Here’s What’s So Messed Up About Bill Gates! w/ Calley Means
What this video covers
This is a commentary segment from The Jimmy Dore Show built around an appearance by Calley Means — the video’s billing says “w/ Calley Means” — and it is about Bill Gates’s influence on food and agriculture, not the regulatory-funding debate. Dore opens with Apeel, the Gates-backed produce coating, which he describes as chemicals sprayed on fruits and vegetables that cannot be washed off, with undisclosed ingredients and, per claims cited in the segment, possible neurotoxic components — and notes that Apeel lobbied against labeling so consumers would not know it had been applied.
Means widens the critique to what he presents as Gates’s broader philosophy: proposals to block the sun (geoengineering), the dismissal of trees as a serious carbon-capture tool, and a vision of the future of food as ultra-processed lab-grown meat rather than regenerative agriculture — an approach Means argues treats chronic conditions as pharmaceutical or vaccine deficiencies instead of consequences of a toxic food system and environment. Dore adds that Gates is “the number one owner of farmland in America.”
Means anchors his argument in soil depletion: he claims an organic tomato in the United States has 70% less nutrients than it did 60 years ago and that, by some measures, America has “40 crop cycles left before the soil is totally just dust” — while regenerative farming, he argues, can produce higher yields and be carbon neutral or even carbon negative. His cost framing: regenerative farming could be done “for a lot less than $1,600 per obese American,” the monthly-cost frame he uses for weight-loss drugs.
The segment then pivots to Washington. Means recounts meeting with senior members of Congress sponsoring a bill to extend Medicare (and eventually Medicaid) coverage to Ozempic — which he describes as “scored as one of the highest cost bills in American history” and the most-lobbied-for bill in the pharmaceutical industry right now. He claims one bill sponsor did not know the FDA says Ozempic is a lifetime drug or that the bill’s intent includes children, and says the drug company effectively wrote the legislation: “Novo Nordisk came in, gave me the bill, I introduced it.”
He closes with the opioid analogy, drawing on his own years in the industry. He recounts how opioid companies funneled consulting payments to pain specialists — including, he claims, a $3 million grant in 2010 to Stanford’s then-dean Philip Pizzo to reform the medical school’s curriculum — and that 9 of the 19 members of the NIH opioid-guidelines panel Pizzo chaired had themselves been directly paid by opioid companies. He presents that as the playbook now being repeated in obesity medicine, and ends with his verdict on the system’s record: the medical establishment’s performance on chronic conditions — “95% of medical spending” — is “an absolute travesty,” with heart disease, diabetes, depression, and cancer all rising as spending on them has risen.
Key points
- The segment centers on Gates’s Apeel produce coating: sprayed-on chemicals that can’t be washed off, undisclosed ingredients, and lobbying against labeling — per Dore and Means’s claims.
- Means frames Gates’s food philosophy as tech-fix maximalism — blocking the sun, lab-grown meat over regenerative agriculture — treating chronic illness as a drug deficiency rather than an environmental one, his characterization.
- On soil, Means claims U.S. produce has far fewer nutrients than decades ago (70% less in tomatoes vs. 60 years ago) and “40 crop cycles left”; he argues regenerative farming yields more and is carbon neutral — his figures and claims, attributed.
- Means recounts lobbying Congress against a Medicare-for-Ozempic bill he calls a potential trillion-dollar giveaway, claiming the sponsor didn’t know it was a lifetime drug intended for kids.
- He draws the opioid playbook analogy: a $3 million grant from opioid makers to Stanford’s Philip Pizzo for curriculum reform, and a NIH panel where 9 of 19 members were paid by opioid companies — his account of the history.
- His closing claim: chronic conditions consume 95% of medical spending while their rates keep rising — his framing, presented as such.