The Dark Story Behind Ozempic’s $500B Business Empire

Kelly, what's the problem with Ozempic?

Drugs like Ozempic and Ozempic. Drug Ozempic.

The topic Ozempic. What exactly is Ozempic?

Ozempic actually represents to me the biggest issue in the country, which is that we're basically being poisoned and then drugged for profit.

Can you explain how Ozempic actually works?

Essentially, it is liquefied anorexia, and the problem with recommending it for long-term Is that—

Do doctors even have to go to a nutrition class?

First day of Stanford med school, my sister brought up that somebody with migraines might need to have a dietary intervention. Her attending surgeon said, "Stop being a pussy.

We didn't go to nutrition school." Is this gonna be the most lucrative drug ever made?

It's the 12th most valuable company in the world. This Danish company, they are the largest funder of politicians, 5 times more than the oil industry. They are 50% of TV news spending. So they're not only able to influence us, they're actually able to buy the news itself.

When I hear Stanford med school professor, or the dean of Harvard med school. Are those people that you trust?

Absolutely not. The problem is that we're listening to experts.

Remember the food pyramid? Let's eat our cereals, it's the base, it's the foundation of your food.

At my house, I think Go-Gurt was like the biggest part of like the pyramid.

If you don't eat your yogurt, you're not going to get to go play.

The food pyramid was propped by the Sugar Research Council, still owned by a cigarette company. We don't even realize this. Kraft is still owned by Philip Morris. We are poisoning our population.

I just I want to do like the 80/20 so I feel good and my family is safe and feels good. It's like, what can I do?

The biggest lie in healthcare is that the reasons we're getting sick are complicated, and the second biggest lie is that these things can't be changed quickly.

They can. All right, let's rock. Kelly, what's the problem with Ozempic?

Starting out firing. I like it. I came on, I came on to talk to Sam about this. I've got some bones to pick with some of his takes here.

There's really— I think there's a huge problem with Ozempic, which is that there's a shortage and they're not making enough of it.

All right, well, I'm glad we're getting right out of the gates here, guys. So, so here's the fundamental point. Um, I'm not concerned with the 350-pound obese diabetic person. Like, that's between them and their doctor. Ozempic actually represents to me the biggest issue in the country, which is that we're basically being poisoned and then drugged for profit. The largest and fastest growing industry in the country, and again, largest and fastest growing, is the healthcare industry. And 95% of those dollars are around drugging and, and managing disease of people that are already sick. So we've had this explosion of chronic disease kind of siloed treatments, and every single one of them relates to more of the disease. So statins, more heart disease. Metformin, which 30% of people over 40 are on. I mean, it's one of the most widely prescribed drugs, right? Diabetes goes up. SSRIs. Now 25% of women are on SSRIs. Depression and suicide is skyrocketing as more SSRIs are prescribed. Literally every single drug you go on the list of every chronic condition, the more prescribed, the more it goes up. So the biggest of them all, obesity. And you can't even wrap your head around this. It's a unique problem in America, but 50% of teens overweight or obese. I mean, that's a moral stain on our country. The childhood obesity rate in Japan is 3%. So we have something unique going on where 50% of teens are overweight or obese, and then 80% of American adults are overweight or obese.

What's the definition of obese? Is there like a celebrity that you can name that like, it's like, that's like, that's like the threshold.

Do I like, do I need to stand up and take my shirt off? And then we just, we can establish some sort of benchmark here.

Like, is Andy Dwyer in Parks and Rec, is that considered obese?

Sometimes, um, it's actually based on a lot of your— this is what my sister and I talk a lot about— it's based on your personalized, uh, biomarkers. I mean, oftentimes you can be obese and not particularly look that fat. Uh, a lot of us have brewing metabolic dysfunction, 94% of us, and the actual definition of obesity isn't even entirely tied to how we look. Um, the, the general definition of, uh, which goes into metabolic dysfunction of something you should be worried about is 35-inch waist for women and 40-inch waist for men though.

All right.

So on Ozempic, fundamentally, we've got this dirty fish tank. We've got 80% of American adults, right? We look at those pictures from the 1960s and look at the pictures today, go to a public space. There's clearly something happening and it's uniquely happening in America. So my, my bone to pick with Ozempic is in the midst of this catastrophe, right? And then it's missed of clearly something happening with our food. And I think it really relates to the fact that 70% of our diet is ultra-processed food. In Europe and Japan and other countries, that's not the case. We're clearly doing something. And then this system is telling us that the answer to that, instead of fixing the root cause, is a weekly jab for life. And the instructions for Ozempic is a lifetime drug. And the most alarming part about it is the American Academy of Pediatrics recently said this is a fully funded a subsidiary of Pharma, um, they said that a 12-year-old— if your 12-year-old is not only obese but a little bit overweight— that Ozempic should be the first-line defense. So this is just a representation of, I think, the biggest issue in the country, which is that we have this explosion of chronic conditions all basically tied to the same thing, which is simple diet, lifestyle things. And we keep lunging for an injection, keep lunging for a pill, and My point, just societally, I actually think it's a big economic opportunity. It's like we are on an unsustainable trajectory. Like, like it's going to be 40% of GDP healthcare costs in the next 20 years. We're becoming truly like a fat and fertile, sick, depressed population. We're destroying our human capital. So if we're not going to take the obesity crisis, the fact that you go into a classroom— I've got an almost 3-year-old— you go into a daycare and most kids are clearly having big issues. If we're not going to take this moment with obesity and actually ask what's the root cause, that's a huge problem. And I think the economic opportunity, and I think one thing investors and entrepreneurs don't quite see is that if this is an unsustainable situation, we're going to have to shift more of that $4.5 trillion to— we can fix our food system. We can incentivize, pay lower income people to exercise. We can actually do things that incentivize the right things. I don't think American— The American people are trying to be fat. They're not trying to be depressed. They're not trying to be unhealthy. We actually incentivize them to be and can change those incentives instead of jabbing them with those topics. So that's why I think this—

have you tried it?

No, I have not tried it.

So, so let's, let's, let's unpack that. So you basically gave us a gift basket of hot takes there, and I just want to open up the ribbon and say, oh, chocolate-covered pretzels, wonderful. Okay, so, so let's unpack those one by one. You said something just now, you said the fish tank. My understanding is you have this analogy where you have a fish tank and the fish are getting sick, but you can see that the water is dirty. The fish tank is not clean. And I think your point is we should clean the tank, not drug the fish. Is that the core analogy that you like to use with this? Yeah.

I mean, let's just go over the stats of that tank, right? And I go to kids 'cause I'm a, you know, personal responsibility guy. I, I'm really resonant with those arguments that it's, it's people's choice, but it's not personal responsibility for kids. So something's happening. And 33% of young adults have prediabetes right now. 20% of young adults have fatty liver disease, right? Um, 40% of high schoolers qualify as having a mental health—

Is that new? Like, a doctor 40 years ago would, would kids have prediabetes and fatty liver?

A doctor would not see one case of a child having diabetes 40 years ago. It is order of magnitude increase. This is an absolute unprecedented step function increase in metabolic health disorders among children. 100 years ago, my sister recently said this, 100 years ago, if you were obese, if you were visibly very fat, you were in the circus. It's literally in a textbook. It was so rare for an American.

They're not that big either. Yeah, like the, the fat, the fat man in the, in the freak shows. They're not, they're not that fat compared to what I, what you see like on a regular basis, right?

So, so literally it was so rare for an adult to be obese 100 years ago, they literally, their job then was to be in a circus. Um, the explosion, Dr. Robert Lustig, who's one of my heroes, who led, uh, hormone issues and, and diabetes research at UCSF, he said early in his career you know, 30, 40 years ago, didn't see one child, one child walk in with diabetes. Again, right now it's 33% of young adults have pre-diabetes. So we've, we've done something to ourselves, right? And what's happened there is my sister graduating from Stanford med school, you choose between 42 specialties, like every doctor. She did head and neck, and then you do a fellowship, focus even more in that space. You know, there's cardiology, Neurology, we, we segmented the body. That's very profitable because a kid, right? A kid with prediabetes, when we segment it, when we say, oh, that's a metformin, right? Then they inevitably have high cholesterol. It's a separate doctor, the cardiologist. That's a statin. They inevitably have some mental health issues, SSRI. They have high blood pressure, ACE inhibitor. They have fertility issues. Inevitably shove them into IVF and invasive procedures. Infertility skyrocketing, which is highly related to this. So they go on this treadmill and they've been lied to that everything's segmented. The biggest mistake we've made since World War II is that we've segmented these chronic lifestyle conditions when they're really the same thing.

All right, look, the question that Sean and I get asked constantly is what skillset did we develop early on in our careers that kind of changed our business career? And that's an easy answer. It's copywriting. We've talked about copywriting and how it's changed our lives constantly on this podcast, and we give a ton of tips, a ton of techniques, a ton of frameworks, and throughout all the podcasts, Well, we decided to aggregate all of that into one simple document so you can read all of it. You can see how we've learned copywriting, but you can see the resources that we turn to on a daily basis. You can see the frameworks, the techniques we use. It's in a simple document. You can check it out in the link below. All right, now back to the show.

Didn't that segmentation come from Rockefeller? Yeah. Isn't that one of your, one of your, your research points?

Yeah. So, and this gets to like kind of the business angle is, is that all of these things were in this game. When it comes to our health, which is highly meditated. The way medicine exists today, the guiding law in Congress is called the Flexner Report, which actually mandates that we can't look at disease holistically. We have to look at things in silos, evidence-based. We need to name a condition and then treat it with either a surgery or a pill. This is enshrined in law.

What was their re— I mean, maybe there was a good reason why they did that. Like if you had to make the argument for why that was a good reason, if you could, What was their reason?

Well, Flexner, who wrote that report in 1909, so it's still the guiding law today, was a paid lawyer of Rockefeller, who invented the pharmaceutical industry as byproducts of oil production. He figured he could make them into certain pharmaceutical cures. So he is the father of the modern pharmaceutical industry and the funder of our top med schools like Johns Hopkins. And he did see economic opportunity in basically professionalizing medicine, siloing conditions, and making money by, by treating. Um, I think there's a way you could spin that in a positive way. I mean, it was the Wild West and a lot of witch doctors out there, and I think in their minds they were trying to make it more professionalized. But there was a clear economic opportunity to name and silo conditions, um, and then profit from the intervention, not from making people healthy. And there was a very clear, you know, you look at Johns Hopkins, uh, the, the guy that started that school, William Halsted, he denigrated nutrition, denigrated any type of holistic thinking. To this day, in medical education, when my sister brought up that somebody with migraines might need to have a dietary intervention, her attending surgeon said, stop being a pussy, we didn't go to nutrition school. This kind of idea of delegitimizing any exploration. First day of Stanford med school, Casey was told by her professors that the American patients are not going to stop eating their Big Macs, that they're going to be sedentary, and that the best thing we can do is stand with serious medicine, with the prescription pad, you know, with the scalpel, and treat these conditions as they pop up. That is like so viscerally ingrained into the medical system. And that's a lie.

Do doctors even have to get— go to a nutrition class? Like, isn't it— isn't it like, like they study that very minimally?

90% of medical— 90% of doctors graduate without taking one nutrition class to this day.

I was pre-med, 4 years of pre-med, zero nutrition, zero in exercise. And I remember asking my teacher because I was like, this is a little strange. Like, we took an anatomy class, right? You take a ton of chemistry, organic chemistry, all this stuff, but you never take anything on nutrition or exercise. And I remember asking about that and I was like, does this happen later? Like, did I miss it? What's going on here? And they were like, no, it's just not part of the curriculum.

Your teacher was also like, don't be a pussy, Sean. Yeah, that's just like, he's like, this means you're pre-med and not med.

All right, so I just want to read some of these stories I pulled from your your blog here. So you, it said that in 19, in 1909, this is what you're talking about. Medicine was the wild, wild west at the time. The fourth most prescribed drug in the country was probably heroin, right?

Or cocaine.

Heroin. Heroin. It was, it was made by Bayer or Bayer. I don't know how you say them. And it was, it was a cure for finicky behavior in infants. So that's good. Then it says that Rockefeller helped start the modern pharmaceutical industry by using oil byproducts. So John D. Rockefeller, obviously oil you know, magnet. He then needed a byproduct for his oil, uh, and said, okay, how are we going to sell pharmaceuticals? Well, if we fund modern educational systems. I didn't realize that Johns Hopkins is named after him.

Yeah, he's the father of modern medicine education. Yeah.

Yeah. He also, uh, founded, uh, University of Chicago.

That's right.

And so it was a radical concept at the time to silo different diseases into different categories so that doctors could prescribe drugs for each of those. Those diseases. And is it true that seed oils were also from, from Rockefeller?

Yeah. I mean, you really— this system is by design. And another thing he did is he had this basically oil lubricant, you know, cheaply made from, from byproducts of seeds. And he saw that he could actually lobby the USDA and get those approved for human consumption. They're much cheaper than the natural fats that we're, you know, genetically, biologically made to eat. And now by basically rigging the regulatory system, having his lawyers literally on the regulatory panels, it's the top source of American calories. Is literally— it's just as a statement of fact, a byproduct of oil production, these, these seed oils. And we're wondering what's going on to our health. The three key pillars of the American diet were foods that didn't exist 120 years ago. You know, processed sugar, refined sugar wasn't really a thing that really came onto the scene about 100 years ago. We now eat 100 times more sugar than we did 100 years ago. It's, it's, it's truly weaponized in our food. Seed oils, the top source of American calories, were a byproduct of John D. Rockefeller, new invention. And then processed grains, the processing really took off after World War II. To make the grain shelf-stable. But the processing, taking that fiber off makes most of the grains we eat, right? It's basically a hidden sugar. It's very little nutritional value, which the fiber has, and actually turns into sugar in our bloodstream, makes it more addictive. Those are the pillars of the American diet that were just fundamentally— aren't biologically made to eat. And, you know, one thing to add to the conspiracy, add to the story, but it's true. Is cigarette companies invented the processed food industry. So you have John D. Rockefeller kind of starting it. But then in the 1980s, as cigarette smoking started going down, Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds became the two largest food companies in the United States. In 1990, two of the three largest M&A deals in American history were cigarette companies buying food companies. So every single processed food company we can actually point to is either still owned by a cigarette company— we don't even realize this— Kraft is still owned by Philip Morris. So these companies actually still own or has been spun off once the doctors and the scientists from the cigarette companies went to the food companies and actually used these ingredients, used the RIG system to actually make our food more addictive. So this isn't just an accident that we're getting sick. And, and Sam, you know, maybe we're talking at different levels because, you know, on the micro level, you know, Ozempic, there's, there's good stories and bad stories, but on, on the high level, And we're, we're really, you know, kind of the purpose of my life is to argue this is we have $1,800 per month that taxpayers are going to pay for Ozempic for an 80% of the US adult target market. What if we actually just took the issue obesity and just from first principles asked, how do we actually solve that problem? You'd never say wait for people to get sick and then jab 80% of American people. We're so in this box of just as an inevitability that we're going to get sick, even though we get much sicker than other countries, and then drug people. We're so in that box. It's like heresy to even question that we're going to do that.

And we should give the listener and Sean background. Basically, we had a discussion on Twitter, Kelly and I, about Ozempic. I actually don't remember what I said, but I think—

How convenient.

Well, I, it, it was something I was like pro-Ozempic, but for people who were, uh, incredibly obese. Cause I, I think that like, I, I, I just think that when people say that something is always bad, I'm like, well, that's not true. Like it could be good in some cases. Now, um, I think that, uh, drugs are mostly not the answer, but occasionally are. I tested Ozempic because I'm a guinea pig and I love testing weird things. I think that like some of the things that for morbidly obese people is interesting. I think it's particularly interesting for alcoholics, but for the average Joe, no, I think it's silly. And I imagine you and I are in huge agreement on that.

How long did you take it for, Sam?

I took it, I tested it for 3 months when it was like, like when I saw that it was like the coolest, or when I saw that it, I read an article saying like everyone in the Hamptons or the rich and famous are taking this. I think I told you about it, Sean, in 2021. And I was like, What is this drug? It limits like your blood glucose stuff. Like, that's interesting. So I tried it and it was, uh, it kind of makes you sick at first, but it's a spectacular drug. But if you don't need it, it's definitely not something that you should take. Diet and exercise is way better.

Can you explain, I don't know how much you know, but can you explain how Ozempic actually works? What does it do that lets you, that, that causes the weight loss? Uh, what is the function? Uh, what is like the pathway that it uses?

Yeah, I mean, so, so the truth is we don't fully actually know all the mechanisms, but GLP-1 is a— our body actually produces it and it gives us the feeling of satiety. So it actually is basically just a supplement that's jamming our body with more of this peptide. It's like taking a bunch of vitamin D or taking another supplement. You're basically taking a supplement of a peptide that our body naturally produces to trick our body into feeling full. So, you know, again, that, that's not really solving the root cause. A couple quick points to what Sam says. I think we're in full agreement. I think the drug should be available. I think people should be able to hack with it, you know. But Scott Galloway was recently talking to you guys. I think, I think he mentioned this. He said this is the biggest, a bigger economic opportunity for the country than AI. He said that the vast majority of American people should be on this. That's the stance of the medical community, the stance of the various medical associations and the FDA is that this drug should be prescribed to the median American. Basically, that it's so hopeless that we're so addicted to ultra-processed food that we need to stimulate ourselves with a peptide in order to trick ourselves into feeling full. Essentially, it is liquefied anorexia. I mean, truly, truly, that's what it is. It's, it's, it's making you not want to eat. It's a crash diet. And the problem with recommending it for long-term is that if you, if you could prove perfectly that this thing works the rest of your life with zero side effects, is totally okay for every American to take for the rest of their lives, maybe there'd be a conversation. But that's actually not true. People are getting off this at high rates because of the side effects. There's very little long-term information. There was a 68-week study to approve it for kids for life, actually, but we don't know the long-term effects. You mentioned not wanting to drink, Sam. I mean, there is increasing information coming out, and this is a key point writ large with the healthcare system, is that, you know, why is it not making people want to do anything they enjoy doing? It's— they say it's actually making people not want to have sex, not want to gamble, not want to drink. Obviously, this drug affects your dopamine and serotonin pathways, and it's actually increasingly showing that it's highly tied to suicidal ideation and depression. One of the problems with the siloing of healthcare— this again, and I want to be really clear— with chronic conditions, the acute innovations of the medical system, if we have an infection, gunshot wound, burst appendix, complicated childbirth, that's great. But that's 5 to 7% of overall spending. The vast majority of the medical system is basically pilling and putting Band-Aids on chronic conditions. And people should be able to hack this. I think it's great. Sam took— a lot of my friends are taking it. But the problem is it's going to be $1,800 of government funding per person per month. That's rigged to the $1,800. It's 15 times cheaper in Europe. The drug is 15 times cheaper in its home country and throughout Europe through totally dysfunctional, rigged policies. We're actually literally paying 15 times more as taxpayers for that drug. So, so that's why I think it's kind of the Rosetta Stone to understanding why we're kind of losing our way.

Sam, have you ever done the napkin math on this drug? So I kind of was doing this this morning about this $1,800 a month.

Well, do you know how— you know how much it costs, Sean? Like when I bought it, just like for fun. Yeah, I did it for fun. It was like $800 a month, I think.

Just real quick on that. They give rebates to individuals, but the system is so rigged that the sticker price is $1,600 to $1,800, which Medicare and Medicaid will pay. So the government's actually going to pay a lot more. Taxpayers will actually pay a lot more, and then they give rebates to individuals paying out of pocket.

But so if you just use $20,000 a year as the cost to take this thing, because it's a long-term drug, you're supposed to take it continuously. And then it's 80%, I believe, of adults are, you know, in the sort of like qualified, you know, that's the TAM basically for this. So you take, you know, you take the US population times 80% times $20,000 a year. And then you're like, well, you're supposed to continue to take this thing. So even if you do, like, you know, so just that alone is something like $2 or $3 trillion a year.

It's the same.

And then you say, great. And then they're going to take this for 20, 30 years. Oh, interesting. So this is a $50 trillion drug. Callie, is this going to be the most lucrative drug ever made?

Well, right now that's priced into the stock. So I think it's the 12th most valuable company in the world. And Novo Nordisk, the company that makes it, just passed LVMH. You know, the iconic fashion designer as the most valuable company in Europe.

You know how like Safeway or Kroger has like a CVS where you can get your drugs in the grocery store? That's kind of like what Louis Vuitton does now. I think like at the front desk they like upsell you on—

exactly. They're tied together. But yeah, Sean, it's certainly priced in with the stock. I mean, this thing is a phenomenon. It's one of the most valuable companies in the world. What's interesting when you look into the— I've actually dug into the JPMorgan analyst reports that actually underlie the assumptions for why the stock is so valuable, about 80 to 90% of the profits expected are not from its home continent, Europe. It's almost all from the United States. So this is not the standard of care in Europe. If you're pre-diabetic in Denmark where this drug is made, they actually prescribe a keto diet. They actually pay you to exercise, which makes sense. This isn't just doled out like candy. From the medical system in Europe. People can pay out of pocket. So all the profit expectations are coming from the United States. This Danish company is one of the 10 largest lobbyists of US politicians and one of the 10 largest spenders on TV news. So literally what you have is pharma companies, just, just as a statement of fact, not conspiratorial, they are the largest funder of politicians. They fund politicians directly 5 times more than the oil industry. They're 50% of TV news spending. So they're not only able to influence us, they're actually able to buy the news itself. They're actually able to dictate what we hear on the news, which is why 60 Minutes literally ran a segment saying obesity's a genetic condition, that it's not tied to eating or not tied to exercise, and that it's, it's an urgent priority to jab a bunch of kids. That's what literally what 60 Minutes said, relatively unquestioned. Then they're the largest funder of med schools and academic research. I mean, Getting back to the nutrition point in med schools, Casey kind of unwound why that was. Stanford Med School, 50% of our budget touches pharma. Pharma is the number one funder of research. Um, pharma is the number one funder of the actual regulatory agencies. 50— excuse me, 75% of the FDA is actually not funded by taxpayers, it's funded by pharma itself. And bureaucracies are built to grow. It's a revolving door.

When I hear Stanford Med School professor, or the dean of Harvard Med School, that just feels like trustworthy to me. Just me as a layman person, I feel like, well, who else am I going to trust if not the dean of Harvard Med or this Stanford professor? Are those people that you trust?

Absolutely not. I think around the country in various levels, we're all losing trust in our institutions in various ways. The military, education, healthcare, I think is number one. And I think this is a really positive thing because the— we're the only animals with experts telling us what to eat and, you know, how to manage chronic conditions. We're the only animals that have rampant levels of metabolic dysfunction, obesity, diabetes. You don't have those among giraffes. Like, the problem is that we're listening to experts. And let me just, let me just take it really specific on Stanford Med School Dean.

You're right.

Nobody more trusted in the country. And working for the pharmaceutical industry in 2009, 2010, we knew that.

Well, can you just explain that? You were, you were a consultant, right? You went to Stanford, then you became a consultant and you consulted for companies. Can you just explain that background?

I went to Stanford. My sister's my best friend. She was much smarter. She was pre-med, you know, top of her Stanford med school class. I did economics and got into politics. And then right after doing some campaigns, realized, you know, everyone that after the campaign works for the two largest spenders in D.C., the food industry and the pharma industry, worked for them and did consulting for a couple of years. Didn't like it. Went to business school and been starting companies for the past 10 years.

Did you know getting into it, were you like, this is slimy?

So I grew up in Washington, D.C., good young conservative, you know, intern at the White House, intern at the Heritage Foundation. I was the annoying conservative guy in class at Stanford, pissing everybody off and, you know, really considered myself ideological. And I considered being conservative supporting American industry. So I worked on some campaigns and then I was very proud to be working for the pharmaceutical industry and working for the food industry, these industries leading the country. And the issue in front of us was, which ties to Stanford Med School Dean, was opioids. So you get in a room, I'm a junior employee, and it's like, there's unnecessary regulation on opioids, these incredible innovations that are solving this scourge of the American people, which is pain. And we have to fight back against this. What are we going to do? And I had a list of Doctors in front of me, and we're like, how do we get these doctors money? Let's get them some research grants. So we reached out to the dean of Stanford Med School, who was a pain specialist, and we funded him directly with consulting payments and then made a donation to Stanford, to his lab, for $4 million from opioid companies to study ethics and pain management. Then we worked with our allies at the NIH, which is totally just a swamp with Pharmaceutical interests. It's funded by pharma. It's a total revolving door. And we helped set up a panel. So the NIH in 2011 did a panel to make recommendations on opioids. Who's the most trusted person you could possibly have on a panel to make a medical recommendation? The Dean of Stanford Med School. So the Dean of Stanford Med School, who just took a bunch of money from opioid companies, was appointed in 2011 to the blue ribbon panel on opioid recommendations. He chose 19 other elite academics 15 of the 19 had direct payments from opioid companies that we very strategically steered to them. And that panel in 2000, I believe it was 2011, recommended basically that this was overblown about the addiction. They basically said, you know, stay the course, pain is a huge problem. And then opioid prescriptions continued to go up. That's how it works. And I could just tell you, I think this is something people are waking up to. I think you see this in the political climate right now where there's I think the defining issue of our time is distrust of our institutions. These lobbyists, these consultants, they know how to rig the debate, right? They know people trust a study from Stanford. They know people trust, you know, what civil rights groups say, that if you call someone racist, that's going to shut down the debate. So that's why corporations that are basically poisoning the American people are the biggest funders of civil rights organizations. It's just look who people trust and funnel the money to.

So let me ask you, when you, when you funded the research for, let's say, that Stanford, uh, professor or dean or whatever it was, and then they— and you funded 15 of the 19 people that were on that panel. Now I want to get really specific. Do you think— what do you believe? Do you believe that they genuinely believed the opioid— like, that, that was their, their genuine conclusion after doing the research and the study, was that the opioid thing is overblown and we should Hey, more opioids for Americans, right? Do you believe that they felt like a little conflicted, like, hey, my gravy train shuts off if this goes down, so let's find some middle ground? Do you feel like they are intentionally misleading or that that's genuinely what they believe?

Very, very good question. I think the reason maybe a lot of listeners and I used to have trouble believing this is because how can this be so evil? So let me break this down. The genius of the healthcare system is that it takes very good people and puts them into a system with plausible deniability. So the problem is that nobody actually has full responsibility for why the outcome that the healthcare system should be solving for, which is people getting sick, why that's exploding as everyone's making money. You know, the doctors can say it's the food companies' fault. The food companies can say it's personal responsibility. The med schools can say we can't control what Americans do. We're just going to keep growing. And making money. The pharma companies, you know, rally about, you know, making stats and curing the sick patients in front of them. So everyone— the systemic design of the healthcare industry is actually genius because it can allow people actually almost a virtue signal about doing the right thing while producing, well, not necessarily evil, it's evil, but it's producing what the system's designed to do, which is growth. So that's one dynamic with the healthcare system. If you go down to your question, Sean, and I've really— Casey's been exploring this, we talk about this in our book. I have to put some culpability on people in the system, and I think it's breaking through. One statistic that's alarming: doctors have the highest suicide rate and highest rate of burnout of any profession in America. I think what's happening is you get a lot of well-meaning people. There's easier ways to make a buck, you know, than the 9 years of training you have to do. You know, people, we actually are a magnet for the best and brightest into the medical system, and then they eventually realize, and if they're not, they don't realize this, they're just not paying attention, that they're complicit in a system that is profiting from people being sick and they're not making people better. So you actually have a dynamic where a lot of people feel trapped. My sister, after leaving, kind of bravely leaving the medical system after a decade of training, got people senior at Stanford, senior at Harvard, senior medical leaders kind of talking to her off the record saying, you are much braver than me. Everyone knows the system is going to run the country off a cliff. So there is a knowledge, and I think what leads to this depression, suicide, burnout among doctors is they don't quite know what to do. They feel really trapped in this system with, with, with really perverse incentives. But we all know people that work at pharma that are doctors. You know, a lot of my friends from Harvard Business School, like, they go into work at Pepsi, work at pharma, work at these companies. It takes good people. But, but more and more, I do You know, think we need to kind of Elon Musk energy. You know, he said, fuck it, I don't care if I lose money, I'm gonna do what's right. I, we need more of that leadership from the healthcare system because we're truly creating a, and I'm not even joking, right? A, a, a fat, depressed, infertile population. I mean, infertility is, is skyrocketing right now. There's, our bodies are screaming out for help.

Right. Well, before we go to infertility, I want to just tie back to the history thing. So you had said something, I think in one of your blog posts, that the first chronic condition that pharmaceutical ever, that, that became a pharmaceutical product was birth control. I think this was in the 1950s, and he said, this is the first pill in American history that people just didn't stop taking.

Right.

And if you're a company and you see this, it's a beautiful business model. Here's a pill they're going to take every single month on an ongoing basis. And it's not a cure, it's a treatment. It's a chronic thing that you're going to continue to do. And I think there's some documentaries now on the Sackler family and all this, but Uh, you know, basically they worked for Pfizer and they started thinking, you know, how can we create more chronic issues? And they— is it true that they also owned the medical journals at the time?

Yes. So let me, yeah, let me try to take that to today and what kind of the business problem and the business opportunity is. So you're right, um, the medical system was at its height of trust after World War II. The invention of antibiotics was credited as a chief reason we won the war. You know, but the antibiotics were founded by, you know, basically somebody digging in dirt and doing some like very rudimentary experiments that cost no money, right? It's like this wasn't actually a huge industry. And literally the Sackler family, they said, okay, this is very strategic. Let's take the trust engendered post-World War II. Let's learn the lesson from the birth control pill and let's get Americans on more and more pills. So they actually, with owning the medical journals, they actually created new diagnosis codes and created this idea of anxiety and created new mental health code categories. And their first big blockbuster, one of them was Valium, a benzo. It's very addictive, very harmful. And the Time magazine cover, you know, late 1960s, early 1970s was Valium Nation. 30% of women were on this drug, very addictive. They were called Mommy's Little Helper. And that was their advertising. And then you just go down the list. The entire thrust of medicine has then been to take that Flexner Report, take what Rockefeller set up and put on hyperdrive, segment the body, segment medical specialties deeper, deeper, deeper, and then create pills just for biomarkers, right? Statin for, for cholesterol, right? The metformin for blood sugar. We've been, we've been pilling ourselves on all these little biomarkers that we can kind of manipulate with one pill, completely ignoring that everyone's getting sicker at the same time. That is by the design, right? It's very profitable. And we, you know, we, I think we talked about this on Twitter, just as a statement of economic fact, there's nothing more profitable than a child that gets sick early and gets on these drugs and doesn't learn metabolically healthy habits. Doesn't learn the basics of why their blood sugar is high, why their cholesterol is high. They're told the savior's in a pill, and they're inevitably going to get more and more and more and more comorbidities. The genius of chronic disease, which the Sacklers understood, is that those patients suffer, those kids suffer, right? You're, you're, you're 4 times more likely to be suicidal or depressed if you have diabetes as a kid, right? You're, you're going to have a lot more issues like infertility, but you don't die right away. You're a patient who goes in the system, often paid for by taxpayers. So this was understood. This is directly understood when the Sacklers and other allies saw the birth control pill. And that takes us to today where I'll call out, you know, even the entrepreneurial community and venture capitalists, right? Investment and good business opportunities in the system still are predicated on this existing model. You know, I talked to a lot of esteemed healthcare VCs and they think innovation is putting a millennial pink package on Viagra and shipping it to people more conveniently. They think that innovation is like better UX on medical records. You know, you look down the list on these thought leaders of venture capital talking about, you know, medical innovation. It's all just better wrappers on the same existing system. There's very little disruption. Now that's a moral problem, but I actually think it's an economic problem because I don't think people fully understand. I've talked to a lot of, a lot of, a lot of the wise people in the, in the health space. If we have an unsustainable situation, if we truly do believe that, if we truly do believe we're on a bad path with our mental health, with our physical health, with our obesity rates, we're not going to drug our way out of that problem. Like we're not going to be doing more and more of the same to solve that problem. I think that's self-evident. And I think there's an economic opportunity there for people who realize it because we're going to have to to shift the incentives of the system.

Hey, so I don't, I don't want to change the world when it comes to food. That's up to guys like you. I just want to do like the 80/20 where I mostly do things great. So I feel good and I look good and my family is safe and feels good as well. Can you tell me what you eat and where you get your food on a daily basis and just what that 80/20 is like? What can I do? What can our listeners do? What can Shawn do to just be mostly great?

Yeah. The core thesis of the, of this book I wrote with my sister is that things are more complicated by design. The biggest lie in healthcare is that the reasons we're getting sick are complicated. And the second biggest lie is that these things can't be changed quickly. They can. So when it comes to food, I believe we should fire every single person in the government and academia who works in nutrition. We should replace it with this one rule, which is— which answers your question and one principle: reduce ultra-processed food consumption. We are 70%— if you look at what your kids are eating or what we're eating, it's ultra-processed food.

So what, what did you— what did you eat for breakfast and what are you gonna eat for lunch?

No matter what dietary philosophy you are, I try to eat whole foods. I had eggs, right? Pasture-raised. So look, look into the quality. So the first step is to reduce ultra-processed food consumption. That's the thing I'd say first and foremost. That is what most people are not doing. Even if you don't get into the type of types of food you're eating. That's the first step. I guarantee you, if you are on the hunt to rid your, uh, fridge of ultra-processed food, being on the hunt for those three, those unholy trinity of three ingredients— added sugar, processed grains, and seed oils— you're going to get to the next level of the quality of the food. The first thing to do is ultra-processed food.

So, which basically just means, uh, mostly, uh, plants and animals that, uh, are, are not processed a ton.

If we simply made that our nutrition policy, we'd be a transformed human capital. The second thing is, as you alluded to, is if you get there, and most people are not there, is to get into quality food, to really understand and be curious and be in a, be on that path of what's being done to our food. The genetic makeup of a grass-fed cow versus a grain-fed cow is entirely different. It's a reversed ratio of omega-3 or omega-6. The grain-fed, which cows are not made to eat, which is totally a new phenomenon, are predominantly omega-6 fatty acids, which are inflammatory, which, which, which causes inflammation in our body. A grass-fed cow, which is how they've been raised forever, which is now a luxury, is omega-3 anti-inflammatory. So if you just hunt for animals, hunt for vegetables that were made in the way we're biologically, you know, made to eat them, that's, that's the second part.

But all right, so I'm hungry. Do you go to like a chain grocery store ever, or do you only go to butchers?

Where do you shop for groceries?

I go to Sprouts, I go to Whole Foods. I look for deliveries of meat that's pasture-raised, of farmers that I trust. But truly, um, just going to your supermarket and not getting ultra-processed food and looking with the eggs, pasture-raised, with the meat, ideally grass-fed, pasture-raised, with the vegetables, organic, not sprayed with a bunch of glyphosate and pesticides. Like, it's simple. It's the things we all talk about. But if you truly just follow that and we incentivize that as a country more, we'll be on a much better path.

What are your vices?

When's the last time you had a Dorito?

Yeah. Or like, just like, like, do you have a bowl of ice cream once a week?

I got— I am like, everyone that knows me, I am like, I've been on a journey here, guys. Like, You know, 2 years ago, I mean, I was running a wedding dress company with my wife, a direct-to-consumer wedding dress company during COVID We, we raised venture money. We had a large team. It struggled a bit during COVID It's called Anomaly. So we make custom dresses. We had a really innovative supply chain. But, you know, I've been running, you know, startups, direct-to-consumer companies, you know, for the past decade. And I wasn't the healthiest person. And during COVID a couple things happened. One is my sister Casey Means, who I wrote the book with, as I mentioned a bunch, she started Levels Health. She left the medical system. She's become a big advocate. I thought she was an idiot when she left medical school or left residency.

I'm—

I, I, you know, as I said, grew up trusting the medical system, uh, thinking it was just crazy that she would leave this path she's on of all these credentials, right? That's how we were raised. It's like, get, get the best schools, get— grow up the traditional systems. So I thought she was crazy, but she really radicalized me with these ideas that the answers are much simpler than they seem. In 2021, as we were selling our direct consumer company, my mom had a pain in her stomach and, and went in to get a scan at Stanford Hospital. And she was perfectly healthy, we thought, but they told her it was stage 4 pancreatic cancer. And she called us, said it was gonna— she's gonna die in a couple weeks, and we rushed to her side. What that experience for me— so this is relatively new, this is 2021— what that experience to me showed is really a microcosm of how the system's broken. Because my mom was on 5 medications over 40 years. Um, she, you know, 30 years ago had high cholesterol, statin, that's normal. High blood sugar, metformin, that's normal. So she was the typical American patient. She was 70 and actually told by her doctor a couple weeks before that she was actually healthy cuz she was on less medications than an average 70-year-old because those issues that most Americans deal with weren't identified as a core, you know, metabolic issue. Just take a pill. She wasn't set on that path of exploring her food, of understanding how sedentary life can, can eventually give you cancer down the road. That led to her getting cancer. This year, cancer rates are at an all-time high. They're particularly at an all-time high around kids. Every single chronic disease. You can name is at an all-time high this year. It's because we're ignoring the warning signs. We ignored those with my mom. So she abruptly died and that kind of radicalized me to my previous experience working for the food and pharma industry. I, right around that time, I took a blood test and the doctor said, oh, your blood is fine. You know, you're fine. I showed my sister, she's like, no, no, this is, this represents metabolic dysfunction. Um, I asked the doctor again what happened. They're like, no, no, you're not treatable yet. You're not quite at the statin rate. But yeah, yeah, that's— it's not good, but you know, we don't have anything to do for you yet. So that's— that kind of— these experiences, it doesn't come from a passion for nutrition. It comes through a passion really for American competitiveness. Um, we are poisoning our population, and the average American is on a path like my mom, kind of the system hand waving these small things, and then they eventually lead to a big thing. So that led me, I mean, I'm not a model in any way, and frankly, I don't have any interest in lecturing anyone listening. I think a lot of people listening are on probably a path right now. My main passion and what Justin and I are really working on, Justin Mares, my partner at TrueMed, is I think a lot of your listeners are on this path. I think they're looking at pasture-raised beef. I think they're trying. What I'm saying and where my experience comes in from working for these industries is that we can't lie to ourselves though. We are not going to get out of this if the largest industry in the country is incentivized for us to be sick. And I think startups, companies, very other people, we need to actually talk about the top-down incentives too. So, you know, I, I'm absolutely on a path. We've written about tactical tips in our, our book, but where I'm spending most of my time is like, how do we change the incentives? Because I don't think the Japanese kids are, you know, just much less lazy and less suicidal than Americans at a 3%, you know, they have a 3% obesity rate. We have a, you know, childhood obesity rate like 25%. There's something happening with the incentives.

What is the answer there? What is the leading theory on why in Japan they're at, you look at this chart, we're at 40%.

Yeah.

America, we're number one, 40% obesity rate. And then Japan's at the bottom, 4%. What are they doing differently? What do you, is it, you know, genetic might be a hypothesis. What are the real hypotheses?

No, did anyone that said genetics, they say obesity crisis is genetics when it's just exploded in the past 40 years and was not an issue at all. They say, they say that diabetes is genetics when you didn't have kids as diabetic 40 years ago. Sean, it is so simple. It is follow the money. It is that simple. It is. I'm just going to say this again. Our most prominent industry makes money when we're sick and loses money when we're healthy.

What does Japan do?

Yeah, so they spend 3 times less per capita on healthcare and double the amount mostly on food. So, so per capita. So, so they actually put food into their healthcare budget. So I'll say that again. They spend 2 times more per capita on food. We spend almost like on all developed countries per capita, we spend the least amount on food and 3 times more than the average.

You're saying the government spends 2 times more?

As a country. As a country. And a lot of the healthcare budget actually goes to incentivizing the food system and food interventions. 9 out of 10 killers of Americans are foodborne illnesses. I mean, we can dance around it. It's just that simple. Like, you would wipe out heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, respiratory illness, COVID deaths, even if you got our country metabolically more healthy, which is many factors, but food is the number one. Other countries understand that and they dramatically rein in the incentives that pay doctors more when you get sicker for a longer period of time. Fundamentally destructured. Now, a lot of these countries, I don't even have systems we fully agree with, like, you know, socialism or whatever have you. In the US, we have much worse than socialism. We have a kleptocracy where the system's just totally been rigged, and every single impulse is for people to get sick, be fed into the system, and then stay sick to be treated. That's every single impulse in the system.

Sean, have you, um, have you ever— you, you— I don't think you've been to Europe recently, um, but when you go to Europe, it's pretty crazy. I, um, you like, I went down this little path where I remember going to Europe and I felt like I ate poorly, like I was on vacation and I ate pretty bad, but I was walking a lot, but I felt awesome. And I went to the store and I bought a pack of Skittles and just, I wanted to look at the ingredients. And then when you compare the amount of ingredients that are in a Skittle or a KitKat or like normal junk food compared to American food. It's like the list of ingredients, it's like 2 or 3 times as long.

I've seen this on Twitter, right? Same brand of bread or whatever it is, same brand of cracker, but then in Europe there's 3 ingredients and in the US there's 17 ingredients that you don't recognize the names. That's what you're talking about.

Yeah. And there's this other thing where if you look at McDonald's, so McDonald's up until like 1985 or 1990, they used beef fat, I believe, to fry their fries. Tallow. And it was, I think it was just salt and a potato for a long time. Now, if you look at the ingredients of a French fry, it's a McDonald's French fry, it's, it's got like 10 other things. Is there— and I think that someone said, said it best where they said in Europe, the rules around food are, it's a default too. We say no to everything. Here's the ingredients we allow you to put in. Whereas in America, it was like, here's the, here's the handful of things we don't allow. Callie, you're rolling your eyes. Is that inaccurate to look at it? Because I've noticed that when I go overseas, I oftentimes I feel better, but I don't think I'm eating better.

No, no, I think you're hitting it on the head, Sam. I'm just, I'm just anticipating what I would be thinking a couple years ago. What some people might be thinking is there's this argument when you talk about this in the US that it's overregulation. And again, I'm like a free market guy. I don't like regulation. And as a working for these companies, whenever anyone mentioned about changing food ingredients in the US, it's like the US food system is great. Let's not have the nanny state. The problem is that the nanny state is the fact that food companies have lobbied and rigged the system to have thousands— we literally, thousands of ingredients that aren't legal in Europe are allowed in the United States. The USDA Nutrition Guidelines Committee, which basically approves and recommends various foods, 95% of it is funded by, uh, 95% of the panelists are directly funded by food companies or pharma companies. So this idea that we allow these ingredients isn't under-regulation, it's actually completely and utterly rigged. You know, Justin Mares and I, we have a company that is trying to change these incentives. But because we've been pounding this mission, we've been looped into a number of advocacy efforts. One thing we're doing, we're working with a guy named Jason Karp and a bunch of health leaders. We've done a legal action against Kellogg's. You know, Kellogg's is a stark example, but their ingredient list, they changed completely for the American kids versus just across the border in Canada. It has addictive ingredients. It has the colorings that make it really bright that are linked to ADHD and other developmental issues. We're literally, through a rigged system, you know, are reformulating ingredients for American kids. That's what Europe frankly realizes more. I mean, what Europe and other countries are doing is it's not really even healthcare policy. It's a let's not poison our population as much policy.

Kelly, I want to shift gears real quick. Um, you— we ask people before they come on the pod, we say, you know, what were some of the big, um, you know, either philosophies, turning points in your life, things that, that really shaped you and, and shaped the way you think about the world. You said something that the most formative experience was at, uh, HBS class. So Harvard Business School class where a professor said that the most depressed group of people he ever studied was HBS people 10 years after graduation. Um, what is that story, and why would Harvard Business School grads 10 years later be the most depressed group of people?

Yeah, it kind of made me think about the Scott Galloway interview you guys did where he's like, you know, don't chase your passions. I just, I really don't think that's the right advice. I don't think we have an epidemic of people, you know, not, you know, fully— I don't think we have an epidemic of people chasing their passions too much. Um, you know, what I've generally seen is a lot of our trauma and expectations through society, you know, throwing really good human capital into suboptimal roads. And yeah, so at HBS, and it's just one microcosm, you know, but, but just something I saw, everyone writes their application essay about, you know, transforming and disrupting the world, disrupting healthcare, disrupting, you know, energy, big industries, having a big impact. And then like many things, you get into that room of, you know, of 1,000 people of kind of, you know, A-type people. And it's a conformity factory. So 85 to 90% of people by the end of the 2 years end up going into traditional industries, into finance, into energy. You know, my friend, a person who wrote an essay about transforming healthcare, went to McKinsey and, you know, I was on the team that helped prescribe more opioids on their side that they recently had to settle lawsuits. So So you have this dynamic. I think this happens at many layers throughout the country where based on various fears that are ingrained in us by society, I think frankly, one of the negative gears of capitalism to just kind of, as John D. Rockefeller said, we need workers, we don't need thinkers. That's what a lot of our institutions do. And this study, this professor, He surveyed white blue-collar workers, different socioeconomic classes, you know, every different professions, you know, like, like 30 different cohorts. The most depressed group was these graduates 10 years out. And again, the reason is because they go in with dreams, they end up conforming and settling, their lifestyle gets to the point where they don't have really flexibility to take that stab, to take that dream. They feel professionally unfulfilled but trapped. And then, you know, 10 years out, they really have a lot of regrets, at least professionally, but that maybe bleeds into other areas. And, um, you know, I, I generally feel like, like grateful, honestly. Like, like, I, in a weird way, my mom's death was always what I'd feared most in life, that happening. And in a way, kind of cementing the finiteness of life and, um, and, and a mission into my head. I feel really like grateful for. And yeah, I think people not chasing their passions, not fully self-actualizing themselves is a much bigger problem than, than too many people following their passions.

You also said that taking mushrooms was like one of the most impactful things.

Did you tell Callie your almost mushrooms story? Yeah. My favorite stories.

Listen to this. So, you know, I have issues that I'm always working out. I had some, I had some trauma. I was working out and I went to this I went to this meeting of this woman who she called herself a shaman, was going to lead me along with my wife through an MDMA or something like that therapy session. I go to the dinner and the meet and greet, and she starts saying things like, we need to give this medicine for free to everyone. And I was like, yeah, but I'm paying like $5,000 to do this. Can I have it for free? She didn't like that. And then she was like, she asked where I was from. I said Missouri. And she goes, ah, Flyover country. Uh, and I was like, all right, that's strike two. And then I started asking her a little bit more and she starts talking about capitalism and how it's ruined medicine and capitalism's horrible and all this stuff. I'm like, well, lady, again, I'm paying you $5,000 to be here. And I was like, so what were you doing before this? She goes, I used to work at Lehman Brothers. And when it collapsed, I left and started doing this. And I was like, I'm out, lady. I'm out. And she, and she texted me. She texted me and she was like, I don't think this is a good fit. And I was like, I agree. This is, this is a round peg in a square hole. This is not a good fit.

Didn't you tell her you're like, I can't do drugs with you.

Yeah. I was like, look, I was already on the fence about taking drugs. And if I'm going to take drugs, it ain't going to be with you. So, and you said that taking psilocybin was awesome. Sean, have you ever done this stuff by the way? And would you ever do it? I've only done it like recreationally, like 15 years ago.

I have never done it. I don't want to say I would never do it, but it's never been something that's called me. But you know, I hear these stories and I want to hear your story, Callie, because the people who advocate for it are people I like, they're people I respect, and they're people who, they advocate for it in such a strong way that it does make me curious. Like, wow. What am I missing? One of the things I've learned in life is that some of the most valuable things are the things you don't know how to value. Meaning you've never traveled, so you don't get the big deal about travel. You've never done this, you don't understand what you're missing out on. And those are some of the most valuable things. And when somebody is stuck in one of those mindsets, you just want to shake them and be like, dude, you don't know, trust me. Like, whatever. I don't know if this is one of those things, but I've heard about it enough where it's made me curious.

Yeah. Yeah. So first, Sam, I think you made the right decision. Set and setting is very important. I think that encouragement of therapeutic psilocybin use for anyone that feels called— Sean, I think you make a great— for anyone that feels called is the most important single thing we can do in America, uh, period. I, I, I, I actually believe that. I think we are truly, um, losing our minds a bit in the country through the all this change that's happening. The, the highest leverage area we can do work on is our brains. And this isn't everything, but it is a blunt force, extremely powerful tool to help rewire our brains. So tell us your experience. Yeah, let me give my experience. So my mom dies. I'm kind of at an existential moment. I'm kind of thinking about what I want to do. Our company was cranking before COVID You know, I had 100 employees, was struggling because the whole market was cut off. And I, again, conservative guy, never had super stigmatized view, never thought about these things.

Um, yeah, can you imagine you— no, like 12-year-old you wearing your Brooks Brothers khakis being like, one day you're gonna be advocating for psychedelics?

No, I could have never. I still got the sports coat, still got the Brooks Brothers. Um, I try to wear that when I talk about this because I think it's a very important thing to actually cross the aisle. Everyone needs to wake up to. But, uh, and I do talk to a lot of Republicans about this who are waking up. But yeah, so, so a friend who is a scientist said, let's do this therapeutic session, blindfold a high-dose music, um, 4 hours introspective alone. And I'll give a couple examples of what I saw. So it's really hard to describe, but I was working with my wife and, you know, we were running a startup, stressful, you know, we would quibble a lot. And I saw myself, uh, kind of getting angry at her, and then my brain like zoomed up and I saw the expanse of the whole like world, like it's like zoomed out of the whole galaxy. And I'm like, it just put this simple insight in my head. Like, I'm so fucking stupid to get mad at my amazing wife about these stupid things in the expanse of like how lucky I am. It's a simple insight. We can all say that, like to be grateful that you shouldn't sweat the small stuff. I've— I'm not perfect by any means, but I think about that like every hour, like with her, like it's totally— it's like a car crash, like cemented in my head. Of how grateful and lucky I am with her and how stupid it is to get like angry over small things completely transformed my thought on that. I saw my mom and she gave me a hug and I like had this idea that she still lived within me and that I could carry her legacy forward by like working with my sister on the book and various, you know, this mission to kind of try to carry her story forward. I truly like have that imprinted in my head. I've never been upset about my mom dying. And I truly feel like viscerally that she lives inside us and lives inside this mission, lives inside the book we wrote. Again, it's a simple, the best way to describe it is the neuroplasticity. You can talk about a car crash or you can get in a car crash. And it's like when something really traumatic happens, your brain like wires it. It's like deep rooted in your brain. But what it does is it, it helps you kind of get out of the, um, uh, trauma and thought processes and fears that we're inevitably ingrained with. And helps cement in a really solid way some of these potentially new frameworks that sound trite but have the seriousness of a long-term thing. And then the other thing I'd say, and I think a lot of people talk about this, and again, Sean, I just share my story. It's only as you're called, but I think it is important to hear these stories. I think it's really dumb and kind of not correct to talk about as some kind of corporate or executive, you know, hack because it's much deeper than that. But for me, it's the most profound and important professional thing I've ever done. I mean, like the whole kind of growing up in DC, trying to chase up the ladder, go to the good schools, the HBS, you know, conformity. It definitely is like, you know, definitely I think consistently gives you this kind of like, you know, idea of how these stupid games we're playing just don't matter. And definitely solidified in my head, like, hopefully some fearlessness on like pushing, you know, a mission forward. And it led to what I'm doing now. And, you know, I'd like to think that's ingrained in the company. I, you know, from my perspective, having a mission that's sincere that Justin and I have, and it's been a differentiator in recruiting like-minded people and customers and merchants. It's not a panacea for everything. I think a lot of people get to this place through prayer, through meditation, through other routes. It's not like a shortcut. But it definitely is a way, brute force, to get out of your traps that are holding you back.

That's pretty damn convincing, Sean. All right. I think you—

I'd like to make an appointment. Yeah.

I think you're going to have— you're busy next weekend? I think you're going to have to mark some time off your calendar.

I don't know, man.

That sounds— when I hear that, I think blindfolded with headphones on. I find that to be incredibly intimidating. I find— I want the result. I don't know if I can go through that.

Hey, Talley, did you do it one time or have you done it more since?

Is it like a regular thing or?

Yeah, no, exactly.

Yeah, I think it seems like giving childbirth that, um, you know, it was a profound experience, so I want to do right away again. It's, it's a really, um, but, but I've done it a couple more times. I mean, to be, to be totally honest, Sam, it's, it's all about— I, I will promise you this, and, and frankly, this is my perspective, but if anyone feels called, if you are called and you're doing it in a, in a good setting without, you know, somebody ranting about politics to you before and where you feel safe And you walk towards the— and this is what the clinical research says, quite frankly. But if you walk towards your fears, if you go into it a way to explore and walk towards, you know, your, your issues, whatever that means to you, it's going to be— I've never personally met someone that's done it in a responsible therapeutic way who hasn't said it's been the most impactful experience of their lives. I actually don't know anyone that hasn't said that. It's not like a, a club or anything, but it truly is. If you're called to do it, I would say this to people, if this resonates, I would try to do it like urgently. Like, I think your life is really like, many people I know, and for me, it's like kind of before and after.

Is this legal? Like, can you Google like psilocybin retreat near me?

Yeah. Yeah. So, I did it in a, it's legal in some countries. There's a Phase 3 FDA approval in the United States. To make it legal, which we're just— I actually advocating a lot on too. I think it fits into the whole root cause health thing that we're trying to push forward. There's sort of religious exemptions, there's state-by-state decriminalization. So I'm not going to give legal advice. I would, I would urge people to find a responsible legal way to do it therapeutically in a trusted, safe setting. And yeah, and Sam, it's just about whenever you feel called, but it's 4 hours, it's exploring your, you know, what's holding us all back, right? There's just different narratives and stuff. I mean, I think you guys are amazing how openly you talk about kind of your mental models and stuff. It's just a way to like zoom out and re-explore those.

Yeah, I think it's awesome. I'm totally in favor of it. I just, I, it's not, I'm, I'm a little intimidated still.

Well, one, one of my favorite phrases is, uh, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. And I think, you know, you're saying when you're called to something, I've always felt this way, which is that, um, things happen at the right time and you'll, you know, intuitively you'll, you'll know when the right time is for certain things or if it's for you. There's a great YouTube video I watched of Tim Ferriss talking about, um, psychedelics. Tim Ferriss is a big advocate for psychedelics. I think he has a nonprofit that he started that's funding research. But what I liked about his video was that he wasn't trying to convince you at all to do it. In fact, he started by essentially convincing you all the reasons you shouldn't do it and was very measured and responsible in the way that he talked about it. So if anybody's curious, if this made you curious, I would watch that video because I thought that was very helpful in framing it. I won't try to summarize his points because I thought he did a good job, but just try to Google or YouTube for Tim Ferriss talking about it. It's like a 5-minute clip or something.

I completely agree with that. It's not like an endorsement, but it is criminal. And I think one of the biggest issues in the country that we don't make this tool available. Just last week, the FDA actually threw a wrench into the approval process for MDMA. Again, like Justin, I see TrueMed as an advocacy organization where we're lobbying and have relationships with 100 members of Congress, both sides of the aisle. We're actually working with presidential candidates too, and, and members of Congress to brief them about this issue. The FDA does not like these treatments. Because instead of long-term kind of numbing your symptoms, it actually does help you get into, you know, the cause and unpacking the trauma that we all have and the mental models that we all have. So actually, like, you know, this gets into what we were talking about earlier, like these type of, I consider this a root cause treatment, right? Anything that gets to the root with mental health, it's obviously the mental models holding us back with metabolic conditions. It's food and lifestyle habits.

What's interesting is, you know, when you first started talking about this, I was almost chuckling a little bit to myself like, oh, You know, first he was kind of railing against prescribing a drug to solve the problem. And then here he's saying the drug solves the problem for me, or it was a great intervention. But what actually, what you're saying is that in both cases, it's the cleaning of the fish tank. So in the first case, that the cleaning of the thing that was making you sick was the food. In the second case, the thing that was making you sick in the head was your own story and perspective on things. And this was a way to change the narrative in your head, the perspective and the story that you were telling yourself every day. So I think in both cases you're actually advocating for cleaning the tank.

Yeah. As my wife and Justin and people that know me will tell you, I have a long— I have a long way to go. The biggest room in my house is the room for improvement. But like, for me, this, you know, what I did— what a bumper sticker.

I love that.

When I did this a couple of times and I haven't done it a long time, Sean, because it just— it jams for me of like, it's the basics. It's like, be a good person, try to exercise, eat healthy, meditate, you know, like like, like the key to life is that, like, that was a big thing for me. It's just like the having the nirvana experience of what the world is with this is one thing, but like the implementation for me is like, so that, that was my message from it. And I think it's like, it was a good message for me. It's like, I think that's what most people that do this in a therapeutic way get. It's like, I need to be a better person. Things are connected. So yeah, it's not like, like you take it and it's a panacea. It's like, it's like a tool. It is a like nuclear weapon, like blunt force instrument to like jam some truths. And it is, you know, not to get too trippy, but it is a natural substance, you know, the oldest living organism that we basically derive from this fungus. So, you know, yeah, it's a good question, but it's not— to me, it's not anti-pharma, pro-pharma. It's what is a root cause cure? What actually helps us, you know, get to the, get to the problem. And I think most modalities that help us actually cure things are, uh, are, uh, pushed back against. And, uh, and drugs that are, uh, basically help numb and are recurring are incentivized.

Do you ever take it like just to have fun, like recreationally, or only medicinally? I mean, I've taken it recreationally. I thought it was awesome. Yeah, I didn't—

high level, I'd say like it's, it's impossible to even articulate and like, I don't have the English words to articulate how different like taking something at a concert is versus a therapeutic experience. It's like a different stratosphere. Like, I truly think if people are called for, do it in a therapeutic high-dose way, it's going to be one of the most impactful experiences of their lives. So, it's just, it's very, very, very different, the set and setting and dose. But high-level, So, I think when you just compare the science on things like alcohol and other drugs that we take versus what these drugs do, which are actually brain regenerative in many ways and very low side effects, I think even how we think about recreational drug use is, you know, our government, you know, we prescribe 15% of high schoolers basically meth, you know, Adderall, which is literally like one molecule away from meth. We, you know, caffeine's pretty powerful. Alcohol is very harmful. You know, I think we totally have it backwards on what's appropriate for recreational use. And I think it's just fine personally, just from a medical perspective, from a scientific literature perspective, even from like a spiritual perspective. It's like, you know, people taking low doses of psychedelics and talking about their feelings, talking about their lives, getting deep. I mean, it's kind of like, where did this like, deep, where did it like, I was watching this thing from the '80s where they were talking about MDMA and it's like, like too many people are going dancing and feeling together and loving to each other. It's like, it's like, it's like, yeah, you watch like the fear-mongering. It's like, is that a bad thing? Like, and then there's like very little side effects. So, um, on the end, you make friends.

Commercials, this is like, they're like, this is your brain on drugs, and it's just a flower. It's nice. It's— there's no problem with it. You know, I wanted to say thank you for coming on. I appreciate your kind of your openness and I don't know, your contrarian opinions, because I'll be honest with you, a lot of times when you were talking, I was thinking, is this a conspiracy theory or is this a fact? At the same time, I was thinking, he sounds crazy, but my eyes verify what he's saying. Meaning I look at the food where we eat and we're sold. I look at the people around me. I look at the, the health conditions and You're not wrong about that. And so I thought this is one of the more interesting episodes. It's one of the few episodes I would say is an important episode. Like we do a lot of fun episodes, interesting episodes, but this is one of the few that I could say is important. And yeah, I just appreciate you coming on, man. This is, this is a good time.

I appreciate you guys so much. And my big pitch to anyone listening that resonates, there's a lot of economic opportunity if you agree with this thesis, because it has to change and we need more entrepreneurs, need more people thinking about changing healthcare systems because It has to move in that direction. But I appreciate you guys so much. Listen to the podcast every episode and just awesome to talk shop with you guys.

You're the man. We appreciate you. Thank you. All right. That's the pod.