Dr Shawn Baker - The Carnivore Diet: Eat Steak Every Day To Get Mentally & Physically Stronger

Full transcript: Dr Shawn Baker on London Real

2:38 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Dr Shawn Baker, the best-selling author, international speaker, podcast host, world-class athlete and former orthopedic surgeon.

2:59 You are best known as the author of The Carnivore Diet, which popularized the health benefits of a zero-carb, high-protein, meat-only existence that has changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world, including Joe Rogan and Dr Jordan Peterson. You have spent much of your life pushing your body to its limits as a record-breaking rower in national strongman competitions, powerlifting tournaments and competitive rugby. You also served in the US Air Force as an orthopedic trauma specialist in Afghanistan.

3:27 You believe that animal protein is one of the most powerful tools that can help anyone reach and maintain a healthy body, and that by simplifying our diets we can all achieve peak physical performance. Shawn, welcome back to London Real. Brian, pleasure to be back. Thank you, great to have you here. Last time we did this in New York City in 2020 in January, before they were even using the word COVID, right?

3:48 It was crazy. We were in Chinatown and then I came back to London. You went back home, and then the whole world has been a little crazy for the last two and a half years, right? It has. It’s been a fun I’m saying that facetiously.

4:00 Fun. Two years for sure. It has been fun, very eye-opening, right? We got to learn a lot about ourselves and who is around us. So look, I want to jump into this.

4:08 I was watching a bunch of your videos recently, and one of them you were talking about, straight out, look, I eat a dozen or two dozen eggs per day, three to four pounds of meat, and that’s what you eat. And I’m sure when you tell most people that they look at you and think, well, how is that possible? And I want to talk about that today, and talk about some of the myths and some of the conceptions and misconceptions. Um, you know, just to remind people, I spent a year as a vegan.

4:34 I trained for an Ironman competition as a vegan, and I went through the whole thing. I got to be friends with some of the top vegans, like John Joseph and Rich Roll. I also had, um, Charles Poliquin come in here during that movie and call them all idiots. Uh, it was fascinating at the time. Um, and may he rest in peace, by the way.

4:53 And it was great to have Charles here, and, um, he’s like the bad guy in the movie, but, you know, later as I went back to, I kind of understood what he was talking about. But I’ve been through that lifestyle, and towards the end of that year I was just asking myself, am I staying vegan to be dogmatic, because I have a tendency to do things until they’re not worth doing anymore, like drinking and drugs? And I thought, wait a second. And I remember I had some sushi and some red meat a year later, and my body was like, yep, this is where we want to be.

5:20 So I’ve been there. I’d love to get your experiences. Where do we start? What are most people’s initial reactions when they hear about your lifestyle, your diet? Yeah, well, most people obviously think it’s crazy, and I thought it was crazy when I heard about it, you know, six years ago when I began this journey, and I think it’s because we are so used to a Western culture.

5:40 You know, this meat-based diet is very common throughout the world. You know, different parts of the world, we can look at Nilotic African tribes, we can look at circumpolar tribes, we can look at Mongolians, you know, southern Brazil and Argentina with the gaucho population. So it depends on your perspective as to what’s normal. You know, in the United States a meat-based diet is crazy. In Mongolia that’s Tuesday.

6:01 You know, I mean, it’s just normal in parts of the world. And so, um, I’ve had a lot of people now do this. I mean, like you mentioned, tens upon tens of thousands of people, so now we have more data points that are showing that there is something here, and we are seeing significant improvement. I think uh, you know, we’re seeing this big push towards plant-based. As you use, you can’t not be aware of this, right?

6:25 And so what we’re ultimately going to see with that is a drive to more and more processed foods, and this is, I mean, this is the problem. This is why we see people that go on a whole-food plant-based diet, they do see some improvement in their health. The same thing happens when we go on a whole-food animal-based diet. Same thing starts to happen. The difference is, with a whole-food animal-based diet you don’t have the issues with fragility, healing issues, the mental health issues that are often associated.

6:52 You know, we have several scientific studies that show that plant-based diets are associated with higher rates of mental health disorders, osteoporosis and fractures, poor healing, and then all kinds of different deficiency states, stunting in children. And so we don’t have that on a meat-based diet. And so it’s been very, very interesting to see Harvard University has now done a study on a carnivore diet. We’ve got 2,000 people on the diet, something like 92 percent of the diabetics came off their insulin completely, 100 of them came off all other injectable medications, and I think 84 came off all oral medications, which is, there’s no other intervention for diabetes.

7:34 It works that powerfully. So we’re seeing some really, really neat stuff. So you’re saying there’s a couple things going on here. If you go full carnivore, almost by definition you’re not eating those processed foods, right? Whereas most Americans, whether they want to admit it or not, are eating lots of processed foods, right?

7:51 Whether you’re vegan, whether you think you’re healthy, whether you’re an athlete, you’re probably putting a lot of nonsense in your body. Yeah, it’s, it’s empty. You know, it’s interesting because we’re getting this push. You know, we see these Beyond Meat burgers, these Impossible burgers, these cricket burgers. You know, they want to see bugs.

8:04 Now, basically what they do is, you know, they refine these foods and they process them so heavily, turn them into powders. And you think about, could we ever have eaten powders in the wild? I mean, if you and I went out hunting, foraging, around, and, you know, out in, out in the UK, we would not come into powder. We wouldn’t have a way to turn things into powder, and so the more these powders we consume, it actually changes the absorption characteristics of the food.

8:28 And so our microbiome, which normally will actually consume up to 22 percent of our food, they don’t do that when it’s powderized, because it’s bypassed. It doesn’t need to have that done. So it’s interesting. In the United States, in the last 30 years we’ve had a dramatic increase in obesity. I’m, you know, I’m here in the UK.

8:45 I’m glad to see you’re not where we are at, the United States, yet. Are you still, about, noticeable? It’s about, you’re about 20 years behind. I think in 20 years the UK will catch up to where we are in the United States. You look around London, you’re like, wow, there’s not so many fat people.

8:56 Absolutely noticeable. Absolutely, in the airports and stuff. That’s noticeable. Absolutely. Most of the time when I see fat people here, they’re American tourists, sad to say.

9:06 But, you know, as we consume more and more of these, these, these powders, uh, you know, like I said, in the last 30 years, it’s the data on food consumption. United States has shown no increase in food consumption. There’s no calorie increase in either food availability or calorie consumption, and yet our obesity rates have continued to skyrocket. No calorie increase. No calorie increases.

9:26 No change in activity level. Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s what the data actually shows. Right now. Now, prior to that, from 1960 to about 1990, we saw about a 300 calorie, you know, per day increase, but since 1990 has been flat, and obesity rates have continued to climb. And the thought is, because we’re consuming these ultra-processed foods which bypass a lot of the microbiome, we absorb more calories.

9:47 We also set ourselves up for gut dysbiosis, gut permeability issues, and that drives continued, you know, weight gain. So it’s very, it’s very interesting dynamic. Wow, that surprises me. I just assumed we were drinking more, uh, you know, sweet drinks and there was more high-fructose corn syrup. We’re actually eating a little bit less sugar than we were 15, 20 years ago, surprisingly.

10:08 Wow. But our caloric consumption has not really gone up at all, but we’re heavier, and we’re definitely heavier, and that’s because what you think is the, the makeup of the food. I think what’s happening, the nature and the quality of the food has changed significantly, so that it’s not what we eat. You know, it’s the calories are not what we eat. It’s what we actually enjoy, what we actually absorb.

10:27 So for absorbing more of the calories, you know, we don’t have to eat as much to do that. And the nice thing about a meat-based diet is there’s a difference between acellular food, these are the powders, and food that is still in its whole form. So when you take a steak, piece of chicken, an egg, or even ground beef, but still the cells are still intact. But once you put it through that high-level industrial processing, all the cells have been broken down.

10:50 The energy, particularly with carbohydrates, there’s so much more available to us, and so we just basically absorb more calories. What will you eat today? Now you’re on the road, you’re in London, like, but what will you eat? In the last couple days? So I’ve been eating, so I’m staying at a hotel.

11:05 I’m staying, I’m staying in Kensington, a little hotel there. They have a breakfast buffet. I eat a dozen eggs for breakfast, and a few, I guess, rashers of bacon. I have a little bit of a little bit of cheese, and a little bit of salmon. That’s my breakfast for the last three days.

11:18 Um, tonight we’re going out. We’re going out to Blacklock, Covent Garden, or something. Yeah. Gonna have some steaks here tonight. So, okay.

11:26 And then when you get there, what will you order? I, I don’t know. Have to look at the menu. Okay. But a big steak, or a couple steaks?

11:32 Well, I’ll probably get a steak, maybe an appetizer, or some sort. You know. Okay, and vegetables, or no? No, no fruit. Problem?

11:39 No. So it’s protein only. Well, protein and fat. And fat that’s important, right? Okay, so that’s with cheese and things like that, right?

11:46 Right, or the fat on the meat. And fat on the meat, ribeye steak, or something? Yeah. And do you prefer, um, red meat over anything else, or do you like to mix it up? I prefer red meat, for sure.

11:56 Okay. Yeah. So if your breakfast buffet had bread, meat, you would be, I would eat a steak if it was there, but it’s not. Yeah, but eggs are also important. Yeah, you just feel the need, or you feel better with them, or, uh, well, I actually feel better on straight meat, to be honest, but I’ll include X because it’s convenient.

12:11 Okay, and you’ve been doing this now for how long? Six years. Six years straight. And when you deviate from it, you feel it right away, right? Sure.

12:18 And you’re 55 years old, correct? And you just won a rowing competition. Well, I just, I just, I just picked up the number one ranked time in the world on the concept too. Yeah, right. And that’s a, it’s a sprint, 500-meter sprint, right?

12:31 And you’re 55, and you’re beating Olympians, 40-year-olds? Yeah. You’re not 45. You’re 55, right? All right.

12:41 That’s so, again, that’s a data point. That, you know, it’s one data point, but it’s something to mention. All right. Well, I’ll tell you, yeah, the number two guy, the number three guy, and then another five guys. Guess what diet they’re on?

12:52 Carnivore. We’re all carnivore, really. Yep. All right. So not only is it a way of decreasing inflammation and just having a better human life, you think it’s a diet for peak human performance?

13:01 Potentially, potentially. I am now, like, there is a, uh, Michigan State decathlete. He’s one of the top guys in the country on it. There is a guy who just made the US Olympic wrestling team. He’s on it.

13:13 Several guys in the NFL, some with several top-level MMA fighters. Several athletes from all over the world have done this. Uh, rugby players, jiu-jitsu athletes. So, yeah, but Shawn, everyone knows you need carbs. You need glucose.

13:28 Okay, you need glucose. Explain this. So glucose, we clearly need. Our brain needs it. Our red blood cells need it.

13:34 Parts of our kidney need it. There are certain cells that are absolutely required glucose. The nice thing is the body is designed so we can make plenty of glucose. We have no problem. My glucose is never zero.

13:43 In fact, sometimes it’s quite high, particularly during a high-level sprinting and heavy, intense activity. So through something called gluconeogenesis, which is a conversion of amino acids or glycerol from triglycerides from fat, we can turn that into glucose. All the glucose we need, and in fact it gives you what you need. You know, so your body makes exactly what you need instead of overconsuming, because that’s what we often do when we eat carbohydrates.

14:09 Carbohydrates, and I don’t want to demonize carbohydrates. A lot of people do fine with carbohydrates. I don’t think they’re evil or anything like that. For some people they just do better without them. I’m one of those, one of those people.

14:19 And when it comes to certain health conditions, clearly there’s a benefit from eliminating them, or drastically reducing them. So I find that, uh, like my liver through another process called glycogenolysis, so it breaks down the glycogen. Your liver can increase that by 15-fold just with exercise, and I’ve had no problem. I’ve gone in there with relatively low, low blood glucose and pulled out world-class, world-class performance. You know, really.

14:46 And so all right. And so world-class athletes can have a meat-only diet and still perform? They have to change their diet around that, or as long as they have enough calories and the time in between. Well, it’s, you know, there’s a transition period, so it may take several months, maybe up to six months for some, to fully adapt to that. And then there is, you know, certainly the issue of eating enough, because that’s a challenge.

15:06 A lot of people lose weight on this, because it’s hard. The problem with meat, the good problem, is it’s very satiating. The bad problem is it’s very satisfying. So if you’re trying to maintain a lot of weight, you got to eat a lot, and sometimes that’s hard to do. Yeah.

15:19 You have to almost kind of force-feed yourself to keep that calorie amount coming up. Yeah. I know what that’s like. I haven’t. When I went on the vegan diet, I found that I, I guess I had to eat more, but I was training for the Ironman as well, but, but yeah, the meat is a good thing because you’re not eating those carbs, so it’s a great way to lose weight.

15:38 I think people have always known that Atkins diets, things like that. But if you want to maintain and keep glucose levels, you have to educate your body that it has to consume more. Potentially. Yeah, particularly if you’re an athlete. Yes.

15:49 Okay, all right. Um, I went to Botswana on safari many years ago, and I remember going out there and I saw the lions, and they would eat the gazelles. And I remember thinking to myself later, you know, they didn’t have a loaf of bread with that. They didn’t have a salad, and like clearly, these animals have been living for hundreds of years without complex carbohydrates that were farmed and then baked. And I just remember having this realization that they seem to be doing okay, and they’re eating meat, and meat, and meat.

16:22 Do you look at this historic perspective sometimes, at least when you’re having debates or when you’re considering this? Well, I mean, you know, I mean, obviously they’re different species, right? And so there’s that caveat there. But if we look at, you know, the entirety of evolution and all the animals that ever existed on earth, something around 80 percent of them have been carnivorous. That has been the default setting for animal, you know, animal survival.

16:47 And to become adapted to consuming plants took a lot of specialization. And so we see these big ruminant, you know, animals, these herbivores and other animals, they have this adaptation in their guts. And humans, you know, we have some capacity to do that. It’s not, you know, I think humans are omnivores. I mean, I’ve never said humans are strict carnivores.

17:05 We are omnivorous. I think we favor carnivory, so something called a facultative carnivore, which means we do better with meat, but we have the capacity. It’s like a hybrid car. Like, it can do electric and fuel, and it prefers the fuel, right? So if we have to, we can go forage and hunt and gather, right, but we would prefer to eat meat.

17:23 Well, if you watch any survival show, you know what happens, right? Right. The ones that kill the big animal win, right? And that’s the concentrated, nutrient-dense calories that you talk a lot about as well. So, 80 percent carnivorous when you look at all those species, and that tells you something.

17:39 Well, it tells you that’s the more efficient way to do it. You know, you think about you and I are made up of animal cells, right? And what do those animal cells need for nutrition? Where would you find that? Well, you’d find it in other animal cells.

17:50 I mean, it’s very simplistic, but that’s all it really needs to be. It’s, you know, we require certain things that are in our body, and where we get those, we get them from very similar places. Now, you can use, you know, I use the analogy, if you’re trying to build a brick house, you’re going to pick up bricks, right? You’re not going to start with pieces of 2×4, right? So there is, uh, you know, the right tools for the job.

18:12 You mentioned ruminant animals. When I was researching this, I had to go look up what that meant. What is a ruminant animal, and why is that kind of important just for eating those types of animals? Well, a ruminant animal, the most common, we’re going to be familiar with, is a cow. So it has a four-chambered stomach.

18:29 You know, one of them is a rumen, and they’ve got other, other parts in them, and some of the other parts, and that’s important in the way they have to break down food. So for instance, a cow is eating, you know, 100 pounds of food a day. You know, you know, probably more appropriate for what we’re talking about, if we look at a gorilla. You know, a lot of people talk about gorillas and how big and strong they are. Gorillas are about 300 pounds, right?

18:53 I’m 250 pounds, so slightly bigger than me. I eat four pounds of food a day. A gorilla has to eat 50 to 60 pounds of food a day, because they’re that inefficient. Not only do they do that, they have to recycle their food. They eat their own feces to recycle B12.

19:08 And so if we’re going on, you know, saying eat like a gorilla, well, are you willing to eat 40 pounds of food, and perhaps recycle your food? So that’s, you know, that’s a difference there. Yeah. Again, back to my trip in Africa. I got to ride these elephants around, and I did a safari first in the Range Rovers, and then on the elephant.

19:25 First of all, elephant goes much slower, so you don’t see as much stuff, but what you realize is an elephant eats all day, like that’s what it does, like 16 hours a day. And when it’s not getting a little bit of a coaxing from the rider, it literally is just pulling up, and it’s got to constantly do that just to maintain, like, the calories it needs. And it’s massively inefficient, and it’s actually quite shocking. And you see a lot of these animals, they spend most of their waking hours.

19:53 Yeah, back to the point of a gorilla. A gorilla spends 80 percent of its waking hours chewing. Chewing. 80 percent of your day is chewing, right? And these ruminant animals have this fascinating system through all their chambers of stomachs that basically take these vegetable matter that we would never want to eat, or could eat, and process it into this tasty meat.

20:13 It’s like a meat manufacturer. Well, they turn it into fat, right? They turn it into short-chain fatty acids. All the fiber they consume, that they ingest, they actually absorb fat out of that. So they’re actually on a fat-based diet.

20:23 So at the end of the day, we need fat, whether we get it from converting fiber into fat. We can. We have some capacity to do that in our own guts, about 200 calories a day worth. That’s where we hear about the benefits of fiber, because we get these short-chain fatty acids that we absorb as fat. So you can just eat the fat and get the same benefits.

20:41 Okay. Do we need fiber in our diet? We’ve been told all of our lives we need fiber. We’ve been told so many nutritional anecdotes. Maybe we’ll get into them today, but fiber.

20:51 Yeah. So fiber, that’s a great, great question. Um, so I haven’t had any, essentially no fiber in six years. I’m not dead, right? Clearly.

20:58 So it’s not essential. It’s conditionally beneficial. Now, again, when we’re talking about, you know, eating a diet that is mostly acellular, like we look at the standard American diet, it’s a bunch of processed food. So when you add fiber to that, you slow down some of that digestion. You give the microbiome a chance to, you know, to function like it’s supposed to.

21:16 You mitigate some of the glucose spikes with that. Fiber also produces satiety, right? So if you’re eating these candy bars all day long, you’re not going to get much satiety, but you put fiber in there, it slows things down. It has a volume effect. So there is clearly a benefit to fiber in the context of a junk food diet.

21:34 But when you put it in the context of an all-meat diet, it’s completely unnecessary, right? It’s just not needed, because it’s a completely different game that you’re playing. But if you’re adding to a junk diet, it can actually make you feel full and slow down a little bit. Right. Okay.

21:47 My grandpa was a cattle rancher in Arizona, and I remember going to the feedlot as a kid, and I remember it smelled really bad, because he had 20,000 head of cattle, and his job was to bring these cows, for the last few months their life, fatten them up and send them for the kill. And we used to get a half a cow every year, and we’d drive it down to San Diego, and I grew up eating meat. It was amazing. Then the whole cholesterol scare happened, I think in the ’80s when I grew up, and my mom actually was feeding me non-fat milk.

22:13 So I grew up on skim milk, because fat was bad. And then there was eggs and cholesterol, and this whole thing that was, what, ’80s and ’90s, and became this whole concept that now maybe we’re starting to question. And I was just wondering, what do we know and not know about some of those facts? Well, first of all, dietary cholesterol doesn’t seem to have an impact on serum cholesterol. Saturated fat does, in some people, not everybody.

22:38 So there’s a lot of people going up a meat-based diet, they see no change in their cholesterol. Some of them do see a pretty significant rise. And so when we’re measuring cholesterol, the problem is things like LDL cholesterol, the so-called bad LDL, is not particularly accurate. That’s been shown to be kind of a weak marker. Now there’s something called ApoB, which is a little bit more accurate.

22:58 These are the actual particles which cholesterol is contained within, and when those go up, your risk goes up. However, that’s assuming all things are equal. So, all things considered, if your ApoB level goes up, your risk for heart disease has gone up. Now, what also happens is a lot of the risk factors come down. And so we know that things like diabetes, for instance, diabetes is probably the biggest driver of heart disease, and so if you get better glycemic control, and that’s what happens on a meat-based diet, we have people coming off their diabetes medicine, blood glucose completely normalizes, that goes down.

23:29 We see inflammation drop dramatically. We see things like our triglyceride levels go down, our HDL goes up. So all, many, many risk factors for heart disease go down significantly. One factor sometimes goes up, called ApoB or LDL cholesterol. Do they cancel out?

23:46 That’s a question we don’t know the answer to. Now, we’ve got a lot of early information on people, they’ve had vascular imaging after doing this diet for three years, five years, 10 years, and the vessels seemed to be very clear. So, like for my, for instance, mine, when I had my heart scanned on it, was completely clear. You know, my coronary artery calcium scan, complete zero, after several years on the diet, because the thought, the theory, is that when your cholesterol goes up, that starts clogging your blood and will build up in your heart, and that leads to the heart disease.

24:15 That was always the narrative. That’s still, in the mainstream, cardiology will still make that argument. Now, the question is, can it go up and your risk go down? And the answer is probably yes. Now, if everything stays the same and it goes up, then you’ve increased your risk.

24:31 But we see a lot of mitigating factors that probably don’t know for sure. There’s some studies in progress right now that’ll help us answer that question. Okay, which, I guess, gets to my next point, which is kind of around the food industry. So again, we got sold this no-fat narrative. These low-fat foods then started becoming high in sugar, low in fat.

24:53 And again, we started morphing into all these processed foods, and we found out at the end of it, via some studies, that a lot of these companies weren’t even being truthful about some of these things, and the sugar content went up. And we found that very possibly we were eating the wrong things. Um, what happened there, and has that narrative changed? Do most people nowadays not believe that fat is necessarily bad for you? Well, it depends on who you talk to.

25:20 I mean, certainly, I think the main, the main thought right now is still that fat is bad for you. Saturated fat is bad for you. Red meat is bad for you. Butter is bad for you. We should be eating canola oil, soybean oil, margarine.

25:35 We should be avoiding, you know, maybe have some lean meat, eat a lot of vegetables, eat a lot of fiber. That’s still the main messaging that we get out of the medical community, I think. Relative to the sort of standard American diet, that’s probably reasonable advice. However, I think it’s also causing a lot of people to have problems. Right.

25:53 Okay. So if you’re on the McDonald’s diet, that might be a better transition, but if you look at that compared to, say, a carnivore diet, it’s not necessarily superior. I don’t think so, right? That’s not mine, that’s, that’s not what I’ve seen with now literally tens of thousands of people. It’s funny, though, because, like, you can sell it to someone, it sounds like it makes sense.

26:14 Look at this rich butter, look at this red meat, it tastes so good, you’re clearly, it’s bad for you, and it’s back in the ’80s, it was like, fat makes you fat, which people didn’t really question, but it doesn’t really make sense. And that we’ll get on to the veganism article. Our argument, which is not far behind that, but, um, is it frustrating to you to see that kind of sold, and that people even buy that without thinking about the science? Well, I think, you know, I think the problem is most people don’t think at all.

26:42 There’s, there’s a minority of people that even care about, you know, what they eat. I mean, really, the biggest decision-making point is, does it taste good, and how cheap is it? That’s, that’s what probably 90 percent of people make their decisions on. So the apathy is more a problem. I can deal with the people that disagree, because I can put the counter-arguments out very easily, because they’re thinking about it, right?

27:03 They’re at least thinking about it. When you have most people that could care less, you know, I’ve, as an orthopedic surgeon, I’ve literally cut people’s legs off and they refuse to change their diet, and it’s clearly because of their diet, and they still won’t do it. So we do have some missions with very significant issues with addictions. The food companies know how to addict people. They, they study this.

27:22 They actually have scientists. It’s like if you had a heroin addict, and they were studying how to make the best heroin that is most addictive, and putting it out there in the population. That’s what they’re doing with the food, and they know it, and you can just walk around, and everybody is everywhere. Everyone’s addicted to it. You know, it’s hard to stop because it’s free, it’s ubiquitous, and your grandmother gives it to you.

27:43 You know, so how do you, how do you stop that? Your grandmother gives it to you? What do you mean? Well, you know, she’s making you, the good little cook, cookies and cakes and all this stuff. You know, you get a reward for being a good kid.

27:52 Right, right. Yeah. And then the food company makes an even better version of that. Right? Because your grandma used to make stuff.

27:58 At least it was five ingredients. It took her two hours or three hours. And food company, you know, there was, there was an interesting study on, I think, it was millennials or Generation Z. They stopped eating much cereal, and you think, well, maybe they care about their health, and they’re not wanting to eat a lot of cereal. No, that’s not why.

28:13 Cereal took too much work, because they had to wash a dish so much. Instead of, you know, instead of pouring milk in the, in the into the bowl and eating their cereal and washing the dish, that’s too much work. They’d rather have a little package they can open up, throw it in their mouth, and throw the wrapper away. That’s how lazy we’ve gotten with regards to preparing our food. Right?

28:31 We’ve gotten super lazy, and so we should be questioning the kind of foods we’re eating. I remember, I, I had somebody come over to my house few years ago, and they brought candy for my kids, and they like, here’s some candy, and I was just like, what are you doing? They’re like, oh, it’s nice to give kids candy and buy them ice cream. I’m like, why don’t you just punch them in the face? Like, seriously, that’s what you’re doing to them, if you think about it that way.

28:50 But I guess we’ve got this whole this whole history of conditioning. Well, you get, I mean, it’s tough with a parent, because you always, like, you know, you feel like, I don’t want my kid to live as, like, a monk or something like that. So there’s always, well, a little’s never going to kill them. The problem is, it’s their birthday every day. I mean, every day at school, that’s somebody’s birthday, or a pizza party, or holiday.

29:09 You know, it just never ends. And so birthday cakes were meant to be eaten once a year. We eat it every day for breakfast now. Yeah, in the forms of our series, right? Sure.

29:18 So, just to finish up, the food industry, they create, it’s a bit like our mobile phone industries. They’re some of the best at creating addictions, right? But they create this processed food that doesn’t satiate us, that’s got the cool packaging, it’s got the great taste, the crunchiness, the this and this, and it gets you addicted to, like I said, the look, the packaging, the feel, the marketing message. Kind of like the Marlboro Man, but probably for food.

29:42 And then people just, without thinking, subconsciously they’re saying, ah, this makes me feel better, so I’m gonna grab it on a day where I’m stressed, and my phone’s beeping, and there’s some politician on the thing, and they just go for it, right? And they ended up and then these things build habits. And so even when you amputate someone’s leg, you can’t say to them, just stop doing what even you know is stupid to do, and then go back and do it. Well, the problem is what’s the alternative?

30:06 I mean, what’s your typical alternative? Is eat some salad low-fat dressing, and that tastes horrible. Nobody wants to do that. But when you say, hey, have a steak and eggs, it’s a lot of people can get behind that, because it’s, it’s viscerally and primarily satisfying. You know, you know when you’re really really hungry, and you eat a nice steak, it’s like, I’m actually nourished, whereas you eat some of this, you know, a cupcake, you eat it, it tastes good, but you don’t get that profound sense of nourishment.

30:33 So when you tell people to replace this junk food, which tastes really good, I mean, it tastes great, they do a good job of making that with quote-unquote healthy food, go eat some quinoa, go eat some, you know, kale salad, the compliance rate is almost none. Yeah, because they feel like it’s a sacrifice, because it is. Right now. Well, I want to talk about the access, but you mentioned how cheap it is. I mean, it’s crazy.

30:56 I mean, if you want to see what the long con is, you go look at how cheap junk food is in the supermarket. It’s like, it looks like it’s priced below cost, and I know some of this stuff is because the McDonald’s hamburger is technically priced below cost. If you look at all the supplements, the damage to this and this, this, they say, like, a Big Mac should cost eight bucks. You shouldn’t eat it anyways, but, I mean, a lot of these things are priced to create an addiction.

31:19 What does the drug dealer say on the corner? First one’s free. Right, right. Is that what’s happening there? It’s just super cheap foods that are, yeah.

31:26 I mean, if you live in poverty, you are automatically, you know, going to have health issues just because that’s what you can afford. And, you know, that food is you know, very, very cheap. You know, when your, your poor mom’s making decisions for the house, and you’ve got 100 bucks to spend for the week, you know, you get three bags of chips for four dollars. You know, that’s what that’s the decision you’re going to make. And so sugary cereal, sugary cereals, yeah, yeah.

31:49 And then that’s, yeah, I mean, that you know, we look at, I think something like 60 percent of the calories we consume in the United States are a combination of sugar, refined grain, and some sort of oil. I mean, that’s about 60 percent of our calories. It’s amazing. Vegan. Some of it’s vegan.

32:04 Yeah, most of it’s vegan. Yes, that’s vegan, right? Yeah, the bad vegan diet. So all right, my next question is, yeah, but Shawn, not everybody can afford a steak like you’re gonna eat tonight. Not everybody can cook eggs, that’s probably a worse argument, but maybe people can’t get the access to the food you’re talking about.

32:22 Well, I mean, you know, outside of some countries, I think most Western countries access to meat is still there, still, now, for the time being, and maybe that’ll change as we get crazy about this stuff. But I mean, uh, ground beef is perfectly fine. That’s, that’s pretty inexpensive. I mean, you can go, I mean, I can tell you US prices. You can find ground beef still, even today, with inflation, three or four bucks a pound.

32:45 You know, a dozen eggs may cost you four bucks, and so you could eat four, seven, eight bucks a day, typically, typically, which is, you know, cup of coffee at Starbucks, basically, something like that. So it is accessible. It’s doable. You take into account all the garbage you’re not eating, all the supplements that you have to take, all the pills you’re taking, all the other things, all the time, all the prep time, all that stuff. It’s actually turns out to be about the same for most people.

33:11 Okay, it’s doable. You’ve got to go out of your way to do it, because you won’t necessarily be able to buy it here and there, although you can. You can go buy meat in places, as long as you’re a little intentional. Yeah, right. And these days there’s sometimes more options for meat.

33:25 Well, I mean, if you’re talking about the grocery store, there’s plenty. You can buy. You buy direct from a rancher, which I often do. You know, you can, if you have the space for a freezer, you can get 300 pounds of meat for, you know, four, five bucks a pound, typically, even grass-finished. So do you care about your meat as far as it being organic or what they put in it or are you just like, just give me the goddamn meat?

33:47 Mostly the latter, but I’ll put some caveats here. I, like, I like to enjoy what I eat, and I think you know, certain meat tastes better than others. But I think it’s important to realize that the data we have, the human data we have comparing, say, grass-finished steak versus grain-finished steak, is not significantly different. There’s no real, the, you know, I’ve collected eight on 12,000 people on this diet. Outcomes are no different depending on which type, which type they use.

34:10 Now, I will say, from an environmental impact standpoint, there are some very good, compelling arguments to consume meat that’s been pastured a certain way, that is to say, high-density grazing with rotational frequent rotation movement of the cattle, that has a very beneficial effect on the diversity of the land, soil carbon and sequestration. And so it’s in that positive. It’s actually, it’s interesting. There’s a professor, Allen Williams, who’s calculated that if we can convert, again, in the United States, around 30 percent of our cattle ranches to rotationally grazed, high-density grazed cattle, we can offset all of the carbon emissions in the United States everything that’s energy, that’s transportation, that’s industry sector, just by moving those cows onto the land.

34:56 So a more efficient use of that land, because you’re touching on the argument that cattle ranching basically has high carbon emissions, right? That’s what’s being called out. That was in, what was the movie, Cowspiracy? They went big on that, right? And they went heavy on it.

35:13 It’s hurting the environment, which is just another thing for the vegans or certain people to talk about. So let’s talk about that. Yeah. So if we, you know, look at, you know, what’s currently being claimed. So right now, based on a 2006 study called Livestock’s Long Shadow, they calculated that cattle emit 18.18 percent of worldwide greenhouse gases.

35:35 Now they corrected that number down to 14.5 because of a guy named Frank Mitloehner, who’s out of UC Davis, and he said, hey, look, you’re doing a life-cycle assessment. You’re not measuring direct emissions, and so they correct that number down. But the true number is five percent. So five percent of worldwide emissions are coming from livestock in general, cattle making up about 60 percent of that. They didn’t, and you know, they said 14 comes from the transportation industry and 14 come from cows.

36:02 The transportation industry they didn’t do life-cycle emission. They just looked at the tailpipe. So if they would compare tailpipe emissions from a car versus burps from a cow, it would be 14 for the car, five percent for the cows, but since they didn’t do that, it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison. Now, the other thing that’s important about that is the 14 is a worldwide, global number, and so I live in the United States. You live in the UK.

36:26 In the United States cows are responsible for two percent of our greenhouse gas emissions, because we have so much other emissions. Now, if you’re in Botswana, right, cows are producing a lot, because there’s nothing else there. There’s no other, there’s nothing to compete with. So using worldwide numbers to dictate policy in the UK and the United States just doesn’t make sense. You know, it may, from, if every single person in the United States went vegan and we got rid of all the cows, we slaughtered all the cows and all the chickens and all the pigs and all the sheep and all the cats and dogs, the worldwide difference in greenhouse gas emissions would be less than one percent.

37:02 That’s every single American giving that up. So is it worth it? Clearly not. And what would then, what would the negative impacts be? Nutrient deficiencies for many people.

37:11 You would have to consume more calories, so we would have to produce more calories, more monocropping which is degraded and degradative to the land, so it’s destroying the soil. So it’s not a solution. Veganism worldwide vegan will never, will never work. That’s interesting. Um, yeah, it’s funny you make that comparison, study, because it’s like when you go to Starbucks in America and they take away your plastic straws, and, um, you’re like, okay okay, well, let’s look at where most of the plastic pollution comes from.

37:39 It comes from Indonesia and all these Asian countries. And you know, I think it was, um, a congressman from Texas who’s been on our show with the eyepatch. I forgot his name. Um, he had this argument with someone who didn’t get Dan, uh, look at his name, but he has argument with someone in Congress where he’s like, do you think that’ll make a difference? Oh, I think it will.

37:55 He’s like, do you know that most of this pollution comes over here? So just an American giving you a paper straw so you feel better about yourself that day doesn’t actually make a net difference on the globe. And there’s a lot of that duplicity going on in America. You just mentioned something else, though. Global veganism is never going to be tenable.

38:14 It’s never going to be practical. It can’t take off in large scale anywhere. We need the animals for agriculture in general, you know, where the farming would collapse completely if you took the animals out of the equation, because fertilizer, they’re all part of that whole ecosystem, right? So it’s not a possibility. It’s not practical.

38:33 It’s, it’s and the vegans agree with this too. No, of course they don’t. I mean, they have some different outlooks, obviously. So let’s talk about veganism, just go into this. Um, so again, and I’ve been there, and I think this gives me a good point of reference, because I was not seduced, but I was invited for a little, my vegan tryout.

38:53 I did a year on it. I trained for the Ironman race, 90 days on my brand new vegan diet, and I was surprised, I didn’t have injuries, because I thought they were coming, and I didn’t have them. Um, I don’t know what that was again. I was going more whole food, all that stuff, but I trained well. I had to eat more.

39:11 Um, is one thing I remembered. I had to eat more, because it probably wasn’t as nutrient dense, maybe, and I made it through, and I also got seduced by the cult of veganism, let’s just say it. So again, I’m doing the right thing for the planet. I’m not hurting the animals, I’m all those things that they kind of throw at you. And the crazy thing is, Shawn, is that you end up really believing it, and like the food tastes better, and you end up hating, consciously or subconsciously, on anybody who’s killing animals.

39:41 Right. Sure. And I felt myself do it, and I was just like, wow. I look at you, and, uh, being disgusted by, like, fish and thinking about the life cycle and all the cruel things purportedly being done to these animals in these different ways, shapes or forms. And it really gets into your head.

39:57 And, um, and again I experienced it for a while, and then I came back. I have a lot of friends that have come on the show over the years. Timothy Chief is one of them, who was the vegan prince. He was the worst vegan. He used to call me out and be terrible with me, to bring fruit over to the thing, and call me out.

40:12 And then later he confided in me, one of my movie premieres, he was like, Brian, I started drinking milk, and I feel amazing. And I was like, bro, you’re the vegan prince. And then he finally came out and talked about it. So there’s a, and again, when I stopped eating plant-based food at the end of that year, um, my vegan friends don’t talk to me anymore, because I got, I got, I got. Yeah, well, you were never a vegan.

40:35 I mean, you were never really a vegan if you leave. So that’s the right currency. So address some of these issues, because these are real, right? And these get sold to you. You watch a movie on Netflix.

40:45 By the way, they’re all on Netflix, and, uh, they give you some narrative that you buy into, and we’re supposed to be rational humans, but we’re not. Then we get into this cult. There’s tons of these arguments that we’re being cruel, we’re saving the planet, but like, at the end of the day, none of them really have that much weight, but people buy into it. Yeah, I mean, they make some very compelling emotional arguments, and I think this, Game Change, was the movie.

41:08 Right, right, right. Sure. Pretty, a movie. Well, I mean, if you follow all the athletes in Game Change, almost every one of them quit and got injured you know, within a few years, and they were never high-level athletes anyway. Well, some of them were, okay, but I mean, I mean, I mean, there were some Olympians, there to be fair.

41:22 But most of them, uh, you know, the Olympic lifter hurt his elbow immediately after him, his worst performance of his career in the Olympics, even though he went to the Olympics, he’d already set that base up as a meat eater two Olympics prior, and then went vegan, still made the Olympic team, but saw a dramatic, dramatic, dramatic decrease in his performance. But I think the, the, the ethical argument, you know, I’m going to eat a guiltless salad because no animal death occurred. That is a big fallacy, you know, because when you look at the way all food is raised, you know, animals are killed.

41:55 Now people say, well, it’s incidental, because the crop, the crop machine ran over the harvester, and most of them run away. That’s a part of where the death is coming from. But you think about it, almost all these crops are sprayed with pesticides, they’re sprayed with rodenticides, they’re sprayed with insecticides. So those things are done intentionally. I mean, a pesticide the name tells you what it’s going to do, like homicide.

42:18 Pesticide. We’re killing pests. We know we’re doing that. They do it intentionally. Literally trillions of small animals and insects are killed to produce all this food, and if they’re not killed with pesticides, farmers are out there.

42:29 They pay people to shoot these animals. They shoot any animals eating the food. They get shot, or they, they blow them up. If they have little moles in the field, they drop bombs on there and blow these animals up. So there are trillions of animals killed for you to be able to eat your vegan salad.

42:43 So there’s, and guess what, those animals don’t have, don’t have as quick a quick slaughter. They don’t have a quick death. They have a slow painless death of poison, bleeding to death, laying in a field, rotting. You know, this is what they do. That’s the suffering you don’t see.

42:58 That there’s not a movie about. I can hear the vegan tears right now. Sure. Right, so all right, you want to be clear that there is animal death even in producing plant-based foods, right? And the counter that vegans say, well, cows eat a lot of the grain, right?

43:11 And they sort of say, like, but the actuality, the numbers are, and these are very clear numbers from the FAO: livestock consumes about a third of our grain production, right? That’s not all crops. I mean, cows aren’t consuming carrots and potatoes and tomatoes and watermelons and, you know, mangoes. They’re not eating that. They might eat some of the scraps, but I mean most of the crops on earth are consumed by humans, either in the form of food or things like biofuels.

43:38 A lot of the soybean oils are turned into biofuels. In fact, all the soybeans, and so most of the soybean goes, the soybean meal goes to China to feed their pigs. China’s not going vegan anytime soon, just for the record. But 100 of those soybean oils are turned, soybeans are turned into oil, which is all 100 human consumption. So it’s not like, you know, this argument that if we stop feeding cows you know grain, that all these humans would have all this food.

44:04 Most of what they eat, most of what the cows eat is inedible to humans. If you go to a livestock feeding area and pick up what they’re eating, there’s no way you’d eat that. This is not fit for human consumption. Okay, so they’re not eating food that other people would be, that people would be eating. They’re only those animals, right?

44:21 Only about 10 percent of what they eat humans can conceivably eat, so it’s a very small percentage. What about the other, you know, we’re going through the vegan list of arguments. So environment, right? Uh, I don’t like harming animals, right? So if you don’t like harming animals, you just have to stop living.

44:38 There’s, there’s nothing going to get around that, and just, you know, like I said, every meal you consume comes with a lot of animal death. That’s just the sad reality of this. And whether you see it on your plate or you don’t, it’s still there. Now you can pretend it’s not there, you know, have your guiltless smoothie or something. Like I think you are, but it’s not, it’s not really happening.

44:56 In fact, there was a study out of Australia looking at wheat production versus beef production. They saw for every kilogram of beef you know, for the number of animals killed per kilogram of beef, there are 25 times as many animals killed for a kilogram of wheat, and that usually comes in the form of things like mice and other things. So what’s more important, one cow’s life or 25 mice? And so it’s who makes that decision. It’s completely arbitrary.

45:22 Yeah, that’s a good point. And that’s something Timothy made decisions like, yeah, you kill one cow, one life, and you get, you know, 300 pounds of meat, right, or you can kill one mouse, you know, well, 300 mice or 200. Yeah, exactly. Which one’s worse? I guess you got to go check the Dalai Lama on that one and find out which way, which is worse.

45:39 Um, are those most of the vegan arguments? Then have we covered them? Well, I mean, you know, they talk about health, and they, you know, they think that the vegan argument is going to protect you from cancer and protect you from heart disease. Interesting, you know, look at the EPIC-Oxford study, which actually looked at this. The number one killer of vegans is heart disease.

45:56 The number two killer of vegans is cancer. So you do all that sort of vegan nonsense, you still die of heart disease and cancer anyway. Veganism is pretty good for losing weight. I mean, you can definitely do that. You can improve certain things, but what you end up doing, and you know, there may be a slight advantage on how you die, you may not die of heart disease as much, but guess what?

46:16 Mental health disorders, osteoporosis, healing issues. You pointed this out. There’s a couple studies out of Italy from 2020 looking at healing and vegan diets, and they compared omnivores versus vegans for surgical scar healing. The vegans did awful compared to that. They had much lower rates of healing, and we’re starting to see that in these athletes that adopt that.

46:36 You know, guys like Cam Newton and some of these other athletes that get injured, they never recover and they never come back. Why is that? Because they have poor tissue quality. I mean, they don’t have the nutrition to heal correctly. Okay, interesting.

46:48 Um, yeah, I’ve had Dr Michael Greger in here many times, and like he’s built his whole career on plant-based, and he does a lot of research, and he’s a lovely guy. Um, but is the truth in practice that most vegans or plant-based people just still eat poorly, have poor physical programs, or is it also just the diet fundamentally? Well, I think the diet is a handicap. I mean, you know, again, you can compare it to a standard American diet and make the argument that there’s some improvements in there, but you still have to do all the other stuff.

47:16 You still have to train. I mean, Greger should train. I don’t know why he’s not in there lifting weights and getting stronger. I mean, that doesn’t make sense to me. If you’re supposed to do all the research on what’s going to improve your health outcomes, you’ve got to do some strength training.

47:29 That’s super, super important. So regardless of your dietary strategy, you got to get adequate protein, and I think most of us eat too little protein, quite honestly, particularly as we get older. We have people that clearly are suffering from protein deficiency. You know, we see that in the elderly population. That’s why we see so many people with fragility fractures, and this is why we’re seeing it.

47:50 There’s a recent study that came out that vegans have a 33 percent increased risk of hip fractures, which is not fun. I can tell you, I took care of a lot of hip fractures as an orthopedic surgeon. You don’t want a hip fracture. Usually there’s about a 40 percent mortality rate within one year of a hip fracture. Wow.

48:05 Okay, I guess the last vegan point was the cult of veganism, so you get into the club. It’s a bit like crypto, which I’ve been into as well, where you end up like, I’m just into crypto and like nothing else. Your rationality drops down to zero, but in the veganism club, like, you’re in, but it’s like Hotel California. You can never leave. Yeah, um.

48:25 And yeah, talk about that. I mean, it does become something. Well, you know, and this is interesting, right? I still do you know, about an hour a day. I do consultations.

48:35 I do lifestyle consultations and every single week without fail, I get two or three ex-vegans that, you know, and some of them been doing it for 20, 30 years after a period of time it catches up to them, and they get sick. They have mental health issues. They have digestive issues. They have autoimmune issues. They have, they just don’t feel good, and that’s, that’s a common thing.

48:54 I think the lucky ones get sick early and they realize that, hey, this isn’t good for me. some of them, you know, they get sucked into the, into the cult, you know, they get sucked, they get brainwashed and they can’t leave, and they, they, you know, they, everything but their diet is causing problems, and so they’re constantly fasting and detoxing and doing cleanses and adding supplements, and they just can’t believe the diet is a problem for them. But more often than not, it is mental health issues because of veganism.

49:22 That’s going to trigger a lot of people. Well, there is, um, a number of studies that show a very strong relationship, particularly things like depression, veganism and depression runs very closely. Now we don’t, or mental health issues in general. Now we don’t know if it’s veganism causing the depression or people that have mental health disorders choosing veganism. There’s probably a little both, but clearly, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of things to think about why that may be occurring.

49:45 There was a study, Stanford University in 2018, and they looked at serum carnitine levels. Now carnitine is something that we can make a low level of, but we can only make a small amount. People with depression have very low levels of carnitine. Where do you get carnitine? You don’t get it from plants.

50:00 You can only get it from animal products for the most part. So if you’re on a, if you’re on a meat-based diet typically, and I see this every day, literally, I see people with bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, we’ve seen schizophrenia, we’ve seen Tourette’s syndrome, we’ve seen major depressive disorder go away completely. Get these people off medication. I had a guy who was he’d been to the ER 200 times in the last several years with suicidal ideation.

50:25 He’s been on ADHD meds as a kid. He’s on a plant-based diet for a while. We put him on a carnivore diet, within six weeks no more depression, no more medications, back to a normal life, now raising a happy family. It’s kind of, it’s just amazing, the wins I’ve seen. Wow.

50:41 Um, famous people that have done this diet? I mean, Dr Jordan Peterson, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan has done it. I think Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s advisor, did it. Okay, um, there are Danny Sorenson with his candid formula with the Kansas City Chiefs has done it. Um, I’m trying to think who else is on there, and what have been some of their experiences, like, with Peterson?

51:01 I mean, he really had a lot of success. He lost weight. Yeah, I think he did it. I think when I had him in here a few years ago he had just started it, but he lost weight obviously. He had some autoimmune issues and some other things, which I, I think he was really struggling with, and those disappeared pretty quickly.

51:15 I think Mikhaila went on it as well. She had even more severe, I think, yeah, she had, nothing, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, and she actually had it. It’s kind of funny because people think she was faking it. She has an artificial hip and an artificial ankle. I’m like, you don’t fake that.

51:29 She legitimately had something going on, but I’ve seen, you know, people with rheumatoid arthritis all these autoimmune diseases, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, psoriasis, all get better on a meat-based diet. It’s literally like a miracle, quite honestly. I know it sounds kind of crazy, and we’ve got, you know, we’ve got, like I said, Harvard University’s got the study on that. We’ve got other studies coming that show these things are really happening.

51:52 What’s been Joe Rogan’s experience? You’ve been on the show a few times, I think. Well, one time, once. Okay. Yeah, and he kind of embraced it.

51:57 Then he was like complaining about some digestion issues, but I know he’s gone back on it a few times. Right. Uh, what’s been Joe’s experience as far as, you know, and then what are some of the symptoms of coming on this diet? Like, is it hard to adjust to? Yeah, well, so Joe, you know, he went on it back in, I think, January, or like 2020, I think something like that, and he felt really good.

52:16 You know, he had some issues with loose stools initially, lasted about two weeks, and it got better, and then he went off, and then he contacted me in August, and I’m going on again because it’s the best I’ve ever felt in my life. And so I know he does it periodically, and he eats a mostly meat diet. You see he’s always eating his elk that he shot. And also, so he’s, you know, and this is what I think. I’m not very dogmatic about it.

52:37 I don’t tell people, don’t eat plants, don’t eat a blueberry. Oh my gosh. I think it’s important to realize that many people do this kind of as a time-limited treatment to fix things, kind of like a reset button, and then most people end up 90, 80, something like that, where they’re eating a lot of meat, a lot of eggs, you know, red meat, fish, you know, whatever they prefer, and then they put 20 percent other whole foods, and that’s a great diet too. I think that’s really good.

53:03 That’s something that our company does. We use AI to help people figure that out. See what they actually do. They need to be on a fully restrictive diet, and some people do for a period of time, but usually we can get people to be on somewhat of a, you know, kind of a less restrictive diet, which I think works in the long range. Okay, you mentioned your company, Rivera.

53:22 What are you doing with the company? I know you raised some capital recently, and you’ve got some big plans, AI-based medical nutrition therapy. That sounds pretty high tech. So what are you trying to do? Yeah, so we’ve learned a lot by putting people on elimination diets.

53:36 We’ve solved a lot of problems for people, and so we typically find out, you know, they do this for six months, a year, and they start adding things back in. We find out how they react to that, so we’ve got a database on thousands of people, and so we know that different demographics, you know, how old you are, what sex you are, what your ethnicity is, what your lifestyle factors are, play a role on what you know what you can eat. You cross-reference that with what disease states you have.

54:00 Do you have depression? Do you have diabetes? Do you have psoriasis? On and on and on. So you have all these different permutations.

54:05 You put in there, and then you put the different food categories in, that use AI to solve that. And so that’s what we’re using, is, you know, prescribing, you know, kind of personalized nutrition based upon who you are, what you’re suffering with, what your lifestyle’s like. In addition to that, we found that, you know, you can lead a horse to the water, but you can’t make them drink. So you’ve got to be able to support them. So we gamify.

54:28 We use the AI to help the physicians help people come off medications. We gamify the process through an app. We’re doing, like, my sort of sentiment is do whatever it takes to get these people healthy. Healthy. If you’ve gotta kidnap them, lock them in, lock them in a, you know, I’d like to do that sometimes.

54:48 You just take a bunch of people and bring them to a camp for six, six weeks, and just feed them what you want. But the bottom line is, you know, and I think, and what I found is community. You probably found that within things like crypto community is so, so important when you’re trying to change behaviors. You’ve got to have somebody that they can, you know, they can relate to, that they can have an ally with. They can have somebody to kick them in the butt when they need it, motivate them, hold their hand.

55:09 So that’s part of it. So our company’s going to be doing all those things. So that’s, but the AI kind of, you know, kind of refines things a little better, and I come to you and I think, look, I got to change something, right? I hear some great things about a meat-based diet. Help me come in and run their tests and do this, and get them in the AI and start looking at what they’re doing, get feedback of how they’re cheating or what they’re eating, and try to keep them on track, right?

55:32 And it may or may not be me, based depending on what the algorithm says. Now, I don’t think it’s going to spit out a vegan. It may, it may be surprised if it does, but it might. So we have certain bias going in, but I think what we find is that, um, you know, once you get somebody into the program and getting them invested in that, and when they start seeing wins, which we do very, very early, and that’s something that most people have never experienced when you get people that have been chronically in pain or chronically depressed for years and years and years, their expectation level is very low when you actually start seeing significant improvements, and we do that very frequently.

56:08 That’s very motivating for these people, and so we get to, you know, it sort of builds upon itself, and you see those all the time, right? I see it. I read, I see it every day. I do interviews, like just like we’re doing. I do interviews with people that have changed their life, you know, with nutrition, and it’s, it’s, it’s literally amazing.

56:23 I mean, I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of these interviews now. How quickly do people see results if they go on a meat-only diet? Well, you know, so again, we’ve got data on about 12,000 people. We see a big inflection point at three months, but we do see people within days. Like, diabetics will come off diabetes medicine within days.

56:39 Some people see their joints stop hurting within a week. You know, it varies, but certainly by three months is when we typically see a big, you know, just this big inflection point for most people, and those joints coming off, that they’re just getting inflammation from their processed foods, or carbs, or who knows. Yeah, well, I mean, I think there’s some data in there. So we know for instance that there’s some study, University of Alabama, did a study looking at low-carb versus low-fat diets and knee pain, and they found low-carbohydrate types clearly superior for knee pain.

57:07 We know that high levels of insulin stimulate these cells called fibroblasts, like synoviocytes, and what happens is those cells secrete these inflammatory cytokines, which start to cause arthritic damage. So if you lower the insulin levels, you see a reduction in that. Wow. Wow. Um, the big elephant in the room that we’re not talking about is big pharma, right?

57:31 Because this diet isn’t good for big pharma. Yeah, right. It’s not. Okay, you’re taking people off all these medications, and they can’t patent the food, and it’s not processed anyways, so not only big pharma but no big business can can do much here. Except maybe, I need business.

57:46 Well, no, I think that’s not it. I think that’s not correct, because you know, while certainly you’re going to take some stuff away from big pharma, you know, some of the processed food companies are going to lose on this as well. But who’s going to win? So let’s say you’re working at Ford Motor Company, you’re the CEO of Ford Motor Company, and 30 percent of your costs are employee health care costs, and you can get those, those costs down significantly, which we can.

58:09 Those guys win. So you basically have a whole vast array of industry that’s going to do better, you know, from better employee health, better productivity. Pharma losing a little bit of money, you know, that’s what we’ll see happening. And how do you feel about big pharma? I mean, it’s a juggernaut these days, and most Americans are on a variety of medications, right?

58:31 So yes, they are. They have saturated the market very nicely. You know, we’ve got, I think everything with, I think the average American over 65 is on five chronic medications right now. I mean, that’s just amazing. Um, you know, there are some pharmaceutical companies that have had some good ones, you know, things like insulin, antibiotics and things like that, but most of these chronic disease medications, these lifestyle medications, weight loss drugs, uh, you know, drugs for autoimmune syndromes, things like that.

59:03 I think Goldman Sachs did an analysis on the pharmaceutical industry, and the question was, does it make sense from a business standpoint to cure disease? The answer that came back was no, it doesn’t. So their motivation is not to cure anybody. It’s basically to, and what the health care system has become is a disease, disease management system. I like to call it the disease maintenance system, because you maintain people in some degree of disease, and you just need to treat their symptoms, and we’re trying to get these people off this and actually fix their disease.

59:34 Yeah, and it’s like a medication annuity for the rest of their life, and you just keep them alive long enough, but they’re kind of barely alive, right? You want them to kind of, yeah, live long and be sick. Live long, live long and not prosper, right? Exactly. And, uh, if that’s the model, then then the companies will optimize for that model, right?

59:54 Whether it’s a conspiracy or not, that’s just what makes financial sense, right? yeah, sure, it just does. I remember I was, I came to the UK, and, you know, they’re not as quick to write a prescription here for a lot of things, right? From, we didn’t have the painkiller issue really here. We didn’t.

1:00:08 Most people aren’t on cholesterol meds here. It’s just not talked about here. And I remember talking to my dad, he’s like, yeah, I’m on the cholesterol meds. All my family. I was like, why?

1:00:16 Like, it’s just a normal thing there to be on Lipitor or whatever the hell it is. And it’s just like like you said, on all these different medications, and it’s not normal here. Even the antidepressant thing, it’s coming now, but it was late. There’s some interesting stats on antidepressants in the UK. I just saw this show today.

1:00:32 So in the UK, in the teenage population, kids 12 to 18, and 20 to 29, since I think between 2016 and 2020, it’s increased 30 percent in the teenagers and 40 percent of the 20-year-olds in four years’ period. 40 percent increase in antidepressants. That’s astounding, and I don’t know what it’s been since the pandemic. It’s probably gone up significantly, as you might imagine. yeah, probably.

1:00:55 Yeah. So I mean, again, we usually lag the States, right? Five or eight years or whatever. So unfortunately it seems like we’re getting caught up, but like I said, when I got here, it was, it was just noticeably different from the States when it was just standard. Well, we don’t, you know, you don’t advertise pharmacy on TV like we do in the United States.

1:01:11 Yeah. Again, whenever I go back to States, I’m just fascinated by these. And again, I love video production, that’s what we do here. I make movies, and the commercials for the pharmaceutical industry are next level. The Viagra commercials are amazing, like seriously, all the little details, the muscle cars, the subtle hints about what’s going on.

1:01:30 I mean, these guys are very good at what they do. Um, do you ever, I always tell my community and people I see in the streets I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I leave that to my guests on the channel. But, you know, whenever you look at big pharma and then big food and all these other things, and even big tech, like you must see that in a weird way they all feed on each other. Um, how do you process that in your head?

1:01:55 Well, I don’t think it’s conspiracy. I think it’s out in the open. I mean, it just makes business sense. I mean, you know, like I said, they’re in the business to make money. Every company, their model is selling drugs.

1:02:04 The food companies want to sell food, and how do they do it? What’s nice if you’re addicted to it? It tastes really good, and it’s cheap. You know, and then the tech industries, tech companies do what they do. So, and they all support each other.

1:02:14 I mean, you know, you look at, like, you know, I mean, we talked about, you know, before we got on here, Sadiq Khan, who’s the mayor of London, he’s the, he is the CEO of the C40 cities. I’m sure, I know, if you’re familiar with that thing. It’s all the green revolution stuff, and so they’re going to be pushing. Did you get in a Twitter battle with him? No.

1:02:31 Not should he, kind of. Okay, anyway, they had something with the mayor of London, but go ahead, continue. but anyway, no, but you know, we’re seeing this, you know, this sort of push towards, you know, obviously a secure biosecurity state. You know, I know David Icke probably talks about that quite well. But, um, you know, certainly we’re seeing with the dietary push, you know, the push towards this plant-based diet, and really the plant-based diet as it’s being pushed out, you know, are we seeing advertisements for eat more blueberries, eat more lettuce?

1:02:58 No, what you’re seeing is Impossible burgers, Beyond Meat, all this is processed garbage, and this is what this is, this is just another avenue to create processed food. And so if we look at the global market projections for alternative protein by 2035, they’re projecting a 300 billion dollar market, which is, that’s a big market, right? So this is why they’re putting all this money, all these hundreds of millions of dollars, and now billions of dollars has been invested from venture capital into this stuff.

1:03:23 They want to they want their ROI, right? They want the money back. And so they’re pushing, pushing, pushing, and we keep seeing sales of these products, Beyond Meat, Impossible, are not doing well. It’s not, it’s not consumer pull. It’s all corporate push.

1:03:37 So we just, you know, but they’re gonna, but they, but their hopes are, and they, they lay it out. They said, you know, we’ve got to get people to accept it. So make them think it’s good for the environment. Make it think it’s good for their health, even though it’s total BS, right? We’re just going to sell that message.

1:03:50 And then you have to you got to make the product scalable, which is also very challenging. then also you’ve got a government on board to regulate it, to sort of incentivize this stuff, and we’re starting to see that. You’re starting to see it here in these cities, you know, where you have New York City is a perfect example. In their public school system, New York City is the biggest public school system in America. Meatless Mondays and vegan Fridays.

1:04:12 Now these poor kids, many of them come from, you know, underserved and poor populations, that’s where they get their nutrition from at school, and now you’re taking out the most nutrient-dense part and replacing it with some, you know, human pet food. This industrial sludge is what they’re producing. Oh, because it’s on some liberal agenda of some people in the upper, upper East Side of New York. Um, sometimes my kids come home from school saying the biggest nonsense.

1:04:37 I’m just like, god damn, I’m gonna get those teachers, um, because they’re just throwing this, their weird agenda at these poor kids, and now they’re having to be indoctrinated into this stuff that doesn’t make sense. Tell me about that whole vegan push, because is it, it’s getting a little backlash, because for a while it was like, yeah, it’s the vegan burger and I’m saving the environment, and I’m getting into this, and it was very trendy for a while, right? But like, is that continuing, or are sales coming down, and are people kind of not buying into that?

1:05:04 Well, I mean, yeah, I think you know, right now there’s been so much hype for this stuff, but the reality is right now these, you know, alternative plant-based burgers and whatnot represent about one and a half to two percent of the market, the protein market. So it’s still very, very tiny, and it’s harder. They’ve been pushing, they seem to have hit their ceiling. You know, their sales are not going up. They’re not hitting their projections.

1:05:24 They’re basically selling stuff at a loss right now. They’re still, they’re still in the, you know, still very much in the red. And so, um, people have realized, I think most people realize this is just processed garbage. Even Greger would say this is, this is not really, really good for food for us. And so that’s one of the sticking points.

1:05:42 So the next thing they’re going to work on are precision fermentation, where they take different microbes and they ferment things and make these specialized proteins, and they’re going to stick that in processed food too, or they’re going to do cell culture meat, which is questionably not even possible. So there’s, you know, we’re not, we’re not done with this. We’re going to continue to see this. There’s going to be a huge push. Like I said, they want to, you know, within the next 15 years they want to capture about 20 percent of the global meat market, which is again 300 billion dollars.

1:06:12 Wow. Will they do it? Probably not. Who knows? I think you know, I think, you know, the optimistic side of me thinks there’s going to be a market for that.

1:06:21 Some people are going to buy into it. You’re going to have people that for whatever reason think they’re saving the environment or want to go vegan or they’re ethically in line, they’re going to be there. They’re going to have some market. Are they going to completely replace the actual real stuff? you know, I don’t know.

1:06:34 That’s a 1.5 trillion dollar market now. There’s a lot of people, there’s a billion people on the planet that are in that market, you know, that are, that are producing that food, and so hard to say, you know, depends on, you know, depends on, uh, if we believe this climate change narrative, that we’ve got to do everything we possibly can to save the planet, and we think that culling all these cows is the right answer, which is not, clearly not. You mentioned, uh, Sadiq Khan, my, uh, former opponent as mayor of London, and, uh, he’s from the Labour Party here, which, if you’re in the States, is kind of the equivalent of the Democrats.

1:07:06 And I guess my question to you is, is that we find with these, um, maybe political or ideological movements, you kind of have a team, right? So if you’re a Democrat or a Labour Party, you’re kind of supposedly pro-environment, whatever that means, you might be pro-vegan, you might be pro-rights for certain groups, and I guess my question for you is, is that do you get kind of, do these groups pull in all sorts of attitudes into the group, to where it’s hard to get out of that? so if I’m left leaning in my politics, do I all of a sudden then buy into the environment?

1:07:42 Do I get surrounded by vegans, and do you see that as an issue where you might not have a choice for what team you’re on and the ideology? You’re right. Yeah, there’s definitely, I mean, in the nutrition, I, you know, I’ve never been political, and vaccines and masks as well, right? It’s all rolled in there together, and you definitely see unfortunately with nutrition, because I think human nutrition should be apolitical. I mean, we’re human beings.

1:08:07 We’re all the same species, we basically have, you know, more or less the same needs, but we definitely see it’s not that way. Is it well? It, it doesn’t seem to be, but there is definitely a political narrative when it comes to nutrition, and it all, it all lumps together. You know, we see that if you eat meat, what we’ve seen, we’ve seen articles talking about, if you’re into fitness, you want to be strong, that’s right wing, that’s, that’s, that’s neo-Nazism.

1:08:30 They’re, they’re sort of conflating wanting to be physically fit and somehow you know, toxic masculinity or something like that. So it’s kind of crazy. It’s getting a little crazy, especially in the States these days, uh, with some of the extremes of these things going on. Um, what’s social media like for you, and yeah, what are the limits? Because, you know, we’ve seen people getting banned.

1:08:51 Right? Yeah. So I, you know, uh, earlier this year, you know, during the pandemic, I was talking. I’m very much, you know, as a surgeon, I, I took thousands of people to the operating room, and I always wanted to make sure they had informed consent and I felt that during the pandemic informed consent wasn’t being adequately conveyed to the people that were making decisions, and so I was speaking up against that, that sort of attitude had me shadow-banned, suspended from YouTube several times, to a point where I was like, I just can’t talk about this stuff anymore.

1:09:25 So there’s some self-censorship going on there, and it’s unfortunate. I think it’s, you know, I, you know, honestly, I think it’s disgusting that you have to self-censor, and you can’t speak freely of what you want to talk about, because that’s how we learn. That’s how that’s how the best ideas go to the top, right? When you all get to participate in this. Um, you know, my social media generally is very positive.

1:09:45 I get, so like I said, I literally get hundreds of people every week telling me you’ve changed my life, I’m so much better, I’m off all these medications, on and on and on. I support what you do. A very small minority is people, you know, mad vegans that would say you’re evil and awful, and, well, I hope you die or something like that, you know, that type of stuff. So generally it’s pretty, it’s pretty positive for the most part. Do you ever get threats and death threats, and vegans step into you, or not really?

1:10:12 I, you know, a few I’ve had a few, and it’s usually a comment. It’s usually comedy. You know, I don’t, I haven’t taken any of them very seriously, and I don’t know, maybe I should, but it’s, it’s, uh, you know, I’ve never in my life, and you’re probably the same way, I’ve never had somebody confront me in real life and come up to me and say, I mean, I’ve had a lot of it online, but never in real life. Usually you’re using real life. Everybody’s been very pleasant, just, you know, gone shake their hands.

1:10:35 I’m very affable and easy to easy to talk to. And so yeah, be interested. Yeah, that was true for me until I ran for mayor. Then I got a couple people in real life, but yeah, usually it’s like in real life the people are the nicest, warmest, but then it’s usually all they hate is online. In the mirror, I got a couple, a couple pieces, but otherwise, yeah, it’s like that.

1:10:54 Um, I had Ted Nugent on the show, uh, during lockdown. I think he was remote, and um he had this term where he harvests the animals, and I just thought it was an interesting term, because the way he presents that is, it’s just all part of the life cycle, right? When we grow up, and again, both my grandparents were, one was a cattle rancher, as I mentioned, one was on a farm, and when you grow up in these rural environments, it’s part of the life cycle, and you get used to it, and animals die, and you eat them, and then new ones come in the next season, and it’s part of life.

1:11:24 But when we get isolated from nature or these parts, we go into cities, then killing an animal, I mean, it’s something shocking, something you’re not used to doing. You don’t do it growing up. And is this part of what’s happening to our culture? Are we being separated from our roots from nature? Is that causing a lot of this?

1:11:42 Right. Well, I mean, I think a hundred years ago, something like 30 percent of the people in the United States were involved in food production. Now it’s about one and a half percent of the people feed 330 million people in the United States, and so we’ve become further and further removed from food production. You know, you saw, I think you saw that advertisement in Saudi Arabia for the line that, that city of the future they’re trying to make, the 34 you know, it’s like 500 meters across or something like that, 200 meters across, 500 meters high, and 170 kilometers long.

1:12:12 It’ll pack nine million people in there, you know, and you know, they, they want to, they want to take people off the land, put them in these little cities, and then, you know, some corporation owns all the land, and we don’t have our land anymore, and so that is a real problem, because most people don’t. And I’ve had the, the privilege, and I consider it a privilege, to go to these ranches and see ranchers and spend time with them, and see what they do, and what they, they actually, they truly care about these animals. I mean, that is not only their livelihood, but they, they go into it because they, they care about animals.

1:12:42 It’s not because they are mean to them and they hate them and all this vegan propaganda, and they find the worst of the worst examples, and they compile it, and it takes them, like, Conspiracy took like seven years to get enough footage to make a movie. It took him seven years of digging and digging and digging, and so it’s, you know, you know, the ranchers I know, they, they just take the best care. I mean, they’re, you know, there’s cows calving at two o’clock in the morning and a blizzard in Wyoming, and guess what they’re doing?

1:13:07 They’re out there two o’clock in the morning getting up to take care of these animals. I mean, your grandfather probably did stuff like that. So it’s, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s like I said, the vegan narrative is so far removed from the truth. We could find any human behavior, right, and if we try to extrapolate it upon all human beings, we wouldn’t want to be human beings anymore, because you can find bad people all over the place. Yeah.

1:13:28 What about hunters? Because that’s pretty fascinating. You know, quite a few hunters, and yeah, that you know, like, you know, Rogan’s a hunter, obviously. Um, that really triggers the vegans, and then the hunters will be the first ones to tell you that they actually care more about the environment and have a more of a relationship with the environment, the animals, than uh, vegan in New York City. Um, what are your thoughts on that?

1:13:50 Well, I think hunting, you know, certainly, I mean, unfortunately we can’t all hunt, with the, the, the number of animals wouldn’t support honey, so we need domestic animals. But hunting, I don’t see a problem at all. I mean, they do a very good job, and the hunting is, particularly in the United States, very well controlled. You know, the animals that are being hunted are going to be a problem if they don’t hunt them. And so, uh, you know, all of us, all animals are going to be food at some point.

1:14:14 You and I are going to turn into food at some point when we’re done, and every single animal goes and as opposed to humane slaughter, I know vegans say there’s no such term, but if you ask a cow, you know, there’s an interesting study out of University of Pennsylvania, and they looked at white-tailed deer, which are ruminate grazing animals, and they tagged a bunch of them at birth, and they tracked them for 32 weeks. over 50 were dead. Didn’t get to 32 weeks, and most of them died through predation.

1:14:42 They were torn apart by a bear, a coyote, or they starved to death, or they died of an injury. That’s how most of them die in the wild. And you compare that to a cow, which has about a 98 percent chance to make it to full adulthood. It’s protected, it’s fed, it’s sheltered. No predators eat them.

1:14:59 They have one bad day. They literally have one bad second of their life, right? You know, they’re in, they’re getting their back scratched. You look at these new commercial dairies, they’ve got back scratchers and automatic milkers, and they’re just hanging out, laying in soft beds. for an animal, they’ve got a great life.

1:15:14 They’re almost like pets, you know, just about like pets are treated. That’s pretty fascinating, whereas in the wild you got to deal with the hard times out there, and in a hunter it’s a good death, right? Because it’s one shot. Well, if there’s a good hunter, and that’s right, you know, you gotta have a hunter that can shoot. Okay.

1:15:29 Um, Indian subcontinent. Most of those people were probably vegan for the last hundred, couple hundred years. Well, I mean, they’re vegetarian. They’re not vegetarian, right? Okay.

1:15:37 This isn’t, it, this is an interesting thing about India. So in the world there are about 1.1 billion head of cattle, right? The largest number of them are in India right now. There’s, well, there’s 200 million cattle in India, another 100 million water buffalos. They have 300 million.

1:15:53 There’s cattle there. The United States has about 92 million or 93 million, something like that, depending on the year. In India, um, those cattle, you know, they still export cattle, they still slaughter cattle there, but most of them are kind of left free to roam. They are, you know, unfortunately not well bred genetically. They are, um, full of parasites.

1:16:16 They don’t produce. They don’t produce very good meat. I mean, they’re, they’re just very slow at producing that and so ironically we could probably double or triple our animal, you know, food production worldwide, if countries like India and some of these other countries that are very inefficient were to improve their efficiency standards with breeding, with nutrition, with, you know, just some of the more modern techniques that we have. If they wanted to eat meat, if they wanted to.

1:16:43 Right? Okay. And as a population, they do okay being vegetarian? Well, I don’t know. They do.

1:16:48 Their life expectancy is pretty low. I mean, they’re about 65 life expectancy. So they’re definitely bottom half of the world. Some people will attribute that to poverty. They have very high rates of diabetes, very high rates of heart disease.

1:17:02 Interesting. There was a study out of University of Adelaide just earlier this year, I believe, and they looked at 175 countries throughout the world, and they saw, even accounting for socioeconomic status, wealth, all kinds of other variables, the countries that ate the most meat had the highest life expectancies across the board. Interesting. And you like to cite Iceland, which is a you know, a country that’s been massively isolated, right? Not a lot of agriculture on that island, right?

1:17:30 You can’t, I mean, have you been to Iceland? I actually haven’t seen pictures. I’ve been to Iceland. I’ve been in Iceland in January. There are no mangoes growing in Iceland in January.

1:17:37 I can verify that. Yeah. Or is it just cold? It’s cold, but it’s, you know, it’s a frozen rock in the North Atlantic, right? And they have fish, and they have some sheep and a few cattle, and they would import a little bit of barley from Denmark, and that was their food, you know, in the dairy, and that was really the foods they had.

1:17:54 So when I went to Iceland to talk about a carnivore diet, they’re like, yeah, we get it. I mean, this is basically all we had for most of our existence. And in Iceland, you know, for instance, the number of centenarians, people over 100, male centenarians, one of the highest places in the world. And of course, they’re absolutely prolific at sports. Strongman athletes and CrossFit athletes have been dominating for a country of only, I think, there’s three, three hundred thousand people in Iceland, and they dominate sports-wise because their diet is heavily, heavily animal and animal-based, and some genetics maybe too.

1:18:25 Right. Genetics as well. Right. Right. Interesting.

1:18:28 Um, what if somebody’s intrigued by this? How do they, how do they test it? How do they try it? Well, I think that, you know, depending on where you are, if you’re on a lot of medications, it makes sense to have a physician overseeing things, because you’re going to come off those medications. If you’re on diabetic medications, insulin, sulfonylureas, if you’re on antidepressants, if you’re on antihypertensive meds, you’re going to need some support.

1:18:53 That’s what our company is going to be set up to do. We have physicians that understand this and help get people off medications. You’re going to come off them, or you’re going to want to come off of them. Well, you’re probably going to come off of those medications just because you’re going to change your diet, and yeah, just because you’re not going to need them. You’re going to feel better, and then when you toss them aside, you got to be a little careful, right?

1:19:09 You’ve got to be careful how you taper off on the medications. That’s just, convinced they’re going to come off them. Well, yeah, we see it over over and over again. Yeah. I mean, sometimes some quicker than others, you know, depending what’s going on, but yeah.

1:19:20 It’s very rare where people don’t start to either reduce their dosage or completely come off. In fact, we did, in this setting of 12,000 people, we had about 5,000 people that reported medication usage, and something like 79 of them within three months came off either completely off all meds or significantly cut back. You know, within three months, with 80 reduction. Medications, which, again, big farmer’s not going to be happy about that, right? That’s their that’s their, you know, their annual plan is, uh, being, being harmed with that.

1:19:50 Not gonna be happy at all about that. Yeah, a lot of people aren’t gonna be happy with you. Um, yeah, sure. Do you ever feel that out there or no? I do.

1:19:57 I do. I mean, you know, like I said, I get you know, and I’m, you know, it’s kind of funny, because all I’m doing is, you know, seeing wins and seeing people help, them saying, this is what we’re doing. And it’s funny, you know, when I was a, an orthopedic surgeon making, you know, three quarters of a million dollars operating on people, no one said a word. It’s like, oh, you’re good, you’re a hero, right? Now I’m in here taking people off medications, getting rid of diseases, and now I’m a villain suddenly.

1:20:22 I shouldn’t I shouldn’t make any money on that. You know, it’s kind of a, it’s kind of a weird sort of dynamic with that. Is this weird dynamic that we have of revering doctors? Well, I mean, I think that that sort of sheen is kind of wearing away. You know, we’ve seen through the pandemics, a lot of people have started to lose faith in certain institutions, doctors, uh, you know, uh, government agencies, things like that.

1:20:46 I think that, you know, physicians are humans like anybody else. There’s good ones, there’s bad ones. I think most physicians are trying to do the best they can. Unfortunately, they don’t have the right tools to do what they’re, what they should be doing. You know, and that whole industry is, is co-opted and owned by the pharmaceuticals.

1:21:00 Well, yeah, I mean, you as a physician, you are essentially a subcontractor for the pharmaceutical industry. I mean, that’s that’s that’s the reality of the matter, because all of your studies have to be funded by these industries. Your papers being published will be funded by that, and when you get to your office, it’s much easier to write a cholesterol med script or a heart medication script, because you can get those done one every 12 minutes, right?

1:21:22 And if your business practice, that just becomes the path of least resistance, right? Is that why? Absolutely, right. yeah there is, I mean, it’s, you know, you I would have to see a patient every 15 minutes, and usually I’d have to see two or three in that 15-minute period of time, and you’re just running, and you just don’t have time to talk about diet and exercise. You know, when I tried to do that, my, the administrator in the hospital came down to me, said, no, you, we pay you to operate on people.

1:21:46 You can’t be talking about lifestyle and stuff like that. So that was, uh, that was an eye-opener for me, and it definitely jaded me to the whole model. And a lot of physicians are waking up to this. It’s kind of funny, on social media I have hundreds and hundreds of doctors that are now following me, and many of them have literally left their practice because they couldn’t stand the ethics anymore. They were just like, I can’t live with myself and still continue to do this.

1:22:09 I had a gal who was working in the food industry. She was one of the persons, that was her job was to make you addicted to processed foods. I mean, that was her job, and she said, I want to come work for you guys because I quit my job. I can’t do this anymore. So I think people are waking up to this for sure.

1:22:24 What about surgery itself? I mean, how many surgeries are the right thing to do for someone if you could get them to change their behavior? So I think most surgeries, many surgeons, I don’t know if I won’t say most, but a very high number of surgeries are probably unnecessary, would would not be necessary if you could get people to change their habits. Now I used to, I did hundreds and hundreds of operations. Every, I did thousands of operations.

1:22:49 People, and I used to pride myself, I would replace somebody’s knee, and I’d do a good job, and they’d feel good, and they come back to me in two years with their other knee, and I would take that as a point of product, because they came back to me for another thing, because I thought I did a good job. Really, what I did was I let that person down. I should have you know said, hey, you’ve got arthritis here. This is a systemic inflammatory process, and if I had known and had the tools, I would have said, let’s change your lifestyle.

1:23:14 This would have been totally unnecessary, but I didn’t know that. Once I figured that out, now it’s a totally different ball game. Plus also, you’re compensated more if they come back from your surgery. Of course. You play with your head too, right?

1:23:25 So then you’re like, well, your subconscious is thinking, well, how do I wind this into it? Well, I mean, yeah, surgery was just, it was just, you know, it was this straight up, the more you do the more you make, and it’s you know, it’s one of those things where, yeah, it’s tough, tough to resist that. What do you think of a knees over toes guy, Ben Patrick? Yeah, I think he’s got some interesting stuff there. I think, uh, you know, I can see you know, particularly with the deep flexion, uh, where that can be beneficial.

1:23:50 You know, we load when we load our cartilage. There’s an interesting MRI study out of Germany from about 15 years ago, and they looked at strength training athletes and they looked at the articular cartilage. The cartilage in our kneecap is the thickest cartilage in our body. It’s usually about four millimeters, which doesn’t seem very thick, but for cartilage it is, and athletes that were using, under high levels of tension, saw thicker cartilage. So they actually, they actually protected that.

1:24:14 So I think by, you know, doing that deflection in the back of the knee, where you often don’t see much pressure, you’re going to prevent probably breakdown of that cartilage, because usually when you stick a camera in someone’s knee, you look way back in the deep, deep flexion part of the knee the tissue is very soft and breaks away, and this is what we start seeing as we get older. Okay. Yeah, I thought I, I like him. I’ve had him on the show. I just like the, the concept of, look, you know, what you have to do is some conditioning.

1:24:42 It’s going to take time, but there’s a lot more you could be doing, especially even professional athletes, down to your mom, your grandma. and, um, yeah, I, I play with it in practice. Yeah, I do some of this stuff. I do that’s for fun. I enjoy it.

1:24:54 Yeah. And tell me about you. You’re 55, and you are still very athletic. You have been, you know, throughout your later years. Um, what’s that all about?

1:25:05 How are you able to be still such a high-performance person? Well, I mean, one, you know, I’ve got the discipline to do it. I enjoy doing it, so I think that’s important. You know, um, it’s, it’s kind of, you know, for me it’s kind of like breathing. You know, it’s kind of what I’ve been doing my whole life, and I just, as part of my identity.

1:25:19 And so, um, I, you know, I enjoy it. I enjoy the process. I enjoy training. I enjoy pushing myself to the limit and seeing what the body can, you know, what you can get out of your body. And I find it, you know, really since I’ve been about 50, you know, when I switched diet, I just noticed my recovery was so much better, you know, when I was in my mid-40s I was starting to get that, I’m getting older, I’m getting these aches and pains.

1:25:42 I can’t do as well. And then when I switched diet, it was like I suddenly got a little bit of youth back, and so now I’m taking advantage of that, and so I’m having fun. You know, like I said, I just started doing jiu-jitsu, and so that’s been a blast. You know, it’s been just, yeah, well, you know, it’s, it’s just, you know, the thing I like about it is, you know, when I do, when I’m doing jiu-jitsu and there’s somebody trying to basically kill you, right?

1:26:02 Because they’re choking you out, it’s basically, they could kill you if they succeed. That’s highly stressful physiologically. So you’re fighting that. You’re fighting it to not die, basically. And then when you’re at home and no one’s trying to kill you, life is so much easier.

1:26:17 It’s like, where is the stress? And that no one’s trying to kill me right now. So I think it’s, I really, I really enjoy that aspect of it. But I, I like, I said, you know, knock on wood, or God willing, I mean, I’ll still be doing athletics in my 80s and 90s, hopefully. Yeah.

1:26:32 And before that, you were doing not like combat sports. You were doing a lot of rowing, Highland Games, which is still very intense physically, right? But also now that jiu-jitsu, you’re kind of going, right? Modeling. Yeah, it’s different.

1:26:45 You know, I find that it takes me between five and seven years to sort of peak at a sport, you know, and I’ve been able to win world championships, set world records in three or four different sports now. And so once I get about five or six years in, and you’re like, I can’t get any better without a tremendous amount of effort. So it’s like, let’s do something new. You know, you suck at it. You know, as you know, starting martial arts, you’re not very good, and I’m still not very good, but I’m, I’m seeing the progress, and that’s fun.

1:27:11 That’s just, yeah, it’s incredibly fun getting better at something. Yeah. You know, Ido Portal calls it the beginner’s mind. Right, right. And, uh, yeah, you suck, but you’re, and you suck a little bit less.

1:27:20 Yeah, you’re learning, but you suck, but you’re learning, faster than anything you’ve ever done, because you’re learning curves like this. So yeah, you suck, but you’re learning new stuff every day, and you can see your progress. You’re like, wow, this is fun. So as long as you can be okay with sucking at something, which means you take the ego hit, which a lot of people can’t, um, then yeah. Yeah, no, I, I came into this knowing that I was gonna get choked out by little bitty people and little women, and stuff.

1:27:44 I didn’t care. I was like, this is fun. I was having a great time with that. Yeah, yeah. That’s cool.

1:27:47 Jiu-jitsu’s, uh, quite a lot of fun, man. Um, yeah, it’s, uh, it’s, it’s, yeah, it’s an incredible workout, and yeah, if you’re going against someone you don’t know, then it can really feel like a death sport, because that’s what it kind of is. So yeah, I got my boys trained in jiu-jitsu. You know, I saw, I was in, I was in Dubai and I guess in the UAE, all the kids by law do jiu-jitsu as part of their, part of their education. Like you’ve seen, it’s in the high school, the grade schools, or something like that.

1:28:16 Can you imagine if they mandated it here, or in you, in the US? That would be, I think it’d be great. Probably change the whole society. You know, I know obviously Abu Dhabi were big adopters, because they were held in no-gi. Yeah, they didn’t see the ADCC for the last 20 years, and Renzo Gracie, been on the show before, is really tight with those guys, so they embraced it.

1:28:35 I didn’t know they were teaching at the young age, but I love it. My boys do it. Again, like I always joke, like I have two boys, five and six. I know you have a young boy, but when I come home at night, what do they want to do? They want to fight.

1:28:46 That’s what they want to do, fight. And so, um, they’re learning jiu-jitsu. They get, they can choke me out pretty good now, and, uh, armbars and all that stuff. So yeah, it’s kind of fun. Going forward, and, um, company-wise, what do you want to do?

1:28:58 What do you want to do? Like, you know, where’s Rivera in five? Well, I mean, I think we are going to be a significant alternative to the, to the sort of, the, uh, status quo, you know. The allopathic model is what it is. You know, some people are still very much married to that and bought into that.

1:29:13 I think a lot of people are not getting out of it what they want to, and I think we’re going to be one of the major players when it comes to, you know, do you want to go to the doctor and get a pill, or do you want to maybe reverse your disease and get in and actually treat what’s going on? And so, uh, we certainly should be up and running in all 50 states. Probably will have a global footprint by five years. That’s that’s the long-term. Uh, well, I’ve already got people, you know, around the world asking me, you know, can we do this in our country?

1:29:43 And obviously there’s, obviously, different hurdles from, uh, from different companies. But we’re, you know, it’s a digital platform, so scalability is obviously, you know, fairly infinite. And so you know, I think we’re going to be a big powerhouse. Yeah, it’s exciting. You know, thinking about, like, my changes over the years, I mean, um, again, I’m 51 and I feel great.

1:30:03 Um, I’m training every day. Yeah, I swim, I run, I do a lot of breakdancing. I I just, I love moving, and, um, again, I’ve now altered my diet to where it’s like, it works for me. I eat a lot of meats, I eat some vegetables, I try to stay away from carbs, and it just keeps me good and fit, and I don’t really get injured. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m going to keep doing it.

1:30:27 So it’s a pretty strict diet. I don’t like to process foods, and, and again, I don’t like, I don’t like the idea of surgeries or medications, and just stay off of it and just keep it old school. Yeah, I mean, I think your diet is great. I mean, like I said, I’m, I’m obviously an advocate of a carnivore diet, but I don’t think everybody needs to do that. You know, I’ve never been dogmatic about it.

1:30:47 I mean, there’s some people, like, if you’re really sick and you can’t get better, this is a good option for you. And, you know, and again, once you kind of go down that path, and you’ve tried the veganism, you’ve made that journey, and I think, I think many people should try that. But I mean, be objective, and don’t get sucked into the ideology. Just do it as a pure, uh, you know, experiment for yourself, and then try the other avenue, or something. Find out something in between.

1:31:12 Find out what works for you. And, uh, you know, because people are asking me, can I eat this on a carnivore diet? I’m like, I’m not your mother. You know, just try and see, see how you do. See how you do.

1:31:20 And that’s kind of a beautiful thing about this diet too, because when you’re a veganism, you’re vegan, you’re always asking, can I eat this? Can I eat honey? No, because it’s a bee. And you’re like, what? And I know you can’t eat eggs because it came from a thing, and it’s got a snout, and, you know, it’s kind of funny that it’s salted citrus fruit now in the grocery store, because it’s got shellac on it, or wax, beeswax.

1:31:40 Now they’re complaining that you can’t eat some of these citrus fruits, and so it’s even fruit isn’t vegan now, so it’s hilarious. Yeah, and look, I would, like you said, I encourage everyone to try some things, and maybe even go down to some of the mindset and cult things. But, um, I would also encourage everyone to really think about this diet if you’re a vegan or you’re into this, because I don’t want to hurt animals and I want to save the planet. How do you speak to that person that’s watching us now, that they would never even conceive of this?

1:32:06 Maybe they’re thinking of it what would you say? Well, I mean, I think be honest with yourself about your health. I mean, that’s something to be because, you know, these, when you start feeling, I don’t feel good, I’m tired, I’m hungry all the time, I’ve got gut issues, that’s probably your diet. So be honest about your health, and if you’re willing to sacrifice your health for your beliefs, be honest with that. That’s fine.

1:32:25 You know, I’m, I’m personally not. I’m not gonna, you know, have some ideology that’s gonna just gonna harm me or my family. I think that, you know, the reality is, as a vegan thinking that no animals are dying for your food is a complete fallacy. I mean, there’s literally, like we mentioned earlier in this in this podcast, millions and millions of animals are dying to produce plant foods, so you’re not really doing that. The environment.

1:32:48 You know, if you really want to, you know, save the environment, and I don’t know that we can, again, I don’t know that, you know, how much humans are impacting the environment. Some, some others, I think, the pollution is an issue. I mean, you go down and you go to a, you know, a deserted island, and there’s plastic bottles washing up all over the place. There’s a real problem with that. And so, you know, veganism, you put all these processed foods, you’re putting all this plastic in the ocean.

1:33:10 Uh, you’re harming the planet in many ways, and just because you know, we, this is, you know, the calculus is unfortunate, because, you know, the current measurement is how many calories can I produce per unit of greenhouse gases, whether it’s methane or nitrous oxide or carbon dioxide. And that’s a calculation, but that’s not a very good calculation, because we’re looking at, what about the nutritional quality of that food? So you know, one of the most greenhouse-gas-efficient products to produce crop-wise is sugarcane.

1:33:44 Sugar is cheap to produce, you know, and so you can make a lot of calories from sugar and minimally impact the diet. And it’s like, is that what we want to be eating for people? And so there’s this new sort of diet, or this stuff called a climatarian diet, and they rank foods by climate impact, and literally that diet is basically 100 percent processed food. It’s just complete garbage. And if we’re going to go down that road, you know, I didn’t mention this, but I mentioned, you know, according to the EPA, you know, two percent of our greenhouse gases come from cattle.

1:34:19 The healthcare industry puts out 10 percent of our greenhouse gases, so literally five times as much greenhouse gases are caused by the healthcare industry. So if you get off your meds, I see this, you come off medications, you stop going to the ER, you stop needing surgeries, guess what, you’ve just reduced a significant greenhouse footprint. And we don’t cut, you know, again, this one. It’s very, you know, it’s very easy to be very myopic or reductionist in your arguments when you’re looking at the big overall picture, like, am I really making a difference?

1:34:46 Am I just robbing Peter to pay Paul? And this is a thing we don’t do, and the politicians aren’t looking at this, and it’s really, it’s really unfortunate to see that. Yeah, I mean, uh, healthcare as a percentage of GDP just keeps going up. Well, I mean, I, you know, as a surgeon I was, you know, I thought about this, how much trash I made to do one operation. All this, one-time, single-use plastic.

1:35:08 I mean, there were literally 10 or 12 full 55-gallon buckets of trash for one operation. You roll out there, and they just wheel it out to the parking lot to be shipped off to Pakistan or wherever they dispose of this stuff. You know, it’s crazy. Yeah, there’s a whole healthcare, man, that’s all, yeah, the whole thing. So yeah, I would just say, if you are one of these people, and then ask yourself, like, if you want to sacrifice your health, but isn’t your health the most important thing?

1:35:35 Like, if you’re not feeling 100, are you going to be there 100 for your family? Are you going to be a good example to your family? Are you going to be draining things on other people? And then it’s like, how important is it? You know, it goes to the, the myth of the vegan athlete.

1:35:47 So if we’re, if we’re going to say veganism is ideology, and many people will, and it’s, do the least harm, right? So what do athletes do? What do you have to do when you’re an athlete? You got to eat more, right? You got to eat more food.

1:35:58 If you’re eating more food, guess what? More animal death. So there’s, you can’t be, you could be a plant-based athlete, I suppose, you can’t be a vegan athlete, because by definition you should be as skinny as possible, have the lowest footprint possible from a food consumption standpoint. So you can’t be a big vegan bodybuilder, because you got to eat all the time. Um, for carnivore diets, um, are you kind of like the poster child for this now, or other people coming up that are eating meat?

1:36:22 You got the Liver King out, right? Right, right, right, right. I don’t know much about the Liver King. You know, I haven’t met him. I, you know, he’s great at marketing, obviously.

1:36:29 He’s created a brand around himself, and I you know, I don’t follow him that much, and I’m not into eating raw liver or anything like that. He’s a raw meat guy, kind of. I think he does. I think he does raw liver or something like that, but I mean, you know, he’s got this whole primal stuff, and I think some of that makes sense. Some of it’s obviously for show.

1:36:44 Um, I think he was just in London recently. It’s what some people were telling me as I was kidding here. Yeah. I, uh, you know, I think again, I’m happy for people to, to, to open up the discussion, you know, and like I said, sometimes when you show people eating raw testicles and stuff like that, like he does, a lot of people are going to be put off by that, and I’m just saying you don’t have to do that. You can have a steak and eggs for breakfast, and that’s sufficient.

1:37:11 That’s all you need to do, and I think that makes it a little more accessible, so it makes me look less crazy. Which is kind of nice, but I can appreciate, you know, the, the, the audience that he’s capturing, and you see a lot of people. There’s a lot of people on social media now, TikTok, you know, if you’ve seen that cesspool, but it’s kind of a crazy place. Uh, I try to stay away, but there’s a lot of people there doing, what, doing me, well, doing meat-based diets and raw meat diets, and of course, as it’s becoming more and more popular, we’re seeing more and more pushback from the, the standard, you know, standard channels.

1:37:43 You know, the dietitians warning you of the dangers of eating meat, and how all these bad things are going to happen, which never happened. I mean, I’ve, I’ve literally been seeing thousands of people doing this over the years. No one’s getting scurvy. No one’s dying. No one’s having their colon fall out.

1:37:57 All the stuff they tell you is going to happen. It just doesn’t happen. Right? Just myths. Do you think there’ll be a point where some of this stuff just gets banned on social media, or do you think, probably, I think I’m very concerned about that.

1:38:08 I mean, I think it could go that way. I think that, uh, you know, we saw the banning around the pandemic. You know, we had world-class physicians, very smart, intelligent people, shut down, banned from social media, and what they were saying turned out, in many cases, to be correct, right? We found out two years later that it wasn’t a conspiracy theory, and I think there’s, there’s people that want to ban it. They don’t want you to talk about, oh, maybe, maybe, maybe cholesterol is not the main driver of cardiovascular disease, or maybe there’s more nuance there.

1:38:37 I just try to put out nuance and say, hey, look, maybe it isn’t so black and white, isn’t so one-size-fits-all. Let’s have a little more diversity of thought when it comes to diet, you know, even if, even if my risk for cardiac disease went up significantly, or yours did, or somebody else’s did, and you say, well, would you be willing to trade that for what you have now, because some people are literally living in chronic pain, they’re, they’re crippled with depression, and they stop feeling, and they get their life back together? You say, well, your heart disease risk went up by 20 percent.

1:39:08 Would you be willing to quit? And they’re saying, no, hell no, I don’t want to live in misery. And so who are we to decide what you or you or I should do, as far as our health? Is destroyed. Who are you to decide how I should die?

1:39:22 You know, I mean, I might rather die of heart disease and cancer or dementia, or who knows what else. I mean, you know, there’s, you know, I think when we get kind of authoritarian and say, you must do this, because if you don’t, you’re going to have this risk factor, which, by the way, is at best speculative. You know, I think anybody telling you they’re going to live longer, or live shorter, or I’ve got the cure that’s going to make you live to 180, I’m like, show me the money.

1:39:47 Where’s the proof? If you show me one guy, 120 years old, that’s walking around, Jack, maybe, maybe you’re going to be one of them. Who knows? Hopefully, right? But until that day, I’m just like, I don’t know.

1:39:57 I don’t know what people can live longer, but what I do know is that I can take people that are sick, that are suffering, that are miserable, and make them a hell of a lot better, improve their quality of life. And I think that’s a great thing. That really is, yeah. I think it’s definitely something everybody should consider, and I’m a big fan of trying things out, so why not? And, uh, steak tastes good Too well.

1:40:17 There’s a reason for that. You know, what it tastes good? Why? Because you’re a human being. It’s supposed to Yeah, because it is good, because it’s got things that you need.

1:40:24 And what, yeah, things I need? Well, I wish my grandpa Benedict was alive today, because he would be feeling much better knowing that the world might be eating more meat. Yeah. I remember when I was a kid, I think, um, one of my brothers or sisters was going vegetarian. It was early adopters back then, because we were from California, and I remember, I think he just had to get up and leave the table.

1:40:44 I mean, for a cattle man, you know, to hear that in the ’80s, you’re just going to be like, what’s going on? Um, what’s interesting, you know, I’ve presented in front of a lot of, a number of cattlemen’s associations, you know, California Cattlemen’s Association, US Cattlemen’s Association. I’m in there telling them that meat is healthy for them, and they’re like confused, because they’ve been brainwashed. Even the cattle ranchers themselves are like, worried about eating too much red meat.

1:41:07 I’m like, no, you got to stop eating the, you know, the sweet potato pie and the sweet tea and the beer and all the other crap that you’re eating. That’s, that’s a real problem. Yeah, that’s interesting, isn’t it? Sometimes how you even get brainwashed by your own stuff. So, well, uh, good.

1:41:21 I think I’m going to go eat a steak now. And, uh, look, I just appreciate you going out there and talking about this stuff, you know? Not only do you have great IP, and you have great stories, and you have great testimonials, but you know, you’re a really intelligent guy that also comes from the medical background, so they can really talk about this stuff. You know, when people hear you talk, they’re like, okay, this kind of makes sense. So, uh, you know, well, you know, and again, I think, Brian, I tell, don’t listen to me.

1:41:45 Don’t listen to anybody. Just try it yourself. Just listen to yourself. Look in the mirror. This is the thing, because it’s very confusing.

1:41:50 We get climate change. There’s a realism. Not, I can’t assess that. I can’t walk outside and say the earth’s rising in temperature. There’s no way for me to know that, but what I can do is I can look in the mirror, and I can say, I feel better.

1:42:01 I look better. I wake up with more energy. I’m happy. You can assess it yourself. You don’t need a doctor to tell you that.

1:42:07 You don’t need a guy in the news to tell you if you’re better or not. This is the one thing you have that no one can kind of hide from you. So I think that’s a great thing to assess. So don’t listen to me, but try things. Yeah, try it yourself, and I think these days more than anything, just, you know, sometimes listen to your heart, listen to your gut a little bit.

1:42:25 Yeah, because we can get so confused with the information and being in our brains all the time, but like, you know, as we’ve seen the last few years, sometimes just take a step back and say uh, what do you really feel? Is this the right thing to do? Is everything these people are saying really true? Or yeah, there’s, there’s something about instinct, you know, and I think that saves us a lot of times. You know, he’s like I’m not going to go down that alley, or I’m not going to take that.

1:42:48 I’m not going to take that medication. I’m just, I’m just going to wait, and I think there’s I mean, there’s some value in that. I think then you can listen to yourself. Yeah, I think we should be doing that more lately. So, um, all right.

1:42:59 We’re really excited to hear about what you do with Rivera, so keep us posted on that. And, uh, yeah, I hope this was informative for people. I’m sure this is very controversial, but that’s good, but look, there’s people out there eating only meat and thriving. That’s actually happening, a lot of people are, and also having a lot of great, um, health benefits. And there’s real people doing this.

1:43:18 It’s been happening for many, many years. You’re one example. I do a lot of meat, and I feel great, and I’ve never felt better, and it could be something that actually might be good for you. And at the same time, use this as a thing to question, really look at your diet and look at the medications you’re on and look at some of the medical treatments you’ve gone through. Is what could have any of that been avoided by a simplified diet of whole foods that might be animal foods?

1:43:45 These are good questions to ask yourself. So I’ll leave everybody with that. Shawn, thanks for coming in here. Great to see you again. Appreciate you.

1:43:53 Let’s do this again sometime. All right, sounds good. Thanks, man. Thank you, appreciate it. Take care.

1:43:57 Bye, everybody. We’ll see you next time you