the PBMs and the PBMs have been so silent behind the scenes that they really haven't lobbied like big pharma.
And you're not going to find anybody going, yeah, protect those PBMs because everyone, the cat's out of the bag now. Anyone who knows what they are go, wait a second, we're letting these guys make a bunch of money off of our prescription drug care.
So I think that's an easy fix. Like you should not allow insurance companies to own middlemen that profiteer off of chronic disease.
I've got to assume these are these companies that are owned by the insurance companies are these uh an additional layer which are private organizations they're own they're they're companies that are owned by the insurance companies now it's just another arm of the correct wasn't originally and then they just got you got it you got it right okay yeah uh and then there's all sorts of things like in in medical in surgical you know people make the assumption that if something came through the FDA, that it's safe, even bigger than pharmaceutical, 92% of the products in the operating room never had a human safety study in the operating room. So any implant, any knee, any shoulder, any joint scopes that go into your body, uh, anything pacemakers, all of it.
Most of that has never had a human safety study, which sounds mind boggling. The FDA couldn't get to all these things.
So they created an exemption in the eighties called the 510 K approval process, which says, if you can find a like product in the market today, we'll give you a daisy chain. So like take a ring rotary phone at your house as a kid, like in the early eights, you know, probably before even your time.
But like that was a phone. If that phone had an FDA approval and you grandfather in a cell phone and then you grandfather in an iPhone and now you got an iPhone 17 or whatever at with AI.
The study was done in 1982 and now we're 30 generations away with a product. What are the elements that are in the operating room that are the highest concern for you? I mean, obviously, anything that's implanted in the body.
But are there some implants that are better than others? Oh, for sure. There always are.
I can give you an example. In women's health, they had a device that was put into the uterus to stop pregnancy.
And that device, what they didn't ever do was a study on how to take it out. And it was absorbing into the uteral lining.
So when a woman, yeah, when women, not a cop, not a cop, not a cop, you do this preceded all that when an e-sure procedure. And when women were deciding to take these various things out, it absorbed into their uterus and they had to take out the whole uterus.
People were having all sorts of side effects. There's a big class action lawsuit.
There were literally like surgical procedures I'm in at crucial points in heart surgeries even where they're using high def cameras. And when they would hit the ablation device, they never tasted it with all the other equipment that's in the OR.
So you're at a crucial part of a heart surgery. You go hit an ablation device to burn or cauterize a piece of a heart tissue or whatever piece of anatomy you're working on, the fucking camera would turn off.
So imagine it's like a video game. You're doing the surgery, looking at the camera because it blows it up in high res.
And when you go to do a crucial part of the surgery, blackout screen. Because they had never tested the camera to work with these pieces of equipment.
I mean, there was a device that literally like a suction device, and they didn't realize that it didn't have a disclaimer not to use it to suck like blood out of anatomy when you're in the middle of surgery. And it literally sucked out like pieces of an organ and killed people.
I mean, there's so many examples. And then even more Wild West, I'll tell you the most crazy fucking story ever.
I told this on Rogan and people, I swear, hand to God, this is true. I was in a surgery at the Houston Zoo on an animal, on a tiger or leopard, I don't remember, on a big cat.
And I noticed the shaver, it's a piece of equipment they used to go in and clean up tissue in a joint. And it had green tape on it.
It was labeled with green or red. I don't remember.
It was labeled with tape. And so I noticed it was a loner.
So I look at the serial number just because I'm like, oh, it's a loner. It's wild.
The Houston Zoo has this freaking loner handpiece. And like a month later, I'm in a human surgery at a hospital.
And I see the guy shaving with this shaver with a green piece of tape on it. And so at the end of the surgery, I wait for it to all be done.
And I put on some gloves and I look and it's the same freaking piece of equipment, the same exact handpiece that was in a veterinary surgical procedure. OK, reps carry what are called trunk stock, right? When I was a surgical rep, I have like a million dollars in surgical equipment

in my fucking trunk.

And like, you have restrictions,

like it's supposed to be kept

at climate controlled temperatures, 85 degrees.

You know, we can't guarantee there's not bacteria

of you, the hospital.

How in the hell is a rep supposed to drive

an hour across town,

carry that equipment in their trunk,

put it into a surgical procedure, wash it, clean it, take it off, drive it to another hospital. And the whole time it's sitting in a trunk that's literally 150 fucking degrees.
There's so many people are just unaware that it's not what it is portrayed to be. The environment is not as safe as it's portrayed to be.
Trust but verify. Do your research.
Do your homework. Don't take surgery lightly.
Know that everything is a calculated risk. And that's why I'm such an advocate for like preventative proactive care, getting predictive, prevent chronic disease.
If you want to stop the five chronic diseases that are killing people and running up healthcare and causing bankruptcy, let's start with not letting them fucking develop in the first place. What are those five? Oh shit, you got atherosclerosis, heart disease, all of it stems from metabolic disease, cancer rates, all of every single one of the big five killers of mankind go back to metabolic health.
And so when we were talking about how do we fix the healthcare system, even a neurocognitive decline, second to age, your biggest, and smoking, your biggest, if you don't, if other than age and smoking, the third biggest risk factor on any of the big five is metabolic disease and metabolic health. So one of the things Callie says is it's very easy to fix our healthcare system overnight.
We incentivize metabolic health. We drive metabolic health.
If we really want to fix the root cause of all of these chronic diseases that are cascading and self-fulfilling prophecies, let's just fix metabolic health and make that the focus of primary cares and make that the focus of our healthcare institutions and incentivize humanity or Americans to have great metabolic health.

How? Make that the focus of primary cares and make that the focus of our healthcare institutions and incentivize humanity or Americans to have great metabolic health. How do Americans compare when you look at other developed countries around the world from healthcare outcomes? I don't remember where it's terrible.
I think we're like 60th or something on like, I don't remember the, I don't want to misquote

that one, but it's not good.

Like the age of men in Japan, their life expectancy is higher.

Women all over the world, their life expectancy is higher.

Our cancer rates are at all time high.

All the things, our deaths of despair at an all time high.

It's the worst of almost all developed countries, but we spend more than almost every other

nation on our healthcare.

I mean, it's just mind boggling, but it's, it's, but it's not as dire, it's not as impossible to fix as people are making it out to be. It really all comes down to incentives.
Like I said earlier, like show me the incentives. I'll show you the outcomes.
If we incentivize the average American and the average clinician in America to get proactive and predictive, if we had a paradigm shift where people realized that their health insurance is more like car insurance, it's there if you total the car. It's there if something catastrophic happens, but you should not be putting your, like, they're not going to rotate the tires, change the oil and maintain the vehicle.
It's your job to take sovereignty and accountability over your health. It's your job to identify these things.
And I think the way of the future is large language models, algorithm-based medicine, you know, like the app we're launching at WasteWell monitors you 24-7, ties into your wearables. We've got a chat bot, Alan, that's an AI bot that literally answers any question, pulls from your medical records, and gets it right better than most clinicians, annotates all of your calls, loads all your questions in for whenever you get on a call with a doctor, and it's all documented.
But that's not unique to us. I think the world is headed that way.
And with algorithm-based medicine, I don't think in five years people will even go to a primary care. I really don't.
I think you're going to have an app in your pocket that monitors your blood sugar, your glucose, all of your blood levels daily. And it's not just a snapshot of you in time every six months or whenever you get time to go get your blood work done fasted.
It's literally swallow this pill in the morning, five minutes before you eat. That pill tells the iPhone or the app everything that's going on in your body.
And we can begin to project all cause mortality risk. And through that, we can drive down chronic disease risk.
And so if we know, like, let's say we have your epigenetics and we know that epigenetics are the gun and then your lifestyle choices and decisions are the bullets that you load the gun with and pull the trigger. Now we can track not only your epigenetics, but also your active biomarkers, but also your behaviors, your exercise, how many hours of sleep you're getting, your deep sleep, your REM sleep, your heart rate variability, and we can begin to project out all cause mortality risk.
And the beauty of that is we can now begin to drive down those risk factors. That's the future of medicine.
That's where this is headed. How long do you think it is until we've got to a really comprehensive, well put together AI contribution? I think in the next 24 months, like I think in the next 24 months, a lot of this will be executed in the next 24 months and it won't just be ways to dwell.
I think there'll be dozens, if not hundreds of companies. And there's a billionaire's arms race into this sector now.
There's so many billionaires getting into the space and putting money into the space and trying to figure it out. And there's that component.
Then there's the large language models and AI's ability to, you know, uh, hack the genome down to different levels. And so like one of my friends and mentors, Dr.
Ian White is brilliant. Like you would love him, but he's actually a Brit too.
He's from Harvard, uh, and 22 years at the bench. His theory is we share a common ancestor with the eternal jellyfish, which lives over 5,000 years.
We share a common ancestor with the Galapagos tortoise, which lives over 200 years. We share a common ancestor with the Greenland shark, which has no cancer and lives over 600 years.
All of those black boxes are within our genetics. With AI and large language models and quantum computing, how quickly is a scientist going to crack that code? Somebody's going to do it.
And so my pitch is like, you've got, you know, the Gary Breckas and the people saying, we think you're going to live to be 150. I'm not that optimistic of that.
I think we can drive health span like what Peter says. And by driving health span, we can indirectly potentially drive lifespan and buy you enough time for somebody who's way smarter than me and you to crack that code and find that black box.
And then who knows what the future holds? Have you heard Peter Diamandis' term longevity escape velocity? No. It's what he's talking about.
So he's saying, you know, when you have this really exponential curve of healthcare, improving insights, longevity, health span extension, stuff like that, you just need to stay alive long enough to be able to get to the escape velocity bit. It's like hands can be off the wheel a little bit more now because for every year that you're alive, it makes living an additional however many days more likely.
And then for every two years, it's even more days and it compounds and compounds. I can totally see that.
And that's, that's, that's, that's, I believe in that because, I mean, when Peter breaks it down and he talks about what's the difference between somebody who lives to be a centenarian and somebody who dies at the average human life expectancy in America, which I think is like 72 for men now or something, it's the onset of chronic disease. And so if we get proactive and predictive in your 20s, if we begin to use algorithm-based medicine and all the analytics and tool sets we have, and we're

monitoring you 24-7. Look, I'm not going to get up in the morning and take 400 pills and do three

hours of red light a day and live in a hyperbaric chamber. That's not sustainable for the average

person. But if we can give you small wins on the board, slight adjustments in lifestyle that allow

you to delay the onset of

chronic disease. What if I could quantify for somebody like my dad? When I talk to my dad about ways to, well, he's like, do I have to change my diet? Do I have to quit drinking? Well then fuck that.
I'm not doing it right. He, that's the mentality.
So I've got to give a guy like that little wins. And I got to give them tangible measuring sticks.
And so it's like that. Statistically, if I can just get 12 pounds of body fat off you, quantifiably, I can buy you five more years.
Can we do that? Right? But you got to give them the carrot. And we haven't done a good job in healthcare of of showing the carrot.
True. Right.
We bully and intimidate. Gamification is the thing to pretty much everything.
Yes. Yeah.
I mean, look, it's why money is the best game on the planet, because you can literally exchange it between you and somebody that's in Thailand. You know exactly.
Everybody's got this one metric that means all of this stuff. And what are we left playing with, with really when it comes to most people's understanding of where their health's at weight maybe they understand how to do a bmi calculations because they know their height as well the small number of autists that have started using wearables like whoop or or whatever uh you know they may be starting to do hrv hacking and stuff but still i mean cgm cgm is a fucking primitive at the moment like you know, they may be starting to do HRV hacking and stuff.
But still, I mean, CGM, CGM is a fucking primitive at the moment. Like, you know, we're not tracking anything, really, that consistently.
And one of the things that's really important when it comes to gamification is the speed of the feedback loop. If you do something that's good, but you only find out about how good it is in six months time, it's not that compelling.
If you do something that's good today and tomorrow you wake up and something's improved or it gives you a little high five, virtual high five or score on the app or whatever. He goes, hey, you know that you didn't eat chocolate last night and actually this morning your resting heart rate was this much lower or your blood sugar was this.
And if we keep going at this trajectory, this is where you can expect to be in this long. And you're, oh my God, I can see, I can almost envision.
You're nailing it. You're getting me so pumped because this is, it's so true.
We have to make healthcare fun. We have to make it approachable.
We have to make it digestible. It's got to be something that the layman can understand.
And it can't be some scientist in a white lab coat dictating to you from a pulpit why you're fat and chronically ill. It's got to be wins on the board.
And I talk about the faster we can get you a win on the board, the better. And I'll give you an example even with me.
I'm not a huge drinker, but I'll drink wine or I'll go out and drink margaritas with friends. And now that I track my sleep with the sleep eight or eight sleep, whatever it is like, dude, when I see the difference in my sleep, it's, it makes me not want to.
And then now I take it a step further. Now I don't drink as much because I really enjoy seeing the results on my sleep, but now I supplement and now I add the magnesium and the zinc and I try different supplements and I, I hate the term biohack, but you try to like hack the system and go, oh man, now I found something.
Now my sleep's at 98 and I got an hour and 45 minutes of deep sleep. And then I realized my data, my recall, my cognition, my retention rate, all of it goes up.
Well, yeah, you're hiding health behind a game, right? You're playing about with numbers on the screen, but the underlying thing that you're working through, because you could imagine a different app that tracked how much alcohol you had and gave you a high five every time you hit double digits or something, you know, you just got to gamify the right things. And unfortunately, yeah, making something painful today, which gives you a reward further down the line is really, really hard.
And almost all health decisions result in pleasure today, pain tomorrow. And the good health decisions are pain today, pleasure tomorrow or improvement tomorrow.
But it's not. It's in six months time.
Yeah. Eating a cookie right now tastes good.
Not having a cookie right now feels like shit. And you don't even lose any weight for, you know, six more months of non cookie eating eating and that's why it's crucial to quantify it quickly and that's where i go to like so at the new uh the new waste well clinic we have a dexa a vo2 max right if i have your dexa your vo2 max and your blood work i can within a very high statistical probability begin to build out an algorithm that will allow me to assess your overall health and your risk factor of chronic disease.
But it also allows me to gamify it and make it comparative to your linear age to your biological age. And I can combine all those.
People get jazzed up when they go, man, I'm 44, but my biological age is coming in at 34. And they go tell their buddies and they print screen it and they send it to their friends and then their friends.
And then it's, but it's also reward systems. Chris, congratulations.
We saw on this date, you started peptide therapy. Here's the improvement we've seen in your HRV, your REM sleep, your D, whatever that quantifiable win on the board is.
It's about creating that dopamine response and that reward system in that community. Even me, like knowing all this, it hijacks my brain.
Like I wear the, I used to have whoop. I love whoop, but I also have a my zone.
And I started wearing that when I trained Muay Thai because I was competing with Tim. And to Tim Kennedy, he's not even paying attention to me, but I'm looking at what he's doing.
And I'm like, I gotta beat Tim's workout today. I wanna get, I wanna outscore him in caloric burn and time in the red zone, the green zone, all the different zones, whatever it is, whatever the goal is of that week.
And it's this own game I've made in my own head. Does that make sense? It's not a game for him.
A lot of people are obsessive about different things. It's just about harnessing that obsession to point it in the right direction.
People can become obsessive about playing video games or smoking weed or ruminating about the bad things that happened to them in their childhood or, you know, fucking fan fiction, like whatever it is, right? There's lots of things that you can become obsessed about. And that's fine.
You can become obsessed about lots of them and they're not going to damage you. But you need to have a couple of pieces in place.
And yeah, I think looking to video game design as a good rubric, I mean, just for clarity, the video games industry is worth more than music, TV and film combined together. Oh, that's wild.
The video games designers understand human psychology more effectively than anybody else on the planet. I had, that is insane.
i mean i know a playstation is going to be like 700 the next one that comes out but i guess computer gaming all the it literally they when you look at the production level too though it's crazy now yeah but you know they've tapped into the fundamental need for humans to feel like they're making progress and have fast feedback loops right you can just i'm gonna play this level i died i'll try again gonna play this level i won fine oh yes let's go again we keep keep moving keep moving keep moving but as you said unfortunately with health it's not as exciting even when you intervene like that's where i go with peptides with testosterone with whatever it may be the the faster i can get you feedback on your trajectory the better, right? Or course correct, the better, right? Maybe I pick up something's not going right. That kicks back to the AI.
The AI algorithm makes a recommendation. The clinician reviews that.
You get a text message. We make an adaption in real time, not this coming in six months.
We'll see you down the road here, a bunch of medss there's no incentive for people to really dig into their health because for every step that they need to take for every time that they hit some sort of a barrier it's just demotivating and demoralizing and they forget you know everyone's got the day after you get better from being sick one of the first things that you want to do is like i mean this is you know i'm know, I'm really gonna, I'm gonna get my health together. That's really it.
So continuing to use those little lily pads for people to bounce off to use that motivation to keep them pushed forward. So I guess, you know, that's great.
And that will be a wonderful world that was maybe very quickly moving toward right now. What's your advice for how patients can advocate for themselves better? What can they do to take control of their health care more? And this podcast is an unlimited number of episodes on how to take control of your health.
But how do you choose a good doctor? How do you advocate? I think the main thing is, you know, find a cash pay clinic in your area because I don't know of a lot of insurance-based plans that will allow you accessibility to true preventative care. And it also limits the tools you have in your tool belt.
And so for a nominal amount of money, you know, anywhere, and I don't want to say nominal, for if you look at what you spend on a mattress, if you look at what you spend on a car, on a house, you're not in that 24-7 for your entire life. You've got one body.
$200 trillion to one are the chances you and I are here alive right now. We won the lottery, man.
This is our one shot. Don't put your body and your family's health in the hands of these insurance juggernauts and big pharma.
Take sovereignty and accountability over your health. Do a basic blood panel with somebody out there.
You mentioned Function, Merrick, Ways to Well. There's dozens of companies.
It doesn't have to be my company. There are dozens of companies, if not hundreds.
Interview them. I tell people too, don't just go sign up with some random clinic.
Think about how much you bid out a kitchen remodel. That's your kitchen.
This is your body. Like don't blindly follow the first Yahoo that wants to put you on some hormone or peptide like or at least do the research and understand for yourself.
And the pathway to me that makes the most logical sense. And this is future proof in your life.
You don't want these insurance companies to be digging through your underwear drawer because they're going to use the data and the data they capture to eliminate you, deny, delay, and obstruct your ability to get care down the road or drop your coverage. So in a way, build your own life raft.
And my goal is to make this affordable for everybody. And I think the way we do that is through technology and large language models and algorithm-based medicine.
But the vision would be get proactive, get predictive, do a basic blood panel, a comprehensive blood panel at least once a year. Use that to drive your health.
If you could afford, you know, $75 to get a DEXA and a VO2 max and combine that with your blood work, you have done more than 99.99% of society. And in the right hands of a solid clinician or algorithm, it can help guide you on the best path forward to prevent chronic disease and drive your health span.
And if you capture your health span, like we said, and delay the onset of chronic disease, one of these brilliant people are going to come up with something. Somebody's going to solve the code.
What are you doing for VO2max? VO2max is just the test. What are you doing to improve yours? Oh, I train Muay Thai.
But I train Muay Thai and I try to maintain, like, I don't go into the often on my my zone. And so I track all my heart rate.
But I try to keep at minimal an active cardio schedule because it's so easy. The reason I started training Muay Thai is before I just lifted and I got all the way up to like one ninety.
You know, I'm short, like one night I had dense muscle mass, but I was bulky and I was tired when I'd go on a freaking one mile jog. My cardio was trash.
And I'm like, well, this isn't necessarily healthy, right? Cardiovascular health is just as important, but lean muscle mass is important too, right? We know one of the biggest risk factors as we age is a lean muscle mass and bone mineral density. And so we've got to protect that.
And so I, I to pitch people on what Matthew McConaughey says, like be active, break a sweat every day. It's about being better, not perfect.
And knowledge is power. The more data you have, you don't have to be Brian Johnson and take 40 pills and track every single aspect of your life.
I don't think that's sustainable for most people. Not that what he's doing isn't working for him and that that may not be, if you can do it, go for it.
But for a lot of people, it's about just being better, making slightly better choices, slightly better improvements, and then showing the reward system that you and I were discussing and quantifying what that means for them in their trajectory of long-term health. Fuck yeah.
Brigham, let's bring this one home. Where should people go? They want to keep up to

date with all your stuff. Thank you, man.
Weighs the number two well. And then my personal is just

Brigham.Buhler, B-U-H-L-E-R. Dude, I appreciate the hell out of you.
Thank you. Yeah, thank you for having me.