Ozempic Won't Solve America's Obesity Problem

When you look at our food system today, the majority of what people are eating is ultrarocessed crap. The average child spends less time outside than a maximum security prisoner, where people are spending eight plus hours on their phone.

We are in the midst of one of the biggest problems in the country. If we don't fix this, America is going to have even more serious problems. The environment that we exist in is structurally just hard to be healthy, which is why you see the default health outcomes in the US being so poor.

Why not just universal basic ompic? Why doesn't that solve the problem?

I think now the problem is we're feeding our kids poison and all of them are sick. I think many of our problems are downstream of the fact that the majority of the country is just sick. No matter if we get rich or whatever, if most of the country is sick, what is the point?

You've been on a quest for the last few years to uncover and make a dent in solving our food crisis, our health crisis, our disease crisis. Why don't you trace your journey a little bit into how you became obsessed with this, and then we'll get into what we're up to?

Yeah. So, Peter Seal has this idea of a secret, and I feel like the idea that what you eat, your lifestyle, all these things, they impact your health outcomes, they impact your energy, they impact how you feel.

I kind of came across that idea when I was 20, and it felt like this secret where, if you look at any data in the US, US healthcare outcomes are horrible. They're bad, they're getting worse. Obesity, heart disease, all of these conditions are basically at record levels and continue to go up.

And as I started to read more about our food system, about environmental toxins, about all these sorts of things, I just became more and more convinced that everyone's like, "What's going on with our obesity crisis? Why are we so sick?" And the answer is simply that we exist in an environment that systematically outputs unhealthy people.

This idea that you could just change your food, change your diet, change your exercise, change your environment and that would lead to much better health outcomes naturally feels to me like this secret that I believed and invested behind and started companies behind for 15 years that still the average person does not totally fully internalize.

So it was just like I just became obsessed with this idea the first time I came across it when I was 20 or so.

And you yourself have gone out of your way to go against the grain in terms of your own personal life and trying to be healthy, but it's very difficult to be healthy today. It's almost like people used to say when they were canceling people on Twitter all the time, hey, just build your own Twitter, you want your own information, you could just build your own, and similarly, you have to build your own food totally.

Yeah. I mean in so many ways I feel like the things like health used to just be an output of the environment that we existed in. My great-grandmother, she lived till she was 95, very healthy until the day that she died.

And she never shopped organic. She never avoided and asked for no seed oils at the grocery store. She never did any of the insanity that I've kind of had to learn, figure out, and do. That's because primarily she lived and grew up in an environment that was not sickness promoting.

She was not exposed to 40,000 novel chemical compounds that exist in the US or eating foods that were addictive and made her feel shitty and impacted her health. The environment that we exist in is just structurally just hard to be healthy, which is why you see the default health outcomes in the US being so poor.

And how are the Amish exempt from this? Just as an example, what do they do differently?

They do a lot differently. You should go to one of the communities. There's a lot of things they do very differently than you and I. They're eating food that is grown locally, seasonally all the time. They're outside all the time working with their hands. They're existing in a tight-knit community.

There's a whole host of environmental and lifestyle differences that the Amish have. You can argue, do you have to live like the Amish to have better health outcomes? But certainly they have much better health outcomes and they live very differently than you or I, but they're not doom scrolling like us.

So how do they make it? It's like they might live longer. They're uninformed. I know they might live longer but at what cost?

So when did things start to get really bad or has it just been monotonically for the last century or was there sort of a moment where things started to escalate and what happened?

Yeah, things started to get much worse in the 1970s. I think my view is that is around the time when you started to see childhood obesity tick up. You started to see obesity, heart disease, things like this kind of start to move.

And in my view, a big reason for that is there was a lot of shareholder and other pressure specifically geared towards big food companies around that time where basically these companies are today like 150 years old. Almost every big food company is shareholder owned. They are not run controlled or anything by CEOs.

They're basically just these lumbering corporations that the market is having them optimized for earnings per share. And what that means is these companies for the last 50 years have consistently decided to trade a real ingredient for something that's kind of a fake version of that.

Like they've moved from strawberries to strawberry flavoring or they've moved from sugar to high fructose corn syrup. And you kind of roll this out over a 50-year period and you look at our food system today and the majority of what people are eating is ultrarocessed crap that is addictive, is not nutrient-dense, and is full of environmental toxins, chemical compounds.

The human body has in our entire millions of years of evolution never encountered many of these compounds. So I think that that shift started in the 70s. It's compounded generationally. It certainly doesn't help today that the average child spends less time outside than a maximum security prisoner.

Most kids today are eating 70% of their diet is ultrarocessed foods. People are spending eight plus hours on phones. All these sorts of things are factors, but I really think that our food system started to become uniquely poisonous in the 70s and that is why you saw especially in the US that's why you started to see many healthcare and health outcomes trend in such a negative direction especially relative to the rest of the world.

What are the levers that could make a dent in reversing some of these trends as relates to the to the food system?

Yeah, from a food system standpoint, I think the biggest single lever that we could pull, which would be extraordinarily politically challenging to pull, is fixing our crop subsidy system. So, if you look, the US government over the last decade has spent close to a hundred billion on crop subsidies.

They're basically subsidizing corn, soy, and wheat so that American farmers can grow corn, soy, and wheat. Because it's subsidized, it's artificially cheap, so we grow a lot of it. Because it's subsidized, it's artificially cheap.

And so these big food companies use it in everything. And so these big food companies have basically gone on a 30-year journey to replace sugar with high fructose corn syrup or to replace olive oil or something like that with soybean oil, which is highly processed and inflammatory, causes obesity and all sorts of rat and human models.

I think that this sort of wholesale swapping of let's take the worst ingredients in their most highly processed form and replace them with an ingredient that humans traditionally ate is one of the root causes of chronic disease. Today, the average American gets almost 20% of their caloric intake from soybean oil.

This is historically anomalous. And it's not because anyone wants soybean oil. You're probably not a big consumer of soybean oil or anything like this. It's just because it's artificially cheap. And because it's artificially cheap, it ends up in everything.

I think that that is one of the core kind of root causes of what is going wrong in our food system today.

And is that a uniquely US problem or is this?

Yeah, it's a uniquely US problem. I mean, the US, our food system relative to Europe or something like that. Europe, many, their countries are smaller. They tend to lean much more into a local food agriculture system. They also don't have as much of a federal intervention on their food system.

The US in many ways this sort of subsidy of corn, soy, wheat, things like that. It had good intent. A lot of this the crop subsidy stuff started with a farm bill in the 80s where basically farmers were exposed to inclement weather, bad weather that was impacting their crop yields.

The US government stepped in and was like, "Okay, we're going to try and keep these farmers solvent." I think that the intent was good, but now here we are years later, we have billions a year going towards these crop subsidies that are making Americans sick.

We used to say, okay, we just need to make sure that we're growing enough calories and make sure that Americans are not dying of starvation. They're not make sure our kids have enough to eat. I think now the problem is we're feeding our kids poison and all of them are sick.

Why not just universal basic ompic? What's it why doesn't that solve the problem?

Well, so I think there's two things. One, I think that GLP1s are potentially an incredibly interesting technology. I think that we are in the midst of the worst chronic disease crisis, one of the biggest problems in the country.

If we don't fix this, America is going to have even more serious problems like 20 years from now. Given that the average American is overweight, we're looking at almost 80% obesity over rate overweight rates. I think that it does make sense to put a bunch of these people on a GLP-1 to try and jumpstart them in a direction where they are moving towards health.

That said, I don't at all think that giving universal GLP1s to everyone is necessarily a universal solve. There's just a very poor history of saying here is an intervention that is going to solve all of our problems as a species.

I just think that it is quite unlikely that ompic is the one thing that is going to be a cure all. Just to use one example, how does ompic work? It basically it turns down someone's appetite so you're just eating less.

If you're still eating the same crap that the average American is eating today but you're on ompic and eating less of it, you are almost certainly going to be deficient in protein and micronutrients and a bunch of things that will have long-term health implications if you undereat or get exposed to not enough of those nutrients for a very long period of time.

So I think we fundamentally have to solve the food issue if we want to have a healthy country.

By the way, have we yet updated our food pyramid in the sense that we have an accurate understanding of what we should be getting on a country level in terms of nutrients?

Yeah, the new food pyramid is a tremendous improvement over the old guidelines. Not only is the site super sexy, Joe Gibbia did a great job on that, but finally, for the first time, people are saying, "Eat whole foods, eat more vegetables, eat meats and other wells sourced sources of protein, vegetables, fruits."

It's crazy that it took until now to say maybe we shouldn't be giving kids 15 servings of whole grain and saying that sugar is totally fine for kids under two. We recommend some amount of sugar for kids on the age of two, which was the past administration sort of guidelines.

So I think they're a tremendously positive step.

And so for people who want to make a difference in the food system you mentioned that policy recommendation. What about people who want to do something direct? You obviously before True you started a bone broth company. What are other big companies that could be built in the space or opportunities to make a difference?

Yeah, I think there's a ton of opportunities. I think the core problem is that a bunch of these lifestyle interventions like eating a healthier diet, exercising, taking certain supplements, taking peptides if that makes sense for your individual person and risk profile. All of these things can be considered healthcare interventions.

If you look at our healthare system, nothing in the healthare system thinks about someone who is at risk of heart disease exercising as a healthcare intervention. No payer pays for it. No one incentivizes you to do that. It's just a doctor is like, "Yeah, you should clean up your diet and exercise."

I think that there is a tremendous tremendous opportunity for people that want to make a dent on this problem. Figuring out how to make these sorts of lifestyle interventions part of the healthare system is what we're doing at Trummed and incentivizing people to actually invest in their health, to invest in prevention, to invest in things that move the needle from a chronic disease standpoint.

So let's get to True Med first. First trace the idea maze a little bit in terms of you you've been obsessed with this problem this kind of meta problem this series of problems and it's kind of like where do you even start I'm sure you you know picked over every nook and cranny how did you settle that hey this was the opportunity what was maybe some other things you consider?

So in growing Kettle and Fire basically when we launched it was $16 a carton for 16 ounces of bone broth and everyone was like this is good but this is very expensive and now 9 years in we're in every grocery store in the country and the average price per box is like $7.

People way more people buy it, but they're also like this is very expensive. I kind of had that experience and then looked at things like Costco and Walmart are the two largest sellers of organic products in the country. To me, that is a signal that people want to invest in products that are good for them.

They want to buy products that leave them off better, healthier, and the like, but it's just cost prohibitive. And then if you look at the healthare system, we have this weird dynamic where if I am at risk of cardiovascular disease or heart disease, I basically can exercise, I can eat well, I can do all of these things that will prevent an acute heart attack or something like that and I'm basically not that's all cash pay.

I'm paying out of pocket. I'm doing all of that kind of stuff totally on my own. Whereas if you take someone that doesn't do any of those things, basically they have a heart attack early and then the health care system will pay hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to manage that person's condition basically for the rest of their lives.

So I think that fundamentally we need to incentivize people to invest in prevention to invest in leveraging lifestyle interventions that can make a dent on chronic conditions. That was kind of the lens through which I was looking at what's the company that I want to start after Kettle and Fire.

When I met Dr. Mark Kimman who is basically he's a functional medicine doctor co-founder of function he mentioned that something he was doing with a bunch of his patients was for patients that would come in he would recommend lifestyle interventions and he would write them something called a letter of medical necessity which is basically a letter that the IRS has said for certain people where an intervention matches a lifestyle intervention matches a condition someone's working to treat reverse or prevent they can spend they can get that letter and use taxfree HSA FSA dollars on sleep aids, healthy, better diet, supplements, exercise, things like that.

When Markman told us about that idea, I was like, this is a really interesting thing. We could basically try and build infrastructure that allows the average person to get one of these elements if they qualify and use the tele medicine rails that Himsow and other companies have spent the last several years building but rather than prescribing ompic or prescribing TRT we can actually prescribe food interventions exercise things like that.

That was kind of the idea and where it started from. I looked at a whole host of other things like thought about starting a grocery store. Thought about starting a life insurance company that would be aggressive in terms of helping you live longer and making lifestyle interventions.

Ultimately felt like this was the type of thing that had the potential to direct hundreds of billions of dollars towards lifestyle interventions over the next couple years and so it felt like it was the right thing to do.

So yeah, everyone knows we need to shift more from chronic to preventive care and and this is basically a way to financially incentivize people to do that.

Exactly. One of your ideas is that the root cause of a lot of issues is this mismatch between our genes and our environment. Why don't you flesh that out a little bit more?

So if you think of an animal in the zoo like an animal in the wild with few exceptions they can get break their leg get an infection whatever but when an animal is exists in a species appropriate environment that animal tends to be healthy like there's a natural match between the the health of the environment and the health of an animal.

When you take an animal away from its natural habitat and put it in the zoo or something like that, zoo animals exhibit all of these diseases that their counterparts in the wild just don't get. They have weird ticks, they get depressed. In some notable cases, animals have even killed themselves, which is just something you don't see in the wild.

They get obese, they get all sorts of things. So my take and what I think is very true is that the health of an animal is basically a reflection of the health of an animal's environment. If an animal is existing in an environment that is not healthpromoting, you're in a season of drought or there's not a lot of food, that animal gets skinny, dies, you basically can see that that animal is not existing in an environment that's healthpromoting.

I think that over the last 100 years or so, we basically as humans have seen we've built an environment that is not considering or not underwriting, not thinking about what is the right thing to do for human health. How do we promote human health and flourishing?

So I think that so often when we think about health, we think about what is going on with you, Eric, with this specific condition as opposed to thinking about what is the environment that you exist in that leads to you not getting 8,000 steps a day that leads to you spending all day on your phone that leads to you eating a terrible diet. No, I'm not, you know, not you actually, but I mean.

I think that that is an important idea that people don't think about enough is just how do you shape your environment so that it's naturally healthpromoting as opposed to having to discipline yourself and doing all the stuff that most people frankly fail at, myself included.

There's this Twitter competition for a million dollars for who gets the best article. There's this so people are doing kind of clickbait stuff and there's one guy who's like you know how to change your life in a day, how to change your life in an hour, like these kinds of posts.

There was one that went super viral that was how to change your life in 1 minute and it was a photo of smashing the phone.

That's pretty good. Totally. The okay so I'm curious for more you you've talked about this idea of hey we should take this health crisis as serious as we take sort of our you know national security crisis like you know we as a country have something of a NRA for health or something of a you know collective effort because it's a you know problem that hey the market might not isn't solving on its own and in fact you know exacerbates what would you gave one example of and the subsidies What are some of the biggest levers you think?

So I'll answer that, but just to frame how I think about the problem, if for example like China or one of our adversaries deployed a boweapon that made 75% of our population obese or overweight, 45% of kids obese or overweight, and healthcare like the largest cost in the country all of a sudden because everyone was sick, everyone in America would be up in arms and trying to figure out how do we solve this?

This is an existential crisis. This is a matter of national security that we make a dent on that. No matter if we win the AI race, get rich or whatever. If most of the country is sick, it's what is the point? We're not thriving as a nation.

I think many of our political problems are downstream of the fact that many the majority of the country is just sick. So, if I was able to wave a magic wand and do anything, I think fixing the subsidies would be one thing for sure that I would do.

Secondly, I would have our health care system just invest far more in prevention. You look at other countries that have incredible health outcomes on a per capita basis. Singapore is a good example. They basically have these people that are not quite doctors but are like coaches or something like that that will check in with you and try and nudge you towards making better better choices.

Then I would take a much stronger stance one much much more similar to that that Europe takes when it comes to certain environmental toxins, chemical regulation, things like that. In the US, we basically take the approach that if a company makes or manufactures a totally novel environmental chemical that as long as they tell us under current regulations, something called grass generally recognized as safe. As long as they tell us, hey, this chemical is safe, we can introduce it into our food system.

This is how you've heard of the forever chemicals and stuff like this got into our food system and basically are all over the planet now because 3M invented them something like 60 years ago and basically they just started using them. In the EU, these novel chemical compounds have to go through something that is much more like what it takes to unleash or you know get a pharmaceutical approved in the in the US today where they have to do many years of safety testing.

They have to show that it doesn't cause acute harm and they basically have to approve it before it's allowed on the market. The end result is we have between 60 and 80,000 chemical compounds in the US that are not allowed in in the EU.

I think that that regulatory approach is one of the hidden reasons why so many people are sick and I think it's one of the reasons that the US Americans are exposed to more toxic compounds and novel chemical compounds than basically any nation in the world and I think that is a big kind of hidden part of our chronic disease crisis and it's something you're going to hear a lot more about in the coming years.

Fascinating. I had one college professor. I have no idea if this is even remotely accurate, but they were they were convinced that Monsanto was evil. Not just in terms of its health impacts, but they thought they thought they were sort of like getting involved in all sorts of foreign wars and like influencing our foreign policy and stuff.

I just say that to say could there be competitors to some of these like mega play like could startups even emerge that would begin to or is it just like structurally unsound?

I think it's really hard structurally and I think that that doesn't mean that it's not going to happen and hopefully it will but one of the things that you have seen is with Monsanto for example like the the pesticide lobby and the the chemical and a lobby is one of the strongest in America and a big part of what they're doing is like for example a couple months ago Monsanto was lobbying hard spent tens of millions of dollars to get a writer in a bill that would basically make sure that no one could ever sue them for the potential health impacts of one of their most popular products, glyphosate.

That sort of thing is these companies get big, they provide a bunch of chemicals. Monsanto specifically has done a lot of things that I think are incredibly morally dubious. Once they get big enough, once they start selling billions and billions of dollars of these products, they spend a lot of that money on lobbying and making sure that they are immune from any of the harms and health impacts that come from some of the some of these like toxic products that they spray everywhere.

Glyphosate is the number one pesticide sprayed in the US and the largest maker of it is spending as much as they possibly can to make sure that glyphosate which there's been 14 billion of damages awarded to people that have gotten cancer or other diseases from glyphosate exposure. Monsanto is spending as much as they can to try and like buy basically pesticide liability shields and other things that shield them from competition and or that shield them from the actions and the consequences of like the diseases their compounds have caused.

I think that when these companies can kind of rig the game in that way, it becomes very very challenging for a startup to kind of come along and make a real play at some of these things.

You mentioned a grocery store just as a simple idea. Is there what's the opportunity that Whole Foods hasn't done with what they've tried to do?

I mean, Whole Foods is amazing and so I think that John Mackey was a total pioneer and legendary entrepreneur. I think that the thing that grocery stores have not really done is and this is kind of the thesis for Trummed is think about food as a healthcare intervention.

To me, I think there's a ton of potential for people to, for example, look at their biomarkers and have a grocery store or some other entity that is responsible for improving your health. I think that if you think increasingly about food, grocery as a health intervention, as part of one's healthare and part of the fight against chronic disease, you would think about a grocery very a grocery store very differently than today which is basically just let's figure out the sourcing and then people can buy whatever they want.

So I think there's my idea was that I think there's a ton of room for a grocery store that is a more active participant in your in your health, telling you to eat certain things, tracking your macros, all these sorts of things that I think would solve a lot of problems for people.

So, let's talk more about if we fully identified the health crisis as one of our main sort of national priorities, what what else we would do? Maybe we could start looking at it in the light of like what were some of the pillars or main principles and maybe talk about where they are so far.

I think that you have seen across all of healthcare, across all of food, just corporate capture of our food guidelines, of our health guidelines, of all these sorts of things. The previous FDA commissioner, their stated goal with running the FDA, their number one goal was to combat misinformation. The current one is to make Americans healthy.

That means grass reform, so cleaning up how we regulate chemicals. That means fixing school lunches, fixing military lunches. Basically what we feed kids, 80% of schools have contracts with soda companies. These soda companies literally will pay a school district to put these vending machines all over the schools.

It helps fund schools, but it also comes at the cost of getting kids sick. So I think cleaning up school lunches, cleaning up military lunches, cleaning up the food guidelines. Second thing is improving and streamlining the way that we look at regulating drugs. Make it faster for companies to lean in and launch innovative therapies that can make a dent on the chronic disease crisis.

Just trying to bring common sense back into the way that we think about health, the way that we think about food, and try and make a dent in the chronic disease crisis.

Are some of these ingredients that we're discussing or foods or you know soda or what like so d so so addicting or so dangerous or so appeasing that they should be outlawed or so like how do we think about?

No I actually don't think that many of these things should be outlawed like I do actually think that consumer choice is a very important thing you know but we have like specifically with kids we have guidelines and we already don't think that kids should have free choice like we don't let them drink so I think that there is a place for soda in this country I just also think that if you want to drink soda all the time that probably we shouldn't be subsidizing it by subsidizing high fructose corn syrup.

Probably we should not have Coca-Cola spending $140 million to influence our our nutrition guidelines like they have over the last 15 years and I think that it's things like that where a lot of times the big food companies and people will sort of fall back on this idea of consumer choice. I think it's very important but we also are currently grappling with an incredibly important chronic disease crisis and if we don't take effort to uniquely address this thing I think that the US is in an incredibly tough spot 10 20 30 years from now.

I want to ask you about psychedelics and I'm like is that in this discourse at all? Does that move outcomes for is that kind of not really not really?

I think that if you just look at the data, psychedelics are an incredibly powerful intervention. Ketamine therapy, ketamine assisted therapy works better than SSRIs in many cases, especially for treating things that are very intense like treatment resistant depression, PTSD, things like this.

I think that for many of our veterans and others that suffer from PTSD and intense depression, psychedelics should be part of a menu of treatments that we are open to giving people. I think that we probably vastly underinvest in them. I think that there's a ton of really promising research around their efficacy and things like this.

I think it's an open question of how ready the average American is to think about these things not as a group of people dropping acid in Golden Gate Park in the 60s but as a vital mental health therapy for people that are really really struggling. I'm very supportive of, again, just looking at psychedelics as another therapy that can address the many mental health and depression issues that we have in this country.

If you look at it just as that through that lens, a therapy that has few to no side effects, especially when done with doctor oversight and things like this, I think they should be part of how we treat and address many of the mental health crises that we see today.

Are there any other really big levers that you would focus on if one of your main goals was to target the mental health crisis?

I think that we are hugely underestimating the impact of biological health and how that is tied to mental health. There's some really interesting studies out there around taking a functional medicine approach where you come in and say you're depressed and rather than doing talk therapy and things like this that statistics show sort of don't work very well for many people.

We focused just on reducing your inflammation and fixing your gut and there have been studies that show just by focusing and taking a functional medicine approach focusing on sleep, focusing on gut health, focusing on lowering your inflammation through diet and exercise that combination of therapies works better than just talk therapy and things like that.

So I think that we massively underestimate the degree to which we are human beings. For our biological organisms and our mental health is very tightly coupled to our emotional sorry to our physical health and so I would have much I think that we should fund much much more of research along these lines of what's called metabolic psychiatry which is basically this idea that many diseases that we put in the mental health bucket thing like epilepsy depression schizophrenia many of these things have causes that are actually metabolic in root and for example one of the best therapies for someone that is schiz schizophrenic or epileptic or even in many cases bipolar.

If you put them on a ketogenic diet, these things will in many cases just resolve. That is not a thing that our current like mental health world really underwrites.

It reminds me of a conversation I once had with Daniel Gross when he he was saying, "Hey, anytime someone is feeling depressed, it would behoove them to, you know, before attributing it to some psychological, you know, defect or making some deep psycho, you know, analysis about it, first just saying, hey, am I sleeping well? Am I eating well? Am I exercising?"

Totally. Have I been outside recently? Yeah. Totally. The I want to shift lastly to another topic that you've just been really curious about for a while which is which is consciousness. What what has sort of your driven your your hunch or or curiosity there and and and where is your thinking drawn you?

I think that I have just been interested in this idea of like what what does it mean to be healthy? What does it mean to live a life that people are excited about, have energy with, have energy and are just like what does it mean to feel great in your body and your in your mind and everything?

I think that consciousness is sort of this root layer of like what does it mean to what is your experience of being alive of of of life? Frankly we don't really have a great answer to this right now. A lot of our a lot of our theories and philosophies and things of what is consciousness are not great. They're not predictive and you ask the average person, you ask even like philosophers that have thought a lot about this.

There's not there's nothing near consensus. So I think that I don't it is an area that I'm very interested in. I think we're going to learn a lot about in the next decade. I hope to have friends and play somewhat of a role in exploring and learning more about about what consciousness is, how to change it, how to improve it, all these sorts of things.

I would put it very much in like personal pet interest bucket. Not like I'm doing anything around it right now.

Well, to obviously you're focused on building True Med, we'll close there. But if if you could scale yourself, you know, infinitely like for people listening who are like also obsessed with this problem. Is is there something else you think is underexplored under whether it's a research area or a company idea or or or or some sort of policy thing that not enough people are looking into that we haven't yet discussed that you want more people to spend?

An idea I've been thinking about recently is like and we mentioned at the beginning that the health of an organism is like the health of your environment. In my view, what that means is that if we started thinking about not improving just Eric's health, but improving the health of like all of your friends and community and people around you that exist in the same environment, like in intervening and improving your environment could have a much larger impact on health than just optimizing your own health.

I think that there's potentially interesting models of improving one's environment, whether that's building like a health oriented city or town or like suburb, you