The Imaginary Casey Means

Does the Story of the Surgeon General Nominee, Really Check Out?

Yes, there is a fight right now among MAHA activists. Yes, it has to do with the announcement on May 7 2025 that “wellness influencer” and bestselling author Casey Means was replacing Dr Janette Nesheiwat as President Trump’s nominee for the office of Surgeon General. Dr Nesheiwat, it emerged, had misrepresented her medical credentials.

A post by former Vice Presidential Candidate Nicole Shanahan, without whose financial and strategic support for RFK Jr’s candidacy, neither he nor President Trump would be in power right now, has been widely circulated. Shanahan found it “strange” that a direct assurance to her from RFK Jr, in exchange for her support for his confirmation, that neither Casey nor her brother Calley Means would be brought to serve in HHS, was disregarded.

There is a lot of condescension — unfortunately, much of it male — that followed the expressions of outrage from key MAHA voices, many of them female. The @SecKennedy account on X called criticisms of Casey Means by MAHA voices, “absurd”. This is a terrible tone in which to address the serious concerns of a base that has fought for this leader and supported him.

Calley Means, for his part, Casey Means’ brother, has been insulting. He used sarcasm to assign to me, as just one example of the regrettable reaction to MAHA outrage, views I do not hold:

I never said, contrary to this unfortunate post, that Casey Means “must be” part of “a CIA plot.” I never said that “the deep state” had anything to do with her meteoric rise to national prominence.

I said — and I stand by every word — that it looks to me as if both Casey Means and Calley Means have been sent to us by scarier interests than the CIA.

Silicon Valley is scarier than any government agency, and far more powerful. The Means siblings, I maintain, are representing Silicon Valley’s interests, and not ours.

I said — and again, I stand by every word — that they both appear to be tasked with representing Big Tech’s interests in the rush to exploit the gold mine that is the pristine, valuable data — especially our private medical data - that is currently held behind secure doors by the United States Government.

I made this point in my February 12 2025 essay about what I saw as Elon Musk’s targeting of our data at that time. The essay was titled “The Sack of Rome.” I warned then that Musk and other Silicon Valley oligarchs were after this data, and that President Trump’s team did not seem to understand the grave and irrevocable risks this mission represented.

I knew then, from my own experience as a tech CEO, that Musk would certainly use his own AI or code (and not only our sovereign government-owned AI) on our datasets. He did, one month later. I knew then that Musk’s team would seek to merge the datasets of multiple agencies (as they sought to do, later).

Anyone who works with technologists would know that these dangerous, destructive actions would be inevitable, because of the value to Musk’s AI that training it on our datasets represents, and because of the value to Musk’s ability to create an “everything app”, that merging datasets from multiple agencies, would represent.

I warned in that essay, and also on Bannon’s War Room podcast, that the Trump administration was facing a catastrophic security risk, via Musk seeking out email communications from national security and intelligence agencies about “five things I did this week.” I knew that Musk’s goal was to create a database of those emails. Those communications, I warned, could be machine-read and turned into a non-secure non-internal database containing our nation’s most important intelligence projects. I may well have been right: “Three sources with “knowledge of the system” reported to NBC that the responses are fed into a Large Language Model to determine “whether someone’s work is mission critical or not.”’

In at least two cases, DOGE has either rewritten its own code into government AI, or it has hosted sensitive government funding activity on a third party — Microsoft — platform.

I warned on WarRoom about the terrible national security risk represented by the administration using any third party platform. I was worried then about Musk’s AI, and about Musk having fired those US government technologists whose job would be to warn about the dangers to national, and to information, security, from what Musk was doing.

A month later, the Signal scandal broke — and our vital national security secrets, including details communicated by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth about the timing of a military strike in Yemen — were all over…. a third party digital platform.

How could the administration have been protected from these appalling security breaches? A third of the US Digital Service tech experts, the ones who would have understood cybersecurity breaches, had been fired via an anonymous email; 21 others resigned, in a letter to the White House on February 25 2025, that blisteringly warned that the data of the United States Government could no longer be secured:

“DOGE’s actions — firing technical experts, mishandling sensitive data, and breaking critical systems — contradict their stated mission of “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity,” the letter states. “These actions are not compatible with the mission we joined the United States Digital Service to carry out: to deliver better services to the American people through technology and design. […]

We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services,” the letter stated. “We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions.”’

The US government technologists who had been let go, or who had resigned, would have been the ones to warn the administration that Signal was not secure. Once the technologists were gone, it was DOGE who should have been the ones to warn Musk’s non-technical colleagues that Signal was not secure.

But — DOGE didn’t.

Hm.

This brings us to Casey Means.

Casey Means is a creation, in effect, of Silicon Valley, for the purposes, too, I argue, of plundering our government data, and of rerouting US health policy, to align with the interests of Big Tech; especially in the booming realm of biometrics.

Let me now re-cite the sections of “The Sack of Rome,” that explain why data, especially biometric data, is so very valuable to Silicon Valley:

“The Value of Government Data

President Trump and the MAGA team, whose leadership is almost all from the pre-internet generation, may not understand the financial value to Silicon Valley of Elon Musk having potentially breached these data already.

But the Broligarchs certainly do understand the value of this, a value so vast it almost cannot be described.

What Musk and his engineers accessed over their weekend alone with our data, is a government, of course, holding the records of the civic business of Americans; but in a digital era, evaluated inside of a digital economy, it is also an unimaginably valuable gold mine.

Imagine a gold mine filled with fully minted, priceless doubloons. It is not a gold mine to citizens, many of whom express their hatred and contempt for the government, including for its bureaucracies. But from the point of view of the Broligarchs it is an immeasurably valuable trove of the purest, most accurate, most pristine, least ambiguous, highest-quality data. Due to privacy restrictions and government firewalls, the Broligarchs have not been able to breach this treasure trove. They want it. They salivate for it.

Why do they want it so much? Why are they likely popping Champagne corks, that one of their own got the keys to this gold mine and sauntered right in, and may have unloaded, in effect, all of these priceless doubloons, intact, while the guards to the gold mine were (by government contract) not present, or overruled?

Here is why.

Silicon Valley has built and monetized almost everything that can live inside your computer or inside your phone. The technologists of Silicon Valley know the existing business models; and there are only so many video games and word processing or bookkeeping software tools, or home shopping networks and weight loss apps, that anyone wants.

The technology for everything that lives inside your computer, and the business models, are now well understood. The limits to growth are visible to the Broligarchs— that is, the limits to growth for products that live inside your computer or phone, or that can be compiled from the world of publicly available datasets.

That saturation is why they are lusting after new sites, mediums and matrices for digitization.

That saturation is why they long to build the Internet of Things, and harvest those data; that is why they want to put sensors everywhere in the built or physical environment.

That is why Columbia University has a data journalism scholarship at the School of Journalism, which includes teaching budding reporters about sensors.

Silicon Valley also lusts after creating technology that manifests in the actual environment; that is why projects such as Harvard University’s Keith Group, which houses Prof David Keith’s evil geoengineering experiments in blocking out the sun, are funded by Intellectual Ventures, one of Silicon Valley’s key venture capital firms. As a book on the Silicon Valley investment in solar radiation management notes, “Intellectual Ventures has developed a large portfolio of patents in this area: A number of other private and public entities have also filed patents in the field of geoengineering.”

The financial rewards of digitizing, harvesting data from new untamed fields, and thus of monetizing your sky and weather, your body and its processes, your brain and mood, your built environment, and yes, your protected government data sources, and privatizing its vast technological functionalities, is why there is so much excitement from investors for colonizing these not-fully-digitized and not-fully-monetized spaces.

This Wild West is why the Broligarchs wish to digitize your body; why they push “wearables” and digital tech inside the human body, so hard. This is why there was more excitement in biotech journals than in medical journals, about the mRNA technology and vaccines, in which Silicon Valley entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg, owned investments, and some VCs even patents. The immense investments already made by Silicon Valley investors, push policy demands for mrna to be bought and put into everything, even as the science around mrna collapses.

HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, which protects your medical data, is an angel with a flaming sword now keeping the Tech Bros from accessing this most valuable and most continually refreshed of datasets, Americans’ constantly evolving personal medical records.

If implants in the body such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink, or digital processes in or around your body such as “wearables,” can be normalized, this — an app or device for which you give consent in the boring, no-one-really-reads-them “terms of service” for use of your medical data — allows entrepreneurs to bypass current HIPAA privacy protections around your medical data.

That breach then represents yet another new colony in the unvanquished Wild West of data.

Freshly minted national “Health Freedom” personalities, Calley and Casey Means, both own digital health companies that are based on data accumulation business models; Calley Means’ company Truemed sells apps for mental health tracking and for sleep tracking, as well as technologies that digitally analyze your gut microbiome (though, since my public criticisms, he seems to have removed from his website the device he had offered that tracks your actual brain activity).

When I sought to point out on X the data management aspect of his and his sister’s business models, Calley Means called my cautions “unhinged”.

Casey Means, the sister in this duo, is cofounder of Levels.com. That company’s business model involves securing your glucose levels and food tracking data. Casey Means has had an astonishing ride through the VC funding process, especially for a female founder, indeed for a founder with no track record at all in building and exiting successful digital companies listed in her bio. (Female founders receive less than 3% per cent of VC funding).”[…]

Because I understood the data-harvesting value proposition of the Means siblings’ business models, I realized early on that their sudden self-representation as grassroots medical freedom activists was absurd. And when, within weeks, President Trump announced, standing alongside Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, a $500 billion joint venture in AI, “Stargate,” which would combine the forces of usually-competing entities Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia, Oracle and Softbank, I saw another warning sign.

I realized as I watched all this unfold, that while President Trump may believe that he has harnessed Silicon Valley, the real risk is that Silicon Valley has harnessed him.

The goal of the Broligarchs in suddenly out of nowhere embracing MAGA, was very clear. It was not just a predictable kowtowing to the new guy in charge; though that surely was an element. This embrace seemed mostly, to me, even before I learned of Musk’s time with our most precious data, what they call in VC land, “a data play.”

The Broligarchs were after the most valuable tranche of un-monetized data in the world -- that of the US Federal Government.”

Okay: so now that you have refreshed your understanding of the value of our government-held data, let’s look at more deeply at Casey Means.

Casey Means’ main credentials are that she is an entrepreneur in the health space, with a highly valued startup, and that she wrote, with her brother, a bestselling book, Good Energy.

Let us start with her tech startup, Levels.com. I will argue that her business is an empty storefront, a misleadingly-packaged void into which value has been pumped artificially by some of the most entrenched, corrupt interests in Silicon Valley.

Levels.com, which Casey Means cofounded in 2019, is a company that tracks your glucose levels via a “filament” continuously inserted under the skin in your arm. Shortly after she cofounded it, Casey Means gave an interview announcing “$12M of seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz and angel investors including Marc Randolph (co-founder and first CEO of Netflix), Dick Costolo (former CEO of Twitter), Michael Arrington (founder of TechCrunch), and Matt Dellavedova (NBA player on Cleveland Cavaliers).” These big names came in for a founder who had never founded a company before, let alone a tech company.

The funding journey for Levels.com continued to be stunning: The company raised $38 million in a Series A round in April 2022. A $10 million Series A extension was raised, including $3 million in crowdfunding. Another $7 million Series A extension was secured, following the initial $38 million Series A. Levels has successfully utilized crowdfunding to raise a portion of its funding, including $5 million from its original $38 million Series A round. So to date, Levels has raised more than $55 million.

Look at who came in as founders: “Josh Clemente (SpaceX, Hyperloop), Sam Corcos (CarDash, YC), David Flinner (Google), and Andrew Conner (Google) founded Levels to solve the metabolic health crisis.”

So Casey Means’ cofounders are….Twitter and SpaceX and Google.

If a business was launched that told people, “You can stick a tiny needle in your arm and have it hooked up to the inside of your body continuously, and it will transmit your internal biometric data to your phone and thence to the Google, X and SpaceX guys for harvesting and tracking, including geolocation tracking, and then it goes up to the Cloud forever to be monetized in ways that you can’t control” — people would probably run.

But that — that — is the gold rush, the Mother Lode. They want to get inside your body.

They want that living biometric data.

So of course, Google and SpaceX and X and Andreessen Horowitz — the premier VC firm that has also heralded the mRNA vaccine and has funded startups that use AI to get lipid nanoparticles such as those in COVID vaccines around the body - came in, to boost this innocent, idealistic young surgeon’s “alternative health care” “there must be a better way” startup.

Andreessen Horowitz — this one: “WHEN are we going to have a COVID-19 vaccine, and how the heck are we going from (what’s been traditionally been up to) 12 years or so of vaccine development compressed into 12 months or so? What will and won’t be compromised here, and where do new technologies — like mRNA or messenger RNA vaccines — come in?” — came in, indeed, hard.

Casey Means’ company’s valuation shot up to $313 million.

Was it because Casey Means was taking a “fresh new approach” to health care, avoiding allopathic Rockefeller medicine, as she claims? And as a huge, multi-million-dollar PR campaign, sustained now for many months, seeks to spin the story?

Or was it to get a whole new line of biometric-harvesting products to be pushed by the White House and HHS — along with someone reliably to advance existing biotech VC interests and to corral medical data — but all of this repackaged with a benign, “MAHA” face in front of it?

Let’s drill into the value of Levels.com. It has 60,000 subscribers and has been in business for six years.

How does a startup with 10,000 subscribers a year, and no new technology, get a valuation of $313 million? Doesn't it say something that the only two tech founders who are well-known in the MAHA movement, Nicole Shanahan and myself, are equally taken aback by Casey Means’ nomination?

Tech CEOs understand the red flag represented by a $313 million valuation for a company founded by someone with no tech experience, no successful exits, a company with few subscribers and no new technology, whose investors and founders include Google and Twitter and SpaceX and Andreessen Horowitz.

This graph below, from Crunchbase.com, is Levels.com’s growth over five years. The company had zero organic growth since shortly after it was launched in 2020. Indeed, growth was not only flat — it was declining, til the Means' siblings were in the news.

How is this going to generate a valuation of $313 million? Why would it even generate new investment?

Unless...the co-founder, who happens to talk to trees, and whose X bio to this day reads, “Committed to awe” — has been put into place by Big Tech interests, who are also funding a costly PR campaign around her, so as to secure her nomination to serve as the next Surgeon General.

A strong valuation can be derived from sophisticated technology. Levels.com does not have it. Levels uses HTML and Wordpress in its tech stack — nothing special. No proprietary technology is disclosed in Crunchbase. Levels.com’s last major funding round closed in August 2024, right after the Means siblings were launched as "MAHA" heroes.

Now this is where things really get interesting. Though Levels is a US based company, almost 8 out of ten of its users are in Mexico. Levels is expensive: “When you first sign up for Levels, the total cost will either be $383 USD, which includes the first month of continuous glucose monitors (w/ either two 14-day or three 10-day CGMs) at $184 + the annual membership fee of $199 or $224 USD, which also includes the first month of CGMs + $40 for the monthly membership option.” The average monthly salary in Mexico is $1695 US, and health care in Mexico is free.

So who are these tens of thousands of Mexican subscribers to Levels.com? Mexico, like Singapore, which is the third top location of Levels.com use, is a well-known source for “bot farms”.

Use of Levels in the US dropped 65.72% this year, even though (because?) the cofounder is in the news.

What does Levels.com actually deliver? Let’s hear from Casey Means:

“12:52 – The little laboratory on your arm

Continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) are like a Fitbit for your diet, constantly taking measurements of glucose levels in the body through a chemical process and then sending that data directly to your smartphone.

“So for people who’ve never seen these before, you can imagine this is the size of two stacked quarters, and it’s stuck with an adhesive to the back of your arm. Sticking out of that sensor is a four millimeter probe. That’s like a hair-like filament that actually goes under the skin. So that’s inserted just really painlessly with an applicator and that filament stays just under the skin. So it’s not actually in the blood. It’s measuring glucose from the fluid that is around, it’s called interstitial fluid. So blood sugar is in the blood, but it seeps out of the bloodstream and can live also in this interstitial fluid and that seeping out into the interstitial fluid takes about 15 minutes. So your interstitial fluid glucose is usually going to be about 15 minutes behind your blood glucose levels, sometimes quicker than that, but that’s on average. Then there’s actually a chemical reaction that is happening on the sensor where basically the glucose concentration, there’s an enzyme called glucose oxidase, is stuck to the sensor filament converts the glucose into a by-product that gives off hydrogen peroxide and then that can be measured through an electrical signal that then registers your glucose levels and then that’s transmitted to the smartphone as the data.”’

I’m not upset that Casey Means did not finish her medical residency, though that’s not a good look for someone who has been proposed to bear up under the rigors of serving the American people as Surgeon General.

I am not even concerned, though I am puzzled, that she somehow managed to get her book, co-authored with her brother, published by a major publisher, Penguin, and given a massive PR push, though neither sibling ever wrote a book before (unheard-of).

But I am upset that the questions raised by her company’s valuation, and by the demographics of its usage, are evident to anyone who looks for five minutes, and that once again no one seems to be vetting president Trump’s choices. If not everything in her company checks out, that is such a serious concern for her shareholders, and thus for the American people, that I hesitate to spell out what that would constitute.

And I am really upset that MAHA, which is an historic realignment that could redraw the fate of the Republican party — and the United States — for a century to come; a movement, led mainly by desperate, furious moms, that pushed through to power via blood, tears and raw courage, is now being told — now, that is, that Silicon Valley has put forward its designated cipher, carefully produced to maximize Big Tech profits and likely too to cart off our valuable biometrics — to sit down

And to shut up,

And to accept a nominee whose narrative does not pass the most sophomoric level of scrutiny.