BONUS: MAHA's First 90 Days

would tagline us attack it tack it the podcast with rotting teeth because there's no fluoride in the water anymore no no i got the podcast all right do it do it do it hi everybody and welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that is banned in the eu but somehow allowed in the united that's really good actually that also might be true at some point although the opposite way around we might be banned in america but allowed in the eu i'm aubrey gordon i'm michael hobbs if you would like to support the show you're already doing that thank you so much or are you or are you so as part of our effort to both address like what is going on in the country but also not to lose our minds and also not to make like mega bummer episodes for the rest of our lives we are going to start doing these kind of periodic check-ins on sort of the the health grifters in office that is the point of this episode officially it's a bonus episode but we're going to put it in the main feed because we think that this stuff is important uh and people should know about it we want everyone to be aware of precisely how bleak in it yeah we want to put our like most bummer episodes free to the public it's so like emotionally it's so like emotionally it's so like emotionally yes and i think there are ways in which it feels like both really important and oddly sort of refreshing to just go okay here are the moving parts here's what's moving forward here's what's not rather than just like the wave of emotions crashing over us all the time for this episode like i just went on the hhs website and pulled every single press release and we're going to talk chronologically about like what rfk jr has done with effectively the first two months that he's been in power in my sort of end of the research for today which is like little some profiles of some like public figures who are supporters of maha stuff always are comic relief for this episode it's not very comical and there won't be relief but there was one of the people that i looked into had a quote that was like i'm fully supportive of rfk jr's quest to find the cause of autism and the way that they put it was to really get to the bottom of what's going on there yeah this is another fucking thing as a queer person who lived through the 90s i absolutely remember the like quest for the gay gene this gets us into it because the first thing we're going to do is an audio visual element so on february 13th rfk jr was confirmed so that's kind of where our story starts like the minute he takes power he deleted all of his previous tweets from before this date one of the first thing he tweets is like a public statement of like now that i'm in power like this is what you can expect from me and both of us i i wanted i wanted to do this like privately with you because our brains are broken in exactly the same way but we'll just do it on the show michael i just i would like to dispute that our brains are not broken in exactly the same way i watched 10 hours of montana state legislature floor session yesterday i think you're gonna talk about how your brain is broken in the true crime way which mine is not broken my brain is also broken in the true crime way okay i'm going to do a little statement and we are going to make like little ding sounds every time there's a conspiracy dog whistle can this be our sound for when there's a wait what do you what do you have no that's too happy that's too happy that's too happy we need we need like the x files theme to play wait hang on we'll get sued i got another one i michael i have a few of these we could do this every time do it i'm gonna put on the rap air horn hang on we should remix the two together it's gonna end up happening because there's gonna be so many of these i was about to tell you not to tell anyone i did that but then i realized i did it into a microphone many many people okay uh here's this did you get it so wait what are we remind me what we're dinging dog whistles for conspiracy theories okay ready all right do it hi i'm robert f kennedy jr on my first day at work here at hhs i want to take this moment to say a few words both to my supporters in the make america healthy again movement but also to all of the american public i could read you a list of statistics proving that americans suffer far higher levels of chronic disease obesity addiction cancer infertility and depression infertility and ever before in history and more than any other country in the world you already know that it's pretty obvious that something has gone terribly wrong with our health i'm also not going to tell you the reasons for this decline why because neither i nor anyone else could be certain see what i will tell you is that we are going to find out and we are going to do something about it no one else was trying my commitment to you is that we're going to make chronic disease our top priority in our first hundred days we're going to examine every possible contributing factor to the epidemic every factor we will leave no stone unturned we're going to examine every possible contributing factor to the epidemic every factor we will leave no stone unturned we will leave no stone unturned we're going to listen to the experts and to the dissidents and the dissidents we're going to listen to insiders and to the whistleblowers whistleblowers we're going to listen to the doctors and we're going to listen to the moms all the moms we will examine our food our medicine our water our lifestyles and our environment everything that goes into america's bodies we have to find something we care about more than being right more than political advantage and more than financial profit financial profit health of our children is a higher calling for all of us and here's another promise we're going to usher in a new era of transparency in all of our health agencies there's going to be no more hidden conflicts of interest no more secrecy no more profiteering from the substances that we're supposed to be regulating that's why we're going to deregulate them dude i i i sort of hate this thing because it makes it it makes me realize what a like tinfoil hat person i sound like because if you took the transcript of this and you were like oh like a normal politician said this most of it i'd be like yeah fine like chronic illness is a problem in america and like yeah we should have government transparency i mean a lot of the stuff he's saying on the surface kind of sounds fine but also when you know the way that he spent his career and when you know the anti-vax talking points this stuff about like we're not going to cave in to big pharma the infertility stuff we're finally going to have a conversation where we listen to the dissidents oh we're finally going to hear from people outside of like the expert consensus it's all conspiracy nonsense well and if you're not good at making your extremism sound reasonable then you're not very good at your extremism yeah yeah that's a good way to put it so to get into sort of the meat of this because i think if you're someone who doesn't follow this very closely this can all sound kind of reasonable like you know why are like people like mike and aubrey like why are they trying to block this guy who like all he wants to look at is chronic illness right but the minute you go like half an inch below the surface you find i'm not talking about like conspiracy talking points i'm talking about actual misinformation i do like that you're like hey you might be thinking i've never listened to this show before why do these people like what's going on non-listeners of our show these bad faith people hey people who aren't listening so one of his first acts in office was to have what's being known as like the maha executive order like the statement of purpose of like here's what we're gonna do as like the make america healthy again movement and so we are going to read some excerpts from it section one purpose american life expectancy significantly lags behind other developed countries with pre-covered 19 united states life expectancy averaging 78.8 years and comparable countries averaging 82.6 years six in ten americans have at least one chronic disease and four in ten have two or more chronic diseases an estimated one in five united states adults lives with a mental illness in a vacuum all of these statistics are roughly true then we get to the next paragraph these realities become even more painful when contrasted with nations around the globe across 204 countries and territories the united states had the highest age standardized incidence rate of cancer in 2021 nearly double the next highest rate further from 1990 to 2021 the united states experienced an 88 increase in cancer the largest percentage increase of any country evaluated so this is straightforwardly false america does not have the highest cancer incidence in the world and we've seen a decrease a significant decrease in cancer incidence and cancer mortality over the last 30 years according to the american cancer society this is not true that like every single thing that he's talking about is getting worse the thing that gets left out of the conversation about stuff like this is like actually how much treatment has progressed of all of these things how much detection has progressed of all of these things yeah if you look at the sort of league tables published by the world cancer research fund the country with the highest cancer incidence is not america it's australia and that's mostly skin cancer and part of that is because australia is like close to the hole in the ozone layer and like is full of white people who are susceptible to skin cancer but it's also because australia has very sophisticated systems for detecting skin cancer early and treating it so the fact that australia has high cancer incidence is in some ways actually good news it means that they're catching it early and if you look at the year he's citing 2020 data, but that's kind of a perfect illustration of this concept because in 2020, we had an almost 10% drop in cancer incidents, which is like totally unprecedented. Like you never get a fall in cancer that dramatic. But of course, it's not because cancer fell by 10%. It's because all the hospitals were closed because of the pandemic. And then of course, cancer incidents skyrocketed in 2021 because people were getting screened again. This is the problem with the whole like muddy way that he's presenting this, that high cancer rates aren't necessarily bad news and a drop in cancer incidents isn't good news. It could be less cancer, but it could also just be less cancer screening. Yeah, there's a real bizarre sort of arrogance to, well, two things. One, there's a real bizarre arrogance to assuming that because we don't have answers that are like definitive and sort of set in stone, that that means no one's trying. Yeah, exactly. That's a really, really strange, only I can fix it kind of attitude, right? And why does shit keep leaving my brain, Michael? I love it when you do two things, one, and then you forget your second thing. I fucking hate it. I hate it so much. This is why as a person in my forties, I never say two things, one, because I know I'm going to forget the second one. That needs to be left behind in my thirties. Fuck. I've noticed this when I'm editing too. They'll be like, the real problem is A, and then I talk and I just never get to B. Cut out me saying A. Our listeners don't need to know how broken our middle-aged brains are, you know? I'm just going to cut out this part. Yeah. I mean, there's, it's really strangely arrogant to assume that because we don't have hard and fast answers that no one's looking. And it also feels like there is this sort of, you have no idea where you're going with this. It's okay, Aubrey, we can just move on. It was back. I had it and it was back. We have so many more excerpts. You'll get there. It'll come back. I know. I know it will. I'm so sorry. Just read this excerpt. Okay. I'm reading an excerpt. All right. I'm sending you a thing about chronic conditions. This poses a dire threat to the American people and our way of life. 77% of young adults do not qualify for the military based in large part on their health scores. You're always talking about this. You're always like, young people aren't qualifying for the military. And I'm like, Aubrey, we can't do a whole episode about it. This is actually like one of the big anti-fat talking points from the 2000s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's nuts. We're not going to be able to invade. Canada because we're too fat. I'll be like, okay. How are we going to annex Greenland when we're all this fat? Like, oh, well, that's a sacrifice I have to make. So be it. Nobody tell them about fat deadlifters. 90% of the nation's $4.5 trillion in annual health care expenditures is for people with chronic and mental health conditions. In short, Americans of all ages are becoming sicker, beset by illnesses that our medical system is not addressing effectively. So this is a talking point that he, we're going to have to do, we're going to have to do. We're going to have to do this. This is what's like crippling the country is that like, we're spending all this money on these chronic conditions that can easily be prevented through like lifestyle. This whole concept is like completely bunk though, because the definition of a chronic condition is just anything which affects your daily functioning and anything that lasts for more than a year. And so this document itself even mentions earlier, roughly 60% of Americans have one chronic condition or another. So I have one, I have carpal tunnel syndrome. That's something that's been going on for more than a year. If you have like back pain, if you have like back pain, one of the other ones mentioned is tooth decay. Most of this is just people getting diagnosed with things and also people living longer. So among people over 65, 95% of them have a chronic illness. The thing about 90% of our healthcare spending goes to people with chronic conditions is mostly just a function of the fact that the vast majority of healthcare spending is spent on older people. Older people happen to be sicker. And when you're sicker, you require more money to get care. And also older people are the only people who get nationalized healthcare. Well, that's the thing. I mean, a lot of people have numerous conditions and like the fact that the healthcare system is spending money on them is an indicator that like people are receiving healthcare. Like a healthcare system that only responds to acute issues like you, you know, you get hit by a car and you like break your shoulder. That's not a real healthcare system. A healthcare system is going to focus on longer term care and it's going to spend money on care. This is actually evidence against the thing that he's talking about. It's actually evidence that the entire medical system does in fact care about chronic conditions already. It's really maddening. I mean, I think you see a similar thing when you look at the numbers around like diabetes, for example, age-based prevalence of diabetes goes like through the roof for seniors, right? There is a bunch of stuff that is to your point, all stuff that is like an outgrowth of living as long as we now live. It's really easy to see those as remedial problems that we have somehow brought on ourselves and not actually like in the scheme of things, good new problems that are like, ah, people aren't dying at 30 anymore. Yeah. We're addressing the issues that people actually have. It doesn't mean that there aren't still issues to address, but it does mean that it, it, it doesn't necessarily mean that we've been like fucking it up real hard. It also definitely doesn't follow that someone acknowledging the prevalence of chronic illnesses is therefore equipped and qualified to find solutions. This is the other thing that feels like it's big here is that like when we have this sort of like, ah, this thing is important and oh, we don't know what to do about it yet. There are two things that can sort of swoop in to fill that gap. One is worldview, right? And I think RFK Jr's worldview is swooping in, in a big way. And the other is marketing. And like, we'll get into this with the influencer side, but like the marketing side is like alive and well, right? Like a bunch of the influencers who've attached to the Maha stuff have done so. I would argue because there is such an opportunity to like get boosted to a new level of audience and to get to sell your products. This is yet another theme that emerged in a lot of the HHS stuff that I read is that he has like the worldview and the orientation of a fucking influencer, not a person of science, right? Because a person of science would be familiar enough with statistics not to like lie in the third paragraph of their sort of flagship executive order. And also this thing of like, you know, we're finally going to study it and like, oh, we're going to listen to the whistleblowers and stuff. This is like what people say on TikTok, who like don't actually know anything and aren't familiar with the science. Like, you don't want people like this running things. I want to be precise about something, which is like, the chances are that RFK Jr is not personally sitting down and writing this executive order. Maybe he is, probably not. I think it's also an issue if he is not able to hire and supervise in such a way that they can actually accurately fact check. It's an institutional problem. It is an institutional problem. And you could absolutely see this guy like just you could imagine this guy sending something back because it's not the numbers that compare with his worldview rather than that. It's not accurate numbers, right? Even though the vast majority of like chronic conditions in America are among older people, he then switches to chronic childhood conditions because this is yet again like the way that you market your thing of like, we're finally going to take care of children. I look this up around 30% of kids who have chronic condition, but things like learning disabilities and ADHD are considered chronic conditions for kids. So if you look at like the sort of distribution, it's primarily ADHD, learning disabilities and asthma, around 10% of kids have asthma. More kids getting diagnosed with learning disabilities, I think is a good thing. I think if kids need help and they're getting the help that they need, it's now about 8% of kids have a learning disability of some kind or another. I don't think that's like a crazy high number. We're not talking about like 96% of kids have a learning disability that that doesn't indicate like over diagnosis to me. And like some kids do have fucking ADHD and like it's really great that people are also getting diagnosed with asthma early. Right. I also think like it's easy to forget what the cultural dialogue was around ADHD in the 90s and 2000s. And that was it's all made up. Psychiatrists are pushing these medications on your kids who don't need them. Yeah. It's over diagnosed and the medications themselves might be the issue. Yeah. And I think you can sort of see some of that peeking through here. Right. As a core assumption. Right. Right. It also like the thing that makes me like so profoundly uncomfortable with so much of his rhetoric is like the assumption is that neurodivergent kids are a problem to be fixed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We have to find out the cause of autism so that there are not more autistic kids. Right. We have to find out the cause of ADHD. Food dies question mark. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's so sort of divorced from the science around those things and it is so it so speaks to the sort of like both the like panic around those issues and also a likely discomfort with people. Totally. He's also so obsessed with the statistic that one in 31 kids have autism now. Experts say that it's more like one in 36 but like that's three percent of kids. And like that doesn't sound nuts to me. I'm just like yeah around three percent of this thing that is relatively rare but is also a real thing in the population like is three percent the wrong number. That seems OK. It's like claiming to care about these conditions while like pretty overtly increasing the stigma facing people who have those conditions. And that's the thing that pisses me off. And also I just feel like I know a lot of people who are struggling with that stigma part. Yeah. And I'm like this isn't helping. OK. Final excerpt. Aubrey get your slide whistle out. The ostensible purpose of this executive order is to set up this commission that is going to study. The quote unquote finally study these issues. And so I'm going to read you a couple excerpts from the sort of purpose of like the commission and like what it's going to do. And I want you to like use your little slide whistle when you hear like a conspiracy talking point. I now all of a sudden have test anxiety where I'm like, oh no, am I going to fail? Just use it the whole time, Aubrey. Just as like background noise. Okay. So this is like the purpose of these assessments that it's going to produce. One, identify and describe childhood chronic disease in America compared to other countries. Great. Two, assess the threat that potential over-utilization of medication, certain food ingredients, certain chemicals, and certain other exposures posed to children with respect to chronic inflammation or other established mechanism of disease. Assess the prevalence and threat posed by prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight loss drugs. Identify and report on best practices for preventing childhood health issues, including through proper nutrition and the promotion of healthy lifestyles. He also has a thing earlier in the document where he talks about electrocardiograms. I do have to say it was very funny to go through that whole thing and just silently, soberly slide whistle. That's what these updates are going to be from now on. Just Mike reading and Aubrey with her slide whistle. A 21 slide whistle salute. So this is, again, the thing that I will never stop shouting about. All of these people saying that like, oh, he just wants to like make Americans eat better or whatever, have to grapple with the fact that what he is saying is full of fucking misinformation. This thing of like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are like making kids have autism or whatever has been looked at. It's not fucking true. I mean, a lot of this stuff is just like whack job blogosphere shit. And I think it plays to this sort of like oddly kind of like Luddite undertone, which is just like there are new medical treatments. They must be witchcraft, right? I don't know why weight loss drugs is on here, too. That's interesting because he always talks about obesity and then he throws in he's like, we need to look into the influence of weight loss drugs. Yeah, no, he's very anti. Yeah, very anti everything. He wants his wellness farms instead. I think the whole like the whole thing is lifestyle. He thinks that lifestyle can cure every single illness. Right. Which is what you think when you have relatively good health. Yeah. Yeah. Your health care has always been provided to you. Yeah. And when you've been taught that health is a meritocracy and you get out of it what you put into it, which is not true of almost anything in this life. To me, it's like it's it's fundamentally hierarchical. It's like there's a good way to live and there's a bad way to live. And if you're fat, it's because you're living in the bad way. And if you live in the good way, you won't be fat. Yeah. And like, listen, my good bitches, if that is not like extremely conservative sort of fascist. Yeah, exactly. Like I can look at you and know everything I need to know about you. Like if someone is willing to dehumanize anyone, there is a good chance they are willing to dehumanize lots more people. Just that group. Right. Speaking of dehumanizing. Oh, what a transition. The other kind of like first hundred days, like my first action in office thing that RFK Jr. does is he joins the Trump administration's other ongoing witch hunts. So on February 19th, he puts out guidance saying HHS takes action on President Trump's executive orders defending women and children. This is the garbage about it. Like there's only two genders. And like we finally we're finally going to go back to only having two genders. And I just want to read a quote from RFK Jr. because I think there's still like a little bit of residue of like, well, he's a Kennedy and like he ran as a Democrat and like maybe he's not so bad. So here is a quote from him. He says, actually, I'll send it to you. This administration is bringing back common sense and restoring biological truth to the federal government. The prior administration's policy of trying to engineer gender ideology into every aspect of public life is over. So no point in going into. This in any more depth. We've done like a million podcasts about it. But like this is, of course, a deranged, bigoted moral panic. But I just want to emphasize that like RFK Jr. is like a piece of shit on trans rights, the same way that every other fucking Republican is a piece of shit on trans rights. Also, people will argue he's not a Republican. I would argue you accepted a position with the Trump administration. I don't know. Like whatever Republican than that. Right. Immediately after this, he rescinds a Biden executive order basically saying that like gender affirming care is fine. And then he's like, well, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't and attacks on gender-affirming care, banning a form of fucking healthcare by law. All of this is illegitimate. The Biden administration put out this executive order. HHS rescinds it. Fuck off, asshole. He also launches an investigation of Maine for allowing trans kids in sports. The governor of Maine is a Democrat. And then now the Trump administration is quite just sort of openly, illegally threatening to revoke all federal funding from the entire state over this. So this is like an ongoing legal battle. And then, this is just last week, he announced that there's going to be an online portal run by HHS where, quote, whistleblowers can submit a tip or complaint regarding the chemical and surgical mutilation of children to the HHS Office of Inspector General. Jesus fucking hell. So this is, again, just classic fascist shit. They set up these fucking hotlines. They had one under the first Trump administration about immigrant crime, right? What they do is they cast this net super wide. They get a million reports. A lot of them are really bad faith. Like, oh, the school nurse is, like, doing surgery on kids or whatever. And more people get caught up in this insane dragnet of, like, deportations, getting disappeared off the street. This is very, very, like, classic authoritarian stuff. Gender-affirming care for kids is, like, you can go to hospital websites and be like, what do you offer? Like, when are appointments available? This is not, like, a clandestine secret thing. This is, like, a part of health care. And studies about it are published in peer-reviewed journals. The idea that we'd have, like, a whistleblower hotline about it is absurd. It's like whistleblowers about, like, knee replacements or something. It's like a normal part of health care. The concept of whistleblowing is, like, the idea that you would blow the whistle on internal operations of a company or institution that is systematically breaking the law. Right, exactly. Or committing unethical acts. Which, again, we have no evidence of in gender-affirming care at all. What we have evidence of is patients who want care seeking out that care. And sometimes. And sometimes being denied that care. Yeah. Right? Like, if there's a problem here, it has much more to do with denials of care than it has to do with, like, it's run amok or whatever. The other witch hunt that he's joining is the administration's crackdown on, quote-unquote, anti-Semitism. Oh, no. So, on February 5th, the HHS announces that it's initiating investigations of four medical schools for anti-Semitic incidents at their commencement addresses. And I was like, I haven't heard of this. Like, were people throwing things? Like, was. No, someone fucking wore a Palestine flag pin or some shit. Aubrey. It's gonna be nothing. I'm sending you the link. Okay. So, I Googled this. I was like, commencement medical schools? Like, it's a very specific thing, right? And the HHS press release doesn't name the schools or, like, what happens. I was like, where are they even getting this? This goes to one article called Medical Schools 2024 Commencements and Anti-Semitism Cold War. Addressing Unprofessional Behavior. This is, like, this random academic article. Scroll down, Aubrey, to figure one. It's in, like, a different color than the rest of the text. It's images of different scarves that people are wearing with their graduation robes. Some of them are wearing keffiyahs. Some of them are wearing Palestinian flag scarves. That's it. It's not anti-Semitic remotely to do that. Like, these are not anti-Semitic incidents at commencement addresses. Like, they're just not. It's so fucking. It's fucking frustrating because the anti-Semitism is a super real thing and it's wild to watch this administration just appropriate it as a way of quashing political speech. Oh, also, you can scroll down to figure two if you want, which is, like, right down there. I don't want, but I will. And these are, like, anti-Semitic slogans that the students were holding, allegedly. One of them says, Stop bombing hospitals. It's not like this is, like, misinformation or something. Like, this group is being falsely accused of something. Like, this is happening. So to say that this is a fucking anti-Semitic slur and that somehow this kid, which, like, I think is relatively brave for putting this on at their fucking commencement, this person is the problem rather than the bombing of fucking hospitals? There's another one that is someone crossing the stage to presumably accept their degree and unfolding a banner that says end genocide, apartheid, Zionism, and something, something, something that I can't read, and then free Palestine. It says, End your complicity. End your complicity, free Palestine. The core problem is the idea that we need some sort of exotic explanation for why young people would be offended at, like, entire cities being razed to the ground and, like, children starving. Why doctors would not want hospitals to be bombed. I don't need an alternate explanation for this. Like, wow, why are people doing this, like, totally irresponsible thing? It's like, no, I think very straightforwardly people are offended by images of children starving, the idea that we're, like, casting around for, like, what are their real motivations is fucking insane. So, anyway, this article, as far as I can tell, is, like, the only place previous to this HHS press release where this, like, anti-Semitic incidents at commencement addresses, like, thing was put forward. So, like, we don't know what the consequences on these schools will be, but, like, this is, like, this is becoming a real thing that people with power are wielding. Yeah, and when you line that up with trying to rescind the tax statuses of universities, trying to, sort of, pull grants and funding, like, there's just, like, so much very clearly politicized manipulation happening here. one we won't get as into it but there's also one about dei there's a deranged article in the washington free beacon about ucla medical school they're giving in the woke dei and that like they don't put have as many white students anymore something something finally someone's looking out for white medical students i'll finally have a white doctor in my life the article itself has statistics indicating that this has not happened it says that like they've appointed this like mega dei president of ucla medical school and it has statistics basically there's the same number of white people from 2020 to 2024 but there are now fewer asian people and more hispanics so like that has shifted but like the idea that like there's no merit-based admissions like this is just like classic right-wing moral panic garbage but of course hhs is now joining this and is like investigating ucla so again we see this pipeline from like bad faith right-wing tabloid nonsense into like actual government policy oh god damn it okay now that you're all pissed off let's talk about influencers let's talk about influencers it's not gonna get better well i'm excited though anyway do you want to know why it's not gonna do you want to know who our first influencer is katie perry in space jillian michaels oh yeah who we talk about off the show like pretty frequently but we finally get to talk about her on the show everybody wants a mean lesbian but then she shows up it's all fun and games and she's on white lotus so michael while you were looking into the sort of official maha agenda thus far i was looking into some of the public figures that have lined up behind rfk jr in particular and one of his biggest champions is queen gremlin herself jillian michaels friend of the show enemy of the show jillian michaels for folks who are unfamiliar jillian michaels was the trainer on the biggest loser mike do you are there any particular memories that you have of you did our biggest loser episode all i remember is her like lying down so she could yell at someone like closer to their face when they were like doing push-ups that's the image that has burned into my mind of like it's not enough for me to be shitty to you from like three feet away i need to be like six inches away i will say as someone who recently re-watched some biggest loser episodes i thought she was awful and then i went back and watched those episodes and i was like oh my brain has been going easy on jillian oh really she's so much worse when you go back and re-watch those old episodes then you can even like imagine one of the big ones and we talked about this on our episode was her shouting at a fat person on the biggest loser who was on a treadmill and was saying like was like wheezing and saying i can't actually do this i need to take a break jillian michaels screaming at them at the top of her lungs the only way you're getting off that treadmill is in a body bag nice it's just a thing that you say to people just as an adult a thing that you say to other adults well it's motivating michael and you say it because you care i'm actually like a really good person for being like a huge piece of shit to you in what i would argue is the least surprising turn in human history jillian michaels is now a regular on fox news she is also on news nation she recently wrote an op-ed for the daily mail about how being trans is the result of social contagion and because people are just doing it because it's quote unquote fashionable you're not even an athlete jillian you just like work out you're just like good at working out she also has a podcast called keeping it real what it's not even like a pun it's not like biggest losing my mind if you go to apple podcast right now and you pull up her podcast there will be three recent guests just on the same screen without even like load more okay those guests include candace owens bill o'reilly and alan dershowitz so she's in she's not like one of the reasonable ones she's like a full-on psycho she just sort of started popping up on these shows like five to ten years ago part of it is she had this program called healthy wager she still runs it that is the idea is you place a bet against yourself oh we've already talked about these these are such garbage yeah and throughout all of this i think this is really interesting this came up with a couple of the sort of like lady influencers that i looked into for this they're continuing to be platformed by like entertainment news and women's media so like e-news keeps giving a platform to jillian michaels it's two e-news with her fashion police it's really notable to me how many of the folks that i started to sort of look into on this maha and started out with some level of weight loss content right and i wanted to just lift up that like people who have strident anti-fat views people who devote their time to making sure that other people look a way that is acceptable to them right are people who also buy into healthism and ableism in a really big way it's very similar to this all this garbage about like sort of anti-trans stuff but also just like i had a purple haired barista at starbucks and somehow that's like an imposition on my rights it's just like a hatred of difference i think you're right about like a core discomfort with difference and a core disdain for difference i think the thing two things one direction two things what's the second thought leave all of you you said one where's two no the thing i was gonna say about julian michaels is that like the sort of core complaint that she has about a number of things she is also very skeptical of ozempic she is also very skeptical of weight loss surgery on the biggest loser she refers to it as and i quote taking the easy way out which like i would encourage you to just pilot that just see how that goes over with anyone who has had or performed weight loss surgery also just leave people alone the core assumption there is that if fat people don't want to be treated badly they should just not be fat yeah but also don't be fat in the ways that i want you to not be fat right which totally erases julian michaels own behavior from that equation right it totally absolves anyone who is treating fat people like shit of having to think about their own behavior and it's kind of thinking that shows up in a lot of conservative politics right yeah it's the if that person didn't want to be sexually assaulted they should have dressed differently or i shouldn't have been there right like it is all of this sort of thinking that is like there are no aggressors there are only foolish people who make themselves pray right that is the canary in the coal mine for a lot of people that their politics might not be as like rock solid and they might not be as deeply empathetic yeah they might want you to think although julian michaels in fairness never wanted anyone to think she was deeply empathetic that was never the message she's mean as hell but now she's just mean as hell in a specific way so that one's just like a little like where are they now okay the answer is they've gone from yelling at fat people to yelling about trans people and immigrants on fox news i my next little section of like rfk jr stuff is like the sort of decent things that he's done or like borderline decent things so maybe maybe this will lift us back up maybe this will lift our spirits we're talking about pharma ads no we are talking about the measles outbreak this is moving very fast it's in many states there are two deaths so far on march 3rd the hhs releases a press release called measles outbreak is a call for action to all of us and this is written sort of officially written by rfk jr the sub headline is mmr vaccine is crucial to avoiding potentially deadly disease genuinely kind of stunning coming out of an administration run by this guy i was happy to see this like there were various things going around on social media of like rfk jr defends measles vaccine and i'm like okay great like lowest imaginable bar he cleared it i'm happy about that however if you read the full public statement oh no he also says some slightly more out-of-pocket things so here is a paragraph from later in the press shocking it is also our responsibility to provide up-to-date guidance on available therapeutic medications while there is no approved antiviral for those who may be infected cdc has recently updated their recommendations supporting administration of vitamin a under the supervision of a physician for those with mild moderate and severe infection studies have found that vitamin a can dramatically reduce measles mortality boy oh fucking boy so out of one side of his mouth he's like get the vaccine and then out of the other he's like well but also you knew vitamin a because like vitamin vitamin a is like a miracle take it from a guy who had an eating disorder vitamin a is in fucking everything there is some data that vitamin a can kind of like in an inchoate way help strengthen your immune system and it's not just vitamin a it's vitamin a that's your immune system when you have measles like it can help you recover a little bit more quickly although it's not like necessary in any way it's like yeah this might help but also people are now taking it as a prophylactic because they think that it will prevent measles and there's no fucking evidence of this and taking vitamin a in large doses regularly is really bad for you so parents in texas are giving their kids vitamin a regularly and kids are coming into the hospital fucking sick michael this is the reason that pete evans kids cook cookbook got pulled from the shelves for vitamin a because there were recipes with mega doses of vitamin a that were designed for like toddlers and and infants dude that's why we all don't have a copy of bubba yum yum by pete evans there's also this the following paragraph tens of thousands died with or of measles annually in 19th century america by 1960 before the vaccine's introduction improvements in sanitation and nutrition had eliminated 98 of measles deaths good nutrition remains a best defense against most chronic and infectious illnesses vitamins a c and d and foods rich in vitamins b12 c and e should be part of a balanced diet notice the conspiracy language here tens of thousands died with or of measles annually people did not die with measles that's like a covid conspiracy myth right yes absolutely like was they died when they had covid when they died but that doesn't mean that's why they died and it's like oh if you die in a car accident but you have covid it's listed as a covid death which wasn't fucking true but this goes around conspiracy circles and it's especially ridiculous with measles because most people who died of measles were fucking little tiny kids so just straight up misinformation and this whole thing of like well by 1960 we basically didn't even like need the vaccine because like sanitation and nutrition got like so much better like he's implying that like the vaccine didn't matter because everything the vaccine achieved we achieved with lifestyle beforehand which is not true so it's like even when he clears the lowest imaginable bar he still throws in conspiracy garbage and fucking vaccine hesitancy talking points yeah it's maddening also like do you want to look at life expectancies before 1960 my god yeah for little tiny kids there's another like we now have outbreaks of whooping cough too and like whooping cough used to kill like hundreds of kids a year and it's coming back it's like really dangerous stuff because people are refusing to get vaccinated i had to go i had to go update mine because my parents didn't vaccinate me because they saw that documentary yeah i had to go get it like a couple months ago yeah i had a friend who like admitted to me recently that he did not have his kids vaccinated until like i think they were teens or whatever and he was just like yeah man i was just in sort of like crunchy lefty spaces where people were like that's what the government wants you to do or whatever and right like and he was just like so i just sort of like went along with that and whatever else it's just really wild i think especially on the maha stuff to just think about how many people i know who are like well they are poisoning our food right right like the number of people i know who talk about endocrine disruptors without actually having any sense of like what that means or how it would function yeah and i think it's just been really striking to me how much the people who think they are least vulnerable to this stuff are actually most vulnerable i think that's my point here also like full amnesty for anybody who was like previously an anti-vaxxer or whatever like if you come to the party late i'm not gonna i'm not gonna yell at you for how late you are i'm gonna be happy that you're here so like good for your friend good for my parents like it's it's much better to sort of de-stigmatize people who change their minds on this stuff and be like well that's great you got vaccinated i think that's good however people get there yeah but this sort of stuff actually leads to like the next little string of rfk junior initiatives so at hhs he's also done a lot of stuff about food additives so on march 10th he announces that the fda is going to close the loophole by which food companies can assess that their own ingredients are generally regarded as safe i don't know if you remember this from our daily harvest episode yeah grass the grass stuff so the idea is that in 1958 eisenhower passed a law that basically established the modern food system and said that like every chemical that goes into food has to be tested and has to be safe however because there was already an existing food supply you had to have like a little exception for existing ingredients so like the one they always use is olive oil lots of foods had olive oil and you can't just like we'll take all the olive oil out of the food and like we'll test it and make sure that it's safe you can say like well it's generally regarded as safe or like baking soda so this makes sense in its inception since this time there's now a process where food companies can self-certify that their ingredients are generally regarded as safe and this isn't necessarily checked there's there's kind of two different ways of doing this and one of the ways of doing it is like you have to submit an affidavit of research and then the fda can be like okay we're not going to contest this and then it goes forward but there's also a way that you just like notify the fda and the fda is like okay since the 1950s we've had more than 750 chemicals enter the u.s food supply and only 10 of them have gone through the process of like being tested so like this is an actual thing and like left-wing think tanks have like also written reports about this we talked about it in daily harvest episode it's like a real genuine problem this loophole in the fda like this is worth closing however this also is like one of the sub sub sub bad reasons why you shouldn't have like conspiracists running things is because i don't fucking trust rfk jr to like run this process if we leave it to him then fucking measles is gonna end up on the grass just like a vial of measles and like your lucky charms absolutely so like again it's like there are people who are like well i think we should give him credit for doing this and like maybe but we haven't seen the outcome of this and i do not trust a person who has no fealty to like basic facts and who has a bunch of conspiratorial beliefs to run a fucking process like this i don't think the outcome of this is going to be positive right it requires like a level of if i'm thinking about like redesigning a system like this right from a policy standpoint this would require years and years of public engagement years and years of buy-in building exactly such high levels of transparency that would be really difficult for someone who has never held office before it also requires a lot of transparency and i don't think that's going to be a good thing it also requires not firing thousands of people tens of thousands of people from fucking hhs which is one of the other first things that he's done they've gone from 82 000 employees to 62 000 employees and just this morning i saw that the nih put out another report showing even more fucking cuts so again any serious effort to make americans healthier and to like address chronic illness would not have mass fucking firings it would have a huge increase in the capacity of the government to do stuff like this and then the people who stay get to stick around for like staff meetings where he's thrown around the r word apparently yeah i know and then just like jesus god he also in that speech said like the deep state is real and shit he's like a baby office rocker yeah he was like it's real and it's not just soros or whatever i was like oh god help us it's literally elon musk though we gotta do something about anti-semitism while i blame a high-profile jewish person for being the deep state the last thing we're going to talk about is he has in late march until now effectively embarked upon the maha tour where he is like visiting different states and in the hhs announcement it says senator kennedy will celebrate new state laws that ban ultra processed foods and dyes in public schools restrict snap purchases of candy and soda and ban the addition of fluoride to public drinking water so he's basically celebrating these like right-wing efforts to do like right-wing food shit the thing again removing dyes from school lunches this is a legislation that was just passed in west virginia it's sort of an empirical question how big of a deal this is the idea that like there's a chemical additive that is like harming us is sort of plausible to me but also that's like we need to actually look at research i don't there's like also a fear-mongering component of this the thing to know about the food dyes stuff is that when you ask people like what's the issue they will tell you it's hyperactivity in kids what they won't tell you is that the core question that most frequently gets researched is do food dyes exacerbate existing symptoms in kids who already have adhd but because we're all playing one giant game of telephone about this shit that has turned into it causes adhd right so it's leaning really hard into like straight up proud ableism the the really bad one is this stealth effort that is happening it in numerous states now to ban soda and quote-unquote candy from food stamps have you heard about this this like nationwide effort to take soda off of food stamps yeah it's just an attempt to make food stamps inaccessible to as many people as possible and to make them as confusing as possible and to make them as unappealing as possible right it's sort of the hostile architecture approach to like public support programs right of course it's also perfect for them because they can say like oh well soda is very bad for you and we care about the health of americans and we're just trying to improve the health of americans right but of course what this amounts to is just a further restriction on food stamps so 15 states have proposed bills to do this and actually when he was running for president rfk jr published a editorial in the wall street journal that said that he wants to exempt not only soda but also quote processed foods from food stamps which is like significantly worse because like soda there's some issues with like how to define soda but like processed foods is just like no one knows what the fuck like everybody has a completely different definition and so exempting quote-unquote processed foods could be a small category or could be like a massive category there is almost no food that you could argue is entirely unprocessed right there's also the question of like why is this happening all of a sudden right if 15 states are doing something at the same time that means that there's a push from like an outside actor so this entire wave is being pushed by a think tank called foundation for government accountability which is very open about the fact that it wants to basically gut every form of welfare so biden expanded food stamps like quite significantly during the pandemic this organization has publish op-eds arguing to roll that back. The FDA also uses a specific like basket of goods when they're calculating food stamp amounts. It's based on like the prices of various foods. And there's like different ways you can do that. There's like the thrifty bucket. There's like the enough nutrition bucket. There's like too much nutrition bucket. There's like different ways of doing this. And this organization has pushed for an even lower threshold to be used. Like people should be eating even shittier and cheaper food than they are now. So this is an organization that wants to cut food stamps. That's not like a he said, she said thing. All of these are designed as entry points into a larger sort of like set of movement values and like policy objectives. And I think we get so far into like wanting to give everything a fair shake and wanting to both sides everything that we like turn off our critical brains and just allow ourselves to get got by some of this stuff. Luckily, I don't think this would make them. I don't think this would make them. much of a difference. Honestly, I mean, people are not spending that much of their income on sodas anyway, because soda is super cheap. But on the other hand, why the fuck are we even doing this? Like, there shouldn't be food stamps, there should just be money that you get. Like the whole idea that like, there's like right now food stamps, like you can't buy hot food with food stamps. You can't buy like paper towels and stuff. Food stamps in most states, tampons and pads are not covered by food stamps. We're just like great cool. It's like a single mom with three kids supposed to go to the grocery store and get like, raw broccoli and then like make nice roasted broccoli with olive oil for her kids. Well, a she doesn't have the time be broccoli is expensive as fuck, right? Like even if you agreed to the premise that like, actually lifestyle is at the root of every everything. He also doesn't want to do the things that would make those lifestyle choices possible. Yeah, it's just it's it's a it's a thing that you say, you can get your weird conspiratorial anti vax garbage into polite society. It's not something he actually has any interest in doing. If you look at the the history of this man's life, like what has he spent the last three decades doing? You find? No evidence of doing anything for low income people or doing anything about chronic disease. You find a bunch of anti vax garbage, right? And a bunch of rhetoric that like actively makes life harder for people who have chronic illnesses, mental illnesses, neurodivergence, all of that kind of stuff. Yes. So that is our bleak RFK Jr. update. Calgon, take me away. Send me to the wellness farm. No one is still with us. Aubrey, nobody. Everyone do that. They're like, this is too much. This is a death march. I hate it. I want you to say two things one and then say something and then the episode ends. And it's a cliffhanger and people have to tune in next time for the second thing. Next time on 40 year old woman's brain. This is a cliffhanger and people have to tune in next time for the second time for the third time. This is a cliffhanger and people have to tune in next time for the third time for the third