Why America Is Sicker Than Ever | Alex Clark | Align Podcast #535
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Alex Clark, thank you so much for being here. How did that feel doing breathwork? How was that experience for you? That's something that is a new novel thing, as is raw milk and a lot of the things you've been exposed to in the last couple of years. What was that experience like for you breathing? I've never done anything like that. I've never meditated. I've never done deep breaths or anything. I mean, so I that's probably the last experience.

thing that I would think to do before an interview but you know what it was so calming and relaxing like I feel so ready now to be asked anything isn't that cool yeah uh so I mentioned before we're recording well technically we're recording but uh I've gone through a I think a similar arc and I'm looking to find uh more maybe common ground or maybe not but explore your experience because I think it resonates with a lot of people experience there was a pre-covid

me that was I think identified maybe more liberal maybe more like slightly left of center love gay people you know love like equal rights and such and then COVID happened and then that brought up a lot more questions and suspicion and um really like questioning government and who can I trust and who's uh

Yeah, just who can I trust? I think is the big thing. What was that experience like? What was like pre-COVID Alex Clark and post-COVID Alex Clark? And what was that transition like?

It changed everything for me, everything that I thought I believed, everything that I really cared about. I was doing a pop culture show at Turning Point USA covering celebrity news, entertainment news, celeb gossip from a conservative perspective. And that was fun. It was like a really easy, non-aggressive way to kind of slowly, strategically introduce young women to conservative ideas and, you know, what we believe and all of that. And so it served its purpose well.

Um, but I personally in my life, I mean, I was not into health and wellness at all. I actually had one set of grandparents growing up who were all in on organic food and no preservatives and all this. And I just remember being like eight years old, playfully making fun of my grandma, like, Ooh, is it organic? You know? And I just thought like the whole thing was just the weirdest thing ever. My family really grew up with a standard American diet.

My mom cooked most meals homemade, but I mean, still a lot of ultra processed food, a lot of ultra processed snacks in high school. I mean, my, I was such a picky eater and my lunch at high school, I would go through the line and just pick five or six rice crispy treats and some red fruit punch. And that's what I would have for my lunch every day. I'm not kidding. It was, it was atrocious. And then, you know, it was put on birth control at like 14 years old, 15 years old for no reason was on that for a decade, tons of antibiotics.

Just thought that that was normal. I was a C-section baby. Just all those types of things. Just did not care. I've always been really thin. So maybe that was like a nice privilege is that I never struggled with weight. So then I therefore didn't really think about it and

You know, think about healthy food. I guess I would have thought like, well, I'm skinny so I can just keep eating whatever I want, not realizing that my insides were basically, you know, melting as tar. And then during the pandemic, what had happened was they had mandated the vaccine to

And, you know, we were being told, like, in order to participate in public life, you have to prove that you've gotten this vaccine for a lot of it. And I just thought something in my spirit was deeply unsettled by that. That was unbelievably evil. I just thought wrong on all fronts for us to say, you know, to tell us basically, oh, you have a choice, but, you know, you will lose your job. Well, that's not really a choice.

And so that really scared me. And I didn't really know anything about big pharma. I don't even know that I'd ever really paid attention to that term. I certainly didn't know what big food was. But what happened was the vaccine happened. So I already was really questioning things and concerned. And even as a conservative.

I had understood that there was corruption and I didn't like the government telling me what to do or influencing all of these different facets of life and industry. I didn't like the government having such a hand in education in this country. I didn't like how Hollywood was so manipulated by the left. I didn't like how big tech and big media were all compromised by the left. That was all like it made sense to me. It was very obvious. But for some reason, I had never until this moment thought about food and pharma.

So at the same time that the vaccines were being rolled out, Hulu came out with a show called Dope Sick. I don't know if you ever watched it. It won a ton of Emmys. And it was about Purdue Pharma and their manufacturing of Oxycontin and how that moment really created the entire opioid epidemic that we now know in the United States, which has just decimated so many families and lives and especially rural communities.

I was fortunate enough that I, growing up, was not touched by the opioid crisis, so I was very ignorant on this, and graduated high school in 2011. So when I think about it now, I understand, like, oh, growing up, I did have friends, you know, in school that were like, oh, yeah, my mom is like, she's struggling with pills and things like that. But I just, I was too young, and I just didn't know. And I don't know, like I said, I was very ignorant about it. When that show came out, I was

floored of what Purdue Pharma was able to get away with, what the FDA was able to get away with working with pharma, how a bunch of those executives ended up working for the FDA. The whole thing was so diabolical to me and deeply evil. I thought, man, this is an American true crime story right here, one of the biggest. And I was curious, I was curious if the FDA had ever...

approved other drugs or medical products that, you know, they had then realized they made a mistake? Or were there other drugs on the market that had like terrifying side effects that the public didn't really know about? That introduced me to the entire anti-hormonal birth control movement, which I had no idea was started by liberal feminists in the 1970s.

So what's really interesting and very frustrating to me is that when I learned all of this and started talking about it, NBC News and all of these different outlets painted me to be a radical Christian nationalist extremist for talking about the harms of hormonal birth control against women. And I'm sitting here like, I don't know what the heck you're talking about. I am not the first one.

in any way, shape or form to talk about this or alert people to this, it actually started with the left. And these were feminists who were, who were standing in Senate hearings demanding that we are told the side effects because at the time and until the seventies, they weren't putting those inserts into the birth control packets. You could unroll that and see all the different side effects listed. We didn't have that. So until these women protested and demanded, because they said,

something is happening to us we are getting sick we're dying there are people that have like

really horrific chronic conditions after taking this pill. And we're not being told any of the truth about what you guys know about this. You need to be putting it in the packet with the pill. So that's why we have that today is because of these women. And it's really a nonpartisan issue. And this is what really sparked my interest in the fact that this entire conversation, this entire topic of health and wellness in America, it's nonpartisan, whether that's birth control or

food freedom being able to buy and and consume whatever food that we want but just you know inform consent when it comes to that and inform consent when it comes to medical products going into our bodies all of these different issues i'm like well this affects every american but

In 2020 on now, before 2020, you could have argued that it was one side largely caring about this issue and talking about it. And that was the left. But after 2020, the people that became the crunchy health and wellness concerned about GMOs and organic food and homesteading and all of this.

That was the right. So now I find myself, okay, I'm like, my eyes are being opened. I'm willing to admit that this issue, the left was largely correct on all of these years of my life that I thought it was new age BS.

I finally came to terms with like, okay, I think that they were right. But then all of a sudden it was like, oh, well, that's a right wing extremist issue. So you know what? I took that as a badge of honor. I was like, fine, I'll take this up. I started talking about it. I had never heard any of this before. Now, of course, there's been people in this health and wellness space, you know, Dr. Mark Hyman and others, Bonnie Hari, the food babe. These people have been talking about this for decades.

forever and people call them crazy and they are the pioneers in the space. Definitely not me. I mean, at least for just the general masses. But when it comes to the conservative movement,

We had been so ignorant on all of these issues, just didn't care, didn't care to know, didn't want to know, thought it was stupid. And all of a sudden, all of us were so hungry for truth and just looking everywhere we could online. But of course, hashtag sunlight was shadow banned on Instagram during the pandemic. So it was like all of these bizarre things and we couldn't get any information. So

anybody willing to talk about it was like this beacon of hope. And just people were drinking this information like it was coming out of a water hose. And I start sharing it with my audience. And I'm like, guys, did you know this about hormonal birth control? And these are women that follow me that are on average 24 to 34 years old. So these are, you know, older Gen Z or young millennials who grew up like it was automatic being put on the pill when we were a teenager and we didn't know any of it. And

They start going down the same journey as me, caring about food, caring about pharma, asking questions, understanding that big government sucks in all aspects, that we want to have clear, you know, critical thinking skills. We don't want to be riddled with brain fog when it comes to making really important life decisions, which you're under all of this, you know, based on the medications that you're on and the food that you're consuming. And it all just...

finally made sense that as a conservative, if I know that the number one person who's going to care the most about me is me and not the government, that has to extend to my concerns with food and pharma as well.

I feel like something that I've been surprised about is I typically identified historically left of center, which I think most people, you know, listen to this probably, I don't know where they're at, but probably center ish. And I think most people in general are center ish. And most people in general are pretty compassionate and they're hoping for the best for, you know,

other people and they're generally kind and they wouldn't ever dare to say a fraction of the things like the troll folks would say on the internet. And when you actually approach the trolls in a compassionate way, what I find is they typically go the other direction. They're like, oh shoot, sorry about that. I didn't really mean that. I didn't think you were going to actually read this.

Oh my God. I thought you were, I just was, I was just like spitting vitriol into the ether. Cause I just have anger that I don't want to, they don't want to hold. And so I'm just putting it out to the internet. I think it's like a lot of the troll folks out there, but something I've been surprised about to witness is the folks that are in the far leaning left side of

I find to be have the most like violence and the most anger and the most aggression. And historically, my perspective would be that like the gun toting NRA people would be more of like the angry, aggressive folks. I recently did a post on the Instagram picture of me in RFK after the Senate thing, and I was very surprised at the number of people that absolutely hated me, unfollowed me. One person said, I hope you fucking get polio.

And that was just me being like, I've spent time with RFK, I've looked him in the eyes, I feel like I can actually feel RFK, which is a very rare thing for a politician, and I trust him. And I think his movement of making America healthy is important. I hope you fucking get polio. That's one of the comments within that space. How do you steel man the far left and their experience?

How do you enter? Do you spend any time like entering the experience of those people? Or do you think that's a waste of time to even try to empathize for that? Oh, I mean, you can't empathize with them. I mean, not that I hope you fucking get polio side, but just generally the people that disagree that are not conservative, that are like RFK, you know, bad, even though he's a lifelong Democrat. Sure. Yeah. So one thing about people on the far left, especially when it comes to this kind of stuff,

If they are to admit that even a fraction of what, let's just say the health and wellness stuff that we're talking about is true, you know, the corruption in the FDA, the corruption in the NIH. If they admit that, if they admit that American mothers are not given true informed consent in the doctor's office when it comes to medical products given to their children, what else are they being lied to about? What else is being shielded to them? What other industries are corrupt?

And unfortunately, that starts to completely unravel your entire worldview. It's a religion. It's a religion. And you have to start over. And that's very scary. I understand that because then it's like if I am tethering my whole entire being based on, you know, the color of my skin, my sexual orientation, what the news tells me is true. Yeah.

You know, what Facebook is fact-checking or not. And then all of a sudden I find out, like, that isn't necessarily what I thought it was. Then you start going down this rabbit hole of feeling like I am not technically

tethered to any sense of reality and that's where things get really spooky for people. You have to be tethered to something true and real. And if everything is not true and everything is not real that you believe, that's very scary. And very, very few have the fortitude to be able to take that leap of going down that road of like, I am willing to take the chance and really test the

what I know and see if it is real and true or not. And if it's not, I'm willing to completely be radicalized. And that is far too scary. And not a lot of people have the courage to kind of go down that route. Now, fortunately for me, I didn't have to go through like a huge come to Jesus scary thing because I grew up, I grew up

conservative. So none of this, I mean, besides food and pharma, basically, you know, I've believed all of this stuff my entire life since I was a kid. So I haven't gone through that. Now, I know plenty of people who have, I mean, you know, Candace Owens is somebody who's had that journey. It happens to tons of people. And I think way more, I mean, we gained

This movement was so important to me also because I could see the writing in the wall with my audience and just new people coming to my podcast when I would talk about these issues. I saw the writing on the wall that the Maha stuff, the Make America Healthy Again, health and wellness topics, talking about corruption in our government when it comes to these industries, this was going to gain the Republican Party everything.

It's such an influx of voters that the likes of which we'd never seen and new people who would have never, ever, ever considered voting Trump or voting Republican in general were going to do it. And I was just absolutely blasphemed behind the scenes for this. They thought it was a waste of time. We were going into an election year. Why the heck are we talking about like health and wellness and organic food? I said, I don't think you're understanding what I'm telling you. I am on the ground with women voters every single day. I am talking to them. I'm getting calls.

thousands and thousands of DMs a day. I know what matters to them. I know what they care about. I know what's piquing their interest. And the women that I am getting saying, I'm going to put a make America healthy again sign in my yard. I am going to put a Trump sign in my yard. I'm considering voting for Trump if he says he's going to really focus on food and pharma, but I never would have before. I said it's astronomical. So to give you an example,

I had posted a, you know, make sure you're registered to vote link before RFK endorsed Trump over the summer of 2024. It got, and I mean, I have a big following, but it got like, I don't know, a couple hundred clicks if. When RFK endorsed Trump and I posted again a register to vote link, I got thousands and thousands of clicks to register to vote. And I thought,

We're going to win this election. And it is going to be based on a few things. Immigration, of course, you know, the economy, but then also the health issue, because chronic disease is the number one, like biggest issue that every single American family has been touched with, is dealing with. And when it comes to our children, you've got American moms who are terrified and nobody fights and nobody votes like a really angry, scared mom.

mom. And I was seeing that from my audience. Why do people from the further, you know, far leaning left of center have a disdain for RFK after him being a lifelong Democrat and standing for health? My very strong suspicion is if he was

voted in or elected under or appointed under Harris, they would be his biggest fan. Is this just a case of just being ideologues and not realizing it and not being like having the capacity to think

uh critically for that or like what's i've been i'm very surprised by the disdain for rfk i was like i was very thrown off yeah i do think that there is like a certain disdain and group think situation where if if somebody like kamala harris on the campaign trail would have been willing to meet with rfk have a conversation and talk about potentially you know linking arms with him like trump did uh i mean she was invited we invited her to all sorts of different uh

you know different marches that we had done or conversations I know that RFK did tried to reach out to their campaign say hey would you want to talk about the potential of like me joining joining your administration if you win like nothing crickets if she would have yeah I think there would have been people that are like okay like just brain dead like well I guess if Kamala Harris is saying he's great then I guess he's great like they just don't think anything but I will say that you know this idea that like RFK was beloved by the Democrats before like that just isn't the case he's

always been somebody who stuck up for really unpopular topics and issues and

The food pharma stuff that has touched Republicans and Democrats equally. I mean, the establishment Republican Party is just as corrupt with food and pharma as the Democrats are. I mean, President Obama, when he was campaigning, was like, we have the right to know if GMOs are in our food and all this stuff. And then he started appointing all these people in his administration that worked for Monsanto. So it's like.

this has always been a problem. We've really never had anybody besides RFK and politics in general, left or right, that was willing to call these people out because there's so much money at stake for these politicians and from these industries and they don't want to give it up. I mean, even Bernie Sanders, you saw RFK Jr. in his HHS hearing. Bernie was like, well, I've never taken money from food or from pharma. And then he's like, yes, you have. And then he's like, well,

Only a couple million or whatever. I mean, these people are just it's very hard to get out of that spider web of corruption. But, yeah, RFK has always been they've always kind of thought I think he was kind of like a kook. And then as the decades have gone on and we've continued to raise the bar of that, we have you know, we're spending the most on health care of any other country. But somehow everybody's getting worse. Everybody's getting sicker. American kids are getting sicker.

How could that be the case? Well, maybe what RFK Jr. has been talking about for decades has some truth to it. Maybe we should hear him out. So, yeah, it really took the mistake of...

The mandating the COVID, if the COVID, if they would have come out with the COVID-19 vaccine and it would have been optional, it would have been very low key. Like, Hey, we have this. If you want it great. If you don't, who cares? The locking down, the forcing kids out of school, telling people you're going to lose your job. If you don't take this telling breastfeeding mothers, they're going to lose their job. If they don't take this, this radicalized Americans to the likes of which you've never seen, they never could have predicted that the right would have all of a sudden taken up on this issue. And it is going to be,

very, very, very hard if they don't come to meet us in the middle and say, okay, we're willing to work together on this. I think it is going to be very hard going forward after these four years for them to win if they do not start like,

getting it together when it comes to the health issue. If they're going to keep their head in the sand on this, they're going to keep losing. Who is the objective or what is the objective? Obviously, this is a subjective question, but maybe there's some objectivity somewhere within it. From your perspective, who is the objective bad guy in all of this? Because I feel like the country or me or most people, many people are in a state of

confusion, a state of I don't know who I can trust. If you look at polls, the rate of people actually trusting mainstream media is incredibly low. So we're looking at TV and news sources and such, and I think maybe we're just assuming it's propaganda. And I wonder, one, if that's potentially by design, if there's some Russian PSYOP thing happening or something of the sort. And I wonder, two, who is the bad guy in all of this? And is there...

a guy or like what like how do you how do you define that because it's it's convenient to have an actual enemy to identify that's why the world would probably be a better place if we had like an alien attack we'd be like aha like it was you that spaceship right there that's the bad guy but we're kind of in this place where we're in the dark and we're taking swings at the dark but i feel like it's very hard to pin down like who the bad guy actually is

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benefits from using the Jawsercise device, which is great. You're activating particularly the trigeminal nerve or the nerve, one of the cranial nerves that activates chewing and swallowing. So you're stimulating cognitive function. And I genuinely feel more confident after using the Jawsercise device for five to 10 minutes or so. Reason being, it literally brings a pump to the masseter muscles. There's 50 odd muscles that it's engaging in the face and neck while you're using it.

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Man, that's a really good question. And I think you're right that you can't pin it on one specific person, but there's a lot of different players in this. I mean, if you go back to...

The Industrial Revolution and more Americans leaving the country, going into the cities, that leading to, you know, grocery stores and then having to have this like mass production of food that doesn't go bad to be shipping across the United States into all these cities. I mean, that plays a role in different things. You have John Rockefeller wanting to, you know, take jobs.

homeopaths and chiropractors and all these people look crazy and that we had to only be focusing on hospitals and prescription drugs because he had oil byproducts that he needed to put somewhere so he wanted to help make more prescription drugs. He's a really... I mean, if we're going to pin this on one person, I think he would be a good one.

But then you've got, you know, we go into the Vietnam War and we're spraying Agent Orange and we're doing all these and all these people are getting sick. And then we have all these leftover chemicals after that war ends. We're like, well, what do we do with these? Well, why don't we start spraying them on our crops since we have those leftover to kill bugs and things? Well, it's exploding bug stomachs. What's that going to do to the humans that are consuming it? Who knows? Who cares? Let's just go for it.

Then you go into the 80s and the cigarette companies buying or sorry, the food companies buying the cigarette scientists who made cigarettes so addictive and said, hey, can we do what you did to cigarettes to ultra processed food? Can we make the food pyramid? Can we sell spots on the food pyramid to different industries so that we can tell people to eat certain food groups more than others? That's going to make them money. Can we subsidize, you know, the government saying, can we subsidize crops?

certain crops to make those ultra processed foods that are really, really unhealthy for us. But we're going to give farmer, we're going to help farmers be able to make those easier instead of subsidizing healthier food options. Let's create GMOs. Let's start adding, let's, let's start making the vaccine companies unable to be held accountable to any adverse reactions or deaths. And then let's make sure that we keep adding then onto the vaccine schedule. So now that

Kids 0 to 18 are taking more than 70 shots throughout the course of their life those first 18 years. You know, all of these different things have one thing in common. That is a lot of different industries that can make billions and billions and trillions of dollars. And so it's really, I guess, money, the root of all evil. That's always what it comes down to. But I think... Or greed.

Or greed. And I think Rockefeller kind of really could be the one person starting this, but there's just so many players throughout the course of the last, what, I don't know, a hundred years that play a really significant role into how we got here today. What's your feeling on concept of, well, deep state, I think is a real thing, but people kind of take that in different directions, but, but deep state lizard people, old men sucking out the life force of babies and,

what do you think's going on there oh half my audience will really hate me how i answer this half will be like yeah right on um so that like really conspiratorial side of things like almost like the q and i'm not into any of that i've never been into that uh

I mean, there are some weird things that are kind of adjacent to that that happen. Like, we do know that, like, we're putting, you know, baby little boy foreskin into different skin creams and weird stuff like that. There are aborted fetal cells in vaccines. Like, I mean, this is, like...

you know this. They are doing geoengineering. They've had to testify about that. So like there are certain things that like seem conspiratorial or might have like 20 years ago that we like know for sure is real. But as far as like lizard people and all that, I mean, Justin Bieber is, of course, but otherwise I'm not so sure. How cloudy is the thinking of the modern American human being and what would be some of the main factors

factors in in clouding our thought and maybe we don't even realize it because it's just a normal part of our lives such as things you've already mentioned maybe birth control or maybe our diets or maybe environmental factors perfumes from putting on our skins maybe propaganda on the news what do you think affects our perspective the most because i think it kind of becomes interesting when sometimes i have this reflection myself particularly when i have judgment for someone else

I can't help but look back at myself and be like, well, how cloudy is my thought and whose thoughts am I thinking in the first place? Yeah. I think the number one thing that's clouding all of our thoughts and influencing how we see the world and what we think is

And how we interact with people and how we judge people is our social media algorithm. So that actually is the number one thing. Like you pause for three seconds on a video, then your entire feed, you're going to start getting fed more and more and more of that same thing. So being really careful about that, taking breaks from scrolling, doom scrolling, which

I am, you know, right there with you. Like that's something that all of us struggle with now, but it's really scary how that can influence everything. So kind of trying your best to have like a diverse range of thought. I mean, for me, I really seek to listen to

to several different podcasts in the health and wellness space. So I'm not only consuming like one type because the thing that, and it can be overwhelming to people in health and wellness is like, there are so many, like thousands and thousands of different opinions on something, you know, just simply like, are vegetables bad for you? Well, if you listen to Paul Saladino or Sally Norton, you're going to get one opinion. If you listen to Mark Hyman, um,

And Cory Booker, you're going to get another opinion. Like it's very fascinating. And so you kind of need to like listen to everybody and kind of pick and choose like what's serving me, what seems to be what is helping my body or hurting my body and knowing your body because that's something too is like one thing that works for someone else like maybe really damaging to you. So that's important. But yeah, definitely the prescription, the medications that we're on is really, really scary. The amount of SSRIs

that are just being handed out like candy to kids now as young as six, seven. Lexapro was approved for kids that age just, what, a year or two ago. That should really terrify Americans because what that means is you are going to have an entire generation of children that grow up and become adults that have been on an antidepressant, a mind-numbing drug,

medication that hinders their ability to see the world in full color and to fully experience a wide range of human emotions, which was which is supposed to be the human experience. Imagine being 30 years old and never truly experiencing not only the depths of grief and sadness, but also joy.

How will that person grow up and perceive the world if you've never really felt true emotions that like God bestowed upon us to feel? It's really important to feel horrific, like feelings of sadness, but as well as joy and happiness and being, you know, emotionally touched by something beautiful, being able to see a sunset and feel emotional about it.

I worry about people that are never going to experience those things. And birth control as well. You know, birth control completely alters a woman's mind where not only is she having personality numbing effects like that,

She's also completely attracted to different men on the pill compared to what she would be off. We know that scientifically. So that's disturbing. You know, these now several generations of women marrying men who they may have not been totally fully attracted to. And then they get off the pill because they're ready to have a family. They're like, whoa, who is my husband? That happens every day.

every day around the world. I hear stories about that all the time from my audience. That was something I really struggled with. For a while there, I was not attracted to my husband and I had to relearn how to be attracted to him. So I tell every boy that I speak to on college campuses and stuff, hey, you need to be talking to your girlfriend about getting off birth control. And I'm not saying be irresponsible. You still need to understand she needs to know how to

you know, track her cycle and know when she's likely to get pregnant and not and all those different types of things. And you need to be using protection, et cetera, et cetera, all the things. But you should get her off birth control and explain to her what the risks are and the side effects. And, you know, then if she hears all that and wants to be on it, then that's on her. But these women don't know. They don't realize that. So that affects all of our abilities to make decisions

true informed decisions on a day-to-day basis from everything. I love that your mind goes into the direction of the value of a person being able to feel their emotions and feel like the full spectrum of emotions. Because I think that that's something in the political conversation that's probably largely neglected because it's not so easy to quantify in an objective way. You just have the symptoms and the outcomes, which is what we have. How would you, if you were, I know that you're passionate about, um,

homeschooling, I think, but children, education and like caring for children in general. What do you think primary deficits in the education and upbringing of modern children are? Because I'm a little disconnect. I'm 37. I don't actually know exactly what's happening within that space, but I do have a lot of opinions around the value of movement and nature and sun exposure and play and human connection and touch and emotional regulation.

What do you think the largest deficits for children are presently and how would you impose or what ideas would you have to support the growth of children in a more positive direction? We have largely abandoned the idea of letting children be children in America. Kids are spending over a thousand hours on screens per year instead of outdoors.

You go into any suburban neighborhood now, it's very rare to see kids playing outside. They don't even know their neighbors. They are going to school, coming home, immediately becoming recluses into their rooms, eating dinner alone with their screens.

This is affecting everything. The rates of depression, anxiety that we're seeing in kids. This is all deeply this can all be deeply contributed to all of the screen time that they're getting. It's affecting their speech. I always like make a joke about this, but there's like a there's a certain dialect associated with what I call iPad kids. If you ever hear them talk, it's like almost like a speech impediment. It's very strange. It's because they're not used to speaking outside, like speaking outside.

out loud. They're used to just hearing people talk and listening in their head and talking in their head because they're not interacting with people anymore. They don't know how to make eye contact. And then they're all self-diagnosing because of social media and stuff. They're all self-diagnosing with different, you know, mental illnesses. It's cool to have a mental illness now, which I think a lot of them don't even, they just think that they do or they want to have one. You know,

you know, on dating apps now, which isn't children, little children, but on dating apps, you, they, they encourage you to list like, here's my mental illnesses. Like that's a good thing. It's a really a thing on your apps. Yeah. It's really a thing. You can also say if you've been vaccinated or not, so you know who to avoid, but yeah,

When it comes to little kids, I mean, in some schools in America, they've completely gotten rid of recess or dialed it back so entirely. They're not even allowed to have true risky play. So this is something I'm super passionate about that nobody ever talks about is risky play with kids. Kids need to be struggling on the monkey bars. They need to be playing dodgeball. They need to be climbing really like topsy-turvy mountains and different things at the playground. We have gotten rid of any of these

toys or equipment on American playgrounds that challenge kids that are scary or they could fall on because we're more worried about them getting hurt. But kids need to get hurt a little bit. They need to be challenged and nervous and scared and have to problem solve. We've basically eliminated from American kids any opportunity to have to

solve a problem because we think, oh, that's too hard for you. You shouldn't have to do that. You shouldn't have to experience feelings of, of like overwhelm or boredom or nervousness or anxiety. That's again, a normal human emotion. Now, what happens to those kids when they, when they get in college or when they start driving? Well, actually they're not driving because his kids were taking away any opportunity for them to learn how to problem solve or be independent and

or understand risk assessment, they're opting to stop driving. So we have a large sum of Gen Z who has never gotten their driver's license because of

I talked to a therapist and author or not therapist. Sorry. I talked to a investigative journalist and author, Abigail Schreier. She wrote the book, bad therapy. And she talks about how she interviewed this group of teenage boys. And there was a Chipotle across the street and they were talking about how they were so starving. They were at school on campus for something and they were starving. And she was like, well, there's a Chipotle right there. Like, why don't you just go across the street and get some food? And they're like, Oh, well, like they,

they basically all freaked out and said, well, we don't know how to do that. Um, the same group of boys also told her they didn't even know how to put a clip on tie for a dance, a clip on tie. They didn't know how to put that on. So these are the types of things when I'm saying that we're completely like handicapping an entire generation. Plus we're medicating them. I'm very worried. Not to mention the fact that, uh, as little as like a couple of days, basically instantly of being on an SSRI in no time at all, you can develop, uh, uh,

a sexual dysfunction disorder from being on SSRIs that completely numb your genitals, your ability to climax or experience sexual pleasure. So now we're also going to have kids that are growing up in their twenties who are unable to experience sex and happiness and get married and all of that. They're not going to be able to do it. It's a massive growing problem, a side effect that nobody is talking about. And then I've been, there's so much I could say. We, we,

Also put a lot of pressure on American kids to hit milestones academically. Like if they're not reading by five years old, then they're doomed or something. That's just absolutely BS in other countries, especially in Europe. It is very normal and celebrated for kids to focus on play and nature and being outside and enjoying being children until like seven or eight years old. And then, OK, we'll start talking about like academics and and reading and all of that.

When I say to people that it doesn't scare me if my future kids are not reading yet by seven or eight years old, they think that I am off my rocker. They think that is absolutely outrageous as an American for me to say that. And I'm not saying I would never read to my kids or talk about literature or even talk about books or anything, or that they wouldn't be allowed that like if they started to pick up a book, I'd be smacking it out of their hands and say, we don't do that until we're seven or eight years old.

But what I am saying is that if my child is not showing an interest in learning timetables or reading a chapter book before seven or eight years old, I'm not going to be like, oh, there's something wrong with them. I'm going to think, wow, my kid is being a kid. Imagine that. We've just completely taken away childhood and it's so sad. And kids are struggling in school because of that. If you are dropping your kid off at kindergarten,

And they are throwing themselves on the floor, writhing around, can't get settled all day, can't sit still all day. If you have a second grader, their teacher is constantly emailing you saying, your son is having trouble sitting still. He's constantly acting up. I really think that you need to consider ADHD medication so he can sit still. Why don't we consider the fact that boys were never

made to sit still like that for seven hours a day. Why can't we consider that boys are wired differently, that they need to be running, they need to be doing, they need to need to be playing, they need to be using their hands, they need to be solving things. Kids learn differently and

Instead, what we've done is with the public school system, especially, we've just said, here's the test that you need to do. Here's the milestones that you need to hit. And every kid has to do this. And then we move on. Instead of in a homeschooling experience, you're looking at each child, even within your own family individually and saying, what skills are you really good at? What skills are you struggling with? What gifts do you naturally have? What different types of skills?

What ways do you excel learning? Like some people, maybe it's audibly, like they can just sit there and listen. Some need to be like drawing while they're listening, doing worksheets outside, using their hands. All of those different things can be explored and you can take your time figuring that out in a homeschool setting, but you can't do that in a public school setting. And then the last thing I'll say about this is the food.

The food that you have no control over when you're sending your kid to public school and then you're wondering why they're having behavioral issues. Our public schools are filled with artificial food dyes, which we know exacerbate ADHD symptoms, behavioral problems, severe behavioral dysfunction, depression.

some of them even known carcinogens. We just banned red number three after decades of knowing that it caused cancer if it was just in our makeup, but we were still allowing kids to ingest it until like a couple weeks ago. So that right there tells you, okay, if that they were wrong about and still letting that in our food, don't you think there's probably like 8,000 other chemicals that we should go ahead and look over a little more closely, which is exactly what RFK Jr. wants to do. But we're letting kids...

eat this food as a healthy, balanced breakfast when they go into school. And inner city kids, basically some of them, the only food they get all day is what they're served at school for those couple meals. So all you're eating is junk that's causing you to act out and unable to sit still. And then you're not learning. You're not able to really process what your teacher is even teaching you. And then you fall behind and then people tell you, well, I'm sorry, I guess you're just stupid. And then, you know, you can imagine what all happens in the rest of your life after that. It's just a...

Really sad cascade of events that starts at such a young age when we are putting our kids in school, in my opinion, too early, too early. And we're taking away that gift of being a child. I love you.

I think that was great. It's cool seeing you talk about that stuff. It's like your passion about seems like everything, but like getting into that, it feels like that's like a special place for you. It's like, it's, it's nice to. Well, what's really weird is that I don't, so people are really surprised sometimes when they're new in my audience is that I don't have kids and I'm not a mom yet. I'm not even married yet. Um, I'd love to be, and hopefully that'll happen soon, but it just hasn't been God's timing. So for me, I'm,

I'm like, okay, it's interesting that like I cover all of this health and these parenting topics on my podcast as I'm not a parent yet. But I'm like, I am going to take advantage of the season that I have been placed in, which is singleness. And I'm going to use this as like wife school and mom school. And I'm going to learn everything that I can about these topics so that when that day comes, God willing, I will be like, okay, I'm going to be like,

I have like a good amount of knowledge here to kind of navigate this next chapter. And so it's really, I'm taking this as like, okay, this has been a real gift for me because I'm kind of a nervous spastic person. And so I get very overwhelmed and anxious and I'm like, maybe God just knew that I was going to need like a good amount of time, like a five year span to like really get dialed into these topics so that when I do become a mom, then I'm going to be like, okay, I know what we're doing. Because if I just like became a mom and didn't know any of this, like I'd be freaking out. If I would have gotten married and become a mom, became a mom,

in 2020 or 2021, I mean, I wouldn't have all of these things that I believe now that I personally don't want to vaccinate my kids at all that, you know, I want to give them raw milk that I want to homeschool all these things. I would have I none of those things would have been my opinion only a couple years ago. So it's amazing like how much you can change in a short amount of time.

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uh there's uh three things that came to mind it's just saying that i'll try to say them as concise as as possible one there's a book that i think you'd really enjoy called master and the emissary by ian mcgill christ are you familiar with this one it's all about like left hemisphere right hemisphere so it's the the main premise of the book is is that if you allow the left hemisphere which is more like analytical mind get stuff done kind of more like masculine analytical you know go forward

executive mind. If you allow that mind to take control too much, it will trump or silent the right hemisphere, which is more like

the creative, expressive, throw paint on the wall, you know, go out, lick a tree, like explore. And that I think is what is largely kind of infecting or corrupting modern culture as a whole. And also kids, because kids inherently most there's, you've probably seen there was, there was some research from NASA where they were, um, studying children to determine how many kids are, would be like considered like geniuses. We're like, I don't probably like, you know,

20% or so, it was like 98% before the age of four because they're in that expressive, creative, explorational mind. And then we kind of start to almost like imprison them in this analytical executive, learn to read the book, learn to sit still, learn to kind of like fall into place. And there's another

thing, recently did a podcast with Steven Porges who he's pioneered a thing called the Polyvagal Theory which is big around like nervous system regulation and such and from his work cooperative play is the fastest way to bring a person's nervous system into a place of feeling like safe and calm and able to regulate itself to be able to learn, to be able to express and to be able to heal itself

And then there's another one called exuberant animal. Thank Frank for answers. These are all guests that have podcast. Uh, and that's all about rough and tumble play and the value of that. And there's a thing with dogs called the bite reflex. If they don't get to bite and they don't have exposure to understanding how to use their jaw, they actually become a dangerous animal because they actually don't have control and they can snap.

that's what happens with kid. So when a kid's learning so much emotional regulation, not just, not just with their emotions, but also with the whole semantics of their body, their understanding, how what's the exact amount to push too much before, Ooh, like Bobby got angry. Oh, Bobby got sad. That was too much. If you take them out of that and you kind of put them into a, in like into the corner to keep everybody safe,

Safety now leads to much bigger volcanic eruptive danger later. Small amounts of danger regularly translates to actually being a much more safe, proficient person. And the same thing happens with language as well. If you suppress language and you protect people from words, you don't get to learn and have that exposure. And eventually it leads to bigger, more volcanic eruptive type pain, I think.

Does it make sense? Yeah, it totally makes sense. And kind of the language thing, like it kind of reminded me of. So when you see like super fringe groups, especially on the far right, like really extremist kind of groups, you know, with extreme ideas and stuff like that.

A lot of them, it gets worse when you ban them from different social media sites and things like that. And you're telling them like you can't talk and you can't say these, then they get even more radical and they get even worse. So it kind of reminded me of that. Yeah. I mean, that's why that's why the, you know,

the right of center is so much stronger now because it's been suppressed. And so it tried to get pushed away. Like the best thing that could have possibly happened if you are a person that is who Rafa right of center, whatever that means exactly.

would be the suppression of speech, would be the misinformation label, would be the canceling of Trump, the canceling of all these different Saladino, like a lot of different people trying to just say something like, hey, I think maybe we should ask more questions about vaccines or COVID, and then you're canceled for that. That was the best possible thing you could do to infuse power into that perspective. Suppression always just

adds to power adds power to that side. Is there anything else that stands out to you in relation to children that you feel like would be a supportive thing to implement into into school systems, particularly around like emotional regulation and such? Is that something that you think about much? I want this is controversial. I want the entire destigmatized mental health campaign to be canceled and removed from public schools.

This has been a big pharma marketing slogan used to medicalize children at an even younger age on things like anti-anxiety medication and antidepressants.

This was never about just feel your feelings. It's okay to be sad. It's okay to cry if you're a boy. Like this is what we thought at first when we heard things like that. Oh, it's okay to be, you know, to be sad. No, no, no. What this turned into was it's not okay to be sad. We need to have a pill for that. And this idea too of like, oh, we need to be constantly talking about our mental health. This is upsetting you. Let's talk about it. Let's keep talking about it. The constant asking children to ruminate

on things that cause them distress has created an explosion of mentally ill kids. It did the complete opposite effect. It did not create wellness. It created sickness in the mind. And so I would prefer that we do not discuss any of that anymore in schools at all. Leave that to parents because we have catastrophically cut the legs off parents

kids being able to actually be emotionally mature and able to really just get through the day-to-day and life in general. Where do you think people, like the common pleb, the common layman person goes from here to be the most productive in their life, to be the most productive for the country? What does an individual...

I'd imagine voting with your dollar, you know, would be probably one of the really potent important things. Yeah, I just interviewed yesterday. Actually, I just interviewed a farmer. The episode hasn't come out yet. And he said something that I really liked. Was it Joel Salatin?

I have interviewed Joel, but it wasn't him. It is the farmer who created Pasture Bird, which is a really clean, really great regenerative chicken brand that's in some select grocery stores in the United States. And they're based out of California. But what Farmer Paul said was, yes, you vote for time every or sorry. Yes, you vote every four years. But

But really, even more important than that, you're voting three times a day. So every single time when it comes to food and pharma anyway, which is my bread and butter, pun intended, this is what I care about. He said that we're voting three times a day, not every four years. So every single time you're choosing what to feed your family, that is impacting everything.

everything. So you may have noticed that in the last couple of weeks, we've seen some really interesting announcements from people in what we would call big food. Steak and Shake announced that they were going to be using beef tallow for their fries.

We have, uh, you know, national seed oil free chains like sweet green and true food kitchen, uh, who are popping up. We have tons of huge brands that are now being bought by companies like Mondelez or, uh, or craft like primal kitchen, uh, CFA chips, simple mills, uh, cookies and crackers. These are all seed oil free, uh,

foods that are now being bought up by these huge companies. And the reason is because they're seeing the consumer voting with their dollars and they are choosing these foods. So we have an opportunity here to majorly disrupt the industry just by what we are choosing to put in our grocery cart and put in our

put on our plate. And I also want to remind any women that are in the audience or any men in the audience to empower the woman in your life on making these decisions and really owning and taking care of the health of your entire family. It typically is.

typically is the woman who is deciding things like what we're going to be eating tonight, where our kids are going to go to school, what doctor we're going to go see for our kids. Empower her to ask questions, to look deeper, to make changes, and to be receptive to some changes that she might want to make after listening to a show like Culture Apothecary, my show. So like

we really have the ability as women to completely disrupt and impact not only entire industries like food and pharma, but our own immediate family and then therefore our community, you know, taking advantage of like, hey, I'm going to tell my kids class or school, I want to be in charge of snacks. I want to be in charge of snacks after soccer practice and provide those for the kids so that you are choosing better ingredients. I mean, there are so many things you could do. Taking over like

and snack at your church nursery. These are different things that really make a huge difference. And I think a lot of times it does kind of, those opportunities are more presented to women often than men even. Amazing.

thank you so much for taking the time to have this conversation I really enjoyed getting to connect with you so people can go check out the podcast is there any other place that would be supportive for people to go if they want to go deeper into your work from here

Sure. So yeah, Culture Apothecary is the name of my show. I release new episodes every Monday and Thursday night at 9pm Eastern, 6pm Pacific. And you can watch every episode on Spotify or on Real Alex Clark on YouTube. And then I'm Real Alex Clark on Instagram. Amazing. Is there anything else to let people with before ending conversation? Do you feel like

we say what would be supportive to say. I just, I want to say, I have to say that you have asked the most thought-provoking, deepest questions I've ever been asked on an interview. So really, kudos to you. I was super impressed and enthralled and had to think about what I was going to say. And it was really fun to kind of have some deeper questions that I normally get asked. It was the lizard people one that got you. I love it!

No, it was so fun. Thank you very much. You're doing a great job. I received that. Likewise. All right. Well, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you. That's it. That's all. I'll see you next week. Hope you guys enjoyed that conversation. I want to invite you over to the Align Podcast YouTube channel if you want to see the quality of both of our skins IRL.

or as close to IRL as you can on the internet with video and check it out, subscribe, leave comments. I love reading the comments over there. And also if you have interest in improving the quality of your skin, they did give us a discount code at OneSkin, which was kind of them. You go to oneskin.co.uk.

slash align. I believe you get 15% off your order, which is pretty cool. So if you want to try it out and get yourself a discount, jump over to their one skin.co slash align. I appreciate y'all. That's it. That's all. I'll see you next week.