Do We Really Want To Get Back To Normal?

Really good history informs us in a way that nothing else does.

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and that's Farmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And if you care about where America's going after this horrible episode we're having in this moment, COVID-19, economic catastrophe that results from it and the social unrest that we're seeing today. Then this conversation is one you want to listen closely to, because it's with an extraordinary man, a man who's spent his life serving our country, John Grossenbacher, who's a Navy veteran. He's a submariner. He was a captain of a nuclear attack submarine, and he rose to be the vice admiral and commander of the U.S. submarine forces. So he was in charge of all the nuclear submarines that were pointed at Russia and as quite an extraordinary, extraordinary history of service to this country. He's led in the military, an organization of 25,000 people. He went around the world, around the country. He served multiple times in the Pentagon, worked with the executive branch, congressional leaders. And then after the Navy, he became the director of the Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory, where I used to work in Idaho as a family doctor, and he knows a little town, Orf, you know, I spent many years as a small town family doc. and it's an incredible facility, employs 4,000 people, 900 square miles, and he led the Science and Engineering Research and Energy, Environmental, National Homeland Security. He's advised governors, senators, congressmen, state and local leaders, and even internationally on energy, environmental, and homeland security matters. And he's married to a very good friend of mine, Tracy Gaudette, who's an extraordinary woman, is how I kind of got to know him, and he and she are quite a power couple. Tracy was the head of the VA's Office of Patient Experience, trying to help improve the quality of care in a more holistic way. She ran Andy Wild's Integrated Healthcare Program, the Duke Integrated Health Program. She's been a good friend for 25 years, and I think you guys are just an incredible, incredible couple. And recently, John has been working on thinking about America in a new way, thinking about What should America look like after COVID-19? How do we want it to look? And even before this, he's written extensively on saving America, saving the idea that is America. And we look at what's happening in America today, it seems very far off from the idea that our founding fathers had that Jefferson and Washington and Franklin and Madison, all those characters were so thoughtful, so perceptive, so deeply thinking about how to solve some of the big problems facing society and nations. And we seem to have gotten so, so far from that. So welcome, John, and I'm so excited to have you on the podcast to talk about some of these issues.

Thanks, Mark. It's great to be here. Thank you. And it's great to see you.

Great to see you, too. All right. So a lot of your writing and research lately has been, after running the world and saving us from imminent nuclear threat, is writing about this concept of saving the idea that is America. What do you mean by that? And why does why does it need saving and how do we do that?

Wow, well, the idea, you know, the idea is an important one and I think it's really unique in history that a group of people, very diverse people come together and they say, we're going to figure out how to govern ourselves and it's going to take some wisdom, it's going to take self-discipline, but we're willing to work together to do that and do it in a way that affords everybody a very high degree of individual choice and freedom. that's unique in world history that a group of people comes together and creates an organization, a government to do that. So that's what I mean by the idea that is America. I think it's under threat. I think it's drowning today. I think all we have to do is look around us. And I understand there's always a tendency to look at the problems of the day and say, oh, they're terrible and they're historically really bad. Well, these are historically really bad. Our political system is dysfunctional. We can't get big things done. It's open partisan warfare between parties. A lack of governance, we can't get fundamental things done. Our economic system is out of balance. There are restraining forces that used to be in place that controlled a lot of the activity in the economy that aren't there anymore. They're not effective. And so what do we have? We have gross income inequality at a level that's just not sustainable and a concentration of wealth in a relatively small number of individuals. So our politics, our economics, our education system isn't serving us, our public education system. So I think that idea is drowning in a sea of all those what I call, you know, societal system. failures and it's happening simultaneously. And now to add on to that, you know, the tragedy of this virus and then the social unrest, it's serious. It's big time.

You know, it's really true. I think, you know, this monopolization of wealth in America is pretty interesting. You know, during the turn of the 1900s, there was a lot of efforts to break up monopolies, the big monopolies of steel, railroad monopolies, and oil. It was very successful. The Sherman Antitrust Act was in place, and that was repealed under Reagan in some ways that allowed for, at least in the areas that I know about, incredible consolidation in industry. For example, the food and agriculture industry. I mean, there were hundreds of seed companies in America. that were providing seeds to farmers. Now there's four main companies. There were so many different slaughterhouses and food processors and now there's four main processors of meat in America. You know, Smithfield, which produces pork, this one plant that got shut down produces 5% of all the pork in America. And so we're seeing the break in our supply chain with incredible centralization and monopolization of industry that when it breaks, it really has an impact as opposed to one farmer and one slaughterhouse going down out of hundreds or thousands, it's not going to have an impact. So we're seeing this incredible break in our society. We're seeing, you know, it's sort of revealed by the cracks that are apparent now with the pandemic of coronavirus. It's the worst pandemic since 1918 with the incredible crushing economic blow that has given our society where 40 million people are out of work and the economic scale of the destruction in people's lives is staggering. There's 40% of Americans who can't withstand a $400 emergency. 40%. And those 40% now are having way more than a $400 emergency. And then on top of that, we're seeing the fragility of our social fabric, the death of George Floyd and the incredible unrest that that's provoked across the spectrum of society. I mean, the scope of the protests, the number of people out there saying, Enough is enough, I can't breathe. I mean, it just, you know, I think it's a metaphor for how I can't breathe that so many people feel, I can't breathe with the weight of all these things that are happening today in America, in the polarization of the economic inequalities, the health disparities, the social inequalities. I mean, this is not America that we want, is it?

No, it isn't. It isn't. And the path out of this, the path forward, I think, is going to be extraordinarily difficult. I mean, I don't try to use words like unprecedented. you know, but it is unprecedented. I mean, let's just think about it. First, we've got to manage our way.

Yeah, you're a military guy. You're not prone to hyperbole, right? Understated, just the facts. And it's, if you're saying that, we should pay attention.

Well, we got to manage our way out of this virus in a competent and compassionate way. You know, we know, I mean, public health experts have made it clear what we need to do to to protect the vulnerable, to protect our essential workers, and to begin reopening the economy, begin economic activity in a way that doesn't take on undue risk. So we know how to do that. It's not going to be easy, but we can do that. Then we have to step back, we have to bury our dead. over 100,000 dead. And we have to take care of those people who are going to have a long path to recovery from the impact of the virus on them. And we have to be prepared for the surprises because we call it a novel virus for a reason. And we've got a lot to learn about it. And undoubtedly there'll be some positive and negative surprises. Then we can start to think about rebuilding our communities, our citizenship, our infrastructures, and our economy. We've got the systems of politics, economics, education that we have, so we're going to have to use those. But I think we're going to have to take every opportunity for reform that won't change the system, let's be honest with ourselves, but it'll move things in the right direction. So politics, let's have fully funded elections, get the money out of politics. It's a competition of ideas. You and your competitor all get the same money and the same TV time, good luck, have at it. I mean, economics, clearly the minimum wage has to be increased. We have to take on issues like corporate governance, where CEOs can't just think that their only responsibility, their prime responsibility, as returning value to the shareholders. What about their employees? What about the communities? What about a sense of social responsibility? So we've got those reforms to get through to rebuild and get ourselves back on our feet. And in the meantime, we've got a feed, we've got to clothe, and we've got to house a lot of people. The economic impact of this pandemic and near near Great Depression levels of unemployment is not going to go away easily and there are going to be people that are hungry and need a lot of help and we don't know how to do that. We haven't done that in modern times. So we're going to have to do that. Then we can turn our attention to what I think the long-term issues are in terms of changing these societal systems of politics, economics, education. I think how we use Technology is an important factor as well. And that won't be easy because they're big, they're complicated, there's lots of stakeholders, but we have to take that on.

Wow, that's a whole lot of reform.

That is.

So reform is clearly needed. We're talking about big ideas. We're talking about reforming elections, reforming campaign finance, reforming corporate governance, reforming digital technology platforms, reforming social welfare programs. I mean, this is like a whole revolutionary idea coming from a submarine commander. You sound like a hippie from the 60s. I don't know. So I don't know what's going on here. But I think the question really I think people are going to have is how do you get this done? Is it doable? We know what needs to get done, but it doesn't get done. how do we break that logjam?

Yeah, I think, you know, in the near term, there's lots of policy things that can be done that will be helpful. You know, I think how we elect, you know, our representatives, how we, the whole primary system, you know, there's lots of what I call nuts and bolts things that can be done. And I think if there's enough interest, if there's a broad social movement for change, then you can get support for those kinds of things. In the economic area, there's really big things. What would happen if we reimagined our economy as not being based on consumption, but on, yes, consumption, but substantially more savings and investments in public goods, the things that are important to us all, infrastructure, education, things that the private sector doesn't do. Those big kind of changes aren't going to come from small, what I would call incremental policy changes. We've got to take on a process of engaging, educating, informing Americans and getting them much more involved in their government. To an American citizen, that's the most important thing that we have to do right now is we have to get involved much more than we've been in any of our memories. I'll even say any of our lifetimes. Then we can do it because.

We.

Can engage, we can empower, we can inform the millions of amazing people in this country who will come up with approaches that are far more sustainable in terms of policy, in terms of how our systems work because systems and the institutions, the organizations within them, the term I like to use is that they're sticky. They don't change easily. There's lots of reasons for that. But to take on major system change in politics, economics is enormous. It's going to take a grassroots level effort, not just engaged citizens, not just even a broad-based community support. It's going to take an overt effort to educate, inform, and engage Americans. And our role is we have to want to do it. We have to want to change the direction of our country. And I think it's also extremely important that everybody who's not suffering right now be engaged in this and be involved in leading it. One, they have a lot more influence on the current system. But I think it's incumbent upon us all to look around us and say, is this what we want? Is this the future of our country that we want? And they're going to have to also engage so that they earn the trust of the rest of us. That we all really believe, you know, we're all in this together. And I'm going to do my part. That doesn't mean we all agree, and nobody expects unanimity, but we've got to be able to work together to form consensus and where necessary compromise and move forward. And we can't do that if we continue in the direction that we're headed with the polarization, but it's about the lack of participation.

So, John, what I think is interesting to me is thinking about America. I was sitting with my wife, this morning talking, taking a walk, and we're talking about America and, you know, what's happening and should we stay, should we go, what's going to happen, you know, in the next election, what's going to happen, you know, as Society tends to break down. And, you know, it's really clear that a lot of the things that made America great, the individualism, self-determination the American dream, you know, people being able to sort of rise up out of the ashes and to reclaim their lives and become successes. I mean, there's, there's a whole sort of mythology of America. But the mythology of America has actually prevented us from understanding the way in which we're interconnected, interdependent, and to think collectively about solving our problems. It's all about me, mine, us, and not, you know, we. And I think that, that it's, I think it's a challenge. I mean, when we combine that sort of DNA of America with the rise of consumerism, materialism, that's a sort of culture of image and beauty and fame and celebrity. We're sort of ending up in a very scary place from my perspective. And some people call it the decline of the American Empire. You sort of argue that that's not inevitable, that we can do something about that. But you also challenge this idea of the original American dream, sort of valued climbing society's ladder, accomplishment, material wealth. And you sort of asked a very important question, is that what we want? Is that the dream we should have now? Is that enough? Can you talk about that and how?

Yeah, yeah. I think the whole term, the American Dream has been with us for a while, probably close to 100 years in terms of climbing the societal ladder, the things you talked about. As a statement, I don't think it's bad. The problem is how we define success, how we define the ladder that we climb within society. And that's what's got to change. Part and parcel of any of the reforms, any of the societal system changes that we need, the foundation is for us to talk about what's important to us, what we value. And I'm not talking about these, you know, these temporary arguments over abortion and gun rights, no, no, no. Things that are more fundamental, you know, what are values? What do we learn at home? What do we learn at school? They govern how I live my life, how I treat you, how you treat me. Those are the things we've got to come to grips with. And it's things like, well, I think people should be honest. You know, I think we should try to be honest. we should try to be fair. Shouldn't we try to be fair to one another? How about generous? Generosity is a good thing, you know? Hopeful. Yeah, hopefulness is confident optimism. Let's be positive about what we can do together. Humility. And it's not false humility. It's, you know, I don't have all the answers, and I don't know anybody that does, so. The way to get to the answers to hard questions is we have to be humble and listen to one another, even though we disagree so that we can work together. And last but not least on my list of these values is patriotism. And I'm not talking about this, you know, we're number one American first nationalism. Patriotism is we're all in this together. and it's important to me that this succeed. So I'm going to do my part.

You know, actually, I had a bit of hope when this all started because I saw America and the world coming together to adhere to social norms that we would not have really imagined possible, where we're all sheltering in place, not just for our own protection, but for each other. Why are we wearing masks? Not so we don't get sick, but so we don't infect others. And I think there's some people who are not doing it, but for the most part, it's pretty universal wherever I go. I see people really being part of our collective community. And I think that, you know, we need more of that. And one of the things that we're reflecting on what you said is that in our educational system, we're not educating children to be thoughtful, engaged citizens. And it's almost like we're creating a workforce of automatons who don't know how to critically think and it's driving so much of the lack of ability to sort through information, to make sense of things, to think about things carefully and thoughtfully. I mean, I remember going to school and I was like, this is terrible. I mean, I was in, you know, high school, first year of high school, 10th grade. And I was like, this is not for me. And I literally dropped out in 10th grade and went and found an alternative school where I was able to create my own curriculum and engage in sort of a sort of intellectual curiosity and critical thinking and discovery and things that were just not part of the regular curriculum. And then I really had the privilege of going to a top college in America, Cornell, where you are taught to analyze and to think and to critique and not just accept at face value and think carefully. Even in medical school, honestly, it was rote learning. It was just, I was an automaton pumped through information and expected to memorize it and regurgitate it out. And I just rebelled at that. In fact, I began to, you know, I mean, I barely got in because I was a Asian Studies major and I majored in Buddhism and not in science or biology or chemistry. And I barely passed a few of the science courses and I did all right on the MCATs, but I took a a lot of work. I spent days and days and hours and months, you know, studying and studying, and I sort of got into the last minute. But I ended up, I ended up being at the top of my class. And I think the difference was that I had the ability to sort through the information, the flood of information, understand what was important, what was not important, what was the narrative and story behind it, and how to think critically about it and to analyze, not just to memorize. And I, I feel like America is just lost that. I'm just like, when I see, you know, like, when I see Americans thinking that, you know, Hillary Clinton was running a pedophile sex ring in the bottom of a pizza parlor and that they actually don't go, wait, that doesn't really make sense. And that they're literally going there and protesting. I'm like, wow, we have created a nation. And it happens on both sides, right?

Yeah. Oh, sure.

And I, it's like, wow, like, We need to start there. And that's sort of what you were speaking to is how do we create a culture of values? How do we create a culture where people are understanding what our values are, how to think critically about issues, how to work in collective ways to solve problems? It seems kind of sad to me that how do we resurrect a thoughtful citizenry?

Yeah. Well, let me make a couple points about that. First of all, getting everybody to sit down and talk about values when they're trying to get through the day is a difficult thing to do. I recognize that. But this is also the business of spiritual leaders, religious leaders, philosophers. I mean, we need to have these kinds of conversations. It doesn't matter where they occur. They can be in the bar, in the barbershop. Who do you talk to about the stuff that really matters to you? most of the time it's family. So we need to make an overt effort to stimulate those conversations. I sometimes think approaches like, I don't know if you're familiar with American One Room, but this kind of experiment runs by some folks out of Stanford to get Americans of vastly different opinions together in one room and with some supervision and guidance get them to talk about things. And guess what? they are less far apart than we imagine they are, and they can come together. So I think there has to be that kind of effort. You know, we have lots of holidays. Maybe we need several citizen days where we can, you know, where we have that we've got to make the time and place to do this. The education system is a classic case of a big complex system. And one one of the challenges in our country is it's so highly decentralized. And that makes, to me, I mean, highly decentralized systems like that, they defy top-down solutions. There's too many stakeholders that you're telling, you're going to give guidance or direction to, and they don't work for you, and it's their money. And so it's hard to change those systems. They can be changed. Today, I think the most important thing we could do is help help the school boards, the teachers, the government officials who own these schools and are responsible directly with the parents and with the teachers to the students. I think we've got to help them. They need university-level resources in terms of data collection and analysis, understanding what works, what doesn't, sharing lessons and getting better, being able to to say what's politically incorrect, you know? And I think the universities could help do that. But the other thing about what you're saying, I think we have to face up to, and this is hard, it's the impact of technology on our lives. And I never blame technology, 'cause I think technology is just stuff. It's things, it's amusements we create because we think They're helpful, either they're tools or we like them, you know, and we've been doing it for years.

Or they're designed to be addictive. Yeah, a lot of them are. I sort of like food, right? I mean, food is great. We all need it. It's delicious, but certain foods are designed to be addictive, hijack your brain chemistry, and certain technologies and tools are serve us and others have been designed to actually hijack our brains, which a lot of the digital technology does. That's why many of the founders and creators of these big tech companies Don't let their kids use their phone or iPads or social media. I mean, it's quite interesting when you see the level of concern about how this is affecting our kids and our, and our, even our adults. And now, my wife, is taking a week off of all technology. And I'm, I'm hoping to do that soon. This summer is my goal. I have a few things to clean up first, like this podcast, but I, I do find that when you disconnect from it, it brings you back to being, a human, as opposed to being a passive consumer of information that's fed to you that you think is actually your choice, but is actually being fed to you in ways that are highly manipulated based on millions of data points from your online activity and your phone activity and your geolocation. I mean, it's kind of terrifying. I don't know if you've seen the movie Great Hack, the Great Hack, which everybody should watch. But it's a movie about Cambridge Analytica and how they manipulated the populace through a very targeted social media, quote, misinformation campaigns that personality type paid the people and targeted messages based on their personality type to control what they were behaving. So, for example, if someone is fear based, and then they actually appeal to that, if someone is sort of empathy based, they appeal to that, and then they can manipulate their choices and behavior, and you think you're an autonomous human being where actually you're not. So I think there's a level of like where they're agnostic, but they're also there can be designed in ways that are not.

Yeah, yeah, I'd like to say that technology, particularly modern visual technologies that you talk about, they abstract reality. They present us with an abstract picture of it. And if you surround yourself in it enough, you'll get, you'll, without even thinking about it, that'll become your sense of reality, particularly of things you don't know anything about. But the other thing I think it's done is we've always had, you know, demagogues and crooks. They've always been part of society. But now, now we give them an opportunity and a way to connect with each and every one of us.

Twitter.

Yeah, well, that they never had before. And guess what? You know, that gets utilized and, and they're taking advantage of, of a lot of people.

Yeah, it's quite a situation right now. I think one of the things I want to sort of talk to you about is this whole idea of how this pandemic is really going to affect us going forward. And you talk about not going back to the new normal and not wanting to sort of just go, let's get back to normal. Well, no, we don't want to get back to normal because normal wasn't good. Normal is sort of what we're seeing now happening in America with the pressurized effects of the pandemic, the economic hardship, and the racial injustice. I mean, it's sort of exploding and it's now hard to deny. So how do you see us moving into a new normal that's quite different?

Yeah, I think listening to you say it all that breaks my heart, it really does. But first, I'll go back to we have to competently and compassionately manage our way through the virus. And then we're gonna have to look at what's happening in the rest of the world because it's gonna impact us. And there's certainly lots of concern about the potential for famine given that in other countries, the supply chain, for a lot of their food sources is a lot more fragile than ours. So are we gonna have to deal with large scale famines around the world? Is there gonna be refugee flows and political unrest associated with that? Could be. And I think we're gonna have to soberly and constructively and compassionately face those challenges together. Then I think we begin the rebuilding that I talked about and rebuilding, you know, certainly rebuilding the economy, but rebuilding our, our communities, our citizenship. And, and at every step of the way, we've got to say, what, what are we doing that we don't want to do anymore? What can we change today? And, you know, and they can go through a long list of things.

What are the, like, top things that are your, your think really need to shift as a result of, of this?

Well, I think these are pre, the things I would go go address first are really all the pandemic did was highlight them. They were pre-existing conditions. So, you know, get the money out of politics, have funded elections, as I said earlier, reduce gerrymandering. You know, we can come up with a computer model that's acceptable to all the states that allocates representation. And now there's no more politicizing that process economically. I do think we've got some significant monopolies that we need to break up. We need a sense of social responsibility, needs to be responsibility in corporations. I mentioned the minimum wage, education, we've got to resource the, and I would use, I like the land grant university concept in the United States. They were created, I think, by Abraham Lincoln. We wanted education, so let's, create institutions by saying go create one and we'll give you this land as an endowment. And so you got some money to get started. And that's where all of, I think just about all of our state universities came from. Well, let's use them in a different way now. We need them because they are a repository of knowledge and educational expertise that needs to be tapped to move us forward in the long term and the long-term reforms.

So you talk about how you work with governors, senators, congressmen, and the White House, local state leaders. I'm very interested in food system reform because I feel like it's sort of central to a lot of our problems. It's sort of central to a lot of the economic stress we're seeing. It's central to the chronic disease stress. It threatens national security, which we'll talk about in terms of the military. It affects our kids' ability to learn in school that affects the environment and loss of biodiversity, climate change. These are all massive issues that are in some way or another connected to food, some more than others. And we need to sort of shift that. How do you see that kind of reform happening and how do we sort of get leadership to get that this is an issue? Maybe they do get it and they just are so entrenched that they're not able to actually do anything about it.

Well, I think it's a classic problem of a big, complex interactive social system. And when you draw a circle around it and you say it's the food system, that's just for purposes of discussion. I mean, you can't separate the food system from politics. You can't separate the food system from economics. So the first step is to have great respect for the complexity of a system like that and what it takes to change it. I think the first step, and I think your work is promoting this, is you've got to build the foundation for a broad social movement. You've got to educate, engage, empower individuals, these amazing people in our country who will do things that Mark Heimann and John Grossenbacher never thought of. But that's the foundation. Now, the harder part, I think, for us, and it's why so many reform efforts fail, system reforms, is you've got to have Enough people who can step back and say now and study and I'll even say admire this system. Because if you don't under if you don't begin to understand how it works as a system, then you can't make the changes, make changes at the last. So for example, the high leverage areas you want to change a system, first of all, change the paradigm under which the system operates. Okay, we we don't want to have a disease care system anymore. We want to have a health care system. Change the purpose of the system. We don't want a food system that delivers cheap calories. We want a food care system that delivers nutrition. Change the structure of the system. And I've read your book. It's part of the problem, you know, and part of the problem is big agriculture and big food. and big seed, break them up. Create the opportunity for change by making them smaller with no objective other than you're changing the structure of the system and now it can adapt and be more susceptible to change that's supported by a broad social movement. So that's the kind of thing it takes. It's long term and in my opinion, you got to do it all. You've got to have the broad social movement. And when you're doing the broad social movement, you can take on, you know, the obvious changes that you can make today and if you know people support, but don't fool yourself. That's not going to change the system. To go after the system, a lot of system experts say you have to learn to dance with it. And my experience tells me that's true. And it's hard. And it's why so many, particularly societal systems, systems because of their enormous complexity. That's why those kind of reforms fail.

So you were Vice Admiral of the US Navy. You were commander of all the US submarine forces around the world. And what we're seeing now is sort of a terrifying, from my perspective, terrifying Trend, which is that 70 of recruits for the military are rejected because they're unfit to fight. And, and 700 retired animals and generals. mission readiness, which formed a group of them called Mission Readiness, where they created a report called Unhealthy and Unprepared. And what was striking was not only are a lot of people rejected because they're obese or overweight and unfit in other ways, but that of active military, there's a huge problem of unhealthy and unhealthy, overweight military. And during Iraq and Afghanistan, they were over 70% more evacuations for obesity related complications than for war injuries, which I found a staggering statistic. So how did you see that yourself? And did you notice this challenge when you were there? And was there a conversation about it? And how does the military take a leadership in this? Because they have aligned interests. You know, they, you said before we were chatting that, you know, healthcare costs for the military I think it must include the VA, right? It's $50 billion a year.

No, just the Department of Defense.

Oh, geez. Okay, so forget the VA, which I don't know how much, how many billions that is, is a lot of billions. $50 billion. And these are, you know, you're thinking $50 billion. Okay, fine. If you're a bunch of 65 year old people with diabetes. But these were talking about people in their 20s and 30s who are healthy, supposedly healthy, and it's $50 billion. So how did you notice this? What did you see the challenges were in addressing this? And how do you think the military could be a leader in taking some of the initiative around changing the food and food systems, at least within the military?

Yeah, I mean, it's important to remember the military is just a cross-section of American society. It comes together today, they all volunteer to come together for this mission to serve. So they have, if America is obese and unhealthy, guess what? the input to the military is obese and unhealthy. And then the challenge of the military leaders immediately, and their job all day, every day, is combat readiness. How do we make sure that when we send these young men and women into combat, that they're going to be successful and they get to come home? And that's, you know, it's hard to describe, I think, to people that don't live in the world, what a unifying force that is. So, do they care about every man and woman under their care? You bet they do. But they also, they know that they're not going to succeed unless they're combat ready, which means both physically and mentally healthy. So, when the input is unhealthy, guess what? Now they've got to go work the problem and they apply resources to it. And that's why the cost of healthcare is so high in the Department of Defense.

But on the bases, they're just playgrounds for the food industry. And there's fast food restaurants and all the bases, they're eating all kinds of junk from the commissary. I mean, it's just like, why does the military say, look, this is going to be a health zone. Our military bases or you want to go escape and go to McDonald's, fine. But here we're going to have a safe zone and we're going to provide food that's going to create high performance, elite military. And that's what we should be focused on.

No, I think your question is a good one. I think, you know, military leaders a long time ago figured out that, you know, if you're going to have Warriors, they have to be physically fit. So they need gyms, you know, they need places to exercise, they need opportunities to do that. But I don't think, you know, and not the most honest answer, direct answer I can give you is I don't think they've connected. Food and health and readiness in the way that you and so many others do.

I mean, if you're a submarine commander, you gotta get those guys in those little tiny things to get in between compartments.

Let me tell you about that. Let me tell you how that affects you. So, when you send a submarine to sea, you send it to sea typically 70 days underwater is pretty standard. you can probably push it to 120. The limiting factor, the limiting factor is how much food you can carry. Because you make your own oxygen, you know, the reactor has enough fuel for 30 years. You clean the atmosphere that the people breathe. So limiting factor is food. So what do you do? You have two big ice boxes and you've stuffed them with as much frozen protein as you can of every form. And then everything else is canned and dehydrated. Everything. So there's an emphasis on both calories and nutrition, but in that context, there are no fresh fruits and vegetables.

Well, canned is fine and dehydrated can be fine too. Right. It's not necessarily processed food. I mean, if they're all eating, you know, Doritos and- Right, but then I.

Think, you know, you get into the food system and where does, you know, when the military procures things, you know, how do they procure them? Where do they come from? And they get trapped in that same system that, you know, you know so well and write about. And, you know, there's even political influence, you know, Wisconsin butter. Everybody should eat Wisconsin butter, you know? I mean, those, those things are factors in that environment. But I think the fundamental issue is that military leaders haven't put enough emphasis and perhaps enough of them don't understand the food element of health and readiness. And if they're getting there today by spending money, you know, I'll even say wasting money on a healthcare system that they wouldn't otherwise need. Nobody's shown that to them. To your point, they could show everybody else how to do that. And I think they should listen to you, Mark. I think they should. I'm serious. I think.

I hope so. We've been talking, I mean, it's interesting. I met with a lot of military leaders over the years. I actually spoke with the CIA and they're very focused just on the, the performance aspect.

Right.

And, you know, you think of these, you know, these guys who have these million dollar horses running the Kentucky Derby, they don't feed them McDonald's fries and a coke. They give them a leaf feed. They know how to create these high performance athletes. And I think the military is seeking to create the mission Readiness and to create the, you know, combat Readiness.

But.

Right.

It's amazing to me that having connected the dots completely and again in, in defense of that world. Part of their thinking is, look, I've got to get, I got to get these people ready to fight. I've got to make sure they have what they need to fight and that they're, and that they're going to be successful. And I've got lots of moving parts here. So I've got these doctors over here, and they're supposed to deliver to me, you know, healthy people. I pay them a lot of money. I'm not in their business. They work for me. You know, what have you done for me lately? What have you done to ensure the health? of my people so that I can make them combat ready. So I do think, you know, the military health care system who serves the operational commanders, see that's- well, that's a problem. And that's the problem there.

Is assuming that doctors know how to help people get healthy. They don't. They know how to treat disease. They don't know how to create health. And that's really what the difference is. That's what functional medicine is really about the science of creating health. It's what Tracy does. It's what we do. I know.

And so it's like- But in that world, the operational commanders rule supreme because they're the ones that have to accomplish the mission. They determine what they do determines whether or not these young men and women come home, you know? And so they are focused so intently on all the things they care about. And again, they have these support functions like medicine, like the food supply system. And they, you know, they expect that those are going to serve them well. And if they don't, then they compensate for it. If it gets bad enough and they're aware of it, then they'll take it apart and fix it. But it's, you know, when you're trying to get through the day in that business, that's not easy to do when you're trapped inside this bigger system.

It just seems like the Defense Department is one of those sort of, you know, closed systems that has the ability to address these systemically because they procure the food, they provide the health care, they're sort of aligned incentives to do the right thing. Yeah.

They're more part of the America and the American societal systems than I think you're saying. But I do think it's an important message that needs to be carried to the top level leadership.

Well, you might know them. They might be buddies of yours, right? Call it the head of the Navy.

Yeah, I'll work on it, Mark.

Okay, you get me a happy conversation.

You're right, you're right.

All right, fantastic. So, you know, you just to sort of close up here, you talk a lot about the challenges we're facing and the impact of COVID-19 and how to sort of reflect on what life will be like after and what do you think the impact will be? I mean, when this all said and done, where will we be as a society? Where will we be as a government?

Yeah. Well, it's hard. I don't think I'm a pessimist, but it's hard for me to say anything that it's going to be very, very difficult. You know, it's not the 1918 Spanish flu and Great Depression simultaneously, but almost, as best I can tell so far, I mean, 100,000 dead. You know, I think the Spanish flu was 670,000 dead Americans. I mean, it's awful. It's horrific. The unemployment levels are very, very high. So that's gonna have a huge impact on us. And then, you know, the international outside our country challenges that are gonna touch us, whether we want them to or not. So I think we've got an enormously difficult path ahead of us. I am hopeful because I believe that, that people, people possess extraordinarily reservoir, extraordinary reservoirs of creativity and fundamental goodness in them, that we do care about one another, that we are connected to, you know, to ourselves and really to all living things. And, and this this terrible time may actually force us to stop doing all the busy stuff we do and look at that and say, yeah, you know what? We got to fix this. And the time to fix it is now. We're not doing this anymore. And then they're going to need help. They're going to need, you know, leaders and, and people who understand the complexities of some of these big societal systems where a lot of people are just doing what they think they should be doing because that's the way the system works or they know it's screwed up, but they don't know how to change it. So there's a lot of fundamental foundational work that's going to have to be done in terms of education, empowerment and training. But, you know, I'm, I'm an optimist. I think that, you know, the course of human progress is, is not over. I do think we're at a critical, a critical point, and, and we haven't talked a lot about technology, but I do think that that's one of the things we're going to have to come to grips with. We have to step back and say, do we want to live in a man-made world? You know, if you have enough man-made light around you, you don't see the stars anymore. I've been in environments where you don't see anything but a man-made world for months at a time. It's not good. And people can tolerate it. People can make it work. But that's not who we are. Is. Is living, breathing. you know, I like to say spiritual beings on a human, on a human Journey.

We want to command the submarines.

Yeah. So we've got a lot of work to do, and we've got to do it together. There's no other way. There is no other way.

That's really true. I think it's really about us sort of understanding our common Collective Humanity.

Yeah. And.

And understanding that, you know, maybe this virus has unified us. in some ways that I think will allow us to understand our collective need to work together to solve our problems, which I think we have done in some degree around this. And I think I really thank you for your thought leadership and your laying out a different view of how we need to think about things going forward. I do want to ask you something that just came up in my mind, which was, who have been the thinkers and writers and teachers that have inspired you? Because you seem to have a very enlightened view. It doesn't seem to be typical of people in government or who've been in public service. So who's inspired you to consider?

Oh, there's so many of them. I mean, I love history because history always reminds me how messy the real world really is. And also how complicated it is and what it takes to solve big challenges. So I'm a big fan of Francis Fukuyama. and he writes these, you know, from the history of mankind, from when the earth's trust was still warm, you know, and our social systems and how they change. And I think really good history informs us in a way that nothing else does. So I like history and then I try to read all I can. For me, it's my best teacher. I like John Meacham, you know, he's a popular historian the day, and I think he wrote a book called the Soul of America, I think it's called, and it's a wonderful book about religion in our country and what it means and what that story of our lives has been. So I think history is number one. I think science education, I spent a lot of my time studying science and engineering, and I think that helps because it grounds you in what reality is. And I think even more importantly, it reminds you every day of what you don't know and how little we really know. And when people behave as if they think they're masters of the universe, I mean, it's so silly. We know so little and we've got so much more to do. So I think the more you know.

The more humble you get about what you don't know. Yeah.

I think so. But history for me is, and these kinds of things has been the best teacher.

So if you were thinking of recommending a summer reading list for people to wake them up to what world we need to live in, what would be your top two or three books?

Oh, I think John Meacham's writings are good. I think he's done, you know, he's written a number of biographies of presidents, but I think I think it's called the Soul of America is a good read. And I'd start there. There's always the classics you can go back to. I mean, if you really read the Federalist Papers, you read a paragraph and you go, Wow, Hamilton and those guys, they really understood, didn't they? They understood human nature in a way that I think is extraordinary. and we would be wise to listen to them, not that their solutions and prescriptions all fit today. I'd like to think that Jefferson probably knew everything about the technology of his day in a way that nobody can today. It's too complicated, it's too detailed, it's too involved. I think we have to be careful with little literal interpretation, but I think conceptually, philosophically, and a really deep understanding of human nature and trying to put together a system in our governmental system that would work given the frailties and the challenges of human nature.

It's great. I mean, I actually have thought lately of going back and reading those writings of Jefferson, Hamilton, and I think maybe we should pause and think about why we started America and how do we get back to some of those founding ideas. And I think for people listening, if they want to learn more about John's work and his perspectives, a lot of his articles are published on the Hill, which is an online publication that is for Washington, but I think it's relevant for all of us. It's just fabulous. articles in terms of saving the idea of America, how to save America, we must examine our values, we must repair our modernized politics, we must rebalance our economic system, we must rebuild our education system, why we have to make technology a choice. These are all fabulous articles that John's written and I encourage you to check out and learn more because I think we need the kind of leadership and thinking you're talking about and hopefully hopefully we can sort of come to our senses after this is through and redesign and recreate a better America.

Oh, thanks, Mark. Thanks very much.

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