3:25 - Joe Rogan and Racial Slurs
17:32 - Spotify and Words as a Safety Issue
44:17 - Democratic Governors, Political Shifts and Dropping Mask Mandates
58:38 - Interview: Shawn Stevenson
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Calvary Audio, Ladies and Gentlemen, February tenth, two thousand and twenty two. I'm Matt Blinsky, and this is that sweet, sweet weekly dos ofb sanity that you all need. The prevailing narrative On this week's episode. Shortly, I'm gonna be having a chat with Seawan Stevenson of the Model Health podcast. It's one of the top wellness and fitness experts in the game, and we have a lot to talk about in terms of public health, looking back on two years of a pandemic and personal health and really making that distinction between the day to day choices that that we make in terms of our own fitness, wellness and health versus those that have kind of been for better or worse heaped upon us over the past couple of years because of the pandemic. And you know, we're not here necessarily to indict all public health, but there have been a lot of public health failures. Um, there have been some successes, but I think public health does not have the standing um today that it had two years ago in terms of trust with the mendical industry, um, the bureaucrats that are making some of these decisions and Sean and I are really going to dive into in a retrospective of of where you know, of of what went on the last two years in terms of public health decisions that may have really caught up on people that they were not expecting. But in the meantime, UM this week's topics, as much as they want out, they keep dragging me back in on two topics that, yes, we're going to beat to death because they just won't leave the public sphere. One Joe Rogan and the controversy that I kind of thought was over but as it turns out, is not over, at least not yet. And uh, masking policy. I'm hoping this is the last conversation we're going to have about this. UM A number of you know, a lot of activity has been going on around releasing of mask mandates but selectively not releasing those as of the last week. So we're gonna get into a little bit more of that in the political calculus, and hopefully, like I said last time, we will ever have to talk about masks um Rogan. So last week I said, you know that I I termed one of my segments the failed cancelation attempts on Rogan and it's still it looks like I was generally right. Yes, the cancelation attempt failed, but it was not over. They came back for another attempt. They came back for one more shot at Rogan. Um. And what happened this week at one The first shot at Rogan was attempts to label him a vaccine scientist and COVID denialists because of a couple of guests he's had on recently. That one extinguished with without much fanfare. Um. But then someone dug up a bunch of essentially a smash cut of old of old recordings of Rogan saying the N word um, and the video at first glance looks pretty bad. And then you actually, you know, once again, any edited video you have to be suspicious of right off the bat. But then you take a look at all the actual segments and what he actually said, and in all of the instances he was not using the term, he was describing someone else using the term. Okay, So first off, I don't want to get into this whole uh linguistic and moral argument around you know, racial slurs in this word in particular, I have no interest in using the N word. I have no you have no interest in anyone. Why, I don't know why anyone would want to use it. And this whole conversation about well, why aren't white people allowed to use it? I mean, that's all ridiculous. No, nobody should be using the word. However, it's clearly distinct from describing someone else using the word, because in that case, you're not using the word. You are, in e fact, describing that somebody else did use the word. Okay, And if you're trying to nail someone on describing someone and describing somebody else using a slur or a certain terminology, then you know, what are we trying to do here, right, Because the whole idea is to you know, is to is stomp out hate and prejudice and make the world a more just and equitable and pleasant place. If you're trying to nail someone for describing somebody else using a word, then stop pretending you're about justice and making the world a better place. You're just about punishing people. You're just trying to nail someone on a technicality or find a way to make them look worse and misconstrue their attempt, their intent and what they're actually doing. And that's what happened here, but the video because it looks bad and because in this era, things just things just explode, and Spotify as the public company that does have to balance some number of concerns, which I'll describe in a minute or two. Uh, this one did. And also because it came on the heels of the other controversy, this one was a little more difficult for Rogan and Spotify to kind of weave their way and weave their way around. But as always, we're looking at, you know, what's actually happening here. This is not just kind of a surface controversy about some crass comments or some common you know, a podcaster with fourteen hundred episodes who in past episodes had described the racial slur um. There's more stuff going on here. So first off, who really is the target here? And and in figuring out who the actual target is, I think it's very telling about how the notion of the political compass is all broken. The rubric for identifying whose right wing or left wing whatever we thought that was from two let's call it the middle of the two thousand tents, that's that's all off off the board. Now the standards no longer apply, and it's it's really interesting. One tweet that was going around a lot was someone, you know, trying to paint Joe Rogan as a right winger, even though you know, the guy outright said he supported Bertie Sanders in the two thousand twenty election. I mean, I have a hard time squaring him being a conservative or a right winger with that point of view. Um. But beyond that, they made a list and they made two columns of trying to show that Rogan does not kind of weigh both sides and give equal time to both sides or left wingers or right wingers, and they said it was essentially his his list of guests was very heavily weighted towards what they called right wingers. And then they you know, they put two columns in there. First off, this was only about a hundred and thirty five guests out of like I said, I think something like fourteen hundred episodes. And not all of his his guests and his interviews are political in nature, but quite a few are, particularly over the last let's call it four or five years. So if you're taking a hundred and thirty some odd sample size out of fourteen hundred, that's clearly not going to tell the story. Aside from that, individuals that they have classified as right wing Sam Harris, Bridget Fetisy Barry Wise, Russell Brand, Tulsey Gabbard who once again ran for president, okay, for the Democratic nomination. She ran as a Democrat. This was not This was two thousand twenty, Brett Weinstein, Stephen Pinker, Tim Dillon. And Tim Dillon is a comedian, right and a crass comedian, a cross gay comedian. And and this is very telling in that they're really at this point classifying everyone who is a dissident who kind of spits in the establishment's face as a right winger right and and that also speaks to, you know, to Rogan's following. Rogan's following is not exclusively or even predominantly left wing or right wing. His followers are people who think that the establishment narrative is bullshit, okay, And that's reflected in who his guests aren't, whose popular guests are, and that what a lot of the chattering classes cannot wrap their mind around is that it's simply thinking that the establishment is full of ship no longer may you know, can can paint you kind of neatly into one corner or the other. Forty years ago, calling out the establishment clearly made you a liberal. These days, in a lot of respects, it makes you a conservative because you know, the media and academia and corporate America is so overwhelmingly liberal. But it does not just because you're someone who is a dissident, who is a contrarian, who doesn't buy what a lot of the corporate media is spinning and a lot of the the new principles and values that are exposed through corporate America, through human resource departments in pr That doesn't mean you're a right winger. Okay, Matt Tybee is someone who very and Glenn Greenwalder guys who very much break this mold right. I mean Matt Tybee. All his writings are anti capitalist and anti police state, Like he wrote a book on police brutality, he wrote a book on on on Wall Street corruption. And yet because he doesn't buy into bullshit narratives for instance, about Russia or a lot of you know, the kind of racial politics of the last four years, they now try to call him some kind of traitorous right winger. And this is just ridiculous, And this is what they do with Brogan's following, and so one tweet that I found very interesting was script and they're not coming after Rogan, They're coming after his followers. So essentially what they're trying to say is anyone who likes Joe Rogan, anyone who listens to him, we are now impeaching you. We are now smearing and labeling you his followers. Essentially, because you guys have deviated from the code, from the narrative, you all have to be just lumped in is some kind of static, knuckle dragging cliche right wing maga types and this just this does not match reality whatsoever. Okay, even beyond that, they try to a lot of people were even dismissing this as Joe Rogan is just another Howard Stern, Like Joe Rogan is not a a PhD. But go listen to Joe Rogan's chats, including the people he speaks with, many of whom are incredibly intelligent. These are intelligent conversations, and people can't a lot of these critics can't wrap their mind around how conversations or a comp public commentator can be simultaneously at one point a kind of you know, meathead MM, a former comedian crafts guy who's interviewing Tim Dylan and talking ship but also interviewing PhD s at the same the next episode, and this it scrambles their brains so much, and it is very much telling that all these former standards are all all these the ways that the way that we categorize things politically or culturally, like these terms no longer apply and people really need to come up with new rubrics for describing them. Um. So that's right off the bat. I think everyone kind of went in the wrong direction right there. And then you know, and thinking about who he is or who he isn't interviewing, and going back to the you know, part one of his controversy last week about labeling him anti vax you would assume that this means that he's simply not interviewing or providing the other side of the argument. And that is just ridiculous because it completely ignores three months ago in October, he had on Sanjia Gupta from CNN. If you haven't noticed, Sanjia group, to the medical resident medical expert at CNN, is pretty heavily in favor of the vacts. And he went on Joe Rogan and he got to make his case for COVID restrictions, for the vaccine, for the dismissal of some of these other treatments that Joe had been hyping. And you want to know something, Gupta embarrassed himself. Okay, and this is not arguable. Okay, even Gupta even admitted, he acknowledged many times over the you know, that his arguments were lightly sourced, lightly supported, and that the that it acknowledged to a number of instances where CNN and other mainstream media had been caught lying and uh and falsely portraying what Rogan had been saying. Okay, are you guys familiar with Peter Hotez. Peter Hotez is one of the most fiercely pro vaccine commentators in the public sphere. Rogan had him on March two thousand twenty, right at the beginning of the pandemic. Okay, so stop pretending that he's not showing both sides of the argument. He's putting on people who first of all, he's discussing and he's weighing multiple points of view, but he's given everyone a chance to perform on his podcast. And you know, yeah, he was a little more critical and he was a little more adversarial with Gupta. But go listen to the group to interview. Let me see for yourself whether group to earn his credibility in that conversation. I think it's pretty clear that he did not. Um. Okay, So beyond this this scrambling of you know, kind of identifiers and and just a misinterpretation of who Rogan's guests and audience are. Once again, what is going on here? So it was brought to a lot of people's attention that the smash cut video, while it had been put together originally in two thousand nineteen, was already the smash cut video of Rogan saying the N word, even though he was once again repeating what other people had said, not using it himself. It came out through an account called patriot Takes on Twitter. And so Patriot Takes is very bluntly a political action committee, right. It is a political account, and it is there to advocate for left wing causes and quote unquote exposing the right wing. This is how they promote themselves. Um, Patriot Takes posing right wing extremism. Okay, So once again people need to understand and this is something that I described a couple of weeks ago in terms of fact checkers fact checking something that purports to be neutral. No, it is a business. The people who are quote unquote fact checkers and who are serving this function, they they get paid and thus they're trying to serve bosses uh and and clients that are paying them. And Patriot Takes is no different. Okay. So Patriot Takes is aligned with another group called Midas Touch. That's m E I D A S T Touch and Mida's Touch apparently um are three. Mightas Touch is an outright Democrats Superpacket's a superpack associated with the Democratic Party, and by a superpacket means they can raise unlimited amounts of money and spend it however they wish. It's run by these three brothers. And you go to these three brothers Twitter accounts and okay, they're they're left wing trolls, their right wing trolls and their left wing trolls. Okay, no, no side has a monopoly on trolls. And these brothers they operate a political consultancy and a pack for political causes. Okay, so what do you think they're trying to do here? They're trying to find it to gin up a controversy to make a supposed political opponent look bad. Because even though Joe Rogan it does did not try to make the left wing his enemy, the left wing has made him their enemy because they have anointed him. You know, uh an anti VAX's right wing knuckle dragon, crazy person patriot takes and the mind is touching these brothers. What they're trying to do is is essentially give a case study. So these three brothers, they're the Massalis brothers M E I S E L A S. And you look at their history and you look at their accounts, and yeah, these are people who do political videos. They're a fucking video agency. Okay, this is what they do. They try to show their effectiveness in political videos, messaging and social media. So great, Okay, if we can go find some uh deceptively edited video of Joe Rogan and use it to boost a controversy, great, that's gonna give us a bunch of good shine, make Joe look bad, and we're gonna get, like I said, more consulting engagements and more money for our superpack. That's that's what this was. Okay, And a bunch of useful idiots of course piled on and indulged this whole thing, and the Mighta's Touch attempt to gin up this controversy as if it was actually an injustice right, as if Rogan had actually done something wrong and said these racial slurs and and shown himself to be a bad guy, which we all know or anyone who's paying it any attention whatsoever is simply false. Okay. And so the Mightas Touched, they're they're using this as part of their portfolio. Okay. They didn't make any secret about it, and they were exposed my account called vocal Distance, Uh, it's a vocal distance on Twitter. Um essentially, you know, exposed that this is where the video had originally been boosted. And Southern Portnoy, Dave Portnoy, who I'm gonna get to a little bit more in a second, he noticed that this was very reminiscent of a video that had gone out attacking him, and he kind of floated it to his Twitter account, you know, identifying and exposing, oh that this group Mightas Touch had LEAs and boosted the Rogan video. Um, Midas Touch goes ahead and contacts Portnoy and says that they want to have a chat with them and Portnoy does a live stream with the three Midas Touch Brothers and on that. You know, they just give this ridiculous spin that they're just trying to expose injustice, that they're just trying to show that these are all private companies and thus there is no such thing as cancel culture or First Amendment. This is just them trying to hold people accountable for wrongdoing so that people can see what public figures have said, and if they disapprove of what these public figures have said, to punish them or choose not choose not to listen to them or be part of their audience. This, of course is all ridiculous. We know this was a hatchet chop. This is very clearly a deliberate attempt to use falsified and deceptive evidence that misrepresents what Rogan did in order to harm his career and put more pressure on Spotify to punish him. Okay, and anyone who can't see that a mile away is just disturbingly naive. So then we go to what what was the reaction from Spotify, Because right off the bat, the first round of this controversy in terms of the vac stuff, they Daniel elk I even I even gave him credit from Spotify said, listen, he stood by the first Amendment. He stood by Rogan. Um, he told you know, his his partners, his shareholders, and employees over at Spotify, you know that we're not gonna do anything about this. And I commended him for that. Then round two, and it includes some racial slurs, which, as we once again know, weren't actual racial slurs, but that was what the controversy was about. UM. At this point, Eck kind of he buckles, and he gives in, and he releases a statement. There are no words I can say to adequately convey how deeply sorry I am for the way that Joe Rogan experienced. Controversy can continues to impact each of you. Not only are some of Joe Rogan's comments incredibly hurtful, I want to make clear that they do not represent the values of this company. I know this situation leaves many of you feeling drained, frustrated, and unheard. All Right, this goes back to a point I made last week. What is this a fucking day care center? This is how a person speaks to children. He's speaking to employees at one of the biggest media corporations on Earth, and that it's not easy to get a job at Spotify, Like you have to have credentials, you have to be highly educated, like he's talking to what are supposed to be serious sophisticated business people, right, and this is how he talks to it. But this is par for the course in these corporate America hatchet job apologies these days. So long story short, he apology gives us groveling up, groveling apology through this note to his staff, and uh continues, one of the things I'm thinking about is what additional steps we can take to further balance creator expression with user safety. Users safety. Okay, this is another ridiculous concept that sprung up recently, that that the content that comes out on social media and and digital media platforms is an issue of safety. Right, Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me. Well, no, apparently, these days, words are a safety issue. And this whole notion just thinking about these things through this prism is ridiculous, but Spotify decided to indulge that this time. Um, it is difficult to have these conversations out so publicly. Blah blah blah, um okay, um, I deeply regret that you're caring so much of this burden, Like what burden are the employees at Spotify is supposed to be caring? Okay, so that some of their friends might you know, might bother them on this topic that they might have to defend the company against. I'm sorry, Like, that's there are worse things. They're more stressful and more onerous and oppressive things that happened to you during the course of your job, regardless echoes on um. We must also believe in elevating all types of creators, including those from underrepresented communities and a diversity of backgrounds. We've been doing a great deal of work in this area, but I think we can do even more. So I'm committing to an incremental investment of a hundred million dollars for the licensing, development, and marketing of music and audio content from historically marginalized groups. Okay, So this was a shakedown, is what it was? That that that Daniel ek is essentially throwing a hundred million dollars at the the problem to pacify whoever he thought was an aggrieved party. And let's just get like, do do people have any notion of the makeup of the music world. The music world does not underrepresent underrepresented parties. It is heavily diverse. Okay, there you go and listen to the music on Spotify, the artists that are featured by Spotify. It is heavily weighted in front of groups that occupy only a small share of the population of America. You want to know something that's great, You want to know why they they're successful on Spotify and where the African American community or the Latino community why they have strong representation on Spotify Because they're good at making music and they should be celebrated for that. So but the the the notion that communities that may be underrepresented in other walks of life are underrepresented in the sphere that Spotify operates is fairly ridiculous. This is a very symbolic and fabricated way to kind of apparently snuff out of controversy, Like, what what did we actually do here? This is just a bunch of money that's going to groups that already we're making a lot of money off spot to five. So this is this bode is very poorly for how corporations respond to these things. A couple of Twitter commentators who have thought had some interesting insight on this. Noam Blum cancel culture is just becoming corporate sabotage via social engineering. People are being manipulated into taking out business competitors by convincing them that they're doing something righteous. Instead of offering better services, companies offer morally superior ones. Okay, so this is the free market is now uh instead of trying. Instead of companies competing over who's got the better product, companies compete over who's more righteous, who's more virtuous? Okay. They engage in these symbolic showings which really don't have any substantial under opainiings. They don't They don't actually uh further justice or stamp out injustice anything of that effect. Um Zai Gilani, who I always go back to one of my favorite commentators in the nineties many entertainment labels to keep for risque material and basically told Congress to buzz off, saying, if you don't like something, don't listen to it. I think about those, um, think about those you know, explicit lyrics stamps on the covers of CDs. Right, they stamped the freaking thing. Everyone knew it was BS. It wasn't gonna stop anyone from buying a hip hop CD or some other CD or album that featured crass language. But you know that was just the bone that they threw to everybody. So he goes on. The firms in charge today are hypercautious, and they happen to have monopolies over expression. This is a bad combo, having so much communication and content concentrated on so few platforms, all that have such a low risk tolerance and engage in all of this kind of performative moral capitalism. That's a terrible combination, okay, and this is why we have such a clouded and and muddied cesspool of an environment these days. But then you think, who was Spotify trying to pacify? Right, Like, who demanded, hey, we need a hundred million dollars given to under historically marginalized groups that have not really been historically marginalized in the audio and music world. Right. And some people suggest that Spotify had to account for the possibility that other artists were going to leave the platform, right that a big music act would say, you're not punishing Joe Rogan enough, Um, I'm leaving the platform. Um. And from there, because the switching costs, because encountering music on Apple Music versus Spotify is you know, it has so many similarities. It's not that like Spotify as an offering that's irreplaceable, right, Um, that that would start what's called the preference cascade, and artists and customers were just going to bolt from Spotify. Well, if you're looking at this, who what artists on Spotify is sitting there and going you know something, I really was going to take my music off Spotify and try to convince all my labelmates to do it. But you want to know something, this half past apology keeping Joe Rogan on but then directing a hundred million dollars towards groups that already do pretty well in the music industry. That's the only thing keeping me on this platform. I'm not sure I buy that. I don't think that they were trying to. I mean they could possibly there were some big artists who just figured, hey, this is a pressure point that I can push, and you know, I want to do something from my community, so great, I'm going to threaten I'm going to threaten Spotify. And what I want to see from them is money, money directed towards my community, um or my interest group. Maybe that's it, But I'm still funding it hard to believe that any artist was actually serious about leaving the platform. So then you think who else could they be trying to pacify? We'll think about who ex message was directed to. It was directed to his staff and employees. And now this is something that happens quite often. Okay, and I think the piece that really typifies this and it's very revealing about this is one of the New York Times from about a year a couple of years ago. The title is the thirty seven year olds were Afraid of the twenty three year olds who work for them. People got to understand, these young, woke employees at these media companies, they don't observe hierarchy. They don't the tail wags the dog. They'll go and rip on their boss. They will start an internal petition. They will try to put pressure on their bosses and get their bosses fired. Okay, there's this whole idea that, oh, these cookie college kids that were and all this woke stuff on college campuses a couple of years ago, once they get to the real world, they're gonna have a route awakening. No, that's not what happened. They got to the real world, and they gave a route awakening to their bosses. They said, hey, we now operate by a new moral code of racial equity, justice, tolerance, inclusion, while paue tolerance, phone inclusion and Poe justice and sensitivity. And either if you don't abide by that, and if you don't have this company, uh, this corporation abide by that, we're going to cause trouble for you. And we want to know something they've been able to they've been able to implement that. Okay, these companies are deathly afraid of internal mutiny and and their employees coming out and trying to start a controversy based on the company portraying so the so called something that conflicts with the younger employees values. I really think you gotta read this New York Times piece. It's really good and it explains this entire phenomenon and that you know, throughout history, generations have always conflicted about, you know, about values, about the older generation thinking the younger generation was insane. But for the first time time, other than maybe a short stint in the sixties, the younger generation is able to throw their weight around it. They get to dictate the morality of their bosses and the companies that their bosses run. And that's really what's going on here. Okay, that's what's happening at Spotify, at Cast and make sure that he doesn't have an internal mutiny. He has to grovel to his employees. And this is something that we've been seeing a lot of. UM. Just before I launched this podcast, UM, I recorded a couple of test episodes. In one of them was about the Dave Chappelle Netflix controversy. And so it happened. Happened to fall on the other side of the line because Chappelle is just that impeachable and because Netflix stood by him. But look what happened with Chappelle and Netflix. He came out with a special that poked a lot of fun at the transgender community. And then there is employee walkouts. You had employees, um, you had you had them picketing, you had them calling their boy, you had employees at Netflix calling their boss a bigot, um and really putting a lot of pressure up the chain. One of those employees went a little too far and got fired because they took they leaked data. You do not screw with Netflix's data. Other than that employee, all these other employees who staged walkouts, who spit right in their boss's face and essentially told them, you know you're we don't stand by this company's decision, and you guys are morally contemptible for allowing Dave Chappelle and you're harming our community. Nothing happened to them. They're still working at Netflix. Think about a generation ago, they'd be out on their ass. In fifteen minutes. They would be fired so quick your head would spin ted. Serrando's of Netflix because Chapelle is just because he's such a big presence, his numbers are incredible, and also because he approaches these topics with a level of sophistication that gives him some plausible deniability. Uh Sorrando stood by Chappelle. He said, thanks, but no thanks. You know, employees like listen, um, it's we We are certainly sensitive to your concerns. But Chappelle stays so they Chappelle by standing firm, and Serrando's by standing firm with him, they headed off that employee attack that doesn't happen always. I don't know if you guys are familiar with a gentleman named Antonio Garcia Martinez Um. He was a product manager and advertising you know, on the ads team at Facebook during its you know, heavy growth phase. Is a noted executive at Facebook. Um left the corporate world for a few years and released a a pretty popular tell all from Silicon Valley and Facebook called Chaos Monkeys. Became a pretty well known and successful author and Internet commentator. A little over a year ago, Um he decided to re enter the corporate world and was hired by Apple to run there at run their ad operations. This was a big hire. This made all the tech press okay because Antonio had become well known in these circles through his book and this writing and the when when Apple hired Antonio, this was big news and its signaled hey, Apple wants to take on Facebook and the ad business. Antonio was fired within ten days. You want to know why. A bunch of spoiled brat employees at Apple started a petition against him regarding some of the content from his book Chaos Monkeys and Chaos Monkeys. The the the supposedly misogynous passage was him writing in kind of a thought bubble semi semi third person in describing you know, his concerns in going into his first date with the woman who turned out to be his wife. It's completely like it's a writing tool. It's a rhetorical tool that he was using. But of course they took they distorted, uh, the intent of that and how that was written, and they claimed that he was misogynist and that Apple was violating its principles and making its employees feel unsafe by hiring Antonio an Apple cave to a freaking petition from two hundred Whiney Bratt employees and fired Antonio within within ten days. There's now a lawsuit on that case, and we'll see and Apple is probably gonna have to pay up. But it's interesting to see what's the value of this. Is Apple We're willing to cough up seven or eight figures to a a false, a wrongfully um terminated executive just to pacify their employees. It seems that Apple is right. Um. So you're seeing a lot of mixed data points on this, but the underlying observation stays the same. These media companies and these big corporations now they have to be concerned about the reaction of their employees to company decisions, and this is not It took these employees at companies up until this recent woke era, you're gonna get fired, Okay, you didn't get to start internal petitions and do walkouts. Those were so rare, Okay, everyone was too concerned about losing their job. These young, like social justice type employees, they don't worry about this stuff. They want to dictate this so the morals, values and the activity of their employers. And in a lot of cases they're able to do so. Now, so how do some other public figures and companies handle this? The company and the individual that are just the absolute masterclass on dealing in this age of cancel culture and social po social justice and woke stuff. Okay, our coin base and Dave portnoy so coin Base and this is a couple of years ago now, um coin Base, you know, had had been noticing that there was a lot of a lot of trouble, a lot of difficulty with employees wanting to speak up about you know, Donald Trump, the American politics and this and leading up to the election in this was becoming an issue for the company. So Brian Armstrong released a memo that was titled coin basis a mission focused company, and essentially in that he stated he laid out that coin Base was had only one mission to on ramp as many people as possible to cryptocurrency, okay, and that that was the that the company was only going to to focus on its business mission, and that anyone that wanted to discuss anything other than the mission could do so on their on their private time. If you wanted to discuss politics or engage in political activism, you could do that on your personal time. But coin Base wasn't going to do it. They weren't going to do campaigns, they weren't going to donate, they weren't going to you know, have internal town halls about politics. They were focused on on building out a cryptocurrency exchange and that was it. And he said if anyone had a problem with that, if any of the employees wanted to be at a at a job where they were able to engage in political activism or only work for a company that engaged in employ agal activism, then have a lovely day. We have a nice severance package for you and you can leave. And so there was a big hubbub about this, Okay, there's he was criticized by all. It was he was, you know, supported by a lot of people, but also criticized by alat Oh how dare coin Base uh try to you know, silence their employees, including those from marginalized groups. YadA YadA, YadA, YadA YadA. So what was the fallout from that? Coin Base lost something like fifty out of like two thousand employees. It was nothing. And you know, they got rid of probably the most sanctimonious, aggrieved, like worst energy employees at the company. And they went on their merry way and coin Base went back to its mission. Um, that was a masterclass in how to handle this situation and how to handle these issues. Hey, this is this is what we do as a company. Okay, if you want to engage in political activism, if you want to do all this stuff, great, that's for your personal life. Okay, you don't get to do that filtered through the company. And uh, Apple, Facebook, Spotify would been well served to have taken that that They would have saved themselves a lot of trouble. What are who are some other companies that have shown leadership in this regard Shopify, Um, Tobias luke Key, I believe is the way to to pronounce the last name. So this is a Canadian company Shopify, Uh, you know, e commerce back end and UH a little bit after the Brian Armstrong memo, he released a statement essentially saying we're a team, not a family. Okay, since he's saying, if you want your work to treat you like a family and be kind of cultivating, you know, your personal interests, your political beliefs, like, that's not this. We're here to do work. We are here to build this company, and you are part of a team, not a family. And that really shut down any of this trouble around you know, uh, employees getting political at Shopify even first and then in regards specifically than Armstrong kind of continuing on putting together the proper blueprint instead of corporate protocols. Here also released a memo regarding UH free speech in the First Amendment in response to this Rogan Spotify issue UM and essentially said and Antonio Garcia Martinez is now back to being an online commentator because he's in this lawsuit with Apple. UM he described it, you know, and and was very laudatory about coin bass perspective on this. Finally a tech company is doing content moderation. Sanely, policy is grounded in rule of law. As government should police speech and commerce, not companies. The First Amendment is the binding moral standard, even if lawed is not technically apply to private companies. Let's go over that again. The First Amendment is the binding moral standard, even if law it is not technically apply to private companies. Okay, because that's what everyone hides behind. They always cop out, but well, it's a private company, they can do whatever they want. Well, okay, if you actually believe in the principles of the First Amendment, that you should be trying to align with those principles, even if you don't have to legally. Okay, it's a cop out, right that we can we can deviate from the First Amendment, that we think it's selectively, that we we want to apply it selectively. We only want to use the First Amendment. It serves its purposes. We don't want to have to abide by it. If we can get away with violating it, then we will know companies, particularly companies as applies to content moderation, should use the First Amendment as the binding moral standard, okay, regardless of whether the tech the law applies. And then in terms of where does the First Amendment not apply? Looking back on the body of law and where case law, because once again, as we all know, first the First Amendment and free speech is not absolute. You cannot threaten people, you cannot defame people. There's lots of things that you things that you can get punished for saying, but the the standards for punishment and the penalties we've derived these over decades and centuries through the law right and understanding, Okay, when can you or can you not invade someone's privacy? What is defamation? What is a criminal threat? Like? These are not things that just came up over the last ten years. The courts and the legal system in case law is has well grounded principles of what constitutes these violations. As opposed to this whole new content moderation thing that social media and digital media companies are doing where they're really making it up as they go along and making it up as they respond to controversies. That's all they're doing. They're figuring out their application and their view on free speech and content moderation in in response to controversies, which is exactly what Spotify did here. So we need more Brian Armstrong, more coin based, more companies taking that approach and less less companies and listen. I don't want to be too critical of Spotify because they have generally stood by Rogan. They're going to keep his podcast on the platform. But I feel like this is going to be the beginning of the end of Rogan on Spotify because they're gonna be monitoring him. He's gonna have to be a little more careful, and not for justifiable reasons. He's always he doesn't want to be walking on eggshells. I think he's probably out of there once this deal is up. Um. But you know, this kind of tepid, lukewarm fifty fifty defense, I don't know how much I'm into it. So I think we need more companies should be taking the coin based approach than the Spotify and definitely the Apple approach. They did Antonio dirty and I hope he gets them. Um. So okay, So that is the coin basis the company that is setting the gold standard for First Amendment free speech and how to handle these cancelation controversies as an individual who is also showing us the blueprint, and that is Dave Portnoy of Barstools. So back in November, once again, you know, also these were the issues that were percolating just before I started I started recording this podcast. Um. He there was a hit job from Insider, formerly Business Insider, and they after clearly contacting every female who had ever had any sort of encounter with Portnoy, UM, they tried they released a piece that tried to portray some of his private sexual encounters as um, not even non consensual like it was. They didn't even claim that these women had not consented, but they didn't enjoy the experience. They thought that Portnoy had been too rough, um, And they kind of tried to to stir up or gin up some some fabricated you know, claims or implications of sexual assault, nothing that even came close to justifying a police investigation. No charges were filed um. And it was pretty clear you know that these even people who read the story, we're like, okay, wait, can we even really be sure what what they're claiming that Portnoy did wrong? These girls all stayed in contact with him, very friendly, and continued sexual relations with him after the incidents, uh in question. And it was a pretty bs uh pseudo controversy, But it was the type of thing that did get other people back down on this stuff. Two thousand, sixteen seventeen eighteen. This type of story comes out, someone probably loses their job or their career takes a serious hit. But Portnoy went full defiance and full offensive. He said, he just was very defined and calling us out and saying, these are all fabric these are fabricated situations. This is clearly a hit job. You people are immoral business and Insider is now just some clickbait emporium, which is what they are. I mean, they try to do this ship all the time. Now no longer respectable tech and finance publication. And uh. And he brought out his all the text messages between him and these girls and as much documentary and supportive evidence as possible. And you know, while so many people may give a tepid apologies that I can understand why someone might feel hurt this or that, and they kind of tipt to around it, Portnoy made no apologies. He went full offensive. I did nothing wrong. You know you're lying, and you're all scumbags. Fuck you, and you want to know something. It worked. That controversy quote unquote controversy disappeared in about a week or two. In his pen, gaming Stock took a bit of a hit for a couple of weeks, and now was about it and everyone moved on. Okay, so brings us to last week. Insider decides to round two, just like it was Round two on Rogan, Round two on Portnoy, and then released another story where a couple of the woman that he had had sexual encounters with claimed that he um filmed them without consent, that he had sent them videos of him having sex with other women, and that one of them mentioned that she was very fearful during a actual encounter with Portnoy. Um this controversy was even more half asked, feckless, and ineffective than the first one. Okay, nobody's even talking about it. It barely created any news whatsoever. The only news that it created was when Dave Portnoy went and filed a sixty five page complaints suing Business Insider and the writers behind the story for defamation. Right, and he's got quite a bit of evidence, text messages, a lot of communications to suggest that not only were these allegations false, but Insider in its research knew they were false and then knowingly and recklessly went after him. Anyways, and if he can prove that he's gonna have a big win on his hands. Okay. It's very difficult to prove defamation in the American courts, but it's not impossible. And if there's evidence that, if it's so clear cut that the the side publishing the accusations knew that they were false or had reason to believe that they were false, you can win one of these. Okay, and uh Portnoy's attorney, Andrew Breler, is a pro um. I've dealt with Andrew Um you know, myself, personally and professionally, and he's one of the best in the business. And Brettler does not take on cases that he doesn't think he can win. So will will Portnoy win win this defamation suit against Insider and and the writers? We shall see, but it's some It's one that Insider is going to have to take seriously. But the real lesson here is, regardless of whether Portnoy wins the lawsuit, like the attempt to harm him failed miserably, his nothing happened to his business, All his advertisers stayed with the company, all his fans stayed And it's pretty much the accusations are getting almost no chat or whatsoever in any through any media channel whatsoever, Like you got it. That's a win. And so I think this is pretty clear that if you take the Portnoy approach, if you take the coin base approach, and to a lesser extent than Netflix Chappelle approach, because you know, Chappelle's a little bit of a different piece, and we're starting to rack up a lot of evidence that offense is the best defense, okay, and that simply telling people no, I will not apologize, I will not indulge your bullshit, okay, and that this is a bad faith attempt to either one outright fabricate lies about me or to deceptive, you know, deceptively misrepresent things that I've said or done. And I'm not having it. And that strategy seems to be winning, okay. And those who kind of tiptoe around things and get on the defensive and give these half hearted apologies that they you can tell their hearts are not in and they do not think it is justified, which aren't justified. That's kind of a recipe for disaster that doesn't always work out so well. This is part of our continued survey and analysis of quote unquote cancel culture. I hate to use the term cancel culture because it's overdone and it's cliched, But that's the era that we're living in. We're going to continue to see these controversies sprout up around public figures many times in terms of content moderation, things that they've said on a digital or social media platform, and what are the standards, what are the practices where can someone get in trouble, what are the proper responses? So we're I'm trying to take a academic and clinical look at this of how these things kind of come about and and you know, and judging the effectiveness and really the the fundamentals of the responses here. So a lot on this one. Rogan Portnoy and Tonio Garcia Martinez go follow him on Twitter. I'm gonna be interviewing him in a couple of weeks. He's fantastic and root for him in his lawsuit against Apple. Um. This will be the continued study here. So I think this is the temperature is gonna gonna cool down on Rogan within the next week or so. It's gonna be interesting to see how he does or does not address this on his next few shows. UM. But yeah, probably they probably buckled a little bit on this one, so I don't know. Hey, congratulations to any of the creators that are going to be in the line of fire on Spotify's hundred million dollars. You are getting paid alright, So much like Joe Rogan, is a story that just won't die. The pandemic masking and pandemic policy, Hey, we gotta keep on talking about it. We're close to the end here, but we still got some more to go. Um. However, you know, the Archduke, the Emperor of Public Health himself, Tony Faucci, did announce this week that he believes the full blown phase of the pandemic, as he puts it, is just about over. So what do we have to look forward to here? And it seems like we should be able to ease off the brakes, return back to normalcy, aside from those of us who haven't you know, haven't taken steps towards that so far, but who knows. I mean, there's been some people throwing out ideas that we're actually entering one of the most painful parts of the pandemic, because you know, much like being stabbed, the knife doesn't always hurt the most going in, it hurts the most when you're removing it um, So what does that look like in the context of the pandemic. Is a piece in the New York Times and a couple more centrist doctors and public health officials wrote it, the end of the pandemic may tear us apart um. A doctor on Twitter, Shara duran Um. The way she put it was at this op ed resonated with me, I believe we are heading into the most divisive phase of the pandemic, and the pandemic the division will not be in this case across political party lines. And so why would this be the most divisive phase of the pandemic. It's because we're gonna be dealing with the people who still can't let go and haven't let go, and for them to return back to normalcy in reality they're not there. That's gonna be a painful process and they're I don't want to put too much blame on these people, because it's not that there's such bad people underneath it all. It's that the reality that they've been living in is one that they felt very cozy within, and getting back to a more normal reality for them is very painful, and so I do sympathize on that. In that regard, however, they're gonna try to make it painful on everybody else, right as they're going to over emphasize all the threats that they see from getting back to normal life, from people stopping, you know, from even from the news, from the pandemic not being in the news every day, or even not being mentioned on this podcast going forward. Um, as Duran goes on, rather, it is now the divide is now between those who are more or less risk averse and those are more who are more or less able to frame risk in context. Right. So, a lot of people of the last but years have been able to do some cost benefit analysis and the ones, but a lot of people in a pretty significant chair of the American population has has simply as treated this like this was gonna be a big Ebola breakout in some movie. And now they're going to be asked to get back into society and that's gonna get super messy. So what are we seeing in terms of uh political shifts in in you know, shifts in the political wind right now? Um So the New York Times acknowledged, um blue state governors dropping indoor mask mandates. We've got New York, We've got Connecticut, We've got we've got New Jersey, and now California. So California, California, Gavin Newsom announced on February seven. As of February fift California's indoor mask mandate will end. The state is still asking unvaccinated people to wear masks inside. Of course, Los Angeles County will be the soul county in the state that maintains its mask mandate. And we'll get to Barbara Ferrare l A County Health Director in just a moment, and why l A continues to be the outlier on all of this stuff. So you've got the Democratic governors just you've got a cascade the down the chain in these blue states. They're all releasing all the pandemic all the pandemic restrictions. And so why does this happen in such a coordinated fashion? Right, it's not the science doesn't look the same in every one of these states. Rights, or at least that the science is how they term it and how they judge sense. So what's happening? For that New York Times story last week, Democratic governors took their concerns to the White House as members of the National Governors Association. They gathered for a meeting in the East Room. Several or several asked President Biden to provide clear guidelines for their states to move from the crisis footing of a pandemic to a recognition that the virus was here to stay. Okay, So we see what happens here. Everyone's tired of it. The polls and the polling is shifting against it. Okay, and and and the politicians understand that people are tired of these restrictions. They understood that oh Macron. They were willing to see how oh Macron played out, but they were they suspected that it was going to be mild and quick, and it turned out that prediction was proven out. So when it proved to be mild and quick and it's on a major, a major downswing across the country, people have had it. They're not going to stand for these restrictions any further, um per some public polling as of last As of this week, seventy percent of Americans agreed with the statement that it's time we accept COVID is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives. Support for vaccine mandates dropped to forty from fifty. That's a pretty significant shift, okay, And you gotta a couple months back that was as high as seventy percent. And I know a lot of us um who are are skeptical of the mandates are kind of shocked that so many people would be in favor of them, because a mandate is a very permanent thing, right, But look, public opinion is not permanent. Public opinion shifts are very quickly. We're already at fort support for vaccine mandates. What do you think it's gonna be in a month? Right? When that's in the third you think any politician is gonna be able to maintain a vaccine mandate when that thing's polling in the high twenties, low thirties. And you see how you see that these people, these people in power, they're only responsive to public opinion, right, or at least it's at some point that's that's the the catalyst for their behavior. So that's what you're seeing with all these Democrats now trying to walk back now claiming that the science has changed, that the guidance has to change, the laws have to change because the science has changed. So for instance, we've got Dr Leona Wen. She's been the resident COVID hysteric medical expert quote unquote over on CNN, and she has been as in her mind, we've been under emergency, catastrophic conditions for two years. Now, let's go back to some of what she said back in so as recently as September two one. According to Lena when the unvaccinated should not be allowed to leave their homes, listen to that, that's insanity, Okay, she wanted unvaccinated. First of all, until about February March two thousand twenty one, everyone was unvaccinated. So by Lena Wen's standards and by her desires, everyone would have been locked in their home for all of two thousand twenty right and into early two thousand twenty one. So what we when we did not have a vaccine for some reason? She she did not think that that was, you know, a a justified or a valid way to handle society. But apparently when there's a vaccine available, the people who are unvaccinated should not leave their house. Now February two twenty two, she gives a big interview. Yeah, the guidance has changed now that the science has changed, Okay, Well, this is the problem with using science as this catch all term, right, what does the science mean? No, these science hasn't changed. The understanding of the virus has not changed. What has changed is that case counts have gone down, right, And we saw they've all gone down in concert all essentially every state saw the same godsdamn curve. It went up super fast towards the end of December early January, and over the last two weeks of January it plummeted. Okay, and that was a delay that that was the same trajectory that we saw a couple on a couple of weeks delay from the UK, that we saw on a couple of weeks delay from South Africa. So the science didn't change, it's that the the prevalence of the virus changed. And given the exhaustion of the the American public with these restrictions and seeing that the omicron wave went by so quickly, they're no longer having it. But this is the type of gas lighting these people want to foist upon us. They want to pretend that there's some underlying science that has changed here, Okay, that there's something different about the virus, about safety levels and everything, and thus that is the only factor that is governing some pretty significant and never before seeing societal restrictions. But we all know that's not true. But look at look at how coordinated this is. We've got Democratic represent Congressional Representative Sean Patrick Maloney from New York Democrats plan to fight covid IS working. Cases are down in, vaccines are widely available. Explain to me how your plan worked when we saw the same exact case curve in all states, regardless of whether they Republican or Democrat, whether they had restrictions, restrictions or not restrictions. And then we saw the same exact curve in the UK, South Africa, Denmark and all these other places that got hit by O Macron. Explain to me how you're tying the causality of the drop in case counts and the disappeared the contraction of the virus to your policies. He would of course not do that, and then mentioning that vaccines are widely available. Vaccines have been widely available since roughly March April two thowy one, you know, January and February. It was really it was specifically for the elderly by March. By the end of April, anyone who wanted the vaccine who was above the age of twelve pretty much get it. Okay, So stop pretending that this is a new development. These vaccines have been available for about nine months now. So with something else says, with science as our guide, we're ready to start getting back to normal. Great, So that's that's their story. They're going to pretend that we were for the past two years, literally until the last week, we were under some unforeseen conditions. There's that that that we saw that we can tie the drop in cases and the trajectory of the virus to certain non pharmaceutical interventions and the existence of vaccines across the board, and they are going to try to memory hold this. It's kind of a similar thing with what the Republicans are doing with January six. I can't really blame them for that either. These are things that look bad politically, so that the politicians are just trying to kind of gas lad us into ignoring that they ignoring what actually transpired here. So a few weeks ago I had this discussion around you know, whether or not some conservatives were red conning the situation and ignoring that conditions had been different. Um, I think that claim was mostly incorrect. I mean, they generally were. I'd say, I think Ben Shapiro laid down ten points. I'd say seven of them them he was correct on, and three of them he was incorrect on. But we see what's going on here in the blue states, blue states with more restrictive democratic governance, and with the you know, with the commentators like Leona When and Sean Patrick Maloney that this is this is gonna be one big gas lighting campaign. That Okay, we saw that, we saw the people are now fully exhausted. They've hit full COVID exhaustion. We need to get back to normal and the pandemic and any we're gonna we're to the We're gonna do everything we can, and we'd rather move on. So in the infinite wisdom of Madman's Don Draper, as he said, if you don't like what's being said, changed the conversation, And that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to change the conversation. They were they were COVID hysterics until literally this week, and now they want to pretend that there is some magical change in the quote unquote science, So they can't this can't be pinned on them as opposed to some other people, you know, who skated to where the puck was going to be. They understood where things were headed. They saw, they saw the patterns, and they saw the trends, and they and that's what gave them guidance, right as opposed to trying to make it all up in real time. But I can't say that this is unexpected, but that is what is occurring. And so to loop back here on California, in Los Angeles, l A, we are going to be the sole outlier, pretty much gonna be the only through through February. Uh, we're in March. We're gonna be pretty much be the only major American county that still is under an indoor mask mandate. And who gets to make these decisions. It is going to be the director of Los Angeles Public Health, Barbara Ferrare. Who the hell is this woman? She's not elected, Nobody elected her. She was appointed by the board of supervisors. Okay, she's not even a doctor. Yet, this unelected bureaucrat has dominion over ten million residents. This is we are the biggest acount. We're bigger than most a ton of countries where twice the size of Sweden, right, Los Angeles, And yet an unelected bureaucrat gets to have domain and get to direct people's lives and all businesses and make these decisions with zero accountability whatsoever. And yet they're still maintaining masking in schools. And so this has been a big problem, right, is that some over the past two years, so much of our lives has been outsourced and the decision making over our lives has been outsourced to unelected, unelected bureaucrats. Right at least with politicians, like, hey, they're up for reelection, right at some point you can vote them out. A lot of them have a stranglehold over their positions. But technically there's some there's some mechanism of accountability. What accountability is there for director of public health of accounting? And this phase is really not reflected well on these bureaucrats whatsoever. Jay Batakaria mentioned says public public health has become a laughing stock because it has forgotten that the health of the public extends far beyond just infection control. Right, It's like we've got to get back to an understanding of public health where there's more factors involve off in the collective health of a county, city, state other than just how widespread a virus or an infection is. Right mental health, Mental health matters, okay, uh, personal fitness matters. All everything else that ties into whether or not we have a healthy society matters other than just how many people have a virus which has you know, in most age coherts and ninety nine nine percent or ninety nine point seven percent survival rate. And we've got to get ourselves out of this type of thinking. And I think it's I'm not as pessimistic as the people that I mentioned, uh at the beginning of the segment, who think we're coming up on the most divisive piece of this pandemic. I think it's gonna be somewhat painful pulling out the knife. It's gonna be strange, um and and you're there's going to be a lot of hostility. But I think that most people are still just ready to move on and are sensible people at this point. But we've still got to recover our sense, and we've got to recover our sense to start looking more more soberly at what constitutes a healthy society. Right, and to certain think about my hosted this this week on Instagram and a comparison, not a comparison, but essentially mentioning that the flu season in two thousand seventeen, in two thousand eighteen was a record breaker. Eighty thou people died of the flu that year. Okay, And of course anytime you mentioned the flu or a comparison to the flu, everyone oh my god, you think COVID's just the flu. It's like, no, that's not the point that I was making and posting that. Okay. We in in two thousand seventeen, two thousand eighteen, with this record breaking flu season, society was operating normally and had to kind of make its assessment of what it considered normalcy and what it considered the amount of harm that we could sustain before we took certain interventions. And society seemed to be okay with understanding that, hey, there's going to be more harm from the from this infectious disease, but we're not going to shut down society or impact people's lives in ways that are going to have other health consequences. We made that risk trade off. It's like, what what are the tradeoffs gonna look like going forward, right if there's a bad flu season or combining that the flu um with whatever the remnants of COVID are coming up this winter, Like, are we gonna go back into a bunch of restrictions that are going to impact people's health and and personal fitness and mental and mental health going forward? And these are things we're really going to have to look at. And that's some of what I'm gonna be discussing with my guest Shawn Stevenson in just a few minutes, um. And he's just been fantastic about understanding the failures of public health, how to take real personal agency and responsibility for your personal health. Um, but people gotta we're gonna have to now that are these politicians are taking a bit of their their foot, a bit off the gas pedal, We're gonna have to really hold them accountable to maintain some perspective and understanding that now that we're out of this pandemic. Okay, the spread of infection infectious diseases is not the soul variable determining public health. Are our public health and public and politicians creating good conditions for a physically fit citizenry. Um, are we allowing people to operate normal, normal, socially, so they don't you know, and sink into the Russian and isolation. These are things that we're going to have to be really active about because we can see what happens when we're more passive. We let freaking incompetent mediocrities like Barbara ferrare bosses around dictate our lives in ways that have so many more health consequences than just what can be. What the results of COVID are um. So with that, UM hope, well, hopefully we will track it. We will see. Hey, is this the most divisive phase of the pandemic? Once again? I think it will be more divisive than people anticipate, but not the most most divisive. So up in a minute, my chat with Seawan Stevenson. Thank you everybody, the prevailing narrative. We will be back in just a moment, Ladies and gentlemen. I'm at Bolinsky and this is the prevailing narrative. And this is a big week in American health. The Archduke, the Emperor of American Health, Anthony Fauci, did declare on Tuesday that the full blown pandemic, as he put it, is almost over. So two years now, health has been on everybody's mind. But what type of health are we talking about? Because Faucci is a public health official, but a lot of us, particularly young people, hadn't necessarily thought about health within the public health prism um prior to the pandemic. And then as as a pandemic comes around in an airborne virus, we start having to think about our health in terms of, you know, of institutions, of policies, of of restrictions on our life that we had never had to experience before. Um. While we previously had thought about health mostly in terms of our day to day personal decisions diet, fitness, sleep, mental health, what have you. UM. So I think it's really interesting now to kind of look back on that for coming up on two years of the biggest public health crisis in American history at least the last hundred years. And we're going to get into all of that with Seaun Stevenson, who was with me today. He is the creator of The Model Health Show, which has been featured as the number one fitness and nutrition podcast in Apple podcasts and iTunes. And while Sean is a student has been a student of biology and kinesiology, it appears that his real fitness and wellness journey started as a teenager when he was diagnosed with a degenerative bone disease, and he kind of look it upon himself to to address that problem and really take agency over his personal health. So Sean, first off, thank you for joining us, and I'd love to hear a little bit about, you know, the beginning of your fitness journey and kind of establishing personal agency and attacking this this illness that you had as a child or as a teenager. Sure. Yeah, So growing up, I was an aspiring athlete and coming from the neighborhood that I grew up in a large portion of my life I lived in Ferguson, Missouri, which has become kind of infamous or famous at this point, and so I've lived in what's considered to be today a food desert. So I lived in Ferguson for a nice chunk of my life. And also he's Saint Louis, South St. Louis, so he's kind of inner city, uh areas where the environment is a little bit dangerous. You know, you gotta be careful going to to the school, you know, to the to the bus stop, and like I said. Most most importantly, what most folks don't see is how many wonderful people are living in these communities, just trying to find a way, trying to better our lives. But often times we don't have examples. I never met a person that went to college, let alone graduated from college, except for my teachers maybe. I mean, you know, one of the teach one of the schools that I went to. I don't know if the teachers even graduated, to be honest, you know, it's kind of remember this very distinct moment. I was in third grade. Mr Ewing shout out to my teacher, Mr Ewing, and we had art class. You know, you'd leave your class for like one thing. And I remember distinctly Mr Dillon was the art teacher. And they wheeled into television into the classroom and put on forty eight hours with Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte and left and went together. All right, this is true story Hamilton's Elementary School in St. Louis, Missouri. Great example, you know, in terms of comedic sensibilities, not so great in terms of education and quote unquote wellness. Maybe that's where I get it my sense of humor. You know so, but coming from this environment again, I was at that time, I was on the school lunch program, you know, the free lunch program at this little red ticket and as soon I get there in the day, you know, this is my opportunity to get breakfast. You know. Sometimes we didn't have that much money at home, and we get money from you know, food from quote food pantries and charitable organizations and things like that. We're on public assistance. And there's another misnomer that people aren't working hard. My my stepfather was the head chef at Morton's of Chicago uh in St. Louis, and my mother worked overnight at a convenience store just to make ends meet, you know, and because we're kind of just always behind the ball, having three miles to feed and my mother actually one incident. And I talked about this in my latest book, Eat Smarter, which, by the way, I'm very happy to say my my publisher just sent me the message on Monday that despite all of the mayhem that took place in about four weeks of press that I did, Each Smarter was the number one bestseller in the United States when it came out. The week that it came out, and it's a national USA today national bestsellers sold a hundred thousand copies, two thousand copies to be exact, and then the short blitz of you know, thank you so much, and you know, we'll talk more about that, and really, but the culmination from that book, the seeds started in those moments, you know, living in that environment because as my mom is trying to make kids meet, working overnight at this convenience store, one night, she got robbed and she was stabbed several times. And my mom is just a tough if if people saw my mom knew my mom today, she's like a wolverine. You know. We called her call the wolverine, but she end up still doing the guy until the police showed up. But it was just constant, you know, issues that we're facing just to get by in this environment. So, you know, I want to kind of break some some some frameworks that people have about people who are in these conditions. You know, we're I'm coming out of the gate, kind of behind the ball and just trying to figure things out. But here's the point. Once I get an example of what's possible, that's when good stuff starts to happen. And so I go through my life, you know, I saw my way out of the conditions that I was in playing sports, and you know, as a scholar athlete performing great on the football field, on the track. But at fifteen years old, I was doing a time trial during track season and I ran a four or five forty when I was fifteen. By the way, so I'm doing a time trial with my coach sprint and as I'm coming off the curve into the straight away, my hip breaks. I broke my hip the iliat crest and my hip and at the time I didn't know what happened. I've never been injured before, but I just kind of came up lane was limping a little bit. I kept coming to practice for a couple of days and I couldn't get my legs to turn over. Eventually got the skan done, the physician puts it up for me to see, Oh, there's the problem. My bone was kind of floating off in space, and at that moment, you know, he's like, you know you're gonna We're gonna get you some crutches. Men said. They even gave me this cool little whirlpool thing adapted to put on my bathtub at home. You know, He's like, you'll get better, but he didn't stop to ask, how did the kid break his hip from just running? Fifteen year old breaking their hip? Isn't that the the injury that that look at bo Jackson? His was definitely more severe. His It was definitely more severe, you know. So mine was just a fracture of the tip of my hip. And basically what happened for me was I pulled a muscle and my bones were so brittle the bone just kind of came off with it. And so that's what I didn't learn until five years later, when I was twenty years old. I finally get this diagnosis after injury after injury kept me off the football field, and I get this diagnosis of degenerative disc disease and did you basically an advanced authority condition of my spine and of my bones to put it simply for folks. And so getting this news at the age of twenty, when my whole life is in front of me and I think I'm about to, you know, go into I mean my prime of life years physically, Yeah, my physician at the time, same scenario puts the scan up for me to see and I was used to fifteen year old scenario like, Okay, tell me what to do, get to get better, let's go, let's get back, let's get back to the game. And with that kind of inspiration that I still had, he kind of like literally reached his hand out kind of like slow down, and he said these words. He said, I'm sorry, son, this is incurable. This is something that you're you're going to have to learn to live with. And my brain didn't register, like I actually asked him again, like I was like, okay, so does this have anything to do with what I'm eating? Should I change what I'm exercising? And I had no context really to asking the question except my nutritional science class that I had in school, which I thought was about fitness. And he told me, this hasn't these are exact words. This has nothing to do with what you're eating. This is something that just happens, and I'm sorry that it happened to you. Now, the ironic part is that he told me this has nothing to do with what I'm eating, But then he wrote me a prescription to eat some pills. Right, And so I was just talking with and we've mentioned this right before we got started. I was just talking with Dr John Abram said, wonderful UM professor out of Harvard. He teaches healthcare policy and also years of physician and one of the top medical I believe the kind of pharmaceutical litigation experts in America. Yes, I mean he's he knows where the bodies are, bare like, he's been through a lot of stuff, but he's just a really lighthearted, optimistic guy still despite all this stuff that he's seen. And one of the things that we talked about was this forgotten issue that took place just a few years back with biox And so when I'm twenty years old sitting in that doctor's office, the two hot insets nonsteroidal anti inflammatory drugs that were the top picks were Celebrates and by Ox, and he could have put me on either one. He put me on Celebrates, which I ended up having side effects from. But Box ended up, after years of litigation, ended up killing uppers of sixty thousand Americans, and it had over a hundred and twenty thousand cardiovascal events documented from taking biox that murder. Then at that time they actually found which is it's a normalcy. You know, they were able to basically kind of shift away the peer viewed data that they provided to the New England Journal of Medicine, because that's how they were selling the drug. Was going to doctors saying, hey, look we got to study in the New England Journal of Medicine. This drug has like reduces the risk of gas gas ro intestinal problems, which was the issue with you know, things like I'd be profen for example, so it's better than that, and it relieves pain better. Neither of those things were shown in their clinical data. And also the thing that they hit they were able to basically manipulate the data that they shared. They did they basically hid the fact that there was a traumatic increase in cardiovascular events that took place in their own clinical trials. There's about a three times higher risk, which is not just two times. Three times higher is substantial, you know, and even young people in their twenties had strokes, are heart attack and died from this drug. And I just to just frame this for everybody out there there, and this was you know, from This is something that was discussed on Shawn's recent podcast, like I said, with John Abramson, one of the top top pharmaceutical litigation experts. The episode was titled The Shocking Truth about Drug Companies and how They've destroyed American health. And so in Sean's case, twenty years old, highly conditioned, you know, highly tuned athlete um having some lower but having some muscular and bone issues and goes to a physician. Physician, gets diagnosed and is there are two anti inflammatory drugs that were that most doctors and physicians were prescribing for these types of infirmaries at the time. Um Sean got the one that was relatively safer. The other one resulted in the death of deaths of sixty thousand people. It's called by Ox and was was the basis for I believe the largest pharmaceutical product liability UM malpractice case in American history, if not the biggest, definitely one of the biggest, yes at that time, since the worst things have happened, you know, which we can get into into today. But here's this is the bottom line from that piece of this story is that merc literally and knowingly put this product on the market and killed people. And even as the time was going on that more and more of these issues were coming up, they kept finding ways to creatively hide their liability and such that no one went to jail. Their fines were a slap on the wrist, and they were able to continue operating in business. They weren't kind of taken out of this kind of medical medical care system, the health care system which if we killed ten people, let alone a hundred, let alone a thousand, let alans, we're talking sixty thou American lives, this business should not exist anymore. But guess what Marc is doing better than ever. They're about to launch their new COVID pill and their prime to make another it's another blockbuster drug. And this is the nature of it, you know, as you know very well the way that the system is set up as far as litigation, they have some of the most powerful lawyers, you know, legal teams on planet Earth who helped to put in to place policy that shields there so so remarkably from these issues where they can create, for example, UM be able to to do a certain type of bankruptcy to reduce liability. Like, there's all kinds of loophole, there's all, you know, there's a lot of Yeah, for sure, I mean I'm not a medical malpractice or or a civil litigation it's attorney, but I'm definitely familiar with a lot of this stuff. And um, as we'll get to within the context of the pandemic and the vaccine. Definitely some gaming of the system to reduce liability. And listen, I mean, liability is all. There is always going to be a game played with with a lot you know, with liability caps in terms of creating drugs and medical care, because you've got to incentivize people to do it. If the if the you know their argument at least is if the malpractice risk is too high, then then why are we creating these drugs in the first place? And you're going to stifle innovation. Um but you know, they get very creative about how to avoid liability. And you know there's other products, Like there's product liability for a kid's toy. Right if that does and work, okay, you know, maybe someone gets a bump or bruise if it's a or or the you know, your kid doesn't get to use uh their micro machine or god, I can't just believe I broughtuct micro machines anyways, but god knows what. When the there's when there's product defects in pharmaceutical in the pharmaceutical world and in medicine, people die, and in this case, lots of people died, and what it's a kind of a blurry line between civil liability and criminal liability, and they don't seem to have any criminal liability where they're negligence and in many cases, um um, you know, risks and defects that they either one were aware of or two should have been aware of, they don't. There's no criminal liability for them, you know, being in part of the chain of causation of a person dying. And that's super problematic. Um. But so in terms that we're gonna get to public health in a second, in terms of you, so essentially you were diagnosed with this this uh infirm rate, you would had only a limited amount of good examples of health and wellness and nutrition. You know that you're exposed to in your childhood because of where you grew up. And so that's one of the things that a lot of people don't um acknowledge about. You know, some working class neighborhoods that to a certain you know that they've got bigger health issues because they don't have as much as one access to knowledge and good examples, but to access their their natural environment is simply unhealthier. So I imagine after this diagnosis, when you're twenty, you went and and became an autodiet act, learning everything you could and really taking personal agency over your your person, your your wellness and your fitness. That is not what happened, but surely thereafter did happen. Took some time because it's always gonna be up to the individual, because I could have packed it, and at that time it would have blamed me. I've got this so called incurable condition and I'm in pain. This is when I'm living in ferguson one bedroom apartment. Um my mattresses on the floor, you know, and I'm eating fast food every day because it's cheap and it's successible, and you know, of course it tastes good. But all that I knew, I didn't know that there was a difference between you know, a fish sandwich from McDonald's and wild caught salmon. Like I didn't. It's just all food. I had no context or right there was for me. There's no differentiation between them, you know. I even when eight in my high I went to a private university for the first college that I went to, very expensive school, auditorium nutritional science class, the whole thing, and what we really talked about was really some false premises around what nutrition is really built on this calorie focused model and not the actually nutrition that is coming through the food. And so two years go by of this time. You know, so I'm from major to twenty two, and I'm still doing the same things that put me in this condition, because the question is how could a young kid have this advanced or three to condition that's usually relegated to people who are in their seventies and eighties and beyond. And you know, my the position actually told me, had the spine of an eight year old man. And what happened was I was accelerating my aging process. My body was deteriorating because I simply wasn't providing the raw materials that my body needed to regenerate my tissues, namely of which for me at that at that instance was my my introvertible disc. And so one day and it took again two years and at this point doing the same thing over and over and being told by each position that I saw bed rest, don't do anything, be careful here, some more drugs. I gained a lot of weight. I was always the one skinny one in my family. I was the skinny kid in my family. But you know, I know a ton about the Human Genome Project and every genetics and all that stuff. But you know, my my fat jeans that were dormant kicked in, and so I'm a lot heavier, really not even recking myself, recognizing myself in my mirror. In the mirror, my mental state is just trash at this point. And it was really when you know, again, rock bottom is a really good place to stand up on sometimes, you know. And so after these couple of years of struggling, it occurred to me finally, after I saw because I would go get another opinion from different physicians, hoping to hear a different answer. I was really looking for somebody to save me. I was looking for one of them to say I've got you, I'm gonna fix this. But they all said the same thing. And one day it hit me that unfortunately they're they're literally telling me that I can't they can't help me, and yet I keep going to them, you know, so when you seek a second opinion, just for everybody moving forward, by the way, So I just talked with Tony Robbins on Monday two, which is really cool. He shared with me this new and he actually in his book he shared a stat that I shared with him back earlier on about this pandemic pandemic related stuff, but he shared a stat in the book that was staggering, and I had I went and dug into it more from the mail clinic, and the study found that essentially, when somebody gets a diagnosis and then they seek out this a second opinion, only twelve percent of the time is it the same diagnosis. Only twelve percent of the time is the exact same diagnosis from the first person to the next position. And twenty one percent of the time the diagnosis is dramatically different from the distinctly it was the word that they use, distinctly different from the first person. So so much about our health care system. It seems so very solid and science based, but it's a whole lot of fucking opinion. And that's the problem because all of these opinions, it just depends on which opinion you get caught up in. Absolutely, and the way that I've heard heard the criticism described various stutely and during this pandemic is false consensus is that you'll hear a medical professional or someone from the medical community states something as if it's gospel, and if there is as if there is a consensus on this drug, this methodology, what what have you? And it's not true. It's just one of a variety of opinions. And if there's anything we saw over the last couple of years, it's people still trying to trying to kind of frame their own personal diagnosis and decision as something that everybody agrees with, that there's a community consensus on and that's simply not true. And as as we've seen with the history of of you know, and those numbers that you just mentioned about so much fragmentation and differing opinions within the medical community. Yeah, it's it's pretty eye opening. And you know where this all did the tables turn and the story you know, spoiler alert, it's a good ending to the story. But it was after seeing the fourth physician and giving you the same bill of goods that I got before. So when you're seeking that second opinion, just for everybody else, learning from my experience, you want to seek a second opinion from somebody who has the same goal as you, who believes that if you have if you just was diagnosed with type two diabetes for example, that you don't have to have the condition, and they want to work with you so that you don't have a condition. But I asked, Okay, what can I do to get healthy? That was the first question that I asked, What what is it that I need to do to feel better? That was the exact question. The second question was, okay, what am I to my disc made of? Whatever my bones made of? The cookie cutter thing that popped up was from marketing, which was calcium, right, doesn't milk? Doesn't body good drinking calcium milk? Mustache, the whole thing. I was in college still at the time, so I was able to just go to the lab and just look into some at some papers, and I found out there was like twenty things that are way more important than calcium that your body can't even absorb calcium without these other co factors. And I was like, I never heard any of this ship and this definitely wasn't taught to me in my nutritional science university nutritional science class that I paid for about my bone density and what actually makes up human tissues. And so I found out what these things were and I just Honestly, the first step that I did, I became a natural pill popper, all right. So I was just like, Okay, I need these Mega three's, I need this chromium, I need the sulfur bearing amino acids, and I just started to consume the nutrients in their isolated forms. Eventually that got very expensive. And also the light bulb came on very quickly actually, and I start to investigate was to have these things, and I basically just started to flood my tissues with these really high quality foods that had all of these compounds that I literally was never getting at all. I was just barely surviving on the way that I was eating. I was eating fake processed foods essentially every meal of my life, like when I was at that point in college. And so once I started to change what I was making my tissues out of, I started to get better a whole lot faster. Coupled with and here's the last part of the story, I came across the study on racehorses of all things and bone density. And this is a multi billion dollar industry, by the way, and if a racehorse breaks a bone like this is grounds like you could lose tens of millions of dollars. So they were doing studies to see how to increase the horses bone density. So they had a control group who basically they did nothing with that had a study group that they gave the horses supplements kind of like what I was doing initially, and they did increase their bone density with supplements. But then they had another group that received supplements and they walked the horses and they had an eat and higher a more dramatic increase in their bone density. So there was something special about exercise, and that was the That's the problem in our society. Part of this this this health complex that are that that humans are experiencing today. We don't really understand that our genes expect us to move. Exercise is not about getting a six pack or you know, uh, resilient bubble butt or whatever. It's about assimilation of nutrients and it's about elimination. Exercises critical movement is critical to move your lymphatic system. It's kind of extracellular waste management system. So if you're not moving, you're literally starting to just retain metabolic waste like a cess pool, and all of your metabolic functioning. He starts to decline and I was not moving because again I was in fear and I was in pain. I wasn't pain, so I just started to do what I could. This didn't mean I went in deadlifted four hundred pounds, which I did later, by the way, I was able to do um. But I just started to just walk or go onto the recumbent bicycle. I was in a lot of pain. But as I was doing this, I started feeling better and better and better in my Then my sleep improved, which was the hardest thing in those two years was sleeping at night. I'd wake up every couple of hours sciatic pain shooting down my leg. Just it was. It was terrifying. I was on more drugs just to sleep at night, you know. And so now that I'm doing things good for myself during the day, it started to help me sleep better in the evening. Six weeks after making that decision to get well, it was as if I had never been injured in the first place. The pain was gone. I lost about eighteen pounds, which again I was a quote skinny kid, so the way just kind of flew off me. Once I started getting in alignment with what my jeans were expecting of me, so results are not typical for everybody. But from there, shortly thereafter, within the upcoming months, people started coming up to me at my university, which I went from a fifteen credit load to down to three, like three credits, like one class just barely hanging on. I was embarrassed and I was in pain just getting around campus. Now I'm feeling better. The next semester is kicking off, back to the twelve credit load. People are coming up to me and they're like, like fellow students. My teachers would stop me, like, what did you do? You look so healthy. They didn't just see a person who lost weight. They saw somebody who was actually radiantly healthy versus the I looked at those old pictures of myself, I look like a dying human being. I look very I look like a ghost of myself. And so they became our first clients, you know. I became a strength and conditioning coach. I graduated after I got my degree, shifted all my coursework back to like biology and kinesiology and nutritional science. Opened up my clinical practice as a nutritionist, work with countless people in that a lot of times people with chronic illnesses were told the same thing that I was told, there's nothing you could do. We saw great success. So even seeing, for example, type of diabetes, which at the time, you know, I've been in this field for twenty years now, it was considered that this was quote incurable, like went to and it's just simply not the case. Now it's well noted that you can reverse this condition. You know, it's understanding what's happening with the beta cells and the pancreas and your insulin sensitivity of the cells and the liver and the metabolism the insulin and all these different things that I would teach people. I'd give them the time to sit down with them and to teach them about their bodies and to find out how do they get in this situation in the first place and find leverage so they can actually do the things necessary, which unfortunately, even if we have the best intentions in our health care system today, many of my colleagues working at physicians, they don't have the time. They're working in value just to keep the lights on, you know, so actually seeing people well and from that, you know, the books have come about, you know, Sleeps Around What was my first book, um I wrote that book. I'm a I'm a nutritionist. The sleep expert part came out of necessity. I had no idea, there wasn't a resource like this. I know gotten friends of mine who are you know America sleep doctor and these different monikers. A book had never done this well as international best sellers twenty one different languages, is translated into and we're knocking on the door of half a million copies sold of this book that's on this fringe idea that the publishers were just still skeptical about because the Sleep book had never done well before, and it changed culture. And this is why I'm here with you today because I know how everybody listening right now, I understand how powerful we are. I'm a guy from Ferguson, Missouri, and my books are in libraries in China, you know, Like that's how powerful we are to affect change and affect culture. And right now what's happening in the world. It really is a result of we've been allowing things to go on all this time for for a couple of decades now and seeing the decline in the health of our communities, and we just accepted and normalize this ship and it's not okay. Now it's bringing it all to the surface. And it's a great thing because we get to say, you know, nope, enough is enough. We know that with COVID, for example, the number one that published by the CDC on July one, they did a massive meta analysis of eight hundred US hospitals and over five yo COVID nineteen pages. I found that the leading risk factor, the number one risk factor for death was obesity. We know this already. We've been saying that since the very beginning, and the c d C, which is everybody's pointing to listen to the CDC, they're saying it with their own mouth. But here's the other thing, and we'll talk about this to The second leading risk factor in that study for death from COVID nineteen was an anxiety and fear related disorders. That's a second leading risk factor for death, and we'll talk about psycho neeuro neuroimmunology and how that's even possible. Third leading cause of death was diabetes and related metabolic disorders. And so we think, I think some people don't quite understand the extent of the obesity and diabetes epidemic in America and just the pure the pure volume, the pure numbers of people who qualify as either diabetic, pre diabetic or obese is quite shocking. Can you can you tell us a little bit about that and it's trajectory over the past thirty five years, because I've heard you mentioned it, and I think that you know, it's the type of thing that is kind of subconscious for people when they might go watch an old movie from the sixties, seventies and eighties and kind of their mind does somewhere process that, Wait, everybody here in these movies is skinny, right, and and then you compare that to what we see now, maybe you could tell us a little bit about the pure extent of those two issues. Absolutely, So we'll just say between we'll we'll just use a short framework. You know, the last hundred years, from nineteen twenties up till nine seventies, the rate of obesity remained actually pretty consistent, you know, somewhere in the ballpark around fIF alright, twelve to fift obesity, all right, But something really crazy happened in the eighties or ob cit rate tripled. It tripled in a decade, and from there it's been no looking back. Today right now, in the United states about and actually this was pre COVID, which we know it's already happened to get the cost of the data net. Our citizens are clinically obese, al right. That to break down these numbers we're knocking on the door. We have almost two fifty million American citizens are either overweight or obese right now. It is insane. And this was something again, it was a rarity just a couple of decades ago. Something has happened. And with that, we have about a hundred and thirty million Americans are either type two diabetic or pre diabetic right now. And on top of that, you know, we know that. Okay, so what is the big issue here? We have this movement towards body acceptance. And this is a beautiful thing because no human being, we should not be cookie cutter. Everybody has the same ideal body type. We have all kinds of shapes and sizes. It's what it's what's happening when we venture into the state of being pre diabetic or diabetic and being obese. Of the absolute damage and and rapid breakdown that takes place in the human body. Nine of the top ten leading cause of death in the United States, nine of the top ten are directly related to insulin resistance and excessive weight, making those conditions far worse. We know this by far. So heart disease is the number one killer most years in the United States across the board, So we're talking about taking the whole population into consideration because it's actually opioids start the leading cause of death for people between the age of eighteen and forty five as of this last year. Another another fact I think people are gonna find shocking. They figured it was kind of a niche you know, a niche hazard, a niche concern. No, it's the number one cause of death. It's crazy, it makes no sense, you know. Specifically, we're talking about Fenton al uh to the synthetic opioid being the leading cause of death for people in their quote prime of life years. But across the board, heart diseases the number one cause of death for many years, and six of our citizens today six have some degree of heart disease. Already, we're taking time bomb And underneath all of this is like, let's have a movement towards self love and body acceptance. Couple that with let's not act like this ship isn't killing people specifically killing people in the communities that I come from, because black women are they have the highest ratio of obesity of any culture, of any citizen in the United States. Almost of black women are obese. These are all this is my aunt's this is my mom, this is the people that I grew up with. These are good people. We just don't know any better. And so we're coming up in these conditions where we have food manufacturers, for example. And I broke all this stuff down. This is what why each Smarter such an important book. I when't broke down, like, how how do we get in this situation in the first place? And there was a great set and this was publishing the Journal of the American Medical Association, so JAMA, one of our most prestigious journals. And they what they did was and because for me, I just I'm a I'm a curious person. I'm just I'm I have a healthy level of skepticism and I'm just asking questions. And so I know that our government has spent literally billions of dollars, about a hundred and seventy billion dollars on agricultural subsidies all right, to help defeat Americans. That's how it started off, which might have been of good intentions, but the vast majority of that money is going towards these cash crops that are largely showing up through the draft, through window and through processed foods, corn, soy, wheat, sugar, things that are used for processed foods, and so, Okay, so we know this already, that's a huge red flag. That's a problem. But does it translate do we have data that it translates to worse help for our citizens? And so the study I was published in Jamma track the people who have the highest consumption of government subsidized foods, and they found that people who ate the most government subsidized foods had a greater incidence of developing obesity. Alright, so it was thirty seven to be exact, but almost in these incidents of becoming obese, our government, the way that things are set up right now is literally feeding the fucking problem. And then instead of treating the underlying issue, we get doled out medications to suppress symptoms. And everybody is making money off the farming of sick people. And it's not okay, It's not okay. And this is again right now is a great time to be alive because we can see this stuff, we've got the data, and we have the audacity to do something about it. It does feel like in response to the natural environment becoming more toxic and and the odds stacking up against us over the past thirty five years UM in terms of these you know, the government subsidizing unhealthy inputs and ingredients um, portion sizes exploding, and people not having you know that there's just naturally their their calorie consumption seems to kind of drift with the larger portion sizes being more availably availability of food. It feels like, you know, much like with yourself in response to greater health concerns and risks, you know, you took it upon yourself to educate, to get more educated. Does feel like the communal knowledge, like we we know more about at least at the top of the funnel. We know more about health, wellness and how to you know, as you say, uh live in in concert with our genes. How are you? How are what our genes expect of us? Um than we ever have before. Now it's just about getting that knowledge out more broadly and implementing it absolutely that you said it perfectly, you know, the data exists, but we've got to understanding and this is what we're seeing right now. There's a lot of turbulence taking place and a big part of that is understanding the systems that are at play that are again, these are multibillion dollar entities that are making a tremendous amount of income that are dependent upon you being sick. They're not just gonna go quietly into the night. You know. It's like, this is just not this is not going to happen. There isn't gonna be a solution for an infectious disease that does not feel the prop the pockets of pharmaceutic companies in a major way. It's just that's not happening. You can forget about that. It's an opportunity. These are opportunistics, kind of parasitic entities that have long track records of felonies like documented literally felonies death fraud Fiser for example, they were ordered to pay the largest health care fraud settlement in the in the history of a Department of justice, all right, and they were they were charged with racketeering like rico charges, which is relegated to organized crime. Right. This is the first time that has ever happened for pharmaceutical company. But nobody knows this. People don't know this. They're just watching the news. Sponsored by Fiser, sponsored by Viser, their maminal organization. This doesn't mean that they can't do something good, for sure, but we have to be open to that. We got it. You look at it with a healthy dose of skepticism. You know, are you with me and a bunch of other people. Another one of these things that kind of gets filed subconsciously, the the um pharmaceutical commercials. At the end, it's some you know, fast talking individual rattles off a litany of potential side effects and it's almost comical. I mean sometimes the description of the side effects goes on for seconds when they're talking faster than a human beings should talk. I mean that that seems kind of disturbing. You know, we live in the we live in the greatest nation in in the world. We still do because of our our freedoms, and of course these are being infringed upon right now. But part of that there's a freedom of of expression, there's a there's a there's an ability to you know, have freedom of speech. And so this is what these pharmaceutical entities are leaning into for their ability to have free speech and talking to you on television. All right. So it's a little again finding a loophole for this because there are only two wealthy nations that allow pharmaceutical companies to promote direct to consumer, the United States and New zee Land. All right, but the New Zealand has much higher standards of efficacy on what's allowed to be said here in the United States, that freedom of speech has ventured into psychological manipulation. And I don't say these terms lightly. I don't. I don't want it to be this case. But when they're playing beautiful soothing music while rattling off all of those side effects, you know, anal bleeding, diabetes, death, like they're just saying these things and this beautiful soothing way all the while you're watching this imagery and you're like, you know, because people want that, they've seen that beautiful imagery is something we aspired towards, and so we're having this cognitive association that this drug might help me get there. You know. It's very it's very it's it's bordering on being, I mean, the world that comes to mind, yes, manipulative. I was gonna say praying on people's natural intentions and good intentions on being happy and healthy. And you know that's that, This is what the advertising industry has done for decades. It's it's their bread and butter. Right. But you know, as you mentioned, it's kind of we accept most countries in the Western world, except that there should be a free market and companies that are involved in commercial activity should be able to engage in these type of advertising tricks. Right. But once again, if you're selling a clothing or freaking kitchen wear or god knows what, okay, society, there's less you know, there's less fallout from allowing corporations to use these marketing tricks to kind of manipulate people's best intentions. Right, But when you're talking about medicine and pharmaceutical inventions, and once again you're you're really dealing with people's health, and when when you're allowing companies to kind of prey on their best instincts with these manipulative tactics in this sphere, it's just it's it's it the cost benefit no longer works out. It seems like, yeah, that's you just said. It's so well, you just said such an important term, which is having a simple cost benefit analysis or risk benefit assessment. These are the basic things that I was taught in conventional education, but really more so working as a research scientist, being able to take huge amounts of peri viewed data and to be able to sift through it and instead of because here's the thing, as humans, we naturally have biases, and that's okay, but we don't understand oftentimes that we have these biases, and so we're constantly looking for things to affirm what we believe already. And so the very best scientists have the ability to put our biases to the side and proactively look for ways that I'm wrong. And even if folks don't like the outcome, you know, the small minority of folks that might not agree with all of the peri of viewed data that I could provide, it's again, it's because it's rubbing against their their bias. Because I'm taking all the data. I don't want to have a dog in the fight, whether it's for vaccine efficacy or whether it's for masks and these things that have become so contentious. What I'm doing is I'm looking at what does the major pejority of high quality per reviewed data show because these are things that seem to be been lost recently that we had accepted they should be a given that a randomized controlled trial that has a specific implement and a specific outcome the gold standard of pacevo controlled randomized controlled trial at that that this should hold rank over observational data with massive confounding factors and biases and does not show causation. Because right now it's happening. Even as the vaccine efficacy story has devolved, it went from you know, and we again the clips of our health officials and you know, even the President of the United States have been out for everybody. I've been talking about this since the beginning, saying that this stops transmission and this is this reduces viral load. Both of these things were proven to be unequivocally untrue. And I'm saying this from real peer reviewed data. And this here's the thing, this data that is getting published in periody journals. They don't want to publish data going against that. That's when you know, like, okay, all right, there's probably probably some integrity here. But here's the thing. Instead of acknowledging that that whole conversation disappears, and now they really double down on well, at least it offers protection and it reduces hospitalizations. Now here's what people don't understand. That is from observational data that does not show causation period and once it's out in the world and the quote real world here, this is where we have easily manipulated evidence take place to the degree that we ignore what the clinical data says. Now, in the very beginning, when the MR and A trials were completed, the first thing that I did was reached out to an epidemiologist who's doing great work out in Canada at Waterloo University, Dr Ron Brown, who had a he reviewed published paper that I was shocked that got published analyzing and the title of the papers essentially the outcome reporting bias and the MR and A vaccine trials. And we and we had this conversation and I brought him on, We talked about it, we walked through it. And what he did was he looked at and he was shocked because when I first heard the numbers pcent effective, n effective, I was like, that's pretty amazing. But here's here's the thing. I know the history, So let me let me hold back my cheerleading for it and walk into this with the healthy skepticism and see how does this actually line up? And so here's what he found, effectiveness percent effectiveness of MADERNA advisor respectively. Those are the relative risk reductions and with relative risk reduction. This is a valid and the numbers are true. This is a valid um statistic to use, but it's used more in clinical there's relative risk reduction versus total risk reduction. Is that correct? Yes, so we'll get We'll get right to this. So it's absolute risk reduction. So relative risk reduction of the r R. This is a number that is looking at a data set that is more comparable to something that we we would use comparing this trial to another something like that. This isn't something that translates to the real world, which that number is called the absolute risk reduction. An absolute risk reduction is your risk risk reduction as an individual from this said treatment. Okay, in this case this m m RNA vaccine, the absolute risk reduction for you as an individual with the FISER vaccine was not It wasn't. It wasn't. It wasn't. It wasn't even five percent, It wasn't even one percent. It was a zero point seven percent absolute risk reduction. For you, as an individual in the real world, you have a less than one percent reduced risk of now here's the thing risk of what? Reduced risk of what? Of contracting and having mild symptoms? Because the vaccines did not show reductions in hospitalizations and reductions in death. The clinical trial data did not show that ship and it's just like it's it's just been completely forgotten. If it was. If that was the case, I'd be all for it. Then I would be happy as a lark to spread the good news. But this is not what we're showing in the clinical trial data. It helped to reduce mild symptoms and continue. So there was zero point seven and from for maderna it was one point one percent absolute risk reduction. And again you can maybe drop this in the show Knows. People could check out the study go if you want to. It's a ton of data. There's an abstract, which is most people are gleaning into. But if you go through the trial data, like and you understand this, you're looking through this lens of skepticism and really like, let me run the numbers here. For him, he couldn't believe it like he just sat there in silence for a minut like he could not believe the framing that was taking place. Now Here's this is the last thing I'm gonna share with this is that risk reduction is true. It is true, but that's what we do and well we won't we allow is the manipulation in the framing of data for our citizens who don't have any context of what that fucking means. And so I'm I'm very passionate about this subject because again, I just want people to have the full data set so that they can make a true, informed consent choice for what they're doing with their bodies. And you know, now we're leaning on observational data when the clinical trial data show number one, this isn't gonna work that. Well, guess what, We're still dealing with this because it didn't stop transmission, which is what the promise was. And they didn't apologize, they didn't say, you know what, we got it wrong. They just kept on changing the story, moving the goal post and to the point where people are so we've already outsourced ourselves and so invest it and them telling the truth for the people who believed it, and they just keep they just adjust, they just buy Okay, well, I guess I'll just get up. I just needed a fourth I need a booster. And by the way, the word booster. Last thing I'm gonna say, what a booster means is another vaccine. It's like a softer blow to the term that means you need another one. Yeah, you need another one. It's just something has been lost clearly. Yeah, And what you mentioned about in terms, But what particularly irks me is that they never own up to it. They never acknowledge, and then they always because they believe they're on the side of the righteous, that their message that because they're encouraging people to be more cautious and to make more steps in the direction of caution, that they think that the actual precision and accuracy of the information that they give us doesn't matter because they think much much like I mentioned earlier with false consensus, that the two twin pillars of um of you know, of public health legitimacy issues are false consensus and noble lies that they tell us noble lies in thinking that we don't understand, we don't know enough, and we don't we're not capable of making the best decisions. In furtherance, of our own health. Thus we need to be steered in. As long as they're directionally correct, they don't have to actually be accurate. That seems to be what's happening over and over and over again, and in particular, you know, it was put on one. You know, one of the public health voices who's been particularly good over the course of this pandemic is a guy named Ja Bakaria Um and he has owned He's consistently owned up, you know, and tried to um be more forthright about the risk reward and cost benefit analysis. And one thing that he said recently in terms of why public health has taken such a hit and trust is quoted public health has become a laughing stock because because it has forgotten that the health of the public extends far beyond just infection control. Public health has acted as if the people should serve it rather than it's serving the people. And I imagine that comment resonates with you very strongly. Absolutely, And you know, again, I don't have a dog in the fight. I do understand human physiology at a level that you know, this is my life, is what I do every day, So of course I'm gonna understand that you know, probably the best thing for humans are the things that our genes expected from us, that our d n A expects from us, that we've evolved with, you know, real food, movement, high quality rest, access to fresh air, and sunlight, these type of things. Absolutely, but I'm still open to the fact that maybe the sun is the worst thing ever, even though it helped to create you know, life caere of this planet. Maybe that big flaming ball is just like an asshole who's trying to kill everybody. You know, Like I'm still this is what makes me different is over time I've allowed myself to to be wrong and opened the door to being wrong. And when you do that, you tend to be right more often. And it's because I have this ability to take a proper risk benefit assessment in these scenarios and not having a dog in the fight. Looking at the data here, you know, with this vaccine rollout, and I see again, Eyes was making forty billion dollars this year. It's like it's it's become this massive cash cow. People like you just mentioned, you know, who are coming forward to say, you know what, the data that we're being shown here, this isn't the whole story. Let's take a look at this to do a And here's what I wanted to share with you because I just actually shared this yesterday. It's a great example of a simple cost benefit analysis. And this is here in California. As of this recording right now, millions of in ninety masks have been shipped to California's schools, all right, for our children and the mass and specifically the biggest school district here, you know, Sacramento Unified School District. Each teacher is getting twenty and ninety masks. And in this particular article, this is you know, you who Yahoo News? You know, I just try to find like a major news site who's talking about it, and then we'll go into the with the real science sets. And they said, doctors say the tighter fitting mask might take some time to get used to, but they urge this students go outside and get some fresh air if you needed, all right, So they want kids to be in masks. Now they're disallowing in the school district cloth mask. All right? Why now? Why after almost two years and you're telling us where something anything works, cloth mask? You're fine. The very first thing that I did this is back in early I went and I shared the period data because it seemed kind of logical for me, like if you cover your mouth like with something, is probably gonna stop the spread of like aerostols and droplests whatever, But is it actually stopping viral transmission? Which viruses are infintesimally small, and so it's just like is this a surface level thing or what does the data show? And so what I did was I went to a study. This was published the b MJ, the British Medical Journal, one of the most prestigious journals in the world. And this was a cluster ran endomized control trial cloth mask compared to medical mask AK, a surgical mask and healthcare workers. This included a nice data set. It was six people in fourteen hospitals and these are people who are versed in doing the thing and reporting accurately. And so they were randomized into three three arms they had and they had to wear them at all times on their workship. By the way, so one or more the surgical mask, one or more cloth mask, and the other one had standard practice, which is you put might put it on sometimes during the day you're going to see somebody who might have an effects of disease. But then you take it off. Now, the laboratory results were blinded, and laboratory testing was conducted in a blinded fashion. All good things. This is a good data set, all right. Now, here's what they found. Healthcare workers wearing cloth cloth masks, We're about thirteen times more likely to experience an influenza like illness than those wearing surgical mask. Thirteen times, not two times, not five times, not ten times, thirteen times more likely to get sick. And the stuff to you. Again, this is randomized controlled trial. The researcher. We're trying to find out, like, why what's going on here with these cloth masks? And here's what they said. This is their quote. Moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks, and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection. This mask can increase your risk of infection. Does anybody fucking care? Like, can we just talk about this? I said this at the very beginning because there at oh there's no randomized controlled trials, you know whatever, No, there there is, And that's just one of the studies. I'll share this one really really quickly. Sure, this one, and this is like the goal. This is like the the Lebron James of these mass trials. This one I'm about to share again. This was published early on. This is prior to all this politicization and craziness has taken place. This was a meta analysis, a meta analysis of nineteen randomized controlled trials. Again, a randomized controlled trial is taking a specific implement, in this case being a face mask, looking at a specific outcome. Does the person get sick? So we know that this was the treatment versus an observational study, which is like, it seems like these people over here might have had some benefit from doing this thing. We don't really know because we didn't implement this strategy. We're just kind of watching to see and that has automatic bias, confounding factors, things that we don't take into consideration, like, okay, so these people over here that are doing this thing, were they in a different age group or was it you know, there there there chronicles the variables that are are that that lead to the results, right where there are other factors what environments were they in Whereas we have a controlled environment here for the most part being these hospital healthcare settings. So this was published in the International Journal of Nursing Studies. This included eight community settings, six healthcare settings, and five is source control. And so now here's what the study said. Now, this is very important because of the wording here. This is the problem with people who don't do this for a living going and looking at a study, and they're just gonna be fishing for something that makes them that affirms their bias. All right, So what they said was most of these randomized controlled trials used different interventions and outcome measures in the community. This is important. It's going to sound a little bit different for what it's gonna end up being in the community. Mask appeared to be effective with and without hand hygiene, okay, and both together were more more effective. That sounds good. Sounds like we've got some benefit in the community. Randomized controlled trials and healthcare workers showed that respirators and if warren continually during the shift without taking them off but not worn if if they took them off at any point, not worn intermittently had benefit. Medical mask, surgical mask, and nineteen randomized control trials. This is the exact words. Medical masks were not effective, cloth mask even less effective. All right, what first of all we should be like, what is less effective and not effective because that's what cloth masks were. That means that there's a potential problem here. Now here's where the computution can take place, because you could see, like all they said that in the community it appears, it's the key word appears. It's a very very strong word. And why would scientists use the word like this the conclusion and here's the conclusion of the study had which is where the bias of researchers can take place. He said that the study suggests that community mask us by well people could be beneficial, particularly for COVID nineteen were transmission maybe pre symptomatic. Now, this is a lot of very loose language. And here's what I did. I went and I took as a long time and being somebody's verse as a research scientists understanding and stuff. I went through every single one of these references, all nineteen the studies, and I'm just gonna read read off some of them for you because in the community they said that it appeared to have some effectiveness. The first one, this was published by Cowing and Company in two thousand and eight. The result of the trial for masks not statistically significant. McIntyre and Company was another reference here their result not statistically significant. Cowling and Company published in two thousand and nine, quote not significant. Masks plus hand hygiene protected protective against LABTT firm influenza if used. Was it within third hours? This seems kind of confusing. Again, this was like hand hygiene without face masks seemed to reduce influenza transmission, but the differences compared to the control group, we're not significant. That's their quote. So they broke it down further than he was, like it maybe over here there seems to be some benefit, but then they can't split out. I'll just share a couple more with you really quickly, because again this is in the community. So this was uh, I ll O, all right, So I hope I'm pronouncing their the scientist's name right, but that's the lead researcher. And Company is publishing two thousand and ten and quote intention to treat, non intention to treat. So the intention with this treatment of being face mask non significant, mass plus hand washing protective in four to six, four to six weeks of observation and beyond, but it wasn't protective for weeks one through three for some reason. It's just like dumbass stuff like this it just makes sense. And so here's what they said. Um, face mask use alone showed a similar reduction in influenza like illness compared to the control group, but adjusted estimates were not statistically significant. Neither face mask use and hand hydien gene nor face mask use alone was associated with significant reduction in the rate of influenza like illness cumulatively. And I'll share one more. Allo came back again. This is one of the people researchers who is the most verse in studying mask They published another one in and this is where you know again it says it appeared to be beneficial in the community. Here's what they This was publishing plus one. By the way, this was a reference put into this bigger study the International journal Nursing Studies. This was publish in two thousand twelve. Here's what the result of the study was. Quote, we observed a substantial reduction in the incidents of influenza infection and face mask and hand hygiene group compared to the control That sounds wonderful, but the estimate was not statistically significant. We're looking at probably relative risk reduction absolute risk reduction. Now here's the key words to the study. There were no substantial reductions and influenza like illness or laboratory confirmed influenza in the face mask only group compared to the control Again, every one of the references had some version of not statistically significant. And I don't want it to be this way. I'm just looking at the data and also the abstract. Yeah, we want to trust public health. We want to trust you know, the medical community. Okay, we don't want to be getting We were not here just to be difficult, disagreeable, or just be skeptical. We're skeptical for a reason because we're trying to get to the truth. Yet they continue to speak very authoritatively on things that they don't have authority on that do not prove out that. Where where as you say they're not conducting um random controls trials that you know that proved causation, they are not conducting studies that are that include a sample sample size and a data set that are just as statistically significant. And this keeps on happening over and over again, which only gives more ground for our suspicions and reduces trust in public health even further. The prevailing narrative will be back in just a moment perfectly said. And at the end of the day, we could still say, hey, if it helps one percent, why not do it? This is why. So with our kids here in California that are already you know, they've they've taken away the use of their disallowed cloth mask. I said this back in early we could have avoided this whole thing. But I guess what. My my video that I did, which has millions of views on other platforms, it was pulled down off of YouTube within thirty minutes. And all I did was just go through this pure viewed evidence and more that I'm not even sharing here right now, just to direct people like, hey, wait a minute, and here's what does have value. We do have some value within nine but even that value is mixed, the results are missed. But here's here's why, just saying hey, just if even helps one so wearing these respirators which our children are now here in California. They've shipped millions to schools for children to wear. This study was published in the journal Ergonomics, and the title of the studies carbon diox breathing in Respiratory protective devices, Influence of speech and work rate in full face mask and they found that wearing these respirators not only leads to just physiological discomfort, oh sure, just get over it leads to fatigue, dizziness, headaches, muscular weakness, and drowsiness. That is our biology telling you that there is something wrong here. Another study, this was published um very recently as well. This was looking at the titles of these headaches and nine five face mask amongst healthcare workers. One other this is this kind of smoking gun of this one and I'll share this with you. This was published by the CDC. The title of the report was the Physiological Burden of prolonged PPE use on healthcare workers during long shifts and here's what they found in the study. The final report stated that prolonged use of can potentially cause increased pressure inside the skull, reduced cognition, widespread activation of the parasympathetic I'm sorry, widespread activation of the sympathetic fighter flight nervous system, and dysfunction of the cardiovascular system, among other things. These are not small things. There is a chance that wearing a mask like this is harming your biology versus the nominal chance. We're talking about a less than one percent risk for poor outcomes to a child like we have to take a proper risk benefit analysis in this scenario, is it worth it to potentially harm the physiology of this child? The biology of this child, which again, certain bad things are going to happen to what degree might be, you know, barely noticeable, but we know that it's causing issues. It's affecting their brain, is affecting their heart, it's affecting their lungs, and then that's an Okay, these are our children, and like logic has left the room. But instead of them acknowledging, hey, I know, we said cloth masks were good, and we censored anybody who said otherwise, we fucked up cloth masks. Actually don't wear these surgical masks barely the same thing. The Danish study, the banglad Death study show they're a tiny benefit since the surgical masks benefit, but it's pretty nominal. It's pretty low exactly. And also again i'm breaking the study down. So in the Bangladesh study it was found to be beneficial just again like five potential benefit for only advanced age groups, so people like under fifty there was literally zero benefit. And so again I'm looking at what the data actually says, and so instead of them acknowledging that this ship doesn't work, they just said we're too And instead of acknowledging that they don't work, they said three is better. Instead of acknowledging that that doesn't work, they said, we're an in ninety five masks. Put one on your children. It is absolute insanity like it it is is, and it's divided people. It's divided families and communities. But I'm here to say this today and I haven't I haven't said this before. The thing is that divide was already there for something like this to fracture our relationships. Yeah, there was already that potential was there already. This was just something to come and kind of be that final lynch pin, or that, if not that lynchpin, but a final um, final breaking point of something that was already fragile. And we're just going in our day to day lives with very superficial relationships and we don't even really know each other in ways that we did in past generations because we've outsourced so much of our time and our thinking too, you know, social media and the like, and you know, so having healthy relationships in the first place hopefully springs from all of this where we don't have superficial relationships that people start stopped talking to people because of a fucking mask. Like to even say that that's a thing at this point in our evolution, it's just it's really it is absolutely ridiculous, and it is an indicator of a deeper, deeper fissions and deeper problems in our society. So I guess the question is how do we get out of it? Right? So you know, our boy Fouci mentions this week looks like the pandemic is is over and near over for the most part. We've got two years of of weight gain, We've got two years of mostly unhealthy lifestyles, a lot of stress and pressure on people and you know, uh to whatever extent, and a widespread anxiety disorders and those have been indulged in amplified by the situation. So okay, not now as we're coming out of it. You know what, what's your perspective on on what steps we can take and how we can start living more healthy and follow you know, and and like I said, implement and make use of all this great body of knowledge that we were now that that we are that we are building in the public spirit. M man, This is the question I've had to you know, when when all of this started to take place, Um, it was especially it was it was especially trouble link for me because I'm a very I'm a very optimistic person, you know. I know I've been a little bit irritable, you know in some of these pieces. But I'm just I'm a very solutions oriented person and I've never had to look so deeply at at a problem before, at the problem and superficial treatments of things creating an illusion of wellness, you know, and all these overnight health advocates that are, you know, by all normal standards, incredibly unhealthy themselves and now holding some kind of authority over people who have invested years of their life to be the best version of themselves. Unhealthy people lecturing healthy people. It's been the craziest part about all this. Everything is disrupted right now. This is the time to act, This is the time to do something. We first do something and change this paradigm where we have a culture of sickness by becoming rediculously healthy ourselves, by becoming radiantly healthy, be becoming more capable, stronger, and more resilient than we've ever been because We're gonna need to be that to deal with the idiocy that is not going to just lay down and go down without a fight. This isn't over. Even if you're like, well it looks like COVID's over. Whatever, bullshit. They're gonna find the next thing to take advantage. They see the doors open. We can literally have our citizens not just take away their rights, but to freely give them away under stress. That card is gonna get played again. You better believe it. So we need to build ourselves up and get stronger mentally and physically than we've ever been. That's my it's not even a challenge. I don't want to I'm not here to challenge everybody. That is my call to arms for everybody listening. Take it upon yourself, stand up right now and get yourself stronger than you've ever been mentally and physically, so that you can handle this ship and just literally just it's like you're bullet proof, you know, it just bounces right off of you. Any of this idiocy, and you say, focus on the goal, which is truly helping our our citizens to get healthier. So that's number one. Focus on getting yourself as healthy as possible and within that cultivating healthy relationships. And let this be a lesson to you about the standards that you carry and the people that you've been fucking with who are not about that life and who will turn on you in a second. Like you know, again, we see these movies where the you know, the friend is like the bags that no for real, that ship happens in real life. And this doesn't mean that person is a bad person, by the way, It's just like they need healing. They need they're missing something in their own life and their own psyche and their own health. It's very difficult to be compassionate when you don't feel well, by the way, you know, and this is just based on the data. When when our blood sugar is disregulated, you know, there's a study done by researchers at the Ohio State University on married couples and just seeing this disregulated lead sugar leading to higher levels of irritation towards their partner. But here's the biggest thing, less likelihood of them solving their relationship ship conflicts when they're blood sugar is abnormal. I already mentioned earlier in this episode. A d thirty million Americans have type two diabetes or pre diabetes, that is, chronic abnormal blood sugar. People aren't just walking around wanting to be ignorant. It's not to say that when you're not in a good, safe state of health that you can't be compassionate and perspective taking all those wonderful things. It's just harder. It takes biological energy and resources to do these things. Again, get yourself healthy as possible, cultivate healthy relationships, and then from there. At this point, literally none of these ass hats deserve your vote if they're not specifically, specifically demonstrating what they're going to do to get our citizens healthier and to stop the praying on our citizens by pharmaceutical companies. Like ask them any chance that you get, what are you gonna do about pharmaceutical companies marketing two disabled veterans? Or what are you gonna do about these food manufacturers marketing to our children? Right with this process foods? And get getting them hooked younger. That's literally there's a book written on the subject, Get them while they're young. That's the kind of the formula in marketing for getting people hooked as early as possible so that they're quote lifetime consumer right, So they have to earn your vote because I know these guys. It's a lot of it's a popularity contest. And even if there are people who get into the into politics because they want to make a difference, there are, but the nature of it is two thirds of United States Congress member is received a check from pharmaceutical companies. Two thirds. It's the nature of the business. It's money. It's a money thing. Even if you're wondering what happened here in California, people trying to run with this whole recall thing, they don't got money like that. These guys are funneling money to this batman villain you know who, literally again, again and again he's been caught not doing the thing that he put in ye as a mandate for us to follow. Because and here is this is the thing. These are the times that he got caught this, these are the time let me say that again, these are the times he got caught. Even with eyeballs on him, he doesn't give a ship because he's not living by these things period for show. That's it. That's it, man, Like, So again, really show your power with your vote. Question these people stop allowing like we've been gone to this place where we're trying to always elect the lesser of evils. We've got to change the system, so we're choosing from the greater of goods. That is a possible outcome, you know. But we have to start to really talk about things that matter. It's so many superficial things. Okay, just to be clear, taxes matter. Yes, I live in California, now I'm not, but it's none of them. But the taxes are second tier thing to our health. Because when you don't have your health, you have nothing. The person who was worried about a tax bill, you know, because they're making higher income, all their one wish is to have good health. Again, they would trade in. I've worked with these people. They'd give most of their money away just to get their health back. We have to make health a priority and a priority off the lips of these people and stop this general bullshit of like we get more health care access, get more health care, access to shitty health care that is sick care. Like, that's not the solution. We've got to provide. We have the capacity to make sure that every citizen of the United States has access to real food. We do community wellness programs and neighborhood parks and all of these things that just these are these should be the norm at this point, and we can make it happen. But we've gotta we've gotta step up and vote and and disrupt the system, no doubt, and hold hold these people. And I think what the frustration of you know, fitness professionals such as yourself and nutrition professionals have seen through that throughout this entire episode was people, once again, people who do not take responsibility for their own health, unhealthy people making health decisions for everybody else, including people like yourself and other private individuals out there that have been very diligent about their about living a healthy lifestyle. And that's got to change. So the last thing before I let you go, Um, if you're just you know, you're you've you've found a way to analyze data sets, to analyze studies. You you live, you breathe this, and you know and and there are people that can read your materials, listen to your podcasts and engage you. However, if you're just a person out there and you want to take as much responsibility for your own health as possible and also understand you know, be able to go and take a skeptical eye to the studies, into the messaging from UH medical companies, the medical system and public health. You know what, what's your advice to them on how to to do some of their their own analysis, be their own skeptic right, instead of having to rely on people who have really sharpened their sword like yourself. That's a great question. Great question. You know. The number one thing is we just you have to get a tune to basic principles of and this is why education matters as far as like what the problems are. So you're not just walking into a scenario where you're coming in and you've got high blood pressure, maybe your cholesterol is high, and they're like, well, here's the listener prol and here's the stat and we're gonna take care of that. If you come into it knowing that at they're treating a symptom, my body is giving me feedback with my elevated blood pressure or blood sugar. And what is doing is a disease is an adaptation by the body essentially to help you to run and stay alive with this environmental input, you know, an epigenetic influence. So it's helping you to survive under abnormal conditions. So it's actually a disease. It's like kind of like, um, it's like a warning sign, you know, it's like an alarm going off, like hey, we got an issue over here. But what happens with when we're just coming and treated with a drug. We're silencing the alarm, but the problem is still there and this is why another alarm is gonna pop up over here. You know, your body is gonna revolt in another way. You're not going to get well. So it's getting educated on it, like how does this system work? Basics about my body, you know, and how do you do that? You can of course tune into folks like myself who are again just just wanting to to support and educate based on real world, per viewed evidence, but also sifting through the evidence. So I'm not just coming with the bias. That's just saying this is the way, in the only way, you know, but people who actually know, like even all these wonderful diret frameworks that are out there, I'm not going to be a subscriber promoter of any of them. You can you can guarantee that I'm going to promote what's best for you right now, and say, hey, these are available tools right because people have gotten results with these things, but many other people haven't. What's best for you? And so yeah, get yourself connected and and and start to find a funnel of education in a way that's fun, that's connected for you. That's how I got into this field. I found wonderful teachers who inspired me. And you know, many of these people are my friends now as well, you know. So that's that's one thing. And the other thing is, you know, if you are looking at, you know, some clinical data as far as like what you should be doing this this particular supplement or drug, whatever case is. I'm just gonna be one thousand with you. It takes a lot of work, in a lot of years to to to differentiate between what is high quality research and what is garbage and what also just is inherently going to have a lot of confounding factors and biases and the like. Most pure viewed evidence and healthcare is funded by pharmacy companies. It's just it is. It's the nature of the beast. And if we even have a randomized, placebo controlled trial for a drug, it's putting the drug up against nothing. It's putting the placebo. It's nothing. But placebos are effective though, by the way, in many clinical trials about effective on average and clinical trials. But it's saying is this, is this something better than nothing? It's not putting the drug up against the lifestyle intervention, for example, which when that was done funded by the CDCs, is massive diabetes study. They found that, you know, folks who were given met form and did have a reduced risk of developing diabetes, Folks who are pre diabetic. But polks, but but but the folks. And there was also a control group which is given general advice, but folks who are giving specific lifestyle intervention and coaching, so talking with them, having repeating coaching sessions, dialing things in personalized for them, finding out what their challenges are. The results from the met form of performance versus a lifestyle interviction, the lifestyle intervintion was twice as effective, twice as effective as just taking a drunk all right, so we know it works, But that lifestyle intervention is not going to be promoted by mark and by visitor. You know, you're gonna be taking money out of their pockets. So you know, um, what I would say is just maintain your sense of sovereignty. Look to your physicians and your healthcare providers as coaches and supporters, teammates. Coaches might even be tough psychologically for you. Instead of this paternalistic relationship. You are the boss of you. You are the CEO of your own body. You have to accept that position first and foremost. The job isn't always gonna be easy, but you are definitely gonna win in the end. Love it fantastic. That is the the empowering and personal agency message that we need coming out of this situation. I know it's been tough on a lot of people, but um a lot of the a lot of the kind of suffocating rules and regulations and messaging that has been coming out of unfortunately you know, institutions and authority figures that a lot of people, you know, pre pandemic, you've been able to live, You've been able to take more control over your personal health. It's been a little more difficult over the last couple of years, but it looks like we are hitting hitting a little escape velocity where we may be able to go back to, you know, taking care of of our own health first and foremost as opposed to having those decisions made by others. So um, everyone, you know, Sean has been such such a proponent of personal agency and and you know, and and taking a real clinical and educated approach towards personal fitness and wellness. And want to thank you so much for that. And Sean, if you could tell us we're to find you on the internet recent uh literature that that your books that have recently been released to reach New York Times number one best seller, your podcast, Please tell everyone where they can find you. Awesome, So you can find my show. It's called The Model Health Show, The Model Health Show. And you know, anywhere you listen to podcasts, you'll be able to find it. Very grateful to say many times over the years have been number one in the country, number one health podcasts. And I think it's just because we care a lot, and we make this education entertaining and fun and empowering. And I'm very big on action steps, you know. So, but we're targeting specific issues. You know, we do masterclasses on different subjects to walk away with like here's five clinically proven things that we can do to reduce our insulent resistance right now. So the model health show. And my latest book is called Each Smarter and has mentioned it's a national best seller USA Today national best seller, and um, you know, it was number seventeen in the country, both fiction and nonfiction when it came out. So it was like on the list with like Matthew McConaughey and the Obama's and but this is there's this guy from Ferguson, Missouri with with this book about food, and it just shows me again we people care about this. You know, We're not at that fantasy place that I was at that you know again, I thought that we really had this stuff figured out. We are the place where people care enough to do something and so very happy about that. So eat Smarter anywhere books are sold. We had a national campaign with Target stores as well, so you can pick it up at Target more than likely unless you're sold out there. And my first book international best seller's Sleep Smarter. So if sleep is a concern, again very big. There's twenty one clinically proven strategies to improviously quality and things that you don't have to turn your life upside down. So yeah, so those are two gonna gonna be two good resources for you. Love it actionable steps, actionable information and knowledge that we're trying to bring to you everybody. Shaun Stevenson, thank you so much for joining us here today. Um Prevailing Narrative, I'm at Polinski. Talk to you. So, I am at Polinski once again. And you can listen and subscribe to The Prevailing Narrative on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you're listening right now. Make sure to follow me on my socials at Matt Bolinsky m A T T B I L I N s k Y. The Prevailing Narrative is a Cavalry Audio production and association with I Heart Radio produced by Brandon Morrigan, Executive produced by Dana Burnetti and Kegan Rosenberger for Cavalry Audio. I'm Matt Bolinsky.