Mark Bell's Power Project - Max Lugavere || MBPP Ep. 837

Starting point is 00:00:00 Power Project family, we talked to you about Mouth Tape before, and it's time to get better quality sleep, stop snoring, and wake up better rested. Andrew, how can they get their hands on some hostage tape? You guys got to head over to hostage tape.com slash power project. You'll receive free shipping plus a free incredible awesome bedside tin. Again, hostage tape.com slash power project. Links to them down in the description as well as podcast show notes. Yes, daddy.

Starting point is 00:00:23 Whoa. Yes, daddy. Whoa. Look at this. Magic. slash power project links to them down in the description as well yes daddy whoa yes daddy look at this magic i thought something was wrong with the audio but you just have mouth tape on it's called being a ventriloquist there you go power project family we talk about meat all the time on the podcast because protein is essential for your health that's why i partnered with piedmontese and if you head to their website they have such so much different types of beef they have beef sticks beef jerky tons of different cuts of meat. You should go check them out.

Starting point is 00:00:46 Andrew, how can they learn more? You guys got to head over to Piedmontese.com. That's P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E.com. And at checkout, enter promo code POWER to save 25% off your entire order. And if your order is over $150 or more, you get free two-day shipping. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. How long do you guys typically record for like sometimes two three hours wow sometimes just don't stop just don't stop i think my ada bill my ada might have been a three and a half hour pod yeah it was uh uh matt winning oh and the my silly dad joke is that

Starting point is 00:01:22 that podcast is still currently being recorded like Like as we're talking here now, that's how long that one was still going. Yeah. Well, the reason why I brought in Max, we had a really important question. These little, uh,

Starting point is 00:01:34 circular spinner spring things that go into shaker cups. There's a lot of controversy over these things. Do they do anything? Do you guys think they do anything? Like, what's your take on this? Max, we got to bring an expert.

Starting point is 00:01:44 Is this a real serious question? Yeah. Look at this thing. Like, do you, like, do you get think they do anything like what's your take on this max we got to bring an expert is this a real serious question yeah look at this thing yeah do you like do you like do you get worried if you if you don't see this dropped in when someone's making a shake are you concerned sometimes actually when i blend up uh collagen the collagen actually gets like caught in here and i have to like wedge my finger into it and push it out it's kind of gross right i don't know i actually i put ice cubes in my blender bottle and i use i let the ice cubes no be the uh that's the agitator this is uh first time you had coffee protein heavy cream all mixed together right i feel jacked up no it's good it's good it's also probably the first time um yeah i don't think i mean because i generally

Starting point is 00:02:25 when i i don't have a strong opinion against them necessarily but i don't i tend not to do like a lot of sucralose and like artificial sweeteners so i probably in like more than a decade haven't had sucralose i'm probably getting a sucralose high i love it as well yeah yeah there is a little bit in that product in in my other product, in the steak shake, there's no sucralose. So we'll send you some of that and see what you think of that one. It's so good, though. I'm down. That's all that matters.

Starting point is 00:02:50 And I'm fasted. And I had cold brew earlier. So I'm getting the infusion of the caffeine. Plus, you brought me the heavy cream. Plus, you got the 1,000 milligrams of sodium that I'm getting. We gave you a full-court press. My brother's pushing kratom on you when he walks in. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:03:09 Did you know about the kratom that he mixed into that yeah it's all mixed in yeah blended mixed mixed in this is can i just move in like seriously i love hanging out with you guys this is awesome so far so good so wait so you purposefully avoid sucralose up until this point yeah i mean i don't want to i you know it's i it's it's not for a strong belief that it's not good for you or anything like that so i just don't want to like you know uh make claims about it or anything like that i just i tend to have like a bias just in terms of the things that i buy and and bring into my house like for you know like the quote-unquote natural and i know that there's like the appeal to nature fallacy not everything that's natural is good for you but it's just like it's a value thing like this natural. And I know that there's like the appeal to nature fallacy. Not everything that's natural is good for you.

Starting point is 00:03:45 But it's just like it's a values thing. Like this is one of the issues that I have with the people in the wellness world that tend to suggest that all of our decisions be based on data. I think that that's like not every decision that you make on a day-to-day basis is data-driven, right? Like you make decisions based on like values. And I think you have to plant a flag, right? is data-driven, right? Like you make decisions based on like values. And I think you have to plant a flag, right?

Starting point is 00:04:07 So as not to have choice paralysis with every decision that you make on a day-to-day basis, right? And so for me, it's a lot easier for me just to like, you know, have this kind of like rule for myself generally. Sometimes it's just comes down to stuff that you like too. A hundred percent. Like maybe this isn't the best thing for me,

Starting point is 00:04:22 but I just, I just, I really like this. I enjoy this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don't, you just, I really like this. I enjoy this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't, you know, I make no like claims about it or anything like that. But, but yeah, just in general. And there's also like a lot of, you know, there's great brands on both sides. So I, yeah, that's just generally mine.

Starting point is 00:04:36 How did you get into just like really studying and taking a deep dive into nutrition in general? Great starting place. So I started college on a pre-med track and that was because I had always been interested in health and nutrition and fitness. I was super passionate about those things. I wasn't an athlete. I became interested in bodybuilding when I was in high school and I never aspired to be a bodybuilder, but I just became really enamored with the world of supplementation. Those are fun times when you're just trying to be kind of jacked. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:05:09 You're trying to figure it out and do your three sets of ten and stuff like that. Yeah. Take your creatine. 100%. And I was like a shy, introverted computer nerd growing up in school. And I wasn't – I didn't – I like – I didn't identify with the athletes in my high school. I didn't identify with the athletes in my high school. And so when I saw like – I think it was like in Manhattan where I went to school.

Starting point is 00:05:34 I stumbled into some mom and pop supplement store and the guy behind the counter was actually like really generous with his knowledge. And he loaded me up with all these like muscle rags, which in retrospect we know are all like marketing vehicles, right? Muscle rags? Yeah. Wait, what are muscle rags? Is that an actual company or something? No, like magazines and like these – Oh, mags. Yeah. Muscle mags. Oh, I muscle rags. Yeah. Wait, what are muscle? Is that an actual company or something? No, like the, like magazines and like these mags. Yeah. Muscle mags. Oh, I said rags. I did. No, I don't, in my head, I feel like that. Are they not ever referred to as that or maybe I don't know. I don't know. New York. Maybe I just made it up on the fly. Maybe it's the most

Starting point is 00:05:59 chuggy thing. Uh, it's another word. You just got to do the, uh, the SoCal thing. Like, oh, you guys don't have that in NorCal. It's okay. It's a SoCal thing. My bad. But as an on-ramp into this world, I was very grateful at the time. And they were super exciting. And I saw the potions on the walls as being like portals, really, essentially, to help me transcend myself at the time. And I became really interested in, in, in working out and, you know, I was seeing great like gains in the gym and I started to feel more confident in my body.

Starting point is 00:06:31 And, uh, and I went to, I went into college aspiring to do something in the sciences, but halfway through college, I realized that I was also creative. I was a storyteller and, um, and that I, I always look, just looking back on my academic career, I was never really that like that good. Cause I would do good in the, I would excel in the classes that I was interested in. So I would get like A's in the, in the sciences that I had taken, but I would get D's in the classes that everybody would take to get the A's in, but I just wasn't interested in them. So I wouldn't show up and I wouldn't study for tests and things like that. So my academic, like my GPA was never that great. So I just knew that like and I wouldn't study for tests and things like that. So my academic – like my GPA was never that great.

Starting point is 00:07:05 So I just knew that like med school wasn't the route for me. And so I ended up pivoting to a double major in film and psychology and that led to me getting a job as a journalist out of college. I worked for a TV network in the US that I did for six years. I did that – and the topics that I covered there really ran the gamut. But I would always try to bring it back to health whenever I had the opportunity to do that. Six years into that role, my experience there kind of like plateaued. I learned everything that there was to learn and I left. And in my personal life, that was when my mom got sick.

Starting point is 00:07:38 My mom was the person I had been the closest to in life. I'm the oldest child in a very small family. I've got two younger brothers and I was always incredibly close to my mom. And in about the year 2011, 2012, she started to show the earliest symptoms of what would ultimately be diagnosed as a form of dementia, like a rare neurodegenerative condition called Lewy body dementia. And I had no prior family history of any kind of neurodegenerative condition. So, you know, the word Alzheimer's disease wasn't, or the condition wasn't even in my lexicon. Is your mom fairly healthy?

Starting point is 00:08:13 She was not overweight. She was a thin and health conscious woman her whole life, but- Is she still alive? No, she passed away three years ago. Yeah. I'm sorry to hear that. She passed away actually due to pancreatic cancer. So she had a very tragic, the last decade of her life, eight years of her life were really hard. And, you know, she was young when she first started to show these symptoms. And so I couldn't chalk up what I was seeing to old age.

Starting point is 00:08:39 And it threw me, it was like a curveball, right? Like to me and my family. It was like a curveball to me and my family. And because I was in between jobs, I had the privilege of being able to start accompanying her to doctor's appointments. I would fly home to New York City, which is – because I had been living in LA at the time. And I relished getting to spend more and more time with my mom. And so I would go with her to these doctor's appointments in New York City, which as I mentioned is where I'm from. And New York is a – like when you live in Manhattan, you have access to some pretty great medical care, right?

Starting point is 00:09:13 So I would go with my mom to doctor's appointment after doctor's appointment. And nobody could give us a clear sense of what it was that she had. Now, granted, her symptoms were atypical, right? She wasn't like textbook like Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease for that matter. like textbook, like Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease for that matter. But we were met with what I have come to call diagnose and adios. Basically, a prescription would like offer their opinion, scribble down a few notes on a prescription pad, send us on our way. One doctor, one psychiatrist actually, actually thought that all of my mom's symptoms were attributable to depression, which I think is often the case, especially with middle-aged

Starting point is 00:09:44 women. One in four women over the age of 40 these days is on some kind of antidepressant drug. And so it actually took us having to go to Cleveland, Ohio, to the Cleveland Clinic, where she was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative condition for the first time. And she was prescribed drugs for both Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. And so that to me was like the line in the sand where I became not just interested but like obsessed with learning everything I possibly could about diet and lifestyle factors and how they might predispose us to these kinds of chronic conditions that we now see people all over the world suffering from, right? But I focused on dementia and specifically Alzheimer's disease because it's the most common form of dementia. So you get the most sort of research on it.

Starting point is 00:10:26 But under the purview of like brain health, you've got cardiovascular health, you've got all these different, you know, sort of fields which are typically siloed off in the world of medicine, right? But for me, I just developed this voracious appetite to understand everything that I possibly could. And I'm not a medical doctor. I didn't go through the academic route just to be super clear. But, you know, this is a journey that began about 10 years ago for me. And it's going to continue for the rest of my life. Like, my mom was robbed from me and my

Starting point is 00:10:54 family. And I think that in large part, it was due to some kind of toxic exposure in her environment, whether that was via diet, whether that was via her lifestyle. As I mentioned, she wasn't overweight. But, you know, my mom's generation, they didn't exercise very regularly, right? My mom wasn't a big believer in – and I'm not saying that this is the cause, but she wasn't a big believer in like organic. So we bought conventional produce, you know, my whole upbringing. So, I mean, that's an area that I've decided. Yeah, it wasn't like you had something you really point to like, oh, she was a hundred pounds over

Starting point is 00:11:28 weight. Maybe that was the issue or she was a prize fighter or something where you're like hitting the head. Yeah. Part of the occupation, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it's not, it's not just like one thing and I'll never know what, what caused this for my mom, but it's led to me ultimately having to leave no stone unturned as I, as I investigate, like what, you know, what it is about our diets and our lifestyles that have become essentially toxic. You mentioned she was health conscious. So that actually makes me curious because she was paying attention to her health. She must have been paying attention to different things. What was she doing at that time that was conventionally the, I guess,

Starting point is 00:12:02 information on health that she was actually partaking in. Yeah. I mean, that's a great question. She was health conscious and she also – the lore of my family was that her dad had died due to heart disease. So my mom was particularly attuned because she thought her dad died due to heart disease to the messaging surrounding what it meant to be what it meant to eat a heart healthy diet okay in the 70s 80s and 90s right grains which was like yeah low fat low fat high grain low saturated fat low cholesterol diets right if it had a red heart healthy logo on it in the supermarket you could guarantee that it was at some point it made its way you know into my house

Starting point is 00:12:43 and so i grew up consuming you know like i just consuming – I remember vividly the huge plastic tub of corn oil that we always had by the stove. I remember we never had actual butter in my fridge. It was always margarine in those yellow plastic tubs. Okay. Yeah, because it was the heart-healthy alternative to animal fats, right? So many examples. I mean, my mom would load up on grain products because they had no, you know, they were either low fat or had no saturated fat and were cholesterol free. And on top of that, my mom was also a passionate animal rights advocate. So my

Starting point is 00:13:18 mom made a very low animal product diet in general. She never ate any beef ever. Very rarely, if ever, did I see her consume eggs because of the cholesterol contained in the yolks. And occasionally she would eat lean chicken breast. She would eat like fish because fish was – we've known for some time as a cardioprotective effect. So yeah, that's kind of like how she lived, you know, high grain, low fat, generally low, definitely low saturated fat, low cholesterol. And when you cut those kinds of things out of your diet, especially the red meat and all that stuff, what do you replace it with?

Starting point is 00:13:55 You replace it with ultra processed, like modern food products, like high grain products. Right. And also like for those decades, like that's when the food pyramid was in service, which has now been retired thankfully. But I mean that was a paradigm that implored Americans every day to consume 7 to 11 servings of grains. And you look at like – you look at the illustrated version of the food pyramid and it's like pasta, bread products and things like that. So I mean that's how I was raised and you know that's how she ate the majority of her life and um you know again i can't like point my finger at her diet and say that's what caused what my mom had yeah but it certainly wasn't protective the og yeah well and there's um what percentage of the population are they starting to estimate that is going to

Starting point is 00:14:42 potentially run into alzheimer's and dementia at this point? Like I've heard some staggering numbers. I don't know if you've heard. Yeah. Well, today if you make it to the age of 85, you have a 50% chance. So that's like a coin toss. Like you want to know your odds of developing Alzheimer's disease? It's a coin toss.

Starting point is 00:14:58 And this is U.S. only? This is U.S. This is U.S. Yeah, I believe they've estimated by like 2030 half the population by the age of 65. Yeah. Yeah, what is it? I think today in the U.S. there's about 6 million people with Alzheimer's disease alone. And that number by the year 2050 is set to be triple that.

Starting point is 00:15:17 So 6, 12, 18. Yeah, 18 million people. So there's something. Something in the environment. Yeah, something in the environment. I mean, the same could be said for cardiovascular disease rates, I mean, cancer incidents. Do you think they're all connected? Because there's some people that believe that heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer's are kind of all the same thing-ish. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:15:40 Well, it depends on who you ask and where you look. But generally, I mean, we know that we're becoming more insulin resistant as a society and more obese. You know, obesity is a huge problem. And if you are obese, your risk for developing certain cancers, for heart disease, for dementia skyrockets, right, as opposed to somebody who is at a normal healthy weight. And so, yeah, everything does seem to be connected, whether it's insulin resistance. But there are, with regard to dementia specifically, it's only as of the past couple of years that we've been able to talk about it as a potentially preventable condition. The 2020 Lancet Commission determined that there are about 12 modifiable risk factors for the development of

Starting point is 00:16:27 dementia. And so modifiable risk factors are risk factors that fall under your control. And just to contrast that, you have non-modifiable risk factors. So non-modifiable risk factors would be, for example, your age, your gender. If you're a female, your risk is twice that of a male's. If you're a female, your risk is twice that of a male's. And your age, your genes, and yeah, your gender and your genes. So – and genes is one of these areas where we're just sort of at the tip of the iceberg in terms of understanding all the different ways that genes play a role. But the most well-defined Alzheimer's risk gene is called the APOE4 allele and about one in four people carry it. And if you have that in the US, that puts you at anywhere between two and 14-fold increased risk.

Starting point is 00:17:11 But then there's this concept of polygenic risk. So you have different genes that we have yet to describe that might, you know, like in you cancel out the APOE4 allele. So it's super complicated stuff. Quick question about that APOE4 allele. Is that something that like if you did a 23andMe could pop up or is it you need more specific testing for that? No, that's actually very easy to figure out whether or not you carry that. But like the recommendations that I make don't vary, don't really change depending on whether or not you carry that gene. I might make different like recommendations like in terms of like dietary fats because there's some you know thinking that apo e4 carriers don't metabolize saturated fats as well okay but um but in general i think like the the modifiable risk

Starting point is 00:17:54 factors are where we really have agency and that's where i think like most people should focus their efforts not on like what gene do i have right okay um what do you think some of the most agreeable things just in, in terms of our, in terms of our health, like what are things that are, I guess the lowest hanging fruit that are modifiable, you think? Yeah. Well, I definitely, I think today, you know, people just, they're eating too many what are called ultra processed foods. I think that's the big thing. Like when I first started, I was more interested in like, you know, like macronutrients and, you know, whether it was like low carb or low fat that was like more harmful, you know, and then you can get granular with like the plant-based

Starting point is 00:18:40 versus the carnivore arguments and our seed oil is good, our seed oil is bad. But I think ultimately like the lowest hanging fruit is to just eat fewer ultra-processed foods and to focus your diet more on the minimally processed whole foods, like the foods that are around the perimeter of the supermarket. And I know people like listening to this, your audience is incredibly savvy. They're like, well, that's not rocket science. But the reality is like today, 60% of the calories that your average person is consuming your average adult is consuming come from these like packaged processed convenience foods and that number is even higher for children for children it's like 70 yeah which is insane just change just change that percentage just whatever way you can yeah in some small degree that you can

Starting point is 00:19:19 and then maybe over time you progress to uh improving it more and more over time yeah improving diet quality. Like diet quality, I think, is like a massive thing. Like the diets of most Americans are of such poor quality. And, you know, there are obviously like there are other, there are factors here that are, that play a role that are outside of, you know, that can be outside of people's control, like where they live, food access and things like that, which, you know, is important. But generally, once somebody becomes aware of the fact that food quality is important,

Starting point is 00:19:49 it also influences the amount of food that you eat, right? Like food quality plays a huge role in terms of like our drive to eat. Yeah, if you were to change that 60% coming from processed food and turned it down to 50%, over time, you'll be encouraged to eat less. Yeah. Because you have better quality food. You can make an argument for protein leveraging and maybe you're eating less calories and over time you're eating less and less junk. Yeah, absolutely. Like there was that Kevin Hall study, I believe it was 2018,

Starting point is 00:20:19 that found that when people were given access only to an ultra-processed diet, they tended to consume a calorie surplus when eating to satiety, right, of about 500 additional calories. Whereas when it was a crossover trial, when those people were given access only to a minimally processed food diet, they ended up eating at like a 300-calorie deficit. So right there, that's like an 800-calorie swing determined purely by the quality of the food that you're eating. So a lot of people's like an 800 calorie swing determined purely by the quality of the food that you're eating. So a lot of people when they are on this like weight loss journey and

Starting point is 00:20:50 they present to their doctors or their dieticians and they hear the advice like just eat less, move more. I think what they're not realizing is that what you're eating influences how much you're eating. So yeah, that's I a uh probably the lowest hanging fruit what were the numbers with kids you mentioned kids you mentioned adults around 60 with processed food do you know the numbers for kids uh it's like closer to 70 yeah yeah i think kids and i what also pops into my head is our our elderly i think they also have like really poor food choices i think i don't really know what it's like to as you get older, but I think a lot of people start to complain of like their digestion and they have a hard time with like maybe something like a steak doesn't go down as smooth, you know, as you get older. So they tend to stick to grains.

Starting point is 00:21:38 They tend to stick with the kind of quick, easy, cheap foods. Yeah, it's a big problem, especially like you know, anabolic resistance is a thing and you know, I'm sure you guys have talked about it. What's anabolic resistance? Well, it's a concept. I think the first time I heard about it was through Gabrielle Lyon, who you guys had on the show. That was a great interview. But yeah, it's this idea

Starting point is 00:21:58 that like you become less sensitive to leucine and to like that anabolic stimulus as you get older. I think there are a few mechanisms at play here. I did look into it and I think it's like part of it has to do with the absorption of amino acids, like the breakdown and absorption of amino acids, but then just generally, you know, your cells become tolerant to various signals as like typically as you get older, right? Like you tend to become a little bit more insulin resistant as you get older.

Starting point is 00:22:25 You tend to become a little bit more resistant to various like growth signaling pathways, whether it's like mTOR, IGF-1, et cetera. So all that being said, it becomes crucially important. And for generally anybody on a lower protein diet protein quality becomes super super important yeah and uh you know there's this argument that you get from the vegan community that when you're eating sufficient protein protein quality doesn't matter as much and that might be true if you're eating enough protein but if you're not eating enough protein right like if you are on a plant-based diet like and they tend to under consume protein. Yeah. Or if you're like an elder person,

Starting point is 00:23:06 like a senior citizen, um, and we know that they tend to under consume protein as well, then that's where protein quality really, you know, can, can become a significant. There's so much on this protein quality subject that I hope we get to, but on our interview with Dr. Lyon, um, that as far as eating meat, that there haven't been any RCTs or randomly controlled trials on populations that eat high amounts of meat or red meat. And that was partially why she was saying like there's really no proof to show that it's unhealthy. Now, when we put that out on social media, it was actually quite fun to go in the comments, but she was very careful with her words when she mentioned randomly controlled trials versus the typical nutrition studies. And I know that you're a guy who delves into a lot of

Starting point is 00:23:55 nutrition studies, but what are people missing when they look at these nutrition studies that show that red meat is unhealthy or meat is unhealthy? What are they missing? Because there are a lot of studies that go over this, but some of them tend to be just kind of trash. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the world of nutrition science can be a bit of a house of cards built on really crappy data. And most of the data is epidemiologic in nature,

Starting point is 00:24:26 meaning it's like looking at populations and cross-sectional data with various cohorts, looking to see like, okay, what are these people eating? How are they aging? They're not randomized controlled trials, which, by the way, are the kinds of trials required to prove cause and effect. But a lot of these epidemiological studies, I'm sorry to interrupt, but

Starting point is 00:24:42 they're in major nutrition journals, correct? Yeah. Yeah. I mean because you can't take a human being and put them on an 80-year-long randomized controlled trial to see and to assess how different dietary patterns lead over the long term in that kind of rigorously controlled setting will lead or contribute to different health outcomes. So you have to – I mean you have to look at populations, see how they're eating and do your best to control for the confounding variables that may be playing a role. For example, like healthy user bias, which is always an issue, always. Now, especially with the higher quality data, they do do their best to control for things like when looking at, for example, per capita meat consumption like the GDP, for example, or various other factors. But you just can't escape the fact that healthy user bias is a real thing. And a good example that I like to offer is like if you were to think about quinoa and you were to look at like all of the people in the United States who eat quinoa on a regular basis, chances are their health is going to be way better than the people who don't regularly eat quinoa, right?

Starting point is 00:26:02 And is that because of the quinoa or is it in spite of the quinoa? Maybe the quinoa is having no effect whatsoever, right? Chances are if you know how to pronounce quinoa, you're health conscious. You're reading health blogs. You shop at Whole Foods perhaps. My mom fed me so much quinoa as a kid. Did she? Yeah, dude. My mom was super health conscious.

Starting point is 00:26:20 She is super health conscious. She was listening to Oprah and Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz and that's the stuff that they would spout. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. But I mean I don't think that study has been done but I guarantee you if you were to look at the US and like stratify by like least – people who consume the least amount of quinoa to people who consume the most quinoa, you're going to see a huge health difference. And so the media might take a headline like that and say quinoa associated with 300% reduced risk of XYZ. And you could do the same thing with an activity. You could do the same thing.

Starting point is 00:26:50 Like look at how healthy surfers are. Yeah. Well, of course. Surfing is fucking impossible. It's really hard. There you go. So like, yeah. So healthy user bias, like with things that like the population generally considers to be healthy and is like maybe not as easily accessible to people who live in food deserts, you're going to see like the most healthy user bias there.

Starting point is 00:27:13 And then it works the opposite way for meat because people who tend to consume more meat and like especially processed meat, right? Like processed meat tends to be fast food. It tends to be chicken nuggets, things like that, right? Like, you know, they'll use pepperoni pizza as like a surrogate for processed meat. It's not usually a charcuterie board. Right. And so – Just throw that in there.

Starting point is 00:27:35 Yeah. Yeah. So it's like – and so you'll regularly see that meat is associated with like worse health outcomes and things like that. But it's for the same reason, just like the, you know, it's the other side of the coin. And it's also like those populations that like, you know,

Starting point is 00:27:49 let's say the meat that you mentioned, they're also potentially eating in a caloric surplus. They're more likely to be sedentary. It's, that's kind of how that bias is structured into that. More likely not to give a fuck. Yeah. The fries and the shake with the burger and the bun.

Starting point is 00:28:02 Yeah. Yeah. And, but you know, new research is really coming out, I think, destroying the myth that red meat is unhealthy. There was just this paper published in Nature Medicine that came out like two or three weeks ago that looked at red meat consumption, looked at all available observational data with regard to red meat consumption and six health outcomes including colorectal cancer um two types of strokes so hemorrhagic and ischemic stroke so the two major

Starting point is 00:28:32 types of stroke and uh and there were like a few type 2 diabetes they found that there was like no weak super weak evidence for the you know for basically all of the health outcomes except for stroke and no evidence that red meat has any association with stroke. And even when you see these weak, it's just like because there's like this endless confounding that occurs when looking at observational level data, it's like you'd have to be a fool to ascribe causality to some of these weak associations that we see.

Starting point is 00:29:05 So to me, it's just like don't base your diet around that kind of data. Base your diet around like common sense and what we know is going to get your body in the best shape that it can be in and eat the foods that are going to assuage your hunger in the best way that we know that they can. I like that word. Yeah. Assuage. We both were like, whoa. they can. I like that word. Yeah. That's a swash. We both were like, whoa. That's an SAT word right there.

Starting point is 00:29:29 Some fanciness. In your book, Genius Kitchen, how did you come to find foods that are brain healthy? And what information is behind some of these foods that might help people's brain, I guess, fire a little stronger, a little faster each and every day? Yeah. So I call the sort of the top foods that I've identified as giving you the most bang for your buck genius foods, which is not a scientific term. It's a term that I've created, obviously. But these are the foods that I think like many of them would repeatedly stand out to me. Um, when I would look at dietary patterns like the Mediterranean diet, like the mind diet, for example, extra virgin olive oil, extra virgin olive oil is one of these foods that humans have been consuming for thousands of years because to make extra virgin olive oil canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, prior to 60 years ago, we hadn't had the machinery or the chemistry labs that are required to make those kinds of fats. But extra virgin olive oil, it's been around in the human food supply for long enough.

Starting point is 00:30:36 And we see that it's associated with better cardiovascular health, with better neurological health. cardiovascular health, with better neurological health. We also see in animal studies that there's really compelling data that there's like, whether it's the phytochemicals or the types of fatty acids found in extra virgin olive oil, that they seem to be really protective. And then RCTs. So, I mean, one of the seminal randomized control trials in a field where, as we've talked about, there are so few of these kinds of long-term large population trials, multicenter trials. Extra virgin olive oil in the PREDIMED study was shown to promote very powerfully cardiovascular health, neurological health, promote weight loss, even when families were consuming a liter a week. So there's a lot of fat to be consuming, right? And nonetheless, it seems to be incredibly protective.

Starting point is 00:31:24 It's very heat stable again it's got these phytochemicals in it that are that are pretty potently um anti-inflammatory uh which we believe is a is a good thing so that's like one example um you know avocados are another example of a food that i would just see again and again and also just like in terms of like a food that most people are going to have access to, it's one of these foods is like a perfect brain food. It's got the highest concentration of fat protecting antioxidants of any fruit or vegetable. And your brain is made of fat. So fat soluble antioxidants are particularly valuable to the brain, like vitamin E, like carotenoids,

Starting point is 00:32:01 like lutein and zeaxanthin. So avocados are another one. I'm a huge fan of eggs for brain health. Eggs, I mean, I mentioned my mom never ate eggs, right? Is it particular kinds of eggs or do you like, like what do you buy when you buy eggs? Do you buy fancy eggs or do you just buy whatever? You know, I have the privilege of being able to buy fancy eggs, but i i like to remind people that all eggs like the cheapest egg you could you know go to the supermarket and like what the cheapest eggs

Starting point is 00:32:29 that you can find are still going to be health healthy yeah there's still going to be a great source of um lutein zeaxanthin of vitamin b12 of choline which we know is so important to i believe you're like a four egg guy and i don't like to compare people, but Andrew over there is a 10 egg guy. 10 eggs a day. Yeah. I think he's trying to show off over there. Damn. That's a flex,

Starting point is 00:32:51 bro. Yeah. 10 eggs in one sitting. It's been kind of incredible. I have dialed it back on the, on the weekends though. Cause like I'll have 10 and then I just don't want to eat the rest of the day.

Starting point is 00:33:00 Like till like dinnertime. But being around family, they're just like, Hey, what are we eating? I'm like nothing. Cause we're, we ate a good breakfast. Well, we didn't eat 10 eggs. Asshole. I'm like, Oh my bad. That around family they're just like hey what are we eating i'm like nothing because we ate a good breakfast well we didn't eat 10 eggs asshole i'm like oh my bad that's right i think like i think like three three to four whole eggs i mean i'll be curious to know

Starting point is 00:33:14 what you guys think about this but i i definitely will add some egg whites in occasionally to the whole eggs just to increase the protein content yeah it's like a bodybuilder trick augmenting your meal i think it's a is a great idea for a lot of people yeah because i mean otherwise you're just going to keep increasing the the calories of fat and yeah we know that protein doesn't uh convert to energy as well so i think it's a great strategy for a lot of people yeah so i'll do that i'll do like you know depending on like how hungry i'm two to four eggs whole eggs and then I'll throw in some egg whites just to jack the protein concentration. But yeah, eggs are a cognitive multivitamin. They've got a little bit of everything required to grow a healthy brain. I mean, it's like the beauty of mother nature.

Starting point is 00:33:54 Mother nature has devised like the perfect care package to grow a nervous system. Eggs are so good. Do you have particular ways you like to prepare them? You know, I love poaching them. That's amazing. It takes some patience, but that's amazing. A little bit, yeah. In Genius Kitchen, I have a really simple instruction, like how to. Because I think you don't require, there's no oil required to poach eggs.

Starting point is 00:34:20 And all you need is like a little saucepan. So you don't need to mess with any of those nonstick pans to poach eggs. So to me, it's like a reallypan, you know, so you don't need to mess with any of those like nonstick pans to poach eggs. So to me it's like a really great, you know, I love doing that. I'll occasionally scramble them, but yeah, I buy like pastured eggs if I can find them. If not, the omega-3 eggs are next in line for me. So omega-3 enriched eggs. What about something like ketones? Is there like a lot of, is there like real research behind ketones,

Starting point is 00:34:43 like being able to help with dementia, Alzheimer's, some people say even cancer, there's some speculation on like, what's your experience with that? And what are your thoughts on that? So the ketogenic diet is interesting with regard to Alzheimer's disease because what happens in the brain of somebody with Alzheimer's disease is you see a phenomenon called glucose hypometabolism so that the ability of the brain to generate atp from glucose is diminished by about 50 and the brain is an energetic like beast you know the brain makes up two to three percent of your body's mass, but it counts for 25% of your body's basal metabolic rate. So it's like an, it's energy is incredibly important, right?

Starting point is 00:35:30 In fact, they think that that's why we became omnivorous actually is to, it was to be able to supply energy to the ravenous human brain. It's called the expensive tissue hypothesis. So our, you know, like if you look at gorillas, they have like these vast GI tracts. But ours became more efficient over time and meat helped us get there, right? Because it required less time eating and digesting food because it's a- Vegan's are coming for you, dog.

Starting point is 00:35:57 Yeah. They will always, yeah. They'll always win. There's nothing I can say to get them off my back. Because even when I promote the consumption of vegetables, which I do regularly, right? They still – it's not like they praise me for that. They're just like, I'm damned if I do, damned if I don't with vegans. It's wild.

Starting point is 00:36:16 But yeah, anyway. So in the brain of somebody with Alzheimer's disease, you see this stark glucose hypometabolism. with Alzheimer's disease, you see this stark glucose hypometabolism. And despite that, the brain's ability to generate energy from ketones, which are a byproduct created via fat metabolism, is unperturbed. So the idea is that for somebody who already has the condition, supplying the brain with ketones can actually effectively keep the lights on, so to speak, the brain with ketones can actually effectively keep the lights on, so to speak, in the brain. And we have a number of small trials that have suggested that ketogenic interventions, whether it's with ketogenic supplements, there's actually a ketogenic food product that's been FDA approved to treat dementia.

Starting point is 00:36:59 I don't know how effective it is, but it's called Axona. It's like an MCT oil-based, you know, super purified, standardized food product. Or ketogenic dietary interventions have been shown to improve functional capacity in patients with Alzheimer's disease. And that's a cohort for which like there really is very little hope in terms of pharmaceutical help because it's like, once you have Alzheimer's disease, I mean,'s a disease process that's already like decades set into motion. There currently isn't any real pharmaceutical help that people identify as being really helpful, right? Yeah, there's nothing.

Starting point is 00:37:35 I mean there's a few drugs that work to modulate different neurotransmitters, but they're not very effective. I mean my mom was on both of them and I don't believe that they helped her in any significant way and there was a drug that recently made headlines called Licanumab which might

Starting point is 00:37:55 slow progression a little bit but the side effects are pretty awful. So yeah from the drug side of things and also Alzheimer's drug trials have a 99.6% fail rate. So it's like, why wouldn't something like modafinil or something like that work? Well, first of all, there's, there's no such thing as a biological free lunch. And, you know, so I would be, I would want to know, like, to my knowledge, it hasn't,

Starting point is 00:38:21 that hasn't been tested in, in Alzheimer's patients. But yeah, I don't know. It might provide a temporary momentary boost. Why don't they just give somebody with dementia a lot of caffeine? But I just think it's like there's like a – those kinds of drugs can be like a double-edged sword. Do the supplemental ketones like do you have you heard people uh because you've been talking about this topic for a while yeah uh you made a documentary documentaries a documentary is not available yet or you're getting close it's not

Starting point is 00:38:57 out yet it's called little empty boxes but people that are that are interested in the film could go to littleemptyboxes.com and see a trailer and sign up to our mailing list for like updates and stuff. So with you talking about this a lot, somebody come to you and say, Hey, you know, we've tried ketone esters with my mom or my uncle or my grandpa, and it's like working great. Or have you not really heard much of that? You know, it may, it may help. It may help. I don't want to make like strong claims and it's not a cure. But one person, Mary Newport, has been advocating for the use of ketone-based therapeutics for a while. Her husband, Steve Newport, had Alzheimer's disease. He passed away some years ago.

Starting point is 00:39:36 But she's a physician and she would routinely give him coconut oil and saw a significant improvement over time in his cognition. And so, yeah, so hypothetically, these kinds of ketone supplements could work to some degree, you know, whether it's like, you know, improving functional capacity for somebody with Alzheimer's disease. More research needs to be done. But the thing about ketones, they're not just a fuel source, right, that can potentially keep the engines going for somebody with Alzheimer's disease, but they also act like a signaling mechanism that has been shown to help support blood flow to the brain. Ketones have been shown to boost blood flow to the brain and also improve or increase, rather, levels of BDNF, which is brain-derived neurotrophic factor. So ketones do seem to have all of these different beneficial things that they do for the brain. They change

Starting point is 00:40:30 the neurochemistry of the brain. There's no other diet that does that. Like there's no other, you know, whether it's like the carnivore diet or the, you know, a plant-based diet, a ketogenic diet actually changes the chemistry of the brain in a really significant way. And I think for that reason, we have to pay attention to it and we have to continue to study it for conditions like Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, et cetera. I mean, it's been used as a therapeutic diet

Starting point is 00:40:52 for certain types of epilepsy for a century at this point. So we know that this isn't a fad diet, right? Like this is a diet that has like profound implications for the brain. Obviously in the wellness world, people have taken that diet and run with it as like the ultimate weight loss diet. Trying to make fucking cupcakes out of it and stuff.

Starting point is 00:41:11 Exactly. It's like settle down. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I think in many ways that's kind of hurt actually how serious of a diet this is and the potential benefits of it, right? And it's also associated now, like you have the vegans coming after it as well because it tends to be associated with meat consumption. So that can kind of hurt its public image.

Starting point is 00:41:42 But yeah, I think it's super important. We need to continue talking about it. You know, I've heard you talk about the amyloid hypothesis before. And if you can explain what that is, that'd be helpful. But along with that, there are probably listeners who have a relative that has Alzheimer's or has dementia. And maybe they're going down some route right now. They're using certain medications. But what would you suggest? I know it's always a dangerous thing because not a doctor,

Starting point is 00:42:05 but you have massive amounts of experience in this. What would you suggest for somebody to try to help that relative do that they can apply right now today to maybe mitigate certain things or move them in the right direction? Yeah, good question. So the first part, the amyloid hypothesis basically is the, we don't know what causes Alzheimer's disease. I don't know what causes Alzheimer's disease. Nobody does. And what causes Alzheimer's disease for one person might be different for the next person because once you've seen – in the field of neurology, they say once you've seen one case of dementia, you've seen one case of dementia. There's probably different routes up that mountain for each person.

Starting point is 00:42:44 dementia. There's probably different routes, you know, up that mountain for each person. But the amyloid hypothesis really has been the sort of guiding target for pharmaceutical inquiry for the past, I would say, since the disease was named in 1906 by Alois Alzheimer. And that is that amyloid beta plaques, which accumulate in the space around neurons, is the cause of Alzheimer's disease. That if we can find a way to get rid of these plaques, yeah, you can see it. If we can get rid of these plaques, we'll be able to cure the condition, right? And so that's the amyloid hypothesis that the plaques and to a lesser degree, the tangles are the cause of Alzheimer's disease. But the problem with that is that people have amyloid in their brains that don't have Alzheimer's disease. Amyloid is, in many ways, first of all, it's produced in our brains naturally. Like it's not necessarily

Starting point is 00:43:40 pathologic, at least at first. It could be our brain's response to inflammatory threat for example. And also drugs that have succeeded at reducing the amy the fact that a panel of eight, that a panel of 11 people, on a panel of 11 people, eight of nine experts told the FDA not to approve this drug because it succeeded at reducing amyloid but didn't improve symptoms. So nine of 11 said don't do it and they still did it. They still did it. Yeah, crazy.

Starting point is 00:44:22 So yeah, aducanumab, there you go. So it's a huge problem. And you see, and all of these different associations are like invested in this hypothesis. So many reputations in science are invested in this hypothesis. But it doesn't seem to be the case that this is the cause of the condition. Amyloid is certainly there, but the question that researchers need to be asking and are starting to ask is, what put amyloid there to begin with? Was it maybe the glucose hypometabolism? Was it maybe some kind of environmental exposure? Was it maybe inflammation, right? Like just low-grade chronic inflammation that so many people are suffering from these days. And so, yeah. So,

Starting point is 00:45:00 I mean, that's the whole issue with the amyloid hypothesis. For somebody with Alzheimer's disease who has amyloid in their brains already, I would say that the primary focus should be from a diet and lifestyle standpoint. I mean, exercise is medicine for the brain. We know that exercise can potentially help slow the condition. We know that exercise helps grow the hippocampus. It's one of the few interventions that can help grow the memory center of the brain. And the hippocampus is an incredibly vulnerable structure and one of the first structures to be affected by Alzheimer's disease. It typically declines about 0.1 to 0.3 percent per year, but exercise can actually grow it by that amount. Um, and, and by the way, for, I'm curious, do you know, cause you've probably paid attention to in people who have Alzheimer's at this point, but do you see many people who get Alzheimer's who have been consistently exercising up until that point in their life? Do you see that often? Or is that, yeah, I mean, it's a,

Starting point is 00:46:03 it's a good question. You know, it's hard to say because like we know that exercise is protective. We know that diet is protective. We know that if you, you know, adopt a brain healthy diet and lifestyle that you're really doing a lot in terms of lowering your risk, right? Another big thing is keeping your blood pressure healthy. That's massive. High blood pressure is a major risk factor for dementia. And we now have a number of seminal trials that are showing us, whether it's like the finger study that was run out of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, that a diet and lifestyle intervention, so eating a primarily whole foods diet, exercising more, staying socially engaged

Starting point is 00:46:45 can help dramatically, not just reduce risk for cognitive decline, even if you're already old and at risk, but you can see about a 25% improvement in cognitive function. If you eat a healthier diet that includes fish and green leafy vegetables and berries and things like that, extra virgin olive oil and exercise.

Starting point is 00:47:06 So yeah, you can see an improvement in cognitive function and potentially you know whether it's you know whether we're preventing or kicking the can down the road it does seem to you know reduce risk for developing you know more severe forms of cognitive impairment and then there was another study that came out another you know we don't have many of these. So it's like, I, I know them and I, and I, I referenced them because they're so important. So there's the finger study. And then there was the sprint mind trial that showed that for people who were aggressively treated for high blood pressure, that they saw a significant risk reduction for mild cognitive impairment. So you have people with hypertension, right? High blood pressure. You put them on, um, the two arms were either like a, a, a moderate and a more

Starting point is 00:47:49 strict intervention to bring their blood pressure down to a normal, healthy range. And those that, um, were in the most sort of, um, like had the most, uh, yeah, there you go. Yeah. With lower, the lower the more they were able to lower their BP while still keeping it in like a you know in a healthy range yeah they were able to prevent mild cognitive impairment which is like pre-dementia

Starting point is 00:48:15 so and like exercise you know we know thanks to meta-analyses exercise is just as effective at helping to promote healthy blood pressure as drugs. But still, people, you know, I get comments all the time on social media like, you know, well, my father exercised his whole life and still developed dementia. And so it's really important to say that we don't have all the answers and that, you know, you can exercise your whole life but if your diet is like you know really poor maybe that's you know maybe that's potentially canceling out the exercise or you know maybe it was some toxic exposure or maybe you know early in life he was like hit on the head a few times you know which is a a risk factor or

Starting point is 00:48:54 maybe they were um you know there's all these still doesn't change the fact that okay it's unfortunate they got it but it still doesn't change the fact that exercise can still help yes it uh you to degrade slower or for you to prevent it from um uh getting worse 100 100 yeah exercise really is the most powerful i would say i mean i think diet's important um i i would put them both on the same playing field uh to honest. But I think, yeah, exercise really is like – it's one of the most powerful – like if we had a drug like that could do for the brain what exercise can do for the brain, like it would be a blockbuster, multibillion-dollar drug. Is it a matter of what kind of exercise? Has there been a difference between like walking, jogging and like lifting? Any ideas on that? Yeah, I think both are important.

Starting point is 00:49:45 There was a study that just came out that looked at – it was a meta-analysis actually, and it looked at both aerobic exercise and resistance training. And it found that resistance training was the most effective at slowing cognitive decline. Interesting. Yeah. Why?

Starting point is 00:50:01 You know, I think because of what it does hormonally and like for the insulin side of things, like the blood sugar regulation side of things, the blood pressure, you know, lowering effect. I think cardio is great. I think cardio is super important. But I think – It just doesn't take that much thought either. So maybe just like thinking about how you're executing an exercise is similar to like if we were throwing a football back and forth. I mean, you got to kind of pay attention otherwise it's going to hit you right

Starting point is 00:50:27 in the face. Yeah. With what? With resistance training? Yeah. Right. Yeah. There's a little more thought involved. Central nervous system is being targeted rather than just your aerobic system. Yeah. And also like it allows you to stay mobile and it fights off frailty. You know, I would say that you can still, if all you were doing is cardio, you can still be pretty frail. Oh, yeah. You know, as a, you know, aerobic athlete, unless you integrate resistance training

Starting point is 00:50:55 on a regular basis. And I think studies are starting to show that it's frailty, really, that is like the major enemy, especially as we get into later life. And that fighting off frailty and resistance training, I mean, it's a, it's a, because the brain thrives when it is atop a mobile body, right? Like the brain atop a sedentary or an immobilized body is really suffering in ways that are both visible and invisible. And I think that insofar as resistance training can, can support your,

Starting point is 00:51:26 you know, your ambulatory ability, like throughout life and like help prevent falls and things like that. Um, I think that's where resistance training really does have the, the upper hand. There's been this bias in the, in the literature, I think for aerobic training for a long time. And I think, I really do think that it's because it's just a lot easier to get a mouse to run on a treadmill. Right. And then to like, look,

Starting point is 00:51:50 yeah. Mice hate bench pressing. You said something like that on Rogan. I was like, that's the greatest thing I ever heard. It's fucking stupid mice. They won't bench. They won't bench.

Starting point is 00:51:58 Yeah. They should spend like an afternoon with you guys. That's right. Imagine what you guys could do with a mouse. Come on, man. At least hit up some dumbbell incline presses or something gotta work those pecs yeah what about a weighted wheel is that a possibility of like the mouse there's they've got to push a sled

Starting point is 00:52:12 but like what if the mouse wheel had like a little bit of resistance to it we're now just hate lifting bro yeah they hate lifting yeah Simeon wants to see a world where mouses have big old quads from resistant wheel. Let's go. Conan wheel. Conan wheel. Yeah. Yeah, so I don't know. I think integrating both.

Starting point is 00:52:33 I mean, yeah, like resistance training, super, super important. And then cardio. You know, cardio, we know we have really good data. And humans, too. We do have really good data. And humans too, we do have really good data on cardio. And the resistance training is like fairly novel, but it is starting to come out and be pretty convincing. Cardiovascular training seems to be a little bit more important as people get older too.

Starting point is 00:52:54 Cardiovascular training? Yeah. Yeah, you want to have like a good aerobic base. You know, like we were having this conversation earlier. Like I think, you know, it's like what's, if you're able to achieve like a hulking like muscular physique but you're winded going up a flight of stairs, like I like to frame sort of my – I've recently started framing like my wellness routine around like if you had to make yourself harder to kill, like what would you have to do, you know? kill, like what would you have to do? You know? And, um, and I think that if you can't go up a flight of stairs or run a mile without much effort, I think, uh, that that's not like, you know, like you're not really doing yourself any, any favors. So I've like, I've actually,

Starting point is 00:53:36 I've started, I, and I hate running personally. So, you know, this is like, I'm, I'm kind of like hyping myself up as I say this, but like, I, uh, I've tried to dedicate like three days a week to running a mile and some days I'll be able to run more. Like I've gotten to the point where now I can run two miles fairly, you know, fairly comfortably. And the big problem for me is mental. Like it's the mental hurdle. It's like, I just get, I'm just bored as hell. Like stare at the shoes. Yeah. Yeah. I just don't like it. Um, like there's only so many times I can listen to my, my workout playlist, you know, like, or whatever, you know, as I'm running, but I try no matter, you know, even with my increased conditioning, I don't, I don't raise the bar for myself because then it's going

Starting point is 00:54:14 to inevitably get to a point where I'm like, I'd rather not do it than have to run the two miles or the three miles. If I could just run a mile to me, that's like, I've accomplished something, you know? And so, uh, yeah, that's a good a good like i don't know for anybody who's like listening who just hates doing cardio like i i really don't like doing cardio but i've like the mile the mile two or three times a week for me if i can do that you know it's not really like an evidence-based like recommendation but but in terms of uh for me dementia and things like that uh has there any information on people just staying active with reading, crossword puzzles, or

Starting point is 00:54:49 problem solving? Are those things impactful as well? You want to keep your brain active. In so doing, you build what's called a cognitive reserve. It's like, I forget the saying exactly, but it's like the more you have to lose

Starting point is 00:55:06 the longer it'll take to lose it or something like that you know so you you really do want to build your mental faculties um but generally the the rule of thumb is you want the whatever it is that you're engaging in to be fairly complex right with something like sudoku the the general um thinking is like the more you do sudoku you're just gonna you tend just to get better at doing sudoku right you want what you're engaging with to have like to draw on as wide of an array of cognitive processes as possible and so that's where like for example you know like really uh complex like rpg video games might play a supportive role or just staying socially

Starting point is 00:55:45 active in general or learning to play an instrument or learning a new language. Those tend to have what's called like a spillover effect where, yeah, you're just learning a new language or you're learning to play guitar or whatever, but that's going to actually have a spillover effect and boost your cognition in other areas as well and subsequently boost what's called the cognitive reserve. I do wonder if something like, you know, we have a bias towards jujitsu on the podcast. Andrew just started also. Nice.

Starting point is 00:56:15 But it makes you wonder what something like that, a physical activity like that is so different, grappling in and of itself that, you know, you wonder if something like that could also be beneficial as far as an activity to help somebody keep sharp because you're learning new movements all the time and it's it's literally like a different bodily language so i don't know what what do you think about that yeah definitely i mean there's like that could almost be considered like a third category of exercise which is like essentially skill-based training you know you're coordinating like it's like hand-eye coordination mind-body coordination you're coordinating your upper body with your lower body. I've never done jujitsu, but I took up boxing about a year and a half ago. Oh, cool. Yeah. And that was, I could see right away the cognitive benefits of boxing because I'm not an athlete, as I mentioned. So I try to throw

Starting point is 00:56:58 a combination. You're like, huh? How do I do that? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was a big thing for me. That was like a fairly heavy lift, no pun intended, like, you know, like learning the combos and things like that. But I feel like it, you know, and again, anecdotal, but it's like I feel like it's helped my brain. And generally we know that like these kinds of things like skill-based training where you're, you know, coordinating different body movements and things like that. It's just they're just much more, uh, complex movements to master than like the simple bench press. I mean, I know that like mastering a bench press is not, um, not as simple as it seems either, but like, yeah, these like jujitsu or boxing, I think can potentially be very beneficial. Not a ton of research that I'm aware of with regard to like

Starting point is 00:57:41 dementia and stuff, but, um, but yeah, I would surmise that probably very beneficial. How do we get ourselves just out of this? Like, uh, it seems like there's like a health crisis going on. It seems like people are very sick. Obesity is still on the rise, even though we sit here and talk about fitness all day long. Um, do you have any ideas or, you know, have you thought about this a lot? Like in terms of, do you think it would be good to get into our education system or like, what do you think are things that would be helpful? I mean, I think education is key. I also, I'm not opposed to like putting warning signs on junk food, like the way they do with cigarettes in the UK or in the EU, they put like, literally, you can see like a diseased lung, like on a pack of cigarettes. And it's, I mean, it does a pretty

Starting point is 00:58:23 good job. I like telling you what the consequences are of consistent cigarette smoking you know i think they've also taxed um sugar like they've taxed you know certain drinks and things like that yeah in other countries yeah i mean i'm all about like letting people decide for themselves what people what most people don't have is the information that allows them to make an informed decision right like i think that if most people knew that fruit juice was literally just sugar water you know i'm saying this guy gained like 12 pounds yeah having like uh like i don't know pineapple juice or just having gallons of juice and we wish we could say like oh yeah this was like 10 years ago when he wasn't as aware but no this shit was like 10 days ago

Starting point is 00:59:09 don't lose your train of thought please don't lose your train of thought what happened we always talk about not drinking your fucking calories it's like the fifth time i've told this damn story but like three weeks ago i was like you know what fuck it let me see what happens if i just start drinking a little juice you know just like have a cup here and there because it was so good i couldn't just i couldn't just keep it to a cup on certain days and after a week because i over consumed the juice because it was so good um i gained like 12 pounds maybe it was muscle though i haven't been 258 pounds since like in years i haven't touched that weight and i was like you know what i see why we don't drink juice

Starting point is 00:59:52 because we're not adult enough to have small portions small portions it is delicious it is favorite juice pineapple juice um actually i i had the simply lemonade ones but they have this simply watermelon which was lower in calories don't make the jokes it was lower in calories so i decided to go with that one and it tasted lighter but even so i just over consumed it because it was so fucking good that's why we tell you don't drink your calories yeah that's a good one yeah i love grapefruit juice is like oh yeah grapefruit is the shit. So you,

Starting point is 01:00:25 you handle, you, you drink some juice here and there? No, I mean, I don't cause I, I don't bring it into my house, but occasionally,

Starting point is 01:00:30 you know, like occasionally post workout, like I'll have like a, but it's, it's pretty rare actually. Yeah. I'm generally like, I would say the only time I'm really these days drinking my calories,

Starting point is 01:00:41 so to speak is like, I put like the heavy cream in my coffee, which we've, we've talked about. Yeah. And, uh, and I'll drink like a smoothie occasionally. I have like a smoothie recipe that's like doing pretty well in California. It's like this place called Earth Bar. You guys familiar with it? If you live in California, there's a few in San Francisco, there's a bunch in LA, but I have a smoothie with them. It's like one of the rare smoothies that doesn't have frozen banana in it. It's just like all low glycemic.

Starting point is 01:01:08 Oh, wow. Blueberries and avocado and things like that. Vanilla whey protein. It's probably really good, huh? It's pretty good. It tastes like an oatmeal cookie. It's pretty good. So generally, I'm not a big smoothie person, but if it's just like a berry-based smoothie

Starting point is 01:01:20 with some whey protein, yeah, I'm in. See, but that's pretty filling. It has some fiber in it. You got the fiber, yeah. Yeah, but normal juice, you could just put this shit down. Yeah, yeah, in. See, but that's pretty filling. It has some fiber in it. You got the fiber, yeah. But normal juice, you could just put this shit down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I made you lose your train of thought. Back to saving the world. Save the world.

Starting point is 01:01:33 I don't know, man. I think I'm a huge fan. Podcasts like this, I think, are a huge public service. There's a lot of people on social media these days that love to hate on whether it's like diet book authors or health podcasters. I think that it's a great public service to have many different on-ramps for people, to get people interested in health and nutrition and to spread this message of like empowering health, right? Because a lot of people think

Starting point is 01:02:07 that healthcare is something that happens when you go to the doctor's office. That's sick care. Healthcare is what happens when you're negotiating with yourself to get off the couch and head to the gym,

Starting point is 01:02:17 when you're pushing your shopping cart through the supermarket. Like that's where healthcare- It's something we should be practicing and working on every day. Exactly. Like it's a lifestyle. And I think that like it's amazing like having podcasts and like I have my own podcast where I try to do this.

Starting point is 01:02:31 And what you want to do ultimately is lead audiences to like be able to form their own questions and lead their own inquiries and investigate their own topics and things like that. Like that's something that I've aspired to be for people because, again, I didn't go through the traditional channels, but I armed myself with information because I had a very important personal vested interest in gaining that information. That was my mom, right? So for me, it's really important to just like – if I could be anything to people, it's like to be an example so that people then feel empowered to go out and do their own research and ask their own questions and things like that. Not necessarily to take everything that I say as gospel.

Starting point is 01:03:15 Like that's not my MO. My MO is really just to like be able to arm people with information and then if they want to take what I've shared you know vet that or you know integrate it and see how that affects them and then tinker um and iterate to me that's i think like you know that's that's like a job well done but yeah i think ultimately like arming people with information so that it's informed consent like you know i think most people like um you know when they open up for example like whether it's like the bottle of watermelon juice watermelon juice or uh or the pint of ice cream right and like they they intend on only having like a spoonful and before they know what they're looking at the bottom of the pint right it's most people don't every time it's just that most people

Starting point is 01:04:02 don't realize that like those foods are designed to be overconsumed. So it's not a moral failure. Like it's not a moral failure if like you can't moderate your consumption of foods that are literally designed not to be consumed moderately. Right? It's not a moral failure. It's like you did exactly what you were supposed to do in that instance. So for people to kind of like to have that information, to know how food affects their behavior, I think that's like one of the major, I think, obstacles. Like if we can overcome that and get this information out to more people, then more people will be inclined to act on that knowledge.

Starting point is 01:04:33 And a lot of times people will say, I'm just not that guy. I can't do that. I can't be like you. I can't. And I think what sometimes people are maybe not paying attention to is it's like, who struggles with these foods? Everybody. Pretty much everybody has an issue with these foods. Pretty much everybody has an issue with social media to some extent.

Starting point is 01:04:54 It's made to be addicting. It's made for you to be on there for too long. And it's easy to point to like our children and kids and be like, Oh my God, all these kids are on Tik TOK and they're all this stuff for way too long. But meanwhile, we're like, Oh no, no, no. Let me just finish this one last email. This is work related. Like what I'm doing, super important. I'm not messing around the way that you are, but I think we just lose sight of the fact that so many of these things are very, very difficult and we need to set up rules and parameters around us. So I agree that there definitely has to be like education, but there has to be like a practical education so people can apply it. And I also agree that it's helpful to have Dr. Baker.

Starting point is 01:05:34 It's helpful to have a Paul Saladino. It's helpful to have Elaine Norton. And you got these people in all these different fields. So people can be like, I don't really vibe with that guy. But that makes sense. I think I can do some of that. Oh, that guy's But that makes sense. I think I can do some of that. Oh, that guy's recommending some 10-minute walks. I can at least figure that.

Starting point is 01:05:49 I don't know about the diet thing, but I can at least figure out to go on some walks. Yeah, 100%. And I like the evidence-based folks. I learn from them all the time. As much as they, not all of them, but a small minority of them love to come after me, they tend to have a vegan slant, you know, so they, they, they love to like,

Starting point is 01:06:08 um, the fuck's wrong with these people. You're a nice guy. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Vegans, we do love you. Sometimes you're just very mean to us. That's all. Yeah. But I mean, but yeah, I, I learned from, I learned from everybody. Like I, I, I, I particularly seek out those that have different opinions than my own so that I can look, you know, whether it's like looking into their sources or just challenging my own assumptions about various things. I think that's crucially important. Yeah. Crucially important. Within this whole field too, there's – you talked a bit about olive oil.

Starting point is 01:06:42 And we were able to talk about that a bit, how it's so beneficial. You talked a bit about olive oil, and we were able to talk about that a bit, how it's so beneficial. But when it does come to other oils, specifically seed oils, to be honest, we've had a bunch of people that have come on to the podcast. Some are like, oh, it's the devil, whatever. But when we look at the practical approach, I don't keep seed oils in the house. I don't cook with them. If I go out to a restaurant, I will eat whatever the fuck I want to eat because I know that I'm not overconsuming it. How do you look at seed oils?

Starting point is 01:07:10 Like are we missing it because we're actually intaking it when we eat out? Like is it as important as people say it is? To be honest, my approach is identical to yours. I don't bring them into my house and I – why would you? I mean I use extra virgin olive oil. Also, the Mind Diet, as I know, long-lived population for whom which seed oils make up a significant part of the diet.

Starting point is 01:07:54 They have no flavor profile. They are, yeah, right there. Martha Claire Morris herself created the MIND diet out of Rush University. Rest her soul. She passed away, but I got to interview her and meet her a bunch of times. Does MIND stand for something? It is the Mediterranean intervention.

Starting point is 01:08:14 It's a combination of the Mediterranean diet and the DASH diet. The DASH diet is a dietary approach to stop hypertension. So that's, as I mentioned, hypertension is a big risk factor for for dementia so if you can if you can get a normal healthy blood pressure

Starting point is 01:08:29 and integrate foods like extra virgin olive oil dark leafy greens fish stuff like that yeah that seems to be a very evidence

Starting point is 01:08:37 based approach I where I've sort of tweaked it is you know these approaches tend to be very grain based

Starting point is 01:08:43 but you know I don't think that the Mediterranean diet is beneficial because of grains. I think it's beneficial in spite of, of grains. Okay. I'm not saying that greens are, are bad or anything like that, but, um, you know, I think that like you can, you can improve it by reducing grain consumption, especially in here in the States, grains tend to be ultra-processed and empty calories for most people. And I also think that – I mean I'm also pretty unapologetic in embracing red meat as a brain-healthy food. I think that red meat is very beneficial.

Starting point is 01:09:17 But going back to seed oils, so yeah, there's no good reason to integrate them. I mean that's like starting at like level one. There's no good reason to introduce them into your diet if you have extra virgin olive oil and if you have avocado oil, which is like a close second in terms of like a good, you know, solid cooking oil with like no flavor profile. But I do think that we do need to look at these oils critically as they are novel foods that didn't exist in the human food supply prior to less than 100 years ago. And we know that our diets are now saturated in these kinds of fats, which are chemically very unstable. They're often oxidized at the point of sale.

Starting point is 01:09:58 And when we consume them in restaurants or when we cook with them and when we heat and reheat them, that oxidation process further continues or accelerates rather. We know that various oxidation byproducts like certain aldehydes are not healthy. They're mutagenic. Cancer can potentially be cancer-causing. And so, yeah, novel food. And also with regard to the brain, we don't, it's a, it's a, it's a vast experiment being played out on a huge stage and we do not know the, the potential brain

Starting point is 01:10:31 consequences of, you know, regularly integrating these kinds of fats into our diet. We, at the turn of the century, they made up about less than two and a half percent, I think of our total daily calories. And now they're about seven and a.5%. So we're consuming about three times as much in terms of their calorie contribution. And yeah, we don't know what they're doing to the brain. The brain is made up of polyunsaturated fats for the most part, omega-6 and omega-3 fats. The brain also happens to be a crucible for oxidative stress. And then you're regularly ingesting these fats that are stripped from their whole food form. They're deprived of the

Starting point is 01:11:10 antioxidants that they're normally bound with in whole foods. We're heating them, we're cooking with them, we're, you know, keeping them out exposed to oxygen and then we're ingesting them. I just don't think it's, you know, without making any crazy claims, I think that we need to be, just have a little bit of caution about them, you know? Now, granted, when people become more mindful of them and they start cutting them out, they're going to be cutting out a lot of ultra-processed foods, you know? So a lot of people who cut out seed oils, they're going to see a health improvement regardless of whether or not it was the seed oil itself that was contributing to whatever symptoms they were feeling. I think in the hierarchy of things that are important, I would agree that minimizing the ultra-processed foods in general, the added sugar, the refined grain products, and the ultra-processed seed oils as a whole, I think that that's probably – should be priority number one.

Starting point is 01:11:56 And then obviously like exercise and making sure that your sleep is on point, all those I think are probably a lot more important than like just isolating the seed oils and going after that. But I do think that they play a role. Yeah. When you produce them, you create a small but significant amount of trans fats in these oils. And they might not be acutely inflammatory. But again, chronically, I don't think we know. And we do know that they – first of all, there's no, the nutritional medical orthodoxy, I think loves them because compared to saturated fat, they will reduce LDL

Starting point is 01:12:34 cholesterol. But meta-analyses don't show that that coincides with any outcome-based improvement. Like there's no, like their use is not associated with reduced risk for cardiovascular disease or anything like that. So again, yeah, I just don't see any valid reason to incorporate them. And yeah, I personally – I choose to avoid them. Have you personally had any like health issues? Like have you been overweight? Have you gotten your blood work done before and had it be way off? you personally had any like health issues like have you been overweight um have you uh you know gotten your blood work done before and had it be way off like did you have to have a uh like an

Starting point is 01:13:10 intervention yourself at some point or because you got into lifting at a young age was it not really as problematic for you yeah i haven't had like any major personally major health issues um i did have actually uh earlier this year i had some weird like nerve thing um and i realized that uh i learned that i have like migraines occasionally which has been like a weird thing to like you know because i always thought like i would have the occasional headache and that was just normal but i had some kind of like migraine associated like nerve issue on my face actually, like something called Horner syndrome like emerged, which is like this super rare thing that usually is caused by bad stuff, like either like brain tumor or like lung mass, but it can

Starting point is 01:13:56 also be associated with migraines. And I found out that I have like, that I have migraines. And actually, incidentally, going back to the seed oil conversation, there was a randomized control trial that was performed that found that when people reduce seed oil intake and increase their omega-3 intake, that the severity of headaches actually goes way down. The severity and frequency of headaches goes way down. And I remember at the time when this like nerve thing for me happened, I was like eating on restaurants like a lot more. So, you know, again again it's like i can't like necessarily point my finger at that but um but yeah from like a brain you know brain health standpoint i do think it's like uh you know worth being mindful of like the uh like one's sort of

Starting point is 01:14:38 overall seed oil um consumption but yeah other than that no major no major like health problems to speak of have you moved in and out of different diets over the years have you been you know some because you're following i imagine you're following like the trends a little bit and you're kind of keeping your eye on some of the things so maybe over the years when you were maybe ripping out stuff out of the magazines and like going to the gym and trying some of these exercises or whatever maybe over that time maybe you were like, oh, let me try keto. Let me try this. Have you messed around and actually like kind of gone into some of those or have you been

Starting point is 01:15:11 a little bit more general? Yeah. I've, I think like my first major dietary iteration was I cut out like the refined grains and I would only eat whole grains. And so that was like for many years I was like, I wouldn't go near white rice, but I would, I would eat,

Starting point is 01:15:27 I would, I would go to town on brown rice. Yeah. And like, I wouldn't eat white bread, but I would like, you know, if you put like whole wheat bread in front of me,

Starting point is 01:15:34 I would like, yeah, I'm not a fan of that. Yeah. No, for many years. Yeah. That was my,

Starting point is 01:15:40 but that was like my, you know, hadn't really looked into it too much further. Yeah. They were saying they were like slower carbohydrates, slower digesting, more fiber, things like that, right? Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Maybe like a little bit of hesitation with like the red meat stuff, you know.

Starting point is 01:15:54 So, kind of like another iteration of like what it was that my mom, you know, ascribed to for most of her life. But then when I really started to dive in, um, yeah, I became a little bit more carb conscious at first bordering on maybe a little carb phobic at first. And I would do like keto and, um, you know, I would, uh, I avoided all grains for, for a time and I wouldn't do like legumes. I, I cut out the bread and the gluten and all that stuff. Um, so yeah, there were like a good couple of years where I was probably like very regularly in and out of ketosis, save for maybe the occasional like fruit,

Starting point is 01:16:28 you know, whole fruit. But now I think my diet's settled to a much more moderate place where I will occasionally eat, you know, I eat like white rice with sushi and if I'm at like a, you know. Damn, I love sushi. Yeah, I love sushi, dude.

Starting point is 01:16:47 Yeah, you'll never be able to take sushi away from me and i there was a time when i wouldn't touch sushi if it didn't have brown rice oh really yeah oh it's kind of a hard combination to find yeah i know it's pretty rare but um but no now i i regularly eat sushi i i love like my sushi chefs just got you know thrown off they're like brown rice like i know i know i love um like, brown rice? I know. What the fuck? I know. I love Latin American food. So if I'm at a restaurant and there's rice and beans on the table, I'll have some of that. So yeah, I've become a lot less dogmatic. I tend to still stay away from wheat and gluten-containing grains and things like that.

Starting point is 01:17:20 I don't eat a lot of pasta. I'll occasionally eat some of the legume pastas. You're not really phobic of anything, I'd imagine. Like you'll have a beer or some wine or something like that. Yeah, I love wine. I don't really drink beer. Beer to me is like liquid bread. So I don't, yeah.

Starting point is 01:17:34 That's actually a good descriptor. Yeah. But I'll do wine occasionally, some tequila. I don't actually, I don't really like drinking that much, but I am single. And so like when I go on those first dates, you know. I think eventually you get old enough and white enough to where you're like i'm gonna have an ipa give me a triple ipa i don't know a white man who doesn't like ipas

Starting point is 01:17:54 i don't like them but like my friends are like well you get older you know you don't understand yet i'm like how much older do i need to be it's the the whitest drink. Do you guys know anybody that makes their own IPAs and stuff? I've never had it but from what I understand everyone's always like yeah they work really hard on it but you drink it and it just tastes like dirt and there's all kinds of shit inside of it. My brother-in-law's made all kinds of different things. That's right.

Starting point is 01:18:18 He's legit though. Oh yeah he's legit as fuck. I don't know if I've ever had a beer that he's made but I'm sure he would be excited to make one for me. He'd be all pumped up. I'm sure he would make a really good beer, though. Yeah. He makes really good everything. Interesting.

Starting point is 01:18:30 Yeah. Has there been any research or anything on, like, alcohol and, like, weed when it comes to dementia and Alzheimer's? Because, I mean, it does seem like in the present moment, like, you know, if you're a burnout and you can't remember shit, like, well, fuck, when does that stop? Or how much worse is that going get right yeah weed i'm not weed is a little outside my wheelhouse and i i have a bias because weed doesn't work with my brain really so i haven't like i you know i generally like avoid like weed related stuff you know when you say it doesn't work through brain what do you mean i'm curious yeah i've always like wished that i could be like one of these functional smokers.

Starting point is 01:19:12 Because a lot of my – or not smokers, but somebody who derives creative value from THC. Because I have some friends that are able to. Or even social value from it. But for me, it makes me incredibly paranoid, incredibly introverted. It's just like the ego chatter. it's hilarious that you're like jealous. Like you want to be like, yeah, it looks like good time. It used to hit me like that when I was younger. Yeah. Yeah. I got super paranoid. The first time I smoked, I thought I was going to run into the street and die dog. It was the worst night of my life. Yeah. It makes me feel psychotic. I don't like it. I'll take like a

Starting point is 01:19:42 small dose maybe sometimes to like turn off if I've had like a really busy day and I want to get to sleep. And it works for me for that purpose. But generally, no. I'm a much bigger fan of like – I think psilocybin is great, like small, low-dose psilocybin personally. But yeah, weed is not a – yeah, I generally don't like spend a lot of time looking into weed. But alcohol I think is pretty noxious from a brain health standpoint. And I do drink it occasionally just to be transparent. But like there was a study that came out because we've been told for a long time that moderate drinking is actually beneficial.

Starting point is 01:20:19 But what this one paper came out found that even moderate drinkers had three times the hippocampal atrophy. So atrophy in the hippocampus compared to alcohol abstainers. Did it matter what type of alcohol it was? I don't think it matters. I don't think it matters. What about red wine? Resveratrol. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:20:36 I was always trying to like make room for that. Yeah. I think you're less likely to have a hangover if your alcohol is less congeners in it which are like the the colorants usually that are that are um yeah usually get extracted from whatever the the you know the substrate is whether it's like oak or whatever power project family how's it going now sleep is essential for your recovery and your performance which is why we partner with eight sleep mattresses we call them the tesla of beds changes temperature based off how you sleep andrew how can they get it yeah head over to over to 8sleep.com slash powerproject. And at checkout, you guys will automatically save $150 off your entire order.

Starting point is 01:21:09 Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. I think we also got to always keep in mind, like we mentioned off air, just things that you're interested in, things that you like, things that you enjoy. So, you know, if you can enjoy stuff in moderation, it's not causing you a lot of other problems, then you could always make an argument. Well, that's probably really actually fairly healthy. Yeah. Like, you know, you smoke weed here and there and it calms you down a bit, whatever the thing is that you like. Sometimes it's, it could be a potential thing that maybe

Starting point is 01:21:39 is viewed by others as being dangerous, but maybe you just like it and maybe it gives you some reprieve and maybe it's a, maybe it's a form of entertainment or whatever it might be. But I think it's important to understand, like, there's just shit that we like to do sometimes. Yeah. Well, I think that it comes back to healthy user bias, that the ability to be moderate, especially with something like alcohol or weed or any other drug, right, has health benefit in and of itself, right? It shows that you are able to moderate your appetite around things that are generally speaking pleasurable, right? So think about how that might apply itself

Starting point is 01:22:12 to like the consumption of ultra processed junk foods, right? The ability to be moderate with those things, I think, especially today in the 21st century, gives you an upper hand. Yeah, what's stronger to completely avoid them and not purchase them or to take one scoop and put them back in upper hand. Yeah, what's stronger, to completely avoid them and not purchase them or to take one scoop and put them back in the freezer?

Starting point is 01:22:27 Yeah, 100%. It'd be hard. It would be difficult, right? Yeah. And I think when you're drinking alcohol, there are healthier ways to do it, to make sure that you're hydrating, that you're keeping your electrolytes up and things like that.

Starting point is 01:22:43 But yeah, I wouldn't say say if you don't currently drink yeah don't there's no need to start you know you know a scary thing that because on the podcast we talk about sleep all the time it's like we guard our sleep um and one thing that i've noticed is i'm noticing my mom but other people i know is like a lot of people who let's say they don't pay attention to health podcasts or this stuff. Right. They, you know, they'll be on screens. They'll be up a little bit later. Even my mom now, she's 60 something.

Starting point is 01:23:12 I try to tell her, hey, go to sleep earlier. But she's watching Nigerian movies until 1 a.m. Right. And you got to wonder, as you get older, first off, it's harder to get as much sleep as you used to when you're younger but the amount of repair that goes on to the brain with quality sleep and you continue to miss out on that with as you get older it's it's scary to think about america's becoming more obese and overweight there's all these things that are impacting people's sleep it's it's it's a problem right so as far as sleep is concerned how do you have any suggestions for people when it does come to that,

Starting point is 01:23:47 especially as you get older, since quality sleep is harder with age? Yeah, it's so important. I mean, when you sleep, your brain is literally like cleaning itself of the proteins that are associated with Alzheimer's disease, like amyloid beta, tau.

Starting point is 01:24:00 We know that on one night of shortened sleep, they can measure levels of amyloid in cerebrospinal fluid. They found that on just one night of shortened sleep, they can measure levels of amyloid in cerebrospinal fluid. They found that on just one night of shortened sleep, there's a 30% increase in amyloid in cerebrospinal fluid and about a 50% increase in tau, which is not necessarily reflective of what you see in brain. But I mean the assumption is that the more there is the – in cerebrospinal fluid, the more likely there will be to clump up and aggregate and form these plaques in the brain, right? So you definitely want to make sure that you're optimizing your sleep. And what's – I think what I – one of the things that I find super fascinating about sleep is that it tends to be front-loaded with the processes that support your immediate survival, right? Like immediately – because like think about like if you were on the run or something or if like your sleep was disturbed midnight. Your body wants to – I think from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes a lot of sense that sleep would be front-loaded with the processes that are going to be the most restorative, right? So we know that when you first go to sleep, that's when you get that initial pulse of

Starting point is 01:25:10 testosterone, of growth hormone, right? Which is like super reparative to the body. Similarly to the brain, to the anatomy of the brain, that's when you see this swoosh of cerebrospinal fluid go throughout the brain, cleansing itself basically of these proteins, like amyloid beta, thanks to the glymphatic system. And that happens earlier on in the night during slow-wave sleep, which tends to be front-loaded again towards like bias towards the beginning of sleep. It's like later in sleep when like the more emotional regulatory processes take place, like you know

Starting point is 01:25:45 you get more REM sleep which is associated with like better emotional regulation and the like so yeah I mean generally just making sure that you're that I think to optimize sleep one of the things that I think seems to be the most salient among you know whether it's like the reading I've done or the sleep experts that I've talked to you just want to make sure that among, you know, whether it's like the reading I've done or the sleep experts that I've talked to, you just want to make sure that you're, you know, as being as consistent as you can with your sleep schedule. I think that's a big one, making sure that you're sleeping in a room that's as dark as possible. We're now seeing evidence to suggest that even low level light exposure at like an intensity of about five lux is associated with worse cognitive function the next day.

Starting point is 01:26:28 So making sure that your room is as dark as possible. Cooler temperatures I think tend to support better sleep. I sleep with one of those like sleep bed cooling systems. Yeah, we use Eight Sleep. Yeah, those are bomb. And yeah, I mean having a healthy dietary pattern I think is associated with better sleep. Making sure that you're – another thing that's a really big one is building up sleep pressure over the course of the day. That's like a concept where when you do things that tire out your body, it puts more pressure on the brain to get to sleep at night.

Starting point is 01:27:04 Like if you're sedentary all day, there's going to be a lot less of that. So it's going to make insomnia more likely. And I think there was a study that came out recently, small study, you know, but seemed to suggest that resistance training really more so than aerobic training taxes the nervous system in a way that builds sleep pressure more than aerobic training does wow yeah that's really cool yeah so resistance train another reason to resistance train yeah right but yeah sleep is crucially crucially important yeah i found that um you know right before i get to bed i like almost feel myself getting into bed i don't know if you guys know i have any idea what i'm talking about, but it's like almost like a sensor.

Starting point is 01:27:45 Like my body just wants to lay down, you know, just like really wants to lay down. And the second that I lay down, I usually fall asleep pretty quickly. I sometimes have a hard time like staying asleep. I'll wake up and fidget and move around and stuff. But other than that, I sleep pretty good, especially more recently. I've really improved my sleep quite a bit. The mouth tape has helped a lot. I think getting myself to breathe hard,

Starting point is 01:28:08 I think was something that was necessary for me because I think I had sleep apnea previously because I used to be really fat and bloated. I used to be 330 pounds. So a lot of weight loss has helped. But I think there is a side of a little cardiovascular, I think can go a long way. A little bit of that training can help too.

Starting point is 01:28:26 Yeah, for sure. But sleep apnea, yeah, I'm glad that you've got that under control because that could be a risk factor for cognitive trauma. Is there a connection between that and dementia and Alzheimer's or not? There is. Yeah. I don't want to – because I haven't looked into the literature in a while, but there is a connection. I mean you want to make sure that you're allowing your body to get into those deeper modes of sleep, deeper phases. And I think the issue with sleep apnea is that it basically prevents – it precludes like those deeper levels of sleep. Where you're repairing and restoring.

Starting point is 01:29:03 Yeah. Yeah. So that's just like my – from what, from what I remember from, you know, whatever it was two years ago that I last looked into that literature. But, uh, but yeah, you want to make sure that you're, that you're sleeping well. And what, what qualifies as a, like a bad night of sleep? Cause like we hear it's like, oh, you should strive for eight hours, but is like six hours. Okay. Is it like four hours to drop off? Like where do you think? Yeah. Yeah. I think it's like, it's is it's like four hours to drop off like where do you think yeah yeah i think

Starting point is 01:29:27 it's like it's it's a range it's generally seven to nine i think is like the i think what the american psychological association tends to tends to recommend um you need more earlier on in life people that are like older tend to get by with with less sleep um you know i i i love having a good eight or nine hours like i can i'm a good sleeper yeah no yeah absolutely you know this this too because we've talked and the audience loves meat already like if there's anything that this audience eats a lot of it's red meat so we know about the benefits of that but there are some people who are like meat yes veggies fuck them right and mark sends us a video from you where you talked about spinach so i'm curious about like if there's any veggies

Starting point is 01:30:12 that people should try to add to their diet in the easiest way possible what how should people i think he was talking about dark leafy greens but yeah dark leafy greens salads i think he was mentioning i think yeah i mean the carnivores disagree with me but i think dark leafy greens, but yes. Dark leafy greens? Salads, I think he was mentioning. I think, yeah. I mean, the carnivores disagree with me, but I think dark leafy greens are super, super beneficial. First of all, they're one of our most nutrient-dense foods. People love to come at me and say,

Starting point is 01:30:36 no, it's all animal products. It's like, yeah, it's mostly animal products. Animal products tend to be the most nutrient-dense foods. I'm not refuting that. But also, you see dark leafy greens up at the top because they're calorie sparse. So they don't have a lot of calories. And that's like – I mean in the equation of how one determines nutrient density, right? It's like a lot of nutrients for few – you know, nutrients per calorie.

Starting point is 01:30:55 And dark leafy greens, they're a good source of folate, which is super important. Folate is literally – it's named for foliage, right? That's where you get folate from. And dark leafy greens are a good source. You get vitamin C. You get various bioactive compounds like carotenoids, which we know are very protective of brain and eye health. You get dietary fiber, which I think is important. Carnivores won't agree with that.

Starting point is 01:31:21 But I think dietary fiber at this point, you know, I think we can say with a fair degree of certainty that it seems to be beneficial. And yeah, they have, I mean, they have a lot going for them. Beal et al., there's a researcher who I like his work a lot. He did a rundown of some of the most nutrient-dense foods. Dark leafy greens were up there next to like organ meats and dairy. Dark leafy greens were up there next to like organ meats and dairy. Dark leafy greens were like the only plant material that were there. So whether it's like arugula, kale, spinach, I wouldn't – Kale.

Starting point is 01:31:54 If you're at risk for kidney stones, I wouldn't do spinach every day. But kale and arugula I think are great. They also – another thing that dark leafy greens have going for them, they provide nitrate, which gets reduced by oral bacteria to nitrite, which, I'm sorry, they contain nitrite,

Starting point is 01:32:11 which gets reduced to nitrate, which then enters the nitric oxide pathway. Actually, I could have it, I could have it, don't quote me on that. But basically,

Starting point is 01:32:19 oral bacteria are involved in the reduction of nitrate to nitrite. Yeah, I think that's what it is, which then enters the nitric oxide pathway, which is important for blood pressure regulation.

Starting point is 01:32:29 Again, going back to like how important it is to have healthy blood pressure. And researchers out of Rush University found that people who regularly consume dark leafy greens, like a cup and a third a day, have more youthful brains by up to 11 years. Now that's associational. So like what did that mean? Like how did they figure that out? They do cognitive tests. Okay. Yeah. They do cognitive tests.

Starting point is 01:32:49 These meat eaters are dumb. But I think it makes sense. First of all, we know that carotenoids, so kale for example, kale is one of the top, if not the top sources of lutein and zeaxanthin, which are carotenoids that are directly protective of

Starting point is 01:33:05 eye health. They help prevent age-related macular degeneration. And we know that these same compounds accumulate in the brain, where they help to protect our brain cell membranes. We know that higher levels of these compounds is associated with slower cognitive decline, reduced risk for dementia, and also better cognitive function in young and healthy people yeah so these two comments are great and kale is the top source i think you get like 25 milligrams in a cup of cooked kale which is like higher than any other dark leafy green um and so and then there was another study that uh came out in 2016 that found that foods – among fruits and vegetables that were high in flavonoids. So these are a type of polyphenol.

Starting point is 01:33:53 It was a randomized controlled trial. They fed subjects from like the age of 24 all the way up to the age of 70. So like a pretty robust like smattering of like the age timeline of lifespans, they found that high flavonoid foods led to an improvement in cognitive function and a boost in BDNF, which is brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Low flavonoid, because it was an RCT and they tested low flavonoid fruits and vegetables, didn't have the same effect, nor did the control diet. And if you look at the top of high flavonoid um containing foods dark leafy greens kale and uh berries citrus things like that but yeah so i'm a

Starting point is 01:34:31 i'm a fan of dark leafy greens i think they're great i think just a lot of people don't like eating vegetables it's like as simple as that is would there be a problem because like i can already i'm an impatient fuck so my instinct is like okay just take those and just blend them into something with some fruits or whatever. Is there any problem with the breakdown of it? Zero. Okay. Yeah. No.

Starting point is 01:34:49 Blend it up. Like however you want to get your dark leafy greens in. Does something like athletic greens help you get there or is that not the same? I think probably there's some benefit. Like I don't – you know. You're always better off eating it. But if you want to be a little lazy about it, maybe you go that route. Yeah. You're better off eating your dark leafy greens.

Starting point is 01:35:07 But I mean something like athletic greens is a good multivitamin and multimineral in general, right? But yeah, I see no reason to hate on dark leafy greens. I'm not concerned about the anti-nutrients. I don't think we ever really hate on them. We just don't really eat them. If they're in front of me, I'll eat it. I'm just, again, lazy. Yeah, restaurants yeah restaurants when they serve it i'll usually eat it my only contention against vegetables in general is usually like it's like a shuttle you know it's a a shuttle of other

Starting point is 01:35:34 calories usually um just because you got to figure out a way to make them taste good and so they are almost always accompanied with like ranch dressing or caesar dressing and people are probably going to use whatever they're given at the restaurant and they're probably going to dump 30 grams of crap yeah crappy oil on there that maybe they don't need yeah I mean I think like it's a it's a good um we lost our blender bowl don't worry it's all right um it'll be down there with the other four that we probably lost look it's a good excuse to get a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil you know like you don't have to go overboard with the fat but like we probably lost. Look, it's a good excuse to get a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil. You know, like you don't have to go overboard with the fat, but like I try to do a salad a day cause I feel like I'm getting

Starting point is 01:36:09 a little bit of extra virgin olive oil, which I think is beneficial. You're getting those flavonoids, you're getting a good hit of dietary fiber. You're getting the, um, cause also like something that I wrote about in my first book is that dietary fiber, plant material, polyphenols, like all the things that you get in plants can help broker a better sort of deal is how I would describe it between, like when you eat, for example, charred meat. Like I love eating red meat, right? But we know that like when you cook meat

Starting point is 01:36:36 using dry heat methods, like on a grill, you create compounds that are not necessarily beneficial, right? Like you create, I mean, what are they called? Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or advanced glycation end products. Like these are compounds that in a Petri dish could potentially show carcinogenic qualities, right? And you can also make the argument

Starting point is 01:36:56 that just people don't eat that healthy in general. So the exogenous estrogens or whatever the whole things are called, the other microplastics and things that we eat when you have fiber from vegetables, maybe it helps you excrete and get rid of some of those things. Helps you get rid of some of those things, helps you with like lipid regulation. Like literally when you eat dietary fiber, it acts like a bile acid sequestrant. So it basically traps bile acids, which is made up of cholesterol. So it helps increase the efficiency of your liver at recycling lipoproteins, like the ApoB and LDL lipoproteins that we love to talk about with regard to cardiovascular health. When you

Starting point is 01:37:38 consume dietary fiber, it traps cholesterol in the gut and it causes your liver to surface more LDL receptors, which help to, which essentially make your liver better at recycling lipoproteins, which you generally want. You want that to happen, right? So yeah, I'm a fan of fiber. I think it helps to, I mean, from a mechanistic standpoint, like we have good reason to assume that it's going to help regulate things like inflammation in the body. Fiber is also satiating. So I've always had this feeling that carnivores just like they never liked vegetables. They grew up not, you know, with in households where vegetables weren't really

Starting point is 01:38:17 prepared very well and the like, but I'm, you know, so maybe, maybe my bias is that I enjoy eating vegetables. Like there's, you know, I'll put that out, out there, but I think that the, that there is good evidence to say that like vegetables are beneficial, but they're trying to kill us, but they're trying to kill us just slowly. Not till we're 98. Well, that's the thing. Those, those are playing the long game. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:38:39 Playing the long game. Yeah. They're not very, they're not very good at, at, you know, like, cause it, it comes back to hormesis. Like those flavonoids are polyphenols. Polyphenols are plant defense compounds. So I posed this question on Instagram actually today to the carnivores. Like if flavonoids are polyphenols and polyphenols are plant defense compounds and it's the high polyphenol intervention that seem to improve cognitive function and boost levels of BDNF,

Starting point is 01:39:06 how are they trying to kill us if they're actually improving the way that our brains work? So I think part of it has to do with – I think there's two potential mechanisms here. One is that it's hormesis, right, which is like when low doses of a toxin or a stress actually elicits a protective and beneficial response in us. Or there's the other, there's the alternative hypothesis that they actually act like prebiotics. So we know that prebiotics like fiber, like resistant starch are beneficial to gut bacteria, but polyphenols are also prebiotic. And so, you know, sometimes these bacteria, they consume these compounds, whether they're flavanols or flavonoids, and then they push out these metabolites that we then absorb. Because in general, polyphenols are pretty poorly absorbed.

Starting point is 01:39:57 But nonetheless, the consumption of polyphenols is associated with dramatically better health. Now, you could say healthy user bias, of course, like that's always going to be there. Right. But, um, but one of the sort of like alternate hypotheses is that, that they have a prebiotic effect and that what they yield in terms of their postbiotic metabolites that are produced by, by gut bacteria, those are actually, you know, better absorbed or fully absorbed, right? And that we benefit from those. And that just goes back to the symbiotic nature of like us and the bacteria that inhabit us. It's a great way to kind of fill yourself up without a lot of extra calories. Again, if you're not dumping a bunch of weird oils on there. Yeah, that too. Yeah. But what's

Starting point is 01:40:40 interesting is when you consume fiber, you tend to absorb it as fat because you ingest fiber and then the bacteria churn out short-chain fatty acids like butyrate. So it's kind of cool, you know, like a salad that has no fat in it could actually end up yielding like a fat source. All right. Well, you sold me. I'm going to make an effort. We'll see if I get anywhere. But I'll make an effort. I'll try to eat more vegetables. I'm going to blend that shit in with some fruits. And if I don't get more jacked, I, you sold me. I'm going to make an effort. We'll see if I get anywhere, but I'll make an effort. I'll try to eat more vegetables.

Starting point is 01:41:05 I'm going to blend that shit in with some fruits. And if I don't get more jacked, I know who to get. Next time I come here, you're going to see me throwing spinach into the coffee concoction. I don't know how good that would be. It can be all right. It would be weird. Yeah, in my mind, when I think of vegetables in general, my mind just goes to broccoli for some reason. But sometimes some of that stuff will

Starting point is 01:41:25 just like make me super gassy so with like the dark leafy stuff how is that for people's how's that for mimesis yeah yeah but is it like typically like pretty like easy on digestion and stuff um it depends i think it depends on the green to be honest and also i think it's important for people to note that if, you know, if certain things don't agree with you, it might not necessarily be the fault of the thing. Like, you know, it might not necessarily be, for example, like fiber, that's the problem. It might be that like we live in a time where many people suffer from gut dysbiosis, right? Like they suffer from like an impaired gut microbiome, for lack of a better term, or reduced gut resilience, you know, which could be attributed to many possible things,

Starting point is 01:42:12 whether it's like, you know, like things early in life that— Might need like really tiny exposures to it to help get you past it over time or something like that. Yeah. I think many of us have lost like gut resilience and we have like increasing rates of autoimmunity and allergies. And I think that there's probably, you know, there's probably many, many things that you could point to, many aspects of like modern life that you could point a finger at, whether it's like C-section overuse or, you know, not many of us have the privilege and luxury

Starting point is 01:42:41 of being breastfed, you know, when we're babies or we're over prescribed antibiotics these days, or there's like this, this, you know, sterility that we, that we're born into now that didn't exist for the vast majority of our, of our evolution, you know, and early in life when our microbiomes are at their most plastic, which there is this, you know, we talk about brain plasticity, our microbiomes have a, have this quality of plasticity as well, which is I think most the case when we're younger. And our microbiomes really serve to train our immune systems. And because our modern lifestyles have become so aberrant compared to our – how we were – how we came into this world historically, I think it's led to this like loss of gut resilience and then throw into the mix all the industrial additives that we're consuming, you know, the,

Starting point is 01:43:31 the, the, you know, whether it's like emulsifiers or the, the, you know, whatever it is like industrial byproducts, uh, industrial, um, you know, various like toxicants. I mean, there's like too many to list. Just the overexposure to gluten, which is something that, you know, we've only had for the past like blip on the radar in terms of human evolution. And now it's like it's literally everywhere at every meal. So I think that there's like just this like this loss of resilience. So that's why some people suffer from like, you know, fiber or compounds but i don't think it's the it's the it's those compounds themselves it's like the

Starting point is 01:44:08 context in which they're being consumed you know that's why i don't wash my cup you guys see like i just rinse it out i don't use soap because i'm yeah i'm serious like a strength like having a having a dog is one of the best biohacks there is for this reason I have a cat I'm keeping my fingers crossed it's similar but my cat doesn't get to go out of the house but dogs are out of the house they're sniffing, they're eating all kinds of fucking things

Starting point is 01:44:37 and they get in your face so that to me is like the research supports this that it's one of the best biohacks there is a kid will really test your immune system seriously having kids, brutal is like one of the, I mean, the research supports this, that it's like one of the best biohacks there is, right? Because it's like- A kid will really test your immune system. Yeah, seriously. Having kids, brutal.

Starting point is 01:44:49 You know, I think onto what you're saying, I actually kind of have a little bit of a theory. I think that when people get disconnected from movement from when they're younger, you know, like a lot of people will, a lot of young kids will move around a lot until they're like nine, 10 years old and you kind of just stop like effing around as much, you don't move around as much. And then a lot of people also might play sports. And so till they're

Starting point is 01:45:12 19, 20 or so, uh, they're still connected to some sort of athleticism. But then from that point on, a lot of people don't move for a long time. Somebody that might just start jogging or go cycling, they're like, well, I haven't really even been on a bike in like 20 years. I haven't gone for a run in 20 years. And some of just what I've seen is like, I think that some dysfunctional digestion has a lot to do with dysfunctional movement. And I think same thing with the brain.

Starting point is 01:45:40 I think if you challenge yourself and you move a lot and you start moving in a lot of different, you have a lot of different disciplines. I think that you can kind of fill in a lot of the blanks in the mind. And I think the digestive system can get kind of, I don't know, just like, I just seen time and time again where people are like, I didn't used to be allergic to this. I didn't used to be allergic to that. I didn't used to have an issue with this. I didn't used to have an issue with that. And it's like, well, you don't really move around that much either. So maybe those two things are connected. I think they're definitely connected. Yeah. I mean, they've, they've shown that just exercise by itself can, can shift the, the, the

Starting point is 01:46:16 gut microbiota composition, which is very counterintuitive, right? It's really interesting, right? Yeah. It's super, super interesting. So yeah, I, I definitely think that, that, that, that theory holds, holds water. I mean mean just throw that into the mix right on top of everything else like overexposure to industrial toxicants overexposure to um ultra processed foods you know lack of uh i mean there's even like um uh circadian aspect to our to our microbiota right like the the fact that like there's like this like, you know, we are governed in many ways by circadian rhythmicity. Like so too is our gut microbiota.

Starting point is 01:46:52 And today we're eating 16 hours a day, you know, around the clock. We're digesting and metabolizing food, which has thrown off the clocks of like, you know, of our clocks as well as the clocks of the bacteria that live within us. So I think there's a lot of potential issues here. But still, I think it's important for people to not major in the minors and the low-hanging fruit, as you talked about, you know, like making sure like to not become too obsessed and to just do what one can to and within within one's means to just shifting their diet to incrementally better quality and getting in more movement and making sure to resistance train regularly, looking to their sleep, stress, all that stuff.

Starting point is 01:47:38 It can be overwhelming but yeah, I think they all have a big impact. Do you count calories? Do you bother? But yeah, I think they all have a big impact. Do you count calories? Do you bother? I mean imagining if you're on the quality side of food, you probably don't care too much. I don't count calories. It's funny. The thing that I count, I try to hit my like protein goal every day. That's the only thing I count.

Starting point is 01:48:03 Do you guys do the same thing? We don't really count but like that's what we pay attention that's what i pay attention to yeah yeah so i mean yeah i used to count but uh i haven't counted since not like five years just because yeah food quality is better same and for for me personally fasting was pretty beneficial in helping me learn how to control my voracious amount of hunger just because because in the past, if I was hungry, I'd have to eat or I'd be a little annoyed. But nowadays, like I have control over that. I was actually going to ask you about that when you mentioned how people are eating consistently throughout the day, because within our space, when people talk about fasting, some people are, people love and hate it. You know,

Starting point is 01:48:43 there are the coaches who are like, oh, fasting's this fat thing. It doesn't matter. Calories in, calories out. But then you see how in application, it helps people learn how to control hunger over time. So I'm wondering what your thoughts are on picking up that habit if you think it's beneficial along with counting calories and all of that. Yeah, obviously calories are important. Obviously if people lose weight when they're fasting, it's because they were able to put themselves in a calorie deficit. I'm not refuting any of that.

Starting point is 01:49:09 But I do think it's a worthwhile tool for, A, I think hunger regulation. There was just a study that came out that found that people that ate an earlier dinner, so early time-restricted feeding, they were less hungry the next day compared to people who ate dinner at 9 p.m. So people that ate dinner at 6 p.m. were less hungry the next day compared to people who ate dinner at 9 p.m. So people that ate dinner at 6 p.m. were less hungry the next day compared to people that

Starting point is 01:49:29 ate dinner, their dinner late, like at 9 p.m. And they consumed fewer calories the next day, about not a ton, but like 60% less. Sorry, not 60%, 60 calories, 60 fewer calories less the next day. 60 fewer calories. Yeah, yeah. Less the next day. So that right there is a mechanism, right, by which like early, an earlier dinner,

Starting point is 01:49:52 early time-restricted feeding could help promote weight loss. It still comes back obviously to Seco, right, to energy balance. But like any tool that is going to be helpful for people I think is worth, like it's worth being able to like have that in your back pocket so that you can pick and choose and you know figure out what's going to work best for you outside of weight from like a cardiometabolic health standpoint I think that there is good evidence that eating earlier dinners so like again early time restricted feeding can help with blood sugar regulation and blood pressure and things like that. So it does seem to be healthier, right? Like, um, so yeah. So again, I think it's a tool. Is it going to, is, is, is when you eat suddenly more important

Starting point is 01:50:31 than what you eat? No, it's not. But it, you know, insofar as it can be like a useful tool for some people, some people swear by it and some people hate it. But the fact that people are out there swearing by it, then why should we bash it? Right? Like I, I hate that. I hate like on social media when you see these like fitness coaches or personal trainers or whatever, like shitting on, you know, just across the board,

Starting point is 01:50:53 like these, these different trends. Like it's, it's cool to like talk about a trend and be like, you know, discuss the nuances and the ups and downs. But like these people who were just who create brands, you know,

Starting point is 01:51:04 like personal brands all about just like shitting on others or different trends oh it's nauseating to me it's first of all it's so lazy it's like creatively and intellectually so lazy but you know i guess whatever gets the clicks it's a lot of just calling out of work that somebody else's dude it's the worst yeah it's the worst but it it's also hard too because sometimes they'll just take a clip of what you said. Yeah. And it's like, well, that was like one minute of me talking that someone turned into a reel. And then it's like, I don't really believe that necessarily.

Starting point is 01:51:35 I believe a lot of other stuff too. Yeah. I mean, you'll never see me. I don't call out people. Yeah, I can't remember the last time I did that because I think it's like, I'm there to help people. Like I'm there to pave a, to light a candle and pave a path for people. Like, you know, and I think,

Starting point is 01:51:50 I think everybody should with, with like, with, with valuable ideas should have a seat at the table and to be able to like converse, you know, because again,

Starting point is 01:51:59 like I, I learn from the evidence-based people, but I also learn from the carnivores. I learn from, you know, even the vegans I've learned from. But not really. We love y'all.

Starting point is 01:52:10 I think when you – people tend to think like someone like Paul Saladino. They think someone like that is like literally trying to – like he's got some other agenda. And yes, he sells products. I sell products. Lane Norton sells products. Like people sell stuff you know but we don't have like there's not like an evil master plan you know that somebody been has been devising and i think that's important to understand it's like i most of the people no

Starting point is 01:52:36 matter what they're putting forward even if they're putting forward to be a fruititarian yeah uh they're trying just to put forward the best information they got and they have found utility in that and they're excited about it yeah but i mean like you think doctors are not trying to sell something you think like the pharmaceutical industry is not everybody's trying to sell something right even if it's just the idea even if it's just the idea yeah i mean you see like in in this in the industry that is science i mean people are trying to sell so phd users are are out there trying to sell their reputations, right? They're trying to sell their – and we've seen how poisonous this can be

Starting point is 01:53:10 when it gets in the way of good science, right? Like we saw recently in the world of Alzheimer's disease with the whole like amyloid hypothesis and the fake data that was like published. I believe it was 2006 that came out and really renewed fervor for the amyloid hypothesis despite the fact that 99.6% of Alzheimer's drug trials that have gone down that path have been abject failures. The data was fake actually? I didn't hear you say that before. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:53:38 There was – oh my god. Because I haven't – I didn't review it before coming on here. So I wasn't like super prepped to talk about it. But yeah, it was like basically published in Nature. It was 2006. This researcher at University of Minnesota, Sylvain Lesney, basically published a paper that at the time interest in this amyloid – in pursuing the amyloid hypothesis was waning because drug trials were just failing left and right. And it just didn't seem to be the answer. A paper came out that really renewed fervor with regard to that hypothesis. So this researcher published data suggesting that he found

Starting point is 01:54:20 the missing, the holy grail, the missing link that connected amyloid plaque to cognitive dysfunction. Because as I mentioned, people that have cognitive, people that have amyloid in their brains don't necessarily also present with the cognitive dysfunction, right? So where is that break in the chain, right? If amyloid is the causal player here in Alzheimer's disease. And so he published a paper where he claimed to have found this amyloid subtype that when injected into a young and healthy mouse caused profound cognitive dysfunction and that was back in 2006 and so that you know because of that basically the funding pipeline increased like you know the millions and millions of dollars turned into billions of dollars of drug discovery for this for this thing but it turns out and this was revealed in a in a article published in science um a couple months ago that yeah basically that that the data was completely fraudulent that

Starting point is 01:55:16 there was evidence that it was just like a copy and paste job oh that was actually just like in july and this is science bro this is like like uppercase S science, you know? So all that is to say is that like show me one person that is not ultimately driven by self-interest, right? That's there. But you got to find the helpers to quote Mr. Rogers. Make you rest in peace to find the helpers, to quote Mr. Rogers. May he rest in peace. Find the helpers. Well, and interestingly enough, I think a lot of the information that's on even just Instagram is like things that are – that can be helpful with big time diseases like dementia.

Starting point is 01:56:02 And from people that aren't doctors, people like yourself, people that have just been researching it, people that have been, again, I point to like someone like Paul Saladino, like who can be like inflammatory, but you got to be able to kind of read between the lines. Like, is he trying to be helpful? Does he have information that's helpful? Maybe something he says triggers you. Maybe something Dr. Baker says triggers you. However, do these people have things that you can take, you can apply to your life, you can mention to a family member that may help them with their weight problem, maybe their potential disease? It's rare to see doctors talking this way. We do have Dr. Lyon and there's some out there, but you just don't really see, you know, doctors are busy, like seeing patients and doing other things. You don't really see them, even though Paul is a doctor, he's not a nutritionist and not like a healthcare, a normal healthcare provider,

Starting point is 01:56:55 whatever the hell that would be called. But you kind of see my point is like, there's a lot of great information out there. And it's just sometimes can be hard to, I guess, you know, sift through. I think Joe Rogan's platform is amazing and that's what I really admired when you were on there. I think you were one of the better guests. I've listened to every nutrition guest he's ever had and I've really loved all the interviews. They've been really amazing to listen to the different sides of people. He's even had debates on there and stuff and I found them to be really fascinating, but you really stood out to me. And the reason why you stood out was because you were just like right down the middle the whole time. And that is a hard place to try to live. And it's really

Starting point is 01:57:34 difficult on Instagram and on TikTok and social media, because I think that the middle is kind of boring. It's like the long game. We talk about it all the time. Like, okay, well, here's your introduction to like what you're going to do lifting wise. And here's kind of like a diet breakdown and, you know, come back in like maybe 10, 15 years and you'll have some probably pretty good results. And people are like, what? That's so long. So I really appreciate the information you were sharing on Rogan. I thought it was amazing. Dude, that means a hell of a lot coming from you. So thank you. Thank you for that. I think that's also why the vegans tend to dislike me as much as they do because I'm the biggest threat because I'm actually the most accurate.

Starting point is 01:58:13 I strive to be at least. And that's not to say that I've never made a mistake. The answer is in the middle and that's where you're hanging out. Yeah, that's 100%. And I do have like a perspective on things that like, you know, that I try to leave room for debate. But yeah, like because every message that I put out, I try to think about like the person at the other end. Like what if the person at the other end is like somebody like my mom, you know? That's the filter that I put like – that I put all of my messaging, all of the recommendations that I make through, you know that's the filter that i put like that i put all of my messaging all of the recommendations that i make through you know and i think like some of these like more hardline

Starting point is 01:58:48 dogmatic personalities some of whom you've mentioned in the space uh i just i don't think that that level of dogma and and that kind of black and white thinking is really that helpful you know because you got to meet people people where they're at. And yeah, I mean like for example, like the vegetable thing, like I just don't think that like vegetables are the cause of all of our problems. Like I just don't. It's kind of a weird fight. It's a weird fight, yeah. It's like if that's the hill you're going to die on.

Starting point is 01:59:18 I think refined grains are a big problem. I think – I mean I personally think that seed oils are a problem. Are they the number one problem? Are they the the smoking gun i wouldn't go that far um but i i i do think that they're you know like with with these kinds of novel foods i i the thing is i just don't want to like you know if like these huge you know multinational food conglomerates, right? Like if they're the ones, if there's like an ad on TV for a product, like chances are you're better off avoiding that product is what I think. You're not seeing ads on TV for avocados. You're not seeing ads on TV for broccoli. You're not seeing ads on TV for extra virgin olive oil, right? But you are for corn oil. You are for,

Starting point is 02:00:05 you know, the mozzolas of the world, right? And so what happens like when you base your diet around that, when there's so much vested interest, there's so many conflicts of interest in science, like in the food industry, right? Like there was just a paper that came out, the 2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans Committee, 95% of people in that committee had conflicts of interest. Conflicts of interest with the food industry, with pharma, right? Like Kellogg's, Nestle, AstraZeneca, right? Those are the people that are telling us how to eat. I just don't like stay out of my kitchen, you know?

Starting point is 02:00:42 Keep your grips like away from my family. Because like you get sick at the end of the day, and where's your recourse, right? Like, what if it was? What if it was these, like, novel foods that didn't exist prior to 50 years ago? Like, what are you going to do about it? You can't prove it, you know?

Starting point is 02:00:55 That's why, like, some of these, like, more evidence-based people, like, maybe there is all this, like, data out there on, like, glyphosate being perfectly safe and healthy to consume, like, in, you know, in volume in volume amounts right you can show me all the data you want i don't want in my body i know it is in my body it's in what was this the stat that just came out it's in like 85 percent of our bodies something crazy like that something crazy like that recently just came out sorry what was i was looking at the committee glyates. Yeah. It's like it just came out something like 80% or 90% of people have glyphosate in their urine.

Starting point is 02:01:28 Adults. Oh. Yeah. You know. Where does that stem from? Because I've been hearing a lot about glyphosates recently. Everyone's been talking about it. Like what, where does that stem from?

Starting point is 02:01:36 I don't even, the thing is I don't, like I don't even feel like I need to hear health claims for it. I just would rather not have it like in me, you know. And I know that it already is, but it's just like, it's a, it's an herbicide. It's a desiccant used to dry like grains and things like that. It's primarily found in like grain, grain products. Um, and also I believe, yeah. Also I believe used in, uh, in the growing of like soybeans and corn and things like that. Okay. And a lot of, some of these things you can even just like, we talk about like barefoot running and barefoot walking and like,

Starting point is 02:02:07 you can just get it just from going, walking through a field or just if the neighbor next door uses it or, you know, there's a lot of different ways to get it more than more so than just eating things that have it. Yeah. Yeah. And it said more than 80% of urine samples of,

Starting point is 02:02:23 from us kids and adults. Yeah. Lovely. Well, we know there's problems, you know? We know there's problems. And like is that, again, is that the main problem? Is the seed oil the main problem? No, probably the main problem is, you know, people have their phones in their room. They're not sleeping properly.

Starting point is 02:02:40 They wake up later than normal. Their idea of breakfast is to eat cereal their lunch is subway and the costco muffin which people still think muffins are fine but a muffin is basically cake or a donut and then they finish their day off with like some pizza or something like that you know and it's like there's just not like that's just not a diet that's going to be uh that's going to really be helpful for any human being to be able to sustain a good, healthy, strong life. Yeah, exactly. And I live in LA.

Starting point is 02:03:16 I have access to great supermarkets. So I'm definitely coming at this from like a place of like I'm pretty lucky. But in general, I think like that's the power of information. It's like you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. Like the genie doesn't go back in the bottle. Once that information is out there and people start like questioning, the problem is I think most people just don't question.

Starting point is 02:03:39 Like they just kind of like, they go about their day and, you know, because the brain loves to like, to identify patterns, you know because the brain loves to like to to identify patterns you know we're pattern seeking machines and then it just becomes less of a cognitive burden to just keep doing the same thing every day day in and day out whether it's like the same route to work whether it's like you know putting the same things in our shopping cart but um but i think if people were like to just stop and kind of like be more mindful and to and to question their purchases and their decisions and their and their attitudes about certain things and even their preferences

Starting point is 02:04:09 like their own preferences that's that's something that i i think is like really important to always like be willing to like reassess the things that you think that you like you know because i like things today that i didn't like you know 20 years ago um and uh but a lot of people they kind of just like take these they take their their preferences or whatever it is to the grave and to me that's just like a um it's not the way to live you know it's hard to do that with beliefs but it's important yeah what is that saying that you see sometimes like in like elementary schools or in libraries like a mind functions like a parachute it's best used when open or something like that. Sounds about right.

Starting point is 02:04:47 Yeah. Something like that. I like that. Yeah. This makes me kind of curious because it kind of flows back into what we mentioned at the beginning of the podcast where you just usually avoid artificial sweeteners, primarily like sucralose. But out of that, you know, because I'm not trying to have you get in a fight with Lane or anybody like that. because I'm not trying to have you get in a fight with Lane or anybody like that. But what is typically popular within the health space that people deem pretty healthy that you're just like, it might be all right, but I just choose to avoid it?

Starting point is 02:05:12 Artificial sweeteners seems to be one of those things, right? Yeah, but again, I think it's like a values thing. It's not even necessarily like a data-driven thing. I had Lane on my podcast recently recently and i'm totally aware of his like stance on artificial sweeteners and i'm you know and i i asked him about them and i was like full disclosure i don't consume them but what does the data say and he shared you know what he typically shares yeah on that topic um but uh but yeah i mean i personally like sweeteners i you know i'll use like stevia monk fruit and like the occasional sugar alcohol and things like that um and that's not i'm not saying that they're that artificial sweeteners

Starting point is 02:05:49 are bad or or anything i don't they're not they don't they're not inert though i think there was a study that even he shared that just came out that showed that compared to stevia uh it was like sucralose and i think there was one other that did show like a glycemic effect. I don't remember the specifics. And it does shift the microbiota. I mean everything you eat shifts the microbiota. So I'm not – but like they're not inert is the thing. And a lot of these like food products that didn't exist like 60 years 60 years ago we're we're still living in

Starting point is 02:06:26 that experiment is like what i think it's like important to be mindful of yeah um and so i take what's called like the precautionary principle approach is like an actual uh you know it's like an actual philosophy where like if you don't you know not having all the data first of all absence of evidence is not evidence of absence so just because you don't yet have proof of, of something like, or on the side of, I think, caution and like with some of these like newer newfangled products, like I think the approach should be guilty until proven innocent as opposed to innocent until proven guilty. There's also a lot of instances where, um, you know, like, like products are foisted onto the market, only later having to be recalled or worse, like having wrought serious health consequences onto people,

Starting point is 02:07:14 you know, at which point it's already too late, whether it's like asbestos in talc. Like, I don't know if you saw that documentary, but like, you know, people with like, it was Johnson & Johnson, it was like public knowledge. Like there was like, I believe it was asbestos in the talc like i don't know if you saw that documentary but like you know people with like it was johnson johnson it was like public knowledge like there was like i believe it was asbestos in the talc that women you know were starting to develop like rare vaginal cancers you know after like growing up using this stuff we were putting like lead in our gasoline lead in our paint like you know there's just partially hydrogenated fats you you know, that were on the market up until 10 years ago. You know, there's all these like examples. Fat-free cheese.

Starting point is 02:07:50 Hey. Benzene in sunscreen, you know, were recently recalled. You know, there was something that just came out where like these chemical hair straighteners that women use associated with different cancers. I have a friend who had been using these kinds of straighteners for more than a decade and she's a young, healthy girl, right? She's in good shape, just had like thyroid cancer. I've heard you talk about mouthwash too. Mouthwash. Which is interesting. Yeah. Strip away your gains. You don't want to strip away your gains. That's some bullshit.

Starting point is 02:08:23 Yeah. How does that happen? No wonder. Because the thing is, mouthwash, and like more research needs to be done. So I'm not saying conclusively that this is the case, but, you know, we have scientific plausibility to say that antiseptic mouthwash, because it kills indiscriminately oral bacteria

Starting point is 02:08:40 which are involved in that pathway, that nitric oxide pathway, that it can potentially have an effect on your blood pressure among other things. And so they've done studies where they found that regular users, people who use antiseptic mouthwash two or more times a day, this is an obese cohort, right? So they didn't have baseline, like They weren't like the healthiest population. But nonetheless, two or more times a week, a day, had a 50% increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes and a doubling of risk for the development of hypertension as a result of – or not necessarily as a result but correlated to regularly using antiseptic mouthwash, which by the way is like 40% of people. 40% of people use mouthwash on a daily basis. And then you combine that with insights gleaned from like other types of studies, right?

Starting point is 02:09:31 Like there was a randomized controlled trial that found that when people used antiseptic mouthwash, I believe it was chlorhexadine in the post-workout setting. We know that exercise is one of the best ways to get healthier blood pressure. There's an antihypertensive effect of exercise. That's a really important benefit of exercise, that they negated that effect of exercise when they used antiseptic mouthwash post-workout. Because you're creating nitric oxide when you exercise, and the oral bacteria are involved in the recycling of nitric oxide. And so immediately after a workout, if you go and swish with antiseptic mouthwash, killing those bacteria, you know, that's like, it's obviously, it's having an effect, right? So not everybody's using chlorhexidine, which is like

Starting point is 02:10:15 a medical, you know, mouthwash, but it's also, you know, it's antiseptic, right? You know, people are regularly using these mouthwashes that boast, we kill 99.9 percent of bacteria in your mouth like what's the name of that mouthwash that that dentist came on he uh loom loom and new yeah i use that it's spelled with like 15 x's though so i don't know how to pronounce it lumiere we had this dentist a few years ago who like he has this mouthwash and this other stuff and stuff's pasting stuff. But he talked about how like typical mouthwash destroys the good bacteria in your mouth that helps you actually be healthier. So, you know.

Starting point is 02:10:51 I mean, yeah, that's not a, why should you, why should you sterilize your mouth? Right. Like there's no part of you that's sterile, right? Especially us. Yeah. Right. Like your mouth is an ecosystem.

Starting point is 02:11:06 And so I think like, you know, there's a reason why there's like fluoride in the water, right? It's because we fucking eat shit. Right? And that's why there's like this epidemic of dental caries, you know,

Starting point is 02:11:17 periodontal disease. And so fluoride helps, right? Like, but like if you actually eat like a biologically appropriate diet yeah you don't need any of that stuff like you can floss you can like brush your teeth and scrape the plaque off and stuff but like you know all these like extra steps it's like you're just sold it you're sold myths on a regular basis about diet about the way a human is supposed to smell about the way that a

Starting point is 02:11:40 human is you know like all these different things. And is there a toothpaste you use, specific toothpaste or mouthwash? I use a toothpaste that has – I mean I've used different brands over time. But generally I look for toothpaste that have a compound in it called hydroxyapatite, which is – yeah, it's supposed to be as good at remineralizing teeth as fluoride. But it doesn't – fluoride has endocrine disrupting potential so you know generally and it in it also disrupts the oral microbiome so i try to avoid fluoride i'm not saying everybody needs to go and avoid fluoride but for me this is i i you know try to eat a low grain diet. Grains are, grains are the worst when it comes to dental

Starting point is 02:12:25 health because any food generally that's easily retained by oral bacteria, like you'd think that sugar sweetened beverages are the worst for dental health. They're actually not that bad for dental health because they don't, because liquid doesn't easily get retained. You need something more like a Butterfinger, like it's stuck to your teeth. Yes. That's like a one-two punch. Yeah. Because it's the sugar, right? It just sits there. It just sits there. And so like 12-year-old Max was eating grains like

Starting point is 02:12:53 for every meal and had a major sweet tooth. And when I went to, every time I would go to the dentist, I would have a new cavity. So I grew up like, you know, with tons and tons and tons of cavities. But after I made the switch to like, you know, I demoted grains. I rarely ever, like I don't ever get cavities anymore. So yeah, it's, but you know, we're sold like, you know, it's everybody's, it almost feel,

Starting point is 02:13:18 and I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but at times one might be inclined to feel like everybody's colluding, you know, to just keep us hooked into the system. And I just like – Yeah, well. He's pointing at me because, yeah, I will go down all those rabbit holes. Like, I told you guys, and then nobody pays attention or anything. Yeah, but you have to see – I mean you have to try to see it like from my vantage point. Like my mom tried to be healthy her whole life, and I saw profound, profound sickness and ultimately death and a medical system that wasn't at any turn able to help her in any meaningful way.

Starting point is 02:13:55 And you look up white privilege in the dictionary, you see my picture. I grew up in New York City. My parents, we weren't poor. Yeah, Manhattan. Yeah? I grew up in, I grew up in like New York city. Like, you know, my parents, like, you know, we weren't poor. Like we had, yeah, Manhattan. Yeah. I grew up in Manhattan. We had access, like, you know, and nonetheless, it was just like, it was just bad, bad. So, I mean, despite, so like with all that, like I see how difficult it is for people.

Starting point is 02:14:20 And so I just like, my heart goes out to people struggling with like the misinformation and the health issues. It's just like it's really bad. Something like dementia is really awful to go through from my understanding because did your mom like kind of forget who you were type stuff? Like did you have to go through that kind of stuff? who I was ever, but she had, it was like her, it was like just her, her overall cognitive function, just like, you know, downshifted severely and, and, and hadn't, wasn't able to upshift like, you know, at that point. Um, she, you know, like she would like start, she would like have a thought and then try to like, you express an idea and soon after initiating would like forget her train of thought or go off and say something like nonsensical and it was really hard i mean i you know because i've been working on this documentary for eight years i have footage like of myself in real time with my mom going through this and uh oh that's the trailer yeah um i my reaction to my

Starting point is 02:15:28 mom sometimes i cringe you know because it was just so hard i was in denial of like what it was that we were what we were all going through and would you sometimes get frustrated with it i would get frustrated yeah yeah i would think like i would think that she was just like fucking with us that's my brother's shit i think i would do probably the same yeah be like hey i'm trying to help you and what are you doing you know i wouldn't i wouldn't understand right away yeah there's also for for people that are around those with dementia there's this i think instinct um to try to coax out correct behavior or correct like reasoning from somebody with dementia when actually what you want to i learned you know after the fact unfortunately but um but you want to practice

Starting point is 02:16:12 what's called uh compassionate communication and there's there's there's like this idea of like it's called therapeutic fibbing which is basically like, you know, for somebody with dementia, it's so hard and, you know, they already likely feel shame about what it is that they have to some degree. And so you, the best way to approach, I think, compassionately is to just kind of like, to not try to correct them, you know, to just go along. Maybe almost like you would with a little kid. Yeah. Yeah. You wouldn't like try to correct a little kid, you know, little kids say things that little kids say,

Starting point is 02:16:48 you know, you'd maybe say, Oh, we're not doing that for right now, but maybe, you know, you try to change the subject. You try to change it or yeah.

Starting point is 02:16:54 Yeah. Well, cause also like you take this stance that like you're educating the little kid, you know, which I think is like, makes sense when you're talking to a little kid. Doesn't really,

Starting point is 02:17:02 doesn't make sense. Yeah. To do with somebody with dementia, you know? like with i have a i have a sibling with schizophrenia and it's the same it's different but the the compassionate i guess what you call compassionate communication that is that's necessary because like they'll have a certain belief and you, you can't say, no, that's wrong. Like you have to, when I, earlier when it happened, my thing was just like trying to tell that sibling, no, that's not right. But you can't tell someone who has things that voices are telling them things. You can't just correct them.

Starting point is 02:17:38 Right. So it's like if you have somebody with mental illness, that is something you got to understand. Yeah. A hundred percent. It's major. And I learned that too late. And my mom always knew that I loved her. And it's like everybody did the best in my family, did the best they could given the circumstances and the information that we had. But yeah, it's difficult. It's difficult. So it's, it's just like

Starting point is 02:18:06 motivated me to, to help, you know, if one person listening to me out there prevents their own dementia, then, uh, then I'll feel like I've done, you know, my job. You watch any movies or TV or anything like that? You get an opportunity to do that here and there? Yeah, dude, I'm a big cinemaphile, like big, I'm a big music fanatic and i'm a big uh movie and like tv fanatic so it's eight o'clock at night and you get to just chill on the couch and you get to watch something what do you eat what do i eat on the couch i thought you're gonna ask what i'm watching yeah oh man yeah we want to know what you're watching too but yeah like uh do you do you will you like indulge in just like eating a little bit of like whatever here and there? Or will it mainly be you're sitting down with some fucking Greek yogurt or something?

Starting point is 02:18:54 Yeah. Or chocolate. No. Honestly, like the Greek yogurt lately has been really great. Like I've been mixing that with some whey protein. Yeah, it's great. Throw some berries in there, some cacao, bee pollen, hemp seeds. I do the same thing.

Starting point is 02:19:07 It gives you something to do while you're watching something. Yeah, dude. I love it. You're not pigging out on something that's going to – Yeah, I try not to. Make you feel like shit. Yeah, I try not to eat anything around the couch because you know that whatever you're eating around – like it's not good. Right, right.

Starting point is 02:19:21 It's like some combination of carbs and fat. not good. It's like some combination of carbs and fat. You know, like it's, it's not the, you know, like me and my,

Starting point is 02:19:30 me and my brothers and my friend, now we have like this thing that we say to each other. I think it helps motivate them, but it's like, you know, when my brother's reaching at the supermarket and I see him reaching for like the, the ice cream or whatever, I'm like, is that going to help you get ripped?

Starting point is 02:19:39 Is that going to help you get ripped? You know? Right. We have a, we have a sense of humor in my family. It's not, I'm not like shaming her or him or anything, but like um but yeah it's like most of the things that you end up eating that's i think one of the unspoken mechanisms by which intermittent fasting works

Starting point is 02:19:55 potentially is that like it cuts off that those hours of the day where you know that you're just eating shit like nobody's sitting around you know binge watching're just eating shit. Like nobody's sitting around, you know, binge watching their latest, greatest Netflix, you know, obsession while eating strips of chicken breast. Like no, like who's doing that? Nobody, you know? So by cutting off, say, your feeding window to whatever it is, whatever time of day it is you eat dinner or soon after that,

Starting point is 02:20:24 you're cutting off those like, you know those expendable calories that are, for the most part, going to be carbs. Yeah, and there's less choices in the day. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. What are you watching? Man, well, the latest thing that I saw, it's going to make me sound kind of dark, but I think it's one of the best things I've ever seen, period, was Dahmer.

Starting point is 02:20:44 Yeah, I knew you were going to say it. yeah yeah did you have you seen it yes dude incredible fucking good yeah yeah man incredible you guys have seen it too right no i have not seen it i haven't seen it yeah dude it's great to watch i was watching that bodybuilding thing last night yeah yeah that one yeah that was a good documentary it's been pretty good what is it i gotta watch your documentary your brother's doc oh yeah i haven. What is it? I got to watch your documentary. Your brother's doc. Oh, yeah. I haven't had a chance to see it yet.

Starting point is 02:21:08 I haven't seen it, no. I think you'll dig it. Yeah, I want to. I'm pumped for that. No. Dahmer's very dark. Killer Sally. Y'all should watch it.

Starting point is 02:21:15 It's the first episode. Well, it's pretty much about this. That guy's jacked, man. He looked great. Yeah. Placed top 14 in the Olympia or whatever. But it's pretty much this woman killed her bodybuilder boyfriend, but she was also a bodybuilder.

Starting point is 02:21:26 So it's a, if you're in fitness or if you into that type of thing, the first episode, you're like, whoa, this watch out. It's cool. They're way into body.

Starting point is 02:21:35 Meatheads. Yeah. Yeah. Damn. Interesting environment for their children to grow up in, to see them like just obsess over like the food and the whole thing. What's it called? It's called killer Sally, right right killer sally i haven't heard of it yeah i'll check it out yeah and the woman uh she's dynamic so like the it just kind of just all goes around her and like she just does a great job job of describing uh you know what the relationship was like and

Starting point is 02:22:02 everything like that wow cool yeah I'll check it out. Dahmer, huh? I got to check that one out. What else you got? What else? Or what did you really like about it, actually? Dahmer? Well, he's obviously like a very complicated character. Like he obviously did monstrous, horrible things, right?

Starting point is 02:22:20 But the incredible thing about that show is that it still elicits like an empathetic feeling towards him and everything that he went through. Like it makes you kind of see the conditions that might have in the right or wrong person create this monster essentially. He's very sick obviously, right? Yeah, he's sick and he had like you know this upbringing where nobody paid attention to him and um and he's questioned why he was that way yeah yeah yeah it doesn't excuse him like he's not excused from what he did you know he deserved everything that he got you know that that came to him but um but yeah but it makes

Starting point is 02:23:01 you feel like you know it makes it makes you feel like there's like a difference. What is that? I love the meme template. Sorry, I didn't mean to. Yeah, it just makes you like, you know, it's sort of like I've used the analogy like if a pit bull who's been abused his whole life bites somebody. Obviously, you put the pit bull down because it's unownable as a pet, but is it the pit bull's fault was the pit bull a monster or was it the conditions that created him you know i'm saying like to me it seemed like he was always at least in his portrayal in this show that he was always aware that what he was doing was wrong and that he you know had a degree of empathy for his victims like he didn't want to see them in pain you know he would always like drug them and shit so again i'm not excusing

Starting point is 02:23:49 him but he's just like it's a it's a fascinating character study and i think like from the production to the acting just like everything was like five stars just everything was incredible everything about it from the music to the to evan peter's performance was just like really like a tour de force it's thought-provoking right like what like what do you do with people that end up in those situations you know how do we treat them how do we yeah there's not a lot of good answers to any of it but you know there's people that uh there's just so many different kinds of people out there and people can be shaped in so many different ways it makes it very hard to determine like what do i what do

Starting point is 02:24:24 we do with this person when we're faced with this, just like in the case with something like a school shooter. There's really nothing you can do about it. It's after the fact. How do we try to prevent this moving forward? And you're just like, I don't know.

Starting point is 02:24:39 Is it society that's pumping this out? Yeah, definitely. It's not one thing. It's a lot. It's systemic. It's's systemic yeah to figure out yeah and there's like you know and it's explored in domer but like there there were the the failings of society at the time also allowed for this for this postule to ferment you know like it allowed for that like whether it was like the cops and how you know creeped out they were by like gay culture at the time, which,

Starting point is 02:25:07 you know, that wouldn't happen today necessarily. But, um, at least not in, in like most, I think parts of, of,

Starting point is 02:25:14 of the country. But like at the time, you know, like they had to go by like pseudonyms, like even when they would go out at like nightclubs. So there was like this, like, you know,

Starting point is 02:25:22 the, the law enforcement kept that whole culture at like arms at arm's length. So there was that. And then there was like the like you know the the law enforcement kept that whole culture at like arms at arm's length so there was that and then there was like the fact that like you know a lot of his victims came from like families that were like pretty hands-off you know they weren't like these these people didn't really have like the support systems in their life in their life where they would go missing and then and then there would be like a response you know like like if i went missing there would be a freaking response you know from my family i would assume you know but it's just yeah so there were all these like different like aspects um but yeah i don't know

Starting point is 02:25:54 it was just like it was just really really well done like i thought the acting was incredible the music one of your favorite movies oh man there's so many um i love like uh what comes to mind i love the wachowskis so like v for vendetta is one of my favorite movies i love cloud atlas even though people tend to not get that movie but i was barry oh yeah dude oh my god we just talked about it just talked about she's great oh so you saw have you seen that i saw it but like i saw it when i was young so i didn't understand it well i just remembered hallie berry so i do need to re-watch it yeah it's it's not a perfect movie but it's like i love it it's really really good i also lately i've like really like i think i was i had a cold or something a couple months ago and i uh

Starting point is 02:26:41 i watched all of this is gonna sound so nerdy but I watched all of the back-to-back, all of the Daniel Craig, James Bond movies. Interesting. Like back-to-back, which when they normally come out, they're years apart but they're actually very intricately connected to one another. They watch better back-to-back like in a binge watch and i became obsessed like i really love like the the james bond like now the whole james bond thing like i'm kind of obsessed with like the character and the and the movies really really good stuff do you want to try to get to making more movies and it's like writing a thing for you since you had a journalist background

Starting point is 02:27:19 i don't know i mean making my documentary what has been the biggest labor of love, you know, and I'm super proud of it. I can't wait to put it out and for people to see it. But it's been difficult. Like, it's been really hard. If I can get to a place in my career where I can do those kinds of projects more easily, then yes, I would love that. more easily, then yes, I would love that. Um, I would love to do that. Cause I love, I love filmmaking. I love storytelling and, uh, yeah, that would be incredible. But, um, but I would need like the support cause doing this documentary has been like, it's been so hard. I did a Kickstarter campaign for it, which went really well. And then that was like seven years ago. You always need more money. You always need more money. Right. Yeah. And,

Starting point is 02:28:08 and also like there's, cause there's, yeah, so many people involved and then like, how do you put it out there? So right now we're trying to figure out like who's going to be the best, what's going to be the best distribution for it. Um, you know,

Starting point is 02:28:19 but if I could like in the future do something that's like more turnkey, yeah, I would definitely. And there's always the thing in the back of your head I should just throw it up on YouTube or something but then you want people to you want it to be yeah no yeah we don't want well received and seen and promoted and stuff right yeah yeah so we're hoping to like get into a film festival and you know sell it to a distributor it's a really great film so I great film. So I don't think it's a matter of if but when. But yeah, we just don't have anything in place just yet.

Starting point is 02:28:52 Awesome. Because we literally just finished it. So there we go. Want to take us on out of here, Andrew? Sure thing. Thank you, everybody, for checking out today's episode. Make sure you stick around for Smiley's tip before we get out of here. Drop some comments down below.

Starting point is 02:29:03 Let us know what you guys think about today's conversation maybe drop some more questions hopefully we can um you know reach out to max and ask some more uh hit that like button and subscribe if you guys are not subscribed already uh follow the podcast at mb power project on instagram tiktok and twitter my instagram tiktok and twitter is at i am andrew z in sema where you at discord's down below so go check that out and see my ending on instagram and YouTube and I can see my yin yang on Tik TOK and Twitter. Where can people find your max? Oh man.

Starting point is 02:29:28 Instagram at max Lugavere, M A X L U G A V E R E. And then I host my own podcast called the genius life, uh, which is on all your favorite podcast platforms. And then I wrote three books that are available at all of your favorite bookstores. Um,

Starting point is 02:29:42 Amazon included, uh, genius foods, genius kitchen, and the Genius Life. We'll throw the links all in the description, including to the book. How old were you there? That was like two years ago. Oh, shit.

Starting point is 02:29:53 Yeah. I look pretty young, huh? Or older. Your hair looks browner in this cover. Oh, it looks browner, yeah. The stress of making a documentary. Yeah. The stress. And the stress of having to battle yeah. The stress of making a documentary. Yeah. The stress.

Starting point is 02:30:05 And the stress of having to battle vegans every time I post anything on social media. And now carnivores because you kind of gave a little shot there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Eat your veggies. Eat your veggies.

Starting point is 02:30:16 And your red meat. Well, Smelly's tip for today is I've been messing around with just different positions with training and different positions of the spine. And I just want to encourage you guys to play around with this. Just try to tuck the hips underneath you a little bit, especially for something like running. Kind of stacking your hips, your hips and your shoulders kind of being in alignment is just a good practice, but I've felt that by taking my hips and kind of tucking them underneath me slightly,

Starting point is 02:30:48 it kind of gives a stretch to my back and kind of elongates the back. So maybe you'll find the same. So play around with that and give it a shot. I'm at Mark Smelly Bell. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never a strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.

Mark Bell's Power Project - Max Lugavere || MBPP Ep. 837

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