Anabology is an anonymous scientist that has come to some radically different perspectives about diet.
The conversation delves into Anabology's exploration of high-sugar, low-protein diets, inspired by scientific literature. Vance and Anabology discuss a study where mice on a high-sugar diet had increased metabolic rates and maintained weight, leading to personal experimentation. The speaker highlights the role of the hormone FGF21 in metabolic rate increases and weight management. They contrast this with traditional high-protein diets like keto and carnivore, noting the latter's negative effects. The discussion also touches on the impact of processed foods, government subsidies, and the potential for genetic engineering to extend lifespan, emphasizing the need for personalized dietary approaches.
http://longestlevers.com = open protocols, http://literature.bio = recommended reading, http://soliloquy.bio = thoughts
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Vance Crowe 0:00
And how long have you been on your your honey diet yourself,
Anabology 0:04
I think that I did the first run of it. I mean, I've been on and off different times for different reasons, but I think I started in maybe December of last year, so like the first or no, not December, actually, like November of last year. So probably it's been, like, almost a year since I kind of, like, tried this out for the first time, and then
Unknown Speaker 0:24
how did you even, like, stumble into it? Yeah.
Speaker 2 0:27
So, yeah. So originally, I kind of just was the kind of person who found reading papers like scientific literature fun, and other people didn't really find it fun, I think. So I kind of just did this as much as I could, because I thought, you know, like I was enjoying doing it, and over time, I kind of found benefits from it, whether it be I was able to consult for people and get a little bit of money, or I was able to do better at my job. So I kind of just reinforced my enjoyment and of reading papers. And I just, like, read so many papers that I found really, really crazy ones, an example of a really, really crazy paper that led me to doing this, like, super high sugar diet. Is there? There was a study where mice were given Coca Cola or water to drink for like, a long period of time, like they either no water and only Coca Cola, or, you know, water only. And then the conclusion of the paper from these authors was that, oh, Coca Cola is bad for you because it increases your cholesterol. But in reality, there was this data hidden in the paper that told, like a much, I think, better story, or like a completely different story. In fact, they didn't really comment on it much, but they showed that the mice who drank Coca Cola had four times the calories as the mice who just only drank water, yet they ended up weighing the same at the end of the study. So their metabolism went up by like four times somehow, when they were just drinking sugar instead of instead of just having water. And this actually had been replicated, so I dug a bit deeper into this. And back in the I think 1980s originally, another group, way before the study, because this was like early 2000s found basically the same thing, where they gave Coca Cola, or some sort of soda to animals, and then they tried to see, like, where these effects were coming from. They found that the metabolic rate increased, but they didn't know why. So then they gave sugar water and they gave caffeine water, and both independently increased the metabolic rate of these animals. So it couldn't be fully attributed to the caffeine. It was like, you know, the Coca Cola, the caffeine plus the sugar together, both increase the metabolic rate. So that kind of, like, sent me down this rabbit hole where I was like, okay, like, why is sugar, you know, even independent of caffeine, increasing metabolism and allowing these mice to just eat so much more without becoming fat. And yeah, and I found some plausible mechanisms. And one was, there was this, like lifespan study, where mice were fed basically a protein restricted diet, like very low in protein, and it extended their life by something like 30% which is, you know, against all of the conventional wisdom of bodybuilders today, saying, Oh yeah, you need to eat all this protein to maintain your muscle. And muscle is good for aging, but with these like protein restricted diets, mice lived longer, and they also ate more and weighed less, and they found that this worked through a specific hormone called FGF 21 but they this hormone also is strongly expressed, or was strongly elevated in animals that ate a lot of sugar. So basically, there's these, like two studies. It's, you know, protein restriction and over feeding sugar, both of them increase the metabolic rate a lot. The animals can eat a lot more food and not get as fat. And they both work through the same hormone, is the idea and and then there was another study where they showed that this hormone also existed in humans and was induced by the same factors. So I was like, sweet. I mean, nobody's ever tried this in humans. Nobody's ever gone to their institutional review board at a university and been like, hey, I want to take fat people and I want to give them as much sugar as I can and restrict their protein like that would never fly. They'd be like, this is unethical. So I decided just to try it, because no one else is going to and I just overfed myself, you know, 1000s of calories of sugar. Ate more calories every day, and I kind of restricted my protein a little bit less than it was before I put all my protein into one meal. I just ate a bit of beef, and then I actually increased my calorie intake by, like, 1000 calories. And over a month, I lost 10 pounds so
Speaker 1 4:43
and like, what's going on to you psychologically? Like, are you you're feeling okay, you're feeling like, bad. How does this go?
Speaker 2 4:51
Yeah, it was actually really surprising. I felt almost like I was on keto before you know, where you kind of have this, like, consistent mental energy throughout the day. So I think the only difference between how I felt on keto and how I felt on this high sugar, kind of like low protein diet was that I was much more hungry on the high sugar diet, but it was totally fine because I could just eat more food. So,
Speaker 1 5:11
yeah, okay, so have you done things like keto before? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 5:15
I've tried all of these things. I've tried carnivore, I've tried keto diets, and I think carnivore and keto are different, like where carnivore you just have a ton of protein, and the protein can be converted into into sugar, so you're not always in ketosis. And actually felt worse on a carnivore diet than a keto diet. But yeah, so I've tried, I've tried, like a kind of a heavy cream based keto diet. I've tried high sugar diets, I've tried Mediterranean type diets. And, you know, a lot of the popular ones, I just felt really bad on but the the one that really like got me feeling good. Finally, I actually had the least migraines of my life on this high sugar diet. So, so
Speaker 1 5:54
where I'm coming from at this is that I have, I've been doing the keto diet for about six months, and getting into ketosis was hell. It was, like, very, very painful, but once I got into it, I would describe it as life changing, right? Like, not only did I lose weight and I wasn't asleep all the time, or, like, need naps, but like, I had a mental clarity I was describing to my wife the other day. Like, I like listening to new music again, which I haven't liked doing in years. And I would attribute that to my diet, like there's some kind of mental clarity going on. So to hear somebody describe like, no, no, I went the other direction, not 70% fat. And, you know, like, just 5% carbs, I went way, 80% carbs. Like, what do you think you're
Speaker 2 6:40
something like that. Yeah. I mean, pretty low fat, probably even less than 10% fat. You know, it was kind of like 100 grams of protein, which is 400 calories, and maybe 3500 calories total. So, you know, we can fill all the rest there with with carbs, whatever that calculates to.
Speaker 1 6:58
And does it matter what kind of sugar you're eating? I think,
Speaker 2 7:01
I think it matters to a degree. I think it matters less than people would expect, right? Because, you know, there's all these kind of, like Whole Foods advocates who say that if you drink a soda, you know, that's much different from eating a fruit, right? But the reason why I picked honey was kind of to just choose a sugar that had the least processing steps, because I think in every processing step you could have some impurity that the, you know, regulatory bodies allow in. And you know, say is, say is essentially safe, and that can confound the effects. I mean, one example is just like, as a personal, kind of, like anecdotal thing, I can drink Coca Cola, just like as much as I want, and feel fine, but if I drink one Dr Pepper now I immediately get a migraine. It's like, really strange. So, so I mean, if you look at the natural flavors that are put in these things, they often are kind of like, sometimes a seed oil carrier. So sometimes it's like some sort of soybean oil carrier, plus, like these organic molecules that they don't have to tell you what they are. And then there's also the caramel color and the phosphoric acid and all these other things that are inside of sodas. So you might call, you know, a soda, basically sugar water. But there's all these other factors in it, you know, that change even between sodas that that can make it not behave like normal, normal sugar. But I think if it's something like cane sugar or coconut sugar or maple syrup or honey. I mean, all of these things I know people have tried and had success with so and so
Speaker 1 8:29
the key to this diet is the fact that you're pulling out protein so that that way your body processes sugar differently.
Speaker 2 8:37
I think that's a crucial aspect of it. So the hormone that is thought to mediate this, essentially, you can give it to animals and their metabolic rate increases like and it's called FGF 21 again, if you eat protein and then you overfeed sugar, you have none of this hormone increase that you otherwise get when you overfeed sugar. So protein kind of blocks these effects, it seems. But I think one key insight that led to me doing this diet, and it hasn't been rigorously tested, I would like to say, because I don't know, I don't know anybody who has spread protein across the entire day in this like slightly lower quantity versus loading it all into one meal. But one of the key insights was that blood sugar, when I wore, like, a continuous glucose monitor, burns off in like, three to four hours. So I was thinking that, you know, if I get the protein out of my system overnight, and then I have the daytime to just eat sugar as much as I want and burn it all off, well, by the time that I eat protein again at dinner, I'm kind of, like, it's almost as if I'm, you know, doing some intermittent fasting, like, I've cut off an entire like window where I'm in this state where I can increase my metabolic rate, but then when I eat protein now, I have to restrict calories. Does this make sense? I
Speaker 1 9:50
get it. I mean, like, it's mind boggling to me, because I learn about these things as, like, a cohesive whole, right? You have to have proteins, carbs and fats and the. Idea that you could separate one out and and burn it all off. Like, is, it's like, I can picture it, but it's hard to get my mind around this.
Speaker 2 10:09
Yeah, and I would say that the advice to eat a balanced meal doesn't really work in today's world. Unfortunately, the most robust way to induce obesity in animals is to give them a high fat, high carb, high protein diet. So it's basically 40% fat, 30% carbs, 30% protein. If you want to induce obesity in animals, no matter what diet you feed them, even if you feed them a clean diet, you know of of tallow, beef tallow and or coconut oil or olive oil, and you know, whatever carb you want, like rice or sugar, you can make an animal fat, for sure, the health outcomes change depending on what kind of oil they're fed. But a balanced meal in today's world, at least, or in these kind of like animal settings, generally, doesn't work, seemingly. But then there's the question of like, why did people used to be able to eat balanced meals all the time and not gain weight and not become obese. And actually saw this paper today that was like posted on Twitter, where, after you lose a couple pounds of body fat, there are these persistent organic pollutants. So essentially, these like pollutant molecules that were stored in your fat that circulate in your blood for up to a year after you lose the fat. So one of the ideas is that there are these kind of molecules that might be toxic that your body kind of wants to sequester into fat, or for some reason, causes you to gain fat. And once you try to lose fat, the they come out of your fat and become active again. So then your body tries to put on that fat really quickly again. So So I think that, like a lot of the effects that we're seeing these days might be mediated by the environment that we're in, where previously we didn't have all these like pollutants around that that could cause these changes. And one of the scary things is that in some animals, they've exposed them to certain pollutants like this, and then have them have children, and their children, even when they don't have any exposure to the pollutant, also become fat with a higher probability. So it could be that it's been multi generational accumulation of pollutants, or like the effects of of kind of like these things in our environment that we're just starting to understand,
Speaker 1 12:22
why are you the first person that I'm ever hearing talk about this?
Speaker 2 12:27
I think that it's, you know, there's like a gap between the scientific cutting edge and medicine, where there have been papers on this for quite a while, and, you know, detailed mechanisms of how a scientist can induce obesity in an animal using a pollutant molecule, for example, and it just never translated into medicine. Like, I don't think that the current model that we have for doctors treating patients is that of preventative care or, like, root cause medicine, it's definitely, you know, oh, I have a, I had a pharma rep come talk to me and and I'll get these bonuses if I give them X amount of, you know, prescriptions or something, you know,
Speaker 1 13:11
yeah. And even if it's not consciously that they're doing that, they've been influenced, there's the reason the pharma companies invest in that way is because they know it works, yeah? So, before we go into, like, the, how did we get here? You lift? How are you putting on muscle if you're not doing giant amounts of protein intake?
Speaker 2 13:30
Yeah. So I think it's, like a big misconception that you need, like, a lot of protein to gain muscle mass. I mean, there's a whole, there's a bodybuilder, Mike menser. There's, like the mike Menzer argument that you know your muscle is 70% water, and you know it's only like 10 or 20% protein at the end. And you know, if you want to put on like a kilogram of muscle mass in a year, or say, even 10 kilograms of muscle mass in a year, well then say it's like 10% protein or 20% protein, then you need, you know, only two kilograms of actual protein an entire year. And then you divide that by 365, and you only need, like, a few extra grams of protein a day above your above your maintenance, right? So you know the actual you definitely don't need like, 100 grams of protein a day, because then you would be gaining muscle if you stored all of it at like, an extremely high rate. That's like, un physiological. Maybe bodybuilders and steroids need it. But the I think that the one of the insights here that like, made me kind of like abandon the high protein mindset, was that people have done studies on this thing called, like, protein balance, where you just measure the amount of nitrogen which makes up proteins that you eat and that you excrete, essentially, like urea and urine is a source of nitrogen from protein breakdown. And after you know you can, you can drop the protein in someone's diet from like 200 grams to 100 grams, and then they actually do excrete more. Nitrogen for a bit, and have, like, a negative, you know, they lose a bit of nitrogen. They lose a bit of muscle, or proteins, which might not be a muscle, but then after like a week, they eventually adapt to this, like, lower protein state, and then their nitrogen balance, the you know, amount protein deficit, essentially ends up like equilibrating and, and then you end up getting maybe even slightly like net positive effects on, like how much protein you retain. So I guess to simplify that, when you eat less protein, your body breaks down less protein and, and, you know, this is pretty robust and has been well studied. I think that once you get below around, like one gram per kilogram of body weight. So like one gram of protein per kilogram of body weight. So for normal adult male, like 7080 grams of protein. Once you get below that, then you start to get these negative effects on all cause mortality, which means, like, you have a higher chance of dying your live a shorter amount of time. But once you're above that, there doesn't seem to be any increased benefits for muscle outcomes, for lifespan outcomes.
Speaker 1 16:08
So this is, like, shocking. So this is an area that I've always just been an amateur in. And I remember before I had children, I mean, I was eating, oh, man, I can't even imagine 180 200 grams of protein a day. Because, like, it would basically be, like, if you don't eat enough protein, then your muscles won't get big. You'll start eating away at your muscles, like, it's bad news for you. So, I mean, it was always, like, more and more and more, and it definitely changed the smell of my urine. I can, I can tell you for sure that
Speaker 2 16:39
Yeah, yeah. And, and I think that you do, you know what if you I think it's, like, kind of self reinforcing, because if you do drop the protein that you eat, like, you might become smaller, just like, immediately after, like, a week, and, like, lose a little bit of weight, and you're like, Oh, my God, it's muscle weight that I'm losing, but, but you can adapt to it, for sure. And I think that the main thing that the literature shows is that the stimulus to keep muscle is, is really just exercise, right? Like, no matter what protein amount that you're eating, if you just exercise and, like lift weights, you'll put on muscle, like it's or unless you're eating basically, like 10 grams of protein a day, or nothing. I mean, you can feed, like pigs, just like a super low protein diet, like a 5% protein diet, and they just, like, double in size in like, a couple months or a month, you know, like, they grow really, really fast. So clearly, like, biology can handle this. It's just, you know, like, where is human biology on this scale of protein efficiency? All right,
Speaker 1 17:38
I'm gonna interrupt for just a moment, and we will get right back to the conversation with anabology. And as soon as we do, he's going to talk about why it is that he doesn't use his real name, both on the podcast and on social media. And let me tell you, the rest of the conversation is every bit, if not more interesting than what you've heard so far. But I need to interrupt, because if you are a longtime listener the podcast, you can already tell that something is a little different here, right? And the reason that I have to tell you this is I am going to make some changes to the podcast, and I've already done them, and this is largely because of the feedback that I got after last week's podcast, where I said, Hey, what needs to change in order to help this thing grow? And I heard some really great insights from several of you. Got lots of notes and letters, way more than I ever thought. In fact, it's one of those experiences where you're like, Whoa. People really do listen to this podcast. So I am going to make some changes, and I want to talk about those changes, but I'm not going to do it here, because if you're new to the podcast, you don't have any idea what we're talking about. But if you're interested in hearing what kind of changes we're going to make and how this is going to go going forward, then at the end of the interview, you can hear all about it. I also want to mention the sponsor of this podcast. The whole reason that I can do this podcast is because so many listeners purchase legacy interviews. Legacy interviews is what I do when I'm not doing a podcast and I'm not traveling around the country speaking. It is when I sit down with individuals and couples to record their life stories. Now for many, many years, I thought that that's exactly what we did. Our goal is to capture stories and then send them to you. And so during these interviews, I was focused on making sure we captured as many stories as we could. But a couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation with a customer who said something so profound and so wonderful that it reshaped in my mind what we're doing here. He said, You captured the spark that was my dad, and I'm so grateful for it. You know, you caught the way that he laughs, you caught the way that he smiles. You caught the way that he has that rye look on his face when he says something. He doesn't know how you're going to react. And now I know that even though my children might not be old enough to remember him at his best, they are going to get to see that and they're. Gonna understand me better for it. So now I understand that, yes, Legacy interviews asks for your stories. That's how we engage our clients, but the truth, the deep inner thing that we offer that is special is that we create an experience where you or your loved ones can feel comfortable enough to really relax and be who you are. And in capturing this, we capture something so precious and so brilliant that it is worth passing down to your family as an heirloom. If you are interested in having me sit down with either you or your loved ones to tell your stories and to capture that spark. Go to legacyinterviews.com to find out more. All right, let's head back to the conversation with anabology. So you right now are anonymous on x, y.
Speaker 2 20:55
So I originally made a Twitter account where I was not anonymous, and I would post basically my same, what I thought were my same opinions. I would post like, these scientific takes, but it never took off. Just having my like, face and name out there it, you know, didn't, didn't really work. And I also felt like I was censoring myself a little bit, even though I thought, you know, on the surface, I was like, Oh, I'm gonna be brave and post my opinions. Like, I still think I was censoring myself. So then I made just an anonymous Twitter with an anime profile picture, and it just immediately, it just immediately,
Unknown Speaker 21:24
immediately took off. So why do you think that is?
Speaker 2 21:27
I think that it makes it so that your ideas just stand out there as as, like an idea. And there's this, like, whole internet culture where it's like, you know, it's like, that's our guy right, where, you know, you can see that and like, relate to it. It's not like some authoritative figure who's like, this is my name. I am Dr XY and Z and and trying to dictate to you. It's like somebody who's just kind of like playing around on the internet and and, and then they're like, Oh, this is interesting content.
Speaker 1 21:55
And then they can paint you in the way that they need you to be in their in their mind, in order to support you or to think about it in a different way,
Speaker 2 22:03
yeah, until I, uh, reply back and disagree with them in the in the tweet threads. So
Speaker 1 22:08
when I go to your Twitter thread and anabology, um, people are posting about starting on the honey diet. So did you like write this up and start saying, hey, people should try this.
Speaker 2 22:21
Yeah. So I just posted when I was doing it on Twitter. I showed my like, Walmart shopping cart of of, like, 20 bottles of honey. And because I was eating a pound of honey a day, that's a pretty crucial aspect of pound of honey. And it just like, blew up, and I kind of like wrote, I made a website called longest levers, because I was kind of annoyed that all of these, like influencers were selling really simple protocols for like, 20 bucks. So I just made a site for kind of, like open protocols that I could just post, you know, wherever. And I have this site called longest levers, and I posted the honey diet and, like, the protocol of how to follow it on there. And after that, I mean, it kind of had, has had its waves, like, I started it out. Some people tried it, and some people really liked it. It didn't work for some people. But then, you know, it went, went down again. But recently, there was a big figure in the Keto space on Twitter who ended up trying it for a week, and they were like, Hey, I'm gonna try this honey diet for a week, and I'm gonna eat a ton of sugar. And, you know, he was coming from keto, and all of his followers were keto, so all of his followers like, Hey, you're gonna cause irreversible damage. You're gonna die. This is gonna be the worst thing ever. Like, you're not gonna be okay. And he ended up trying it. And, you know, before, whenever he would go off of keto, he would always get depressed, he would get, you know, anxious, his body would feel bad. But this time, whenever he went off of keto and went on to the honey diet. None of his symptoms went back. The only side effect that he said he had was that he wanted to do more handstands.
Speaker 1 23:50
I mean, it's a real issue. I mean, I did keto because I had some like, diabetic, like, episodes. And I was like, I went to my doctor. They didn't really take me seriously. And so I was like, All right, well, like, I'm just gonna do this. And I got my blood work done, and then I started doing keto, and it took me, whatever, about two weeks to get fully into ketosis. But I remember driving down the road and like, where, like, my breath started to change, and all of a sudden I started having, like, epiphanies level ideas. And I was like, This is amazing. But then after a few months, something happened, and I had to go off of it. And going off of it was hell, and so I got back on it. And was like, how am I going to get off this ride? Because I don't want to be, you know, in a key, I don't want to have a high fat diet for the rest of my life. It's, it's actually a rather bland diet. So the idea that there's a way off this ride is really appealing to me.
Speaker 2 24:50
Yeah, and I think that's like, one of the drawbacks of keto specifically, is that you you have to go through the period where you're losing all of your water weight, and, you know, you're kind of suffering. You have the Keto flu, which. Call, which I think, I think that a lot of the time, the Keto flu and the transition period on keto might actually be more related to, like the adaptation to higher levels of protein, rather than like the fats. Because often whenever people do keto, they're almost like keto carnivore, where they just start eating a bunch more steak and meat and things that are higher protein. So I mean, obviously that argument doesn't hold. If you just decided to do like a normal diet and add a ton of olive oil or or cream or something, yeah, but, but I've seen less success, I would say, on like a carnivore diet than just like a pure, pure keto diet. That's like, high, intentionally, very high fat, higher calorie. But anyway, the honey diet, you don't lose water weight immediately, so you and if you're on keto, you might actually gain a few pounds when you start, because you're gaining water weight back, but you can go on and off of it like this. This morning, I decided that I was craving a bowl of pasta, so I had basically like a pound of pasta this morning, which is off the diet, because I think it was like eight servings of eight grams of protein each, which is like 64 grams of protein. So that if I have my normal dinner tonight, then I'll have too much protein, right? So it's, you know, you have to be careful about what the carb sources are and but, but I definitely go on and off the diet like all the time, and I can still get these benefits on the diet without any transition period. I think,
Speaker 1 26:17
I mean, before you walked in here today, I was thinking like, this is the most counter cultural idea I have probably encountered in a very long time, because the growth of carnivore diet, specifically, some people say they're on keto, and they're really not. But like, the growth of high fat high protein diets is skyrocketing right now, and it's because people are looking around being like, I'm tired of being fat, and I think there's something in our wheat, or we're eating too many carbs, or we're given too much sugar. So you saying this is going to it's got to completely unnerve people,
Speaker 2 26:55
yeah. And it's, I mean, the the anti sugar narratives are really compelling narratives, because there's all of these mechanisms that you can point to. You can be like, Oh, well, diabetics, they have high blood sugar, so it must be the sugar or sugar increases insulin, and diabetics have high insulin. So it must be the, it must be the sugar or sugar is glycating. It can react with things. So the stiffening of your arteries as you age, it must be the sugar. And, you know, we could go and dive into each of those points. And I, you know, I have, like, my my perspective on that, obviously, but I think that I think, like, the outcomes kind of, like, speak for themselves, where I can, you know, do this diet and get perfect blood work and, like, lose a lot of weight, so, so I don't think it, like, can be the sugar if there's, like, you know, this, this level of, you know, so many people trying This diet, and it's working. But I think my prediction is that I think we're, like, about a couple years out from this, like, really becoming a big thing. I think that the tides are really turning against sugar right now, for example, there's, like, the skyrocket of Casey and Cali means, which I think they're probably great people I love, like, their narrative I love, you know, their stances against, like, you know, the tobacco industry controlling our food supply. And, you know, or scientists from the tobacco industry like coming into food and making it addictive, and all of these things, which I think are valid and and I like their mission, but I think that, you know, Casey means, in her book good energy, she spoke against sugar and thought it was like the root cause of a lot of these diseases. So, like, the people at the forefront of the health movement are very anti sugar right now, but I don't think that this has reached its peak yet. I think we're still like, a bit from this being like
Speaker 1 28:31
a real No man, I think this is just really started to jump from being maybe not radical, but but like acceptable, to now it is going to the mainstream. I mean, we're watching RFK ride that wave up and and so I think, like, we are not anywhere near the fever pitch, which means there's going to be millions of more people going on keto and carnivore diets. There's going to be a whole bunch of people pointing at the, you know, the sugar industry is as the root cause of all the things going on. But like, you know, you look around the world and you would be blind if you didn't say, we are massively obese. People are not healthy. We're we could be raising the best food possible that we ever have before. We have more technology. We have, you know, better access to knowledge. What's going wrong?
Speaker 2 29:23
Yeah. So, I mean, I think the root cause of a lot of these issues that we see in our food system are just government subsidies, right? So, I mean, I think we really wanted to have, like, a robust food supply, like, especially after World War Two and, like, all this, like, rationing and everything, you know, as I was reading a book, and I was reading a book. And I don't know the exact timelines here, but I was reading this book from the 1960s it was a Time Life Sciences magazine, essentially. And they showed these charts, and they were very proud of it, where, in the past couple decades, from like the 1960s soybean production in the US went from like nothing to greater than all these other crops. Yeah, and I think this is driven by a lot of the subsidies, you know, corn, soy and wheat that kind of give the substrate for most of Americans diet, which is, you know, processed foods. So I think, I think the system as it works right now is like, you have subsidies for corn, soy and wheat, which go to farmers to grow it, but they can sell it for very cheap, because it's such a subsidized market that you can't sell it for very expensive. It's like nearly free. And then this goes to, like, the food manufacturers who make processed foods with these kind of really cheap ingredients, they're not going to make these processed foods with nice, expensive, maybe healthy fat, like I would call beef tallow a healthy fat. They're gonna use soybean oil because it's cheap. And then those these go to stores like Walmart, which have to sell to these like bottom quartile income earners in the US who barely have any money to feed their entire family. And then Walmart makes razor thin margins on this food, like even less than sales tax. So the government makes more money off of Walmart than Walmart makes off of Walmart and and then, you know, these people eat the food, and then they have bad, bad outcomes for some reason. So it all seems like, at every single step, it's like the government is funding it and benefiting from it, right?
Speaker 1 31:16
Yeah, I then, I'm trying to stay with you, because I actually when you describe the subsidies, I think it's worth spending a little bit of time thinking about, do you know how subsidies actually work, like how the farmer benefits from the government tilting the scale towards soybeans or corn? I haven't looked super deeply into it, so it's worth understanding because there, I think people have this impression that you get a check in the mail from the government for that. But that's not actually what happens. What happens the the largest subsidy for farmers is, is crop insurance, and it's that, if you have a record of the last, I think, five years of crops on your field, then when you go to plant your your your your corn or your soy, whatever the major crops are. You go to an organization and you say, I want to buy crop insurance. Now that crop insurance is subsidized by the government, so you don't actually have to pay the full amount for what it would cost to insure your crops. But as long as you're growing corn, soy, wheat, some of these major crops, then they'll say, Okay, well, we'll cut that price down on there. And then if there's too much rain in the spring and you can't get into plant, then you're going to get what's called Prevent Plant. You're going to get paid out for that. If you you have flood or hail or things happen, then you don't have to worry that you're not going to be able to make your mortgage payments, or you're not going to be able to pay for your equipment, because the as long as you are using those crops, you're going to stay in business. And then the other subsidy, this is one that my friend Keaton Kruger is going to freak out when he hears me talking about this. But the really big one is the mandate on using ethanol in our gasoline. So 40% of our corn, it goes to goes to ethanol. And most of the time, not most of the in many states, you don't have the option to have ethanol free gas. They just said in the State of Illinois or the state of Iowa, you must have gasoline blended with ethanol, which means we're all paying for it every time we drive our cars. Do they
Speaker 2 33:24
use the entire corn, like mass essentially, like the corn kernel for ethanol, or do they take out parts of it and, like, devote some to corn syrup, devote some to corn flour, devoted to other whatever?
Speaker 1 33:36
That's a great question. So actually, one of the big things that happens with the ethanol production is that the byproduct from ethanol can be fed to cattle. So there's still starches in there. There's still some amount of protein in there, and so they're using, it's only on the corn right. The cob doesn't matter. The stock doesn't matter. They're not using that that's used in other kinds of corn production. But yes, so a lot of times, what you'll find is near ethanol plants. There are a lot of cattle feeding operations because they just take the DDGs in and they Yeah, the distilled grains and to and then they feed them to cattle.
Speaker 2 34:17
Okay, interesting. Yeah, I've seen, I mean, it seems like there's a lot of products that are exclusively coming from, like corn, soy and wheat, because of, you know, maybe the subsidies, you know, from from the outside, like, I haven't looked into mechanistically, how all the subsidies work, but, but I'll give an example. Like Vitamin E is at a very, very low percentage in soybean oil. Like, there's other foods that have a much higher percent of vitamin E. Yet, basically all of the vitamin E that you can buy on the market is from soybean oil, because they want to extract every little value that they can out of this, just like insanely huge product that we have in the US. So then there used to be Vitamin E from wheat germ. Um, oil, I believe. But now soybean oil has has taken over. Yeah, I don't know if, like, soy has more subsidies than wheat. I guess that would work with the narrative. But, yeah, I
Speaker 1 35:09
mean, I think another thing that happens, and the reason you see soy do so well, is that once so a crushing facility, which is what you need for soy, or really, for any, anything you're going to get oil out of they're not cheap to build. And you you can't build one. You don't build one that's like, oh, it can do soy and olive oil and canola and canola like they are hyper specialized systems. And so once you've invested into those crushing facilities, then that that plant has a huge advantage, because in order to, you know, create the other plants, you have to create more plants, and it's expensive. But then you also have the challenge of transportation. So like, you know, if you wanted to start growing some much less popular plant that had an oil to it, you may be able to find a crushing plant, but now you've got a truck at 500 miles. So the price that you're going to have to get for that oil is going to have to be way higher. So soy has gone so far ahead of the other oils. They have a huge advantage, and they continue to get more sometimes there's subsidies to build those crushing plants. So right now, there's, there was a huge emphasis in the last five years, 10 years, where they've built a bunch more crush plants in the hopes that they can get more things for things like biodiesel or the new aviation fuels that they're trying to make out of these large scale crops. Yeah.
Speaker 2 36:31
And I think it's like, worth talking about, kind of like, the history of how this got into our food in the first place, because I think it's, like, kind of ridiculous that we're subsidizing it at all as like a food. Because back, you know, 1920s and before it wasn't even considered a food, soybean oil, there was a they were using these, like plant oils in paints, mainly way back then. And then eventually, the kind of petroleum industry discovered that they could use petroleum for paints, right? So it displaced this, essentially plant oil paint industry. And they were like, Okay, well, we need to figure out, like, a new place for these oils, because we're producing all of them. We have all these farmers. We can't just, like, let this die. So then what happened is there were people who discovered that you could put it into animal feed and actually feed the animals less calories, and they would gain more weight faster. So they were like, wow, this is, like, a great invention, like we we need to give it to all these animals, and they'll become fat really quickly, and we can spend less money. So then it took off in an animal feed, initially soybean oil and vegetable oils. But then eventually there was this thing. It was called, it was called The Seven Countries Study, and there was this man, Ansel keys, who did this kind of, like long term epidemiological study. So essentially, he was, like, looking at these big populations, and he was interested in cardiovascular disease, and he found that the people who had higher cholesterol in these populations had a higher incidence of cardiovascular disease. So this was like the origin of the idea that cholesterol causes heart disease, essentially. And you know, this has been debated a lot, but this was kind of like the start of this. So then Ancel Keys and others in the soybean oil or and vegetable oil industry kind of like used this data because they knew before from the animal data that vegetable oils lowered cholesterol. So they were like, wow, this is a great food for humans now, because it'll lower cholesterol, it'll lower your chance of heart disease. And this is what they were saying in this like 1960s life Life Science Magazine and but then a decade or a couple decades later, there was a study called the Minnesota coronary experiment. So, like, we're up to kind of, I think, 1980s at this point, but the data for this study didn't come out until after the 2000s so essentially, this is the perfect study. So if you wanted to design a study where you could test something perfectly for diet, what you would do is you would take people who are institutionalized, whether it be like a mental hospital or a prison, because you can completely control their diet. And that was what the study was. So they took this Minnesota coronary experiment, is where they had institutionalized individuals, and they fed them corn oil, and they fed them some saturated fat. I think it was, it was like lard at that point, which was actually more saturated than it is now. But they fed them, I think it was lard, but saturated fat versus a vegetable oil, and they tracked the mortality, the cardiovascular disease mortality, of these individuals, and they also tracked the cholesterol over time. So previously the Ansel keys study, they only saw an association between cholesterol and heart disease, but now they were actually able to test it directly. So then is. You know, again, a couple decades after the original association was found, they found that the CORN OIL DID lower the cholesterol of the essentially institutionalized inmates. Whatever it did lower their cholesterol over time, but they died of more heart attacks. So saturated fat did not cause more heart attacks, it raised everyone's cholesterol, but they actually died less of all causes of cancer, of heart attacks. So this study was hidden away for multiple decades after it was done and only released, like after it was dug up, you know, way longer after this guy's, you know, I think passed away and, you know, career is over, but he built his entire career on this, like, idea that that cholesterol was bad, and then did a study that was a perfect study and found that it wasn't bad, and then never publicized it. So then saturated fat has been demonized for such a long time that, you know, the average person, if you ask, Oh yeah, like, what? What's a what should you avoid? They're gonna be like, Oh yeah, saturated fat, sugar, salt, that's what. That's what they say you should avoid. And I'm completely 180 on all of those issues.
Speaker 1 41:01
So when you say 180 what would you say is the things you should avoid.
Speaker 2 41:06
So the things you should avoid, I think the things you should avoid are the polyunsaturated fats. So mostly vegetable oils. That's that would be soybean oil, corn oil, cotton seed oil, rapeseed oil, sunflower oil. I think that avocado oil and olive oil should be eaten in moderation. I think that they're not perfect, but they're a little bit better. I think the oils that should be eaten based on this data, is coconut oil, butter, beef, beef fat, beef towel, which is what McDonald's used to fry their French fries in before everybody got fat. And
Speaker 1 41:37
this is becoming big. So the thing you're saying here is not that counter cultural. If you're listening to people that are around the carnivore diet or keto diet, they're saying, yeah, the saturated fats that we were told about that come from meat, we are this is all lies. This is we should go back to that. And that's hard enough for a lot of us to, like, wrap our brains around, because this was something so driven into us that it's like, you know, I can even remember sitcoms being like, you're eating a steak for breakfast. What? Haven't you read a newspaper in the last 20 years? And you're like, Okay, well, that's been indoctrinated into us. But the idea that even things like olive oil or avocado oil or something to be eaten in moderation. That is stunning, because there was a lot of stuff that was like, well, olive oil is the best thing ever. You should put it on everything that people living in the Mediterranean eat it all the time, and look how great their health is, right?
Speaker 2 42:35
Yeah. So I think that that data might have been misinterpreted, that the people in the Mediterranean are always like skinnier because they eat olive oil. There's this guy on Twitter, his name, his name, and on YouTube, I guess it would be a better place. But on YouTube, his name is fire in a bottle. His name is Brad Marshall, and he would do a much better job of me than explaining this. But he probably has like 10 hours of just video content going into just like the source data for these claims about olive oil, and just seeing that, hey, wait, it actually is making these people fatter. Like the Mediterraneans, who are eating more olive oil are fatter. So I think that, I think one of the big pushes for olive oil and avocado oil, like I think that comes from the idea that, like, fruits are good if you accept that seed oils are bad, because, like, the fruit part, they're like, Oh yeah, you can eat tons of fruits, fine. But the seeds, you're like, Oh yeah, the seeds, they're meant to be planted into the ground, so they're going to try and kill an animal that eats it, right? But the fruit itself, the body of the fruit, has the incentive of being eaten, because it frees up the seed for the tree, right? But I think that it's like, still, it's like, not a perfect argument. I mean, evolutionarily, like, maybe there were some things that did really well eating olives, or did really well eating avocados. But if you, if you look at like, their similarity to seed oils, they have, like, pretty similar components if you eat enough of it, so and so
Speaker 1 44:03
these poly unsaturated fats. These are things that have to be created. They like tell me about this. This is something I hear a lot about. So
Speaker 2 44:13
polyunsaturated fats are a natural fat, and they're found in seeds. There's different ones that are found in fish. So omega sixes are generally the seed oils. Omega six just details the structure of the fat. Essentially, Omega three is what people call the anti inflammatory fats are found in fish. I think that the main role for these fats in nature is that they're kind of like, less stable and more dynamic, like they like to they're more fluid, essentially. So if you have an animal that, like, needs to live in a very, very cold environment, like a fish, then you have a ton of these polyunsaturated fats, like in their kind of cells, in their cell membranes, and seeds, also, and fruits even, kind of like may follow this trend like the farther. North that you go, the more polyunsaturated fats you find in like these, these animals or like not animals, but I guess, yeah, animals in fish, and also the fruits and and nuts and everything. So, yeah, the the, I think the most dangerous one, I would say, is the Omega six kind of like seed oil. Mainly, I have some other issues with omega threes that we can dive into, even though those have been put on a pedestal. But I think that the the easiest way to understand why I think they're bad, and I have like 100 reasons, is humans and all these like mammals, used to get a very low amount of these seed oils, essentially in their diet, right? The only time when you would really eat a high quantity of nuts or seeds is when all of your fruit and all of your animals have run out, like you're, you know, if you had a steak on the table as, like a primitive man and you had some acorns, like, what are you going to eat? You're gonna eat the steak, right? So then it kind of ends up being this, like, sort of signal to the body that, hey, like Winter's coming, you're running out of food, like, maybe you need to slow down your metabolism and store fat. And you know this happens with squirrels, like they fatten up for the winter when they're eating all these acorns, versus, like, some other foods that they might eat. So because it was such a low part of our diet for, like, the most of our lives, except for when we were gearing up to be fat for winter, they are involved in these different pathways that biology kind of just acquired. So so one of these pathways is inflammation, or by pathways, I just mean like, processes that the body body does. So normally, it would be like, less than 3% of your diet. And then once you eat it, it goes into your cells. It goes into your cell membranes, and then, say, the cell gets damaged, right? And then a virus kills the cell. Well, now all this cells contents are flying around everywhere in your body, including the fats in the cell membrane, and one of these fats that's very reactive and useful to signal to other cells that, hey, something went wrong. Is the seed oils that were previously embedded into the membrane of the cell. So there's this pathway. It's essentially called these are called prostaglandins. So the seed oils, the Omega sixes, would be converted into prostaglandins. And I know I'm going into the weeds here, but then they are converted into inflammatory signals by the body to tell you, hey, there's like damage going on. We need to stop this. And now we've made this from like 3% of our diet to like 30% of our diet. So we have like 10 times the inflammatory signals that we that we've ever had from before. So and also the there are molecules like Tylenol or ibuprofen or aspirin, and everyone knows these as COX inhibitors. If you've looked a little bit deeply into that, they they block this enzyme called Cox cycle, oxygen ace. And what this does is it stops the conversion of the seed oils into the inflammatory signals, essentially. So the Tylenol or aspirin or or ibuprofen, I prefer aspirin. It's basically an anti seed oil. And if you go to a McDonald's or, I mean, maybe McDonald's would do better, depending on the quality control of of the restaurant. As you just heat up these oils, they spontaneously degrade into these inflammatory molecules. So then, if you go and you eat french fries from a restaurant that hasn't changed their oil in like one or two days, then you're basically eating these pre formed inflammatory signals. It's like, it's like the anti aspirin.
Speaker 1 48:40
There's so much here, and it's so counter cultural. How does one even begin to approach, like, thinking about their diet in this way? Because, I mean, you could go from following whatever the USDA says, but nobody does that, right? But like, whatever diet you have formed, then you, like, make this change, go towards carnivore or keto, and now this other guy comes along and says, no, no, no, you shouldn't be doing that. You should be eating, you know, mostly sugar. How should, how should people wrap their minds around this?
Speaker 2 49:13
Yeah, so I think that, like, the concept of N equals one, just the concept of of self experimenting, that you can do an experiment on yourself and and that is good data. I think that is something that's really powerful. I mean, for me, I essentially one summer. What really got me into this is is, like One summer I was doing an internship, and I no longer was cooking food at home. So every day I went to KFC and I ate the same thing as I was eating at home. At home, I was eating chicken, I was eating potatoes, and I was having, like, sodas, even, and, um, but then when I went to KFC, I was having sodas, I was having chicken, and I was having french fries, but the addition was the fryer oil that they were using. And over that summer, I gained like 25 pounds of fat in like a couple months. And I got the most migraines in my life. It was like, you know, I had a brain injury years before that, and that summer was like, you know, the feeling after I had a brain injury again, it was like that many migraines, just like every single day, terrible, like, the only thing that could stop it is, like, amounts of antihistamines that would completely knock me out. So, so then I quit that. I did carnivore, and I cut out seed oils for my diet, and my migraine slowly went away, and I lost weight. So that was like a self experiment. I mean, it was a pretty damaging self experiment, because, you know, it's not great for your body to eat like that, but, you know, but that's like, sometimes the only way to find out the truth, you just have to make sure that you're, you know, not going so far into one thing that you end up killing yourself.
Speaker 1 50:46
Yeah. I mean, that actually is probably my biggest fear about ketosis, is that it has been so good for me, like it's enabled me to work more, it's enabled me to be more present with my children. And I keep wondering, like, Yeah, but is there this thing sneaking up behind you that you don't, you don't see, and you're not aware of, and it's gonna get you, like, that's something that's really scary to me, because to give this up and to go back to what I was doing before I found keto, it's not tenable. I can't do it. I get, like, I think about who I was, and I haven't talked about this on the podcast at all, but like, I go to think about how hard life was before I got rid of carbohydrates, and to think about going back there is an actually scary thing, like a thing enough to make me stare up at the ceiling at night and being like, well, am I trapped then in this high fat diet for the rest of my life.
Speaker 2 51:41
Yeah. So I think, like, my heuristic on this is that I kind of have found a diet that if I do it for about a month, like, I'll start to feel okay again. So I'll make changes, like, I experiment all the time, and, you know, right now, I'm trying to try and make the diet easier, because, you know, it's hard to eat, like, this much honey or this much fruits, I'm trying to find a way to incorporate corn chips with no oil into my diet. So it's just like, I can have something crunchy and it can be basically a junk food that everyone likes, right? But if that fails, you know, I always have these diets that I know that I feel okay on, and really, it's, it's like a pound of beef at night, and then some fruits during the day, and then that's about, that's about where I where I land if I if everything else fails. So I guess, like, I feel like you could feel some confidence in the idea that you, you have found a diet that works for you, and you can always go back on it. And, I mean, the Keto flu is, is a hard thing, right? Because there's like, a long transitionary period, transitionary period to get between, you know, when you're on this other diet and then go back on keto. But I would argue, you know, there,
Speaker 1 52:44
if I was going to try and go to get into ketosis again, I would do it very differently. I would do it using intermittent fasting to get there faster. And I would probably, you know, reserve a weekend to do pretty hardcore working out to try and burn off as much glycogen as possible. But the first two times, I didn't know any of this. So, like, there are things that you could do to lessen that my fear is just the brain fog, like the, like the literal loss in IQ points. And I think that's true. I think, like, my IQ was lower, substantially lower. And like the idea of going back, it feels like I'm the, you know, the Homer Simpson shoving crayons at my nose or something.
Speaker 2 53:24
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think it's a real thing. I think that if your metabolism, metabolism is better, you're able to just think and execute on the world in in a better way. I think, like, what one just like side tangent is, you know, in saunas, if you're in a sauna for like, 30 minutes, by the end of it, like, the last five minutes, you look at the clock, you know, you look at the clock, it says five minutes, and then you wait 22345, minutes, and then you look at the clock again, and now it says four minutes and 50 seconds. So So time, like, slows down by by so much. And I think, I think that when your body temperature rises and you're able to, just like, pack more thoughts into every unit time, and I think that there's something here with metabolism, where, if you have a slow metabolism, and you're, you know, you're putting on weight, your thyroid isn't functioning very well, then your body temperature usually is below, like, 98 you know, during the day, and you're, you're kind of, like, slow but a lot of times when people go on to, like, a better diet model, whether it be keto or high sugar diet, their body temperature skyrockets and goes up to, like, 98.6 99 even. I've even seen people like, hitting like 100 midday, like almost having a fever, but they feel so much better, and their brain seems to, like, work better. It's like they're able to put more thoughts and and, you know, effort into the day. So I think it's, I really think it's like it might be a function of just temperature of the brain. That's
Speaker 1 54:45
a very interesting observation. You know, something I went out on x and said, and I had people come out of the woodwork pissed off at me, was it would make sense to me that your genetics would play a large role in what. Nutrition was right for you. So if you come from a long line of people that live around the equator, this is like high high amount of solar energy. It's like high carbohydrates. You don't need to store a bunch of fat. Whereas the further you go north and you're you know, in a colder area, you need to be able to store fats the longer temperatures, longer winter, like your body would be adapted to having high fatty foods. How does this resonate with you? Like people told me I was a racist for saying this. So,
Speaker 2 55:33
yeah, so, yeah, I definitely don't think you're a racist for saying that. I think if you look at the African American population in the US, just to, like, poke a hole in this, they actually have kind of worse health outcomes. Usually they have, like, higher obesity rates. So I think that even if you are, and, you know, generally, you would assume that they're from somewhere closer to the equator, just because of the, you know, yeah, history. But I think that, you know, genetics do play a role, but you can't outrun like, a really, really bad diet, right? Because no matter what animal we choose, we can make them obese in a lab with basically the same diet. And you would think that, like, some would be adapted to it, or, you know, some would, some would do better. And it's true that there is genetic variation between different trains of mice or a dog or whatever. But like, I think that if we're speaking to, you know, 99% of people, I think, like, a lot of these, just like, heuristics generally hold, I think the second thing is that genetics, I think that Darwinism is wrong. So like, like, Darwinian selection, the whole idea that evolution is gradual, where, essentially, whenever you have a changes between two generations of a species, all you do is, like mutate, like a few DNA bases and a few bits of DNA. Essentially, there's this guy. His name is James A Shapiro, and he's written, like quite a lot of work on this, of how in single generations you can acquire entirely new sets of machinery. Essentially, you can steal genes from viruses or bacteria can, like everyone knows, bacteria can transfer genes between each other, at least if you're in biology, you know this, but, but this seems to work on like mammalian scales that we've identified human proteins that we've just like stolen from viruses. And I would suggest that genetics are a lot more plastic than people think, and there can be these really, really fast, like single or few generation changes, even in genetics, like not just epigenetics, that can lead to vastly different diet outcomes. So I think that, just like the heuristic of, oh, my ancestors were in mountains, so I should eat like a like a mountain person. I mean, I think it, you know, if you're if the people who were in the mountains were 10 generations back, there probably was a lot of change between you and
Speaker 1 57:56
them. I this is a great area to explore, as in terms of just an idea that is counter cultural right? You don't believe that Darwinian evolution is is correct, or you think it just took us down a wrong path, or people misunderstand it?
Speaker 2 58:11
Yeah, I think it's like the Neo Darwinists who are wrong. So like Darwin himself, like he was a pretty he seemed actually pretty humble, if you read any of his writings, like he said that, you know, a lot of his ideas seemed really absurd, and he didn't have the solutions to everything, and gradual selection, like, just seems crazy. And I don't even think he called it selection. I forget what he called it now, but, but, like, the obsession around natural selection wasn't what Darwin was like talking about. But like, the Neo Darwinists who really, like, solidified the idea that, like, oh, it's natural selection. It's gradual evolution. You have single mutations like those. Those are the people who kind of got it wrong. So, yeah, I don't want to dig on Darwin, but yeah, I think that, just like the it's kind of this, like determinist, like mechanistic universe that people like, like to live in, where you think that you know the mechanism of how biology works, or how something works in general, but it's like such a complex system that it's like, really the task of, like, asking, like, what's possible, like, not like, what is there? I guess see more. I think that biology is just like, so good at creating really, really magical things that if you think that, you know, there's this, like, one single, simple thing that happens, like, you really need to ask yourself the question, like, is there something better? And then biology has probably tried it, right? Like, an example is, you know, if you wanted to have organisms that survived, like in a population, you would want them to be able to adapt to a new environment very quickly. And if you did Darwinian evolution, if you all you did was do single DNA base fare changes, like, very, very slowly over time, they would all die out. So then you need something that's like, adaptive and faster. You need evolution that's faster. So then you have to ask the question. It's like, hey, has biology done this? And then the answer is like, I think unequivocally yes. Like, the species that survive more are better at adapting to their environment, even on the genetic level. So, yeah, so I think that there's like a million other mechanisms like this where, you know, people just like, obsess over this one really specific pathway or or reductionist idea, and then miss just like the entirety of the wonder that is biology.
Speaker 1 1:00:24
The way that I always understood that biology handled having enough diversity to be able to overcome things like mass starvation because of a famine or something like that, would be that that's why you have men and women come together, instead of women just being able to clone themselves and put it off, then you would have no diversity, and eventually something would wipe you out, but that the diversity would come from men and women coming together. But you're saying there is an added factor of a high amount of mutations between generations that is kicking off things that are even maybe more important for diversity.
Speaker 2 1:01:03
Yeah, so I may have misspoken a little bit. I think that mutations aren't the mechanism for evolution on like a mammalian or human scale. So I think that, like viruses are kind of like the R and D sector for evolution. Okay, so the idea is that, if you believe in Darwinian evolution, every single step in evolution needs kind of like an intermediate state. So how do you build like a really, really complex like protein or like piece of machinery in your cells, for example, where it would be completely useless on every step in the middle? Well, the answer is, viruses have the intermediate states, but you can just grab them and test them out really quickly and see if, if you want them or not. So an example is there's this one protein called syncytin, which I think, like attaches the placenta to the rest of the body. That is like, definitively from viral origin. Like humans didn't evolve it, mammals didn't evolve it at all. It was just like stolen from a virus. There's also an arc protein, which is a little viral capsid that sends genetic material between neurons. And there's, like, no intermediate state in in things with neurons, but it just came from a virus. So, so the mutations, I think that if you like, have, like men and women, just like coming together, and you introduce diversity, but still gradually, where it's just like the mutations of the woman versus the mutations of the man, you still just don't end up getting these like, well, working like intermediate states that you need for some new trait to emerge, I guess, like, the space of possibilities is so big. Like, every single you know, DNA base pair, you have, like, basically four different options, or, you know, multiple options. And then you can combine those in so many different ways. And you have 1000s and 1000s of these bits for each each little bit of machinery for each protein. And then those all come together, if you wanted to just go through every possible iteration, you would run out of time in the universe. Like you can't do that. So it has to be directed in some way.
Speaker 1 1:03:09
So where you add on genetic engineering of things like crops or even humans and things like that.
Speaker 2 1:03:15
So I think that it's like, great that we can do it. So I think, like, there's this pervasive ideology in the health space that, like, it's kind of like the naturalistic fallacy, that that natural things are always better. And I think, as kind of a heuristic, generally, it's good. Like, if, if you're asking the question, do I eat this random chemical that I've not identified on my desk, or not, you probably shouldn't it like, this is a novel thing. It's never been your biology. Just don't, don't eat it, right? But if you're like, Oh, should I eat this fruit? Well, it's like, yeah, probably because people have eaten it for so long that it's, it's Lindy, you know, yeah.
Speaker 1 1:03:53
But I mean, a lot of the fruit that we're eating now is so radically different, and that radical change has happened in the last couple 100 years, not, not even 1000s of years, right?
Speaker 2 1:04:02
So, so I think that if you wanted to select, like the Lindy fruits, you would do the ones that have been cultivated for the longest. Like dates, for example, were one of the first domesticated fruits, like 3000 plus years ago, and growing alongside humanity for quite a long time. But like, back to the the genetic engineering point, even if this is true, like, even if it is the best thing to do natural things, people naturally die, and I don't want to die. So if you want to do things like extend life, or you want to, like, live like a really, really fit 90 year old, well, you're going to have to do these things that are unnatural. So I think that, like, if I want to, you know, and this is controversial, like, some people say, oh, yeah, you should live this, like, natural life and a natural death, and then just go and die once you're, once you're, you know, old and 80 or 90. But, yeah, I guess, like, philosophically, I think. That if there is an option not to die like at every single point in my life, I'm still going to choose not to die like if you if I was 90 years old and you handed me a gun, I wouldn't shoot myself, right? So, so then I would want to live till 91 and maybe at 91 I want to look to 92 right? So if I can be healthy, I want to live for as long as I possibly can, and eventually, and I don't want to give up my health, so I'm going to have to do unnatural things like genetic engineering of myself or or the things that I eat, or whatever eventually, um,
Speaker 1 1:05:30
yeah, that'll be an interesting risk calculation, right? Because if you're starting to do those kinds of, you know, editing your own germ line, like there's, you may not be able to go back from that. It's not the sugar diet that maybe takes you 30 days to get back on.
Speaker 2 1:05:45
Yeah, definitely. I mean, so I also think that there's, like, an interesting thing here that you, you kind of touched on. And I don't know if you want to go into this, but I think that once we get into the world where you're going to have to do these, these kind of interventions to stay alive for longer the like life insurance companies are going to have a very different risk assessment than like individuals. And I've like, thought about this a lot. So imagine you have, like a a molecule that you can just give to any anybody, and it will immediately triple their lifespan. They'll live like 300 years if they were going to live 100 years, right? But there's like a 50% chance of them dying. So if you wanted to maximize the income that you get as a life insurance company, you would give this to the entire population, because this would maximize the amount of years lived. But then, if you're an individual, and say you're like, 20 years old, and you have a pill on the table, and it can make you live 300 years, but it also could just kill you 5050, you're not going to take it because you're just going to die, right? So, yeah, so like, life insurance, just like, isn't, isn't really aligned with, like, individuals best interests. And I don't know what to do with this thought, but that's like, a thought I've thought a lot about. Do you
Speaker 1 1:07:00
believe that radical longevity will occur?
Speaker 2 1:07:05
I think it could. I think it could. I think that it probably isn't going to come from where people think it's going to come from. I think there's like a lot of capital being deployed into things like cell reprogramming. I think it's there's like, a lot of capital being deployed into AI, but I think that we just, like, lack a coherent model of what biology is, and I don't see the counter narrative ability in AI, for example, to solve these problems like aI just spits out what it was trained on, which is the scientific consensus, which has got us nowhere.
Speaker 1 1:07:41
And where are you at on AI? Are we like, just moments away from hitting AGI, where they take over? I,
Speaker 2 1:07:48
well, I think that one of the most compelling arguments against AI becoming this, like life threatening, huge AGI thing is just like the scaling laws, there's like this defined amount of energy that you need for these increases in intelligence. And once you get to, I think, like GPT 11. I mean, we're on GPT four, almost GPT five, right now, once you get to GPT 11, in, like scaling, essentially in the amount of energy that you would need to train GPT 11, like at the physical limit. The physical limit, even with renewable energy and, like perfect energy production, you know, even, like a Dyson Sphere, you end up just like overheating the earth and you boil all of the oceans. So, so there's, like, there's these, like, physical caps that we're that we're going to run into, of, like, how much energy we can devote towards this task. And the question is, will we reach, like, some super intelligence that is dangerous before we get to these physical limits, which, like, I think, like it actually seems more of a coin flip than people would think.
Unknown Speaker 1:08:55
Are you using AI right now?
Speaker 2 1:08:56
Yeah, I use it in what way I mean, I like perplexity. I like just being able to not have to, like, browse through the internet to get to a source that I want. I think that tell me about perplexity. Yeah. Perplexity is just a, essentially, you hook up one of the flagship large language models like Claude or chat GPT, to a search engine, and then it can just read all of the results immediately and do multiple search steps. So if I want to find a specific paper or something, or papers on a specific topic, just like ask it to find me these papers, and I can click on the links that it tried to cite when it gave me the answer. So I mean, I think that there's like, a big over reliance on AI, and it's like, it's like, the the Apple Maps thing. Like, once the iPhone came out and people had Apple Maps, people, like, lost their ability to navigate, yeah, their sense of direction. Yeah, exactly. So. So then with AI, like, this is clearly happening with quite a lot of people where, you know, they're relying on the AI to think. And I see this like on Twitter, where you. Know, people will like, reply to me with a screenshot of chat GPT fact checking my claim. It's like, you couldn't, like, think or, like, find the paper yourself, or try and like, figure this out yourself, like you're just being like, Oh yeah, the hive mind says this, and I am promoting the hive mind,
Speaker 1 1:10:15
yeah. And I think, like, another big challenge that AI brings is that you discovered things through like, serendipitously looking through papers, right? And if what you have is like, digest all this information and feed it into my mouth, then the serendipity is going to be much, much more difficult to find or to have. And I think, like, just even the thing we're talking about right now. Had you already been on an AI diet, you might not have found it,
Speaker 2 1:10:45
right? Yeah. And AI also views safety like one of its prime directives is to be safe, which is like, I guess, a good thing. But also it views safety as, like, not spreading medical misinformation. And medical misinformation often is the truth. So you know, one of my hallmarks to see if a new AI is good or not, is I give it basically all of this evidence of a counter narrative model of how life works with, like, really, really solid, rigorous evidence. And then I ask it. I'm like, what is the probability of this being correct over the mainstream model? And it basically always sides with the mainstream model. And like all of the AIS that I've tested, I think the only one that wasn't able to that didn't do it was recently, was notebook LM, which is a Google product where it can look at like 1 million tokens at once, basically like entire books at once. So then I filled up its entire context window with like, books on the counter narrative model, and then it finally admitted that, oh, this counter narrative model might actually be correct.
Speaker 1 1:11:47
Yeah, I think that the whoever takes the guardrails off of AI will get the sharpest tool and and then that's going to create a different sort of Darwinian evolution for for the future of AI? Well, so
Speaker 2 1:12:03
I think there's two points there. I think like that one, I think that you're correct that the people who can use AI effectively and also not sacrifice on their, you know, with the map analogy, navigational abilities, who can still think and then use AI as a tool, I think that the the gap between those people and then the people who defer to the hive mind is going to just widen over time, like, it's going to make a lot more intellectual inequality. It's like, not going to make, you know, things easier for like, the lower class, is what I think. But also, there are relatively uncensored AIS because of meta, and they've like, released these, like, llama models that are like open source, and people can take the guardrails off of those. And I think that there was one recent like llama model, they somebody released, I think Nvidia released it that was you could run it on, you know, what would be a very expensive like local computer, but on a local computer, like, not on the cloud and and it was on par with, like the other flagship models, like GPT four, Claude 3.5 and, and, you know, people are gonna very quickly take the guardrails off of that and use it so but I really don't think it's been like that helpful without guardrails so far. Like, more helpful than just, like a normal AI, because it still has, like, the fundamental limitations of, like, how good of a question can you ask and can it defer? Can it go against the narrative? Like, even if you have no guardrails, it still can give you this very unsafe, controversial, but pro narrative subject, just because it's how it's trained on, you know, the the consensus, essentially,
Speaker 1 1:13:35
So, speaking of narratives, and kind of, going back to our original nutrition conversation, I think one of the growing narratives right now in the United States is that glyphosate, which is very commonly used as an herbicide, is the cause of many, many, many problems in our culture. And if you go talk with the Ag companies or the people at universities or farmers, they will all say, this is not true. This is That's incorrect. This is the softest, most gentle herbicide that we've used, you know, ever and compared to, compared to other things, it's really good that we're using glyphosate. Where do you come out on this idea? Yeah,
Speaker 2 1:14:16
I think there's a few things here. So one is, I have looked at the animal data on glyphosate, and it's, it's like, tough, because they use just like, orders of magnitude higher doses than you would see a human eating, and they do see negative effects, but it's like, really, really high doses. So, I mean, there may be some data on, like, lower doses, but, but I'm not sure. I don't know if it's, like, been super well studied, but I think that, like, regardless of how well studied these, these things are, um, you know, it's, it's not Lindy, right? Like it's, it's something that's completely new in our diets that we've never experienced before. It's kind of hyper novel, like we haven't seen it evolutionarily. And if there are alternatives. Uh, to this, then like to just adding new things to our diet arbitrarily, without having some stated goal or for our health, like some stated benefit for from our health, then I think we just, like, shouldn't do it and, and obviously there's the argument that, oh well, we need to have, you know, have this because otherwise we couldn't feed everybody, right? Like there's, there's no other way to feed people without having these things that supplement the growth of our, you know, favorite, corn, soy and wheat crops. But I think I would push back on that. I think that at the peak, before Americans colonized the us of the bison population in the US? Or was it buffalo or bison? Bison population? It was like 80 million or something bison. And then if you milk one cow for a year pretty efficiently without, like, adding hormones or anything like that, you can probably get around 4 million calories from this. And one person only needs, like, 1 million calories in a year, if you just have, like, a 2000 something calorie a day diet. So then, if we just like, have, I mean, and we do have, like, this many cows basically in the US. But if we just like, I think, like, clearly, we have enough land for this much cattle, because we already had those, just naturally with, with all of the all over the bison in the US and and, like, you know, if farmers were just like, able to give everybody in their community, like local milk, without all of these, like USDA, like firewalls in place and making it, like, super hard, we could have, like, so many more people, just like, fed on things like really high quality foods, like grass, fed grass finished milk. And you know, if you deprived the the calf after, like, the cow, cow, you know, gives birth to the calf, you could feed like four people in a year, just like, solely on milk. So, you know, I think that when people say it's like the only way to do it, it seems like it's the only way to like it's the only way to do it. If we keep our agricultural system the same, if we keep it with like these, these, you know, big staple crops, but if we radicalize, you know, our entire agricultural system, if we have people growing their own chickens, if we have farmers giving milk to their local communities, if we get rid of all of the USDA, you know, issues that they have with anybody selling raw milk. It's, you know, I think it would be a much easier problem to solve.
Speaker 1 1:17:26
Yeah, I hear you on all of the things you're describing. I think the the word that you're using should not be underestimated in terms of its gravity, which is radical, right, like if you decide that you want to make these changes, you must build the change before you start taking away the things that have held up this system. And like, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm starting right now to buy eggs using Bitcoin. This is like my dream come true. I want to have my own, you know, I buy beef from farmers that are I know, and so these are all things that I like and want. But now, having seen the inside of macro agriculture, I understand like this is a very delicate system held up by bailing twine and and duct tape, because of regulation, because of the need to get the speed going, all these things. But if you decide, like, we're just going to cancel glyphosate because we think this is causing a problem, you will cause mass starvation this there's like, we cannot recover those calories using labor. And so when I hear the narrative building in this way. It really intimidates me, because I'm like, Look, you can build a mob up, and you can convince them that the reason that their children are obese, or the reason that autism has occurred, or the reason infertility is going on is because of this glyphosate or because of the GMOs. But if you take those away, you're going to see immediate reactions that that and and it should not be underestimated that humans have done mistakes to force themselves to starve millions of people in the past, right? So I'm and
Unknown Speaker 1:19:14
it's usually governments that do it right, yeah, or every time
Speaker 1 1:19:16
it's yeah at the request of a mob of people that were like, you know, we know the right answer, and the right answer is radically change the agriculture system. Yeah,
Speaker 2 1:19:25
I mean, I mean, government was the way that we got here, and I don't think government is the way out, right. So, I mean, I think that, like, fundamentally, you really just, like, have to make the country rich to do this, because the food system right now is like built to feed the bottom line, really, but any consumer, I mean, this could happen within, like a decade. If everybody decided just to buy the nicest, organic, grass fed, whatever brand, and the market would shift very quickly, because markets are pretty efficient. But. The problem is that nobody can afford that, right. So, so how are you going to, like, demand that this, you know, the society changes to, like, a more expensive food system without everybody having the money to do it, right? It's like, pretty impossible. So, I mean, I do think that the like, the research, like, dedicated towards, like making better pesticides and their herbicides, or things like this, like, it's probably decent, if you can make something that's like, less toxic. No,
Speaker 1 1:20:27
it's like, totally choked. And the government has done this at the request of the very companies that made the current herbicides, right. They the, you know, when? When, when the activists went out to push against glyphosate. Monsanto would be like, You know what? Let's just add a couple more years of testing onto this and we'll prove that this is safe. And then anybody else that was coming up the pipe with a new pesticide, they're like, well, we don't have 30 million more dollars to be able to put in through the testing. And then on top of that, you look at a company like Bear, who bought Monsanto and then was handed these billion dollar judgments against them that glyphosate was causing cancer. Well, if you can make glyphosate the like result in billion dollar lawsuits against you, there is no nobody's going to want to bring a new chemistry that's even slightly dangerous, that's even slightly less. Lindy, what
Speaker 2 1:21:21
are the, what are the pests that glyphosate kills? Do you
Speaker 1 1:21:25
know? Oh, it's, it's an herbicide. So what it does is, it is, it kills the other plants. And, you know, I don't actually know the pathways. I could easily find many people that could, but the way that glyphosate works differently than other plants is it essentially just tells the plant, hey, it's autumn. Quit growing. You know, whatever energy you were putting towards seed production, just stop and die, whereas there are others that are burning plants to death or they're residual in the in the ground. So when I think people are blaming glyphosate, and they're like, ready to rip that out, because they're like, that's not Lindy, yeah. Well, lasso and warrant and dicamba and all these other ones, of which most people have no idea what the names of these herbicides are all about, like, Well, those are going to stay in your in your soil, and it's going to cause all, you know, other challenges or the other option, which is use labor. But you know, the amount that we've inflated our money makes it so the labor option is not tenable.
Speaker 2 1:22:25
Yeah, and yeah, I guess. I mean, people did grow plants before all these herbicides and pesticides existed and were able to feed a decent amount of people, but people wanted to shift towards a society where everyone lives in a city. I mean, that's that's probably closer to the root of the root of the problem than, you know, even government subsidies, right? Just like the the obsession around city living. So,
Speaker 1 1:22:47
yeah, nearly everyone that comes in to do a legacy interview when they're taught, when, if they're, like, over the age of 70, they all canned and, like, they canned with their mothers. They had their own gardens. This was a huge percentage of their time, really, their resources was put towards, you know, weeding those crops, cultivating them, canning them, putting them away, and then getting them out. And we don't do that at all now. We've outsourced that, and even the knowledge to bring that back would be so difficult, because, like, that was all artisan knowledge.
Speaker 2 1:23:21
Yeah, I'm a big believer in like, market forces, though. So I think if like, enough consumers demand it, like people end up filling those, those like spaces in the market. And I think that, like, we're seeing this in tech, like a lot, I think people have noticed that screens are pretty bad for you, and, like, pretty, pretty toxic. Like, if you're just like, staring into an iPhone screen all day, your attention is just like stolen. The rest of the world melts around you. Now you fried your dopamine.
Speaker 1 1:23:49
You know, you pop getting refreshed. Did I get a new email? But?
Speaker 2 1:23:52
But now people are making things like the daylight computer, where it's a it's essentially a computer that you can just like use, or a tablet, rather that you can just like, use outside, and you can see the screen in the daylight, which you can't with a normal led phone screen, because it's like, reflective, and it's also monochrome, so it has no colors, and it's like, fairly locked out, and so you're not scrolling all the time on it, but it's still, like, useful for all your daily activities. When people switch to screens like this and they just like, feel much better, but they have to pay a premium, obviously, compared to just like the most bottom of the line tablet. So I mean, I think that if like, people have enough money, they end up doing things like this, right? There's like, very good correlations between, like, wealth and lifespan outcomes. Like, if you're poor, you're probably going to die much faster, and your health is going to be much worse, right? So, yeah, I don't know. I
Speaker 1 1:24:38
know, and, like, I just to clarify the vision that you're talking about with, like more pasture raised chickens that I raise in my backyard, or or more beef being made by local producers. What keeps us from doing that is regulation. Right? It is everything from your city government saying whether or not you can have chickens in your backyard. Guard to the major packing plant saying, like no, in order to be able to sell your beef across state lines, even though it's, you know, a mile and a half down the road, we have to have a USDA wizard come in here and, you know, pass the blessing on it to make sure that it's safe. If you got rid of those rules, if you made Thomas Massie the, you know, the king of the USDA. I think you would watch this happen, and you could bring it to a price point that would be more reasonable.
Speaker 2 1:25:27
Yeah. I mean, I used to live in upstate New York, and I was getting gallons of, like, raw, organic, a, two, a two, pasture raised milk for $8 a gallon. And I was getting it, which is, like, a reasonable price, for 3000 calories. It's like, much less than whatever other food you're buying, if you're buying, like a processed food even a lot of the time. And then I was also getting beef for $5 a pound, like, of the same quality, but, you know, it's like, it's like an hour trek out, out to there, so it's, it's difficult. And then also, like, if everybody was buying from them, they wouldn't meet quantity because, like, they have, you know, they have deals with Organic Valley, for example, like the milk producers that they need to produce 1000 pounds of milk every, you know, every couple days. And then the milk truck comes, and if they sell too much to their local community, then they break their deal with, like, the giant milk reseller. So then, you know, there were definitely barriers. And some of the one of the first farms that I wanted to start to buy raw milk from, they were producing raw milk, but they couldn't sell it because of like regulations and and one day, the farmer, he posted on Facebook that the that Walmart and like their beef producers were putting red dyes without telling anybody in the beef to make it look shelf stable for longer, right, to make it look fresh for longer. And the day after that, like, immediately, you know, he posted this at like, seven o'clock at night, the day after USDA, auditors came and, like, did, like, a really, just rough audit over, like, his entire operation costed him a lot of money. So it's, you know, it definitely seems that there's like forces that are, you know, there's like an antibody response of the of the big industry here that that happened, and there's like forces that are trying to keep it the way it is, because a lot of us isn't a lot of us at interest, yeah,
Speaker 1 1:27:17
my sense from having met a lot of people in big food and big ag is that the people trying to change the system benefit from painting those people as nefarious. And I think a lot of them are no different than your State Farm Insurance Guy. They're just like, a guy that shows up at work and, like, he's just trying to make his bottom line work, and he's like, you know, just doing what comes naturally. He sees papers and he reads and he says, Oh, this one says it's okay. And I think that, you know, I understand the desire to have adversarial because it motivates people, but I think that I've met a lot of these people, and I think that they're just
Speaker 2 1:28:04
right. And I think that, you know, it's probably not just like individuals who are scheming and saying, oh, I want, you know, to make the world an unhealthy place, but like, emergently, a lot of a lot of just like, really negative and terrible things can happen without any individual person, just like, just plotting to do terrible things. I'm
Speaker 1 1:28:23
in total agreement that you have this, like, consensus that emerges. You have this like, well, we needed to do this thing, and so we created all these other reasons in order to be able to achieve that goal. I get that, and I know I'm gonna hear a whole bunch from my audience about how conspiracies are real, and there are bad people out there doing things. I just think that when I hear Cali, those two people talking that you mentioned earlier in the podcast, I think, like, I think if you met these people all the way up to the CEOs, you would, you would be like, they're really not as impressive as this, and I don't think that they're able to pull together these giant nefarious things, but it's probably more of a result of being emergent, yeah,
Speaker 2 1:29:08
and I think there's like, a spectrum of this between industries like, I think there are definitely industries where just like, emergently, you end up doing really terrible things that are just like, bad for the world, but with everybody Being good intentioned, like, in the middle, like, I think if there's like a giant, like soybean oil refinery in China, like everybody working at that company, you know, company or, or, I guess, government owned company, but company, and the people who are running it and everything, I bet everybody is like, well intentioned. They just, there's like, I want to feed people, right? But then what you get, especially in China, is, you know, they have this mutation, the Asian Glo gene, where, you know, if they drink alcohol, they get red faced, right? This is a deficiency in an enzyme that detoxes what are called aldehydes. This is what forms whenever you fry polyunsaturated fats, and it's toxic to you. So they have, like, much, much worse health outcomes whenever they. Eat the same food as us because of this, like mutation and like, especially over there, like, they're just trying to feed their population. They're making sesame oil, they're making soybean oil. Then everyone eats it. They get, like, lean diabetes. They their teeth fall out. They have all these, like, terrible health outcomes, and it's just like destroying them. But nobody is, nobody's like, nefarious there. They're just trying to feed people. But then there's also organizations like the CIA or FBI, where people go into it because they want power, and they want to play this political game, right? And I think there's like a spectrum there where it's like, Where does the USDA, or where do these organizations fall on this? Like, the more political you get, the more people who are in there are probably trying to play a political game because of the nature of the organization they're trying to seize power. This
Speaker 1 1:30:42
is brilliant. I really think that that's an insightful way to look at it. And I my first thought is, I think even people that joined the CIA and FBI did not join it because they were power hungry. I think they joined it because they were told or propagandized, or they watched a lot of movies, and they thought, Oh, this is like, where I can go to do good. And then what is good changes based on where you sit in an organization and who you're hearing like, who is the other side and who's our side. And I mean, I because, I mean, I watched it happen. I was at the World Bank. And I mean, I did everything I could to get in there, because it was the good organization. And then you get there, and if you're looking around and you and you don't let the blinders go on, you see how people will change from the reason we need to invest in this country is because this will help them out the most to, well, we maybe need to do something to move that bad leader out of power, because he's preventing us from being able to do all the good things that we need to do, and at a scale of like the CIA or the FBI. I mean, the power must inherently corrupt people, inherently I think probably the USDA is the exact same way. Yeah.
Speaker 2 1:32:00
Yeah. Well, I also think that there is, you know, there's, like, some evolutionary advantage to having sociopaths in your society, where, you know, if you're going to war against another tribe, like, you need the people who can go over there, kill a bunch of guys and then not be
Unknown Speaker 1:32:13
come back and just be fine, yeah, exactly. So,
Speaker 2 1:32:16
like, like, we still have those in society, like, definitively. And like, where do you put those people? And like, where do they end up, right? So, you know, I think it's like, I think it's probably inaccurate to say that every single person, or even, you know, like, 99% of people who are going into these, really, these organizations where you can accumulate a lot of power are, like, good people, necessarily. You
Speaker 1 1:32:38
know, I am speaking from my own like experience, and I now, now at 42 I have encountered people where you're like, Whoa. The thing that makes you up, the thing that drives you is so different for me that it's like, you don't even fit into my model. So I I understand that, um, man, I have a ton more questions for you. I thought this was a fantastic conversation. I actually have to wrap up. But if people wanted to encounter more of your ideas, and they wanted to, you know, challenge you, where would they go?
Speaker 2 1:33:13
So, yeah, you can go to x.com, or twitter.com. I think the link still works. Slash anabology is the name A, N, A, B, O, L, O, G, y, and I also have some websites. One is called longestlevers.com where I just post protocols for free. I also have a couple other sites, but you can find those on my twitter so and
Speaker 1 1:33:39
as we wrap up just one quick thought, What is something that you think people should let me rephrase that. I want to ask a parting question. It's my favorite question to ask. I ask it on the Ag tribes report. So as a parting question, who is one person out there on x that you respect but you totally disagree with?
Unknown Speaker 1:34:08
Let me think I
Speaker 2 1:34:19
have to think for a while on this. I think it's hard to remember people. I kind of feel like the answer is that I, like, have stopped scrolling a lot because I've like, leaned into this, just like human friendly technology, like reflective LCDs and these things that have, like, really pulled me off of off of the internet. I would say, I guess maybe like, Casey means, or Callie means, like these people who are kind of, like anti sugar, so like, I respect them just like an insane amount, because this is what I want to I want government to, like, move in this direction where we're focused more on, like, the health of humans. Yeah, you know, obviously I don't want this us to have mass starvation. But, like, I think that health has, like, not been a priority of anybody, like, ever in government, it seems, until now. And I think that's a great thing, but I just like, super disagree about the direction against sugar.
Speaker 1 1:35:17
Well, anabology, thanks for coming on. Thanks, man, that was sick. Dude, that was awesome.
Interviewer 1:35:34
Okay, if you stuck around this long, then you deserve to know what kind of changes we're going to make to this. First of all, I want to say thank you to the many, many people that wrote me DMS and emails and texts. It was overwhelming this week to come to the full realization that the numbers on the downloads are actually people that are listening while they're washing dishes or driving their vehicle or doing chores or whatever it is that you're doing when you listen. It really means a lot to me. How many of you wrote to describe how often you Listen, why you listen, what makes it great? Because of so many of you, it makes me go like, yes, I want to do this. I love it. I've always loved the podcast. In fact, one of the greatest things about doing this was that it allowed me to overcome a problem I've had for my whole life, which is I would have conversations with somebody on a bus in a bar at a restaurant at a baseball game, and I would leave that and I would want to go tell every single person I saw for the next week. Oh my gosh, you're not going to believe how interesting this person was. Let me tell you all about him. And then they said this, and then they said this. Well, the reason that I don't have that undying urge anymore is because I get to share it with you. I get to have these conversations, and you get to sit in with them, and I'm so grateful that you listen. And I, for one, know that your attention is the most valuable thing that you own. So I'm always grateful for every single person that listens. And so because I got some great feedback, some of it stung a little bit, but because I got this great feedback, it brought me into a place of creativity, where I could start thinking, What about what I'm doing is really important and needs to be here, and what can I get rid of? What can allow me to focus on the most important thing, which is having really great conversations that I'm interested in, and what else is fluff that I don't need. So some of the things you're going to notice are going to be, I'm going to start podcasts differently. I don't know that I'm going to put in all the work on music intros and all of this stuff. I don't know that I'm going to do that. I don't also think I want to have a more natural start to things. Another thing I'm going to do is I'm probably not going to release a podcast every week. There are some weeks when I find a guest, because I need to get the podcast done. And it's not to say that they are not brilliant and amazing people. Literally, every single person has a story. I believe that in the deepest fibers of my being, but if I am not interested in the the guest or what they're talking about, it's just like trying to read a book that you don't care about. You can read the words, but how much are you really taking in? So because I'm going to free myself from that, it means that anytime you see a podcast come out that is titled VCP, the Vance Crowe podcast, you can know that it is going to be an interesting conversation with somebody as fantastic as anabology, but with somebody that I've been able to actually take the time and attention to really dig into it. Also, I am getting rid of the video component. By far and away, more people listen to this podcast than watch it. And I've been spending a lot of resources on recording it with video, but then also editing it and trying to create shorts and trying to build up an audience there. And you know what? I don't care about YouTube. And if you're not going to do video, then what you need to do is you need to rely on people to write reviews and to share it with their friends. So I am going to commit to doing way more interesting podcasts, probably a lot less of them. I am still going to do the Ag tribes report every Thursday night, but what I need from you in order to make this work is for you to write me reviews and to share episodes with your family and your friends and tell them, this is a great podcast. I thought of you. I think you're gonna enjoy this, and you would not believe how big of a difference that will make for me. So the way that we grow this is we continue to have legacy interviews blossom. The way that legacy interviews blossoms is more people listen to the podcast, because almost all of our legacy interviews come from people just like you that listen to the podcast. If you're interested in having me record a legacy interview with your loved ones. Go to legacy interviews.com. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for all the feedback. I want to throw a special shout out to Tim, Steve, Ashley, Dan Nicholas, Bucha. Brent, all of you gave me really pointed feedback, and there is nothing more valuable in this world than somebody that cares about you that tells you what you need to do to get better. So thank you so much for that, and we will be back when we're back with another great interview. You
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
And how long have you been on your your honey diet yourself,
Anabology 0:04
I think that I did the first run of it. I mean, I've been on and off different times for different reasons, but I think I started in maybe December of last year, so like the first or no, not December, actually, like November of last year. So probably it's been, like, almost a year since I kind of, like, tried this out for the first time, and then
Unknown Speaker 0:24
how did you even, like, stumble into it? Yeah.
Speaker 2 0:27
So, yeah. So originally, I kind of just was the kind of person who found reading papers like scientific literature fun, and other people didn't really find it fun, I think. So I kind of just did this as much as I could, because I thought, you know, like I was enjoying doing it, and over time, I kind of found benefits from it, whether it be I was able to consult for people and get a little bit of money, or I was able to do better at my job. So I kind of just reinforced my enjoyment and of reading papers. And I just, like, read so many papers that I found really, really crazy ones, an example of a really, really crazy paper that led me to doing this, like, super high sugar diet. Is there? There was a study where mice were given Coca Cola or water to drink for like, a long period of time, like they either no water and only Coca Cola, or, you know, water only. And then the conclusion of the paper from these authors was that, oh, Coca Cola is bad for you because it increases your cholesterol. But in reality, there was this data hidden in the paper that told, like a much, I think, better story, or like a completely different story. In fact, they didn't really comment on it much, but they showed that the mice who drank Coca Cola had four times the calories as the mice who just only drank water, yet they ended up weighing the same at the end of the study. So their metabolism went up by like four times somehow, when they were just drinking sugar instead of instead of just having water. And this actually had been replicated, so I dug a bit deeper into this. And back in the I think 1980s originally, another group, way before the study, because this was like early 2000s found basically the same thing, where they gave Coca Cola, or some sort of soda to animals, and then they tried to see, like, where these effects were coming from. They found that the metabolic rate increased, but they didn't know why. So then they gave sugar water and they gave caffeine water, and both independently increased the metabolic rate of these animals. So it couldn't be fully attributed to the caffeine. It was like, you know, the Coca Cola, the caffeine plus the sugar together, both increase the metabolic rate. So that kind of, like, sent me down this rabbit hole where I was like, okay, like, why is sugar, you know, even independent of caffeine, increasing metabolism and allowing these mice to just eat so much more without becoming fat. And yeah, and I found some plausible mechanisms. And one was, there was this, like lifespan study, where mice were fed basically a protein restricted diet, like very low in protein, and it extended their life by something like 30% which is, you know, against all of the conventional wisdom of bodybuilders today, saying, Oh yeah, you need to eat all this protein to maintain your muscle. And muscle is good for aging, but with these like protein restricted diets, mice lived longer, and they also ate more and weighed less, and they found that this worked through a specific hormone called FGF 21 but they this hormone also is strongly expressed, or was strongly elevated in animals that ate a lot of sugar. So basically, there's these, like two studies. It's, you know, protein restriction and over feeding sugar, both of them increase the metabolic rate a lot. The animals can eat a lot more food and not get as fat. And they both work through the same hormone, is the idea and and then there was another study where they showed that this hormone also existed in humans and was induced by the same factors. So I was like, sweet. I mean, nobody's ever tried this in humans. Nobody's ever gone to their institutional review board at a university and been like, hey, I want to take fat people and I want to give them as much sugar as I can and restrict their protein like that would never fly. They'd be like, this is unethical. So I decided just to try it, because no one else is going to and I just overfed myself, you know, 1000s of calories of sugar. Ate more calories every day, and I kind of restricted my protein a little bit less than it was before I put all my protein into one meal. I just ate a bit of beef, and then I actually increased my calorie intake by, like, 1000 calories. And over a month, I lost 10 pounds so
Speaker 1 4:43
and like, what's going on to you psychologically? Like, are you you're feeling okay, you're feeling like, bad. How does this go?
Speaker 2 4:51
Yeah, it was actually really surprising. I felt almost like I was on keto before you know, where you kind of have this, like, consistent mental energy throughout the day. So I think the only difference between how I felt on keto and how I felt on this high sugar, kind of like low protein diet was that I was much more hungry on the high sugar diet, but it was totally fine because I could just eat more food. So,
Speaker 1 5:11
yeah, okay, so have you done things like keto before? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 5:15
I've tried all of these things. I've tried carnivore, I've tried keto diets, and I think carnivore and keto are different, like where carnivore you just have a ton of protein, and the protein can be converted into into sugar, so you're not always in ketosis. And actually felt worse on a carnivore diet than a keto diet. But yeah, so I've tried, I've tried, like a kind of a heavy cream based keto diet. I've tried high sugar diets, I've tried Mediterranean type diets. And, you know, a lot of the popular ones, I just felt really bad on but the the one that really like got me feeling good. Finally, I actually had the least migraines of my life on this high sugar diet. So, so
Speaker 1 5:54
where I'm coming from at this is that I have, I've been doing the keto diet for about six months, and getting into ketosis was hell. It was, like, very, very painful, but once I got into it, I would describe it as life changing, right? Like, not only did I lose weight and I wasn't asleep all the time, or, like, need naps, but like, I had a mental clarity I was describing to my wife the other day. Like, I like listening to new music again, which I haven't liked doing in years. And I would attribute that to my diet, like there's some kind of mental clarity going on. So to hear somebody describe like, no, no, I went the other direction, not 70% fat. And, you know, like, just 5% carbs, I went way, 80% carbs. Like, what do you think you're
Speaker 2 6:40
something like that. Yeah. I mean, pretty low fat, probably even less than 10% fat. You know, it was kind of like 100 grams of protein, which is 400 calories, and maybe 3500 calories total. So, you know, we can fill all the rest there with with carbs, whatever that calculates to.
Speaker 1 6:58
And does it matter what kind of sugar you're eating? I think,
Speaker 2 7:01
I think it matters to a degree. I think it matters less than people would expect, right? Because, you know, there's all these kind of, like Whole Foods advocates who say that if you drink a soda, you know, that's much different from eating a fruit, right? But the reason why I picked honey was kind of to just choose a sugar that had the least processing steps, because I think in every processing step you could have some impurity that the, you know, regulatory bodies allow in. And you know, say is, say is essentially safe, and that can confound the effects. I mean, one example is just like, as a personal, kind of, like anecdotal thing, I can drink Coca Cola, just like as much as I want, and feel fine, but if I drink one Dr Pepper now I immediately get a migraine. It's like, really strange. So, so I mean, if you look at the natural flavors that are put in these things, they often are kind of like, sometimes a seed oil carrier. So sometimes it's like some sort of soybean oil carrier, plus, like these organic molecules that they don't have to tell you what they are. And then there's also the caramel color and the phosphoric acid and all these other things that are inside of sodas. So you might call, you know, a soda, basically sugar water. But there's all these other factors in it, you know, that change even between sodas that that can make it not behave like normal, normal sugar. But I think if it's something like cane sugar or coconut sugar or maple syrup or honey. I mean, all of these things I know people have tried and had success with so and so
Speaker 1 8:29
the key to this diet is the fact that you're pulling out protein so that that way your body processes sugar differently.
Speaker 2 8:37
I think that's a crucial aspect of it. So the hormone that is thought to mediate this, essentially, you can give it to animals and their metabolic rate increases like and it's called FGF 21 again, if you eat protein and then you overfeed sugar, you have none of this hormone increase that you otherwise get when you overfeed sugar. So protein kind of blocks these effects, it seems. But I think one key insight that led to me doing this diet, and it hasn't been rigorously tested, I would like to say, because I don't know, I don't know anybody who has spread protein across the entire day in this like slightly lower quantity versus loading it all into one meal. But one of the key insights was that blood sugar, when I wore, like, a continuous glucose monitor, burns off in like, three to four hours. So I was thinking that, you know, if I get the protein out of my system overnight, and then I have the daytime to just eat sugar as much as I want and burn it all off, well, by the time that I eat protein again at dinner, I'm kind of, like, it's almost as if I'm, you know, doing some intermittent fasting, like, I've cut off an entire like window where I'm in this state where I can increase my metabolic rate, but then when I eat protein now, I have to restrict calories. Does this make sense? I
Speaker 1 9:50
get it. I mean, like, it's mind boggling to me, because I learn about these things as, like, a cohesive whole, right? You have to have proteins, carbs and fats and the. Idea that you could separate one out and and burn it all off. Like, is, it's like, I can picture it, but it's hard to get my mind around this.
Speaker 2 10:09
Yeah, and I would say that the advice to eat a balanced meal doesn't really work in today's world. Unfortunately, the most robust way to induce obesity in animals is to give them a high fat, high carb, high protein diet. So it's basically 40% fat, 30% carbs, 30% protein. If you want to induce obesity in animals, no matter what diet you feed them, even if you feed them a clean diet, you know of of tallow, beef tallow and or coconut oil or olive oil, and you know, whatever carb you want, like rice or sugar, you can make an animal fat, for sure, the health outcomes change depending on what kind of oil they're fed. But a balanced meal in today's world, at least, or in these kind of like animal settings, generally, doesn't work, seemingly. But then there's the question of like, why did people used to be able to eat balanced meals all the time and not gain weight and not become obese. And actually saw this paper today that was like posted on Twitter, where, after you lose a couple pounds of body fat, there are these persistent organic pollutants. So essentially, these like pollutant molecules that were stored in your fat that circulate in your blood for up to a year after you lose the fat. So one of the ideas is that there are these kind of molecules that might be toxic that your body kind of wants to sequester into fat, or for some reason, causes you to gain fat. And once you try to lose fat, the they come out of your fat and become active again. So then your body tries to put on that fat really quickly again. So So I think that, like a lot of the effects that we're seeing these days might be mediated by the environment that we're in, where previously we didn't have all these like pollutants around that that could cause these changes. And one of the scary things is that in some animals, they've exposed them to certain pollutants like this, and then have them have children, and their children, even when they don't have any exposure to the pollutant, also become fat with a higher probability. So it could be that it's been multi generational accumulation of pollutants, or like the effects of of kind of like these things in our environment that we're just starting to understand,
Speaker 1 12:22
why are you the first person that I'm ever hearing talk about this?
Speaker 2 12:27
I think that it's, you know, there's like a gap between the scientific cutting edge and medicine, where there have been papers on this for quite a while, and, you know, detailed mechanisms of how a scientist can induce obesity in an animal using a pollutant molecule, for example, and it just never translated into medicine. Like, I don't think that the current model that we have for doctors treating patients is that of preventative care or, like, root cause medicine, it's definitely, you know, oh, I have a, I had a pharma rep come talk to me and and I'll get these bonuses if I give them X amount of, you know, prescriptions or something, you know,
Speaker 1 13:11
yeah. And even if it's not consciously that they're doing that, they've been influenced, there's the reason the pharma companies invest in that way is because they know it works, yeah? So, before we go into, like, the, how did we get here? You lift? How are you putting on muscle if you're not doing giant amounts of protein intake?
Speaker 2 13:30
Yeah. So I think it's, like a big misconception that you need, like, a lot of protein to gain muscle mass. I mean, there's a whole, there's a bodybuilder, Mike menser. There's, like the mike Menzer argument that you know your muscle is 70% water, and you know it's only like 10 or 20% protein at the end. And you know, if you want to put on like a kilogram of muscle mass in a year, or say, even 10 kilograms of muscle mass in a year, well then say it's like 10% protein or 20% protein, then you need, you know, only two kilograms of actual protein an entire year. And then you divide that by 365, and you only need, like, a few extra grams of protein a day above your above your maintenance, right? So you know the actual you definitely don't need like, 100 grams of protein a day, because then you would be gaining muscle if you stored all of it at like, an extremely high rate. That's like, un physiological. Maybe bodybuilders and steroids need it. But the I think that the one of the insights here that like, made me kind of like abandon the high protein mindset, was that people have done studies on this thing called, like, protein balance, where you just measure the amount of nitrogen which makes up proteins that you eat and that you excrete, essentially, like urea and urine is a source of nitrogen from protein breakdown. And after you know you can, you can drop the protein in someone's diet from like 200 grams to 100 grams, and then they actually do excrete more. Nitrogen for a bit, and have, like, a negative, you know, they lose a bit of nitrogen. They lose a bit of muscle, or proteins, which might not be a muscle, but then after like a week, they eventually adapt to this, like, lower protein state, and then their nitrogen balance, the you know, amount protein deficit, essentially ends up like equilibrating and, and then you end up getting maybe even slightly like net positive effects on, like how much protein you retain. So I guess to simplify that, when you eat less protein, your body breaks down less protein and, and, you know, this is pretty robust and has been well studied. I think that once you get below around, like one gram per kilogram of body weight. So like one gram of protein per kilogram of body weight. So for normal adult male, like 7080 grams of protein. Once you get below that, then you start to get these negative effects on all cause mortality, which means, like, you have a higher chance of dying your live a shorter amount of time. But once you're above that, there doesn't seem to be any increased benefits for muscle outcomes, for lifespan outcomes.
Speaker 1 16:08
So this is, like, shocking. So this is an area that I've always just been an amateur in. And I remember before I had children, I mean, I was eating, oh, man, I can't even imagine 180 200 grams of protein a day. Because, like, it would basically be, like, if you don't eat enough protein, then your muscles won't get big. You'll start eating away at your muscles, like, it's bad news for you. So, I mean, it was always, like, more and more and more, and it definitely changed the smell of my urine. I can, I can tell you for sure that
Speaker 2 16:39
Yeah, yeah. And, and I think that you do, you know what if you I think it's, like, kind of self reinforcing, because if you do drop the protein that you eat, like, you might become smaller, just like, immediately after, like, a week, and, like, lose a little bit of weight, and you're like, Oh, my God, it's muscle weight that I'm losing, but, but you can adapt to it, for sure. And I think that the main thing that the literature shows is that the stimulus to keep muscle is, is really just exercise, right? Like, no matter what protein amount that you're eating, if you just exercise and, like lift weights, you'll put on muscle, like it's or unless you're eating basically, like 10 grams of protein a day, or nothing. I mean, you can feed, like pigs, just like a super low protein diet, like a 5% protein diet, and they just, like, double in size in like, a couple months or a month, you know, like, they grow really, really fast. So clearly, like, biology can handle this. It's just, you know, like, where is human biology on this scale of protein efficiency? All right,
Speaker 1 17:38
I'm gonna interrupt for just a moment, and we will get right back to the conversation with anabology. And as soon as we do, he's going to talk about why it is that he doesn't use his real name, both on the podcast and on social media. And let me tell you, the rest of the conversation is every bit, if not more interesting than what you've heard so far. But I need to interrupt, because if you are a longtime listener the podcast, you can already tell that something is a little different here, right? And the reason that I have to tell you this is I am going to make some changes to the podcast, and I've already done them, and this is largely because of the feedback that I got after last week's podcast, where I said, Hey, what needs to change in order to help this thing grow? And I heard some really great insights from several of you. Got lots of notes and letters, way more than I ever thought. In fact, it's one of those experiences where you're like, Whoa. People really do listen to this podcast. So I am going to make some changes, and I want to talk about those changes, but I'm not going to do it here, because if you're new to the podcast, you don't have any idea what we're talking about. But if you're interested in hearing what kind of changes we're going to make and how this is going to go going forward, then at the end of the interview, you can hear all about it. I also want to mention the sponsor of this podcast. The whole reason that I can do this podcast is because so many listeners purchase legacy interviews. Legacy interviews is what I do when I'm not doing a podcast and I'm not traveling around the country speaking. It is when I sit down with individuals and couples to record their life stories. Now for many, many years, I thought that that's exactly what we did. Our goal is to capture stories and then send them to you. And so during these interviews, I was focused on making sure we captured as many stories as we could. But a couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation with a customer who said something so profound and so wonderful that it reshaped in my mind what we're doing here. He said, You captured the spark that was my dad, and I'm so grateful for it. You know, you caught the way that he laughs, you caught the way that he smiles. You caught the way that he has that rye look on his face when he says something. He doesn't know how you're going to react. And now I know that even though my children might not be old enough to remember him at his best, they are going to get to see that and they're. Gonna understand me better for it. So now I understand that, yes, Legacy interviews asks for your stories. That's how we engage our clients, but the truth, the deep inner thing that we offer that is special is that we create an experience where you or your loved ones can feel comfortable enough to really relax and be who you are. And in capturing this, we capture something so precious and so brilliant that it is worth passing down to your family as an heirloom. If you are interested in having me sit down with either you or your loved ones to tell your stories and to capture that spark. Go to legacyinterviews.com to find out more. All right, let's head back to the conversation with anabology. So you right now are anonymous on x, y.
Speaker 2 20:55
So I originally made a Twitter account where I was not anonymous, and I would post basically my same, what I thought were my same opinions. I would post like, these scientific takes, but it never took off. Just having my like, face and name out there it, you know, didn't, didn't really work. And I also felt like I was censoring myself a little bit, even though I thought, you know, on the surface, I was like, Oh, I'm gonna be brave and post my opinions. Like, I still think I was censoring myself. So then I made just an anonymous Twitter with an anime profile picture, and it just immediately, it just immediately,
Unknown Speaker 21:24
immediately took off. So why do you think that is?
Speaker 2 21:27
I think that it makes it so that your ideas just stand out there as as, like an idea. And there's this, like, whole internet culture where it's like, you know, it's like, that's our guy right, where, you know, you can see that and like, relate to it. It's not like some authoritative figure who's like, this is my name. I am Dr XY and Z and and trying to dictate to you. It's like somebody who's just kind of like playing around on the internet and and, and then they're like, Oh, this is interesting content.
Speaker 1 21:55
And then they can paint you in the way that they need you to be in their in their mind, in order to support you or to think about it in a different way,
Speaker 2 22:03
yeah, until I, uh, reply back and disagree with them in the in the tweet threads. So
Speaker 1 22:08
when I go to your Twitter thread and anabology, um, people are posting about starting on the honey diet. So did you like write this up and start saying, hey, people should try this.
Speaker 2 22:21
Yeah. So I just posted when I was doing it on Twitter. I showed my like, Walmart shopping cart of of, like, 20 bottles of honey. And because I was eating a pound of honey a day, that's a pretty crucial aspect of pound of honey. And it just like, blew up, and I kind of like wrote, I made a website called longest levers, because I was kind of annoyed that all of these, like influencers were selling really simple protocols for like, 20 bucks. So I just made a site for kind of, like open protocols that I could just post, you know, wherever. And I have this site called longest levers, and I posted the honey diet and, like, the protocol of how to follow it on there. And after that, I mean, it kind of had, has had its waves, like, I started it out. Some people tried it, and some people really liked it. It didn't work for some people. But then, you know, it went, went down again. But recently, there was a big figure in the Keto space on Twitter who ended up trying it for a week, and they were like, Hey, I'm gonna try this honey diet for a week, and I'm gonna eat a ton of sugar. And, you know, he was coming from keto, and all of his followers were keto, so all of his followers like, Hey, you're gonna cause irreversible damage. You're gonna die. This is gonna be the worst thing ever. Like, you're not gonna be okay. And he ended up trying it. And, you know, before, whenever he would go off of keto, he would always get depressed, he would get, you know, anxious, his body would feel bad. But this time, whenever he went off of keto and went on to the honey diet. None of his symptoms went back. The only side effect that he said he had was that he wanted to do more handstands.
Speaker 1 23:50
I mean, it's a real issue. I mean, I did keto because I had some like, diabetic, like, episodes. And I was like, I went to my doctor. They didn't really take me seriously. And so I was like, All right, well, like, I'm just gonna do this. And I got my blood work done, and then I started doing keto, and it took me, whatever, about two weeks to get fully into ketosis. But I remember driving down the road and like, where, like, my breath started to change, and all of a sudden I started having, like, epiphanies level ideas. And I was like, This is amazing. But then after a few months, something happened, and I had to go off of it. And going off of it was hell, and so I got back on it. And was like, how am I going to get off this ride? Because I don't want to be, you know, in a key, I don't want to have a high fat diet for the rest of my life. It's, it's actually a rather bland diet. So the idea that there's a way off this ride is really appealing to me.
Speaker 2 24:50
Yeah, and I think that's like, one of the drawbacks of keto specifically, is that you you have to go through the period where you're losing all of your water weight, and, you know, you're kind of suffering. You have the Keto flu, which. Call, which I think, I think that a lot of the time, the Keto flu and the transition period on keto might actually be more related to, like the adaptation to higher levels of protein, rather than like the fats. Because often whenever people do keto, they're almost like keto carnivore, where they just start eating a bunch more steak and meat and things that are higher protein. So I mean, obviously that argument doesn't hold. If you just decided to do like a normal diet and add a ton of olive oil or or cream or something, yeah, but, but I've seen less success, I would say, on like a carnivore diet than just like a pure, pure keto diet. That's like, high, intentionally, very high fat, higher calorie. But anyway, the honey diet, you don't lose water weight immediately, so you and if you're on keto, you might actually gain a few pounds when you start, because you're gaining water weight back, but you can go on and off of it like this. This morning, I decided that I was craving a bowl of pasta, so I had basically like a pound of pasta this morning, which is off the diet, because I think it was like eight servings of eight grams of protein each, which is like 64 grams of protein. So that if I have my normal dinner tonight, then I'll have too much protein, right? So it's, you know, you have to be careful about what the carb sources are and but, but I definitely go on and off the diet like all the time, and I can still get these benefits on the diet without any transition period. I think,
Speaker 1 26:17
I mean, before you walked in here today, I was thinking like, this is the most counter cultural idea I have probably encountered in a very long time, because the growth of carnivore diet, specifically, some people say they're on keto, and they're really not. But like, the growth of high fat high protein diets is skyrocketing right now, and it's because people are looking around being like, I'm tired of being fat, and I think there's something in our wheat, or we're eating too many carbs, or we're given too much sugar. So you saying this is going to it's got to completely unnerve people,
Speaker 2 26:55
yeah. And it's, I mean, the the anti sugar narratives are really compelling narratives, because there's all of these mechanisms that you can point to. You can be like, Oh, well, diabetics, they have high blood sugar, so it must be the sugar or sugar increases insulin, and diabetics have high insulin. So it must be the, it must be the sugar or sugar is glycating. It can react with things. So the stiffening of your arteries as you age, it must be the sugar. And, you know, we could go and dive into each of those points. And I, you know, I have, like, my my perspective on that, obviously, but I think that I think, like, the outcomes kind of, like, speak for themselves, where I can, you know, do this diet and get perfect blood work and, like, lose a lot of weight, so, so I don't think it, like, can be the sugar if there's, like, you know, this, this level of, you know, so many people trying This diet, and it's working. But I think my prediction is that I think we're, like, about a couple years out from this, like, really becoming a big thing. I think that the tides are really turning against sugar right now, for example, there's, like, the skyrocket of Casey and Cali means, which I think they're probably great people I love, like, their narrative I love, you know, their stances against, like, you know, the tobacco industry controlling our food supply. And, you know, or scientists from the tobacco industry like coming into food and making it addictive, and all of these things, which I think are valid and and I like their mission, but I think that, you know, Casey means, in her book good energy, she spoke against sugar and thought it was like the root cause of a lot of these diseases. So, like, the people at the forefront of the health movement are very anti sugar right now, but I don't think that this has reached its peak yet. I think we're still like, a bit from this being like
Speaker 1 28:31
a real No man, I think this is just really started to jump from being maybe not radical, but but like acceptable, to now it is going to the mainstream. I mean, we're watching RFK ride that wave up and and so I think, like, we are not anywhere near the fever pitch, which means there's going to be millions of more people going on keto and carnivore diets. There's going to be a whole bunch of people pointing at the, you know, the sugar industry is as the root cause of all the things going on. But like, you know, you look around the world and you would be blind if you didn't say, we are massively obese. People are not healthy. We're we could be raising the best food possible that we ever have before. We have more technology. We have, you know, better access to knowledge. What's going wrong?
Speaker 2 29:23
Yeah. So, I mean, I think the root cause of a lot of these issues that we see in our food system are just government subsidies, right? So, I mean, I think we really wanted to have, like, a robust food supply, like, especially after World War Two and, like, all this, like, rationing and everything, you know, as I was reading a book, and I was reading a book. And I don't know the exact timelines here, but I was reading this book from the 1960s it was a Time Life Sciences magazine, essentially. And they showed these charts, and they were very proud of it, where, in the past couple decades, from like the 1960s soybean production in the US went from like nothing to greater than all these other crops. Yeah, and I think this is driven by a lot of the subsidies, you know, corn, soy and wheat that kind of give the substrate for most of Americans diet, which is, you know, processed foods. So I think, I think the system as it works right now is like, you have subsidies for corn, soy and wheat, which go to farmers to grow it, but they can sell it for very cheap, because it's such a subsidized market that you can't sell it for very expensive. It's like nearly free. And then this goes to, like, the food manufacturers who make processed foods with these kind of really cheap ingredients, they're not going to make these processed foods with nice, expensive, maybe healthy fat, like I would call beef tallow a healthy fat. They're gonna use soybean oil because it's cheap. And then those these go to stores like Walmart, which have to sell to these like bottom quartile income earners in the US who barely have any money to feed their entire family. And then Walmart makes razor thin margins on this food, like even less than sales tax. So the government makes more money off of Walmart than Walmart makes off of Walmart and and then, you know, these people eat the food, and then they have bad, bad outcomes for some reason. So it all seems like, at every single step, it's like the government is funding it and benefiting from it, right?
Speaker 1 31:16
Yeah, I then, I'm trying to stay with you, because I actually when you describe the subsidies, I think it's worth spending a little bit of time thinking about, do you know how subsidies actually work, like how the farmer benefits from the government tilting the scale towards soybeans or corn? I haven't looked super deeply into it, so it's worth understanding because there, I think people have this impression that you get a check in the mail from the government for that. But that's not actually what happens. What happens the the largest subsidy for farmers is, is crop insurance, and it's that, if you have a record of the last, I think, five years of crops on your field, then when you go to plant your your your your corn or your soy, whatever the major crops are. You go to an organization and you say, I want to buy crop insurance. Now that crop insurance is subsidized by the government, so you don't actually have to pay the full amount for what it would cost to insure your crops. But as long as you're growing corn, soy, wheat, some of these major crops, then they'll say, Okay, well, we'll cut that price down on there. And then if there's too much rain in the spring and you can't get into plant, then you're going to get what's called Prevent Plant. You're going to get paid out for that. If you you have flood or hail or things happen, then you don't have to worry that you're not going to be able to make your mortgage payments, or you're not going to be able to pay for your equipment, because the as long as you are using those crops, you're going to stay in business. And then the other subsidy, this is one that my friend Keaton Kruger is going to freak out when he hears me talking about this. But the really big one is the mandate on using ethanol in our gasoline. So 40% of our corn, it goes to goes to ethanol. And most of the time, not most of the in many states, you don't have the option to have ethanol free gas. They just said in the State of Illinois or the state of Iowa, you must have gasoline blended with ethanol, which means we're all paying for it every time we drive our cars. Do they
Speaker 2 33:24
use the entire corn, like mass essentially, like the corn kernel for ethanol, or do they take out parts of it and, like, devote some to corn syrup, devote some to corn flour, devoted to other whatever?
Speaker 1 33:36
That's a great question. So actually, one of the big things that happens with the ethanol production is that the byproduct from ethanol can be fed to cattle. So there's still starches in there. There's still some amount of protein in there, and so they're using, it's only on the corn right. The cob doesn't matter. The stock doesn't matter. They're not using that that's used in other kinds of corn production. But yes, so a lot of times, what you'll find is near ethanol plants. There are a lot of cattle feeding operations because they just take the DDGs in and they Yeah, the distilled grains and to and then they feed them to cattle.
Speaker 2 34:17
Okay, interesting. Yeah, I've seen, I mean, it seems like there's a lot of products that are exclusively coming from, like corn, soy and wheat, because of, you know, maybe the subsidies, you know, from from the outside, like, I haven't looked into mechanistically, how all the subsidies work, but, but I'll give an example. Like Vitamin E is at a very, very low percentage in soybean oil. Like, there's other foods that have a much higher percent of vitamin E. Yet, basically all of the vitamin E that you can buy on the market is from soybean oil, because they want to extract every little value that they can out of this, just like insanely huge product that we have in the US. So then there used to be Vitamin E from wheat germ. Um, oil, I believe. But now soybean oil has has taken over. Yeah, I don't know if, like, soy has more subsidies than wheat. I guess that would work with the narrative. But, yeah, I
Speaker 1 35:09
mean, I think another thing that happens, and the reason you see soy do so well, is that once so a crushing facility, which is what you need for soy, or really, for any, anything you're going to get oil out of they're not cheap to build. And you you can't build one. You don't build one that's like, oh, it can do soy and olive oil and canola and canola like they are hyper specialized systems. And so once you've invested into those crushing facilities, then that that plant has a huge advantage, because in order to, you know, create the other plants, you have to create more plants, and it's expensive. But then you also have the challenge of transportation. So like, you know, if you wanted to start growing some much less popular plant that had an oil to it, you may be able to find a crushing plant, but now you've got a truck at 500 miles. So the price that you're going to have to get for that oil is going to have to be way higher. So soy has gone so far ahead of the other oils. They have a huge advantage, and they continue to get more sometimes there's subsidies to build those crushing plants. So right now, there's, there was a huge emphasis in the last five years, 10 years, where they've built a bunch more crush plants in the hopes that they can get more things for things like biodiesel or the new aviation fuels that they're trying to make out of these large scale crops. Yeah.
Speaker 2 36:31
And I think it's like, worth talking about, kind of like, the history of how this got into our food in the first place, because I think it's, like, kind of ridiculous that we're subsidizing it at all as like a food. Because back, you know, 1920s and before it wasn't even considered a food, soybean oil, there was a they were using these, like plant oils in paints, mainly way back then. And then eventually, the kind of petroleum industry discovered that they could use petroleum for paints, right? So it displaced this, essentially plant oil paint industry. And they were like, Okay, well, we need to figure out, like, a new place for these oils, because we're producing all of them. We have all these farmers. We can't just, like, let this die. So then what happened is there were people who discovered that you could put it into animal feed and actually feed the animals less calories, and they would gain more weight faster. So they were like, wow, this is, like, a great invention, like we we need to give it to all these animals, and they'll become fat really quickly, and we can spend less money. So then it took off in an animal feed, initially soybean oil and vegetable oils. But then eventually there was this thing. It was called, it was called The Seven Countries Study, and there was this man, Ansel keys, who did this kind of, like long term epidemiological study. So essentially, he was, like, looking at these big populations, and he was interested in cardiovascular disease, and he found that the people who had higher cholesterol in these populations had a higher incidence of cardiovascular disease. So this was like the origin of the idea that cholesterol causes heart disease, essentially. And you know, this has been debated a lot, but this was kind of like the start of this. So then Ancel Keys and others in the soybean oil or and vegetable oil industry kind of like used this data because they knew before from the animal data that vegetable oils lowered cholesterol. So they were like, wow, this is a great food for humans now, because it'll lower cholesterol, it'll lower your chance of heart disease. And this is what they were saying in this like 1960s life Life Science Magazine and but then a decade or a couple decades later, there was a study called the Minnesota coronary experiment. So, like, we're up to kind of, I think, 1980s at this point, but the data for this study didn't come out until after the 2000s so essentially, this is the perfect study. So if you wanted to design a study where you could test something perfectly for diet, what you would do is you would take people who are institutionalized, whether it be like a mental hospital or a prison, because you can completely control their diet. And that was what the study was. So they took this Minnesota coronary experiment, is where they had institutionalized individuals, and they fed them corn oil, and they fed them some saturated fat. I think it was, it was like lard at that point, which was actually more saturated than it is now. But they fed them, I think it was lard, but saturated fat versus a vegetable oil, and they tracked the mortality, the cardiovascular disease mortality, of these individuals, and they also tracked the cholesterol over time. So previously the Ansel keys study, they only saw an association between cholesterol and heart disease, but now they were actually able to test it directly. So then is. You know, again, a couple decades after the original association was found, they found that the CORN OIL DID lower the cholesterol of the essentially institutionalized inmates. Whatever it did lower their cholesterol over time, but they died of more heart attacks. So saturated fat did not cause more heart attacks, it raised everyone's cholesterol, but they actually died less of all causes of cancer, of heart attacks. So this study was hidden away for multiple decades after it was done and only released, like after it was dug up, you know, way longer after this guy's, you know, I think passed away and, you know, career is over, but he built his entire career on this, like, idea that that cholesterol was bad, and then did a study that was a perfect study and found that it wasn't bad, and then never publicized it. So then saturated fat has been demonized for such a long time that, you know, the average person, if you ask, Oh yeah, like, what? What's a what should you avoid? They're gonna be like, Oh yeah, saturated fat, sugar, salt, that's what. That's what they say you should avoid. And I'm completely 180 on all of those issues.
Speaker 1 41:01
So when you say 180 what would you say is the things you should avoid.
Speaker 2 41:06
So the things you should avoid, I think the things you should avoid are the polyunsaturated fats. So mostly vegetable oils. That's that would be soybean oil, corn oil, cotton seed oil, rapeseed oil, sunflower oil. I think that avocado oil and olive oil should be eaten in moderation. I think that they're not perfect, but they're a little bit better. I think the oils that should be eaten based on this data, is coconut oil, butter, beef, beef fat, beef towel, which is what McDonald's used to fry their French fries in before everybody got fat. And
Speaker 1 41:37
this is becoming big. So the thing you're saying here is not that counter cultural. If you're listening to people that are around the carnivore diet or keto diet, they're saying, yeah, the saturated fats that we were told about that come from meat, we are this is all lies. This is we should go back to that. And that's hard enough for a lot of us to, like, wrap our brains around, because this was something so driven into us that it's like, you know, I can even remember sitcoms being like, you're eating a steak for breakfast. What? Haven't you read a newspaper in the last 20 years? And you're like, Okay, well, that's been indoctrinated into us. But the idea that even things like olive oil or avocado oil or something to be eaten in moderation. That is stunning, because there was a lot of stuff that was like, well, olive oil is the best thing ever. You should put it on everything that people living in the Mediterranean eat it all the time, and look how great their health is, right?
Speaker 2 42:35
Yeah. So I think that that data might have been misinterpreted, that the people in the Mediterranean are always like skinnier because they eat olive oil. There's this guy on Twitter, his name, his name, and on YouTube, I guess it would be a better place. But on YouTube, his name is fire in a bottle. His name is Brad Marshall, and he would do a much better job of me than explaining this. But he probably has like 10 hours of just video content going into just like the source data for these claims about olive oil, and just seeing that, hey, wait, it actually is making these people fatter. Like the Mediterraneans, who are eating more olive oil are fatter. So I think that, I think one of the big pushes for olive oil and avocado oil, like I think that comes from the idea that, like, fruits are good if you accept that seed oils are bad, because, like, the fruit part, they're like, Oh yeah, you can eat tons of fruits, fine. But the seeds, you're like, Oh yeah, the seeds, they're meant to be planted into the ground, so they're going to try and kill an animal that eats it, right? But the fruit itself, the body of the fruit, has the incentive of being eaten, because it frees up the seed for the tree, right? But I think that it's like, still, it's like, not a perfect argument. I mean, evolutionarily, like, maybe there were some things that did really well eating olives, or did really well eating avocados. But if you, if you look at like, their similarity to seed oils, they have, like, pretty similar components if you eat enough of it, so and so
Speaker 1 44:03
these poly unsaturated fats. These are things that have to be created. They like tell me about this. This is something I hear a lot about. So
Speaker 2 44:13
polyunsaturated fats are a natural fat, and they're found in seeds. There's different ones that are found in fish. So omega sixes are generally the seed oils. Omega six just details the structure of the fat. Essentially, Omega three is what people call the anti inflammatory fats are found in fish. I think that the main role for these fats in nature is that they're kind of like, less stable and more dynamic, like they like to they're more fluid, essentially. So if you have an animal that, like, needs to live in a very, very cold environment, like a fish, then you have a ton of these polyunsaturated fats, like in their kind of cells, in their cell membranes, and seeds, also, and fruits even, kind of like may follow this trend like the farther. North that you go, the more polyunsaturated fats you find in like these, these animals or like not animals, but I guess, yeah, animals in fish, and also the fruits and and nuts and everything. So, yeah, the the, I think the most dangerous one, I would say, is the Omega six kind of like seed oil. Mainly, I have some other issues with omega threes that we can dive into, even though those have been put on a pedestal. But I think that the the easiest way to understand why I think they're bad, and I have like 100 reasons, is humans and all these like mammals, used to get a very low amount of these seed oils, essentially in their diet, right? The only time when you would really eat a high quantity of nuts or seeds is when all of your fruit and all of your animals have run out, like you're, you know, if you had a steak on the table as, like a primitive man and you had some acorns, like, what are you going to eat? You're gonna eat the steak, right? So then it kind of ends up being this, like, sort of signal to the body that, hey, like Winter's coming, you're running out of food, like, maybe you need to slow down your metabolism and store fat. And you know this happens with squirrels, like they fatten up for the winter when they're eating all these acorns, versus, like, some other foods that they might eat. So because it was such a low part of our diet for, like, the most of our lives, except for when we were gearing up to be fat for winter, they are involved in these different pathways that biology kind of just acquired. So so one of these pathways is inflammation, or by pathways, I just mean like, processes that the body body does. So normally, it would be like, less than 3% of your diet. And then once you eat it, it goes into your cells. It goes into your cell membranes, and then, say, the cell gets damaged, right? And then a virus kills the cell. Well, now all this cells contents are flying around everywhere in your body, including the fats in the cell membrane, and one of these fats that's very reactive and useful to signal to other cells that, hey, something went wrong. Is the seed oils that were previously embedded into the membrane of the cell. So there's this pathway. It's essentially called these are called prostaglandins. So the seed oils, the Omega sixes, would be converted into prostaglandins. And I know I'm going into the weeds here, but then they are converted into inflammatory signals by the body to tell you, hey, there's like damage going on. We need to stop this. And now we've made this from like 3% of our diet to like 30% of our diet. So we have like 10 times the inflammatory signals that we that we've ever had from before. So and also the there are molecules like Tylenol or ibuprofen or aspirin, and everyone knows these as COX inhibitors. If you've looked a little bit deeply into that, they they block this enzyme called Cox cycle, oxygen ace. And what this does is it stops the conversion of the seed oils into the inflammatory signals, essentially. So the Tylenol or aspirin or or ibuprofen, I prefer aspirin. It's basically an anti seed oil. And if you go to a McDonald's or, I mean, maybe McDonald's would do better, depending on the quality control of of the restaurant. As you just heat up these oils, they spontaneously degrade into these inflammatory molecules. So then, if you go and you eat french fries from a restaurant that hasn't changed their oil in like one or two days, then you're basically eating these pre formed inflammatory signals. It's like, it's like the anti aspirin.
Speaker 1 48:40
There's so much here, and it's so counter cultural. How does one even begin to approach, like, thinking about their diet in this way? Because, I mean, you could go from following whatever the USDA says, but nobody does that, right? But like, whatever diet you have formed, then you, like, make this change, go towards carnivore or keto, and now this other guy comes along and says, no, no, no, you shouldn't be doing that. You should be eating, you know, mostly sugar. How should, how should people wrap their minds around this?
Speaker 2 49:13
Yeah, so I think that, like, the concept of N equals one, just the concept of of self experimenting, that you can do an experiment on yourself and and that is good data. I think that is something that's really powerful. I mean, for me, I essentially one summer. What really got me into this is is, like One summer I was doing an internship, and I no longer was cooking food at home. So every day I went to KFC and I ate the same thing as I was eating at home. At home, I was eating chicken, I was eating potatoes, and I was having, like, sodas, even, and, um, but then when I went to KFC, I was having sodas, I was having chicken, and I was having french fries, but the addition was the fryer oil that they were using. And over that summer, I gained like 25 pounds of fat in like a couple months. And I got the most migraines in my life. It was like, you know, I had a brain injury years before that, and that summer was like, you know, the feeling after I had a brain injury again, it was like that many migraines, just like every single day, terrible, like, the only thing that could stop it is, like, amounts of antihistamines that would completely knock me out. So, so then I quit that. I did carnivore, and I cut out seed oils for my diet, and my migraine slowly went away, and I lost weight. So that was like a self experiment. I mean, it was a pretty damaging self experiment, because, you know, it's not great for your body to eat like that, but, you know, but that's like, sometimes the only way to find out the truth, you just have to make sure that you're, you know, not going so far into one thing that you end up killing yourself.
Speaker 1 50:46
Yeah. I mean, that actually is probably my biggest fear about ketosis, is that it has been so good for me, like it's enabled me to work more, it's enabled me to be more present with my children. And I keep wondering, like, Yeah, but is there this thing sneaking up behind you that you don't, you don't see, and you're not aware of, and it's gonna get you, like, that's something that's really scary to me, because to give this up and to go back to what I was doing before I found keto, it's not tenable. I can't do it. I get, like, I think about who I was, and I haven't talked about this on the podcast at all, but like, I go to think about how hard life was before I got rid of carbohydrates, and to think about going back there is an actually scary thing, like a thing enough to make me stare up at the ceiling at night and being like, well, am I trapped then in this high fat diet for the rest of my life.
Speaker 2 51:41
Yeah. So I think, like, my heuristic on this is that I kind of have found a diet that if I do it for about a month, like, I'll start to feel okay again. So I'll make changes, like, I experiment all the time, and, you know, right now, I'm trying to try and make the diet easier, because, you know, it's hard to eat, like, this much honey or this much fruits, I'm trying to find a way to incorporate corn chips with no oil into my diet. So it's just like, I can have something crunchy and it can be basically a junk food that everyone likes, right? But if that fails, you know, I always have these diets that I know that I feel okay on, and really, it's, it's like a pound of beef at night, and then some fruits during the day, and then that's about, that's about where I where I land if I if everything else fails. So I guess, like, I feel like you could feel some confidence in the idea that you, you have found a diet that works for you, and you can always go back on it. And, I mean, the Keto flu is, is a hard thing, right? Because there's like, a long transitionary period, transitionary period to get between, you know, when you're on this other diet and then go back on keto. But I would argue, you know, there,
Speaker 1 52:44
if I was going to try and go to get into ketosis again, I would do it very differently. I would do it using intermittent fasting to get there faster. And I would probably, you know, reserve a weekend to do pretty hardcore working out to try and burn off as much glycogen as possible. But the first two times, I didn't know any of this. So, like, there are things that you could do to lessen that my fear is just the brain fog, like the, like the literal loss in IQ points. And I think that's true. I think, like, my IQ was lower, substantially lower. And like the idea of going back, it feels like I'm the, you know, the Homer Simpson shoving crayons at my nose or something.
Speaker 2 53:24
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think it's a real thing. I think that if your metabolism, metabolism is better, you're able to just think and execute on the world in in a better way. I think, like, what one just like side tangent is, you know, in saunas, if you're in a sauna for like, 30 minutes, by the end of it, like, the last five minutes, you look at the clock, you know, you look at the clock, it says five minutes, and then you wait 22345, minutes, and then you look at the clock again, and now it says four minutes and 50 seconds. So So time, like, slows down by by so much. And I think, I think that when your body temperature rises and you're able to, just like, pack more thoughts into every unit time, and I think that there's something here with metabolism, where, if you have a slow metabolism, and you're, you know, you're putting on weight, your thyroid isn't functioning very well, then your body temperature usually is below, like, 98 you know, during the day, and you're, you're kind of, like, slow but a lot of times when people go on to, like, a better diet model, whether it be keto or high sugar diet, their body temperature skyrockets and goes up to, like, 98.6 99 even. I've even seen people like, hitting like 100 midday, like almost having a fever, but they feel so much better, and their brain seems to, like, work better. It's like they're able to put more thoughts and and, you know, effort into the day. So I think it's, I really think it's like it might be a function of just temperature of the brain. That's
Speaker 1 54:45
a very interesting observation. You know, something I went out on x and said, and I had people come out of the woodwork pissed off at me, was it would make sense to me that your genetics would play a large role in what. Nutrition was right for you. So if you come from a long line of people that live around the equator, this is like high high amount of solar energy. It's like high carbohydrates. You don't need to store a bunch of fat. Whereas the further you go north and you're you know, in a colder area, you need to be able to store fats the longer temperatures, longer winter, like your body would be adapted to having high fatty foods. How does this resonate with you? Like people told me I was a racist for saying this. So,
Speaker 2 55:33
yeah, so, yeah, I definitely don't think you're a racist for saying that. I think if you look at the African American population in the US, just to, like, poke a hole in this, they actually have kind of worse health outcomes. Usually they have, like, higher obesity rates. So I think that even if you are, and, you know, generally, you would assume that they're from somewhere closer to the equator, just because of the, you know, yeah, history. But I think that, you know, genetics do play a role, but you can't outrun like, a really, really bad diet, right? Because no matter what animal we choose, we can make them obese in a lab with basically the same diet. And you would think that, like, some would be adapted to it, or, you know, some would, some would do better. And it's true that there is genetic variation between different trains of mice or a dog or whatever. But like, I think that if we're speaking to, you know, 99% of people, I think, like, a lot of these, just like, heuristics generally hold, I think the second thing is that genetics, I think that Darwinism is wrong. So like, like, Darwinian selection, the whole idea that evolution is gradual, where, essentially, whenever you have a changes between two generations of a species, all you do is, like mutate, like a few DNA bases and a few bits of DNA. Essentially, there's this guy. His name is James A Shapiro, and he's written, like quite a lot of work on this, of how in single generations you can acquire entirely new sets of machinery. Essentially, you can steal genes from viruses or bacteria can, like everyone knows, bacteria can transfer genes between each other, at least if you're in biology, you know this, but, but this seems to work on like mammalian scales that we've identified human proteins that we've just like stolen from viruses. And I would suggest that genetics are a lot more plastic than people think, and there can be these really, really fast, like single or few generation changes, even in genetics, like not just epigenetics, that can lead to vastly different diet outcomes. So I think that, just like the heuristic of, oh, my ancestors were in mountains, so I should eat like a like a mountain person. I mean, I think it, you know, if you're if the people who were in the mountains were 10 generations back, there probably was a lot of change between you and
Speaker 1 57:56
them. I this is a great area to explore, as in terms of just an idea that is counter cultural right? You don't believe that Darwinian evolution is is correct, or you think it just took us down a wrong path, or people misunderstand it?
Speaker 2 58:11
Yeah, I think it's like the Neo Darwinists who are wrong. So like Darwin himself, like he was a pretty he seemed actually pretty humble, if you read any of his writings, like he said that, you know, a lot of his ideas seemed really absurd, and he didn't have the solutions to everything, and gradual selection, like, just seems crazy. And I don't even think he called it selection. I forget what he called it now, but, but, like, the obsession around natural selection wasn't what Darwin was like talking about. But like, the Neo Darwinists who really, like, solidified the idea that, like, oh, it's natural selection. It's gradual evolution. You have single mutations like those. Those are the people who kind of got it wrong. So, yeah, I don't want to dig on Darwin, but yeah, I think that, just like the it's kind of this, like determinist, like mechanistic universe that people like, like to live in, where you think that you know the mechanism of how biology works, or how something works in general, but it's like such a complex system that it's like, really the task of, like, asking, like, what's possible, like, not like, what is there? I guess see more. I think that biology is just like, so good at creating really, really magical things that if you think that, you know, there's this, like, one single, simple thing that happens, like, you really need to ask yourself the question, like, is there something better? And then biology has probably tried it, right? Like, an example is, you know, if you wanted to have organisms that survived, like in a population, you would want them to be able to adapt to a new environment very quickly. And if you did Darwinian evolution, if you all you did was do single DNA base fare changes, like, very, very slowly over time, they would all die out. So then you need something that's like, adaptive and faster. You need evolution that's faster. So then you have to ask the question. It's like, hey, has biology done this? And then the answer is like, I think unequivocally yes. Like, the species that survive more are better at adapting to their environment, even on the genetic level. So, yeah, so I think that there's like a million other mechanisms like this where, you know, people just like, obsess over this one really specific pathway or or reductionist idea, and then miss just like the entirety of the wonder that is biology.
Speaker 1 1:00:24
The way that I always understood that biology handled having enough diversity to be able to overcome things like mass starvation because of a famine or something like that, would be that that's why you have men and women come together, instead of women just being able to clone themselves and put it off, then you would have no diversity, and eventually something would wipe you out, but that the diversity would come from men and women coming together. But you're saying there is an added factor of a high amount of mutations between generations that is kicking off things that are even maybe more important for diversity.
Speaker 2 1:01:03
Yeah, so I may have misspoken a little bit. I think that mutations aren't the mechanism for evolution on like a mammalian or human scale. So I think that, like viruses are kind of like the R and D sector for evolution. Okay, so the idea is that, if you believe in Darwinian evolution, every single step in evolution needs kind of like an intermediate state. So how do you build like a really, really complex like protein or like piece of machinery in your cells, for example, where it would be completely useless on every step in the middle? Well, the answer is, viruses have the intermediate states, but you can just grab them and test them out really quickly and see if, if you want them or not. So an example is there's this one protein called syncytin, which I think, like attaches the placenta to the rest of the body. That is like, definitively from viral origin. Like humans didn't evolve it, mammals didn't evolve it at all. It was just like stolen from a virus. There's also an arc protein, which is a little viral capsid that sends genetic material between neurons. And there's, like, no intermediate state in in things with neurons, but it just came from a virus. So, so the mutations, I think that if you like, have, like men and women, just like coming together, and you introduce diversity, but still gradually, where it's just like the mutations of the woman versus the mutations of the man, you still just don't end up getting these like, well, working like intermediate states that you need for some new trait to emerge, I guess, like, the space of possibilities is so big. Like, every single you know, DNA base pair, you have, like, basically four different options, or, you know, multiple options. And then you can combine those in so many different ways. And you have 1000s and 1000s of these bits for each each little bit of machinery for each protein. And then those all come together, if you wanted to just go through every possible iteration, you would run out of time in the universe. Like you can't do that. So it has to be directed in some way.
Speaker 1 1:03:09
So where you add on genetic engineering of things like crops or even humans and things like that.
Speaker 2 1:03:15
So I think that it's like, great that we can do it. So I think, like, there's this pervasive ideology in the health space that, like, it's kind of like the naturalistic fallacy, that that natural things are always better. And I think, as kind of a heuristic, generally, it's good. Like, if, if you're asking the question, do I eat this random chemical that I've not identified on my desk, or not, you probably shouldn't it like, this is a novel thing. It's never been your biology. Just don't, don't eat it, right? But if you're like, Oh, should I eat this fruit? Well, it's like, yeah, probably because people have eaten it for so long that it's, it's Lindy, you know, yeah.
Speaker 1 1:03:53
But I mean, a lot of the fruit that we're eating now is so radically different, and that radical change has happened in the last couple 100 years, not, not even 1000s of years, right?
Speaker 2 1:04:02
So, so I think that if you wanted to select, like the Lindy fruits, you would do the ones that have been cultivated for the longest. Like dates, for example, were one of the first domesticated fruits, like 3000 plus years ago, and growing alongside humanity for quite a long time. But like, back to the the genetic engineering point, even if this is true, like, even if it is the best thing to do natural things, people naturally die, and I don't want to die. So if you want to do things like extend life, or you want to, like, live like a really, really fit 90 year old, well, you're going to have to do these things that are unnatural. So I think that, like, if I want to, you know, and this is controversial, like, some people say, oh, yeah, you should live this, like, natural life and a natural death, and then just go and die once you're, once you're, you know, old and 80 or 90. But, yeah, I guess, like, philosophically, I think. That if there is an option not to die like at every single point in my life, I'm still going to choose not to die like if you if I was 90 years old and you handed me a gun, I wouldn't shoot myself, right? So, so then I would want to live till 91 and maybe at 91 I want to look to 92 right? So if I can be healthy, I want to live for as long as I possibly can, and eventually, and I don't want to give up my health, so I'm going to have to do unnatural things like genetic engineering of myself or or the things that I eat, or whatever eventually, um,
Speaker 1 1:05:30
yeah, that'll be an interesting risk calculation, right? Because if you're starting to do those kinds of, you know, editing your own germ line, like there's, you may not be able to go back from that. It's not the sugar diet that maybe takes you 30 days to get back on.
Speaker 2 1:05:45
Yeah, definitely. I mean, so I also think that there's, like, an interesting thing here that you, you kind of touched on. And I don't know if you want to go into this, but I think that once we get into the world where you're going to have to do these, these kind of interventions to stay alive for longer the like life insurance companies are going to have a very different risk assessment than like individuals. And I've like, thought about this a lot. So imagine you have, like a a molecule that you can just give to any anybody, and it will immediately triple their lifespan. They'll live like 300 years if they were going to live 100 years, right? But there's like a 50% chance of them dying. So if you wanted to maximize the income that you get as a life insurance company, you would give this to the entire population, because this would maximize the amount of years lived. But then, if you're an individual, and say you're like, 20 years old, and you have a pill on the table, and it can make you live 300 years, but it also could just kill you 5050, you're not going to take it because you're just going to die, right? So, yeah, so like, life insurance, just like, isn't, isn't really aligned with, like, individuals best interests. And I don't know what to do with this thought, but that's like, a thought I've thought a lot about. Do you
Speaker 1 1:07:00
believe that radical longevity will occur?
Speaker 2 1:07:05
I think it could. I think it could. I think that it probably isn't going to come from where people think it's going to come from. I think there's like a lot of capital being deployed into things like cell reprogramming. I think it's there's like, a lot of capital being deployed into AI, but I think that we just, like, lack a coherent model of what biology is, and I don't see the counter narrative ability in AI, for example, to solve these problems like aI just spits out what it was trained on, which is the scientific consensus, which has got us nowhere.
Speaker 1 1:07:41
And where are you at on AI? Are we like, just moments away from hitting AGI, where they take over? I,
Speaker 2 1:07:48
well, I think that one of the most compelling arguments against AI becoming this, like life threatening, huge AGI thing is just like the scaling laws, there's like this defined amount of energy that you need for these increases in intelligence. And once you get to, I think, like GPT 11. I mean, we're on GPT four, almost GPT five, right now, once you get to GPT 11, in, like scaling, essentially in the amount of energy that you would need to train GPT 11, like at the physical limit. The physical limit, even with renewable energy and, like perfect energy production, you know, even, like a Dyson Sphere, you end up just like overheating the earth and you boil all of the oceans. So, so there's, like, there's these, like, physical caps that we're that we're going to run into, of, like, how much energy we can devote towards this task. And the question is, will we reach, like, some super intelligence that is dangerous before we get to these physical limits, which, like, I think, like it actually seems more of a coin flip than people would think.
Unknown Speaker 1:08:55
Are you using AI right now?
Speaker 2 1:08:56
Yeah, I use it in what way I mean, I like perplexity. I like just being able to not have to, like, browse through the internet to get to a source that I want. I think that tell me about perplexity. Yeah. Perplexity is just a, essentially, you hook up one of the flagship large language models like Claude or chat GPT, to a search engine, and then it can just read all of the results immediately and do multiple search steps. So if I want to find a specific paper or something, or papers on a specific topic, just like ask it to find me these papers, and I can click on the links that it tried to cite when it gave me the answer. So I mean, I think that there's like, a big over reliance on AI, and it's like, it's like, the the Apple Maps thing. Like, once the iPhone came out and people had Apple Maps, people, like, lost their ability to navigate, yeah, their sense of direction. Yeah, exactly. So. So then with AI, like, this is clearly happening with quite a lot of people where, you know, they're relying on the AI to think. And I see this like on Twitter, where you. Know, people will like, reply to me with a screenshot of chat GPT fact checking my claim. It's like, you couldn't, like, think or, like, find the paper yourself, or try and like, figure this out yourself, like you're just being like, Oh yeah, the hive mind says this, and I am promoting the hive mind,
Speaker 1 1:10:15
yeah. And I think, like, another big challenge that AI brings is that you discovered things through like, serendipitously looking through papers, right? And if what you have is like, digest all this information and feed it into my mouth, then the serendipity is going to be much, much more difficult to find or to have. And I think, like, just even the thing we're talking about right now. Had you already been on an AI diet, you might not have found it,
Speaker 2 1:10:45
right? Yeah. And AI also views safety like one of its prime directives is to be safe, which is like, I guess, a good thing. But also it views safety as, like, not spreading medical misinformation. And medical misinformation often is the truth. So you know, one of my hallmarks to see if a new AI is good or not, is I give it basically all of this evidence of a counter narrative model of how life works with, like, really, really solid, rigorous evidence. And then I ask it. I'm like, what is the probability of this being correct over the mainstream model? And it basically always sides with the mainstream model. And like all of the AIS that I've tested, I think the only one that wasn't able to that didn't do it was recently, was notebook LM, which is a Google product where it can look at like 1 million tokens at once, basically like entire books at once. So then I filled up its entire context window with like, books on the counter narrative model, and then it finally admitted that, oh, this counter narrative model might actually be correct.
Speaker 1 1:11:47
Yeah, I think that the whoever takes the guardrails off of AI will get the sharpest tool and and then that's going to create a different sort of Darwinian evolution for for the future of AI? Well, so
Speaker 2 1:12:03
I think there's two points there. I think like that one, I think that you're correct that the people who can use AI effectively and also not sacrifice on their, you know, with the map analogy, navigational abilities, who can still think and then use AI as a tool, I think that the the gap between those people and then the people who defer to the hive mind is going to just widen over time, like, it's going to make a lot more intellectual inequality. It's like, not going to make, you know, things easier for like, the lower class, is what I think. But also, there are relatively uncensored AIS because of meta, and they've like, released these, like, llama models that are like open source, and people can take the guardrails off of those. And I think that there was one recent like llama model, they somebody released, I think Nvidia released it that was you could run it on, you know, what would be a very expensive like local computer, but on a local computer, like, not on the cloud and and it was on par with, like the other flagship models, like GPT four, Claude 3.5 and, and, you know, people are gonna very quickly take the guardrails off of that and use it so but I really don't think it's been like that helpful without guardrails so far. Like, more helpful than just, like a normal AI, because it still has, like, the fundamental limitations of, like, how good of a question can you ask and can it defer? Can it go against the narrative? Like, even if you have no guardrails, it still can give you this very unsafe, controversial, but pro narrative subject, just because it's how it's trained on, you know, the the consensus, essentially,
Speaker 1 1:13:35
So, speaking of narratives, and kind of, going back to our original nutrition conversation, I think one of the growing narratives right now in the United States is that glyphosate, which is very commonly used as an herbicide, is the cause of many, many, many problems in our culture. And if you go talk with the Ag companies or the people at universities or farmers, they will all say, this is not true. This is That's incorrect. This is the softest, most gentle herbicide that we've used, you know, ever and compared to, compared to other things, it's really good that we're using glyphosate. Where do you come out on this idea? Yeah,
Speaker 2 1:14:16
I think there's a few things here. So one is, I have looked at the animal data on glyphosate, and it's, it's like, tough, because they use just like, orders of magnitude higher doses than you would see a human eating, and they do see negative effects, but it's like, really, really high doses. So, I mean, there may be some data on, like, lower doses, but, but I'm not sure. I don't know if it's, like, been super well studied, but I think that, like, regardless of how well studied these, these things are, um, you know, it's, it's not Lindy, right? Like it's, it's something that's completely new in our diets that we've never experienced before. It's kind of hyper novel, like we haven't seen it evolutionarily. And if there are alternatives. Uh, to this, then like to just adding new things to our diet arbitrarily, without having some stated goal or for our health, like some stated benefit for from our health, then I think we just, like, shouldn't do it and, and obviously there's the argument that, oh well, we need to have, you know, have this because otherwise we couldn't feed everybody, right? Like there's, there's no other way to feed people without having these things that supplement the growth of our, you know, favorite, corn, soy and wheat crops. But I think I would push back on that. I think that at the peak, before Americans colonized the us of the bison population in the US? Or was it buffalo or bison? Bison population? It was like 80 million or something bison. And then if you milk one cow for a year pretty efficiently without, like, adding hormones or anything like that, you can probably get around 4 million calories from this. And one person only needs, like, 1 million calories in a year, if you just have, like, a 2000 something calorie a day diet. So then, if we just like, have, I mean, and we do have, like, this many cows basically in the US. But if we just like, I think, like, clearly, we have enough land for this much cattle, because we already had those, just naturally with, with all of the all over the bison in the US and and, like, you know, if farmers were just like, able to give everybody in their community, like local milk, without all of these, like USDA, like firewalls in place and making it, like, super hard, we could have, like, so many more people, just like, fed on things like really high quality foods, like grass, fed grass finished milk. And you know, if you deprived the the calf after, like, the cow, cow, you know, gives birth to the calf, you could feed like four people in a year, just like, solely on milk. So, you know, I think that when people say it's like the only way to do it, it seems like it's the only way to like it's the only way to do it. If we keep our agricultural system the same, if we keep it with like these, these, you know, big staple crops, but if we radicalize, you know, our entire agricultural system, if we have people growing their own chickens, if we have farmers giving milk to their local communities, if we get rid of all of the USDA, you know, issues that they have with anybody selling raw milk. It's, you know, I think it would be a much easier problem to solve.
Speaker 1 1:17:26
Yeah, I hear you on all of the things you're describing. I think the the word that you're using should not be underestimated in terms of its gravity, which is radical, right, like if you decide that you want to make these changes, you must build the change before you start taking away the things that have held up this system. And like, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm starting right now to buy eggs using Bitcoin. This is like my dream come true. I want to have my own, you know, I buy beef from farmers that are I know, and so these are all things that I like and want. But now, having seen the inside of macro agriculture, I understand like this is a very delicate system held up by bailing twine and and duct tape, because of regulation, because of the need to get the speed going, all these things. But if you decide, like, we're just going to cancel glyphosate because we think this is causing a problem, you will cause mass starvation this there's like, we cannot recover those calories using labor. And so when I hear the narrative building in this way. It really intimidates me, because I'm like, Look, you can build a mob up, and you can convince them that the reason that their children are obese, or the reason that autism has occurred, or the reason infertility is going on is because of this glyphosate or because of the GMOs. But if you take those away, you're going to see immediate reactions that that and and it should not be underestimated that humans have done mistakes to force themselves to starve millions of people in the past, right? So I'm and
Unknown Speaker 1:19:14
it's usually governments that do it right, yeah, or every time
Speaker 1 1:19:16
it's yeah at the request of a mob of people that were like, you know, we know the right answer, and the right answer is radically change the agriculture system. Yeah,
Speaker 2 1:19:25
I mean, I mean, government was the way that we got here, and I don't think government is the way out, right. So, I mean, I think that, like, fundamentally, you really just, like, have to make the country rich to do this, because the food system right now is like built to feed the bottom line, really, but any consumer, I mean, this could happen within, like a decade. If everybody decided just to buy the nicest, organic, grass fed, whatever brand, and the market would shift very quickly, because markets are pretty efficient. But. The problem is that nobody can afford that, right. So, so how are you going to, like, demand that this, you know, the society changes to, like, a more expensive food system without everybody having the money to do it, right? It's like, pretty impossible. So, I mean, I do think that the like, the research, like, dedicated towards, like making better pesticides and their herbicides, or things like this, like, it's probably decent, if you can make something that's like, less toxic. No,
Speaker 1 1:20:27
it's like, totally choked. And the government has done this at the request of the very companies that made the current herbicides, right. They the, you know, when? When, when the activists went out to push against glyphosate. Monsanto would be like, You know what? Let's just add a couple more years of testing onto this and we'll prove that this is safe. And then anybody else that was coming up the pipe with a new pesticide, they're like, well, we don't have 30 million more dollars to be able to put in through the testing. And then on top of that, you look at a company like Bear, who bought Monsanto and then was handed these billion dollar judgments against them that glyphosate was causing cancer. Well, if you can make glyphosate the like result in billion dollar lawsuits against you, there is no nobody's going to want to bring a new chemistry that's even slightly dangerous, that's even slightly less. Lindy, what
Speaker 2 1:21:21
are the, what are the pests that glyphosate kills? Do you
Speaker 1 1:21:25
know? Oh, it's, it's an herbicide. So what it does is, it is, it kills the other plants. And, you know, I don't actually know the pathways. I could easily find many people that could, but the way that glyphosate works differently than other plants is it essentially just tells the plant, hey, it's autumn. Quit growing. You know, whatever energy you were putting towards seed production, just stop and die, whereas there are others that are burning plants to death or they're residual in the in the ground. So when I think people are blaming glyphosate, and they're like, ready to rip that out, because they're like, that's not Lindy, yeah. Well, lasso and warrant and dicamba and all these other ones, of which most people have no idea what the names of these herbicides are all about, like, Well, those are going to stay in your in your soil, and it's going to cause all, you know, other challenges or the other option, which is use labor. But you know, the amount that we've inflated our money makes it so the labor option is not tenable.
Speaker 2 1:22:25
Yeah, and yeah, I guess. I mean, people did grow plants before all these herbicides and pesticides existed and were able to feed a decent amount of people, but people wanted to shift towards a society where everyone lives in a city. I mean, that's that's probably closer to the root of the root of the problem than, you know, even government subsidies, right? Just like the the obsession around city living. So,
Speaker 1 1:22:47
yeah, nearly everyone that comes in to do a legacy interview when they're taught, when, if they're, like, over the age of 70, they all canned and, like, they canned with their mothers. They had their own gardens. This was a huge percentage of their time, really, their resources was put towards, you know, weeding those crops, cultivating them, canning them, putting them away, and then getting them out. And we don't do that at all now. We've outsourced that, and even the knowledge to bring that back would be so difficult, because, like, that was all artisan knowledge.
Speaker 2 1:23:21
Yeah, I'm a big believer in like, market forces, though. So I think if like, enough consumers demand it, like people end up filling those, those like spaces in the market. And I think that, like, we're seeing this in tech, like a lot, I think people have noticed that screens are pretty bad for you, and, like, pretty, pretty toxic. Like, if you're just like, staring into an iPhone screen all day, your attention is just like stolen. The rest of the world melts around you. Now you fried your dopamine.
Speaker 1 1:23:49
You know, you pop getting refreshed. Did I get a new email? But?
Speaker 2 1:23:52
But now people are making things like the daylight computer, where it's a it's essentially a computer that you can just like use, or a tablet, rather that you can just like, use outside, and you can see the screen in the daylight, which you can't with a normal led phone screen, because it's like, reflective, and it's also monochrome, so it has no colors, and it's like, fairly locked out, and so you're not scrolling all the time on it, but it's still, like, useful for all your daily activities. When people switch to screens like this and they just like, feel much better, but they have to pay a premium, obviously, compared to just like the most bottom of the line tablet. So I mean, I think that if like, people have enough money, they end up doing things like this, right? There's like, very good correlations between, like, wealth and lifespan outcomes. Like, if you're poor, you're probably going to die much faster, and your health is going to be much worse, right? So, yeah, I don't know. I
Speaker 1 1:24:38
know, and, like, I just to clarify the vision that you're talking about with, like more pasture raised chickens that I raise in my backyard, or or more beef being made by local producers. What keeps us from doing that is regulation. Right? It is everything from your city government saying whether or not you can have chickens in your backyard. Guard to the major packing plant saying, like no, in order to be able to sell your beef across state lines, even though it's, you know, a mile and a half down the road, we have to have a USDA wizard come in here and, you know, pass the blessing on it to make sure that it's safe. If you got rid of those rules, if you made Thomas Massie the, you know, the king of the USDA. I think you would watch this happen, and you could bring it to a price point that would be more reasonable.
Speaker 2 1:25:27
Yeah. I mean, I used to live in upstate New York, and I was getting gallons of, like, raw, organic, a, two, a two, pasture raised milk for $8 a gallon. And I was getting it, which is, like, a reasonable price, for 3000 calories. It's like, much less than whatever other food you're buying, if you're buying, like a processed food even a lot of the time. And then I was also getting beef for $5 a pound, like, of the same quality, but, you know, it's like, it's like an hour trek out, out to there, so it's, it's difficult. And then also, like, if everybody was buying from them, they wouldn't meet quantity because, like, they have, you know, they have deals with Organic Valley, for example, like the milk producers that they need to produce 1000 pounds of milk every, you know, every couple days. And then the milk truck comes, and if they sell too much to their local community, then they break their deal with, like, the giant milk reseller. So then, you know, there were definitely barriers. And some of the one of the first farms that I wanted to start to buy raw milk from, they were producing raw milk, but they couldn't sell it because of like regulations and and one day, the farmer, he posted on Facebook that the that Walmart and like their beef producers were putting red dyes without telling anybody in the beef to make it look shelf stable for longer, right, to make it look fresh for longer. And the day after that, like, immediately, you know, he posted this at like, seven o'clock at night, the day after USDA, auditors came and, like, did, like, a really, just rough audit over, like, his entire operation costed him a lot of money. So it's, you know, it definitely seems that there's like forces that are, you know, there's like an antibody response of the of the big industry here that that happened, and there's like forces that are trying to keep it the way it is, because a lot of us isn't a lot of us at interest, yeah,
Speaker 1 1:27:17
my sense from having met a lot of people in big food and big ag is that the people trying to change the system benefit from painting those people as nefarious. And I think a lot of them are no different than your State Farm Insurance Guy. They're just like, a guy that shows up at work and, like, he's just trying to make his bottom line work, and he's like, you know, just doing what comes naturally. He sees papers and he reads and he says, Oh, this one says it's okay. And I think that, you know, I understand the desire to have adversarial because it motivates people, but I think that I've met a lot of these people, and I think that they're just
Speaker 2 1:28:04
right. And I think that, you know, it's probably not just like individuals who are scheming and saying, oh, I want, you know, to make the world an unhealthy place, but like, emergently, a lot of a lot of just like, really negative and terrible things can happen without any individual person, just like, just plotting to do terrible things. I'm
Speaker 1 1:28:23
in total agreement that you have this, like, consensus that emerges. You have this like, well, we needed to do this thing, and so we created all these other reasons in order to be able to achieve that goal. I get that, and I know I'm gonna hear a whole bunch from my audience about how conspiracies are real, and there are bad people out there doing things. I just think that when I hear Cali, those two people talking that you mentioned earlier in the podcast, I think, like, I think if you met these people all the way up to the CEOs, you would, you would be like, they're really not as impressive as this, and I don't think that they're able to pull together these giant nefarious things, but it's probably more of a result of being emergent, yeah,
Speaker 2 1:29:08
and I think there's like, a spectrum of this between industries like, I think there are definitely industries where just like, emergently, you end up doing really terrible things that are just like, bad for the world, but with everybody Being good intentioned, like, in the middle, like, I think if there's like a giant, like soybean oil refinery in China, like everybody working at that company, you know, company or, or, I guess, government owned company, but company, and the people who are running it and everything, I bet everybody is like, well intentioned. They just, there's like, I want to feed people, right? But then what you get, especially in China, is, you know, they have this mutation, the Asian Glo gene, where, you know, if they drink alcohol, they get red faced, right? This is a deficiency in an enzyme that detoxes what are called aldehydes. This is what forms whenever you fry polyunsaturated fats, and it's toxic to you. So they have, like, much, much worse health outcomes whenever they. Eat the same food as us because of this, like mutation and like, especially over there, like, they're just trying to feed their population. They're making sesame oil, they're making soybean oil. Then everyone eats it. They get, like, lean diabetes. They their teeth fall out. They have all these, like, terrible health outcomes, and it's just like destroying them. But nobody is, nobody's like, nefarious there. They're just trying to feed people. But then there's also organizations like the CIA or FBI, where people go into it because they want power, and they want to play this political game, right? And I think there's like a spectrum there where it's like, Where does the USDA, or where do these organizations fall on this? Like, the more political you get, the more people who are in there are probably trying to play a political game because of the nature of the organization they're trying to seize power. This
Speaker 1 1:30:42
is brilliant. I really think that that's an insightful way to look at it. And I my first thought is, I think even people that joined the CIA and FBI did not join it because they were power hungry. I think they joined it because they were told or propagandized, or they watched a lot of movies, and they thought, Oh, this is like, where I can go to do good. And then what is good changes based on where you sit in an organization and who you're hearing like, who is the other side and who's our side. And I mean, I because, I mean, I watched it happen. I was at the World Bank. And I mean, I did everything I could to get in there, because it was the good organization. And then you get there, and if you're looking around and you and you don't let the blinders go on, you see how people will change from the reason we need to invest in this country is because this will help them out the most to, well, we maybe need to do something to move that bad leader out of power, because he's preventing us from being able to do all the good things that we need to do, and at a scale of like the CIA or the FBI. I mean, the power must inherently corrupt people, inherently I think probably the USDA is the exact same way. Yeah.
Speaker 2 1:32:00
Yeah. Well, I also think that there is, you know, there's, like, some evolutionary advantage to having sociopaths in your society, where, you know, if you're going to war against another tribe, like, you need the people who can go over there, kill a bunch of guys and then not be
Unknown Speaker 1:32:13
come back and just be fine, yeah, exactly. So,
Speaker 2 1:32:16
like, like, we still have those in society, like, definitively. And like, where do you put those people? And like, where do they end up, right? So, you know, I think it's like, I think it's probably inaccurate to say that every single person, or even, you know, like, 99% of people who are going into these, really, these organizations where you can accumulate a lot of power are, like, good people, necessarily. You
Speaker 1 1:32:38
know, I am speaking from my own like experience, and I now, now at 42 I have encountered people where you're like, Whoa. The thing that makes you up, the thing that drives you is so different for me that it's like, you don't even fit into my model. So I I understand that, um, man, I have a ton more questions for you. I thought this was a fantastic conversation. I actually have to wrap up. But if people wanted to encounter more of your ideas, and they wanted to, you know, challenge you, where would they go?
Speaker 2 1:33:13
So, yeah, you can go to x.com, or twitter.com. I think the link still works. Slash anabology is the name A, N, A, B, O, L, O, G, y, and I also have some websites. One is called longestlevers.com where I just post protocols for free. I also have a couple other sites, but you can find those on my twitter so and
Speaker 1 1:33:39
as we wrap up just one quick thought, What is something that you think people should let me rephrase that. I want to ask a parting question. It's my favorite question to ask. I ask it on the Ag tribes report. So as a parting question, who is one person out there on x that you respect but you totally disagree with?
Unknown Speaker 1:34:08
Let me think I
Speaker 2 1:34:19
have to think for a while on this. I think it's hard to remember people. I kind of feel like the answer is that I, like, have stopped scrolling a lot because I've like, leaned into this, just like human friendly technology, like reflective LCDs and these things that have, like, really pulled me off of off of the internet. I would say, I guess maybe like, Casey means, or Callie means, like these people who are kind of, like anti sugar, so like, I respect them just like an insane amount, because this is what I want to I want government to, like, move in this direction where we're focused more on, like, the health of humans. Yeah, you know, obviously I don't want this us to have mass starvation. But, like, I think that health has, like, not been a priority of anybody, like, ever in government, it seems, until now. And I think that's a great thing, but I just like, super disagree about the direction against sugar.
Speaker 1 1:35:17
Well, anabology, thanks for coming on. Thanks, man, that was sick. Dude, that was awesome.
Interviewer 1:35:34
Okay, if you stuck around this long, then you deserve to know what kind of changes we're going to make to this. First of all, I want to say thank you to the many, many people that wrote me DMS and emails and texts. It was overwhelming this week to come to the full realization that the numbers on the downloads are actually people that are listening while they're washing dishes or driving their vehicle or doing chores or whatever it is that you're doing when you listen. It really means a lot to me. How many of you wrote to describe how often you Listen, why you listen, what makes it great? Because of so many of you, it makes me go like, yes, I want to do this. I love it. I've always loved the podcast. In fact, one of the greatest things about doing this was that it allowed me to overcome a problem I've had for my whole life, which is I would have conversations with somebody on a bus in a bar at a restaurant at a baseball game, and I would leave that and I would want to go tell every single person I saw for the next week. Oh my gosh, you're not going to believe how interesting this person was. Let me tell you all about him. And then they said this, and then they said this. Well, the reason that I don't have that undying urge anymore is because I get to share it with you. I get to have these conversations, and you get to sit in with them, and I'm so grateful that you listen. And I, for one, know that your attention is the most valuable thing that you own. So I'm always grateful for every single person that listens. And so because I got some great feedback, some of it stung a little bit, but because I got this great feedback, it brought me into a place of creativity, where I could start thinking, What about what I'm doing is really important and needs to be here, and what can I get rid of? What can allow me to focus on the most important thing, which is having really great conversations that I'm interested in, and what else is fluff that I don't need. So some of the things you're going to notice are going to be, I'm going to start podcasts differently. I don't know that I'm going to put in all the work on music intros and all of this stuff. I don't know that I'm going to do that. I don't also think I want to have a more natural start to things. Another thing I'm going to do is I'm probably not going to release a podcast every week. There are some weeks when I find a guest, because I need to get the podcast done. And it's not to say that they are not brilliant and amazing people. Literally, every single person has a story. I believe that in the deepest fibers of my being, but if I am not interested in the the guest or what they're talking about, it's just like trying to read a book that you don't care about. You can read the words, but how much are you really taking in? So because I'm going to free myself from that, it means that anytime you see a podcast come out that is titled VCP, the Vance Crowe podcast, you can know that it is going to be an interesting conversation with somebody as fantastic as anabology, but with somebody that I've been able to actually take the time and attention to really dig into it. Also, I am getting rid of the video component. By far and away, more people listen to this podcast than watch it. And I've been spending a lot of resources on recording it with video, but then also editing it and trying to create shorts and trying to build up an audience there. And you know what? I don't care about YouTube. And if you're not going to do video, then what you need to do is you need to rely on people to write reviews and to share it with their friends. So I am going to commit to doing way more interesting podcasts, probably a lot less of them. I am still going to do the Ag tribes report every Thursday night, but what I need from you in order to make this work is for you to write me reviews and to share episodes with your family and your friends and tell them, this is a great podcast. I thought of you. I think you're gonna enjoy this, and you would not believe how big of a difference that will make for me. So the way that we grow this is we continue to have legacy interviews blossom. The way that legacy interviews blossoms is more people listen to the podcast, because almost all of our legacy interviews come from people just like you that listen to the podcast. If you're interested in having me record a legacy interview with your loved ones. Go to legacy interviews.com. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for all the feedback. I want to throw a special shout out to Tim, Steve, Ashley, Dan Nicholas, Bucha. Brent, all of you gave me really pointed feedback, and there is nothing more valuable in this world than somebody that cares about you that tells you what you need to do to get better. So thank you so much for that, and we will be back when we're back with another great interview. You
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