Carnivore Aurelius

28:47Truly, it was that simple. There were other studies in the early 1900s on rabbits, where they injected. And in reality, we don't know now that eating high cholesterol foods raised your cholesterol. Yeah. Number one, and number two, we don't know that high cholesterol in your body causes heart disease. Both are false. It's not that one of the two or false. Yeah. What I pointed out in the seed oils thread that was just critiqued by rolling stones was that since that point in the 1950s, we've actually done a number of randomized controlled trials. So, key data was all correlational. We just assumed that people who tend to eat more saturated fat tended to have higher cholesterol and this led to heart disease.

29:31We didn't separate, separate, randomized and control for an intervention to actually test. So, correlational studies are great to build a hypothesis. And it was great that they did it. But they're not proof. But they're not proof. So, what we did was try to prove it and what did all the randomized studies show? Actually, the exact opposite in many cases. There's a study called the LA Veteran Study, which I think is actually very interesting. It was done on 200 veterans in the 60s, where they took one group of veterans, gave them their normal diet in cafeteria, and another group of veterans, they substituted all of the saturated fat for seed oils.

30:12What happened was that over eight years, actually, the group eating less saturated fat had a slightly lower cholesterol, actually, and a slightly lower rate of heart disease. But what they did have was double the rate of cancer over those eight years. And what the researchers concluded was that we can't study the impact of saturated fats and unsaturated fats on your diet if the study is not conducted for as long as eight years, because these oils take a long time to build up in your fat tissue. Now, the problem with all the modern evidence that people tend to rely on is their very short -term controlled trials.

30:51Where we see that maybe in two weeks time on an animal or on a human that unsaturated fat tends to lower cholesterol levels, but what's happening over the course of eight years? So now back to the LA Veteran Study, yes, it may have reduced heart disease marginally in that study, but the group eating saturated fat also had double the rate of heavy smokers in their group. So something about saturated fat protected against cancer in the heavy smoker group, actually, but possibly caused more heart disease. And there are a few other studies just like that. There was one called the Minnesota Coronary Experiment, which showed for every 30 nanogram per desolate or reduction in cholesterol, there was actually an increased rate in heart disease, and a few of these other controlled trials, which call into question this whole diet heart hypothesis, this whole edifice.

31:53But no one's really talking about these. Maybe because you can call it corruption, you can call it self -interest. It's unclear to me, but what I do know is that there was a rash decision to reorient our diets away from red meat and towards some of these processed fats that in my opinion has been processed. Well, processed fats and grains, I believe. And grains as well. Yeah, indeed. Like if I remember growing up the food pyramid. Yeah, they told us to eat six to 11 servings of grains a day on the bottom of the food pyramid. Grains and legumes, I believe. Exactly. And bro to barns, someone I like, who was a thyroid researcher in the 70s, had a great quote saying, substituting these polyunsaturated fats in our diet, or seed oils as some people refer to them today, is like playing Russian roulette with our health, except no one's given the choice whether or not they're playing the game.

32:57So there's a very mixed bag of evidence on the seed oils is what I am to say. And there's absolutely terrifying evidence in animals about what these oils do to your brain, to obesity, to cancer rates, yet we've turned them into now today 20 to 30 % of the American average American diet. And we want what are seed oils in in for your average person who doesn't pay attention to their diet, where are the seed oils? Sure. Seed oils largely come from oils like canola oil, sunflower oil, oil, safflower oil, soybean oil. I remember in the vegetarian community canola oil was considered a healthy oil. Exactly.

33:44And it still has heart association, heart healthy logo on it today. So these oils bar none have been by far the biggest change in our diet in the last 100 years. I mean, they didn't even exist in the 1800s. And now as I mentioned, they're almost 30 % of the average Americans diet. They're in all processed foods. They're in almost every restaurant. If you eat out, they're cooking with it. If you get take out, if you get uber eats, they're dousing it in these oils. It's their cheap and they're so -called heart healthy. And you have an incredibly hard time avoiding them today. So one of the biggest problems with them is that they accumulate in your fat tissues for up to eight years.

34:34And we are in totally unknown, unparalleled territory. When it comes to seed oils, we don't know what happens to humans when we have this brand new fat in our tissues. The fatty acid content of our fat tissues, the amount of linoleic acid, which is from seed oils in them, has gone up five times in just the last 40, 50 years. So the average human today, their fat tissue is now like 30 % seed oils, which is a totally novel phenomenon in history. Now it's a very controversial topic and a lot of people would disagree on it still. So my take on it is stop playing Russian roulette with your health. Use olive oil if you really don't want to use butter, right?

35:16Use something that has stood the test of time like olive oil, where you make - And if someone doesn't - why would someone not want to use butter, talk about butter? Sure, butter because your doctor probably still thinks the saturated fat from butter is killing you. Because there's still sort of this idea and this paradigm that saturated fat increases your cholesterol and that will lead to heart disease. Now I also really do not recommend, especially for the carnivores out there, walking around with a cholesterol that's 250, 300, 400. I think high cholesterol actually is potentially damaging, but not for the reasons why we've been told.

35:57So one of the things we knew as early as the 1950s was that high cholesterol was a biomarker for low thyroid function actually. Because thyroid is necessary to convert cholesterol into all the youth hormones like testosterone, progesterone, all the stuff that makes it fun to be alive, and vitamin D actually as well. So high cholesterol is a biomarker and an indicator that something is going wrong metabolically and you should figure out what that is. Now the difference in my stance is that I don't think it's as simple as attributing all the blame to saturated fat and butter and because steak is much more complex food than just saturated fat and removing it from our diets I think has been quite a big problem for our health.

36:49You're sharing your experience of what worked for you. Whenever I read any sort of diet or health recommendation, I always wonder how does the writer know this is right for me? Yes. Because I've tried things that were good for other people and maybe even worked for them. Exactly. Yeah, I'm a fan of radical experimenting because I do think people are different and you need to kind of embody an idea, run the code if you will, to know if it's true. So one of the mantras I've stated a number of times is don't trust me. Please don't trust me. Verify this all for yourself. I don't want to be trusted.

37:31These are things that just worked for me. I think in a perfect world, the right sort of health practices should work for most people. The challenge today is that I like to think of health like where we should be on these tracks, like a train that is healthier entire life, like living in a court of nature. Like I said, if you go back in time to these hunter gatherer tribes, health and happiness, that's our birthright. Actually, sickness was the anomaly, or today it's the opposite. So it shouldn't need to be too complex to be healthy. It feels like as a species, we're becoming more and more disconnected from nature.

38:12Exactly. And what happens when that train is on the tracks and it veers off tracks, it will break and light on fire. You can't take a train on fire and just put it back on the tracks actually. It will still be on fire. So I'm a huge advocate of returning to nature, but I don't think that returning to nature can necessarily be rough. It's not enough for a lot of people because there are fires today that we need to put out first before you return back to nature. But in essence, I think you can define sickness and even depression and unhappiness as being misaligned out of harmony with your true nature, with not knowing who we are.

39:01You have to be kind of so ignorant of who we are today to live like we do, to live in these boxes and cities and living these incredibly unfulfilling lives where we work for a boss, we hate, we're under blue light all day, we eat seed oil slop for dinner. This is just so out of alignment with our entire evolutionary history as beings. It would be almost like taking a lion, putting it in a zoo, only feeding it salads, shielding it from the sun, and then telling the lion it has a problem when it gets sick. It's the environment. It's everything around us. It's not us. If you have a health issue, it's not you.

39:46It's a sign that something is out of whack in your environment, in your lifestyle, in your diet. Based on your experience, what are the things lifestyle -wise that have made the biggest difference? Yeah. I've been through a big journey with health. At first, I would have said only diet matters. Eat meat. You're going to be okay. But since then, my approach has actually become a lot more holistic because we are holistic beings and everything we do is like food. Everything we're ingesting is affecting us. When I say ingesting, I mean to light through our eyes, the emotions in our body, the breath.

40:29So I have water from our shower. The water we drink, but the water, yes, that brings us all around our body. We're going to scare some of you. It's true. I now think of there being eight or so pillars of health.

40:46I'll list off the pillars quickly and then I could even give some super practical tips for each of them to help people. What do you think pillars? Eight pillars. See if we can remember these all. Diet, toxins and detoxification. That's part of... No, no. Diet is the first. The second, I would actually single out toxins and detoxification because we live in this particular world with, we're bathing in literally, metaphorically, a ridiculous amount of toxins. Okay. Next is sleep. Forth is movement. Sleep for his movement. Fifth is breath. Fifth is breath. Light. Six is light. Seventh stress. Stress.

41:38Eighth is play. Play. Having a silly ghost time. Is it one through eight in that order or not necessarily? Not necessarily. Okay. It's just a list of eight. Let's start with the thing I think everyone should agree on. Because in some ways the diet wars are a bit of a distraction. I think everyone that's caring about their diet is on the same team and you can make some big changes without arguing about kind of vegan versus carnivore right off the bat at least toxins.

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43:36Let's talk a little bit more about the carnivore diet before we go into the list. I think it's really interesting. One of the things that the carnivore diet does is the elimination diet, which is a really interesting one. Yes. If you reduce what you put in your body to one food, whatever that one food is, anything that you're allergic to, as long as it's not that one food, you've stopped putting in your body. Exactly. So let's say you're allergic to sprouts and you don't know that you're allergic to sprouts. You'll solve your sprout issue by becoming carnivore. 100%. And what's unique about carnivore?

44:13Well, first off to your point, people, we see benefits, dramatic benefits from any diet that's actually just one food. That's what I'm saying. That's like potato diets, the rice diet, and people benefit tremendously. By shrinking your diet to one food, it eliminates 99 .9 % of the things that you might be eating that are causing distress that you don't know are causing distress. Exactly. And the one thing though that's unique about carnivore in terms of elimination diets is that it's nutritionally replete, meaning it has every single nutrient your body requires. Whereas just eating rice and just eating potatoes actually would not.

44:53So nutrients, when I tend to recommend red meat to people, their first reaction is like, oh yeah, I just need it for the protein, right? I think people's assumption is that red meat is just bro protein. But what they don't know is it's actually a multivitamin. It's full of B vitamins, it's full of torine, which there was just a recent paper showing that torine increases longevity in every single animal studied. And torine is nowhere to be found in plant foods. It's high in creatine. Creatine in a recent study showing it's associated with lower rates of cancer. Incredible for your brain, vegetarians who supplement with creatine increase their cognitive performance.

45:33So there's something that's clearly missing on those diets. There's carnitine, there's coolean, there's selenium. It can go on. But red meat is just truly nature's, one of nature's multivitamins, along with a few of these other organs and such. And clearly tried and true for humans for as long as we've been. Yeah, if you go back in time, I mean, one of the hypotheses that, you know, Paul Saladino is recommended as well is that humans have a species specific diet, just like a dog does, just like a lion does. And the way in which we understand that is probably by going back in time to see what we evolved to eat.

46:18So if you go back, call it two, two million years even, there's a hypothesis called the expensive tissue hypothesis was that unlike apes, humans have a very small colon. So apes have a massive colon because they eat these leaves all day and they ferment them into fat. Humans instead actually have a very small colon and a very large small intestine. It's backwards. I did not name them. And as a result, we were able to increase our brain size, unlike apes who are still throwing poo at each other in the trees. So versus on Twitter. Exactly. Which maybe is no better honestly. So the idea was that the nutrients and the easily digestible nutrients in red meat and fat and bone marrow were what unlocked that ability, what unlocked that ability for our brain to grow because we didn't need to spend all this time fermenting it.

47:22If you look through all of history, through every tribe ever, ever recorded. And I can mention the work of West and A price quickly because he did this in the 1940s. He wanted to go out and look to see if there were any, he was a dentist who wanted to search the world and see if there were any people who didn't have terrible cavities like we're developing at that time. And he thought he would find the holy grail of vegan and vegetarian diets because that was starting to even become the rage back then. Instead what he found was that every single tribe that was healthy, prized and prioritized these animal -based super foods, whether it was meat, whether it was milk, whether it was shellfish, whether it was organ meat, they consumed over 10 times the amount of the fat soluble vitamins, A, D, E, and K, then we do today.

48:16All from animal sources. Yeah, they ate vegetables. They ate carbohydrates. But and each tribe consumed a different amount of vegetables and carbohydrates. But the one thing that they had in common was they all ate animal foods. There was no healthy vegan or vegetarian population. And there never has been in the history of the world. It's a totally new phenomenon. Whether or not there are any healthy ones is still a question. Yes, it is. And studies on veganism, a lot of people will point to the bodybuilders and say, look at these guys, they're so strong and fit. Well, this is the problem with how we think about health today, in my opinion.

48:53Health is not six pack abs or muscles. It's how's your brain working, how's your mood, how's your gut, how's your skin, how's your energy levels. Are you fun to be around? It's a holistic conception. And studies consistently show that vegan veganism and vegetarianism associated with higher rates of strokes, higher rates of depression, higher rates of infertility, sperm count declines, hormonal issues, so on and so forth. So the evidence is irrefutable, in my opinion, that we need animal foods in our diet if you want to live optimally. And I think there's some people today who are vegan and maybe doing slightly better, but if you look at their supplement cupboards, they're supplementing over 100 pills a day to get there.

49:42So maybe it is possible if you do that, but then you need to deal with all of the other additives in the pills. And so on and so forth. So if you're looking for what humans have thrived on forever to construct this species specific diet, clear meat plays a role. So I ended up doing this carnivore diet actually for a strict carnivore diet for about two years. But I can talk a little bit about how I've changed my mind since then, actually. Yeah, how has it evolved for you? Sure. And what caused it? Tell me everything. Sure. So about two years into the carnivore diet, I started to hit a little bit of a wall.

50:25My energy started to decline again. My gut started to deteriorate a little bit, started to wake up in the middle of the night. A lot of perplexing issues. Around that time, I saw a study showing that honey, eating honey in patients with high blood sugar lowered their blood sugar. This was mind blowing. Honey is a straight sugar. How could a carburetor lower your blood sugar? I mean, at this time, I legitimately thought orange juice was correct. Yeah, heroin crack. I have one friend who said, if I drink orange juice, I'll go blind. Exactly. So that was the first inkling. The honey? Yeah, the seed of doubt.

51:11After posting that article, someone reached out to man said, you should check out this guy, Ray Pete. Said, sure, why not? I'm kind of interested in some of the French thinkers. Here is this guy who one did not market himself at all. You can barely even find his website. It looks like the first website on the internet. But reading through, he agreed with my stance on just about everything, unsaturated oils, toxic, red meat organs, amazing vegetables, kind of food for goats and rabbits. Potentially full of gochujens and other toxic chemicals, which can discuss as well. But the one thing he didn't agree on was that carbohydrates were essential, actually, to thrive.

51:59Now, at the time, I believed that carbohydrates were indeed essential for our body, but not essential on our diet. Because as many people know that are versed in the health world, your body can make carbohydrates out of its protein and out of its fat. But Ray's stance was that the process of doing so was actually a backup system. It was like turning on the generator and going in, call it low power mode. It was an evolutionary sign that we were in a famine state, actually. And that as a consequence, we down -regulated our thyroid and our metabolic rate so that we could conserve fuel for longer.

52:40But that's also talking about keto. It sounds like that would also be critique of keto. Carnivore is like a more extreme keto in a way. So I was also keto for - But yes and no, Carnivore is more protein than fat. Whereas keto, it's really about the fat. Yeah, exactly. It's limiting the protein. It's limiting the protein. You're explicitly trying to drive ketones through fat, although - So what Ray is saying is that that process of driving the ketones is hard on the body. It's extremely stressful on the body. Do we know that to be true? So you can look at studies on epileptic patients. So the ketogenic diet was originally created for epileptic patients because it was the one thing that helped them and it still does help them.

53:24But the one thing that's almost - that's tried and true, irrefutable in the medical literature about these studies is that on those diets, their thyroid falls. Their T4 levels decline, their T3 declines and their TSH increases. And we know that those are bad things. We know that those are bad things. And this was my first time really hearing about thyroid. I thought this was just some random organ people mentioned offhand, honestly. And one of the unique things he mentioned was that you don't need to go to a doctor to test this, actually. You can just take your body temperature every morning and the body temperature is the best surrogate of your thyroid function because thyroid is key to producing energy.

54:07And energy is required to heat up your body. So I went, got the thermometer, and my body temp was waking body temp was anywhere from 96 .5 to low 97. According to Broda Barnes, who actually was a thyroid researcher, our body temp, and as you all may know, should be around 98 .6. That's human body temperature. But mine was remarkably lower. Mine is like yours was, has always been lower. And I think we have this epidemic of kind of subclinical hypothyroidism today, where people are walking around with extremely low thyroid function. Did you do the test under your arm? You're supposed to do it. Yeah, I did the mouth technically Broda Barnes recommended a mercury thermometer, an old school one, under your armpit.

54:57That's how I did it when I did the testing years and years ago. Exactly. So I started to research more about thyroid and I realized that it's this linchpin of our health. It is kind of the thermostat for our overall metabolic rate. It controls the metabolism of every single cell in the body. All of our energy generation, our cognitive function, our mood, hypothyroidism is associated with pretty much every disease, diabetes, high cholesterol, obesity, weight gain, depression, almost all the diseases of modern society. So here I was kind of thinking I was healthy, but in many ways I was declining and so on.

55:41But maybe what it sounds like is for two years you were putting out the fires on the train. Exactly. And once the fires were out, you realized that you were missing something. Exactly. So the carnivore diet is worlds better than what I was eating. Yes. And it works. Same with keto. Keto and carnivore think work for so many reasons other than them being low carb. So big reason why people demonize carbs today is because they cut them out and they feel better. The challenge for that is carbohydrates are not a food. Carbohydrates are a molecule, right? Like a chain of molecules. Like pasta is not a carb.

56:23Pasta is a food that has carbohydrates in it. And loads of carbohydrates tend to irritate your gut, tend to cause inflammation, tend to downregulate your metabolism. So when you cut out carbs, you're probably cutting out bread. You're probably cutting out processed food. You're probably cutting out pasta and all these grains. Desserts, all kinds of things. Exactly. I'm not going to eat cake anymore. Right. And we kind of straw man. No rice and no grains. Yes. Part of that. Yes. Exactly. Whereas what Ray recommended was only eating the most easily digestible carbs, which were fruit according to him.

57:05And honey. And honey. Exactly. And now this totally aligned with my philosophy on health because vegetables, one of the reasons why carnivores avoid vegetables is because vegetables can't run away from you like an animal. So they produce pesticides to fend off predators like plants out there in the garden. They don't want to be eaten. Fruit on the other hand actually specifically was created by the tree to spread the seed of the tree for animals to eat. So fruit is actually one of the only foods in the world made for animals to eat. Even animal food, even steak is not made for us to eat. Milk is another as well, although people have challenges tolerating dairy.

57:49But also most people who have problems tolerating dairy have problems with pasteurized dairy. Yes. The way it's sold now. Exactly. Yeah. It's with the quality of the dairy or it's one thing hypothyroidism does actually is down regulates the production of lactase. The enzyme that produces or that digest lactose. So there's what I've learned over the last kind of five to 10 years in health is that there's usually a root cause of your health issues. And what this bioenergetic view, which is kind of this rapete philosophy where he just connected all of these different dots with his philosophy with the bioenergetic view, people like Doug Wallace are talking about today.

58:31There is really only one disease and it's low energy production. It's dysfunctional mitochondria. So now for the first time I had what I believe was this bottoms up view of diets. Instead of saying I'm going to just demonize one food group, whether it's vegetables for carnivores and maybe whether it's carbs for keto people, whether it's meat for vegans, I'm going to construct a diet from the bottoms up to increase my mitochondria's ATP production and energy generation and figure out exactly what it is my body needs to thrive. And what are those things? One of those things that is the grand question.

59:12I think the one area every dietary camp can agree on and should agree on is that we have nutrient requirements. Like nutrients aren't just those things on the on the back of a label. They're required for every enzyme in your body to function. So when we generate energy, the food we eat has to go through a 30 step process or so to turn into ATP, the currency of the cell. Every one of those steps requires vitamins and minerals. So the first thing I think people should do is this is a little bit complicated, but well worth doing is put your diet in something like chronometer where you can actually track the nutrients in your diet.

59:53So write down everything you eat in an app that will tell you the nutrient density of what you're eating. Exactly. The nutrient content. The breakdown. Based on the RDAs. So yeah, the RDAs, they're flaws, but it's a decent heuristic and guidelines for how many nutrients we need. And it will shock you how many nutrients you're missing if you're not careful about this. The easier kind of heuristic and hack and why the carnivore diet works so well is just eat the whole animal because the animal does the full animal does actually have pretty much every single nutrient we need to throw out. So a key to the carnivore diet is not just eating meat.

1:00:34It's eating nose to tail meat. No, it's to tail meat. Exactly. Not just steak. So steaks, liver, heart. Exactly. Brains, all of it. I mean, these if you look at the animal kingdom, killer whales, wolves, they all go for the organs first actually. They prize them more than the muscle meat. So the organs are what holds the most nutrient density in the body. Yes, your liver in particular, I mean, if anyone's still skeptical of the nutrient content of meat, liver next to kale, like makes kale look like green toilet paper. I mean, liver is loaded in more of every single nutrient in plant foods and countless others that you can't even find in plant foods.

1:01:20It's like vitamin A retinal. You can't have an optimal hormonal profile without vitamin A retinal. It's critical to hormone production, to lowering all the excess estrogens in the environment for your liver detox. I mean, one of the most important nutrients in the world. It's amazing to me, and I'm just in awe of this every single day, like how much our body adapted to require everything nature provides. For instance, the methionine, methionine is an amino acid in steak. Studies show on animals actually that too much methionine shortens their lifespan. But if you give them glycine, it offsets all the effects.

1:02:01Well, glycine is what's in collagen, and collagen is 50 percent of an animal in the wild. So we're meant to be eating this glycine in balance with all of the methionine in our diet, along with the B vitamins to help recycle all of them through this process of methylation. But to our earlier point, the more we live and eat and accord with how we did for all of eternity, the better things tend to just work out in terms of our diet and our life and our health. And it makes sense because this animal machine that we are has refined itself over millions of years based on that information that it was getting.

1:02:46That was exactly. That's what was coming in for millions of years and it worked. And then if you decide I'm going to try to fuel my Volkswagen with vinegar, we don't know how that's going to work. Yeah, you're out of luck. And the beautiful view of, so it's a modern medicine back to that car analogy. Modern medicine looks at us like cars like this. And when you have an issue, you need to open the hood, look inside, replace a part. Right? So when I had a gut issue, they insisted on shoving a camera somewhere in me to see what's going on under the hood. And if I had an issue, they needed to do something in there to replace it.

1:03:24Whereas this bioenergetic view looks at us like a car in a way if you want to use that analogy. But imagine if your car got sunlight, if it could turn from a Toyota camera into a Mercedes, or if you put vinegar in it in the wrong food and the wheel fell off. If we are entirely interconnected, constantly adapting, regenerating, rebuilding to every single thing in our environment. And when we are giving our body signals that something is out of whack, out of harmony, we degenerate because our body is panicking. It's going into panic mode, effectively a hibernation. It's shying away from the environment instead of embracing life and vitality.

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1:05:38I got a call from a friend of mine who has always been healthy physically but always never paid attention to any of the diet or health issues that anyone else focuses on. He just full on American diet. Normal average. He called me. I'm concerned. I went to the doctor and I did a blood test and everything was going wrong. I'm really scared. I gave him a list of things to try. I said, you have nothing to lose. Before you start taking drugs that you would have to take for the rest of your life. Just make these changes. The list of diet changes, the list of going out in the sun every morning and go for a walk in the sun every morning.

1:06:20Don't eat these things. Eat these things. See what happens. He called me back. He said, everything changed. Everything changed. He went back to the doctor. Got a blood test. Everything's normal. In three weeks. If he told the doctor what he did, the doctor would have fought. Yeah, exactly. Despite everything improving. Your body, you can become a new person in almost 30 days with the right diet. It's remarkable how fast your body can change, can adapt, can regenerate if you fuel yourself. Another friend who came to visit recently who was a vegan for 25 years and a month ago started eating meat.

1:07:01The first day he ate meat, everything changed. The first day. And meat's bad for you. It's amazing. That's remarkable. I guess most people assume when you're dieting, quote -unquote, it's just for abs or for your beach body. Most people don't realize how transformative health can be. How transformative, changing your diet and lifestyle can be for everything. I mean, they're different, I would say chapters in my life. But before and after caring about my health, it was like a different book. I am truly a different human being. It's not just that my skin is a little better, or I have more muscle.

1:07:48It's that I care about different things. I'm more creative. I'm more longer as placid and conformist. And that's because, according to this bioenergetic view in a way, you need energy to cope with the world. Without energy, you end up just deferring to what's out there because your body is effectively in a panic mode. So energy is the tool. It is the door to higher states of being. And to me, that's what health is now. Health is a tool to step into my eyes self. It's not my eyes self. It's a means to becoming, becoming it. That's amazing. So you say if you want to become a sheep, eat what a sheep would eat.

1:08:38Exactly. Vegetables. It's true. And if you want to be an apex predator on Earth, eat what the apex predator is eat. Talk more about the argument against vegetables. Sure. So the carnivore argument against vegetables is one that from a disease standpoint, when I was on the carnivore diet, I would have said disease is largely due to inflammatory burden. That was kind of my conception of disease. And there's a great paper from Bruce Ames in the 90s, I believe it was. He suggests that 99 .9 % of the pesticides in our diet are actually not from the glyphosate and the pesticides they spray on the food.

1:09:22It's from the plant itself. They're endogenously produced. And they're doing that to protect themselves. To protect themselves. From being eaten. It's like a protective layer of poison. Exactly. And we are the only creatures dumb enough to still eat them. Now, throughout history, we did include some vegetables in our diet. But if you look at these traditional ways of eating them, they usually went through extensive preparation processes to do so. Whether it was soaking them, sprouting them, fermenting them, cooking them for extended periods of time. Eating raw vegetables is kind of one of the most inane ideas, I think, possible.

1:10:07Because these foods aren't designed to be eaten by humans in their raw form. We don't have the machinery to cope with loads and loads of these foods. Now, I think some vegetables, sure, they're fine. But a diet that's copious in these raw vegetables is just asking for gut irritation and gut issues. Now, I saw you eat a raw carrot today. You weren't supposed to tell. Only about raw carrots. Sure. So, going back to my dietary stance, I now think that we do indeed need some of call it each category of food. The problem is that most of each category of food today is crap and terrible. So, that's why it's super easy to strawman these categories and say they're all bad for you.

1:11:01Most carbohydrate rich foods are probably, are a problem. Most red meat people are eating, they're eating burgers. If you're eating burgers in fries, that's a problem. It's not the red meat, though. Most fats are polyunsaturated garbage fats are a problem. But that's not to say the whole category itself is a problem.

1:11:26Most but others, I think, can be used tactically. So, going back to the raw carrot, my kind of central theory, one of the central theories of disease now is like Hippocrates said, disease starts in the gut. So, our gut is colonized by microbiota, you know, trillions and trillions of bacteria. And when they're fed, extensive amounts of food, because we don't digest it appropriately, they spread, they migrate, and they ultimately die off. And when that happens, their cell wall, referred to as endotoxin, irritates the lining of our gut and sends a signal to our body that were under some sort of inflammatory burden.

1:12:19Now, small amounts of these are not a major issue, but today, with the state of our gut health and leaky gut, as people have probably heard of, it's causing a massive inflammatory burden almost every single time. Explain leaky gut. Sure. So, your gut lining in the small intestine is about one hairs width, thin. It's this incredibly small barrier that is the only thing that stands between the inside world and the outside world. And anytime we have an energetic decline or under the burden of stressors, the gut wall actually opens up. And part of that is actually what I believe to be a protective adaptive response, because if things are really hitting the fan, we want to let as much nutrients in as positive, as many nutrients in as possible.

1:13:12But unfortunately in our modern world, we're kind of always under these chronic stressors. So our gut is always leaking into the bloodstream, things that shouldn't necessarily be there. One of those is endotoxins. And endotoxins are correlated as well with almost every single disease. And part of the reason the keto and carnivore diet works so well, in my opinion, is because they cut out all of these inflammatory triggers on your gut. But steak and fruit and some other foods digest very rapidly in the small intestine and aren't able to feed these bacteria in your gut and in your colon to the extent that some of these other foods like vegetables would, which are higher in fibers or indigestible particulate matter.

1:13:59So the raw carrot is a ray -peat idea. And it's kind of taking off recently. But one of the things that perplexed me for a while is, why are there some studies showing, you know, fibers associated, dietary fibers associated with lower rates of disease? Yet why do people like myself benefit tremendously when they're not eating fiber? Like when I'm eating loads of fiber, it's a major problem for my gut. And a problem for everyone around me to be frank. But still, yeah, studies show, social, social, social, social studies show that fiber tends to benefit or tends to show benefit for a number of these diseases.

1:14:45Ray -peat came along and suggested that insoluble fiber, fiber that actually can't feed our gut microbiome, but is present in some foods actually binds these endotoxins and eliminates them out of the gut. So it's like a street sweeper that comes through, helps bind and remove these irritants. So the raw carrot is pretty much purely insoluble fiber. And there's a reason why it looks like the same thing in the toilet as it does going yet, because you're not digesting it. And that's the benefit of it. So eating the vegetable in this case is actually like a medicine. It's not so I can get the nutrients from it, but it's so I can clean out the endotoxins in my gut.

1:15:32For ladies having hormonal issues actually, it can be tremendously beneficial as well, because when you detox estrogen out of your liver through the bile, it gets dumped into your gut. And actually you can reabsorb that estrogen that's meant to be detoxified. Insoluble fiber, another thing that does is binds and removes the excess estrogen. So there are loads of cases on line of people who are having serious cramping or hormonal issues. And those resolving with this raw carrot, the single raw carrot. Would sillium do the same thing or no? I honestly don't know too much about sillium, but I believe sillium is more soluble fiber, maybe not.

1:16:14I don't think so. Not familiar. Yeah, not familiar. But yeah, hypothetically any insoluble fiber should help. Soluble fibers, on the other hand, can be a disaster. And that's where... That's your case. Yes, if they don't work out. Exactly. So when I tactically include foods from each of these categories, that is when I'm thriving. That is what I think we were adapted to eat. So the carrot is one example from the vegetable world. Yes. Beyond meat and beyond carrots, what else is in the diet? Just to be clear, not beyond meat. Okay, not beyond meat. Real meat. Real meat. Are you into grass fed as well?

1:16:56Yeah, vegan cows. So cows that only eat plants. So starting with nutrients, there's micro nutrients, which are things like minerals and vitamins, and there's the macro nutrients, the carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. So like I said, I think you need every micro nutrient, and you should check chronometer for that, or the RDAs. Regarding macro nutrients, this gets into the discussion on thyroid. Is that any time we're restricting excessively one of these macro nutrients, our body has to mobilize resources adaptively, and that in turn slows down our metabolic rate and our energy production. So if we excessively restrict carbohydrates, for instance, carbohydrates are critical for our brain for one.

1:17:47Everyone needs 150 grams of carbohydrates for their brain a day around that. No matter who you are, carbohydrates are critical for our gut, they're critical for our thyroid conversion in the liver. So many other things, and because our body knows that, it has to slow down our metabolism to save resources if we were hypothetically in a famine without carbohydrates, or else we'd burn through all of our tissue and die. The same goes for fats, actually. Fats are also critical for our cognitive function, for our hormones, for loads of other things, and when you restrict fat excessively, same thing happens.

1:18:23Everything slows down. So carbohydrates and fats, what I generally now eat for myself, and this is an experiment, like everyone should work out for themselves, is I try to eat now, actually two times at least the amount of grams of carbohydrates to proteins in my diet. So I'm on a fairly high carb diet, and that's just how I feel the best, that's how my thyroid works the best. And what would be in the category of carbs that you do eat and the ones that you don't eat? Sure. If I were to define my diet now, I would do it, I would suggest it is highly nutrient dense, easily digestible diet, both are key.

1:19:09So for me, the carbohydrates that are easiest to digest in the following order starts with fruits, honey, maple syrup. And this is where it's completely counter again. I mean, I thought I pissed off a lot of people, when I said red meat was good for you, this might piss off more people and did it in my life, that simpler the sugar tends to be easier to digest. So fruit and honey are very simple sugar molecules. They're just a sucrose molecule effectively, which is fructose and glucose. And because there are short chains of these molecules, your body doesn't require much work at all to break them down.

1:19:53And for that reason, when you eat something like fruit or honey, tend not to have much digestive distress. Now you do need to experiment because some people have issue with some fruits, some fruits are higher in fructose, lower in glucose. So it is an experiment, but generally fruits tend to be the easiest to digest and honey and maple syrup as well. From their white rice and white potatoes can be easy for people to digest, but those are starch molecules. So they're long -chain. It's so funny because in the world that you're in, former keto, current kind of or world, this is pure sacrilege with yourself.

1:20:33Oh my god, yeah. I mean, like I said, I looked at people eating orange juice. Like I almost wanted to smack it out of their hands. I thought they were killing themselves. So this was in terms of carbohydrates, a complete 180, a complete and total 180. And in my life, I've honestly learned through mistakes and failure. Yeah, we all do. That's the only way we learn. Yeah. And I'm sure there will still be more, but I think I could have only gotten to this weird hydrahead of the rapier world where I think somehow red meat and sugar, meats and sweets, I like to say, are good for you, is through making loads of mistakes along the way.

1:21:16But as always, don't trust me, verify this. Experiment. See how your thyroid adjusts. See how your energy adjusts. See how your mood adjusts. And your body is the ultimate intelligent resource in the world. It will tell you if these things are working or if they're not. I think we all need to trust our own intuition, our own bodies a little bit more. And for me, carbohydrates are resounding, yes, now. Every time I look at them, it's just... It's saladino back on sweets. Yep. That's interesting. We both kind of had an awakening around the same time as well. Interesting. Which is quite funny. Yeah.

1:21:55So he loves fruit now, loves honey now. And funnily enough, loads of rapiders as well went through the same exact journey. You kind of need to traverse this world from veganism to plant based, to paleo to... Were you vegan at one point? No, I wasn't. But there is this sort of process, I think everybody goes through, where you first start reading some ingredients on the back of the label. Then you realize, holy crap, I can't pronounce. One of these things, everything's kind of killing me. You start looking to be healthy. You usually make the wrong health decisions at first, because there are so many piranhas out there just making crap up.

1:22:38And also missing form, like people just don't know. People just don't know. People just don't know. They're certainly not taught in medical schools. No. And nutrition science in particular is so muddled, because it's very hard to do a good nutrition study. Because to really control for something, you'd have to lock people up in a metabolic ward. And that's why I want LA veteran study, I reference, is actually so important, because they don't do studies like that anymore. So there are studies for just about every dietary camp to point to. And unfortunately, people are, I think, using it. I don't think out of ill will, actually.

1:23:18But they are harming themselves and others. And so long as you are honest with yourself, I think, and you have the right intentions and you're mindful, you will know if something's working or not. So instead of doubling down on your diet, if you don't feel as good as you want to be, I think we need to be very so critic today and admit that kind of all know nothing and experiments. Yeah, and listen to experiments. Other people have done. If it sounds interesting to you, try it. Yes. And then see what happens. Yeah, in Hinduism, actually, and Abhadeva Vedanta, this is kind of out of left field, but there's something called the triple method they use for to kind of learn to be enlightened.

1:24:03And they suggest it's first listen to the teacher, next kind of contemplate the teaching itself and third meditate on it and do it yourself. I think there's kind of a triple method for diet where it's like, one, does this accord with our entire evolutionary history? Two, are there some experts who actually agree with this? Like, is there real science behind it? And then three, is it benefiting you? I mean, most people are skipping one of those steps in terms of their diet and sticking to something that isn't actually benefiting them because they've been sort of convinced artificially to do so.

1:24:48If you find something that's benefiting you that no expert support, why would that matter? I think the human predicament we're in is unfortunately that we're very bad at predicting the long term rewards of something. We're very good at seeing the short term benefit and many of the things that benefit us the most over the short term are actually quite damaging in the long run. So take fasting, for instance, which is something I actually don't love anymore either. Something I kind of did a 180 on. Fasting feels really, really good at first, but it's because it's spiking your adrenaline and it's giving you this kind of rush of energy that I think in the long run, the science I've seen would suggest is hurting you.

1:25:40So that's where just because our mind is not an enemy but also is not necessarily evolutionary adapted for our long term benefit, it can mislead us. So I think you do need to be careful with just feeling something out and feeling how good it is for you. So back in terms of the diet, yeah, I think getting all the macronutrients in terms of the carbs, protein, getting sufficient protein, best studies I've seen are like around 1 .6 grams of kilogram of body weight around that, animal protein tends to be the most bioavailable and easily digestible. And fats, that's back to the whole I think saturated over unsaturated fat or mono unsaturated.

1:26:28Collagen bone broth. Collagen is critical in my opinion to balance out the methionina in the diet. Eating just muscle meat is almost like eating a refined food diet nowadays. All throughout history would balance the collagen with methionine, with the muscle meats and all the nutrients and all the organs. So as much as you can eat notes to tail and eat 10 to 30, 40 grams of collagen a day, I think you'll experience immense benefits. If you eat steak and bone broth, yeah, is that enough variance or do you need to eat liver or at least take a liver supplement? Yeah, I mean, I'd recommend getting some liver on a weekly basis just enough to hit the RDAs.

1:27:22So a few a few hundred IE, or a few thousand IE a day, I believe it is. Because if you look at these RDAs, what we've actually studied, the best study is showing what we need, show you need some vitamin A retina. So liver and egg yolks are really the only source in the world of those. So I think you know, the base of your diet should be things I mentioned. And then you should tactically supplement with these kind of animal superfoods. If you're eating a lot of eggs, do you need the liver? You can get by, but liver still has loads of other minerals other than vitamins other than vitamin A. So like loads of B vitamins, coline, selenium, copper that you're not going to get from eggs alone.

1:28:07Oysters as well, I think are kind of the liver of the sea, tremendously beneficial foods as well for hormones, testosterone, the zinc is incredible for you. So yeah, I think the heuristic of eating a varied diet from animals will get you a lot of the way there. And then I think we just need to break out of this paradigm of thinking of diet solely in terms of calories. Diet is a tool to increase your hormone, to improve your hormonal profile, your thyroid, your gut health, everything I listed before. And if those things aren't improving, it's time to potentially change up your diet. Should we talk about environmental stuff?

1:28:52Sure. Sure. The biggest scariest one by far is the toxic exposure. If you're an average person today, not kind of wary of everything in your environment, you're exposed to 200 to thousands of chemicals a day, novel chemicals, brand new in terms of history, to our diet. And I think this goes a long way to explaining why disease is skyrocketing. Because each and every one of these chemicals is poisoning our metabolism. Take BPA for instance, which is found in plastic products. BPA has been shown to inhibit thyroid function, to lower androgen synthesis, to increase estrogen, to damage your cognitive capacities in your brain.

1:29:41Just about anything bad these chemicals do. So even before diet for a lot of people, I just suggest stop poisoning yourself, go via negative and prove via removing. So some things that are I think the biggest culprits are generally the ones where exposed to on a daily basis. So think your soaps, shampoos, conditioners, body washes. Our skin is a mouth, which a lot of people don't realize. Anything you put on your skin, you're going to - Same as eating it. Yeah, effectively the same as eating it. So if you want to eat your shampoo, stop dousing yourself in it. And that's why I think all your like your shampoos body washes, surprisingly you can use loads of food products for these.

1:30:27And they're also nice snacks while in the shower. So like egg yolks, olive oil, coconut oil, honey, you can use these all in your body, surprisingly. And this is kind of the ancient - some of the ancient wisdom we forgotten. So those are big. The next biggest category is tap water. You're not pretentious if you say you don't want tap water at a restaurant. If you live in the United States, go to ewwg .org, slash tap water, put in your zip code and you will be absolutely terrified of what's in your water. There are hundreds if not thousands of chemicals at, you know, well exceeding the guidelines ewwg recommends linked to cancer, infertility, heart disease, just about every single disease today.

1:31:11Heavy metals like lead, pharmaceuticals that you pee out are recycled back into the water supply. So there's birth control. There's SSRIs. There's pesticides in the tap water. It is truly one of the worst cocktails you could be putting in your body. So instead of drinking tap water, you should drink. I, what I generally recommend is I like coconut water, I like nature's water, fruit juices and such, or buy yourself a nice reverse osmosis or distiller filter, remineralize it and you're good to go. And you can remineralize it with some cheap drops on Amazon. But that's a huge one for people, especially those with skin issues, I've noticed some major changes from just cutting out tap water.

1:31:57The next one I would say is plastics. I mean these are ubiquitous in the environment now, obviously it's, we're basically all Barbie just covered in micro, plastics in all of our organs. So avoid plastic to the best of your ability. And especially do not heat plastic. So one of the biggest sources of plastic actually is bottled water in plastic bottles of water. So only have, if you're going to have bottled water, only have it out of a glass bottle. Yes, exactly. And even that potentially problematic. There was one study showing that bottled water, a lot of these were in plastic. But there's one study showing the fumarates and the malleates, I believe they are, in bottled water, inhibited the Androgen receptor, like the testosterone receptor, up to 90 % from bottled water.

1:32:49So we're swimming in this toxic soup today. And you need to be incredibly proactive and get ahead of this. So all of the, anything you're putting on your skin, which is cosmetics as well for ladies, loaded with heavy metals. Another one is deodorants. Deodorants, many of them are very high in aluminum. So just kind of sift through, sift through all the chemicals you're exposed to on a daily basis. And if you wouldn't eat it, if it didn't exist 20 years ago, throw it in the trash. Last one just came to mind as well, are these teflon pans. I would not touch a teflon pan. Get rid of it. So cast iron or stainless steel?

1:33:33Yeah, I would prefer stainless steel. Why is that? One of the introductions in our diet in the last 50 years was actually fortifying foods with iron. So growing up, if you're, if you're eating a lot of junk food like I was, if you're subsisting on cheeses and processed grains, if you look at the ingredients, most of these have added iron. So a lot of us have actually some excess iron stored in our body today, especially this like synthetic form of iron. And iron, as we know, is incredibly reactive with oxygen and can rust in our body. So too much iron, if it's not balanced by copper, can be somewhat toxic.

1:34:14There's worth being cautious over. Okay. So I limit it. I would prefer to use stainless steel, ceramic. I've heard of people using glass. You're pyrrex. Yeah. Yeah. Some of those can be better, but I think the more natural the better. Some people have only cook over fire that I know. And that has its issues as well, but the more natural I think the better. Okay. Yeah. In terms of toxins, that is... Is it other airborne toxins or... Okay. The air today, there was a study that actually came out recently. I think it was somewhere in Europe showing estrogens in the air. So, you know, an air filter, I think, is important if you really do want to bulletproof yourself and play defense.

1:35:04Oh, another... Probably makes sense more if you're in a city with a lot of people close together. Exactly. If you're out in the country, probably less of an issue because there's a lot of trees and there's a lot of oxygen and a lot of fresh air. 100%. If you were in a city, one, I would try to leave, two, yeah, get in our air filter, please. Another category is actually polyester clothing. And I think this is especially problematic for women. There's studies showing polyester bras in particular, leech, BPA, and some of these forever chemicals, the PFAS, into the bloodstream. So, you really almost need to be like a Sherlock Holmes today and sift through everything you're exposed to or you will completely overburden your detoxification abilities, which brings me to the second part of this category, detoxification.

1:36:02So, thankfully, our bodies are pretty remarkable and have a very robust ability to detoxify, provided we're giving ourselves the right nutrition and the right, sort of, practices. One thing I've been doing recently actually is lymphatic drainage. I think it's quite powerful. The lymph system along with our liver and our gut is one of the primary detoxification mechanisms. What I suggest for this is actually this guy, Dr. Perry Nicholson. He has a big six, pretty much smack or rub these six areas on your body, 30 seconds each, once a day, and it dramatically increases your detoxification abilities.

1:36:44According to him, he's seen people lose, you know, 20 plus pounds from this a lot. What are the six places? Starts it your collar. It's kind of like the head shoulders knees and toes, some, but starts at your collarbone, from there it goes up into your neck, from there it goes back down. And you do tapping? Yeah, I'll usually tap, and then I'll go up. You can tap, you can rub, you can circle. Then it goes to your armpit, from there it goes to your abdomen, afterwards to your groin, and finally to your knees. And it's 30 seconds, I mean. 30 seconds to a minute. I mean, it's five, six minutes a day can dramatically increase your detoxification ability.

1:37:26But then what's key is you need to be pooing because you'll dump all of that into your gut to be eliminated. So many people with health issues aren't going once a day. And going once a day is a very important parameter and tool for your health because if the goods are staying inside of you for longer than a day, there's a reason why it's stinks because it's giving off putrid byproducts. And those are leaking back actually into your bloodstream, causing loads of inflammation. So gut motility, what I recommend for that is, one check your thyroid, again, it's kind of the usual approach. Two, which is with the taking your temperature first thing in the morning.

1:38:12Yeah, improve your thyroid, that will help immensely. Two of the raw carrot also beneficial for gut motility. Three walking after meals. Four magnesium tremendously beneficial for me. Specifically, I like magnesium glycinate. Don't get magnesium sitrate, stands for magnesium, S word, it, right? Because it makes you really go. Too much. But yeah, gut motility is incredibly beneficial. And then the last thing is your liver health. Your liver is one of the primary detox organs. And getting those enzymes checked with a doctor, making sure your liver is functioning, make sure you don't have fatty liver, fueling your liver with how do you find the right doctor?

1:39:02That's a journey. That is really a journey. I think doctors in a way, I heard this analogy once, are like wild animals. You need to, you need to watch your back with them, unfortunately, today. But if you find the right doctor, it can be a god's end. I think ultimately the right doctor is within. I think we all do need to become our own doctor. But there are loads of great kind of functional medicine practitioners today out there. So I would look into kind of functional medicine, integrative medicine. Unfortunately, you have to go to the fringes. I think to find someone that's beneficial. But find someone that's walking the walk, and find someone that's working for you, right?

1:39:50They're not an antagonist. They should be your ally on the journey. They should be willing to experiment with you and read studies that you send them. They should want to be challenged and be open -minded. What do the tests you do for the liver? There's the standard liver panel, like LT, AST, GGT, some of the liver. Some of the blood tests? Yeah, some of the liver enzymes. You'll be able to test with a doctor. And then if your thyroid is low based on your morning temperatures, what do you recommend? For me, the biggest by far was carbohydrates, actually. Adding carbohydrates. Adding them back in.

1:40:30Just because they're so critical for the conversion of T4 to T3 in your liver, that's one huge piece. The next piece are some nutrient deficiencies. So if you're deficient in selenium, iron, vitamin E, vitamin A, vitamin C, protein, a number of these nutrients you should be able to find on the panel, I mentioned. Your thyroid function will be inhibited. So complete nutritional diet is absolutely okay. Next, I would say this goes into one of my other pillars, but sunlight. Sunlight is so important for your metabolic rate. And sunlight has impact on the thyroid? Yes, bright light, bright light in particular.

1:41:16It's not just the vitamin D from the sun, which is critical for your thyroid, but being in a bright environment is also a signal to our physiology that we're in summer. We're in... But it's also bright, natural. Exactly. Or something like son of space or a jive light? Yeah, possibly. But yes, to your point, when you're indoors under bright light, it may seem bright, but it's actually anywhere from 100 to a thousand times less bright than the sun. So get outside. Like, our parents are right growing up. Growing outside is very important for your health. In general, would you say spending as much time outside as possible is probably best?

1:41:52Yes, unless... Yeah, unless you live in Antarctica, maybe. Or... Yeah, I think for most people, they want to be outside as much as possible. And one terrifying stat from our modern world is that the average American spends 93 % of their time inside. So that alone can explain a lot of disease. One of the reasons why circadian function, by the way, is important, I think, is because a disregulated circadian rhythm lowers thyroid function. So I think actually the thyroid is the linchpin that all of these other facets that all the dietary camps, all the diet gurus are all giving about, comes back to our energetic function overall, our mitochondria and our thyroid.

1:42:39So this is why sunlight is such a big pillar for me, because it does play an immense role into our overall physiology and our health. Another reason why going outside is so important, this goes back to the toxin category, is because many buildings today in homes are loaded with mold. And also many building material for dogs. Yes, furniture. Yes, furniture. New carpeting. New carpeting. They are aerating and giving off hundreds of chemicals. So if you tend to feel like crap every day going to a certain environment, it's worth checking, especially the AC unit for mold, especially in your home, actually.

1:43:24If you live close to the sea, if you're in an area that reigns a lot, mold is ubiquitous today. And that's one thing as well. I believe you can test for and on a blood test, then you're in test two, elevated mold levels. So yeah, sunlight is an incredibly important and underrated pillar, especially the, you know, kind of actually the first person I ever had mentioning morning sunlight was, I think you in tools of Titans, I believe you mentioned it, Tim Ferris -Fuck. So I was going to say the fuchsia vermin thing, which it is as well. He's been really influential in that. But sunlight, especially in the morning, is great for tuning your circadian rhythm and boosting your metabolism throughout the day.

1:44:07Do you think if you were not sick as a child, you would have come to this stuff, or it's really in reaction to just realizing I don't feel good enough? Like for me in my life, like suffering has been the greatest fuel. And a great spiritual teacher, like his name is Eric Bre, he's a quote that success can be a curse, because you're never forced to question reality and wake up to it. So I think that's why we see a lot of kind of so -called successful people that are unhappy. Because they're never forced into that corner where they have to change their life. They have to turn some other direction.

1:44:51They have to turn within. So the adversity I face with regards to health and his instrumental in my journey today. And I would say that for anyone on this podcast, like or anyone listening that if you have a health issue, if my life is any indication, it will be a gift and I'd say any health issue I've had has always been such a tremendous gift because it was kind of like a warning message that I was doing something wrong. And that's something needed to change. I don't think our bodies are fighting us. They're not out to get us. They are really messengers and almost like a dashboard and alarm system.

1:45:33A visual cue on our body that's something inside is going wrong and that we need to live in a new environment or need to change something about our diet. For instance, if the diet or it could be your relationship or it could be the house you're living in or it could be the job you have or it could be legitimately anything. And the more I've learned, the more I realize how holistic health truly is, I mean take stress and emotions. I think stress and emotions are such an important part of health. I've been reading a lot of Eastern spiritual teachers and I often will look at how long they live. And most of them tend to live longer than a lot of the diet gurus.

1:46:22Despite actually a pretty negative take on the body and and not a great diet. And I've been thinking for a long time like how is that possibly the case? And what I realize is that our emotions, our stress levels, our cortisol, you know, Allah, Jotas Benza, Bruce Lipton, we're feeding on these on a daily basis. They are as important as the food in our diet. Take, you know, meditation has been such a big part of my life. In the span of a 30 minute meditation with say a migraine for instance, I've gone from feeling like I was in the depths of hell to the highest joy in 30 minutes. Because something about meditation is releasing an emotion, lowering your stress and allowing you to tap into some higher joy, some higher energy that is always here.

1:47:19What was your first experience of meditation? My first experience of meditating, actually I was on a plane and the lady next to me was sitting upright the entire flight. Like vertical eyes closed and I made some comment like did you sleep well? And she was like no, I was meditating. You should look into it. That was the first I'd ever heard about it actually. How long did those at? That was around the same time I'd quit that job. So around 2017. After that I was, you know, doing the meditation on and off. It was this hot thing. Everyone did you find a teacher? Did you learn from a book? So the first thing I did actually was download headspace at that point in time.

1:48:01And that was very helpful. From there I ended up using Sam Harris as waking up which I recommend even more. I think it's the best app bar none for for beginners. Do you still use that? No, so call it two or three years later. I was going through some trouble in my personal life. You know, my ex I had a girlfriend who I'd been dating for eight years. She was like a very prominent part of my life. We were diverging. A close family member died suddenly. I was fed up really with my life in New York. The whole partying, the whole kind of bottles and models. And by models I mean Excel financial models.

1:48:50Was not doing it for me anymore. And COVID hit then as well. I was going through a lot of trouble. I started to realize how just kind of anxious and nervous I was. Somehow I was fortunate enough to meet a meditation teacher and a philosophical counselor. This guy named Andrew J. Taggart. And he taught me to meditate in kind of Zen Buddhist Advaita Vedanta Inquiry School. Slowly kind of shepherded me and convinced me to just sit down and spend more time meditating. At first he gave me the pitch right like everyone needs at that time. I think that oh it'll be great for your productivity maybe for your blood pressure and for your mood.

1:49:40Which I think it was. But for me it's been so much more than that. It's shown me that all the clichés are true. I think happiness is purely within. And there have been moments when I've touched it which is quieting my mind and meditating. And that's stuck with me. And really one of the main driving forces for my life now is how to embody that more on a day -to -day basis. Yeah. I'm happy you have that experience. Thank you. I think it's part of the reason things are such a mess today I think is because we're all focused on finding happiness outside of ourselves. And it's unfortunately the case that in the modern world everything we're told that will make us happy.

1:50:37It is just a hedonic treadmill. It can't last. Like if you think about how many times, at least in my own life, how many times I've thought I needed something and then the search will be off. And then I got it. And lo and behold here I am still searching. This leads to this kind of existential terror. I think everyone is kind of taking out on each other because nobody knows how to be happy anymore. And we're using kind of each other as tools to fulfill our own selfish desires and our own insecurities and our own angst. And it's just reigniting this separation and inflammatory world. Whereas once you recognize that the happiness can only come from within, I think that's when we start to slow down.

1:51:29We start to turn around. We start to stop competing with other people so much. Start to realign our lives towards this simple harmony so that we can stay quiet and stay present and find what it is we're truly seeking. So when I think of diet today actually, diet for me today is not actually a means to be this bodybuilder that's flexing in the mirror. Diet for me is a way to get my body out of the way actually to quiet my body so that I can then quiet my mind. And then I could see what is really here at all times. In your list of eight, that would be the stress piece. Yes. I think from a worldly view, like a secular viewpoint, meditation is one of the most effective tools to lower your stress.

1:52:20I say one of. And one of the things I learned, one of my favorite books ever is this book Letting Go by David Hawkins. He talks about how we carry around these emotions with us. And the reason why we're so stressed all the time is not because of the external world, but because it's triggering emotions inside of us. So say something happens at work. You think you're going to miss a deadline or something and you totally flip out. If you ask yourself and choir a few times, what's so bad about me really missing this deadline? At first, it might be something like, you know, my boss is going to hate me.

1:52:57Next it might be, okay, what's so bad about your boss hating you? Well, my boss hates me, I'm not going to get a raise. Oh, okay, what's so bad about that? If I don't get a raise, my wife won't love me. Okay, what's so bad about that? But if my wife doesn't love me, I'm going to be alone. So you start to get to these deep existential kind of terrors that are subterranean beneath the surface. So the reason why you're freaking out when you're going to miss the deadline is not because you're going to miss the deadline. It's because you don't want to be alone. You don't want to be alone. So meditation for me is actually an inquiry now.

1:53:35And thanks to Andrew who taught me taught me all of this. It's an inquiry into kind of what I'm holding on to and then an allowing. So find what it is that's triggering you with you, triggering you, and then you sit with it and you just let it be and you accept it. And that to me, bar none is the biggest most effective stress lowering tool in the world. But it requires a lot of work. And that's where I think the spiritual journey is not crystals and fairy dust. It's really crawling through like shit for a long time. It's crawling through a long tunnel of poo of your own crap you've buried for a very long time.

1:54:17Now there are other easier stress lowering tools than that. Like breathwork is very effective. Specifically extended out breath breathing. So if you're if you're exhaled longer than your inhale, it activates your parasympathetic nervous system. Carbohydrates again. There's a reason why we crave them under stress. It's because they're very effective at turning off the stress response. Now that can be a problem if you need too much, but tactically used it can be very effective. How do you use breathwork? How do I use breathwork? I should be doing more breathwork to be on it. But do you do it while you're doing anything or would it be its own practice?

1:55:00It would be its own practice I would say or something like yoga for instance. But the reason why breath I think is important how I use breath as a tool is nasal breathing I think is very important for your health. To not mouth breathing. Not mouth breathing. Actually too when you sleep. So keep some tape in your room and if your partner doesn't like you and they can tape up your mouth but also to encourage nasal breathing when you sleep which may sound frightening but it's actually very effective. The back is stressed really quickly. There's some things magnesium again. It's very effective for lower stress.

1:55:39Magnesium is kind of like the relaxation mineral. Without it your body is kind of always in this triggered highly highly excited state. Some other things that have worked for me in the past are l -theanine and then just eating a completely nutritious diet. But breathwork nasal breathing increasing your CO2 that is incredibly important for your overall metabolic rate, your inflammation and actually the aesthetics of your face. mouth breathing actually will change the shape of your jaw. Cause it to droop more, cause it to sag more. You can lick these memes up online but mouth breathers have a distinct look to their face and that actually in turn will feed into worse health because you won't take as full of breaths as well.

1:56:28If your jaw is actually compressed. Sleep? Sleep. That's a big one. If you ask what the most healing thing in the world is, it's not liver unfortunately. It's not sunlight. It's not any food. It's doing absolutely nothing. It's falling asleep. And I think that's very important to remember when it comes to health actually. That restoration and regeneration comes from doing absolutely nothing. So deep sleep, REM sleep is bar none probably like probably the most important factor of health. I mean if you told me I had to choose between going vegan and sleeping eight hours a night or sleeping four hours every single night and going carnivore.

1:57:18That would be a top decision. I'd say carnivore now. I'd honestly mark my word. I think I would go vegan. Honestly. Yeah, sleep. He becomes sleeper really asleep. Sleepy. Sleepy. Sleepy. Sleepy. Hangry. Everything just goes to crap. So for sleep, morning sunlight very important. Dark room, cold room, no blue light at night. Credibly important. Use candles, use red lights. Hours? What hours? I've tend to notice in my life that the early, what's the saying early to bed early to rise keeps a man healthy and wise. I've the best I've ever felt in my life. I was on the nine to five grind nine PM to five AM.

1:58:02I'm asleep. So sleeping at nine PM waking up at five. That's the best I've ever felt. But you know plus or minus a few hours. Yeah. There's some old wives tales that you know sleeping after 12 AM is not nearly as restful asleep before 12 AM. I don't know that there's signs for that but it feels for I know that on my ororing the only time I get deep sleep regardless of when I go to sleep is before midnight. That's very interesting. If I don't go to sleep before midnight, you're just skipping. It'll just be R &M and light sleep. Wow. If I go to sleep at 10, I can get up to two hours of deep sleep.

1:58:37Well, there we go. And it feels that way for me. I've never measured it but it feels like going to bed earlier as a good decision. I know also in Chinese medicine that each hour of the night restores a different part of the body. And I believe the liver is before 12. It's good to know. I mean, it would be fun to look at. I'm fascinated with Chinese medicine. We're looking up and we're talking about it. I'm very curious. The Chinese medicine clock, sleep clock for organs. Chinese medicine is not something I've explored yet. Oh wow. Yeah. Deep dive into the Chinese body clock. So me that too. That sounds great.

1:59:16This is amazing. Oh, okay. Yeah. Gal bladder, 11 p .m. to 1 a .m. Liver, 1 to 3 a .m. Well, something I have heard, right? Something a lot of people face is waking up in the middle of the night. And this was something that was disturbing me towards the end of the carnivore diet. Every night I started waking up at 3 a .m. or so. That's not something I ever dealt with. And according to this sort of peterian philosophy, one of the reasons why that would happen is because your liver runs out of glycogen, which is the stored carbohydrates. Now, remember, carbohydrates are critical for your brain. So when that happens, your body needs to switch over and needs to spike cortisol, spike adrenaline to release fat, to release protein to turn into glucose if you don't have any for your brain.

2:00:12And that's what wakes you up, which is interesting because that Chinese body clock suggests 1 to 3 a .m. is for the liver. So one of the other sleep tips I have is if you are waking up a lot during the night, try some and you are open to this carbohydrate model, try a spoonful of honey, some fruit, and a little salt before bed. The carbs help to fill up your liver glycogen. They're super easily digestible, it won't irritate your gut. This isn't to say eat pasta right before bed, talking honey and fruit, or fruit juice. And the salt actually helps to lower adrenaline. Help me a lot. I'll be with deep sleep as well.

2:00:51In terms of changing your life, one of the things from Jota spends that completely changed my life was changing my warnings. And every ancient religion talks about the power of like 4 a .m. to 7 a .m. as they're being greater chi, or greater ability to access higher states of consciousness during those twilight hours. So one of the things I did when my life kind of felt like crap was I started waking up earlier, I started meditating at those hours, I started envisioning my higher self and completely reshaping my day based on that morning change in routine. And not only that, I made sure to not go on my phone for the first two hours because your body is incredibly kind of programmable and open to subliminal messaging in those hours.

2:01:43Jota spends it with says because your brain is in theta waves then. So make sure you're only thinking elevated thoughts before bed and in the morning during those hours. What do you do for movement? Movement has been a journey for me as well. Now what I recommend and believe as most beneficial is muscle mass. Bar none like studies show muscle mass is one of the most effective longevity tools. Not only that, muscle is this sink for glucose and it sink for fat. So one of the best ways to lose fat in my opinion is to increase your muscle mass because it burns fat at rest and will take kind of all the all the store body fat instead of shunting it all to the liver to dispose of it which can overwhelm your liver.

2:02:35It actually will use it as fuel. When you're at rest, it's almost a cheat code to increase your metabolism all day long. Not only that, there's a study recently which I thought was great showing muscles release these myocons. They release molecules when you contract them. That shuttle them themselves to the brain and increase BDNF, a neurogenesis, mood, cognitive function and the research actually called them hope molecules. Wow. So every time you work out you increase a little hope in your body. And what's the workout that you're currently into? Now I will try to hit each muscle group for around kind of 10 sets a week.

2:03:14So whatever that is, whether it's compound lids. Is it every other day or? It's I've really modulated my workouts over time and this will get into my workout. It's sort of one key piece about working out. I will say is that over exercising is as bad as under exercising and you really need to listen to your body. If you are super stressed, I do not believe in no pain, no gain here. I think a lot of people will say I wake up, I feel like crap, I go to the gym and it's a new day. That's one of those moments when I don't think you should listen to your mind because that's just pure adrenaline, pure stress and it will sort of backfire.

2:03:52So if you're working out and you feel winded and wiped the whole rest of the day and the whole next day, which often happens, especially if you're hypothyroid, you did too much. So you need to find the dosage that works right for you, whatever that is. And exercise is really hard to make a unilateral recommendation for people, but I do think building muscle and mobility is very important as we age. One of the things I loved about Peter at T is book is that, suggested that the ways in which we die aren't necessarily affected by missing out on blueberries in your antioxidants and such. We die because we do things like we fall and get hurt and then we end up in a hospital.

2:04:36We don't do what we love anymore and kind of waste away. So if you care about your health, I think you need to really get proactive in terms of your mobility, your stability and how much muscle you're carrying as you get older. Have you experimented with heavier weights and less reps versus lighter weights I have a little bit. I'm honestly not an exercise guru, but I knew means now I've really just got into the point where I trust my body. I think we can all get to the point where we trust our body in terms of health. And what are the basic exercises you do? Basic exercises, I think the compound lifts are important, but these are also more in -depth for people and you need proper form.

2:05:23So squats, bench press, pull -ups, these are lifts that recruit your whole muscle mass, your whole body. And in doing so, they can be incredibly stressful but also incredibly beneficial for your hormone profile, for your mobility, for your flexibility, etc. Then there's also the isolated movements which are kind of more aesthetic in nature but still will build some muscle. So like the bicep curls, the hamstring curls, the calf raises and things like that. Those are more secondary. Those are more secondary. But for me honestly today, when it comes to movement, I tend to like activities that give me joy.

2:06:10So if I'm doing an exercise and I'm just dreading being in the gym, I'm out. I'm gone. I'd much rather be playing tennis or swimming or, yeah, snarkling or something along those lines that's getting the movement in, but also bringing me joy. It's more movement and play than training. Exactly. Exactly. But don't get me wrong for a long time. I did intensely lift muscle. I think it is beneficial, but I think we have an overreliance today on exercise for health. If you need to like lose weight and want to get healthy, I think you do that in the kitchen in the sunlight, not in the gym. The gym is something for me when you're already healthy.

2:06:56It's like let's see what our body can do. Let's build up some muscle and move around a little bit. And that gets kind of into the play aspect as well. Play seems trite and silly, but from personal experience, there's nothing that changes my health more than having a good dose of play in my life. And what's remarkable is there's actually studies that support this, that being in stimulating environments, that doing new things actually increases neurogenesis. We'll build new neurons in our brain. We'll improve cognitive function. We'll increase dopamine, increase mood. And it really puts a emphasis on the importance of being in a meaningful environment in your life.

2:07:41Like if you live somewhere where every day is just a rot mechanism, a rot machine, your body is going to degenerate. Like it's play and joy is a muscle almost. And if your body doesn't think you need to do it, it won't utilize resources for that. So if you hate where you live, leave. Find somewhere new to go and take everything every step you can to get out. Obviously, that comes kind of from a privileged position, but you need to make the intention first to get out. And and put yourself into an environment that stimulates you like a human is meant to be. I read some negativity online about you saying something good about having a happy family life.

2:08:27How could he? I wanted to ask about it because it's strange that that's controversial. Yeah, I think if you're not sad with your family, if you don't hate your family, you honestly are a threat to society today. It's it's crazy that we live in such an upside down world, right? Where you know, in terms of life, you know, we've prioritized hookup culture instead of marriage, you know, polyamory and such instead of monogamy. All these new facets we've never been exposed to in history are now supposed to be the kind of way out for us. And it's really quite perplexing to me. When I look in terms of my life, when I look at society today, it feels like we have this infinite buffet available to us.

2:09:21We have so many different ways to live our lives. And I think that's tremendous in some ways. But unfortunately, we have a lot of fake fools gold paths. We have a lot of paths that are just dead ends that may feel great along with empty calories. Yes, exactly. Empty calories. And listen, I'm a single man, so I'm not speaking from experience. But when I envision like what a good life really is, family to me is fundamental. Love, family, joy. I don't give a crap about being healthy if that's not a big part of my life. All of these other facets are kind of just means to an end to just increase the amount of joy and love around me.

2:10:11And if you don't want a family good, good on you, honestly, I think that's the beauty of the modern world is that you get to pick that for yourself. But I'm noticing this trend in which we are almost discouraging family starting. There's almost subliminal messaging that if you are starting a family, you are somehow harming those around you or something either aren't. Giving up. You're giving up. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of this has been around. I tweeted recently that it was a woman holding a baby. And I tweeted saying, ladies, there's nothing wrong with you if you want this over being a partner at a law firm.

2:10:54And there was obviously a lot of vitriol. Not obviously, but there was a lot of vitriol around that. And what's clear from talking to women today is they somehow feel like they're just up. They've been encouraged or made to feel like they're giving up on life. If they just if they want to start a family, if they don't want to ascend the corporate ladder and become a partner and become a high -flying CEO at a firm. So great. Give them that option. Everybody should have that option. But let's remember what the highest joys here on earth are. And I can tell you, man, woman, no matter who you are, your meaning in life is not going to come from work alone.

2:11:43I think work can be such an incredibly important avenue of self -expression, but it's not going to be an end in it of itself. It's funny because that tweet that you sent out was basically you were telling your life story. You were working at a finance company and you realized it was empty and you opted out. Exactly. Sharing that information with your eyes. Exactly. I think because it was couched in these other terms, it was sort of this hot button topic. But today, work is taken such a predominant spot in our lives, interestingly. At least in America. At least in America. And we assume it's going to fulfill our deepest yearnings in life.

2:12:29We assume that that next promotion or when I get 100 ,000 more followers on Instagram or if I hit a certain benchmark in terms of revenue. But I've seen through enough life experiences now that all of these external goals are fleeting and impermanent and actually end up just turning us into kind of hungry ghosts, as Buddhist would say. For more and more and more and more. So my philosophy and I think this is where I differ from a lot of those in the health world is I think humans need a higher purpose or we go insane. I think we need a purpose that is an end in it of itself. Not a means to an end.

2:13:19So examples means to an end money. You can't eat money. It's a means to an end. If you make that your end in life, you will never have enough. Work as well. Promotions means to an end. Even relationships, I think a means to an end potentially. What is possibly an end in it of itself that's good just for doing it? I think things like creativity, things like play, things like love, things like meaning, things like God even, if I dare say. But what we all need is a way to be in the world that allows us to be content, that allows us to be at peace and elevating work to that idol is going to lead you to a state of despair in all likelihood.

2:14:10Just climbing a ladder to nowhere. Exactly. Exactly. And I think modern society is that climbing a ladder to land.