Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2208 - Brigham Buhler
Uploaded: 2024-10-01T17:00:02.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2208 - Brigham Buhler' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-10-01. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2208 - Brigham Buhler' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-10-01. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2208 - Brigham Buhler

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
So, so tell me what it's like to testify in front of the Senate.
What is that like?
Man, it was pretty wild.
It all transpired so fast.
I got a call from Cali Means.
We've become pretty good buddies.
I know you're having him and his sister Casey on the podcast.
Brilliant folks that are just patient advocates.
I mean, at the end of the day, they had the same experience as I had.
Cali, a little bit different walk of life.
He was a lobbyist.
Casey was a doctor, Stanford trained surgeon.
Realized that she was in a system where they didn't really heal people.
They just treated symptoms and profiteered off disease states.
And she said, there's got to be a better way.
So their voice rung so loud after I think they did Tucker that it led to
momentum.
And then because of you having me on the podcast, that's how I met RFK.
And so Bobby's team had reached out to me maybe about a year and a half ago to
come up to
Dallas while he was doing a campaign there and sit down with him.
And he was just asking a hundred questions about what's going on and what did
you see on
the pharmaceutical side?
And what did you see owning pharmacies and billing insurance companies?
And so when they had an opportunity to put this team together to testify in
front of the
Senate, the goal was to create a nonpartisan group of individuals to take a new,
fresh approach
to what is going on with chronic disease in America.
Because the chronic disease crisis is at an all time high.
I mean, we could go through all the statistics and I know that Casey and Callie
will when
they're on here.
So I don't want to steal their thunder, but it's staggering.
I mean, close to anywhere between 1.7 to 1.9 million people are dying a year of
chronic disease.
We talk a lot about war since the dawn of this country, roughly estimated
between 1.3 to 1.5
million people total have died in war, American lives.
So in a year, we're losing more people to chronic disease than all the wars
combined.
And we're not talking about it.
So to me, I was excited when they said, hey, the Senate's willing to hear.
And that's the beauty of a democracy.
They did let us come in there and candidly take a dump on the Senate floor on
what's
going on with this health care system and really dig into the weeds.
Did anybody try to take the side of the pharmaceutical drug industry?
Did anybody question you or try to push back?
So prior, you do a debrief.
So we did do a roundtable prior to going into the communal roundtable in front
of the public
eye, which they had no idea what was coming.
The Senate didn't expect it.
We had assembled a grassroots effort to get the word out there.
And over 2,000 people took off from work.
These are this is a Senate hearing.
Over 2,000 hardworking Americans took time from their busy day, flew to D.C.,
had to sit
in an overflow room to listen to these testimonies.
And the level of feedback from people, from like real humans, real world people,
was staggering.
I mean, people afterwards came up in tears sharing their story of how the
system had let them
down or a loved one down, misdiagnoses, like all the different issues that they've
dealt with
trying to navigate this system.
And to the senator's credit, you know, behind closed doors, they did say you
probably don't want to go ultra hard after the food industry or ultra hard
after the pharmaceutical industry because it may limit our ability to get
things done.
But they did.
How did they phrase that?
They just said you catch more flies with honey than you do vinegar.
And, you know, me, Callie and the other folks that sat on this panel, you know,
our goal was to just share our stories and share what we saw.
And so my testimony in particular was really more about the human side.
You know, there's so many staggering datas and statistics and numbers, but
behind all that is a person.
Like, that's all I wanted people to understand.
These are human lives.
You know, when Jelly Roll testified, I think he said this equivalent to a 747
jet worth of people die of opioids a day.
And that's insane.
And that all started with the lapses in the FDA and the drug regulatory market.
And we know that, you know, there's an argument out there.
You know, Callie released the number of 50 plus percent of the FDA's funding
comes from Big Pharma.
When it comes to drugs alone, 75 percent of the drug funding comes from the
pharmaceutical companies themselves.
And so there's a big market there.
And with Big Pharma spending over $8 billion a year advertising, that's more
than the entire sum of the FDA's budget.
$8 billion a year just in advertisement.
Imagine how much they're making so that they can afford $8 billion just in
advertising.
Yeah, it's insane.
And those ads are wild.
But what I saw is, the truth is, my hope is that people listen and the American
people fight.
We can fight with our pocketbooks.
We can fight through our choices as citizens.
Do I have faith that the government's going to fix these problems overnight?
I don't.
But at least we're having the conversation.
And to their credit, they let us speak freely.
They didn't put a censor on us.
They, you know, they tried to give us some coaching, you know, to say, hey, if
you go this route, just understand there's going to be blowback.
And, you know, we're here to get progress on these topics, not, you know, burn
the house down type deal.
And then I did have some, and it was a bipartisan effort.
So some of the senators in the room had mentioned, well, the American people
just want a pill.
You know, they don't really want a solution that they're not, they're looking
for an easy way out.
And I pushed back.
And it's funny because one of the moms that was there was like, oh, my God, I
can't believe you were just dropping F-bombs in that meeting.
But I'm like, I think you're fucking wrong.
I mean, after being in health care since I was 20 years old, what I see is
people struggling for answers.
People are in the pit of despair.
Who was saying that the American people just want a pill?
I don't want to name any names, but one of the senators there was saying, in
his experience, people are looking for the easy way out.
And I don't think that's the case.
I think people are looking for hope.
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If there was a real easy way out, like if there really was a pill with no side
effects that cured all your ails, sure, people would want that.
And this is the problem.
The advertising, that $8 billion a year, it leads you to believe that there is
some sort of a solution in the bottom of a prescription bottle.
And that's not real.
That's the problem, is that they've been misled so long and so far down the
line, and here they are, chronically ill, suffering, and they're hoping it's
the next pill.
And that was, our hope was to break down from the start of how do we process
these foods?
How do we grow, harvest, and what do we do with our soil?
What do we do with our pesticides?
How do we bring these products to market?
How do we regulate our food industry?
And that's all new to me.
That's not my expertise.
My expertise and my testimony was focused on what I saw as a drug rep, what I
saw as a med device rep, what I saw billing insurance companies.
And that was a part of the talk that we didn't even get to dive deep into.
But the goal was to explain to the Senate, from the food processing, growing,
harvesting, chemical treatments, to the packaging, to the ingredients we add
into our food, to the hospital systems, throughout the system, front to back,
the American people are set up for failure.
In the 1950s, the FDA had approved 700 different ingredients in our food
products.
That's it, 700.
Today, there are over 10,000 chemicals and petrochemicals in our food products
in the United States.
In Europe, still 700.
Jesus.
And what gets crazier is when Food Babe, she's an influencer, right?
And that's been, you know, crapped on by the media.
Well, it's an unfortunate name, Food Babe.
But she's an advocate, and she's just a voice, a mother out there saying, hey,
guys, what's wrong with this picture?
Let me show you what's in Fruit Loops in America.
And let me show you what's in Fruit Loops in Canada.
The same manufacturer, Kellogg's, is selling one product to the American people
and a safer, less ingredient, less chemical-filled product outside the United
States.
They have the ability to sell it here, but they don't because they know they
can sell more addictive, more colorful, vibrant, that attract kid food sources
here in the U.S.
It's so dark.
And so we walked through all of that.
It blew my mind on the food front.
And we know, you and I have talked, like, in the healthcare system, my main
message was, we're here to talk about the boom in chronic disease.
We know that food and our environment has a huge impact on that, but so does
preventative care.
And so does building an ecosystem that allows clinicians to troubleshoot and
diagnose and prevent chronic diseases from evolving in the first place.
These are all metabolically related disease states.
All the chronic diseases that are killing us can be traced back to diet,
lifestyle, and nutrition.
But none of our clinicians are trained on diet, lifestyle, and nutrition.
That's the hard pill for people to swallow, diet, lifestyle, and nutrition.
It's very hard for people who are addicted to shitty food, who are lazy, who
don't have a history of exercise, and, you know, their lifestyle sucks.
And they get on from work and they like to drink.
Yeah.
Like, all those things are killing you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But you and I have talked about this with some of your comedy friends that have
become my friends, too, to watch the evolution.
You just got to give people momentum.
We just got to get some wins on the board.
We got to give them hope.
And we've got to start by having the conversation.
And that's what I was optimistic about.
For the first time in my adult life, the Senate is willing to sit down with a
group of individuals and have a deep conversation about where our food comes
from, how our food is being processed,
what ingredients are in our food, and how that could potentially lead to
chronic disease.
And it got labeled by some of the, I would say, hatchet job media outlets that
have come out.
And we can dive into that.
Somebody called it the woo-woo.
Yeah, I saw that.
Let's dive in.
First of all, fuck you, whoever wrote that.
Because there's nothing woo-woo about anything you guys were saying.
Yeah.
That's what's really crazy.
Yeah.
To say that toxic chemicals that are illegal in other countries but are legal
in the United States, and there's a reason why they're illegal.
You could find all the different things that they do to the body, all the
different damage they cause.
To say that that's woo-woo is so crazy.
Like, what did they list as an example of woo-woo?
What's hard is they went immediately at, like, these are all entrepreneurs that
have something to sell you.
And I can tell you, sitting in the room with those people, all of us were
scared.
All of us were scared.
It's scary.
I'm not going to make money off of this.