Calley Means
speaker
1,357 appearances
15 recordings
7 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard 9 Apr
Calley Means’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I probably did say that. Kennedy makes two big arguments about our health, and the first is deeply divisive. He is skeptical of vaccines.
Science disagrees. The second argument is something that a lot of Americans, regardless of their politics, have concluded. He says our food system is serving us garbage and that garbage is making us sick. Coming up on today explained a confidant of Kennedy's, in fact, the man who helped facilitate his introduction to Donald Trump, on what the Make America Healthy Again movement wants.
You're listening to Today Explained. Callie Means is an informal advisor to RFK who went viral on Twitter about two years ago with this explosive claim. Callie had worked as a consultant for Coca-Cola, and he said that he'd witnessed Coke give millions of dollars to various groups to ensure that sugar taxes failed and that soda was included in food stamp funding.
Callie went on to co-author a book with his sister, Dr. Casey Means, called Good Energy, and he founded a company called TrueMed. Today, he maintains deep skepticism of big food and big pharma, and he contends that these industries have economic incentives not to make Americans well, but to keep us sick.
Kelly, what do you hear as the main pushback against you? What do your critics argue?
I've seen some of the ad hominem attacks. I wonder if you can explain that aspect of your message. Why does everything, because you know that many people will be turned off by kind of what they view as conspiratorial thinking. Might it make sense to temper this a little bit? Do you think part of the problem is, like, you know, it sounds a bit nutty, someone might say, right?
The idea that everybody is in league to keep Americans sick.
I'm going to push just a little bit further on this, Kelly, because there are statements of fact that you are making. Yes. And they will pass a fact check. It's it's the idea that pharmaceutical companies want to keep us sick. I didn't say that. Companies want to keep us.
Well, the economic incentive is the want. I mean, it's America. It's a capitalist society.
What are their motivations?
You're saying there is an economic incentive.
I think that many people would agree with you that when there is money involved, the incentives to grow, to grow the company can lead to perverse outcomes like a lot of sick Americans. You are the founder of a company that sells, among other things, supplements, fitness classes, fitness equipment. I was on this morning. You have some good sales.
You personally have an economic incentive in this, too. And I wonder, is there any part of you that thinks maybe I should just be the guy that says the thing but not try to make money off it?
And you're not making any profit?
Excuse me.
President Trump appointed a seed oil lobbyist to be chief of staff of the USDA. He fought Obama-era rules to cut ultra-processed foods from school lunch. He made RFK eat a Big Mac for a photo op. In the 2024 election, President Trump overwhelmingly won in America's farm-dependent counties. Those are areas where there is a lot of farming.
And so you would assume the president has to really take care not to alienate big ag. Do you think President Trump really is genuinely invested in the Maha movement?
There is an area here that is deeply divisive, and it will come up again and again, we can predict, in Mr. Kennedy's hearing. And that is his views on vaccines. So he has said before that he believes autism comes from vaccines.
He runs a nonprofit, Children's Health Defense, that consistently cast doubt on vaccines, on the schedule on which they're administered, on the ingredients in them, on whether they protect or actually cause chronic illnesses. Do Mr. Kennedy's positions on vaccines concern you at all?
You know, our parents are old enough to remember polio. We're in the millennial generation and polio feels like it was a million years ago. It really wasn't. Americans broadly are susceptible to conspiratorial thinking. One of the concerns that I know you don't like the word conspiratorial, but let me let me offer you the concern as I've heard it articulated.
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