#2210 - Calley Means & Casey Means, MD

Casey Means (0:03)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Calley Means (0:06)

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

Joe Rogan (0:12)

What's up? Nice to meet you guys.

Casey Means (0:14)

Great to be here.

Joe Rogan (0:15)

Thanks for coming here. I'm all happy, but this is not a happy subject. I don't know. It's probably a bad way to start off a podcast of how fucked we are. But I really appreciate what you guys have been doing. And I think I first saw you on Tucker. And the details of all the stuff you guys have exposed is, it's not, I mean, it's shocking, but it's not surprising.

It's really crazy. So can we get into this? Like you used to be on the dark side. Let's start with you. Tell everybody your background, like how you got started with this.

Calley Means (0:51)

We were born and raised in Washington, DC. And I thought being a good young conservative was supporting the farm industry, supporting the food industry, defending those industries. So I went to Stanford with Casey. She studied biology, I studied political science and economics and went on campaigns, but then was a lobbyist. Everyone bipartisan in DC goes to work for the food and the farm industry. And on one morning, I'm working with the farm industry to literally steer money to the Dean of Stanford Med School, who's a pain specialist to be put on an NIH panel to say that opioids in 2011 that the issues around addiction were overblown. And we actually helped engineer an NIH panel to issue a report to say, OBO2RK pain is a crisis. And then later in the afternoon, working for food companies, working for Coke, steering money to institutions of trust, steering money to the NAACP to say that taking Coke off food stamps was racist. Coke soda today, to this day, is the number one item on food stamps. What I realized fundamentally is that we're profiting, the biggest industries, the biggest spenders in the country are profiting from kids particularly getting addicted, sick and fear, and then drugging them and profiting from that.

Joe Rogan (1:58)

What is the conversation like when you guys are formulating a strategy to try to pretend that opioids aren't a problem? Like how, what are the conversations like?

Calley Means (2:08)

This is really important for people to understand. The institutional design of the system, which was greatly impacted by Casey's awakening, is that it takes good people and gives them plausible deniability. Nobody's in those back rooms conspiring and trying to be an evil person. They're literally talking to these junior staffers like me about the scourge of pain and how we have to get this innovation of opioids to the American people. Now it's about obesity and trying to get ozempic to six-year-olds, which is now the standard of care. In the rooms, it's about doing what's right and getting this innovation to the American people and everyone can fool themselves. With the food, it's about getting cheap calories to kids. It's not we're going to buy off and weaponize these academic research institutions like Harvard, to say sugar doesn't cause obesity, and then pay the NAACP to say lower-income people need to be getting their government subsidized coke. It's that we're promoting choice.

I really did believe that and people believe that. I think there's pings that's coming through in so many ways of people realizing this really isn't going the right direction. I think you see it with suicide rate among doctors, the burnout rate among doctors, the fact that every friend I have from Harvard Business School who went into the pharma industry, who went into the food industry, there's chronic rates of depression among elite business people. I think people are starting to realize this, but still in these rooms, it's about doing the right thing. You convince yourself of that.

Joe Rogan (3:31)

Wow. So it's just everyone's captured by this thing and nobody steps out of the lines.

Calley Means (3:37)

I mean, the highest level Joe, I think we don't realize that there's a defining existential issue in our country where our major institutions have been captured.

I think there's like pings of consciousness trying to alert us to this, like you having people on that are calling this stuff out, trying to ring the alarm bell and people flocking to this show. Iconic class from the military industrial complex, from the healthcare industrial complex. I think Elon being the richest person, the world's trying to sell us something. It's like, let's get resources to these people calling these things out. I think it's like Donald Trump, like I've been thinking about this a lot. Why is he the defining figure of our lifetime? Why have voters again and again and again gone to him and said, this MAGA movement, why are we supporting this person, making him the defining person of our generation? What does he represent? He represents putting finger on something that's just not quite right with institutions. And I think the problem is, we can't quite wrap our head around how bad it is and how so many people are complicit, but there's all these signs right now, and I think we're gonna be brought to our knees if we don't realize this, that our institutions have been captured. To me, healthcare, what Casey talks about, it's a really visceral example of something just not right with what's happening to food, what's happening to our kids' health. And I think it's happening to the military too, or the military industrial complex. I'm truly worried that we're on the verge of almost a societal level collapse with what's happening to our food, what's happening to our health, what's happening with the potential to nuclear war. And I think we have people starting to realize this, and they're trying to lunge out for it, but we're being told it's alarmist, we're being told it's a conspiracy theory. And to me, that's what we've kind of landed on this health issue. Let's just bring it down to the facts of what's happening to kids. Let's bring it down to just, forget the conspiracy theory, what even anyone's saying in this room. Let's look what's happening to our food and look what's happening to kids. because by the stats we're seeing, there's something really dark happening. Like outside any conspiracy theory, just the statistics of what is happening to our health in this country and uniquely in America is dark.