- Harnessing the power of psychology,
the reach of social media,
and the funding of private equity,
the evolution of misinformation has begun.
It has become increasingly difficult to figure out
what is true versus what is a sales pitch.
Today I wanna highlight a viral example
and give you some tips
so you too can protect yourself from falling victim to it.
(graphic whooshing)
The modern snake oil salesman
is really just an I.K.A. expert.
I coined this term during my TED Talk in Monaco
just before the pandemic.
The epidemic of the "I know all" expert.
There are too many of these experts out there
claiming to have all of the answers
when the rest of the scientific community has questions.
Back then, these I.K.A. experts
flourished in what I called the gray zone.
That is when a question within the field of medicine
has not yet had a complete answer by modern science.
20 years ago,
we didn't really have a proven and safe medication
to help patients struggling with weight loss.
Companies and medical gurus pounced and tried to sell you.
- I lost 21 pounds.
- 39 pounds.
- 31 pounds.
- [Announcer] Millions of Americans have made Hydroxycut
the number one weight loss supplement.
(static buzzes)
- Did you know that tea
can also help you lose weight?
Today, I've got teas that will bust your fat for good.
- Well, now we have Ozempic.
Suddenly, the fat burner supplement market
is beginning to struggle.
At the start of the pandemic, we had no answers for COVID.
How could we?
It was a new illness,
but the gurus continued with the same game.
- We've just learned that Dr. Oz
was sending emails urging the Trump administration
to begin promoting the use
of an anti-malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine.
(static buzzes)
- The patented nanosilver we have,
the Pentagon has come out and documented,
and Homeland Security, and said,
"This stuff kills the whole SARS corona family
at point blank range."
Well, of course it does.
It kills every virus.
- Now we have Paxlovid,
a medication given to mitigate the effects of COVID.
Suddenly, no more gurus promising miracle cures.
These are just two examples of modern science
making legitimate progress in these gray zones
and putting pressure on the snake oil salesmen
to up their game,
- Bring it on.
- They've seen the gray zone is only successful
until science catches up.
So they've begun to focus on an area
where science really can catch up.
Aging.
Anti-aging is really just a BS marketing term.
Aging is not a disease.
There's aging poorly, and aging well.
There's no preventing it,
unless of course you can pay
five monthly payments of $19.99.
- Brian Johnson.
- The man who spends $2 million a year
to slow down his age.
- He's managed to reverse his biological age already.
- To an 18 year old.
But that anti-aging market share was not enough for them.
So they decided to target our worst weak spot.
The entire healthcare system.
- Dr. Butterfingers killed Michael Jackson.
After that, that was like going to the doctor.
- It's official.
Private healthcare companies are scamming us.
- There is a lot of corruption in medicine.
They're always getting (beep) wrong.
- The system is truly crumbling
and has too many problems to name.
Many folks are paying for but not getting good care.
They feel gaslit by their doctors
and duped by their insurance companies.
I don't blame them.
The worst part,
those who've been hurt the most by the system
become prey for the I.K.A. experts.
How?
Well, they prime your emotions
by pointing out real problems
and then they begin to sell you pricey BS solutions.
They promise a better way, a shortcut,
a more personalized approach,
claiming to have better knowledge
than scientists and doctors who have dedicated their lives
to the art of healing people.
Like they're all in on a secret
that all medical institutions are not privy to.
- I know something you don't know.
(static buzzes)
- Or are flat out hiding from you, and it works.
Especially on social media.
The videos often go viral.
You send them to me, asking for reactions.
It also doesn't hurt when they have a celebrity
co-signing their messaging.
In recent times, one good example
is when owner and president Dana White
had his reaction dealing with some serious health issues.
- This is Gary Brecka.
In five months, this guy completely changed my life.
This is for all the naysayers
that are saying it's not true and it's all bullshit.
Everybody was saying, "Well, share your blood work with us."
We just did my blood work yesterday.
- Yeah,
- And here you go.
He told me things about me that I didn't even tell anybody.
So, he knew just from looking at my blood.
I was on the verge of a stroke, or a heart attack,
or something bad.
And five months he got those down to what?
143.
From 764 to 13.
- I don't think people were skeptical
of whether or not Dana White's health improved.
I think they were skeptical for the marketing
and the promises that were made
about why his health improved.
Cutting out bad habits, improving healthy habits,
will make your health improve.
That's evidence-based.
It's only when information that is at best a theory
is promoted as fact.
Or when miracle Cures are given credit
for the significant progress that's been made,
that's when the naysayers commit.
- I will never go to a doctor ever again
about my general health.
All they want to do is put you on pills.
This guy will change your life.
Some of your favorite actors,
some of the most powerful richest people in the world
are all now doing this with Gary.
- Now, I have to be honest here,
because I'm pretty skeptical
when a doctor uses a celebrity endorsement
to build their branding.
It's not intrinsically bad,
but definitely a red flag based on historical precedent.
So I had to look into who this physician was
that saved Dana White's life.
Well, it turns out he's not a doctor,
but a professional human biologist.
To be honest, I'm not sure what that means.
He does have a bachelor's degree in science
from Frostburg State University.
I don't think he's actually even able
to call Dana White his patient,
given that he's not a doctor.
But that doesn't stop his clips with medical advice
from going viral on TikTok.
Let's take a look.
- Dana White?.
And they said, "Yeah," and I go,
"Well, what's the life-threatening alert?"
They said, "Triglycerides are almost 800."
Now, triglycerides a measure of blood fat, okay?
It shouldn't be above 149.
- That so far is very accurate.
800 is a high number.
It falls into the moderate to severe high category.
- At 200 or 300, this is a cataclysmic level in the blood,
especially in a fasted state.
- We only typically check
for triglycerides in a fasted state,
and 200, 300 is not ideal.
But to say it's cataclysmic is being very dramatic.
There are incredibly high levels
where you start getting into the thousands of triglycerides
that puts you at a risk for developing pancreatitis.
But 200, 300 does not put you near that risk.
- They weren't 400, they weren't 500, they weren't 600.
They weren't 700.
They were like 768.
- That is a high number and usually runs in line
with someone who has perhaps pre-diabetes or diabetes.
They're consuming a lot of simple carbohydrates in excess,
not just a small amount of them.
They're living an unhealthy lifestyle, maybe not exercising,
because all of that does drive having high triglycerides.
- I remember, I think his assistant called me,
and I was at the airport, and she said,
"Hey, Dana wants to know if his life expectancy's in."
- The idea of having a life expectancy is incredible.
Look, I know that Gary worked for a life insurance company
and that's, like, his gimmick.
It's like his thing where he tells people
how long they're gonna live.
But here's why, not knowing anything about medicine,
it is that it's BS.
Human behavior changes.
Human risk changes.
It's an ever-evolving state.
So to claim that you have control or intimate knowledge
of when someone's gonna pass is just untrue.
Yes, through AI and data, you can get an estimate
of someone's chance of having a heart attack or a stroke
in the next 10 years.
A serious what we call ASCVD risk.
But just that risk alone,
not the immense complexity that is the human body.
That's why it's a gimmick.
- So if you or someone that you know suffers from headaches,
migraines, muscle soreness, or brain fog.
- Those are a lot of symptoms.
- One of the leading causes of brain fog
and leading causes of migraines, believe it or not.
- And muscle soreness.
- Is deficiency in sodium in your water.
Now, I'm not talking about iodized table salt.
I'm talking about pink Himalayan sea salt.
- Oh man, I hate to laugh,
but this is the difference with someone who has a license
for someone who doesn't.
You can't go and tell people
that their migraines are caused by low salt
when you have absolutely no evidence.
Look at the list of things that causes headaches.
How in the world has he come to the deduction
that it's because we're low in sodium,
that we are experiencing headaches?
Are there people who are low in sodium
that develop migraines or soreness?
Sure.
But to say it with such oomph
is just completely disconnected
from what a practicing physician can do.
- You wake up a few times a week, or a few times a month,
with dull headache,
very likely it's your sodium content.
- How can it be very likely?
When I look at my patients, they overconsume sodium,
so much so that it causes increases in blood pressure
leading to hypertension.
Putting patients on a DASH diet, which is a low sodium diet,
actually improves their blood pressure.
This is someone who is not practicing day in and day out
as a doctor seeing patients,
because this frankly is dangerous advice.
Diagnosing a patient individually,
you might be able to give advice like this, and I say might,
but if you're talking to the web on a video,
how can you assume everyone watching needs this thing?
What if they don't?
What if they have too much of it,
and you just recommended that they take more?
That's the consequences that are not being thought about,
'cause the liability threat isn't there.
And the knowledge of being a doctor, I guess.
- Depression really exists.
Anxiety really exists, but.
- That's true.
Anxiety and depression do exist.
- But if you actually look
at how we define these conditions,
take depression for example,
we define depression as an inadequate supply of serotonin.
- No, we don't define it that way.
We may have defined it that way years ago
when that was our chemical imbalance model of depression.
But now we've seen that it's so multifactorial
that we don't have a good understanding of it.
We, as not being I.K.A. experts,
are not afraid to say we don't know,
and it's much more complex than a chemical imbalance.
And while, yes, we do give medications, called SSRIs,
that aim to increase the amount of serotonin
in the area where they act,
the fact that we increase the serotonin
is not even why they really work.
We don't even truly understand how they work.
We just know that we've done the trials
and they do have a success rate.
But how they work, the mechanism,
the mechanism by which depression occurs, we don't yet know.
And being honest and not afraid to say I don't know
is what makes a true medical expert.
- So if you are a low in serotonin,
you're by definition depressed.
- No, that's not a,
I've never checked serotonin levels in a patient
to diagnose depression.
I don't know any doctor that does that.
No organization does that.
In fact, here are a ton of articles
saying that we no longer view the serotonin theory
as the definition for depression.
- We take people that are depressed
and we put them on SSRIs.
- Yeah.
- Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
And what these do is they ration
what little serotonin these people have.
- No, they block the things that take up serotonin
and allow the serotonin to be there to function.
But why that mechanism actually works for depression
is poorly understood,
and we have to have the transparency and honesty
to say it's poorly understood.
- You wake up in the morning and you do not like to eat.
You're not hungry.
It's probably because your blood sugar is very, very low.
You have very good blood sugar regulation.
- It's true that if blood sugar is poorly regulated,
like if you're a diabetic,
your appetite can get thrown off
and you could be hungry more often.
- You wake up in the morning,
you're fasted, you don't feel like eating,
your blood sugar continues to turn down.
You eat late in the morning or early in the afternoon,
and it skyrockets.
Right?
This is why you have an energy slump
between two and four in the afternoon
- Or because physiologically,
it's part of your circadian rhythm.
As someone who talks about nature and natural all the time,
I think we should talk about the circadian rhythm.
There is a natural dip between 2:00 and 4:00 p.m.,
maybe 2:00 and 5:00 p.m., and then 2:00 a.m. as well.
And those are the times of the day where you feel sleepiest.
That's a normal part of being a human.
Yes, if you eat a heavy high-carb meal, high-fat meal,
you can experience this slump a little bit worse,
especially if you have underlying conditions,
sleep apnea, insomnia for other reasons,
you're drinking too much coffee at night,
not getting good quality rest,
or even alcohol before you go to sleep.
Yeah, all those things can absolutely happen.
But to say that the reason why you slump in the afternoon
is because you ate, that's not exactly true.
Look, that was a lot of misinformation,
but he's not a doctor.
But you don't need to be a doctor to be a good businessman.
He's well-spoken.
He's had a unique background
working in the life insurance industry, predicting death.
He does share some info that is accurate.
His website is well-made,
his product sounds super promising.
A genetic test that discovers what's holding you back
from feeling the way you want to.
Only 600 bucks.
And you'll get a customized supplement protocol
that you'll have to pay more for.
But wait, there's more.
The Superhuman Protocol.
Just buy the $133,000 Superhero Protocol bundle.
The most important part of the website for me,
all the way on the bottom, in the midst of all that text,
it states very clearly,
"Testimonials shared are not intended to make claims
that these products can be used to diagnose, treat, cure,
mitigate, or prevent any disease."
So, what does this all mean for you?
Well, I hope this unique example highlights the pattern
to look out for in the future,
but here's three easy actionable steps.
Number one, approach celebrity advice
and endorsements with skepticism.
Be equally skeptical of gurus giving medical advice
who don't have professional liability
if something goes wrong.
If I give the wrong advice, my license is on the line.
But what if there's no license to begin with?
Two, be skeptical of medical advice from podcasts
that sound too good to be true.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
And not to spoil it,
but if there's extraordinary evidence,
it's probably not a secret anymore.
Three, there's very rarely advice
that works for almost everybody,
but the basics do work.
In fact, the reason these celebrities usually improve
with many of these programs is not because they bought
the Superhuman Protocol bundle or supplements,
but because they focused on sleeping well,
avoiding bad habits like drugs and alcohol,
maintaining social relationships,
staying active, and eating a whole food diet.
(graphic whooshing)
Barbara Corcoran from Shark Tank
was actually on this YouTube channel,
and she said that almost all the medical products
on Shark Tank are BS,
but we actually reviewed some of them.
So click here to check that out.
And as always, stay happy and healthy.
(bouncy electronic music)