#2208 - Brigham Buhler

Brigham Buhler (0:03)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:06)

Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

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

Brigham Buhler (0:19)

Man, it was pretty wild. It all transpired so fast. I got a call from Cali Means. We've become pretty good buddies. I know you're having him and his sister Casey on the podcast. Brilliant folks that are just patient advocates. I mean, at the end of the day, they had the same experience as I had. Cali, a little bit different walk of life. He was a lobbyist. Casey was a doctor, Stanford-trained surgeon. Realized that she was in a system where they didn't really heal people. They just treated symptoms and profiteered off disease states. And she said, there's got to be a better way. So their voice rung so loud after I think they did Tucker, that it led to momentum. And then because of you having me on the podcast, that's how I met RFK. And so Bobby's team had reached out to me maybe about a year and a half ago to come up to Dallas while he was doing a campaign there and sit down with him. And he was just asking a hundred questions about what's going on and what did you see on the pharmaceutical side and what did you see owning pharmacies and billing insurance companies.

And so when they had an opportunity to put this team together to testify in front of the Senate, the goal was to create a nonpartisan group of individuals to take a new fresh approach to what is going on with chronic disease in America. Because the chronic disease crisis is at an all time high. I mean, we could go through all the statistics. And I know that Casey and Callie will when they're on here. So I don't want to steal their thunder. But it's staggering. I mean, close to anywhere between 1.7 to 1.9 million people are dying a year of chronic disease. We talk a lot about war. Since the dawn of this country, roughly estimated between 1.3 to 1.5 million people total have died in war, American lives. So in a year, we're losing more people to chronic disease than all the wars combined. And we're not talking about it. So to me, I was excited when they said, hey, the Senate's willing to hear. And that's the beauty of a democracy. They did let us come in there and candidly take a dump on the Senate floor on what's going on with this health care system and really dig into the weeds.

Joe Rogan (2:28)

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

Brigham Buhler (2:34)

So prior, you do a debrief. So we did do a roundtable prior to going into the communal roundtable in front of the public eye, which they had no idea what was coming.

The Senate didn't expect it. We had assembled a grassroots effort to get the word out there, and over 2,000 people took off from work. These are, this is a Senate hearing. Over 2,000 hardworking Americans took time from their busy day, flew to DC, had to sit in an overflow room to listen to these testimonies. And the level of feedback from people, from like real humans, real world people, was staggering. I mean, people afterwards came up in tears sharing their story of how the system had let them down or a loved one down, misdiagnosises, like all the different issues that they've dealt with, trying to navigate this system. And to the Senator's credit, you know, behind closed doors, they did say, you probably don't want to go ultra hard after the food industry or ultra hard after the pharmaceutical industry, because it may limit our ability to get things done. But, they did...

Joe Rogan (3:42)

Well, how do they phrase that?

Brigham Buhler (3:45)

They just said, you catch more flies with honey than you do vinegar. And, you know, me, Callie and the other folks that sat on this panel, you know, our goal was to just share our stories and share what we saw. And so, my testimony in particular was really more about the human side. You know, there's so many staggering data and statistics and numbers, but behind all that is a person. Like, that's all I wanted people to understand. These are human lives. You know, when Jelly Roll testified, I think he said this equivalent to a 747 jet worth of people die of opioids a day. And that's insane. And that all started with the lapses in the FDA and the drug regulatory market. And we know that, you know, there's an argument out there. I know Callie released the number of 50 plus percent of the FDA's funding comes from Big Pharma. When it comes to drugs alone, 75 percent of the drug funding comes from the pharmaceutical companies themselves. And so there's a big market there. And with Big Pharma spending over $8 billion a year advertising, that's more than the entire sum of the FDA's budget.