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- [00:00]
Dr. Mike
They agreed that our health care system is too reactive, not proactive. I'm like, great. They agreed that we need to do more prevention rather than focusing on cures. Great, I'm on board. But vaccines, check all those boxes. And yet they're anti the thing that can accomplish those goals. So for all the issues that our healthcare system has, which there are many, and I'm excited to discuss them with you, vaccines are not the problem, they're the solution. And they've been doing great things.
- [00:27]
Philip DeFranco
Long time no see. Welcome back to the podcast. My name is Philip DeFranco, and each week we're going to be talking to the most important or interesting people in the world of politics, finance, the news, and how to live life to the fullest. And today I had a conversation with Dr. Mike in good faith. And Mike, he's a bit of a renaissance man. He's a family physician, a professional boxer, a huge content creator, and, you know, a million years ago, he was named the sexiest doctor alive by People magazine. And today we talked about RFK's reign of terror on America's health, a cure for cancer, being killed by Trump, the end of MRNA vaccines in America, how many misinformation's gonna be the death of us all? And the future role of AI in healthcare. So, hey, depending on where you're watching or listening, follow and subscribe. Rate 5 stars or hit that, like, button and enjoy the pod. Mike, I'm gonna just start off with the very basic question, how screwed are we right now?
- [01:19]
Dr. Mike
Okay. I don't wanna be alarmist because I wanna live by that mantra that we started in 2020. Stay alert, not anxious. So I'm gonna go with a six and a half.
- [01:28]
Philip DeFranco
A six and a half out of 10, is that. What does that mean?
- [01:31]
Dr. Mike
Yeah, six and a half out of 10. So above average screwed.
- [01:37]
Philip DeFranco
Okay, let's. In what ways are we screwed, do you think?
- [01:41]
Dr. Mike
The biggest way and the way that people probably don't feel yet is we're screwed on our innovation front, especially healthcare innovation. Because with this administration, they have come in raising all of these flags on issues that are important, that have been discussed, that have not been neglected, but they're complex issues that require time to solve, like the chronic health issues that face America, the obesity epidemic that faces America. But instead of actually solving those problems, they just talk about them and then actually cut all the research funding and the labs that are evaluating the problem and trying to find unique solutions for those problems. They talk about cancer rates going up, and then they cut a half A billion dollars worth of research for MRNA vaccines, which can potentially be used to prevent cancer. So all the innovation that we could be having as a country in order to prolong our lives, improve the quality of our lives, in order to give us the competitive edge in this very tough landscape against other countries that are trying to create their own innovation, we're losing that battle big time. So the fear for me is when your viewers and listeners are going to come to their doctor 10, 15, 20 years from now, hoping that there's a solution to their problem, There isn't one. We can all look back at this moment and understand why.
- [03:08]
Philip DeFranco
That's the thing that I always wonder is will people actually look back? Right? Because there's a number of times where people will, you know, they'll get a lot of likes or like, retweets and it'll be like looking at a problem that we're seeing today and going like, oh, it's so crazy that this started with Reagan. It's like, but it's so far down the road and the impact's going to be felt. But also then I guess one of my questions is, why do you think that they're. They're canceling medical and scientific research? Like, what is the point? I know that when Trump went in, he was like, I'm a let RFK Jr just fucking run wild. But, like, what do you. Why do you think they're doing it?
- [03:52]
Dr. Mike
I think that's a better question for a psychic rather than a physician like myself, simply because I can't even begin to understand what is the value of doing these things. I try and put my shoes, myself in the shoes of other people. Quite often I try to exhibit charitable thinking. I think that's beneficial for the world and my own mental health. But in this scenario, there is no form of charitable thinking that I can imagine someone coming in and canceling these contracts, canceling the ability to do research, harming actual preventive things that our healthcare system does well, instead of actually focusing on the problems of our healthcare system. Even in a recent jubilee debate that I had where I was surrounded by people who were either vaccine hesitant or full on anti vax, they, they agreed that, that our healthcare system is too reactive, not proactive. I'm like, great, they agreed that we need to do more prevention rather than focusing on cures. Great, I'm on board. But vaccines check all those boxes and yet they're anti the thing that can accomplish those goals. So for all the issues that our healthcare system has, which there are many and I'm excited to discuss them with you. Vaccines are not the problem, they're the solution. And they've been doing great things. So nor have you proposed any potential solutions other than ones that create a very good headline, like changing the sugar additive inside soda does not change the negative health impact of soda, but it does make for a really good soundbite.
- [05:26]
Philip DeFranco
Mm. That and what is it? Beef tallow, he's saying. Yeah.
- [05:30]
Dr. Mike
Replacing oils with beef tallow or removing certain dyes and foods. Look, if you wanted to put a focus on that and shift some funding from chronic health research to food diets, whatever, everyone in their own administration is going to have slightly different priorities. But if that's your sole wind, if that's what you're banking on, changing America's health problem, you're going to lose. Just very confident in saying that.
- [05:56]
Philip DeFranco
How far do you think the canceling of funding for, for MRSA is going to set us back? Because one of the things that I see with debates and conversation around America pulling back on things, completely exiting or abandoning things, you know, USAID comes to mind and we start seeing these estimates for this is the amount of death that we're going to see. Obviously, one of the things that might not, might not be a part of that equation is if someone else is going to step in, step up. Do we see the focus just go to other countries and progress will still be made. I mean, do you. How far do you think this is going to set us back, let's say as a country, but also as human beings?
- [06:42]
Dr. Mike
It's definitely gonna set us back as a country. How bad remains to be seen on what other actions they take to keep fostering this sense of distrust in the public. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who's in charge of NIH, recently just came out and said the reason why the MRNA platform can't work is because people have lost trust in. Well, the reason people have lost trust in it is not for a scientific reason. It's because of Secretary Kennedy sowing seeds of distrust. And that's a loss for us as a people, for sure, but it's also a loss for us as a country because there was a great substack article where Dr. Drew Weissman out of UPENN was interviewed and he pointed out that there is a new biotech company in China that that has been giving a billion dollars to the development of MRNA vaccines. So we frequently get asked a question on the YouTube channel. Dr. Mike, what do you think about me going to Another country to get my medical care, to get my hair transplanted in Turkey. And I'm like, well look, maybe not ideal to do that because other countries are not as strict as we are with follow up with making sure people are reputable that have good licensing. What's going to happen in 20 years when in order to get a proper vaccine I have to travel to China? Oh man, Phil, that's a scary world.
- [08:07]
Philip DeFranco
That is. I mean it's. But also, I mean when we were thinking of MRNA, obviously most people think of like the COVID 19 shot, but I mean, isn't it also supposed to be kind of the next stage of fighting cancer? I don't know where things are with that, but I mean, do you, do you have a mindset or a mind of where we are right now and the potential impact we could be seeing?
- [08:29]
Dr. Mike
Yeah. The reason the MRNA platform has gotten so much popularity is obviously for the COVID 19 vaccines, but also for a universal upper respiratory virus vaccine. So one that could manage the flu Covid, just the common cold viruses and one that you can give and it works for all the existing strains and all the possible strains that can come afterward. So there was potential there. That was the highest potential of the MRNA vaccine from what can come soonest. But then as time went on, we started seeing promise in melanoma research, pancreatic cancer research. Even for me living in the northeast where Lyme is very prominent and Lyme disease obviously in the headlines with Justin Timberlake talking about it, there was potential for an MRNA vaccine surrounding Lyme. There are ways to use the platform. It's our biggest promise as a platform for delivering care, not just from an infectious disease standpoint, but also from a chronic disease standpoint. And we're just losing all of that. And again, not for any logical reason. It's not that there is a better solution out there or maybe even a slightly different one that he believes in. It's just without any rhyme or reason, no one understands what's happening. And, and it's really a disappointment to see such an incredible institution like HHS sink to the lows that it currently is at now.
- [09:53]
Philip DeFranco
And with RFK Jr. Specifically, I think it was about four months ago you did this really great around 20 minute video breakdown of, you know, what was being said about RFK Jr. How he was trying to present himself at the time, how that conflicted, we'll say, rather than say a lie with other things that he had said since then. What has been kind of the scariest thing or things that you've seen coming from RFK Jr. And I guess connected to that. What are your feelings about what he's doing in this position?
- [10:29]
Dr. Mike
The scariest part is the level of hypocrisy and my inability and the larger scientific community as a whole ability to understand what he's doing. There doesn't seem to be any logic behind it. There's constant flip flopping around his stances. One second he's pro vaccine and recommends the measles vaccine in order to decrease the spread of measles. On another interview, he's saying he would never give it to his kids again. In a different interview, he's saying a child that receives even one vaccine doesn't seem as bright as a child who's never been vaccinated. And when you have an individual that you can't understand that you can't see what their plan is moving forward, that's scary because you just don't know what the future holds for our healthcare institutions. Like if he came in, he said, look, I want to shift the budget from 40% into pandemic research. I'm going to cut that to 20%. Shift that to the NIH metabolic research. Great. He's shifting priorities. Administrations do that all the time. We can debate if that's ideal. Some scientists would say yes, some would say no here. It's just universally agreed in the medical community that what Secretary Kennedy is doing is bad for public health. It's going to hurt children. The measles outbreak is the biggest that we've had in 30 years. It continues to grow. And we're just very fortunate right now that, that there isn't another infection that is spreading through this country. Because if it was with Secretary Kennedy at the helm, I have no idea what would happen again because there's this level of hypocrisy and inability to understand his next move.
- [12:10]
Philip DeFranco
Okay, so I mean, that's where we are now. That's the potential threat that's upcoming. Let's say three and a half years from now. Right. The election goes the other way. Right. And the other way the Democratic candidate wins. Got it right. Then these loyalists that are being installed here and there and departments being ripped apart or they're being high and incentivized turnover, stuff like that. How long do you think it would take to even get back to where we were before this administration took. Took back power?
- [12:52]
Dr. Mike
A decade? If I'm being optimistic, it's that much of a setback. Labs are being shut down. That takes time. Think about anything that needs to happen. On a government front, how slow and glacially painful that process is. So rebuilding these labs, rehiring these individuals, even when he makes a mistake, when he's doging our research centers, he realizes he fired too many people and he probably needs to bring some back. That process is not straightforward. You don't just fire someone and bring them back and everything's all good. Their labs have been disseminated, their employees have been reintroduced to other labs. They've moved, they've picked up their families. These are individuals. It's not like playing Monopoly and you're just moving pieces on a little game board. These are real people that are involved in this journey. And to put that all together is going to take at the very least 10 years I just had on my podcast. I haven't even published it yet. Kevin hall, who's one of our premier metabolic researchers, if I had to say the Michael Jordan of metabolic research, he's done studies that have really fostered our understanding of what it means to go on a low carb diet for our metabolism, what it means to study those who have been participants on the show the Biggest Loser and how their metabolism was. Was impacted from losing such a drastic amount of weight. This should be an individual that Secretary Kennedy's holding up on a shelf and saying, we need more of this. If he truly believed in nutrition research. And yet when Secretary Kennedy came in and there was some research being done by Kevin hall that perhaps disagreed with what RFK believes, his beliefies, what ends up happening is they start censoring Kevin hall, changing his answers to reporters at the New York Times while still attributing the answers to him. So much so to the point where he has to say, I'm taking early retirement. I'm closing my lab. And we lost Kevin hall as an NIH researcher. We lost his lab, one of the few labs that is actually doing the research that we need to understand the impact of ultra processed food, of what the ideal diet is to help someone lose weight and keep weight off. These questions that I need answered as a physician, we're losing for no rhyme or reason, just because the research disagrees with Secretary Kennedy.
- [15:18]
Philip DeFranco
I mean, there. I mean, would you say that right now you or the community in general is losing the information battle?
- [15:29]
Dr. Mike
Absolutely. We were not prepared for this. And I say that we in a larger sense, because in 2017, I wrote an article for the American Academy of Family Physicians website where I said that the absence of evidence based docs online is going to create a problem. It's going to create A gray zone where these, I know all experts love to flourish. And that happened. It played out during the pandemic. There were not enough well trained social media savvy positions to be able to fight back against this narrative of anti vaccine or anti pandemic narrative. And as a result it was very tricky in order to manage that pandemic. Luckily at the time President Trump was very much pro the vaccine. He was celebrating the MRNA platform, he called it his vaccine. Actually Operation Warp Speed. He still gives a lot of credit to. And we were able to get through that. Still losing a ton of lives, still losing people to disease simply because of vaccine hesitancy due to misinformation. So I think about where we are now and I don't feel like we've learned our lesson. We still don't have buy in from these well, well trained experts to be on social media. They're not understanding that they there's tremendous value in conversations like the one we're having now. I am getting more politicians interested cause they've realized they're facing a losing battle unless they go on podcasts. But they also don't understand what it means to go on a podcast. I've had very recently a top senator on my podcast and they're worried about how the podcast is gonna make them look and they're wondering about how to adjust certain things in the podcast and it's just not the way you need to communicate with the general public. That's not what a podcast is. And yes, there might be blowback about certain statements. And you know, I actually remember something you said to me. We had some outcry about something you and I were talking about on our, on our last conversation on your show. And you said, if it's not true, if it's not something I believe in, if it's not something that really agrees with my values or disagrees with my values, why would I go bother correcting this out of a two hour conversation? Some snippet that someone pulled out of context. What is the value of fighting it? And you were right because we're going to continue making podcasts, people are going to understand who we are. This is a very transparent, open format. We don't have a script in this conversation. You see, you can ask me any question. I don't know what questions you're going to ask me. And, and that's what makes this for a very beautiful format. Does that mean I can't mess up? Sure. Does that mean I can mess up? Sure. And that's a good Thing and these politicians are deathly afraid of it. Health care institutions are deathly afraid of it. But the more they stay off these platforms, the more they're gonna face tremendous disadvantage in this informational war that we're currently in.
- [18:33]
Philip DeFranco
Yeah, I mean, when it comes to the people in Congress or anyone in that world, I can understand the fear. But then I also get disconnected from it. Because right now, unless they're a part of or on the side of this administration, they're getting the shit kicked out of them. So, you know, staying safe. And a lot of them, I feel like, and maybe it's projecting, I feel like they end up, you know, they want to be safe for their own job rather than. I appreciate the people that are going out there and saying different things, whether I agree or I disagree with them, because they are trying something out. They're trying to break away from what was very obviously a losing strategy. But with that and then connected to the war on information. Do you think that there is a way to actually break through on these topics? Because maybe I'm just cynical, but I do not believe that we are in a place right now where when presented with information that is accurate, but conflicts with how many people feel that that person goes, oh, I was wrong, I'm gonna switch up and change my mind. I genuinely believe that. And I'm also of the mindset of I think people are wrong when they start talking about it being a foregone conclusion that Democrats might take back power in three and a half years and that there can be some return to normalcy because in part, not only can they win the election, it takes so much longer to build back and to see those results and seeing positive results of a long build, build up. It's often very easy to miss or not even think about. But I think that many people in this country are going to have to experience pain based off of their own decisions for them to ever change their mind. And I part of the reason I think that is the only changes I've ever been able to make in my life and stick with were because I realized, oh shit, I'm causing myself more pain. And I think we as human beings navigate towards or navigate away from our own pain. And I think we navigate towards what is the easier path. And I think there's a lot of talk and a lot of like tribal bullshit, but when people start, I feel like feeling the pain of this, another horrible pandemic happens, or the hospital that they wanted to go to shuts down, or their buying power is not what it is, I think this has to, it has to happen because otherwise why would anyone change? I think people have to be personally impacted. But what are your thoughts there? Because I think the war over words is largely lost.
- [21:25]
Dr. Mike
Yeah. I feel like you're becoming a bit of a cynic and I would urge not becoming bin. I would urge you to fight back against that feeling and I'll explain why. In healthcare, I face a similar predicament quite often with my patients where it feels like I can't make a lifestyle change or a medical change in their life unless they have their first heart attack or have their first stroke or they lose a loved one to a similar condition. And that is true in a lot of cases, exactly as you describe. They need a wake up call, something bad happens and then they're willing to make that change, put in the hard work. But there is a group of people, there are ways to motivate individuals to make that change before the problem happens. And it doesn't happen over one visit. It doesn't happen with a simple magic slogan. It takes time, it takes trust, transparency, and if you invest in that, which is why I'm such a big proponent of having continuity of care. With a primary care doctor, family medicine doctor, you can get good outcomes, you can get prevention, you can stop the problem before it happens. So I will absolutely be banging my pot and pan here on the YouTube channel, even though it feels like we need something bad to happen.
- [22:46]
Philip DeFranco
I'm not, I'm not saying that you doing what you're doing is bad. I'm not saying that it is having no impact. I think that the benefit of it, while obviously giving people that are of that mindset or have been leaning that way, confidence in reality and facts and data and I mean, even what you constantly talk about, not ever being 100% sure, always being skeptical of yourself and the data, but not having such an open mind that your brain slips out. But I think that the huge benefit is planting seeds so that when the pain comes, there's something to point to. Right? That this person was saying this, how much that'll matter, we'll see. But I think that that's where we see maybe the gains of 10 to 15 to 20% of more trust from people that might not have been trusting, but cynic or not, I think it's more realist. I think the pain has to be felt and it's gonna be felt in an overwhelming way for people that are middle class and definitely more vulnerable communities, and it's gonna be ugly. But I don't think that we're truly gonna see it. And maybe, who knows, the timetable on things has been really off this first year, but I think it's gonna be in the three, four years from now.
- [24:19]
Dr. Mike
I wanna make sure that people don't feel like this is a political conversation because it really feels like one. I'm apolitical in this sense, sure.
- [24:30]
Philip DeFranco
I think that everything is politics.
- [24:32]
Dr. Mike
But yes, you're right to some degree. And there's a way we can discuss that for sure. To me, why what I'm saying is apolitical is is this is a clinical decision. I am not choosing vaccines because I am on the side of Dems or on the side of moderates or conservatives. Operation Warp Speed was a conservative achievement. We celebrated it when Biden came into office and he made some missteps saying that boosters were gonna be better than they were over promising them, saying that everyone needed to get them when that wasn't perhaps the best guidance. Even the whole disagreed with that guidance. We were critical of him. So we can be critical of medical policy from the Dem side. We can celebrate wins on the conservative side. So I would love to see a switch happen when you say swap sides. I don't think even needs to be a swap to Dems or moderate or independent. None of that matters to me. What matters to me is someone who believes in the science and who follows the science. This isn't some religion that we need to say we believe in it. And that's the it. Just you look at reality and off of the reality you try and make the best decisions. And right now, the way the political landscape has shifted is it's warped into an alternate reality where facts don't matter. There's a tremendous death of expertise happening where people are able to use ChatGPT or Grok or one of these LLMs and think that they know better than experts. Whereas just the other day, and I'm not singling out ChatGPT here, because all of them have these like weird hallucinations. I was trying to figure out something about my podcast and I asked it a simple question. What were my best podcast episodes in terms of view counts? Because I didn't want to go look my catalog and I just wanted to see if it knew. And it literally gave me the first result as an episode with a guest. I've never had on ever. I've never even talked with that person. So it just goes to show that perhaps experts have value. We can even look to chess as an analogy here. Computers have Been beating humans for well over a decade in the chess space and yet we're all watching humans play chess. Twitch chess streaming is at an all time high. We got to not lose the human aspect here. And we need to understand that there is a value to expertise from experience, from understanding how to apply the knowledge. That's why some of my colleagues who perhaps had better test scores, who perhaps knew more facts, are not as good clinicians as someone who can communicate well with another person, but can use ChatGPT or a reference to look up information, but then translate it well to their fellow human. So I would love for us to zoom out a bit and think about this problem like a family medicine doctor, more holistically, what's actually happening here. We're losing the idea of what fact is. There are criticisms of our healthcare system. There are major problems. There needs to be seismic shifts happening across the board in trying to figure out how to get more people care and starting with the simple things as opposed to trying to tackle miraculous cures or promising that we're going to remove chronic diseases in our children because we're removing dyes from certain ingredients and really get down to what matters. And that's the human connection. I think if we lean into, lean into that message, whether we're right, left or center, we're going to have the biggest success. And I hope that whoever ends up running against. I don't even know who's going to be running for president because no one knows. It's very possible that there is a third presidency coming from President Trump. So I can't even begin to predict that.
- [28:20]
Philip DeFranco
No. I mean, yeah, nothing's ever fully off the table. And even J.D. vance or a number of these other people, that's a whole different conversation. But when you talk about the human element of that, like, what do you, what are you really saying there? Because the words sound very nice, but I don't know what that specifically means because, like, when you're talking about one side or the other, I think that an important aspect of the last election that kind of gets overlooked because RFK Jr only pops up into the news whenever he makes a big announcement or he's like randomly working out is part of the reason Donald Trump was able to get elected was the collective group. Right. There are a number of people I talked to that were like, I'm not voting for Donald Trump, I'm voting for the group. I like some of the stuff that Elon Musk is saying about Doge. I like the stuff with RFK Jr around Maha and I saw a lot of kind of, I'd say, like LA Granola type moms scattered across the country that horseshoed over that way over Maha. So I'm not saying it's necessarily Dem versus Republican. A lot of it ends up being certain ideologies. And I think that's what I'm saying is that I'm not saying pain's gonna be felt so that all of a sudden you're like, I'm not a Republican anymore. I'm saying to break out of specific belief systems and ideologies that reinforce itself based off of the communities that we're naturally finding and the content that we're being fed based off of the algorithms that are just reinforcing things. Because I'm able to consume a lot of stuff I don't agree with for research, and sometimes I push the algorithms to get that content to specifically see what's being said in spaces outside of my own. But that's my true belief is I think the only way that you can step away from a tribe, actually once we get into tribes rather than ideologies, it's crazier because everyone searches for community. And there's been a lot of really entrenched community here. But anyway, I've gone on a little bit of rant, bringing it back to what you're saying. As far as the human thing, not the political thing, I'm a little lost what you mean there.
- [30:35]
Dr. Mike
When someone comes into my office and they have low thyroid levels, for me to treat them with thyroid replacement hormone is not a political choice, it's a clinical choice. However, if whether it's a Republican or a Democrat or an Independent makes the ability to produce thyroid hormone too expensive or so much problematic that we are facing shortages, suddenly becomes a political problem. But to me, that's still a clinical problem. Because to me, I'm not worried about which party's doing it. They're just creating a clinical problem in my world. And to me, the reason why I care about it is because of the human sitting in front of me. So whether we're talking about thyroid hormone vaccines or health insurance, my goal is to be human first and think about my patient. Every decision that is made on the YouTube channel puts my patient at the forefront. Even though my viewers are not the patients, I think about it from my patient's perspective. We've gotten opportunities to do sponsorships for over the counter products, things that you would use for pain. And it's like, why not take it? It's just an over the counter product. But it's just not something I would ever say to a patient. I would never say this pain reliever is better than this pain reliever universally. So if I'm not going to say that to a patient, I'm not going to say it on the YouTube channel.
- [31:55]
Philip DeFranco
I.
- [31:55]
Dr. Mike
And the same goes true or holds true for the political side of things. My patients know that whether they're on the side, left, right or center, they're going to get good quality care and I'm going to be advocating for them no matter the cost. So there's a lot of people in the academic space, especially that believe this current administration is creating havoc and they need to put their head in the sand and wait it out. And I think that there is nothing worse than that strategy. I recently wanted to do a video very similarly how I did in the beginning of the pandemic where we had a hundred doctors give a little sound bite about what they felt about the pandemic. And we put it into a really unique montage video and we titled it 100 Doctors Tell youl About Coronavirus, because that's what we're calling it at the time. And I wanted to do a video that I was inspired by a specific substack to do called I was going to blank, but my grant was canceled. So I was going to cure cancer, I was going to reverse diabetes, but my grant was canceled. And we reached out to all these researchers that had their grants canceled. We went into their communities and we asked them to fill in a Google sheet just to give us their email their information so we could send a crew or get them to self record just that one line and, and show them how impactful their message could be. Guess how many signups we got?
- [33:18]
Philip DeFranco
Z. Oh, really? I was going to ask.
- [33:21]
Dr. Mike
They're waiting. Their academic guidance is wait this out. This will be a disaster. Pain will be felt and everything will return back to normal. And I don't think that's staying silent is a good strategy here.
- [33:32]
Philip DeFranco
I was going to. Okay, so I was going to ask you because I was, I was listening to. It's not the most unique thought, but I was listening to Pete Buddha Judge, earlier this week and he, you know, was being asked about, you know, Trump. Is what we're seeing from Trump an attempt to consolidate a dictatorship. And one of the things that came from that conversation is that one of the things that he's saying is the self censorship of institutions and experts. And so I was going to ask you, is that something that you're, you're seeing in your field. So it sounds like a resounding yes, absolutely.
- [34:04]
Dr. Mike
We're seeing it from them. We're seeing it in terms of when Kevin hall was doing his research, they wouldn't let him do a media interview at all. And then when he said what about just email questions? And they said, well, as long as we review them. And upon reviewing them, they added language and changed his language, still attributing it to him, that's by definition censorship. And that is what he.
- [34:25]
Philip DeFranco
So who changed it?
- [34:28]
Dr. Mike
Someone in the Secretary Kennedy's administration or.
- [34:32]
Philip DeFranco
Sure. Wow, that's crazy. I mean haves from what you've put out there. Okay, let's, let's actually, it's. The landscape's changed. But four months ago, when you put out that video on RFK Jr. Right, it was like 22 minutes. What reaction did you get from that outside of like, if you go to the comments, it's a lot of Mike, thank you for speaking up. I'm contacting my congressperson. Have you, did you receive any meaningful heat from that rather than just like comments online? Like, has it, did it affect your work in any way?
- [35:07]
Dr. Mike
I did a few things simultaneously. One, I was able to publish an opinion piece within Fox News to say the same message, that I'm currently a practicing doctor and things are in chaos. Which was surprising that Fox News as a right leaning outlet was celebrating that opinion of mine. But then it hit me again. This issue is not actually political. People in the Fox News newsroom also hate this message of destroying our health care system. So there are people even on the right who hate what's happening but are also afraid to speak up. And this isn't limited to media outlets. There's also self censorship and fear happening across congresspeople, judges, people that are being threatened by a fear of a primary fear of funding cuts by donors. And this type of intimidation is creating a level of censorship that's making it difficult to speak up. I remember I just did an interview, I forgot was it bulwark or semaphore? But they asked like, are you afraid for your business that you might lose funding by speaking out openly on these issues? It's like I couldn't care less. The reason why we did this was to have impact for the world in a healthcare perspective. So if that means sponsors leave because they disagree with the message, which is wild to me because it's in their own best interest to support these measures, that's their choice. And I'm not afraid of that. I really wish that more academics Felt this way because the academics that have spoken up. I have an individual who came on my show, a scientist, Kevin Klatt. He also is RD in the nutrition space. And his colleagues are applauding him for speaking out against the administration. And they're calling him brave. We need that bravery to spread. We need that to be more contagious. Because I feel like there's been too much silence from the American Medical association, the American Osteopathic association, key opinion leaders like Sanjay Gupta, Dr. Sanjay Gupta. I would love all these people to unify and come together to. To call for Secretary Kennedy's resignation. Not because it's a political movement, but because they know what he's doing is terrible for health. They know it's gonna cost people their lives. The fact that we've lost this funding for MRNA research is gonna cost lives. The fact that he's supporting vaccine hesitancy with the MMR vaccine, that's gonna cost people lives. It just unforced errors over and over and over again.
- [37:43]
Philip DeFranco
I wonder if you're giving Fox News a little extra credit. I wanna go back to that. Cause you said that they were celebrating something that you were saying. Is this connected to the article that was YouTube star Dr. Mike has warning for RFK Jr's MAHA movement? Or. Or.
- [37:59]
Dr. Mike
But that was an article that they wrote as well. It was. It was a op ed that I wrote. It's like if you search Fox News, Dr. K. Dr. Mike Chaos or something.
- [38:10]
Philip DeFranco
Dr. Mike Chaos.
- [38:11]
Dr. Mike
Yeah.
- [38:12]
Philip DeFranco
Yeah, I'll look at it. Well, because I was going to say, I was like. I mean, I. I will say I think it's a positive that they include what you're saying. But I also think that the headline.
- [38:26]
Dr. Mike
Is, I'm a physician and I'm worried our healthcare agencies are facing increasing chaos.
- [38:31]
Philip DeFranco
Okay, I might need you to text it to me because I'm looking through the. And I don't think that it is. This is not an argument that you shouldn't be doing it. I think that you going on there and talking and Pete Buttigieg going on there, especially when he's debating with someone live. I think it can be a positive, But I also think that there is a conversation around it being less about celebrating and wanting to get the message out and rather offering red meat to a base that needs something to target in the ever changing landscape of the news is changing every two hours. So we have this One thing for RFK Jr everyone needs, like a foil. When I was listening to. Oh, my gosh, I'm gonna Get his name wrong. Is it Klepper on Comedy Central? He talks about like people in maga, like wanting pictures with him because it's like you're the bad guy. You're, you're, like you're the foil. You're the, you're the guy that has to be overcome. And you know. But do you feel like when you're doing it, you are reaching people? I mean, do you go to the comments of those sorts of videos and to judge anything or. No.
- [39:40]
Dr. Mike
I mean, I go into the comments. It just comments are so platform specific and outlet driven that if you go on X and you look at the comments there, they're going to be for the same article. They're going to be so different than if you go on Blue sky or something because everyone is segregated into these bubbles. And I think it's important to penetrate those bubbles, whether it's to be celebrated as a hero or a villain. When doing my Jubilee Surrounded series, the people in that room all started out disagreeing with me. They all had their preconceived notions or beliefs about vaccines and obviously I didn't win them all over. That's impossible. And I'd be grandiose to think that. But several changed their minds. They openly said it in their post interview and several of them at least started considering the opposite position. And when you think about the difficulty in having someone make a change in their identity or in their lifestyle, it starts with the pre contemplation phase. They need to start thinking about, well, what if I was to take the opposite position? And just doing that from a single conversation to me is a huge win. So even if people who are vaccine hesitant watch my content on Fox News and go, well, why is that doctor doing that? Like, could he be right? That to me is a win. Even though they're not going to be the ones commenting, they're not going to be the ones leading the charge. But just instilling that bit of pause and reflection to me is a win from a single article. Again, it's going to take many conversations. Just like I just had a psychiatrist on my podcast and he said something interesting. He said, watching therapy is like watching a 00 baseball game or, or a 00 soccer game. It looks really boring, but there's a lot happening and it's slow and things need to build up and things will change, but it's not instantaneous. And I think that's what's happening when I have these conversations with Fox News, with Jubilee, and it goes to show that I'm not partisan here. I'm just trying to get the information to everyone.
- [41:50]
Philip DeFranco
I'm gonna give a bad mark to Fox News, though. On the note of your op ed, you have to sign up for Fox News and give them your email to actually get to your op ed.
- [42:00]
Dr. Mike
Yeah.
- [42:01]
Philip DeFranco
They're like, hey, you want to. You want to see what this fucking guy's saying? You got to join the family. The Fox News family. So to be honest, we could, we.
- [42:08]
Dr. Mike
Can cross the board.
- [42:10]
Philip DeFranco
No, I know. Yeah. But I was going to joke about, like, they want their email so. So that, you know, they can be like, hey, maybe Dr. Mike convinced you, but here is 10, 10 times the amount of information that goes against what he says. But connected to that, because I did want to ask you about Jubilee. My. My initial question was going to be, do you regret going on Jubilee? We've seen a lot of conversation around it recently. Some of. I mean, some of the videos that have fucking come from there, like, the Mehdi Hasan video is fucking insane. I haven't watched the yours in a while since it was released, but I remember, I don't know if it's recency bias, but I was like, holy shit. I don't know if it's become a different thing, but it sounds like you don't regret it. It felt good for you.
- [42:50]
Dr. Mike
Yeah, I definitely don't regret it. I'm actually really happy I did it. We are the ones who recommended it to them. After watching Pete Buttigieg do his work on Jubilee, I said, I think this is a really good idea. And I feel like they're going to do a vaccine episode and I'd rather be the person leading that charge to make sure I do the best job possible to make sure that people see what it's like to speak to a doctor about vaccines. And, you know, the video has over 10 million views. I believe it's their third or fourth most watched episode for surrounding only behind, like these extreme episodes of Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro, things like that.
- [43:27]
Philip DeFranco
So sure.
- [43:28]
Dr. Mike
To me, I'm proud that that's what's getting viewership because there was no animosity in my episode. No one was fighting with each other. Were people saying things that were wrong? Sure. And that's part of being a human. There's always going to be people sharing things that are untrue. But at the end, how do you feel after watching the episode is what I believe the main message is. Just like how you said, if you snip at 15 seconds of our conversation, it's not representative of what it's like to view the thing in its entirety. And to me, watching that whole episode really highlights how different people feel, how some people have been truly hurt, how some people have a major distrust of our system, so much so that it's leading them to make bad decisions. And at the same time, it shows how to have a conversation with a doctor who's not judgmental, who's trying to lead with empathy, who's being transparent about what they know and don't know, because not every doctor is going to do that. They're going to have bad experiences. There are going to be people who are hurt by vaccines. And we need to admit that and have these conversations openly so that the general public can regain some trust back in our broken system.
- [44:35]
Philip DeFranco
Yeah, I mean, it does feel like a lot of the, a lot of the stuff that I see where you're just like, how do you believe that? It feels very much like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Right. It's like a bad experience here. So fuck everything. The whole thing is fucked. Because obviously I'm not like, I'm not trying to get a flag and be like, yeah, Big Pharma, fucking love that. I love Big Pharma, it's so great. But I would be very interested in whether it be the surrounded or the change my mind sort of videos, seeing where the people are two months later, four months later, six months later, because I feel like so much of people talk about you are the five friends that you keep around. You're a consolidation of that. I think as far as a lot of opinions, that is a big aspect of it. And then you are, you know, the, the content, in large part the content that you consume. And so when, you know, vaccines cause autism is being fed to someone 20, 50x more than, you know, Dr. Mike trying to, to talk about the history and the data and the realities of the world. It's very easy to see like where people would shift. But it's good to, it's good to hear that because I don't want to make sure that the thing, what I'm saying here is not being confused with give up, don't throw out, don't have the conversations. Because I do think that in a time when we're seeing people scared to speak truth to power or to the mob, whatever the mob is at that time, it's becoming more and more commonplace. We're seeing it from corporations and individuals. So I, I commend you for, for doing it. Obviously it's not like it's all charitable. Like part of this is, is a business, but I, I don't know, but everything is a business. So it's like when people use that as a, as an attack, it's like, what are you talking about? Like, we, we. It. We have to be able to continue this for years and years.
- [46:38]
Dr. Mike
Yeah. Yeah. I think that the big struggle that folks have these days is keeping two thoughts in their minds that seem antagonistic to one another. So, like, the idea that people are hurt by vaccines is true. At the same time, vaccines don't cause autism. The ability to keep two thoughts that seem like they can't possibly coexist needs to be taught more often. And people need to challenge themselves to figure out avenues in their life where that applies. So the other day, one of my teammates on the, the YouTube channel said something like, oh, did you see this neurologist? He was talking with this other famous person and he said that he has trouble going to meetings on time. And he traced it back to how he was as a child and then how his mom was when she was pregnant with him. And that's what happened. It was in utero that he experienced this, and that's why he's like that today. And I said two simple things that seem like they completely contradict each other. One is that's complete bullshit. And two, it's possible that that happened because it's complete bullshit because you can't know that. You can't know that with any level of certainty because there's so many variables in the way you had a 30 second conversation with someone you don't know their entire life story. There's variables that they haven't told you about. There's variables you haven't considered. There's variables we don't understand. So it's bullshit. Second, there are experiences and exposures in utero that impact a child's neurophysiological development. But again, those two thoughts seem like there's no way you could say that's bullshit. But it could also be true. But it can. And we need to be flexible in our mindset in order to adapt to that level of thinking so that we can make good decisions. Right now there's people that like, I would even put Joe Rogan in this category where he's like, why the hell is Dr. Peter Hotez talking about vaccines when he's not in good shape? Well, you don't need to be in good shape to get a vaccine so that you could give it to a lot of people. It's hard to get people to change their ways. So should we not do vaccines because people aren't exercising? Or perhaps we could recommend both. We can tell people that, hey, change your lifestyle and get a vaccine. And people who are not changing their lifestyle, we can keep working on that and finding unique ways to challenge them and get them excited about making a lifestyle change. Perhaps bring in the medical side of things, seeing what's driving their inability to lose weight. But to Joe Rogan, it's like, unless you're killing yourself, there is no other way that you could be right. But again, that doesn't need to be the case. It could be that there's a team approach, there's a medical approach, there's a therapy approach, there's a lifestyle approach. There's so many variables in one's life that you can impact.
- [49:18]
Philip DeFranco
When I feel like something we need to expand on because like you were talking about potential for clipping and stuff. And I am also interested in, in what way you're specifically thinking and talking about it. When you're talking about vaccines hurting people, are you talking more specifically recently, historically, generally when you talk about that? Because I feel like when people talk about vaccine injuries and vaccines hurting people, it's often in certain different, specific contexts.
- [49:48]
Dr. Mike
The context is that every medical intervention we do and don't do has harms and benefits. The goal with medical interventions is to maximize the benefit, limit the harms. However, in vaccines, it's a slightly different trade off. Why vaccines are given to healthy people, they're given to prevent future problems. So that means the risk benefit needs to drastically favor the benefit and minimize the harm. Unlike a medication that is given to someone who's already very sick and might lose their life. So we're more comfortable with some harms that can come from those medications for the possibility of saving their life. So those constantly need to be in flux. And when it comes to vaccine harms, there are things on the vaccine pamphlet that can happen after getting a vaccine. The huge majority of those are very mild redness at the site of injection, an elevated temperature, basically an immune response from getting your immune system kicking into high gear. But then there are rarer side effects. And it depends which vaccine obviously you're talking about that can happen. Now we've created a vaccine adverse reporting event system, vaers, in order to track this. We also have the vaccine safety data net that tracks vaccines across millions of doses after we're giving them to track what's happening, to track what patterns emerge. Because it's really about watching patterns, not individual cases. Because when someone gets a vaccine and then they have a heart attack later, it could be just because they were gonna get a heart attack and the vaccine has nothing to do with it. So how do we decide whether or not the vaccine caused it? We look at patterns, we zoom out, and we see the people who've gotten the vaccine, what was their rate of having a heart attack versus people who didn't in an age match disease match group, and we see what happens. So that's why we're able to point out that younger males, for example, had higher rates of myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle, after getting a vaccine. So we're able to call that out. But in most cases that was mild. They didn't require hospitalization, it wasn't a serious issue. And. And if it was, we knew exactly what to do afterwards and were able to put out that warning so that we can have informed consent. And informed consent is the most important part of practicing good medicine. Because informed consent isn't just about telling people the risks. That's part of it. You need people to be aware of the risk of their treatment, but it needs to be the risk of doing the treatment and the risk of not doing the treatment and the benefit of doing both. So if you look at what Secretary Kennedy's doing, to me, that's not informed consent celebration. He's just doing magnification of the risks, therefore not actually giving you an accurate clinical picture of what your risk benefit is by getting a specific treatment. And that's why I completely disagree with his message.
- [52:52]
Philip DeFranco
And so, I mean, hearing you talk about things throughout the years, one of the things I've always appreciated is, once again that you've had a skepticism. But I also was interested. Cause I've heard you say that you have changed your mind when presented with new information. And I was really interested. If you are aware of for yourself, what is the biggest example of that?
- [53:16]
Dr. Mike
Biggest example, what's some good stuff that we can come up with? I mean, obviously in 2020, going into 2021, when the vaccine was coming out, we were all recommending people get the vaccine. We were in a really bad spot. Hospitals were being overwhelmed. We were having to reschedule surgeries, we were rescheduling colonoscopies, preventive screenings, and it was getting into a really bad state, similar to how it was early in the pandemic in the March timeframe. But then when boosters started coming out, the government started getting a little too political with them, and I needed to scale back my messaging and Saying, hey, this booster is not necessarily for everyone. And I had to change my messaging and mind on that, so much so that at the time, the CDC director wanted to come on my podcast to talk about boosters and vaccines in general. And I said, look, I'm open to having you on, but I disagree with your messaging about recommending boosters universally for everyone. I don't think that's the right piece of advice. And they actually scrubbed coming on my show as a result of that.
- [54:22]
Philip DeFranco
Oh, wow.
- [54:22]
Dr. Mike
So also outdoor transmission of the virus mid pandemic, we started seeing how, I think what a big mistake that I made was because we didn't know. And the CDC probably held onto that messaging for way too long was do not gather. And then as we learned that gathering outside was safe, not because people were doing it recklessly. And we tested that because there were at the time a lot of protests going on and we didn't see transmission during those protests. So, for example, on Thanksgiving, I thought we did a really bad job as I guess the larger health community as a whole telling people, absolutely, don't gather. Whereas we probably should have done something called risk reduction strategies. Like saying, look, if you're going to gather, here are safe ways to do it. Here's ways to reduce your risk. At that time, there's no vaccines, but there were ways to meet outside, perhaps limit exposure to someone who is immunocompromised, make sure you get tested before and after, especially if you're caring for someone who is ill. So there was various strategies we could have implemented there. But at the time our public health messaging was a bit antiquated. It was parental in nature, where it was send a stern message, one message, unifying message to. So it's very clear that we don't support this and I don't think that's the right way to go about doing public health. It's the same way that people are like, the only way to remove STDs or protect from STDs is abstinence. Well, you could use a condom barrier protection absolutely works. But there's some doctors who are very conservative in nature that say, no, condoms shouldn't be recommended cause they encourage promiscuous activity or whatnot. And risk reduction is not a good idea because they can go wrong. I think we need to practice risk reduction in order to be human first in our philosophy.
- [56:16]
Philip DeFranco
Very interesting. Connected to RFK Jr. And I think it'll end up touching on several things I was going to ask. This is more general. If you three and A half years from now or right now became HHS secretary, what would you do?
- [56:33]
Dr. Mike
I would immediately resign and put someone in charge who actually knows what they're doing.
- [56:37]
Philip DeFranco
No, you're supposed. The pursuit of power now. Yeah.
- [56:42]
Dr. Mike
I haven't said this publicly, but there was someone that reached out to me, and again, I don't know the seriousness of it, but they were saying that there's an opportunity potentially for me to join an advisory committee. I'll leave it at that. And while I felt very appreciated in that moment, I very quickly explained how I'm not the right person for that. And we should look at people who have experience in these fields to a higher degree. And we need to stop putting people in positions of power that don't have the expertise that's necessary for running these administrations. So if you look at an office like the Surgeon General's office, where the goal of a surgeon General is to communicate widely to a group of people to explain science, to highlight areas of focus for medical research, I'd love that position. I think that's great. I would do a good job at it. But putting me on a committee that or an advisory panel that is guiding dense scientific research that has a dense understanding of virology, immunology, epidemiology, that is not where my expertise is. And we need to put people in those positions who do have expertise there.
- [58:00]
Philip DeFranco
I love your thinking and idea there. That is not the norm now. The norm is the heads of. The heads of These departments are CBOs. They're chief vibe officers. They are. It's PR and marketing and communication. I mean.
- [58:14]
Dr. Mike
I mean, our surgeon general that is not yet appointed, I believe, doesn't have an active medical license. So.
- [58:22]
Philip DeFranco
Yeah, I mean, the idea is like, what. What is the general vibe, in addition to being a loyalist? What is the general vibe that you get across? And I don't know. I mean, that's. Hopefully that's not the new norm. Joking wise.
- [58:37]
Dr. Mike
But the. The norm should be, Phil, that everyone should, like people should want the truth, whether the truth agrees with them or disagrees with them, because that's what a good scientist does. And actually, that was the whole controversy with Kevin Hall. Kevin hall, when he does research, if it disagrees with his preconceived notions as a researcher, he gets excited because that means he misunderstood something. And this is going to fine tune his understanding of the. Of what's going on. Yes, they can look into the design and see if they did anything wrong, et cetera, but that means something is improving. When your science disagrees with you. But this current administration, when the research disagrees with them, they try and stifle it and redesign a study so that it does agree with them. When they write reports like the Maha report, they use ChatGPT because they love that it supports their messaging with imaginary research. That's a problem. We need the ability to disagree. We need to have discourse. In fact, that's how science has gotten better. The first individual who came out and said, hey doctors, you should probably wash your hands in between autopsies and delivering babies was viewed as a crazy person. They were thrown in an insane asylum. So there needs to be some thought as to how do we debate things and have discourse? How do we allow that on social media platforms without shadow banning people who have innovation in their minds. But that doesn't mean we should just let anyone run wild, as President Trump said about Secretary Kennedy, to run HHS.
- [60:07]
Philip DeFranco
With RFK Jr. How, how and why do you think is he trying to overhaul preventative health screening?
- [60:15]
Dr. Mike
I mean, he's not doing anything. There hasn't been anything that has supported public health screening. There hasn't been anything to support family physicians, mid level practitioners, like nothing. There's just been, there's been a lot of cool sound bites of him sitting in steak and shake, having soda and fries. Like that's what I remember of his first six months or so. He came in with all these promises of I'll have the answers by September of what causes autism. No, sir, you will not. And at the same time, if we go back and look at his book where he made thimerosal, the mercury esque ingredient within vaccines, the culprit for the autism explosion, you look at what actually transpired by the year 2000, almost all childhood vaccines were not with dimerosal. We removed it just to be safe. Even though we saw no evidence of harm. We removed it and yet we saw no drop in autism. So he just changes the goalposts whenever he sees fit. Oh, it was this, this was a problem. Like the organization he ran, Children's Health Defense, used to be called World Mercury Project. And when he got no attention there and mercury and dimerosal were removed from most vaccines, he literally changed the name of it in order to stay relevant. So to me, it's like we gotta call it out for what it is. It's dishonest, it's not accurate. And if you want the truth, it's not Secretary Kennedy that you want in power.
- [61:51]
Philip DeFranco
Yeah. Connected to public health. And I think it's a little bit top of mind because I was watching you have a conversation with Dr. Mike Israel four months ago. Recently, what are your thoughts in connection in regards to combating obesity around GLP1s as far as where it is today? Because I feel like the conversation around them has drastically changed over the last year. Some people are locked in. It seems like based off of some of the stats I'm seeing the adoption's higher. But as someone in your position, what are your thoughts?
- [62:33]
Dr. Mike
I think that they are a tool and they need to be utilized when appropriate and not abused. There are some individuals who are certainly abusing these medications as basically performance enhancing drugs or appearance boosting drugs where they want to lose a few pounds for a wedding. So they're getting these medications and that's not what they're for. The risk certainly goes up because they're not an individual that gets the benefits. So to me, that risk ratio changes for individuals who have type 2 diabetes, for individuals that are overweight and have obstructive sleep apnea, they absolutely change their metabolic profile. They allow that person to get healthier. There are certain individuals who have a level of food noise that does not even make sense to the average person. They cannot work without having the food noise destroy their life. So they're facing a choice of do I just stuff my face to get rid of food noise and that will allow me to be a better parent, worker, colleague, etc. Or do I not, do I put all my effort in fighting the food noise and. And then struggle as a parent, co worker, colleague? That's a terrible choice that someone has to make. Whereas if you can give one of these medications to that individual, silence the food noise, suddenly they're better shape from a physical standpoint, they're in better shape from a mental health standpoint. They become a better worker, a better member of society, their children become healthier and happier, their work becomes more productive. They're making breakthroughs in scientific research. So to me, to just paint them with a brush is all bad or all good, is really missing the nuanced picture that they are.
- [64:21]
Philip DeFranco
So is that, is that largely. I mean, not, not for you to be an expert on it, but is that what it largely does, is that it just kills the food noise or.
- [64:31]
Dr. Mike
Absolutely.
- [64:31]
Philip DeFranco
And then like kind of.
- [64:32]
Dr. Mike
And all the other medication is not a medication that is making a drastic impact into how your body metabolizes food. What the medication does is it slows the transport of food, which then alters your biochemistry to make you feel fuller, therefore not as hungry, therefore reducing that Food noise. There's even been some promise for these medications in working for certain substance abuse disorders specifically focused with alcoholism. So this is a behavior modifying medication more than it is a metabolism modifying medication. And that really holds true to the principle that something happened in our food supply over the last 30, 40 years that has made food hijack our machinery internally in a way that made us more hungry, constantly insatiable, therefore over consuming calories, therefore constantly increasing our weight and therefore creating this epidemic of chronic health diseases. Wow.
- [65:38]
Philip DeFranco
So that's. So most of the. Whenever we see these like studies and I try to not add a lot of weight because I feel like there'll be like some small study and then it takes over the headlines and we're like, oh, well, this is a fact now. But a lot of the, a lot of the studies that we're seeing where it's like, oh, it also. GLP1s also help with this is a lot of it at the end of the day, just that is just a natural side effect of losing weight.
- [66:05]
Dr. Mike
A lot of times, yes. But also there is some sort of behavior modification of some addictions. It just, that's what we're seeing. How relevant that impact is, who the right patient is, that remains to be seen. Those are questions we need answers to. But you know when you take someone and you help cut their excess body fat percentage by 10, 20% over the course of time slowly, because you don't want to be doing this too aggressively. And some people are, especially when they go to these pill mills or shot mills and they're just getting them without any logic or guidance or follow up or dose measurement, they can lose weight so fast that they can still be metabolically unhealthy for a different reason, where they've lost weight, but they've also lost a tremendous amount of muscle and losing muscle is not good for you. So there needs to be a very careful titrated weight loss. There needs to be resistance training involved, There needs to be dietary modifications. Because you're eating less, you still need to make sure you're consuming enough protein. And that is really done when you're seeing a physician in real life, you're working with either a nutritionist or a registered dietitian, a physical therapist at times. But when you go to a lot of these websites, it's like, check this box if you want the medication and let's move on.
- [67:29]
Philip DeFranco
So does that mean you're kind of against sites like, I guess, Hims and other. There's like places that just have it now. Right. Is it off brand?
- [67:41]
Dr. Mike
There's a lot of actually legalities that are happening here with compounded semaglutide, which is the main ingredient in these GLP1 medications like WeGovy and Ozempic.
- [67:53]
Philip DeFranco
So is it the same sort of medication or it's just the one aspect of it?
- [67:57]
Dr. Mike
It's the same medication. So this is what's interesting that most people don't realize is Ozempic and Wegovy, for example, they're medications that are used for slightly different indications. Wegovy is a weight loss medication. Ozempic is to treat type 2 diabetes. They both cause weight loss. Why it's the same ingredient? It's like marketing acetaminophen, which is the main ingredient in Tylenol. And I can call it, on one hand, Mike's Fever Reducer, and the main ingredient is Acetaminophen. And on the other hand, I could say Mike's Pain Reliever. And I put acetaminophen in there, too. Same ingredient, just different marketing. And because the pharma companies have conducted different trials for each medication and they change the dosages slightly, therefore they're able to have them approved for different indications with your insurance company.
- [68:50]
Philip DeFranco
But I think what I was more questioning is, are places like that that have kind of normalized it, because I think. I think Weight Watchers has it now. There's like a number of places where all of a sudden, you know, it's. It's more. It's. It's being kind of broadcasted out there that it's. It's readily available. I remember when we first started talking about it, the main concern that a lot of people had was around the supply. Yeah. And so I'm.
- [69:15]
Dr. Mike
And that's still an issue.
- [69:16]
Philip DeFranco
Is it still an issue?
- [69:17]
Dr. Mike
Yeah.
- [69:18]
Philip DeFranco
As far as people that are diabetic.
- [69:19]
Dr. Mike
Yeah, the diabetic and people who are taking WeGovy for weight loss or Zepbound for weight loss with obstructive sleep apnea. So there's absolutely availability issues still happening. There are websites that are profiting from it, that are not doing it in the correct, reasonable way, where they just get a prescription, it gets refilled, as long as they're paying their monthly premium. And that's not great because that's not how the medication is intended to be used. But if the patient is clicking the boxes and saying, no side effects, no side effects, I feel good. Just keep giving me the medication. A lot of these websites will just let them go through with it. And there's other Ones that websites that do things like self diagnose yourself with a uti, self diagnose yourself with strep throat, self diagnose yourself with erectile dysfunction. And to me, that's destroying the doctor patient relationship while it is improving access to people who struggle. I feel like the larger problem of creating a disconnect in that doctor patient alliance probably does that situation more harm than good.
- [70:19]
Philip DeFranco
Wow. But so as far as. As far as, like, what you're seeing, are there. Are there diabetics out there that are having a hard time getting their medication based? Because it's very interesting that a big chunk of that conversation, if that's the case, has. Is not being reported in the news anymore. And then I end up, like, going down my rabbit hole and I go, like, is it because it's being more widely adopted and people are like, hey, they want to be able to promote it? I don't know. That's. That's.
- [70:48]
Dr. Mike
Well, there's definitely more supply because there's been more demand. But right now, with the way that our country is as a whole, from a tariff standpoint, a manufacturing standpoint, there's all sorts of random shortages and issues that arise within individual pharmacies. So that is still happening because of, again, multifactorial causes, but it's not as bad as it was. I remember when we were first having this conversation maybe two years ago, my patient couldn't get the dose that she was on, so she had to get the lower dose, even though we were looking to increase her dose because of lack of availability, or people had to switch pharmacies and go an hour away to get the medication at a different pharmacy. So that was happening a lot more. That has decreased in nature. But the big reason is we should take medications when appropriate, not just because we think they'll be fun to take.
- [71:46]
Philip DeFranco
They're just so fun. That was. That was.
- [71:48]
Dr. Mike
I mean, everything happening with hormones, everything.
- [71:50]
Philip DeFranco
I took from 20 to 25 years old, I only took stuff that it was because I thought it might be fun.
- [71:55]
Dr. Mike
I mean, right now there's like, hormone clinics that are coming out all over the place, popping up left, right and center that are just mass prescribing hormones without giving any kind of informed consent or counseling on what they're actually doing.
- [72:08]
Philip DeFranco
Do you mean like, guys that, like, want to have testosterone or something?
- [72:11]
Dr. Mike
Yeah.
- [72:14]
Philip DeFranco
I'm starting to get at that age where I'm like, I might need to start looking into it. I was like, you see one random fucking TikTok and it's like, since I started take take a testosterone, I'm not tired. I'm like, you're not tired? I was like, because I have to run three miles to feel like I'm not active. Like, still waking up. I'm at that point in my life, like, my body doesn't start unless I fucking throw it down a hill and then push it up 1.
- [72:42]
Dr. Mike
I wish it was that easy, Phil. I really do. I mean, look, if there was ever a shortcut that was that good, I promise I'd be talking about it. I promise I'd be recommending, and I promise I'll be taking it, so. Because I'm not. And I also feel like crap when I wake up in the morning and it's hard to get my body moving. There is no shortcut to good health. That's the real reality.
- [73:06]
Philip DeFranco
This is the part of the podcast where I just start asking you health advice that's being promoted to me through fucking TikTok, dude. My wife mentioned this to me as far as, like, she was like, have you heard about this? I started getting a little bit of content around it, and then I searched it, and so now I'm fucking fed it every, like, one out of every 15 videos. Is there a big push with. Is it. Is it nad? Is that what this, Like, Are you familiar with what that is?
- [73:35]
Dr. Mike
It's funny. That's your algorithm. My algorithm is, like, listening to turtles orgasm. We're in a.
- [73:43]
Philip DeFranco
That's questionable. I would say my main thing is, like, the world's falling apart in food porn, and then now nad is.
- [73:51]
Dr. Mike
Dude, you got to.
- [73:51]
Philip DeFranco
Slowly.
- [73:52]
Dr. Mike
There's this turtle. I follow no microphone to its face. Phil, I'm going to play the sound for you. Hold on.
- [74:00]
Philip DeFranco
This is. This is very millennial of you is what it sounds like. You're trying to go back to a time of the Internet where you were.
- [74:06]
Dr. Mike
This is why people need to. I'm literally doing turtle noises.
- [74:12]
Philip DeFranco
Yeah. We started with, how is RFK Jr destroying the future of medicine in the country? And you're like, but, hey, something that makes me less depressed about that is turtle noises. Okay. I think. I think this is, like, an old video, right?
- [74:33]
Dr. Mike
No, no, this. This is an account. I follow.
- [74:36]
Philip DeFranco
Yeah. Oh, okay. You're like, no, it's a livestream. It's happening.
- [74:43]
Dr. Mike
Do. Do you.
- [74:44]
Philip DeFranco
Do you listen?
- [74:45]
Dr. Mike
This is how I handle listening to Secretary Kennedy all day long.
- [74:50]
Philip DeFranco
I don't know if the video is very, very cute of what's happening, because it sounds like if you close your eyes, it's Very questionable. It's very.
- [74:58]
Dr. Mike
Anyway, nad, okay, so there's these drips that promise the fountain of youth, and it is not proven. It is a way to people, a way people use to sell you a questionable intervention that I do not think carries weight. And as a result, I am more than skeptical. I would advise people to stay away from it for the main reason that when you intervene in one's health by doing a treatment, a drip, what have you, you have to know that the benefit is really good. And people like to shit on pharma because pharma has done questionable things in the past. True. But what pharma has to do is it has to go through the fda, which means it has to do legitimate trials, which costs tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars in order to prove their medication works better than some other treatment. It needs to have a safety profile. We need to know what its side effects are. But for nad, we don't need to do any of that. And anyone can just sell you anything. And therefore, to me, I would not do it because it's just. You're walking into a cave without knowing if there is a bear inside of it or a turtle making cute orgasm noises.
- [76:14]
Philip DeFranco
So questionable. This is the. This is. You just. You presented such a big red flag to me after. After just being years of green flags, generally. I. I'm going to. I'm going to switch it to not your feed because I'm nervous of what else we're going to uncover there. This is kind of like the opposite of. Anytime we talked on podcasts, it always started more personal and then we got into issues. But how are you doing? How are you doing generally these days? It's been a while since, one, we've talked in general, but two, since we've talked in this format.
- [76:50]
Dr. Mike
I think I'm doing good. It's obviously been a wild ride because I thought we'd be venturing more into doing fun stuff on YouTube, and yet it's turned into advocacy. And that wasn't what I expected. But I think it's an important task that we need to lean into, which has shifted the people that are watching my content to some degree. I've had patients come in that were 60, 70 years old that I would never expect that they would know that I create YouTube content, and now they're celebrating it and they're grateful for learning something new. That's exciting. Also exciting just to see people in that age demographic making use of YouTube. I would love to see YouTube grow and become the number one platform for those in their 60s and 70s. I did gain some weight after my boxing journey. I'm on my weight loss journey now. Losing some of that weight, that's been a challenge. Because after a long day of listening to Secretary Kennedy talk, I just want to eat comfort food.
- [77:55]
Philip DeFranco
But what's your comfort food?
- [78:00]
Dr. Mike
Junk burgers? Chipotle?
- [78:03]
Philip DeFranco
Yeah. I was wondering if it's more.
- [78:04]
Dr. Mike
Double the ingredients.
- [78:05]
Philip DeFranco
Salty, sweet, salty, Salty all day, salty. Okay. I'm the opposite. I'm like, I'm so thankful that Yasso bars exist.
- [78:16]
Dr. Mike
That's that Greek yogurt ice cream thing.
- [78:19]
Philip DeFranco
Yeah. I'm just like, you know what? I was like, I ate great today. I'm gonna. I'm gonna have one to three of these, depending on what it was. Because I. I'm in this place where I'm just. I'm just doing maintenance. Maintenance is so much easier than the fucking journey. It was like. It was like five years of hell of like, ups and downs and plateaus, and now I'm just like, I like this.
- [78:40]
Dr. Mike
This little maintenance is usually the hardest for people. So that's interesting to hear you say that.
- [78:45]
Philip DeFranco
Really?
- [78:46]
Dr. Mike
Well, because we can. We've proved time and time again we can help patients lose weight. It's the keeping the weight off that's the hard part.
- [78:54]
Philip DeFranco
Interesting. I don't know. I. I know that in the past, like, when I was at my. My biggest. What I was saying before we started, I think our first chats, I was like 250 to 280. Between those times, like, I was housing like double, triple orders from Wendy's for lunch and like, do it and fucking in the middle of the pandemic. Just like, I'm like, yeah, why not? Why would I not have a full ribeye with sides and all the. Not even broccoli. Like, what am I doing? But I. For me, my big thing was. I know that you did like a big thing about. Or. Yeah. Nutrition versus the activity. What I found is that by doing more activity, that helped me for my personal thing. It helped me deal with my depression. And a lot of my food eating was depression based. And I think feeling like I needed to have some sort of control or something like, that was an instant button. But, like, I'm at this. This place where I'm living my. My cleanest, most boring life and just trying to make it interesting. So it's like, are you enjoying that process?
- [80:04]
Dr. Mike
Was it fun for you to experiment in this way and learn things?
- [80:09]
Philip DeFranco
Experiment in what way do you mean?
- [80:10]
Dr. Mike
Well, like how you said that you were trying to find an approach that worked for you.
- [80:14]
Philip DeFranco
Oh no, it was fucking miserable finding it. Once I found it, it's great because, you know, it's like you hit a plateau and you're like, what the fuck is the point? And then it goes the opposite way because I, I got into a place and it's part of the reason why I never recommend people do things the way that I did it. Because I'm like, I come from a place of. In the past, I really heavily struggled with an eating disorder in the past. And so I try to be very careful with any recommendations. And it also was part of the reason why it took me so long to find what worked for me. And so, I don't know, I just, what I ended up doing was like finding what worked for me for a breakfast. I'm a big, I'm an egg snob. And so like finding, okay, what's, you know what, how can I set up my day where it's like I'm getting what I need and it feels like I'm fueling my body and my brain and what are snacks I can have just having it readily available. Because if I, I'm gonna go for a weekend and thank God it's only a weekend and I'll be around a bunch of my friends for a fantasy football draft, right? And I'm not going to have any of the shit that I've, I've had around myself. I have to have my, my, like my tools, my treats to be able to maintain. But if I'm out of that, I can't hold it. But I'm at a place. And this is why I think that the maintenance thing is where I've actually found the easiness is if I'm, if I'm eating whatever for three days, it's not a big deal because where I'm at like over the aggregate of a month, it's going to even out as long as I don't let three days turn into a week turn into a month. So that's why that was what was helpful. But yeah, I mean, for me, I'd go on these two three hour hikes, which I was very privileged to have that time in the day to be able to do. And it put me in a right head space. And then I wouldn't feel as motivated to eat all my feelings. And so. And then once you see the changes coming, it kind of snowballs. Or at least that was my experience.
- [82:28]
Dr. Mike
Yeah, it just goes to show how much it, it feels like a Metabolic issue, but how much mental health can play a role. And that's why I think, you know, you're. You're doing the right thing by not being prescriptive in what you've done to others. But I really applaud you for sharing what you just shared. And I'm sure you've said it other times about your journey, of how difficult it was and what sucked and what didn't. Because while you may not be being prescriptive and telling people exactly what they should be doing, the fact that you're sharing how difficult it was for you and how it ended up being possible, and the fact that you're zooming out and looking at aggregates as opposed to, oh, today it's a little higher. I'm so demotivated. Those type of general strategies are really valuable to show as to the reason why you're doing so well. And I think that's, that's really great that you're sharing that.
- [83:20]
Philip DeFranco
Yeah. But, yeah, so I. That's the thing is, like, I would not recommend necessarily. I've talked to some friends that are like, that sounds like a mental disorder. And then other friends going like, that sounds like you keeping yourself accountable. Like me weighing myself at the same time every morning for the last four and a half years. Right. It's just, I'm like, I need that data. I can't. It can't be vibes. It can't be like, I do it once a week and, you know, I just so happened last night or the day before do a lot of salt. So, you know, just little things like that. But I don't know for you, what are you. What are you doing? I was like, because I, I have to. I'm not. I was like, I'm not in the room with you. I have to check myself when you say, you know, that you're on also, I hate, I hate that I'm so guilty of it. I hate how, like, journey is such, like, a fucking ingrained word when we're on this. It's like you just, you just. It's a lifestyle change we're talking about, like, we're finding God. Like, I'm becoming reborn. Yeah, no, it's.
- [84:24]
Dr. Mike
All I, All I'm really doing is just trying to be mindful of portions. And I completely shut down physical activity for a bit and was neglecting that working till 9pm every day. And now I'm trying to revive that part back. And once I get myself moving similar to you, it help my headspace. It helped my cravings and allows me to feel more engaged in taking care of my healthcare. So that to me was the biggest win. Getting the body moving, even though that's not the primary driver for weight loss, it allows me to stack wins across the board moving forward.
- [85:00]
Philip DeFranco
That was something that threw me up. I mean, something that felt very defeating was all of a sudden this, this mindset of your body is so adaptable that you know, you could do all this physical activity and then. Cause I rightly and wrongly, like I look to my Apple watch or fitness tracker and there's a little fucking thing in my head that's like it said I burnt 1,000 calories, which I don't see as one, know the numbers that are like immensely off. But two, I use it as a, a bar for movement. That's, that's how I treat it. Because it's, it's bullshit. But is it, is it. The way that you understand how it works is like if you are generally sedentary and throughout the day versus someone that is more active, generally that at the end of the day the body is using the same, close to the same amount of calories. As far as like, you're talking about.
- [85:58]
Dr. Mike
Like a basal metabolic rate, I guess.
- [86:01]
Philip DeFranco
That'S it because I think it's like the general thinking, I'm gonna fucking horribly paraphrase this. The idea is that if you do like I went on a two mile or a two hour run and walk this morning, right? So there was a lot of activity. But comparing that to another day where I'm relatively sedentary, generally speaking, would I be burning the same amount of calories because my body would adapt to that level of activity?
- [86:28]
Dr. Mike
I don't think the research has shown that it adapts a, that quickly. Perhaps over time there's some compensation that happens. This is where Kevin Hall's research on the Biggest Loser study was quite interesting, where he saw that A, the people who have lost tremendous amounts of weight on that program ended up regaining a lot of that weight after the fact. Because the way they were losing the weight then was they would exercise for very long periods of time from being fully sedentary. They would also cut their nutrition, their calories pretty significantly as well. And what he saw is that their basal metabolic rate, so how many calories they burn just by being alive throughout the day dropped by about 400 calories, I think his research showed. And then what he saw even as the years went on because he kept studying this group of people, was that some of them had really significant drops in their Basal metabolic rate that stayed on even though they regained weight. Which people used to say, oh, well, once they become bigger again, their metabolic rate will go up in order to keep feeding that extra weight. But as they regained weight, some of them stay still had a decrease in that metabolic rate. And the New York Times or one of these newspapers reported inaccurately about his study where they believed that essentially their metabolism was so damaged from losing that much weight and exercising so much that that's what yielded them putting the weight back on. But that's not exactly what happened. What happened in his research was those who continued exercising the most actually had the biggest cuts to their metabolic rate. So it was like almost as if the body was saying, you're gonna exercise, so we need to decrease the amount we're burning throughout the day in order to be able to fuel the exercise. Or the same way that the body would say, oh, we're not getting enough nutrients, we need to slow the metabolic rate to make sure we have enough calories to survive. But the people that kept exercising after that study, who had the biggest drop in their metabolic rate also were able to hold off weight the longest. So those two ideas don't make a lot of sense. They seem like they disagree with one another and we don't have yet a clear understanding as to why that happened. Because you would think, oh, if they drop their metabolic rate, they should be the ones putting on the most weight. After that study, it seems to have the opposite impact.
- [89:00]
Philip DeFranco
And I know that you consume a lot of these studies as part of your job and, well, jobs. But what would you say your new general day to day news diet is if you, if you have one?
- [89:13]
Dr. Mike
It's so broad. I'm looking at substacks of researchers that are doing great work. I'm spending a lot of time on X to see what is happening, probably on the conservative side of things, more often than not. I follow a lot of scientists that share a lot of good work, whether it's substack or news focus, as well as some leading medical contributors from ABC News and such that give me probably the most data. And then because when I see patients, I can't be an expert in everything all the time, I use references like one is called up to date and it literally has up to date evidence as it comes in for certain conditions and treatments. So I'm constantly referencing that to make good recommendations to my patients and that allows me to be able to present good information, even like the idea. This is pretty cool. From my podcast with Kevin hall. He started Talking about how ultra processed food and the consumption of ultra processed food has increased the amount of calories we're consuming because it's easy to eat, it doesn't fill you up, you perhaps are hungrier sooner. And then I said, well, that's why I tell my patients to eat a diet low in ultra processed food foods. And he goes, great, Mike, but how about if I was to tell you before we had our research cut, we were doing a study where we were feeding the predominance of calories from ultra processed foods, but ones that we specifically picked because we knew that they were satiating, we knew they were healthy, and we were having people lose weight and be metabolically healthy. And I'm like, well, why would you do that study? He said, well, ultra processed food stores better. It's cheaper. So perhaps there is a way to have an ultra processed rich diet for people who are living in food deserts that could be a healthy approach for them. And my mind was blown. I'm like, yeah, let's do that research. Nope.
- [91:04]
Philip DeFranco
Secretary Kennedy said, no, it's I genuine. I mean, it's one of those things where it's like it's going to be really hard to calculate or showcase what doesn't happen, what was not gained. And you just get into those, those weird holes where you just start imagining an alternate reality where it's like, did we just miss out on insert blank? That would have affected everything. I mean, now I'm just, now I'm just having kind of fun. Something that's been popping up more and more and I feel like the field that could benefit in the most positive way is, is kind of your general world. Do you have general good feelings about AI at least when it comes to tools to your job and use, not talking about people diagnosing themselves or the genuine fucking potential collapse of society you might see as jobs en masse are replaced. But I've seen stories pop up where all of a sudden it's helping cancer screenings pop up. As far as seeing what maybe the human eye might miss, do you have a lot of hope? Do you utilize it in your day.
- [92:17]
Dr. Mike
To day at all day to day? Minimally. I think that there is a lot of hope and a lot of excitement in figuring out what receptors to target to run simulations in drug labs to decide which studies are worth running so that we can be more effective with the time and money that we do have available to us. There are values to AI where it is better than us. I mean, when he can look at a scan and look at pixels that our eyes can't catch. That's a tremendous value. We just need to not turn it into some sort of money maker where it's working, but it's actually harming a lot of people simply because we're trying to simplify the system and make it work en masse without putting the human first. And I think when we put AI into its place as a tool, but keep the human first focus, there's a tremendous platform for it. There's a way to use it, even for patients to use it. I think that there's potentially great questions you can have it recommend that you ask your doctor in order to empower you to make better decisions for yourself. At the same time, I've seen individuals completely ignore AI. I mean, Elon Musk is a prime example of this. He's very supportive of Secretary Kennedy. And Elon Musk has grok, which if you ask Grok what percentage of health claims that Secretary Kennedy makes are untrue, it says the majority of them are untrue. So if Elon Musk is not listening to his own AI surrounding an issue of public health, is he going to listen to it about his cholesterol score?
- [94:00]
Philip DeFranco
Don't you worry, Mike, he's going to beat the woke out of grok. Don't you worry? He's going to. He's going to. He's going to make Mecca Hitler. He's going to make Mecca Hitler say all the things he wants to eventually.
- [94:15]
Dr. Mike
It's scary because what's scary to me about AI is that it's privately owned. Not that I'm anti private ownership of companies, it's that if enough people start having it deliver truth to them and now that truth is modifiable by some guy, what is that guy gonna turn up or turn down and how is that gonna impact society? Or is there a way for us as content creators to sort of vaccinate for a punny word, the population to say, okay, everything you read in AI needs to be verified by someone who's actually in that field in that world. Because as I said, this administration that we're in, there's just tremendous hypocrisy. I mean, there's currently an environmental lawyer running a health agency in an administration that doesn't particularly care about the environment.
- [95:10]
Philip DeFranco
To touch on like what you were saying as far as like, obviously Elon has GROK and X. But so many of these, well, pretty much all of them are these news outlets, these platforms are owned by incredibly rich people that can, if they want have their hand on the lever. It does give me an appreciation for the rise of substacks. It feels like we've seen a whole plethora of creators come up through YouTube to a lesser extent, Instagram, more TikTok. But having that place where it does feel like we have this rise of academics with an audience and they're having to figure out the networking effect. And I think that I'm hoping that it is a big net benefit, especially as people are rightly and wrongly depending on certain places, not trusting certain institutions. I think it's, you know, it has to happen. I don't know. I was kind of focused over the past few days about Bezos and the Washington Post and it's been very interesting to see what that, what that place has been over the past 10 years because it's been wildly different things with wildly different goals. And I don't know, it's one of those things where I'm wondering, is this the change? Is it where things are forever? Although nothing's.
- [96:39]
Dr. Mike
I think everything's forever right now. I don't think anyone knows the direction of where things are going. I think everyone is in an experimentation stage and where it lands, ultimately everyone's going to have to adapt one way or another. And I think that's the big focus that I would love to see in education in the form of digital literacy. Because with AI popping up, knowing what's real, what's not, you know, there was always this worry that with AI coming up, people are going to be able to do look alike videos and this and that. And I knew that would happen. But then I thought about the idea of the human brain becoming more skeptical and saying, is this AI? Is this real? And people are starting to go in that direction. Whenever a video comes out, the most upvoted comment, is this even real? Can we verify? And that inner detective is starting to come to the fort. Right. So we'll see what happens.
- [97:38]
Philip DeFranco
I mean, the tools have gotten crazy. I mean, you know, if you have someone, someone like try to make a video of you outright, it can be a little rough, but like the, the ability to just take a photo and have it just reimagine a photo seems to be more effective. Well, not even dance, like use you as a little, like a little puppet to be able to talk and you could mimic voices.
- [98:00]
Dr. Mike
That's like the scary thing, especially on phone calls and such where I've seen videos and I'm like, wow, that's full on my voice. And that's what's Cool about technology companies innovating. Like, YouTube is currently beta testing some features to fight back against this with likeness recognition. And I'm excited for the future of that because we want to be able to have some tools.
- [98:20]
Philip DeFranco
It's. That's the thing, though, is we're going to need private companies to actually do that since it does not feel like proper regulation is going to be in place. Because understandably, like, we want, like, I'm very, oddly, like, not. Not a lot of the things that it's connected to, but I am America's cheerleader. I want America to do well, and I don't want us to lose any advantages that we have. But, like, regulation does have to matter to some degree, otherwise we're going to destroy ourselves or at least people are going to be destroyed in the process. Off of that very serious note, and I'm, and I still have more questions about AI as far as it taking away or simplifying paperwork. And that might not even be the most interesting thing for the audience.
- [99:00]
Dr. Mike
That's the most valuable and no one's actually talking about that or doing it.
- [99:04]
Philip DeFranco
Yeah, that seems like it.
- [99:05]
Dr. Mike
If we're talking about, like, where I can have the biggest net benefit, it's not with some crazy technological innovation. It's with doing something simple like helping me pick which insurance company is the best for my situation in order right now for me to purchase an insurance plan for me and my employees. The amount of paperwork I have to read and basically learn another language is immense. And I'm in the field. So can we have AI simplify that? Can we have AI make it so that my patients don't have to jump through hoops for a prior authorization to get a CAT scan. Like that makes the patient frustrated, distrust the system. It makes my life and my job more difficult so that instead of seeing a patient for half an hour, I'm spending half an hour fighting the prior authorization. Let's get AI baby. Let's use the technology for what it can do. Remove repetitive tasks. Like, no one saw the TI82 or whatever it was calculator come out and go, oh, my God, this is gonna make doctors lose their job. No, no, no. We just allowed it to calculate 10 plus 10 and we celebrate it for what it was. So AI get rid of the repetitive, mundane tasks that really clog up the system instead of trying to shoot for the pie in the sky all the time.
- [100:19]
Philip DeFranco
Yeah, I have. I have two final questions. Unless I get sidetracked like I always do, one you might not even answer because your field, it's like, it's a very. It's very hard to have like a fun thing because there's so many negative things. Do you have a conspiracy theory that you believe?
- [100:40]
Dr. Mike
I guess it's. What's your definition of conspiracy theory?
- [100:43]
Philip DeFranco
It's not. It's not.
- [100:44]
Dr. Mike
Oh, I have one. I have one. I have one. I shared it with Marquez Brownlee the other day. You're not ready for this.
- [100:53]
Philip DeFranco
I don't think I am.
- [100:54]
Dr. Mike
Okay. You know what a WI fi repeater.
- [100:58]
Philip DeFranco
Is like an extender?
- [101:01]
Dr. Mike
Yes.
- [101:02]
Philip DeFranco
Yeah.
- [101:04]
Dr. Mike
I'm concerned that because no legit companies are making them. I've never seen a legit company, like a company with a reputation make them. There's some kind of spy devices that are hacking into our networks across the country.
- [101:19]
Philip DeFranco
Country. Why not? I mean, there are mesh networks. So like if you, if you get.
- [101:24]
Dr. Mike
No, no, mesh networks are coming from legit companies. There's. Yeah, yeah, they're. They're publicly.
- [101:29]
Philip DeFranco
You're just talking about. I got, I got this like old fucking netgear. I need to get connection to the other side of the house. You get some brand you've never heard of. Extender.
- [101:39]
Dr. Mike
And that's most of those Extenders, they all come with like really weird names. I'm skeptical of those. And I'm also skeptical why every device needs to be connected to your WI fi. Like, why does, I don't know, like shoes that massage your feet need to be connected to WI fi.
- [102:01]
Philip DeFranco
I think, I wonder if it is a mixture of like, hey, we can say it's this feature versus like, it's just to get more.
- [102:08]
Dr. Mike
You said conspiracy theory and I didn't. It wasn't going to be super logical, but to me it's sus.
- [102:13]
Philip DeFranco
No, no, no.
- [102:14]
Dr. Mike
I'm not. I don't like giving my password to some random device of a no name company that is connected to the web, which means it's directly accessible, which means my entire home is now accessible. This conversation is now accessible to everyone in the world.
- [102:27]
Philip DeFranco
I operate my life under the belief that nothing I say is private.
- [102:31]
Dr. Mike
Okay, Fair.
- [102:33]
Philip DeFranco
I will be in my own bedroom and I'll be like, are you crazy for saying that? I'm like, write that shit on a piece of paper and I'll. I'll put. I'll burn it afterwards. No, I believe that there's no such thing as privacy anymore. I think that's. Even if you have an expectation of it, it is probably. It's probably off base. Whether it be because of your conspiracy Theory or because we're not reading Terms of Service and we're giving away everything.
- [103:06]
Dr. Mike
I also don't think those products even come with a Terms of Service because they come with shady packaging. And it almost feels like you're opening a spy device when you open one of them.
- [103:16]
Philip DeFranco
But. But here's the thing. You're still using it because why? Because what? Every.
- [103:21]
Dr. Mike
No, no, no. I. As soon as.
- [103:23]
Philip DeFranco
Whatever you say, like, I don't like whatever you say. You're like, I just don't have signal.
- [103:29]
Dr. Mike
Mesh, network or B for the win. Let's go.
- [103:31]
Philip DeFranco
Oh, orbeez. Yeah, I use them.
- [103:32]
Dr. Mike
Come on, let's go. Let's get one.
- [103:36]
Philip DeFranco
But I think it's, it's we, we as a collective. So majority. We can bitch about things, we can complain about things, but we're like, at the end of the day, if it's convenient, I don't give a shit. That's. That's what, that's what most of the purchases that people make have shown me. Second question. I'm so glad we had a stupid question to lead into this because I would hate to go from, this is how the, like, this is. This is the destruction of our company is because of this. And then this is the follow up. This is from my producer. I have to fucking say that so that I don't feel stupid for asking it. Mike, you have a new friend and he wears stilts. How many hangouts would you have to have with him before you start to suspect that he is wearing stilts?
- [104:21]
Dr. Mike
I would know on the first hangout.
- [104:24]
Philip DeFranco
You would know that. How do you know?
- [104:28]
Dr. Mike
Because he's taller than he was before?
- [104:31]
Philip DeFranco
No, it's your. It's a new friend.
- [104:32]
Dr. Mike
Oh, new friend. So someone I just met. Yeah, I think I would know right away. Also because of mobility, anatomic movement, biomechanically. I would.
- [104:46]
Philip DeFranco
Look, are you, Are you, Are you constantly. When you're, when you're talking to someone, are you watching their biomechanical movements?
- [104:51]
Dr. Mike
You know what is. It's the doctor in me. I'm always constant, constantly evaluating certain things. So that does happen. Like even when a patient comes in, they're walking into the exam room. I'm evaluating the way they walk.
- [105:05]
Philip DeFranco
Okay. You're always looking.
- [105:06]
Dr. Mike
Actually, part of my assessment. Like I, I'll. I'll put on steady gate antalgic gait. So like, there, there's, there's things that we're looking for. I was just doing an exam on a gentleman, listening to his heart, and as I'm listening to his heart. I see his hand is on his leg, and I see that there's a black line on his nail, which is potentially a subungual melanoma. Mmm. Again, not doing a nail exam.
- [105:32]
Philip DeFranco
But, Mike, I'm gonna get in your head real quick. Do you find that you're constantly looking for problems in your life?
- [105:40]
Dr. Mike
Phil? I'm looking for solutions.
- [105:42]
Philip DeFranco
Ooh. I'm looking for solutions to what? Solutions to what, Mike?
- [105:48]
Dr. Mike
To make people live happier and healthier lives.
- [105:51]
Philip DeFranco
Problems you don't. You can't finagle your way.
- [105:54]
Dr. Mike
You know how uncomfortable stilts are for the biomechanics of the knee?
- [105:58]
Philip DeFranco
No, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know how uncomfortable stilts are.
- [106:01]
Dr. Mike
You should try it before you judge it. And you should do it on grass so you're grounded with the earth.
- [106:07]
Philip DeFranco
Grounded with the earth.
- [106:09]
Dr. Mike
I was like, wait, do you believe Secretary Kevin?
- [106:12]
Philip DeFranco
Okay, I was like. I was like. Cause here's the deal. I was like, three years ago, I put my feet in the grass. Cause I'm always wearing shoes. I'm not like, I don't like. It felt nice. But then I saw a video and it was like, here's eight things that could burrow into your feet. I was like, well, I'm never fucking standing on grass barefoot again. No, I. Wait.
- [106:36]
Dr. Mike
Struggle is real.
- [106:36]
Philip DeFranco
Yeah. Yeah. You know what? I was gonna get more into your head, but I. I lost it. Mike, I'm going to let you go. I appreciate you so much. I. I love that we ended a very serious conversation about the future of our country and our future of our health and the impact it's going to have with stilts and you having. Probably.
- [106:57]
Dr. Mike
I'm going to think about if there's any alter. Alternative motives for you asking that question.
- [107:03]
Philip DeFranco
What? The stilts. Oh, you think I'm on stilts?
- [107:06]
Dr. Mike
I don't know.
- [107:07]
Philip DeFranco
It would be so sad. Okay, if I'm going stilts or maybe is it genius? Why would you stilts to six foot? Wouldn't you stilts to six three? Or is it some people are.
- [107:19]
Dr. Mike
Are getting leg lengthening surgeries and stuff?
- [107:22]
Philip DeFranco
That's insane. That's it. Whenever I see a video, I try.
- [107:25]
Dr. Mike
Not to be judgmental.
- [107:27]
Philip DeFranco
I. I love that for you, I'll be judgmental. That's insane. I've. Like, whenever there's a video, it's always like, I did this, and this is my new height, and it looks like they're on stilts. And then they're like. And I Used to like to play basketball. I'm like, you didn't fucking think this out, my guy? No. Okay, I just remembered. And then I'm going to let you go. I was joking about like you always finding problems and you saying you always find solutions. Do you have a hard time when someone's telling you about something that is wrong, not giving them a solution and just listening?
- [108:02]
Dr. Mike
I, that was a big problem in my 20s.
- [108:06]
Philip DeFranco
Oh, so you, you found.
- [108:07]
Dr. Mike
And you try to adapt and just be more of an empathetic ear at times. Unless people are saying they'd like to truth seek together.
- [108:18]
Philip DeFranco
I feel like that's such a hard thing because I think it is. I don't, I don't. Because I don't know if it's a guy thing. I don't know if it's a certain personality thing. I feel like I'm a, I'm a hammer. And you're like, here's a nail. And I'm like. And I'm not supposed to hit it.
- [108:33]
Dr. Mike
It's like the white guys can jump movie or white men can't jump movie where she's like, I'm thirsty. And he brings her a glass of water and she's like, I want you to say I too know what it feels like to be thirsty. So sometimes I try and think about that in my day to day life. But obviously I'm imperfect as all humans are and we seek to get better every day because we want solutions.
- [108:54]
Philip DeFranco
Phil, you're a born fixer. Being held back by society. That's what's happening. Mike, I appreciate you and I hope that we talk again soon, man.
- [109:03]
Dr. Mike
Awesome. Thank you, brother. Stay well.
- [109:06]
Philip DeFranco
And to you listening. Thanks for listening. Also remember, depending on where you're listening, definitely subscribe or follow. Give that five stars or hit that like button especially because I'll have more for you soon. See you then.