Brigham Buhler: Why We’re Sicker Than Ever (And Who’s Profiting From It) | Align Podcast #517
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Welcome back to the Lion Podcast. My name is Aaron Alexander. This is a place that we bring together the world's leading experts in all things health and wellness to help you optimize your mind, body, and movement. Today's conversation, I think, is one of the most important conversations that we have had on here. This conversation is all about exposing the depth of corruption amidst big pharma, the insurance companies, the FDA, some of the institutions and companies that we have come to see as being corrupt.

companies to trust and just the depths of lies and deception that exist within them. And I think it's one of the most important conversations that we've had on here. I think that if you have family or friends or you just care about your own autonomy and sovereignty and agency within choosing a healthy life,

and how to do that. I think this is just such a valuable conversation is with my very dear friend, Brigham Mueller. He is the founder of Ways to Well. I might have seen him on the Rogan podcast. He's been on there several times. He just testified in front of Senate on these matters and topics. And he's just

A brilliant human being. I'm very grateful for him. He's the founder of WasteWell. I think I mentioned that already. And I think you guys are going to enjoy this conversation. Thank you for subscribing on the Align Podcast YouTube channel for a chance to win prizes at the end of each month. We send you guys out some sweet prizes, including we've given away infrared light panels. We've given away molecular hydrogen devices. We've given away all sorts of cool stuff. So jump over to the Align Podcast YouTube channel. Thank you for subscribing wherever you're listening to this. Thank you for reviews. Thank you for doing you. Let's get to it with my guy, Brigham Bueller.

B-Rigs, we're here. We're here. The long-awaited conversation. I know. We've talked about this for three years. I know. We've had a lot of conversations not recorded. Why, Brigham Bueller, from your perspective, is alcohol legal and psychedelics a criminal act? I think alcohol was...

early enough to the game to be monetized and created in a form that makes total sense like big pharma. You know, there's a whole patented process and delivery mechanisms put in place. And alcohol was early enough to that game and accepted readily by society for whatever reason. The same way prescription drugs are, you know, a lot of people don't think of it this way. But

a prescription opioid is still a drug just because a doctor wrote it doesn't make it good for you and that's one of the challenges that i had being behind the curtain in the healthcare system was realizing oh no like uh oh this there's a lot of times that that corporate capture that i talked about in front of the senate is real and it's not that a clinician has anything but the best of intentions

But clinicians reach for the tool in their tool belt and the tool that society has accepted in their tool belt are drugs that have come through the establishment and the corporate capture of big pharma. And I think that's a lot of what's happened with tobacco and alcohol. It's readily accepted in our society because it's been captured by the corporate conglomerates and marketed to the public and presented to be safe, even though we

We all know that alcohol is probably one of the most detrimental compounds out there that's available everywhere. Every restaurant, every bar, every convenience store. It's crazy. And legal opioids, which you have significant experience in the whole opioid. Would you call it an epidemic? Yeah, it was the opioid crisis, obviously.

you know it is crazy so if you go back a lot of people don't know this prior to the opioid crisis a lot of people now know because of all the netflix series and shows that the opioid crisis was created by the sackler family but what they don't know is the sackler family originally made all their wealth creating the volume crisis of the 70s where they literally marketed it to

Women in all of the news articles in the New York Times and all these various print magazines telling patients or telling women, you know, having trouble with anxiety, a little stress, take a Valium. Right. And it was so readily available and marketed that it created a crisis in America where millions of Americans were addicted to Valium.

They faced congressional hearings. They battled through it. The Sacklers came out the other end with fines unscathed. And then the machine continued on. And they got into a hydrocodone system like the cotton system, which is the delivery mechanism. And they used a much more less addictive opioid. And once that patent was about to expire, they

the cash cow was going to be up and so this happens a lot in pharmaceutical industry you try to find a way to extend the patent and with the patent expiring on hydrocodone they knew that they had the cotton system which is just the delivery mechanism it's it's layering the pill to release the hydrocodone over time but they had to find a substitute and they were running out of daylight to continue their profit margins and so at the time the sacklers decided why not move to oxy

but the issue with oxy is it's 10 times more addictive than hydrocodone it's a much more potent opioid and they knowingly released that crisis on the american people and it was you know profits over patients which is a pattern that you'll see if we walk through the history of big pharma and the american public how what's the origin story of the there are

Groups of people that can legally be drug pushers of various different sorts and wreck the lives of millions of people. And they get they're completely clear to do so. And then there's the villainization of the people that are growing, you know, 120 pounds.

pot plants in California. Like how far back does that go where it's kind of almost, it feels like it's like this like dark underbelly, like mafioso world, but it's in the guise of we're saving the people, we're protecting the people. Like how far back does that go with corporatocracy pushing drugs and owning the industry of pushing drugs and villainizing everybody else that's not a part of that, that team?

Yeah, I think, I mean, I think a lot of that goes back to the dawn of humanity, right? There's always been people trying to stop an awakening and trying to stop free thinking and trying to force people back to the confines of the structured, rigid society that we're trying to curate. And that's a sword that cuts both ways. If we look at the most recent, like with psychedelic research, like you and I have talked about, there was a great awakening in the 60s and 70s where not only

Not only were individuals experimenting with psychedelics in a personal setting, but academia was readily accepting psychedelics as a potential future treatment for all sorts of chronic illnesses, like mental health related illnesses, stress, anxiety, depression. And the data was compelling and promising.

But the hippie movement of the 60s and 70s and the Black Panther movement became a threat to – and this isn't me being conspiratorial. The CIA released its biggest threat at the time during Nixon's administration was the Black Panthers and the hippie movement. Yeah, Timothy Leary. He was like – what was it called? Tune in, turn on, drop out. Yeah, but he was considered America's most dangerous criminal or threat to the United States. Yeah.

And so I think a lot of it comes down to dogma. And you could do this with an array of different things. So it was the psychedelics in the 60s and 70s. It was testosterone in the 80s and 90s. It was estrogen in the late 90s, early 2000s.

Yeah. Like, and so over time, an agenda gets pushed. And so even if you look at like the women's health initiative, which scared women out of optimizing their hormones as they aged and began that decline, you know, and it was a skewed study.

funded by pharmaceutical companies in an effort to push new compounds. And so if women weren't on estrogen, guess what they do have to take? They've got to take an array of drugs to make up for the fact that their hormones are imbalanced, right? Including osteoporosis medications that are hundreds of dollars a month.

All of these things add up to the ability to monetize disease states. And you'll see that repeatedly throughout the history of medicine, throughout the history of humanity, time and time again. And so I don't know where it started originally.

I mean, I do know we had a lot of impact from the Rockefellers and their control of the health care environment. And a lot of that was established by some of these powerful families, you know,

They built academia. They built the teaching institutes. They structured most of the studies. At the time, they were using leftover petrol chemicals and trying to figure out what do we do with these chemicals and how do we utilize these to maximize our profitability. And even President Eisenhower, I talked about this in my speech in front of the Senate. President Eisenhower, in his famous speech about the military-industrial complex, he

also gave the American people a stern warning about the capture of the scientific medical complex. And he said, if we allow corporate interest and special corporate interest and corporations to control the direction of science, they will infiltrate academia, they will infiltrate the government, and they will limit our accessibility to innovation. And

That is what's happened. So many things are now being monetized and it's not about curing a disease. It's about treating a disease and monetizing the illness. So you have specific experience with this because you have a, can you share what you do in like your role within the realm of like pharmaceuticals and all that and your, your relation to all of that?

Yeah. And so, and this came up too, after the Senate hearing, a lot of people were like, well, who's this guy and what's his background and why is the Senate listening to him? My background was, I was a drug rep right out of college. I worked for one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the country, Eli Lilly. And from there I went into surgical sales where I spent a decade with some of the best and brightest surgeons in the country. And I watched throughout that process,

how hard clinicians were working to just survive and how hard they were working to just keep their practice doors open. It wasn't about driving patient outcomes. It wasn't about fixing

in healing patients, it became about hitting quarterly earnings, hitting quarterly profits, whether for the hospital system or the institute you work for. Most clinicians in this country are not private practice anymore. They work for some sort of giant corporate conglomerate, whether it's a hospital system or

a giant telemedicine company and all of those companies have an agenda and that agenda is to hit those profit margin, those quarterly earnings, like I was saying before. And so I saw that corporate capture throughout that process. And from there I left.

when I lost my brother to the opioid crisis. And I was out educating clinicians on the importance of not writing opioids, on writing non-addictive, non-abusive pain creams, on how we could address this opioid crisis through alternatives that weren't being accepted through traditional medicine. And the reason those weren't being accepted had nothing to do with the efficacy or the quality of the product or the patient outcome. It had everything to do with

You can't get these products into a hospital system or a medical practice because those clinicians are punished for stepping outside the normal boundaries of what is considered typical medicine. And the problem with that is the dogma that it creates is it pushes these clinicians back to using nothing more than the pharmaceutical drugs that are in their bag.

Right. They reach for the tool in their tool belt that's safe, that's not going to get them sued, that's not going to put them at risk with their job as an employee of a hospital or an establishment. And that hospital or establishment is just saying, we need you to see more patients and we need you to hit that quarterly number.

You mentioned to me something I didn't know of this concept before, and I was very surprised about it, that when you were going and dealing with insurance companies, you had a thing called a gag order, where you're not able to actually explain the intrinsics of any of the financial stuff. How does that work exactly? Yeah, this is pretty wild. And I didn't know this existed. And I'll tell your listeners, most of your clinicians and doctors don't even know this exists.

And so on the pharmacy side, if you own a retail pharmacy like I did, and you could offer a patient an alternative medication for cheaper, that is a cash pay option. I'm not allowed to disclose to that patient that it would be cheaper to pay cash because there is a gag clause in all of the contracts with the insurance companies. And so these big, huge insurance companies, United, Cigna,

Aetna, all of those companies have gone out and acquired what's called a pharmacy benefit manager. And I broke this down on RFK's podcast. A pharmacy benefit manager was created in the 70s with the hope of driving down the cost of medicine for the average American. They were an advocate for the average American.

person in the United States to help fight big pharma and drive down the cost of those medications. And what happened within a few years, like anything, is it got captured. And all of those pharmacy benefit managers got bought and gobbled up by who?

The big insurance companies. And so those big insurance companies now can control what drugs get reimbursed, where they fall on a tier order, what medications you get, what's your copay, what's your deductible. And they can project out through their algorithms and data how to monetize you to the best of their ability. And so it changed the system fundamentally where there's benefit in keeping patients chronically ill.

I mean, this is just the fact if I'm UnitedHealthcare and I can make thousands of dollars off of you a month by keeping you in a by treating a chronic disease rather than curing a chronic disease. Right. I'm not here to tell you they're intentionally making people sick.

What I'm telling you is they're intentionally capitalizing on your sickness versus seeking a way to heal you. And so this gag clause, what it says is you come in and let's say your grandma comes in. Metformin is a drug that's an amazing diabetes drug, been on the market 20 something years, cost me about $2. I would sell it to your grandma for $4. I would double my money. Everyone wins. Your grandma gets a great medication. We make our profits.

Everyone wins in that model, but that's not how the model works. Your grandma comes in. She tells me she has United Healthcare. I swipe her card instantly. It tells me I have to charge your grandma $10.

I am not allowed to tell your grandma I could have sold her the medicine for four because she's disclosed she has insurance. And my contractual arrangement with the insurance companies prevent me from sharing that information. And I could be sued or even face criminal charges in this country for disclosing that information. And where does that extra $6 go? So instantly it gets clawed back and goes to the pharmacy benefit manager.

And so this is where it gets really tricky, right? This is where they've gotten smart. It's like Scooby-Doo where you pull off the mask and you go, oh, it wasn't a ghost. It was old man winters, right? That's what they, except when you pull off the mask of the PBM, oh, it wasn't the PBM. It was United Healthcare. It was Blue Cross Blue Shield, whichever of the big five insurance companies happens to own that particular pharmacy benefit manager. They get that money.

And so it gets a little complicated and nuanced. I'll do my best to try and make it as seamless as possible. But so then people go, well, wait a second. If they get a rebate at the pharmacy benefit manager level, let's just do simple math. $1,000 drug a month. The goal of the PBM was to drive that $1,000 drug down to an affordable price for the average American.

And so historically, they'd say, no, we need to get that medication to the American people for $500 a month. That was how the model was supposed to work. But how the model works today is a $500 drug. The PBM comes in and says, could we bump that to $1,000?

Why? Because then they say, you're going to give me a $500 rebate to our pharmacy benefit manager off each month's supply of this drug. Now, at the end of the year, United, Cigna, Aetna and the big insurance companies are able to go to employers because 90% of Americans are insured through their employer. And they come back to people like me who employ 300 plus people. And they say, Brigham, Aaron cost us $25,000 last year in medications.

It's unfortunate, but we're going to have to raise your co-pays, premiums and deductibles. And we've got to make up that twenty five grand. But they never paid the twenty five grand because they received it as a kickback into a holding company. And so that's the gist of how it works behind the scenes. And so this entity that was meant to drive down the cost has been corporately captured to drive up the cost.

And then your healthcare, your clinician, your hospital system, your doctor's medical practice has been corporately captured by the insurance companies because they can't afford to fight that insurance company. And that insurance company is telling them, we don't want you to pull blood work. We don't want you to do a deep dive. We're not going to reimburse that. You need to pull a minimal lipid panel.

Right. And you begin to see why are we chronically ill? Why do more Americans why do we spend more on health care than any other nation? Health care is our number one budgetary constraint for the federal government, more than our military constraint.

Everyone talks about what we spend every year on wars and military arsenal and our military programs. It's dwarfed by what we spend on healthcare. - It's the highest risk for bankruptcy for an individual as well, right? - Yep, it's the number one cause of bankruptcy for individuals in the country. And it's also the number one concern for most states in the United States, number one budgetary concern.

But we're headed over a cliff with our health as a nation. We're chronically ill. We could go through all of the chronic cancer is at an all time high. Diabetes is at an all time high. Metabolic disease is at an all height, all time high. And our mental health is in shambles. The United States has the highest rate of suicide that it's ever had greater than in the Great Depression. Deaths of despair are at an all time high.

Why? Because we're chronically ill, chronically inflamed, chronically poisoned from top to bottom. And then it's hard to find help. So many people are in the pit of despair and they're just trying to find help. And they're going from doctor to doctor to doctor.

But when we go back to the speech from Eisenhower, they will silo off medicine. They will compartmentalize it and they will profiteer. That's exactly what we're experiencing. If you go to a primary care clinician, they're not going to look at your hormones. I talked about this on some other podcasts too, but imagine you're a mother, stressed, you're working long hours, you're a single mom, you're not sleeping well, you're gaining weight.

You have anxiety. You're overwhelmed. You're a little depressed. You go into a primary care. That clinician has six minutes with you on average. He or she has to see 40 people a day to keep their practice doors open and to make their employer happy. They are a servant of the industry. Unfortunate. It's not their fault. They're a pawn.

in the scheme and it's not unwittingly. And so they're forced to use the tools in their tool belt that they were taught in med school. Well, who wrote the curriculum of med school? It was all written by the big pharmaceutical companies that fund the medical school and fund the research. And so when you're funding all the research, funding the FDA, funding most of the three letter organizations, 50 percent of the FDA's funding comes from big pharma. Seventy percent of our drug funding comes from big pharma at the FDA.

You are skewing the lens of all of our regulatory bodies. You're skewing the lens of our academic institutes. You're skewing the lens of the education of our clinicians. And then we're setting them free into a marketplace and putting them under tremendous pressure to get patients in and out the door. And what happens? You're seeing what happens. We trade patient outcomes for profits. And this is the model we've built in this country. It's not a health care system. It's a sick care system.

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100 percent. 100 percent. You got to think a lot of the funding, a lot of the campaign funding, Republican or Democrat. You know, and again, I said this in front of the Senate. This is not a Republican issue. This is not a Democrat issue. This is a humanity issue. This is unfair to humanity. We have traded the American people's health.

for the profits of these big corporate conglomerates. And I think that it's a tough situation, but I do think that the government is starting to realize how bad it's gotten and we've got to fix it. We don't have a choice. If we don't fix this as a nation, it's one of our biggest risks to toppling this nation. Like we have to figure this out and the corporate capture has to be rectified.

Who is powerful enough to fix it? I guess it would be the people. This has come back to like the people, I would imagine. Yeah. So I will tell you, even before we went in and I'm new to all the politics stuff, I've never done any of that. I had to go buy a suit to testify in front of the Senate. I was not prepared for that. Okay. So.

Before you go in, you sit at a roundtable where you debrief with senators and we got pushback. I'll tell you, they were like, look, just don't go too hard in the paint on big food or big pharma. You're going to catch you're going to catch more flies with honey than you do vinegar. You know, I just ask that you use this time wisely, you know, so on and so forth. It wasn't nobody said you can't say this. You can't say that. I'll give them credit. Democracy worked that day.

They allowed somebody like me to come in and present to the Senate. And I was just presenting as somebody who had experience in the health care space, a different lens from somebody who had seen behind the curtain, who had many touch points and who had lost a brother to this crisis. And I think the challenge becomes.

It's easy for every piece of data. And we saw this. So let me give you a simple example. I'll say, why are there all these dyes and chemicals in our food? Right. My friend, Bonnie Hari brought here as well. Food, babe. She brought up there over 10,000 approved ingredients in American food today. 10,000 FDA approved ingredients in America. You know what I mean?

You know how many there are in Europe? 400. 400. Do you know how many there used to be in the United States in the 70s? 700. We now have 10,000, including petrol, leftover petrol chemicals being put on french fries to add to their preservative shelf life. These petrol chemicals are known to cause cancer in rats.

All sorts of food dyes, hundreds of food dyes. The red food dye comes from a parasitic bug that we smash up and use the red dye, like the red dye is created from

The tissues of this parasitic tick, essentially, and that's put in foods. I mean, we could go down the list like the McDonald's French fries here have 10 ingredients. The McDonald's French fries in Europe have four ingredients and one of them is salt and it's an alternative ingredient. What is it about America and who are the bad actors that need to be removed for this to stop?

I mean, I think big food's been captured. My friends Callie and Casey Means break that down. They do a really eloquent job of breaking down how when big tobacco began to get hammered by the government, they knew they had to pivot. They knew they had to find a life raft to maintain those levels of profit. And what they did is they went out and bought the big food companies. So...

A lot of the big food companies were captured by the big tobacco companies. And then they moved those same scientists that they had projecting about how tobacco is not dangerous for, you know, 20 years trying to plead that case. They moved them to big food and they created the food pyramid.

And they created all the studies that led to the food pyramid. And they created the dietary suggestions to the government that led to us eating ultra processed foods and carbohydrates and shifting our diet away from healthy fats and healthy proteins, which led to the chronic diseases that we now suffer from. And they also have the solutions for them. And they also happen to have the solutions. And a great example of that would be Bayer Bayer,

pharmaceutical is owned by Monsanto, the chemical company. Monsanto uses products like Roundup that are known to cause cancer in on crops throughout the world and then also sell cancer treatments. Do you see the level of like I'm not here to say they're intentionally giving cancer. What I'm here to say is there is a conflict of interest between

And how do you get somebody to address that conflict of interest when there's no checks and balances? You own the regulatory bodies that are supposed to regulate you. You own the media companies that are supposed to expose you.

Most of the number one contributor to news outlets and all of these various media platforms, the number one advertiser by a mile is pharmaceutical companies. $7 billion spent in advertising last year. That's more than all of the FDA's budget. The FDA only has $6 billion in its budget and it all comes from big pharma, 50% of it. So if you look at the capture, it's overwhelming. And one of the things that,

I've been talking about is we don't have to wait for our policymakers.

Right. Policy comes from the people and the people have to vote with their policies and their beliefs and their heart. But we also have the ability to boycott products. We also have the ability to send a clear message to companies like Kellogg's and Monsanto in these corporately captured monsters and say, look, we're not going to buy your products if you keep putting this stuff in there. All we're asking you to do is give us the same products you're giving Europeans, right?

This isn't that tough. And it's the same thing with medications and drugs. You know, like we prescribe opioids at a much higher level than other nations. We prescribe all of these drugs at a much higher level than other nations.

Is it just what would from the, to steel man, the side of the pharmaceutical reps and companies and overlords and the insurance companies and such, what would their position be for why we have, uh, whatever you said, 10,000 ingredients and, uh,

Did you say 10,000? Yeah, here in the United States, their rebuttal is, and again, this is the problem when you capture academia. Their rebuttal will be, we have these foods, we have these chemicals and dosages that aren't showing that data, or we have a study that shows the opposite. And then you also are funding academia.

in bankrolling a lot of these congressional and senatorial like campaigns. You're funding a lot of the politicians and policymakers. You're funding the FDA. You have a lot of levers that you can pull to create what they would call disinformation, right? So if I say red dye is linked to ADHD, right?

The next day, they're going to roll out their misinformation campaign and use their corporate media outlets to shut that down. And we saw that after the Senate, like my testimony was one of peace and unity and working together and working together as humans and forgetting the party lines and

and realizing that this is an American problem. This is a human problem. These are people's lives. We can talk about statistics all fucking day till we're blue in the face. You cannot argue the data. We are chronically ill as a society. I don't need a 10-year double-blind fucking placebo-controlled trial to go walk through an airport and look around and tell me that we're healthy.

And tell me that all of a sudden every American just became lazy and fat. There's no way. We're chronically inflamed. We're chronically exhausted. We're chronically depressed. Our hormones are wrecked. Girls are starting their period six years younger. Six years younger than they were before. Men's testosterone is half of what it was in the 80s. Every aspect of our health has declined as a society, including our mental health.

But people don't want to say the emperor wears no clothes. People want to bury their head in the sand and go, well, where's the double blind placebo controlled trial? We're living it. You're living it. You're in it. It feels like it literally is like we're in the Matrix. It's like a red pill, blue pill scenario. If you actually pull it back and you're like, oh, my God, like it's the whole entire game is rigged.

And this is all a dream and everything I've been told was an illusion. And there's the invitation and opportunity to like, well, I will tell you, that's how I feel. That's a very good. I even said in front of the Senate, the health care system isn't broken. It's rigged. And we're the ones paying the price because we are. And I mean, I could give you example after example when when we look like what I'm trying to think of the an example of corporate capture would be.

As soon as we came out the other end of that Senate testimony, the next day there were hatchet job articles printed in several media outlets.

And I broke this down on Joe Rogan. If you peel back the layers to the onion, who owns this media outlet? Where did this lens on what happened come from? When they say an alt-right woo-woo caucus of misinformation influencers, I just sat there and go, were we even in the same room?

We were concerned citizens from all different walks of life, including a Harvard grad, a Stanford surgeon, a John Hopkins thought leading surgeon or doctor, a Harvard psychiatrist,

Many thought leaders. I was the least qualified person to be in that damn room and my conversation was not about The nuances of studies it was a message about we're chronically ill and we have to stop the partisan bullshit and we have to get back to helping people and that takes us in medicine you can't treat what you don't diagnose so it starts with diagnosing the disease let's diagnose the disease and

There's a cancer in our healthcare system and it runs deep and it runs insidious and it is spreading rapidly. And it is corporate capture, corporate collusion and trading patient lives. That's period. That's what's happening. What citizens have the option to exit that system? And are there, is there a demographic of people that are too deeply dependent on it in order to have the freedom to exit?

Well, that's what we're trying to build at Ways to Well. And I'm trying to build a life raft. So I don't know if you've heard Dana White. He's changed his life. He went from being obese on the verge of diabetes, heart issues, all sorts of health issues, chronically inflamed. He hired a company, got proactive and predictive, dialed in his health, dialed in his hormones, took a non-traditional approach to his health care.

Because if you come into a primary care, they're going to go, okay, you're, you're overweight. You're this, you're this or that. Here are these five drugs that'll help you with this. Take this for your sleep. Take this for your anxiety. Take this for your diabetes. Take this for your weight loss drug, uh, and push you out the door.

That is back to the rigged system. We have got to get proactive and predictive. You have to start thinking of your health insurance like car insurance. It's there if you wreck the car. It is not there to change the oil, rotate the tires, and maintain the vehicle. If you are expecting it to do that, you are going to eat the average American diet, you're going to get the average American healthcare system, and you're going to die of the average American chronic disease.

That's what you're headed towards. So you can wish all day long that they're going to change.

But again, just like I said, speak with your pocketbooks to these food companies. We've got to start speaking with our pocketbooks to our own health. And this is not an exorbitant amount of money to go to one of these telemedicine companies or one of these clinics that focus on functional medicine or preventative care is typically under $500, which is it's a lot of money. But what do you spend on a mattress? What do you spend on a car payment? What do you spend on your house note?

Those are things you're in a few hours a day. You're in this flesh vessel your entire existence on earth. This is it. This is the only meat suit we got. And like, we got to take care of it. And we've got to get proactive and predictive and take sovereignty over our health. And when you wreck the car, you can worry about using insurance. But right now, insurance is not covering proactive and predictive for all the reasons I already laid out. Why is insurance so expensive?

in the United States. - Because of all the things we talked about. What they're doing is it's a profit-based system, right? So I'm an insurance company. Everything that you take, I need to make a profit off of. And so a lot of people go, well, hold on a second. If becoming diabetic costs six times more for the insurance company to cover you than it did when you weren't diabetic, why would they let you become diabetic? And it's a few things.

The things they don't make money on, like surgeries, these big, huge catastrophic events where you are in a hospital for months, typically don't happen until you're the federal government's problem, right? After 65, you become...

You're on the Medicare Medicaid plan. You're no longer that insurance's burden. Now you're the federal government's burden, which means you're the American people's burden, which means we're the one fitting the bill for all these chronically ill people that have been let down by their insurance provider for the last 30 years. Because the heart attack you had at 65 started at 30. The choices you make in your 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s

will tell you where you're headed in your 60s and 70s. But by then it's too late. By then you're in the system, you're the federal government's problem, and the insurance companies washed its hands with you and made its money and monetized you all the way to the scene of the crash. Yeah. So for a person that wants to exit that scenario,

What would be the first steps? How does a person become proactive in their own health? And also, where do they most wisely invest their dollars? I would tell people the biggest bang for your buck would be to find a cash pay primary care or internal medicine practice or one of the many companies out there like Ways to Well that are focused on preventative care.

The key is preventative care. Why wait to get sick before getting well? What's the price range for a person to be able to get involved in something like that through Ways to Well or any option they may have access to? So for us, our goal is to make it as affordable as possible at Ways to Well. A comprehensive blood consult is $500.

But that includes 45 minutes with a clinician that is going to do a deep dive into over 70 biomarkers. This is not the blood work you get at a primary care where they're pulling a couple of lipid panels. We are pulling over 70 biomarkers and doing a deep dive into you at the biological level. But that's one component. You know, the vision for the future in my mind is that

practices around the country that are utilizing DEXA and VO2 Max. These are very cheap tools in the tool belt that allow us to assess your overall health and wellness. If you give me a DEXA, VO2 Max and comprehensive blood work, we have AI at Ways to Well, Alan, that will assess those three pillars.

and can quantify for you which chronic diseases are statistically most likely to be headed towards in your future, and we can course correct now, today. We have a cancer screening that can screen for over 200 types of cancer at stage zero. Stage zero. If you catch a cancer at stage zero, do you know what the survival rate is? 99%. Why do we wait in our system

Right.

And so this is where the cash pay model frees the patient up to be able to choose their own adventure. They can choose their path and it is going to vary by budget for somebody. Five hundred dollars is a lot of money. But I'll tell you what, if you could do one blood test a year, it's better than none. If you could do one blood test a year and spend 45 minutes with a doctor that could give you all the tools you need to spend the next year trying to optimize your health and prevent these chronic diseases, that's

That's a win.

You're so far ahead of other people who are just putting their faith blindly for them and their loved ones' lives in the hands of these broken healthcare institutes. What insurance companies or plans would you recommend a person gets involved with? Well, that's tough because most people are insured through their employer. If we're talking about most Americans, they are insured through their employer. But so many people who are insured through their employer won't do anything unless their insurance covers it. And that's

And that's where I'm going. There's yes. Are the insurance companies bad guys? Absolutely. They are as big pharma, a bad guy. Yes. I do think there's a lot of bad things happening in both those, but at some point people have to take accountability. You've been told there are thousands of podcasts and educated individuals making you aware that this is rigged. This isn't good. Do you give a shit enough?

To take a deep dive once a year and look at your body to help prevent these things. Or are you just going to blindly continue to follow the sheep to slaughter? Because that's where that's headed.

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The peptides. Why are some peptides such as BPC-157, one that I'm generally a fan of from at least when it was like available to use. Why do certain peptides become illegal to sell and other peptides are available?

It goes right back to there is a big level of influence and pressure being put on the Food and Drug Administration by their buddies over at Big Pharma. And there's a lot of, I don't want to call it collusion, but cross-pollination. Most of the heads of the FDA over the last 20 years have gone to work for the big pharmaceutical companies that they were put in place to regulate.

I think it's like 10 out of the last 12 or something like that. It's staggering. The majority of those folks have gone to work for the people they were regulating. In fact, that happened with the Sacklers. The individual, the head of the FDA who approved OxyContin and gave them a label that said it was non-addictive, non-abusive, went to go work for the Sacklers 18 months later.

That's dangerous. That's terrifying. And so when we get to peptides, Merck is currently investigating over 200 peptides for patent. Interesting. So in one breath, these things all of a sudden overnight are being pressured to be pulled out of the marketplace. But these big pharmaceutical companies are investigating them for patent, for insurance coverage, and to monetize them. Right? And so you're going to see the same thing you see with GLP-1s, the weight loss drug. That's a peptide.

GLP-1s are still on the market. Why are they on the market? Because all the big pharmaceutical companies patented them and are making billions of dollars a year off of them. But those compounds were already being compounded at compounding pharmacies for a fraction of the cost. So a GLP-1 in the insurance model is around $1,500 a month average wholesale price in America.

through a compounding pharmacy, that is a 200 something dollar a month medication. I mean, it's almost a 10th of the price. And so there's a lot of money to be made in limiting accessibility to things like peptides, hormone optimization, stem cells, regenerative treatments, psychedelics, all of these various tools that have historically been part of society for thousands of years. Yeah.

The something that you mentioned and I've heard of that was, that was, I found to be pretty like shocking was the, the stuff with Bayer and the HIV epidemic and that. Can you share a little bit about that? Just more of like some of the, the, the things that we don't hear about in the mainstream. I feel like there's so much of that. And once you start turning rocks over, you're like,

It's a little like scary and angering. Yeah. When you ask how far it goes back, you know, Bayer, well, one Bayer during World War II, there are letters from Bayer, the heads of Bayer, sending letters to the Third Reich, asking the Nazis and asking them to send more Jewish concentration camp patients to

preferably women and children, for their studies that they were doing with new drugs and new chemicals. And they sent the Third Reich complied and sent 150 women to Bayer. And then there's a follow up letter six months later, basically saying thank you to the Third Reich. And this is all documented. And I've referenced all of this on the Ways to Well website, by the way, because I talked about all this on Joe Rogan.

The letter back to the Third Reich six months later was, thank you so much for sending the study participants. They arrived in great health and working order. Unfortunately, none of them survived phase one of the trials. We basically kindly request another 150 women for studies.

Right. And it is a dark history of Bayer Monsanto. We could do a whole podcast on Bayer Monsanto, but that same company Bayer that's known for, you know, a lot of people know him for aspirin. Bayer did that during World War II. Jump forward to the 80s AIDS crisis in Africa. People are dying of AIDS in the droves. AIDS is a major issue in the world in the 80s.

Bayer had a hemophilia drug that they knowingly found out had been contaminated by AIDS, right? By the HIV virus. Bayer knew that these, because the way the hemophilia drugs work is you essentially are mixing different bloods and creating this compound. And the issue with it is they accidentally inadvertently infected a huge batch with HIV, right?

At that point, you're in a conundrum. Do you destroy this huge lot size of compounded medications for hemophilia and lose all those millions of dollars? Or do you just continue to ship it and see what happens? Bayer knowingly decided to ship these hemophilia medications to third world countries where they didn't have representation and oversight like they do in the U.S. and knowingly infected thousands of people with the HIV virus.

This is all documented. I have it all on the Ways to Well website. I can cite all the historians that have cited this, all the news articles, everything that's happened. And this was when HIV was a death sentence, you know, and to add insult to injury. When you ask about peptides, when you ask about corporate capture, when we talk about big pharma and the collusion.

Compounding pharmacies and generic manufacturers were attempting to bring HIV treatments to the marketplace for pennies on the dollar because at the time, the only treatment for HIV to stop you from dying was $10,000 a month. $10,000 a month is what the pharmaceutical companies were making off of keeping you alive when you had HIV.

And compounders and generic companies were trying to offer these compounds for $100 a month. And as soon as they launched those drugs into Africa, the big pharmaceutical company sued all of the compounding pharmacies and generic pharmacies trying to put them out of business. And it got caught up in litigation, delaying patients' accessibility to these drugs. And my argument was the people of Africa aren't going to pay $10,000 a month. They're just going to die.

So what you did is you indirectly killed people for your greed. And these are the people we're talking about. And when we look at it time and time and time again, this is what they do. Like right now, it is happening. The GLP ones that are being labeled by the Kardashians and all these people is, you know, the new weight loss drug. They are a weight loss drug and they work great as a weight loss drug.

But they were originally a diabetes drug. And we know that this diabetes disproportionately impacts poverty stricken and minority communities.

And because it's now relabeled as a boutique weight loss drug and it's selling for fifteen hundred dollars a month, the demand is so high that the people who really need it can't get it. There's a shortage in this country on those drugs, but they're being marketed and sold to every housewife that wants to lose 10 pounds for spring break. And I'm not here to say that part's good or bad.

But the people that suffer are the people that can't afford those medications. And again, that's where compounding pharmacies like mine are trying to come in and help people. We're selling those drugs for a couple hundred dollars, you know, and what happens is companies like Eli Lilly and these big pharmaceutical companies come and sue you and try and bully and intimidate you into not making the drug.

Right. But the FDA is asking compounding pharmacies around the country to make this drug because they know there's a massive shortage and there are people that need this drug to stay alive.

Who was I was talking to somebody literally yesterday and they're like, my dad can't get his diabetes medicine. And I'm like, what is it? And it's a GLP one. And I'm like, you know, that compounding pharmacies make that and that you could get that from a compounding pharmacy legally safe, compliant, all FDA improved ingredients, FDA inspected facilities, independently third part of their third party verified labs on every single compound that goes out that door.

These are not there. They are in many ways safer than what you're getting from big pharma because big pharma doesn't have that type of oversight. There's over twenty five hundred major pharmaceutical facilities in the United States that are owned by big pharma that have not been inspected in five or more years, five or more years. The FDA has been in our building three times in 18 months. Like you tell me which sounds safer.

What about Monsanto? Is Monsanto as corrupt and evil as what most of my new age friends suggest? Yes, there's a long, long... Monsanto is who owns Bayer now, right? Bayer, who I told you that Third Reich story, I told you about the 80s, but they also, Monsanto also pivoted when they realized that some of their chemicals that they were spraying on crops were causing baby deformities, right?

They quit selling them in first world countries and they moved those to third world countries as well. And so they shipped those products into countries like Vietnam and Thailand and places where they would be

Harder for those people to strike back and sue or fight them. And they created all sorts of abnormalities in defective births throughout those countries because those chemicals are being sprayed all over those people's food. And there are dozens and dozens of stories like that. Even to this day, you know, Monsanto is arguing against our Senate testimonies.

And the next day when this article came out about how we were misrepresenting the facts, I did this on Joe. I said, let's look at who owns this news company. When you peel back the layers to the onion, it was nothing more than a PR firm owned by Monsanto.

So they can overnight with their huge budgets, roll out disinformation campaigns and just squash you like a bug. And it gets even more insidious than that, where they will literally release family members addresses, your personal address. They'll put your name out there on the Internet and they will have people begin to attack you.

They'll literally hire people on the payroll, scientists are on the Monsanto payroll, put there to get online and immediately begin trying to debunk anything that people say that question anything they're doing. But my rebuttal would be fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me five times, we're getting out of control here. Like at some point,

I can tell you years ago when I was going through the loss of my brother, I went to a therapist and one of the things she said that to this day stuck with me, Brigham, when somebody shows you who they are, believe them. And she's like, I'm going to say it twice so you don't forget. When somebody shows you who they are, believe them. Monsanto has shown us who they are.

Big Pharma has shown us who they are. We know who these people are. I don't care what disinformation campaign you want to send. Look at the average American, go to a Walmart, go to a grocery store, go walk around an airport and tell me that we aren't chronically ill as a society. Look at the statistics and tell me we aren't chronically ill. Something changed in our nation.

And it changed in the 80s and 90s. And that's when a lot of these transitions happened and more and more corporate capture happened from the food, from farm to food to table, from the chemicals we spray on our crops, from the way we agriculture, from the way we process and ship foods and plastics. Like one of the most staggering things I learned at this Senate hearing was a professor or a PhD from Harvard University.

brought up that 5% of our brain weight is now microplastics. 5% of the weight of our brain is now microplastics. Now, I didn't go to Harvard and I didn't go to fucking Stanford and I'm not a fucking PhD, but you don't have to be splitting atoms on the weekends to go, hold on a second, that can't be good.

I don't give a fuck what Monsanto has to say about it. That ain't good. There's no way that's good. Was there a specific, like to me it feels like this is like a, you know, I'm a hippie so I look at things different. But I see it as almost like it's like,

It feels like good and evil and like energetics kind of commingling among the planet. And I don't even know that Monsanto or these individuals or even like individual people as much as it's like energetic entities. And it's like an entity expressing his greed and greed is this disease, this toxicity that's kind of perfusing the planet via Western culture. And it probably started with like the gold rush or, you know, wherever the heck it started.

And it seems like it's governed, 'cause I'm thinking as you're talking, I'm like, well, where does all this money go? And does it even matter at some point? And is it just about power? And does the power provide any fulfillment to these people? Or is this just like, what is this? You know what I mean? - I can tell you when I was a drug rep, I came out of college, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed.

I wanted to help people. You're still pretty bright. Of course. Thank you. Of course, I wanted to make money. Everyone wants to make money. You know, I wanted to be able to buy a house and have a car and make a living. But I didn't want to do it to the detriment of society. And I don't think anyone does. But when I was in that machine, when I was a cog in that machine and they're bringing in professors from Harvard and Stanford and all these academic schools and they're telling me that these drugs are good.

And here's the study that shows why they're good. And I was part of the problem shitting on like estrogen and the Women's Health Initiative. And I would take that study and I would show a doctor because that was what I was trained to do. I sold an osteoporosis drug. This study shows that these estrogens are bad. They increase the risk of heart attack and stroke and all these things. That was the message I was taught. And I believed it.

But I was also incentivized to believe it. I was paid to believe it. I was in the system and I wanted to believe it.

Clinicians want to believe that what they're doing is best for their patient. They want to believe that that system hasn't been captured. They want to in the employees want to believe. And so when somebody's boycotting out front of their building, they go, God damn it. Here's another asshole trying to ruin my good day. You know, that's just how it goes. I don't think that all those people sitting in the building at Kellogg's this past week were sitting in there going,

We're killing people and we don't care. That's not what they're saying. What they're saying is, I think you're wrong and we're right. And we have scientists that say you're wrong. And my rebuttal is 10,000 chemicals versus 400 chemicals. Look at the health of those nations. Look at the budget of those nations. Look at the cost of health in those nations. Look at our nation. Is it just the food? It's everything. But we've got to start somewhere.

And so let's start by having the conversation. Can we have the conversation? Can we shed our bias and can we sit down as humans and be team humanity, not team Kellogg's, not team Monsanto, not team Eli Lilly, not team anti-establishment either. I'm here to say, let's work together and let's begin to find solutions. You're already making these compounds in other nations. Why not make them here? Why not just see if we can help together?

prevent this chronic disease crisis.

You know, and you can go deeper and deeper to the vaccine schedules and how many vaccines a child gets before the age of 10 now is through the roof. But you know what else is through the roof? Autism. You know, my little my nephew's autistic, and it happened after his second birthday when he began to get all these additional vaccines. And my brother and his wife totally believe that it is because of that. It's anecdotal, but the data is overwhelming how many children are now being diagnosed with autism.

Why? How? Is it the plastics? Is it the vaccines? Is it all of it? We don't know. At some point, you just have to look around and get out of whatever the statistics or the science or whatever the stories or books that you've been suggested to believe and indoctrinated with and just take a look around. Yeah. Yeah.

And if the world that you're looking around at is like, oh, cool, there's no depression, there's no anxiety, my neighbor doesn't have suicidal ideation every couple of months passed through, this is great. There's no obesity. Kids are playing. We're connecting with each other. We're making eye contact. We're hugging each other. We're like a smiling culture. When I was a kid in the 80s,

the handicap bus was the short bus. It really, it literally was called the short bus and, and, and kids with autism and all these various chronic issues rode that bus. My brother who has an autistic child was like, Brigham, there's no short bus. It's a full size bus in our neighborhood that pick up the handicapped children because there's so many children suffering and nobody really knows why when you talk to these clinicians,

But I go back to Alex Jones. They're turning the frogs gay. You know, that's not what Alex Jones is saying. But if you look at it, the truth is when Monsanto and these chemical companies spray a pesticide on a field that that literally disrupts the endocrine system and mitochondrial function of bugs and causes them to become infertile and die.

And we think that spraying that on those fields and then indirectly ingesting those is not going to make some sort of impact. Like, let's just use a little bit of common sense. If it's killing the bugs and the frogs and everything in that entire ecosystem, it can't be 100% safe for us. And again, it's just...

There's layer upon layer upon layer, and this is a very complicated problem to solve. But part of solving a problem is having the discussion and working together. That's all I'm trying to get at. Where should people go from here? What can they do from here? What would be like your suggestion to...

actually make a difference in one's own life, the life of their family, the life of their community, if they so choose to do so. - One of the things is, you know, knowledge is power. As old and as cliche as that is, knowledge is power. And there are great podcasts out there. Podcasts are the new form of media that allow people to have a platform and speak freely.

In a world where everything can be demonetized and everything is limited, most of the funding of most of the major media outlets does come from big pharma. I don't even want to say it's an agenda of we're trying to push something. They're scared. You don't bite the hand that feeds you.

And you can only go so hard in the paint, whereas podcasts and these other free media platforms are a resource and a tool in the tool belt to be able to learn about what's really going on in here in a long form format like you and I are doing right now. And so I would say find great podcasts like yours, Peter Atiyah's, Joe Rogan's, Huberman, where there are brilliant scientists way smarter than me that are deep diving into these things if you want the educational side of it.

If you're looking for resources and help in real time, I would implore people to find a cash pay practice in their area, go meet with a clinician, interview them. Look at how hard we work to hire somebody to be a nanny or to be a maid or to work on our car or to do handiwork on our house. I find it so ironic and crazy that people will just blindly let their insurance company tell them what doctor to go to. This is your life. This is it.

400 trillion to one. You won the lottery. That's the chance that you're alive today. 400 trillion to one. Do not put it in the hands of these people. Take some sovereignty and accountability over your health. Find a cash pay clinic in your area. Ask them to do a deep dive. Shop them. Find the one that works for your budget. Find the clinician that you think you connect with the best and do it one time.

And if you don't see a difference and you can't tell that your mind is blown, then maybe you chose the wrong clinic. Because I'm telling you, most people who come into WasteWell go, oh, my God, I had no idea that doctors would take this much time and do this type of research and dive in and explain this to me. And a lot of patients just want answers and they're caught on the merry-go-round. And there is answers out there. There are answers.

It just takes somebody taking the time to sit down and have a discussion with you and to truly look at you and assess you in a multi-modality approach to make sure that you're headed the right direction and help prevent these chronic diseases from ever happening in the first place.

break him motherfucking bueller thanks man thank you so much for finally doing this dude yeah thank you for having me you're amazing appreciate it you're amazing you don't like hearing stuff like that but it's very good getting to delve into the animals of your mind and being able to like unpack all of like the depths of these layers and

You've clearly put an immense amount of time and energy and research and care into all of this. And I think it feels like the life of your brother is definitely not in vain because I feel like the difference that you're making likely as a product largely of that is affecting millions of people. It's incredible. No, thank you. I definitely think that the message isn't of doom and gloom. Like for the listeners, I know we covered a lot of doom and gloom, but the message is hope. There is an opportunity there and there are opportunities

There are conduits that can allow you to access health, true health, healthy living. And one of the things I didn't get into is diet, lifestyle, nutrition is the number one thing you can do. Number one, there is no silver bullet. It's about consistency, diet, lifestyle, nutrition, but it also helps to have a good Northern star and a good compass.

Because it'll get you where you want to go. And to get where you want to go, you've got to start measuring and quantifying where you are today and getting the lay of the land and finding a compass that will navigate you where you want to go. Yeah. If your doctor or healthcare advisor doesn't have a decent tan and you can't like see at least like the edges around a little bit of ab, why? Yeah.

I like it. Yeah. You know? Yeah. No, people say, would you, people say, don't ever, people say, don't ever eat the food from a skinny chef. Yeah. Right. Don't ever eat the food from a fat doctor. That's, that's a bigger talking track. Talk point. I appreciate you so much. Thank you for, thank you for having me. Thank you. That's it. That's all. See you next week.

I hope you guys enjoyed that conversation. I would ask for you to share this conversation with a friend or friends or a family member if you felt like it was an important one. I personally think this is one of the most important conversations that could be had and shared. And if you feel inspired to do so, I think it is helpful for

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