#51 – BOUGHT the Movie: The Big Health Sell Out ** November 19, 2014
Guest // Jeff Hays ** Host // Louise Kuo Habakus

Listen to the inside story behind the making of BOUGHT. And click here to buy the DVD or movie download.

Our health is bought by Wall Street and the big health sell out has happened with our help.

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Louise: Hello everyone, I am Louise Kuo Habakus, your host on Fearless Parent Radio where we’re talking about cutting-edge unconventional ideas in health, wellness, green living and holistic parenting. We provide evidence-based research, practical information and most importantly, support and community. Today’s show is about an eye-opening and paradigm shifting new movie called Bought. It’s a documentary about the two biggest categories of things we put into our bodies on purpose: food and drugs; and the social contract that we have with the people who make and sell these things to us: the corporations we collectively call Big Food, Big Ag and Big Pharma. It’s a social contract that is been broken. Now if you haven’t seen Bought yet it’s not too late, the six-week online release ends this Friday, November 21, 2014. You can watch this movie for under five dollars and I highly recommend that you go and do it this week. You can go to fearlessparent.org for more information.  It’s my great pleasure to introduce our guest today successful filmmaker and entrepreneur, Jeff Hays. Jeff has been producing films for over 20 years and has been shortlisted for an Academy Award. He holds eight patents and the 20+ companies he founded have collectively raised over $100 million in capital. Jeff considers his most important roles in his life to be the father of nine and the grandfather to 10.  You can read more about Jeff and his work at JeffHaysFilms.com. Hi Jeff. Welcome.

Jeff:     Hi. Thank you.

Louise: So let’s get right down to it.  I want to start out by asking you why you make films.

Jeff:     You know this is funny when I was 25 years old I went to a meeting at the Success Motivation Institute in Waco, Texas and they were selling franchises of personal development stuff and there they talked about the founder had set a business criteria.  For whatever he did he had two business criteria: 1) He wanted to make an impact; 2) He wanted to make money. I at 25 years old, I was looking for my philosophy, my meaning.  What was I going to do? I adopted that and that has been what for 36 years has been my standard; I want to make an impact and I want to make money. I don’t believe you can be sustainable if you just make an impact but are constantly poor and can’t do something new.  So for me I always wanted to be a filmmaker.  I remember being a siding salesman like 21 years old and riding with my partner we would be driving between these little west Texas towns  and I would be like “You know, I want to be a filmmaker.” And he would be like, “You got to be kidding, how would you do that?” and I’m like “I don’t know.”  And he says, “I want to be a pilot.” And I’m like “How would you do that?” and he’s like “I don’t know.” He’s just finishing his thirty year career as an incredibly successful pilot.  He teaches airline pilots how to fly airbuses.  He works for Airbus and I ended up in the film biz. What I love about it really is you can be whatever you decide you are. A couple of west Texas bumpkins riding around selling siding saying “you know, this was what I want to do.

Louise: That’s right, that’s right.  When you ask millennials today, 87% say they want to make a lot of money and it sure would be nice, Jeff, if we could just grab them right and say you can make an impact too ….

Jeff:     And have meaning to your life. My mentor used to always tell me, “Jeff, it’s not just can we but should we?” That question would’ve saved Enron; yes guys we can do this but should we?

Louise: And it’s not that you have to sacrifice making money.  There’s all sorts of brilliant ways that you can do that and that’s important.

Jeff:     Yeah, why why would you settle for making money and not making an impact?

Louise: So Jeff, tell us what kinds of films you make and how you decide what to make?

Jeff:     The enterprise promise of Jeff Hay’s Films is that we make movies that make movement and so I look for people that don’t have a voice that deserve one.  So it limits the field.  I look for something where there’s already people. People think I know a lot about these subjects.  When I announce them, I do a film about GMOs, big Pharma and vaccines. And they say oh tell me about vaccines. And I say how do I know? What research do you do before you start?  What they don’t understand is that I film my research.  Like a trial lawyer, it doesn’t make any difference what I know, what matters is what the audience sees.  Like the trial lawyer, it doesn’t matter what he knows, it matters what a jury hears.  So me becoming an expert is meaningless.  What’s relevant is what can I present to an audience in a relevant way?

Louise: Well also Jeff, it’s the process, right?  Your process of asking the questions and uncovering it. So if you take people through it rather than presenting to them what they should already know, then you are going to start from a place where there’s more trust, right?

Jeff:     We definitely meet them where they are because we are in that same place.  This film I really made for my 31-year-old daughter; I’m pausing there because she just had a birthday.  The film ends on the picture of a nine day old baby and I know that baby was nine days old because that is my granddaughter, Julia.  And Casey was in the film, my daughter, when she was in there, the Gardner family, she and her husband, Casey was pregnant with Julia and by the time we finished the film Julia had been born.  That was her third child.  And Casey had asked the question, she is not an activist, she is just a mom and “I’m concerned about vaccines” and when she asked this question, she was attacked by her friends on Facebook.  Some of them were well don’t bring your kids around my kids. It broke her heart.  So I made this film really for her to be able to have the argument for her that she doesn’t want to have with her friends.  And that was the…we would’ve followed it wherever it went.  Had the truth come out that everybody should have been, should be immediately vaccinated, that’s what we would’ve shown.

Louise: Jeff, you know your daughter is there with 89% of parents who are saying that the issue of vaccines and vaccine safety is topmost on their mind of health issues related to their children. 89% you know from a University of Michigan poll.  You hit that right square in the bull’s-eye in terms of just hey I’m concerned about this, can you help me think through: what are the issues? Who’s talking about it? why is it so hard to talk about this topic?

Jeff:     I have an email that came in this morning from somebody that was involved with us on the GMO side of the film and she says “For your information, my son is going for his well check up today and he is behind on some of his vaccinations because of I’ve been putting them off.  If he doesn’t get them, he is going to have issues with school soon and I’m sick about it.  So now I can be really honest about how I feel about vaccines: I think it is a gray area, I think they are important but I have lots of questions like why are we having so many?  Why are we putting new and dangerous ingredients into them? Why are they not being tested longer?  Why is the flu shot being pushed? I could go on.  She talked about how she couldn’t have had this conversation earlier and again, she is on the GMO side of the film, is completely in the dark.  This is just a mom wanting to do the right thing and going should I have them all? Should I have some them? They must be important because they really get shoved down my face.  This is the landscape.

Louise: It’s really our common humanity that these subjects are so polarizing.  I think it’s tempting to get into our heads about them which we can do and there’s a lot of facts and we can talk about some of them on the show too but really this is about being parents and what does it mean to make these decisions for our children and to be able to be honored for that right that we have to make these decisions. And when something is being crammed down your face like this your antennae start vibrating and I think that increasingly that is what we’re seeing.  You know Jeff what I what I heard a lot in response to the film was that filmmakers like you and a small community of others, what you’re really doing is taking the place of investigative journalism, you know what 60 minutes used to be. That’s gone.

Jeff:     It has to be gone. What’s funny is that the viewer on television, the TV news viewer, the CNN viewer, the FOX News viewer, they think they are the customer of the network and there like they should be putting out shows I like because I’m the customer.  We are not the customer of these networks. The customer pays and so I’m HBO’s customer but I’m not NBC’s customer.  NBC’s customer is who buys ads.  Just by definition, if I go to breakfast and the restaurant next door, if I don’t eat at one but I eat at the other, the customer at one is who you give your money to.  The customer of the big networks is the advertiser and that’s Big Food and Big Pharma and big everything.  And that is who they please and that is the system. And compared to public television, it is a very efficient system but it’s not an efficient system for truth.  It’s an efficient system for the people who own it.

Louise: And I think that is probably one of the most important things that people need to understand. I was having a conversation about this and when you think about America, we think we’re free, right?  Landed of the free, home of the brave.  Actually when it comes to our press, we are not free and we are actually not brave either and that’s something else I want to talk about – fear.   Fear is something that really comes into play here but you know Americans believe that the press is the truth and that’s why it’s especially troubling and why films like yours are especially important.

Jeff:     And it’s also a responsibility from my side. We chose a view of this film that …. It’s not an anti-vaccine film, it’s not even an anti-GMO film, what it’s about is what kind of country do we want to live in where we make these decisions about what goes into our bodies and our children’s bodies or these decisions are made for us by a government that has been shown to have been bought by financial interest.  And that is just the basic philosophical issue.  You can be pro-GMO and have every vaccine known to man and still support the issue of pay but we have a right to know and make the decision.

Louise: Absolutely.  I think that what is so shocking about this topic is that there is a collective blind spot that we have when it comes to these things that we put into our bodies and I think that Jeff, we want to believe that we are making good decisions. So when we’re presented with information that doesn’t square with what we’re doing, it’s extremely threatening and we can do one of two things. We can take a deep breath and say, alright, I need to go get some books, I need to watch some films, I need to go do some research or we sort of crawl back in the cave and say I can’t handle this, this is going to require me to go to a place that I don’t want to go; I’m not ready to go, I don’t want to go and I’m not willing to go.  So it’s going to be a lot easier for me to make the person who is telling me this information crazy because that feels a lot better to me, right, it’s like I’m feeling very threatened.  I think that went when the information is presented, Jeff, it’s so straightforward and you really do lay this out beautifully in the film.  You have a constellation of people that you noted; activists, professionals, researchers, parents, lawyers and nurses and I mean it’s really tremendous the way you bring together a cross-section of society.  When you listen you can’t help but be grabbed by the information because it is pretty shocking. Yet there’s a lot of resistance to this, right?  Why is difficult do you think for people to connect the dots?

Jeff:     First off, there’s two points I want to make.  You would be shocked to know the amount of punches that we did not throw.  Like chickenpox vaccine – we’ve got great material from half a dozen experts that we could have made a wonderful story about the chickenpox vaccine and the resulting shingles,  all that and I can go on and on and on of the stories that we did not tell that we filmed and the purpose was we felt there’s a limit to where you can take someone before you hit overload.  I was at CrossFit working out and this girl mentioned she’s pregnant and I’m like oh, don’t get the flu shot and she looked at me so we started talking and then I watched her when I went too far and she looks at me and says well you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.  I had pushed her to the point where she hit the overwhelm and that causes people to freeze and it’s wrong.  So with the film we were so careful to try to only pace it to as far as we could take it to open the conversation and then leave it to you and to the other people that are continuing the conversation to the to be a resource for these people.  That comes the answer of your question.  This is human nature and that’s why scientists have to die off for science to move forward because they literally will go to their graves with their beliefs regardless of how many facts start stacking up on the other side. This has been proven over and over; it’s human nature we somehow weave our identity out of our beliefs.  It’s amazing that we make any progress at all.

Louise: There’s tremendous faith and hope that you get from the film and from this work that I and many of my colleagues do. It’s a hopeful thing because what you do is you see some very dedicated, passionate, incredibly smart people who are pushing the boulder uphill.

Jeff;     Let’s use Kelly Brogan as an example.  She blows my mind. So here you have a  New York City psychiatrist, MIT undergrad, Cornell med school, NYU psychiatric residency, a couple of hundred thousand dollars in debt and so we talk about all the training and all in one way of thinking and then as she begins to become aware of some of the things I’m being told are not helping, they’re hurting and then even questions as a psychiatrist the use of psychiatric drugs in her practice and what is the real outcome for the patients and seeing this, do you realize that I can’t imagine what kind of integrity and internal honesty that she must have to be able to consider the thought that everything that I have learned in this one area and the massive school that and the massive amount of income I can make by just keeping going has to be put in question, 99% of psychiatrists would not be able to even allow that to bubble up into their consciousness but much less subject their beliefs to rigorous testing. My hat is off to someone who is capable of the mental gymnastics it would take to be able to question everything you’ve invested your life in and then come out of the other side with ways to help and help other people. Amazing.

Louise: Absolutely. It’s why I have personal deep regard for her.  She’s our medical director and you know she really is fearless.  Fearless in a way where she and others like her, they do exist not nearly in the numbers that we wish, there is this internal compass that is pointing true North and people are saying in view of the suffering….what I was going to say to you Jeff is that what distinguishes Kelly and others like her who come to this from a professional path, right, because many people come to it through personal experience with injury, personal experience either with their children or health problem – a severe health problem….

Jeff:     They are dragged into this because they don’t walk into it.

Louise: That’s right, exactly.  You know, I have told people that I actually don’t think that I could’ve been reached any other way except through my children.  I think that even if it had been me or my husband that you can rationalize but when it comes to your children and you looking you  say no, this was not the way they were born, this is not what was happening, I know, I know with every fiber in my body with every ounce of my being that there was something else that happened here and I’m going to figure it out. Did you approach some professionals who declined to be filmed? So you know that their position was consistent with having real questions about the issue but they couldn’t get brave enough to be filmed and go on the record, did you experience that?

Jeff:     Oh absolutely!  I’m thinking of one academic who has written papers in this area and by the time we wanted to film, he was looking for a job.  So he refused, he felt it was too risky.   So I filed David Healy who wrote the book Farmageddon which is just brilliant.  We flew to Wales and filmed him in Wales and at the end of the film he called and asked if we would please leave him out of it, that he could not afford to be associated with the Andy Wakefields of the world.  We filmed Andy Wakefield and I have spectacular footage with Andy and I pulled…Bobby and I wrestled with it for weeks and we decided not to include Andy in the film.  I felt like I was leaping on this pileup on him but we decided it was not worth branding the film where people could dismiss it by having him in the film.  I have such respect and love for Andy Wakefield and he’s not a part of the film because I was chicken.  There’s some examples and then by name Jeffrey M. Smith, who is a leader in the GMO movement, was going to promote the film and after it was over he and his group decided to step left of it because they could not afford to be seen as taking a position on vaccines because they felt it would injure their movement.  And yet I think I know where he stands on this personally and maybe I should say where he’s chosen to “sit” instead of “stand” on this personally.

Louise: So that really just is like a punch to the gut.  I mean it I understand it, I understand it so well. Obviously in the making of this film and doing this work, we want to be effective so you do have to start with where people are and if you start from a place where people won’t even meet you to press play and watch the film,  then you…..

Jeff:     You cheated everybody.

Louise: Exactly, exactly.  It does go to show that the this is extremely complicated and so what you have is a situation where you have people living their lives in a way that is not necessarily consistent with the way, their personal lives with their professional lives. I talk about this a lot because like I come from industry, you know, not the pharmaceutical industry, I come from financial services and I ran marketing for a big investment management firm, I was corporate vice president for an insurance company, I was a consultant. I know the business world. I know what it is. I know what its objective function is, how it operates and this idea that people are solving to what they need to do to advance their careers.  They’re making decisions that don’t square with their values in the workplace and then they go home and they live completely differently.  And their spouses, often their wives but not always, their spouses actually are spending the money earned by their husband’s or wife’s big corporate salary and they’re spending the money to undo the effects of the corporations on our society.  So they go and shop and buy organic food and non-GMO food and they go to alternative practitioners, they obtain religious and philosophical exemptions to vaccines and these are people who are actually involved in making the vaccines their livelihood and promoting them.  That level of profound dissociation that has to exist when you have who you are in one realm so different than who you are in another…Jeff that has got to be making us sick.

Jeff:     Warner Earhart said all organizations eventually turn evil.  What he meant by evil is when an organization begins to serve itself instead of its members. This is so funny…so I think he’s right.  I think it happens over and over.  I’m an entrepreneur; I’ve started lots of companies. The ones that have succeeded and grown large eventually they kicked me out.  It always happens, it cracks me up.  We’ll hire managers and eventually the professional managers will look at me and say Jeff you have too many ideas, you’re derailing things, that the truth is this business that you started is now bigger than you and we kind of need you to step out and let us the professionals handle this, this is big.  And I look at them and laugh remembering when this business they think is so important was nothing but a thought that I alone had.  Now when I start a company, I always know that’s the eventuality and I just plan for it.  I smile when it occurs but suddenly the organization and I have also gone without paying myself, run my family through the ringer so I can feed the beast that I created and then so this company that I started to make me money suddenly I’m borrowing money, raising money from investors, doing everything to feed this thing that I created.  You look at what’s happened with the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program where it was designed to help people and instead it grows into something that’s designed to help itself.  I’m reading John Grisham’s new novel and I didn’t realize that there’s an exact parallel that they started for coal miners for black long, a compensation program and the whole book is about how this compensation program grew into something that was just horrendous where they use it to drag these miners out until they die because they always do and it’s exactly the same evolution.  We’ve got to stand up.  It is my mentor’s comment – it’s not just can we but should we?  If we would start asking that question, and it doesn’t mean that I have to turn from a Libertarian into a Liberal Democrat, it means I have to be a human being.  It means should I walk past somebody that can’t feed themselves? Should I turn my back on somebody?  Should I ignore those around me that can afford medical care?  What should we be doing?  I think this crosses all political lines.  If we can safely have this argument then wow, we could really do something.

Louise: That’s right.  You  make such an important point because you’re making the point that organizations they really solve to self-preservation.  At first it’s all about the vision and the goal and the dream but what happens over time is that the realities of what it takes to get going and who you’re competing against and growth of the market and the need for profitability and all of the these requirements of remaining viable start to take precedent.  And so you begin to solve things like within an organization within a corporation fighting for budget and in order to fight for budget you need to explain why you’re so great and what it is that you do that is so much more important than what others are doing and so it become this self fulfilling prophecy of growth at all costs and essentially what it was that inspired what you were or what you started out with, becomes sort of a distant memory.

Jeff: What’s funny is that I don’t sit idly by when people accuse…I always use the word “organization” instead of “corporations” because it’s easy to pin this on corporations and especially with the Citizens United decision and so it’s easy to get mad at corporations but the reality is its organizations. You only have to look at academia.  So you have people who sit in academia and there all like yeah your corporations are so bad and yet you watch how academia has been purchased by big Pharma and you have a budget so you don’t do the research you want to do, you do the research that gets funded for your department.  Corporations come in with the money and next thing you know you find these people that we expect to be protecting us not doing studies on what their heart tells them to do them. My sister was a professor at Baylor College of Medicine for 20 years and 20 years ago she was telling me about the effects of selenium enhanced garlic where they were growing garlic in soil that had selenium in it and the profound anticancer effects of the properties of this and of course the research started and died there at Baylor because there was no money for it.  Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical company that Procter & Gamble owned that they sold off wired tons of money into my sister’s department and then they got lots of stuff done so it’s not just corporations. It’s anytime we get human beings together and organizations, the organizational self-preservation is exactly right.

Louise: You are so right Jeff and I agree with you. I think the point that we’re making is so that this is human nature.  I would also argue that it’s not irrational, right? People are behaving in a rational fashion in response to the rules and the system and what they see around them and it does take heroic efforts to extricate yourself out of that.

Jeff:     If we start thinking with our reptilian brain, you know, for me to come to your house and just take my food out your house instead just having to get it myself is the most rational thing.  We have evolved a frontal lobe to inhibit these impulses and to do better and I’m telling you we have to do….these are rational human and these are the natural evolution of an organization, we have to develop the ability to stop and say it’s not just can we but should we? We have to subject ourselves to the rigorous honesty that a Kelly Brogan goes through that says “okay, is this career that I envisioned for myself the right thing for me to do or do I need to modify it?” She is the crystallization of this very concept but there’s thousands of people doing it every day and this, if I could have one movement, this would be the movement is for us to question what we’re doing as a group and what was our real objective?  The objective of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program was to help families and get money when children are inevitably damaged by vaccines and that has been thwarted.   The objective of the childhood vaccination program was to keep kids from being sick.  So now we have the CDC who their charge is to protect the country from infectious diseases and their tool to do that, their primary tool is vaccines and they are also in charge of determining the safety of their primary purpose and tool.  We’ve got a conflict that we just have to solve.

Louise: That’s right.  After you lay it out, it’s really not so complicated.  I think that the real insight for me has been that people will, and we know this as parents, that our children will live up to our highest expectation of them too.  I think that when you put people side-by-side who are doing this work and who are thinking in this way and who are parenting in this way, it does make us more brave when we stand next to someone and they stand next to someone and so you know one of the beautiful accomplishments of your film is to bring together two movements that have been separate.  When I say separate I hesitate because I will tell you that I have yet to meet somebody in the vaccine safety and you know the vaccination choice communities that do not understand what’s going on with food.  So the people that I know and that I work with in this space, we all eat differently because of the work that we’ve done in learning about vaccines and yet that’s not the case vice versa, right?

Jeff:     So this was my objective, if I can stitch these two causes together. 1) They belong together. It’s the same bad actors and it’s the same effects.  Toxins in your body and these kids who are the canaries in the coal mine, the kids who are susceptible to toxins,  you know it’s like I don’t like this thought of ‘do vaccines cause autism?’ the answer is absolutely sometimes and as does GMOs. I believe acetaminophen, I believe that you have these at risk kids and who knows which individual thing is going to be or the combination that will push them over the edge.  It all needs to be looked at and it certainly needs to be looked at it in total.  If I can get these two groups to align we will multiply it by orders of magnitude the people interested in vaccine safety in telling the truth about vaccines and we will have a much stronger group.  I hated and understand completely when Jeffrey Smith said we can’t support this and I get it because it will literally injure his cause which is his charter and his responsibility to his organization.  I get it and I still hate.

Louise: So there are so many things, stunning, stunning things that are in your film, and you know, this is my life’s work, I do this 24/7 and yet there were things that I learned in watching your film.  I hope that doesn’t sound immodest but you like to think that when you have spent so much time on something that you’ve even seen and heard it all.  Is there something you want to talk about like one of the stories? I can tell you some of the things that really jumped out for me, was there one story you want to share that just really grabbed you by the throat or by the heart?

Jeff:     There’s a bunch.  We start with Sarah Bridges and originally, we had the film finished in July and I it just didn’t have the heart right.  So we re-edited it and didn’t finish it until September.  We shot some more footage in and God bless my Director Bobby for being willing to… I love working with him in post production because he becomes egoless.  I was having hard conversation with him and he goes “You don’t understand, Jeff, I don’t like feedback like this but I crave it.”  And one of the things we did is we took Sarah Bridges story from the middle of the film and opened the film with it because here is a mom one of the things I wanted to stamp out was the phrase “you’re just a mom” that for some reason a mom doesn’t need to be listened to.  If our mothers didn’t have good instincts about protecting us those genes died thousands and thousands of years ago. The fact that we’re walking this earth shows that we come from a long line of mothers who instinctively protected their children because the ones who didn’t, their genes died out.  This is real, a mother’s instinct. You sit here with Sarah Bridges who is a neuropsychologist, a PhD, sitting next to her son who’s wearing a seizure helmet and a diaper at 20 years old.  Who went through a seven-year battle and the court found yes she has a son with autism and mental retardation caused by vaccines.  Everybody agreed to open with that and then to look at that mom in the eye and say you’re just a mom, your opinion doesn’t count.  It kills that argument at the beginning and that was our attempt.  There she sits her marriage fell apart as she said predictably.  The price that she paid, the price that her son Porter paid on a life that didn’t happen. The grandkids that will never come.  The entire line, the good that he might’ve done in the world. This is not a common side effect but it’s an effect and we need to acknowledge it and tell the truth about it. I was deeply moved by her poise and her intelligence and her willingness to stand on the front lines and tell the truth.

Louise: 100% Jeff, I agree. You know when you start to multiply out by tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, entire generations of children, big percentages of them you know not being able to live out their full potential, not being able to have their birthright and live there their lives the way that they really should’ve been allowed to. The costs are staggering, you know, it is pretty mind blowing.

Jeff:     Well, this was a huge learning for me in the film. I had read so much about autism. I don’t have it in my family.  It’s something that I wasn’t really familiar with them and so this talk of autism and I hear well we’re just getting better at diagnosing it and I thought that must be the case.   It’s probably some these doctors in Orange County are going overboard in diagnosing it. You have Jerry Seinfeld come out and say I’m on the spectrum. Really, the spectrum is so broad that who isn’t on the spectrum?  I worked around a lot of software developers and we used to joke that the bold ones look at your shoes instead of theirs.  Yeah well ok some of these are on the spectrum and I thought yeah ok, that’s what autism was. And then I started filming some kids who have autism. Who it’s not like they may be on the spectrum somewhere and if people see how bad this is, how oh my gosh, I literally had no idea. We’re not talking about somebody who has trouble making eye contact in the conversation, were talking about a life that will never reach its full potential.  People need to know what autism really looks like.  The moms that haven’t slept in years a full night.  If I had to describe the autism moms I met they’re tired. They pour their life into protecting their child.  We’ve got to do better about helping.

Louise: Yes, Amen, amen.  Jeff, let’s end on a lighter note.

Jeff:     Yes, please.

Louise: Obviously your film is filled with hope.  We do this work with deep intention for positive change. Is there a funny story that you can share with us in the making of the film, you know, something that surprised you, something that was a little bit unpredictable or just funny that you’d like to share?

Jeff:     Now that you say that and I can always think of something but I literally cannot think of one funny thing, I’m sorry.  So we will have to dynamite something out of my memory.

Louise: Yeah, yeah, I know and we are sort of in a heavy space right now so it’s sort of an abrupt transition.  So Jeff, tell me, what can we look forward to?  This is week six of the online release and what’s next?  Tell us about how it’s being received. I know the feedback I’m getting is that it’s fantastic.

Jeff:     The film we’ve had great support from Mercola promoted it.  We made a deal with Mercola.  He and I both really like Barbara Loe Fisher and the National Vaccine Information Center, and he has been an angel.  It would not exist if it wasn’t for checks that Joe Mercola himself wrote. Literally they were at one time years ago ready to close the doors and he stepped in.  So everybody who watches the film through them the money went to this promotion that he did. The money, all of the money, went to NVIC.  So we got a really good push there.  I wanted to see how we could do in an online release. Next we will release DVDs.  I’ll do the small theatrical release in New York and LA and in Salt Lake that I do just for the fun of it.  This week we’re going to step back and say okay now what’s the most effective thing we can do to get this out into millions of homes? So that’s where I’m to be calling people like you.  All the people that they really are the thought leaders in this and in these communities.  I would like to create a way for us to really distribute the film widely.  I think it needs to be seen and the response were getting to it is uniformly good.

Louise: Absolutely.  You know you might even consider putting something at the end of the film that just says if you have an idea to get in touch.  I’ve been getting some suggestions.  I just got one yesterday from a chiropractor who is gifting the film to her daughter who is in her first year in chiropractic college and she said have you thought about either giving it to chiropractic colleges or offering it at a reduced rate for our future doctors. So I thought that was interesting.

Jeff:     Yeah, great idea and I have and I know I guess maybe all the presidents of all 16 chiropractic colleges and they’re a great place for us to get into.  So great feedback.  So I literally what to look at every idea we can do to…the objective of Jeff Hays Films is movies that make movements and I want to create. I’m going to be releasing a lot of follow-up content from stuff that we shot, we filmed an M.D. here at my house three weeks ago with a series of short films of “okay, now that you’ve seen Bought, what do you do? What do you do if you decide not to vaccinate? What do you do if you want alter the schedule? What do you do if you want to use the full schedule? What’s my advice for you? Same thing if you want to clean up your eating.  How do you do that?  Some great follow-up that we are going to send out for free to people to help answer the question, now what?

Louise: That is terrific, Jeff.  To surround all of us with this high quality programming through your and Bobby’s gifted eye and heart and hope for all of us.  I just want to say thank you very much.  I have to close now.  I wish I could talk to you forever. I want to tell everybody Bought is a powerful, game changing film and you have got to watch it.  We are at a fascinating time in our history. Information exchange is really happening at light speed and we all have front row seats right now in watching our society wrestle with what are the most challenging issues of our time.  So you owe it to yourself to get as informed as possible and to engage in the dialogue.  For everybody, even if you’re there and you know, this film is a vehicle to use with your loved ones, with your colleagues, with your neighbors, with parents whose children your kids play with who aren’t quite there yet, you can share this film with them.  It’s a really important film, Jeff, thank you.  Thank you for coming on Fearless Parent Radio.

Jeff:     Thank you.

Louise: So to my wonderful listeners, please tell us what you think.  Comment on our radio blog at fearlessparents.org.  Next week, we have Dr. Toni Bark who is interviewing the wonderful Leda Scheintaub on bringing cultured and fermented foods into our kitchen. I want to thank everybody for listening to Fearless Parent Radio. Archives of the show are available on PRN.fm, on our website fearlessparent.org and on iTunes and PodBean.  This is Louise Kuo Habakus signing off.  Be fearless everyone.

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If we shop at big box stores or watch mainstream TV, for example, we willingly expose ourselves to some of the best influence that money can buy. We may think we have freedom of choice when, in fact, we participate in and fund (through our purchases) a process that allows our choices to be constrained for us.

No one believes she’s an easy mark. But there’s a good reason that drug companies spend like mad (24.3% of total revenues) to sell us hard. It works. Americans fill 4 billion prescriptions per year costing $320 billion (excluding OTC meds and vaccines). Since 30% of us opt out, we’re talking about 18 prescriptions — not pills! — per Rx-popper.

Now what if I told you that Americans spent more on healthcare ($3.8 trillion!) and less on food than any other country in the world? Would that make you curious? Would you wonder if there was a relationship? Would you follow the money where it took you, inside the controversy and to the front lines of the battle? Would you take on vaccines and GMOs and place a bullseye on Big Food and Big Pharma?

Let’s take a successful filmmaker with an independent streak and a passion for telling the truth. He starts scratching beneath the surface and becomes engrossed, amazed, and then completely pissed off. It turns out he’s a guy after our own hearts. He does something about it. He makes a movie called Bought and it has been quite a trip. Don’t miss this inside look into the making and the telling of the hopeful and heart-breaking truth about America’s health.

Jeff Hays is a successful filmmaker and entrepreneur. He has been producing films for over 20 years and has been short-listed for an Academy Award. Jeff holds 8 patents and the 20+ companies he has founded have collectively raised over $100 million in capital. He considers his most important roles in his life to be the father of 9 and grandfather to 10. Read more about Jeff’s work at Jeff Hays Films.

Louise Kuo Habakus is Executive Director of Fearless Parent, lead host and producer of Fearless Parent Radio, and mom of two. She is a published author, runs the non-profit Center for Personal Rights, lectures widely, and has appeared in numerous media outlets, including ABC World News Tonight, Fox & Friends, and The New York Times. Louise was a Bain consultant and a C-level executive in the financial services industry. She holds two degrees from Stanford University. She is an advisory board member of GreenMedInfo and the Documenting Hope project.