Derek Thompson

None of this seems to directly fix the food supply, right?

You're regulating the downstream marketing and selling of food to individuals and

which might or might not be good, but it doesn't fix the food supply at the source.

What are the better ideas for fixing the food supply upstream?

Kevin, I have to ask a question that must be bouncing around in a lot of listeners' heads, which is a lot of the recommendations that I'm hearing here sound exactly like what I would hear if I had someone from the Maha Make America Healthy Again movement on my show.

You left the NIH citing censorship under RFK Jr.

Clearly listening to you

You think that Maha's right about emphasizing the quality of our food supply, but also given your recent history, you clearly depart meaningfully from this movement.

So how do you cash out what Maha's getting right and wrong?

I'm very interested in Maha's relationship

to pharmaceutical therapies versus supplements.

So you hear from RFK Jr.

often a deep skepticism toward big pharma, a skepticism toward vaccines, a skepticism essentially toward technologies that have phase three clinical trial evidence that they make us healthy.

At the same time, out of this general Maha space, especially in the podcast world, you've got a huge fondness for supplements.

And in many cases, supplements are directly funding a lot of these podcasts and shows.

Well, as I learned from your book, thanks to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, there is no need for any supplement sold in America to demonstrate any proof of effectiveness.

That is to say, when you buy a supplement, you are buying something that exists in

in the supplement aisle precisely because it's never even been tested to do anything that it says on the label.

How do you make sense of this weird relationship that Maha seems to have with, let's call it more broadly, medicine, where they're skeptical about the therapies that have been shown to be effective, but trusting of the pills that have no proof of effectiveness?

I feel like a larger theme of this show, this interview, is that American food and drug policy is very scattershot in terms of where we regulate and where we under-regulate.