“We’re being lied to about chronic disease. That’s 90 percent of medical spending—92 percent of American deaths are chronic disease. Only 8 percent are infectious. And we have this system that profits from that. But what we could do, which is what President Trump and Bobby Kennedy talked about, is get to the root cause.”
In this episode, I sit down with Calley Means, co-author of “Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health.”
He has been working in the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement on a blueprint for reforming the public health establishment.
“We’re going to let information out. We’re going to do new research on why we’re getting sick. We’re also going to release the existing research. We’re going to stop infantilizing the American patient. We’re going to trust Americans that they’re trying to make the best decisions for their health and their kids,” says Means.
Watch the video:
“I really think that the problem with public health in America right now is we’ve relied too much on the experts. We should have expertise, we should have to read science, but we should have it open, and then really unlock flexibility for Americans to make the best decision for their personal situation with their doctors.”
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Calley Means, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Calley Means:
I’m pumped to be here.
Mr. Jekielek:
You were for years a consultant in the food industry, and I guess I want to find out, right now you’re speaking a lot against the practices of the existing food industry. And I want to just find out how you got there.
Mr. Means:
In D.C., growing up as a young conservative, it was the right thing to just really not question our great industries. I was an intern at the White House for Bush and the Heritage Foundation. I did campaigns. It was just what you did. You went and consulted for the great corporations of America and helped push innovation with pharma and helped push food innovation. I thought it was the right thing to do. I thought I was on the right side.
But over years I’ve put together and I think the country has put together, that it’s really corporate capture that is a big issue. There has been this shift from 15 years ago. You would never question these big industries. Now, there is a lot of skepticism that’s very warranted. I definitely put those pieces together while working for these industries.
Mr. Jekielek:
First of all, how did you transition into working for these industries from government?
Mr. Means:
It’s a revolving door. It’s what everyone does. When you’re done with the campaign, you go and lobby, you go consult, and you go back and forth. And you find yourself with these public affairs and lobbying firms, and then inevitably at these firms, you’re working with people across the aisle, people that you were competing against during the campaign. You’re working with McCain. I was working with the Obama administration and Obama campaign people to help the biggest spenders in D.C., pharma and the healthcare industry. So you just kind of find yourself there.
And everyone’s talking about innovation and helping these industries. I found myself helping food companies pay the NAACP to say that taking Coke and soda off of food stamps was racist. I found myself working for opioid makers and lobbying for pharma to pay off researchers to say that opioids weren’t addictive. The food industry spends 11 times more on nutrition research than the NIH. The lifeblood of scientific research comes from the pharma industry. They’re not trying to advance unbiased scholarship. They’re trying to get a result.
Mr. Jekielek:
Clearly what is it that you discovered and what caused you to find your eyes at the come to God moment.
Mr. Means:
I left the industry and it didn’t quite feel right. I didn’t put all the pieces together. I became an entrepreneur for the past 10 years. My sister, a surgeon, the star of the family, is from Stanford Medical School and was a NIH researcher. She left the system after realizing she'd never learned at Stanford during residency what actually makes people sick. She was doing surgery all day on inflammation but she’s like she didn’t know why people are getting inflammation. She just knew how to cut it out or to prescribe a drug for it.
So she put together this idea that it’s simple but we have a sick care system. You know when you wind it down 95% of medical spending is on managing people that are already sick. So that was really formative to me, helping with that, and then having a child, or my mom abruptly getting a cancer diagnosis and dying. But also hearing that was unlucky,
when it wasn’t unlucky. What I put together with my sister is that my mom was on five other medications. Each of these medications and each of these chronic diseases that we’re all dealing with in America are missed opportunities to get to the root cause.
If you have high cholesterol, statin doesn’t cure the issue. If you have high blood sugar, you have metformin. If you’re a little depressed, you have SSRI. These drugs are being prescribed like candy right now. It’s making money. It’s very profitable to really ignore the root cause and just be managing these conditions for life. That’s what my sister and I really put together after my mom’s death.
We decided to write a book. The thesis of the book is simple. It’s that we’re being lied to about chronic disease. That’s 90% of medical spending.
92% of American deaths are chronic disease. Only 8% are infectious. And we have this system that profits from that. But what we could do, which President Trump and Bobby Kennedy talked about, is get to the root cause.
We spend 4.5 trillion dollars on medicine right now. There is a world where that could be steered towards reversing chronic disease, towards incentivizing thriving among the American people. So it’s not about making people eat healthy or making people exercise, but we could be incentivizing those things with our public policy. That’s what we really wanted to divide our lives pushing.
Mr. Jekielek:
What do you know about how President Trump and Bobby Kennedy ended up having a meeting of the minds?
Mr. Means:
From being in D.C., I had my political eye on this issue. If I was going to contribute one thing to this, it’s how does the politics reflect the policy we want? There’s no change in America unless you get voters behind it in our system. I could see there were all these parents frustrated with kids getting sick, and all these adults kind of anxious about the fact that we’re dying younger and getting sicker. How do you channel that into a movement?
So my sister and I began advocating and went on Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, the independent media. Non-corporate owned media is so important, what you guys are doing. Tucker connected me with Bobby, and I got connected with the Trump campaign through Fox News. We just started sharing ideas. Bobby obviously knows them well, but the Trump campaign was very interesting. Then something happened with the Butler shooting. I was watching the Trump assassination attempt on TV with the blood pouring down his face. It was very emotional.
So I called Bobby. There’s a movement that Bobby built where he was getting 20% of the vote around this idea of combating chronic disease. Really the same ideas that Trump talks about combating corruption. And he called Trump that night. A huge part of the MAHA movement was really forged in this conversation just hours after Trump was shot.
From my small vantage point, they really bonded. Trump was obviously really thinking about unity, thinking about big ideas, and they had hours of future conversations. And I think there was something special that was forged between them. You see it to this day. They really like each other. Trump really gets it. Bobby was really, I think, able to bring Trump along and explain how sick kids are a great example of the swamp, of the bad incentives that Trump talked about.
Then Bobby just busted his butt to help Trump during the campaign. That led to a lot of respect and it led to electoral help. You had the gender gap closed. You had independents vote for Trump for the first time. You had different demographic groups and young people. The MAHA movement really helped politically and that’s what’s giving this movement the power to really take on these interests.
Mr. Jekielek:
It’s just interesting to me how much stemmed from that assassination attempt, that unbelievably close call, because that was also the moment that Elon Musk decided to officially endorse Trump.
Mr. Means:
That was one of the most important events in American history, I think. I think this election was one of the most important elections of American history, I think, of my lifetime. And I think the biggest story in the world of our generation is populist backlash against these institutions that have really let us down, experts that have let us down.
It’s manifesting throughout the world, right? Trump represents that, and they took a shot at him. And he got up, and he put his fist up, and he said, fight. I mean, it was one of the most extraordinary moments in American history. So that led Elon to support. That led Bobby to make the call. I think a lot came out of that.
Mr. Jekielek:
How are you involved in all this?
Mr. Means:
After helping to facilitate the introduction, I stayed close to Bobby in the Trump campaign, participated in events, helped as much as I could with messaging during the campaign. Then I went to Palm Beach with Bobby. What’s cool about this is that Bobby has got an informal group of people that have come to this for the right reasons.
They are really passionate about helping kids. In an off-the-record closed-door meeting with Bobby Kennedy in the Trump campaign, there’s no ideology. The questions are, how do we create policies to get transparency? How do we get policies to change the incentives that profit from people being sick?
Mr. Jekielek:
There are a number of Americans that are honestly concerned. One of the mantras here is he’s going to get rid of the polio vaccine. People are afraid that their children will suffer because of these policies. They actually believe that. I’m not talking about people that are looking to sabotage it for some other reason.
Mr. Means:
Bobby Kennedy is focused on one thing and one thing only when it comes to vaccines, and it’s getting information to the American people. If there’s one thing that guides Bobby, it’s transparency. Most Americans agree with this, it’s troubling when there’s an attack on information even getting out.
I mean, it is true. It is actually wild when you dig into this, how little information is actually out on the vaccines we’re giving our kids, how stigmatized and attacked anyone is for even asking questions.
Bobby is going to instruct the NIH with President Trump to do unbiased research on every single area that impacts American public health. That’s what they’re going to do. It’s going to be much, much wider than vaccines. It is a fact that 50% of pharmaceutical trials that underlie FDA approval for the $4.6 billion prescriptions Americans get per year aren’t able to be replicated. We have junk science. Just as a demonstrable fact, the two largest vaccine makers in America have settled $5 billion in criminal penalties. You can have great public health advancements and still be skeptical and continue to do science.
That’s the big agenda for Trump. It is about transparency. We’re going to let information out. We’re going to do new research on why we’re getting sick. We’re also going to release the existing research. We’re going to stop infantilizing the American patient. We’re going to trust Americans that they’re trying to make the best decisions for their health and their kids.
I really think that the problem with public health in America right now is we’ve relied too much on the experts. We should have expertise. We should have to read science, but we should have it open and then really unlock flexibility for Americans to make the best decision for their personal situation with their doctors. Right now we don’t have that.
The American Medical Association has a stranglehold over American practice of care. This is a pharma lobby group. This is a pharma lobbying group that has the judgment to recommend gender transition surgeries to two-year-olds, which is literally what the American Medical Association does today. They have no age limit on gender transition surgery. This is an industry, a group that we’ve outsourced 20% of the U.S. economy to.
This is the Trump MAHA agenda. It’s transparency and it’s trusting patients to make the best decisions for themselves. Science is about asking constant questions. Science is a constant hypothesis. Science is asking taboo unpopular questions. Science is researching areas we’re told not to look into. That science. I believe and I truly believe this and I think it will shock many on the left. The Trump administration is going to go down in history books as a return to science.
There has been an absolute war on science for people who say that we can’t ask questions. People say that we should be locking down schools, wearing masks, causing a generation of developmental issues with kids. The war on science has happened from the captured medical industrial complex that profits when people are being sick. The NIH researchers have made billions of dollars of unreported, conflicted royalties from drugs.
Every single institution that impacts our health makes money when Americans are sicker. They’re not asking why we’re getting Alzheimer’s. They’re not asking why we die at a four times higher rate of COVID deaths in America than other countries in Asia, right? They’re asking, how can we profit from people being sick? It’s just a demonstrable economic fact that every institution that impacts our health, insurance companies, pharma, hospitals, med schools, profit when we’re sicker.
Mr. Jekielek:
One would think that should be examined.
Mr. Means:
Yes, pharmaceutical companies make more money when people are prescribed drugs for long periods of time. Hospitals are fee-for-service. The more patients, the more beds. My friends from Harvard Business School who work in hospitals now, it’s how many beds are you filling, and what’s your capacity of beds, and how many people are in the beds. That’s their economic model. They lose their job if the beds aren’t full.
With insurance companies, Obamacare was in its disaster. Obamacare was a sick care bill. It made it that insurance companies can only get 15% profit margin, but they can raise premiums to get that 15%. If you can only take 15% profit margin, but raise premiums to get that 15%, your incentive clearly is for costs to go up, i.e. people getting sicker. There’s no cost controls with insurance. What has happened? Premiums have doubled in the past 10 years. Insurance premiums are the top source of American inflation.
Mr. Jekielek:
You said that insurance premium increases are the prime source of inflation?
Mr. Means:
No, the single largest source of inflation.
Mr. Jekielek:
That’s an astonishing amount because there have been a lot of sources of inflation.
Mr. Means:
The biggest source of inflation is healthcare. Healthcare is growing. It’s the fastest growing industry in the country and largest.
Mr. Jekielek:
You’re basically saying that the cost inflation in healthcare is greater than anything else.
Mr. Means:
It’s by far the largest driver of American inflation. I’ve been looking at reports that are telling me that essentially on average since 2020, it’s about 40%. Multiple sources are telling me that.
Mr. Jekielek:
Overall inflation?
Mr. Means:
Yes, exactly. Overall inflation across since 2020.
Mr. Jekielek:
You’re talking about a massive number.
Mr. Means:
It’s the largest part of our economy. It’s the fastest growing part of our economy. It’s the fastest growing part of our economy. It’s the fastest growing prices in our economy. You know, again, premiums, healthcare premiums have doubled 100%. They’ve doubled.
Mr. Jekielek:
Is the healthcare industry going to suffer because of this change in governance?
Mr. Means:
That’s what they’re arguing. Again, people don’t argue that their industries are profiting from sick kids. They’re arguing that Bobby Kennedy’s policies are going to lead to worse outcomes for their companies. We’re here in Phoenix, Arizona. The biggest building in town is a brand new children’s hospital. You can see it from all over town. It’s a towering monument to failure, in my opinion.
When a new children’s hospital is opened, it’s a bipartisan thing, right? The governor comes and cuts the ribbon and says this is going to bring 40,000 new jobs to Arizona, right? They celebrate. It’s in the press. Everyone’s there, and everyone is celebrating.
I was recently with the governor of Texas. He’s a good guy. But he was bragging that you could see the Texas Medical Center from space. It’s the biggest complex in Texas. That’s not good. It means there’s more sick kids. The fact that healthcare is so fast growing because we’re getting sick means it’s intertwined with the jobs. The biggest employer in most states is the healthcare system.
The fact that we’re getting so sick has made the healthcare industrial complex the most employed industry in the company. It shouldn’t be surprising. I know it’s shocking, but it shouldn’t be surprising that they use the fact that they’re so intertwined with jobs as the argument.
Mr. Jekielek:
What are the top reforms and line items that could actually shift this and restore a more reasonable set of incentive structures?
Mr. Means:
Directing the NIH to no longer be a pharmaceutical R&D factory, propelling research, directing them to study what glyphosate is doing, study what atrazine is doing, other food chemicals that we allow that no other country allows, studying various pharmaceutical standards, doing reproducing FDA studies that are underlying the trillions of dollars we spend on pharmaceutical products. So reproducing studies, getting the root cause, getting the science right. Throughout the orgs, but particularly the FDA, getting conflicts of interest out of the agencies.
Why is the FDA funded by pharma? The drug approval budget is 75% funded by pharma. Why don’t people have access to better diagnostic technologies? Let’s let patients work with their doctors. Let’s have Medicare money go to food if somebody’s obese instead of straight to Ozempic. Let’s loosen up and make flexible these Medicare and Medicaid standards to help patients make the best decisions with the doctors.
What are the principles? Transparency, reducing conflicts, flexibility for patients, medical freedom, and trusting patients. Those are the principles that are going to be guiding a flurry of agency actions from Bobby Kennedy.
Mr. Jekielek:
The one thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about since COVID is the erosion of the application of the Hippocratic Oath. Have you been thinking about that?
Mr. Means:
It’s why doctors have the highest burnout and suicide rate of any profession in America. They are hurting patients. Many doctors, most of them, almost all of them got in for the right reasons. We are a criminal system that attracts the best and brightest minds, saddles them with $500,000 in debt, and then throws them into a system where they’re janitors. They are janitors following corrupt American Medical Association billing codes to manage and profit from disease. It’s a disaster.
We need to empower doctors. There is no doctor-patient relationship right now. There’s no primary care where they’re really trying to figure out and diagnose what’s going on and make real root cause interventions. They are janitors that have an algorithm and get reprimanded if they go outside that algorithm to prescribe a pill in 15 minutes. And now 80% of Americans are overweight or obese.
We have an Alzheimer’s epidemic, a cancer epidemic, every single chronic disease you could possibly think of as an all-time high this year as we’re spending 4.5 trillion dollars on medical care and medical spending is outpacing GDP growth by double. Every single doctor should be speaking out, but we should also change the systems that they operate in.
Mr. Jekielek:
I have spoken with many doctors during COVID, like your sister, who were seeing some serious problems and trying to mitigate those problems or at least help people. But a lot of people were along for the ride, but they didn’t fully realize it.
Mr. Means:
That’s letting them off the hook. They’re speaking to you from their house in Paradise Valley with their $3 million mortgage and their vacation house and their children’s private school, which is funded by more patients being sick. That is true. They are band-aiding the disease and profiting from disease and not asking why people are getting sick, if they are on traditional medicine.
So the reason they are doing that and the reason fancy doctors with white coats at Harvard and Stanford are able to say that we’re anti-science, talking about healthy eating or root cause interventions like more sunshine or exercise, is because the entire system is propagated on more and more patients being sick. They use these credentials to basically say that we’re crazy for talking about this. I don’t want to fully let them off the hook. They should be aware by now and they should be speaking out.
Mr. Jekielek:
This transition is being run very differently than past transitions. Can you speak to that?
Mr. Means:
What is happening right now is literally one of the most important moments in American history. I think it was one of the three most important elections, maybe two most important elections, Trump beating Kamala Harris in American history. What’s happening now is absolutely historic. We’re going to see the biggest flurry of vigor and executive action potentially in American history, at least since the New Deal.
There is a mandate from President Trump, not a word of ideology. It’s curing the military industrial complex, the healthcare industrial complex, the education industrial complex. There is a huge directive to be disruptive. This is a once-in-a-lifetime, once-in-a-century situation happening with the transition.
Mr. Jekielek:
One would expect there will be some resistance to this process that you’re describing?
Mr. Means:
There was resistance to an absolutely corrupt and insane continuing resolution that would have generally just been jammed through, that’s giving just Christmas presents to all the special interests. Then the second most powerful and richest person in the world, Elon Musk, called out the BS. They think that they can basically just sneak all these things under CMS code changes, continuing resolutions, and all this minutiae.
But now, you have the biggest microphones and most richest people in the world calling that out and scaring and saying that they’re going to spend a hundred million dollars to primary any person who steps out of line. This is a very good thing. What happened with Elon Musk recently by using his weight to kill this continued resolution is absolutely historic. We need more of this. This is what we voted for. We have slithering, unnamed, faceless people that are profiting from kids being sick and have completely co-opted government.
What do we have on the other side? We have the richest person in the world shining light on this corruption. We have the American voters who came together and voted for Trump for the first time. Many people who thought they would never vote for Trump, voted for Trump. They gave leverage to this promise of Bobby Kennedy to get kids sick. We’ve got to keep that momentum up. We’ve got to keep getting wins for Trump.
Mr. Jekielek:
Explain to me exactly what you think actually happened with that continuing resolution, because it seemed to me like it was kind of a popular uprising of people through X, with Elon Musk using his voice quite prominently and others like Vivek Ramaswamy. How do you read what happened exactly?
Mr. Means:
We’re tired of the BS. The American people are tired of the BS. We cannot do business as usual. Look at that 1500 page bill, it’s an absolute cataclysm. We look at the cynicism of trying to jam it down our throats and have people read it for 15 hours. It’s over. And we just need to stay accountable.
This is grassroots action. This is effective grassroots action. You have somebody that is able to communicate directly with people, shining light on things, and it’s rallying people up. We need to keep this level of intensity up through the next four years to support President Trump and transformational change. We are in a great country and we'd be able to talk about this stuff and there’s so much opportunity.
But this corporate capture of our institutions, this corruption could bring our country down. Look at the fact that the American Medical Association still pushes COVID shots on six-month olds, the fact that the mental health epidemic is absolutely skyrocketing among kids. There’s a multi-front war on children. I don’t think it’s one person. I think it’s the invisible hand and the fact that our major industries profit from a distracted child. Look at the tech companies.
As far as the people that don’t quite get this or still trust the medical system, I honestly am not speaking to them. I’m preaching to the converted. Like everything we do, everything my sister and I do, we’re speaking to the converted. Because if people can continue to get this confidence and this vision, their energy impacts other people. I think Bobby Kennedy’s energy has impacted Trump. This is spreading. It’s unimpeachable.
I would want this majority that elected Trump and cares about these MAHA principles and cares about protecting kids to get wins and let that energy spread to more and more people. I want this MAHA thing we’re talking about, this paradigm of health we’re talking about, to be the Overton window for how both sides talk about health. My strategy is to speak to the converted about that. I don’t care about convincing somebody that has a Dr. Fauci candle in their house. They'll turn around eventually, but I have no concern with them right now.
Mr. Jekielek:
What are you going to be doing in this coming administration then?
Mr. Means:
Nothing has been announced. I’ve been an informal advisor, helping however I can. My good friends Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary are going to be leading the NIH and FDA. Dr. Oz has become a great ally and friend. We’ve got great people in there. I’m trying to support them however I possibly can during this very quick transition period. I don’t have any announcements right now on what I will be doing specifically .
Mr. Jekielek:
A final thought as we finish up?
Mr. Means:
It’s surreal being at a conservative conference talking about cleaning up our food supply and about root cause interventions. These were just hippie things five to 10 years ago, and I think it’s really positive that there’s this, really, I think, consensus around getting to the root cause and that things that would’ve been said at a Berkeley rally 10 years ago are now being said at AmericaFest. I think it’s great, and thank you for shining a light on these issues.
Mr. Jekielek:
Calley Means, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Mr. Means:
Thank you.
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